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QUEENSBURY  The Town Board got rid of its politically connected law firm on Jan. 1, but they replaced it with a law firm that has the same connections.

The board actually picked two law firms to handle its legal business. To represent the board, the town chose Miller, Mannix, Schachner & Hafner. That firm does not allow any of its lawyers to be politically active.

But the board also chose Bartlett, Pontiff, Stewart & Rhodes for issues involving labor negotiations and contracts.

Two principals in that law firm are members of the Queensbury Republican Committee and the Warren County Republican Committee. They are Malcolm OHara and John Wright.

The firm disclosed the connections in its three-page letter to the board.

Supervisor John Strough, who had objected to FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth on the grounds that lawyers there were members of the GOP committees, was fine with the new law firm.

The Town Board voted unanimously to replace FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth with Bartlett, Pontiff, Stewart and Rhodes. Strough said that was because a lawyer at the new law firm was one of the best on labor issues.

Larry Paltrowitz is the person well be working with almost exclusively on this, and hes one of the best in the area, Strough said.

FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth, which handled all of the towns legal work last year, had one principal who was a member of the GOP committees. That was John Aspland, who landed in hot water after he responded to emails from then-Councilman Doug Irish about how to handle a candidate who wanted to drop out of the Town Board race last year.

Aspland was criticized for approving Irishs plan to have others campaign for the unwilling candidate, rather than advising Irish on how to notify the public that a candidate was dropping out at a point when it was too late to take his name off the ballot.

But in his firms response to the town request for proposals, the firm said Aspland was no longer even a member of a Republican committee.

Aspland had previously made public his resignation from his role as vice chairman of the town Republican Committee. But the RFP response said he is no longer even a committee member.

That wasnt enough to get his firm rehired.

The town gave its general representation contract to Miller, Mannix, Schachner & Hafner, at a price that was $40 an hour more expensive than that of FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth. The difference was $200 per hour versus $160 per hour. The price will also go up to $210 an hour next year, under the contract.

Last year, FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth billed 588 hours, for a cost of $94,000, although the final bills for the year could still come in. Under the new firm, the town would pay $117,000 for the same number of hours.

The new firm also has a cap of $190,000, while the previous firm had a cap of $120,000.

That price difference was the main reason cited by Republicans when they voted at the end of 2016 to hire FitzGerald, Morris, Baker & Firth.

But after the Aspland email controversy, Strough said his fears had been realized, and the town needed a law firm that was not politically connected.

Miller, Mannix, Schachner & Hafner emphasized their firms standards in their response to the towns request for proposals.

None of the members of our firm are currently or have ever been members of a local political committee. Unlike some firms, we strongly believe that any such membership by an attorney intending to practice municipal law creates an appearance of impropriety and is inappropriate, the firm wrote. Unlike many firms, we avoid representation of private parties located or doing business in any municipality we represent if the issues of representation could even possibly involve the municipality. Therefore, we are not working for any outside parties creating any potential or existing conflicts of interest.

Strough also noted that the firm would not charge the town more for phone calls, copying, postage and other expenses that other firms often add on to their regular hourly fee.

(Councilmen) Tony Metivier and George Ferone did an analysis on this. They felt the price per hour wasnt everything, Strough said. Were getting the best bang for our buck.

In addition to the charges, he said, There is such a thing as efficiency. Theres institutional knowledge of the town.

Prior to 2017, the law firm had represented Queensbury for 20 years.
GRANVILLE  Police late Friday seized a vehicle that was missing a sideview mirror that is being analyzed to determine whether it hit an elderly Hebron man last week.

The Granville woman who owns the vehicle would not consent to be questioned by police, instead referring them to her lawyer, Granville Police Chief Ernie Bassett said. She has not been charged or publicly identified as the inquiry continued Monday.

Police believe the elderly woman likely hit Frank Grunert, 78, of Hebron the night of Jan. 2 as he walked along Church Street to a nearby church. Grunert suffered a severe head injury and was in critical condition, but had improved as of Friday.

Bassett said the car was seized pursuant to a search warrant, and has been impounded pending an examination by State Police evidence technicians.

While witnesses to the collision told police they believe a truck was involved, Bassett said followup investigation led to the conclusion that it was more likely a car. A truck that had been seen in surveillance video was located and ruled out, and officials have also found surveillance video of the car on Church Street as well.

We have witnesses who described a pickup truck, but the physical evidence matches a car, Bassett said.

Bassett said the car was located at a home not too far from the crash scene, but he declined to elaborate.

We attempted to interview her but we were directed to her attorney, Bassett said.

Her lawyer, Michael Martin, said his client is in her 80s and did not realize she apparently hit a person that night. It appeared the mirror was the only part of the car that may have made contact, he added.

My client is cooperating with police, he said. She doesnt have any recollection of hitting anyone.

I dont believe there was anything nefarious about it, Martin added.

Bassett said it was unclear when a decision about potential charges will be made.

Weve made some headway, but it could be a little bit, he said.
Welcome Guest! You Are Here:
Zach Pickard has had a rough, sometimes physically painful, year.

But because he is Zach, a tiny person with an outsize personality, a quick wit and the unflagging devotion of a new dog who is bigger than he is, you wouldnt know it.

Some people enjoy bits and pieces of this world. Zach loves everything, all the time: magnets, making slime, Nintendo, Impractical Jokers on TV, YouTube and KFC, with which his mother says he is obsessed.

His tiny voice, like that of a doll, is most often roiling with laughter as he delights in the latest verbal or practical joke he has engineered.

At 10 -- he'll turn 11 later this month -- Zach is one of only 144 children in the world with the rapid aging disease progeria. He recently chose to have a seven-hour surgery to repair his damaged hip socket. He had been unable to walk for months, and he was restricted to a wheelchair.

For a child who has had to adjust to a slew of limitations in his life -- tiny stature, stiff joints, baldness and prominent veins -- being in a wheelchair all the time was too much.

Zachs parents knew that two other children with progeria had gone through the surgery proposed for Zach. Its called VDRO, for varus derotation osteotomy. It tips the ball of the femur into the hip socket, where it is stabilized with plates and screws to hold the bone in the proper position.

Before the surgery, Zachs mom introduced him to a friend of hers who was in a wheelchair. The friend and Zach discussed the limitations of wheelchair living.

Then his parents, Brandon and Tina Pickard, left the decision up to their son: Would he have surgery? Would he adapt to the wheelchair instead?

Zach chose surgery. The operation took place Sept. 20 at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital. The Pickards called the seven hours excruciating.

Occasionally someone in the operating room would call the waiting room to let them know how Zach was doing, but the rest of the time, his parents sat with their fears: What if the surgeons didnt have enough skin to stitch up? Because they are so tiny and lack reserves of body fat, children with progeria dont have as much skin surface as other children, making grafting a near impossibility.

We were really thinking he was going to be a grumpy patient, but he turned out great, Tina Pickard said.

While in a brace post-surgery, Zach gained a much-needed pound and a half. He is 41 inches tall and weights 32 pounds now.

The Pickards hope that in 2018, Zach will be able to resume participation in a progeria drug trial in Boston that is exploring drugs that can add months to the lives of progeria patients.

One in 4 million to 8 million newborns have the gene mutation that causes progeria. The mutated gene causes a collection of symptoms that resemble premature aging.

The average life expectancy of a child with progeria is 13 years. The Pickards have invested in beating that number, becoming active fundraisers for the Progeria Research Foundation.

Just after Zachs surgery, Carmen the dog arrived. She joins Zachs guinea pig, K.C. Pickard. Carmen barks at strangers but is a friendly, mellow animal, rubbing her face against Zach to ask for head pats.

Zach rolls on the floor to be closer to Carmen, who weighs about as much as he does. In the manner of the best child-pet friends, Carmen is fascinated by everything Zach does.

Zach has been out of school and instructed at home so he doesnt fall behind in his last year of elementary school before moving on to sixth grade and middle school. To return to school, he has to be able to independently go to the restroom. He has land therapy and aqua therapy weekly.

The Pickards have one word for their sons decision to have surgery, which they repeat to Zach: Brave.

For Zach, its a joke. What does brave mean?

It means being brave, he says, breaking into peals of giggles.

Asked whether the string of magnets hes working on is a collar for Carmen, he grimaces.

He casts the side-eye of a soon-to-be middle school student, then glances at his big dog and the relatively short band of magnets: Shes not a Pomeranian, you know.

Heres how much strength resides in that tiny body: Zach walks across the Pickard family room aided by a metal walker. He pauses, flexes his arms on the walker, and lifts his feet from the floor.

His parents murmur: This is huge, they say.

And suddenly it felt like Christmas, even though it was only Dec. 18.
DAVENPORT  The German American Heritage Center's aim was brought to poignant, passionate life Sunday in a play that personified one German family's immigrant experience.

We don't often have something that relates so well to our mission of talking about German immigration, GAHC director Kelly Lao said in introducing Here, I'm Hank, presented as part of a free two-day community open house. This is just a perfect fit for us.

The 40-minute, two-actor play  by Janet Schlapkohl of Iowa City  was commissioned in 2016 by the University of Iowa history department, as part of a comprehensive traveling bus museum, Germans in Iowa, for which GAHC provided photos and artifacts, Ms. Lao said. The Davenport museum (at 2nd and Gaines streets) hosted the exhibit for 10 days last October, but Sunday was the first time it presented the play.

It goes with our whole exhibit, our theme all year long, Ms. Lao said. Dramatic theater, we don't get a lot of, so it's really cool when we have it.

The play related a story about Heinrich, a Prussian bastard who immigrated to Iowa in 1870 as a young man to avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian war. His mother (played by Ms. Schlapkohl, an adjunct playwriting and drama instructor at University of Iowa) was scared that he would see battle.

In the costumed play (featuring hymns and other songs) she counts pennies, and kindness from shopgirls who compliment him. They face hunger. In America, the children get fat, the grown-ups get work and everybody goes and picnics, Heinrich (played by Michael Sotelo) says. So many people go to America.

He doesn't know anyone there, and his mother replies, Half of Prussia is there. She knows successful farmers in Iowa. He doesn't want to leave her, and wants her to come soon after.

Heinrich arrives in New York (he says Here, I'm Hank) after a boat ride of 18 days, and takes a train to Chicago, then Davenport. One passenger says there are far too many Germans. Her husband was a captain in the Union Army. Now that the war is over, all of you Germans are swarming in to take up land and jobs while men like my husband, who sacrificed their health to keep this country together, to see their futures stolen away.

Here, I wonder why am I a Hank and the cattle are Holsteins? Heinrich asks. His mother can't afford to immigrate, but with help of an Iowa butcher, she does arrive after her son gets married and has a child.

Ms. Schlapkohl based the story on her family's experiences. She had a relative Heinrich who came in 1868, and most of her family came from the port city of Husum after World War I.

I picked kind of the peak of immigration as the time to look at, she said of her play. It was, why are we here and how did it impact families?

Conscription was a huge reason, she said of avoiding war.

This was the first place they came, Ms. Schlapkohl said of Davenport. This was the place you could say, 'We're gonna make it. That guy owns a butchering plant; that guy owns a hotel. It was an established community, and they had money. They had the German National Bank early on.

"Davenport was the thing, and the first place from the train where most people arrived, and went off to different places. It was such a huge part of the story for almost every single German immigrant.

Laura Reich (whose husband Ed is German), of Moline, volunteered to read some lines and blow a train whistle at key moments.

It was very entertaining. The music interspersed was nice, she said. Of GAHC (where she's been a member for years), she said: I come here often for the different events they have. I like the various activities; I'm really into crafts so I join a lot of their craft things, she said. Their different programs, I try to come to all of them.

The center (open since 2000 in a four-story 1871 former hotel) has hosted a free open house since 2012, Ms. Lao said.

It also brings in new people, younger people  people who've never been here before, just to see that we exist, she said. We have 30,000 cars pass us every day. It makes an excuse to come in the parking lot and come inside. The thing, too, with 'heritage center,' some people think it's a club, or you have to be German.

Elizabeth Schnurbusch came Sunday partly because it was free. I enjoy the history; I'm German, she said. My people aren't here. I'm from Missouri, and they came in 1804.

I like learning about German ancestry, she said. I love history.

A new first-floor exhibit, Butchers, Bakers and Bankers opens next weekend, about the businesses Germans excelled at in Scott County. It will run through May 6.

On the third floor, replacing a display about 1917 and anti-German sentiment, will be Culinary Customs about German food, from Jan. 21 to June 11. Mississippi River Distilling Company will give a Jan. 21 presentation on how the Burchett brothers traveled to Germany to learn about distilling.

Nick Eli, a German teacher at Rock Island High School, will prepare one of his favorite dishes (Rote Grutze), berries and vanilla cream, offering samples at a Jan. 27 workshop. Ms. Lao also said there will be a mustard tasting, and a sausage-making workshop (The Best of the Wurst).
MILAN  The Quad City Animal Welfare Centers new Cars 4 Critters vehicle donation program allows supporters to donate cars, trucks, motorcycles, trailers, boats, and RVs to help the shelter. Donated vehicles will either be sold at auction or sold for parts. Participants must have the title of the vehicle in order to donate through Cars 4 Critters.

Proceeds will assist with QCAWCs mission of operating a shelter for homeless animals, offering a spay and neuter program, and providing humane education to the community.

QCAWC will pick up donated vehicles free of charge and will provide the necessary Department of Motor Vehicles forms. Donations may be used as tax deductions. QCAWC will provide letters for taxes.

If the vehicle is scrapped, QCAWC will provide the donor with a donation letter stating the amount the vehicle was scrapped for, which is tax deductible.

For more information or to arrange to donate a vehicle, please contact QCAWC Executive Director Patti McRae at (309) 787-6830 ext. 13 or patti@qcawc.org.

QCAWC was founded in 1977 and is the only full-service, no-kill shelter serving the Quad Cities area.
Walk into Tango Salon, and you immediately enter an atmosphere oozing with style, beauty and fashion.

At the helm of this downtown Bettendorf boutique salon at 836 State St. is Leann Themas, whose own sense of personal style permeates everything from the trendy gray paint on the walls to the unique product lines she carries.

Its all wrapped up in the 1930s-era cozy brick house that long-time Bettendorf residents might remember as the location of Simon-Landauer East, a womens clothing store. Themas moved her business into the building in 2003 and purchased it from the Landauers in 2009.

I like that its a unique location, having a river view, Themas said. Mainly, we offer a unique experience, not being at a mall or a general commercial space.

Ample parking is available close to the entrance at the back of the building, and it is handicapped-accessible.

Tango Salon offers full-service hair care, including cuts, styling, coloring and texturizing. An esthetician offers skin care services as well as body waxing. In addition to the personal services, the salon carries boutique brands of products exclusive to professional salons, hand-crafted jewelry, scarves, and its most recent addition  a full line of bath and body products from FarmHouse Fresh. The popular line of bath and body care was given the Professionals Choice award in 2017 by American Spa magazine.

The reaction to the FarmHouse Fresh line has been fantastic and beyond my expectations, Themas said. The Texas-based company operates an animal rescue, and all of its products are made with natural ingredients.

I think people enjoy experiencing and supporting a business that has a mission, and FarmHouse does, she said.

Closer to home, Themas is proud to carry jewelry hand-crafted by her mother, Dena Miller, of Savanna, Illinois.

She keeps in mind that people have different styles, and likes to use a lot of semi-precious or natural stones, she said.

Tangos clientele includes adults and children, and sometimes entire families. New clients are being accepted by the salons staff of six.

Themas and her husband, Joe, have been Bettendorf residents since 1991. She is a vocal supporter of downtown Bettendorf and is a member of a group that supports women business owners. Between the building of the new Interstate 74 bridge and new commercial and residential development in downtown Bettendorf, she is excited at the possibilities.

It will be a more desirable area to be in, she said. Residential is big for all of us. Were right here, and can service the people who are right here.

She feels strongly about the relationship her salon establishes with its clients.

Its a very personal business because we touch people, she said. To have someone feel excited about how they look and how they feel about themselves, it doesnt get any better than that.
DES MOINES  A majority of Iowa voters would prefer fully funded public services like education and water quality to a tax cut, and four out of five believe the states minimum wage should be increased.

Thats according to a poll published Monday by the progressive advocacy group Progress Iowa. The survey was conducted by Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning national firm.

Public Policy Polling surveyed 664 Iowa registered voters on Jan. 3 and Jan. 4 using automated phone calls. The poll has a margin for error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

In the poll, 58 percent of Iowa voters said they would prefer their tax dollars be used to adequately fund public services like education, infrastructure and clean water, while 35 percent of voters said they would prefer a decrease in their tax bill by a few hundred dollars each year.

The federal government in December passed tax reform that in 2018 will result in an average federal tax reduction of $930 for middle-class workers, according to analysis from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington D.C.

Iowa lawmakers say they want to provide state-level tax relief as well during the 2018 legislative session.

I hope they see these (poll) results and they see people want an investment in public services, even at the expense of their own bottom line, Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa said.

When given four options for what they think should be Iowas minimum wage, only 16 percent of poll respondents said it should remain at $7.25 per hour.

Twenty-eight percent said Iowas minimum wage should be raised to $9 per hour, 32 percent said $12 per hour, and 20 percent said $15 per hour.

Republican leaders who control the lawmaking process in the Iowa Legislature said recently that increasing the states minimum wage is not one of their priorities, that their focus is on providing more high-paying job opportunities for Iowa workers.

Three in five Iowa voters said taxpayer funds should support public schools only, not private schools and homeschooled students, according to the survey. Sixty-two percent said tax dollars should be spent to fund public schools only; 30 percent said tax dollars should also go toward private-school and home-schooled students.

The poll also showed last years changes to the states collective bargaining system for public employee unions were not popular. More than three in five voters said the state should be required to negotiate with public employees over workplace benefits and safety policies; 21 percent said there should not be such a requirement.

The controversial, Republican-led changes in 2017 significantly reduced the benefits that public employee unions can collectively bargain.

The Public Policy Polling Poll also found Gov. Kim Reynolds approval rating under water: 39 percent approve and 47 percent disapprove of Reynolds job performance, according to the poll.

That is a stark difference to a recent Iowa Poll, which in December found 51 percent of Iowans approve of Reynolds job performance and 30 percent disapprove.
A good Monday to all. Sidewalks and driveways are improved over yesterday but still are somewhat slick, so be careful out there. Plus some area schools are closed today or are delaying the start of classes because of the weather. Here are the weather details from the National Weather Service.

1. Here comes a January thaw

Today will be cloudy through mid-morning then gradually clearing with a high near 34 degrees.

Tonight patchy fog will be possible after 4 a.m. Otherwise, skies will be partly cloudy with a low around 17 degrees.

Tuesday will be partly sunny with a high near 36 degrees.

Tuesday night brings a slight chance of drizzle after midnight, then patchy fog after midnight. The overnight low will be around 33 degrees.

2. School closings/delays today

Some area schools are cancelling classes or delaying the start of classes today because of the weather. Check out the list.

3. Area police urge caution on the roads

Freezing rain and drizzle that froze on contact with the ground made driving conditions hazardous Sunday, and the roadways won't be much better Monday morning until the sun comes out.

"It has been so cold there is a layer of permafrost below the roadways," meteorologist David Sheets said Sunday.

Until the roads are salted and the sun is out Monday sending temperatures into the middle 30s, people can expect slick roadways with the potential for black ice. Read more.

4. Credit Island bait shop changes hands

The manager of Credit Island Bait Shop in west Davenport walks barefoot to work most days.

Lisa Benningfield, who has proudly worn that hat since April 2016, lives on site with her family in the five-bedroom house attached to the popular roadside store at 2304 W. River Drive. Outside of regular business hours, chances are the mother of two is home and willing to greet customers early in the morning or late at night.

That level of hospitality likely will not change Feb. 1, when a new owner takes over the enterprise frequented by area anglers.

Longtime owners Alan and Alice Kump struck a deal with Chad and Terri Kinsey of Viola, Illinois, a Mercer County community about 30 miles south of the store.

Keeping fishermen in mind, the sellers really want to see the store  across the street from the entrance to Credit Island Park  survive and thrive. Read more.

5. Eagles turn out for their day

The annual Bald Eagle Days wrapped up Sunday at the QCCA Expo Center in Rock Island. There was also live viewing near Lock and Dam 15 on the site of the former Dock building in Davenport. And the eagles did not disappoint. Check out these images.

6. Davenport street reopens

Iowa Street between 8th and 10th streets in Davenport is scheduled to be open today. The intersection of Iowa and 9th had been closed because of a water main break.
DES MOINES  Reported cases of gonorrhea in Iowa have more than doubled over four years, according to state public health department data.

There were 3,600 cases of the sexually transmitted disease in Iowa in 2017, according to the states preliminary data.

That would be a 145 percent increase since 2013, and a one-year increase of more than 38 percent.

It doesnt appear to be one issue only. It seems like there are a number of factors involved, said George Walton, the state public health departments STD program manager.

Walton said he thinks part of the overall increase is because gonorrhea is showing up in more segments of Iowas population.

Gonorrhea diagnoses are increasing among both men and women, but faster among men, according to the department, which said that likely indicates an increase among men who have sex with men.

The disease primarily impacts young Iowans: ages 15 to 34 account for 80 percent of diagnoses, according to the department.

It also disproportionately impacts Iowas black population, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of diagnoses even though it accounts for only 3.5 percent of the states population.

Walton said further analysis is needed to determine which factors impact the various populations that are disproportionately affected.

He said more robust testing also could be boosting diagnoses. He said the department is encouraging medical facilities to be more thorough in testing for gonorrhea.

Were starting to find more infections that in the past would have been missed, Walton said. Thats a part of it, certainly not all of it.

Walton said the department cannot determine whether increased sexual activity or risky sexual behaviors  like failing to wear protection  are contributing to the increase in gonorrhea diagnoses. He said increases in diagnoses of other STDs like syphilis have been linked to increases in sexual activity as a result of more common use of dating sites, so its conceivable other STDs like gonorrhea are increasing for the same reason.

That doesnt mean thats the case. I just means we dont have that comprehensive information one way or the other, Walton said.
Warrants issued in fatal shootings

SIOUX FALLS | Police have issued arrest warrants for two people in the fatal shooting of two men in Sioux Falls last week.

The Sioux Falls Police Department said Saturday that warrants were issued for 34-year-old Manuel Jesus Frias and 27-year-old Maria Shantel LeClaire. Both were named as persons of interest Friday night.

The Argus Leader reports the Frias warrant is $1 million cash for first-degree murder. The LeClaire warrant is $500,000 cash for accessory to first-degree robbery.

The two men were shot outside an apartment building around 5:30 a.m. Friday. One man died at the scene. The other was taken to the hospital where he later died of his injuries.

The men, both in their 20s, have not been identified. Two weapons were recovered from the scene.

Officials: Carbon monoxide dangerous

OMAHA, Neb. | Experts at the Nebraska Regional Poison Center are reminding people about the dangers of carbon monoxide.

The odorless and colorless gas is produced when fuels don't burn completely in furnaces. Carbon monoxide exposure can be fatal.

There are more than 400 deaths and 15,000 emergency room visits every year in the United States because of carbon monoxide. Problems are more common during the winter months.

The symptoms include sleepiness, headaches, dizziness and blurred vision.

The Poison Center recommends that everyone keep carbon monoxide detectors on every level of their homes. And make sure to inspect furnaces and other fuel-burning equipment annually.

2-year-old boy killed in crash

MOORHEAD, Minn. | Moorhead police say a 2-year-old boy was killed in a four-vehicle crash.

The crash happened at an intersection on Highway 10 around noon Saturday. Police say an eastbound pickup struck the rear of a vehicle occupied by two adults and the child. Both vehicles continued eastbound, striking two more cars.

Police say the child was taken to a Fargo, North Dakota hospital, where he died. The victim's name has not been released. The driver of the pickup was not hurt. Police say he has been cooperative with authorities and did not show signs of impairment.

The crash is under investigation.
PIERRE | Gov. Dennis Daugaard's final legislative session as governor won't be full of new state spending, but South Dakota lawmakers will keep busy debating changes to the state's ballot question system, tougher penalties for meth dealers and the use of lakes on private land.

Legislators return Tuesday for the opening of the 2018 session and Daugaard's State of the State address. Here's a look at the agenda until lawmakers adjourn in late March:

Lackluster finances

It's simple: South Dakota's not flush. Daugaard last month proposed government spending limited by disappointing tax collections, meaning schools can't expect a per-student funding hike and most state workers will likely go without raises for the second straight year.

Officials pin the weakness in sales tax, the state's main revenue source; low farm income; e-commerce sales and increased health care costs. The GOP-controlled Legislature will reshape the current budget and craft the next one during the upcoming session.

Ballot questions

Some lawmakers are eyeing changes to South Dakota's first-in-the-nation state ballot question system, including a proposal that would ask voters to make it harder for constitutional amendments to pass at the ballot box.

House Speaker Mark Mickelson has floated an idea that would end citizens' ability to gather signatures to propose constitutional changes at all. He's also discussed giving voters a chance to scrap a victims' rights constitutional amendment approved at the ballot that critics say has brought too many unintended consequences with it.

Lawmaker pay

Should legislators get a raise? It could be voters' choice. Top lawmakers are sponsoring a measure that would set legislators' salaries at one-fifth of the median income. U.S. Census numbers for 2015 show that would mean a raise of 70 percent for the state's 105 lawmakers to nearly $10,200.

Supporters say low pay limits the pool of people who can serve as legislators.

University unions

Faculty take note: Mickelson has proposed ending collective bargaining at South Dakota's public universities.

Mickelson has said he doesn't think collective bargaining "serves the mission of educating our kids." Union contracts cover more than 1,300 staff members at the state's six public universities and at schools for the blind and deaf.

The union negotiates on issues such as academic freedom, grievance rights, evaluation and tenure, but members can't bargain for salary and benefits.

Flooded lands

Daugaard wants lawmakers to extend an expiring law that governs the use of lakes on private land for recreation. The new rules were the product of a special legislative session last year on so-called nonmeandered waters.

Nonmeandered waters are bodies of water that weren't specially designated during government surveys in the late 1800s. Some private property has since flooded, forming new, unofficial bodies of water and creating good fishing. But that has come at the cost of farmland and pastures lost by agriculture producers.

The law restored access to nearly 30 specific lakes for public recreation hampered after a 2017 state Supreme Court decision. It also said lakes on private property are open for recreational use unless a landowner installs signs or buoys saying an area is closed.

The governor's bill would move the law's June expiration date to 2021.

Ag's bills

Attorney General Marty Jackley is seeking harsher penalties for methamphetamine dealing and manufacturing. The proposed changes also include tougher sentences for meth distribution if the person has things such as cash or guns and increasing penalties for distributing the drug to a minor.

Jackley also wants to require companies to inform state residents whose personal information was acquired in a data breach. The plan would require companies to notify the attorney general if it affected more than 250 residents.
Over the past three years, many have heard me talk about what we want our country to look like in 2026, the year we celebrate Americas 250th birthday. We must get away from the centralized, overregulated system of government that has stifled economic growth. In the past year, weve made great strides in getting back on track to a freer, less intrusive government.

Just before Christmas, President Trump signed tax relief legislation into law, the first major overhaul of our tax code in more than 30 years. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which takes effect immediately, will lead to more jobs and bigger paychecks for hardworking families. Additionally, lowering the corporate tax rate for American businesses will put them on a level playing field with the rest of the world and allow them to be more competitive in the global marketplace, keeping jobs and income here at home.

In 2017, we were able to undo 15 Obama-era regulations under the Congressional Review Act, saving taxpayers $36 billion and more than 4 million hours of paperwork. The Trump administration has also withdrawn or reconsidered close to 900 ineffective and duplicative regulations. Some of these regulations include the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, the Clean Power Plan, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) power grab rule and retirement plan rules. Each of these Washington-knows-best rules would have led to more paperwork, more government intrusion and less freedom for the American people.

In the Senate Banking Committee, we made progress on legislation to provide relief to our financial institutions. Our bill, which includes six provisions I offered, will improve our nations financial regulatory framework by rolling back some of Dodd-Franks one-size-fits-all regulations. In doing so, our bill will help assure that South Dakota families and businesses have access to credit when they need it. This is critical as we work to grow a healthy American economy.

Our armed forces also received a boost. After years of underfunding, our military received additional resources for the second year in a row, allowing military leaders to take necessary steps to regain the required level of readiness. Im also pleased to report that the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that specifies where funds should be spent, included eight of my provisions that will help our armed forces accomplish their missions and take care of our troops and their families.

We are just eight years away from our 250th birthday. In 2017, we made significant steps toward a freer, less intrusive government that will help keep us safe and grow our economy. We will continue to work on the important issues that will shape our birthday celebration in 2026 and provide a stronger, healthier economy that we can pass onto future generations.
Montana fifth-graders are encouraged to participate in an art contest to raise awareness about missing children.

The state has participated in the national Bring Our Missing Children Home poster contest every year since 2009, according to a press release from the Montana Department of Justice. The Office of Public Instruction is also partnering in the contest.

The winner of the state contest will receive $100 at an award ceremony in Helena with Attorney General Tim Fox.

The state winner will also be entered into the national contest, the winner of which will receive a trip to Washington, D.C., to attend the National Missing Childrens Day ceremony in May. The childs parents and teacher will also be flown to Washington to accompany the child.

Posters must be original, handcrafted artwork that is 8.5-by-14 inches in size, with the words Bring Our Missing Children Home appearing somewhere on the poster. Posters with digitally produced images, collages, cut-outs and stamping will not be accepted.

Each entry must be accompanied by a written application. Forms are available online at dojmt.gov/missing-persons.

The application will be judged on the level of understanding of the subject, clarity and grammar appropriate for the fifth grade, the DOJ said.

Poster artwork will be judged on originality, creativity, use of color and materials, and reflection of contest theme.

The contest is intended to educate children about safety.

This program will allow Montana fifth-graders to compete in state and national poster contests while giving schools the opportunity to teach students about personal safety, said Joni Turpin, of DOJs Missing Persons Clearinghouse.

Entries must be received by Feb. 9 and should be mailed to: Montana Department of Justice, Missing Persons Clearinghouse, 2225 11th Ave., PO Box 201406, Helena, MT 59620.

Since 2003, the Montana Department of Justice has issued 34 AMBER Alerts. All 49 children involved were located, but four were found dead.

In 2016, Montana begin using CodeRED, a new mobile alert app for emergency communications, to issue AMBER Alerts.
MEXICO, Jan 8: Violent clashes involving gunmen, a community police force and state police killed 11 people in the troubled southern state of Guerrero on Sunday, while a separate series of shootouts the previous night left seven dead in the northern Mexico beach resort of San Jose del Cabo.





Guerrero state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said eight people were initially killed when gunmen ambushed community police before dawn in the town of La Concepcion, near the resort city of Acapulco. Two of the dead were from the community force.





Later in the morning, state police arrived to disarm the local agents, and another shootout erupted in which three people were killed. Alvarez said he did not know how they died, but local media said they were community police.





State Attorney General Xavier Olea Pelaez said 30 members of the community police were detained on suspicion of crimes including homicide and illegal weapons and drug possession.





Among those arrested was Marco Antonio Suastegui, the founder of the community force and the leader of a social movement that for over a decade has fought against a hydroelectric project in the region.





Photojournalist Bernandino Hernandez said that while covering the violence he was beaten, kicked and dragged by state police and forcibly relieved of his cameras memory cards. He also witnessed several other journalists being treated roughly.





Hernandez said he had photographed police using force against locals who tried to prevent the arrest of the community agents: Some people were dragged by the hair to take them away.





Hernandez is a regular contributor of photographs to The Associated Press but was not on assignment for AP at the time.





Guerrero has been one of Mexicos most violent states in recent years, home to marijuana and opium poppy fields as well as warring organized crime gangs.





Its also where 43 teachers college students disappeared in 2014 after being taken by police from the city of Iguala who allegedly handed them over to a drug cartel. They remain missing.





In the northern state of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said in a statement that marines responding Saturday night to reports of gunfire in San Jose del Cabo came upon heavily armed men wearing tactical vests and riding in two vehicles with license plates from the U.S. state of California.





Both vehicles sped off with the marines in pursuit and subsequently crashed, the statement said. In two separate exchanges of gunfire, all seven of the cars occupants were shot dead by marines.




Guwahati : The troops of Assam Rifles had apprehended six Naga militants including two NSCN (K) and four NSCN (KN) militants in Nagaland on Friday, officials said on Saturday.





Based on specific information, the troops of Assam Rifles Phek battalion under the aegis of HQ IGAR (North) launched an operation at Meluri Town and apprehended six militants including two of NSCN(K) and four of NSCN(KN)) from a house in Meluri town.





Security personnel had recovered one carbine machine gun(CMG), two pistols, ammunition of various calibers and one hand grenade along with various incriminating documents, Spasmo proxyvon tablets and uniforms in possession from them.





A top official of Assam Rifles said that, the apprehended militants of the two factions were involved in extortion and threatening of the local populace.





Later, the nabbed militants along with recovered arms and ammunition were handed over to Phek police station for further investigation.








Guwahati: Security forces had busted a temporary camp of banned outfit United Liberaion Fron of Assam  Independent (ULFA-I) in Arunachal Pradesh on Friday night, officials said.





Kohima based Defence PRO Colonel Chiranjeet Konwer said that, based on intelligence input, Assam Rifless Jairampur battalion of security forces under the aegis of DAO division had launched operation in Namdapha Reserve Forest area in Arunachal Pradesh and busted a temporary hideout of the banned outfit.





The operation was launched based on specific intelligence about presence of militants trying to terrorize and attempting extortion in Miao circle. The Jairampur battalion swiftly launched an operation and surrounded the temporary hideout and in subsequent search recovered blank extortion notes, opium and other administrative stores from the area. The militants had been using the hideout as place of transit and had been terrorizing and carrying out extortion from villagers of Miao circle, Colonel Konwer said.








Guwahati: Ahead of the Republic Day celebration, an encounter between suspected militants of banned outfit ULFA (I) and security forces was took place at Jagun area in Assams Tinsukia district along with Arunachal Pradesh border on Sunday evening.





Tinsukia district SP Mugdha Jyoti Mahanta said that, following intelligence input about presence of a six-member armed militant group, the troops of Assam Police and Assam Rifles had jointly launched operation at the area between Kasharani village and Hajong village along with the Assam-Arunchal Pradesh border.





While the security personnel had reached the area, the militant groups had started firing upon the troops and security personnel retaliated. Over 1000 rounds fired between both sides, the top Assam cop said.





The encounter is going on and no casualties have been reported from the security forces, Mahanta said.





The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has recently alerted the Assam Police and other security agencies that, ULFA (I) and other militant groups under CorCom are trying to attack on security forces ahead of republic Day celebration in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Meghalaya.




Sagarmatha Network Pvt. Ltd. is the organization dedicated in the field of printing, publishing service since 2001. As part of media, we've been publishing Review Nepal, an English medium weekly registered at District Administration Office (DAO) Kathmandu with registration number 130-162-163 and reviewnepal.com as an online digital newspaper, with registration number 849-075-076 at Department of Informational and Broadcasting (DIB) from Kathmandu, Nepal since 2003.
Kathmandu, Nepal : Police arrest senior orthopedic doctor Govinda KC, who was in his 14th hunger strike on the charge of contempt of court from agitating site at Maharajgunj based Teaching Hospital premises on Monday evening.

A police team mobilized from the metropolitan police office,Teku, arrested KC as per the directive of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had ordered the police administration to arrest KC on the charge of contempt of court.
Kathmandu, Nepal: the Supreme Court (SC), the Apex Court of the country, has on Monday ordered the Police administration to arrest senior orthopedic doctor Govinda KC on contempt of court case.





The SC has made the order soon after KC begun his 14th hunger-strike demanding resignation of Chief Justice Gopal Parajuli.





Dr. KC began his 14th series of hunger-strike accusing Chief Justice Parajuli of maintaining ties with medical mafia. KC had been staging hunger strike demanding reform in the medical sector.





According the SC, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Police Headquarter are ordered to present Dr. KC on Tuesday 9:00 AM.




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Jan-07-2018 23:43 TweetFollow @OregonNews Nothing Like a Wacky Fatwa to Begin the New Year Could the flurry of hate mail from a variety of supposedly Zionist/Muslim/Christian sources be the work of one sad and very disturbed individual?

A fatwa in the Islamic faith is a nonbinding but authoritative legal/learned interpretation that the Sheikhul Islam can give on issues pertaining to the Islamic law. ~Wikipedia

(LONDON) - The silly season has started earlier than usual in 2018. Fatwa number 3 just arrived: FATWA

MUSLIM LEAGUE FOR YAHUD ALLIANCE

FILE No. LIT - 1644

To: Stuart Littlewood A fatwa has been issued against you by the Muslim League for Yahud Alliance in Chittagong, Bangladesh. It has been evidenced by the documentation provided to us by the Coalition Against Palestinian War Crimes based in Kuwait. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it proves that you are one of the world's extreme Izrail haters. You have an extensive history of collaboration with the jihadist Muslim Brothers who compose the Palestinian Hamas war criminals in Gaza, with the Palestinian gangster regime in Ramallah and the Iranian-backed Hizbullah heretics in Beirut in the commission of the crime of incitement to genocide against the innocent Izrailite population, as detailed in the Goldstone Report. It calls on all educated Sunni Muslims, Christian and Jewish clergy, UK anti-terrorist activists, human rights NGOs, journalists, students, academics, trade unions, British political parties and Members of Parliament to have you incarcerated as a violator of international humanitarian law and a traitor to the ummah. Other procedures are stipulated, including the application of the Sharia laws from the Hanbali jurists to British racists like you who violate the sacred teachings of the Holy Qur'an regarding the Izrailite waqf entitlement, as the People of the Book, to the Holy Land Of Izrail. As an affiliated NGO with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, we will do our part to bring you, a corrupt kaffir and harbi, to justice. A copy of this decree has been handed to the Home Office in London to have you inscribed on the international no-fly lists and to confiscate your passport. As well, it is deposited with the International Council of Imams in Djakarta for their separate actions against you. We have also requested that Scotland Yard seek a warrant for your arrest as an interim measure, pending a trial for aiding denominated terrorist regimes in violation of UK anti-terrorism laws. O Allah! let Your glorious Majesty reign upon the entire world with the arrogant kaffis and harbis burning in the Hellfires as promised to us by Your Messenger of Wonder, Muhammad, peace be upon Him. O Allah! let this ugly man's face be forever covered with the dung of donkeys for the stench he has emitted by trampling on Your Holy People of the Book and betraying the noble English people. Sealed By:

His Excellency Sheikh Naheed ibn Umar AlHaq, DML

Supreme Justice

Sharia Court

Muslim League for Yahud Alliance

Chittagong, Bangladesh This is word-for-word the same bollox as fatwas sent to other pro-Palestinians including prominent churchman Dr Stephen Sizer by the World Muslim Zionist Organization in Dhaka. So, is the Muslim League for Yahud Alliance (whoever they are) cyber-scribbling for the WMZO? And I don't see them on any International Criminal Court NGO list, nor do they seem to have a web presence. Here's another fatwa I received back in 2009 from the Coalition Against Palestinian War Crimes which is also a flunkey of the WMZO, apparently: COALITION AGAINST PALESTINIAN WAR CRIMES File No. TG-4617 A fatwa has been issued against you by the World Muslim Zionist Organization in Dhaka. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are one of the world's top Jew-haters, with an extensive history of collaboration with the Palestinian war criminals in Gaza and Ramallah. It calls on jurists, NGOs and governments to immediately take all the necessary measures to have you incarcerated as a traitor to the British people. Other procedures are stipulated, including the application of the Sharia laws to disloyal individuals like you who emanate from the People of the Christian Book and live in the Dar al-Harb. As an NGO, we will do our part to bring you, the kuffir, to justice. A copy of this letter has been handed to the Home Secretary. It is also being sent to Interpol and deposited with the UK Council of Imams. We have been promised an investigation by MI6 which may entail the seizure of your computer files. Muhsir al-Mutawakil

Chairman The issuer of the 2009 fatwa, Muhsir al-Mutawakil, turned out to be the man behind the Boycott of Palestinian Goods and Services campaign, a kind of reverse 'Boycott Israel' operation based in Canada, a favourite hang-out for Zionist extremists. Al-Mutawakil is a Palestinian Arab from Rafah in the Gaza Strip who converted to Judaism. Where is he now? Around that time I was branded an enemy of Palestine by the embassy in London. Then I was slapped with a fatwa by a crazed Christian-Zionist branding me an enemy of the Israeli people and demanding $10,950 otherwise he and his disciples would have me removed from my job, barred from the Holy Land and put under close surveillance. He styled himself His Eminence The Very Reverend Charles J. Edgbaston, DD, PhD, Chair, Christians for Moses Ministries Inc. and Rector, Zion College of Canada. Neither of those organisations had a web presence. This freak was in a league of his own. He said he'd broadcast the sentence of his church court to the media and my family. His disciples were empowered to facilitate my removal from my place of work. He was applying to the Home Office to revoke my passport and he warned that medical and pension benefits might be stopped and my bank accounts frozen. And he had ordered his goons to put me under close surveillance. He was also getting Israel to ban me from the Holy Land. And he'd do all this unless I handed over a suitcase full of US dollars. The charge-sheet he sent me provides an entertaining window into the mindset, hatred and self-delusion that drives some Christian Zionists. It is headed NOTICE OF JUDICIAL SENTENCE BY ECCLESIASTICAL COURT and begins: "Reliable sources in the Anglican community have informed Christians for Moses Ministries that you are committing slander against the holy state of Israel and its holy Jewish people, singing the praises of Palestinian Islamic terrorists and committing an assorted variety of other related reactionary activities." So Edgbaston was asking the Anglican community rather than the Coalition Against Palestinian War Crimes for false intelligence. "Our disciples in London corroborate this news. This constitutes a disproportionate abuse of your Christian upbringing and calls into question your British residency. My British residency was being questioned? Jeepers. Was I about to be ethnically cleansed from my UK ancestral homeland and my house demolished at gunpoint by a D9 Caterpillar? And was the good Reverend defending the same holy state of Israel that was founded on terror, shows contempt for international law, flourishes by ethnically cleansing the resident population and now stands accused of war crimes? Review by our Investigations Department of the evidence submitted in your dossier clearly reveals that the views and activities you have adopted on behalf of the enemies of Israel are obscene and racist." The allegations continued: "You act as a stooge of the Palestinian Islamic terrorists, engaging in a demonization and negation of the holy Jewish people and their Zionist state... I want you to realize that your outrageous behaviour is unforgiveable. Zionist Israel is a revolutionary micro-state whose existence has permeated the world with universal morality." Military blockade, economic strangulation, wholesale land and water theft, racial subjugation, demolition of homes, war on helpless civilians with nowhere to run, etc, etc... this is what passes for universal morality in the Zionist world apparently. He concluded: "It is now abundantly clear to the entire world that Palestinianism is the insistence on an ethnically-exclusive state for ethnically-defined Arab Muslim people only. The so-called Palestinian people are not enduring any brutal occupation but the Christians under the Palestinian Arabs are... Israel, in fact, maintains no 'occupation'. Edgbaston claimed to have 55,000 followers worldwide and he caused a fair amount of consternation among the people he threatened. Did they really think the British authorities would do the bidding of a religious loon demanding money with menaces? It would be interesting to know how much the good Reverend made from his nasty extortion racket. Fr. Antoine Habib, a contributor to this website claimed: "The Very Rev. Dr. Charles Edgbaston has forwarded over $10 million to victims of Arab terror in Israel. Together with Christian zionists all over the world, he has also brought tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab and Russian lands to Israel. Recently, he financed the Coalition Against Palestinian War Crimes research which was sent to the Goldstone Commission." I don't suppose those in receipt of Edgbaston's generosity questioned where the money came from. And another contributor said Muhsir al-Mutawakil, who issued my 2009 fatwa, founded the Coalition Against Palestinian War Crimes. It wouldn't surprise me, if you followed the links, that all these people turned out to be one and the same. Where is the Reverend Edgbaston now? Still blackmailing seekers of justice? Working on other programmes for the Zionist cause under new identities? Perhaps the World Zionist Organisation, which really does exist, could please assure everybody that none of the shadowy organisations named above are associated with the WZO or tasked with spewing hate mail on its behalf. It was bad enough to discover we are plagued on all levels by fubared Christian-Zionists, especially in the US. And until recently I couldn't believe that creatures such as Muslim-Zionists existed. But now that Saudi Arabia and possibly other Arab factions are in bed with Israel I suppose this mad mutation is now stalking the Middle East. Whoever that shady sheikh in Chittagong is (alias The Very Reverend Charles Edgbaston? alias Muhsir al-Mutawakil? alias Fr Antoine Habib?) his fatwa paints a lurid picture of what we in the West would become if Sharia law was ever allowed to gain the foothold some have been campaigning for. On the other hand there's a lot to be said for adopting its donkey dung treatment to punish Zionist 'hasbara' trolls. _________________________________________

Palestine | Education | History | Israel | Most Commented on





Articles for January 6, 2018 | Articles for January 7, 2018 | Articles for January 8, 2018
 SCOTUS back to work with remarkable split habeas ruling giving capital defendant another (long-shot?) chance to obtain relief | Main | "Mass Incarceration and the War on Drugs" 

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein today delivered these lengthy remarks at the American Correctional Association's Winter Conference. Folks interested in prison policies and practices, as well as the messages being delivered by the US Justice Department these days, should make time to read the entire speech. And sentencing fans (including students in the Sentencing class I start teaching today) may be especially interested in these interesting comments about reform and rehabilitation from the early part of the speech:

The American Correctional Association has a proud history of supporting the work of prison and jail officials. More than 147 years ago, in 1870, corrections officials from the United States and abroad met in Cincinnati, Ohio and adopted a Declaration of Principles they believed should guide the field of corrections. One of your principles is that the purpose of incarcerating criminals is the protection of society.

One of the most important management principles is that it is essential to articulate the big-picture goal for an organization. That vision filters down into how other managers understand their mission, and ultimately into everything that our employees do. In law enforcement, our goal is to reduce crime.

Correctional agencies play a critical role in achieving that goal. By providing inmates with structure, and teaching them discipline and skills during their incarceration, you increase the probability that they will become productive members of society and reduce the likelihood of recidivism.

When I read the original version of your principles, I noticed that the word reform appears 27 times. The word rehabilitate does not appear at all. Rehabilitation came into vogue as a sentencing goal in the 20th century. Many people ultimately concluded that rehabilitation was not a realistic goal for prisons.

After spending almost three decades in law enforcement, I agree that we need to focus on reform of criminals, not rehabilitation. The reason is that re-habilitation, by definition, is about restoring a persons good reputation and ability to work.

There are some criminals for whom rehabilitation is a reasonable goal. They are people who lived law-abiding lives and were productive members of society, before something went wrong and caused them to go astray.

But many of the career criminals housed in our prisons unfortunately were not properly habilitated before they offended. The criminals who were not productive members of society need reform, not rehabilitation.

Admitting that most of our inmates need reform is not a way of disparaging the criminals. It is instead a frank way to acknowledge that our task is more than just helping them overcome a few mistakes. Many inmates do not just lack self-restraint. They lack job skills. They lack education. They lack family structure. They lack discipline.

While they are under governmental supervision, you have the chance to help them reform by imposing discipline and offering opportunities for improvement. The most important thing for many inmates to learn is the discipline of following a schedule: wake up at a particular time, report to work when required, eat meals at the designated hours, and go to bed early enough to start fresh the next morning.

Some of the programs you offer also may be useful to reform inmates and set them on the right path. Programs such as institutional work assignments, prison industries, substance abuse treatment, and educational or vocational training. Your work makes our communities safer.

The principles from 1870 also codify the professionalism that defines corrections officials. They explain that [s]pecial training, as well as high qualities of head and heart, [are] required to make a good prison or reformatory officer.
 Noticing the continued decline of the federal prison population (for now) ... and a story embedded with intricacies | Main | Interesting comments on reform and rehabilitation from Deputy AG Rosenstein 

January 8, 2018

SCOTUS back to work with remarkable split habeas ruling giving capital defendant another (long-shot?) chance to obtain relief

At the end of this long Supreme Court order list, comprised primarily of a long list of cases in which certiorari has been denied, comes a fascinating little per curiam opinion in Tharpe v. Seller, No. 176075 (S. Ct. jan 8, 2018) (available here). The ruling is a rare summary SCOTUS win for a capital habeas defendant, and the short majority opinion provides only a small glimpse into the case (though a clear view of what motivated a majority of Justices to want to intervene). Here are excerpts from the opinion (with cites removed):

Petitioner Keith Tharpe moved to reopen his federal habeas corpus proceedings regarding his claim that the Georgia jury that convicted him of murder included a white juror, Barney Gattie, who was biased against Tharpe because he is black. See Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 60(b)(6). The District Court denied the motion on the ground that, among other things, Tharpes claim was procedurally defaulted in state court. The District Court also noted that Tharpe could not overcome that procedural default because he had failed to produce any clear and convincing evidence contradicting the state courts determination that Gatties presence on the jury did not prejudice him.... Our review of the record compels a different conclusion. The state courts prejudice determination rested on its finding that Gatties vote to impose the death penalty was not based on Tharpes race. And that factual determination is binding on federal courts, including this Court, in the absence of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary. Here, however, Tharpe produced a sworn affidavit, signed by Gattie, indicating Gatties view that there are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. Niggers; that Tharpe, who wasnt in the good black folks category in my book, should get the electric chair for what he did; that [s]ome of the jurors voted for death because they felt Tharpe should be an example to other blacks who kill blacks, but that wasnt my reason; and that, [a]fter studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls. Gatties remarkable affidavit  which he never retracted  presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpes race affected Gatties vote for a death verdict. At the very least, jurists of reason could debate whether Tharpe has shown by clear and convincing evidence that the state courts factual determination was wrong. The Eleventh Circuit erred when it concluded otherwise.

Justice Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, authored a lengthy dissent to the majority's short ruling. It starts and ends this way:

If bad facts make bad law, then unusual facts inspire unusual decisions. Ante, at 3. In its brief per curiam opinion, the Court misreads a lower courts opinion to find an error that is not there, and then refuses to entertain alternative grounds for affirmance. The Court does this to accomplish little more than a do-over in the Court of Appeals: As it concedes, petitioner Keith Tharpe faces a high bar on remand to obtain even a certificate of appealability (COA). Ante, at 2. One might wonder why the Court engages in this pointless exercise. The only possible explanation is its concern with the unusual facts of this case, specifically a juror affidavit that expresses racist opinions about blacks. The opinions in the affidavit are certainly odious. But their odiousness does not excuse us from doing our job correctly, or allow us to pretend that the lower courts have not done theirs. The responsibility of courts is to decide cases, both usual and unusual, by neutrally applying the law. The law reflects societys considered judgments about the balance of competing interests, and we must respect those judgments. In bending the rules here to show its concern for a black capital inmate, the Court must think it is showing its concern for racial justice. It is not. Its summary vacatur will not stop Tharpes execution or erase the unusual fac[t] of the affidavit. It will only delay justice for Jaquelin Freeman, who was also black, who is ignored by the majority, and who was murdered by Tharpe 27 years ago. I respectfully dissent.... Todays decision can be explained only by the unusual fac[t] of Gatties first affidavit. Ibid. The Court must be disturbed by the racist rhetoric in that affidavit, and must want to do something about it. But the Courts decision is no profile in moral courage. By remanding this case to the Court of Appeals for a useless do-over, the Court is not doing Tharpe any favors. And its unusual disposition of his case callously delays justice for Jaquelin Freeman, the black woman who was brutally murdered by Tharpe 27 years ago. Because this Court should not be in the business of ceremonial handwringing, I respectfully dissent.

This is quite the way to start Supreme Court activity in 2018, a year that seems certain to have at least the usual share of SCOTUS fireworks. (I am also inspired by Justice Thomas's closing thought to imagine a new tagline for this blog: "Engaged in ceremonial handwringing since 2004.")

January 8, 2018 at 10:13 AM | Permalink

Comments

"By remanding this case to the Court of Appeals for a useless do-over, the Court is not doing Tharpe any favors."

Other than, e.g., delaying his execution in the process or something.

One notable thing here is that SCOTUS review is -- as CJ Taft said as I recall -- on some basic level not about the person who already had two shots at least to have a case reviewed. It is about settling law and policy for the nation. That is a basic reason six justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, reached out to do this.

The "ceremonial handwringing" is an extra effort to show even a chance of racial discrimination is too much. It is not "callous" to decide this even if there is some disagreement on the merits. Of course, as seen on this blog, ymmv.

The dissent speaks of the victim being "ignored." Unclear. This line can be provided in each case involving a victim. The Supreme Court determines let's say some Sixth Amendment provision is violated. This requires re-litigating a case, delaying punishment. The dissent disagrees with the argument. Do we need another claim the victim is being ignored? Each criminal case has victims. Justices are ignoring that, including when Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch decide the defendant's claim is correct.

Posted by: Joe | Jan 8, 2018 10:53:55 AM

"Justices are ignoring that, including when Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch decide the defendant's claim is correct."

Are NOT ignoring that. New year, same typos.

Anyways, I don't know what the victims feel about this result, but after 27 years, the cry of "ceremonial hand-wringing" can apply here too. Me personally, I would not think too much about this result -- the person wasn't executed for nearly three decades. Delaying it a bit further would not be for me much of a concern for me all things factored in, including the issue of racial equality that is being honored.

My loved one is still dead and I waited this long. I would realize how bad the affidavit looks and would be upset with the moron involved. But, I would actually understand this result. I know how the legal process works, including how courts practice extra care not to look like they are being racist and such. But, that's just me. Thomas and others had a different view. The whole thing is a tad subjective.

Posted by: Joe | Jan 8, 2018 11:03:36 AM

......



Anyways, reference is made to the U.S. admitting error in another case and GVR granted. Jimmie White v. U.S. Looking at SCOTUSBlog, appears to be a criminal case.

Posted by: Joe | Jan 8, 2018 11:12:33 AM

Long-shot, indeed. Mr. Tharpe finds himself in the 11th Cir. after all.

My take is that the p/c op. was so narrow precisely b/c Roberts was in the majority.

Posted by: John | Jan 8, 2018 11:55:14 AM

The competing opinions in this case (and earlier cases on when a COA should issue) remind me a little of the old parable of the six sight-impaired persons and the elephant. Everybody is describing something different and nobody can give an accurate picture of the ultimate issue -- how much merit is enough to warrant a COA. It's probably aggravated in this case because -- as the dissent noted -- the lower court gave several reasons for denying a COA and the Supreme Court only set one of those reasons aside, remanding for the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider whether to grant a COA.

While my expectation is that Tharpe will be a "good for this one case only" precedent, the disagreement in the opinions could make for interesting arguments in other cases to other courts. Most circuits do not grant a COA merely because the inmate can point to some evidence in the record which could have permitted the state courts to reach the opposite result. Instead, applying the plain language of 2254, they hold that the claim is not debatable because the federal courts have to defer to the state courts factual findings unless clearly erroneous. Here, the inmate had a good solid piece of evidence that would have supported his claim, but the state courts found the conflicting evidence more credible. To the extent that this ruling requires COAs to be granted if a defendant had good evidence supporting his claim in state court, there will be a lot more habeas appeals in the various circuit -- although very few inmates will actually receive relief from these additional appeals.

Posted by: tmm | Jan 8, 2018 2:32:00 PM

Face it. The majority opinion is anti-majoritarian. The dissent focuses on the perception of the victim/extended family. Many victims want retribution. Heck, many victims need retribution as part of the "healing process." In my experience, a majority of victims do not "turn the other cheek" or accept their lot. Which, of course, is understandable -- family protects family, tribe protect tribe.

The majority focuses on the perception of legitimacy of the judiciary by the extended citizenry. In the US we live in a republic, not a democracy. In a republic, it is more divisive to give into the majority -- individual retribution -- then it is to support broad unifying principles that do not necessarily elevate individual perceptions of justice. The majority of SCOTUS made a value judgment -- elevate the principal that the judiciary guards against racism in a single case even if it frustrates individual needs for retribution and closure. I like living in a country where the majority isn't always right. It ain't ceremonial hand-wringing if the citizenry are reminded the Constitution/rule-of-law is what makes this country great and, hopefully free of dictators.

Posted by: ? | Jan 8, 2018 9:31:15 PM

Prof. Berman. Joe is hogging the Comment Section. Tell him to limit his meaningless, weasel, drivel rants to 1 or 2 a day.

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 9, 2018 3:46:35 AM

"The only possible explanation is its concern with the unusual facts of this case, specifically a juror affidavit that expresses racist opinions about blacks."

Gorsuch is a Harvard Law School radicalized lawyer. Thus he is too stupid to understand the real explanation. There is no question of factual guilt in the case. The decision is to generate jobs for government make work, worthless government lawyer workers.

Rent seeking should be criminalized in statute. The Supreme Court Justices should have their immunity cancelled, arrested, and sent to federal prison for a decision that is to steal tax money, and to return nothing of any value.

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 9, 2018 5:03:22 AM

Thomas got it right---are we going to toss the murder verdict? The answer is (or should be) anyway: no. So the DP stands as well.

I can see capital defense attorneys now digging through the lives of jurors and shaking them down with threats of publicity. That's what the case will do.

Posted by: federalist | Jan 9, 2018 8:03:33 AM

Federalist, speaking from experience and as shown by the facts of this case, defense counsel is already doing so. Even before Pena-Rodriguez, most states permitted defendants (and civil litigants) to argue that jurors intentionally failed to disclose certain information during voir dire. (In my state, we have been averaging around 4-5 appellate cases per year in which juror non-disclosure is one of the claims.) While many states are strict about what jurors can say at a later hearing about actual deliberations, there are often exceptions for certain types of misconduct (e.g. bailiff coming into jury room, conversations back at the hotel or during recesses prior to the start of deliberation). In capital cases, at some stage of the review process, even before Pena-Rodriguez and this decision, it was a given that some attorney for the defendant would try to talk to the former jurors to see if they would say anything that might open the door to a claim of nondisclosure or some type of misconduct outside deliberations (or ineffective assistance if the trial attorneys failed to do this during the limited period for investigating and filing a motion for new trial).



Posted by: tmm | Jan 9, 2018 2:04:33 PM

TMM. Assume a member of the jury had to be asked to remove his KKK hood and robe when entering the court. If the defendant was factually guilty, why should the views of the juror be constitutionally relevant? What right was violated if the defendant is factually guilty?

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 9, 2018 4:17:16 PM

A wonderfully sober question, David, that can be simply answered by saying that the decision to recommend a death sentence is always a discretionary one for jurors and so there is reason to fear you KKK member advocate for death based on the unconstitutional factor of race rather than based on proper factors.

If only issue is jury determination of guilt, it would still be unconstitutional (a violation of the Equal Protection Clause) if a juror were to decide in guilt based on the defendant's race rather than on the evidence. Your suggestion seems to be that such a violation ought to be found harmless if there is clear evidence that the defendant is guilty. But courts are generally inclined to call race-based case-processing concerns structural errors not subject to harmless error analysis. See, e.g., Justice Kennedy for the Court in a ruling last year, Weaver v. Mass:

"the Courts precedents [provide] that certain errors are deemed structural and require reversal because they cause fundamental unfairness, either to the defendant in the specific case or by pervasive undermining of the systemic requirements of a fair and open judicial process. See Murray, A Contextual Approach to Harmless Error Review, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 1791, 1813, 1822 (2017) (noting that the eclectic normative objectives of criminal procedure go beyond protecting a defendant from erroneous conviction and include ensuring  that the administration of justice should reasonably appear to be disinterested  (quoting Liljeberg v. Health Services Acquisition Corp., 486 U. S. 847 870 (1988)))."

Posted by: Doug B | Jan 9, 2018 9:17:14 PM

Empirically, the sole structural error, the sole discrimination was to find the undervaluation of black murder victims. Kill a white, get the death penalty, whether the defendant is black or white. Kill a black, get a lighter sentence, whether the defendant is black or white. This effect was likely true in the days of facial (statutory) discrimination. It is the sole empirically validated and ubiquitous discrimination. It is the most disturbing form of discrimination. It may be a factor in the 5 fold higher risk of being murdered if black. In the days of statutory discrimination, lynch mobs killing black males had immunity by prosecutorial discretion. There were hundreds of witnesses at some of them.

I deem the undervaluation of black murder victims and Justice Kennedy's views to be in that tradition, with greater cover of piety, but greater lethality. This discrimination is not just procedural, but is also deadly to real people, especially, young black males. So Justice Kennedy promotes the false piety of the legal system, fixes appearances of procedure, and black young males die. The KKK lynched 5000 black males in 100 years. The excess of murder of young black males is around 5000 a year, today. The modern and pious criminal justice system has been 100 times more effective at killing young black males than the KKK.

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 10, 2018 5:50:08 AM

Would an algorithm, written, updated yearly, and owned by the legislature, solve the problem of "that the administration of justice should reasonably appear to be disinterested ? The technology exists today for such.

Let me have 2 hours with Justice Kennedy's personal computers. I can find dozens of inappropriate, and biased remarks disqualifying him from serving on the jury. I can find criminal acts, sending him to prison and justifying heavy fines. That is true of all of us. No one can withstand forensic review of personal computers, without deserving decades in federal prison. Should all prospective jurors be qualified only after such a review?

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 10, 2018 6:07:11 AM

David, for the comments I made, it doesn't matter if that bias would be harmless error. I was replying to Federalist's comment that these opinions will open the door to defense attorneys pestering jurors afterward -- noting that defense attorneys are already doing that.

More importantly, your question assumes that it is clear that the defendant is factually guilty. I deal regularly with claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. In every one of them, the inmate's attorney makes a creative argument about why the evidence at the original trial was sufficiently unclear that this one piece of evidence might have made a difference. While the test for prejudice -- structural vs. presumed prejudice vs. harmless error analysis vs. Strickland prejudice -- matters to the ultimate result after the hearing on the claim, it really has little impact on whether the inmate's counsel will raise the claim, particularly in a capital case.

Posted by: tmm | Jan 10, 2018 10:55:37 AM

When Justice O'Connor used the phrase, a lawyer's performance meeting a standard of reasonableness, what does it mean? Is the professional standard of due car, i.e. the competent lawyer? Is it the Dream Team standard, because it is a capital case? Is it, the every conceivable argument standard?

I am not in any way trying to provoke you. If a judge has declared inadequacy of counsel, is there cause for a malpractice claim? It would be a per se tort, and skip all the obstacle to finding malpractice by a lawyer. Does such a decision induce a duty in both the judge and in the prosecutor to report the substandard performance of defense counsel to the Disciplinary Counsel? Does absolute trial immunity preclude such a claim?

I am sure we share the value of not convicting an innocent defendant. Wouldn't greater liability improve the performance of defense attorneys across the country, benefiting defendants and the rule of law?

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 10, 2018 11:45:00 AM

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Oprah Winfrey gave one of the most rousing speeches weve seen since the 2016 political campaign.

The venue? Sundays Golden Globes, where she received the Cecil B. DeMille award.

In her acceptance speech, the former talk show host talked about Recy Taylor, a black woman from Alabama who was kidnapped and raped by six men after leaving church. Taylors case was an early call for action and civil rights.

Winfrey said women who have stood up to abusers are present-day agents of change. And the men who have sexually abused and bullied them are going to realize their time is up. A new day is on the horizon.

Winfrey, who sounded like a presidential candidate, got a standing ovation from the crowd, largely dressed in black to show support for those who have spoken out.

The unusually somber evening continued the thread with awards for shows that tackled abuse (Big Little Lies won four, including Best Limited Series; The Handmaids Tale won two, including Best Drama; I, Tonya" won Best Supporting Actress).

While Natalie Portman tried to press the point while presenting the Best Director Award (she pointed out there was no woman in the mix), winner Guillermo del Toro (for The Shape of Water) pulled it back and gave credit to the women in his films and his life.

Women power continued with Lady Bird and its star, Saoirse Ronan, winning in the Best Comedy/Musical Film categories.

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, the stars of Thelma and Louise, a film that celebrated the strength of female friendship, presented the Best Actor/Drama prize to Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour.

And Frances McDormand, the force behind Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, won Best Actress/Drama, adding to her films take (it got Best Film/Drama, Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell and Best Screenplay), setting it up as a frontrunner for the Oscars. The women in this room arent here for the food. Were here for the work, she said.

Lady Bird and The Shape of Water appear to be strong Oscar contenders, too.

James Franco won Best Actor/Comedy or Musical, for The Disaster Artist, which could help its chances.

The odd men out: The Post, Steven Spielbergs film about The Washington Post and its publisher, and Get Out and Dunkirk, two early leaders in the Oscar sweepstakes.

TV winners: Best Comedy and Best Comedy Actress to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and its star Rachel Brosnahan; Best Comedy Actor, Aziz Ansari for Master of None; Best Limited Series Actor, Ewan McGregor for Fargo; Best Drama Actor, Sterling K. Brown, This is Us; Best Drama Actress, Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaids Tale.

Clearly, though, it was Oprahs night.
Freedom Fighter at a Young Age...Ruby Bridges

Chloe McClure North Middle Grade 8

One of my favorite American heroes is Ruby Bridges. She was only six years old when she enrolled in an all-white school in New Orleans. I consider her to be very brave as African-American students in the South, at that time, went to segregated (separate) schools .

On the first day of school, parents from the school yelled terrible words to her and threatened to poison her food. Still, she continued to attend the school and through the support of her teacher and her parents, she made it through that tough year.

Ruby Bridges is still alive to this day and she still encourages equal rights for all Americans, especially children.

I read in the dictionary that a civil right is something we are guaranteed by law. For example; we have the right of free speech and the right to vote. Kids have most of the same rights as adults, but the right to vote occurs when you are 18.

I wish it was a right to not be bullied. Bullies do and say things that are mean to others. Bullies make people sad and not wanting to be at school. I wish that we also had the right to have friends. I think if we had more time to talk at school, we could make friends.

Ruby Bridges is someone I think I would like. She understands being bullied and she understands how important rights are.
LE MARS, Iowa | A Le Mars man has pleaded not guilty to attempting to defraud an insurance company of nearly $29,000.

Scott Leininger, 39, entered his written plea Friday in Plymouth County District Court to charges of forgery and submitting a fraudulent insurance claim.

According to court documents, Leininger submitted a claim to Homesite Insurance of $28,929 on Nov. 4, 2016, for damage to equipment needed because of his physical disability. He is accused of using a fictitious name and service provider to support the claim.

An investigation found that the business that Leininger claimed assessed the damage noted in his claim does not not exist and the Sioux City address provided on the claim was an empty lot. Investigators could find no evidence supporting the existence of the business or the person whose name was on a letter explaining the need for the repairs to Leininger's equipment, court documents said.

The investigation found that Leininger's claim was fraudulent, and the insurance company did not pay the claim.
SIOUX CITY | Three Sioux City lawyers have been nominated to fill the upcoming district associate judge vacancy.

The Woodbury County Magistrate Nominating Commission chose Mark Cord, David Dawson and Matthew Pittenger from the 12 applicants.

The district judges of the Iowa Judicial Subdistrict 3B will meet to select one of the three nominees for the position, which will become vacant in February when District Associate Judge Timothy Jarman retires.

Cord is a partner with the Moore Heffernan Moeller Johnson & Meis firm in Sioux City, Pittenger is an attorney with the Juvenile Law Center in Sioux City, and Dawson is an assistant Woodbury County attorney and former Democratic state legislator from Sioux City.

District associate judges hear serious and aggravated misdemeanor cases, small claims, hospitalization cases as well as juvenile cases and civil suits for judgment of up to $10,000.
ORANGE CITY, Iowa | The trial for a man charged with killing his grandfather was continued Monday in order to give the defense more time to prepare its case.

District Judge Duane Hoffmeyer scheduled the trial for Santos Rodriguez Jr. for May 1 in Sioux County District Court. The trial had been scheduled for Tuesday.

Rodriguez, 20, of Rock Valley, Iowa, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and first-degree arson in connection with the Oct. 29 stabbing death of Luis Luevanos in his Rock Valley home.

Public defender Jason Dunn had requested the continuance so he could have more time to conduct pretrial investigations, take depositions and make other trial preparations. Rodriguez on Dec. 21 waived his right to a speedy trial.

Rodriguez is accused of stabbing Luevanos, 84, several times, then setting fire to the bedroom in which Luevanos' body was lying. Firefighters discovered Luevanos' body when they responded to the fire call at his home in the 1400 block of 15th Street.

Rodriguez was arrested Nov. 8 in Utah. According to court documents, Rodriguez admitted to authorities after his arrest that he stabbed Luevanos and intentionally started the fire.

If found guilty of first-degree murder, Rodriguez would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. First-degree arson carries a 25-year prison sentence.
A spike that saw fatal crashes on Iowas highways exceed 400 in 2016 did not repeat itself last year, to the relief of authorities, but the number of deadly crashes in construction zones continued its troubling pace yet again  and drivers should expect to encounter more of them.

Only three times in the last decade has the proportion of fatal crashes within work zones exceeded 3 percent of the total. Two of those times were 2016 and 2017.

Mark Bortle, a traffic safety engineer with the Iowa Department of Transportations office of construction and materials, said the states nearly 3-year-old gas tax increase  which has pumped millions of dollars into additional road projects  could be a factor in the double-digit work zone fatalities seen in each of 2016 and 2017.

There are more dollars for us to spend on projects, so that does directly relate to more potential for drivers to drive through, around or past a construction project, Bortle said. Theres more projects out there and were doing more work on the higher volume roadways every year.

The 10-cent per gallon increase has generated $515 million in additional revenue for road projects since it was passed in 2015, state data show.

Whats more, Bortle said, favorable weather extended last years construction season, which also increased the chances of motorists driving through work zones.

Road construction zone deaths in Iowa reached 10  or 3.03 percent of the total  last year, which is above the five-year, 10-year and 20-year averages, according to Iowa DOT data. Three of those 10 deaths were of road workers.

Work zone fatalities surpassed 3 percent of total Iowa highway deaths just two other times in the last decade  reaching 13 deaths or 3.23 percent in 2016, and 12 deaths or 3.08 percent, in 2010.

The Iowa DOTs 511 traveler information website provides visitors with a snapshot of road conditions and work zones across the state, which can help drivers avoid construction areas altogether, Bortle said.

Last years drop to 330 total highway deaths  compared with 402 in 2016  is a welcome return closer to the five-year average in Iowa, state officials said.

Yet the decline makes 2016s spike, which followed a three-year downward trend, all the more puzzling, said Patrick Hoye, bureau chief with the Governors Traffic Safety Bureau.

When we compare it to (2016), obviously we are feeling much better about the traffic fatality trend after 2017, he said. We really just are struggling to explain 2016.

The Iowa Legislature last year sought to improve driving safety with measures that included expanding Iowas Move Over or Slow Down law and strengthening the ban on texting while driving, which may have helped lower the toll after they took effect.

The Move Over or Slow Down law requires motorists to change lanes if possible  or to slow down if not  to protect law enforcement and emergency crews, utility workers and road maintenance employees stopped by the side of highways.

The texting-while-driving law allows officers to pull over violators for that alone, without also having to spot some other offense, as was the case before.

Iowa State Patrol officers had issued 174 citations for use of electronic communication device while driving in 2016.

By late-December, 2017 had seen 668 such citations, Hoye said.

Warnings for texting while driving tripled in that span, from 129 in 2016 to 394 last year.

Thats a significant jump in citations, he said. I think our other law enforcement partners would tell you the same, that their numbers would have increased throughout the year as well.

An analysis of 2017 highway fatalities from Jan. 1 through mid-December  the most recent data sets available from the Iowa DOT  found that:

-- The states most populated counties, Polk and Linn, topped the list with the most fatalities  24 and 12, respectively.

-- About 1 in every 4 fatalities involved impaired driving.

-- A seat belt was not in use in approximately a third of the fatalities.

-- Saturdays and Mondays were the deadliest days on Iowas highways, with a total of 47 and 46 deaths, respectively.

The final tally of Iowa highway deaths is subject to change, as a fatality can be considered crash-related when a death occurs within 30 days after the crash, according to the Iowa DOT.

Jan Laaser-Webb, supervisor of transportation safety, utilities and access management with the Iowa DOTs Office of Traffic and Safety, said impaired, distracted and drowsy driving remained key contributors to traffic fatalities in 2017.

Laaser-Webb said education and enforcement often are used to change drivers behaviors, but physical updates to the states roadways can have an impact as well.

Adding roundabouts in busy intersections, updating turn lanes and highway shoulders and repainting lane lines can help make roads safer, she said.

Looking to this year, Hoye said he expects debate at the Statehouse to possibly include strengthening ignition interlock rules for drunken drivers.

With a combination of awareness and enforcement, we think we can change some of the driving behavior that was plaguing 2016, Hoye said.
DES MOINES | New state laws and spending will be crafted over the next four months as legislators convene for the 2018 session of the Iowa Legislature, which begins Monday.

Here are a half-dozen key issues facing state lawmakers as they being their work.

Tax reform

Enacting some kind of tax reform, or tax cuts, remains one of the top priorities for statehouse Republicans who gained unfettered lawmaking control after the 2016 election. Senate President Jack Whitver, a Republican from Ankeny, called it a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Federal tax reform has provided the state with some extra revenue: an estimated $106 million in the state budget that will be crafted during the session, plus another $138 million in the ensuing budget year.

Multiple top statehouse Republicans have said that extra money should go back to state taxpayers in some form of tax relief. Although Rep. Pat Grassley, who leads the Houses budget committee, cautioned against treating the windfall like the state has won the lottery.

Republicans have given few details about what their tax reform plan will look like, but they promised a plan is coming.

In my opinion, this wont be a successful session unless we have a significant tax bill get accomplished, said Bill Dix, leader of the Senate Republicans.

One key challenge facing statehouse Republicans hoping for tax cuts is a tight state budget. According to numbers produced by Grassley, the state has little new money for the next state budget, and most of that has already been spoken for in automatic increases and department requests, although those can be tweaked or rejected.

Democrats in the minority say they are willing to support tax cuts, but not at the expense of busting the state budget or if the proposal benefits wealthy wage-earners more than middle-class and low-income workers.

Their tax packages that we have seen in the past have not been beneficial to everyday Iowans, said Janet Petersen, leader of the Senate Democrats. With the budget our state is facing, knowing that all of us will be coming back and Republicans will have to fix the budget mess were in, it seems like this is not a wise time to be cutting taxes when theyre busy cutting essential services that Iowans count on and our public education system.

State budget

Revenue coming into the state continues to increase, but at a rate lower than projected the past few years. As a result, for a second consecutive year, the governor and state lawmakers must make spending cuts in the middle of the budget year.

More than $30 million in adjustments must be made to the current state budget year, which runs through June 30.

And the state is already on the hook for more than $100 million to repay to its reserve accounts funds that were used to close a budget hole in the previous year.

Im expecting another tight year, said Charles Schneider, a Republican who leads the Senate budget committee.

Health care

Few issues facing the state are more polarizing than the privatized management of the states $4.7 billion Medicaid program for low-income Iowans and those with severe disabilities. Providers have complained that they are not being reimbursed sufficiently or in a timely fashion, and patients and caregivers say some services have been reduced or eliminated.

Republican leaders, including Gov. Kim Reynolds and House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, said this week they are open to legislative solutions to improve the managed care program. But Reynolds remains steadfast that the program should not return to state management.

Weve made mistakes. The rollout was not perfect. But its the right thing to do, Reynolds said. While mistakes have been made, I believe we can work with the Legislature and I look forward to working with the legislature.

Medicaid reimbursement also figures into mental health care access, another issue statehouse leaders hope to address during the session.

The problem is that in many areas in the state, there are no services in the community to support their needs, said Rep. David Heaton, who leads the Houses health care budget committee. Theres no housing, theres no community services available.

The governor and a panel of lawmakers during the interim conducted separate examinations into how to address opioid addiction, a growing issue in Iowa. During the session, they will consider such measures as requiring physicians and prescribers to check a database to prevent addicts from getting addictive painkillers from multiple places, a Good Samaritan law that protects anyone who seeks help for an addict in crisis.

Public education

Another state budget year likely means a small increase in state funding for public K-through-12 school districts, if any increase at all.

K-12 public school funding increased by 3 percent or more just six times in the first 38 years under the states current funding formula; it has increased by that much only once in the past eight years.

Despite that, Iowa is bucking a national trend: only three states increased public school funding by a higher rate between 2008 and 2015, according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Last years increase was 1.1 percent; this years may be in the same ballpark, or lower.

Were hearing everything from a 0 to 2 percent increase. Im anticipating more toward the zero end because of what were dealing with the budget, said Rep. Mary Mascher, a Democrat from Iowa City who serves on the House education committee.

Water quality

Legislators have spent the past few sessions trying to find new or redirected funding for programs and projects designed to improve the quality of the states rivers and lakes. Iowa is one of the biggest contributors of pollutants that are flowing down the Mississippi River and killing marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Senate and House each approved their own proposals in 2017, and leaders this week pitched their chambers as the best. Whether the two sides, both Republican-led, can agree on a compromise remains to be seen. And Gov. Reynolds, also a Republican, said she does not plan to express which proposal she prefers.

The Senate version would have appropriated $744 million split among several pots or silos for water quality, nutrient reduction and water and wastewater treatment, while the House plan called for $513 million and included a bonding feature designed to expand funding opportunities.

Workforce

Boosting the credentials of Iowas workers remains a top priority for Reynolds and legislative leaders as they continue their efforts to address the states skills gap: half of the jobs in Iowa require middle skills, but only a third of workers possess those middle schools, according to a 2012 state report.

Reynolds continues to promote her Future Ready Iowa program, which has the goal of 70 percent of the states workforce having post-high school education or training by 2025. She hopes to propose new funding for the program to support grants and apprenticeships, and promote more partnerships between educational institutions and businesses in need of workers.

The governors goal has bipartisan support among lawmakers, although the parties must find common ground in supporting programs designed to achieve the goal.

One of the things that Iowans are asking for is the ability to help them move their skill set up to the next level, to be able to build their career and increase their earning capacity for themselves and their families, Petersen said.
The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.
Dawn Marie Fowler, age 31, of Mechanicsville Derrick Clifton Marshall Douglas Lee Oliver, Jr., age 28 Eric Alan Jett, age 34, of Leonardtown Jackie Lorraine McKeever, age 34, of Mechanicsville James Matthew Courtney, age 27, of Great Mills Lisa Marie West, age 48, of Lexington Park Tyrone Lamont Jackson, age 33, of Lexington Park Previous Next

LEONARDTOWN, Md.

Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at so.md/expungeme.

(January 07, 2018)The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.ASSAULT, RESISTING ARREST: On December 23, Dep. Robinson responded to the 18000 block of Three Notch Road, in Lexington Park, for a report of a disturbance. Upon arrival Dep. Robinson observed visible injury to the victim, and the suspect, was actively destroying property inside the residence. Marshall was placed under arrest, at which time he became combative and assaulted Dep. Robinson. Marshall was charged with Assault 2nd Degree, Malicious Destruction of Property, and Resist/Interfere With Arrest. CASE# 68220-17.THEFT: On December 24, DFC. Lawrence responded to the 45000 block of First Colony Way in California, reference to a theft. Upon contacting the complainant it was learned Suspect, stole merchandise from the business on December 21, 2017. The suspect was charged via criminal citation for Theft. CASE# 68404-17.THEFT: On December 24, Dep. Robinson was in the 21000 block of Great Mills Road, in Lexington Park, when he made contact with. A check of the tag Corbin had on her vehicle indicated the tag had been reported stolen out of Calvert County. Corbin was charged via criminal citation for Theft. CASE# 68414-17.ASSAULT: On December 25, Dep. Siciliano responded to the 27000 block of Neale Court, in Mechanicsville, to check the welfare of an individual at the residence. Upon arrival, Suspect, became argumentative and confrontational. Deputies on the scene were able to determine an assault had taken place, and while conducting that investigation, Suspect Jett assaulted the victim again. Jett was arrested and charged with Assault 2nd Degree. CASE# 68585-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for Theft by DFC. Tirpak# 270. CASE# 67880-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for CDS Possession by Dep. Muschette# 303. CASE# 67934-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for FTA/Child Support by Sgt. Raddatz# 99. CASE3 68026-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding Child Support Warrant by Cpl. White# 200. CASE# 68010-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for FTA/Intoxicated/Endangering through Worchster County by Cpl. Connelly# 151. CASE# 68055-17.12/22/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for Malicious Destruction of Property by DFC. Steinbach# 268. CASE# 68196-17.12/23/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for Assault 2nd Degree by Dep. Ball# 315. CASE# 68232-17.12/24/2017:, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for FTA/Theft and Property Destruction by Dep. Ball# 315. CASE# 3260-17.
Ellen Page is married.

The actress who got her big break with the 2007 film Juno revealed she married girlfriend Emma Portner, reports Out Magazine. In an Instagram post, Page and Portner showed their marriage rings with Page writing, Cant believe I get to call this extraordinary woman my wife.

Page, 30, came out in 2014, revealing her same-sex orientation during a speech at a Human Rights Campaign conference in Las Vegas. Last November she accused filmmaker Brett Ratner of outing her to the cast and crew of X-Men: The Last Stand. Page, then 18, played mutant Kitty Pryde in the movie based on the Marvel Comics series.

Both Page and Portner are native Canadians. A choreographer, Portner moved to New York City where she started her own dance company. She reportedly met Page through Instagram.

I get to call this incredible woman MY WIFE! @ellenpage I LOVE YOU! Portner posted on Instagram, using the same picture of their hands with two fingers touching.

Page was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as a pregnant teenager in Juno. Audiences responded to the film as comedic which Page said in subsequent interviews surprised her because she was accustomed to playing serious, dark characters.
Fort Lauderdale is home to one of the top funded HIV/AIDS philanthropic organizations worldwide.

In its annual report, Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA) ranked the Campbell Foundation 80th out 392 global HIV/AIDS organizations.

Were sitting in the epicenter of new infections, said Ken Rapkin, Campbell Foundation Executive Director.

Rapkin spoke to SFGN via telephone on a January morning in South Florida. A popular tourist destination, Florida is also a state with one of the highest populations of people living with HIV/AIDS.

In 2016, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported 39,660 diagnoses of HIV infection in the United States. Of that number, Florida accounts for 4,972 cases.

People kind of have this idea that AIDS is over, said Rapkin. That its a done deal and all you have to do is take a pill and its a lot like diabetes.

That is a foolish assumption, said Rapkin, who added that some have grown weary of the struggle.

Older gay men are burned out from it, Rapkin said.

Still, for 23 years, the Campbell Foundation has endured in its mission to fund HIV research and provide better treatments. In FCAAs newest funding report the Campbell Foundation surpassed the Wells Fargo Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Coca-Cola Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, the Knight Family Foundation and Keith Haring Foundation just to name a few.

In 2016 the Campbell Foundation awarded 17 grants totaling $376,646.

Some of the money is distributed in what Rapkin calls end of the year holiday hugs. Recent beneficiaries include the Poverello Center, Latinos Salud, AH Monroe, AIDS Service Association of Pinellas, Broward House, Childrens Diagnostic & Treatment Center, FoundCare, McGregor Clinic, SunServe and Tuesdays Angels.

Rapkin said grant requests are thoroughly vetted by the board of directors and a peer review panel. The assistance of volunteers has played a big part in the foundations longevity, Rapkin said.

We are not top heavy, Rapkin said. We do not pay consulting fees and a lot of our researchers work for free.

While researchers still hunt for a cure, providing better treatment options for those living with the virus is an important part of the Campbell Foundations mission. Rapkin said HIV infection is not good for the body and while the funerals may not be happening as frequently, a new generation is grappling with issues such as premature aging and inflammation of internal organs causing osteoporosis and heart disease.

AIDS is not over, Rapkin said.

What is over is the White Houses watchdog group. When asked about the recent firings which completely gutted the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, Rapkin said he was not surprised.

Every President does this, Rapkin said. They want their own people in there.

The Trump Administration has yet to show its hand on how it will deal with HIV/AIDS. The White House hung a red ribbon for last years World AIDS Day, but President Trump has yet to disclose his strategy. Rapkin said he fears advancements made during the Obama and Bush administrations  such as PrEP and PEPFAR  will be stopped by a pray it away philosophy often deployed by Vice President Mike Pence.

Do they replace them (advisory council) with competent people is the question, Rapkin said.
A teacher in New Jersey temporarily handed over her certifications after making homophobic remarks on social media.

Jenye Viki Knox worked as a special educator in Union, New Jersey in 2011 when she first made Facebook comments regarding the schools LGBT History Month bulletin board, according to Gay Star News.

When a friend asked for her opinion about the board, Knox said homosexuality is a perverted spirit that has existed from the beginning of creation, and it was a sin that breeds like cancer.

She also asked, Why parade your unnatural immoral behaviors before the rest of us?

The school gave her a three-month unpaid suspension for conduct unbecoming of a teacher.

Knox later resigned after and filed a federal lawsuit in 2013, claiming that school officials violated her right to free speech and religious rights. The lawsuit was settled but is under a confidentiality agreement.

The New Jersey Department of Education revoked all of her certificates, according to Gay Star News. Knox later appealed and proposed a suspension of her licences for three years.

The state Department of Education accepted the appeal in December 2017.
The second most powerful position in New York City politics is now held by a gay man living with HIV.

Last Wednesday, Corey Johnson was elected speaker of the New York City Council. The 35-year-old Johnson represents the West Village, Chelsea and areas of Midtown Manhattan on the council, a spot the New York Times considers second only to Mayor Bill de Blasio in power. Johnson now will voice decisions concerning the citys $86 billion annual budget.

A native of Massachusetts, Johnson has spoken publicly about growing up in public housing, struggling with drugs and alcohol and his HIV positive status. During his city service Johnson has championed issues affecting the middle and working class and those living in poverty.

The affordability crisis gripping our City threatens the very existence of our neighborhoods. New Yorkers who have lived in the same community their entire lives now find themselves priced out, unable to afford their rent or even groceries, Johnson tweeted.

Johnson was first elected to NYC Council in 2013, reports Gay Star News, winning with 86 percent of the vote. He has passed 18 pieces of legislation with a focus on rent regulation, tenant protection and assisting New Yorkers affected by HIV/AIDS.

Im honored and humbled to have been selected by my colleagues as Speaker of the New York City Council. I look forward to working with all of my fellow Council Members on behalf of all New Yorkers, Johnson tweeted.
Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.




The 90th edition of the Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 4 but Canadian harness racing will feature our own version on Saturday, February 3 at the annual OBrien Awards Black Tie Gala.

Canadas harness racing champions will be announced at the Black Tie Gala which will feature an Oscars theme, red carpet and all!

Presented by Standardbred Canada, the O'Brien Awards celebrate the absolute best in harness racing over a given year. They are the highest honour the sport bestows upon its heroes in this country.

Winners receive the coveted OBrien bronze trophy, a replica of the late great horseman, Joe OBrien, a member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame and a native of Prince Edward Island.

Tickets and program ads are now on sale and can be purchased by contacting the Industry Marketing Department at 905-858-3060. The deadline to reserve space in the program is Wednesday, January 10.

Finalists in each of the 17 categories (click here for the release) were announced on December 20.

Follow the latest updates on the OBrien Awards on Standardbred Canadas Facebook Event page and website.

Heres some important information on the 2017 OBrien Awards:

Attire - Black Tie Gala

Tickets - Tickets are $200 each and may be purchased by contacting SCs Industry Marketing Department at 905-858-3060. Deadline to purchase tickets is January 23.

Program Ads - Each year Standardbred Canada produces a four-colour souvenir program for the OBrien Awards. Full-page, four-colour ads are available for purchase in the program at a cost of $600 plus HST.

The deadline for reserving space in the OBrien program is Wednesday, January 10. To book an ad, please contact the Industry Marketing Department at SC at 905-858-3060 x 243.

Hotel Reservations - There is a special OBrien room rate of $125 available at the Hilton Mississauga / Meadowvale for a limited number of rooms. The deadline to receive the special rate at the Hilton Missisauga / Meadowvale is January 11.

Click here to make a reservation for the Hilton. Or you can call (905) 821-1981 or toll free 1 (855) 757-4862. Use the promo code STC for the special rate of $125.

Rent A Dress - Ladies, if youre thinking about making a new dress purchase for the OBrien Awards, why not consider renting? Rent Frock Repeat is proud to support the OBrien Awards by giving a 15% discount on their rentals. Simply use promo code OBRIEN18 when processing your order! It's that easy! Live in the GTA and want try a frock on before renting? Call them at 1-855-376-2548 or email them at [email protected] and set up your own private fitting -- for FREE! Visit rentfrockrepeat.com for more details.
By Olivia Rose

AS THE Government seeks to improve the overall structure, systems and management of the Ministry of Border Control, a new Director of Immigration has been appointed.





According to a recent Government press release Derek Been officially took up the post on Wednesday, November 15, 2017.





Anya Williams, Deputy Governor and Head of the Public Service, said that Beens appointment comes at a critical time.





"I am pleased to congratulate Mr Been on his appointment and to welcome him back to the Turks and Caicos Islands civil service.





"Mr Been possesses a wealth of knowledge and experience, having previously served as a former undersecretary within this and numerous other ministries along with serving as a former permanent secretary within government.





"He is fully aware of both the challenges and needs of the department and has already in his short time in the department set about an action plan for change.





"I look forward to working with him and to supporting him in his role where I have every confidence that he will do exceptionally well.





Minister of Border Control and Employment Sean Astwood pointed out that now more than ever there needs to be sound direction and developments in the policies and practices guiding both migration and immigration activities for the protection and security of the countrys borders.





"Mr Been, as a former civil servant, undersecretary and permanent secretary of numerous areas within Government, brings with him a wealth of knowledge and experience that will be fundamental to the departments ability to address the many challenges that have inundated our communities and social systems over the years.





"While we have embarked on numerous initiatives for the reshaping of migration and immigration in the TCI, there is a long road ahead of us but I am encouraged by the energy and diversity that Mr Been has on how the department, and indeed the country, can achieve its goals.





"Over the coming weeks Mr Been will be working to institute new guidelines and policies for the improvement and revitalisation of his department and together, with our support, I expect that he will have another long successful tenure with us.





Commenting on his appointment Mr Been thanked God for the opportunity to help further develop his beloved country.





"I am fully cognisant of the inherent challenges and threats that seem to dominate the immigration and labour sectors.





"However, opportunities also exist and the way we manage migration and immigration is critical to the cultural, social and economic well-being of these Islands and for those who conduct business and reside here permanently.





"The Immigration Department is essentially an enforcement body; the staff that I lead is expected to operate within the provision of the laws of the country.





"I expect the officers to be fair, firm and consistent in exercising their functions and we expect the public and our clients to appreciate and adhere to the law.





"As it relates specifically to the role as director, I will support lawful entry to persons (business and pleasure) who will benefit these Islands, while preventing the abuse of the society and its economy.





He noted critical to meeting the objectives of the ministry, increased staff training and cross training, forging strategic alliances and the use of technology to protect borders are essential.





Been is considered a civic leader having dedicated many years of service to the Boys Scouts where he serves as the Leader of the Grand Turk Division.





He holds a post graduate degree from the University of Leicester Business School and previously dedicated over 10 years to the Turks and Caicos Islands civil service.





He served as the former Undersecretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Communication and Immigration from 1999 to 2004; as the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs from 2006 to 2009 and as the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works, Utilities and Housing from 2009 to 2010, before taking up the post of Deputy Director of the Turks and Caicos Islands Ports Authority from 2010 to 2016.





During his tenure in Government Been had the opportunity to assist in a number of key projects including the construction of the North and Middle Caicos Causeway, Leeward Highway, the introduction of the Ports Authority, the Public Works Change Initiative, the Blue Ribbon Commission and several other key projects.




By Olivia Rose

VOCAL attorney Mark Fulford has urged the Government to take the necessary action to ensure that public beaches are visibly demarcated.





Fulford in his response to a heated argument which erupted on New Years Day between homeowners and local beachgoers on Taylor Bay, said beach access is a "mess that needs action.





He said: "The law as it relates to our beaches is crystal clear like our waters, which is that all beaches are public.





"The residents of Chalk Sound cant seem to catch a break. Yesterday it was the landing of an illegal sloop, now today it is Belongers including our very own Miss Turks and Caicos Islands being chased off one of our beaches.





Fulford, shedding light on the issue, noted that the ambiguity and confusion surrounds access to the beach in the form of legally registered easement known as beach access over the land towards the beach.





He stressed that all public beach access needs to be registered with the land registry.





"Chalk Sound residents have been talking about this issue for months as it appears that the position surrounding Taylor Bay Beach access is unclear.





"However, to the naked eyes it appears that Taylor Bay beach is effectively surrounded by privately own land which were to have an easement ie. public beach access registered thereon at least 25 years ago when a well-known development was granted the land for the creation of an ultra-high end residential subdivision.





"If this was all properly done and registered back, then the land documents will show that such an easement exists.





"I cannot say as I dont have access to those documents but the minister for DECR will have such access and can clarify the true position.





"However, if it was not properly done back then it lies to this Government to review the development agreement or file plans as was approved by planning to ascertain and confirm that it was agreed that a beach access was to be created.





Fulford further advised the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources (DECR) to ensure a senior staff member visits the homeowner to properly advise them regarding the boundaries of their property.





He said: "And also correctly advise him on the laws relating to beaches in our beautiful by nature TCI, which is that all beaches are public.





"This will quell the storm that is brewing over the unfair, rude and downright disrespectful manner in which that property owner spoke to one of us (a Belonger) which I condemn in the highest fashion.





"Our country is very inviting but there are lines that should not be crossed.





He further called on the Government to further take a paper to Cabinet with a decision to acquire a sliver of the land and have a beach access registered over the land as it was intended, while ensuring that public access is clearly identified.




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An online investigative publication has accused Paris police of failing to act on prior warnings about one of the Islamic State militants who killed Father Jacques Hamel in 2016, and of post-dating intelligence memos once the attack occurred.



Mediapart claims that officials held back a note on 19-year-old Adel Kermiche regarding an intercepted seven-minute encrypted conversation on Telegram suggesting that he intended to carry out an attack on French soil, citing churches as a target and Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in particular. The publication asserts that police had the report a week before the fatal July attack on the 85-year-old priest yet failed to pass it up the chain of command to counter-terror units.



In one of the videos on Telegram, Adel Kermiche reportedly said he gave classes at the mosque of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, and called on jihadists to hit churches: You go into a church where there is polytheism and you demolish everything! You do what has to be done and thats it! People in France, now is the time to strike. Here! I say it clearly: strike!



Mediapart blames the initial police error on overly bureaucratic processes that slow the transfer of information, as well as understaffing during summer holidays and poor work conditions.



The publication cites an unnamed intelligence officer as saying that since what they write is classified as a defense secret, there are too many controls, too much rereading, too many chiefs who want to correct the notes, put their own input into it.



Once the attack occurred, the police tried to cover up their bungling of the situation by altering the date on two intelligence memos to make it look more recent, Mediapart claims. Superiors allegedly ordered the officer who wrote the original report to get rid of the note, then rewrite and post-date it to make it look as if the information was received after the attack on Father Hamel.

Corruption in the establishment runs deep, even in the police I wouldn't be shocked if similar cover-ups were made regarding other disasters they caused, including the murder of 2 cousins in Marseille . All officials involved in the cover-up should be told to resign and stop robbing the taxpayers of money they don't intend to earn honestly. This was just one of the worst disasters of the Francois Hollande regime.

Labels: Christianity, dhimmitude, France, islam, jihad, Moonbattery, political corruption, racism, terrorism, war on terror
The big winner at Sunday nights Golden Globe Awards was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Directed by Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), the film won Best Picture, Best Actress (Drama) for Frances McDormand and Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell. Oh, and McDonagh earned Best Director and Best Screenplay honors.

For those who didnt see the film, that success might leave some pop culture and movie fans a bit curious. But thats always an issue during this time of year. Critical darlings arent always mainstream hits. The movies that get awards arent often the ones most people have seen.

Three Billboards got a limited release in early November and slowly rolled out to the rest of the country over the rest of the month. By Thanksgiving, some moviegoers may have been eager to see a film that was drawing awards buzz and looked like a quirky, Coen brothers-type of dark comedy. Yet for mainstream audiences, the movie may also have been lost among the wave of holiday releases like Murder on the Orient Express, Justice League and Coco, in addition to other awards contenders such as Lady Bird and The Disaster Artist.

The movie might not even be showing in many theaters around the country now, though the Golden Globes honors will probably change that and result in a re-release. If you missed it the first time around, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association got it right. Three Billboards is one of the best movies of the past year.

Frances Force of Nature McDormand

No argument here with McDormands Best Actress win at the Golden Globes.

Mildred Hayes is the driving force of Three Billboards and McDormand has to carry the movie because of it. Though her acerbic, profane personality is frequently hilarious, shes not the most likable character. Shes mean to a lot of people, most notably in one heartbreaking instance toward the end of the story.

Plenty of people will believe she can act any way she wants to because shes a grieving mother who wants justice  and vengeance  but being sympathetic yet unlikable is not always an easy trick for an actor to pull off. Yet McDormand does it masterfully. She also reminds you that maybe, just maybe, shes in over her head and hasnt truly thought this situation and its potential ramifications through. That vulnerability is another side of Mildred that McDormand shows in a typically wonderful performance.

McDormand beat out four other outstanding actresses  Jessica Chastain, Sally Hawkins, Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams  in showcase roles for the award. And since the Academy Awards dont divide the actor categories by drama and comedy like the Globes, the competition will be even more fierce. Saoirse Ronan (who won Best Actress, Musical or Comedy) will likely get a nomination for Lady Bird and Margot Robbie is drawing buzz for her portrayal of Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

Does the Golden Globes win make her the Oscars favorite? Maybe, though I wonder if more people will gravitate toward Ronans Christine McPherson, whose story far more people will relate to. (Personally, my pick would be Hawkins for The Shape of Water, but thats another article.) McDormand is a familiar name to movie fans, but I wonder if enough people will have seen Three Billboards or if her character is likable enough for Academy voters to support.

This is a very dark film

Though Three Billboards comes off as a comedy, albeit an unusual one, in trailers and commercials, some might be surprised at just how dark the movie is. Ultimately, this is a movie about grief and loss, and trying to make sense of the world after something cherished has been taken away.

Mildred Hayes (McDormand) wants justice for the rape and murder of her daughter Angela, and isnt happy with the local polices lack of progress in that investigation. While driving on a back road near town, she sees three decayed billboards that have fallen into disrepair and is inspired to send a message to Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson).

Rattling Willoughbys cage also shakes up the small town where Mildred lives. Everyone understands the grief shes feeling, but they like their police chief and dont think he deserves to be blamed like this. Understandably, the people of Ebbing have also moved on with their lives. That frustrates Mildred, with which anyone whos experienced the loss of a loved one can surely sympathize. How can you just go on? Cant you see whats happened here? Why arent you upset too?

Willoughby is also dealing with a major issue thats an open secret around town, but doesnt use that as an excuse for not having solved Angela Hayess murder. The investigation turned up nothing. DNA evidence wasnt a match. He understands Mildreds anger, but theres nothing else he can do, barring new evidence turning up or someone confessing to the crime. (Mildred also hopes that restarting the conversation might get someone to admit they saw something or brag about what he did to Angela.)

The weird characters of Ebbing  notably the racist officer Dixon (Rockwell), the young man who runs the marketing company in charge of the billboards (Caleb Landry Jones), or the little person who has a crush on Mildred (Peter Dinklage)  make the movie entertaining, adding plenty of color and personality to the story.

But then McDonagh will remind you that something terrible has happened and its not funny at all. He gets you to laugh at the goofy sheriff and his bumbling officer, but then theres a quick glimpse of the autopsy photos that show Angela Hayes was burned to death after being sexually assaulted. Its jolting, and those shifts of tone might confuse some viewers. However, unsettling the audience is exactly what McDonagh intends. Hes just using humor as the delivery device for his dark story.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Prepaid Gas meter project about to die

THE New Nation reported that Titas Gas Company's target to install some 200,000 prepaid meters in Dhaka city is unlikely to be achieved within the time frame of December 2018 due to leakages in service lines, faulty connections, and consumers' unwillingness. Teams of the company have to leave consumers' houses keeping 40 percent meters uninstalled as there is a manpower shortage of the Titas-appointed contractors. Following a successful pilot project, the state-owned gas transmission and distribution company began commissioning the meters to prevent the misuse of gas and irregularities in billing. But it has got stuck in midway thus threatening the most-hyped project.





If successful, consumers will be able to pay gas bills using prepaid, rechargeable cards which will be made available through agents. It was a good initiative of Titas to take the project as flagship activity to stop waste of the nonrenewable natural resource.





The meters won't work if there's any leak either in service line or in household connection. So if leakage points exist neither the consumers nor the company get advantage of the meters.





The project to install 200,000 Prepaid Gas Meters at household connections in different areas, including Gulshan, Banani, Baridhara, Bashundhara, Badda, Tejgaon, Cantonment, Kafrul, Khilkhet, Uttara, Mirpur and adjacent areas was taken in 2013. The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council approved the project involving Tk 712 crore fixing the project completion period between January 2015 and December 2018. But three-fourths of the total period was lost in red-tapism well before the start of the project.





Finally, Titas started installing meters on September 17 last year, but started facing problems shortly.





From 2012 to 2015, Titas installed 8,600 prepaid meters in the Lalmatia, Dhanmondi and Mohammadpur areas of Dhaka to combat the wastage of natural gas and system loss, enhance efficient domestic energy use, and help ensure energy savings vis-a-vis national energy security. Since receiving their meters, the consumers of Lalmatia and Dhanmondi areas have been paying less than the fixed rate for gas. Aligning the government's digitized policies and modernization, the project has a huge impact on consumers' satisfaction, evading system loss, and making effective use of natural gas. Definitely, the project is long due as the European countries introduced the prepaid metering system in the 1970's and Bangladesh opted for depending on renewable energy.





The gas reserve is not unlimited and we should use the gift of nature very carefully, meaning it should be used efficiently. But system loss, illegal connections, waste in households have hindered the ensuring of the optimum usability of natural gas, though the highest quantity of gas is burnt to get electricity, which is in contrast to the sustainable development policy. We still hope that Titas will accomplish the task within 2018 after fixing faulty lines and service lines while consumers should get positive awareness.
Warm clothes' sale gets momentum in city's footpaths

People of all walks of life crowded the makeshift shops to buy warm clothes as lowest temperature prevailing in the capital and across the country. This photo was taken from in front of Motijheel Sonali Bank head office on Monday.

M M Jasim :

Sale of warm clothes in the city's footpaths has broken all records as the lowest-ever cold wave is now sweeping over the country, particularly in the northern region.

Customers of different strata of society are crowding the city's footpaths for buying warm clothes at cheap prices. The vendors are also passing very busy time with the customers.

The vendors said they have been selling huge clothes almost everyday since the temperature decreased last week over the country. They said woollen sweaters, jackets, hoodies, blazers, vests, cardigans, zip-ups, wind cutter, coats, full-slave t-shirt and polo shirt, scarves, caps and sweatshirts are being sold at footpaths makeshift shops in the city.

Bangabazar, Motijheel, Municipal Hawkers' Market, Gulistan and Farmgate, footpaths near Baitul Mokarram National Mosque, Bangbandhu Stadium, Dhaka College, New Market, Gausia Market, Muktijoddha market at Mirpur section 1, Shah Ali market at Mirpur 10, and Purabi Super Market in Pallabi are the most popular footpath markets. Vendor Mustafa Kamal at Motijheel footpath said, "I could not reap benefit from the sale of warm clothes before the cold wave had hit the county. But now I am satisfied over the sale of warm clothes which has fetched me huge profit."

Street vendor Kamrul Hasan in Gulistan area said, "Bone-chilling cold is forcing people to buy warm clothes. So, our sale is now satisfactory."

Kamal Uddin, a vendor in New Market area said, "Sales of winter clothes were very low last year. People did not need to wear woolen sweaters as the weather was not cold enough. However, sales of warm clothes have been increasing since this week."

Surplus and rejected sweaters made by the local garment industries are mainly on display in the shops, while the lower-income and middle-income groups of people are opting for used clothes, he said.

"The variety and most importantly the price, attract a cross section of people. There are every things on the footpaths," Kamal said.

The prices of locally made and Indian shawls range from Tk 200 to Tk 250. Woollen sweaters and cardigans cost Tk 150 to Tk 200, while winter caps cost Tk 50 to Tk 60.

Woollen blankets are selling at a price between Tk 400 and Tk 1500, sometimes even more depending on the quality.

Abdul Karim, a peon of a government office, told The New Nation, "There are quality clothes available in the stores. Footpath is the only place where we can afford to buy winter clothes. Because of the rejected garment products the middle class and the low income group can survive the winter."

Roki Chowdhury, a private service holder, said, "I buy winter clothes from the Motijheel footpaths as the price of the clothes is very cheap and affordable. I have bought three sweaters and two coats for my family members and me."

Meanwhile, some customers alleged that the vendors are hiking the prices of the winter products.

Rifat Monowar, a customer, said the price of warm clothes soared following its huge demand as cold wave gripped the people of the country.

He also alleged that the vendors have formed syndicates to make windfall profit from sale of warm clothes.
2.6 temperature recorded in Panchagarh

28,00,000 blankets, 80,000 packets dry food distributed among cold hit people: 12 died in cold-related diseases

Md Joynal Abedin Khan :

Bangladesh recorded its lowest ever temperature in history at 2.6 degrees in Tetulia upazila of Panchagarh district under the influence of a severe cold wave sweeping over 20 districts, mainly the northern region.

Bangladesh Meteorological Department's Tetulia office Assistant Officer Md Raidul Islam told our local correspondent that the lowest ever temperature was recorded at 8:38am on Monday.

The second lowest temperature in Syedpur in Nilphamari was 2.9 degrees Celsius, while it was 3 degrees Celsius in Dimla, 3.1 degrees Celsius in Kurigram's Rajarhat and 3.2 in Dinajpur.

In the 24 hours prior to 6:00am Monday morning, temperature averaged to the country's all-time low, according to the Bangladesh Meteorological Department. The weather office considers temperatures from 4-6 degree Celsius to be a severe cold wave. Panchagarh, Nilphamari, Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Kurigram, Gaibandha, Lalmonirhat, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj, Bogra, Pabna, Kushtia, Moulovibazar, Jamalpur, Mymensingh, Joypurhat, Meherpur, Sirajganj and Tangail are currently experiencing severe cold waves, it mentioned.

A cold wave has been sweeping across seven divisions of Bangladesh since January 4. Though it began as a light cold wave (8-10 degrees Celsius), it soon developed into a medium cold wave (6-8 degrees Celsius).

The Weather Office records date back to 1948. The previously record was 2.8 degrees Celsius in Srimongal, which dated back to February 4, 1968, he said.

There may be a slight change in the next 48 hours and night temperatures may rise later on in the week, according to him.

Fog is an everyday occurrence from midnight to morning in winter. But, according to Monday's weather bulletin, it may linger in parts of the country from Tuesday.

At least 13 people, including 7 babies, died in Panchagarh, Thakurgaon, Nilphamari, Kurgram, Rajshai and Dinajpur due to the cold-related diseases, reports our local correspondents.

The bone-chilling cold coupled with thick fogs is forcing people to stay inside of houses for the second consecutive day yesterday hampering normal activities in northern districts.

In Panchagarh, a baby died in diarrhea in Satmora Union in Panchagarh sada upazila.

A total of 28,000 blankets and warm clothes were distributed among severely cold hit poor people in last two days, said our local correspondent quoting Mohamamd Jahirul Islam, Deputy Commissioner of the district.

In Thakurgaon, Jahura, 70, wife of Mobarak Ali in Sadar upazila and Sakina, 90, wife of Dabirul Islam, of Goalpara in the district town, died of cold related diseases, said Thakurgaon Civil Surgeon Dr Abu Mohammad Khairul Kabir.

In Nilphamari, around 28,000 blankets and warm clothes were distributed among the poor people in last three days, said our local correspondent quoting Mohammad Khaled Rahim, DC of the district.

Meanwhile, several thousand blankets and dry food were distributed among the cold hit poor people in Syedpur upazila in last two days, reports our local correspondent.

In Kurigram, six persons died so far due to the cold wave that has been sweeping over the country, said Resident Medical Officer (acting) of Kurigram Sadar Hospital Dr Jahangir Alam.

Some 57,000 blankets and warm clothes were distributed among the poor people in the district in last three days, said Abu Saleh Muhammad Ferdous Khan, DC of the district.

Relief and Disaster Management Minister Mofazzal Hossain Chowdhury Maya, said that as a quick measure 29 lakh of blankets have distributed among the poor people across the country.

Mohammad Mohsin, Additional Secretary, Disaster Management planning-2, told The New Nation on Monday evening, "29 lakh blankets and 80,000 dry food packets (Tk 12,00 for per packet) were sent to the severely cold-hit poor people in 20 districts."

"The district administrations, NGOs, voluntary, professional, socio-cultural and charitable organisations, business bodies, and other institutions have intensified distribution of warm clothes among the cold-stricken people to mitigate their sufferings," he said.

"Stock of medicines is adequate," said Divisional Deputy Director (Health) Dr Mozammel Hossain," adding that steps were taken at the government-run health facilities in all eight districts for providing healthcare facilities to cold-related patients.


Now tannery wastes polluting Dhaleshwari

Untreated poisonous wastes from tannery factories, relocated to Savar from the capital\'s Hazaribagh area to save Buriganga are now seriously polluting another major river, Dhaleshwari. This photo was taken on Monday.

UNB, Savar : Though most tanneries have already been relocated to Savar from the capital's Hazaribagh area to save the Buriganga River, the untreated poisonous wastes from the leather factories are now seriously polluting another major river, the Dhaleshwari, putting its existence and biodiversity at stake apart, said experts. They said the water quality of the river has seriously degraded due to the direct disposal of liquid and solid wastes, including the high level of concentrated chromium and salt, and faulty installation of central effluent treatment plant (CEUntreated poisonous wastes from tannery factories, relocated to Savar from the capital's Hazaribagh area to save Buriganga are now seriously polluting another major river, Dhaleshwari. This photo was taken on Monday. Talking to UNB, water experts Prof Ainun Nishat and Buet Prof Md Mujibur Rahman and green activists Bangladesh Paribesh Andolan (Bapa) general secretary MA Matin and Savar River and Environment Protection Movement president Rafiqul Islam Mollah said the government must take immediate steps for making the CETP at the tannery estate fully functional fixing its problems, and creating a dumping place for solid wastes, including unused rawhides. They also said proper action also needs to be taken to check other untreated industrial and domestic wastes, chemicals, and heavy metals, and enforce law to save the Dhaleshwari River, and its biodiversity and inhabitants on its banks. Locals told UNB that said aquatic resources, including fish, have almost become extinct in the river as its water has got seriously contaminated with the releasing of huge untreated waste and salty water from the tanneries every day. Visiting the river bank near the new tannery estate on Friday, it was seen that all kinds of hazardous wastes from the tanneries are flowing into the river through drains and four big pipelines.

Even, it is difficult for anybody to take breath standing on the river bank due to bad odour coming from of the polluted black-colured water of the endangered river. Shah Alam, a resident of Jhauchar near the tannery estate and Tetuljhora Union Parishad member, said nearly 20,000 people in the area are being subjected to severe pollution by the newly relocated tanneries having no effective measure to protect the environment. He said people are being affected with various diseases, especially skin-related ones, due to the adverse impact of the environmental degradation.

Four other local residents-Monir Hossain, Mizanur Rahman, Sirajul Islam and Giasuddin-also echoed the UP member and said even tube-well water in the areas has got stinky due to the contamination of the river water with tannery wastes. Fishermen Afajuddin and Lat Mia of Jhauchar area who greatly depend on the river for fishing said they have now become day-labourers changing their old profession as no fish is now available in the river.

They said the water is so stinky and polluted that hardly any fish or other aquatic animal can survive in it. "We saw dead fish floating in the river six months ago," said Lat Mia.

Green activist Rafiqul Islam Mollah said hundreds of tonnes of salt are used in tanneries every year alongside other toxic materials like chromium to process rawhides, but their wastes are being discharged directly into the river as the CETP is not run properly. It also lacks necessary components to treat the wastewater.

He said they are planning to wage a strong movement together with people to save Dhaleshwari and locals from the pollution by the tanneries. Prof Ainun Nishat said it is regrettable and shameful that inefficient engineers from Buet designed the CETP which is not capable to treat the huge amount of liquid wastes, including salt, of the tanneries. "Out of the four units of the CETP, only one unit is functioning regularly."

He said the government should immediately engage other experts to fix the faulty design of the CETP and enhance its capacity to treat all kinds of tannery wastes.

Prof Mujibur Rahman said the Dhaleshwari will die if proper steps are not taken very soon to check the untreated wastes of the relocated tanneries. "Now pollution by the tanneries has been shifted to Dhaleshwari from Buriganga. We shouldn't allow any industry to kill a river and harm people." Alongside ensuring an effective and functional CETP, MA Matin said a dumping space must be set up to discharge solid wastes of the tanneries.
Security report claims IS footprint 'on rise' in Pakistan

Pakistan Today, Islamabad :

Militant group Islamic State (IS), is continually on the rise in Sindh and Balochistan, as claimed in a security report, 'Pakistan Security Report 2017', released by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), on Sunday.

The report also claims that despite a 16 per cent decline in terrorist attacks last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its associated groups remained the strongest threat, followed by Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.

The report said that such realities required concerted efforts and a revision of the National Action Plan. According to the report, militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of the country in 2017. 815 people died and around 1,736 were injured due to these attacks. There was, however, a decrease of 16 per cent in such attacks over the previous year whereas the number of people killed decreased by a 10 per cent.

As many as 213, or 58 per cent of these attacks were executed by the TTP, its splinter groups, mainly Jamaatul Ahrar, and other militant groups. 186 people were killed in these attacks.

National insurgent groups, mostly in Balochistan, were responsible for around 138 attacks, or 37 per cent of the total, killing 140 people. As many as 19 terrorist attacks were sectarian-related, in which 71 people were killed and 97 injured.
Macron calls for Europe-China alliance on climate, Silk Road

The French president also visited the centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian

AFP :

French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe Monday to take part in China's Silk Road revival plan, despite some European misgivings about the massive project, as he began a state visit.

Macron also called on Europe and China to team up on curbing climate change, in the face of US plans to withdraw from the Paris accord.

"Our destinies are linked," he said in a keynote speech on the future of Sino-French relations during a visit to the northern city of Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road.

"The future needs France, Europe and China," Macron said, adding he would travel to China "at least once a year". Macron began his three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's huge New Silk Road project, an initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabrics, spices and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt, One Road", the plan will see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety, with some in Europe seeing it as Chinese expansionism.

While France had been cautious about the plan, Macron heartily endorsed the initiative.

"It represents a real opportunity to create bridges, through exchange, between countries and civilisations, just as the ancient silk routes once did," he said in an interview with the Chinese website China.org.cn. "I think it's very important that Europe and China strengthen their collaboration on the initiative. France is ready to play a leading role in this."

But Macron warned that it should be carried out "within the framework of a balanced partnership"-a reference to concerns about China's trade surpluses. France has a 30-billion-euro ($36 billion) trade deficit with China.
Vietnam oil exec `kidnapped` from Germany goes on trial

AFP :

The corruption trial of a Vietnamese former oil executive who was allegedly kidnapped from Germany opened on Monday, a high-profile case that can carry the death sentence.

Vietnam's communist government has embarked on a snowballing anti-corruption campaign, which observers say is politically driven and mirrors a graft crackdown in neighbouring China.

Scores of former officials, bankers and state executives have been arrested or jailed, including a senior banker who has been sentenced to death.

On Monday a court in Hanoi said it had started proceedings against Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former head of state-run PetroVietnam Construction, for alleged mismanagement and embezzlement.

Thanh appeared before the court together with ex-politburo member Dinh La Thang and 20 other senior officials. They are accused of causing $5.2 million of losses for the state during an investment by PetroVietnam in the construction of a thermal power plant.

German authorities say Thanh was kidnapped from a Berlin park in July and have decried the brazen Cold War-style seizure as a "scandalous violation" of its sovereignty.

Vietnam denies the kidnap and insists the fugitive Thanh had returned home voluntarily to face the charges.

"This is a very serious case, drawing wide public attention," said an online announcement by Hanoi's People's Court, adding the accused all held key positions at major state-owned institutions.

After a two-week trial, Thang and Thanh could face 20 years in jail for mismanagement.

In addition Thanh faces an embezzlement charge, which can carry the death penalty.

The downfall of Thanh and the other men on trial has stunned a public unaccustomed to questioning the role of officialdom in an authoritarian country which routinely quashes dissent.

But the leadership is at pains to parade its anti-graft credentials, experts say, as well as remove political enemies. In a linked case, last week Singapore deported fugitive Vietnamese intelligence officer Phan Van Anh Vu, who held a senior rank in the secret police. Vu was trying to seek asylum in Germany, his lawyers said, arguing he may have information about Thanh's kidnapping on German soil.

In Ho Chi Minh City the trial of 46 people-including former banking tycoons Pham Cong Danh and Tram Be-also began on Monday.

They are accused of violating lending regulations that caused losses of around $270 million to the Vietnam Construction Bank. Transparency International has ranked Vietnam 113 out of 176 on its corruption index, worse than its Southeast Asian neighbours Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar.
Oath-taking camp of DIU Air Rover Scout Group

Prof Dr Mostafa Kamal, Dean, Permanent Campus of Daffodil International University along with other distinguished guests and newly oath taken Rovers pose for a photograph at \'7th Oath Taking Camp 2017\' of Daffodil International University held at perma

Campus Report :

A 4 daylong '7th Oath Taking Camp 2017' for newly enrolled Rovers of Daffodil International University (DIU) Air Rover Scout Group held from 27-31, 2017 at permanent campus of the university at Ashulia, Savar. Prof Dr Mostafa Kamal, Dean, Permanent Campus of DIU was present as the chief guest.

Presided over by Md. Shaiful Islam, RSL, DIU Air Rover Scout Group, the ceremony was also addressed by Rover Scout Leader and Rover trainer Farhana Rahman Setu, PRS, and SM Salauddin Morsalin. The Oath Taking Ceremony was conducted was conducted by SRM Nazmul Hassan. The camp included Training, Oath Taking Ceremony, Social Awareness and Development Program, Grand Camp Fire, Reunion and certificate distribution. Prof Dr Mostafa Kamal said, oath-taking camp is very important and historical event for a Scout which inspire rovers to engage them in scouting through self-adoption of mind. He advised the rovers to maintain and follow the rules and ideas of Baden Powell to create a beautiful world. He appreciated the recent activities done by the Rovers of Daffodil International University and suggested to keep up the speed. He also said, introducing Rover Movement at the university, Daffodil International University has set an example to be followed by other private universities.
Protest in Sudan against rising bread prices

AFP, Khartoum :

Police fired tear gas on Saturday at groups of students protesting in a central Sudanese town against soaring bread prices, witnesses said, as opposition parties called for anti-government demonstrations.

Bread prices almost doubled on Friday across Sudan after flour manufacturers raised prices amid dwindling supply of wheat following a government decision to stop importing the grain and allow private companies to do so.

"Citizens, demand your rights," shouted university students in the central Sudanese town of Sennar as dozens of residents joined them in a sporadic march against the rise in bread prices, witnesses said.

Police fired tear gas to break the protest while shopkeepers closed their

shops in the town's main market, witnesses and residents from Sennar told AFP by telephone.

"The police fired tear gas at protesters. I had to close my shop as demonstrators approached the market," a shopkeeper said on condition of anonymity.
No street progs to be allowed in city on Weekdays, says Quader

bdnews24.com :

Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority has banned holding rallies and processions on the streets on the weekdays as it attempts to ease traffic congestion.

Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader announced the

ban after the 10th meeting of DTCA's Governing Council at the Nagar Bhaban on Sunday.

Besides the ban on street programmes except on weekly holidays, Friday and Saturday, the meeting also decided to bar more than two people riding on a motorcycle, according to Quader.

"Anyone violating these rules will face legal action," he said.

Narayanganj Mayor Selina Hayat Ivy, Nurul Majid Mahmud Humayun MP, top officials, representatives of transport owners and workers, among others, attended the meeting chaired by Quader.

DTCA Executive Director Syed Ahmed spoke about the progress of the projects to ease traffic congestion in the capital.

Quader asked the DTCA to take more short-term projects than long-term ones ahead of the election.

"Is building the Metrorail the only job of DTCA? Metrorail will be built, but it will take time. We need to take short-term, realistic decisions ahead of the election. Think about what we can do to keep the traffic congestions in Dhaka at tolerable levels," he said.

The minister also said the government and the ruling Awami League were already following the rules of not organising programmes on streets on workdays.

"Even Chhatra League's founding anniversary procession was deferred by a day. The others must obey the rule," he said.
New Year's class begins at Parents Care School

Chairman of Chittagong Sikkha Kaylan Foundation Principal Dr. Abdul Karim visiting inaugural session of first class of New Year of Parents Care School & College at Chowkbazar in the city on Thursday.

Chittagong Bureau :

The first classes of the new calendar year -2018 begins at Parents care School & College of Chowkbazar, Chittagong from Thursday .

Chairman of Chittagong Sikkha Kalyan Foundation Principal Dr.Abdul Karim inaugurated new classes by feeding sweats to students and made courtesy meet with them .

During the opening session of new classes Director of SKF DrKhalid Bin Kabir Bhuyia, Principal of School Md Nurul Islam, Admin Officer MA Fazal, senior teachers Johora Arjun Shiuli, Reba Das, Asstt Teachers Afroza Jahan, Ayesha Aman, Jhuma Paul, Oma Paul, Abdullah al Muntasir Chowdhury, Jalaluddin Kawser, Anisul Islam were present .

Chairman Dr Abdul Karim advised the students to be more attentive in their studies so as to become talents and knowledgeable .

He further said humanity enhances through moral education, a school sources said.


TIB expresses grave concern

Failure to refund climate fund, depositors' money

Staff Reporter :

Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) on Monday expressed deep concern over Farmers Bank's failure to refund Tk508 crore to Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Fund (BCCTF), along with deposits of other clients.

It also called upon the government to ensure transparency and accountability of all the stakeholders involved in managing the funds.

TIB Executive Director Dr Iftekharuzzaman in a statement said that the failure of Farmers Bank to return deposits after the expiry of the deadline was a matter of grave concern for the entire banking sector.

"If there is further delay in releasing the funds for climate change adaptation activities, it will increase the risk for the region which is not acceptable in any way," he said.

He also sought for quick intervention to recover the fund.

"There should be an investigation into why the climate fund money was invested in Farmers Bank for making profit, instead of entrusting well-reputed and credible financial institutions. People, including the former board of directors who were involved in the crisis, should be held accountable after proper investigation.

"Customers and organizations are losing their confidence in Farmers Bank every day as they are failing to get their deposits back. It is unacceptable to put the burden of corruption and irregularities of the bank on the customers."




1251 women, minors raped, 58 of them killed in 2017 : Khaleda

The Mohila Parishad said 1251 women and kids were raped, 224 were gang-raped and 58 of them were killed in 2017, tweeted Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Chairperson Khaleda Zia on Monday.

'I'm gravely disturbed at such colossal lawlessness and heinous attack on our women's dignity. This unelected regime uses public money but robs them of their basic rights', Zia added. Meanwhile, the Law Ministry on Monday shifted 16 cases filed against BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia to the makeshift court at Bakshibazar in the city. The ministry issued three gazette notifications in this regard, reports the UNB.
25 injured in Sylhet AL factional clash

UNB, Sylhet :



At least 25 people were reportedly injured during a clash between two factions of Awami League in Usmani Nagar upazila on Monday.



The clash originated after Manjur and Hannan, two AL leaders belonging to rival camps within the party, locked into an altercation and at one stage Hannan thrashed Manjur at Tazpur Degree College compound.



Later, Manjur gathered his men and counter-attacked near Tazpurbazar, springing a one hour long skirmish.



Both the factions pelted stones at each other indiscriminately, leaving at least 25 people injured, including Upazila Swecchasebok League leader Chanchal Pal, besides vandalizing a dispensary.



Police opened rounds of fire tackling the clash that triggered a huge gridlock on the Sylhet-Dhaka route.



Ana Mia, the president of Tazpur Degree College Jubo League unit said he had heard a bit about the clash where Chanchal Pal had "blamed the attackers of being BNP-Jamaat men". Ana and Chanchal are said to be the leaders of the two camps that fought today.



Confirming the occurrence, officer in charge of Usmani Nagar police Station Anwarul Haq said additional police forces have been deployed to avoid unwanted circumstances.












HC rejects writ petition seeking not to harass or arrest

Staff Reporter :

The High Court on Monday rejected a writ petition filed seeking not to harass or arrest the family members of a bridegroom as he married a Rohingya woman who

came to Bangladesh from Myanmar being tortured in her own country. The court also ordered the petitioner to deposit Tk 1 lakh within 30 days in the concerned section of the Supreme Court as the cost.

The HC bench of Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury and Justice J B M Hassan passed the order after hearing the petition.

Advocate A B M Hamidul Misbah appeared for the petitioner in the court while Deputy Attorney General Motahar Hossain Saju stood for the State.

Saju said, "According to foreigners act, it's a crime to bring out someone or to marriage someone from a special area. The Law Ministry has issued a notification in this regard. So, it is contrary to the law to marriage or bring out someone came from Myanmar. They filed the writ petition to avoid arrest or harassment. But the court rejected the petition and ordered the petitioner to deposit Tk 1 lakh as the cost."

According to the case documents, Babul Hossain, a resident of Singair upazila of Manikganj district, filed the petition not to harass or arrest his family members as his son Shoaib Hossain Jewel recently married a Rohingya woman named Rafisa, 18, who was living in Kutupalong Refugee Camp of Cox's Bazar.

On October 25 last year, the Law Ministry issued a notification imposing bar to marriage Rohingya women. Babul Hossain challenged the legality of that notice in the writ petition.

According to the writ petition, preparation of marriage of Shoaib and Rafisa faced obstacles from the authorities on September 14 last year. Later, they came to Singair and went elsewhere after police had searched them. In this circumstance, Shoaib's father filed the writ petition.
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Home >The Revolt > Camera Destruction > New Mexico, France, Italy: Speed Cameras Taken Out In The New Year
Seef Properties, a leading real estate development company in Bahrain, announced that it has signed a share registry agreement with Bahrain Clear at the Bahrain Bourse in Bahrain Financial Harbour.

The agreement was signed by the Seef Properties chief executive officer Ahmed Yusuf and Bahrain Bourse chief executive officer and managing director of Bahrain Clear Shaikh Khalifa bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, in the presence of officials from both companies.

Bahrain Clear has been assigned as a share registrar of Seef Properties and will act as custodian for all clearing and depository activities, a statement said.

Bahrain Clear will provide Seef Properties with a variety of services that includes maintaining a record of the share register that holds the shares in electronic form, and updating the data of the registry resulted from dealing on the companys shares in accordance with the rules and regulations of Bahrain Clear and Bahrain Bourse, said Yusuf.

Additionally, Bahrain Clear will provide Seef Properties with online services that include real-time shareholding confirmations with the percentage of investors holdings dealings, investors account statements, and other periodical reports, he added.

Bahrain Clear is a fully owned subsidiary of Bahrain Bourse established in July 2017, which undertakes a range of activities related to Bahrain Bourse, including custodian activities and provision of all advisory and technical services in the field of depository, clearing and settlement.  TradeArabia News Service
Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the international financial centre in Abu Dhabi, and the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) have entered into a Fintech cooperation agreement, marking a significant first in the Mena region.



The agreement represents a leap forward in promoting the region as a connected and collaborative environment for Fintech to thrive in. It provides a framework for information sharing, and for facilitating the movement of start-ups, knowledge, and talent between the two jurisdictions. With the new partnership, Bahrain EDB and ADGM will explore initiatives to promote economic growth in financial services through the adoption of new technology, and highlight Menas strengths in the FinTech sector.



We are excited to witness the first FinTech MoU between two Mena jurisdictions, said Richard Teng, chief executive officer, Financial Services Regulatory Authority of ADGM. Together, we advocate and see the Mena region as a continuous whole and look to leverage each others strengths to anchor a vibrant Fintech ecosystem.



From our close discussions with the Economic Development Board of Bahrain, and especially at the first Regional Regulators FinTech Roundtable recently in Abu Dhabi, it is clear we value the importance of collaboration and mutual support in any relevant manner. I look forward to continuing to work closely with our partner in building a more connected, collaborative network among our fellow regulators in the Mena region to cater to the rapid pace of FinTech growth here, Teng added.



The agreement will allow for a closer collaboration on the exchange of information on trends, services and products, leading to a closer relationship in the development of Islamic finance and Fintech initiatives across the region.



Professional and academic knowledge transfer, accelerator programs and the mutual promotion of the development of relevant technologies such as digital payments and blockchain are fundamental to the growth of these sectors. Fintech start-ups will have the ability to access information from each respective jurisdiction through one common point of contact.



We have seen exciting momentum in FinTech in Bahrain and across the region over the last year, said David Parker, Executive Director  Financial Services at Bahrain EDB. The FinTech sector has witnessed approximately $50 billion in investment globally, but the Mena region has received only about 1% of that.



In Bahrain, we recognise that there is great potential for growth in this sector and we are capitalising on this by creating the right ecosystem. This MoU marks another inspiring moment in our regional development. In Bahrain, an ongoing series of legal and regulatory reforms are supporting easy access to a wide range of new opportunities, including a Fintech sandbox and support for both conventional and Sharia-compliant crowdfunding. We look forward to this agreement leading to the rapid development of even more initiatives across the region, he added.



As an IFC and FinTech hub, ADGM has reached significant milestones and established strategic partnerships to bolster the regional Fintech ecosystem, supporting the safe development of Fintech both in the region and globally. The EDB partnership further enhances ADGMs Fintech collaboration hubs that currently stretch across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America.



This agreement comes as the region looks to establish itself as a centre of FinTech excellence, and follows a number of recent supportive measures in Bahrain. Underpinned by the establishment of a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region based in Bahrain, key activities include the establishment of a new regulatory sandbox, the launch of a national e-wallet and the development of the Mena regions largest FinTech hub, which is set to open in the first quarter 2018. - TradeArabia News Service
Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has issued directives to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (Sama) to ensure that banks do not take advantage of the recent increase in living allowances and bonuses to deduct other loans or fees.

King Salman had earlier ordered an increase in the salaries and allowances of the kingdom's public sector employees and military personnel to help offset the introduction of value-added tax (VAT) and a rise in fuel prices this year.

According to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) the directives entail that banks shall not deduct any amounts or fees from the said allowances and bonuses for the repayment of personal loans and other financing obligations.
Drake & Scull International (DSI), a regional leader in engineering and construction services, announced today that it has successfully completed the restructuring of its corporate general bank debt in the UAE and has secured new credit lines and working capital facilities for its ongoing and new projects portfolio.

DSI has obtained the support from all its creditors for the restructuring of its corporate general debt in the UAE.

The company reached in Q4 2017 a consensual agreement with nine regional and local banks to refinance Dh566 million ($154.1 million) comprising 56 per cent of its total corporate general debt standing at Dh1.07 billion as of September 30, 2017, it said.

The tenor and the maturity of the Dh566 million corporate general debt have been extended and re-termed on average for three years. Additionally, the company successfully secured under the new term sheets signed on bilateral basis with all respective banks, new credit lines and working capital facilities for its ongoing and future projects portfolio in the UAE.

The remaining tranche of the companys corporate general debt comprising the Dh440 million sukuk will mature in November 2019. The company will initiate talks with its sukuk holders to refinance this tranche in the second half of the fiscal year 2018.

As of September 30, 2017, the total bank debt of the group stands at Dh2.92 billion. Corporate general debt and projects debt comprise 34 per cent and 66 per cent of total bank debt, respectively.

Another upcoming strategic priority of the company's plan include the restructuring and refinancing of its projects debt with the initial focus on approximately Dh 1 billion of funded projects debt in Saudi Arabia. The company is concurrently in advanced talks with its creditors in Saudi Arabia and expects to complete the refinancing of its Saudi projects debt in this quarter.

Rabih Abou Diwan, investor relations director, Drake & Scull International, commented: The latest deal with the banks reflects the confidence in the DSI turnaround plan, the resilience of the groups business model and the positive outlook of the company in the MEP sector, despite the cyclical challenges that impacted the regional construction industry.

Our main objective is to drive a consensual restructuring plan with all our creditors across the region to rebalance our capital structure to be more efficient and conducive for our business plan and future prospects.

"The completion of our debt restructuring in the UAE will enable us to accelerate projects performance and delivery in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. This represents a key priority for the Group as we continue to streamline the business and unlock value across all operating segments.

Furthermore, with the new corporate debt structure and the extended credit facilities along with the funding we have in place, the Company will be able to improve productivity, secure substantial contracts and boost revenue generation, he said.

We are concurrently also assessing our funding requirements for our ongoing and future projects across all markets. We expect to reach bilateral consensus with our lenders to refinance our projects debt and upon completion we will be considering syndication across all the debt structure in the fiscal year 2018.

In conjunction with the completion of Drake & Scull's debt restructuring, Tabarak Investment has announced that it is moving ahead with its plans to support the operations of Drake & Scull International to achieve full operational recovery leading to sustainable growth. The company has assured that its investment in DSI is strategic and long-term, and that it will continue to support the latter by completing existing projects, studying new ones targeted through Tabarak, and looking for new opportunities to diversify and expand income.

Tabarak Investment has confirmed a significant improvement in the efficiency of operations under the leadership of DSIs new management, which will support the latters financial performance in 2018. - TradeArabia News Service
KEO International Consultants, a leading design, engineering and project management firm, has appointed Philip Gillard as vice president of its design division.

Gillard is an astute design professional and Riba chartered architect with over 20 years of international design and project delivery experience. He takes on a key influential role by also joining KEOs executive leadership board, said a statement.

We are delighted to have Philip as part of our international team of experts leading our architectural and engineering design practice, one of KEOs most dynamic divisions. This new appointment aligns with our progressive vision and supports our strategic moves to further strengthen KEOs reputation as a global consulting powerhouse. In his role as VP of design, Philip will work with our talented team to reach new heights in creativity, innovation and design depth. He will also be fostering client relationships and expanding the technical excellence within our architecture and engineering practice, said Donna Sultan, president and CEO of KEO International Consultants.

The Middle East market is constantly evolving and KEOs integrated and multi-disciplinary approach enables us to respond to our clients maturing expectations. I am truly excited to be leading KEOs talented team of building design professionals. I am passionate about this opportunity to work closely with our clients to deliver incredibly successful projects across the region, said Gillard.

He joins KEO after a 17-year career with Gensler, where he was one of its partners, a global education leader and since 2015, the managing director for the Middle East region.

Over its 50 years in operation, KEO has grown to become one of the most recognised and award-winning consultancies worldwide, offering unparalleled design, architectural, engineering and project management services. The firm has worked on some of the most iconic projects in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region and has helped clients achieve their vision of delivering their most complex and distinguished developments, the statement added. - TradeArabia News Service
Gulf Stevedoring Contracting Company (GSCCO), part of the Gulftainer group of companies, will highlight new business opportunities at Jubail Container Terminal at its upcoming Jubail Value Proposition event.

Set to take place at the InterContinental Al Jubail on January 15, the event will convene key government stakeholders and maritime industry professionals in Saudi Arabia.

A series of interactive presentations and discussions will provide an overview of GSCCOs achievements in Jubail as well as the innovative operational solutions it offers at the Jubail Commercial Port (JCP).

Ranked the fastest-growing port in the Middle East in 2017, JCP is home to some of GSCCOs flagship facilities, including the Jubail Container Terminal (JCT), that contributes significantly to the regions economic activity and offers an attractive value proposition for industrial entities in the region.

JCP serves as an ideal destination for Saudi exports and for the import of industrial equipment. With the fastest customs clearance processes in Saudi Arabia, JCP is currently a port of call for more than 10 shipping lines with direct weekly services.

Speaking on the significance of the Jubail Value Proposition event, Richard James, managing director of GSCCO, said: This definitive event seeks to encourage new ways of doing business in Jubail and reinforce the citys status as a leading industrial and commercial hub. It offers a unique platform for identifying new business opportunities that can help accelerate economic growth in Saudi Arabia, as well as for sharing best practices in innovation in the maritime sector. We look forward to hosting the event and building synergies with key industry stakeholders.

Jubails strategic location on the Arabian Gulf has enabled the city to evolve into a gateway for international trade. With the citys petrochemical plants now in full production, Jubails ports are experiencing a steady surge in activity. In 2017, Jubails import volumes grew by 83 per cent, and JCT alone witnessed a staggering 26 per cent hike in throughput.

Participants wishing to attend the Jubail Value Proposition event can register online at jvp.gulftainer.com. - TradeArabia News Service
Grundfos, a leading pump manufacturer, has appointed Okay Barutcu to the role of group senior vice president and regional managing director of Grundfos East Europe, West Asia, Middle East & Africa region.



The East Europe, West Asia, Middle East & Africa region is a newly defined sales region together with Western Europe, which made up the original Europe, Middle East and Africa markets before the split (effective January 1, 2018) to support Grundfos global growth ambitions.



In his new role, Barutcu will lead the companys business across over 80 countries including14 wholly-owned sales companies, a number of liaison offices and local assembly plants Grundfos operates in the region. He will also be spearheading opportunities for the companys development and expansion in this region.



Prior to this role, Barutcu was the Group Senior Vice President and Regional Managing Director for the Asia Pacific markets since 2015, where he was responsible for 22 countries with 14 wholly owned sales companies and local assembly plants.



Poul Due Jensen, group executive vice president Sales, Marketing & Service, Grundfos said: During his tenure in the Asia Pacific, Okay managed to transform and strengthen this very dynamic region for the company. I am sure his experience and expertise in developing emerging markets will further support Grundfos growth in the East Europe, West Asia, Middle East and Africa markets.



Barutcu will now be based in Dubai where the regional headquarters.  TradeArabia News Service
The headquarters of wireless power transmission company NuPower Middle East and North Africa was inaugurated in Bahrain today by Electricity and Water Affairs Minister Dr Abdulhussain Mirza.

Speaking on the occasion, the minister thanked the company's officials and employees for choosing Bahrain as their headquarters. He said the strategic project will contribute to enhancing Bahrain's competitive position as a market for attracting investments and technology in the field of energy production in addition to strengthening and supporting the national economy and trade relations with a group of top American companies providing additional value and support to clean and renewable energy, a Bahrain News Agency (BNA) report said.

Company chairman and chief executive officer Talal Mashleh said NuPower, through its Bahrain headquarters, will achieve major objectives in investing in clean energy while preserving the environment and will be an active partner in the community.

He said the company is working closely with one of the leading US companies in wireless transmission technology, Texzon, which has more than 500 international patents to convert clean and safe energy.
Worldwide semiconductor revenue totalled $419.7 billion in 2017, a 22.2 per cent increase from 2016, according to preliminary results by Gartner, a leading research and advisory company.



Undersupply helped drive 64 per cent revenue growth in the memory market, which accounted for 31 per cent of total semiconductor revenue in 2017.



"The largest memory supplier, Samsung Electronics, gained the most market share and took the No.1 position from Intel  the first time Intel has been toppled since 1992," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "Memory accounted for more than two-thirds of all semiconductor revenue growth in 2017, and became the largest semiconductor category."



The key driver behind the booming memory revenue was higher prices due to a supply shortage. NAND flash prices increased year over year for the first time ever, up 17 per cent, while DRAM prices rose 44 per cent.



Equipment companies could not absorb these price increases so passed them onto consumers, making everything from PCs to smartphones more expensive in 2017.



Other major memory vendors, including SK Hynix and Micron Technology, also performed strongly in 2017 and rose in the rankings.



Second-placed Intel grew its revenue 6.7 per cent in 2017, driven by 6 per cent growth in datacenter processor revenue due to demand from cloud and communications service providers. Intels PC processor revenue grew more slowly at 1.9 per cent, but average PC prices are on the rise again after years of decline following the markets shift from traditional desktops toward two-in-one and ultramobile devices.



However, the current rankings may not last long, said Norwood.



Samsungs lead is literally built on sand, in the form of memory silicon. Memory pricing will weaken in 2018, initially for NAND flash and then DRAM in 2019 as China increases its memory production capacity. We then expect Samsung to lose a lot of the revenue gains it has made, he added.



2017 was a relatively quiet year for mergers and acquisitions. Qualcomms acquisition of NXP was one big deal that was expected to close in 2017, but did not. Qualcomm still plans to complete the deal in 2018, but this has now been complicated by Broadcoms attempted takeover of Qualcomm.



"The combined revenues of Broadcom, Qualcomm and NXP were $41.2 billion in 2017  a total beaten only by Samsung and Intel," said Norwood. "If Broadcom can finalize this double acquisition and Samsungs memory revenue falls as forecast, then Samsung could slip to third place during the next memory downturn in 2019."  TradeArabia News Service
More than 60 Blockchain start-ups will participate in the upcoming UNLOCK Blockchain Forum, one of the biggest Blockchain forums to take place in the region in Dubai, UAE said event organisers.



The event is taking place on January 14 and 15 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel DIFC.



We are proud of the efforts we have taken to help build the Blockchain ecosystem not only in Dubai but also across the Mena region, said Walid Abou Zaki, executive director of organiser Al-Iktissad-Wal-Aamal Co.



We hope that Dubai benefits from having these start-ups where many are present here for the first time ever. These innovative start-ups are from more than 35 countries around the world. We are also expecting more than 350 delegates to attend. In addition, we have a line-up of more than 45 prominent Blockchain experts speaking at UNLOCK. We look forward to welcoming all and we are confident that this forum will become the leading Blockchain event in the region for years to come.



UNLOCK Blockchain has signed up sponsors that include Smart Dubai, IBM, DarkMatter, Emirates Airlines, Microsoft, Avanza Solutions, Dewa (Dubai Electricity & Water Authority), DU Telecom and Dubai Municipality. UNLOCK Blockchain Forum is also supported by startupbootcamp, CrytpoValley Labs, and Careem as transportation partner.



Lara Abdul Malak, project lead for UNLOCK, said: We have created an event that will bring Blockchain into the mainstream discussion and across various sectors. Attendees will hear about what Blockchain is, how to successfully implement Blockchain projects. We will also discuss Blockchain in utilities, smart cities, real-estate, banking and more. Many announcements and agreements will be signed at UNLOCK to further develop Blockchain in the Mena region and encourage start-ups to flourish.  TradeArabia News Service
The Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) is set to kick off another new exhibitions season with a packed schedule of events this January, expected to play host to more than 172,000 trade visitors and 6,000 exhibiting companies.



These industry leading events range from healthcare and science, to technology and design, including Arab Health, the largest medical exhibition and conference in the Middle East, CABSAT, Intersec, Sign and Graphic Imaging Exhibition and more, reported Emirates news agency Wam.



Mahir Julfar, senior vice president - Venue Services Management, Dubai World Trade Centre said: "We look forward to hosting yet another eventful year at the Dubai World Trade Centre. We are proud to remain key players in the steady prosperity and growth of the MICE industry, contributing towards the economic progress of the emirate. We remain committed to offer commercial communities from all over the world a platform to help them network, discover new markets, expand their portfolios, and grow their businesses."



"DWTC has been at the forefront of its efforts to lead and grow the MICE industry in the region, as well as to connect businesses from the world over with industry professionals. We are excited to witness the success that this year will bring to the emirate, the region, and the MICE industry", he added.



Arab Health will return at the end of this month from January 29 to February 1. This years edition is expected to welcome more than 4,200 exhibiting companies and approx. 103,000 attendees from over 150 countries. Arab Health will be accompanied by 19 business, leadership and Continuing Medical Education (CME) conferences providing the latest updates and insights into cutting edge procedures, techniques and skills.



Cabsat Mena and Sign and Graphic Imaging M.E Exhibition (SIG) will run from January 14 to 16. In its 24th edition, Cabsat Mena will continue to focus on the production and distribution of content, as well as the buying and selling of content and satellite capacity. Creatives, engineers, and strategists will share their expertise on how to cut through the clutter and take the industry into a new world.



In its 21st year, the largest and most anticipated event of the year in Mena for exhibitors and visitors in the signage, digital signage, retail signage solutions, outdoor media, and screen & digital printing industries, Sign and Graphic Imaging ME will offer visitors with the latest innovation and breakthroughs around the globe; a chance to experience innovative developments first hand; an opportunity to build and develop a strong customer base including future prospects; and a platform to network with key decision makers in the industry, regionally and globally.



Intersec, the leading exhibition for commercial security, information security, health and safety, fire and rescue, homeland security and perimeter and physical security, will return to DWTC from January 22 to 24 with more than 1,200 international and local exhibitors. Key manufacturers and suppliers will show and discuss their latest products and innovations.



January 12 14 will host Schools & Child Care Show, bringing together all segments of the booming regional educational sector under one roof.



Following its launch in 2017, the UAE Public Policy Forum returns this year from January 15  16. The annual global discussion platform is dedicated to enhancing government sector performance in the UAE and the region. The forum will be structured around key pillars including: defining, designing and evaluating Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), enabling environments for PPPs, strategic planning for PPPs, accountability and performance of PPPs, and technology and innovation.



During the same period, the Middle Easts only aircraft interiors event, Aircraft Interiors Middle East (AIME) & Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO ME), will feature the latest innovations in aircraft interiors.
US-based Seagate will be exhibiting its industry leading surveillance storage technologies at the upcoming Intersec 2018, a leading trade fair for security, safety and fire protection, in Dubai, UAE.



The event runs at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre from January 21 to 23.



As Gold Sponsor of Intersec 2018, Seagate will also feature demonstrations of its SkyHawk, SkyHawk AI and Exos X12 products and solutions from partners Hikvision and Dahua. At the event, Seagate will be offering one-to-one briefings with its EMEA surveillance manager, Stephen Jones, who will be able to discuss Seagates latest surveillance offerings, recent partnership announcements, along with their plans for the future of surveillance.



Jones will also be speaking at the conference, sharing valuable insights on surveillance trends, the technologies driving data growth, and the impact on storage requirements.  TradeArabia News Service
The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) has been recognised as a global leader in innovation and creativity after winning eight international awards and honourable mentions in nine categories, at the awards ceremony in Arizona USA, at the 75th Ideas.America.



Dewa won three gold prizes in the Idea of the Year category, and Team Idea of the Year. Dewa also received three silver awards: the performance excellence for savings per implemented suggestion award, the annual net savings per eligible employee, and performance excellence for total dollars saved, reported Emirates news agency Wam.



Dewa also received a silver award for Safety Idea of the Year.



Dewa also received the bronze award for the Best Program Administrator, the Kudos Award, and honourable mentions for the participating team, and another in the Best Communication Excellence category, and an honourable mention in the Evaluator of the Year Award.



Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, managing director and CEO of Dewa, said: "Our efforts in innovation actively support our leaderships initiatives to anticipate, shape the future, and prepare for changes. We are committed to implementing best practices, in accordance with the highest international standards, and constitute innovation in its core character.



In turn, this is strengthening Dewas leading position among service institutions, locally, regionally, and internationally. The awards received by Dewa, for its innovative initiatives and projects from prestigious international institutions, are a testament to its superiority in establishing innovation as a work method and a culture. Ideas America 2017, the world's largest platform for sharing best practices and innovative and creative ideas, is a product of continuous work and tireless efforts by teams that have adopted innovation and continuous development within their plans and strategies," said Al Tayer.



"Dewa provides all the opportunities to enhance and develop the knowledge and creativity of employees in a creative environment that stimulates creativity and innovation, and has raised the importance of innovation to 40 percent in its strategic plan. Dewa aims to focus on the future, the innovation and happiness of all stakeholders," added Al Tayer.
The upcoming Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week 2018 is special as it will be held in the Year of Zayed and will coincide with the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Zayed Future Energy Prize, which was established to honour the legacy of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and promote his vision of sustainability and environmental protection, said Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, CEO of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, Masdar.

In an interview with the Emirates News Agency Wam, Al Ramahi said Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, which will be held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, starting on January 13, is one of the largest sustainability events in the world, and aims to promote understanding of key social, economic and environmental issues that will lead to a sustainable global development path, to enable the international community to realise the importance of efficient and realistic strategies to reduce climate change.

Al Ramahi added that over 35,000 participants from more than 150 countries will participate in Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, while highlighting the unique media presence in the event, represented by 600 global media outlets.

He also stressed that the event is a unique opportunity to explore the opinions and visions of international leaders and communicate with policy-makers, decision-makers, experts, entrepreneurs and scholars, to discuss key future energy and sustainability challenges.

He noted that the theme, "Easternisation," will be one of the key social, economic and environmental trends to be discussed during the event, based on the three main topics of climate change, urbanisation and digitisation, as well as other important topics, such as mobility, sustainable cities, energy efficiency and water sustainability.

Al Ramahi noted that previous year has witnessed many achievements that confirm the companys leading local and international role in renewable energy, and construction work has started on the third phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Energy Complex in Dubai, with a total production capacity of 800 megawatts and covering an area of 16 sq km. The plants initial energy output of 200 megawatts is expected be reached in the first half of 2018, followed by another 300 megawatts in the following year, and the final 300 megawatts in the first half of 2020, he added.

He also highlighted the recent announcement of Beah and Masdar about the official launch of their joint project, "Emirates Waste to Energy Company," which plans to develop facilities in the region that can transform waste into energy, which is another example of the companys sustainable innovation.

Al Ramahi further said that the facility, which is being developed by the new company in Sharjah and will operate with a variety of fuels, is the first of its kind in the region, while noting that its first operational phase will process over 300,000 tonnes of solid waste annually, generating 30 megawatts of energy.

Sharjah will be the first city in the Middle East to achieve its goal of transforming 100 percent of its waste into energy, with the development of the facility, which will be able to process solid waste, instead of burning the waste in rubbish dumps, he said.
Royal Jordanian is offering its passengers the opportunity to choose their preferred seat in advance, through RJs website, at a discount of up to 40 per cent on the price they would pay for a preferred seat at the airport.





Attractive discounts are also available for passengers when they purchase their preferred seat through RJs call center, or at RJs global sales offices.



Economy class passengers can now easily book a seat of their choice: on an exit row, which offers more leg space, aisle or window.



RJ passengers can also select a front-row seat when traveling with family and children, which enables them to experience a comfortable journey at a low price.



RJ president/CEO Stefan Pichler said: This great feature comes in the framework of Royal Jordanians promise to offer inflight comfort and luxury to its guests. When selecting their preferred seats, passengers can work on their laptops in extra comfort and space. Families and friends can better enjoy the company of their loved ones during their journey. - TradeArabia News Service


Best Western Hotels & Resorts organised an exclusive media familiarisation trip to Phuket this month, inviting a series of influential and up-and-coming bloggers to the island for an action-packed three-day itinerary.



Two famous bloggers and one journalist from Travel & Lifestyles publications, plus the winners of a Facebook Live contest organized by KTC and Chillpainai, were invited to Phuket from December 14-16, 2017. They were joined by members of Best Western Asias marketing team.



Staying at two hotels, the media delegates were able to experience Best Westerns different and distinct products in Phuket. Best Western Patong Beach is a modern midscale city hotel located in the main tourist hub of Patong, while Best Western Premier Bangtao Beach Resort & Spa provides an upscale beach resort experience on the islands idyllic west coast.



Activities on the fam trip itinerary included a tour of Phuket Town, with its classical Sino-Portuguese architecture, local food tasting sessions and a trip to Mai Ton Island, an exquisite tropical paradise located just off Phukets east coast.



The media delegates were also provided with an introduction to Best Western Rewards, the companys award-winning guest loyalty programme.



Phuket is one of the worlds most popular resort destinations, attracting an ever-increasing number of domestic and international visitors to its pristine shores every year. But there is more to Phuket than just sun, sea and sand; our immersive fam trip was designed to introduce our media friends to the cultural experiences that make Phuket such a fascination destination, said Olivier Berrivin, Best Westerns managing director of International Operations - Asia.



Best Western offers an excellent choice of hotels in Phuket which are suitable for all types of traveler, from couples seeking a romantic beachfront break to groups of friends and families who want to be in the heart of the action. This media fam trip will help to spread the word about this enchanting island and the many activities and attractions it has to offer visitors, Berrivin added.



The fam trip forms part of Best Westerns continued efforts to engage with the media and travel trade in Asia, for the benefit of the entire travel industry. - TradeArabia News Service


The Mercure Gold Hotel, a luxury property in Dubai, UAE, is set for a grand revival following the completion of a dramatic upgrade.



The extensive redesign and refurbishment was completed by Dubai-based architecture and interior design firm, Design Haus Medy (DHM), with the brief centred on the concept of "movement and continuous evolution".



DHM creative director, Medy Navani, said: "Besides a simple and functional refurbishment, the redesign aimed to enlarge the lobby waiting area, to bring identity into the design and to structure the flow of guests throughout the hotel."



"One's very first step into the lobby of a hotel should give the feeling of spaciousness and luxury of a grand hotel, where the guest is the main focus point. We achieved this in the Mercure Gold by introducing a royal blue carpet, which marks the directions of the flow of key foot traffic, as well as separates waiting zones into comfortable islands".



Navani said the design concept was connected to the idea of Dubai's continuous flow of movement, with its rapidly changing environment and unique transformation of people lives.



"Repetitive golden elements are wrapped around existing columns, and continue their movement through all the furniture pieces, and the reception desk reminds one of a frozen stage during continuous transformation.



"Parametric design is spread from the lobby into an all day dining area, evolving the straight golden colour elements into flower-like wooden arms, shaping interesting forms that clad the columns. The all day dining area was designed as a flexible environment, with around 120 seating places that can be easily transformed into a wedding hall, or private celebration facility", Navani said.



Movable partitions continue the main design theme of the hotel, and feature "water flow" shapes, emphasised with beautiful agate porcelain on the floor. The colour scheme and materials chosen by DHM were carefully selected to reflect the hotel's luxury hospitality standards, designed to look spectacular and equally functional, maintainable and durable.



Just 20 minutes from the Dubai International Airport, the hotel is ideally located in close proximity to the Dubai Convention Centre, World Trade Centre and Jumeirah Beach-La Mer and offers visitors fantastic four-star hospitality in downtown Dubai. - TradeArabia News Service
In another step to demonstrate its commitment to strengthening its Omani workforce, Al Baleed Resort Salalah by Anantara has introduced an overseas training programme, providing key Omani members of the team with the opportunity to gain valuable experience at other Anantara properties around the world.



With 74 Omani employees working across every department, recruiting and training talent from the local community remains a priority for the five-star resort.



Overseen by Yousra Mizouali, training manager, the announcement of the programme follows a cross-training initiative for Omani employees that took place during the pre-opening phase of the resort, with firm plans now in place to ensure this becomes a regular occurrence. The latest batch of overseas training took place in November 2017 and saw four Omani employees embark on programmes at a selection of Anantaras flagship resorts. The budding hoteliers worked across different departments, including security, reservations, human resources and front of house, and were handpicked by Yousra and the team according to their commitment, aptitude and willingness to learn, with the aim to ensure they develop and progress within the company.



Commenting on the programme, James Hewitson, general manager, said: We have introduced the overseas training programme to give our Omani employees the opportunity to gain exposure to other cultures and different processes and ways of management. We hope it has helped to instill a strong sense of pride in their work so they can begin to progress up the career ladder. Overall, we are focused on continuing to drive Omanisation at the resort through a series of initiatives, including a recent partnership with the National Hospitality Institute (NHI), so that we can encourage local people from the surrounding community to pursue a successful career in hospitality.



Mizouali added: The programme involves hands-on training, whereby they shadow team members in their respective departments and are presented with new challenges and tasks that theyll need to learn in order to progress. Our aim is for employees to return with a renewed energy and passion for hospitality so they are motivated to improve and add value to both our property and tourism within Oman.



Fakhri Mohammed Rabia, bell captain, had the opportunity to visit Anantara Layan Phuket Resort & Spa where he assisted with guest relations. Commenting on the experience, he said: It was exciting to work in a different country and gain experience at a more established and busier hotel. During my time, I learnt how they manage their teams and service guests efficiently, whilst also proving myself capable to take the next step in my career.



Ali Said Al Mahri, training officer, spent several weeks at Anantara Riverside Bangkok where he focused on getting an insight into how they approach training whilst also gaining a deeper understanding of the brand. Talking about his first trip to Thailand, he said: It was an excellent opportunity to work with a new team in a new culture as well as learn different ways of training and see how the brand standards are upheld across different properties.



Suhail Said Mohammed Tabook, reservations agent, visited Anantara Sathorn Bangkok Hotel to assist the reservations team as he prepares to progress his career. When speaking about how he benefited from the experience, he said; I learned to appreciate the melting pot of cultures that exist within the Ananara family and I feel I am now able to perform more of the functions required to move up the career ladder.



Khalid Musabah Bin Said Al Saidi, security supervisor, shadowed the team at Anantara The Palm Dubai Resort, learning how they coordinate and execute security safety. He said: I gained a huge amount of experience during my time in Dubai and cant wait to implement what I learnt back in Salalah. - TradeArabia News Service


Meet award-winning artisans and buy their products at Kerala Arts and Crafts Village
Recovering commodity prices mean Wyomings 2018 economy is likely to be better than last year, but several long term trends suggest the Cowboy State continues to face several roadblocks to significant growth.

With oil prices pushing $60 per barrel and natural gas prices improving as well, many of the challenges caused by the energy bust that hit Wyoming two years ago may be eased. The improvements in the oil and natural gas industries are important because the state relies on energy companies for roughly 70 percent of its tax revenue and the bust has led to a several-hundred-million dollar budget deficit.

Revenue projections made last October found that the state had enough to cover its standard budget, meaning the regular cost of providing state services with the exception of education. It was an improved commodity price forecast that led to the boost in projected revenue.

Those are things that I think are going to make the states budget easier, said University of Wyoming economist Rob Godby. It seems that we have a reasonably sustainable budget at current level.

But a stabilized natural resource sector isnt enough to fix the states larger economic woes. Even the higher oil prices are unlikely to drive the benefits normally associated with a strong energy industry in Wyoming, such as higher sales tax revenue and service industry jobs catering to the industry.

Jim Robinson, an economist with the states Economic Analysis Division, said that oil companies, for example, will need to see another six months or so of $60 per barrel prices before they expand operations in Wyoming.

The good news is that prices have remained around that point for several months already and Robinson said it appears that global demand and supply reductions by some foreign nations will keep prices high for at least a few more months.

Some of it is companies are waiting to see if prices are really going to stay that way, even get better, Robinson said. The industry just needs to see those prices are going to be there for more than one more month.

But Robinson cautioned that once production is increased, the prices may fall once again as the supply exceeds demand.

Mark Haggerty of Headwaters Economics in Montana said that while oil and natural gas were likely to be stronger in 2018 than in the last two years, coal is expected to see a long, downward trend.

Coal has changed from a stable, predictable base load source of generation to one that is now dispatched over a shorter time frame with other fuels, Haggerty said. Thats one of the reason why the energy markets that affect Wyoming are less certain now.

Outside of energy, both Godby and Haggerty said that Wyoming is facing long-term challenges that are unlikely to be solved over the next twelve months.

Haggerty said that big cities are increasingly the center of economic activity because modern industries like high-tech require clusters of similar companies and a highly-educated workforce. Some smaller communities in the Mountain West have found success in creating clusters of economic activity, but those towns usually have what Haggerty referred to as the golden triangle: a national park or other attractive outdoor offerings, an airport with flights to major destinations around the country and a university.

Wyoming lacks any community that ticks all of those boxes and with the state coming off the largest population drop since the 1980s, Godby said that even if Wyomings energy economy stabilizes, the success of neighboring states like Montana, Idaho and Colorado is likely to hurt Wyoming.

The economies around us are some of the hottest economies around the country so potentially they will continue to draw population out of the state, Godby said. Well just have to see.
The Wyoming Supreme Court threw up its hands Thursday in a contested case between a coal company and an oil and gas firm over the right to mine.

Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer in Wyoming, and Berenergy, a private, Denver-based oil company, each argue that they have superior rights to mine coal and drill for oil and gas, on the same patch of Wyoming.

Their federal leases essentially overlap and the minerals cannot be economically mined at the same time, according to the court documents.

The companies sought court decisions to solve their conflict, both arguing that various statutes and policies governing leasing of federal minerals gave their businesses priority. The federal agency that oversees leasing of federal minerals in Wyoming has not been part of the legal disagreement between Peabody and Berenergy.

Thats a problem, according to Justice Michael K. Davis, who wrote the Supreme Courts decision. The conflict requires a federal decision, Davis wrote. The court acknowledged the importance of the outcome of this dispute to both firms, and to the local county that receives the revenue.

Berenergy seeks to protect its right to produce oil and gas, a right it has even though those wells are apparently near depletion, Davis wrote.

Peabody would make substantially more money from mining the coal, not to mention benefit the community from revenue and jobs, he added.

Nonetheless, the state courts are not the proper forum to settle the rights of these federal lessees, he said.

The case came to the Supreme Court after the companies appealed a two-year-old compromise brokered by the District Court of Campbell County.

It had Berenergy shutting down its wells and allowing Peabody to extract the coal when it was ready to do so. Peabody would then have to compensate the oil and gas company, and put $13 million in escrow to cover the oil and gas firms potential costs down the line.

But, neither company was pleased with the decision. Berenergy protested halting oil production, for what amounted to first use rights for the coal firm, despite Berenergys preexisting lease rights, while the coal firm contested fronting $13 million, an amount that they alleged was extortionist.

The myriad policies regarding who is right all lead back to the feds, the Interior Department, or even Congress, the justice wrote.

Both the Wyoming Supreme Court decision, and the District Court decision from 2015, note the curiosity of the Bureau of Land Managements absence in the dispute.

Political issue can be thorny, but in this case, the political issue of who should go first (oil and gas or coal) when concurrent mineral development on federal lands may not be possible, seems to be a thorny issue that the BLM should be answering, the District Court decision states. The entity charged with protecting the publics interest has decided to sit this one out.

A spokeswoman for the agency did not comment on the details of the case.

BLM Wyoming is currently reviewing the recently issued decision to determine our next steps, said Spokeswoman Kristen Lenhardt.

The case concerns the area of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, just south of Wright. It is the largest surface coal mine in the country and employed more than 1,300 miners as of September.

A spokeswoman for the company said she could not comment on the details of the case, but said that Peabody looks forward to working with the appropriate parties to resolve the issue.

A message left at the Berenergy offices in Denver was not returned by press time.

Wyoming Supreme court has remanded the case back to the lower court to figure out if the federal agency can join.

If it cannot be made a party or does not choose to participate, which is very likely, Davis wrote. The district court must dismiss the case.
Happy Monday! Casper still seems stuck in a winter wonderland of sorts, or at least thats what I try to tell myself as I scrape ice from my windshield and slosh through melting snow in the mornings. But the holiday season is mostly over, people are back in the office and political news is picking back up.

Now for the news(letter):

Barrasso cancels Russia trip

Wyomings U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican, cancelled a trip to Russia after the Kremlin denied a visa to one of his Democratic Senate colleagues. Barrasso had planned to travel to Russia with fellow Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

The trip was scheduled for around Jan. 11, according to Barrasso spokeswoman Laura Mengelkamp, but Barrasso and Johnson cancelled it after Russia refused to give Shaheen a visa. Shaheen found herself on a Russian black list of individuals who supported sanctions against the country.

Mengelkamp didnt give much of a reason for the cancellation in an email.

The Russian government denied a visa to one member of the delegation. Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Barrasso canceled the trip, she wrote.

Barrasso also planned to visit Ukraine and Germany on the trip with a focus on national security, nuclear nonproliferation efforts and promoting American natural resource exports.

Of particular interest to Senator Barrasso is the expansion of U.S. natural gas exports, Mengelkamp wrote.

Barrassos decision to cancel the trip can be seen as a nice moment of bipartisanship from a senator who rarely takes an accommodating tone with Democrats. But its likely a little more complicated than that. There has long been a tradition of American lawmakers and even candidates refusing to criticize political opponents while overseas and Barrasso is an establishment stalwart unlikely to implicitly buck that convention by traveling to Russia with a Republican colleague while a Democratic senator was forced to stay home.

Murray praises end of voter fraud panel

Last week, Wyoming Secretary of State Ed Murray sent out his first press release since early December, when he denied allegations of sexual assault by a Colorado woman whom worked with Murray in the 1980s.

Murray, who is considering a run for governor, sent out a statement praising President Donald Trump for disbanding a federal commission examining alleged voter fraud across the country.

Murray had joined with a majority of both Republican and Democratic secretaries of state who declined to turn over state-level voter data to the federal government last fall. Murray argued at the time that it was an instance of federal overreach and that he believed it was laying the groundwork for restricting state autonomy in administering elections.

The press release was framed as Murray expressing his agreement with Trumps decision to disband the panel, which was kind of funny because Trump only eliminated the panel due to the intransigence of state officials like Murray.

Im a lifelong Republican, but President Trumps creation of the Commission didnt sit well with me from the get go, Murray said in the statement. It doesnt matter who the president is, I am going to safeguard the privacy of Wyomings voters from any federal overreach because of my strong belief in a citizens right to privacy.

Wyoming GOP praises Trump

Wyoming Republican Party Chairman W. Frank Eathorne sent an email to supporters passing along a list of accomplishments apparently sent to state party leaders by the White House described as looking back on year one of Make America Great Again #MAGA.

The highlights? (According to the email)

$5.5 trillion in tax cuts, 60 percent of which go to families;

the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 17 years;

22 regulations eliminated for each new one enacted;

a record-setting 12 conservative federal circuit judges confirmed.

Not all of these may resonate in Wyoming, where, for example, unemployment numbers have generally been tied more to the energy industry than national trends. And our coverage of the GOP tax plan impact on Wyoming families also doesnt entirely square with the White House assessment. But the rollback of environmental regulations has been felt in the state.

Freiss-ing in... Phoenix?

I got a Christmas card at the office from Jackson philanthropist and investor Foster Friess, who has said he is considering challenging Barrasso in next years GOP primary. That seems increasingly unlikely given that Friess hasnt said anything about it in a long time and didnt seem so committed to begin but. But anyway, he sent me a Christmas card in an envelope that said Greetings from Jackson Hole! on the outside but was postmarked in Phoenix.

Its probably not fair to make much of that given that it appears to be the kind of card you design online with instructions to send it to a long list of addresses, which some company then mails out from wherever they are based.

Still, its not a great look for Friess -- a non-entity in the state political scene -- who is already liable to face attacks as an outsider seeking to unseat a relatively popular incumbent if he does run against Barrasso.

Round up

CHENEY PRAISED -- Political blog Scope Weekly listed Wyomings U.S. House Rep. Liz Cheney as part of a wave of women who took public office last year.

-- Liz Cheney was sworn into the House of Representatives earlier this year and has become one of many candidates attempting to change the political environment for women nationwide. Daughter of former Vice President, Dick Cheney, Liz has been outspoken about President Trumps view on NATO and relations with Russia, Scope editor Anne Howard wrote.

EVERYTHING IS TOTALLY FINE -- While many people were alarmed by Trumps fight on Twitter with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un over who had a bigger nuclear button, Barrasso didnt seem to mind.

-- I believe the president is the commander in chief. Thanks. Barrasso told Vox reporter Tara Golshan when she tried to ask whether he was bothered by Trump taunting the young dictator.

The tweet read in full: North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

Barasso further praised the tweet to media, saying: We finally have a president who is actually dealing with the problem at hand, instead of what weve seen previously, which was ignoring the problem.

ENZI MOVES ON HEALTH PLANS -- Wyoming U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi praised a proposed rule from the Department of Labor that would allow small businesses to band together to offer health plans to employees. Enzi proposed a bill last year that would have done something similar.

-- I have long heard from small businesses regarding the need for greater flexibility and more options for providing health insurance coverage to their employees, Enzi said in a statement.

MOVER AND SHAKER -- Eric Ueland, a former top aide to Enzi, was selected as the State Departments undersecretary for management in September but is still awaiting confirmation from the full Senate, contributing to a lack of leadership at the department, according to trade publication FCW.

-- State is ... dealing with uncertainty in the executive ranks, FCW editor Adam Mazmanian wrote in an article noting that Uelands appointment is still in limbo.

Thanks for reading! As always, if you havent subscribed to get this email every Monday you can do so at trib.com/email. Please send me tips and tidbits and encourage your friends and colleagues to sign-up for the newsletter. You can find new Wyoming politics stories every day at trib.com/307politics.
Mondays Highlights</&h1>

Monday

support meetings

Alcoholics Anonymous: 6:30 a.m., 917 N. Beech; 8:30 a.m., 500 S. Wolcott; 10 a.m., 328 E. A St.; noon, 500 S. Wolcott; 2 p.m, 917 N. Beech; 5:30 p.m., 328 E. A; 6 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200; 6 p.m., 456 S. Walnut; 7 p.m., 917 N. Beech; 8 p.m., 328 E. A. Douglas: 7:30 p.m., 628 E. Richards (upstairs in back). Unless otherwise noted, all meetings are open. Casper info: 266-9578; Douglas info: (307) 351-1688.

Al-Anon: Noon, 701 S. Wolcott, St. Marks Church, main entrance, left to library.

Narcotics Anonymous: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 7 p.m., 302 E. 2nd, Methodist Church; 8 p.m., 4700 S. Poplar (church basement). Web site: http://www.urmrna.org.

Nicotine Anonymous: 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club. Info: Pam M., 577-0518.

Teen Addiction Anonymous: 3:30-4:30 p.m., Boys & Girls Club Teen Center. Info: 258-7439.

Adult Children of Alcoholics: 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., 12-24 Club, 500 S. Wolcott St., Suite 200.

TOPS Weight Loss: 5:30 p.m., Weight Loss Support Group TOPS #246, Wyoming Oil & Gas Building, 2211 King Blvd. Use NE door entry. Info: 265-1486.

Free tax

volunteers needed

The United Way of Natrona County Wyoming Free Tax Service (VITA) is in need of volunteers to assist in the preparation of free basic income tax returns for low to moderate income taxpayers. Basic tax training along with computer training will be provided Monday through Friday, beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 8. Please contact Mandy at 237-9367 or by e-mailing mandy@unitedwaync.com for further information on the program or volunteering.

Low vision

support meets

Monday will be the next meeting for the Low Vision Support Group. It will be at 10 a.m. at the Casper Senior Center. Kim Kantor, supervisor of the Wyoming Senior Citizens group, will present a program on Medicare options. Need a ride? Call Howard at 234-5867.

Rotary hears about clean water

Brian Deurloo with Frog Creek Partners will present a program on clean water to Rotarians and guests at a noon luncheon meeting of the Casper Rotary Club at the Ramkota Hotel. Deurloo is a native of rural Wyoming and a 1991 graduate of Sheridan High School. In 1997, he obtained a mining engineering degree from Colorado School of Mines. Prior to starting Frog Creek Partners, he worked as U.S. General Manager for an international energy company where he managed projects in Viet Nam, Australia, Brazil, and the United States from Alaska to Louisiana. Deurloo is building an environmental technology company based upon his passion for removing pollution,

Frog Creek Partners is an environmental technology company that specializes in storm water filtration and pollution measuring services.

Ladies bible

study begins

Monday Ladies Bible Study at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, 2300 E. 15th St., begins Monday, Jan. 8, and continues through Feb. 19, with two classes offered  3:15 to 5:15 p.m., or 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Workbooks are $15. Please RSVP to the church office at 234-6475 or email at pop@casperpoplc.org. This will be a good pre-Lent Bible Study. For more information, visit the website at www.princeofpeacecasper.org.

The study is, Finding I AM  How Jesus Fully Satisfies the Cry of Your Heart, by Lysa Terkeurst. What is the deep cry of your heart? The ache in your soul that keeps you up at night? The prayer you keep repeating? Jesus not only cares about this deep, spiritual wrestling, but He also wants to step in and see you through it. Join Lysa TerKeurst on the streets of Israel to explore the seven I AM statements of Jesus found in the Gospel of John.

Tween Monday: Stomp Rockets

The Natrona County Library will host a science program for students in grades 4-6 at 4 p.m. Using water bottles, bike tubes and paper, students will build rockets that theyll launch with their feet. All supplies provided at no cost. Call 577.READ x5 for more information.

Open houses at Southridge, Manor Heights

In an effort to ensure all parents and students are as informed as possible leading up to the Open Enrollment period for the 2018-19 school year, NCSD has announced the schools open house schedule. The 2018-19 Open Enrollment window ends Jan. 3-17, 2018. Mondays open houses are 4:30 to 6 p.m., Southridge Elementary; 6 to 7:30 p.m., Manor Heights Elementary.

Funday Monday at the Elks

Funday Mondays at the Elks have resumed each Monday at 5 p.m. This is a members only event. Start the week off right with a burger.

Victoria Season 2 preview screening

Wyoming PBS and the Natrona County Library will host a preview screening of the first hour of the second season of the hit drama series from Masterpiece, Victoria, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Natrona County Library. Tea and biscuits will be provided at no cost. The dazzling series that gives Queen Victoria a whole new image stars Jenna Coleman (Doctor Who) as the feisty rookie monarch, asserting her rule over one of the most powerful nations on earth. The drama all takes place against the backdrop of the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when society was changing as fast as the queens growing family. Victoria, Season 2 premieres at 8 p.m., on Sunday, Jan. 14, on Wyoming PBS.

Photo group meets

The first meeting of Casper Photography Association for 2018 is at 7:15 p.m., Monday, Jan. 8, at the Oil and Gas Commission building. Dinah Utah will be furnishing the refreshments and the program is the Christmas slideshow as our program. Its time to pay dues, $20 for an individual and $30 for a family. New members are always welcome.
A murder suspect arrested Thursday in Mills was leaving a gas station covered in blood from his shoulders down to his feet, a police report shows. A knife was found in his pocket and he allegedly told a deputy he had killed his ex-girlfriend and slit his own wrists.

Donald J. Crouse, 48, is suspected of killing a woman in northern Wyoming earlier on the same day he was found. He appeared Monday in Big Horn County Circuit Court, where he was charged with first-degree murder.

The report, written by officer Grant Pederson of the Mills Police Department, offers the first details concerning Crouses arrest.

Pederson notes in the report that he was looking for the murder suspect around 10:30 p.m. Thursday when he spotted a parked Subaru matching a description provided to the department. Pederson spotted Crouse leaving the Loaf n Jug on West Yellowstone Highway covered in blood, according to the report. After Crouse got into the Subaru, he was detained without a struggle.

Crouse told the officer that he had a knife in the cars center console and he was the guy (Pederson) was looking for, according to the report. Crouse had a knife in his pocket, and the report does not indicate if another knife was found in the car.

Crouse had several cuts on both wrists, the report states. He told police that he had slit his wrists in Lovell before driving to Mills. Crouse was hospitalized before being transported to Natrona County Detention Center. While hospitalized, Crouse said he killed his ex-girlfriend, according to the report.

Two dogs in the Subaru were taken to Caspers Metro Animal Services.

Police in Lovell went to Crouses apartment on Thursday for a welfare check and found Carol Jean Barnes, 49, of Cowley dead inside, according to Lovell police. She was killed sometime in the afternoon or evening of the same day.

Police said Crouse and Barnes were previously in a relationship of an unspecified nature. The two did not live together, according to Lovell police.

Our thoughts, prayers and sympathy are extended to the victims family and loved ones, Lovell police Chief Dan Laffin wrote in the Friday release.

In addition to the Mills and Lovell police departments, the Natrona County and Big Horn County sheriffs offices and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation were involved in the case.

Crouses public defender was not available for comment Monday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
TEHRAN, Iran  Irans Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.

In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.

The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.

Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not verify that.

The Revolutionary Guard is a paramilitary force loyal to the countrys leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many demonstrators protested against the Guards massive budget, its interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.

Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the last 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots who will be dealt with seriously.
We've collected a few front pages from newspapers.com to give you a look at some Jan. 8 papers in history. With a subscription to newspapers.com you can search the Arizona Daily Star and many other newspapers using keywords or dates, and download articles or pages.
Workshop offers free science project help

Southern Arizona Research, Science and Engineering Foundation invites students and their parents to learn the ins and outs of creating a quality science or engineering project.

SARSEF experts will guide participants though the research process, and every child will leave with a relevant topic and testable question, project board, lab book and the beginnings of a project.

The organization will hold sessions at 4574 E. Broadway Blvd. for grades fourth through eighth on Saturday, Jan. 20, from 1 to 4 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 27, from 9 a.m. to noon.

A session for kindergarteners through third-graders will be held Saturday, Jan. 27, from 1 to 3 p.m.

Registration is required and the cost is $25. Contact: director@sarsef.org for more information and details.

Courts host civics contest for high-schoolers

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona are hosting a civics contest for Arizona high school students with cash prizes.

The theme of the contest is The 14th Amendment 150 Years After Ratification: What Does Equal Protection Mean to Students?

Students are asked to write an essay and/or produce a video focusing on how Congress and the federal courts have applied the Equal Protection Clause to their educational opportunities.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona will also conduct a local contest for students living in the state. Winners at the local level become finalists in the circuit contest.

Local contest winners will receive cash prizes of $1,000 for first place, $500 for second place and $250 for third place.

The top three finishers in the Ninth Circuit contest in both the essay and video competitions will receive $2,000 for first place, $1,000 for second place and $500 for third place.

For more information, visit: www.ca9.uscourts.gov/civicscontest.

Entries will be accepted beginning Feb. 1 through April 1. Local contest winners will be announced in May and the Ninth Circuit winners in June.
PHOENIX  U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be looking to crack down on marijuana sales in states where they are legal, but Arizona medical-marijuana users likely dont need to worry.

A provision buried in the federal budget, plus a safety valve in what Arizona voters enacted in 2010, should protect individual medical-marijuana users here unless the Drug Enforcement Administration starts targeting individual users, which is considered extremely unlikely.

Sessions announced last week that he is rescinding a memo that directed the federal prosecutors under his jurisdiction not to target businesses or individuals who are in compliance with state marijuana laws despite the fact the drug remains illegal under federal law.

Instead, Sessions directed the prosecutors to treat questions of whether to pursue charges of marijuana possession, cultivation and transportation the way they would any other federal offense, consistent with the departments finite resources. That directive was effective immediately.

For the moment, though, Sessions and his prosecutors cant do anything about Arizona.

A provision in the federal budget, first adopted in 2014, prevents his agency from using any resources to target patients and providers in states where medical marijuana is legal. That provision has been renewed every year since.

But this protection expires Jan. 19 unless Congress includes it in the new spending bill  or at least adopts another continuing resolution to keep the government operating while a budget deal is being negotiated.

If it is not included, or if there is a government shutdown, the Department of Justice will no longer be prevented from targeting state-legal medical marijuana, said Morgan Fox, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which helped craft the 2010 Arizona law allowing medical marijuana.

Even if that happens, there are some protections built into the Arizona law.

The first is designed to protect medical-marijuana users against any state administration that decides to use the illegality of marijuana under federal law to shut down Arizonas program.

As approved by voters, the 2010 law allows people with certain specified medical conditions to be certified by the state to obtain up to 2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks, buying it through state-licensed dispensaries.

The law also says if the Arizona Department of Health Services fails to issue a medical-marijuana-user identification card within 45 days of getting a valid application or renewal, the card shall be deemed issued and a copy of the application qualifies as a valid ID card.

A separate section says if the health department is not accepting applications, people can effectively self-certify by providing the same required information in a notarized statement along with the written certification of a physician that the patient needs the drug.

Such a possibility is not out of the question, even with the voter approval of the 2010 law.

Ive always thought we should enforce federal law, just like we should enforce state law, Gov. Doug Ducey said Friday.

That, then, goes to the question of what happens if federal agents crack down on growers and dispensers and theres no place for medical-marijuana patients to buy it.

Here, too, the Arizona law has a remedy: Patients can simply grow their own.

The statute contains a provision allowing those who are not within 25 miles of a dispensary to grow up to 12 plants for their own use. If there are no dispensaries, the more than 151,000 people who already have state-issued medical-marijuana cards  and those who would self-certify in the future if the health department balks  all would be at least 25 miles from a state dispensary and all free to grow their own.

There also are several state court rulings that have upheld Arizonas medical-marijuana law despite its illegality at the federal level.

From Duceys perspective, if people want to legalize marijuana they should seek to amend the federal prohibitions.

If we want to change a law, we should have a discussion about changing a law, he said Friday. Im certainly open-minded to those discussions.

But the governor has made it clear in the past that he would not support legalization.

I dont think that any state became stronger by being stoned, he said during a 2016 news conference.
PHOENIX  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is set to deliver his fourth state of the state address and outline his policy proposals for the 2018 legislative session.

Monday's speech on the session's opening day comes as the Republican governor faces ongoing pressure to boost funding for the state's K-12 schools as he prepares a re-election run.

Per pupil state funding for Arizona public schools is among the lowest in the nation and teacher pay is also at or near the bottom. Several thousand education advocates marched at the Capitol over the weekend.

Ducey says he's pushed to increase spending by $700 million since 2015 and that more will come this year.
A wolf that once roamed parts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico would be removed from the list of federally protected species under legislation proposed by U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake.

The Arizona Republican introduced the measure last week. He's a critic of the Mexican gray wolf recovery plan, calling it a regulatory nightmare for ranchers and rural communities.

The bill calls for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine if a population of fewer than 100 wolves has been established along the Arizona-New Mexico border. If so, the predator would be considered recovered and removed from the endangered list.

Environmentalists say it's an attempt to sidestep the Endangered Species Act.
#MAMA (Make America Mediocre Again) is the real campaign slogan of Donald Trump. Ballistic bozo has abdicated his role as a world leader, while simultaneously jacking up the odds that we will all be incinerated after one of his trumper tantrums on twitter. He has violated his oath of office by crippling the State Department, the DOJ, and every regulatory agency under his watch. He treats public lands as if they are his private property. You might ask, what has happened to the constitutional check on this tyrant?
Help India!

Over the past three and a half years, India has witnessed an increase in attacks on marginalised communities in the name of cow-protection (Gau Raksha). From Jammu and Kashmir to Karnataka and West Bengal to Maharashtra, it would be fair to say that the series of attacks have left few states untouched. The impact of these attacks has been especially felt in the state of Jharkhand, which has been witness to some of the worst attacks by right-wing goons in the name of protecting cows. From the brutal murder in Latehar, including that of a minor, to the mob attacks in various parts of the state, the state has seen some of the worst attacks in the country. TCNs Afroz Alam Sahil travelled across Jharkhand to understand and narrate how the terror spread by right-wing fundamentalists under the garb of protecting the cow has left a trail of blood in its path. In the second of the eight-part series, Afroz Alam Sahil visits the village of Manua, the home of Alimuddin Ansari who was lynched by a mob of so-called Gau Rakshaks in June this year. He finds out that despite progress in the case, the residents of his village believe the next attack is not a matter of if but when.

Support TwoCircles



The village of Manua in Ramgadh district of Jharkhand does not have any defining quality that sets it apart from other villages around it; yet, even on the first impression, it seems that there is something that is worrying the residents of Manua. And the first impression, at least in this case, is clearly not mistaken.

This happens to be the village of Alimuddin Ansari, a businessman who was lynched by a mob in June this year over suspicions of trafficking beef. Manua has a population of about 5,000, of which around 60% are Muslims. Although residents discuss numerous stories of communal harmony in the region, they also acknowledge that over the past 2-3 years, the influx of vigilantes in the name of cow protection has wreaked havoc with the peaceful nature of the village. Violence at the hands of these vigilantes are becoming increasingly common: in last two years, there have been more than 24 instances of cases registered in the local police station over people, mainly Muslims, being attacked.

In June this year, Alimuddin Ansari became a victim at the hands of these vigilantes, when he was beaten to death in a crowded market near Ramgarh Bazaar.

One of our first stops in the village was the house of Alimuddin, where his wife Mariam welcomed us with tea and snacks.The last six months have been torrid, to say the least for Mariam and her children. He said he would be back by evening that day, but he never did, says Mariam. After his death, a lot of political leaders came to visita lot of promises were made..we were given a cheque of Rs 2 lakh. We were promised a government job for my son, a house under Indira Awaas Yojana and even a widowers pension. Six months on, none of these promises have been fulfilled, she added. Even the money she received has been almost completely spent on court cases and her childrens education. Now, no one comes to visit Mariam says.

During our conversation, we are joined by the neighbours and other well-wishers of the Ansaris. One such person is Irshad, the Mukhiya (village head) of Shirka, a neighbouring village. Although the activities of the so-called Gau Rakshaks has been on a rise in the last 2-3 years, the arrest of a dozen people in this (Alimuddins) case has scared them a little bit. This case is pretty strongthere are more than 10 videos recorded of the incident.

Mehmood Ansari of Anjuman Islamiya says that while these so-called Gau rakshaks act like they wish to protect cows, the real reason is different. Loot, ransacking trucks, beating up people and snatching cash and other valuables, are the main motives of these attackers, Ansari says.

He adds that even in this case, there have been numerous attempts to intimidate and bribe witnesses. Even during the trial, they (the Gau Rakshaks attempt to intimidate us in the court. While about 35-40 people from our side, they arrive with almost 200 people, Ansari says.

The case of the murder of Alimuddin Ansari is being handled at a fast-track court, where all 13 witnesses statement has been recorded. Following consistent pressure from all parties barring the BJP, Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das had announced on July 13 that the case will be handled by a fast-track court.

BJP leaders arrested for Alimuddins murder

According to Ramgarh SP Kishore Kaushal, Nityanand Mahato and Raja Khan of the BJP Ramgarh district have been arrested along with several others for the alleged murder of Alimuddin Ansari. While Mahatao is the media cell head of Ramgarh unit of BJP, Khan is a member of the BJP minority cell. Both of these have been arrested on the basis of video footage recorded, Kaushal added. Of the 12 people arrested in total, most either belong to the BJP or Bajrang Dal.

Death of Zuleikha Khatoon had nothing to do with the case

In October during one of the hearings related to the case, Jaleel Ansari, a witness, was asked to produce his Aadhar card as residence proof. His wife, Zuleikha Khan, who was the sister of Alimuddin Ansari, and their son Shahbaaz stepped out of the court premises but died in an accident moments later. Given the circumstances, most people suspected foul play in the matter. However, Alimuddins family says that it was an accident as Shahbaazs bike tripped after a collision and Zuleikha died due to severe injuries. After initially filing a complaint following Zuleikhas death, the family of Alimuddin has withdrawn the complaint. We do not wish to take help of lies or false complaints, says Mariam.

Not the first case from Manua

Just five days before the murder of Alimuddin Ansari, Mohammed Mubeen (25) and his uncle Sarfuddin Ansari were assaulted by so-called Gau Rakshaks near the Pargada railway line in Ramgarh. Members of Bajrang Dal then took the duo to the police station, and despite being attacked by the Bajrang Dal goons, the police booked the duo and let the assailants go.

The duo, who were released on bail after 35 days in custody, are still scared of what happened that day. Narrating the events of the day, Mubeen says, We bought the cow for Rs 11,500 from Ravi Mishra, a well-known person in this region. On our way, we were stopped by about 8 people who then attacked uswhen we were taken to the police station, we tried to present our side of the story but the police paid no heed. While Mubeen was talking to us, his mother spoke out, We (Muslims) do not need to eat beefnow should we stop drinking milk too? Is it a crime for a Muslim to have a cow?

Mubeens father Mustaqim says that Mishra, from whom they bought the cow, is a good family friend. He wants to helpbut he is in government service and has been receiving threats from various people. He is scared, he says. It is a feeling that is now common among residents of Manua and Jharkhand.

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Last month I wrote that the very notion of justice in Britain was under threat. This week we have found what we have been relying on to keep us safe is rotten. This was not the topic I had hoped to return with after Christmas, I had foolishly thought the Archbishop of Canterbury would have made a quiet apology for the way he handled the George Bell Case. Nothing has come from the Church of England's cold, grey bureaucracy, an institution which is overseeing the final death throes of Anglicanism in England, to even suggest that it has learnt a lesson.

Instead, it has been revealed that we can not expect the Criminal Justice System to protect us.

2017 saw Hollywood rocked by allegations of sexual abuse, the #MeToo movement spread like wildfire as women in their droves took to social media to call out their abusers, and powerful men were brought low because they took advantage over many years. Some cases were much less clear-cut. I think of Westminster, where the only cases that have been made public are about hands on knees and the concerning abuse of power by former policemen. This, I suspect, is not the last that we shall hear of this sordid affair but, in this era when the news moves on so quickly, several more terrifying cases have come to the fore.

Justice? What justice?

It is an odd word, justice. Everyone talks about it as though they cherish it above all else. Flashy politicians, senior police officers and, that oddity of the last decade, Police and Crime Commissioners have long insisted crime figures are falling. I wonder how many people actually believe them now. Those of us who have seen the response of the police to so-called "petty" crimes (which are not petty when it is you who is the victim) know that it is an unfunny joke.

In the time it takes to get anything resembling a response, victims are long past the point of expecting the perpetrator to be caught and punished.

Today (7 January 2018), Peter Hitchens pointed out in his Mail on Sunday column that :

"some crimes- in which people die or are seriously hurt- cannot be magicked out of existence in this way.

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year's Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.

"And the use of knives, in general,l is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of 'blade offences' in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies."

He went on to quote further figures that are frankly mortifying but raised the important point that if we still had the medical knowledge of 1965, when the death penalty was abolished, the figure for killings would be significantly higher.

Worboys and Johnson

John Worboys is a convicted rapist.

He raped not one woman, as wicked and sick as that is, but several. Around 100 allegations were made but he was convicted on 19 of them, with eight women being told their cases would not be pressed as there was insufficient evidence to gain a conviction. They could take some scant comfort in the knowledge that he was given an indeterminate sentence of imprisonment for public protection (with a minimum of eight years), in other words, this was to be until he was deemed to no longer pose a threat to women. Now, eight years into his sentence, he is to be freed. The Parole Board is "confident" that he will not re-offend and have imposed "stringent" licence conditions, including reporting to a parole officer each week.

His victims, some of whom were not informed until they saw it on the news, are expected to accept the fact that this monster will be back on our streets. This, however, is not uncommon now. Most, if not all, of us, have heard it said that sentences are light and criminals can be sure to serve half of their sentences at best. The official sentence allows the courts to feel as though they are still powerful and doing their jobs, the early release gets them out of the prisons which are not the austere centres of punishment and reform intended to deter crime but the place that hardened criminals, whom the courts can no longer pretend are only "petty", are sent to vegetate.

Further proof is in the case of triple murderer Theodore Johnson.

Here is a man who killed his wife in 1981 by hitting her with a vase and pushing her off a balcony after, he claimed, she had provoked him (although we can never know her version of events). So he went to prison for three years for manslaughter. He then strangled his partner with a belt in 1992 and, after a failed suicide attempt, was diagnosed with a "depressive illness" requiring his permanent detainment in a secure hospital. Four years later, he was out again. At this point, you should be able to see a sickening pattern emerging. In 2016, he hit his partner, who he met while on unescorted leave from the hospital, with a claw hammer and strangled her with a dressing gown cord. Again he failed to commit suicide, this time by jumping in front of a train.

The Judge's words fail to properly summarise the horror of this case, it was, he said, "an unimaginably terrible death." I suspect that even now, wheelchair-bound, that he is still as dangerous but we are told that he will spend 26 years (he is now 60) in prison.

The law in our own hands?

It annoys me to hear the police say that we should not take the law into our hands, as though the law does not belong to us and is given to them by us to ensure it is upheld. The police, despite appearances to the contrary, was never intended to be a paramilitary force as they have in other countries, Peel never intended for Britain to be subjected to a continental gendarmerie but to be not just like us but to actually be one of us.

Police uniforms were designed to look a little like army uniform as possible, hence the deep blue with the silly helmets which not look remarkably smart in comparison to the caps. The reason for this can be found in our peculiar history, the product of which has been English liberty and common law. We could do what we liked unless the law, made by our free sovereign Parliament, said otherwise. Everywhere else had to make do with being given permission to do things by the law. Britons used to be proud of this and it truly was the envy of the world.

Now, the police are armed with guns and truncheons, they rarely walk around the streets and you would be lucky to recognise them as they zoom past in their cars.

The beat policeman has gone now, it did not matter that he was effective or that people felt safe. No, what we needed was a distant police force, obsessed with "institutional racism" and turning up to Gay Pride in high heels, with painted nails and in a specially decorated car. This isn't the fault of the individual officer, the few I have come into contact with are decent, brave and devoted to their work. The fault lies higher up, with the faceless bureaucrats and weak-willed politicians. It lies with people more interested in appearing to be sufficiently diverse than catching criminals. It lies with courts that do not realise that we, the ordinary people, do take crime seriously and we do want it to be properly punished. I am afraid to say that we are waking up to the horrid truth that, unless somebody in power acts, we are on our own.
A Labour activist has come forward to discuss the sexual abuse they suffered in the party.

The Labour supporter, whose identity has been kept secret, told Blasting News there is lots of abuse in the Labour Party, ranging from physical abuse to verbal abuse being conducted online.

"It is essentially a kangaroo court"

They said: "I was sexually assaulted whilst I was drinking. I came forward to the Labour Party. But it is difficult to go through the process to ensure your complaint is taken seriously. It is essentially a kangaroo court. Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) panel members decide if the complaint is forwarded to the Complaints Panel.

"This makes it difficult to come forward. However, it is much easier to come forward to them than the police. I am grateful for the support the Labour Party has provided me with."

The activist said they were not going to complain about the sexual assault they endured, but they felt they could not allow the candidate to become successful in being selected to stand for election. They told Blasting News the candidate was unsuccessful, but that is because they were not selected by the party's membership.

The candidate was also popular with the Momentum wing of the Labour Party and they tried to appeal to Corbyn supporters to get selected.

The Labour member welcomed Labour MP Jess Phillips' efforts to reform the party's complaints procedure.

"The complaints process is broken"

They said the complaints process is broken. According to the Labour supporter, they had to write a complaint about the person who sexually assaulted them, who then had to provide a statement in response to the accusation.

A small NEC panel interviews each individual before another NEC panel decides to forward the complaint to a disputes panel.

They added: "It is unnecessary to go through so many processes. It must be less stressful."

The Labour activist also discussed the toxic culture in the party right now. They were told that because they were on the 'Blairite' wing of the party, they should not be a Labour member at all.

They added: "This goes against what it means to be in a political party.

Labour's problems seemed to be aired much more than the Conservative Party's, who do a better job at hiding their divisions, as do other parties.

"Many members are aggressive and forthcoming"

"Many members are aggressive and forthcoming. So many of them are not willing to listen. There is a big group of members filled with ultimate hate towards those who do not like Jeremy Corbyn. They are only interested in ultimate control of the party. Hundreds of thousands of new members have changed the direction of the Labour Party."

The activist said they were a former Corbyn supporter, but they left Momentum because many of their members refuse to campaign for Blairites.

They added: "One member was assaulted because they disagreed with them for campaigning for a local candidate.

I joined Progress, which is a more moderate group in Labour."

Because of the Labour member's former sympathies with Corbyn and their support for New Labour, they see themselves as a 'voice of reason' between both sides of the Labour Party.

They added: "There are many members in the Labour Party who hate more moderate activists. But they are not interested in getting Labour into government. They are nothing but a hindrance to the party. They make many activists feel like they should not be in the party at all.

"I find it all very tiring. I work very hard for the party and I would love to be a candidate myself. However, I feel like my work isn't good enough because I do not support Jeremy Corbyn.

I always get called 'Blairite scum.' People will hate me because of my views, despite all of my work."

Momentum has also attracted criticism from MPs from all sides of the political spectrum. Before Christmas, Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed by a select committee, where Labour MP Chuka Umuna asked the Labour Leader why he will not disband Momentum. Mr. Corbyn refused to condemn them.
It is widely accepted that the earliest settlement of the American continent occurred during the last Ice Age when prehistoric people crossed from what is now Russia into Alaska over the now disappeared land bridge. These early settlers are believed to be ancestors of the modern Native Americans and Inuit. According to a paper released by EurekAlert, a new research by an international team of researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev, who holds positions both at St John's College, University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, added new details to the accepted theory, making the whole picture a bit more complicated.

The researchers sequenced the full genome of an infant, a girl whose remains were discovered in 2013 at the Upward Sun River archaeological site in Alaska, and whom the local Native community named Xach'itee'aanenh t'eede gay, or Sunrise Child-girl. Even though the child had lived around 11,500 years ago, long after the arrival of first settlers to the continent, her genetic makeup does not have anything in common with either southern or northern lineages of indigenous Americans.

Ancient Beringians, early offspring of Native American ancestors

Called Ancient Beringians, the newly discovered prehistoric people are thought to descend from the same ancestor group as the Northern and Southern Native American tribal groups, yet they have likely separated from their ancestors earlier in their history and later remained isolated from the common, ancestral Native American population.

Their common ancestors are believed to have first emerged as a distinctive tribal group in Northeast Asia around 36,000 years ago, just before the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum. The climate change, which back then was opposite to the global warming, forced them to migrate on foot to Alaska via the then exposed sea floor of the Bering Strait about 20,000 years ago.

The migrants maintained constant contact with their distant relatives back in Asia until around 25,000 years ago when the gene exchange across the strait finally ceased. This relation breakup was likely caused by brutal changes in the climate, when glacier build up in that part of Siberia isolated the Native American ancestral group which was still residing in Beringia, an ancient land which included dry seabeds of the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, as well as the adjacent Chukchi and Kamchatka Peninsulas in Russia, and Alaska in the US.

Early Native Americans arrived from Siberia in single wave of migration

Until the new research, the existence of two separate Northern and Southern branches of early Native American peoples has divided academics regarding the pattern of Americas having been originally settled. The new study allowed the team to postulate that the Ancient Beringian people were more closely related to early Native Americans than their Asian and common Eurasian ancestors. According to Jos Victor Moreno-Mayar, from the University of Copenhagen, "It looks as though this Ancient Beringian population was up there, in Alaska, from 20,000 years ago until 11,500 years ago, but they were already distinct from the wider Native American group." Professor Willerslev summarised the study, "We were able to show that people probably entered Alaska before 20,000 years ago. It's the first time that we have had direct genomic evidence that all Native Americans can be traced back to one source population, via a single, founding migration event."
TeleWare and Team Venti Join Forces

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By Mandi Nowitz

Web Editor By Mandi NowitzWeb Editor

TeleWare announced a new partnership with Team Venti, allowing for further growing in North America and beyond. Both companies are Microsoft (News - Alert) Cloud partners, delivering compliance solutions offering one-stop compliance recording and analytics services for businesses utilizing Skype for Business.





Charlie Ramirez, Team Ventis Managing Partner at the US-based hosting and systems integrator explains, We have been hosting Skype (News - Alert) for Business unified communications for over five years, including premium enterprise voice seamlessly integrated with Office 365. Working with TeleWare has now enabled us to deliver a full-featured hosted unified communications compliance solution for our clients in North America.

Team Venti was chosen by TeleWare (News - Alert) for its strong cloud offering for communications recording. Because TeleWares Skype for Business seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Azure, Team Venti has the capability to offer mid-sized enterprises a fast-to-deploy solution that is ready to go. The first month saw significant success, starting with healthcare and IT companies searching for recording solutions that adhered to industry regulations and offered quality assurance and team training.

Team Ventis offerings include deploying Microsofts Cloud PBX (News - Alert), hosted voice services, PSTN Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Skype Meeting Broadcast services. With services being cloud-based, deployment can be done internationally, but hosting is done in Texas at Team Ventis headquarters.

Steve Haworth (News - Alert), CEO of TeleWare added, For Team Venti, the challenge was to find an easy-to-deploy solution that was fully compatible with Skype for Business. A solution that was easy to use, fully scalable, had a user friendly interface, and was highly affordable. TeleWare ticked all the boxes.

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Edited by Erik Linask
Donald Trump made a controversial trip to attend the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on Saturday afternoon, despite protests from many civil rights leaders. Following his comments, many critics weren't pleased with his remarks.

Trump on civil rights

For the better part of the last two and a half years, Donald Trump has come under fire for many of his policy proposals and reckless remarks. During his campaign for president, and since his election win over Hillary Clinton, the former host of "The Apprentice" has put forward ideas and policies that many say with hurt minorities in the United States.

From immigration reform to education changes, Trump claims to be the president for all Americans, though recent polling shows his approval rating is hovering around just 35 percent. Due to the backlash against him, many wondered what would happen when the White House announced that Trump would be attending the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Many civil rights leaders, like Democrat Rep. John Lewis, were vocal in their opposition to Trump's attendance, but that didn't stop the president from following through. As reported by NBC News on December 9, the president addressed those in attendance with a prepared speech.

President Trump calls Martin Luther King Jr. "a man who I've studied and watched and admired for my entire life" pic.twitter.com/OVQEMg5hzF  NBC News (@NBCNews) December 9, 2017

Speaking at the opening of the historic civil rights museum in Jackson, Mississippi on Saturday, Donald Trump made sure to give remarks that were much different when compared to his campaign-style rally in Pensacola on Friday night.

"These buildings embody the hope that has lived in the hearts of every American for generations," Trump said of the museum, before bringing up his own "great success" in the state of Mississippi.

"We want our country to be a place where every child, from every background, can grow up free from fear, innocent of hatred and surrounded by love, opportunity and hope," President Trump says https://t.co/tLoG01ERC6 pic.twitter.com/7zxf1yJ7bq  CBS News (@CBSNews) December 9, 2017

(Trump's addresses his own success in the video above)

Not stopping there, Donald Trump praised Martin Luther King Jr.

for his role in the fight for civil rights, going as far as claiming that he was "a man who I've studied and watched and admired for my entire life." "We want our country to be a place where every child, from every background, can grow up free from fear, innocent of hatred and surrounded by love, opportunity and hope," he added, in regards to the continued fight for equality.

"We refuse to give a big picture to an individual who don't care about our voting rights and seeks to suppress it." African-American leaders held a news conference to protest Pres. Trump's appearance at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum: https://t.co/Q99VaBYTRh pic.twitter.com/RCaF8V6lLo  CBS News (@CBSNews) December 9, 2017

Donald Trump also referenced "injustice" that has been done to many African-Americans over the years, saying he hopes the "future that is more just and is more free." "That's big stuff," he said, while adding, "Those are very big phrases, very big words." Despite his attendance, Trump didn't get the best response, with John Lewis and fellow Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson labeling the president's visit as an "insult" to the civil rights struggle.
Fire and Fury, the new book by Michael Wolff that has taken cable news by storm, is rightly being excoriated as a collection of gossip, half-truths, and downright lies designed to slake the hunger of the never Trump crowd for dirt on the president they love to hate. However, according to Business Insider, one revelation about Elon Musk and the colonizing of space. The story may serve as part of an explanation as to why the Trump of the campaign, who twice expressed skepticism about the Journey to Mars, has ordered NASA to send astronauts back to the moon.

Trump expressed interest in the moon during the transition

During the transition, according to the Washington Examiner, historian Douglas Brinkley met with then President-Elect Trump to brief him on the history of past presidents, notably Nixon, Reagan, and Kennedy. Trump was particularly interested in how the Apollo race to the moon helped to define the Kennedy presidency. He was very interested, according to Brinkley, in returning Americans to the lunar surface. Recently. Trump signed a policy directive ordering NASA to set course to the moon.

Enter Elon Musk

Musk, in an account in the book that the SpaceX CEO has confirmed, directly lobbied the president on his companys Space Colonization plans.

Unlike the two incidents during the early campaign when Trump seemed to disparage going to Mars, Trump is said to have jumped on the idea.

It is not hard to understand why the idea of exploring and colonizing space might appeal to Trump. He is not only a man of immense ego but also someone who has spent his entire life building things.

Quite a number of buildings and hotels have his name upon them. In a sense, Trump ran for president because he had no more worlds to conquer as a private businessman. As president of the United States, he can turn his attention to other worlds, with people like Elon Musk, someone else with an ego and a tendency to build things, as partners.

What happens next?

The next step will be revealed when the 2019 budget is rolled out in a few weeks. How serious Trump is about being a space president will depend on not only how much money is to be requested for NASA and perhaps other agencies related to space colonization but how such funds are proposed to be spent.

The conventional wisdom is that for the third attempt in a generation to go back to the moon and then beyond to succeed, NASA will have to set up numerous partnerships with commercial companies such as SpaceX. The space agency may even go as far as outsourcing a lot of the development of the vehicles and infrastructure necessary to make humanity a multi-planet species. However, bad politics had aborted previous attempts to restart space exploration and could do so again.
Teresa Giudice met with a divorce attorney over the weekend, but is the "Real Housewives of New Jersey" star really ready to leave her husband, Joe Giudice? According to a new report, the reality star and mother of four may have sat down with a divorce attorney days about but her time with the attorney was nothing more than two friends having dinner with one another.

On January 8, with rumors swirling in regard to a potential divorce between Teresa and Joe Giudice, a source spoke to All About the Real Housewives, revealing that Teresa Giudice and Loren La Forge-Kyriakoulis are actually good friends.

The source also told the outlet that their time together was "strictly personal."

Could Teresa Giudice be considering a divorce?

Teresa Giudice and Joe Giudice were found guilty of charges of bank and wire fraud years ago, and in 2015, she spent nearly a year behind bars. Now, following her December 2015 release from the Danbury Correctional Facility, her husband is serving a 41-month term at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he was recently relocated to after first spending time at the Fort Dix Correctional Institution in New Jersey.

Although there have been tons of rumors in regard to alleged tension between the reality star and her husband, the All About the Real Housewives source claims a divorce is not in the works.

Speaking of the possibility of an impending split between Teresa Giudice and her husband, Joe Giudice, the insider told the outlet that the couple is not getting divorced. "It's not happening," the source said. "Period."

Teresa Giudice and Joe Giudice share four children

The "Real Housewives of New Jersey" couple has been facing challenges with their four daughters, 16-year-old Gia, 13-year-old Gabriella, 11-year-old Milania, and eight-year-old Audriana, since receiving their prison sentences years ago.

Luckily, however, the couple was allowed by the judge on their case to serve their terms at different times. That way, the four children would never have to go without having at least one of their parents in their life. Still, spending so much time away from the girls has likely been quite hard for both Teresa Giudice and Joe Giudice.

To see more of Teresa Giudice, her family, and her co-stars, including Danielle Staub, Melissa Gorga, Margaret Josephs, Dolores Catania, and Siggy Flicker, don't miss new episodes of the eighth season of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" on Wednesday nights at 9 PM on Bravo Tv.
After a year of political uncertainty and turmoil, the 2018 Golden Globes kicked off the new year and Donald Trump was a highlighted topic. While the show was airing, the president attempted to deflect attention to his Twitter feed but made an embarrassing blunder in the process.

Trump on Twitter

Not long after Donald Trump kicked off his campaign for president, he quickly engaged in a war of words with critics in Hollywood. After spending a decade on reality TV as the host of "The Apprentice," Trump was hoping to use his celerity to gain support in Hollywood, but it never happened.

Trump made it a routine to bash celebrities on social media who disagreed with him, tweeting out against stars from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Alec Baldwin. During his campaign and since his election, Trump has been the butt of a joke and the source of criticism from those out in Hollywood, which has only increased since the start of the "Me Too" movement after the bombshell report from the New York Times exposed decades of sexual misconduct by film producer Harvey Weinstein. As the 75th Golden Globe Awards took place on January 7, Donald Trump decided to tweet an article in praise of himself but appeared to misquote the piece.

On Sunday night, millions of Americans tuned in to watch the 2018 Golden Globe Awards.

Though it's unknown whether or not Donald Trump was watching, the commander in chief took to Twitter to quote a recent article by New York Post writer Michael Goodwin. In the article, Goodwin praised the president's first year in office, writing that it's been an enormously consequential presidency."

Trump misquotes column praising him, brags about his "consensual presidency" https://t.co/8PAWs5ahcW pic.twitter.com/n8230ZWSy7  The Hill (@thehill) January 8, 2018

In his two-part tweet, Donald Trump quoted Michael Goodwin, though he didn't get one of the words correct.

Instead of using the word "consequential," the president wrote "consensual," tweeting, "His is turning out to be an enormously consensual presidency." As expected, critics quickly trolled the president on social media, creating yet another humiliating Twitter blunder for Trump.

The piece calls it an enormously consequential presidency, not consensual. https://t.co/WYikeVQzrM  Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 8, 2018

Next up

As Donald Trump continues to remain a target out in Hollywood, the president is showing no signs of changing his style and rhetoric.

In an attempt to create his own awards show, the commander in chief and the White House have come up with the "Fake News Awards." Trump will award trophies to the news outlets, reporters and TV hosts who he believes come up with the biggest lies about his administration, with the winners set to be announced on Wednesday, January 17.
On Sunday (Jan. 7), Israel released a listing of 20 bds groups that are prohibited, effective immediately, from entering the country, Haaretz reported. Some of those groups banned are US based anti-Israel groups that include Code Pink, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

According to Haaretz, Israels Strategic Affairs Ministry had delayed releasing the list of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) groups for several months. The BDS, which is a Palestinian-led movement, are found in France, Italy, Sweden, South Africa, Chile, the United States, and elsewhere.

Israeli Affairs Minister statement

Strategic Israeli Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan stated that they have moved from a defensive stance to an offensive approach in dealing with the BDS movement. Erdan further stated that by boycotting certain organizations, those groups will understand that under no circumstances, will the State of Israel allow them to inflict harmful acts on Jewish citizens. Israels Interior Ministry spokesperson, who will be in charge of enforcing the BDS compliance, added that these groups and its members are attempting to take advantage of the law as well as Israels generosity.

The CEO of the New Israel Fund responded to Israels actions and stated that such a political ban amounts to nothing more than that of an autocracy system of government and not a democracy. He further stated punishing those with whom Israel disagrees with, is wrong.

Citizens previously banned entry into Israel

The Interior Ministry has already denied several people access into Israel due to their BDS support. In Dec. 2016, a person named, Isabel Phiri, who is a church elder with the World Council of Churches and lives in Switzerland, was placed on a flight back to Switzerland after she arrived at the Ben-Gurion International Airport.

This was the first incidence of where a tourist was denied entry based on anti-Israel activities and supporting the BDS movement.

In another case, the chairman of the British anti-Israel group, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was held for questioning and denied entry in 2017 due to his support for the terrorist organization, Hamas, after landing at Israels airport.

Israel also stated that mayors and government officials who are anti-Israel and promote and engage in such activities will also be prevented from arriving, as will advocates who arrive in Israel on behalf or is a part of a delegation of the blacklisted BDS organizations.
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HA NOI  Experts at the Law Committees forum on Thursday called for an early decision on administrative management models for special administrative economic zones.

National Assembly (NA)s Deputy Chairman Uong Chu Luu said at the forum several options were discussed to decide which administrative management model should be applied to which economic zone.

The first option proposed there would be no peoples councils and peoples committees but a head of the zone appointed by the Prime Minister, with a centralised power and a compact administrative management system.

The second option was to continue with peoples councils and peoples committees in the special zones like other localities.

Luu said another option proposed the setting up of peoples councils and committees but with a chairman who would be empowered like the head of the zone.

Whichever option is chosen, it must comply with the Constitution and ensure a compact and efficient administrative management system to drive growth, Luu said.

The draft Law on Special Administrative Economic Unit is expected to be discussed at the fifth meeting of the 14th National Assembly in May.

Nguyen Si Dung, former Deputy Head of NA Office, emphasised the urgency to make a quick decision. He believed the first option was a good administrative management model as it would create conditions for a breakthrough development of the special zones.

There were concerns, however, about the mechanism to prevent the abuse of power by zonal heads, he said.

Dont expect everything to be perfect from the beginning. The mechanism and policies will be improved during the operation, former Deputy Minister of Justice Hoang The Lien was quoted by au Tu (Investment) online newspaper. Lien said he favoured the first option.

Echoing Lien, former Deputy Head of NA Economic Committee Nguyen Van Phuc voted for the first option, agreeing this model would create breakthroughs.

Phan Trung Ly, former Head of the NA Law Committee, however, voted for the second option, saying both options were compliant with the Constitution.

According ang Hung Vo, former Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, the proposal to provide a 99-year land lease term for several prioritised sectors in the draft law was necessary to encourage huge, long-term investments.

Hastened preparation

On Thursday, a delegation from the board of the project tasked with establishing special administrative economic zones, headed by Minister of Home Affairs Le Vinh Tan, worked with the central coast province of Khanh Hoa to develop Bac Van Phong special administrative economic zone.

On Wednesday, the delegation worked with the southern province of Kien Giang to develop Phu Quoc special zone.

It will also work with the northern province of Quang Ninh to develop Van on special zone.

Tan said the projects for developing special administrative economic zones of the three provinces would be evaluated and completed to be proposed to the Government in February.

Tran Duy ong, Director of the Ministry of Planning and Investments Economic Zone Management Department, said 12 criteria were developed to evaluate the projects of developing Van on, Bac Van Phong and Phu Quoc special administrative economic units.  VNS
HCM CITY  Shrimp exports increased sharply last year and the trend will continue this year, according to the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP).

The exports were worth an estimated US$3.8 billion last year, $700 million up from 2016 and $400 million higher than the associations target.

There was big demand for shrimp in key markets such as the EU, China, Japan, and South Korea especially during the year-end festive season, VASEP said.

In the first 11 months of last year, the EU was the largest importer of Vietnamese shrimp, with shipments to the market going up by 42.4 per cent to $780 million and accounting for 22.2 per cent of Viet Nams exports.

Shrimp exports to China surged by 60.2 per cent to $637.9 million in the period, but shipments to the US fell by 7.8 per cent mainly due to high anti-dumping duties.

Truong inh Hoe, VASEPs general secretary, said the strong growth in shrimp exports last year was mainly thanks to better control of antibiotic usage in breeding the crustacean, an increase in exports of processed products, and buyers increased confidence in Vietnamese shrimp products.

In the EU, Vietnamese shrimp exporters enjoyed preferential treatment under the blocs Generalised System of Preferences while Thailand and China, the two main competitors, did not.

Indias shrimp exports to the EU were down because antibiotics were being frequently found in its products, and Indian companies faced the risk of bans, he said.

This meant European importers were looking for safer shrimp products, including from Viet Nam, he said.

The depreciation of the US dollar against the euro and yen had also supported Vietnamese exports, the association said.

Tran Van Linh, chairman of Thuan Phuoc Seafood and Trading Corporation, told Viet Nam News that an increase in the shrimp farming area, an improvement in farming technology and the quality of shrimp used for breeding, reduction in the use of antibiotics, and an expansion of eco-friendly farming had helped create reliable supply sources for processors besides helping them meet export standards.

A number of Vietnamese shrimp processors have invested in producing value-added shrimp products, heralding a new export age.

Last year his company earned $91 million from shrimp exports compared to $75 million in 2016, he said.

Export volume went up by only 5 per cent last year, but thanks to an increase in export of value-added products, which accounted for 90 per cent of the exports, export revenues were up.

Viet Nam has a good reputation for value-added shrimp products.

Shrimp exports in 2018

This year his company would strive to maintain a strong foothold in its key markets, including the EU and Japan, Linh said.

This year the market would be more favourable than 2017, he said.

The Viet Nam-EU Free Trade Agreement, which is expected to come into effect this year, will help make Vietnamese shrimp more competitive than Thai and Indonesian, and Viet Nams shrimp exports to EU will be better this year.

VASEP has also forecast that shrimp exports would rise strongly this year, especially to the EU, China, Japan, and South Korea.

China has high demand for seafood and its domestic output has reduced due to diseases and unfavourable weather.

Since December that country has cut import tariff on frozen shrimp from 5 per cent to 2 per cent.

These factors would boost Viet Nams shrimp exports to China, and the country could surpass Japan to become the second largest market.

But Linh said currently shrimp exports to China were mainly in the form of border trade, with the key items being unprocessed products with low added value.

Vietnamese authorities should work with their Chinese counterparts to increase official shrimp exports and Vietnamese exporters should increase shipments of processed products to increase revenues, he said.

Despite many advantages, the shrimp industry could also encounter some challenges this year, including risks like unfavourable weather and diseases.

Ho Quoc Luc, general director of Sao Ta Foods JSC, said The biggest challenge to the industry is its small scale of farming, often making it difficult to trace product origin whereas import markets lay much emphasis on food safety and traceability of products.

In this context, the industry needs to enhance quality control and build breeding areas of international standards to mitigate its weaknesses and boost exports this year, Luc added.  VNS
HCM CITY  The Ministry of Transport has submitted the draft of a new circular that includes regulations for passenger transport (by car) through software such as Uber and Grab.

Adjustments in the new circular would like to balance the management of passenger transport with electronic contracts through software such as Uber and Grab and traditional taxis as well as to be appropriate with the demands of practical management, Minister Nguyen Van The told the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

The new circular will request transport companies to meet 10 conditions, including: having a business licence or business registered certification to do electronic business and having certification from the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) confirming that applicants have completed registration (both Uber and Grab havent met this requirement yet).

Importantly, software providers must sign contracts to provide software using services for transport companies that have transport licences instead of the current co-operation agreements.

Transport companies must display their logos at a minimum of 90mm x 80mm in both front and back windows.

To ensure tax collection, the circular clearly states that software providers and transport companies must provide all information related to trips and electronic bills to both the passengers accounts and the General Department of Tax (GDT), under the regulation of the Ministry of Finance.

For enterprises who would like to use electronic bills, the circular requires 11 conditions, including using software which has already been certified by the MoIT, sending electronic bills to the GDT and providing telephone numbers to customers for emergencies.

Cars under nine seats, which are used for electronic-bill transportation, must not be more than 12 years old, same as the regulation for traditional taxis.

The presence of Uber and Grab has provided commuters with more options and convenience and local authorities with more management experience. However, there remains a lack of specific conditions for them to operate, thus leading to unfair competition", Vu Anh Tuan, director of the Viet uc Universitys Transport Research Centre, told the newspaper.

If they want to continue doing business after two years of a pilot scheme for ride-hailing apps in Viet Nam, Uber and Grab should have a legal representative, pay tax, report their activities, pay social and health insurance for drivers and foster the skills of their drivers, he added.

He also suggested that local managers should limit Uber and Grabs number of vehicles to ensure fair competition with traditional taxis and reduce traffic congestion.

According to the Ministry of Transport, the four localities that have registered to officially join the pilot scheme are Ha Noi, Quang Ninh, Khanh Hoa and HCM City, whereas a Nang has yet to take part. Of 36,800 member vehicles, there are 21,600 in HCM City, 15,000 in Ha Noi, 62 in Quang Ninh and 100 in Khanh Hoa.

In HCM City alone, Grab Taxi has more than 18,100 vehicles and Uber over 3,600 vehicles. The respective numbers of Grab Taxi and Uber vehicles in Ha Noi are some 11,400 and nearly 2,400.  VNS
HA NOI  Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue has signed Decision No.16 approving the restructuring plan of the Vietnam National Chemical Group (Vinachem).

The decision, designated for 2018-2020, aims to improve Vinachems structure, capacity, production efficiency and business competitiveness.

While signing the decision, the deputy prime minister stated the need for streamlined and compact business models after the equitisation process at Vinachem and its member companies.

The key focus of Vinachem is State divestment from the mother company and a number of its subsidiaries.

The mother company plans to become equitised in 2018-19, leaving only 50-65 per cent of its charter capital of some VN20 trillion (US$890 million) under State control.

As for Vinachems member companies, it plans to retain more than 65 per cent of charter capital at the Vietnam Apatite One Member Limited Company in 2018.

It will also maintain 50-plus per cent to less than 65 per cent stake in seven member companies, less than 50 per cent stake in nine others, and divest completely from 15 companies.

According to Vinachems financial report of the second half of 2017, the combined profit from its subsidiaries was VN50 billion ($2.2 million), with a loss of VN192 billion ($8.5 million) by the parent company.

Nonetheless, Vinachems 2017 revenue increased by 5.5 per cent compared to 2016.

Starting from 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Trade started inspection of Vinachems previous ineffective investments, including an 80 per cent accumulated loss ratio of VN4.2 trillion ($200 million), most notably from the Ninh Binh Nitrogenous Fertiliser Plant project, though no sanctions have been imposed so far.

Vinachems main businesses are production and trading of basic chemicals, and mining and processing of raw material for fertilisers, pesticides and chemical production.

According to reports of the Department of Corporate Finance under the Ministry of Finance, the Government is instructing the corresponding agencies to complete the 2018 national equitisation plan at 64 State-owned enterprises (SoEs), with another 18 enterprises in 2019 and one more in 2020.

The State 2018-2020 equitisation scheme focuses on State capital withdrawal from large-scale enterprises, with a wide scope of business and high structural and financial complexity.

The Government has specially requested the participation of strategic investors with a strong financial background and management capacity, and has asked the SoEs to carefully prepare, process and audit themselves before the equitisation process.  VNS
SON LA  The construction of an agricultural product processing plant using Korea-designed modern technology, commenced in the northern mountainous province of Son La on Saturday.

Covering an area of over 4ha in Van Ho District, the US$7.5 million factory is jointly invested in by IC Food Corporation of the Republic of Korea, Stevia Corp of the United States and SC Agro Food of Vietnam.

The first phase of the factory is scheduled to begin operation in August 2018, with a capacity of 1,700 tonnes of products a year, while the second phase, with a capacity of 3,400 tonnes a year, will be completed five months later.

It will become a processing plant for various kinds of farm produce, which will be exported. Some 100 vegetable co-operatives will cooperate with the factory.

Speaking at the ceremony, chairman of the provincial Peoples Committee Cam Ngoc Minh said this is the fifth plant, among six of its kind, to be constructed in the locality, adding that this reflects the local authoritys right orientation in attracting investment in agricultural development.

Son La boasts over 41,000ha of fruit trees, 6,000 of which used the advanced technique. As many as 47 chains of production, supply and consumption have been formed so far in the locality.

Many areas of high quality vegetables and fruits have also taken shape in the province, with a total yield of 60,000 tonnes a year, satisfying the material demand of processing plants.  VNS
HCM CITY  A year after it began to restructure under a Government-approved scheme, Sacombank appears to have turned the corner with decent results for 2017.

Its total assets increased as of December 31 by 10.7 per cent to VN364 trillion. Deposits were up 11.4 per cent to VN323 trillion (US$14.2 billion), and outstanding loans by 12.6 per cent to VN219 trillion. Income surged 33 per cent to VN8.2 trillion, strongly supporting bad debt resolution efforts.

Non-interest income was worth VN2.4 trillion, with traditional fee income increasing 29.6 per cent.

The lender managed to recover more than VN19 trillion ($837 million) worth of bad debts last year, reducing its non-performing loans (NPLs) ratio to 4.28 per cent compared to 6.68 per cent a year earlier.

Its chairman, Duong Cong Minh, said the bank hopes to reduce the NPL rate further to below 3 per cent this year.

The bank is among the largest in terms of network with 566 transaction offices in 48 cities and provinces in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia.

Its two major goals in 2018-20 are to speed up the restructuring and settle bad debts, improving its asset quality, and become the top retail bank in the country and the neighbourhood.

The Government decided to restructure banks to improve the health of the financial sector.

Sacombank was among the lenders with a high NPL rate, and its restructure is expected to be completed in three to five years.  VNS
ONG THAP  Old houses in Tan Tich Hamlet, Cao Lanh City, in the southern province of ong Thap, are being colourfully decorated as part of the Australia-Viet Nam Mural Village art project, which is being conducted within the area.

According to Vo Phan Thanh Minh, vice chairman of Cao Lanh Citys Peoples Committee, as part of the project, houses by the Tien River along a length of 2km are being decorated, under the sponsorship of the Australian Embassy in Viet Nam.

The mural village is expected to be a destination that will attract more tourists to the region and demonstrate the friendship between the two nations.

There will be over 60 paintings of various sizes, created by nearly 30 artists from Australia and HCM City, as well as students from ong Thap University, Nguyen Huong Nhu, head of the group of artists participating in the art project, said.

Each painting will have features of Australian and Vietnamese cultures, such as the images of the kangaroo, koala, and typical images of ong Thap Provinces tourism, such as the lotus or the mandarin orchards.

The eye-catching and beautiful paintings are like putting a new coat on the village to welcome the new year, Ngo Thi Cam No, a local, said. Moreover, more and more visitors have arrived, making the quiet village livelier.

The art project is scheduled to conclude on January 10.

Besides the Australia-Viet Nam Mural Village, another project in the area receiving aid from the Australian Government is the Cao Lanh Bridge -- a construction within the project to connect the central areas of the Mekong Delta  which is officially open to the public.  VNS
By Dr. Andres Sosa *

Many people around or after their fifties complain about knee pain that occurs apparently without reason and it is described as an uncomfortable sensation that comes and goes but not bad enough to visit a doctor.

Sometimes pain becomes aggressive, causing difficulties in daily activities like using the stairs, bending down or standing up from a chair. Most people will think that visiting a doctor is now necessary.

After consulting with a specialist and hearing some new words like Knee Osteoarthritis, people immediately wonder if pain will decrease somehow and if they could ever be able to move freely again. Under the appropriate orthopedic care the answer is YES for both questions.

Inside our knees, bones are covered by cartilage, a spongy soft tissue that protects bone surfaces from touching each other, acting like a shock absorber. Space between bones is filled by articular liquid, a fluid that serves as a lubricant, facilitating bone displacement during movement.

There are many circumstances in later life in which cartilage cannot support weigh bearing, articular liquid looses its lubricant properties, space between bones becomes narrow and bones begin touching each other with movement. This is known as initial knee osteoarthritis.

If nothing is done to improve this condition, repetitive rubbing will change bones surfaces, cartilage damage will continue and the local inflammatory response will be to overproduce bad quality articular liquid. This translates into symptoms such as severe pain, swelling, limited range of motion, tenderness and mild deformity of the knee.

The goal of medical treatment is to reduce pain, allowing the patient to get back to common activities but the outcome strongly depends on how early it is diagnosed and treated. Initial knee osteoarthritis (stage I) can be treated conservatively, improving lifestyle and using specific medication.

Mild knee osteoarthritis (stage II) may require intra-articular injections with steroids and local anesthetics, a very effective option to manage pain and improve movement. Injections are also useful to drain the excessive quantity of articular liquid and to replace it with a high-lubricant synthetic fluid to prevent additional cartilage damage. Some other treatment options like platelet rich plasma or stem cells matrix are commonly applied at this stage.

Advanced knee osteoarthritis (stage III) may be treated using arthroscopy techniques, a minimally invasive video-camera assisted procedure that allows the surgeon to check the joint from inside, repairing or removing the affected tissues. Severe knee osteoarthritis (stage IV) involves irreparable cartilage damage and the knee may need to be replaced using a joint prosthesis, a surgical procedure that is very safe and successful nowadays.

Lastly, it is very important to remark that treatment for all stages of knee osteoarthritis require dedicated physical therapy for better results.

If you have been feeling knee pain, the best thing you can do is to arrange an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. Meanwhile, try applying coldpacks three times per day for 10 minutes but do not forget to use a cloth between the coldpack and your skin to avoid burns. Cold therapy will help to decrease inflammation and pain.

Avoid applying heat on a painful knee. Knee osteoarthritis is related to inflammatory conditions and a warm environment around the joint can only make things worse. Try also to avoid using expensive ointments and creams that will make you lose your time and money.  Family Medical Practice Vietnam.

*Family Medical Practice Hanoi is delighted to welcome Dr. Andres Sosa to our medical team! Dr. Sosa is an Orthopedic Surgeon, fellowship trained in Italy, specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal trauma (fractures, dislocations, wounds), degenerative joint diseases (osteoarthritis, spine disc herniation) and sport lesions (sprains, joint instability, tendon ruptures) with a particular and deep interest in upper limb, spine and knee. With two European master degrees and multiple courses overseas, Dr. Sosa is able to perform open surgery, internal fixation, shoulder/knee arthroscopy, external fixation and joint replacement as well as non-surgical pain management therapies.

To contact Dr. Andres Sosa for more advices about this or any other topic, please come visit us at Family Medical Practice Hanoi in 298 I Kim Ma, Ba inh. Tel: (024) 3843 0748. Email: hanoi@vietnammedicalpractice.com

FMPs downtown Ho Chi Minh location is: Diamond Plaza, 34 Le Duan, District 1: 95 Thao ien Street, District 2. Tel: (028) 3822 7848. Email: hcmc@vietnammedicalpractice.com

FMP a Nang is located at 96-98 Nguyen Van Linh Street, Hai Chau District, a Nang. Tel: (0236) 3582 699. Email: danang@vietnammedicalpractice.com
HCM CITY  An exhibition displaying 37 art photos promoting the values and diversity of Vietnamese people and culture by renowned French photographer Rehahn has opened in HCM City.

The exhibition, which highlights the Precious Heritage Collection, is being held by the photographer Rehahn in collaboration with the local company Le Bao Minh group, the exclusive distributor of Canon in Viet Nam.

It opens at 184 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in the citys District 3 during one month, free of charge from 8-11am and 2-5pm daily.

This is one of the monthly activities of the companys Fun Photography, which provides quality and meaningful works of art for young people with passion for photography, as well as promotes the values of Vietnamese people and culture.

All the photos will be sold throughout the exhibition to raise money for charity work supporting disadvantaged ethnic people living in Viet Nam.

Photographer Rehahn has travelled to more than 35 countries around the world and decided to live in the central province of Quang Nams Hoi An city.

Last year, he was voted one of the top 20 photographers worldwide on the website International Photography.

He is one of the most featured photograpgers of the last four years, having amassed a serious following.

Visiting 49 of the 54 nationalities throughout the country, he has spent his time building strong relationships with the people.

He witnessed first hand the complex diversity and fragility of some ethnic groups cultural heritage.

He built up the Precious Heritage Collection by capturing images of the contrasting cultures, and collecting traditional costumes and precious artifacts.

Established in 2014, Fun Photography is an organisation of photography and art for the community.

It provides VNAClass - training courses, VNAPhototour  phototour programmes, VNACreative  community activities such as programme conversations, exhibitions, and contests for photographers.  VNS
HA NOI  The much-awaited trial for economic mismanagement and embezzlement at PetroVietnam (PVN), the largest State-owned company, commenced Monday morning in the capital city.

The first-instance trial is scheduled to last for two weeks (January 8-21), looking into one of the most notorious cases of corruption involving the disgraced former Politburo member, inh La Thang, and Trinh Xuan Thanh, former chairman of PVNs subsidiary PetroVietnam Construction JSC (PVC).

Defendant inh La Thang, former Politburo member and former chairman of PetroVietnam, being escorted by public security officers to January 8 court.  VNA/VNS Photo Doan Tuan

The case has been under public scrutiny, as the Partys crackdown on corruption is reaching an unprecedented high, netting several executives and top-level officials hitherto thought to be immune from the law.

Most defendants are the ones holding key positions in critical economic units who have been entrusted by the State and the people to manage public capital and implement nationally important projects, including Thai Binh 2 thermal power plant project, reads the indictment of the Supreme Peoples Procuracy.

However, during the implementation of the project, multiple wrongdoings have taken place, including abuse of power to make profits.

Twenty two defendants have been put on trial, including 17 detainees and five defendants on bail. Twelve, including inh La Thang, have been indicted on charges of deliberate violations of State management regulations on economic management, causing serious consequences as per Article 165, Paragraph 3, under the 1999 Penal Code.

Trinh Xuan Thanh, former chairman of PetroVietnam Construction JSC , appeared on January 8 trial.  VNA/VNS Photo Doan Tuan

Eight defendants stand indicted on charges of misappropriation of assets, while Trinh Xuan Thanh and Vu uc Thuan, former director-general of PVC, have been prosecuted on charges of economic mismanagement and embezzlement.

The jury consists of five members, two judges and three peoples jurors. Judge Nguyen Ngoc Huan is presiding over the trial. Due to the magnitude of the case, the Peoples Court of Ha Noi has arranged for a deputy judge and two deputy peoples jurors to be present at the court.

Forty out of 42 lawyers defending the accused appeared in court this morning. While five lawyers represented Trinh Xuan Thanh, three rooted for inh La Thang.

Out of the 31 witnesses who were ordered to appear in court, 24 were present and seven were absent, with only three of them citing official reasons.  VNS
HCM CITY  HCM City targets a serious reduction in the number of AIDS cases by 2030, according to the citys Health Department.

Nguyen Huu Hung, deputy director of the citys Department of Health, was quoted by Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper as saying that the city had been selected by the Viet Nam Administration of HIV/AIDS Control (VAAC) as one of five pilot cities to reach the target by 2030.

The UN Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has chosen the city as one of the largest fast-track cities in the world achieving its 90-90-90 targets set by the UN in 2014.

The 90-90-90 goals mean that by 2020 90 per cent of HIV-infected people will know their infection status, 90 per cent of HIV positive people will receive anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs, and 90 per cent of people taking ARV drugs will have a low HIV load.

HCM City is expected to reach its 90-90-90 target ahead of schedule, having achieved a 73-75-96 target so far.

In recent years, international support for AIDS/HIV has been declining, so the city has tried to ensure that there will be no interruptions in HIV/AIDS prevention by issuing new policies to maintain ARV for an HIV patients entire life and to limit drug resistance and spread of the disease.

The city continues to provide HIV treatment for patients, including paying 100 per cent for health insurance cards and 20 per cent co-payment for ARV drugs for people living with HIV in the city, including those with temporary residence certificates of six months.

Methadone treatment for patients addicted to drugs is also paid by the city.

According to the Viet Nam Authority of HIV/AIDS Control under the health ministry, the city has 31,877 people living with HIV/AIDS receiving ARV treatment.

This figure represents more than 25 per cent of the estimated total figure of people living with HIV in the country

Dr Hoang inh Canh, deputy director of the Viet Nam Authority of HIV/AIDS Control warned that AIDS could spread among people not yet diagnosed for HIV. The estimated number could be about 50,000 people, especially among five groups: transgender people, gay men, users of drug injections, people working away from home, and prostitutes.

"Viet Nam is adopting the latest international models of HIV prevention, but it is necessary to have new peers to prevent spread to these five groups, he said.

With ARV drugs and other efforts, many experts say that people living with HIV can live for 50 years from the date of infection, he said.

The first person diagnosed with HIV in the country in 1992 is alive and well.

This year, health insurance began covering the costs of treating opportunistic infections.

By 2020, 80 per cent ARV drug costs will be covered by health insurance.  VNS
HA NOI  English fluency targets set by a national project are too high and not backed by sufficient inputs, experts say.

At a recent meeting on English teaching at colleges and universities held by the education ministry, Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, head of HCM City Transport Universitys foreign language department, said a 2015 survey of fourth and fifth year students had found that fewer than 20 per cent could match expected fluency criteria.

The 2008-2020 national project, Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages in the National Education System, requires university graduates not majoring in foreign languages to reach B1 level, the third of six levels under the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. (A1 - beginners; A2 - elementary; B1,B2 - intermediate; C1,C2 - advanced).

It takes 360 to 400 hours of teaching for students to advance from level A2 to B1 level. But the current total in English teaching at the school is about 100 hours, Anh said.

Professor ang Van Minh, deputy director of the Thai Nguyen University said that the university has had to lower its English output criteria to A2 instead of B1.

We set the target too high but do not have solutions to realise it, he said.

Schools nationwide are struggling to achieve targets by the major national project, the meeting heard.

Representatives of academic institutions said that the English level of students at high school is so low that it is difficult to improve their English proficiency when the enter university.

Thus, a B1 standard upon graduation not feasible, they said.

After eight years, the national foreign language project, has failed to reach its targets in terms of the number of learners, and quality of teaching learning at all academic levels, localities and sectors, a recent investigation by the State Audit Office of Viet Nam found.

The office reported that project outcomes for the period 2011-2016 period are not commensurate with the investment of more than VN4.2 trillion (US$182.6 million). Its targets are too high and broad, and lacks lacking appropriate schedules and solutions to realise them.

Under the project, a foreign language will become a major subject for all students from third to 12th grade. It sought to significantly enhance foreign language proficiency of Vietnamese human resources by 2015, and having graduates of intermediate schools, colleges and universities be more independent and confident in communication by 2020.

This would enhance their abilities to study and work in an integrated and multicultural environment, making foreign languages capabilities a national strength, the project envisaged.

Tran Anh Tuan, deputy head of deputy head of Department of Higher Education under Ministry of Education and Training, admitted that accomplishing some primary targets of the project by 2020 would a tough challenge.

The report by the State Audit Office of Viet Nam states that in 2015-2016, proper surveys of teaching and learning foreign languages have not been done. Information about the number and quality of teachers, students, infrastructure and teaching equipment at ministries, sectors and localities have not been updated, it said.

It also said that assessment and issuance of new English curricula and textbooks has been delayed. Some localities have rushed to expand the new English programme without having qualified teachers, students and infrastructure, it said.

Uneven teaching quality

The English proficiency level of teachers is one of the main reasons for the the projects failures, the meeting heard. Nearly half the English teachers at primary schools do not met set criteria.

An English proficiency test conducted by the Education Ministry for 500 English teachers in 2013 showed none of them were qualified for level C2. The majority had only reached B2 levels. 71 teachers had reached the C1 level. Twenty-two teachers were at beginning and intermediate (A1 and A2) levels.

Another test on 324 teachers of English majors the same year also had disappointing results. The English proficiency of 139 teachers was at A1 and A2 level.

Tuan said that the national foreign language project has failed to reach its target, because teachers have uneven English proficiency levels. The number of teachers trained abroad remains low, and many universities do not test the proficiency of English major teachers.

Grammar focus

Nguyen Minh Tri, a student of Sai Gon University told Tuoi tre (Youth) that English learning at primary, secondary, high schools and university placed too much focus on grammar. Students rarely have the chance to practice speaking and listening, he said.

Two English lessons per week and too many students in a class do not allow us to practice, he said.

Representatives of many universities agreed that the number of English lessons at schools is not enough for students to fulfil criteria required by the national project.

An experienced expert in English education, Vu Thi Phuong Anh, told Tuoi Tre that quite a few English teachers trained abroad have a good command of the language as well as teaching skills. But it would be hard for them to make any breakthrough if current curricula and teaching methods are persisted with, she said.

She said that learning English through books only cannot help students improve their proficiency. We must change curriculum and teaching methods, she said, without elaborating.

Tran Khac Hoan of the Vinh University of Technology and Education proposed to the management board of the national foreign language project, that they focus on improving English teachers capacity, especially through overseas training, even for schools not under the Education Ministrys management.

The project should fix an annual budget for promoting English learning and teaching at educational institutions, said Phan Thanh Tien of Hue University.  VNS
The trial of inh La Thang and Trinh Xuan Thanh for alleged wrongdoings at PetroVietnam and one of its subsidiaries, is set to begin today.  VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  The trial of Trinh Xuan Thanh and inh La Thang for alleged wrongdoings at PetroVietnam and one of its subsidiaries, is set to begin today.

The 22 defendants in the case will be represented by a total of 42 lawyers, including three for Thang, former Politburo member and former Chairman of the Member Council of the State-owned Vietnam Oil and Gas Group, PetroVietnam.

Five lawyers will defend Thanh, former Chairman and General Director of PetroVietnams Construction Joint Stock Corporation PVC.

Twelve of the 22 defendants are accused of deliberately violating State regulations on economic management, causing severe consequences. Eight others were charged with misappropriating property.

Thanh and Vu uc Thuan, former PVC General Director, are charged with both offenses.

According to the indictment by the Supreme Peoples Procuracy of Viet Nam, this is an extremely serious case involving people holding key positions in important economic units and major national projects like the Thai Binh 2 thermal power plant.

The agency indicts Thang with main responsibility for breaches in construction of the power plant.

He allegedly instructed PVC to carry out the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) package, which was illegally signed with the PetroVietnam Power Corporation (PV Power) under his order.

Based on the illegitimate contracts, Thang went on to direct PetroVietnam to wrongfully advance over US$6.6 million and over VN1.3 trillion ($57.7 million) for PVC, which was then misused by Thanh.

Thangs actions is estimated to have caused losses of nearly VN120 billion to the State.

Thanh and Thuan are also alledged to have directed Nguyen Anh Minh, former PVC Deputy General Director and Luong Van Hoa, former Director of PVCs Vung Ang-Quang Trach Oil and Power Project Management Board, to draw up false documents to withdraw more than VN13 billion from the project for personal use.

Bankers in the dock

Also today, the HCM City Peoples Court will open the third trial against Pham Cong Danh, the banker notoriously implicated in the biggest economic probe in Viet Nams history.

Among the 46 defendants in the case are high-level officials of different banks like the Viet Nam Construction Bank (VNCB), Sacombank and TPBank.

Seventy lawyers have been permitted to attend the trial, in which more than 200 people will be summoned as witnesses.

This will be the third trial against Danh, who is now serving 30 years in jail for wrongdoings at VNCB that incurred losses of more than VN9 trillion, and other breaches at OceanBank.

In the new case against him, Danh is accused of using the VNCBs money as collateral to take loans totalling more than VN6 trillion from TPBank, Sacombank and BIDV.

The borrowed money, however, was for Danhs personal use and he did not repay it.  VNS
A tollbooth in the southern province of Soc Trang was forced to open for free for all vehicles twice on Sunday following severe traffic jams deliberately caused by drivers protesting the station.  Photo dantri.com.vn

SOC TRANG  A tollbooth in the southern province of Soc Trang was forced to open for free for all vehicles twice on Sunday following severe traffic jams deliberately caused by drivers protesting the station.

Drivers collectively demonstrated from the early morning as they stopped their cars in front of the Soc Trang toll gate located on National Highway 1 but refused to pay the fee and pass through.

The tollbooth was set up to collect fees for investors who invested more than VN1.4 trillion (US$62.2 million) in a road project to expand the National Highway 1 section running across Thuan Hoa Commune and to build a bypass for Soc Trang City under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model.

The drivers argued that the booths location was unreasonable and that they had to pay tolls for the bypass that they did not use, between VN25,000 and 140,000 each depending on the type of vehicle.

The congestion worsened with long lines of cars and trucks stretching more than one kilometre, forcing authorities to order the booth to open for free at 8am.

This was the first time the Soc Trang BOT station had to open free after a half year in operation. The second time, however, soon followed in the afternoon of the same day.

The tollbooth decided to start collecting fees again from 2pm, but same scenario was re-enacted with the drivers blocking the station.

A free pass was given out again 20 minutes later as the lines were becoming longer. However, this free pass lasted for only 10 minutes.

BOT tolls reduced

A series of protests from drivers against several BOT tolls across the country  deemed as a domino-effect after drivers achieved victory at the Cai Lay station in Tien Giang Province - was triggering a toll reduction wave to ease objections.

The ien Ban BOT tollbooth in Quang Nam Province on Sunday announced that the Ministry of Transport has agreed to offer free passes or reduced fees for nearly 1,800 vehicles passing through the station.

The ien Ban station director Ho Anh Son said that public buses, light trucks and cars which are owned by those living in the three communes nearby and not used for business purposes will be free to pass the booth. Other vehicles from other neighbourhoods in the ien Ban Township will get a 50 per cent discount.

The move will come into effect in February, according to Son.

So far, two BOT booths in Quang Nam: ien Ban and Tam Kyy were all subject to free passes or fee reductions.

Earlier on Friday, investor of the Song Phan BOT station in Binh Thuan Province and the Peoples Committee of the Can Tho City where the Can Tho-Phung Hiep BOT booth was located, asked the transport ministry to allow a toll reduction. Both the stations saw strong protests from drivers recently.  VNS
HCM CITY  Police here have busted a weapons-trading ring involving electric guns, scimitars and bayonets, which were being sold online in Viet Nam.

HCM City police had earlier arrested a dealer for providing a large amount of weapons in HCM Citys Cu Chi District.

Following months of investigation, police concluded that the head of the ring was PhamThanh Long, 34, and his wife Vu Thi Diep, 28, residents of Cu Chi District.

On Friday night, police conducted a raid at Longs house and found a large quantity of weapons in the couples possession.

After conducting a search of the house, they seized 2,547 scimitars, bayonets and different types of knives, 700 electric guns and electric robes as well as hundreds of pepper sprays.

The couple admitted to the police they had been purchasing arms from an unidentified man named H since July last year.

They sold the arms online to avoid being detected by police.

The couple had created two accounts on Facebook to advertise and sell the products to those in need of arms.

Police are further investigating the case.  VNS
THUA THIEN HUE  Scrap warehouses are posing a threat to crowded residential areas in the central province of Thua Thien Hue.

In recent years, several fires have broken out in these warehouses, causing heavy damage to property and injuring people. But they have not been removed, threatening the lives of locals.

Along Highway No.1 through Huong Thuy Township, heaps of scrap have piled up in residential areas. It includes broken electronics, rusty iron, plastic and paper boxes, among others, which pose a high risk of catching fire, Tien Phong (Vanguard) newspaper reported.

An explosion was reported recently at a scrap warehouse in Thuy Chau Ward, costing hundreds of millions of ong.

In 2012, a fire had occurred at this wards 400sq.m scrap warehouse. After the fire was extinguished, people found a large bombshell in the ashes. Fortunately, there was no damage.

According to the newspapers survey, there are 53 business establishments causing environmental pollution in residential areas, 24 of which are scrap warehouses (accounting for 45.3 per cent).

In Thuy Chau Ward alone, 15 establishments collect and trade in scrap.

In 2012, the Peoples Committee of Huong Thuy Township approved a project to relocate these trading units to an area of more than 10ha, but no one has moved so far.

Some scrap traders said they could not afford to pay for the land or warehouse at the concentrated area.

Nguyen Thanh Minh, vice chairman of Huong Thuy Township, said the local authorities would mobilise and support scrap-trading households to move to the concentrated area.  VNS
XIAN  French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday launched a state visit to China in Xian -- the starting point of the ancient Silk Road -- in a nod to his counterparts scheme to revive the famous trading route.

Macron will visit the northern citys famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of Franco-Chinese relations.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of Chinas first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient Chinese artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

Macron is beginning the three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinpings colossal New Silk Road project, an ambitious initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabric, spices, and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt One Road", the plan is to see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety and France has so far been cautious on it. Observers say China is waiting for Macron to outline his views on the scheme, in his emerging role as a European leadership voice.

Macrons first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord to fight climate change after the US pulled out of the deal.

After Xian, Macron will travel on to Beijing along with his delegation which takes in some 60 business executives and institutions.  AFP
BERLIN  The European Union will invite Irans foreign minister for talks about the recent anti-government protests that have hit the country, Germanys Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday.

"Together with the EUs foreign policy chief (Federica Mogherini), we agreed to invite the Iranian foreign minister, if possible next week," Gabriel told German public broadcaster ZDF, without giving further details.

21 people have died and hundreds arrested since December 28 as protests over economic woes turned against the Iranian government as a whole, with attacks on government buildings and police stations.

"We very quickly affirmed that we support the freedom to demonstrate and that the state should support this," Gabriel said.

At the same time, Gabriel said Berlin will not follow the lead of US President Donald Trump, who pledged to help Iranians "take back" their government.

Trump also seized on the recent unrest to again slam a multiparty nuclear deal with Iran as deeply flawed.

Germany, as well as France, has "warned against attempts at instrumentalising the domestic conflicts in Iran," said Gabriel.

The US on Friday took the Iran protests to the UN Security Council, where deep divisions emerged over the issue, with Russia arguing the demonstrations posed no threat to international peace and security.  AFP
The National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio has just released a short video detailing the final stages in the restoration of their iconic Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress, Memphis Belle. They recently reinstalled the control surfaces, the last major components to go back on the aircraft.

The Belle now sits resplendent in her new paint as well, with most of her markings, save the famous nose art, properly recreated. Restoration staff know how minutely their work will be inspected by the public, and have gone to great lengths to ensure that the B-17 is as close as possible to the way she looked in mid-May, 1943, just after the completion of her final mission against the Axis.

It is clear that they have put a lot of thought into the project, and it will doubtless be the crown jewel of their collection at Dayton once she goes on display. As we noted HERE, the museum will be holding a major three day event to unveil the Memphis Belle between May 17th and 19th, coinciding exactly with the 75th anniversaries of the 25th combat missions for her crew and the bomber herself.

Here is a video released by National Museum of the United States Air Force
WATERLOO  A Waterloo man has been sentenced to prison for setting fire to a privacy fence outside a Waterloo home in July.

Taylor James Gray, 24, had been charged with first-degree arson for the July fire outside 520 Elm St., but he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree arson and on Monday was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He will also be responsible for restitution.

No motive for the fire was disclosed, and Gray declined to comment during sentencing.

The defendant did pose quite a danger to the family that was inside at the time, said Assistant County Attorney James Katcher.

He said the fire didnt spread to the house, but damaged a wooden fence.

Waterloo man arrested for arson after allegedly setting fire to fence WATERLOO -- A Waterloo man was arrested for arson after police say he used an accelerant to 

The Elm Street home had been the subject of violations under the citys chronic nuisance ordinance in recent years following gunfire and other complaints. The latest nuisance complaint was settled out of court when the resident submitted an abatement plan to the city.

Authorities said in the early morning hours of July 23, Gray poured lighter fluid on the homes from steps and the fence, and the fence then began to burn. The fire apparently burned out, and residents, who were inside sleeping at the time, noticed the damage later that morning and gave police video from a surveillance camera.

The video showed a figure with a T-shirt pulled up to hide his face, but the short-sleeved garment didnt cover a large tattoo on his forearm, and court records indicate the tattoos shown in the video matched those on Gray.

Probation in 2014 church burglary WATERLOO  A second person has been sentenced to probation in the 2014 burglary of a Waterlo

Grays prison sentence includes 10 years for the arson charge added to 15 years as part of a probation revocation in an unrelated burglary and theft case. In that case, Gray and another person had allegedly entered Burton Avenue Baptist Church and discharged a fire extinguisher, causing more than $1,000 worth of damage, and took an overhead projector.
DECORAH --- A former Kansas sheriffs deputy has been arrested in Winneshiek County on a Kansas warrant for sex crimes.

Winneshiek deputies detained David Allen Huggins, 45, of LaCygne, Kan., on Thursday on the warrant for aggravated indecent liberties with a minor and sexual exploitation of a child. He remained in jail awaiting extradition to Kansas as of Monday afternoon.

Huggins was staying with friends in Winneshiek County at the time of the arrest, according to authorities. He was arrested without incident.

He had been a deputy with the Linn County (Kan.) Sheriffs Office and had been assigned as a school resource officer there. He was placed on leave in November, according to media accounts. The incident allegedly happened in Kansas.
ST. ANSGAR -- An Osage woman was killed in a single-vehicle crash Saturday morning in St. Ansgar.

According to a Mitchell County Sheriff's Office press release, Hannah Nichole Pfeifer, 19, was traveling east on Highway 105 at 1:40 a.m. Saturday when the 2003 Chevrolet Silverado she was driving left the road and struck a tree near Grainmillers Drive.

Pfeifer, the only occupant in the vehicle, was killed.

The sheriffs office said the crash remains under investigation.
It is an issue that has driven Iowans to public events and town halls by the hundreds.

How can the state improve its mental health care system?

I asked the governor and states top state lawmakers that question last week, just days before the Legislature convenes for its 2018 session.

Iowa has worked on its mental health care delivery system for years. In 2013, the state shifted from a county to regional delivery system. Instead of all 99 counties having their own mental health care system, most counties grouped into regions to share resources and deliver services.

Advocates say it was a step in the right direction, although there have been bumps in the road. Multiple regions are experiencing disharmony among the counties.

More importantly, Iowans with mental health needs are sometimes still falling through the cracks. The stories are personal, heartbreaking and horrifying, and they have driven Iowans by the hundreds to speak out about issues with and needs in the system.

Today, state lawmakers convene for the 2018 session, during which they have the opportunity to improve existing programs, create new ones and examine the potential need for more funding.

What are their plans? What do Iowas top elected leaders plan to do to address the states mental health care system?

Heres what they said this week.

Gov. Kim Reynolds touted the 2013 redesign and said the state since then has increased mental health funding by 34 percent. She also said more can be done, and a systemic approach is needed, one that includes mental health care, opioid addiction treatment and privately managed Medicaid.

We need to make sure that its coordinated, its accountable and that were strategic in how were really meeting the needs of Iowans that are vulnerable or suffering, Reynolds said.

Reynolds said a state task force has made recommendations to her administration, and she believes there are opportunities to improve the states mental health care system. She said she plans to talk about the issue during her condition of the state address to the Legislature on Tuesday.

Bill Dix, the Republican leader in the Senate, said he hears from mental health care providers that, in some cases, services exist, and perhaps the opportunity is to better coordinate those services to ensure people who need them receive them.

Dix said he expects a group of GOP senators to meet during the session and make recommendations.

There are a number of Republican senators who view this as one of the must-do things this session, Dix said. I anticipate that theyll be working to build broad consensus on a proposal to accomplish just that.

Linda Upmeyer, the Republican House Speaker, also noted the state has been working on its mental health care system for many years, yet acknowledged more needs to be done. She said services must be available to help individuals who are going into a mental health crisis, as well as for those emerging from a crisis and trying to become stable.

I think we can all agree that what we need now is more services in our communities, Upmeyer said.

Mark Smith, the Democratic leader in the House, said his primary goal is to increase the number of mental health care professionals  psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, social workers, nurse practitioners  working in Iowa, particularly in rural areas.

We are short on professionals. That needs to be fixed by more programs that help people with getting educations and moving into rural areas, Smith said.

Smith also said the Medicaid reimbursement system is causing issues in mental health care. He said providers are struggling because of low or slow reimbursement from Medicaid.

Janet Peterson, leader of the Senate Democrats, said the state erred in closing two state-run mental health institutions in 2014 without having adequate community-based services ready for patients who had been treated in those facilities.

She also cited concern with the states funding system, which is generated in part through local property taxes. She noted Polk County, the states most populous, has been locked into the same funding level since 1996 even though the population of the county has grown by 100,000 people.

We have fewer dollars to serve more people and more needs. And some areas of the state that are seeing growth are having those same problems were having in Polk County. Whereas other communities, where theyre losing population, arent having those problems, Petersen said. But I do believe we can come together to work on that. And we must come together and work on that.
American special services supported by NATO initiated a special operation directed against the Government of Finland. In particular, the agents of the CIA and British intelligence in Helsinki began a campaign to discredit President Suomi Sauli Niinisto, in order to disrupt the neutrality policy of Finland within the anti-Russian course of the West and to spoil its relations with Russia as much as possible.
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.
Jeffrey Tayler in Quillette:

Editors note: As we enter 2018, brave women are protesting Islamic modesty culture and laws in Iran. Jeffrey Tayler has documented womens protests against modesty culture in Europe for years. What follows is an interview conducted by Tayler with Femens leader, Inna Shevchenko, in 2017.

A female activist has just sawed down a giant Christian cross on the central square of the capital city of Ukraine, in protest against the prison sentence meted out to Pussy Riot band members for the punk prayer they had performed in a Moscow cathedral earlier that year. What fate awaits her when she flees, personally threatened by her countrys president for her audacious deed, to France, the self-proclaimed homeland of human rights? Upon her arrival in Paris, do orchestras greet her with rousing renditions of La Marseillaise? Do accolades of support pour in from the French media? Does she settle, finally, into secure environs, certain, for the first time in her young but politically active life, that she can pursue unhindered her feminist struggle for human rights and the propagation of atheism? And, in the country that enshrines laicite (secularism) in Article 1 of its constitution, does she find her staunchly godless views lauded?

Quite the contrary! The now twenty-seven-year-old Inna Shevchenko, the leader of the international topless protest movement Femen, had, in August 2012, barely taken up residence in the attic of Frances historic Theatre du Lavoir (which would become Femens headquarters), when she found herself and her activists under threat.

More here.
From DilDev's Blog:

He dueled him for many a long minute, and then trapping him at the end of a gantry, removed his hand from his wrist. Luke was surprised, but said not a word beyond his cry of pain. After a silence of several minutes, Vader came towards him in an agitated manner, and thus began,

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to offer you a place at my side to throw down the Emperor and reign over this galaxy.

Lukes astonishment was beyond expression. He stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This Vader considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of ambition.

You do not yet realize your importance, and only now have begun to discover your power. Join me and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.

More here.
by Leanne Ogasawara

It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow.

But at least it was home, I thought.

My son would be going to the public elementary school I attended. He hardly spoke any English at all and couldn't read or write his own name, so he was a bit nervous on his first day. I decided to walk him over to make sure he found the room okay and didn't have any communication issues.

And it was the strangest thing. The suburban streets on the way to school were lined with big cars like the cars the secret service drives in the movies. Big and heavy-looking, they were everywhere. Wondering if something was happening, I asked in the office about it, but was told nothing special was happening that day. Then, later I told my mom about it only to be informed that no, those were the parents' cars of the kids being dropped off at school. She told me that everyone now in our neighborhood drove large minivans and SUVs. She hated the cars and hated what had become a big traffic jam every morning because of what she called "the drop off line."

So, let me get this straight, I thought. In the past twenty years, while people in Japan or Germany have been making use of light, fuel-efficient cars and public transportation, parents in the US started buying big cars to drive their kids to school everyday and wait in line while the car idle. Isn't that illegal? What about the bus?

Of all the things that I found myself unable to adjust to on my return, maybe the biggest shock of all was how little has changed in terms of the environment. Wait, let me rephrase that. people are talking about it a lot more. Maybe even talking in inverse proportion to lack of doing anything. A few things have gotten better but in general the consumption patterns are so much worse than I had even remembered. Today's hyper-consumerism: for me that is the bottom line.

In 1999, I saw statistics in a book written by the Union of Concerned Scientists on the environmental impact of consumer choices that showed that the average American is twice as hard on the environment as those consumers in Continental Europe and four times that of the Japanese. I remember feeling really horrified by that. How, I wondered, could one country so shamelessly consume so much more than their fair share? Living in Japan, where so much has been done to lessen environmental impact over the past twenty years, I assumed the US would also have stepped up. Right? Well, according to this recent article in the Guardian, the depressing statistics remain.

Right now, our planet only has enough resources for each of us to consume 1.8 global hectares annually  a standardized unit that measures resource use and waste. This figure is roughly what the average person in Ghana or Guatemala consumes. By contrast, people in the US and Canada consume about 8 hectares per person, while Europeans consume 4.7 hectares  many times their fair share.

If that doesn't make you feel angry, then I don't know what will.

++

That the issue is being politicized (or worse, seen in terms of individual "personal expression") is a big stumbling block to real action on the grassroots level. Of course, it does matter who is in the White House, but it's not as if this problem suddenly started with the start of the current administration and I would argue, international agreements that lack teeth only go so far into addressing the changes tat need to be made to the current paradigm. Or put a different way, the corporations that control our government are not going to change unless we make business as usual unviable for them. Like we have seen in Portland, and like we are now seeing in California, if we citizens show we can think outside the corporate box, city and state government will respond and this can lead to change! Real change often begins on the local level and this must start with our own lives.

Thesis: Top-down government leadership is necessary to enact laws and policies that address systemic problems to decrease our carbon impact. Because the US lacks top-down leadership and is instead ruled by corporate interest, if consumers do not vote with their wallets and force corporations to change, the government will never change. It is ass-backward but there it is.  Concrete steps below.

++

In Ming Dynasty China, there was an interesting Neo-Confucian philosopher called Wang YangMing. Master Wang was famous for his unusual epistemology. The unity of knowledge and action () says in a nutshell, If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself. No other knowledge is possible. All we know is what we do. And what we do is all we can know.

To approach the issue you would, I think, have to work well outside a Cartesian mind-body duality since philosophers after Descartes have been open to the notion of a disembodied mind. But let's say you think, like Master Wang (and me) that knowledge is always something *embodied* and therefore in this radical de-emphasis of the thinking-action divide, all knowledge is as embodied also an action. So, in this way, as some philosophers have suggested, this pushes beyond Ryle's "know-that" versus "know-how," to say that all Confucian knowing is a knowing-to.

With "doing" in mind, I want to recommend a new book on climate change and making a difference.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a new book out about low carbon living.

I really recommend the book, which urges every single person to reduce their own impact by 20% the first year. It gives very practical methods for doing this, which are surprisingly easy.

The main point is you aim for a 20% reduction in carbon and you can much more easily do this by reviewing and making changes to your habits in the BIG THREE areas: 1) Cars 2) Beef 3) Home heating and aircon.

(If you don't believe in carbon, no problem, you can just aim for environmental protection through less plastic).

20% is not enough of course but it is a doable first-year goal. And it is almost too easy to make a plan if you address the above three high-impacting areas (if you make a lot of small, less impactful changes, it will be harder to hit the 20%)

I'll tell you my plan but everyone will have to figure out their own approach since everyone's situation is so different. We live in LA and it is hard to survive without a car. But we are committed to only ever having one fuel-efficient car. My plan is that starting early next year, we will employ the Union of Concerned Scientists' "2 mile rule." We won't use the car for any trips under two miles in the daytime. The union of concerned scientists suggested three miles and didn't stipulate day or night.

Baby steps, baby steps.

More important in our case is we are going to look into a more efficient air con. Our aircon is a zone type so we never actually heat or cool the entire house but it is a very old system. A new system would drastically cut down our impact. When I look at our current behaviors this is without a doubt the major issue. The book talks a lot about the impact of inefficient systems. We don't shop from chain stores or big box stores at all, but we do use Amazon. I am going to try and only hit "buy now" once a month to cut the consumerism by 20% there. This will be challenging for me because of my addiction to books. The other biggie is food. We only eat "happy cows" when we eat beef and same for poultry, but I will plan to seriously increase our vegetarian days to bring meat down to once or twice a week max. Those are the biggies beef and fossil fuels. Food is especially tough since if a person's veganism is made up of monocrops that is also a huge problem for so many reasons relating to soil health and petrochemicals. I recommend reading the book Vegetarian Myth (with a grain of salt since it will challenge your notions on the issues). In fact, I think industrialized food is the toughest nut to crack because it has become so all-pervasive.

Other forms of shopping are much easier to tackle. I've had good luck with a refurbished iphone and try really hard not to purchase things from big box stores at all I buy a great part of my clothing and other things used on ebay and prefer it that way.

Over the years, I have repeatedly emailed the schools where my son goes to ask them to forbid idling cars (that must be illegal!) and 100% forbid plastic water bottles (as in japan)to bring back buses and water fountains to schools. Bike racks. Nothing was achieved except they did fix the water fountains at the elementary school finally. But, he now goes to a public school with no bus available. I think that is what happens if parents don't support existing school buses they go away. Kids are safer and healthier on the bus. Remember, we want our kids to have independence so that they will be capable of solving problems! [Fact-free parenting and riding the bus]

All of the above is said in in full recognition that people can only do what they can do. I have had a period in my life where for financial reasons I could never have aimed at much more than 20% because I was so financially strapped. And isn't it ironic (and so pathetic) that it takes money to do a lot of this?

I just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, New York 2140. The book takes place after climate change has brought three periods of disaster to the planet. The future is all about rising sea levels and devastating inequality. It is a very convincing portrait of a possible scenario of things to come. The water levels create a New York that is wonderfully reminiscent of Venice with vaporetto and water taxis, frozen canals and sky towers that rise out of the waters in the Bay. But the inequality is such that many can no longer read. The 1% control everything and the rabble (yes, that is us) must make do. The book contains short but very cutting commentary about a human species that at every turn chose selfish financial gains (on quarterly profits) over the sustainability of our planet and the people living on the planet. And even after a complete collapse, people keep doing things the same waywith the wealthy taking the lion's share of the wealth and the rest of the people feeling helpless to do anything. Unions are weak as ever and not only does "greater good" not include the animals or the soil but it doesn't even include 99% of the people. Yes, this is persuasive.

But there is a big surprise. This is a utopian novel. You expect a dystopian novel. not least given the subject matter but people are still people and kindness does win in this novel. I am more persuaded by dystopian visions and yet found this book really almost heart-warming. In the end, the rabble strike back. How? By general strikes, non-payments to the banks en masse of student loans and mortgages and the immediate stopping of nonessential consumer purchases to cripple the business model.

History was happening. When that happens you can feel it.

So, a positive note to kick of 2018, I wanted to share this list of local California achievements

New state laws that will took effect on January 1st

1. First year of community college will be free for all new students (must be full time)

2. Recreational marijuana legal to purchase

3. Vehicle registration will cost $25 to $175 more based on the value of your car

4. Minimum wage up to $11 per hour

5. Sanctuary State law will limit local cooperation/resources with ICE

6. Guns banned at all public schools even for those with concealed carry permits

7. All ammunition purchases (or pickups) must be made in person

8. Gender identity no longer a requirement on IDs

9. Baby changing tables will be required in all restrooms, including men's

10. Pet stores will only be able to sell rescue animals (sp. dogs, cats, rabbits)

11. Employers will no longer be able to ask for your salary/benefits history, and must provide a pay-scale for the job upon request

12. Wearing a seat belt on buses will become mandatory for those with seat belts. Buses carrying children aged 8-16 must provide seat belts

13. Free tampons and pads must be in at least half of all restrooms in public schools that serve low-income areas (defined as 40% poverty or more)

Here is to working together on the local level!!!

++

My Top Reads of 2017 (Death in the Anthropocene; Vegetarian Myth, New York 2140, Are we Deranged?)

Global Warming Part One at 3Quarks here: The Sound of Lotus Blossoming
This week holds some far-out events.

Get ready for a night of mushrooms (eating, drinking and foraging), Egyptian belly dancing, and some major art shows.

Monday, Jan. 8th



Fresh Festival @ Joe Goode Annex

When: 8pm

Where: Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama St. (Mission)

Why: You'll experience cutting-edge live art, dance and music in this four-week festival. // Tickets $25-$35 (per night) are available at joegoode.org.





Monday, Jan. 8th

Learn Egyptian Style Belly Dance @ Alonzo King Lines Ballet

When: 6pm

Where: Alonzo King Lines Ballet, 26 7th St. #5 (SoMa)

Why: You'll learn the fundamentals of Egyptian raqs (dance) movement, posture and technique if you're a beginner; for more seasoned belly dancer, the 7pm advanced class focuses on strengthening and refining techniques as well as expanding your knowledge of rhythms and songs. // Tickets ($15) are available at dancecenter.linesballet.org.





Monday, Jan. 8th

Delfina Pops up @ The Old Farina

When: Through Thursday, Jan. 11th

Where: 3560 18th St. (Mission)

Why: While Delfina is closed for renovations, you can order some of your usual favorites for lunch and dinner, including pizzas, from the restaurant's pop-up inside the recently shuttered Farina space, just down the block on 18the Street. Keep your eyes peeled for daily guest sommeliers and bartenders. // delfinasf.com





Tuesday, January 9th

Sandwiches, Shakes & Cakes @ Sweets Inspirations

When: 9am to 9pm daily

Where: 2239 Market St. (Upper Market)

Why: Because you're still secretly a Top Chef fan. The show's well known local alum chef Ryan Scott and sandwich god Ike Shehadeh have quietly opened Sweet Inspirations, a new bakery and restaurant slinging fried chicken sandos, burgers, desserts and more. // instagram.com/sweetssf





Wednesday, Jan. 10th

Savory Macarons, Meet Wine

When: 7 to 9pm

Where: Russian Hill address will be revealed to ticket holders.

Why: When else will you taste exotic wasabi-grapefruit or saffron-and-caramelized-pistachio macarons paired with vino? // Tickets ($39) are available at eatfeastly.com.





Wednesday, Jan. 10th

Opening Party @ Kaya



When: 6 to 9pm

Where: 1420 Market St. (Civic Center)

Why: Because Daniel Patterson is doing Jamaican food, that's why. But that's not all: He's teamed with the master, Nigel Jones of Oakland's Kingston 11, to open Kaya, a Jamaican restaurant and rum bar, in the former Alta space on Market Street. Celebrate with small bites and cocktails to benefit the Cooking Project. // Tickets ($60-$80) are available at eventbrite.com.





Thursday, Jan. 11th

Fungus Among Us @ California Academy of Sciences

When: 6 to 10pm

Where: Cal Academy, 55 Music Concourse Dr. (Golden Gate Park)

Why: Because mushrooms forever. Get the knowledge on how and where to forage, tasty earthy shroom-infused cocktails, and cultivate your own mushrooms to take home. // Tickets ($15 per person; $12 for members) are available at calacademy.org.





Thursday, Jan. 11th

Automat Burger Pop-up @ Triple Voodoo Brewery

When: 6pm until they sell out.

Where: 2245 Third St. (Dogpatch)

Why: Since Lazy Bear isn't so friendly to those with budget-related resolutions, you can taste a delicious double-smashed cheeseburger (with pimento cheese special sauce)) from one of the fancy restaurant's alums, Matt Kirk. Pair it with a Triple Voodoo IPA and stick around for trivia night. // automatsf.com





Friday, Jan. 12th

Fog Design + Art Fair @ Fort Mason

When: 9am to 6pm, January 11-14

Where: 2 Marina Blvd. (Marina)

Why: With art world luminaries gathered from around the world, Fog Fair is the place to be for culture vultures in the know. Be on the lookout for our favorite works of art. // Tickets ($25) are available at eventbrite.com;fogfair.com.





Saturday, Jan. 13th

Learn to Cook Tamales @ The Civic Kitchen

When: 10am to 2pm

Where: 2961 Mission St. (Mission)

Why: You've resolved to eat out less and cook more. What better way to dig in than with a four-hour lesson in handmade tamales ($145) at new cooking school Civic Kitchen. Check the schedule online for one-off classes and six-week courses. // civickitchensf.com





Sunday, Jan. 16th

The East Cut Art Fair in SoMa

When: 10am to 5pm

Where: 160 Spear St. (Embarcadero)

Why: Because even though you refuse to call this swath of SoMa the "East Cut," you have art fair FOMO. Check out contemporary art curated by four Bay Area galleries: Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (Oakland), George Lawson Gallery (SF), Seager Gray Gallery (Mill Valley) and Slate Contemporary (Oakland). Shop small collectibles from local makers and large-scale pieces from national and internationally acclaimed artists. // theeastcut.org
Mark your calendar for these art shows, performances and more.

Oborozuki by Miya Ando Courtesy of Nancy Toomey Fine Art

What: Oborozuki (Moon Obscured by Clouds)



When: January 4 through February 17, 2018

Where: Nancy Toomey Fine Art, 1275 Minnesota St. (Dogpatch), nancytoomeyfineart.com

Why: You have read Murasaki Shikibu's novel The Tale of Genji and you are in love with Lady Oborozuki. Inspired by the novel and the word Oborozuki, which means "the moon obscured by clouds," this solo show of artist Miya Ando includes a series of paintings on aluminum, as well as works on paper that investigate the transitory aspect of time and temporality.





What: Object Action: The "F" Word in a Post-Truth Era



When: January 6th through February 16th, 2018

Where: State Space, 1295 Alabama St. (Mission), statespacesf.com

Why: Because you too. See the sculptures, installations, paintings and videos of badass women artistsincluding Ana Maria Fernandez, Michele Pred, Angela Hennessy and Sanaz Mazinaniwho offer their unique takes on the topic of feminism in the Trump era. The opening marks the debut of the charitable initiative Collect for Change; sales from this show will benefit nonprofits including Art & Abolition, Girls Garage and more.





Toilet Paper booth. (Courtesy of Untitled)

What: Open House



When: January 8th through February 24th

Where: Jessica Silverman Gallery, 488 Ellis St. (Tenderloin), jessicasilvermangallery.com

Why: Amuse and Artsy magazines named her boothwith works by Judy Chicago, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Julian Hoeber, Dashiell Manley, Nicole Wermersas one of the best at Art Basel Miami last year; Amuse describing it as "ever so topical." Jessica Silverman brings to San Francisco 13 International emerging art stars from Glasgow's The Modern Institute. Look for a site-specific mural by Nicolas Party, Monika Sosnowska's Pipe, and more.

Pipe by Monika Sosnowska (Courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery)

What: A [4CH VERSION]



When: January 9-21, 2018

Where: Ars Citizen temporary space (Gallery 200) @ Minnesota Street Project,1275 Minnesota St. (Dogpatch), arscitizen.org

Why: Sound is everything. Here Paris-based composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda transforms the gallery into an immersive musical landscape that is both physically and personally interactive and too complex to explain. Hear it to believe it.





What:SF Sketchfest

When: January 11-28, 2018

Where: 16 venues across San Francisco, sfsketchfest.com

Why: You need a laugh. The 17th year of everyone's favorite comedy festival will bring more than 700 performers to the stage. Eat light and get ready to bust a gut with the likes of Louie Anderson and Martha Kelly, Julie Benz, David Cross, Broken Lizard, cast members from Twin Peaks and more.





What: Untitled Art Fair



When: January 12 - 14, 2018

Where: Palace of Fine Arts, 3601 Lyon St. (Presidio), untitledartfairs.com

Why: You either went to last year's debut fair and know better than to miss it. Or you missed it and then felt totally lame. This year's contemporary art fair will gather together 50 galleries and exhibitors from around the worldunless you are a globetrotter with quite deep pockets, expect to see art you can't see anywhere else.





Kohey Nawa: Trans-figure. Pixcell-Double Deer#7 (Courtesy of Scai The BathHouse, Photo by Nobutada Omote | Sandwich)

What: Kohey Nawa: Trans-figure



When: January 18 through February 25, 2018

Where: Pace Gallery, 229 Hamilton Ave. (Palo Alto), pacegallery.com

Why: Because technology and science can be quite artful. The first U.S. solo exhibition for Japanese artist Kohei Nawa will wow you with his collection of pixelated sculptures made out of toys, taxidermy and musical instruments.
Human Vaccines Market

The World Human Vaccines Market Research Report provides detailed analysis of the key regional market status of the Healthcare Industry.

A vaccine is a biological preparation which contains a weakened or killed microbial agent, its toxins or its surface proteins, which provides active acquired immunity against the disease caused by the microbe.

we expect the Middle East and Africa Human Vaccines Market which was $ 2.8 billion in 2015 to reach around $ 5.46 billion in future, growing at a CAGR of 11.8%.

The aim of vaccination is to stimulate and train the body immunity to recognize and destroy the microbial threat in later encounters. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases and is largely responsible for eradicating many deadly diseases such as smallpox and the restriction of diseases such as measles, and tetanus.

Middle East and Africa are laggards when it comes to immunization coverage. According to World Health Organization (WHO), out of the total number of children worldwide who did not receive the required three doses of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines, more than 40% were from sub-Saharan Africa. Other nations with large unvaccinated population include Nigeria, Iraq, Chad, Niger, Angola, Somalia and Sudan. UNICEF estimates that in 2015, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Somalia, South Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic and Ukraine had less than 50%coverage of the third dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine. More than half of the unvaccinated children live in Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Uganda and South Africa.

Thus Middle East and Africa offer immense potential and opportunities for the vaccine market. Apart from the unmet needs for vaccination, second most important market driving factor are the policies of national Governments and international bodies such as World health organization (WHO). For example vaccine action plan of WHO along with huge funding from international bodies were responsible for driving the vaccine market to great heights in the past and also resulted in development and expansion of vaccine production capacities especially in developing states notably India. Other driving factors are increasing funds from philanthropy organizations such as Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, inclusion of several new vaccines in the national immunization schedule of many countries, development of new vaccines which includes vaccine for hepatitis, growing awareness of vaccination, growth of manufacturing low cost vaccines especially in developing countries, the entry of China in the vaccine market etc.

The markets constraints include falling profitability of vaccine, manufacturing, eradication of diseases such as smallpox which effectively eliminates the need for vaccine, side effects associated with vaccines, variability of efficacy of vaccines and difficulty of producing vaccines for microbes with high mutations such as HIV.

The low profitability in vaccine manufacturing has reduced incentives for developing vaccines for diseases of the developing world such as tuberculosis and malaria.

The markets trends include strong research pipeline under which number of novel vaccines are being developed such as rubella vaccine, ebola vaccine etc. DNA recombinant technology is also a common technology used in the development of novel acting vaccines.

Taking all the factors into consideration,

Key Players for Middle East and Africa Human Vaccines Market:

GlaxoSmithKline Plc., Merck & Co. Inc., Pfizer, Inc., Sanofi Pasteur, Inc., AstraZeneca Plc., Bharat Biotech, Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Emergent Biosolutions Inc., Astellas Pharma Inc., Panacea Biotec and others.

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Human Vaccines Market Segments:

Middle East and Africa Human Vaccines Market has been segmented on the basis of technology which comprises attenuated, inactivated, toxoid, conjugate & subunit, recombinant DNA. On the basis of disease indication; market is segmented into pneumococcal, influenza, hepatitis, rotavirus, DTP, polio and others. On the basis of type the market is segmented into prophylactic and therapeutic. On the basis of composition market is again segmented into mono vaccine and combination vaccines. The route of administration segments the market into oral, injectable and other. Moreover on the basis of end user; market is segmented into children and adults.

Regional Analysis of Middle East and Africa Human Vaccines Market:

Depending on geographic region, Human Vaccine Market is segmented into several countries: UAE is the largest market for human vaccines in the entire Middle East and Africa human vaccines market closely followed by Egypt. The rest of Africas market especially Sub Saharan regions are however the fastest growing market with huge unmet medical needs.

Table of Content

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Research Methodology

Chapter 3 Market Dynamics

Chapter 4 Market Factor Analysis

Chapter 5 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Technology

Chapter 6 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Disease Indication

Chapter 7 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Type

Chapter 8 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Composition

Chapter 9 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Route Of Administration

Chapter 10 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By End User

Chapter 11 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Country

Chapter 12 Company Landscape

Chapter 13 Company Profile

Chapter 14 Others

Chapter 15 Appendix

Chapter 16 List Of Tables:

Table 1 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, 2013-2022 (Usd Million)

Table 2 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Technology, 2013-2022 (Usd Million)

Table 3 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Disease Indication, 2013-2022 (Usd Million)

Table 4 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Type, 2013-2022 (Usd Million)

Table 5 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Composition, 2013-2022 (Usd Million)

Chapter 17 List Of Figures:

Figure 1 Research Process

Figure 2 Porters Five Forces Model

Figure 3 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Technology

Figure 4 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Disease Indication

Figure 5 Middle East And Africa Human Vaccines Market, By Type

Continued

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Amended Preliminary Economic Assessment

Sydney, Jan 5, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Lithium Power International Limited ( ASX:LPI ) ("LPI" or "the Company"), in order to comply with Australian Security Exchange's ("ASX") compliance and regulatory requirements, is pleased to provide an Amended Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) for its Maricunga lithium brine project in northern Chile by the Maricunga joint venture company, Minera Salar Blanco (MSB).



It is noted that the content of the PEA remains unaltered, however further disclosure and additional information is provided to allow further compliance with ASX and JORC disclosure requirements.



Highlights



- PEA confirms the high quality of the Maricunga Lithium Brine Project ("the Project"), with the outcomes from the PEA providing a base for further development.



- The Project is progressing to a feasibility study, providing improved certainty regarding reserves, metallurgical design, equipment and operational risks.



- Conventional evaporation pond and process technology to minimise operational risks.



- PEA completed by Tier-1 engineering consultancy WorleyParsons to international standards. Accuracy of operating and capital cost estimates expected within a +/- 25% range.



To ensure appropriate disclosure of information and assumptions used in the PEA full access to the PEA document prepared by WorleyParsons is available from the LPI website http://lithiumpowerinternational.com/



Lithium Power International's Chief Executive Officer, Martin Holland, commented:



"Release of the PEA is a very important step towards becoming a lithium producer. The study demonstrates a very positive and robust outcome that justifies completion of a full feasibility study. The operating expenditure estimate places Maricunga in the lower quartile on the cost curve, at US$2,938/t (excluding KCl). The project has a payback of less than three years. It's important to state that the high level of detail in this study meets international standards."



Executive Summary and Key Study Parameters



The project plan is to produce 20,000t/a of lithium carbonate (LCE), with production of 74,000t/a of potassium chloride (KCl) from year 3 of the project when potash salts have accumulated to a level where continuous processing can be carried out. Key operating and capital costs are summarised in Tables 1 to 3.



The study was based on extraction of an average 222 litres per second (l/s) of brine throughout the project life of 20 years. The brine commences approximately 10cm below the salt lake surface and extends below the base of the proposed bore field at 200m below the surface. Brine will be extracted from a minimum of 13 individual wells, pumping via a central collection pond to the evaporation ponds.



In the evaporation ponds, the brine would be concentrated through evaporation and chemical saturation, with precipitation of different salts, such as halite, sylvinite and carnallite. All salts that precipitate would be periodically harvested from the ponds, and stored in designated stockpiles. The sylvinite and carnallite salts would be sent directly to the KCl processing plant, where through processes of size reduction and classification, flotation, leaching, drying and packaging, KCl fertilizer is obtained.



Concentrated lithium brine from the evaporation ponds would be pumped to the reservoir ponds, from which a Salt Removal Plant would be fed. This plant would remove calcium impurities as calcium chloride and tachyhydrite from the brine. This would be achieved through consecutive evaporation and crystallization steps. This process allows a higher concentration of lithium in the brine.



The concentrated lithium brine obtained from the Salt Removal Plant would then be fed to the lithium carbonate plant, where purification, solvent extraction and filtration remove remaining impurities including calcium, magnesium and boron. The concentrated lithium brine would then be fed to a carbonation stage, where through the addition of soda ash, the lithium carbonate precipitates. This precipitated lithium carbonate would then be fed to a centrifuge for water removal, and final drying, size reduction and packaging. The lithium and potash products would be exported from ports in the second region of Chile, near Antofagasta.



The project has excellent existing infrastructure. The project is located beside one of the international roads connecting Chile and Argentina. High capacity electricity infrastructure is also nearby, providing excellent power options for the project development.



Completion of a definitive feasibility study in the second half of 2018 and securing the project environmental and operating permits will take the Company to the point of final decision to proceed and financial investment.



To view the full Study, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/79800PV9





About Lithium Power International Ltd





Lithium Power International Limited (ASX:LPI) is a pure-play lithium explorer and developer, focusing on developing and fast-tracking to production the high-grade Maricunga lithium brine project in Chile.

LPI has a well-known performing technical team with the experience to take the Maricunga project all the way through the development stages to production.

The regions that LPI is currently focused on are:

1. Maricunga JV (Chile) - Located within the "Lithium Triangle", Maricunga is Chile's highest grade and most advanced lithium project outside the Salar de Atacama. The project lies 170 km northeast of Copiapo and 250 km from the port of Caldera.

2. Pilbara (Western Australia) - LPI has three granted exploration tenements covering 203 km2 in the Pilbara region of northern Western Australia. The largest granted exploration tenement is the Pilgangoora tenement which is 2-3 km west of the Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS) and Altura Mining (ASX:AJM) lithium deposits.

3. Greenbushes (Western Australia) - LPI has two granted exploration tenements covering 400 km2 in the Greenbushes area of southern Western Australia. The tenements are adjacent to the world's largest hard rock lithium mine owned and operated by Tianqi/Talison.

4. Centenario (Argentina) - Through its Argentinian subsidiary, Lithium Power holds a total of seven granted tenements in the Centenario lithium brine salar within the Salta province of the Puna Plateau. In total, the seven granted tenements cover an area of 68.46 km2.

With the exception of the Maricunga JV, all tenements are 100% owned by LPI or LPSA (including rights to the Centenario tenements).
A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest, called Chappal chor Pakistan outside Pakistan embassy in Washington DC over reported misbehaviour meted out to Kulbhushan Jadhavs kin in Islamabad.

The protesters donated old shoes and said the protest is in solidarity with Jadhavs family.

Baloch protestors also joined the protest and raised anti-Pakistan slogans. The protestors urged people to bring old shoes to give them to Pakistan.

They also asked them to dress like a Siachen soldier with at least 2 layers of clothes for cold. Chappal chor Pakistan started trending after Pakistan asked Kulbhushan Jadhavs mother and wife to remove mangalsutra, bindi before meeting him.

His wifes shoes were not returned after meeting which left India and the world flabbergasted.
The 63-year-old suffered at least 17 wounds; prominent Shiv Sena leader and former municipal corporator Ashok Sawant was brutally stabbed to death outside his home in Mumbai. He was returning home from a meeting around 11 p.m. on Sunday night when two persons who lay in wait, pounced on him with knives and choppers outside his house, a police team rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead on admission. Police have checked CCTV footages in the locality and have identified one of the two killers. The preliminary motive behind the crime appeared to be extortion.

Extortion and Shiv Sena go parallel; there are several examples where Shiv Sena leaders demand fixed haftas (bribe) and they even ask extortion money from small time businessmen, builders and hawkers. In 2011, Santosh Shinde, Sena shakha pramukh Santosh Gharat and Vinod Mishra stopped a contractor, Manmad Qureshi and demanded Rs 1,000. When he refused to pay, they allegedly assaulted him. Qureshi lodged an FIR against them an hour after the incident. Shinde reportedly confessed to having demanded the money. Shinde claimed that he was collecting the money for party-related work. There are many such examples  people are fed-up with the high handedness of Shiv Sena leaders. From routine life to festive seasons, people in various businesses are forced to pay money for the party. Anyways, in this case I dont know what exactly had happened, but extortion is not new thing with the party and killing of Shiv Sainiks is a part of underworld activity in Mumbai.

Last year, a 36-year-old Shiv Sena worker, who was aspiring to contest the Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) polls, was allegedly hacked to death by unidentified persons at Triveni Park area on Nashik Road in Nashik. The victim, Surendra alias Gharya Shejval, a resident of Canal Road, located near Nashik Road Central Jail, had died on the spot. Shejval had quit the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) and joined Shiv Sena. Shejval was returning home along with his friend on their two-wheeler after visiting a Shiv Sena corporators office around 9.30 pm. The accused followed them in a car and attacked Shejval with swords and sharp weapons, in which he died on the spot.

After going through footage from CCTV cameras in the area, Police identified one killer who had identified the other killers  one of them is a well-known criminal called Jagga. Ashok Sawant had started a cable business a few years ago and had complained to the police after he reportedly began to receive extortion calls the past two days. But he did not seek any security or cover. Sawants brother Subhash Sawant is an assistant police commissioner at the Mumbai Polices Anti-Terrorism Squad.

As usual, the parts of Kandivali East observed a spontaneous shutdown after the killing of the two-time municipal corporator. This is another irony; people are made to mourn by force. Anyways, this is the reason, somewhere Shiv Sena losing its sheen.

In 2014, a local Shiv Sena leader Ramesh Jadhav from suburban Malad was stabbed to death. All the five accused, who stayed in the same locality, were tracked down from their hideouts and arrested. Jadhav, who owned an imitation jewellery business, a night before the murder, had tried to mediate and calm down the clashing groups over a trivial local issue. Tension prevailed in Malad and Dindoshi areas after the murder as scores of Sena workers held demonstrations demanding immediate arrest of the accused.

In 2012, Gangster-turned-politician Arun Gawli was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the murder of Shiv Sena politician Kamlakar Jamsandekar in 2007. Gawli was convicted along with 10 others. Jamsandekar was shot dead at his home in suburban Ghatkopar. Gawli was arrested in May 2008. According to the chargesheet, a sum of Rs 30 lakh was paid to the Gawli gang for eliminating the Sena corporator over a land deal. Gawli was elected as an MLA from Mumbais Chinchpokli constituency in 2004 on an Akhil Bhartiya Sena ticket and completed his term. Shiv Sena leaders have butchered many people around and they too got brutally killed by their rivals.

Five years since the death of Balasaheb Thackeray, Shiv Sena, Maharashtras nativist party that he founded and led for half a century is a changed outfit.

The political landscape in India and in Maharashtra has changed remarkably since the death of the maverick politician. In 2012, Shiv Sena was in the opposition with just 45 seats in the 288-member Maharashtra assembly. Though the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had one more seat, it was still considered the Shiv Senas junior ally in Maharashtra. And Thackeray was like a father figure to the saffron siblings. Now, Thackerays party is in power in Maharashtra and at the centre, though one-time junior partner BJP wields the reins. Sena now has 63 MLAs in Maharashtra, won entirely under Uddhavs leadership in the October 2014 elections, and 18 members of the Lok Sabha, some of whom may have benefitted from the 2014 Modi wave, as the two parties fought in alliance. The party also has three Rajya Sabha members. But now even after being in power, Shiv Sainiks could not shed their image of bad boys. Party remains in news for one or the other reason, and most of the time for its controversy.

In spite of all odds one must not restore to violence and killings. Hope investigation in Ashok Sawants case brings out the motive and truth. Till then, may his soul rest in peace.

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)
Former Shiv Sena corporator, Ashok Sawant, was stabbed to death outside his house in Mumbais suburb Kandivali at around 11 pm, on Sunday night.

Two men accosted Sawant (62) late on Sunday night who then attacked him with sharp weapons.

The incident took place when he was returning home after meeting a friend.

He was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared brought dead, a police official told PTI.

Sawant had entered the cable television business a few years ago, the official added.

Sawant was a two-time corporator of Shiv Sena from Samta Nagar.

An FIR has been led under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code at the Samata Nagar police station, reported India Today.

Investigation in the case is on.
Hookah bars and pubs have become death traps for young generation, said Senior BJP MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha commenting on the recent deadly Kamala Mills fire mishap that had killed 14 people. He has also demanded the Government to immediately ban the Hookah parlours in the state by issuing an ordinance.

Lodha had presented a revised bill for total ban on Hookah parlours in the state in the recently concluded Nagpur assembly session. But considering the large number of youths died in Kamala Mill accident, there is no need to wait for next assembly session. Govt should also ban Hookah parlours in other states of the country  Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Punjab. It is a fact that Hookah bars are run in many restaurants in the city and it is necessary to cancel licenses of these establishments, he expressed.

I have been demanding to shut the Hookah bars for almost since last three years. I have raised this demand in assembly and also had told this to the Chief Minister by personally meeting him. This time, I have presented a revised bill in the assembly. The next budget session will have discussion about this. But after the death of several people when the fire broke out at Mojos Bistro lounge pub, government should not wait till the budget session and instead, issue an ordinance to ban Hookah bars with immediate effect. Hookah bars have come up as nests of crimes in Mumbai and major cities of the State, Lodha concluded.


Join Age of Autism's Mark Blaxill and Kim Rossi at this event in Framingham, Massachusetts on Thursday, January 11. You can attend the screening and Q&A or opt to attend the meet and greet before the movie as well. Buy your tickets here.
Mercedes-Benz today celebrated a milestone at its Tuscaloosa County plant.

Almost 21 years after the plant opened, workers turned out the 3 millionth vehicle assembled there. Employees on the Assembly 2 line, which builds SUVs, enjoyed a special ceremony to commemorate the event, plant officials said.

Mercedes-Benz plant produced its 3 millionth vehicle, a diamond silver Mercedes-Benz GLE 350 SUV, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018.

The vehicle, a diamond silver Mercedes-Benz GLE 350 SUV, is destined for a customer in the United States.

"We're already starting off 2018 with an exciting milestone  a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team members," said Jason Hoff, President and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International. "Last year was an exciting and successful time for MBUSI  the celebration of 20 years of production in Alabama and we got our first glimpse of what's to come in the future with the announcement of an additional $1 billion investment in our plant.

"This year  2018  will be equally rewarding as we devote our full attention to building the next generation of SUVs," Hoff said.

The Tuscaloosa County plant employs more than 3,700. It is in the final stages of a $1.3 billion plant expansion, which includes a new body shop, enhancements to the SUV assembly shop as well as upgraded logistics and IT systems. The plant is also gearing up for a $1 billion expansion announced last year to produce electric vehicles.
The Saks Building in downtown Birmingham has sold after being on the market for six months.

The sale price of the building located at 1904 1st Ave. North wasn't disclosed. The building was listed at the end of June for $4.2 million.

"It was a pretty quick sale," said Corporate Realty's Emily Byrd.

She said it helped that the three-story, 18,848-square-foot building is 100 percent occupied. A surface parking lot beside The Pizitz was also a strong selling point.

Coyote Logistics, which is owned by UPS, signed a 10-year lease for the building in 2014.

The Saks Building was built in 1924 and redeveloped by Corporate Realty in 2005. It was renovated in 2014.

The company that owns the building, CRD Number 3, was sold in the deal, which closed a few days after Christmas.

Developer Mike Mouron, who was involved in redeveloping the Federal Reserve building in downtown Birmingham, is the new owner.

Mouron said he bought the building because he is attracted to historic buildings. He also liked that the building has a long-term lease.

"I think it is a desirable area," he said, speaking about its proximity to The Pizitz, Elyton Hotel and other upcoming projects like Founders Station. "It is only getting better."

Byrd said it's exciting that existing developers are becoming more interested in buying a stake in downtown. She said she hopes it's a sign downtown Birmingham will see more activity in 2018.
Toyota's Huntsville engine plant produced almost 700,000 engines last year.

The factory announced today that it is turning out about 3,000 engines per day, six times the number it produced when the plant opened in 2003.

Approximately 1,400 people are employed at the factory. The engines power a third of all Toyota vehicles built in the U.S., encompassing the RAV4, Highlander, Tacoma, Tundra and Sequoia models.

2017 was a big year for Toyota in Huntsville. The plant announced a $106 million expansion to install a new 4-cylinder production line for advanced engines, and workers produced the 5 millionth engine built there last February.

Huntsville is the only Toyota plant globally to build 4-cylinder, V6 and V8 engines under one roof.

The company also highlighted its various community initiatives. Toyota Alabama supported more than 50 local non-profit organizations in 2017, investing more than $700,000 in education, mobility, environmental, human services and diversity programs.

Engine and vehicle donations were made to local technical schools to support workforce development efforts and promote careers in manufacturing. In all, the company has donated $9 million to local non-profits.

The plant also made a $90,000 donation to Huntsville STEAM Works to develop a mobile fab lab. In addition, it garnered the Association of Energy Engineer Award for Energy Management, the 11th City of Huntsville Air Pollution Control Achievement Award, the Toyota North America Award for Overall Environmental Improvement and top Facilities Shop.
After Oprah Winfrey honored Recy Taylor in her speech Sunday at the Golden Globes, the case of the Alabama native who was the victim of a horrific crime has returned to the spotlight. Winfrey mentioned Taylor, who died Dec. 28, 2017 just days before her 98th birthday, while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award. Taylor was named as one of many women who spoke out, despite possible repercussions, and sought equality and justice. Kelly Kazek | kkazek@al.com

Don't Edit

(Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

Taylor, shown above in 1944, was the victim of a vicious attack by six white men in 1944. A then-24-year-old Taylor was walking home from church in her hometown of Abbeville when the group abducted her and gang-raped her. One of the suspects admitted his role in the crime and he named the other men involved. Others later claimed it was consensual sex. None were arrested. The case was twice brought before Henry County grand juries made up of white men, and both times they declined to indict the accused.

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(AP File Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

At the time, the NAACP assigned Rosa Parks to investigate Taylor's case in an attempt to get justice. In 2011, officials in Abbeville made a formal apology to Taylor, shown above in 2010 holding a photo of herself from the 1940s. The next month, the Alabama Legislature also issued resolutions of apology.

Don't Edit

(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

The Alabama Department of Archives and History has an online file of documents relating to the case including telegrams, letters, pamphlets and a news clipping. The article above appeared in The Chicago Defender, a respected African American newspaper. The photo caption says this was the first photo published of Taylor following the rape. She is shown with her daughter, Joyce Lee Taylor and her husband, Willie Guy Taylor.

Click here to see the entire file at the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

This three-page pamphlet encouraged people to write to Chauncey Sparks, then governor of Alabama, on behalf of Recy Taylor and also includes a plea for donations to continue the campaign for justice. It outlines the brutal details of her rape and says the suspects in the case were released. Why? the pamphlet asked. Mrs. Recy Taylor is a Negro. Her assailants are white.

Don't Edit

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Inside pages of the three-page pamphlet.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Pages of a petition from Equal Justice Under Law submitted to Gov. Chauncey Sparks seeking action in the case of Recy Taylor.

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Alabama Department of Archives and History

The cover of a nine-page book prepared by the organization Equal Justice Under Law detailing the case against Recy Taylors assailants. The forward by Henriette Buckmaster discusses the long fight of women for equality and then says Taylor represented women who only want to "raise their children without fear, and love their husbands with assurance and be individuals to which their highest hopes and capacities entitle them. This is what we are fighting for.

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Alabama Department of Archives and History

The introduction to the nine-page pamphlet from Equal Justice Under Law.

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Alabama Department of Archives and History

A letter to Gov. Chauncey Sparks from 48 students at the University of Alabama who ask him to insist on the indictment of the criminals who are guilty of the kidnapping and raping of Mrs. Recy Taylor of Abbeville, Alabama. We believe that justice must be given to Mrs. Taylor regardless of her race.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Letter written to Gov. Chauncey Sparks from the Social Service Employees Union pleading for justice for Recy Taylor.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

A letter written to Gov. Chauncey Sparks from residents of Henry County, where the attack occurred, includes a handwritten note that says: I never like to give my support to one side of 2 parties involved in a matter until I can hear the story of both parties, but if the truth have been correctly stated to me in the Recy Taylor case, Recy Taylor should be given a fair trial against her intruders. And she, Recy Taylor, should be defended and protected from such a gruesome act imposed upon her by her intruders, the six white youths, the accused. The letter is signed by Wm. H. Martin and includes a second page filled with signatures.

Don't Edit

(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

The second page of the letter from the residents of Henry County. It states: We have won the war against the fascist abroad but we will not have won the peace, for which Alabama boys, both black and white have fought until we have removed all traces of injustice.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

A postcard to Gov. Chauncey Sparks from a Los Angeles resident.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

A telegram from the Alabama Chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare asking Gov. Chauncey Sparks to use his influence to get justice for Recy Taylor.

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(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

A telegram from the International Union Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Bessemer asking Gov. Chauncey Sparks to use his influence to get justice for Recy Taylor.

Don't Edit

(Alabama Department of Archives and History)

A Western Union telegram to Gov. Chauncey Sparks from Cleveland, Ohio, attorney Jerome Land.
Gadsden police are investigating a fatal shooting in Alabama City.

According to police at the scene, the incident happened at approximately 5 p.m. in the area of 28th Street.

The identity of the victim has not been released.

Gadsden police are currently investigating a shooting late Saturday night where two people, including a juvenile, were wounded. On Thursday, an 18-year-old was fatally shot.
Four people were arrested over the weekend after authorities say they were caught climbing on a fire lookout tower.

Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver said deputies responded Saturday afternoon to a report of the group climbing on the tower near Little River Canyon. Once on the scene, they found two men and two women atop the structure and ordered them to come back down.

Once on the ground, all four were arrested. Shaver said investigators found illegal drugs at the top of the tower, including methamphetamine, marijuana and opioid pills.

The suspects were charged with criminal trespassing, unlawful possession of marijuana, two counts each of unlawful possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia.

Those arrested were: William R. Whipkey, 18, of Marietta, Ga.; Zach V. McBrayer, 18, of Marietta, Ga.; Andreanna K. Phillips, 20, of Rockmart, Ga.; and Sara G. Brennan, 21, of Villa Rica, Ga. They were being held in the Cherokee County Detention Center.

"We take trespassing on the fire tower very seriously because it serves as a public safety communication tower,'' Shaver said, "and it is very dangerous to climb because of deterioration due to its age."
A federal judge on Monday dismissed Tuscaloosa County sheriff's officials and the University of Alabama president in a wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Megan Rondini, a former student who killed herself after alleging she was raped by a man from a prominent family.

U.S. District Judge David Proctor on Monday issued the order dismissing Sheriff Ron Abernathy, Investigator Josh Hastings, Investigator Adam Jones and University of Alabama President Stuart Bell from the lawsuit. The order was filed just before 11 a.m. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama Western Division.

The lawsuit against T.J. Bunn and the discrimination claims against the University of Alabama will proceed. Efforts to reach UA officials for comment weren't immediately successful. Abernathy is expected to respond on Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Rondini's parents, Michael and Cynthia Rondini, identifies Bunn as being part of a family that is "well connected and powerful in the Tuscaloosa community, and were major financial supporters of UA." Bunn works at ST Bunn Construction Company, which is across the street from the Innisfree Pub, where Rondini reportedly became drunk, or was drugged, before being raped for 30 minutes in July 2015.

Rondini was a UA student from Texas when she reported to police she was raped by Bunn in 2015. Rondini's story became public in a June BuzzFeed story, as told by her parents, family and friends. They claimed the 20-year-old was mistreated by Tuscaloosa investigators, the university and DCH Regional Medical Center.

The claims that authorities sided with Bunn's version of events and did not thoroughly follow-up on Rondini's story, and that an investigating officer was more interested in finding out whether Rondini committed any crimes on the night of the rape. The university allegedly "deliberately and repeatedly denied services and mishandled accommodations with hostility toward" Rondini, the suit goes on to say. The lawsuit claims Rondini confided in a UA counselor who told her she could no longer give her therapy because she was a family friend of the Bunns, and that a second counselor would not see Rondini unless she first took anxiety medication.

The lawsuit also claims UA did not accommodate Megan after the rape, alleging that she saw Bunn's car outside her apartment and saw her alleged rapist on the Tuscaloosa campus.

In July, Bunn's attorney, Ivey Gilmore, took out a full-page ad in the Tuscaloosa News entitled "Character Assassination In The Internet Age." Gilmore said in the ad that had reviewed all of the evidence obtained by law enforcement in the case and that while the lawsuit claims a sexual assault took place, Rondini's text messages to friends immediately before the incident make it clear that she intended to have a sexual encounter with Bunn. "To be clear, this case is not a matter of 'he said, she said,''' Gilmore wrote. "It is this young woman's own words, and her own text messages that led every investigating authority to conclude she had not been sexually assaulted."

The judge on Monday instructed the Rondinis to file a second, amended complaint by Feb. 7.

"To be clear, this case is not a matter of 'he said, she said,''' Gilmore wrote. "It is this young woman's own words, and her own text messages that led every investigating authority to conclude she had not been sexually assaulted."
Construction on an additional 44,000 square feet of retail space at Lane Parke in Mountain Brook will start in July, the developers said.

Developer John Evans, of Evson Inc., said he is hoping to attract out-of-market boutique retailers in phase two of the project. Demolition of an existing shopping center, including Rite Aid, is expected to start July 1.

A grand opening is tentatively being set for October 2019. Evans said he hopes all of the new retailers will be open by that time.

Regions Bank at the corner of Culver Road and Montevallo Drive is the only current tenant of phase two.

Evans said 2,750 square feet in phase one hasn't been leased yet. Two retailers and one restaurant will soon begin buildout in the rest of the remaining phase one space, he said.

Tulipano, a clothing boutique with one location in Buckhead, Ga., is opening a second location in Lane Parke, Evans said. Swoops children's clothing outgrew its space on Cahaba Road and is moving into space in phase one, he said.

High-end Italian restaurant Medici also plans to open a restaurant in Lane Parke.

Evans said construction of phase two was delayed primarily by Rite Aid's lease, which now ends on June 30. He said the pharmacy declined to take a space that would have given them room for a drive-through. The space was later taken by Kinnucan's.

Traffic in the Lane Parke area will hopefully improve around the first of February when the construction of Jemison Lane from Lane Parke Road to Montevello Road will be complete.

The grand opening of phase one of Lane Parke was celebrated in October 2016.

Lane Parke is made up of the retail section, Lane Parke Apartments and The Grand Bohemian Hotel Mountain Brook.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday said it won't review the case of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., the man on Alabama's death row for the 1989 pipe bombing death of federal appeals judge Robert S. Vance.

U.S. Supreme Court justices did not issue a written opinion on why it would not review Moody's case.

Moody, who at 82 is the oldest inmate on Alabama Death Row, was seeking to appeal an U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in March 2017. That appeal regards his decision to represent himself at his 1996 capital murder trial. After convicting him, the jury voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence.

"We are disappointed with the Supreme Court's decision," Spencer Hahn, an assistant federal public defender who represents Moody, said in a statement to AL.com on Monday. "This non-unanimous death verdict resulted from a case in which the defendant represented himself, despite numerous requests for counsel. Our court system should be concerned about the obvious unfairness of such a situation."

Moody had asked to represent himself at his trial. But once jury selection began, he asked for a 12- to 18-month continuance so he could hire two lawyers. The judge refused to grant a continuance.

Last March the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed lower court rulings that stated Moody had "knowingly and voluntarily waived his right to counsel" and the denial of a continuance at his trial was not contrary to federal law as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his direct appeal, Moody did not challenge the trial court's decision to permit him to represent himself at trial pursuant to a previous SCOTUS decision, the 11th Circuit stated in its opinion. "He did, however, argue that the trial court erred in refusing to grant him, after voir dire examination of the jurors had begun, a 12- to 18-month continuance so that he could obtain the services of two new attorneys who had expressed an interest in representing him."

According to the opinion the trial judge held two lengthy discussions with Moody--one on August 2, 1994, and another on May 7, 1996-- "during which it explicitly warned [Mr.] Moody of the perils of going forward without counsel," and made multiple inquiries over the course of the proceedings to determine whether Mr. Moody was "standing by his request to proceed pro se."

The trial judge noted that Moody had been a party in 63 other legal proceedings, both civil and criminal, and had represented himself for all or part of about 35 of those proceedings. The judge stated Moody was "not a novice."

Judge Vance was killed Dec. 16, 1989, and his wife, Helen, was seriously injured after the judge opened a package that had been sent to his home, detonating the pipe bomb. A similar pipe bomb killed a lawyer in Atlanta two days later.

Moody was linked to the crimes through a similar bomb nearly two decades earlier that had injured his wife when it exploded. His prosecution in that case led to his resentment of the courts leading up to the 1989 bombings.

In 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody of 71 charges related to the pipe-bomb murders of Vance and civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson.

Months later, an Alabama grand jury indicted Moody on two counts of capital murder and one count of assault in the first degree (for injuries suffered by Judge Vance's wife). Moody represented himself at his state trial, which took place in October of 1996.

The jury found him guilty and recommended a sentence of death for the murders. The trial judge followed the jury's recommendation and sentenced Moody to death.
A man who died Saturday after he was shot by a Jefferson County sheriff's deputy Saturday died from the gunshot wound, not a medical issue, authorities said Monday.

The Jefferson County Coroner's Office said Jackie Harlan Roberts, 62, did not die of natural causes. There were questions because Roberts was struck in the shoulder and was awake and talking when he left the scene en route to UAB Hospital.

However, his condition quickly deteriorated and he was pronounced dead not long after arrival at the emergency room. "Our prayers are with the family as they deal with this loss and also with our involved personnel,'' Chief Deputy Randy Christian said Saturday.

Roberts had been staying at his sister's home where the incident occurred and the 911 call originated. Deputies responded just after 12:30 p.m. to a home in the 4800 block of Vernon Parkway near Grayson Valley. Christian said they received a report that the man had assaulted his sister and husband at their home.

Roberts then went outside to his car and armed himself with a handgun.

Deputies arrived to find him sitting in the car with a gun in his hand. Roberts ignored commands to drop the weapon and began waiving it around. A deputy fired a single shot which struck the suspect in the shoulder.

Roberts was taken to the hospital with what authorities believed to be non-life-threatening injuries, but he died shortly after arrival at UAB Hospital.

The shooting remains under investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation, which is standard procedure for officer-involved shootings.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by a convicted Mobile cop-killer, who is scheduled to be executed Jan. 25, to rehear his appeal.

The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) had ruled in November that Alabama can execute Vernon Madison, a death row inmate who claims to be mentally incompetent. Madison initially was granted a stay of his execution by SCOTUS just hours before his scheduled 2016 execution.

Madison, 67, one of Alabama's longest-serving death row inmates, was convicted in the April 1985 slaying of Mobile police officer Cpl. Julius Schulte.

In November, however, SCOTUS unanimously reversed its earlier decision, saying Madison can be executed. "More than 30 years ago, Vernon Madison crept up behind police officer Julius Schulte and shot him twice in the head at close range," that ruling stated.

In its ruling Monday to reject Madison's request for a rehearing, SCOTUS did not issue a written explanation.

Courts had been split on whether Madison was competent to be executed.

Madison faced a state competency hearing before his scheduled 2016 execution, where he claimed several strokes he recently suffered affected his mental status and made him unable to remember his crimes or remember that he was on death row. The trial court denied Madison's petition, and said the execution could proceed.

But then the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Madison was incompetent and he could not be executed.

Madison's attorney, Angie Setzer with the Equal Justice Initiative, in an email to AL.com stated that the media have misreported what the Supreme Court has done in the case. "The Supreme Court has not concluded that Mr. Madison is competent to be executed; the Court has made it clear that is an unresolved question. What the Court said is that a federal court constrained by the restrictions imposed by federal habeas law cannot make that determination. The Court's decision denying rehearing affirms that judgment but Mr. Madison's competence to be executed is still yet to be decided.

Madison Request for Re-hearing by KentFaulk on Scribd
The Army said it corrected an error after an operator "inadvertently" like a tweet mocking President Donald Trump's claims that he's "really smart."

On Saturday, the U.S. Army's official account "liked" a tweet from actress Mindy Kaling. The tweet shows Kaling as her character from NBC's "The Office," with the words "You guys, I'm like really smart now. You don't even know."

The tweet, which has been shared more than 49,000 times and has 218,000 "likes," references Trump's earlier statements in which the president referred to himself as not just smart "but genius...and a very stable genius at that."

Among those liking the post was the official Army account. The service later issued a statement to The Hill about the post.

"An operator of the Army's official Twitter account inadvertently 'liked' a tweet whose content would not be endorsed by the Department of the Army," the spokesperson said. "As soon as it was brought to our attention, it was immediately corrected."

The "like" didn't bypass Kaling, however, who answered back with a tweet of her own.
A Colbert County lawyer has been indicted on a felony charge of bribing a juror, the Alabama Attorney General's Office announced today.

William J. "Billy" Underwood surrendered today at the Colbert County Jail and was released on $5,000 bail, Sheriff Frank Williamson said. Underwood, who practices law in Tuscumbia, was indicted by a Colbert County grand jury on the Class C felony charge, AG Steve Marshall announced in a news release.

Underwood is accused of "offering, conferring or agreeing to confer any pecuniary benefit upon a juror with the intent that the juror's vote, opinion, decision or other action as a juror will thereby be corruptly influenced in Colbert County," the AG's Office said.

Prosecutors haven't publicly identified the case in which Underwood is accused of bribing a juror. In a news release, Underwood said the charge involves "a prospective juror in a case where that individual never went to the courthouse and a jury was never empaneled."

Underwood is represented by William Hovater and W. Brent Woodall.

"Our jury system is the cornerstone to the justice system in our country," Marshall said in a statement. "My office will always work diligently to ensure that our citizens can be confident that justice will prevail when they go into a courtroom in our state.

"Any possible violation of the laws applying to the sanctity of the jury system must always be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent under the law," Marshall added. "Whether the alleged offender is an attorney or not, such illegal activity will not be tolerated in our state. Our litigants should never question whether they will be treated fairly when they enter our county courthouses."

Further details about the case haven't been released.

The investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is urged to contact the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency's Russellville Field Office at 256-436-1344.

If convicted, Underwood faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
When it comes to fighting crime in the present, Alabama's "Big 5" mayors are upbeat. When it comes to fighting revenue shortfalls in the future, they see some hard choices ahead.

Those seemed to be the two biggest takeaways from the latest gathering of the Big 5, which includes the mayors of Birmingham, Montgomery, Huntsville, Mobile and Tuscaloosa. They gathered in Mobile on Sunday for an exchange of ideas of law enforcement and a dinner at Wintzell's that included Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox's first oyster, according to Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson.

They followed that up on Monday morning with a discussion of legislative priorities. That session was tempered, according to at least a couple of the city leaders present, by generally low expectations for the impending election-year legislative session.

Speaking at a Monday-morning press conference the mayors - minus Birmingham's Randall Woodfin, who was already en route back home - said they felt they were doing some good by sharing ideas on law enforcement. Most had been accompanied on the trip by their respective police chiefs and/or public safety directors.

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, among others, praised Mobile and its police department for things such as its approach to online intelligence-gathering and Project Shield, under which it negotiates access to business and private security cameras. Battle theorized that if police forces successfully share such strategies, they can create "a statewide technological corridor" for law enforcement.

Battle, a candidate for governor in 2018, also said that public safety and economic are closely related, and not just because jobs created by the latter help pay for the former. "If a company, an industry does not feel comfortable, does not feel safe in your community, they won't move here," he said.

Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said mayors and police officials also compared notes on what they're doing to improve youth outreach and community policing efforts. "We know that law enforcement is bigger than just the police force," he said of efforts to work cooperatively with troubled communities. "Each of our cities are doing something different in that arena."

Stimpson said that the growth of internet commerce continued to put pressure on cities by siphoning away sales tax revenue. Cities could try to slow the decline by reducing costs, he said, but "at the end of the day we have to deliver services to our citizens" and that meant "major challenges" were ahead.

"We have a 21st century economy, we need a revenue code that matches," said Maddox, who's also a candidate for governor.

Mobile's finance director, Paul Wesch, has been critical of the state's Simplified Sellers Use Tax (SSUT), maintaining that it shortchanges cities on their fair share of revenue from online sales. Maddox seconded that view, saying that Tuscaloosa has lost an estimated $6 million to $8 million in revenue thanks to online sales, but has recouped only about half a million from the SSUT.

Maddox said he'd like to see, in the short run, an effort to revise the SSUT so that it tracks where in the state online purchases originate and distributes proceeds accordingly. In the longer run, he said, cities have to get away from their dependence on sales tax and business license fees.

Both would require heavy lifting in the legislature. And the mayors didn't see that as a very realistic expectation for 2018. Many observers predict that because it's an election year, legislators want a brisk, controversy-free session.

"The conventional wisdom, obviously because of it being an election year, is that they'll probably not take up very many controversial issues," said Stimpson. "And a lot of issues that are really important to the state are controversial. They're not easy issues."

"I have no different take," said Strange. On the bright side, he said, cities often find themselves "playing defense" against legislative initiatives, and they might have less to worry about this year.

Maddox maintained that the economic shift toward online sales, and the accompanying loss of sales tax revenue, isn't going away. It's a long-term trend that could continue to play out for the next 20 years or more.

"We're got to have to take a longer-term look at this," Maddox said of the revenue question, or "we're going to find ourselves in a financial crisis in 10-15 years."

Replacing lost sales tax revenue means finding money elsewhere, which is sure to be a hard sell. Asked if cities and the state might ultimately have to rely more on property taxes, Maddox declined to endorse that approach specifically, or to rule it out.

"Eventually all revenues will have to be put up for discussion," he said. "There's probably a lot of different solutions that are out there."

"Those are some really big discussions. This is not going to be simple," Maddox said. "This new economy is here. But our revenue codes are solidified in statute and tradition. And it's going to take time, but you've got to begin the discussion."
Gov. Kay Ivey qualifies to run for a full term as governor on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (Erin Edgemon/eedgemon@al.com)

Gov. Kay Ivey on Monday officially qualified to run for a full term in the state of Alabama's highest office.

Ivey visited the Alabama Republican Party headquarters in Hoover to fill out the paperwork and to speak to members of the media ahead of the start of the 2018 legislative session today and her first State of the State address on Tuesday.

The primary in the governor's race is June 5. Candidates have until Feb. 9 to qualify.

"Because I am a conservative, I want to continue to fight for Alabama families," she said. "Unemployment is at an all-time, record low. We are cleaning up Montgomery, and we are restoring conservative values to state government. We will continue to fight for more jobs and higher pay, safer streets and improved schools for everyone."

She said she took over and provided continuity when "Alabama was under a dark cloud."

Gov. Robert Bentley resigned in April 2017 amid a sex scandal.

Ivey said she planned to share "more good news" during her State of the State address. She didn't speak further about Tuesday's address.

When asked about the legislative session, Ivey said the general fund budget was the main item she wants to see lawmakers pass. "Let's stay with that," she said.

Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Tom Parker also qualified to run for chief justice on Monday. He announced his run in April 2017.

Parker was elected to the Supreme Court and 2004 and reelected in 2010 and 2016.

Ivey will deliver the annual State of the State address to a joint session of the Alabama Legislature at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday in the Old House Chamber of the State Capitol.

Ivey has invited Jefferson County resident Caryn McDade as a special guest to the State of the State address, the governor's office announced on Monday. McDade, who has a learning disability, received a job through Ivey's first-ever Governor's Disability Job Fair in October 2017.

McDade had dropped out of high school due to her learning disability. She later took GED classes at the Birmingham Career Center and was referred to the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services. After learning from that agency how to seek and obtain employment, McDade attended the job fair and was hired by Southern Hospitality Home Health Care in Fultondale as a home health care aide.
State lawmakers who arrive for the start of the 2018 legislative session on Tuesday will likely be thinking more about calling campaign donors than fretting about gas taxes or prison construction.

With state offices up for election this year, political analysts anticipate a low-key and dull legislative session where bare bones issues such as approval of the annual General Fund and Education budgets will be the focus before campaigning begins in earnest.

But will the annual assembly on Goat Hill be a complete waste of time for lawmakers and taxpayers? Most observers aren't going that far in their assessments, but they don't paint a rosy picture when it comes to Alabama tackling high-profile matters.

"I know the expression has been overused, but I believe they will try to 'kick the can down the road' as much as possible," said William Stewart, professor emeritus of political sciences at the University of Alabama and a longtime observer of state politics.

Said Steve Flowers, a former Republican in the Alabama House who is currently a political analysts and writer: "It will be a lackadaisical session. Nothing gets done in a campaign year."

A host of lawmakers are also predicting a "nuts and bolts" session ahead of the June 5 primaries and the Nov. 6 general election. All statewide offices are up for election this year, including every House and Senate seat.

But lawmakers are also keenly aware of looming unknowns that could surface and force the Legislature's hand when dealing with issues that otherwise would be avoided in an election year.

The two often cited examples include the potential for multi-million dollar expenditures to beef up mental health and correctional officer staffing inside the state's beleaguered prisons and the prospects of raising the state's tax on fuel purchases to provide match money for a federal infrastructure program.

"They could have something forced on their platter by court orders or external circumstances," said Jess Brown, a retired political science professor from Athens State University, who is also a longtime observer of state politics.

State Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, and a longtime backer of reforming the state's prison systems, said he anticipates lawmakers approving an additional $30 million to $40 million for additional prison staffing. The Alabama Department of Corrections is asking for $50 million extra for next year.

The move comes as the state and the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center have yet to reach a settlement in a federal lawsuit alleging inadequacies in mental health services provided to inmates.

"We have a lot of major issues we need to tackle and we were elected to four-year terms, not three, so we need to address the federal court decision on prisons," said Ward.

State Sen. Rusty Glover, R-Semmes, who is running for lieutenant governor this year, said that if Congress approves an infrastructure program in Washington, D.C. before the end of session, lawmakers may be forced to increase the state's gasoline tax.

Alabama hasn't raised the gasoline tax beyond its current 18-cent-per-gallon charge since 1992.

But if nothing happens before the Legislature's expected April 23 adjournment, the gas tax is likely staying put, Glover said.

"I've heard from the Senate President Pro Tem (Del Marsh) and the Speaker (Mac McCutcheon) that there will not be a gas tax bill this year and if they are saying it this early, the likelihood is that it's not likely," Glover said.

State Rep. Randy Davis, R-Daphne, who is not seeking re-election this year, said he's concerned that the Legislature did not consider an increase to the gasoline tax in the past "two to three years."

He said, "there may be something coming out of Washington, D.C., that requires a significant amount of match money. We have basically little-to-no match money because of what we have done with the (past road construction) programs we have now. The bill dollar road projects, what was our match money, is going back to pay off debt."

Davis said if a federal infrastructure program is approved out of Congress quickly - a "big if," according to most political observers - then Alabama lawmakers may have to reassess the situation.

President Donald Trump is expected to roll out a massive plan this month to address boosting the nation's roads, bridges and airports.

"I don't know how it will play out in Alabama," Davis said. "If it happens quickly in January, that gives a whole different perspective to the legislative session."

Lawmakers will also keep an eye on Congress for what may happen with the reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides health insurance to children in lower-income families. The program is currently set to expire in March, and Alabama could be on the hook to fund tens of thousands of children insured under Medicaid through the CHIP program.

"We carried forward $92 million from the 2018 budget, which is available," said state Sen. Trip Pittman, R-Montrose, referring to additional resources the state carried over from last year. "The unknowns are the CHIP program and the potential additional asks for mental health and corrections."

Another unknown is whether the large number of retiring House and Senate members may be tempted with introducing controversial legislation before their terms expire.

About nine to 11 Senators are in their final legislative session, while the Alabama House will say goodbye to nearly two dozen members. Not all, however, are retiring as some will be running for higher office.

"There is a bit of a wild card in the usual predictions about election years and that is the relatively high proportion of lawmakers who do not intend to run for re-election," said Jim Carnes, policy director with the Arise Citizens' Policy Project. "Are some of them going to be more willing to take their time to pursue something a little more controversial because they are no longer concerned about campaign season? I think that has the potential to disrupt some of the predictions about normal fourth-year behavior."

Angi Horn Stalnaker, a Republican political strategist in Alabama, said one thing she anticipates is the Legislature steering clear of unnecessary "fluff" or "feel good legislation" that could get mocked on the campaign trail.

"I doubt you'd see legislation that gets us a state dessert or pizza that we've seen in the past," she said. "You'll see a hard-nosed focus on what are the constitutional duties of the Legislature which, in my mind, is a good thing."
John Meredith, of Huntsville, is a former Capitol Hill lobbyist who was recognized as one of the country's 100 most influential Black Republicans.

The GOP is a myriad of political ideology. Our factions agree on the need to address many policy issues but they do so from unique perspectives.

The immigration issue shows just how diverse segments of the party are. So, which group speaks for the party?

John Meredith is a contributing columnist for AL.com (Contributed photo)

Trump voters, many of whom have no racist bones, have forged an alliance with the Alt-Right. Donald Trump's election thrust this faction's perspective of nationalist populism into the political mainstream. Roy Moore's defeat showed us the limits of its appeal.

Their approach to immigration policy is to build a wall on America's southern border. A political alliance for only two years, do they get to speak for a party well over 150 years old?

Is the Christian Right better suited to be the voice of the GOP? There are no more honorable men in public office today than U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt and Alabama Rep. Mike Ball.

Christian voters have been a segment of the party much longer than the aforementioned faction. They have raised money for countless local and Congressional races and been a major organizational factor in the election of every GOP President since, and including, Ronald Reagan.

This faction's approach to immigration would support temporary protected status (TPS) or asylum for Christians persecuted in their homelands. Are the constraints of divine morality too limiting for Christians to speak for the party?

The passion held by the Tea Party faction make it a strong candidate for party spokesman. Many Republican voters self-identify with this group and they are particularly strong in Alabama.

Their views are echoed in Congress by members like U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks and across multiple media formats by personalities like WVNN radio host Dale Jackson in north Alabama.

One of the most influential factions, their voters routinely organize successful word of mouth and get out the vote campaigns. They take part in the operation of party institutions with many taking leadership roles within their communities.

Their position on immigration is to identify, detain and deport as many undocumented aliens as possible. Does the potential disruption of the American marketplace disqualify this faction from speaking for the party?

No GOP faction is more pro-business than conservatives. They are oldest and largest segment of the party. Many have been loyal to the party since the (Sen. Barry) Goldwater years.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby and many other policymakers remember life as the minority party in Congress and are tempered by the experience.

Initially operating from that minority status, conservatives welcomed all the other factions into the party. Finding value in what the others brought to the table, they weaved the will of the various factions into a coherent public policy agenda that has resulted in record highs on Wall Street and record low unemployment on Main Street.

The conservative approach to immigration policy is to ensure continuity of business operations for American employers through uninterrupted access to a pool of security screened foreign workers to willingly fill jobs not taken by American workers. (A program President Trump currently uses at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.)

Does the willingness of this faction to take a little less for the base so even more people can see an increase in the quality of their lives make conservatives too moderate to speak for the party?

There were 17 GOP candidates vying for the party's nomination during the last Presidential Primary. Obviously, there is a wide range of political thought within the party.

The immigration issue highlights the complexity of maintaining party unity and that goal is unattainable when factions denounce each another's perspective.

We are all Republicans. So, who gets to speak for the GOP?
The growing boycott, divest, and sanction effort around the world continues to resist international pressure from Israel.

New York City  Donald Trumps declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion among many long-time observers: The United States is not interested in a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse that adheres to international law, instead supporting Israeli demands to annex more Palestinian land and create an ethnonationalist state with as few Palestinians as possible.

Meanwhile, Palestinians continue to be forcibly removed from their homes in East Jerusalem to create facts on the ground that serve as Israeli talking points for why Jerusalem is already Israels de facto capital.

With both Trump and US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley displaying just how far they are willing to bully other nations into falling in line, ordinary activists are left to contemplate how they can force Israels hand to abide by international law.

Here is where the BDS movement comes in. It was launched in 2005 by more than 250 Palestinian civil society organisations calling for the international community to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. The movements founders closely studied the Boycott Apartheid South Africa movement that was launched in the 1950s and gained traction in the 80s.

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While that movement grew for 30 years before reaching global prominence, BDS for Palestine has significantly affected the global conversation on Israels occupation in just 12 years.

Its success is partly due to a focus on tactics rather than a clear-cut solution, giving ordinary citizens of any country the ability to participate without trapping themselves within the parameters of the medias controlled discourse of the peace process.

This is not to suggest the BDS movement does not have broad goals. Its three demands are an end to the occupation of Palestine, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees to their homes.

In contrast to the endless, abstract debates of one-state versus two-state solutions, the BDS movement highlights the most pressing reality of the conflict: the suffering of a population at the hands of a government intent on denying them rights on the basis of their ethnicity.





This emphasis on Palestinian human rights has allowed the movement to build alliances with local movements across the world.

There are prominent examples, such as the alliance with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, but also many others worldwide.

In Rio de Janeiro, I saw local BDS activists team up with a movement from Brazils favelas to protest the use of the caveirao, an armoured military vehicle that Brazilian police special forces use when entering impoverished neighbourhoods.

Dozens of young children, residents of the favelas, were killed by these vehicles, which are imported from Israel. In fact, these elite security forces, which have been linked to civilian deaths among Brazils lower class in the favelas, are often trained in Israel.

Activists have pointed out that police forces in several other countries, such as the US and Argentina, accused of using excessive force, have also trained in Israel.

They have also exposed records of Israeli arms sales to Myanmar, a country accused of crimes amounting to genocide, as well as South Sudan, India, and other states accused of atrocities against their populations.

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These connections have convinced local activists of the connectedness of their struggle with the Palestinians. This has, in turn, had the effect of making Palestine a mainstream, progressive issue  at least in Western countries.

However, the ascendancy of Palestine as a prominent issue has come as the result of years of small victories and some lost battles.

In 2017, the popular UK band Radiohead insisted on performing in Tel Aviv despite calls for a boycott. The performance was labelled by the media to be controversial, not only because of the expected protest among pro-Palestine activists, but also because of the outcry among other communities of progressive artists  showing that support for Palestinian rights is no longer the fringe position it once seemed to be.

To be sure, there remain tremendous battles along the way for this movement, particularly when it comes to the Israel lobby in the US, which has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting BDS on college campuses, while trying to outlaw it both nationally and on a local level.

In 2017, the lobby was even able to make relief efforts for some victims of Hurricane Harvey in Dickinson, Texas, conditional upon an agreement that they do not support BDS.

However, these efforts empowered the local movement, offering it even more publicity. Whereas the chances of a city in Texas hearing about BDS would have been minimal before, the move brought national media attention and controversy, forcing Dickinson to remove the requirement for hurricane relief aid.

The challenges along the way for the growing BDS movement are many. Although some consider its decentralisation a strength, the movement lacks charismatic leadership, proper funding, and organisation required to mount a significant challenge to the powerful Israeli economy.

As right-wing ideologies and neoliberal policies ascendant in many countries push them into further military and economic alliances with Israel, the future of the BDS movement is at once full of formidable challenges and unparalleled opportunity.
Talks between South and North Korea come after increasing international pressure Pyongyang spearheaded by the US.

On New Years day, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un delivered an address full of mixed messages. He issued nuclear threats but also offered to engage in a dialogue with South Korea, restore a hotline between the two capitals, and schedule talks at the demilitarised zone in Panmunjom. He even suggested that North Korean nationals participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

It is difficult to say what pushed the North Korean leader to relax his otherwise belligerent rhetoric. There is little intelligence available on the inner workings of his regime and these days even high-ranking visitors from China, North Koreas main ally, are denied the courtesy of an audience with Kim Jong-un.

Nevertheless, it seems that Washingtons carrot and stick strategy might have worked. Although most of the worlds attention has been focused on US President Donald Trumps provocative tweets on North Korea, his administration has been quite busy working on the issue on various fronts.

Talks and military pressure

During a June 2017 meeting with then newly elected President Moon Jae-in, President Trump stated that the era of strategic patience is over, which clearly informed Kim Jong-un and other stakeholders that the failed polices of past US administrations would not be repeated.

Subsequently, the Trump administration led international efforts to increase pressure on North Korea. This includes United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions in August, September, and December of 2017- a significant achievement given the tensions between the US and Russia on Ukraine and Syria, and between the US and China on a wide range of security and trade issues. Meanwhile, Washington put North Korea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

At the August ASEAN Regional Forum, the Trump administration also urged the ten-nation bloc not to serve as a safe place for North Korean business and diplomats to conduct illicit activities.

At the same time, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on a number of occasions reiterated Washingtons readiness to sit down for talks with Pyongyang. In December, he even declared that the US was willing to talk to North Korea without any precondition.

The US has kept up military drills in the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula, including, Key Resolve, Foal Eagle, and the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises in the spring and summer. In December, the Vigilant Ace 18 exercise brought into South Korea the largest concentration of fifth-generation fighter jets.

With military exercises an important part of a comprehensive strategy, the Trump administration is unlikely to accommodate calls to pause military exercises in return for a North Korea pause in nuclear and missile tests. However, Washington conceded to postpone military drills until after the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea.

South Koreas weak institutions

Often overlooked as a motivation for North Korea accelerating its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in recent years is the institutional instability (despite its economic strength) of South Korea. In recent years, Seoul has been shaken by the arrest of a member of the National Assembly accused of operating a North-Korea-sponsored plot to overthrow the government; days-long filibusters; corruption investigations of politicians and business leaders; the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye; and an early presidential election.

When President Moon took office in May 2017, he faced a number of challenges, including North Koreas increasing nuclear and ballistic tests, a US president with an aggressive approach to security and trade issues, and preparations for the February 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

President Moons left-of-centre predecessors were manipulated by Kim Jong-uns father Kim Jong-il into providing cash, food aid, and investments. He will have to pursue a firmer position if he is to stand up to Pyongyangs aggressive posturing.

President Moon and his compatriots want to show the world that despite North Koreas threats, South Korea remains capable of hosting the Winter Olympics. Seoul was already the victim of an unsuccessful North Korean plot to disrupt the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. In 1987 two North Korean agents put a bomb on a Seoul-bound aeroplane killing 115 people on board; the explosion was meant to wreck the Seoul airport, but the device exploded early.

Today, South Korea certainly would welcome the Norths participation as a competitor rather than have the North excluded as an enemy. However, this weeks meetings with North Korea and its participation in the Olympics will test President Moons wisdom and policies; he should avoid giving Kim Jong-un the military and public relations victories that he seeks.

China and Japan

Frequently criticised by President Trump for its failure to enforce sanctions, China now claims it will enhance UN sanctions enforcement, with a recent pledge to deal seriously with violations.

China must balance its resentment of US sanctions on Chinese businesspeople who transact with North Korea, anger at South Koreas deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Defense system, and fears of a North Korea regime collapse with the more important goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. While it appears that China played no role in this weeks developments, it can be a productive player on the Korean Peninsula in 2018 if it wishes to do so.

Japan can also play an important role, but it needs work on its relations with South Korea. A wide gap in personal political ideologies exists between the conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and progressive President Moon.

Former President Parks views on North Korea policy aligned with Abes, and under Parks leadership South Korea and Japan reached an agreement in 2015 on compensation for the crimes committed against women by the Japanese military in Korea during World War II.

Seouls plan to re-negotiate the agreement appeals to President Moons base but hurts relations with Tokyo. Amid rising nationalism, which will continue to increase as the enthronement of a new emperor in 2019 approaches, Japan is likely to watch this weeks developments with wariness.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Trump administration says recipients of Temporary Protected Status have 18 months to leave or find a legal way to stay.

New York, USA  Members of the Salvadoran community in the US have expressed their devastation after President Donald Trumps government said it would stop providing legal status and the ability to work to some 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador.

The move, announced on Monday by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), gave Salvadoran holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) until September 9, 2019, to leave or find a legal way to stay in the country.

The US government had originally granted Salvadorans special protection status after two earthquakes killed nearly 8,000 people in 2001.

Based on careful consideration of available information, including recommendations received as part of an inter-agency consultation process, the Secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist, the DHS said in a statement.

Devastating

Rosa Cecilia Martinez, originally from El Congo in El Salvador, said she had no words to describe her feelings upon hearing the news.





I dont know how to express how devastating this is, Martinez, a single mother of two, told Al Jazeera.

Its devastating to know we only have 18 months left in the country.

In its statement, the DHS also said it had determined that El Salvador could successfully reintegrate its nationals.

However, TPS holders said the Central American country was not ready to receive the thousands of families that would be forced to return.

Our country is in chaos, said Martinez, who migrated to the US in 1998 aged 16 and received temporary legal protection from deportation under TPS in 2001.

The schools are saturated and there is insecurity. How are they going to receive the thousands of families and give us education, healthcare and security to us and our children?

Unfair decision

El Salvador, home to about six million, is often described as one of the worlds deadliest countries. In 2016, it averaged 14.4 murders a day.

High levels of insecurity, coupled with education challenges and limited employment opportunities, lead large numbers of people to consider migrating elsewhere.

Three hundred people leave El Salvador daily as migrants in search of a better future, argued Edwin Murillo, who lives in the US state of Texas but is originally from San Salvador.

If 300 people are leaving daily, because the living conditions are not suitable, then how is it possible that the Trump administration has decided to force thousands of Salvadorans to return? Murillo, a member of the National TPS Alliance, a group lobbying US Congress to provide immigrants with a pathway to permanent residency, told Al Jazeera.

In terms of demographics, work and education, El Salvador is not prepared to receive our families, he added, calling the DHSs move an unfair decision which overlooked Salvadorans contributions to this country.

There is nothing

During his election campaign, Trump had promised to overturn some of the immigration policies of his predecessors.

The DHSs move on Monday came months after his administration had also eliminated special protection status for thousands of Haitian and Nicaraguan TPS recipients.





Salvadorans were until recently the largest immigrant group protected under the programme.

Norma Portos, an immigration lawyer who has worked with Salvadoran TPS holders living in New York, said the decision came down to determining that the original conditions for providing the temporary legal residency and deportation relief were no longer valid.

The Trump administration claims it has done all the necessary studies and assessments to determine it is no longer necessary to renew TPS status for Salvadoran immigrants. But this determination remains relative because we can see that living conditions remain poor in El Salvador, Portos told Al Jazeera.

Perhaps the Salvadoran government has been able to recover from the 2001 earthquake, but it is not ready to receive its nationals because of the violence and insecurity in the country, she added.

As for Martinez, she said she was starting to think about returning to El Congo in the wake of Mondays announcement.

Were she forced to return, Martinez said that she would leave her two children behind.

It is very dangerous in my hometown, she said.

If I return to El Congo, my life would plummet into uncertainty. There is no work, there is no security, there is nothing.
Egypt will hold presidential elections in March, with a possible runoff in April.

Egypts presidential election will take place on March 26-28, with a runoff to be held from April 24-26 if needed.

At a news conference in Cairo on Monday, Egypts national election commission said the results would be announced on April 2  or, in the event of a runoff if no candidate secures more than 50 percent of the vote  on May 1.

So far, two candidates have stated their intentions to run: Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and opposition leader, and Essam Heggy, an Egyptian space scientist who served as the countrys adviser for scientific affairs from 2013 to 2014.

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Current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has not yet confirmed whether he will run for a second and final term  in accordance with the countrys constitution  but he is widely expected to.

In an interview with CNBC in November, Sisi said he would only attempt to remain president if the Egyptian people wanted him to.

It doesnt suit me as a president to stay one more day against the will of the Egyptians, he said.

As Egypts army chief, Sisi became president in 2013 after removing the Muslim Brotherhoods Mohamed Morsi in a coup. He went on to win by a landslide in the 2014 presidential elections.

Under Sisi, human rights in Egypt have deteriorated, with organisations reporting at least 60,000 people have been imprisoned since the general came to power.

There have also been reports of forced disappearances and a clampdown on press freedom.

Arrests and accusations

On Sunday, former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik pulled out of the presidential race, saying after a long absence from the country he was no longer best-equipped to lead.

I saw that I will not be the ideal person to lead the state during the coming period, Shafik said in a statement on Twitter.

Shafik had previously shared his plan to run in an exclusive video message to Al Jazeera and was seen as a potential challenger to Sisi.

The New York Times quoted one of Shafiks lawyers, who asked not to be named, as saying Shafik had been forced to withdraw by the government, which threatened to investigate previous charges of corruption against him.





A former air force commander, Shafik served as prime minister for one month during the 2011 Arab Spring.

He was narrowly defeated in the 2012 presidential elections by Morsi, who subsequently issued a warrant for Shafiks arrest.

Shafik fled to the UAE and was tried in absentia and found guilty of corruption charges. However, he was later acquitted.

After returning to Egypt, following deportation from the UAE, Shafiks family voiced concerns he had been kidnapped by Egyptian authorities.

Shafik subsequently appeared on television to deny this.

Another potential candidate, Colonel Ahmed Konsowa, was arrested in December after announcing plans to run.

Konsowa was sentenced to six years in prison for stating political opinions contrary to the requirements of military order, his lawyer told AFP news agency.
Google honours Mary Ann Evans, who participated in more than 38 films, and stood out in Bollywood.

Described as fearless and hailed as the original Bollywood stuntwoman of the 1930s, actress Mary Ann Evans would have been 110 today.

In her honour, Google is changing its logo in India to a doodle, or illustration, of her and action movie posters of old-time Hindi cinema. This is her story:

Circus stuntwoman

Born in 1908 in Perth, Australia, Marry Ann Evans moved to India with her family, where she later become a star of the Bollywood cinema.

After learning stunts as a circus performer in Peshawar, Evans joined a touring dance troupe in Bombay, and then made it to the Zarco Circus that led her to perform in movies.

Evans changed her name to Nadia on the advice of an Armenian fortune teller, and soon after found her winning formula: Fearless Nadia, the action heroine.

Her first lead role in a movie was in the film Hunterwali, in 1935. Fearless Nadia blasted onto the screen performing all of her own stunts.

Over the years, Nadia performed in over 38 films, swinging from chandeliers, leaping from speeding trains, and even taming lions.

Feminist actress
Hailed for constructing the first synthetic gene, Har Gobind Khorana would have been 96 on January 9.

Hailed for constructing the first synthetic gene, Nobel Prize winner Har Gobind Khorana would have been 96 on Tuesday, January 9  thats the date of birth in his documents, although the exact date remains uncertain.

In the Indian-American scientists honour, Google is changing its logo in 13 countries to a doodle  or illustration  of him and his DNA work.

This is his story:

Village origin

Khorana was born in a small village of about 100 residents in Raipur. He was a member of practically the only literate family in his village  Khoranas father taught his five children to read and write.

Having advanced his education through scholarships , Khorana received his Bachelors degree in 1943, and his Masters in 1945 at the Punjab University in Lahore.

In 1948, he completed his PhD after being awarded a scholarship by the Indian government to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Liverpool in the UK.

He then went to the Swiss city of Zurich to work with Professor Vladimir Prelog for one year. In Khoranas biography, Prelog is credited for moulding immeasurably his thought and philosophy towards science, work, and effort.

Married to Swiss Esther Elizabeth Sibler, Khoranas biography praised Sibler for bringing a consistent sense of purpose  at a time when [ Har ] Khorana felt out of place everywhere and at home nowhere.





Freedom

A job offer in 1952 took Khorana to the University of British Columbia in Canada , where he initiated his Nobel Prize-winning work. During his time there he was offered all the freedom in the world to do his own research, according to Gordon M Shrum, a Canadian scientist in British Columbia.

At the University of British Columbia, Khorana and a group of scientists began to work in the field of biology. Khorana was an expert on the chemical synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids.

In 1960, he moved to the US , where started working at the University of Wisconsin. He was granted American citizenship in 1966.

Two years later, Khorana, Robert W Holley and Marshall W Nirenberg were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.

But this was not his only accolade. In 1972, Khorana was also recognised for the construction of the first artificial gene, while four years later he announced that he had gotten an artificial gene to function within a bacterial cell.

Among his several recognitions, Khorana also received the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the National Medal of Science.

Khorana died on November 9, 2011. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a professor emeritus. He was survived by his children, Julia and Dave.

You by Gordon

can have all the freedom to do what you want, but we dont have much in terms of facilities.]
The Rukban refugee camp has received UN aid from the Jordanian side in a one-off delivery.

Authorities in Jordan have allowed a one-off delivery of UN humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of displaced persons from Syria along the two countries border, according to Jordanian state media.

The remote Rukban refugee camp, which is home to at least 55,000 refugees, received food and other essential items by crane lift on Monday.

The aid drop came after a request from the United Nations amid concerns about poor living conditions in the makeshift camp, where many are suffering from malnutrition.

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The refugees were trapped there when Jordan sealed its border with Syria following an attack on its soldiers there that was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in June 2016.

The move impeded delivery of life-saving humanitarian aid and severely restricted humanitarian agencies capacity to operate there.

Several months of talks between Jordanian officials and the UN, which was asked to present a plan for the delivery, led to the agreement for the one-time aid drop.

According to the Petra state news agency, the delivery on Monday was assisted by Jordanian army and foreign ministry staff.

Officials in Jordan have previously said that Rukban camp will never be a Jordanian responsibility, insisting said that aid must come from the Syrian side.

By using a crane to drop the aid onto the informal settlement, Jordan can continue to maintain this position as it has not had direct contact with the camp or its inhabitants.

Jordan is concerned that there may be ISIL sleeper cells within Rukban camp.

An estimated 1.5 million Syrians have fled to Jordan since the beginning of the civil war in 2011.








The National Human Rights Committee of Qatar (NHCR) calls the UN report proof the blockade is illegal.

A blockade against Qatar by several fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is arbitrary and negatively impacting the people of the region, according to a new UN investigation.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, as well as Egypt, cut diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar in June last year, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Doha strongly denies the charge.

In November 2017, representatives from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) visited Qatar, where they met with some 20 governmental and civil society groups, as well as people who had been affected by the blockade.

Following the missions visit from 17 to 24 November, OHCHR issued a report and sent a copy to the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar (NHCR).

In a press conference on Monday, Ali bin Smaikh al-Marri, head of NHRC, said the study was proof the blockade is illegal.

This report shows without a spec of doubt that these procedures undertaken by blockading countries are not mere diplomatic severing of relations, they are not just an economic boycott, he said.

These are unilateral, abusive, arbitrary measures that are impacting citizens and expats in Qatar.

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Marri said the report described the measures taken against Qatar by the countries imposing the blockade as arbitrary and negatively infringing on human rights.

He also said the Saudi-led groups actions amounted to economic warfare.

According to Marri, the OHCHR had requested a visit to the countries imposing the blockade before issuing the report, but never received a reply.

Al Jazeeras Mohamed Vall, reporting from the Qatari capital, said the report was seen in Doha as a victory for human rights, and for the citizens who have been affected by the blockade.

For the Qataris, this is the first official confirmation by one of the major UN institutions, of what Qatar has been reiterating during the last several months, he added.

Vall noted that the OHCHR report said the sanctions imposed by the Saudi-led group have not distinguished between Qatars government and Qatari citizens.

He added that the investigation had also found that the measures not only impacted Qataris with interests in the blockading countries, but also citizens of those states residing in Qatar.

The NHCR has previously said that the blockade is breaking up families and disrupting young peoples education.

Before the crisis, GCC citizens enjoyed a great deal of freedom of movement between the six member states, and close tribal ties, meaning that over generations, thousands of intermarriages have been celebrated between Qataris and other GCC citizens.

Visits between these family members have also been made harder, leading to the NHCR previously calling the blockade worse than the Berlin wall.

Those claims by the NHCR were supported by Amnesty International, which, in June, accused the Gulf states of toying with the lives of thousands of people in their dispute with Qatar.
Seventeen relatives of Salman al-Awda have been banned from leaving the kingdom, family member says.

Saudi Arabian authorities have imposed a travel ban on 17 relatives of prominent scholar Salman al-Awda, who has been held for nearly four months, Human Rights Watch reported.

A member of the Awda family said in a statement on Sunday that a relative discovered the ban when he tried to leave the kingdom.

The customs officer reportedly confirmed to the family member that the royal palace had imposed the ban for unspecified reasons.

Saudi authorities arrested Salman al-Awda, a prominent figure of the Awakening movement, on September 7.

The family member told HRW that Awda was being held over his refusal to comply with an order by Saudi authorities to tweet a specific text to support the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar.

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Instead, Awda posted a tweet on September 9, saying: May God harmonise between their hearts for the good of their people  an apparent call for reconciliation between the Gulf countries, HRW said.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed a boycott against Qatar on June 5, accusing Doha of aiding terrorists and having close ties with Iran. Qatar denies the allegations.

The Awda family member cited by HRW said that authorities permitted Salman al-Awda only one phone call in October.

Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salmans efforts to reform the Saudi economy and society are bound to fail if his justice system scorns the rule of law by ordering arbitrary arrests and punishments, said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW.

Theres no justification for punishing family members of a detainee without showing even the slightest evidence or accusation of wrongdoing on their part.

According to HRW, Awda was among the first of dozens of people arrested in mid-September as part of a crackdown against what Saudi authorities said were those acting for the benefit of foreign parties against the security of the kingdom and its interests.

Saudi Arabia carried out another wave of arrests in November against people they accused of corruption and held many at five-star hotels until they agree to turn over assets to the state.

Awdas brother, Khaled, was also held after he tweeted about his brothers detention, media reported. He remains in detention, according to HRW.

If Mohammad bin Salman wants to show that a new era has begun in Saudi Arabia, a refreshing first step would be the release of activists and dissidents who have never been charged with a recognisable crime and should never have gone to jail in the first place, Whitson said.
At least 23 people have been killed in Syrian and Russian air raids on the outskirts of the countrys capital Damascus.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the figure includes six children and four women killed in Mondays attacks on the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta district.

The monitor, which gathers its information from a network of sources inside Syria, added since December 29 a total of 126 people have been killed in air strikes on the besieged area, including 29 children and 28 women.

Al Jazeera was not able to independently verify the figures.

The only ambulance centre in the residential neighbourhood of Madira in Eastern Ghouta was completely destroyed, an Al Jazeera correspondent reported. He said several aid workers were also wounded in the strike.

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For the government of President Bashar al-Assad and his ally Russia, the proximity of Eastern Ghouta to the capital makes it a key target.

The area is under the control of groups loyal to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a loose conglomeration of US and Turkish backed armed brigades made up of Syrian army defectors and ordinary civilians.

Since 2013, the government has maintained a suffocating siege on the area in an effort to weaken the rebel groups and continues to shell it despite a so-called de-escalation agreement.

The deal  reached last year by Turkey, Russia and Iran  was meant to put an end to hostilities there and to allow humanitarian supplies into the enclave.

The area is one of the last rebel strongholds in the country and is home to some 400,000 people. The four-year siege has led to a major humanitarian crisis, with severe shortages of food and medicine.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, an adviser to a coalition of medical charities operating in Syria, told Al Jazeera from the UK city of Salisbury that more than 120 children were in need of urgent medical care in Eastern Ghouta, noting the last week and a half has been horrific in terms of the amount of attacks.

Government assaults on the district have been frequent in recent weeks and are believed to be part of the Syrian governments strategy to retake rebel-held positions.

Military base capture

Earlier on Monday, the Syrian army reclaimed a military site on the outskirts of Damascus from rebel forces, according to the Syrian Observatory.

Government troops managed to open a road on Sunday to the Military Vehicles administration base in the city of Harasta in the Eastern Ghouta, freeing some 200 troops trapped inside the compound, the British-based monitor said.

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The government forces had been besieged by rebel fighters from the Ahrar al-Sham group and al-Rahman Corps since an offensive on December 31, during which anti-government forces expanded their control over the site.

Some 160 pro-government and rebel fighters have been killed in fighting over the base since December 31.

Rebel forces stormed the site in November 2017 in an attempt to prevent government strikes on rebel-held enclaves in Eastern Ghouta.

Car bomb attack

Elsewhere in Syria, at least 43 people, including 27 civilians, were killed in a car bomb attack on Sunday in the countrys northwestern city of Idlib, according to SOHR.

At least 14 of those killed were children and seven were women, the monitor said.

The blast, for which there has been no claim of responsibility so far, struck the military headquarters of the Ajnad al-Kavkaz armed group, the SOHR reported.

It added it was not clear whether the attack was specifically targeting the groups base.

The rebel-held province of Idlib has seen increased violence in recent weeks as President Assad intensifies his efforts to gain control over the region.
PM declares victory for ruling UBP, but fails to achieve outright majority in parliament, unofficial results show.

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) is poised for another coalition government, after none of the parties managed an outright majority in the snap parliamentary elections, according to unofficial results.

The conservative National Unity Party (UBP), led by Prime Minister Huseyin Ozgurgun, came in first place  with 36 percent of the votes  ahead of the centre-left, pro-unification Republican Turkish Party (CTP) at 21 percent, local media reported on Monday, based on an unofficial count.

The UBP, which has been in power for 27 years, since the establishment of the TRNC, will need to form a coalition government again in the 50-member parliament.

The UBP has emerged as the biggest party by a wide margin, Ozgurgun said while declaring victory on Monday. We are preparing for new days with the power the people have given to the UBP.

The newly-formed right-wing Peoples Voice Party (HP) managed 17 percent of the votes in its first election, followed by previous ruling coalition partner, Democratic Party (DP).

Meanwhile, the left-wing Communal Democracy Party (CDP) of President Mustafa Akinci is projected to win only three seats.

Official results for Sundays vote are expected to be announced late on Monday.

More than 190,000 people were registered to vote. Ballots were cast at more than 700 polling stations across the country.

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The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is split between Turkish Cypriots in the north and Greek Cypriots in the south.

The TRNC, which has a functioning parliament and state institutions, unilaterally declared independence in 1983, breaking away from the Republic of Cyprus, and is only recognised by Turkey.

Cyprus had been practically divided since 1974, when Turkey militarily intervened on the island in response to a brief Greek-inspired coup.

The UBP, which was the largest partner of the previous right-wing coalition with the DP, has traditionally advocated for keeping good relations with Turkey.

The party wants to maintain the Mediterranean islands status quo, rather than settling the long-standing dispute to reunify Greek and Turkish Cypriot parts.

Along with the right-wing DP, which was founded by ex-UBP members, the UBP gave hundreds of TRNC citizenships to Turkey nationals weeks before the poll, in a move seen as a bid to increase its voter share.

Since the establishment of the de facto TRNC, the north has been described as the occupied part of Cyprus by the United Nations Security Council.

Repeated diplomatic efforts to end the partition have failed, as did the latest round of talks in Switzerland in July to reunify the island, despite efforts by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has vowed to continue its work after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for it to be scrapped.

In a series of tweets on Sunday evening, a spokesperson for the UN agency said it would continue providing help to Palestinian refugees until the international community comes up with a solution for their plight.

UNRWA is assigned by the General Assembly to continue its services until a fair solution to Palestinian refugees issue is reached, UNRWA official Sami Mushasha noted.





His comments came shortly after Netanyahu called for the agency to be scrapped, accusing it of helping fictitious refugees.

UNRWA is an organisation that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem and the narrative of the right-of-return, as it were, in order to eliminate the State of Israel, the Israeli leader said, adding the development agency needed to pass from the world.

The agency plays a significant role in supporting Palestinian refugees with access to education, healthcare, social services and employment in the occupied Palestinian territories and in neighbouring states.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in historic Palestine by Zionist militias during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and later by the Israeli army during the 1967 war.

Today, those refugees and their descendants total more than five million people.

Netanyahus comments come less than a week after US President Donald Trump threatened to cut off American funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) for not showing enough appreciation or respect towards the United States.

With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them? Trump asked.

Analysts have warned that if the US leader follows through with the threat, and the withdrawal of aid includes funds earmarked for UNRWA, there would be a big strain on the PA to cover those costs.
French President Emmanuel Macron is on a three-day visit with trade topping his China agenda.

It is being described as a new stage in French diplomacy  along with potential trade deals being signed.

President Emmanuel Macron is on his first official visit to China and economic issues are the focus of the three-day trip.

Climate change is also a key topic for cooperation between both countries, after President Donald Trump announced the US is pulling out of the Paris climate change accord.

Macron is backing Chinese President Xi Jinpings new silk road project. The One Belt, One Road initiative aims to extend Chinas reach across Asia and beyond by using a network of new railways, ports, and other infrastructure.

Macron also wants to strengthen French partnerships with China, particularly in Africa.

Macron said France has the experience of unilateral imperialism in Africa and wants to help China avoid what he called Frances African mistakes.

So, what does the French connection with China mean for both Asia and the world?

Presenter: Laura Kyle

Guests:

Einar Tangen  Economic Affairs Adviser to Chinese government

Barthelemy Courmont  Director of Research, French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs

Graham Ong-Webb  Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University
Editor's Note: Over winter break, meteorologists said a temperature drop and expected rain could cause snow to fall in Gainesville. Though that didnt come to pass, we at the Alligator wanted to take you back to Jan. 19, 1977 when snow did fall.

Snow! Heaviest snow ever causes stir in Gainesville

By Dennis Kneale, Alligator Staff Writer

Its snowing in Florida. Class is dismissed.

With that, journalism professor Jon Roosenraad turned loose 40 students  some of them already hanging out windows in the stadium to catch elusive snowflakes  to celebrate the first heavy snowfall in Gainesville in five years.

This is the heaviest snow since Ive been here for 30 years, Gainesville Mayor Jim Richardson, a UF business professor, said. Ive seen a little bit drift down three or four times, but not like this.

And while the precipitation was far from blizzard proportions, it did cause telephone lines to become snowed under with callers talking about the Florida flurries.

Phones on the UF campus and in other parts of Gainesville could receive incoming calls only because heavy phone traffic locked telephone wires and kept phone users from getting dial tones, a company spokeswoman said.

One Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company employee said, The last time the phone lines were this bad was when President Kennedy was shot.

While temperatures dropped below 20 degrees early Tuesday morning, students and other residents in five apartment complexes were left without light and heat from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. when a wire fell into transmission and distribution lines.

WCJB weatherman Mel Turner said Tuesdays snow was the first for Gainesville since 1972.

As far as I know, this is the heaviest snowfall ever in Gainesville. Id have to say weve got a legitimate snowfall, Turner said.

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Temperatures were expected to go as low as the mid-teens Tuesday night and are projected to get only as high as the mid-40s today.

Alachua County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Ray Newman said Tuesday the snow may cause slick roads in and outside Gainesville.

I imagine the snow will cause some problems for the drivers (Tuesday night) who dont know how to handle the roads, but the displaced Yankees we have here will have no difficulty, Newman said.

Meanwhile wispy snowflakes drifted and stuck onto frigid cars and the damp ground.

Residents in the Village Park apartment complex on Southwest 16th Avenue stood outside in the cold yelling and taking pictures of one another in the snow.

The Murphree Commons turned into a snowball battlefield as students happily pelted one another with the white stuff thats not supposed to fall in Florida.

About 100 students gathered on the Plaza of the Americas to walk amidst the snowfall  and continue to grin at one another.

Ben Gross was one Northerner who enjoyed the snow like everyone else.

I havent seen snow in four years. I love it. Ive been praying for it, its outrageous, Gross said.

People are nicer when it snows out, Donna Desimmone said.

But UF Executive Vice President Harold Hanson wasnt impressed.

I was born in Minnesota, raised in Wisconsin and lived in Norway. I dont see any snow, he said Tuesday.

A copy of the front page of The Independent Florida Alligator from Jan. 19, 1977.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted a UF-run project $8.7 million for a five-year research project on food security and poverty alleviation efforts in Africa.

This grant is in addition to a $49 million grant IFAS received in 2015 from the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Adegbola Adesogan, the director of UFs Feed The Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems.

The funding goes to Adesogans lab, which researches topics dealing with the food and health of vulnerable people. UFs Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences announced the grant Wednesday.

The Gates additional funding will allow researchers to improve livestock feeds and food safety in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, Adesogan said.

We want this work to be sustained after the life of the grant, he said. We dont want to do research that just sits on the shelf.

Arie Havelaar, a Department of Animal Sciences professor, said funding will allow his team to study diseases transmitted from animals to humans to minimize childhood exposure to harmful bacteria found in chicken feces.

The process of selecting what would be funded has been difficult and very involved, he said.

Proper childhood health and development is related to livestock productivity, Adesogan said. The research will focus on identifying efficient feeding methods for livestock as they are versatile sources of capital, income and food in the community.

Contact Elliott Nasby at enasby@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter at @NasbyElliott.

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Along with more than a dozen other universities, UF received an anonymous email Tuesday that threatened violence on campus unless the writer received a payment of 1.2 bitcoin, or about $19,735, police said.

The email, sent to UF President Kent Fuchs, said threats would start at noon Wednesday if regular bitcoin payments were not made, University Police Sgt. Eddie King said. Florida Department of Law Enforcement and FBI are looking into the threat along with local police, though King said there likely is no threat.

Since the initial email, no violence or threatening incidents have been reported.

Nothing has happened, King said. I would say it was a scam.

While exact details of the threat remain private due to ongoing state and federal investigations, King said the email described using pipe bombs on campus and targeting students and faculty.

The writer of the email, who referred to themselves as Only fair, sent police instructions on how to purchase and deposit bitcoin, King said.

On Thursday, the University of West Florida, one of the universities who received the threat, released a public safety notice urging people to remain vigilant and be aware of their surroundings.

UF spokesperson Janine Sikes said students should remain alert upon returning to classes despite the threat likely being a scam.

As always, we urge anyone seeing suspicious activity on campus to report it to the University Police Department, Sikes said.

Contact David Hoffman at dhoffman@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter at @hoffdavid123.

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As Paula Delpech searched for a new pair of ankle boots at Macys, she worried about what the store closure means for the stores' employees and the economy.

What else do we have but Macys? the UF nursing professor said.

The Oaks Mall location is one of 11 stores closing nationwide in 2018, as part of the franchises 100-store closure announced in August 2016, according to a press release from Macys. The historic downtown Miami location is the only other Macys closing in Florida. Store associates were notified about the closure Jan. 3.

A clearance sale in both Florida stores will begin Monday and continue through mid-March.

The Oaks Mall has not announced what will replace Macys, a mall representative, Marissa Ellenby, wrote in an email.

Dillard's recently announced it intends to expand into Macy's current space, doubling its size, according to the Gainesville Sun.

The closures will allow the company to focus on both brick and mortar and online shopping equally, the Macys press release said. The corporation expects to save $300 million by closing the 11 stores in 2018 and reducing production cost.

Gloria Parker, a UF Health Shands Hospital nurse, shops at Macys for after-Christmas sales and is disappointed to see the store close.

Im from the older generation, and we never did online shopping, she said. I know people think its convenient, but I want to go pick up things, feel textures. Things like that you cant do online.

Macy's Locations Closing

Laguna Hills Mall, Laguna Hills, CA

Westside Pavilion, Los Angeles, CA

Novato (Furniture), Novato, CA

Stonestown Galleria, San Francisco, CA

The Oaks Mall, Gainesville, FL

Miami (downtown), Miami, FL

Magic Valley Mall, Twin Falls, ID

Honey Creek Mall, Terre Haute, IN

Birchwood Mall, Fort Gratiot Township, MI

Fountain Place, Cincinnati, OH

Burlington Town Center, Burlington, VT

Contact Amanda Rosa at arosa@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter @amandanicrosa.

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This story was updated Jan. 12, 2017, to include Dillard's intention to expand into Macy's space.
Hum, ho  the Trump-haters have found a new authority figure to swear that the man is crazy. Rocketing to fame thanks to the objective media today is a woman with the extraordinary name of Bandy X. Lee.

Dr. Lee, M.D. is now in danger of having her license pulled by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for engaging in ethically prohibited long-distance diagnosis without even interviewing the supposed patient in person. In real psychiatry, not the imaginary kind peddled by the NYT-WaPo Axis of Lies, psychiatric diagnosis is serious business, which normally involves a private interview with the clear, legal consent of the patient, an explicit set of criteria covered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the APA, and an absolute guarantee of privacy in the patient-doctor relationship. Dr. Lee violated all those rules, and in the real world (not in the media narrative), that means her career is at an end. I've seen licenses pulled for much less than that.

That is presumably why Dr. Lee's claimed team of fellow psychiatrists have never been named  if they exist. Lee uses the term "we" in claiming that her extremely dubious "diagnosis" (which does not exist in the DSM) is backed by an unspecified group of fellow "experts." A real licensing board would suspend her for abusing her license to practice for obvious political payoffs, thereby bringing her profession to public ridicule and contempt.

So what are Trump's psychiatric symptoms?

Lee's Exhibit A is Trump's response to Kim III (a paranoid who is never criticized by Democrats). Kim III boasted about the "big button" on his desk, to launch ICBMs tipped with nukes at the United States of America, Japan, South Korea, and quite possibly China, all within range of North Korea's ICBMs. In response to Kim's threat, Mr. Trump tweeted:

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

To Americans who know Trump's jargon, his Twitter response sounded like "well, mine is bigger than yours!"

Trump talks and tweets like that, and his main political motivation is to dominate the 24-hour news cycle. Trump's provocative tweets got him elected by giving him close to full control over the news cycle, rather than getting stomped by the liberal media every day. In politics, Trump's tweets constitute the only way any Republican has managed to dominate the news since Dwight D. Eisenhower. The newsies are all stacked with Democrat activists who will do anything  including suborning the FBI and IRS  to destroy Republicans. Trump has found the answer, and Lee's current smear against POTUS is designed to destroy Trump's favorite weapon, the off-the-cuff Twitter response, including a typo (covfefe). From now on, any tweet from Trump will be another sign of psychiatric disorder, and Lee will put her diagnostic reputation on the line for that.

In addition, of course, Lee has effectively picked the side of Kim III, a Stalinist murderer who keeps his people in a state of starvation. I would not want to be on Kim III's side in a public spat  would you? It seems as if Lee has no grasp of politics, either American-style or North Korean. This is possible if she is Chinese by birth and doesn't understand American political jargon.

For the last couple of years, Trump's provocative tweets have provoked the mass media every single time, which is how he won the election and kept his media haters in a foaming rage. Trump does not expect to make friends among his fixed haters, and he's right. So he treats them like enemies, which is also right.

Those of us who understand how American men talk in ordinary life are not particularly surprised. What surprises the media is his use of Twitter  but that's also how he gets their collective goat every 24 hours.

Now, either Lee does not understand how normal Americans talk informally or she is running a political scam, like so many "authority figures" quoted by our mendacious media. In either case, she is liable to be summoned by her local licensing board to explain her violation of established diagnostic ethics. Normally, the licensing board will send her a cease and desist order, but this is national politics, and the AMA and APA might just be overlooking Dr. Lee's nationally broadcast remarks. If the FBI, along with Obama's DOJ, can crumble in the face of Hillary's email corruption, what's the AMA going to do? (They are going to kowtow to Obama, like all the other professional forces in American life.)

When Trump wants to sound serious, he goes like this:

To the Congress of the United States: Consistent with section 108 of the National Security Act of 1947, as amended (50 U.S.C. 3043), I have enclosed the National Security Strategy of the United States. This National Security Strategy sets forth my guidance and direction for an America First foreign policy and charts a path to achieving the goals and objectives that will make America great again. DONALD J. TRUMP THE WHITE HOUSE

Now, a competent psychiatrist might have taken the time to read the White House website for Trump's more official language. Trump speaks differently on Twitter from how he speaks in his role as POTUS. This should not come as news, but apparently the left will never, ever get it.
I am amazed. All of a sudden, Democrats are talking about the Constitution and double-taxation. In what possible way would Congress taking away a deduction be declared unconstitutional? If it was constitutional to put the deduction in the tax code, it is constitutional to take it out. That is a simple concept.

From an AP article titled "States exploring tax changes in response to federal overhaul":

"I'm certainly not a constitutional lawyer, but the notion that this is not constitutional is something we want to pursue," said Phil Murphy, New Jersey's Democratic governor-elect. California state Senate [p]resident [p]ro [t]em Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate[,] ... [said:] "Our hard-earned tax dollars should not be subject to double-taxation, especially not to line the pockets of the Trump family, hedge fund[-]managers[,] and private jet[-]owners[.]"

Federal tax law has phased out up to 80% of itemized deductions for high-income taxpayers for years, and not once did I hear Cuomo or journalists raise alarms about it. But now that Trump wants to help almost everyone, Democrats, journalists, and charities are having a cow.

As for double-taxation, it is stupid for Democrats to complain because they double-tax so much  especially the poor and middle class, whom they just pretend to care about.

Federal income taxes are not deductible before paying state income taxes.

Payroll taxes are not deductible before paying both federal and state taxes.

The following, mostly regressive, taxes are rarely deductible before paying either federal or state taxes.

 Sales taxes

 State motor fuel taxes

 Federal motor fuel taxes

 Cigarette taxes

 Alcohol taxes

 Telecommunications taxes

 Utility taxes

And then there is the multitude of other taxes and fees that are not deductible. Politicians, but especially Democrats, are always raising these taxes and fees, and not once have I heard the concern of double-taxation.

Corporate dividends are not deductible, yet states and the federal government tax them again for individuals and corporations.

Estates have paid significant taxes on their assets as they were earned  yet Democrats have no problem taxing them at 40%, and states like Illinois can get another 16%.

IRAs and other retirement accounts can essentially be confiscated by the government. The federal government can get up to 40% in estate taxes, plus the beneficiaries can be taxed another 37% on the whole amount, plus some states can get more. Where is the concern for double-taxation?

Let's stop pretending journalists and other Democrats care about anything other than the government keeping more money. They can't stand the thought of Trump and Republicans allowing almost everyone in the private sector keeping more of the money they earned rather than submitting it to the government.

When the AP writes a Democrat talking points article like this, it should recognize all the double-taxation that exists and acknowledge that Democrats have never cared about it before. They still don't. And they never cared about the phasing out of itemized deductions, which also limited people in high-tax states from getting their full deductions.
Former Trump aide and confidant Steve Bannon issued a sort-of apology on Sunday for the incendiary statements he made about Donald Trump and Trump's family to Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff. Curiously, he gave the statement exclusively to the far-left wing, virulently anti-Trump website Axios.

Battered by the backlash from Michael Wolff's book, Steve Bannon is trying to make amends with the Trump family, providing a statement to Axios that expresses "regret" to President Trump and praises his son, Donald Trump[,] Jr. "Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

"My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda  as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News[,] and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama."

"President Trump was the only candidate [who] could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus. I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism[] and remain ready to stand in the breach [Editor's note: Originally, this quotation read 'breech.' It has been changed to 'breach' at some venues and left standing at others.] for this president's efforts to make America great again."

"My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from my life experiences as a [n]aval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years when our focus was the defeat of 'the evil empire' and to making films about Reagan's war against the Soviets and Hillary Clinton's involvement in selling uranium to them."

"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning[,] and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr."

"Everything I have to say about the ridiculous nature of the Russian 'collusion' investigation I said on my 60 Minutes interview. There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt."

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr[.] has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency."

Significantly, Bannon did not mention the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or Trump's daughter, Ivanka, in his apology. And he didn't claim he was misquoted by Wolff or that his words were taken out of context. His words fell like hammer blows on the White House and sent the political class into a frenzy.

Those who know Bannon are surprised that he even attempted an apology. The controversial leader of the anti-establishment forces is, like Trump, a fighter, and the idea that he would deliver a mea culpa is alien to his personality, say his friends.

But Bannon found himself in more trouble than he could have possibly imagined and hesitated for a critical six days after the story broke before "clarifying" his statements to Wolff. While Trump and many of his aides raged against him publicly and privately, Bannon remained silent.

This delay doomed the Breitbart editor and may significantly alter the landscape for Republicans in the 2018 midterms.

Politico:

"The problem for Steve is that we were already into January 2018, and he doesn't really have a system, he doesn't have a fund, he doesn't have a political team," said Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, whose wife works in the White House communications department. "Now it's going to take extra time to make things up, if he's able to, and repair the trust he had with the president. The clock is no longer on his side." A Republican pollster and operative with close ties to the White House marveled at the terrible timing of Bannon's feud with Trump. "It happens after taxes, before the Camp David meeting this weekend," the operative said, noting that McConnell and Ryan were both spending quality time with Trump during the peak of his Bannon frustration, shortly after celebrating their first big legislative victory. "He couldn't have picked a worse day on the calendar for this to happen. The swamp won."

The "swamp" may have won a battle, but the GOP civil war will continue to rage. "Establishment" forces are declaring victory after the McConnell-Ryan-Trump Camp David meeting this weekend, but if Trump has shown anything over the last year, it is his unpredictability and his ability to turn on people on a dime. Any thoughts that McConnell-Ryan have "won" are incredibly premature.

But that won't help Bannon.

Bannon's influence, the operative predicted, will be zilch in the coming 2018 midterms, with no recruitment plan or financial backing to offer establishment-challenging outsider candidates. The operative, who has polled Bannon's name ID in states like Alabama, said his image was 40 percent positive, 20 percent negative among Republican primary voters before the feud. "Now he's going to be 20 to 40  or worse," the operative predicted.

Even before Fire and Fury excerpts were released, Bannon had failed to recruit viable candidates to run against establishment politicians in most of the important races. Now that the Mercers have abandoned him, he will either have to find another angel to fund his efforts or get down in the trenches and raise money like everyone else.

The latter prospect does not bode well for Bannon's chances of success. We are just a few months away from the GOP primaries, and with Trump making noises about supporting incumbents, the leader of the guerrilla movement to change the Republican Party may come up short.
It's a safe bet that someone in the military intelligentsia of North Korea is charged with taking good measure of Kim Jong-un's enemies. In the oft rerun movie Patton, a similar role for the German Wehrmacht was assigned to cerebral Captain Oskar Steiger, who recounts a list of General Patton's accomplishments and idiosyncrasies and concludes Patton to be "the pure warrior ... a magnificent anachronism." In strategic terms, beware of Patton.

Foremost on Kim's mind these days is President Donald Trump as the two leaders exchange rattles of tongues, sabers, and nukes. How is a North Korean version of Captain Steiger advising his leader today? He would be forced to say President Trump may be considered dangerous but is highly unpredictable, famous for keeping not only his foes, but his allies, staff, and party members constantly off balance.

If Kim moved the conversation on to the secretary of defense, he would get a contrasting earful. General James Mattis, sometimes called the "warrior-monk," is a dedicated student of world and military history. Unlike his boss, President Trump, James Mattis is predictable  very predictable. The list of Mattis's quotable phrases is lengthy and legendary, and all revolve around a blunt theme, as illustrated in his view of warrior diplomacy: "be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

The media may be stuck on the notion that the president plays good cop-bad cop only with suave and crafty secretary of state Rex Tillerson, but the president and the secretary of defense have devised their own version, perhaps better cast as bad cop-killer cop. President Trump is obliged to ply a version of diplomacy, as erratic as it may appear, but Secretary Mattis, also known to loyal legions of soldiers as "Mad Dog," labors under no such constraints. North Korea's "Captain Steiger," and, no doubt, Kim Jong-un, must weigh the military resolve of the U.S as personified in "Mad Dog" Mattis.

Kim Jong-un may be inclined to risk sparring with President Trump, but Secretary Mattis is waiting ringside, and he doesn't spar. He annihilates. Kim Jong-un may be rethinking his options.

Beware of "Mad Dog."

Dean Kedenburg is an anthropologist in the hamlet of Leucadia, California.
A grand jury looking into charges that Jane Sanders, former president of Burlington College and wife of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, misrepresented the amount of money donors gave to the school on loan applications in order to purchase a large tract of land. The school went belly-up in 2016 because of the huge debt load.

At least one witness has already been called to testify before the grand jury.

VT Digger:

Burlington College borrowed heavily to finance the purchase of 33 acres of lakefront property from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington. The deal relied on pledged donations and projections of increased enrollment. In 2015, VTDigger reported that Jane Sanders overstated pledged donations in the loan document. Two donors listed in the document told VTDigger at that time that their listed pledges were greater than what their personal financial records showed they gave. VTDigger also interviewed the largest confirmed donor listed in the loan application. Corinne Bove Maietta, a member of the renowned Burlington Bove's Restaurant family, disputed the manner in which her pledge was represented by Sanders in the loan agreement. Maietta said she agreed to give the college an unspecified amount upon her death as a bequest. Documents show, however, [that] Sanders stated in a loan application that Maietta would contribute a series of cash payments totaling $1 million. The payments were to be completed over a period of time, according to records obtained by VTDigger. Maietta said she also never signed a formal pledge agreement with the college. A former vice president at the college disputes that claim. Lloyd said de Graaf questioned her about the Maietta pledge during the grand jury testimony, but she declined to go into specific detail. Burlington College closed in May 2016. The college sold most of the property to developer Eric Farrell for a large housing project before the school went bankrupt, but the sale wasn't enough to save the school. The outgoing president of the college, Carol Moore, cited the debt load from the land purchase as the proximate cause of the school's closure.

Did Jane Sanders fraudulently represent the amount of donations the school would receive for the land deal on a loan application? Or did she innocently misunderstand what the donors were willing to give? Well, that's what pledge agreements are for. That one large donor can't remember signing a pledge agreement at all is significant. That others claim that their pledge agreements were altered or misrepresent the amounts they were willing to give is also telling.

Shortly after the loan fiasco, Sanders was asked to resign by the college board. She left the small school in a financial hole it was unable to fix.

So is Sanders an idiot or a crook? She was probably crazy to purchase the land in the first place, expecting student enrollment to soar just because the school would be on the waterfront. But how she got the loan money is the issue, and that's where crimes may have been committed.

Needless to say, an indictment of his wife for fraud would not help Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign in 2020. It probably wouldn't sink it. After all, media darling Sanders can count on the press running interference for him. But in a race a dozen and a half Democrats are expected to enter, the scandal would almost certainly cost him votes that he could ill afford to lose.
Ricardo Hausmann is no typical academic. This past week, he suggested in an article that a foreign invasion may be the only way out for Venezuela's collapsing socialist regime. The respected Venezuelan economist who is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy school is known for going out on a limb and making the powers that be uncomfortable. He's done it a lot and it's because he loves his country.

He was one of the first to call fraud on Venezuela's recall referendum of 2004 and blast Jimmy Carter, who claimed all was free and fair. With Venezuela soon starving, he shocked the world ten years later by calling on Venezuela to default on its debts and use the cash to feed its people. He warned a second time that banks that issue new debt for Venezuela as a lifeline to the regime were propping up the regime's capacity to create more starvation.

Now he's calling for the most obvious of solution of all to the monstrous problem of totalitarian socialism, which is failing and cannot reform itself, and whose suffering people are powerless to cast them out: Invade the hellhole.

According to a column by the Miami Herald's Andres Oppenheimer:

In his Jan. 2 syndicated article, D-Day Venezuela, Hausmann proposes that Venezuelas opposition-controlled National Assembly impeach dictator Nicolas Maduro and appoint a new constitutional government, which in turn could request military assistance from other countries.

Hausmann calls on a coalition of the willing to act at the invitation of Venezuela's opposition, which had had the majority in the National Assembly until Nicolas Maduro's dictatorship effectively superceded their powers with some 'constitutional' parliament of his own invention and liking. For good measure, he banned all the top opposition leaders from running for office as well.

Sure, invasion is a dirty word in Latin America. But attitudes are changing, Hausmann argues. All of the countries of the region are getting the creeps, not to mention the human waves of refugees - real refugees, by the way, the kind who will go anywhere. What's more, as Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer argues, Venezuela already has been invaded by a foreign power, Cuba, which runs everything in that country.

Hausmann even argues that his idea is hardly radical or unprecedented - there are many historic precedents. From Oppenheimer:

Venezuelas independence hero, Simon Bolivar, himself gained the title of Liberator of Venezuela thanks to an 1814 invasion organized and financed by neighboring Nueva Granada (todays Colombia), Hausmann argues. And France, Belgium and the Netherlands liberated themselves from oppressive regimes thanks to international military actions in World War II, he adds.

And since Oppenheimer is an Argentine-born moderate lefty, and Hausmann's views are unknown, we'll never hear the Big One of precedents for a change in power after an incumbent regime abuses its power totally: Pinochet's Chile.

But that's the precedent that's really useful.

Chile's military government of the 1970s was created as a result of a completely parliamentary maneuver, buttressed by its supreme court. It was never a freelance coup d'etat as the Castroite-propaganda-influenced left would have you think. Unlike what Hausmann is calling for, it was a fully domestic operation, involving no foreigners, done so because Chile's military had not been corrupted as Venezuela's military is now. The bottom line is that it was absolutely legal based on Chile's constitution.

Like everything Hausmann proposes, the idea of sweeping out the socialist garbage in Caracas makes sense. Hausmann is pointing out that these are not ordinary times - Venezuelans are actually starving. The very survival of the nation is at stake and the current totalitarian regime is completely unreformable, just as the great Jeanne Kirkpatrick noted in her famous essay, ' Dictatorships and Double Standards .' Oppenheimer thinks a foreign invasion is unlikely to happen, but he's Mr. Swamp on Latin affairs and as such is frequently surprised. If nothing else, it's important that this idea is now out there. Watch the Chavistas scream.

As Americans, we are moved by the suffering of socialism's victims in that country and don't care which nation does this, just that the regime gets gone. If the Venezuelans want to do this with Colombia, Brazil and Peru helping out, rather than us, President Trump should send the word that the rest of us will be pleased and, in the immortal words of April Glaspie, the U.S. has "no objection."




Deep in the desert in northern Mexico, between the states of Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila, is an area known as zona del silencio or the "zone of silence", also known as Mapimi Silent Zone for its close proximity to the city of Mapimi. Legend says that in this area electromagnetic transmissions cannot be received, radio doesnt work, compasses do not point to magnetic north, and the flora and fauna have abnormal mutations. Over the years stories of alien encounters, falling "hot pebbles" and all sorts of paranormal activities have been drawing tourists and curiosity-seekers from all over the world.

The myth started in July, 1970, when the U.S. military base near Green River, Utah fired an Athena test missile toward White Sands Missile Range. The missile lost control and instead of landing on the intended target continued 400 miles south and fell in the Mapimi Desert region. Immediately, a team of specialists arrived to find the fallen rocket. When the rocket was found after three weeks of intense search, an airstrip was built to transport the wreckage. The entire operation was very hush-hush, consistent with governmental common sense, and nobody was told anything or asked. The secretive nature of the operation was already spurring rumors among the residents.

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One version of the story tells about a certain local named Jamie who was hired by the military to guard the missile from vandals and sight-seers. Jaime rather liked the attention and money that the missile had brought, and when the military left, he along with two local landowners began to talk of the possibility of building a hotel in the area to encourage tourism. Some say that it was Jamie who began playing up the importance of the region to generate interest in the area, and together with his new friends started creating a story with lots of pseudo-science and local folklore, and fed it to the regional media. The media swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and a legend was born.

According to this bizarre story, strange magnetic anomalies of the atmosphere prevent radio transmission in specific points and make the needles spin on magnetic compasses. The magnetic waves are so unique that they create a vortex that draws in material from the upper atmosphere, including the ill-fated missile. The Allende meteorite, which fell in the general region of the Zone in 1969, is often cited as corroborating evidence.

The phenomena is now claimed to have been first reported in the 1930s by Francisco Sarabia, a Mexican pilot, who claimed that his radio had mysteriously failed to function while flying over the zone. Others claim to have seen UFOs, and objects falling from cloudless skies.

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Now hundreds of people come from all over to experience the area. The locals call them zoneros. They are surprised when they find their radios and compasses working, upon which their guide  often a local, for whom these tourists represent a source of income, explains to them that the zones move, and therefore be hard to locate.

The local residents themselves do not believe in the Zone of Silence. When asked about strange phenomena, they invariably reply that they do not see strange things in the desert, only strange people. While some are eking out a living becoming guides or selling sodas and eatables to tourists, others find these outsiders a nuisance.

Mexconnect.com shares an amusing anecdote:

Upon being asked where la Zona could be found, a local rancher told a carload of people that they needed to keep following the road until they saw martians jump from one side of the road to another. The amazing part, he commented later, was that they thanked him. Another group of zoneros arrived at the field station and asked one of the workers how to get to the Zone. The young fellow, struggling to be polite and truthful at once, only replied, "Nunca van a llegar (You are never going to get there)."

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ROME - Oman's government has signed to obtain 81 million Omani rials ($210 million) of financing from Saudi Arabia for one of its key industrial projects, in a deal that could help to ease concern about the health of the sultanate's finances.

The money will come from the Saudi Fund for Development, a state agency, to support work at Duqm, where Oman is building a multi-billion-dollar industrial zone on its southern coast, the official Oman News Agency (ONA) said.

The 81 million rials of aid for Duqm is part of the $10 billion regional program, ONA said without giving financial details. Twenty million rials will go towards building a road and 61 million rials towards developing Duqm's fishing harbor.

According to Al Arabiya, Oman plans to make Duqm a major center for its fishing and fish processing industries, in addition to building an oil refinery, a petrochemical complex and a wide range of manufacturing facilities in the zone. ONA quoted Yousef bin Ibrahim al-Bassam, managing director of the Saudi fund, as saying it had also allocated $150 million to finance the growth of smaller companies in Oman, and would extend the aid in cooperation with Oman Development Bank.
Anti-government demonstration dispersed in Tunis #Fech_Nestanew collective protesting price hikes

(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, JANUARY 8 - A demonstration in front of the Tunisian Interior Ministry by about a hundred young activists from the #Fech_Nestanew (What Are We Waiting For) movement, which aims to denounce price hikes and government policy, was broken up by security agents on Sunday evening on the centrally located Avenue Bourguiba.



The activists continued to parade through the adjacent streets shouting slogans against Tunisian President Beji Cad Essebsi and Premier Youssef Chahed, while scenes of the protests were transmitted in real time via social media.



The Fech Nestanew campaign was launched on January 4 by a group of young people (some of whom are part of the Union Generale des etudiants tunisiens (UGET) student union and others from civil society) with the main goal of protesting against the price hikes that went into effect with the 2018 budget.



Some members of the movement were arrested by law enforcement for a few hours on January 4 after they were caught writing protest slogans on the walls of the Tunis Metro 2 station.



The movement defines itself as transversal and apolitical, includes activists from the "Manich Msameh" (I Don't Forgive) movement, and aims to expand nationwide.



"The campaign is open to all Tunisians," activist Ouennas Rouissi told the website Realites Online in an interview about his January 4 arrest.



"It's a way to protest against the actions of those responsible for the current crisis, the old Troika, Nidaa Tounes, Ennahdha, l'Union Patriotique Libre (UPL) or still Afek Tounes," he said, adding that the movement is not connected to any particular political party.



"Some opposition parties, such as Popular Front, have supported us, as well as some independent members of parliament.



However, our main demand remains the suspension of the work that was started as part of the 2018 budget bill," Rouissi said.(ANSAmed).




Migrant arrivals in Spain doubled in 2017 Almost 27,000 people via sea and land, IOM

(ANSAmed) - MADRID, JANUARY 8 - Double the number of migrants came to Spain in 2017 compared with the previous year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports. Over 21,468 people arrived via sea and another 5,473 via the Ceuta and Melilla borders in 2017 and at least 3,116 drowned in the Mediterranean in the attempt to reach Europe. The IOM figures show that from January 1 to December 20, 2017, some 26,941 migrants arrived in Spanish territory compared with 13,246 the previous year.



Over 43,600 migrants arrived in the two-year period between 2015-2017. Spain is the southern European country which has seen the highest increase in migrants. However, the total number of refugees arriving in Europe via sea along the various Mediterranean routes - eastern, central and western - fell to 181,543 people in 2017 from 378,895 in 2016. (ANSAmed).




ISTANBUL - Turkey's post-coup state of emergency mass arrests have continued into the new year, with 643 people arrested for suspected terrorism in the first week of 2018, according to the Turkish Interior Ministry.

Over two-thirds (467) of those arrested are accused of ties with alleged coup mastermind, Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Another 112 were arrested in operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), during which 17 Kurdish militants were said to have been "neutralised", meaning either killed, wounded, or captured.

Authorities also took into custody 46 suspected ISIS jihadists and 18 members of illegal far-left organisations.

More than 50,000 people have been arrested in Turkey for suspected terrorism since the failed coup attempt in July 2016.


ANSAmed - Weekly diary from January 8 to January 14

(ANSAmed) - ROME, JANUARY 8 - Weekly diary of the main events scheduled in the Euro-mediterranean area from January 8 to January 14: MONDAY JANUARY 8 No major events scheduled TUESDAY JANUARY 9 BRUSSELS - EU, High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini and Commissioners Johannes Hahn and Christos Stylianides will receive Horst Kohler, Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary General for Western Sahara.



TUNIS - Hearing in trial of 33 people accused of the terrorist attack at the luxury resort in Sousse on June 26, 2015, in which 38 people died TUNIS - Hearing in trial for the terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum on March 18, 2015, in which 24 people died, including four Italians WEDNESDAY JANUARY 10 ROME - Southern EU Countries Summit.



THURSDAY JANUARY 11 TEL AVIV - Anniversary of the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.



ROME - 8th edition of the Errichetta Festival dedicated to masters of Balkan and Middle Eastern music (until 18/1).



FRIDAY JANUARY 12 No major events scheduled SATURDAY JANUARY 13 No major events scheduled SUNDAY JANUARY 14 TUNIS - Anniversary of the fall of the regime of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. (ANSAmed).




Pope says migrants are people, urges end to stoking fears Recalls message for World Day of Peace dedicated to refugees

(ANSAmed) - VATICAN CITY, JANUARY 8 - Pope Francis said freedom of movement is "a fundamental human right" and called for seeing migrants as people rather than stoking fears regarding refugees.



"Nowadays people talk a lot about migrants and migration, sometimes only to stir up ancestral fears," Pope Francis said.



"Migration has always existed. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of salvation is essentially the story of migration," he said.



"We must emerge from the widespread rhetoric on the subject and start from the essential consideration that those who we have before us, above all, are people," he said.



"One cannot forget the situation of families broken up due to poverty, wars and migration. All too often, we have before our eyes the drama of children who cross borders separating the world's south from the north by themselves, often victims of human trafficking," he said.



Pope Francis recalled his message for the 2018 World Day of Peace, titled "Migrants and Refugees: Men and Women in Search of Peace".



"Even recognising that not everyone is always motivated by the best intentions, one cannot forget that most migrants would prefer to stay in their own countries, while instead they are forced to leave due to 'discrimination, persecution, poverty and environmental degradation'".



"By practising the virtue of prudence, government leaders should take practical measures to welcome, promote, protect, integrate and, 'within the limits allowed by a correct understanding of the common good, to permit [them] to become part of a new society.' (Pacem in terris, 57)," Pope Francis said, citing his World Day of Peace message.



"Leaders have a clear responsibility towards their own communities, whose legitimate rights and harmonious development they must ensure, lest they become like the rash builder who miscalculated and failed to complete the tower he had begun to construct".



"I wish to thank once again the authorities of those countries who have gone out of their way in recent years to provide assistance to the numerous migrants at their borders.



I'm thinking above all of the efforts of many countries in Asia, in Africa and in the Americas, who welcome and assist numerous people. I still keep alive in my heart the meeting that I had in Dhaka with some members of the Rohingya people, and I wish to renew my feelings of gratitude to the authorities of Bangladesh for the assistance that they are giving them in their own country".(ANSAmed).




UNHCR says Qatar blockade is arbitrary, harms population 'Unilateral, abusive' measures 'not diplomatic or boycott'

(ANSAmed) - ROME, JANUARY 8 - A report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called the blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the UAE ''arbitrary'' and harmful to the population of the region, reported Al Jazeera on Monday.



Ali bin Smaikh al-Marri, chairman of Qatar's National Human Rights Committee (NHRC), said that the report proved that the measures imposed by the countries ''are not only diplomatic and not even an economic boycott. These are unilateral, abusive and arbitrary measures that are having repercussions on the citizens of and people who live in Qatar''. In November 2017, UNHCR representatives are said to have met in Qatar with members of the government, civil society and people who had suffered repercussions from the blockade.



The report was drawn up after that visit. (ANSAmed).




Business and private aviation in the Middle East has been a huge success story in recent years, with many Gulf countries beginning to dominate the market.

One Arab country fast becoming a business aviation hub is Lebanon, and private and business aviation services company, Sky Lounge Services, is growing rapidly due to customer demand.

Based at Rafic Hariri International Airport (RHIA) in the General Aviation Terminal, the licensed Lebanese air operation company only launched services in April 2016 but already it has added a new jet.

We started out managing three private aircraft  a Global Express, a Falcon 2000, and Falcon 2000LX  as well as chartering a Hawker 400XP, explained sales manager, Nour Oueida.

Because of the increase in market share and overload of flight bookings, we had to expand the AOC fleet to be able to match our clients growing requests. Consequently, we recently acquired a newly refurbished Challenger 605, which started operating in August 2017.

The company sells, operates and manages aircraft  and it is soon adding ground-handling services to its fixed-base operations (FBO) profile.

We provide personalised FBO and handling services that typify professional attention to detail, said Oueida.

Our customers include people from the political, business and family spheres. We fly to any destination in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, and are able to answer the demands of any business or lifestyle.

Oueida said Lebanon is seeing increasing business aviation as the country becomes more stable.

Following the significant growth of flying hours and air traffic in the Gulf region, Lebanon is finally emerging into that wave and rising above the shocks of the political turmoil in the wider region and the remains of the global economic crisis, explained Oueida.

This increase in peace is attracting more trade, business and tourism to the country, and, as we can see, the industry is, indeed, spreading out in the region and the trending market is expanding.

According to new figures released by Bombardiers market forecast, the Middle East is set to be the fastest-developing region for business aviation in the world, with an estimated 7% fleet growth by 2030.

Oueida is keen to point out that Sky Lounge Services is successful due to its attention to safety, reliability, and customer management.

We have high safety standards and our winning point is client reliance, said Oueida. Clients trust that we will always find an aircraft for them at any time and anywhere, and at the best price. And, from an operations point of view, we are definitely the fastest and most accurate and effective with flight scheduling, to get all the permits done on a timely manner, to process clearances, and to secure slots.

We are still expanding our network with foreign operators to ensure we get priority notification on aircraft availability and special quotations for our clients.

As well as the new aircraft, the company is trying to build stronger client relations by working on a loyalty programme.

Oueida said: The loyalty programme will ensure better quotations for our frequent flyers and loyal customers. We are also working on making the private aviation industry in the region more accessible. Although, in general, private aviation inspires pictures of luxury and wealth, we want the image to be seen as more friendly and closer to home by the public  a means of transportation that can be accessible at a point.

We are still in the study phase of the project and how we can introduce it, given the demographic characteristics of our target customers.

The company is also in the negotiation process and contract phase with several owners willing to put additional aircraft under its management.

These additional aircraft might soon be available for charter, said Oueida. With all these things happening, it is a very exciting time for us, not just in the business aviation market, but also in Lebanon.


Currently Super Carry is being retailed through 162 new commercial outlets in 140 cities across 25 states.

New Delhi: The country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) plans to expand the sales network for its light commercial vehicle 'Super Carry' as it aims to be a significant player in the segment.

The company, which launched Super Carry in September 2016, is seeing good traction in the light commercial vehicle (LCV) segment that is dominated by players like Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra.

"The retail network is being rolled out in phases.

Currently Super Carry is being retailed through 162 new commercial outlets in 140 cities across 25 states. It is our endeavour to reach closer to customers as much as possible," an MSI spokesperson told PTI.

The spokesperson, however, did not share details on the number of sales outlets it plans to open going ahead.

"We plan to be present across India at all potential locations...We will plan as we move ahead based on customers need and market requirements," the spokesperson said.

MSI has established a new commercial sales channel for the LCV business.

When asked about Super Carry's sales performance, the spokesperson said the LCV's current market share in the mini truck segment stood at around 5.5 per cent, "while in the similar 700kgs payload segment, where it competes with Tata Ace, M&M Supro and Piaggio Porter, it is 8.7 per cent till December 2017".

"In the future, we plan to be a significant player in the segment," the spokesperson added.

MSI sold 900 units of Super Carry in 2016-17. In the April-December period of the current fiscal, it has already sold 5,958 units.

"More units of Super Carry have been sold than some of its competitors during the second and third quarters of 2017- 18," the spokesperson said.

MSI rolls out Super Carry from its Gurgaon facility.

Asked if the company plans to hike production capacity, the spokesperson said: "The production capacity for Super Carry is currently sufficiently planned to meet the market requirements."

Besides the domestic market, the company has also started exporting Super Carry to countries like South Africa, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Equipped with a 793-cc diesel engine, Super Carry delivers a mileage of 22.07 km per litre.
Patanajali's products are already available on several online platforms through various other sellers.

Partnerships with etailers will be in addition to its own portal patanjaliayurved.net, where the company is selling its products online. (Photo: PTI/File)

New Delhi: Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali Ayurved is likely to partner with eight leading etailers and aggregators to give a big push to online sales of its swadeshi range of FMCG products, said a company official.

The Haridwar-based company is expected to enter into agreements this month with major online retailers -- Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, 1MG, bigbasket, grofers, shopclues and snapdeal -- a step through which its range of products will be available on various online platforms.

Patanjali is organising a function on January 16 here and representatives of all the online companies are expected to attend it along with Ramdev and its MD Acharya Balkrishna.

"We are now going into massive way. Now, we would have an organised and systematic agreement with the players to place our all product online, so that it could reach to customers to the end point," Patanjali spokesperson S K Tijarawala told PTI.

These partnerships with etailers will be in addition to its own portal patanjaliayurved.net, where the company is selling its products online.

"This would change the scenario of whole FMCG trade through online" he added.

Some of Patanajali's products are already available on several online platforms through various other sellers but this would allow the Haridwar-based firm to systematically place its range of products.

"The retailers and aggregators would share the dias...

They are coming and make announcement together that they would be working with brand Patanjali," Tijarawala said, adding that through this arrangement Patanjali's product could be served across the globe.

However, he refused to share further details and arrangements with the online retailers.

Recently, Patanjali had forayed into kids and adult diapers and affordable sanitary napkins segments.

Last month, it had also announced to venturing into solar equipment manufacturing.

Besides FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) segment, Patanjali Ayurved is present in other sectors such as education and healthcare.

In 2016-17, it had crossed a turnover of Rs 10,500 crore and aims a two-fold growth this fiscal.
Meeting is also slated to discuss new stringent call drop norms that were enforced by TRAI in Oct last year.

The meeting with telecom industry CEOs will be chaired by the DoT Secretary.

New Delhi: Concerned about the deteriorating call drop situation, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will meet service providers on January 10 to discuss the burning issue as also the new service quality norms that have been implemented in the sector.

"We want to convey to the operators, the government's concerns on state of call drops. Service providers have to get their act together," Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters here on Monday.

She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference to mark the completion of the first phase of Bharat Net project.

The meeting with telecom industry CEOs will be chaired by the DoT Secretary. The meeting is also slated to discuss the new stringent call drop norms that were enforced by telecom regulator TRAI in October last year. On the same day, DoT will also hold a separate meeting with the telecom regulator on the call drop issue.

The Telecom Commission, meanwhile, will meet on Tuesday to discuss multiple issues including some recommendations by Inter-ministerial Group (IMG) on relief measures for the stressed industry, importantly, the raising of spectrum caps.
A higher opening in the domestic equity market gave the uptrend some momentum.

Rupee is trading at 63.26 against US dollar in opening session on selling of greenback by exporters and banks. (Photo: PTI)

Mumbai: The rupee strengthened by 11 paise to trade at 63.26 against the US dollar in opening session on Monday on selling of the greenback by exporters and banks amid gains in stocks which scaled record levels.

Currency dealers said continued foreign fund inflows and weakness in the greenback against other currencies overseas supported the rupee.

Furthermore, a higher opening in the domestic equity market gave the uptrend some momentum, they added.

On Friday, the rupee ended at a 32-month high of 63.37, up 4 paise on steady unwinding of the American currency by exporters.

Meanwhile, the benchmark BSE Sensex rallied 178 points, or or 0.52 per cent, to trade at an all-time high of 34,331.85 and the NSE Nifty breached the 10,600 for the first time in opening trade on Monday.
The market regulator is also seeking a pass through for losses incurred by investors.

Sebi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bengaluru: Market regulator Sebi has recommended a unit-based tax system for hedge funds as part of its proposals for next months Budget, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The proposal, if approved, would make the country's equity hedge fund investors eligible for capital-gains tax exemptions after one year, Bloomberg said.

The market regulator is also seeking a pass through for losses incurred by investors in other alternative investments such as venture capital, real estate and private equity, the report added.

Sebi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kangana is currently shooting for her dream project Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi.

Mumbai: Kangana Ranaut has acquired the title of Queen in Bollywood, but unfortunately, she has failed to make a mark since 2015, as she has given back-to-back disasters in I Love New Year, Katti Batti, Rangoon and Simran.

However, that doesnt seem to have affected her fan following, as Mid-Day reports that even before her Manali bungalow gets the final touches, fans have been clicking selfies with the bungalow and neighbours have been extending their help to make the actress feel at home.

The report says that locals are taking selfies outside the bungalow and neighbours have been extending a helping hand, by sending milk, vegetables and foodstuff to make her stay comfortable in the new place.

On Kanganas reaction, the daily says that the Himachal ki beti, Kangs is touched by the love she has been receiving from people.

Kangana is currently shooting for her dream project Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. Apart from that, she has been announced as a part of Zindabaad with Ranbir Kapoor and Jaljeera with Life Of Pi actor Suraj Sharma.
The 2018 Golden Globe Awards was hosted by talk show host Seth Meyers.

Mumbai: The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards was held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. The 2018 Hollywood Awards event was hosted by talk show host Seth Meyers.

Here are complete details of who won what at 2018 star-studded Golden Globes:

Hollywood veteran Gary Oldman, in a career spanning over 30 years, has finally earned a well-deserved 'Golden Globes' trophy for the movie 'Darkest Hour'.

The actor won the award for 'Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama' at the 2018 Golden Globes for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the film.

During his speech, the actor said, "Well, I feel very humbled and surprised to have been asked to come at this stage. I would like to congratulate my fellow nominees for their beautiful work. I am in very fine company this evening indeed."

After thanking the cast and crew on the 'Darkest Hour', Oldman thanked his wife, Gisele Schmidt "who put up with my crazy for over a year."

But when asked about the Time's Up movement that dominated the evening backstage, Oldman said, "When the curtain came down on Harvey [Weinstein], I was flabbergasted. Fortunately he was never in my orbit. I met him in '92 and he gave me the creeps. And I said, 'Let's never work with that guy.' And I never did. The evolutionary wheel is turning. What we do, what we say, how we say it and who we say it to, is very important. If that is exposed, then it is a good thing."

The 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' also discussed the challenge of playing a real-life figure.

He added, "I am proud of the movie because it shows and illustrates the power of words and action. That words and actions can literally change the world."

The actor beat out Timothee Chalamet ('Call Me by Your Name'), Daniel Day-Lewis ('Phantom Thread'), Tom Hanks ('The Post') and Denzel Washington ('Roman J. Israel, Esq.').

Meanwhile, Frances McDormand received the award for 'Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama' at the star-studded event. From the moment she walked on stage, the star warned the fans that this was going to be a speech to remember.

She started by saying, "Well I have a few things to say. I'm going to keep it short because we've been here a long time and we need some tequila. All you ladies in this category, bar, tequila's on me."

The actress then joked that while she's thankful for the HFPA, she is 'unsure' about who they truly are.

"I'm still not quite sure who they are when I run into them, for the last 35 years, but I love seeing their faces and, let's face it, they managed to elect a female president," explained McDormand.

McDormand also took the opportunity to mention the Times Up movement and said she felt really proud to be a part of this "tectonic shift" in the industry.

"Some of you may know, I keep my politics private, but it was really great to be in this room tonight and to be part of a tectonic shift in our industry's power structure. Trust me, the women in this room tonight are not here for the food. We are here for the work," explained McDormand.

James Franco took home the Golden Globe for 'Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy' for his performance as Tommy Wiseau in 'The Disaster Artist'.

Franco brought up the enigmatic movie maker Tommy Wiseau to the stage when he won the award-and even did an impression of the latter.

"This was billed as a movie about making the best worst movie ever made but, in fact it's a story of friendship. This year I learned from friends and collaborators," began Franco.

Franco, who also directed the film, said he was very happy to share the moment with Wiseau, and also thanked his cast and crew, including Seth Rogen and his brother.

Franco noted, "I love [Dave] more than anything, thanks to my mother for giving him to me."

Saoirse Ronan won the Golden Globe for 'Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical' for her performance in the movie 'Lady Bird'.

The visibly overjoyed star took the stage with a message of gratitude to those who supported her along the way.

She started by saying, "My mom's on FaceTime over there on someone's phone. So, hi! I have no time at all to say thank you but I just want to say how inspirational it is to be in this room tonight."

During her speech, the Lady Bird star was quick to thank the film's cast and crew.

Here's a quick look at the winners from all categories:

Best Motion Picture  Drama: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy: Lady Bird

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture: Allison Janney, I, Tonya

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Director  Motion Picture: Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

Best Screenplay  Motion Picture: Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Motion Picture  Animated: Coco

Best Motion Picture  Foreign Language: In The Fade, Germany, France

Best Original Score  Motion Picture: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water

Best Original Song  Motion Picture: This Is Me, The Greatest Showman

Best Television Series  Drama: The Handmaids Tale

Best Television Series  Musical or Comedy: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television: Big Little Lies

Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television: Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies

Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television: Ewan McGregor, Fargo

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series  Drama: Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaids Tale

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series  Drama: Sterling K. Brown, This is Us

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series  Musical or Comedy: Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series  Musical or Comedy: Aziz Ansari, Master of None

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television: Laura Dern, Big Little Lies

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television: Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies

Cecil B. DeMille Award: Oprah Winfrey
Says leaders turnaround in view of upcoming elections.

Bengaluru: BJPs emerging mascot and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Sunday trained his guns on Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, who had recently asserted that he too was a Hindu.

Addressing the BJPs Parivarthana Rally at Vijayanagar in Bengaluru on Sunday, Mr Adityanath said the CM had made the turnaround seeing the growing popularity of Hindu ideology in the state.

He (Siddaramaiah) sho-uld realise that Hinduism is a way of life in India and not merely the name of a caste or religion. It is basically a culture, he said.

During the tenure of the previous BJP regime, the government had introduced the Anti-Cow Slaughter Bill in the Karnataka Assembly. If he is a Hindu, why did he and the Congress oppose the bill? Now, with the Assembly elections appro-aching, he has started di-viding castes in the state, remarked the UP CM.

Drawing a parallel between UP and Karnata-ka, Mr Adityanath hinted that the issue of Hanu-man Jayanthi, which had become controversial a few months ago after the Congress government banned a procession in Hunsur in Mysuru, may play a dominant role during the Assembly elections here. Like Uttar Pradesh is the birthplace of Lord Rama, Karnataka is the birthplace of Lord Hanuman. So, Hanuman Jayanthi is a great issue here as everyone celebrates the day. Like Rama in UP, it is Hanuman in Karnataka, he said.

Taking a dig at the Congress government, the UP CM said law and order had completely collapsed. Earlier, riots used to take place in UP, but after the BJP took over, the government has not allowed any riot to happen, he said.

There was a lot of development activity taking place in the country, which the Congress government here was hardly able to comprehend. During the tenure of the previous NDA government, the state had got the Bengaluru International Airport and the Metro project and now, it had the Smart City project. If a government, which thinks on similar lines like the Centre has to be installed in the state, it was necessary to vote for the BJP, he added.
Human chain to fight dowry

Government employees, volunteers and politicians in Bihar will form the worlds longest human chain, involving about four crore people, on January 21 to create awareness against child marriage and dowry. A similar human chain was formed last year to promote prohibition of liquor.

Bihar records 15 per cent of dowry-related deaths in country. In 2016, 987 cases of dowry deaths were registered in Bihar while the total number of dowry-related cases was 4,852.

Patna: Bihar is gearing up to form the world's longest human chain, involving about four crore people, on January 21 to create awareness against child marriage and dowry.

Bihar records 15 per cent of dowry-related deaths in the country. In 2016 alone, 987 cases of dowry deaths were registered in Bihar while the total number of dowry-related cases was 4,852, according to official figures.

The JD(U)-ruled state ranks second in the country after neighbouring Uttar Pradesh in dowry-related cases.

The state government is expecting active public participation from across the state in the human chain initiative. According to officials, a group had been formed to create awareness among people residing in rural areas.

"We want the involvement of more and more people in the anti-dowry campaign. The human chain will be formed at all district headquarters, block and panchayats, said an official.

According to sources, efforts are also being made to form a map of Bihar through the human chain in Patna's Gandhi Maidan.

This will be the second human chain in Bihar in last one year. The first one was organized exactly a year ago in support of the liquor ban in which according to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar "over four crore people had participated".

In December 2017, chief secretary Anjani Kumar Singh issued directives to all district magistrates and superintendents of police to earmark locations where the human chain will be formed.

Government officials and employees, including school teachers, have also been asked to participate in the campaign against child marriage and dowry.

The campaign against dowry and child marriage was launched in Bihar on October 2, 2017. According to JD (U) leaders, about 1,500 people had gathered in Patna when Mr Kumar had called for a massive drive against the social evil.

"People had welcomed the move when the chief minister had urged for a public participation in abolishing child marriage and dowry," JD (U) spokesperson Niraj Kumar told this newspaper.

Deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi who was also present during the event had urged the chief minister to introduce tough laws to deal with cases related to child marriage and suggested enacting a legislation under which the elected representatives of Panchayats will be held responsible if child marriages are reported from their areas.

Observers believe that after getting an overwhelming response from people, especially women, for imposing liquor prohibition, the chief minister urged the masses to join him in his effort to weed out social evils such as dowry and child marriage.

Mr Kumar is the first political leader in the country to introduce the campaign against dowry on a massive scale.

While some observers feel that the campaign may prove risky for him electorally, JD(U) leaders dismiss the speculation. "The move has only added to his popularity and with people's support, cases related to child marriage and dowry will come down in the next one year and society in Bihar will change," said a ruling party legislator.

According to reports, the prevalence of child marriage in Bihar is 40 per cent, while dowry-related cases have been a major cause of violence against women in the state. Survey reports suggest that Bihar ranks second in the country when it comes to dowry-related cases.

"This movement will eradicate evils of child marriage and dowry. Active public participation through human chain will involve all members of society to join the fight against these evils," JD (U) leader Niraj Kumar said.
Opposing CBFC's pass for all India release on Jan 25, home minister Gulab Chand Kataria stated, the film will not be released in the state.

Succumbing to pressure from the community at a time when three by-polls are going to take place later in January, Rajasthan government has decided against the release of the film in the state. (Photo: File)

Jaipur: Despite a name change, Sanjay Leela Bhansalis controversial film Padmavati, which is now renamed as Padmavat, continues to face opposition from Rajput community in Rajasthan.

Succumbing to pressure from the community at a time when three by-polls are going to take place later in January, Rajasthan government has decided against the release of the film in the state.

Notwithstanding, clearance from CBFC for all India release on January 25, home minister Gulab Chand Kataria has categorically stated that the film will not be released in the state.

He earlier cited the order from chief minister Vasundhara Raje, who had at the peak of protests against the film had written a letter to Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani and had sought necessary changes in the film as suggested by the Centre.

The CM had also said that maintaining law and order in Rajasthan was of highest priority and it will be maintained at all cost with reference to protests against the film.

Although, the home minister took excuse to threat to law and order if the film was allowed to release, it is believed that the ruling BJP was playing safe because of bypolls in the state for two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats, which have significant presence of the Rajput community.

Only three days ago, Shri Rajput Karni Sena chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi had called upon the community members to gather in Chittorgarh on January 27 and push for a complete ban on the controversial Sanjay Leela Bhansali film 'Padmavati'.

He said that they will not let the film be released at any cost. A panel that reviewed the film in a special screening has expressed the view that some of the facts presented in the film can upset the Rajputs and the Muslims, but the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chief has ignored that, he added.

"We have a very clear stand since day one that we want this film to be banned. The committee made by the CBFC watched the movie and said the movie was vulgar and the facts were distorted. The film is made just to earn money. Along with the name of the movie, the characters names should also be changed," Karni Sena member Mahipal Singh Makrana said.
The petitioner sought a direction for strict compliance with the rule so that people could sleep peacefully.

Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government in UP has banned the unauthorised use of loudspeakers at religious and public spaces across the state.

The state government on Sunday directed the police to remove loudspeakers installed at religious places by January 20.

The move comes after the Allahabad high cou-rt ordered the removal of loudspeakers from religious places, in an attempt to curb increasing noise pollution.

In December 2017, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court had sought replies from the state government and the UP Pollution Control Board on the alleged misuse of loudspeakers in religious places.

The court order came on a PIL filed by M.L. Yadav, a local lawyer, who alleged that the Noise Pollution Regulat-ion and Control Rule was not being followed in religious places like temples, mosques, gurdwara and churches. The petitioner said that students, patients and senior citizens bore the brunt of noise pollution.

As per the rule, the use of loudspeakers cannot be allowed from 10 pm to 6 am but the rule was frequently violated.

The petitioner sought a direction for strict compliance with the rule so that people could sleep peacefully.
The medical college had hit headlines in Aug 2017 when 63 children, including infants, died within 4 days due to disrupted supply of oxygen.

No loss of life has been reported so far. The cause of the fire was not immediately known. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Gorakhpur: A major fire broke out today at the state-run BRD Hospital, infamous for deaths of scores of children last year allegedly due to shortage of oxygen, fire department said.

No loss of life has been reported so far.

Three fire tenders were pressed to control the blaze that caused extensive damage to the principal's office and the adjacent record room situated in the hospital premises.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known.

#Gorakhpur: Fire broke out at principal office in Baba Raghav Das Medical College, three fire tenders rushed to the spot pic.twitter.com/JacSNGzdXr  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 8, 2018

The medical college had hit the headlines in August last year when 63 children, including infants, died within a span of four days when the supply of oxygen was allegedly disrupted due to non-payment of dues to the vendor.
Mr Gandhi also got off the stage to welcome an 83-year-old air commodore who had come to hear his speech.

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday took his fight against the Narendra Modi-led BJP government to the Indian diaspora in Bahrain. In an 18-minute speech, he spoke of a nation thats under threat by Hindutva forces, and appealed for help. I have come here to ask for your help to fight these forces of anger and hatred. Brothers and sisters, India needs your help, he said at an interaction with the Indian diaspora.

Mr Gandhi, who took over the reins of the Congress in December, said that an atmosphere of fear prevails in the country, and added, Its a tragedy that instead of talking about job creation, health care, providing world-class education, the focus is on what we are allowed to eat, who is allowed to protest and what we can and cannot say.

Instead of uniting the communities and people of all religion to face the challenge, the government is busy converting the fear of jobless youths into hatred between communities, he said at the interaction organised by the Global Organisation for Person of Indian Origin (GOPIO).

Claiming that he is getting ready to present a nai, chamakti, behetar Congress Party (a shinning and improved Congress Party), he said if he is able do so successfully, defeating the BJP is not a badi baat (big thing).

Talking about attacks on dalits across the country, Mr Gandhi said, Dalits are being beaten to submission. Without naming names, he added, Judges investigating sensitive cases are dying under mysterious circumstances.

Reports have alleged that Justice B.H. Loya, who was hearing the case of extra-judicial killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh against BJP president Amit Shah, died five months after taking charge.

In a tacit manner Mr Gandhi also referred to the assassination of activist and journalist Gauri Lankesh. Activists and journalists are threatened and shot dead, he said, and amidst lour cheer and applause, claimed, India has been taken off its path of progress.

During interaction with the Indian diaspora after his speech, Mr Gandhi didnt merely acknowledged the partys mistakes but also his own mistakes.

Launching into Hindi, Mr Gandhi said, Main insaan hoon aur hum sab galitiyan karte hain (Im a human being and err is human).

This was Mr Gandhis first foreign visit since his elevation as party chief in December. Indians number at an estimated 400,000 people out of Bahr-ains population of 1.3 million, making them the largest expatriate group in the country.

While fans and well-wishers thronged Bahrain airport to greet the Congress president, cheers, loud applause and roars of Rahul Gandhi zindabad echoed in the Gulf Hotel where Mr Gandhi addressed the Indian diaspora, saying, I have not come here to tell you anything. No. I have come here to ask for your help to fight these forces of anger and hatred.

Stressing on his observation that India is under threat, Mr Gandhi referred to the freedom struggle saying, We need you as our ancestors needed you in 1947to protect the idea of India.

A miffed BJP fielded one of its Muslim faces from Bihar, spokesperson Shanawaz Huss-ain, to counter the Congress chief. Mr Hussain said that Mr Gandhi was imitating Prime Minister Narendra Modi by trying to reach out to the Indian diaspora.

During his interaction with the Indian diaspora, Mr Gan-dhi claimed that the Congress has the ability and power to defeat BJP led NDA in 2019. When asked what would be his three main priorities if the Congress came to power, Mr Gandhi said, Creating jobs, healthcare and providing world-class education.

Mr Gandhi also got off the stage to welcome an 83-year-old air commodore who had come to hear his speech.

On the question of the BJPs aggressive social media campaign against him, Mr Gandhi said that no matter how much lies they (read BJP) spread, ultimately truth is revealed.

A diamond always remains a diamond, he said.
Royal aides opt for a more 'practical' option in St Georges Hall at Windsor Castle.

One person who would have readily approved of their choice was the Queen, for whom Frogmore is a very special place. (Photo: AP)

Much like any other engaged couple, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had their own plans for their perfect wedding day. However, if you are a public figure, and that too a royal, it is likely that your plans will be tossed out the window for more practical purposes.

It turns out that the pair have been denied their chosen venue of Frogmore House for the wedding reception.

Frogmore is a significant venue for the couple, as the pair have reportedly enjoyed romantic picnics at the estate and it was also the backdrop for their glamorous engagement photos.

However, according to Express, Meghan and Harry were denied the chance to celebrate their wedding at the exclusive venue, which is closed to the public for most of the year, in favour of the more 'practical' alternative, St Georges Hall at Windsor Castle.

The couple were thought to be keen on Frogmore, which Meghan described as 'dreamy', for their wedding reception, but have now been 'gently vetoed' by royal aides.

It is just a mile away from their venue of St George's Chapel, where they will wed on May 19.

According to a royal source, one person who would have readily approved of their choice was the Queen, for whom Frogmore is a very special place.

Meghan and Harry announced their engagement on November 27, with the American actress showing off her sparkling ring complete with diamonds owned by his mother Princess Diana.

They live in Nottingham Cottage in Kensington Palace next door to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
Sawant (62) was accosted by two men late on Sunday night who then attacked him with sharp weapons.

Sawant was a two-time corporator of Shiv Sena from Samta Nagar. (Photo: ANI)

Mumbai: Former Shiv Sena corporator, Ashok Sawant, has been stabbed to death outside his house in Maharashtra's Kandivali.

Sawant (62) was accosted by two men late on Sunday night who then attacked him with sharp weapons.

The incident took place when he was returning home after meeting a friend.

He was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared brought dead.

Sawant was a two-time corporator of Shiv Sena from Samta Nagar.

Investigation in the case is on.
The section penalises sexual intercourse between two consenting adults of the same gender.

A three-judge bench of SC said it would examine examine the constituitional validity of the law referred to as Section 377. (Representational image)

Mumbai: Bringing cheers to the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) community, the Supreme Court (SC) has opened a fresh debate on homosexuality. On Monday, while responding to a petition brought by five persons from the LGBT community, a three-judge bench of SC headed by the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, said it would reconsider and examine the constitutional validity of the law referred to as Section 377. The section penalises sexual intercourse between two consenting adults of the same gender.

The SC referred the plea to a larger bench on Monday. I think we are in good hands at the moment. Its highly progressive that the SC has taken a stand of this kind that they are going to review section 377. I think its high time that a country which stands for plurality and respect for all individuals should decriminalise this section Its enshrined in the constitution that every person irrespective of the number, are deemed to receive respect and life of dignity, said Harish Iyer, an activist fighting for the rights of LGBTQ.

"It's a relief that they have considered re-opening this debate, it's a positive move and I have hopes that atleast this time the section will be decriminalized," said Madhura Sarode, a transgender.

In December 2013, the SC had overturned the High Courts ruling of decriminalising homosexuality. In 2009, Delhi HC had decriminalised the section. The SC had upheld section 377 in 2013 and stated that community is a negligible part of the population.

Speaking to The Asian Age, Advocate Ejaz Naqvi said, Its a welcome move. State as well as judiciary should not interfere in the privacy of two adults. Homosexuality is not bad in comparison to corruption or moral corruption. Thats why state should concentrate on eradicating corruption, rather than eradicating abnormality in sexuality. Naqvi represents Lalita Salve, a woman constable from Beed who wants to change her gender and had approached High Court on the same.
Around 29 school children had died in the incident as the buses carrying them fell into the river.

Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Monday directed the lawyer representing Union Territory of Diu Daman to file a status report within two weeks, stating if any departmental action has been taken against government officials in connection with the collapse of Damanganga Bridge in August 2003.

Around 29 school children had died in the incident as the buses carrying them fell into the river. The HC has also sought report of the trial, as charges have not been framed and the trial is pending since 2009.

The division bench of Justice Naresh H. Patil and Justice Nitin W. Sambre was hearing PIL filed by Ishvarlal Naik. Naiks lawyer Ramesh Ramamurthy argued before the bench that the government had appointed retired high court Justice R.J. Kochars committee to probe the incident.

Advocate Ramamurthy, Justice Kochar in his report had recommended departmental and penal action against government officials who were found to be negligent that led to the incident.
Youngsters hobby stems from fact that he has always been fascinated by Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Anurag Lakandry says that his hobby stems from the fact that he has always been fascinated by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Anurag Lakandry, a 24-year-old ITI student and resident of Tindharia in Darjeeling, is creating waves by making miniature models of the famous Darjeeling Toy Train to popularise it around the world.

Speaking about his endeavours to this correspondent, Lakandry says that his hobby stems from the fact that he has always been fascinated by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) and thus came up with the idea of making miniatures on them.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) or Toy Train is a two feet narrow gauge railway based on zig-zag and loop line technology that runs between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling in the state of West-Bengal.

A model created by Lakandry

Everyone in my family has always worked for the DHR as loco pilots and my house is near a railway loco shed. These coupled with my natural inclination gradually made me garner interest in Railways.

Elaborating on how he makes the models, Lakandry says that the materials he uses are varied.

I use a lot of different things to make these models. Nuts, bolts, fuse snips, wires, and metal sheets are just a few of the things that I used. I make use of simple things to make them as I lack good accessories. As for the parts of metals he uses, he solders them himself. And whenever he runs out of material, he just picks up the scraps from different shops which he feels will fit the general make of the model.

All the parts of the DHR engine are in my mind so it never creates any problem for me when I am sourcing the materials for it, he adds.

Lakandry says that support for his endeavour comes from the most unlikeliest of sources.

There are a few British gentlemen who had supported me a lot. Michael Whitehouse, chairman of Vintage Trains is one such person. He sends me the motors tracks to make my model accurate.

Lakandry adds that he has been to Thailand, Myanmar in 2014 and 2017 with European railway experts where he learnt a lot of things about the Railways.

The youth adds, I visited the railway sheds depots in Myanmar and Thailand in 2014 where I also got the chance to drive a 2ft Burmese Mine Railway Tender Tank Steam locomotive in the main line.

Last year, Lakandry was also fortunate enough to drive YC 629 Meter Guage Steam Locomotive on the main line of Indian Railways.

The young locomotive enthusiast adds that while many people do show interest in his models, it is the Railfans from Britain who especially love the DHR. It was with the help of such Railfans that Lakendry was able to graduate from dead engines to motorized ones.

At present Lakandry is attempting to make a steam model with the help of a boiler cylinder and books on steam engines that the railfans have sent him.

Anurag has started getting orders from London, Singapore, Russia and some other places as well.

On December 2, 1999 the UNESCO conferred the World Heritage site status to DHR which became only the second railway in the world to receive such status.
The Peshwas were not a major power at the beginning of the 19th century. Their glory ended with the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.

Not many are interested in the real historical significance of the Bhima-Koregaon battle where the Mahar contingent of the East India Company forces defeated the Peshwas army in 1818. The Peshwas were not a major power at the beginning of the 19th century. Their glory ended with the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761. The memory of Mahar bravery is worth remembering, but it did not change the fortunes of the community in any big way, nor did it alter the condition of the dalits in the rest of the country. It is a matter of doubtful validity whether the success of the Mahars in that battle of two centuries ago would serve as a morale booster for dalits across the country now.

There is, however, the harsh truth that whenever dalits gather in a big way as they did in Bhima-Koregaon on New Years Day last week, the other dominant castes feel uneasy and even a little bit frightened. The sight of lakhs of the dispossessed at one place must indeed drive shivers of fear down the spines of the those who believe themselves to be upper castes. The gathering of the poor in Paris at the time of French Revolution in 1789 must have been spine-chilling to the remnants of the French nobility of the day. But the unfortunate truth is that the incandescent moment of dalit strength and pride does not last, and most of them go back to their daily lives of struggle, frustration and some success.

It is interesting in this context to note the observations of Ramdas Athavale of the Republican Party of India and Union minister of state in the Narendra Modi government. He advised the new dalit political star from Gujarat, Jignesh Mevani, to build bridges and not create divisions. What he meant was that confrontation would not help in the present times. It is the advice of a seasoned politician to an upcoming one. Then he made a far more important remark. He said that if so many dalits could gather, it should be possible for Prakash Ambedkars faction of the RPI and his own to fight the elections together and decide whether they should support the Congress or the BJP.

The BJPs political and ideological opponents look to assertions of caste identity to counter the overweening, or what appears to be dominant, hold of the Hindutva party in the country. For the last three years, the Congress, the Communists, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and Lalu Prasad Yadavs Rashtriya Janata Dal have almost despaired of countering Prime Minister Narendra Modis nebulous rhetoric of economic development. They knew that Mr Modis BJP could be scoring brownie points on development issues, but the main thrust of the Prime Ministers party is rightist-oriented Hindutva nationalism. The Patidar agitation in Gujarat prior to the 2017 Assembly elections and the reassertion of Dalit identity in the Bhima-Koregaon gathering near Pune in Maharashtra is sure to warm the hearts of the BJPs critics and opponents that the so-called Hindutva consensus which seemed to have emerged in the majority community is breaking down under the stress of caste identities intertwined with economic woes.

The BJP leaders seem to have sensed the problem of social unrest expressing itself through the caste voice. Prime Minister Modi, speaking at the BJP office in New Delhi immediately after the narrow victory in the Gujarat Assembly elections, expressed his fear and uneasiness. He said he would not allow Gujarati people to be split along caste lines. It is the echo of what his party senior of the past, Lal Krishna Advani, had said in the face of Mandal challenge posed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh when he announced reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in government jobs in 1990, and Mr Advani countered it with the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, saying it was done to save Hindu society from being splintered along caste lines. Mr Advani did not really succeed in the 1990s though he believed he did. Mr Modi thinks that he is uniting all sections of society on the development plank, though many of his critics would say that what he has in mind is just Hindus, and that he does not care about the religious minorities.

In Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had worked assiduously to Hinduise the tribal population across central India, and created a votebank for the BJP. There was also an attempt to win over the OBCs as well. The BJP has benefited hugely from the political consolidation of the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and OBCs. But it was never going to be a stable social-political block. It is showing cracks and the BJP is quite clueless about how to deal with it effectively. The Hindutva rhetoric has run its course, and it does not any more serve as the political talisman that it seemed to be for some years now.

The emerging spokespersons of caste formations like Hardik Patel of the Patidars and Jignesh Mevani of the Dalits or Alpesh Thakore are likely to become mainstream political leaders sooner rather than later, and their voicing of caste interests and concerns, which are real and genuine, may not be sufficient by themselves because protest is a symptom and not a solution to difficult social and economic problems. The anti-BJP cheerleaders should not get tipsy over the emergence of these young voices as they did over Kanhaiya Kumar of Jawaharlal Nehru University some time back. The challenge to the political dominance of the BJP and Mr Modi comes from the people at large and for diverse reasons. The Left liberals would be committing a blunder if they confound popular discontent with the BJP and Mr Modi with politics based on caste identities.
Half of teenagers in the US feel like they are addicted to their mobile phones and feel the pressure to respond to phone messages.

Jana Partners and the California State Teachers Retirement System, Apple Inc's shareholders, are urging the smartphone maker to address the growing problem of addiction of the youth to iPhones.

According to a report by Reuters, Jana and CalSTRS, one of the public pension plans, who together control about $2 billion worth of Apple shares, has recently delivered a letter to Apple on January 6, which asks the company to consider developing software that would allow parents to control and regulate their childrens phone use. They have also asked Apple to study the impact of excessive phone use on mental health. The investors are reportedly worried that Apples reputation and the stock could be hurt if it does not address those concerns.

This comes after the issue of phone addiction among young people has been on the rise in the United States as parents report their children cannot give up their phones.
Twitter considers newsworthiness and whether a tweet is of public interest before removing an account or a tweet.

Twitter responded in its blog post that even if it did block a world leader, doing so would not silence that leader.

Twitter on Friday reiterated its stance that accounts belonging to world leaders have special status on the social media network, pushing back against users who have called on the company to banish US President Donald Trump.

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate, Twitter said in a post on a corporate blog. Twitter had already said in September that newsworthiness and whether a tweet is of public interest is among the factors it considers before removing an account or a tweet.

The debate over Trumps tweeting, though, raged anew after Trump said from his @realDonaldTrump account on Tuesday that he had a much bigger and more powerful nuclear button than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Critics said that tweet and Trumps continued presence on the network endanger the world and violate Twitters ban on threats of violence. Some users protested at Twitters San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday. Twitter responded in its blog post that even if it did block a world leader, doing so would not silence that leader.

The company said that it does review tweets by world leaders and enforces its rules accordingly, leaving open the possibility that it could take down some material posted by them. No one persons account drives Twitters growth, or influences these decisions, the company added. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Twitters statement. Some Twitter users expressed support for the companys decision, while others complained of a double standard. If I tweeted half of what Trump has since he entered office, Id be permanently banned from this platform, a Twitter user wrote from the account @michaelranaii.
The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.'

An agitated protestor said, 'When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also.' (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Washington: A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' outside the Pakistan embassy in Washington, over the misbehaviour meted out to former Indian Naval Officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife.

The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.'

An agitated protestor said, When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also.

Another protestor said that Pakistans narrow-mindedness has been exposed from the way it treated Jadhavs family.

Policy makers and people here need to understand that Pakistan as a whole is also being run by narrow-minded mentality, he added.

Washington DC: A group of Indian-Americans & Balochs held a protest by the name '#ChappalChorPakistan' outside Pakistan embassy over the misbehavior meted out to #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/iVssgetFZQ  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

A meeting took place between Jadhav and his family on December 25 in Islamabad, on the request of the Indian government.

Washington DC: A group of Indian-Americans & Balochs held a protest by the name '#ChappalChorPakistan' outside Pakistan embassy over the misbehavior meted out to #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/iVssgetFZQ  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Jadhavs wife was asked to remove her shoes and use another pair as she went in the Foreign Office to meet her husband.

Pakistan claimed that her shoes were confiscated on security grounds as there was "something" in it.

Jadhav is on a death row in Pakistan over charges of terrorism and spying for India's intelligence agency- Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

On May 18, 2017, the International Court of Justice stayed the hanging after India approached it against the death sentence.
A total of 24,473 attempts were made since last June's general election from devices connected to the parliamentary network.

Parliament blocked 113,208 attempts in 2016, down from 213,020 the previous year. (Photo: Representational | File)

London: Around 160 requests a day were made in late 2017 to access pornography websites from computers within the Houses of Parliament, Britain's Press Association (PA) reported Monday.

A total of 24,473 attempts were made since last June's general election from devices connected to the parliamentary network, according to data obtained by a PA Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

Prime Minister Theresa May is already reeling from a wave of sexual misconduct allegations in Westminster.

She was forced to dump minister and long-time friend Damian Green last month after he apparently misled police over claims pornography was found on computers in his Westminster office in 2008.

The parliamentary internet network is used by MPs, Lords in the upper house and their staff.

Authorities claim most attempts are not deliberate and point to a decrease in recent years.

Parliament blocked 113,208 attempts in 2016, down from 213,020 the previous year.

"All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament's computer network," a parliamentary spokesman told PA.

"The vast majority of 'attempts' to access them are not deliberate. This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliament's guest Wi-Fi."
The country has deployed Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces and Afghan mercenaries in order to stem the anti-government protests.

In December, Ahmadinejad had said: 'Iran is suffering from mismanagement and the Rouhani government (Hassan Rouhani) believes that they own the land and that the people are an ignorant society'. (Photo: AP)

Tehran: The Iran government reportedly arrested its former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in south-central Iran's Shiraz for inciting the December 28 anti-government protests that have engulfed different parts of the country.

The arrest came after the former president made provocative statements related to the protests last week in Bushehr.

The local authorities are likely to detain Ahmadinejad under house arrest with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneis approval, the Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper added, citing 'reliable sources in Tehran'.

In a rally in Bushehr in late December, Ahmadinejad had said: "Iran is suffering from mismanagement and the Rouhani government (Hassan Rouhani) believes that they own the land and that the people are an ignorant society".

"Some of the current leaders live detached from the problems and concerns of the people, and do not know anything about the reality of the society", the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Irans fifth head of the judicial system, Amole Larijani, had also accused Ahmadinejad of inciting protests.

The former Iranian president spoke about Larijani in a videotaped statement, sarcastically saying: "I have no children spying for the West, I have no brothers who are actively smuggling goods, and I do not steal land to raise my cattle".

Along with Ahmadinejad, a prominent Shiite cleric and politician Mehdi Karroubi and former Iranian prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi were also detained and put under house arrest.

Iran is still witnessing a wave of demonstrations, being held in many cities across the country as people took to raising anti-government slogans, over alleged corruption and rising prices that plagued the people of the country earlier this week.

Khamenei on Tuesday blamed the country's 'enemies' to instigate the ongoing anti-government protests. Also, Rouhani said in last week that the people of Iran were free to protest peacefully, but rejected protesting by violence.

The country has deployed Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces and Afghan mercenaries in order to stem the anti-government protests. The authorities have blocked two popular social media apps- Telegram and Instagram, as a security measure.

Also, three protesters were reportedly shot dead by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in central Iran last week. More casualties are feared as well.

The official death toll in the anti-government protests is, as of now, 20. Thousands of protesters have been arrested in the last few days.
by Mathias Hariyadi

Episodes of religious and political intolerance are growing in the country. The bishop launches slogan 'We are Different, We are Indonesia' and the image of Our Lady of All Ethnicities. The Indonesian Church is engaged in numerous initiatives and projects aimed at promoting and guaranteeing the national value of pluralism.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  The archdiocese of Jakarta has welcomed 2018 as the Year of Unity with a recently released pastoral letter. In it, Jakarta Archbishop Mgr Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo (picture 1) appeals for national unity to counter the growing religious and political divisions in the most populous Islamic country in the world.

"In 2018, we want to deepen our understanding of the third principle of the state philosophy  national unity  as embodied in the motto 'We are different, We are Indonesia'," says the letter, which was read in all the parishes of the archdiocese during Saturday and Sunday services.

Episodes of religious intolerance are on the increase in Indonesia. Radical movements, which exploit the religious sentiment of the population for their own interests, are gaining more ground in the political life of the nation.

Renewing the Catholic Churchs commitment to dialogue and peaceful coexistence between the various religious confessions, Mgr Suharyo offers the image of Our Lady of All Ethnicities (picture 2) as a symbol of national unity.

On the Virgin's upper body, one can see the Garuda Pancasila, the countrys national emblem, whilst the head is adorned with a white and red veil, the colours of the Indonesian flag. A map of the country is on the crown.

"We hope that the image will make us understand that brotherhood, unity and harmony within the Church and society are God's blessings that we must continue to ask in our prayers and be realised in our efforts", the archbishop says.

The Indonesian Church has always been active in initiatives and projects aimed at promoting and guaranteeing the national value of pluralism, expressed in the Pancasila philosophical and political doctrine.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of Indonesia (KWI) has repeatedly highlighted the important role played by the Catholic Church in the process of national unity and has urged Catholics to establish deeper relations with communities and representatives of other religions.

The archdiocese of Jakarta has also dedicated its work plan for the four-year period of 2016-2020 to the founding principles of the Indonesian State, Mgr Suharyo notes. The goal is Amalkan Pancasila, i.e. putting into practice the spirit of Pancasila (pictures 3 and 4).
The bishop of Daejeon, who is the national president of Justice and Peace, expresses his satisfaction for tomorrow's meeting in Panmunjom between the delegations from the North and the South. He praises President Moons "patience and perseverance" and Kim Jong-uns "new, softer language". He hopes that reunions between divided families will resume.

Seoul (AsiaNews)  "The Korean Church has prayed and is praying for the talks between the two Koreas, and for tomorrow's meeting to be successful. I'm happy, very happy," said Mgr Lazarus You Heung-sik, bishop of Daejeon, who spoke to AsiaNews about the forthcoming meeting between the delegations from North and South Korea in the village of Panmunjom, in the demilitarised zone.

Tomorrow's meeting will take place after two years of tears and tensions caused by the Norths repeated rocket launches and by the uncompromising attitude of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye.

"We have arrived at this appointment thanks to the patience and perseverance of President Moon Jae-in who never stopped holding the door open to meeting with the North, even at the most intense moments of the last months, the bishop said.

Moon also met with Xi Jinping and reviewed with him the issue of the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system, criticised so much by China. Unlike what happened with former President Park, they reached an agreement."

The turning point came with Moons invitation to involve North Korean athletes in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and with the acceptance by North Koreas leader Kim Jong-un.

"In President Kim Jong-un's New Year address, there was a new, softer language. He said many times that the North and the South are 'one people, one race' and expressed the desire for a meeting, tomorrows.

The opportunity to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics is essential. We hope that North Korean athletes can come, but also many fans: sport, culture can unite us more. Above all, coming together undermines prejudices and confirms that with we cannot reach peace with weapons."

Immediately after the announcement, the hotline between Seoul and Pyongyang was reactivated and the date of the meeting was set for 9 January. Tomorrow, the Korean delegations will talk about the Olympics, but [South Koreas] Unification Ministry said today that it will try to put family reunions back on the agenda.

Following Koreas division in 1953, many families found themselves divided between the South and the North, unable to see each other. At present, some 60,000, aging people still hope to meet their relatives before dying. The last family reunion was held in 2015.

"The issue of families is a heart-wrenching issue because it highlights the whole story of suffering in the two Koreas, Mgr You said.

Afterwards we hope that cooperation at the Kaesong industrial complex and at Mount Kumgang Tourist Region can restart. They provide an opportunity for exchanges and dialogue that allow the growth of trust and collaboration between the two Koreas ".
The number of local tourists reduced to 40 thousand a day; no restrictions for foreigners, who pay a more expensive ticket. The Islamic mausoleum "hymn to eternal love" is visited by about 6.5 million people each year.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) - The Delhi authorities have decided to limit the number of daily entrances to the Taj Mahal, the "hymn to eternal love", a UNESCO heritage monument and the greatest tourist attraction in India.

Officials of the central administration explain that the decision was taken to limit the damage caused by wear and tear. The number of local visitors will be reduced to 40 thousand in the future, while for foreigners, who pay a more expensive ticket, there will be no restrictions.

In 2016 about 6.5 million tourists visited the famous white marble mausoleum in Agra, Uttar Pradesh. Dedicated by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to the memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, it is considered a masterpiece of Muslim art in India. Since 2007 it has been included among the seven wonders of the world.

Experts claim that the massive crowds of tourists exacerbate damage from usury. The monument is already under constant maintenance to prevent the yellowing of marble due to pollution, footfall, and corrosive agents such as bird droppings and human sweat.

On condition of anonymity, an official of the Archaeological Survey of India reports that "we are responsible for ensuring the safety of the monument and visitors. Crowd management is becoming our biggest challenge. "

The entry restrictions will not be applied to foreign tourists, who pay a ticket of 1000 rupees (13 euros), unlike Indians who pay 40 rupees (0.50 euro cents). The authorities say should the cap on national citizens be reached, they will still be allowed entry, but with a price increase.

Recently, the Taj Mahal has returned to the spotlight because of some contested decisions by chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath famous for his criticism of Christians in India and Mother Teresa. At the beginning of October 2017 his nationalist government decided to eliminate the monument from the state tourist guides; later, given the flurry of criticism, the Hindu guru retracted his statements and declared: "The Taj Mahal is the gem of India and a gift to the whole world. It is an integral part of our culture and the government is committed to its conservation ".
by Nirmala Carvalho

Extremists are threatening St Mary's Post Graduate College in Vidisha. Fr Biju describes the social outreach of the diocese of Sagar. Founded 27 years ago, the Manav Vikas Seva Sangh is an association that serves 286 tribal villages.

Mumbai (AsiaNews)  "It is really sad that whilst the Church is committed to the development of society, Catholic educational institutions are being targeted to sully our image," said Fr Thomas Philip, head of the Manav Vikas Seva Sangh, the human development body of the Diocese of Sagar (Madhya Pradesh).

The clergyman, also known as Father Biju, spoke to AsiaNews, about the case of St Mary's Post Graduate College in Vidisha, which is located in his diocese. For days, the school has been the target of an intimidation campaign by Hindu extremists, who want to conduct a Hindu ritual inside its premises and are threatening serious consequences if they are prevented.

"In any case, the clergyman said, we are not discouraged. The Catholic Church will certainly continue to work for the development of the marginalised and oppressed." Already, trough its apostolate, the diocese serves schools and development, without discrimination, and Hindus are the main beneficiaries of our services. In fact, Most students at the college in Vidisha are Hindus."

To illustrate what the diocese does, Fr Biju turned to the Manav Vikas Seva Sangh (MCSS)), which was founded 27 years ago. The organisation is the official arm of the diocese and deals in particular with improving the conditions of society.

The MVSS deals with community welfare without distinction of caste, creed, religion or race. It wants society to be based on the teachings of the Gospel like peace, justice, equality, love, cooperation and fraternity. Since inception, it has fought relentlessly and vigorously to give voice to those who have no voice, power to the powerless, and resources to the poor."

It "is present in 286 villages and is behind various projects, like subsistence production, support for women, health and hygiene, informal education, good governance, sustainable agriculture, children's rights, and natural resources management."

The area is hilly and "is inhabited mostly by a poor and illiterate tribal people, the clergyman explained. And locals are deprived of the simplest comforts such as home, clothes, food.

These highly exploited groups live in the forests and their survival depends on harvesting food [from the forest], subsistence farming, and day labour. However, "Climate change and job losses due to mechanisation have severely afflicted their economic life.

Our approach is to strengthen the community, by helping families, meeting the essential needs of the group, and ensuring inclusion and participation in their own development. Our strategy boosts tribal people and gives them access to and benefit from education and employment, as well as health and social services.

In essence, "we are working to eradicate poverty and hunger among tribal people and improve their living conditions.

To this end, the work includes providing universal access to primary education, promoting gender equality and helping women and girls, reducing infant and child mortality, improving access to health care, ensuring environmental sustainability through clean water, proper sanitation and waste collection, taking steps against the caste system and other discriminatory social practices, and encouraging tribal people in their own, individual development."
by Melani Manel Perera

More than five thousand complaints have been filed in first nine months of 2017, 1,174 of which against the police. Detention and torture during interrogations are singled out. Lack of resources slows the wheels of justice.

Colombo (AsiaNews)  Sri Lankas police seriously violated the human rights of the people, said Deepika Udagama, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HCRSL) at the first press conference of the year last Thursday.

Speaking about the past year, Ms Udagama said that in the first nine months of 2017, the Commission received 5,614 complaints. Of these, 1,174 were against the police for illegal detention and torture.

She also highlighted the lack of resources to deal with the high number of complaints and noted that "the law must be applied to all citizens in the same way".

"From the point of view of respect for human rights, there have been improvements. There is freedom of thought and freedom of assembly and the culture of fear has almost disappeared, she explained.

However, she added, the most important difficulties stem from police conduct during the detention and the interrogation phases."

Between January and September 2017, the Commission recorded 249 cases of torture, 298 cases of arbitrary detention and 323 cases of threatening behaviour.

The HRCSLs recommendations "do not have much resonance in the media, the HRC chairperson said. One or two television channels that talk about them cannot improve the situation in the country on their own. Everyone is responsible for helping our office."

The Supreme Court "is coming up with very important rulings on matters concerning fundamental rights, such as arrest, detention, torture, sexual crimes and disappearances. This must be reported on the front page, and not in the third or fourth.

We ask all media to provide proper coverage, because such rulings can make a difference in the legal and constitutional protection of fundamental human rights."

Another critical point that must be quickly addressed "is the lack of resources. We do not have enough employees. This causes long waits and does not produce rapid service."
Target of the attack the rebel faction Ajnad al-Qawqaz. At least 7 civilian casualties, but the toll is still provisional. At the moment the reasons for the explosion are still unknown. Several people are missing. The province is one of the last anti-government strongholds.

Damascus (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The deadly toll of a powerful explosion that hit the rebel town of Idlib, in the northwest of Syria, is 23 victims and dozens injured. According to reports from the London-based NGO Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which has a dense network of informants on the ground, the explosion hit the headquarters of an anti-government group. At least seven civilian deaths were registered.

The cause of the explosion, which affected the district of Thalatheen, are not known. According to some testimonies, it was a car bomb. Others speak instead of a drone attack.

SOHR sources report that rescue teams are still engaged in the recovery operations of corpses and in search of possible injured under the rubble of damaged buildings and homes affected. Several people are missing.

The rebel faction hit, known as the Ajnad al-Qawqaz group, includes hundreds of fighters and mercenaries from Asian nations. Its men fight with the militia of the Fateh al-Sham front, a movement once affiliated to al Qaeda, in an attempt to reject the offensive launched last year by the Syrian regular army in the area.

The province of Idlib, bordering Turkey, is one of the last strongholds still in the hands of opponents and rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The government military surrendered control of the area in 2015, when the entire province ended up under the control of the opponents.

However, in the last year the soldiers of Damascus - and their Russian allies - have taken over most of the territory; their goal is to bring together Idlib and the neighboring province of Hama under their control. Idlib, in particular, is of strategic importance because it is on a fundamental link road for the country that unites the capital Damascus to Aleppo, the second most important city in Syria.

Last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed that the offensive against the Islamic State (IS), the primary objective of the Moscow intervention, can be said to have ended. Now the focus has shifted to the militia groups affiliated to al-Qaeda. However, analysts and experts point out that the transition conceals significant risks. There are at least two million Syrians living in the province of Idlib, including tens of thousands of internally displaced people who have left - in the past - other areas affected by the conflict. A large-scale offensive by the Syrian government could cause serious destruction and trigger a massive migration.
Flames and smoke hinder the recovery operations of the missing. The tanker carried about 1 million barrels. The leaking oil is "condensed" and easily mixes with water.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) - An Iranian tanker collided with a Chinese freighter off the East China Sea. The 32 crew members of the oil tanker, 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis are still missing. The 21 members of the Chinese crew are all safe.

The collision took place on 6 January at about 160 nautical miles from the Yangtze River Delta. The Chinese transport ministry communicates that there is an oil spill.

After the clash, the Sanchi tanker, registered as Panamanian, went on fire and is still burning today. Long columns of smoke rise from the tanker and the recovery operations of the missing are blocked by the flames.

The oil tanker had left the island of Kharg in Iran bound for the port of Daesan in South Korea and was expected to arrive by 10 January. It transported 136 thousand tons, about one million barrels, of a very light type of crude, called "condensate", very dangerous for pollution. In fact, it evaporates easily and mixes with water much more than normal crude oil. Furthermore, the substance is colorless and odorless and more difficult to detect.

The Chinese freighter - registered in Hong Kong - was carrying grain from the United States to Guangdong. The cause of the collision is still unknown.
by Kirill Gundjaev

The year spent in the commemoration of the "tragic events of the twentieth century and the beginning of persecutions against the faith". "Suffering has not left the world, every day we hear of wars and rumors of war". Yet "the world survives despite the assaults of the evil one".

Moscow (AsiaNews) - We publish excerpts from the Christmas message of the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill (Gundjaev), addressed to the bishops, priests, monks and all the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the Russian Church, as in many Eastern Churches, Christmas is celebrated on January 7th. The Message was released on 5 January.

Dear friends in the Lord,

Today we call upon all people, together with the Church, to glorify the Creator and Maker with the words: O all the earth, sing ye unto the Lord (heirmos of the First Ode of the Canon for the Nativity of Christ).

The all-beneficent God who loves his creation sends down his Only-Begotten Son the awaited Messiah so that he may accomplish the cause of our salvation. The Son of God, which is in the bosom of the Father (Jn 1:18), becomes the Son of Man and enters our world so that through his blood he may deliver us from sin and so that the sting of death should never inspire fear in the human person.

We know that the Magi who bowed down before Christ brought him gifts. What gift, then, can we bring to the Divine Teacher? The very gift which he asks of us himself: Give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways (Prov 23:26). What does it mean to give ones heart? The heart is a symbol of life. If it ceases to beat, then we die. To give ones heart to God is to dedicate our whole life to him. This dedication does not require that we renounce all that we have. We are merely called upon to remove from our hearts that which is an obstacle to the Divine presence within it. When all our thoughts are taken up with our own ego, when there is no room in our hearts for our neighbour, then there is no room for the Lord too. The presence of our neighbour in our heart depends mainly upon our capability to feel anothers pain and respond to it with deeds of mercy.

The Lord requires that we observe his ways. To observe the ways of God is to see the Divine presence in our lives and in human history: to see the manifestations of both Divine love and his righteous ire.

The past year for our people was replete with reminiscences about the tragic events of the twentieth century and the incipient persecution of the faith. We recalled the great spiritual exploits of the new martyrs and confessors who steadfastly bore witness to their fidelity to Christ. Yet even at that terrible time for our country, the Lord bestowed his mercy: after an enforced two hundred year rupture, the Office of Patriarch was revived in the land of Russia, and the Church, at a time of tribulation, found in the person of the holy bishop Tikhon, who was elected First Hierarch, a wise and courageous pastor, through whose ardent prayers before the Throne of the Most High Creator our Church and people were able to pass through the crucible of trials.

Today we are undergoing a special period: afflictions have not yet left this world, every day we hear of wars and rumours of wars (Mt 24:6). Yet how much of Gods love is poured out upon people! The world exists in spite of the forces of evil, while human love and family values abide in spite of the unbelievable attempts to destroy, desecrate and distort them. Faith in God is alive in the hearts of the majority of people. And our Church, in spite of decades of persecution in the recent past and the endeavours to undermine her authority in the present, remains and shall always be with Christ.

We believe that after undergoing the current trials, the peoples of historical Russia will preserve and renew their spiritual unity, will prosper materially and socially.

May this year be for our people, for the peoples of historical Russia and all the nations of the earth, a year of peace and prosperity. May the Divine Infant, who has been born in Bethlehem, help us to find hope that overcomes fear, and through faith feel the power of Divine love which transforms the life of people.
In his address to diplomats, Francis asks for the solution to conflicts - starting with Syria - and tensions - from Korea to Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan and Venezuela - and augurs that migrants and the "discarded" be welcomed, like unborn children and the elderly and respect for freedom of religion and opinion, the right to work.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Respect for every person, with all their rights, in a perspective of integral human development, as a path to peace. This is the leitmotif of the length address delivered by Pope Francis this morning to the representatives of the 185 states and international organizations that have diplomatic relations with the Holy See, received for the exchange of New Year greetings.

Evoking the 70 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Francis asked for the solution to conflicts - starting with Syria - and tensions - from Korea to Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan and Venezuela  and augured a welcome for migrants and for the "discarded", such as unborn children or the elderly and respect for the rights to religious freedom and opinion, to work.

First of all, the Pope recalled that this year marks the centenary of the end of the First World War, from the ashes "of the Great War, we can learn two lessons that, sad to say, humanity did not immediately grasp, leading within the space of twenty years to a new and even more devastating conflict. The first lesson is that victory never means humiliating a defeated foe.. Peace is not built by vaunting the power of the victor over the vanquished. Future acts of aggression are not deterred by the law of fear, but rather by the power of calm reason that encourages dialogue and mutual understanding as a means of resolving differences [1]. This leads to a second lesson: peace is consolidated when nations can discuss matters on equal terms".

Relations between nations, like human relationships, must also be regulated on the principle that "the principle that all states are by nature equal in dignity". "The basic premise of this approach is the recognition of the dignity of the human person, since disregard and contempt for that dignity resulted in barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of mankind". And " recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms. Which in a Christian perspective is in "significant relationship" with the Gospel message.

" Those rights are premised on the nature objectively shared by the human race. They were proclaimed in order to remove the barriers that divide the human family and to favour what the Churchs social doctrine calls integral human development".

But, particularly in the wake of the social upheaval of the 1960s, "he interpretation of some rights has progressively changed, with the inclusion of a number of new rights that not infrequently conflict with one another". "Somewhat paradoxically, there is a risk that, in the very name of human rights, we will see the rise of modern forms of ideological colonization by the stronger and the wealthier, to the detriment of the poorer and the most vulnerable".

Seventy years after the Declaration of Human Rights, "it is painful to see how many fundamental rights continue to be violated today. First among all of these is the right of every human person to life, liberty and personal security. It is not only war or violence that infringes these rights. In our day, there are more subtle means: I think primarily of innocent children discarded even before they are born, unwanted at times simply because they are ill or malformed, or as a result of the selfishness of adults. I think of the elderly, who are often cast aside, especially when infirm and viewed as a burden. I think of women who repeatedly suffer from violence and oppression, even within their own families. I think too of the victims of human trafficking, which violates the prohibition of every form of slavery".

"Defending the right to life and physical integrity also means safeguarding the right to health on the part of individuals and their families". Efforts are therefore made to "ensure the supply of essential medicines at affordable prices".

"Defending the right to life also entails actively striving for peace, universally recognized as one of the supreme values to be sought and defended". For this purpose, "integral disarmament and integral development are intertwined", while the proliferation of weapons clearly aggravates situations of conflict and entails enormous human and material costs that undermine development and the search for lasting peace" .

In the hope that men will instead choose the path of negotiation "it is of paramount importance to support every effort at dialogue on the Korean peninsula, in order to find new ways of overcoming the current disputes, increasing mutual trust and ensuring a peaceful future for the Korean people and the entire world.

Two States for Israelis and Palestinians

" It is also important for the various peace initiatives aimed at helping Syria to continue, in a constructive climate of growing trust between the parties, so that the lengthy conflict that has caused such immense suffering can finally come to an end. Our shared hope is that, after so much destruction, the time for rebuilding has now come. Yet even more than rebuilding material structures, it is necessary to rebuild hearts, to re-establish the fabric of mutual trust, which is the essential prerequisite for the flourishing of any society. There is a need, then, to promote the legal, political and security conditions that restore a social life where every citizen, regardless of ethnic and religious affiliation, can take part in the development of the country. In this regard, it is vital that religious minorities be protected, including Christians, who for centuries have made an active contribution to Syrias history". " It is likewise important that the many refugees who have found shelter and refuge in neighbouring countries, especially in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, be able to return home. The commitment and efforts made by these countries in this difficult situation deserve the appreciation and support of the entire international community".

"The desire for dialogue is also necessary in beloved Iraq, to enable its various ethnic and religious groups to rediscover the path of reconciliation and peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Such is the case too in Yemen and other parts of the region, and in Afghanistan".

"I think in particular of Israelis and Palestinians, in the wake of the tensions of recent weeks. The Holy See, while expressing sorrow for the loss of life in recent clashes, renews its pressing appeal that every initiative be carefully weighed so as to avoid exacerbating hostilities, and calls for a common commitment to respect, in conformity with the relevant United Nations Resolutions, the status quo of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims. Seventy years of confrontation make more urgent than ever the need for a political solution that allows the presence in the region of two independent states within internationally recognized borders. Despite the difficulties, a willingness to engage in dialogue and to resume negotiations remains the clearest way to achieving at last a peaceful coexistence between the two peoples".

"In national contexts, too, openness and availability to encounter are essential. I think especially of Venezuela, which is experiencing an increasingly dramatic and unprecedented political and humanitarian crisis. The Holy See, while urging an immediate response to the primary needs of the population, expresses the hope that conditions will be created so that the elections scheduled for this year can resolve the existing conflicts, and enable people to look to the future with newfound serenity".

"Nor can the international community overlook the suffering of many parts of the African continent, especially in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Nigeria and the Central African Republic, where the right to life is threatened by the indiscriminate exploitation of resources, terrorism, the proliferation of armed groups and protracted conflicts".

"A shared commitment to rebuilding bridges is also urgent in Ukraine. The year just ended reaped new victims in the conflict that afflicts the country, continuing to bring great suffering to the population, particularly to families who live in areas affected by the war and have lost their loved ones, not infrequently the elderly and children".

Alongside the international situation, Francis highlighted some realities that injure social peace, starting with the family, that "specially in the West, the family is considered an obsolete institution. Today fleeting relationships are preferred to the stability of a definitive life project. But a house built on the sand of frail and fickle relationships cannot stand. What is needed instead is a rock on which to build solid foundations", represented by the "faithful and indissoluble communion of love that joins man and woman".

Today there is much talk about migrants and migration, at times only for the sake of stirring up primal fears. It must not be forgotten that migration has always existed. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the history of salvation is essentially a history of migration. Nor should we forget that freedom of movement, for example, the ability to leave ones own country and to return there, is a fundamental human right. There is a need, then, to abandon the familiar rhetoric and start from the essential consideration that we are dealing, above all, with persons". In this regard, the Pope thanked Bangladesh for helping the Rohingya people and expressed "particular gratitude to Italy, which in recent years has shown an open and generous heart and has also been able to offer positive examples of integration". Francis also expressed his appreciation to Greece and Germany.

Freedom of religion, even to change it

"Among the human rights that I would like to recall today is the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, which includes freedom to change religion [20]. Sad to say, it is well-known that the right to religious freedom is often disregarded, and not infrequently religion becomes either an occasion for the ideological justification of new forms of extremism or a pretext for the social marginalization of believers, if not their downright persecution. The condition for building inclusive societies is the integral comprehension of the human person, who can feel himself or herself truly accepted when recognized and accepted in all the dimensions that constitute his or her identity, including the religious dimension".

Referring finally to the right to work, the Pope affirmed that " There can be no peace or development if individuals are not given the chance to contribute personally by their own labour to the growth of the common good". But " On the one hand, we note an inequitable distribution of the work opportunities, while on the other, a tendency to demand of labourers an ever more pressing pace. The demands of profit, dictated by globalization, have led to a progressive reduction of times and days of rest, with the result that a fundamental dimension of life has been lost  that of rest  which serves to regenerate persons not only physically but also spiritually. A cause for particular concern are the data recently published by the International Labour Organization regarding the increase of child labourers and victims of the new forms of slavery".

"In recalling some of the rights contained in the 1948 Universal Declaration, I do not mean to overlook one of its important aspects, namely, the recognition that every individual also has duties towards the community". In this regard, Francis spoke of "caring for our earth. We know that nature can itself be cruel, even apart from human responsibility. We saw this in the past year with the earthquakes that struck different parts of our world, especially those of recent months in Mexico and in Iran, with their high toll of victims, and with the powerful hurricanes that struck different countries of the Caribbean, also reaching the coast of the United States, and, more recently, the Philippines. Even so, one must not downplay the importance of our own responsibility in interaction with nature. Climate changes, with the global rise in temperatures and their devastating effects, are also a consequence of human activity. Hence there is a need to take up, in a united effort, the responsibility of leaving to coming generations a more beautiful and livable world, and to work, in the light of the commitments agreed upon in Paris in 2015, for the reduction of gas emissions that harm the atmosphere and human health". (FP)
[W]hen we already desire to perform a good act, like an act of charity, we say Its the Holy Spirit inspiring me to do this. And when we realise we harbour within ourselves the desire to attack someone because they are weak, we have no doubt: It is the devil.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  The devil pushes us to scorn those who are weak, to humiliate them instead of consoling them, said Pope Francis in his homily in this mornings Mass at Casa Santa Marta.

The Holy Father took his cue from the First Book of the prophet Samuel, which is about the latters parents, Elkanah and Hannah.

Elkanah had two wives. Hannah was barren; the other, Peninnah, had children. Instead of consoling Hannah, Peninnah did not miss an opportunity to scorn her and treat harshly, reminding her of her infertility.

In the Bible, Francis said, there are many stories of contempt for the weak, as in the case of Hagar and Sarah, Abrahams two wives, one of whom was barren.

Scorn and contempt for the weak is also an attitude found among humans like in the case of Goliath vis-a-vis David, but also in Jobs and Tobiass wives who belittled their suffering husbands.

I ask myself: What is in these people? What is it in ourselves that pushes us to mock and mistreat others weaker than ourselves? It is understandable when a person resents someone stronger than them, perhaps as a result of envy . . . but towards the weak? What makes us do that? It is something habitual, as if I needed to ridicule another person in order to feel confident. As if it were a necessity . . ..

This happens even among children, the pontiff noted. Recalling his youth, he mentioned a woman, Angelina, who lived in his neighbourhood and suffered from a mental illness. She used to walk the streets all day. Local women would give her food to eat and clothes, but the children made fun of her. Lets find Angelina and have some fun, theyd say.

How much evil is there, even in children, that they treat the weak in this way! Pope Francis lamented.

And today we see it constantly in our schools: the phenomenon of bullying, attacking the weak, because you are fat or foreign, or because youre black . . . Attacking and attacking . . . Children and young people, too.

It wasnt just Peninnah, Hagar, or the wives of Tobias and Job: children too. This means there is something in us that makes us act aggressively toward the weak. I believe this is the trace of Original Sin.

Why annihilate others? This is the work of Satan, according to Francis. Psychologists might explain this desire to annihilate others as caused by weakness, but "I believe it is a consequence of Original Sin. This is the work of Satan. Satan, Francis said, has no compassion.

And so, as when we already desire to perform a good act, like an act of charity, we say Its the Holy Spirit inspiring me to do this. And when we realise we harbour in ourselves the desire to attack someone because they are weak, we have no doubt: It is the devil. Because attacking the weak is the work of Satan.

In concluding, Pope Francis said, Let us ask the Lord to give us the grace of Gods compassion. He is the One who has compassion for us and helps us move forward.
Theophiloss car was attacked when he arrived in Manger Square. Palestinians accuse the Greek Orthodox Church of selling land to settler groups. The transaction took place under Theophiloss predecessor. Palestinian and Jordanian authorities attended Christmas Mass.

Bethlehem (AsiaNews/Agencies)  The Basilica of the Nativity is the heart, guard and shield of the holy city of Bethlehem, said Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III during Midnight Mass marking Orthodox Christmas on 6-7 January.

Theophilos III led the Christmas procession from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Various officials attended the liturgical service, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Jordanian Interior Minister, Ghaleb Zu'bi.

During the ceremony, the patriarch prayed for peace in the Middle East and reiterated the closeness of the Orthodox Church to the Palestinian people. This expression of solidarity comes at a difficult time for the patriarchate.

When Theophilos arrived in Bethlehems Manger Square he was met by a protest by Christian Palestinians who accuse the Greek Orthodox Church of selling property and land to Jewish groups.

Protestors threw stones, bottles and eggs and pounded his car with their fists, chanting traitor, traitor. Father Issa Musleh, spokesman for the Orthodox Church, rejected the accusations.

"Those are old deals the patriarch wants to rectify and clarify, because all those old deals are detrimental to the rights of the patriarchate and its congregation."

The controversy dates back to 2004, when three companies associated with a settler group, Ateret Cohanim, obtained a long-term lease on three buildings belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church: the Petra Hotel, the Hotel Imperiale and a building in the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Jaffa Gate.

This transaction provoked the wrath of the Palestinians and led to the removal in 2005 of Theophilos IIIs predecessor, Patriarch Ireneos.

Under the current patriarch, the Greek Orthodox Church has launched a legal battle against the agreement, calling it "illegal" and "unauthorised".

Last 1 August, a district court in Israel rejected the Patriarchates position. The latter now plans to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Australian prune industry receives funding boost





Australias prune industry has been given a funding boost, receiving a cut of the Federal Governments $5 million leadership in Agricultural Industries Fund.

The Australian Prune Industry Association (APIA) has been awarded AUD $159, 000 from the fund, all of which will be invested into people and culture.

APIA Chairman, Grant Delves, said industry leaders recently met with Horticulture Innovation to form a new strategic plan for the Australian prune industry. From the meeting, three key areas were identified as areas that could help reinvigorate the industry.

With limited resources, APIA chose to focus on the first two areas  R&D and promotions, Delves said.

The new funding allows us to invest in the third outcome of building skills, capacity and knowledge.

Investment in industry leadership a must

Mr Delves said it was key industry leaders receive training.

By developing their leadership capability and capacity APIA executives will be more effective in their role, helping drive leadership and improve communication throughout the industry.

APIA also hopes to use the funding to invest in young growers after one of the industrys youngest growers, Ann Furner, successfully attended the International Prune Association Congress in South Africa in 2010.

Furner is now a strong advocate for visiting prune farms across the world for educational purposes.

My husband, Anthony and I have 18 hectares of prunes and we are currently investing in new technology that I heard about while attending the 2015 IPA Congress in Italy, Furner said.

I believe investing in young growers gives them the confidence to participate actively in their industry.

Funding will lastly be used to bring world-class guest speakers to address the industry at APIAs annual conference



Related articles
No Aussie sugar tax despite renewed push by doctors





The Australian Federal Government has said it has no intentions of introducing a tax on sugary drinks despite renewed calls to do so from the Australian Medical Association.

Late last week, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) released its 2018 nutrition statement, saying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages should be introduced as a matter of priority.

Federal Health Minister, Greg Hunter, has however told AAP that the current Federal Government does not support a tax on sugary drinks as a way of addressing obesity.

Unlike the Labor party, we dont believe increasing the family grocery bill at the supermarket is the answer to this challenge, Minister Hunt said.

Call to also ban kids junk food advertising

The AMAs 2018 nutrition statement also says advertising and marketing of junk food and sugary drinks to children should be banned.

AMA President, Dr Michael Gannon, said advertising and marketing of such foods is undermining healthy food education.

Advertising and marketing unhealthy food and drink to children should be prohibited altogether, and the loophole that allows children to be exposed to junk food and alcohol advertising during coverage of sporting events must be closed, Dr Gannon said.

The food industry claims to subscribe to a voluntary code, but the reality is that this kind of advertising is increasing. The AMA calls on the food industry to stop this practice immediately.

More nutrition education for parents

The position statement further calls for increased nutrition education and support to be provided to new and expecting parents.

The AMA says eating habits can be affected by institutions such as schools, aged care facilities and hospitals.

Whether people are admitted to hospital or just visiting a friend or family member, they can be very receptive to messages from doctors and other health workers about healthy eating, Dr Gannon said.

Hospitals and other health facilities must provide healthy food options for residents, visitors, and employees.

Vending machines containing sugary drinks and unhealthy food options should be removed from all health care settings, and replaced with machines offering only healthy options.

Related articles
Its a bit like Christmas, the arrival and opening of that box from the publishers containing samples, examples, of the first print run of your magnum opus, your book, no matter whether it is the first ever or the latest in a long line. You, and maybe co-authors, will have exuded, expended, the proverbial blood, sweat and tears. So it was, arriving in late December 2016 and suitably synchronous with general celebrations, that our Developmental Disorders of the Brain was born into a wider world. Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus: The mountains will labour  and a silly little mouse will be born (the ancient Roman poet Horace, on authorship). We hope not, maybe an elephantulus, a tiny elephant at 377 pages, hard and soft back, with an electronic version.

Supposedly born in the year 2017, its conception and prior genome, as it were, extended surprisingly far back in time. In 1995, my then graduate student, now Professor Jason Mattingley, and I published Clinical Neuropsychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. This volume, whose translation into Serbo-Croat, of all languages, was to prove stillborn due to the Croatian war, dealt largely, but not exclusively, and certainly not comprehensively, with degenerative disorders which can plague our later lives. A book in the neurosciences is obsolete and out of date even before it hits the...
I am writing this email because I am confused about what to do for my Personal Identifiers (Biometrics).



I have applied through my IMMI account online. I have also attached all supporting documents and went to my health examination.



The problem is, is that my home country (South Africa) requires Personal Identifiers (Biometrics) for a Subclass 600 tourist visa to Australia. But I am currently living and working in South Korea. There are no centres for biometrics here.



Please can you help me or inform me what to do next.
Thank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.
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.
Steven Brubacher stood side by side with his 6-year-old son, saying he feels blessed to be alive after a close call over the weekend.

Canoe flipped over Sunday in Sarasota Bay

Steven Brubacher, son, 3 others were in the canoe

They were rescued, hospitalized and are recovering

PREVIOUS: 5 rescued after canoe capsizes in Sarasota Bay



On Sunday, Brubacher, his son, brother-in-law and two nephews treaded water for almost an hour after their boat flipped over in Sarasota Bay.

"This can't be happening  our boys might drown. We might drown," Brubacher said as he recalled the accident.

The family has been taking out the canoe in Sarasota Bay for more than two years. Brubacher said he was out on the water just three days before the accident.

No one really knows what caused them to flip over into the water.

"Probably just someone went out of balance and we all went over," Brubacher said.

He said they tried to flip the canoe back over but flooded it instead. The reality of the situation eventually started to sink in.



A charter boat captain in Manatee County is to thank for saving the lives of 5 boaters he found clinging to a capsized canoe in Sarasota Bay on Sunday morning. (Courtesy of Capt. Taylor Rahn)

"We all started getting really scared, and then we started hollering for help," Brubacher said.

On the cold day, no other boaters were in sight. The closest piece of land was too far for the young boys to swim.

"We all decided we need to ask God to send a boat here. That was our only option. I knew it was our only option," Brubacher said.

It was a prayer eventually answered by Sarasota charter boat Capt. Taylor Rahn.

"The captain saw us, and as soon as we saw his boat start aiming towards us we all said, 'Thank you Lord, thank you Lord, thank you Lord," Brubacher said.

Rahn says they showed signs that they were succumbing to the elements.

"They were screaming. They were crying. They were scared to death and the young boy was basically going in and out of being conscious," he said.

The three children ages 5 to 11 were airlifted to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. Brubacher and his brother-in-law were taken to another hospital to be treated for for hypothermia.

The father-son duo were reunited later Sunday night.



"I knew the best thing in my heart is to have him right next to me, and we just cuddled on my chair in there for a very long time," Brubacher said.

The family hopes to meet up with Rahn soon and thank him properly for saving them.
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A former Hardin County judge candidate who recently filed to run for Jefferson County District Attorney has asked the Supreme Court of Texas to intervene after he was declared ineligible to seek the office.

David Bellow filed last month to run for District Attorney on the Republican ballot.

According to a petition filed at the Supreme Court of Texas last week, he was ruled ineligible by the Jefferson County Republican Party on Dec. 15 because he is not a licensed attorney.

District Attorney Bob Wortham, who Bellow would challenge in November's general election if he remained on the ballot, sent a letter to Republican Party Chair Garrett Peel on Dec. 15, writing that Bellow is ineligible under the Texas Government Code.

In his petition, Bellow alleged that Peel is required to put his name on the ballot and argued that he is eligible to be a candidate despite not meeting the qualifications to hold the office.

Bellow argued that there is "no minimum time" that he is required to be a licensed or practicing attorney before taking office, and said there is "no evidence that (he) will not be a licensed attorney before taking office if he were to win."

He also alleged that the section of the Texas Government Code that requires county and district attorneys to be licensed to practice law violates the Texas Constitution, which does not explicitly list that requirement for the positions.

Bellow asked the state's highest court to order that his name be placed on the ballot, that he be declared an eligible candidate, and that the court rule on that the Government Code section is unconstitutional.

Responses to his petition are due by Thursday.

Bellow said on his campaign website that "the chances of me winning are admittedly not very high" but said he is running to expose corruption in the DA's Office.

He ran unsuccessfully for Hardin County judge in 2014 and for a Hardin County Commissioner's Court seat in 2010 and listed a post office box in Lumberton as his public mailing address when he filed for the DA election last month.

Wortham accused Bellow of running only "to get attention."

"He's not a lawyer and no one's going to grant that, he's not qualified for the position," he said.

Bellow was indicted last January on a third-degree felony charge of stalking. He was accused of placing an illegal tracking device on his estranged wife's vehicle in March 2016. That charge was dropped in November.

He was indicted in June 2016 on a charge of aggravated perjury related to the same tracking device. In December, he filed motions alleging prosecutorial misconduct and asking for Wortham to be removed from the case and replaced by a special prosecutor.

LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.com

Twitter.com/LizTeitz
An alleged intoxicated driver was arrested early Sunday morning after stealing a patrol car in Orange County and crashing it in Louisiana, according to Texas Department of Public Safety.

A DPS Trooper in Orange County pulled over 28-year-old Eric Parker of Denton for suspected intoxicated driving down Interstate 10, according to a DPS statement from Sgt. Stephanie Davis.
Soldiers walk through the scene of a roadside bombing that killed four troops in southern Thailands insurgency-hit Pattani province, Sept. 22, 2017.

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on 2018-01-17

Thailands snail-pace peace talks with Malay Muslim separatist movements have reached a critical juncture. The main armed group, Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), is thinking of moving to the next level of dialogue by drawing international negotiators to the table, and beyond the normal tit-for-tat violence between them and Thai security forces.

It has been 14 years of ambushes, roadside bombings and targeted killings of Thai security officials and suspected collaborators. Thailand, on the other hand, continues to follow a two-pronged strategy: winning the hearts and minds of local Malay Muslim through economic development aimed at stimulating growth in the impoverished southern border region; and engaging in hot pursuits of militants on the ground.

Other than that, the security officials are sitting ducks, waiting to be hit by militants as they move from place to place.

In all, nearly 7,000 people have died from the insurgency-related violence, yet a political settlement is nowhere in sight.

Every now and then, the insurgents carry out coordinated attacks outside of this conflict-affected region known as the Deep South or Patani, the Malays historical homeland, to send a stern warning to the Thai security apparatus that they are capable of expanding their campaign of violence away from the historically contested region.

However, recent months saw a significant shift in Malay-Muslim separatist tactics. Key up-and-coming individuals, who will take over the movement when the elders pass, believe its time to move beyond the shaming and humiliation of the Thai security apparatus. They want to explore other possibilities and opportunities through engaging members of the international community.

But shifting the playing field from the battleground to the worlds stage will not be easy. Members of the international community are reluctant to engage the BRN out of concern of upsetting Bangkok.

In fact, one of the BRNs demands for a formal negotiation with the Thais is mediation by the international community. This issue was raised during a series of meetings over the past six months between the designated facilitator, Malaysias Ahmad Zamzamin Hashim, and a senior member of the BRN ruling council, Doonloh Wae-mano.

Zamzamin also used his meeting with the BRN leader to arrange a meeting between Doonloh and Thailands chief negotiator, Gen. Aksara Kerdpol. The meeting is expected to take place in Indonesia but no date has been set.

The upcoming meeting is not a breakthrough or a game changer, BRN sources insisted. They said BRNs position remained the same: if the Thais want to carry out formal negotiations, they will have to internationalize the process, which means the negotiations will have to be mediated and facilitated by foreign governments and the venue will have to be outside of Malaysia.

Permitting Doonloh to meet with the Thai chief negotiator was a gesture of goodwill toward Kuala Lumpur in its capacity as the facilitator for the peace initiative, BRN sources said.

Thai officials, however, are split on the idea of the meeting itself; some think a face-to-face meeting between Doonloh and Aksara is a positive development, a step in the right direction.

Others are concerned that dealing directly with the BRN will undermine the official process between Bangkok and the other separatist groups, most notably, MARA Patani, an umbrella organization of long-standing Patani-Malay rebel organizations. In other words, these officials would like to see BRN come under MARA Patanis umbrella and deal with the Thais from there.

BRN sources also revealed the group is not in a hurry to get to the negotiating table. First and foremost, their representatives will have to be granted legal immunity and be properly trained, preferably by members of the international community with experience in conflict resolution and peace mediation.

Furthermore, any formal negotiation, they said, will have to be done outside Malaysia, preferably in Western countries with a strong reputation in conflict resolution and mediation.

Thai security and BRN sources said these demands have upset Zamzamin, the retired Malaysian spy chief who invested a great deal of energy going back and forth between the Thais and the rebels to keep Kuala Lumpur at the center of the process.

After all, Malaysia shares a common border with Thailands conflict-affected region. And in this respect, Malaysia is a stakeholder to the conflict, not exactly an honest broker.

The sources said Zamzamin met with Doonloh at least three times over the past six months. He has tried hard to convince Doonloh to permit BRN to join the Kuala Lumpur-facilitated peace talks between Thailand and MARA Patani.

The decision to join MARA Patani, or come to the negotiating table, is not up to Doonloh entirely, sources in the BRN said. The group is governed by a ruling council, the Dewan Pimpinan Parti (DPP), and such an important decision would be made collectively.

While MARA Patani claimed to have BRN members on board, BRNs operatives on the ground and abroad, as well as the movements Indonesia-based Information Department, maintained that these people acted on their own and without the DPPs consent.

Thai officials working on the conflict in the far South said MARA Patani was resting on shaky ground, because their process has not generated any meaningful traction. Moreover, the very fact that BRN, the group that controls virtually all of the militants on the ground, refuses to join them at the table also makes it difficult to move ahead with any plans, such as the implementation of a safety zone  an area where a limited ceasefire is to be observed.

Kuala Lumpurs commitment to the talks should be clearer by the end of February when Zamzamins contract with the government is up for renewal. Some observers dont think MARA Patani can survive without him at the helm.

Progress in the peace talks is moving at a snails pace partly because the BRN, which controls the militants, refuses to come to the table; and partly because Bangkok has never shown that it is interested in getting to the bottom of the Patani Malay cultural and historical grievances.

Thailand only wants to deal with the security aspect of this insurgency and discontent. The government believes it can win over the hearts and minds of the local Malay Muslim to deny the BRN militants the legitimacy for their armed struggle.

But such efforts are unlikely to bear fruit if Bangkok refuses to talk about the historical grievances and mistrust between the state and its Malay minority.

An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly gave the name of the governing body of BRN as the Dewan Penilian Parti. It is the Dewan Pimpinan Parti.

Don Pathan is a consultant and security analyst based in Thailand. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.
Former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamads picture is projected as the opposition names him as its prime ministerial hopeful in the upcoming general election, during a convention in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Jan. 7, 2018.

Elderly statesman Mahathir Mohamad has officially become the standard bearer for Malaysias opposition, with the 92-year-old former longtime leader saying he is prepared to take the helm in the hopes of unseating scandal-plagued Prime Minister Najib Razak through upcoming elections.

But reactions from observers and government officials have been mixed to the oppositions move to pick the former prime minister, who ruled for 22 years from 1981 to 2003 and developed a reputation as an autocratic ruler, as its main hope for defeating the incumbent.

Malaysian opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan (PH) over the weekend named Mahathir as its prime ministerial hopeful after the countrys general election, which is due by August, although Najib is expected to call the polls earlier on in 2018.

I thank you for nominating me as prime minister. Im already 92 years, I wont be there for long, Mahathir, who will turn 93 in July, said to cheers during a convention held by the opposition bloc on Sunday.

Should PH win the election, Mahathir would serve as prime minister to pave the way for his once bitter foe, imprisoned opposition de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim, to take over as PM if granted a royal pardon for a sodomy conviction, officials said. Without the pardon, Anwar would be barred from politics for five years.

Sundays decision means that Mahathir could return as prime minister 15 years after he stepped down from the position.

The four opposition PH parties unanimously appointed Mahathir during their convention to challenge Najib, the leader of the Barisan Nasional coalition and the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) party.

The good thing is PH can lay claim to having an experienced candidate on its side and that it can make critical choices in the run-up to the 14th general election, by consensus, Azmi Hassan, a Malaysian geopolitical analyst, told BenarNews.

The bad thing is that choosing Mahathir may distance a lot of voters as he had a lot of bad history. This factor matters the most to on-the-fence voters, he added.

Another analyst, Hisomuddin Bakar with the independent research firm Ilham Center, described the move as bold.

It would greatly impact Malay voters in urban and semi-urban areas, he told BenarNews, referring to constituents from Malaysias ethnic majority who make up the voting base of UMNO, Mahathirs former party.

But Khairy Jamaluddin, the current minister for youth and sports, said Mahathirs candidacy would cause political instability.

This will cause upheaval in PKR and create uncertainty among investors, not knowing how long Mahathir will be prime minister before Anwar takes over, Khairy told reporters on Sunday, referring to Anwars Peoples Justice Party (PKR).

In a series of tweets, Abdul Rahman Dahlan, a minister in Prime Minister Department, lambasted the choice of Mahathir, but hailed it as absolutely good news for BN.

PH shows how all these years of talking of reform and giving young people a chance were mere rhetoric, one of his tweets read.

Putting the past behind

Mahathir came out of retirement amid allegations that billions of dollars from state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) were misused by Najib and others. Mahathir has since branded Najib, his one-time protege, as corrupt and has led calls for his resignation. Najib has denied allegations of wrongdoing in the 1MDB affair.

The main goal now is to topple UMNO and Najib, Mahathir told journalists on Sunday.

As an autocratic leader decades ago, Mahathir threw several opposition leaders into jail, including Anwar in the late 1990s.

It wasnt easy for the parties that were formerly my enemies to accept me, but they know the importance of bringing down the current government, Mahathir said.

Those who were uneasy with me, my policies  my actions and although it is difficult for them, they realize that what is important is not the past, but what is in the future.

Anwar is serving a five-year jail term for sodomy  a charge that he and his supporters insist is politically motivated. He is set to be released on June 8, according to the Prison Department.

Sundays announcement also saw Anwars wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the Peoples Justice Party president, being named as the oppositions hopeful for the job of deputy prime minister, should the opposition win the election.

While a date for the general election has not been announced, PH is not recognized formally as a political alliance. The Registrar of Societies (ROS) demanded additional documents, which the opposition submitted.

The ROS director could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Hareez Lee in Shah Alam, Malaysia, and Hata Wahari contributed to this report.
Philippine soldiers stand near bodies of Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters after a clash in Datu Unsay town, Maguindanao province, in this undated photo released by the military, Jan. 8, 2018.

Two of the largest former Muslim rebel groups in the Philippines on Monday announced the formation of a joint fighting unit to help the military pursue militants linked to the Islamic State (IS) and avert a siege similar to last years Marawi city.

The leaders of the 10,000-member Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and its precursor, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) said they had agreed to create the Biwang Bangsamoro Unified Coordinating Council during a meeting on the main southern island of Mindanao over the weekend.

The teams would include fighters from both sides who would coordinate with soldiers otherwise hobbled in going after Islamic State (IS) forces in remote areas, Mohagher Iqbal, a MILF senior member said.

The formation of the elite fighting group was decided immediately by both groups due to the serious increasing threat of IS in Mindanao, Iqbal, the MILFs chief negotiator in peace talks, told BenarNews.

He said the new team would conduct joint intervention measures and share intelligence information.

Its a key to establish sustainable peace and order, Iqbal said. We dont want the peace efforts we are forwarding with the government to be spoiled by the so-called IS-inspired groups. Everybody should be vigilant.

The end of war in Marawi does not mean the end also of ISIS, he added, using another acronym for IS.

MILF broke away from MNLF in the late 1970s over ideological differences. It signed a peace deal with government in 2014 after dropping its fight for independence.

The MNLF signed its own peace pact with Manila in 1996. Its founder, Nur Misuari, eventually became the governor of a Muslim autonomous region, but failed to lift the area out of poverty despite millions of dollars being poured into the region.

Misuari later led a deadly siege of Zamboanga city in 2013 that left more than 200 rebel fighters, soldiers and civilians dead.

Misuari went into hiding and the court suspended his arrest warrant on rebellion charges on orders from President Rodrigo Duterte  whom he considers a personal friend  after Duterte came to power in 2016. An arrest warrant on lesser graft charges was filed in September 2017.

Duterte has said he believes that any initiative to bring peace to the volatile south would not work without the help of Misuari and his forces.

Bad elements

In May 2017, Isnilon Hapilon, the acknowledged leader of IS in the region, led Filipino, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern fighters in taking over Marawi, where they had planned to establish a seat of power.

An intense, five-month battle ensued, leading to the deaths of more than 1,000 combatants and civilians.

Duterte identified Abu Turaipe as the new IS leader in the south, following the deaths of Hapilon and top Malaysian militant Mahmud Ahmad in the battle of Marawi.

MNLF Chairman Muslimin Sema attended the unification ceremony and vowed that they would not allow another siege to take place similar to Marawi.

We want to ensure the safety and protection of the people against bad elements who want to sow terrorist acts, Sema said.

He said both sides had agreed to set aside ideological differences and were uniting as one to protect our land from the IS.

But while the Marawi war has ended, government troops were fighting against other groups in the southern region, namely, the splinter Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) which has not openly declared allegiance to IS but appears to be aiding their fighters.

BIFF split from the MILF in 2008 and vowed to push the separatist fight, attracting younger, more hardline members of the MILF.

On Saturday, the military said, troops on reconnaissance patrol came under attack from about 50 BIFF militants. The two-day battle left a one soldier and nine militants dead.

Last month, BIFF militants stormed a community in Shariff Aguak town, killing two civilians and setting on fire more than 20 houses.
He is a patient at a private clinic in Germany |

Von: By ANTJE SCHIPPMANN, BJORN STRITZEL & ROLF KLEINE

The leadership of Iran suppresses and tortures its enemies. It supports the Islamist terror of Hezbollah and Hamas. And its fundamental-Islamic judiciary carries out brutal death sentences.

However, in Germany, the elite of the regime is paid court to. The most recent example of this: in the private clinic INI (International Neuroscience Institute) in Hannover, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (69) is currently enjoying first-class treatment.

Specialists under the supervision of the world-famous brain surgeon Prof. Madjid Samii (80, with 26 honorary doctorates) fight for his health here. Its a luxury that normal Iranians and their children can only dream of.

Lesen Sie auch

He also executed children

According to Amnesty International, during his time as Chief Justice of Iran (1999 to 2009) 2000 people were executed  including even children.

The student Atefah Sahaaleh (16) confessed under torture to being a rape victim. In Iran, this counts as adultery. On August 15, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was publicly hanged on a crane.

The boy Makwan Moloudzadeh (13) was accused of having an affair with a boy of the same age. On December 4, 2007, he was executed in the Kermanshah prison.

Auch interessant

Political prisoners tell of systematic torture and humiliation in Iranian jails.

To this day, the patient belongs to the inner circle of dictator Ali Khamenei (78) and is even considered to be his potential successor. According to the German foreign office, the federal government is therefore informed that Shahroudi has now been treated for weeks in Hannover. Shahroudi is a member of Irans Assembly of Experts. If the German government were to consider this a government office, he would enjoy diplomatic immunity.

And he receives prominent visitors. A picture distributed via the messaging service Twitter shows Ayatollah Reza Ramezani (54) sitting next to Shahroudis hospital bed  the highest-ranking representative in Europe of the torture regime and head of the Islamic Centre in Hamburg.

Charges pressed against the death judge

Now the former MP Volker Beck has pressed charges against Shahroudi for murder and crimes against humanity. We must not be a sanatorium for people who commit crimes against human rights, but we must hold them responsible, Beck told BILD.

It would be a great mistake if the federal government were to grant diplomatic immunity to the organizer of mass-killings by the Iranian judiciary, Beck added.

In principle, it is possible to punish offences that were committed abroad, jurist Ulf Buermeyer, head of the Gesellschaft fur Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Rights), tells BILD.

Even life-long prison sentences can be imposed for this, explains Buermeyer. However, there are several major hurdles for such cases, especially when diplomatic issues are involved.

The director of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch in Germany calls for the government to take the case seriously.

The legal authorities should intervene. If there is a risk of flight, they should act accordingly, Wenzel Michalski tells BILD.

For years and in sadly regular intervals, the German governments representatives for human rights have condemned the executions of minors in Iran, explains Michalski. Now is the chance to follow up political condemnations with actions.

The exiled Iranian activist Mina Ahadi has defended dozens of Iranians whose relatives were executed under Shahroudi. She sent her appeals for clemency directly to him  he refused them all. Shahroudi is a dangerous man with blood on his hands. The German authorities must investigate him.
For Immediate Release, January 8, 2018 Contacts: Craig Tucker, Karuk Tribe, (916) 207-8294, ctucker@karuk.us

Jonathan Evans, Center for Biological Diversity, (213) 598-1466, jevans@biologicaldiversity.org

Bob Wright, Friends of the River, (916) 442-3155 x 207, bwright@friendsoftheriver.org U.S. Supreme Court Slams Door on California Suction Dredge Miners California Moratorium on Suction Dredge Mining for Gold Remains in Effect WASHINGTON The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected a request from recreational gold miners to overturn a California Supreme Court decision upholding a statewide moratorium on recreational suction dredge mining. The courts rejection of the request, effectively upholding Californias role in regulating small-scale gold mining, is an important victory for fish, water quality and tribal cultural sites. Suction dredge mining is a continuation of the genocidal legacy of goldminers that started over 150 years ago, said Leaf Hillman, the Karuk tribes director of natural resources. We pressed California to develop stronger protections for our fish, water and cultural sites only to have mining groups sue. Now the courts have clarified Californias authority to regulate this destructive hobby. Suction dredge mining typically uses gas- or diesel-powered machines to vacuum up gravel and sand from streams and river bottoms in search of gold. It threatens important cultural resources and sensitive wildlife species, and the California Native American Heritage Commission has condemned its threats to irreplaceable tribal and archeological resources. Suction dredge mining pollutes waterways with mercury and sediment and destroys sensitive habitat for important and imperiled wildlife, including salmon and steelhead, California red-legged frogs and sensitive migratory songbirds. Suction dredge mining recklessly tears up rivers, threatens our waterways and harms imperiled salmon, said Jonathan Evans, environmental health legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. In this time of drought and climate change, we cant afford to have Californias waterways trashed by a small but vocal group of hobby miners. In 2016 the California Supreme Court upheld a statewide moratorium on recreational suction dredge mining for gold and validated mining regulations that protect water supplies, fisheries, wildlife and cultural resources. Suction dredge miners have repeatedly asked the courts to prevent the California Department of Fish and Wildlife from enforcing the current moratorium on suction dredge mining. The moratorium, in place since 2009, is designed to prevent mercury pollution and damage to wildlife, waterways and cultural resources until protective rules are adopted. Dissatisfied by the California Courts decisions, suction dredger Brandon Rinehart, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Californias authority to regulate an activity the miners believe should be governed by federal law. With todays ruling the California decision stands. The harm done by suction dredging is well documented by scientists and government agencies. It harms state water supplies by re-suspending toxic mercury, sediment and heavy metals. The State Water Resources Control Board and Environmental Protection Agency urged an end to suction dredge mining because of its significant impacts on water quality and wildlife from mercury pollution. A coalition of tribal, conservation and fisheries groups have been seeking to improve and uphold Californias laws regulating suction dredge mining. This coalition includes the Center for Biological Diversity, the Karuk tribe, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermens Associations, Institute for Fisheries Resources, Friends of the River, The Sierra Fund, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Foothills Anglers Association, North Fork American River Alliance, Upper American River Foundation, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, Environmental Law Foundation and Klamath Riverkeeper. Members of the coalition are represented by Lynne Saxton of Saxton & Associates, a water-quality and toxics-enforcement law firm.
WASHINGTON, USA - Twitter announced Friday it would not block the accounts of world leaders even if their statements are "controversial," citing a need to promote a "public conversation" on political issues.

The announcement came just days after a tweet from President Donald Trump hinting at the use of US nuclear weapons sparked criticism that the social network was allowing threats of violence.

"Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation. Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society," the California-based company said in a blog post.

"Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions."

Twitter made no specific reference to Trump or his tweet this week saying he has a "nuclear button" which is "bigger and more powerful" than that of North Korea's.

Some activists said Twitter should have banned Trump and one group projected images on the company's headquarters with a message "@jack is #complicit," a reference to chief executive Jack Dorsey and "Ban @realDonaldTrump."

"Endangering the world"

The group called Resistance SF accused Dorsey of "endangering the world" and violating its own rules by not banning Trump.

Friday's announcement comes less than a month after Twitter began enforcing new rules aimed at filtering out "hateful" and "abusive" content on the social network, including messages which promote or glorify violence.

Twitter, which has struggled to maintain an open platform without allowing violence or hate speech, said at the time it would not cut off accounts for military or government entities.

Friday's statement left open the possibility however that Twitter could remove specific tweets from political leaders which violate its policies.

"We review tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly," the statement said.

"No one person's account drives Twitter's growth or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind."

Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge.
Rwandan authorities have barred journalist Bob Mugabe from travelling to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, #netFreedom2017. The authorities who questioned him accused him of working against the state, treason and spreading rumours to undermine the state.

Rwanda.  Tomas Griger via 123RF

In response to the Rwandan authorities preventing the editor of the online news outlet Great Lakes Voice, Bob Mugabe, from leaving the country to participate in the 2017 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, a key United Nations gathering on internet-related issues, Freedom House issued a statement.

While the international community is gathered in Geneva to discuss policies that will shape the internet and our digital future, the Rwandan government prevented Bob Mugabe from attending the IGF, holding him at the airport and interrogating him for four hours about his human rights work, said Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project at Freedom House.

The authorities who questioned him accused him of working against the state, treason and spreading rumours to undermine the state, all because of his of critical reporting published online, previous meetings at the UN Human Rights Council, and other human rights activities.

Given the governments record of taking arbitrary measures against human rights defenders and independent voices in the country, Mugabe risks being charged for treason simply for reporting on and voicing his criticism of Rwandas human rights record.

The UN and the IGF Secretariat should urge the Rwandan government to end its arbitrary investigations of Mugabe and immediately lift the travel ban against him.
Somali authorities should immediately release Abdishakur Abdullahi Ahmed, also known as Shaasha, who works as a correspondent for the Nairobi-based RTN Somali TV channel and owns a local radio station, City FM, the Committee to Protect Journalists said this week.

 panaceadoll via 123RF

Authorities in Somalia's southern Hirshabelle state arrested Abdishakur on December 28, 2017, and accused him of airing false news after he reported critically on the local administration, according to RTN managing director Fuad Haji and Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, secretary general of the government-recognised National Union of Somali Journalists. The journalist has not formally been formally charged.

A court in Hirshabelle's city of Jowhar ordered police to release Abdishakur on bail pending investigation, on January 2, according to City FM director, Hamdi Buukar Hassan, Moalimuu, and documents seen by CPJ.

Jowhar police commander Mohamed Siyaad, also known as Canjeex, told CPJ he could not comment on Abdishakur's case and referred CPJ to state authorities. Moalimuu said that Jowhar police told him they had not received the court order.

"Authorities should immediately release Abdishakur Abdullahi Ahmed. Holding him without charge is in clear violation of his rights," said CPJ deputy executive director Robert Mahoney in New York City. "Somali authorities should stop trying to intimidate journalists and make press freedom a priority."

On December 26, a report in which Abdishakur criticised the Hirshabelle government's performance during its first three months of power aired on RTN Somali TV. Fuad said he believes that this triggered the arrest.

Abdishakur had previously questioned Hirshabelle cabinet appointments and government decisions in his reporting and on Facebook, according to Ismail Sheikh Khalifa, chairperson of the Mogadishu-based Journalists for Human Rights, a new organisation whose mandate includes providing legal support for journalists whose rights have been violated, and a Jowhar-based journalist who requested to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.

Somalia's information minister, Abdirahman Omar Osman, told CPJ that his office had urged state authorities in Hirshabelle to release Abdishakur "without further investigation."

CPJ was unable to reach Hirshabelle President Mohamed Abdi Ware despite repeated calls and text messages, or vice president Ali Abdullahi Hussein, also known as Ali Guudlaawe, despite repeated calls.
As both consumers and working professionals, we have come to view internet connectivity in the same way as electricity and running water - it's an essential! Yet as more of our devices become synced and begin to communicate with each other, connectivity will soon take on an entirely new meaning.

Colin Thornton, managing director of Turrito Networks and Dial a Nerd

Today, as broadband internet is becoming more widely available at a cheaper cost, more devices are being created with smart Wi-Fi capabilities and sensors built into them. If you pair this with increasing reliance on software and smartphones and businesses looking for digitally-driven insights, you have a perfect storm, in a sense, for the emergence of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

There is simply too much data, derived from too many devices, for humans to process effectively.

Expect to see businesses devising clear strategies around IoT

This year, we expect to see businesses devising clear strategies around IoT, which, simply put, is connecting any device with an on and off switch to the internet (and/or to each other).

As IoT develops, it will automatically create opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence within almost every sphere of life, and work.

By way of example, imagine the massive amount of data being generated by Fitbit-type wearable devices across the world. Now, imagine if there was an AI program monitoring this data and looking for signs of an impending heart attack. It could be pre-programmed with some obvious signs, but could also learn' from real-life examples.

Maybe, with enough learning, AI could detect heart attacks days or even weeks before they happen!

AI to be a top five investment priority

As a recent press statement by Gartner indicated, the term "artificial intelligence" was not in the top 100 search terms on gartner.com in early 2016. However, by May 2017, the term ranked at number seven, indicating the popularity of the topic and interest from Gartner clients in understanding how AI can and should be used as part of their digital business strategy.

Notably, the company predicts that by 2020, AI will be a top five investment priority for more than 30% of CIOs.

Investing heavily in skills, processes, tools

Similarly to other key technology trends, organisations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes, and tools that are specific to the development and evolution of AI - and it is suggested that businesses focus on tightly scoped solutions, targeting specific tasks.

Take a look at chatbots being used by online retailers, for example. At some point in the not-too-distant future, when you engage with an online agent to ask if they have stock of a certain item or what their warranty policy is, you will be answered by an AI bot, not a human.

A new frontier

Unsurprisingly, within the technology industry itself, AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors - with AI and business intelligence soon to be incorporated into every application, app and service within the enterprise.

Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. There is also a strong view that organisations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences.

However, regardless of application, the real power of AI lies in its contextual awareness: its ability to sense and respond to the current context. As a result, the potential of AI is especially seductive in the sphere of sales and marketing.

People browsing the internet are, often unknowingly, creating huge amounts of data. Their likes and dislikes, shopping habits, budgets and more are being recorded on a daily basis. It would be impossible for humans to sift through this data in a scalable (and sustainable) way to customise a specific users experience.

It will, therefore, be left to AI to monitor and learn, so that people are engaging with content (and advertising) that appeals to them.

For South African businesses of all sizes and across sectors, AI undoubtedly presents new channels for growth and innovation  at a time when both are badly needed.

The key, however, will be investing into smart technology and smart peopleand sooner rather than later!

View more ICT trends in the BizTrends2018 special section.
Opportunities for economic growth abound within the exchanges between the formal and informal economies.

Kamogelo Mmutlana, CEO of Barloworld Logistics

From street vendors to domestic workers, spaza shop traders, subsistence farmers, taxi operators, small-scale manufacturers, and roadside restaurateurs, the South African informal economy is a bustling, vibrant industry.

No longer viewed as merely a survivalist strategy by those impacted by poverty, informal trade creates economic opportunity for approximately 32% of the local non-agricultural workforce, with this number increasing to as much as 60% globally.

Considering that there are an estimated 90,000 permanent spaza shops and more than 500,000 table-top vendors throughout the country, each generating anywhere from R10,000 to R200,000 in sales per month, the lower-end of the so-called "retail pyramid" accounts for a considerable proportion of local trade.

Leading organisations within the formal economy not only have a responsibility to enable access and opportunity within the informal sector but would be well advised to assess the burgeoning potential within it critically in order to partner in the sector's growth.

Whether corporate South Africa acknowledges it or not; we are inextricably linked to the informal economy. Notwithstanding geographic and cash trade challenges, the potential for value exchange between these sectors of our economy requires focused attention from supply chain organisations.

Putting practices in place to facilitate formal, informal trade

Gaining traction is the trend of local supply chain businesses putting practices in place to facilitate formal and informal trade, but for such to be successful, a deeper understanding of the dynamics, and indeed psyche, of the informal market is required.

Universal solutions are not necessarily viable within the informal economy. What has successfully worked in India or Vietnam cannot be assumed to work locally.

As this trend continues to evolve, we must remain mindful that our markets have wholly unique requirements and expectations. These nuances require thoughtful consideration, innovative application of technology and sustainable business practices in order to facilitate free access and opportunity.

In South Africa, the trend of the private sector tapping into the informal economy is not new; however, policy and legislature need to play their part.

Attempts to regulate the informal economy through existing mechanisms may, instead of protecting this vibrant marketplace, quash the very entrepreneurial spirit that drives it forward.

Access to credit, bespoke liability, wholesale pricing, and reliable supply are all required to participate in any market economy. These requirements - when overlaid on a landscape of informal trade - pose challenges for both the public and private sectors.

The first step is to critically assess your product offering - from product sizing and pricing right through to distribution model and order financing.

As a business, it is critical to understand where your point of value would be when entering into the informal economy. In most cases, distribution and payment models are key factors when creating market share within this space.

The shared economy trend

It is important that businesses work with their partners to assess the entire supply chain when hoping to capitalise on this shared economy trend. From ordering mechanisms to delivery and the collection of cash, opening opportunity with informal trade sector requires supply chain partners not only be attuned to these needs but flexible enough to adapt.

The major challenge is that there is no cut and paste solution and often these fall beyond the scope of traditional supply chain models.

To realise the opportunities this trend offers, partnering with local, innovative providers that offer limited-basket drops, or technology driven payment mechanisms, for example, are likely to create viable routes-to-market within this space.

As supply chain providers, the onus lies on us to drive this trend by opening opportunities within previously untapped markets.

The ability to action single, small item drops while maintaining the cold chain to a Gogo selling Shisanyama, the collection and reuse of recyclables from waste-pickers, or the provision of cost-effective compost made from organic waste to subsistence farmers create smarter business strategies. These ultimately unlock opportunities to enhance profits and drive growth for both the informal and formal economies.

As economic pressure persists, and the entrepreneurial spirit flourishes, the informal economy will continue to grow, and indeed take its place amongst the most significant contributors to our GDP.

The trend of value sharing and opportunity creation between the formal and informal sectors will thus continue. Those connected to this local zeitgeist, and indeed innovative and agile enough to adapt, will thrive and drive our economy forward.
South Africa's mango export season isn't running on all cylinders yet, as Tommy Atkins makes up the bulk of the harvest at the moment and more's the pity, as two regions whose harvests normally are sequential, came in simultaneously this year, causing an early Tommy Atkins peak.

Meditations via pixabay

Usually, Malelanes mangoes are earlier than those from Hoedspruit. But this year both arrived at the same time, causing oversupply on the market.

Mangoes are for the moment mostly exported to the Middle East and Russia, where growth in both markets is expected, with a sprinkling to the EU and India. Prices on the export markets are liveable, says one exporter. In dollar terms, prices are the same as last year, but with the strengthened rand, the price back on the farm isnt wonderful.

At one fresh produce market, an agent says that the market moves so slowly that there are still significant mango volumes left from before Christmas. However, I got some fresh mangoes in today which sold for very good prices.

Expectations of a normalisation

With high temperatures in the north of the country, producers have no choice but to pick mangoes as fast as they can. Substantial rain a few weeks ago resulted in anthracnose in some areas. Expectations are that as Tommy Atkins finishes up, and other cultivars start, the situation will normalise in about two to three weeks time.

Tommy Atkins is the main cultivar for the Malelane production area, where the harvest is pretty much packed. Hoedspruit specialises in Keitts, a cultivar with a long window of almost two months. Tzaneen has just started picking its Tommy Atkins.

As for South African mangoes being in an off cycle, theres not much evidence of that for the moment with all the Tommy Atkins around, but overall volumes could be down by 30% to 40%.

Fresh Plaza
From crowdfunding and instant mobile payments for emergency relief to virtual volunteering platforms, technology has changed the way we give. Previously the domain of big business, giving is now in the hands of everyone - and we're talking serious money.

Over a period of six months, more than $350m was raised in relief aid for Hurricane Harvey through online platforms such as www.YouCaring.com. Driven through social media, emotive pictures and stories of loss going viral, you could get involved and not even build up a sweat while doing it. Instant generosity at the click of a button.

Another example - in a world before drought  the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge - who hasnt heard of the ice bucket challenge? Anyone know what ALS is? Guess that's not the point. Thanks to technology, the idea went global, with the likes of Oprah, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and even Obama taking part. Over a six-week period, more than $115m was raised and August officially became ALS Awareness Month. Maximum impact  driven entirely by the internet.

Closer to home (and a long way off from international disaster relief), social media has started to galvanise the masses  xenophobia, political activism, the Imizama Yethu fires in Hout Bay and the Knysna fires being prime examples. The bottom line, whether youre for or against clicktivism, technology brings scale to social problems.

How non-profits can start their technology journey

Technology is continuing to open up new revenue opportunities for both business and the non-profit sector. Put simply, if youre not leveraging technology, if youre not open to technology as an acquisition, engagement and operational channel, then you really will be left behind. This is no more apparent than in the non-profit sector  and in the developing world.

We can see the technology trend reflected back to us in the data on www.forgood.co.za (a technology platform empowering non-profits). Looking at a sample of 6,833 actions across the country and our 12 corporate volunteering programmes, 1 ,57 of those actions were linked to technology. That's 26%, or one in four tech-related requests and interventions  a significant number. From savvy millennials to retirees who have time and a wealth of knowledge under their belt, the way we give is increasingly becoming digital.

The advent of global tech products being adopted into enterprises has also opened the door for non-profits to utilise those very same products  but for free. For example, the Google Ad Grants programme, which offers non-profits R130,000 per month in free advertising. Use it to attract donors, tell your story and raise awareness  it's almost criminal if youre an active non-profit (hopefully with a profile on forgood.co.za) and you aren't leveraging this.

Another example, Google Apps for Business (email, calendar and online storage, all on your own domain name), you guessed it free for non-profits. Forget fancy internal servers and complicated software providers. Google wants to be your friend.

Creating more sustainable business models

As we move to the age of the 'social enterprise', non-profits are trying to lower their reliance on donor funding by creating more sustainable business models. One of the products helping to drive this trend is Shopify. Now with local representation in South Africa and deep integration into UAfrica (and others) for delivery options, any non-profit (or small business for that matter), can have a fully functional online shop, beautifully designed with point-and-click pay / deliver features, for less than R1,000 per month. Itll take you a few hours to set up a basic Shopify e-commerce shop. When done properly off a low-cost base, an online shop is a lot more scalable than a cake sale.

We're not saying ditch the 'offline' events that non-profits have become masters at (who doesnt like cake!)  just make sure you've got an instant payment portal such as SnapScan at your event  cash is no longer king. And don't forget to promote and manage the event on your social media platforms - a small ad investment to a targeted audience could yield some serious donor cash and audience engagement.

Think about the exponential impact your organisation could achieve if you started thinking with a digital mindset. Technology is not going away. It's changed how we do business, how we interact with each other and how we give. If you want to be a part of it, jump on.
I recently travelled to Dubai to attend the 37th Gitex Technology Week - where the future of business begins. Tech pioneers and futurists, business leaders and IT professionals come to GITEX to experience the world's most advanced technology and drive digital transformation...

Damian Michael, founder and MD of iNNOVO Networks

GITEX Technology Week is a game-changing, must-attend event located in Dubai  the worlds fastest growing technology hub. For 37 years, visionaries and tech pioneers have been descending on the city to witness first-hand the technology that has inspired generations and innovations that are set to change the world.

A dynamic innovation hub, a bridge between east and west, a pioneer in technology innovation and early adoption makes theoretical technology a mass-consumption reality. In just a few decades, Dubai has reinvented itself from a quiet fishing port to a global investment hub and leading travel destination, now renowned for its record-setting skyline, driverless metro, and man-made islands.

Its comprehensive government investments in digital innovation to advance key social, economic, governance and environmental indicators, means this incredible transformation will only gain pace in coming years.

These are the trends I predict we'll see more of in 2018:

1. Hype vs reality

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, promising self-driving cars, medical breakthroughs, and new ways of working. But how do you separate hype from reality? How can a company apply AI to solve real business problems in 2018?

Heres a synopsis of what I learnt, and which AI learnings your business should keep in mind for 2018.

Weve all seen the sensational headlines: "The robots are coming, and theyll take our jobs!", "AI can do your job faster and more accurately than you can!"

Human jobs wont go away, but they will change. Roles will be more creative and specialised as AI is integrated into the workday.

Better data leads to better math, leads to better predictions, so people using AI can automate the tedious work and take action on the insights. AI does the math faster, saving money by automating normally complex processes. It makes your life easier even now, behind the scenes. This is what it looks like today. In the longer term, AI will transform industries.

One of AIs promises is to make self-driving cars safer. AI will power everyday driving decisions, such as whether to stop abruptly or swerve to avoid hitting an obstacle. AI will help redesign the entire shopping experience, optimising everything with more and better data. Retailers will seamlessly stock the precise number of goods needed on shelves at any given time, and know which product at which price should be highlighted to a specific customer as they navigate a store.

2. The blockchain landscape

Blockchain is emerging as the mainstay for digital identities in the emerging trust economy. The total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies hovers around $150B (with a single bitcoin trading for more than $5,000). Blockchain technology has fostered a renewed examination of todays highly centralised web, and reignited conversations around currency and value, digital governance, and the fundamental structures and rails of our modern internet.

Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.

The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.

With blockchain, we can imagine a world in which contracts are embedded in digital code and stored in transparent, shared databases, where they are protected from deletion, tampering, and revision.

In this world, every agreement, every process, every task, and every payment would have a digital record and signature that could be identified, validated, stored, and shared.

Intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and bankers might no longer be necessary. Individuals, organisations, machines, and algorithms would freely transact and interact with one another with little friction.

This is the immense potential of blockchain and the rise of decentralising various industries eg. telecoms, finance, freight etc.

3. Smart systems and robots

Using automation to assist human doctors with surgery, provide diagnostics and other applications.

Robots will play an increasingly important role in business and life in general. Robotics will continue to accelerate innovation, thus disrupting and changing the paradigm of business operations in many industries.

Robotics can sharpen a company's competitive edge by improving quality, increasing operational productivity and agility, and enhancing experiences of all stakeholders.

In the future, there will be a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. Organisations will implement a chief robotics officer role and/or define a robotics-specific function within the business.

Robotics will face regulation. I believe by 2019, government entities will begin implementing robotics-specific regulations to preserve jobs and to address concerns about security, safety, and privacy.

E-commerce and omni-channel commerce companies will deploy robotics systems in their order fulfilment warehousing and delivery operations. This has already been implemented at Gitex.

In the end, high-performing organisations of the future will be those who position themselves at the centre of the digital ecosystem, taking control and making sure that they are at the heart of disruption.

View more ICT trends in the BizTrends2018 special section.
Traditionally the domain of a serious set of older engineers, cement / concrete technology and civil engineering are currently undergoing a slow but steady transition. With smart future cities starting to become a reality, the generation that will be their future custodian is finding its voice - and is demanding to be involved from concept to development and construction.

As a generation that expects to work harder than previous generations (to fix what weve already broken), Generation Z is already doing this from within the system - leveraging new technologies, digital transformation and new architectural thinking among others to renew and transform our century-old discipline. Finding the balance between encouraging their creativity and maintaining the principles of structural integrity has thus become the new challenge facing the sector: one we expect to continue grappling with well beyond 2018.

Connected from birth, the iGeneration or Generation Z is the demographic group following the worlds Millennials. Most have used the internet from a young age and are extremely comfortable with technology and interacting on social media. As the next generation preparing to enter the workplace and market, theyre not only excited to see what the future holds, but to understand how they can contribute to this directly.

Pushing boundaries

With more Generation Zs considering civil engineering as a preferred career path, theyre pushing the boundaries of what was previously assumed, thought about and expected from materials like cement and concrete  making it critical to engage with them from the outset. While uses of these media have changed, design and structural principles havent and wont however, meaning that they have to push boundaries within certain parameters.

Creating the appropriate framework for experimentation that leads to direct learning is thus an opportunity of which we have to take advantage. While principles and concepts could simply be taught (and were accepted) in the past, this approach simply doesnt work in the Generation Z space because of their diversity and complexity. Theyre smart spenders for example, who arent sucked in by advertising or seduced by big brands. They dont automatically believe or trust what you say and will research the facts youre sharing with them as youre doing so to verify them. Theyre also impatient and demanding when it comes to service, and have an incredibly short attention span (roughly four seconds). If you dont hook them during this window of opportunity, it closes. This makes learning by doing arguably the only viable approach.

Creating learning opportunities

Creating new learning opportunities has thus become a sector imperative  with some interesting new initiatives emerging. The Concrete Society of Southern Africas (CSSA) partnership with various local universities is a great example of this. The CSSA typically starts its engagement with new civil engineering students with its annual concrete canoe race. Here teams design, build and race their canoes whilst working in a new and inter-disciplinary way with project management and technology students (The canoe has to have a GPS on it for instance.).

In a similar way, the CSSAs egg protection device competition requires students to work within strict specifications to construct a bridge to protect their egg. The competition is sponsored by PPC, which means that the teams are provided with a specified mix to cast their bridges professionally. Seven days after construction, the teams come through to our PPC Jupiter plant where weights are dropped onto the bridges to assess which remain intact longest. This is only after the bridges have qualified however, being measured against the specs provided.

An egg protection device.

Our own PPC Imaginarium has also created a diverse and interesting creative incubation space for concrete as a design medium. Held annually, entries are invited from both expected (architecture, industrial design and sculpture) and unexpected disciplines (fashion, jewellery and film). Here again, while workshops are held to highlight mixing and other techniques, these are not compulsory  and entrants will need to grapple with specifications including size and weight, learning throughout.

Gamification

Gamification techniques have also recently been incorporated into CSSAs offering to its younger members. Intended to leverage a natural desire for socialising, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status and self-expression, Concrete Quiz nights were introduced at branch-level during 2017. Participants in these events are quizzed on their knowledge of concrete technology and the concrete industry, as well as general knowledge.

Needless to say, the results of these and many other initiatives are not only encouraging but potentially industry-transforming in the long-term, with many of us older generations both humbled and amazed by what can and has been produced.

Going forward into 2018 then, meaningful engagement arguably needs to become one of our pressing priorities so that we can unlock the potential of this techno-creative generation, and stand back to allow a completely new set of dynamic opportunities to emerge.
The past two years have seen the Competition Commission undertake a number of market inquiries involving the retail, healthcare and public passenger transport markets. However, few market inquiries have captured the attention of South African consumers more than the inquiry into the high costs of data in the country. Businesses and consumers will be waiting in anticipation for the outcome of the Commission's inquiry into data costs, which is expected to be finalised in August 2018.

#Datamustfall

It started with the hashtag #datamustfall, which set social media alight as consumers and experts weighed in on the topic. This was followed by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) launching an investigation into priority markets in the electronic communications sector in July 2017, which forms part of various ICASA initiatives aimed at addressing the high costs of communication in South Africa.

The #datamustfall campaign also caught the attention of the Minister of Economic Development who requested the Commission to initiate an inquiry. In August 2017, the Commission, who has concurrent jurisdiction with ICASA in respect of competition in the telecommunications market, published the terms of reference for its market inquiry.

The scope of the inquiry

The Commission believes that there are features of this market that prevent, distort or restrict competition. The purpose of the inquiry is to assess the elements of the data services value chain which contribute to the pricing of data. While the scope of the inquiry is broad, the Commission indicated that the inquiry will assess, amongst others, the adequacy of the current regulatory regime, the strategic behaviour of large fixed and mobile operators, the costs and profits of fixed and mobile operators, infrastructure investments made by operators and the allocation of spectrum. The Commission will also benchmark the costs of data services in South Africa against data prices in other countries. Every aspect of the data value chain will be investigated to identify areas of market power and possible structural or regulatory factors which may be contributing to high data prices. The Commission will also look at the extent of data coverage and whether such coverage is adequate by international standards.

The outcome of the inquiry

The success of the inquiry will ultimately depend on the extent to which stakeholders engage in the process. Consumers, operators, government, regulators, civil organisations and any other interested parties were invited to make formal submissions by 1 November 2017. After formal submissions, private and public consultation processes will follow and other information gathering exercises, which will culminate in the Commission issuing its recommendations. Extensive submissions and engagements are likely to result in more meaningful and robust recommendations. Recommendations may include amendments to legislation, regulations and policies, spectrum allocation, engagements with stakeholders who are able to take immediate corrective measures, further investigation or immediate enforcement action against firms found to be in contravention the Competition Act.

Can the spectrum issue be resolved?

While there are other potentially problematic issues which will come to the fore during the inquiry, one of the structural concerns already raised as a significant contributor to high data costs in South African is the availability of spectrum. The lack of spectrum allocation to telecommunications operators means that they have to build additional base stations and other infrastructure at a significant cost, which ultimately consumers pay for. ICASA has recognised that spectrum allocation will be an important factor in bringing data costs down and improving competition in the sector. This is evident from the fact that adequate spectrum allocation in other African countries has resulted in significantly lower data costs.

The debate regarding the allocation of spectrum appears to be an ongoing one, with the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services calling for an open access network approach which would result in all spectrum being pooled and assigned to an open access network, while ICASA prefers the auctioning of spectrum to operators. Irrespective of the approach adopted, it is clear that the spectrum issue must be resolved if there were to be any chance of bringing data costs down. This is one area to monitor closely in 2018.
By the year 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be made up of skills that aren't yet considered vital to the job today. The current Fourth Industrial Revolution is the most disruptive of its kind to date. Previous industrial revolutions have taken almost decades to build up the kind of training systems and markets we are seeing today to grow skill sets on such a large scale.

In the year 2017, 73% of CEOs declared the skills gap as a major concern. This can also be described as the large gaping hole between a businesss current capabilities and set of skills, compared to the skills and talent needed to remain relevant and competitive.

With the amount of pressure placed on professionals to frequently update themselves to remain relevant, the online education sphere is growing rapidly. Just this year, the 2017 Distance Education Enrolment Report revealed over six million students completed at least one distance education course.

Build up your skills in half the time

Online short courses allow busy working professionals to pick up new, industry-relevant skills without having to leave their job or put in less hours at work.

Such working professionals have noticed this gap both professionally and personally. Michele Galloway, a past student of online education company GetSmarter, challenged generational identities when she took an online course in graphic design once discovering the education she received years before needed to be updated. In her profession, where it took just a few years to move from Magic Markers to Macs, Michele realised her 35 years' experience in the industry, albeit impressive, was not going to be enough to keep herself above the rest in this competitive environment.

Ive always had a positive attitude towards continuous learning. After starting my own business, I saw the quiet November and December months as the perfect opportunity to upskill and learn new things. Business people spoke about technical terms I didnt understand, and that just made me want to learn more. I had work experience from working in advertising years ago, but needed technical training, she says.

Specialised knowledge in our economy is increasingly rare and highly rewarded, with the world shifting toward favouring those who seek professional development and continuing education in a number of areas. Michele chose to build up her skills, which in turn made her more specialised within her industry. The journey of lifelong learning exposes professionals to the latest trends and knowledge in their field of interest, offering the opportunity to remain relevant in a working world that is changing faster than ever.

The modern economy will be further characterised by swift and frequent technological innovation, implementation and change, making it almost impossible to rely solely on one qualification. But often, when one imagines online learning, they envisage themselves sitting and staring at a computer screen  frustrated, alone and completely in the dark.

The solution? Collaborative learning.

What is collaborative learning?

Online education that focuses on collaborative learning does so through the creation of a digital hub for continual discussion and reflective interaction. Through this platform, you no longer have to try and fit everyones opinions into the minimal time you have to come together in face-to-face meetings. By sending each other material online, everyone is free to reflect on what has been said in their own time and gets to participate, whether that is with fellow students, or the professors and industry experts themselves. Collaborative learning enhances the educational experience and fills the gap where face-to-face interaction might have been.

What are the outcomes of collaborative learning?

Course material is easier to grasp and understand. Its likely youll probably remember what Shannon said on the topic more than what was written in the notes.

You have the opportunity to test your understanding of the material with your classmates and get exposed to their understandings of the material.

Questions form a huge part of learning. You can benefit from the inquisitiveness of others.

Networking and supporting opportunities arise, making giving up or suffering alone a lot harder.

Communicating in forum posts improves your online communication skills. This skill is transferable to any work environment.

Once the effectiveness of an online environment is established, students can focus then on the actual education part to continually gather new and informed skills and rapidly growth hack their careers.
The EFF has reiterated that it wants every potential student to be registered as party members visit universities and colleges across the Eastern Cape this week, regardless of whether or not the institutions have space.

Eastern Cape EFF convener Yazini Tetyana said on Saturday that they would, over the next two days, visit state hospitals across the province to address the shortage of healthcare in rural areas.

This would be followed by EFF members going to the province's four universities and several TVET colleges to assist with registration.

"All tertiary institutions should be open for walk-ins and fighters are to make sure that no one is left behind. Free education in our time," Tetyana said.

This is contrary to the call made by Universities South Africa (USA) that institutions would not allow walk-in registrations for the new academic year.

Rhodes University spokeswoman Veliswa Mhlope said while they discouraged walk-ins, they were committed to helping students who had done well to access higher education.

"Those who meet our admission criteria in degree programmes in which we may still have spaces will not be turned away," she said.

USA's call followed the announcement by President Jacob Zuma that tertiary education would be free to pupils from households with an income of less than R350,000 a year.

EFF president Julius Malema urged matriculants who passed in previous years but who could not afford university fees to report to academic institutions today.

However, Mhlope said: "In line with the statement issued by Universities SA, we discourage walk-in applications.

"They create a significant risk of stampede while the chances of being admitted into a programme that is already oversubscribed are almost nil."

Mhlope said if more students arrived than anticipated, Rhodes staff could help them to find out if there were spaces in their chosen fields still available at other universities.

Yesterday, Tetyana said there should be spots available in most tertiary courses as not everyone who had registered initially would follow through.

"When you apply the university asks what your first, second and third options of study are," he said.

"You can only enrol in one, so automatically space is free in the other two. So we will find a place for every person wanting to study."

Mhlope said Rhodes would register about 1,800 first-year students.

Nelson Mandela, Fort Hare and Walter Sisulu universities failed to respond to questions by yesterday.

Source: Herald
Food trends in general will always cross the spectrum. There will be those that lean towards health, as this is a global mega trend that is not going away, and there will be micro trends that center around a specific food item that might not be healthy; for example, gourmet artisan doughnuts. We are only just starting to see these in South Africa, but I predict there will be more.

The free from eating movement is gaining momentum as people grapple with the notion of what healthy food really is, as we get bombarded with mixed messaging in the media. We are seeing a wider range of wheat and gluten-free baked products and other free from food.

There is definitely a strong move way from commodity meat eating among the more affluent and people are starting to source meat protein where the animal has been ethically raised. The notion of eating less meat is catching on in a bigger way and there will be an increase in demand for vegetarian protein and/ or meat substitutes. People want to know where their food comes from and shopping at markets where there is a closer connection to the source, is popular.

Growing product trends

There is a growing focus on veganism and more vegan products are becoming available in retail, as well as in food service. Chefs are challenging themselves to create delicious and inspiring vegan dishes and more vegetarian and plant focused restaurants are opening.

Fermented foods will continue to grow and products like kimchi and kombucha will become more mainstream and readily available vs. having to source these at specialty stores.

Turmeric - the super healthy Asian spice is popping up every year, as people get excited about Golden food. Fresh turmeric root is now easily available in retail stores in SA, so we will likely continue to see turmeric in focus for 2018.

We have started to see more seaweed on menus and sea greens have arrived in-store with large SA retailers now selling fresh samphire. We are also surrounded by the coastline, so this is great resource for us.

People are also shopping more frequently and eating smaller meals on more occasions; seeking on the go snacking food products. Individual and portion controlled products are also now readily available in supermarkets. People are looking to artisan foods and want to know where their food comes from.

Food considerations and alternatives

In terms of restaurant trends, the world is becoming more aware of food waste and the concept of nose-to-tail dining and root-to-leaf consumption has definitely become a focus for restaurants as chefs find creative ways to utilise more of the produce they buy in.

Poke hit Cape Town last year with the opening of a poke restaurant and we are seeing it popping up on a few menus. Whilst it has been around for ages internationally and in the USA, it definitely has not peaked for us in SA yet, so 2018 will likely see more of this delicious and super healthy Hawaiian dish featured perhaps with a few localised or alternative ingredient variations  customisable meals such as these are highly suited and very popular with millennials.

Small plate dining or tapas has become a trend that is probably here to stay  and the social aspect of sharing food has fast become appealing, offering diners variety in a meal.

One trend I would love to see catch on in SA that hasnt yet, is innovation centered around breakfast and brunch dishes  our menus are generally quite boring and tend to be very egg and bacon focused. I would love to see more salad and vegetables on morning menus and see brunch being a bigger deal.

drizzleanddip.com

www.instagram.com/drizzleanddip
It is, without a doubt, difficult to quantify all the ways in which technology has impacted our lives. As a sector, ICT evolves at a rapid pace and in a way few others can mimic.

Jarryd Chatz, CEO of BitCo

In the span of a single year, we see a great deal of new technology emerging to impact the way in which we operate on a daily basis. 2017 was yet another example of this truth in action, with trends like fibre and cloud computing continuing their stratospheric rate of growth.

Savvy business owners understand the value of trendspotting, particularly when it comes to trends with wide-ranging industry bearing and the potential to disrupt. So, whats on the agenda for 2018?

1. Fibre connectivity

The Great Fibre Land Grab War raged on throughout 2017 and, with no sign of slowing down, it would be no surprise to see an even larger portion of South Africas population accessing fibre connectivity this year.

This means more and more players entering the market to offer better deals with bigger bundles at lower costs. As a result, operator deployment margins and models will continue to feel the pressure of an increasingly competitive market.

2. The internet of things (IoT)

When speaking about the internet of things or IoT, we are referring to the interconnectedness of all internet-capable devices and products, a trend set to continue well into the future. IoT is certainly claiming a good deal of the spotlight lately. With lower connectivity costs, more and more things are being connected every day.

With more connections come larger data usage and even more niche offerings. This will lead to the further expansion of the cloud and cloud app offerings in the next few years.

This is excellent news for customers and businesses alike, who are on the lookout for better products and services at a more affordable cost.

3. Cloud technology

Due to improvements in South Africas connectivity over the last few years, cloud computing has seen a massive surge in users, a trend that will no doubt remain highly relevant in 2018. This is largely due to the clouds use of the internet to offer diverse, affordable tech services from any supplier, anywhere in the world.

Cloud technology is also essential to the software-as-a-service business model thats currently taking the business landscape by storm, so it wont be going anywhere in the foreseeable future.

4. Edge computing

On the clouds flipside, we have edge computing. Serving a slightly different purpose, edge computing provides information processing and content collection delivery devices that are located close to the source of data, rather than at the extremities of a network.

Essentially, edge computing limits data wastage and brings supplier and customer closer together for greater efficiency. Edge technology is expected to continue its evolution and rise in popularity over the next year, as providers work to raise their game.

SA businesses need to begin understanding the ever-evolving environment of ICT, as applying innovative changes can make or break an organisation. Its also important to note that not all ICT trends are bound for lasting success.

Some become intrinsically woven through our lives while others fade into obscurity due to stunted buy-ins, so always remember to adopt new tech according to the specific needs of your organisation.

View more ICT trends in the BizTrends2018 special section.
The recent advances in data analytics and machine learning will see a huge shift in how we use data in 2018.

Paula Raubenheimer, head of programmatic at SouthernX, The SpaceStation.

In 2017 we largely focused on predictive and descriptive analytics, but in 2018 were going to see prescriptive data and analytics take data mining in the digital space to the next level. Prescriptive data is so valuable in the current sphere, but its data that not even Google and Facebook had access to in South Africa in 2017.

2016 saw a shift from descriptive to predictive analytics, which was a big step for the media buying world; and now were taking an even bigger step into prescriptive  a clear indication of how quickly the environment is developing and improving.

Whats the difference between prescriptive and predictive data?

There are a few definitions but the most frequently used definition for this difference is that predictive analytics describes what might happen, while prescriptive analytics describes what should happen  a powerful difference when budgets are being cut and brands expect more granular and accurate reporting on media campaigns. In essence, prescriptive analytics can improve the outcome of campaigns by using cause and effect to determine the most likely outcome of a campaign.

What does prescriptive data mean for brands?

Prescriptive data and analytics allow us to take a macro look at the causes and effects of the data points used in both descriptive and predictive analytics, and use this to get a more a holistic view of the probable outcome of a campaign.

So, predictive data is used for forecasting, descriptive data mining creates business intelligence, and prescriptive provides information for simulation and optimisation  meaning that prescriptive data goes further than predicting the outcome of a campaign, but it also provides suggestions to the campaign manager in order to improve the probable outcomes. It can also show a variation of outcomes, so if you change X, then Y will happen, but if you change A and B, then C, D and E will happen.

This new way of using data means that so much of the guesswork that still exists in running online campaigns is mitigated. Brands and marketers will have more control over the actual outcome of campaigns, and proactively change elements of it in order to maximise the result, before the campaign is launched.

According to Digitaldefynd.com, analytics would be used to understand customer patterns and programmatically suggest profitable customer paths to marketers to route customers in that direction. For instance, Amazon uses prescriptive analytics for product recommendations based on customer data around original purchase and product engagement patterns. This helps Amazon to provide better user experience and also increases customer spend.

Where is prescriptive data currently being used?

An article on Mycustomer.com shows how retailers are taking advantage of this technology. The use of prescriptive data analytics is of particular interest, as many experts believe that prescriptive tools give retailers more choice in terms of actioning insight from consumer data. Dealing with channels as individual silos will lead to inaccurate understanding of customers and ineffective decisions, but combining insights from assorted channels will provide a clearer picture of the overall business.

The banking and credit industries are also already taking advantage of prescriptive data. By mining and analysing a customers past financial and credit data, they can automatically receive recommendations on how to proceed with applications, and be able to show a number of variant outcomes if the recommendations are applied.

Because this data is not easily gathered, those who have it are in the drivers seat. Global platforms like Google and Facebook are looking to add this data to their arsenal to close the loop in the analytics and programmatic process.

2018 is going to change the way we market digitally in many ways. Personalisation and targeting through data are key to developing an effective customer journey, and a successful customer journey is what is going to make the difference between a campaign that delivers the right results and one that doesnt. Prescriptive data will become an essential tool in this armoury.
One of the biggest trends we're set to see this year is a plethora of marketing messages facing ever-decreasing attention from consumers. Everywhere we look, brands are vying for attention, so it takes clever planning for yours to stand out from the snowballing amount of spam.

Leigh Andrews, editor-in-chief of marketing and media at Bizcommunity.

I hate to be the harbinger of bad news but for consumers, todays ease of communication paints a scary, overwhelming picture. Research differs on the exact benchmark, but all agree were facing thousands of messages per day from friends, family, colleagues, clients and brands, everywhere we look.

Joshua Saxon of the IE School of Human Sciences & Technology writes for the American Marketing Association that consumers switch between screens up to 21 times an hour according to a British study. Take that in. With our consumer hats on, were completely switching our attention every few minutes. No wonder the human attention span is said to have dropped to less than that of a goldfish. Not exactly a case of evolution at its finest.

The once idealised inbox zero is a thing of the past, as we receive messages on so many platforms each day that youre bound to see the little red notification tag wherever youre trying to concentrate. Its disruptive marketing at its best  or rather, at its worst. Theres been a drastic rise in the uptake of pop-up ads and auto-play video features, with in-video ads the latest social media bugbear.

And that, my friends, is the definition of attention spam (no, not the canned meat). Urban Dictionary sums it up as follows:

Attention spam is any material or fodder which tends to destroy the attention span.

Unfortunately, that also sounds like the definition of the bulk of marketing messages today.

Consumers may read your messages, but will they respond?

Even what was once seen as private personal communication is up for grabs to the highest bidder. We now have advertisers on WhatsApp and PRs that can reach the media at any time, any place to pitch breaking stories. They also know that their Thursday, 2am or Sunday, 8pm message has been read, thanks to the advent of the ever-handy Whatsapp blue tick and Facebook Messenger circles.

Lets not even think about the AI/tech-implant implications  then theyll know your location too.

For brands and marketers, this means finding the real firework idea that grabs attention  and not only that, as the rise of purpose-led marketing means consumers will only pay attention if your messaging stands for what they stand for. Mere product punts just wont cut it in 2018.

Megan Jones elaborates on AdWeek:

If your branded content doesnt resonate with your targeted audience, you have failed.

Heres how to ensure your campaigns succeed:

Personalise user experience, go native

At the end of the day, its still all about the user experience or UX.

Alexandre Forster of Twipe Digital Publishing recently investigated the impact of ad-blocking on UX, using what most Western online scrollers have at their disposal: Chrome extensions Disable HTML5 Autoplay and uBlock Origin. He activated these on the LA Times website, which is often referenced as a textbook case of how ads can worsen a user experience.

Forster compared loading time and data usage with ads and autoplay off, and then on. The results? With ads and autoplay blocked, a typical article page took 3.2 seconds to load and used 58.7KB of data. With all the ads and video-enabled, these values increased to 22.53 seconds and 5.5MB  seven times longer and nearly 100 times more data.

According to the most recent The state of the blocked web 2017 Global Adblock Report by PageFair, adblocker penetration in SA is fairly low, but thats set to rise, especially as Fin24 Tech has reported that at least a fifth of your mobile data is consumed by advertising! With time, data and attention at a premium in 2018, little wonder consumers are turning to ad-blockers and scrolling past whenever they register what they deem as an ad or spam.

SA-based performance digital marketing consultancy BlueMagnet points out that ad-blocking technology is many a disgruntled social media scrollers new best friend.

But its not necessarily the death knell for marketers. In fact, BlueMagnet states 2018 digital marketing strategies can survive the snowballing trend of ad-blocking technology on Facebook and YouTube in particular as the platforms focus on personalised UX means theyve built features that can disable ad-blocking. How meta is that  you can disable the apps your potential customers are trying to use to disable those ads!

This means the ads shown and re-targeted to those overwhelmed users are only done so where the user is already heavily invested, replacing the WTF, why am I seeing this response with one of: Oh cool, Ive been meaning to find out more about that product/service. Let me click through

Another tactic is to create content that doesnt feel like an ad  yes, native video content. Entrepreneur India predicts this trend will rise over the coming months due to its engaging and personalised layout, with the added benefit of being undetectable by ad blockers as it's formatted according to the platform where the ad is hosted, so blends in with the organic content. If it doesnt look like an ad, its more likely to keep your customers attention as it seamlessly slots in with the content they visited the page for.

Thats a true marketing win in todays attention spam era that may well lead to the ultimate end-goal of conversion. Onwards, 2018!
When the yachts contesting the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) left Cape Town on Sunday, 10 December bound for Melbourne, Australia,, EVP and chief marketing officer of HCL Technologies, the technology partner of the VOR in Cape Town, who features on the Forbes list of the 50 most influential CMOs, shared the five most important trends he sees in marketing today.

Matt Preschern, EVP and chief marketing officer of HCL Technologies.

Before I list the most important trends I see emerging in the marketing environment, Ill share some background context. There are three dimensions that are of critical importance.

Firstly, we live in an age of disruption, which is unparalleled to anything that we have seen before and which has changed the marketing landscape.

There are over 20 billion mobile devices in use on the planet, and data is quadrupling annually.

This has resulted in a reduction in the human attention span from 12 seconds to 9 seconds, and our inability to concentrate is further impacted by the fact that the average human checks their cellphone between 150 and 180 times per day.

The second dimension is that the human trust barometer is at its lowest point ever. Research by Wunderman has shown that people have a very low-level of trust in enterprise, government and non-profit organisations.

The third dimension is that of security, particularly cyber security. If, for example, a large retailer loses the data on 20 million accounts, this has a huge impact on every aspect of the business, particularly on the reputation and the relationship that the business has with its customers.

So, with this as the background context, these are the five key trends that I see impacting on global marketing and media in 2018, not in any particular order.

1. Business-to-business needs to build authentic brands

The value proposition of the business in the market has to match the customers experience.

2. The explosion of data globally

Today it is much easier to access information. Messaging needs to be more personalised and theres an increasing importance of the ability to interact on a one-to-one basis. What is super important is the use of technology in the form of automation and the ability to analyse and interpret data to the point of accurately refining and targeting messaging.

3. The campaign is dead

In a world where people have access to everything, marketing and communications cannot be in campaign form anymore, it has to move to an always on modus operandi. Social media dictates that you constantly reinforce who you are, what you do, why youre different, and this ties back to my earlier point about authentic brands.

4. Video is vital

The single most important aspect is how you communicate and when you do so. Video is by far still the fastest growing and most impactful form of communication. As a marketer, you cannot afford to ignore the power of video. Short videos work exceptionally well.

5. The martech (marketing technology) stack

This comprises automation; data analytics and content management vehicles, and is vital.

Critical to this is the human capital with the skills and talent to manage all the interactions with customers and to fulfil the brands promises.
What a year it's been! But enough people have written about that, so I'd rather look at a few of the consequences we'll feel in 2018. Which, to my surprise, are mostly positive.

Chrisna Basson, head of strategy at Weathermen & Co, Namibia.

1. Hyper-local tech and innovation

The one thats most exciting and most pressing, is southern Africas pace with innovation and technology. The pace is still too slow, but the opportunities are massive. Pace is due to a number of things, some of which are:

The cost of data;

The lack of exposure;

Complacency;

Risk-aversion;

Being distracted by all the craziness happening in our governments; and

The imposed Western frameworks that weve too easily been adopting for generations.

The Harvard Business Review (HBR)'s Reverse Innovation explainer video explains this well:

Yet weve come to a point where weve seen many of techs possibilities, and learned the importance of it only being successful where its localised. So the need for, and growth of, hyper-local tech solutions will hopefully gain momentum.

Africa can be left out. It needs to determine its own innovation and develop locally. Rely less on the rest of the world. Create not only consume.

2. Being loud vs. being effective

So said Paul Scanlan, CTO of Huawei Technologies at AfricaCom 2017.

Another move is that from a mere civil awakening, to a more strategic and intelligent civil awakening. Again, the focus is on southern Africa. An example of this is definitely NOT what goes on on Twitter, or Facebook, or in the comments section of News24.

Its rather an informed and considered approach to addressing issues. Note the word approach, because for real change to come, whether in the boardroom or in governments, its not about being loud but effective.





You cant demand something from your parents or boss and expect them to give it to you. Ask nicely. Do your homework. Demonstrate why you deserve it. Which we, as civil society, can and should do.

3. Self-actualisation

That sort of leads to the next point.

That of breaking things down to their essence and making whatever the essence is count. The minimum viable product, idea or strategy.

This is not necessarily to keep things easier or smoother, but rather to strengthen its sense of self.

Its a journey of self-actualisation because with the continued political and economic instability we're seeing, as well as all the uncertainty that realities like big data and AI bring, theres a need for focus.

Because thats what makes you succeed.

4. Decentralised thinking

We'll see a lot more drive to minimise inefficiency within the entire value chain, in order to maximise a company or systems most viable reason for existence. And what makes it profitable, of course. Making sure systems and structures are lean, and purpose is clear, so that what it does is strong and resilient, for whatever may come. Fractal patterns and biomimicry are popular because they're important.

Biomimicry

This also builds confidence in the notion of defining your own rules. Which, when combined with all the innovation possibilities, allows for more decentralised vs centralised thinking. Cryptocurrencies, open software, YouTube, Bozza Mobile, the list goes on.



Gone are the days of us falling victim to the powers that be. We really can create the life we want to live. So yes, it's positive.
Terms like "command centre" or "digital centre of excellence" have been in the South African marketing landscape's lexicon for a few years now; but for the most part that is largely where the concept has remained. Until now.

Mike Oelschig, head of advisory at Cerebra.

The past 10 years have seen unparalleled disruption, spurred on by the social web and mobile accessibility that together fundamentally changed how organisations connect with their customers.

In this social era of business, more and more customers are migrating to social media as their preferred channel of brand engagement and query resolution. Additionally, they are also demanding more authentic engagement, quicker responses, better quality content, profound insight and an intentional recognition of their humanity and individuality.

The problem however, is that for the most part corporate South Africa havent evolved their thinking to meet the service demands of todays customer. Community management in the current context of corporate South African is broken  for a few reasons.

Problem 1: Community management is one thing, with multiple functions

Because community management is a relatively new function in the marketing landscape, and because it overlaps with traditionally siloed business units like marketing, corporate communication and even HR and product development, agencies and corporates alike often expect community managers to cover a multitude of responsibilities.

These include content planning, content strategy, content creation, media planning, media management, customer care, influencer engagement, crisis communication, data analysis, reporting, and more.

As a consequence, often very junior, ill-equipped resources find themselves compromised in situations that should require more experienced, strategic input (just think of how often brands are embarrassed online by poorly thought-out content or short-sighted customer engagement) and genuinely skilled and experienced community managers are often asked to do very menial, FAQ-style customer engagement which can be a poor use of their time.

The organisations that employ these rare employees often see them leaving and churn is unhealthily high in this category.

Problem 2: Social service is the same as your call centre

Social media war room.

Historically, a good grasp of spoken English and the ability to understand and use a companys customer service systems were about the only requirements for a customer service agent in a call centre environment. This is no longer true.

With customer service through social, most customer engagements are public and thus a potential reputational threat if it is not handled well. Of course, it is also an opportunity to publically demonstrate your commitment to customer centricity.

Community managers are as much your brands external spokespeople as the corporate communications or PR teams  who by all accounts are senior staff with very specific training and experience in dealing with external stakeholders. And yet, community managers arent classed anywhere near as important.

Problem 3: Community management is a necessary evil

Most brands at least acknowledge that their customers are moving to social. Its what they do with that knowledge that is the problem.

Just put the intern on the channel, he gets Facebook is what many leaders think and do. It is seen as a tick-box exercise, not the strategic imperative that it should be.

The solution: The social command centre

Great community management, with the right structure and resourcing, can be an incredibly powerful sales, customer engagement and business intelligence tool.

As the head of Cerebras consulting division, I have been involved with, consulted to, designed, or set up no less than 5 social media command centres in the last 12 months. Corporate South Africa is waking up to the need for a centralised, department-agnostic and strategically driven command centre that handles all social and digital customer engagements.

Benefits of the command centre model:

Driving efficiencies

Through a command centre model, community managers have measureable, business critical KPIs that are aimed at driving constant improvement. Response times decrease, the quality of responses improve, processes are continuously optimised and the risk of brain drain is dramatically reduced. Employee engagement and reducing churn

By definition, a social command centre comes with a well thought-out, objectives-based, data-backed resourcing structure that ensures the right people, with the right experience are handling the right functions of the team. Seniors are empowered with work that correlates to their experience, and juniors have the ambition that comes with a clear growth path through the team. Actionable business and customer insights Having a team dedicated to improving the customer experience, with people skilled and engaged enough to do so, naturally results in a team that is absolutely committed to understanding the customer better. This level of insight into the customer leads to better products, better marketing and a much more customer-centric organisation all round.

In summary, not only do the benefits of this model far outweigh the costs involved, but more and more companies are going this way  so be rest assured that if your company isnt also doing so in 2018, youll be outmatched and outclassed in customer engagement by your competitors that do.
We live in a world of blurred lines. There are companies that look and feel like cab companies. We love the services they deliver, so we're grateful for them but they claim not to be cab companies.

Omar Essack, CEO of Primedia Broadcasting.

There are companies that provide a constant stream of content. They are the sources of huge amounts of information; some of it about what our friends and family are up to; some about the state of the world; some accurate; some not. They often look and feel like media companies and yet they claim that they are not.

There are countless of these sorts of businesses. They have added enormous value to our lives. Equally they have caused massive disruption, not only to the industries that they displace but to ways of life, ways of relating and increasingly, it seems to our neurobiology.

The business literature calls them platform businesses. They themselves are adamant that theyre not the same sort of business as those they disrupt. Yet, in the words of old; if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

The evolution of power, and regulation of traditional media

That is the challenge that confronts the world as it ponders what social media platforms mean for the good of all of us.

Traditionally media companies operate within a compliance framework. They have codes of conduct that govern editorial integrity and they have strict processes that govern the type of advertising that they will carry.

If they contravene these codes they are subject to penalties that range from censure, to fines and in the case of highly regulated users of national spectrum, like terrestrial radio and terrestrial television the threat of losing their licenses. There are both clear standards and clear penalties if these media companies act outside the agreed framework.

Those standards and penalties exist for a reason. They exist because of the tremendous power that media has in society. Media companies have the power to destroy peoples reputations, they have the power to swing elections, to obscure truth, to promote schemes or products damaging to peoples livelihoods and health.

The tide is turning

The codes and the regulations exist to protect individuals and society from the potentially negative effects that mass media behaving irresponsibly can have. This regulation and policy did not appear the first time a newspaper was printed or a radio broadcast occurred, it emerged over years to govern very powerful industries.

Until very recently, the worlds largest social media platforms have skated past such frameworks claiming that they are not media companies despite being the worlds most powerful distributors of content.

That tide has started to turn with regulators around the world starting to turn their attention to what these businesses operating model may mean for elections.

However, the issue is much broader than just electoral manipulation (although that is of massive concern):

It is the wholesale distribution of stories that are simply false; it is the opaque experimentation with algorithms that cause particular types of content to be elevated above others with none of the checks and balances that apply to existing media.

Alongside the increasing legislative and regulatory attention, some of the worlds larger advertisers are holding back their digital ad spend until they can be assured that their spend does not occur alongside content that they deem to be inappropriate for their brands.

Response from platforms

Those checks and balances did not emerge arbitrarily, they emerged from the recognition that news and information has the ability to move markets, shape livelihoods and influence the direction of society.

In this context, the platforms are scrambling to make changes and on a weekly basis are releasing updates about what efforts they are making to respond to the challenges.

However, in the existing analogue world of broadcast and print, nothing gets to air or publication until it has gone through comprehensive checks and balances. This is how many media companies have created brands that audiences trust, which helps to create a reliable, credible platform and context that is appropriate for advertisers.

Going forward: the role of pressure from advertisers

There is no doubt that platforms have added enormously to all our lives and they will continue to grow. However, the stakes are too high for them to continue in an entirely unregulated fashion.

It is incumbent on all of us to insist on higher standards, to not accept the excuse that they are not responsible for the advertising they take on or the content that is distributed on their platforms.

The onus is particularly heavy on advertisers to be vigilant, as it should not be only about protecting their brands but ought to be about ensuring that social cohesion and democracy is underpinned by responsible media platforms.

Ultimately, it is advertising money that fuels these businesses, advertisers ought to be insisting that some of that money goes to creating more comprehensive checks and balances  as recent events have shown, the consequences of not doing that, could potentially be devastating.
Africa has become a continent of catchphrases, be it 'Africa rising', 'untapped middle class', 'e-commerce explosion', 'leapfrogging technology' or 'brand loyalists', the list is endless... but what do they mean in a real-world context?

Ailsa Wingfield, head of Nielsen Emerging Markets Thought Leadership.

In 2018, therell be a distinct need to take a step back from these lofty ideals and consider the fact that we still need to go back to the basics because no one is even getting the fundamentals right!

Agile brands are needed

This year will require an appreciation that despite the commodity price trials and economic and political tribulations, its impossible to ignore Africas powerhouse economies of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, which account for more than half of SSAs GDP and nearly a third of consumers.

Fortunately, we expect to see these economies slowly turning around, however, in these trying times it cannot be all about price, cost-cutting or budget slashing and it cannot be about putting strategy and innovation on hold.

What it requires is solving the relationship crisis with consumers and retailers, especially in these larger markets. This is because during tougher periods, consumers can feel abandoned by the brands they know and trust when all theyre seemingly faced with, is paying more for less, and the brands which have earned their spend are not always available, as supply is interrupted by irregular cash flow. Manufacturers and retailers that will thrive in 2018 are therefore those that adjust their messaging to match the mood, are agile in adapting their offerings to suit the consumer needs, and promoting for loyalty and not promiscuity, to ensure that loyalty is rewarded and not lost.

Go small to go big in Africa

Getting to grips with Africa in 2018 will require some real discipline and an acknowledgement that bigger is no longer always better. It should be all about being more precise in terms of how and where youre going after consumers. This will equally apply to packaging, products, visibility and distribution - and having the ability to adjust your strategy to focus on not everything, but that which matters.

Corporates will have to concentrate on less, more meticulously, to get it right - they simply cant be everywhere, all of the time. They will need to go into smaller markets/cities/areas first, with more relevant products and optimise retail activation in the places which matter most, and then start scaling from there.

A more meaningful middle class

When talking about Africas flavour of the month Middle Class classification in 2018; it will be more important than ever to prioritise Africas rising Consuming Class who spend more than $10 per day. Globally, the Consuming Class represent a massive rising opportunity in emerging markets, which by 2025 will swell to 4.2 billion (53% of the population) and account for half of consumption spending. Its therefore clear that Africas growing consumer base represents significant potential for spending to increase exponentially and rapidly as advancement continues, and African consumers circumstances improve.

With that in mind, businesses will need to consider the current as well as the future - five, 10 and even 20 years time - and develop product portfolios, media plans and retail strategies which serve todays consumer needs and take consumers future purchasing potential into account.

Fit for purpose

Understanding who Africas consumers really are will also allow for more purposeful innovation in terms of the products that are designed, how they are marketed, distributed and sold in African markets. As part of this reality check, it will be more important than ever to move beyond income and demographic numbers to also understand how consumers live, shop, buy, interact and experience products, what influences this, what they watch and the impact of technology scale and utility.

Businesses will need to ponder whether to create new propositions for Africa or bring ones in from other emerging markets. Brands need to be mindful that success requires more than just bringing another affordable or available product. They need to identify their brand mandate/role, pinpointing at which stage of the consumer needs spectrum they are prepared or able to tap into.

Overall, Africa will continue to offer one of the greatest gifts of untapped growth (excuse the catchphrase) in 2018, but more than ever, it will require differentiation, individualisation, resilience and focused but adaptable strategies.

This year therefore calls for exceptional product, marketing and retail innovation to underpin the ability to capitalise on Africas undeniably hot prospects.
Working in the digital advertising industry makes 2018 a truly great time to be alive. There are new ways for marketers to reach their customers more effectively every day. 2018 is going to be an incredible year for personalised advertising, robots taking over and your car knowing when you need milk.

Bianca Quinn-Diavastos, managing director at Jetweb.

1. The Internet of Things - Who is the boss?

The European Commission describes the internet of things as merging "physical and virtual worlds, creating smart environments. Even if you think youre not one of them, you probably are. Your TV, phone, car and your smart watch are all connected. Researcher Gartner, estimates that more than 8.4 billion "Things" are connected to the internet today, a 30% increase from just one year ago.

We useD to only concern ourselves with our phone and laptop being connected, however we now need a fridge, air conditioner and a security system that can connect and preferably be controlled remotely.

5G is on the horizon. 5G is a new network system that has much higher speeds and capacity, and much lower latency than existing cellular systems. Next generation speeds and capacity could finally enable full realisation of virtual and augmented reality, snap downloads of movies, vastly more traffic, seamless autonomous vehicle communications and controls on land and air.

2. Artificial Intelligence AI  The rise of the machines, has it finally arrived?

AI is defined as the intelligence exhibited by machines. Any type of device or machine that understands its environment and takes an action to maximise the chance of achieving success and reaching a goal is the best way to understand how AI works, for example, self-driving cars, robots, and various types of machine learning including facial recognition and human speech programs.

AI is somewhere between scary and exciting. It will definitely be a hot topic for marketers in 2018, as the emergence of AI could be the "worst event in the history of our civilisation", unless society finds a way to control its development, physicist Stephen Hawking said in November 2017.

According to researcher Gartner, AI bots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by 2020. A third of the worlds population is using social media, and AI is playing a huge part in how businesses are communicating with potential prospects online. In South Africa we have 16 million active Facebook users and 8 million who access Facebook daily. Customers want to reach you where they are comfortable, and in 2018 it will be Facebook. This will expedite the rapid growth of AI and Bots to reach customers and to resolve their queries faster and more effectively.

Mountain Dew is currently using a bot on Facebook and Twitter:

Mountain Dew Facebook (click on the message button to begin the journey).

Mountain Dew Twitter.

3. Dynamic Advertising - You will need to make it personal in 2018, very personal

For most, our phones are possibly the most used object in our daily lives. The average person checks their phone over 500 times a day, while most South Africans check their phones within the first five minutes of waking. As a result, consumers patience for receiving irrelevant ads and content has run out.

In 2018 we will see smarter use of re-marketing. Dynamic Advertising evolved in 2017 and it offers marketers the opportunity to use data to make advertising personal. It is essential to re-engage an interested customer. If I am looking at a dress online but I am unsure if I want to purchase it, a generic brand ad will not necessarily send me back to the site, but a personlised ad with that specific dress will.

Dynamic advertising allows you to show users products you know they are in the market for. This creates extremely powerful and effective personalised ads. Only 5-8% of your website visitors will convert on your page, so re-targeting is an effective way to reach all of the leads you thought were lost.

In April 2017, Channel 4 announced a new VoD ad format, which was developed by video tech firm Innovid, that allows advertisers to incorporate the first names of viewers into their ads.

All Channel 4s 15 million registered users who watched an Alien Covenant trailer ad while signed in on a web browser, will see personalised messages asking them to Run followed by their first name.

4. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality  Let me entertain you

According to market research firm IDC, worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality market are projected to approach $14 billion during 2017, and explode to $143 billion by 2020. As reported by Quid, Facebook is setting itself up to be a key player by acquiring 11 AR/VR companies between in 2017.

Big brands have embraced this trend with innovative and creative executions on a large scale.

PepsiCo recently pranked commuting Londoners with an AR-enabled bus stop display. Travelers were shown a prowling tiger, a meteor crashing, and an alien tentacle grabbing people off the street.

In 2018 digital marketers will need to consider AR and VR and it exciting opportunities as part of their strategy. It is important to try out new things to reach customers. Consider what will work well for your brand, and dont be afraid to try it. Through social media you can reach out to customers and do market research to find out what tactic and trends will work. I am excited about the year ahead in digital, and I cannot wait to immerse myself in these trends.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is ushering in technologies that can enable us, the South African digital industry, to change the course of history.

Josephine Buys, IAB South Africa CEO.

The world over, fake news and brand safety is under the spotlight and its no different here in South Africa. The IAB has kickstarted a series of round tables for our members to discuss the challenges and agree on opportunities to address this rising problem with several collaborative initiatives in the pipeline.

These include verification seals for:

Consumers to be assured that their news source has been verified as credible.

Brands to rest assured that their online marketing messages are being delivered in those brand safe environments.

I believe both consumers and advertisers will push the industry to own our truth.

Private Market Places

As premium display advertising continues to decrease we will continue to see a rise in Private Market Places (PMPs), where private, invitation-only digital advertising deals are bought and sold programmatically over a curated list of premium websites. Programmatic campaigns will run transparently, efficiently and cost effectively across brand safe environments.

Mixed Reality

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality evolving into Mixed Reality. Mixed Reality will combine the best aspects of both VR and AR to let users augment the real world with virtual objects that look as if they are really placed within it. Expect to see an acceleration in examples of this digital marketing.

Artificial Intelligence explosion

The explosion of Artificial Intelligence and data driven solutions will see more marketers swiftly adopting data informed strategies and continued expansion to include data driven innovation. As marketers use tools to master complex algorithms to learn more about consumer habits, they will increasingly be able deliver the right message at the right time and more importantly on our mobile first continent, on the right device.

The Platform Economy

Continued growth, and increased awareness and education around the Platform Economy (online structures that enable a wide range of human activities). There is so much opportunity to innovate and scale by leveraging digital technologies which can give us the necessary growth opportunity for our economy to create employment.

As Mary Meekers Internet Trends report declares that Healthcare is at a digital inflection point, there will be continued rapid growth in sources of health data as consumers increasingly move towards enhancing healthy lifestyles with apps that track health and benchmark performance. Podcasts will see growth as a word of mouth media channel. On-demand audio, intentionally downloaded by a highly engaged listener, leads to a stronger emotional connection and greater trust. This is every brands holy grail in 2018 and beyond.

Gamification will take over

At this years IAB Digital Summit in March 2017, trend specialist John Sanei predicted that gamification would take over our lives as quantum computing (billions of times faster the super computers currently available) looms. This form of computing will fit into a pair of glasses allowing us to augment and create a brand new reality in front of our eyes. Every aspect of our lives will be gamified, rewarded and recognised, which creates an opportunity for marketers to use gamification to turn customers into super fans.

Rise of short form video

Despite the high cost of data (in South Africa) still being a hot topic, I believe we will see a rise of short form video as smart phone access proliferates and companies like biNu negotiate arrangements with the mobile network operators so that advertisers can foot the bill for data used. Hopefully this will also improve access to online education and training.

Mobilising social change

Digital innovation will also play an important role in mobilising social change. The alarmingly high youth unemployment rate in South Africa can be reduced by creating an enabling environment for our youth to not only to survive but to thrive and experiment in the digital space.

Free internet for all

That can happen if we declare internet access a basic human right  to give all South Africans basic minimum levels of access to free public Wi-Fi and through zero rated content. In 2017, IAB proudly supported the Association for Progressive Communications, with the assistance of Applied Law and Technology and the South African National Editors Forum on the launch of the issue paper addressing, Perspectives on universal access to online information in South Africa: Free public Wi-Fi and Zero-rated content.

The purpose of this issue paper is to examine the background and legal frameworks to support the right to universal access to online information, with a specific focus on the South African context. As IAB collaborates with the SA Human Rights Council to make this a reality, our goal is to secure free internet for all, but that might come just a little later than 2018!
Forget about Harry and Meghan, the match of the century is advertising and research, with data playing cupid.

Natalie Otte, head of Kantar Millward Brown, South Africa.

Getting hitched

While advertisers and researchers have at times made uncomfortable bedfellows, this is all about to change as the ad industry begins to embrace data (although when we speak advertising we prefer to call it insights, or behaviours, not data and numbers). Drumroll please...!

According to Tham Khai Meng, Ogilvy Worldwide CCO, When data meets creativity, you get pure sex. Data and creativity are two sides of the same coin.

So, what does data and analytics mean to good creative? In a panel discussion at New Yorks Advertising Week last September, Sami Thessman, CCO, Wunderman New York said it helps you back your idea, because its becoming harder for advertisers to sell soft ideas, especially as CMOs are becoming more data focused and analytics driven.

Netflix has successfully been using data to feed their creative content, their latest innovation allows you to choose your own end to your favourite show. Even Hollywood uses data to inform creative decisions. Another great example of this mix is Buzzfeed who use data to drive the direction of their content. Buzzfeed generates about 600 pieces of content daily, continually learning from their audience about whats working and whats not (think of this data pool as the worlds largest focus group).

Blurring the lines between content and advertising, BuzzFeed created the Dear Kitten videos for Purinas Friskies, which have clocked up over 65 million views on YouTube. The success of this campaign led to their first TVC, also for Friskies.

According to BuzzFeed, Dear Kitten's success wasn't just because the web is cat crazy, but rather, the results stemmed from combining data from previous campaigns to create custom content that resonated with its audience.

We live in a culture of search, skip or share, where people have gone from simply receiving content to seeking it out and potentially sharing it. This presents a huge opportunity for brands with content that resonates but offers little for those that do not.

Seizing on the wealth of behavioural data left by peoples digital exhaust, we now try to reach people in the moment when they are shopping or at the point of purchase. But this is also the moment when people are most likely to doubt advertising claims, compare features and pricing and try to make up their own minds.

The influence of advertising therefore is all the more powerful because ad exposure is often decoupled from the purchase decision. People feel first and think second. Advertisings true power is to establish motivating feelings, ideas and associations linked to the brand in peoples memories, which will shape the way they make decisions along the path to purchase.

In 2018 well see advertisers leveraging consumer insights to produce effective advertising that creates an emotional connection with the consumer and leaves a lasting impression. Brands will start taking control of their own destiny, collecting data to develop a personalised relationship with their customer. Data is the last competitive advantage and, intelligent marketing will lead to greater ROI.

According to Alistair Mokoena, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather South Africa, forward-looking agencies will:

Identify: use data to define a growth opportunity for the brand.

Plan: use data to understand which audiences to target and which touchpoints to use at what time.

Inspire: use data to identify insights that lead to a powerful creative approach.

Pre-test: use data to understand the potential of an idea or execution before launch.

Adapt: use data during a campaign to understand what can be improved .

Post review: use data from past campaigns to identify ways to improve results.

Ilse Dinner, head of marketing communications for Kantar, Africa & Middle East, Insights.

Does Screen ^ Size Count?

While TV is still the biggest medium in South Africa, we are a mobile centric country. The accepted wisdom is that TV and digital work well together, but in the future mobile and video content on demand could undermine the power of TV as people consume more snackable content whenever and wherever they are. Yet the mobile ad experience is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today. How do you successfully build a relationship with customers on a 6 screen?

People spend on average four hours a day on their phone (check out the Moment app to see how much time you spend on your phone doing what, I think youll be in for a big surprise!).

So with 8.4 billion mobile connections and 7.6 billion people in the world, mobile is great for reach, but how does one reach effectively? Banners and pop up ads can make you hate both the publisher and the advertiser, and video pre-rolls are not always the solution either. You cant always recut your TV commercial for the small screen, and ad blockers are on the rise.

Well see initiatives like the Coalition for Better Ads leveraging insights and expertise to develop and implement new global standards for online advertising. This will likely lead to advertisers creating more compelling content, publishers reducing advertising clutter and media agencies improving targeting.

The quickie

According to Kantar Millward Brown, ads have six seconds to land an impression in the name of the brand. Mark Pritchard, the CMO for P&G reckons brands have two seconds to connect with the consumer  and its hard to be relevant in six seconds, never mind two, so that means you really need to know your audience to grab their attention creatively. You need to find the C spot, and quickly!

When it comes to digital, the only real way to beat the skip is through creativity. Brands must either work within the six-second window or keep as many people watching as possible.

Either strategy can be effective but both require brands working with peoples brains not against them. Deliver too much information too fast and peoples conscious minds will choke. Fail to create anticipation that a video will deliver something of value and people will skip. As always, real insight into the audiences interests and motivations is key to delivering an ad that connects and resonates.

Pages that render faster on digital devices will become increasingly important. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) spearheaded by Google is a collaboration between developers, publishers and websites, distribution platforms and tech companies, who are constantly working together to make the mobile experience even better.

This open source initiative makes it easy for advertisers and publishers to create mobile friendly ads and content and have it load instantly everywhere. Well see more marketers using AMP html technology/frameworks to build ads that render faster, making the ads lighter and more engaging.

Coitus interruptus

In our connected world, the perception is that people are always on but that doesnt mean they are always receiving. Digital disruption empowers consumers to get what they want, when they want, and increasingly they dont want to be interrupted by ads that are not relevant or good. We know people actively block content on their digital devices, and that skipping ads has become second nature, especially among younger viewers.

Back in 2005, Craig Davis, then COO at J. Walter Thompson stated, We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in, and this still rings true today. Negative reactions to advertising can damage brands, so advertisers and marketers must focus on improving the quality of creative and adapting it to different platforms because attention is a reward not a right.

Well see advertisers using behavioural profiling technology that allows them to personalise messages to their audience based on data collected to ensure the ads are engaging. Matching content to customers interests and behaviours based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group will ensure their ads are relevant.

Brands must treat the consumers time as valuable. According to the latest Connected Life study by Kantar TNS, 20% of touchpoints can deliver up to 80% of impact, so brands who identify their 20% avoid bombarding and frustrating their customers while ensuring their investment is focused effectively. Weve heard this sentence a gazillion times, digital offers the opportunity to serve an ad to the right person, with the right message, at the right time, and in 2018 well see marketers working harder to get this right.

Honey Alexa ^ Im home (but you knew that already didnt you?)

Ads often follow users from site to site: a customer who searches online for accommodation in Cape Town will be inundated with Western Cape holiday offers (often still after the fact). Facebook and Google will keep reminding you about the shoes you saw last month but never bought, while Instagrams shop now feature makes it ridiculously easy to buy shoes that Insta models are wearing in between looking at photos of your friends. But dont be creepy, be relevant.

Technology like Alexa will continue to shape the future of advertising. Artificial intelligence will know more about you than you do yourself, allowing brands to reach consumers in useful and engaging ways, on a scale that has been impossible until now.

J. Walter Thompsons "The Next Rembrandt" for ING and Google DeepMind's "AlphaGo" are fantastic examples of AI, both winning big at Cannes Lions.



Augmented reality and virtual reality will play an increasingly prominent role in marketing and advertising, providing a multisensory connection and experience that TV and online simply cannot, with authentic and personalised engagement opportunities. Advertisers who dont follow suit will get left behind.

So how about a threesome?

All too often research and creative partners only meet at the final debrief. Marketers need to share the consumer insights and data with their advertising partners upfront in order to allow the agency to create effective and more relevant advertising from the beginning  it can be unfair on the creative agency who are suddenly put on the spot with confronting new feedback on an initiative they have worked on for months.

For consumer research to be valuable, it must be part of the total creative development plan. Tagging it on as an afterthought is the source of nearly all pre-test evil in the world whereas if done in the initial stages, it allows for better optimisation of the creative idea. A team effort that from the start combines research, creative and client, will produce a stronger final output for the brand.

Over and above, consumer research must focus on optimising ad performance in line with the communications and brand strategy, and this year well see research agencies playing a greater role in the creative development journey.

The C Spot

If you ask people they will tell you that not all ads are bad, they just screen out the ones that arent good or relevant. And consumers have changed too. They no longer want to stand on the sidelines, bombarded with a barrage of one-way messages. They want brands to engage them with relevant content delivered in a format that speaks to them. They want to be involved in campaigns that trigger their emotional side, that make them feel something. And the only way to do that is to come up with great, creative ideas that win the hearts (and pockets) of consumers.

This year well see more storytelling emerging as the Romeo to the consumer Juliet because people love a good story. Only one third of advertising globally is story led, yet stories are the reason we stay awake late to finish a book, watch a movie or binge watch on Netflix. And stories engage us like nothing else. Here are two of our favourite favourites: TigerAir Infrequent Flyers and MTV #FCKHIV.

In 2018, the advertisers who are in a happy relationship will be the ones who are open to quickies and threesomes, and know how to find the C spot.

*Kantar Millward Brown is a sponsor of the BizTrends2018 advertising category.
Amazon recently blew away its earnings forecast making Jeff Bezos (for now) the world's richest person. The interesting call out here was that Amazon's growth wasn't necessarily to the detriment of everyone else. The economy in which we're operating post-2007 needs to be rethought as an evolution of a zero-sum game.

Mathew Weiss, The Brand Union Africa managing director.

If the right fundamentals are in place, there can be a positive net for all players. But, again, only if the companies involved are prepared for the new economy.

So what does this have to do with marketing and media trends?

Perhaps the biggest trend isnt a trend at all. At Brand Union weve been tracking how brands manage to survive, thrive and adapt to their markets over the long-term. While there are obviously many aspects to a company that make it a success, one determining factor rose above all others.

Back to Amazon. When we unpack what exactly other brands and companies are competing against, we realise that Amazons most significant points of difference are not the usual suspects. They are not distribution models, scale, logistics systems or even their e-commerce engines. In fact, Amazons most profitable business line isnt even their e-commerce arm  its their SAAS (Software as a Service) offering.

What sets them apart is how they have embedded their philosophy, and their brand into their DNA. They call themselves Pioneers. When hiring employees, they lay down how they expect everyone to push the envelope, to explore, and to pioneer. They have built their structures around accommodating and encouraging this learning. And, they are in fact more akin to a commercial laboratory, experimenting, trialling and building on what works.

Amazingly over a quarter of their new products or services fail, but they can always say that they have tried, failed and learnt  relentlessly driving on with first-to-market initiatives. What really distinguishes them is that they are an innovations engine.

Innovation is the basic survival gene

Innovation is what breaks the zero-sum model for companies. Its the basic survival gene that will allow brands to adapt, to pivot, to evolve, to learn and to apply faster than their competitors.

Take Netflix for example. Here is a brand that started life as an online DVD rental company. No stranger to innovative ideas, it was their brand DNA that allowed them to successfully make the crucial pivot into online content streaming.

Its rather passe to call innovation a trend, but it is the most fundamental aspect that brands need to engage with in order to secure their futures. Its what will allow categories and industries to sustain themselves or change to secure their longevity.

All too often when we discuss media and marketing trends we think within a silo, focusing on what will make for more compelling forms of communication, but we sometimes miss the bigger challenge of whether marketing is simply tactical attempts at awareness versus true experiential opportunities.

Everyone seems to have bought into the idea of experiential marketing, but in order to provide it, we need the support, buy-in and collaboration of more than just the marketing department. Marketing sometimes gets referred to as being 360. This showcases an outward focus. For true innovation to exist within a company the brand needs to drive innovation as a cultural and systemic attribute, 360 within the company. Marketing therefore potentially has a powerful new position to play in shepherding the efforts of multiple facets of a company in realising innovative experiences.

Marketing is the ideal playground for innovation

There is plenty of information to suggest that there exists an inherent tension between branding and marketing. The one is trying to build consistency, coherence and valuable equity over the long-term. The other is trying to resonate with customers in the short term, building relevancy, awareness and consideration.

Through this lens we could imagine that marketing is the ideal playground for innovation  that its role is to disrupt. We would be half right. Its a great vehicle for innovation, but its goal isnt disruption. We live in a disruptive world. Its the context or the landscape for our efforts. In that case we require some kind of coherence.

Marketing rightfully will seek innovative means, form and content in order to connect with consumers, but branding will need to provide some form of stability that allows the marketing to sometimes miss the mark knowing that the long-term branding will course-correct efforts both internally and externally.

So, heres the trend: branding is the key to unlocking company innovation.

Branding will increasingly be used as an articulate platform upon which a company can build internal capabilities for innovative thought and from which external marketing can safely push the envelope. Branding will finally be acknowledged as a business fundamental and not as a marketing function.
Are you already busy planning your 2018 social calendar? I've listed a few cool festivals you should check out between January and March - add them to your list!

January

The Wolfkop Weekender | Citrusdal

This festival takes place 18-22 January. It is a a popular music event along the banks of the Lilo River in Citrusdal and attracts hundreds of locals and internationals each year. Book your ticket on the website.

Up the Creek Music Festival | Swellendam

This colourful music festival takes place 25-28 January. The festival has taken place every year since 1999, along the banks of the Breede River in Swellendam. You can set up your tent for the weekend or camp right next to your car. This years lineup is fire! Check out the website for ticket details.

February

Magoebaskloof Berry Festival | Limpopo

Febuberries for the win! The Magoebaskloof Berry Festival will be on the weekend of 3-4 February. This festival promises good fun for the whole family, including picking your own berries, a village market and breathtaking scenery. Check out the website for more information.

Ultra Music Festival | Cape Town

The Ultra Music Festival will take place 9-10 February as a fifth anniversary celebration. As anticipated, the world's most renowned DJs will be on deck, such as Armin Van Buuren, AfroJack, Dubfire and Hardwell, to mention a few. Check out the website and book your tickets.

March

Lunar-Altered States of African Music Festival | Riviersonderend

The Altered States Music Festival is a must for any psy-trance music fan. It is well remembered for its underground psychedelic music and promises the best psychedelic music from around the world. Get your tickets to secure your place on the cosmic circle dance floor.

Cape Town International Jazz Festival | Cape Town

Every person, has to attend the Cape Town International Jazz fest at least once in their life. The annual Cape Town International Jazz Festival, takes place 23-24 March. The Jazz Fest has a reputation that precedes itself, welcoming thousands of local and international guests each year. This years guest artists include Corinne Bailey Rae, Jarred Rickets, Amanda Black, Miles Mosley, Micasa and many more household names. Check out the website to secure your tickets.

Splashy Fen Musical Festival | KwaZulu-Natal

The Splashy Fen Music Festival has become one of South Africas premier music festivals. The festival begins on 29 March and ends 1 April. Currently Splashy Fen is South Africas longest running music fest and one of the most friendliest. You can expect natural amphitheatres, great acoustics, breathtaking mountain vistas, winding rivers and large level fields for camping. For more information check out the website.

The South African Eco-film Festival | Cape Town

The fifth Annual Eco-film Festival returns to Cape Town 23-24 March. The festival aims to showcase challenging, intriguing and creative film content highlighting important issues and concerns within the South African context. For more information check out the website.
An all-female cast and creative team will stage William Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre from 7 February 2018 until 3 March 2018.

Alicia McCormick as Kate and Daneel van der Walt as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew - image by Jesse Kramer

Award-winning director Tara Notcutt will lead some of South Africas most celebrated actresses in a version of The Taming Of The Shrew; a meeting of classic text with modern twists, including lip-synching, 90s fashion, and an all-female cast, supported by an all-female creative team.

The Taming Of The Shrew is Shakespeares battle of the sexes. Matters of gender, marriage, and family come together in this dark comedy of Kate, a headstrong woman, and her tempestuous relationship with Petruchio, the man who is set on wooing and winning her.

In the lead role of Kate is Alicia McCormick, Daneel van der Walt as Petruchio and Buhle Ngaba as Kates sister Bianca. Lynita Crofford plays Baptista; Dianne Simpson is Gremio and Ann Juries plays Grumio. Kathleen Stephens is Lucentio, Naledi Majola is Tranio, Kate Pinchuck is Hortensio and Masali Baduza is Biondello.

Dara Beth is assistant director. Costume design is by Mariechen Vosloo, set design and decor by Jo Glanville and lighting design by Ronel Jordaan. The choreography is by Cleo Notcutt.

In the 62-year history of Maynardville Open-Air Theatre, The Taming Of The Shrew has been performed five times.

I am honoured to be directing my first Shakespearean play at Cape Towns iconic Shakespearean venue, says Notcutt. This historic production is a first, featuring an all-female cast and team, while at the same time, honouring the vision of Maynardvilles founders - to present world-class productions of Shakespeares plays in the magic of an open-air venue. It is fitting that The Taming Of The Shrew was the first play presented at Maynardville, and now it is taking us into the next era.

The Taming Of The Shrew will be the 50th show that Notcutt directs. At 31, Notcutt is also the youngest person to direct a play at Maynardville and the fifth woman to do so. Notcutt has worked in many styles, from intimate drama and physical theatre to illusion and opera, and now makes her Shakespearean debut. Her directing credits include the international touring hit play miskien, comic book storytelling such as Mafeking Road, Undermined, and the cult political satirical thriller The Three Little Pigs.

The production forms part of the inaugural Maynardville Open-Air Festival, which will feature a programme of music, dance, comedy and more. The festival will include performances by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cape Town City Ballet, a comedy season run by the Cape Town Comedy Club and a variety of Cape Towns top performing artists.

The Taming of the Shrew will run from 7 February until 3 March 2018 at 8.15pm Monday to Saturdays. Tickets cost from R150 to R220. Bookings will be through Computicket on 0861 915 8000, online at www.computicket.com or at any Shoprite Checkers outlet.
Bizcommunity was privileged to receive an invitation to the Volvo Ocean 65 Practice Race, the in-port manoeuvres designed to give participants of the the Volvo Ocean Race a practice run ahead of the 10 December 2017, third leg start and a rare opportunity for media to have an exclusive experience with the "rockstars" of sailing, who include previous Olympic Gold medalists, veterans and America's Cup winners!

The Biz crew were assigned to team Brunel, whose skipper, Bouwe Bekking, has completed seven Volvo Ocean Race challenges!

The media machine

The race is not only characterised by extreme excellence at a sporting level, but is also a state-of-the-art media machine providing up-to-the-minute multimedia, multi-platform content and data from the worlds oceans onto the screens of fans around the world.

To achieve this requires facilities such as the below-deck media stations, complete with production and editing desks operated by the official OBRs - the onboard reporters assigned to each vessel, who are not part of the racing crew, but report on the race, sending back videos, photos and text on an up-to-the-minute basis.

Custom-designed hardware and software on the boats, along with handheld Canon and Garmin cameras, helmet cameras, 3D cameras, HD night vision cameras, bow cameras, mast cameras, stern cameras, processors that send data back to race control and motion sensors recording things like wave height and the state of our oceans, demonstrate leading edge technology and services from some of the biggest players in the satellite and imaging technology industries in action.

#TurnTheTideOnPlastic #CleanSeas

With the brand focus on the health of our oceans and on taking action to help Turn the Tide on Plastic, The Volvo Ocean Race has positioned itself as a global sustainability roadshow, partnering with 11th Hour Racing, AkzoNobel and United Nations Environment Clean Seas campaign to bring together science, government, sport and business to spread awareness and action on these pressing issues.

Widgets, digits and hashtags

Follow the Volvo Ocean race on Twitter and Facebook download the app, desktop widget, live trackers, ranking scoreboards, subscribe to Volvo Ocean Race or individual teams on Youtube or www.volvooceanrace.com for news updates, stats and videos.

#volvooceanrace, #CleanSeas, #TurntheTideonPlastic, #LifeAt45Degrees

The prevailing South easterly wind conditions in Cape Town provided an electrifying start for the fleet as they departed Cape Towns iconic Table Bay Sunday on the 6,500m, third leg of the extreme contest across the Southern Ocean towards Melbourne, Australia.

Bizcommunity would like to thank Volvo Ocean Race and Purple pine Communications. Wishing bon voyage and fair winds to all competitors, Brunel were following you!
LONDON, UK - BBC journalist Carrie Gracie announced Monday she had quit her post as China editor in protest at an "indefensible pay gap" at the British broadcaster, winning support from dozens of colleagues.

Gracie said she resigned last week over a "crisis of trust" which has engulfed the BBC since the broadcaster was forced last year to reveal the salaries of its highest-paid employees.

The disclosures showed "an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work," Gracie said in a blog post announcing her resignation.

"These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff," she added, stating that up to 200 women employed by the broadcaster had made complaints over pay discrimination in recent months.

Two-thirds of BBC staff earning more than 150,000 ($203,000, 169,000 euros) were shown to be men, according to the figures published in July.

Gracie warned that a "bunker mentality" by managers so far "is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level".

"No systemic discrimination against women"

Her resignation was widely reported by BBC news programmes, while the broadcaster said there was "no systemic discrimination against women".

The former China editor has returned to London and will resume her former post within the television newsroom.

On Monday, she co-presented BBC Radio 4's Today programme, during which she said she was "moved" by the positive reaction to her decision which spoke of a "depth of hunger" for pay equality.

More than 130 journalists who are part of the BBC Women group backed her decision.

"It is hugely regrettable that an outstanding and award-winning journalist like Carrie Gracie feels she has no option but to resign from her post as China editor because the BBC has not valued her equally with her male counterparts," they said in a statement published by the BBC's Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent.

Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the UK's National Union of Journalists, said the body was "determined to hold the BBC to account" and reach settlements on behalf of women who have suffered a salary deficit.

Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge.
The Pentawards, the most prestigious worldwide competition exclusively devoted to packaging design, is coming to China.

The event will host a dedicated conference in China in collaboration with ADF&PCD Shanghai 2018. As part of this partnership, the Pentawards Exhibit will showcase a selection of the 2017 award-winning packaging, offering visitors the unique opportunity to gain a global perspective of the best and most creative packaging designs from the last year.

ADF&PCD Shanghai 2018, which is Chinas only dedicated event for the aerosol, dispensing, perfume and cosmetic packaging community, held at Shanghai Mart on 28 and 29 March, will welcome big-name brands, cutting-edge innovation and top design agencies. Not only will the show benefit from the industry-leading Pentawards Conference, but the Pentawards Exhibit will provide visitors with a first-hand look at the best and most creative packaging designs from the last year.

Paul Macdonald, global brand director of the Easyfairs Packaging Portfolio, comments: Its really exciting to have the Pentawards on board for this years show, with some of the best and brightest minds from the packaging design world set to speak as part of the conference programme. Attendees will learn the best ways to tell a brands story, how to deliver innovation through design, and how to turn packaging challenges into opportunities. Having the Pentawards Conference at ADF&PCD Shanghai adds a unique gravitas to an already packed show, and helps us build on the momentum generated by our sister shows in Paris and New York.

Speakers at the conference

The dedicated packaging design-focused conference will be hosted and chaired by Rhonda Jiang, editor-in-chief at Package and Design Magazine, and will boast major names from all over the globe, specifically focusing on the creative design community. For example, Laurent Hainaut, president and founder of ForceMajeure, will be headlining the conference programme. ForceMajeure is one of the leading international design houses, specialising in brand creation, brand renovation, product design and innovation, whilst Hainaut brings with him expertise from working on accounts including Unilever, Diageo, PepsiCo, Danone Waters, LOreal, Revlon and many others.

Ippei Murata, art director of packaging design at Shiseido, will be taking to the stage to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with developing a packaging design team for the Chinese market. Murata joined Shiseido, one of the leading cosmetics companies in the world, in 2001 helping to design the global Shiseido brand and establish it as a leading makeup brand in Japan. After a stint at Shiseido Europe, she moved to Shanghai to develop the package design team.

Also speaking as part of the Pentawards will be MS Xiaojing Huang, strategic director at Yang Design. Yang Design is one of the most forward-looking product strategy and design consultancies in China, with both international and local experience. Not only is Huang an internationally renowned design strategist and trend expert, but she is also a leading figure in the Chinese design marketplace.

Theme for 2018 conference

In addition to big-name speakers and international brands taking part in the conference, cutting-edge and innovative topics will also be on the agenda, with the theme for the 2018 conference finalised as how can you turn design challenges into opportunities?. Visitors to The Pentawards Conference can expect to hear an array of subjects, ranging from How to meet the expectations of the always connected and demanding millennials and Store shelf vs e-commerce. Do they require different packaging?, through to The importance of ensuring brand recognition and identity and Why the future of packaging must be both interactive and responsive.

Macdonald concludes: The Pentawards is recognised around the world, not only because of the major names it attracts, but also the subjects it covers. Anyone with an interest in packaging design will not want to miss the Pentawards Conference or the Pentawards Exhibit at ADF&PCD Shanghai 2018. It is inspirational, educational and innovative, offering something for everyone.

For further information, click here.


The PLA Navy's first indigenously-built aircraft carrier was launched in April 2017. A Xinhua photo

BEIJING (PTI): China has started building its third aircraft carrier with a hi-tech launch system even as it is completing a new type of destroyer with modern weapons to be deployed in Indian Ocean and South China Sea, a media report said last week.



The carrier's construction has started even as another home-grown carrier is being built at a Shanghai shipyard since last year, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on January 5 quoting People's Liberation Army (PLA) officials.



China launched its first aircraft carrier in 2014 which is a refitted vessel of the hull of a former Soviet ship.



Last April, China launched its first indigenously-built aircraft carrier which is being fitted with equipment. It had already announced plans to build a third one earlier. The second aircraft carrier is expected to be launched this year.



The Shanghai shipyard is still working on the third aircraft carrier's hull, which is expected to take about two years, the Post reported.



"Building the new carrier will be more complicated and challenging than the other two ships," it quoted a PLA official as saying.



China has been trying to build up a blue-water navy giving precedence to its navy as it looks to expand its influence globally.



China has also designed an aircraft to operate from the deck of the carrier and is currently training pilots.



Sources said it is too early to say when the third vessel would be launched, but China plans to have four aircraft carrier battle groups in service by 2030, the Post report quoted naval experts as saying.



Also state-run Xinhua news agency reported that China is building a new type of destroyer for its navy equipped with modern defence, anti-missile, anti-ship and anti-submarine weapons.



The new destroyer is expected to be in service soon and its future missions might include assignments to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, state-run Global Times reported.



Construction of the destroyer has focused on improving the ship's fighting capability, a military representative, Leng Jun, was quoted as saying in the report.



After soliciting opinions from military officers and soldiers, designers changed the original plan for helicopters on the warship, increasing the height of the cabins to improve the passing efficiency, said a report by the PLA Daily, the official organ of the Chinese military.



A new welding technique was explored and used in building the outer hull, which was made of a new type of material, the report said.



To provide a more comfortable environment for soldiers on the ship, workers used new materials to protect against shock and noise and increased ventilation equipment in the destroyer's living cabins.



The vessel will have to undergo planned testing, including equipment operation, berthing and sailing, before it is commissioned for use, it said.


COIMBATORE (PTI): A Defence Innovation Centre would be set up in Coimbatore by industry body CODISSIA to assist small industries in manufacturing components for the defence sector, Defence Minister Nirmala Seetharaman said on Sunday.



The Defence Ministry would release Rs 20 crore as an initial funding to the Coimbatore District Small Industries Association (CODISSIA) to set up the innovation centre, she told reporters here after discussions with the association office-bearers.



"Ministry of Defence has recognised CODISSIA as an innovation centre required for defence production," she said adding the association had earlier submitted a proposal in this regard.



Seetharaman said small and micro units as well as startups, that can manufacture components required for the defence production, would be identified by the association.



"They can design or test their products at the centre," she said, adding the association had earlier submitted a proposal in this regard.



The Minister said the decision to set up the innovation centre was taken in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Make in India" programme and his dream of making India a defence manufacturing hub.



Defence Ministry had identified many micro, small and medium enterprises, which can meet the huge requirements of the sector, she said adding that being an industrial hub, Coimbatore had the potential to supply components to Defence production.



CODISSIA President V Sundaram said the city would have an exclusive defence park within three years.



Earlier, Tamil Nadu Municipal Administration Minister S P Velumani submitted a memorandum seeking to set up a Defence park to manufacture and supply components to the sector to Seetharaman at the airport on her arrival min Coimbatore.






NEW DELHI (PTI): Indian Navy will showcase its operational prowess during a major event, starting Monday, along the western coast of the country, which will be attended by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.



"In the programme, more than ten ships, including aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, a submarine and various naval aircraft will exhibit their combat capabilities and battle readiness," a Defence Ministry statement said on Sunday.



Sitharaman will preside over the Navy event which will display the operational might and maritime prowess on January 8-9, the statement said.


By Martin Keane

The leaders of Irelands co-operatives, including dairy processors and national livestock marts, will gather at UCC tomorrow to discuss strategies for the future success of our industry in an increasingly competitive global environment.

The 41st ICOS National Conference will investigate the policy environment likely to influence future global conditions. It will also examine the measures we can take to grow and develop our businesses to ensure long-term, sustainable growth and development.

Very significant investments have been made in the future processing capabilities of our industry. Producers have contributed strongly to that, including investment and expanded production. The signals in surveys from various dairy co-operatives are all positive with a continuing growth in milk output anticipated. Co-ops have robust and strategic plans in place to deal with this combined challenge and opportunity.

In order to achieve success, we need a supportive framework in which to operate and that is why the currently proposed CAP reforms are crucially important, albeit with some caveats.

The EU Commissions communication on the Future of Food and Farming sets out proposals for a range of CAP reforms post-2020. It aims to provide direction as to how the CAP should evolve to meet emerging challenges for European agriculture. It outlines a less prescriptive approach and greater subsidiarity at Member State level to make the CAP more relevant and practical.

Irish farmers and co-operatives are facing unprecedented challenges in the coming years as a result of Brexit, climate change and global market volatility. Under any CAP reforms, market supports and risk management measures will be necessary to protect against this volatility.

Its essential for the CAP proposals to be supported with sufficient financing and strong and effective market support and risk management tools. This will provide much needed stability and will enable farmers to meet the outlined goals, including ambitious environmental targets. Income stabilisation tools will also help to address volatility, allowing farmers to defer a small proportion of their income in a good year and draw it down in a bad one. Seasonality is also a key issue that must be addressed to stabilise market prices throughout the year.

The CAP can also help promote the development of a European futures market. This would be a key tool that co-operatives could use to manage volatility through financial hedging. To achieve this, its use needs to be encouraged and training and advisory services provided for co-operatives so that they can effectively use it as a risk management tool.

We also welcome the focus on trade within the CAP and the commitment to promote EU food quality and standards worldwide. This will help to improve market access for EU products globally and will be critical to overcome the challenges posed to the Irish agri-food sector by Brexit.

The potential for increased national flexibility within the proposals will allow us to better address local issues, particularly within environmental schemes. With a strong and controlled EU framework, we can avoid any potential distortion to competition or the functioning of the single market.

However, ICOS opposes mandatory capping and degressive direct support payments. Decoupled direct payments are the main tool that farmers have at their disposal to support and stabilise farm income. Capping and degressive payments would only serve to reduce income for active farmers, who are in most need of this support.

The recent CAP Communication highlights the effective role which producer organisations can have in strengthening the position of farmers in the food supply chain.

Co-operatives are the most effective form of producer organisation. They integrate the role of producer, processor and the marketer, helping to rebalance the food chain, bringing viable incomes to their members and offering a level of protection from volatility. Therefore, we call on the Commission to encourage, promote and protect the role of co-operatives within the upcoming policy reforms.

Martin Keane is president of the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society (ICOS).
In the first part of a four-part series looking at finalists for the Cork Company of the Year Awards 2018, Padraig Hoare casts an eye over those in the Emerging category

Buzz growing around ApisProtects unique beekeeping technology

It is no wonder there is such a buzz surrounding ApisProtect, a truly innovative and unique company that uses technology to help beekeepers prevent losses and increase productivity in their hives.

In 2013, Fiona Edwards Murphy began her doctoral research into the application of sensors and networking in honey bee hives.

The Kanturk natives name has long been whispered within academic, student, and business circles as one associated with ingenuity, innovation, and savvy. Her research, and application of it, was seen as one of the most exciting in years to come out of University College Corks IGNITE programme.

The project received international recognition, including at least eight academic publications and awards from the likes of the Irish Research Council, IBM, and Google.

ApisProtect was named Business of the Year 2017 at the IGNITE Awards  the culmination of the huge amount of work and dedication put in by Ms Edwards Murphy and the ApisProtect team.

Currently, ApisProtect helps commercial and amateur beekeepers managing 81m beehives around the world  who are losing up to half their colonies each year  to reduce losses and increase productivity in their hives.

ApisProtect uses in-hive Internet of Things (IoT) enabled sensors, machine learning, and world-class beekeeping knowledge to help beekeepers identify hive problems, diseases, and pests.

The companys technology enables beekeepers to monitor hives at times that are typically difficult or impossible such as during the night, during poor weather, or in the winter.

It allows beekeepers to evaluate the productivity of their beehives in terms of pollination or honey production.

It also helps beekeepers to make faster and more effective decisions on beekeeping actions, and assists beekeepers to act early to reduce or prevent beehive events which would otherwise cause large-scale colony losses.

Ms Edwards Murphy said being nominated in the Emerging Category of the Cork Company of the Year Awards was a tremendous boost for the young business.

Were thrilled to be selected as a finalist for emerging company of the year. Weve come so far in our first year of business, and the support from the Cork business community has been amazing, she said.

EviView is making strides on the world stage with e-ConnX

Chief executive officer of EviView, Pat Lynch: We couldnt have imagined the amazing progress we have achieved in such a short period of time.

EviView, which was established in 2015  it provides smart analytics software for lean-focused pharmaceutical manufacturers  has exceeded all expectations.

By its third anniversary, this year, with its innovative e-ConnX solution, EviView will be in an extremely strong position to further occupy the Irish market and to enter into Polish and US territories.

Its e-ConnX technology is pioneering the way life-science manufacturers manage their performance and reliability. This is an unmet need in the industry.

The concept of e-ConnX is ingenious  it is a customised, shift-to-shift performance-management application used to implement the weekly production schedule.

It also provides downtime reasons for any non-adherence to the schedule. The South Mall company has intrigued the giants in the sector across the world, making significant progress with 10 of the worlds top-20 pharma and biotech companies.

The concept of e-ConnX was developed on the factory floor by professionals who identified costly production problems and inefficiencies in their own workplaces.

It is an easy-to-implement and highly scalable software platform that helps companies measure production and reliability performance, and is particularly powerful at data-visualisation  it becomes easier to diagnose exactly where you are having issues that are delaying production schedules, increasing costs, and scuppering sales deadlines.

The efforts of the EviView team are only enhanced by the nomination as a finalist in the emerging category of the Cork Company of the Year Awards, according to chief executive, Pat Lynch.

Its been an amazing two years for the EviView business.

While we knew we were catering for an unmet need in the life-science space, we couldnt have imagined the amazing progress we have achieved in such a short period of time.

This progress is testament to the huge efforts of our talented team.

We are honoured to be chosen as finalists for the best emerging company category. Exciting times! he said.

The success of EviView means growth in the coming years.

The market focus will be on Ireland, the UK, the US, Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Poland.

Fuller Marketings third-party approach earning the plaudits

Ruth Fuller of Fuller Marketing: To have made the finalist shortlist is, without doubt, an achievement in itself and its one we are immensely proud of. 

Specialists in the concept of third-party marketing, the reputation of Fuller Marketing continues to rise in 2018. It does not matter the size of the firm engaged with the company, which works with clients big and small in industries across the board, offering revolutionary third-party marketing to organisations of all sizes.

Fuller Marketings core offering of third-party marketing means if a marketing department exists, it provides the niche support it requires, and in its absence, Fuller provides the whole marketing function.

Founder Ruth Fuller has gained a stellar reputation in the marketing field over the years, working with some of the most recognisable names in Cork business, as well as international brands.

Clients of Ms Fuller have included Bishopstown Credit Union, Cork On Ice, Elite Pilates, Cork Chamber of Commerce, Network Cork, McDonalds, Aviva, Emirates, Mars Ireland, Reckitt Benckiser, LOreal, 7Up, PepsiCo, EOne Movies, Musgrave Group and RedFM.

Fuller Marketing was founded, according to Ms Fuller, on the insight that many SMEs shy away from bringing in the best digital expertise because of cost. There is a real need for digital marketing and most businesses recognise this, she said, so Fuller Marketing offers senior level marketing at a reasonable price.

The South Mall-based business also works on new projects with a number of clients. This could involve a new website, brand position, a new product launch or an analysis of the business.

It is wonderful recognition for Fuller Marketing to be recognised in the Emerging Category of the Cork Company of the Year Awards, Ms Fuller said.

To have made the finalist shortlist is, without doubt, an achievement in itself and its one we are immensely proud of. We see this recognition by our peers as an acknowledgement of, and a testament to, our work. Not only are we passionate about what we do, but we are passionate about where we do it.

Being in business in Cork is so important for us and as we see it, we have a lot to offer to both the business community and wider Cork region.

We have big plans for the future growth of our business. We have set ourselves challenging targets but ones that we are confident we will achieve, she said.
By Trish Dromey

With innovative technology that uses solar power and LED lighting to illuminate bus shelters and advertising displays, Dublin technology start-up Solar AdTek is aiming to make a breakthrough in global markets this year.

The company, established in 2014, specialises in providing energy-efficient lighting for advertising. It has already installed solar lighting systems for bus shelters in 20 locations, including seven in Ireland. as well as some in Sweden and France.

We will shortly have solar advertising units in the UK, Italy, Dubai and Belgium and expect to have installed a minimum of 200 by the end of the year, said Solar AdTek co-founder and chief executive Eoin OBroin.

The company also provides LED lighting systems which have been specifically designed for grid-connected advertising displays and already has customers for these in eight countries.

We are now talking to companies in 12 countries and expect growth of up to 500% in this side of the business this year, said Mr OBroin.

Solar AdTek is starting the new year with contracts to supply 1,300 sets of LED lights for use in advertising signs in UK motorway service stations and 600 for use in rail and bus stations in Ireland. The company has also tendered for a significant UK project and will be making an announcement about a large Irish project next month.

Given the level of orders on its books and contracts under discussion, the company expects to quintuple turnover to several million euro by the end of 2018.

It also expects the solar lighting side of the business to grow from 20% to 50%.

LED systems have been our biggest seller up until now, but the solar lighting market is one with the most potential, said Mr OBroin.

He previously founded and ran a company that manufactured advertising signage, while his co-founder and Solar AdTeks chief technology officer John Bouchier co-founded a company which developed LED lighting systems for retail display.

The two men met and worked together on a solar bus shelter project in Dublin for outdoor advertising company Clear Channel in 2011. They identified a global opportunity to provide illumination for a large number of outdoor advertising displays, including those on bus shelters that were not being lit up at night.

Setting up Solar AdTek, they focused on energy-efficient lighting and developed a solar control unit as well as customised LED lighting modules for use on grid-connected advertising displays.

Replacing existing fluorescent tubes with our bespoke LED lighting will provide an energy saving of up to 80%, said Mr OBroin, adding that a solar-powered bus shelter saves one tonne of carbon annually.

Solar lighting systems are less expensive than getting a grid connection and the benefits include better illumination, lower maintenance and reduced energy costs, he said.

In 2015, the company raised funding for expansion from private investors and Enterprise Ireland, which identified it as a high-potential start-up. Solar AdTeks first customer was Clear Channel which was looking for solar lighting for bus shelters. In addition to installing solar lighting in 20 bus shelters, the company has since supplied over 2,000 sets of LED lights to customers in eight countries.

Target customers include outdoor advertising companies, transport authorities as well as companies manufacturing bus shelters and advertising display units. Having seven solar-powered bus shelters as reference sites in Ireland is seen as a significant selling point.

Mr OBroin said developing solar lighting systems for Ireland was a challenge, because, at 53 degrees north, it has long winter nights which require lighting and short winter days to generate the solar power necessary for this.

However, success here allowed the company to go on to install units in Sweden at 59 degrees north. Plans for 2018 include expansion into Europe and beyond.
by John Whelan

Ryanair boss Michael OLeary and the British Airline Pilots Association general secretary Brian Strutton may have little in common, but they are in agreement that the UK needs to urgently close out an agreement with the EU on access to the EUs Open Skies framework post- Brexit.

Fresh anxiety was pumped into the concerns of both and the wider aviation industry in mid- December when the EU Commissions Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport stated in a notice to all UK and EU aviation bodies that as of withdrawal date (March 30, 2019) the operating licences granted to airlines by the UK Civil Aviation Authority will no longer apply.

In response, Mr Strutton, said: Here it is in black and white from the EU Commission: UK flights to the EU will be grounded in March 2019 should no agreement be reached. We need the UK government to sort air traffic rights now. Once again, no deal is not an option.

Ryanair recently applied for a British air operating licence in a bid to keep its domestic UK services operating in the event of a hard Brexit. Nevertheless, shareholders, already nervous about the impact of pilot union recognition, are worried they may be asked to sell off some of their shareholding if the UK fails to conclude a deal on access to the single aviation market with the EU.

Under EU regulations airlines must ensure that 50% of their ownership is held by EU nationals. Dublin- registered Ryanair is 60% owned by EU nationals, but that drops to 40% once UK shareholders are excluded.

Aer Lingus and British Airways owner AIG faces similar problems. Both, however, have extraordinary provisions in their articles of association to force investors to sell up, should their shareholder base fall below the 50% threshold.

IAG has a provision to force non-EU shareholders to divest within 10 days in the event of threat to its licence to freely fly across the EU. The divestiture clause exists because non-compliance with EU ownership will result in the suspension of the carriers operating license and, with it, the rights to carry passengers, mail, and cargo within the EU single market.

However, there are also many other sectors of Irelands aviation industry providing jet engine and airframe maintenance services into the UK market. Once the UK is formally out of the EU these businesses will be damaged. Our prominent aircraft leasing industry will also lose some of its trading flexibility. Wet leasing, in particular, will be impacted as under these agreements the aircraft is operated under operator certificate.

In contrast with other sectors, the aviation sector is not covered under the World Trade Organisation rules, hence in the event of a no deal there is no fall-back position. Brexit Minister Simon Coveney must take a more direct interest in ensuring that negotiations on air services between the UK and the EU take place as smoothly as possible.

The UKs broad December Brexit deal offered reassurance, but the really tough free-trade negotiations have yet to begin. There is little sign that aviation is being prioritised or that the need for urgency is understood.

John Whelan is a consultant in Irish and international trade
Will & Grace star Debra Messing has criticised the E! network for failing to pay women the same as men in a live interview on the channel.

Arriving at the Golden Globes, Messing referenced the departure of presenter Catt Sadler, who resigned in December after learning her male co-star earned almost double her salary.

Messing told host Giuliana Rancic: "I was so shocked to hear that E! doesnt believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I miss Catt Sadler. We stand with her."

Debra Messing drags E! (while being interviewed on E!): "I was so shocked to hear that E! doesn't believing in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts" pic.twitter.com/HF3B2uhwtF  David Mack (@davidmackau) January 7, 2018

Catt Sadler responded to Messing's support, telling BuzzFeed News: "I am immensely grateful for the outpouring of support today. Times Up."

Eva Longoria also criticised E! while being interviewed by Ryan Seacrest on the channel.

Standing alongside Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, Longoria stated: "We support gender equity and equal pay and we hope E! follows that lead with Catt."

Eva Longoria piles on E!: "We support gender equity and equal pay, and we hope that E! follows that lead with Catt as well. We stand with you, Catt."



Ryan Seacrest: " I love Catt. We love her." pic.twitter.com/rtKoBO5XCW  David Mack (@davidmackau) January 8, 2018

The awards show was overshadowed by the sexual harassment scandal that has rocked Hollywood, with many stars taking a stand on the night.

Many celebs

Read More:

Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Susan Sarandon, Emma Watson, Laura Dern and Michelle Williams were among the actresses who were accompanied by advocates in a show of support for victims of sexual harassment and assault.

The nominees and presenters also

Read More:

Many male celebrities in attendance, including Tom Hanks, James Franco and Gary Oldman, joined their colleagues in taking a stand, by dressing in black and wearing Times Up pins.

Missi Pyle wears a Time's Up pin as she arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards. Picture: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Times Up is the campaign to end gender discrimination across all industries, which is being backed by a number of Hollywood heavyweights,

- PA, additional reporting by Steve Neville.

More from the Golden Globes

Read More: 75th Golden Globes: Here is a list of the winners on the night

Read More: In video: Highlights of Golden Globes overshadowed by abuse scandal

Read More: Saoirse Ronan wins Best Actress; Irish director wins Best Film at Golden Globes

Read More: Everyone LOVED Saoirse Ronan having her mom on FaceTime as she won her Golden Globe

Read More: Activists accompany stars at the Golden Globes red carpet
One of the worlds most prestigious literary awards is to accept Irish-published entries for the first time.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction opened its doors after controversy over last years longlist when Solar Bones, the acclaimed comeback novel by Mike McCormack, was ruled ineligible until it was put into book stores in Britain by a Scottish publisher.

The novel had been first published by Tramp Press, a small Dublin-based firm, before the UK rights were sold to Canongate, allowing it to be entered for the competition.

Organisers of the award said the rules have been changed given the "special relationship" between the UK and Irish publishing markets - whereby most Irish publishers release books simultaneously in both jurisdictions.

Previously entries to the Man Booker had to be written in English and published by a UK publisher.

The organisers said the aim is to ensure independent Irish publishers are given the same opportunity to be recognised as Irish publishers who have headquarters in the UK.

Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: "Were delighted to support Irish publishers and the writers whose work they bring into the world.

"So much exciting new fiction is being written and published concurrently in Ireland and the UK that we felt it was only right to acknowledge and honour that."

Ronan Colgan, president of Publishing Ireland, said: "We are extremely grateful for the support shown by the Man Booker Prize and our friends and colleagues in the UK publishing industry.

"This announcement is wonderful news, not just for Irish publishers and Irish writers but for our intertwined literary heritage."

There have been a number of Irish-born authors to win the prize, including Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993 and Iris Murdoch for The Sea, The Sea in 1978 when the competition was known as the Booker Prize.

Other Irish writers who won in the 2000s when the award was known as the Man Booker Prize include John Banville for The Sea in 2005 and Anne Enright for The Gathering in 2007.

The 2018 prize is open for submissions from publishers for books published in the UK and Ireland between October 1 2017 and September 30 2018.

The winner of the 50,000 (56,000) prize will be announced on October 16 2018 at an awards ceremony at Londons Guildhall, broadcast live by the BBC.
Update 8.35pm: Karen Bradley has been appointed as Northern Ireland Secretary, moving from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Downing Street said.

Speaking tonight MS Brady said she was keenly aware that there are immediate challenges.

"It is now a year since Northern Ireland has had an effective, functioning power-sharing administration, and forming a Northern Ireland Executive, to deliver for the benefit of all, is my top priority.

"I believe a devolved government in Belfast is best placed to address these issues and take the key decisions which affect people's day to day lives, whether these relate to the economy, public services or issues of policing and justice."

Update 2.39pm: Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney phoned Mr Brokenshire while on a visit to Cairo to wish him well.

Mr Coveney said he had shown unfailing dedication and determination to secure political progress consistent with the objectives and commitments of the Good Friday Agreement.

"His unwavering commitment - in public and in private - over the last year to securing the effective operation of the devolved power-sharing institutions in Belfast has been hugely important," he said.

"While it is not always obvious to the public gaze, very important progress has been made on significant issues over the last year and I believe that a positive outcome can still be achieved. If it is, it will be a testament to the quiet, understated but hugely valuable work of James Brokenshire."

Mr Brokenshire said the parties in Northern Ireland have gotten over bigger issues in the past.

He said: "I think that there is a duty and responsibility on them now to get back into an Executive, back into devolved government and get on with serving the people of Northern Ireland.

"It has been a huge honour and privilege to be able to serve as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

"I have been hugely moved and touched by so many people that I have met and seen, worked with in Northern Ireland and that underlines to me the really positive focus that we should have now."

Update 1.48pm: Brokenshire accepted he could not give 'energy' needed in Northern Ireland role

James Brokenshire quit as Northern Ireland Secretary for medical reasons as he acknowledged that forthcoming surgery would mean he could not give the "effort, energy and complete focus" needed for the role.

In his letter to UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Mr Brokenshire said an operation to remove a small lesion in his right lung meant he had to stand down.

Efforts to restore the power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland and the impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland mean that the role is demanding and sensitive and Mr Brokenshire said he had hoped to lead the "essential work with renewed intent" before his diagnosis.

In his letter to Mrs May he said: "I recognise that this comes at an important moment for politics in Northern Ireland."

There was an "urgent need" to restart stalled talks on the restoration of devolved government, he said.

"We are now well into overtime to re-establish an executive if further intervention in the day to day affairs of Northern Ireland is to be avoided."

Mr Brokenshire, 50, said he had been informed about the lesion "in the last few days" after a series of tests in recent weeks.

He said his decision to step down was the right thing to do.

"I have a small lesion in my right lung that will require surgery to remove. Whilst the health team believe that will deal with the issue and that I will be back to work - it will take a number of weeks," he said.

The Prime Minister appeared to hold out the prospect of a return to government for Mr Brokenshire, who had previously served under her in the Home Office with responsibility for security and immigration.

Mrs May said Mr Brokenshire had demonstrated that the role in the Northern Ireland Office was "vital work which will demand long hours, hard effort and complete focus" and it was "absolutely right that you should put your health first".

She told him he had performed with "great diligence, determination and good humour" in his government roles and "I know that you will approach your forthcoming operation in the same way".

She added: "I very much look forward to working alongside you again when you are back to full health."

Mrs May sent her best wishes to Old Bexley and Sidcup MP Mr Brokenshire, his wife Cathy and their three children.

"While it is typical of you that your first thought was not for yourself, but for your duties as a Cabinet Minister and public servant, it is absolutely right that you should put your health first, for your sake and that of your family," she said.

DUP leader Arlene Foster said: "Since becoming Secretary of State in 2016, Mr Brokenshire had immersed himself fully in the role by dedicating long hours to trying to make progress.

"James leaves the role with a very intimate knowledge of Northern Ireland and I look forward to working with him again in the future."

Earlier: James Brokenshire resigns as Northern Ireland Secretary due to ill-health

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire is understood to have resigned from the UK Cabinet position due to ill-health.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire has quit the Cabinet in the first of what are expected to be a number of changes as Theresa May reshuffles her top team.

The Northern Ireland Office confirmed his resignation, but gave no further details.

However, a source close to the 50-year-old minister said he had decided to stand down because he was facing major surgery within the next couple of weeks.

The Old Bexley and Sidcup MP is a close ally of Mrs May, having served under her for five years at the Home Office, and he was not among ministers who were predicted to go in the UK Prime Minister's first major reshuffle since she took office.

Explaining his decision, a source close to Mr Brokenshire said: "He has a small lesion on his right lung and is getting major surgery in the next couple of weeks."

Meanwhile,

Read More:

The Prime Minister will seek to stamp her authority with a Cabinet reshuffle beginning today amid reports that up to six senior ministers could be axed or moved.

As MPs prepared to head back for Westminster following the Christmas break, she reaffirmed her intention to lead the Conservatives into the next general election.

Downing Street sources indicated the reshuffle was expected to be conducted over two days, with junior and middle-ranking ministerial appointments likely to continue into Tuesday.

It is likely to represent her biggest overhaul of her top team since she appointed her first Cabinet on entering No 10 in 2016.

She made only limited changes among her senior ministers following the election in June having seen her position badly weakened by the loss of her overall majority in the Commons.

It is thought her most senior ministers - including Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Brexit Secretary David Davis - will remain in their current posts.

However, Education Secretary Justine Greening, Conservative Party chairman Sir Patrick McLoughlin, Business Secretary Greg Clark and the Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom are among those reported to be vulnerable.

Downing Street sources sought to play down the reports, describing them as "speculation" and "guesswork".

It is thought that Mrs May will take the opportunity to bring forward some more junior ministers, with Immigration Minister Brandon Lewis and Justice Minister Dominic Raab among those tipped for promotion.

It is unclear, however, whether she will announce a direct replacement for Damian Green who was forced to quit as her effective deputy after he admitted lying over the alleged discovery of pornographic material on his Commons computer during a police raid in 2008.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt had been widely seen as the favourite for the post, although reports have suggested that she may be reluctant to move him in the midst of an NHS winter crisis.

Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth said yesterday: "If she promotes this Health Secretary tomorrow it's a betrayal of those 75,000 people in the back of ambulances."
by Greg Murphy

The family of a Japanese man killed in a fatal stabbing in Dundalk last Wednesday have thanked the people of Ireland for their kindness.

A statement was issued by the Japanese embassy on behalf of his family.

"We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the kindness the people of Ireland have shown.

"When he was alive, our son spoke about the warmth of the people of this town and his love of Dundalk.

"He came to Ireland initially as a language student and only intended a short stay. However, he was touched by the kindness of the Irish people, and he decided to work here.

"As a family, we are truly saddened by what has happened, but we hope that this incident will not give Japanese people a bad impression of Ireland.

"We would like to give our heartfelt thanks to the ambulance personnel, the Gardai, National Pen Limited, Mr Oliver Morgan who set up the GoFundMe page, the staff of the Embassy of Japan, and the members of Louth County Council who organised tonights candlelight vigil.

"Finally, we hope that a tragic event like this one will never happen in this country again.

The Sasaki Family"

Sasaki is understood to have come from Ebina, west of Tokyo.

He worked in a call centre in Dundalk, and it is believed he was targeted randomly on Avenue Road in Dundalk shortly before 9am on Wednesday as he made his way to the office.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people have attended a candlelit vigil in Dundalk tonight, in memory of Yosuke Sasaki.

A large crowd gathered in Market Square this evening to remember the 24-year-old.

Candlelight vigil in #Dundalk this evening in memory of Yosuke Sasaki who was killed last week. pic.twitter.com/TMeFO8nDD3  John Sheridan (@CllrJohnS) January 8, 2018

John McGahon, Chair of the Dundalk Municipal District Committee, said the fact that a guest in Dundalk had met such a tragic end was heartbreaking.

"What we want to do ... is show strength, unity and solidarity with his friends, family and community in Japan."
Latest: The man whose body was found in a flat in Limerick yesterday has been named locally as 45-year old Martin Clancy, from Limerick city.

The State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy arrived at the scene this lunchtime ahead of conducting a post mortem later today.

The results of the autopsy will help gardai decide the course of their investigation.

Gardai are understood to be treating the death as suspicious.

Mr Clancy's neighbours paid tribute to him today.

"Quiet, lovely person, sound out, kind," said one neighbour.

"He took everyone that was homeless in off the streets kind-of-thing.

"He was a good person.

"Two weeks ago, I was just talking to him at the door and he was doing ok because I had brought him over food and whatever."

Another neighbour said: "I knew Martin very well. He was very quiet, he didn't bother anyone.

"Martin was always walking his dogs. His two dogs he was always out with."

State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy arrives at the scene. Pic: Liam Burke/Press 22

Update 7am: Gardai are appealing for witnesses following the discovery of a mans body at a flat in Limerick last night.

The body, of a male believed to be in his 40s, was discovered at an address on Little OCurry Street shortly before 6pm.

The State Pathologist has been informed and the Garda Technical Bureau has been called to the scene which has been sealed off for forensic examination.

Pic: Liam Burke/Press 22

The cause of death has not yet been determined but Gardai say they are investigating all the circumstances surrounding the mans death.

Gardai are appealing for witnesses - or anyone who may have seen anything unusual or suspicious in or around the area - to contact Henry Street Garda Station on 061 212400, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
Gerry Adams has not had a complaint against the Irish Independent upheld by the Press Ombudsman.

The complaint related to a story printed on the front page of the Irish Independent on September 1, 2017.

The story featured a report on an interview given by Deputy Adams to LMFM, a radio station in counties Louth and Meath.

The report was printed with the headline: Dont jail IRA murderers of innocent farmer - Adams.

The report was based on the reponse given by Adams to the news that Gardai had uncovered new lines of enquiry in its investigations into the 1991 murder of Tom Oliver, in County Louth.

According to the report, Deputy Adams has told LMFM that he did not think jailing Mr Olivers killers "would assist the process" and "would be totally and absolutely counterproductive".

The front page report ended with the information that the full story was available inside the paper.

Solicitors representing Deputy Adams contacted the editor of the Irish Independent stating that their client "denies your grossly inaccurate assertion that he had said that Mr Olivers killers "should not be jailed".

In the letter, they claimed that even from a cursory reading of the LMFM interview transcript it is quite clear that Deputy Adams remarks had been completely misconstrued and that he did not state that those responsible for the killing of Mr Oliver in 1991 should not be prosecuted.

Solicitors representing the Irish Independent responded by saying that the article was fair and accurate and by no means false and misleading.

The solicitors included extracts from the radio interview transcripts which they claimed supported the headline on the article.

As Deputy Adams was not satisfied with the newspapers response, his solicitors made a complaint with the Office of the Press Ombudsman and included a link to the audio file of the complete interview with LMFM.

The editor of the Irish Independent made a submission to the Ombudsman stating that the quote referred to by the complainant is incomplete and that the newspaper report was a truthful and accurate representation of the interview.

In turn, solicitors representing Deputy Adams responded saying that the headline and whole tenet of the article was inaccurate as their client had stated in the interview that Thomas Olivers family deserved the truth and also that Sinn Fein continued to facilitate attempts to put in place an independent international body to obtain information for Thomas Olivers family and other families.

The Press Ombudsman chose not to uphold the complaint lodged by Gerry Adams.

The decision stated: "Newspapers are entitled to concentrate on particular parts of interviews which they regard as newsworthy. The view that Deputy Adams regarded the sending to jail, if convicted, the murderers of Mr Oliver as counterproductive was newsworthy.

"The qualification which Deputy Adams made in his radio interview that the families of those killed were entitled to the truth did not need to be referred to in the front-page report to meet requirements found in Principle 1. The reference to the counterproductive outcome of jailing Mr Olivers murderers was a specific statement, the right of families to the truth was something that had been stated before by Sinn Fein representatives and was, therefore, less newsworthy.

"The headline used on the front page article Dont jail IRA murderers of innocent farmer  Adams whilst not reflecting the full intent of what Deputy Adams had said in his radio interview was a reasonable summary of the most newsworthy aspect of Deputy Adams interview."

Digital desk
Irish journalist Samantha Barry has been named as the new editor of Glamour magazine by Conde Nast.

The Cork native will become the eighth editor of the magazine and the first from an exclusively digital background to lead a Conde Nast magazine.

Barry had served as Head of Social Media and Emerging Media at CNN having previously had roles at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and BBC World News, as well as RTE and Newstalk.

Barry will replace Cindi Leive as editor-in-chief, with Leive having served for 16 years.

Thank you so much @cindi_leive. Ive got impressive shoes to fill. https://t.co/b7fXrC0qek  Samantha Barry (@samanthabarry) January 8, 2018

Speaking about the role, the 36-year-old said: "I am as humbled by Glamours past as I am excited about Glamours future"

"I could not be more proud to take the reigns of an iconic womens brand at this pivotal moment for all womens voices.

"For me, Glamour is the home of strong storytellers, insightful journalism, beauty and fashion. I look forward to building on the brands success, and sharing Glamour with audiences everywhere."

Conde Nasts artistic director, Anna Wintour, said in a statement that Barry was "fearless like so many leaders of the moment.

"Sam is Glamours first digital-native editor, which is to say she arrives from the future rather than the past," said Wintour.

"As an editor she has led all manner of news coverage from the 2016 presidential election and the horrific Las Vegas mass shooting to the love story voicemails and the 2018 New Years Eve festivities.

"Sam understands social media as a tool for storytelling and reporting; a way to support social conversation and the ever-changing contours of whats cool."

Wintour added that she felt Barry "has both a reverence for Glamours history and a crystal clear view of its future in the digital environment."

The appointment marks a shift for Glamour, one of the biggest fashion and beauty media brands in the world.

The magazine announced last year it was to undergo a digital-first strategy.

Bob Sauerberg, CEO and President of Conde Nast said, "Samanthas fluency in connecting with consumers in digital, social and video will give Glamour fans the content they love, and in ways that are most meaningful to them."

Speaking to the New York Times about the new position, Barry said "I care about the brand and the magazine is a huge part of that brand," before adding "Glamour is a brand  its not just a magazine."
Shane Ross says he has not decided what position he will support when the cabinet debates abortion this week.

Ministers are due to consider the recommendations of the Oireachtas committee on the Eighth amendment.

It said there should be abortion without restriction for the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy.

Transport Minister Shane Ross says he is still deciding whether to support the recommendation or not.

"I will make a decision on that very shortly, I am reading the report on that at the moment," Minister Ross said.

"I will be discussing it before I say anything about it with my Independent Alliance colleagues because we have not met since but we will be meeting in the next few days."

When asked whether the Independent Alliance would share a united view on the issue, Minister Ross said that he didnt think so.

"We will discuss the view we are going to take.

"But certainly on issues of that sort we are perfectly happy for people to act according to their own conscience."
Update 3.30: One of two men arrested in connection with the murder of Denis Donaldson in Co. Donegal, has been released without charge.

Donaldson, who was exposed as a British spy, was killed near Glenties in April 2006.

Two men aged in their 30 and 40s were arrested last night.

The suspect in his 40s was released without charge today, the man in his 30s is continuing to be questioned at Letterkenny garda station.

Gardai say the investigation is ongoing.

Earlier: Two men have been arrested in Donegal in connection with the murder of former Sinn Fein official and British agent Denis Donaldson over a decade ago.

Denis Donaldson, a senior Sinn Fein official and close colleague of Gerry Adams, was shot dead at a remote cottage near Glenties, Co Donegal, in 2006 after being exposed as a British spy.

He had been living at the cottage since his exposure as an MI5 agent the previous year.

Gardai arrested two men, one aged in his 30s and the other in his 40s, on Sunday.

They were being questioned in Letterkenny Garda Station and they can he detained for 72 hours.

The Real IRA claimed responsibility for the murder three years later but the circumstances surrounding Mr Donaldsons outing and subsequent assassination have been shrouded in mystery.

The sequence of events surrounding Mr Donaldson's death dated back to 2002 after three men including Mr Donaldson were arrested following a raid on Sinn Feins Stormont office. The power-sharing executive between unionists and nationalists collapsed and Government restored direct rule to Northern Ireland a week later.

In 2005 charges against three men were dropped and within days Sinn Fein said Mr Donaldson was a British agent and expelled him from the party. He later said he had worked as a spy since the 1980s.

More to follow.
As many as 64 African migrants, including a mother whose surviving three-year-old child clung to her as she drowned, are feared dead after a traffickers overcrowded rubber dinghy began to sink in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Italian coast guard rescued 86 people from the boat, which set off from Libya, hours after it started sinking on Saturday morning, a UN migration agency official said.

Rescue divers leaped into the water to pull dozens to safety, including some who managed to stay aboard the half-submerged dinghy as well as others who were struggling in the sea.

Eight bodies were recovered on Saturday. Officials at the time said the corpses were all women, but UN migration officials who met the rescue ship when it arrived Monday in Catania, Sicily, said two of the eight dead were adult men.

Since trafficking dinghies are often crammed with far more than 100 migrants, fears quickly arose that dozens more could be missing. An Italian coast guard search through the night did not find any more survivors or corpses.

Flavio Di Giacomo of the UNs International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said survivors interviewed by the agency in Catania revealed 150 people had been aboard the dinghy when it set out from a beach east of Tripoli.

"Sixty-four migrants lost their life in the shipwreck (which) occurred last Saturday," Mr Di Giacomo said, adding "probably 56 missing migrants" perished at sea.

Mr Di Giacomo said the dinghy was packed and made of poor quality rubber.

Some eight hours into the Mediterranean crossing, "water started pouring in, panic ensued, the migrants all moved to one side, and the boat lost its balance and was deflating".

Some migrants managed to cling to the portion of the dinghy that was not submerged, but many others fell into the sea. He added that the Italian coast guard arrived quickly, about half an hour after the dinghy spotted by a European naval aircraft.

Catania mayor Enzo Bianco told Italian Radio Radicale that among the survivors was a child who lost her mother.

"I watched a three-year-old girl while she was starting to play at the port here. She was saved, grabbed at the last second by the coast guard in the sea," the mayor said.

"She was clinging to her mother and she saw her drown."

Mr Bianco said the child is now with her aunt, who was among the survivors.

All of the missing are adults, Mr Di Giacomo said, adding that three other children survived - boys aged two, nine and 10.

The migrants came from Mali, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria, he said.

A doctor said some of the survivors needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation when they were brought aboard the rescue ship.

"We can proudly say that many among those we resuscitated are now alive," said Dr Maria Rita Agliozzo, who was aboard the coast guard rescue ship with a paramedic.

"Unfortunately, some of them did not make it."

She said the surviving children are in good condition.

"We still have to reconstruct their personal stories, because the children are shocked and didnt answer our questions.

"Its a step-by-step process, hopefully they will work through what happened."

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been rescued at sea and taken to southern Italian ports in the last few years, including nearly 119,000 last year.

Another 3,100 drowned along the way in 2017, the IOM said.

Mr Di Giacomo said the Libyan coast guard in recent days rescued 250 other migrants from traffickers boats and recovered the bodies of two women, while survivors said another 10 migrants were missing.

Those putting themselves at the mercy of smugglers and the sea include refugees fleeing wars or persecution who hope to receive asylum, as well as economic migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, who are not eligible for permission to live in Europe.
By Cillian Sherlock

Donald Trump will undergo a health check-up on Friday, according to reports.

The US President's medical examination comes after speculation, including in journalist Michael Wolff's recently released book 'Fire and Fury', that he is mentally unfit for the role as head of state, according to The Telegraph.

The White House said results of the examination will be released.

Mr Trump will have his heart, blood and urine tested.

It is reported he will also face questions on his sleeping habits and sex life.

He will be examined by the same doctor that gave Barack Obama his last several physicals.

The news follows a slew of tweets from the US president in which he declared himself to be "a very stable genius" and of "being, like, really smart".

The results of the examination may also shed light on Trump's Jerusalem speech in December.

His slurring speech, which can be seen at the 45-minute mark below, was met with criticism and the rise of the twitter hashtag #DentureDonald.

The White House said his "throat was dry".
Update 5.50pm: Three people were injured after a fire broke out in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system, New York City fire chiefs have said.

The blaze started at around 7am (noon GMT), causing smoke to billow from the roof at the Manhattan building which contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Two civilians and a firefighter were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, the New York fire department said.

It took about an hour to put out the fire.

The president was at the White House when fire engines clogged the streets around his Fifth Avenue building during the morning rush hour.

Update 2.21pm:Two people were injured after a fire broke out in the heating and air conditioning system at Trump Tower in New York City.

The city's Fire Department said the blaze broke out at around 7am (noon GMT) on Monday, causing smoke to billow from the roof of the building which contains US president Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Fire officials said a civilian was treated for serious injuries and a firefighter suffered minor injuries. It took about an hour to extinguish the blaze at the high-rise building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The president's son Eric later tweeted his thanks to firefighters for doing "an incredible job".

Update 2pm: Two injured, one seriously, in Trump Tower fire

Two people have been injured, one seriously, in a fire at Trump Tower, New York.

Donald Trump's son Eric has said smoke emerging from the top floor of New York's Trump Tower was the result of a "small electrical fire in a cooling tower".

"he New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise," he said.

There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower. The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise! https://t.co/xuTmq1GBbj  Eric Trump (@EricTrump) January 8, 2018

Earlier: Emergency services attend fire at Trump TowerThe New York Fire Department is attending the scene of a fire at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

A blaze was reported on the top floor of the building at 7am local time (noon GMT).

Aerial views showed firefighters on the roof, with smoke billowing from one corner of the high-rise.

Fire breaks out at New York City's #Trump Tower, firefighters seen on the roof: CBS News (Video: CBS News) pic.twitter.com/30fdqBmAnO  Global Times (@globaltimesnews) January 8, 2018

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The building houses luxury apartments and a number of businesses.

Smoke billowed from one corner of the high-rise for a while before most of it dissipated.

About 84 firefighters were at the scene initially. A few remained on the roof about an hour later.
A couple who met on a lonely hearts website have been found guilty of plotting "devastating" carnage over Christmas with an Islamic State-inspired bomb or ricin attack.

Sudanese asylum seeker Munir Mohammed volunteered for a "lone wolf" UK mission as he chatted on Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander.

He enlisted the help of pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan, drawing on her knowledge of chemicals needed to make a bomb after seeking her out on SingleMuslim.com.

At the time of his arrest in December 2016, Mohammed had two of the three components for TATP explosives as well as manuals on how to make explosives, mobile phone detonators, and deadly ricin poison.

Mohammed, 36, of Leopold Street, Derby, and El-Hassan, 33, of Willesden Lane, north-west London, denied preparing terrorist acts between November 2015 and December 2016.

But following an Old Bailey trial, a jury found the pair guilty of the plot.

Judge Michael Topolski QC remanded the pair in custody and warned them they faced jail when they are sentenced on February 22.

Following the verdicts, he said: "Munir Mohammed, you have been convicted of planning a potentially devastating terrorist attack by creating an explosive device and deploying it somewhere in the UK targeting those you regarded as enemies of the Islamic State.

"Rowaida El-Hassan, you share the extremist mindset with Munir Mohammed and you were ideologically motivated to provide him with support, motivation and assistance.

"You knew he was engaging and planning an attack. You knew he was planning an explosion to kill and maim innocent people in the cause of Islamic State."

Mohammed was unanimously convicted and his co-accused by a majority of 10 to one jurors.

Mohammed arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and claimed asylum in February 2014, the court heard.

After being left hanging for more than two years, he appealed to Derby MP Margaret Beckett for help with his immigration problems.

The long-serving Labour MP was informed by authorities that his case was "not straightforward" and had been referred to a "specialist unit for consideration".

Meanwhile, Mohammed was working at a Kerry Foods in Derby making sauces for supermarket ready meals and wooing a potential British bride he met online.

The prosecution claimed he was drawn to University College London graduate El-Hassan because she referred to having a Masters degree in pharmacy in her dating profile.

She wrote that she was "looking for a simple, very simple, honest and straightforward man who fears Allah" who she could "vibe with on a spiritual and intellectual level".

Jurors were told the pair had a "rapidly formed emotional attachment and a shared ideology" and by the spring of 2016 were in regular contact on WhatsApp and had met more than once in a London park near El-Hassan's home.

As well as arguments, jokes and everyday concerns, they also shared extremist views and videos.

Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC said Mohammed "resolved upon a lone wolf attack" and El-Hassan was well aware of his plan.

In August last year, Mohammed was put in touch via Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander, known as Abubakr Kurdi.

He pledged allegiance to Kurdi and offered to participate in "a new job in the UK", said to mean an act of terrorism, jurors heard.

In September last year, Mohammed complained he had not received his instructions, saying in coded language: "If possible send how we make dough (explosives) for Syrian bread (a bomb) and other types of food."

Mother-of-two El-Hassan advised fellow divorcee Mohammed on what chemicals to buy for a bomb, jurors were told.

In November last year, Mohammed got hold of a video containing information on how to manufacture ricin, the court heard.

In the days before his arrest, Mohammed was captured on in-store CCTV buying "acetone free" nail polish from Asda, in the mistaken belief it was a chemical component of TATP.

He also looked at pressure cookers at Ace Discounts, which the prosecution said could be used to contain the explosives.

When police raided his home on December 12 last year, they found hydrogen peroxide in a wardrobe and hydrochloric acid in the freezer.

Mohammed denied the chemicals were for a bomb, claiming the hydrochloric acid was to clean the alloys on his car and the peroxide was to treat a burn.

He told jurors he sent El-Hassan extremist videos "mainly for the news" and claimed his intention was "to marry her".

However, the court also heard he had an arranged marriage in Sudan with a woman he had never met called Fatima who he was hoping to bring to England on a student visa.

El-Hassan, who came to Britain from Sudan at the age of three, told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat.

Asked if she had feelings for Mohammed, she said: "It was mixed feelings at the time. Yes, there was emotional attachment.

"There were feelings developing and we were getting to know each other. I was grateful for things he helped me with. And he was grateful for things I helped him with. I liked the attention he was giving me."

Sue Hemming, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: "Munir Mohammed and Rowaida El-Hassan were clearly attracted to each other through their support for Daesh's violent ideology and its intolerance of those who do not subscribe to its views.

"They planned to kill and injure innocent people in the UK and had the mind-set, the methodology and almost all the material needed for Mohammed to carry out an attack.

"Both will be in prison, where they cannot plot together and will no longer be a danger to the public."
Update 3.45pm: Theresa May has kept the biggest beasts in her Cabinet in post in a reshuffle forced by the resignation of Damian Green after he admitted lying over pornography on his office computer.

Former justice secretary David Lidington was appointed to Mr Green's old position of Minister for the Cabinet Office, but did not inherit the title of First Secretary of State which marked Mrs May's long-time friend and ally as her effective deputy.

It is understood that Mrs May does not intend to appoint a first secretary of state in what is expected to be her biggest reshuffle since taking office in 2016.

Downing Street confirmed Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Brexit Secretary David Davis are all keeping their current jobs.

But Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire has resigned from the Cabinet on grounds of ill-health, just weeks ahead of major surgery for a lesion on his right lung.

Mr Lidington was also named Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, replacing Sir Patrick McLoughlin, who was sacked as Conservative chairman following criticism of his role in the party's poor performance in last year's snap election.

Brandon Lewis has been named the new party chairman, amid farcical scenes which saw the Tories' official Twitter account incorrectly announce that the job had gone to Chris Grayling.

Speculation remained rife at Westminster that several big names were on their way out of the Cabinet, with Education Secretary Justine Greening, Business Secretary Greg Clark and the Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom all reported to be vulnerable as the Prime Minister seeks to assert her authority.

Mrs May indicated the door would be open for a return to Government after Mr Brokenshire, a close ally since their days in the Home Office, has overcome his health difficulties, telling him in a letter that she was looking forward to "working alongside you again when you are back to full health".

Former immigration minister Mr Lewis, who also takes the title of minister without portfolio, said he was "honoured" to be appointed party chairman less than eight years after arriving in the House of Commons as MP for Great Yarmouth in 2010.

His promotion appeared to mark a concerted effort to revitalise Conservative campaign headquarters, with the appointment of a number of younger MPs from diverse ethnic backgrounds to senior roles in the party, including former soldier James Cleverly as deputy chair.

Junior minister Chris Skidmore was appointed vice chairman for policy, Maria Caulfield as vice chair for women, and 2017 intake MPs Kemi Badenoch and Ben Bradley as vice chairs for candidates and youth respectively.

But the shake-up was overshadowed by a blunder at HQ which saw the official @conservatives Twitter feed congratulate Transport Secretary Mr Grayling on becoming chairman.

The tweet was deleted within moments of being sent, but not before it had been shared by a number of Tory MPs and reported on TV.

A Tory source said CCHQ political director Iain Carter sent the message to a majority of the party's MPs via WhatsApp, before deleting it and saying it was sent in error.

And there was controversy over Ms Caulfield's new position, after she led opposition to a parliamentary bid to end the criminalisation of women who terminate their own pregnancies.

Labour's equalities spokeswoman Dawn Butler branded the appointment "appalling", while the British Pregnancy Advisory Service described it as "profoundly disappointing".

Meanwhile, Sajid Javid has had his responsibility for housing added to his existing Cabinet title in a sign of the issue's increasing political importance.

He is now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Sir Patrick McLoughlin said he felt it was the right time to leave the Cabinet "as we discussed some months ago".

The outgoing Tory chairman has faced criticism over the way the general election campaign was run, but Mrs May said he had responded to the challenge with "vigour" and praised his "wisdom, hard work and dedication".

Earlier: Brandon Lewis named as new Tory chairman amid cabinet reshuffle

Brandon Lewis has been named the new chairman of the UK Conservative Party, amid farcical scenes which saw the Tories' official Twitter account incorrectly announce that the job had gone to Chris Grayling.

A tweet on the official @conservatives channel congratulating Mr Grayling on the appointment was deleted within moments of being sent, but not before it had been shared by a number of Tory MPs and reported on TV.

Brandon Lewis

Theresa May's first major reshuffle since taking office in 2016 was also marked by the

Read More:

But bigger names were also expected to leave the British cabinet, with Education Secretary Justine Greening, Business Secretary Greg Clark and the Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom all reported to be vulnerable as the Prime Minister seeks to assert her authority.

Mrs May's most senior colleagues, including Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Brexit Secretary David Davis and Home Secretary Amber Rudd were all understood to be remaining in post.

Confirming he was leaving Mrs May's top team after almost two years as party chairman, Patrick McLoughlin - who was blamed by many Tories for the party's poor showing in last year's snap election - told Sky News: "I've been in the Cabinet eight years. I have had a very good run and I enjoyed it immensely."

The appointment of Mr Lewis as Sir Patrick's replacement and minister without portfolio was initially overshadowed by the mistaken announcement that Mr Grayling was being moved from Transport Secretary to Conservative chairman.

A Tory source said that CCHQ political director Iain Carter sent the image appearing to confirm Mr Grayling's appointment as chairman to a majority of the party's MPs in a WhatsApp message, before deleting it and saying it was sent in error.

In a major shake-up of CCHQ, the Conservatives announced prominent backbencher James Cleverly as deputy chairman, junior minister Chris Skidmore as vice chairman for policy, Maria Caulfield as vice chair for women, and 2017 intake MPs Kemi Badenoch and Ben Bradley as vice chair for candidates and vice chair for youth respectively.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Sir Patrick said he felt it was the right time to leave the Cabinet "as we discussed some months ago".

The outgoing chairman has faced criticism over the way the general election campaign was run, but Mrs May said he had responded to the challenge with "vigour" and praised his "wisdom, hard work and dedication".

Justice Secretary David Lidington was seen entering 10 Downing Street, amid speculation he may be in the running for the post of First Secretary of State, left vacant by Damian Green's resignation last month.

Amber Rudd

In a break from tradition, Mrs May has asked not only new appointees but also Cabinet ministers remaining in post to see her at 10 Downing Street. The move has made it more difficult for observers to work out who may be in line for dismissal or a new job.

Ms Rudd, who is expected to stay on as Home Secretary, was also seen entering through the famous black door of Number 10.

Ms Rudd, who pulled up in a black BMW, briefly paused for pictures and greeted journalists before walking through the door.
Donald Trump's former chief strategist has reaffirmed his support for the commander in chief and praised Mr Trump's eldest son as "both a patriot and a good man", as he faced a growing backlash.

Steve Bannon infuriated the US president with comments to author Michael Wolff describing a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York between Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign aides and a Russian lawyer as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic".

But Mr Bannon said today his description was aimed at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who also attended the meeting, and not Mr Trump's son.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency," Mr Bannon said in the statement, first obtained by the news site Axios.

He said his support for Mr Trump and his agenda was "unwavering".

Hours before the statement came out, administration officials used appearances on the Sunday news shows to rally behind Mr Trump and try to undermine Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which portrays the 45th president as a leader who does not understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides.

Chief policy adviser Stephen Miller, in a combative appearance on CNN, described the book as "nothing but a pile of trash through and through".

He also criticised Mr Bannon, who is quoted at length by Wolff, saying it was "tragic and unfortunate" that Mr Bannon "would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive".

CIA director Mike Pompeo said Mr Trump was "completely fit" to lead the country, pausing before answering because, he said on Fox News Sunday, it was such "a ludicrous question".

"These are from people who just have not accepted the fact that President Trump is the United States' president and I'm sorry for them in that," said Mr Pompeo, who gives Mr Trump his regular intelligence briefings.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was at the White House once a week, and "no one questions the stability of the president".

"I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to, to lie for money and for power. This is like taking it to a whole new low," she told ABC's This Week.

Stephen Miller said "the portrayal of the president in the book is so contrary to reality, to the experience of those who work with him".

Mr Miller's interview on CNN's State of the Union quickly grew heated, with Mr Miller criticising CNN's coverage and moderator Jake Tapper pressing him to answer his questions and accusing him of speaking to only one viewer: Mr Trump.

Mr Tapper abruptly ended the interview, saying: "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time."

Soon after, Mr Trump tweeted: "Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"

Mr Trump used Twitter on Saturday to defend his fitness for office, insisting he was "like, really smart" and, indeed, a "very stable genius".

He pressed the case again today as he prepared to depart Camp David for the White House.

"I've had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author," he tweeted.

Mr Wolff's book draws a derogatory portrait of Mr Trump as an undisciplined man-child who did not actually want to win the White House and who spends his evenings eating cheeseburgers in bed, watching television and talking on the telephone to old friends.

The book also quotes Mr Bannon and other prominent advisers as questioning the president's competence.

Mr Trump and some aides have attacked Mr Wolff's credibility, pointing to the fact that the book includes a number of factual errors and denying that the author had as much access as he claimed.

- AP
Some new faces are expected as part of Theresa Mays Cabinet reshuffle.

The British Prime Minister is also reportedly going to appoint a no deal Brexit minister, while Justine Greening could lose her role as education secretary.

Lucy Fisher - whos a political correspondent for The UK Times - says it would send a signal.

"She was really just brought in so Theresa May could lock in her loyalty after she went up against Theresa May for the party leadership," said Ms Fisher.

"I think Andrea Leadsom on the back benches could agitate, I think she can command the support of some of the more awkward squad so I think getting rid of her would be a sign of boldness."
Officials from Donald Trumps administration and his allies are rallying to his defence in a bid to contain the fallout from an explosive new book that questions the presidents fitness for office.

Chief policy adviser Stephen Miller, in a combative appearance Sunday on CNN, described the book as "nothing but a pile of trash through and through".

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Mr Trump was "completely fit" to lead the country.

"These are from people who just have not accepted the fact that Mr Trump is the United States president and Im sorry for them in that," Mr Pompeo, who gives Mr Trump his regular intelligence briefings, said on Fox News Sunday.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said she visits the White House once a week, and "no one questions the stability of the president."

"Im always amazed at the lengths people will go to, to lie for money and for power. This is like taking it to a whole new low," she told ABCs "This Week."

Michael Wolffs Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House portrays the 45th president as a leader who does not understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides.

That picture, said Mr Miller, "is so contrary to reality, to the experience of those who work with him."

"Donald Trump is a very dangerous man. He does not belong in the presidency. ... I'm not going to support any member of the House or Senate who continues to support this President." - Richard Painter, former White House lawyer for George W. Bush https://t.co/DuL2qfbkCH pic.twitter.com/V5FLPOLcDD  CNN (@CNN) January 8, 2018

Mr Miller also criticised MrTrumps former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who is quoted at length by Wolff, saying it was "tragic and unfortunate" that Mr Bannon "would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive".

Mr Bannons description of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York between Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign aides and a Russian lawyer as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" particularly infuriated the president, who released a seething statement accusing Mr Bannon of having "lost his mind."

Trying to heal the damage and make amends, Mr Bannon released a statement Sunday praising Trump Jr as "both a patriot and a good man" and insisting his description was aimed at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, not the presidents son.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency," Mr Bannon said in the statement, which was first obtained by the news site Axios.

Mr Millers interview on CNNs State of the Union quickly grew heated, with Mr Miller criticising CNNs coverage and moderator Jake Tapper accusing Mr Miller of speaking to an audience of one: his boss.

Mr Tapper abruptly ended the interview, saying: "I think Ive wasted enough of my viewers time."

Soon after, Mr Trump tweeted:

The president took the extraordinary step on Saturday of using Twitter to defend his fitness for office, insisting he is "like, really smart" and, indeed, a "very stable genius."

He pressed the case again on Sunday as he prepared to depart Camp David, where he spent the weekend meeting with Republican congressional leaders, top aides and Cabinet members.

On Sunday, two days after the books release, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to an electronic image of the text.

Posting the text of a book without permission would violate copyright restrictions and potentially damage sales. Yet, hours after WikiLeaks tweeted the link, "Fire and Fury" remained Number One on Amazons lists of hardcover and ebook bestsellers.

AP and Digital desk
A 24-year-old man is facing a slew of felony charges for illegal straw purchase of 21 guns at gun stores, almost exclusively in Bucks County. Leonard Truesdale was arraigned on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022, on 21 counts each of making false statements on firearm purchase forms, criminal conspiracy to make false statements on firearm purchase forms and selling or transferring...
latest news

October 31, 2022

Buddy TV

In November, there are hundreds of new and returning TV showsit can be overwhelming to try and choose what to watch. That's why we've selected some of the best options...
Staff at Covers discarded their fleeces and flocked to don their favourite festive jumper in December to raise funds for charity.

The team were encouraged to give a minimum of 2 each which raised 350 for Sussex-based childrens hospice, Chestnut Tree House.

Chestnut Tree House cares for 300 children and young adults with progressive life-shortening conditions. It currently costs over 3.5 million each year to provide care services, both at the hospice and in families own homes.

Henry Green, Managing Director of Covers, said: We love having an opportunity to raise money for a good cause so it was great to see so many of our branches across the South East participating in Christmas Jumper Day.

Christmas is all about children, so being able to raise money for Chestnut Tree House makes me incredibly proud of the team.
Private equity (PE) firms such as Blackstone, Xander-APG and others are placing bets on malls in tier-II cities due to increased demand from retailers for good quality spaces in such cities, which are scarce.
Unlock 30+ premium stories daily hand-picked by our editors, across devices on browser and app.

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Ruias-controlled on Monday said it has completed its Rs 28 billion planned investment in its Vizag and Salaya terminals. The company will now look at further investments to take its capacity further to 150 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) in the next two years time.
Targeting to generate at least 25% of its consolidated revenue from the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) category, namely, confectionery and packet tea, in the coming five years, Industries India Limited (EIIL) rolled out its own brand  Jollies.
hardly ever downed a peg. Yet, the dark rum in a fat bottle his company brewed was the favourite evening companion for millions cutting across age, class and continents.
One of the most famous addresses in Bengaluru has just got a new tenant. Call it a coincidence or a calculated move by two backed by the same investor, Softbank -- Flipkart's 50,000 sq ft space, the base of the e-commerce giant's operations for over a decade has been taken over by . Now, the latter, led by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, will set up a base of operations for its own marketplace.



This Bengaluru address was one of the first headquarters that Flipkart, the e-commerce company co-founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, had moved to after closing its first few major funding rounds. Thanks to Flipkart, the popularity of Koramangala in the commercial space market zoomed. It soon became one of the most sought-after locations for setting shop among start-ups and venture capital funds.



Flipkart has already moved almost all its office in Bengaluru to a new two million sq ft custom-built campus, at Cessna Business Park on Sarjapur Road. According to sources, it used to pay Rs 3.5-4 million a month for the old space, while has bagged its lease for Rs 6 million a month.



One97 Communications, the holding company for Paytm Mall, and Flipkart are both backed by Japanese telecom major SoftBank Group. However, the two have no plans to join forces anytime soon.



With its new office, plans to attract infotech talent in Bengaluru and give an impetus to its product development, customer service and other operations. The new office is spread across two floors in the Vaishnavi Summit area and will seat at least 700 professionals. It is expected to be fully operational by this month-end, extending the capacity from its existing offices in HSR Layout and Bannerghatta.



"Our new premises will complement our aggressive hiring plan for 2018 and help us attract talent across tech, product, business and design. This young and dynamic talent will play a critical role in our mission to build India's largest and most trusted mobile commerce platform," said Amit Sinha, operations head at Paytm Mall.



The aim is to take on its two biggest rivals -- Amazon India and Flipkart -- on their home turf. Both have leased huge office spaces in some of the costliest and most sought-after addresses in Bengaluru.



With a little over 65 million products, Paytm Mall claims to cater to customers across 19,000 pincodes. Its investors include Alibaba Group Holdings, Ant Financial and SAIF Partners.
Bengaluru, the second-largest market for ride-hailing services in India, will likely be the first city to see a new local taxi fare structure designed while keeping in mind new-age services like Uber and Ola.
Workers and employees of are in the process of filing an application with the Supreme Court (SC) to consider their resolution plan, which could not be taken up by the committee of creditors due to paucity of time.
Congress President arrived in Bahrain on Monday as part of his outreach to the Indian diaspora.

Congress tweeted: "Euphoric reception for Congress President on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain."

It also said this was Gandhi's first foreign visit since his elevation as party chief in December.

"Fans and well wishers throng the Bahrain Airport to greet Congress President Rahul Gandhi," the party tweeted.

Gandhi's visit is part of his interactions with Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs). Gulf countries have the biggest Indian diaspora of more than 35 lakh.

Gandhi will be chief guest at the three-day valedictory function organised by 'Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin' (GOPIO) starting on Monday.

Delegates from 50 countries are participating in the event.

Apart from meeting Prime Minister Prince Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa., Gandhi is also likely to meet King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Gandhi will also have an interactive session with business leaders of Indian Origin.

Gandhi's outreach is being seen as a move to popularise Congress among the large Indian diaspora.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi engages with the diaspora during his visits abroad.
Five employees of a bar-cum-restaurant were charred to death when a major fire broke out at Kumbaara Sangha building in Kalasipalya in Bengaluru during Monday morning, police said.

The incident occurred at 2:30 am at Kailash Bar and Restaurant when the employees were asleep.

Police identified the victims as Swami (23), Prasad (20), Mahesh, all residents of Tumakuru, Manjunath (45) from Hassan and Keerthi (24) from Mandya.

"An incident of fire has occurred at Kailash Bar and Restaurant located in the ground floor of Kumbaara Sangha building (in the vegetable market area). Fire and smoke was noticed by some persons at around 2.30 am and fire services were pressed into action. Two fire tenders and one fire rescue vehicle attended to it and it has been doused," a senior police officer said.

The cause of the fire was unknown and was being investigated, he said.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has launched a project to examine the causes behind of youth in a bid to tackle the religious extremism in the country.
Saudi Arabia has given its nod to India's plan to revive the option of ferrying Haj pilgrims via sea route to Jeddah, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said in a statement today.

Naqvi made the comment after the signing of annual Haj agreement between India and Saudi Arabia in Mecca.

"Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route...Officials from both the countries willdiscuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years," Naqvi said according to the statement.

Naqvi said that sending pilgrims through ships would help cut down travel expenses significantly and added that it would be a "revolutionary, pro-poor, pilgrim-friendly decision".

The practice of ferrying Haj pilgrims between Mumbai and Jeddah by waterways existed earlier too, but was stopped from 1995.

Naqvi also said that for the first time Muslim women from India will go to Haj without 'Mehram' (male companion).

"Separate accommodation and transport have been arranged for these woman Haj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia and woman Haj assistants will be deployed for their assistance," he added.

More than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without 'Mehram'. All these women will be exempted from lottery system and allowed to proceed to Haj, he added.

Women above 45 years of age, who wish to go for Haj but who don't have a male companion, are allowed to travel for Haj in groups of four or more women according to the new Haj policy of India.
The Indian Navy will have to soldier on for the foreseeable future with a glaring capability gap in detecting and countering naval mines, even as Chinese submarines regularly patrol the waters of the Indian Ocean and could potentially deploy said weapons that would prove to be a danger for the country's sea warriors.
The City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) and the GVK group have set 2021-end as a deadline for the commercial launch of the Navi Mumbai airport.
The commerce and industry ministry is awaiting a concrete proposal from iPhone maker to set up manufacturing unit in India, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Monday.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from ...Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu told reporters here.

During a recent meeting with officials, the minister has asked them for a proposal.

Nick Amman, Director, Government Affairs and Priya Balasubramaniam, Global Vice President, Operations, Apple Inc met the minister last Friday.

The Cupertino-based iPad manufacturer Apple has asked for certain concessions for setting up manufacturing unit in the country.

The government had sought investment and job creation details from the iPhone maker to facilitate setting up its manufacturing facility in India.

In March, the then Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had informed the Rajya Sabha that the government has not accepted most of the demands of the company.

Apple India had sought concessions, including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for smartphone manufacturing and service/repair for a period of 15 years.

The company also wants relaxation in the mandated 30 per cent local sourcing of components, besides reduction in customs duties on completely-knocked-down and semi-knocked- down units of devices that are to be assembled in the country.

Apple does not manufacture devices on its own but gets the job done through contract manufacturers. It sells its products through company-owned retail stores in countries like China, Germany, the US, the UK and France, among others.

It has no wholly-owned store in India and sells its products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro.
The State Bank of India plans to raise up to $2 billion (over Rs 126 billion) by issuing bonds in US dollar or other convertible currency over two fiscals to fund overseas expansion.

"The executive committee of the Central Board.. has approved long term fund-raising in single/multiple tranches up to $2 billion," State Bank of India (SBI) said in a regulatory filing.

It said the fund-raising will take place through a public offer and/or private placement of senior unsecured notes in US Dollar or any other convertible currency during 2017-18 and 2018-19.

Last month, the bank's board had approved raising Rs 80 billion through various sources, including masala bonds, to meet Basel III capital norms.

Masala bonds are rupee denominated specialised debt instruments that can be floated in overseas markets only to raise capital.

The bank said it has time until March 2018 to raise the funds.



Shares of SBI were trading 0.44 per cent higher at Rs 307.55 on BSE

Banks in India have to comply with the global capital norms under Basel III by March 2019. Internationally agreed time frame for the same is January 2019.

Basel III reforms are the response of Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to improve banking sector's ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic stress, whatever the source, thus reducing the risk of spillover from the financial sector to the real economy.




Indian Overseas Banks (IOBs) decision to utilise the share premium money to write off losses is expected to expedite its return as a dividend-paying bank, says experts. The loss-making bank had last paid dividend to its shareholders nearly four years ago.



IoB last week said it was planning to write off its losses using the reserves. In a notice to exchanges, the bank said its board had approved the use of the balance available in the share premium account, amounting to Rs 76.5 billion as on March 31, 2017, to write off the accumulated losses to the tune of Rs 69.8 billion as on March 31, 2017, to present a true and fair view of the financial position of the bank and to take the same into account during 2017-18.



While questions have been raised by various sections on whether this will become a precedent for other to follow, R Subramaniakumar, chief executive of IOB, has justified the move, saying this will not alter the liability, or change the position of assets, or tweak the shareholding.



At present, Government of India is the largest shareholder in the bank, with a stake of about 82 per cent. LIC, with around 10 per cent, is the second-largest.



While refusing to comment on dividend payments, Subramaniakumar said: "We just want to give a true and fair picture of the balance sheet."



He added, the bank has taken the necessary approvals from the government and regulators before taking the decision, which it terms as set-off instead of write-off.



This exercise will also facilitate the bank in having surplus distributable items which is a necessary condition for considering the payment of coupon on AT-1 bonds.



The bank will convene an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders on January 30 for obtaining their approval. The Chennai-based lenders loss had widened in the second quarter of 2017-18 to Rs 12.23 billion, compared with Rs 7.65 billion a year earlier. The banks gross non-performing assets (NPA) as a percentage of total advances stood at 21.77 per cent at the end of the second quarter.



is one of the undertakings for which the government had put strict criteria before offering capital. One of those was cutting losses and shedding non-core assets. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also put in place a prompt corrective action plan on the lender, greatly limiting its lending exercise on high-risk accounts.



Subramaniakumar is hopeful that the Bank will be a profitable one by 2018-19.
Shri Ananthkumar inaugurates 18th All India Whips Conference at Udaipur, Rajasthan

Whips Conference is like twin Rainbows  Rainbow of various Political Parties and Rainbow of various States: Shri Ananthkumar

Debates held in Legislatures should be cordial and graceful, aimed at making a difference to the lives of the people: Smt. Vasundhara Raje Scindia

The 18th All India Whips Conference was inaugurated by Shri Ananthkumar, Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Chemical & Fertilizers today at Udaipur, Rajasthan. Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Smt. Vasundhara Raje Scindia, presided over the inaugural session as the Chief Guest. The two-day conference is hosting around 90 Delegates belonging to 19 States and Centre. The conference will conclude on 9th January, 2018.

In his inaugural address, Shri Ananthkumar informed that the duty of a Whip is not only to monitor the Members of the party in Legislature but also to moderate and motivate them.

He compared the Whips Conference to twin Rainbows  Rainbow of various Political Parties and Rainbow of various States and stated that Parliamentary Democracy is the best form of democracy. The entire purpose of this conference is to strengthen the parliamentary democracy, its institutions and ultimately serve the people at large, the Minister added.
Signing of bilateral annual Haj 2018 agreement between India and Saudi Arabia

UnionMinister for Minority Affairs ShriMukhtar Abbas Naqvi today said that Saudi Arabia has given the green signal for Indias decision to revive the option of sending Haj pilgrims through sea route also and officials from both the countries will discuss on all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years.

A decision in this regard was taken yesterday,during the signing of bilateral annual Haj 2018 agreement between India and Saudi Arabia by Shri Naqvi and Haj and Umrah Minister of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Dr Mohammad Saleh bin TaherBenten at Makkah.

Shri Naqvi said that sending pilgrims through ships will help cut down travel expenses significantly. It will be a revolutionary, pro-poor, pilgrim-friendly decision", ShriNaqvi added. The practice of ferrying Haj pilgrims between Mumbai and Jeddah by waterways was stopped from 1995.

The Minister said that another advantage with ships available these days is they are modern and well-equipped to ferry 4,000 to 5,000 persons at a time. They can cover the 2,300-odd nautical miles one-side distance between Mumbai and Jeddah within just 3-4 days. Earlier, the old ships used to take 12 to 15 days to cover this distance.

Shri Naqvi said that last yearhe had discussed the option to revive sea route for Haj pilgrimage with Transport and Shipping Minister ShriNitinGadkari. Now, after the green signal from the Saudi Arabia Government, officials from India and Saudi Arabia will discuss all the issues related to Haj pilgrimage through sea route. He said that this time Haj 2018 has been made 100 per cent digital/online. Indias transparent and digital Haj process has been lauded by Saudi Arabia Government.

Shri Naqvi said that for the first time Muslim women from India will go to Haj without Mehram" (male companion).

Separate accommodation and transport has been arranged for these women Haj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia and women Haj Assistant" will be deployed for their assistance.
It has been three years since gunmen attacked the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. In the days that followed, five more lost their lives while police hunted for the perpetrators  brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi. Eventually, they were shot dead after an eight-hour standoff involving hostages.
Air strikes by regime and Russian aircraft on rebel positions in the northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, including eight children, a monitor said on Sunday.

The strikes carried out on Sunday were the latest against jihadists and rebels in a week-old regime offensive on Idlib, the last province in to escape government control.

The raid left "at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family" west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib" province, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, said.
Special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court judge Shiv Pal Singh on Monday proposed that all the 16 convicts in the fodder scam case, including the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, will stay in an open jail where they could rear cattle.

According to reports, while pronouncing the sentences via video conference, Singh said "gau palan (cattle rearing) is a good option for the convicts as they have 'good knowledge of fodder and cattle medicine".

This recommendation came up by Singh after one of the convicts requested him to reduce the quantum of sentence by six months so that he could obtain bail and stay with his family.

On January 6, a special CBI court sentenced Lalu to 3.5 years in jail in regards to the case. He was also slapped with a fine of Rs 5 lakh.

Lalu has been sentenced in the case relating to embezzling of more than Rs 8.9 million from the Deoghar Treasury between 1991 and 1994.

The court also said if he fails to furnish the fine, his jail term would extend by six months.
US President Donald Trump on Sunday postponed his much-talked about ' Awards' to the mainstream media for "dishonesty and bad reporting" to January 17.

The awards ceremony was supposed to be held on Monday.

Trump upon his return from the presidential retreat of Camp David on Sunday tweeted about the new date of one-of-its-kinds-kind" awards to various media houses.

"The Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday," he tweeted.

"The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!" he said.

Trump had, on January 2, announced that he would give away awards to media houses for "dishonesty and bad reporting".

"I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o'clock. This would be one of its kind media award by the US president. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Media. Stay tuned!" he had tweeted.

Trump had coined the term 'Fake News' during his presidential campaign, targeting media houses for "biased" news.

He very often identifies CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post as "fake media".

In November, he tweeted about a competition among news networks for the 'Fake News Trophy', excluding the Fox News.

"We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!," he wrote on the micro-blogging site on November 27.

In an email to supporters of the president on December 28, the Trump campaign had sought nomination for the 'King of Fake News' trophy.

"At President Trump's request, we are holding a contest to name the 2017 KING of Fake News. And we want to hear from you," it said.

"The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people. Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEY'RE WRONG," it wrote the supporters.

Noting that Americans were "sick and tired of being lied to, insulted, and treated with outright condescension", the Trump Campaign said, "That's why President Trump is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year. There's no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda".

As per the Trump Campaign list, the competition for 'King of Fame news' is between three news organisations.

"ABC News "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election," it said.

"CNN "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks, it wrote.

"TIME "MISTAKENLY" reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office," the Trump Campaign said, asking the participants to "let the President know if there is another story you think should be crowned as the 2017 KING of Fake News".
The government might lift the import duty on sugar from the current 50 per cent to check any cheaper shipments from Pakistan. However, no final decision has been taken yet, industry sources and officials said.
As Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat is all set to hoist the flag at a school in Kerala on Republic Day despite facing censure from authorities from doing the same last year on Independence Day, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday cornered the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) in Kerala for attempting to communalise the whole affair.

"The state government is making this issue only to create an issue between the minority and the majority," BJP leader Shiv Shankaran told ANI, adding that Bhagwat was due to be in Palakkad for an RSS state meet on January 26, which led him to make the decision.

The BJP leader also accused the government of diverting the media's attention from more important issues.

"There are lots of corruption cases against this government and they want to divert the media attention towards non-issues," he said.

Recalling last year's spat between the RSS chief and government authorities, Shankaran said the government could not take any legal action against the school or Bhagwat as there was no violation of law.

"Government has been claiming that they had sent a notice to that school, but even today no such notice has been received. This means that there is no legal sanction or legal sanctity for this particular action," Shankaran said.

Further, he also accused CPI(M) of supporting anti- activities, alleging that hoisting of Pakistan's flag and training by terror organisations were continuing in Kerala unabatedly.

Bhagwat hoisted the flag in Karnakkiyamman School in Kerala's Palakkad last year on August 15, even after the district collector issued a memo to the school, categorically stating that it was inappropriate for a political leader to hoist the national flag in an aided school.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hollywood actor Brad Pitt has offered to pay USD 120,000 to watch an episode of the 'Game of Thrones' with its leading lady Emilia Clarke.

Pitt, who seems to be a huge fan of the TV series, was, sadly, outbid at the charity auction.

The final bid at the silent auction at Sean Penn's annual gala for Haiti was USD 160,000.

It was held at Milk Studios in Los Angeles, California, reports pagesix.com.

During the charity gala, the auctioneer announced the opportunity to watch an episode with Clarke, who was in attendance with her 'Game of Thrones' co-star Kit Harington.

The auction started at USD 20,000, but the 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' star bid USD 80,000 and then he outbid himself to USD 90,000.

Later, he raised his own bid to USD 1,20,000.

In the end, the "Fight Club " actor was outbid by a gala-goer who ended the auction at USD 1,60,000.

However, HBO recently confirmed that the hit series would be taking a year off before airing it's final season in 2019.

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China is grappling with a severe winter flu epidemic, so much so, that hospitals flooded with patient waiting for treatment.

Patients has are reportedly tense and worried over the delay in receiving treatment.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission of China has reported that the number of winter flu cases is higher than in previous years.

The number of death cases is incalculable as observed by the state-run media the Global Times

Due to inadequate medical facilities in small cities and villages, patients from small cities and villages outnumber city patients.

Zhang Miao, 34-year-old from a Chinese village camping at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital's corridor for three days was quoted by the Global Times as saying that, the medical facilities in her village are inadequate and thus spending around 18,000 Yuan (USD 2,771) for her treatment was worth it.

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China's state-run media has blamed India for U.S. President Donald Trump's recent decision to deny Pakistan financial aid till it continues to supports terror outfits operating from its soil.

According to an editorial in the Global Times, the apparent view in Beijing is that India's recent foreign policy initiatives are for self-benefit, and can only lead to confrontation and to pulling each other down.

The Global Times editorial, urges New Delhi to change its views and strategic thinking for the greater good of the neighbourhood.

Recently, President Trump lampooned Pakistan for continuing harbour terrorists and announced plans to suspend security-related assistance via Twitter.

Given this geopolitical scenario, Beijing thinks that Islamabad should change focus more on China and Russia. Pakistan's central bank recently announced that it will be replacing the US dollar with the Yuan for bilateral trade and investment with China. This announcement was made a day after Trump's tweet, suggesting a shift to China.

The Global Times editorial says China should provide qualitative and effective economic assistance and cooperation to Pakistan.

Growing China-Pakistan cooperation however should not be seen as competition for geopolitical advantage with the United States. The development of Pakistan's economy should be seen in a positive way to ensure stability in South Asia and overall regional development, the editorial concludes.

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday said that acquittal of Giuseppe Orsi and Bruno Spagnolini in the AgustaWestland case, would have no impact on the case.

The CBI, in a statement, said: "Both (Giuseppe Orsi and Bruno Spagnolini) have been convicted by the lower court in Italy. The Italian authorities can appeal against the acquittal before the Supreme Court of Italy. Our investigation is independent and we have a strong case against both of them. This acquittal will, however, have no impact on our case".

An Italian court on Monday acquitted two former Leonardo (earlier Finmeccanica) executives in the AgustaWestland case, wherein bribes were paid to secure the contract of supplying 12 VVIP choppers to India.

Giuseppe Orsi, former president of Leonardo, and the former head of the subsidiary AgustaWestland, Bruno Spagnolini, were acquitted for want of evidence.

The Italian media reported that The Court of Appeal of Milan acquitted the two ex-Leonardo managers since there was no evidence to support the corruption charges.

Orsi and Spagnolini were accused of bribing Indian officials and make false billings, in order to obtain the 556-million euro contract (Rs 3,700 crore) for around 12 helicopters in India.

According to the allegations, Orsi and Spagnolini, who both succeeded in securing the position of managing director of AgustaWestland had bribed Sashi Tyagi, the then chief of staff of the Indian Air Force, to obtain the lowering of the flight quota, by making changes, as indicated in a tender notice.

With the changes made, as suggested by the two, the AgustaWestland would have taken the honours. The Indian government and the Revenue Agency were civil parties at that time in the process.

n April last year, the two Leonardo managers had been convicted of both the crimes: Orsi for four and a half years and Spagnolini for four years.

Italy's highest court, however, had ordered a new appeal process in December last year. The attorney general had recently asked for confirmation of convictions, regarding the dispute of false invoices. The judges, on the other hand, agreed with the defendants who had asked for an acquittal.

The motivations for the sentence would be announced within 90 days.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), earlier on September 1 last year, had filed a charge sheet against retired Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi, former Air Marshal JS Gujral and ten others in the case.

The chargesheet, filed before a special court, also named as accused Air Chief Marshal Tyagi's cousin Sanjeev Tyagi, lawyer Gautam Khaitan, Carlo Gerosa and Guido Haschke, alleged middleman Christian Michel, former AgustaWestland CEO Bruno Spagnolini and former Finmeccanica chairman Giuseppe Orsi.

The investigation conducted and various documents collected so far revealed that AgustaWestland International Ltd, UK paid an amount of Euro 58 million as kickbacks through Gordian Services Sarl, Tunisia and IDS Sarl, Tunisia.

These companies further siphoned off the said money in the name of consultancy contracts to the Interstellar Technologies Ltd, Mauritius and others, which were further transferred to UHY Saxena, Dubai, Matrix Holdings Ltd, Dubai and others.

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Congress President Rahul Gandhi had a "euphoric reception" on his arrival at the Kingdom of Bahrain on Monday.

The Congress soon took to Twitter and said that this was the party president's first foreign visit after his takeover.

The members of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) received the Congress scion at the airport with open arms and smiles.

Fans and well-wishers thronged the airport, breaching the security, to greet and take selfies on their mobile phones with the newly elected Congress chief.

Gandhi will be addressing the Non-resident Indians (NRI) conclave in Bahrain.

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Sawant (62) was accosted by two men late on Sunday night who then attacked him with sharp weapons.

The incident took place when he was returning home after meeting a friend.

He was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared brought dead.

Sawant was a two-time corporator of Shiv Sena from Samta Nagar.

Investigation in the case is on.

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The Terminal 4 of New York's John F Kennedy International Airport have been shut down after flooding due to a water main break at the baggage claim area.

The flooding led to the suspension of international flight arrivals at the airport on Sunday and the passengers at Terminal 4 have been diverted to other terminals, said the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The water leaked from the ceiling onto a check-in counter covering large areas of the floor, local media reported.

Local media quoted a spokesperson of the Port Authority as saying that "about 3 inches of water was inside the west end of Terminal 4".

The suspension of flights further added to the misery of people stranded at the airport, after a powerful winter storm last week led to the cancellation and delay of hundreds of flights.

Massive delays, walls of people in terminals, complaints of hours-long waits to get to a gate after landing, then hours more to get checked baggage were some of the cries of the stranded passengers, who took to the social media, to vent out their anger.

Many were reported to be waiting for hours at the baggage claim after getting off the plane on Saturday.

Two airplanes -- a China Southern and a Kuwait Airways -- collided on Saturday at the Airport runway. However, passengers had safely disembarked.

Two Air India's Delhi to New York flights had been delayed indefinitely on Sunday, as permission to fly into the airport was not available due to inclement weather.

The airport website says that Terminal 4 is the major gateway for international arrivals at JFK airport.

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The beef traders' protest against the alleged harassment by the cow vigilante groups entered its third day on Monday.

Manna Bepari, the president of the Qureshi Meat Traders Association of Goa, while talking to ANI, said that the import of beef from the neighbouring states of Goa is getting hampered and so, they are suffering a huge loss but will call off the strike only when the state government will provide them complete assurance of safety.

"We used to bring meat legally from the neighbouring states and if the state government would support us then we will continue doing that. We demanded police protection from the government for selling beef in the state. Even after bringing it legally, the NGO's were accusing us falsely", Bepari said.

He said, "Goa is a tourist destination and if anyone thinks that they could completely ban the sale and the consumption of beef in the state, then they are wrong, it won't happen here".

Majority of beef is imported from Karnataka by the meat traders in Goa.

Consumption of red meat in Goa is high, as it is one of the tourist spots in India and lakhs of foreigner visit here every day.

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It seems Hugh Jackman just couldn't hide his disappointment when James Franco won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for his role in 'The Disaster Artist'.

Franco took the honour over Jackman ('The Greatest Showman'), Ansel Elgort ('Baby Driver'), Daniel Kaluuya ('Get Out'), Steve Carell ('Battle of the Sexes').

During the acceptance speech, 'The Wolverine' star's 'bewildered' reaction was caught on camera, after which viewers rushed to Twitter to point out the actor's disappointment.

Hugh Jackman definitely had a reaction to watching James Franco accept the award he was also nominated for at the #GoldenGlobes: https://t.co/FIqG3l2TFJpic.twitter.com/ddsaqHgKop  E! News (@enews) January 8, 2018

One person tweeted: "truly feeling REFRESHED by this look from hugh jackman @ james franco"

truly feeling REFRESHED by this look from hugh jackman @ james franco pic.twitter.com/r2KYyyq4pu  Aubrey Page (@aubreypage_) January 8, 2018

As he accepted the award, Franco brought up the stage, the man he plays in 'The Disaster Artist', 'The Room's writer/director/actor Tommy Wiseau.

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Hollywood star Allison Janney has now become a 'Golden Globe' winning artist as the actress took home the trophy for 'Best Supporting Actor (Female) in a Motion Picture for her performance in dark-comedy 'I, Tonya'.

Janney thanked co-star Margot Robbie, who she called a "quadruple threat," and the real-life Tonya Harding in her acceptance speech, who she noted was in the audience.

She said, "Tonya Harding is here tonight. I'd like to thank Tonya for sharing her story."

Gushing over Margot Robbie, Janney thanked the former for her "unbelievable, brave, fearless portrayal of Tonya."

The actress beat out Mary J. Blige in 'Mudbound', Hong Chau in 'Downsizing', Laurie Metcalf in 'Lady Bird' and Octavia Spencer in 'The Shape of Water'.

Meanwhile, Sam Rockwell won the award for 'Best Supporting Actor (Male)' for his his portrayal as Jason Dixon in 'Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri'.

This was the first Golden Globe win for the actor. He thanked his "amazing cast" and also director Martin McDonagh for "not being a d***."

Rockwell, who has done a lot of work in independent films, also joked that "it was nice to be in a movie that people see."

In the flick, Rockwell plays Officer Dixon, a hotheaded racist cop from a fictional Midwestern town who goes up against a mom (played by Frances McDormand) seeking justice for her murdered daughter.

The actor also thanked his co-star, Frances McDormand for making him a "better actor" and added, "Frances McDormand. I've said it before, you're a bad ass, you're a force of nature. And it was really fun to be your partner and thanks for making me a better actor."

The star won out over Willem Dafoe ('The Florida Project'), Armie Hammer ('Call Me by Your Name'), Richard Jenkins ('The Shape of Water') and Christopher Plummer ('All the Money in the World').

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hollywood veteran Gary Oldman, in a career spanning over 30 years, has finally earned a well-deserved 'Golden Globes' trophy for the movie 'Darkest Hour'.

The actor won the award for 'Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama' at the 2018 Golden Globes for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the film.

During his speech, the actor said, "Well, I feel very humbled and surprised to have been asked to come at this stage. I would like to congratulate my fellow nominees for their beautiful work. I am in very fine company this evening indeed."

After thanking the cast and crew on the 'Darkest Hour', Oldman thanked his wife, Gisele Schmidt "who put up with my crazy for over a year."

But when asked about the Time's Up movement that dominated the evening backstage, Oldman said, "When the curtain came down on Harvey [Weinstein], I was flabbergasted. Fortunately he was never in my orbit. I met him in '92 and he gave me the creeps. And I said, 'Let's never work with that guy.' And I never did. The evolutionary wheel is turning. What we do, what we say, how we say it and who we say it to, is very important. If that is exposed, then it is a good thing."

The 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' also discussed the challenge of playing a real-life figure.

He added, "I am proud of the movie because it shows and illustrates the power of words and action. That words and actions can literally change the world."

The actor beat out Timothee Chalamet ('Call Me by Your Name'), Daniel Day-Lewis ('Phantom Thread'), Tom Hanks ('The Post') and Denzel Washington ('Roman J. Israel, Esq.').

Meanwhile, Frances McDormand received the award for 'Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama' at the star-studded event. From the moment she walked on stage, the star warned the fans that this was going to be a speech to remember.

She started by saying, "Well I have a few things to say. I'm going to keep it short because we've been here a long time and we need some tequila. All you ladies in this category, bar, tequila's on me."

The actress then joked that while she's thankful for the HFPA, she is 'unsure' about who they truly are.

"I'm still not quite sure who they are when I run into them, for the last 35 years, but I love seeing their faces and, let's face it, they managed to elect a female president," explained McDormand.

McDormand also took the opportunity to mention the Times Up movement and said she felt really proud to be a part of this "tectonic shift" in the industry.

"Some of you may know, I keep my politics private, but it was really great to be in this room tonight and to be part of a tectonic shift in our industry's power structure. Trust me, the women in this room tonight are not here for the food. We are here for the work," explained McDormand.

The actress beat out Jessica Chastain ('Molly's Game'), Sally Hawkins ('The Shape of Water'), Meryl Streep ('The Post') and Michelle Williams ('All the Money in the World').

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hours after the Supreme Court decided to review the constitutional validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalises homosexuality, the LGBTQ activists on Monday expressed faith in the apex court to finally overturn its 2013 verdict that criminalised homosexuality.

Welcoming the top court's decision, LGBTQ activist Akkai said, "The recent judgments on right to privacy and triple talaq gives us hope."

Akkai also called upon all political leaders to support the rights of the community.

"We are living in 21st century. All politicians and political parties must break their silence and support individuals' sexuality," Akkai said.

A three-judge bench, which was hearing a plea, filed by one Navtej Singh Johar, seeking to declare section 377 as unconstitutional, on Monday said the validity of anti-gay law needed to be revisited.

Women activist Abha Singh also views the court's decision as a step towards overruling of its earlier order that quashed Delhi High Court's decision to decriminalise homosexuality.

"Now that the Supreme Court has recognised the right to privacy as a fundamental right, it now becomes the court's duty to extend the same rights to the LGBTQ community" Singh said.

In August last year, while pronouncing privacy judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy was a fundament right and linked it with homosexuality.

Another activist Shashi Bhushan spoke in the same vein, and commended the Supreme Court for the "progressive step."

Meanwhile, social activist Rahul Easwar sided with the SC's 2013 decision, but nevertheless called its social acceptance before legal acceptance.

"It is still not proven if homosexuality is a scientific aspect or a cultural aspect. In the nature versus nurture debate, people like me who lean to the right conservative side hold that it is more of a nurture thing which can be corrected," Easwar told ANI.

Citing above reason, Easwar observed that differing opinions should be respected and further discussions and debates should happen before drafting a law.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
There was an increase in the presence of Islamic State (IS) in Pakistan in 2017, an Islamabad-based think-tank report said.

Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) has said in its Pakistan Security Report 2017 that over 150 people were killed in around six terrorist attacks claimed by the IS in the last year, Geo news reported.

According to the report, some new challenges such as emergence of self-radicalised individuals and small terrorist cells have raised their heads in the country.

Also, incidence of religious extremism including on educational campuses, and increasing footprints of the IS in parts of the country have also become a problem for Pakistan.

The report, which has been compiled after taking data from multiple sources, coupled with interviews and articles by subject experts, revealed that Daesh and its local affiliates and supporters claimed six major terrorist attacks in Pakistan, killing 153 people.

Among the major attacks claimed by the IS was deadliest suicide bombing that took place inside the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, in which at least 90 people were killed and more than 300 injured.

In Balochistan, the Daesh carried out a suicide attack on the convoy of Senate Deputy Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri in Mastung, besides abducting Chinese nationals from Quetta and killing them later, the report said.

At first, the Pakistan government was in denial mode regarding the presence of the IS in the country, but lately authorities have confessed that the group does have a tangible presence in Pakistan and is an imminent threat.

Aftab Sultan, the director general of the Intelligence Bureau, had earlier in a briefing to the Senate Standing Committee on Interior, reportedly said the "Islamic State group was emerging as a threat in the country because several militant groups had a soft corner for it".

The report further noted that at least 815 people were killed and more than 1,500 were injured in a total of 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of Pakistan in 2017 by militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups.

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A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' outside the Pakistan embassy here, over the misbehaviour meted out to former Indian Naval Officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife.

The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.'

An agitated protestor said, "When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also."

Another protestor said that Pakistan's narrow-mindedness has been exposed from the way it treated Jadhav's family.

"Policy makers and people here need to understand that Pakistan as a whole is also being run by narrow-minded mentality," he added.

A meeting took place between Jadhav and his family on December 25 in Islamabad, on the request of the Indian government.

Jadhav's wife was asked to remove her shoes and use another pair as she went in the Foreign Office to meet her husband.

Pakistan claimed that her shoes were confiscated on security grounds as there was "something" in it.

Jadhav is on a death row in Pakistan over charges of terrorism and spying for India's intelligence agency- Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

.

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Ranchi special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court judge Shiv Pal Singh, who pronounced the verdict in a fodder scam case against Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Chief Lalu Prasad, is himself waiting for justice in a land case.

Singh, who hails from Uttar Pradesh's Jalaun district, is nowadays meeting various officials there to get his ancestral land in Sheikhpur Khurd village freed.

The judge is said to have made frantic efforts in order to resolve the issue.

To this end, Jheloun Tehsildar Jitendra Pal said Singh had come to him and after hearing his grievances, a team was sent to review the land.

He further said that, following the first meeting, he never met the judge.

Surendra Pal Singh, brother of the judge, said that former Pradhan constructed a crossroad on Shiv Pal's land without any authority.

Shiv Pal Singh had awarded Lalu Prasad Yadav a jail term of three-and-a-half years in the fodder scam case, along with a fine of Rs 5 lakh.

The special CBI judge had also, during the hearing on Tuesday, observed he got phone calls from Lalu Yadav's men, in connection with his conviction.

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Bengaluru Development Minister KJ George on Monday announced Rs 5 lakh compensation each for the kin of the workers, who died last night in a fire at Bengaluru's Kailash Bar Restaurant.

Five employees were killed in the fire while they were sleeping inside the eatery in the Kumbaara Sangha building, in the wee hours of Sunday.

RV Dayashankar, the owner of Kailash Bar Restaurant has been absconding after a call from the police.

The reason behind the fire is yet to be ascertained and the matter is being investigated.

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The Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to authorities in Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh in connection with relief, release certificates and rehabilitation of 98 bonded labourers rescued from Samba and Reasi districts of J-K.

The NHRC has taken cognisance of a complaint that 98 bonded labourers, rescued from two brick kiln sites in the two districts on December 28-29, have neither been given any immediate interim relief nor release certificates as per law, and they have been left to fend for themselves.

The labourers belong to Bilaspur, Janjgir, Champa, Jaijaipur, Raigarh of Chhattisgarh and includes 20 women and 41 children. The victims were allegedly subjected to lathi charge by the Delhi Police and some of the victims including pregnant women have sustained injuries.

The commission has asked its Director General (Investigation) to inquire into the matter and submit a report within two weeks.

The investigation division has also been ordered to immediately contact the office of the chief secretary, resident commissioners of Chhattisgarh and J-K in order to see the welfare and wellbeing of the victims till they reach their native places in Chhattisgarh.

A report to be also obtained from the Delhi Commissioner of Police on use of force by police on the victims.

The commission also issued a notice to the district magistrates (DMs) of Samba and Reasi calling upon them to submit a report in accordance with the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, together with the copies of the release certificates and explanations on the allegations made in the complaint within a period of three days of receipt of the notice.

The DMs of Bilaspur, Janjgir, Champa, Jaijaipur, Raigarh shall also coordinate with the DMs of Samba and Reasi in order to ensure expeditious rehabilitation of the released bonded labourers. They are expected to submit their report to the commission within four weeks.

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Shri Rajput Karni Sena is now demanding for the names of the characters in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's controversial directorial 'Padmavati' to be changed, days after the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) suggested changing its title to 'Padmavat', after Malik Muhammad Jayasi's epic poem of the same name on which it is based.

Talking to ANI, Karni Sena member Mahipal Singh Makrana said, "We have a very clear stand since day one that we want this film to be banned. The committee made by the CBFC watched the movie and said the movie was vulgar and the facts were distorted. The film is made just to earn money. Along with the name of the movie, the characters names should also be changed."

Makrana appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take cognisance in the matter.

"Till now, we have always protested against the movie keeping law and order in mind and without violating it. I appeal to Prime Minister Modi to take cognisance in the matter, otherwise the Central Government and the state government will be responsible for the dire consequences," he added.

The CBFC had, in December 2017, suggested few modifications in the controversial movie, after which it would be given a UA certificate.

Following this, Karni Sena demanded the resignation of CBFC Chief Prasoon Joshi, Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore.

'Padmavati', starring Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor in lead roles, based on the legend of Rani Padmini, a Hindu Rajput queen mentioned in Padmavat, has been facing protests from various groups for allegedly tampering with historical facts.
Humans, have since the beginning of time, have always come together and communicated their interests, some of them being similar in nature. Whether it is writing, photography, music, poetry, art, comedy or any other interest, today, in the digital world, the inherent need to connect with people of similar interest is still not fulfilled.

Nojoto, a mobile-based interest-based network plans to be the "Linkedin for Talents", is serving all three purpose for talents to "showcase interest, network with people and get hired."

A theater artist himself, Satyaprem, Co-Founder and CEO left his high paying job last year and spent about six months travelling and talking to over 5,000+ artists, musicians, writers, poets, and found that talents across world are facing these three problems:

 No platform to showcase interest

 No platform to network with people of similar interest

 No single platform to get hired

After six months of concept validation and developing MVP, they were five co-founders with Kamal Singh Chauhan, heading Technology, Amit Kumar - Heading Mobile, Mukesh Poonia Heading Design, Front end and Production and Himanshu heading Growth. All have raised initial capital from friends, family and senior leadership at PayU.

Nojoto, today is growing at 200 percent month over month, with a highly engaged community of over 15,000+ talents across Tier 1,2, 3 cities&25,000+ content pieces shared till now, is aiming to reach five million users by 2018 and 100 million Indian users by 2021.

Indian talent community too feels the need for such a platform and over 40+ events were held across India in the last four months, created by the community and for the community, where people came and showcased their talent in poetry, comedy, music, art and more. Nojoto plans to establish local level talent platforms across all major Tier 1 and 2 cities of India in 2018 connected on Nojoto at the national level.

They have organically created large distribution platforms on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube with a reach of over one lakh+ people, and also tying up with large distribution platforms for growth. Nojoto has partnered with Mhrao Udaipur, a TV channel in Udaipur, which also broadcasts their content in the form of two episodes every week and are in advance content syndication talks with cable operators to increase distribution across India - which in-turn will help Nojoto grow at a faster pace.

The team claims that all this has been achieved with zero marketing dollars being spent. Initial organic growth helped them fine tune product and growth levers. With nine+ months in building the business, and product, growth and model being fully baked is ready to scale across India.

Moreover, based on user demand and insight, Nojoto also has created tools so that people can broadcast their interest better such as "Quotes", "Frames"& "Voice" - that lets people broadcast their words as text, photos and audio - and add background image or Music (keyboard, piano, flute etc).These tools not only make the life of artists simple, but also helps to spread virally by and through word of mouth or Facebook when people share content created by these tools on their respective social media platforms.

Nojoto today generates revenue through events and workshops, and talent hiring. They plan to launch a talent hiring solution in March 2018, once they touch two lakh users and generate 100, 000 USD of revenue in 2018.

Commenting on talent hiring market, Kamal informed that "Nojoto plans to escalate freelancing and gigs, which he insists will gradually replace jobs, making India a talent economy over the next couple of years."

"Thirty-five percent of freelancers in the United States today contribute about a trillion dollars to the economy &India today has 15 million freelancers, and 1.5 million freelancers gets added every year, out of which 50 percent hiring is for talents" added Kamal.

With the model fully set to scale, backed by strong founding team, the team informed that they are in advance talks with institutional investors and seasoned entrepreneurs to raise capital and scale to first India and then at the global level.

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A Pakistani Urdu newspaper has issued its annual 2018 calendar with United Nations-designated terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed on it.

The revelation was made by a Pakistan-based journalist, Omar R Quraishi, who mentioned it on his Twitter handle.

In a tweet, Quraishi mentioned, "Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it."

Saeed was recently released from house arrest after a Pakistani court cited lack of evidence against him in the 26/11 Mumbai attack case.

The JuD chief 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).

Earlier this week, Saeed invited all Islamic states to launch 'Jihad' against the United States and Israel.

The event was conducted in the wake of US President Donald Trump-led administration unilaterally identifying and declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Meanwhile, Pakistan recently prohibited Saeed's Jamaat-Ud-Dawah (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) from collecting donations.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) ordered to prohibit all companies from donating cash to JuD and FIF, as well as several other such organisations named in a list of banned outfits by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

India has, time and again, protested against Pakistan for harbouring Saeed, who is wanted for allegedly plotting the Mumbai attacks.

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Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain has reportedly pardoned five Military-Rangers personnel, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment over their involvement in killing of a youth inside a public park in Karachi in June 2011.

"President of #Pakistan pardoned all 5 officers & soldiers of Military-Rangers involved in June-2011 cold blooded yet unprovoked murder of Sarfaraz of Pakistan-occupied-#Kashmir," said Senge H Sering, Washington DC-based activist on twitter.

Sarfraz Shah was shot dead by the Rangers personnel and left to die inside the park.

The fatal shooting sparked widespread public outrage after the footage of the killing, filmed by a cameraman from a private TV channel who was at the park to cover an event, was later aired by all news channels.

According to The Express Tribune, an anti-terrorism court on August 12, 2011, had sentenced Rangers constable Shahid Zafar to death and life imprisonment to five others, including Sub-Inspector Bahaur Rehman, Lance Naik Liaquat Ali and constables Muhammad Tariq, Manthar Ali and Afzal Khan.

The park's watchman, Afsar Khan, was also jailed for life in the case, The Express Tribune reported.

However, the Pakistan Supreme Court had, in 2014, commuted the death penalty awarded to Shahid Zafar into life imprisonment and retained the punishment of others.

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Pakistan on Monday released 147 Indian fishermen.

The fishermen, who were arrested for allegedly fishing in country's territorial waters, were freed from a Karach jail on Thursday.

The Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA) had earlier on December arrested 28 Indian fishermen for allegedly fishing illegally in the country's territorial waters in the Arabian Sea.

Around 168 Indian fishermen have been held by the Pakistan Maritime Security personnel in the last five weeks.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be on a two-day visit to Switzerland between January 22-23 for the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit that is scheduled to be held on January 23 in Davos-Klosters.

During the visit, the Prime Minister will deliver a keynote speech at the plenary session of the WEF summit.

He will also have a bilateral meeting with Alain Berset, the President of the Swiss Confederation on January 22. The session will be moderated by Professor Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of WEF.

The theme for this year's WEF summit is - "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World".

Also, this is the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to the summit, since former Prime Minister H. Deve Gowda's visit in 1997.

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The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday said it has attached Rs 4.72 billion worth of properties, including one in Australia, belonging to the group of PGF Ltd and PACL Ltd, which is accused of duping scores of investors.

The group, according to Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), had collected Rs 491 billion over a period of 15 years from investors through a collective investment scheme in the garb of sale and development of agriculture land.

In this regard, a case was registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for acts of criminal conspiracy and cheating.

Based on this, an investigation was initiated by the ED for committing the offence under Section 3 of Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Further investigation is underway.
The chief minister of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pervez Khattak, was reportedly seen sharing the stage with banned terror outfit Jamaat-ud-Dawa's (JuD) leader and terrorist Hafiz Abdur Rehman Makki, during a public meeting of the Difa-i-Pakistan Council (DPC), in Peshawar on Sunday.

The participation of Khattak, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader, in the conference stirred a controversy in the political circles.

Makki is the brother-in-law of United Nations-designated terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai terror mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

Saeed addressed the council's 'Tahaffuz Baitul Muqaddas Conference' via telephone after he was stopped by the Punjab Government from attending the conference, the Dawn reported.

Makki was present on the stage in the absence of Saeed.

"Imran Khan was a strong critic of the DPC, but his party's chief minister shared the stage with leaders of extremist groups," Dawn quoted Awami National Party's information secretary Zahid Khan, as saying.

However, the PTI has not joined the DPC, which is a coalition of more than 40 Pakistani political and religious parties.

Maulana Samiul Haq's Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-S), which recently formed an electoral alliance with the PTI, is a member of the DPC.

Addressing the conference, Maulana Samiul Haq, who is also chairman of the DPC, said, "America should not consider Pakistan a piece of cake. Its forces had suffered defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the worst graveyard for Americans,"

He said US President Donald Trump had declared "war against Pakistan" by issuing threatening statements.

Trump recently castigated Pakistan for providing safe havens to terrorists, following which America announced to cut off military aid to Pakistan, for not taking "necessary steps" to curb terrorism.

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A Delhi court on Monday granted bail to Rishabh Aggarwal, who was arrested in connection with alleged irregularities in India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO) redevelopment contract case.

The Special CBI Court has also asked Aggarwal to submit a Rs 1-lakh personal bond.

The court has posted the hearing on bail plea of Sanjay Kulkarni, managing director of Capacite Structures, for tomorrow.

The court had, on January 5, reserved its order on the bail applications of Kulkarni and Aggarwal, after hearing arguments from defence advocates and the CBI, who opposed the applications saying the accused might hamper the 'initial stage' of the investigation, citing a possibility that both might flee from justice.

According to reports, the investigating agency had booked Mittal, Kulkarni, Aggarwal, and two others -- public servants Pradeep Mishra and Akashdeep Chouhan -- who allegedly delivered the bribe, in the case on December 22.

It alleged in the FIR that the contract to redevelop the prime land at Pragati Maidan was given to Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Pvt Ltd and Shapoorji Pallonji Qatar WLL for about Rs 2,149.93 crore by NBCC.

Mumbai-based Capacite Structures was trying to get that work from Shapoorji Pallonji on sub-contract.

Kulkarni had approached Aggarwal, the suspected middleman of having good contacts with public servants, for getting the sub-contract in favour of the company.

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Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday said there had been a major reduction in the Chinese troops at the Doklam plateau region between India and China, after a truce was called last year.

The 73-day Doklam stand-off came to an end on August 28 after the two sides agreed to withdraw their respective troops from the plateau and the Chinese troops stopped building a key road close to India's corridor. The road was being built by China in an area also claimed by Bhutan.

Commenting on reported intrusion of Chinese in Arunachal Pradesh, General Rawat said that the matter "has been sorted out".

"There has been a very major reduction (of troops) from the Chinese side," he told the media.

"It has been sorted out and we have had our border personnel meeting after that," he said, when asked about the Arunachal Pradesh intrusion.

Earlier in the day while addressing a seminar on the Army technology, Rawat said that the Army "would like to" move away from imports in defence technology and "fight the next war" with homemade solutions.

"We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defence technology), because for a nation like ours, the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with homemade solutions," he said.

He also called for modernisation of the armed forces, adding the time has come to look take cues from the 'Arthashastra' and 'Chanakya Niti'.

"There is a huge requirement of modernisation of our armed forces, in every field. The future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them," the army chief said.

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The Rashtriya Janata Party-Nepal (RJP-N), which is an amalgamation of six Madhesh based parties, has shown willingness to join the new government in the country if their demands are fulfilled.

Anil Kumar Jha, member of the RJP-N (Ratriya Janata Party- Nepal) President Council said the party will join the new government if the demands they have raised are met.

"That will depend upon the structure of the government and which party will lead the government and who will be the Prime Minister because none of the parties have fulfilled the majority (provision). But, yes we can support the government if the Prime Minister and the party, which will lead the government, fulfills our demand of constitution amendment and work upon the Madhesi agendas," Jha said in an interview with ANI.

With a simple majority of 50 percent in the general election, alliance of leftist parties, Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) and the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Center are poised to take the lead to form the new government.

"We have the people's mandate to raise these voices and agendas which remains to be fulfilled in the next parliamentary sessions. If that is not fulfilled by the parliament then we must need to go the streets again," Jha said.

The RJP-N won 11 seats in parliament which were contested under First Past the Post election system.

The CPN-UML has won highest seat of 48 in the parliament in the general election held in two phases in November and December, 2017.

The amendment bill which was previously dissolved in parliament, the RJP-N is now expecting to get it endorsed in the new parliament.

"Any of the party which is in Nepali parliament we can support but all depends upon the issue of constitution amendment and the fulfillment of the demands and necessity of our people, the people of madhesh," Jha added.

After the commencement of the general elections Nepal will be holding the election of National Assembly in February which will ultimately pave the way for the formation of the new government.

As of now, Chairman of the CPN-UML KP Oli is expected to be the next prime minister who will remain in the post for two and a half year after which Maoist Center Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal will retain the post as per the power sharing deal made between duo in September.

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The governor of Tabuk province of Saudi Arabia Prince Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud had reportedly arrived in the Dalbandin area of Balochistan's Chaghi district in Pakistan for hunting an endangered bird specie.

The Tabuk governor, who is also a part of the ruling Al Saud royal family, reportedly arrived on Sunday in his special flight at the Dalbandin airport. He was received by the Saudi Ambassador to Pakistan Admiral Nawaf Ahmad Al-Maliki, tribal elder Haji Ali Muhammad Notezai, Chagai district Council's Chairman Dawood Khan Notezai, Deputy Commissioner Shihak Baloch and other senior officials, amid tight security arrangements.

Pakistani Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan and Adviser to the Balochistan chief minister on forest and wildlife Obaidullah Babit were also scheduled to receive the Saudi prince, but did not come to the airport, reported the Pakistan Today.

However, according to local reports, the Saudi prince met Dastagir Khan and other senior officials at a hotel, where he was lodged.

The Saudi prince later went to explore the area allotted by the federal government to him for hunting the houbara bustard. He was earlier issued a hunting licence by the Pakistani foreign ministry for that allotted area.

A Pakistani-based journalist, Amar Guriro, had earlier reported that on January 4, Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak, who is the Minister of Tolerance of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was found hunting in a desert in Sindh's Ghotki district, along with Pakistan's People Party (PPP) leader and district chairman Ghotki Haji Khan Mahar.

He tweeted: "With the onset of winter, Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak, Minister of Tolerance #UAE set a hunting camp in the desert of #Ghotki district #Sindh. On Jan 4 #PPP leader & District Chairman Ghotki Haji Khan Mahar seen hunting endangered #Houbarabustard with Sheikh at the hunting camp."

Another Pakistan-based journalist named Andleeb Abbas lambasted Dastagir Khan's meeting with the Saudi prince, during his visit to Balochistan for hunting the endangered bird.

She wrote on her Twitter handle: "When lawmakers are lawbreakers and dollarslaves...Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir goes to receive Prince Fahad in Quetta to welcome him for Houbara Bustard hunting..An internationally and provincially banned hunting..#StopHoubaraHunting"

The houbara bustard, an internationally protected migratory bird, is mostly found in arid habitats spread across northern Africa, Central Asia and South-East Asia, with a population on the Canary Islands. They are dull brown with black markings on the wings with a greyish neck and a black ruff, along the side of the neck. Males and females appear very similar to each other, but males are much larger and heavier.

Owing to the dwindling global population of houbara bustard, it is not only protected under the international conservation conventions, but its hunting is also banned under the national local wildlife protection laws. Locals are not allowed to hunt it.

However, the federal government issues special permits every year to the ruling elite families of the Gulf countries.

In 2014, the Balochistan High Court (BHC) had barred the hunting of houbara bustard on two separate petitions. However, the federal and Balochistan governments had filed a petition in the apex court against the decision of the BHC.

The top court, after hearing the plea in 2015, had dismissed the petition of the federal and Balochistan governments and had upheld the verdict of the BHC for banning the hunting of the endangered bird.

According to sources, the Saudi prince visits the area every year for hunting the houbara bustards.

Earlier, a hunting party of eight, including Arab nationals, was arrested, when they were found illegally hunting the endangered bird in Balochistan on Saturday.

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Stand-up comedian Bob Newhart has expressed concern that Seth Meyers might get into controversy for taking up sexual harassment issue at the Golden Globes.

Meyers, who will be hosting the 75th Golden Globes Awards, has shared with a leading daily that instead of just cracking jokes on stage, he would be utilising the time by discussing issues like sexual misconduct and harassment that have not got as much air time in past years.

"He has to deal with the issue," said the 88-year-old, adding, "It's the 200-pound gorilla in the room."

Newhart indirectly compared Harvey Weinstein with a gorilla.

Weinstein, a film producer, has been charged with sexual assault cases.

The veteran actor, Newhart, who won his Globe in 1962, said that these days "they've gotten more legitimate."

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that puts on the annual TV and movie awards show, in a statement, had said, "The Association is excited to have Seth Meyers host the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards. With his natural comedic wit and innate ability to charm audiences, Seth will help us carry on the celebratory tradition of recognizing the best in television and film at the Party of the Year."

Last year the show was hosted by Jimmy Fallon.

Other previous hosts include Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey/Amy Poehler.

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In a major blow to South Africa, pacer Dale Steyn has been ruled out of the remainder of the three-match Test series against India due to a heel injury.

The 34-year-old sustained significant damage to his left heel, during the second day of the ongoing opening Test between the two sides.

The incident took place during Steyn's 18th over in India's first innings when he unfortunately landed awkwardly in the foot-holes, leading to tissue damage on the under-side of the foot.

He was later taken for scans, after which South Africa team manager Mohammed Moosajee confirmed he would not bowl again in the ongoing match.

Steyn, currently in a moon boot, saw a foot and ankle specialist on Sunday and said that he would now be reassessed in four to six weeks' time, ESPNcricinfo reported.

Though the South African selectors are yet to name Steyn's replacement, Duanne Olivier and Lungi Ngidi are among the frontrunners.

It should be noted that the ongoing series was Steyn's first Test since November 2016 after recovering from a career-threatening shoulder injury against Australia.

Steyn has taken two wickets so far in the first Test, which takes him to 419 Test wickets overall.

He now needs just three more wickets to surpass Shaun Pollock as the country's leading wicket-taker in the format.

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NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Monday said the Union 2018-19 would not be a populist budget, contrary to what many believe.

This is the last full-year of the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and certain sections of the media have been rife with reports about how the would be used to seek votes. Kumar, however, opines that the budget will mainly focus on improving the welfare of common man.

"I can say this with a great deal of confidence. The distinguishing feature of this and also that of the prime minister is that they have never allowed any budget exercise to be a populist one," Kumar said, while talking exclusively to ANI.

"The Modi doesn't present budget for seeking votes like others and that is what you should expect this time. I hope and suppose that the budget will focus on sectors which will improve the welfare levels of our population," he added.

Kumar also believes that the budget will primarily focus on basic healthcare facilities, primary education, agriculture, infrastructure, and to expand the productive capacity of the economy; taking it to a higher growth trajectory.

Ahead of the budget, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to hold a meeting with 30 top economists of the country on January 10.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley; CEO, NITI Aayog, Amitabh Kant; Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog, Rajiv Kumar; chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, Bibek Debroy, and other members of the Economic Advisory Council will also be present.

Kumar also disclosed the agenda of the meeting to ANI.

He said that the meeting was a traditional practice since the formation of the NITI Aayog.

"We want to gather the views of as many people as we can. Views and suggestions for making this budget as relevant and as influential for the economic activity of the country," Kumar concluded.

The Budget Session of the Parliament is scheduled to be held from January 29 to February 9, while the second session will be held from March 5 to April 6.

The Budget will be presented on February 1.
Uttar Pradesh Madrasas on Monday refused to abide by the Uttarakhand government's order of installing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's portrait in all educational institutions saying it is "against Sharia".

Speaking to ANI, Chairman of Fatwa department of Darul Uloom, Mufti Arshad Farooqui said that the government must think before issuing such orders which affects the Sharia religion and sentiments.

"It is against Sharia. There had never been order to put photos of any Prime Minister ever, why now? The government must think before issuing orders which affects Sharia, religion and sentiments," he added.

On Sunday, clarifying his stance on the installation of Prime Minister Modi's portrait in madrasas, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said that the move should not be objected to.

"He is the Prime Minister of the nation and madrasas are schools. Our books also include pictures of great personalities. So why should anybody have an objection to it?" asked Rawat.

The madarsas in the BJP-ruled State have refused to comply with the State government order, on religious grounds.

The order was issued to all the government-run educational institutions soon after the Independence Day last year, asking them to install a portrait of Prime Minister Modi inside their premises and take a pledge to implement his vision of building a new India by 2022.
Central Council for research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), an autonomous body under the Ministry of AYUSH has signed nine (09) Memorandums of understanding (MoUs) and one letter of intent with different countries for coordination/cooperation in homoeopathy system of medicine/ R & D in homoeopathy.

Details of Exchange of information and technical experts:-

1. Federal University of Rio De Janerio (Brazil) [July 2017]

2. Scientific Society for Homoeopathy (WissHom) (Germany) [June 2017]

3. Institute for the history of medicine, Robert Bosch foundation (Germany) [June 2017]

4. Universidad Maimonides (Argentina) [Aug 2016]

5. Yerevan State Medical University, Government of Armenia (Armenia) [Apr 2016]

6. College of Homeopaths of Ontario (Canada) [April 2016]

7. Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine (United Kingdom) [Nov 2015]

8. Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States, University of Mississippi, USA[ Oct 2015]

9. National Centre for Natural Products Research (USA)[Oct 2015]

10. Letter of intent with Instituto Politecnico Nacional through the Escuela Nacional De Medicina Y Homeopatia (Mexico)[Oct 2012]

The demand and popularity of Homoeopathy has risen in the country. There is 49% rise in the foot fall of patients to the Outpatient departments seeking homoeopathic treatment at the institutes/units under Central Council for research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), an autonomous body under the Ministry of AYUSH, from 2012-13 to 2016-17. Cooperation with foreign countries in the field of Homoeopathy has enhanced the popularity and acceptance of Homoeopathy in many countries of the world.

Signing of MoUs with foreign countries/foreign universities has paved way for:

i. undertaking collaborative research in the field of Homoeopathy with foreign universities;

ii. setting up of Homoeopathy Chair in foreign universities; exchange of knowledge and experts between the two countries;

iii. mutual recognition of pharmacopoeia of two countries.

The steps taken by the Ministry of AYUSH to popularize homeopathy in the Country and in foreign countries are as follows:-

1. The Ministry of AYUSH under International Co-operation Scheme of the Ministry undertakes various measures through participating in International exhibitions/ conferences/ workshops/ seminars/ road shows/ trade fairs, etc. for generating awareness.

2. Under the Information, Education and Communication (IEC) Scheme, the Ministry takes up initiatives for propogation and promotion of AYUSH systems of medicine by organizing Arogya fairs/Melas, Conferences, Exhibitions, Seminars, Workshops, Symposium and also undertakes publicity through electronic multimedia and print media campaigning for awareness amongst the citizens all over the country.

3. Government of India is implementing Centrally Sponsored Scheme of National AYUSH Mission (NAM) for popularization of AYUSH systems of medicine including Homoeopathy in the country.

Following MoUs have been signed by the Ministry of AYUSH in the field of Traditional systems of medicine including Homoeopathy:

I. The Ministry of AYUSH has signed Country to Country MoUs for Cooperation in field of Traditional Medicine including Homoeopathy with many countries including Bangladesh, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius, Mongolia, etc.

II. MoU for establishment of Academic Chair in Homoeopathy has been signed with Yerevan State Medical University YSMU, Armenia.

III. MoUs for undertaking Collaborative Research in the field of Homoeopathy have been signed with following foreign Universities/ Institutes:-

1. Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, UK.

2. College of Homoeopathy (COH), Ontario.

3. University of Maimonides, Argentina.

4. Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia Convention of the United States (HPCUS).

5. Scientific Society for Homoeopathy (WissHom), Germany.

6. Federal University of Rio De Janerio- UFRJ.

IV. MoU for cooperation in the field of development of museum on AYUSH system and archives on homoeopathy has been signed with Institute for the History of Medicine, Robert Bosch Foundation, Stuttgart, Germany.

As of now, 28 Information Cells have been set up in 25 countries to disseminate authentic information about AYUSH systems of medicine including Homoeopathy.

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A major step was taken during the first NDA Government led by Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Income Tax Act was amended to include a provision that donations made to political parties would be treated as expenditure and would thus give a tax advantage to the donor. If the political party disclosed its donations in a prescribed manner, it would also not be liable to pay any tax. A political party was expected to file its returns both with the income-tax authorities and Election Commission. It was hoped that donors would increasingly start donating money by cheque. Some donors did start following this practise but most of them were reluctant to disclose the details of the quantum of donation given to a political party. This was because they feared consequences visiting them from political opponents. The law was further amended during the UPA Government to provide for pass through electoral trust so that the donors would park their money with the electoral trusts which in turn would distribute the same to various political parties. Both these reforms taken together resulted in only a small fraction of the donations coming in form of cheques.

In order to make a serious effort to carry forward this reform process, it was announced in Union Budget Speech for the year 2017-18 that the existing system would be substantially widened and donations of clean money could be made to political parties in several ways. A donor could enjoy a tax deduction by donating in cheque. Donors were also free to donate moneys online to political parties. A cash donation to a political party could not exceed an amount of Rs.2000/-. In addition, a scheme of electoral bonds was announced to enable clean money and substantial transparency being brought into the system of political funding.

Donations made online or through cheques remain an ideal method of donating to political parties. However, these have not become very popular in India since they involve disclosure of donor's identity.

However, the electoral bond scheme, which was placed before the Parliament a few days ago, envisages total clean money and substantial transparency coming into the system of political funding. A donor can purchase electoral bonds from a specified bank only by a banking instrument. He would have to disclose in his accounts the amount of political bonds that he has purchased. The life of the bond would be only 15 days. A bond can only be encashed in a pre-declared account of a political party. Every political party in its returns will have to disclose the amount of donations it has received through electoral bonds to the Election Commission. The entire transactions would be through banking instruments. As against a total non-transparency in the present system of cash donations where the donor, the donee, the quantum of donations and the nature of expenditure are all undisclosed, some element of transparency would be introduced in as much as all donors declare in their accounts the amount of bonds that they have purchased and all parties declare the quantum of bonds that they have received. How much each donor has distributed to a political party would be known only to the donor. This is necessary because once this disclosure is made, past experience has shown, donors would not find the scheme attractive and would go back to the less-desirable option of donating by cash. In fact the choice has now to be consciously made between the existing system of substantial cash donations which involves total unclean money and is non-transparent and the new scheme which gives the option to the donors to donate through entirely a transparent method of cheque, online transaction or through electoral bonds. While all three methods involve clean money, the first two are totally transparent and the electoral bonds scheme is a substantial improvement in transparency over the present system of no-transparency.

The Government is willing to consider all suggestions to further strengthen the cleansing of political funding in India. It has to be borne in mind that impractical suggestions will not improve the cash denominated system. They would only consolidate it."

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With effect from 06 January 2018

Gujarat Automotive Gears announced the resignation of Chintan Doshi from the post of Company Secretary and Compliance Officer with effect from 06 January 2018.

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Hindustan Construction Company rose 3.34% to Rs 43.30 at 11:57 IST on BSE after the company said its joint venture with AL FARA'A was awarded Rs 484 crore contract for Pune Metro Rail Project.

The announcement was made during market hours today, 8 January 2018.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 184.72 points or 0.54% at 34,338.57. The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was up 151.95 points or 0.84% at 18,221.98.

On the BSE, 15.78 lakh shares were traded on the counter so far as against average daily volumes of 14.87 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock had hit a high of Rs 44 and a low of Rs 42.05 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 48 on 25 April 2017 and a 52-week low of Rs 31.90 on 27 November 2017.

The mid-cap company has equity capital of Rs 101.55 crore. Face value per share is Re 1.

Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) said that the company as a lead partner in joint venture (JV) with AL FARA'A has been awarded Rs 484 crore contract by the Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation for Pune Metro Rail Project. HCC's share in the JV is 51% i.e Rs247 crore.

The contract is for construction of eight elevated metro rail stations on line II (E-W Corridor) of Pune Metro Rail Project. The work involves general and structural civil work of the station buildings and architectural & site development. The 14.66 km long line II of Pune Metro is completely elevated and has 16 stations out of which 8 are being built by HCC.

HCC's net profit fell 49.7% to Rs 11.60 crore on 6.5% growth in net sales to Rs 970.75 crore in Q2 September 2017 over Q2 September 2016.

HCC serves the infrastructure sectors of transportation, power and water. The HCC group, comprises of HCC, HCC Infrastructure Co, Lavasa Corporation and Steiner AG in Switzerland.

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After hitting record highs in early trade on firm global cues, key benchmark indices traded with modest gains in morning trade. At 10:15 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, advanced 187.65 points or 0.55% at 34,341.50. The Nifty 50 index rose 53.35 points or 0.51% at 10,612.20.

Among secondary indices, the S&P BSE Mid-Cap index rose 0.86%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index advanced 0.7%. Both these indices outperformed the Sensex.

The broad market depicted strength. There were more than two gainers against every loser on the BSE. 1,702 shares advanced and 762 shares declined. A total of 90 shares were unchanged.

Power generation and power distribution stocks advanced. Jaiprakash Power Ventures (up 4.59%), Reliance Power (up 2.13%), Adani Power (up 1.29%), GMR Infrastructure (up 0.94%), JSW Energy (up 0.66%), Power Grid Corporation of India (up 0.57%), CESC (up 0.51%), Torrent Power (up 0.37%) and NTPC (up 0.23%) gained. NHPC (down 0.6%) and Reliance Infrastructure (down 0.09%) edged lower.

Tata Power Company was up 0.05%. With regard to a media article titled Adani, JSW & Tatas bid for stake in GMR's power plant, the company informed that it has not participated in any such expression of interest. However, the company understands that the bid may have been submitted by Resurgent Power Ventures Pte in which Tata Power has a minority stake, it said in a statement. The announcement was made during market hours today, 8 January 2018.

Cement stocks were mixed. Shree Cement (up 0.43%) and ACC (up 0.16%) edged higher. Grasim Industries (down 0.66%), Ambuja Cements (down 0.13%) and UltraTech Cement (down 0.09%) declined.

Seamec gained 2.14% at Rs 174.05 after the company said it has entered into a contract for charter hire of vessel 'SEAMEC III' with IGOPL Offshore for undertaking a job in Mumbai High Offshore. The charter is for firm period of 100 days with option for extension. The contract will commence around 10 January 2018. The value of charter during firm period is $2.4 million. The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 5 January 2018.

Goa Carbon was locked in 5% upper circuit at Rs 1,061.05 after the company reported net profit of Rs 22.50 crore in Q3 December 2017 compared to net loss of Rs 0.93 crore in Q3 December 2016. Net sales rose 159.6% to Rs 186.60 crore in Q3 December 2017 over Q3 December 2016. The result was announced on Saturday, 6 January 2018.

The 14-day long winter session of the Parliament concluded on Friday, 5 January 2018. The Speaker said that 16 bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha by the government in the session, of which 12 bills including the triple talaq bill was passed. Important bills passed during the session also included the Requisitioning and Acquisition of Immovable Property Bill and the Goods and Services Tax (Compensation to States) Amendment Bill.

Overseas, Asian stocks edged higher following firm US lead as investors awaited upcoming earnings releases. US stocks rose to record levels on Friday, 5 January 2018 even as Wall Street shook off jobs data that missed expectations. The US economy added 148,000 jobs in December, according to the Labor Department, as against expectations of 190,000 jobs.

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Seamec was locked in 5% upper circuit at Rs 178.85 at 10:30 IST on BSE after the company said it entered into a contract for charter hire of vessel with IGOPL Offshore.

The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 5 January 2018.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 187.98 points, or 0.55% to 34,341.83. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 133.46 points, or 0.68% at 19,838.38.

On the BSE, 1,048 shares were traded in the counter so far, compared with average daily volumes of 5,634 shares in the past one quarter. The stock had hit a high of Rs 178.90 and a low of Rs 174 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 194 on 7 August 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 78.35 on 3 February 2017.

The small-cap company has equity capital of Rs 25.42 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Seamec said that the company has entered into a contract for charter hire of vessel 'SEAMEC III' with IGOPL Offshore for undertaking a job in Mumbai High Offshore. The charter is for firm period of 100 days with option for extension. The contract will commence around 10 January 2017. The value of charter during firm period is $2.4 million.

Seamec reported net loss of Rs 6.65 crore in Q2 September 2017, lower than net loss of Rs 20.22 crore in Q2 September 2016. Net sales rose 41.3% to Rs 34.23 crore in Q2 September 2017 over Q2 September 2016.

Seamec is a leading provider of diving support vessel (DSV) based diving services. The company has experience in ongoing subsea inspection, repair, maintenance and light construction required for the efficient and productive support of offshore oil production. Seamec also provides utility services.

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Israeli archaeologists have announced the discovery of half-million-year-old stone tools that suggest that the cognitive capabilities of the hominids who crafted them were much more similar to our own than previously thought.

Dubbed a kind of stone-age Swiss Army knife by one of the archaeologists working on the site, many of the objects found were flint hand axes, among other tools, Efe news reported.

"The carving of these pieces requires a conceptual leap that allowed them to imagine the desired tool before starting to shape it," said Ran Barkai, the head of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv University, emphasizing that this was the key to the discovery's importance.

The tools were found in the Israeli Arab town of Jaljulia, located at the edge of the coastal plain near the border with the West Bank.

Excavation's director Maayan Shemer called the findings (at Jaljulia) "amazing", highlighting the tools' technological variety.

Shemer said the investigations can aid scientists in their understanding of Homo erectus, a species of extinct hominid that inhabited the area during the Paleolithic Age.

--IANS

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Mexican marines exchanged gunfire with a group of gunmen in Mexico's Baja California Sur state, leaving seven dead, officials said on Sunday.

The state's Attorney General's Office (PGJE) said the clash took place late on Saturday in the popular beach resort of Los Cabos, as the marines headed to a neighborhood in San Jose del Cabo, one of two towns that comprise the resort, to investigate the sound of gunfire.

On the way, the marines detected armed men riding in two vehicles, both with US license plates, in the road ahead of them and ordered them to stop, but they sped up in an attempt to flee while the occupants fired their guns.

As the chase continued, both vehicles eventually crashed into walls or barricades, though the four occupants of the second vehicle got out and continued to fire on the marines until they were killed.

Marines seized high-caliber weapons and vehicles in the operation.

The PGJE said it opened an investigation into the incident it said was "allegedly linked to criminal events that have taken place in the state."

In late December, authorities found bodies hanging from bridges near Los Cabos, in a sign that violent crime sparked by rival drug trafficking organisations is plaguing the state.

--IANS

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Afghanistan has pressed Pakistan to grant up to one year extension of the stay of over 1 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Afghan diplomats said on Monday.

The demand came days after Pakistani Cabinet decided to grant only one month extension to the stay of nearly 1.4 million registered refugees in Pakistan, Xinhua reported.

The Pakistani cabinet in its January 3 meeting granted the extension in the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards that allow registered refugees to stay legally in the country.

The PoR cards expired on December 31, 2017 and under the Cabinet's new decision, registered Afghan refugees can legally stay in Pakistan until January 31.

The Cabinet had also decided that the issue of early repatriation of Afghan refugees should be raised with the UN refugee agency and with the international community.

Afghanistan Deputy Ambassador to Pakistan Zardasht Shams said over a million refugees cannot be sent back home in one month time.

Shams told Xinhua late on Monday that the Afghan government is in contact with the Pakistani officials to extend the stay of the registered refugees by one year or at least six months.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has already suspended voluntary repatriation of the refugees from Pakistan for winter break until March, he said.

The Cabinet has taken the decision at a time when the documentation of the hundreds of thousands of unregistered refugees is underway in Pakistan.

The Afghan Deputy Ambassador said about 700,000 unregistered refugees had been documented until January 5. The documentation process, which is going on in 21 centres across Pakistan, is scheduled to conclude on January 31.

--IANS

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A court here on Monday declared controversial defence consultant and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari a "proclaimed offender" in an Official Secrets Act case.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Deepak Sherawat declared Bhandari as proclaimed offender as the accused failed to appear before him despite lapse of 30 days.

The Crime Branch of Delhi Police told the court that it had published the proclamation of accused in the newspaper but the accused did not mark his presence.

The Delhi Police booked him for alleged violation of the Official Secrets Act in 2016.

--IANS

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A Bangladeshi court on Monday turned down a petition to legalise marriage between its citizens and refugees from Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority.

Babul Hossain, a construction worker from the district of Manikganj, had filed the petition with the Bangladesh High Court in December, challenging a government ban on marrying Rohingyas for Bangladeshi citizens, which has been in effect since 2014, Efe news reported.

"The court dismissed the petition and fined the petitioner 100,000 taka ($1,200) for wasting its time," said deputy Attorney General Motahar Hossain.

Hossain's son got married to a Rohingya in September 2017 at the refugee camp in Kutupalong and since then the couple has been on the run, fearing that they may be arrested.

"The court said this man has committed a crime by bringing the girl outside the camp as she is not a Bangladeshi citizen. He also committed a crime by attempting to marry her since there is an administrative ban (against such marriages)," the Attorney added.

The defence lawyer, ABM Hamidul Mishbah, said that he would file an appeal to the Supreme Court against the order.

In October 2017, the country's Law and Justice Ministry ordered civil registries to thoroughly scrutinize the identity documents of couples before registering a marriage, after a significant increase in the number of mixed relationships.

According to the United Nations Inter Sector Coordination Group, some 655,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh since August 2017.

The current exodus was triggered by the Myanmar security forces launching an operation in retaliation for an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on several security posts in Rakhine State on August 25.

The governments of both the countries earlier reached an agreement on the process of repatriation for the Rohingya refugees present in Bangladesh. The process is expected to begin within two months.

--IANS

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Former White House official Steve Bannon has said he regretted for the comments attributed to him that were critical of President Donald Trump's family in a new book, media reports said.

The former chief strategist was widely lambasted by members of the Trump administration for his participation in the newly released book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House", which was written by Michael Wolff, reports ABC News.

In it, Bannon was quoted as saying that the President's son participated in a "treasonous" meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man," Bannon said in a statement on Sunday.

"He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency," he added.

Excerpts from the book caused a political firestorm last week.

Bannon zeroed in on the Donald Trump, Jr. for the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russians which was also attended the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner and onetime campaign chief Paul Manafort.

"They're going to crack Don Junior like a egg on national TV," he said, referring to the ongoing investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father's office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero," he was also quoted as having said in the book.

The White House has lashed out against Wolff and the book, calling it a "work of fiction", ABC News reported.

Trump also expressed outrage over Bannon's participation in it, calling his former aide "Sloppy Steve" and a "staffer who worked for me".

"I guess sloppy Steve brought him into the White House quite a bit, and it was one of those things. That's why sloppy Steve is now looking for a job," Trump tweeted on Sunday.

The President also distanced himself from Bannon last week.

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency... When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

Bannon had managed to stay in Trump's orbit before earning his ire, reports Politico news.

Although he was fired in August, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said recently that Trump and Bannon spoke in December.

--IANS

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The BJP on Monday questioned the AAP government in Delhi over the deaths of 42 homeless people in the city this month, saying that if Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal would have taken interest, their lives could have been saved.

"At least 42 homeless people have died in the first one week of January 2018, and this information has been confirmed by the Ministry of Home Affairs," Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party President Manoj Tiwari told reporters.

He also said that since December, over 250 homeless people have died.

Hitting out at the Chief Minister for preferring the Rajya Sabha elections and candidates over the homeless, the BJP MP said: "If Kejriwal would have taken more interest in the homeless instead of his Rajya Sabha candidates, then we would not have heard about the deaths."

As per the reports of the Centre for Holistic Development, at least 40,633 homeless people have died in Delhi since January 1, 2004.

The report also claimed that in December 2017 alone, 250 people died on the streets.

According to the report, 44 people died in from January 1 to January 6, including a two-year-old child.

The BJP leader also said: "Let's leave the blame game and do an all party meeting on how to save lives of homeless in the city."

Tiwari also said that when he got the news, he went to see the conditions of the homeless in the city during nights.

"I was shocked to see that how people were sleeping with the animals in the Yamuna riverbed and on the streets in the open sky," he said.

He also said that with the help of Sikh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, the BJP arranged a temporary night-shelter for over 650 people in the Kashmere Gate area of north Delhi.

As per the Delhi government, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) runs 251 shelters -- 83 of them housed in permanent buildings and 113 operating out of porta-cabins. FIfty-five temporary shelters in tents have also been put up for the winter season.

On Saturday night, the International Court of Justice Judge Dalveer Bhandari inspected the Delhi government's nightshelter in south Delhi's Sarai Kale Khan area. He stressed on the need to set up more such facilities.

Bhandari was accompanied by Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

--IANS

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A book with all data about parliamentary elections in India, constituency wise, was released at the ongoing World Book Fair here on Monday.

"Election Atlas of India", whose foreword has been written by former Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi, also describes alteration in constituencies following the delimitations and also during the reorganization of states.

"The Atlas uses statistical data collected and collated at various levels about electors, candidates, gender and marginalized sections in terms of electoral participation and many other consequential factors related to elections. These new parameters and aspects are depicted in the form of impressive graphs, charts and thematic maps based on GIS technology with tremendous clarity," said Zaidi in the book by Datanet India - an IT-enabled organization disseminating socio- economic and electoral statistical data.

--IANS

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The Bombay Lawyers Association (BLA) on Monday filed a petition in the Bombay High Court demanding an enquiry commission to probe the death of CBI Special Court Additional Sessions Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, who presided over the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

"We have filed it today and shall mention it before the Chief Justice on Wednesday for fixing a hearing date. If not, we shall have to wait for it to come up in the normal course, which can take time," BLA lawyer Ahmad Abdi told IANS.

The BLA has urged the court to "constitute a commission of enquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to investigate the events and circumstances surrounding the death of Judge Loya".

The plea came in the wake of a report published in a newsmagazine 'Caravan' in its November 21, 2017 edition, the BLA said, requesting it to be treated as a public interest litigation (PIL).

The BLA has made the Maharashtra government, the Registrar-General, the journalist who investigated and wrote the story and the magazine as respondents.

The petition has mentioned several media reports since the controversy over Judge Loya's death first erupted after the Caravan news reports.

Earlier, several legal luminaries including former Supreme Court Judge Justice P.B. Sawant, retired Bombay High Court judges B.G. Kolse-Patil, B.H. Marlapalle, A.P. Shah and others sought an independent probe into the matter.

"If independence and integrity of the judiciary is to be preserved, then the death of Judge Loya and the circumstances surrounding the same should be thoroughly investigated," the BLA petition states.

According to the BLA petition citing news reports and Caravan investigations, Judge Loya died of heart attack on December 1, 2014 while on a visit to Nagpur.

At that time, he was handling the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which the Bharatiya Janata President Amit Shah was one of the accused and later discharged, besides other top Gujarat police officers among the accused.

--IANS

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China on Monday told the US that pointing fingers at Pakistan will not help in fighting terrorism.

Rebuffing a US suggestion that China should convince Pakistan to crack down on terror, Beijing said it would not be "conducive" to link terrorism with its "all-weather" Islamabad.

"As we stressed many times, Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti-terrorism cause and countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of common mutual respect instead of finger-pointing at each other," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said.

"This is not conducive to the global counter-terrorism efforts," Lu told the media.

Last week, a US official said China could be helpful in persuading Pakistan to dismantle safe haven for terrorists.

"China always opposes linking terrorism with any certain country and we don't agree to place the responsibility of anti-terrorism on a certain country," Lu said.

"Actually, China is defending the countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter-terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and respect."

China defends its "iron-brother" Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. Beijing says Islamabad has made sacrifices and done a fabulous job in fighting terrorism.

China was quick to jump to Pakistan's defence when US President tweeted that his administration was stopping all aid to Islamabad for not using the money to flush out terrorists.

Days after Trump's announcement, Washington cut security aid to Islamabad. China has invested heavily in Pakistan.

The over $ 50-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor - a key artery of Beijing's Belt and Road project -- connects China's Kashgar with Pakistan Gwadar.

It goes through the disputed Kashmir held by Islamabad and claimed by New Delhi.

--IANS

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The DMK and Congress on Monday boycotted Governor Banwarilal Purohits inaugural address to the Assembly and their MLAs trooped out of the House after accusing him of letting a "minority" AIADMK government remain in office.

The DMK, along with the Congress, demanded an immediate floor test in the legislature.

As soon as Purohit addressed the MLAs with a 'Vanakkam" in Tamil, the opposition legislators began raising slogans. In no time, the DMK MLAs walked out, led by their leader M.K. Stalin, followed by the Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League.

Stalin told the media that the government did not enjoy majority support in the House as it had only 111 MLAs when it needed 117 in a house of 234.

Stalin said that despite repeated requests, the Governor was not taking a decision on the need for a floor test. "How can the Governor allow a minority government to run the state?"

Even among those with the ruling AIADMK, many MLAs were inclined to oppose the government in the wake of the feud within the ruling party, he said.

Stalin said he hoped that the Madras High Court would soon come out with a ruling regarding the case of 18 disqualified AIADMK MLAs opposed to the ruling faction.

Disregarding the opposition protest, the Governor continued his address, detailing the government's achievements and its efforts to promote welfare measures.

The government is set to build a grand memorial for late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa and turn her house, Veda Nilayam, into a memorial, Purohit said.

He lauded the efforts of the state and central governments in resolving the Tamil fishermen issue.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued a provisional order for attachment of properties worth Rs 472 crore belonging to Nirmal Singh Bhangoo in Australia in Rs 45,000 crore PACL ponzi scam, an official said on Monday.

The properties attached under Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) include MiiResorts Group 1 Pty Ltd and Sanctuary Cove properties, said the official, adding the provisional order would be sent to the government who would then take it up with Australian government.

Bhangoo was recently arrested along with his other company directors. He is presently in judicial custody.

The ED is investigating money laundering on the basis of Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) February 19, 2014 FIR under offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating against Bhangoo and his companies PGF and PACL.

Bhangoo and his companies are accused of cheating 5.5 crore investors all over India by promising them agricultural plots and high return on their investments. They also collected Rs 45,000 crore over the years from the investors through their false promises.

Bhangoo had employed the agents offering them 15-20 per cent commission on each investors' money and further each agent was asked to bring more agents and investors, like a multi-marketing scheme. There were 11 levels of agents for collecting money from investors.

According to the ED statement, the PACL directly and through its 43 front companies during 2009 to 2014 invested an amount of Rs 650 crore in its group company PIPL which further invested Rs 147 crore in 2010 for acquiring 50 per cent of shares of Australia-based Miiresorts Group 1 Pty Ltd.

The PIPL also invested Rs 459 crore between 2009 and 2014 for acquiring over 99 per cent shares of another Australian company Miigroup Holdings Pty Ltd.

An amount of Rs 25 crore was also remitted to Australia-based Hicky Lawyers Trust for purchase of Sanctuary Cove Properties, said the statement.

It said that Miiresorts Group purchased Sheraton Mirage Hotel for a price of approximately (Australian) $62.5 million and sold the same to Australian Wattle Development Pty Ltd in May 2010.

"This proceeds of sale (Australian $87.37 million/Rs 447 crore) by the order of the Federal Court of Australia were received by McCullough Robertson Lawyers and invested in an interest bearing account with an Australian trading bank," the statement said.

It said that the two Australian companies-- Miiresorts Group and Miigroup Holdings-- are controlled by Bhangoo and his family members.

--IANS

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Rabat, Jan 8 (IANS/MAP) Egypt will be guest of honour at the 24th edition of Casablanca's international publishing and book fair to be held in February.

The book fair will take place from February 8-18, according to the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The programme will focus on Moroccan-Egyptian relations, the issues of culture and philosophy as well as on the works of Egyptian writer Jamal El Ghitani.

The fair will be attended by eminent writers, novelists and researchers from both the countries.

--IANS/MAP

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United Arab Emirates (UAE) flag carrier Emirates Airline on Monday signed a a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Etihad Airways for cooperation in aviation security.

The MoU was signed by Tim Clark, President Emirates Airline, and Tony Douglas, Group CEO of Etihad Aviation Group, reports Xinhua news agency.

Emirates said that "the historic agreement, the first between the UAE's two world-leading aviation groups, signals the importance of closer collaboration in aviation security to effectively exploit joint synergies to enhance efficiency and security for the benefit of both groups' customers".

One of the key areas of cooperation outlined in the MoU involves the sharing of information and intelligence between Emirates, which in November added the 100th Airbus A380 Superjumbo to its fleet, and Etihad, whose name means unity in Arabic, on critical aspects of aviation security.

Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, chairman and chief executive of Emirates Airline said: "Security is one of the foremost priorities of the global aviation industry."

Through this agreement, Emirates Group Security will collaborate with Etihad Aviation Group to share know-how and extend aviation security services in order to better handle shared challenges, he added.

In October 2017, Clark said the Dubai government-controlled airline was open to cooperate with local rival Etihad Airways, but stressed that a full merger between the two was "up to the owners", hence the ruling families of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

--IANS

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Brussels, Jan 9 (IANS/AKI) European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday lauded the role played by Italy in the migration crisis and the bloc's stability pact, heaping praise on its Economy Minister Carlo Padoan.

"Italy has been extremely useful to the EU in respect of migration policy and the stability pact," Juncker told a Brussels conference on the EU's 2021-2027 budget, which Paduan also attended.

"I pay special tribute to Italy's economy minister Mr Padoan, who has been extremely cooperative," he added.

The EU made available 17 billion euros in 2016 and 2017 from its current budget to help member states like Italy - which have an external border - meet their migration policy obligations, said Juncker.

--IANS/AKI

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Five persons were killed and 15 were injured when an overloaded SUV overturned early Monday in Jogulamba Gadwal district of Telangana, police said.

The victims were workers returning home after night duty at a cotton ginning factory in Gadwal town.

The accident occurred near Parcharla on Dharur-Gonupadu road when the workers were returning to their village Chinnapadu in a Bolero.

The injured were admitted to a hospital in Gadwal, where the condition of three of them was stated to be critical.

A police officer said the vehicle was carrying more people than its seating capacity. The driver allegedly was drowsy and was also driving the vehicle at a high speed.

Family members of the victims alleged that the ginning mill had arranged one vehicle for 20 workers and this led to the tragedy.

--IANS

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Healthy buying from foreign funds, along with optimism over the upcoming quarterly earnings result season, on Monday catapulted the key equity indices -- NSE Nifty50 and S&P BSE Sensex -- to their record closing highs.

Index-wise, the buoyant global cues lifted the wider Nifty50 of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) to close above the 10,600-points-level. It gained 64.75 points or 0.61 per cent to 10,623.60 points.

The Nifty50 touched a fresh intra-day high of 10,631.20 points.

The barometer 30-scrip Sensitive Index (Sensex) of the BSE too closed at a fresh high of 34,352.79 points -- up 198.94 points or 0.58 per cent from its previous close -- after it scaled a new intra-day high of 34,385.67 points.

The BSE market breadth was bullish as 1,792 stocks advanced compared to 1,158 declines.

"Markets rallied higher on Monday to close with gains for the fourth consecutive day. The Nifty touched record highs in intra day trade," Deepak Jasani, Head, Retail Research, HDFC Securities, told IANS.

"The rally came on the back of positive global cues," added Jasani.

Apart from key indices, even the broader market indices closed at fresh highs.

The S&P BSE mid-cap index closed higher by 0.98 per cent at a new high of 18,247.55 points. The small-cap index edged up 0.97 per cent to close at a record high of 19,895.77 points.

On the NSE, the Nifty50 mid-cap index edged higher by 1.19 per cent to close at a record high of 5,702.70 points.

"Asian shares ex-Japan traded towards all-time peaks on Monday after Wall Street posted its best start to a year in over a decade," Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls, told IANS.

On the currency front, the Indian rupee weakened by 14 paise to close at 63.51 against the US dollar from its previous close at 63.37.

Provisional data with the exchanges showed that foreign institutional investors purchased scrips worth Rs 692.83 crore, while the domestic institutional investors divested funds worth Rs 206.30 crore.

Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services, said: "Supportive global market and optimism ahead of earnings season took the market to a new high. A cut in FY18 GDP growth estimate by CSO did not impact the movement since it was overtly conservative."

"Revival in earnings, incremental Q-o-Q growth in GDP and budget expectations are sustaining the momentum," Nair added.

All the sub-indices of the BSE ended with substantial gains barring the telecom index which declined by 45.33 points.

Sectorwise, the S&P BSE capital goods index surged by 243.37 points, followed by healthcare index by 179.60 points and IT index by 157.03 points.

Major Sensex gainers on Monday were: Coal India, up 3.26 per cent at Rs 287.85; Infosys, up 2.33 per cent at Rs 1,035.65; Sun Pharma, up 2.28 per cent at Rs 591.95; Larsen and Toubro, up 1.80 per cent at Rs 1,338.10; and Hero MotoCorp, up 1.37 per cent at Rs 3,790.35.

Major Sensex losers were: Bharti Airtel, down 4.43 per cent at Rs 516.10; ONGC, down 0.28 per cent at Rs 197.15; State Bank of India, down 0.18 per cent at Rs 305.65; Tata Steel, down 0.18 per cent at Rs 768.95; and Adani Ports, down 0.07 per cent at Rs 424.15.

--IANS

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Actor Gary Oldman took home his first Golden Globe Award in Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama category for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in "Darkest Hour".

Oldman called for a change in the world while accepting his trophy at the award gala, held here on Sunday.

"Well I feel very humbled and surprised to have been asked to this stage. I would like to congratulate my fellow nominees for your beautiful work, I am in very fine company this evening indeed. I'm very proud of 'Darkest Hour'," Oldman said.

"It illustrates that words and actions can change the world and boy-o-boy does it need some changing."

Oldman was up against Timothee Chalamet for "Call Me by Your Name", Daniel Day-Lewis for "Phantom Thread", Tom Hanks for "The Post" and Denzel Washington for "Roman J. Israel, Esq.". This was Oldman's first Golden Globe nomination and first win.

The actor also quoted his character in his acceptance speech, and thanked the whole team.

"Winston Churchill said, 'My taste is very simple. I am easily satisfied with the very best'. And I am surrounded by the very best," Oldman said.

The 59-year-old had a special mention for his wife Gisele Schmidt, who was visibly emotional in the audience.

--IANS

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A 12-year-old girl was killed when a group of dogs attacked her while she had gone to relieve herself in an open field in Jharkhand, police said on Monday.

The incident took place on Sunday night at Bhagwatidih village, Koderma district.

According to the police, the victim tried her best to escape but was overpowered by the canines. Her parents were informed by other children who had gone to field.

The incident comes after Koderma was declared Open Defecation Free (ODF), but a large majority still go out in the open and many villages are yet to get their toilet facilities, according to villagers.

--IANS

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The India is awaiting an appropriate proposal from US tech giant Apple to set up a manufacturing unit in the country, Union Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Monday.

Briefing reporters here after a meeting of the Council for Trade Development and Promotion, the Minister said India was looking to manufacture more of products it currently imported and was eager to partner with Apple in this regard.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from Apple... Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu said.

"We are users, and we should be manufacturers... We should be partners of Apple," he added.

While the matter of the American iPhone maker setting up a unit in India had been discussed during Chief Executive Tim Cook's visit to India over a year ago, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Alphons Kannanthanam had, in October, also spoken favourably about the proposal.

In March last year, then Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had informed the Rajya Sabha that the government had not accepted most of the demands of the company for setting up a local unit.

Apple has sought concessions, including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for a period of 15 years. It also wants relaxation in the statutory 30 per cent local sourcing of components.

--IANS

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India's envoy to China, Gautam Bambawale, on Monday met Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Rashid Alimov and discussed the agenda and preparation of the annual summit of the grouping in China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend the summit, likely to be held in June.

Bambawale, who took over as India's envoy to China in November last year, presented his credentials to Alimov.

Both sides discussed issues of further development and strengthening of multifaceted interaction in the SCO framework in a constructive atmosphere.

There was a detailed exchange of views on the main agenda items of SCO and preparation for the upcoming events of SCO in 2018.

Bambawale assured Rashid of India's readiness to closely cooperate on all important areas of SCO activities.

India and Pakistan entered the Chinese-led grouping last year. With their admission, the number of member countries stands at eight.

--IANS

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Highlighting how job creation in India is at an eight-year-low, Congress President on Monday said the two threats facing India under the Narendra Modi government are inability to create jobs and the rise in the forces of hatred and division.

Addressing the Indian diaspora in Bahrain here, he said: "Tragically the conversation in our country today is not about jobs, healthcare or education. The only thing India talks about is what you are allowed to eat, who is allowed to protest and what we can say or rather what we cannot say."

"India today is free, but once again it is under threat. There are two clear threats facing our country today. The first is our government's inability to provide jobs for our people. Our main competitor China produces 50,000 jobs every 24 hours. India currently produces 400 jobs in the same amount of time."

"It is an important figure. What China does in two days, it takes India one year to do. These are not my figures, these are figures of the government of India given in the Parliament. Job creation in India is at an eight-year-low," Gandhi said in his address at an event organised by Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin.

"New investments have been lowest in 13 years. Bank credit growth has sunk to a 63-year low. To make matters worse, many in the Indian diaspora have lost hard-earned money because of arbitrary decisions like demonetisation. It landed a crippling blow to India's overall economic growth. The fact is that India can simply not afford this," he added.

Underlining India was the second-most populous country with 30,000 new youngsters coming daily into India's job market, he said that not providing education and jobs to these youngsters was "a recipe for disaster".

"The government's failure in creating jobs is resulting in tremendous anger and unrest in India. The youth are asking a very simple question, what are we going to do in future. This anger is visible in the streets and is rising rapidly," he said, adding the "tragedy" is that instead of focusing on what are critical issues like poverty alleviation, job creation and building a world-class education system, "we see instead rise in the forces of hatred and division".

Gandhi also said that activists and journalists are threatened in India. "They are shot dead for expressing their views. People are killed because of their religious beliefs, Dalits are beaten into submission, judges investigating sensitive cases die under mysterious circumstances. And through all this, the government has nothing to say."

Claiming India has been taken off its path of progress, he said: "We need to bring our conversation back from violence and hatred to one of progress, jobs, and love between our people. And we cannot do that at home without our largest skill base on the planet - all you people in this room."

"Together, we must steer India back to its original strengths, we need to make India the centrepiece of ahimsa, of non-violence, of compassion."

He also said that he was in Bahrain for a purpose and that is "to tell you what you mean to your country".

"That you are important. To tell you that there is a serious problem at home, to tell you that you are part of the solution and that I am here to build the bridge between your world and home," he added.
State-run Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) has announced its plans to set off its accumulated losses with funds from its share premium account.

In a release late on Monday, IOB said it intends using Rs 7,650 crore in its share premium account to write off its accumulated losses worth Rs 6,978.94 crore. The decision, approved by the bank board last week, will now be put to vote at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on January 30.

"The Bank proposes to utilise the balance in its share premium account as at 31.03.2017 of Rs 7650.06 crore to set off its accumulated losses on that date of Rs 6978.94 crore so as to present a true and fair view of the financial position of the Bank," the statement said.

"Necessary approvals have been obtained. The Bank is convening an extraordinary general meeting on 30.01.2018 for the purpose of obtaining the approval of the shareholders for the proposal," it added.

According to IOB, the bank is only setting off its losses to strengthen its balance sheet and and not writing these off .

"The proposed utilisation of share premium account to set off accumulated losses is a balance sheet neutral action. Book value of shares, Bank's net worth, equity capital structure and shareholding pattern will all remain unchanged," it said.

"No reduction in the paid-up share capital of the Bank Ais contemplated in the proposal . Capital adequacy ratios will not be impacted thereby."

IOB has recently been brought under the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)'s prompt corrective action (PCA) framework which forces banks to increase recoveries of bad loans, reduce risky loans and strengthen their capital base, among other measures, in order to improve their balance sheet position .

The RBI has brought 11 state-run banks, including IOB, IDBI Bank, Allahabad Bank, Central Bank of India, UCO Bank and Bank under the PCA owing to their weak financial health caused by the huge accumulation of non performing assets (NPAs), or Abad loans.

--IANS

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Filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta's "Jonaki" will have its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2018.

"Jonaki" is the second feature film of the National Award winning director, whose first feature "Labour of Love" won 13 international awards.

The film, an Indo-French-Singaporean co-production, stars Jim Sarbh and sees the 81-year-old actress Lolita Chatterjee making her comeback as Jonaki.

Produced by Magic Hour Films, For Films, and Catherine Dussart Productions, "Jonaki" is a tale of an 80-year-old woman who searches for love in a strange world of decaying memories, while her lover, now old and grey, returns to a world she is leaving behind.

It will be screened in the Bright Future Section of IFFR 2018 to be held between January 24 to February 4.

Sengupta said in a statement, " 'Jonaki' is an esoteric journey of the unfulfilled life of an 80-year-old woman. It is a film that is very personal to me and to have its world premier at Rotterdam is a true honour.

"IFFR celebrates and upholds auteur cinema with the highest regard and I think this is the perfect platform for us to showcase our vision."

Samir Sarkar of Magic Hour Films, the principal producer of "Jonaki", describes the movie as a "powerfully poignant tale of love lost".

--IANS

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Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday launched a pilot 'Delhi Common Mobility Card' which will enable commuters to travel in both Delhi Metro and 250 select city buses.

The Delhi govenrment aims to shift to a 'Common Mobility Card' which could be used to travel in Metro and all Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and cluster buses by April 1.

Under the pilot project, Delhi Metro cards will be valid in select 200 DTC and 50 cluster buses from Monday.

During the trial, by tapping the Metro card on an Electronic Ticketing Machine or ETM in a bus, a ticket would be generated, which would also reveal the balance in the passenger's Metro card.

Currently, ETMs are used by conductors in buses to issue tickets.

The money deducted from commuters' Metro cards will go to Delhi Metro Rail Corp (DMRC), which issues the Metro cards. The money will be later transferred to the Delhi government.

Delhi Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot said that after the trial period, a new card would be designed which would have both DMRC and Delhi government etched on it.

Commuters would be able to purchase and recharge these cards at all Metro stations, railway stations, airports, Inter State Bus Terminals and DTC bus pass counters.

--IANS

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Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday admitted that he also "made mistakes as he is also a human being" and promised to present a new party, whose focus will be to give a "new vision" to India.

"You said Congress party accepted its mistake. I am admitting that I also made mistakes. I am a human being. We all make mistakes," said Gandhi during an interaction with the NRIs here to a query about the mistakes of his party.

"You said there is gap. There is a gap in the media. In media, the campaign could be one-sided. But, we are fighting on the ground. Gujarat is the BJP's bastion and stronghold. But they somehow managed to escape the defeat (in the assembly election)," he added.

"Congress party has questioned them (the BJP) in the state. So, we are fighting them on the ground. Our focus is to give India a new vison, a new Congress party to the people.

"If you give a new Congress party to you, it is not a big thing to defeat the BJP. We have made mistakes. But we too have our strengths in the party. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had predicted a 2 per cent fall in GDP when demonetisation was announced," he noted.

"There is a good mix of experience and youth in the Congress party. We will present a new Congress party to you and a new vision to the country. You will see a dramatic change in the Congress party," said Gandhi.

Gandhi also said, during the interaction, that job creation, transforming the education system, and developing a strategy for global healthcare system will be three main focus of the Congress party when it comes to power.

He also said the Congress will put pressure on the BJP government to pass the Women Reservation bill in Parliament.

"When we come to power we will definitely pass the women reservation bill in the Parliament. We already have reservation for women at the panchayat level but we will ensure that it is passed in the Parliament," he said in response to a question.

--IANS

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A militant was killed and a woman injured on Sunday during a gunfight between security forces and the militants in central Kashmir's Badgam district, officials said.

"On specific inputs regarding the presence of terrorists, Jammu and Kashmir Police, 53 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) launched a cordon and search operation in Aarizal village of Beerwah tehsil in Badgam," an official of Defence Ministry said.

The official said that during the search operation, one militant while trying to flee came out of the house he was hiding in and fired indiscriminately at the security forces. As a result, a woman was injured.

"In retaliation, a terrorist has been neutralized, whose identity and affiliation is being ascertained. Arms and ammunition have been recovered," the official said.

The injured woman was taken to a hospital and her condition is now reported to be stable.

According to the official, the area is under cordon and searches are being conducted.

Police has also confirmed that one militant was killed in the area during a brief encounter with the security forces.

--IANS

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Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant was stabbed to death outside his home here late on Sunday, police said Monday, adding two alleged assailants have been arrested fro the crime.

According to police, Sawant, a former municipal corporator, was returning home around 11 p.m. from a meeting in Thakur Complex, to his apartment in Videocon Towers, riding pillion on a scooter.

As they nearly reached his home, suddenly, an unknown person kicked the scooter, making it go off-balance and forcing the driver to stop it. He then entered into a heated argument with this unknown person even as Sawant waited.

As per the witness accounts of the incident, two other persons, who were lying in wait on the dark road, then attacked Sawant with knives and choppers, making him collapse in a pool of blood barely 400 metres from his house.

A police team which arrived at the crime scene soon after took him to a nearby private hospital where he was pronounced dead. The 63-year-old leader suffered at least 17 serious wounds including on the neck, chest and head.

Police have checked CCTV images in the area and have identified one of the two suspected killers. The preliminary motive behind the crime appeared to be extortion.

"We have arrested two persons, and seized an autorickshaw used in the crime, while further investigations are underway," Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone XII, Vinay Rathod said.

The assailants had recced the area in advance before committing the crime at the opportune time, travelling in the autorickshaw, the sleuths have found.

Sawant served twice as municipal corporator from Poisar village area, lost the elections once, and his daughter was elected once, after which he was appointed a deputy Vibhag Pramukh by the Shiv Sena.

He is survived by his wife, politician daughter, and another daughter and a son who are both doctors.

Large parts of Kandivali east observed a spontaneous shutdown as a mark of respect and around 5,000 mourners, including representatives of various political parties, turned up for Sawant's funeral ceremonies which were completed at the nearby Borivali east crematorium in the afternoon.

--IANS

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Barcelona's recently-signed midfielder, Brazil midfielder Philippe Coutinho, is suffering from a right thigh injury that will keep him on the sidelines for three weeks, the club said on Monday following medical examinations.

Coutinho recently made the move from Liverpool to Barcelona and was presented to fans at the Camp Nou on Monday, reports Efe.

"I am very happy. I have always said I am living a dream, we are very happy to be here," the Brazilian star said on his arrival in Barcelona.

The thigh injury had already prevented him from playing in his final few games at Liverpool.

Coutinho signed his contract Monday at Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium, posing with his jersey alongside the club's president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, who recounted how Coutinho has been pursued by Barca for months.

"We were trying it last summer. We had known for some time that it was necessary for him to come," Bartomeu said.

"Coutinho wanted to come here, it was one of his objectives. His desire, his effort and his patience have been decisive for him to be here today, because there were other clubs that had an interest in signing him," said the leader.

On Saturday, Barcelona announced it had reached an agreement with Liverpool FC for the transfer of the 25-year-old player, and would sign him for the rest of the 2017-2018 season and five more.

Barca, which currently leads the La Liga standings and has qualified for the knockout stage of the Champions League tournament, said Coutinho's contract would include a 400 million euro ($481 million) buyout clause.

Although the club did not reveal further details, British media reported that Barcelona had agreed to pay Liverpool a 120 million euro transfer fee, as well as up to 40 million euros in "variables," to acquire the Brazilian player.

This makes Coutinho the most expensive player in Barcelona's history.

--IANS

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A Sessions Court here on Monday rejected the bail plea of a Class XI student of Ryan International School, arrested for allegedly murdering Class II student Pradhuman Thakur on September 8 last year.

Lawyers for the nearly 17-year-old accused sought bail for him. Arguments from the prosecution and defence were completed on Saturday.

Said Barun Thakur, father of the murdered child: "We are happy and satisfied by the decision of the court. One day we will get justice for the innocent Pradhuman."

"The court also slapped a Rs 21,000 fine on the defence for filing 'unnecessary' applications and wasting time of the court," a prosecution lawyer told IANS.

The next hearing of the case will be held on January 22.

On January 3, the accused was presented in the Sessions Court and was sent back to the protection home for 14 days judicial custody till January 17.

Last week, for the first time, the accused was presented before the Sessions Court after the Gurugram Juvenile Justice Board on December 20 ordered that the accused would be tried as an adult. The accused is in an observation home in Faridabad in Haryana.

Officers from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said the accused murdered the younger boy just to defer a unit test and a scheduled parent-teacher meeting.

Police had on September 8 arrested Ashok kumar, 44, a school bus conductor, for allegedly killing the child.

The case was handed over to the CBI on September 22. It did not find any evidence against Kumar and took the Class XI student into custody on November 8. Kumar got bail on November 21.

--IANS

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The CBI on Monday said its investigation in the multi-million dollar AgustaWestland VVIP helicopter deal case during UPA government is "independent and very strong".

The central agency's remarks came after an Italian appeals court in Milan on Monday acquitted Italian defence and aerospace major Finmeccanica's former chief Giuseppe Orsi and former AgustaWestland CEO Bruno Spagnolini in connection with the case.

"The case in which an Italian court today (Monday) acquitted Orsi and Spagnolini was investigated by Italian Police itself. The accused were earlier convicted by a trial court in Milan. Now, the Italian Police have options to appeal in highest court. We have investigated independently in the case and our case is very strong," CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal told IANS.

The Milan court cleared Orsi and Spagnolini on the basis of insufficient proof in the charges framed against them.

In December 2016, Italy's highest court had ordered a re-trial of the case, after the former executives of the Rome-based group were found guilty on corruption charges related to a 560 million euros ($672 million) contract to supply a dozen helicopters to New Delhi.

A judge earlier that year had sentenced Orsi to four and a half years in prison for corruption and falsifying invoices and Spagnolini to four years in jail.

The CBI on September 1 last year filed chargesheet in the Rs 3,726 crore AgustaWestland chopper case against Orsi, Spagnolini, former Indian Air Force chief S.P. Tyagi, his cousin Sanjeev, former IAF Vice Chief J.S. Gujral, advocate Gautam Khaitan, and three alleged European middleman -- Christian Michel, Guido Haschke, and Carlo Gerosa.

Tyagi, who was the Indian Air Force chief from 2004 to 2007, his brother Sanjeev and Khaitan were allegedly involved in irregularities in the procurement of 12 AW-101 VVIP helicopters from Britain-based AgustaWestland.

They were arrested in December 2016 by the agency in connection with the case. Currently, they are out on bail.

The CBI, which registered an FIR in the case on March 12, 2013, has alleged that Tyagi and other accused received kickbacks from AgustaWestland to help the manufacturer win the contract. The FIR mentioned charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, and under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

The CBI said the company was favoured in lieu of illegal gratification accepted through different companies in the name of consultancy services.

Tyagi, the CBI alleged, took bribes of several crores of rupees through middlemen and a complex route of companies in several countries from AgustaWestland to change the specifications of the contract -- reducing the operational flight ceiling from originally proposed 6,000 metres to 4,500 metres and bringing down the cabin height to 1.8 metres.

The CBI probe allegedly revealed that several payments were made to the Tyagi brothers by the European middlemen as bribery.

--IANS

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Going by the popular mood in Rajasthan, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje on Monday said Sanjay Leela Bhansali's movie 'Padmavati', now rechristened as 'Padmavat', will not be released in the cinema halls of the state.

"The sacrifice by Queen Padmini (also known as Padmavati) is a matter of honour and respect for all of us and hence we will not allow anyone to show disrespect to this honour," Raje added further.

Queen Padmini, she said, "is not just a historical character for us, but a pride for all of us and we will not allow anyone to disrespect this pride in any away".

Raje has also written to state Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria in this regard.

Bhansali's period saga Padmavati, which was mired in controversy, is finally going to see the light of day and it will now be released on January 25 as Padmavat across the country but not in Rajasthan.

Vasundhara Raje said the film would not be released in the state "respecting the sentiments of the people of Rajasthan".

"Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has already written to Smriti Irani (Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting) in this regard. As it touches the emotions of people of Rajasthan, we will not allow it to be released in Rajasthan," Home Minister Kataria told media persons.

Replying to a question as to why it was being released in India then, he said that the controversial part had been removed from the film.

"Although no one has seen it as of now, the CBFC (Central Board for Film Certification) and producer are claiming the same (removal of controversial part). Once it is released, the facts will come to the fore," he added.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president Ashok Parnami also said that the film Padmawat would not be released in Rajasthan.

"If there is tampering with the history in any film that affects the sentiments of people of Rajasthan, then it will not be released in the state," he added.

Later in the day, the Rajput Samaj also called a press conference to announce that the central as well as the state governments would lose a major share of their vote bank if they chose to allow the release of the controversial film.

Rajpur Sabha chief Giriraj Singh Lotwada said: "Queen Padmini is our honour and we will not allow our honour to be desecrated at any cost."

Shri Rajput Karni Sena, however, still remains firm on its stand, disallowing release of the movie. It is now demanding that the names of the characters in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie be changed.
President Ram Nath Kovind will inaugurate the 4th International Dharma-Dhamma Conference on "State and Social Order in Dharma-Dhamma Traditions" in Rajgir of Nalanda district in Bihar on January 11, officials said on Monday.

Nalanda University Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh told the media here that the varsity, in collaboration with the Centre for Study of Religion and Society, India Foundation, Ministry of External Affairs and the Vietnam Buddhist University, is organising the conference from January 11 to 13 at Rajgir International Convention Centre, Rajgir -- about 100km from here.

The event is being organised as part of the commemorative events to celebrate the Silver Jubilee year of ASEAN-India Dialogue Partnership, with active support of the Ministry of External Affairs.

Besides President Kovind, Bihar Governor Satya Pal Malik, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Sri Lankan Minister of Foreign Affairs and Development Assignments Tilak Marapana and Kingdom of Thailand's Minister for Culture Vira Rojpojchanarat, among others, will attend the conference.

The overall theme of the Conference -- State and Social Order in Dharma-Dhamma Tradition -- which aims to facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and foster harmony at the global level and also seeks to explore the shared values of the dharmic traditions that may provide the guiding light to the world and a vibrant sense of inter-connectedness.

As one of the defining principles of the human civilization, Dharma-Dhamma provided the structure upon which the broad array of human existence and cosmic life was built across the globe.

The notion of Dharma-Dhamma, in its manifold manifestations, including truth and non-violence, peace and harmony, humaneness and spiritual linkages and universal fraternity and peaceful co-existence, served as a moral compass that guided people in the Indian sub-continent through ages and continues to shape and sustain the Indian cultural ethos.

--IANS

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Human Rights Watch on Monday called on French President Emmanuel Macron, currently on his first official visit to China, to urge Beijing to improve its human rights situation.

Macron was expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and sign various bilateral agreements, Efe new agency reported.

He is the first European leader to travel to China after Xi renewed his five-year mandate as head of the Communist Party in November 2017.

According to HRW France Director Benedicte Jeannerod, Macron must follow through on his commitment to demand greater respect for human rights as he himself said that "France's diplomatic and economic imperatives with China cannot justify cover-up of the question of human rights".

"If Macron is serious about promoting liberty and democracy worldwide, he should arrive with a long list for President Xi and other Chinese leaders," Jeannerod said in a statement.

HRW also urged the French President to publicly reiterate call for full freedom of movement for Liu Xia, widow of the late dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who is still under house arrest.

Macron, as part of his state visit was also urged to discuss that how French companies can operate in China given rising Internet censorship and the restrictions on virtual private networks that allow users to circumvent the digital blockade.

HRW also said that Macron must further express concerns about China's anti-rights conduct against the UN and Interpol.

Official French sources told Efe that rebalancing trade relations with Beijing is a major priority of the visit as France has a deficit with China of around $36 billion, the largest of its foreign trade.

--IANS

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Independent MLA Hanuman Beliwal has attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi while announcing that Rajasthan needed a new political party to provide an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress.

Beliwal made the announcement at a huge rally of farmers here on Sunday. He said the youths had seen through both the major political outfits and "their false promises" and were looking for a change.

Beniwal asked people to refrain from getting lured by promises he said Modi would make at Pachpadra while laying the foundation stone of the Barmer Refinery.

The farmers' rally discussed issues such as loan waiver, irrigation and employment for youths. It was announced that similar rallies will be organised in Bikaner, Sikar and Jaipur.

And in Jaipur, a third front would be announced to contest the next election.

The rally was also addressed by MLA Kirorilal Meena who said: "Hanumanji and I will work together to form a new government in the state.

"We will rule the state by following the 'JM' way where 'J' stands for Jat and 'M' stands for Meena, Mali, Meghwal and Muslims.

"JM also stands for Judicial Magistrate which means that we will work as judicial magistrates to arrest the BJP and Congress in the state," he added.

Meena said Modi had earlier promised to bring home the heads of 10 Pakistani soldiers for every single Indian soldier killed by Pakistanis.

"Now, so many soldiers are dying on the border. Why is Modi not keeping his promise?"

--IANS

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Armed bandits on a motorcycle opened gunfire and snatched a bag containing Rs 3.5 lakh from an employee of a gas agency owned by the family of an Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister, police said on Monday.

Police said two employees with the currency bag were on their way to the office from the gas godown on Sunday evening when three persons stopped them and fired a shot, injuring one of them in the leg.

Senior Superintendent of Police Swapnit Mamgai said the police were confident of resolving the case soon and that the injured man was out of danger.

--IANS

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The Indian government's proposal to send Haj pilgrims through the sea route has got the green signal from the Saudi Arabian government, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Monday.

The discussion on reviving the sea route came up during the signing of the annual bilateral Haj agreement for 2018 between India and Saudi Arabia in the presence of Naqvi and Saudi Minister for Haj and Umrah Mohammad Saleh bin Taher in Mecca on Sunday.

Naqvi said officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through the sea route can commence in the coming years.

"Sending pilgrims through ships will help cut down travel expenses significantly. It will be a revolutionary, pro-poor, pilgrim-friendly decision," Naqvi said.

The ferrying of Haj pilgrims between Mumbai and Jeddah by waterway was stopped in 1995.

The Minister said that another advantage with ships available these days is they are modern and well-equipped to ferry 4,000 to 5,000 persons at a time. They can cover the 2,300-odd nautical miles one-side distance between Mumbai and Jeddah in just three to four days.

The old ships used to take 12 to 15 days to cover this distance.

Naqvi said that last year he had discussed the option to revive sea route for Haj pilgrimage with Transport and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari.

He said that Haj 2018 has been made fully digital.

On the issue of Indian Muslim women going to Haj for the first time without mehram (male guardian), the Minister said that separate accommodation and transport has been arranged for these women.

Also, female Haj Assistants will be deployed for their help.

More than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without mehram and all of these women will be exempted from the lucky draw. These women would be travelling in groups of four or more women, according to the new Haj policy of India.

So far, around 3.59 lakh applications have been received for Haj 2018, against the quota of around 1.70 lakh pilgrims.

"For the first time, we have given option to Haj pilgrims to opt for another embarkation point. This will ensure that there is no financial burden on Haj pilgrims even after removal of Haj subsidy. This decision has received overwhelming response," Naqvi said.

--IANS

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A plane of the Saudi-led coalition crashed in the northern province of Saada in Yemen, but its pilots were later rescued, local media reported.

The jet crashed because of a technical fault and the two pilots were rescued after a joint search and rescue operation, the Al Akhbariya TV reported on Sunday.

The coalition's air forces carry out regular surveillance and airstrikes on Yemeni territories controlled by the Houthi rebels as part of its war on Yemen that began in 2015.

Earlier, the Houthi-controlled Saba news agency reported that its air forces shot down a fighter jet from the Saudi-led coalition, without providing further details.

The war in Yemen has killed hundreds of civilians as result of the airstrikes and clashes between Yemeni armed groups.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Comedian Seth Meyers opened his stint as host of the 75th Golden Globe Awards with a political undertone and jokes around US President Donald Trump and sexual harassment scandals in Hollywood.

He opened his monologue saying: "Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen", adding that it would be the first time in months that men won't be terrified to hear their names read out loud.

The host, dressed in black, took a dig at Hollywood names Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, who have been alleged for using their position to sexually harass people. The award show was held here on Sunday.

"A lot of people thought it would be more appropriate for a woman to host tonight's show, and they might be right, but if it makes you feel any better I have absolutely no power in Hollywood," Meyers said, as the camera panned to actor Seth Rogen in the audience.

"Remember when he was the one causing trouble with North Korea?" Meyers questioned, referring to Trump's tweets calling out on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

There was mention of Weinstein in his monologue.

"Don't worry, he'll be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person to be booed at the annual In Memoriam," said Meyers, which was followed by groans from the audience.

"It will sound like that," he added.

Meyers, who was hosting the Golden Globe Awards for the first time, took a jibe at disgraced actor Kevin Spacey too.

He said: "Despite everything that happened this year, the show goes on. For example, I was happy to hear they were going to do another season of 'House of Cards'. Is Christopher Plummer available for that too? I hope he can do a Southern accent because Kevin Spacey sure couldn't."

The joke was in reference to Plummer replacing Spacey in the film "All the Money in the World".

Sexual misconduct and gender equality was the highlight of the monologue, but there were undertones of politics too.

"We're all here at the courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. A string of three words that could not have been better designed to infuriate our president. The only name that would make him angrier would be the 'Hillary Mexico Salad Associated'."

The comedian wrapped up his monologue on a serious note, saying: "People in this room worked really hard to get here but it's clearer now than ever before, the women had to work harder. So thank you for all that you do. I look forward to seeing you lead us into whatever some next."

The ceremony was aired in India on Vh1, Comedy Central and Colors Infinity on Monday morning.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday arrived at the Indian Naval Base INS Hansa in Goa to participate in the 'Rakshamantri's Day at Sea' programme, an official said.

During the two-day event, which began on Monday, she is expected to board several naval ships and witness live naval operations, said an Indian Navy statement.

Sitharaman will also witness "various naval operations, including practice missile firings, warships submarine and aircraft interaction exercises, flying operations from aircraft carrier and flypast during the two-day sea sortie".

She was received by Admiral Sunil Lanba and other senior officials of the Indian Navy.

--IANS

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With digital transformation comes the daunting task of preparing a workforce for technologies like Big Data, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) that can address the massive demand coming from governments and businesses in India.

According to a top IBM executive, the time is ripe to start the journey right from schools and universities, leading to up-skilling and re-skilling the enterprise and start-up developers' community in the country.

Between 2010 and 2030, India's working population is expected to expand from 750 million to almost one billion.

"Without adequate education and training, such population growth poses an increased risk of the emergence of a growing class of under or unemployed. Skill is emerging as the new currency across businesses globally and in India," Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem and Start-ups, IBM India/South Asia, told IANS.

"We believe the industry is no more bifurcated into blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The 'new collar' job community is embracing technology rapidly, forging deeper relationships with ecosystem partners and acquiring 'in-demand' skill-sets," Kumar emphasised.

Sensing the urgent need to build a talent pool for the future, IBM recently announced a collaboration with the Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) to spur emerging technology skills in the domestic telecom industry.

The agreement outlines a roadmap to build capabilities in the areas of information and communication technology (ICT) to provide the required and relevant skills for the telecom Industry.

"This collaboration will provide an opportunity to students and young professionals to get skilled in emerging technologies including Big Data, Cloud Computing, IoT and mobile applications that have a huge potential in the telecom sector," Kumar said.

IBM's student developers' programme (career education) that infuses software capabilities that are industry specific and market relevant has helped more than 24,000 students and faculty members develop industry-relevant software capabilities.

Developers are the new marketers and decision-makers across organisations and it has become imperative to make them the centre of the core strategy.

"We also have collaboration with US-based Galvanize and Coursera to offer cognitive and Cloud curriculum to developers to help them equip with new age requirements around data science and Machine Learning (ML), etc," the IBM executive said.

In 2017, IBM organised "IBM DeveloperConnect Roadshow" in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad where it offered day-long workshops that combined technical sessions and hands-on activities, led by technical experts from IBM around data science, ML and Cloud.

"We are going to organise the 'IBM Code' day for developers in Bengaluru on February 14 which is another step towards introducing the developer community to IBM technologies," Kumar told IANS.

IBM also has an online learning platform Cognitiveclass.ai that offers several online courses in the area of data science, AI, big data and Blockchain.

"We also work with external Edtech partners who offer structured courses and curriculum based on these technologies. For instance, Jigsaw Academy is leveraging the IBM Data Science experience platform and CognitiveClass.ai to offer advanced customised learning to students and professionals on data science," Kumar noted.

Similarly, GlobalKnowledge is a training partner offering detailed courses on Cloud and cognitive development, also enabling professional certifications in these domains.

"Today, we are witnessing start-ups adopting Cloud at a fast pace, looking at creating enterprise class solutions and use best practices at a competitive cost, more agile systems and greater efficiency," Kumar said.

IBM Cloud Private is an integrated Cloud platform built on a Kubernetes-based container architecture.

It is a pre-packaged offering with enterprise-grade content, bringing Cloud native environment to Private Clouds so that start-ups can maintain control over core data while giving developers the flexibility to easily update and launch new apps in a secure manner.

"We foresee start-ups in the FinTech, e-commerce and HealthTech space leveraging IBM Cloud Private for on-premises software portfolio or easily integrate next-generation data and software optimised for Cloud," Kumar added.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

--IANS

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(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The party of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh has named a new leader after he was killed last month by Shia Houthi rebels, his one-time allies in the countrys civil war.

The General People's Congress party (GPC) elected 65-year-old Sadiq Abu Ras, a former Agriculture Minister, as the new chief of the party, Xinhua news reported on Monday.

The election took place in central Sanaa, the rebel-held capital, amid a tight security presence.

"The position of the party remains steadfast against the aggressors (Saudi-led military coalition) on the soil of the Yemeni people," the party said in a statement.

The statement did not mention Saleh's death, but demanded the release of his family members, party's leaders and journalists of Saleh-owned television channel Yemen al-Yawm from Houthi-run prisons.

However, senior leaders of the party rejected the party's statement and the election.

"Any statement that does not publicly break relations with Houthi murderers and declare war against them does not represent us and is not our party," the GPC Secretary-General Yasir al-Awadhi tweeted.

On December 4, Houthi fighters killed Saleh, many of his family members and party's leaders after a week of deadly clashes that erupted after the former President switched sides of allies and declared "opening new page with the Saudi-led coalition".

Saleh, who ruled the country for 33 years and stepped down following 2011 popular protests, had waged six wars against Houthi movement that ended in 2010.

However, Saleh allied with Houthis and supported them when they advanced from their far north stronghold of Saada province and stormed the capital Sanaa in September 2014, where they overthrew Saudi-backed government and forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.

In March 2015, the Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen to restore Hadi to power and roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi-Saleh rebels.

Three years now into Yemen's civil war, over 10,000 Yemenis, mostly children, have been killed and three million others have been displaced, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
South Korea's top nuclear envoy will visit the US this week to discuss the Korean peninsula's nuclear issue, an official said on Monday.

Lee Do-hoon, special representative for the Korean peninsula peace and security affairs, will visit Washington from Wednesday to Friday, South Korea's Foreign Ministry was cited as saying by Xinhua news agency.

During the visit, Lee will meet his US counterpart Joseph Yun, a chief negotiator at the six-party talks for the denuclearised Korean peninsula.

Lee will also meet key figures of the US government in charge of North Korea affairs, the Foreign Ministry said.

The South Korean envoy will make an indepth discussion with the US officials on ways to peacefully resolve the peninsula's nuclear issue and improve inter-Korean relations.

Lee's visit to Washington would come a day after the high-level talks between South and North Korea on January 9 in the truce village of Panmunjom.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Train services in different parts of West Bengal were affected due to a call to disrupt rail traffic by Jharkhand Disom Party, coupled with dense fog in the eastern states.

The agitation by supporters of the Jharkhand-based party, which has a presence in tribal infested areas in parts of Bengal, forced the authority to either divert or short terminate or short originate a number of express and passengers trains, causing inconvenience to passengers.

Opposing land acquisition in tribal areas, the party had called "rail roko" and accordingly, its supporters blocked railway tracks at Indrabil, Kantadih, Madhukunda and Maluka stations.

In South Eastern Railway (SER), train services were affected on non-railway issues in Adra and Chakradharpur divisions, a SER spokesperson said in a statement.

According to the statement, Ranchi-Howrah Special was short terminated at Adra and would return back from Adra to Ranchi. Santragachi-Purulia Rupasi Bangla Express, leaving Santragachi on Monday, was short terminated suitably over Adra division and would return.

Shalimar-Bhojudih Aranyak Express leaving Shalimar on Monday would also be short terminated over Adra division.

Dhanbad-Tatanagar Subarnarekha Express leaving Dhanbad was run on diverted route via Purulia-Kotshila-Muri-Chandil, the spokesperson said, adding a number of trains to and from northern states of the country was also delayed including the Howrah and Sealdah Rajdhani Express trains by an average of 10 -12 hours, due to dense fog in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and parts of West Bengal.

Several trains have been rescheduled owing to delay in arrival of corresponding down trains.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US President Donald Trump has announced that will postpone the announcement of his "Fake News Awards of 2017" to January 17, citing high interest.

"The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt and biased of the mainstream media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17, rather than this coming Monday," the President tweeted on Sunday.

"The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated."

Trump has often labelled coverage critical of his administration as "fake news", accusing leading US outlets of spreading "fake news" against him during the presidential election campaign as well as after he became President.

In December, multiple American news outlets reported that the White House was planning to remove the current head of the State Department, as his relationship with Trump was "strained".

Trump denied it as "FAKE NEWS!" on Twitter, and added that "He's not leaving... We work well together."

On December 11, Trump dismissed a New York Times report that he watched four to even eight hours of television each day.

"Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day - Wrong!" Trump Tweeted.

Responding to Trump, Clifford Levy, a deputy managing editor at New York Times, tweeted that the newspaper stood by its story, which was based on 60 interviews.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US President Donald Trump spoke to his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron over the phone and discussed the Korean Peninsula and Iran, according to the White House.

Trump updated Macron on the developments of the situation on the Peninsula, underscoring the "international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearisation" of the Peninsula, Xinhua news agency quoted the White House as saying.

The two leaders also talked about the demonstrations in Iran.

Iran had earlier blasted the US' stance on the demonstrations in the country, with its Ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo slamming the Trump administration's attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Islamic Republic.

Trump on Saturday said that he was willing to talk with Kim Jong Un and that he supports the upcoming talks between the two Koreas slated to take place on Tuesday.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress on Monday said an atmosphere of fear has been created in the country by the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre and demanded that FIR against "The Tribune" and its staffer for alleged breach of details of a large number of Aadhaar cards be withdrawn.

The party said if the government believed in the Freedom of Speech and Expression and the freedom of press, then the FIR must be unilaterally withdrawn by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which operates under the central government.

"An atmosphere of fear, terror, intimidation and coercion and stifling of democratic dissent has been systematically created, perpetuated and perpetrated by the NDA-BJP government," said Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari.

Dissenting journalists were put to death and media organisations which dared to speak truth were systematically hounded and targeted, he said.

"NDTV was raided and the Wire has been subjected to systematic coercion and intimidation. The Tribune, which runs a story on Aadhar data breach, is rewarded with an FIR which names the journalist and the institution itself," he added.

Tewari further said: "If this is not fascism, if this is not an attempt to muzzle dissent, if this is not gross abuse of state authority, then I am afraid, we possibly do not have a definition for this.

"That is why, the time has come for all progressive, right thinking and patriotic forces to stand united against this systematic repression which has been unleashed on democratic dissent by the Narendra Modi government," he added.

The party also asked the people to introspect and decide on the kind of government they would want post 2019.

"They must seriously introspect, reflect and make a choice... Do they want a government which believes in the enlightened idea of India, where they can live without fear and intimidation, where they do not have to look over their shoulder before they utter the next sentence...

"... Or they want the country which is majoritarian, which is theocratic where the government is prepared to bite off your tongue the moment you utter a word. The time has come to make that fundamental choice," said Tewari.

"That is our appeal to the people of India and they should make a choice 'whether you want a liberal and democratic India or a theocratic and fascist India'," Tewari added.

--IANS

sid/nir

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actress Sonam Kapoor, who is gearing up for the release of her forthcoming film "Pad Man", says that she wants to do good work and be a part of good films.

Recipient of Special Mention Award at the 64th National Awards for her role in the 2016 film "Neerja", Sonam was asked if she thinks "Pad Man" would help her achieve another National Award and she said: "I don't do films for awards, I just want to do good work and be part of good films."

Sonam, along with Akshay Kumar, was present on the set of Grand Finale of Zee Marathi's Show "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa" on Sunday to promote "Pad Man".

During the media interaction, Sonam also revealed that she will be shooting for Vidhu Vinod Chopra's film after which she will start her next film "Zoya factor".

"I am going to shoot in February, March and April for Vinod (Chopra) Uncle's production. Then I will start preparing for 'Zoya Factor'," she said.

"Also there are three releases this year, first 'Pad Man' this month, then 'Veere Di Wedding' in May and then Dutt biopic, so I will be busy with films. So, there is no time for other plans." said Sonam.

Talking about Marathi cinema, Sonam said she is glad that the industry is being recognised for its worth.

"Marathi films and songs have become very trendy right now. But people aren't aware of the years of hard work and quality work that happened earlier. But I am so glad that it has become so popular now that even we have to come and promote our films on the Marathi platform," she said.

Directed by R. Balki, "Pad Man" is scheduled to release worldwide on January 26.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The brutal cold that has chilled a good part of northeastern US, with temperatures often significantly below zero, will begin to moderate at the beginning of the week, according to the latest reports.

The National Service (NWS) said that, although the "bitter" cold and freezing winds continued affecting the northeast on Sunday, the situation will moderate on Monday and that trend will continue through mid-week, reports Efe news.

The national map shows evidence of a certain return to normalcy across most of the nation, with the exception of Maine, Virginia and the eastern region of North and South Carolina, the NWS said.

In the Philadelphia-Boston corridor, the rise in the mercury on Sunday will put the temperature at about minus 5 degrees Celsius between Monday and Tuesday, warming to around freezing, CNBC reported.

In interior states such as Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, weather authorities are warning that ice accumulation and freezing rain could make road travel difficult.

Meanwhile, New York's JFK airport experienced more flight delays on Sunday, with record low temperatures of minus 15 degrees Celsius, breaking the 2014 record.

Besides JFK, the airports at Fort Worth and Dallas, and Chicago's O'Hare, were also affected by the freezing weather.

In what proved to be one of the nation's coldest spots, New Hampshire's White Mountains, the mercury dropped on Sunday to minus 22 degrees Celsius, with winds of up to 60 km per hour.

Over the past week, the frigid storm conditions have left at least 22 people dead in the country, according to CNN.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With reference to the Chinese Whispers item From CBI court to peoples court (January 8), one can genuinely appreciate the pain and agony of Lalu Yadavs younger son and the leader of Opposition in Bihar assembly, Tejaswi Yadav soon after Mr Lalu Prasad was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail in a case by a CBI special court on Saturday. But the moot question obviously arises: Can the so called peoples court now change the fate-accompli of Lalu Yadav more so when he has already been convicted by the CBI Court a criminal case?
On Monday, Congress President promised a brand new Congress in the months to come. He said there would be dramatic changes in the Congress party, particularly among the leaders who head its state units.
Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj on Monday concludes a five-day visit to Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. Its a precursor to New Delhi hosting leaders of the 10-member Asean as chief guests at the Parade.
On Sunday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s central election committee announced the name of Manju Basu as its candidate for the bypoll from the Noapara assembly constituency in West Bengal. Basu, a two time former Trinamool Congress (TMC) legislator from Noapara, left the BJP embarrassed after she turned down the candidature and said she was still with the TMC. I am a loyal soldier of Mamata Banerjee. I am still with the TMC and have full faith in Mamata Banerjee, Basu told the media. However, BJP sources claimed Basu had given a missed call to the partys toll-free number to get a membership. You can have offers from various political parties. But whether you will accept it or not is a personal decision, said Basu, known to be a close associate of Mukul Roy, who has now joined BJP.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday said it will contest at least 35 seats in the Meghalaya Assembly elections.

Elections to the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly are due in the first half of this year as the term of the present Assembly expires on March 6.

"We are hoping to field 35 candidates for the next election as we have good chance of winning," AAP state president Wanshwa Nongtdu told reporters here.

He claimed the chances of the AAP is "good".

The AAP leader also exuded confidence that the party will form the next government by fielding "common man" as its candidates.

"We are Aam aadmi and we will have common man as candidates, we have few retired officers, few intellectuals who want to contest and we prefer our candidates be to be AAP candidates," he said.

Declaring the first list of candidates, Nongtdu said Peter Aiborlang Dohkrud will contest from Mawlai, Dorass Ramsiej from Mawkyrwat, Wonder Lapang will take on Congress president Celestine Lyngdoh from Umsning constituency in Ri-Bhoi and Debrict Binone from Nongpoh.

According to the AAP leader, the candidates have been approved by AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and party observer for North East, Rakesh Sinha.
Around 1,300 women from India will go on Haj without a "Mehram" and will be exempted from the lottery system this year for the annual pilgrimage, Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi reiterated today.

Till now, women Haj pilgrims were required to be accompanied by their husbands or a "Mehram" during the annual pilgrimage.

"Saudi Arabia has relaxed the norms and allowed a group of at least four women to go on Haj without a male companion," Naqvi said during an interaction with PTI journalists here.

The term "Mehram" refers to a male, whom a woman cannot marry (i.e. father, brother, son etc.).

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his 'Mann Ki Baat' radio programme, had said that the women who have applied to go on Haj without a 'Mehram' would be exempted from the lottery system and allowed to go on the annual pilgrimage," the minority affairs minister said.

The Centre had decided to allow the women pilgrims over the age of 45 years to undertake the pilgrimage in groups of at least four, sans a "Mehram", he added.

Meanwhile, referring to the impasse in the Rajya Sabha between the ruling party and Opposition, due to which the "triple talaq" bill could not be passed during the just- concluded Winter session of Parliament, Naqvi said it was not a setback for the government.

"We have made the practice of triple talaq illegal and unconstitutional. Hence, there is a provision of imprisonment (for the offenders)," the minister said.

Pointing to the response of the Muslim community to the triple talaq decision, Naqvi said there was "not a single protest", unlike the protests on the Shah Bano issue during late Rajiv Gandhi's tenure as prime minister.

"The Congress missed an opportunity to make a statement about our bill in the Lok Sabha. It did not even suggest an amendment. Now, it is stalling the bill in the Rajya Sabha," he added.

Asked if the Muslims were going away from the BJP, Naqvi said, "For the first time, the BJP got around 17 per cent votes from the Muslim community in Gujarat. We realised this when we analysed the results booth-wise."



This is the first time the saffron party had received so many votes from the Muslim community, the minister said, adding, "The figure used to be around 8-9 per cent."



In last month's Gujarat polls, with 99 MLAs, the BJP secured a simple majority in the 182-member Assembly, 16 less than its 2012 tally of 115.

The opposition Congress, which had won 61 seats in 2012, managed to increase its tally to 77.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A total of 147 Indian fishermen, released by Pakistan after spending eight months in captivity in Karachi, crossed over to India through the border here today, officials said.

In a goodwill gesture, Pakistani authorities had released 147 fishermen yesterday.

Their release followed a December announcement by Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal that nearly 300 Indian fishermen would be freed in two phases till January 8.

On December 28, Pakistan had released the first batch of 145 Indian fishermen, who were held there on similar charges.

The fishermen travelled from Karachi to Lahore and then crossed through the Wagah border today, officials said.

Fishermen from Pakistan and India are frequently detained for illegally fishing in each other's territorial waters since the Arabian Sea does not have a clearly defined marine border and the wooden boats lack the technology to avoid being drifting away.

Owing to prolonged bureaucratic and legal procedures, the fishermen usually languish in jail for several months.

A number of non-governmental organisations in both India and Pakistan have raised the issue, pressing their governments to release arrested fishermen without much delay.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling "emotional and excited" as he prepares to visit his birthplace during the four day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month.

Moshe, 11, was two-year-old when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based LeT terrorists.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents' bodies, was saved in a daring move by his brave nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

"Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on January 15. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories," an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshe's grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5 in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

"I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House," Moshe had told the Indian Prime Minister.

Modi had responded by saying, "Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere".

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on January 14.

"Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug," Rosenberg said adding, "he is hoping to meet the Indian Prime Minister again during his India trip".

"He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully PM Modi 'at his home in Mumbai'," the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

"During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the site seeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment," Rosenberg noted.

Moshe's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

"It is heart warming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India haven't forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one", Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said that the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like "homecoming" for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshe's bar mitzvah in Mumbai.Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued ten year multiple entry visas to Moshe andhis grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honourary citizenship by the Israeli government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Madras High Court was today informed that nativity certificates presented by 296 students from other states admitted to MBBS courses in Tamil Nadu through NEET in 2017-18 were found to have been issued without any inquiry or scrutiny.

The submission was made by a committee of advocates and government officials after a random verification of the certificates complying with a directive of Justice N Kirubakaran.

The judge had earlier given the direction on a batch of petitions by aspiring medical students seeking to quash the merit list of the admission on the ground that many students from outside the state allegedly produced dual nativity certificates.

The petitioners contended that many students from other states were allotted MBBS seats in Tamil Nadu based on nativity certificates obtained "fraudulently", adversely affecting their chances to get admitted in the courses.

During the course of hearing, it came to light that a total of 1,269 students had applied in two states, claiming nativity in both the states for admission to medical courses.

Subsequently, the court directed advocates representing the petitioners and the government to randomly verify the certificates.

The committee found that certificates submitted by 296 students admitted under the CBSE category were issued without any scrutiny.

Such certificates were issued online, before actual physical copies were issued, the committee informed the court.

The supporting documents filed for issuance of nativity certificates were vague and most of them did not denote the actual native place, the memo added.

Recording the submissions, Justice Kirubakaran directed the committee to file the findings in an affidavit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nepal police have arrested four people from capital Kathmandu for their suspected involvement in smuggling hides of red panda, the endangered species found primarily in Eastern Himalayas.

Acting on a tip-off, the police detained the accused from Tokha Municipality yesterday and recovered the rare species' hides from them, an official statement said.

The suspects were arrested and sent to District Forest Office, Hattisar, Kathmandu for further investigation and action today, the Himalayan Times reported, quoting officials of Nepal's Metropolitan Crime Division.

According to the National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1973, the red panda, also known as Ailurus, is classified as highly endangered species in Nepal.

Some 220 red pandas, which are slightly larger than a domestic cat with a bear-like body and thick russet fur, were found in eastern Nepal during a census conducted in 2015.

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Four people were killed and 12 others injured when their car dashed into a roadside tree on the NH-28 due to dense fog early morning today, the police said.

The accident took place near Dadri village under Safdarganj police station area, they said, adding three people died on the spot.

The injured were taken to the district hospital from where the seriously injured were being rushed to Lucknow's Trauma Centre, where one more succumbed to injuries, SP Anil Kumar said.

The identity of the victims was not known yet, he said.

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Amid outrage on the FIR lodged over the reporting of alleged Aadhaar data breach, the government today said it has been filed against "unknown" accused while asserting its commitment to the freedom of the press.

A day after the Delhi police confirmed registering of an FIR on January 5, based on a compliant by Aadhaar-issuing body UIDAI, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad took to Twitter to clarify the government's position on the issue.

"The government is fully committed to freedom of Press as well as to maintaining security and sanctity of Aadhaar for India's development. FIR is against unknown," he said.

Though the complaint by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) named four persons, including the Chandigarh -based daily The Tribune's reporter who had filed the story on alleged breach in Aadhaar database, Prasad said the FIR was against "unknown".

"I've suggested UIDAI to request Tribune and its journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders," he said.

After filing the police complaint, the UIDAI had said in a statement, "This is a case in which even though there was no breach of Aadhaar biometric database, because UIDAI takes every criminal violation seriously, it is for the act of unauthorised access, criminal proceedings have been initiated."



The move attracted strong criticism from various media organisations, including The Editors Guild of India, which sought withdrawal of the case.

The Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, Harish Khare, had said in a statement yesterday that "the authorities have misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise and have proceeded to institute criminal proceedings against the whistleblower".

He said the daily would explore "all legal options" open to it to defend its freedom to undertake serious investigative journalism.

The UIDAI had also said that it respects free speech, including the freedom of the press, and its police complaint should not be viewed as "shooting the messenger".

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Journalists under the banner of the Press Club of Shimla, today held a meeting and submitted a memorandum to Himachal Pradesh Governor Acharya Devvrat protesting the UIDAI filing a case over a report in The Tribune on alleged Aadhaar data breach.

A delegation led by press club president Dhananjay Sharma called on the governor at the Raj Bhawan here and appraised him about the incident.

They said that the action by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was totally uncalled for and a brazen attack on the press press.

"We are shocked over the move of the government and condemn it and vow to fight it out," the memorandum said.

The Delhi Police has registered an "open-ended" FIR on a complaint from the UIDAI over the report on the alleged data breach of more than one billion Aadhaar cards.

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The acquittal of former top executives of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland-- Giuseppe Orsi and Bruno Spagnolini -- will have no bearing on the CBI case as it is based on an independent investigation with strong evidence, senior central agency officials said today.

The comments came after Orsi, ex-president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, and Spagnolini, a former CEO of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, were acquitted by an Italian court today.

The officials said the same set of evidence had resulted in their conviction earlier.

The sources said the case in Italian courts is based on the evidence gathered by the Italian authorities whereas the CBI carried out a completely independent investigation in the matter.

They said there is an option of appeal with Italian authorities even after the order of the Milan court of appeals.

"We have had a completely different probe. We have very strong case," CBI Spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said here.

In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considered definitive until the appeals process has been exhausted.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 by Italian authorities looking into alleged corruption into the sale of 12 helicopters to India for the use of VVIPs worth Rs 3600 crore.

The two were accused of international corruption and false invoicing in relation to bribes exchanged for the contract with India.

Both were cleared on charges of committing international corruption at the first-instance trial in 2014 but convicted of false invoicing and sentenced to two years in prison.

Both appealed against the conviction, while the prosecution appealed against the acquittal on the corruption charge.

In December 2016, the supreme court of cassation ordered a repeat of the appeals trial.

Milan's third court of appeal today acquitted Orsi and Spagnolini, who were serving four-and-a-half years and four years sentences under the charges.

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Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone today said it has added two new dredgers to become the largest fleet in the country.

"Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited (APSEZ), India's largest port developer and part of Adani Group today announced the addition of two new 8000 m3 Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers (TSHDs)," the company said in a statement.

These dredgers are among the largest in the Indian Fleet of TSHDs, the company said.

The Royal IHC, world leader in dredge building, designed and engineered the state-of-the-art TSHDs as per APSEZ specifications and delivered it to the Adani team at Holland last month, the company said, adding that both the dredgers have arrived at Adani's Hazira Port after their maiden voyage through the Suez Canal route.

"We at Adani are proud to dedicate the two new dredgers to the nation, taking our fleet strength to 19 dredgers; it is the largest dredging fleet in the country. This will substantially increase our capacity for dredging in APSEZ.

"These TSHDs are a big asset, as they will also support dredging efforts in other Indian Ports and will further facilitate in Port led initiatives of the Government," said Karan Adani, CEO, APSEZ.

Adani Hazira Port Pvt Ltd (AHPPL) is strategically located close to the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) along the West coast, which accounts for a major part of the country's trade.

The port handles all types of cargo including bulk, break-bulk, bulk liquid chemicals, petroleum products & edible oil, containers, automotive and crude.

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The Vodafone Group on Monday told the Delhi High Court that it was agreeable to consolidation of the two international arbitrations it has initiated against India in connection with a tax demand of Rs 110 billion under a retrospective law of 2012.

Vodafone has initiated arbitration proceedings under the India-United Kingdom and India-Netherlands Bilateral Investment Protection Agreement (BIPA) in connection with the tax demand raised against the company in relation to its $11 billion deal acquiring the stake of Hutchison Telecom.

The telecom major's lawyer, senior counsel Harish Salve, told Justice Manmohan that it will tell the second tribunal, under the India-UK BIPA, to consolidate the two proceedings if India consents to it.

Salve said this would be the company's defence against India's argument that the two proceedings under the different BIPAs was an abuse of the process of law.

The senior lawyer also said that since the Supreme Court had allowed appointment of a presiding arbitrator in the second arbitration under India-UK BIPA, nothing survives in the central government's suit opposing the proceedings.

The apex court had on December 14 last year said that the chairman or presiding arbitrator can be appointed so that the tribunal is set up but it should not commence hearing till the Delhi High Court decides the pending matter by January 10.

During his nearly four hour-long argument, the lawyer also said that Indian courts do not have the jurisdiction to stop the arbitration proceedings being conducted under international law.

"Domestic courts have no role to play in public international law," he said and added that since the second arbitral tribunal has also been formed, the high court need not hear the matter any more.

He also argued that the government should go after Hutchison since it primarily earned money from the transaction.

The arguments remained inconclusive today and will continue tomorrow.

The Centre had earlier argued that disputes encompassing tax demands raised by a host state were beyond the scope of arbitration provided under the BIPA as taxation is a sovereign function and can only be agitated before a constitutional court of the host state.

It had also argued that laws passed by Parliament cannot be adjudicated by an arbitral tribunal and do not fall within the ambit of BIPA or any other international treaty.

The government is of the view that the $11 billion Hutchison-Vodafone deal was liable for tax deduction at source (TDS) under the Income Tax (IT) Act.

As Vodafone had not deducted the tax at source, the government had raised the demand of Rs 11,000 crore which was subsequently quashed by the Supreme Court on January 20, 2012.

Thereafter, the government made a retrospective amendment to the IT Act which re-fastened the liability on Vodafone.

Aggrieved by the imposition of tax by the retrospective amendment, Vodafone International Holdings BV (VIHBV), Vodafone Group's Dutch subsidiary, had invoked the arbitration clause under India-Netherlands BIPA through a notice of dispute of April 17, 2012 and notice of arbitration of April 17, 2014.

While the proceedings under the India-Netherlands BIPA was pending, the telecom major had initiated arbitration under the India-UK BIPA as well on January 24, 2017.

Challenging the second arbitration, the government had said the two claims were based on the same cause of action and seek identical reliefs but from two different tribunals constituted under two different investment treaties against the same host state.
Indian-origin actor Aziz Ansari finally took home the Golden Globe this year as he emerged winner in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series Musical/Comedy category for his role in "The Master Of None".

The 34-year-old actor said he was elated on his first win at the annual awards as going by the websites he thought he had already lost the award this year too.

"I genuinely didn't think I would win as all the websites said I was gonna lose. Also, I am glad that we won this one. To lose two of these in a row would have been a really sh***y moment for me. But this is nice. The only reason my acting is good on the show is because everyone holds me up," Ansari said in his acceptance speech.

"I want to thank Italy for all the amazing food we ate on season two," he joked.

The actor also thanked his parents for their support.

Ansari was nominated in the same category for the Netflix show "The Master of None" in 2016.

He was up against Anthony Anderson of "Black-ish", Kevin Bacon of "I Love Dick", William H Macy of "Shameless" and "Will and Grace" star Eric McCormack.

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Assam Chief Minster Sarbananda Sonowal today invited industrialists from Tamil Nadu to invest in the state, saying his government has announced key initiatives to boost trade, including the "Act East Policy".

Sonowal addressed a conference organised here as part of the state's first ever Global Investors' Summit scheduled to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi next month in Guwahati.

He said Modi had termed the north-east region as the new engine of India's growth.

The chief minister said his government has succeeded in bringing in investments worth about Rs 7,000 crore to the state since his government came to power.

"That is only in the last 1.5 years. New policies, reforms, establishing new units by famous brands (in Guwahati) has given a new vibrancy to the industrial scene of the state," he said.

The government has announced very attractive tax incentive for the industry.

"A new startup policy supporting young entrepreneurs has been put in place. We have also announced a very attractive IT enabled services policy and a bio-technology policy," Sonowal said.

Detailing other initiatives taken up by the government, he said steps have been taken up to upgrade Guwahati airport as an international airport, mainly connecting the South-East Asian countries.

Work for the construction of new terminal and expansion of the airport has already begun, he added.

Noting that the government has taken steps to give Guwahati a new global identity, the chief minister said, "We are planning to develop Guwahati as a new city with modern facilities to boost economic and commercial ties between India and ASEAN countries".

He said Bangladesh has set up an office of Assistant High Commissioner, while Bhutan recently opened a consulate in Guwahati.

"We are working to get consulates of more neighbouring countries and ASEAN nations in Guwahati", Sonowal added.

Additional Chief Secretary of Assam, Ravi Capoor told reporters that the state was in the advanced stage of rolling out the North East Investment Policy.

"I think may be next month or in this month, we would be seeing a new investment policy. It is in the very advanced stage of discussion and finalisation," he said.

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Several Delhi University colleges have been accused of collecting application fee more than once from those aspiring to join the institution as assistant professor.

It has also been alleged that the colleges neither called any applicant for an interview nor returned their money.

While DU's Dean of Colleges Devesh K Sinha said he did not have data about the number of applications received and money submitted, Academic Council member and professor of Sri Aurobindo College Hansraj Suman said there was a huge sum of "unclaimed money" collected as application fee.

"Nearly 40 colleges advertised for recruitment to the posts of assistant professors two years back with a fee of Rs 500 for general category and Rs 250 for OBC, SC/ST and handicapped aspirants," Suman told PTI.

Neither the applicants were interviewed nor the fee was refunded, he said, adding that after the new vice-chancellor took charge in February 2016, the SC/ST and women candidates were exempt from submitting fee.

"The colleges have the addresses of every applicant and can always send cheques to the applicants if they want to refund," Suman said, adding he had also raised the issue during the Academic Council meet.

Responding to the allegation, Sinha told PTI he would look into the issue and direct colleges to arrange for refund.

Delhi University Teachers Association President Rajib Ray said there are colleges that have advertised twice or thrice for the same post but did not interview anyone.

"Ethically, one should call for interview or refund the money. After 18 months, there is another advertisement for the same post. At least they should exempt applicants who have already paid the money," Ray said.

The DUTA president said very few appointments took place since 2015 and the number of applications received are as high as 7 lakhs.

"Since 2015, interviews have taken place in very few departments of merely eight to nine colleges. Both colleges and university have been maintaining a lackadaisical attitude," he said.

The DUTA said it has raised the issue in executive council meetings as well.

The Academic Council is a body which takes all academic decisions of the university. These decisions come into effect after being approves by the executive council.

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In a joint operation, the Uttar Pradesh Police's Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) and the Kanpur police conducted raids at three hotels in Ghantaghar pocket and nabbed a suspect allegedly operating for a terror module active in the eastern belt, officials said today.

The suspect was interrogated intensively by the ATS and Intelligence sleuths, the police officials said.

During the raid, ATS sleuths seized a laptop and diary of another suspect from a hotel room that was locked from the outside. The door was broke open and the belongings including laptop and diary belonging to a suspect from Muzaffarpur in Bihar seized, they said.

Superintendent of Police (East), Anurag Arya, told PTI that top ATS sleuths had received inputs about a suspect from national intelligence agencies.

After getting a tip-off, the ATS team comprising 40 commandos apart from police personnel of Rail-Bazar, Harbansh-Mohal, Babupurwa, Fazalganj and Raipurwa raided three hotels in Ghanta-ghar vicinity.

ATSs Inspector General (IG), Asim Arun, confirmed the raids but declined to share details.

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A Gurgaon district court on Monday rejected the bail application of the 16 and a half-year-old boy, accused in the brutal Pradhuman Thakur murder case.

The defence lawyer had filed the bail application after the case was transferred from the juvenile justice board last month.

The boy's lawyer Ashwani Kumar Singh said the next hearing of the court in this matter will be held on January 22 and proceedings will be carried out in-camera.

The court on Monday rejected the bail of the accused minor and we are waiting to know the ground under which the bail was rejected, Singh said.

Seven-year-year old Pradhuman Thakur was found murdered with his throat slit inside the toilet of Ryan International School, Bhondsi, on September 8 last year.

The CBI had arrested the class 11 student exactly 2 months after the incident on November 8, 2017.

Pradhuman Thakur's father Barun Thakur was present inside the courtroom.

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Bangladesh today lifted a 2012 ban on the export of its national fish hilsa, whose key markets include India, to check its smuggling and tap into the growing global demand for the popular but scarce food species.

The country's new fisheries and livestock minister, Narayon Chandra Chanda, announced the decision here, just a day after he assumed charge.

Bangladesh's Ministry of Commerce had banned the export of hilsa on August 1, 2012 due to its low availability.

Chanda said the ban appeared "largely futile" and so "we will export hilsa in official channel to stop its smuggling".

"Our hilsa production has (also) increased and there is demand in the international market so we want to move towards exports," Chanda told journalists.

Bangladesh had launched a frantic campaign to protect hilsa, its most precious but dwindling aqua resource, several years ago. It had eventually imposed the ban for an indefinite period in 2012, even risking its ties with neighbouring India and several oil-rich Middle Eastern nations.

Chanda said despite the ban, hilsa fish was being smuggled out of the country and "as a result the government is losing out in taxes (and) if we allow exports it will open the way for legal trade and diminish smuggling significantly".

He said the government, however, will continue its conservation campaign particularly to protect the female hilsa.

According to official statistics, hilsa makes up nearly 11 per cent of total fish produced in Bangladesh and its trade contribution to the country's gross domestic product stands at one per cent.

Bangladesh's water bodies produce nearly 75 per cent of world's hilsa yield, while the country and last year the patent office named hilsa a "geographical indication product".

Hilsa is globally reputed for its unique taste but apart from the fish itself, its roe or egg tastes as good as, if not better than, caviar, one of the world's most cherished dishes.

Bangladeshi people are also known for their skill to cook hilsa in more than 50 ways with mustard, curd, brinjal, green banana, baking in young plantain leaves, smoke, fry, and so on.

According to literature on fish resources, the roaming ground of hilsa ranges from Persian Gulf to Gulf of China through Bay of Bengal but 75 per cent of it are produced in Bangladesh. The species is regarded the best in terms of taste.

Basically asea-water fish, hilsa makes its way up fresh water rivers travelling up to 1300-km during mating season, a feature that gives it the repute of being the most mobile fish species having its roaming ground both in sea and fresh water.

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Opposition party in Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today described the proposed move to ban the entry of Indian officials in Gurudwaras in UK as unfortunate and said nobody can stop anybody from entering the 'Guru ghar' for paying obeisance.

"It is a very unfortunate what they (Sikh groups) had done. Guru ghar is open for all," SAD chief Sukhbir Badal said while addressing the media here today.

"Going to a Guru Ghar (House of the Guru), nobody can stop anybody. We are very clear on it... I do not agree what their statements are," he said.

A Sikh group in the UK had said that it wanted to ban Indian officials from entering Gurudwaras, alleging that they were "interfering" in the internal matters of the Sikh community.

"Sikhs in the diaspora are fed up with Indian Government officials and their agents increasingly interfering in our institutions and Sikh affairs, undermining of Sikh campaigns for greater rights and internal matters," Amrik Singh, the Chair of the Sikh Federation (UK), had earlier said in London.

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Thousands of Republican Party of India (RPI) workers today participated in a morcha seeking action against perpetrators responsible for the last week's violence against Dalits in Bhima Koregaon in Pune district.

Local RPI leaders demanded that the judicial inquiry ordered by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis into the violence be completed within a stipulated time and the culprits be awarded punishment.

The morcha was taken out from Vishrambaug locality of the city to the new Collector's office, a distance of around 4 kms.

Fadnavis had announced the probe by a sitting High Court judge into the caste clashes that broke out in areas nearby Bhima Koregaon on January 1 in which one person was killed.

The violence occurred during the bicentennial event to commemorate the defeat of Peshwas by the British forces in the Bhima Koregaon battle.

Dalits view the battle as the defeat of "casteism" of upper-caste Peshwas.

In the wake of the incident, various Dalit organisations observed a statewide bandh on January 3 which turned violent.

The Pune rural Police had registered an FIR against right-wing leaders Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide 'Guruji' under SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act and under various sections of the IPC including attempt to murder as one person was killed in the caste clashes.

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Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was today conferred the first Mufti Mohammad Sayeed Award for Probity in Politics and Public Life at an official function here in the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir.

The award, given by J-K Governor N N Vohra, has been constituted by the PDP to commemorate the death anniversary of PDP founder and two-time state's chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

The PDP founder died on January 7, 2016.

Flanked by the CM Mehbooba Mufti, Indian-origin UK politician Lord Meghnad Desai, Deputy Chief Minister Bihar Sushil Kumar Modi, Governor N N Vohra presented an award -- a shawl and traditional fur cap to Kumar -- at the General Zorawar Singh Auditorium in the city.

Speaking on the occasion after receiving the award, Kumar thanked Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed Trust for conferring award to him for his Probity in Public life.

"It is moment of happiness for me and Bihar that I was honoured by Jammu and Kashmir. My focus is on development, peace and a corruption free and transparent governance inBihar", Kumar said.

The Bihar chief minister, who was all praises for the PDP founder, invoked Mufti Mohmmad Sayeed's famous words when he said, "no solution will come from confrontation" and that disputes can be resolved through talks only.

"Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was a tall political leader and only home minister of India from Muslim Community. He always worked for peace," he said.

Earlier, Mehbooba Mufti had written to her Bihar counterpart stating that there was no better person - in terms of probity in political and public life - who could receive this award.

She also threw light on Kumar's links with J&K, when as Union railways minister had laid foundation stones for Anantnag and Baramulla rail lines.

Kumar had closely worked with Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in the VP Singh government at the Centre. He was the minister of state for agriculture, when the latter served as home minister.

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Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik today gave his assent to a bill that seeks to withdraw 20,000 "politically-motivated" cases filed across the state over protest demonstrations, including one against Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and some others.

The case against Adityanath and a dozen others was filed for holding a meeting in alleged violation of prohibitory orders over 22 years ago.

Eight bills, passed during the winter session of the UP legislature, got the governor's nod including the Uttar Pradesh Criminal Law (Composition of Offences and Abatement of Trials) (Amendment) Bill, 2017.

Apart from Adityanath, who also holds the home portfolio, Union Minister Shiv Pratap Shukla, BJP MLA Sheetal Pandey and ten others were respondents in the case filed at Gorakhpur's Pipiganj police station on May 27, 1995.

Gorakhpur is Adityanath's home turf, and he represented the Lok Sabha constituency for five terms before being appointed the chief minister earlier this year.

Adityanath, who was then the local MP, allegedly made a hate speech following the killing of a Hindu youth in a clash between two groups during a Moharram procession. He was arrested and spent 10 days in jail before being enlarged on bail.

In May this year, shortly after Adityanath took over the reins of the state, his government had told the Allahabad High Court that he cannot be prosecuted in another case for allegedly making a hate speech that was said to have triggered communal riots in Gorakhpur in 2007.

The governor also gave approval to the UP Prayagraj Mela Authority, Allahabad, Bill 2017, aimed at having improved arrangements for holding Maha Kumbh, Kumbh, Magh and other 'melas' at the Sangam in Allahabad, a Raj Bhawan communique said here today.

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Dazzling in colourful kimonos and wafting clouds of hairspray in their wake, thousands of young Japanese women marked their entry into adulthood today -- before hitting a bar to celebrate.

Formal "Coming of Age" ceremonies, which began as a rite of ancient samurai families, were held across Japan for its 20-year-olds, reminding them of their responsibilities after becoming old enough to legally drink and smoke.

Their male counterparts looked more like they were attending job interviews as most opted for the kind of plain business suit they will wear as "salarymen" in the future.

"I'll definitely be having a few drinks tonight," Arisu Oshida told AFP, wrapped in a salmon-pink kimono and expensively made-up with cherry-red lips and gold flakes in her hair.

"It will probably taste a little different knowing it's legal to drink alcohol. I expect to be somewhere between tipsy and smashed by midnight."



Huddled against the chill wind, crowds of new adults offered prayers at Tokyo's Meiji shrine, while many more flocked to Disneyland just outside the capital to ride rollercoasters and pose for photos with Mickey Mouse and friends.

Celebrated on the second Monday of the year from snow- swept northern Japan to the subtropical south, Coming of Age Day includes those who turned 20 the previous year or will do so before March 31.

There were an estimated 1.23 million new adults as of January 1 -- largely unchanged from the previous year and half the 1970 peak of 2.46 million, according to government figures -- mirroring Japan's shrinking population.

"My parents warned me not to go mad tonight," said Makoto Kusaka, sporting a dark suit and a pair of gold earrings.

"I suppose I have to be more responsible now I'm officially an adult. But I'm not confident that I won't be very drunk later tonight.

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A minor tribal boy is being treated for bullet injury which his family claimed he suffered when he was shot by police in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district.

However, a top police official said the boy, admitted to a hospital, may have been caught in the crossfire between security forces and Naxals in the insurgency-hit district, and sustained the injury.

The 11-year-old boy, Boti Markam, is undergoing treatment for injury to his thigh.

"Boti Markam, a resident of Karka village, has sustained bullet injury. He is being treated in the Government Hospital at Jagdalpur (in Bastar district)," Deputy Inspector General of Police (south Bastar range) Sundarraj P told PTI.

Once he recovers and is fit enough to speak, his statement would be recorded for further needful action, the IPS officer said.

The DIG said the boy may have got injured after being caught in the crossfire during an encounter between security forces and ultras in Karka last week.

"We are investigating the matter. But it is for sure security forces never intentionallyharm any civilian," he added.

The parents of Markam had told reporters after he was admitted to a hospital in Dantewada yesterday that police fired at him when he was grazing cattle in forests.

On January 6,Markam, along with another boy of the village, had gone to forests located on the village's outskirtsto graze cattlewhen police personnel arrived there, his father told local reporters.

After police personnel allegedly fired at them, the two fled from there. While trying to escape, Markam sustained bullet injury on his left thigh, he said.

According to his father, his son was next day brought to Bacheli (in Dantewada) on a makeshift wooden stretcher by his relatives and admitted at a local hospital.

The family has not lodged a police complaint in his regard, he said.

Markam was shifted to the Jagdalpur hospital last night.

Notably, on January 6, a Naxal was gunned down in an encounter with a joint team of the District Reserve Guard (DRG) and CoBRA (commando battalion for resolute action) in forests between Karka and Dugalpara under Gangaloor police station limits.

Police suspect the boy may have received the injury in the same exchange of fire.

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The Supreme Court today said it appeared that the matter relating to probe into extra-judicial killings, alleged fake encounters by the Army, Assam Rifles and police in insurgency-hit Manipur was not being taken up seriously by a Special Investigation Team of the CBI.

The apex court observed this after it was informed that despite its order in July last year, only 11 FIRs out of a total of 92 cases have been registered by the SIT in the matter.

"It appears to us that the matter is not being taken up by the CBI and the SIT with the seriousness which it deserve," a bench comprising Justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit said and directed the CBI's DIG, who is in-charge of the SIT probe, to remain present before it on January 16.

The bench also asked the DIG to file a status report of the progress made in the investigation in these cases.

The top court had on July 14 last year set up an SIT comprising five CBI officers and ordered registration of FIRs and probe into the extra-judicial killings in Manipur.

It had asked the CBI director to nominate a team of five officers for the SIT, who will lodge the necessary FIRs and complete the investigation into alleged fake encounters by December 31 last year.

During the hearing, the lawyer appearing for petitioners, said that the court had ordered lodging of FIRs till December 31 but as per the office report, only 11 such FIRs have been registered in a total of 92 matters.

"The SIT is dragging its feet," the counsel said after which the bench asked Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Maninder Singh about it.

The court also asked Singh as to whether any one from the SIT was present in the courtroom for the hearing.

"Our experience is that if an SIT has been set up, somebody from the SIT should be present in the court for two things. One to tell us what is going on and second is to instruct the lawyers. SIT cannot and should not say that our job is only to investigate," the court said.

Meanwhile, the ASG, who initially said that the matter was listed for only an application, told the bench the DIG would be present in the court on the next date of hearing.

Senior lawyer Colin Gonsalves, who was appearing for the petitioners, said that former head constable of the Manipur police Herojit Singh, who was an eye witness to fake encounter cases, has filed an application in the court.

He said that CBI team had raided Herojit's residence and in 2010 seized his three diaries, in which he had recorded details of such fake encounter cases.

Gonsalves also said the SIT has not yet recorded the statements of witnesses.

However, the ASG said that Herojit's case has nothing to do with the matter pending before the court and it was not maintainable.

He contended that Herojit was an accused in one of these cases in which trial was going on and he should have moved the lower court or the high court on the issue of these diaries.

Regarding the ASG's submissions, Gonsalves said Herojit was accused in a case in which he had allegdly shot at an unarmed man on the instructions of his senior officer.

The apex court, which is hearing a PIL seeking probe into 1528 extra-judicial killings, had in July last year ordered registration of FIR in 81 cases including 32 probed by a Commission of Enquiry, 32 cases investigated by judicial enquiries and high courts, 11 cases in which compensation has been awarded by the NHRC and six cases probed by a commission headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Santosh Hegde.

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The South African pacers proved too hot to handle for India who were left tottering at 82 for seven in their second innings at tea on day four, chasing what now has become an improbable 208-run target in the series opener here.

Vernon Philander took 3-22 as Indian batsmen failed to apply themselves against quality fast bowling on a seaming and bouncy track.

The visitors need another 126 runs for victory with 48 overs remaining in the days play. Twenty nine overs were bowled in the afternoon session which ended with the fall of Wrddhiman Saha (8).

Post lunch, India began their chase in circumspect fashion. Shikhar Dhawan (16) looked to make a quick start while Murali Vijay (13) struggled against Philander.

Vijay survived twice via DRS reviews for caught behind and lbw appeals. Vijay wasnt third time lucky though, caught behind off Philander in the 8th over as the slide began for India.

Six balls later, Dhawan was caught pulling much like the first innings, only this time off Morne Morkel (2-29). Four overs later, India were struggling at 39/3 as Cheteshwar Pujara (4) was caught behind off Morkel too.

Virat Kohli (28) and Rohit Sharma (10) stemmed the fall of wickets by adding 32 runs for the fourth wicket. After drinks though, Philander returned from the other end and trapped Kohli plumb in front.

India were desperately struggling thereafter. Keshav Maharaj dropped Sharma (on 9) off Kagiso Rabada (2-30) in the 23rd over, but the batsman didnt make this chance count. An over later, he played on off Philander.

First innings hero Hardik Pandya (1) then gave slip catching practice off Rabada as India lost 7 wickets for 47 runs in the session. Saha fell at the stroke of tea, trapped lbw by Rabada. R Ashwin was batting on 1 not out at tea.

This was after Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah shared six wickets as South Africa were bowled out for 130 runs (41.2 overs) in their second innings at the stroke of lunch.

The hosts lost 65/8 in this morning session to lead by overall 207 runs. Shami took 3-28 while Bumrah returned figures of 3-39.

Starting from day two overnight 65/2, the slide began in the second over of the morning. Shami had Hashim Amla (4) caught at gully with Rohit Sharma taking a low catch. The decision went up to the TV umpire but he didnt find conclusive evidence to overturn the soft signal.

Four overs later, Shami sent back nightwatchman Kagiso Rabada (5), caught at second slip. In the 29th over then, when Bumrah had Faf du Plessis (0) caught behind off a snorter, South Africa were struggling at 82/5.

Bumrah also removed Quinton de Kock (8) as it became 92/6 and the collapse became imminent.

AB de Villiers (35) waged a lone battle at the other end but he just couldnt find anyone to support him as Shami trapped Vernon Philander (0) lbw to take 11/3 in six overs this morning.

South Africa crossed 100 in the 36th over as Maharaj (15) played a few strokes. Bhuvneshwar Kumar (2-33) then got down to action with the batsman caught behind in the 39th over.

Saha took his 10th catch of the Test when Morne Morkel (2) was caught behind off Kumar two overs later. This is an Indian record overseas and Saha went past MS Dhoni who had nine catches against Australia in his last Test at the MCG in 2014.

Bumrah completed South Africas misery as de Villiers holed out in the deep in search of some quick runs, rounding up a dismal morning. Dale Steyn, batting despite a bruised ankle, was the unbeaten batsman.

On day one, South Africa were bowled out for 286 runs in the first innings with Bhuvneshwar taking 4-87. India were reduced to 28/3 at stumps.

On day two, India finished with 209 runs in their first innings, surrendering a 77-run lead. South Africa were 65/2 at stumps with an overall lead of 142 runs. Hardik Pandya single-handedly kept his side in contention with 93 runs off 95 balls and then took 2-17 as well.

Day three was completely washed out due to persistent rain.

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China today made it clear that it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking its all-weather ally with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of combating terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's backing for Pakistan came as the US stepped up pressure on Islamabad to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The Trump administration last week suspended nearly USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we don't agree to place the responsibility of anti terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump stepped up criticism against Islamabad for providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused Pakistan of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan.

Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts.

"First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.

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A delegation of senior officials of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), which visited India last week, has apprised Indian political parties of the outcome of its Congress in October that re-elected President Xi Jinping as the boss of the party.

During the four-day visit that ended on Saturday, the delegation, headed by Meng Xiangfeng -- deputy director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee -- met with leaders of the the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the opposition Congress party and other left-wing parties, state- run China Daily reported today.

It apprised the political parties of the achievements of the once-in-a-five-year National Congress of the CPC which also endorsed Xis ideological thoughts, specially socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. His ideological thoughts have been included in the CPC constitution enhancing his stature in the party.

Xi, the general secretary of the CPC, is now ranked along with party founder Mao Zedong as he emerged as the most powerful leader heading the party, the military and the presidency.

The delegations visit to India followed the visits of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and later Chinas top diplomat Yang Jiechi last month to take part in the 20th round of India-China boundary talks held in Delhi last month.

The visits were the first such contacts between the two countries after the last year 73-day tense standoff at Dokalam. Officials say the visits were part of efforts by both the countries to improve bilateral ties, post Dokalam.

The CPC delegation which visited India briefed the Indian politicians and people from various communities in Delhi and Mumbai on the spirit of the 19th CPC Congress, the report said.

In 2015, Chinese President Xi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stimulate the exchange programme of the International Department of the CPC and India's External Affairs Ministry to enhance contact between Indian states and Chinese provinces.

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Intense cold weather in Nepal has claimed seven more lives, taking to 24 the death toll due to severe winter conditions over the past week in southern part of the country, according to a media report.

More than half of the them, 14, were reported from Saptari district while five each in Rautahat and Siraha districts in the Tarai region, it said.

Seven people, including a 7-month-old child, lost their lives due to excessive cold in various municipalities of Saptari district last night, the Himalayan Times quoted senior police officials as saying.

The locals of Saptari have sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, demanding relief materials for those vulnerable to cold.

In Rautahat, two people died due to freezing cold last night, Superintendent of Police Yagya Binod Pokhrel said.

Rautahat District Administration Office said warm clothes and blankets were being distributed to the poor and in Dalit settlements of the district.

In Siraha, a five-year-old child died due to excessive cold, taking the number of deaths due to cold wave in the district to five, according to the report.

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The Centre today asserted it is committed to the freedom of the press amid mounting outcry over an FIR lodged in connection with a newspaper report on alleged Aadhaar data breach with BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha wondering if people were living in a "banana republic".

The Delhi Police has registered an "open-ended" First Information Report(FIR) on a complaint from Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) over the report on alleged data breach.

The UIDAI's complaint sparked condemnation from the Confederation of Newspaper and Agency Employees' Organisations which demanded its withdrawal. Calling it an attack on the free press, the Confederation said the UIDAI should highlight errors in the report, if any, instead of taking penal action.

Though the complaint named four persons, including the Chandigarh-based daily The Tribune's reporter who had filed the story on alleged breach in Aadhaar database, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the FIR was against "unknown" entities.

"Government is fully committed to freedom of Press as well as to maintaining security and sanctity of Aadhaar for India's development. FIR is against unknown," Prasad said in a tweet.

"I've suggested UIDAI to request Tribune and its journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders," he said.

The UIDAI in a fresh statement said it is committed to the freedom of the press and will approach the newspaper and its reporter for cooperation in the investigation of alleged data breach.

"We're going to write to @thetribunechd and @rachnakhaira to give all assistance to investigate to nab the real culprits. We also appreciate if Tribune and its journalist have any constructive suggestion to offer," the UIDAI said in a tweet.

In a series of tweets, Shatrughan Sinha said a journalist who did a story to highlight the misuse of Aadhaar details was being hauled up for reporting an "alleged truth".

"What kind of 'justice' is this? Is there only politics of vendetta? Even public is being victimised for coming out honestly for society and the nation," he said in a tweet.

Sinha has been critical of the central government and the BJP leadership over a host of issues.

The actor-turned-politician also congratulated the Editors' Guild of India for its strong response to the lodging of an FIR in connection with the incident and expressed hope that the "genuine authorities" in the government and the Supreme Court in particular would take notice and come up with swift corrective measures.

"A journalist is hauled up for reporting alleged truth about malfunctioning & misuse of Aadhar. Are we living in a Banana Republic (sic)?" the tweet from the Patna Sahib MP read.

The Congress accused the Centre of "muzzling dissent" and adopting an "ostrich-like approach" by "prosecuting" the newspaper and the journalist who exposed the alleged breach.

Dubbing it as "a clear attack on journalism", Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari alleged that there have been systematic assaults on scribes and an atmosphere of fear and violence has been created against them.

"The newspaper which warns the government that the privacy and the private data of thousands of citizens are at risk is rewarded with an FIR which names the journalist as well as the institution itself," Tewari told reporters.

"If this is not fascism, if this is not trying to muzzle dissent, if this is not gross abuse of state authority, then I am afraid, we possibly do not have a definition for it....

In a statement, the Confederation of Newspaper and Agency Employees' Organisations said the action amounts to an attack on the freedom of the press and also denial of access to the press from reporting any unpalatable to those in authority.

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A sessions court today rejected the bail plea of a 16-year-old student, accused of killing 7-year- old Pradhuman Thakur at the Ryan International School here.

Additional Sessions Judge Jasbir Singh Kundu declined relief to the accused and imposed a cost of Rs 21,000 for "wasting court's time" in baseless litigation and directed the father of the accused to deposit the amount.

"The conduct of the appellant (accused) indicates that he is taking court proceedings for a joy ride. He has indulged in wasting precious court time in baseless litigation on account of which seven court hearings have gone down the drain.

"This court finds no irregularities, illegalities or impropriety in the impunged order dated December 15, 2017 passed by JJB, dismissing default bail application," the court said.

The court said the accused's ulterior motive in filing the present application was aimed to divert the track of the ongoing investigation or delay the probe and then "grab" the default bail.

It also directed in-chamber proceeding in the matter and ordered the media not to use the juvenile's name in any of the reports.

Talking to PTI, Barun Thakur, father of the seven-year old-boy Pradhuman Thakur who was found killed, welcomed the order and said he was satisfied with the verdict and the progress of the investigation so far.

The court had earlier reserved the order after hearing arguments of the counsel for the accused, the CBI and the complainant.

The defence counsel had claimed that the charge sheet in the matter was not filed within one month, as prescribed in the Juvenile Justice Act, and he was not given the required documents.

Opposing the contention, the CBI had said the mandatory period for filing a charge sheet was 90 days under CrPC provisions as the accused had been declared an adult by the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB).

Pradhuman was found with his throat slit in the school's washroom on September 8 last year.

The Gurgaon Police had claimed the crime was committed by a school bus conductor, which was later refuted by the CBI.

The probe agency had claimed the teenager had killed Pradhuman in a bid to get the school closed so that a parent- teacher meeting and an examination could be deferred.

The court was hearing an appeal filed by the accused against an order of the JJB denying him bail.

The JJB had on December 20 held that the teenager would be tried as an adult and directed that he be produced before the Gurgaon sessions court.

The JJB had noted that the accused was mature enough to recognise the consequences of his actions.

If convicted, the accused will stay in a correctional home till he is 21 years old after which the court can shift him to a jail or grant him bail, it had said.

The board had earlier rejected the bail plea of the Class 11 Ryan International School student.

It had set up a committee which included a psychologist from the PGI, Rohtak, for an expert opinion on the accused who was taken into custody by the CBI in November 2017.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 lowers the age of juveniles from 18 years to 16 years for heinous crimes such as rape, murder and dacoity-cum- murder, which warrant at least seven years of imprisonment.

However, the JJB first decides whether the crime was "child-like" or was it committed in an "adult frame of mind", following which it orders the accused to be tried as a juvenile or an adult.

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Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today launched a common card for rides on public buses and the metro, terming it a big step in the city's transport sector.

Delhi is the first city in the country to have a common mobility card, which can at present be used on 200 DTC and 50 cluster buses plying on different routes, apart from metro trains.

The buses of DTC's Raj Ghat Depot-I and Rohini Depot-I plying on different routes and those of Cluster scheme's BBM depot-II will have the facility as of now.

"It's a big step in the transport sector that will facilitate the seamless travel of people in Delhi," Kejriwal told reporters after a short ride on a DTC bus on the occasion.

The card, which will function like a debit card, will be operational in all DTC and cluster buses from April 1. The city has around 3,900 DTC and over 1,600 cluster buses.

Earlier, the Delhi government and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) agreed to authorise the metro smart card to be used as common mobility card for paying fares in DTC and cluster buses.

The Reserve Bank of India gave approval to the DMRC in February, 2017 for operating its pre-paid instrument called PPI-MTS (Prepaid Instrument Mass Transit System) for this purpose. The DMRC smart card is the first to get authorization under this category, said a government official.

The Smart card will be tapped on the Electronic Ticketing Machines (ETMs) available with bus conductors for payment of fares.

Smart cards can be purchased from any Delhi metro station. The common mobility cards will be made available at all the ISBTs, railway stations and tourist information centres of the Delhi tourism department in coming months, the official said.

Transport minister Kailash Gahlot was present during the launch along with top government and DMRC officials.

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Concerned about the deteriorating call drop situation, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will meet service providers on January 10 to discuss the burning issue and also the new service quality norms that have been implemented in the sector.

"We want to convey to the operators, the government's concerns on the state of call drops. Service providers have to get their act together," Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters here on Monday.

She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference to mark the completion of the first phase of Bharat Net project.

The meeting with telecom industry CEOs will be chaired by the DoT Secretary.

The meeting is also slated to discuss the new stringent call drop norms that were enforced by telecom regulator TRAI in October last year.

On the same day, DoT will also hold a separate meeting with the telecom regulator on the call drop issue.

The Telecom Commission, meanwhile, will meet on Tuesday to discuss multiple issues including some recommendations by Interministerial Group (IMG) on relief measures for the stressed industry, importantly, the raising of spectrum caps.
The Enforcement Directorate today sought cancellation of the bail to a chartered accountant, accused in a money laundering case and alleged to have links with RJD chief Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharti.

The ED's counsel alleged before Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva that CA Rajesh Agarwal laundered money for various persons through shell companies.

The counsel said Agarwal, the main accused in the case, was wrongly granted bail by the trial court while co-accused-- two Delhi-based businessmen brothers Surendra Kumar Jain and Virendra Jain-- are in jail under judicial custody.

It sought cancellation of the bail granted to Agarwal, saying since it was an economic offence he should not have been granted the relief.

Meanwhile, Agarwal's counsel claimed that he has not yet received the complete paperbook after which the court asked the ED to supply the documents.

The court listed the matter for consideration on February 13 and directed Agarwal's counsel to file his response to ED's plea seeking cancellation of bail.

Additional Solicitor General Sanjay Jain, appearing for the ED, had earlier told the court that the anti-money laundering agency was probing a separate graft case against Bharti, with whom Agarwal is suspected to have had links.

The ED has claimed that Agarwal was associated with some transactions involving a firm, allegedly linked to Rajya Sabha member Bharti, which is under the scanner for suspected tax evasion.

Agarwal, who was arrested on May 23 last year in connection with a Rs 8,000 crore money laundering racket allegedly involving two Delhi-based brothers, was granted bail on September 4 by the trial court, which said no purpose would be served by keeping him in custody.

The case had emerged after the ED filed a criminal complaint in February last year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

It was based on a charge sheet filed by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office against certain individuals and firms "for providing accommodation entries by accepting funds from their beneficiaries through mediators and converting the same into share premium transactions in the beneficiary company".

The ED claimed that the entire racket could be worth about Rs 8,000 crore.

It recently filed a second charge sheet against Misa Bharti and her husband in the case before the trial court.

In July last year, ED filed the first charge sheet in the case against various accused, including Agarwal, but it did not make Lalu's daughter an accused. However, the document contained her name.

It had raided the farmhouses of Bharti and her husband Shailesh Kumar in Delhi in relation to the case being probed against Agarwal, the Jain brothers and others, who are alleged to have laundered money using over 90 shell companies.

Besides Agarwal and the Jain brothers, it included the names of around 35 people and the firms as accused.

The ED also claimed that Agarwal was instrumental in providing accommodation entries to many high-profile people and political entities to help launder their slush funds. These include those being probed by the Income Tax Department in a Rs 1,000 crore dubious land deal case.

The ED had in May last year filed a charge sheet against the Jain brothers. It had also attached agricultural land worth Rs 1.12 crore belonging to them in Bhatti village in the National Capital Region.

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An encounter broke out today between security forces and militants hiding in a house in Chadoora area of central Kashmir's Budgam district, police said.

The gunbattle began after security forces launched a search operation in Zuhama village of Chadoora following information about presence of militants in the area, a police spokesman said.

He said the search operation turned into an encounter when militants, believed to be two, opened fire on security forces.

Intermittent exchange of fire was going on when reports last came in, he said.

No casualties have been reported so far.

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A group of engineers, including those from DRDO's chemical warfare unit, who are facing the threat of suspension of their degrees, today moved the Supreme Court for relief, saying most of them have been working for over 10-15 years and their career will be jeopardized.

The engineering degrees of these candidates, many of whom are employed in aeronautical and IT streams also, were obtained after pursuing distance learning course from four institutions in academic session 2001-2005.

However, according to a November 3 order of the apex court, the degrees of students, who studied in these four deemed universities--JRN Rajasthan Vidyapeeth, Institute of Advanced Studies in (IASE), Rajasthan, Allahabad Agricultural Institute (AAI) and Vinayaka Mission's Research Foundation, Tamil Nadu, will remain suspended from January 15 this year.

A bench of Justices Adarsh Goel and U U Lalit today said that it will pass orders on multiple petitions separately on January 12.

Senior advocate V Giri appearing for some of the engineers said that there were candidates who appeared in competitive examinations based on degrees obtained from these universities and qualified it to get a job. They are now at senior positions in their respective organisations.

"These candidates risk losing their jobs after being 10 -15 years in service. The court should have a humane approach towards them as it will have a cascading effect on them and their families will be in trouble," he said.

Giri said that there were also some candidates who were in service and used their degrees to get the promotion.

The top court said that the degrees were wrongly given by the universities and it had the interest of students in its mind while granting them two opportunities to clear the examination to be conducted by AICTE.

"Post facto approvals were granted to these universities by the authorities concerned despite there being a provision for prior sanction for enrolling the students. There was ambiguity between them but we didn't want the students to suffer and hence granted them opportunities," the bench said.

After their degrees were held to be "illegal and void", it was not the students' right that they be given such an opportunity, it said.

"There has to be some test of their abilities as many of the study centres affiliated to these universities did not even have necessary infrastructure. Those who will not pass the examination will have to face the consequences," the bench observed.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for one of the students who studied from ITM university (now Northcap University) at Gurgaon, said that his client didn't even know that his degree was in the distance learning category.

Arora said that there is another category of students who didn't know it was a distance learning course as they attended regular classes.

"World class companies tested their skills, they qualified for the post, did their post graduation all on the basis of that degree," she said.

"It is not the case where their skills were not tested. They had all necessary infrastructure at their colleges and students attended all the classes just the degree was from another university," she contended.

Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh supported the cause of the students and said that some other methodology could also be there for testing the abilities of students.

He said that if on the basis of this foundation degree, a candidate acquires another superior degree than his case can be considered by the court.

Similarly, other candidates who are now mining engineers, many with the Central Armed Police Forces like ITBP and Seema Suraksha Bal have also approached the court seeking relief.

The bench said it will consider the petitions and pass the orders on January 12.

On November 3, the top court had set aside the ex-facto approvals granted by the UGC to the four deemed universities, terming them as "incorrect" and "illegal", saying that such institutions were not justified in introducing any new course in technical without the approval of AICTE.

The top court had directed the AICTE to hold tests for the students whose degrees would stand suspended by January 15, 2018 and said these students should not be given more than two chances to clear the examination.

If the students do not successfully clear the examination within the stipulated time, their degrees will stand cancelled and every single advantage on the basis of that degree shall also stand withdrawn, it said.

The court had said that any promotion or advancement in career on the basis of such degree shall also stand withdrawn.

It had also cancelled the engineering degrees awarded to students who were admitted after the academic session 2001-05 in these four deemed universities in distance mode.

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An Italian appeals court today acquitted Giuseppe Orsi, the former president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, over charges of alleged bribes paid in exchange for a Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal to sell 12 AgustaWestland helicopters to the Indian government.

Milan's third court of appeal also acquitted Bruno Spagnolini, former CEO of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, who had also been handed a four-year jail term on the same charges, Italian agency ANSA reported.

Orsi was arrested in 2014 and resigned as chief executive of Finmeccanica which was later renamed as Leonardo.

He was at the helm of AgustaWestland when the deal was struck and was suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes.

Orsi had been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for false accounting and corruption.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of 12 luxury helicopters to India.

The two were accused of international corruption and false invoicing in relation to bribes exchanged for the contract with India.

Both were cleared on charges of committing international corruption at the first-instance trial in 2014 but convicted of false invoicing and sentenced to two years in prison.

In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considered definitive until the appeals process has been exhausted.

Both appealed against the conviction, while the prosecution appealed against the acquittal on the corruption charge.

In December 2016, the supreme court of cassation ordered a repeat of the appeals trial.

India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AgustaWestland in January, 2014 for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

India's defence ministry had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after the arrest of Orsi and Spagnolini by Italian investigators in connection with the case.

In 2010, India had inked the deal to acquire 12 three- engine AW-101 helicopters from AgustaWestland for VVIP use.

In view of the corruption charges, India also barred Finmeccanica and its group companies from participating in any new programme of the defence ministry.

The CBI in September last year charge sheeted former IAF Chief S P Tyagi in a Delhi court along with nine others for bribery in the case.

They were charge sheeted for offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the IPC in the case relating to alleged bribery of Rs 450 crore.

The CBI alleged there was an estimated loss of Euros 398.21 million (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on February 8, 2010, for the supply of VVIP choppers worth Euros 556.262 million.

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A US-based group is organising an international conference-cum-exhibition in New Jersey in August to propagate the values and principles enunciated by Mahatma Gandhi at the global level.

The event is being organised by the Gandhian Society in New Jersey on August 18 and 19 as part of its celebration of Mahatma Gandhi's 149th birth anniversary and it will involve over 100 schools and universities.

The aim of the two-day exhibition - "Gandhi Going Global" - is to spread awareness among the global audience about the tenets of the Gandhian philosophy, organisers said.

After the meet, modular exhibits will be taken to different universities and schools in the US where they will be displayed for two months by rotation with an aim to spread the Gandhian philosophy among students, they said.

The programme will be organised with the help of Ahmedabad-based Sabarmati Ashram, the Gujarat Vidyapith, Navjivan Press as well as Delhi-based Gandhi National Museum and the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Gandhian Society founder and president Bhadra Butala told reporters here today.

These organisation will put up galleries at the event to showcase the replica of Gandhi memorabilia, books and literature, among others thing, said Butala.

The exhibition will also see an interactive museum on the life and times of the Father of the Nation. It will be set up with the help of the Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, he said.

Among other highlights will be key-note speeches by noted Gandhian philosopher and technocrat Sam Pitroda and Gujarat Vidyapith chancellor Ela Bhatt.

Human rights activist Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr, will be felicitated on the occasion for his works, Butala said.

Michelle Obama, lawyer-writer and former US First Lady, has been invited to deliver a key-note speech and a confirmation about her participation is awaited, he said.

"Globally-recognised institutions like King's Centre, Nelson Mandela Foundation and Gandhi Ashram, South Africa will also participate with their collections," Butala said.

Trustee of Gandhi Ashram Kartikeya Sarabhai said the aim of the "Gandhi Going Global" exhibition is to showcase the relevance of Gandhi to today's generation.

"The exhibition will talk about some of the concepts like non-violence and how they are relevant to the world. We will also do activities in schools and colleges leading up to this event," Sarabhai said.

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An Iranian oil tanker on fire for two days after colliding with a Chinese cargo ship off the coast of China is at risk of exploding or sinking, authorities said today as rescuers recovered one body amid no sign of survival for 32 foreign crew members.

Rescuers recovered an unidentified body believed to be that of a missing crew member of Panamanian-flagged tanker 'Sanchi' while search is on for 31 other crew members, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing here.

Thirty-two crew members, including 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis, went missing after the tanker carrying 136,000 tonnes of oil condensate from Iran to South Korea collided with a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter and caught fire on Saturday in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze River's estuary.

Condensate is an ultra light version of crude oil. It is highly toxic, low in density and considerably more explosive than regular crude oil.

The huge fire still raged around the tanker with thick black smoke billowing from the vessel and the surrounding sea.

The 274-metre tanker Sanchi is "in danger of exploding or sinking", the ministry said.

Lu said China sent several ships to the site, but the environment and conditions on the ground are not favourable.

About the concerns of a major oil spill he said, We also have dispatched cleaning vessel to the site. We are also investigating to prevent any secondary disaster."



The oil tanker has tilted toward the right side after the collision. The 225-meter-long second vessel CF CRYSTAL, carrying 64,000 tonnes of grain, was partly damaged in the collision. It was owned by a Chinese shipping company and was travelling from the United States to Guangdong, China.

Asked how China plans to deal with issues related to compensation, he said the reason for the accident is yet to ascertained.

"Immediately after the accident happened, China started its rescue work and is trying to clean the waste," he said.

Chinese maritime authorities dispatched eight vessels, including three specialised cleansing vessels, for search and rescue operation.

After coordination by the China Maritime Search and Rescue Centre, South Korea dispatched a coast guard ship and a fixed-wing aircraft to assist in the search and rescue.

The US Navy also sent a military aircraft to help with the rescue efforts.

Environment experts have expressed fear that the accident could create a massive environmental disaster and kill off marine life across a wide area.

Greenpeace in a statement said it was "concerned about the potential environmental damage that could be caused by the 1 million barrels of crude oil on board."



According to reports, the collision has the potential to cause the worst such oil spill in decades.

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A major fire today gutted the principal's office and an adjacent record room of the state-run BRD Hospital here, the fire department said.

No loss of life has been reported in the blaze in the hospital, which was in the last year after scores of infants died at the facility.

"Prima facie, it seems that the fire was caused by a short circuit," SP (North) Ganesh Saha said.

A committee has been constituted to probe the reasons behind the fire, Chief Fire Service Officer T K Singh said.

Six fire tenders took nearly an hour to control the flames which destroyed important documents in the record room.

The Baba Raghav Das Medical College had hit the headlines in August last year when 63 children, including infants, died within a span of four days when the supply of oxygen was allegedly disrupted due to non-payment of dues to the vendor.

The state government has, however, vehemently denied that shortage of oxygen led to the deaths.

An FIR against nine accused, including ex-principal Dr Rajiv Misra, his wife Dr Purnima Shukla and nodal officer Dr Kafeel Khan, was filed by director general medical education (DGME), K K Gupta in Hazratganj police station in Lucknow and police have filed a charge sheet against them. All the nine accused have been arrested.

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A major fire swept through a resto-bar located in a 70-year-old building in a busy area in the city, killing five employees in their sleep, police said.

The blaze broke out in Kailash Bar and Restaurant on the ground floor of the Kumbara Sangha (potters association) building at Kalasipalya around 2.30 am, when smoke was noticed and fire brigade alerted by some persons nearby, police said.

"Fire services were pressed into action.. Two fire tenders and one fire rescue vehicle attended to it and it has been doused...The cause of the fire is not known and is being investigated," a senior police officer said.

Resto-bar owner V R Dayashankar was absconding.

Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy told reporters at the spot that it was the responsibility of the owner to look after the safety of his employees and "police will book cases against him and arrest him."



Reddy also said the city civic body Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) should have ensured safety.

"BBMP and excise department should have looked into the safety aspect of the building. The owner should have also considered whether to allow his employees to stay in the building."



Police suspect that though the owner was the licence holder to run the business, he had leased it to someone else.

The victims were identified as Swami (23), Prasad (20), Mahesh, all natives of Tumakaru, Manjunath (45) from Hassan and Keerthi (24) from Mandya.

Bengaluru development minister K J George who visited the spot along with Bengaluru Mayor R Sampath Raj announced a compensation of Rs five lakh to the next of the kin of the deceased.

Condoling the deaths, George said, "Whoever is guilty in the incident will not be spared."



"This is a 70-year old building where the incident happened.. We'll wait for the forensic and postmortem report.. It appears all the five died of suffocation," he said.

Sampath Raj said the BBMP will carry out fire safety audit of all high rise and commercial buildings.

He said several bars had already been sealed and notices issued to some others for violation of relevant rules.

Police Commissioner T Suneel Kumar said at the site that a case has been registered against the owner of the resto bar under section 304 of the IPC which pertains to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

Teams had been formed to nab the owner.

The incident comes close on the heels of a devastating fire at a plush rooftop pub hosting a birthday party at the Kamala Mills compound in an upscale locality in Mumbai that left 14 dead on December 29.

Fire and emergency services in Bengaluru had recently launched a safety audit of restaurants, bars and pubs in the city.

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With the arrest of five more people today in connection with the mob attack on police at a village in Howrah district on January 6, the total number of those held rose to 12.

The Officer-in-Charge of Shyampur police station, Suman Das, was seriously injured in the attack and still remained critical, being put on ventilator support in a city hospital.

Das had gone to the village to execute a court order on a land dispute along with other policemen.

The five persons were held today from Jagdishpur village under Dholahat police station in South 24 Parganas district, a police officer said.

Suspecting them to be strangers, villagers alerted police that led to the arrests, Howrah SP (Rural) Gourav Sharma said.

All the five are said to be relatives of the main accused, Munsi Matiar Rahaman, Sharma said.

Rahaman was on January 6 arrested along with six others in connection with the case. They were produced in a local court, which remanded them to five days police custody.

Das, 44, was chased down a road for over half a kilometre by a mob, and brutally beaten with rods and bamboo sticks.

He was immediately taken to a local hospital for check up, but admitted to private-run Belle Vue Clinic in Kolkata with severe head injury.

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Former Chairman-cum-Managing Director of Indian Bank M Gopalakrishnan and two other ex- officials of the bank have been convicted by a special CBI court in Chennai nearly 25 years after they committed cheating of about Rs 18.80 crore, an agency spokesperson said today.

He said the special CBI court, Chennai, sentenced Gopalakrishnan, A V Shanmugasundaram, the then Zonal Manager in New Delhi, and Satish Kumar, then Assistant General Manager, Indian Bank, New Delhi to three years of rigorous imprisonment and fines from Rs 30,000 to Rs 1.40 lakh.

It was alleged in the FIR that Shanmugasundaram, Satish Kumar and Gopalakrishnan conspired during the period of August 1989 and August 1993 with the Director of Scantel Pvt Ltd and Allied Equipment and Services Ltd, New Delhi.

"In pursuance of the conspiracy, the accused released Rs 18.08 crore as credit facility to the said Director of private firm who cheated the Indian Bank," CBI Spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said.

He said after completion of investigation, charge sheet was filed before the designated court at Chennai for criminal conspiracy cheating and provisions of prevention of corruption Act.

"During the trial proceedings, the said Director of private firm died, and charges against him were abated. After the trial, the xourt convicted the accused for the said offences," he said.

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A former Shiv Sena corporator was killed by unidentified assailants here last night, a police official said today.

Ashok Sawant, 62, a two-term corporator from Samata Nagar in suburban Kandivli, was attacked with choppers while he was returning home after meeting a friend around 11 pm, he said.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital in Kandivli but was declared dead on arrival, the official said.

Sawant had entered the cable television business a few years ago, he said.

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Asylum claims in France hit a record 100,000 last year, official figures showed today, as President Emmanuel Macron's government draws up hotly-debated new legislation on immigration.

Officials said the rate of arrivals was "historic", with Albanians forming the biggest group of applicants despite their country being considered safe by France.

"It confirms that France is one of the countries receiving the most asylum claims in Europe," Pascal Brice, head of France's refugee protection agency OFPRA, told AFP.

"It's a historic level," he added, though he noted the numbers are just half of those seen in neighbouring Germany last year.

Macron's government is preparing to unveil a bill on immigration next month, but his centrist Republique En Marche (Republic On The Move) party are divided on how to tackle the issue.

Macron and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe have vowed to speed up the process for managing asylum requests and offering improved conditions for successful applicants.

But they have also promised a much tougher line on economic migrants that would see an increased number of deportations and tighter controls on people arriving.

Last year France forcibly removed 26,000 people from the country, a 14 percent increase on the year before, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told AFP today.

"The goal now is to improve the conditions of repatriation, whether voluntary or forced," he added.

In his New Year's message, Macron had warned that France "cannot welcome everyone" although he pledged an immigration policy that walked the line between "humanity and efficiency".

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France will confer its highest order of merit, the 'Legion of Honour', on legendary film and theatre actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay at the 42nd International Kolkata Book Fair.

The honour will be bestowed on the actor -- who starred in many of Satyajit Ray's iconic films -- by French culture and communication minister Francoise Nyssen in Kolkata.

"The highest order of merit, the Legion of Honour, will be conferred on the legendary film personality Soumitra Chattopadhyay from the inaugural dais (of the book fair) by our minister of Culture and Communication Francoise Nyssen," French Ambassador Alexandre Ziegler said here today.

Chattopadhyay, 82, acted in several of Ray's films, including Apur Sansar, Abhijan, Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri and Sonar Kella.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award winner, who has also starred in many recent Bengali films such as Bela Seshe and Posto, is a noted theatre actor, too.

A French delegation consisting of well known authors and poets led by Nyssen will attend the Kolkata book fair, where France is the theme country.

The largest attended book fair in the world, the Kolkata gala will open on January 30 and conclude on February 11.

It will host publishers from across the the world, including the UK, USA, Russia, Japan, China, Colombia, Peru, Portugal, Vietnam and Spain.

"France, the country of literature and culture, is the focal theme country of the international Kolkata Book fair 2018," Publishers and Booksellers Guild honorary general secretary Tridib Chatterjee said.

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Gary Oldman starrer "Darkest Hour" will release in Indian theatres on January 19.

Oldman today won his maiden Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama for his portrayal of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Joe Wright-directed film.

After his win, Oldman said, "There are certain figures that are indispensable. And really, looking at Churchill more specifically and closely than just being a figure in British history... really diving into it, our world order we've sort of enjoyed over the past 70 years is arguably down to one man."



"As I said out there, I'm proud of the movie because it shows and illustrates the power of words and actions that words and actions can literally change the world. And the courage (Churchill) had... he took on this racist thug, this dictator, it showed extraordinary courage. I look at people like Washington and Lincoln, that's who I believe you could compare him to," the actor added.

"Darkest Hour", the film focuses on the early days of World War II. With the fall of France imminent, Britain faces its darkest hour as the threat of invasion looms. As the seemingly unstoppable Nazi forces advance, and with the Allied army cornered on the beaches of Dunkirk, the fate of Western Europe hangs on the leadership of the newly-appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The film also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup and Ben Mendelsohn.

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Oprah Winfrey, Sterling K Brown, and Aziz Ansari were some of the first-timers who were honoured at the Golden Globe Awards 2018.

Celebrated host-media mogul, Winfrey, became the first African-American woman to be honoured with the annual Cecil B DeMille Award, named after the Hollywood producer-director behind "The Ten Commandments".

She gave a rousing address at the ceremony paying her tributes to the women who courageously spoke out against sexual abuse.

In another first, "This Is Us" star, Brown created history as he became the first African-American to win a Golden Globe in the Best Actor in a TV Series, Drama category for his performance as Randall Pearson on the NBC hit series.

Ansari, the Indian-origin actor, finally bagged the trophy as he was named the winner in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series Musical/Comedy category for his role in "Master Of None". He was nominated in the same category for the Netflix show in 2016.

The 75th awards ceremony also ended the dry spell for many recognised names such as Gary Oldman and Frances McDormand at the event.

Oldman won his first Globe as the Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in "Darkest Hour". It was his first nod as well.

The veteran actor, interestingly, has been critical of the Globes in the past.

McDormand took home the trophy for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Golden Globe for her performance in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri".

The six-time lucky actor played Mildred, a grieving mother of a young woman whose rape-murder has gone unsolved in her small-town American community.

The actor has been nominated for a Globe in the past, including for her Oscar-winning role in "Fargo," but had never won an individual award.

Alison Janney was named the Best Supporting Actress in Motion Picture category for her role of LaVona Fay Golden, the mother of infamous figure skater Tonya Harding in "I, Tonya". This was the actor's sixth Golden Globe nomination.

The Globe for the Best Actress in the Musical or Comedy category went to Saoirse Ronan for her role in "Lady Bird", both written and directed by Greta Gerwig. The actor earlier received nominations in 2008 and 2016.

While Ewan McGregor won his first Globe as Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his role in "Fargo". This was his fourth nomination.

Guilermo del Toro, Martin McDonagh, Sam Rockwell, Rachel Brosnahan and Alexander Skarsgard struck gold in the first nod at the award ceremony.

While del Toro took home the Golden Globe for Best Director for Motion Picture ("The Shape of Water"), McDonagh scored a win in the category of Best Screenplay for "Three Billboards..." Both were nominated in these two segments.

Skarsgard, who plays Nicole Kidman's abusive husband in HBO's "Big Little Lies", won his first Globe as the Best Supporting Actor in Limited Series category.

Rockwell won the golden title for Best Supporting Act in Motion Picture for his role in "Three Billboards..."



Brosnahan emerged Best Actress in a Television Comedy Series for playing the protagonist, Miriam 'Midge' Maisel in "The Marvelous Mrs Maisel", who admitted backstage that she had blanked out after saying 'hi' to Winfrey in the middle of her acceptance speech.

As the first award show in the new year, Golden Globes 2018 set a precedent by addressing the sexual harassment scandal that rocked Hollywood late last year and the winners speeches reflected the shift in Hollywood.

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Golden Globes, the first Hollywood award show of 2018, kicked off with a focus on sexual harassment instead of fashion as Hollywood A-listers arrived on the red carpet dressed in black to support the Time's Up initiative and #MeToo movement.

Black was the colour of the night as almost all the female actors including big names like Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Heidi Klum, Catherine Zeta Jones, Margot Robbie, Alison Brie, Jessica Biel, Claire Foy, among others turned the Globes dark on the fashion front.

The 'Time's Up' initiative was launched by powerful Hollywood women such as Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, Kerry Washington and others to fight sexual harassment in the industry following allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and numerous others in the show business.

Streep, who is part of the initiative, and Michelle Williams arrived with gender and racial justice activists as their guests.

While Streep walked the red carpet hand-in-hand with justice activist Ai-jen Po, Williams arrived in an embellished off-the-shoulder look with 'Me Too' founder Tarana Burke at her side.

"People are aware now of a power imbalance and it's something that leads to abuse'. It led to abuse in our own industry and led to abuse in domestic work... in the military, in Congress... and we want to fix that. We feel emboldened to stand together in a thick black line," Streep said on the red carpet.

Before the carpet, women from the film industry encouraged their peers to join the movement, via Instagram and Twitter announcements.

Witherspoon, Tracee Ellis Ross, Rashida Jones, Brie Larson and Tessa Thompson created a video together to urge those at the Globes to join them in wearing black.

While women were all up to support the anti-sexual harassment initiative their male peers also did their bit for the movement by donning Time's Up pins on the lapels of their tuxedos.

Justin Timberlake, Hugh Jackman, and Strangers Things stars Gaten Matazarro, Finn Wolfhard, Daniel Kaluuya, Bradley Whitford, Ewan MacGregor, Jude Law, James Franco, William H Macy, Noah Schnapp, Nick Jonas and host Seth Meyers were among the leading men taking part in the movement by adding the black-and-white pins to their looks.

To show his support, "This Is Us" actor Chris Sullivan not only donned a 'Time's Up' pin to his look, but also painted his fingernails black.

Celebrities who could not attend the 2018 Golden Globes, supported 'Time's Up' by sharing their pictures in all black outfits on social media.

Anne Hathaway, Olivia Munn, and Shonda Rhimes were all unable to attend the Globes due to being sick, but still sported their black outfits and voiced their support from home.

"In solidarity from my sick bed," Hathaway captioned an Instagram of herself in a black dress.

"At home with the flu so my black dress stays on the hanger but my #TIMESUP pin will be on my PJs! Wear black at home with all of us," Rhimes posted.

She also shared a separate photo of herself on Instagram in a #TimesUp T-shirt, writing "Standing in solidarity with my sisters everywhere tonight."



Munn wrote on Twitter: "I'm staying home today sick with the flu. But so appreciative of everyone who has rallied around to support."



Pop diva Jennifer Lopez, with boyfriend Alex Rodriguez by her side, expressed her support through a video which she shared on Instagram.

"Today is the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, and a lot of the women, with the hashtag Times Up, are standing up for equalityto be treated equally and for sexual harassment," Lopez, who is currently in Puerto Rico, said in the clip.

"And I stand here in black today doing the same from far away. And it's the same thing here in Puerto Rico we want to be treated equally," she added.

Other celebrities, including Bryce Dallas Howard, Gabrielle Union, Hilary Duff, Zoe Saldana, and Karlie Kloss, took to social media to share their #TimesUp photos.

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The government has assured that it would consider hiking import duty on sugar from the current 50 per cent to check any cheaper shipments from neighbouring Pakistan, the Indian Sugar Mills Association said today.

In view of steep fall in global prices, Pakistan has not been able to export its surplus sugar and is mulling a subsidy to make outward shipments viable.

"If Pakistan imports do become viable, or if any contracts start taking place for importing sugar into India from Pakistan, especially if the state of Sindh notifies any subsidy, the Government of India is willing to increase the import duty adequately to check any such imports," ISMA said in a statement.

This along with other issues related to the sector were discussed last week in a meeting with the Food Ministry officials. Officials from the ISMA and the National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories (NFCSF) were also in the meeting.

On sugar exports from India, the ISMA said it was discussed that there would be "no scope for any exports" because the closing stock would be tight at 40 lakh tonnes at the end of the ongoing 2017-18 season (October-September).

"Therefore, reduction in the export duty may not make much sense now," it said.

The ISMA has pegged sugar output of India, the world's second largest producer, at 251 lakh tonnes in 2017-18 against 203 lakh tonnes in the previous year.

"It was agreed that there was unrealistic talk about 2018-19 sugar production, whereas not even about 10-15 per cent of the sugarcane for harvesting then has been planted," the sugar association said.

Though the sugarcane sowing may improve with better rainfall in western and southern states, it was accepted that it is totally "premature" to even guess a figure about next seasons production, it said.

"In fact, the sugar production can get adversely affected if the rainfall from June to September 2018, is not good. Therefore, July 2018 will be a better time to have any preliminary idea about 2018-19 production, and not earlier," it added.

Nevertheless, the Food Ministry officials assured that if there is a surplus in next 2018-19 season, appropriate timely action would be taken to ensure surplus sugar is exported even to SAARC nations, the ISMA said.

It was felt that there was enough time for the government to hold discussions and negotiations, since the surplus, if any, would come up only after November 2018, and there is no concern about the surplus till then, it added.

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The Andhra Pradesh Government Employees Association today said that its members would be staging protests across the state on Tuesday to demand the scrapping of the Union government's "Contributory Pension Scheme".

The association comprises government employees, teachers, public sector employees and pensioners.

Its Krishna District President A Vidyasagara Rao said that the government must go back to the old pension scheme that was in place before 2004.

"About 1.66 lakh people from government organisations under Contriburoty Pension Scheme are concerned because 10% from the salaries and another 10% of government's contribution is invested in stock markets and the returns from such investments are uncertain," Rao said.

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The Congress today accused the central government of "muzzling dissent" and adopting an "ostrich-like approach" by "prosecuting" the newspaper and the journalist who exposed the alleged Aadhaar data breach.

Dubbing it as "a clear attack on journalism", Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari alleged that there have been systematic assaults on scribes and an atmosphere of fear and violence has been created against them.

He asked the people need to introspect whether they want a liberal, democratic India or a theocratic and fascist country.

Media organisations have been systematically hounded and targeted, he alleged and demanded that the FIR "against 'The Tribune' and the journalist" be withdrawn "if the government believes in the freedom of press".

"The newspaper which warns the government that the privacy and the private data of thousands of citizens are at risk is rewarded with an FIR which names the journalist as well as the institution itself," Tewari told reporters.

"If this is not fascism, if this is not trying to muzzle dissent, if this is not gross abuse of state authority, then I am afraid, we possibly do not have a definition for it....

"That is why time has come for all progressive, right thinking and patriotic forces to stand united against this systematic repression which has been unleashed on democratic dissent by the Narendra Modi Government," he said.

The Congress spokesperson said the first people who sensed such an atmosphere were the creative community which as early as September 2014 launched which was called by some as the "Award Wapsi Movement".

"Our appeal to the people of India at the beginning of 2018 from this podium is that please do make a choice you want a liberal or democratic India or do you want a theocratic and fascist India. That is the choice that you need to make," he said.

When pointed out that a minister had said that the FIR is against unknown people, Tewari said it seems the minister has not read the FIR or his reading of the FIR is "extremely selective as he chose to skip the names".

"To the best of our understanding not only journalists are named, but the Tribune as an institution has been named in the FIR.

"So, not only is that an attack on individual journalists, it is an attack on the institution per se... this is a clear attack on journalism.

"If the Minister is not shedding crocodile tears ... true test of that is that the FIR must be unilaterally withdrawn by the UIDAI," he said.

Attacking the government, the Congress said on its website: "The prosecution of a reporter for exposing security flaws in the Aadhaar infrastructure by UIDAI is an ostrich- like approach.

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A farmers and agriculture workers convention here today blamed the government's policies for "agrarian distress" in the country.

Addressing the Kisaan Sankalp Sammelan at Gandhi Maidan in the Chhattisgarh capital, farmer leaders said cultivators are distressed all over the country due to poor agriculture policies and sought to fulfill promises by the ruling BJP in Chhattisgarh.

In his address, Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Mahasabha General Secretary Hannan Mollah said farmers were abandoning agriculture and committing suicide due to government policies.

"Instead of ensuring relief to farmers, the government is rubbing salt on their wounds. Now farmers across the country are uniting and raising demands of a loan waiver and seeking full return against their produce," he said.

Mollah said that assimilation of Chhattisgarh farmers in the national movement will create a "new wave".

Speaking on the occasion, noted agriculture economist Devinder Sharma said that farmers' income was still very low in the country, despite whopping growth in income in other sectors since 1971.

"Failing to recover the cultivation cost, distressed farmer are committing suicides," he said.

Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav said farm-based companies related to seeds, fertilisers and pesticides have raked in huge profit in the country whereas farmers are in crisis.

"From the past 70 years, the government has kept the prices of crops low. It clearly indicates that not only the governments policy but their intention is also wrong," he said.

Yadav observed that it was for the first time when farmers' movements in various states are amalgamating into a nationwide movement.

"Now farmers want remedy for their problems and are coming together to raise their voices," he said.

Leaders representing various farmers and labourers associations also addressed the convention.

Farmer leaders also chalked out a strategy for the agitation in support of their various demands in near future in Chhattisgarh.

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The government will start a fresh process this month to procure 12 advanced minesweepers for the Indian Navy after negotiations for the Rs 32,000-crore project between the Goa Shipyard and a South Korean company hit a dead-end.

The Navy badly needs the minesweepers or mine counter- measure vessels to guard India's critical sea lanes in the backdrop of China's growing naval might in the Indian Ocean region.

"We will issue fresh EoI (Expression of Interest) for the project very soon. It will be issued this month," Chairman of state-run Goa Shipyard Ltd Rear Admiral (retd) Shekhar Mital told PTI.

Sources said the Goa Shipyard Ltd had to call off the negotiations with Kangnam Corporation following differences over a host of issues including terms and conditions for technology transfer.

The EoI is likely to be issued to a number of major foreign defence majors which build minesweepers.

According to original understanding, the Goa Shipyard and the Kangam Corporation were to build 12 minesweepers in India under the Make in India initiative and the deliveries were to be completed within nine years of the start of the project.

However, both sides struggled to finalise various key aspects of the project.

A parliamentary standing committee on defence last year had slammed the government for delay in procurement of the minesweepers and asked it to make efforts to fill the gap in the Navy's capability.

The minesweeper ships detect and destroy underwater mines and are considered vital for keeping the critical sea lanes safe.

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A complaint has been lodged with the Gujarat police charging Teesta Setalvad and her NGO Sabrang Trust with trying to "mix religion with politics" and spreading disharmony through the curricular material prepared for the erstwhile UPA government which had given it a grant of about Rs 1.4 crore.

The complaint, lodged with the Ahmedabad city police by Rais Khan Pathan, a former close aide of Setalvad, also took into account the report of a panel of the Ministry of Human Resource Development which in its finding has claimed that a prima facie case existed against her under section 153A and 153B of IPC for promoting enmity on grounds of religion and imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration.

Sources said the crime branch of Ahmedabad police has sent a communication to the deputy secretary, department of school education and literacy of the Union HRD Ministry, urging it to "furnish point-wise reply on the application/ complaint at the earliest".

They said the ministry is yet to submit its response to the communication sent in November last.

The HRD Ministry in 2016 had sought the opinion of the top law officer endorsing the report of its three-member committee, saying "the report of the inquiry committee is exhaustive and deals with every aspect of the matter and that action as suggested in the said report may be undertaken in terms of fixing liabilities/lapses, action for inciting disharmony and hatred and also for recovery of the money as is stipulated in the scheme itself".

Pathan had filed the complaint in November last year with the crime branch of the Ahmedabad police on the basis of the report against Setalvad, her husband Javed Anand, officials of the Sabrang Trust and unknown officials of the HRD Ministry.

He sought investigation and prosecution for the alleged offence of criminal conspiracy, criminal misappropriation of property, criminal breach of trust by public servants, promoting enmity between different groups on the ground of religion, among others.

Pathan has alleged that a large amount from the HRD funding was used during 2008 to 2014 on 'Khoj' project of the Sabrang Trust under the scheme of 'National Policy on Education' in Maharashtra and Gujarat as well as on the 'Peace Building and conflict resolution' project.

The project was launched by Setalvad's NGO in some districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat.

The HRD panel claimed to have gone through "a sizeable portion" of written materials prepared by Setalvad for the trust and 'Khoj' for teachers and the students of class V and VI, with the complaint alleging it contained "explosive literature" which reflected "hatred" and "venom", thereby falling under sections 153A and 153B of the IPC.

Pathan in his complaint has claimed that the three-member panel, comprising Supreme Court lawyer Abhijit Bhattacharjee, Gujarat Central University Vice Chancellor S A Bari and Ministry official Gaya Prasad, had confirmed that the then officials of HRD Ministry in connivance with trustees of Sabrang Trust illegally sanctioned the funds under the 'Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan'.

"Large amounts were also transferred as donation from Sabrang trust to Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), another NGO of Teesta Setalvad which too was used for various activities such as payment of salary to office staff in Gujarat, travelling expenses to riot victims of Gujarat, advocate fees and on various campaigns launched in Gujarat against the state government," Pathan's complaint alleged.

The HRD panel, which had questioned the grant of money to the tune of Rs 2.05 crore, out of which Rs 1.39 crore was released as the trust was unable to utilise 50 per cent of the amount, said one of the reasons for its ineligibility was that the documents of the trust suggested "brazen contempt of Supreme Court by Setalvad in her writing".

The report had said the committee was of the view that there was "a hiatus between the theory and practice" of the trust as it was simply "whipping up identity politics" claiming it was not conducive to the avowed purpose for which the trust had said in its application form.

It alleged that the public money given under the scheme of 'Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan' to the trust/'Khoj' was "clearly found to be spreading disharmony, feeling of enmity, hatred and ill will etc".

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The Delhi High Court today directed the AAP government to resolve the difficulties faced by parents under the economically weaker section (EWS) category for admission of kids in nursery in private schools here.

The court was anguished that while the process of nursery admission has already begun in the private schools here, the government is yet to declare the date for EWS category.

"EWS category is facing lot of difficulty, please look into it," a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar told the counsel for the government.

When the counsel said he wished to address on the issue, the bench said, "We do not want you to address here. We want resolution."



"Parents must know (dates) well in advance because it is natural that every parent has aspiration to admit his/her child in a good school and it is not wrong. Why have you not started it (process of EWS category) yet," the bench said.

The court further asked the Delhi government's counsel to take instructions and inform it why the date for admission process for EWS category has not been fixed yet.

The court's query came during the hearing of a PIL filed by an NGO, Justice for All, through its counsel Khagesh Jha, who has urged the court to direct the authorities to make appropriate arrangements for daily collection and disposal of garbage from the premises of these schools.

The bench said that they had read in newspapers about the difficulties faced by the parents, who wish apply for their ward under the EWS category.

The NGO, however, in its plea has claimed that multiple agencies in Delhi were busy shifting the blame on each other and that there was no coordination between these agencies as regards improving the infrastructure for the students.

It has also dealt with the "poor" condition of toilets in these schools.

Meanwhile, the South Delhi Municipal Corporation, in its response to the petition, said that it was working for the betterment of schools regarding infrastructure, hygiene and staff and to provide more facilities to the children.

It further said that to improve hygiene and sanitation conditions, the corporation has asked the school principals to constitute a committee which will be responsible for maintaining cleanliness in schools.

It said that thought teachers' appointments are not based on gender as of now, efforts are made that women teachers be posted in girls and co-ed schools.

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The Madras High Court on Monday directed the Tamil Nadu government not to terminate striking transport employees from service without its permission.

The first bench, headed by Chief Justice Indira Banerjee, made it clear that no striking worker can be terminated from service without the leave of the court.

It, however, declined to vacate its interim order passed on a PIL filed in this regard on January 5.

Taking a serious view of the strike, the court had said workers should get back to work or "face consequences," including termination and contempt of court.

The public interest litigation (PIL) petition sought a direction to the state government to convene a meeting with workers on strike and find a solution.

The matter pertains to the strike called by certain transport unions across Tamil Nadu over wage-related issues.

After recording the submissions of workers, the bench said that in no way can the staff be denied their legitimate dues, particularly those already deducted from their wages.

The court said it expected the state government to clear dues immediately by taking loans or through other means.

However, it declined to accept the trade unions' contention that the stir was not a "flash strike"



"None of the government authorities or even the transport minister are affected by the strike. Only the middle and poor class people who depend on public transport are affected," it observed.

"Transport workers are entitled to their legitimate dues, but people cannot be inconvenienced through such strikes," it said.

The strike entered fifth day today.
The Bombay High Court today turned down a plea of a private developer seeking permission to construct a floating hotel and a jetty near the Nariman Point in South Mumbai.

A division bench of justices A S Oka and P N Deshmukh dismissed the petition filed by Rashmi Development Pvt Ltd, challenging an order passed by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and a committee denying permission for the construction of the floating hotel, jetty and ramps abutting the Marine Drive promenade.

The petitioner claimed that the proposed project already had NOCs (no objection certificates) from the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC), the Western Naval Command, the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, the Coast Guard and the city police.

The HC, in its order, noted that the letters issued by the city police, the Western Naval Command and the Coast Guard on the issue were misconstrued by the company as NOCs.

"The Western Naval Command had never granted NOC for erection of the floating hotel. All that their letter records is that the safety and security issues will have to be examined first," the bench said.

"Even the Coast Guard in its letter says that a security audit will have to be carried out first before permission is granted for construction of a floating hotel and jetty," it said.

"After perusal of the facts of the matter and all the letters issued by the authorities, we hold that the grounds stated in the impugned order cannot be said to be illegal. It is impossible to find fault with the impugned order," the bench said.

The court also asked the state government to take note of the action of the MTDC on the issue.

"The MTDC is a government department. It is aware of the committee headed by senior officials and the fact that the civic body is bound by the committee's recommendations. Still, the MTDC has openly supported the petitioner. This stand taken by the MTDC needs to be seriously viewed by the state government," the high court said.

In May last year, the court-appointed three-member committee -- which comprised Mumbai Police Commissioner, BMC commissioner and chairperson of the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee -- had rejected the proposal.

The committee was constituted by the HC in 2015 to regulate any temporary or permanent construction along the Marine Drive promenade.

The committee rejected the proposal and forwarded its decision to the BMC saying the hotel was meant to be a tourist attraction and, consequently, would lead to much more vehicular movement in the area which would add to the existing traffic woes.

It also said that since the proposed site for the jetty -- the end of the Marine Drive promenade, near the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) -- came under the jurisdiction of the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority, the latter's permission must also be taken.

Following the committee's decision, the BMC too refused to grant permission for the project.

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The high court here today sought responses from Delhi and Haryana governments on supplying 330 cusecs of water a day through the Munak Canal to the national capital, instead of a sub-branch canal as an estimated 50 per cent of water sent through it is lost due to seepage.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar asked the authorities concerned of the two governments if the sub-branch canal can be repaired without disrupting water supply to Delhi.

The bench also sought the stand of the Delhi Jal Board on a PIL, which claimed that 100 per cent sewage treatment facility in the national capital would reduce the water crisis in the city.

The bench ordered the DJB to place before it its action plan on construction of sewerage facilities in Delhi, which the government agency proposes to do by 2031.

The court was hearing the plea filed by advocate S B Tripathi, who has said the population in Delhi was increasing each day, but the raw water available to the city was the same or decreasing.

"As per the information, currently water requirement for drinking is about 1080 MGD (million gallons per day) while the available water is about 900 MGD only," the plea said.

The petition, referring to a DJB affidavit filed in the court, said only 55 per cent of Delhi population has sewerage facility, while the remaining population was without sewerage.

It said that the sewage generation from the remaining 45 per cent unsewered area was flowing into drains and ultimately into the river Yamuna.

It said that if the sewage of the remaining 45 per cent population is treated, the water crisis in Delhi can be lessened.

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Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) today said its joint venture firm has bagged a contract worth Rs 484 crore from Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation for the Pune metro project.

"Hindustan Construction Company, a lead partner in the joint venture with AL FARA'A, has been awarded Rs 484 crore contract by the Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Ltd for Pune metro rail project," HCC said in a BSE filing.

The contract is for construction of eight elevated stations on line II of the Pune metro rail project.

Hindustan Construction Company JV had earlier received a Rs 497 crore order for Pune Metro. The contract was for construction of nine elevated metro stations. The total length of Pune Metro-phase 1 is 32 km.

HCC's share in the JV is 51 per cent (Rs 247 crore). The project is to be completed in 36 months.

HCC shares were trading 3.34 per cent higher at Rs 43.30 on the BSE.

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The new BJP government in Himachal Pradesh plans to make it compulsory for doctors of all hospitals in the state to prescribe generic drugs to patients, Health Minister Vipin Parmar said today.

"The government of Himachal Pradesh shall soon bring out a law to make prescription of generic medicines compulsory in all the hospitals of the state," Parmar told a delegation of the Indian Medical Association at Nanao village near here.

"Himachal will become the first state to bring out such a bill," he said.

He said it is a priority of the Himachal government to provide qualitative and best medical facilities to the people.

He said doctors have been instructed to prescribe generic drugs and those medicines, which are available free at the hospitals.

He said if a doctor prescribes drugs other than generic, he will have to write his reasons on the prescription too.

Parmar urged IMA officials to cooperate and give suggestions to improve the healthcare system.

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Former Chief Election Commissioner T S Krishnamurthy has pitched for second round of elections in constituencies where the winning margin is less than the NOTA option and the victorious candidate fails to muster one-third of votes.

He also expressed the view that India's first-past- the-post electoral system has outlived its utility.

"In my opinion, NOTA is very good; we should say if NOTA crosses certain percentage of votes; for example if the difference between the winner and the loser is less than the NOTA votes, you can say we should have second round of elections," Krishnamurthy told PTI.

A law needs to enacted to implement this measure, he said.

NOTA (None of the above) gives the voter a right not to vote for any candidate contesting from a particular seat.

More than 5.5 lakh voters -- or 1.8 per cent voters -- pressed the NOTA button on the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the recent assembly elections in Gujarat, where the winning margin was less than NOTA in several constituencies.

NOTA's vote share in Gujarat elections was higher than that of any party other than the Congress and the BJP.

Krishnamurthy also said, "Another possibility is to say that the winner should poll more than 33.33 per cent or one-third of total number of votes polled," a move which would make smaller political parties "disappear".

"There should be second round (of elections) if NOTA is more (than the winning margin) or if a person fails to get 33.33 per cent (of the total votes polled)," he said.

Krishnamurthy said NOTA will eventually force political parties to field candidates known for their integrity, and those who are more popular in segments taking into account people's sentiments.

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Himachal Pradesh Health Minister Vipin Parmar today said the government would soon bring a law to make prescription of generic drugs mandatory in state-run health facilities.

He said this while meeting a delegation of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) at Nanao near here.

"Himachal Pradesh will become the first state to bring out such bill. It is the priority of the government to provide qualitative as well as the best medical facilities to the public," Pramar said.

Instructions have already been given to government doctors to prescribe generic drugs and those medicines which are available at no cost, he said.

If some other medicine is being prescribed, the doctor has to state a reason on the prescription, the minister said.

He appealed to the IMA to cooperate in this regard and give suggestions to further improve it.

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A human skeleton was found inside an abandoned barrel filled with concrete here today, police said.

The barrel was found abandoned near a trade union office on the shores of a backwater in Kumbalam.

Police reached the area following complaints that foul smell was emanating from the barrel reportedly recovered two months ago during a dredging operation in the backwater.

They found the skeleton in the barrel which was broke open.

Top police officials, including Police Commissioner M P Dinesh, visited the place.

Police said the skeleton had been sent to the Medical College Hospital in Kalamassery for scientific analysis.

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Hailing India as the "main partner" of Seychelles, a top leader of that country today said New Delhi has never bracketed the island nation as a "high-income country" while offering help, unlike Europe which would tell it to sort out problems on its own.

Delivering a talk at the Sapru House here, Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly of Seychelles, Wavel Ramkalawan, also said, "Terrorism is not a major concern for us at the present time. Our security concerns are piracy, drug threat and poaching."



Ramkalawan, whose ancestors hailed from Bihar, is from the Seychelles National Party (SNP), which has a majority in the 33-member Assembly.

During his talk 'Seychelles of my dreams', hosted by the Indian Council of World Affairs, he spoke about the opportunities and challenges in his country, the relationship with India and the old cultural ties between the two nations.

"Whenever we ask India for help, it doesn't look at us as high-income country. Europe would tell us, you're high-income country so go sort it yourself," he said.

"We consider India as the main partner...India has helped us with hydrological maps and not sold to us, but given to us as gifts. And, we want the ties to go higher," Ramkalawan said.

The SNP leader presently heads the National Assembly's Outer Island Committee, the Committee for Truth and National Reconciliation and the Finance and Public Accounts Committee.

In response to a question, over reports of a naval base being planned by India in the Assumption Island, he said, "Seychelles would never accept any naval base of any country, be it the US or India or any other."



Ramkalawa emphasised the bilateral ties between the two countries and said the "second Dornier aircraft from India would arrive very soon".

India few years ago had agreed to give the Dornier DO-228 aircraft to Seychelles to carry out surveillance and anti- piracy missions.

"Supervising our territory needs a lot of help...If we have a facility in the south, we can patrol the area for poaching, drug trafficking or piracy," he said, adding that cooperation of India is much-needed in this area.

He also emphasised that Seychelles has a "world responsibility" towards conservation of environment, the islands and their biodiversity.

The Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, off East Africa. It's home to numerous beaches, coral reefs and nature reserves, as well as rare animals such as giant Aldabra tortoises.

"The green turtle is an endangered species, but at least now the number of female turtles are rising. We need to protect our territory but Seychelles also needs to be a champion of environmental protection.

"Also, our beautiful country is called a paradise, and we want people to visit it. But, mass tourism is not on the agenda, instead it is as of now restricted to resorts and small hotels," he said.

He also alleged that there was "slowness on part of the present Seychelles government in moving projects, which have been supported by India".

"The projects, which were conceived received during recent high-level visit, were not brought to the Assembly for ratification by the then president of Seychelles. But, we will sort it out soon, and by February, try to bring it to Assembly for ratification," he said.

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India and Nepal have reached an agreement to resolve differences on reconstructing damaged pillars along the mutual border and clearing the encroachment on the "No Man's Land", an Indian official said here today.

The agreement was reached during a meeting of Indian and Nepalese officials at the SSB Group centre here, Balrampur District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Misra said.

Six Nepalese officials and officials from five districts of Uttar Pradesh took part in the meeting, he said.

India and Nepal will soon start reconstructing the damaged pillars and clear the "No Man's Land" of encroachers, said Misra, the nodal officer for the Indian side.

A team to survey the border areas for the purpose has arrived in Balrampur, Misra said, adding that the work to be carried out on the border has been divided into three parts.

They include identifying the damaged pillars, reconstructing them and clearing the No Man's Land.

Misra said the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the Public Works Department, Revenue Department, and the Nepali Police will contribute to the process.

He hoped the resolution of differences will help in strengthening ties between the people of the two countries.

Hariprasad Mailani, the nodal officer of the Nepalese side, said no one will be allowed to misbehave with the Indian people and jawans in Nepal.

The SSB, which works under the the Union Home Ministry, is tasked with guarding the 1,751-km India-Nepal border.

Uttar Pradesh shares a 599.3-km open border with Nepal touching seven districts - Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Sravasti, Balrampur, Sidhharthnagar and Maharajganj.

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An Indian man in the has hit a jackpot by winning a whopping dhirham 12 million ($3.2 million) in the biggest-ever raffle prize money in Abu Dhabi.

Harikrishnan V Nair, 42, who works as a business development manager for a firm in Dubai and has been living in the with his family since 2002, won the huge amount on Sunday in 'Big Ticket' raffle draw.

"I still cannot believe it. Is it me? Is it really me?" an excited Nair, who is from Kerala, told Khaleej Times.

He said he had bought the tickets twice before, but had never won.

Nair said he had always wanted to travel the world with his family and the time for it has come.

"I think 2018 is the year for that. I will plan a world tour soon," said Nair, father of a seven-year old son.

"I would like to plan for my son's education and buy another house in India. I want to take good care of my mother and my wife's mother too, who are in India," he said.

Charity is also on top of Nair's agenda.

"I have always wanted to help people in need, and by God's grace I can do it now. That is something I will really do," he said.

His wife, a logistics support staff, said she could not believe the news.

"I was dump-founded when I got the call from my husband. First I thought he was playing the same prank I had planned on him," she said.

"Now that he has won the jackpot, I will let him figure out what he wants to do with it. He is after all a business development manager and would know better how to manage his funds," she said.

Eight Indians were among 10 people who had won dhirham 1 million each in a mega raffle draw in Abu Dhabi in October last year.

In August, an Indian man had won dhirham 5 million ($1.3 million) in the draw in the .
The International Olympic Committee has "extended the deadline" for North Korea's participation in the Winter Olympics, it announced today.

"We will be as flexible as we can be," an IOC spokesman told AFP over North Korea sending a team to the Pyeongchang Games in South Korea.

Talks between the two Koreas hosted by IOC president Thomas Bach will take place at the Olympic movement's headquarters in Lausanne on Tuesday.

"We welcome the discussion which will take place... between the governments of the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)," the IOC said.

"The IOC has been having discussions with both sides for a long time.

"In doing so we have kept the door open by extending the deadline for registration, and by offering support to North Korean athletes in the qualification process, whilst always respecting United Nations sanctions."



On Saturday, North Korea Olympic body member Chang Ung said the isolated state was "likely to participate" in the Pyeongchang Games from February 9-25, Kyodo agency reported.

Tuesday's Lausanne summit comes days after the two Koreas agreed to hold their first official dialogue in more than two years to discuss the North's participation in the Winter Olympics.

The tentative rapprochement comes after the North's leader Kim Jong-Un warned in his New Year speech that he had a nuclear button on his desk, but also said Pyongyang could send a team to the Olympics.

The IOC in its statement Monday emphasised that its mission was "always to ensure the participation of all qualified athletes, beyond all political tensions and divisions.

"With regard to the very particular situation on the Korean peninsula we need the political commitment from all parties concerned to make such a participation possible," it added.

"Once this political commitment is clear the IOC will take the final decision.

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The Islamic State (IS) militant group poses a major threat to Pakistan and is alarmingly increasing its presence in the country, according to a think- tank report.

Pakistan has been denying that ISIS had an organised presence in the country, however, even though the terrorist group has claimed responsibility for several other attacks in Baluchistan in recent years.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) yesterday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn reported.

The PIPS shared the findings of its security analysis titled Special Report 2017, providing an insight into security challenges of Pakistan.

"Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar and others with similar objectives perpetrated 58 per cent attacks, while 37 per cent and 5 per cent of the attacks were carried out by nationalist insurgents and violent sectarian groups respectively," it said.

The report has also highlighted that Baloch nationalist- insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were only second to TTP as far as the their threat capability was concerned.

The report also noted the alarming increase in the footprint of ISIS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh as it carried out the deadliest attacks in those provinces. It said that footprints of ISIS was increasing and it "killed 153 in 6 deadliest attacks".

It said "down 16 per cent from the year before, 370 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan (in 2017), killing 815 and injuring 1,736 people."



It said that Balochistan and tribal region remained critical areas with 288 and 253 terrorism-related killings, respectively, in 2017.

The report said that security forces and law enforcement agencies killed 524 militants in military/security operations as well as armed clashes and encounters.

It also reported that Pakistan's National Security Policy is set to be released in 2018 and it will take into account especially global and regional scenarios, including the evolving Pakistan-US relations.

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The International Society for Krishna Consciousness is planning to promote spiritual tourism at the Sagar Islands in West Bengal and would take up several projects in the area for which West Bengal has promised help.

As part of the ISKCON plan a Vedic Centre for Culture and Education, a world-class park, community hall, light and sound exhibition to attract the visitors to Sagar Islands, which attracts lakhs of pilgrims during holy 'Makarsankranti' on January 14-15 every year, an ISKCON statement said.

The West Bengal government has promised all help to the project, it said.

An NRI has also expressed the wish to contribute to the projects at Gangasagar, it added.

ISKCON has set up a large camp at the Ganga Sagar fair ground which will be operational from January 11 to 16 to house pilgrims from the country and abroad.

During the Mela ISKCON's Sewa camp aims to distribute one lakh plates of 'prasadam' to the pilgrims, Sundar Govind Das, the in charge of Food for Life programme run by ISKCON, Mayapur, said.

It will also provide free medical aid by doctors of a private super-speciality hospital and distribute blankets among the pilgrims, he added.

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The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU) has decided to go ahead with its plan to not mark their attendance as the administration insisted on introducing a mandatory attendance rule.

During a meeting with the JNU vice chancellor this morning, JNUSU president Geeta Kumari said, "we explained to the administration how such a surveillance is going to curtail academic freedom and destroy JNU culture".

"We explained how students of the campus attend lectures not just at classrooms, but also at dhabas and hostel mess. Learning is a 24X7 process for us. The VC, however, insisted on the adoption of compulsory attendance model of IITs," Kumari said, after submitting a memorandum with around 2,500 signatures.

JNUSU joint secretary Shubhanshu Singh said that they have started campaign on the move in some classes.

"Some professors are also taking part in the campaign," Singh said.

However, JNU Teachers' Association president Ayesha Kidwai said that the teachers body would decide its course of action at its General Body Meeting which is scheduled for January 10.

The JNUSU had yesterday announced for boycott of attendance.

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At the age of 92, Malaysia's one-time strongman Mahathir Mohamad is again seeking the leadership, but this time at the helm of the opposition that he crushed while in power.

Mahathir was named the opposition's prime ministerial candidate yesterday after weeks of infighting, in an extraordinary turnaround as his heirs in government face a massive financial scandal.

He will be the world's oldest leader if the coalition backing him wins a general election due by August, although analysts believe this is unlikely.

The authoritarian leader known for his acid tongue ruled the country for 22 years until 2003, making him Malaysia's longest-serving premier. He jailed opposition members without trial on security grounds in 1987 and was seen as an authoritarian figure who trampled over human rights.

Even in retirement, he could not resist sniping at his successors. When allegations emerged that huge sums were looted from a sovereign wealth fund set up by current Prime Minister Najib Razak, he broke from the ruling party and established a new political outfit to try and oust a man who was once his protege.

The US Justice Department alleges USD 4.5 billion was stolen from the investment vehicle, 1MDB, in a campaign of fraud and money-laundering. Najib denies any wrongdoing and has cracked down hard, purging critics from his government and curbing domestic investigations.

The most remarkable aspect of Mahathir's return to frontline has been a rapprochement with his former nemesis and jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, a dramatic shift after the pair's falling out dominated the political landscape for two decades.

Anwar was heir apparent to Mahathir until the premier sacked him in 1998 over political differences, and was then jailed for six years on sodomy and corruption charges.

After being released Anwar led the opposition to its best-ever showing in 2013 elections, but was imprisoned again in 2015 under Najib's government. Anwar has condemned his convictions as politically motivated.

After Mahathir cut ties with ruling party the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) he sought to mend his broken relationship with Anwar, with the pair meeting in 2016 for the first time in 18 years.

His party, Bersatu, joined the main opposition coalition Pact of Hope, which includes Anwar's party and many other former sworn enemies, and yesterday he was endorsed as the grouping's candidate at their convention.

If the opposition ousts the UMNO-led coalition which has ruled Malaysia since independence in 1957, Mahathir's position as premier is supposed to be temporary, with Anwar taking over once he is released from jail and has secured a royal pardon to overturn a ban on .

The opposition hopes that Mahathir will boost its chances with Muslim Malays, who make up over 60 percent of the population, with the rest comprising mainly ethnic Chinese and Indians.

Tian Chua, a lawmaker from Anwar's People's Justice Party, said Mahathir could deliver the knock-out blow to a government already reeling from the 1MDB scandal.

"Mahathir will invoke the glorious days of his 22-year reign and that will draw support from rural Malays, who are disgruntled with the rising cost of living," he told AFP.

But ruling party MPs quickly dismissed his candidacy and social media was flooded with angry comments criticising the decision to put forward a man accused of ruling with an iron fist.

"It is ridiculous. He is over 90 and he started all the problems we are facing," said Facebook user Radha Dulip Singh.

Analysts said a victory for Pact of Hope looked unlikely. A survey by pollster the Merdeka Centre last month showed the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition potentially regaining its crucial two-thirds parliamentary majority, needed to amend the constitution.

The opposition has often appeared disorganised and disunited -- a far cry from the strong alliance that Anwar led at the 2013 polls -- while the electoral system is strongly stacked in BN's favour, with the government long accused of gerrymandering.

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A man was killed allegedly by his daughter and her boyfriend for scolding them in Noida's Atta village, police said today.

Vishwanath last morning around 4 found his daughter Pooja, aged around 19 years, and her boyfriend Dharmendra in his rented accommodation in a compromising position and scolded them, they said.

Enraged over being scolded, Pooja and Dharmendra thrashed Vishwanath, the police said.

He was rushed to a hospital in Noida in serious condition



from where he was referred to a Delhi hospital, they said.

He today died during treatment, police said.

On the basis of a complaint by Gayatri, Vishwanath's wife, a case was registered against Pooja and Dharmendra, they said.

Pooja has been arrested while her boyfriend was absconding, the police said, adding an investigation was underway in the matter.

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A man was allegedly shot dead by some unknown people near the Indo-Nepal border here, with the deceased's kin accusing some jawans of the Sashashtra Seema Bal (SSB) of killing him following an altercation with them.

However, the SSB has denied the charges saying Kamlesh Paswan was intercepted while smuggling and after a clash they had to shoot him in the leg in self-defense.

On the basis of a written complaint by the brother of the deceased, Akhilesh Paswan, a case under relevant sections of the IPC has been registered against unknown people, SP Maharajganj RP Singh said.

Akhilesh said, "My brother was playing volleyball with his friends when three SSB jawans passed objectionable remarks on some women, who were attending nature's call."



"Kamlesh had a clash with them over the issue and later they called more jawans and shot at my brother's leg. They then dragged him to Sonouli border and later took him to community health center where doctors declared him dead," alleged.

SSB Deputy Commandment Dilip Kumar Jha said, "The Jawans caught Kamlesh at IndoNepal border with smuggled things and after a clash they shot at his leg in self-defense."



A probe into the matter is underway, the SP said.

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Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra today said that maximum care should be devoted in promoting interests of youths and not allow disruptions in their examination and study schedules.

The governor was speaking at 'The First Mufti Memorial Lecture' to commemorate the Mufti Sayeed Day at the Gen Zorawar Singh Auditorium here.

Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti and her Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar were also present at the event along with their deputies Nirmal Singh and Sushil Kumar Modi respectively.

"There is a need to devote maximum care to promote the interests of youths and not allow disruptions in their study and examination schedules, which would hamper their careers," he said.

"We must reaffirm our faith and reinvent our belief in what we are able to do. Our state has problems and some are our making and some beyond our reach," Vohra said.

"In amalgam of these so called domestic and non-domestic factors... the entire polity and public services of the state, and the people must work together to protect our student community and our youth. We have not been able to do so and I regret to say that," the governor said.

The academic sessions have been disrupted several times and exams and results were postponed. Therefore, students competing in all India tests and seeking admission in institutions are being left behind, he said.

"So I think we must in this new year owe to take a few firm resolutions in what we need to do to take our step forward," Vohra said.

The 'First Mufti Memorial Lecture' was delivered by Lord Meghnad Desai on "Devolving Power: The British Experience" and the governor observed that the state had suffered on various counts because of domestic and external factors, which were detrimental to its development.

Governments need to work dutifully, in a transparent and accountable manner, and achieve their goals in an equitable and inclusive manner, he said.

Paying tributes to former J-K chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on his second death anniversary, Vohra described him as a man who was entirely devoted to advancing the welfare of his people and development of the state.

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The Jammu and Kashmir government today launched a major welfare initiative for workers in the unorganised sector to provide them institutionalised socio- economic security.

The scheme, named "Muhafiz" (Guardian), was launched by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

Under the scheme, around three lakh workers registered with the Jammu and Kashmir Building and Other Construction Workers' Welfare Board (JKBOCWWB) would be covered under accidental, life and disability insurance.

"Government is committed to the welfare of marginalised sections of society, particularly labour class who have seen enough exploitation in the past," Mufti said.

The chief minister said, "Compensation in case of deaths, accidents or injuries has to be there. But efforts should be made to make their life better besides focusing on the education and upbringing of their wards."



Mufti announced the enhancement of monthly scholarship for the children of these workers to Rs 1500, which was earlier Rs 1200.

She advised the department to ensure that more and more workers, particularly female, are covered under the ambit of the scheme.

Mehbooba, on the occasion, unveiled the micro credit linked debit card of the JK Bank for these workers. She also launched the insurance scheme for them and the website of Workers' Welfare Board.

The scheme has been launched to commemorate the second death anniversary of former chief minister and PDP founder Mufti Muhammad Sayeed.

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The Delhi Police today said Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani's request for holding a rally here tomorrow is still "under consideration", even as the organisers insist it will be held on pre-scheduled time.

The 'Social Justice' rally or 'Yuva Hunkaar Rally' is planned to be addressed by Mevani and Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi.

One of the organisers and former JNU Students' Union president Mohit Kumar Pandey said, "There has been a lot of attempts to stop this event and even some media houses are spreading wrong information that the permission for the rally has been denied."



Ever since the rally was announced on January 2, "a lot of money has been spent on posters calling Mevani a deshdrohi (traitor) and urban naxal," Pandey told PTI, adding the event will be held as per schedule.

Mevani could not be reached for his comments.

In a statement, the organisers have urged the prospective participants to "assemble on the Parliament Street at 12 pm tomorrow".

A senior police officer though said, "Mevani's request for the rally is still under consideration."



The rally seeks to raise the demand for the release of Dalit outfit Bhim Army's founder Chandrashekhar Azad and emphasise on issues like educational rights, employment, livelihood and gender justice.

A large section of students from universities and colleges in Delhi, women's groups, teachers' associations and activists associated with Mevani from across the country are expected to attend the rally.

Azad, 30, was arrested in June last year from Himachal Pradesh as he was the main accused in the Thakur-Dalit clash in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district.

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A militant allegedly involved in the recent kidnapping of a policeman has been arrested in Dima Hasao district, police said.

The militant was apprehended during a joint operation conducted by the police and Assam Rifles yesterday.

The militant was identified as S S Maj Naimeyning alias Aboy of Zeliangrong United Front (ZUF), the police said.

A pistol with live ammunition was recovered from his possession



A joint team of police and troopers of 43rd and 22nd battalions of Assam Rifles had on January 1 rescued Prafull Phukan, the abducted personal security officer (PSO) of the executive magistrate of North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council, from Hungrum village in Dima Hasao district.

Phukan had been abducted on December 31.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Switzerland on January 22 on a two-day visit during which he will deliver the keynote address at the plenary session of the (WEF) in Davos.

This will be the first participation by an Indian prime minister in the WEF in over two decades. In 1997, the then prime minister H D Deve Gowda had attended the Davos Summit.

Announcing the prime ministerial visit on Monday, the external affairs ministry, in a statement, said the prime minister will also have a bilateral meeting with Alain Berset, the President of the Swiss Confederation on January 22.

The theme for this year's WEF is 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World'.

"Prime Minister will deliver the keynote speech at the plenary session of the (WEF) in Davos- Klosters, Switzerland, on January 23, 2018," the ministry said.

The plenary session will be moderated by Prof Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman, WEF.

To be attended by over 3,000 global leaders, including CEOs, heads of state and government, artists and civil society members, the Davos Annual Meeting of WEF will conclude on January 26.

The WEF, which describes itself as an international organisation for public-private cooperation and was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation, hosts its annual meeting in Davos every year in January.

In a statement last month announcing its co-chairs for the 2018 meeting, the WEF had said that over 3,000 leaders, representing 100 countries, will gather in a collaborative effort to shape the global, regional and industry agendas, with a commitment to improve the state of the world.

Desi cuisine and yoga will mark the start of the five-day annual jamboree of the rich and powerful from across the world in the snow-laden Swiss ski resort town of Davos. This is the first time India will host the welcome reception at the summit.

The Indian presence is set to be the largest-ever with as many as six Union ministers, two chief ministers, several top government officials and over 100 CEOs, figuring among the registered participants.

The official sessions at the WEF will also have special India-focused discussions including one on "India's role in the world", how it is rethinking economics with the use of big data in policymaking and the country's role in securing peace and stability in the Asian century.

The registered participants from India, include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar and Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region of India Jitendra Singh.

Others expected to be present at the elite global gathering are Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi along with a number of his cabinet colleagues, as well as Pakistan People's Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

China is also expected to have a significant presence and its Belt Road Initiative will feature as a key theme in a number of panel discussions, including those attended by Pakistani leaders.
The US-based Educational Testing Service and the Learning Links Foundation today launched the 'TOEFL Information Van', a one-month-long drive here to create awareness about the English language test in schools in selected cities of Kerala.

The initiative is to enhance awareness about the TOEFL test and its different facets and comes in the wake of a large number of Indian students especially from the Kerala region, keen an overseas education, a release said here today.

As part of the programme, the van will be visiting selected schools in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kottayam, Kochi, Kozhikode and Thrissur in Kerala, it said.

The drive was launched here today and it would be extended to other cities in the coming days.

The drive is expected to help students with the latest information, preparation tips and registration advice regarding the TOEFL examination taken by thousands of aspirants every year, it said.

"Indian students who want to study abroad but dont know where to start should keep a look out for the TOEFL Information Van," said Jennifer Brown, Executive Director of the TOEFL Programme.

"With Indian students continuing to study abroad, it is important that we continue to provide them with the necessary resources to help them achieve their academic and career goals.

The service of two experts would be available in the van to provide students with information about the TOEFL test.

The TOEFL test of academic English is a popular English-language assessment, recognised by more than 10,000 institutions in over 130 countries.

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Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi today said majority of Muslims were in the favour of banning the practice of triple talaq.

"Triple talaq is un-Islamic and is a bad tradition. We want the empowerment of women. It (banning 'talaq-e-biddat') is not a Hindu or Muslim issue. We cannot leave out Muslim women in empowerment programmes being undertaken by our government," the minister told reporters on the sidelines of a function here.

In recently-concluded winter session of Parliament, Lok Sabha passed a landmark bill making talaq-e-biddat or instant triple talaq a "cognisable and non-bailable offence".

The bill recommends maximum three-year imprisonment for any Muslim man who gives instant divorce to his wife by uttering the word talaq three times in quick succession. The bill also provides for subsistence allowance to Muslim women and custody of minor children as may be determined by the magistrate.

Though the bill was tabled in Rajya Sabha, it could not be passed as the Parliament was adjourned till budget session. Opposition members in Upper House had demanded that the bill be referred to a select committee.

Naqvi said majority of Islamic communities and groups have welcomed the Centre's move to criminalise tribal talaq.

He said the Central government wanted to offer an "economical option" of travel to Indian Muslims as Haj subsidy was getting reduced.

The minister said the government of Saudi Arabia accepted the Indian government's request of allowing Haj pilgrims to take the sea route to reach Jeddah.

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Paying rich tributes to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on his second death anniversary, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today said the PDP-founder always believed in peaceful resolution of issues rather than acrimony or discord.

Delivering his speech of acceptance after receiving the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed award on 'Probity in Politics and Public Life' here today, Kumar said the leader had a firm belief that issues confronting a system can be resolved only through dialogue and negotiations.

The Bihar chief minister said Sayeed always gave a new direction to the position he occupied.

Narrating his long association with the late leader from the times of Jan Morcha, Janta Dal and later as his deputy in the home ministry, Kumar said he enjoyed a long but intense relation with Sayeed in whom he always found a leader who was concerned about the welfare of his people.

He said in 2003, as the then railway minister, he worked with Sayeed and found him very keen in extending railway network to Kashmir.

"It was difficult to carry forward work on Udhampur- Katra-Baramulla rail link due to some communication gaps but he (Sayeed) persuaded us to work on the project seriously," Kumar told the gathering.

He said during the construction of Srinagar railway station, Sayeed as the the chief minister, was very keen on preserving the heritage and old cultural pattern and took keen interest in preserving the grandeur of the place.

Earlier, the Bihar chief minister was conferred the first Mufti Mohammad Sayeed Award for Probity in Politics and Public Life, by Governor N N Vohra at a function here.

On the occasion, eminent economist Lord Meghnad Desai also delivered the first Mufti Memorial Lecture on the topic 'Devolving Power: The British Experience' in which he traced the legal and constitutional journey of the British society.

The event, chaired by the governor, was also attended by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti; Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi among others.

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A man from Kutch lodged in a Pakistan jail is yet to return to India even a year after the end of his prison term as his nationality has not been verified by the Ministry of Home Affairs, a Right to Information plea has revealed.

Ismail Samma, 51, a resident of Nana Dinara village some 50 kilometres from the Indo-Pakistan border in Gujarat's Kutch district, went missing in August 2008 as he strayed into the Pakistan side while grazing cattle, said Jatin Desai of the Mumbai-based NGO, Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy.

Desai, who filed an RTI on this issue in August last year with the Ministry of External Affairs, recently received a reply to it from the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

Samma, arrested in Pakistan after he crossed the border, was sentenced to five years in jail for espionage in October, 2011, he said.

"His jail term ended in October, 2016. But due to lack of nationality verification on the part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, he has not yet been repatriated," Desai said.

While Samma's family had been looking for him for several years, it recently learnt that he was lodged in a jail in Pakistan.

A fellow villager, Rafiq Suleman, who had returned from a Pakistan jail, told the family he had seen Samma in a Karachi prison.

Desai said Indian government officials knew about Samma's whereabouts from at least 2014, when he was provided consular access by the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

In its reply on Samma's status, the Indian High Commission stated, "According to the records available with this Mission, Mr Mohammad Ismail S/O Mohammad Samma was provided Consular Access on February 7, 2014, and request for verification on his nationality was forwarded to the MHA on March 7, 2014."



It added, "However, the same is still awaited from the MHA due to which this Mission is unable to take up the case of release for Mr Mohammad Ismail with the Government of Pakistan."



The RTI reply also informed the petitioner that "there is no time limit for confirming nationality after the High Commission gets consular access."



Under an agreement signed between India and Pakistan, if a man is arrested across the border, he shall be given consular access within 90 days of his arrest. Once his nationality is verified, the process of expatriation is initiated.

"At times, the two countries do not follow the rules. Since there is no time limit for nationality verification after consular access, Ismail, who was given consular access in February, 2014, is still in jail as his nationality has not been verified. It is inhuman," Desai said.

"We need to see that nationality is verified within three months. The government needs to be more sensitive in such cases," he said.

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The Supreme Court was on Monday told there was no need to re-investigate Mahatma Gandhi's assassination as the conspiracy behind the murder and identity of assailant Nathuram Vinayak Godse who had fired the bullets have already been duly established.

Senior advocate Amarendra Sharan, who was appointed as an amicus curiae to assist in the matter, has filed a report in the apex court and has said that claims regarding existence of British special intelligence unit by the name 'Force 136' and its alleged role in the assassination was not substantiated.

The report said that records of the case established that an independent judiciary had adjudged the crimes of Nathuram Vinayak Godse and other accused in the matter and justice was served.

Gandhi was shot dead at point blank range in New Delhi on January 30, 1948 by Godse, a right-wing advocate of Hindu nationalism. The assassination case had led to the conviction and execution of Godse and Narayan Apte on November 15, 1949.

Sharan has filed the report on the PIL by Mumbai-based Dr Pankaj Phadnis



, a researcher and a trustee of Abhinav Bharat, who has sought reopening of investigation on several grounds, claiming it was one of the biggest cover-ups in the history.

"The bullets which pierced Mahatma Gandhi's body, the pistol from which it was fired, the assailant who fired the said bullets, the conspiracy which led to the assassination and the ideology which led to the said assassination have all been duly identified," the report said.

"No substantive material has come to light to throw any doubt on any of the above requiring either a re-investigation of the murder case or, to constitute a fresh fact finding commission with respect to the same," it said.

A bench headed by Justice S A Bobde is scheduled to hear the matter on January 12.

The petitioner has questioned the 'three bullet theory' relied upon by various courts to hold conviction of accused Godse and Apte, who were hanged, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who was given benefit of doubt due to lack of evidence.

Regarding the claim by the petitioner about the alleged fourth bullet, the amicus has said that as per records of the case, only three empty cartridges and two spent bullets were found at the place of occurrence and no fourth spent bullet or empty cartridge was found from there.

The report also said Godse was arrested at the spot with the murder weapon, a semi automatic Beretta pistol which could load seven cartridges at a time, and the records suggested that only three bullets were fired.

It said during the trial in the case, six eye-witnesses were examined and they all mentioned about three shots having been fired by sole assailant Nathuram Godse only.

"From the above documents, it is clear that there was no 4th bullet which was fired upon on the fateful day of January 30, 1948. Additionally, the other bullet alleged to be the fourth bullet was recovered from Gwalior and not from Delhi," it said.

Dealing with the petitioner's claims about Savarkar's role, the amicus said that Savarkar was acquitted of charges of conspiracy by the trial court in the case and now it would neither be advisable nor possible to come to a definitive finding with respect to his alleged role in the assassination.

The report also dealt with certain remarks of the Justice J L Kapur Commission of Inquiry, which was set up in 1966, in the case.

On the allegations about conspiracy and role of 'Force 136', the amicus has said there was no documentary evidence in contemporary literature to prove that there even existed such a secret service and was mandated to carry out the murder.

"Furthermore, it is difficult to give any evidentiary value to the submissions regarding apprehension of Nathuram Godse by a CIA Agent named Herbert Reiner at the place of occurrence. Nor, any evidentiary value can be given to the statement made to Vijaya Laxmi Pandit (the then Indian ambassador to USSR) by the ambassadors of the various other countries regarding the involvement of the British," it said.

Phadnis has challenged the decision of the Bombay High Court which on June 6, 2016 had dismissed his PIL on two grounds -- firstly, that the findings of fact have been recorded by the competent court and confirmed right up to the apex court, and secondly, the Kapur Commission has submitted its report and made observations in 1969, while the present petition has been filed 46 years later.




The Tamil Nadu government has informed the Madras High Court that a core committee, headed by the Principal Secretary,Health and Family Welfare Department,would be formed to improve working conditions of contract nurses.

U Anbu, Additional secretary to Government, Health and Family Welfare Department stated this in his status report filed before the First Bench, comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose.

Senior counsel P Wilson, appearing for MRB Nurses Welfare Association submitted that government had in a notification in 2015 when recuitments were made, promised that the nurses would be absorbed in the permanent post within two years. However even after two years they had not been absorbed in service, despite vacancies.

The petitioner also submitted that the consolidation pay of Rs 7,700 per month was far below the minimum wages which was Rs 18,000 per month.

The work done by the nurses who have gone on strike was similar to that by other nurses in permanent post who were paid higher salary. Hence concept of equal pay equal work should be applied.

Counsel said that the association had suspended the strike on a order from the court, which had directed the government to address their genuine grievances.

However this order had not been adhered to, he said and described the formation of a commitee as just an eyewash.

The bench posted to January 12, further hearing of the petition filed by one N Ganesh.

Anbu, in his counter affidavit, said the government had decided that concrete efforts would be taken on how the contract nurses could be brought under regular time scale.This could be done keeping in mind various administrative issues and financial implications, he said.

The Director of Medical and Rural health services has also assured that nearly 200 MRB Contract nurses would be brought into regular time scale as per Medical Services Recruitment Board seniority before the financial year end.

As it would take some more years to bring all 9,533 contract nurses on time scale, considering pay structures in other states, contract pay enhancement in consultation with the finance department and national health mission has to be examined, he said.

The project director and state health society has been requested to take immediate action.

The Director has also been requested to send suitable proposal to enhance cadre strength/new creation of posts of nurses, equivalent to norms of Indian Nursing Council, he said.

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flights were suspended into a flooded terminal at New York's flagship airport on Monday, flung into chaos after a water main broke during brutally cold temperatures following a deadly winter storm.

Gushing water compounded meltdown at John F Kennedy Airport, where furious passengers have camped out for days as a result of equipment damaged by the storm and a backlog of flights.

Water poured from the ceiling and the arrivals area was submerged by standing water, through which a few intrepid passengers picked their way gingerly, according to footage broadcast by CNN.

flights into Terminal 4 were suspended and the water main break occurred just before 2pm, said a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that runs the airport.

The west end of Terminal four lay under about three inches (eight centimeters) of water, where maintenance crews were mopping up, with police and fire crews on site, the spokesman told AFP.

The cause of the break is being investigated, he added.

Terminal 4 is used by more than 30 airlines, including Air India, China Airlines, Delta, Egyptair, El Al, Emirates, Etihad, KLM Royal Dutch, Singapore Airlines, Thomas Cook and Virgin Atlantic.

On Saturday the airport was forced to close Terminal 1, which serves the likes of Air France, Japan Airlines and Lufthansa, to international arrivals in an attempt to get on top of the backlog.

But tempers have flared among furious travellers, forced to sleep on the floor of terminals, with stranded on planes for hours waiting to access a gate and massive delays in baggage claim.

"I am so angry, words cannot even express how I feel right now," one stranded female traveler told NBC television before the water leak.

"It's getting like a madhouse," traveler Steven Litvin told NBC, leaving with his wife eight hours after their plane landed -- with only half their luggage.
China today said it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The US last week suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we dont agree to place the responsibility of anti terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan. Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts.

"First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.

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Mohammad Shami and Jasprit Bumrah made full use of seaming conditions to put India on the cusp of a famous Test win in South Africa at lunch on day four of the series opener here.

Shami and Bumrah shared three wickets each in the morning session on day four, effecting a South African collapse in which they lost 8 wickets for only 65 to be bowled out for 130



in the second innings.

With home team extending the lead to 207 runs, India will have to chase down 208 for their third ever Test win on South African soil.

Starting from day two overnight 65/2, the slide began in the second over of the morning.

Shami had Hashim Amla (4) caught at gully with Rohit Sharma taking a low catch. The decision went up to the TV umpire but he didnt find conclusive evidence to overturn the soft signal.

Four overs later, Shami sent back nightwatchman Kagiso Rabada (5), caught at second slip. In the 29th over then, when Bumrah had Faf du Plessis (0) caught behind off a snorter, South Africa were struggling at 82/5.

Bumrah also removed Quinton de Kock (8) as it became 92/6 and the collapse became imminent.

AB de Villiers (35 runs, 50 balls, 2 fours, 2 sixes) waged a lone battle at the other end but he just couldnt find anyone to support him as Shami trapped Vernon Philander (0) lbw to take 11/3 in six overs this morning.

South Africa crossed 100 in the 36th over as Keshav Maharaj (15) played a few strokes. Bhuvneshwar Kumar (2-33) then got down to action with the batsman caught behind in the 39th over.

Wriddhiman Saha took his 10th catch of the Test when Morne Morkel (2) was caught behind off Kumar two overs later.

This is an Indian record overseas as Saha went past MS Dhoni who had nine catches against Australia in his last Test at the MCG in 2014.

Bumrah completed South Africas misery as de Villiers holed out in the deep in search of some quick runs, rounding up a dismal morning. Dale Steyn, batting despite a bruised ankle, was the unbeaten batsman.

On day one, South Africa were bowled out for 286 runs in the first innings with Bhuvneshwar Kumar taking 4-87. India were reduced to 28/3 at stumps.

On day two, India finished with 209 runs in their first innings, surrendering a 77-run lead.

South Africa were 65/2 at stumps with an overall lead of 142 runs. Hardik Pandya single-handedly kept his side in contention with 93 runs off 95 balls and then took 2-17 as well.

Day three was completely washed out due to persistent rain.

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Pakistan is believed to have told US interlocutors that a major military offensive against the Taliban from both sides of the Afghan border, if failed, will have negative consequences for the entire region, according to a media report today.

The key element in the new US strategy for Afghanistan is to launch a two-pronged military offensive that inflicts a military defeat on the Taliban and forces them to join the Afghan reconciliation process on Kabul's conditions, diplomatic sources told Dawn .

The paper in a detailed report from Washington reported that Pakistanis do not disagree with the basic thrust of the American argument but they have one major worry: What if it fails?



Trump in August unveiled his South Asia policy and vowed to boost strategic partnership with India in Afghanistan. He had called for tougher measures against Pakistan if it fails to cooperate with the US in its fight against terrorism.

Pakistani officials, who have interacted with US officials on this issue, say that they too have the same ambition: ridding the region, particularly Afghanistan, of militants.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis at his weekend briefing at the Pentagon urged Islamabad to cooperate with the US in defeating the Afghan Taliban, including the Haqqani Network which, he says, has safe havens inside Pakistan and uses them to recuperate and re-launch attacks into Afghanistan.

While Pakistanis reject the US charge that they have allowed the Haqqani Network to maintain safe havens, they appear more eager to understand the US plan to defeat the Taliban.

But they fear that a major military offensive, without engaging some Taliban factions in direct talks first, could be counter-productive. The Taliban might outlive this offensive too, and deal with it "lying low in their mountain fastness, as they did with previous offensives," as one interlocutor said.

And in the process Pakistan will lose whatever influence it has. With all lines of communication closed, the Taliban will become even more dangerous, particularly for Pakistan, which has always faced the blowback of previous adventures in Afghanistan, whether launched by the Russians or Americans, the report said.

The Pakistani officials their interlocutors that the country is still coping with the consequences of Britain's Afghan adventures. Those adventures led to the creation of FATA, a buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which later became the source of many troubles.

The Trump administration, however, does not seem much interested in the Pakistani argument, at least for now. But it would if the Taliban outlive the proposed offensive as well, the report said.

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A Pakistani court today granted bail to the father-in-law of Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah over eight years after he was arrested on charges of sedition and terrorism.

The Peshawar High Court (PHC) granted bail to 84-year-old Maulana Sufi Muhammad, the chief of banned militant outfit Tehreek-e-Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), due to his old age and poor health.

Vying for implementation of Sharia in Pakistan, TNSM was declared a terrorist outfit and banned in 2002. It operates mainly in the Dir region, Swat and Malakand districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Muhammad was arrested in 2009 by Pakistan army during military operation Operation Black Thunderstorm in Swat against the Taliban.

He was arrested along with his two aides for inciting violence and committing terrorism. He was charged with sedition, aiding terrorism and conspiracy.

The court ordered release of Muhammad, who is currently hospitalised, against two surety bonds of Rs 700,000 each.

His arrest came following a peace deal between the then PPP government and TNSM. Under the deal, the then President Asif Ali Zardari had signed the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation law for Swat, paving way for the implementation of Sharia law in the Malakand region on April 19, 2009.

In January 2011, Muhammad denied to an anti-terrorism court that he had any links to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and that he only sought enforcement of sharia in Malakand.

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Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi and invited the PM to inaugurate the new Mandovi bridge here.

A statement issued by the Chief Minister's Office stated that Parrikar met the Prime Minister and invited him to inaugurate the new Mandovi bridge near Panaji.

The bridge is currently under construction and is expected to be completed by May, 2018.

The CMO release added that Parrikar briefed the PM on other projects currently underway in the state and the two also had a brief discussion on the political scenario in the country.

Parrikar was in Delhi today to attend the third meeting of the Council for Trade Development and Promotion chaired by Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Suresh Prabhu.

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The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has mooted a hike in the entry fee at popular tourist sites and discounts on cashless modes of payment, as per a proposed amendment to the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Rules, 1959.

According to the draft, a copy of which is with PTI, Indians, those from the other SAARC countries and BIMSTEC countries will now have to pay Rs 40 per head (Rs 30 currently) to visit the UNESCO World Heritage properties or category 'A' monuments -- the Taj group of monuments at Agra, the Agra Fort, the Fatehpur Sikri monuments at Fatehpur Sikri, the Humayun's Tomb and Qutub Minar in Delhi.

Those opting to pay by card or any other cashless mode of transaction will get a discount of Rs five.

For the Red Fort in Delhi, the revised entry fee would be Rs 50 per head (Rs 30 currently) for Indians, those from the other SAARC (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives and Afghanistan) countries and BIMSTEC countries (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar) and Rs 35 for cashless payments.

Those from the other countries would have to pay Rs 600 per head (Rs 500 currently) to enter these monuments, the draft said, adding that in case of digital transactions, the amount would be reduced by Rs 50.

For the category 'B' monuments, an entry fee of Rs 25 (Rs 20 for cashless transactions) has been proposed in the draft for Indians, those from the other SAARC countries and BIMSTEC countries.

These monuments include the Akbar's Tomb at Sikandra, the Itimad-ul-Daula's Tomb at Rambagh, the group of monuments at Mehtab Bagh in Agra, Delhi's Jantar Mantar, Khan-i-Khana, Purana Qila, Tughlaqabad Fort, Ferozshah Kotla and Safdarjung's Tomb.

Others would have to pay an entry fee of Rs 300.

Presently, Indians, citizens of the other SAARC countries and BIMSTEC countries have to pay an entry fee of Rs 15 and other nationals are charged Rs 250 per head.

The draft has also proposed a fee hike for additional facilities -- Rs 850 (Rs 800 for cashless transactions) for category 'A' and Rs 400 (Rs 350 for cashless transactions) for category 'B' monuments.

The Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment) Bill, 2017 was tabled in the Lok Sabha on July 18, 2017 by the Ministry of Culture and was passed by the House on January 2, 2018. It is yet to be tabled in the Upper House.

The ASI has invited suggestions and objections to the rules which have to be conveyed to its director general by February 5.

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A PIL was today filed in the Bombay High Court seeking a judicial probe into the 2014 death of special CBI judge Brijgopal Harikrishan Loya, who was then hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

In its plea, the Bombay Lawyers' Association has sought setting up a commission of enquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to go into the circumstances leading to Loya's death.

Loya died of heart attack in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

In November last year, Loya's death was in spotlight after media reports quoting his sister fuelled suspicion about the circumstances surrounding his death and link to the Sohrabuddin case in which BJP chief Amit Shah, and senior police officials were accused. Shah and many others were later discharged for want of evidence.

"We have sought the appointment of a retired judge of the Supreme Court as commission of enquiry to look into the death of judge Loya and submit a report," the association's president Ahmad Abdi told PTI.

Altogether 23 accused, including police personnel, are facing trial for their involvement in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, and subsequent disappearance and death of his wife Kausar Bi and their associate Tulsidas Prajapati in Gujarat in November 2005.

The case was later transferred to the CBI and the trial shifted to Mumbai.

"It is to be noted that judge Loya died on December 1, 2014 and on December 30, 2014, the special CBI court, which was assigned the case, discharged Amit Shah from the case," the petition said.

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A 'sub zonal commander' of rebel outfit Peoples Liberation Front of India (PLFI) was today arrested along with an aide when they arrived at Balumath-Chandwa main road under Balumath police station to collect levy, police said.

Acting on a tip-off that a PLFI sub-zonal commander Dabloo Yadav along with his aide Deepak Pandey would be arriving near the under-construction Yogiadih Railway crossing to collect levy, Superintendent of Police Prasant Anand constituted a police team to apprehend them today.

Addressing a press conference here, Anand said the police team rounded up Yadav and Pandey soon after they arrived while another accomplice managed to give police the slip.

A country-made pistol, three live cartridges, six mobile phones and a PLFI letter pad was recovered from their possession, he said.

A squad headed by Yadav, who was an active member of CPI (Maoists) before he joined PLFI, was active in Chandwa, Latehar, Balumath, Ghagra police station limits. Several cases including collection of levy and firing at a Railway site were registered against him.

Pandey was an active member of rebel outfit JJMP and also an arms supplier, Anand said.

Anand expressed hope that PLFI would be weakened in the district following the arrests.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi today drew the attention of the country's top police officials to the problems arising out of social media and cyber crimes, saying they should be dealt with on highest priority.

Speaking at the concluding day of the annual conference of the DGPs and IGPs here at the BSF Academy, the prime minister said that there was an emerging global consensus towards greater information sharing on illicit financial dealings and India could play a key role in achieving this.

Modi said cyber security issues should be dealt with immediately and should receive highest priority, according to an official release.

In this context, the prime minister particularly mentioned the importance of social media.

He said messaging should rely on local languages for greater effectiveness.

Referring to the radicalisation of youth, Modi urged the top police officers to use technology to pinpoint the problem areas.

Around 250 top officers from the state police forces and central police organisations participated in the three-day meet.

The prime minister said India is an "organic entity" and not an "assembled" one and asked the police officers from the states to open up in sharing information on illicit financial dealings.

He said while openness is getting increased acceptance worldwide, there is a need for greater openness among states too, on security issues.

Modi said security cannot be achieved selectively, or alone, and for that breaking of silos and information sharing among states can help make everyone more secure.

Following a directive of Modi, the home ministryhas been organising the conference outsidethe national capital since the NDA government came to power in 2014.

The last three conferences were held in Guwahati, Rann of Kutchand Hyderabad.

The prime minister recalled how the nature and the scope of the conference has changed since 2014, beginning with its being shifted out of Delhi.

He appreciated the officers who have been instrumental in facilitating this change.

Modi said the conference has now become more relevant, in the context of challenges and responsibilities facing the country.

He said the new format of the conference has resulted in a marked improvement in the quality of discussions.

The prime minister commended the country's security apparatus for the work they have been doing in securing the country.

He said that the officers present in the conference have delivered leadership, despite often having to operate in an environment of negativity.

Modi said that as a result of the discussions in the conference over the last few years, now, once an objective is clearly defined for the police force, there is a lot of cohesion in the execution.

He said this conference was helping top police officers get a more holistic view of the problems and challenges. He said the range of topics being discussed has also become more broad-based over the last two years.

This has helped give a whole new vision to senior police officers, he said.

Discussing ways to add even more value to this conference, the prime minister suggested that the follow up should continue through working groups, all the year round.

In this context, he specially emphasised the importance of involving younger officers. Modi said this would greatly help in improving effectiveness of the exercise.

The prime minister also presented President's police medals for distinguished service to Intelligence Bureau (IB) officers. During his address, the prime minister congratulated and appreciated the medal winning officers of the IB, for their dedication and commitment to service.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and union ministers of states Hansraj Ahir and Shri Kiren Rijiju were also present on the occasion.

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The ruling party of the prime minister of northern Cyprus, a statelet recognised only by Turkey, was leading parliamentary elections today but will probably still need to form a coalition, partial results showed.

More than 190,500 people were registered to vote in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), established in the wake of Turkey's 1974 invasion of the island in response to an Athens-backed coup.

The vote comes ahead of presidential polls later this month in the internationally recognised Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus, with peace efforts on hold until both sets of elections are over.

The National Unity Party (UBP) of prime minister Huseyin Ozgurgun led the polls with 36 percent of the vote, ahead of the socialist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) at 21 percent, Turkish Cypriot media reports said, based on a count of 58 percent of ballot boxes.

The vote of the Democrat Party (DP) -- the outgoing junior partner in the ruling coalition -- however collapsed to 7 percent. The People's Party (HP) -- a new party -- polled well on 17 percent.

If confirmed, the results would probably pave the way to a UBP-CTP coalition, which could be useful for president Mustafa Akinci, as the CTP broadly supports peace talks he has led.

But the HP -- which may still play a role in the coalition -- has expressed scepticism over negotiations to reunify the island.

Akinci will want broad backing at home as he seeks to push once more for a federal solution to the Cyprus problem and convince his Greek Cypriot counterparts he means business.

The election in the northern third of Cyprus comes six months after efforts to reunify the island collapsed at a United Nations-hosted peace summit in Switzerland over several sticking points including the withdrawal of Turkey's 45,000 troops.

The election, originally planned for July, was brought forward after tensions in the ruling coalition of the UBP and its junior partner DP, as the opposition pressed for snap polls.

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People with high social status, such as influencial businessmen and powerful politicians, are more likely to be perceived as insincere when they apologise, a study has found.

"The high-status person is perceived as someone who can control their emotions more effectively and use them strategically, and accordingly they are perceived as less sincere," said Arik Cheshin of the University of Haifa in Israel.

"This perception applies to the world of business and work, and it's reasonable to assume it applies to politicians, too. The more senior they are, the less authentic their emotions are perceived as being," said Cheshin, one of the authors of the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

In experiments involving hundreds of participants, the researchers examined whether the power status of a person who has committed a transgression influences trust in that person and the ability to forgive them.

In the first part of the experiment, researchers told the participants about an employee who had been found forging documents, leading to the imposition of a fine on the company.

They showed the participants pictures of the employee expressing various emotions in a later staff meeting - happiness, sadness, anger and fear.

The next experiment used video clips showing the same emotions.

In another experiment, the researchers examined the same situation, but this time relating to a real incident.

They showed the participants a real video clip in which the CEO of Toyota cried and apologized for failing to take action, even though he knew there was a problem with the breaks in various vehicles.

In all the cases, some of the participants were told that the person was a junior employee, while others thought that he was the CEO.

The findings showed that in all three cases the CEO's emotions were perceived as less sincere than those of the junior employee.

When the researchers explored the reason for this difference, it emerged that the participants perceived the CEO as someone who can control their emotions and even use them strategically.

"The assumption is that the CEO has much more to lose, and accordingly has a stronger motivation to try to use their emotions to create empathy. Accordingly, the participants described them as less sincere," researchers said.

Next, the researchers examined a similar situation, but this time they not only asked who was perceived as more authentic, but also whether there was a difference in terms of the participants' willingness to forgive a junior or a senior employee in exactly the same situation.

They presented the participants with a true case of a CEO who insulted the company's customers and then posted a video apology on YouTube.

Again, some of the participants were told that he was a senior employee and others thought that he was a junior worker. Once again, it was found that the CEO was perceived as less sincere and less deserving of forgiveness.

The researchers also found that in the case of the junior employee, the participants gave much more detailed explanations as to why the worker should be forgiven.

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A Delhi court today granted bail to a suspected middleman in an alleged case of corruption in the Rs 2,150-cr revamp project of ITPO complex at Pragati Maidan in which NBCC Chairman-cum-Managing Director Anoop Mittal has also been made an accused.

Special judge Arvind Kumar granted relief to Ghaziabad- based Rishabh Agrawal on a personal bond of Rs one lakh and a surety of the same amount.

The court has posted for tomorrow the order on bail plea of Sanjay Kulkarni, managing director of Capacite Structures.

The court had on January 5 reserved its order on the bail applications of Kulkarni and Agrawal after hearing arguments from defence advocates and the CBI.

The probe agency opposed the applications saying that the accused might hamper the investigation which, it claimed, was in initial stage, and cited the possibility that both might flee from justice.

The agency had booked Mittal, Kulkarni, Agrawal, and two others-- public servants Pradeep Mishra and Akashdeep Chouhan who allegedly delivered the bribe -- in the case on December 22.

It alleged in the FIR that the contract to redevelop the prime land at Pragati Maidan was awarded to Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Pvt. Ltd. and Shapoorji Pallonji Qatar WLL for Rs 2,149.93 crore by NBCC.

Mumbai-based Capacite Structures was trying to get that work from Shapoorji Pallonji on sub-contract.

Kulkarni had approached Agrawal, the suspected middleman having good contacts with public servants, for getting the sub-contract in favour of the company, it alleged.

The FIR alleged that Agrawal approached Pradeep Kumar Mishra, a public servant in an intelligence agency who was on deputation and was also close to certain senior functionaries of NBCC Ltd.

Under the influence of Mishra, Mittal "strongly directed" the executive director of NBCC to settle the matter in favour of Capacite Structures, it alleged.

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Archaeologists in Israel have discovered half-million-year-old stone tools that suggest the cognitive abilities of the early humans who crafted them were much more similar to our own than previously thought.

The tools were found in the Israeli Arab town of Jaljulia, located at the edge of the coastal plain near the border with the West Bank, researchers said.

Described as a kind of stone-age Swiss army knife by archaeologists, many of the objects found were flint hand axes, among other tools, 'SBS News' reported.

"The carving of these pieces requires a conceptual leap that allowed them to imagine the desired tool before starting to shape it," said Ran Barkai, the head of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

"The findings are amazing, both in their state of preservation and in their implications about our understanding of this ancient material culture," the excavation's director, Maayan Shemer, added.

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A collegian's death here a couple of days ago took a turn after police from his native Odisha asked PM Palem police here to investigate his allegations of ragging.

Shreyash Kesharwani (16), student of a college here, had died on January 6 while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Rourkela in Odisha.

Inspector K Lakshmana Murthy of PM Palem police station said that a communication from Govindpur police in Odisha had been received and a fresh investigation into the case had begun.

Police said that Kesharwani, a native of Garposh area under Bamra block of Sambalpur district in Odisha, had told his family that he was ragged and beaten up on December 26 by some students in the college's hostel.

The family had reportedly recorded his statement on a mobile phone while he was undergoing treatment at the hospital in Odisha, Palem police said.

Inspector Murthy said that the contents of the mobile recording made by the victim's relatives would be examined.

College authorities meanwhile told police that there was no incident of ragging and that Kesharwani had injured himself after he fell in the bathroom.

College authorities told police that his father took him back to Odisha and they got to know of his death on January 6.

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A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents has protested outside the Pakistani embassy here against the "inhumane" treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials.

"The trial of violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court," said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Baolchistan, which organised the unique event named as "Chappal-Chor Pakistan" (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhav's wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out "inhumane" treatment to Jadhav's wife and mother during their tightly- controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian on December 25 in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

"The recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt. Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even Bindi and Mangal Sutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata Soubhagya Nari (married Indian woman)," said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in USA.

Carl Clemens, volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the "petty vindictiveness and humiliation" that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

"They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to Pakistan's own destruction," said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Pakistan on December 25 had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer.

New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member bench of the ICJ on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case. It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has thanked the Reserve Bank of India for featuring the chariot wheel of the famous Konark Sun Temple in the new Rs 10 denomination banknotes, due to be released by the apex bank shortly.

The chief minister said he felt proud that a rich cultural heritage of Odisha has found a place in the countrys currency.

"Filled with pride that the rich cultural heritage of #Odisha finds place in Nations currency. #Konark Wheel, the timeless symbol of our art and sculpture, is depicted in the new Rs 10 currency note. Congratulate @RBI for incorporating the world famous Sun Temple motif in the note, Patnaik said in a tweet.

The new Rs 10 note in the Mahatma Gandhi series is designed in the base colour of chocolate brown and has the motif of the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha on its reverse, according to a release from the RBI.

The new note will have the same height of 63 millimetre as the current 10 rupee note but the width will be 123mm, slightly lesser than the 137 mm width of the existing note.

The existing 10 rupee note features images of the country's fauna - rhinoceros, elephant and tiger.

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A day after Punjab's Congress government launched its farm debt-waiver scheme, the opposition Shiromani Akali Dal today accused the ruling party of defrauding farmers by waiving only a part of their loan.

"Debt-waiver (scheme) is a massive fraud with the farming community. There cannot be a bigger fraud than this," SAD president Sukhbir Badal told reporters here.

The opposition party has decided to meet Punjab Governor V P Singh Badnore on January 12, seeking the dismissal of the Amarinder Singh government. It will also hold a meeting of the core committee of the party on the same day on the issue.

In Mansa district yesterday, Singh launched his government's farm debt-waiver scheme and slammed opposition parties for spreading a "false propaganda".

Farm debt waiver was one of the key promises of the Congress ahead of the state polls in February last year.

Badal said that Singh had promised before the Assembly polls that the "entire debt" of all farmers would be waived.

The total amount of debt is about Rs 90,000 crore, he said.

"But Captain Sahib waived just Rs 167 crore for 47,000 farmers yesterday. It worked out to be an average of Rs 35,000 per farmer," he said, referring to Singh.

Badal also raised questions on the functioning of the two commissions - Justice Ranjit Singh Commission and Justice Mehtab Singh Gill Commission - formed by the Congress government to probe cases of sacrilege and look into the "false cases" registered during the decade-long SAD-BJP rule.

He asked the government to appoint a sitting judge of the Supreme Court to look into the matters.

Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar yesterday reportedly accused the SAD of being behind the incidents of sacrilege.

"The commission has not given any verdict and Jakhar has been making wrong statements," he said.

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The restrictions on use of airspace in the run-up to Republic Day have been reduced to seven days from nine, bringing some relief for passengers planning to travel from or into Delhi.

Nearly 1,000 flights were expected to be cancelled or rescheduled by the airspace closure imposed for commercial airlines for 100 minutes everyday for nine days from January 18 to 26.

But now there will be no restrictions on January 19 and January 25 which will bring the number of flights affected to approximately 780, according to an airport official.

The number of days for which the restriction was placed was brought down to seven after hectic consultations among the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Ministry of Home Affairs and the Indian Air Force, a source said.

"Of the total nine days, three were standby days and the Indian Air Force has decided to withdraw two of them. January 19 and January 25 have been excluded (from the period of restriction)," according to the official.

The Airport Authority of India had issued a Notice to Airmen on December 29 informing airlines that no take-offs or landings would be allowed at Indira Gandhi International airport between 10.15am and 12.35 pm for nine days between January 18 to 26.

IGI witnesses 67 air traffic movements (both take offs and landings) per hour between 8 am to 11 pm everyday. With airspace shut for 100 minutes for seven days, an estimated 780 flights will either be cancelled or rescheduled now. This means on an average 100 flights per day would be impacted.

The source said that efforts are on to ensure that no more than approximately 60 domestic flights are cancelled per day.

International flights, which account for the remainder of flights, will only be rescheduled and not cancelled.

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on Monday met with Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa here and discussed a variety of bilateral issues of interest during his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief.

Gandhi, who is here as a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa.

He will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf country's Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

"Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, HRH Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain," Gandhi said in a tweet.

The Congress president also met with foreign minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Gulf Daily News reported.

According to a statement issued by the Congress yesterday, Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) today.

Delegates of 50 countries are participating in the function, the statement said.

He will also have an interactive session with business leaders of the Indian-origin tomorrow.

"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow," Gandhi tweeted ahead of his trip yesterday.

Gandhi is expected to return to India on January 9.
The National Green Tribunal has cancelled a bailable warrant issued against the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Managing Director Mangu Singh for failure of its officials to appear before it to apprise it about the installation of rainwater harvesting systems.

A bench headed by acting NGT chairperson Justice U D Salvi passed the order after counsel for the DMRC assured the bench that a senior official of the Delhi Metro would be present before it to answer its query.

"The counsel appearing on behalf of the DMRC seeks cancellation of bailable warrant. He undertakes to keep the senior official of the DMRC equipped with necessary instructions present before the tribunal. Undertaking is accepted. Bailable warrant issued is cancelled," the bench said.

The tribunal had directed a senior official to be present before it to explain why rainwater harvesting system could not be installed at some locations of Delhi Metro.

When the matter came up for hearing on December 22 last, the NGT issued warrant against the DMRC MD noting that nobody appeared before it, despite its order.

The matter will now be heard on February 15.

The tribunal had earlier slapped fines on four real estate developers here after it was found that rainwater harvesting system installed on their premises was not functional.

The NGT had imposed an environment compensation of Rs three lakh each on builders after perusing the inspection report filed by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC).

Taking to task several hospitals, malls and hotels here for not complying with its orders on rainwater harvesting, the green panel had earlier imposed fines and issued warrants for not installing these systems.

The green panel was hearing a plea by environmentalist Vikrant Kumar Tongad who had sought directions to the DMRC to "install proper rainwater harvesting system" on all its existing, proposed and under-construction metro stations, tracks and depots.

The green panel, however, had widened the ambit of the petition and incorporated various other institutions like hospitals, hotels and malls.

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The Supreme Court today refused to entertain a petition challenging the recruitment process for President's Bodyguard on the grounds that persons belonging to only three castes were eligible for it.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra dismissed the plea saying, "we do not get into these kind of PILs".

"How can a PIL be entertained against the President who is the head of the Republic? Heard. Dismissed," the bench, also comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, said.

The petitioner, Ishwar Singh, had moved the apex court against the Delhi High Court order dismissing his plea in this regard.

He has challenged the recruitment process of President's Bodyguard alleging that candidates belonging to three castes -- Jat, Sikh and Rajput -- were only eligible for recruitment.

"The rest of the citizens of India are barred from the said recruitment, therefore, such recruitment is against the principles of equity before law laid down under Article 14 and also against Article 15...," the plea has claimed, adding that the recruitment was "unconstitutional".

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Ousted chairman Cyrus Mistry's counsel on Monday argued before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) for introduction of certain "safeguards" within the Tata Group to protect the interests of minority shareholders.

Mistry's counsel C Arya Sundaram told the tribunal's Mumbai bench that such safeguards would ensure the diversified conglomerate works like a "board-managed" entity.

Ltd is the holding company of the Tata Group and holds the bulk of shareholding in its companies, whose activities range from making salt to software export.

Sundaram, who represents all the where Mistry is a stakeholder, told the bench that his ouster from was also a "consequence of the company's rampant practice of allowing the nominee trustee directors of Tata Trusts to override the opinions of the minority shareholders and even the company board".

"Increasingly, all decisions for Tata Sons as well as other group were being taken or approved by the two nominee trustee directors of the Tata Trust, who superseded the decisions of even the Tata Sons board," he argued.

He said the articles of association of Tata Group, that deal with powers of the Trust and the company's board, had several provisions that were often "misused" to undermine the sanctity of the Tata Sons board and the minority shareholders.

Sundaram said the opinions of the majority shareholders of the company always superseded those of the minority ones and there "was a constant interference from the nominated trustees of the Tata Trust in the functioning of Tata Sons as well as that of the smaller group companies".

"The articles enable the trustees to reduce the company board to a dummy board," Sundaram claimed.

"One of these articles allows the Tata Trusts to nominate one-third of the directors of Tata Sons. Another article permits the majority shareholders to force the minority shareholders to sell their shares or to allow transfer of shares," Sundaram argued.

He said these articles were not in consonance with the Act and dubbed them as "oppressive".

"They are oppressive to the interest of the minority shareholders and defeat the purpose of having a board-run/ managed company. All that Mistry is seeking is that these articles be struck down or that some essential safeguards be introduced."

Sundaram said the reason Mistry had approached the NCLT was to seek protection for the minority shareholders through safeguards such as bringing in place a "transparent corporate governance" for Tata Sons and its decisions vis-a-vis the group companies.

Mistry has been locked in a legal battle with the Tatas since his unceremonious exit as chairman of Tata Sonsthe promoter company of the USD 105 billion car-to-software group in October 2016.

Mistry's arguments will continue tomorrow.

Mistry was ousted as Tata Sons Chairman on October 24, 2016, and also removed as a director on the board of the holding company on February 6, 2017.

Cyrus Investments Pvt Ltd and Sterling Investments Corporation Pvt Ltd had moved the NCLT against Tata Sons after Mistry's ouster alleging oppression of minority shareholders and mismanagement.
Sarovar Hotels & Resorts today said it has signed a deal for a hotel in Mumbai as part of its expansion plans in the country.

Royal Hometel Suites in Dahisar in Mumbai is expected to open in 2018. The property is owned by Lion Pencils Ltd, Sarovar Hotels said in a statement.

The company however did not share the details of the deal.

The company is already present in Mumbai with all its three brands - Sarovar Premiere, Sarovar Portico and Hometel, he added.

Part of the global hospitality firm Louvre Hotels Group, Sarovar Hotels & Resorts has over 75 operating hotels across 50 destinations in India and Africa.

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Paving way for the Centre to make available a cheaper mode of transport for Haj pilgrims, Saudi Arabia has given its nod to India's plan to revive the option of ferrying devotees to Jeddah via sea route, 23 years after the practice was stopped.

Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi confirmed the development in a statement after he and Saudi Arabia's Haj and Umrah Minister Mohammad Saleh bin Taher Benten signed a bilateral annual agreement regarding the pilgrimage in Mecca yesterday.

Terming his meeting with Benten "very fruitful", Naqvi said officials from both the countries will discuss the technicalities involved so that the pilgrimage via sea route can be commissioned in the coming years.

"Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route... Officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years," the statement quoted Naqvi as saying.

However, it did not specify the year when the option for pilgrimage via sea route would be opened. As of now, devotees can travel to Saudi Arabia for performing Haj only by air.

The "revolutionary, pro-poor and pilgrim-friendly" decision of sending devotees through sea route will help cut down travel expenses "significantly", Naqvi said.

The government has been weighing the option of opening the sea route in the light of a 2012 Supreme Court order to abolish by 2022 the subsidy offered to Haj pilgrims who travel by air.

Ministry sources, however, said air services to Jeddah would continue to be available for those who can afford the journey. India has a Haj quota of 1.70 lakh.

It used to take nearly 12-15 days for pilgrims to reach Jeddah in Saudi Arabia from Yellow Gate in Mumbai's Mazgaon before the sea route was closed in 1995, sources said.

Naqvi said with the availability of modern and well- equipped ships -- which can ferry 4,000 to 5,000 persons at a time -- the 2,300-odd nautical miles one-side distance between Mumbai and Jeddah can now be covered within just three to four days.

The minister said for the first time, Muslim women from India will go to Haj without 'Mehram' (male companion) and separate accommodation and transport have been arranged for them.

"Woman Haj assistants will be deployed for them," he said, adding more than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without 'Mehram' and of them will be exempted from lottery system and allowed to proceed for the pilgrimage.

According to the new Haj policy of India, women above 45 years of age, who wish to go for Haj but who don't have a male companion, are allowed to travel for Haj in groups of four or more.

The Haj Committee of India has received around 3,59,000 applications for Haj 2018. For the first time, we have given choice to Haj pilgrims to opt for another nearest embarkation point, Naqvi said.

This will ensure that there is no financial burden on Haj pilgrims even after removal of Haj subsidy. This decision has received overwhelming response, the statement said.

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The Supreme Court today listed for final disposal a batch of pleas challenging the Bombay High Court verdict decriminalising the possession of beef in case of animals slaughtered outside the state.

A bench of Justices R K Agrawal and Abhay Mohan Sapre listed the matter in third week of February on non- miscellaneous day.

The top court had earlier said that the landmark judgement declaring right to privacy a fundamental right would have "some bearing" in matters relating to slaughter of cows, bulls and bullocks in Maharashtra.

The Bombay High Court had on May 6 last year struck down sections 5(D) and 9(B) of the Maharashtra Animals Preservation (Amendment) Act, 1995.

While section 5(D) criminalises possession of meat of cows, bulls or bullocks, slaughtered outside Maharashtra, section 9(B) imposed burden on the accused to prove that meat or flesh possessed by him/her does not belong to these animals. The state government had filed an appeal in the top court.

The top court had on August 25 observed that after the verdict by a nine-judge constitution bench, the right to eat food of one's choice was now protected under privacy.

Several individuals and organisations have challenged the high court's verdict upholding ban on slaughter imposed by the state government.

The Maharashtra government had approached the apex court challenging the high court's verdict striking down sections 5 (D) and 9(B) of the 1995 Act on the ground that it infringed upon a person's "right to privacy".

The high court had termed as "unconstitutional" the provisions which held that mere possession of beef was a crime, saying only "conscious possession" of the meat of animals slaughtered in the state would be an offence.

It had upheld the ban on slaughter of bulls and bullocks imposed by the Maharashtra government, but had decriminalised the possession of beef in case the animals were slaughtered outside the state.

The state government, in its appeal before the apex court, has assailed the verdict, saying the restriction imposed by the 1995 Act on possession of flesh of cow, bull or bullock could not be interpreted and concluded to be an infringement of "right to privacy".

It had said the high court "while coming to the finding that right to privacy forms part of the fundamental right to personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of Constitution ought to have appreciated that right to privacy was not yet designated as a fundamental right".

The plea had said that according to the verdict, obligation upon the state to prove "conscious possession" of beef would "constitute an unsurmountable circumstance readily available to the wrongdoer to escape sentence".

The verdict had come on a batch of petitions filed in the high court challenging the constitutional validity of the Act and, in particular, the possession and consumption of beef of animals slaughtered outside Maharashtra.

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The Supreme Court on Monday referred to a larger Bench a plea seeking decriminalisation of gay sex between two consenting adults.

A Bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said the issue arising out of of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) required to be debated upon by a larger Bench.

of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

The Bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by one Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex.

Senior advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for Johar, said the penal provision was unconstitutional as it also provided prosecution and sentencing of consenting adults who are indulging in such sex.

"You can't put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex," Datar said and referred to a recent nine-judge Bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight the point that the right to choose a sexual partner was part of the fundamental rights.

He also referred to the 2009 Delhi High Court judgement delivered on a plea of NGO 'Naz Foundation' in which the provision was held unconstitutional.

Subsequently, the apex court in 2014 had set aside the high court judgement and termed the provision as constitutional.

After the dismissal of the review plea against the 2014 judgement, a curative plea was filed which was referred to a larger Bench.

The fresh plea of Johar and others will now also be heard by the larger Bench.
The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the Karnataka High Court order quashing the 2014 government regulation that packets of tobacco products must carry pictorial warning covering 85 per cent of the packaging space, saying that "health of a citizen has primacy".

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud was "unimpressed" with the submissions of the Tobacco Institute of India (TII) that the interim stay would harm the fundamental right to do business of tobacco manufacturers.

"Considering the ...submission advanced at the Bar and keeping in view the objects and reasons of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003 and the measures taken by the state, we think it appropriate to direct stay of operation of the judgement and order passed by the High Court of Karnataka," the bench said.

Rejecting the submissions of senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for tobacco manufacturers, that it would affect their business, it said, "We have remained unimpressed by the said proponent as we are inclined to think that health of a citizen has primacy and he or she should be aware of that which can affect or deteriorate the condition of health.

"We may hasten to add that deterioration may be a milder word and, therefore, in all possibility the expression 'destruction of health' is apposite."

The bench then posted the appeals filed by NGO 'Health for Millions Trust' and Umesh Narain for final hearing on March 12 and asked the parties to complete pleading in the meantime.

Attorney General K K Venugopal, appearing for the Centre, said that the high court judgement needed to be stayed and 85 per cent pictorial warning on packaging space of tobacco products be allowed to remain as a large section of the population is not educated.

Life sans health is not worth living and chewing of tobacco or smoking of cigarettes or bidis, causes irretrievable hazard to health.

It is the obligation of the state to make the people aware of the injurious nature of these indulgences, Venugopal said.

Initially one may start with smoking or chewing tobacco as an "adventure, but gradually it becomes a habit and, thereafter, it gets converted to addiction. That addiction becomes the killing factor or causation of pain, suffering, agony, anguish and ultimately death," he said.

"So far as tobacco is concerned, this is the most dangerous thing as it causes cancers and heart diseases," Venugopal said.

If the high court order of pictorial warning covering 40 per cent of packaging space of tobacco products is allowed to operate than India will be pushed to 147th rank after Zimbabwe which mandated more prominent display of such pictorial warnings, the Attorney General said.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for TII, said that even a parliamentary panel had suggested that there should pictorial warning covering 40 per cent of the packaging space of tobacco products and urged the court that it let the high court order remain in force till March 31 and list the matter for final hearing.

Sibal also suggested that the court may consider it capping at 50 per cent.

The high court, on December 15, last year had struck down the 2014 amendment rules that mandated pictorial health warnings to cover 85 per cent of packaging space of tobacco products, holding that they were unconstitutional as they violated fundamental rights like the right to equality and the right to trade.

The Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Amendment Rules, 2014 (COTPA) had come into effect from April 1, 2016.

It came into being based on the recommendations of experts committee, the NGO had said.

The bench was hearing appeals including those filed by NGO 'Health for Millions Trust' and Umesh Narain, a senior advocate, against the high court verdict.

The high court had, however, made it clear that the 40 per cent pictorial health warning rule, which existed prior to the amendment rules, would remain in force.

In May last year, the Supreme Court had transferred all petitions against the 85 per cent rule filed in various high courts to the Karnataka High Court and asked it to hear and dispose them of.
The Supreme Court today fixed February 6 for hearing a plea challenging the government's 2011 decision to keep the CBI out of the ambit of the Right to Information Act.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud posted the matter for final hearing after the parties said that they need time to make detailed submissions on the issue.

The case was first filed in the Delhi High Court, but later transferred to the top court after the Centre had said that several petitions in this regard have been filed in different high courts across the country.

A PIL seeking that the probe agency be brought under the RTI Act was filed in 2011 in the Delhi High Court by advocate Ajay Agrawal, who had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Rai Bareilly constituency against Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

The high court had, in July 2011, issued notices to the government and the CBI as the advocate had alleged that the agency was brought out of the ambit of the RTI after he sought information regarding documents relating to the politically- sensitive Bofors payoff case.

The government had told the high court that the exemption granted to the CBI under RTI was not a "blanket exemption" and does not warrant judicial interference.

The petition said that the exemption from RTI was prevalent for intelligence and security organisations, including Intelligence Bureau, RAW, DRI and ED.

When the agency filed the plea for transfer of all similar matters from different high courts to the apex court, the proceedings before the Delhi High Court got stayed.

In the fresh application before the apex court, Agrawal has alleged that the government's 2011 notification was issued "solely to scuttle the RTI appeal pending before the Chief Information Commissioner, New Delhi in regard to the Bofors case in which order was passed by the CIC directing the CBI to provide the requisite papers to the petitioner".

Agrawal, who was pursuing Bofors payoff case for years, has sought quashing of the Centre's June 9, 2011 notification, contending that "by issuing the notification and placing CBI in the second Schedule, the government appears to be claiming absolute secrecy for CBI without the sanction of the law."



The petition has claimed that the government's move appeared to be "arbitrary" in nature.

With no reasons advanced, "citizens are likely to deduce that the purpose of including the CBI in the Second Schedule was to curb transparency and accountability from the investigations of several corruption cases against high- ranking Government officers", it contended.

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State Election Commission of Gujarat today announced that elections for around 1,420 village panchayats will be held on February 4 and counting of votes will take place on February 6.

The elections to the village panchayats comes a couple of months after the state assembly elections, in which opposition Congress had an edge over ruling BJP in rural areas of Gujarat.

The commission in a press release said that notification for the election will be issued on January 5, while last date of filing of nomination forms is January 20.

Voting will take place on February 4 while counting of votes will be taken up on February 6, the release said.

The elections will be held in regular course to most of this village panchayats as their term is ending, it added.

The village panchayats elections are not fought on party symbols. However, both the BJP and the Congress have started preparations for the elections.

BJP held meeting of core committee last week to prepare for the elections, while the main opposition party Congress today held meeting of its leaders to start preparations for polls.

After the Gujarat Assembly elections held in December last year, BJP retained power by winning 99 seats while Congress bagged 77 seats.

Congress won more seats than BJP in rural areas of Gujarat in the Assembly polls.

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A 33-year old school teacher has been arrested here on the charge of raping his fiancee and refusing to marry her, police said.

Rameshkumar was arrested on a complaint from the parents of the woman and produced before a court which remanded him to judicial custody today, they said.

The marriage of the two had been fixed for later this month and the engagement was held on November 5.

The man had met the woman in her house on two occasions on November 19 and December 5 when he had 'raped' her, police said.

Later he had told his mother to cancel the wedding.

Shocked by his move, the woman told her parents about the incident following which they lodged a complaint with the All Women Police Station here.

Inspector Padmavathi investigated and arrested the man, police added.

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International rapper Sean Paul is all set to headline Vh1 Supersonic music festival in Pune next month.

The three-day festival will see performances by many international artistes and bands, a release said.

The 'Gimme The Light' hitmaker said he is excvited about his India visit and looks forward to play in Pune.

"I am really looking forward to going to India again, it's always a great vibe there and I know the fans will enjoy the vibe I am about to bring; it will be super-sonic," Paul said.

"I am ready to try some new cuisine there too, let's see how that goes," he added.

The festival will be held from February 9 to February 11 at Laxmi Lawns in Pune.

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The Congress today welcomed the Supreme Court's decision to reconsider its 2013 verdict, criminalising gay sex, saying section 377 of the IPC was "archaic" and had no place in the 21st century.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said section 377 should be decriminalised and hoped that the government would repeal it or courts read down the article.

"The time has come that either the courts must read down section 377 or the government should repeal it from the Indian Penal Code. It is an archaic provision which has no place in 21st century India," he told reporters.

The Supreme Court today referred to a larger bench a plea seeking decriminalisation of gay sex between two consenting adults.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said the issue arising out of section 377 required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

The section refers to "unnatural offences" and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10 years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

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Delhi Minister Imran Hussain today wrote to DDA Vice Chairman Udai Pratap Singh, seeking a proposal from the authority to develop "greenery" on the either side of the 23-kilometre-long Yamuna river bank.

Hussain said plantation along the river's banks will not only improve Delhi's green cover, but will also help in soil conservation and prevent encroachment.

The Yamuna riverfront falls under the specially- designated as zone 'O', for having special characteristics and ecological significance. The zone 'O' is conceived to set the strategies for rejuvenation of river Yamuna.

According to Hussain, the zone 'O' is nearly 23 kilometres long on each side of the Yamuna and is under the control and supervision of the Delhi Development Authority.

Hussain said in the letter that the DDA has been approached several times to make the sites on the 'O' zone available to the government for carrying out tree plantation.

"I would, therefore, request you to kindly intervene and issue necessary directions to the officers concerned to forward a proposal to this government in the interest of promotion of greenery in Delhi," he told the DDA vice chairman.

He said increasing the green cover in Delhi was essential to effectively tackle the menace of rising air pollution.

Planting trees along the banks would help neutralise the adverse affects of the air pollution and they may also help in preventing soil erosion, Hussain said.

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The Shiv Sena today said Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' claim that the law and order situation was under control rings hollow as most culprits of the Kamala Mills compound fire here were still at large.

The BJP ally, a partner in the Fadnavis government, also raised the issue of alleged political pressure on BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta to not act against 10-15 illegal pubs and restaurants in the compound after the December 29 blaze in its premises.

Fadnavis, who also holds the home department, has said the law and order situation is "absolutely good" in the state, rocked by caste conflict at Bhima-Koregaon near Pune and subsequent violent protests by Dalit agitators.

"If the chief minister claims to have control over the law and order situation despite the riots after the Bhima- Koregaon incident, then people would like to know why the culprits behind the Kamala Mills fire are still at large," an editorial in Sena mouthpiece 'Saamana' said.

Only if they are arrested can the Shiv Sena accept the the claim that things are under control, the Marathi daily said.

The main accused in the fire at 1 Above pub in the Kamala Mills compound that claimed 14 lives are yet to be arrested though several FIRs have been filed.

According to the Sena, the state did take action against some illegal structures at pubs and restaurants across Mumbai after the blaze, but "... insulted the victims by announcing a Rs 1 lakh reward for providing information about the absconding accused".

"This means the state has asked people (instead of police) to find the accused," the Sena publication said.

The editorial said names of those who reportedly put pressure on the civic commissioner to spare illegal constructions in the compound should be made public.

"It was political pressure. One must know that the commissioner is appointed by the state government and he/she generally listens to the government," it said.

The real question, it added, is whether the Kamala Mills owners were among those who put pressure on the commissioner.

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Puducherry Lt Governor Kiran Bedi has evolved a scheme to engage students of higher secondary schools proficient in writing essays to play the role of "teachers" in the primary classes in government schools here.

She announced this in a whatsapp message to media persons today at the end of her visit to Bharathiar Government Boys Higher Secondary School in Bahoor near here.

Bedi said in her messagethat the students were asked to write an essay during her visit. Those who would emerge with "A" grade would be invited to don the role of teachers in the primary classes.

She said all the students of the school would be invited to her office Raj Nivas with parents and siblings for a film soon.

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A senior leader of on Monday organised a massive "Brahmin and Purohit Sammelan" (a Brahmin convention) in Bolpur town of Birbhum district, a move seen by the opposition BJP to arrest consolidation of Hindu votes in favour of the party.

The day-long sammelan is organised by party's Birbhum district president, Anubrata Mondal in his home district.

Mondal said the convention aims to highlight "misintepretation" of the hindu religion by the BJP and discuss what the Hindu religion stands for.

"The Hindu religion is being misinterpreted by the BJP. Today we will discuss the real meaning of Hindu religion," Mondol told reporters.

A source in the ruling party said around 12,000-14,000 Hindu priests are attending the meet that started around 12.30 pm on Monday.

The priests will be felicitated with a copy of the Gita, shawl and pictures of Sarada Maa and Ramakrishna, he said.

The saffron party has accused the leadership of practicing "soft hindutva" to stop the Hindu voters from uniting under the BJP.

They have been quoting Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's recent visit to Sagar island to take stock of arrangements for the January 14 Makarsankranti festival in support.

"The so-called secular leaders are practicing Hindutva because they are well aware that Hindus are uniting under the BJP. They have realised that they will no longer be able to win elections by appeasing Muslims," BJP state president Dilip Ghosh said.
A senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader organised a "Brahmin convention" in Bolpur town of Birbhum district today, a move described by the BJP as the Mamata Banerjee-led party's tactical shift towards "soft Hindutva".

The day-long "Brahmin and Purohit Sammelan" was held by the TMC's Birbhum district president, Anubrata Mondal, who is a strong critic of the BJP and its policies.

Mondal said the convention was organised to highlight the "misinterpretations" of Hinduism by the BJP and discuss what the Hindu religion stood for.

"Hinduism is being misinterpreted by the BJP. We will discuss the real meaning of Hinduism," he told reporters.

A source in the ruling party in the state said thousands of Hindu priests attended the meet, adding that each one of them was felicitated with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a shawl and pictures of Sarada Maa and Ramakrishna.

The saffron party has accused the TMC leadership of practising "soft Hindutva" in a bid to stop the Hindu voters of the state from tilting towards the BJP.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's recent visit to the Sagar island to take stock of the arrangements for the January 14 Makar Sankranti festival also came under attack from the saffron party.

"The so-called secular leaders are practising Hindutva, because they are well aware that the Hindus are uniting under the BJP. They have realised that they will no longer be able to win elections by appeasing Muslims," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said.

Mondal refuted the "soft Hindutva" allegation and said the TMC would also organise a conference of Muslim clerics this month.

Addressing the meet, he stressed the need to make a new generation of Hindu priests as a "society cannot exist without Hindu priests".

He also described the priests as the "teachers of the society".

The conference began with the chanting of vedic mantras.

The conference was organised months ahead of the crucial panchayat polls in the state. The BJP has been making steady inroads in Birbhum district, considered to be a TMC stronghold.

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West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh today alleged that the Trinamool Congress was trying to "befool" the Hindus by organising the Brahmin convention in Birbhum district.

"The Trinamool Congress had earlier befooled the Muslims and now they are trying to befool the Hindus by organising Brahmin convention," Ghosh told a public rally at Ausgram in Purba Burdwan district.

"I would urge Brahmins not to attend the Brahmin convention called by the TMC leader and accept gifts from tainted TMC leaders," Ghosh told the rally.

Senior TMC leader and Birbhum district TMC president today organised a Brahmin convention in Bolpur town of Birbhum district.

Speaking at the rally Union Minister of State for Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises and senior BJP leader Babul Supriyo claimed that many Trinamool Congress leaders want to join the saffron party.

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Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami today took up with Prime minister Narendra Modi the plight of 15 fishermen from the state detained by Iranian authorities and sought his intervention in securing their release.

The fishermen engaged in fishing from the Emirate of Dubai fishing base were arrested by the Iranian Coast Guard on October 24 last year after they "inadvertently" strayed into their waters, he told Modi in a letter.

Natives of Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi districts in Tamil Nadu, the fishermen "are reportedly detained in their fishing boats in KISH Island, Iran for the past two months," he said.

An Iranian court imposed fine on these fishermen and the same had to be paid by them with the financial support from their local sponsors from Dubai, UAE, he added.

One of the fishermen was a diabetic and also suffering from hypertension while another " is reportedly having heart problem and is seeking medical intervention."



The prolonged incarceration of the fishermen who went abroad for earning their humble livelihood would severely affect their families and dependents, he said.

"Hence, I request your personal intervention by instructing the Ambassadors of India in Tehran and United Arab Emirates to provide necessary medical attention and to take effective legal steps to secure the immediate release of these poor innocent fishermen from Tamil Nadu, Palaniswami urged Modi.

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Tami Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today made his maiden address to the state assembly even as the main opposition DMK along with its allies walked out of the House boycotting his speech.

Soon after he arrived, Purohit greeted all members of the House with a 'Vanakkam' and began his address.

Even as he began his speech, Leader of the Opposition MK Stalin was on his feet trying to raise some issues.

The governor paused for a moment and told Stalin 'please ukkarunga' (please take your seat) in Tamil but to no avail.

Stalin was supported by his party MLAs, who raised slogans demanding that their leader be allowed to speak.

A little later, the DMK Working President led his party members and staged a walkout.

Congress members and the lone IUML legislator also followed suit.

The Governor then continued his address.

Amid noisy scenes, sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, who made his debut in the assembly after having won the December 21 RK Nagar bypoll by a thumping margin of 40,000 votes against E Madhusudhanan of AIADMK, was seated calmly.

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Amid a boycott by opposition parties led by the DMK, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today made his maiden address to the state assembly, urging the Centre to sanction Rs 4,854 crore towards Cyclone Ochki rehabilitation work.

Soon after he arrived in the House, Purohit greeted all members with a 'Vanakkam' and began his address.

Even as he began his speech, Leader of the Opposition MK Stalin was on his feet trying to raise some issues.

The governor paused for a moment and told Stalin 'please utkkarunga' (please take your seat) in Tamil but to no avail.

Stalin was supported by his party MLAs, who raised slogans demanding that their leader be allowed to speak.

A little later, the DMK Working President led his party members and staged a walkout.

Congress members and the lone IUML legislator also followed suit.

Amid noisy scenes, sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, who made his debut in the assembly after having won the December 21 RK Nagar bypoll by a thumping margin of 40,000 votes against E Madhusudhanan of AIADMK, was seated calmly.

Later, Purohit resumed his address which was peppered with praise to late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa's vision and expression of thanks to the Centre for fund-releases towards instances including an "on-account" release of Rs 133 crore for cyclone Ockhi rehabilitation work.

"I urge the Central government to...sanction the due release of Rs 401 crore for temporary restoration and Rs 4,854 crore for permanent restoration towards damages caused by Cyclone Ockhi."



Thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for visiting cyclone-hit Kanyakumari, he said the Centre should ask its team which visited Tamil Nadu to assess storm damages to expeditiously submit its report.

Recalling the financial assistance provided by the State government to the bereaved families vis-a-vis the storm, he said Tamil Nadu was committed to continuing rescue efforts till the last fisherman was rescued.

Lauding the State for achieving a smooth transition to the GST regime, he said Tamil Nadu's fiscal position has been "resilient" and continues to be so despite unexpected setbacks in revenues.

"Though there is a concern about increasing revenue deficit due to slow growth in revenue receipts, the State is firmly on the path of containing the fiscal deficit and Debt to GSDP ratio within the norms."



Referring to his State-wide tours, Purohit complimented Tamil Nadu for "active participation," in "Swachh Bharat Mission," which was being pursued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a "missionary zeal."



"During my tours, I witnessed commendable work by the State in implementing this mission..16 districts have achieved Open Defecation Free status under the mission."



It may be recalled that Purohit toured a number of districts in which he undertook cleanliness drives and held meetings with officials.

It evoked strong protest from Opposition parties primarily the DMK which alleged that it amounted to interference in the rights of the state.

Outlining the policies and programmes of the AIADMK regime, he reiterated the government position that Katchatheevu islet should be retrieved from Sri Lanka which will restore the traditional fishing rights of Indian fishermen.

"Efforts taken by the central government has substantially reduced the incidents of unprovoked attacks by the Sri Lankan Navy on our fishermen."



Seeking release of Tamil Nadu fishermen from Sri Lanka, he thanked the Union government for supporting Tamil Nadu in its efforts to promote deep sea fishing by sanctioning Rs 200 crore for replacing existing fishing vessels with tuna longliners.

On the contentious Cauvery issue, the Governor said, "The Government continues to urge the Centre to expedite the constitution of the Cauvery Management Board and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee to fulfil the long-standing legitimate demand of the State."



He said Jayalalithaa enabled the State to become "power surplus," and Tamil Nadu will pursue its goal of adding 13,000 MW thermal power to its generating capacity.

Despite its "immense fiscal stress," the government has already implemented pay revision on the basis of the recommendations of the pay panel 2017 at an additional cost of Rs 14,719 crore per annum, he said.

"Many representations are being received from various quarters about the pay revision.. This government will constitute a committee to examine these."



The governor also urged the Centre to accord early approval for Phase-II of the Chennai Metro Rail Project.

Hailing Tamil Nadu's Universal Public Distribution System which has ensured a "functional food safety net," Purohit said all rice card holders were being provided with Pongal gift hampers consisting of one kilogram each of raw rice, sugar besides other items this year as well.

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The Supreme Court today asked the Kerala Government to file an affidavit listing out the practical difficulties in relocating the toddy shops in the state which have been shut following its order to close down liquor shops along highways across the country.

The bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud asked the state to file the affidavit within four weeks.

Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, appearing for the Kerala Toddy Shop Licensee Association, told the court that over 625 toddy shops were shut in the state and more than 3,000 workers were rendered jobless.

He also told the court that toddy has been considered differently from other forms of liquor as it is a natural drink and is not as intoxicating as other forms of alcoholic drinks.

It has no role in accidents due to drunken driving on highways, Ramachandran said.

He also said that there was hardly any big roads in Kerala where vehicles can be driven at a very high speed.

The association has been seeking modification of the apex court order banning liquor shops alongside highways within 500 metres on grounds that toddy does not fall under the category of alcoholic beverages.

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The Trump administration feels it is time to try "something different" to prevent Pakistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists as exercising patience or offering inducements have failed to deal with the problem threatening the region's stability, a top official said today.

The remarks by the official came days after the Trump administration suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan, resulting in an outrage from Islamabad.

President Donald Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

The official said policies followed by the successive US administrations post 9/11 vis-a-vis Pakistan have not worked.

The US is committed to not allowing either Pakistan or Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists from where they can attack America and its allies, said the senior Trump administration official on condition of anonymity.

"These sanctuaries really threaten stability in the region and they continue to fuel the overall terrorism problem that we're facing," the official said.

The "previous administrations have tried to exercise what they might call strategic patience or offering inducements like Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill which gave billions of dollars to Pakistan", the official said, adding none of it has worked so far.

In 2009, the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act (KLB), also known as the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, is passed and Congress authorised tripling of the economic-related assistance to Pakistan to USD 7.5 billion over five years, from the period of 2010 to 2014.

Terrorists continue to operate freely inside Pakistan and there is a relationship between terrorist organisations and the establishment, the official said.

"This administration believes it's time to try something different. We simply can't ignore the sanctuaries if we're going to make progress in Afghanistan," the official said, adding that "the president has been clear about his commitment to stabilising Afghanistan".

On Trump's comprehensive South Asia strategy for regional diplomacy announced in August last year, the official said, "It looked at India-Pakistan relations, encouraging better ties between the two countries and reducing tensions between them".

In August, while unveiling his new South Asia strategy, Trump had accused Pakistan of giving "safe haven to agents of chaos, violence, and terror," and said the time had come "for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilisation, order, and to peace".

The official said the Trump's new policy was not about looking at Pakistan through the lens of Afghanistan, but it was about looking at the region and the future of the US.

"9/11 attacks you know had their roots in this region. We've invested a lot of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. We are committed to not allowing the Taliban to dominate Afghanistan and we are committed to not allowing Afghanistan or Pakistan to become a safe haven from which terrorists can attack the US and its allies," the official said.

"So, I wouldn't classify it is looking at Pakistan through the Afghanistan lens. I think that's too narrow of a viewpoint. I think this is about the region and the future of the region. And the fact that these continued sanctuaries really threaten stability in the region and they continue to fuel the overall terrorism problem that we're facing," the official added.

The US and others have long complained that Pakistan gives safe haven to the Afghan Taliban and their allies, the Haqqani network, allowing them to carry out cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistan denies these allegations but President Trump has escalated the criticism against Islamabad since he took office.

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US President Donald Trump today postponed the announcement until January 17 of his much- talked-about 'fake awards' to the "most corrupt and biased" American mainstream media for its "dishonesty and bad reporting".

Trump,71, has been at loggerheads with several US mainstream media outlets, including the CNN, ABC News, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

He has quite often described these popular media houses as "fake media".

The awards were supposed to be announced today, but Trump upon his return from the Camp David presidential retreat yesterday tweeted about the new date for one-of its-kind awards to be given to the several media houses.

"The Fake Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday," he tweeted.

"The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!" he said.

The "fake media" term is now popularly related to with which one does not agree with.

On January 2, Trump had tweeted that he would announce the awards to the media houses for "dishonesty and bad reporting".

"I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o'clock. This would be one of its kind media award by the US president. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!" he had tweeted.

In November, he tweeted about a competition among news networks for the 'Fake News Trophy', excluding the Fox News.

"We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favourite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!," he tweeted on November 27.

In an email to supporters of the president on December 28, the Trump campaign had sought nomination for the 'King of Fake News' trophy.

"At President Trump's request, we are holding a contest to name the 2017 KING of Fake News. And we want to hear from you," it said.

"The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people. Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEY'RE WRONG," it said.

Noting that Americans are sick and tired of being lied to, insulted and treated with outright condescension, the Trump Campaign had said "That's why President Trump is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year".

"There's no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda," it said.

As per the Trump Campaign list, the competition for 'King of Fake news' is between three news organisations.

"ABC News "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election," it said.

"CNN 'MISTAKENLY' reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J Trump, Jr had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks," it wrote.

"TIME 'MISTAKENLY' reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr from the Oval Office," the Trump Campaign said, as it asked the participants to "let the President know if there is another story you think should be crowned as the 2017 KING of Fake News".

Trump's postponement of the awards has come as questions about his mental stability continue to make headlines in the media.

Trump hit back in a series of tweets on Saturday, calling himself a "genius".

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Army Chief General on Monday said Indian and Chinese troops had resolved an issue over the recent attempt by Chinese teams to build a road on the Indian side of the border at Tuting in Arunachal Pradesh.

Government sources said two excavators, brought in for road building activities by the Chinese teams, were returned on Saturday following an amicable resolution of the Tuting incident at a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) between the two sides in Arunachal.

They said the Indian side had conveyed its concerns over the incident to China, which said that the teams had crossed into India by mistake and would no longer engage in such activities.

"The Tuting incident has been resolved," Gen. Rawat told reporters on the sidelines of an event, adding that a meeting of border personnel was held two days ago.

The Army chief also said there was a major reduction of Chinese troops in the Doklam area. Troops from the two countries were engaged in a 73-day long standoff in Doklam in the Sikkim sector last year.

On December 28, Indian troops had foiled attempts by Chinese road building teams to build a track around 1km inside Indian territory in Tuting, government sources had said.

They had said the civilian teams went back when confronted by the Indian troops, but left behind two excavators and some other equipment.

"The two excavators were returned to the Chinese side following the BPM on January 6," the sources said, adding that India's objection to the incident was conveyed to China.

In an address at an event on modernisation of the armed forces, Gen. Rawat said future wars would be fought on difficult terrains and circumstances and the forces would have to be prepared for them.

His comments were seen as an apparent reference to China.

Days after the end of the Doklam standoff, the Army chief had said India should be prepared for a two-front war, noting that China had started "flexing its muscles".

He had also said China was trying to take over Indian territory in a gradual manner, and cautioned the forces to guard against such attempts.

"Future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances. We have to be prepared for them," Gen. Rawat said.

He further said the armed forces needed major modernisation and that the country must fight the next war with indigenous solutions.

Gen. Rawat said the Army was ready to induct equipment and platforms made by domestic defence firms.




Two doctors from the Yadav community are set to test their political fortunes in the bypoll for Alwar parliamentary constituency scheduled on January 29, which is being viewed as a a semi-final for the Rajasthan Assembly polls due this year.

While the Congress had already nominated former MP from Alwar Dr Karan Singh Yadav, the BJP has given a go ahead to local heavyweight and incumbent state Labour Minister Dr Jaswant Yadav to contest the Lok Sabha bypoll.

While electioneering is focusing on developmental issues, it will be caste factor and doctor vs doctor subtext which will decide the outcome in this Yadav-dominated area.

Both doctors have started campaigning in the constituency to get hold of ground realities much before the names were finalised by respective parties as both have a stronghold in the area.

Dr Karan Yadav is a former MP, having defeated Chand Nath in the 2004 general elections from Alwar.He has also been a two-time MLA from Behror.

He also served as superintendent of state-run SMS Hospital in Jaipur between 1998 and 2003.

After he joined Congress, he won state assembly elections from Alwars Behror constituency and parliamentary elections from Alwar seat.

Dr Jaswant Yadav holds bachelor of ayurveda, medicine and surgery (BAMS) degree and is a state cabinet minister and MLA from Behror.

The bypoll has been necessitated following the death of BJP MP Chand Nath, who had defeated Jitendra Singh in the 2014 Lok Sabha election by a margin of over 2.8 lakh votes.

There are eight state assembly constituencies accommodating nearly 18.27 lakh voters.

Nearly a fourth of the voters in Alwar belong to the Yadav community.

Other communities with significant representation are Meos, Dalits and Brahmins.

The Yadav domination in Alwar can be gauged from the fact that in 11 Lok Sabha elections held since 1977, candidates from the community have won election eight times.

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Two men have been jailed in China for insulting a policeman and posting his personal information online after a video of the officer beating a dog to death stirred outrage.

The two men were handed five-day sentences on Saturday, the Changsha police bureau in the central province of Hunan said on their official Weibo social media account.

One of the men published the address and photos of the policeman's house online, while the other "openly insulted" him, the bureau said.

The policeman, surnamed Chen, was seen killing a leashed golden retriever on a sidewalk in front of a dozen onlookers in a video posted online last month.

Surveillance footage from police showed the dog had attacked at least four people.

Lacking a dart gun and unable to trace its owner, Chen and another officer decided to bludgeon the dog to death "to prevent it from hurting more pedestrians", the local Tianxin bureau of Changsha police said on Weibo.

Infuriated dog lovers also directed their anger at Chen's mother, who was harassed at her convenience store, according to the local Xiaoxiang Morning newspaper.

The Tianxin police bureau also received numerous phone calls questioning the officer's behaviour, it said.

"Killing a dog on the street, no matter a good dog or a mad dog, will cause trauma and pain to some Internet users," wrote one concerned commentater on Weibo.

"I support the police in the crackdown of stray dogs, and hope that they devote greater effort in eliminating the mad dogs in public area," wrote another.

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Employees of the UCO Bank joined the cleanliness drive at Versova beach here, to support the initiative by lawyer-activist Afroz Shah.

"Employees volunteered for the beach cleanliness drive to mark the Bank's 75th Foundation Day on January six," R K Shah, Zonal Manager of UCO Bank Mumbai Zone, said.

Employees, donning UCO Bank yellow T-Shirts, joined other volunteers in the cleanliness drive yesterday, the bank official said.

The 75th Foundation Day of the bank, which was founded by industrialist G D Birla with inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi, was celebrated with fanfare, he said.

The General Manager and Circle Head of Mumbai Sunil Kumar Pandit said the bank has a pan-India presence and is providing services through over 3,000 branches.

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Britain's education minister, Justine Greening, resigned from the government today after refusing another Cabinet position in a reshuffle by Prime Minister Theresa May, a Downing Street source said.

Greening was offered the welfare and pensions brief "but declined to take it," the source added.

"The prime minister is disappointed but respects her decision to leave the government."



Shortly after confirming Greening's departure, Downing Street officially announced she would be replaced by Damian Hinds, who had been serving as employment minister.

Greening, who represents a London constituency and backed Britain remaining in the EU during the Brexit referendum campaign, will return to the House of Commons backbenches.

Some Conservative colleagues immediately voiced their support for her.

Fellow member of parliament Heidi Allen wrote on Twitter she was "bitterly disappointed" at Greening's departure, saying: "A dreadful shame we have lost such a progressive, listening, compassionate woman from government."



May launched a long-awaited reshuffle of her Cabinet today, which nevertheless left most of her senior ministers in position.

Greening becomes the fourth minister since November to leave the government, after deputy prime minister Damian Green, defence secretary Michael Fallon and aid minister Priti Patel were forced out in unrelated scandals.

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The Delhi High Court was today informed by the central government that an American woman entrepreneur, who was detained and denied entry at Chennai Airport, has been deported to the US.

The issue came up before the court when it was informed that the American citizen, who was living in India for over a decade on a multiple entry valid business visa, was detained at the Chennai Airport at 1.30 am on January 5 and was told that since there was a mark on her file, she would have to go back to the US.

Taking note of the development, the court said that as the 48-year-old woman, Kasha Elizabeth Vande, has already been deported, it cannot restrain the authorities from sending her back to her country.

"Court is informed that the US national was put on a flight the same day and returned to the US on January 5, 2018.

"In view of the above development, the court granting the relief of retraining the authorities from deporting the woman does not arise," a bench of Justices S Muralidhar and I S Mehta said.

During the hearing, the counsel for the Ministry of External Affairs showed a letter from December 2017 that the foreigner was blacklisted as she was involved in NGO activities in Puducherry while holding a business visa.

The government's counsel said her blacklisting was recommended following visa violations.

The court asked whether the woman was informed in advance that she was blacklisted, to which her lawyer Kamlesh Kumar Mishra replied in the negative.

The bench said it was open for the woman to seek appropriate orders from the appropriate forum regarding her blacklisting.

According to her lawyer, Kasha was running a cafe and boutique named Kasha ki Asha in Puducherry.

On her arrival to Chennai via Kuwait Airlines, she was detained at the airport after which she informed her acquaintance Lal Babu Lalit about the incident who then filed a habeas corpus petition in the high court through advocate Mishra.

The plea had sought an order to the authorities to immediately produce Kasha before the court.

The court had sought response of the MEA and Bureau of Immigration on the petition.

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Newly elected corporators of the BJP, BSP and SP came to blows in the House today when the national song, Vande Mataram, stopped playing due to a technical snag, Meerut Mayor Sunita Verma said.

The song was being played on a music system in the House for the first time, she said.

The civic body was meeting for the first time after the elections.

The corporators also raised slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

Police had to be called in when some outsiders entered the House.

Verma, from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) always raises unimportant issues.

There was a ruckus last month too, when Verma remained sitting while the Vande Mataram was being recited during her swearing-in ceremony.

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A Vietnamese court began a major corruption trial today of 22 defendants, including a former senior Vietnamese Communist Party official and a top oil executive the government is accused of snatching from Germany.

Most of the defendants are current or former senior oil executives, including three other former chairmen of state- owned energy giant PetroVietnam.

The company and the banking sector have been at the center of an unprecedented crackdown on corruption under the watch of Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.

Former Politburo member Dinh La Thang, 57, also a former PetroVietnam chairman, is accused of "deliberately violating state economic management regulations, causing serious consequences" for his role in awarding PetroVietnam's Construction Joint Stock Co, or PVC, a contract to build a thermoelectric plant without a proper bidding process.

He also allegedly advanced USD 67 million to PVC, which did not use the funds for the proper purpose, causing losses of USD 5.5 million to the state.

Thang, the first former Poltiburo member to be prosecuted in decades, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Trinh Xuan Thanh, 51, a former PVC chairman, is accused of the same charge as well as embezzling USD 186,000 from another thermoelectric plant.

The embezzlement offense carries the death penalty.

In August, Germany accused Vietnam's intelligence service of kidnapping Thanh from a Berlin park. Vietnam denied the allegation, saying Thanh turned himself in to police voluntarily, but the incident strained ties and Germany expelled two Vietnamese diplomats.

The trial of Thang and Thanh "sends out a stern warning that there will be no 'no-go zones' in this campaign, and corrupt officials, no matter who they are and what position they hold, will be brought to justice," said Le Hong Hiep, a research fellow at the Singapore-based ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute.

"The campaign has some aspects of political infighting, but the main driver is still the party's wish to stem widespread corruption, which has undermined the people's confidence in the party's governance capabilities as well as its economic reform efforts," Hiep said.

He said political power was previously fragmented in Vietnam, weakening the fight against corruption, but is now concentrated in the party general secretary. The corruption crackdown is intensifying now because Trong and his allies were able to consolidate power after a party congress in early 2016 at which Trong won a second five-year term, Hiep said.

Once a rising political star, Thang was dismissed from the all-powerful Politburo in May and was subsequently fired as secretary of the southern commercial hub of Ho Chi Minh City. He was arrested on December 8, and his brother Dinh Manh Thang was detained one day later for alleged embezzlement in another corruption case.

Hiep said the trial of Thanh will continue to have a chilling effect on relations between Vietnam and Germany and may affect a free trade agreement between Vietnam and the European Union.

"The EUVFTA may be delayed, but I believe it will eventually be ratified by the EU, especially if the trial of Mr Thanh is seen as transparent and fair. In the end, economic considerations may outweigh political ones in this case," he said.

Security around the court house in central Hanoi was tight.

"I'm happy that the government is getting tough on corruption," said Ngo Quang Hung, 62, a retiree who was among several dozen people gathered outside the courthouse.

Foreign media are not allowed to attend the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.

In Berlin, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Rainer Breul said embassy representatives were inside the courtroom. "We will observe it very closely and then evaluate what this means for our policy," Breul said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, noted that "we have condemned this kidnapping as completely unacceptable. This is a breach of the law."



Germany has made clear that the incident has weighed on trust between the two governments "and that it is necessary for Vietnam to act to restore this trust," Seibert said.

Vietnam ranked 113th out of 176 countries in Transparency International's 2016 corruption index.

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A director of two Dubai-based firms has been "non-cooperative" and evading probe in a money laundering case connected with the Rs 3,600-crore VVIP chopper deal, the Enforcement Directorate(ED) today told a court here.

The probe agency was opposing the plea of Rajeev Saxena, one of the directors of M/s UHY Saxena and M/s Matrix Holdings, seeking cancellation of the non-bailable warrant (NBW) issued against him by the court last year.

During the arguments before Special Judge Arvind Kumar, special public prosecutor N K Matta, appearing for ED, said Saxena has not joined the probe despite repeated summons.

The counsel said, "the investigation in the matter is going on since June 2016 and Saxena is aware that he is needed in the probe, yet he has been evading it."



The agency, which concluded its arguments today, claimed that during the probe it was found that AgustaWestland, United Kingdom, had "paid an amount of Euro 58 million as kickbacks" through two Tunisia-based firms.

The court has now kept the matter for hearing on January 11 when it will hear arguments on behalf of Saxena, who had approached the court for cancellation NBW issued against him on October 6 last year.

In his application moved through his advocate, Saxena has sought cancellation of the warrant claiming he was not an absconder and he had given all the details and documents to the ED.

Saxena's name was mentioned in a charge sheet filed against his wife Shivani Saxena, who was released on bail after being arrested by the ED.

He has not been arrayed as an accused so far and the agency has told the court that another supplementary charge sheet may follow.

Saxenas are residents of Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, an archipelago which is home to the most expensive properties in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the charge sheet claimed.

The probe agency alleged that the two Dubai-based firms were the entities "through which the proceeds of crime have been routed and further layered and integrated in buying the immovable properties/shares, among others" in this case.

Maintaining that AgustaWestland had paid Euro 58 million as kickbacks through two Tunisia-based firms, the ED has alleged that "these companies further siphoned off the said money in the name of consultancy contracts to M/s Interstellar Technologies Limited, Mauritius and others which were further transferred to M/s UHY Saxena and M/s Matrix Holdings Ltd, Dubai and others."



The agency had also arrested Delhi-based businessman Gautam Khaitan who is currently out on bail. It had registered a PMLA case in 2014 and named 21 people in its money- laundering FIR.

On January 1, 2014, India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks of Rs 423 crore paid by it to secure the deal.

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Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today offered a piece of advice to politicians, like him, some of whom after becoming a part of the government unfortunately forget to serve people and think they are there to "only enjoy fruits".

Addressing party workers in Jammu city, Kumar said those in and public life should work with honesty. He stressed that the public has given us an opportunity to serve them and "we need to use it to work for their betterment."



Without identifying anyone, he said it was unfortunate that an atmosphere has developed in the country where politicians and those in the government forget to serve people and "they think they are there to only enjoy the fruits."



"Besides concentrating on overall development, we have to work for social reforms as well," Kumar, 66, said.

Underscoring the need for brotherhood and togetherness, the Bihar chief minister said: "We believe that when there is peace in society, it will move forward, and so the country."



"We have to work differently, ensure brotherhood and work for peace in society. We have to see how our efforts can benefit people, especially those on the (poverty) line."



Kumar was accompanied by Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi on his visit to Jammu and Kashmir.

He launched a website of the JD(U), assured the workers of his participation in the party convention in March-April, and of his full support to strengthen the party in the state.

He said the Bihar government intends to launch a vigorous campaign against child marriage and dowry in the state.

"After implementing a ban on the consumption of liquor, we are planning to launch a vigorous campaign against child marriage and the nuisance of dowry," he said.

State JD(U) president G M Shaheen welcomed Kumar and Modi and said their presence boosted the morale of party workers.

"We felt the need for a website to inform the public about the party programmes. The website will provide an opportunity to interested persons to get membership without any charge and the public can also highlight their grievances so that party workers can try to address them," Shaheen said.

He said the JD(U) plans to participate in panchayat polls next month.

"We are taking part in panchayat polls scheduled to start from mid February," he said, adding that the party aims to contest the next Assembly elections in the state.

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"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" today won four Golden Globes, including Best Drama, in an overtly political awards ceremony where Hollywood's biggest turned up in black to say it was "Time's Up" for sexual harassment.

The glittering 75th Golden Globes ceremony, honouring achievements in television and cinema, sent out the message that a new post Harvey Weinstein-era could be on the horizon.

Most award winners, particularly Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman and Frances McDormand, gave rousing speeches on the need for change and gender and race equality.

"Three Billboards...", about an angry mother who goes to extremes to keep the investigation focused on her daughter's murder, became a front-runner at the Oscars.

McDormand won Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Golden Globe, co-star Sam Rockwell won Best Supporting Actor and Martin McDonagh was recognised for Best Screenplay.

The awards were dedicated to what McDormand referred to as the "tectonic shift" in Hollywood's power structure after more than 70 women accused powerful producer Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

Women in the industry have launched the Time's Up movement to address gender disparity and abuse and almost all of Hollywood -- both women and men -- turned up in black at the red carpet to show their support.

McDormand, 60, addressed the Time's Up movement in her acceptance speech, saying, "Some of you may know, I keep my politics private, but it was really great to be in this room tonight and to be part of a tectonic shift in our industry's power structure."



Winfrey, 63, the first African-American woman to be honoured with the annual Cecil B DeMille Award, used her time on stage to deliver a powerful speech about inclusion.

Winfrey, who received a standing ovation twice in her eight-minute speech, said women have not been heard or believed for speaking truth to power but that has to change.

"I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me too' again," she said.

The Hollywood Foreign Press, criticised for not including women in the Best Director category, tried to make amends by bestowing Greta Gerwig's "Lady Bird" with Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and Best Actress for Saoirse Ronan.

"The Shape of Water", which entered the race with maximum seven nominations, won the Best Director for Guillermo del Toro and the Best Score for Alexandre Desplat.

Gary Oldman won Best Actor in a Drama, for playing Winston Churchill in "the Darkest Hour".

Allison Janney won Best Supporting Actress for her role of an abusive mother in "I, Tonya", a real-life drama on figure skater Tonya Harding.

James Franco won Best Actor in a Comedy for "The Disaster Artist" about Tommy Wiseau, the eccentric Hollywood figure behind "The Room", known as the "Citizen Kane" of bad movies.

But the actor was criticised for rudely blocking Wiseau from the microphone during his acceptance speech onstage.

"Coco" was named Best Animated Film.

Fatih Akin's German revenge drama "In the Fade", starring Diane Kruger, was named Best Foreign Film.

Some expected winners returned empty handed.

Steven Spielberg's newspaper drama "The Post", which had six nominations, including nods for lead stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, failed to win anything.

"Call Me by Your Name" and "All the Money in the World" and "Get Out" were the other films that were snubbed.

In the television category, women dominated the wins. "Big Little Lies", "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Marvelous Mrs Maisel" were the major winners.

"Big Little Lies" star Kidman got the award for Best Actress in a Television Movie or Limited Series.

"This character that I played represents something that is at the centre of our conversation right now: abuse. I do believe and I hope that we can elicit change through the stories we tell and the way we tell them," Kidman said.

Her co-stars Alexander Skarsgard and Laura Dern won Best Supporting Actor and Actress, and the show also won for Best Limited Series or TV movie.

The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale" won Best Drama while lead star Elisabeth Moss got the Globe for Best Actress in a Drama.

"This Is Us" star Sterling K Brown created history by becoming the first African-American actor to win the Best Actor - Drama award.

"I am being seen for who I am, and being appreciated for who I am, and it makes it that much more difficult to dismiss me or dismiss anybody who looks like me," Brown said.

Indian-origin Aziz Ansari finally took home a Globe, winning Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series Musical/Comedy category for his role in "The Master Of None".

The Amazon series "The Marvelous Mrs Maisel", about a 1950s housewife who becomes a stand-up comic after discovering her husband has been cheating on her, won the Globe for Best TV Comedy, and its leading lady, Rachel Brosnahan, walked away with the Best Actress in a Comedy trophy.

Award ceremony host Seth Meyers was the first to address, as he put it, the "elephant not in the room".

"It's 2018 and marijuana is finally allowed, and sexual harassment finally isn't," he began.

"Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen... There's a new era underway and I can tell because it's been years since a white man was this nervous in Hollywood," he said.

The host took potshots at Weinstein and said the reason he was chosen to present the awards is because he is "a man with completely no power in Hollywood".

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The widespread protests in Iran was a sign of failure of the government, US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron have agreed, the White House said today.

The two leaders spoke over phone yesterday during which they also discussed the developments in the Korean Peninsula.

North and South Korea are scheduled to hold talks tomorrow.

Trump spoke to Macron to provide an update on developments on the Korean Peninsula, and to underscore American, South Korean and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearisation of North Korea, the White House said in a readout of the call.

"The presidents also agreed that the widespread demonstrations in Iran were a sign of the Iranian regime's failure to serve its people's needs by instead diverting the nation's wealth to fund terrorism and militancy abroad," it said.

At least 21 people have been killed in Iran after anti- government began on December 28.

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A newspaper employees' union today demanded the withdrawal of an FIR against a journalist over her report on alleged breach of details of more than one billion Aadhaar cards, terming it an attack on the free press.

The Confederation of Newspaper and Agency Employees' Organisations, in a statement, condemned the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), saying it should highlight errors in the report, if any, instead of taking penal action.

"The action amounts to an attack on the freedom of the press and also denial of access to the press from reporting any unpalatable to those in authority," it said.

The Delhi Police has registered an FIR on a UIDAI official's complaint over the report in the Tribune newspaper.

A reporter of the newspaper has been booked under the Indian Penal Code sections 419 (punishment for cheating under impersonation), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery), 471 (using a forged document) and also under sections of the Information Technology Act and the Aadhaar Act.

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A woman pleading the Bombay High Court to allow her to terminate her 28-week pregnancy on grounds that the foetus has grave medical abnormalities has caught the court in a fix.

The woman, from Mumbai, and her husband have argued that not only will the child be born with abnormalities and face consequent difficulties, but forcing the woman to continue with the pregnancy will also cause her trauma and affect her "mental health".

A bench of justices R M Borde and Rajesh Ketkar are now in a quandary.

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act has provisions to allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy even if it has gone beyond the permissible 20-week period if the pregnancy and child-birth poses a threat to the woman's physical health or life, the Act does not deal with the mental health of the woman.

It has no provision to deal with foetal abnormalities either.

The MTP Act permits abortions after consultation with one doctor up to 12 weeks. Between 12 to 20 weeks, medical opinion of two doctors is required. Beyond the 20-week, exceptions are legally permissible only if continuation of the pregnancy poses a threat to the mother's life.

In all such petitions that come before the Bombay HC, the court first refers the case to a medical board of expert doctors for their opinion on whether or not such pregnancy poses a threat to the life of the woman concerned.

Often other benches of the Bombay HC have permitted such petitioners, several of whom were minors, and also victims of rape, to terminate the pregnancy if the board had ruled there exists a risk to the woman's life, or in some cases, if the board affirms that the foetus has irreparable or grave medical abnormalities.

In the present case however, while a board of doctors at the government-run JJ Hospital in the city affirmed in a report submitted on January 2 that the foetus has severe brain deformities, that its stomach is not seen yet and that it also has severe cardiac abnormalities, the report ruled that the pregnancy and the consequent childbirth will not pose any risk to the physical health or life of the petitioner.

The petitioner's lawyer Meenaz Kakalia has urged the court to go beyond the definition of the health and life of the woman and the risks to it as defined under Section 5 of the MTP Act.

She has urged the court to consider the "mental anguish and the trauma that will be caused to the woman in forcing her to undergo the pregnancy, and to give birth knowing that the child will be born with life threatening problems, as akin to the possible harm to her life and her physical being."



The bench, however, is in a fix, as the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare proposed amendments to the Act in 2014 - including introducing the concept of risks to the mental health of the woman and also the idea of substantial foetal abnormalities - in the latter case, a pregnancy can be terminated at any point during the pregnancy - the draft bill with such amendments is yet to be ratified by Parliament.

"You prove to us that the threats to the mental well- being of the petitioner is covered under Section 5 of the MTP Act and only then can we allow the plea. Sadly, while the proposed bill provides for the above concept, it is yet to become a law," the bench said.

Incidentally, during his previous tenure as a judge on the Aurangabad Bench of HC, Justice Borde had permitted a victim of rape to terminate her pregnancy, even though it was beyond the 20-week ceiling and posed no threat to her physical health, after she threatened to commit suicide.

"She said if we don't allow then she will have no choice but to end her life. This was a considerable threat to her physical being, to her life, thus, I permitted it,' Justice Borde said.

The bench is likely to pass an order on the present plea on Tuesday, January 10.

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Denmark's GN Store Nord is aiming to win a bigger slice of the rapidly growing market for wireless earbuds by introducing a new product challenging Apple's popular Airpods.

Wireless is expected to account for an increasing share of the $9.6 billion global earphone and headphone market and that means intense competition between tech keen to cash in on the trend.

Integrating Amazon's voice control system Alexa and halving the price are among the steps taken by GN to attract new customers with its latest product.

"We're expanding our brand to deliver products aiming for a broader segment dominated by Apple," Rene Svendsen-Tune, chief executive of GN's audio division, told Reuters.

GN is better known as a hearing aid maker but draws on a Danish tradition of innovation stretching back to 1869 when it started life as a telegraph company.

In fact, its hearing aid division has benefited from working closely with Apple for years by using bluetooth-like technology that, installed in the ear, allows users to stream voice and music from their iPhones.

It will continue that cooperation while competing with the tech giant on the wireless earphone market, Svendsen-Tune said.

GN launched its first wireless earphones in November 2016. The following month Apple launched its Airpods after dispensing with the plug-in for jack cables in its iPhone 7.

GN's original earphones, tailored for athletes with features to track progress and measure heart rate, sold for $370, twice as much as Apple's equivalent.

"Apple has helped develop this market with great speed but now we're launching a new generation," Svendsen-Tune said, speaking ahead of the launch of the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In the first half of 2017 around 900,000 wireless headphone units were sold in the U.S. alone, and since the launch in 2016, Apple has accounted for 85 per cent of the sales, according to data from the NPD Group.

GN said it was in second place but had only a single figure market share. But the market is still evolving and competition is fierce.

"If we can maintain a second place in 2018, I believe we will have done very well," Svendsen-Tune said.

GN's audio division accounts for 40 per cent of the company's revenue, while the hearing aid division contributes 60 per cent.

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By Emilio Parodi

MILAN (Reuters) - An Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted two former Leonardo executives in a bribery case related to a large 2010 helicopter contract with the Indian government.

Giuseppe Orsi, former chief executive of the Italian state-controlled defence group previously known as Finmeccanica, and Bruno Spagnolini, former head of its helicopter unit AgustaWestland, were both cleared of corruption charges, with the court citing a lack of sufficient proof.

In December 2016 Italy's highest court had ordered a retrial of the case after the former executives of the Rome-based group had been found guilty on corruption charges related to a 560 million euro ($672 million) contract to supply a dozen helicopters to New Delhi.

After Monday's acquittal Orsi's lawyer, Ennio Amodio, said the decision closed a case "which should have been clear to investigators (from the start)", adding that the judge found no evidence of corruption, of the passage of money or that Indian officials interfered with the tender.

Orsi had received a four-and-a-half-year jail sentence after the previous trial had overturned the verdict of a lower court, with Spagnolini sentenced to a four-year jail term.

"With all the damage that was caused to the company, the damage caused to me is minor," Spagnolini told reporters after Monday's decision.

The case was a big political issue in Italy and India when it opened in 2012 and severely tarnished the company's reputation at a time when India had established itself as one the world's biggest arms buyers.

The Italian group has always said the case was against the individuals rather than the company and the case against Leonardo was dropped by prosecutors in July 2014.

AgustaWestland, which was treated separately, agreed on a 7.5 million euro settlement with the court a month later.

Mauro Moretti, Leonardo's CEO from March 2014 to May last year, worked to improve the company's reputation during his time at the helm and streamlined the organisation to increase transparency.

A separate investigation into suspected corruption and money laundering is still open in India and involves individuals alleged to have worked as intermediaries in the deal.

India cancelled the helicopter contract in 2013 after Orsi was arrested, but AgustaWestland opposed India's decision and the contract remains suspended and the subject of international arbitration in Paris.

Shares in Leonardo were up 2.7 percent at 1351 GMT.

($1 = 0.8340 euros)

(Reporting by Emilio Parodi; Writing by Giulia Segreti; Editing by David Goodman)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(Reuters) - Kohl's Corp posted a 6.9 percent increase in comparable-store sales for November and December, helped by strong holiday shopping traffic and higher online sales, leading the department store operator to raise its full-year profit forecast.

The numbers compare to the 1-3 percent growth in holiday sales posted by rivals J.C. Penney Co Inc and Macy's Inc last week.

Kohl's shares were up 6.8 percent at $58.05 before the bell on Monday.

The company said it now expects its fiscal 2017 diluted earnings per share to come in between $4.10 and $4.20, versus its previous forecast of $3.72 to $3.92. Analysts on average expect the company to report a profit of $3.64 for the year, according to Thomson I/B/E/S.

To counter fewer shoppers visiting malls and opting for the convenience and savings that online shopping provides, Kohl's has focused on revamping beauty departments at its stores and bringing in popular brands such as Under Armour.

The company said its forecast does not include the impact of recent changes in the tax code, which are expected to have a positive impact on its effective tax rate.

(Reporting by Vibhuti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Maria Sheahan

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Airline Niki's insolvency should have been filed in Austria not Germany, a Berlin court ruled on Monday, in a move which could unravel last month's deal to sell the Air Berlin business to British Airways owner IAG.

Niki filed for insolvency in Berlin last month after Germany's Lufthansa scrapped plans to buy the Austrian airline, grounding its fleet and stranding thousands of passengers.

After hurried talks to find a new owner for Niki before it lost its valuable runway slots, IAG agreed to buy the business and make it part of low-cost unit Vueling.

But Fairplane, a group representing airline passengers, said last week it had filed legal cases to have the insolvency proceedings for Niki shifted to Austria.

Fairplane argues Niki, which is registered as a company in Austria, had been profitable but lost access to bridge financing when insolvency proceedings were opened in Germany in December.

It also says it sees a conflict of interest in the appointment of the same administrators for Niki and its parent and debtor Air Berlin. IAG and Niki declined to comment.

The regional court for Berlin said on Monday a number of factors indicated that Niki's focus was in Austria rather than in Germany, such as the fact that most of its workers had Austrian contracts, that its accounting was done in offices in Vienna and that it was operating under an Austrian license.

It said it would reverse a lower court's Dec. 13 decision to allow insolvency proceedings in Germany, but said the ruling would only take effect after a one-month period during which Niki can appeal the decision in German federal court.

Fairplane said it did not believe a reversal of Niki's insolvency filings in Germany would scupper the airline's sale.

"As soon as there is an insolvency process for Niki in Austria, the administrator there can approve the deal agreed with IAG/Vueling in Berlin and pursue its implementation, it said in a statement.

IAG said it was "committed to working with all relevant parties to proceed with the purchase".

A court in Austria's Korneuburg is reviewing an application for a new insolvency process for Niki there and said on Monday a decision would be made on Friday at the earliest.

(Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Additional reporting by Alistair Smout and Kirsti Knolle; Editing by Alexander Smith and David Evans)

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By Robert-Jan Bartunek and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Denmark's Novo Nordisk, the world's biggest maker of insulin, has made a 2.6 billion euro ($3.1 billion) bid for Belgian biotech group Ablynx as it seeks to diversify and strengthen its business for treating rare blood disorders.

Novo went public with the offer on Monday after Ablynx rebuffed earlier approaches and analysts predicted the Danish group, whose new chief executive is seeking new products to bolster growth, would need to raise its bid to win and might face counterbidders.

The approach comes at a time of renewed interest by large drugmakers in acquiring smaller biotech companies to boost their product portfolios.

U.S.-based Celgene clinched a deal to acquire Impact Biomedicines for up to $7 billion on Sunday, while Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical agreed last week to buy another Belgian biotech group TiGenix for $630 million.

Novo has offered up to 30.50 euros per share for Ablynx, a 60 per cent premium to its Dec. 6 share price, before its first approach.

Ablynx specialises in the research of novel drugs based on nano-bodies found in the immune systems of llamas and alpacas, for which it partners with several of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

The main attraction for Novo is Ablynx's experimental drug caplacizumab for the rare bleeding disorder acquired thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, which would complement Novo's line-up of blood products focused on haemophilia.

The $11 billion haemophilia market is facing upheaval and Novo stands to lose sales following approval of a new Roche drug Hemlibra.

Haematology has become an increasingly important for Novo, but is still small in comparison to its key diabetes business.

NEW NOVO CEO ACTS

The Danish company said it would pay 28.00 euros per share in cash for Ablynx and an additional 2.50 euros in a so-called contingent value right (CVR) if certain conditions related to its research portfolio were met.

An acquisition would be the first by Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, who took over a year ago. He has said the firm needs external innovation to broaden its product line-up.

Under previous chief executive Lars Rebien Sorensen, Novo sat out a spate of deal-making across the drugs industry in recent years and instead focused on its market-leading position making insulin and other diabetes treatments.

But in March, the company approached Global Blood Therapeutics, a U.S. biotech company focused on serious blood disorders, to discuss a potential takeover, people familiar with the situation said.

Novo Chief Financial Officer Jesper Brandgaard said the current bid could be revised if Ablynx agreed to engage in talks.

"I think it would be natural to update the bid following a detailed discussion with the board of directors of Ablynx," he told a conference call, adding that it would be premature to speculate on any subsequent raise.

Brandgaard also played down the threat of an interloper, saying: "In terms of counter proposals it is not our understanding that any other bidder is pursuing the target."

ABLYNX SHARES SUSPENDED

Ablynx already rejected an offer by the Danish group on Dec. 14 and Novo Nordisk said the new bid, made on Dec. 22, was some 14 percent higher.

"Novo Nordisk regrets that the board of directors of Ablynx has so far declined to engage in any discussions, despite the proposals which have been put forward," it said in a statement.

The Belgian company had was not immediately available for comment on Monday. Belgium's market regulator on Monday suspended Ablynx's shares until further notice.

Analysts at Jefferies said they had a fair value of Ablynx at 29 euros per share, rising to 36 euros under a long term upside scenario.

"We envisage Novo needing to hike the offer and could see counterbids," the analysts said, adding that they see the latest offer as "a low-ball bid".

Tax breaks and other incentives have created a thriving biotech industry in Belgium, with many companies spun off from university projects now listed on the local stock exchange.

Ablynx's shares have almost doubled in price in the past 12 months, buoyed by successful clinical trial data. They closed at 21.20 euros on Friday.

Its products, which are all still undergoing medical trials, target many different diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis or cancer.

($1 = 0.8322 euros)

(Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Ben Hirschler in London and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund Blair and Keith Weir)

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By Ernest Scheyder and Valerie Volcovici

HOUSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's administration has proposed opening up nearly all of America's offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, but the industry says it is mainly interested in one part of it, now cordoned off by the Pentagon: the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The industry's focus on an area located near a sprawling network of existing platforms, pipes and ports could ease the path to new reserves, and assuage the drilling opponents near other places offered under the Interior Department's proposed drilling plan issued last week, like California's Pacific, the Atlantic and Arctic.

But accessing it would likely require the consent of the U.S. military. The eastern Gulf has been formally off-limits to drilling since 2006 due mainly to the Defense Department's concerns oil development would interfere with extensive military testing and training exercises in the area.

"The eastern Gulf of Mexico could be very attractive to industry because of the proximity to existing infrastructure in the central and western Gulf of Mexico," the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents the offshore oil and gas industry, said in a statement.

"Investing in the eastern Gulf could yield results - new jobs, new oil and gas production and increased energy security - quicker than investing in other offshore areas."

The American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America have also expressed an interest in the eastern Gulf on behalf of its members, and big driller Royal Dutch Shell Plc told in October that "we have appetite and we are interested" in the eastern Gulf.

Trump's Interior Department has set up an "interagency working group" with the Defense Department to negotiate the issue, according to a Defense Department letter seen by .

In the letter, sent by Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in September, Shanahan says the Pentagon "supports the development of national domestic energy resources in concert with enabling military operations, training and testing."

Defense Department spokeswoman Major Carla Gleason said collaboration with Interior on the issue was "a priority."

Major offshore producers such as Exxon Mobil Corp, BP Plc, Anadarko Petroleum Corp and ConocoPhillips declined to comment.

Shell welcomed the expanded offshore prospects the Trump administration plans to make available, but has not committed to any new activity, said spokesman Curtis Smith.

A Chevron spokeswoman, Veronica Flores-Paniagua, said the company is happy with Trump's move and wants to continue to explore parts of Gulf, and also to better understand the geology of the Atlantic Seaboard.

WEAK AUCTIONS

Other regions offered in the proposed five-year drilling plan unveiled by Trump's Interior Department last week are unlikely to see much interest, given the ample and relatively cheap opportunities to drill from shale plays on land.

The Arctic is remote and expensive, Pacific states such as California have vowed to block drilling, and other areas also harbor deep opposition from politicians, environmental groups and business interests worried about spills.

Sajjad Alam, an analyst focusing on oil and gas in Moody's corporate finance group, said the high costs and difficulties in many of the areas offered for lease under the plan are likely to keep them low on an oil company's priority list.

Recent leasing statistics in the Gulf of Mexico already show soft demand for acreage from the oil industry.

The amount of money per acre that oil companies spent in the Gulf in 2017 was about a third what they spent in 2013 when oil prices were higher, according to a review of government data. Energy firms bid for less than 1 percent of total U.S. acreage in 2017, compared with 4.5 percent in 2013.

But for oil companies, the option of exploring new areas is nice to have, and one they might exploit if oil prices rise.

"We'd like an opportunity to look at all of the areas (including the Eastern Seaboard and Alaska)," said Tracy Krohn, the chief executive of W&T Offshore Inc , which currently produces oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

"I don't know that we would exclude any areas."

The API said some of its members could be interested in looking at parts of the mid- and southern-Atlantic too, because of successful wells drilled in similar geology off Brazil, Africa and Canada.

"It would make sense to go out there and run seismic and do some exploratory drilling down the road," said Erik Milito, API's director of upstream operations.

(Additional reporting by Liz Hampton, Nichola Groom, Timothy Gardner, and Gary McWilliams; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Simon Webb and Lisa Shumaker)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Mi Nguyen

HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam began the trial on Monday of 22 executives charged over losses totalling hundreds of millions of dollars at the state oil firm, PetroVietnam, with the most serious offences potentially carrying the death penalty.

The defendants included the communist state's first politburo member to face trial in decades and a businessman who Germany says was kidnapped by Vietnamese agents from a Berlin park.

The trial is part of a widespread crackdown on fraud and mismanagement in the energy and banking sectors that intensified after the security establishment gained greater influence in the ruling party last year.

The PetroVietnam trial in Hanoi was taking place simultaneously with a separate trial in the commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City, where a fraud case involving Vietnam's Construction Bank was being heard.

The 46 defendants include the bank's ex-chairman Pham Cong Danh, who is accused of causing losses of 6.1 trillion dong ($268.62 million), according to the government's website.

Total losses caused by fraud at the bank amounted to 15.5 trillion Vietnam dong ($682.55 million), a previous report said.

The PetroVietnam case at the Hanoi People's Court was not open to the public and security was tight.

Photographs released by the Vietnam Agency, the official state provider, showed defendants handcuffed as they were led to the courtroom.

Of the 22 executives on trial, 12 are accused of "violation of state regulations on economic management causing serious consequences". Eight are accused of embezzlement, according to the government's official news website. Two are accused of both.

The most senior former executive on trial is Dinh La Thang, who was arrested last month. He is a former politburo member who was dismissed from his post over the losses at PetroVietnam and then stripped of his role as party head of Ho Chi Minh City.

Also on trial is Trinh Xuan Thanh, who Germany says was kidnapped last year and taken home against his will to face accusations over losses of more than $150 million at a subsidiary of PetroVietnam.

Thanh is accused of both corruption and breaking state rules on economic management. A reporter saw the bespectacled Thanh arrive under police escort at the court on Monday.

Thanh appeared on state television in August and said he had decided to return home to turn himself in.

Neither Thang nor Thanh made any comment at the court and was unable to contact the lawyers representing them.

The maximum jail term for deliberate violation of state regulations is 20 years in prison, state television VTV1 reported in a news bulletin on Monday.

Government critics have voiced suspicions that the corruption crackdown is politically motivated, at least in part, and aimed against those close to former prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who lost out in an internal power struggle in 2016.

The trial is due to last until Jan. 21.

In a separate case linked to the corruption crackdown, a fugitive Vietnamese tycoon was arrested in Hanoi on Thursday after being sent home from Singapore, where he was accused of immigration offences.

Phan Van Anh Vu, 42, told his lawyers he was also a senior officer in Vietnam's secret police and was trying to get to Germany and could have details of the operation in which Thanh was spirited home from Berlin last year.

($1 = 22,709 dong)

(Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Paul Tait)

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A $45,000 electric SUV using facial recognition to unlock doors, Amazons Alexa to entertain and a 49-inch screen across the dashboard may be a harbinger of drivings future. It also shows what Chinas doing to grab that business now as the government pushes gas guzzlers off its roads.
Nvidia, trying to spread its industry-leading graphics chip into new areas, said Uber Technologies and Volkswagen AG will use its artificial intelligence expertise to help bring self-driving cars to the roads.
A Rs 32,000-crore project to indigenously build 12 minesweepers at the Goa Shipyard Ltd (GSL) in collaboration with South Korean firm Kangnam Corporation has reportedly just fallen through, dealing a major blow to the government's Make in India mission.

According to sources cited by The Times of India, this decision was taken by Union Minister for Defence Nirmala Sitharaman. "Goa Shipyard has been asked to issue a new global expression of interest for the mine counter-measure vessels (MCMVs). The fresh RFP (request for proposal) or tender will follow thereafter," quoted the daily. With this, the Indian Navy's nearly decade-old quest for new minesweepers, desperately needed to beef up security along its long coastline, has been pushed back even further.

The world's fifth largest navy reportedly has only four minesweepers in active service-all acquired from the erstwhile Soviet Union between 1978 and 1988-to defend its 14 ports. The Navy needs six-times that number to plug the shortfall.

Worse yet, the defence ministry last year revealed to a parliamentary panel that all the MCMVs currently operational will be retired by 2018-2020. So the government does not have the luxury of time to float the fresh tender for minesweepers, whose role is to clear sea mines laid by enemy warships, submarines and aircrafts to blockade harbours and offshore installations or to disrupt maritime trade.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that the collaboration between GSL and Kangnam Corp has fallen through. In 2008, the UPA Government had floated a tender for minesweepers that the Busan-based firm had won. Then tom-tomed as India's first major defence hardware import from East Asia, the Rs 2,300 crore deal involved importing two MCMVs and the required technology transfer to indigenously build another six vessels. But the defence ministry had scrapped this deal in 2014 after an inquiry revealed that the South Korean shipyard may have hired middlemen to facilitate the contract.

The following year GSL bagged the larger Rs 32,000-crore order, again in collaboration with Kangnam Corp. Under the new deal, 12 vessels were to be constructed in India, with 60% indigenous content, and deliveries were to be completed between 2021 and 2026.

But perhaps the deal was doomed from the start. The already slow-to-take off project then faced a lot of issues ranging from a difference in opinion over the selection of propulsion engines for the vessels to be built to the quantum of technology expertise to be transferred. In the meantime, GSL has already invested over Rs 700 crore in building infrastructure for construction of the MCMVs.

The ministry of defence will reportedly issue a fresh global expression of interest to Kangnam, Italy's Intermarine Shipyard-which was the second closest bidder in the 2008 tender-and other foreign shipyards that specialize in building MCMVs, with non-magnetic hulls and high-definition sonars, acoustic and magnetic sweeps to detect marooned and drifting mines.

In the face of China flexing its muscles in the Indian Ocean-one of the most militarised regions of the world with at least 100 warships prowling at any given time-one hopes the Indian Navy gets its minesweepers sooner rather than later.



With PTI inputs
Ryan Bundy, left, walks out of federal court with his wife Angela Bundy, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. Ryan Bundy, along with his father Cliven Bundy, brother Ammon Bundy, and co-defendant Ryan Payne, are accused of leading an armed standoff in 2014 against government agents in a cattle grazing dispute. (AP Photo/John Locher)

LAS VEGAS (AP)  A U.S. judge who declared a mistrial last month could end the much-watched criminal prosecution of a Nevada rancher accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities.

Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarros decision on Monday is sure to echo among states rights advocates in Western states where the federal government controls vast expanses that some people want to remain protected and others want open for grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling.

To the Bundys, its really more a political trial than a criminal trial, said Ian Bartrum, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas law professor.

Theyre trying to get a particular message out about federal government overreach in the West, and Nevada in particular, and that states should have more local control, Bartrum said of 71-year-old family patriarch Cliven Bundy and his co-defendant sons, Ryan and Ammon Bundy.

For the government, this is a criminal trial, Bartrum said. They say, You cant have people show up with automatic weapons and defy federal officers.'

Indeed, Steven Myhre, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Nevada, has cast the Bundys and co-defendant Montana militia leader Ryan Payne as leaders of a conspiracy that enlisted protesters and gunmen to do whatever it takes to stop federal Bureau of Land Management agents from seizing Bundy cattle in a decades-long grazing dispute.

The April 2014 standoff 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas pitted about three dozen heavily armed federal agents guarding corrals in a dry riverbed against hundreds of flag-waving men, women and children calling for the release of some 400 cows. The cattle had been rounded up from public land where Bundy let his herd graze for 20 years without paying government fees.

Several gunmen among the protesters had assault-style rifles and staked out commanding positions on a freeway overpass. Most of them were acquitted of criminal charges in two trials last year.

Ryan and Ammon Bundy also were acquitted of federal criminal charges in Oregon after leading an armed takeover in early 2016 of a national wildlife refuge to demand the government turn over public land to local control.

In the Nevada standoff, near Bunkerville, no shots were fired before outnumbered and outgunned U.S. Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service agents withdrew.

They got what they wanted that day, Myhre said during Nov. 14 trial openings. They got it at the end of a gun.

Trouble with the case was evident from the start, and Myhre lost a last-minute bid for a postponement. Proceedings were interrupted several times for closed-door hearings and sealed document filings before Navarro declared a mistrial Dec. 20.

The judge signaled she might dismiss the case outright and severely criticized prosecutors for willful violations of constitutional due process, including failing to turn over some evidence to defense teams.

The defense is supposed to be able to see whatever evidence the government has gathered, Bartrum said. The way it works is the defense sees if its relevant and the judge decides if its relevant enough to come in at trial.

The government is saying there was no bad faith, just a regrettable oversight, Bartrum added. But harmless is not for the prosecution to decide.

Cliven Bundys lawyer, Bret Whipple, said Friday he was optimistic his client will be exonerated and freed.

The court laid the foundation when she granted the mistrial, the attorney said.

Bundy is the only one of the four defendants still jailed after refusing the judges offer of house arrest.

He feels that to accept conditions for his release would be to acknowledge he did something wrong, Whipple said. He wants to walk out a free man.

Gregg Cawley, a University of Wyoming professor who writes about land protests in the West, said a collapse of the case would be seen by many as a victory for states rights.

But it would not actually be a clean victory, Cawley said. Conspiracy is very hard to prove. The Bundys got acquitted in Oregon. But if charges in Nevada are dropped, theres no resolution to the question.

It could be seen as criminals going free on a technicality, rather than an actual vindication.
A group of diverse but like-minded individuals, the members of ARC have come together in their common desire to fight hatred, bigotry, intolerance and violence because of the harm these antisocial behaviors cause to our society. In that effort, we will not use or sanction the use of illegal actions (such as violence or intimidation) in pursuit of our desired aims and if we learn of anyone who does use these unethical methods we will report those individuals to the authorities. Instead, we will use the guarantees found in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that ensure freedom of legal speech and expression.
File photo

Searchers believe they have found the wreckage of an airplane that went missing more than a week ago in Box Elder County. The Cessna 172 was carrying two occupants, the pilot 71-year-old Denny Mansell, and a passenger 74-year-old Peter Ellis.

The plane took off from the Ogden Hinckley Airport on the afternoon of December 29 but never returned. The men had told family members, they planned to fly to the Promontory area and view the trains at the Golden Spike Historical Site from the air.

Box Elder County Sheriffs Chief Deputy Dale Ward said, Saturday morning searchers found an object believed to be an airplane, resting on the bottom of the Great Salt Lake, in approximately 14-feet of water. With the help of sonar equipment, they were able to determine that the object was an airplane about the size of the missing Cessna 172. There was also a sizable debris field around the aircraft.

Because of weather and equipment issues, dive teams have been unable to reach the site and determine if it is the same missing plane. They have postponed their dive temporarily until conditions improve.

Ward said searchers are confident that the located object has been absolutely identified as an

airplane, the general size and description of the missing Cessna 172.

During the past week, searchers analyzed radar data from the aircraft prior to its loss of signal. They also followed up on tips from the public and worked with analytical experts, known by the Mansell and Ellis families. They were able to determine, there was a high probability the aircraft was in the north part of the lake.

The missing aircraft is red and white in color. Its registration number is N4395R.

Deputies, along with search and rescue teams have been assisted by the Utah Department of Public Safety, Civil Air Patrol, Box Elder Communications Center, Utah Division of Natural Resources, and the Weber County Scuba/Search and Rescue.

The recovery effort is expected to continue next week.

Ward said the family appreciates the publics help and respecting their privacy during this difficult time.

<hr /><p style=text-align: center;>will@cvradio.com
After we finished painting and photographing in Northfield on our New England Fall Foliage Art Trek, we moved onto the picturesque village of Stowe. The painters set up their easels to capture this gorgeous overlook of town with the stark white church below slicing through all of the vibrant foliage, creating the perfect focal point. Meanwhile the photographers and tourists shot and explored nearby. We reconvened that night for an amazing dinner at a local farm-to-table restaurant, enjoying the company of new friends.








Sisiku Ayuk Tabe Archives

Peu avant son interpellation le 5 janvier 2018 a Abuja au Nigeria, le president par interim dAmbazonie a accorde une interview exclusive a Cameroon-Info.Net. Sisiku Ayuk Tabe souligne quil est ouvert au dialogue pour mettre un terme a la crise sociopolitique dans les regions du Nord-Ouest et du Sud-Ouest, il pose neanmoins des conditions a remplir avant ce dialogue avec le regime. Il indique quil na jamais signe de contrat avec une firme canadienne pour lexploitation du petrole dans la peninsule de Bakassi.

After your declaration of Independence on the 1st October 2017, what is the next step forward?

After the declaration of our independence on October 1st, we have come ahead to name a government. We now have a government in place. There are secretaries of states for different ministries. We have a vice president, we have ambassadors to respective parts of the world and we are going to get to work. As we speak now, our main priority is getting nations of the world to recognize our nation. And when this is done, we will look for the recognition from the African Union and eventually at the United Nations, and we will deal with the setting up of our structures and when we go to Buea, it will eventually be a great mission.

What is your reading of the political situation in the North West and South West regions, of Cameroon in general and of Africa?

Well, It is regrettable the political situation in our nation. The situation in Africa is not also not as great except that we got a small hope in Zimbabwe lately but the African Union being silent on our situation given the magnitude of atrocities that Mister Biya has leveled on our people is regrettable. We believe that political situation will only end up in one thing, - the defeat of Mister Biyas forces out of our land to his rightful boundaries, because we are two neighboring nations. Mister Biya knows and the world should know that there is not act of union between those two nations. So the concocted union of 1961 between the French Cameroon and the former British Southern Cameroon was never materialized and we are going to make sure that as we have started, those two nations will just be brotherly nations, now the relationship between those nations will depend on how we cement the separation because if Mister Biya continues with this his ruthless attitude on our people, then in future the two nations might not be so brotherly.

What is your reaction of the recent acts of violence in the Anglophone regions?

My reaction is that of shock. I am appalled by Mister Biya's brutality on our people. Our people have been peace-loving, they continue to be peace-loving. This our restoration movement has been peaceful and we are people who are unarmed and we have continued to use the first of the argument of our case. We have the right and self-determination that our forefathers were never handed over the certificate of sovereignty for their independence and most importantly, they did not sign any act of union with Mister Amadou Ahidjo, Biya's predecessor. On the strength of these arguments, we know that we have the right to form our own nation which we have declared the restoration on the 1st October 2017 and no matter any acts of violence that are perpetrated by Mister Biya on our people, our resolve to form our nation is firm and we are going to make sure that that happens.

What is the situation of the Cameroonians who ran into the Cross River State of Nigeria and what project do you have for them?

The people who have run into Cross River State and most parts of Eastern States of Nigeria are not Cameroonians, they are former British Southern Cameroonians, but now we call them ambazonians. That situation is deplorable because some of them trekked for five days in the bushes before getting into Nigeria. Of course, most of them are women and little children. The question many people ask is what happened to the men? We have just been informed, either some of the men were just killed, some of them have been disappeared by the forces of Mister Biya or some of them are hiding in the bushes. So the situation is bad and in terms of projects, what we have done is to launch a worldwide campaign, a relief campaign and containers of relief material; clothing, food, medications that our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora have gifted and most of those containers are coming and we hope the containers get into Nigeria before Christmas. We are working with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to make sure that some form of accommodation is provided to our people. In the government that I just announced, we have the department of Health and Social services that is particularly handing that, and thankfully, the under secretary for that department is actually here in Nigeria and she has been on the field and she is still on the field and is providing much support to the refugees. We want to take advantage of this to thank all our brothers and sister in the Diaspora and well-wishers across the world who have come to of our refugees to provided them with much needed relief at this time.

What are your projects and what are the means you have to realize them?

We have lots of projects for all the teams and departments that we have created to resolve the ongoing crisis. The seven ministerial departments we have created are working on their mandates now and they have each got projects which are meant to quickly take us to Buea and when we get to Buea, we will enlarge our team to cover all the functional ministries and the act of nation building will get off in endless.

Until which level are you prepared with your project of the division of Cameroon?

I don't know about the nation of Cameron, those are two different nations. The Republic of Cameroon and former British Southern Cameroon now called the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, those countries have never been one, they are not one today, they will not be one tomorrow. They are two different nations and we hope to keep the as such and to continue to build our own nation that has been devastated and abandoned in the last 56 years.

Have authorities of Yaounde got into contact with you for dialogue?

No authority in Yaounde has gone in contact with me or any member of my team for any dialogue what so ever.

Are you prepared to dialogue with the Yaounde regime, if yes on what conditions?

Of course we are open to dialogue, however the conditions for us to dialogue with the Yaounde regime are as follows:

1- Mancho Bibixy, Penn Terence and all our brothers and sisters who have been arrested unlawfully and put in all the prisons across the Republic of Cameroon and our ambazonians cells must be released unconditionally,

2- Mister Biya must take his forces of disorder from our zone, the military, the gendarmes must vacate our cities,

3- There must be an unconditional amnesty for all those who are in the Diaspora since Mister Biya's airport looks like the only airport through which most of our people want to come home, that must be opened to them without any hesitation,

4- Any dialogue that we want to have with Yaounde must happen out of both our countries, the Federal Republic of Ambazonia and the Republic of Cameroon. That dialogue must be mediated by international organizations preferably the United Nations, the African Union, the Commonwealth of Nations, the European Union, in the presence of France, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. Those are our conditions for us to have a meaningful to look for the root cause of the problem.

A Canadian firm claims to have signed a contract with you to exploit fuel in Bakassi, how true is this and if yes, what are the terms of the said contract?

I have never, not me, not any member of my team has signed any Canadian firm or any firm for that matter, so that is a false claim. We haven't signed any contract with any company for any fuel exploitation in the Bakassi or anywhere in our region for that matter.

When did you start having the idea of the Independence of Southern Cameroons?

The restoration of independence of Southern Cameroons is something that has been mentioned by our forefathers from the word go, that is why the independence vote or the joining vote was 60 to 40. 40 % of the people voted against that and you have to remember, they were caught between the rock and the hot plate the choice they had was joining the Republic of Cameroon or joining Nigeria. In one side, they had left the Republic of Nigeria in 1954, so seven years later, asking them to go back to the Federal Republic of Nigeria or do anything else, was giving them the octane choice of no choice at all. So our people were given one choice of joining the Republic of Cameroon and yet 40% of the people voted against. For me personally, I think the moment I started reading our history the problems our people were facing, not only the problems they were facing but I read through the right we had to make a decision on our future. That right has been deprived from us for long time. It became obvious to me that somebody had to do something about it and so my quest for the restoration for our independence has developed and grown as I learn more about our history. The realization that our forefathers for our independence were never handed the certificate of sovereignty is an insult to us and the knowledge that even the act of union between our two nations was not signed and yet we have been treated as second class citizens and slaves for the last 56 years adds salt to injury, so I think we have a duty, a responsibility to now move our nation to become independent, to take our destiny into our own hands and thats exactly what we are doing.

How did you manage and follow up the manifestations of last 1st October?

Prior to 1st October 2017, I declared the restoration of our independence on the night of 30th September to the 1st October. It was a moment of great pride, it was a moment of joy, although the joy became short lived because as we got up in the morning and started seeing the images of our peace-loving people going out of the streets and celebrating the restoration of their independence. And then we saw the barbaric nature with which Mister Biyas forces came on our people and the genocide that came after. No matter what happened, that is a day in our history that we will never forget, a day that our people decided to stand up as one person to say that enough is enough and that they were taking their destiny into their own hands. I am very proud to be alive to witness this. I am very happy, I am humble to be part of this story, I am particularly humble to be the leader of this great restoration movement at this time. I think we are so lucky to be alive as ambazonians in the 56 years history of our nation. Anyone who is alive now and is partaking in this restoration movement must be very proud because many would have wished to be in our situation, some have gone to meet the Lord. And so those of us who are here now, we have a place in history but we owe to those who have to come after us to tell them what we were doing in 2017. So particularly for the date of 1st October, I think those are the moments of your life where you say, where were you on this date. And I still remember very well where I was on that date. I will see when we get to Buea to tell the world where I was on the 1st October 2017.

Are there any foreign partners on whom you count on this project of Independence?

As soon as we declared our independence, all options for the restoration for a nation, for the sovereignty and of the rebuilding of nation came on the table for us. So we have all the options available now, we would meet foreign partners to make that a reality and I am almost certain that that is what we are working towards and it is looking very good.

What missions are you assigning to the Government you just created?

As I said, we have created a government with seven ministries and ambassadors. The first mission for the ambassadors is to seek recognition by member states. We have deployed ambassadors across the world, to all continents and we are going to continue to deploy more ambassadors as we become friendlier with more nations as we make our case head to other nations, we are going to appoint more ambassadors and we hope that these ambassadors are going to get our recognition for our nation which will eventually translate to the recognition by the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations. That's the priority project for the government, once we get recognition, all other ministries are still working and preparing themselves for the day when we get to Buea and we hit the ground running.
| BY Ricki Green |

Australian lingerie label Honey Birdette has launched a new campaign starring British bombshell Roxy Horner.

Titled Do Not Disturb, the campaign stars Horner as she checks-in at a glamorous hotel for a night of debauchery. Surrendering to temptation, pushing all the limits and revealing a bold sensual femininity.

Featuring 12 new lingerie collections; comprising of bras, briefs, thongs, suspenders, chemises and playsuits, the campaign is dominated by a dark decadent palette of black, blush, midnight blue and red.

Each look is styled with Honey Birdettes extensive range of hosiery and perfectly complimented by the white decor of the hotel suite.

The campaign stills are accompanied by a one minute video and like the visuals are overflowing with sensuality and sexual empowerment.

The Honey Birdette Do Not Disturb collection will be available exclusively at Honey Birdette Boutiques in Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as via its Australian, UK and USA online stores.

Creative Director & Photographer: Florian Semanaz

Model: Roxy Horner

Make-Up: Chloe Langford, DLM

Hair: Jayde Turner-Ledwidge, DLM

Videographer: George Tyler
| BY Lynchy |

MullenLowe Group China has appointed Dixi Chern to the role of Unilevers Business Director in China.

Chern (pictured left) joins the network with over 10 years of industry experience having been in strategy roles in his past agencies at POSSIBLE and Mirum. Prior to joining MullenLowe Group China, Chern was Media Strategy Director at Starcom MediaVest where he worked on major campaigns for AB InBev across Greater China.

We have gone through a very comprehensive search in the past few months to find the right candidate to take up this vital role, said Richard Tan, CEO of MullenLowe Group China. The global MullenLowe Group has a very long tenure with Unilever for more than a century, and have had 25 years of partnership with Unilever China since 1993. Based on this long-lasting partnership, it is vital that our team leader for the account has the vision and relevant experience to deliver cutting-edge solutions, ensuring the Unilever brands stay ahead in a rapidy developing market.

The cohesiveness and creativity of the fully integrated agency model really attracted me, added Chern. This is a great opportunity and Im looking forward to playing that vital role to make a difference to the Unilever business development in China!
| BY Lynchy |

Geometry Global Korea has appointed Mike Forster as its Managing Director. Forster (pictured left) was most recently Managing Director at Geometry Global Indonesia, and reports to Diana Cawley, CEO of Geometry Global Asia Pacific.

Forsters career has mostly centered on building brands and client relationships, with specific focus on brand activation and shopper marketing. Having worked in diverse markets from UK, Netherlands and Russia to Hong Kong and Malaysia, he has helped a number of global and local clients such as Unilever, Diageo, Philips and Coca-Cola, to name but a few.

Forster commented, Its an exciting time to be in South Korea and I believe the dynamic online to offline offer Geometry Global Korea has, with our focus on driving behavior change, uniquely positions us for success with international clients here. Whist the strength of the chaebols is a challenge, recent developments are opening new opportunities for foreign companies.
The government of Tajikistan has tasked relevant ministries and agencies to take measures to establish direct air communication with Armenia, news.tj reports.

January 8, 2018, 14:46 Tajikistan prepares for establishing direct air communication with Armenia

STEPANAKERT, JANUARY 8, ARTSAKHPRESS:The governments of Armenia and Tajikistan signed an agreement on air communication on June 14, 2017.

By governments decree the Ministry of Transport together with other relevant ministries and agencies is ordered to take necessary measures to ensure the implementation of a government-to-government agreement between Tajikistan and Armenia on launching direct air communication.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan has been tasked to inform the Armenian side that Tajikistans respective internal procedures necessary for the agreements entry into force have been completed.

During the official visit of the President of Tajikistan to Armenia, the two Presidents agreed to consider the opportunity to launch direct flights.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said they are ready to provide privileges to Tajik partners within the frames of the open sky policy run by Armenia in the aviation field.
Head down to the shores of Lake Burley Griffin on Tuesday nights (weather permitting) for Yoga by the Lake with Kayla Bonney. The class is run in Bowen Park on the Kingston foreshore and is perfect for all levels. The class goes for 60 minutes with 10 minutes of meditation at the end of the class. The class is perfect for beginners and more advanced students as there are lots of posture adjustments offered to suit all needs. The class usually begins slow building to some more dynamic sequences in the middle and stretching to conclude. The class is on a donation basis but there is no pressure for anyone to pay, says Bonney, she just wants everyone to enjoy Yoga. More details on Facebook @yogawithkayla or on Instagram @inspiredphysiology_and_yoga
Police suspect he was driving his red and white Ford Falcon utility that evening and are also calling for information from witnesses who may have seen it out, or who may be able to identify the woman in images taken at Kingsley's Weston Creek.
His work is informative, topical, funny and quirky and, very importantly, it offers a personal touch. He writes in a style we can call the Simbu School of writing  eloquent, realistic, gritty. He has no respect for stultifying political correctness. He won the 2014 Crocodile Prize essay award.

Sil never ceases to surprise with the range of topics he addresses in his journalism. Stylistically, he walks in the footsteps of the great essayists.

He also authored a significant book, launched in Canberra in 2013, The Flight of Galkope, a magical combination of Simbu history and myth brought to modern times with a thoughtful discussion about the prodigious Simbu diaspora.

TUMBY BAY - Kela Kapkora Sil Bolkin has been a consistent and popular contributor to PNG Attitude and the Crocodile Prize for many years.

Sil was undertaking post-graduate study at the Australian National University when The Flight of Galkope was launched by Charles Lepani, at the time PNGs high commissioner to Australia.

I flew down from Hervey Bay for the event and found to my dismay that the publisher had lost the entire shipment of books. We were undeterred: the book was launched that day with the single proof copy.

The consignment arrived the following day and, as we were both flying out of Canberra, Sil met me at the airport and presented me with a copy.

Now the essays have begun to appear again. Sil hasnt lost any of his bite and readers can look forward to a steady stream of incisive pieces. Sil Bolkin is a substantial and significant Papua New Guinean writer. Heres one of my favourites.

__________

Papua New Guinea as a banana republic: the Chinese Li Wu

KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN

First published in PNG Attitude in February 2014

PORT MORESBY - A recent incident I witnessed at the Taurama Shopping Centre in Port Moresby ended up posing some important questions for all Papua New Guineans.

An argument started between a Tari man in a Chinese kaibar and the Chinese man on the other side of the counter. Moments later, a towering Chinese man came out and punched the 1.5 metre Tari man into submission.

He was beaten and bruised to the point of exhaustion and, as you might expect, two of his Tari wantoks came to the rescue and nearly punched and kicked the tall Chinese man to death.

The public who witnessed the incident were divided in their support. The pro-Chinese mob said the Chinese had created employment and paid taxes through their businesses. They said Papua New Guineans do not create employment but sit and gamble (bom or 7-leaf) or talk politics and wait for free handouts.

They added that Papua New Guineans finding themselves with some money become one-day-millionaires and go on a drinking spree and sing until dawn. They concluded that PNG men and women have no business acumen and should not talk about Chinese business aggression.

On the dissenting side, the pro-Taris said most of the Chinese come into the country through back door deals with politicians and immigration officials and corrupt every system in place. They said being citizens of a superpower doesnt give Chinese the right to break the laws of a small country and trample on its citizens.

As the arguments went on, they almost erupted into another melee but police officers speedily arrived on the scene, and this was most interesting.

Two police cars arrived containing high ranking officers. The Chinese called these senior police officers by name and chatted with them. It was evident they were friends. The policemen ignored the bruised Tari man.

I started taking photographs but an obese policeman demanded that I delete them on the spot. I deleted the shots while he watched. One of the policemen said, You journalists write bullshit. I told him I was not a journalist and didnt even know how to write.

No one could find out the reason for the argument because the Tari man could not speak good Pisin and the Chinese culprit could only speak Mandarin. People tried to ask the young women in the kaibar to explain what went wrong but the Chinese told them not to talk.

Anyhow, no arrests were made. The Taris were told to go home and refrain from being such nuisances and one of the Chinese came out of the kaibar and gave the police servings of rice and stew in takeaway cartons and some Coca Cola.

One of the policemen took the plastic bag without saying thank you and looked in the direction of the crowd, swore and told us to disperse. Maybe swearing at the public was an indirect way of saying thank you to his Chinese friend for the free lunch.

When the police left, a veteran public servant said the Chinese keep a black book that contains the names of the 80% of PNG politicians and bureaucrats who are given Li Wu.

Li Wu in Chinese Mandarin is gift or present and Her Li is a congratulatory gift. Most politicians when they are elected and ministers when they are appointed receive Her Li, the public servant said.

He added that around 80% of top police officers are on the payroll of Chinese businesses. Occasionally you hear people on the streets of Port Moresby say, Em ol polis bilong LGNA or Em ol polis bilong RH. LGNA and RH are, of course, Asian companies.

The incident at Taurama Shopping Centre seemed to confirm what the veteran civil servant had said about the black book and the various police officers in PNG in the pay of both government and Chinese and other Asians.

The Chinese are able to call top ranking police officers who within minutes will arrive to provide protection. The top officers release the Chinese and get junior police to assault Papua New Guineans.

One has to ask, Does the Li Wu to politicians and top bureaucrats make Chinese businessmen and women in Papua New Guinea immune to the laws of the independent state of Papua New Guinea?
It has been more than a decade since Joel Giambra ran for elective office. But as a self-described "libertarian Republican," he believes he is the best candidate for the New York GOP to defeat Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in November.

Giambra, a Buffalo-area Republican, is seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination. He announced his candidacy Jan. 3  the day of Cuomo's State of the State address in Albany.

He has more than 25 years of government experience. He was elected to the Buffalo Common Council as a Democrat and served for eight years in that role before becoming Buffalo city comptroller.

In 1999, he challenged incumbent Democrat Dennis Gorski for Erie County executive. He won that race and served two terms as county executive.

Since leaving office, he has worked in real estate  he is the president of a development firm, Executive Properties  and as a lobbyist for Park Strategies, a New York City-based firm with locations in Albany, Buffalo and Washington.

"It was the lobbying work probably that gave me the incentive to want to get back in because I began to realize how bad we needed to change the system of pay to play," Giambra said in a phone interview Friday. "I was part of a campaign finance system and election law system that's an incumbent protection plan along with a pay-to-play operation within the confines of the existing laws."

It's also why Giambra emphasized the need for campaign finance reform and is making it a major focus of his gubernatorial bid. He supports closing the so-called LLC loophole, a gap in election law which allows wealthy individuals to form multiple limited liability corporations and donate huge sums of money to candidates and committees.

He questioned the impact of Cuomo's campaign war chest on his policy-making decisions. The governor's campaign reported nearly $26 million in July and could have closer to $30 million when its latest filing is released later this month.

"How is it that an elected official can amass $26 million and not be compromised?" Giambra said.

Other than closing the LLC loophole he doesn't have a plan to address the state's campaign finance laws. He said he will talk to good government groups, such as the League of Women Voters, and key stakeholders about the best ways to reform the state's campaign finance system.

"It's all about special interest and it's all about campaign donations," he said. "We have to expose that and we have to fix that."

Giambra criticized Cuomo's economic development strategy. During his two terms as governor, Cuomo has launched regional economic development councils which have determined how to invest billions in state funding. He also created the Start-Up NY program, an initiative that allows businesses to operate in designated tax-free zones.

In Giambra's backyard, Cuomo spearheaded the establishment of the Buffalo Billion program to spur economic development in western New York.

As county executive, Giambra said he advocated for reducing what he called corporate welfare. As examples, he cited the state's $750 million investment to support the Solar City project in Buffalo and the $90 million of taxpayer dollars spent to build a factory in central New York for a light bulb manufacturer.

While his economic message could resonate with Republicans, it may be difficult for Giambra to secure the party's gubernatorial nomination.

He describes himself as "socially moderate." He is a proponent of marriage equality and generally supports abortion rights. He is opposed to abortion after the second trimester unless the health of the mother is in jeopardy.

But it's his support for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 that could hurt him the most.

During the last presidential election, Giambra joined a group of New York Republicans and independents that supported Clinton for president against Donald Trump, a fellow New Yorker and the GOP presidential nominee.

Endorsing Clinton could help Giambra win over some Democratic voters in a general election race against Cuomo, but it's viewed as a negative by some Republicans, especially those in upstate who backed Trump in 2016.

Giambra admitted that the Clinton endorsement is "already having an impact." He said there has been some resistance from Republicans to his gubernatorial bid.

Giambra's first step in the process of winning over GOP leaders came Monday in Albany. Republican county chairs met in the state capital to discuss the state of the 2018 ticket.

Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb is the only other Republican who has entered the race for governor. State Sen. John DeFrancisco is continuing to explore a gubernatorial bid.

Despite the factors going against him, Giambra thinks he can be successful.

"My job is to win over the hearts, the minds and the votes of middle New York state," he said. "That's who I am. That's where I think this state is. That's where I think this country is right now."
Toyota provided a glimpse into the future of mobility with the e-Palette concept, which made its debut at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show on Monday.

The study imagines a future where Toyota merely manufactures the hardware and other companies provide the software to operate the vehicle.



The automaker also announced the e-Palette Alliance alongside the physical concept. The Alliance encompasses a host of launch partners, including Pizza Hut, Amazon, Mazda, and Uber, which will all leverage Toyotas proprietary Mobility Services Platform (MSPF). The goal is to develop the right mobility services for the future alongside the appropriate vehicle.

As mentioned, that vehicle is the e-Palette. Toyota said the concept boasts an open interior ripe for customization. For example, the automaker imagines the concept vehicle as a package delivery van, a ride-sharing vehicle, and a mobile e-commerce vehicle.

The open interior design allows for purpose-built interiors to suit each of the mobility needs specifically. Thus, the e-Palette can shift from one service to the other and companies can ultimately share the platform. Pizza delivery vehicle by day, Uber ride-sharing vehicle by night.

Additionally, the automaker envisions the concept will come in three sizes to meet the needs of all businesses in the budding world of mobility services.

Various companies would take delivery of the e-Palette and provide their own self-driving-car software, while Toyotas Guardian technology works to ensure proper operation. The same MSPF can also provide over-the-air updates for self-driving systems.

The concept isnt quite a reality yet, however. The automakers president and namesake, Akio Toyoda, said the e-Palette concept and Alliance is a stepping stone for a new business model that balances traditional vehicle sales and new mobility services. Toyota hopes to conduct the first vehicle tests in the early 2020s and potentially provide mobility solutions for athletes competing in the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

Photo Gallery

Video
The long-awaited 2018 Ford Mustang Bullitt has yet to premiere but it has already emerged that the first production example will be sold by Barrett-Jackson at the companys Scottsdale auction on January 19, 2018.



Members of the Mustang 6G forums made the revelation after discovering that Lot #3006 is simply dubbed Ford Charity Vehicle and features a darkened image of the original Mustang Bullitt. The description then reveals that Ford Motor Company will auction a special new Ford Mustang at the event with 100 per cent of the hammer price benefiting Boys Republic.

Boys Republic is a private, all-boys school for troubled adolescents in California. Interestingly, Steve McQueen from Bullitt actually attended this school and went on to serve as honorary chairman in 1966 and 1975. Giving the proceeds of the auction to the school will be a perfect way to celebrate the Bullitt legacy.

It is understood that the new Mustang Bullitt will be based around the Mustang GT and therefore continue to use a 5.0-liter naturally-aspirated V8 engine. While it wont benefit from any significant performance increases, the styling of the Bullitt will be bespoke and include a dark green paint scheme, five-spoke wheels with chrome and black accents, distinctive badging, and some unique interior elements.

If reports prove accurate, the Mustang Bullitt will be shown to the world at the Detroit Auto Show.

PHOTO GALLERY
GMC and Chevrolet introduced their mid-size pickup twins for the 2014 model year, and since then, changes have been relatively minor. However, a new report from AutoNews published on Monday claimed the GMC Canyon is in for a refresh this year.



The mid-size pickup received two notable updates since its re-introduction: a 2.8-liter Duramax inline-4 cylinder engine and a range-topping Denali trim. Details on what a refreshed Canyon will include are scarce, but design tweaks and new content are likely.

The report also reiterated news that the 2019 GMC Sierra will not show up at the 2018 North American International Auto Show. Instead, Chevrolet will debut the 2019 Silverado in full after its surprise showing in Texas last month.

It will be the first time since 1998 that GMC and Chevrolet will not reveal the latest full-size pickups together. GM President Dan Ammann told the publication that GMC will work to broaden its appeal and further differentiate itself from Chevrolet. While the Sierra and Silverado may be mechanically related, the designs will likely differ quite a bit.

The North American International Auto Show will be heavy on trucks, dictated by consumers relentless appetite for utility vehicles. In particular, the Ford Ranger is rumored to debut at the show and will provide direct competition to the GMC Canyon and its Chevrolet Colorado cousin.

Note: current generation 2017 GMC Canyon pictured
The unimaginable pain and heartache caused by the judge's decision to return shared custody of innocent souls Aubrey and Chloe Berry to their father is worsened in that this heinous murder was avoidable.

The judge was informed by Child Services of two issues concerning the children's safety while in their father's care. Rather than err on the side of caution as is done in restraint order applications, she chose to side with the rights of the accused over the rights of the innocent.

Three things can be gleaned from this. One, many years from now the judge will have filed this decision under "woulda, shoulda, coulda" and her life will carry on. Two, Chloe and Aubrey's lives won't. Three, the time is long overdue for judges to be elected and accountable to the people.

But let's not stop there, the same can be said about the senate. Another example of an appointed position with no accountability and one where you are paid whether you show up for work or not. In addition, we should consider the Parole Board. The lenient sentences being given by appointed judges render the board purposeless. We can all start to improve our lives with as little as a click of a mouse, let your voice be heard. It takes less effort than brushing your teeth and just could improve our lives.

Robert Brown


Photo: Contributed

Police say a Canadian man arrested in the U.S. and charged in the death of his ex-girlfriend last spring has been escorted back to southwestern Ontario.

Ager Hasan, 24, is accused of second-degree murder in the death of his ex-girlfriend Melinda Vasilije, 22, whose body was found with multiple stab wounds in her home in Kitchener, Ont., in April 2017.

Border records show Hasan had already crossed into New York state by the time police had issued a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest, shortly after Vasilije's death.

He has been in police custody since he was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, in July.

Waterloo police say they worked collaboratively with American law enforcement officials to return Hasan to Canada through the extradition process.

He will appear in court in Kitchener on Monday.
A central New York used car dealer has been arrested for allegedly failing to pay more than $206,000 in sales taxes to the state Department of Taxation and Finance.

Samy S. Guindy, 53, of 2746 W. Foxhill Lane, Camillus, has been charged with two counts of second-degree grand larceny, 30 counts of first-degree offering a false instrument for filing and 30 counts of third-degree criminal tax fraud, all felonies.

The charges stem from Guindy's ownership of two used car dealerships in Syracuse, Auto Hunter on Lodi Street and the now-defunct Auto Solution of CNY on West Genesee Street.

Guindy is accused of under-reporting sales from December 2010 through August 2015 at Auto Solution of CNY. He failed to pay at least $68,856 in sales taxes to the state, authorities said.

As owner of Auto Hunter, he allegedly under-reported sales from December 2010 through May 2017 and failed to remit at least $137,717 in sales tax payments.

"Sales tax fraud deprives the state and the communities where these businesses operate of revenue needed for vital services, and forces honest taxpayers to shoulder the burden," said Nonie Manion, acting tax commissioner.

The case will be prosecuted by the Onondaga County District Attorney's Office.

If convicted, Guindy faces up to 15 years in prison.
Photo: Google Maps

UPDATE: 3:50 p.m.

Kamloops RCMP are urging the driver involved in a fatal pedestrian collision Sunday night to come forward.

They're asking for the publics assistance and say due to darkness, the driver may have thought they hit an animal.

There is no illumination on that stretch of Highway 5, and the victim was dressed in black.

ORIGINAL: 6:15 a.m.

A body was left lying on a Kamloops highway Sunday night after a hit-and-run collision.

Police were called to the scene in the southbound lanes of Highway 5, near the Trans-Canada Highway junction, just after 9 p.m.

The 911 call reported a body lying on the road.

Police and emergency services found a 21-year-old deceased male who appeared to have been struck by a vehicle, which did not stay at the scene. The victim is not a Kamloops resident, say RCMP Staff Sgt. Edward Preto.

The highway was closed for several hours while police investigated and reopened about 3:15 a.m. Traffic was diverted via Hwy 1 during the closure.

Anyone with information is asked to call Kamloops RCMP at 250-828-3000 or CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-8277.
Photo: Google Street View

UPDATE: 11:15 a.m.

All lanes of Tranquille and Eighth Street in Kamloops are now open  to motorists only.

Pedestrians are still being diverted away from the area, police say.

ORIGINAL: 10:50 a.m.

A major Kamloops artery has been closed and a store evacuated due to a possible natural gas leak.

RCMP are redirecting traffic and pedestrians at the intersection of 8th Street and Tranquille Road.

Cpl. Jodi Shelkie says the Penny Pinchers store "experienced a structural problem, and until it is confirmed that the natural gas lines were not compromised, traffic will be diverted from the area."

Fortis Gas crews have been called to the scene.
New York State Police are investigating a larceny that took place New Year's Eve in the town of Owasco.

Trooper James Wozniak said police are searching for a man and woman who stole several bottles of alcohol from Owasco Wines and Liquors on Owasco Road.

Wozniak said state police received a complaint after the store owner realized several bottles were missing. Upon further investigation, the trooper said, security footage showed a black male and female had entered the store at around 4 p.m. Dec. 31 and took three bottles of alcohol.

"She placed a bottle in her purse and the male placed two bottles in his jacket," Wozniak said, noting that the alcohol was worth around $100.

Police said there was no weapon involved as the couple could be seen calmly leaving the store. It was unknown if the suspects had a vehicle.

Anyone with information regarding the incident should contact Wozniak at (315) 255-2767.
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Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) delivered 178,264 vehicles in December, 2017, up 5.73 percent year on year, but down 1.24 percent month on month. By the end of December, the group sold a total of 2,001,036 vehicles in the whole year, jumping 21.27 percent compared with the year before.

The outstanding sales performance of both joint ventures and self-owned brands contribute together to the sales growth. In the last month of 2017, the delivery of passenger vehicles under GAC self-owned brands reached 43,600 units, increasing 20.79 percent from a year earlier. In 2017, the total sales of passenger vehicles from GAC self-owned brands were around 508,600, growing 36.7 percent compared with 2016.

In 2017, all of GACs joint ventures saw sales growth. GAC Honda handed over 705,000 vehicles last year, exceeding its annual sales target and increasing 10.37 percent year on year. The delivery of GAC Toyota also surpassed its annual sales target with a total volume of 442,400 units, up 4.88 percent compared with the previous year.

The sales of GACs another joint venture with Japanese automakers, GAC Mitsubishi, doubled in the past year. GAC Mitsubishis delivery soared 110 percent to 117,400 vehicles in 2017, the highest growth rate among all subsidiaries of GAC.

GAC FCA sold 222,332 vehicles in 2017. The sales of locally produced Jeep models surged 57 percent compared with the previous year to over 200,000 units.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- FAW Car Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as FAW Car) announced on Jan. 7 that it signed strategic cooperation agreements with Management Committee of Guian New Area, Guizhou Province and Guian New Area Mobike Chuxing Technology Co., Ltd (hereinafter referred to as Mobike Chuxing). Besides, it also signed a cooperative production framework agreement on EV project with Sitech Electric Vehicle Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Sitech).



According to the strategic cooperation agreement signed with Mobike Chuxing, FAW Car plans to acquire 10% stakes in Mobike Chuxing. Joining forces with Mobike Chuxing is deemed as the most significant measure among FAW Car's three agreements.

It is revealed from the agreement that FAW Car will be the product provider and manufacturer of Mobike Chuxing. Besides, FAW Car stated that they will cooperate in car manufacturing and research in customized vehicle segment as well as vehicle sales in mobility service area. Both parties will share such relevant resources as operational experience, operating modes, customer data, etc. Besides, they will also share other advantageous resources, including but not limited to financial service and after-sale network.

The cooperation agreement between FAW Car and Guian New Area showed that FAW Besturn brand will set up an office in Guian Jin'gang Automobile Culture Park, mainly taking in charge of brand promotion, experience and sales for the full lineup of FAW's brands.

FAW Car and Guian New Area will jointly promote the model development and cooperative manufacture for Sitech. What's more, they will also conduct comprehensive cooperation in Mobike's ride-sharing customization development, integrated platform building between vehicles, charging piles and network, as well as a green mobility demonstration area in Guizhou Province.

In accordance with the strategic cooperation agreement signed with Sitech, FAW Car and Sitech will produce NEV products and derivative models at FAW Car's factory, based on FAW Car's NEV manufacturing licenses. In principle, the existing equipment of FAW Car will be prefered to use in car manufacturing. Their cooperation will remain in force from the signing date to Dec. 31, 2022.
In our daily experience space has three dimensions. Recently, however, a physical phenomenon that only occurs in four spatial dimensions could be observed in two experiments. The theoretical groundwork for those experiments was laid by an ETH researcher.

Ever since Albert Einstein developed the special theory of relativity in Zurich in 1905, by fourth dimension one usually means time. But how can one visualize a fourth spatial dimension  in addition to top-bottom, right-left and front-back? In the arts Salvador Dali tried that: his crucifixion scene painted in 1954 shows as cross consisting of the three-dimensional unfolding of a hypercube in four dimensions (similarly to the unfolding of a cube into squares).

A completely different, but no less fascinating, look into the fourth spatial dimension was now obtained by two teams of scientists from Switzerland, USA, Germany, Italy and Israel. The ETH researcher Oded Zilberberg, professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, played a pivotal role in both publications, which were recently published in the scientific journal Nature. He provided the theoretical basis for the experiments in which a four-dimensional physical phenomenon could be observed in two dimensions.

The quantum Hall effect

Both experiments dealt with the so-called quantum Hall effect. Commonly, that effect manifests in the boundary layer between two materials, in which electrons can only move in two dimensions. A magnetic field perpendicular to the material initially leads to the classical Hall effect: a current flowing through the material gives rise to a voltage in the perpendicular direction  the larger the magnetic field, the higher the voltage. The reason for this is that the magnetic field generates a force acting at right angles to the direction of motion (the Lorentz force) that deviates the electrons. At very low temperatures and very large magnetic fields, however, quantum mechanics starts playing a role, which means that the voltage no longer increases continuously, but rather jumps in discrete steps. Three Nobel Prizes in Physics have so far been awarded for experimental and theoretical work on the quantum Hall effect.

A question of topology

The quantum Hall effect can also be understood as a topological phenomenon. Topology describes, for instance, how many holes an object has and into what other shapes it can be transformed without cutting it. Similar laws are responsible in the quantum Hall effect for the electrons only being able to move along topologically well-defined paths. For particular strengths of the magnetic field, for example, the electric current can only flow along the edges of the material, but not inside it. Around twenty years ago, it was shown mathematically that analogous topological effects should also occur in four spatial dimensions. At the time, however, that was more like science fiction, says Oded Zilberberg, as actually observing something like that in an experiment seemed impossible  after all, physical space only has three dimensions.

Virtual dimensions by topological pumping

But Zilberberg had a clever idea: using so-called topological pumps it should be possible to add a virtual dimension to both of the real dimensions of the quantum Hall effect. A topological pump works by modulating a specific control parameter of the physical system, which causes its quantum state to change in a characteristic way over time. The end result then looks as though the system had been moving in an additional spatial dimension. In this way one can, theoretically, turn a two-dimensional system into a four-dimensional one.

An optical image of the fourth dimension

That this can also work in practice has now been shown in two independent experiments. A team of physicists led by Mikael Rechtsman at Penn State University and including Kevin Chens group at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA has realized Oded Zilberbergs idea by burning a two-dimensional array of waveguides into a fifteen-centimetre-long glass block using laser beams. Those waveguides were not straight, however, but rather meandered through the glass in a snake-like fashion so that the distances between them varied along the glass block. Depending on those distances, light waves moving through the waveguides could jump more or less easily to a neighbouring waveguide.

The varying couplings between the waveguides acted as topological pumps and thus doubled the number of dimensions of the experiment from two to four. The researchers could now literally see the expected four-dimensional quantum Hall effect by feeding light into the waveguides at one end of the glass block and recording what came out at the other end with a video camera. In this way, for instance, the characteristic edge states of the four-dimensional quantum Hall effect, in which light should emerge only from the waveguides at the edge of the lattice, became directly visible.

Four-dimensional quantized transport

Using extremely cold atoms trapped in optical lattices made of crossed laser beams, Immanuel Bloch and his collaborators at the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich also realized topological pumps. In their experiment, the pumping was effected by periodically varying the properties of the split lattice wells in which the atoms were trapped. By measuring the resulting two-dimensional motion of atoms in the lattice they were able to confirm that the atoms, indeed, behaved according to the topology of the quantum Hall effect in four dimensions. In particular, they were able directly to observe the quantized transport phenomena predicted to occur in that case (which are the equivalent of the voltage perpendicular to the direction of the current in the ordinary two-dimensional quantum Hall effect).

Progress in fundamental research

So whats the practical use of all this? Right now, those experiments are still far from any useful application, Zilberberg admits. But for fundamental research they represent important progress. Physicists can now investigate not just on paper, but also experimentally the effects that phenomena occurring in four (or even more) dimensions can have in our usual three-dimensional world. Quasicrystals in metallic alloys are one example. In three spatial dimensions such quasicrystals have no periodic structure, but when one looks at them in higher virtual dimensions, they actually exhibit regular patterns. And, finally, there is string theory, according to which higher spatial dimensions are compactified in such a way that, at the end, our normal three-dimensional world emerges.




Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On January 5, 2018, National Development and Reform Commission of PRC released a draft of the innovative development strategy of intelligent vehicles for public comments.



In this draft, it firstly elucidates the development blueprint of China's intelligent auto industry.

It states that by the end of 2020, the framework of technical innovation, industrial ecosystem, traffic network facilities, product regulations and information security will be basically formed. The sales of intelligent vehicles will account for over 50% of total vehicle sales in 2020.

It is predicted that in 2020, over 30 million vehicles may be sold in China. If intelligent vehicles could really take up 50% of overall auto sales, then the annual sales of intelligent vehicle will reach more than 15 million units among which the sales of L3 (including higher level) intelligent vehicles are expected to surpass 3 million units.

Meanwhile, LTE-V2X will cover 90% of Chinas major cities and expressways. Satellite navigation system BeiDou with extreme accuracy will accomplish full coverage around China.

By 2025, China should form a more mature nationwide intelligent vehicle system on basis of 2020. 5G-V2X basically meet the demands of Chinas auto industry development. Almost every new vehicle will be featured with intelligent applications and synergy of drivers, vehicles, roads and cloud will be achieved.

By 2035, China plans to become an automobile power in the world with its intelligent vehicles renowned globally and build an intelligent auto society of security, high efficiency and civilization.

From the above strategic visions, it could be learned that developing intelligent vehicles is imperative for China to become a world-class auto power. To achieve this goal, making a reasonable overall arrangement is very crucial. Taking technical innovation for instance, the industrial reformation may result from innovation of technologies, at the same time, building an independent innovation system requires to mutually develop core technologies, testing and evaluation system and demonstration running management.

Previously, China was short of relevant laws in intelligent vehicle area. The draft also clarifies that a suitable law system should be built to ensure auto enterprises having legal support.
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Deerfield-based Walgreens Booths Alliance projected a tax windfall in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Bob Bong / Daily Southtown)

The Republican-backed tax overhaul will translate into a $200 million cash savings for Walgreens this year, but the nations largest drugstore chain has not announced any plans to share the wealth with its employees.

Deerfield-based Walgreens Boots Alliance projected the tax windfall in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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The company expects to obtain a cash benefit in excess of $200 million for fiscal year 2018, Walgreens said in the filing.

Walgreens said the tax savings would boost its net earnings by 30 to 35 cents per share for the fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31.

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The sweeping tax reform bill, signed into law on Dec. 22 by President Donald Trump, permanently lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. In the wake of its passage, more than 120 companies have announced bonuses affecting about 1 million employees, according to Americans for Tax Reform, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit started by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.

Walgreens, which earned nearly $4.1 billion on more than $118 billion in revenue last year, was not ready to announce any employee bonuses from its projected $200 million tax savings.

We just have not elaborated beyond the financial impact at this stage, Walgreens spokesman Michael Polzin said Monday.

Companies giving tax reform-driven employee bonuses include AT&T ($200 million), American Airlines ($130 million) and Comcast ($100 million). Chicago-based Boeing pledged $300 million for charity, workforce development and infrastructure improvements.

Sinclair Broadcast Group gave $1,000 bonuses for 9,000 employees. The conservative Hunt Valley, Md.-based television station owner is seeking approval from federal regulators for its proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Chicago-based Tribune Media.

Whether or not corporate tax savings trickle down to employees, the tax reform bill will affect individual taxpayers by eliminating personal exemptions and nearly doubling standard deductions. Individual tax rates also have been lowered, but unlike the corporate tax cuts, the cuts for individuals are set to expire in 2025.

In 2018, individual taxes would be reduced by about $1,600 on average, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

rchannick@chicagotribune.com

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Pedestrians pass in front of a Whole Foods Market store in Union Square, Wednesday, June 24, 2015, in New York. Mom-and-pop suppliers are chafing under new rules from the grocer's owner, Amazon, which require them to work with an outside firm to coordinate merchandising.

Pedestrians pass in front of a Whole Foods Market store in Union Square, Wednesday, June 24, 2015, in New York. Mom-and-pop suppliers are chafing under new rules from the grocer's owner, Amazon, which require them to work with an outside firm to coordinate merchandising. (Julie Jacobson / AP)

Whole Foods Markets is placing new limits on how products are sold in its stores and asking suppliers to help pay for the changes, riling some mom-and-pop vendors that have long depended on the grocer for visibility and shelf space.

The changes, outlined in an email recently sent to the company's suppliers, are intended to save on costs and centralize operations. They come as Whole Food's new owner, Amazon.com, pushes to reduce prices at the chain's 473 stores.

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Some small-business owners said they are already feeling the effect.

Valerie Gray, for instance, began selling her pasta sauce, Italian Heart's Gourmet Foods, to the Whole Foods store in Reno, Nevada, four years ago. For years, she said, the grocer allowed her to display 108 bottles of pasta sauce at a time. A professional photograph of Gray and her husband hung from the ceiling, alongside a sign that read "Made Locally."

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But in the past month, that photo has come down, Gray said, and the shelves now accommodate just 36 bottles of sauce as the store makes room for national brands. Sales of Gray's pasta sauce have dropped by 75 percent in the past month, she said.

"It feels like that local, personal touch is going away," she said, adding that Whole Foods accounts for half of the company's sales.

"It's hard to set ourselves apart anymore in the sea of well-known national brands."

Previously, Whole Foods allowed suppliers like Gray to oversee their own merchandise or hire local firms to do so. But under the new rules, Whole Foods is requiring suppliers to work exclusively with Daymon, a Stamford, Connecticut-based retail strategy firm, and its subsidiary, SAS Retail Services, to schedule in-store tastings, check inventory on shelves and create displays on their behalf. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)

"For the last two years, we have been working to streamline our processes to ensure all our suppliers are supported and set up for success," Don Clark, general vice president of purchasing for nonperishables, said in a statement.

"The changes to our in-store execution and demo programs are creating a consistent, high-quality experience that benefits both our suppliers and our customers."

In an email obtained by The Washington Post, Clark advised suppliers that they would be required to help fund the effort.

Suppliers that sell more than $300,000 of goods annually to Whole Foods will be required to discount their products by 3 percent (for groceries) or 5 percent (for health and beauty products) to fund the new program. Local suppliers will also have to pay $110 for each four-hour product demonstration by Daymon, while national suppliers will have to pay $165. Daymon did not respond to requests for comment.

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"To successfully run this program, we need your financial support," Clark wrote.

Some suppliers said the new policies put them at a disadvantage because they rely on regular three-hour demonstrations and tastings to introduce products that might be unfamiliar to shoppers.

"Right now, you can set up your table and sample away," said Jenna Huntsberger, owner of Whisked, a Washington, D.C.-based company that sells cookies, quiches and pies to area Whole Foods stores. "So many small brands have gotten their start like that, and shoppers love that they can walk by and meet the person who made their food."

The changes are also likely to affect a cottage industry of companies that act as liaisons between local suppliers and sellers such as Whole Foods.

Sweet Leenie, a Baltimore-based firm founded by former Whole Foods employee Kathleen Overman, specializes in hosting product demonstrations for companies like gelato maker Dolcezza and Shenandoah Spice Company. Regular tastings at Whole Foods, Overman said, make up more than 80 percent of her business.

"Whole Foods has done a great job of creating a community of local food producers and brands," she said. "Our job has always been to advocate for those small businesses, but with these new rules, companies like mine will no longer be useful."

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Since taking over the grocery chain in August, Amazon has looked for ways to combine the power of two well-known brands. Whole Foods stores now sell Amazon Echo devices, and Amazon has added more than 1,000 Whole Foods private-label products on its website.

It is also working to combines sales systems to eventually provide discounts to Amazon Prime members. There are already signs the efforts are paying off: Amazon sold $10 million in Whole Foods-branded products in the first four months following the merger, according to analytics firm One Click Retail.
Picking the perfect pan for cooking may seem simple enough. A frying pan for scrambled eggs and burgers. A huge pot for boiling pasta or sweet corn.

If you want to cook well, though, choosing the right pan for a particular technique or recipe can mean the difference between culinary success and lousy results. A seasoned cook knows this.

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Others cooks? Not so much, suggests Aida Mollenkamp.

"They might think they're not a good cook or a recipe doesn't work when in fact they just aren't using the right tools. ... So you'll have one person using a frying pan and trying to braise in it and that is generally not going to work very well," says Mollenkamp, whose cookbook "Keys to the Kitchen" (Chronicle Books, $35) details pan shapes and materials and how they can affect what you're cooking.

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"Look at the main thing that's happening in a recipe, then decide on the pan," she says.

Of course, things can get confusing. For instance, chefs and pan-makers have several names for wide shallow cooking pans  those you may call skillets or frying pans  but chef Christopher Koetke, host of "Let's Dish" on the Live Well network, can clear that up.

There are basically two types  "saute pans with straight sides and saute pans with sloped sides," says Koetke, who is also vice president of Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago. "The one with the sloped sides is technically called a sauteuse. ... And what we refer to as a saute pan here (in the U.S.)  the sautoir  is the one with the straight sides."

But you won't need dozens of pots and pans to be a good cook  just good pans. "It's better to start with a few pieces and add to it than buy a set of stuff that's really substandard," says Koetke.

Adds Mollenkamp: "There are three things you need to be willing to invest in for the kitchen. Knives, a good cutting board and a good pan. If you don't have those things then you're really going to be in an uphill battle."

So what pan should we be using for which cooking technique? Here are Koetke's and Mollenkamp's suggestions based on five types.

jhevrdejs@tribune.com

Slope-sided skillet

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For: pancakes, vegetables, eggs, crepes, delicate foods. "It's really good for flipping things," says Koetke. Or redistributing vegetables while they're cooking. And if you need to get under food to turn it, "your spatula sort of follows the contour of the pan."

Straight-sided skillet

For: pan-frying steak, chicken, pork; searing; deglazing cooking liquids for a pan sauce. "If you're going to cook in a half-inch of oil, you definitely want the straight-sided pan," says Koetke. Why? Cooking oil won't slosh out the sides, nor will spatters from pan-frying meats. Also, he adds, it's easier to reduce liquids for a pan sauce  in a sloped pan, when liquids bubble up they may burn on its sides.

Stock pot

Tall, narrow pot with two handles. For: pasta, gnocchi, dumplings, stock/soups, blanching. "You want that higher pot so the food can drop in and bounce back up as opposed to trying to do that in a Dutch oven," says Mollenkamp.

Dutch oven

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Large round or oval, wider than it is tall, two handles, tight-fitting lid, stove top and oven safe. For: braises, pot roasts, stews, slow simmers on the stove or in the oven. "Anything that's going to cook low and slow, you've got to have a Dutch oven," says Koetke.

Adds Mollenkamp: "Because it can hold in the heat, you're not going to have to worry about your sauce burning along the way. ... It really can be one-pot cooking that you wouldn't get if you use a lightweight sauce pot."

Saucepan

Round, single handle, heavy bottom. For: milk, custards, puddings, sauces, melding flavors while retaining moisture. "If you're interested in making a pate a choux or any of those pastries that need to really be worked in the pan, with a saucepan like that you can maneuver with it," says Mollenkamp.

What to look for on labels

"You don't need many pots and pans, but you do need good ones," writes Aida Mollenkamp in her book "Keys to the Kitchen" (Chronicle Books, $35). Choose pans that are ovenproof, she suggests, noting "very few nonstick pans can withstand high oven temperatures." Here are several materials she cites in her book:

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Aluminum: "Economical and lightweight," but "does react with some ingredients."

Anodized aluminum: Treated to be "almost nonstick," but "costlier than regular aluminum."

Cast iron: "Holds heat like no other" but quite heavy and acidic ingredients "may take on a metallic flavor."

Copper: Good conductor but should be lined, usually with stainless steel because "copper reacts with a lot of ingredients."

Enamelware: Cast iron or steel that's coated with enamel; must be cleaned with nonabrasive utensils so enamel doesn't scratch or chip.

Stainless steel: Nonreactive and durable but "doesn't conduct heat as well as other metals."

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Clad: Different metals paired for best properties of each; manufacturers sandwich good conductors (i.e. aluminum or copper) with stainless steel.

Nonstick: Choose nontoxic coatings, but don't expect exceptional browning.

How to shop for pans

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Dozens of pots and pans of varied sizes, types, materials and colors reside in cookware stores, some bearing imprimaturs of food personalities (i.e. chef Thomas Keller, Rachael Ray and Guy Fieri). We asked chef Christopher Koetke, host of "Let's Dish" on the Live Well network and vice president of Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago, what to look for when shopping:

"Is there heft to the pan? If it's light and flimsy, then the metal is thin and the thinner the metal, the greater there is a possibility of hot spots and/or warping over time."

Will you be able to lift it when it's filled with food?

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Are the pan and handles oven safe? They should be.

Is the handle comfortable to hold? Bolted to the pan? Or welded? "Look at the way it's attached to the pan. Sometimes you have these little spot welds that hold the pan together. Over time, those will break."

Does it have a thick bottom base? "Sometimes people put heavy plates on the bottom of the pan and then the rest of it is thin metal. I'm not a gigantic fan of that because it tends to burn on the side of the pan where the metal stops."

Choose pan sizes depending on your family's size. You can always go back and supplement with pans as your family grows or cooking style changes.
On Sunday (January 7), Tom Hanks, Frances McDormand, Michelle Williams, host Seth Myers and the biggest names in Hollywood will be attending the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. But what makes this award show unique is its much-envied dinner menu, and this year, TV and film stars will be dining on world-class dishes and desserts made by executive chef Alberico Nunziata and executive pastry chef Thomas Henzi.



"The 75th anniversary of the Golden Globes is truly a milestone year for the prestigious awards show, and I'm thrilled to be leading the team in creating the special menu for this event," Nunziata said. "We have an incredibly talented culinary team, and we are looking forward to presenting another show-stopping menu for guests this year."



The Beverly Hilton's executive chefs curated a three-course menu for the Golden Globes that begins with a delicata appetizer consisting of burrata cheese, opal basil, teardrop tomatoes, Taggiasca olives, golden frisee, garlic flowers, roasted butternut squash, and purple sweet potatoes with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.





This is followed by an entree of Mediterranean Chilean sea bass served with red beet parmesan risotto, Castelvetrano olive tapenade, broccolini florets, golden stripe baby beets, yellow squash, and zucchini. To round out the meal, guests will enjoy a dessert of Efendi, made with white chocolate coffee cream, coffee liqueur biscuit, Frangelico mascarpone, and crunchy praline.



Moet & Chandon will provide the Champagne for the awards with more than 1,500 Moet & Chandon Imperial minis, 125 cases of Moet & Chandon Grand Vintage 2006, and Moet Rose Imperial magnums. Additionally, 500 Moet 75 drinks (the official cocktail of the Globes) featuring Moet Champagne and honeyed citrus with a candied blood orange slice garnish will be served.



Sunday marks the 43rd consecutive year and the 47th time that The Beverly Hilton has hosted the star-studded event.



The live broadcast will air Sunday, January 7, at 8 p.m. EST/5 p.m. PST on NBC.

And now that you know how the stars will be dining, click here for the 10 things you need for your own Golden Globes soiree.

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Recent research suggests a link between the use of folic acid and multivitamins and reduced autism risk. (Getty Images )

Taking folic acid and multivitamins during pregnancy could reduce your child's risk of autism, a new study suggests.

Kids were less likely to be diagnosed with autism if their moms took supplements before pregnancy and while they were expecting, according to a study of just over 45,000 Israeli children.

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"Reduced risk of [autism] in offspring is a consideration for public health policy that may be realized by extended use of folic acid and multivitamin supplements during pregnancy," the researchers concluded in the report, published in JAMA Psychiatry.

The international team of scientists, led by Stephen Levine from the University of Haifa in Israel, gathered data on tens of thousands of children born in Israel between 2003 and 2007, and followed their progress until 2015.

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The team also gathered prescription data, to see whether the kids' mothers had been prescribed folic acid or multivitamin supplements either prior to or during pregnancy.

Women who took supplements prior to pregnancy were 61 percent less likely to have a child diagnosed with autism, compared with moms who didn't take supplements, the researchers found.

In addition, taking supplements during pregnancy was linked to a 73 percent reduced risk of an autism diagnosis, the findings showed.

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But the study cannot prove a direct cause-and-effect link between supplements and autism due to its design, and suffers from some major limitations, said Dr. Ruth Milanaik, director of the neonatal neurodevelopmental follow-up program at Cohen Children's Medical Center, in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

For example, prescription records can't show whether women follow through and take their supplements, she said. Supplements also are available over-the-counter, and some of the moms could have purchased and taken them without waiting for a prescription.

"I don't have a problem with saying folic acid is good for pregnant women. You should not only take folic acid during pregnancy, you should also take folic acid before pregnancy," Milanaik said. "But this study does not show that [not taking supplements] is a cause of autism in any way, shape or form."

[ Related: Stillbirth risk doubles for pregnant women who sleep on their backs ]

[ Pregnant women addicted to opioids face tough choices ]

[ Women with high-risk pregnancies far more prone to heart disease ]
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On Monday, Geely Auto announced that it handed over 1,247,116 vehicles in 2017, soaring 63 percent compared with the previous year and setting another sales record. At the same time, the Hangzhou-based automaker eyes 1.58 million vehicle sales in 2018, jumping 27 percent compared with 2017.



In the last month of 2017, Geely Auto sold 153,625 vehicles, including the sales of Lynk & Co, surging 42 percent year on year. The monthly sales of Lynk & Co reached up to 6,012 units.

According to Geely, the main sales driver was its SUV portfolio, including the Boyue, the Emgrand GS, the Vision SUV and the Vision X3. The delivery of the Boyue in 2017 reached up to 286,885 units and its monthly sales have exceeded 30,000 units for 3 consecutive months.

As Geelys first crossover SUV, the Emgrand GSs December delivery was 18,850 units and its annual sales surpassed 150,000 units. The Vision SUV reported a year-on-year growth of 38.8 percent to 14,610 units in December, 2017. The total sales of Vision SUV in 2017 were 127,042 units.

In sedan segment, Geely delivered 25,074 the New Emgrands in December, 2017 and the models annual sales of last year totaled 264,432 units, up 9.7 percent year on year. The sales of the all-new Vision, launched in November last year, were 14,524 units in the last month of 2017.

As the first model in A+ class segment, the Geely Emgrand GL broke the December sales record with a total of 14,088 vehicles sold in December, 2017. The annual sales of Emgrand GL increased 39 percent year on year to 124,112 units.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- According to insiders from Ford Motor, Changan Ford Automobile Co., Ltd (Changan Ford) and Ford Motor (China) Ltd. (Ford China) plans to build a sales new company to take charge of all Ford's PV businesses in China, including domestic vehicles of Changan Ford, imported vehicles of Ford brand, domestic and imported vehicles of Lincoln brand and PVs of Jiangling Motors (JMC), like SUV Everest, and be responsible for their sales management and marketing promotion.



Currently, Ford Motor's Chinese businesses can be divided into four major parts, Changan Ford, imported vehicles of Ford brand, JMC and Lincoln brand. All of them own independant sales system.

The new company will integrate resources from different parts to build a much more extensive sales network which may help reduce operating cost, optimize resource utilization and enhance its sales ability and service quality. For instance, vehicles of Jiangling Ford can be sold through the channels of Changan Ford and imported vehicles will get a broader sales network. Besides, it is beneficial for product position and avoiding rivalry among all products of Ford.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- In the past year, the global auto industry has put great efforts in new energy vehicle segment. We made a summary about the top stories of new energy vehicle segment in China in the past year, for your reference.

NEV subsidies said to phase out in 2018

Even though relevant departments have decided in 2015 that NEV subsidy may phase out, it is still a surprise for many automakers when a draft of the phasing out plan was revealed.

The draft shows that it is much more difficult for NEVs to be qualified for the subsidy. The adjusted subsidy policy is likely to favor those vehicles with longer range and lower consumption, which will accelerate the elimination of low-end products and promote the development of the NEV technology.

Previously, the departments were said to reduce the subsidy by 20 percent before 2018, by 40 percent from 2019 to 2020, and be totally withdrawn in 2020.

Dual-credit Scheme to take effect

In September, relevant departments issued the dual-credit scheme, which will begin to take effect from April 1 this year. In 2019, new energy vehicle sales quota for automakers is set at 10 percent of their annual sales. For 2020, the new energy vehicle sales should account for at least 12 percent of automakers total sales volume.

Even though the scheme will be effective starting on April 1, the punishment for those which fail to meet the standard will actually begin from 2019.

Ever since the issue of the scheme, automakers at home and abroad have changed their attitude toward Chinas new energy vehicle market, especially global automakers. In order to gain more market shares in the new energy vehicle market and meet the requirements, many new joint ventures came into being in the last year, such as Zotye Ford and JAC VW.

New startups in new energy vehicle market

In the past year, several new startups managed to launch their mass-produced models against all suspicions.

On December 16, ES8, NIOs first mass-production vehicle, was officially launched in Beijing. At the launching ceremony, the Shanghai-based electric vehicle start-up unveiled the models price and presented many marvellous features and services, such as its swappable battery service system and NOMI artificial intelligence system.

Several days before ES8s launching, another startup, WM released its auto brand and its first SUV model also made debut at the launching conference. The SUV will be officially launched at the 2018 Beijing Auto Show.

NEV joint venture boom

In June, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co., Ltd. (JAC) and Volkswagen AG signed a joint venture agreement in Berlin, in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. The joint venture with JAC would be VWs third joint venture in China, which was forbidden before as foreign automakers could only establish up to 2 joint ventures in China.

Just a month later, BAIC and Daimler signed new framework agreement. Both parties would invest RMB 5 billion in total and introduce Mercedes-Benz battery electric vehicles to China. Besides, they would also set up a battery electric vehicle manufacturing base and power battery factory.

In August, another two joint ventures between global automakers and local ones came into being. The first one is the joint venture between Ford and Zotye. Both parties hold 50 percent of the joint ventures stake and they will offer battery electric vehicles under self-owned auto brands.

Renault-Nissan and Dongfeng entered joint venture agreement to build electric vehicles in China. The new joint venture, dubbed as eGT New Energy Automotive Co., will be owned 25 percent each by the two foreign automakers and 50 percent by Dongfeng.

China said to relax ownership limits on foreign joint ventures

Ever since the reforming and opening, it is stipulated that the foreign party should hold no more stake than the local one to protect Chinas auto industry. But this situation may be changed in new energy vehicle industry.

Zheng Zeguang, Vice Foreign Minister, said that the pilot project to ease control on the stake of special vehicle and new energy vehicle joint ventures will begin before June, 2018 in the free trade zone.

China planning to ban fossil-fuel powered vehicles

Xin Guobin, the vice minister of industry and information technology(MIIT), said at the International Forum (TEDA) on Chinese Automotive Industry Development that his ministry is working with other regulators on a timetable to end production and sales of traditional fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

Even though this plan is not about new energy vehicle, it will boost the expansion of new energy vehicle market. In October, Changan announced its Shangri-La Plan. According to the plan, Changan will start to ban the sales of traditional fuel-powered vehicles in 2025 and invest RMB 100 billion in new energy vehicle segment.

In the last month of 2017, BAIC also said that it will ban the sales of self-own branded traditional vehicles first in Beijing city in 2020. In 2025, the automaker will finally stop the sales and production of those vehicles across China.
Pueblo voters give big support to public safety tax to fund police

75% of votes are in favor of Pueblo Measure 2B, collecting millions of dollars a year to fund 20 Pueblo Police Department officers and four sergeants.
The latest issue of China Briefing Magazine, titled China Industries Outlook 2018, is out now and currently available to subscribers as a complimentary download from the Asia Briefing Publication Store.

In this issue:

Foreign Investment Performance

Healthcare Reforms Underscore Market Growth

How to Invest in Chinas Growing Education Subsectors

Pollution Controls Create Green Industry Opportunities

At Octobers 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that China had entered a new era. In this new era, according to Xi, Chinas economy and society has reached a turning point.

After then-leader Deng Xiaoping launched his bold reform and opening up policy in the late 1970s, China experienced economic growth and industrialization at a pace and scale unprecedented in human history. During this period, China lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and became known as the factory of the world due to its outsized role in global manufacturing.

As a result of this breakneck development, China now faces myriad challenges. These include a rapidly aging society, an uneasy transition towards a knowledge-based economy, and a highly polluted environment. In Chinas new era, socioeconomic issues such as these are becoming more important than relentless economic growth and expansion. And foreign investment into China must adapt to respond to these new priorities.

In this issue of China Briefing magazine, we look at the industries that stand to gain from Chinas new era. First, we analyze macro-level foreign investment trends into China, and how the high-tech sector stands out above others. We then shift our focus to Chinas healthcare sector in the context of policy reforms and demographic changes.

Next, we examine how to invest in Chinas education industry, which has become a priority for the central government and private families alike. Finally, we consider how Chinas war on pollution introduces new opportunities for foreign investors.



About Us China Briefing is published by Asia Briefing, a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. We produce material for foreign investors throughout Asia, including ASEAN, India, Indonesia, Russia, the Silk Road, and Vietnam. For editorial matters please contact us here, and for a complimentary subscription to our products, please click here. Dezan Shira & Associates is a full service practice in China, providing business intelligence, due diligence, legal, tax, IT, HR, payroll, and advisory services throughout the China and Asian region. For assistance with China business issues or investments into China, please contact us at china@dezshira.com or visit us at www.dezshira.com

Dezan Shira & Associates Brochure

Dezan Shira & Associates is a pan-Asia, multi-disciplinary professional services firm, providing legal, tax and operational advisory to international corporate investors. Operational throughout China, ASEAN and India, our mission is to guide foreign companies through Asias complex regulatory environment and assist them with all aspects of establishing, maintaining and growing their business operations in the region. This brochure provides an overview of the services and expertise Dezan Shira & Associates can provide.

An Introduction to Doing Business in China 2017

This Dezan Shira & Associates 2017 China guide provides a comprehensive background and details of all aspects of setting up and operating an American business in China, including due diligence and compliance issues, IP protection, corporate establishment options, calculating tax liabilities, as well as discussing on-going operational issues such as managing bookkeeping, accounts, banking, HR, Payroll, annual license renewals, audit, FCPA compliance and consolidation with US standards and Head Office reporting.

Managing Chinas Financial System

Foreign investors often find Chinas financial system to be one of the most difficult areas to navigate when establishing or growing their presence in the country. Navigating Chinas tax system, and its complexities, requires time and commitment. In this issue of China Briefing magazine, we look at the factors that make Chinas tax system unique, and identify steps foreign investors can take to manage its challenges. We first examine the issues that most commonly disorient foreign investors. We then discuss the importance of pre-investment capital planning, within the context of tough foreign exchange controls, before examining the ever-maturing regulations for the transfer pricing system.

Dezan Shira & Associates
The Chinese version of a play based on incidents in ghettos during World War II is to be staged on the mainland toward the end of the year.









When Israeli playwright and director Joshua Sobol first read diaries describing life in the ghetto of Vilna, in Lithuania, during the World War II, he realized that there had been a theater in the ghetto.





Then, in 1982, he started to do research on the subject. He found that many of the people involved were still alive. He felt the urge to adapt the story into a play.





The theater, which was established by Jews who were pushed into the small ghetto by German soldiers, used to stage various shows, including operas, dance and plays.





Sobol could not fulfill his idea of turning the stories into a play until he shared these stories with his students at the Beit Zvi School for the Performing Arts in Israel.





Speaking about how he was moved to write the play, he says: "When I read the diaries of people living in the ghetto, what surprised me most is that they wrote songs which are full of life and hope during the most difficult times.





"Almost every day, people were taken away and killed in the forest some 12 kilometers from the ghetto," says Sobol.





"When I told them (my students) about the theater in the ghetto, they couldn't believe it. We talked about it for two hours, which made me realize that the play was right there."





In 1984, the play, titled Ghetto, premiered at the Haifa Theatre in Israel, and the play has been staged in more than 25 countries, including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, and has been translated into 20 languages.





The play is scheduled to be staged in China in November, where it will be performed in Chinese for the first time.





Sobol will direct the play in Beijing working with Chinese actors.





His wife, Edna, the set and costume designer, who worked for six productions of the play, will do the set and costumes for the Chinese version.





Sobol recalls that he met a few survivors from the ghetto of Vilna and among them was a woman, who was only 17 when she first moved there.





"I asked what the theater meant to her and to her friends. And she told me that after very hard days of workforced labor by the German soldiersthey put on their best clothes to go to the theater to meet friends. The theater reminded them that they were still human beings," he says.




The Metropolitan Museum of Art is partially abandoning its "pay-what-you-wish" admissions policy that has made it an egalitarian destination for generations of art lovers.





Starting March 1, the museum will charge a mandatory $25 entrance fee to most adult visitors who don't live in New York State, the Met's president and CEO Daniel Weiss announced on Thursday. The admission fee will still be pay-what-you-wish for New Yorkers.





Weiss says the extra moneyan estimated $6 million to $11 million per yearwill help bring long-term fiscal stability to the institution. The Met, which has a $305 million operating budget, registered a shortfall of about $10 million for its most recently completed fiscal year.





People from all over the world have been able to come to the museum and pay next to nothing since the museum was founded in 1870, but the number of people willing to pay the suggested donation of $25 has dropped off substantially in recent years.





"The goal of the policy is to find a better balance for the institution," Weiss says. "The current policy has failed."





Entrance will remain free to all children under 12 and the pay-what-you-wish suggested fee will still apply to students up to graduate school in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Students living outside the tristate area will be charged $12, while seniors will pay $17.





The fee change will affect about 30 percent of the museum's visitors. Weiss says the $25 fee will allow visitors to enter the Met over three consecutive days, instead of just one.





Two cousins from Bologna, Italy, who recently visited the Met chose to pay $15 each, saying they felt this amount was sufficient.





"But $25 is a lot. It's absolutely too much," says Francesca Betocchi, an attorney.





"We think art education should be a free, open door for everybody, not only for those who have more money," says her cousin, Paola Borri, a 51-year-old accountant.





Michael Dysart, a retired psychotherapist visiting the museum, says he understood its financial pressures.





"It's a complicated issue, because everyone needs more money nowall the institutions. They need to be financially secure, but at what cost? What's the trade-off?" he says.





As part of the late 19th-century legislation that allowed the museum to open in Central Park, admission was initially required to be free most days of the week. In 1970, city officials agreed to let the museum charge fees, as long as the amount paid was decided by the visitor. Lawsuits in recent years have challenged signage at the museum listing a $25 "recommended" admission price, saying some visitors were misled into thinking they had to pay that amount.





Since 2004, the number of adults who have paid the suggested entrance price in full has dropped from 63 percent to 17 percent. Voluntary contributions now average just $9, the museum says.





Factors that may have contributed to this include the economic recession as well as Met programs aimed at attracting younger people.





Weiss says the Met's overall attendance has increased by 40 percent over the past eight years, racking up a record 7 million visitors last year.




Greek authorities were awaiting on Sunday for a formal briefing from U.S. authorities to launch the procedures for the repatriation of the Greek antiquities seized from a billionaire's home and office in New York city, Greece's Culture Ministry said in a press statement.







According to media reports U.S. authorities have seized many art works believed to have been looted from Italy and Greece from the home and office of billionaire- philanthropist Michael Steinhardt.





Among the items is said to be an ancient Greek oil vessel from the fifth century B.C. depicting a funeral scene.

Regarding this particular item, according to the Greek ministry's statement, Greek authorities have been closely cooperating with U.S. authorities for its identification over the past month.





Greece will submit comprehensive information to prove whether the seized items have been looted from the country, according to the press release.




The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge will open in the second quarter this year, people familiar with the matter told China Daily.





Although a precise date has not been fixed, the bridge will start services officially around May to June, according to the sources.





The final commissioning date will partially depend on the construction progress of port facilities in Zhuhai and Hong Kong, the sources said.





The Macao checkpoint is more likely to be completed earlier considering its rate of progress, according to the sources.





Meanwhile, policies for cross-border traffic have yet to be reached among the governments of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Guangdong province and the Macao SAR.





This includes the details of the cross-administration management mechanism like customs arrangements, emergency rescue plans and cross-border car insurance arrangements.





The central government will confirm the date later, according to the sources.





Recently, chief engineer of the HZMB Authority Su Quanke said that all work on the principal section-a 29.6-kilometer bridge-island-tunnel complex-is expected to be completed in early February and the contractors will conduct an official handover ceremony.





Except for the principal section, the bridge also consists of ports and link roads in Zhuhai and the Macao and Hong Kong SARs. Those works are conducted by the respective governments.





The 55-kilometer bridge, 20 times the length of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, connects Hong Kong in the east of the Pearl River Estuary with Macao and Zhuhai in the west.





Construction on it began in 2009. Once operational, it will shorten the four-hour drive from Hong Kong to Zhuhai to less than an hour and become the first completed infrastructure project built and managed jointly by the governments of Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macao.




A total of 159,100 people were punished in 2017 for violating the Party's code of conduct and corruption in China, according to the top anti-graft body of the Communist Party of China (CPC).





They were involved in 122,100 cases, of which 48,700 were related to poverty alleviation work, said the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).





Some 61,000 officials were punished for violating the Party's eight-point frugality code from January to November last year in 43,400 cases.





In order to have a deterrent effect, the CCDI also made public 670 cases of violating the Party's code of conduct and corruption on its website last year, based on reports from local Party disciplinary commissions.





A recent public opinion poll showed that 93.9 percent of those surveyed in 2017 were satisfied with the Party's anti-graft work, up from 2012's 75 percent.





Moreover, since the start of 2017, 1,300 fugitives have returned to China, including 347 Party members and state functionaries, as well as 14 who are on the list of 100 "red notice" corruption suspects.





Around 980 million yuan (151 million U.S. dollars) of illicit money has been recovered in the process.





China also held more than 50 consultations with foreign law enforcement departments in 2017 on major cases involving fugitives and illicit money, according to the CCDI.




Michael Uribe, 36, struggled with drugs and alcohol for years. His struggle landed him in prison, convicted of multiple felonies, including armed robbery, and eventually, a homeless shelter in Phoenix. He did well for a while, even got a job, but he ended up descending into the world of drugs again.

Phoenix police picked him up for an old arrest warrant out of his hometown of Flagstaff. He was returned to Flagstaff to face the consequences. After his release from jail, he lived in his car and would take a shower at the Flagstaff Shelter Services emergency shelter. He continued to struggle with alcohol and drugs.

But then I stopped, he said. I knew I had to make a change.

He has a job at the shelter, and, more importantly, he has his own home with the help of a housing program at the shelter.

The housing program at FSS is now a year old. Nearly 100 people experiencing homelessness have been housed by the program, said Ross Altenbaugh, executive director of FSS. And 85 percent of them are still living in homes instead of the emergency shelter.

We always wanted to be a housing agency, said Altenbaugh, who took over the reins at the emergency shelter a little more than three years ago.

In Altenbaughs office at the shelter, a white board hangs on the wall near her desk. More than 50 names occupy the white space. Each arrived at the shelter experiencing homelessness. All were moved into a home as part of the shelters housing program.

Theres someone up there whos been homeless as long as Ive been alive, Altenbaugh said. Were talking cumulatively more than a century of homelessness on that board.

Not all of them make it. Some go back into the system and return to the emergency shelter. They cant maintain their housing.

It doesnt work for everybody, unfortunately, but it sure works better than some of the alternatives for people, Altenbaugh said. People do better in housing than in shelter. Putting an emphasis on housing is key.

The program receives rapid rehousing funding from the Arizona Department of Housing and the Department of Economic Security, about $140,000, which equates to about $3,400 of assistance per individual, per year.

Its the No. 1 thing that is actually moving the needle, Altenbaugh said.

The program is based on a Housing First model, which works on the philosophy that to get people experiencing homelessness stable, they need to have a stable living environment. The research in the field has shown that the model is less expensive and more successful at ending a persons homeless crisis, Altenbaugh said. The program took more than three years to get off the ground because FSS, which went from a seasonally open shelter to being open every day of the year, needed to reorganize and hire staff trained in providing case management to help the clients find the services they need to become stable in a housing scenario.

Some of the clients need very little help from the subsidies, Altenbaugh said. Sometimes, its just a matter of helping with a deposit, a months rent, and they stabilize. Other clients, with greater mental or physical challenges, require more help.

Altenbaugh added that several properties in the city have agreed to help with the program.

A lot of it is people willing to take a chance and willing to do it because its a program of empowerment, Altenbaugh said.

The clients sign their own leases, and case managers identify barriers that make staying housed a challenge. Some need to be directed to mental health services at The Guidance Center or Southwest Behavioral & Health Services. Some need help finding and keeping jobs. Some simply need help with transportation. It depends on the individual, Altenbaugh said.

The emergency shelter has about 100 beds for adult men and women and offers showers, supplies, meals and referrals to a host of other services in the city. More than 155 people come through the doors of the shelter every day.

Lauren Lawry is Uribes case manager. She said that Uribe lives with two other men in his new apartment. There are a few other dorm-style apartment arrangements in Flagstaff for clients of the shelter. Most housed clients have other roommates, but some are housed by themselves. Each client is set up in a scenario that will help them become financially stable.

Of being in his own home that has a kitchen to cook his own food, Uribe said, Its strange. It feels good because Im on my own now.

He added that its been a slow process of getting used to opening his own door and falling to sleep in his own bed. Later, he will head off to work at the shelter, where he gives the clients the supplies they need, makes coffee for them, directs them to people who will get them connected with other services in the city. He likes the work.

I used to live there, he said. I want to help.

He started off as a volunteer for the shelter at first.

They gave me a chance, and I took it, Uribe said.
You are here: China

China has dispatched several vessels to search for and rescue crew members after a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter collided Saturday evening, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Sunday.





Spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks in Beijing in response to a question about the collision of the two vessels off the east China coast.





"China attaches great importance to the accident," said Geng, adding that some of the crew members have been rescued while others are still missing.





Geng said China also dispatched several specialized cleaning vessels to prevent secondary disasters.





According to reports, the collision occurred at around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze River's estuary.





Reports say 32 crew members from the oil tanker, including 30 Iranian nationals and two Bangladeshi nationals, have gone missing.





Geng said the cause of the accident is still under investigation.




You are here: China

Two Chinese scientists, explosives expert Wang Zeshan and virologist Hou Yunde, won China's top science award Monday for their outstanding contributions to scientific and technological innovation.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) poses for a photo with explosives expert Wang Zeshan (R) and virologist Hou Yunde, winners of China's top science award, at the National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. [Photo/Xinhua]



President Xi Jinping presented award certificates to them at an annual ceremony held in Beijing to honor distinguished scientists and research achievements.

He shook hands with them and offered congratulations.

Other leaders, including Li Keqiang, Zhang Gaoli and Wang Huning, were also present.

Monday's ceremony honored 271 projects and nine scientists with national prizes.

Seven foreign scientists won the International Science and Technology Cooperation Awards.

On behalf of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, Premier Li Keqiang extended congratulations to the prize winners and thanked foreign experts for their support to China's science and technology development.

While addressing the ceremony, Li called for more scientific and technological research in major disease prevention and control to improve people's well-being.

He said that more efforts should be made in food safety and pollution control to enable people to live a better life.

Li called for building China's strength in science and technology and urged increasing basic scientific research, diversifying investment in research and development, boosting integration of basic and applied sciences and enhancing innovative ability.

The Premier said China would pursue international cooperation in science and technology and take a more active role in the global innovation network.

"We welcome all kinds of talented people to join China's innovation and entrepreneurship campaign and share the development opportunities and achievements of innovation," he said.

Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli presided over the ceremony, which was attended by about 3,300 people.

Before the ceremony, Xi and other leaders met with representatives of the winners.

Also on Monday, Vice Premier Liu Yandong met with the seven scientists from the United States, Britain, Uzbekistan and Sweden who have won the International Science and Technology Cooperation Awards, and presented the medals to them.
Portrait of Emmanuel Macron: Soazig de la Moissonniere / Presidency of the French Republic





The President of France Emmanuel Macron will be visiting China from January 8-10. This will be his first official visit in Asia since his electoral win over Marine Le Pen last May.

His selection of China shows the importance he attaches to the country. Recalling some of Macron's public comments during his pre-election campaign, it was clear he is favorably disposed towards the country.

In his view, "bilateral relations between China and France have historical meaning" and he is prepared "to further friendly ties," with a focus on many issues of common interest such as climate change, energy, trade, terrorism and the preservation of world peace. Macron is also knowledgeable about China's history as he has positively referred to both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

From another perspective, his visit has additional symbolic importance. That is because it will be the first visit to the country by a European Union leader since Xi Jinping, the chief of the Communist Party of China, secured a second five-year term at the Party's 19th National Congress.

Hence, the strengthening of Sino-European relations cannot but be a priority for both sides despite some concerns about Chinese investments in Europe, reinforced after President of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker gave his 2017 State of the Union speech.

Numbers show why China and France are committed to enhancing economic contacts. The bilateral trade volume was approximately 10 billion in 1995 but has achieved an impressive increase since. In 2016, for example, it reached 62.4 billion.

According to the French National Institute, China was then the eighth most important destination for French exports and sixth biggest supplier of French imports following countries such as Germany, Spain, Italy and the U.S. What is even more significant is that  through the years  the Sino-French economic relationship has gone beyond a straightforward buyer-seller collaboration, adopting the form of a solid, long-lasting industrial partnership.

Of particular importance is nuclear energy. The French energy company EDF, for example, has been active in China for decades. Specifically, it has been working with nuclear operator China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) on the Daya Bay and Ling Ao power plants since 1984.

Ten years ago, the two companies set up the Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture to construct and operate two nuclear reactors based on European pressurized reactor technology in Taishan, Guangdong Province. EDF and CGN are also partners in the development of the Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear power station in the U.K. for a generation.

Chinese investments in France are equally welcomed in the words of former French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. Examples include e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has opened branches in Paris and recently announced its agreement with French luxury group Kering. Huawei is also dynamically active and has  inter alia  opened a mathematics research center in the French capital.

Moreover, cooperation at the regional level should not be ignored. In the summer of 2015, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang paid a visit to Marseille and hailed the growing ties between the CMA CGM Group and Chinese enterprises in container purchases, maintenance of vessels, logistics and other businesses. And the Chinese dairy group Synutra has transformed the Carhaix-Plouguer city located in Brittany by investing in a local factory.

If there is a new factor, which can certainly contribute to the advancement of Sino-French relations, this is the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative. France is attempting to benefit as much as it can, and President Macron is expected to discuss this theme in Beijing.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a relative new term for French public opinion, which is slowly familiarizing itself with its meaning. During a high-level conference in Paris last November, Director of the French Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) Pascal Boniface said he expected "multilateral benefits."

At the political level, Beijing and Paris seem to be on the same page on several issues. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, they insist on international law and multilateralism in global governance. France is generally seen an international power not always agreeing with American foreign policy choices and this goes in line with China's calculations on peace, prosperity and a shared world community.

Last but not least, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate has brought the two sides together in cooperating to uphold this deal. In mid-December, for instance, Macron met with Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai, who was in Paris to attend the One Planet Summit as the special envoy of President Xi.

Xi Jinping and Emmanuel Macron have already met once on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg and have held various telephone conversations. Their Beijing meeting will give them the opportunity to better set the agenda of Sino-French and Sino-European relations for the coming years. The tone of their communications until now is generating optimism.

George N. Tzogopoulos is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/GeorgeNTzogopoulos.htm





Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.




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At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron, president of the Republic of France, will pay a state visit to China from Jan. 8 to 10. To mark the 54th anniversary of the establishment of bilateral relations on Jan. 27, China.org.cn had an exclusive interview with the French president right before his visit. Macron spoke on a host of topics, including the two countries' diplomatic ties, China's Belt and Road Initiative, global anti-terrorism operations, international cooperation and solutions for climate change. The following is the transcript of the interview:





China.org.cn: Hello, Mr. President. You are going to undertake a state visit to China at the beginning of 2018. It will also be your first visit to China since your election as President of the French Republic. Can you tell us what expectations you have for your visit? Which topics will you give particular attention to? What are your thoughts on China?

Emmanuel Macron: I've had several excellent interactions with President Xi Jinping, whom I met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg. He invited me to undertake a state visit to China, which I accepted with great enthusiasm. We hoped that the visit would take place at the earliest possible date, so that together we could define the direction of our comprehensive strategic partnership for the next five years. It's my first state visit to China, and to Asia as well. It is of great importance.

Similar to many French people, I find China to be a fascinating country  the oldest living civilization, a "State older than History" as General de Gaulle said. I'm very aware of the mutual fascination that ties China to Europe, woven along the ancient silk routes that connected Xi'an to the eastern Mediterranean. Our relationship is anchored in time, and in my opinion is based on civilization, in the sense that France and China are two countries with very different cultures but which both have a universal calling. They are two countries that have always been eager, across distances, to meet and recognize each other. It's for all these reasons that I wanted to start my state visit in Xi'an  it's a way to experience ancient China.

I also want to experience the China of today, and to meet its youth, its entrepreneurs, its artists, its researchers. For France, China is a political, economic, scientific and cultural partner of the highest importance. Through the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1964, France was the first Western power to recognize the People's Republic of China. In 1997, we were the first to establish a comprehensive partnership. Our relationship has always been pioneering. We must remain at the vanguard.

Consequently, I hope that this visit will allow us to inscribe our comprehensive strategic partnership in the 21st century, so that it reflects how our two countries are today and puts us in a position to respond together, in a decisive manner, to current challenges: the maintenance of peace and stability which have been put in danger by terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the preservation of the environment and the fight against climate change, and free trade between populations and between nations.

China.org.cn: The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) established Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and presented the goals and future direction of China's development. What are your thoughts on this? Since you were elected President of France, you've proposed a series of reforms marked by a "quick, precise, and concrete" character, creating a new atmosphere in your country's domestic situation. In your opinion, what will be the new developments in Sino-French relations within the framework of their comprehensive strategic partnership in this new era? In what domains will the two parties strengthen their cooperation?

Emmanuel Macron: I followed the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party with great attention. It's not my place to comment on the sovereign choices that China makes for itself, but I noticed in particular the continued focus on openness, the pursuit of reform, the emphasis on innovation, the qualitative content of growth and the preservation of the environment. These are elements that will allow us to give new impetus to our partnership.

Following the 19th CPC National Congress and the profound political changes in France, which are strengthening us in our will and our ability to reform Europe, the moment is ripe with opportunity. Our country is once again on the international stage. I'm implementing an agenda of transformation that aims to strengthen our country and its ability to innovate, to create jobs and to "liberate creative energies" by giving back to our citizens the possibility to act. I'm doing this with great determination, but also with pragmatism, a cherished virtue in China. My approach is to say what I do and to do what I say, precisely, thoroughly, quickly. This applies on the domestic scene but also in our relations with important partners. I wish to work with President Xi Jinping on a precise roadmap for the next five years and to pursue very closely and attentively its realization. There are three key areas of priority.

The first relates to our global agenda. Multilateralism is currently undergoing a crisis. We have to give it a new dynamic by constructing responses to crises through dialogue, by fighting climate change, by defining the best rules for commercial exchange. I'm convinced that France and China, which are two powers of multilateralism deeply attached to their independence, can work together in changing the situation. Because the challenges that we must confront, most specifically climate change, are creating a need for global coordination, for the first time in the history of mankind.

The second issue concerns our bilateral agenda. China is our most important commercial partner in Asia. We've developed structuring partnerships in civilian nuclear energy and aeronautics. The forthcoming opening in Taishan of the first EPR in the world, which is French-Chinese, demonstrates our ability to undertake ambitious industrial projects together. The direction of Chinese growth towards quality and the new expectations of the Chinese people are opening up new possibilities in sectors where French businesses offer an internationally recognized savoir-faire: the food-processing industry, ecological transition, health, care for the elderly, industrial modernization, innovation, tourism, financial services and the art of living, without forgetting sports, seeing as how our two capitals will be hosting the Youth Olympics two years apart from one another, in 2022 and 2024. This suggests that we need to increase and rebalance our economic and commercial exchanges. This is one of the important topics that I'll bring up with President Xi Jinping.

Culture, education and science must be central to our partnership. France welcomes more than 37,000 Chinese students and is the top non-Anglophone destination outside of Asia for Chinese students. More than 700 agreements tie our universities and higher education establishments together. Two million Chinese tourists come to visit our country each year. France has the most important Chinese diaspora community in Europe. These human connections are the true engine of our relationship. My visit will allow us to consider a whole series of projects that will give the opportunity to our students, entrepreneurs and artists to interact more and undertake initiatives together.

The third issue concerns relations between Europe and China. The European Union is China's number one commercial partner in the world, but the European-Chinese partnership is not at the level it should be. The project I'm undertaking for a strong, sovereign, united Europe that projects its interests and values throughout the world will make Europe a natural partner for China in responding to global challenges. I also hope that we will carry the European-Chinese partnership into the 21st century.

China.org.cn: December 12 marked the second anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement, the signing of which illustrated the joint efforts of China and France in the struggle against climate change. China has announced that it will spend 20 billion RMB on the creation of a "Chinese fund for South-South cooperation against climate change", further expressing its determination to actively participate in climate governance. But after American President Donald Trump announced his country's withdrawal from the agreement, the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries in coping with climate change, has found itself with a financial deficit of 2 billion dollars. In your opinion, what impact will the U.S. withdrawal have on the implementation of the Paris Agreement? What is your evaluation of China's efforts in the fight against climate change?

Emmanuel Macron: China's role in the fight against climate change is essential. Without its determination we wouldn't have reached the Paris Agreement, and without the steadfastness of its engagement the agreement would likely not have withstood President Donald Trump's decision. I've said what I think about his decision: I respect it but I deeply regret it. France and China have given a very firm response together: the Paris Agreement isn't renegotiable, we will continue putting it into operation as planned, along with everyone else who refuses to turn their eyes away from this issue, which is vital and pressing for humanity. Everyone needs to play their part, without ever thinking that the struggle against climate change is someone else's problem, because we are all directly affected by it.

Now, we have to move faster. This was the goal of the One Planet Summit that France organized last December 12 in order to bring together relevant actors and to mobilize financing. Twelve new and very concrete commitments were agreed upon, and they will be very quickly implemented, because we can no longer wait to take action. China has once again risen to the challenge. It announced its decision to create a unified national carbon market, which represents a determined step forward for the pricing of carbon throughout the world. The measures taken by China to achieve its "ecological advancement" goal are impressive. We are accompanying this transition, which is in line with deeply held expectations of the Chinese people, through the French Development Agency: 25 of the 30 projects that have been financed in China since the beginning of its activities 15 years ago contribute directly to the fight against climate change, with spending that has reached 1 billion euros and with significant results, including the creation of a biomass power plant in Yichun, the thermal rehabilitation of public buildings in Wuhan and the conception of a French-Chinese eco-neighborhood in Chengdu.

At the international level, after the American decision, I believe that the fight against climate change relies in great part on the abilities of French-Chinese co-leadership. We are going to strengthen our dialogue in anticipation of the COP 24 in 2018 and the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity, which China will host in 2020. I also hope that we will work together on the Global Pact for the Environment, which France has brought to the United Nations in order to bring international law in line with the challenges of our time. In short, we put the environment and the climate at the heart of our partnership. This provides us with significant opportunities. I'll give you an example: Last year, we organized a French-Chinese month on the environment. 100 events took place, with 160,000 participants in 18 Chinese cities. Imagine what this means over the course of a year! I hope that we'll mobilize all the energies of France and China to transform the fight against climate change into an unprecedented opportunity for cooperation and to show the world that we can succeed. In France, we've launched a website, Make Our Planet Great Again, to bring together initiatives that are beneficial for the climate. It is both in French and English. From now on, it will also be in Chinese, because it's with China that we want to, and can, succeed.

China.org.cn: In May 2017, during the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, President Xi Jinping proposed the construction of a path for peace, a path for prosperity, a path for innovation and a path for connecting different civilizations. The Belt and Road Initiative connects the economic circles of Eastern Asia, the most dynamic in the world, and the EU, the largest group of developed economies in the world. What do you think of this initiative? In your opinion, how will the Belt and Road Initiative help to strengthen interconnection and exchanges with regards to investments, commerce and human exchange between China and France, China and Europe, and even Asia and Europe?

Emmanuel Macron: The Belt and Road Initiative, launched by President Xi Jinping, is very important. I'm convinced that it can play a major role in structuring the Eurasian region and that it represents a real opportunity to create bridges, through exchange, between countries and civilizations, just as the ancient silk routes once did. It's also important to work for better connectivity between Europe and Asia, something we passionately yearn for. I think it's very important that Europe and China strengthen their collaboration on the initiative. France is ready to play a leading role in this. We must identify concrete projects to implement together in Europe, in Asia and in third countries. We must strive for a good relationship with multilateral authorities in order to assure the coherence of our objectives. We must aim for the best environmental outcome, with, for example  this is an idea I propose  the objective of creating ecological silk roads in the coming century. We must do it within the framework of a balanced partnership, in which the rules of finance correspond to our standards and to what we're seeking together. We also have to be on the lookout for opportunities to cooperate with the states, businesses and civil society of various partner countries. I'm convinced that if we succeed in advancing in such a way, we will be able to contribute to defining the equilibrium of contemporary multilateralism.

China.org.cn: What will be France's response to the frequent terrorist attacks throughout the world, to the instability of the international situation and to the marked growth of uncertainty? How will you work with China on these issues?

Emmanuel Macron: The fight against terrorism is one of top priorities in the world. In Iraq and Syria, we are participating in the international coalition, whose actions have brought about a fatal blow to Daesh's territorial ambitions. In the Sahel, France is playing a leading role, through Operation Barkhane, in the fight against terrorism in a region that covers Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Burkina Faso and Niger, and supports the activity of the joint force comprising these five African countries, the G5 Sahel. To bring a lasting end to this scourge, military action won't be enough.

We have to dry up the sources of terrorism financing. This is the objective of the international conference for mobilization on the fight against the financing of terrorism, which we will organize in Paris next April, to which China is invited. I hope to work actively with China in anticipation of this meeting, but also within the framework of the G20 on the role of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which we hope to strengthen. We must also find political solutions for the crises that in many places  in Syria, in Libya, in Africa and also in Asia  have paved the way for terrorism, which feeds off the chaos they produce as it does from the weakness of states. Regarding Libya, for example, the current situation is in large part the result of military intervention that wasn't joined with a political solution, and I recognize that errors were committed at that time. We've consequently worked to revive the political process within the framework of the United Nations. This is also the direction of our efforts on the Syrian crisis.

More generally, when facing crises, instability and threats against peace and international security, we need to relentlessly seek out paths for international cooperation and to inscribe our responses within a multilateral framework. Regarding North Korea, a subject that I'll bring up with President Xi Jinping during my visit, we'll shoulder our responsibilities with China at the United Nations Security Council for the strengthening and full application of sanctions, in order to bring the North Korean regime back to the negotiating table. I expect much from the indispensable pressure China can exercise on North Korea in order to encourage it to change course.

China.org.cn: With the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union underway, with Germany's domestic situation characterized by uncertainty, with European integration facing challenges, you've proposed to develop a timetable for reviving the European Union at the beginning of 2018. Can you tell us more about the specific plans you have for revitalizing the European Union? In the wake of Brexit, will it be possible for France to become the new financial center of Europe?

Emmanuel Macron: Challenges have always pushed Europe forward; confronting them is the source of its ability to innovate and create. Today we are facing a choice that will be determinant for the continuation of our shared adventure: What kind of Europe do we want for tomorrow? By electing me as President of the Republic, French people have chosen Europe, while others have turned away from it. The path of renunciation was unambiguously offered to them, but they decided to refuse it. This is a strong and brave choice. Since my election, I've consequently hoped that France will carry a message in support of rebuilding Europe. We must give ourselves the means for true European sovereignty on security and defense, on questions of immigration, on foreign policy, on ecological transition, on technology, on everything relating to economic and monetary power. These are the topics we will reflect upon with Germany, with all of our partners and with the European institutions during the coming months in order to produce results that are concrete, visible and quick for our citizens. I know that China wants a strong and stable Europe that will be a strategic partner in globalization. This is my goal as well.

The British have decided to leave the European Union. This is a decision we regret but also respect. Concerning the new economic and financial order within the European Union after the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, it's still too early to comment. On the other hand, what is clear is that our goal is to confirm the leadership role of Paris's financial market in Europe. We have the best offer. Paris is a world city and a global financial center, which is supported by a regulatory and fiscal environment that we are making much more appealing and by a robust development of startups and high technologies. The Parisian financial market, and especially Paris EUROPLACE, is currently intensifying its work to strengthen our leadership role for the development of activities and operations denominated in RMB in Europe.

China.org.cn: During a visit to Africa, you declared that "French will be Africa's first language" and "maybe the world's," which provoked some very animated discussions on the internet, what is your response? It's well known that China and France have close connections to Africa; in your opinion, in what domains will the two countries develop their cooperation with Africa in the future?

Emmanuel Macron: French is currently the fifth most spoken language in the world, the fourth language on the internet, the third language in business, the second language of international information in the media, the second working language for the majority of international organizations and the second most studied language in the world. According to projections, a figure of 770 million French-speakers is forecasted for 2060, 85 percent of which will be in Africa. I support this enthusiasm. In my view, the French language is universal  it's not limited to France.

Today, China has a very strong presence in Africa, a continent in which it's heavily invested with a financial capacity that we don't have. At the same time, France has a deep knowledge of Africa because of its history, its proximity to the continent, its diaspora communities, which China doesn't have. We consequently must work together for Africa, undertaking joint projects there which correspond to real needs and to the choices of African countries, of their people, of their youth. This is the objective of the partnership that, during my visit, will be signed between the French Development Agency and the China Development Bank, which will allow the co-financing of projects focused on the fight against climate change in Africa. I also hope that we will strengthen our dialogue on security in Africa, particularly regarding support for the G5 Sahel. Finally, I think that China can play an important role in education in Africa, which is one of our biggest priorities. In Dakar this February, I will co-preside with the President of Senegal, Macky Sall, over a conference on rebuilding the global partnership for education. I'll be counting on China's support.




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German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Conservative Union and Martin Schulz's Social Democratic Party (SPD) on Sunday kicked off a week-long exploratory talks for a renewed grand coalition government.

Merkel, Schulz, and Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), and some other leading figures of the three parties, 13 for each party, joined the talks at Willy Brandt Haus, SPD's headquarters.

"I think that it can be done. We will work very swiftly and very intensively," she told journalists before the meeting, saying that she acknowledged there was a lot of work ahead, but she was "optimistic" that an agreement could be reached.

For his part, Schulz said he hoped for "constructive and open" talks, calling for speedy progress of the government formation.

Germany has no new government since the Sept. 24 federal elections last year, in which both the Union and the SPD suffered great loss in votes while far-right populist Alternative fuer Deutschland became the third largest party.

The first coalition exploratory talks among the Union, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) broke down in late November after FDP walked away from the negotiating table.

The coalition with the SPD, the so-called Grand Coalition as they are two largest parties in the Bundestag, remains the only feasible option for Merkel, who said a minority government would not be accepted.

It is expected that an agreement of the talks will be reached on Jan. 12, and then it will be submitted for each party to be approved.

A new government will not be born before the Easter even if talks go well.

Differences still exist between the two sides, especially between the SPD and the CSU. The SPD wants "a United States of Europe" as Schulz said, and the family reunion of refugees, while the CSU wants a limited European Union and opposes the family reunion.
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The second Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) forum leaders's meeting will kick off in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on Wednesday, with the aim of building a community of shared future of peace and prosperity.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will attend the meeting under the theme "Our River of Peace of Sustainable Development." The river refers to the Lancang-Mekong River.

Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in southwest China, the river is called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River as it flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the sea.

More than 326 million people live along the 4,880-km-long waterway, which flows through an area of more than 795,000 square km.

Like the Lancang-Mekong River, the common mission and ideals that bind the six countries together have forged a common destiny for them.

Consensus to build a community of shared future





"Sanya Declaration determined the goal of building a community of shared future of peace and prosperity, which was reaffirmed in the joint press communique of the third LMC foreign ministers' meeting in December," said Hu Zhengyue, vice president of China Public Diplomacy Association and former Chinese assistant minister of foreign affairs.

Sanya Declaration was issued after the first LMC leaders' meeting held in Sanya City in south China's Hainan Province in March 2016.

China has proposed building a community with a shared future for mankind and the LMC cooperation mechanism can be a "good starting point" and a "demostration area" to implement the concept, Ruan Zongze, executive vice president of China Institute of International Studies, told Xinhua.

The six countries - China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam -- are closely inter-connected because they are nourished by the same river, Ruan said, adding that they have very similar development concepts and a lot in common in inter-connectivity, water resources, agriculture and technology.

The six nations have very deep traditional friendship with innate advantages, solid basis, strong willingness and great potential for cooperation, and a have common goal to build a community of shared future of peace and prosperity, said Huang Xilian, deputy director-general of the Department of Asian Affairs under the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

"This is why from the very start the Lancang-Mekong cooperation mechanism has gained great importance attached by and extensive support from the governments and peoples of the six countries," Huang said.

Lancang-Mekong efficiency with bright prospects

The LMC has achieved fruitful results since its inception in 2016. It has demonstrated a Lancang-Mekong speed and efficiency.

On mechanism construction, the LMC has formed dialogue mechanisms at different levels. It so far has held one leaders' meeting, three foreign ministers' meetings and five senior officials' meetings, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou told a recent news briefing.

On regional cooperation projects, most of the 45 early harvest projects identified at the first LMC leaders' meeting and the 13 initiatives put forward by China at the second LMC foreign ministers' meeting have been completed or made substantive progress, reads the joint press communique of the third LMC foreign ministers' meeting held in Dali City of southwest China's Yunnan Province on Dec. 15.

"The reason why the Lancang-Mekong cooperation mechanism has enjoyed rapid development is that the mechanism accords with the six nations' common willingness to enhance all-win cooperation and the trend of regional economic integration," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, "It has showed strong vitality since it was born."

In the first 10 months of 2017, trade between China and the other five countries in the Lancang-Mekong area reached 17.76 billion U.S. dollars, up 15.6 percent from the same period of the previous year, and is expected to exceed 20 billion dollars in the whole of 2017, showed the latest Chinese official statistics.

From January to October 2017, China's investment in the five countries reached 2.68 billion dollars, up 22.3 percent from the previous year.

Guo Yanjun, director of the Institute of Asian Studies of China Foreign Affairs University, is optimistic about the LMC's prospects. "The cooperation initiatives and projects have truly reflected the demands of the six countries and they should further such pragmatic cooperation in the future," he told Xinhua.

However, Guo warned that the cooperation mechanism should not be advanced with a too fast speed as there is development disparity among the countries.

The leaders at the second LMC leaders' meeting are expected to adopt several documents on the future development of the sub-regional cooperation.

"We expect that the upcoming LMC leaders' meeting will achieve fruitful results, chart the course for future development of the mechanism and inject impetus, so as to benefit the peoples in the region," said Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Xiong Bo in a recent signed article.

China-Cambodia ties important for LMC

On Thursday, Premier Li will also pay a visit to Cambodia. It will be his first overseas visit in 2018.

"Premier Li's choice of Cambodia as the destination of his first overseas visit in 2018 shows that China attaches great importance to China-Cambodia relations," Hu Qianwen, former Chinese ambassador to Cambodia, told Xinhua.

During his stay in Cambodia, Li will meet with Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, and hold talks with his counterpart, Hun Sen. The two sides will exchange views on bilateral ties and international and regional issues of common concern, so as to plan for future development of China-Cambodia relations.

The two sides are expected to reach consensus and sign cooperation documents on infrastructure, science, agriculture, tourism and other fields.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of China-Cambodia diplomatic relations. "China-Cambodia relationship has developed in a very steady and rapid way and is becoming better and better with very solid strategic mutual trust between the two countries," Ruan said.

"China-Cambodia cooperation is an example of international cooperation that features equality and mutual benefit between a major country and a relatively small country," he said.

Ruan said Cambodia is also very interested in the Belt and Road Initiative, which was proposed by China to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa based on ancient land and maritime trade routes.

"Cambodia has seen that cooperation with China is key to Cambodia's future development, which can help improve its economy and enhance its role in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Indo-China Peninsula," he said, "China-Cambodia relationship is in essence a community of shared future."

The relationship between China and Cambodia has its particularity, as it is also that between China and an ASEAN member, Hu Zhengyao said, "The sound development of China-Cambodia relations is conducive to China-ASEAN cooperation and the LMC."

"With a very solid foundation for future development of bilateral ties, it is expected that China and Cambodia can strengthen coordination and cooperation within the framework of ASEAN," Guo said.
BERLIN - The foreign ministers of Germany and Turkey on Saturday held meeting in the German city of Goslar, in a bid to seek reconciliation after two years of tensions.

Sigmar Gabriel welcomed his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu to his hometown of Goslar in north Germany.

At a joint news conference after the meeting, Cavusoglu described Gabriel as a "personal friend", and Germany and Turkey as two "proud" nations, while the German lawmaker announced the revival of a joint economy commission which had been suspended amid the diplomatic spat.
City plays a major role in the infrastructure network as an industrial center providing technical training for key projects

Liuzhou, a heavy industry city in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, has a significant role in the Belt and Road Initiative, both technically and intellectually, local officials said.

LiuGong Machinery, a leading construction equipment manufacturer headquartered in the city, has a presence in 51 countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, the China-proposed plan to build a trade and infrastructure network to revive the ancient Silk Road routes.

At the same time, technical institutes in Liuzhou are cooperating actively with colleges in countries involved in the initiative, particularly those in Southeast Asia, to provide technical training for local people.

LiuGong, which launched China's first modernized wheel loader, is extending its range of products and services to help the construction of the high-speed railway between Thailand and China stay on schedule. Construction on the line began on Dec 22.

The company has provided 100 pieces of construction equipment for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and 90 for China-Laos railway projects.

LiuGong became involved in the Belt and Road Initiative much earlier, said Liang Yongjie, senior deputy general manager of overseas sales and marketing at the company. In 2015, the company launched a Belt and Road project together with the Guangxi government and the embassies of 11 countries.

"We have 112 dealers with 398 branches that cover 51 countries involved in the Belt and Road," Liang said. LiuGong has 20 manufacturing facilities worldwide, with divisions in Europe, North America, South America, India, Asia Pacific, Russia, the Middle East and South Africa.

The sales generated from Belt and Road-related countries account for 80 percent of LiuGong's global revenue.

Take India as an example. In 2017, LiuGong's sales growth climbed 54 percent compared to the previous year. Its wheel loaders and motor graders accounted for 20 percent of the market share in the country.

Liang said the company emphasizes the localization of different offices, with 93 percent of employees recruited from local areas.

LiuGong has also set up a center in Thailand to provide training for dealers in local communities. "We also hire local teachers to help remove language barriers, as many people in Thailand don't speak English," Liang said.

The company's education programs are drawing the attention of vocational schools in Liuzhou, as demand is high for skilled workers in railway projects along the Belt and Road.

Liuzhou Vocational and Technical College has a strategic cooperative relationship with LiuGong dating back to 2007.

So far, more than 300 graduates are employed by LiuGong, one-third of whom have worked in countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with some making it to the regional management level.

The two sides have established an international customer experience center, which will be a model example for joint cooperation between colleges and companies, according to Yang Xu, deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China Committee at the Liuzhou Vocational and Technical College.

Other vocational schools are taking advantage of the high-speed railway projects springing up across the region. Liuzhou Railway Vocational Technical College is rolling out international vocational education cooperation programs focusing on the Trans-Asian Railway and the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway.

The college now educates professional teachers from ASEAN countries through its Sino-ASEAN Rail Transit Vocational Education Teacher Training Center.

According to Qiu Tongbao, the vice-principal, the center has held four training classes for 66 teachers from 12 colleges and universities in Thailand.

The first class for teachers from Indonesia opened in December.

The college has established the Sino-ASEAN Rail Transit Technical and Skilled Talent Training Base in cooperation with Thailand's Ayutthaya Business and Technology Institute, Tangen Vocational Technical Institute, Chonburi Technical College and Nakhon Nayok Commercial Polytechnic College.

The college has also jointly established the China-Thailand Rail Transit College with Rajamangala University of Technology Isan.

According to Qiu, to attract overseas students to Liuzhou for training, there are no tuition fees, and free meals and accommodation are provided. "All they need to pay is the round-trip tickets from their hometown to Liuzhou," said Qiu.

"We are also working on the forming of China-ASEAN Rail Transit International Vocational Education Group by working with universities, organizations and companies. It will be an international cooperation and exchange platform for resource sharing and mutual development," said Qiu, adding that an Indonesia-China high-speed railway institute is also being planned.

Jiao Yaoguang, vice-mayor of Liuzhou, said the city encourages vocational training schools to "go out" as local companies become increasingly influential in the global marketplace.

"It is important that we take advantage of our professional teaching resources," Jiao said. He said different vocational schools can participate in different ways, such as the Liuzhou Vocational and Technology College's focus on manufacturing and Liuzhou Railway Vocational Technical College's focus on high-speed railways.

"Or, for schools like Liuzhou City Vocational Technical School, they can participate in the automobile industry, or even tourism and culinary services," Jiao said.

As Guangxi is the only region in China connected to ASEAN by both land and sea, Jiao hopes that Liuzhou, as the region's industry and transportation hub, can serve as a front door for the Belt and Road Initiative.

Representatives from Asian media visit Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, to focus on the region's development plan under the Belt and Road Initiative.Li Jin / China Daily

(China Daily 01/08/2018 page12)
15 Bible Passages You and Your Church Should Keep This Year Christian Post Contributor | 08 January, 2018 by Dr. James Emery White

It's that time of year again.

We're going to lose weight, exercise more, get out of debt, stick to a budget, stop smoking, save for the future and spend more time with family.

We make resolutions because we want to bring change to bear on our circumstances. We want to improve ourselves and our quality of life. And the top resolutions, for most people, tend to revolve around the same three poles: money, health and family.

But what would a set of New Year's resolutions look like for you and your church, your role as a leader or simply as someone who wants to live a life of strategic Kingdom investment?

And specifically, what if they came from the Bible?

Though many more could be added, here are 15 to consider:

1. Pray more.

So he said to me, "This is the word of the Lord... 'Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,'" says the Lord Almighty. (Zechariah 4:6, NIV)

2. Invest in your spiritual gift(s).

Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. (I Timothy 4:14-15, NIV)

3. Get more intentional about evangelism.

I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. (I Corinthians 9:22, NIV)

4. Care for yourself spiritually.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. (Philippians 3:12, NIV)

5. Make the tough decisions you know are best.

And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me. However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me  the task of testifying to the good news of God's grace. (Acts 20:22-24, NIV)

6. Confront debilitating patterns of sin.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. (Hebrews 12:1, NIV)

7. Do the hard work needed to build community.

If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. (Matthew 18:15, NIV)

8. Keep in touch with contemporary culture.

From the tribe of Issachar, there were 200 leaders... All these men understood the signs of the times and knew the best course for Israel to take. (I Chronicles 12:32, NLT)

Read more about Christian New Year's Resolutions on The Christian Post.
If youve ever played in Game Square, memorized John 3:16 with hand motions, or scored prizes with Awana Bucks, you have the late Arthur Rorheim to thank.

The Chicago youth minister who co-created the Awana program and served the organization for over 70 years died on Friday at age 99.

Beyond the millions who have participated in Awana, Rorheim reshaped evangelical church life in America by introducing more rigorous and Scripture-centered kids ministry and popularizing church programming on weeknights.

As Awanas cofounder, longtime executive director, and president emeritus, he saw the organization grow from a weekly club at his church on Chicagos North Side to 47,000 churches from 100 denominationsgathering more than 3.7 million participants a week.

Ive never found the word retirement in the Bible, Rorheim would say, and he continued to advise the organization and visit its Streamwood, Illinois, headquarters well into his final years.

He was proud of how God chose to work through an ordinary, untrained man like me, since over his decades of leadership, he never earned a seminary degree or took on formal training in curriculum development.

No other Christian youth organization has done more to reach the youth of our world than Awana, wrote Robert Lightner, Dallas Theological Seminary professor emeritus, in response to Rorheims 2010 autobiography, Mr. Awana.

In the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when churches rarely offered activities for kids beyond Sunday school, North Side Gospel Center senior pastor Lance Doc Latham enlisted Rorheim to lead a weekly club for children. They established a biblical foundation with their early instruction while offering fun activities and incentives especially designed for young minds.

According to his biography:

[Rorheim] then began to conceive many of the features that distinguish Awana clubs and youth programs: curriculum handbooks, outreach events that appealed to non-churched children, a system of awards to motivate handbook completion, uniforms, and a Game Square to capture childrens interest. He eventually named the program Awana, based on its key verse: 2 Timothy 2:15 (Approved workmen are not ashamed).

Image: Awana Clubs International

With over 500 kids in attendance each week, Rorheim and Latham saw the opportunity to expand the model and established Awana as a national organization in 1950. The parachurch ministry expanded internationally in 1972 (first to Bolivia) and now operates in 100 countries and 30 languages.

God showed me that children the world over all have the same needsthey need Christs redemption and they need adults to love themand that he could use Awana to meet the needs of their hearts, Rorheim said.

A 2017 Christianity Today cover story featured the Awana ministry model and how it has evolved in the 21st century, noting Rorheims involvement in the programs origins as far back as 1933. He went on to serve 42 years as executive director and 7 as president.

Many of todays Christian leaders acknowledge the impact of Awana, and Rorheim himself, on their spiritual lives.

I know that I would never be where I am today if it hadnt been for Art challenging me so many years ago, said Willow Creek Community Church senior pastor Bill Hybels, who came to faith at an Awana camp Rorheim led.

Sad to hear of the death of Art Rorheim, tweeted Dan Darling, vice president for communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). His idea to entertain kids in a way that would gain an audience for the gospel became a worldwide ministry with tremendous influence. My life and millions of others were impacted by Awana.

Rorheims wife, Winnie, nicknamed Mrs. Awana, died in 2015. They had two children, four grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. The family has set up a tribute site at ArtRorheim.org.

Granddaughter Kerrybeth Gwaltney remembered Rorheim, who she called Paco, in a post on Facebook.

Our stories are innumerable, but heres just one: Paco said he could hear the songs of heaven in his last few months of his life. He even created a songbook and said he could point to the songs and hear the music, she wrote. He said he could hear these songs from heaven: I'm So Glad That Our Father in Heaven and The Old Rugged Cross.
|

Two weeks ago, the US State Department released its list of countries of particular concern (CPC)a compilation of nations that have engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.

The list contains the same names as last year: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Pakistan was added to a special watch list of governments or entities that dont meet the requirements for the CPC designation yet still engage in or tolerated severe religious freedom violations.

The CPC list was about six weeks late, frustrating some religious freedom watchers, including the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is appointed by the federal government to make policy recommendations.

The State Departments Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF)established nearly 20 years ago under the Clinton administrationis officially tasked with annual reports on the state of religious freedom around the world.

The office is responsible for passing along a list of CPCs to the president each year, who would determine if the religious freedom violations were egregious enough to merit sanctions against particular nations. Almost right awayin 1999that responsibility of naming the CPCs was shifted to the secretary of state.

But it didnt always get done. A list came out promptly in 1999 and 2000, but was running two months late by 2001 and missed 2002 entirely, in the wake of 9/11 and the early years of the Iraq war. There was a list in 2003 and 2004, and the first sanctions appeared in 2005. The spotty performances continued: A list was issued in 2006, but not 2007 and 2008, then in 2009, but not 2010, 2012, 2013, or 2015. Two lists showed up in 2016.

Congress addressed the inconsistent religious freedom reports by unanimously passing the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act in December 2016. It amended the 1998 policy and added a category of entities of particular concern to cover non-government actors such as ISIS or Boko Haram, confimed that the international religious freedom ambassador-at-large reports directly to the secretary of state, and added a 90-day deadline from the time the State Department issues its annual religious freedom report to the time it needs to present a new list of new CPCs.

Not even a year later, the State Department missed its first 90-day deadline, failing to publish a list of CPCs after its August 15 annual report.

The delay was particularly frustrating to USCIRF, which was created in the same bill as the IRF. Over the years, USCIRF has never missed a deadline, functioning as an independent watchdog and recommending lists of CPCs to the State Department. (Because USCIRF is independent, it is thought to have more leeway than the government agency, which might be more hesitant to call out countries it needs to preserve diplomatic relations with.)

Failing to designate CPCs tells the violators of religious freedom around the world that the United States is looking away, USCIRFs chairman Daniel Mark stated in November. The State Department should make such designations without delay.

A major part of the problem may have been that the office is missing an ambassador at large. President Donald Trump chose his nominee for the positionKansas governor Sam Brownbackin July, but Senate confirmation hearings have been slowed down by Democrats angry about Brownbacks stance on LGBTQ issues.

Another uncertainty is the future of the IRF itself. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wants to combine its office and duties with the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, created four years ago to advise State Department leaders on religion-related policy matters and to help diplomats navigate religious dynamics overseas. (Religious freedom experts are divided over whether the move is a good one.)

Tillerson also wants IRF to absorb the offices for religious minorities in the Middle East and Asia, the representative to Muslim communities, and the special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The efforts are part of an 8 percent cut across the entire State Department, which Tillerson is achieving through hiring freezes and reduced promotions.

His cuts extended to the introduction to this years IRF report; Tillerson used just 440 words instead of the typical 5,000 to explain overall global religious freedom issues. Instead of diving into an explanation of problemssuch as North Koreas religious prisoners, Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria, and the instability caused by Islamic extremism in the Middle EastTillerson called out only ISIS.

Still, the United States promotes religious freedom as a moral imperative, he wrote then. Americas promotion of international religious freedom demands standing up for the rights of the worlds most vulnerable populations.
Nebraskans United for Life Welcomes Governor and Abortion Industry Whistleblower

January 12 Celebration of Life in Omaha features citizen journalist Sandra Merritt

OMAHA, Jan. 8, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts will welcome Sandra Merritt to the Nebraskans United for Life Annual Celebration of Life banquet on Friday, Jan. 12, 2018, at Omaha's DC Centre. Merritt, along with undercover journalist David Daleiden, exposed Planned Parenthood's role in the trafficking of aborted baby body parts.



As a result of their video sting on abortion providers and lobbyists, Merritt and Daleiden have been the victims of court action from coast-to-coast. The backlash against the abortion industry has culminated in a Congressional investigation and a national cry to defund Planned Parenthood.

WHAT: Nebraskans United for Life Annual Celebration of Life banquet and fundraising auction



FEATURING:

 Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts -- master of ceremonies

 Sandra Merritt, citizen journalist involved in the undercover video sting that exposed Planned Parenthood's involvement in baby body parts trafficking -- keynote speaker

 Spirit Catholic Radio Network host Matt Willkom -- guest auctioneer



WHEN: Friday, Jan. 12, 2018, reception at 6 p.m. (Central), dinner program at 7 p.m. (Central)



WHERE: DC Centre, 11830 Stonegate Drive, Omaha, NE 68164



TICKETS: $45, available at $45, available at give.cornerstone.cc/NebraskansUL



ONSITE CONTACT: Kristan Gray, Cell 712.246.8378, kgray@nufl.org

"We are excited to have the governor and Ms. Merritt join us," said Kristan Gray, executive director of Nebraskans United for Life. "Both have been staunch advocates in the quest to restore a culture of life for pre-born children. We welcome Governor Rickett's open and unwavering support of life and look forward to hearing Sandra's first-person narrative of the work she did, along with David Daleiden, to expose the abortion industry's unconscionable trade in aborted human body parts."

Thomas More Society attorney Matt Heffron works out of the national nonprofit law firm's Omaha office and will be on hand to support Merritt. "As a participant in the defense of Ms. Merritt's colleague, David Daleiden, I applaud the way she has put herself on the line to fight for what is right," said Heffron. "The work done by Daleiden and Merritt has shone light on atrocities committed by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. Decades of nefarious operation in the dark have been revealed online, in courtrooms and the halls of Congress, because of the efforts of these two brave citizen journalists. The Thomas More Society is honored to help defend their right to tell the truth."

About Nebraskans United for Life
home US University of New Mexico halts fetal tissue research following allegations of illegal activity

The University of New Mexico (UNM) has suspended its fetal tissue research program as the school conducts an investigation regarding allegations that a tissue from an abortion has been misused.

The UNM Health Sciences Centers has confirmed that it has launched an investigation on how one researcher handled and processed a fetal tissue acquired from the local abortion clinic Southwestern Women's Options (SWO).

The university and the SWO have long been accused of violating the law over the transfer of fetal tissue for research. Among the accusers was a post-abortive woman named Jessica Duran, who said that SWO was not forthcoming about what would happen to her fetus.

Under current law, it is illegal to buy or sell fetal tissue, and there are other specific rules for how it can be used.

Allegations against UNM were first forwarded to New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas' office in 2016 by a special U.S. congressional committee created to investigate Planned Parenthood's alleged involvement in the sales of aborted baby body parts and the world of fetal tissue research.

The committee examined tissue procurement firms and research entities including UNM, and it produced a report citing 15 instances in which it provided information to U.S. and state authorities of possible violations of federal and state laws.

On Thursday, the office of the attorney general announced that it has found no violations of state law in its investigation over the transfer of fetal tissue.

Balderas had ordered civil and criminal reviews but his office said that there was not enough evidence to indicate state violations. The investigation, however, was limited to state laws because Balderas had no jurisdiction over federal law. "We consider this matter closed," the attorney general's office said in a letter to pro-life group New Mexico Alliance for Life, which also made allegations against UNM.

The office also noted that the state law that governs research related to fetuses was never intended to regulate fetal tissue resulting from an abortion.

According to Life News, the university had suspended a researcher who was suspected of selling aborted baby body parts to a Michigan company.

Duran's attorney, Michael Seibel, said that he had just learned about the internal review at UNM Health Sciences. "This lady was suspended and barred from her lab in October according to reports and we're just finding out about it now through some sort of internal leak?" Seibel said.

Seibel is also questioning the investigation conducted by the attorney general's office, noting that his client has not been contacted by investigators.

He has accused the attorney general's office of protecting political special interests, but James Hallinan, a spokesman for Balderas, denied the allegation saying the office had conducted a thorough investigation that included interviews.
ADAMS, Neb.  A three-year venture to collect history on a small Gage County community is nearly complete for four women.

Beverly Buss, Janie Oltman, Karen Page and Elvera Seeley, all longtime residents of Adams, have spent years collecting stories, photos and anything else they can find related to their town to put into a book.

The group is currently taking orders for HometownAdams with plans to have the books available this spring.

Oltman said Adams had a newspaper, the Adams Gazette, dating back to 1886, which became the Adams Weekly Globe in 1907 and was published until 1981.

Stories from these old papers can still be found at the local library and were a key source for the book.

Another came around three years ago, when efforts to catalog the history were put into place.

Probably three years ago, they tore down the old fire hall to build the new one, and there was a safe in there that had a lot of historical information, Oltman said.

Also in the safe was a 100-year-old flag, now displayed in a case at the Adams community building, that recognized those who served in World War I.

The stars are for all the men from this area that went to service," Oltman said. "There are two gold ones in the middle for two who didnt come home.

Page said there was a large celebration in Adams around 100 years ago to recognize the historic flag, and that the event is just one example of many pieces of Adamss history featured in the book.

There was a big celebration of it here in town, she said. There were like 2,000 people here to celebrate and its now framed in the community building.

You dont want that history to get lost. Someone needs to write it and get it out there, because you dont want to lose it. Thats our biggest concern. You get to our age and you get more interested.

Many tales came from Adams historian Byrleta Pittamm, while Seely added that some of the best stories about Adams came from people who initially thought their own experiences werent that interesting.

The group met regularly to collect stories about Adams, which has more history than some may realize.

I think as we began to hunt for things we would find things that happened in Adams and that kind of sparked our interest to do more research, she said. We would all do research, and with Bevs prompting and urging, we would help her.

The book has an entire chapter dedicated to fires in Adams throughout the years. The women said nearly all of the old buildings experienced a fire at some point.

Information about the book can be found on Facebook by searching for Hometown  Adams, Nebraska.

The 212-page book costs $30, and anyone interested in buying the book can contact Buss at 402-440-3409 or via email at bevbuss@yahoo.com.
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While the world was watching the all-black, red-carpet protest for equality for women at Sunday night's Golden Globes, H&M featured on its website a photo of a black boy modeling a hoodie with the words, "Coolest monkey in the jungle."

As Twitter erupted calling the ad "racist," the Swedish-based international retailer issued an apology and vowed to review their internal policies on diversity and inclusion.

According to the New York Daily News, H&M apologized Monday morning for what many said was an insensitive association between the young model and a hateful slur against black people.

Now Playing: The sweatshirt sported the phrase, Coolest Monkey in The Jungle. Video: Fortune

"This image has now been removed from all H&M channels, and we apologise to anyone this may have offended," the company told the Daily News in a terse statement from its Stockholm headquarters.

On Instagram's official page, the company initially posted: "We sincerely apologize for offending people with an image of a printed hooded top. The image has been removed from all online channels."

It's hard not to believe there was no one in the room to notice the racist connotation of putting a black child in that hoodie, an article of clothing that has specific meaning for the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

It's hard not to believe there was no one in the room to notice how showing a black child with the slogan comparing him to a monkey would be offensive. Such racist imagery has an historical reference worldwide to describe black people as less than human.

In 2016, a West Virginia woman was fired after posting on Facebook that former first lady Michelle Obama was an "an ape in heels." How many times has this played out in media?

More over, you don't have to be African American to get it. The outcry on social media has been swift.

The Weeknd, who is of Ethiopian descent, posted on Twitter that he would decline to work with the company in the future:

"woke up this morning shocked and embarrassed by this photo. i'm deeply offended and will not be working with @hm anymore... "

Award-winning New York Times columnist Charles Blow tweeted:

"@hm, have you lost your damned minds?!?!?!"

GIRL OF THE YEAR: American Girl unveils new astronaut-inspired doll

Models of Diversity, an organization devoted to promoting equality and diversity in the fashion, beauty, and media industries, condemned the promotion in a tweet:

"@hm And then H&M UK got the bright idea to feature a black boy model with 'Coolest Monkey in the Jungle' hoodie on its website. How on earth can this be?

SHAME ON YOU!"

Over the years, H&M has debut a number limited-edition collections with some of the world's top designers and fashion houses, including Balmain, Jimmy Choo, Comme des Garcon, Roberto Cavalli, Karl Lagerfeld, Versace and Alexander Wang.

UPDATE: The 4-year-old little boy, who lives in Sweden with his family, was accompanied by his step-father to the shoot in London. Neither his mother or step-father saw the hoodie before the ads were released worldwide, according to a source in Stockholm. His mother has faced parent shaming from around the world, especially from her native Kenya, as a result. I've done many shoots with children and sometimes parents are in a waiting room so the children don't get distracted. But I always go over with the parent what the child will be wearing in the shoot. Not sure what happened here.
A former Houston Community College trustee will be sentenced Monday after pleading guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for his influence over contract work with the college.

Chris Oliver, who represented swaths of southwest Houston for the college system for more than 20 years, said he took envelopes stuffed with cash and Visa gift cards  totaling about $12,000  from a one-time HCC contractor who was later appointed Mayor Sylvester Turners public works director.

The extortion and bribery case against Oliver was unsealed over the summer. The acting U.S. attorney agreed to dismiss the extortion case for his May guilty plea on the bribery indictment, for which he faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of not more than $250,000.

He will appear before U.S. District Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore at 9:30 a.m.

Fallout from Olivers plea began over the summer. He was stripped of his title as the boards vice chair and stopped attending board meetings.

Karun Sreerama, Houstons Public Works director, stepped down in July after he was revealed to have paid Oliver $12,000, which his attorney said was directed by the FBI. The dismissed count described $77,000 in other alleged payments to Oliver.

Oliver's seat was up for re-election in November, and candidates campaigned pledging to restore trust.

HCC has spent at least $175,000 on an investigation into college procurement initiated after Olivers plea. A spokeswoman told the Chronicle that the college expects to conclude an examination of past procurement over the last several years in March.

Separately, trustee Dave Wilson retained consultant Wayne Dolcefinos firm to investigate HCCs procurement, facilities, employment and related financial matters.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges last month asked HCC for more information on board governance in light of these probes, a letter obtained by the Houston Chronicle shows.

It asked HCC to prepare a report explaining its compliance with an accreditation standard that requires board members to act collectively without control by a minority of trustees.

HCC chancellor Cesar Maldonado said in an email to trustees obtained by the Chronicle that the colleges response will be reviewed by the accreditor for further action if necessary, including monitoring, sanction or the appointment of a Special Committee to review the institution.
A former Houston Community College trustee was sentenced Monday to nearly six years in prison after a judge said he accepted about a quarter-million dollars in bribes in exchange for his influence over college contract work.

U.S. District Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore asked he ex-trustee, Christopher Oliver, during the proceeding if his conduct was "standard procedure" for HCC trustees and if the college was a "cesspool."

"I don't know about standard procedure... but in my particular case, the line is definitely blurred," he said, as two current trustees watched in the courtroom. "You don't come from wealth. You're in an elected position. Things are thrown at you."

Oliver, 54, who represented swaths of southwest Houston for the college system for more than 20 years, pleaded guilty in May 2017 to taking envelopes stuffed with cash and Visa gift cards  totaling about $12,000  from former HCC contractor Karun Sreerama, who was Mayor Sylvester Turners public works director when Oliver's case was unsealed.

But the judge described deeper corruption.

Between 2009 and 2016, she said, Oliver received 69 bribe payments totaling $225,259 from at least four people seeking contracts with HCC. The $12,000 he accepted from Sreerama in 2015 and 2016 was provided to Sreerama by the FBI, the judge said, and Oliver will be required to repay that sum. After his 70 months in prison, he will serve one year of supervised release.

Red flags about Oliver's conduct were raised with HCC going back to at least 2011, when attorney Larry Veselka told the college's board about the findings of a months-long internal investigation into multiple college trustees. He found that Oliver's voting on a contract connected to a company from which he accepted payments prompted questions.

"Further inquiry could be justified to confirm that there was no quid-pro-quo understanding or that the arrangement or understanding did not constitute a prohibited gift to a public servant," he wrote.

A Houston Chronicle review of trustee minutes, depositions and lawsuits found that HCC trustees did not censure Oliver formally until after his guilty plea last year, despite Veselka's findings and other allegations against him over the years.

On Monday, Gilmore said Oliver served in his position for "too long" as his integrity eroded.

Oliver agreed and said he should not have sought re-election in 2011. "I probably should have called it a career."

He and his attorney declined to comment as they left the courtroom after the sentencing. Oliver will have to turn himself in to begin serving his prison term.

Fallout from the plea at HCC began almost immediately after the FBI announced Oliver's conviction in July. The acting U.S. attorney agreed to dismiss an extortion charge for his guilty plea on the bribery indictment.

Oliver was stripped of his title as the board's vice chairman and stopped attending board meetings. Oliver's seat was up for election in November, and candidates pledged to restore trust. Sreerama stepped down from his position at the City of Houston in late July.

HCC has spent at least $175,000 on an investigation into procurement in the wake of Oliver's plea. The college expects to conclude an examination of past years' procurement in March, HCC spokeswoman Linda Toyota told the Houston Chronicle.

Separately, Trustee Dave Wilson retained consultant Wayne Dolcefino's firm to investigate HCC's procurement, facilities, employment and related financial matters.

HCC's accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, has begun its own review. The agency last month asked HCC for more information on board governance in light of the two investigations, a letter obtained by the Chronicle shows.

It asked HCC to prepare a report explaining its compliance with an accreditation standard that requires board members to act collectively without control by a minority of trustees.

Chancellor Cesar Maldonado wrote in an email to trustees, also obtained by the Chronicle, that the college's response will be reviewed by the accreditor "for further action if necessary, including monitoring, sanction or the appointment of a Special Committee to review the institution."

HCC said that it has put in place additional procedures to detect violations in the future, including requiring HCC vendors who obtain contracts with the college to provide updated conflict-of- interest disclosures every year.

An HCC cabinet signed off on changes to vendor relations in December.

"I am disappointed about what the former trustee has done, but actions have consequences and I believe justice has been served," board Chair Eva Loredo said in a written statement provided by HCC. "Our task now is to retain the public trust... Our goal is to put in place the strongest anti-corruption measures possible. We are committed to ensuring that the future is one that is worthy of our students and the community we serve."

Maldonado said HCC would continue to advocate for "new ideas and practices" to protect the university, though he called current college processes "among the most stringent and comprehensive of any college in the nation."

The FBI conducted the investigation with assistance from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General.

Lindsay Ellis writes about higher education for the Chronicle. You can follow her on Twitter and send her tips at lindsay.ellis@chron.com.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is set to receive the first $6 million of $125 million in state funding to build a new psychiatric hospital, the first such public facility in Harris County in 31 years.

The 300-bed hospital will be built on land adjacent to the 274-bed, UTHealth-run Harris County Psychiatric Center, providing relief in an area so underserved that the Harris County jail is considered the state's largest mental health facility.

"This is a game changer for Harris County," said Dr. Jair Soares, chair of psychiatry at UTHealth's McGovern Medical School. "It should decompress the situation at the jail and allow local patients who needed longer stays to be treated near home."

Combined with the Harris County Psychiatric Center, the new hospital would make the UTHealth Continuum of Care Campus for Behavioral Health the largest such academic center in the nation.

The Texas Health and Human Service Commission's announcement Monday it is releasing the first round of funding approved by the 2017 Legislature for mental health projects around the state. UTHealth hopes to break ground on the new hospital by early 2019 and begin admitting patients in fall 2021.

The new hospital will admit many patients currently discharged by HCPC, which has only acute-care beds and where the average length of stay is about seven to eight days, partly because it has roughly 45 patients waiting to be admitted at all times. The new hospital will have some acute-care beds but mostly be comprised of sub-acute and residential treatment beds.

It also will mark a new model of state residential psychiatric care. Under the nearly 100-year-old model, psychiatric patients requiring long-term treatment are sent to state hospitals in areas far from where the patient and their families live. Rusk State Hospital, the closest to Houston, is more than a three-hour drive.

Rusk is where HCPC patients needing longer term care theoretically would go, though Soares said only a small percentage do.

The new model calls for such treatment to be delivered in cities, near other psychiatric facilities, as part of an effort to emphasize a continuum of care and do away with the stigma historically associated with mental illness.

HHSC said Monday it will give UTHealth the first installment to allow planning to begin and architects to be hired to design the facility. Soares said the center hopes to receive the rest of the funding, to be given in installments, as the year unfolds.

"This is a huge deal for Houston," said state Rep. Sarah Davis, R-Houston, a member of the House budget-writing committee who played a key role in passing the mental health funding. "It addresses an obvious need and has the potential to save taxpayer dollars by keeping patients out of jails, where they're more expensive to house, don't get adequate long-term psychiatric care and typically end up back on the streets."

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, a long-time advocate of the need for more public psychiatric beds, added that "this is some of the best news I've heard relative to mental health in some time. It doubles capacity  still not enough  and puts mental health into the whole Texas Medical Center research environment where it will get the same due as conditions like cancer and heart disease."

Currently, the only public in-patient psychiatric care in Houston besides HCPC are 32 beds at Ben Taub Hospital, including 12 in its emergency center.

The Texas Medical Center owns the land, currently occupied by a small parking garage, where UTHealth will build the new hospital. The TMC is donating the land to the state, which will be considered its owner. UTHealth has a similar arrangement with HCPC, which is jointly owned by the state and county.

Harris County Mental Health Court Probate Judge Rory Olsen said the announcement "shows the State of Texas is working diligently to improve mental health services for the people of Texas."

"When HCPC opened, it had adequate capacity to serve our needs," said Olsen, whose 2013 writing on the subject is credited by UTHealth leaders for galvanizing the movement for a new facility. "But in the 31 years that have since passed, the county has grown and our population has grown. Thus expansion is needed to continue staying ahead of the curve."

HCPC was originally intended to house 500 beds. Because of limited funding, it was built to only house 250.

Patients who are discharged from HCPC even though they would benefit from longer-term care often run into trouble with law enforcement. The Harris County jail calculates that it houses more psychiatric patients than all of the state hospitals combined.

Besides the $6 million Texas HHSC announced Monday will be coming soon to UTHealth, the agency said it will soon release another $41.7 million for other state projects, part of the 2017 Legislature's $300 million effort to begin improving public in-patient psychiatric care.

The funding represents the first phase of a three-phase effort expected to be continued by the 2019 and 2021 Legislatures.

UTHealth leaders said the campus will be designed to address not only different levels of care but also to integrate the different types of care, including psychiatric, substance abuse and medical care. It will allow psychiatry and behavioral sciences to continue its research into the causes and treatment of behavioral health issues, and to expand its training of the next generation of healers.

Soares said there has some been some preliminary internal design work done on the building, but bidding for the project's architect has yet to go out.

"It will be great to have the two hospitals together on one campus, providing a continuum of care," said Soares, also executive director of the HCPC. "It should have a significant impact on the vicious cycle we see of patients being discharged from acute beds, only to end up returning to treatment or being arrested."
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When local photographer Jim Olive threatened to sue the University to Houston to force it to pay his price for a photo posted on a UH website, the school told him to get lost. As a state institution, the university said, it has sovereign immunity, which protects it from copyright and most other lawsuits.

Olive did go away, but not for long. He has the university back in court, pursuing an unusual legal strategy more commonly associated with real estate than intellectual property.

Olive recently filed suit against UH in state district court in Harris County, claiming that the university's unauthorized use of his photo of the Houston skyline amounted to "unlawful taking" under the Texas Constitution, which prohibits government agencies from taking private property without adequate compensation. The takings provision is typically used when government wants to build a new road, school or other public projects.

Legal analysts said if successful, Olive's approach could provide a tool for writers, photographers and artists trying to defend their intellectual property in the internet age, when pictures, stories and images are reproduced with little regard to ownership.

"That is quite unusual, to say the least," said Houston intellectual property lawyer Steven Mitby. "It could open up a lot of options."

The University of Houston said in a written statement that it attempted to resolve the matter by offering to pay what it believed to be fair market value for the photograph.

"UH has great respect for artistic talent and federal copyright protections and has routinely paid, and will continue to pay, market value for images provided by artists and professional photographers," said Mike Rosen, executive director of media relations.

Olive is the latest to try a broad interpretation of the takings law to win compensation from a government agency. Hundreds of homeowners have sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, arguing that the agency's decision to release water from local reservoirs during Hurricane Harvey while knowing it would flood their homes amounted to an illegal taking.

Olive, 72, a professional photographer for five decades, specializes in skyline photos. He rents a helicopter for as much as $2,500 an hour and sits sidesaddle out the open door to capture Houston's urban landscape. Olive knows his photos are routinely used without his permission or paymentso he hired a service to find out who is using them.

When he finds an offender, Olive sends a letter about the copyright violation and a bill. Most pay up.

The service notified Olive in 2016 that the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business had used one of his aerial photos since 2012, according to his lawsuit. He sent the university a bill for $41,000, which included $16,000 for the frequent use of the photo and $25,000 for stripping off Olive's credit line when the university allegedly provided a copy to a national magazine for a story about the university's ranking.

Within days, the University of Houston removed the photo from its website, according to court documents. In a August 2016 letter, the university offered to pay $2,500. When Olive threatened legal action, the university said it was immune from federal copyright lawsuits under the common law principle of sovereign immunity.

"They just blew us off," said Olive. Under Texas law, he would have to convince the Legislature to pass a bill allowing him to sue the university.

But Olive thought there may be another way around the problem when he learned Texas artist David Langford successfully settled a similar dispute. Langford alleged an illegal taking when he sued the Texas Department of Public Safety eight years ago for using his 1984 photograph of a cowboy carrying a saddle without permission or payment on 4.5 million vehicle inspection stickers, according to court documents.

Olive is seeking unspecified damages.
The Liberty County Historical Commission will learn more about the historic Caddo Mounds at the regular quarterly meeting on Monday, Jan. 15, 6 p.m., in the A.J. "Jack" Hartel Community Building, 318 San Jacinto St., Liberty. Meetings are open, and the public is encouraged to attend. The guest speaker for the evening will be Rachel Galan of the Caddo Mounds State Historic Site.

Galan began her love of Caddo Culture at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) where she completed her undergraduate work in English and Anthropology. She earned her Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas in Austin. She spent 11 years as a librarian at SFASU during which time she served as Director of the East Texas Research Center, Head of Digital Projects, and Associate Director of the Library. A certificate from SFASU in resource interpretation facilitated a change in career and allowed her to return to her love of Caddo culture.

Galan joined the staff of Caddo Mounds State Historic Site as the Educator/Interpreter in February 2014.

More than 1,200 years ago, a group of Caddo Indians known as the Hasinai built a village 26 miles west of present-day Nacogdoches. The site was the southwestern most ceremonial center for the great Mound Builder culture. Today, three earthen mounds still rise from the lush Pineywoods landscape where visitors discover the everyday life and the history of this ancient civilization.

The Caddo selected this site for a permanent settlement about A.D. 800. The alluvial prairie possessed ideal qualities for the establishment of a village and ceremonial center: good sandy loam soil for agriculture, abundant natural food resources in the surrounding forest and permanent water source of springs that flowed into the nearby Neches River.

From here, the Caddo dominated life in the region for approximately 500 years. They drew local native groups into the economic and social dependence through trade and sophisticated ceremonial/political system. The traded with other native groups in Central Texas and as far away as present-day Illinois and Florida. Caddo Mounds' sphere of influence was only a small portion of the broader Caddo cultural domain encompassing northeast Texas, Norwest Louisiana, western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. The Caddo culture, in turn, had trade connection and perhaps religious and political ties, with similar cultures farther east in the Mississippi Valley and beyond.

The settlement at Caddo Mounds flourished until the 13th century when the site was abandoned. Most archeologists agree that the elite ruling class left Caddo Mounds after the loss of their regional influence, as outlying hamlets and trade groups became self-sufficient and grew less dependent on the cultural center in religious and cultural matters.

The Hasinai Caddo groups continued to live through the 1830s in their traditional East Texas homeland in the Neches and Angelina River valleys but by the early 1840s, all Caddo groups had moved to the Brazos River area to remove themselves from Anglo-American repressive measures and colonization efforts. They remained there until the U.S. government placed them on the Brazos Indian Reservation in 1855, and then in 1859 the Caddo (about 1,056 people) were removed to the Washita river in Indian Territory, now western Oklahoma. The Caddo continue to live in western Oklahoma, primarily near the Caddo Nation Headquarters outside Binger, Oklahoma.

For more information on the Liberty County Historical Commission or the program on Caddo Mounds Historic Site, please email lchc318@gmail.com or call 936-334-5813.
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The San Jacinto County Republican Party is ready to host this year's annual Reagan Dinner on Feb. 17 with guest speaker Jason Chaffetz.

The Reagan Dinner is the San Jacinto County Republican Party's annual fundraiser that invites visitors to hear from political leaders, some of whom are involved in Texas.

"We basically raise the funds for the party to operate for the year," said San Jacinto County Republican Party Chairman Dwayne Wright. "A lot of the big counties do that as well."

Past guest speakers include Texas Governor Greg Abbot, United States Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and more.

This year's speaker is Jason Chaffetz, a contributor to Fox News Networks who was elected into Congress in 2008.

"He was the Chair of the Oversight Committee," said Wright.

Chaffetz has led investigations into the United States Secret Service, the Department of Education I.T. vulnerabilities, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Office of Personnel Management data breach, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Benghazi terrorist attack, Fast and Furious and more.

According to Wright, Chaffetz is expected to speak on another key investigation, which is the alleged misuse of classified information by Hillary Clinton in the email scandal. Chaffetz left Congress last year.

"Because he's no longer in office he can speak freely," said Wright.

Other speakers for the Reagan Dinner include U.S. Representative Kevin Brady and Rafael Cruz, father of Senator Ted Cruz.

The Reagan Dinner is scheduled for Feb. 17 at the Coldspring Community Shelter located on Hwy 150 across from the San Jacinto Count Courthouse. The event begins at 6 p.m. Tickets are $75 per person.

For more information on the event or to purchase tickets, call Sheena Bass at 281-389-1618.
There is power in numbers and Hollywood's best affirmed that notion.

Actors and actresses "blacked out" the red carpet by wearing black gowns, tuxes, pantsuits, and dresses in pants to the Golden Globe Awards Sunday, Jan. 7.
The chief of a small Brazoria County town was recuperating Sunday in Houston after he was struck Saturday directing traffic along Texas 35.

John Barnard, 57, was off-duty and controlling an intersection at Texas 35 and Loop 419, near the refinery complex south of West Columbia. A semi-tractor trailer headed east on Texas 35 swerved around stopped traffic, just as officers instructed a sedan to enter the intersection, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
AP Honor Roll

Katy ISD is one of 447 school districts in the United States and Canada honored by College Board with placement on the eight annual AP District Honor Roll for increasing access to Advanced Placement course work while simultaneously improving the percentage of students earning scores of 3 or higher on AP exams.

From 2015-17, the number of AP exams administered in KISD increased by 23 percent. The number of students participating in AP exams increased 26 percent to 9,478 in 2017 and the number of students receiving a 3 or higher increased by 24.6 percent in those two years.

To be included on the AP District Honor Roll, districts must:

Increase participation/access to AP course work by at least 4 percent in large districts, at least 6 percent in medium districts and at least 11 percent in small districts.

Increase or maintain the percentage of exams taken by Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander students who scored a 3 or higher on at least one AP exam.

Improve or maintain performance levels when comparing the percentage of students in 2017 scoring a 3 or higher to those in 2015, unless the district has already attained a performance level at which more than 70 percent of its AP students are scoring a 3 or higher.

Visit https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/score-reports-data/awards/honor-roll for more information.

School boardrecognized

January is School Board Recognition Month and Katy ISD is joining districts across the state to thank these community volunteers for their commitment and contributions to our public schools.

"Our board gives their time and energy, without pay, and many times at the expense of their very own families, to provide guidance and leadership to the students, staff and community of Katy," said Superintendent Lance Hindt. "In a climate of change and challenge, they develop policies and make tough decisions on complex educational and social issues that affect the entire community and the lives of individual students."

Katy ISD trustees are: Ashley Vann, president; Courtney Doyle, vice president; Charles Griffin, secretary; and Rebecca Fox, Bryan Michalsky, George Scott and Bill Lacy, members.

The board will be celebrated throughout the month with a special recognition and presentation at the Jan. 22 meeting.

SPARK Parkdedicated

Waving "Thank You" signs and singing along to a melodious gratitude song, the Franz Elementary Choir officially dedicated their new SPARK Park, which is available for public use during non-school hours and on weekends.

This park is a collaborative effort between Katy Independent School District, Franz Elementary School parents, students, staff, the PTA, as well as local entities, who together contributed to the SPARK grant which was just under $130,000. Fundraising efforts included a $5,000 donation from the PTA and a weeklong of SPARK fundraising activities at the school, that included taping the principal to a wall, crazy hair day and water games that included popsicles, of which $2,150 was collected. Other funding included $1,000 from the West Harris County MUD #7 and $1,000 from Raintree Village Homeowner's Association. Design work was paid for by Katy ISD. SPARK contributed $116,000 from The Kinder Foundation and Houston Endowment park desert initiative.

The park includes a concrete trail, sensory play panels, musical instruments and four bollards covered with tiles painted by students and staff. When visitors walk through the park, they will notice a variety of trees, which include Monterrey oaks, Mexican plums and anacua trees. In total, 34 trees were donated by Trees for Houston.

Principal Yvette Sylvan said, "It has been said that 'A true community is not just about being geographically close to someone or a part of the same social network.' It's about feeling connected and responsible for what happens. Humanity is our ultimate community and everyone plays a crucial role."

"We hope during the break you will come and enjoy this park," added Ashley Vann, Katy ISD Board of Trustees president.

SPARK, an organization created in 1983 to increase park and recreational spaces in the Greater Houston area, has helped to turn underutilized school playgrounds into neighborhood parks at more than 200 locations. This is the third SPARK Park at a Katy ISD school.
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Robinson Elementary hasn't been whole since Hurricane Harvey.

The floodwaters that gushed through the school's doors also forced students to attend two adjacent campuses several miles away: Pleasantville Elementary and Holland Middle.

Fourth-graders shared hallways with eighth-graders. Closets were converted into offices. Principal Paige Fernandez-Hohos split her time between those two campuses and the battered Robinson Elementary, scrambling busses in the morning and walking through her old classrooms that lacked insulation and flooring in the afternoons.

But on Monday, the staff and student body was back under one roof for the first time this school year.

Robinson, which cost $6.5 million to repair, on Monday became the first of seven storm-damaged Houston ISD schools to reopen to students.

The district will rebuild four of those damaged schools  including Kolter, Braeburn, Mitchell and Scarborough elementary schools  at a cost of about $126 million. Meanwhile, Liberty High School has been temporarily relocated to Sharpstown High, and Hillard Elementary is still undergoing renovations.

Fernandez-Hohos said watching students scamper into the school signaled a new beginning.

"It very much feels like the first day, and it's nice that it coincides with the new year," Fernandez-Hohos said. "It's like a fresh start for everybody."

Aside from those schools damaged by Harvey and its floodwaters, three other Houston ISD schools also welcomed students for the first time since renovations and reconstruction projects. Sharpstown High School was rebuilt for $62.8 million and Scarborough High was renovated for $14.6 million as part of the district's 2012 Bond Program. North Forest High School, which was not funded by the bond, opened its new building across the street from its old campus in Northwest Houston. The new school cost $59.5 million.

As students streamed into the reopened Robinson Elementary this week, some walked into classrooms they used last year. Others roamed aimlessly, suddenly strangers in what should have been a familiar school. Teachers and assistant principals were ready to help stragglers get to their correct classrooms.

Students weren't the only ones feeling lost.

For Whitlee Wyche and her family, little has been normal since they stayed dry perched atop furniture in their flooded Tidwell apartment for three days during Harvey.

They moved to an apartment in the Robinson Elementary School zone; four of her children were then bused from the flooded campus to the dry Pleasantville Elementary and Holland Middle schools.

She said that after so much upheaval, it's nice to see her students take another step toward normalcy.

"How do y'all feel about going back to this school?" she asked her car full of fidgeting elementary schoolers.

Her kids were suddenly shy, but 5-year-old Paris gave a thumbs up.

At the entrance to the school, special education teacher Evonnu Rasmus could barely contain her excitement. As kids began shuffling into the school's lobby, she closed her eyes and wrapped several in hugs.

"We're just happy  almost to the point of tears. We're so happy to see them back at our school," Rasmus said. "There's nothing like home, there's nothing like home. I'm still trying to hold back the tears. I'm just so happy to see them."

But not all of the former Robinson Elementary students returned Monday, even though many had registered that morning and in the weeks before winter break.

Fernandez-Hohos said the school usually counts about 700 students, but after the storm, only about 550 returned or enrolled from other schools.

Among those who did not return were Julian and Leila Herrera.

In mid-September, the siblings toured Pleasantville Elementary and Holland Middle to see where Robinson students had been relocated. The family had moved about 30 minutes away from both the original Robinson campus and its relocated classrooms. After only a couple days of rushed commutes, their parents decided to enroll them in a school closer to their temporary home.

Arlett Herrera, Julian and Leila's mother, said the family had hoped to be back in their flooded home by the holidays. But working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and insurers has proved more time-consuming and laborious than she imagined.

Next year, Leila will be in fifth grade. Her mom still doesn't know where Leila will finish elementary school.

"I'm lost," Herrera said. "Do I keep them there or put them back in Robinson? It will be Leila's last year, and she made a lot of good friends at Robinson.
A Houston teen is in custody after police say he accidentally shot his girlfriend while fiddling with a pistol last week.

Ezra Carter, 18, was charged with aggravated assault of a family member after turning himself in on Friday.
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WASHINGTON  The Trump administration announced Monday it will end special protections for Salvadoran immigrants next year, a decision that could lead to the expulsion of as many as 200,000 people, many of them from the Houston area.

The long-anticipated decision came from newly-appointed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who said the special status, known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), will cease on Sept. 9, 2019.

The 18-month delay was designed for an "orderly transition," the administration said in a statement. It also will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative fix for those who will either be required to leave the country or be deported.

Now Playing: The Trump administration will end the relief program that grants TPS to immigrants from El Salvador, leaving nearly 200,000 vulnerable to deportation. Nathan Rousseau Smith (@FantasticMrNate) reports. Video: Buzz 60

The decision comes as President Donald Trump and congressional leaders are negotiating continued protections for some 800,000 "Dreamers"  young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children.

CRACKDOWN: Trump moves to end 'catch and release', prosecuting parents and removing children who cross border

Their special status under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, is slated to end in March, unless Congress intervenes.

El Salvador is now the fourth country whose citizens will lose have lost Temporary Protected Status under the current administration, joining Nicaragua, Haiti and Sudan.

Until now, Salvadorans had been considered the largest beneficiaries of the program, which provides special legal status for people whose countries have been affected by natural disasters, war or political tumult.

The protections were granted to citizens of El Salvador after a 2001 earthquake that killed more than 1,000 people. The Obama administration temporarily extended the protections in 2016, setting up Monday's deadline for another extension.

DEEPER UNDERGROUND: Businesses feel the pinch as undocumented consumers limit shopping expenses

Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee called the decision "cruel" and said that as many as 36,000 people could be affected in Texas.

"El Salvador, a violence-torn Central American nation, suffered catastrophic damage in the 2001 earthquake that launched a humanitarian crisis," she said "According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious organizations, 'El Salvador is in no position to accommodate the return of roughly 200,000 Salvadorans' because of violence, food insecurity and lasting devastation from natural disasters.'"

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said there are over 80,000 people from El Salvador who live in the city, and that 19,000 of them will be directly affected by the end of TPS. "Many of them own businesses and work in our service industries," Turner said. "They contribute $1.8 billion to the Texas GDP."

Outside of Houston, the decision is expected to cause shock waves for large populations of Salvadorans in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. In recent years, thousands more have entered the country illegally through Mexico along with others from Central American fleeing violence and poverty.

Activists on both sides of the immigration debate reacted forcefully.

"These individuals are taxpayers and employers. They are homeowners, good neighbors and parents of American children," said UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguia. "Yet, despite a chorus of opposition from elected officials and business, religious, civil rights and community leaders around the nation and around the globe, the Department of Homeland Security has moved forward with a decision that does nothing more than harm our country, our allies, and endanger the lives of individuals who are making measurable contributions to this country."

Murguia urged Congress to take action to extend the status for the Salvadorans. Other critics of the decision noted that the State Department currently has a travel warning for Americans considering travel to El Salvador.

But advocates for limited immigration welcomed the decision.

"By ending the Salvadoran TPS, Secretary Nielsen has taken a major step toward saving the TPS program so it can be used for future emergencies," said NumbersUSA President Roy Beck. "The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the 'temporary' protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration."

El Salvador President Salvador Sanchez Ceren spoke by phone Friday with Nielsen to renew his plea to extend special status for Salvadorans seeking refuge in the U.S., according to the Associated Press.

DEEPER UNDERGROUND: Fearing deportation, undocumented immigrants in Houston are avoiding hospitals and clinics

Among those directly impacted was Cristian Chavez Guevara, a 37-year-old Salvadoran TPS holder from Houston, who said the program changed his life after he first entered the U.S. illegally. "I was able to get a license, pay taxes, and my life finally seemed to feel normal," he said. "Since then, I've been building dreams for the future and working to pave a more promising path forward for my family. All of that has come to a halt today."

Guevara said the impact will be felt in both countries. "The economic situation in El Salvador is very bad," he said. "Organized crime controls the streets and neighborhoods. As TPS holders, we help fill economic needs for our families back in El Salvador. But, all of our dreams and hopes ended today."

STRANGERS IN THEIR HOMELANDS: Trump's deportees are often preyed upon by gangs

Guevara added that his own family will be torn apart, noting that his fiancee is a legal resident. "I have also raised my cousin because her mother was deported when she was young," he said. "What am I going to do now? How am I going to tell them I have to go?"

The decision is likely to add another contrast in the 2018 race between Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican and a hard-liner on immigration, and Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso who opposes Trump's proposed border wall.

O'Rourke criticized the Trump administration's decision on Twitter, calling TPS a "bipartisan tradition of extending these protections. Without them, thousands of families who have contributed so much to our communities will have their lives thrown into chaos. This is wrong."

Cruz's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In rendering her decision, Nielsen said that conditions in El Salvador have improved sufficiently, determining that "the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist."

She cited millions of dollars in international aid since the earthquake that helped finance water and sanitation projects and reopen schools, roads and hospitals damaged by the quakes.

She also noted that the U.S. government has repatriating more than 39,000 Salvadorans in the last two years  which the administration takes as evidence that the country of 6.2 million is able to handle the return of its citizens.

Salvadorans in the United States who benefited from TPS may still receive other protections for which they might otherwise be eligible under immigration law.

Salvadorans with TPS will be required to re-register for the program and apply for employment authorization in order to legally work in the United States until the termination of El Salvador's TPS designation.

-- Washington Correspondent Bill Lambrecht contributed to this report.

***

A NEW AMERICA: President Donald Trump has empowered federal authorities to deport immigrants here illegally, promised to punish so-called sanctuary cities and is pushing Congress to start funding a complete wall along our southern border. Fearful of being exposed and sent back to countries that may no longer be familiar or welcoming, immigrants are withdrawing even more into the shadows. The worry extends to their spouses and children, who, in many cases, are American citizens. Click here to read our series "A New America" on our subscriber website, HoustonChronicle.com.








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One of the country's most-popular Japanese ramen chains has filed suit against some like-minded ramen shops in the Houston-area.

Jinya Ramen was founded by Tomo Takahashi in Tokyo, Japan in 2000. The chain came to the United States a decade later first making its mark on the West Coast before heading east.

RELATED: Ninja Ramen owner expanding to Garden Oaks with new restaurant Flying Pho

According to the Southeast Texas Record, lawyers for Jinya filed suit against Ramen Fun, Mikoto, and Atsumi in Cypress on Jan. 4, arguing that the defendants stole its intellectual property and trade dress.

Jinya also says that in particular Ramen Fun allegedly copied its menu and employee uniforms soon after Jinya opened up for business in the area.

The first Jinya in Houston opened near Egret Bay Boulevard in October 2014. A location in Houston's Midtown district opened its doors in 2015. There are now five locations in the Houston market.

Now Playing: Any ramen lover will tell you--it's all about the broth. We build layers of rich umami flavor with the help of mushroom stems, fresh ginger, kombu (a type of edible kelp), sesame oil, and, of course, low and slow heat. Video: MyRecipes

The nationwide chain is asking for unspecified monetary damages, according to the suit.

RELATED: Lyric Market culinary hall to open fall 2018 in downtown Houston

Japanese ramen is known for having a thick, pork-based broth and is miles different from the instant ramen noodles with which most people are familiar. One of the most popular styles, Tonkotsu, is a specialty at Jinya. The noodles are aged for three days and the broth is simmered for 10 hours.

The dish has its roots in China, brought back to Japan from soldiers who fell in love with the traditional Chinese street food.

Chron.com reached out to Jinya Ramen for further comment on Monday but has yet to hear back.

Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.
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AUSTIN  Infighting over the heart and soul of the Republican Party boiled over on social media this week as two well-known GOP House members took shots at each other on Twitter over a primary election in southwest Houston.

Rep. Jonathan Stickland, a conservative Republican from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, tweeted pictures Thursday night of his paid campaign staff knocking on doors in Houston for moderate Republican Rep. Sarah Davis's primary challenger, Susanna Dokupil.

"Response so far: Overwhelmingly positive," wrote Stickland.

Davis, who has been under political attack by Gov. Greg Abbott and other conservatives for months, shot back with a meme of Stickland with his 2008 quote: "Rape is non existent in marriage, take what you want my friend!"

Stickland made the comment in a joke online and later apologized  and continued to do so repeatedly in responding to Davis' meme, which she reposted multiple times on Twitter.

"I've apologized 4 stupid comments I made in my younger years, have u publicly apologized for your horrendous liberal voting record?" he responded, adding questions about whether she apologized for her positions on abortion, property tax reform and the minimum wage.

The exchange between Davis and Stickland is the latest example of increased tension in the fight for the direction Texas Republican Party. Stickland, Abbott and others are hoping to edge out the West University Place Republican from the Texas House in favor of a more conservative member and shifting the overall chamber to a deeper shade of red. Meanwhile, House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate whose leadership team helped block hot button conservative legislation like the so-called bathroom bill, has vowed to do everything he can to help Davis win reelection.

"My race is definitely probably bigger than just me. It probably is about where the party's going to go," said Davis. She said it is unusual to see people from outside her district campaigning in her neighborhoods, which she added is a sign politics are becoming more divisive there.

Davis, a member of House leadership who was first elected in 2010, is facing a trying primary election after becoming the target of conservatives who argue she is too liberal. Her district has supported her over four election cycles, although voters favored Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 15 points in the 2016 presidential election.

Davis drew the ire of Abbott during a special legislative session in 2017. During the session, Davis opposed nearly all of Abbott's legislation, including regulating bathroom usage for transgender people, increasing abortion regulations and establishing private school vouchers.

Instead, she called out the governor for not prioritizing legislation that would restore funding for therapy for young children with disabilities and called on the governor to add ethics reform to his agenda. The governor's office then accused her of "showboating."

"The governor is obviously angry at the House because he didn't get everything he wanted out of the special session," she said. "Why he singled me out, I couldn't tell you. I really don't know."

Other Republicans have gotten in the mix to push out Davis, including Stickland, a vocal member of the House's conservative Freedom Caucus known for his agitating style. The group of about a dozen lawmakers have pushed to replace moderate and business-minded Republicans with hard right conservatives who want to shrink government and fight abortion.

"Sarah Davis has been a chief captain for killing conservative legislation in the Texas House and then coming back home to say she tried," said Stickland. "Governor Abbott deserves support for his agenda, an agenda millions of Texans voted for, yet Sarah Davis is a chief captain to defeat Governor Abbott's agenda. Republicans need to know this."

In the past, governors typically avoid engaging much in lower-level races, however Abbott endorsed Davis' opponent, Susanna Dokupil, CEO of Paladin Strategies, a Houston-based strategic communications firm. She worked for Abbott as assistant solicitor general and handled religious liberty issues while he served as Texas attorney general before his election as governor.

The race in District 134 has attracted attention from other outsiders, including Texans for Vaccine Choice, a parent group concerned with government-required vaccinations. The group is regularly at odds with Davis, who has pushed to prove the effectiveness of vaccines, and a fan of Stickland's.

The group conducted an online fund-raiser for Dokupil on Facebook Friday and its members have also knocked doors in the district, said Jackie Schlegel, executive director of Texans for Vaccine Choice.

Early voting for the March 6 primary begins Feb. 20. The winner of the election will go on to face the Democratic nominee in the November general election.

Andrea Zelinski covers state government, politics and the courts for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. Send her tips at andrea.zelinski@chron.com.
Bunker Hill

12/23/17 at 1800 Hours. 11900 Block of Cobblestone. Fraud. Victim reported that he received a credit card in the mail for a new account at Home Depot. When he inquired with the store, he learned that an account had been opened with a high credit limit and that someone had attempted to make a purchase. However, their charge was declined. Information was obtained and provided to detectives for a follow-up.

12/23/17 at 1815 Hours. 11900 Block of Cobblestone Fraud/Credit Card Abuse. While investigating the above listed incident, officers learned of a neighbor who was also notified of a credit card being opened in his name and that had been used at a Home Depot in Pearland, TX. Charges were in excess of $4000. Information was obtained about this incident was also provided to detectives.

12/23/17 at 1845 Hours. 11900 Block of Cobblestone Fraud/ Credit Card Abuse. Officer was dispatched to the above address in reference to a credit card fraud. This victim also reported being notified of 2 credit cards being opened in his name and both had been used at a Home Depot and a Lowes. Information was obtained and forwarded to detectives.

(Note: Detectives are looking into similarities in the above cases as a possible case of a prior mail theft as being the method of identity theft)

12/24/17 at 1530 Hours. 200 Block of Warrenton. Disturbance. Officers were dispatched to the area in reference to a disturbance and possible argument. Upon arrival officers learned that the subjects had been involved in verbal disagreement only. No violence had occurred.

12/25/17 at 1845 Hours. 200 Block of Bunker Hill Road. Disturbance. Officers were dispatched to a possible domestic disagreement situation. Upon arrival, officers learned that the subjects had been involved in an argument, however, one party had already left the house. The party still present did not want any charges or additional investigation and only wanted the other subject to be spoken to about his behavior.

12/28/17 at 1615 Hours. 11900 Block of Cobblestone. Fraud/Identity Theft. Victim reported receiving information from his credit monitoring service that 2 credit cards had been opened in his name and used to make purchases at a Home Depot. Information was obtained and provided to detectives for follow-up investigation.

12/31/17 at 1715 Hours. 400 Block of Blalock. Officers were dispatched in reference to the burglary of a habitation. Upon arrival officers observed where a suspect had forced entry into the unoccupied residence by kicking out a rear window. The suspect apparently cut him/herself upon climbing through the window into the property. Once inside the home, a TV and a package (gift) with unknown contents was taken. Investigators recovered the blood evidence, shoe prints and fingerprints. The investigation is on-going. (Note: The alarm system was not active and it is unknown exactly when the crime occurred)

1/2/18 at 1315 Hours. 11600 Block of Green Oaks. Fraud. Victim reported that upon receiving his credit card statement he observed numerous unauthorized charges made to amazon on his account. Information about the charges were obtained and provided to detectives for follow-up investigation.

Piney Point

12/28/17 at 1730 Hours. 11400 Block of Memorial drive. Theft by Fraud. Victim reported that he learned that an unknown person had hacked into a family email account and requested through his accountant that a check be cut and sent to a business in Florida. The check has since cleared; however, it was never authorized. A check of the originating email shows it to be fraudulent. Investigation is continuing.

1/4/18 at 2145 Hours. 11500 Block of Memorial Drive. Officer initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle after observing a traffic violation. Through the course of conducting an investigation, officer found the 2 rear occupants to be in possession of narcotics and a firearm. Both were arrested and booked into the Harris County Jail.

Hunters Creek

12/27/17 at 1800 Hours. 100 Inman Oaks. Attempted Fraud. Victim reported receiving a call from his bank advising that a subject had just inquired if a check made out under the victim's name was good. When he was told "no" he left the bank. A check of the victim's accounts showed no other activity. Information was collected and provided to detectives for a follow-up investigation.

12/28/17 at 1630 Hours. 100 Block of Stage Stop. Theft. Victim reported that unknown suspects in a red Ford Explorer stole a backpack leaf blower from a landscaping job site. Only a limited description of the vehicle was available. Information was provided to detectives about the theft. Detectives are checking area Pawn Shops and nearby surveillance systems.

12/30/17 at 0001 hours. 8525 Katy Freeway. Criminal Mischief. Officers were dispatched to a disturbance involving a male and a female. Up on arrival officers learned that after being involved in an argument with her boyfriend the female entered the business where the clerk locked the door in order to keep the belligerent male outside. The male became upset and punched the window causing it to break. The male agreed to pay for the window and made arrangements with the store. A report was written documenting the incident.
The newly appointed U.S. attorney took his oath of office Monday in Houston, assuming the role of chief federal law enforcement officer for a swath of Texas that stretches from the Louisiana border to Laredo.

Ryan Patrick, 38, a private attorney, former state district court judge and son of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, was long considered the front-runner for the post. He is new to the federal court system, having submitted his credentials to the federal bar one week before Donald Trump's inauguration last January.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, presided over the ceremony in her stately wood-paneled courtroom where formal portraits of current and former judges line the walls. She thanked Acting U.S. Attorney Abe Martinez for his service "despite the uncertainties of the comings and goings" of his predecessor and successor and he stood by during the oath. Five judges, the clerk for the district, probation officials, a few federal public defenders, a couple dozen assistant U.S. Attorneys and support staff also watched from the gallery.

None of Patrick's family members were in attendance. A formal investiture ceremony for the entire district will likely be held in late February or early March, Patrick later said.

Referencing an injury that forced her to use a walker, Rosenthal warmed up the crowd noting that the new U.S. attorney is ready and able.

"Mr. Patrick brings energy, enviable youth ... a strong set of legs and a willing heart to the task that lies ahead," she said. "It's not an easy task and it's not an easy district."

"It's never true that a U.S. attorney has an easy path. There are difficult situations, hard issues and challenges," the presiding judge said. "We are by geography, by time, by accidents of history, by politics with the big p and the little p, we're on the front lines. That puts you in really interesting position."

Acknowledging the room was packed with seasoned federal court players, she said, "We are ready to assist you and make life harder for you when we should," which elicited chuckles.

Patrick, in a formal suit with a red and white tie, did not make a statement beyond telling Rosenthal he was ready to begin the oath.

Afterward he told the Houston Chronicle, "I'm excited to be back to work for the people of Texas."

"Except for last year I've spent my whole professional legal career in public service," he said. "And I was eager to get back to it."

Patrick said the structure to perform the work before him is mostly in place. "Nothing needs to be blown up and reinvented," he said. "This is a great district with great people... with very interesting challenges and with the resources and people we have, we're going to meet every one of those challenges."

The position previously held by career prosecutor Ken Magidson handles civil cases and criminal matters amid one of the busiest dockets in the nation, which includes an international border, a major city, a major port and Magidson noted recently, the federal government touches everything in those sectors.

The state's two Republican U.S. senators said upon his formal appointment last month that Patrick is well prepared for the task.

Patrick was narrowly defeated in his bid for reelection, one of several Republican Harris County state district judges swept out of office by Democrats in November 2016.

Patrick spent the past year running his own law firm and doing criminal defense work as senior counsel for the firm HooverSlovacek. He was a state district court judge between 2012 and 2016, and before that served as an assistant district attorney for Harris County. He earned degrees from Baylor University and South Texas College of Law Houston.

In a recently updated Twitter profile, he describes himself as a "Christian, Husband, Father, Baylor Bear. US Attorney for the Southern District of Texas. Former state judge." He lives with his wife and three children in Houston.

The Southern District of Texas includes Houston, Galveston, Victoria, Corpus Christi, Brownsville and Laredo. The district sees a huge influx of immigration, drug and human trafficking cases each year and oversees expansive Medicare fraud and white-collar investigations.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com
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WASHINGTON  As the days wound down on 2017, the promise of a simple, fairer tax code got more complicated.

The sweeping tax cuts that Congress passed just before Christmas capped a tumultuous first year for President Donald Trump, and a career capstone for Texas U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican from The Woodlands.

As chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Brady had been outlining an ambitious tax reform package for more than two years  long before Trump became the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee.

But the endgame of the negotiations focused on the Senate, where Republicans had a slim two-vote majority.

"If anybody decided to withhold their vote, and certainly with two deciding to withhold their vote, that would have doomed our efforts," said Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

RELATED: For Texas, GOP tax bill has its hits and misses

As GOP Majority Whip, Cornyn was the man, on paper at least, most responsible for keeping Republicans in line. That meant the political care and feeding of every senator in the caucus.

"It was a matter of working through the objections and concerns of individual senators, and I don't have to tell you that the tax code is enormously complex," Cornyn said in an interview, "and we were concerned with both the intended and unintended consequences."

As originally envisioned, the blueprint Brady produced with House Speaker Paul Ryan, called "A Better Way," held out the hope of fewer and lower tax brackets, a code so simple, devoid of special interest "loopholes," most people could do their taxes on post cards.

But in Congress nothing is simple.

The final product that came out of months-long negotiations among Republican lawmakers actually increased the number of tax brackets from seven to eight, preserved or introduced new tax breaks for businesses, and curtailed but did not eliminate popular middle-class tax deductions for state and local taxes, including the interest write-off for mortgage loans.

In the end, Cornyn and Brady could say that the vast majority of Americans will see their tax liability reduced, at least initially before some of the individual tax cuts expire. But as always, there were compromises.

"Throughout our nearly seven-year journey on tax reform, we've had to make many choices," Brady told his fellow tax writers as the tax bill headed for final passage in December. "We rejected simply tweaking Washington's monstrous tax code and just calling it a day. Instead we put it all on the table and went bold for the American people."

Critics saw much of the same, including a host of business-friendly measures that would dwarf the average middle-class family's $2,100 tax savings. One of them was extending the "carried interest" loophole that benefits Wall Street hedge fund managers, a perk that Trump had campaigned against.

In a testy television interview on the morning of the bill's final passage, Brady called it an "ancillary" issue that most Americans "can care less about."

But that was hardly the first compromise in the hard-fought tax bill, a historic milestone that Trump was eager to notch by Christmas.

"At the end of the day, the most important thing was to get tax reform done," said Courtney Alexander, a spokeswoman for the American Action Network, a center-right group that sunk $24 million into a public campaign to pass the tax bill. "Not a year from now, but quickly so that people could see the result."

One of the first compromises involved Brady's promise that tax reform should be "revenue neutral," meaning that, for the most part, rate cuts would be offset by new revenues drawn from closing special tax credits and deductions.

The tax bill Trump signed at the end of December, the first major legislative breakthrough of his presidency, is estimated to add $1.5 trillion to the nation's debt over the next decade, though Republicans argue that the budget hole will largely be filled with new revenues from job creation and business growth.

The first sign of retreat on the revenue neutral pledge came last summer when the House leaders' plan for filling the gap  a new 20 percent "border adjustment" tax on imports  ran into a maw of opposition from retailers and conservatives who balked at any kid of a tax increase as part of a GOP reform plan.

"It's a no-starter," said Austin area Republican Roger Williams, who introduced his own tax plan in April. "It's a tax increase."

The White House, after initially wavering, eventually jettisoned the idea  though not until Brady had become the national spokesman for the border tax, which was supposed to close a $1.2 trillion revenue gap.

With the death of the border tax, it became increasingly clear that the original promise of a revenue neutral tax bill could stop the whole tax reform project dead in its tracks.

By fall, prominent GOP voices, among them Texas U.S. Sen Ted Cruz, were arguing forcefully that "revenue neutral" had to go.

"Tax reform does not need to be revenue neutral," Cruz said in a major speech in September at the influential Tax Foundation.

Revenue neutral, in its traditional meaning, Cruz argued, meant the government would simply maintain Americans' overall tax burden, "just shifting money from one pocket to another."

Cruz and his conservative allies maintained that tax reform needed to take into account the expected economic spurt of tax cuts. That concept, called "dynamic scoring" quickly carried the day, allowing congressional leaders to brush off "static" projections of lower revenue based on previous tax law.

RELATED: How will tax overhaul affect Houston economy, real estate market?

Now the Republicans could just assume more revenue growth from an up market, a disputed proposition among independent economists.

Andrew Harnik/STF

The art of compromise

Other compromises would follow.

The House draft of the tax bill, largely shaped under Brady, did not cut the income tax rate for the nation's top earners.

The revenue saved by leaving the top 39.6 rate in place would pay for other tax cuts, while inoculating Republicans against the charge that they were merely doing the bidding of the super-wealthy like Trump.

But that populist message succumbed to supply-siders in the Senate, principally Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, a chief negotiator who argued that traditional GOP orthodoxy called for across-the-board tax cuts. That included those at the top of the income ladder  those whose tax savings would presumably foster investment that would benefit working Americans.

Democrats, who uniformly opposed the tax bill as a deficit-funded giveaway to the rich, called it "trickle down"  a derisive term harkening back to the days of Ronald Reagan, the last president to preside over a major tax overhaul in 1986.

But Senate Republicans stuck to their philosophy, dropping the top individual rate to 37 percent, a difference that could mean tens of thousands in savings for some of the nation's wealthiest people, especially those in high tax states who were losing most of the deductions they had enjoyed from their state and local taxes.

At the same time, Trump had been pushing for a drop in the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent  well below the 20 percent in Brady's original plan. But needing to fit the bill's "static score" within an agreed-upon $1.5 trillion limit, lawmakers at first stuck to 20 percent, and then eventually settled on 21 percent.

The $1.5 trillion tax cut limit was the result of another critical decision: To skirt a likely Democratic filibuster in the Senate, which would take 60 votes, Republicans were forced to use a budget maneuver limiting the size of the projected deficit.

Democrats, feeling frozen out, complained of a dearth of public hearings.

Still, there was dissention in the Republican ranks, and with a paper-thin majority in the Senate, GOP leaders could ill afford defections. "We had the experience of the failed vote on the Affordable Care Act staring us in the face," Cornyn said. "Everybody understood the importance of getting this done."

To help get there, the American Action Network, the largest outside group pushing the tax bill, quietly convened a series of weekly meetings of top House, Senate, White House leaders, along with representatives from a host of conservative groups.

"There was always someone from each faction in the room at these meetings," Alexander said.

One near-fatal defection was that of Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, who harbored reservations about the size of the deficit. He wanted a "trigger" that would reverse the tax cuts to the tune of $350 billion if deficit projections grew in the coming years.

For Cruz and other uber-conservatives, that idea was a non-starter. Corker's plan had to go, and in a frantic overnight showdown on the Senate floor, Cruz won the fight. "It really was a battle to see who could persuade the (GOP) conference," he said.

Some tax bills to rise

Other brush fires had to be put out, principally those set by Republican lawmakers in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California. Many saw that their constituents would actually face higher federal tax bills if they lost their relatively substantial state and local tax deductions.

The specter of net tax increases in a tax cut bill was sobering, particularly for enthusiastic tax cutters like Cruz.

Brady, heading up the House delegation in Senate-House negotiations, ultimately had to settle for capping, not eliminating, the deductions for state and local taxes. The negotiations also resulted in a revised cap on the mortgage interest deduction, dropping it from $1 million to $750,000 of loan value.

The final bill also increased the exemption amount from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which is supposed to limit how much the well-to-do can write off with credits and deductions.

On the business side of the tax code, negotiators decided to eliminate the AMT for corporations altogether, another tax benefit designed to stimulate the economy  the GOP's guiding principle.

Another hard-fought provision would allow businesses to immediately write-off the costs of new equipment. While popular with some business interests, it was anathema to others, who feared the loss revenue would keep tax writers  operating under the $1.5 trillion cap  from dropping overall tax rates further.

"We oppose any provision that stands in the way of lower rates," said Freedom Partners vice president Nathan Nascimento.

But the push for lower corporate tax rates gave rise to new fairness concerns, particularly for small businesses.

That concern was championed by Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, who lobbied successfully for the first-ever 20 percent deduction for "pass-through" businesses, those that pay taxes through their owners' personal returns.

While intended as a boon to small businesses, the change also helps mega-real estate conglomerates, including Trump's real estate empire. Another crunch-time change preserved a tax break that benefits pipeline companies, further exposing Cornyn  the official GOP vote getter  to criticism from the bill's opponents.

Cornyn dismissed the charge of favoritism, saying the attack "would make a Russian intelligence officer proud."

Amid growing criticism of the multiplying benefits for the wealthy, a pair of Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, finally threatened to hold out unless the GOP plan put more money into the child tax credit. It was a middle-class, family-friendly proposal that ultimately held sway.

Along the way, Cruz succeeded in adding a tax break for private and home-school families, though the benefit for home-schoolers was eventually struck down on technical grounds.

Zach Gibson /Bloomberg

Obamacare repeal

The final controversy of the tax bill was perhaps the most significant: the repeal of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, a pillar of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul that required most Americans to buy health insurance.

Cruz, an outspoken critic of Obamacare, said he probably had the support of only a half-dozen senators when he first sought to make repeal of the mandate part of the tax plan. Some saw it as a poison pill, but in the end the entire GOP caucus went along.

While repealing the mandate freed up revenue for more tax cuts  the government would save money on insurance subsidies for low-income Americans  it created on final compromise: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine would extract a promise that, in exchange for her vote, Republicans would support separate legislation to shore up the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, whose prices are expected to increase without the individual mandate.

As a new legislative year begins, it remains to be seen if that final deal will stick.

Cornyn called the tax bill end-game the most difficult legislative work of his 15 years in the Senate.

"We all had concerns about the optics of this because we knew this was going to be criticized as tax cuts for the rich, and we were determined to make this benefit all tax brackets," he said.

If there's simplicity in the end, he said, it will come from fewer Americans having to itemize deductions on their tax returns  largely owing to a doubling of the standard deductions and child tax credits.

"The major simplification was that now only about one out of 10 taxpayers have to itemize," he said, "and previously it was about three out of 10."

Cruz, who ran for president on a flat-tax platform, said his biggest regret is that the tax cuts weren't made deeper and more permanent. But he allowed that compromise was critical to success.

"Getting all the pieces together to get everyone to yes was a complicated endeavor," he said.

But he pronounced himself satisfied with the final product: "If we were able to reduce taxes and allow 90 percent of taxpayers to fill out their taxes on a postcard, that's a good thing."
Carolyn Kaster/STF

The two greatest presidents in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's lifetime have been Ronald Reagan and the first year of Donald Trump's presidency, the Houston Republican said in a radio interview this morning in which he repeatedly defended the president's intellect.

"He is one of the smartest people I have ever met in politics," Patrick, 67, told North Texas radio host Mark Davis on 660 AM. "He's able to analyze things so quickly."
Ramanan Krishnamoorti envisions a world where accidents like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be prevented.

So more than a year ago, Krishnamoorti and his team at the University of Houston started working on a predictive model that could alert oil and gas company employees when a problem might arise  and how to mitigate it.

"We are trying to apply fundamental science and engineering processes to predict when a catastrophic event might occur and to develop new methodologies to monitor the process," said Krishnamoorti, the school's chief energy officer and director of its Subsea Systems Institute.

And last month, the team received $1.2 million from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's Gulf Research Program to continue their research. Prior to this grant, the project was funded by $50,000 from the institute, created in 2015 to find ways to reduce the risk of offshore accidents and oil spills following the 2010 accident.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by BP, exploded in April 2010, killing 11 crew members and pouring an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Academies handed out a total of $10.8 million to six projects, including Krishnamoorti's, last month to improve "understanding and management of systemic risk in offshore oil and gas operations" in response to Deepwater Horizon, according to an organization news release.

Along with Houston's predictive model, the projects include developing better well-sealing techniques, better tools to assist decision making in that environment, and better remote detection capabilities, said Kelly Oskvig, program officer for the GRP's Safer Offshore Energy Systems initiative, in the release.

The Deepwater Horizon accident occurred due to an uncontrolled buildup and release of gas, Krishnamoorti said. This happens when gas and water, for example, flow up the drilling pipe along with oil, where it then can explode once it reaches the surface.

Krishnamoorti's team has been working with Mulberry Well Systems LLC on the project since the beginning, said Colin Leach, company president.

"I have always been involved in what we shall call preventative well control ... being able to see what's going on such that one can avoid problems," Leach said. "That's, as far as I'm concerned, way more important than trying to remedy a blow out after it's occurred."

In the next three years, Krishnamoorti expects to have a model that any offshore drilling company can use to warn when gas or water is flowing up the pipe. That is not currently the industry standard, he added.

If workers know when danger is imminent, he said, they could clear the platform or stop production until the problem is resolved.

The goal is to determine "how best we can ensure safe and reliable drilling operations," he added. "We don't want to put people's lives in danger, we don't want to do environmental damage."

Among other things, Mulberry Well Systems will be assisting the university with making the model practical for use, Leach said.

"We can understand a lot but what difference does it make?" Leach said. "How can we put it in place and have it be something that will provide improvement?"

Krishnamoorti said he believes the model likely will be funneled into commercial production, where it would be sold to a company and could be tailored to their specific needs.

"We can mitigate this easily: once you know you have gas coming out you can manage the pressure so you can prevent such an explosion from happening," he said.

Two other Texas universities, University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, are working with Louisiana State University and others in projects tapped by the National Academies as well, the release stated.

Alex Stuckey covers science and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.
The summers final Live on the Waterfront concert was held Wednesday evening at Prince Arthurs Landing. The popular series in Thunder Bay has completed nine weekly shows that began on July 13. Wednesdays concert was unique as it was held one hour later in the evening to mesh with the 10 p.
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BROOK PARK, Ohio -- Council President Mike Vecchio announced city council committee assignments during the Jan. 2 Brook Park organizational meeting. In addition, Mayor Mike Gammella named city commission appointments.

Council members unanimously chose long-time Councilman Rick Salvatore as president pro tempore. Current Building Commissioner Ted Hurst and City Engineer Ed Piatak retain their positions. Clerk of Council Michelle Blazak will remain in her role through January while council members review candidate resumes.

As previously reported, Mark J. Elliott was confirmed as recreation director. Mayor Mike Gammella's proposed appointees for safety director, Scott Adams, and service director, Ron Jordan, will be discussed at the Jan. 16 council caucus, with the possibility of confirmation at the regular council meeting that follows. The mayor told cleveland.com Monday morning he will wait until Jan. 16 to publicly announce his appointments for economic development director and human resources director.

Gammella appointed Robin Way to recreation commission, Chris St. Clair to planning and zoning commission and Terry Gardner to civil service commission. Vecchio's city council committee assignments are as follows: Aviation and Environmental - chairman Carl Burgio, co-chairman Rich Scott, member Edward Orcutt; Finance - chairman Scott, co-chairman Gregory Stemm, member Jim Mencini; Legislative - chairman Mencini, co-chairman Salvatore, member Stemm; Parks and Recreation - chairman Salvatore, co-chairman Mencini, member Brian Poindexter; Planning - chairman Burgio, co-chairman Orcutt, member Stemm; Safety - chairman Stemm, co-chairman Scott, member Mencini; Service - chairman Orcutt, co-chairman Scott, member Mencini; Board of Zoning Appeals - chairman Scott, co-chairman Salvatore, member Mencini.

Salvatore will continue as trustee for Southwest General Health Center and immediate past councilwoman Rachel McDonnell will be council's representative to the Berea Board of Education. Brian Poindexter will serve as board alternate.

Gammella later thanked residents for allowing him to lead Brook Park.

"I intend to work with this community and this council," Gammella said. "My intention and I believe council's intention is to work together over the next four years to move this city forward and act in a professional and expedient manner. I intend to be the best mayor this town has ever had."
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Kichler Lighting of Independence with 400 local employees has agreed to sell to Masco Corp. of Michigan.

Kichler Lighting of Independence is being purchased by Masco Corp. of Michigan.

The 80-year-old company that specializes in interior lighting fixtures is expected to retain the Kichler name and "operate in many ways as a stand-alone business," said Masco spokeswoman Sue Sabo.

That includes not making changes in Kichler's 700-person workforce, 400 of them in Northeast Ohio. "At this time, we do not anticipate relocating or eliminating any positions," she said. Companywide, Masco has 26,000 employees.

The acquisition of Kichler is expected to close by March 31. It is a cash deal. The price was not disclosed.

Kichler Lighting, known formally as L.D. Kichler Co, provides lighting for homes and businesses, as well as ceiling fans and outdoor lighting. Kichler generated $450 million in revenue last year.

Masco recently bought another local business, Mercury Plastics, Inc. of Middlefield. Mercury manufactures water handling systems for appliances and faucets, and other plumbing products. Mercury last year had revenues of $45 million and employs 300 people.

Masco is based in Livonia, Michigan, and focuses on the home improvement and building products space. Its brands include Behr paint; Delta faucets, bath and shower fixtures; KraftMaid cabinets; Milgard windows and doors; and Hot Spring spas.

Of its purchase of Kichler, Masco President and CEO Keith Allman said in a statement: "We are excited about the prospects of expanding Masco's reach into the fragmented $6 billion U.S. residential lighting industry.

"Kichler Lighting is a strong strategic fit with our focus on building products where brand, innovation and strength of distribution provide a competitive advantage," Allman said. "Kichler's products share many of the same customers as numerous other Masco brands and will complement our current product offering while strengthening our relationships with these customers."
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Greg Huth has been hired as Cuyahoga County's deputy chief economic development and business officer.

Huth, who will earn $120,000 a year, replaces Judith Weyburne, whose title was deputy director of development.

Huth, who began his job today, was deputy director of economic development in Cincinnati. He had served as Cleveland's economic development director from 2004 to 2006, then was an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor handling civil cases.

He will report to Ted Carter, chief economic development and business officer, and oversee day-to-day operations and strategic planning, the county said.

"The Department of Development plays a critical role in supporting the residents and businesses of Cuyahoga County," Huth said in a news release. "I look forward to being a part of this dedicated and creative team."
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Anderson Varejao gave Cleveland all kinds of things during his dozen years with the Cavaliers - the Varejao Flop, the Wild Thing wig, etc. But there's on other thing, perhaps more lasting, that he gave to the city:

Jazz guitarist and fellow Brazilian Diego Figueiredo.

"Cleveland is very special for me,'' said Figueiredo in a call to his home in Franca, Brazil. "That is because the first time I went to Cleveland was to visit my friend Anderson Varejao in 2009.

"After that, I met Jim Wadsworth from Nighttown [where he will return for a Wednesday, Jan. 17, gig], and we started a good connection with Cleveland,'' he said. "I would say Cleveland is my main city in the United States for me.''

Most recently, Figueiredo was in town as part of last summer's Tri-C JazzFest. He's a bit leery, then, of the weather when he gets here this winter. After all, the temperature in his hometown the day of the interview was 96 degrees . . . and the temperature in Cleveland was 4 degrees.

Jazz guitarist Diego Figueiredo, left, and his friend and fellow Brazilian Anderson Varejao pose in an undated photo taken during one of the musician's stops in Cleveland to play the city and visit is friend, who spent a dozen years with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Not to worry, though. It'll be hot enough inside Nighttown, for sure, when he unveils his finger-picking style of acoustic jazz guitar.

"I really like to play solo,'' said Figueiredo, who will do just that at Nighttown. "My main ability is to solo. I like to play with a trio or a quartet or a big band - but it's all a different project.

"For example, last year, when I played at the Tri-C JazzFest, I played with bass and drums,'' he said. "I like to do both. With solo, I can show my real ability and put in all my techniques, and with the band, I have to do something more [and] concentrate on the group.''

Only 37, Figueiredo has already released nearly two dozen albums, his first when he was but 17. It's a pretty heady schedule of recording for a fellow who's constantly touring, albeit with side trips home to the warm climes of Brazil to recharge his batteries in his hometown or in the nation's capital, Sao Paulo, where he also has a home.

"I like to keep recording at least one album a year, sometimes two,'' he said. "I try to get some time [in the studio] between tours, and even inside the tour to record some new product.

"Two years ago, I was in Denmark for a tour and . . . I decided to record a new album there,'' said Figueiredo, who is always working on songs and has them ready to record whenever the opportunity presents itself. That's what happened then: The tour had a five-day break, so he went into a studio in Copenhagen and laid down the album "Broken Bossa.''

As much fun as that is, Figueiredo said he prefers being onstage to being in a booth at some studio.

"I like the connection with the audience,'' he said. "When you are in the studio, you are just you - you don't have the feedback of the audience.

"In a live concert, I can feel that connection, and I can play even better in front of an audience,'' he said.

That's an amazing skill, then, given the beauty of his version of jazz, which as you might expect is heavily flavored by the guitar-driven music of his native Brazil.

"My first teacher was my father,'' said Figueiredo. "He played the old traditional music. He was not a professional, but he loved the guitar. He introduced me to it.

His mentor, though, is a doctor from his hometown named Harolda Garcia, whom Figueiredo met when he was just 12 years old.

"Haroldo is one of the greatest musicians I've ever seen in my life,'' he said. "If I had to choose one guy in my life that changed my music, he was that guy.''

Well, him and Anderson Varejao . . . at least as far as Cleveland Brazilian jazz fans are concerned.

Diego Figueiredo

When:

7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17.

Where:

Nighttown, 12387 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights.

Opener:

Moises Borges.

Tickets:

$20, at the door, online at nighttowncleveland.com and by phone at 216-795-0550.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency, has served as a financial lifeline for an Ohio man who is among the United States' most prominent right-wing extremists.

A recent Washington Post report examined how the anonymity and decentralization of bitcoin have helped Andrew Anglin, a Columbus area native who runs a prominent neo-Nazi website, and other members of the racist "alt-right" movement to outmaneuver efforts to choke off their financial support.

In an email, Anglin told cleveland.com that the ongoing campaign to pressure "normal" financial companies from doing business with him and others in the alt-right movement pushed them toward cryptocurrency.

Ironically, the move into cryptocurrency enriched rather than impeded Anglin and his allies, since it coincided with an explosion in cryptocurrency prices. But an official with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-extremist activist group, said the center will follow the alt-right's transition into digital currency.

"Right now, it's the money for haters, gun-runners and fentanyl patch smugglers," said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC's intelligence project. "But if it's going to be a legitimate currency... we'd like to weed people like that out of that business proposition."

Whether Anglin and his allies are able to continue to outfox their foes may hinge on how well they ride the extremely volatile cryptocurrency markets.

For those who are unfamiliar with the basics of bitcoin, here is a quick explainer.

Bitcoin is both a software-based, online payment network and a currency of sorts.

New bitcoins are awarded to network users as a reward for solving complicated math problems, work that helps maintain the network. The bitcoins then can be traded among users participating in the network. The transactions are publicly recorded in the network, showing the individual accounts, known as "wallets," that made them.

Over the past year, the price of bitcoin has risen astronomically

--

from around $1,000 a piece in January 2017 to as high as $19,800 this month, according to Coinbase, a popular online exchange -- as more people have begun to believe in its value and have invested through online exchanges using "real" money as a form of speculation. This has contributed to wildly fluctuating prices that many economists say resemble a classic investing bubble.

There are two inherent qualities of bitcoin that contribute to its popularity. One, because the network for exchanging bitcoin is decentralized, it can't be shut down. Two, while transactions can be tracked by anyone, the owners of the accounts, or wallets, remain anonymous.

Enter Andrew Anglin, 33, who has been quite public in his solicitation of bitcoin contributions to cover the operating costs and legal expenses associated with running The Daily Stormer, the white-supremacist website he founded. (The website's name is a reference to the Nazi propaganda tabloid Der Sturmer.)

Last January, a group of about 40 protesters gathered outside a suburban Columbus medical clinic owned by Anglin's father, according to an article by Columbus Alive, a weekly newspaper. Anglin had advertised the clinic's mailing address as a destination for cash and check donations to the The Daily Stormer.

Shortly after the protest, Anglin, removed references to the Worthington clinic from his website, according to Columbus Alive. He wrote in a post on his website -- replete with anti-Semitic slurs -- that officials from the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully pressured his father to stop accepting the checks by contacting the clinic's landlord.

Anglin also wrote that Coinbase had suspended the bitcoin wallet that the site had created for him. He previously had been banned from using Paypal, the popular online payment processing company.

So, Anglin advertised a new post-office box in Worthington, as well as a new bitcoin wallet that he said could not be shut down.

Anglin told cleveland.com and others that he is in Africa, although a process server for a federal lawsuit filed against Anglin by a woman in Montana said he spotted Anglin in a suburban Columbus grocery store in December. The Montana woman, in allegations similar to another lawsuit in Ohio, accuses Anglin of encouraging his followers to harass and threaten her online.

After racist protests that turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, financial companies such as Paypal banned other alt-right organizations from using their services. GoDaddy, the popular web host, canceled the domain registration for Anglin's website, although for now, it's back online with a new host.

The bitcoin wallet that Anglin advertised in February contains bitcoin worth about $3,600 as of late Monday morning, according to blockchain.info, a site that documents bitcoin transactions. But since the wallet was set up, it has accepted bitcoin worth about $555,000, as of late Monday morning.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is among those who have been tracking transactions within bitcoin wallets that the center believes are tied to Anglin and other white supremacists. The group says it plans to release identifying information for more than 200 of these bitcoin wallets in the near future. About 10 of those accounts are associated with Anglin or the Daily Stormer, said Beirich, the SPLC official.

Transactions into the wallet Anglin advertised have slowed down in recent months. According to Bloomberg, other cryptocurrencies with greater anonymity features than bitcoin are gaining in popularity among criminals and other users seeking to hide their transactions.

In an email to cleveland.com, Anglin declined to comment on his own strategy, but said alt-right figures in general have begun to use more private cryptocurrencies since efforts began to track their bitcoin wallets.

"There is no way we would have gotten into Bitcoin if it were not for the persecution by the SPLC and other lobbying organizations. And no one would have switched to privacy coins if they hadn't created these trackers," Anglin wrote.

Beirich acknowledged the SPLC's success in pressuring traditional financial institutions to cut off support for Anglin and other white supremacists has resulted in an unexpected consequence. The group believes another man who helps Anglin run the Daily Stormer now controls bitcoin wallets worth millions of dollars.

"We now have another problem on our hands," she said. "We're concerned with these guys moving money into cryptocurrencies, and also there's the problem that they're finding themselves coming into considerable wealth."

The SPLC now is focusing on lobbying Coinbase and other cryptocurrency exchanges to ban white supremacists from using their services, Beirich said.

"We're going to reach out to the companies that created the bitcoin wallets. We want to ask them to treat white supremacists as Paypal and the credit-card companies basically are," she said.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - At age 6, Yvonne Lake has begun puberty.

The first grader marches off to school each morning wearing a training bra. And she returns home many afternoons with tearful stories about bullies teasing her about an exposed bra strap or the fuzz above her lip.

Researchers have linked early puberty in girls with obesity, poverty, high stress levels and single-parent homes. Yvonne falls into most of those categories.

Her mother, Juanita, has mental-health issues and does not work. She is raising her daughter alone on $1,000 a month of disability benefits. Most of that money goes toward the rent.

But a tight budget is perhaps the least of the stressors weighing on this mother and child. Over the last year, they have dealt with isolation, sexual abuse and violence inflicted on Yvonne's estranged father.

For several months now, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer have chronicled Juanita's efforts to navigate her daughter through this troubled landscape. The stories have appeared as installments of "A Greater Cleveland," a series about children growing up in poverty. Today, we reprise some of those stories.

Mother's disturbing discovery

Yvonne is usually talkative, but she won't tell her mother what happened one day last year, when she spent a day in the care of one of Juanita's friends. Yvonne turns silent whenever Juanita raises the subject.

But what Juanita does know is of great concern. She recalls walking in to pick up her daughter and seeing her friend's 10-year-old sister caressing Yvonne's chest. A doctor later tells her that Yvonne showed signs of sexual abuse.

Juanita, who was sexually abused by a brother when she was about Yvonne's age, is now reluctant to leave Yvonne with even her most trusted friends and relatives. And she has been unable to find a child-care service that she considers both affordable and trustworthy.

So, when school is out, Yvonne goes pretty much everywhere her mother goes - to the grocery story, to doctor's appointments and to classes mom is taking at Cuyahoga Community College.

Yvonne is tagging along one summer day, when Juanita is shopping and finds a gently used My Size Barbie doll that would make a great Christmas gift for her daughter. Yvonne spots the doll at the checkout counter and becomes excited.

To preserve the element of surprise, Juanita resorts to fib and says the doll is a gift for a cousin.

For lack of wheels

During the school year, Juanita accompanies her daughter to school - on foot. Mother and daughter walk down their pothole cratered street and wind their way up a hill to Yvonne's elementary school.

The half-mile trek, while easier than an alternate route with an even steeper slope, can be daunting during rainy or bitter-cold days.

Juanita explains that she always used to drive her daughter to school. But no longer. That is because her car sits in a police impound lot because she cannot afford the more than $1,400 in fines and fees that she would need to pay to retrieve it.

Juanita has fallen victim to what advocates for court reform say is a criminal justice system that routinely turns a traffic infraction into a mountain of debt for low-income Ohio drivers.

For Juanita, the trouble began one day last year, when police stopped her for a lane violation after she had dropped Yvonne off at school. Making matters worse, Juanita had allowed her insurance policy to lapse when money was tight. She planned to buy a new policy with her next check, but that check didn't come until two days after she was pulled over.

Because she lacked insurance, Juanita also was charged with misdemeanor driving under suspension. That led police to tow her car and confiscate the license plates.

Paying off her court fines and the fees owed to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles would leave Juanita unable to pay the rent and buy groceries. So, more than a year later, the car remains at the impound lot.

Gun violence hits home

Little Yvonne discovers her mother in bed crying one day, and brushing Juanita's dreadlocks out of her face, asks what is wrong.

While unsure about which words to use, Juanita finally gives in to Yvonne's inquiries.

"Your daddy is in the hospital," she says. "Your daddy was shot in the head."

Yvonne hasn't seen her father, Johnny, in more than a year. He hasn't been a regular presence in his daughter's life since she was a toddler. For some of that time, he was in prison for heroin trafficking.

Word of the shooting has come from Juanita's mother, who heard from acquaintances that Johnny was in a hospital. But she has heard nothing about his condition.

Juanita and Yvonne try to see Johnny. But they find themselves stuck in the hospital waiting room for hours because they don't know the password that Johnny's relatives have put in place to discourage unwanted visitors.

Juanita requests the password via Facebook messages to Johnny's family, but receives no responses.

Before leaving, Juanita pulls aside a nurse and hands her a gold-framed photo of Yvonne, accompanied by a hand-written note from the little girl.

"Daddy I love you," the note reads. "I'm a little disappointed, but I understand you're human. When you feel better, I want you to live better. Maybe if you feel like it, come see me and we can just talk."

The nurse promises to read the message aloud to Johnny, and she says she will place the frame in such a way so that he will see Yvonne's face when he wakes up.

A disheartening move

Mother and daughter are forced to move from their Garfield Heights apartment because the landlord is raising the rent by $40 a month, a sum that breaks the family budget.

Juanita pores over Craigslist rental listings and scours local nonprofit databases for affordable housing. To her dismay, the most affordable options are in questionable neighborhoods of Cleveland, the city she grew up in and hoped she had escaped.

She eventually settles on a one-story, two-bedroom in Cleveland's Union-Miles neighborhood. The place is tucked away on a seemingly quiet one-way street with little foot or vehicle traffic.

On moving day, a neighbor tells Juanita that she has chosen a relatively safe block in the neighborhood.

The neighbor points to a field a couple streets away, where gunfire had erupted a few days earlier. He describes the tracks left in the grass from a police chase that followed the shooting.

"Yeah, stay away from that side of the street," the neighbor says. "But this side is usually quiet."

Stress takes its toll

A week or two after being turned away at the hospital without seeing Johnny, Juanita reports that Yvonne is acting up in school. School officials tell her that Yvonne seems angry and is talking back to the teacher.

Juanita decides to pull Yvonne out of class for a few days.

One day at home, Juanita finds Yvonne hitting her teddy bear and screaming into her pillow. She tells her mother that she doesn't want to lose her daddy the same way that she lost her favorite uncle, who had been gunned down in Cleveland the previous summer.

Juanita later reaches out to a former neighbor, who remains in touch with Johnny's relatives. The neighbor tells her that Johnny has been transferred to a long-term-care facility somewhere in Cleveland. He's listed under a pseudonym, so Juanita has no way of tracking him down.

The neighbor says that Johnny can blink once for yes, and twice for no -- but that's about it.

Without contact with Johnny's family, and with Johnny being in a diminished state, Juanita says it could be a long time, perhaps years, before Yvonne will have the chance of reconnecting with her father.

A Greater Cleveland is a project of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. See the entirety of our project by clicking here.

A Greater Cleveland is a call to action to the community to help identify and remove the barriers to success faced by Cleveland children in poverty. For those moved to make donations, we ask that you consider a gift to the United Way of Greater Cleveland, which is focusing on issues of multigenerational poverty that this series will examine. Because of the sensitive family matters discussed in this series, we have provided the people we write about anonymity and are using pseudonyms to identify them.
McCUTCHENVILLE, Ohio -- A father and his young daughter were killed in an early-morning house fire, reports say.

The mother, Lisa Stock, 34, and another daughter, Alana Stock, 1, survived the fire, which occurred at 12:45 a.m. Saturday, the Findlay Courier reports.

Officials tell the Courier that Lisa Stock called 911 to report the fire, saying she was able to get Alana out of the house through a window but that she was stuck inside.

A sergeant with the Wyandot County Sheriff's Department arrived and rescued Lisa Stock, the Toledo Blade reports. Stock then told the sergeant that her husband, Shawn Stock, 37, and another daughter, Avery, 2, were still in the house.

Firefighters were able to get inside and found Avery, who was taken to Wyandot Memorial Hospital. She was pronounced dead at the hospital, the Courier reports.

Shawn Stock died at the scene.

According to the Blade, the fire remains under investigation, but it's believed it was caused by a wood-burning stove in the basement of the home.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.comcrime and courts comments section.
AKRON, Ohio - The University of Akron's law school will offer summer classes for incoming students.

The Summer Start Program will allow students to begin their studies in late May rather than August.

Participants will take two first-year courses. The courses will be held during the 10-week summer semester. They will be scheduled between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Students who participate in the summer session can take a reduced course load during the 2018-19 academic year or take two required classes normally reserved for upper-class students.

A few colleges, including the University of Michigan, offer summer-semester programs for law school students.

Akron's law school will operate the program on a trial basis this summer. The pilot program will accommodate up to 30 students and will include up to $2,500 in scholarship assistance.

Nontraditional students can start their legal studies when they're ready rather than having to wait until August, officials said in a news release. UA students can also begin their law school program in the fall or spring semesters.

Prospective summer-program students are encouraged to apply early to maximize their chances of receiving a scholarship. The application deadline is March 31, 2018. Late applications may be possible depending on space availability.

The program may be canceled if enrollment is insufficient. Students would be notified no later than April 30.

All admitted applicants will be automatically considered for a scholarship. The school received donations to offer scholarships for this summer. If the program is continued, officials hope to raise additional money.
LEECHBURG, Pennsylvania -- A police chief is facing charges after being accused of trying to set up a sexual encounter with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl, reports say.

CNN reports Michael William Diebold, the Leechburg police chief, placed an ad online seeking a "fun, discreet, sub playmate -- m4w."

When a person identifying as a girl, 14, responded to the ad, court records show Diebold responded by saying "everyone has to have a first time ... you will just have to get me naked tomorrow," according to CNN.

The "teen" who responded was an undercover investigator, reports say.

Diebold, 40, was charged Friday with several offenses, including unlawful contact with a minor and criminal attempt to commit involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. Both are felonies.

According to the Post-Gazette, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a statement saying: "This case is particularly heinous because the perpetrator is a public official, sworn to serve and protect the community. We have a zero-tolerance policy for the sexual abuse of children and my office will prosecute any offender to the fullest extent of the law, no matter who they are."

Diebold is being held in Westmoreland County Prison on a bail of $500,000, the New York Times reports. Diebold is scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 16 and will plead not guilty, his lawyer tells the Times.

However, the Times reports court records show Diebold told investigators he knew it was wrong to have sexual contact with a 14-year-old is wrong and said his life was "totally over."

Diebold made news last summer when he lost part of his arm in a fireworks accident, according to the Post-Gazette. He was married 18 days after the accident.

The Leechburg police department has three full-time officers, including Diebold, and 15 part-time officers, reports say.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
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SHELTON  With one structure already taking form, developer R.D. Scinto is continuing work on a three-building, mixed-use development at the corner of Commerce Drive and Bridgeport Avenue.

Its yet another addition to the companys portfolio in Fairfield County, and the Shelton-based agencys chief operating officer Robert A. Scinto said the project is on pace to unveil over 40,000 square feet of retail and medical space at 100 Commerce Drive this spring.

We looked to max out the site with the most square footage we could build, and we went out to the market with this, and it was received very well, Scinto said. We worked very hard to get it leased up. We think its a great corner.

The project is at the site of the former Tetley Tea building across from Walgreens. R.D. Scinto purchased and demolished the building in March to make way for the trio of buildings that will sit on 5.3 acres of land.

More Business Scinto plans shopping center on Sheltons Bridgeport Avenue

A frame of one of the structures is already standing near the entrance of the development with windows installed. According to Scinto, the 6,000-square-foot building will house two restaurants.

The Westport-based Spotted Horse Tavern will be among the tenants in the first building, occupying 5,000 square feet, while the remainder of the space has yet to be leased, Scinto said.

The next portion of the project will be a two-floor, 32,000-square-foot mixed-use building that will house an as-yet-unnamed medical provider on the top floor while several retailers take the lower level.

Among the list of tenants for the main buildings first floor will be sushi restaurant Hunan Pan, liquor store Ninety 9 Bottles and a Robeks location.

The foundation is formed right now; were waiting to get a break in the weather, Scinto said, adding that workers plan to start one of four concrete pours to build a 20-foot wall for the building.

Wrapping up the development will be a stand-alone Starbucks, which Scinto said will be an amenity to the developers other properties in the area like, including on Enterprise Drive not far from the site.

We did this because we wanted to get Starbucks closer to our office tenants, then everything else followed, Scinto said.

This will be one of over 30 properties the real estate agency has developed in Shelton and other parts of Fairfield County. It recently wrapped up construction on an 84,000-square-foot facility for Coopers Surgical in Trumbull and a 21,000-square-foot addition to another Trumbull business Scinto said.

We are working on a handful of deals right now that we hope to get done for ground-up construction, he said.

A leader in local grassroots group Save Our Shelton said he supported the Commerce Drive project, adding that the Tetley Tea building had outlived its purpose and needed to be torn down. The group has voiced its opposition to what it calls over-development in Shelton.

Its getting a nice restaurant, and its getting, hopefully, a small amount of high retail which basically serves the community that they have right there, said Greg Tetro, of Save Our Shelton. I dont think its really as invasive or as large as any of the other ones.

Although he said the development on Commerce Drive was a good look for the location, Tetro said he had concerns about the potential exodus of other retailers that have been in the area for years.

Every time something new comes in, something existing gets hurt, and I hate seeing the existing land owners who have been here for a long time get hurt by the newest latest greatest, Tetro added. My hopes are that it adds to the beauty instead of just tearing something down.
NEW HAVEN - Attorneys defending Newtown from a negligence lawsuit over the Sandy Hook massacre asked a judge on Monday to throw out the complaint, arguing that educators exercised reasonable discretion in the way they responded to the 2012 school shooting.

The teachers didnt create this emergency, and no one could say that they chose a course of conduct that could be considered negligent, attorney Charles Deluca said in Superior Court, referring to the slayings of 20 Sandy Hook schoolchildren and six educators by a gunman five years ago. They did the best that they could, based on limited information.

But attorneys for parents of two children who died in the massacre who are suing Newtown and the school district for negligence argued that the educators were liable for not carrying out the districts emergency lockdown plan.

The teachers were drilled on these guidelines, said Devin Janosov, one of the attorneys for the parents. If the teachers were drilled on the guidelines, it undercuts the argument that they were discretionary.

The hearing, which lasted more than two hours, is one of the last steps before trial. It is up to Superior Court Judge Robin Wilson to decide either to throw out the parents lawsuit or to deny Newtowns motion and allow the case to proceed.

The lawsuit is separate from a higher-profile negligence case brought by 10 families against the gunmaker Remington. That lawsuit was argued late last year in state Supreme Court and is awaiting a ruling.

At issue in the case against Newtown is whether educators were liable for not following the districts lockdown procedure when a 20-year-old named Adam Lanza broke into a locked school by shooting out a plate glass window.

Newtowns attorneys say it was Lanza - and not educators  who were responsible for the worst crime in Connecticut history.

If anything, attorneys said in court on Monday, the slain educators were heroes.

This was split-second decision-making under an emergency, life-threatening situation, Deluca told the judge.

Among the handful of observers in court were First Selectman Dan Rosenthal and former First Selectman, Pat Llodra.

The judge has 120 days to reach a decision. It was not immediately clear when she would rule.
If youre doing it right, entrepreneurship will never get easier, no matter what you accomplish. There will always be new challenges to tackle. Mark Zuckerbergs 2018 New Years challenge is proof of that.

As is his tradition, the Facebook co-founder yesterday shared his New Years resolution on the platform. In 2015, Zuckerberg said he would be reading a new book every other week. 2016 saw him building an AI program to run his home. In 2017, Zuckerberg hit the road on his own version of a listening tour as he traveled to the American states he had yet to visit.

But if his 2017 resolution was a response to, as Zuckerberg characterized it, the tumultuous nature of 2016, it seems that his 2018 challenge is meant to reckon with Facebooks role in contributing to that general feeling. Consider also that 2017 saw both increased scrutiny of Facebooks moderation practices and its general counsel -- along with counterparts at Twitter and Google -- testify before Congress about how the tech platform was used by Russian actors to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Related: Facebook's Content Moderation Rules Are Both Careful and Shocking

In his post, Zuckerberg reflects back on when he started issuing these challenges to himself in 2009. He recalls the difficulties of growing a not yet profitable Facebook in the midst of recession. So heavy did the concerns weigh on him that the then 25-year-old CEO traded in his hoodie for a tie every day. Zuckerberg noted that 2018 feels much like the early days of the company, in that there is still much work to be done, albeit for slightly different reasons.

Whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent, he wrote. My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory. This may not seem like a personal challenge on its face, but I think I'll learn more by focusing intensely on these issues than I would by doing something completely separate.

Related: 21 Weird Things You Didn't Know About Mark Zuckerberg

At the beginning of 2009, Facebook had 150 million active users. As of the end of June 2017, the company had reached the 2 billion mark. If Zuckerberg has his way, that number will only continue to grow. There is no doubt that Facebook is a global force and the events of 2016 and 2017 only served to throw that into sharper relief. But it seems that in order to move forward, Zuckerberg is recentering the companys original mission in his efforts to take on the new challenges ahead, and prevent those challenges from affecting the company's bottom line.

Check out Zuckerbergs full post below.

Related:

Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 Resolution Reveals an Essential Truth About Entrepreneurship

Lo que Zuckerberg ha aprendido de sus propositos de Ano Nuevo

What Do Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett and Other Business Titans Have on Their Desks?



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


In a new column Inge van Lotringen, 46, one of Britains most outspoken beauty editors with over 20 years experience answers your most pressing anti-ageing questions.

Q: Im 67 and have suddenly developed milia (small, white bumps) under my eyes. An eye cream from my local chemist that promised to get rid of them didnt work. Is there anything non-invasive that will?

A: The manufacturer of that eye cream was talking nonsense: milia, tiny cysts filled with keratin (fibrous skin cells), sit so deep in the skin that you cannot squeeze them out yourself and no cream will remove them. Dont despair, though, because you definitely can get rid of them.

An anonymous reader asked for beauty advice on removing milia (file image)

Ive been a beauty journalist for 20 years and the industry has never been better at producing effective solutions for your beauty woes  particularly when it comes to anti-ageing face and body treatments, the area I will be focusing on in this column.

From thinning hair to knee wrinkles, every week I will be answering your questions on anti-ageing procedures in as frank and honest a way as I can.

Ive tried a lot of this stuff and, over the years, suffered sores, burns and bruises in the quest for beauty.

So, I know which treatments will actually work and which ones should make you run a mile!

Which brings me back to your milia. The cream might have been useless, but there are several solutions to your problem  good thing, really, as milia are very common and can occur at any age due to build-up of product or cholesterol in the skin.

Inge van Lotringen (pictured) recommended having milia removed by a professional

They do eventually disappear thanks to the skins natural exfoliation process, but that can take years. So consider having them removed by an experienced and insured aesthetician or doctor. They will lance them with a thin, sterile needle, then push them out  youll only feel a little nip. Its speedy and effective and usually costs from 50.

Dr Vicky Dondos of Londons Medicetics Clinic, in my book one of the UKs best face-perfectors (her client list is packed with models and A-listers), prefers zapping them with radio-frequency waves, delivered via a needle (from 95).

Results are immediate, but always make sure that a medical supervisor is on hand to greenlight the procedure when near the eye  you dont want to be zapped in the retina, she says.

As for skincare, Vicky suggests an eye cream with retinol (an active form of vitamin A that stimulates skin cell growth) or mandelic acid (an apple-derived acid that peels the skins top layers) may help prevent milia and slightly speed up their exfoliation. But start sparingly with these as they can cause irritation.

As a rule, everyone should avoid rich creams with mineral oil or silicones as they increase your chances of developing milia.

Ingeborg van Lotringen is the beauty director of Cosmopolitan magazine.

If you have a beauty problem and want no-nonsense advice you can trust, please email me at inge@dailymail.co.uk.
Australians are no strangers to flying, with more than 1,600 domestic flights being scheduled every day.

This being said, few know what is really going on behind the scenes to get them to their destination.

So to offer some insight, one female airline pilot has opened up about life in the cockpit after flying the skies on domestic and international flights for nine years.

Skyscanner Australia has interviewed an anonymous female airline pilot who has been flying the skies on domestic flights and internationally flights for nine years (stock image )

When it comes to emergencies, not all flight problems are shared with passengers when they happen.

'It depends what the problem is. We dont want to scare people. You cant hide it if you have an engine fire, but thats a very rare occurrence,' the pilot told Skyscanner.

'We are trained to deal with all sorts of situations, so we try to keep people calm. We once had a huge bird strike and there was blood all over the wings but nobody seemed to notice. We didnt tell them.

'We dont want to get people upset. A slight sense that somethings wrong can send people into hyper-drive.'

The pilot shared with the website that not all flight problems are shared with passengers when they happen

Becoming a pilot is no easy process, with the woman explaining that there are typically two routes you can follow - military style training or private training.

The minimum requirement of hours for people to complete is 1,000, with 500 hours of that as pilot in command in a multi-engine plane.

Although the shift work can be difficult, pilots get staff travel rates or industry rates on flights, hotels, car hire and at some theme parks too.

The minimum requirement of hours for people to complete is 1,000, with 500 hours of that as pilot in command in a multi-engine plane

When flying she said that there needs to be a minimum of two pilots on the flight deck: the captain and the first officer.

One will take charge of controlling and maintaining the flight while the other does radio calls and paperwork.

The woman also revealed that pilots aren't flying the plane the entire time that they're in the air.

'It depends on the flying conditions, how rough the weather is, or how tired you are, but typically we fly it for three or four minutes from take off to 5,000 or 10,000 feet and then we engage the autopilot,' she said.

When it comes to meals pilots don't always eat the same as the passengers on board as they often get special crew meals

When it comes to meals pilots don't always eat the same as the passengers on board as they often get special crew meals but on long haul flights they may be given similar food to the people on board.

Additionally, both pilots always eat different meals to reduce the risk of food poisoning and many of them bring their own meals from home.

'Airline food can be monotonous - you can get the same meals every day for one or two months,' she said.
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The focus at this year's Golden Globes is not on the awards themselves - but on the very powerful public debut of the Time's Up movement, an anti-sexual harassment initiative spearheaded by some of Hollywood's biggest and brightest female stars.

But it was not just the ladies making a stand at the 75th annual award ceremony by wearing all-black ensembles - their male peers also did their bit to show support for the movement by proudly opting not to wear traditional white tuxedo shirt in favor of donning totally-black suits.

Justin Timberlake, Ewan McGregor, and William H. Macy were just some of the leading male stars who took to the red carpet at Sunday night's awards ceremony wearing all black - with all three men also adding Time's Up pins to their suit jackets in an added show of support.

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Taking a stand: Several men at the Golden Globes showed their support for the Time's Up movement by wearing all-black, including Justin Timberlake (l) and Ewan McGregor (r)

Showing support: Justin, 36, proudly showed off his all-black look, and his Time's Up pin in a selfie with his wife Jessica Biel

What a hero! Thor star Chris Hemsworth jazzed up his all-black suit with a patterned fabric and velvet shoes

Dapper gents: William H. Macy (l) and Joseph Fiennes (r) also opted to eschew the more traditional white shirt in favor of a black option; both also wore pins

Meaningful: Nick Jonas (l), Kit Harrington (c), and Aziz Ansari (r) all took part in the powerful protest

Support: Nicole Kidman's musician husband Keith Urban joined his wife in supporting the movement with an all-black look

Face off: Gary Oldman (l) and Denzel Washington (r), who were both nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama, had another thing in common at the event - their matching all-black looks

Justin, 36, proudly showed off his poignant choice of ensemble while posing for a selfie with his wife, actress Jessica Biel, which he posted shortly before the ceremony - making sure to add the hashtag #timesup.

And the chart-topping singer was not the only male star who made his sartorial mark on the red carpet.

Thor star Chris Hemsworth, 34, who attended the event without his wife Elsa Pataky, looked incredibly handsome in a patterned silk suit, which he paired with some velvet lace-up shoes - injecting some fun elements to the all-black outfit.

William H. Macy, 67, also made a solo appearance on the red carpet, attending without his wife of 20 years, actress Felicity Huffman, and he too chose to do so in a totally black outfit.

The Shameless actor happily showed off his black outfit as he made his way into the event, even pausing to flash his Time's Up badge to photographers as he posed happily for photographers.

Speaking up: The Handmaid's Tale star O-T Fagbenle (l), Seth Rogen (c) and Sam Rockwell (r) also donned all black - although winner Sam chose not to wear a Time's Up pin

Superstars: Actor and model Garrett Hedlund looked incredibly dapper in his all-black outfit as he took to the stage with Kerry Washington during the evening's event

Statement on-stage: Although Andy Samberg did not walk the red carpet ahead of the event, he did show off an all-black outfit when he took his turn in the spotlight while presenting an award with Amy Poehler

Taking his moment: Twilight star Robert Pattinson also chose to avoid the red carpet - but he made his agenda loud and clear when he took to the stage in his all-black look, complete with a Time's Up pin

A sartorial statement: Actor Richard Jenkins (l) and musician and activist Justin Tranter (r) both opted for all-black - albeit in very different ways

Power couple: Jason Bateman and his wife of 16 years Amanda Anka both followed the statement-making dress code

Black out: Norman Reedus (l) and Edgar Ramirez (r) went all out with their all-black outfits and poignant pin collections

Father figure! Stranger Things co-stars David Harbour, who plays Sheriff Jim Hopper, and Caleb McLaughlin both wore black shirts under their suit jackets - although David chose to add a Time's Up pin to his

British star Joseph Fiennes, 47, was another leading man who plumped for a full black look, adding a Time's Up pin to the pocket of his suit, which was also accessorized with a black pocket square and a black tie.

Keith Urban, 50, and Jason Bateman, 48, both matched their wives in all-black outfits, as did rival nominees Gary Oldman, 59, and Denzel Washington, 63, who were up for the coveted Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama gong.

Although Gary eventually walked away with the top prize for his role in Darkest Hour, the two men both made quite a statement on the evening in their powerful ensembles.

Game of Thrones star Kit Harrington - who was no doubt eager to make a positive impression, after being thrown out of a New York bar during a drunken argument - Nick Jonas, Seth Rogen, Sam Rockwell, Richard Jenkins, and activist Justin Tranter also all made their mark in all-black.

Stranger Things: Three of the young leading stars from the Netflix series - (l-r) Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, and Noah Schnapp - also put pins on

Super star: Tom Hanks was pictured wearing a Time's Up badge, while his wife Rita Wilson put a bold spin on the all-black trend with her embellished dress

Standing together: Host Seth Meyers showed off a pin on his lapel as he arrived with his pregnant wife Alexi Ashe

The must-have accessory: Jude Law (l) and James Franco also joined stood in solidarity with the Time's Up stars

The Greatest Showman: Nominee Hugh Jackman - who is up for Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical or Comedy - also added a pin to his jacket

One step further! This Is Us star Chris Sullivan (l) added both a pin, and black nail polish, to his look for the evening, while Sebastian Stan (r) chose just to wear a badge

Dapper duds: (l-r) Daniel Kaluuya, Bradley Whitford, and Freddie Highmore all looked very handsome in their pin-adorned suits

And even those who didn't wear all black found a way to make a stand.

Best actor nominee Hugh, 49, who is up for his appearance in The Greatest Showman, went for a more traditional white-and-black tuxedo, but proudly added the Time's Up pin to his pocket.

Young Stranger Things stars Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, and Noah Schnapp all also wore the pins; interestingly their co-star Caleb McLaughlin opted not to wear one of the badges, however he did plump for an all-black look for the evening.

This Is Us star Chris Sullivan went the extra mile to show his support, not only adding a Time's Up pin to his look, but also painting his fingernails black to match the somber outfits being shown off on the red carpet at this year's ceremony.

The evening's host, Seth Meyers, also proudly showed off a pin on his lapel as he arrived on the red carpet alongside his pregnant wife Alexi Ashe, who stuck to the all-black dress code in a long silk frock.
They sent royal fans into a frenzy after finally announcing their engagement last year.

And now Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have delighted fans once again by sending out official thank you cards to their well-wishers.

After being inundated with handwritten notes and letters, the newly-betrothed couple posted thank you notes via Kensington Palace, saying that they were 'incredibly touched' by the reaction.

The cards, which are now circulating on social media, feature the official Kensington Palace crest alongside a photo of the couple, and a short note thanking fans for their 'thoughtful' messages.

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'With warmest thanks': The newly-betrothed couple sent out thank you notes via Kensington Palace, saying that they were 'incredibly touched' by the reaction

Deja vu? The card followed the same format as this note from the Duchess of Cambridge thanking fans for their birthday messages in February last year

An image, shared on Instagram by @ParkysPrincess, shows the inside of the card which reads: 'Prince Harry and Ms. Meghan Markle were incredibly touched that you took the trouble to write as you did in connection to their forthcoming Wedding.

'It really was most thoughtful of you and greatly appreciated. His Royal Highness and Ms. Markle send you their warmest thanks and very best wishes.'

The image of the card, which was originally sent to Lauren Parkinson, was shared online alongside instructions on how royal fans could receive one themselves by writing to the couple at Kensington Palace or Clarence House.

The message inside follows almost the exact same format as a card sent by the Duchess of Cambridge in February last year where she thanked fans for their birthday wishes.

The 'incredibly touched' couple have delighted fans once again by sending out official thank you cards to their well-wishers

The image was shared on Instagram by the page 'Harry and Meghan Updates' along with instructions on how fellow royal fans could receive thank you notes themselves

Break with protocol? Some fans have suggested the card represents a break with tradition as it is unusual for a non-royal's name to appear on official correspondence from the Palace

Royal fans lucky enough to receive a card were thrilled, with one person writing: 'This is such an honour'

Mounting excitement: It comes as the couple are set to tie the knot in St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in May

Kate also sent her 'warmest thanks and best wishes' and said she was 'touched' by the messages she received.

Some fans have suggested the card represents a break with tradition as it is unusual for a non-royal's name to appear on official correspondence from the Palace - however, others pointed out that similar cards were sent out when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge got engaged in 2010.

Kensington Palace has been contacted for comment.

It is not the first time Harry, 33 and Meghan, 36, have personally thanked fans for their well wishes.

When portraits from their official engagement shoot were released last month, the couple released a bonus 'candid' photo, thanking fans for the 'warm and generous messages they have received during such a happy time'.
Countryfile viewers opposed to fox-hunting expressed their anger last night after the show referred to foxes as 'vermin'.

BBC presenter Tom Heap fronted a section on gun laws in the UK countryside that sparked hundreds of emotive tweets, with many declaring the broadcaster 'pro-hunting'.

The row was inflamed after foxes in the piece were described as 'vermin' by presenter Tom Heap as he visited farmers in Lincolnshire.

This weekend, Theresa May ruled out bringing fox hunting back before the next election despite insisting she still personally supports it.

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Presenter Tom Heap felt the wrath of viewers on Twitter after Countryfile aired on BBC One last night; pictured holding a gun and going on a 'lamping' expedition to hunt out foxes, Heap enraged some when he called foxes 'vermin'

Farmers in Lincolnshire appeared on the show to discuss controversial gun laws which sees some GPs charging farmers for authorisation to re-new licenses

To call them 'vermin' is 'disgusting', raged one viewer...while many said the BBC exhibited a clear 'pro-hunting' stance during last night's show

The programme, which aired at 7pm on BBC One, examined the issue of rural doctors providing authorisation for gun owners to re-new licenses.

As Tom Heap joined a farmer in Lincolnshire, Mark Clother, he told viewers: 'He's shooting vermin - foxes that might take poultry from local farms.'

The comment saw hundreds of people join the debate on Twitter, with many blasting Heap for using the term 'vermin'.

@EJANDODIN wrote: 'The only 'vermin' involved in shooting are the 2 legged ones targeting our beautiful badgers, foxes and raptors.'

@suelynne4003 'I have to pay my licence fee for biased presenters to tell us foxes are vermin! I am fuming. These are native mammals and deserve their place in our environment. As for people who want to kill them - no words are printable.'

Heap was heavily criticised on social media for calling foxes vermin but many claimed the BBC has consistently promoted

@Terry_Whittaker raged: 'Welcome to the UK countryside where foxes are shot because people nearby may keep poultry and geese, and a shotgun is referred to as "a vital tool of country life". Vital: adjective 1. absolutely necessary; essential.'

The show followed a 'lamping expedition', which involves seeking foxes at night with a bright 'lamp', as a way of protecting chickens and geese on agricultural land.

As Heap tracked through darkness with Lincolnshire farmer Clother, the pair discussed the best ways to attract foxes including 'squeaking' devices.

Clother then told the presenter that looking for the reflecting eyes of the animal alerted farmers to their presence.

Eventually, they spot the fox's red eyes and make a decision on whether the animal is too far away to shoot. They decide it is and retreat back to the farm.

Femail has contacted BBC's Countryfile for comment.

One of the Lincolnshire farmers who appeared on the show to discuss gun laws takes aim at a shooting range

The farmers in Lincolnshire maintained that the only way to protect their livelihoods was to ensure fox numbers were kept down

This weekend, the British government announced it is scrapping a promise to reconsider the ban on fox hunting, which was outlawed more than a decade ago.

Theresa May ruled out bringing the practice back before the next election despite insisting she still personally supports it.

The Prime Minister accepted that her intervention in favour of fox hunting dealt a blow to the Tory election campaign last year.

The Conservative manifesto included a commitment to call a Commons vote on the issue and it was heavily targeted on social media by Labour.

The law, introduced by Labour in 2004, bans the use of dogs to hunt foxes and other wild mammals in England and Wales.

Mrs May told BBC's Andrew Marr Show she had received a 'clear message' on the issue and said there will not be a vote during this parliament.
He's still best known for his starring role in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, nearly 13 years ago.

And fans cannot believe just how much Freddie Highmore has grown up, following his appearance on the red carpet at the Golden Globes in Beverly Hills last night.

The British actor, 25, had been nominated in the Best Actor in a Television Series Drama category for his role in ABC drama The Good Doctor.

Viewers, however, seemed more distracted by his dramatic transformation from the 13-year-old who played Charlie Bucket back in 2005 to the grown-up actor he is today.

Social media users quickly took to Twitter to comment on his appearance, with one fan joking: 'I refuse to believe he is grown'.

Fans have gone wild over Charlie and the Chocolate Factory actor Freddie Highmore's dramatic transformation, following his appearance at the Golden Globes last night

Freddie, then 13, played the lead role in the 2005 adaptation of the Roald Dahl book

Social media users were quick to comment on how different he looked, with one joking: 'I refuse to believe he is grown'

Another wrote 'Freddie Highmore is like 2 years younger than me and I still think he's 11 years old', while one person commented 'I kind of want Freddie Highmore to win just so I can say Charlie Bucket won the #GoldenGlobe.'

Not everyone thought he had changed that much though, with one remarking: 'Freddie Highmore looks the same now as he did in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He just got taller.'

Freddie, who plays a young autistic doctor in The Good Doctor, looked dashing in a black tuxedo and bow tie as he arrived at the star-studded awards ceremony.

His nomination in the Best Actor in a Television Series Drama marked his first ever-nod at the Golden Globes, although he ended up missing out to This Is Us star Sterling K. Brown.

Freddie, now 25, looked dashing in a black tuxedo and bow tie as he arrived at the Golden Globes (left), more than a decade after playing Charlie Bucket (right)

He had been nominated in the Best Actor in a Television Series Drama category for his role in ABC drama The Good Doctor (pictured)

During the early years of his career, Freddie also starred in the 2007 film Arthur and the Invisibles (pictured)

Following his appearance at the Golden Globes, many struggled to shake off the image of Freddie as Charlie Bucket

Others admitted that the last film they'd seen him in was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Although best known for the 2005 film Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Freddie's breakthrough performance was as Peter Llewelyn Davies in the 2004 movie Finding Neverland.

He went on to star in August Rush and Arthur and the Invisibles in 2007, as well as The Spiderwick Chronicles in 2008.

Since then, he has appeared in TV drama Bates Motel, before taking up the role as Dr. Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor last year.

Freddie joined his fellow actors in sporting a Time's Up pin on his jacket at the Golden Globes last night.

Freddie took up his role as autistic doctor Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor last year

The star (pictured left at the BAFTA Los Angeles Tea Party on Saturday and right in 2008) also gave a critically-acclaimed performance in TV drama Bates Motel

The badge worn by male stars showed their support for the Time's Up movement, an anti-sexual harassment initiative spearheaded by some of Hollywood's biggest and brightest female stars.

Actors and actresses chose to wear black this year, in solidarity with victims of Harvey Weinstein and numerous other figures exposed by the harassment and abuse scandal, including Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Dustin Hoffman.

During the night, Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B DeMille award and gave a speech which has been hailed 'one of the greatest American speeches'.

Calling for unity following the sexual harassment scandal, she said: 'I want all the girls watching to know a new day is on the horizon.

'And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they are the leaders to take us to the time where nobody has to say "me too" again.'
A mother has shamed her daughter's primary school on Twitter after she noticed that a homework project asked her to research only male scientists.

Jennifer O'Reilly-Turner, from Suffolk, posted an image of the year six project, aghast that students weren't asked to also look into famous female scientists.

After posting the note on Twitter, hundreds of people responded, sharing O'Reilly-Turner's outrage and sharing great examples of women the teacher could have suggested.

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Sexist: Jennifer O'Reilly-Turner, from Suffolk, was shocked to see a list of scientists that her daughter's primary school had asked her to research were all male

The mother, who describes herself on Twitter as 'Teacher, Lawyer, Linguist' originally wrote: 'Most disappointed to see that my child's Year 6 teacher hasnt included *any* female scientists at all in this terms research project. Not even a mention of Rosalind Franklin!

After putting Professor Brian Cox's Twitter handle into the tweet, it caught the eye of plenty of STEM enthusiasts, many who were enraged on the family's behalf.

@LuciaNixon replied: 'V. depressing that primary schools are still sinks of sexism. Can you speak to the teacher or head? Give a talk?'

@MorgaineFee suggested that even if the teacher couldn't think of any names themselves 'the answer is still a couple of Google searches away' before including 'Rosalind Franklin (DNA), Mary Anning (paleontologist), Barbara McClintock (genetist), Dorothy Hodgkin (structure of important organic molecules)' and more.

A doctor, @jesswade, added her thoughts, saying an intervention might be a good idea: 'Maybe we should do a twitter takeover of Megans homework and make our own posters?'

An irritated @ViviKaged penned: 'Great message to send out to young girls. Role models are hugely important (also to POC kids too) plenty of female biologists, let kids research from the thousands that are out there. They might be more inspired then.'

@jondcarroll replied, saying: 'suggest a challenge to that teacher and create the next list with no male scientists!'

Others revealed their own similar scenarios including @PippaBC, who ended up educating her child's school.

She revealed: 'Take it up with them. I did the same after my da's yr2 list of artists was all male. Bought the school a book on women artists and had a word with the teacher  and they changed the list.'

O'Reilly-Turner later revealed that she had been in contact with her child's educator, writing: 'I emailed the teacher, politely pointed out the omission, said theyd be considering a more female input and that in the future they should include more women and the response was basically: "Fine: I look forward to reading about their findings".
Until now, flat-chested women unhappy with their lot have had to go under the knife if they want to boost their assets.

But now a high-tech vibrating bra promises to do just that - not only enlarging but making breasts perkier and even bringing them closer together - in the space of just seven days.

The inventor of the Enhancebra, or E-bra, makes the extraordinary claim that his device can permanently increase the size of a womans breasts by one cup size without the need for surgery.

Serbian Milan Milic who claims the vibrating bra works by increasing blood flow to the breasts and improving circulation.

These images, allegedly taken just eight days apart, appear to show how the Enhancebra has boosted this woman's bust - it claims to do so by vibrating and boosting blood circulation

Yours for 150: Inventor Milan Milic claims his device can permanently increase the size of a womans breasts by one cup size without the need for surgery

Speaking about his invention, he previously told MailOnline FEMAIL: It is a natural process that increases the blood circulation that is feeding the breast.

When we researched the human body, we had a theory about how we could manipulate the human body to manipulate the tissue and muscles.

We believe we have found a solution to do this and in this case we use it to enlarge and enhance a womans breasts.'

Now, after 14 successful trials on women around the world, the garment is set to be mass-produced for the first time, the Sun Online reports.

It is claimed that the $199 (150) bra, which will be available to women in the US and the UK from Enhancebra.com, could help millions of women around the world achieve a bigger cleavage without undergoing painful breast augmentation surgery.

Milan, a former engineering student, began researching alternatives to breast surgery after his girlfriend told him she wanted bigger breasts.

The security guard spent months researching the subject as a hobby before making a prototype of his vibrating bra.

In 2015, he brought the device - called the E bra - to the U.S. where two American women became the first to trial it outside of Europe.

This woman trialled the bra over six months and and shared pictures of the dramatic results. After 14 successful trials on women around the world, the garment is set to be mass-produced

The inventor claims the vibrating bra works by increasing blood flow to the breasts and improving circulation (pictured: one woman shows off the results

Miracle bra? It is claimed that the $199 (150) bra, which will be available to women in the US and the UK, could help millions of women around the world achieve a bigger cleavage

Inventor Milan's girlfriend Jelena Sabic, 26, was the first to test the prototype and the couple were blown away when she managed to enlarge her breasts by a whole size in just seven days.

Milan recalled: It all started about two years ago. Jelena wanted bigger breasts and wanted plastic surgery but she was afraid of the operation and the scars afterwards.

She didnt want to insert a foreign body into her body plus it was too expensive for us to afford that operation. So we started to research how we could do it differently. After our research we made the first prototype of the new bra.

We tried the first test of the prototype on Jelena. We thought the first result wouldnt be visible for about two or three months but after just two days the results were very good  we understood we were on to something big.

'After seven days she [had] gone up a whole size. You only need to wear the bra for five minutes a day, three times a day and after just seven days you will have increased her bra size by one cup size.'
Meghan Markle's half-sister has said she's certain that their father will walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding to Prince Harry in May.

Samantha Grant, 52, confirmed while appearing via live video link from Florida on the Channel 5 show The Wright Stuff, that barring a disaster her father Thomas Markle would take his place beside the royal bride-to-be at Windsor Castle.

Her comments come after reports last week claimed Meghan wanted her mother, yoga instructor Doria Ragland, to have the honour of walking her down the aisle.

But Samantha told Matthew Wright today that 'unless a plane crashes', Thomas Markle 'will be there'.

Samantha Grant is certain that her father Thomas Markle will be walking her half-sister Meghan down the aisle at her May wedding

Host Matthew Wright said during the interview: 'There's a growing hope and expectation here that your father, Thomas, may be walking Meghan down the aisle. Do we know yet whether that will happen?'

Speaking live from Florida, Samantha responded and said: 'Yes he is. God forbid unless a plane crashes'

She added: 'He'll be there one way or the other. Yes he is. Any rumour to the contrary is My favourite new word is becoming 'oh rubbish.' Yeah, so [he] will be there.'

It comes after 73-year-old Thomas broke his silence on the impending nuptials to say he thought his daughter and Prince Harry were 'a very good match'.

Describing the Royal as a 'gentleman', Thomas Markle quashed rumours of a rift with his actress daughter during a conversation with a passerby in Mexico.

Thomas Markle, pictured with Meghan in an Instagram she posted, has expressed his desire to attend his daughter's wedding in person

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are set to marry on May 19, with rumours swirling about who will walk her down the aisle

The conversation was captured in video footage obtained by the Sun, in which Thomas Markle can be heard expressing his desire to attend the wedding in person.

When asked how he felt about the impending ceremony at St George's Chapel in Windsor, he said: 'I think its wonderful, Im very delighted. I think theyre [a] very good match, Im very happy for them, Meghan and Harry.

'I love my daughter very much  Harrys a gentleman.'

It was the first time Mr Markle has spoken publicly about the Prince, though he has previously said he would 'love to' be the one to give 36-year-old Meghan away on May 19.

Samantha, who has been outspoken about her relationship with her half-sister, also aired her own thoughts on whether President Donald Trump would be invited.

She said: 'I think it is up to Harry and Meg who they want to invite.

Presenter Matthew Wright questioned Samantha on the royal wedding as she said that only a disaster would stop her father attending

'I think Donald Trump is getting to the point where he can't fire everybody. He can fire everybody in the White House and then he'll simply be alone. But he can't fire everybody at the wedding and he certainly can't fire the Royal Family.'

She also described her book, 'The Diary of Princess Pushy's Sister', as a 'service' to 'share information that is socially and historically valuable'.

And asked what she would say to her sister if she could talk to her today she responded: 'I would say "you should know not to believe everything that you read in tabloids".

'I love you, I admire you, I'm incredibly proud of you and we will sit down and have tea and I look forward to it.'

The Wright Stuff airs weekdays on Channel 5 from 9.15am




Princess Charlotte's first day at nursery school has been marked by the release of two pictures taken by her proud mother, the Duchess of Cambridge.

The two-year-old, who is fourth in line to the throne, was photographed at Kensington Palace before travelling to nearby Willcocks Nursery School.

Charlotte is pictured sitting down on some outside steps in the grounds of the famous palace, while another photograph shows the little girl standing as she holds onto a rail.

The young princess is wearing a red coat, 120, by Amaia Kids teamed with a pink scarf, and a Cath Kidston pony rucksack, demonstrating perhaps that she already shares her great-grandmother the Queen's love of horses.



Kate, who celebrates her 36th birthday on Tuesday, is a keen and accomplished amateur photographer who last year accepted a lifetime honorary membership of the Royal Photographic Society which recognised her "talent and enthusiasm".

The Duchess bucked tradition when she took the first official photographs of her newborn daughter in 2015.

Princess Charlotte's first day at nursery school has been marked by the release of two pictures taken by her proud mother, the Duchess of Cambridge

Confident Charlotte beamed for the camera as she posed for pictures on her first day at nursery

Prince George, pictured with his father William on his first day at Thomas's in Battersea. Kate missed accompanying her son on his first day of school on September 7 2017, due to severe morning sickness

Keen photographer Kate, pictured taking snaps of Prince William's helicopter manouvres in Canada, often takes her own shots of her children rather than commissioning official portraits

The photos of Charlotte showed the young princess being cradled by her older brother Prince George at William and Kate's Norfolk home, Anmer Hall.

The 35-year-old, a history of art graduate, has also released pictures to mark other milestones in her children's lives, including George's first day at nursery school and Charlotte's first birthday.

And today was no doubt an important milestone for the pregnant Duchess, who missed accompanying Prince George on his first day of school at Thomas's Battersea due as she was battling severe morning sickness at the time.

The princess will be a full-time pupil at the nursery, which charges fees of just over 3,000 a term for pupils attending its Monday to Friday morning school, and employs lots of play as children learn.

The princess will be a full-time pupil at Willcocks Nursery School, which charges fees of just over 3,000 a term for pupils attending its Monday to Friday morning school

Prince George on his first day at the Westacre Montessori nursery school near Sandringham in Norfolk in January 2016

Charlotte looked much more grown up in the new images released today, appearing to have grown taller, and with longer hair and a more confident smile, than when she was seen back in July during the family's official visit to Poland and Germany.

Although she was briefly spotted in the back of the car as her parents drove to the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace in December, she has not been seen publicly in an official capacity for six months.

At her nursery school, the little Princess will enjoy pottery and poetry classes at the sought-after nursery, which is rated 'outstanding' by Ofsted and located next to the Royal Albert Hall.

Before starting officially, she would have been invited with her parents for a short 'stay and play'. Kate and William would then have been asked to leave to see if Charlotte was happy to be left alone.

Charlotte, pictured in July during the family's tour of Poland and Germany in an image used for the family Christmas card

The school recommends in its guidance to parents that pupils bring a toy or photo from home, and take a picture of their teacher back to their house.

It says: 'As your child builds a rapport with the teachers, we will ask you to stay in the vicinity for the first few sessions so that you can return if needed.'

Fees are 9,150 a year for morning sessions and 5,400 for afternoons.

Palace sources said Charlotte would attend the school 'full time' but declined to elaborate on whether that was for either morning or afternoon sessions - or both.

When it was announced that Charlotte would be attending Wilcocks, a spokesman said: 'We are delighted that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have chosen the Willcocks Nursery School for Princess Charlotte. We look forward to welcoming Charlotte to our nursery in January.'

Royal fans caught a brief glimpse of Princess Charlotte in December as she travelled to the Queen's Christmas lunch with her parents

The youngster was last seen in public in an official capacity during the family's tour of Germany and Poland in July

Princess Charlotte showed her burgeoning confidence as she waved to the crowds during the family's official visit to Poland and Germany

It holds what it calls morning school for 32 youngsters, aged almost three to five years old, who are in class five days a week for three hours.

On its website, Willcocks says pupils experience 'a fun and structured morning with lots of free play where children embark on the first stages of learning to read, write and to understand simple numbers with the minimum of pressure'.

Charlotte may be enrolled in the afternoon school, which is less structured than the morning session but provides a similar wide range of activities including art and music.

Her older brother Prince George attended the Westacre Montessori School in Norfolk, starting in January 2016, as it was close to Anmer Hall where the family was then based.

The little princess is looking much more grown up than when she acted as flower girl for her aunt Pippa Middleton at her wedding in May 2017
Anyone who has ever stumbled onto the site People of Walmart would likely be unsurprised to learn that some very strange customers  with very strange taste  have been known to shop there.

But even braced for some weirdness, seeing the most popular things bought from the retail giant's website in each state is still surprising and amusing.

Recently, Walmart released an infographic that shows some of the top-selling products in each US state, offering a peak into the unusual shopping habits of its customers.

Odd habits: Walmart has revealed some of its top sellers in 2017, broken down by state

Get them while they're popular! The store revealed a very varied list of best-selling items on Walmart.com, from coolers in Virginia to plastic hangers in Pennsylvania

The details: More specific information was also shared, including which states favored school supply items, and which preferred beverages

The infographic doesn't list the actual top-seller in each state, rather, it reveals the most interesting of the top 25 highest sellers on Walmart.com.

Still, it's sure to raise some eyebrows that watermelon-flavored gum is so popular in North Dakota that it made it to the top 25 highest-selling products in the whole state.

Food, naturally, is a big seller across the US. North Carolinians are fans of mayonnaise, people in Arkansas buy chocolate more than most anything else, and South Dakota residents need their orange juice.

Some of the choices, though, are a bit surprising. Vanilla frosting is especially popular in Washington, and people in Louisiana seem to do a lot of cooking and baking with root beer extract.

Grape-flavored drink mix is big in Ohio, sweet canned corn is popular in Vermont, and Great Value brand French Fried Onions are a Washington, D.C. favorite.

Bringing the magic in Boise: Kids in Idaho really like My Little Pony miniatures

What the kids are playing with: In West Virginia, lots of little girls are getting dolls from the My Life As series, while Tennessee kids love Disney Infinity Power Discs

Bath tub QB: While it's not surprising that people in Wisconsin buy Green Bay Packers gear, it is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser that they like bath mats with the team logo, specifically

Tastes: In Connecticut, there are a lot of shoppers seeking Scarlett Johansson's Ghost in the Shell DVD. In Delaware, spiced Jelly candy is popular

Spiced jelly candy  those colorful gumdrops covered in sugar  are a top seller in Delaware.

Some toys are also bigger sellers in certain states. The people of Idaho love My Little Pony (specifically, the mini collection), Arizona kids dig L.O.L. Surprise! dolls, and in Hawaii, Farmer Barbie is the most popular of them all.

Tennessee kids love Disney Infinity Power Discs, and parents in Georgia are buying their little ones the Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Smart Stages Chair.

Other odd favorites include a Green Bay Packers bath mat in Wisconsin, lavender-scented cleaning products in Michigan, erasers in Illinois, cinnamon-flavored toothpaste in New Hampshire, and in Connecticut, the DVD of the Scarlett Johansson movie Ghost in the Shell.

The new map includes some of the most popular products for the whole of 2017.
A former UFC Octagon Girl who has graced the cover of Playboy magazine has found a lucrative career away from the cameras - as apop-artist who has sold paintings for tens of thousands of dollars.

Brittney Palmer might be best recognized by UFC fans as one of the bombshell models carrying round numbers across the ring between bouts, but she actually lives somewhat of a double life.

The 30-year-old studied classic portraiture at UCLA and attended Brentwood Art Center and today is an accomplished artist in her own right, selling her work for upwards of $25,000 a piece.

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The day job: UFC Octagon Girl Brittney Palmer might be a recognizable face to fight fans, but she is also an accomplished pop artist

In the studio: The 30-year-old model sells her colorful paintings for upwards of $25,000

Some of her high-profile clients include fighting royalty like Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor.

'A lot of UFC fighters have actually commissioned me to paint for them. And their wives! And the list keeps going!' she says.

Brittney's paintings focus on pop culture, with bright depictions of celebrity icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

The portraits are painted in vibrant colors and see the subjects depicted in close-up glamour-style shots.

Pop at its best: Her work features depictions of pop culture icons in vibrant colors

Ready for their close-up: The subjects are shown in glamour head shot-style poses

A hit: Her paintings have been purchased by the likes of fighters Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor

Getting started: The model first turned to painting at 21 years old when her dreams of being a professional dancer were shattered in a serious car accident

She has exhibited her works worldwide at galleries from Miami to Milan and has even previously been enlisted by Reebok to design clothing for UFCs International Fight Week.

The stunning brunette fell into the art world almost by accident, after taking her feelings to the canvas when a car accident left her unable to walk on her own for three months - and shutting down her dreams of being a dancer.

After becoming hooked on painting, she studied her craft and even relocated to Los Angeles to attend university and be a part of the city's thriving arts scene.

She now recognizes her work with the UFC as something that has helped her make her way in her art career as it has given her a platform and opportunities to get her work in front of the right people.

But that doesn't mean it has all been rosy.

Moving on: After falling in love with painting, Brittney moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to pursue her art studies

Bright future: She has since exhibited her works worldwide from Miami all the way to Milan

On and on: She has been one of the UFC's famous Octagon Girls since she was 20 years old

Recent moves: Brittney recently showed pieces - including clothing - at her No Agency exhibition at Art Basel in Miami, where she sold an illuminated boombox artwork for $25,000

She admits: 'I definitely think there is a stigma that is attached to being a model and being an artist. A lot of people would say that artists are supposed to act a certain way or look a certain way and that's definitely not who I am.

'So I do find there is a little bit of judgement in the beginning of someone finding out I'm an artist, but once people truly get the inside story of me... being an artist is really at my core.'

Brittney focused on her work in preparation for her latest show, the No Agency exhibition at Art Basel, which she has described as being inspired by a trip to Bali.

She was showcased in Miami alongside four other artists including Lee Taylor Jones, Dan Alva, Tanya Ragir, and Tonia Colderon, with each artist also having their work showcased on clothing.

The show was a massive success, with Brittney selling one of her most expensive pieces - an illuminated boombox artwork that moved to the beat of music - for $25,000.
Confident Charlotte beamed for the camera as she posed for pictures on her first day at nursery

Posing for her proud mummys camera, there wasnt a hint of nerves about Princess Charlotte as she set off for her first day at nursery today.

Charlotte, who turns three on May 2, even managed a cheeky little smile as she stood on the steps of her parents apartment at Kensington Palace.

Her outfit is likely to have cost well in excess of 300, including her 120 coat from Amaia Kids.

Charlotte was also wearing a pair of 27 red Dona Carmen Mary Jane shoes, 12 chestnut ribbed tights, as well as a 4 hair bow.

Around her neck was a pink woollen scarf, part of a set with a matching Marie Chantal hat and costing 125.

And over her shoulders was a pink spotted rucksack featuring  naturally, for a member of the Royal Family  ponies, which costs 25 from British retailer Cath Kidston.

Charlotte has grown so much since she was last seen officially in public in July when she joined her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, on a tour of Poland and Germany.

Right royal resemblance: The Queen Mother in 1907 aged seven has similar features to the young princess who cheekily posed for pictures today

Six months on, not only has her hair grown, but she has also finally lost the dimpled softness of babyhood. Now she looks like such a big girl  and the image not only of her mother at the same age but also of her great-great-grandmother, the late Queen Mother.

Unlike her brother, four-year-old Prince George, who seems a slightly shyer child, Charlotte displays the spirited, coquettish confidence of the former Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, who died in 2002.

All the genes: The young Duchess of Cambridge aged three shares the same big brown eyes and cheeky smile

Charlotte was photographed by her mother Kate, who is due to give birth again in April, on the same sun-bleached stone steps as her sibling for his first day at big school last year.

The duchess, who celebrates her 36th birthday today, also took the official photograph of George on his first day at nursery too. A keen amateur photographer, she has lifetime honorary membership of the Royal Photographic Society.

Charlotte will attend the Willcocks Nursery School, a stones throw from Kensington Palace, five mornings a week  and by the look of excitement on her face, will have no problem settling in. The 20,000-a-year school has been described by society magazine Tatler as being comprised of a mixture of old English families and chic foreigners.

Princess Charlotte's first day at nursery school has been marked by the release of two pictures taken by her proud mother, the Duchess of Cambridge

Charlotte was probably greeted by something familiar on her first day at nursery  her favourite toys. Willcocks makes the gesture for all new children to help them make a smooth transition from home to school.

It is likely Kate was also invited into the nursery for her first stay and play session with Charlotte, where the parent gradually spends more time away from their child until they are happy to be apart from their mother or father for the whole day.

A mummy's fashion verdict Daily Mail consultant fashion editor Camilla Ridley Day, mother of three children aged six, four and two, writes: SHE looks utterly adorable, doesnt she? And with Charlottes outfit, Kate is channelling her taste for timeless classics, such as this well-cut wool coat. Its interesting she has chosen burgundy too. It is a shade Kate often wears, and one that she knows suits brunettes like her and Charlotte well. A perfectionist, she has matched the shoes to the coat, a lovely touch. But while every mother will be tempted to dress up her little girl for her first day, Id be interested to see whether, after hours playing with glitter and glue, she repeats it every day. Take those beautiful tights, which are made by Chelsea designer Amaia and cost around 12. One tumble in the playground and theyre ruined for ever! Advertisement

It will have been an important milestone for Kate, who missed Georges first day at school because of the severe morning sickness she suffered early in her pregnancy with Charlotte.

Founded in 1964, Willcocks is rated outstanding by Ofsted and even teaches its pupils pottery, acting and basic French.

As Charlotte is now at nursery and George at school, the children will not accompany their parents when they undertake a four-day tour of Norway and Sweden this month.

The princess will be a full-time pupil at Willcocks Nursery School, which charges fees of just over 3,000 a term for pupils attending its Monday to Friday morning school

Keen photographer Kate, pictured taking snaps of Prince William's helicopter manouvres in Canada, often takes her own shots of her children rather than commissioning official portraits

Prince George, pictured with his father William on his first day at Thomas's in Battersea. Kate missed accompanying her son on his first day of school on September 7 2017, due to severe morning sickness

Prince George on his first day at the Westacre Montessori nursery school near Sandringham in Norfolk in January 2016

Charlotte, pictured in July during the family's tour of Poland and Germany in an image used for the family Christmas card

The youngster was last seen in public in an official capacity during the family's tour of Germany and Poland in July

Princess Charlotte showed her burgeoning confidence as she waved to the crowds during the family's official visit to Poland and Germany
Revolve co-founders Michael Karanikolas and Michael Mente launched the Los Angeles-based fashion e-commerce company in 2003. Neither had a fashion background, but brought tech and analytics knowledge to the company.

From the beginning, the duo focused on using influencers to sell clothes and an image, above celebrities and traditional advertising. They've enlisted models, bloggers, vloggers, and social media stars to set an example of what the Revolve customer is, giving real-life Revolve customers something to aspire to.

According to WWD, they now have a network of 5,000 influencers. Most of them simply shill clothes, but the top influencers are paid for appearances, sent on trips, and invited to parties.

Behind the brand: Revolve co-founders Michael Karanikolas (left) and Michael Mente (right) with Chrissy Teigen

Those trips are getting bigger and bigger. In addition to summer trips to the Hamptons, Revolve has introduced #Revolvearoundtheworld, taking influencers to far-off locales every year like Croatia and Lake Como, Italy.

They hosted four or five in 2017, and are planning six or seven in 2018.

Taking the social star track certainly seems to be paying off. In October, Revolve was projected to reach $1 billion in sales by the end of the year  a number heavily attributed to the power of influencers. In fact, influencers are reportedly responsible for driving 65 to 70 per cent of sales.

And that's not all: According to Fashionista, influencers who go on these trips are often also paid an appearance fee and given a clothing allowance.

While the pricey trips have raised eyebrows in the past, the most recent one to Phuket has earned the most vocal reaction about race  and it's entirely possible that 'the Mikes,' as they are called at the company, will take notice.

'Listening to our customers guides us every step of the way. Theres only one boss  the customer, and they have the ability to fire the whole company anytime they want,' Mente told Fortune in 2016.

In fact, a desire to appeal to customers in Asian markets may have contributed to the high inclusion rate of Asian influencers on the trip to Phuket.

'The Chinese customers are really convincing us that we have to invest more in this market,' Mente told China Daily in 2016.

'We see social revenue, which means transactions directed from social media, being 10 times larger in China than the US. In the US, Instagram is very popular but it doesn't actually drive sales. In China, however, Weibo and WeChat directly translate to sales as customers can immediately buy Revolve products via these apps.'

The last trip before Phuket  to the Bahamas, just after Thanksgiving  had an even more predominantly-Caucasian guest list. However, it also included African American model Chanel Iman and Nickayla Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican, African American, and German descent.
No matter how fussy your children, every youngster enjoys a bowl of creamy tomato soup.

It's a firm family favourite as it's cheap, easy to heat up and keeps everyone happy.

But with dozens of tinned versions on supermarkets shelves, are the luxury soups worth their premium price tag, or can you save precious pennies on a value own-brand version?

Blind taste testers at Good Housekeeping Institute (GHI) sampled seven different cream of tomato soups to find out which are the best, and which are not worth the money.

And surprisingly, best-selling Heinz is not the top-rated.

Waitrose's 52p 'essential' cream of tomato soup won the blind taste test, ahead of Heinz's 95p best-selling and much loved Cream of Tomato Soup

The best (and worst) tinned tomato soups 1. Essential Waitrose Cream of Tomato Soup (52p) - 74/100 2. Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup (95p) - 72/100 3. Crosse & Blackwell's Cream Of Tomato Soup (85p) - 67/100 4. Amys Kitchen Organic Chunky Tomato Soup (1.75) - 66/100 5. Free and Easy Tomato Soup (1.65) - 63/100 6. Tesco Cream of Tomato Soup (45p) - 48/100 7. Tesco Everyday Value Tomato Soup (25p) - 44/100 Advertisement

The taste test ranked Waitrose's 52p own-brand cream of tomato soup the best, one above Heinz's famous 95p Cream of Tomato Soup.

The value soup was judged as 'simply delicious,' with testers praising the 'luxuriously smooth' finish and the 'tomatoey tang'.

'The perfect treat to brighten up those gloomy winter nights, at a bargain price,' the testers said.

With a score of 74/100, it beat Heinz's soup by two points.

Judges were also delighted with the much loved brand, and said: 'Glossy thick soup with a bright orange tinge.

'We adored the rich aroma of sweet ripe tomatoes balanced wonderfully by a pinch of salt and single cream, delicate and velvety finish.'

Tesco's 25p Everyday Value Tomato Soup was bottom of the pile with a score of 44/100 (left), but its slightly more premium 45p Cream of Tomato Soup didn't fare much better with a score of 48/100 (right)

They criticised the processed aftertaste, but said that the taste was so distinctive that they were able to tell the soup was Heinz's during the blind test.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the pile, Tesco's cut-price 25p Everyday Value Tomato Soup was slated by judges, and ranked last.

With a score of just 44/100, the testers said: 'This soup did not inspire passion. Our testers enjoyed the vibrant orange appearance but were disappointed by the thin, watery texture.'

Tesco's more premium 45p own-brand Cream of Tomato Soup did not fare much better, with a score of 48/100.

Crosse & Blackwell's 85p Cream Of Tomato Soup was the third best-rated on the list with a score of 67/100, while Free and Easy's dairy-free soup was third from bottom

The judges said: 'Our testers enjoyed the bright orange colour and rich tomato flavours, but all found the strong artificial sweetness and metallic aftertaste overwhelming.'

Crosse & Blackwell's 85p Cream Of Tomato Soup was the third best-rated on the list with a score of 67/100, while the most expensive soup on the list, Amys Kitchen Organic Chunky Tomato Soup (1.79), was mid-pack with a score of 66/100.

Third from bottom was a 1.65 dairy-free creamy tomato soup by Free and Easy which used creamed coconut instead of cream.

But judges, who gave it a score of 63/100, said: 'Though we loved the smooth, silky texture and dark orange hue, some found the flavours too complex and jarring for a tomato soup.'

Brands and supermarkets have been contacted for comment.

A spokesman for Heinz said: 'Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup is the number one choice at the check-out when it comes to canned soup. We use sun-ripened tomatoes with no added preservatives to make Heinz Cream of Tomato and were pleased GHI singled out its balanced flavour and delicious velvety texture.'

A spokesman for Waitrose said: 'Our customers love our essential Waitrose Tomato Soup - and the vast majority of those who've reviewed it have given it five stars out of five - so we're thrilled that the Good Housekeeping Institute feels the same.'
Fertility experts have warned the NHS is rationing IVF for older men, despite evidence that age does not affect their chances of having a baby.

Couples who want IVF face strict criteria, with most women aged over 40 unable to get fertility treatment on the NHS.

But some areas also ban men aged 55 from accessing assistance, with officials having considered a cut-off of 40.

Couple who want IVF on the NHS face strict criteria, with most women over 40 denied the treatment and some areas banning men aged 55

Anonymous donors can now be traced Sperm and egg donors can no longer expect to be anonymous because DNA-testing companies have made it simple to track them down, experts have warned. Gene testing firms like 23andMe, which are growing in popularity, could trace family members by flagging up blood relatives who are also registered with them. Social networking sites also make it easier to find donors using clues from other relatives, such as their surname. Men are already thought to have been put off becoming sperm donors by a law change in 2005 which allowed children to find out their names at the age of 18. But those years of anonymity can no longer be counted on, the annual British Fertility Society conference heard. Wendy Kramer, whose Donor Sibling Registry helps children to meet biological relatives, said: My son was the first person to find his donor through DNA in 2005. Now it is a regular occurrence. DNA testing means anonymity is no longer an option. Advertisement

However, the latest research suggests this is unfair, with a 17-year analysis of more than 25,000 couples in Britain showing male age makes no difference to the odds of having a child through IVF.

Mens sperm declines in quality as they get older, seeing their sperm count fall and its quality and swimming ability decrease.

But new technology available routinely on the NHS appears to solve the problem.

The study, not yet published but presented by the University of Birmingham at the Fertility 2018 conference in Liverpool, shows that the live birth rate is roughly 35 babies for every 100 couples having fertility treatment, regardless of the mans age.

This is believed to be almost entirely down to intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)  a procedure which has only been possible for the past 25 years. In ICSI, sperm is injected directly into a womans egg. This can require only 20 to 30 sperm, instead of more than 15million which are needed in normal conception or traditional IVF.

The results of the study raise fresh concerns over the strict criteria applied to IVF on the NHS.

In England, some couples are able to get three cycles of IVF through the health service, while others get none and are forced to pay around 5,000 for treatment.

The age limit, set by the clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which determine local NHS budgets, has been cut to 35 for women in some areas.

And others have set a cut-off for men  usually below the age of 55. Wolverhampton, Wiltshire and North Staffordshire CCGs are believed to be among those with the policy that the male partner must be under 55 for treatment.

In Scotland, fresh cycles of IVF must be started by the female partners 40th birthday. If she is between 40 and 42 and has never previously had IVF, she may be granted one cycle.

Male fertility expert Professor Allan Pacey, from the University of Sheffield, said: There is very little medical evidence to support the decision by CCGs to restrict a womans access to assisted conception based on the age of her male partner.

Both men and women wanting to have children by means of IVF are facing age limits imposed by clinical commissioning groups

I suspect those CCGs who have such male age limits are doing so as a way of rationing treatment, rather than it being for a medical reason.

The study was one of the biggest on male age in IVF, including every couple who had fertility treatment from 2000 to 2017 at CARE, the UKs largest private fertility clinic.

Lead author Dr Ioannis Gallos said: I will no longer tell male patients that their age will make it harder for them to conceive through IVF. There is no reason for male age limits which aim to ration NHS fertility treatment.
A newlywed was diagnosed with breast cancer just six weeks after she married her first ever Tinder date on April Fool's Day.

Yasmin Kidwai Coop, 45, a personal assistant, and cameraman Jason Coop, 46, tied the knot on April 1, 2017 - three years to the day after they were matched on the dating app.

Yet just weeks after the couple's luxury honeymoon, Ms Coop, from Kingston, south-west London, found a lump in her right breast while showering.

She said: 'We just wanted to be like any other normal married couple, but instead I was facing a cancer battle as a newlywed. We hadn't even really had a chance [to] start our married life'.

After enduring weeks of grueling radiotherapy and medication to control the cancer, Ms Coop has been given the all clear. She now wishes to raise awareness of the condition, which affects one in eight women in the UK at some point in their lives, to help other sufferers.

She said: 'I want to talk openly about what's happened to me so other people are checking themselves and keeping an eye on their own health.'

Yasmin Kidwai Coop was diagnosed with breast cancer just six weeks after she married her first ever Tinder date Jason Coop (both pictured) on April Fool's Day 2017

Ms Coop endured weeks of grueling radiotherapy after receiving the diagnosis

She found a lump in her right breast while showering shortly after the couple's honeymoon

WHAT IS BREAST CANCER? Breast cancer is the most common form of the disease in the UK. Symptoms include a lump or area of thickened tissue in the breast. Other signs may include a change in the size or shape of the breasts; nipple discharge; a lump or swelling in the armpits; dimpling on the skin; a rash in or around the nipple; and a change in the nipple's appearance. Breast cancer is more common in older people, as well as those with a family history of the condition. Obesity and excessive alcohol intake are also linked to the disease. Treatment includes a combination of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

'We hadn't had a chance to start married life'

A few weeks after the couple's three-day honeymoon in a luxurious shepherd's hut in Somerset, Ms Coop found a lump in her right breast.

She said: 'It was pea-sized, but because I had just been on my period, I put it down to swelling and decided I'd go to the doctor if it didn't go away.'

Two weeks later, the lump had not reduced, therefore Ms Coop visited her doctor who referred her for a mammogram at Kingston Hospital.

She said: 'After the scan, the doctors said they weren't worried about my right breast, but had found some unusual lumps on my left side, so sent me for a biopsy.

'Just a week later I was called back in and told I had stage two breast cancer. We had only just got married six weeks earlier. We hadn't even really had a chance [to] start our married life, only for me to be diagnosed with cancer.'

After being referred to The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, Ms Coop had the tumour removed, as well as five weeks of radiotherapy, before taking medication that prevents cancerous cell growth.

She said: 'Doctors told me they had got rid of all the cancer, which was a massive relief. Now I just want to get on with married life.

'We just wanted to be like any other normal married couple, but instead I was facing a cancer battle as a newlywed.

'I found the lump and had my husband at my side throughout. We are hoping the next six months of marriage will be a bit less eventful than the first six.'

Ms Coop is now keen to raise awareness of the condition, saying, 'I want to talk openly about what's happened to me so other people are checking themselves and keeping an eye on their own health.'

The couple got married on the three-year anniversary of their first Tinder date

Mr Coop unconventionally proposed to his later bride over the phone

Ms Coop feels they have not have the opportunity to enjoy being a newly-married couple

Her mother Margaret (pictured) gave her away after her her father died from cancer in 2008

'I knew it wasn't going to be a traditional wedding'

Ms Coop, who lost her father, Shaukat Kidwai, aged just 67, in 2008, after an 18-month battle with pancreatic cancer, tied the knot when her then-boyfriend proposed over the phone.

She said: 'It was November 2016 and I knew our three year anniversary was coming up.

'I was in the car one morning and called Jason. I just said, "Our anniversary is on a Saturday next year  so if we are going to get married, that might be a good date".

'I left it with Jason and he called up Lovekyn Chapel, the only remaining free-standing chantry chapel in England, which we loved.

'He booked it for April 1. We knew not many people would want to wed on April Fool's Day.'

Ms Coop, who joined Tinder in 2014, had her mother Margaret, 75, give her away in front of 60 guests.

She said: 'I asked my mum, Margaret, to do the honours, but I knew very well it wasn't going to be a traditional wedding.

'We planned a day which was very collaborative, where our friends and family brought food, my good friend gave Jason a designer suit, as she works in the fashion business, and my dress was from a vintage shop.

'I had flower girls, Jason's niece and two goddaughters, and we had his nephew and my godson as our pageboys.'

Although Ms Coop thoroughly enjoyed the day, she felt the absence of her father.

She said: 'All my dad ever wanted was to see me settle down and be looked after. I wish he had met Jason, so the day was bitter sweet, but also perfect.'

Ms Coop is supporting Cancer Research UK on February 4th's World Cancer Day 2018. Wear a Cancer Research UK #UnityBand to help fund more research, treatments and cures.

Although Ms Coop thoroughly enjoyed her wedding, she felt the absence of her father

She wishes he could have met Mr Coop as he wanted to see his daughter settle down

Ms Coop has been given the all clear and hopes the couple's future will be less eventful
A sensor worn on the thumbnail could prevent skin cancer by alerting wearers when they are getting too much sun exposure.

The battery-free UV Sense device detects radiation from the sun and changes colour to show how high levels are.

By measuring how long a wearer has been outside, the device, which is less than 2mm thick and 9mm in diameter, encourages users to reapply sun cream when scanned by a user's smartphone.

UV Sense, which launched in the US last week, is due to be available in the UK in 2019. Its price is unclear.

Melanoma, which is the most serious form of skin cancer and often spreads, affects more than 15,000 new people every year in the UK. Its main cause is overexposure to UV light.

A sensor on the thumbnail alerts wearers when they are getting too much sun exposure (stock)

UV rays activate a sensor that collects UV absorption information in the capacitor, which stores electrical energy. This is transmitted to a smartphone that gives exposure information

HOW DOES UV SENSE WORK? UV Sense contains a sensor and antenna. It also has a capacitor, which stores electrical energy. UV rays activate the sensor, which collects UV absorption information in the capacitor. The antenna then transmits this data to the app via the user's smartphone antenna, which is activated by tapping or waving the phone close to the thumbnail device. Measuring both UVA and UVB rays, the app gives a score that predicts the radiation's intensity and gauges the risk of negative skin outcomes, such as sunburn and wrinkles. Users can first enter information that describes their skin type to determine how sensitive to the sun's rays they are. Advertisement

Allows wearers to track sun trends

When setting up the device, a connecting app asks users about their skin type to get an idea of how much sun exposure they can tolerate.

The device then recommends sun-safety products and gives general advice.

UV Sense, which can be worn for up to two weeks, also stores three months of UV ray data, allowing users to see 'sun' trends in their local area.

As it is powered by smartphones, being both Android and iPhone friendly, the device does not require any batteries and is activated by UV radiation.

Guive Balooch, global vice president of L'Oreal's Technology Incubator, which manufacturers the device, said: 'Armed with research and consumer insights from My UV Patch, we set out to create something that blended problem-solving technology with human-centred design.'

L'Oreal launched My UV Patch in 2016, however, unlike the patch, UV Sense provides real-time information.

Consumer studies show My UV Patch, which can only be worn for a few days, has a positive impact on the sun-safety behaviours of users with 34 per cent applying sun cream more often and 37 per cent trying to stay in the shade more frequently.

This comes after researchers from Brown University found just one glass of wine a day can increase the risk of certain forms of skin by up to 11 per cent.

For every extra 10g of alcohol a day, the risk of developing basal cell carcinoma (BCC) rises by seven per cent and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) by 11 per cent, they found.
The key to controlling hunger and fighting obesity is in brain cells that produce hormones, according to research.

A new study sheds light on the complex messaging system between neurons in the 'hunger circuit' and the brain.

Scientists showed that antenna-like structures on brain cells, called primary cilia, control appetite, which offers potential new options to treat obesity now that researchers know exactly which neurons to target.

Uncovering the neurological causes of obesity may combat one of the biggest health problems in the world that affects more than a third of adults in the US.

Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco suggest the key to controlling hunger and fighting obesity lie in antenna-like structures in the brain that produce hormones

Previous research has revealed that most of the gene mutations that increase the risk of obesity are located in the brain.

Now it seems controlling appetite could all boil down to the primary cilia - microscopic sensory antennae neurons use to gather information about their environment.

Professor Christian Vaisse, of the University of California at San Francisco, said: 'We're building a unified understanding of the human genetics of obesity.

'Until recently many obesity researchers had barely heard of primary cilia - but that's going to change.'

Although obesity is driven by environmental factors, such as limitless access to sugar and fat-laden foods and increasingly sedentary lifestyles, not everyone becomes overweight.

It has been estimated genetics contribute up to 70 percent towards a person's vulnerability to piling on the pounds.

Most mutations occur in the hypothalamus - the brain's 'hunger circuit' that monitors levels of the hormone leptin that is secreted by fat cells and controls appetite.

Studies on humans and mice found mutations in genes linked to the chemical can't detect when their body has already got plenty of fat - and constantly eat as if they were starving.

Now Dr Vaisse and colleagues have discovered how mutations in the gene MC4R - located in part of the hypothalamus called the arcuate nucleus - and cilia defects drive obesity.

By fluorescently tagging the MC4R protein in the brains of laboratory mice they found it was uniquely concentrated in the cells' primary cilia - suggesting appetite-regulation occurs there.

The findings published in the journal Nature Genetics show that when mice expressed the mutated versions of the human MC4R gene seen in patients with extreme obesity it failed to reach the cilia.

THE FATTER YOU ARE, THE HARDER TO LOSE WEIGHT For those with a lot of weight to lose, a study published in 2015 makes for depressing reading. The fatter a person is, the harder it is for them to lose weight, scientists discovered. Heavier people produce more of a protein that inhibits the body's ability to burn fat, researchers found. This is because fat produces a protein, called sLR11, which stops the process by which cells burn energy to keep warm - and therefore preventing weight loss. The Cambridge University findings may have implications for the treatment of obesity and other metabolic diseases. Advertisement

When the researchers also blocked a protein called ADCY3 which - like MC4 - is found in primary cilia and has been associated with obesity - the animals significantly increased their food consumption and put on weight.

The researchers say ADCY3 and MC4R come together in the primary cilia of neurons in an area called the PVN (paraventricular nucleus).

This allows these cells to detect signals from the arcuate nucleus indicating high body-fat levels - and to reduce appetite.

But if mutations prevent MC4R from getting to the cilia - or other genetic defects damage the primary cilium itself - the brain has no way to pull the emergency brake on weight gain.

High leptin levels indicate excess body fat while low ones warn energy reserves are depleted.

The PVN neurons then send out instructions to the rest of the brain to adjust your appetite and energy level appropriately.

Dr Vaisse said: 'It's exciting how much progress this field has made.

'In the '90s we were asking whether or not obesity is genetic; a decade ago we were discovering that most obesity risk factors primarily impact the leptin circuit in the brain; and now we are on the verge of understanding how defects in this specific subcellular structure of a particular subset of hypothalamic neurons drives weight gain and obesity.'

He said it raises the possibility of developing treatments that could improve appetite control in people with obesity by modifying signaling at the primary cilia of MC4R-expressing neurons.

However, the development of treatments may still be a long way off.

Dr Vaisse said: 'We still know so little about the primary cilium - and particularly how it is involved in signalling within these particular neurons.

'We yet don't know what we might do to fix it when it is broken.'
When it comes to survival in the most extreme conditions women really are the strongest sex, a study of famines, epidemics and slavery has found.

It is well known that women are the 'life expectancy champions'  living longer than men in every country in the world.

But to see if this holds true when death rates are 'extraordinarily high', researchers compared the survival rates of males and females in the most 'horrific' situations.

The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark looked at some tragic historical events when average life expectancy dropped below 20 years.

Known as 'high-mortality populations', researchers looked at seven time periods when human lives were wiped out by starvation, disease and violence.

The 'horrific' situations included the 1933 Ukraine famine in the Soviet Union, in which four million people died

These included the 1933 Ukraine famine in the Soviet Union in which four million people died; the 1845 Irish potato famine; life expectancy of slaves in Trinidad in 1813; the Swedish famine of 1772-1773; survival rates of freed slaves from the US settling in Liberia between 1820 and 1843 and a deadly measles epidemics in Iceland in 1842 and 1882.

Researchers analysed records of births and deaths to calculate whether males or females lived longer.

The researchers, from the Max Planck Institute in Odense, southern Denmark and colleagues reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 'The conditions experienced by the people in the analyzed populations were horrific.

'Even though the crises reduced the female survival advantage in life expectancy, women still survived better than men.'

They added: 'In all populations, they had lower mortality across almost all ages, and, with the exception of one slave population, they lived longer on average than men.

WHAT WERE THE EVENTS STUDIED? The 1933 Ukraine famine in the Soviet Union in which four million people died

The 1845 Irish potato famine

Life expectancy of slaves in Trinidad in 1813

The Swedish famine of 1772-1773

Survival rates of freed slaves from the US settling in Liberia between 1820 and 1843

And a deadly measles epidemics in Iceland in 1842 and 1882 Advertisement

The authors said that in the case of the slaves of Trinidad young adult men may have had a higher survival rate than young adult women 'because a premium was placed' on the survival of male slaves who sold for higher prices.

In Liberia in 1820, freed American slaves were encouraged to migrate back to Africa. But around 43 per cent died in their first year. Life expectancy was staggeringly low - 1.68 years for men and 2.23 years for women.

The authors write: 'Even in Liberia, the population with the lowest life expectancy, newborn girls were hardier than newborn boys,' lending support to the idea there is a 'biological underpinning' of the female survival advantage.

In the Irish potato famine, a type of mould Phytophora infestans caused crop failures over three years  and life expectancy shrank from 38 years for both sexes, to 18.7 years for men and 22.4 years for women.

In the Ukrainian famine  caused by a disastrous collectivisation of agriculture - life expectancy dropped from 41.58 to 7.3 years for men, and from 45.93 years for women to 10.9 years.

Grain confiscated from kulak (rich peasant) family in the village of Udachoye, in the Donetsk region during the famine

In the Ukraine famine  caused by a disastrous collectivisation of agriculture - life expectancy dropped from 41.58 to 7.3 years for men, and from 45.93 years for women to 10.9 years

In Trinidad - the only colony controlled directly from London - birth and death registers of slaves show that life expectancy varied from between 15.18-19.45 for males, and 13.21-20.58 for females.

Conditions on a Trinidadian plantation was incredibly harsh.

The planters of Trinidad rejected in 1832 a document by the British governor which proposed a day off to permit religious instruction and the abolition of the whip  the planters argued the whip was necessary for discipline, and time off for religion would encourage idleness.

In Iceland, life expectancy dropped from 35.35 years to 17.86 for males, and from 40.81 years to 18.82 for females. Many of the people in Iceland died of complications of measles, including dysentery and bronchitis.

During Sweden's last major famine, in 1771, abnormal weather resulted in widespread crop failures and life expectancy dropped to 17.15 years for males and 18.79 for females.
Children are experiencing the effects of the opioid crisis as the drug epidemic forces kids out of their homes and into foster care, according to research.

A new study found that in Florida alone, at least 2,000 children were placed into foster care due to parental neglect as the opioid epidemic began to grow between 2012 and 2015.

Addiction to prescription painkillers, such as oxycodone and morphine, has contributed to a dramatic rise in overdose deaths and health care costs, but this study is the first to connect the crisis to orphaned children.

Children removed from their homes due to parental neglect have a greater chance of mental and physical health problems as well as criminality, emphasizing the need to put an end to the public health emergency that killed nearly 65,000 Americans in 2016.

A graph shows the rise in painkiller prescriptions between 2012 and 2015 as it correlates to the rise in children being fostered due to parental neglect in Florida

Researchers from the University of South Florida College of Public Health analyzed data from 2012 to 2015 submitted from Florida to the federal government's Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.

They found that in 2015, roughly two out of every 1000 kids and teens were removed from their homes due to parental neglect, a 129 percent increase since 2012.

According to the Florida Drug-Related Outcomes Surveillance and Tracking System, the number of opioids prescribed during this same time period rose nine percent.

In 2012, doctors prescribed about 72 prescriptions for every 100 residents.

The findings published in Health Affairs show the rate grew to 81 prescriptions per 100 residents by 2015, averaging about 71 prescriptions during the 2012-2015 time frame.

On average, for every additional six opioid prescriptions per 100 people, the removal rate for parental neglect increased by 32 percent.

This means an estimated 2,000 children were removed from their home as the epidemic grew.

'While the reported drop in opioid prescription rates over the last two years is encouraging, unfortunately it appears illicit opioid use has more than offset the decrease,' said Dr Troy Quast from the University of South Florida College of Public Health.

'We need to keep affected children in the forefront of our minds when tackling this crisis,' he added.

The child mortality rate in the US has progressively declined in the last 50 years and most 15 to 19 years old die as a result of gun violence

Previous research has shown that children removed from their homes due to parental neglect have a greater likelihood of juvenile delinquency, teen motherhood, mental and physical health problems and adult criminality.

This study comes as new research also published today in Health Affairs reveals that the US has the highest child mortality rate out of the 19 other industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The study from Johns Hopkins Hospital found that over a 50 year period (1961-2010), childhood mortality progressively declined.

From 2001 to 2010 children between 15 and 19 years old were 82 times more likely to die from gun homicide in the US, the study showed.

Another cause of death within that age group was car accidents.

Dr Quast said: 'Through my experience as a foster parent, I've seen first-hand how the foster system has been overwhelmed by children removed from homes where the parents are opioid-dependent.'

'My goal in this study was to gain insight into the factors behind this surge,' he added.
Around 90 per cent of Jaguar Land Rover's sales in Britain are diesel models

Jaguar Land Rover launched an attack on the demonisation of diesel as sales in the UK sunk by a fifth in the last three months of 2017.

As the car maker posted a rise in sales for its global business, as we revealed yesterday, JLR  which is owned by India conglomerate Tata Group  said that business in the UK had been hammered by the constant attack on diesel engines.

Around 90 per cent of Jaguar Land Rover's sales in Britain are diesel models, which compares with around 45 per cent globally.

Britain's car industry body said last week that 2017 sales across the sector recorded their biggest drop since 2009, blaming plans to increase a levy on new diesel cars and weakening consumer confidence in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Andy Goss, sales director for JLR said: 'We are facing tough times in key markets such as the UK where consumer confidence and diesel taxes will hit us.'

Goss said that ministers who talked of banning diesel cars and of the engines being dirty were harming the industry.

He said: 'We employ 40,000 people with thousands more in the supply chain. We are delivering huge benefits to the economy.'

JLR said global sales rose 7 per cent to a record 621,109 vehicles in 2017. The company has embarked on a major turnaround plan since being bought by Tata in 2008.

This includes investment in new models and expansion of production with the aim of building around 1m vehicles a year by the turn of the decade.

It said growth in China, its largest market, and in the US helped to offset difficult conditions in Britain and the rest of Europe, where demand was flat.
The French owner of Vauxhall will slash another 250 jobs at the group's Astra plant at Ellesmere Port plant in Cheshire, it was confirmed today.

PSA, which also owns the Peugeot and Citroen brands, said the move was needed to 'accelerate the recovery of plant productivity. The jobs cuts are on top of 400 already announced at the site in October last year.

Vauxhall told Unite union on Thursday that more redundancies were needed in the period between April and September 2018. The Ellesmere Port plant will move staff to a single production shift in April.

Job cuts: The 250 job losses announced today are on top of 400 already announced last year

It said in a statement: Vauxhall Management affirmed the company's continued commitment to the Astra plant at Ellesmere Port.

The company remains confident in the ability of the Ellesmere Port workforce to deliver the necessary improvements in financial performance.

The move heightens fears raised during the 1.9billion takeover about the future of Astra production at Ellesmere Port and further job cuts across Vauxhall and Opel, also bought by PSA, which employ about 4,500 in the UK.

It is believed the fall in the pound has pushed up the costs of some materials, while demand for five-door family cars is falling.

In 2016, Vauxhall sold 60,719 Astras to private buyers and fleet operators to make it the sixth most popular car in the UK.

That figured dropped to 49,370 last year, as sales across Vauxhall's entire range declined by an alarming 22 per cent.

UK registrations of Astra models - which are built at the Ellesmere Port plant - declined by almost 20% in 2017, new figures released this week showed

PSA bought the loss-making European arm of General Motors  which included Vauxhall and Opel  in August.

Amid frantic lobbying from unions and government in the UK, it pledged to stick to GMs existing production commitments in the UK.

That means it is committed to making the Astra in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, until 2021, while production of the Vivaro van in Luton will continue until 2025.

Justin Madders, Labour MP Ellesmere Port & Neston, said it was more 'devastating news' for workers in the area.

He added: 'When previous job losses were announced in October, it was made clear that manufacturing costs were higher at Ellesmere Port than some other plants.

'That is why I called on the government to urgently intervene and work with the management to reduce costs and improve productivity, for example by creating incentives to encourage suppliers to relocate to Ellesmere Port.

'Sadly, and unlike on previous occasions when the facility has faced difficulties, ministers have provided warm words but no concrete action, while governments in other countries are pulling out all the stops to improve competitiveness.'
Huma Abedin backed up copies of her emails with Hillary Clinton to her pervert husband Anthony Weiner's laptop, DailyMail.com can disclose - conflicting with her account to the FBI and in court that she did not preserve the conversations.

An examination by DailyMail.com of emails released by the State Department shows that backup copies of many of Abedin's work-related messages with Clinton were created in the dates after Clinton left the State Department in early 2013.

The emails, released at the end of December, show that they had been put on Weiner's laptop by a BlackBerry archiving program.

A tech expert told Dailymail.com that Abedin would have to have activated the backup program and may well have plugged her device into the laptop - raising further questions over her testimony to the FBI.

Abedin was Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department and remains her closest aide.

Like Clinton, she was cleared by then FBI director James Comey in the wake of the investigation into the former Secretary of State and her staff's handling of classified material.

Last Thursday it was revealed that the Department of Justice is looking again at the Clinton email investigation, after President Donald Trump's provocative tweet calling for 'jail' for Abedin. It is also being examined by the FBI's Inspector General.

Huma Abedin did in fact back up her emails between her and Hillary Clinton on to her husband Anthony Weiner's laptop an examination by the State Department revealed

The emails were discovered by the FBI just weeks before the 2016 presidential election when the agency seized Weiner's laptop after DailyMail.com revealed he was sexting a 15-year-old girl

The disclosure that Abedin made backups will raise further questions over Comey's decision-making and is likely to be studied by the Department of Justice's renewed probe.

The emails were discovered by the FBI just weeks before the 2016 election when the agency seized Weiner's laptop after DailyMail.com revealed he was sexting a 15-year-old girl, an offense for which he is now behind bars.

The FBI sought permission to review its other contents when they realized that the laptop contained not just evidence of his perverted grooming of a minor, but emails from the notorious Clintonemail.com server.

Comey sent shockwaves through the election when he revealed that the Clinton email probe had been renewed in October because of the discovery of emails on Weiner's laptop.

He quickly abandoned it, saying the emails were not new, but Clinton continues to believe that his actions helped cost her the election.

Since then legal action by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has forced the release of hundreds of emails, including a latest tranche at the end of last week which show that they were on Weiner's laptop because they had been backed up from another device.

The messages were archived from 'BBB Backup' and 'LoaderBackup' from a BlackBerry Bold 9700 in February 2013 - weeks after Huma and Hillary left the State Department

Huma had told the FBI that she did not have a way of preserving the messages she exchanged with her boss and said those conversations were 'left on the system'

Emails released by the State Department this week included at least five messages from Abedin that were marked 'Classified' and were found on Weiner's laptop

The emails show they were sent in from Abedin's BlackBerry on February 3, 2013 and February 7, 2013. She had left the State Department, like Clinton, on January 20

The classified messages included discussions on Israel and other Middle Eastern issues from 2010, 2011 and 2012

It is unclear if whether the FBI agents who examined the emails found in Weiner's laptop in October appreciated that their presence there contradicted Abedin's statements from her deposition

What is unclear is whether the FBI agents who examined the emails found in Weiner's laptop in October appreciated that their presence there contradicted Abedin's evidence to them and a deposition she made under oath.

Abedin had told FBI investigators that she did not have a method of preserving the emails she exchanged on a private server with Clinton.

'Abedin stated that she lost most of her old emails as a result of the transition [from the State Department].

'She had only accessed clintonemail.com through a web portal and did not have a method for archiving her old emails prior to the transition,' said notes taken during an FBI interview of Huma Abedin on April 5, 2016.

Abedin gave a similar response when she was deposed under oath by attorneys from Judicial Watch on June 28, 2016.

'With respect to those State Department work-related emails on the Clintonemail.com accounts, what did you do, if anything, to preserve those emails?' asked an attorney with Judicial Watch, according to a transcript of the deposition.

Abedin responded that she 'did not do anything to preserve those emails'.

Abedin and other members of Clinton's inner circle at the State Department used multiple email addresses  including one official State Department account, and another on Clinton's private email server located at her home. Above they are pictured in 2010

'The instances where it was Clintonemail to Clintonemail, there were instances where the content of those emails had personal matters in there, and there may have also been State Department matters in there, too.

'It was a - a combination. But I did not - I did not preserve those e-mails,' added Abedin.

Abedin and other members of Clinton's inner circle at the State Department used multiple email addresses  including one official State Department account, and another on Clinton's private email server located at her home.

Abedin testified that she left all of her emails from her Clinton server account in her inbox after leaving the State Department. She said she did not delete any emails.

'I just left everything on what - on the system, I guess,' she said during her deposition.

The discovery of the existence of the Clinton server has led to a series of lawsuits by Judicial Watch.

It was during one of those that Abedin was deposed under oath and it was due to another one that the State Department had to release the latest tranche of emails last Friday.

Abedin has said she was not aware that her emails were on Weiner's laptop and did not know how they ended up on his computer.

She reportedly used the laptop occasionally to check her messages.

Some of the emails found on Weiner's laptop were forwarded to him directly from Abedin, their details show.

But many of them ended up on the computer through the backups of Abedin's BlackBerry on February 3, 2013 and February 7, 2013. She had left the State Department, like Clinton, on January 20.

The messages were archived from 'BBB Backup' and 'LoaderBackup' from a BlackBerry Bold 9700.

Ariel Coro, a technology consultant and analyst for Univision, reviewed the emails and told DailyMail.com that Abedin or someone working for her would have had to intentionally set up the backup program for her BlackBerry.

'What you're seeing here is a backup restore of what was sent from her phone,' said Coro.

'They set up a backup to be done when she plugged it in to her computer, to the laptop, or potentially over the air [remotely].

'This is not an accident, this was configured to back up, either directly [to the laptop] or through the air,' he added. 'This was something that was configured, or at least opted-in.'

That means that either Abedin, or an assistant, consciously set up the backup system or that she confirmed that she wanted to backup when she was prompted to by her BlackBerry.

Once that program was set up, it could be scheduled to archive her data automatically. It could have also been programmed to save phone contacts, photos, texts and other phone data.

The emails released by the State Department included at least five messages from Abedin that were marked 'Classified' and were found on Weiner's laptop.

The government classifies information at that level when its exposure 'reasonably could be expected to cause damage to national security.'

The classified messages included discussions on Israel and other Middle Eastern issues from 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Philadelphia firefighter Lt Matt LeTourneau (pictured) and the man he was trying to rescue from a house fire have died after the interior of the home collapsed on Saturday morning, pinning them under debris

A Philadelphia firefighter and the man he was trying to rescue from a house fire have died after the interior of the home collapsed on Saturday morning, pinning them under debris.

Lt Matt LeTourneau was trapped for 30 minutes until firefighters were able to remove him, Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said at a news conference later that day.

LeTourneau, 42, was taken to Temple Univeristy Hospital where he was pronounced dead around 11am

The resident of the home was found dead in the building and two firefighters were injured.

The fire broke out around 8.30am on the 2200 block of N Colorado Street, although the cause remains unknown. The blaze was reported at 8.51am and firefighters arrived three minutes later.

Approximately 100 emergency crew members, including LeTourneau, responded to the fire. He was injured when part of the house's structure collapsed.

LeTourneau, 42 (left and right) was trapped for 30 minutes until firefighters were able to remove him. He was taken to Temple Univeristy Hospital where he was pronounced dead around 11am

The fire broke out around 8.30am on the 2200 block of N Colorado Street (pictured), although the cause remains unknown. The blaze was reported at 8.51am and firefighters arrived three minutes later

'All of the men and women of the Philadelphia Fire Department are heroes,' Thiel said

From the day they take the oath to this city, they are heroes. Among those heroes, there are the pantheon of men and women who have made ultimate sacrifice. Today, tragically Lt Matt LeTourneau joins that host of heroes. And our hearts are breaking.'

The department did not immediately identify the civilian who was killed.

Residents said they didn't know the man's full name, but he was called Andre and believed to be in his 50s living alone.

His next door neighbor, Sherel Smith, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she saw him around 2am Saturday carrying a box containing a heater. He said thathe didn't have heat in his house to face the bitter cold.

'He said he was going to turn on his heater and stay in the house,' said Smith told the newspaper.

LeTourneau (left on the far left, and right) was an 11-year veteran of the Philadelphia Fire Department and he was promoted to lieutenant in 2015. He received a unit citation in 2010 and a letter of commendation for his service during the World Meeting of Families in 2015

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney issued an statement saying all City of Philadelphia flags will be flown at half-staff for 30 days. Funeral arrangements for LeTourneau have not yet been announced

Another person from a neighboring home was taken to Temple University Hospital and was listed in critical condition. A name and further details about injuries were not disclosed.

LeTourneau was an 11-year veteran of the Philadelphia Fire Department and he was promoted to lieutenant in 2015.

He received a unit citation in 2010 and a letter of commendation for his service during the World Meeting of Families in 2015.

He lived in Springfield and is survived by his mother, other relatives and friends. He had no children

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney issued a statement saying all City of Philadelphia flags will be flown at half-staff for 30 days. Funeral arrangements for LeTourneau have not yet been announced.

The last Philadelphia firefighter killed in action was Lt Joyce Craig, who was fatally injured in December 2014 while battling a wind-whipped house fire.
Michael Wolff, author of the new Trump tell-all, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,' said he wasn't out to write such a punishing account of the president's West Wing.

'I would have been delighted to have written a contrarian account here: Donald Trump, this unexpected president, is actually going to succeed,' Wolff said Sunday on Meet the Press. 'OK, that's not the story. He is not going to succeed. This is worse than everybody thought.'

NBC's Chuck Todd had asked Wolff about his previous criticism of media coverage of Trump, as the author once said he thought it too negative.

Michael Wolff, the author of the best-seller 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House', says he wasn't out to burn the president in his new book, however what he encountered at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is 'worse than everybody thought'

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd wanted to know if Michael Wolff had left out 'good stuff' because it went against his narrative. Wolff replied that he actually left out 'stuff that was even more damning'

Wolff explained that that was before he saw the Trump dysfunction, up close.

'You know, I think that in the beginning, the media took this point of view without having had this experience,' Wolff said.

'You know, I went into this, a decent part of the country went into this, his entire staff went into this thinking maybe this can work,' Wolff recalled. 'And that was exactly my frame of reference.'

Moderator Chuck Todd asked Wolff is he purposely left out 'good stuff' because it would take away from the narrative of the Trump presidency being a disaster.

'If I left out anything, it's probably stuff that was even more damning,' Wolff replied.

When Todd asked if, 'It's that bad,' Wolff agreed.

'It's that bad. I mean, it's an extraordinary moment in time and the last several days focused on my book I think are proof of this ,' Wolff said. 'It's not unreasonable to say this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff.'

Todd asked if the 25th Amendment, which, among other things, outlines how a vice president and a president's cabinet can take a president out of office, was ever discussed by staff in Trump's West Wing.

'All the time,' Wolff answered.

The author said staff would use it to describe Trump's behavior saying things like, 'We're not at a 25th Amendment level yet.'

'That's alarming,' Todd noted.

Wolff agreed. 'This is alarming in every way,' the best-selling author said.

'So the 25th Amendment is a concept that is alive every day in the White House,' Wolff said.
A third of stalking victims are men, according to new police figures.

The latest data has shown that 41 out of 46 police forces across the UK dealt with 1,800 stalking cases against men between 2014 and 2017.

But it is believed that in reality the figure is much higher as around 85 per cent of stalking victims do not report the incident to the police.

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, more than 1.2million people were stalked in the year ending March 2016, with 759,000 being women while the other 450,000 were men.

Some 450,000 men (stock photograph) were stalked in the year ending March 2016, figures reveal

Figures obtained by BBC 5 Live Investigates found almost half (47 per cent) of stalking crimes reported by male victims were committed by other men.

The Freedom of Information request showed figures from 41 out of the 46 British police forces who were asked about stalking.

Driving instructor Bob Coughtrey, 53, claimed that his local police force told him there was 'nothing they could do' when he told them he was being stalked.

Mr Coughtrey, from Lancashire, said he was stalked by a female pupil who repeatedly sent himtext messages after she passed her test.

He said: 'She sent me a message which said "part of me wishes I hadn't passed my test, because I would have got to spend more time with you".'

Mr Coughtrey added that the messages became 'darker and darker' and said the phone calls went on 'every night' and would leave him up to 15 voicemails.

However, he said the police told him they could not intervene because she had not made direct contact with him.

But he later said he became 'vulnerable and anxious' when his former pupil arrived at his flat after she followed him home.

More than 750,000 women were stalked during the same year (stock photograph)

He said: 'I phoned 999, and within a few minutes a police car arrived and they arrested her on suspicion of harassment.'

She was given a restraining order and a suspended prison sentence.

He added: 'It's horrible. It's almost suffocating. It changes your life, how you feel about people.

'You feel as if you're not quite being taken seriously, because you're a man.

Sharon Stratton, from the College of Policing, told the BBC: 'I understand stalking is under-reported generally, and men report less than women.

'We must ensure that we encourage people to come forward.'
A shopping centre is investigating a complaint after some children were refused entry by a security guard because they were 'Murri'.

A mother shared a post on social media saying her son and nephews were stopping at Vincent Market Place in Townsville, Queensland, when they were allegedly turned away because of their race.

'They were stopped at the entrance by the security guard who told them "all Murri kids under the age of 18 can't enter without a parent after 6 o'clock,"' the mother told Daily Mail Australia.

A shopping centre (pictured) is under fire after a group of children were refused entry by a security guard because they were 'Murri'

A mother shared a post on Facebook saying her son and nephews were stopping at a Vincent Market Place in Townsville (pictured) when they were turned away because of their race

Murri is a term used to describe Indigenous Australians most often used in Queensland as Koori is used in the same way in NSW and Victoria, according to Welcome to Country.

The young teenagers, aged 15, 14 and 12, were in shock after hearing the 'rule' which they hadn't heard before, the mother said.

'While in there, they were also being watched by the two security guards and one staff member,' the mother told Daily Mail Australia.

'He later told us he felt unhappy and violated, they were all really in shock.

'Emotions were running high when they got home.'

Woolworths responded to the complaint online saying they were 'disappointed' by the situation.

'The security guard involved is not employed by Woolworths but provided by the centre itself,' the company wrote.

A Vincent Market Place spokesman told Daily Mail Australia the 'experienced security guard' advised a number of children that 'minors needed to be accompanied by adults after 6pm at the centre', however it is not a rule.

'[It] alleges that the children were advised they could not enter the centre because they were Indigenous,' he said.

'This is simply not the case and the centre retains a diverse customer base.'

'They were told by the security guards there that no Murri's under the age of 18 are allowed to go into Woolies after 6 o'clock,' the mother wrote on Thursday

The centre has referred the incident to its security contractor.

Vincent Market Place spokeswoman Jenny Garland told Townsville Bulletin the allegations were 'ridiculous' and the shopping centre did not have a discrimination policy 'in terms of race'.

'We don't discriminate on who can or can't go in, that's ridiculous,' she said.
A United Airlines flight did not heed warnings to hold short of a runway on which a JetBlue flight was arriving at Boston Logan International Airport, authorities say.

The incident occurred on Friday when United Airlines flight 1946 was returning to its gate because of an unspecified maintenance issue,ABC News reports.

Apparently, the Boeing 737 entered a 'safety area' near where the JetBlue plane was due to land, which triggered an alarm.

A United Airlines flight and a JetBlue flight nearly crossed paths on Friday after the United flight, returning to its gate due to a maintenance issue, entered a 'safety area' near where the JetBlue flight was due to land. The JetBlue plane performed a go around. Pictured is a snowy view of Boston Logan International Airport, where the incident took place, on January 4

Air traffic controllers warned the flight to 'hold short of runway 27' at least five times, to which the pilot replied: 'We're short.'

The United flight did not end up reaching runway 27.

But the JetBlue flight nonetheless performed a 'go around,' which United Airlines later said in a statement was 'completely unrelated' to the matter.

GD Pennington, who was on the United Airlines flight, tweeted: 'Close call with our pilot slamming the brakes and go around of landing aircraft.'

Sarah Sossong, who was on the JetBlue flight, tweeted: 'Bravo to our @JetBlue pilot on flight 1154 who pulled up quicklydue to "another aircraft on our runway".

'After a bumpy go around, he landed @BostonLogan to a round of applause.'

The incident comes amid widespread travel chaos following the bomb cyclone that rocked the Eastern Seaboard this past week. Pictured are stranded passengers at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York

Police were called in to break up 'disturbances' caused by furious passengers at the airport; meanwhile, one terminal was evacuated on Sunday due to flooding. Pictured is a view of stranded passengers

Stranded passengers blame card games or check their phones to pass the time as they face delays or cancellations

The incident preceded a Saturday diversion in which a JetBlue flight en route to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic from Boston returned to its home base because of an unusual odor smelled by passengers and crew on board.

JetBlue flight 1095 departed at 5pm and returned to Boston Logan at 6.24pm, Fox 25 News reports.

The airline said in a statement: 'Shortly after departure from Boston the crew on board JetBlue Flight 1095 to Punta Cana reported an unusual odor and customers and crewmembers feeling unwell.

Record-setting cold weather has rocked the Northeast

'In an abundance of caution, the crew elected to return to Boston and was met by medical personal. The aircraft will be inspected. '

The incidents come following widespread travel chaos in the aftermath of the bomb cyclone that brought hurricane-force winds and blizzard conditions to much of the Eastern Seaboard this past week.

Police were called in to break up 'disturbances' caused by furious passengers who have been stranded at the John F Kennedy International for nearly two days as a terminal is evacuated due to flooding.

Passengers have complained of being stranded on the tarmac for hours and then facing lengthy delays in baggage claim that made traveling, particularly with babies or the elderly, a misery.

A portion of JFK was evacuated around 1.30pm on Sunday due to a massive water break. The water rose quickly as passengers fled the terminal.

A plane being towed at New York's JFK struck a Kuwait-bound airliner, prompting the flight to be cancelled.

A China Southern plane was being towed at JFK when it clipped the right tail end of a Kuwait Airways plane before the latter was due to takeoff for an overnight flight around 12am Saturday morning, the Port Authority said on Twitter.

On Friday, an American Airlines flight bound for Cancun from JFK turned around for an emergency landing after someone on board said they saw a wing was on fire.

American Airlines officially said that the plane, a Boeing 738, needed to land due to a 'possible mechanical issue'.

And an Airbus A380 - the world's largest passenger jet - was en route to land at the JFK when it was diverted to Stewart Airport in Orange County on Thursday due to winds and whiteout conditions.
They have apologised for their actions and vowed to repay their medical costs

The last of the nine to be taken ill has woken up in hospital in a stable condition

A group of backpackers overdosed on hyoscine, mistaking it for a bag of cocaine

A group of backpackers who nearly lost their lives in a bizarre drug overdose have offered to repay their medical bills for the treatment that saved them.

The nine travelers have broken their silence on their 'stupid mistake', explaining that they opened a package sent to their mailbox addressed to someone else, found white powder inside and assumed it was cocaine.

According to Perth Now, it was actually hyoscine, which is a motion-sickness medicine often abused as a date-rape drug.

A group of backpackers who overdose on hyoscine five days ago have now spoken to media

Nine travelers have broken their silence on the 'stupid mistake' that led to their mass overdose

It took less than five minutes for them to be stricken with extreme hallucinations and paralysis - the outcome of what the group described as 'probably the most stupid mistake they had ever made'.

Luckily a friend arrived to the Victoria Park property just in time to call 000 and save the lives of the two women and seven men.

'You can't move your legs...You can't speak, you can't say "help us",'' revealed one of the backpackers, explaining the effect that the drug has on the body.

Emergency services discovered nine seriously ill people in different states of unconsciousness

The men were taken to Royal Perth Hospital, with the last of the group waking up on Monday

A quick-thinking friend called 000, who found nine backpackers seriously ill at a Perth house

The last of the nine people woke up on Monday morning - five days later - with his condition changing from 'critical' to 'stable'.

At the suggestion of the State Government, the group have promised to pay their medical bills for the life-saving treatment they received in Australia, which 'could run into thousand of dollars'.

'Of course we have to pay for the mistake,' said one of the men. 'There's no point that the taxpayers have to pay for us. It is our mistake.

'It is the least we can do to thank the paramedics,police and hospital staff who saved us,' he said.'Thank you to Australia...And, sorry again.'

The last of the nine backpackers to overdose on hyoscine has woken up in a stable condition
Tesco has been forced to apologise after giving the wrong medication to a woman with chronic pain syndrome, making her violently sick and leaving her in hospital.

Sasha Jackson, 34, suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes pain all over her body.

After a flare up on New Year's Eve paramedics came to her home in Clevedon, north Somerset and gave her an emergency prescription for anti-inflammatory drug Naproxen.

Her partner Darren Davies, 51, picked it up from the town's Tesco superstore later that day.

But when they started making her vomit incessantly, he realised the box said Metformin  a treatment for type two diabetes.

Sasha Jackson (pictured), 34, suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes pain all over her body

After a flare up on New Year's Eve paramedics came to her home in Clevedon, north Somerset and gave her an emergency persription for anti-inflammatory drug Naproxen

Her partner Darren Davies (pictured right with her), 51, picked it up from the town's Tesco superstore later that day. But when they started making her vomit incessantly, he realised the box said Metformin  a treatment for type two diabetes

Tweeting about the disturbing mix-up he wrote: 'Collected an emergency prescription from Tesco Clevedon following a visit from paramedics, prescription was for Naproxen, what we got was Metformin in a Naproxen box, my partner has been violently ill and had to visit hospital as a result of the side effects of taking this drug.'

It was only after googling the name of the drug on the box that the couple realised what had happened.

The side effects of Metformin include nausea and vomiting.

Shocked they called the NHS 101 hotline, who advised them to go straight to hospital.

Pictured: Tesco Superstore Clevedon where Ms Jackson was given the wrong pills

The 34-year-old was admitted to Southmead Hospial the same day, where staff were astounded at the mix-up.

WHAT IS FIBROMYALGIA? Fibromyalgia, also called fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), is a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body. As well as widespread pain, people with fibromyalgia may also have: increased sensitivity to pain fatigue (extreme tiredness) muscle stiffness difficulty sleeping headaches irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)  a digestive condition that causes stomach pain and bloating Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

Mr Davies told the Bristol Post: 'The nurse kept apologising and it wasn't even her fault or Southmead's fault, but I think she was just absolutely horrified and felt bad, I guess, because it looks bad on the NHS.'

He went back to the store on January 2 to tell the store manager what had happened, where he got an apology and the promise of an investigation.

But he claims his partner is still ill, despite having stopped taking the pills.

He told the newspaper: 'At the end of the day, Sasha wasn't feeling good anyway and what she really needed was pain relief. What she got made her much worse.'

Tesco apologised and confirmed no one else had been affected by the mix up.

A spokesman said: 'We are extremely sorry for the concern and upset this incident caused Sasha and Darren.

'There was a selection error when dispensing this individual prescription and no other prescriptions from the pharmacy were affected.

'We are conducting a full and thorough investigation, and will update Sasha and Darren with our findings.'
Dante Bencivenga, 58, was kicked off a Spirit Airlines flight for reportedly urinating all over the on-board bathroom, and was later banned from the Florida airport for one year for being belligerent on Thursday

Bad bathroom behavior got one Florida man kicked off his flight, and eventually banned from the airport.

Dante Bencivenga, 58, had already boarded his flight at Southwest Florida International Airport on Thursday but was asked to leave the plane when flight attendants said he urinated all over the toilet and carpet in the on-board bathroom.

He had already deplaned when he was arrested at and charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication after causing a scene at the Spirit Airlines gate, Fox 4 reported.

Spirit Airlines employees noticed Bencivenga drifting in and out of consciousness as he waited to board his flight on Thursday, Lee County Port Authority Police said.

He also smelled like alcohol.

But he made it on the plane anyway, and made a huge mess in the bathroom.

The man reportedly urinated on top of the toilet and all over the floor in the stall.

When flight attendants noticed, they asked him to leave the plane and he did so without becoming belligerent.

But then, while gate agents were trying to rebook the man for a Friday flight, he grew unruly.

Bencivenga continued to cause a disruption and would not leave the terminal, Spirit Airlines representatives said.

Bencivenga was charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication, and has been banned from the Southwest Florida International Airport for one year

When officers responded, Bencivenga said he was not drunk, despite what police described as a strong smell of alcohol.

Bencivenga requested to take a breathalyzer test to prove he was not intoxicated, police said.

He was taken into custody at the Lee County Jail and released Friday on $2,250 bond.

Due to this actions after being removed from his flight, Bencivenga has been banned from the Southwest Florida International Airport for one year.
Few military men seek sedentary retirements and Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon admits he is dismayed by the idea of a gentle slide into leisurely routine.

When he left the Army in 2011 after 23 years service, he swapped a career commanding troops in the worlds battlefields to volunteer in even more hazardous trouble spots.

The 54-year-old has served in both Gulf Wars, in Bosnia, Kosovo and been twice to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Julia, 50, his wife of 25 years, and their two children, got used to his absences  and his fizzing, restless energy. Why, the man holds a world record for performing 4,448 press-ups in the space of three hours!

Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, pictured here with Julia, his wife of 25 years, has revealed a new horror in Syria that shames the civilised world - and poses a chilling threat to Britain

Excitement and adrenaline still fire my rockets, he says, deploying the metaphors of combat. As a young tank commander, I served in Iraq, and when I came home I felt euphoric: you think youre indestructible, bullet-proof.

Self-preservation is not particularly high on my agenda, but when youve survived wars you develop an instinct for avoiding danger.

While serving in Afghanistan as commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment, he devised a mobile testing unit that allowed DNA samples to be taken from insurgents bombs.

It meant matches could be made with suspects within three hours, instead of the usual 14 days it took to send samples back to the UK for processing.

Suspects could be legally held in custody for only 96 hours, so his invention  one of simple genius  meant evidence could be gathered before they had to be released. It was a breakthrough in battlefield counter-terrorism.

Hamish is a useful man to have around in a crisis, and today he deploys his skills to help the victims of conflict as an unpaid adviser to the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM).

He is also co-director of Doctors Under Fire, a role he shares with London-based trauma surgeon David Nott, who, for the past 25 years, has given up several weeks of each year to operate without pay on victims of conflict in the worlds most dangerous trouble spots.

The two men first met in Syria in 2013. David was en route to a hospital in Aleppo to carry out life-saving surgery on civilian victims of the conflict. The route bristled with armed insurgents intent on killing Westerners.

Hamish, pictured here aged 27 on tour in Cyprus, left the Army in 2011 after 23 years service. Now 54, he has served in both Gulf Wars, in Bosnia, Kosovo and been to Iraq and Afghanistan

Hamish recalls: I said to David, Great to meet you. Im sure youre going to die and we wont meet again, and David replied: Likewise. 

Mercifully, they both survived and a firm friendship formed between two men with a shared humanitarian purpose.

Hamish has witnessed so many acts of violence and evil you might imagine that he is inured to shock. Actually, he is speaking today because he believes the West needs to wake up to the fact that the worst crisis he has ever known is unfolding in Syria.

Ghouta, a besieged suburb of Damascus with some 400,000 inhabitants, is, he says, a scene of horrors that defy belief or description. This benighted area is the last bastion to hold out against the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and its luckless inhabitants are being bombed, gassed and starved into submission.

In my years of soldiering Ive witnessed many atrocities, says Hamish. But Ive never seen anything as horrific as what is going on in Ghouta now.

It is ten times worse than Afghanistan was in 2007.

Last year, when I was near Aleppo, I thought it was as bad as it could be, but Ghouta is worse. If Armageddon is the end of the world, then it seems as if this final destructive battle is being fought every day in Ghouta.

How the sun still rises over it each morning is a mystery. It is being barrel-bombed relentlessly; its people starved and cowed into submission.

It has been razed to the ground by constant air strikes and its inhabitants now live underground in cellars, caves and tunnels.

However, even this subterranean world does not provide safety: three times in the past four days chlorine bombs have been dropped by Syrian forces on Ghouta. Chemical weapons  outlawed by the Geneva Convention  kill by stealth, infiltrating the underground homes in which innocent civilians live.

Death from chlorine inhalation is grisly. The chemical, combined with water in the lungs, produces hydrochloric acid, which then dissolves the lungs.

Hamish has expertise in this field. A chemical weapons expert, when not volunteering he works for Avon Rubber in Wiltshire, who manufacture the worlds leading gas masks. He also knows how best to deal with a chemical attack and treat its aftermath.

But for the people of Ghouta, the choice is an invidious one. If innocent civilians are flushed out onto the streets by gas attacks, they then face death from the barrel bombs and high-energy explosives that rain down from Putins Russian jets and Assad-regime aircraft, he says.

Daily life is bleak. Water is contaminated and its supply intermittent. It must be boiled before it is drinkable, but wood for fires  the only means of heating and cooking  is running out. And a bitterly cold winter is setting in.

Hamish is now trying to draw the world's attention to Syria. Ghouta, a besieged suburb of Damascus with some 400,000 inhabitants, is, he says, a scene of horrors that defy belief

People have eaten their dogs and cats, says Hamish. Now, if a rat is caught it provides a meal.

And then theres what is perhaps the most grotesque inhumanity of all: the deliberate targeting of hospitals in air strikes, and the killing of hundreds of doctors and medical personnel who are there expressly to save lives.

The rules of war dictate that hospitals and their staff should be protected, says Hamish. In any conflict, they provide sanctuary, solace and hope. In Ghouta they have been cynically destroyed.

In the past 12 months, most of the hospitals UOSSM supports have been destroyed by Russian and Syrian air attacks. Hundreds of medics have also been killed.

The contrast between this hell and Hamishs life in England could not be more stark. The home he and Julia share with their 18-year-old son, Felix (daughter Jemima, 20, is at university), is a spacious modern house in rural Wiltshire.

Hamishs parents, both expats born in India, moved, after its partition, to Kenya, where they were farmers. Hamish boarded at Tonbridge public school, Kent, then studied agriculture at Reading University, where he met Julia, a chartered surveyor.

I ask if she worries about his forays into danger and she says she doesnt. It makes him feel alive  it is what makes him tick. As a military wife you get used to your husband being away. Having Hamish away for short periods now is nothing compared to what Army families go through.

So what motivates him? Why abandon his country home to face death in the most bleak and dangerous corner of the world?

When you see the depravity human beings are capable of, and you know that the West is doing nothing  that no one cares about Syria  the idea of standing idly by is anathema.

Mans inhumanity to man is an outrage, and our political leaders are sitting on their hands. You think: Syria is a three-and-a-half hour flight away, in sight of Cyprus, British sovereign territory, and people are dying there in their thousands.

Having spent my life on the battlefields of the world, its very difficult to stand by and hold the coats when you can do something.

Ghouta is the last bastion to hold out against the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and its luckless inhabitants are being bombed, gassed and starved into submission

He is calling on the British Government and the United Nations to impose no-fly zones to protect hospitals in Syria.

Such a policy was implemented by Sir John Major in Northern Iraq in 1991  and it saved the Kurdish race, Hamish contends, adding: The failure of our Government to support this initiative now means that a Red Cross or Red Crescent on a hospital is viewed as an aiming mark rather than a protective symbol.

Desperately sick children are languishing without health care. He shows me photos of Rawan al-Nasser who is eight years old but weighs no more than a one-year-old baby. Her kidneys are failing, her brain haemorrhaging and her liver is malfunctioning.

Although she was born healthy, she developed an eye condition which was treated. She seemed to rally, but then four years ago the siege began and all hope for Rawan ended.

Hospitals were shelled. Medics killed. The supply routes for food and vital medicines were cut off. Rawan has not seen a doctor for four years because there are none in the besieged area of the city where she lives, says Hamish. And her condition is compounded by starvation.

He is not an unemotional man but he has the stiff upper lip of an Army commander. His compassion is the muscular variety that favours actions over words.

All over Ghouta, children are suffering. Thousands are starving. Others are dying of treatable diseases and blast injuries.

There are babies like Karim, hit by an artillery attack on a market that killed his mother. He sustained severe injuries to his skull and desperately needs critical care and surgery. Then there is Qassem, aged two, who lost his mother last month in an air strike which blew away half of his face. Treatment in intensive care and reconstructive surgery are vital to keep him alive.

Meanwhile, Putin is parading his military genius and has air and sea bases on the Mediterranean showcasing Russian military hardware, says Hamish.

He has not been constrained by the Geneva Convention or rules of war, or any political democratic concerns at home.

The consequences of Putin and Assads actions in Syria are shocking and far-reaching. Half a million people have died in the conflict. Seventy-five per cent of children there suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

What a terrible legacy for a country and its people to endure, says Hamish. In the past 12 months, the use of chemical weapons has become the norm in Syria; if not endorsed by Russia, certainly with their knowledge.

Syria has become the benchmark for political and diplomatic failure and inertia by the West. There will be, according to Hamish, chilling consequences for our own security in Britain unless we act

Sarin has killed up to 100. Chlorine continues to be used in Ghouta, where an attack in the summer of 2013 killed 1,500.

It was the 21 chlorine barrel bombs, deployed over a week exactly this time last year in Aleppo, which broke the will of the people in West Aleppo to resist.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to oppose any further investigation by the UNs Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Besides, their antiquated procedures produce reports so long after the event that they have little impact or effect.

This is how atrocities become the norm and why ISIS now views chemical weapons as a key component in its terror arsenal.

Yet, through inertia and inactivity, we in the UK appear to acquiesce in these abuses.

But I believe the time has come to fight for the embattled people of Ghouta  because they cannot help themselves.

Today the area is supposed to be a de-escalation or safe zone  designated as such by Putin himself. But in reality it is a killing field that shames the United Nations Security Council, the UK, the U.S.  in fact, all who claim to stand up for humanity.

Safety and security are, by definition, the underlying and critical requirements for safe zones. So the Syrian air force should be grounded, and Putin has the power to order this.

As it is, however, Syria has become the benchmark for political and diplomatic failure and inertia by the West. Putin is given free rein to do as he pleases, and there will be, according to Hamish, chilling consequences for our own security in Britain unless we act.

It has a direct impact on all of us, he says. Russia may boast that it has won the battle to defeat Islamic State militarily, but we are now losing the war against ISIS as they regroup in Syria, in places like Idlib and Ghouta.

Idlib, a province in north-west Syria bordering Turkey, is one of the rebels remaining strongholds. Of its two million inhabitants, many have been displaced.

Ghouta has been bombarded by airstrikes. Hamish believes the worst crisis he has ever known is unfolding in Syria

It is a breeding ground for bandits and terrorists, Hamish says. If youre being blown up and starved  as the people of Idlib are  and the West is ignoring you, then youve nothing to lose from joining ISIS.

Which is why we must call for a ceasefire.

It is the UK, the EU and the U.S. who are now at the top of ISIS hit lists  and unless we recognise this, we will see horrific ISIS attacks, such as those in Manchester and London, become as normal as chemical weapon attacks are now in Syria.

He calls on the Government to support the UN Geneva Peace Process and the Astana Peace Talks, which seek to resolve the civil war that has ravaged Syria since 2011  and to which, until now, the UK has paid only lip service.

By these means, he says, I hope we can bring fair elections to Syria and get the humanitarian aid, medical help and infrastructure reconstruction to those civilians in the country we have so parlously let down by ignoring their plight.

The UK has the chance to make a real difference. Britain has always prided itself on being a great and stalwart protector of the sick and oppressed. Have we forgotten our role in the world?

Surely, the least we can offer the beleaguered people of Ghouta  and Syria as a whole  is to lead the reconstruction of their country with our troops as the peacekeepers?

Boris Johnson has already suggested that British troops could be available to help ensure governance in Syria, and I would favour a majority western force.

This force would enable aid delivery and reconstruction, which should create the positive conditions in which the Geneva process can unfold.

I would say to the leaders of the Western world: it is time to stop doing nothing about Syria.

What is more important than the plight of dying children like Rawan, Karim and Qaseem  and protecting our own country from the murderous extremes of ISIS?
Teachers around the country will soon be equipped with the skills to help their students through mental health-related issues.

As part of a $110 million funding package - set to be announced Monday - the Government will provide educators with free access to training resources.

Teachers in early learning, primary and secondary schools will be granted online and face-to-face programs about mental health and its warning signs, Herald Sun reports.

Learning tools are expected to help teachers identify issues and prevent them from becoming serious, while also helping to connect children to alternative support services.

Teachers around the country will soon be equipped with the skills to help their students through mental health-related issues as part of a $110 million Government package

The initiative will be driven by a $46 million beyondblue education program, which is set to be launched in August.

Teachers are likely to receive training in suicide prevention - designed to help in diffusing crisis situations.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the 'positive initiative' would have a widespread impact and would affect all members of the community.

'These positive initiatives will help schools and communities to support the well-being and mental health of our kids and respond rapidly to personal and community challenges,' Mr Hunt said.

Health Minister Greg Hunt (pictured) said proving free training resources to educators would have a widespread impact which would be felt by all members of the community

The Government package is inclusive of a $16 million handout to Emerging Minds - an organisation that trains people working with children to identify, assist and refer 'at risk' individuals.

An additional $30 million will be given to headspace to ensure continuity of mental health services in primary health, along with $13.5 million for the Orygen National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health.

Kids Helpline and ReachOut will also be divvied out $1.8 million across two years.

Former Australian of the Year and Orygen executive director Professor Patrick McGorry said the funds would be channeled into the development of innovative treatments.

Mr McGorry praised the generous Government package, with three quarters of mental health illnesses affecting people before they reached 25.
Craig McLachlan will continue to star in the Rocky Horror Show, as the actor vehemently denies allegations he sexually harassed and bullied his former co-stars.

Three female cast members of a 2014 production of the musical told a Fairfax Media and ABC investigation McLachlan inappropriately touched them or exposed himself.

McLachlan, who has described the allegations as 'made up', is currently on tour in Adelaide starring in a new Rocky Horror production.

Daily Mail Australia understands the tour will go ahead - and the 52-year-old will continue to play his lead role in the remaining six shows, the first of which will be held on Tuesday night.

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Craig McLachlan will continue to star in the Rocky Horror Show amid allegations he sexually harassed and bullied his former co-stars

Erika Heynatz (pictured left) and Christie Whelan Browne are among the women to make allegations against McLachlan, who says the accusations are 'baseless'

Scundi said McLachlan kissed her passionately onstage even after she had asked that it not be done

Production company The Gordon Frost Organisation refused to comment on the matter.

McLachlan said the allegations by Erika Heynatz, Christie Whelan Browne and Angela Scundi are 'baseless'.

'They seem to be simple inventions, perhaps made for financial reasons, perhaps to gain notoriety,' he was quoted as writing.

'These allegations are ALL made up.'

But Victoria Police has confirmed it is investigating.

'Detectives from Melbourne SOCIT (Sexual Offences Investigation Team) are investigating allegations of sexual offences dating back to 2014,' it said in a statement on Monday.

Production company The Gordon Frost Organisation refused to comment on the matter

Whelan Browne said McLachlan indecently assaulted her on stage during a sexuel scene

The cast of The Rocky Horror Show, led by Craig McLachlan, are pictured in 2014

'As the investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to make any further comment.'

The actor is also set to star in the return of the popular Doctor Blake Mysteries on Channel Seven later this year, and the network has been contacted for comment.

Whelan Browne also appeared in the Channel Ten program The Wrong Girl alongside McLachlan in 2016 and 2017.

She told the ABC she was dismayed when she learned he had been cast but felt she had to continue to have a civil relationship with him for the sake of her career.

She said his behaviour towards her on that program was appropriate.

But she said during Rocky Horror that McLachlan, who played the transvestite Frank N Furter to her Janet, said he indecently assaulted her on stage during a sex scene.

Craig McLachlan poses with the award for Best Actor in a Musical at the Capitol Theatre in 2014

This 2013 picture Rocky Horror Show's (left to right) Nicholas Christo, Tim Maddren, Ashlea Pyke, Craig McLachlan, Erika Heynatz and Brendan Irving

McLachlan said the allegations by Erika Heynatz, Christie Whelan Browne and Angela Scundi are 'baseless'

Scundi said McLachlan kissed her passionately onstage even after she had asked that it not be done.

She said when she confronted him about the unwanted kiss, he abused and threatened her.

'I said: ''Don't you kiss me. Don't you do that ever again'' and he turned. I haven't felt that terrified ever in my life, or ever again,' she told the ABC.

'He was just a different person. He said: ''You are nothing. Don't you dare talk to me like that. I will end you.'' And in that moment, I believed him.'

McLachlan said Rocky Horror was a 'confrontational musical oozing with sexuality'.

McLachlan is pictured arriving at the 58th Annual Logie Awards at Crown Palladium in 2016

Erika Heynatz is among the women take make serious allegations against McLachlan

'As such, as part of the musical the actors have to perform certain actions, all of which follow from the show itself - and indeed ''make'' the show.'

The three women said they had asked the production company, GFO, for an independent investigation into their claims, but that fell through.

In a statement, GFO said managing director John Frost was not available for an interview and the company declined to make any comment on the record.
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It is New Zealand's most notorious gang whose members operate in a criminal world of violence that is usually shut off to the outside world.

But one photographer managed to gain their trust - and in turn rare access - resulting in haunting images of some of the key members of the Mighty Mongrel Mob.

Since 2007 Wellington-born Jono Rotman has spent nearly eight years embedded with the Mob, gaining a unique glimpse of their culture, customs and even a bloody clash with rival group the Black Power.

Like most gangs, the Mob, who formed in Wellington and Hawkes Bay in the 1960s, have a stringent code against outsiders, preferring to operate in the shadows. And it's this that makes the chilling images that much more spectacular.

Rotman, who captured images of the gang's key members including convicted killer Shane Harrison, Bung Eye, Greco and Toots, told Daily Mail Australia he began earning their trust while photographing New Zealand's prisons.

I spoke with a gang liaison officer who gave me a contact of someone who bridged the divide between gang and civilian life. Things evolved from there, he said.

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Shane Harrison, who was convicted of murder in 2014, is featured in a chilling series of portraits of The Mongrel Mob by Photographer Jono Rotman

Rotman began travelling the country, visiting the homes and clubs of hundreds of gang members belonging to 30 different chapters.

Their history is extremely violent, so naturally I did feel intimidated at times,' he said. 'There was always an unspoken understanding that if I crossed them they would kill me.

As well as donning menacing face tattoos, some of the Mongrel Mob-who despite being primarily of Maori descent-use reviled Nazi symbols as an another act of rebellion towards authority.

Rotman made it clear he wanted to focus on art, rather than exposing the gang - and in turn they granted him unprecedented access to their inner workings.

Gangs represent a certain set of human drives taken to an extreme. This is what I wanted to explore,  Rotman said.

An exhibition of the portraits sparked outcry earlier this year after including a portrait of murderer Shane Harrison which was exhibited in his victim's hometown.

The work is not about who did what or what happened,' Rotman said. 'This is about a particular part of the country and history of the country I was interested in as a project, not about a stereotype but about these particular people.

Bung Eye, from the Notorious chapter: the artist has spent eight years embedded with the mob, who are the biggest and most infamous gang in New Zealand

Greco from the Notorious chapter: the artist said he managed to reach out to the mob after meeting a gang liaison officer who put him in contact with some members

Denimz from the Rogue chapter: Rotman slowly earned the trust of the gang, travelling across the country to the homes and clubs of hundreds of gang members

Willy of the Mighty Mongrel Mob: Rotman was granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of the gang

Toots from the King Country chapter: There was always an unspoken understanding if I crossed them they would kill me, Rotman said

Sean Wellington and his sons: critics have blasted the images for glamorising gang culture, but Rotman insists they he is merely seeking to objectively show a side of the country's cultural narrative

Zap from the Notorious chapter: the photographer convinced the gang he wanted to focus on art, rather than exposing their criminal conduct

Breeze, a member of the notorious chapter: exhibition, The Mongrel Mob Portraits, is currently being exhibited in the City Gallery Wellington

Aaron from the Rogue chapter (left) and an old snapshot of the notorious chapter of the Mighty Mongrel Mob (right): As well as donning menacing face tattoos, some the mob also sport Nazi iconography as a mark of rebellion towards authority

Rotman has captured over 200 images of the infamous gang, and he says he plans to keep the project running
Detectives hunting the so-called Croydon Cat Killer are helping police a hundred miles away after a man was arrested over a fresh spate of pet killings.

Pet owners have told of their horror after finding their cats dismembered and dumped near their homes.

The bodies of five animals have been discovered in Northampton  and police are probing a possible link between the attacks and the slaughter of hundreds of pets around the M25 over the last three years.

Their devastated owners spoke out after a 31-year-old man was arrested over the killings carried out between August and November.

Yesterday the owners of two-year-old tabby Miti (pictured) told how her head and tail were laid out on the roof of their car, barely a hundred yards from where the remains of another cat were found just weeks earlier

Northamptonshire Police said the suspect, who was also held in connection with arson attacks, has been released pending further investigation.

Yesterday the owners of two-year-old tabby Miti told how her head and tail were laid out on the roof of their car, barely a hundred yards from where the remains of another cat were found just weeks earlier.

The couple, who asked not to be named, live in Duston, Northampton  opposite the house where the suspect was arrested.

Mitis owner, a 39-year-old fork lift driver, said: My wife was traumatised. It is the sickest thing I have ever seen

Just weeks earlier, the body of one-year-old black and white cat Mikka was found in a carrier bag opposite her home in Duston, beheaded with her ears and tail cut off.

That same day another mutilated cat was discovered on a park bench nearby.

Mikkas owners, who have a seven-year-old son, said their pet had been very carefully placed in the bag on the driveway of a neighbour.

We were just horrified, said the father of one who did not want to be named.

To see her like that  beheaded  is beyond horrible. My wife has been terrified of leaving the house when its dark.

In the space of a few months this area has just been under attack. We have had these arson attacks and our pets have been murdered in this sick way...

In August, a 14-year-old girl discovered the body of Rusty left in a bag on her doorstep in Kingsley Park with its head, limbs and ears cut off.

Police said it happened just days after the familys other cat was killed when it was set on fire.

Then in September, the owners of 15-year-old Topsy found the mutilated animal outside their front door.

The suspect was arrested in the early hours of December 8, hours after a nearby residents home was destroyed in an arson attack.

Andy Oldham, 48, who lives in Duston and owns a 16-year-old cat named Smeagle, is unsure if his home was targeted in an attempt to murder his pet.

He said: We heard him, whoever it was, slipping out and then the shed and the roof was completely ablaze.

'The bedroom, the roof, the ceiling is all destroyed. We could have been killed if we hadnt got out in time.

The body of one-year-old black and white cat Mikka (pictured) was found in a carrier bag opposite her home in Duston, beheaded with her ears and tail cut off

Northamptonshire Police confirmed they are working closely with the Met probe into the animal deaths, known as Operation Takahe.

The 31-year-old arrested is thought to be an Eastern European truck driver, according to The Sun.

He had been living in a Duston bedsit for six months and his DNA is said to have been found on one of the mutilated cats.

But Northamptonshire Police said that although the offences are similar to attacks in the London area, officers cannot be sure they were carried out by the same person.

The co-founder of a group cataloguing the deaths does not believe that the person arrested is behind the Croydon killings.

But Boudicca Rising, of South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (Snarl), said another animals mutilated corpse was found in Peckham, south London, just yesterday morning and that other killings were discovered on December 7, 8, and 9.

She said: It is the same thing in Peckham, the cat was mutilated in the same way. Its impossible to say but I am still not convinced that the man from Northampton is the guy responsible for all the killings, and police have not charged him.

The attacker was first dubbed the Croydon Cat Killer, because it is believed the killings started in the South London area in around October 2015.

The Met has been working with the RSPCA and Snarl, while a 10,000 reward has been offered to anyone who provides information leading to an arrest.

Northamptonshire Police said: We arrested a 31-year-old man in connection with a number of arsons in the Duston area and also in relation to a number of recent cat mutilations in Duston and offences in Kingsley Park from August and September last year.

The man has been released under investigation. We are aware of the Metropolitan Police investigation into similar offences in the London area, and we will continue to work closely with them.'
A man has been found stabbed to death in his home in the early hours of the morning.

The 32-year-old was discovered by police after they were called to a property on Williams Rd in Strathmerton, in country Victoria, about 1.40am on Monday.

The victim has not yet been formally identified, and homicide squad detectives are on the scene attempting to determine the circumstances surrounding the death.

A 46-year-old man was arrested at the scene and is currently being interviewed by police.
Commuters returning to work for the first full week after the festive period are enduring travel misery today amid fresh strike action.

Workers at five rail companies stage are walking out in the latest wave of strikes - a continuation of the bitter dispute over the role of guards.

Passengers complained of 'packed' trains, 'heaving' platforms and 'joke' train operators as they struggled to make it into and from work today.

Crowding became so severe on the 7.12am South Western Railway service from Basingstoke to London Waterloo that passengers pulled the emergency cord twice after commuters fainted.

Commuters ride a crowded South Western Railway train on the Portsmouth to London Waterloo line today as workers in five rail companies stage a fresh wave of strikes

With the first two trains cancelled on strike day, the 6.24am South Western Railway service into London from Godalming in Surrey was standing room only today due to RMT industrial action

Commuters board a Greater Anglia train at Shenfield in Essex on the way to work this morning

One commuter posted this picture on Twitter and said: 'Thanks Southern Rai for making my first day back to work a comfortable one as normal'

One passenger told the London Evening Standard: 'It was ridiculously overcrowded. It was certainly among the worst overcrowding I have ever seen.'

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) are walking out today and on Wednesday and Friday on South Western Railway (SWR), Arriva Rail North (Northern), Merseyrail and Greater Anglia, and today on Southern.

Rail workers at five train companies are said to be 'solidly supporting' strikes, while passengers face cancellations and replacement buses because of the latest walkout.

Picket lines were mounted outside stations across the UK, while Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was urged to convene a special summit to try to break the deadlock.

It comes as many commuters would have been hoping for a fresh start this year after suffering the consequences of endless strike action in 2017.

Southern Rail passenger John Read tweeted: 'Another short, packed train today. I guess the carriages are on strike with the guards?'

Lindsay Wade said: 'Five rail firms go on strike... they quote 'for commuters' safety'. Currently the train is so full (of) people they're falling over, crushing each other, arguing... and there is a conductor on the train... we need them for what.'

Commuters wait for trains at Clapham Junction train station in South West London today

Thousands of commuters, including those at Clapham Junction today, face a week of mayhem

Commuters try to board a train at Clapham Junction as train services are hit by strike action

Packed platforms at Clapham Junction station in South West London this morning

A member of the RMT union on the picket line hands a leaflet to a man outside London Waterloo this morning

And Chris Fisher added: 'Lovely day for a train strike by Northern Rail. It's only -4C and there's only two more days of a strike left this week.'

Meanwhile London Mayor Sadiq Khan said today: 'Thousands of people who work in London  once again  face a miserable journey to work due to yet another round of strike action on South West services.

'This Tory government and the private rail companies seem to think that the best way to deal with the long-running and serious grievances of their staff and the trade unions about passenger safety is to ignore them altogether and bury their heads in the sand.

'It is increasingly clear that they simply do not care about the serious impact their failure to resolve these issues is having on the lives of normal people who live or work across London.'

Talks were held between the union and SWR and Arriva, but they ended without any breakthrough to the long-running row over staffing, driver-only operation and guards.

Northern said it will run around 1,350 services on strike days, more than half its normal timetable, with most running between 7am and 7pm.

Commuters at Canada Water station on the London Underground faced long queues, with one saying that this was a knock-on effect from the Southern Rail strikes today

Commuters arriving at Basingstoke train station in Hampshire today were greeted by this delay-filled departures board

Commuters try to get on board a Greater Anglia train at Shenfield in Essex this morning

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union protest outside London Waterloo today

Members of the RMT union on the picket line outside Waterloo station in London this morning

SWR plans to run more than 70 per cent of its normal weekday service of 1,700 trains, although there will be rail replacement buses and arrangements to have tickets accepted on other train companies.

Greater Anglia said it planned to run a normal service with no alterations.

Merseyrail will run a reduced service, mostly between 7am and 7pm, with a break during the middle of the day and no trains on the Kirkby, Ellesmere Port or Hunts Cross lines.

Arriva Buses will accept Merseyrail tickets on all three strike days covering the Northern and Wirral lines.

Southern, which is facing its 39th RMT strike, said it planned to run a normal service on most routes, but advised passengers to check for any last-minute changes before they travel.

Long-suffering rail passengers endured more than seven million severe delays over 12 months, during the 2016-2017 period.

People arrive at Waterloo Station in London this morning on their way to work in the capital

Commuters look at departure boards as others arrive at London Waterloo train station today

People arrive at Waterloo Station in London today as services are hit by strike action

The strikes are affecting services on the regional South Western Railway. Waterloo is pictured

A notice at Waterloo warns of reduced services due to the strike action taking place today

Passengers lost at least 3.6 million hours in a year plagued by the usual issues such as signalling problems as well a wave of strikes and engineering works.

Consumer group Which? analysed data from rail regulator the Office of Rail and Road between April 1 2016 and March 31 this year.

Angie Doll, passenger services director for Southern Railway, said: 'The RMT's action is especially regrettable as the leadership announced this strike just hours after we had invited them for talks in a bid to end the dispute.

'The RMT leadership opposes changes that we made a year ago to improve passenger services. No-one has lost their job. We have made four offers to the RMT to resolve their dispute but they have rejected every one of them without even putting them to their members for a vote.'

Andy Heath, Merseyrail managing director, said: 'These latest strikes are part of a much bigger picture of UK-wide strikes by the RMT which, unfortunately, local passengers are falling victim to.

Furious commuters told of their anger at the train strikes on social media this morning

'I would like our passengers and business leaders to be aware that these three strike days represent a high stakes strategy being adopted by the RMT union with no consideration of the impact on the city region.

'These three days of strike action demonstrate the RMT's disregard for the impact their actions have on our passengers and damage to the economy of the city region.

'Since the last meeting with the RMT there have been eight strike days with the RMT steadfastly refusing to accept all attempts to get round the table. Both passengers and business leaders are saying to us that this is enough and now is the time for talks.'

Andy Mellors, SWR's managing director, said: 'We are sorry that our passengers will once again suffer due to this unnecessary strike action.

'Our passengers just want to get to work in the morning and back home on time in the evening to see family and friends.

'We have repeatedly guaranteed that no one will lose their job and that we will roster a second person on board every train.

Commuters and other social media users voiced their displeasure at the strikes with memes

'However, what we have been trying to talk to the RMT about is what happens if a guard is unavailable at short notice, perhaps due to illness or disruption; and how we might keep passengers moving rather than leave them stranded.'

Richard Allan, Arriva Rail North's deputy managing director, said the company was committed to investing in new and updated trains, better stations and faster journeys.

'During talks, Northern again offered to guarantee jobs and pay for conductors for the rest of our franchise to 2025 if we can reach agreement with RMT.'

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: 'RMT members remain solid and united in each of the separate disputes across the country over rail safety this morning as we continue to fight to put public safety, security and access before the profits of the train operating companies.

'Today we have written to Chris Grayling calling for summit talks under an independent chair to break the deadlock in these long-running disputes.

Southern has said the RMT's action is 'especially regrettable as the leadership announced this strike just hours after we had invited them for talks in a bid to end the dispute'

RMT general secretary Mick Cash says the disputes are 'about putting the safety of the travelling public before the profits of the private train companies'

The RMT criticised Chris Grayling, saying he and Theresa May are happy to cheer on overseas rail companies that rip off British passengers

'We expect a positive response to this important initiative and we welcome the support of both the Labour Party and the TUC for our proposal. It offers a real chance of progress.

'It makes no sense at all that we have been able to agree long-term arrangements in Wales and Scotland which secure the guard guarantee and which underpin the basic principles of safety, access and security for the travelling public.

'If that rail safety guarantee is right for Wales and Scotland then it must be right for the rest of the UK.'

A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'This is a dispute between a private company and the RMT. However, the Transport Secretary recognises the disruption caused to passengers and has met with union leaders on several occasions, including as recently as December, to help bring an end to the strikes.

'He offered guarantees of employment to members who currently fulfil the role of the second person on the train beyond the length of the franchises - instead the RMT called strikes on five train companies to cause maximum disruption to passengers.

'Nobody is losing their job as a result of driver-controlled operation trains - employees have been guaranteed jobs and salaries for several years.'
Bernie Sanders received backlash after he stepped out in a pricey jacket Monday for Mayor Bill de Basio's second term swearing-in ceremony in New York City.

The longtime Vermont Senator sported a $690 Burton 2L LZ down coat in the brisk weather New Year's Day and was since dubbed a 'stylish socialist' by The Washington Times.

Sanders, 76, is known for his advocacy of lower and middle-class Americans, whom he expressed his support of during his speech and often on his social media platform.

'Democratic Socialism means democracy. It means creating a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthiest people in America,' Sanders wrote to his Twitter page back in early 2016 prior to Donald Trump's election win.

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US Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during the mayor, comptroller, public advocate inauguration for 2nd term in frigid weather in front of City Hall Monday in New York

Sanders swore in Mayor Bill de Blasio as Mayor of NYC for second term. Frigid temperatures made for a shorter and less crowded ceremony

Sanders was criticized for wearing this $690 Burton 2L LZ down coat while supporting poor Americans

One year later, Sanders penned in a post: 'In terms of our relationship with poor and working people, America's record is worse than virtually any other country on earth.'

Newsweek since slammed the Independent politician for his compromising statements - as the site pointed out that he is 'one of the richest politicians' who has 'three houses.'

A social media statement by Sanders from April said: 'How many yachts do billionaires need? How many cars do they need? Give us a break. You can't have it all.'

Meanwhile, Sanders kept silent on the matter Monday, and said in the beginning of his speech: 'Now, by Vermont standards this is a warm and pleasant afternoon.'

Democratic Mayor de Blasio, a Sanders' supporter, chuckled over the comments as he listened to the six-minute speech which praised the 'good news' in New York in contrast to the 'bad news' over in Washington, the New York Times reported of the event.

'Instead of pandering to billionaires we have a government here which has chosen to listen to the needs of working families,' Sanders said.

The comments led to Sanders administering de Blasio's oath of office, while the mayor took to the mic.

He shared his appreciation of his supporters while discussing the promising four years ahead.

'Something big is happening in New York City, something new, something different, something that has begun a new progressive era in this city's history,' de Blasio said.

'Something is being done here that matters to all of us, but is also being felt far beyond our borders.'



Sanders swears in Bill de Blasio as Mayor during the inauguration for his second term in New York

Sanders and Mr. de Blasio speak while standing together during the swearing-in ceremony
One of Bondi's most recognisable residents is waging a campaign to rid the beach of mounted police who he says treat the national icon as a 'horse toilet'.

Speedo-wearing Dimitri Moskovich, who works out every day at Sydney's most famous beach, is so upset about horse droppings on his beloved Bondi he confronted Prime Minister Malclom Turnbull last week.

'Stop police horses coming here,' Mr Moskovich told Mr Turnbull. 'We don't need horses here. It's an abuse to our beach.'

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Horse droppings left behind by mounted police patrols on the promenade at Bondi Beach

A NSW Police Mounted Unit patrol walks along the iconic sands of Sydney's Bondi Beach

Dimitri Moskovich is fed up with police horse manure fouling his beloved Bondi promenade

Taken aback, Mr Turnbull replied: 'The horses presumably swim between the flags.'

But Mr Moskovich was not amused. 'Doesn't matter,' he said. 'They s**t on the sand, they s**t on the promenade.'

'You love the beach and it's a disrespect to all of us.'

Mr Turnbull then said: 'You know, that issue has never been raised with me before.'

But Mr Moskovich told Daily Mail Australia he had been trying for years to get police horses banned from Bondi Beach.

'There is no reason for Bondi Beach, which is a national icon, to become a horse toilet,' he said.

Initially Mr Moskovich spoke to individual mounted officers, then took his complaints to Waverley Council and last week went to the prime minister.

Mounted police patrol Bondi Beach which some locals say is being fouled by horse droppings

Dimitri Moskovich (in purple towel) points at police horse droppings left on Bondi Beach

'I kept telling them there is no need for horses,' the 52-year-old said. 'I was telling them the horses should have bags under their bums.'

'Bondi Beach is a national icon and a national icon is being s**t on. It's a disgrace to the whole nation.'

'Every time it's like an assault. It's a violation. I feel like somebody spits in my face.

'I'm an animal lover. When I see a dog s***ts anywhere and the owner does not pick up I say "guys, please pick up". At the same time you can't say anything to the police.'

Mr Moskovich, a property investor who can be found exercising at Bondi up to six hours a day, said he often had to warn tourists about the horse-made hazard on the promenade.

'It doesn't even occur to them that they can walk along Bondi promenade and they can walk in a huge heap of horse s***,' he said. 'It's just wrong.'

'I've seen it on the sand as well but most of the time it's on the promenade.'

Police say that as horses are plant-eaters their droppings (pictured here at Bondi Beach) are not particularly offensive

New South Wales mounted police horses walk through water at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbul (left) is confronted by Dimitri Moskovich (in sunglasses)

Eventually, council officers remove the manure. 'It could be five hours later, it could be the next day,' Mr Moskovich said.

The Russian-born fitness fanatic, who has been pictured in polling booths on election days wearing only his Speedos as he votes, considers Bondi Beach his office.

'If somebody is using your backyard or your balcony as a toilet you would get upset,' he said. 'It's really upsetting.'

Mr Moskovich has used his Facebook page to call for police horses to be banned from the beach.

Social media reaction has mostly been supportive of Mr Moskovich's campaign.

'Coppers should collect their horses dung and grow roses with it,' one user wrote.

'Again with the walking s*** machines!' another wrote. 'How many riots have they stopped today...?'

NSW mounted police patrol Bondi Beach; some locals complain about the horses' droppings

Mounted police horse droppings left on the promenade at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach

A pair of mounted police horses and officers with life guards on the sands of Bondi Beach

A third protested: 'Dimi, I have made complaints to the council and to the police numerous times.

'They aren't going to do anything about it... But they will give you a fine for a dog s*** one millionth of the size.'

And then there was this comment referring to the video of Mr Moskovich with Mr Turnbull: 'I don't recognize the guy in blue T-shirt. Who is Dima talking to?'

A New South Wales Police Force spokesman said the mounted patrols at Bondi were a useful crime-fighting tool which would continue.

'Mounted police patrol Bondi as part of high-visibility policing and community interaction duties,' the spokesman said.

'They venture down on the sand and promenade as that is where they are most visible by the majority of people and the most interaction takes place.

'This also provides a vantage point, by utilising the height advantage from a horse, to identify any criminal activity.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull listens as Dimitri Moskovich complains about police horses

Dimitri Moskovich in his Speedos is a regular sight on Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach

Two mounted police officers and their horses standing in water at Sydney's Bondi Beach

'In relation to the manure, the mounted unit patrols of Bondi are for a few hours at most once a week and they receive a great deal of community support whilst present.'

Mr Moskovich said he got a phone call from a senior mounted unit officer in the days after he confronted the prime minister.

He said he was told bags which are fitted under police horses' tails in some countries were not suitable and that because horses were herbivores their droppings were not particularly offensive.

'If I'm a vegetarian would you be OK if I s**t in the middle of your living room?' Mr Moskovich asked.

'We need police on the beach. Bondi Beach must be policed. But we do not need mounted police on the beach.'

Mr Moskovich made headlines four years ago in a rope climbing accident at the beach when he fell seven metres while distracted by the sight of a 'very nice topless girl'. He suffered 20 fractures to both legs.
The year 1968 was memorable for many reasons. Student demonstrators in Paris called for the fall of the French government; in the U.S. people wanted an end to the Vietnam War; while in Prague there was a brief flowering of democracy as protesters took on the communist leadership.

And in Britain? Well, The Beatles may have sung about revolution, but it was a far more mundane development that was to dramatically effect our lives.

Fifty years ago, the full alphanumeric postcode  a combination of letters and numbers  was introduced.

In 1965 Tony Benn (pictured) announced the postal code system would expand nationwide, starting in Central London

On June 5, 1968, residents of the exclusive London district of Mayfair woke up to find they were no longer just living in W1, but a whole new combination that they had to try to remember, composed then of four letters and two digits.

Remember, youre not fully addressed without it, was the memorable slogan on posters and the leaflets that were pushed through letterboxes.

Fail to include the postcode and your letters could be severely delayed, residents were warned.

Over the next six years, tens of millions of UK households would have to get to grips with this addition to their postal address.

They were not to know that what began as a minor irritation would, five decades later, come to define and influence so many areas of our lives, from our status and property values to insurance premiums, loan eligibility, the range of healthcare available to us  and even whether we are targeted by criminal gangs.

Ten most expensive postcodes in Britain W84QP - 36.1M N6 4LP - 22.9M SW1X 7EE - 22M SW10 9TB - 18.6M W14 8AA - 15.1M N6 4LB - 13.7M SW3 6LR - 12.2M W8 5PR - 12.1M W1S 4HE - 11.7M W8 5BT - 10.6M Advertisement

The idea of a postcode originated with Sir Rowland Hill, a Victorian social reformer who is credited with laying the foundations of the modern postal service.

He thought the Post Office charged too much (it was the recipient who had to pay for the letter back then), was slow, unreliable and really benefited only the wealthy.

So, in 1857, he divided London into sectors to help distinguish between streets with the same name in different parts of the city.

Hills system, however, consisted only of one or two letters: W for west, SE for south-east and so on.

It wasnt until 1917 that the Post Office started using numerals in postcodes  and then it was in Dublin (still part of the United Kingdom) where the idea was pioneered.

The now-familiar London postal districts, W1, SW2 etc, followed soon afterwards.

A full code (six letters and numerals) was piloted in 1959 in Norwich  selected because its sorting office had already been fitted with new automated sorting machines using the letters NOR followed by two digits and a letter to identify individual properties.

Remember, youre not fully addressed without it, was the memorable slogan on posters and the leaflets that were pushed through letterboxes. In the six years after it was introduced, tens of millions of UK households would have to get to grips with this addition to their postal address

It was a success. In 1965, Postmaster-General Tony Benn  still Anthony Wedgwood Benn at the time  announced that the postal code system would be expanded nationwide, starting with Central London.

The postcodes Mr Benn settled on, however, were not specific to an individual property.

They consisted of six or seven letters and numerals and covered an average of 15 properties each. Today, there are two million postcodes covering 29 million properties.

The aim of the postcode was straightforward and uncontroversial: a means of helping Royal Mail staff sort letters faster.

Neither Benn nor anyone else foresaw the day when our postcodes would become as much part of our identity as our age or place of education.

Nor could anyone have had any idea of the chaos that could result from a simple change in postcode.

A few years ago, the Royal Mail moved my village from one postcode district to another.

For months, I had problems trying to prove to my bank that I hadnt moved home, or to convince delivery companies that my house existed at all.

It was a sharp reminder as to how much commerce nowadays  even more so in the age of the internet  is linked to this crucial element of our address.

It could have been worse, as one homeowner in Salcombe, Devon, found out when he tried to renew his home insurance. He was refused cover on the grounds that his property was liable to sea flooding  even though it was 250 ft above sea level.

On June 5, 1968, residents of the exclusive London district of Mayfair woke up to find they were no longer just living in W1, but a whole new combination that they had to try to remember, composed then of four letters and two digits (Stock Image)

The insurance company analysed all risk by postcode, and his house had been blacklisted because it shared a postcode with homes much closer to the water.

Residents in Thurso, in the far north of Scotland, have a different problem. When they try to order goods online, they often find that firms will refuse to deliver to them, or demand an extra fee.

As if their homes were not remote enough, they share a postcode district with Kirkwall (KW), the main town on the Orkneys, which is a two-hour ferry journey away  with just two sailings a day.

Meanwhile, the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, which is part of the British Overseas Territory, was given an unusual four-letter postcode  STHL  to stop postal sorting staff confusing it with St Helens in Merseyside. Any letter that found its way on to the St Helena mail ship would not be returned to sender for months.

Today, we are classified by marketing organisations into socio-economic groups based on our postcode.

This determines whether they will target us with marketing campaigns, or whether we qualify for special deals.

Experian, the consumer credit reporting agency, for example, has pigeonholed us into 66 groups. If you live in a townhouse in Chelsea, London, you might be classified as a member of the Uptown Elite, defined as high-status households owning elegant homes in accessible inner suburbs where they enjoy city life in comfort.

If you live in one of Londons poorer districts, on the other hand, you may be classified among Families With Needs, defined as families with many children living in areas of high deprivation and who need support.

You wont be aware of it, but if you apply for a loan, book a holiday or even apply for a job, a company will have access to this information and may be making judgments about you as soon as you disclose your postcode.

Charities make rather cynical use of postcodes, too. In 2013, the National Deaf Childrens Society admitted it used data based on postcodes to direct its door-to-door fundraisers to sectors with the right age, income profiles or a track record of generosity.

It is one of lifes great ironies that we owe our postcodes to that great class warrior Tony Benn who, in 1963, renounced his hereditary peerage so he could stand for Parliament as a man of the people. His unintended legacy has become an instrument of snobbery quite unlike any other

Of course, were all aware of the postcode factor when it comes to property prices. Those digits and numerals can have a huge effect  at least according to the people with the wrong postcodes.

Residents of Whitton in West London fought for 40 years to be shifted from the postcode district TW3, which covers Hounslow, into what they considered the more salubrious TW2 district covering Richmond.

A compromise was reached in 2015 thanks in part to the MP Vince Cable, who was Business Secretary at the time with responsibilities including the Royal Mail.

Whitton is now accepted as part of the formal address  although residents must still put up with the TW3 postcode.

The Whittonites are not the only ones accused of postcode snobbery. Residents of Tyersal in West Yorkshire are campaigning to be transferred from BD (Bradford) to a more upmarket LS (Leeds) postcode. While Windsor residents have risen against their SL (Slough) postcode.

They have failed so far to change it, and surely whats good enough for the Queen  Windsor Castle has an SL postcode  is good enough for them.

There was a time when people would have been glad to move out of Londons East End and settle in Essex. But thats not how its seen by one group of Ilford residents who have campaigned for a London postcode, E19, rather than IG.

The aim of the postcode was straightforward and uncontroversial: a means of helping Royal Mail staff sort letters faster. Neither Benn nor anyone else foresaw the day when our postcodes would become as much part of our identity as our age or place of education

Our cultural identity and passions are now very different from people living in Essex, stated a petition to the Royal Mail last year  and it possibly related to the fact that, while London voted to remain in the EU, large parts of Essex voted to leave.

However, there may be another reason at play. Last January, the website Moneysupermarket.com revealed the IG4 postcode was the worst for burglary in Britain  pushing up premiums for the unlucky residents.

The Royal Mails Address Management Unit has rarely changed a postcode, except for operational reasons. However, it has agreed to give a few organisations a distinctive code  with the former Girobank, for example, carrying the code GIR 0AA.

It is one of lifes great ironies that we owe our postcodes to that great class warrior Tony Benn who, in 1963, renounced his hereditary peerage so he could stand for Parliament as a man of the people.

His unintended legacy has become an instrument of snobbery quite unlike any other.
Hope Hicks, White House Communications Director, will need therapy after she leaves her job working for Donald Trump, her friends and family have said.

According to Michael Wolff's explosive new book Fire and Fury, which details the inner workings of Trump's White House, Hicks' family and friends are concerned for her mental health.

'Following the Trump victory and her [Hope Hicks] move into the White House, her friends and intimates talked with great concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her tenure was finally over,' the book states.

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The family and friends of Hope Hicks are concerned for her mental health due to her White House job

Hicks was the first person that Trump hired for his campaign back in 2015. She formerly worked for Trump's daughter Ivanka's fashion brand, and was brought on to the campaign team at Ivanka's recommendation.

Hicks took over the role of communications director from Anthony Scaramucci in August of 2017.

Hope Hicks (background, center) came into the role of WH Communications Direction in August of 2017

Wolff's new book 'Fire and Fury' looks inside the Trump administration

The book also gives insight into Hicks' family and friends concerns and how the evolved during the campaign.

'As the campaign progressed, moving from novelty project to political factor to juggernaut, Hicks' family increasingly, and incredulously, viewed her as if having been taken captive,' Wolff reported.

Additionally, Wolff also stated that Hicks hasn't escaped Trump's incendiary nature.

'On more than one occasion, after a day  one of the countless days  of particularly bad notices, the president greeted her, affectionately, with 'You must be the world's worst PR person,'' the report stated.

The book also claimed that Hicks had an on-again, off-again relationship with President Trump's first campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

The tome, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,' by Michael Wolff says that Hicks was upset about the married Lewandowski's media coverage after he was dismissed from the campaign.

'Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, "Why? You've already done enough for him. You're the best piece of tail he'll ever have," sending Hicks running from the room,' an excerpt said.
Just what we needed at the start of January: a gluey Sunday morning interview between BBC TVs Andrew Marr and Prime Minister Theresa May.

For you, Britain, the holiday season is well and truly over. The dreary politicos are back, striking predictable attitudes, spouting prepared positions, uninspiring, interruptive, blame-deflecting, antagonistic  a political class that has become neuralgia made flesh and bone.

The Maidenhead hotel venue with its institutional carpet, high-backed chairs and the obligatory pot plant gave the interview the look of an episode of Songs of Praise broadcast from an old folks home.

Just what we needed at the start of January: a gluey Sunday morning interview between BBC TVs Andrew Marr and Prime Minister Theresa May

The Maidenhead hotel venue with its institutional carpet, high-backed chairs and the obligatory pot plant gave the interview the look of an episode of Songs of Praise broadcast from an old folks home

Christmas had left a powder blue- jacketed Mrs May puffy-faced and a bit shiny on the upper cheeks.

Marrs hair was scraped back Norman Wisdom-style.

The programme should really have been broadcast in black and white.

They clashed for half an hour, though clash wrongly suggests a thrilling clank of blade on breastplate. Instead they kept just missing each other, questions and answers and follow-ups never quite connecting.

Marr opened with a sly put-down. Are you now strong enough to announce a proper reshuffle?

Translation: Youre so pathetically weak, you cant even sack Philip Hammond!

Mrs May: Well, its no prizes for guessing, Andrew, that obviously Damian Greens departure before Christmas means some changes do have to be made.

She would not dignify Marrs acidity by even recognising it.

Fluency is not her art. She speaks with checks and neck convulsions and occasional, bulges of the eyeballs. It would be alarming to have her for your dentist.

Marr kept doing that TV interviewer thing of starting questions with but.

If he seemed truculent at times, it was perhaps because Mrs May ignored questions and said what she and her aides had decided beforehand needed to be said.

Marr asked about a new forest the Government wants to plant in northern England.

Mrs May: Ill talk about the forest in a minute And with that she was off into some stuff about plastic bags. The formula of the modern politics interview demands that the interview ask the politician if she understands public concern, and the politician replies that she recognises it but feels the issue is bigger than that.

Fluency is not her art. She speaks with checks and neck convulsions and occasional, bulges of the eyeballs. It would be alarming to have her for your dentist

These phrases are uttered in the way that Homer used epithets and the way cattle auctioneers skate over early bids at a market sale.

Sure enough, Marr asked Mrs May if she understood why so many people are outraged about the early release of rapist John Worboys.

She recognised it twice and added, five times, that we should look at this whole issue in a wider context.

It was time for the annual tradition of asking about the winter pressures in the NHS  a custom that goes back to the days when Sir Lancelot Spratt was a houseman.

Marr said this years problems were worse than ever and the Tories had cut spending on care.

Mrs May deployed the venerable response that weve put extra money into the NHS.

Marr said a lot of the brightest, best Conservatives like Sarah Wollaston and Oliver Letwin want a new NHS tax.

Translation: Wollaston and Letwin are the sort of civilised Tories we BBC grandees will admit to our dinner parties.

Mrs May tried to argue that money was not the only solution but Marr chopped her short with OK (which is what they say when they want to stop a politician scoring runs).

There was also some brief business about Toby Young, just appointed to some quango. (Mr Young, son of a revered Leftist, is hated by the Islingtonians for having veered to the Right.)

Marr said Mr Young once wrote something on Twitter about womens breasts.

How shocked he looked. Andrew Marr as a sainted beacon of sexual probity!

And so it begins again: another year of attempted harpooning and part-evasions and verbiage and same-old, same-old.

Coming Sundays promise J. Corbyn and the Scots Nats and Uncle Vince Cable and all.

What bliss if a party could find a leader able to invigorate these lifeless pavanes.
Some 50 million trees are to be planted to create a 'Northern Forest' between Liverpool and Hull.

The plans have been given the green light by the Government and 5.7 million will be used to back the initiative.

Trees will be planted over the next 25 years across a 120-mile stretch along the M62 corridor to boost habitat for wildlife including birds and bats, protect species such as the red squirrel and provide more access to woodlands for millions of people living in the area.

Plans have been given the green light by the Government and 5.7 million will be used to back the initiative (Stock Image)

Some 50 million trees are to be planted to create a 'Northern Forest' between Liverpool and Hull. Trees will be planted over the next 25 years across a 120-mile stretch along the M62 corridor

The Woodland Trust aims to plant 62,000 acres of woodland in a project which is forecast to cost 500 million over 25 years.

It could generate an estimated 2 billion for the economy in growth in tourism, boosting rural businesses and generating jobs, increasing property values, and reducing the economic impacts of flooding.

The Northern Forest is set to form part of the Government's long-awaited 25-year environment plan and 5.7 million of public money is being committed to launch the scheme.

It is hoped government funding to kick-start planting will help encourage private landowners to come on board with the project.

Planting will begin in March at the Woodland Trust's 1,680-acre Northern Forest flagship site at Smithills, Bolton.

The Northern Forest will connect the five Community Forests in the north of England, the Mersey Forest, Manchester City of Trees, South Yorkshire Community Forest, the Leeds White Rose Forest and the HEYwoods Project.

Woodland will also be created in and around major urban centres such as Chester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Manchester.

The woodlands will be a mix of native broadleaf trees such as oaks and conifers including spruce and pine.

The Northern Forest will connect the five Community Forests in the north of England, the Mersey Forest, Manchester City of Trees, South Yorkshire Community Forest, the Leeds White Rose Forest and the HEYwoods Project

Establishing a new network of forests in England including on farmland, and funding larger-scale woodland and forest creation, also forms part of the Government's clean growth strategy to meet legally binding targets to cut climate emissions.

Austin Brady, director of conservation at the Woodland Trust, said: 'The Northern Forest will accelerate the creation of new woodland and support sustainable management of existing woods right across the area.

'Planting many more trees, woods and forests will deliver a better environment for all - locking up carbon on a large scale, boosting wildlife habitat and greening our towns and cities.

'The Woodland Trust and Community Forests will use new and innovative mechanisms to engage communities and a wide range of partners in delivering the forest.'
Seth Meyers blasted Harvey Weinstein as he got the Golden Globes awards underway with a bang.

The awards show's host tackled the Hollywood sex abuse scandal full-on as he cracked awkward jokes about disgraced movie mogul Weinstein and House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey.

Late night host Meyers' opening monologue didn't take long to address the scandal, as he said: 'Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen.'

He later added: 'Harvey Weinstein isnt here tonight because Ive heard rumors that hes crazy and difficult to work with.

'But dont worry, hell be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person ever booed during the In Memoriam.'

As the gathered stars groaned, he added: 'It will sound like that.'

Seth Meyers blasted Harvey Weinstein as he got the Golden Globes awards underway with a bang

Slammed: Weinstein and Spacey were both the subject of Meyers' jokes as he kicked off the awards ceremony

It was never going to be an easy gig for Meyers, but he received warm applause from the crowd despite a series of awkward jokes about the ongoing scandal in Hollywood.

'Its been years that a white man in Hollywood was this nervous,' he quipped.

'A lot of people thought it would be more appropriate for a woman to host tonight's show, and they might be right, but if it makes you feel any better I have absolutely no power in Hollywood,' Meyers said.

In a similar vein, he joked that they could not find a woman host because they were told they would be 'judged by some of the most powerful people in Hollywood' in a hotel - a reference to how Weinstein's victims say they were abused.

He also joked that he was chosen as the male host for the show because he's a 'man with absolutely no power in Hollywood'.

'Im not even the most powerful Seth in the room tonight,' he joked as the camera panned to comedian Seth Rogen.

'Remember when he was the guy making trouble with North Korea?' Meyers said, in a reference to President Donald's Trump Twitter battle with the rogue state's leader Kim Jong-un.

Late night host Meyers' opening monologue didn't take long to address the scandal, as he said: 'Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen'

There were audible gasps from stars in the audience - most of whom had worn black in support of the Time's Up movement - as Meyers continued to lay into the likes of Weinstein.

'Its 2018: Marijuana is legal and sexual harassment finally isnt,' the host added, to applause.

Moving away from the Weinstein scandal, Meyers also found time to make another dig at President Donald Trump.

The Golden Globes host made reference to the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner speech in which he roasted Trump - then a member of the audience - telling him he was not qualified to be commander-in-chief.

He continued: 'I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president. You do not have what it takes. And [Tom] Hanks. Where's Hanks? You will never be vice president.'
A man who thought he was on his way to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex has been caught in the act by a group of 'creep catchers' in New Zealand.

The 'child sex predator' - who claimed to be 39 - allegedly brought condoms to meet up with a young man who he believed would be turning 16 in three weeks time.

He also dressed in a suit and tie to 'role play as a teacher', for the night-time meet up at a secluded cul de sac in Auckland.

But when he arrived to find the veteran 'paedo hunters' instead of an underage male, he tried justifying his actions, saying he 'would never intentionally harm anyone.'

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The 'child sex predator' (pictured) - who claimed to be 39 - was busted by 'creep catchers' in New Zealand on his way to meet up with a 15-year-old for sex Saturday night

Despite the 'catchers' relentlessly pointing out a child under 16 is unable to legally give consent, the predator proclaimed his intentions were innocent.

'I would absolutely never do anything with someone who was unwilling to do in, in this case I believe the person was interested, they were willing, I was not forcing them or anything like that,' he told the group.

'I would never intentionally and hope never unintentionally actually harm the person.'

The New Zealand Creep Catchers routinely pose as underage children online to lure in predators, then share videos of their busts to social media.

The citizen stingers didn't buy the man's story for a second, clearly seeing through his 'manipulation' tactics, which he frequently used to dull down the severity of his actions.

'Tonight we caught another predator attempting to have sex with an under-aged child. The man, 39 years old (so he says, but probably 48) from Auckland, was caught by the New Zealand Creep Catchers,' they wrote in a Facebook post.

'This creature has brought condoms and dressed up in a shirt and tie in order to role play as a teacher in which he expressed desire to have anal and oral sex with a minor.'

The lengthy exchange between the predator and group, which lasted nearly 25 minutes, left social media users outraged after it was uploaded on Saturday.

He allegedly brought condoms to meet up with a young man who he believed would be turning 16 in three weeks time

More than 500 frustrated commenters condemned the man's behaviour, with them angered at how little remorse he showed for his actions.

'He's f***ing disgusting. Creatures like this roaming our country. Educate and hold your children close people. Thank you creep catchers, keep up the good work,' one disgusted viewer wrote.

'Absolutely vile and even trying to justify what he's doing f***ing creep... one bullet through his head would be the perfect ending to this story,' another added.

Several praised the team's effort: 'Good work guys. We need people like you to catch these scum bags and name and shame them. I have no sympathy for these so called men you guys catch out at all. Nice work and keep it up.'

He dressed in a suit and tie to 'role play as a teacher', for the night-time meet up at a secluded cul de sac in Auckland

After the first heated exchange, the man got into his car and began driving away, only to approach the group again to continue justifying his motives.

When he continued to avoid making an apology or showing any sign of remorse, the group urged that he get in his car and go home.

Eventually - just as he was getting in his car for the second time - he made his confession.

'Yes, for the viewers I'm sorry, I'm sorry I came here tonight, I'm sorry you came out, I never wanted to hurt anyone, that's true, that's always been true. I made some bad decisions.'

In a statement to Daily Mail Australia, New Zealand police urged such 'suspicious behaviour' be reported to authorities, rather than dealt with privately.

'Police are aware of the Facebook page NZ Creep Catchers and while we understand the communitys frustration at criminal offending and the power of social media to spread information, we recommend potential offending or suspicious behaviour is reported directly to Police,' the statement read.

'Vigilante action such as this could harm current and future Police investigations targeting online offenders. Police would hate to see actions such as these hinder or prevent a prosecution against an online offender.

We strongly discourage members of the public from taking matters into their own hands as they could place themselves and members of the public at risk.

Police encourages anyone who has concerns about potential offending to contact us immediately. All complaints will be taken seriously and followed up as appropriate.'
Clinton James Dally, 36, died on a Bali holiday

The heartbroken girlfriend of the Australian father who died in Bali has described him as a 'good man'.

Clinton James Dally, 36, was found dead in his hotel room after complaining of a headache, just a day after he and girlfriend Ni Ketut Kartika, 29, arrived at Matahari Bungalow.

'I'm feeling too shocked in my heart ... why all the people (that are) nice have such short lives?' Ms Kartika told 9 News.

'He's a nice person and a good man.'

Ms Kartika said her boyfriend of three months went to the pool, drank two cocktails and a Bintang before having dinner.

The heartbroken girlfriend (pictured) of Mr Dally has described him as a 'good man'

'I'm feeling too shocked in my heart ... why all the people (that are) nice have such short lives?' Ni Ketut Kartika (pictured) told 9 News

Mr Dally was found dead of an apparent heart attack on Saturday afternoon at Bali hotel

A photograph taken inside the hotel room shows a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of Gentleman Jack whiskey, some Panadol, Berocca tablets, a phone, wallet and smart tablet on a small table

The Perth man was found in his Kuta hotel room face-down on the bed unconscious.

When the doctor arrived it was declared the man died of an apparent heart attack,The Herald Sun reported.

9NEWS reported that a photograph taken inside the hotel room shows a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of Gentleman Jack whiskey, some Panadol, Berocca tablets, a phone, wallet and smart tablet sitting on a table.

Ms Kartika told police that Mr Dally had been suffering from stomach pains on Saturday morning before he died, and that he had taken a Panadol and had a beer on Friday.

Mr Dally had told his girlfriend he wasn't sick, but simply tired.

Kuta police chief, I Nyoman Wirajaya, said an investigation had been conducted and police had found the room to be neat.

'We do not find any violence or crime in this case,' he concluded. 'The doctor alleged that the victim died because of a heart attack.'

Police said the man's body was taken to Sanglah morgue awaiting instructions from local and Australian authorities concerning an autopsy.

Mr Dally (right) visited the Kuta Art Market (left) on Saturday morning before he passed away

Mr Dally (left) has been found dead in his Balinese hotel room at the Matahari Bungalow (right)
The countrys top doctor has called for a serious debate over whether NHS staff should be forced to have the flu jab.

Sir Bruce Keogh, national medical director of NHS England, said thousands of healthcare workers were unwittingly putting patients and their own families at risk.

Latest official figures show that 40 per cent of frontline staff have not been vaccinated. If the flu jab were made compulsory, employees who refused it could be sacked.

Figures have shown the number of patients admitted to hospital with flu has trebled in a week  and are twice as high compared to this time last year.

The countrys top doctor has called for a serious debate over whether NHS staff should be forced to have the flu jab

Sir Bruce, a former heart surgeon, said: I think a serious debate around mandatory flu vaccination is inevitable before next winter.

Flu is a double whammy for the NHS, increasing the number of patients and putting staff out of action, but as a third of people with the virus do not know they are carrying it staff may not know they are putting patients, colleagues and their own families at risk.

People who get the flu jab every year have fewer hospital admissions People who get the flu jab every year have fewer hospital admissions and less severe symptoms, a study found. The Institute of Public Health in Pamplona found that among over-65s admitted to hospital for flu, vaccination in the current and any of the three previous years was associated with a 55 per cent lower chance of having a severe case, a 65 per cent lower chance of being admitted to intensive care and a 56 per cent lower chance of death than in those who had only had the one jab, reported the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Advertisement

This past weeks flu figures underline why it makes sense for NHS staff who havent yet had the flu jab now to do so.

'A proper discussion for next year about mandatory jabs ... would be sensible.

Sir Bruces intervention comes after health chiefs called for doctors to switch to a new vaccine next winter after admitting the current jab is ineffective for over-75s.

Last week NHS England wrote to all GPs saying they should adopt an injection used by other European countries for the last 20 years.

Some healthcare workers refuse to have the flu jab because they do not believe it is effective, while others are worried about the side effects.

Imposing compulsory vaccines would prove hugely controversial and could breach human rights laws.

Cambridge University Hospitals considered bringing in mandatory flu jabs in 2011 but stopped following legal advice.

NHS watchdog Nice is drawing up guidelines on increasing the uptake of the flu jab to be published at the end of the month.

Figures have shown the number of patients admitted to hospital with flu has trebled in a week  and are twice as high compared to this time last year

It is not known if they will call for compulsory vaccinations.

But Professor Paul Cosford, medical director at Government agency Public Health England, said: We would welcome a debate about this ... Healthcare workers have an important role to play in protecting the health of the public.

PHE figures show just 59 per cent of frontline staff have been vaccinated against flu. At some hospitals, only 34 per cent have received the jab.

Some vaccinations are already compulsory for certain staff. Surgeons must be immunised from hepatitis to stop them catching it and spreading it to patients.

ONLY a handful of places remain uninfected by the deadly Aussie flu virus.

Dorset, Ilford, Market Drayton, Telford and the City of London are the only places to have reported zero cases, according to website Flusurvey.org.uk.

However, as the map relies on self-reported data from patients, the situation could be much worse.

The NHS is braced for one of the worst flu seasons in 50 years after a surge in infections in the UK, with hotspots being Plymouth, Doncaster and Belfast.

Only a handful of places remain uninfected by the deadly Aussie flu virus.

Dorset, Ilford, Market Drayton, Telford and the City of London are the only places to have reported zero cases, according to website Flusurvey.org.uk.

However, as the map relies on self-reported data from patients, the situation could be much worse.

The NHS is braced for one of the worst flu seasons in 50 years after a surge in infections in the UK, with hotspots being Plymouth, Doncaster and Belfast.
Leading stores are to voluntarily ban sales of products containing acid to under 18s  but it will continue to be available online from many sources.

The move comes amid a spike in acid attacks.

It was presented by the Home Office as a major breakthrough as ministers draw up a formal legal ban that would apply across retailers in the high street and online.

However, there are serious questions over how effective voluntary or legal bans will be, given the difficulty of policing sales.

Leading stores - including Waitrose - are to voluntarily ban sales of products containing acid to under 18s  but it will continue to be available online from many sources

Legal bans are already in place on the sales of knives to under 18s, but studies by trading standards show that many retailers are failing to abide by this.

At the same time, the ban has failed to stem an alarming increase in knife attacks and murders involving teenagers.

In theory supermarkets and other home delivery companies should not be delivering alcohol to addresses where there are no adults present, however this is not being uniformly applied.

The voluntary ban includes products that contain sulphuric acid such as drain cleaners/unblockers, hydrochloric acid (10% and over) such as brick and patio cleaners and sodium hydroxide (12% and over) such as paint strippers.

Former chief prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal, says the voluntary acid sales ban, agreed by by Tesco, Wickes, B&Q, Screwfix, Wilko, the Co-op, Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis, does not go far enough.

He said there is a problem because shops which do not comply with the rules are unlikely to face any sanction.

From November 2016 to April 2017 there were 408 attacks across the UK, with 20 per cent committed by under-18s (file photo)

He added: The other issue is online. I checked and you can buy sulphuric acid at 96per cent strength, which will burn your face off, for 10 on next day delivery.

Until you tackle that issue, youre only playing with it rather than tackling it.

Amazon and others sell a range of acid products online. For example, a 1 litre carton of battery acid, which is sulphuric acid, is available for 10.17 on Amazon. This will continue to be available even when a legal ban on sales to under 18s come into effect.

Purchases made through online stores are based on customers having a bank debit or credit card. Generally, these will be over 18 and therefore the proposed ban on sales would not apply.

Russell Findlay, who had sulphuric acid thrown in his face three years ago, said the move was a step in the right direction and a good thing.

However, he said he doubted what impact it would have on people determined to carry acid, and said it was necessary for young people to receive better education.

Crime minister Victoria Atkins welcomed retailers' decision to voluntarily ban the sale of acid to under 18s

He told the BBC: These young gang members, they need to be made to realise how cowardly and craven these acts are.

Nationwide, from November 2016 to April 2017, there were 408 attacks, of which about one in five were committed by under-18s.

The ban will apply to products that contain sulphuric acid, such as drain cleaners; products that contain hydrochloric acid (10per cent and above), such as brick and patio cleaners; and products that contain sodium hydroxide (12per cent and above), such as paint strippers.

The Home Office is proposing to make it unlawful to sell the substances to under-18s, and also make it a criminal offence to be in possession of acid in a public place without good reason.

These are similar to existing controls over the sale and possession of knives by under 18s, which have failed to reduce knife crime.

Crime minister Victoria Atkins said: Im pleased that so many of the UKs major retailers are joining our fight... and signalling they are committed to selling acids responsibly.

This is the next step of our acid attacks action plan that has already seen us consult on new laws to restrict young peoples access to acids.
Andrew Pierce questions why Tracey Brabin (pictured) Labour MP for Batley and Spen, formly Jo Cox's seat, didn't condem activist Peter Ward for his 'bomb scare' tweet

After the senseless murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, her friend Tracy Brabin won Coxs Batley and Spen seat in the resulting by-election.

Back then, the ex-Coronation Street actress seemed to espouse the same brand of inclusive politics that had made Cox so well-loved in West Yorkshire.

Unfortunately, now the mask seems to have slipped  and all because the nearby Dewsbury Conservative Association had the temerity to book a dinner at the National Coal Mining Museum.

When the location for the dinner  scheduled for March and with Tory Deputy Chief Whip Esther McVey as guest speaker  became known, it prompted some bitter comments on social media.

Peter Ward, an activist in Brabins constituency party, was so incensed that the Tories would be wining, dining and enjoying themselves in a museum dedicated to mining that he declared on Facebook: Sounds like a good night for bomb scares.

Brabin notably failed to condemn Ward publicly. After threats to the caterers, the event was called off. Mark Eastwood, chairman of Dewsbury Tories, says: Bearing in mind Tracy Brabin took over from Jo Cox . . . after she was killed in an act of terror, its surprising she [didnt criticise] this man after he, in effect, advocated an act of terror.

Brabin later retweeted an apology from Ward about his joke, but what was she thinking?

Peter Ward has since contacted us to say that Tracy Brabin made clear that she did not condone his remark in a private letter

A NIGHT AT THE PANTO WITH SIR NICK

Newly knighted Sir Nick Clegg, who was 51 yesterday, never liked Westminster life. In a magazine interview, the former Lib Dem leader said: People are locked up night after night away from their families.

They feel they should be running the country and yet most couldnt run a whelk stall. They are like Sunday pantomime actors, desperate to put on the make-up and get the applause.

I couldnt describe Clegg better myself.

A cutting riposte to failed Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabees claim that in straight-talking Donald Im a very stable genius Trump, America has its own Winston Churchill.

Winnies grandson, Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, begs to differ, tweeting: Am really sorry Governor, but not even the palest imitation. Quite.

THE 11 MPs on the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee are off to Washington DC to quiz second-rank figures at Facebook, Google and Twitter on fake news.

This will allow MPs to meet individuals and organisations conducting work that will aid the Committee in its inquiry, says chairman Damian Collins. Wouldnt it be cheaper to FaceTime these tech titans?

CHAMPERS FOR EU'S TROUGHERS

JOKE OF THE WEEK Shadow Home Secretary Diane the abacus Abbott, who famously got into a terrible muddle over policing figures in a memorable interview during the election campaign, says: There is a 50 per cent chance of a second referendum on Brexit and a 60 per cent chance against. Advertisement

UKIP MEP Jonathan Arnott has learned that for the past four years the European Council has issued a tender for 1,000 bottles of champagne.

This is taxpayers money and, meanwhile, so many of my constituents in the North-East struggle to buy foodstuffs, never mind splash out on fizz, he rightly fumed.

When they divide up the EUs assets, will this country be entitled to 500 bottles?

If so, can we use them to raise a glass to toast Brexit and the end of these obscene wastes of taxpayers money once and for all? Todays European Council is like a scene out of Animal Farm.

Clearly, some are more equal than others. But who should play Comrade Napoleon  Orwells Father of All Animals  and lead the quaffing? Step forward, Jean Claude-Drunker.
President Donald Trump's son Eric has was caught on camera wearing a sombrero at his birthday celebration, flying in the face of his father's less-than-flattering remarks about Mexican people during his presidential campaign.

Trump was taped at a restaurant in Westchester County, New York, blowing out the candles on his Fudgie the Whale cake for his 34th birthday.

Guests included his wife Lara, his brother, Don Jr., and a group of friends.

Eric Trump celebrated his 34th birthday in less-than-sensitive style with a sombrero

The sombreros were accompanied by a group of musicians around the table singing Mexican tunes - an interesting choice of atmosphere for a member of the Trump family, given Donald's remarks.

Lynne Patton, a member of the party and an appointee to the Department of Housing and Urban Development posted the following on Twitter: '#HappyBirthday to one of the greatest people I know. We love you, Eric! Amazing night with even more amazing friends. I think Lara summed it up best when she said, 'I love everyone at this table so much!'

The video of the sombrero-wearing comes after his father's inflammatory remarks about Mexican people

In the run up to his election as president, Donald Trump made disparaging remarks about Mexican people.

'They're bringing drugs. They're bring crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,' he said.

The restaurant, Guadalajara in Briarcliff Manor, New York , said Trump had visited about 'four times in the last three months' according to the New York Daily News.

When asked about feeling awkward serving the party given the president's comments, a staffer at the restaurant told the Daily News: 'We have to take care of him as a regular customer.'
Australia's internet speeds have gotten even slower, falling behind countries including Kazakhstan.

The woeful connection speeds have landed Australia the title of having the 55th slowest internet in the world, according to Speedtest.

Compared to last year, Australia's dismal connection has dropped two spots on the global ranking.

Australia's slow internet speeds have dropped two places on the global scale (stock image)

The woeful connection speeds have seen Australia drop to 55th in the world for internet efficiency(stock image)

With download speeds of 25.88 Mbps, Australia falls behind Guam, Lithuania and Macau.

Singapore topped the global list, with download speeds six times faster than down under at rates of 161.21 Mbps.

The slow speeds come despite $49 billion National Broadband Network Australia being implemented around the country.

An NBN Co spokesman told The Australian if more people switch to NBN, speeds should increase.

'This means that the majority of data being captured by these kind of reports are being generated by the five million or so legacy services on slower ADSL services,' the spokesman said.

While one reason for a slower connection is because people are unwilling to pay for faster internet, another is because people don't need faster connections, according to the publication.

Fixed Broadband Speeds SLOWER CONNECTIONS: 55. Australia - 25.88 Mbps 56. United Arab Emirates - 25.69 Mbps 57. Puerto Rico - 24.95 Mbps 58. Vietnam - 24.77 Mbps 59. Serbia - 23.96 Mbps FASTEST IN THE WORLD: 1. Singapore - 161.21 Mbps 2. Iceland - 145.64 Mbps 3. Hong Kong - 141.56 Mbps 4. South Korea - 132.52 Mbps 5. Romania - 98.64 Mbps Source: Speedtest Advertisement

Australia's slow internet speeds are slower than countries including Kazakhstan (pictured)
Glenn Dylan Hartland (pictured), 42, allegedly raped women he met on Tinder, held them against their will and distributed sexually explicit images of his victims

A Melbourne man accused of raping women he met on the dating application Tinder has lost a bid to be released on bail.

Glenn Hartland, 43, of Moonee Ponds, is charged with multiple counts of rape and false imprisonment relating to four women he met online between 2014 and 2016.

He was taken into custody in December after allegedly approaching a victim in public. On Monday, he sought bail in the Melbourne Magistrates Court but was denied.

The court heard Mr Hartland is being kept in protective custody after being bashed being bars, according to The Herald Sun.

Police claim Mr Hartland harassed one of his victims, who is a witness in his trial, last month by yelling at her: 'There's no point hiding, you liar'.

Officers allege he also had the woman under surveillance. He was arrested after the incident and charged with four additional offences.

Mr Hartland, from Prahran in Melbourne's south, vehemently denied the charges when confronted by A Current Affair.

Mr Hartland, a self-proclaimed 'fitness fanatic', has boasted of competing in triathlons on social media

One of Mr Hartland's alleged victims has described him as 'a shape shifter.'

'One minute he's a lawyer, the next he's a pro snowboarder,' the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the Herald Sun.

She said she was just one of a list of women who allegedly fell victim to Mr Hartland after meeting him on Tinder.

But Mr Hartland denied the charges this week and said he would fight them in court, no matter no long it took.

'I'm going to fight these charges, whether it takes the rest of my life,' he told A Current Affair.

Mr Hartland's case was one of the first for a new Victoria Police task force.

He claimed the task force wrongly pegged the charges on him.

'They need this to win, but like I said, I'm not going anywhere,' he said.

On his LinkedIn profile, Mr Hartland claimed to be a triathlete, a writer, an entrepreneur and a 'senior life saver'

'I'm going to fight these charges, whether it takes the rest of my life,' Mr Hartland said

On his LinkedIn profile, Mr Hartland claimed to be a triathlete, a writer, an entrepreneur and a 'senior life saver'.

He also claimed to be the owner and founder of Yawsnowboarding, an online store for 'street wear'.

Elite Triathlon Performance Australia released a statement which said Mr Hartland was a club member for a short period earlier in 2017 but was suspended.

The club said his suspension was unrelated to the allegations he faced.

Mr Hartland has not been convicted of any crime and is due to return to court again next week for a preliminary hearing.
A little seven-week-old puppy was rescued after being trapped in a boiling hot car in Sydney's west.

Heroic police officers rescued the tanned pup by smashing through the window of the car on one of the city's hottest days.

The distressed puppy was saved from 65C heat inside the car while the outside temperature reached about 40C, NSW Police wrote on Facebook.

A little seven-week-old puppy (pictured) was rescued after being trapped in a boiling hot car in Sydney's west at the weekend

The small puppy was found at Oran Park, 65 kilometres west of Sydney, after concerned passers-by spotted the pooch.

Police were able to give the pup fresh water and air conditioning relief on Saturday and had no sign of injury.

NSW Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail the puppy was taken to a local police station for collection and was 'collected by the owner's land lady' while investigations continue.

'It's a timely reminder not to leave children or animals inside an unattended vehicle,' NSW Police wrote.

In December, a woman's dog died after being left in a car while in the care of its dog walker.

The four-year-old Keeshond was believed to be trapped in the car for about six hours after the dog walker allegedly forgot about it.
An Australian nurse who was jailed for running an illegal surrogate baby trade in Cambodia has lost her appeal in court.

Tammy Davis-Charles, 50, was found guilty in August 2017 of running an illegal commercial surrogacy clinic.

The Melbourne woman had her sentence upheld when she appealed at the Appeal Court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on Monday.

Charles was arrested in November 2016 with two Cambodian colleagues after the country passed an edict forbidding commercial surrogacy.

Tammy Davis-Charles (pictured), 50, was found guilty in August 2017 of running an illegal commercial surrogacy clinic

On Monday, she lost an appeal to her sentence in the Appeal Court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Members of the Cambodian police escort Australian surrogacy fixer Tammy Davis-Charles (top, R)

Charles and two Cambodian co-defendants were sentenced to one year and six months in prison on charges including being an intermediary in surrogacy and engaging in falsifying documents.

Charles' two co-defendants, Penh Rith and Samrithchan Chariya, also had their sentences upheld.

Appeal Court Judge Kim Dany said the court had 'already given a lenient sentence'.

Dressed in a blue prisoner uniform, Charles did not react to the ruling or speak to reporters afterwards.

She will have one more opportunity to appeal the sentence in front of the Supreme Court.

Cambodia was a popular destination for infertile couples seeking babies through commercial surrogacy before the practice was banned in 2016.

Charles (pictured right) and two Cambodian co-defendants were sentenced to one year and six months in prison

The appeal judge said Charles' sentence was 'already lenient', and ruled to uphold the sentences of the woman's co-defendants, Penh Rith and Samrithchan Chariya

Charles (L) sits in a van while arriving at the Appeal Court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 08 January 2018

Charles (second from left) arrives at the Appeal Court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 08 January 2018

Judge So Lyna said Davis-Charles charged foreign couples between $50,000 to $70,000 for surrogacy services and paid Cambodian women between $10,000 to $12,000 to carry babies on their behalf.

She said Davis-Charles provided surrogacy services to 23 Australian and American couples and that Davis-Charles paid Penh Rithy $600 to $800 to organise paperwork for babies born through Cambodian surrogate mothers.

Judge So Lyna said Charles' assistants, Rithy and Chariya, knew about the commercial surrogacy ban but still engaged in the business.

Davis-Charles sits in a car near the Municipal Court in June 2017 when she was on trial in Phnom Penh

She was found guilty of being a intermediary in surrogacy and engaging in falsifying documents along with her two Cambodian assistants

Davis-Charles, who has been detained in the Cambodian capital since Nov. 2016, told the court during the trial that her job was only to take care of surrogate mothers.

She said she did not know surrogacy was illegal in Cambodia.

Davis Charles was also fined $1,000 and Penh Rithy and Samrithchan Chariya were fined $500 each.

As a result of the ban on commercial surrogacy in Cambodia and Thailand, many couples are now turning to communist Laos for In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and surrogacy services.

Despite banning commercial surrogacy, neighboring Thailand remains a key centre for surrogate births, thanks to sophisticated medical care.

Police alleged Davis-Charles moved from Thailand to take advantage of the continued demand after several scandals in the neighboring country prompted a government crackdown.

More than 20 Cambodian surrogate mothers were paired with clients in the Davis-Charles clinic, and they received around $10,000 each.

With cheap medical costs, a large pool of poor young women and no laws excluding gay couples or single parents, countries in Southeast Asia were for years attractive destinations for the surrogacy trade.

Cambodia defended its decision by saying it did not want the country to become a 'factory' for making babies.

Laos has emerged as the next frontier in the 'rent-a-womb' business, which still exists through shadowy unregulated networks in Cambodia and other countries.
Actor Craig McLachlan has withdrawn from the current production of the Rocky Horror Show in Adelaide after being accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour and bullying by a number of former female colleagues.

The show's producers, the Gordon Frost Organisation, say they have spoken with McLachlan and have agreed that it is not appropriate for him to continue in the current production.

'We will be conducting a full internal investigation and will cooperate fully with authorities,' GFO said in a statement on Monday.

McLachlan, who has described the allegations as 'made up', had been until today on tour in Adelaide starring in a new Rocky Horror production.

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Craig McLachlan has withdrawn from the current production of The Rocky Horror Show amid allegations he sexually harassed and bullied his former co-stars

Erika Heynatz (pictured left) and Christie Whelan Browne are among the women to make allegations against McLachlan, who says the accusations are 'baseless'

Angela Scundi said McLachlan kissed her passionately onstage even after she had asked that it not be done

GFO said they were not aware of the allegations until Monday, claiming legal correspondence received before Christmas contained no details of the victims or their claims.

'While we clearly cannot comment on the details of this particular case, sexual assault in any form is unacceptable, and we will work diligently within this industry to support the right of all people to be protected in the workplace, and stand by those who are victims of inappropriate behaviour,' the statement read.

'In order to clarify media reports, we wish to state that we were not aware of any details of these allegations until they were published in the media today. We received correspondence from a law firm shortly before Christmas however this contained no details of the claims or the claimants.

'The response from our lawyers was based on this lack of information and was not in any way directed at the women who have come forward and made these allegations.'

McLachlan was still billed as the 'star' of the show at the Adelaide Festival Theatre on Monday (pictured)

The organisation further stated they had no record of complaints from any of the women alleging misconduct by McLachlan, formally or informally, to the company manager or executive producer of The Rocky Horror Show in 2014.

'Furthermore no one at GFO recalls any verbal discussion of this nature. It would be distressing to us if anyone within our company was dismissive of sexual assault allegations, and this will form a part of our internal investigation,' the statement read.

Three female cast members of a 2014 production of the musical told a Fairfax Media and ABC investigation McLachlan inappropriately touched them or exposed himself.

McLachlan, who has described the allegations as 'made up', had been until today on tour in Adelaide starring in a new Rocky Horror production.

GFO added the six remaining shows of the tour will be 'unaffected', and go ahead without the 52-year-old, the first of which will be held on Tuesday night.

Despite the change, McLachlan was still billed as the 'star' of the show at the Adelaide Festival Theatre on Monday.

Production company The Gordon Frost Organisation has released a statement confirming McLachlan has stood down, and there would be a 'full internal investigation' into the claims

Whelan Browne said McLachlan indecently assaulted her on stage during a sexual scene

Channel Seven is seeking an 'urgent update' from December Media, who produce television series The Doctor Blake Mysteries, following the allegations, Mumbrella reported.

The show initially aired on the ABC before it was axed, with the broadcaster saying the time was right to bring the series to an end.

McLachlan said the allegations by Erika Heynatz, Christie Whelan Browne and Angela Scundi are 'baseless'.

'They seem to be simple inventions, perhaps made for financial reasons, perhaps to gain notoriety,' he was quoted as writing.

'These allegations are ALL made up.'

The cast of The Rocky Horror Show, led by Craig McLachlan, are pictured in 2014

Craig McLachlan poses with the award for Best Actor in a Musical at the Capitol Theatre in 2014

But Victoria Police has confirmed it is investigating.

'Detectives from Melbourne SOCIT (Sexual Offences Investigation Team) are investigating allegations of sexual offences dating back to 2014,' it said in a statement on Monday.

'As the investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to make any further comment.'

Whelan Browne told the ABC McLachlan, who played the transvestite Frank N Furter to her Janet, indecently assaulted her on stage during a sex scene during the 2014 production.

She later appeared in the Channel Ten program The Wrong Girl alongside him in 2016 and 2017.

Ms Browne told the ABC she was dismayed when she learned he had been cast but felt she had to continue to have a civil relationship with him for the sake of her career.

She said his behaviour towards her on that program was appropriate.

This 2013 picture Rocky Horror Show's (left to right) Nicholas Christo, Tim Maddren, Ashlea Pyke, Craig McLachlan, Erika Heynatz and Brendan Irving

McLachlan said the allegations by Erika Heynatz, Christie Whelan Browne and Angela Scundi are 'baseless'

Erika Heynatz is among the women take make serious allegations against McLachlan

Scundi said McLachlan kissed her passionately onstage even after she had asked that it not be done.

She said when she confronted him about the unwanted kiss, he abused and threatened her.

'I said: ''Don't you kiss me. Don't you do that ever again'' and he turned. I haven't felt that terrified ever in my life, or ever again,' she told the ABC.

'He was just a different person. He said: ''You are nothing. Don't you dare talk to me like that. I will end you.'' And in that moment, I believed him.'

McLachlan said Rocky Horror was a 'confrontational musical oozing with sexuality'.

'As such, as part of the musical the actors have to perform certain actions, all of which follow from the show itself - and indeed ''make'' the show.'

The three women said they had asked the production company, GFO, for an independent investigation into their claims, but that fell through.

McLachlan is pictured arriving at the 58th Annual Logie Awards at Crown Palladium in 2016
Bryan Box, known for his role as Jamie Garrison in the Netflix series '13 Reasons Why,' was arrested in California for burglary and theft of elderly residents

Actor Bryan Box, known for his role as Jamie Garrison in the Netflix series '13 Reasons Why,' has been arrested for allegedly burglarizing and stealing from elderly residents in California.

According to the San Francisco Gate, Box, 23, a former caregiver, is accused of ransacking the homes of several residents in the Bay Area, where he used to work prior to his acting career.

Police say Box 'exploited' his role in the web TV series, and entered the properties of his said former clients, who he charmed while speaking of his recent successes.

The newspaper reports that Box was caught after police connected him to a series of burglaries in the vicinity.

He was 'linked to six burglaries' total - added up to a total of $50,000 stolen items.

Among the items, were a Social Security card, jewels, prescription medication and a laptop computer, according to SF Gate.

Back in the fall, police confiscated a portion of stolen items from a pawn shop in the area, where the actor had visited and also spoke of his newly-found fame.

Box (pictured far right) is shown playing the part of Jamie Garrison in the popular 2017 Netflix series

The actor (right) was said to have exploited his role in the series, which police say he talked up to his victims

Box was arrested at his home in Vallejo on December 29 and charged with nine counts of felony charges for burglary, possession of stolen property and theft from elderly.

Other stolen valuables heisted from his ex- elderly clients were found inside his family's Vallejo's home.

Box was booked to jail but later released on bond of $250,000.

He is set to appear in Marin Superior Court on January 16 for his arraignment.

Box is set to appear in Marin Superior Court (shown) on January 16 for his arraignment

Producers of '13 Reasons Why' have not yet shared comment on the shocking matter.

The young actor landed his role as a student in the 2017 controversial series about suicide through a Facebook post inquiry.

The manager of the pawn shop also revealed Box had boasted about his recent notoriety - and lied to him about where the valuables came from.

'(The manager) was able to physically describe defendant and knew about his recent notoriety from the television show '13 Reasons Why,' court documents said, according to the Marin Independent-Journal.

The 'defendant allegedly told (the manager) he had come into possession of a lot of jewelry due to the recent death of an aunt.'
Shocking CCTV footage has emerged of a gang of African youths viciously attacking a defenceless African teenager on a suburban Melbourne street.

The video, obtained by A Current Affair, shows the group repeatedly assaulting the young man, throwing him onto the bonnet of a car before beating him to the ground.

The victim then has his head punched and stomped before the gang rob him and casually walk away.

Shocking CCTV footage has emerged of a gang of African youths viciously attacking a defenceless African teenager on a suburban Melbourne street

The footage was captured in Tarneit, a suburb in Melbourne's west. The gang initially confront the teenager, who quickly attempts to flee down a street.

The group catch up to him, before throwing him into the car and begin their brutal attack.

As many as four of the African gang can be seen violently kicking and stomping on the teen as he lays helpless on the ground.

He again attempts to flee, scurrying around the side of the car, but the gang catch him again and use the vehicle as leverage to inflict further damage by jumping off the car onto his body.

As the aggressors subside, other members of the group come in and begin stealing his belongings.

The entire gang then come into shot and surround the injured victim. There appears to be as many as 20 assailants.

They calmly make their way up and down the alley way before walking out of shot.

The teenager is unable to be seen.

He again attempts to flee, scurrying around the side of a car, but the gang catch him again and use the vehicle as leverage to inflict further damage by jumping off the car onto his body

There appears to be as many as 20 assailants. They calmly make their way up and down the alley way before walking out of shot

Police described the incident as 'terrible' and said they fully plan to investigate what appears to be the latest issue of gang violence in the Victorian capital.

'There's a victim in our community who's been subjected to what looks like a really serious assault,' Commander Russell Barret from Victoria Police told A Current Affair.

'Whether there is a level of organisation in it, I can't say at this stage, but we will obviously investigate it.'

Victoria Police could not confirm to Daily Mail Australia whether any charges have been laid.
The British soldier arrested after a prostitute fell to her death as they had 'strange, extravagant' sex on a balcony is a convicted rapist on the run from police, it has been claimed.

Reece Vella, from Worcester, was arrested on Sunday afternoon after bar girl Wannipa Janhuathon, 26, fell to her death in the early hours of Saturday in Pattaya,Thailand.

Reece's family said they were 'extremely upset' following his arrest in Thailand, saying he had left Britain months earlier after suffering from PTSD.

Arrested British tourist Reece Vella served as a private in the Royal Logistics Corps, headquartered at Deepcut Barracks in Surrey, until he left nearly five years ago

Vella has been arrested after a prostitute fell five floors to her death as they had 'very strange, extravagant sex' on a balcony at a Thai hotel

The family were concerned for his health, revealing the 25-year-old had not had anything to eat or drink since he was taken into custody.

The former soldier, who followed his two older brothers into the military, quit the army after suffering from PTSD.

Vella served as a private in the Royal Logistics Corps, headquartered at Deepcut Barracks in Surrey, until he left nearly five years ago. During his service, his brother Andrayoss claimed he was one of the top 100 shots in the British Army.

His brother said after leaving the army, he suffered with depression and 'fell into the wrong crowd', serving a stint in prison.

But it has transpired this stretch was for the rape of a teenage girl he was convicted of in 2012.

Vella was jailed for almost five years after he admitted raping the girl in Worcester having punched her twice in the face and hit her with a bin lid, according to The Mirror.

The paper claims he was being hunted by police in the UK.

Reece was briefly allowed to make contact with his family on Monday and, according to Andrayoss, said he was being asked for 12,000 to ensure he is given food and water.

Reece also claimed he did not steal a motorcycle, as the police claimed, but that he had hired it and was due to return it on the day he was arrested.

Andrayoss said: 'I was able to speak to him very briefly. He obviously very stressed. The authorities are going to transfer him to the city's main jail soon.

'When you are in the military you have a family around you to support you, and when he left he fell into the wrong crowd. He was exploited really.'

He also said his brother had struggled with drugs in the past and had served a stint in prison.

'But he had turned his life around,' he added. 'He was going to Thailand to make a fresh start.'

The prostitute suffered severe head injuries and multiple fractures after falling naked along with a half-empty packet of sex drugs from an apartment in the notorious tourist resort.

Police searched the empty room - finding clothes and used condoms - then began a manhunt for the Briton amid suspicions that he had fled the scene.

Vella, from Birmingham, West Midlands, was arrested yesterday afternoon at the nearby Route CC Roadhouse bar and was filmed in possession of two mobile phones - one of which police claim was Wannipa's handset.

Vella, from Birmingham, West Midlands, was arrested yesterday (pictured) afternoon at the nearby Route CC Roadhouse bar. The former soldier, who followed his two older brothers into the military, quit the army after suffering from PTSD

He moved from the semi-detached family home in Worcester to Thailand to start a new life four months ago.

Vella's brother Andrayoss said his family had been devastated by the news ans were sure he was innocent.

'We are in pieces. Extremely upset. My gran is terrified, mum has been crying and dad can't bring himself to talk about it.

'He was in the military for a while. All three of us were. He did service for his country.

'When he left he had some mental health issues and so he fell in with the wrong crowd here in England. He got into a bit of trouble.

'He didn't have anything to do and people were talking in his ear when he was just sat around.

'Reece decided to move to Thailand to start a new life. He's not a bad character, he just made some mistakes.

'He was a great, loving guy to have around in our family. We are very close and he would take my son to play in the park.

'He wanted to get away from here. He was going to train in Muay Thai and sort his head out.

Reece flew to Thailand for a new start four months ago, they said. His family rarely heard from him.

In custody: Vella, 25, is interviewed by Pattaya Police Chief Apichai Krobpetch, far right, after the incident on Saturday morning

'It was a horrible shock when we were told he had been arrested.

'It was an accident. We know it was. People said he ran away after the crime but we don't know anything about that.

'We feel really sorry for the girl and her family. What has happened is horrible.

'What we are going through is horrible too. We face losing Reece. That's something that could happen.

'We haven't been able to speak to him yet, but we have been told he has not had any food or water since he was arrested. He is starving and we have been asked for money to make sure he is fed. It's awful.'

The bar girl, also known by the nickname Joy (pictured), had moved from her home town in Sakon Nakhon province, and was working at Sky Bar in the city's bustling Soi 6 street which is lined with hundreds of prostitutes working in bars and massage parlours

In footage from the arrest, the tourist - who arrived in Thailand between three and four months ago - is heard asking to be un-cuffed before laughing as he says: 'Can I have a cigarette now?'.

He later admitted to police that he had taken the prostitute back to his rented room and 'had sex in the bedroom then on the balcony before she fell'.

The prostitute suffered severe head injuries and multiple fractures after falling naked along with a half-empty packet of sex drugs from an apartment in the notorious tourist resort. Paramedics arrived and performed CPR on Wannipa - who was still alive - but she was later pronounced dead in hospital

He then said he was 'distraught' and returned to a different hotel.

Police Lieutenant Narong Chantra, deputy head of investigations at Pattaya Police, said Vella had been arrested on suspicion of 'negligence causing others to die' and fled the scene knowing that he was staying in the country illegally on an expired visa.

He said: 'CCTV from the incident was examined and after checking evidence at the hotel the suspect was found to be Mr Reece Vella, a British citizen, aged 25 years.

In footage from the arrest, the tourist - who arrived in Thailand between three and four months ago - is heard asking to be un-cuffed before laughing as he says: 'Can I have a cigarette now?'

Thai police said that Vella arrived at the venue earlier in the evening before agreeing a fee of around 1,500 baht (35) then leaving with Wannipa (pictured) and going to a room at the nearby Cosy Beach View condominium block

'An arrest warrant was issued after evidence was presented to the court. The police case is that on the day of the incident Mr Vella visited the bar and paid to take Miss Wannipa away.

'Miss Wannipa and Mr Vella were having very strange, extravagant sex on the balcony until she fell down below and died.

'Mr Vella was in shock and knowing that he had overstayed his visa ran away and kept her mobile phone in his bag and left the room.

'Mr Vella has been arrested on suspicion of negligence causing others to die, overstaying his visa in excess of 59 days and stealing a motorcycle at night.

'The foreign suspect will be processed and prosecuted in accordance with the law.'

Vella was filmed in possession of two mobile phones - one of which police claim was Wannipa's handset

Police claim Vella (pictured on his arrest) and Wannipa had been having what translates as 'fancy or extravagant' sex on the balcony before she fell to her death

But police claim that the pair had been having what translates as 'fancy or extravagant' sex on the balcony of the hotel (pictured) before Wannipa fell to her death

A packet of a Viagra-related gel was found next to Wannipa Janhuathon, 26, after she plunged five floors from a hotel balcony

The bar girl, also known by the nickname Joy, had moved from her home town in Sakon Nakhon province, and was working at Sky Bar in the city's bustling Soi 6 street which is lined with hundreds of prostitutes working in bars and massage parlours.

Thai police said that Vella arrived at the venue earlier in the evening before agreeing a fee of around 1,500 baht (35) then leaving with Wannipa and going to a room at the nearby Cosy Beach View condominium block.

But police claim that the pair had been having what translates as 'fancy or extravagant' sex on the balcony before Wannipa fell to her death - along with a packet of Kamagra oral jelly which was found next to her body at around 5.30am local time.

Sources close to the investigation said that the packet of Viagra-related gel which fell along with her body, gave them the first clue that Wannipa had not been alone - and had actually been mid-way through sex when she plunged naked to the ground.

The building's security guard Kriengsak Khamchachai, 23, described hearing a 'loud crash' as Wannipa hit the floor. Pictured: The Cosy Beach View apartment block

The building's security guard Kriengsak Khamchachai, 23, described hearing a 'loud crash' as Wannipa hit the floor. He then walked over and saw her body in a pool of blood before raising the alarm.

Paramedics arrived and performed CPR on Wannipa - who was still alive - but she was later pronounced dead in hospital.

Devastated staff at the venue said Wannipa was one of the 'happiest, friendliest girls anybody could wish to meet'.

They added in a statement: 'As many of you know we lost our beautiful Joy [on Saturday] morning.

'The place will not be the same without Joy's big cheeky smile and sense of humour.

'She really was a very special girl and left a lasting impression on all of us. She will remain in our hearts forever.'
An eye-watering clip shows the South Indian practice of eyeball 'cleaning', in which a healer scrapes a metal pin around their patient's eye in order to remove clumps of dirt.

The cringe-inducing video shows a woman lying on a platform as a healer rolls the pins around her sockets.

The bizarre practice is surprisingly common in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

The healer uses what appears to be a bent paperclip scraping it swiftly from side to side across the soft surface of the women's right eye.

Moments later her pulls a lump of dirt from behind the woman's first eyeball - much to her delight.

Then he moves on to her left. It truly is three minutes of uncomfortable footage.

An eye-watering clip shows the South Indian practice of eyeball 'cleaning' in which a healer runs a tiny metal rod around his patient's eye in order to remove clumps of dirt

In some areas of the South Asian country the service is available for an incredibly cheap five Indian Rupees - a measly eight cents - and has been practiced for centuries

But the woman in question seems to enjoy the procedure, grinning throughout.

In some areas of the South Asian country the service is available for an incredibly cheap five Indian Rupees - a measly eight cents - and has been practiced for centuries.

It's not only Indians who enjoy this skin-crawling experience. Barbers in China's Sichuan Province use similar methods to clean customer's eyeballs.

It's all part of the service barbers give in some areas of Sichuan.

An old Chinese saying suggests cleaning the eyes makes the beauty of life more visible.

And some people are prepared to take risks to make sure they don't miss a thing.
Onlookers screamed in terror as a female trapeze performer fell 40ft to the ground head-first at a packed circus in Belarus when a stunt went wrong.

During the mobile phone footage, Yulia Tikaeva is seen to swing between two other performers before slipping.

She continues flying through the air before falling and hitting the edge of the safety net as she crashes to the ground.

Yulia Tikaeva was performing a stunt where she was being swung between two other performers

The 20-year-old didn't quite have enough grip and slipped before falling towards the safety net at the circus in Gomel, Belarus

The 20-year-old was carried away unconscious on a stretcher after the fall. She is now in intensive care with 'serious head injuries'.

Children and their parents watched in horror as the Moscow artist fell the equivalent of four storeys, landing on a hard floor during the acrobatic performance in Gomel.

She has major swelling on her head but doctors say 'no bones are broken', and she has been under close medical observation since the accident on Friday.

A spokesman for Gomel city circus said: 'Yulia is still receiving medical treatment. Her skeleton is intact, there are no fractures.

'She has a head haematoma but doctors say that so far surgery is not needed. Time will go and we'll see how she feels. All of us are thinking about her. Many thanks once again for being worried about her.'

Onlookers watched in horror as the Moscow performer fell the equivalent of four storeys

She clipped the edge of the safety net before crashing to the ground. She was carried away unconscious on a stretcher

Another source said her head injuries were 'serious'.

A spectator called Elena said: 'She was not caught in time she fell behind the safety net, with her face down. We had seats in the sixth row and saw how she was down

'The crowd applauded when she was carried away on a stretcher. Circus workers say that by the end of the show that night they received a call from hospital that the girl was alive but still unconscious.'

Another member of the audience Margarita said Yulia 'was flying from the hands of one male artist to another.

'She only touched his hands and fell. It looked like she would fall on the net but she only touched it and crashed onto the floor below.

'All the spectators gasped. She was lying there and did not move. People ran up to her One acrobat showed with his arms that it was the end of performance.

'Then lights went completely off and the girl was carried away. The show went on and horse riders came to perform.

'They wanted to cheer us up after the accident and performed really well.'
Former Sinn Fein politician Denis Donaldson was killed in 2006 after being outed as a British spy. Two men have now been arrested over his alleged murder

Two men have been arrested over the murder of MI5 agent Denis Donaldson more than a decade after his death.

The 55-year-old, a senior Sinn Fein official and close colleague of Gerry Adams, was shot dead at a remote cottage near Glenties, Co Donegal, in 2006 after being exposed as a British spy.

Gardai arrested two men, one aged in his 30s and the other in his 40s, on Sunday.

They were being questioned in Letterkenny Garda Station under section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act and they can he detained for 72 hours.

Dissident republican group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for killing Mr Donaldson in 2009.

One of those arrested was Gary Donnelly, a hardline republican and independent councillor in Derry and Strabane.

Mr Donnelly was arrested on Sunday after he spoke at a centenary commemoration of the Meenbanad ambush in Co Donegal where two republicans were freed from a British Army escort in what is considered one of the first acts in Ireland's War of Independence.

The dilapidated house near the village of Glenties, Co Donegal, where former Sinn Fein member and British spy Denis Donaldson lived and was killed

Micheal Cholm Mac Giolla Easpaig, an independent councillor in Donegal who organised the event, said: 'We believe Gary Donnelly's arrest to be politcally motivated.

'It was a staged arrest, politically motivated and it was to undermine the work of independent councillors like ourselves.'

Mr Mac Giolla Easpaig said the arrest warrant had been issued on November 22 and that Mr Donnelly was a frequent visitor to Donegal and could have been arrested on a number of occasions in the last two months.

Mr Donaldson was born in the staunch republican enclave of Short Strand in mainly loyalist east Belfast in 1950.

He later worked in trusted positions in Sinn Fein under the leadership of Gerry Adams.

But he was later outed as a British spy, and claimed he had been turned in a moment of weakness.

At the time of his death the former Sinn Fein head at Stormont was living in virtual squalor at a near-derelict cottage without electricity or running water.
This is the moment one brave little dog barks his disagreements to not one but two wild African lions - resulting in the male lion running away from the enraged pup.

At the start of the footage, the couple are seen taking a relaxing walk but as they strut their way through the tall grass they soon get accosted by the small dog and his loud mouth.

The two big cats live in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, in northern Tanzania, of eastern Africa - which is also home to the world's largest inactive, intact, volcanic crater.

This is the moment one brave little dog barks his disagreements to not one but two wild African lions - resulting in the male lion running away from the enraged pup

At first, the pooch is a safe distance away as he shouts at the lion and his lioness.

But then, fed up of being ignored, the dog races towards the pair and faces the male head on.

The pup jumps up and down seemingly trying to bite the wild cat's mane.

Those people shooting the footage can be heard gasping at this astounding turn of events as the dog attacks the lion.

The two big cats live in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, in northern Tanzania, of eastern Africa. The hound is most likely owned by the Maasai people - a semi-nomadic group located primarily in Kenya and northern Tanzania

Shockingly, the lion moves back trying to escape the dog as if he fears the aggressive little pup.

Once the dog has proved his worth and scared the big beast, the video shows the tiny mutt turning his back on the usually fierce creatures and strolling off.

The hound is most likely owned by the Maasai people - a semi-nomadic group located primarily in Kenya and northern Tanzania.

Livestock belonging to the Maasai tribe shockingly graze alongside wild animals all the time.
A company director who stole the identities of British vets to feed an addiction to prescription painkillers has been jailed for nearly three years.

Ryan Curtis, 31, forged 34 prescription forms in order to obtain diazepam, codeine and zopiclone at pharmacies across Greater Manchester.

The father-of-two combined the names of vets he found online with stamps and holograms ordered from the internet in order to make the forms appear authentic.

Curtis, who runs an aerial photography company in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, also created an identity card in which he purported to be a veterinary surgeon.

Ryan Curtis (left, outside Manchester Crown Court) forged 34 prescription forms for painkillers, while his partner Natalie Lewis (right) took several of the forms to pharmacies

His partner Natalie Lewis, 33, also helped him to carry out his fraud, presenting several fake prescriptions created by Curtis.

Police were alerted when pharmacists became concerned about the quantity of medication being obtained and the doctors - including one based in Austria - said they had no knowledge of the prescriptions.

Officers raided the home Curtis shared with Lewis and two children and found a computer containing a fake label programme called 'GoDoc'.

It emerged Curtis had set up the fraud after becoming hooked on prescription painkillers several years earlier due to back problems and anxiety.

But further inquiries revealed he had also been selling quantifies of drugs to a teaching assistant, after she found him online.

At Minshull Street Crown Court, Manchester, Curtis was jailed for two years and eight months after he pleading guilty to fraud by false representation, making articles for the use of fraud and supply of class C Drugs.

Lewis, a care worker, who admitted deception was given a three-year conditional discharge after a judge branded her role as minimal.

Chudi Grant, mitigating, said: 'He has a back problem going back eight or nine years and also suffers anxiety and it was for this reason that he was prescribed medication.

Curtis (left) was jailed for two years and eight months, while his partner Lewis (right) was given a three-year conditional discharge after a judge branded her role as minimal

'As others frequently do, he increased the limit of these drugs so that he could not get sufficient subscription from his GP.

'His use of prescribed medication increased and that has spiralled out of control. In order to get these drugs he started effectively making fraudulent prescriptions.

Drugs sought by Curtis Diazepam, also referred to as Valium, is a medication that typically produces a calming effect on the user. It is also used to treat anxiety and muscular spasms.

Codeine is an opiod painkiller. The drug is commonly used for long-term pain when everyday painkillers, such as ibuprofen and paracetamol, haven't worked.

Zopiclone is a type of sleeping pill that is used to treat insomnia. It helps users to fall asleep quickly, and also helps to stop people from waking up during the night. Advertisement

'He initially started taking them for himself but once he could get access to them others wanted to become involved and he sold them on.'

Judge Mark Savill told Curtis: 'You have made a significant number of sophisticated false prescriptions relating to class B and C drugs in relation to animals.

'They involved a number of false veterinary practises and three genuine doctors who you had searched for and used their details.

'This was not a straight forward flick of the pen, bringing them together and using them in the way you did with stamps, logos and holograms seems to be to describe a sophisticated enterprise.

'On one occasions you sold these drugs to someone else. I am concerned primarily about the risk to other people.

'These were drugs that are regulated and you on occasions sold them to people who you should not have.

'Given the level of sophistication and how long it went on for, these offences are so serious that only a custodial sentence can be imposed.'
A man has been caught on tape appearing to abuse his pet dog at a beach in the south of Queensland.

The man and his female companion pulled up at a beach in Currumbin on Monday, with two dogs in the back of their ute.

Footage shows the man appear to hit and kick the young Staffordshire as the pup expressed its excitement to be near the ocean.

Eyewitness Tarah Lee Barry claims the man 'closed fist punched' his young dog 'in the head'.

Scroll down for video

Footage shows a man appearing to hit and kick his excited puppy in an attempt to control him at a beach in the south of Queensland

Ms Barry filmed the altercation between man and dog, trying to make her disgust clear from a distance.

She shared the clip to Facebook, telling her followers the man 'started kicking [the dog] and dragging it around by it's lead yelling at the dog to "settle down"'.

'The poor dog was just super excited about being at the beach and clearly had no training plus the guy had no control of the dog with just a collar to lead it,' she said.

The video shows the man kick his legs and pull hard on the pup's chain collar to restrain it.

Ms Barry said she reported the man's actions to the RSPCA, along with the numberplate of his ute.

A spokesman for RSPCA Queensland told Daily Mail Australia said the organisation were investigating.
Estonian Defence Forces General Riho Terras has confirmed that Russia's war games last year simulated a 'large-scale military attack against Nato'

Russia simulated a 'large-scale military attack against Nato' in its war games in September, the commander of the Estonian Defence Forces has claimed.

A massive programme of war games featuring tens of thousands of troops and code named 'Zapad' took place near the Belarus capital Minsk in September.

Estonian Defence Forces General Riho Terras has confirmed that the exercises were a simulation of a conflict with the US-led Nato alliance.

The war games, which occur every four years, showed off Russia's ability to build up its troops with very little notice in case of conflict, Terras said.

At the time of the simulation, there were fears Moscow was using the training as a cover to station soldiers and equipment in the country.

The simulations included artillery, tanks, rocket launches and simulated air and navy raids, were a dry-run for a 'shock campaign' against Western European NATO members - including Germany and the Netherlands.

Drills also rehearsed the capture of the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania- as well as Poland, Norway and the non-aligned states of Sweden and Finland, analysts said at the time.

Gen Terras told German newspaper Bild of the drills: 'Let me be clear: with the exercise Zapad 2017, Russia simulated a large-scale military attack against Nato.

Russia simulated going to war against NATO, bombing Germany and invading Baltic states during its 'West 2017' military exercises

The war games showed off Russia's ability to build up its troops with very little notice in case of conflict, Terras said

The simulations included artillery, tanks, rocket launches and simulated air and navy raids, were a dry-run for a 'shock campaign' against Western European NATO members - including Germany and the Netherlands

'It was not targeted towards the Baltic states only, as it was a theatre-wide series of exercises spanning from high North to the Black Sea.

'The scale and extent of the entire exercise was far greater than officially stated.'

Russia's neighbours claimed at the time that the Kremlin was using the exercises as a rehearsal for an occupation of a number of adjacent nations that were under Moscow's rule before the Communist Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

Moscow has repeatedly said the exercises, which began on September 14, were purely defensive in nature and were not aimed at targeting a third country or group of countries.

Two analysts previously told Bild that the drills were simulations against Nato during interviews in December.

The unnamed experts said the drills imagined the invasion of the Sulwalki Gap, a small area of NATO land that links Belarus with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

A mock state on a similar stretch of land was created during Zapad and named 'Veyshnoria' before it was 'invaded' as part of the war games.

The experts also claimed Russia practised 'neutralising or taking under control air fields and harbours (in eastern Europe), so there are no reinforcements arriving from other NATO states there'.

Drills also rehearsed the capture of the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania- as well as Poland, Norway and the non-aligned states of Sweden and Finland, analysts said at the time

Russia's neighbours claimed at the time that the Kremlin was using the exercises as a rehearsal for an occupation of a number of adjacent nations that were under Moscow's rule before the Communist Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Pictured, troops during the simulations

The analysts also said that the country's air force flew through the North Sea and past Germany and the Netherlands for two days to rehearse taking out the likes of airports, power reactors and naval bases.

'They exercised bombings of Western European targets, approaching the German and Dutch coast from the North Sea as well as Swedish, Finish and Polish mainland from the Baltic Sea,' the sources said.

'The drill included waves of Tu-95 strategic bombers as well as support aircraft like fighter jets and refuelling planes.'

Targets in a real-life situation would include 'critical infrastructure, that is, air fields, harbours, energy supplies and so on, in order to shock the countries and make the populations demand from their governments that 'we shouldn't be involved here, we should go for peace instead'.

Training manoeuvres over the North Sea may have been designed to show Russia has plans for 'show of force attacks' deep in Western air space, the sources said.

They also suggested missile defence systems were better prepared in Eastern European NATO states compared to the likes of Britain, Germany and Denmark.

The war games also involved anti-submarine warfare and air defence drills throughout the Baltic Sea, it is claimed. This was to practice weakening NATO in the event of an invasion of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Experts also claimed Russia practised 'neutralising or taking under control air fields and harbours (in eastern Europe), so there are no reinforcements arriving from other NATO states there

Some of the thousands of troops deployed during the exercise are said to have been sent to the Kola peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland. One of the sources said Russia may have plans in place to 'neutralise assets' in the region

There were also anti-aircraft, anti-ship and even anti-combat diver drills in the area, the sources said.

Attacks on Sweden and Finland were also rehearsed in September because Russia 'would not expect them to remain neutral' in the event of a real war, the experts suggested.

Some of the thousands of troops deployed during the exercise are said to have been sent to the Kola peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland. One of the sources said Russia may have plans in place to 'neutralise assets' in the region.

Another exercise reportedly saw two waves of Tu-95 and Tu-22m3 bombers as well as 50 war ships practising raids on Norway's Svalbard archipelago between Russia and the Arctic Ocean.

Up to 12,700 troops took part in the drills in Belarus while a further 12,000 were involved in training in Leningrad and Pskov regions - close to the border with Estonia, - and 10,000 more were sent to the Kola peninsula, the sources said.

But taking into account navy and airforce personnel and National Guard troops, more than 120,000 were involved, they added.

Up to 12,700 troops took part in the drills in Belarus while a further 12,000 were involved in training in Leningrad and Pskov regions - close to the border with Estonia, - and 10,000 more were sent to the Kola peninsula, experts said

One exercise reportedly saw two waves of Tu-95 and Tu-22m3 bombers as well as 50 war ships practising raids on Norway's Svalbard archipelago between Russia and the Arctic Ocean

Speaking as the drills were taking place, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said Warsaw opposed any lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region and role in its separatist conflict

At the time of the drills, the Kremlin said it had provided exhaustive information on the exercises before they were held to the military attaches of all interested countries and allowed their observers to attend the event to allay any concerns.

But the analysts refuted this claim, saying that there was 'not a single observer' - just 'invited guests' from NATO members who were allowed to watch some of the exercises. They were not given access to all of the units that took part, they said.

Speaking as the drills were taking place, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said Warsaw opposed any lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region and role in its separatist conflict.

'We are very concerned by what is happening in Belarus, from the exercises there,' Szydlo said during a visit to Bulgaria.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite made the exercises the centrepiece of her annual speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

'Even as we speak, around 100,000 Russian troops are engaged in offensive military exercise 'Zapad 2017' on the borders of the Baltic States, Poland and even in the Arctic,' she said at the time.

'The Kremlin is rehearsing aggressive scenarios against its neighbours, training its army to attack the West. The exercise is also part of information warfare aimed at spreading uncertainty and fear.'
The President of Austria has hit back at racist social media users who attacked a newborn baby for being Muslim.

Asel Tamga became the first Austrian born in 2018. Her birth was celebrated in the local press with a photo of the happy family in which her mother wore a hijab.

A deluge of racist and hateful comments followed on social media, forcing President Alexander Van der Bellen, 73, to step in.

Hurtful abuse: Asel Tamga became the first Austrian born in 2018, but when a photo of her with parents Naime and Alper was posted online it attracted a deluge of racist comments

President Van der Bellen shared a Facebook post condemning the hateful attacks on Baby Asel, and added his own stern words of wisdom.

After wishing Asel welcome to the world, he added that; 'all people are born free and equal to dignity and rights.

'Confidence and cohesion are greater than hatred and incitement.'

Naime and Alper Tamga from Vienna welcomed daughter Asel at 00.47 on New Year's Day, making her the first baby born in Austria in the new year.

A photo of the family was shared on Facebook and a rash of racist comments followed among the thousands of well wishes.

Defender: President Van der Bellen shared a Facebook post condemning the hateful attacks on Baby Asel, and added that 'all people are born free and equal'

One social media user commented: 'The next terrorist is born.'

Another person wrote: 'Does the woman have cancer? Or why does she otherwise wear a headscarf?'

The abuse was so severe that Facebook ended up removing the post, local news reports.

Austrian NGO Netpeace said the deluge of hateful comments is proof that online hatred is growing out of control as social media users even manage to turn a happy family picture into hate speech about religion and ethnicity.

The NGO said it is remarkable that so many people are nowadays even posting such comments under their real name instead of using an alias.

Happy family: Alper, Naime and Asel Tamga pose with their medial team that helped bring her into the world on New Year's Day

Netpeace spokeswoman Sabine Beck said: 'We think that this present case shows that it is about time to take measures.

'We urge the Federal Government to take extensive measures. These range from media education in schools to reinforcement of public prosecutor's offices.'

The hateful messages come amid tensions in Austrian society over the migrant influx to Europe and Islam.

The country's new conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's coalition includes a far-right party.

One of the hostile messages to the baby's family referred to the new far-right interior minister Herbert Kickl, saying he 'is going to send you out of the country. He's the man to do it.'
A jealous policewoman threatened to petrol bomb the house of a man she met on Tinder and kidnap his children when he started seeing someone new.

Detective Constable Kirsty Anderson, 39, plead guilty to harassment at Bradford Crown Court and is facing jail.

Anderson, who had worked in the force's domestic violence unit, met the man on a dating app and the two went out for eight weeks until he left her when she became too intense.

The 39-year-old plead guilty to harassment at Bradford Crown Court, and resigned from the force only 24 hours before she entered her plea

She had worked for the police for over 13 years, and resigned on Thursday just 24 hours before pleading guilty.

When her 37-year-old ex began dating someone else, Anderson, from Otley, West Yorkshire, began her threats and harassed him for six months.

The detective told the man that she would make the false claim he had HIV. She also inundated him with phone calls and texts.

Eventually, he reported Anderson to the police force that she worked for, saying that his new partner's hair had begun falling out and she was having panic attacks.

The disgraced former detective also admitted gaining access to police computers for information she was not cleared to see.

Defending, Mike Rawlinson, said the detective had a 'raft of mental health problems,' reports The Sun.

In an online profile, the former police officer said she was 'dedicated and hardworking' and described herself as a 'successful investigator in serious complex crime and acquisitive crime.'

Her sentencing is set for the January 26. She was granted bail, and told she could not contact the victim or his new partner.

Judge Abdul Iqbal said: 'All options remain open, including a custodial sentence.'
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has declared the law applies equally to all Australians following yet another sickening African gang attack in Melbourne.

He made the call on A Current Affair after it aired shocking CCTV footage of African youths viciously attacking a defenceless teenager at Tarneit in the city's west.

'Let's call it out. Everybody regardless of their race or ethnicity needs to abide by Australian law,' Mr Dutton told the Nine Network on Monday night.

Peter Dutton has expressed his outrage at crime following this sickening attack in Melbourne

'The law applies equally and if people regardless of their background are offending against the law, if they are breaking the law, they need to suffer the consequences.

'Because at the moment we've got people who are being subject to home invasions, they're having their cars stolen, they're being attacked in businesses and it is unacceptable.'

Mr Dutton, who now also holds the Home Affairs portfolio, stepped up his rhetoric against the Victorian Labor government after A Current Affair showed African youths repeatedly assaulting a young man, throwing him onto the bonnet of a car before beating him to the ground.

The victim then has his head punched and stomped before the gang rob him and casually walk away.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton (right) told A Current Affair host Leila McKinnon the Victorian government was wrapped up in political correctness

'I've got nothing but praise for the Victorian police but I do believe that the Andrews Government has wrapped itself in this political correctness, which is driving Australians mad,' Mr Dutton said.

The attack happened at Tarneit, in Melbourne's west, where Daily Mail Australia last week witnessed three African teenagers spitting at police as they were arrested at the Tarneit Central shopping mall in Melbourne's west.

The flare up involved African teens and up to 20 officers.

Just three days after Christmas, in the same suburb, African youths calling themselves Menace to Society trashed the Ecoville Community Park, smashing furniture, windows and walls and spraying 'MTS' graffiti.

Tarneit is a troubled suburb, with a riot involving African teens breaking out at the local mall

The Ecoville Community Park at Tarneit was desecrated and smashed just after Christmas

Only days before Christmas, 'MTS' graffiti was also scrawled on an AirBnB party house at Werribee, also in Melbourne's west.

Rocks were also pelted at police forcing them to retreat from the house, when more than 100 youths of primarily South Sudanese appearance turned on them.

Mr Dutto, a Brisbane-based Liberal MP, doubled down on his controversial remarks last week suggesting Melburnians were too afraid to go out to a restaurant at night.

'Victorians aren't stupid and Australians aren't stupid,' the minister said.

'They know that these crimes are taking place and there's a big problem in Victoria, not in NSW, not in Queensland, not in Perth or elsewhere.

'But because there's been a breakdown in law and order in Victoria and that makes Australians mad, that makes Victorians especially mad and Victorians want something done about it.'
High street giant H&M has come under fire over a controversial advert for a children's top which shoppers have labelled 'racist'.

The Swedish fashion chain is selling a green hooded top on its UK and US websites emblazoned with the phrase 'Coolest Monkey in the Jungle'.

The image, which has since been taken down from website in the wake of the uproar, shows a young boy modelling the 7.99 hooded top.

H&M is selling a green hooded top on its website emblazoned with the phrase 'Coolest Monkey in the Jungle'

The retailer has now faced a fierce backlash, prompting many to call for a boycott of the store

Customers took to Twitter to question whether H&M were being 'casually racist', pointing out that 'monkey' has long been used as a racial slur.

Even those who doubted the brand was being racist admitted there should have been more awareness of how the image could be perceived.

The campaign group Models Of Diversity, which pushes for more diversification across the industry, said H&M should be 'ashamed'.

Referring to the green top, Labour MP Kate Osamor tweeted: 'I was totally shocked, dismayed to say the very least to find this online imagine. @hm do you think this imagery is an appropriate representation of a young black boy?'

Other Twitter users were also quick to weigh in on the debate.

One wrote: 'Is this part of a publicity stunt? Do some brands want to be dragged on twitter in order to gain more visibility?'

The item has sparked a heated online debate, with many accusing the brand of 'casual racism'

Another added: 'Wow. I mean, put it on a child of literally ANY other race. How did NO ONE consider this is inappropriate? Not the photographer, stylist, creative director, editor... I truly wonder if anyone raised a concern that was ignored or they are all just stupid.'

Others pointed out there appeared to be no racial undertones but asked whether there had been a significant 'oversight' in the advertising campaign.

One Twitter user wrote: 'Do you know that they're not calling him a monkey? It's just a jumper with the name 'monkey' on it, you're making it racist.'

The online listing for the garment, which is made for children aged 18 months to 10 years, is still available to buy online but no longer features the image of the child model.

A spokesman for H&M told MailOnline: 'This image has now been removed from all H&M channels and we apologise to anyone this may have offended.'

Some shoppers have been left outraged by the item, accusing the brand of 'casual racism'

In October a shopper vented her frustration about children's Halloween costumes in the store which were not gender-neutral.

Poppy Lambert-Harden, from Brighton, was shopping with her mother when she discovered that her favourite outfits were in the boys' section of her local store for the second year running.

The observant five-year-old had the same problem last year and was forced to buy a skeleton costume from the boys' section of the store, after complaining girls' costumes 'weren't very scary or cool'.

And the shop has also faced the wrath of customers for the way it sizes its clothes.

Others pointed out there appeared to be no racial undertones but asked whether there had been a significant 'oversight' in the advertising campaign

One size 14 blogger posted a photograph of herself attempting to squeeze into a size 16 dress being sold by the retailer.

And in August, Samantha Bell shared a picture showing how a pair of size 16 jeans from the retailer appeared to be significantly smaller than a Primark pair.

It has previously been suggested that a discrepancy between UK and European sizing at H&M means that shoppers struggle to fit into their usual dress size at the store.
The couple had been married since 2013 and share a daughter together.

They first met when Faryal was 19 and Khan was 24 through mutual friends at a party in New York.

At the time, the businesswoman, who runs a cosmetic company, was studying political science and journalism at Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences in New Jersey.

Khan and Faryal are pictured inside the Royal Box at Wimbledon in 2013, the year they married

In exclusive interview with You Magazine in April, she said when they met he said: Youre like a girl I would marry', and she thought 'What a total bull*******.'

When he left they kept in touch over Skype, subsequently meeting again in London eight months later where the pair were photographed together outside Harrods.

They began dating shortly afterwards when he went to surprise her in New York. Three months later, the pair were formally engaged.

But weeks before the wedding in 2013 she was asked by Amirs management team to sign a prenup.

She said during the interview: 'In our culture, thats really bad. I couldnt care less about the money but my parents felt very insulted, especially because they are so well off. My parents didnt make Amir sign a prenup.'

Faryal said she signed it nonetheless, but it was later cancelled by Amir when she fell pregnant with their daughter, Lamaisah. She was born in 2014.

They wed at Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in front of 250 guests, followed by an elaborate celebration for 3,800 people in Bolton before she moved to the UK.

The pair lived a quiet and happy life for many years until the tail-end of 2016 when things began to sour.

In December, she launched an explosive rant on Snapchat, accusing Khans parents, Sajjad and Falak, of trying to destroy their marriage.

She even claimed her 'evil, hating sister-in-law' Mariyah 'came to hit' her while her husband was not at home.

However Mariyah responded to the allegations by saying: 'Do I look like I can beat someone up?'

Faryal began her series of posts: Don't get your sons married if you're going to abuse and bully the wife.

'I've always been so quiet but seriously this message is for everyone! When you bring someone's daughter  treat her as your own. Your son will be much happier & so will you. :)

Using the Snapchat name Faryalxmakhdoom, she continued: 'When you force your son to divorce his wife, when she's nine months pregnant!!! And your son doesn't ... and he sticks besides his wife. He's called a p***y?

'Ok, I'm guessing Islam teaches us to get married and divorce our wives and treat them bad???

Khan is pictured with his mother, father and brother Haroon in a photo posted on Mariyah's Instagram account

'My husband has done farrrrr more than any son has done. And far more than any brother has done. But why is he treated so bad? Jealousy? That's disgusting.'

While she did not name anyone in the messages, she endorsed comments by her followers which suggested it related to her in-laws.

She also shared a screenshot of Mariyah laughing at a comment on Instagram which suggested Faryal should have been on the 'dogwalk' rather than the catwalk  a reference to Faryal taking part in the Asiana Bridal Show in Birmingham earlier that month.

Faryal added: 'What have I actually done lol been a good wife to your broth.I worked my ass off on a catwalk from 7am till 12am at night.

'My husbands a multi-millionaire but still work and do my own as I can never touch his BLOOD money, when I have a right too! and then I get hating evil sister in laws s******g on me?'

Mariyah responded by saying she 'didn't need to justify herself on social media as "Allah is watching".'

Khan's brother Haroon also appeared to have his say, posting on Twitter: 'The world knows how good the khan family is #saynomore'.

Faryal later published a photograph of Haroon, the other son of Khan's parents Sajjad and Falak, lying on a bed naked and claiming he was drunk.

In an interview with Murtaza Ali Shah at Geo News, Khans parents rubbished Faryal's allegations, claiming she is 'lying' they never laid a hand on her and treated her like their own daughter.

Mr Khan said: 'Faryal was adopting a dress code which in the Islamic faith was not acceptable.

'I ask Faryal to produce evidence of violence. Where is the evidence? We have always held her in highest esteem and gave her the same level of respect and love that we gave to our two daughters.'

Falak said her daughter-in-law has called them 'paindoo' - Urdu for 'villagers' - used as a slur for primitive people from the Pakistani countryside.

She said: 'I am a proud Pakistani, I have always respected my in-laws and we have our traditions and values. No one abused Faryal and I once asked her to take dupatta (veil) and she didn't listen and I never brought up the subject again.

Amir told us that she doesn't listen to him and that we should tell her parents about that. We lived in the same house but Faryal never mixed with us. She called us paindoo. She has forgotten that the same paindoo parents gave birth to Amir Khan and brought him up'.

Khan released a statement on Twitter, describing the actions of both parties as 'childish'.

He said: 'I have supported my wife, and that's because she was in the right.

'Since I've been married I've seen how my family and siblings have treated her. It wasn't fair. I'm not happy that it's come out. It was a private matter and should've kept private.

'My siblings were posting on social media over and over again. I asked my father to have them remove it and no one listened to me.

'I was patient and kept quiet but FARYAL said she couldn't take it anymore and had to speak up. So she did.

'I supported her when it came to family bothering her or upsetting her. But I did not support siblings or my wife to be this childish all over the media, crying and bashing one another. It's really getting out of control and needs an end.'

In January, the couples relationship was strained after a sex tape, featuring Khan performing a sexual act on webcam as female model watched on, was published on major US pornographic website.

It was claimed the X-rated video was made shortly after the couple married in 2013.

Faryal was said to be 'absolutely disgusted' by the revelations, but continued to have a united front with her husband by posting a series of jokey Snapchats together.

Earlier this year, Faryal relived their daughter's glittering 100,000 birthday party last year by posting photos and videos of the event

Tensions between the boxer and his family deepened when he failed to attend Haroons wedding due to training.

Haroon was said to be 'bitterly disappointed' about his brother's absence, but Faryal hit back saying she didn't go because she was not wanted.

On Snapchat, she said: 'Everyone's been asking why I didn't attend Amir's brother's wedding. I kept quiet.

'But the truth is AMIR'S wife and child were not invited. Or even included in the celebrations. They could have at least tried.'

The claim came after Haroon revealed that his brother 'didn't even send a message of congratulations' after the event.

Haroon responded: 'We, family, friends, are all shocked and saddened by what his Faryal has been saying but we tried to forget about the negatives at the weekend and just enjoyed.

'She is a one off and lives by her own set of rules.'

At the end of January, Khan revealed his father Shah, who was his manager, his uncle Taz Khan, formerly his consultant and lifelong best-friend Saj Mohammed, who was his assistant, were all no longer working with him.

He told SportsMail's Jeff Powell: 'I have had to grow up and take control of my own life.

Khan later revealed his father, uncle and life-long best friend Saj Mohammed, were all no longer working with him

'Dad won't be negotiating my contracts any more but I love them and they have been so good for me. But I've matured now and come to realise it is best to keep the two elements of my life apart.'

But his father was said to be 'humiliated' by his very public sacking.

A family friend told MailOnline. 'Credit for that goes to Faryal who got Amir to do it.'

Things quietened between the family for a few months until April, when, during an interview with the Daily Star, she said: 'After everything Amir has been through I'm the only one still standing here  no one else is. I don't see some of his friends, I don't see some of his family members.

The couple continued to remain strong and even announced plans to adopt a child in the new future.

Speaking to The Sun, Khan said: 'When I was in Africa, I met so many young African kids and I loved them.

'I wanted to take them back home with me.'

In June, the couple put their six-bedroom home in Lostock on the market for 1.6million. Two days ago, they knocked 200,000 off the asking price.
A gold-toothed Russian foster father has been accused of more than 900 counts of rape and violent sexual acts, mostly against girls aged 13 or under in his care.

Viktor Lishavsky, 37, abused five schoolgirls for whom he was the legal guardian, treating them as his 'personal harem' and 'sexual slaves', it is alleged.

The 'monster' was detained in June last year but now has been identified as more details of his alleged vile crimes have been revealed.

If convicted he would be the worst-ever paedophile in Russia, reports say.

Viktor Lishavsky, 37, has been accused of more than 900 counts of rape and violent sexual acts mostly against girls aged 13 or under in his care

He allegedly abused five schoolgirls for whom he was the legal guardian, treating them as his 'personal harem' and 'sexual slaves'. The 'monster' was detained in June last year but now has been identified as more details of his alleged vile crimes have been revealed

By day he ran a shoe repair shop but at night he regularly attacked the adolescent girls in his care over a five year period, it is alleged.

He was detained in Komsomolsk-on-Amur after one foster girl complained to a teacher who alerted police about a man who was previously head of an evangelical church in Amursk in Russia's Far East.

Other underage girls in his foster family then shared details of how he took them one-by-one to a flat and sexually abused them.

He is accused of 248 rapes plus 358 'violent sexual acts' against girls aged 13 or under, according to a leaked charge sheet.

Additionally, he faces accusations of another 22 'violent acts of a sexual nature' against girls below the age of 14.

Lishavsky allegedly committed a further 11 rapes or other brutal sexual attacks in which he threatened murder or serious harm to health. These involved 'particular cruelty', according to the charges.

Several other charges relate to torturing the girls and abusing his role as a guardian.

Separately, Lishavsky is accused of a further 122 crimes of 'a sexual nature with the use of violence, or threat of violence', and 151 charges of 'sexual intercourse taking advantage of the helpless state of the victim' - all these against underage girls between 14 and 17, according to Mash online news outlet which has links to law enforcement and named him, revealing details of the indictments.

LIshavsky (pictured in a car next to one of the girls who was allegedly in his care) was detained in Komsomolsk-on-Amur after one foster girl complained to a teacher who alerted police about a man who was previously head of an evangelical church in Amursk in Russia's Far East

Social services in the Khabarovsk region are also accused of negligence in putting vulnerable children including orphans under his supervision.

Lishavsky and his common-law wife Olga are reported to have had three children of their own, and to have fostered up to nine more youngsters.

No charges have been brought against her.

When the case first emerged, officials said an unnamed man had been accused of 729 sexual crimes, but now the figure totals 919 - all but a handful involving sex abuse.

He 'considered the girls to be his personal harem', according to a report by Ren TV.

'With the money that the government paid him as a foster parent, he rented an apartment where he had sex with either one or another foster daughter every other day, or every third day,' the network said.

The man was paid 265 a month by the state to care for each of the five adolescent girls he abused.

Officials in the Khabarovsk region of eastern Russia are said to be 'deeply shocked' over the allegations against a man they viewed as a 'model foster father'.

Alla Kuznetsova, education minister in the region, said the foster parents had passed repeated inspections by social services.

Lishavsky and his common-law wife Olga (pictured above) are reported to have had three children of their own, and to have fostered up to nine more youngsters. No charges have been brought against her

Lishavsky's wife, Olga, is pictured above, second from right in the front row, with children who were in the couple's care

'In the case of this family, there were no alarms at all,' she said.

In the first year there were five inspections. In subsequent years, two checks annually, she said.

She confirmed: 'Those five girls for whom the man was guardian have been sent back to the orphanage.'

Local fostering chief Tatiana Petrachkova claimed the alleged paedophile and his wife were seen as 'a trouble-free family' who had won commendations for the way they raised children.

His foster children were shown on local TV as an example of a successful family helping deprived youngsters.

Senior official of the Russian Investigative Committee Igor Komissarov expressed dismay over the alleged reign of terror from 2012 to February 2017.

'Just imagine these girls who were given to a rapist,' he was quoted as saying.

'Why in Khabarovsk region did the so-called foster dad have the opportunity to rape children under his control for five years?'

He claimed a drive by Vladimir Putin's government to close orphanages - many dating from the Soviet era - had had the unintended consequence of seeing children taken on by unsuitable foster parents who abused or exploited them, often sexually.

People had come forward to act as foster parents motivated by the money they were paid by the state, he said.
A Sudanese mother, whose eldest son has been imprisoned for gang activity, says a lack of employment opportunities is driving the wave of gang crime in Melbourne.

Asha Awur told A Current Affair the men who come from African nations like Sudan have fled traumatic upbringings and struggle to assimilate immediately into Australian culture.

She says the men feel 'isolated and frustrated' by their new lives, and often turn to crime as a way of combating their feelings and supporting themselves.

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Sudanese woman Asha Awur, who is raising her large family in Melbourne, says a lack of employment opportunities is the driving force behind the wave of gang crime

Ms Awur, a Sudanese mother of young children herself, says this is the case even for children who have moved to Australia, who are working to fit in at school, and in a predominantly Christian nation.

Religion is a major part of life in Sudan, with the majority of the population adhering to Islam.

Ms Awur also said those who come from overseas are not given enough support or opportunity to establish themselves.

The lack of support is something she feels herself, telling the program her Centrelink payment is not enough to raise her children on.

Ms Awur said her children rely on her for extra money, and hypothesises that they steal if she cannot provide it.

'If mum isn't always giving me money, there's no pocket money, and maybe I have to find a different way of stealing, get my own money,' she said, mimicking her children.

Ms Awur also says her Centrelink payments are not enough to raise her large family on

The woman claims the lack of support often results in people abusing drugs and alcohol.

'Noone is helping them out - they can't make money, so they end up in drugs, smoke and drink,' she said.

Berhan Ahmed, the CEO of the African Australian Multicultural Employment and Youth Services, wrote in the Herald Sun last week his organisation, supported by the Government, was working to tackle issues which could lead young Africans to participate in gang crime.

In particular, he referenced employment opportunities and educational support as issues the organisation was looking to help their clients overcome, using 'resourcing that will help prevent their children from being recruited into criminal gangs'.
A rescued squirrel which was finally being released back into the wild had his freedom cut short after a house cat attacked and clawed at the animal before it had chance to escape.

Parents in Collierville, Tennessee, took in the grey squirrel after their son, Hoss, found the injured rodent.

They offered care and respite to the adorable animal for a couple of days before sending it back on its way.

However the release ended in tragedy as the family's house cat jumped up the tree and prevented the squirrel from escaping back into the wild.

Hoss wasnt at home when his parents released the squirrel so his mother prepared a goodbye video.

The footage starts with the besotted mother asking the grey rodent to: Look at the camera and say goodbye to Hoss.

The man in the film holding the recovered animal says: There you go, go up that tree.

Parents (pictured) in Collierville, Tennessee, took in the grey squirrel after their son, Hoss, found the injured rodent

At this point the squirrel slowly makes his way up the trunk of the tree with the man offering calming strokes to the rodent.

All seems to be going fine and the man affectionately says, There you go! as the animal continues his climb.

Suddenly, a scream can be heard and just before the camera tilts, viewers can see a cat bounce on the feeble animal and drag him back down from the tree.

Shouts of Oh no, stop! can be heard as the weak rodent is carried away by the fierce feline.

The video was recorded on January 4 2016.

The man in the film holding the recovered animal says: There you go, go up that tree. At this point the squirrel slowly makes his way up the trunk of the tree with the man offering calming strokes (pictured left) to the rodent

The Collierville mother said: We had no idea our cat Tom was outside at the time of release.

Since my son was not home I was making a video for him.

Once Tom got the squirrel he did immediately drop him at our door.

Tom the cat did not kill the squirrel.

She added that the family kept the squirrel so it could continue to recover but that the tiny animal eventually died a few days later from whatever he was sick from originally.
Andrew Littlefair, pictured outside Teesside Magistrates' Court, is living in fear of attack

A father who called for people to burn mosques and the Koran after the Manchester bombing has denied he is a racist, saying: 'I have Muslim friends'.

Andrew Littlefair, 50, of Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, wrote in one Facebook post: 'Give me bullets for my gun - I'll shoot every b****** one.'

But he is now living in fear of attack as he faces jail after admitting six counts of publishing threatening religious material intending to stir up religious hatred.

Littlefair, who lives on a cul-de-sac, said: 'I live in a quiet street, and there are a lot of angry people at the moment. I live around a lot of Muslim people and I have Muslim friends who know I'm not racist.

'But it is the people who are not my friends that worry me. I'm worried this being out there is putting me at risk.'

Teesside Magistrates' Court heard he wrote the posts in retaliation to two of the terror attacks to hit Britain last year.

The rant on June 4 came the morning after the London Bridge attack, and less than a fortnight after the Manchester Arena bombing on May 22.

In one post, he wrote: 'It's time to unite and fight wipe out this disgusting disease they call Islam. My grandad didn't fight and die for this!'

The rant by Littlefair came the morning after the London Bridge attack on June 3 (pictured)

Following a court hearing last Wednesday, Littlefair claimed he was drunk and that his words were taken 'out of context'.

He said: 'It was a stupid, drunken rant which I did after seeing pictures of all those bairns after the bombings.

'Yes I had a few drinks on the night before and I'd opened a can that morning. But to say I want to kill Muslims - I mean, I couldn't hurt a fly.

'And I know I shouldn't have said Muslims - I should have said Isis. Isis are not people, they are brainwashing people.

'But I have Muslim friends and I've spoke to some and they are disappointed. But this doesn't show me for who I am.'

The rant also came less than a fortnight after the Manchester Arena attack on May 22 (above)

The court heard the starting point for his crimes is a year in prison. Littlefair said: 'I can't stop worrying and I can't eat.

'(My daughter) is in bits thinking I'm going to go to prison - I'm a 50-year-old and it doesn't feel good to face prison for the first time.

'I just got myself a good, steady job and have to go back to work but I can't concentrate. I just hope to God it is a suspended sentence.'

Magistrates granted him unconditional bail to appear at the court on a future date.
Britain could still be regulated by the European medicines watchdog after Brexit in a move which could give EU judges an ongoing say over the UK, it has been reported.

Ministers are said to be pushing for the UK to continue to be subject to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) - which evaluates the safety of medicines in the bloc.

It comes despite a decision by Brussels to move the agency's headquarters out of London to Amsterdam after Britain voted to leave the union.

But any move to keep the UK under the agency's control threatens to highlight deep divisions within the Government as it abides by the rulings of the European Court of Justice.

This could mean that Britain will have to abide by rules, regulations and legal rulings concerning medicines coming from Brussels after we formally quit the bloc.

Tory MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg told Mail Online: 'As the British Medical Journal has been calling on the EU to reform its regulation of clinical trial since 2011 Brexit is an opportunity for the UK to do better.

'Leaving the EU means departing from the direct jurisdiction of the ECJ and that is one of Mrs May's red lines. I expect it to be kept.'

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) - which evaluates the safety of medicines in the bloc - is currently based in Canary Wharf in London but is moving its headquarters to Amsterdam. But the Government is said to be pushing to keep the UK a member of it after Brexit

Theresa May has previously ruled out Britain remaining under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice - saying this is one of her 'red lines' in Brexit negotiations.

But three Government figures have told the Financial Times that Britain is pushing to stay in the EMA while one official said the PM's red line is 'not quite so rigid now'.

The issue threatens to highlight deep splits in the Government over how closely aligned to the EU the UK should stay after Brexit.

Some are pushing for Britain to stay close to the EU after Brexit, but others including Boris Johnson want us to break away more fully and cast off their rules and regulations.

The move comes amid calls among some for the UK's chemical and aviation industries to also continue to be regulated by the EU.

This would mean the sectors would have to stick to Europe's standards and safety rules and be subject to rulings made by EU judges.

Sarah Wollaston, the Tory chairwoman of the Commons health committee, said she hoped 'common sense' would prevail.

Speaking in a personal capacity, she told the newspaper: 'There is a very strong case for allowing flexibility for sector deals, especially when it's in the best interests of patients both here and in Europe.'

Sarah Wollaston, the Tory chairwoman of the Commons health committee, said there is a case to allow sectors to be 'flexible' in the post Brexit deals brokered (file pic)

It comes as Mrs May is preparing to embark on a new year's Cabinet reshuffle in a bid to freshen up her team after the Tory election disaster and shore up her premiership after a calamitous six months.

She wants to overhaul her 'stale, male and pale' top team today - with a former nurse dubbed 'Scary Spice' tipped to become health secretary.

Anne Milton could take over at health if Jeremy Hunt is promoted to fill the gap at deputy PM, left vacant by the axing of Damian Green over computer porn allegations.

Mrs May could also send a stark message to Brussels by installing a dedicated 'Cabinet minister for no deal' to prepare for a collapse in Brexit talks.

Brexit minister Steve Baker is already deputy to David Davis in the Department for Exiting the European Union, and has responsibility for 'contingency planning'.

His role could be beefed up and given the right to attend Cabinet, although he would not be a full member.
A Melbourne family have been forced to stash large knives throughout the house and have even turned their toilet into a 'safe room' as they fear the growing presence of gangs in their community.

The Beatons have been terrorised by what they claim are African street gangs, forcing the family to implement increased security measures after five burglary attempts in the past year.

'It used to be you had a fire plan to protect your family, now you need to have a break and enter plan to keep your family safe,' Eric Beaton told A Current Affair.

The family are so scared for their safety they are packing up and moving to the Gold Coast at the end of January.

The Beatons have been terrorised by what they claim are African street gangs, forcing the family to increased security measures after five burglary attempts in the past year

Their two young daughters also hide weapons around the house, stashing knives in various places should they need further protection

The family say they have been 'crying for help' tackling the threat, but feel so let down by law enforcement they have had to resort to extreme measures.

They have turned their bathroom into a 'safe room', where the children are instructed to hide in case of emergency.

'I tell the kids to come (in the safe room) if anything was to happen and they're not to come out no matter how much I scream or yell, unless I do or the police get them out,' Danielle Beaton said.

'I don't care what they do to me as long as my kids stay safe.'

Their two young daughters also hide weapons around the house, stashing knives in various places should they need further protection.

'She runs around and puts knives in certain hiding spots so if they come in she's got something to defend herself with,' Mrs Beaton said.

They have turned their bathroom into a 'safe room', where the children are instructed to hide in case of emergency

'I'm tired of worrying, it's time to go live life now, get out of here,' Mr Beaton said

They say they have been targeted by African gang members five times in the past 12 months, including a break and enter attempt, a house burglary and three attempted carjackings.

'If they don't change their way, there's going to be hell to pay,' Mr Beaton said.

The Beatons say they are devastated to be leaving family and friends, and for pulling their girls out of school, but they see no other option than to flee.

'We've built our life here, but we don't see that life as worth it any more, because we feel like we're in danger,' Mrs Beaton said.

'I'm tired of worrying, it's time to go live life now, get out of here,' Mr Beaton added.
The CEO of a cryptocurrency made for live-streaming porn has reportedly disappeared with his investors' money.

Four investors of Fantasy Market have claimed the creator of the digital currency  Jonathan Lucas  has failed to repay their investment despite multiple requests, the New York Post reports.

'Jonathan Lucas (most likely alias) has scammed us and run off with the cryptocurrency,' one angry investor told the newspaper.

The CEO of a cryptocurrency made for live-streaming porn has reportedly disappeared with his investors' money. File photo

In his investment plan, Lucas claimed he was attempting to raise up to $25million.

Fantasy Money tokens, or FMtokens, could be used to pay for viewing live-streaming porn, it said.

It's not known how much money Lucas actually raised.

In private chats, he boasted that he'd raised around $4.4million in September last year, although he later told a reporter that he had raised less than $2million.

Over the weekend, it appeared the company was trying to return investments  asking investors to contact them in the next 90 days.

Four investors of Fantasy Market have claimed the creator of the digital currency has failed to repay their investment despite multiple requests

But one investor, who did get a refund, said he is still annoyed after getting a dollar amount equal to what he invested in September.

'But since the coin has more than tripled in value since then, they kept the rest of my contribution, essentially stealing quite a lot of money from me,' he said.

It comes days after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission warned that investors should 'exercise caution' with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, noting state and federal regulators may not be able to recoup any lost investments from illegal actors.

Many promoters of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and other cryptocurrency investments are not following federal and state securities laws, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton and Commissioners Kara Stein and Michael Piwowar said in a statement.

While regulators are trying to police these quickly growing markets, the SEC urged investors to be vigilant.

'The SEC and state securities regulators are pursuing violations, but we again caution you that, if you lose money, there is a substantial risk that our efforts will not result in a recovery of your investment,' the officials said.
Three school bullies have been detained in China after brutally slapping, kicking and stamping on one of their classmates.

The three female pupils from Ningde County, Jiangxi Province, were allegedly enraged after the victim reported to their teacher that they had been smoking in school, according to Chinese media.

They ganged up with four other female pupils from the same class and punished the victim in a dorm room earlier this month.

Local education bureau has launched an investigation into the matters after receiving reports from parents.

Zeng has her hair grabbed by her classmates in the school dormitory in southeastern China

She is brutally slapped as the girls said she reported to the teacher of them smoking in school

Disturbing footage, filmed by a witnessing student, was uploaded to Chinese social media platforms.

Parents of the school's pupils were shocked after seeing the video and reported the incident to the police.

Ningde education bureau reported that the incident happened at 9pm on January 3 in the dormitory of Si Yuan School.

The victim has been named Zeng. Both the victim and the seven attackers are seventh-grade students who are around 13 years old.

It's said that the seven schoolgirls attacked Zeng in the dormitory while she was sleeping.

They grabbed her hair and slapped her face. Blood stains can be seen on the corner of her mouth.

Zeng was forced to kneel down in the front of the bunk beds.

'You wouldn't be beaten up like now if you didn't report it. You are so disgusting,' one of the attacking girls could be heard yelling as she slapped Zeng in the face.

Another girl can be seen kicking and stomping on Zeng's back several times.

'See how nice I am to you, giving you massage,' she said.

Seven girls are brutally kicking, stomping and slapping their classmates as punishment

One girl says she is treating Zeng nice and gives her 'a massage' as she steps on her back

Zeng is then sent to local hospital for checkups and is given counselling guidance

The video was first sent to a closed group chat belonging to a group of students from Si Yuan School. Later, it was shared to other web messaging groups.

It's known that Zeng was sent to Ningdu People's Hospital for check-ups. She was also given counselling guidance.

Parents of the seven schoolgirls were asked to attend a meeting at the school.

The three girls who started the assault were given detention and the others were given verbal warning.

Education bureau officials and teachers offered guidance to students and parents on anti-violence in school.

Apparently, Chinese web users thought the punishment to the attackers were not enough.

'Detentions and verbal warnings are not enough, the school should send them to the juvenile prison,' commented 'lizhaogong'.

'Tumidimifeng' said: 'The girls must have thought they are very cool for beating up people. What a sickening thought.'
Three quarters of Swiss people support banning the burqa in all public places, a study has shown.

Three in four Swiss support an initiative to ban all face coverings in public - which would effectively ban the Muslim veil.

A survey of 1,167 people conducted by two Swiss Sunday papers found 76 per cent of those spoken to were in favor of the initiative.

This was compared with 20 per cent who disagreed and three per cent who said they had 'no view' on the issue.

Three in four Swiss support an initiative to ban all face coverings in public - which would effectively ban the Muslim veil

The initiative 'Yes to a ban on face coverings' garnered more than the required 100,000 signatures last September to put the decision to a popular vote, reports The Local.

This put the initiative on the ballot under Switzerland's system of direct democracy, which lets voters decide major policy issues.

The measure was proposed by a group including MPs from the nationalist Swiss People's Party that was also behind a ban on building minarets in Switzerland.

The group called for it to be made illegal for anyone to cover their face in public. Some exceptions include local custom, the weather and health and safety reasons.

A survey of 1,167 people conducted by two Swiss Sunday papers found 76 per cent of those spoken to were in favor of the initiative

Such a law would mean the effective ban of the hijab, niqab and burka, although the committee says it is also targeting hooligans who cover their face for criminal intent.

The Swiss government has publicly opposed the idea, saying it's up to each of the 26 cantons (areas) to legislate on the issue.

The issue has been argued over in Swiss society for many years, with the senate rejecting a draft bill on the topic in March after the lower house approved it.

It was also rejected by the people of Glarus canton during an open-air assembly this May.

Such a law would mean the effective ban of the hijab, niqab and burka, although the committee says it is also targeting hooligans who cover their face for criminal intent. Pictured: One of the Swiss People's Party's posters in the referendum which resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets

But the canton of Ticino, in the south of the country, overwhelmingly backed a regional ban of the burka and other full-face coverings in public in 2013.

However, in December it controversially proposed a counter-project suggesting it be made illegal to force anyone to cover their face.

If the ban goes through, it would put Switzerland alongside France, Austria and other European countries in prohibiting face-covering garments.

The vote is unlikely to take place before 2019.
A father-of-one who had acid thrown in his face in a horrifying case of mistaken identity is backing a ban on selling corrosive substances to teenagers.

Andreas Christopheros was left blind and scarred for life after a cup full of acid was hurled at him as he opened the door to his house in Cornwall in 2014.

Now retailers including Wickes, Waitrose and B&Q have signed up to a voluntary code to stop selling corrosives to teenagers under 18 after a spike in assaults.

And Mr Christopheros is urging other stores to take head to save victims from the agonising pain he endured, adding: 'I'll be wearing scars until the day I die'.

Andreas Christopheros was left blind and scarred for life after a cup full of acid was hurled at him as he opened the door to his house in Cornwall in 2014

In 2014 David Phillips (left) travelled more than 300 miles from his home in Hastings, East Sussex to Cornwall where he carried out the sickening revenge attack on Mr Christopheros (right before the assault)

BAN ON SELLING ACID TO UNDER-18S The Home Office said Wickes, B&Q, Screwfix, Wilko, The Co-op, Morrisons, Waitrose, Tesco and John Lewis are among the major retailers to have signed up, which will see under-18s unable to buy the following products: :: Products that contain sulphuric acid such as drain cleaners/unblockers :: Products that contain hydrochloric acid (10% and over) such as brick and patio cleaners :: Products that contain sodium hydroxide (12% and over) such as paint strippers But there are questions over how effective any ban would be, given difficulties in policing sales. The products would also still be available to buy online. Advertisement

In 2014 David Phillips travelled more than 300 miles from his home in Hastings, East Sussex to Cornwall where he carried out the sickening revenge attack - but turned up on the wrong doorstep.

He threw the corrosive liquid as Mr Christopheros answered the door believing he was about to collect a Christmas parcel.

In a bid to encourage more shops across the UK to sign up to the code, Mr Christopheros revealed how he will be forced to undergo surgery for the next five to ten years.

He said: 'I'm without eyesight in my left eye and limited in my right and as time goes on, there's potential for me to go completely blind'.

In August, he was among those backing calls for tougher sentences after suffering horrific burns.

Mr Christopheros' attacker, who was jailed for life back in 2015, had his time cut by the Court of Appeal.

He added: 'It's been a tough ride. It affects every aspect of your life.

'Even when you sleep; from the moment you wake-up, everything is a challenge'.

The new plan will be a voluntary code and will see stores signing up to ban the sale of corrosive liquids to teenagers under the age of 18.

In a bid to encourage more shops across the UK to sign up to the code, Mr Christopheros revealed how he will be forced to undergo surgery for the next five to ten years

Mr Christopheros is also among those backing calls for tougher sentences for those found guilty of acid attacks

Ex-chief prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal, said the voluntary ban did not go far enough as there were no sanctions for failure to uphold it.

He added: The other issue is online. You can buy sulphuric acid at 96 per cent strength, which will burn your face off, for 10 on next-day delivery.

Mr Christopheros added: 'I've always stood by the fact that if someone wants to get their hands on acid, they're going to get their hands on acid.

'I believe any person who carried out an acid attack, no matter how severe the injuries are, the attacker should be facing life with a minimum term of 20 years.

The property developer was left disfigured after David Phillips hurled acid over him

'On top of that, one bit of legislation which I'd really love to see be pushed through is a decanting legislation; to make it an offence to decant acid from it's original, well-labelled bottle, into any other receptacle.

'If this legislation was in place, it would certainly make the jobs of the police officers on the streets much easier to combat.

'To be caught with acid in any bottle that isn't in its original bottle; six months inside.

'I think if people are willing to cross that line, they need to have a sentence which completely justifies that crime.

'At the moment, this is the best I've looked in three years. It's a long road to recovery.

'I'll be wearing scars until the day I die.

'The injuries and the scars have healed somewhat but aspects like my eyesight will deteriorate unless technology advances.'

At the Court of Appeal in April 2016, Phillips had his jail term cut to 16 years and he will be eligible for parole after serving just eight.

Mr Justice Wyn Williams said a life sentence was not justified as, although the crime involved a high level of planning and determination to carry out, it was a revenge attack, albeit on the wrong man.
An American husband married to a British woman for 18 years face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives thousands of miles apart after he was told he must return to the US.

Devastated Clayton and Colette Murwin, from Wallasey, in Merseyside, have been informed he does 'not fit the criteria' to stay in the UK.

Mr Murwin, 53, has been ordered to leave the country without appeal and faces deportation at any time.

Devastated Clayton and Colette Murwin, from Wallasey, in Merseyside, have been informed he does 'not fit the criteria' to stay in the UK

The couple lived in the UK from 2000 to 2003 but then moved to America for 13 years to care for Mr Murwin's sick mother.

In 2016 the couple returned to the UK and after his six-month visa ran out, Mr Murwin applied to stay.

But he's now been told his application has been refused, with no chance to appeal.

Mrs Murwin now can't go back to the US because she's been in Britain for more than a year.

Heartbroken Mr Murwin told ITV News: 'I don't need any benefit from this country, I don't need anything...all I need you to do is let me stay here with my wife and live the rest of my life.

'This is my wife. This is wrong on too many levels...you don't do this to people.'

His 56-year-old wife said: 'It's a separation...it's not us doing it...it's like they're forcing us to divorce. We don't want to.'

The couple face living thousands of miles apart after Mr Murwin was told he could not stay in the UK

Mrs Murwin said the ruling was like 'waiting for a death sentence.'

She said: 'We didn't think there would be an issue, because he had been granted it the first time and we can prove our family structure - we have been married for 18 years.

'But apparently we don't fit the criteria for a family life visa.

'We are not sleeping, we are not eating, I am suffering with anxiety and I am scared to go to work in case I come home and he is not here.'

She said her five children consider Clayton their father and one of their seven grandchildren had asked 'why does Grandad have to leave?'

She added: 'There is nothing out there for Clayton, his mum passed in August, and his life is here with his family.'

As their application has been certified, which means they cannot appeal, the only option the couple have is to apply for a judicial review, which costs 4,000.

The review means a judge can overturn the certification, which would give them the right to appeal - but their application could still be denied.

In the meantime, if Mr Murwin doesn't leave the country he will be deported and banned from entering the UK for ten years.

Mrs Murwin cannot go to the US with her husband because she didn't return to the country within a year and so her green card has expired and is unlikely to be renewed.

She said: 'I've found my soulmate and it is not often someone in life does that.

'But then to be told you have to leave them against your will? How can we have a relationship over Skype, after being together all this time?

'It was hard enough doing that with my family while I was over in America and I wasn't happy, which is why we moved back.

'I just want to be able to enjoy my grandchildren, with my husband.'

The letter from UK Visas and Immigration said: 'The UKVI has refused your application primarily as they do not believe or accept that there are insurmountable obstacles to engage Ex1 (consideration of child's best interests) or that there would be very significant difficulties which you and your wife would face in continuing your family life outside of the UK.

'I am sure that you would disagree with this decision.'

A spokesman for the Home Office told MailOnline: 'After entering as a visitor, Mr Murwin applied for leave to remain under Human Rights grounds but his application was refused.

'Mr Murwin is able to appeal the decision from the United States, or make an application for a Spousal Visa as the spouse of a British Citizen.'

A petition has been launched against the ruling and friends and family have started a GoFundMe page to raise funds so the couple can attempt a judicial review.
An eminent Muslim leader in the Indian city of Hyderabad has issued a fatwa against the city's prawns, sending its seafood sellers into shell-shock.

Mohammad Azeemuddin, head Mufti of the religious school of Jamia Nizamia, decreed earlier this week that the popular seafood dish was off the menu.

Prawns, he said, were in fact arthropods - insects - and that consuming them was prohibited under Makrooh-e-Tahrimi which translates as 'strictly abominable'.

An eminent Muslim leader in the Indian city of Hyderabad has issued a fatwa against the city's prawns, sending its seafood sellers into shell-shock

This meant they were not halal but were in fact haram meaning strictly prohibited.

The news shocked seafood sellers around the city whose livelihoods depend on selling the tasty treat to Muslim customers.

The fatwa has caused a furor in the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangan because prawn is one its most popular dishes - and many fatwas in the past have allowed it.

But other religious schools in the city have said that prawn is actually fine to eat, reports Gulf News India.

Confusingly, another religious institution in Hyderabad, Madrasa-e-Anwarul Huda, said that prawn was halal and not even Makrooh.

And the authorities of Jamia Nizamia eventually clarified that the fatwa is only strictly applicable to the followers of the Hanafi school of Muslim thought - just one of the four main schools of Sunni Islam.

The fatwa has caused a furor in the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangan because prawn is one its most popular dishes - and many fatwas in the past have allowed it
Sisters who attempted to smuggle seven Albanian men into the country in a camper van that smelled 'unbearable' because of the toilet have been jailed for 11 years.

Alison and Fabiola Alman were stopped by Border Force officers in Portsmouth when a scan of their vehicle revealed five men in the rear sleeping area.

When searching the vehicle, officers also discovered two more men in a compartment above the cab.

Alison Alman (pictured left), 43, was jailed for six years after attempting to smuggle 11 men into the country in a camper van, while her sister Fabiola (pictured right) was jailed for five

Portsmouth Crown Court heard Alison had got into 4,000 worth of debt with a drug dealer, who said she could pay it off by smuggling what he claimed was his family, including a minor, into the country.

But the 43-year-old was unable to drive the camper van herself, due to a ban after being convicted for drink-driving.

Prosecutor Keely Harvey told the court Alison's sister Fabiola, 47, agreed to drive the camper van.

When stopped by officials, Ms Harvey said both women claimed they had been on holiday and did not know the men were in the van.

She said this was despite a strong smell of urine and excrement described by officers as 'unbearable', which the vehicle hire company had to fork out 3,000 to pay for cleaning.

The court heard Alison blamed the smell on some cheese in the fridge, while Fabiola - who was offered 800 to drive the camper van - said her sister was a 'big eater'.

Officers described the smell of urine and excrement in the camper van (pictured) as 'unbearable'. Alison Alman blamed the stench on some cheese in the fridge.

Ms Harvey said: '[Alison] put the smell down to some cheese kept in the fridge, which had been switched off for 24 hours.

'Fabiola stated that the toilet was full, and put this down to her sister being a big eater; She said she herself suffered from constipation and did not use the toilet.'

Both women were arrested by officials when they arrived on a Brittany Ferries sailing from Bilbao, Spain, to Portsmouth on October 4, last year.

Alison, of Wood Green in London, and Fabiola, from the Sandpits Area of Gibraltar, both admitted assisting unlawful immigration.

Both women were arrested by officials when they arrived on a Brittany Ferries sailing from Bilbao, Spain, to Portsmouth on October 4, last year

Sentencing Alison to six years in jail and Fabiola to five years, Judge David Melville QC said: 'The men were unwanted immigrants, with no right to be in the UK.

'This was a planned operation, in which some care had been taken, and Alison Alman was in desperate need of money.'

The six men have since been returned to Bilbao, while the minor was passed into the care of social services, the court heard.

Speaking after the hearing, chief immigration officer Jo Howorth said: 'These two women claimed the purpose of their trip was to go on holiday, when in reality their intention was to smuggle people into the UK.

'Their attempt was stopped by Border Force officers who identified the people they had hidden in the motor home in squalid and dangerous conditions.

'People smugglers like Fabiola and Alison Alman exploit the vulnerable and put lives at risk while lining their own pockets in the process.

'I hope this case serves as a clear warning that those who try to break the UK's immigration laws will be brought to justice.'
A worker from a Chinese factory producing Apple's iPhone has reportedly died after jumping from a 12-storey window.

The worker's colleagues told Chinese media that the worker had been upset about failing to obtain a 'referral fee' which led to his jump on Saturday.

China Labour Watch, a U.S.-based activist organisation, has also stated that a worker at iPhone maker Foxconn died on Saturday after jumping from a window.

A worker at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, has reportedly died after jumping off a 12-storey window. In the file photo above, workers walk at Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory

Zhengzhou is the provincial capital of Henan in central China and has about 10 million people

According to Chinese news site Youth.cn, the incident occurred in the evening of January 6 at the Fuhang Apartment in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of central China's Henan Province.

The worker is said to be working at a factory of Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant which manufactures iPhones. The apartment building is believed to be a dorm building for the factory workers.

Officers from the Zhenggang Police Station have confirmed to Youth.cn the death of a Foxconn employee on January 6.

The police said the worker had jumped off a building and the worker's family members had arrived at the station for investigation.

Youth.cn also quoted a source who claimed to be a worker from the Zhengzhou Foxconn factory.

Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn manufactures iPhones for Apple. The company, owned by billionaire Terry Guo, has factories across China, such as the one in Chengdu (above)

Foxconn has been accused of poor labour practices in the past. In the file photo above, employees work at Foxconn's plant in Guiyang, Guizhou province of China

The source claimed to have seen the worker plunging down from a 12-storey window at around 6pm on Saturday.

The source also claimed that the worker had apparently failed to get a referral fee from his agency, which found the job for him.

China Labour Watch has named the dead worker as Ming Li, a dispatch worker from an agency at the factory in Zhengzhou.

The New York-based group said Ming Li lived at the factory and his motives of jumping remained unclear.

Foxconn's factory in Zhengzhou, a city of about 10 million people, can produce 500,000 iPhones a day, according to a report. Pictured, an attendee inspects the new iPhone SE during an Apple special event at the Apple headquarters on March 21, 2016, in Cupertino, California

Foxconn's factory in Zhengzhou, a city of about 10 million people, can produce 500,000 iPhones a day, according to a report from The New York Times.

The investigative report, published in December 2016, claimed the Foxconn plant - simply known as the 'iPhone city' by locals - is the world's biggest iPhone factory.

Foxconn is owned by Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, who has been billed by Taiwanese media as 'the Donald Trump of Taiwan'.

MailOnline has contacted Foxconn regarding reports of the death and is awaiting a reply.

The report comes after a small number of students were discovered in November working overtime in Foxconn's Chinese factory, violating local labour laws.

Apple Inc and Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and a major supplier to the U.S. firm, have been accused of poor labour practices in the past.

But the U.S. firm has been trying to get a grip of such issues, releasing annual reviews of the iPhone supply chain.
A US military helicopter made an emergency landing on Monday in Japan's Okinawa islands, the second incident in three days.

A Marine Corps AH-1 attack helicopter with two people aboard landed in a field at a waste disposal site on Okinawa's main island, according to Japanese media stated.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage after the helicopter landed near a hotel in the village of Yomitan.

U.S. Marine Corps AH-1 attack helicopter sits near a Japanese police vehicle in Yomitan village, Okinawa, Japan on Monday

Photos showed an apparently intact helicopter parked in a grassy area.

The US side told police that a warning light had indicated a problem with the aircraft, public broadcaster NHK said.

It was the latest in a series of incidents involving US military equipment that have fueled local opposition to the basing of American forces on the island.

US military personnel examine US Marine Corps' UH-1Y helicopter after its emergency landing on a beach in Uruma, Japan's southern Okinawa islands, Sunday

'We do not know about the cause as the incident is still under investigation,' the spokesman told AFP.

In a similar incident a Marines Corps UH-1Y helicopter made an emergency landing on a beach in Okinawa on Saturday because its rotor appeared to be spinning too fast.

The chopper, carrying four people, made an emergency landing on a small islet in Okinawa Prefecture.

The U.S. Marine Corps said the emergency landing on the small islet was due to 'indications of the main rotor moving at too high a speed.'

No one was injured, but military personnel could be seen removing a large part of the rotor the next day and carting it away.

US military personnel remove a part of the main rotor on Marine Corps' UH-1Y helicopter from a beach in Uruma, Japan's southern Okinawa islands, Sunday

'I'm speechless. The frequency is too often. It cannot be helped but to think there's a systemic problem within the US military,' Okinawa Deputy Governor Moritake Tomikawa told reporters.

The incidents are the latest in a series that have inflamed Okinawan opposition to the large U.S. military presence on the southern Japan island chain.

In separate incidents last month, parts fell from U.S. military helicopters onto schools in Okinawa.

One boy had minor injuries after an emergency escape window fell from a CH-53 transport helicopter into a school playground in Ginowan city. The school is next to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.
The minister in charge of planning for a 'no deal' Brexit will attend Cabinet following today's reshuffle, it has been claimed.

The change is intended by Theresa May to prove to Brussels Britain is serious about walking away from negotiations if only a bad deal is on the table.

Contingency planning for a no deal Brexit is deeply contentious inside Government as the Treasury has been reluctant to commit billions on projects it hopes will be unnecessary.

The role of no deal minister already exists and is held by Steve Baker, David Davis' deputy at the Brexit department.

Brexit minister Steve Baker (left) could be promoted to attend Cabinet and tasked with preparing for 'no deal' departure from the EU

Prime Minister Theresa May (pictured arriving back in Downing Street today) is reshuffling her top team amid fears it is too 'stale, pale and male'

A promotion to make the post one which 'attends Cabinet' was revealed by the Telegraph today as the first act of a dramatic reshuffle of Mrs May's government.

The shake-up got off to a dramatic start today as James Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary.

Mr Brokenshire decided to quit on health grounds as the PM kicked off the overhaul of her 'stale, male and pale' top team.

He is understood to have a lesion on his lung and will need surgery in the coming weeks.

The departure of her close ally will be a blow to Mrs May as she begins her New Year in a bid finally to stamp her authority on the government following the botched election.

Speculation is focused on whether former nurse Anne Milton could take over at health if Jeremy Hunt is moved.

Justice Secretary David Lidington is said to be shifting to fill the gap left by the axing of deputy PM Damian Green over computer porn allegations - although he might not enjoy the same seniority.

Mrs May could also send a stark message to Brussels by installing a dedicated 'Cabinet minister for no deal' to prepare for a collapse in Brexit talks.

Mrs May has previously been too weak to carry out a full shake-up, but sealing the Brexit divorce deal has allowed her to claw her way back into the driving seat.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire decided to quit on health grounds as the PM kicked off the reshuffle

Anne Milton (right) worked as a district nurse for the NHS for 25 years (left) and is now tipped to be the new Health Secretary. Her Commons nickname is 'Scary Spice'.

Jeremy Hunt (pictured leaving his London home today) is tipped to take over as Mrs May's deputy after the departure of Damian Green last month

Boris Johnson (left out for a job this morning) and Brexit Secretary David Davis (right) are expected to be kept in post as the PM stops short of a radical overhaul

Five or six changes are expected to be made at Cabinet level, although the biggest beasts such as Boris Johnson and Chancellor Philip Hammond are considered untouchable.

Education Secretary Justine Greening is said to face a demotion or be sacked amid claims the PM finds her 'patronising'. Ms Greening ignored questions about whether she expected to be fired as she left her London home this morning.

CABINET RESHUFFLE: WHO COULD MOVE? Westminster is rife with rumours as to who could be sacked, moved or promoted in Theresa May's reshuffle Rumoured sackings or demotions: Education Secretary Justine Greening Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom Business Secretary Greg Clark Tory chairman Patrick McLoughlin Communities Secretary Sajid Javid Rumoured promotions: Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt Transport Secretary Chris Grayling Health Minister Anne Milton Justice Minister Dominic Raab James Cleverly MP Nusrat Ghani MP Suella Fernandes MP Rishi Sunak MP Advertisement

Tory chairman Patrick McLoughlin is almost certainly for the chop, while the futures of Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom, Business Secretary Greg Clark and Communities Secretary Sajid Javid are also in doubt.

The move would show EU counterparts in Brussels that Mrs May still plans on leaving the EU even if a deal is not reached.

A government source said Mrs May will promote more women from 'non-white backgrounds' and it has been confirmed she will replace Mr Green after his forced resignation.

Mr Hunt has been tipped to become her effective deputy, with his current role likely to be given to former NHS nurse Ms Milton, MP for Guildford - who is nicknamed 'Scary Spice' for her combative Commons performances.

A minister told the Telegraph: 'If you are a woman in the 2015 intake stand by your phone - if you been a minister of state since 2010 be prepared for bad news.'

A source said that Mrs May will make changes to the Cabinet because she is worried voters see 'stale, male and pale Ministers on the wrong side of 50' in government.

Immigration minister Brandon Lewis would be a popular choice as party chairman.

Government sources have made clear the Prime Minister is not intending to move any of the 'big four' Mr Hammond,Mr Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd or Brexit Secretary David Davis.

Justine Greening faces being demoted or sacked from Education Secretary amid claims Mrs May finds her 'patronising'

Tory chairman Patrick McLoughlin is almost certain to depart, while Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom and Business Secretary Greg Clark (pictured from left) are at risk

Mrs May is set to promote MPs from the junior ranks of government into the Cabinet while giving younger politicians a place on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Meanwhile, junior justice minister Dominic Raab has also been earmarked for promotion.

Mrs May will turn her attention to shaking up the lower ministerial ranks tomorrow.

MPs first elected in 2015, such as James Cleverly, Suella Fernandes, Nusrat Ghani and Rishi Sunak could be given ministerial jobs for the first time.

The changes will be seen as 'succession planning' to bring through a new generation of politicians.

Former Tory leader Lord Howard said Mrs May must make clear that 'no deal is better than a bad deal' in Brexit negotiations.

Allies of Communities Secretary Sajid Javid hope he will survive the reshuffle, while justice minister Dominic Raab will be hoping for a promotion

Commenting on the prospect of a 'no deal' minister, he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I certainly think you've always got to make it clear in any negotiation that no deal is better than a bad deal, because if you go into any negotiation saying "I've got to have a deal at any price", you're going to be taken to the cleaners, which is what I feel would happen if Mr Corbyn was in charge of these negotiations.'

He also encouraged the PM to promote talented MPs who entered Parliament at the 2015 and 2017 general elections.

'The challenge facing the Prime Minister today, what she will want to do is to give fresh impetus to the Government and there is an array of talent on the back benches, and in junior ministerial positions,' the peer said.

'There really is, particularly but not exclusively those who have entered Parliament relatively recently and I hope and I believe that the Prime Minister will seize this opportunity to give some of those people a chance to show what they can do.'
President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller reportedly had to be escorted by security from CNN's studios in Washington, DC, after his trainwreck interview with Jake Tapper on Sunday.

Tapper cut 32-year-old Miller's interview short after he started attacking the network's credibility, labeling them 'fake news'.

Tapper accused Miller of wasting his audience's time to please the president.

Apparently after Miller was taken off air, he refused to leave the studios, a CNN source told CBS.

'The segment was over and Mr. Miller was politely asked to leave the set multiple times. After refusing to leave, he was escorted out by security,' the source said.

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Stephen Miller reportedly had to be escorted from CNN's studios in Washington, DC on Sunday after his trainwreck interview with Jake Tapper

Tapper, right, cut Miller's interview short when he questioned the network's credibility

CNN has not issued a statement confirming the report.

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Matt Dornic, a network spokesman, responded to a tweet a CBS reporter published about the story, saying 'This is not a statement from CNN we did not issue a statement'.

'You need to correct or delete this tweet. I don't know your source. But we did not issue any such statement.'

DailyMail.com reached out to the White House for comment Monday morning, and a spokesman pointed out this 'correction'.

President Trump applauded Miller's performance in a tweet on Sunday.

'Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration,' Trump wrote. 'Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!'

Tapper grew tired of Miller repeating pro-Trump and anti-Stephen Bannon talking points and called the aide's constant interruptions 'hysterical,' as he cut the interview short by announcing, 'I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time.'

The interview began courteously enough with Tapper wishing Miller a 'happy new year.'

It went downhill from there.

Tapper asked Miller about allegations laid out in the new book, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,' by Michael Wolff.

Bannon, Tapper reminded Miller, had criticized the Trump Tower meeting between Russians and campaign staff, saying, 'The chance that Don Jr. didn't walk these Jumos up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero.'

The president applauded his 32-year-old aide, writing in a tweet that he 'destroyed' Tapper

Tapper wanted to know if Miller had any first-hand knowledge of the now-president meeting with the Russians who visited in Manhattan office building in June 2016.

Miller took the cue to lash out at Bannon.

'Steve Bannon's eloquence in that description notwithstanding, it's tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments, so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive,' Miller said.

'And the whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments, which were grotesque,' he said, using the adjective again.

Bannon, Miller said, wasn't even there.

'It reads like an angry, vindictive person spouting off to a highly discredible author,' Miller continued, pivoting to lash out at Wolff too.

'The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction,' Miller added. 'And I also will say that the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.'

Miller tried to counter Wolff's portrayal of what Trump is like to what the aide personally encountered when traveling with the candidate and now president.

When Tapper tried to get him back on track to talk about the meeting, Miller replied, 'I have no knowledge of anything to do with that meeting.'

From there, the conversation was more about CNN.

Miller charged that the cable news network was going '24/7 with all the salacious coverage.'

'And I know that it brings a lot of you guys a lot of joy to trying to stick the knife in,' he said.

Tapper pushed back on that claim, noting how many people from the White House are quoted, on the record, in Wolff's book.

The newsman also got into a tussle with Miller over who hired him, suggesting it was Bannon who helped bring the young aide on board.

Miller said the credit goes not to Bannon, but to Trump's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. He also said Bannon had nothing to do with the writing of Trump's controversial travel ban.

Pictured above are CNN"s studios in Washington, DC

Throughout the interview, Miller repeatedly praised Trump's political prowess, knocking the 'so-called political geniuses in Washington' who didn't predict the populist Republican's ascent.

'The only person who has called himself a genius in the last week is the president,' Tapper uttered.

Miller said that point was true, calling the president a, 'A self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV and who has changed the course of our politics.'

'I'm sure he's watching, and he's happy that you said that,' Tapper shot back.

Miller called Tapper's comment 'condescending' and said it was a 'snide remark,' broadening that point to the whole of CNN.

'You get 24 hours of negative, anti-Trump, hysterical coverage on this network that led in recent weeks to some spectacularly embarrassing false reporting from your network,' Miller said.

Tapper countered by saying, 'I think the viewers right now can ascertain who is being hysterical.'

The conversation further devolved as the CNN newsman tried asking the aide about Bannon's role in the White House and also about a letter Miller helped draft that articulated reasons to fire FBI Director James Comey, a move Trump made in May.

When Tapper got to the president's mental fitness, Miller turned it into a full-on slap of CNN, saying there was a 'crisis of legitimacy' and a 'toxic environment' at the network.

Miller also argued that the president's Saturday tweets, in which he boasted about his 'mental stability' and IQ, were helpful in arguing the point that he had the fortitude to do the job.

'The president's tweets absolutely reaffirm the plainspoken truth: A self-made billionaire revolutionized reality TV and tapped into something magical that is happening in the hearts of this country,' Miller said.

With that, Tapper scoffed.

'The president has an approval rating in the 30s,' the journalist said. 'I don't know what magical you're talking about.'

The two squabbled for a minute more, before Tapper had had enough.

'I get it,' the veteran journo said. 'There is one viewer that you care about right now. And you're obsequious, you're being a factotum, in order to please him.'

Tapper meant Trump.

Miller tried to protest, but Tapper quickly said, 'Thank you Stephen.' The camera panned away from the White House aide as Tapper started reading from the teleprompter, readying his audience the next segment.
A 'modern-day slave' who had been living in an attic for six years while being forced to work without pay has been freed in a dramatic rescue operation.

The Hungarian man was found after officers from Britain's specialist anti-slavery unit raided a number of properties in Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Investigators said the man's reported ordeal was one of a series of cases where 'vulnerable' people are preyed on by others from their country of origin.

A suspect is led away after a raid by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority in Oldham, last month, saw four people arrested on suspicion of modern slavery offences

The man, in his late 50s, claims his exploiters put him to work in a food processing plant and made him collect scrap metal before denying him wages.

Four people have been arrested as part of the investigation, which is codenamed Operation Sidebar.

The man is now safe and is due to be relocated, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) said.

The GLAA, formerly known as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, was formed after the deaths of 23 cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004.

It is a law enforcement agency set up to tackle exploitation, human trafficking and modern slavery.

New police-style powers to arrest, search for and seize evidence have given to the unit's officers.

Estimates from the Home Office put the number of suspected 'modern-day slaves' in the UK at 10,000 to 13,000, although the real figure is feared to be far higher.

The GLAA said it had particular focus on car washes as well as industries including cleaning, construction, manufacturing and warehouse working.

The Oldham raids were carried out late last month but details have just emerged.

A 22-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman were arrested at a property in Greenacres area of Oldham.

A 60-year-old man was held at a separate address nearby and, 24 hours later, a woman was also arrested.

It is understood the man rescued was found in the attic of one of those who was arrested.

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, formerly known as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, was formed after the deaths of 23 cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 (above)

The four - all Hungarian nationals - were held on suspicion of committing offences under the Modern Slavery Act.

They were questioned and released pending further investigation, the GLAA said. Greater Manchester Police provided support during the raid.

The GLAA said the investigation was launched after concerns were raised by supervisors at a food production factory about the condition of another man, 66, who the GLAA said was being driven to and from work by one of the suspects.

He too has now been relocated from the Oldham area after agreeing to enter the National Referral Mechanism, a process set up by the Government to identify and support victims of suspected human trafficking in the UK.

Senior investigating officer Martin Plimmer said: 'This appears to be another case of opportunists preying on vulnerable fellow countrymen and exploiting them for their labour.

'While we are still in the very early stages of this investigation we appear to have uncovered two victims - one of whom claims to have been exploited for a considerable period of time.

'Working with police and immigration officers, we have been able to arrest suspects and will now gather evidence to ensure that justice is done.'
Scientologist actress Elisabeth Moss has been accused of hypocrisy for giving an emotional 'metoo' Golden Globe acceptance speech while her religion has been accused of covering up sexual assaults.

The 35-year-old won Best Actress In A TV Drama at the ceremony in Los Angeles for her portrayal as Offred in the Amazon series The Handmaid's Tale adapted from the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood.

Moss, who rarely talks of her association with the Church of Scientology, made reference 'to the women who were brave enough to fight for equality and freedom in this world'.

But the speech sparked a backlash online with some pointing to allegations made against the religion that it had covered up sexual assaults.

Scientologist actress Elisabeth Moss (pictured) has been accused of hypocrisy for giving an emotional 'metoo' Golden Globe speech while her religion has been accused of covering up sexual assaults

The 35-year-old won Best Actress In A TV Drama in Los Angeles for her portrayal as Offred in the Amazon series The Handmaid's Tale adapted from the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood

One Twitter user wrote that 'her outpourings of supposed empathy and solidarity to the [metoo] movement don't quite ring true since she is still a prominent Scientologist - an organisation which silences women more than any other.'

Another said: 'Elisabeth Moss winning for Handmaid's Tale, and then giving a speech about injustice and inequality, all while being a proud Scientologist is GOLDEN.'

According to Fox News, the church has come underfire recently amid claims it had knowledge of rape claims made against Scientologist actor Danny Masterson long before reports became public in the media.

In November, it was reported that four women had come forward to accuse Masterson of sex attacks.

The historic claims against the 41-year-old all dated back to the early 2000s.

The women, all members of the Church of Scientology, also claim that the organization covered up the alleged sexual assaults by Masterson, a fellow Scientologist. Masterson has denied all the accusations against him.

The case began in 2004 when a woman filed a report with the Los Angeles Police Department saying Masterson raped her when she was 'passed out' in an earlier incident in 2003.

She claims she woke up when she realized what was happening but he choked her until she passed out again. However, the case was eventually closed after the Church of Scientology submitted over 50 affidavits from Scientologists who denied the woman's account.

In a December statement released to the media the church said it 'adamantly denies' ever ignoring any allegations of criminal behavior 'especially at the expense of alleged victims'.

'What is being stated is utterly untrue. This has nothing to do with religion. This story is being manipulated to push a bigoted agenda. The church follows all laws and cooperates with law enforcement. Any statement or implication to the contrary is false.'

Moss (pictured ahead of her acceptance speech) was raised as a Scientologist and in 2013 said that it gave her stability and empowerment and helped her learn to respect herself

The police report detailing the alleged assault from one victim were obtained by The Underground Bunker.

The woman claimed that the church had 'threatened her' and if she told the police she would 'lose everything and everyone'.

She added in her statement to police: 'Then they put me on a massive ethics program as punishment. My rapist was not punished at all.

'They didn't even call him to talk about it. I ended up breaking up with him two months later.'

In Scientology, reporting another church member to law enforcement is considered a 'suppressive act' and which can lead to punishment or even expulsion from the church.

Sources familiar with the case told Buzzfeed, the woman's file had mysteriously vanished in 2004, leaving Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller to reconstruct it.

In her speech on Sunday, Moss used her acceptance speech to honor author Margaret Atwood by reading a message from the author about female empowerment

The other three women allegedly reported their rapes directly to the Church of Scientology.

Moss was raised as a Scientologist and in 2013 said that it gave her stability and empowerment and helped her learn to respect herself.

When asked about her support in 2014, however, Moss would not answer questions about the religion.

Last year, the former Mad Men star responded to a comment about Scientology on Instagram having written about her role in the Last Handmaids Tale.

And while the post initially garnered positive responses, Instagram user @moeleybanks decided to ask a question which compared Gilead, the authoritarian state depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, to Scientology.

'Love this adaptation so much. Question though, does it make you think twice about scientology?' asked @moeleybanks. 'Gilead and Scientology both believe that all outside sources (aka news) are wrong and evil it's just very interesting.'

While Moss usually avoids talking about her religion, on this occasion she responded to the question.

'@Moeleybanks That's actually not true at all about Scientology,' she wrote.

'Religious freedom and tolerance and understanding the truth and equals rights for every race, religion and creed are extremely important to me. The most important things to me probably. And so Gilead and THT hit me on a very personal level. Thanks for the interesting question!'

In her speech on Sunday, Moss paid tribute to Margaret Atwood by reading a message from the author about female empowerment.

'We were the people who were not in the papers,' read Moss. 'We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the story.'

Moss then dedicated the award to Atwood.

'Margaret Atwood, this is for you and the women who came before you and after you who were brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice' the Mad men actress continued.

'We no longer live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. We no longer live in the gaps between the stories.

'We are the story in print. We are writing the story ourselves.' she concluded.
French President Emmanuel Macron went out his way to woo Chinese leader Xi Jinping by gifting him a horse from the elite French Republic Guard on the first day of his state visit.

Macron is on a three-day tour of China and picked an 8-year old brown gelding named Vesuvius from the presidential cavalry corps, braving stringent Chinese quarantine checks to offer it to President Xi Jinping.

The choice of the gift, an 'unprecedented diplomatic gesture' according to the French presidency, was made after the Chinese president expressed his fascination for the 104 horsemen who escorted him during his last visit to Paris in 2014.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron are pictured at the Museum of Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses in Xian, Shaanxi province, China

Macron and his wife Brigitte pose for a photo as they tour around Big Wild Goose Pagoda

It is the first time France has offered one of the elite cavalry corps' horses and is also a response to China's 'panda diplomacy', after Macron's wife Brigitte became the godmother of a Chinese panda lent by Beijing to a zoo near Paris.

'It mattered a lot for the president, even if it was very complicated to import a horse for sanitary reasons. It's a symbol of French excellence,' an Elysee official said.

Since his election last May, France's youngest leader since Napoleon has shown his willingness to use symbols and history to win over his global counterparts.

Macron flattered Russian President Vladimir Putin in May with a meeting at the sumptuous palace of France's former monarchy, built in Versailles by Louis XIV - the 'Sun King' - to symbolise absolute power.

He also invited U.S. President Donald Trump to watch a military parade on the grandest avenue of Paris on Bastille Day last July to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War One.

Trump later said Macron was doing a 'terrific job'.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron are greeted by a monk at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda in the northern Chinese city of Xian

The horse was from raised by the Republican Guards who are seen marching during the annual Bastille Day military parade in Paris

French President Emmanuel Macron went out his way to woo Chinese leader Xi Jinping by gifting him a horse from the elite French Republic Guard. Pictured: Emmanuel Macron shakes hands with a local elderly iman as his Brigitte looks on, during a visit to the Great Mosque of Xian

Macron launched his visit in Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road, in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route

Macron is on a three-day tour of China. Pictured: The French President poses with children as they are welcomed on the tarmac at Beijing's Capital Airport

After Xian, Macron will travel on to Beijing along with his delegation which takes in some 60 business executives and institutions

Macron launched his visit in Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road, in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route.

He visited the northern city's famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of Franco-Chinese relations.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient Chinese artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

Macron and wife Brigitte meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and wife Peng Liyuan before a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse

In a meeting today Macron urged Europe to take part in China's massive Silk Road infrastructure project but warned against 'hegemony', saying both sides should share the benefits

He plans to seek a 'strategic partnership' with Beijing on issues including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord to fight climate change after the US pulled out of the deal.

After Xian, Macron will travel on to Beijing along with his delegation which takes in some 60 business executives and institutions.

In Xian, Macron also decided at the last minute to visit the Wild Goose Pagoda, a virtually unknown landmark in the West compared with the terracotta soldiers but well-known by Chinese people as a historic site for Buddhism.

The 40-year old French president is keen to gain more access for French companies to often protected Chinese markets and is travelling with a delegation of about 50 businessmen.
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Salim Mehajer has revealed the extraordinary precautions he took to keep his identity secret after meeting his new model girlfriend in Sydney's affluent eastern suburbs on New Year's Eve.

In a bizarre letter shared to his Instagram story in the very early hours of Tuesday morning, the 31-year-old said he had first laid eyes on Central Coast business graduate Melissa Tysoe at 10.30pm at the Vaucluse party.

Mehajer said the pair shared a smile of 'immense connection', which magnified when he decided to sit next to her and she didn't move away from him - an action which strangely sent 'shivers' down his spine.

He then went on to explain how delighted he was that his new love interest did not initially know who he was, and how he gave her a fake surname and shut down his social media to prevent her from finding out.

At the time they met, Salim had been through a rough few months, with tapes emerging detailing allegations he had threatened to rape his mechanic's mother and that he was under threat of angry bikies.

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Salim Mehajer (right) and his new sweetheart, Melissa Tysoe (left) have penned gushing love letters to each other, and shared them to social media

Mehajer gave Ms Tysoe a fake last name, and set his social media to private when the pair first met at a Vaucluse NYE party

Salim Mehajer and new flame Melissa Tysoe have both shared gushing love posts to Instagram (Mehajer's left, Tysoe's right)

'She didn't even know who I was, thank god,' he exclaimed through the post.

'Even her sister, who lives in Tasmania, has never ever heard of me. I was like yesssss! [sic].

'To ensure this will continue being the case, I even placed my Instagram account on private, not letting her see my images or understand anything about me.

'I even changed the spelling of my surname in case she decides to Google me.'

Earlier in the year, Mehajer was at the centre of an insurance scandal, with allegations of fraud made against him following a series of unfortunate car accidents.

But none of that appeared to have mattered to his Instagram model girlfriend, who penned a gushing post in support of her new beau on Monday night.

Taking to the picture sharing platform, the business and commerce graduate told her nearly 57,000 followers she shared an 'intellectual connection' with Mehajer, who was a 'kind man with an incredible mind'.

Mehajer first met the businesswoman and Instagram model (pictured) on New Year's Eve, and again 90 minutes later at midnight

While Ms Tysoe's letter focuses on Mehajer's positive attributes, the former deputy mayor of Auburn tells followers how he tried to avoid the blonde beauty finding out who he was

The 31-year-old told social media followers the pair shared a smile of 'immense connection' as the clock struck 12

Ms Tysoe was first linked to Mehajer earlier this month after he shared a video of the pair kissing to his Snapchat account.

The pair have quickly become inseparable, with a bevy of images showing them spending time together and being affectionate.

On Monday night, she attempted to explain how their relationship blossomed so quickly, despite their massive cultural differences.



'What do I see in him? We pray to different gods, we are tied to different cultures, but we share the same passions,' she said.

He shared his utter delight that Ms Tysoe had no idea who he was upon their meeting, and went to great lengths to continue her ignorance

News of the controversial businessman's new relationship broke when he shared pictures and video of the pair on Snapchat (pictured)

At the time Mehajer and Ms Tysoe met, he had made headlines for allegations he had threatened to rape his mechanic's mother, and that bikies were going to 'get' him

Ms Tysoe praised her new beau for his intelligence and values, saying these qualities were not easy to come by.

'For the first time in a long time, I have an intellectual connection with somebody,' she wrote.

'I see a kind man with an incredible mind, a companion who values the same things I do - family, travel, food, new experiences, happiness in confidence, fitness and health, who is so determined in his career and business.

'But above all, someone who does it all for their family. Someone with a cute playful side, who makes me laugh and likes me for me, even though I'm a dork sometimes.'

The pair have been very active on social media, sharing their time together with more than 250,000 combined Instagram followers

Salim's video of the pair kissing (pictured) came just days after he declared his love for former flame Constance Siaflas

Ms Tysoe appeared to directly mention Mehajer's lengthy list of controversies in the letter.

'There is good and bad in everyone,' she wrote.

'Sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad people do good things.

'In the early stages of crossing paths with someone, it is difficult to tell one from the other.

'All I know is, we are human and we all make mistakes, but for most people, their worst mistakes are kept secret and not put out in the media, so we are given a second chance.

'I think he deserves one too.'

Ms Tysoe told followers the pair had much in common, and that he had a 'cute, playful side'

She appeared to directly reference Mehajer's alleged wrongdoings, noting 'sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad people do good things'

Mehajer later shared the post to his Snapchat story, captioning the note: 'She reads me like a book'.

In his lengthy response, which is expected to be continued, he says he had prayed for a woman like her earlier that day.

'What still sends shivers down my spine till [sic] this very day, is that she was an answered prayer I made that day,' he wrote.
Nigel Farage appeared to praise Ukip leader Henry Bolton for jilting his wife for a 25 year-old glamour model saying 'at least he is being talked about'.

Mr Bolton hit the headlines last week when it emerged he left his wife Tatiana Smurova - mother of his small two children - over Christmas.

The Ukip leader, who was barely known before his shock election in September, has started a relationship with ex topless model Jo Marney.

Speaking in Brussels today, Mr Farage appeared to endorse the relationship as it has raised Mr Bolton's profile.

Asked about the affair, Mr Farage said: 'At least he is being talked about. People are writing about him - they weren't before.'

The ex Ukip leader was quizzed about his thoughts on the scandal after he travelled to the EU capital for a showdown meeting with Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier.

Nigel Farage was quizzed about his thoughts on the Henry Bolton scandal after he travelled to the EU capital for a showdown meeting with Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. He said: 'At least he is being talked about. People are writing about him - they weren't before.'

Mr Bolton, a father of three, has claimed his wife had been living abroad since July and insisted there had been no 'clandestine affair'.

But Ms Smurova said he sent her a loving text on Christmas Eve and told how she only found out he had left her on December 30 when he dropped the bombshell in a text message.

Speaking on the 'terrible betrayal', Russian-born Ms Smurova, who has dropped the Bolton part of her surname, told the Sunday Mirror: 'What kind of person runs away to sleep with another woman, leaving their two small children over Christmas?

'I'm still breastfeeding his child for goodness sake.

'I feel as though I've been thrown in a cold ocean and I'm just trying to stay on the surface.'

Henry Bolton hit the headlines last week when it emerged he left his wife Tatiana Smurova - mother of his small two children - over Christmas to be with Jo Marney, who he is pictured with

Russian-born Tatiana Smurova, pictured with her young baby Victoria, hit out at her husband for leaving her. She said: 'What kind of person runs away to sleep with another woman, leaving their two small children over Christmas?'

Sources close to the UKIP leader have said his marriage had been under strain for months after his wife moved to Vienna in Austria to take up a job with a EU funded security organization.

But Mr Bolton's other ex wife Lidia Gouniakova broke her silence to claim he is a serial love cheat.

The Russian hairdresser said: He was cheating on me, too.' She claims Mr Bolton ditched her after starting an affair with Ms Smurova.

Two years ago Ms Smurova hit the headlines after giving birth to her second child at London's St Pancras station after going into labour.

The couple named the baby girl Victoria after the rail station.

Ms Smurova went into premature labour as she travelled with her husband from their home in Kent.

The baby was safely delivered by paramedics called to the station by staff.
Special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators want to interview President Trump in person as they move forward with the Russia probe  and Trump's lawyers are reaching out for ways to protect the president by limiting the inquiry.

It has long been understood that investigators would seek answers from the man who presided over the campaign and White House that has been probed over issues ranging from any collusion to possible obstruction of justice and other matters.

Trump's lawyers in and outside the White House met with Mueller's team before Christmas where they raised the issue, having already charged Trump associates with lying to the FBI and extracted guilty pleas from others.

Prosecutors have indicated they will likely seek an interview with Trump, the Washington Post reported. Such a preference would be in keeping with standard prosecutorial strategy to talk to everyone who might have knowledge of a situation under investigation.

The president's legal team is mulling how to present the president to the special counsel for questioning when or if the times comes. Trump's team is said to be seeking clarification on the special counsel's desired format on the expected questioning

The push is now being confirmed by people close to the president.

'This is moving faster than anyone really realizes,' a source close to the president told the paper. It could include an interview on a defined are of inquiry.

The person said the president is comfortable participating and that it would put to rest questions of collusion  something Trump has repeatedly denied in public, although not under oath as he would have to with the FBI.

In limited circumstances, this has even brought presidents to be deposed  as President Bill Clinton was required to do in special prosecutor Ken Starr's Lewinsky probe, where his videotaped statements got used against him.

Investigators have already interviewed key figures throughout the White House and has indicted former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his former deputy Rick Gates.

President Trump's legal team is anticipating an interview request from Bob Mueller (pictured) before the conclusion of the Russia probe

Trump's White House lawyer Ty Cobb said 'the White House does not comment on communications with the [office of special counsel] out of respect for the OSC and its process,' and repeated its 'full cooperation.'

Trump is experienced in litigation from his career as a real estate mogul.

But a look at his past appearances reveals what his legal team must be mindful of: interviewed directly under oath, Trump has had to acknowledge past misstatements that he was unable to defend.

In his 2007 deposition in a libel lawsuit, he got asked about his note to a reporter where he claimed he owned a 50 per cent stake in a real estate project.

'I own 30 percent,' he testified under oath. 'And I've always felt I owned 50 percent,' he tried to explain, since he didn't put up his own money on the deal. 'The 30 percent equates to much more than 30 percent.'

Again and again, lawyers for the reporter, Tim O'Brien, grilled Trump, as the Washington Post recounted during the campaign.

Then he got asked about saying publicly he was paid 'more than a million dollars' for a speech.

Under questioning, he revealed he got paid 'approximately $400,000.' The balance was for the promotion of the event, which he considered 'of great value.'

The president's legal team is seek to mitigate the risk by various means, from trying to have him answer questions in writing to limiting the scope of the questioning.

If no deal gets negotiated, Mueller's office could subpoena Trump. He has the option of pleading the Fifth Amendment, but failing to answer questions could carry major political consequences, as Trump has said he has done nothing wrong. He also has blasted the Mueller probe as a witch hunt, an argument he could muster if he refuses to cooperate.

Trump's legal team is anticipating an interview request from Robert Mueller before the conclusion of the Russia probe, according to NBC, and may ask the Department of Justice to allow Trump to provide written responses to the special counsel's questions.

There is speculation Mueller, the former FBI Director, may conduct the interview himself. In past presidential grillings, several lawyers on both sides are present

Trump's team is also seeking clarification on the special counsel's desired format on the expected questioning, the network said, including topics and duration, and asking whether Mueller would conduct the interview himself.

Mueller's team is said to be probing allegations that Trump intentionally obstructed justice in the Russia collusion case when he fired former FBI Director James Comey last year in May.

It is also interested in a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer that the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., set up and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, attended.

Manafort has already been indicted in the Russia probe - but not for any contacts he may have had with representatives of the Kremlin in the course of the presidential campaign. He and business partner who also worked with him on the Trump campaign, Rick Gates, have been charged with a dozen financial and lobbying crimes.

Prosecutors have the advantage of knowing what cooperating witnesses have told them. Michael Flynn, former national security advisor to President Donald Trump, leaves following his plea hearing at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse December 1, 2017 in Washington, DC. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged Flynn with one count of making a false statement to the FBI

Since Mueller's October indictment of Manafort, NBC reports that Trump's legal team has been brainstorming ways to sidestep an interview altogether.

The lawyers reportedly sat down with the special counsel's office in late December.

Prior to that, Ty Cobb, one of Trump's White House lawyers, had said he believed interviews for the investigation were wrapping up.

But the president himself has not been interviewed yet in the election meddling case that has morphed to include his axing of Comey.

Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to the president, also suggested that Trump may have met with the Russians, too, at Trump Tower in the summer of 2016.

NBC reports that Trump's lawyers are seeking to determine whether the special counsel's interest in the president would meet a legal bar for interviewing the nation's chief executive.

Trump's legal team declined requests from comment from NBC. So did Pete Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel's office. Carr also declined to comment to DailyMail.com.

Cobb told DailyMail.com over email, 'The White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process.

'The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution.'

Since the October indictment of Paul Manafort, Trump's legal team has been brainstorming ways to sidestep an interview altogether, NBC reports

The president said Saturday that he would be willing to speak to Mueller, but he's not, as he understands it, under investigation.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Just so you understand  just so you understand, there's been no collusion; there's been no crime And in theory, everybody tells me I'm not under investigation. Maybe Hillary is, I don't know, but I'm not.'

The White House has long said that Comey was fired for incompetence, although the president said in a consequential interview that he had Russia on his mind when he let go of the law enforcement official who was midway through a 10-year appointment.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders reiterated Wednesday that Trump was not involved in the Trump Tower meeting about adoption sanctions, either, that Trump Jr. believed was an opportunity for the campaign to obtain embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton.

'As the President has stated many times, no. And he wasn't part or aware of that,' she said in response to a question about the Bannon claim that appeared in Michael Wolff's blockbuster book 'Fire and Fury.'
Robert Prudham, 33, from Maidstone in Kent, swindled almost 5,000 from car park machines (pictured, outside court)

The ex-husband of 'Queen of Benefits' Cheryl Prudham has been jailed after he stole thousands from his bosses and splashed out on a family holiday in the sun.

Robert Prudham, 33, from Maidstone in Kent, swindled almost 5,000 in coins and notes from car park machines, including those at a hospital, while working as a collector for Meteor Parking Ltd.

The father-of-six was jailed for 14 months today after admitting four counts of theft and one of fraud by false representation at Maidstone Crown Court.

After stealing the cash, Prudham handed over around 2,240 to his ex-wife who spent it on a family trip to Spain.

Mother-of-twelve Cheryl, 35, once said to rake in 40,000-a-year from the state, will wait until tomorrow to learn her fate.

She admitted handling stolen goods and was due to be sentenced today via a TV link with Warrington Crown Court in Cheshire, close to where she now lives.

But problems with the link meant the mother, who is now believed to work as a part-time carer, will not be sentenced until tomorrow.

A restraining order, in place after Prudham was convicted of harassing Cheryl, meant the pair could not be in the dock together at Maidstone.

She has previous convictions dating back to 2004, details of which were not given in court, and was warned at a previous hearing that she also faced jail.

Prudham, father to her six youngest children and also known as Robert Ring, stole 4,788 in the space of a month.

He targeted the supposedly tamper-proof cashboxes while emptying machines at car parks, many at train stations, across Kent and south east London.

Robert and Cheryl Prudham at home with nine of her children, when they lived in Kent

He even swiped cash from parking machines at Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford, Kent.

A court heard he also hid his criminal past from a recruitment agency, and resigned just four weeks after landing the job.

The day Prudham quit was also when bosses discovered he had pocketed 2,000 from Fremlin Walk shopping centre in Maidstone.

The next day Cheryl, who was pregnant with twins at the time, paid the holiday installment.

Three months later they were seen with their large brood - then totalling nine and aged between 14 and one - soaking up the sunshine during an all-inclusive fortnight break on the Spanish island of Menorca.

She had gone to a branch of Thomson in Sittingbourne on February 11, 2014, and handed over 2,241.96 in cash, the court heard.

In total, Cheryl paid 7,671.96 in installments for the 14 night break for 11 people at the Victoria Playa hotel in Santo Thomas.

They flew out from London's Gatwick airport on May 16, 2014, and returned on May 30.

Mother-of-12 Cheryl Prudham, who has previously made national headlines after raking in 40,000 a year in benefits (Pictured, with Robert Prudham and her daughter)

Shortly before he quit his job, Prudham had told a colleague the holiday had cost him 10,000.

Details of the trip were revealed during the trial last year of a work colleague Prudham was alleged to have 'corrupted' into stealing with him.

But he was cleared by a jury in less than 45 minutes of any involvement in the thefts carried out over five days in February 2014.

Prudham, who now lives with his new partner in Manchester, has 18 previous convictions for 29 offences, including many for theft and dishonesty.

Jailing him, Judge Adele Williams said his response to previous court orders had been 'abysmal' and he had failed to take advantage of opportunities offered by the probation service.

'You obtained this employment by fraud, you failed to reveal your previous convictions for dishonesty, and obtained a job collecting money by fraudulent means,' she added.

'You then committed the theft offences which was a significant breach of trust. This was quite deliberate dishonesty.'

Prudham, who arrived at court without a bag packed, waved at his girlfriend and family in the public gallery and asked them to send him money.

Eve George, defending, told the court that at the time of the thefts he was 'short of money'.

'It is no excuse but he does have six children with his co-defendant,' she added.

'Since moving to Manchester he has turned over a new leaf and has not committed any more offences.'

He was jailed for a total of nine months on each of the theft charges and five months' consecutive for fraud.

Prudham began working for the car park company, owned by Vinci Services, on January 12, 2014, having told Folkestone-based recruitment company Red Eagle that he was of good character with no criminal convictions.

Left, Prudham poses for cameras outside Maidstone Crown Court today, and right, swearing at photographers during an earlier hearing

The money was meant to be transferred into cashboxes and then taken to a secure central location at Ashford Designer Outlet Centre in Kent to be counted.

But money went missing between collection and drop-off, said prosecutor Oliver Doherty.

When 2,000, mostly in notes, went missing from Fremlin Walk car park, an audit was carried out and the other three thefts were discovered.

'It was easy for the company to check who had access (to the parking machines) because there were security procedures in place and the only people who had access when the 2,000 was stolen was Robert Prudham and his colleague,' said Mr Doherty.

He also told the court the cashboxes could be easily disabled and the money simply tipped out.

'Robert Prudham immediately resigned on discovery of the thefts,' said Mr Doherty.

'The investigation also discovered that Cheryl Prudham, the then partner of Robert, had a family holiday booked with TUI and there had been regular deposits to pay for the expensive holiday.'

As well as the hospital and shopping centre car parks, Prudham stole from machines based at train stations in Borough Green, Chatham, Hildenborough, Longfield, Maidstone East, Meopham, Rainham, Sevenoaks, Staplehurst and Orpington - all in Kent.

Those he targeted in south east London were at Bromley North, Eltham and Mottingham stations.

Prudham resigned on February 10, the day the final amount of money was stolen.

He and Cheryl were living in Gravesend, Kent, at the time.

His 28-year-old colleague, Jacob Underdown, from Sheerness, Kent, who was cleared of three theft offences told the trial he 'didn't have a clue' how Prudham was able to steal the money.

But he also told police Prudham had looked 'pretty shifty' during one of their rounds, adding: 'He said he was going on holiday in April and had 3,000 left to pay.

'He was going to Spain, full board because he has 10 (sic) kids. He said the full cost was 10,000.

'I was with him the whole time and don't recall him taking bags. If he has done it, I don't know how he has done it.'

The prosecutor said it was subsequently discovered money could be stolen from the cashboxes with the tamper seal remaining in place.

Prudham had lied about not having previous convictions when he filled in a job application form with the recruitment agency in September 2013.
Two men had been arrested and given detention after publicly insulting a police officer who killed a golden retriever on a street in China.

According to the police, the 24-year-old Mr Zhou posted pictures and personal details of the policeman on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, on December 31. Another Mr Zhou, 26, publicly insulted the policeman on the same day.

The incident occurred on the same day after the policeman was filmed beating a leashed golden retriever to death with a wooden club in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province.

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Horrific: A police officer can be seen holding a long wooden club and wielding it towards a golden retriever that was chained to a road barrier in Changsha two weeks ago.

According to Changsha Police's social media account, each of the two men was given a five-day detention for disclosing confidential information of a police officer and showing disrespect to a police officer.

On New Year's Eve, the police officer was seen repeatedly beating a dog with a wooden club on its head.

The golden retriever can be seen struggling to stand up and crying loud before it died.

The incident has sparked an outcry online as dog lovers criticised the police officer's method of handling a 'dog attack incident'. The public said the officer was 'cruel' and 'heartless'.

Outcry: The incident has sparked fury among the web users and two men who publicly assaulted and disclosed the policeman's address were detained for five days

The horrific incident happened in Changsha (pictured) of Hunan Province in south China

The officer claimed he did not carry any tranquillising gun and decided to use a wooden club to kill the canine instead.

Some said 'out-of-control' dogs should be killed to prevent more injuries as they fear the canine carried any virus such as rabies.

Changsha Police Bureau received flags from citizens who supported the killing of the dog.

The policeman was hailed as hero for beating the 'stray' dog as he performed his duty to protect the citizens.

Changsha Police stated complaints should be expressed through a formal channel and follow the laws and orders.
Some 290 migrants have been rescued from the Mediterranean Sea as they tried to reach Europe according to Libyan authorities.

The migrants, including 53 women and 57 children, were rescued from two stranded vessels which suffered engine troubles during the crossing on Sunday

They were rescued off the coast of Garabulli, 30 miles east of Tripoli, then taken to the capital, naval officer Meftah al-Zlitni said.

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Saved: Some of the 290 migrants rescued off the coast of Libya by the navy on Sunday

Rescued: Among the hundreds who tried and failed to cross the Mediterranean Sea were 53 women and 57 children

Desperate: A young child cries as the many people scramble to get off the large dinghy

The bodies of two female migrants were found on one of the vessels, a statement from the navy added.

The rescue took place one day after 64 migrants are believed to have drowned when a smugglers' rubber dinghy sank in the same area of the Mediterranean.

The boat started sinking due to a puncture off the coast of Libya. Italian coast guard eventually rescued 86 people, and retrieved the bodies of eight dead women.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) later said that according to survivors, interviewed by the UN agency in Sicily, there were 150 persons aboard the overcrowded rubber dinghy went it took off from Libya.

The Italian coast guard launched a search but didn't find any more survivors or bodies.

Coast guard rescuers managed to save dozens of migrants who were stranded in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya

The migrants were saved by the Italian coastguard, and survivors say there were around 150 migrants on board the boat before it deflated

Many of the migrants had fallen out of the dinghy and had been in the water for a number of hours

A spokesman for Libya's navy and coastguard said the boat capsized and sank in international waters and that they did not have the resources to rescue them

Rescuers arrived at the scene in the early afternoon and around 20 migrants were in the inflatable while a number of others were in the water

Return: The two boats of migrants were rescued off the coast of Garabulli, 30 miles east of Tripoli, then taken to the capital

Shrinking numbers: Some 119,000 people attempted to cross the Mediterranean in the second half of 2017, a decrease of one third on the previous yea

In need: Medics tend to a migrant after being rescued with others by Libyan coast guards, at a naval base in Tripoli,

Men, women and children regroup at the naval base after trying and failing to sail across the Mediterranean

Since the 2011 fall of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has become a key launch pad for migrants making desperate bids to reach Europe, often on unseaworthy vessels.

Last year, 3,116 people died attempting the crossing, according to the OIM.

There was however a sharp drop in arrivals in Italy during in the second half of 2017 following efforts by Rome to discourage migrants from attempting the crossing.

Some 119,000 embarked on the perilous journey, a decrease of one third on the previous year, according to Italy's interior ministry.

The first six days of 2018 saw 400 people rescued and taken to Italy, compared to 729 over the same period in 2017, it said.

Some of many: Thousands try to make it across the Mediterranean - the first six days of 2018 saw 400 people rescued and taken to Italy

Aid: A worker from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees offers a blanket to a woman carrying a young child
The Ohio Department of Transportation is planning to require fencing at some overpass construction sites after Marquise Byrd (pictured) was killed last month

Ohio state has plans to require fencing at some overpass construction sites after a Michigan man was killed when a sandbag was tossed onto an interstate and smashed through his car windshield.

The change comes after 22-year-old Marquise Byrd, of Warren, Michigan, died on December 22, three days after a car he was riding in was struck by a sandbag tossed from an overpass onto Interstate 75 in Toledo.

Authorities have charged four teenagers with throwing the sandbag and other objects at cars.

The bridge where the sandbag was dropped had fencing, but much of it was removed for a reconstruction project.

Now, a new rule is being drafted that will require temporary fencing during work on overpasses that already have fencing and during projects to add permanent fencing to overpasses, said Matt Bruning, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Transportation.

'There shouldn't be any period of time where there isn't any fencing,' he said.

A year ago, the state agreed to increase the number of highway overpasses with fencing.

The plans call for adding permanent fencing to about 160 overpasses over five years at an estimated cost of just under $1 million per year, Bruning said.

Byrd, of Warren, Michigan, died on December 22, three days after a car he was riding in was struck by a sandbag tossed from an overpass onto Interstate 75 in Toledo

The bridge where the sandbag was dropped had fencing, but much of it was removed for a reconstruction project. Marquise Byrd is (pictured right)

Byrd, who was killed in December when a sandbag was thrown onto Interstate 75 in Toledo from an overpass, had plans to pop the question to his girlfriend on his birthday, a friend said.

'It would have been a surprise to her, and only his mother knew of his plan,' Lillian Diallo said to People.

'He was robbed of being a married father, a husband taking care of his family and living the dream that was almost in his grasp.

'In his mind, that would have been the greatest gift he could have got on his birthday.'

The sandbag hit Byrd in the head and he died at the hospital.

'He was just in a car riding like any of us, not bothering anybody, and the sandbag came down and came down on his side of the car,' Diallo added.

Now, a new rule is being drafted that will require temporary fencing during work on overpasses that already have fencing and during projects to add permanent fencing to overpasses. Byrd is pictured right with family and friends

Byrd was a front seat passenger in a southbound vehicle on Interstate 75 (above) in Toledo, Ohio, when he was struck by a sandbag

Four teenage boys, ages 13 to 15, have been charged with murder in an Ohio juvenile court in connection to Byrd's death.

The teens initially were charged with the juvenile equivalent of felonious assault. The driver of the car, who has not been identified, suffered minor injuries.

Byrd, who was the father of a two-year-old boy, was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car when the sandbag smashed through the windshield on December 19.

Officers received a call at 10.10pm on December 19. They responded to the scene and saw the teenagers leaving the area after the incident.

The Lucas County Coroner's Office said Byrd died of blunt-force trauma injuries to the head and neck.

Police and a prosecutor have said the teens threw other objects from the overpass that night.

The vehicle in which Byrd was sitting on December 19 is seen in the above photo

Byrd's cousin, Shaveontae King said she has no sympathy for the teens and wants authorities to charge them as adults.

'My auntie has to bury her son. He's gone. He's never coming back,' she King said.

'She's holding up the best she can.'

King told The Toledo Blade: 'I would appreciate if [the boys' parents] could at least call my auntie and tell her they're sorry.' She said Byrd was like a brother to her.

When asked to describe him, she said: 'Young, energetic, outgoing, lovable. He had a bright smile.'

The teens have been charged with murder and vehicular vandalism in the Michigan man's death, and they appeared in court last Thursday, when they entered pleas of denial to the charges.

Authorities have charged four teenagers (one pictured right) with throwing the sandbag and other objects at cars

The teens were charged with murder and vehicular vandalism in Byrd's death, and they appeared in court last Thursday, when they entered pleas of denial to the charges

Lillian Diallo, an attorney for the victim's family, told The Blade that the teenagers should have been home instead of out late on the night the sandbag was dropped onto the interstate.

'You dropped a 30-pound sandbag over an overpass,' Diallo said. 'Where is your conscience? Where is your morality? How could you do that to another human being?'

Ohio also agreed to add the fencing at the urging of Randy Budd, whose wife, Sharon Budd, suffered brain damage when teenagers dropped a rock from an interstate overpass onto their car in central Pennsylvania in July 2014.

Those four teenagers were sentenced to prison in the case.

In another case, five Michigan teenagers were charged in October 2017 with second-degree murder in the death of Kenneth White, a father-of-four.

White was killed by a rock that smashed through the windshield of his van as he was heading home from work.
A father from Massachusetts stabbed his familys pit bull to death at the weekend after it attacked his one-year-old daughter and bit her face.

According to Falmouth, Massachusetts police, the child was playing in the kitchen at her family's home on Brick Kiln Road just before 9am on Sunday when the pit bull terrier turned on the toddler, causing major trauma to her face.

The girl's father tried to pull the dog off his daughter but couldnt.

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Dog mauling: A one-year-old girl was playing in the kitchen at her family's home in Falmouth, Massachusetts (pictured) on Sunday when her pet pit bull attacked her

The toddler suffered severe trauma to her face and was rushed to a hospital after her father stabbed the dog to death

Police said the father retrieved a pistol from a nearby room, but realized it wasnt loaded.

He then grabbed a knife and started stabbing the dog to save his daughter from its jaws, fatally wounding the animal.

The Falmouth Fire and Rescue Department and Falmouth Police Department rushed to the home and began treating the injured girl. She was transported to the Falmouth Hospital by ambulance, and subsequently airlifted to a Boston area hospital by helicopter.

Falmouth fire Lt Scott Stanbard tells WBZ-TV the toddler's injuries are believed to be life-threatening.

The victim's relatives later revealed to Fox 25 the little girl had three blood transfusions and underwent an hours-long surgery overnight to repair some of the damage. She will also require plastic surgeries in the the coming weeks.

Police said the family had owned the pit bull five years and it had no known history of aggression.

The one-year-old was then airlifted to a hospital in Boston, where she underwent surgery overnight

'At this time, the attack appears to have been unprovoked,' police said in a statement.

Speaking to the Boston Herald, Susan Moran, chairwoman of Falmouths Board of Selectmen, praised the father's 'heroic efforts' to minimize the injuries to his child.
Chaos, running rows and f-word confrontations over foreign policy are revealed in a new fly-on-the-wall documentary about the last days of the Obama White House.

Senior officials give the film unvarnished accounts of a 'whole drama' over how Syria was dealt with  and how there was nothing to force the Iranians to abide by their terms of the deal supposed to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.

In 'The Final Year' Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, also says that it took 'too long' to get the measure of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The documentary, shot by director Greg Barker and produced by Magnolia Pictures, followed Obama and his cabinet during his final 12 months in office.

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Obama's last days in the White House were filled with chaos and f-word confrontations over foreign policy, the new documentary The Final Year reveals. Pictured: (r-l) Obama, John Kerry, then Secretary of State, Samantha Power, Ambassador to the United Nations and Ben Rhodes, who are all featured in the film

But on Obama's final address to the UN, what should have been a largely ceremonial affair, Rhodes says he had a 'huge fight' with Power over the tone of the speech. Pictured: Obama in a still from the trailer talking to his team

The Final Year, out later this month, covers the officials in 21 countries including Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria and Japan, and highlights events such as the Syrian peace negotiations.

It also covers the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear deal and Obama's visits to Hiroshima and Laos.

On the internal negotiations to find peace in Syria, Samantha Power, Obama's US ambassador to the UN, says it is 'beyond frustrating' and 'haunting' that they couldn't do more.

She says: 'There's no issue where my thoughts and my feelings and ideas have made such a marginal impact on desperate people.'

In a moment of exasperation she says: 'Of course, I ask myself had I made an argument differently, I think we could have tried other things (sighs)...there's a whole drama there'.

Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry says: 'Samantha will get her point of view out there as tough as anybody else.

'We joke and commiserate at times when we're both in the same place and don't get what we wanted. Sometimes we have some tough arguments in this business'.

In the documentary, senior officials give accounts of how there was nothing to force the Iranians to abide by their terms of the deal supposed to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. Pictured: Iran's President Hassan Rouhani

The documentary, out later this month, shows how devastated Obama's team was, some reduced to tears, when they learned Hillary Clinton lost the presidency to Donald Trump. Pictured: Power and Jenna Lyons after seeing Trump won the state of Florida

Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice tries to brush off the disagreements and says they did not want 'group think' among the cabinet.

But on Obama's final address to the UN, what should have been a largely ceremonial affair, Rhodes says he had a 'huge fight' with Power over the tone of the speech.

Power says that she and Rhodes have a 'fundamentally different perspective' about the world and that she thinks the 65 million refugees are a sign things are 'going in the wrong direction'.

Rhodes says that he sided with Obama in saying this was the best moment to be alive and says that Power 'felt that was potentially discordant with the mood'.

On Russia, Rhodes talks about one of his biggest regrets, admitting the administration took too long in figuring out Putin's real interests.

He says: 'The error we may have made is Putin doesn't seem to pursue Russia's national interests - he pursues Putin's interests.

'Russia's national interests are not to have a shrinking economy and be this rogue actor.

'I think probably we figured that out but...that was the thing that took us too long in retrospect, to separate Putin out from Russia'.

The Final Year, out later this month, covers the officials in 21 countries including Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria and Japan, and highlights events such as the Syrian peace negotiations

Ben Rhodes adds that Trump's decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accord will lead to the 'complete isolation of the United States'. He is critical of Trump and says he is part of the 'retrenchment forces pushing back from the other direction' away from Democratic values. Pictured: Obama with Power and Kerry

During negotiations over the Iran deal, Rhodes makes another striking admission, though it is not clear if it was just a phase during the negotiations that eventually led to the deal.

Rhodes says: 'At a certain point the Iranians have a fairly substantial body of evidence to say that they don't need to abide by the deal. We may lose control of it today.'

Rhodes was the subject of a New York Times profile last year that caused a storm because he boasted about setting up an 'echo chamber' to sell the Iran deal to the public, and claiming that he had turned the media into tools.

He is also highly controversial in the Trump White House, where Michael Wolff's explosive Fire and Fury book revealed senior officials believe Rhodes  whose brother is president of CBS News  is a serial leaker who orchestrated attacks on the Trump administration using classified material.

'The Final Year', shot by director Greg Barker and produced by Magnolia Pictures, is out later this month

At one point Rhodes explodes in rage at the bombing of a humanitarian convoy in Syria, apparently by the Russians or the Syrians and says it is 'f***ing sick' nobody is being held accountable for it.

Rhodes is sharply critical of Trump and says he is part of the 'retrenchment forces pushing back from the other direction' away from Democratic values.

He says that 'maybe this just has to happen, confront the ugly reality of it'.

Rhodes says that Trump's decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accord will lead to the 'complete isolation of the United States'.

The last scenes of The Final Year show the heartache among Obama advisers on election night.

Thinking that Hillary Clinton would win, Power invited some women, including Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to watch with her in the West Wing.

Steinem says: 'I didn't think it would be this bad.'

Power can be seen sitting with her head in her hands, crying.

In an offhand remark she says: 'To think of them in control of the Senate, the House and the Presidency'

Rhodes is shown sitting alone in the darkness and is so shell-shocked he cannot even speak when asked how he feels.
A motorcyclist who was allegedly clocked travelling 206km/h in an 80 zone told police 'there was no one around, so I just gave it a squirt and that was it.'

The 39-year-old man was pulled over by highway patrol officers on Taren Point Road, in Sydney's south, just after 7am on Monday.

Police allege the man admitted to travelling more than 120km/h over the speed limit on his brand new blue Yamaha R6 motorcycle.

The driver had his license immediately suspended and motorcycle number plate confiscated, and was issued with a Field Court Attendance Notice.

A motorcyclist who was allegedly clocked travelling 206km/h in an 80 zone told police 'there was no one around, so I just gave it a squirt'

Social media users were divided in opinion over the image, which was posted to NSW Police's Traffic and Highway Patrol Command Facebook page.

'For sale: Brand new Yamaha R6, low kilometres, only ridden once, make an offer,' joked one man.

'Had someone pulled out of a side street we wouldn't be having this conversation,' one man wrote, condemning the rider for justifying his speed.

'Bike should be confiscated and sold at a public auction, doesn't deserve to ever hold a license to ride again.'

While a majority of the social media users blasted the man's alleged actions, some motorbike enthusiasts were more sympathetic.

'All these cagers not realising how little it takes to squirt a bike from 80 to 200,' wrote one man.

The motorcyclist will appear in Sutherland Local Court in February.
Terrie-Ann Jones (pictured) was found dead at her home in the quiet suburb of Cimla, near Neath, South Wales on Friday night

A handyman has appeared in court charged with murdering a 'loving mother' found dead in her home.

John Paul Lewis, 56, is accused of killing Terrie-Ann Jones, 33, inside her semi-detached house in South Wales.

Terrie-Ann, described by her family as the 'life and soul of the party', was found dead at her home in the quiet suburb of Cimla, near Neath.

Maintenance man Lewis, from nearby Briton Ferry, appeared at Swansea Magistrates' Court where he spoke only to confirm his name and address.

Magistrates said he would next appear at Swansea Crown Court on Wednesday, January 10, and remanded him in custody.

Miss Jones - who is originally from Bristol - was found dead at 7.35pm on Friday evening.

South Wales Police said specialist officers were giving support to Miss Jones' family.

A statement on behalf of the family said: 'Our lives have been devastated. We've lost a loving mother, daughter, sister, auntie and friend to many people.

'Terrie-Ann was the life and soul of the party and is going to be missed by everybody that loved and knew her.'

Cimla town councillor Adam McGrath, who lived on the same street to the home where Miss Jones was found, called her death 'very sad news'.

He said: 'It's such a quiet community and such a quiet area. I actually live in Talbot Road myself, I only live 10 doors way.

'I was here last night and heard all the commotion. It's very, very sad news for the area of Talbot Road. It is such a tight knit community.'
Police in Florida say they have shot dead a robbery suspect after he was located in a backyard after a one-hour search.

The robbery happened at a bus stop in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Plantation at around 8pm Sunday night.

The victim waved down officers and told them the suspect had stolen his backpack at gunpoint.

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Police in Florida say they have fatally shot a robbery suspect after he was located in a backyard

The suspect then ran east about a block, crossing into the city of Lauderhill.

Lauderhill police spokesman Lt. Michael Santiago told reporters that officers from his department, Plantation and Davie searched for the suspect.

He said officers from Plantation and Davie found the suspect behind a house and established a perimeter.

'Officers encountered a suspect and shots were fired,' Santiago said. 'The suspect at the time died of his injuries.'

The victim said the suspect had stolen his backpack at gunpoint at a bus stop in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Plantation

Santiago said a gun was found near the suspect.

'Officers from the city of Davie and the city of Plantation were involved in the shooting in Lauderhill's jurisdiction,' Santiago said, according to ABC 10.

No Lauderhill officers fired their weapons and no police officers were hurt during the incident, he said.

The names of the officers and the suspect have not been released. The officers have been placed on administrative leave, according to the Sun Sentinel.
Channel 4 News has been slammed for failing to make clear that a junior doctor who appeared on the programme has links to the Labour party.

Dagan Lonsdale was introduced only as a 'junior doctor' when he appeared on the TV news show last week and criticised the government over the state of the health service.

But it later emerged that Dr Lonsdale is a Labour supporter who spoke at the launch of a party health plan last year.

Viewers have since complained that his connections to Labour were not made clear before he was allowed to chastise the Conservative Government and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt live on air.

It comes after the BBC was criticised for failing to point out that a nurse who repeatedly attacked the Government is a pro-Corbyn supporter.

Channel 4 News has admitted it should have informed viewers of the Labour party links of a junior doctor who berated the government when he appeared on the show last week

Dagan Lonsdale was only introduced as a 'junior doctor' before he berated the government over the health service and accused the Health Secretary of 'double speak'

A Channel 4 spokesman has since said: 'We accept that given his previous campaign activity on behalf of the Labour Party, his political interests should have been made clearer to viewers.'

Dr Lonsdale appeared on the show as part of a discussion alongside Labour MP Eleanor Smith and Kate Andrews, from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

He accused Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt of 'showmanship' and 'double-speak' before signing off: 'It's a course created by this government that now must be held to account.'

Dr Lonsdale was hailed by Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan in May last year when he helped launch the party's 'NHS New Deal' alongside another Labour MP, Jon Ashworth.

He has also praised Labour's election campaign as 'extraordinary' on his Twitter feed and retweeted messages by Jeremy Corbyn.

As well as speaking at a Labour event, Dr Lonsdale has previously tweeted messages of support for Jeremy Corbyn, as well as retweeting messages sent by the Labour leader

He previously confronted Jeremy Hunt live on air after ambushing the Health Secretary on Sky News and held a protest outside the Department of Health.

Channel 4 insisted that the discussion with Dr Lonsdale followed an 'in-depth' interview with Mr Hunt running for 'over seven minutes'.

It comes after activist Danielle Tiplady was introduced as a 'staff nurse' when she was interviewed by BBC 5Live and reeled off Labour attack lines on the NHS

It comes after a staff nurse was interviewed by BBC radio without the show mentioning she was a Corbyn supporter.

Danielle Tiplady, once photographed alongside the Labour leader, was interviewed by BBC 5Live during which it was claimed she reeled off Labour attack lines on the NHS.

But the BBC introduced the staff nurse only by saying 'Let's bring in Danielle who is a staff nurse'.

Listeners were not told that she was a left-wing activist who had previously written for the communist Morning Star newspaper.

the BBC admitted it should have made clear on air she was a political activist.

A spokesman said: 'BBC 5 live seeks a wide range of voices for its phone-ins. We should have established and made clear on air this contributor was a political activist.

'The programme also spoke to Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, Chair of the Health Select Committee in the House of Commons.'
Michael Christopher Sager, 22, was arrested on Friday near Sacramento, California

A man has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his roommate after work crews discovered a human skeleton buried in the backyard of a house.

Michael Christopher Sager, 22, was arrested on Friday near Sacramento, California, where police believe he stabbed his former roommate in 2015 after getting into a verbal altercation.

The crime went undetected, with no missing persons report filed, until work crews renovating a home in suburban North Highlands made the gruesome discovery on the day after Christmas.

Homeowner Dimas Velasquez said extensive repairs to the property were necessary after he evicted the prior tenants in November for unpaid rent, and they left it in squalid condition.

The remains were discovered in a shallow grave just steps from the back door.

The landlord was cleaning out trash from the backyard of this home after evicting the tenants for unpaid rent, when a worker discovered human remains in a shallow grave on December 26

The remains were discovered just steps from the back door in this shallow grave

Sager, who goes by the nickname 'Big Mike', was laid off from his job in January, and had issued fundraising appeals to help pay the rent at the home as well as afford 'skitzophrena pills' (sic)

'It was so much trash back there and we didn't notice anything until we got most of the trash removed, and a cat was digging at an area, and my friend found it,' Velasquez told Fox40.

Police investigators spent two days at the property, painstakingly unearthing the remains until it became clear there was an entire skeleton.

Forensic teams confirmed that the remains were not ancient, and that the death was the result of a homicide.

The investigation led to Sager, who police say had lived in the home at the suspected time of the murder. The landlord identified him as the boyfriend of the daughter who used to live in the home.

The victim was a male in his 20s who also lived in the home, cops believe, but his identity is being withheld pending confirmation from the Sacramento County Coroners office.

Sager posted this image of bladed weapons in June of 2015, saying he was interested in selling them. Police believe the victim was stabbed, but have not specified the type of weapon

Cops believe Sager stabbed his former roommate in 2015 after getting into a verbal altercation

Sager, who goes by the nickname 'Big Mike', grew up in the area, attending high schools in both Sacramento and North Highlands, where the remains were found, according to his Facebook page.

He worked as a machine operator for a printing company until he was fired in January of last year, according to his posts.

In May, Sager created two fundraising appeals on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe.

One requests funds to help pay for household bills, and shows the front of the home where the remains were discovered.

The other requests $300 to pay for 'skitzophrena pills' (sic).

Sager is being held in Sacramento County Jail without bond.

He is next scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon.
Senator Rand Paul said he was left in 'living hell' after his neighbor allegedly attacked him outside his Kentucky home in November.

The Kentucky Republican told CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday for four or five weeks after Rene Boucher allegedly tackled him outside his home in Bowling Green and left him with six broken ribs, cuts on his face, fluid buildup in his chest he was in a 'living hell.'

'Couldn't get out of bed without assistance, six broken ribs, damage to my lungs, two bouts of pneumonia,' Paul said, detailing his agony.

'It was a really tough go of it. But each day I feel a little bit better. This last month I've been doing better.'

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Senator Rand Paul said he was left in 'living hell' after his neighbor allegedly attacked him outside his Kentucky home in November

The Kentucky Republican told CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday for four or five weeks after Rene Boucher allegedly tackled him outside his home in Bowling Green and left him with six broken ribs, cuts on his face, fluid buildup in his chest he was in a 'living hell'

Boucher has been charged with assault in the November 3 attack at Paul's home, and pleaded not guilty. He was accused of tackling him from behind while the failed GOP presidential candidate was mowing his lawn.

His attorney told CBS in November the attack wasn't politically motivated at all, describing it instead as a 'very regrettable dispute between two neighbors over a matter that most people would regard as trivial.'

The 59-year-old, though, says the attack happened after years of frustration due to being unable to sell his $740,000 home. He said he told Paul in the wake of the mauling that he hadn't been able to sell the house for ten years because the congressman's trees were 'in the way'.

It's believed Boucher was referring to woodland at the back of Paul's property that blocks the doctor's views of the picturesque private lake that forms the centerpiece of their upscale gated community.

Friends say it could explain why the retired anesthesiologist has failed to find a buyer for his five-bedroom, 1.36-acre home which is nonetheless described on property websites as 'overlooking' the desirable water feature.

Boucher's alleged grievance was relayed to the media by another of Paul's neighbors, Alicia Stivers, the first person who saw the bloodied and dazed lawmaker after assault.

Boucher (pictured in court November 9) has been charged with assault in the November 3 attack at Paul's home, and pleaded not guilty. He was accused of tackling him from behind while the failed GOP presidential candidate was mowing his lawn

The 59-year-old says the attack happened after years of frustration due to being unable to sell his $740,000 home. He said he told Paul in the wake of the mauling that he hadn't been able to sell the house for ten years because the congressman's trees were 'in the way'. Boucher's home is pictured

It's believed Boucher was referring to woodland at the back of Paul's property that blocks the doctor's views of the picturesque private lake that forms the centerpiece of their upscale gated community

But regardless of why the assault took place, Paul (pictured November 13) said people shouldn't focus on the motive behind his specific attack but instead should work to deter politically motivated attacks from happening in the future

Boucher has also been said to be a socialist - leading some to wonder whether the alleged attack was politically motivated.

But regardless of why the assault took place, Paul said people shouldn't focus on the motive behind his specific attack but instead should work to deter politically motivated attacks from happening in the future.

'My colleagues come up all the time, and they want to make sure there is some kind of deterrent because people don't want to think that it's open season on our elected officials,' Paul told CBS.

'I think one of the things about motivations is people got obsessed, some in media, about the motivations.

'But I think really we usually don't ask if someone's raped or mugged or whatever why the person did it. We want punishment and deterrents.'

He said he saw similar questions asked about the attacker of the gunman who opened fire on Congress practicing softball in Alexandria, Virginia in June.

Paul added that he doesn't think any motivation or justification 'political or personal' is enough to 'attack someone who's unaware from behind in their own yard.'
A British couple have been stranded in Italy after their baby was born 15 weeks early while they were on a Christmas holiday.

Twenty-four-week-pregnant Jordan Wilson and her boyfriend, Ashley Challoner, were on holiday in Venice as an early Christmas treat.

University of East Anglia nursing student, Miss Wilson, was stunned when she woke up one morning surrounded in fluid.

She was forced into labour and gave birth to Matilda, who was due in March, on December 3. The baby, who was born nearly four months early, weighed just 1.7lbs - the size of an iPad.

Matilda, who was born nearly four months early, weighed just 1.7lbs - the size of an iPad

Twenty-four-week-pregnant Jordan Wilson and her boyfriend, Ashley Challoner (left), were on holiday in Venice as an early Christmas treat. Pictured is Matilda (right)

Miss Wilson and Mr Challoner could now find themselves in the country for another three months as they wait for their daughter to grow big enough to come home to the UK.

Miss Wilson, 26, said: 'We booked to come to Venice on holiday before I found out I was pregnant, but we still came because I was only 24 weeks, and you can fly without having to speak to your doctor.

'We flew out on November 28, nothing was wrong, but then I woke up one morning and there was just fluid everywhere.'

Miss Wilson, who had the forethought to take her notes abroad with her, called her midwife who told her to go to the nearest hospital.

Battling the language barrier, the couple managed to ascertain Miss Wilson had gone into early labour.

Drugs kept the delivery at bay for two days, but determined to meet her parents little Matilda was born on December 3 and was taken straight to the neonatal intensive care unit.

Miss Wilson and Mr Challoner could now find themselves in the country for another three months as they wait for their daughter to grow big enough to come home to the UK

She said: 'It didn't have a gynae unit so we were rushed to Trento, in Italy, which is where we are now.'

'Obviously I was shocked. But I would like to think because I'm studying nursing that helped to keep me more calm, the more stressful thing has been understanding the language. And I've been crying a lot but I blame that on the hormones.'

Since she was born Matilda - who has an Italian birth certificate - endured a blood transfusion and was hooked up to oxygen for her first few weeks of life, while the whole family was stranded in Italy.

'We're stuck out here until she's better really,' said Miss Wilson.

Doctors hope to discharge Matilda at the beginning of February, but even then they will need to stay near to the hospital for a couple of weeks until they are sure she is well enough - potentially until her original due date on March 14.

Now, Matilda weighs 2.6lbs - just more than a bag of sugar - and no longer has to use a full face oxygen mask, although she still has a nasal tube.

Miss Wilson's mother, Helen Richardson, started an online fundraising page to help support the couple.

While the couple had insurance which is covering an apartment close to the hospital, and 27-year-old Mr Challoner's boss said his truck driving job would be held for him, they used all their savings for baby supplies to fund their day-to-day living.

Already 1,500 has been reached which will go towards everything from a cot and sheets, to a sterilising unit and baby monitors.

Now, Matilda weighs 2.6lbs - just more than a bag of sugar - and no longer has to use a full face oxygen mask, although she still has a nasal tube

But Miss Wilson said she did not know about the page until someone tagged her in it on social media.

'I think I was the last to know,' she said.

'The support we've had has been overwhelming, not just the GoFundMe page but we could not have asked for better from all the nurses, they're really trying although we don't speak Italian. And I've received messages of support from so many people.'

University of East Anglia nursing student Miss Wilson found out she was pregnant in August - and the couple were thrilled.

The pair saved hard for the holiday, to Venice after a difficult year where Mr Challoner had to move from Norwich to Yorkshire to look after his father.

This meant they had only been able to see each other twice a month, as Miss Wilson still had a year left at university.

The couple are hoping to return home to Britain with Matilda as soon as possible.
Tyron S Stapleton, from Omaha, Nebraska, was charged with first-degree sexual assault for having sex with a 13-year-old girl and could face up to 20 years

A Nebraska man charged with sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl claimed that she 'had made a move' on him, according to police.

Tyron S Stapleton, from Omaha, Nebraska, received the first-degree charge and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

A Douglas County judge ordered that the 33-year-old man be held on 10 per cent of $24,000 bail.

During an interview at Project Harmony in Omaha, the now 15-year-old girl shared that Stapleton lived in her family's North Omaha home when he allegedly assaulted her.

She added that the man forced them to have sex, according to an affidavit filed in Douglas County Court as reported by the Omaha World-Herald.

'The victim stated that she told him to stop and pushed (him) away but Stapleton responded, "It's OK. It's OK,"' a detective said in a written statement.

Stapleton, 33, told police that there was 'more to the story' and that the girl had 'made a move' on him

'The victim stated that it hurt during the incident and (she) told Stapleton to stop again, but Stapleton said, "It's OK" and put his hand over her mouth.'

Stapleton shared with local authorities that he remembered living in the upstairs bedroom at the girl's home for two months, according to the affidavit.

He asserted that there was 'more to the story' when told of the assault.

'If I was to come tell you that somebody made a move on me, who's going to believe me?' he explained.

'The girl would follow me and follow me and follow me around.'
A Sinn Fein MP who posted a video of himself balancing a loaf of bread on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre has been suspended by the party.

Barry McElduff said the insensitive post was not intended as a reference to the republican murders of ten Protestant workmen on January 5, 1976 in County Armagh.

The Kingsmill brand is popular in Northern Ireland and shares its name with the village where one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles took place.

Mr McElduff said he apologised 'unreservedly' after he was summoned to meet senior party figures at their offices in west Belfast.

Barry McElduff (right) said the insensitive post (left) was not intended as a reference to the republican murders of ten Protestant workmen on January 5, 1976

Barry McElduff said he apologised 'unreservedly' after he was summoned to meet senior party figures at their offices in west Belfast.

Mr McElduff said in a statement: 'I apologise unreservedly for this.

'In recognising the serious consequences of my actions, I fully accept the party's decision to suspend me from all party activity for a period of three months.'

Party chairman Declan Kearney said the West Tyrone MP had fallen well short of the standards Sinn Fein expects of its members.

Before Monday's meeting, Mr Kearney became the first senior leadership figure to comment on the weekend furore.

'What has happened is absolutely inexcusable and indefensible and the party is taking this matter very seriously indeed,' he said.

He added that Sinn Fein wished to express 'deep and sincere regret'.

'What happened is absolutely irresponsible,' he told BBC Radio Ulster.

'Barry McElduff has already made an unreserved apology and that was the correct thing to do in the circumstances.

Mr McElduff said the insensitive post was not intended as a reference to the republican murders of ten Protestant workmen on January 5, 1976 in County Armagh

'The reality is huge offence has been caused and I and Sinn Fein strongly disapprove of what has happened.'

Mr Kearney said Sinn Fein accepted that the incident had caused 'maximum hurt' to the Kingsmill families.

'Sinn Fein expects the highest standards of not only our members but also our very senior elected representatives and what has happened here clearly falls well short of those standards,' he added.

Sinn Fein's former Stormont finance minister, Mairtin O Muilleoir, also apologised for retweeting the video.

Mr Kearney said Mr O Muilleoir had offered the party an explanation for the retweet.

The Police Service for Northern Ireland confirmed they are investigating the message.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams leaving the party's headquarters on the Falls Road in Belfast on Monday

Kingsmill victims: L-R top - Robert Chambers, John Bryans, Joseph Lemon and Joseph McWhirter. L-R bottom - Walter Chapman, John McConville, Kenneth Wharton and Reggie Chapman, who all died in the massacre

Superintendent Emma Bond said: 'Police have received a number of reports of a post on a social media platform, made by a local public representative. Enquiries are ongoing.'

The tragic incident saw 10 people killed when gunmen stopped a van carrying textile workers on their way home, asked them for their religion, lined them up by the side of the road and executed them when they were found to be Protestant.

Just one of the 11 victims who were shot survived the barbaric attack.

In the video, posted onto Twitter, McElduff, the MP for West Tyrone, is seen walking around the shop with the loaf on his head, asking where the store stocked the bread.

The timing of the video has sparked huge debate, coming on the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmill disaster.

Cold-blooded IRA attack that left just one survivor... who was shot 18 times The Kingsmill massacre took place January 5, 1976 near the village of Kingsmill in south County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Gunmen stopped a minibus carrying 12 textile workers, 11 of whom were Protestant and one of whom was Catholic. After the terrorists asked who on the bus was Catholic, the workers assumed that the gunmen were loyalists and tried to conceal the Catholic's identity. Brutal: The minibus carrying the textile factory workers is left peppered with bullet holes and blood stains the ground after the massacre, as detectives patrol the scene of the murders But after the Catholic was identified he was told to leave the bus and not to look back. The 11 Protestants were all shot. Just one survived, despite being shot 18 times. The South Armagh Republicans claimed responsibility and said the killings were in response to attacks on Catholic civilians. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had murdered six Catholics the previous night in the Reavey and O'Dowd killings. After the Kingsmill massacre, Protestant leader Ian Paisley accused Eugene Reavey of organising the murders in retaliation. Devastation: A window on the workers' minibus is left smashed by a bullet after the terrorists lined up their victims and executed them outside their vehicle The Kingsmill massacre was the deadliest mass shooting of The Troubles in the 1970s. In 2007 it emerged that the UVF members behind the Reavey and O'Down killings had planned to murder at least 30 Catholic school pupils in retaliation for the Kingsmill attack. A 2011 report found the attack was carried out by Provisional IRA, despite the group being on ceasefire. It is believed they acted without sanction of the IRA Army Council. Advertisement

Yesterday, McElduff has since taken the video down and apologised.

He tweeted: 'Have deleted video post. Had not realised or imagined for a second any possible link between product brand name and Kingsmill Anniversary.

'Further, I apologise for any hurt or offence caused. Never my intention to offend anyone who has suffered grievously.'

DUP Assembly Member William Irwin has demanded an answer as to why the 'bizarre' video was posted online in the first place.

Irwin said: 'Was it tomfoolery or a blatant insult to innocent victims?

'The timing and brand of bread raises many questions about the motivation behind this video.

'Given Sinn Fein's repeated insensitivity to victims and glorification of terrorists, PIRA victims throughout the United Kingdom have interpreted this video as a calculated and deliberate insult.'

DUP leader also echoed the sentiment, tweeting: 'Kingsmill victims were shot by the IRA after being asked their religion.Shame on any elected rep who posted that inhuman video. I feel sorry for IRA victims & West Tyrone who have McElduff as their MP.All murder was wrong. Glorifying any murderer is sickening. Mocking is depraved.'

Jim Allister, the TUV leader, said it was beyond the 'bounds of credibility well beyond breaking point' to say that the video was not posted as a delibrate reference to the Kingsmill attack.

Allister said: 'Sinn Fein's utter contempt for victims is clearly on display here,' he said. 'Any talk of equality or human rights from that party is once again exposed as so much cant and hypocrisy.'

David Taylor, an Ulster Unionist councillor, said McElduff was unfit to serve as an elected representative.

He said: 'Barry McElduff really is beyond contempt and should be truly ashamed of himself for his actions.'

And Alliance Party leader Naomi Long tweeted: 'I see you have deleted your video. Will you also explain what on earth you were thinking of, posting this on the anniversary of the Kingsmills Massacre?

'Have you any apology to make to those victims & survivors deeply hurt by your antics whether deliberate or not?'
A top Democratic donor is thinking about cutting off her donations to the senators who pushed Sen. Al Franken out after he was accused of non-consensual touching.

'In my gut they moved too fast,' longtime Democratic donor Susie Tompkins Buell told the New York Times in a text message. 'For me this is dangerous and wrong. I'm a big believer in helping more women into the political system but this has given me an opportunity to rethink of how I can best help my party.'

Buell said that Franken, who officially left the upper chamber on January 2, 'was never given his chance to tell his side of the story.'

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Donor Susie Tompkins Buell (right), photographed back in 2004 with Hillary Clinton (left), says she might cut off donations to the senators who backed Sen. Al Franken's ouster, telling the New York Times she thought the move was premature

Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, served his last day on Capitol Hill on January 2 after announcing his resignation in December on the heels of multiple accusations that he acted inappropriately with women

Franken was accused of inappropriate sexual behavior, including groping and kissing women without their consent.

As allegations piled up, he said he wanted the Senate Ethics committee to take up the matter.

His Democratic colleagues, however, wanted him out.

The charge was led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York with possible 2020 presidential ambitions.

'As for Gillibrand, unfortunately, I believe she miscalculated and she shot herself in the foot,' Buell told the Times. 'I have supported her for many hears. Will I going forward? To be determined.'

Franken's ouster makes the math more difficult for Democrats later this year, as the party already had to defend 23 Senate seats.

Now they have to guard 24.

The two independents who caucus with the Democrats, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, are also up for re-election.

BUYERS REMORSE: Democratic donor Susie Tompkins Buell (left), again photographed with Hillary Clinton (right), but in March 2017, said she thought it was a mistake for Democrats to ditch Sen. Al Franken before he was able to tell his side of the story

Susie Tompkins Buell told the Times that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's (pictured) push to toss Sen. Al Franken out of the Senate over the accusations was a miscalculation

Donor Susie Tompkins Buell (right) is pictured during a fundraising luncheon for Hillary Clinton (left) in 2007. Buell told the New York Times that the Al Franken episode is making her rethink how she gives money to the Democratic Party

Minnesota's Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton chose his lieutenant governor, Tina Smith, to fill Franken's seat until a November special election.

Smith was sworn into the body on Wednesday, alongside Doug Jones, the Democrats' surprise winner in the Alabama Senate race.

She's planning to run in the special election to keep the seat, hoping to fill it for the remainder of Franken's term, which was to be over in 2021.

Republicans are already licking their chops at the opportunities presenting themselves in Minnesota thanks to Franken being pushed out, as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another Democrat, is up for re-election as well.

'Tina Smith's abysmal name ID makes her one of the worst appointments in history if Democrats intent to keep this sea,' said Michael McAdams, the spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a statement to reporters on Monday.

'Not only will Smith have to introduce herself to Minnesota voters for the first time, but she will have to do so while defending a voting record that mirrors Elizabeth Warren's,' McAdams added.

Before Republicans get too giddy, they must find a candidate first.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman, who ran for re-election against Franken in 2008 and was routed by 312 votes, has said that he's out.

The state's former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, known as 'T-Paw' to supporters, has also said he's politically retired, according to the Pioneer Press.

The only Republican with national name ID who has expressed interest in the Franken seat is former Rep. Michele Bachmann, known for her associations with the Tea Party movement, her colorful husband Marcus and her short-lived 2012 presidential campaign.

Speaking to televangelist Jim Bakker, Bachmann said she's waiting to hear from God and then she'll decide whether to enter the race.

She said that in the 2012 race she 'fulfilled the calling God gave me,' by getting Republicans across the board to support a full Obamacare repeal.

'So the question is, am I being called to do this now?' she said of the upcoming Senate race.
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya believes she had a brief encounter with Ivanka Trump following her infamous meeting with three top Donald Trump advisors in June 2016.

The Kremlin-linked lawyer had met with Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner, and then campaign chair Paul Manafort under the offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton, though Veselnitskaya says she was there to lobby on a Russia sanctions issue.

When it was over, she told NBC she exchanged pleasantries with a blonde haired woman she believes was Ivanka Trump.

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE: Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya believes she chatted with Ivanka Trump following her infamous meeting at Trump Tower

She wasn't sure because she didn't get formally introduced, though a personal familiar with the meeting told the NBC the woman was, indeed, the president's daughter Ivanka, who was a fixture on the campaign and a Trump Organization official.

The claim that yet another Trump family member met with a Russian during the outreach campaign comes despite the White House insistence that Donald Trump did not meet with the Russians.

Former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, who apologized and tried to walk back some of his comments over the weekend, is quoted in the new bombshell book 'Fire and Fury' expressing certainty that Donald Trump did meet the Russians.

'The chance that Don. Jr did not walk these Jumos up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero,' he said.

Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she spoke to a blonde woman there but was not formally introduced

Ivanka Trump, daughter of President elect of the United States, Donald Trump is seen inside the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, U.S., on Friday, November 18, 2016

Bannon also labeled the meeting itself 'treasonous,' though he modified the comment over the weekend.

'Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad ..., and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,' Bannon said in the book.

He said over the weekend that he was referring only to Manafort, a seasoned operative who did millions of work for a pro-Moscow Ukrainian political party, and not the president's eldest son.

There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt,' Bannon said. 'I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency.'

Donald Trump Jr. attended the meeting, but Steve Bannon says he wasn't referring to the president's son when he called it 'treasonous'

Ivanka Trump, daughter of developer Donald Trump, arrives to hear her father announce that he will run for president of the United States, in the lobby of Trump Tower, New York, Tuesday, June 16, 2015

MUZAK TO HIS EARS: Investigators for Special counsel Robert Mueller are reportedly interested in the Ivanka Trump encounter with Russians

Bannon said Sunday: 'My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate,' Bannon said. 'He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.'

He also bent over backwards to laud the president.

Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin arrives at the Capitol for a closed door meeting with the House Intelligence Committee November 13, 2017 in Washington, DC. Akhmetshin was reported as one of the people participated in the June 2016 meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselniskaya and Donald Trump Jr., and other Russian Trump campaign officials

'There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt,' Bannon said in a statement. 'I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency.'

The LA Times reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is calling back one meeting participant for more questions and is interested in the Ivanka encounter, which also involved Rinat Akhmetshin, a D.C.-based lobbyist with Russian intelligence connections.

'Investigators also are exploring the involvement of the presidents daughter, Ivanka Trump' - who didn't attend the meeting ' 'but briefly spoke with two of the participants,' the paper reported.
Former soldier Michael Hampshire was killed in the blast on May 17, 2015

An experienced former British soldier died after a catastrophic suicide blast in Kabul by an 'opportunistic bomber', an inquest has heard.

Michael Hampshire, 29, was working as a security contractor for HART International, a risk management company operating in the Afghanistan capital when the convoy he was travelling in was targeted.

The B6 land cruiser was in a two car convoy which was almost destroyed after a Taliban suicide bomber detonated a car filled with explosives.

Three people died in the explosion and 18 people were also injured in the attack which happened at 9.05am on May 17, 2015.

Mr Hampshire, from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, was engaged to wed his fiancee Claire Taylor at the time of his death.

Bradford Coroner's court heard the armoured vehicle carrying Mr Hampshire was blown some 45 metres down the road and he was trapped beneath it after being thrown out the window.

The force of the blast was so strong it sucked the window of the armoured car from the vehicle, the inquest heard.

Detective Chief Inspector Iain McLindon of Scotland Yard said the bomb blast was 'not a targeted attack' but 'an attack on any Western influence operating in Afghanistan'.

Mr Hampshire, from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, was engaged to wed his fiancee Claire Taylor at the time of his death

Speaking at the inquest today DCI McLindon told the court: 'Michael was a very experienced and good soldier and I suspect that is why HART [International] chose him to be of service to them.

'He worked in Kabul and Somalia and from the statement as a leader of a close security unit in Kabul he was the cream of the crop.'

Mr Hampshire - who had previously been a soldier between 2002 and 2013 - was tasked with picking up a high-profile target from the Baron Hotel in a mission to transport them to the Ministry of Interior.

The subject entered the vehicle at around 8.50am where they set off on their journey followed by German close security and an interpreter behind them in a different vehicle.

DCI McLindon said the investigation had been difficult following the murder of another security operative stationed in Kabul investigating the bombing.

The operative, named Simon Chase at the inquest, had been shot in a restaurant while investigating the perpetrators behind the bombing.

'This made things harder because Northern Island Coroner's Courts don't explore deaths outside their remit,' DCI McLindon added.

Pathologist expert Dr Kirsten Hope undertook the examination of Mr Hampshire's body on behalf of the Home Office.

The B6 land cruiser was in a two car convoy which was almost destroyed after a Taliban suicide bomber detonated a car filled with explosives

Dr Hope said the former soldier would have died 'within seconds and not minutes' and approximated 'his death was rapid'.

A police boss overseeing operations in Kabul at the time has labelled the incident an 'opportunistic attack'.

Alistair Black said he was not aware of any imminent attacks nor had any information to prevent the blast.

Mr Black, deputy senior police officer in Kabul, stated 'Route Abby' or 'Route A' was given to Mr Hampshire and his team because other routes in and out of the city had been blacklisted as 'too dangerous'.

It had been decided on the morning of the incident that the route was safe enough to use prior to the convoy beginning its journey to the Ministry of Interior.

It had been chosen as the designated route following intelligence sought from other international agencies and ground surveillance teams.

Mr Hampshire's father Martin Hampshire, who appears unrepresented at the inquest, asked Mr Black: 'So what could have been done for the incident to be avoided?'

Mr Black responded: 'What happened was a tragic incident. It was an opportunistic attack on an international target.'

Adding: 'It was our job to protect people - it was not that we were there to target them.'

The court heard in his role as a Hart Close Protection Officer, Mr Hampshire would transport government officials, army command and high profile figures.

The inquest, which is due to last eight days, continues.
A couple who met on a lonely hearts website have been found guilty of plotting carnage over the Christmas holidays with an Isis-inspired 'Mother of Satan' bomb or ricin attack.

Sudanese asylum seeker Munir Mohammed volunteered for a 'lone wolf' UK mission as he chatted on Facebook with a man he believed was an Islamic State commander.

He enlisted the help of pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan, drawing on her knowledge of chemicals needed to make a bomb after seeking her out on SingleMuslim.com.

At the time of his arrest last December, Mohammed had two of the three components for TATP explosives as well as manuals on how to make explosives, mobile phone detonators, and deadly ricin poison.

In the days before his arrest, Mohammed was captured on in-store CCTV buying 'acetone free' nail polish from Asda, in the mistaken belief it was a chemical component of TATP.

Sudanese asylum seeker Munir Mohammed (left) enlisted the help of pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan (right), drawing on her knowledge of chemicals needed to make a bomb

Mohammed, 36, of Derby, and El-Hassan, 33, of Brondesbury, North West London, denied preparing terrorist acts between November 2015 and December 2016.

But following an Old Bailey trial, a jury found the pair guilty of the plot.

Judge Michael Topolski QC remanded the pair in custody and warned them they faced jail when they are sentenced on February 22.

Mohammed arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and claimed asylum in February 2014, the court heard.

After being left hanging for more than two years, he appealed to Derby MP Margaret Beckett for help with his immigration problems.

The long-serving Labour MP was informed by authorities that his case was 'not straightforward' and had been referred to a 'specialist unit for consideration'.

The bedroom of Mohammed, who is from Derby, is pictured from one angle. He was described as an 'extremely dangerous terrorist' by police

Would-be bomber Mohammed is seen on CCTV on a trip to his local Asda store where he bought the wrong type of nail varnish remover to make explosives

Meanwhile, Mohammed was working at a Kerry Foods in Derby making sauces for supermarket ready meals and wooing a potential British bride he met online.

The prosecution claimed he was drawn to University College London graduate El-Hassan because she referred to having a Masters degree in pharmacy in her dating profile.

She wrote that she was 'looking for a simple, very simple, honest and straightforward man who fears Allah' who she could 'vibe with on a spiritual and intellectual level'.

Jurors were told the pair had a 'rapidly formed emotional attachment and a shared ideology' and by the spring of 2016 were in regular contact on WhatsApp and had met more than once in a London park near El-Hassan's home.

As well as arguments, jokes and every-day concerns, they also shared extremist views and videos.

A Counter Terrorism Policing North East picture of Hydrogen peroxide found in Mohammed's home address

Disposable masks found at the home of El Hassan, She told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat

Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC said Mohammed 'resolved upon a lone wolf attack' and El-Hassan was well aware of his plan.

In August last year, Mohammed was put in touch via Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander, known as Abubakr Kurdi.

He pledged allegiance to Kurdi and offered to participate in 'a new job in the UK', said to mean an act of terrorism, jurors heard.

In September last year, Mohammed complained he had not received his instructions, saying in coded language: 'If possible send how we make dough (explosives) for Syrian bread (a bomb) and other types of food.'

Mother-of-two El-Hassan advised fellow divorcee Mohammed on what chemicals to buy for a bomb, jurors were told.

In November last year, Mohammed got hold of a video containing information on how to manufacture ricin, the court heard.

Advent Notebook found in the home of would-be bomber 36-year-old Mohammed, from Derby

In the days before his arrest, Mohammed looked at pressure cookers at Ace Discounts, which the prosecution said could be used to contain the explosives.

When police raided his home on December 12 last year, they found hydrogen peroxide in a wardrobe and hydrochloric acid in the freezer.

Mohammed denied the chemicals were for a bomb, claiming the hydrochloric acid was to clean the alloys on his car and the peroxide was to treat a burn.

He told jurors he sent El-Hassan extremist videos 'mainly for the news' and claimed his intention was 'to marry her'.

However, the court also heard he had an arranged marriage in Sudan with a woman he had never met called Fatima who he was hoping to bring to England on a student visa.

Hydrogen peroxide found in Mohammed's home address (left), and One Shot Drain Cleaner found at the home of El Hassan (right)

El-Hassan, who came to Britain from Sudan at the age of three, told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat.

Asked if she had feelings for Mohammed, she said: 'It was mixed feelings at the time. Yes, there was emotional attachment.

'There were feelings developing and we were getting to know each other. I was grateful for things he helped me with. And he was grateful for things I helped him with. I liked the attention he was giving me.'

Following the verdicts, Judge Topolski said: 'Munir Mohammed, you have been convicted of planning a potentially devastating terrorist attack by creating an explosive device and deploying it somewhere in the UK targeting those you regarded as enemies of the Islamic State.

'Rowaida El-Hassan, you share the extremist mindset with Munir Mohammed and you were ideologically motivated to provide him with support, motivation and assistance.

'You knew he was engaging and planning an attack. You knew he was planning an explosion to kill and maim innocent people in the cause of Islamic State.'

Mohammed was unanimously convicted and his co-accused by a majority of 10 to one jurors.

It's difficult to know whether El-Hassan was an extremist before meeting Mohammed, say police

Rowaida El-Hassan (pictured) and Mohammed were 'looking for a relationship but... in each other found a shared ideology'

It is 'difficult to say' whether Rowaida El-Hassan was an extremist before she met Munir Mohammed on a dating site or whether she was radicalised through their romance, anti-terror police have said.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Greenwood, who led the investigation into the pair, said he believes they met because they were genuinely looking for a relationship but El-Hassan could have been in no doubt about Mohammed's extreme ideology.

He said: 'I guess from her perspective, she was a single mother and a Muslim looking for a partner.

'So I guess in that sense it's a normal place to look for a relationship.

'I think both El-Hassan and Munir were looking for a relationship but, on that website, in each other found a shared ideology and together became even more dangerous. Because that little bit of knowledge he lacked around chemicals, she had, being a very bright and qualified pharmacist.

The kitchen in the home of El-Hassan, who lived in Brondesbury, North West London, is pictured

'So she was able to give practical advice on where to source the specific chemicals he needed in order to manufacture the explosive TATP.'

Asked whether El-Hassan was radicalised by Mohammed, Mr Greenwood said: 'It's difficult to say, again, because she hadn't previously come to our attention.

'All that I can say is that Munir shared with her some really graphic and brutal execution videos, lots of other ideological material, including children executing Isis prisoners and children involved in military training in the name of the Islamic State.

'And she appeared to be very receptive to that and they seemed to encourage each other with their shared mindsets. She could have been in no doubt as to Munir's mindset because he made it plain to her.'

The lounge at El-Hassan's home is pictured. Asked whether El-Hassan was radicalised by Mohammed, anti-terror police said: 'It's difficult to say'

And asked whether they had a genuine romance, the detective said: 'They definitely did have a romantic relationship or a relationship of sorts. So, to what degree or to what strength of feeling, I don't know.

'But it's certainly possible and couldn't be ruled out they had a relationship as part of what they were both involved with together.

'But that doesn't take away from the fact that, irrespective of whether she was influenced by him, she knew fully his mindset and contributed to a set of circumstances that, had we not intervened, could have resulted in significant loss of life in the UK in the lead-up to Christmas 2016.'

Munir Mohammed is an 'extremely dangerous terrorist', warns police chief

A police chief said officers do not believe Munir Mohammed had selected a definite target but was trying to get orders from ISIS

Munir Mohammed is an 'extremely dangerous terrorist' who was preparing a pre-Christmas attack which would 'almost certainly' have resulted in death and injury, according to anti-terror police.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Greenwood, who led the investigation, said officers do not believe Mohammed had selected a definite target but was trying to get orders from Islamic State.

Mr Greenwood said: 'Mohammed is an extremely dangerous terrorist.

'Had he not been arrested when he was - which was on December 12, 2016, at a time when he'd already started to acquire chemicals, already started to look at pressure cookers, on the delivery mechanism for an attack and was already in conversation with Islamic States operatives - I think he was very close to mounting some sort of attack.

'And that could well have occurred before Christmas 2016 and I think that attack would have involved the loss of life and multiple injuries had Mohammed had his way.'

Mr Greenwood said: 'We're fairly confident that, at the time of arrest, he was well-on with a plan to conduct a terrorist attack in the UK that would almost certainly have resulted in the loss of life and that would probably have been an explosive attack.'

Mohammed, whose bedroom is pictured abopve, was preparing a pre-Christmas attack which would 'almost certainly' have resulted in death and injury, according to anti-terror police

He said: 'I don't think that he had a target at the time of arrest. He'd started to acquire the chemicals and was watching the instructional videos to manufacture TATP.

'So he was acquiring the knowledge and operational capability to conduct an attack but at the same time he was trying to get direct tasking from the Islamic State, he was reaching out on the internet.'

Mr Greenwood said Mohammed was in contact with a key Islamic State commander looking for 'tasking'.

He said: 'I think had that tasking not been forthcoming he would probably have picked a target himself. But he was really keen to act in the name of the Islamic State to be tasked by them and conducting an attack in their name.'

He said: 'This investigation very much typifies the modern threat that we face - a very radical Islamic extremist who's looking on the internet to feed that extremism.

'And he found multiple execution videos, rhetoric of the Islamic State that fed that extremism. That moved on to him seeking instructional videos of how to carry out an attack and then led on, once again, from actually reaching out to speak to members of the Islamic State to act in their name.'
New Yorkers have reported seeing 85 UFOs over the city in two years including orange orbs, a cigar-shaped craft and fireballs of lights, researchers have revealed.

There have been a total of 27 sightings above the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan since 2016, according to the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center.

Brookyln saw 24 over the same period while in Queens, there were 20 reports of unidentified objects including a 'group of about seven UFOs, with a leader to the side, and a cluster to its north,' in June.

New Yorkers have reported seeing 85 UFOs over the city in two years including orange orbs, a cigar-shaped craft and fireballs of lights, researchers have revealed

In Queens, there were 20 reports of unidentified objects including a 'group of about seven UFOs, with a leader to the side, and a cluster to its north,' in June, according to the New York Post.

This compared to just eight strange such incidents in The Bronx and just six in Staten Island.

The Post reports that one report from Manhattan told of an object 'rotating like a drill as it was also moving off axis and in a line towards the east'.

While this was happening, the witness said, you could see 'four lights that would only be on one side and seen' after it fully rotated. The unidentified witness, who saw the object out of a gym window, said it was hundreds of feet long and included 'four other smaller craft appeared that were to me saucer or spherical that blipped in and out.'

Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said of the findings: 'It only takes one or two regular witnesses, UFO investigators, groups or promoters to highlight UFO activity in one particular area.

'Another area might have just as many UFO sightings, but if there are no active ufologists there and/or a local media that ignores such stories, then they will never get any attention.

There have been a total of 27 sightings above the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan since 2016, according to the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center

'Internet reporting sites like the National UFO Reporting Centre make it easy to report sightings, but this is just raw data that needs to be processed and investigated to make any useful basis for analysis.

'When looking at this data you need to obtain detailed reports from witnesses who are reliable and credible.

'Even then expert witnesses, like pilots, can be mistaken and it is notoriously difficult to separate knowns (e.g. misidentified stars, aircraft, rockets etc) from unknowns.

'Large data bases tend to be riddled with a wide variety of errors due to these problems and only give an accurate guide to levels of UFO reporting rather than UFO activity.'

In February last year, it was revealed that more people were reporting sightings of spaceships and UFOs than ever before.

Exactly 104,947 UFO sightings had been reported since the first sign of aliens was spotted in 1905, according to data from the Center's data.

And since the 1990s, the number of other-worldly sightings had shot up from 10,000 to 45,000 a year.

The National UFO Reporting Centre, which is based in Washington, is a site dedicated to keeping track of UFO sightings from across the world.

Data from the site released last year showed that people living in the UK, the US and Australia were most likely to report seeing an alien spaceship, while countries such as Russia, China and Greenland rarely catch a glimpse of extraterrestrial activity.
Eleven more members of former Pi Delta Psi frat at Baruch College, New York, were charged over the death of pledge Chun 'Michael' Deng, 19

Four New York City men were given jail sentences Monday in the death of a 19-year-old fraternity pledge during a 2013 hazing ritual in Pennsylvania, with a judge saying she believes they succumbed to 'brainwashing' and 'indoctrination' that is rampant at fraternities around the nation.

Baruch College freshman Chun 'Michael' Deng was blindfolded, forced to wear a heavy backpack and then repeatedly tackled as part of the fraternity's Crossing Over initiation ceremony.

He was knocked unconscious and later died at a hospital.

Police charged 37 people with crimes ranging from aggravated assault to hazing to third-degree murder.

'Not one person out of 37 picked up a telephone and called an ambulance. I cannot wrap my head around it,' Monroe County President Judge Margherita Patti-Worthington said. 'So there's something greater going on here, and I think it's probably really prevalent. We see across the country these issues in fraternities.'

The four defendants sentenced Monday, Kenny Kwan, Charles Lai, Raymond Lam and Sheldon Wong, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, hindering apprehension and other charges.

Kwan got 12 to 24 months in county jail. Lam and Wong were sentenced to 10 to 24 months each. Lai, who spent 342 days in jail after he was unable to make bail, was sentenced to time served.

Kenny Kwan (center) pictured May 15, 2017, is the last of the four men who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 2013 death of Chun 'Michael' Deng. He got the longest sentence - 12 to 24 months in county jail

Pictured here is Raymond Lam in this May 15, 2017, file photo leaving the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg who is one of four men who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 2013 death of Chun 'Michael' Deng

In this May 15, 2017, file photo, Sheldon Wong, right, leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa. Wong was sentenced to 10 to 24 months

All four defendants apologized, a few of them tearfully.

Lam was the most emotional, saying he has been consumed by guilt. He said he has attempted to kill himself.

'The guilt will never go away, and I think about Mr. Deng every day,' he said.

In a statement to the court, Deng's mother wrote about the anguish of losing her only son and demanded a sentence that would send a message about hazing.

'This punishment should forever remind them of the pain and grief we will carry for the rest of our lives as the result of their misconduct,' Deng wrote.

'It is also our hope that the punishment may also save lives by sending a clear message to other fraternities and their members that the outrageous tradition of hazing will no longer be tolerated and must be ended once and for all.'

Charles Lai pictured leaving the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg on May 15, 2017 who is another one of the four men who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Lai, who spent 342 days in jail after he was unable to make bail, was sentenced to time served

Deng was taking part in a hazing ritual at this house in Pennsylvania when he was knocked unconscious. Frat brothers waited an hour before taking him to the emergency room, by which time he was braindead

Earlier Monday, the Pi Delta Psi fraternity was banned from Pennsylvania for 10 years and was ordered to pay a fine of more than $110,000 for its role in Deng's death.

The judge and a prosecutor slammed Pi Delta Psi for calling itself a victim of rogue fraternity members, saying the fraternity tolerated and even encouraged hazing for years.

'It's the epitome of a lack of acceptance of responsibility. It's their rituals and functions that led us here today,' Monroe County Assistant District Attorney Kim Metzger said in court.

Pi Delta Psi has 25 chapters in 11 states, including one at Penn State University that will now have to be disbanded.

In a written statement, Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American cultural fraternity founded in 1994, said its now-disbanded Baruch College chapter brought 'shame and dishonor' to the national fraternity.

Pi Delta Psi's attorney, Wes Niemoczynski, argued that Pi Delta Psi had developed a 'no excuses' hazing policy before Deng's death but said the policy worked on the 'honor system' and proved to be inadequate.

The fraternity's initiation rituals 'involved some physicality, but they certainly did not involve the level of physicality, the level of inhumanity and the depravity of the individuals who are also coming before the court,' he said.

The defendants sentenced Monday faced the most serious charges. Dozens of other defendants have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to probation.
It was supposed to be a night about myriad women in black dresses making a powerful collective statement about sexual harassment.

Instead, it turned into a night about one powerful black woman making what could turn out to be an historic statement of political intent.

Make no mistake, Oprah Winfreys astonishing speech at last nights Golden Globes was the moment she told the world: Im ready to be President of the United States.

Oprahs astonishing speech at last nights Golden Globes was the moment she told the world: Im ready to be President of the United States- and her longtime partner Stedman confirmed it

Her partner Stedman Graham appeared to confirm this by telling the Los Angeles Times: Its up to the people. She would absolutely do it.

And Meryl Streep said an Oprah presidential run was now inevitable: She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president. I dont think she had any intention (of declaring). But now she doesnt have a choice.

Until Oprah got up to receive her Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, the Globes had meandered along a predictable virtue-signalling path with attendees competing to be the most sincere #MeToo star in the room and host Seth Myers whacking all the right villains, from Weinstein to Spacey.

But within a few minutes, the whole mood changed to one of euphoria and excitement as she spoke with such blazing eloquence and passion that the audience repeatedly jumped to its feet to roar approval.

She invoked Sidney Poitier, who inspired her as a kid when he became the first African-American to win the Oscar for Best Actor.

She invoked Recy Taylor, a young rape victim in Alabama from 1944, whose case was taken up by civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, and who died just ten days ago.

She invoked all the women behind #MeToo but she also invoked every man who chooses to listen.

Finally, she invoked all the little girls watching at home as she had once watched Poitier.

A new day is on the horizon! Oprah shouted to them, and when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say Me Too again.

It was a speech that made the heart pound and the tear ducts sting.

It was also a speech that sounded distinctlypresidential.

Notably, it was inclusive. Oprah was careful, unlike some in the #MeToo campaign, not to sound like she hated all men. She even praised the much-maligned fake news media: I want to say that I value the press more than ever before, she said, speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.

Theres one guaranteed way to earn yourself instant positive headlines from a press that so obviously loathes the current President.

My own mind flashed back to seven years ago this very week to when I looked Oprah in the eye and told her: A lot of people say if you ran for president, youd win.

We were in a Beverly Hills hotel room doing a lengthy interview for CNN. It was my first ever show for the network.

You know, she replied, its one of those things that, if youre living in the ego of yourself, its flattering to hear that. But the thing I really admire about myself is I know where my lane is, and I know how to stay in my lane.

Wheres your lane? I pressed.

My lane is evolving the consciousness of people everywhere, getting people to see the best of themselves and, therefore, the best in other people.

Who knows the American people better than you? I asked.

Listen, she responded, I am not in any position or qualified to run a country, a city, a town hall meeting.

I changed tack.

Let me ask you a different way. You are a very successful businesswoman?

Yes.

And its a billion-dollar-plus business; as an empire, its very impressive and its big.

OK.

And its successful. How would you get America back on its feet again?

Oprah gave me a slightly scolding look.

I dont know the answer to that. Thats out of my lane. Youve now driven off the road and out of my lane!

I want you in that lane!

But you cant put me in that lane!

Why not? Youd be great in that lane.

Oprahs eyes flashed with sudden intensity. No. What I can talk about is compassion for anybody who is struggling, who has lost their job, who doesnt know how theyre going to pay this months bills. I have great empathy for that and understand what it means.

I thought then that Oprah would make a far better first female president than Hillary Clinton.

Seven years ago I interviewed Oprah for CNN and asked her if she'd run, and I thought then she'd make a better president Hillary Clinton

Shes an entirely self-made billionaire who fought her way out of abject poverty and abuse to become the biggest star in America.

Shes got a massively generous heart, giving away a rumoured $500 million to charity.

Shes whip-smart, well read and connected, very warm and funny, knows how to run things, and genuinely cares about people.

Shes also a natural-born winner.

But dont take my word for it, ask Donald Trump.

Trump - here in 1988 - has repeatedly said Oprah would make a great VP - in 1999 to CNN, and in 2015 he repeated it to ABC. I like Oprah. Shes great, shes talented, shes a good person

In 1999, Trump appeared on CNN to talk about a possible presidential run.

Do you have a vice presidential candidate in mind? he was asked.

Oprah, Trump replied immediately. I love Oprah, she would always be my first choice. Shes a great woman, somebody very special. Shes popular, shes brilliant, an exceptional woman. If shed do it, shed be fantastic.

When Trump finally did announce a formal campaign, in June 2015, he hadnt changed his mind about a potential VP, telling ABCs George Stephanopoulos: I like Oprah. Shes great, shes talented, shes a good person.

Ironically, it was Trump himself who almost certainly persuaded Oprah to consider a run, because all the reasons she cited for NOT running were blown apart by his extraordinary victory.

In March last year, Oprah was interviewed by Bloomberg TVs David Rubenstein and asked again if she would be a candidate, given, he said, its clear you dont need government experience to be elected President of the United States.

As the audience whooped, Oprah replied: I thought, Oh gee, I dont have the experience, I dont know enough. And now Im thinking, Oh.

Well last night, that 'Oh' became a 'Lets go, O'.

For the past week, Washington has been agog with Michael Wolffs spectacularly juicy Trump book, Fire and Fury.

Washington has been agog with Michael Wolffs spectacularly juicy Trump book, Fire and Fury for the past week- but I doubt it will end Trump's presidency

The author, who pulled off one of the journalistic coups of all time by implanting himself into the White House for months on end (memo to the administration: if you let a wolf into your house, its probably going to eat everyone..), proclaimed it would mark the end of this presidency.

I very much doubt that.

Trumps base wont give a damn about it, and as for the President himself, he managed, with one tweet, to get everyone talking about the words Trump and stable genius for days on end  which in itself is little short of genius.

What happened last night should worry the President a lot more than Wolffs riotously readable book.

If Oprah does run in 2020, then Trump will face someone who is almost as rich as him, as big a star as him and massively more popular than him.

Hell also face an opponent with a crossover appeal to all sections of American society, a ferocious will to win to match his own, and more than enough self-confidence to handle his inevitable taunts and tweet onslaughts.

In another part of our interview, Oprah hinted at a higher calling.

I have always believed the "Oprah Winfrey Show" was really the foundation for the beginning of what was to come for my supreme moment of destiny, she said. I am very clear that my life and my purpose is bigger than myself. This isn't all about me, you know, having houses and shoes. It's about, how can I be used for something greater than myself? And that is why I'm hereNegro me, former colored girl in Mississippi.

The interview aired on January 17, 2011, which was Martin Luther King Day.

She grew emotional when she spoke about the great civil rights icon.

I know that I would not be here, this life that I live, the dream that I live in, that he predicted for our people, had he not been who he was. I stand in the shoes and on the shoulders of those who have come before me. Im very much aware of that, and Im very connected to it.

Im fairly certain Dr King is looking down on America right now and urging Oprah to rise to her supreme moment of destiny.

Its time to switch lanes, Ms Winfrey.

Run.
Craig Branstetter, from Chowchilla, California, was arrested in January 2017 and charged with having unlawful sex with and sending harmful materials to one of his students

A former high school math teacher will serve five years' probation and possible jail time after he was found guilty of sex with a 16-year-old student and texting her inappropriate photos.

Craig Branstetter, from Chowchilla, California, was arrested in January 2017 and charged with having unlawful sex with and sending harmful materials to one of his students at Dos Palos High School, according to ABC 30.

The 44-year-old initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea to 'no contest in November, at which time he was immediately sentenced to probation and possible prison time.

The victim, who has not been named due to her age, told police that Branstetter was her math teacher and that they talked to each other over various social media accounts, according to ABC.

The 44-year-old initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea to 'no contest in November, at which time he was immediately sentenced to probation and possible prison time

The victim was a student in Branstetter's class at Dos Palos High School, pictured

She said that for several months she would send him photos of her stomach after exercising, and he would respond with lewd and sexual pictures.

The victim also says she and Branstetter had sex three times in his car.

'We feel like this is a fair disposition for the case,' Merced County Deputy DA Harold Nutt told ABC.

And Branstetter's attorney Jeff Hammerschmidt says his client didn't 'get off easy' when he was sentenced to just probation.

'The reality is for a felony probation, a person can do a year in jail,' Hammerschmidt explained.

By pleading no contest and accepting a plea deal, four charges of having sex, molesting and sending harmful matter to a minor were also dropped, according to the Los Banos Enterprise.

The victim, who has not been named, said that she had sex with the teacher three times in his car, and that they exchanged dirty photos over various social media accounts

'There's numerous restrictions on the person's freedom, just because someone gets probation does not mean they got off easy.'

He said the former teacher was evaluated to be sure he wasn't a threat to society, and as a part of accepting the plea deal won't have to register as a sex offender.

Part of the evaluation was by a psychiatrist, who determined he was not a pedophile, according to Merced County Deputy District Attorney Travis Colby.

'His position of public trust does factor in and was considered,' Colby explained.

'This case was pretty straightforward, a teacher who had sexual intercourse with one of the students.'

Branstetter, who is married and a father of two, will turn himself into authorities in February, and has no plans to return to teaching, according to his lawyer.

He might have to serve up to a year in jail in addition to his five years of probation, but that has yet to be decided by Merced County Sheriff's authorities.
These incredible pictures show a three-story house left encased in ice after firefighters battled to put out a five-alarm fire in freezing conditions.

Three families 'lost everything' after a massive blaze destroyed their homes at 7 Allston Street in the Boston suburb of Dorchester.

The Boston Fire Department said initial damage estimate for the property  and the one next door at 5 Allston Street  was $1.5million.

A three-story house was left encased in ice after firefighters battled to put out a five-alarm fire in freezing conditions

Three families 'lost everything' after a massive blaze destroyed their homes at 7 Allston Street in the Boston suburb of Dorchester

'The 14 residents of #7 will stay with family and friends,' the department tweeted on Sunday working through the night to extinguish the fire.

'They have lost everything.'

Around 100 firefighters worked through icy and bitterly cold conditions on Saturday night  when temperatures plummeted as low as -4F  as the blaze tore through the wood-framed house.

As they battled the blaze, their jackets and hoses froze solid.

Around 100 firefighters worked through icy and bitterly cold conditions on Saturday night

Firefighters were left covered in ice and with their jackets frozen solid as they battled the fire

The Boston Fire Department said initial damage estimate for the property  and the one next door at 5 Allston Street  was $1.5million

One firefighter was treated at the scene just before 3am before being transported to hospital

One firefighter was treated at the scene just before 3am on Sunday before being transported to hospital.

The fire department said no other injuries were reported.

Joe Finn, the Chief of the Boston Fire Department, took to Twitter to thank all firefighters and command staff for their 'outstanding effort in less than ideal conditions.'

He added: 'Proud to lead you and be part of one of the best departments around.

'Everyone there saw it firsthand. Well trained, Well equipped, Well staffed. Solid Professionals. Thanks.'
Police in Michigan are searching for a mother and her boyfriend after the woman's four-year-old daughter was found suffering from severe burns on New Year's Day and later died from those injuries.

The child, identified by family members as Gabby Barrett, was discovered with scald wounds all over her body shortly before 11am on January 1 at her family's mobile home on Greenmeadow Drive in Sumpter Township.

Police officers who responded to the scene found the toddler with 'obvious burns on her arms and legs.

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Wanted: Police in Michigan are searching for Candice Diaz, 24 (left), and her boyfriend, 28-year-old Brad Fields (right), in connection to the death of the woman's daughter

Victim: Gabby Barrett, 4, passed away on January 1 after suffering from scald burns on much of her body

Police were called to this trailer home in Sumpter Township, Michigan, on New Year's Day on receiving a report of an unresponsive child

According to investigators, the mobile home that housed Barrett, her mother and the woman's boyfriend was littered with animal waste and contained guns and drugs.

Gabby was rushed to St Joseph Mercy Hospital, where she was pronounced dead a short time later.

Two days later, the Washtenaw County Medical Examiner ruled the child's death a homicide with evidence of multiple traumatic injuries and signs of Battered Child Syndrome.

On Monday, arrest warrants were approved by the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office charging Gabby's mother, 24-year-old Candice Diaz, and her partner, 28-year-old Brad Fields, with second-degree murder, felony murder, first-degree child abuse and torture, reported WDIV.

The pair are believed to be traveling in a 2002 Chevy Cavalier with the Michigan license plate DTR1854.

It has been reported that the Michigan State Police and the state's Child Protective Services agency are investigating.

Local police had some past experience with Candice Diaz: in May 2016, SWAT officers were called to the trailer home after the woman reported that her boyfriend had attacked her, shot her dog and then himself.

House of horrors: Police say the mobile home was covered in animal waste and contained guns and drugs

Gabby's family members (grandparents pictured left) say Diaz had custody of the toddler (left and right) at the time of her death

Gabby is pictured with her biological father, Kyle, who is not connected to her death

The man was later arrested and charged with domestic violence.

Diaz eventually pleaded guilty to weapons charges and was sentenced to probation.

On Sunday night, some of Gabby's family members, including her biological father and her grandparents, gathered in Sumpter Township for a candlelight vigil honoring the deceased four-year-old girl, reported Fox 2 Detroit.

According to the family, Gabby's mother had custody of the girl at the time of her passing on New Years Day.

Her parental grandmother, Deborah Barrett, described Gabby as a 'ball of joy' who loved to play and run around the house, while her paternal grandfather, Jerry Barrett, said he misses the child very much.
British Pregnancy Advisory Service said they were 'shocked' at the appointment

Theresa May is facing a backlash after appointing a female MP who opposed loosening abortion laws to a senior job representing Tory women.

Maria Caulfield was made the Conservative vice chair for women today as part of the Prime Minister's overhaul of her senior team.

But her appointment has been met with fierce criticism from pro-Choice groups over her role in leading the opposition to proposals to decriminalise some later abortions.

Ms Caulfield, the MP for Lewes in Sussex, had argued that any attempts to change the law would bring 'unjust and oppressive change' and put women and unborn children at risk.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), which provides abortion and counselling services, said hit out at the appointment.

Maria Caulfield was made the Conservative vice chair for women today as part of the Prime Minister's overhaul of her senior team (file pic)

A spokeswoman said: 'We are shocked that the Conservative Party has decided to appoint as their vice chair for women an MP who supports the criminalisation of women who end their own pregnancies.

'Just last year, Caulfield led the parliamentary opposition to a Bill which would have decriminalised abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.'

Dawn Butler, Labour's shadow women and equalities minister, said it was an 'appalling decision'.

She said: 'Women deserve to have the strongest advocates at the top of politics, not people who seek to restrict their rights and freedoms.'

Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, said she was 'staggered' by the appointment.

'Women's equality goes hand in hand with reproductive rights,' she said. 'Someone who believes those rights should be restricted can never advocate effectively for us.':

Ms Caulfield spoke against the Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill in March, which would have changed abortion laws.

Under current laws, it is illegal for a woman to have an abortion after 24 weeks for non-medical reasons and each procedure must be signed off by two doctors before it can go ahead.

Bpas said the legislation sought to protect women who 'in the most desperate of circumstances' use medication purchased online to end a pregnancy.

MPs voted in favour of the legislation by 172 votes to 142 at its first Commons stage, it ran out of time to make further progress after the snap election was called.

The Bpas spokeswoman said: 'That the new Conservative vice chair for women believes that these women should face up to life imprisonment is appalling.

Theresa May's decision to appoint Maria Caulfield (pictured outside No10 second to far right) as Tory vice chair for women has been met with fierce criticism from pro-Choice groups over her role in leading the opposition to proposals to decriminalise some later abortions

'Maria Caulfield has stated that she wants to be a "voice for the unborn child".

'It is profoundly disappointing that the Conservative Party did not think that a better choice for vice chair for women would be someone willing and able to speak up for the one in three women who will have an abortion in their lifetime.'

In the Commons debate on the Bill, Ms Caulfield said she would refuse to be cowed into silence on her views on abortion.

She said: 'Too often today, debates about abortion - about the risks involved and the rights of the unborn child - are shut down,.

'But I, and many colleagues who share my views, will not be silenced as we seek to be a voice for the voiceless, and as we argue for more modern and humane abortion law that upholds not only the dignity and rights of women but the dignity and rights of the unborn child.'

A former nurse who grew up on a council estate in south London, the Lewes MP said criminal convictions for women were extremely rare and those seeking abortions were not 'living under the constant shadow of arrest'.
The secret love story of a holocaust prisoner known as the 'Tattooist of Auschwitz' and his wife - a woman he was forced to ink at the horrific concentration camp - has been revealed for the first time in a new book.

Lale Sokolov - born Ludwig 'Lale' Eisenberg to Jewish parents in Slovakia in 1916 - met his wife Gita Fuhrmannova when he tattooed the identification number '34902' on her skin at Auschwitz in 1942.

While in the camp, they smuggled each other letters through an SS guard and had secret meetings by her block before they were separated upon release.

It wasn't until weeks later that they were reunited in Bratislava, where they wed in 1945 before fleeing to Australia to live out the rest of their lives.

Sokolov kept the stories of his time in Auschwitz secret for more than 50 years, until he told them to writer Helen Morris in the three years before he died in 2006.

Now, in the writer's new book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Morris tells how Sokolov met wife, Gita, and how they came to live in Australia after World War II.

Lale Sokolov - born Ludwig 'Lale' Eisenberg to Jewish parents in Slovakia in 1916 - met his wife, Gita Fuhrmannova, when he tattooed her at Auschwitz in 1942. While in the camp they smuggled each other letters through an SS guard and had secret meetings by her block before they were separated upon release

It wasn't until weeks after they left the camp that they were reunited in Bratislava, where they wed in 1945 before fleeing to Australia to live out the rest of their lives. Gita and Sokolov pictured together before their deaths in 2003 and 2016, respectively

Auschwitz and its sub-camps, Birkenau and Monowitz, were the only places prisoners received number tattoos. Pictured above, a young man checks the numbers tattooed on the arms of Jewish Polish prisoners coming from Auschwitz, in Dachau concentration camp after its liberation by the US army at the end of April 1945

Sokolov was taken to Auschwitz - the Nazis' biggest death camp - in 1942 when he was 26 years old.

He contracted typhoid shortly after his arrival and was taken care of by the man who had tattooed his camp number, 32407, on his arm.

The Frenchman took him under his wing by teaching him the trade and made him into his assistant.

Eventually, Sokolov was made into the main tattooist, partly because he spoke several languages, including Slovakian, German, Russian, French, Hungarian and Polish.

As the tattooist, he worked in the Political Wing of the SS and tattooed hundreds of thousands of prisoners. A guard was assigned to look after him at all times.

'He never, ever saw himself as being a collaborator,' Morris told the BBC. 'He did what he did to survive. He said he wasn't told he could have this job or that job.

Sokolov was taken to Auschwitz - the Nazis' biggest death camp - in 1942 when he was 26 years old. Gita arrived a year later

Sokolov, pictured with Gita, contracted typhoid shortly after his arrival and was taken care of by the man who had tattooed his camp number, 32407, on his arm. He then became the man's apprentice and later the camp's main tattooist

He fell in love with Gita (pictured above with the couple's one son) when he was forced to tattoo a camp ID on her when she first arrived at Auschwitz

After being released from Auschwitz, Sokolov waited at a train station for weeks in hopes of finding Gita. On his way to a nearby Red Cross, a woman stepped in front of his horse - it was Gita

'He said you took whatever was being offered. You took it and you were grateful because it meant that you might wake up the next morning.'

Auschwitz and its sub-camps, Birkenau and Monowitz, were the only places prisoners received number tattoos.

Prisoners were only tattooed at the camp between autumn 1941 and spring of 1943.

It was in July 1942 when he was given the arm of a young woman to tattoo the numbers 34902 on.

He later said that she 'tattooed her number on his heart', according to the BBC.

It was then he learned that the woman's name was Gita Fuhrmannova, and she was in the women's camp at Birkenau.

With the help of his personal SS guard who watched over him because of his job, he was able to sneak letters to Gita.

He snuck Gita extra food rations and moved her to a better work station within the concentration camp.

Sokolov was made into the main tattooist, partly because he spoke several languages, including Slovakian, German, Russian, French, Hungarian and Polish. As the tattooist, he worked in the Political Wing of the SS and tattooed hundreds of thousands of prisoners. A guard was assigned to look after him at all times

Sokolov was taken to Auschwitz (women pictured at the camp above) - the Nazis' biggest death camp - in 1942 when he was 26 years old

The couple soon were able to have secretive meetings outside of her block.

'Gita, she had her doubts, very strong doubts,' Morris writes. 'She didn't see a future. He always, deep down, knew that he was going to survive.

'He didn't know how, but it comes back to that whole notion of being a survivor. He's a survivor because of luck, being in the right place at the right time, and being able to manipulate opportunities that he saw.'

In 1945, Gita was selected to leave Auschwitz before the Russians arrived.

Sokolov left the camp soon after and made his way back to his hometown of Krompachy in Czechoslovakia using jewels he had stolen from the Nazis.

He found that his sister Goldie had also survived, as well as their family home.

But who he truly wanted to see was Gita.

He traveled to Bratislava in a horse and cart, hoping Gita would make her way through the city, which at the time was an entry point for people returning to Czechoslovakia.

With the help of his personal SS guard who watched over him because of his job, he was able to sneak letters around the camp to Gita

Documents in Morris's book revealed Sokolov's ID number, as well as others who lived in the concentration camp

The couple married in October 1945, but Sokolov was soon arrested after the government learned he was sending money to support an Israeli state. So Sokolov and Gita fled the country, making their way to Vienna, then Paris before deciding to head to Australia, where they lived out the rest of their lives Iin Melbourne

He waited at a train station for weeks until a stationmaster told him to check out the nearby Red Cross.

On his way there, however, a woman stepped in front of his horse - it was Gita.

The couple married in October 1945, but Sokolov was soon arrested after the government learned he was sending money to support an Israeli state.

So Sokolov and Gita fled the country, making their way to Vienna, then Paris before deciding to head to Australia, where they lived out the rest of their lives in Melbourne.

Sokolov started a textile business, Gita began designing dresses, and they had one son together in 1961.

Gita returned to Europe a few times before she died in 2003. Sokolov never returned before his death in 2006.

The former tattooist died in 2006, but before his death he told the stories of his imprisonment to Morris for her book, the Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Her book will be released in the UK on 11 January, 2018.
Jean-Claude Juncker today called on the EU states to abandon hopes Brexit will be cancelled and cough up extra money to cover Britain's future contributions.

The EU Commission President has called on European governments to lift a 1 per cent cap on budget increases.

Mr Juncker said extra money was needed to fill a huge black hole that Britain's departure leaves in the EU's long-term plans.

The UK has agreed to meet its commitments during the current budget period running to 2020 but the EU so far has no plan for what to do afterwards.

Jean-Claude Juncker today called on the EU states to abandon hopes Brexit will be cancelled and cough up extra money to cover Britain's future contributions

Mr Juncker claimed at a press conference today that lifting the budget was equivalent to 'one cup of coffee a day'.

He insisted: 'I think Europe is more than one cup of coffee a day.'

Mr Juncker needs to find up to 10 billion euros a year to fill the British hole in the budget.

He warned: 'We need more than 1 per cent [spending] if we are to pursue EU policies and fund them adequately.

'Don't believe those who say [Brexit] is not going to happen. Our working hypothesis is that our British friends will be leaving us in 2019.

'Between now and then we need to find the means of reacting to the loss of a significant number of billion of euros when a net contributor goes.'

The President added: 'We need to deliver on time so the EU can travel in calm budgetary waters towards its future.'

Britain hopes that budgetary pressures will create splits in the EU bloc that it can exploit in the next phase of negotiations.

Britain hopes that budgetary pressures will create splits in the EU bloc that it can exploit in the next phase of negotiations (pictured are Brexit Secretary David Davis and Theresa May head to head with Mr Juncker and EU negotiator Michel Barnier last month)

Brexit Secretary David Davis was reappointed in the Cabinet reshuffle today and will now continue with a whirlwind schedule of visits to European capitals.

Official negotiations are due to resume shortly with a goal of agreeing a transition arrangement by the March summit.

Talks on the future relationship will then finally begin with a view to striking an agreement on the principles of how Europe will work in future by October.

Eloise Todd, chief executive of the Best for Britain, said: 'President Juncker is completely wrong to say Brexit is a dead certainty.

'We have until March 2019; the government wants the date set in stone because every day that goes by exposes their strategy of pretending Brexit is all things to all comers.

'The government think the wool can be pulled over the British public's eyes: Ireland isn't sorted, the kind of Brexit we will end up with isn't sorted, and all the public announcements made by Theresa May about pick n' mix Brexit are impossible.'
Pope Francis has appealed for all nations to ease tensions with North Korea and support a ban on all nuclear weapons.

In his annual 'state of the world' address, he called for countries to support dialogue ahead of confrontation, a day before Seoul and Pyongyang hold their first talks in two years

In the speech, Francis also repeated his call for a two-state-solution between Israelis and Palestinians and respect for the 'status quo' of Jerusalem following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognise the city as Israel's capital.

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Pope Francis has appealed for all nations to ease tensions with North Korea and support a ban on all nuclear weapons in his annual 'state of the world' address on Monday (pictured: Pope Francis delivers his speech in the 'Regia' hall at the Vatican)

'It is of paramount importance to support every effort at dialogue on the Korean peninsula, in order to find new ways of overcoming the current disputes, increasing mutual trust and ensuring a peaceful future for the Korean people and the entire world,' Francis said.

The pope addressed envoys from more than 180 countries a day before North Korea and South Korea are due to hold talks expected to address North Korea's participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

Some diplomats see this as a possible opening for discussions on other topics such as humanitarian issues and divided families.

Earlier this month, after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un asserted that he had a nuclear button at the ready, Trump tweeted that the U.S. button was bigger and more powerful.

'Nuclear weapons must be banned,' Francis said, quoting a document issued by Pope John XXIII at the height of the Cold War and adding that there is 'no denying that the conflagration could be started by some chance and unforeseen circumstance'.

Noting that the Holy See was among 122 states that last year agreed a United Nations treaty to ban nuclear weapons, he called for a 'serene and wide-ranging debate' on disarmament.

In his annual 'state of the world' address, he called for countries to support dialogue ahead of confrontation, a day before Seoul and Pyongyang hold their first talks in two years (pictured: Pope Francis delivers his speech in the 'Regia' hall at the Vatican)

In the speech, Francis also repeated his call for a two-state-solution between Israelis and Palestinians and respect for the 'status quo' of Jerusalem following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognise the city as Israel's capital (pictured from left: daughter Ivanka Trump, left, wife Melania Trump, Trump and Pope Francis)

The United States, Britain, France and others boycotted the talks that led to the treaty, instead pledging commitment to a decades-old Non-Proliferation Treaty.

At the individual greetings after the speech, Francis spent more time chatting with South Korea's envoy, Jonghyu Jeong, than with most other diplomats.

Washington's new ambassador to the Vatican, Callista Gingrich, attended along with her husband, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich.

Addressing climate change, Francis called for a 'united effort' to remain committed to the 2015 Paris accord on reducing carbon emissions. French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to breathe new life in the agreement after Trump announced that the United States would withdraw..

Francis, who has made defence of migrants and refugees a major plank of his pontificate, warned against 'stirring up primal fears' of newcomers.

'There is a need, then, to abandon the familiar rhetoric and start from the essential consideration that we are dealing, above all, with persons,' he said.

Migration has become a top political issue in countries including the United States, Italy and Germany.
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Some 600 men showed up to support students with absent fathers at a Texas middle school's Breakfast with Dads event after just 50 volunteers were sought.

This heartwarming act of kindness occurred last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas.

The middle school has a population of nearly 900 students and about 90 per cent of those pupils come from low-income families.

About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up for the Breakfast with Dads event, which was held on December 14, 2017, but Kristina Dove, the senior partner relations manager at Big Thought, a youth development nonprofit, wasn't sure if every student would have a father present during the program.

Advocates for a Texas middle school only asked 50 men to support students, who would have been without fathers at their 'Breakfast with Dads' event, and to their surprise 600 men (pictured) showed up

This heartwarming act of kindness occurred last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas. Pictured are some of the hundreds of father figures and mentors who showed up to the event

The middle school has a population of nearly 900 students and about 90 per cent of those pupils come from low-income families

About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up for the Breakfast with Dads event, which was held on December 14, 2017, but children's advocate Kristina Chaade Dove wasn't sure if every student would have a father there, and decided to call on volunteers

Dove immediately jumped into action, using social media to call for volunteers for the event

And on the day of the program, event organizers were overcome with emotion when 600 men showed up to support their students. This mentor is showing students how to play the trumpet

She immediately jumped into action, using social media to call for volunteers for the event.

'Please Share! Men Needed! On next Thursday, December 14th at 8:30 AM at Dr. Billy Earle Dade Middle School we will host 'Breakfast with Dads' the reality of a great event like this is alot of our kids will not have a Dad present,' Dove wrote on Facebook on December 4.

'But there is nothing like having a male present in the form of a mentor. We are [in] need of at least 50 or more additional male mentors who can devote 1 hour of their Wednesday morning next week to this cause,' she added.

And on the day of the program, event organizers were overcome with emotion when 600 men showed up to support their students.

'When a young person sees someone other than their teacher take interest in them, it inspires them. That's what we want to see happen,' the Rev Donald Parish Jr., pastor of True Lee Missionary Baptist Church and the event organizer, told the Dallas Morning News.

Jason Rodriguez, the assistant chief of police for the Dallas Independent School District Police Department, tweeted about the event.

Jason Rodriguez (center), the assistant chief of police for the Dallas ISD Police Department, participated in the event. He shared this photo on Twitter

'Words cannot describe the impact mentoring youth can have on both you and your mentee. Powerful to see a community of fellow men and fathers come together to wrap their arms around or young men. Thank you for having me out,' Rodriguez wrote (center)

Rodriguez also posted this photo of himself and another student giving a thumbs up

Rodriguez is seen showing one of the young boys how to tie a necktie

'Words cannot describe the impact mentoring youth can have on both you and your mentee. Powerful to see a community of fellow men and fathers come together to wrap their arms around or young men. Thank you for having me out,' Rodriguez wrote.

He posted photos of himself with four students smiling from ear-to-ear. Rodriguez is also seen showing one of the young boys how to tie a necktie.

Stephanie Drenka, a Dallas photographer and blogger, gave details of the event on her website.

'I was privileged to photograph the event at Kristinas request. It was a miracle any of the pictures came out in focus, because I could barely see clearly through the tears streaming down my face and fogged-up glasses,' she recalled on her blog.

Stephanie Drenka, a Dallas photographer and blogger, gave details of the event on her website. She took this photo of one of the men with 'Our sons matter' written on his back

According to Drenka, Jamil 'The Tie Man' Tucker led the auditorium in a hands-on icebreaker activity. Pictured is one of the mentors helping a student tie his necktie

This young man is seen shaking hands with one of the mentors of the program after tying his tie

'When a young person sees someone other than their teacher take interest in them, it inspires them. That's what we want to see happen,' the Rev Donald Parish Jr, pastor of True Lee Missionary Baptist Church and the event organizer said

'I will never forget witnessing the young students surrounded by supportive community members. There were so many volunteers, that at times I saw young men huddled in the center of 4-5 mentors,' Drenka wrote

'I will never forget witnessing the young students surrounded by supportive community members. There were so many volunteers, that at times I saw young men huddled in the center of 4-5 mentors,' Drenka wrote.

'The look of awe- even disbelief- in students' eyes as they made their way through the crowd of Dads was astonishing,' she added.

According to Drenka, Jamil 'The Tie Man' Tucker led the auditorium in a hands-on icebreaker activity.

He talked about learning how to tie a necktie as a rite of passage some young men never experience.

Meanwhile, mentors and fathers handed out ties to the students and helped them 'perfect their half-Windsor knot,' according to Drenka

The mentors and students had breakfast together while they chatted

These three men were paired with a group of three young students

The moving program has not only touched the lives of those who participated, but it also made its rounds on the internet as people said the inspirational event 'brought tears' to their eyes

Meanwhile, mentors and fathers handed out ties to the students and helped them 'perfect their half-Windsor knot'.

The opportunity gap in Dallas has reached a crucial point, with more than 30 per cent of children living in poverty while more affluent areas of the city continue to prosper, according to Drenka.

Studies have shown that the presence of a caring adult in a young person's life can help overcome the negative effects of adverse childhood experiences.

'We hope this event was only the beginning of a movement in Dallas to ensure every student has access to mentorship,' Drenka said.

The moving program has not only touched the lives of those who participated, but it also made its rounds on the internet as several people on social media said the inspirational event 'brought tears' to their eyes.
'Morning Joe' co-host Joe Scarborough said Monday it's an open secret that Donald Trump is losing his mind, and The Washington Post has steadfastly refused to let anyone write about it in its pages.

'I've written twice in my column a quote about one of the people closest to Donald Trump during the campaign saying he's got early stage of dementia,' Scarborough said.

'But twice The Washington Post hasn't  would not let me put that in my column,' he added.

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Joe Scarborough (right) said Monday that he's tried twice to write in his Washington Post column about claims that Donald Trump has dementia, but the newspaper censored him

The 'Morning Joe' host interviewed author Michael Wolff (shown) about his new book 'Fire and Fury'

Donald Trump, 17, said on August 19, 2015 that although his father died following a six-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease, he wasn't diagnosed until age 88

Trump's father died in 1999 after a six-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease, a degenerative brain-wasting condition.

DailyMail.com asked Trump about it during an August 2015 campaign press conference in New Hampshire.

'He was 88 years when he developed it, and he died at 94,' Trump observed at the time.

The president is currently 71.

Asked if he had any concerns about his own mental health, he replied: 'No. Not whatsoever.'

'My mother was 88, 89, and she was in amazingly great health. And my father, too, was in great health. They lived long lives.'

Fred Trump is seen at right in 1987, six years before his Alzheimer's diagnosis, along with Trump, his first wife Ivana, and his mother Mary

Author Michael Wolff wrote in his book 'Fire and Fury' that nearly everyone who is regularly around the president is aware of his declining mental state.

'Until your book came out, this was something we were not allowed to speak about,' Scarborough told him.

Wolff said most journalists who cover the White House daily are uncomfortable writing about such an explosive claim because it would shut off their access to the administration.

But a book's author, he argued, doesn't have that problem.

'You can't say what you know, or all that you know, because you have to go back the next day,' Wolff said, adding that 'I could say it because I'm not going back.'
It could've been a catastrophe for this dad that had an unexpected interruption after leaving the office door unlocked during a live, at-home TV interview.

Daniel Smith-Rowsey, an adjunct professor and film historian at St Mary's College of California, was being interviewed via Skype about Sunday's Golden Globe Awards on Al Jazeera English when his young son popped into view.

'Umm,' Smith-Rowsey said, with a bit of a laugh from his home in Berkeley, 'that's my child, excuse me.'

Host Sohail Rahman took it in stride and welcomed Rainier, age 5, who his father calls 'Razor,' to the show.

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Daniel Smith-Rowsey (center), an adjunct professor and film historian at St Mary's College of California, was being interviewed from home on live TV by Al Jazeera English's Sohail Rahman (left) when his son, Rainier ('Razor,' at right), age 5, popped into view

'He can come in, it's not a problem, Daniel,' the anchor said. 'We're quite happy to have youngsters on the program, too.'

Smith-Rowsey smiled from ear-to-ear, happy to have his boy welcomed so graciously.

'Oh, OK, he wants to be part of this,' the father told the host, of his cheerful child.

Later, Smith-Rowsey told TODAY in an email: 'I saw [my son] coming in and cursed myself for not locking the door.'

Later, Smith-Rowsey told TODAY in an email: 'I saw him coming in and cursed myself for not locking the door'

Smith-Rowsey didn't miss a beat as he told Rahman that 'Hollywood has never been afraid to be outspoken' while Razor ran his toy car down his father's side

But you never would've known that from the professor's reaction, which was quite different from what viewers saw from professor Robert Kelly, 45, in an interview with the BBC in March, when his children burst into the room unexpectedly.

The video of Kelly shooing one of his children away while his wife, Jung-a Kim, frantically tried to get them out of the room, with a bit of kicking and screaming involved, went viral last year.

Kelly took a lot of flack at the time for keeping such a stern face when his child, Marion, 4, walked up to him while he was on camera, and looking visibly annoyed throughout the interruption.

The political science professor later laughed about the experience, which he admitted in December to the Guardian 'stunned' him and his wife, for both the unexpected nature and the resulting attention the family received.

Smith-Rowsey, on the other hand, couldn't stop grinning as his son gleefully joined in, full of personality during his interview.

'Razor and I had never discussed protocol about this, so I hoped against hope that he would sense that he shouldnt be on camera,' Smith-Rowsey said, of his experience sharing screen time with a tiny, unannounced guest.

But Razor sensed no such thing, much to everyone's delight.

Robert Kelly in an interview with the BBC in March, when his children burst into the room unexpectedly

The video of Kelly shooing one of his children away while his wife frantically tried to get them out of the room, with a bit of kicking and screaming involved, went viral last year

They boy immediately waved to camera, with a toy car in hand, and a big smile on his face.

Smith-Rowsey didn't miss a beat as he told Rahman that 'Hollywood has never been afraid to be outspoken,' while Razor ran his toy car down his father's side.

Smith-Rowsey and Rahman were discussing the #MeToo and Times Up movements, which coincided at the Golden Globes with men and women wearing black in solidarity with individuals across the country, in all industries, who have decided 'Time's up' for a lack of equality and safety in the workplace.

As Smith-Rowsey tied up his comments, his little guy sweetly rested his head on his dad's shoulder.

Host Sohail Rahman took it in stride and welcomed Rainier, age 5, who his father calls 'Razor'

This prompted the proud papa to bring Razor back into the conversation, asking him to echo his sentiments with a gentle, 'Right, my little child?'

'Yes!' Razor piped in, from just off camera.

As Rahman thanked Smith-Rowsey for being on the show, Razor's forearm extended up over his dad's shoulder and he waved a small car.

'Bye!' Razor said, as his dad told Rahman, 'Thanks for having us.'
Deputy Daniel A. McCartney, 34, was killed Sunday near Tacoma, Washington

A Navy veteran and father of three who worked as a sheriff's deputy has been shot dead while responding to an armed home invasion.

Deputy Daniel A. McCartney, 34, was killed in a shootout with armed suspects near Tacoma, Washington on Sunday around 11.30pm, after a panicked 911 caller reported an active home invasion.

Dispatchers could hear screaming and scuffling on the 911 call, police said.

McCartney rushed to respond to the home on a wooded street in Frederickson, about 15 miles southeast of Tacoma.

The Pierce County Sheriffs deputy engaged two suspects in a foot pursuit, and was fatally struck in an exchange of gunfire, police said.

One suspect, a white male, was found dead at the scene. Another, a black male, escaped on foot and is still being sought by police.

Officers and medical staff take part in a procession for fallen sheriff's deputy Daniel A. McCartney at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma on Monday

McCartney was killed in a shootout with armed suspects after responding to a home invasion

The home invasion occurred on this wooded street in Frederickson, about 15 miles southeast of Tacoma. Police have launched a massive manhunt for the suspect who escaped.

Cops launched a massive overnight manhunt for the remaining suspect.

Streets were shut down and the media was asked not to respond to the scene as K-9 units actively searched the containment area.

McCartney was rushed to a hospital in Tacoma, and tragically succumbed to the injuries just after 2am.

He was the married father of three young boys, and had joined the Pierce County Sheriff's Department in 2014, the department said in a statement.

The fallen deputy previously served as a police officer in Hoquiam.

McCartney was the married father of three young boys and a proud Navy veteran. Deputies are seen escorting the fallen deputy's body from the hospital early Monday morning

Officers salute as the body of fallen deputy McCartney is escorted from the hospital

'Overnight our department, our community, and especially one of our families suffered an incredible loss,' the statement said.

'Please continue to keep his family, friends, and our department in your thoughts and prayers.'

'We are heartbroken but steadfast in our pursuit of justice,' the department said.

The search for the suspect who escaped was still underway on Monday morning.

Police warned that the black male suspect was armed and dangerous, but provided no further description.
President Donald Trump must decide this week whether to waive nuclear sanctions on Iran or effectively end the United States' participation in an international accord with Tehran.

Trump allowed the deal to remain in place last year while Congress considered legislation to strengthen the 2015 agreement. In the meantime, lawmakers opted not to take advantage of an opportunity to reimpose sanctions themselves.

By Friday, Trump must decide to approve an extension or scrap the deal altogether.

The decision is set against a week of anti-establishment demonstrations in Iran that the country's security force said it had quashed on Sunday after arresting the last of the protests organizers.

President Donald Trump must decide this week whether to waive nuclear sanctions on Iran or effectively end the United States' participation in an international accord with Tehran

Trump and his administration had come to the defense of the protesters in Iran. The U.S. president said last week that they would have the full assistance of his government when the time was right.

'Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration,' he said in one of his tweets. 'The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!'

The spontaneous demonstrations in response to economic conditions and government oppression, including censorship, and Tehran's enforcers' response offered another reason for Washington to punish Iran.

In October, Trump said he would not certify Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement that was negotiated under the previous administration because it was in violation of the 'spirit' of the accord, citing its development of ballistic missiles and financial support for terrorism.

'We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror, and the very real threat of Irans nuclear breakout,' Trump stated.

The Trump administration asked Congress then to come up with and pass a companion agreement that addresses those issues.

It said it would also like Congress to amend the legislation that gives lawmakers the authority to slap sanctions on Iran if it decides Tehran is in violation of the nuclear agreement, outlining 'trigger points' instead that set off automatic sanctions.

Trump said he wants Congress to fix 'the deals many flaws' such as existing sunset provisions. The administration would like nuclear sanctions to snap-back on Tehran if it falls back into old habits after prohibitions outlined in the deal have expired.

Trump and his administration had come to the defense of the protesters in Iran, seen here on Dec. 30. The U.S. president said last week that they would have the full assistance of his government when the time was right

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week that Trump would be inclined to authorize another sanctions waiver if he felt that real progress was being made toward the changes he demanded in October.

'The president said he is either going to fix it or cancel it,' Tillerson told the Associated Press on Friday. 'We are in the process of trying to deliver on the promise he made to fix it.'

The White House said Tuesday that Trump was keeping his 'options open' as he contemplated the decision.

In his October remarks, Trump said he would keep a campaign promise to rip up the deal if it came to that.

'The deal is terrible. So what we've done is, through the certification process, we'll have Congress take a look at it, and I may very well do that,' he said. 'But I like a two-step process much better.'

Trump is required to consider sanctions on Iran every 120 days. If he does not sign the sanctions waiver this week, the U.S. will be violating its end of the nuclear agreement.

Every 90 days Trump must has also certify Iran's compliance with the nuclear accord. He chose not to in October and is likely to arrive at the same decision now.

It is unclear whether decertification would open a new window for Congress to impose sanctions on Iran, having forgone the opportunity the first time around.

Last week, Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Ben Cardin, the top-ranking Democrat, met with Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, about the changes to the existing sanctions regime that the president wanted.

'My sense is theres a little momentum right now, and it doesnt feel to me like were in a place where the president might do that, but who knows,' he told reporters.

Tillerson suggested during his interview with the AP on Friday that Trump was leaning toward allowing the deal to remain as is while Congress continues to work to address his outlined issues.

'I dont want to suggest were across the finish line on anything yet,' he added.

As White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held her first press briefing of the New Year last week, the unrest in Iran was front and center.

'We certainly keep our options open in terms of sanctions. In terms of signing a waiver later in January, the President hasn't made a final decision on that,' Sanders said of the sanctions waiver last Tuesday. 'He's going to keep every option on the table.'



The U.S. Treasury Department then hit five Iranian-based entities with new sanctions on Thursday for their involvement in the Irans illicit production of ballistic missiles.

Vice President Mike Pence said Trump's administration would stand with the protests in 'their hour of need' last week. It's anticipated that Trump could use the government's handling of protesters as a reason not to waive nuclear sanctions

Vice President Mike Pence meanwhile said Trump's administration would stand with the protesters in 'their hour of need.'

'The last administrations refusal to act ultimately emboldened Irans tyrannical rulers to crack down on the dissent. The Green Revolution was ruthlessly put down, and the deadly silence on the streets of Iran matched the deafening silence from the White House,' Pence said in as Washington Post op-ed.

'Today, the Iranian people are once again rising up to demand freedom and opportunity, and under President Trump, the United States is standing with them. This time, we will not be silent.'

The demonstrations continued to weigh heavily on Foreign Relations committee members' minds on Monday as Trump neared the deadline for the nuclear sanctions decision.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez wrote Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin asking that the federal government to do more to assure U.S. tech companies that they would not be violating U.S. sanctions if they provide workarounds for protesters to use online platforms that the Iranian government has censored.

'I believe it is both in our national and moral interests to support these protesters and their desire for a free, democratic, and transparent Iranian government that doesnt needlessly waste Irans resources on foreign adventurism that has resulted in massive human rights abuses, funding of terrorist organizations, and the deaths of American soldiers,' they said.
CNN's Jake Tapper and White House aide Stephen Miller continued to take jabs at each other once they were off the air.

'This is the reason they don't put you on TV. OK? This is the reason,' Tapper told Miller, according to a transcript given to CBS News.

Miller was Tapper's guest on State of the Union Sunday for a segment that included the Trump aide going after CNN's White House reportage, saying it was 'negative, anti-Trump, hysterical coverage' and Tapper slapping back, labeling Miller himself 'hysterical' and a 'factotum,' and cutting the interview short.

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After the interview between Stephen Miller (left) and CNN's Jake Tapper (right) concluded on Sunday, Tapper reportedly told Miller that, 'This is the reason they don't put you on TV,' as Miller told the journalist he was 'offended'

The White House is saying that aide Stephen Miller (pictured) was not escorted off Jake Tapper's set, though several unnamed CNN sources say security was called on the Trump aide after the contentious back-and-forth

The president tweeted that he loved what he saw, telling supporters that the 32-year-old Miller 'destroyed' the CNN newsman. Trump also called Jake Tapper a 'flunky!'

'I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time,' Tapper said, moving on to preview his next guest.

From there, things stayed heated, with Business Insider reporting that security had to usher Miller out, according to two CNN sources.

Another CNN source told CBS, 'The segment was over and Mr. Miller was politely asked to leave the set multiple times  after refusing to leave, he was escorted out by security.'

The network has yet to release an official statement.

CNN's Matt Dornic, a communications professional for the network, pointed this out on Twitter, asking CBS to correct its report.

When DailyMail.com asked the White House to verify the information, a spokesman pointed out this 'correction.'

Later, on Air Force One, Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters that Miller wasn't escorted off-set, but left on his own volition.

The transcript given to CBS has Miller huffing that he wasn't given three minutes to 'tell the truth about the president of the United States.'

'You had plenty of time,' Tapper responded. 'I let you give like a three minute filibuster at the very very top.'

Miller didn't buy it.

'You gave me two minutes,' he said.

At that point, Tapper seemingly tried to get Miller off the set by saying, 'OK. Thanks for coming in.'

'You should be ashamed of yourself. Honestly,' Miller shot back.

Tapper talked back, pointing to Miller's attitude being the reason the White House seldom puts the aide on TV.

Miller said he was supposed to be talking about the Camp David Summit and he charged Tapper with only wanting to talk about the 'salacious.'

Tapper said he had plenty of questions ready to go on topics like immigration, but didn't get to them because Miller had been repeating himself.

Miller was also angry Tapper referred to him as a 'factotum'  often used as a synonym for servant.

'I had plenty of questions but you kept on repeating yourself and kept on not letting me ask my questions .... after you entire interview attacking CNN ... OK, so don't act so offended,' Tapper said.

Miller had one more response before the tape cut off.

'I'm not acting offended, I am offended,' he said. 'I'm offended by you and I'm offended by your network.'

CNN hasn't responded to an inquiry from DailyMail.com about the authenticity of the transcript.

When Tapper returned from commercial break, Miller was gone and the journalist began the second part of his show by saying, 'Welcome back to State of the Union and planet Earth.'

President Trump applauded the back-and-forth between 32-year-old Miller and Tapper as the aide had accomplished a two-part goal of tarring and feathering former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and CNN as well.

'Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration,' Trump wrote. 'Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!'

The interview, however had began courteously enough, with Tapper wishing Miller a 'happy new year.'

It went downhill from there.

Tapper asked Miller about allegations laid out in the new book, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,' by Michael Wolff.

Bannon, Tapper reminded Miller, had criticized the Trump Tower meeting between Russians and campaign staff, saying, 'The chance that Don Jr. didn't walk these Jumos up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero.'

Tapper wanted to know if Miller had any first-hand knowledge of the now-president meeting with the Russians who visited in Manhattan office building in June 2016.

Miller took the cue to lash out at Bannon.

'Steve Bannon's eloquence in that description notwithstanding, it's tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments, so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive,' Miller said.

'And the whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments, which were grotesque,' he said, using the adjective again.

Bannon, Miller said, wasn't even there.

'It reads like an angry, vindictive person spouting off to a highly discredible author,' Miller continued, pivoting to lash out at Wolff too.

'The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction,' Miller added. 'And I also will say that the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.'

Miller tried to counter Wolff's portrayal of what Trump is like to what the aide personally encountered when traveling with the candidate and now president.

When Tapper tried to get him back on track to talk about the meeting, Miller replied, 'I have no knowledge of anything to do with that meeting.'

From there, the conversation was more about CNN.

Miller charged that the cable news network was going '24/7 with all the salacious coverage.'

'And I know that it brings a lot of you guys a lot of joy to trying to stick the knife in,' he said.

Tapper pushed back on that claim, noting how many people from the White House are quoted, on the record, in Wolff's book.

The newsman also got into a tussle with Miller over who hired him, suggesting it was Bannon who helped bring the young aide on board.

Miller said the credit goes not to Bannon, but to Trump's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. He also said Bannon had nothing to do with the writing of Trump's controversial travel ban.

Throughout the interview, Miller repeatedly praised Trump's political prowess, knocking the 'so-called political geniuses in Washington' who didn't predict the populist Republican's ascent.

'The only person who has called himself a genius in the last week is the president,' Tapper uttered.

Miller said that point was true, calling the president a, 'A self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV and who has changed the course of our politics.'

'I'm sure he's watching, and he's happy that you said that,' Tapper shot back.

Miller called Tapper's comment 'condescending' and said it was a 'snide remark,' broadening that point to the whole of CNN.

'You get 24 hours of negative, anti-Trump, hysterical coverage on this network hat led in recent weeks to some spectacularly embarrassing false reporting from your network,' Miller said.

Tapper countered by saying, 'I think the viewers right now can ascertain who is being hysterical.'

The conversation further devolved as the CNN newsman tried asking the aide about Bannon's role in the White House and also about a letter Miller helped draft that articulated reasons to fire FBI Director James Comey, a move Trump made in May.

When Tapper got to the president's mental fitness, Miller turned it into a full-on slap of CNN, saying there was a 'crisis of legitimacy' and a 'toxic environment' at the network.

Miller also argued that the president's Saturday tweets, in which he boasted about his 'mental stability' and IQ, were helpful in arguing the point that he had the fortitude to do the job.

'The president's tweets absolutely reaffirm the plainspoken truth: A self-made billionaire revolutionized reality TV and tapped into something magical that is happening in the hearts of this country,' Miller said.

With that, Tapper scoffed.

'The president has an approval rating in the 30s,' the journalist said. 'I don't know what magical you're talking about.'

The two squabbled for a minute more, before Tapper had had enough.

'I get it,' the veteran journo said. 'There is one viewer that you care about right now. And you're obsequious, you're being a factotum, in order to please him.'

Tapper meant Trump.

Miller tried to protest, but Tapper quickly said, 'Thank you Stephen.' The camera panned away from the White House aide as Tapper started reading from the teleprompter, readying his audience the next segment.
A hunt is on for Peter McGlade (pictured) after he escaped from North Sea Camp near Boston, Lincolnshire, at 6.10pm yesterday

A convicted prisoner has absconded from a Lincolnshire open prison after jumping over a wall.

A hunt is on for Peter McGlade after he escaped from North Sea Camp near Boston, Lincolnshire, at 6.10pm yesterday evening.

Officers, a drone, dogs and air support have been drafted in as part of the search operation.

Police believe he may still be in the local area.

McGlade is described as being 5ft 5 tall, having brown hair, being clean shaven, having an oval shaped face, and a scar on his right hand.

He was last seen wearing dark clothing with possibly a green hoody.

Police are advising the public not to approach McGlade if they see him, but to instead call 999 quoting incident 286 of January 7.

The case is similar to a 2015 incident in which a brazen inmate walked out of the same prison before tricking a hotel to give him a free room for the night.

Douglas Ward, 26, dodged at least four roll calls at North Sea Camp Prison while he was living it up in the Grade II-listed boutique hotel with wife Eileen, 27.

A court heard the inmate - who was serving more than five years for firearms offences at the time - was only rumbled when suspicious hotel staff discovered his Facebook page listed his status as a 'serving prisoner'.

In a 2015 incident, Douglas Ward, 26, dodged at least four roll calls at North Sea Camp Prison while he was living it up in the Grade II-listed boutique hotel with wife Eileen, 27

By then, Ward had uploaded photographs of him and his wife drinking the contents of the mini-bar in their room at 15-bedroom Cley Hall Hotel, a Georgian property in the centre of Spalding, Lincolnshire.

A judge heard the pictures prompted a friend to ask Ward if he had been released from jail, only for the prisoner to brag that he was just 'out for the day'.

Ward was handed a concurrent 15-month sentence at Lincoln Crown Court for absconding, alongside a 900 Criminal Courts Charge and a 100 victim surcharge.
New York's JFK airport has been hit with delays for a fourth day running on Monday.

Travelers faced chaos after the airport was hit with blizzard conditions, a burst water pipe, plane crashes and an armed passenger trying to smuggle a gun past security in recent days.

The Port Authority are now warning of fresh delays at JFK Airport on Monday, with almost 60 flights delayed or cancelled.

The problems began on Thursday when the airport's snow teams weren't able to keep up with the 'bomb cyclone' which brought heavy snowfall and strong winds. JFK was closed, initially to reopen Thursday afternoon.

Huge piles of unclaimed luggage remain at JFK airport which has been hit with days of delays

Many passengers were forced to leave their bags behind as the luggage carousels were not working. Now a huge mountain of bags remain at the airport

Exhausted passengers lay down as they wait for their delayed Avianca flight at Terminal 4 on Monday

A passenger rests in the arrivals area of Terminal 4 near a huge pile of unclaimed luggage, Monday, as New York's JFK airport is hit with delays for a fourth day running on Monday

Avianca passengers wait for flights at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, Monday, where delays have continued after four days of chaos

The majority of international flights bound for JFK weren't due to arrive until the afternoon, when it was due to reopen, so set off as usual with almost no cancellations.

But the storm got much worse, forcing the airport to close completely until 7am on Friday - meaning dozens of flights already in the air had to divert with many simply returning to their point of origin. More than 6,000 flights were cancelled amid the chaos.

By the time the airport finally did reopen Friday, the dozens of diverted aircraft from Thursday all had to compete with the day's normal scheduled flights.

The result was a disaster. There simply was not enough availability to deal with double the amount of flights, meaning aircraft kept arriving but had nowhere to go, forcing air traffic controllers to direct them to unused runways and taxiways for extended periods of time resulting in very lengthy delays, the PointsGuy reported.

The delays were compounded on Sunday when a water mains pipe in Terminal 4 sprung a leak

Staff were forced to wade through the freezing floodwater at the terminal which was evacuated of passengers

Lost luggage is surrounded by water at the airport where passengers were forced to leave it behind. The leak caused a power outage at Terminal 4 on Sunday which reopened last night

Staff worked quickly to clean up the water which flooded the airport as temperatures plunged to around 5 F degrees

The reopening was compounded by further disasters - such as a plane needing to turn back for an emergency landing after a false alarm and a collision on the tarmac.

One Air China flight had to wait more than hours for a gate at Terminal 1 where it was eventually loaded via airstairs, rather than a jet bridge.

The backlog continued into Saturday where one Aeroflot flight say on a runway for nine hours before the crew finally requested someone come pick them up, and simply left the plane on the runway.

Eventually, the Port Authority stepped in and requested that the FAA stop all arrivals to the backlogged terminals, meaning every inbound flight had to call ahead to the dispatch centers to confirm there was a gate available for them when they landed.

But the mismanagement meant that many passengers had already been waiting hours for their flights.

Passenger Lily Crawford told Pix 11: 'People are sleeping on the ground, people are sitting on the ground. People have taken over wheelchairs. There are no outlets, people are running out of power on their phone.'

She added: 'It's complete chaos.'

Video and photos showed dozens of suitcases on the floor of the terminal as water spewed from the ceiling and onto computers and other technology in an arrivals area

The airport has been rife with chaos for the past weekend as many passengers remained stranded from canceled or delayed flights from Thursday's 'bomb cyclone' snowstorm. Water is seen castigating

Airport employees (left and right) were seen desperately trying to clean up the area

Chaos at @JFKairport terminal 4 after water main break. Listen to passengers describe what happened: It was just a madhouse. They were just like pushing people out. Nobody was moving. Everyone was confused. pic.twitter.com/Y9CdVQcCUX  CeFaan Kim (@CeFaanKim) January 7, 2018

The terminals with the worst delays, Terminal 1 and 4, banned all inbound flights until Sunday morning, forcing international flights once again to return to Europe or Asia.

But a 'cascading series of issues' including extreme cold, frozen equipment breakdowns, staff shortages and difficulties in baggage handling, stopped JFK from getting back on track.

A further delay came on Saturday, when a 61-year-old man, of Queens, was arrested for trying to smuggle a loaded, stolen gun through security. Staff spotted the loaded Sig Sauer P238 .38 caliber gun, which had been wrapped up in a coat, as it went through the conveyor belt of an X-ray machine at security, police said.

On Sunday, a burst mains pipe in Terminal 4 at New York's Kennedy Airport on Sunday caused further delays at the beleaguered airport trying to recover from the aftermath of a snowstorm that has stranded thousands of passengers.

The pipe break sent about three inches of water gushing onto the floor of the terminal.

Video shows streams cascading from a ceiling and people slogging through pools of water. Power to the affected areas was temporarily shut off for safety reasons and additional staffing and busing operations were deployed to assist travelers.

Crowds of angry passengers at the John F Kennedy airport descended into 'near riots' after being grounded for more than two days by the massive 'bomb cyclone' that battered the Northeast last week

Port Authority police officers were dispatched to break up a 'disturbance' over a canceled flight in Terminal 4, Virgin Atlantic tweeted Saturday night. Video (pictured) showed passengers questioning an employee at the airport

'We are sharing a gate with another airline, and they have just cancelled there flight, causing the disturbance and the police being called,' Virgin Atlantic tweeted just before midnight

The water system damage caused 143 flight cancellations. Passengers disembarking from international flights were processed through customs and then were forced to exit the airport without their bags because the baggage claim was not working.

Video and photos showed dozens of suitcases on the floor of the terminal as water spewed from the ceiling and onto computers and other technology in an arrivals area.

Airport employees were seen desperately trying to clean up the area.

The Terminal's arrivals section was reopened later in the evening.

Police were called in to break up 'disturbances' as tempers flared amid furious passengers who had been stranded for for days as the terminal was evacuated due to flooding.

The disturbance was reportedly caused by angry passengers of an XL Airways France flight, whose trip had been delayed for 2.5 days.

The disturbance was reportedly caused by angry passengers of an XL Airways France flight, whose trip had been delayed for 2.5 days

According to passenger, Jeremy Silver, the madness began when travelers learned of their canceled XL Airways France flight at gate B23 (pictured)

Passengers are seen waiting on information about their flights at gate B23

'We are sharing a gate with another airline, and they have just cancelled there flight, causing the disturbance and the police being called,' Virgin Atlantic tweeted just before midnight.

According to passenger, Jeremy Silver, the madness began when travelers learned of their canceled XL Airways France flight at gate B23.

Silver said the incident was a 'near riot' as he prepared to board a bus with Virgin Atlantic flyers whose flight was operating on time.

'It seems as if some punches were thrown as people jostled,' Silver told the New York Daily News.

'The crowd went nuts booing and shouting.'

Silver's flight was headed to London and Virgin had to transport passengers from the terminal to the aircraft via bus.

According to one passenger, travelers were 'literally protesting at the an Air China gate'.

'Then an Air France plane pulls up and the passengers lose it and block the boarding area. One pax saying they've been there for 3 days. Very bad situation at JFK,' the passenger said in a tweet.

A passenger on the plane, Benjamin Sutton, tweeted updates about the XL Airways flight. He tweeted the above photos as he and others were transported on a bus (left) to the aircraft (right)

The flight left shortly before noon Sunday and is expected to arrive in Paris at 1.20am Monday morning

'Update on flight SE041: flight departed JFK at 11:50am. Scheduled arrival at CDG: 00:20am on Jan. 8,' the airport tweeted

Video recorded by one passenger showed angry customers gathered around a JFK employee.

'@XLAirways_NA Fix this. We haven't slept in 2 days and we're all *really* pissed,' on user tweeted in the caption of the video.

Several people are heard in the video trying to get information from the employee.

A passenger on the plane, Benjamin Sutton, tweeted updates about the XL Airways flight.

'The @XLAirways_NA agents keep repeating that other airlines at @JFKairport are dealing with the same issues, but plenty of flights at neighboring gates have boarded and taken off in the meantime,' Sutton tweeted at 6.48am.

About four hours later, Sutton tweeted a photo showing passengers being bused to their XL Airways flight.

The flight left shortly before noon Sunday and is expected to arrive in Paris at 1.20am Monday morning.

Chaos reigns at John F Kennedy Airport as thousands of passengers are stranded due to bomb cyclone-related delays and cancellations

Passengers are packed in quite closely in certain terminals as they ride out the travel nightmare in which they have unwittingly found themselves

'Update on flight SE041: flight departed JFK at 11:50am. Scheduled arrival at CDG: 00:20am on Jan. 8,' the airport tweeted.

In another incident, a woman was recorded on video launching into profanity-laden tirade while waiting for her bags at 2.30am Sunday.

'I'm tired, man,' she shouted, as passengers described waiting hours for their luggage, only for their flight numbers to suddenly disappear from the boards.

A huge pile of lost and unclaimed baggage remains at JFK this morning after travelers could not be reunited with their bags.

'What happened at JFK Airport is unacceptable, and travelers expect and deserve better,' said Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton.

On Saturday, a China Southern plane was being towed at JFK when it clipped the right tail end of a Kuwait Airways plane before the latter was due to takeoff for an overnight flight around 12am Saturday morning, the Port Authority said on Twitter.

Both aircrafts, which were Boeing 777s, sustained damage. No one was injured.

Kuwait Airways tweeted in Arabic that their plane was made inoperable due to the crash.

A China Southern plane being towed along the tarmac at JFK airport clipped the right tail end of a Kuwait Airways plane early Saturday morning. Pictured is a scene from the incident's aftermath

Both planes sustained damage but no passengers on the Kuwait-bound flight were injured. Pictured is the China Southern plane

Pictured is debris from the crash that left one plane's passengers forced to stay in accommodation after their overnight flight was cancelled

The passengers on the Kuwait-bound flight were booked into hotels and will be rescheduled on different flights

Passengers on Kuwait Airways flight 118 were taken to hotels and alternative routes for them will be planned, NBC New York reported.

In a statement released before the water pipe break, the Port Authority said Saturday's cold 'created a cascading series of issues for the airlines and terminal operators.'

'These included frozen equipment breakdowns, difficulties in baggage handling, staff shortages and heavier than typical passenger loads,' the statement said.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said Monday it will investigate the water pipe break that added to the weather-related delays at Kennedy Airport and will 'hold all responsible parties accountable.'

'While the water pipe break that occurred appears to be weather-related, we have launched an investigation into the incident to determine exactly what occurred and why an internal pipe was not weather protected and whether any other failures contributed to this disruption.'

The situation added to the misery piled on travelers after a winter storm blasted New York on Thursday.

Passengers line up near the ticketing area of a terminal at JFK amid the airport's many cancellations and delays

The failure of baggage claim machines has caused the baggage claim process to be done manually - as in, by hand - greatly increasing the amount of time it takes for people to get their luggage

Frustrated: Passengers wait in the airport's Lufthansa terminal area amid the chaos

Carlos Koester, 52, was in New York for a week with his wife and two teens and just wanted to get home to Brazil.

'We love New York, but now we are stuck here. It's frustrating. The storm caught us and now we have been stranded here for 13 hours,' Koester told the Daily News on Sunday.

Passengers complained of being stranded on the tarmac for hours and then facing lengthy delays in baggage claim that made traveling, particularly with babies or the elderly, a misery.

Multiple trans-Atlantic flights simply gave up and went home, including an Aeroflot flight from Moscow that turned back over Iceland.

Customers were outraged over the airport staff's poor communication and baggage claim malfunctions causing all off-loading to be done by hand, according to the New York Daily News.

Instagram user zhxiang20 uploaded a video showing stranded passengers in the airport packed in like sardines.

Stranded passengers play cards and check their phones in an effort to pass the time

The New York City metropolitan area has seen temperatures hovering in the single and low double-digits over the past couple of days. Pictured in the foreground, a man sleeps

Pictured are dozens of suitcases piled atop one another at JFK

The crash comes amid general travel chaos at JFK airport ever since it closed on Thursday due to the 'bomb cyclone' that hit the East Coast. Pictured is a busy scene at a baggage claim

The airport has been plagued with travel delays and baggage claim malfunctions

Another user, Sua Lee, shows utter chaos in a video as people swarm around a JFK terminal in an effort to understand the travel nightmare unfolding around them.

Passengers told DailyMail.com on Friday of their travel nightmares due to the huge snowstorm, which caused more than 5,000 flight cancellations in and out of the US Thursday.

Teacher Jessica Holden, who was returning to New York on a Thomas Cook flight from Manchester, England, said: 'The fight was due to land at 1.55pm, it touched down at 4pm but we were sat on tarmac until 6pm.

'I waited for baggage, then at 7.30pmish they said 'Oh sorry, because the plane went into the wrong terminal we can't bring it in.''

'There was nothing since. It's now 11pm and we've just been told we won't get our baggage tonight. People are getting angry. I just want to go home.'

Gemma Bond, who is from the UK and was visiting New York City for a vacation, said: 'After my flight being cancelled due to JFK's closure I was very lucky to get on a later flight today which had us land at JFK at 5.50pm local time, you could see the airport and runways had masses of back log and that this wasn't going to be a quick exit.

Passenger Gemma Bond took this photo at JFK on Friday night as she was stuck on a plane for nearly three hours after landing

Crews can be seen trying the clear the snow from the runway in this photo snapped by flyer Gemma Bond on Friday night

Cars are covered in snow in the airport's parking lot in the borough of Queens, New York

'After 25 minutes we were informed it could be another 50 minutes it was actually another two hours plus.'

On Friday, an American Airlines flight bound for Cancun from JFK turned around for an emergency landing after someone on board said they saw a wing was on fire.

American Airlines officially said that the plane, a Boeing 738, needed to land due to a 'possible mechanical issue'.

And an Airbus A380 - the world's largest passenger jet - was en route to land at the JFK when it was diverted to Stewart Airport in Orange County on Thursday due to winds and whiteout conditions.

Port Authority said in a statement that it is 'working diligently with the FAA, airlines, and individual terminal operators to limit the arrival of flights into JFK Airport, until there are adequate gates available to handle the backlog of flights due to recovery of flight schedules in the wake of Thursday's storm'.

Charleston, South Carolina's airport has also been heavily affected by the storm.

The Southern, subtropical coastal city rarely sees snow but received four inches during the 'bomb cyclone'.

Forecasters said below-normal temperatures are likely to continue into early next week, predicting freezing rain from Kansas to Tennessee. Ice could complicate road transport.

Mount Washington, New Hampshire recorded the second-coldest temperature on earth early Saturday, minus 36 Fahrenheit.
Billionaire Ed Bass married his almost 40-years-younger girlfriend, Sasha Camacho, in two quiet ceremonies at the end of last year.

Bass, 72, and Camacho, 36, married once in Forth Worth on December 16 but would repeat their vows at a home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, just before Christmas.

District Judge David Evans wedded the duo, according to public records.

Billionaire Ed Bass, 72 married his girlfriend, 36-year-old Sasha Camacho, in two quiet ceremonies at the end of last year

The couple had a small party at the City Club of Forth Worth, on Thursday, that was hosted by Mercedes Bass

The couples did their vows at a home belonging to the Hyder family, according to close friends who told the Star Telegram. The Hyders are a prominent family in the Fort Worth area.

They had a small party at the City Club of Forth Worth, on Thursday, that was hosted by Mercedes Bass. She was married to the groom's older brother, Sid before their divorce in 2011.

Ed Bass is one of four sons of Nancy Lee and Perry R Bass - a wealthy business tycoon. The brothers also inherited part of their oil dynasty from uncle, Sid Richardson, but decided to parlay the inheritance to build their own wealth.

Forbes recently estimated Ed Bass' fortune at $2.6billion.

They married once in Forth Worth on December 16 but would repeat their vows at a home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, just before Christmas. Bass waves at Fort Worth Livestock Show in 2012 which he sponsored

In 1984 founded the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona.

The three acre project was a venture to potentially establish future life on Mars.

He was instrumental in the opening of the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in 1998. The 2,056-seat hall with its signature 48-foot-tall limestone angles quickly established the site as a landmark in the city.

Forbes recently estimated Ed Bass' fortune at $2.6billion

In 1984 he would found and become the lead financier for the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. The three acre project was a potential venture to establish future life on Mars

More recently, Bass has been a pusher for the construction of the $540million Dickies Arena in Forth Worth's Cultural District. It will house the Fort Worth Stock Show.

Just last year, Bass - along with the rest of his brothers - sold their oil company to ExxonMobil for $5.6billion in stock.

Also in 2017, he gave $30million to the University of Arizona so that they could continue to run the Biosphere and work to look into climate change.

His new bride is a community volunteer and self-proclaimed business consultant

His new bride is a community volunteer and self-proclaimed business consultant. Camacho lists the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a place of employment on her LinkedIn profile.

Claudia Sazcha Camacho - her legal name according to court documents - and her new husband have not kept their relationship a secret, but have never spoken publicly about it.

Both have been married previously.

Bass was married to wife, Vicki, but they divorced a while back. Camacho divorced back in 2009 in California, according to records.
Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had prostate cancer surgery last summer.

A source described as 'close to' Romney told CNN and then other news outlets that he 'was treated over the summer for prostate cancer. He was treated surgically by Dr. Thomas Ahlering at UC Irvine Hospital in California.'

'His prognosis is good; he was successfully treated,' the source added.

CNN reported that Romney was diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer last year, and that the cancer was removed before it could spread beyond Romney's prostate.

Romney's disclosure about his past health problem is likely a sign that he's preparing to run for the U.S. Senate seat in Utah that will be vacated by Orrin Hatch.

The White House said Friday that President Donald Trump spoke with Romney Thursday night, and they discussed Hatch.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was treated for prostate cancer last year; the disclosure may be a sign that he's clearing the decks before making a run for the U.S. Senate seeat being vacated by Orrin Hatch

CNN's Jake Tapper first broke the news on Twitter, providing details about Romney's diagnosis and treatment

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, moved to his mother's native Utah after he left office. A Mormon, he attended Brigham Young University there.

He has also been an outspoken Trump critic, branding him' 'a fraud' during the 2016 campaign who had 'neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.'

Romney dropped a hint about his Senate ambitions last week after Hatch announced his plan to retire, changing the location listed on his Twitter account from Massachusetts to Holladay, Utah.

Trump had urged Hatch, his 83-year-old longtime ally, to run for another term. But the senator said last week that 'every good fighter knows when to hang up the gloves.'

A source close to Romney told the Daily Beast that Romney is planning to run for the seat, but would not be announcing his candidacy anytime soon in deference to Hatch.

Scroll down for video

Before, after: Mitt Romney updated his Twitter bio to Holladay, UT hours after Senator Orrin Hatch announced he would not be seeking another term

Hatch said last week that he is retiring after the coming November election and won't run again

President Trump tweeted congratulations to Hatch, after he failed to prevent the 83-year-old from seeking another 6-year term

Romney could create real road blocks to the administration's agenda.

If he is elected in deep-red Utah, his role as a never-Trump voice could occasionally ally him with Democrats working to counter the president.

During his famous 2016 speech, Romney said: 'I'm afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart.'

'Dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark,' Romney said in the blistering remarks.

Trump responded at the time by labeling Romney a 'choke artist' who lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama  a 'winnable' race.

On Tuesday, Trump praised Hatch.

'Congratulations to Senator Orrin Hatch on an absolutely incredible career,' Trump wrote.

'He has been a tremendous supporter, and I will never forget the (beyond kind) statements he has made about me as President. He is my friend and he will be greatly missed in the U.S. Senate!'

Trump's statement referenced an emotional statement by Hatch praising the president who looked on at the White House upon Senate passage of a $1.5 trillion tax cut Hatch had a hand in crafting.

Hatch ignored President Trump's pleadings to seek reelection despite an intensive lobbying campaign that could have prevented the emergence of a potentially serious Republican overseer in Romney.

President-elect Donald Trump and Mitt Romney dined at Jean Georges restaurant, November 29, 2016 in New York City when Romney was under consideration for secretary of state

Hatch was elected in 1976, on a campaign that warned against the dangers of staying in office too long.

The president went out of his way to keep him in the chamber, lauding him repeatedly in public, and slicing away permanent environmental protection from huge swaths of land in Utah that had been designated as a national monument.

The president 'has the greatest and deepest amount of respect for Sen. Hatch,' White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday, adding that Trump was 'very sad to see Sen. Hatch leave.'

Sanders declined to answer whether Trump would campaign for whoever becomes the GOP nominee in the deep-red state.

'Obviously, I don't think we've made a determination in terms of campaigning, but the President certainly has the greatest and deepest amount of respect for Senator Hatch and his over four decades of experience in the Senate,' she said.

'He's particularly thankful for the senator's leadership and massive effort that he played, and the role that he played in getting the tax cut and reform package passed. And the President certainly praises his service and is very sad to see Senator Hatch leave and knows that he will certainly be missed.'
Storms brought rare rainfall to California on Monday and increased the risk of mudslides in fire-ravaged communities, driving property owners to stack sandbags over fears that more devastation could occur.

Authorities in an area known as northern wine country ordered evacuations farther south for towns below hillsides burned by the state's largest-ever wildfire.

Forecasters issued a flash flood watch for parts for Sonoma and Mendocino counties north of San Francisco and warned that heavy rainfall could trigger mudslides in those areas devastated by October wildfires.

The blazes leveled entire neighborhoods, killing 44 people and destroying more than 8,900 homes and other buildings.

Evacuations have been ordered for communities below hillsides charred by California's largest-ever wildfire

Residents of Montecito, CA prepare sand bags ahead of the expected floods

The mudslides could affect a number of towns between Santa Barbara and Ventura

The recent 'Thomas Fire' which devastated parts of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, have caused emergency services to evacuate residents in some areas ahead of potential flooding, mud slides and debris damage

Storms brought rain to California on Monday and increased the risk of mudslides in fire-ravaged communities in devastated northern wine country

A worker lays out a roll of wattle for erosion control in the wildfire damaged Coffey Park neighborhood Monday, in Santa Rosa, California

A yearslong drought eased in California last spring but hardly any measurable rain has fallen in the state over the past six months.

The extremely dry conditions and high winds last year led to some of the most destructive blazes on both ends of the state.

The storm coming in from the Gulf of Alaska could dump up to 4 inches of rain on Northern California areas still recovering from fires before clearing up by Tuesday evening, National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Anderson said.

'Everything is soaking into the ground at this time, but if it gets very heavy, it could trigger a flash flood warning,' Anderson said.

The storm moved in to the San Francisco Bay Area early Monday, snarling traffic during the morning commute and causing several crashes. No major injuries have been reported.

In this photo provided by Santa Barbara County Fire Department, a flash flood area sign is posted, as evacuations have been issued for several fire-ravaged communities

Authorities ordered evacuations farther south for towns below hillsides burned by the state's largest-ever wildfire

People fill up sandbags under the rain in Santa Barbara, California

Rain water pools where a Fountaingrove neighborhood home once stood

Sand bags were made available to all residents as heavy rain is expected over the next few days. Montecito is home to many celebrities including Golden Globe winner, Oprah Winfrey

Firefighters have control of what was one of the largest wildfires in California history but believe mudslides are on the way. The fire aftermath is seen above in Ventura on Christmas Day

Officials in the city of Santa Rosa, one of the areas hit hardest by the October wildfires, say crews are standing by in case they are needed.

Robert Lewin, director of Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management, urged residents of Summerland, Carpinteria and Montecito to leave by mid-Monday local time.

The hillside communities were evacuated last month as the massive Thomas Fire raged.

Mr Lewin said flash floods can turn normally dry creeks into destructive rivers of mud and debris that can wash out roads and destroy homes.

The National Weather Service also issued a winter weather advisory for portions of the Sierra Nevada above 7,000 feet, forecasting about 4 to 7 inches of snow and up to 1 to 2 feet on higher peaks Tuesday.

Members of the Santa Barbara Area Regional Task Force discuss plans while staged at Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara

Members of the Long Beach Fire Department Swift Water Rescue Team check equipment. The team will respond if needed for any area flooding in the Montecito or Carpinteria areas.

A woman walks in the rain at a vista point with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background

Bill Susel, 77, removes debris from a gully in back of his home on Spring Trail in Kagel Canyon, in preparation for expected heavy rains later

Rainwater flows down Alverstone Avenue in Ventura, California

The Thomas Fire, which has burned 280,000 acres and destroyed nearly 1,100 homes, is now landslide territory. The fire is seen above in Santa Barbara on December 13

It says travelers should prepare for difficult travel conditions, including gusty winds, low visibility and slick and snow-covered roads.

In Southern California, residents of the hillside communities of Montecito, Summerland and Carpinteria who evacuated flames and smoke in December were ordered to leave again because rain could wash dirt and debris into neighborhoods.

The wet and windy system moving ashore could soak much of the state and drop several inches in parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, where the Thomas fire has burned for more than a month and left hillsides bare.

About an inch of rain is forecast for downtown Los Angeles, the most in nearly a year.

The wet and windy system moving ashore could soak much of the state and drop several inches in parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, where the biggest California blaze has burned for more than a month

With a burned car in the foreground a worker finishes up erosion control efforts in the wildfire damaged Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa

Kyle Field installs rain wattles around his property as rain started falling in the area in Ventura. Though Field's home was destroyed in the Thomas Fire, he plans to rebuild
The White House rejected an apology from Steve Bannon, the president's former chief strategist, on Monday, saying there's not any conceivable 'way back' into Donald Trump's good graces for him.

Bannon apologized to President Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr, on Sunday, for slamming a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that's come under scrutiny from the feds as 'treasonous.' He claims now that he was talking about ex-campaign hand Paul Manafort, not Trump Jr, made he made the remarks to an author of a tell-all book.

Raj Shah, the top deputy White House press secretary, said on Monday, though, that on Fox News that President Trump's opinion 'hasn't changed' since Bannon's statement.

'Frankly, look, the president said it, the man has lost his mind, and good riddance,' Shah proclaimed.

On Air Force One, Hogan Gidley, another White House spokesman told reporters riding with President Trump on Monday afternoon, 'I dont believe theres any way back for Mr. Bannon at this point.

NO WAY BACK: The White House rejected a groveling apology from Steve Bannon, the president's former chief strategist, on Monday, saying there's not any conceivable 'way back' into Donald Trump's good graces for him

'When you go after somebodys family in the matter which he did, two of the presidents children are serving this nation, sacrificing in their service, it is repugnant, it is grotesque,' Gidley stated.

Hammering Bannon, Gidley said, 'I challenge anybody to go and talk about someone else's family and see if that person doesn't come back and come back hard.'

Bannon apologized to the Trumps on Sunday through the website Axios.

'I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency,' the Breitbart News executive said.

He also explained that when he labeled Trump Jr and Jared Kushner's meeting with a Russian lawyer 'treasonous,' he meant for that description to be attached to Paul Manafort, the campaign's chairman and someone who he said should have known better.

Bannon said his comments about the 'treasonous' Trump Tower meeting weren't meant for Donald Trump Jr, but rather former campaign chairman Paul Manafort (pictured), who would known what the 'duplicitous' and 'cunning' Russians were up to

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon (right) is trying to make things right with his former boss, President Donald Trump (left)

President Trump is seen returning to the White House after spending the weekend at Camp David. He received an apology from his former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon today

'My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate,' Bannon explained. 'He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends.'

'To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr,' Bannon told Axios.

Bannon has found himself isolated from Trumpworld in recent days, as author Michael Wolff's new book, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House' has hit bookshelves.

A Bannon insider told CNN Sunday that the former chief strategist had planned to attack Wolff in a statement, before the president started attacking him.

Bannon was an on-the-record source for the Wolff book.

'We think it's highly inappropriate,' Shah said on Fox News on Monday.

In the book, Bannon described the 2016 meeting between campaign aides and a group of Russians as 'treasonous' and 'unpatriotic.' He also predicted that the Russia probe, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, would focus on money laundering.

'Theyre going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,' Bannon said.

On Sunday, Bannon called Donald Trump, Jr 'a patriot and a good man' in his statement.

'He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around,' he said.

Heaping praise on the president, Bannon said, Trump, 'was the only candidate that could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus.'

Bannon also played up his loyalty to the president.

'My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda  as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama,' he said at one point.

'I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism; and remain ready to stand in the breech for this president's efforts to make America great again,' Bannon said at another.

The president has lashed out at Bannon publicly hours after an excerpt from Wolff's book containing the 'treasonous' passage hit the web.

'Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,' Trump said. 'When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.'

Later, Trump coined a new nickname for Bannon  Sloppy Steve  in tweets.

'Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job,' Trump tweeted. 'Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!'

As it smacked around Bannon last week, the White House said that Brietbart should 'consider' firing Bannon, too, putting the conservative activist on the ropes.

Axios also reported that the president wanted his surrogates to go on TV to 'bury Steve.'

Sunday morning Trump took no prisoners as he sent Senior Advisor Stephen Miller on CNN's State of the Union to rip into Bannon, an ally of his when they were both in the administration.

Miller called Bannon's description of the Trump Tower meeting 'grotesque.'

In a contentious back-and-forth with SOTU host Jake Tapper, Miller said Bannon was 'so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive.'

Trump heralded his 32-year-old aide with a tweet of appreciation, though not for his Bannon takedown, but for going rough-and-tumble with Tapper.

'Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration,' Trump wrote. 'Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!'

Shah was in the hot seat on Monday, appearing on Fox News.

'This book has little to no credibility. Its a total fabrication,' he said. 'We really think this book is just tabloid trash and really doesn't represent anything going on behind me.'
Adam Hettig, 32, was arrested on Saturday after allegedly robbing a Subway in Chili, New York

A parolee was arrested on Saturday after allegedly robbing a Subway restaurant at knifepoint while wearing his ankle monitor.

Adam Hettig, 32, was paroled in March after serving time for a burglary conviction.

Deputies in Chili, New York, responded to a robbery on Saturday and the suspect was described as a white male with blue eyes, and more than 6 feet tall, according to the Democrat and Chronicle.

Police say the suspect used a butcher knife to threaten an employee.

They were then notified by the Monroe Crime Analysis Center that Hettig's ankle monitor showed he had been in the restaurant at the time of the robbery.

A store clerk said that Hettig entered the Subway and used the restroom before going behind the counter.

'When I came out he was pushing up against the door, he pushed it open, and then he went around my back around the table, and he had put a knife to my throat,' said the employee to WHAM.

Police say the suspect used a butcher knife to threaten an employee at a Subway in Chili, New York

The clerk, who wishes to remain anonymous, said Hettig became agitated after demanding money.

'He got impatient, I don't know what he thought I was doing, but he got impatient and that's when he choked me,' said the employee. 'He had the knife in the right hand and choked me with his left (hand).'

Deputies searched Hettig's home and he was arrested without incident.

Police identified Hettig as a suspect based on the clerk's description and the ankle monitor he wore that showed he was at the restaurant

He also admitted to the robbery, according to police.

'It was a very violent robbery. He put the knife right to her throat, so it was good for us to get him taken care of and remove him from doing this to any other store clerks' said Sgt. Scott Walsh, an investigator with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.
A powerful thunderstorm rolled over Sydney on Tuesday morning, bringing heavy rain, more than 4,600 lightning strikes and strong winds.

The brunt of the storm lashed the western suburbs overnight, bringing up to 16mm of rain, uprooting trees and knocking off roof tiles near Blacktown.

About 6,800 properties in Bankstown lost power at about 4.30am, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

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A powerful thunderstorm rolled over Sydney on Tuesday morning, bringing heavy rain, more than 4,600 lighting strikes and strong winds (pictured)

By 5am, the thunderstorm made its way to the inner-city, bringing more than 6mm of rainfall in three hours

The brunt of the storm lashed the western suburbs overnight, bringing up to 16mm of rain, uprooting trees and knocking off roof tiles near Blacktown (pictured)

Emergency crews are still working to restore power to 700 customers in Sefton and Chester Hill, 1,300 homes in the Dudley and Whitebridge, 1,400 customers in Narara, Niagara Park and Ourimbah, and 600 customers in Castle Cove and Roseville Chase, according to Ausgrid.

A lightening trike knocked out power to another 1,000 homes in Westleigh, Thornleigh and Hornsby.

By 5am, the thunderstorm made its way to the inner-city, bringing more than 6mm of rainfall in three hours.

Weatherzone reported 4649 lightning strikes between 3am and 6am over Sydney on Tuesday.

Passengers can expect slight delays on domestic flights out of Sydney Airport, but international and domestic arrivals are on time, an airport spokesman said.

Meanwhile, rail commuters on Sydney's north shore T1 line can expect delays.

'It's quite an active lightning system over Sydney,' BOM forecaster Jordan Notara said.

He said the lightning will die down in the next couple of hours and build up again on Tuesday afternoon.

'It's a typical summer scenario,' he said.

Weatherzone reported 4649 lightning strikes between 3am and 6am over Sydney on Tuesday

About 6,800 properties in Bankstown lost power at about 4.30am

Pictured is an uprooted tree in Blacktown in Sydney's west

Passengers can expect slight delays on domestic flights out of Sydney Airport, but international and domestic arrivals are on time

The SES has warned NSW residents to take precautions as the storm activity sticks around.

Residents are warned to secure outdoor furniture, tie down trampolines and stay inside and keep away from windows.

Despite the heavy rainfall, Tuesday's temperature is expected to tip 30C in the city and reach the high 30s around 12pm on Tuesday.

'Today will feel quite humid,' Mr Cronje told the Sydney Morning Herald.

'We're not expecting the sea breeze that helped cool things down a bit yesterday.'

A second round of storms will roll in in the early evening, bringing cool air.

Temperatures will drop between 6C and 8C at night and will remain in the mid-20s on Wednesday.

A lightening trike knocked out power to another 1,000 homes in Westleigh, Thornleigh and Hornsby

Sydney was reportedly the hottest place on earth on Sunday with Penrith taking out the title of the hottest part of the city on Sunday, reaching 47.3C just after 2.30 pm

The thunderstorms come after days of extreme heat.

Temperatures soared to the mid-30s in Sydney on Monday, with the western suburbs reaching 40C, after the city sweated through its hottest day in almost 80 years.

Sydney was reportedly the hottest place on earth on Sunday with Penrith taking out the title of the hottest part of the city on Sunday, reaching 47.3C just after 2.30 pm.

Richmond reached 46.3C just after 2.30pm while the temperature in Bankstown broke 45C.

More than 50 new fires were sparked on Sunday, with 21 blazes continuing to burn into Monday, according to the RFS, and a severe fire danger rating was issued for the Hunter region.

The NSW Rural Fire Service warned residents to prepare their bushfire plans. If people are considering leaving their homes they should 'leave early', the RFS said.
Five men including a former soldier and a woman have been charged with belonging to banned far-right terror group National Action.

Joel Wilmore, 24, from Stockport, was a Reservist in the British Army and was detained along with five others during a series of raids across the country last week.

Darren Fletcher, 28, from Wolverhampton, Nathan Pryke, 26, from Cambridge, Daniel Bogunovic, 26, from Leicester, Adam Thomas, 21, and Claudia Patatas, 28, both from Banbury, are all due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Tuesday.

A police spokesman said all six accused had been charged with being a member of a proscribed organisation contrary to section 11 of the Terrorism Act.

The Far-right group National Action has been banned under terrorism laws (stock photograph)

It comes after anti-terror police swooped on a number of addresses and the arrested suspects on January 3.

West Midlands Police said the raids were pre-planned and intelligence-led and insisted there is no threat to public safety.

Mr Wilmore joined the Royal Logistics Corp in June 2011 but was discharged in 2013 after he failed to fulfil basic training obligations, according to Sky News.

Mr Thomas was also charged with possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

And Mr Fletcher was also charged with five counts of breaching an anti-social behaviour order.

A police spokesman last week: 'All six have been detained on suspicion of being a member of a proscribed organisation (National Action) contrary to sec 11 of the Terrorism Act.'

The group of six people have now been charged with belonging to banned far-right terror group National Action

The move is the latest in a wave of arrests of alleged National Action members since the group was banned by the Government.

Counter-terror police have detained dozens of people, including some on suspicion of plotting terror attacks, since the order formally came into effect.

A string of counter-terrorism units were involved in the operation, including from the West Midlands, North West, South East and East England.
Venus Romero Iraheta, 18, pleaded guilty to the murder in Virginia on Monday

A teen female MS-13 gang member has pleaded guilty to the revenge killing of another girl after telling her she 'would see her in hell' and stabbing her in savage vengeance for her own boyfriend's death.

Venus Romero Iraheta, 18, pleaded guilty to the murder in Fairfax County, Virginia on Monday, one year to the day after brutally stabbing 15-year-old Damaris A. Reyes Rivas 13 times.

Prosecutors said Iraheta was the main aggressor in the gruesome gang torture and slaying, which was captured on cell phone video. A total of 10 people have been charged in the murder.

Iraheta, then 17, believed Damaris had lured her boyfriend, Christian Sosa Rivas, to his death.

Both Iraheta and Rivas were members of MS-13, an ultra-violent transnational gang based in Central America that has terrorized parts of Maryland and Northern Virginia, investigators said.

Killed: Damaris A. Reyes Rivas, 15, was tortured and stabbed 13 times on January 8, 2017

Authorities suspect that Rivas's death was ordered by top ranking members of the group in El Salvador, supposedly upset over his claim that he was a leading member of the group.

His body wasn't found by police until days later, on January 12, in the icy Potomac River.

In revenge for her supposed role in Rivas' murder, Iraheta lured Damaris to an area near Lake Accotink Park in Fairfax County on the night of January 8, 2017 with an offer to smoke marijuana, according to prosecutors.

Three ghoulish cell phone videos, which have been previously played or described in court, show parts of what happened next.

Jose Cerrato, then 17, shot the videos to prove his loyalty to MS-13, prosecutors said.

Killer: Iraheta was one of 10 people involved in the gruesome murder of Damaris, prosecutors say. She supposedly blamed Damaris for luring her boyfriend to his death days earlier

Iraheta lured Damaris to a wooded area near this park with an offer to smoke weed together, prosecutors say. Three gruesome cell phone videos show the gang torturing the girl

The first video shows the 10 gang members surrounding Damaris in a wooded area of the park, screaming in Spanish and berating her, the Washington Post reported.

One gang member snaps a cigar cutter menacingly at the girl and tells her she's should loose a finger.

A second video shows Damaris stripped of her shirt and shoes, standing shivering in the cold while the group interrogates her about Rivas' death.

Iraheta wields a large hunting knife in the video and a voice is heard off-camera urging 'stick the steel in her' in Spanish.

The cruel torture then moved to one final location, near a Beltway overpass.

Iraheta a recited her full name to ensure Damaris knew her killer's name and 'told the victim she would never forgive her and would see her in hell', an FBI agent testified based on witness interviews.

Killer Iraheta (left) told victim Damaris (right) that 'she would never forgive her and would see her in hell', an FBI agent testified

The third video shows the sickening aftermath of the stabbing, with Damaris lying bloody on her back amid a pile of leaves.

One gang member, Wilmer A. Sanchez-Serrano, is then allegedly seen jamming a large sharpened stick into the girl's throat over and over before the video cuts off abruptly.

Of the others charged in the case, three pleaded guilty in October and are set to be sentenced on May 5.

Cindy Blanco Hernandez, 19, pleaded guilty to two counts of abduction by force and the abduction of another juvenile female.

Aldair Miranda Carcamo, 18, pleaded guilty to gang participation and two counts of abduction by force. Emerson Fugon Lopez, 17, pleaded guilty to abduction in connection with Alexandra's death and gang participation.

Four other suspects are set for trial in the coming months.

If Iraheta had gone to trial for the murder, she likely would have faced damning testimony from the others involved.

She is set to be sentenced on May 25, and faces a maximum of life in prison plus 20 years.
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Gay couples across the country locked lips at the stroke of midnight as the new Marriage Act officially became legal in Australia.

In an historic moment for the Australian gay community and following a powerful campaign, many same-sex couples signed their names on marriage certificates during spectacular midnight nuptials on January 9.

Newlyweds Luke Sullivan and Craig Burns were one of the first to tie the knot in Queensland during a touching night-time ceremony which saw the pair exchange vows exactly one minute after the law came into effect.

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Newlyweds Luke Sullivan (left) and Craig Burns (right) were one of the first to tie the knot in Queensland during a touching night-time ceremony which saw the pair exchange vows exactly one minute after the law came into effect

The couple (pictured) tied the knot at one minute past midnight in a midnight ceremony in front of 55 friends and family members

The athletes married in a beautiful ceremony at the Summergrove Estate, in the Tweed Coast Hinterland, at 12am in front of 55 family members and friends.

Daylight savings and the time difference meant the grooms were one of the first couples in the country to officially be recognised as married under Australian law.

'It's a very surreal feeling,' an emotional Craig said in the lead-up to the event.

In a reverse-style wedding event, the couple hosted a pre-ceremony reception until 11.30pm when their marriage was officiated under a backdrop of fireworks.

It is a dream both Craig and Luke - who met online three years ago - thought may never become a reality.

The athletes married in a beautiful ceremony at the Summergrove Estate, in the Tweed Coast Hinterland, at 12am in front of 55 family members and friends

Daylight savings and the time difference meant the grooms were one of the first couples in the country to officially be recognised as married under Australian law

'It's a very surreal feeling,' an emotional Craig (pictured left with partner Luke) said in the lead-up to the event

In a reverse-style wedding event, the couple hosted a pre-ceremony reception until 11.30pm when their marriage was officiated under a backdrop of fireworks

'I couldn't help but have this thought, "I might not have this opportunity",' Luke told 7news before his wedding.

The accomplished athletes became engaged in March 2016 after a touching proposal set on the rocks in Byron Bay, NSW, with both men dressed in Speedos as Craig popped the question on one knee.

Their $50,000 nuptials were gifted by businesses across the state who donated their services towards one of the first legal same-sex weddings.

Craig, a sprinter, hopes to qualify for the next Commonwealth Games and will represent Queensland at the 2018 Queen's Baton Relay in March.

It is a dream both Craig (right) and Luke (left) - who met online three years ago - thought may never become a reality

'I couldn't help but have this thought, "I might not have this opportunity",' Luke (left) told 7news before his wedding

The accomplished athletes became engaged in March 2016 after a touching proposal set on the rocks in Byron Bay, NSW, with both men dressed in Speedos as Craig popped the question on one knee

Their $50,000 nuptials were gifted by businesses across the state who donated their services towards one of the first legal same-sex weddings

Teegan Daly and her now-wife Mahatia 'Tie' Minnicon also officially tied the knot in a moving midnight ceremony on January 9.

The couple wed in Melbourne and celebrated until 3am in the morning.

For the historic occasion, Teegan wore a gold jumpsuit and her partner Mahatia opted for a traditional white gown.

Same-sex marriage legislation cleared parliament on December 7, nearly a month after it was revealed 61.6 per cent of participants in a voluntary postal survey backed the change.

Amid scenes of jubilation same-sex couples were quick to lodge formal intentions to wed and while some were granted exemptions to the four-week waiting period, Tuesday is the first official day ceremonies can take place.

Craig, (right) a sprinter, hopes to qualify for the next Commonwealth Games and will represent Queensland at the 2018 Queen's Baton Relay in March

Australian Commonwealth Games sprinter Craig Burns (left) and fiance Luke Sullivan (right) embrace before their marriage ceremony

Craig and Luke (pictured left) pose in a photobooth ahead of their marriage ceremony at Summergrove Estate

The happy couple waited nearly two years after their engagement for the new Australian Marriage Act to come into effect

In Newcastle, 32-year-old Rebecca Hickson will marry her partner of nine years Sarah Turnbull, 34.

The pair said they wanted to be part of history and planned to also be one of the first couples to tie the knot in a ceremony from 8am.

'We've already had our big hoo-ha ceremony three years ago but now we get to declare our love for each other again and have it recognised as a real union,' Rebecca said.

She described the build-up to the postal vote deadline as 'a horrible time' but said the two are now excited to move beyond it.

Australian Commonwealth Games sprinter Craig (left) and Luke (right) pose ahead of their marriage ceremony at Summergrove Estate, New South Wales on January 8, 2018

Craig (right) and Luke (left) are congratulated by friends after exchanging vows at their marriage ceremony

The accomplished athletes became engaged in March 2016 after a touching proposal set on the rocks in Byron Bay, NSW, with both men dressed in tiny Speedos as Craig (left) bent down on one knee

Melbourne couple Ron Van Houwelingen, 50, and Antony McManus, 53, echoed Ms Hickson's feelings about the postal vote and said no country should have to endure the same 'horrendous' process to legalise gay marriage.

On Tuesday, the long-time activists will also look forward and tie the knot where they first met as performing arts students three decades ago - at the former Prahran College of TAFE's David Williamson Theatre.

'I'm looking really forward to celebrating the victory,' Ron said.

It is a dream both Craig (left) and Luke (right) - who met online three years ago - thought may never become a reality

Pictured is Craig and Luke's official marriage certificate which was legally recognised on January 9

The loving couple celebrated well into the night after exchanging vows at one minute past midnight

Newlywed Luke Sullivan (pictured) is embraced by his mother in law Robyn Burns before his midnight ceremony

The couple's (pictured) athletic aspirations will delay their honeymoon until the end of the year

Australian Commonwealth Games sprinter Craig (left)) and Luke (right) walk together before their marriage ceremony at Summergrove Estate

The two have already held more than a dozen commitment ceremonies, including in 1993 on their sixth anniversary when gay marriage 'wasn't on the radar'.

'I suppose it's been a wedding planned for 30 years but we've had really a month to get things together,' he added

'It's been quite hectic trying to organise that in such a short amount of time.

Craig Burns is walked down the aisle by his mother Robyn before his marriage ceremony in Queensland

Craig Burns (left) and fiance Luke Sullivan (right) are congratulated by friends at their marriage ceremony at Summergrove Estate

Australian Commonwealth Games sprinters Craig and Luke Sullivan pose with their parents Rob and Robyn Burns (right) and John and Sue Sullivan

Gillian Brady and Lisa Goldsmith pose after the wedding ceremony at The Court on January 9, 2018 in Perth, Australia

Lisa Goldsmith and Gillian Brady embrace during their touching wedding ceremony at The Court on Tuesday

Lisa Goldsmith and Gillian Brady during the wedding ceremony at The Court on January 9, 2018 in Perth, Australia

The loving couple waited years to finally tie the know after the Australian Marriage Act was finally changed

The couple decided to tie the knot the day the Marriage Act was officially changed on January 9

Couples across Australia wed in midnight ceremonies as the Australian Marriage Act legalising same-sex marriage took effect on January 9

In an historic moment for the Australian gay community and following a powerful campaign, many same-sex couples signed their names on marriage certificates during spectacular midnight nuptials on January 9

Same-sex couple Lisa Goldsmith and Gillian Brady also took the opportunity to wed on January 9 in a touching ceremony at The Court.

The Perth brides married in front of a small group of friends and family with Gillian dressed in a dapper suit while Lisa chose a beautiful white dress.

Sarah Turnbull and Rebecca Hickson were quick to exchange vows too and married in a beautiful ceremony in Newcastle, Tuesday, January 9, 2018.

Today is the first official day same-sex marriage ceremonies can take place in Australia after legislation was passed in parliament in December

Sarah Turnbull (left) and Rebecca Hickson pose for a photograph with their Certificate of Marriage after being married in a ceremony in Newcastle, Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Today is the first official day same-sex marriage ceremonies can take place in Australia after legislation was passed in parliament in December

Sarah Turnbull and Rebecca Hickson were quick to exchange vows too and married in a beautiful ceremony in Newcastle, Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Rebecca Hickson (left) and Sarah Turnbull (right) married in a ceremony in Newcastle, Australia

Both brides opted to wear stunning white gowns during their historic wedding on the day the Marriage Act was changed
One of two men suspected of punching a passenger at Manhattan's busy Union Square subway station - which resulted in the victim getting struck by a train - on Monday appeared in court, where his lawyer praised him as a 'terrific kid.'

Benjamin Gonzalez, 24, of Queens, surrendered to police last Wednesday - more than two weeks after he and another man who has not been identified allegedly attacked Brooklyn artist Francis Christie.

According to police, just before 3am on December 16, Christie was waiting for a Brooklyn-bound Q train at Union Square on his way home from a Christmas party when he was accosted by two men who punched him in the head.

Vicious attack: Benjamin Gonzalez, 24 (pictured in surveillance video, left) is suspected of punching Brooklyn artist Francis Christie (right) on December 16

Christie collapsed to the floor, with his head hanging over the edge of the platform, where the southbound Q train clipped him.

Gonzalez then allegedly pulled up Christies battered head and struck him a second time.

Surveillance video at the station captured the two suspects fleeing after the vicious attack.

The victims skull was fractured but he survived and was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he awakened later not remembering what had happened to him.

ABC Eyewitness News later reported that the victim has sustained brain trauma and fractures to his eye sockets, and his nose was bleeding profusely.

Surveillance video at Union Square station captured Gonzalez and his alleged accomplice (seen in foreground) fleeing after a Q train struck their victim in the head

A lawyer representing Gonzalez (left) said in court the 24-year-old suspect was 'one semester shy of graduating college.' The second suspect (right) has not been named

Christies mother, Joy Wells, who lives in Colorado and runs a horse farm, told New York Daily News that more than two weeks after the attack, her son remains at the hospital and the pace of his recovery has been slow.

Mrs Wells was also dealing with the news that her Army veteran husband had contracted pneumonia and had to be rushed to the intensive care unit in Colorado while she was in New York looking after her son, who is also her only child.

The woman recalled that before the December 16 attack, her son was excited about an upcoming art show in Greenpoint, where he was to present some of his latest works painted with a new chrome pen.

Meanwhile, Christie's alleged assailant Gonzalez appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court, where prosecutors said they have yet to indict him for the subway attack. He faces charges of assault and reckless endangerment.

His lawyer said the 24-year-old suspect was 'one semester shy of graduating college' and described the clean-cut, bespectacled young man as a 'terrific kid.'

Gonzalez remains free on $100,000 bail and he is due back in court on February 21.
Commuters are facing lengthy one-hour train delays after too many Sydney drivers called in sick or are on holidays.

Sydney Trains wrote on Twitter the delays are due to 'staff availability' and commuters should allow extra travel time for 'flow on delays'.

About 70 train drivers called in sick Tuesday with Sydney Trains CEO Howard Collins telling reporters the drivers have proper illnesses.

While some commuters are arriving an hour early to beat the delays, carriage overcrowding means people have been turned away from catching their train, Sunrise reported.

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Commuters are facing lengthy train delays after too many Sydney drivers called in sick

Commuters are reportedly being turned away from catching their train due to overcrowding

Some trains are not stopping at all stations and may change 'at short notice' Sydney Trains said

Some commuters are arriving hours early to beat delays but have been stuck on slow services

Thousands of commuters have been left stranded after lengthy delays and cancelled train services hit Sydney as many workers head back to work for the first time after holidays

With many people heading back to work for the first time this week after the holidays, thousands have been left stranded as some trains are not stopping at usual stations and may change 'at short notice', according to Sydney Trains.

There were 18 train cancellations across the city on Monday because of staff calling in sick and lack of staff to cover the shifts.

'We are seeing high levels of sickness of our train drivers ... but we are managing that well,' Mr Collins told 7 News.

The stormy weather also contributed to delays on the north shore line after lightening strikes caused damage to signal equipment.

Buses replaced trains early Tuesday morning between Chatswood and Gordon but train services have since resumed.

Commuters have taken to social media to share their outrage over the delays, many saying the train service is 'utterly incompetent'.

'First you cancel a s***load of services this morning, then the rest are f***ing delayed. Get your s*** together and stop blaming staff for your inability to formulate a functional roster,' one person wrote.

There were 18 train cancellations across the city on Monday because of staff calling in sick

'Caught the train to work Tuesday morning. Arrived Wednesday afternoon,' another wrote.

'Left home at 7.30am ... it's 9.20am and I'm still on the train to work. Snail speed between Central and Museum, literally one stop! SydneyTrains delays are ridiculous. Awful service,' someone wrote on Twitter.

'I have never used a more incompetent public transport in my life,' one shared.

'Usual train service - disappeared. Next service, 30 [minutes] after delays. Whilst on the train - changes to stops,' another wrote.
A White House spokesman said Monday that when President Donald Trump has his annual physical on Friday, a mental health evaluation won't be part of the routine.

Spokesman Hogan Gidley swatted away the question with a curt 'no' as he briefed reporters aboard Air Force One.

Trump, 71, will undergo a routine checkup at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center near Washington, D.C.

Gidley also defended Trump's description of himself as a 'stable genius,' saying the choice of words was a direct response to how reporters misunderstand him.

'Most of the press calls him unstable and stupid,' deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said.

'But the record shows quite a difference, than what the media is trying to portray. He comes back with exactly what he is. He's brilliant, not just in the business world, but as a political tactician, as a president. The accomplishments speak for themselves."

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Gidley said journalists who speculate about the state of the president's mental health are 'ridiculous' and 'repugnant,' particularly those who devote stories and broadcast interviews to doctors who have no firsthand knowledge to share.

It's an 'absolute dereliction of duty for journalists to report, as fact, psychiatrists who have never sat down with the president [or] have a conversation with him,' he said.

'The people who are in with him consistently talk about how incredible he is. I've met with him [on] multiple occasions. He's sharp as a tack, he is a workhorse. He demands his staff to be the same way,' Gidley added.

But Democrats, he complained, repeat talking points holding that 'Republicans are just stupid, cant accomplish things and dont have the capacity to serve.'

Trump swatted down claims of mental instability over the weekend, calling himself 'a very stable genius' and 'like, really smart.'

In a series of Saturday morning tweets, Trump played defense in his battle with the author of a new book that painted a chaotic and dysfunctional picture of his campaign and the early months of his presidency.

'Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,' Trump tweeted.

The commander-in-chief added that although doubts about his mental capacity have been frequently raised by his critics, he proved them wrong with his 'successful' career in television and business and his stunning victory in the 2016 election.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Trump called himself "really smart' and 'a very stable genius'

'I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!' he said

Questions surrounding Trump's competence for office intensified following the release of 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House' by Michael Wolff, which included shocking claims, including doubts among Trump's senior aides about his mental fitness in the role of 'leader of the free world.'

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced questions three days in a row about Trump's mental health and his ability to serve as commander-in-chief.

Sanders said that what 'is really mentally unstable is people that don't see the positive impact that this president is having on the country.'

Trump's father, Fred Trump, died in 1999 after a six-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease, a degenerative brain-wasting condition.

DailyMail.com asked Trump about it during an August 2015 campaign press conference in New Hampshire.

'He was 88 years when he developed it, and he died at 94,' Trump observed at the time.

The president is currently 71.

Asked if he had any concerns about his own mental health, he replied: 'No. Not whatsoever.'

Donald Trump, 17, said on August 19, 2015 that although his father died following a six-year battle with Alzheimer's Disease, he wasn't diagnosed until age 88

Joe Scarborough (right) said Monday that he's tried twice to write in his Washington Post column about claims that Donald Trump has dementia, but the newspaper censored him

The 'Morning Joe' host interviewed author Michael Wolff (shown) about his new book 'Fire and Fury'

'My mother was 88, 89, and she was in amazingly great health. And my father, too, was in great health. They lived long lives.'

'Morning Joe' co-host Joe Scarborough said Monday it's an open secret that Trump is losing his mind, and The Washington Post has steadfastly refused to let anyone write about it in its pages.

'I've written twice in my column a quote about one of the people closest to Donald Trump during the campaign saying he's got early stage of dementia,' Scarborough said.

'But twice The Washington Post hasn't  would not let me put that in my column,' he added.

Fred Trump is seen at right in 1987, six years before his Alzheimer's diagnosis, along with Trump, his first wife Ivana, and his mother Mary

Wolff wrote in his book that nearly everyone who is regularly around the president is aware of his declining mental state.

'Until your book came out, this was something we were not allowed to speak about,' Scarborough told him.

Wolff said most journalists who cover the White House daily are uncomfortable writing about such an explosive claim because it would shut off their access to the administration.

But a book's author, he argued, doesn't have that problem.

'You can't say what you know, or all that you know, because you have to go back the next day,' Wolff said, adding that 'I could say it because I'm not going back.'
The White House ripped as 'repugnant' attacks on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, saying their 'sacrificing' service to the nation should shield them from criticism.

The defense of the 'sacrificing' power couple came amid new charges in Michael Wolff's book against the two, along with slaps at Don Jr. and Eric Trump, and follow Steve Bannon's apology and claim that he wasn't talking about Don Jr. when he called a meeting with Russian 'treasonous.'

'When you go after somebody's family, in the manner in which he did  two of the President's children who are serving this nation, sacrificing in their service  it is repugnant, it is grotesque,' White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters, after getting asked on Air Force One about Bannon's apology.

Ivanka Trump walks with her husband, White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, toward Marine One while departing with her father President Donald Trump on February 17, 2017 to South Carolina. The White House said they should not be attacked because of their 'sacrificing' for the nation

'And I challenge anybody to go and talk about someone else's family and see if that person doesn't come back and come back hard,' he said, defending the pushback, which included an extraordinary statement from the President attacking Bannon, his former chief White House strategist.

Gidley was pressed about Ivanka and Kushner's sacrifice. Both moved from New York and set up shop just steps from the Oval Office, declining government salaries. Both have traveled the world with their father, visiting dignitaries and palaces. Kushner has focused on Middle East peace and other topics, while Ivanka has weighed in on tax reform and issues surrounding working women.

'I'm sorry, well, they both gave up personal and private lives to come work at the White House and work for the American people,' Gidley said. 'They do that every day. And it's ridiculous for anyone to try and attack what they do for this nation.'

Wolff in his book, 'Fire and Fury,' says Trump considered Kushner 'a suck-up' and that 'Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.' It also reports that Trump as president was considering Kushner for Secretary of State, and that commentator Ann Coulter told Trump: 'Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can't. You just can't hire your children.'

STOP THROWING SHADE: White House senior advisor Jared Kushner (R) and Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the US president, stand on the runway at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv

THIS JOB IS A DOWNER: Ivanka Trump (R) and her husband Jared Kushner step off Air Force One upon arrival at Chopin Airport in Warsaw, Poland on July 5, 2017

THE TRAVEL, THE INCONVENIENCE ... The daughter of US President Donald Trump Ivanka Trump (R) and her husband White House senior advisor Jared Kushner make their wave from Air Force One to Marina One upon arrival at the airport in Hamburg, Germany

BACK OFF: Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser, center right, and his wife Ivanka Trump, assistant to U.S. President Donald Trump, center left, arrive for the morning sessions during the Allen & Co. Media and Technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho

The claim that Ivanka and her husband should be shielded from attacks comes days after a report that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Kushner Companies for the firm's use of a visa program that lets wealthy foreigners invest and get 'green cards' in return.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the company was asked about its use of the EB-5 program in May 2017.

Federal prosecutors in New York also had asked about the firms use of the program to secure investors willing to fork over $500,000.

Last year, it was reported that Kushner's sister, Nicole, pitched Chinese investors in Shanghai about investing in the company's two-tour project in New Jersey known as One Journal Square.

'Kushner Cos utilized the program, fully complied with its rules and regulations, and did nothing improper. We are cooperating with legal requests for information,' according to the firm.
The Google employee who was fired last summer over his sexist memo explaining why women are 'biologically' less likely to succeed, is now suing the tech giant claiming it discriminates against conservative white men.

Former software engineer James Damore argues he was 'singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated' after his ten page internal memo on diversity was leaked.

Damore was fired in August shortly after the memo went viral and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who cut a family vacation short to deal with the fall out, released a statement saying the former employee had violated their code of conduct and 'cross(ed) the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.'

Now Damore is suing Google, claiming that it discriminates against conservative white men.

Former software engineer James Damore (pictured) argues he was 'singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated' after his ten page internal memo on diversity was leaked

He is now suing the tech giant claiming it discriminates against conservative white men

The suit, filed by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Republican National Committee's committeewoman for California,in Santa Clara Superior Court, also names another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, as a plaintiff.

It argues that by trying to make the workplace more diverse, and equalize pay and the number of women in the tech firm, that white males were suffering.

'Google's management goes to extreme  and illegal  lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google,' the suit, obtained by Buzzfeed, reads.

The lengthy complaint, which includes communications from other Google employees criticizing Damore for his sexist memo, paints him as the perfect employee.

It describes how he received eight performance related bonuses after joining the company in 2013 and a $150,000 annual stock bonus.

But it says he became unhappy about the company's steps to help minorities into tech.

CEO Sundar Pichai said in August the engineer had violated Google's code of conduct by 'advancing harmful gender stereotypes'

'Damore was surprised by Google's position on blatantly taking gender into consideration during the hiring and promotion processes, and in publicly shaming Google business units for failing to achieve numerical gender parity,' reads the suit.

It highlights a talk given by Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat and Human Resources Director Eileen Naughton in March 2017 which reportedly 'shamed' departments with less than a 50 per cent female workforce.

Damore also claimed in the suit he felt pressured to attend diversity training events because he said that bosses had made it clear that embracing diversity was imprtant when considering promotion.

But when he attended, he felt like his complaints were not heard. He also complained that Google, a 'liberal' company was biased against conservatives such as himself.

The suit states that those holding the diversity events asked for feedback, which is when he wrote his memo, which he also forwarded to several different internal Google discussion forums.

After a coworker leaked the memo, Damore claims in his lawsuit he was threatened and insulted by his coworkers, including one who emailed him calling him a 'terrible person' with 'misogynistic' views and promising to 'hound' him until one of them was fired.

Damore was eventually fired in August although he claims management did not identify 'any Google policy or procedure that Damore had violated,' the suit reads.

However, Damore was on an at-will contract at the time, meaning his employers did not have to prove he'd violated policy.

Damore, who graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a doctoral degree in systems biology, first had his 3,300-word manifesto published by technology news site Motherboard. It noted that women could not get ahead at Google because of biological differences.

It prompted backlash from Google's new head of diversity, Danielle Brown, who denounced the memo in her own note to staff.

She said the memo 'advanced incorrect assumptions about gender' and did not display a viewpoint 'that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages'.

'DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN' ACCORDING TO JAMES DAMORE'S MEMO The following is an extract from engineer James Damore's lengthy memo Women, on average, have more: Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.

This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there's overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women's issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs. Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that 'greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men's and women's personality traits.' Because as 'society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.' We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism. Men's higher drive for status We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life. Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths. Advertisement

Many have argued that the engineer's memo was proof of the sexist, male-driven structures that Silicon Valley has become known for in recent months.

Others said Damore's concern that the company was too left-leaning was legitimate. Some also claim he is the voice of many conservative employees who are too scared to speak out against Google's politically correct policies because they fear they will lose their jobs.

In his 10-page document, the Damore explained his belief that the company is blind to inevitable differences between men and women and says that staff are trained to think a that lack of diversity is down to discrimination when sometimes there are other factors to consider.

Damore, who graduated from Harvard in 2013, had noted that women could not get ahead at Google because of biological differences.

'At Google, we're regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,' he wrote.

'Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it's far from the whole story.

'On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.'

Among the perceived differences is that women are have 'a stronger interest in people rather than things' which he said explains 'why women prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.'

Men, he said, are more prone to jobs like coding 'because it requires systemizing'.

Damore wrote that women were generally 'more prone to neuroticism' and that this is why there aren't so many females in high-stress jobs. The software engineer has not been identified.

'We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.'

Among the biggest problems, he said, was that staff who do not agree with the company's approach to the issue are told keep their ideas 'in the closet'.

'Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies,' he said.

The suit, filed by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Republican National Committee's committeewoman for California,in Santa Clara Superior Court, also names another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, as a plaintiff

Later he added that conservatives were an increasingly marginalized minority.

'Conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.

'At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases.

'Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices,' he said.

At the end of his memo, Damore suggested 'non-discriminatory ways' to reduce inequality, writing: 'Women on average are more prone to anxiety.

'Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.'

He suggested that the company should do away with programs which cater to a specific minority in order to stamp out discrimination.

The engineer faced a barrage of outraged complaints on Twitter after his memo was published online.

Much of the outrage came from Google employees who disagreed with his stance. Other critics said the man deserved to be fired for his opinion.

He was fired shortly after and CEO Pichai released a statement saying that employees have a right to express themselves but 'to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.'

The other plaintiff, Gudeman, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked at Google as an engineer from November 2013 to December 2016.

He now works as a self-employed software contractor and writer.

A Google spokesperson did not respond to reporters' requests for comment.
A 26-year-old woman is facing serious driving offences after she allegedly stole a car and led police on a dangerous pursuit through Melbourne's south east.

The black Suzuki Swift was stolen from Pakenham resident, Lauren Byers, who was at home when the thief broke through her back door and gate about 7.30 Monday morning.

Dramatic footage taken from a helicopter shows the moment police caught the offenders tail about an hour later as she sped towards the Monash Freeway.

Dramatic helicopter footage captured the moment more than seven police vehicles cornered a 26-year-old woman after she led police on a dangerous chase through Melbourne's south east

The pursuit lasted more than 40 minutes, with the woman seen driving recklessly through busy suburban roads before attempting a u-turn across a median strip and blowing the tyres.

Several police cars closed in on the driver on Heatherton Road as she attempted the dangerous turn, forcing the vehicle to a halt and leaving the thief with nowhere to run.

Still refusing to get out of the written off car, police smashed the windows and used pepper spray in their arrest of the 26-year-old.

Several police cars closed in on the driver on Heatherton Road as she attempted the dangerous turn, forcing the vehicle to a halt and leaving the thief with nowhere to run

Still refusing to get out of the written off car, police smashed the windows and used pepper spray in their arrest of the 26-year-old

Officers from more than seven police vehicles assisted in the arrest, with the woman dragged to the back of a paddy wagon in hand cuffs before been taken away.

The vehicle's owner described the incident as an 'inconvenience', telling Nine News she had only recently finished paying off the vehicle.

The offender is being questioned by police and is expected to be charged with aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle and conduct endangering life.
In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother's house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history:' The winner is Sidney Poitier.' Up to the stage came the most elegant man I ever remembered. His tie was white, his skin was blackand he was being celebrated. I'd never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people's houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney's performance in Lilies of the Field: 'Amen, amen, amen, amen.'

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille award right here at the Golden Globes and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award. It is an honorit is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who have inspired me, who challenged me, who sustained me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson who took a chance on me for A.M. Chicago. Saw me on the show and said to Steven Spielberg, she's Sophia in 'The Color Purple.' Gayle who's been a friend and Stedman who's been my rock.

I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. We know the press is under siege these days. We also know it's the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice. Toto tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: what I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I'm especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year we became the story.

But it's not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It's one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They're the women whose names we'll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they're in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They're part of the world of tech and politics and business. They're our athletes in the Olympics and they're our soldiers in the military.

And there's someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she'd attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn't an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

Their time is up. And I just hopeI just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks' heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it's here with every woman who chooses to say, 'Me too.' And every manevery man who chooses to listen.

In my career, what I've always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. I've interviewed and portrayed people who've withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me too' again.'
A British mother is to marry a US convict who is serving life in a maximum security jail for the brutal murders of two men.

Emma Pickett, 33, from Stourbridge in the West Midlands and Justin Erskine, 30, met on a prison pen-pal website and after writing letters to each other for five months, they will now tie the knot.

The pair have only met twice, and it is unlikely they will ever spend time together outside the grounds of the groom-to-be's jail due to Erskine's life sentence without parole.

Emma Pickett, 33, from Stourbridge in the West Midlands and Justin Erskine, 30, met on a prison pen-pal website

Erskine was jailed in 2006 for supplying the knife which killed one of two men murdered during an argument about drugs.

He also dug their graves and helped bury the bodies.

The couple fell in love after meeting on the WriteAPrisoner site, where Erskine's biography asks for 'earnest and (if possible) intriguing, intellectually arousing, interesting, or otherwise fascinating responses only.'

Emma Pickett (right), 33, from Stourbridge in the West Midlands and Justin Erskine (left), 30, met on a prison pen-pal website and after writing letters to each other for five months, they will now tie the knot

He continues: 'This page is one step in a multi-faceted approach to stave ennui, apathy, and cynicism, while restoring my faith in humanity. I kid (?) - no pressure!

'Really, it would just be a pleasantly welcome change of pace to get to know some new people and make some new friends, which is what I suspect I'd be doing with my life, if not for prison.'

Despite his brutal crime, care assistant Ms Pickett has decided put his violent past to one side.

Ms Pickett (left) jailbird beau Erksine (right) have exchanged 1,600 letters since meeting online

The pair have exchanged 1,600 letters between them and are getting married after the felon popped the question in prison, according to The Sun.

He wasn't allowed to go down on one knee because the regulations in the prison are so strict he had to remain seated at all times.

Miss Pickett has agreed to move her whole family - including her three children aged six, 12 and 14 - over to the US to be closer to her soon-to-be husband.

Her eldest daughter calls the murderer 'stepdad' and that Erskine tries to call her youngest every night to read her a bedtime story.

The James T Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware where the couple met after writing to each other

She told the paper: 'There is a stigma attached to it but it is not the case that everybody in prison is automatically a terrible person.'

They will get married at the James T Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware where the couple met.

According to state law, they will not be permitted to consummate the marriage and instead the couple have resorted to conveying their intimate feelings via letters.
The nephew of French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (pictured) was stabbed in Eilat in Israel

The nephew of French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe was among three tourists repeatedly stabbed in the Israeli seaside resort of Eilat, it emerged tonight.

The wounded holidaymakers, who have not been named, were found lying on the promenade last Wednesday after being targeted by a gang of Israeli men.

It comes at a time of heightened tension between France and Israel, as President Emmanuel Macron and Mr Philippe refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel's capital city.

This has greatly angered many in Israel, and especially those who do not want East Jerusalem to be set aside as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Mr Philippe has also controversially backed the publication of anti-Semitic essays by the author Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, better known as Celine, despite fury from France's sizeable Jewish community.

By Monday night, Israeli news outlets were reporting the shocking Eilat crime, while French media ones generally remained silent.

According to the Israeli i24 news channel: 'The French consul in Tel Aviv was rushed to the spot urgently.

'Three French tourists, including the nephew of the French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who was on holiday in the seaside resort of Eilat in Israel, were attacked last Wednesday by a group of Israelis.

'The municipal police found three young tourists lying on the Eilat Promenade with stab wounds on the lower part of their bodies. Two of them were slightly hurt, and the third more seriously.'

All were taken to a local hospital, where they were later joined by the French consul, who is thought to have contacted Mr Philippe immediately.

Two of those hurt were released from hospital on Thursday, while the third remained in a ward. It is not known if he is Mr Philippe's nephew.

A criminal enquiry into the attack has been launched in Israel, with police attempting to bring the perpetrators to justice. They are all believed to be Israeli men, according to detectives.

It comes at a time of heightened tension between France and Israel, as President Emmanuel Macron and Mr Philippe (pictured together) refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel's capital city

There was no comment on the incident from France's Ambassador to Israel, or from the French foreign ministry.

On Monday, President Macron reaffirmed his country's commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Leaders on both sides must continue 'calling for calm and dialogue', Mr Macron said during a meeting with members of the Palestinian Central Council.

It follows American President Donald Trump plunging the area into renewed chaos by recognising Jerusalem as solely being the capital of Israel, and not Palestine too.

This shocked Western allies including France and Britain as much as it did Arab leaders, who insist that East Jerusalem must become the capital of Palestine.

On Sunday Mr Philippe said he was fine about the publication of Celine's anti-Semitic essays.

Referring to Celine, Mr Philippe said: 'There are very good reasons to detest the man himself, but you cannot deny the writer's central position in French literature.'

But CRIF, France's main Jewish umbrella group, said in a statement that it opposed the publication of the three 'racist, anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler' essays.

Last year the Jewish Agency of Israel claimed that 5000 Jews emigrated to Israel from France in 2016, partly because of security fears, and an atmosphere of anti-Semitism condoned by those in power.
A gigantic fire erupted at a warehouse in north London this evening.

Fifteen fire engines and 90 firefighters were called to the blaze at a paint factory in Waterloo Road, Staples Corner.

Dramatic pictures show the extent of the inferno, which could 'be seen for miles around' and broke out just before 9.30pm off the busy North Circular Road.

The fire service battled for three hours before the flames were brought under control at 12.22am.

The London Fire Brigade has now confirmed 'factory workers left the building' before they arrived and no one is believed to have been injured.

Scroll down for video

Dramatic pictures show the extent of the inferno, which could 'be seen for miles around' and broke out just before 9.30pm off the busy North Circular Road

Fifteen fire engines and 90 firefighters were called to the blaze in Waterloo Road, Staples Corner

Firefighters were called to the blaze, which sent blue acrid smoke across the far north of London, at around 9.20pm

The flames engulfed a paint factory just off the North Circular Road near Brent Cross

Dramatic pictures show the extent of the inferno, which could 'be seen for miles around' and broke out just before 9.30pm off the busy North Circular Road

Met Police's Barnet force tweeted a dramatic picture of a fireball above the paint factory

Thick blue and black acrid smoke could be seen billowing across the north London skyline, with one neighbour saying he could see fireballs shooting into the night.

People were warned to avoid the area and local residents told to shut their windows and doors.

Concerned passers-by took to social media to alert others of the blaze, which was described by some as a 'huge fireball in the sky'

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) tweeted to say it has received over 45 999 calls in relation to the fire around half a mile away from Brent Cross Shopping Centre.

One person tweeted: 'What on earth is this? Was just on the North Circular.'

Another said: 'Just passed the biggest fire I've ever seen in my life.

'Looks like a warehouse or something of that size near the north circular at Wembley.'

This is the moment huge flames ripped through a paint factory causing smoke to billow across the sky

Around 100 firefighters were called to the scene at Staples Corner, in north west London late on Monday night

Another Twitter user posted: 'HUGE fire off north circular just now. Literally exploding, plumes of smoke. I think it is a warehouse although not confirmed.'

Others have described it as 'horrific', while the police have branded it 'serious'.

One Twitter user posted to say they were being kept awake by the fire three miles away.

One Twitter user posted to say they were being kept awake by the fire three miles away

Achal Dhillon who lives in Hendon, less than half a mile from the scene, said the fire was burning 'quite violently' for more than 30 minutes.

The 33-year-old said he saw fireballs being propelled into the air from the burning building up to a height of 100 metres.

Witnessing the fire spread through the building Mr Dhillon, after spotting what was initially a small blaze or a 'little dot', said there was then a 'loud pop'.

He said: 'Then we saw a lot of flames suddenly rise up by themselves... then just this huge mountain of fire, almost pyramid shaped and spiralling as it was shooting fireballs into the air.

'It is still going, there is a huge trail of thick black smoke.'

Mr Dhillon said he was 'amazed' at how quickly the fire service responded, adding that it was probably only a couple of minutes before they arrived and were tackling the flames.

An LFB spokesman told MailOnline: 'This is a significant fire at a paint factory off the North Circular which can be seen across London.

'We'd ask people to avoid the area if possible and local residents to keep their doors and windows shut.'

'The Brigade was called at 9.20pm. Fire crews from Hendon and surrounding fire stations are attending the scene. The cause of the fire is not yet known at this stage.'

They said the warehouse is 50m by 20m and the fireball is 'very visible and can be seen for miles around'.

They added : 'The Brigade was called at 2120 and the fire was under control by 0022. Fire crews from Hendon and surrounding fire stations were at the scene.

'The cause of the fire is under investigation.'
The field of contenders for Manson's remains narrowed after a Monday hearing in LA

The fight over control of Charles Manson's estate and remains has narrowed, with a pen pal and purported grandson emerging as the main contenders.

Other contenders did not appear at a hearing Monday in a Los Angeles courtroom, leaving the fight to grandson Jason Freeman, 41, and pen pal Michael Channels, 52, for now.

At one point, the legal battle threatened to become a circus, with as many as five contenders.

Probate Judge David J. Cowan did complicate matters at the hearing though, by telling Freeman and Channels that the question of venue would be up for debate, the LA Times reported.

He also advised Channels, who is representing himself, that he would be well advised to seek a lawyer as the proceedings complexify.

'I called 50 of them,' Channels replied. 'Half of them hung up on me, the other half laughed.'

Grandson Jason Freeman, 41, (left) and pen pal Michael Channels, 52, (right) are the two primary legal contenders for control of Manson's remains after a Monday hearing

Freeman's attorney Alan Davis has until January 12 to file a claim to recover Manson's remains, as well as arguments on the proper court venue for a ruling on the remains.

The court will decide whether venue is proper in Los Angeles, where Manson resided before his arrest in 1969, or in Kings County, where he was imprisoned for orchestrating the 1969 killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and eight other people.

Channels, a pen pal of Manson's for 30 years who claims to have the killer's a last will and testament, must respond to Davis' filing by January 19.

Until then, Manson's body is being held on ice by the coroner in Kern County, where he was hospitalized prior to his death on November 19 at age 83.

Channels says he met Manson in 2002 after the two had corresponded through letters and that soon after, Manson sent him a will leaving his entire estate to him.

Before his death in November, Manson was serving a life sentence for orchestrating the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and eight others in a murder spree (pictured above in December 1969)

Manson's body is being held on ice at the coroner's office (pictured) in Kern County, where he was hospitalized prior to his death

Freeman's lawyer is skeptical of the will, since it wasn't even properly signed.

'We are aware that there is a document that is reported to be a will, but frankly we are very suspicious,' his lawyer Davis has said. 'Manson was incarcerated and we are suspicious that someone could get to him and get it signed.'

In the so-called will, Manson cuts out both of his known sons from his estate. But even if it was valid, one legal expert says that Freeman would still be the likely beneficiary since the will doesn't mention his grandchildren specifically, just the sons.

'The grandson was not disinherited in the will,' Jack Barcal, a specialist in probate and trust law, previously told the OC Register. 'The property should go to his grandson or whoever the grandchildren are.'

While Channels' alleged will gives him the right to all of Manson's estate - including the rights to cash in his prison account, and the rights to his prison and police records and his image, music, printing, movie and publishing rights, he says it has been more of a hassle than anything.

'It turned into something I have never expected,' Channels said. 'It's a nightmare all the way around.'

Freeman said if he received Manson's remains, he would cremate them and spread them secretly so the location couldn't be turned into a morbid tourist destination.

Channels has said something similar in prior interviews.

'Cemeteries don't want him,' he said. 'They think if they take him, they will pollute the whole ground.'

Channels claims Manson gave him a will not long after they met in 2002, leaving his entire estate to him
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A shocking photograph of Aboriginal men lined up, shackled with heavy chains around their necks, and being guarded by white men armed with rifles is just one of many confronting images captured in the late 1800s.

Black and white photos have emerged showing the cruel treatment of Indigenous Australians at the hands of white settlers in the late 1900s.

Other harrowing pictures depict Aboriginal men and boys chained together, standing or sitting, wearing just a cloth around their waists.

Aboriginals lined up, shackled by neck chains and wearing just a pair of briefs with white men standing guard, pictured with a huge rifle is just one many chilling images that have emerged

The shocking black and white photos showcase the cruel ways Aboriginal people were treated from the late 1890s

Huge groups of Aboriginal men and boys are pictured chained together, standing or sitting, wearing just a cloth around their waist, as white police men and 'Aboriginal trackers' stand beside them with four rifles

Aboriginal prisoners (pictured) were chained and forced to lay a railway near Derby, Western Australia, about 1897

The photos, taken between 1890 and the 1930s, show Aboriginal prisoners being captured moments after being caught committing petty crimes such as killing cattle.

The raw images show rows of chained Indigenous people standing under the shade of a tree with police men and 'Aboriginal trackers' pictured with four huge rifles.

Police were paid per indigenous prisoner and cruelly brought them into jail using chains.

While some Aboriginal prisoners are captured working on a boat, other prisoners were forced to lay railways in Derby, Western Australia.

In early Australia, incarceration was used as a tool to weaken the Aboriginal Australians and they were often arrested for petty crimes such as stealing and killing cattle.

The confronting collection of photographs show Aboriginal prisoners across the country, from on board ships to working on wharf rail lines and chained to railway wagons.

Some Aboriginal prisoners are captured on a boat (pictured) while other prisoners were forced to lay railways

Police were paid per indigenous prisoner and cruelly brought them into jail using chains where they were forced to work

In early Australia, incarceration was used as a tool to weaken the Aboriginal people and were often arrested for petty crimes

The haunting collection of photographs show Aboriginal people chained, captioned 'Native Prisoners on N.2', in about 1930

A chilling image shows one lonely Aboriginal man (pictured) standing in chains as he leans against a tree with a piece corrugated iron at the stump of the tree as well as a hat and pile of cloth

One of the photos is captioned 'native prisoners on N2', which is believed to be a ship, shows 12 Aboriginal men lined up with chains to their necks, dressed in rags.

Two white men were photographed leading one Indigenous prisoner by a chain alongside three horses and whip in hand around 1910.

At least 22 Aboriginal prisoners are seen to be chained together while standing in a shallow river of water wearing a cloth around the groin region.

Another image shows white man dressed in shirt and trousers holding a chain connected to two elderly Indigenous prisoners

Hundreds of Aboriginal prisoners were captured and chained, forced to work on many projects including laying rails

Two white men are pictured with three horses, with one of them leading an Aboriginal man by a chain to his neck

At least 20 Indigenous Australians were photographed standing in a shallow river, all chained together (pictured)

Haunting photos show the disturbing history and abuse of aboriginal people in the early twentieth century (pictured 1930)

Another image shows a white man dressed in a shirt and trousers holding a chain that is connected to two elderly looking Indigenous prisoners.

A chilling image shows one lonely Aboriginal man standing in chains as he leans against a tree with a piece corrugated iron at the stump of the tree as well as a hat and pile of cloth.

A line of Indigenous men were photographed at the turn of the century wearing chains during their transit to jail, surrounded by what appears to be white first class citizens.

Australia is marking their ten year anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

One decade ago, the declaration was passed to combat the discrimination, marginalisation and human rights violations of the 370 million Indigenous people living in more than seventy countries today

A line of Indigenous men were photographed at the turn of the century wearing chains during their transit to jail (pictured)

At least 30 Aboriginal prisoners are pictured chained together being led to Cossack Goal in Western Australia around 1902

Shocking images of entrapped Indigenous Australians serve as a reminder of the dark past and oppression that was suffered

The haunting photos show the disturbing history and abuse of aboriginal people in the early twentieth century.

Australia is marking their ten year anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

One decade ago, the declaration was passed to combat the discrimination, marginalisation and human rights violations of the 370 million Indigenous people living in more than seventy countries today.

A decade since this landmark legislation, shocking images of entrapped Indigenous Australians emerged, serving as a reminder of the dark past and oppression that was suffered.
James Franco has been accused of sexual harassment by a number of women on social media, many of whom shared their stories on Sunday night after the actor's Golden Globe win.

Sarah Tither-Kaplan was among those who publicly denounced Franco's behavior, with the actress going after Franco for his alleged mistreatment of actresses on his sets.

'Hey James Franco, nice #timesup pin at the #GoldenGlobes, remember a few weeks ago when you told me the full nudity you had me do in two of your movies for $100/day wasn't exploitative because I signed a contract to do it? Times up on that!' wrote Tither-Kaplan.

The actress and comedian has been appearing in short films with Franco for over three years after enrolling at Studio 4, the actor's comedy and improv school.

Studio 4, which had outposts in New York and Los Angeles, closed its doors back in October without warning or explanation.

Also speaking out against Franco was Violet Paley, who tweeted: 'Cute #TIMESUP pin James Franco. Remember the time you pushed my head down in a car towards your exposed penis & that other time you told my friend to come to your hotel when she was 17? After you had already been caught doing that to a different 17 year old?'

Paley, Tither-Kaplan and reps for Franco did not respond to requests for comment.

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The disappearing artist: James Franco was photographed as he signed autographs at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday (above)

Grin and bear it: The actor, 39, was all smiles while making his way into the airport just one day after he picked up the Best Actor Golden Globe for his work in The Disaster Artist

Allegation: Sarah Tither-Kaplan claimed that she was forced to do 'exploitative' scenes with 'full nudity' in two of Franco's films while being paid just $100 (tweets above)

James Franco was speechless as he landed in NYC on Monday night with his brother Dave Franco by his side. He was hit with Sexual assault allegations after women came out against him on Twitter after he received a Golden Globe last night.

Paley, an actress, writer and director living in Los Angeles, later clarified her tweet by writing: 'Just to be clear I wasnt 17, I was an adult.'

The age of consent in both New York and California is 17.

Paley was accused by one man of only speaking up after Franco took home the Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical prize at the Golden Globes on Sunday, to which she replied: 'Hey dude, I get that it looks like that and 3 other girls and I have all spoken up before this. But this time it actually got attention because hes trending. Thanks for your concern!'

Paley also liked a number of tweets posted by others calling out Franco and his hypocrisy for wearing a Time's Up pin to the ceremony.

Spot the fully clothed man: The film Tither-Kaplan seems to be referencing in these tweets is The Long Home (cast photo above), which is directed by Franco

She also retweeted a number of Tither-Kaplan's posts, who followed up her tweet about exploitative nudity by writing: 'Hey James Franco, now that you have a Golden Globe why don't you give speaking roles that don't require nudity in your upcoming films to the dozens of women who have done full nudity + sex scenes in your indie films and art projects?'

The film Tither-Kaplan seems to be referencing in these tweets is The Long Home, which is directed by Franco and stars an eclectic cast of actors including Ashton Kutcher, Courtney Love, Robin Lord Taylor, Annaleigh Tipton, Josh Hutcherson and Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton.

Allegation: 'Remember the time you pushed my head down in a car towards your exposed penis,' wrote actress Violet Paley (above)

'Pretty sure Zoe Levin and Courtney Love are both fully clothed and have lines in the Long Home and if you signed a contract to do said scenes you have nothing to complain about next time don't take the gig,' wrote one social media user in response to Tither-Kaplan's post.

The actress responded to that argument by stating: 'Hi sweetie! I'm not either of those people. There's a BIG difference between being a famous actor who doesn't need money and can turn down jobs and a non-famous actor who needs jobs to survive. Stay blessed! You're part of the problem!'

She later took the time to explain her situation as a working actress who is holding down three to four jobs at a time.

'When you are a struggling, unrepresented, non-union actor who doesn't have a trust fund, life is very different than for an actor who is known, union, and repped. I don't have the luxury of turning down jobs,' wrote Tither Kaplan.

'If a famous actor who has the ability to make or break my career with the snap of his fingers offers me a part, I don't have bargaining power. I need work. I need to eat. I need a career. I can't afford to say "no".'

She then explained: 'And if I do say "no" to an offer, or even try to negotiate for myself, I risk getting labeled as "difficult", "ungrateful", a "diva", and never getting another opportunity again.'

Tither-Kaplan is hoping however that this might all finally change in the wake of this watershed moment.

'I hope that the system of exploiting people under the guise of giving them opportunities changes now that #TIMESUP , but only time will tell if it does,' she wrote.

Accusation: Paley said: '& that other time you told my friend to come to your hotel when she was 17? After you had already been caught doing that to a different 17 year old?'

Talent: Tither-Kaplan (left) has been appearing in short films with Franco for over three years after enrolling at Studio 4, the actor's comedy and improv school

No more: Studio 4, which had outposts in New York and Los Angeles, closed its doors back in October without warning and with no explanation for the sudden decision

Time's up: 'I don't think James Franco would like me and that makes me feel extremely proud,' wrote Full Frontal writer Nicole Silverberg (above)

Full Frontal writer Nicole Silverberg also went after Franco by tweeting: 'The Disaster Artist is actually a fantasy movie by virtue of the scene where a woman is treated poorly on set and every single man notices and immediately speaks up.'

She later noted: 'I don't think James Franco would like me and that makes me feel extremely proud.'

Actress Ally Sheedy was the most notable name to call out Franco on Sunday, doing so in a series of tweets throughout the show.

'Why is a man hosting? Why is James Franco allowed in? Said too much. Nite love ya,' wrote Sheedy at the start of the telecast.

Winner: Allegations against Franco gained notice in the wake of his Golden Globe win (above)

'Ok wait. Bye. Christian Slater and James Franco at a table on @goldenglobes #MeToo,' said Sheedy an hour into the program.

And in her final tweet, posted right after Franco's victory in the Best Actor category, she said: 'James Franco just won. Please never ever ask me why I left the film/tv business.'

Sheedy later deleted the tweets, but soon after she posted a number of women began to speak out against the actor for his admission back in 2014 that he pursued a relationship with a 17-year-old student.

That incident has in no way tarnished Franco's reputation however, with the actor likely to pick up his second Oscar when this year's honorees are announced later this month.

'Its ... rich of James Franco to be wearing a Times Up pin,' tweeted writer Doree Shafrir.

'Still remember that time James Franco grossly tried to pick up a teenager off Instagram. #TimesUp' wrote Samantha Grasso.

'Remember when James Franco tried to solicit a teenager on Instagram? But he was still honored at the Globes. LOL. But yes, Time Is Up, y'all,' read a tweet from the account #blackwomandirectors.

And writer and comedian Miel Bredouw asked: 'When is the time up on James Franco.'

Boy's club: Franco hosted a dinner for the other male actors nominated in the film categories at Sunday night's Golden Globes earlier in the week (l to r: Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet, Michael Stuhlberg, Richard Jenkins, Tom Hanks, Hugh Jackman, Gary Oldman, Ansel Elgort, James Franco, Daniel Kaluuya and Sam Rockwell)

Strong tweets: 'Why is a man hosting? Why is James Franco allowed in? Said too much. Nite love ya,' wrote Sheedy, 55, at the start of the telecast (Sheedy's three tweets above)

Don't forget: Sheedy shot to fame in the 80s as a member of the Brat Pack, earning her spot in the infamous eight-actor clique following her roles in The Breakfast Club (above) and St Elmo's Fire

The incident these tweets apparently reference happened back in 2014 when the actor began corresponding with a Scottish teenager.

Lucy Clode, who was 17 at the time, had gone to see Franco on Broadway in Of Mice and Men, and posted a photo to Instagram of herself and the actor taken while he signed autographs that night.

Franco then reached out to Lucy and, after learning she was just 17, began to exchange a number of suggestive messages before asking her what hotel she was staying at in the city.

'Your single? What's the hotel? Should I rent a room?' wrote Franco to the teenager in one rapid-fire exchange.

When she then responded by saying she did not think he was the real James Franco, the actor took a photo of himself waving and sent it to the young tourist.

He then wrote: 'It's me. Yes or no? Tomorrow or Thursday?'

Franco's persistence was later revealed when Clode posted the exchange on her account, forcing the actor to address his pursuit of the teen.

Disaster: Ally Sheedy went after James Franco on Twitter following his Best Actor win at the Golden Globes on Sunday (pair above in 2014 at the opening night party for The Long Shrift)

He addressed the controversy during an appearance on Live With Kelly and Michael.

'It's the way that people meet each other today, but what I've learned- I guess because I'm new to it- is you don't know who's on the other end,' said Franco.

'You get a feel for them, you don't know who you're talking to.'

He then added: 'I used bad judgement and I learned my lesson.'

Franco did not at any point mention the fact that Clode was just 17 and a tourist.

A 2014 New York Times profile of Sheedy reveals that it was around this same time that she first met the actor.

Sheedy said that she was volunteering at the famed LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan when Franco came in to speak with the students while he was appearing on Broadway.

She described the actor as 'a beautiful, generous man' at the time, and said that soon after they met he asked if she would star in an off-Broadway production of The Long Shrift he planned to direct.

It is unclear however what exactly happened between that first meeting and Sunday to upset Sheedy so much.

The actress also liked a few tweets on Sunday in response to her posts, including one that read: 'ALLY SHEEDY QUEEN OF NOT HAVING TIME FOR YOUR HYPOCRISY.'

Another tweet liked by Sheedy read: 'I don't know why this made me tear up, but it's been one of those nights.'

Sheedy shot to fame in the 80s as a member of the Brat Pack, earning her spot in the infamous eight-actor clique following her roles in The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire.

She went on to star in more independent fare like the 1998 film High Art, and in recent years has appeared in just a handful of movies and television programs.
Competition is heating up between two of the world's largest tech firms in the battle to dominate CES 2018, held annually in Las Vegas.

Coverage of last year's trade show detailed the rise of Amazon's smart assistant, which was used to enhance everything from cars to refrigerators.

Now Google is hoping to fight back with its own Assistant set to take on its rival and the company's largest presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in a decade.

Voice-commanded virtual assistants packed into speakers and other devices will be a 'game-changing' trend this year, CES researchers have said.

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Competition is heating up between two of the world's largest tech firms in the battle to dominate CES 2018, held annually in Las Vegas. Google is hoping to take on Amazon's Alexa, with the firm's largest presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in years

VOICE ASSISTANTS AT CES Voice-commanded virtual assistants packed into speakers and other devices will be a 'game-changing' trend this year, Consumer Electronics Show researchers have said. Sales of smart speakers are expected to nearly double in the US, to $3.8 billion (2,8 bn), from last year according to Lesley Rohrbaugh and Steve Koenig, researchers with the Consumer Technology Association, which organises CES event. Being able to order items, select music, get information, and more by speaking to digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana has been such a hit that pressure will be on for more ways to interact with machines using voice, the researchers predicted. At the same time, artificial intelligence will improve, with machines getting better at thinking like people, anticipating desires, and holding conversations instead of simply taking orders, according to Ms Rohrbaugh. Advertisement

CES officially kicks off at 9am PT tomorrow (5pm GMT) at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, but members of the media began arriving yesterday for briefings and an early sneak peek.

They were welcomed by the sight of the words 'Hey Google' plastered over the Las Vegas Monorail, which has been wrapped in a giant ad promoting Assistant.

Giant video screens, billboards and an outdoor booth at CES, complete with a twisting blue slide, are just some of the other marketing measures being used by the Mountain View firm to keep the phrase on the minds of visitors to the conference.

In a written statement, Rishi Chandra, VP of product management at Google Home and Scott Huffman, VP of engineering at Google Assistant, said: 'Both the Google Assistant and Google Home had a very big year in 2017, with new devices, new languages and new features.

'The Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices, including speakers like Google Home, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, headphones, TVs, watches and more.

'We have even more things in store for the Assistant at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

'If you're at CES, stop by the Google Assistant Playground on Central Plaza-21 to check out some of our new integrations, devices, and the newest ways you can use your Assistant.'

Google doesn't usually have a booth at CES and the company hasn't made this kind of impact since its co-founder Larry Page delivered a keynote speech at CES more than a decade ago.

Google Home and Assistant have been trying to catch-up to Amazon's Echo and Alexa for a number of years now.

Apple, whose rival Siri voice assistant and HomeKit platform are key challengers to Google Amazon, traditionally avoids CES, preferring to announce its new products at its own launch events.

Sales of smart speakers are expected to nearly double in the US, to $3.8 billion (2,8 bn), from last year according to Lesley Rohrbaugh and Steve Koenig, researchers with the Consumer Technology Association, which organises CES event.

Giant video screens, billboards and an outdoor booth at CES, complete with a twisting blue slide, are just some of marketing measures being used by the Mountain View firm to keep the phrase 'Hey Google' on the minds of visitors to the conference

Visitors to CES were welcomed by the sight of the words 'Hey Google' plastered over the Las Vegas Monorail, which has been wrapped in a giant ad promoting Assistant.

'That market is not just heating up, it is a wildfire,' Mr Koenig said while discussing industry trends expected to play out at CES and globally in the coming year.

'Compatibility with digital assistants has become table stakes (in the consumer electronics industry).'

Being able to order items, select music, get information, and more by speaking to digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana has been such a hit that pressure will be on for more ways to interact with machines using voice, the researchers predicted.

The CES show-floor is expected to be rife with appliances, televisions, vehicles, speakers, robots, and more augmented with virtual assistant software such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Samsung's Bixby.

Coverage of last year's trade show detailed the rise of Amazon's smart assistant, which was used to enhance everything from cars to refrigerators. Google is hoping to fight back with its own Assistant

The CES show-floor is expected to be rife with voice assistant enabled appliances. A woman plays with Buddy the companion robot by Blue Frog Robotics during the CES Unveiled preview event in Las Vegas yesterday

'We will truly be able to converse with our AI devices,' Ms Rohrbaugh said while envisioning where smart speaker technology was heading.

'AI is going to know you and you will be able to trust the device.'

Behind the scenes, telecommunications service providers around the world will continue to roll-out fifth-generation, or 5G, networks capable of moving seemingly limitless amounts of data blazingly fast, according to the researchers.

Such 5G networks will be key to enabling machines such as self-driving cars to process sensor data quickly enough to make real time decisions, they said.

'Clearly, we don't want self-driving vehicles to hesitate for even a millisecond, so we are going to need 5G,' Mr Koenig added.

Those higher speeds will also be necessary to 'make virtual reality really wireless,' handle data used to manage 'smart cities,' power augmented reality, and even to channel the flood of high-definition video streamed online.

'5G and AI are heralds for the coming data age,' Mr Koenig said.

Spending on consumer electronics devices and streaming services in the US alone was expected to climb slightly more than 3 percent this year to $351 billion, with the number of 'connected' devices in the country rising to 715 million from 671 million last year.
The Google Doodle for January 8th 2018 celebrates Fearless Nadia, the Bollywood stuntwoman, on what would have been her 110th birthday. Renowned as Indias original queen of stunts, Fearless Nadia is also the alleged inspiration for 2017 film Rangoon, directed by Vishal Bharadwaj.

Who is Fearless Nadia?

Fearless Nadia was born Mary Ann Evans on the 8th of January 1908 in Perth, Australia to a Scottish father and Greek mother. Four years after her birth, her father was posted to India to serve the British Army during World War I and the Evans family moved to the subcontinent.

While receiving a tribute at the Alchemy Festival at Londons Southbank Centre, Fearless Nadia recalled learning how to ride a horse and dreaming about becoming a stuntwoman during her years in Peshawar after her fathers death.

This Google Doodle of Fearless Nadia was created by Bangalore-based illustrator Devaki Neogi

In 1926, Mary Ann Evans returned to Bombay with her son where she was trained by Madame Astrova, a Russian dance teacher, which led to a tour with a dance troupe and then, the Zarco Circus. After adopting her stage name Nadia, as advised by an Armenian fortune-teller, she rose to cinematic fame.

Fearless Nadias first lead role in Jamshed (JBH) and Homi Wadias 1935 film Hunterwali (The Lady of the Whip) saw the original Indian stuntwoman swing from chandeliers, jump from speeding trains and tame lions in her role as Princess Madhuri.

After her raging success, the Wadia brothers then cast Fearless Nadia in five more films; Pahadi Kanya, Miss Frontier Mail, Diamond Queen, Punjab Mail and Lutaru Lalna and a brand of Nadia-themed products, such as belts, matchboxes and playing cards were created and sold.

Using 1940 film Diamond Queen as an example, Mumbai-based film historian Amrit Gangar highlighted to HuffPost India that Nadia stood out and became a feminist icon because none of them played stunts the way Nadia did.

"Her conquering the evil, and woman conquering an obviously all-powerful man and his gangs was a kind of camouflaged message for the Indian masses to fight against the mammoth power of the British colonialists. But basically she showed the woman's power single-handedly, performing her own stunts without any double and that was unprecedented."

Devaki Neogi's rough sketch of Fearless Nadia Google Doodle in the style of a movie poster

"Blonde-haired and sparkling blue-eyed Fearless Nadia became an extremely popular mascot for Wadias' stunt films. Large sections of Indian movie-going people liked the woman fighting oppression and helping the poor like Robin Hood," Gangar said.

Fearless Nadia starred in her last film Khiladi in 1968 and married Homi Wadia five years earlier after his mother died, due to her disapproval. Nadia died on the 9th of January in 1996 in Mumbai at the age of 88.

Last year saw Wadia Movietone embroiled in a legal battle with the creators of 2017 film Rangoon over the resemblance between Kangana Ranauts character Julia and Fearless Nadia. What this reiterates is that Nadia has redefined the Indian heroines role and transformed it into an independent, modern and cosmopolitan entity.

What is a Google Doodle?

Todays Google Doodle of Fearless Nadia was created by Bangalore-based comic illustrator Devaki Neogi and draws inspiration from old-time Hindi cinema action movie posters. Google Doodles were first created by co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to inform others that they would be attending that years Burning Man Festival.

After a positive response, Googles logo has been changed on a more regular basis in order to mark cultural events or people. Recent Google Doodles have celebrated Kenya Independence Day, Max Born and Robert Koch.
Samsung has unveiled a 12-foot (146-inch) television screen that can 'grow' to almost any size and shape.

Called 'The Wall', it can be linked to additional units to build a larger screen and theres no upper limit on how many can be synced together.

The television was revealed yesterday at the 2018 global Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas alongside a host of other gadgets set for release in the coming months.

Bizarre products featured at the event include radiation-proof pants, a smart suitcase that follows you, and an AI mirror that rates your beauty products.

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Samsung has unveiled a 12-foot (146-inch) television screen (pictured) that can 'grow' to almost any size and shape

CES HIGHLIGHTS Samsung's 'The Wall': 12-foot (146-inch) television screen that can 'grow' to almost any size and shape by linking to other screens. ForwardXs CX-1: An artificial intelligence-powered smart suitcase that follows its owner around the airport. HiMirror: A smart mirror that uses facial recognition to chart how effective different beauty products are and whether it's time to try something new. Spartan boxer briefs: Wearable device lined with silver fibres to create electromagnetic shielding for your testicles from smartphone radiation. BrainCo headband: Monitors and analyses brainwaves to provide 'neurofeedback' on whether, for instance, a student is really concentrating on a certain subject. Advertisement

Samsung's modular 'Wall' works on the same principle as stadium scoreboards, where the pixels are made up of LEDs.

It doesnt have to build into a regular rectangle shape, leaving viewers free to pic whatever configuration they choose.

As the worlds first consumer modular MicroLED television, "The Wall" represents another breakthrough, Jonghee Han, President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics, said yesterday.

It can be customised to any size and delivers incredible brightness, colour gamut, colour volume and black levels.

'Were excited about this next step toward the future of screen technology and the remarkable viewing experience it offers consumers.'

No pricing, or resolution, has been announced, but Samsung says its MicroLED TV will ship sometime this year.

CES is expected to attract more than 170,000 people from around the world over the next three days, and has already seen a number of strange gadgets.

These include ForwardXs CX-1 - an artificial intelligence-powered smart suitcase that follows its owner around the airport.

The case is fitted with facial recognition technology allowing it to lock onto its owner, and has sensors and four-wheel-drive rollers to avoid obstacles.

For those worried about security, the case features an alert that goes off on a smart-connected wristband if it starts going out of range.

Called 'The Wall', the TV (pictured) can be linked to additional units to build a larger screen and theres no upper limit on how many can be synced together

Also revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday was the HiMirror, a smart mirror that studies your skin to give you beauty tips

Also revealed yesterday was the HiMirror, a smart mirror that studies your skin to give you beauty tips.

The gadget uses facial recognition to chart how effective different beauty products are and whether it's time to try something new.

A hand-held device connects to the HiMirror, providing an analysis of the skins condition and advising how to treat conditions such as lines, red spots, wrinkles, dark circles, hydration and melanin.

The HiMirror uses facial recognition to chart how effective different beauty products are and whether it's time to try something new

Radiation-blocking Spartan boxer briefs (pictured) were also on display, lined with silver fibres to create electromagnetic shielding for your testicles

Radiation-blocking Spartan boxer briefs were also on display, lined with silver fibres to create electromagnetic shielding for your testicles.

The underpants were designed to protect men who put their smartphones in their pockets from tiny doses of radiations given off by their device.

The bizarre wearable device, designed by French researchers, is said to absorb 99 per cent of mobile phone and Wi-fi radiation.

The Spartan underpants (pictured) were designed to protect men who put their smartphones in their pockets from tiny doses of radiations given off by their device

ForwardXs CX-1 (pictured) is an artificial intelligence-powered smart suitcase that follows its owner around the airport. The case is fitted with facial recognition technology allowing it to lock onto its owner, and has sensors and four-wheel-drive rollers to avoid obstacles

Also featured at CES is a gadget created by Massachusetts-based BrainCo, which has has come up a special headband monitors and analyses brainwaves.

The device provides 'neurofeedback' on whether, for instance, a student is really concentrating on a certain lesson or subject.

The BrainCo headband provides the worlds first opportunity to quantify real-time student engagement in class, the firm claims.

Now the data can be used to improve teaching techniques, and perhaps make lessons a little more interesting.
DNA evidence is being used to prosecute rhino poachers for the first time.

A unique database in South Africa has been used to catch and imprison criminals who kill the animals for their valuable horn.

The system has so far played a role in the prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of nine people.

One case, involving DNA taken from three horns and tissues from two carcasses, led to a sentence of 29 years.

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A unique database in South Africa has been used to catch and imprison criminals who kill the animals for their valuable horn (file photo)

AFRICA'S RHINOS There are two species of rhino in Africa - the black rhinoceros and white rhinoceros. Despite their names, both the white rhino and black rhino are the same dark grey-brown color. Both species are vegetarian and need to eat large amounts of food everyday. According to WWF, the greatest threat facing both of these species is poaching for the illegal trade of their horns. The number of rhinos poached in South Africa alone has increased by 9,000 per cent since 2007 - from 13 to a record 1,215 in 2014. Powdered horn in used in traditional medicine in certain Asian countries, as a supposed cure for conditions ranging from hangovers to fevers and cancer. While horns are used in traditional medicine, they're also a bought as a status symbol of wealth. Source: World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Advertisement

The database, called the Rhino DNA Index System (RhODIS), has already been used in more than 5,800 forensic cases.

The system has successfully made links between recovered horns, blood-stained evidence items, and specific rhinoceros carcasses in more than 120 cases.

'RhODIS provides individual matches that, similar to human DNA profiling, is used as direct evidence in criminal court cases,' said Dr. Harper, Director of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of Pretoria.

Black rhinos are considered an endangered species and white rhinos are 'near threatened', according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Rhino poaching has undergone a surge in popularity in recent years and the database is the latest tool in the fight against poachers.

In South Africa, rhinoceros poaching incidents increased from 13 in 2007 to 1,215 in 2014.

Rhinos are killed for their horns, which are sought after for medicinal purposes and, increasingly, as cultural status symbols.

A kilo of rhino horn is worth around 23,000 ($30,000)  making it more valuable than a kilo of gold at 19,000 ($25,000).

In the last 10 years, more than 7,000 African rhinoceros have been hunted and killed illegally.

RhODIS includes a biosampling kit to link rhinoceros horns seized from poachers and traffickers in various countries directly to the specific crime scenes where rhinoceros carcasses were left behind.

The system has so far played a role in the prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of nine people. Pictured is a male northern white rhino, the last of his kind, protected by a ring of armed guards in Kenya

The database, called the Rhino DNA Index System (RhODIS), has already been used in more than 5,800 forensic cases. Pictured is an unborn rhinoceros calf in South Africa killed when its mother was murdered by poachers for her horn

The scientists used DNA from 3,085 white rhinoceros and 883 black rhinoceros to determine the probability of a match between rhino DNA and a specific crime scene.

The analysis in the study shows that it it possible to reliably match the unique DNA profile of an individual animal from any tissue - including horns and powders made from the horns - with a panel of 23 different genetic markers.

The dataset also offers insight into rhino populations and found that white and black rhinoceros are actually three subspecies of black rhinoceros.

The paper was published in Current biology.
The Google Doodle for January 9th celebrates Har Gobind Khorana, the Indian-American biochemist, on what would have been his 96th birthday. He is most famous for his Nobel Prize-winning research on how the genetic code of a cell, or the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, control the cells synthesis of proteins.

Who is Har Gobind Khorana?

Har Gobind Khorana was born on the 9th of January 1922 in a village called Raipur in Punjab, now part of Pakistan. He lived in India until 1945 when he was awarded a Government of India Fellowship. This allowed Khorana to travel to the UK and study for a Ph.D at the University of Liverpool where Roger J. S. Beer supervised his research.

Dr. Khorana then spent time at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich with Professor Vladimir Prelog, returned to India for a brief period and then back to England where his interest in proteins and nucleic acids came to fruition in Cambridge.

The latest Google Doodle celebrates Indian-American biochemist Har Gobind Khorana

In 1952, a job offer took Dr. Khorana to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he worked with Dr. Gordon M. Shrum, Dr. Jack Campbell and Dr. Gordon M. Tener on the subject of phosphate esters and nucleic acids.

As the Google Doodle describes, it was at the University of Wisconsin that he and two others received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for discovering that the order of nucleotides in our DNA determines which amino acids are built and in turn, the proteins that are created for essential cell functions.

Dr. Khorana is also renowned for constructing the first synthetic gene and received a multitude of awards during his lifetime, including the National Medal of Science.

Google Doodle illustrator Rohan Dahotre provides concepts of the Har Gobind Khorana Doodle

What is a Google Doodle?

Google Doodles were first created by co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to inform others that they would be attending that years Burning Man Festival.

After a positive response, Googles logo has been changed on a more regular basis in order to mark cultural events or people. Previous Google Doodles have also celebrated Nobel Prize winners Robert Koch and Max Born.

Todays Google Doodle was created by Bangalore-based illustrator Rohan Dahotre and celebrates Dr. Khoranas work in DNA.
Apple has released an updated version of its operating system software to fix a major microchip security flaw that affected nearly all computer chips made in the last decade.

Last week, Alphabet Inc's Google and other security researchers disclosed two major chip flaws, one called Meltdown affecting only Intel Corp chips and one called Spectre, that left computing devices vulnerable to hackers.

'iOS 11.2.2 includes security improvements to Safari and WebKit to mitigate the effects of Spectre,' the firm said.

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The latest updates, 11.2.2 for iOS and 10.13.2 for macOS High Sierra, are available now for iPhones, iPads, and Macs to protect users. Pictured, a boy makes faces while testing out the Animoji feature on an iPhone X at the Apple Store Union Square on November 3, 2017, in San Francisco, California.

The technology giant also released software updates for its Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch.

The iPhone maker had said on Thursday it will release a patch for the Safari web browser on its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Apple had also said that there were no known instances of hackers taking advantage of the flaw.

'For our customers' protection, Apple doesn't disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until an investigation has occurred and patches or releases are available,' the company said on its website.

The iOS update is available for iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation, it said.

HOW TO UPDATE ALL OF YOUR APPLE DEVICES The latest updates, 11.2.2 for iOS and 10.13.2 for macOS High Sierra, are available now for iPhones, iPads, and Macs to protect users. To make sure you are protected, download the latest updates on your device. On iOS, go to Settings, General then Software Update, then tap Download and Install.

On MacOS, open the App Store and click Updates in the App Store toolbar, then use the Update buttons to download and install any updates listed.

On Apple TV, go to Settings, System, then Software Updates. Select Update Software, then select Download and Install. After the update downloads, your Apple TV will restart and prepare the update. Macs, iPhones, iPads and Apple TV were all hit by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Apple says it has already put measures in place to help protect its customers and more will be released in the coming days. Measures released in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 will to help defend against Meltdown. Apple Watch is not affected by the issue. Advertisement

Every iPhone, iPad and Mac device could be at risk of being hacked, it had previosuly warned.

Apple confirmed last week that almost all of its devices are affected by Intel and Arm chip 'design flaws' that could expose billions of people's personal data to cyber criminals.

The flaws leave the devices open to the devastating 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' bugs, discovered by security researchers.

The tech company has warned its customers to only download software for its platforms from trusted sources, like the App Store.

Apple has confirmed that all of its Mac and iOS devices are affected by two major chip flaws called Spectre and Meltdown

Apple says it has already put measures in place to help protect its customers from Meltdown and more will be released in the coming days.

The firm today released further measures for its Safari web browser to help defend against Spectre.

Browser makers Google, Microsoft Corp and Mozilla Corp's Firefox all confirmed to Reuters that the patches they currently have in place do not protect iOS users.

With Safari and virtually all other popular browsers not patched, hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users may have no secure means of browsing the web until Apple issues its patch.

Apple stressed that there were no known instances of hackers taking advantage of the flaw to date.

In a written statement last week, Apple said: 'All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time.

'Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the App Store.

'We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.'

Details emerged yesterday about two massive security flaws which put billions of people worldwide at risk of being hacked. Meltdown and Spectre could let cyber criminals steal data from nearly every computing device containing chips from Intel, AMD and Arm

Tech firms have been aware of the bugs since last year, with chip manufacturer Intel informed in June 2017, but the finds have only just gone public.

Apple remained silent for more than a day about the fate of the hundreds of millions of users of its products.

Ben Johnson, co-founder and chief strategist for cyber security firm Carbon Black, said the delay in updating customers about whether Apple's devices are at risk could affect Apple's drive to get more business customers to adopt its hardware.

Speaking to Reuters, he said: 'Something this severe gets the attention of all the employees and executives at a company, and when they go asking the IT and security people about it and security doesn't have an answer for iPhones and iPads, it just doesn't give a whole lot of confidence.'

Measures released in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 will to help defend against Meltdown, according to Apple.

Apple Watch is not affected by the issue.

Benchmark tests taken in December showed that the updates had no effect on performance, a spokesman for Cupertino-based company said.

Apple says it has already put measures in place to help protect its customers and more will be released in the coming days. Macs, iPhones, iPads and Apple TV are all hit by the weakness. The updates had no effect on performance, a spokesman for Cupertino-based company said

These are expected to cause system slowdowns of around 2.5 per cent.

Security researchers at Google's Project Zero computer security analysis team, in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries, exposed the two flaws this week.

Meltdown, which is specific to Intel chips, lets hackers bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer's memory, potentially letting hackers read a computer's memory.

It was first discovered by Project Zero in June last year, when expert Jann Horn found that passwords, encryption keys, and sensitive information open in applications that should have been protected could be accessed.

A second bug, called Spectre, affects chips from Intel, AMD and Arm.

This lets hackers potentially trick otherwise error-free applications into giving up secret information.

Project Zero disclosed the Meltdown vulnerability not long after Intel said it's working to patch it.

Intel says the average computer user won't experience significant slowdowns as it's fixed.

WHAT ARE THE MELTDOWN AND SPECTRE DESIGN FLAWS? Researchers from Google, academia and cybersecurity firms discovered two flaws in computer chips that affect nearly all modern computers: Meltdown This is a flaw that affects laptops, desktop computers and internet servers with Intel chips. It lets hackers bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer's kernel memory. This has the potential to let hackers access the content of this portion of a computer's memory. This would enable them to steal data, such as passwords saved in web browsers. Spectre This bug affects chips from Intel, AMD and ARM and lets hackers potentially trick otherwise error-free applications into giving up secret information. 'Spectre' affects chips in smartphones and tablets, as well as computer chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Hackers can trick apps into leaking sensitive information. Spectre is a broader bug that applies to nearly all computing devices. It is harder for hackers to take advantage of but less easily patched and will be a bigger problem in the long term, experts say. Advertisement

Tech companies typically withhold details about security problems until fixes are available, so that hackers don't have a roadmap to exploit the flaws.

Both Intel and Google said they were planning to disclose the issue next week, when fixes will be available.

But Intel was forced to come clean about the problem yesterday after news of the flaw became public.

In an interview with CNBC yesterday, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said: 'We've found no instances of anybody actually executing this exploit.

'Phones, PCs, everything are going to have some impact, but itll vary from product to product.'

However, clips on social media claim to show computer security experts using the exploit.

Browser makers Google, Microsoft Corp and Mozilla Corp's Firefox all confirmed that the patches they currently have in place do not protect users. The flaws leave devices like the Macbook vulnerable

Michael Schwarz, who has a PhD in information security, posted on Twitter 'Using #Meltdown to steal passwords in real time', along with a GIF animation of the procedure.

Researchers say Apple and Microsoft have patches ready for users for desktop computers affected by Meltdown.

Microsoft declined to comment and Apple did not immediately return requests for comment.

Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers at Graz University of Technology who discovered Meltdown, called it 'probably one of the worst CPU bugs ever found' in an interview with Reuters.

Gruss said Meltdown was the more serious problem in the short term but could be decisively stopped with software patches.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF Intel - Chips from the past five years have been patched, more to come The chip manufacturer says it has already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 per cent of processor products introduced within the past five years. The firm is yet to announce a timetable for patching Intel processors more than five years old. Reports have suggested that up to 15 years of Intel processors may be affected. Google - Patch available today On January 5, Google is issuing a security update to protect Android phones. Google-branded phones should automatically download the update and you need to just install it. With Pixel and Pixel 2 the update will automatically install too. Some Android phone manufacturers are slow to patch, so you should contact them to make sure they update it as soon as possible. The patch for Chrome will be installed on January 23 and some Chromebooks had a mitigation in its OS 63, released in December, write Wired. If don't want to wait until then an experimental feature from Google called Site Isolation can help in the meantime. This feature makes it harder for malicious websites to access data from other websites you are looking at, writes Cnet. To use this feature on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS or Android copy and paste chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process into the URL in Chrome. Click 'Strict Site Isolation' and then press 'Enable'. Save your work and then press 'Relaunch now'. A few Chromebooks are not expected to get the patch because they are too old. Here is a full list (look for 'no' in the right-hand column). According to Google no other products are affected by these vulnerabilities. Microsoft - Windows 10 patch available, older versions to come There is already a patch available for Windows 10 which will automatically be applied. For older operating systems a patch will be available next week. According to the company, Azure infrastructure is updated. Linux - Patch available The system has a patch. Reports suggest it can slow down Linux-based systems by as much as 17 per cent. Users can opt out if they do not want it. Amazon - Cloud services patched The company says its web services have been updated. Major cloud services aimed at business customers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, say they have already patched most of their services Consumers should check with their device maker and operating system provider for security updates and install them as soon as possible. Advertisement

In the coming days, Apple plans to release further measures for its Safari web browser to help defend against Spectre. These are expected to cause system slowdowns of no more than 2.5 per cent

Spectre, the broader bug that applies to nearly all computing devices, is harder for hackers to take advantage of but less easily patched and will be a bigger problem in the long term, he said.

Intel's CEO said Google researchers told Intel of the flaws 'a while ago' and that Intel had been testing fixes that device makers who use its chips will push out next week.

Before the problems became public, Google on its blog said Intel and others planned to disclose the issues on January 9.

Google said it informed the affected companies about the 'Spectre' flaw on June 1, 2017 and reported the 'Meltdown' flaw after the first flaw but before July 28, 2017.

The flaws were first reported by tech publication The Register.

It also reported that the updates to fix the problems could causes Intel chips to operate five to 30 per cent more slowly, with some experts claiming this could be more like 50 per cent.

Meltdown, which is specific to Intel chips, lets hackers bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer's memory, potentially letting hackers read a computer's memory

Intel denied that the patches would bog down computers based on Intel chips.

'Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits,' the Santa Clara, California, Company said in a statement.

'Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.'

ARM spokesman Phil Hughes said that patches had already been shared with the companies' partners, which include many smartphone manufacturers.

'This method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory,' Mr Hughes said in an email.

AMD chips are also affected by at least one variant of a set of security flaws but that it can be patched with a software update.

The company said it believes there 'is near zero risk to AMD products at this time.'

Google said in a blog post that Android phones running the latest security updates are protected, as are its own Nexus and Pixel phones with the latest security updates.

Gmail users do not need to take any additional action to protect themselves, but users of its Chromebooks, Chrome web browser and many of its Google Cloud services will need to install updates.

Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing service used by businesses, said that most of its internet servers were already patched and the rest were in the process of being patched.

INDUSTRY'S BIGGEST PLAYERS Intel, AMD and Arm are three of the biggest names in the world of computer processors. Intel Intel, the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer, started life producing memory chips, including the first metal oxide semiconductor in 1969. The firm's introduction of the Pentium microprocessor in 1993 helped usher in a personal computer revolution during that decade. Major companies, including Dell and HP, were early adopters of Intel's chips in their PCs. Today, most laptop and desktops in the world are powered by an Intel CPU, including rival Apple Macs, which dropped its proprietary chips in favour of the industry leader's in 2005. AMD Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD, is Intel's only significant rival in the PC processor marketplace. Alongside Nvidia, it is also one of two dominant players in the manufacture of graphics processing units, used in PC video gaming. Both Microsoft and Sony chose AMD processors over Intel's to power their latest consoles, the Xbox One and PS4. AMD processors are also the preferred choice for many custom and home built PCs, particularly among the gaming community. Arm Arm processors have conquered the world of smart devices, thanks to their stripped back design. British company Arm Holdings develops the design of the chips, which is then licensed to other firms. Processors that use the company's RISC architecture require fewer transistors than larger personal computer chips. This makes them cheaper, use less power and give off less heat, making them ideal in smaller, more portable gadgets. This ranges from smartphones to internet connected baby monitors. Advertisement

The defect affects the so-called kernel memory on Intel x86 processor chips manufactured over the past decade, The Register reported citing unnamed programmers, allowing users of normal applications to discern the layout or content of protected areas on the chips.

That could make it possible for hackers to exploit other security bugs or, worse, expose secure information such as passwords, thus compromising individual computers or even entire server networks.

Dan Guido, chief executive of cyber security consulting firm Trail of Bits, said that businesses should quickly move to update vulnerable systems, saying he expects hackers to quickly develop code they can use to launch attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities.

'Exploits for these bugs will be added to hackers standard toolkits,' Mr Guido said.

Shares in Intel were down by 3.4 per cent following the report but nudged back up 1.2 percent to $44.70 (33) in after-hours trading.

Shares in AMD were up one per cent to $11.77 (8.70), shedding many of the gains they had made earlier in the day when reports suggested its chips were not affected.

It was not immediately clear whether Intel would face any significant financial liability arising from the reported flaw.

'The current Intel problem, if true, would likely not require CPU replacement in our opinion. However the situation is fluid,' Hans Mosesmann of Rosenblatt Securities in New York said in a note, adding it could hurt the company's reputation.
Classic 80s movie Dirty Dancing is still a huge tourism boost to the quaint country hotel

Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia in the US stood in for the Kellerman's resort in Dirty Dancing

Andrea David puts Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey back in the picture in her compositions

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Thirty-one years on from Dirty Dancing's release in 1987, Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia in the US, where it was filmed, is still welcoming film fans through its doors.

One of them, travel and film blogger Andrea David, spent time recently tracking down the exact spots at the country hotel where key scenes in the cult '80s movie were filmed - and matching them with stills from the movie.

Quaint Mountain Lake Lodge stood in for Kellerman's resort in the movie, and is where the studious Baby Houseman met dancer Johnny Castle and fell in love against a backdrop of Sixties-style drama.

Sadly the hotel's lake has dried up, in the film the boathouse and Baby's family's holiday house looked over it, but the rest is remarkably unchanged, despite three decades passing since Dirty Dancing was filmed there.

While Patrick Swayze and Baby's father, played by Jerry Orbach, are no longer around, there are plenty of mementos still there, as David discovers.

Scroll down - for the nostalgic time of your life.

Virginia Cottage at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia was Baby Houseman's home in the hit movie Dirty Dancing. It looks exactly the same as it did in 1987. The soundtrack to the movie was one of the key elements of its success. It featured songs such as (I've Had) The Time of My Life by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes and Hungry Eyes by Eric Carmen

Dancer Penny Johnson leads Kellerman's guests through a dance class in the movie. Nowadays it's a quieter spot but Andrea David brings it back to life through her photographs

Baby and Johnny hide from her family in Dirty Dancing, or do they? This blogger has a knack for finding the right spot and the right shot to give cult movies a new life on Instagram

The Harvest restaurant at Mountain Lake Lodge is where a lot of the dining scenes were shot in Dirty Dancing. Andrea David recreates a breakfast scene from the movie with Baby's parents, the Housemans

Andrea David places the scene of Baby falling out with her father over her lover, the dancer Johnny Castle (played by Patrick Swayze). In the film the boathouse looks out over a lake, but the lake has since dried up and disappeared

The Houseman's cabin, Virginia Cottage, is almost as they left it from the movie and can be rented out. David puts Patrick Swayze back in one of the most famous scenes in Dirty Dancing

'No one puts Baby in the corner'. Johnny Castle and Dr Houseman face off over Baby before he comes back for her later and utters the immortal line. Blogger Andrea David brings the late actors back to life with her compositions

Dirty Dancing was one of Patrick Swayze's most famous roles. The late actor, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, is commemorated at the hotel with this stone

Mountain Lake Lodge still looks as it did in Dirty Dancing which was set in the 1960s at a country club style holiday resort

Time of their lives: 30 years on and fans from all over the world still flock to the site of the cult 1980s love story

The film spawned a number of classic lines like 'I carried a watermelon', which fans quote back in the Dirty Dancing visitors' book

Find more shots from Dirty Dancing's locations on Film Tourismus or @filmtourismus on Instagram.
The mysterious American airline that flies US government workers to the secretive Area 51 military base is recruiting cabin crew.

A fleet of passenger aircraft is stabled at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport to ferry the workers to the off-limits area in rural Nevada, and anyone who boards one is sworn to secrecy about where they're going and what they do for a living.

The planes, which don't carry any company logos  they're plain white with a red band down the side - are operated by the US Air Force and are often referred to as Janet Airlines because that's the call sign the planes in it use while in civilian airspace.

One of the unmarked secretive aircraft that fly between Las Vegas and Area 51. The service is now advertising for cabin crew

However, it appears that the airline is advertising for staff after a job advert appeared on the website of AECOM, a private defence contractor that operates the service.

According to the vacancy ad, candidates must be able to perform regular flight attendant duties such as passenger safety briefings, emergency procedures and light cleaning.

However, it's preferred that all applicants should qualify for 'a top secret government security clearance'.

Another job duty is to remain level-headed when dealing with unusual incidents, with the listing giving examples as turbulence, weather delays and even hijackings or bomb threats.

The Area 51 base in the Nevada Test and Training Range, which is a secretive off-limits area owned by the US government

The position is a full-time job but the advert gives no indication of what the salary might be.

It is believed that all Janet Airlines flights fly out of a private terminal at McCarran nicknamed Gold Coast.

From Las Vegas they fly north-west to a place that has what's widely regarded as the most restricted airspace in the world, the Area 51 base in the Nevada Test and Training Range.

It has been reported that once the Janet aircraft approach this secretive area their call signs change from the likes of 'Janet 210' to 'bones 58'.

Services to Area 51 operate from a secretive terminal called Gold Coast at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, pictured

Nick Pope, author of Encounter in Rendlesham Forest and the man who used to investigate UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence, explained to MailOnline Travel that Area 51 is the place where some of America's most hi-tech military hardware is built and tested  but he doubts any of it is extra-terrestrial in origin.

He said: 'Area 51 exists - it's part of a military testing range in Nevada - and because of the remote and sparsely-populated location, it's where various secret prototype aircraft and drones are developed and test flown.

'The UFO and conspiracy theory community think it's the place where crashed UFOs are kept and where the US military are trying to back-engineer this alien technologY.

'Sadly, despite the rumours, I've seen no evidence that we've recovered any extraterrestrial technology.'
She ascended back into public life after appearing on the 2017 season of I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!

And although she was seen as a controversial and outspoken character, Tziporah Malkah has now revealed she was bullied by her co-stars whilst in the jungle.

According to Woman's Day, the 44-year-old formally known as Kate Fisher, took to Facebook to slam Ten and confessed she'd be soon releasing a tell-all blog.

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Opening up: Although she was seen as a controversial and outspoken character, Tziporah Malkah has now revealed she was bullied by her co-stars and the network whilst on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here

'I learned to be thick-skinned in the jungle,' she wrote on the social media account, according to the publication.

'Of course I'm A Celebrity didn't air all the bullying - the network also played a part.'

The magazine also added that when a fan asked for more information, Tziporah told them to wait for the blog and hinted it'd be explosive.

Tormented: 'Of course I'm A Celebrity...didn't air all the bullying - the network also played a part'

'Wait for my blog. I won't be holding back,' she said.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Tziporah for comment.

While fans patiently await her tell-all experience, last week, the former model took social media to air an explosive row with her boyfriend Guy Vasey, 46, where the pair called it quits after just six-months.

It's over: But while fans patiently await her tell-all experience, last week, the former model took social media in an explosive row with her boyfriend Guy Vasey, 46, where the pair called it quits after just six-months

Online war: He proceeded to post an image of a comment written by Tziporah, which read: 'U started it babe. I thought we were in a Prisoners Dilemma but u threw it all out the window when u took ur gloves off and started airing our dirty laundry online. Go for it [sic]'

Continued on: The online war continued with Tziporah telling Guy to go back to go back to 'that woman in Melbourne who you've had multiple 3somes with'

The exchange started when Guy responded to a fan inquiring about their relationship, commenting: 'thanks for your concern I am fine despite what Tz says to me.'

He proceeded to post an image of a comment written by Tziporah, which read: 'U started it babe. I thought we were in a Prisoners Dilemma but u threw it all out the window when u took ur gloves off and started airing our dirty laundry online. Go for it [sic].'

'PS: G-de make the Jews His chosen ppl for a reason. We are stiff necked. U wanna fight me in public? Go ahead, bring on ur own misery [sic],' she went on.

The online war continued with Tziporah telling Guy to go back 'to that woman in Melbourne'.

'So go off and have down trodden kids with her,' she wrote.

Tziporah has since revealed that the pair of back together.
Even for the most besotted, some time apart is a good thing.

That seemed to be the case Sunday as Sofia Richie was spotted grabbing coffee in Calabasas, California, while her boyfriend Scott Disick was busy bonding with his son, Mason.

Sofia went low-key in a dark ensemble of a black long-sleeved top with white text splayed across the sleeves and on the chest, with black leggings and white trainers.

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Out and about: Sofia Richie, 19, was spotted grabbing coffee at a Starbucks in Calabasas, California

The 19-year-old model had her dark locks parted on the right, carrying a small black purse on her arm as she emerged holding two beverages and a bag from the coffee establishment.

Disick, 34, looked to be having a carefree day down by the beach with his eight-year-old son Mason, as he relaxed on the deck of a lavish beach house with his arm around his first-born.

The bearded reality star wore a black hooded sweatshirt with blue jeans and black sunglasses, while Mason wore an all-white ensemble of a hoodie, pants and sneakers.

'O no we are not a bunch of beach boys,' wrote Scott, who has two other children with ex Kourtney Kardashian: daughter Penelope, five, and son Reign, three.

Sporty: The daughter of singer Lionel Richie was clad in a dark athletic ensemble

Idyllic: Scott Disick shared a beachfront shot relaxing with his eight-year-old son, Mason

The Sunday outings came less than a week after what was reported to be a tension-fraught New Year's Eve for the couple in Aspen, Colorado, where a source told the New York Post Scott 'went ballistic' and 'crazy' with jealousy when he saw her chatting it up with Formula One racer Lewis Hamilton - who she was romantically-linked with early last year - while the two were party-hopping in the well-heeled town.

After 'Sofia started talking to Lewis' during a billiards game he was playing, a 'very jealous' Scott 'insisted they leave the party immediately,' the insider told the paper.

A source told E! News that Disick was 'frustrated' by the 'unexpected' run-in.

'He doesn't like surprises and reacts aggressively in situations like that,' the source said. 'This isn't the first time that Scott has lost it for a minute.'

Jealous again? Sofia, posed with Lewis Hamilton in January of 2017, rankled Scott when she chat with the racer on New Year's Eve

Luxe living: Scott and Sofia posed on a private aircraft in a shot posted two days before their New Year's Eve row over Hamilton

The insider said that 'everything is fine between' Scott and Sofia following the awkward incident in Aspen. The source said, 'They will get in small fights and are over it within a few minutes,' adding that 'Sofia is definitely a good match for him because she understands him and puts up with his behavior in moments like this.'

A publicist for the racing champ told the newspaper that the meeting was a cordial one without any hysterics on anyone's part.

'Although Mr. Hamilton was in Aspen for the holiday, there was no jealousy, no fight, and no issue,' the rep said. 'Rather, as Ms. Richie has herself confirmed, there was a perfectly friendly, polite exchange and any claim to the contrary is simply false.'
She started the new year in style with a picture-perfect proposal on top of the ski slopes in Aspen, Colorado.

And newly-engaged Paris Hilton, 36, flaunted her massive diamond ring while shopping with fiance Chris Zylka, 32, in Beverly Hills on Sunday morning.

The adorable duo wore matching black ensembles as they strolled into Barney's New York, with Paris' sparkling $2million engagement ring taking center stage.

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Back in black! Newly-engaged Paris Hilton, 36, flaunted her massive diamond ring while shopping with fiance Chris Zylka, 32, in Beverly Hills on Sunday morning

The Hilton heiress sported a chic black minidress which featured white piping around her slender waistline and along the collar.

She showed off her toned and tanned legs beneath an adorable pleated skirt, teamed with a pair of crochet black booties.

Paris kept her shoulders covered with a long-sleeved cardigan and carried a small purse with a delicate gold chain across her shoulder.

Lovers in LA: The adorable duo wore matching black ensembles as they strolled into Barney's New York, with Paris' sparkling $2million engagement ring taking center stage

She revealed her massive sparkling ring through a pair of rocker-chic black fingerless gloves.

The Simple Life starlet kept dark cat-eye sunglasses over her eyes and styled her golden locks with delicate curls.

Her actor beau followed the dark theme wearing a long-sleeved sweater and matching black trousers.

Cute: The Hilton heiress sported a chic black minidress which featured white piping around her slender waistline and along the collar

Shop til you drop: Her actor beau followed the dark theme wearing a long-sleeved sweater and matching black trousers

The hotel heiress has only had one thing on her mind  her dream wedding to fiance Chris Zylka  since the actor proposed to her on New Year's Eve.

Paris shared the surprise proposal on Instagram to her eight million followers and has since posted a series of images about her happiness as a bride-to-be.

The couple first met eight years ago at an Oscars party at Chateau Marmont but didn't start dating until 2016, finally making it official on social media in February 2017.

On Sunday, alongside a black and white image of the duo, she wrote: 'Never in a million years did I think I would find someone so completely perfect for me. Someone who would make me happier than I ever dreamed I could be.

The couple have yet to set a date, but the ceremony may take place before the year is out.

Congrats! The hotel heiress has only had one thing on her mind  her dream wedding to fiance Chris Zylka  since the actor proposed to her on New Year's Eve
She's currently on holiday in the US with her boyfriend Jeremy Banks.

And it appears Kirralee 'Kiki' Morris may have been surprised with a proposal during the couple's trip to New York City.

The former Bachelor star, 30, shared a romantic New Year's Eve photo on Instagram, and fans were soon drawn to her ring finger.

Is that an engagement ring? It appears The Bachelor's Kirralee 'Kiki' Morris may have been surprised with a proposal during her recent trip to New York City with boyfriend Jeremy Banks

Kiki, who hails from Newcastle, appeared to be wearing a diamond band, which was reported by NW magazine as an 'engagement ring'.

In the photo, Jeremy and Kiki are shown passionately kissing while he affectionately grabs her pert derriere.

The former glamour model is dressed in thigh-high boots, a flirty miniskirt and crop top, and a wide-brimmed grey hat.

Kiki's Instagram followers were thrilled for the couple, with one fan commenting below: 'That is a lucky dude.'

Wedding bells? Kiki, who hails from Newcastle, appeared to be wearing a diamond band, which was reported by NW magazine as an 'engagement ring'

Another wrote, 'FFS I will if you don't!', presumably encouraging Jeremy and Kiki to make it official after dating for over a year.

The Sydney-based couple certainly haven't been shy about flaunting their romance on social media recently.

They shared several Instagram snaps from their trip to the Big Apple, before jetting off to Los Angeles for the new year.

Taking in the sights: The Sydney-based couple certainly haven't been shy about flaunting their romance on social media recently. Pictured in New York

Claim to fame: Kiki appeared on Richie Strahan's season of The Bachelor back in 2016, but her quest for love was unsuccessful

Kiki appeared on Richie Strahan's season of The Bachelor back in 2016, but her quest for love was unsuccessful.

Speaking to Popsugar about her time on the show, Kiki said: 'I knew my relationship with Richie hadn't progressed like the other girls.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Kiki for comment.

Moving on: Speaking to Popsugar about her time on the show, Kiki said: 'I knew my relationship with Richie hadn't progressed like the other girls.' Pictured right: Richie Strahan
She was nominated for her first-ever Golden Globe for her work as executive producer and series lead in murder mystery, The Sinner.

And Jessica Biel was supported by her leading man Justin Timberlake as she attended the 75th annual ceremony at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The actress, 35, united with her husband, 36, in support of victims of sexual harassment and assault by both wearing black to the annual event.

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Loved up: Golden Globe nominated Jessica Biel was supported by husband Justin Timberlake as she attended the 75th annual ceremony at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Sunday

Jessica oozed glamour in an ethereal strapless couture gown as she and her husband of five years shared a sweet moment on the red carpet.

The talented star wore trademark brunette tresses swept back in a loose bun, which allowed her beautiful features to shine through.

The mother-of-one boasted a healthy glow with help from beauty brand St Tropez, using both their Tan Enhancing Body Polish and Instant Tan Finishing Gloss ahead of the awards.

While she added a pair of sparkly dangling earrings and a diamond bracelet to her accessories, as well as a slick of berry-colored lipstick.

Justin looked handsome in a black tuxedo, teamed with a black shirt and black bow tie.

In support: The actress, 35, united with her husband, 36, in support of victims of sexual harassment and assault by both wearing black to the annual event

Glamour couple: Jessica oozed glamour in an ethereal strapless couture gown as she and her husband of five years shared a sweet moment on the red carpet

The Bringing Sexy Back hitmaker sported the Times Up pin in honor of the Times Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal assistance to women who experienced harassment or abuse in the workplace.

As the gorgeous couple were preparing for the event earlier in the day, Justin posted a cute snap with the caption: 'Damn, my wife is hot!'

Jessica shared an Instagram snap of herself showcasing the baubles with the caption: 'Just me and a bunch of my sparkly best friends cruising to the globes.'

A hilarious Twitter video was also shared of the couple on the way to the Globes as they rocked out to his new single Filthy.

As long as I've got my suit and tie: Justin looked handsome in the black tuxedo, teamed with a black shirt and black bow tie

Pinned: The Bringing Sexy Back hitmaker sported the Times Up pin in honor of the Times Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal assistance to women who experienced harassment

Jessica and the couple's son Silas, two, both star in the newly-released video for the track.

Justin sang along to the song as he repeatedly put the camera on his wife dancing in the backseat.

At one point, Jessica took over the vocals, singing into the camera as she waved her hands over her head.

Stunning: Jessica - who is nominated for two Globes for her work on The Sinner - commanded attention in a gorgeous strapless gown that put her enviable figure on full display

Look of love: Jessica gave a heartwarming glance at her husband of five years

Justin and Jessica began dating in 2007, wed in Italy five years later, and welcomed son Silas on April 8, 2015.

Stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honor the best in film and television as 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

Handsome gent: Justin looked every inch the movie star as he supported his wife of five years during her big moment

Head turner: Jessica added a pair of sparkly dangling earrings and a diamond bracelet

Dazzling: The actress and mother-of-one injected a bolt of color to her red carpet look with a slick of berry-colored lipstick

The focus on Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host - is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Impressed husband: Justin posted a snap of the couple getting ready for the Globes as he captioned it: 'And DAMN, my wife is hot!'

Shout out! Jessica thanked Bulgari for her stunning jewels as she made her way to the event

Sing-a-long: Justin also posted a sweet Twitter video of the couple in the car on the way to the Globes as they rocked out to his new single Filthy

Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water leads the film nominations with seven, while The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are tied for second, with six each.

The top TV contenders were female-led dramas; HBO's Big Little Lies and the FX series Feud: Bette and Joan

Overall, 25 awards are given out - 14 for movies and 11 for TV - and, as usual, the 90-member HFPA has sprung more than a few surprises in the nominations, placing horror satire Get Out in the best comedy-musical category.

There were no nominations at all for female filmmakers despite huge successes in 2017 for Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit) and Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled).

Vocal master: Justin sang along to the song as he repeatedly put the camera on his wife dancing in the backseat

Take the mic: At one point, Jessica took over the vocals singing into the camera as she waved her hands over her head

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
Karl Stefanovic's father previously revealed he barely speaks to his famous son after the Today host and his brother Peter 'walked away' from him 25 years ago.

And Karl's estranged dad Alex Stefanovic, 71, is now reportedly set to release an explosive tell-all to air Karl and his family's 'darkest secrets'.

Reports in Woman's Day claim the book will likely be the end of any potential relationship between the already-strained father and son.

'It's going to be BRUTAL. Honest, but brutal!' Karl Stefanovic's estranged father Alex is writing an explosive tell-all to lift lid of family's 'darkest secrets'

An insider told the publication Alex doesn't hold back while exposing the family's dirty laundry.

'It's going to be BRUTAL. Honest, but brutal,' they continued, adding Alex will detail elements from each of his children's life.

One sensational chapter reportedly explains what Alex describes as the family's 'gambling curse'.

No-holds barred! An insider told the publication, Alex doesn't hold back while exposing the family's dirty laundry in the book

In happier times: The family feud reportedly began when Alex, now 70, divorced Karl and Peter's beloved mother, Jenny Stefanovic

'It was a strained marriage and had been for a long time': Alex previously told New Idea that Karl and Cassandra Thorburn's marriage was in trouble for many years, and claimed Karl had spoken about his troubled marriage in the early 2000's

As Alex has not kept in regular contact with Karl for some years, it's believed he has not met Karl's new girlfriend Jasmine Yarbrough, 33.

He previously told New Idea that Karl and Cassandra Thorburn's marriage was in trouble for some time: 'From what I know, it was a strained marriage and had been for a long time.'

'Karl came to see me in the early 2000s and said, "Marriage is too hard, its all over"' he claimed.

Karl shares three children with ex-wife of 21 years: Jackson, 17, Ava, 12, and River, 10.

Alex claims he has been unfairly cast as the 'family villain' and hasn't been able to see his grandchildren.

'Could cost Karl everything of he's not careful': One sensational chapter reportedly explains what Alex describes as the family's 'gambling curse'

He maintains they have not spoken much 'for 10 years' and that Karl and Peter 'sided' with their mother Jenny following the split.

Despite these claims, Alex did see his sons when he attended Peter's wedding to Today newsreader Sylvia Jeffreys in early April.

According to Alex, Karl will also not call him 'dad' and instead refers to him as 'big fella'.

Daily Mail Australia have reached out to Karl's representatives for comment.
While those tuning into McMafias first three episodes might have found the plot confusing, there appears to be one simple constant  a topless James Norton.

The 32-year-old British actor, who has been tipped as the next James Bond, has stripped off in every instalment of the BBCs thriller so far - and Sunday night's episode of the show was no exception.

In the clearest sight of his toned torso yet, he was seen donning a pair of black swimming trunks and jumping off a yacht in the south of France, before having a tense discussion on the shore with a sinister new acquaintance.

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Rippling: James Norton flashed a glimpse of his rippling abs as he stripped down to his swimming trunks in the latest episode of his BBC show McMafia on Sunday night

Just as Aidan Turner has taken his shirt off for several scenes in the hit series Poldark, James has kept his fans entertained, having already been involved in three bedroom scenes and two swimming scenes.

Yet, whilst a clear, uninterrupted view of his physique left several fans swooning, the BBC will have been hoping that it also might have served another purpose - arresting the declining ratings.

The big-budget series lost nearly 750,000 viewers between its first two episodes, as many viewers complained that the slow action, use of tiny subtitles and the jumpy locations failed to grip them.

Jump: The 32-year-old actor was seen jumping off a yacht in the south of France in the episode

Cartel: He shared scenes with Caio Blat, who plays Mexican cartel member Antonio Mendez

Since launching on New Years Day with just under 5.6million viewers, the next nights episode was watched by 4.8million, putting it well below the likes of 2016 hit series The Night Manager.

The disparity in the ratings comes despite the remarkable similarities in the productions, both of which feature exotic locations, high drama and violence, large sums of money and are both fronted by brooding British men.

Those looking for an explanation for the dramatic drop in McMafias ratings might point to the somewhat confusing scheduling, which saw three episodes air in one week.

It will now air in the typical drama slot of 9pm on Sundays, though any further dip in the ratings would be a disappointment for those involved, given the large budget and the international scale of the production.

Scenes: The star has appeared in three bedroom scenes and two swimming scenes so far

Bond? The star is rumoured to be the next actor to take on the coveted role of James Bond

In its focus on organised crime and corruption, the series has so far featured several gruesome scenes, including a gang boss being pushed off the roof of a building and Nortons characters uncle Boris having his throat slit.

A young girl being trafficked as a potential girlfriend for a wealthy businessmen was also seen being shot in the knees and left to die after she attempted to escape her hostages.

The violence continued on Sunday, with a police officer being battered to death with a metal pipe and one of the henchmen who murdered Boris being held tortured in a basement.

Ahead of Sundays third instalment, the Russian embassy claimed the programme is a cliched and inaccurate portrayal of its citizens.

Shocked: The gritty drama recently featured one of the most disturbing scenes to air on the BBC, as his character watched his uncle have his throat and wrists slit

Gory: One particularly gruesome scene featured a man getting his wrists and throat sliced in front of lead star James - who plays his nephew Alex Godman

It posted on Twitter that the thriller depicts Britain as a playground for Russian gangsters, an accusation about which the BBC declined to comment.

As the show debuted on New Year's night, viewers took to Twitter to complain about its 'tiny subtitles'; and they later complained that the programme is too gory.

One particularly gruesome scene featured a man getting his wrists and throat sliced in front of lead star James Norton - who plays his nephew Alex Godman.

The show - which has been one of the most hotly-anticipated dramas for the New Year - features eight parts and jumped right into the action with the grisly scene.

Graphic: The show - which has been one of the most hotly-anticipated dramas of the New Year - features eight parts and jumped right into the action with the grisly scene

The highly-anticipated BBC thriller starring James Norton (pictured) started last night

The plot revolves around gangsters - with one murdering Godman's uncle, causing blood to spurt around the room from his wrists, mouth and neck.

'This is so going to be gory!! Thanks #BBC #mcmafia,' one person tweeted; but others were less impressed, with one writing '#McMafia the way the mob slit the uncle' with a string of shocked emojis after it.

McMafia is based on Misha Glennys book of the same name, which focuses on the world of organised crime.

The author previously told The Sun: 'There are a couple of more scenes to make one shiver but I think nothing quite competes with the unexpected shock of that sequence in the opening episode.'

Subtitles: Norton (right) plays the son of an ex-Russian mobster Alex Godman. But viewers claimed some of the scenes spoken in Russian had 'tiny' subtitles
She commanded attention with her endless skimpy bikini displays on 2017's installment of Love Island.

And Montana Brown continued to turn heads on Sunday, as she accentuated her enviable toned figure and perky posterior in a racy khaki two-piece while enjoying some winter sun in Barbados.

The 22-year-old ITV2 star flashed her pert derriere in the thong bikini as she leaned over her sun lounger while soaking up the luxurious atmosphere in her idyllic Caribbean resort.

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Soaking up the sun: Montana Brown continued to turn heads on Sunday, as she accentuated her enviable toned figure and perky posterior in a racy khaki two-piece while enjoying some winter sun in Barbados

Cheeky: The 22-year-old ITV2 star flashed her pert derriere in the thong bikini as she leaned over her sun lounger while soaking up the luxurious atmosphere in her idyllic Caribbean resort

Getting fellow holiday revellers hot under the collar, she highlighted her slender pins and narrow waist as she searched her beach bag for her phone.

Montana teamed her cheeky bottoms with a plunging bikini top which displayed her taut abs and ample cleavage as she chatted to her mum Sarah on the beach.

Aside from flashing the flesh, the reality TV star continued to showcase her natural beauty as she worked her brunette locks into a sleek top knot while shielding her eyes from the sun with a pair of oversized shades.

Montana shot to fame on ITV2's Love Island this year, and although she failed to find Mr Right, she garnered a huge fan following with her witty sense of humour.

Setting pulse racing: Getting fellow holiday revellers hot under the collar, she highlighted her slender pins and narrow waist as she searched her beach bag for her phone

Mane attraction: Aside from flashing the flesh, the reality TV star continued to showcase her natural beauty as she worked her brunette locks into a sleek top knot

Work it: Montana teamed her cheeky bottoms with a plunging bikini top which displayed her taut abs and ample cleavage as she chatted to her mum Sarah on the beach

The brunette has been riding the wave of fame since departing the Mallorca villa - bagging a presenting role with MTV as well as her own fashion line with Pretty Little Thing.

After the series came to an end, Montana confessed it was the prospect of working in the public eye after the show that convinced her to apply.

She said on Loose Women: 'I just thought it could be a great platform do what I want to do, I dont know what yet. I thought it would open doors and opportunities, to be in the public eye and influence public in good way.

'I definitely thought I was going to find a boyfriend. But its not easy have to find real connection with people, you dont have a connection with everyone.'

No shade: She shielded her eyes from the sun with a pair of oversized shades

Figure-flaunting: The London native looked incredible as she relaxed by the sea

Spotlight: Montana shot to fame on ITV2's Love Island this year, and although she failed to find Mr Right, she garnered a huge fan following with her witty sense of humour

She also addressed her decision to have sex on camera with villa squeeze Alex Beattie - against her mother's advice.

She laughed: 'Mum was like, "Do not have sex on camera!" When youre in the moment you forget so easily. You're like, "Oh well!" My mum's words went in one ear, out the other.

'When she came to visit in villa, she was like, "Well talk about when we get home". I have zero regrets looking back and seeing journey I went on.

'I never thought I would have sex but when youre in a relationship with someone It felt right for me at the time.'

Success: The brunette has been riding the wave of fame since departing the Mallorca villa - bagging a presenting role with MTV as well as her own fashion line with Pretty Little Thing
Kelly Clarkson couldn't contain her excitement as she spotted Meryl Streep at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday.

The 35-year-old songstress had just arrived at The Beverly Hilton and was on the red carpet when she spotted her idol standing several feet in front of her.

Walking down some steps escorted by E! host Ryan Seacrest Kelly suddenly stopped in her tracks, swung around and gasped: 'Oh my god, that's Meryl!'

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'Oh my god!': Kelly Clarkson had a serious fangirl moment on Sunday night as she spotted Meryl Streep on the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles

'What happened?' Ryan Seacrest had been escorting the singer down some steps on the red carpet when she suddenly spotted the Oscar-winner

Looking confused Ryan asked Kelly 'What happened?' thinking she'd just tripped on her dress, until he realized the American Idol alum was just having a serious fangirl moment.

Kelly then summoned the courage to turn back around and face Meryl, 68, and asked: 'Oh my god, can I meet you? Ive adored you since I was like 8,' before getting a hug kiss from the Devil Wears Prada star.

The mother-of-two looked gorgeous in a dramatic black ball gown with one gold sleeve, a custom design by Christian Siriano.

Her dark blonde locks were teased up into a sophisticated updo with a little volume on top and she kept her makeup look understated.

Shock: Ryan wasn't sure what was wrong at first as the singer suddenly stopped in her tracks and turned her back to the movie icon

Kelly then summoned the courage to turn back around and face Meryl, 68, and asked: 'Oh my god, can I meet you? Ive adored you since I was like 8,'

Meeting an icon: The Breakaway singer finally summoned the courage to walk over and meet the Devil Wears Prada star

It's happening: Kelly was greeted warmly by Meryl, 68, and the duo chatted for a while

Meanwhile Meryl is nominated for best performance by an actress in a drama for her role in The Post.

Nominated in the same category are Jessica Chastain (Molly's Game), Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), Frances McDormand (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri) and Michelle Williams (All the Money in the World).

Meryl walked the red carpet hand-in-hand with justice activist Ai-jen Po as the stars protested sexual harassment in Hollywood and across the world.

Oscar winner: Meryl is nominated for best actress for her role in The Post

Beauty in black: Kelly wowed in a dramatic black ball gown with one gold sleeve as she arrived at The Beverly Hilton

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

The majority of stars wore black in solidarity with victims of Weinstein and numerous other figures exposed by the harassment and abuse scandal, including Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Dustin Hoffman.

Making a statement: The American Idol alum opted for a custom Christian Siriano gown

Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water leads the nominations with seven, while The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are tied for second, with six each.

Overall, 25 awards are given out - 14 for movies and 11 for TV - and, as usual, the 90-member HFPA has sprung more than a few surprises in the nominations, placing horror satire Get Out in the best comedy-musical category.

There were no nominations at all for female filmmakers despite huge successes in 2017 for Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit) and Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled).

Red carpet glam: Her dark blonde locks were teased up into a sophisticated updo with a little volume on top and she kept her makeup look understated

Time-up: This Golden Globe Awards ceremony is the first time Hollywood has united publicly to make a statement against the pervasive culture of misconduct

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
Her dance partner came out as gay in an interview with Attitude magazine this month.

Yet Candice Brown was still being accused of 'snogging' Matt Evers when she made her Dancing On Ice debut on Sunday night, on ITV,

The Great British Bake Off winner also pulled off a spectacular gravity-defying lift during the routine to At Last - but scored a meare 13 points out of 40, putting her in next week's dreaded Skate Off.

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Kisses: Candice Brown (left) was seen kissing her dance partner Matt Evers following her Dancing On Ice debut on Sunday night

Candice lashed out at claims she kissed Matt in a Twitter snap, as she posed between her skating partner and her fiance, Liam Macaulay.

She captioned the pouting snap: ''Snogging' my two favourite boys @Dennisthepug @TheMattEvers Thank you for being my left and right.'

With the perfect pout on her scarlet lips, the baker was kissed on the cheek by both of her favourite boys.

At the end of her performance on Sunday night, viewers took to Twitter in their droves to point out the moment Candice puckered up to her partner.

She had been performing to At Last but sadly fell foul of disappointing critique and will battle it out in next weekend's Skate Off.

Gravity-defying: The baking supremo pulled off an impressive lift during the dazzling routine

Touching: Candice got very close to her partner in the debut dance to Last

It comes a matter of months after Candice was seen getting a kiss from Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood, with whom she worked closely on the show in 2016.

The 51-year-old leaned in to give the beauty a farewell kiss after a night out at the Pride Of Britain Awards in November.

Shortly afterwards, Paul announced his split from his wife of 20 years Alexandra but Candice dismissed any speculation of a budding romance.

She told The Sun at the time: 'It's absolutely not for me to say anything.'

Candice and her long-term partner Liam had not long since confirmed their engagement, in October.

Oh dear: Despite her gravity-defying routine, Candice received low marks and will battle it out in the first elimination skate-off next week

Failing to impress: The duo scored a mere 13 of out 40, with Ashley Banjo calling for her to try and feel 'more relaxed' on the rink

Kisses for the mrs: Candice (centre) later poked fun at the claims, as she was sandwiched in with her fiance Liam Macaulay (left) and partner Matt (right)

Meanwhile, Candice's partner Matt made the decision to come out this weekend, when he appeared in the latest issue of Attitude.

Now 41, Matt admitted he had struggled with speaking openly about his sexuality after he saw his uncle banished from the family for coming out, 20 years ago.

He described the heartache of watching his passing from an AIDs related illness when he was not accepted within the family.

'I didn't know I was gay at the time,' Matt explained. 'But when he was dying it hit me really hard that he didn't know the love of his mum, my grandmother.

'They were strict Catholics at the tip of the Bible belt. I wasn't aware of why his passing and the thought of him never being accepted by his own family hurt me so much until I realised I was gay. It's scary, the difference between generations.'

Just friends: Only this week, Matt made the decision to come out as a gay in an interview with Attitude magazine

Meanwhile, Candice opened up about her rib injury during training for Dancing On Ice on Lorraine on Monday.

She explained: 'I fall over on my own feet anyway. My ribs really suffered and I said I'll keep it to myself, I thought they would say I can't compete.

'I sneezed and I thought I was going to pass out. I texted Matt and said "I need help!'

'I went to see the physio, I felt a lot better, it's kind of gritting my teeth and getting on with it.'
Fans were left reeling by his death in Friday's double bill, after his discovery of Pat Phelan's crimes led him to be shot and blown up by the builder.

And it seems Coronation Street's residents will soon learn of Luke Britton's passing in the coming days, as teaser images show the Nazir family holding a vigil for the late mechanic.

In scenes set to air next week, Luke's girlfriend Alya will learn of his passing from police, oblivious to the fact that Phelan was responsible for the shocking death.

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Emotional: Coronation Street fans will see the street learn the news of Luke Britton's death next week, as his girlfriend Alya holds a candlelit vigil for the late mechanic

Police will tell Alya that Luke was shot and killed in a dramatic car explosion, with a teaser image showing the Underworld manager struggling to hold back the tears with friend Kate Connor.

Another snap shows Alya standing outside Underworld with a vigil set up to honour her late boyfriend, along with her grandmother Yasmeen and brother Zeedan.

In another image, Phelan can be seen precariously watching the vigil take place, with the Street clueless as to his responsibility for Luke's death.

Shocking: In teaser images, Alya can be seen learning the news of Luke's death along with friend Kate Connor

Responsible: Sinister Pat Phelan, who secretly killed Luke in a dramatic car explosion can be seen precariously watching the vigil in one of the snaps

Condolences: In another image residents of the street can be seen visiting Alya after Luke's death

Luke was killed off in explosive scenes in Friday's double bill, as he pursued Phelan in a dramatic car chase after discovering the builder's crimes.

But evil Pat managed to force Luke off the road before reaching for his gun, walking over to the car and shooting him in the drivers seat of his vehicle.

But the vile villain wasn't done there as he coldly turned back to the car, and shot the petrol tank, engulfing the car in an enormous fireball.

Dramatic: Luke, played by Dean Hagan, was killed off in Friday's double bill, after discovering Phelan's sinister crimes

RIP: Phelan (played by Connor McIntyre) murdered Luke after he realised the mechanic had discovered evidence which implicated him in the disappearance of Andy Carver, who he had shot dead

Despite Phelan's horrendous acts, Dean Hagan, who played Luke, has revealed that his death is the start of a long road which will see Phelan get his comeuppance.

Dean told the Manchester Evening News: 'I was excited to realise I was going to be a pivotal part of the start of Phelan's demise, the start of the unravelling, that someone else has found out the truth and he has now killed again, which is a desperate act and one that is going to eventually start more questions being asked.

'The Phelan era is huge and he has played such a massive part in the street so to be involved in that is brilliant. Luke will play his part in the whole end game.'

No mercy: In the shocking scenes, Phelan was seen running Luke off the road in his car before shooting him
She's known for expressing her opinions as part of the Studio 10 panel.

And on Monday, Jessica Rowe spoke out against attendees wearing all-black outfits to the Golden Globe Awards as a protest against sexual harassment.

The 47-year-old called the demonstration 'dumb' and suggested Hollywood's biggest stars should have boycotted the red carpet altogether for greater impact.

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'It's dumb': On Monday, Studio 10's Jessica Rowe (pictured) spoke out against Hollywood stars wearing all-black to the Golden Globe Awards as a protest against sexual harassment

'It is wonderful women are finding their voice, that we are speaking up, but to me it is dumb to wear black on the red carpet,' she said on Network Ten's morning show.

'Theyre still going to be wearing designer black, theyre going to still be looking gorgeous and wonderful.'

She added: 'To me, it is tokenistic and its not a good way of sending the right message.'

Opinion: 'It is wonderful women are finding their voice, that we are speaking up, but to me it is dumb to wear black on the red carpet,' she said on Network Ten's morning show

The mother-of-two said the celebrity guests could have opted to not attend the ceremony or, at least, wear red or purple instead to represent 'defiance'.

Her Studio 10 co-host Joe Hildebrand also took issue with the protest, which he described as 'strange'.

'The last great Hollywood protest movement about the treatment of women was the #AskHerMore Campaign which said, "We dont want to be defined by what were wearing on the red carpet, we want to be taken seriously as actresses",' he remarked.

'And then the very next social protest movement in Hollywood is one in which theyre defining themselves entirely by what theyre wearing on the red carpet,' Joe added.

Televised debate: Jessica's Studio 10 co-host Joe Hildebrand (second from left) also took issue with the protest, which he described as 'strange'

'Theyre still going to be wearing designer black, theyre going to still be looking gorgeous and wonderful,' Jess said of Golden Globe attendees like Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness

In recognition of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements against sexual harassment in Hollywood and other industries, attendees opted to wear black at the awards show.

Rose McGowan, who has spoken out against Harvey Weinstein in the past, took to Twitter to criticise actresses like Meryl Streep for taking part in the Globes protest.

'Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster (Weinstein), are wearing black Golden Globes in a silent protest,' she wrote.

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement

Protest: In recognition of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements against sexual harassment in Hollywood, attendees opted to wear black at the awards show. Pictured: Alison Brie
She presented at the 75th annual Golden Globes on Sunday evening.

But the night was still young as Christina Hendricks made a glamorous entrance at one of the star-studded event's numerous after-parties.

The 42-year-old actress still wore her sweeping black custom gown from American fashion designer Christian Siriano during an appearance at local nightclub Poppy.

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Ready for more: The night was still young as Christina Hendricks made a glamorous entrance at a Golden Globes after-party at Poppy nightclub in Los Angeles on Sunday evening

Just hours earlier Christina oozed movie star glamour as she arrived on the red carpet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the annual awards show.

While the color of her dress was chosen out of solidarity with the Time's Up movement, it also served to highlight her signature ginger locks.

Daring to impress, the Mad Men star wrapped her enviable figure in the cold shoulder dress that showcased her pretty decolletage.

The flowing train covered a smart set of black capri pants as a thin strap of fabric circled her lithe waist.

Looking good: The 42-year-old actress still wore her sweeping black custom gown from American fashion designer Christian Siriano

Party time: Christina appeared to be in the mood to let her hair down after presenting at the annual event earlier that evening

Incoming: The party capped off an eventful night for the popular actress, who posed for photos as she made her way inside

Her trademark ginger tresses were swept back in a messy bun as the loose locks brushed her petite shoulders.

The Good Girls star went with a few sparkly accessories as she wore diamond baubles on her wrists and ears.

She chose a rose palette for her makeup as she rocked a slight smokey eye and bright berry lip.

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement

Striking: The Mad Men star made her presence felt as she posed for photos on Sunday evening

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - TELEVISION Best TV series - Drama The Crown Game of Thrones The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Stranger Things This Is Us Best performance by Actress in a TV series - Drama Caitriona Balfe, Outlander Claire Foy, The Crown Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Best performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama Sterling K. Brown, This is Us - WINNER Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Jason Bateman, Ozark Best TV series - Musical or Comedy Black-ish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Master of None SMILF Will & Grace Best performance by an Actor in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Anthony Anderson, Black-ish Aziz Ansari, Master of None - WINNER Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick William H. Macy, Shameless Eric McCormack, Will and Grace Best performance by an Actress in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Pamela Adlon, Better Things Alison Brie, Glow Issa Rae, Insecure Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Frankie Shaw, SMILF Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Big Little Lies - WINNER Fargo Feud: Bette and Joan The Sinner Top of the Lake: China Girl Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies Jude Law, The Young Pope Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks Ewan McGregor, Fargo - WINNER Geoffrey Rush, Genius Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Jessica Biel, The Sinner Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies - WINNER Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Alfred Molina, Feud Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies - WINNER David Thewlis, Fargo David Harbour, Stranger Things Christian Slater, Mr. Robot Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Laura Dern, Big Little Lies - WINNER Ann Dowd, The Handmaid's Tale Chrissy Metz, This is Us Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies Advertisement

Commanding: The actress commanded attention as she donned a sophisticated couture black gown that highlighted her signature ginger locks

Cheers! The actress appeared to be in a celebratory mood as she raised a Moet & Chandon goblet backstage at the annual event

After her wildly successful run as Joan on Mad Men, Christina has found another television project Good Girls that debuts this year.

She'll play a suburban mother who teams up with two friends to risk everything to take their lives back.

Meanwhile, more stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honor the best in film and television as the 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

Stunning: The actress ensured she stood out courtesy of her sweeping black gown on Sunday evening

Stunning couture: The flowing train covered a smart set of black capri pants as a thin strap of fabric circled her lithe waist

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

The focus Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host -- is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Strike a pose: Christina greeted photographers as she made her way into the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday evening

Hair today: Her trademark ginger tresses were swept back in a messy bun as the loose locks brushed her petite shoulders

Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water leads the nominations with seven, while The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are tied for second, with six each.

Overall, 25 awards are given out - 14 for movies and 11 for TV - and, as usual, the 90-member HFPA has sprung more than a few surprises in the nominations, placing horror satire Get Out in the best comedy-musical category.

There were no nominations at all for female filmmakers despite huge successes in 2017 for Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit) and Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled).
McMafia

Rating:

Who could have guessed that the world of inter-national banking involves so much semi-nudity?

McMafia (BBC1) has swept away the fusty old image of pinstripe suits and shiny shoes for ever, replacing it with the essential businesswear of 2018: swimming trunks.

When James Nortons financier Alex Godman isnt looking worried and preoccupied in bed, while reclining topless against a pillow, he is diving off yachts in the Riviera or conducting tense negotiations in his designer bathing shorts.

When Alex Godman (James Norton) isn't looking worried and preoccupied in bed, in McMafia, he is conducting tense negotiations in his designer bathing shorts

Not that most viewers have even noticed, Im sure. Its purely coincidence that millions of British women are suddenly discovering an intense interest in how the proceeds of organised crime are laundered through labyrinthine offshore accounts.

This thriller, based on a true account of how criminal networks today operate as global businesses, has wrestled with a major problem from the start: unless they involve suitcases full of cash, financial transactions are boring.

Wads of banknotes make for great television. And the bigger the better  theres a fantastic moment near the end of the drugs drama Breaking Bad where a 30st crook, grinning with joy, flops back on a $10 million mountain of dollar bills like a double bed.

But bank transfers dont hold the same fascination. Every episode of McMafia involves a shot where Alexs finger hovers over the mouse button of his computer, as he readies himself to make a colossal payment into some bank in the Bahamas.

Christopher Stevens says McMafia (BBC1) has swept away the fusty old image of pinstripe suits and shiny shoes for ever, replacing it with the essential businesswear of 2018: swimming trunks

Will he, wont he? Tens of millions of pounds hang in the balance. But we just dont care. Its only a mouseclick, after all.

Small wonder this drama diverts us whenever it can with glamorous locations, visceral violence and the Norton torso.

TRAINEE OF THE NIGHT Fossil hunter Chris Moore, In Attenborough And The Sea Dragon (BBC1), set Sir David, 91 to work cleaning up dinosaur bones. 'You can begin on three days a week,' he offered. Well, it's good work experience. Advertisement

Its all done with glorious menace. The five-star hotels are lit with golden spotlamps, and the champagne receptions ring with laughter, but every scene feels cynical and fraudulent. These billionaire mobsters know how to spend money, but they have no idea how to enjoy it.

On the rare occasions when Norton has his clothes on, youll have noticed that his face is expressionless. At first he seemed to be hiding his emotions, but now he has admitted that hes no longer sure what hes feeling, or who he even is. That diverts our attention to the female characters, and two are becoming really intriguing  Alexs mother Oksana (Maria Shukshina) and Lyudmilla, the Russian woman captured by people traffickers.

And they dont seem to be quite the victims they first appeared.

Will and Grace

Rating:

Its a fair bet that all the stars of Will And Grace (C5) are glued to McMafia, and not for the high finance. This screamingly camp sitcom, which ran for eight series around the millennium, is back after a 12-year break.

When it launched in 1998, the notion of openly gay characters, having one-night stands and catfights, was outrageous enough, especially for American audiences, to guarantee a gigantic hit. These days, with gay and lesbian couples on every TV quiz show, its about as edgy as a feather cushion.

All four characters look like theyve been preserved by being dipped in varnish. But theres a good reason for bringing them back now  to poke fun at the Trump presidency.

In the opening episode, they broke into the Oval Office: Will and Grace (Eric McCormack and Debra Messing) had a pillow fight, while Jack (Sean Hayes) set about seducing the secret servicemen.

Its hardly satire. But as an excuse for reviving one of the most sharply written U.S. comedies, it will do nicely.
He made headlines for all the wrong reasons on Friday night, when he was caught on camera getting thrown out of a New York City bar following a row over a pool table.

But Game Of Thrones star Kit Harington was back to his polished best on Sunday evening, when he stepped out in style for the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards, held at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills.

The 31-year-old actor was all smiles as he hit the glittering gala's red carpet in a classic black tuxedo, which he teamed with a matching shirt and bow tie.

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Stepping out: Kit Harington attended the Golden Globe Awards, held at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, on Sunday evening

With his raven locks styled in his signature curls, the screen heart-throb appeared to be in jovial spirits as he prepared to make his way into the annual awards show.

The night before, he joined his Game Of Thrones co-star Emilia Clarke at the 7th Annual Sean Penn & Friends Haiti Rising Gala in Hollywood.

Nonetheless he was put in the shade by the Mother of Dragons, who donned a gorgeous long red skirt with large golden buttons running along the side of her hip, matched with a crimson-coloured long-sleeved top.

Throne out: His appearance came two days after he was booted from New York City dive bar Barfly, following a row over a pool table

Meanwhile, the actor who plays Jon Snow looked dapper in a black suit worn with a fitted black sweater and matching velour shoes, which was a far cry from his appearance on Friday night in Barfly, a dive bar in Gramercy Park in the Big Apple.

Video of the dispute appears to show Kit attempting to locate his coat and belongings in a manner disruptive to the other revellers.

His leading-man charm didn't appear to impress one young lady, who tartly told him: 'Say excuse me,' as he tried to jostle past her.

The bar has only one pool table, squeezed into cramped quarters outside the restrooms.

Good spirits: The 31-year-old actor appeared to be in good spirits at the glittering awards gala

In good company: The actor was joined by his Game Of Thrones co-star Emilia Clarke

A good looking pair: Emilia beamed while Kit smouldered as they posed for photos on the red carpet

According to one eyewitness, Kit was booted out of the bar and left, but then came back in and had to be physically dragged out into the cold by bouncers, TMZ reported.

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Kit Harington for comment.

In September, west London-native Kit announced his engagement to his erstwhile Game Of Thrones co-star Rose Leslie.

Looking good: Kit commanded attention in a smart black tuxedo suit and matching dress shirt

Centre stage: The pair were on hand to present an award at the annual event on Sunday evening

The Brits were flying high in the nominations stakes ahead of the 75th Golden Globe Awards.

Netflix series The Crown - which chronicles the life of Queen Elizabeth II from the 1940s to more modern times - scooped three nominations, but failed to win on the night with Elisabeth Moss and The Handmaid's Tale proving to be its two biggest obstacles.

Elsewhere Londoner Daniel Kaluuya sreceived a nod for his role in Get Out, but narrowly missed out to The Disaster Artist star James Franco in the category for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy.

Christopher Nolan, the genius behind acclaimed war drama Dunkirk, was up for Best Director, while the esteemed movie was also in the running for Best Drama Motion Picture, and Best Original Score.

Pals: The night before. he joined Game Of Thrones co-star Emilia Clarke at the 7th Annual Sean Penn & Friends Haiti Rising Gala in Hollywood

Nolan went go head-to-head with fellow Brit Ridley Scott in the Director category, who was nominated for All the Money in the World, while British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was also pitted against the directing heavyweights for his crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

However the award went to Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water.

Gary Oldman offered a rare triumph on the night in the otherwise American-dominated Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture  Drama, for his portrayal of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour.

While fans of Daniel Kaluuya rejoiced at the actor being nominated for his role in the thriller, the positioning of his nomination was met with controversy after being listed in the Comedy and Musical movie category, despite it being categorised as a horror when it was first released.

British contenders in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy category included veteran actresses Judi Dench, for Victoria & Abdul, and Helen Mirren for The Leisure Seeker.

Raking in the dough: Kit Harington as Jon Snow is seen with Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in Game Of Thrones. The show's stars are among the highest paid in television

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - TELEVISION Best TV series - Drama The Crown Game of Thrones The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Stranger Things This Is Us Best performance by Actress in a TV series - Drama Caitriona Balfe, Outlander Claire Foy, The Crown Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Best performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama Sterling K. Brown, This is Us - WINNER Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Jason Bateman, Ozark Best TV series - Musical or Comedy Black-ish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Master of None SMILF Will & Grace Best performance by an Actor in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Anthony Anderson, Black-ish Aziz Ansari, Master of None - WINNER Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick William H. Macy, Shameless Eric McCormack, Will and Grace Best performance by an Actress in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Pamela Adlon, Better Things Alison Brie, Glow Issa Rae, Insecure Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Frankie Shaw, SMILF Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Big Little Lies - WINNER Fargo Feud: Bette and Joan The Sinner Top of the Lake: China Girl Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies Jude Law, The Young Pope Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks Ewan McGregor, Fargo - WINNER Geoffrey Rush, Genius Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Jessica Biel, The Sinner Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies - WINNER Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Alfred Molina, Feud Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies - WINNER David Thewlis, Fargo David Harbour, Stranger Things Christian Slater, Mr. Robot Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Laura Dern, Big Little Lies - WINNER Ann Dowd, The Handmaid's Tale Chrissy Metz, This is Us Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies Advertisement

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement

Betrothed: Kit and his fiancee Rose Leslie are seen in July attending the season seven premiere of Game Of Thrones at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles

Jude Law was shortlisted in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his leading role in The Young Pope, in which he plays the first American pope in history, Pius XIII aka Lenny Belardo.

He went up against Scottish star Ewan McGregor - who was nominated for Fargo - as well as long-time American actor Robert De Niro.

Elsewhere David Thewliss - of Harry Potter and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas fame - was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his role as V. M. Varga in Fargo.

Alfred Molina was nominated in the same category for Feud: Bette and Joan, in which he portrays legendary movie director Robert Aldrich.

Flawless: Kit's Game of Thrones co-star Emilia Clark put on a showstopping display in a black sleevless gown as she walked the red carpet

Blonde beauty: Channeling her character on the hit fantasy drama, the star rocked ice blonde tresses and a statement pink lip with the stunning look
She's presenting at the 2018 Golden Globes.

And Gal Gadot wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement as she arrived at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the annual awards show in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The 32-year-old actress stole the spotlight as she donned a sophisticated couture black gown and tailored jacket.

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Classic beauty: Gal Gadot, 32, wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement as she arrived at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the annual awards show in Los Angeles on Sunday

Daring to impress, the Justice League star wrapped her enviable figure in the form fitting dress.

The tailored jacket allowed her gorgeous decolletage to take center stage as the dress was low cut.

Her trademark brunette tresses were swept back in a tight bun allowing her youthful face to shine.

The Israeli born beauty went with a few sparkly accessories as she wore diamond baubles on her wrists and ears.

Spotlight stolen: The actress stole the spotlight as she donned a sophisticated couture black gown and tailored jacket

That tailored look: The tailored jacket allowed her gorgeous decolletage to take center stage as the dress was low cut

Gal was joined by her husband Yaron Versano on the red carpet as he cut a dapper figure in a classic tuxedo.

The happy couple were married in 2008 and share daughters Maya, six, and Alma, nine months.

She shared the stage with The Rock Dwayne Johnson as they presented the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series  Musical or Comedy.

Meanwhile, more stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honor the best in film and television as the 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

Shining star: Her trademark brunette tresses were swept back in a tight bun allowing her youthful face to shine

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

The focus Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host -- is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

What a team: Gal was joined by her husband Yaron Versano on the red carpet as he cut a dapper figure in a classic tuxedo

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
She was wearing plain black in solidarity with the Time's Up movement.

And, as always, Helen Mirren looked her very best as she wowed at the Golden Globes on Sunday night.

Now 72, the age-defying British actress showed off her incredible figure in the gown, which while long-sleeved, featured a leg-baring section of lace.

Always chic: Helen Mirren, 72, wows in leg-baring lace at Sunday's Golden Globes in LA

Her white hair styled in a sleek short style, Dame Helen accessoried with diamonds and a slick of red lipstick.

Helen joined Viola Davis on stage to present Best Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role in any Motion Picture.

And the two proved a winning double act, as they set up their award presentation to Sam Rockwell.

'Supporting actors are not really supporting at all,' began Viola, with Helen quickly adding: 'Just with not as many lines.'

Pure class: Her white hair styled in a sleek short style, Dame Helen accessoried with diamonds and a slick of red lipstick

Double act: Helen and Viola wowed on stage, winning over fans with their double act

In a back and forth Viola agreed with: 'Or close ups.'

'Or personal make up artists,' said Helen.

'Or publicists.' 'Or remuneration.'

Social media success: The pair were a hit on Twitter

The pair's double act certainly won over Twitter, with fans such as author Glennon Doyle commenting: 'Um my screen just exploded in badassery.'

Another fan, wrote: Helen Mirren and Viola Davis is the buddy movie I need Hollywood.

And it seems the friendship was not just an act, with the pair swigging champagne backstage together after their moment in the spotlight.

Here's to Helen! The pair swigged champagne together from golden glasses backstage

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - TELEVISION Best TV series - Drama The Crown Game of Thrones The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Stranger Things This Is Us Best performance by Actress in a TV series - Drama Caitriona Balfe, Outlander Claire Foy, The Crown Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Best performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama Sterling K. Brown, This is Us - WINNER Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Jason Bateman, Ozark Best TV series - Musical or Comedy Black-ish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Master of None SMILF Will & Grace Best performance by an Actor in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Anthony Anderson, Black-ish Aziz Ansari, Master of None - WINNER Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick William H. Macy, Shameless Eric McCormack, Will and Grace Best performance by an Actress in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Pamela Adlon, Better Things Alison Brie, Glow Issa Rae, Insecure Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Frankie Shaw, SMILF Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Big Little Lies - WINNER Fargo Feud: Bette and Joan The Sinner Top of the Lake: China Girl Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies Jude Law, The Young Pope Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks Ewan McGregor, Fargo - WINNER Geoffrey Rush, Genius Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Jessica Biel, The Sinner Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies - WINNER Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Alfred Molina, Feud Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies - WINNER David Thewlis, Fargo David Harbour, Stranger Things Christian Slater, Mr. Robot Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Laura Dern, Big Little Lies - WINNER Ann Dowd, The Handmaid's Tale Chrissy Metz, This is Us Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies Advertisement
She's known for her love of designer fashion as much as her work ethic.

And on Monday, PR guru Roxy Jacenko looked incredibly stylish as she was spotted heading back into her office in Sydney, wearing a pair of sky-high heels.

The 37-year-old blonde carried a pair of back up ballet flats, alongside her $12,000 orange Hermes Birkin bag.

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Getting down to business! Roxy Jacenko flaunts her trim pins as she totters around in high heels...but carries a back-up pair of ballet flats with her $12,000 Birkin

Showing off a soft golden glow she acquired over the Summer holidays, Roxy stunned in a black long sleeve and lace Dior dress.

The mother-of-two had her blonde locks out and over her shoulders in loose tousled curls, and she covered her eyes with a pair of black aviator shades.

Roxy had appeared on Studio 10 earlier that day to discuss Golden Globes fashion.

Looking good: Showing off a soft golden glow she acquired over the Summer holidays, Roxy stunned in a black long sleeve and lace Dior dress

The savvy businesswoman collects several Birkins, and has a range of different colours, including brown, grey, red, black, purple and bright blue, each potentially priced at a close $100,000 each.

The prize in her collection is a black crocodile skin handbag, which Hermes revealed has an estimated value of AUD$84,350.

This week, Roxy revealed to Daily Mail Australia that she is writing a fourth book, with her six-year-old daughter, Pixie.

New venture: This week, Roxy revealed to Daily Mail Australia that she is writing a fourth book, with her six-year-old daughter, Pixie

The Sweaty Betty PR founder, 37, told Daily Mail Australia they are working on an illustrated book for children about 'doing the right thing'.

'Pix and I are working on a picture book this afternoon for kids to encourage them to be kind and do the right thing. Coming soon,' she wrote on Instagram.

Roxy told Daily Mail Australia the book is set for release by the end of the year.

Incoming! Roxy told Daily Mail Australia the book is set for release by the end of the year

She explained that writing the book will be a way to teach her daughter to always treat others with kindness.

'Pixie and I are working on an illustrated book together for kids which will promote being kind and doing the right thing, regardless of how others are treating you,' Roxy said.

'It so important to understand how to manage relationships and conflict at a young age. So I wanted to do it with her and help her and others in later life.'
For the first time this year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association appointed a Golden Globe Ambassador for its annual awards show.

The role replaces the traditional Miss Golden Globe but still is an honor bestowed upon the offspring of a celebrity.

On Sunday night, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson proudly introduced his teenage daughter Simone Garcia Johnson as the first to take on the job.

'Simone, I am so incredibly proud of you,' the A-lister told the 16-year-old live on stage.

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'Incredibly proud': On Sunday night, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson proudly introduced his daughter Simone Garcia Johnson, 16, at the Golden Globes

Simone is The Rock's daughter from his first marriage to Dany Garcia, who remains his manager.

The teen thanked her parents and told the audience she was honored to have been chosen by the HFPA.

She said she will focus on working to help young women from under-served communities learn new journalism skills.

Family: Simone walked the red carpet with her famous dad and her mother Dany Garcia, along with Garcia's second husband Dave Rienzi, who is also The Rock's personal trainer

In an interview with the NY Times, Simone said she was happy that the HFPA had decided to create a role that wasn't gender defined.

'Im so happy about the change because its more inclusive and it promotes equality,' the teen said. 'Im really passionate about those things.'

Anke Hofmann, vice president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, said the group had been considering a change for a while.

'Now, its gender-neutral, and the ambassador could be a woman, a man, a transgender,' she said.

Cause: As Golden Globe Ambassador, Simone will focus on working to help young women from under-served communities learn new journalism skills
Anne Hathaway and Amy Schumer supported the Hollywood campaign against sexual harassment from home after sickness kept them away from the Golden Globes on Sunday evening.

The flu kept Oscar-winner Anne, 35, bed-bound and unable to attend the glitzy ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills,California.

She took to Instagram to support the Time's Up campaign that encouraged all-black outfits at the awards ceremony to make a statement against sexual harassment in Hollywood and other industries.

Sick solidarity: Anne Hathaway wore all-black at home while sick on Sunday in solidarity with the Time's Up campaign at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California

Anne wore a black slip dress in a selfie and raised two fingers.

'In Solidarity from my sick bed. #TIMESUP #WHYWEWEARBLACK #GoldenGlobes,' she wrote in the caption for her nearly 10 million followers.

Amy Schumer, 36, also was sick but wore all-black in solidarity in an Instagram post with Rachel Feinstein.

'Home sick but proud as hell to wear black in solidarity with my sisters,' Amy wrote in the caption.

Black outfits: Amy Schumer also was home sick but wore black in solidarity along with friend Rachel Feinstein

Jennifer, 48, showed her support from Puerto Rico where she was helping provide relief in the wake of Hurricane Maria in September.

She wore all-black in solidarity and got emotional while speaking with boyfriend Alex Rodriguez, 42, at her side.

'We are humbled and proud to be part of this effort. Today is the Golden Globes in Los Angeles,' Jennifer said voice cracking.

All-black: Jennifer Lopez wore all-black in support of the campaign launched by Hollywood women while providing relief to Hurricane Maria survivors in Puerto Rico

'A lot of the women with hashtag Time's Up are standing up for equality to be treated equally and for sexual harassment.

'I stand here today in black doing the same from far away. And it's the same thing here in Puerto Rico. We want to be treated equally,' she said.

Olivia Munn, 37, also showed support despite being ill.

Equal treatment: The singer spoke emotionally about seeking equal treatment as boyfriend Alex Rodriguez stood next to her

'I'm staying home today sick with the flu. But so appreciative of everyone who has rallied around to support. I'll be watching from home,' she tweeted along with a statement on why supporters were wearing black.

Mark Ruffalo, 50, also took to social media to show his support.

The actor wearing black in a Twitter video urged people to use their social media accounts to spread the word about Time's Up.

'Let's join them. Why not? What do we have to lose? It can only get better,' he said.

The flu: Olivia Munn was at home sick with the flu but still offered her support

Social media: Mark Ruffalo also took to social media to urge people to support Time's Up
Ryan Gosling famously clarified the pronunciation of her tricky Irish name with his hilarious 'Ser-sha, like inertia' quip back in 2016.

But it would seem Jessica Chastain didn't get the memo as she was widely mocked on social media for 'butchering' Saoirse Ronan's moniker as she presented her with a Best Actress prize at the the 75th Golden Globes at The Beverly Hilton on Sunday.

The Molly's Game star, 40, took to the stage with Thor hunk Chris Hemsworth, 34, to announce the nominations for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy.

Awkward! Jessica Chastain was mocked on social media for 'butchering' the pronunciation of Saoirse Ronan's name at the Golden Globes on Sunday

But Jessica ran into hot water when she attempted to pronounce the Lady Bird star's name while reading out her name alongside fellow nominees Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Margot Robbie and Emma Stone.

Things went from bad to worse when the actress realized she would have to say the tricky Irish moniker once again when she opened an envelope to reveal Saoirse had won the coveted prize.

Co-presenter Chris provided little help, and didn't even attempt to get his tongue around the name, which Jessica pronounced as 'Sher-sha'.

Twitter users quickly flocked to social media to mock the incident, with one writing: 'Jessica chastain butchering saoirse Ronans name is making my eye twitch.'

Uh-oh! The Molly's Game star, 40, took to the stage with Chris Hemsworth, 34, to announce the nominations for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy

Talented: Saoirse, 23, won the coveted prize for her role as the titular character in Greta Gerwig's coming of age story, Lady Bird

Another joked: 'Saoirse Ronan winning gave Jessica Chastain an extra chance to mispronounce her name.'

'We are all the panic on Jessica chastains face when she saw she had to pronounce Saoirse Ronan #goldenglobes,' one Twitter user observed.

Other social media fans called out Chris for refusing to even attempt to say the name: 'Omg Im dead at Chris Hemsworth not wanting to pronounce Saoirse Ronans name when Jessica Chastain held out the envelope to read together.'

Numerous viewers referenced Saoirse's SNL appearance last month, in which she clarified the pronunciation.

Oh dear: Jessica first ran into hot water when she attempted to pronounce the Lady Bird star's name while reading out her name alongside fellow nominees

Here we go: Things went from bad to worse when the actress realized she would have to say the tricky Irish moniker once again when she opened an envelope to reveal Saoirse had won

Paying reference to the 'Ser-sha, like inertia' comment, one said: 'Jessica Chastain clearly didn't see Saoirse Ronan's SNL appearance, or Ryan Gosling's explanation, for pointers on her name... #GoldenGlobes.'

But the criticism wasn't universal, with other Twitter users writing things like: 'Jessica Chastain should get a bonus for pronouncing Saoirse Ronan's name correctly...'

Saoirse, 23, beat off stiff competition from a quartet Hollywood heavyweights to win the prestigious prize for her portrayal of the titular role in Greta Gerwig's coming of age film Lady Bird.

The movie also won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy.

Mocked: Twitter users quickly flocked to social media to mock the incident

Hard no! Co-presenter Chris provided little help, and didn't even attempt to get his tongue around the name

'Butchered': Many fans pointed to Saoirse's SNL opening monologue last month, in which she offered a public service announcement on how to say her name

The Irish actress previously described Ryan Gosling as 'Jesus' for teaching the public how to correctly pronounce her name while presenting her with an award at the Hollywood Film Awards back in 2016.

Discussing his 'It's Ser-sha, like inertia' quip, she said: 'I couldnt believe it! The power of Ryan Gosling is stronger than anything else.'

'He's like, Jesus or something, like a blond Canadian Jesus.'

The Brooklyn star also addressed the issue while making her Saturday Night Live hosting debut in December, kicking off her episode with a public service announcement on how to pronounce her name.

'It's making my eye twitch': The criticism wasn't universal, with other Twitter users praising Jessica for successfully pronouncing the tricky Irish moniker

No drama! The actress appeared to laugh off the faux pas from her seat

Talented: Saoirse beat off stiff competition from a quartet Hollywood heavyweights to win

She explained in her opening monologue: 'I am very Irish, and I have an extremely Irish name. Some would say too Irish. Its Saoirse. It means freedom. But Ive got a little problem; it's spelled wrong. Its a full typo.'

The actress then attempted to teach the proper pronunciation through the medium of song, with SNL cast members coming up with names such as 'Sore Cheese' and 'Sushi' in place of Saoirse.

Big Little Lies and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri were the big winners of the night, picking up four prizes each.

Dominating the television category, Big Little Lies was named Best Limited Series or TV Movie, with three of its stars taking home individual prizes.

Oh what a night! The movie also won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy

Woman of the hour: This marks the first time Saoirse has won a Golden Globe, after previously being nominated for Brooklyn in 2016 and Atonement in 2008

Talented twosome: Saoirse posed on the red carpet at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles with Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig

Dream team: Director Greta and leading Saoirse later posed alongside Timothee Chalamet (who portrayed Lady Bird's love interest) and Laurie Metcalf (who portrayed her mother)

Nicole Kidman won Best Actress, Limited Series or Television Movie for her role as domestic abuse victim Celeste Wright, while screen husband Alexander Skarsgard picked up the Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Laura Dern was also a winner, taking home Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the big winner in the movie categories, picking up the coveted Best Motion Picture, Drama accolade, as well as Best Screenplay.

Frances McDormand took home Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama and her co-star Sam Rockwell won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture.

Hollywood glamour: Jessica turned heads in an Armani Prive gown and stunning Piaget jewelry

Missed out: The star was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama for her role in Molly's Game, but the prize went to Frances McDormand

A galaxy of Hollywood greats descended on the Golden Globes red carpet on Sunday to honor the best in film and television as 2018 awards season officially kicked off.

The color black was chosen as a simple way to show solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault and make a statement against a pervasive culture of misconduct, brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host - is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy - events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Jokers! Chris and Jessica didn't seem too affected by the Twitter drama as they larked around in the press room at The Beverly Hilton when they'd completed their presenting duties

Plenty to smile about: The twosome were laughing and joking as they posed for photographs

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
Elisabeth Moss wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement at the 2018 Golden Globes.

And the actress took home the award for Best Actress In A TV Drama at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the annual show in Los Angeles on Sunday.

'This is for the women who were brave enough to fight for equality and freedom in this world,' she said in her acceptance speech.

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Class act: Elisabeth Moss, 42, wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement at the 2018 Golden Globes in Los Angeles on Sunday

Moss won for her portrayal as Offred in the Amazon series The Handmaid's Tale - which was adapted from the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood.

She used her acceptance speech to honor Atwood by reading a message from the author about female empowerment.

'We were the people who were not in the papers,' read Moss. 'We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the story.'

Moss then dedicated the award to Atwood.

Big winner: The actress took home the award for Best Actress in a TV Drama at the Beverly Hilton Hotel

Portrayal: Moss won for her portrayal as Offred in the Amazon series The Handmaid's Tale - which was adapted from the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood

Gracious: She used her acceptance speech to honor Atwood by reading a message from the author about female empowerment; (pictured with Bruce Miller)

'Margaret Atwood, this is for you and the women who came before you and after you who were brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice' the Mad men actress continued.

'We no longer live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. We no longer live in the gaps between the stories.

'We are the story in print. We are writing the story ourselves.' she concluded.

Sobering words: 'We were the people who were not in the papers,' read Moss. 'We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the story'

Dedication: Moss then dedicated the award to Atwood as she said: ''Margaret Atwood, this is for you and the women who came before you and after you who were brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice'

Moss arrived at the red carpet in a classic pilgrim style black couture gown.

Her collar was bedazzled with shiny sequins as she paired the understated look with diamond drop earrings.

Her trademark golden tresses were swept up and back in a messy bun with a a few locks framing her youthful face.

Past hits: Moss also won in 2014 as Best Actress In A Mini-Series for her role in Top Of The Lake and was nominated as Best Actress in A TV Drama in 2011 for her work on Mad Men

Arrival: Moss arrived at the red carpet in a classic pilgrim style black couture gown

Moss also won in 2014 as Best Actress In A Mini-Series for her role in Top Of The Lake and was nominated as Best Actress in A TV Drama in 2011 for her work on Mad Men.

Meanwhile, more stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honor the best in film and television as the 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

Adornment: Her collar was bedazzled with shiny sequins as she paired the understated look with diamond drop earrings

So proud: The actress posed with her trophy shortly after accepting the accolade on Sunday evening

Plenty to smile about: She shared a backstage laugh with actress and model Samira Wiley

All mine: The actress showed off her trophy at Hulu's 2018 Golden Globes After Party later that night

The focus Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host -- is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Youthful: Her trademark golden tresses were swept up and back in a messy bun with a a few locks framing her youthful face

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement

Let's dance: Elisabeth let her hair down at the FOX Golden Globes After Party with Amanda Brugel and Yvonne Strahovski

Good times: She rubbed shoulders with stars including Connie Britton at the event

Make mine a double: The high spirited actress hit the bar as the party got into full swing

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - TELEVISION Best TV series - Drama The Crown Game of Thrones The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Stranger Things This Is Us Best performance by Actress in a TV series - Drama Caitriona Balfe, Outlander Claire Foy, The Crown Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Best performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama Sterling K. Brown, This is Us - WINNER Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Jason Bateman, Ozark Best TV series - Musical or Comedy Black-ish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Master of None SMILF Will & Grace Best performance by an Actor in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Anthony Anderson, Black-ish Aziz Ansari, Master of None - WINNER Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick William H. Macy, Shameless Eric McCormack, Will and Grace Best performance by an Actress in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Pamela Adlon, Better Things Alison Brie, Glow Issa Rae, Insecure Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Frankie Shaw, SMILF Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Big Little Lies - WINNER Fargo Feud: Bette and Joan The Sinner Top of the Lake: China Girl Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies Jude Law, The Young Pope Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks Ewan McGregor, Fargo - WINNER Geoffrey Rush, Genius Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Jessica Biel, The Sinner Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies - WINNER Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Alfred Molina, Feud Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies - WINNER David Thewlis, Fargo David Harbour, Stranger Things Christian Slater, Mr. Robot Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Laura Dern, Big Little Lies - WINNER Ann Dowd, The Handmaid's Tale Chrissy Metz, This is Us Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies Advertisement
She may not have stepped out on the Golden Globes's exclusive red carpet in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

But that didn't stop Australian model Lara Worthington (nee Bingle) from lending her support to the Time's Up movement.

As Hollywood stars dressed in black to highlight their support for sexual harassment and assault victims in a post-Harvey Weinstein era, the 30-year-old took to Instagram to show her solidarity.

'Sisters in arms!': Lara Bingle wears black as she voices her support for sexual harassment and assault victims... despite not attending the Golden Globes

In a black-and-white image, Lara could be seen in a black blouse and jeans alongside makeup artist Filomena Natoli and stylist Marina Fonin.

'Sisters in arms. #wewearblack #timesup' Lara, who is married to Avatar star Sam Worthington, captioned the shot.

The other two women also uploaded the same snap to their respective social media accounts.

Marina succinctly summed up her view on the matter by simply writing 'YES' next to the photo.

'#wewearblack #timesup' Despite not walking the red carpet at the lavish event in Los Angeles, Lara didn't let that get in the way of her letting her feelings be known publicly

Meanwhile, Filomena echoed her friends' support for the cause with a lengthy and passionate call to action.

'SISTERS STAND UP,' she wrote.

'#wewearblack whether it's a black suit or a black bikini and stand up against inequality and sexual harassment across all industries, because #TIMESUP on waiting, silence & discrimination. We demand for women and marginalized people in all occupations and industries to feel safe.'

'We demand for women and marginalized people in all occupations and industries to feel safe': Lara, who is married to Sam Worthington (right), was joined by makeup artist Filomena Natoli and stylist Marina Fonin, who called for action

Lara wasn't the only Australian publicly on board with protesting against indecent behaviour by using their clothing.

Helping the A-listers of Hollywood turn the red carpet black were stars from Down Under including Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie.

Nicole, 50, and Margot, 27, both donned the shade as they attended the illustrious event.
They are two of America's most beloved comic actresses.

And Carol Burnett and Jennifer Aniston proved the dream team as they united to present at Sunday's Golden Globes.

The pair were on stage to introduce the nominees for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy.

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'She's kinky!' Jennifer Aniston skips the red carpet... but gets a laugh as she tweaks Carol Burnett's ear on stage at the Golden Globes

Comedy gold: The pair were on stage to introduce the nominees for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy

However it was the double act between the pair that impressed, as they jostled for space and teased one another.

Jennifer, 48, who had skipped the red carpet, told Carol: 'Wow. On a night when so many people, all of their dreams will come true tonight, So has mine, because I get to present with my idol, the amazing Carol Burnett.'

Deadpan, Carol, 84, replied: 'Thank you sweetheart, thank you. That's so sweet. And you, know, i'm happy that you're coming back to television because Will And Grace was one of my favorite shows.'

Winning: It was the double act between the pair that impressed, as they jostled for space and teased one another

Approval: The audience laughed away at the comedy onstage

That famous ear: Jennifer tweaks Carol's lobe

As the room erupted in laughter, Friends star Jennifer pretended not to get the joke, so Carol added quickly: 'I'm just kidding.'

During her years presenting her long-running TV variety show, The Carol Burnett Show, the actress always signed off with a slight tug of her left ear - a secret family signal to her grandmother, who raised her.

Jennifer asked Carol if she could touch the famous ear.

'Kinky!' Jennifer asked Carol if she could touch the famous ear

'Kinky!' Burnett joked after the display, asking the actress: 'Was it everything you dreamed it would be?'

Replied Jennifer: 'It was everything, everything, thank you.'

'As I said, she's kinky!' Burnett said.

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
Radio star Meshel Laurie has blasted KIIS 101.1's Jase Hawkins and Polly 'PJ' Harding after yet another controversial stunt from the duo.

Meshel - whose KIIS FM Melbourne breakfast radio show was dumped last year and she and Matt Tilley were replaced by the duo- vented her frustration after seeing their guests, Will and Woody, wear T-shirts with her and Matt's faces on them.

Jase and Polly - who launched their new show on Monday - appeared to encourage the new drive hosts to wear the tops.

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'Sad, please don't use my name and face for cheesy stunts': Meshel Laurie SLAMS KIIS FM hosts Jase Hawkins and Polly 'PJ' Harding (L) for 'tacky' merchandise featuring her picture...after THAT toilet snap

The snap was shared on KIIS 101.1's Facebook and Instagram, but has since been deleted.

Meshel shared a screen grab of the image on her Instagram page, blasting the radio hosts.

'We never had T-shirts or mugs, or any merch (sic) at all, so they've made these especially for a fake stunt. Sad,' Meshel began.

Hitting back: 'We never had T-shirts or mugs, or any merch (sic) at all, so they've made these especially for a fake stunt. Sad,' Meshel vented

Her former colleague: Meshel and Matt Tilley were replaced by Jase and Polly

'Please don't use my name and face for cheesy radio stunts guys. @kiis1011.'

She also shared a meme of Beyonce looking sad, alongside the caption: 'The face you make when you find out the same lame b***hes still bringing you up.'

The 41-year-old also shared a quote that read: 'Spread love wherever you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving you happier.'

Drama: She also shared a meme of Beyonce looking sad, with the text that read: 'The face you make when you find out the same lame b***hes still bringing you up'

Her caption read: 'I'm tryin (sic), but sister, some days are harder than others.'

The original post shared on the KIIS 101.1 FM Instagram and Facebook page read: 'Classic stitch up from Will and Woody, as they made the "always awkward" Jase & PJ even more awkward by wearing Matt & Meshel merch on their debut show.'

One follower reportedly called the stunt 'super tacky', while another said it was 'disgusting' and 'so offensive' with one even saying they will never listen to the shows.

The stunt comes after Jase took to Instagram to share a photo of a woman believed to be PJ in her underwear and hunched over a toilet, on Sunday.

Too far? The stunt comes after Jase took to Instagram to share a photo of a woman believed to be PJ in her underwear and hunched over a toilet, on Sunday

Jase captioned the photo, which was shared with his 16,000-plus followers, 'Don't be nervous Peej. Show starts Monday, @kiis1011.'

He then added the crying with laughter emoji.

According to the Herald Sun, the picture was 'liked' by the show's official Instagram account and was posted before station management became aware of it.

Controversial: According to the Herald Sun, the picture was 'liked' by the show's official Instagram account and was posted before station management became aware of it

Sources told the News Corp publication the photo was indeed of PJ and that she was with Jase when he posted it online.

PJ also reportedly shared a unflattering image of her male co-host, but swiftly deleted it.

It is understood the radio stars would post embarrassing snaps of each other every Friday as part of their New Zealand radio show.

Joking around? Sources told the News Corp publication the photo was indeed of PJ and that she was with Jase when he posted it online

Jase recently took to Instagram to reflect on his time in New Zealand before his show moved to Australian airwaves.

'Thanks NZ for the most incredible three years, I've loved every second of it. Time for the next adventure,' he wrote.

PJ also wrote on Instagram: 'Lots of laughs in 2017, here's to a s**t tonne more! Next stop: MELBOURNE (for good this time).'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted KIIS FM for comment who declined to comment.
She presented at the 2018 Golden Globes with Dame Helen Mirren.

And Viola Davis wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement as she arrived at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the annual awards show in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The 52-year-old actress stole the spotlight as she donned a sleek sleeveless Brandon Maxwell gown.

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Stunner: Viola Davis, 52, wore black in solidarity for the Time's Up movement as she arrived at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the Golden Globes in Los Angeles on Sunday

Daring to impress, the How To Get Away With Murder star wrapped her enviable figure in the form fitting dress.

The low cut couture allowed her pretty decolletage to take center stage as her toned arms were on full display.

Her trademark raven tresses were set au natural with beautiful coils that framed her flawless face.

The Oscar winner adorned her neck with a string of sparkly diamonds that fell in strands across her decolletage.

Spotlight: She stole the spotlight as she donned a sleek sleeveless Brandon Maxwell gown

Beauty queens: Viola joined Helen Mirren on stage to present Best Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role in any Motion Picture

Viola was joined on the red carpet with her husband and fellow actor Julius Tennon.

She shared Instagram snaps of the happy couple getting ready for the big event.

Viola joined Helen Mirren on stage to present Best Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role in any Motion Picture.

Happy couple: Viola was joined on the red carpet with her husband Julius Tennon

Impressive: Daring to impress, the How To Get Away With Murder star wrapped her enviable figure in the form fitting dress

And the two proved a winning double act, as they set up their award presentation to Sam Rockwell.

'Supporting actors are not really supporting at all,' began Viola, with Helen quickly adding: 'Just with not as many lines.'

In a back and forth Viola agreed with: 'Or close ups.' 'Or personal make up artists,' said Helen. 'Or publicists.' 'Or remuneration.'

Cheers! And it seems the friendship was not just an act, with the pair swigging champagne backstage together after their moment in the spotlight.

And it seems the friendship was not just an act, with the pair swigging champagne backstage together after their moment in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, more stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honor the best in film and television as the 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

Style goddess: Her trademark raven tresses were set au natural with beautiful coils that framed her flawless face

Getting ready: She shared Instagram snaps of the happy couple getting ready for the big event

The focus Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host -- is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Baubles: Viola showed off her fantastic collection of jewelry for the evening

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
She just got a clean bill of health after major surgery to finally stop debilitating migraines.

Now Grant Denyer's wife Chezzi, 38, is getting prepared to take life head-on once again, taking to Instagram to proclaim the new year 'our year' for the couple.

On Sunday, the TV producer posted a candid shot of herself nestled next to her Family Feud host husband, gushing over the former Sunrise weatherman along with the caption '2018 is our year, my love.'

'Our year': Chezzi Denyer, 38, has shared a picture of herself and TV host husband, Grant, sitting in a pool, proclaiming it is 'our year,' after the pair have had considerable health setbacks in 2017

Looking loved-up, the pair posed in a swimming pool with Chezzi casually putting her arm around her TV personality husband's neck.

It's no secret the pair have had a trying 12 months health wise.

In March last year, Logie nominee Grant was in a horror car accident which saw him fracture his tailbone and break a finger.

Health woes: The TV producer recently had major surgery in order to correct a sinus issue, which was causing her debilitating migraines

Meanwhile, Chezzi has been dealing with on-going migraines due to a serious sinus condition - affecting her hearing, smell and taste.

But with Grant making a full recovery and Chezzi recently undergoing a serious operation to correct her sinuses, it seems the 38-year-old has been given a new lease on life.

The couple's fans were clearly happy to see her optimistic attitude, with a number of them congratulating her and one user writing: 'sending lots of love with good miracle blessings.'

Renewed optimism: More recently, the couple have been enjoying time together at the Central Coast with their two daughters, Sailor, 6, and Scout, 3

Another Instagram user added 'Beautiful photo! You both look so relaxed.'

The blogger responded in kind, saying, 'Thank you, it's been a wonderfully relaxing holiday! xxx,' while saving more personal messages for friends.

Chezzi has been open about her health struggles, late last month sharing an extremely graphic image of herself post-surgery.

'First time I've been able to wear sunnies!': Chezzi has been keeping fans informed through Instagram of her recovery since her surgery last month

'I've swallowed heaps of blood which makes me feel quite queasy and I have very low blood pressure for some reason,' she posted beside the image.

'I'm on a lot of medication to reduce inflammation and bruising.'

However, updating fans last week, it would seem the surgery was a major success, with life getting back to normal for the mother of two.

Heath setbacks: Both Grant (left) and Chezzi Denyer both had health issues last year, with Grant involved in a horror car crash which saw him fracture his tailbone and break a finger

'First time I've been able to wear sunnies comfortably since my surgery last month!!' she wrote.

Grant and Chezzi married in 2010.

They share two daughters Sailor, 6, and Scout, 3, with the family residing outside of Bathurst.
She filmed scenes for The Bold And The Beautiful in Sydney last year.

And American actress Katherine Kelly Lang, 56, appears to have warmed to the idea of a sea change Down Under after making multiple visits to Australia in the past.

Speaking to TV Week, the soap star said she and partner Dominique Zoida have already been looking at properties around North Sydney's.

'We've looked around the Manly area': The Bold And The Beautiful's Katherine Kelly Lang plans move to Australia with partner Dominique Zoida

The trip to Australia was said to be celebratory to mark three decades of the show's TV success.

It also appeared to be a push to promote tourism in Australia - with producers joining forces with the nation's airline Qantas.

'It's always wonderful to be in Australia,' Katherine told the publication while she chomped on a Tim Tam.

'It's always wonderful to be in Australia': The star recently visited Australia as part of an international episode for the soap

'Hopefully we can buy in the near future. But we couldn't live here full-time, because of my job on Bold': It appears the couple were looking for a potential holiday home

The Californian-native recently sold her LA abode and admitted she and partner Dom were hopeful of finding a Sydney house to share.

'I love the idea of having a place here... We've looked around the Manly area and hopefully we can buy in the near future. But we couldn't live here full-time, because of my job on Bold,' she said.

Dom and Katherine also own a Malibu getaway, with the couple listing plans to add a pool and horse stable to the home.

American ties: Dom and Katherine also own a Malibu getaway, with the couple listing plans to add a pool and horse stable to the home

Katherine has been married twice before and has three children: Zoe Katrina D'Andrea, 20, Julian Snider, 25 and Jeremy Snider, 27.

The actress has been one of the star's of the popular American soap opera since 1987.

The Bold And The Beautiful airs weekdays from 4.30pm on Network Ten
She's been attempting to see if blondes really do have more fun after dying her brunette locks a bold shade of platinum a few months ago.

And that certainly seemed to be the case for Emilia Clarke as she partied with her Game Of Thrones co-star Kit Harington and Gwendoline Christie at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on Sunday evening.

The British actress, 31, looked as though she was having an absolute ball as she burst into a fit of giggles while sharing a joke with her fellow cast member Christie, 39, backstage at the high-profile event.

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So blondes DO have more fun? Emilia Clarke, 31, partied with her Game Of Thrones co-star kit Harington at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on Sunday evening

The British actress was also seen rubbing shoulders with fellow GOT star, Gwendoline Christie

Emilia - who portrays Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen in Game Of Thrones - enjoyed a reunion with another of her HBO co-stars in the form of Kit Harington, 31, as the pair joined forces to present a prize.

The duo addressed the star-studded crowd as they named actor and comedian Aziz Ansari winner of Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy for his role as Dev Shah in Netflix's Master Of None.

Emilia looked incredible as she joined in the Golden Globes Time's Up protest by wearing black in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment and assault.

The actress turned heads in a strapless, figure-hugging Miu Miu dress with a plunging neckline.

Plenty to smile about: The British actress, 31, looked as though she was having an absolute ball as she burst into giggles while sharing a joke with her fellow cast member, 39, backstage

Talented twosome: Emilia enjoyed a reunion with another of her HBO co-stars in the form of Kit Harington, 31, as the pair joined forces to present a prize

Say cheese! The gorgeous duo appeared in seriously high spirits as they took a playful selfie with a female companion

Adding height to her frame with Jimmy Choo stilettos and a matching clutch, Emilia injected some A-list glamour to her look with Harry Winston jewels.

Kit was suited and booted to perfection in a tailored black suit by Dior Homme.

Gwendoline looked equally striking as she hit the red carpet at the Golden Globes, showcasing her statuesque form to perfection in a dramatic ruffle-detail gown by Giles Deacon.

The actress teamed her stunning gown with Ara Vartanian jewelry and Manolo Blahnik shoes as she joined the great and good of Hollywood at the star-studded event.

And the winner is! The duo named actor and comedian Aziz Ansari winner of Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy for his role in Netflix's Master Of None

Doing their bit: The co-stars joined in the Golden Globes Time's Up protest by wearing black in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment and assault

Dapper dude: Kit was suited and booted to perfection in a tailored black suit by Dior Homme

Although Game Of Thrones fans will no doubt be delighted to see some of the cast members in attendance at the Golden Globes, they have a long time to wait until the next installment of the fantasy drama.

HBO recently confirmed season eight will not hit screens until 2019, meaning the show will sit out 2018 entirely.

Season seven of the medieval drama wrapped after just seven episodes on August 27 with an 80-minute segment called The Dragon And The Wolf.

It contained a slew of reveals not least of which was that Harington's Jon Snow is actually the son of actor Wilf Scolding's Rhaegar Targaryen and Aisling Franciosi's Lyanna Stark, long written out of the series.

Pulling out the stops: Gwendoline looked stunning in a semi-sheer black dress which boasted dramatic frills and sash detailing

Three's company! The girls also cosied up to handsome co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as the trio once again got the giggles on their way into the HBO afterparty

United they stand: The GoT stars were among those who took a stand against sexual abuse in the entertainment industry by wearing all-black ensembles

That makes him the heir to the Iron Throne and also the nephew of Daenerys Targaryen, meaning their lusty romance is incest.

The final scenes showed the Night King riding undead dragon Viserion with the White Walkers leading an army of the undead as they finally battered down the Great Wall that had kept the south safe for millennia.

A galaxy of Hollywood greats descended on the Golden Globes red carpet on Sunday to honor the best in film and television as 2018 awards season officially kicked off.

The color black was chosen as a simple way to show solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault and make a statement against a pervasive culture of misconduct, brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Unlikely duo: Gwendoline shared a moment with famed astronaut Buzz Aldrin at the ceremony, with the pair holding hands and gazing at each other

Trailblazer: The 87-year-old American engineer was one of the first two humans to land on the Moon, and the second person to walk on it

Making a statement: The actress turned heads in a strapless, figure-hugging Miu Miu dress with a plunging neckline

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host - is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

Big Little Lies and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri were the big winners of the night, picking up four prizes each.

Dominating the television category, Big Little Lies was named Best Limited Series or TV Movie, with three of its stars taking home individual prizes.

Nicole Kidman won Best Actress, Limited Series or Television Movie for her role as domestic abuse victim Celeste Wright, while screen husband Alexander Skarsgard picked up the Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Worlds away from Westeros: Adding height to her frame with Jimmy Choo stilettos and a matching clutch, Emilia injected some A-list glamour to her look with Harry Winston jewels

Blonde ambition: Emilia wore her platinum locks poker straight and injected a welcome bolt of color to her ensemble with a slick of bright pink lipstick

Bad news: Game Of Thrones fans have a long time to wait until the next installment of the fantasy drama

Girl about town: Emilia later continued her night of fun at HBO's Golden Globes afterparty

Best of British: Emilia and Kit looked ready to party as they cuddled up inside the HBO bash

Laura Dern was also a winner, taking home Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the big winner in the movie categories, picking up the coveted Best Motion Picture, Drama accolade, as well as Best Screenplay.

Frances McDormand took home Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama and her co-star Sam Rockwell won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture.

Oprah Winfrey received the Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

Stealing the spotlight: Gwendoline looked equally striking as she hit the red carpet at the Golden Globes, showcasing her statuesque form in a ruffle-detail gown by Giles Deacon

Ruling the red carpet: The actress teamed her stunning gown with Ara Vartanian jewelry and Manolo Blahnik shoes as she joined the great and good of Hollywood at the star-studded event

Girls just wanna have fun! Gwendoline also headed to continue the party at the HBO bash at Circa 55 inside The Beverly Hilton

Starring role: Nikolaj is best known for playing Jaime Lannister in the hit HBO series

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - TELEVISION Best TV series - Drama The Crown Game of Thrones The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Stranger Things This Is Us Best performance by Actress in a TV series - Drama Caitriona Balfe, Outlander Claire Foy, The Crown Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid's Tale - WINNER Best performance by an Actor in a TV Series - Drama Sterling K. Brown, This is Us - WINNER Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan Jason Bateman, Ozark Best TV series - Musical or Comedy Black-ish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Master of None SMILF Will & Grace Best performance by an Actor in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Anthony Anderson, Black-ish Aziz Ansari, Master of None - WINNER Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick William H. Macy, Shameless Eric McCormack, Will and Grace Best performance by an Actress in a TV series - Musical or Comedy Pamela Adlon, Better Things Alison Brie, Glow Issa Rae, Insecure Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - WINNER Frankie Shaw, SMILF Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Big Little Lies - WINNER Fargo Feud: Bette and Joan The Sinner Top of the Lake: China Girl Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies Jude Law, The Young Pope Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks Ewan McGregor, Fargo - WINNER Geoffrey Rush, Genius Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Jessica Biel, The Sinner Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies - WINNER Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Alfred Molina, Feud Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies - WINNER David Thewlis, Fargo David Harbour, Stranger Things Christian Slater, Mr. Robot Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television Laura Dern, Big Little Lies - WINNER Ann Dowd, The Handmaid's Tale Chrissy Metz, This is Us Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies Advertisement
She's The Biggest Loser host who is currently enjoying a well-deserved break in Byron Bay.

And on Sunday, an unsuspecting Fiona Falkiner was overcome with emotion when she walked into her surprise 35th birthday bash.

The bubbly TV personality cried tears of joy when she saw the surprise shindig in her honour, which was organised by her girlfriend Lara Creber.

Biggest shock: On Sunday, an unsuspecting Fiona Falkiner was overcome with emotion when she walked into her surprise birthday bash

Taking to Instagram to capture the moment, the TV personality can clearly be seen in a state of shock, glassy-eyed with her hand over her mouth.

'My first ever surprise party,' she posted, 'No words, tears, laughs and smiles thank you so munch [sic] to all the beauty people in my life.'

The reality star also thanked her girlfriend, writing: 'especially you, @larzicrebs.'

'Body positive': Model Fiona has been enjoying a well-deserved break in Byron Bay with a number of friends, with the bevvy of beauties promoting body 'positive message.'

It comes after Fiona has enjoyed the past week at tourist hot spot, Byron Bay, with girlfriend Lara and a number of their mutual friends.

Spending the time enjoying leisure activities and updating fans with a number of bikini-clad snaps at swimming holes.

'From London to New York and today, all together in Byron Bay,' the curvy TV host under an image of her and a bevy of bikini-clad friends.

Curves ahead: While on holiday with girlfriend Lara Creber, the TV personality has regularly flaunted her curves

Leisure: The TV host also enjoying time at Northern Rivers swimming holes over her New Year break to Byron Bay

The popular host then adding a body positive message: writing 'love your body,' before adding the hashtag #bodypositivebabes.

Socialite Fiona made the decision to go public with her girlfriend in October last year, after images emerged of the couple kissing.

'Who cares if you are tall, short, have some wobbly bits or some muscly bits, hairy or bald, love a man or a woman, every body is unique and beautiful,' she said.

Before adding: 'Instead of casting judgement and negativity towards others. This is the world I want to live in.'

Lovebirds: Earlier this week Fiona and girlfriend Lara Creber shared a loved-up snap, before the shock surprise birthday party
She's a proud mother to three children with actor husband Chris Hemsworth.

And on Friday, Elsa Pataky doted on her precious offspring, in Byron Bay, on the New South Wales coast.

The 41-year-old opted to go barefoot, and looked beautiful in a Bohemian-style green frock.

Hands-on mother! Barefoot Elsa Pataky, 41, perfects the boho chic look in a patterned green frock, as she doted on her precious children, in Byron Bay last Friday

Elsa, who is known for her roles in The Fast and the Furious franchise, cut a casual figure in a green patterned loose-fitting frock.

Opting to go barefoot, the actress drew attention to a delicate anklet on her right foot.

Carrying her belongings in a black fringed bag, slung across her body, Elsa accessorised further with layers of delicate gold and silver jewels.

Cool and casual: The Fast and the Furious actress went low-key for the occasion, opting for a loose-fitting green patterned frock

Hands-free: Elsa slung a black fringed bag across her body

Leading the way: The blonde beauty held onto her son's hand, as they made their way to what appeared to be an activity centre

Elsa kept her beauty look minimal, allowing her cropped blonde locks to fall effortlessly.

The L'Oreal ambassador appeared to sport just a light coating of foundation.

Elsa was pictured with daughter India Rose, five, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, three.

The clan headed to what appeared to be an activity centre, with Elsa approaching the counter.

Cute: The tot wore a red T-shirt with a graphic emblazoned on the front, blue shorts and striped socks

Beauty: Elsa allowed her cropped locks to fall effortlessly

Doting: At one stage, the mother-of-three doted on her precious daughter India Rose, five

Elsa and Chris' children looked cute as a button, all sporting casual T-shirts and shorts, going barefoot for most of the occasion.

Meanwhile Chris, 34, made a suave arrival at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The Thor star wore an all-black ensemble, in support of the Time's Up movement, aiming to stop sexual harassment of women.

Attentive: Elsa crouched down to meet her daughter, giving India Rose her full attention

Touching: The L'Oreal ambassador embraced her precious daughter

Natural: Elsa opted to go barefoot, drawing attention to a delicate anklet on her right foot

Chris donned a textured suit jacket and coordinating trousers, along with a dress shirt with several buttons left undone and suede shoes.

The Hollywood heartthrob recently opened up on his relationship with Elsa, telling GQ Australia: 'My wife and I fell in love, had kids, didn't really see each other for a few years, then fell back in love.'

'In terms of work, (Elsa) has certainly given up more than I have,' he continued.

Off they go: The model and her other son were pictured outside, with the youngster appearing very enthusiastic

Mother and daughter: At another stage, Elsa held onto the hand of her daughter
Her movie In The Fade won at the Golden Globes on Sunday in Los Angeles.

And Diane Kruger was ready to celebrate as she was spotted in a quirky outfit change at the InStyle and Warner Bros. after-party for the annual awards event.

The actress, 41, donned a dramatic look with torn white fabric strewn across her body as she reveled in the Best Foreign Language Film prize.

Shabby chic: Diane Kruger, 41, was spotted in a quirky ensemble at the InStyle and Warner Bros. Golden Globes after-party in Los Angeles on Sunday

As if she were Cinderella and her step sisters tore apart her ball gown, Diane wore a chic and shredded wardrobe for the celebrity-stacked event.

The corset white top allowed her enviable figure to take center stage as it cut low and cinched her lithe waist.

Always one on the fashion forward front, the Inglourious Basterds star draped herself in the lace fabric that cascaded along her black leggings.

She paired the daring look with a small silver metallic clutch, black high heels, and a pair of diamond drop earrings.

Reveling: Diane donned a dramatic look with torn white fabric strewn across her body as she reveled in the Best Foreign Language Film prize

Channeling fairy tales: As if she were Cinderella and her step sisters tore apart her ball gown, Diane wore a chic and shredded wardrobe for the celebrity-stacked event

Fashion forward: Always one on the fashion forward front, the Inglourious Basterds star draped herself in the lace fabric that cascaded along her black leggings

Meanwhile, Diane made her red carpet debut with Norman Reedus whom she's been linked to since March 2017 after first meeting as co-stars in Sky back in 2015.

The actress posed alongside her actor boyfriend for the first time in the 10 months since they officially confirmed their relationship before later packing on the PDA with a kiss when In The Fade was named Best Foreign Language Film.

The German-born star dazzled as she hit the red carpet in a stunning black Prada gown with polka dot sheer detailing, gunmetal beaded edges and a dramatic flowing train.

Packing on the PDA: Diane looked utterly smitten as she cosied up to boyfriend Norman Reedus that evening

Come here, you! Norman wrapped an arm around the blonde bombshell as they shared the black carpet

It's official! Diane and Norman made their red carpet debut as a couple at the 75th annual Golden Globe awards at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Sunday

Sealed with a kiss: The couple enjoyed a rare moment of PDA as they celebrated the talented actress' big win with a passionate kiss

The former model was joining in the Golden Globes Time's Up protest by wearing black in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment and assault.

Diane wore her blonde locks swept back from her face in a chic up-do and injected further glamour to her look with dazzling diamond jewelry.

The talented actress completed her ensemble with a small black patent clutch bag and smokey eye make-up.

Her big moment: The actress, 41, was enjoying a major career moment as her movie In The Fade won Best Foreign Language Film

Loved-up: Diane jumped up and planted a huge smooch on her boyfriend of 10 months as In The Fade was named winner of the coveted prize

Norman, 48, followed the lead of his leading lady and also opted for Prada for the night, teaming a satin lapel tuxedo with a black shirt and bow tie.

The Walking Dead star sported the Time's Up pin in honor of the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal assistance to women who have experienced harassment or abuse in the workplace.

The couple went public with their romance in March 2017, two years after meeting when they co-starred in Sky in 2015.

When they met, Diane was still in her decade-long relationship with actor Joshua Jackson, 39.

Gothic glamour: The German-born star dazzled as she hit the red carpet in a stunning black Prada gown with polka dot sheer detailing, gunmetal beaded edges and a flowing train

Black is the new black: The former model was joining in the Golden Globes Time's Up protest by wearing black in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment and assault

Red carpet moment: Diane wore her blonde locks swept back from her face in a chic up-do and injected further glamour to her look with dazzling diamond jewelry

Although the pair walked multiple red carpets during their time as co-stars, the Golden Globes marks their first event as an official couple.

It was a big moment for Diane, with her movie, In The Fade, announced as winner of the Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language Golden Globe.

In the action-packed crime drama - which was released on December 27 - Diane plays Katja, who is seeking revenge after a bombing that kills her husband and young son.

The project marks the first time the actress has appeared in film in her native tongue.

Natural beauty: The talented actress completed her ensemble with a small black patent clutch bag and smokey eye make-up

Woman of many talents: It was a big moment for Diane, with her movie, In The Fade, named as winner of the Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language Golden Globe

Diane recently admitted taking on the role was a life-changing experience and affected her more than she could have ever thought possible.

She explained in an interview with Modern Luxury magazine's January issue: 'Ive been very good up until this point to separate my work from my everyday life.

'This was the first time it wasnt possible. I didnt expect [the film] to affect me this amount... its changed me forever.

'I definitely started to feel like I was drowning in their grief after witness[ing] that much pain. I felt like I was in it.

Oh what a night! The talented actress joined In The Fade's director Fatih Akin on stage in front of the star-studded crowd as he accepted the coveted prize

Leading lady: The director paid tribute to his leading lady for her work in the gritty drama

'I was Katja reacting to what was happening in front of me. I wasnt done at the end. I couldnt have gone on another day - I was a mess; I really was.'

A galaxy of Hollywood greats descended on the Golden Globes red carpet on Sunday to honor the best in film and television as 2018 awards season officially kicked off.

The color black was chosen as a simple way to show solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault and make a statement against a pervasive culture of misconduct, brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

More kisses! Diane didn't only reserve the kisses for her man, and puckered up to her director as they posed with their Golden Globe prize backstage after the main event

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host - is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy - events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Big Little Lies and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri were the big winners of the night, picking up four prizes each.

Job of a lifetime: Diane recently admitted taking on the role was a life-changing experience and affected her more than she could have ever thought possible

Dominating the television category, Big Little Lies was named Best Limited Series or TV Movie, with three of its stars taking home individual prizes.

Nicole Kidman won Best Actress, Limited Series or Television Movie for her role as domestic abuse victim Celeste Wright, while screen husband Alexander Skarsgard picked up the Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Laura Dern was also a winner, taking home Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie.

Plenty to smile about: The actress said she was 'a mess' psychologically after filming wrapped on the tense drama

I'll drink to that! Diane posed proudly with her Golden Globe award backstage in the Moet & Chandon area

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the big winner in the movie categories, picking up the coveted Best Motion Picture, Drama accolade, as well as Best Screenplay.

Frances McDormand took home Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama and her co-star Sam Rockwell won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture.

Oprah Winfrey received the Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement at the event, hosted by NBC funnyman Seth Meyers.

Gritty: In the action-packed crime drama - which was released on December 27 - Diane plays Katja, who is seeking revenge after a bombing that kills her husband and young son

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
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After the glitzy annual ceremony at The Beverly Hilton, a host of stars kept the party going after the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday.

Keeping up a show of solidarity for the Time's Up initiative, Emily Ratajkowski, Rumer Willis and Sarah Hyland lead the red carpet arrivals at the InStyle and Warner Bros. after party wearing sexy black gowns.

Gone Girl stunner Emily, 26, opted for a simple black velvet spaghetti strap dress which skimmed the floor and accentuated her slender figure, while Rumer, 29, and Sarah, 27, also made a statement in plunging ensembles.

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Beauties in black: Emily Ratajkowski, Sarah Hyland and Rumer Willis dazzled at the InStyle and Warner Bros Golden Globes After Party on Sunday night

Complementing her black dress, Emily added a dash of color with sweeping red eye-shadow and kept her glossy brunette locks loose.

The Blurred Lines beauty showed a glimpse of cleavage in the low-cut number and donned sparkly hoop earrings for a little bling.

Rumer rivalled Emily on the glamour front as she brought the drama in an extremely low cut dress with voluminous ruffled tulle skirt.

The Dancing With The Stars champ wore her copper red locks super straight and accessorized with a purple clutch and lots of bling.

Slinky silhouette: Emily, 26, looked incredible in a black velvet dress with spaghetti straps

Smouldering: The Gone Girl star made a statement with streaks of red eye-shadow

Striking: Emily wore her glossy brunette locks slicked behind her ears as she posed up a storm on the red carpet

Wow factor: Rumer rivalled Emily on the glamour front as she brought the drama in an extremely low cut dress with voluminous ruffled tulle skirt

Front and centre: The daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis put on an eye-popping display and accessorised with a purple clutch

Glamour: Modern Family star Sarah Hyland, 27, stunned in a black dress with spaghetti straps which showed off some serious cleavage

Sarah, 27, meanwhile sparkled in a black dress with spaghetti straps which showed off some serious cleavage.

The Modern Family star wore her brunette locks in glossy waves and sported some diamond earrings and rings adorning her fingers.

Other stars at the event included Mariah Carey, Miranda Kerr, Reese Witherspoon, Lea Michele, Julianne Hough, Laverne Cox, Nina Dobrev, Kaley Cuoco and Alexandra Daddario.

Mariah commanded attention as she arrived with her toyboy Bryan Tanaka. The adorable duo looked like two kids in love as they giggled through the red carpet in glamorous coordinating black ensembles.

The pop princess rocked a skintight black dress, in solidarity with the Time's Up movement, to the festive after party.

Her plunging, semi-sheer, Dolce & Gabbana dress was held together with one strap across her neck and she sported a pair of sparkling drop earrings.

Ready to party! Song diva Mariah Carey, 47, showed off her figure in a heavily ruched fishtail gown

Making it a date night! The songstress was joined by boyfriend Bryan Tanaka, 34

Stylish: The pop princess rocked a skintight black dress, in solidarity with the Time's Up movement, to the festive after party

Sexy: Her plunging, semi-sheer, Dolce & Gabbana dress was held together with one strap across her neck and she sported a pair of sparkling drop earrings

Suited and booted Bryan looked undeniably handsome with his hair done and untied his bow tie to lead his lady to the party

Hollywood beauties: Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Kravitz and Lea Michele simply glowed in their black dresses

Suited and booted Bryan looked undeniably handsome with his hair done and untied his bow tie to lead his lady to the party.

The dynamic duo playfully held on to each other before Bryan dipped the Heartbreaker to the side for a sweet photo op.

Miranda Kerr took her baby bump to the red carpet as she attended the event in a beautiful black leopard print Balmain gown with a dramatic feathered train and cheeky keyhole detailing.

The mother-of-one, who raises son Flynn, six, with ex-husband Orlando Bloom, 40, teamed her striking dress with strappy Giuseppe Zanotti heels to add height to her frame.

Miranda injected a touch of A-list glamour to her ensemble with sparkling Niwaka jewellery as she tenderly caressed her baby bump on the red carpet.

Mom-to-be: Pregnant Miranda Kerr showed off her baby bump in a skintight animal print dress with long tassels

Wow: The mother-of-one, who raises son Flynn, six, with ex-husband Orlando Bloom, 40, teamed her striking dress with strappy Giuseppe Zanotti heels to add height to her frame

Work it! Miranda injected a touch of A-list glamour to her ensemble with sparkling Niwaka jewellery as she tenderly caressed her baby bump on the red carpet

Screen siren: Kate Beckinsale wowed in a figure-hugging black number with sequinned puffy sleeves

Gorgeous: The Pearl Harbour star's hourglass curves were accentuated by the figure-hugging fishtail gown which featured shoulder pads for extra drama

Blonde beauty: Julianne Hough looked simply stylish in a black gown with silver embellishments and sheer sleeves

Kate Beckinsale wowed in a figure-hugging plunging black number with puffy sequinned sleeves. The Van Helsing beauty wore her long locks up in a playful ponytail and rocked diamond-encrusted earrings.

Her hourglass curves were accentuated by the figure-hugging fishtail gown which featured shoulder pads for extra drama.

Julianne Hough looked simply stylish in a black Jenny Packham gown with silver embellishment and sheer sleeves.

Actress Kaley Cuoco stunned as she arrived on the red carpet with her hunky new fiance, Karl Cook.

The 32-year-old showed off her yoga-toned physique in a sheer frock worn with black undergarments. She tied her blonde locks into high ponytail, which was secured in place with a bow-tie.

Glowing: Actress Kaley Cuoco stunned as she arrived at the event with new fiance, Karl Cook

Sensational: The 32-year-old showed off her yoga-toned physique in a sheer frock worn with black undergarments. She tied her blonde locks into high ponytail, which was secured in place with a bow-tie

Head turners: Vampire Diaries beauty Nina Dobrev looked sensational in a cut-out gown with shimmery panel and Nikki Reed rocked a regal dress with gold embellishments

Pals: The TV sensation put on a leggy display as she posed alongside Big Little Lies star, Reese Witherspoon

Stunning:The Twilight actress looked every inch the beauty icon as she tied her brunette tresses into a chic chignon, which boasted a few loose tendrils framing her face

After party people: Susan Sarandon is seen posing alongside Rosa Clemente, Marai Larasi and Emma Watson

Chest a glimpse: Baywatch star Alexandra Daddario wowed in a halterneck dress with cut-out on the chest

Vampire Diaries beauty Nina Dobrev looked sensational in a cut-out gown with shimmery panel which showcased her enviably toned physique.

Nikki Reed also flaunted her toned legs in an asymmetrical regal dress with gold embellishments.

The Twilight actress looked every inch the beauty icon as she tied her brunette tresses into a chic chignon, which boasted a few loose tendrils framing her face.

Alexandra Daddario wowed in a halterneck dress with cut-out on the chest. She completed the look with a slick ponytail and vampy lips.

Hailey Baldwin oozed sex appeal as she took to the red carpet in a saucy semi-sheer gown with boasted a frilly bustier before exposing her midriff.

The daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin gave a glimpse of her derriere as she worked her angles at the event.

Striking look: The 31-year-old star completed her dramatic look with a deep berry lip color

Sensational: The brunette beauty was keen on showcasing all elements of her sexy dress as she worked her angles

Flashing it: Hailey Baldwin oozed sex appeal as she took to the red carpet in a saucy semi-sheer gown with boasted a frilly bustier before exposing her midriff

Bottoms up! The daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin gave a glimpse of her derriere as she worked her angles at the event

Laverne Cox looked magical in a sparkly gown with sheer bodice and sleeves while Ireland Baldwin went edgy mixing leather and lace and Sistine Stallone shimmered in a sexy sheer embellished gown.

Ashley Judd and Salma Hayek, two of Harvey Weinstein's accusers, held hands as they arrived at the bash.

Diane Kruger opted for an edgy ensemble which including swathes of fabric that looked like they'd been torn.

The German-American beauty exhibited her flawless decolletage in a low-cut white bustier top, which she teamed with skinny black trousers and towering heels.

Bombshell: Laverne Cox looked magical in a sparkly gown with sheer bodice and sleeves

Standing out: Ireland Baldwin went edgy mixing leather and lace while Sistine Stallone shimmered in a sexy sheer embellished gown

Show of unity: Ashley Judd and Salma Hayek, two of Harvey Weinstein's accusers, held hands as they arrived at the bash

Enviable figure: Salma looked flawless as she showed off her curves in a skintight jumpsuit

Let 'er rip! Diane Kruger and Hailey Baldwin opted for outfits including swathes of fabric that looked like they'd been torn

Edgy: The German-American beauty exhibited her flawless decolletage in a low-cut white bustier top, which she teamed with skinny black trousers and towering heels

Cara Santana accessorised with emerald while Tracee Ellis Ross flashed her pink bra top under an oversized blazer.

Pregnant Eva Longoria sported a plunging tuxedo-esque dress with split in the skirt.

The former Desperate Housewives star, who is expecting her first child with husband Jose 'Pepe' Antonio Baston, looked absolutely glowing as she arrived in style.

Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown showed her fashion credentials in a ruffled mini dress.

Christina Hendricks teamed capri pants with a dramatic ball gown with a mix of satin and velvet.

Other stylish arrival at the event included Erika Christensen, Tamera Mowry-Housley, Chrissy Metz, Jamie Chung, Kerry Washington, Busy Philipps and Dove Cameron.

Stylish in pants: Cara Santana accessorised with emerald while Tracee Ellis Ross flashed her pink bra top under an oversize blazer

Two peas in a pod: Cara looked striking as she arrived on the arms of her hunky fiance Jesse Metcalfe

Amazing: Lena Waithe, left, and Tracee Ellis Ross opted for androgynous chic as they took to the red carpet

Happy: The pair looked to be in great spirits as they enjoyed a giggle

Flashing some leg: Pregnant Eva Longoria sported a plunging tuxedo-esque dress with split in the skirt

Radiant: The former Desperate Housewives star, who is expecting her first child with husband Jose 'Pepe' Antonio Baston, looked absolutely glowing as she arrived in style

A galaxy of stars descended on Beverly Hills Sunday to honour the best in film and television as the 2018 awards season officially kicks off with the Golden Globes.

This year's ceremony is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

The ceremony Sunday night focused much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton - the first for late night NBC funnyman Seth Meyers as host -- is not as reliable at predicting Oscars glory as the galas held by Hollywood's acting, producing and directing unions.

Satin chic! Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown showed her fashion credentials in a ruffled mini dress

Bit of both: Christina Hendricks teamed capri pants with a dramatic ball gown with a mix of satin and velvet

Let the fun begin: Erika Christensen channeled gothic princess while Tamera Mowry-Housley opted for something racier, with Tamera accessorizing her look with some Gabriel NY diamond earrings

Young Hollywood: Nicola Peltz looked like a classic Hollywood screen siren as she was accompanied by boyfriend Anwar Hadid

Glitzy: This Is Us star Chrissy Metz wore an off-the-shoulder dress with sequin embellishments

On the same page: Kerry Washington, Busy Philipps and Dove Cameron shimmered in strapless dresses

Pals: Kerry Washington, Debra Messing, and Eva Longoria looked to be in a great mood as they posed together

Girl power: Tarana Burke, top row from left, Michelle Williams, America Ferrera, Jessica Chastain, Amy Poehler, Meryl Streep, Kerry Washington, and bottom row from left, Natalie Portman, Ai-jen Poo, and Saru Jayaraman

But it remains one of the most high-profile and glamorous - not to mention boozy -- events of the awards calendar and tends to generate more headlines for tipsy tributes, daring gowns and wacky tuxedos.

Actors and actresses turned out in black this year, in solidarity with victims of Weinstein and numerous other figures exposed by the harassment and abuse scandal, including Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Dustin Hoffman.

During the night Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B DeMille award and gave a speech which has been hailed 'one of the greatest American speeches' with some even dubbing her the future president.

Showing them how it's done: Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer and Will & Grace's Debra Messing looked effortlessly stylish in their black ensembles

Cute couple! Vanessa Hudgens went for a black and white look as she was joined by boyfriend Austin Butler

Date night: Christian Slater posed with wife Brittany Lopez while Ansel Elgort was all smiles with girlfriend Violetta Komyshan

Nailed it: Mena Suvari, Jackie Cruz and Angela Sarafyan let their individual styles shine through

So glam: Jamie Chung looked gorgeous in a strapless prom-style dress with layered skirt

Lacy ladies: Shay Mitchell, Ali Larter and Michelle Monaghan went slightly sheer

Twitter users went wild over the barnstorming speech, joking that the former talk show host should make a run in 2020.

Winfrey began her speech by saying she hopes by accepting the award, the first black woman to do so, has an impact on young girls.

'At this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this award,' Winfrey said.

Sexy: Lea looked striking in a figure-hugging black down with a soaring thigh high split

Here come the boys! In a sea full of powerful women, the men, Scott Eastwood, Nick Robinson and Dylan McDermott also showed their solidarity in slick black suits

'I want all the girls watching to know: A new day is on the horizon. When that new day finally dawns, it will be because of the magnificent women and many of them are in this room tonight.'

She closed her speech with a call for unity: 'I want all the girls watching to know a new day is on the horizon.

'And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they are the leaders to take us to the time where nobody has to say 'me too' again.'

Flower power: Bellamy Young and Constance Wu opted for black frocks with floral designs

Wow factor: Molly Sims' dress looked like a piece of artwork with its spectacular sleeves

Red carpet pros: Emily VanCamp and Sonequa Martin-Green knocked it out of the park with demure necklines

No fuss: Danielle Macdonald, Zoey Deutch and Kiersey Clemons kept it simply in plain black

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
They tied the knot at a Melbourne registry office in 2015 before announcing their abrupt split just months later.

And two years on, millionaire Geoffrey Edelsten, 74, and estranged wife Gabi Grecko, 28, have reconciled after an 'intense reunion' and the couple plan to tie the knot in a second wedding in New York.

The medical entrepreneur told Daily Mail Australia on Monday that he has never been happier and the couple will make their reunion official in a vow renewal ceremony.

True love! Millionaire Geoffrey Edelsten, 74, and estranged wife Gabi Grecko, 28, have reconciled after an 'intense reunion' and the couple plan to tie the knot in a second wedding in New York

He also hit back at recent claims made by his ex-wife Brynne Edelsten, 34, after she said Geoffrey's reconciliation with Gabi is just a 'joke.'

'Brynne misconstrued my comments to her questions about Gabi,' he said.

Geoffrey said his reunion with aspiring rapper Gabi occurred after they made 'intense contact' and decided they wanted to be together again.

'It has got more intense over the past few weeks until present time,' he said.

It's officially back on! The medical entrepreneur told Daily Mail Australia on Monday that he has never been happier and the couple will make their reunion official in a vow renewal ceremony

Loved up! In a surprising twist, the businessman said the couple intend on renewing their vows 'in a synagogue in New York City'

Wearing his ring! Geoffrey was spotted with a lovely piece of jewellery on his ring finger

The successful businessman said the couple intend to renew their vows 'at a synagogue in New York City.'

'There has never been a divorce because neither of us wanted one,' he admitted.

The news comes just one day after Brynne claimed the reunion was a farce.

Gabi in the flesh: 'Apparently it was only a joke about Geoff and Gabi getting back together...that's what he said in his texts to me last week anyway,' she said

'Apparently it was only a joke about Geoff and Gabi getting back together... that's what he said in his texts to me last week anyway,' she said.

The texts show Brynne wishing Geoffrey and Gabi a 'Happy New Year,' followed by a love heart emoji.

Geoffrey replies by saying the 'media reports are a joke' in relation to his romance with Gabi and 'he was in East Timor helping [the] government with medical services.'

New year, new you! The texts show Brynne wishing Geoffrey and Gabi a new year, followed by a love heart emoji

Brynne asked her ex-partner if the news about him and Gabi came as a surprise to which he replied 'big surprise.'

Brynne spent five years married to Geoffrey before citing her husband's 'dalliances' with another woman as the reason the pair split in 2014, claims which Geoffrey denies.

They still 'speak or text' occasionally because there are 'ongoing court proceedings' between the pair, she claims.
L'Oreal's new Elvive campaign has sparked mixed reviews after appearing to liken Winona Ryder's career comeback to damaged hair.

The 46-year-old actress - who made an almighty return to the screen as single mother Joyce Byers in Stranger Things - has been unveiled as the latest star to join the all-star L'Oreal family, though it seems not everyone is a fan of the way the brand has marketed her debut.

The ad follows Winona as she prepares to step onstage at an award ceremony, though her identity isn't revealed until 45 seconds into minute-long the commercial.

'How dare they!' L'Oreal's new Elvive campaign has sparked mixed reviews after appearing to liken Winona Ryder's career comeback to damaged hair

Instead, audiences feast their eyes on the unidentified star's beautifully, bouncy curls as she hypes herself up in her dressing room wearing a gorgeous black gown.

When Winona's face is finally unveiled, the screen reads: 'Everyone loves a comeback. Damaged hair deserves one, too.'

However, while the beauty company is no doubt attempting to champion Winona's acclaimed performance in the hit Netflix series, it has certainly divided opinion on social media.

Hair she is! The 46-year-old actress - who made an almighty return to the screen as single mother Joyce Byers in Stranger Things - fronts the beauty brand's latest Elvive campaign

Plot: The ad follows Winona as she prepares to step onstage at an award ceremony, though her identity isn't revealed until 45 seconds into minute-long the commercial

Airing for the first time during Sunday night's Golden Globes ceremony, one viewer slammed: 'Wait was there just a shampoo ad saying we finally let Winona Ryder back in Hollywood because she fixed her hair.'

Another mocked: 'just impulse shouted HOW DARE THEY?! at the shampoo ad with Winona Ryder and the tag line everyone deserves a comeback."'

'First the appalling Winona Ryder damaged hair ad then Tommy stuck alone in a corner. Terrible treatment of my faves tonight #GoldenGlobes75,' raged a further.

Dividing opinion: The commercial has received mixed reviews online

Mystery woman: Instead, audiences feast their eyes on the unidentified star's beautifully, bouncy curls as she hypes herself up in her dressing room wearing a gorgeous black gown

Controversial: When Winona's face is finally unveiled, the screen reads: 'Everyone loves a comeback. Damaged hair deserves one, too.'

However, there were also those who praised the advert and its message.

'#GoldenGlobes Winona Ryder looking fab in the hair ad.Everyone deserves a second chance,' one fan commended.

'Yesss. Winona Ryder in LOreal Elvive ad. You come back girl. Youre perfect in @Stranger_Things,' another raved.

MailOnline has contacted Winona's representative for comment.
The cream of Hollywood converged as the 75th annual Golden Globes got underway in Beverly Hills on Sunday evening.

But James Corden opted instead for a comparatively low key night out with stunning wife Julia Carey at a local restaurant, where they enjoyed a dinner date just three weeks after welcoming their third child.

Corden, 39, looked dapper in a navy blazer overlaid with distinctive green and red stitching as they made an exit from Santa Monica eatery Georgio Baldi following a subdued evening away from the red carpet.

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Subdued: James Corden opted for a low key night out with stunning wife Julia Carey at Santa Monica restaurant Georgio Baldi on Sunday evening, where they enjoyed a dinner date just three weeks after welcoming their third child

The Late Late Show presenter added to his look with a simple T-shirt and matching blue chinos, with casual trainers rounded off a distinctly smart-casual ensemble.

Joining her husband, Julia, 37, indicated that shes already bounced back into shape following the birth of their third child, a daughter, on December 12.

Leading the way as they headed towards a waiting car, the TV presenter caught the eye in a black silk blouse and skinny jeans.

Looking good: Leading the way as they headed towards a waiting car, TV presenter Julia caught the eye in a black silk blouse and skinny jeans

A patterned jacket added a distinctive flourish to an otherwise casual look, while tasselled suede boots rounded things off.

James was forced to drop out of his presenting role on The Late Late Show last minute after Julia went into labour.

The role was duly filled by his close friend and former One Direction star Harry Styles - who had announced James' baby joy just 30 minutes after Julia gave birth.

She and husband James are still yet to name their daughter, with James revealing during a later appearance on the US talk show that he had suggested calling their little girl Beyonce.

Leave of absence: James was forced to drop out of his presenting role on The Late Late Show last minute after Julia went into labour

The Gavin & Stacey actor revealed: 'After the baby was born, anyone who's been in this situation will know, we were both crying, I was crying my eyes out, my wife's crying her eyes out, the baby's crying.

'The doctor asked about her name and I don't know why I said it and I looked at the doctor and said, "We're going to call her Beyonce." My wife did not think that was funny.

He claims a nurse actually believed him and had even started filling out the necessary paperwork, as he added: 'I had to go over to her and go, "Excuse me, there's only one Beyonce."'
Coleen Rooney was seen stepping out after paying an emotional tribute to late sister Rosie McLoughlin on the fifth anniversary of her death.

The 31-year-old WAG showed off her baby bump in a sporty hoodie and a pair of leggings as she ran errands in Wilmslow on Monday morning.

The brunette kept a low profile during her shopping trip, wearing her hair pulled off her face in a ponytail.

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Emotional: Coleen Rooney was seen stepping out in Wilmslow after paying an emotional tribute to her late sister

Tragic: Her outing came as she shared a moving tribute to Rosie McLoughlin on the fifth anniversary of her death - pictured in 2006

The wife of Everton striker Wayne Rooney was heartbroken after special angel sister Rosie lost her battle with Rett Syndrome, a rare brain disorder that causes severe disabilities, in January 2013 at the age of 14.

And taking to social media platform Twitter on Monday morning, Coleen, 31, made sure her memory was honoured by sharing a poignant image of Rosies name illuminated with lights.

Shortly after posting the shot, the Littlewoods designer was inundated with well meaning messages from members of her loyal 1.31 million following.

'Thinking of u and your family today. Rosie was a special person who I know made the lives of ppl she met brighter,' (sic) wrote one.

Sporty: The 31-year-old WAG showed off her baby bump in a sporty hoodie and a pair of leggings as she ran errands in Wilmslow on Monday morning

Minimal: The brunette kept a low profile during her shopping trip, wearing her hair pulled off her face in a ponytail

Active: Coleen ensures she always makes time for gentle exercise throughout her pregnancy

A second added: 'Big hugs today and hope today is as gentle as it can be. She is looking over you ever day.' (sic)

'Thoughts are with you all x shine bright little angel,' wrote another.

Coleen was said to idolise her adopted sister and chose Rosie as chief bridesmaid when she married Wayne in 2008.

Rosie was originally taken in as a foster child by Coleens parents, bricklayer Tony and Colette, a former nursery nurse, when she was two. Although they were aware she was disabled they did not know the full extent of her condition, which has no cure.

Loading up: Coleen was laden down with heavy bags after her grocery shop

Tribute: Taking to social media platform Twitter on Monday morning, Coleen, 31, made sure her memory was honoured by sharing a poignant image of Rosies name illuminated with lights

Devastated The wife of Everton striker Wayne Rooney was heartbroken after special angel sister Rosie lost her battle with Rett Syndrome, a rare brain disorder that causes severe disabilities, in January 2013 at the age of 14

Support: Shortly after posting the shot, the Littlewoods designer was inundated with well meaning messages from members of her loyal 1.31 million following

In an exclusive article for The Mail on Sunday in 2006, Coleen wrote: When Rosie arrived she could crawl, and even though she couldnt use her hands that much she would handle toys on her play mat and she could eat.

But over a period of time she stopped crawling and lost what use of her hands she had. Then she started having problems swallowing her food.

It took pretty much a year for Rosie to be diagnosed and, looking back, I can see how much Mum pushed to find out what was wrong with her and to try to do what was best for her.

Close: Wayne has previously paid tribute to Rosie in posts shared with his Instagram followers

Loving: Rosie was originally taken in as a foster child by Coleens parents, bricklayer Tony and Colette, a former nursery nurse, when she was two

In a statement released shortly after her death, Tony and Colette wrote: Sadly our special angel Rosie, our much-loved daughter and sister, went to Heaven at 2.50 this morning at home where she was surrounded by her loving family.

Rosie was just 14 years old and fought a lifelong battle with Rett syndrome. Throughout her life she brought so much love and happiness to all our family and everyone who knew and met her.

She was such a strong little girl and an inspiration to us all. We shall cherish for ever the memories we have shared and the love she showed us each and every day of her life. As a family we are heartbroken but we are blessed to have had her in our lives.

Remembering our angel: Coleen makes a point of honouring her sister's memory on social media

Coleen had been on holiday in Barbados with her younger brothers, Joe and Anthony, but cut short the trip when she heard that Rosies condition had deteriorated.

Taking to Twitter to express her sorrow shortly after her passing, she wrote: We are absolutely heartbroken to have lost our angel Rosie.

So glad we ended our holiday short, due to her deteriorating & we was able to spend the last few days together with her and our family! Sleep tight Rosie Mc x. We love you more than words can say x.
She's the stunning model who's been referred to as 'Australia's Kylie Jenner'.

But Belle Lucia has now candidly revealed her self-esteem was 'severely affected' by her years-long battle with acne.

Taking to Instagram on Monday, the beauty shared a throwback snap with her 921,000 followers, which showed her suffering from the skin condition as a teeanger.

Candid: On Monday, Australian model Belle Lucia shared a throwback photo of herself as a teenager accompanied by a lengthy caption in which she revealed acne affected her self esteem

The photo was placed side-by-side with a more recent snap of the starlet, who is now no longer suffers from skin blemishes.

Adding a lengthy and emotional caption, Belle began: 'No one is perfect - Left is me as a teenager. I struggled with acne for many years as a young girl, not only was it isolated to just my face but it affected my chest and back.'

She then told fans how severely the condition affected her claiming she had to 'stop modelling as a result'.

'Australia's Kylie Jenner': The beauty, who usually shares bikini photos, got candid with her 921,00 followers

Explaining why she chose to share the picture, the stunner stated: 'I'm posting this to hopefully help those out there suffering with acne or anyone worrying about the way they look'.

'When I was young I wish someone would have told me that your looks don't define you and even the 'models' you see on advertisements aren't perfect', she added.

Belle's candid picture and her brave omission received mountains of praise from her legion of fans, with one gushing: 'Love how real this post is, so beautiful!'

Inspirational: Aussie-based Belle, who is half-German half-Portugese is one of the country's most popular models on Instagram

Another was encouraged by the beauty's wise words, writing: 'Exactly what I needed, Ive been struggling with acne for a while now'.

Aussie-based Belle, who is half-German half-Portugese, is one of the country's most popular models on Instagram.

Frequently sharing sizzling snaps showing off her bikini body, the star was this week seen posing beside a pony in a nude G-string bikini on a beach.
She was the controversial Big Brother contestant who left the Gold Coast house with a new boyfriend.

And now Cat Law, 34, has opened up about returning to university as a mature age student in a bid to further her nursing career.

She revealed her plans in a candid Instagram post on Monday.

'I'm heading back to Uni': Former Big Brother contestant Cat Law announces she's going back to school as a mature age student

'Don't be afraid to be thought of as the smart girl. I've decided to take a pretty big life change and return to uni as a mature age student,' she captioned.

A picture showed a very confident Cat wearing black-rimmed glasses.

'That's right, I'm heading back to uni at 34 eek! I've been working as a Registered Midwife for 6 years and now it's time to add Registered Nurse to my name as well. Wish me luck,' she continued.

She's a smart lady! Cat already has three university degrees according to the official Big Brother fan page and a 'fervent obsession with board games'

Where the love affair began: She's also an identical twin and was newly divorced before entering the house (pictured with Lawson)

She finished 11th place on the series before returning to Melbourne to resume working as a midwife - with fellow contestant Lawson Reeves by her side.

Cat already has three university degrees according to the official Big Brother fan page and a 'fervent obsession with board games.'

She's also an identical twin and was newly-divorced before entering the house.

But since being evicted she has found love with Lawson, the pair launching a food blog together and regular posting at music festivals and at the gym.

Christmas at work! But since being evicted she has found love with Lawson, the pair launching a food blog together and regular posting at music festivals and at the gym

They're still together! She was the controversial Big Brother contestant who left the Gold Coast house with a new boyfriend

She recently caused a stir on her Instagram page when she captioned a picture of herself drinking wine with: 'Nothing like having some time to sit and think. Like today for example, I started to wonder if deaf people find farts as funny.'

A fan criticised Cat's humour in the moment, telling her she 'hopes no one close to her ever has a disability.'

Cat was quick to explain that she never intentionally meant to offend.
She promised to serenade husband Dr. Rick Wolfe on their first wedding anniversary.

And Gamble Breaux might be planning a dance performance too, as she showcased her moves in an Instagram video on Saturday.

The Real Housewives of Melbourne star, 46, shared footage of herself in a pink bikini and pirate hat while dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Getting her groove on! Gamble Breaux might be planning a dance performance for her first wedding anniversary to Dr. Rick Wolfe, as she showcased her moves on Instagram on Saturday

'Won the bet! Thriller dance bought to you reluctantly by @lukewolfee hahaha,' she wrote in the caption.

Gamble's 2016 wedding to eye surgeon Dr. Rick Wolfe in Byron Bay, NSW was aired on Real Housewives Of Melbourne.

Around 60 guests attended the beachside wedding, including her co-stars Janet Roach, Gina Liano, Jackie Gilles and Lydia Schiavello.

Thrilling! Over the weekend, The Real Housewives of Melbourne star, 46, shared footage of herself in a pink bikini and pirate hat while dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller

Gamble stunned in a custom-made Alin Le' Kal gown which clung to her slender figure and featured a long and billowing train.

After the ceremony, the tearful bride thanked her guests, saying: 'It's been one of the best moments of my life. I'm the luckiest girl at the moment.'

Ahead of their wedding anniversary, Gamble announced on social media that she plans to celebrate the occasion with a song.

She was pictured in a recording studio, choosing a drum track for a composition written by Jason Singh.

Gamble wrote in the caption: 'Behind-the-scenes! I am very excited that Jason has agreed to write a song for me to sing to @rickwolfe1 for our anniversary!'

Real Housewives Of Melbourne airs Wednesdays at 8:30pm on Arena

In the recording studio! Ahead of their wedding anniversary, Gamble announced on social media that she plans to celebrate the occasion with a song
Angelina Jolie has not been seen alongside estranged husband Brad Pitt in over a year.

But on Sunday evening, Golden Globe viewers did a double take when she sat next to a man who strongly resembles the actor she raises six children with.

The 42-year-old Oscar winner looked happy as she posed with Chris Hemsworth, who has often been called a young Pitt.

They look good together: Angelina Jolie sat next to Brad Pitt look-alike Chris Hemsworth at the Golden Globes on Sunday in Beverly Hills

So five years ago: Jolie and Pitt were side by side at the Globes in 2015

Fans have often said that when Chris starred in Avengers, he looked exactly like Brad when he starred in Troy.

On Sunday Tweeters commented: 'No one acknowledges the similarity between these two! I confuse Chris with Brad all the time lol.'

Another added: 'For a long time I thought that Brad Pitt played Thor in avenges. LOL.'

Photo bomber: Also at the A list table eight was director Taika Waititi

Angelina looked comfortable next to the hunk at their table inside the Beverly Hilton hotel where the Golden Globes took place. Also with them was director Taika Waititi as well as Angie's 14-year-old son Pax.

Chris is a 34-year-old actor from Melbourne, Australia who has been married to Elsa Pataky for seven years.

He is best known for the films Thor, The Avengers, and In The Heart Of The Sea. He can next be seen in Avengers: Infinity War in May.

Confusing: Fans have often said that when Chris starred in Avengers, he looked exactly like Brad when he starred in Troy

Brad, who is still in the process of working out the details of his divorce from Jolie, did not attend the Globes on Sunday.

Angie oozed glamor as she posed with her handsome 14-year-old lad on the red carpet as he matched his mom in a black tuxedo with Time's Up pin.

The By The Sea director looked nothing short of sensational in a black gown, keeping with the event's color scheme, with sheer neckline and feathered sleeves.

No Pitt: Brad, who is still in the process of working out the details of his divorce from Jolie, did not attend the Globes on Sunday; seen in 2015

Her handsome boy! Jolie was joined by son Pax Thien, 14, as well

Class act: Jolie, 42, dazzled in a black gown with sheer neckline and feathered sleeves

The Salt star wore her hair up in an elegant chignon and donned Forevermark Diamond drop earrings for a little sparkle.

She complemented her flawless alabaster complexion with some shimmery pink lip gloss.

Jolie will present a gong during the evening, as well as Jennifer Aniston, who was also previously married to Pitt.

The duo rarely attend the same events but with both slated to be presenting there was higher chance for a run-in between the actresses.

Proud: Angelina looked every inch the doting mother as she posed with the teenageer

Snappy duo: Pax matched his mom in a black tuxedo suit with Time's Up pin

But Aniston, 48, chose to skip the red carpet, instead making an appearance on stage alongside Carol Burnett to present the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy.

It is unlikely the women will be seated near to one another however as Jenny Cooney, a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association - who helps work out the seating plan for the Golden Globes - recently revealed personal circumstances are taken into account when planning who will share a table at the glitzy ceremony.

'There have been years where major stars may be together for the first time since a high-profile split and we go to great lengths to put them on opposite sides of the ballroom' Cooney told Australia's Vogue.

Natural beauty: The mother-of-six looked sensational with her hair pinned up and wearing diamond drop earrings

Vision in black: Jolie showed off her sheer sleeves and the flattering ruching around her waistline

'It was always stressful to have Jennifer Aniston in the same room with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and this year we were wondering if Brad Pitt showed up, how that would be received by Angelina Jolie.

'It's good for the audience but maybe not for the exes,.' she added.

Jolie split with Pitt in September 2016, filing for divorce and citing irreconcilable differences and requesting physical custody for all six of their children.

Ex factor: Jennifer Aniston, who like Jolie was also married to Brad Pitt, presented during the evening but skipped the red carpet

Aniston was married to Pitt 2000 until 2005. They split as it was rumored that the actor had fallen for Jolie on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith.

This year's Golden Globes is seen as the first big opportunity for Hollywood to speak with one voice against a pervasive culture of misconduct brought to light by the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, unmasked as a serial predator.

The focus Sunday night is expected to be as much on the stars' acceptance speeches as on the performances being honored at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's glitzy bash.

Actors and actresses turned out in black this year, in solidarity with victims of Weinstein and numerous other figures exposed by the harassment and abuse scandal, including Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Dustin Hoffman.

In the spotlight: Later in the evening Jolie took to the stage with Isabelle Huppert to present

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
She enjoyed Christmas on the golden sands of Miami Beach, but Lottie Moss was back to the comparatively mundane realities of London life as she stepped out on Monday afternoon.

The model sister of catwalk veteran Kate Moss went make-up free for a low-key trip to a Chelsea supermarket, where she picked up several bags of essentials.

Opting for an oversized yellow jumper over black gym leggings, Lottie, 19, looked casual as she handled the rather unglamorous task of navigating her shopping laden trolley across an adjoining car park.

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Here she comes: She enjoyed Christmas on the golden sands of Miami Beach, but Lottie Moss was back to the comparatively mundane realities of London life as she stepped out on Monday afternoon

The young model added to her relaxed look with a pair of running shoes, while her trademark blonde locks were scraped into a messy bun.

Joined by ever-present friend Emily Blackwell, Lottie looked weary during her first sighting in the capital since returning from her idyllic Caribbean holiday.

Making her way hone later that day, the model had her hands full with a heavy looking shopping bag and multi-pack of mineral water as she walked alongside her close friend.

Don't mind me: The model sister of catwalk veteran Kate Moss went make-up free for a low-key trip to a Chelsea supermarket, where she picked up several bags of essentials

Low key: Opting for an oversized yellow jumper over black gym leggings, Lottie looked casual as she ventured out in the capital

In good company: The model was joined by ever present friend Emily Blackwell during her latest outing

Lottie's latest appearance comes after she slipped into a racy black basque for a sizzling new photo shoot.

The willowy model sported a sumptuous bodysuit featuring an intricate lace design and sheer paneling, which protected her modesty with strategically-placed fabric.

Teasing a glimpse of her ample cleavage, the fashionista showed off her model prowess as she seductively gazed down the camera lens.

She styled her long blonde locks in sweeping curls, which cascaded over her shoulders and accentuated her striking looks with a soft pink lip and a sweep of mascara.

Let's go: A rather weary looking Lottie caught the eye as she exited the Chelsea supermarket with Emily on Monday morning

She's got baggage: The young model handled the rather unglamorous task of navigating her shopping laden trolley across an adjoining car park

Hands free: Pal Emily chatted on her phone as they made their way home

The striking model recently jetted to the Bahamas after a warm festive holiday in Miami.

And Lottie has been commanding a strong social media presence during her idyllic getaway, sharing a plethora of bikini-clad snaps via her Instagram page.

On Sunday, she slipped into a tiny white bandeau two-piece as she posed against a backdrop of clear blue waters in Green Turtle Cay.

The blonde looked thoroughly relaxed as she flaunted her washboard abs in the sizzling shot.

Sizzling display: Lottie commanded attention on Monday as she slipped into a racy black basque in a sizzling photoshoot

A sun-kissed Lottie then showed off some serious under-boob as she slipped into a vintage print swimsuit in another sultry snap.

The busty blonde appeared a little windswept as she seductively paraded her ample assets in the skimpy ensemble.

Lottie is known for previously dating Alex Mytton from reality series Made In Chelsea, but their on and off nine-month romance came to an end in July last year.

Idyllic holiday: On Sunday, she slipped into a tiny white two-piece as she posed against a backdrop of clear blue waters during her Bahamas getaway

Buxom blonde: A sun-kissed Lottie then showed off some serious under-boob as she slipped into a vintage print swimsuit in another sizzling snap

Following their split, the model has since moved on from her heartache as she has been romantically linked to rugby player Elliot Clements.

The gorgeous model was scouted for her first modelling agency at the tender age of 13 and first courted the attention of the modelling world when she attended her older half-sister Kate's wedding to her ex-husband Jamie Hince in 2011.

Sussex native Lottie has gone onto land campaigns with Calvin Klein and Bulgari, as well as fronting the cover of Vogue Paris in 2016.
They have just returned from an envy-inducing getaway to Antigua.

And Millie Mackintosh and her beau Hugo Taylor proved there was no rest for the wicked as they arrived in style to witness Blood Brother FW18 London Fashion Week fashion Catwalk show on Monday.

The former Made In Chelsea stars looked clearly smitten as they put on a trendy display while taking to the front row at the BFC Show Space.

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Hot couple: Millie Mackintosh and Hugo Taylor proved there was no rest for the wicked as they arrived in style to witness a collection at London Fashion Week Men's on Monday

Loved-up: The former Made In Chelsea stars looked clearly smitten as they put on a trendy display while taking to the front row at the BFC Show Space

The Quality Street heiress couldn't keep her hands off her fiance as they fussed over each other ahead of the event.

Millie ensured to arrive in style in a chic white coat, which she paired with a plunging black top.

A pair of shiny biker trousers flaunted her slender limbs, which were accentuated in a pair of towering stilettos.

Relying on her natural features, Millie kept her make-up look simple, opting for mascara-laden eyes and a healthy dose of bronzer.

In love: The Quality Street heiress couldn't keep her hands off her man as they fussed over each other ahead of the event

Looking good: Millie ensured to arrive in style in a chic white coat, which she paired with a plunging black top

Trendsetter: A pair of shiny biker trousers flaunted her slender limbs, which were accentuated in a pair of towering stilettos

Hugo also looked super cool in his all-black ensemble which consisted of a shearling-lined biker jacket.

His matching shirt was casually unbuttoned to expose his chest hair and he accessorised with a dangling gold chain.

The pair proved that it was difficult for them to keep their hands off each other as they attended the stylish event.

Beauty: Relying on her natural features, Millie kept her make-up look simple, opting for mascara-laden eyes and a healthy dose of bronzer

Glossy: Millie's chestnut locks boasted a shiny blow dry

Looking good: Hugo also looked super cool in his all-black ensemble which consisted of a shearling-lined biker jacket

Hunk: His matching shirt was casually unbuttoned to expose his chest hair and he accessorised with a dangling gold chain

While fans know them as an original golden Made In Chelsea couple, Millie revealed the couple go way back as they have been friends for a 'long time' before the show.

Of their relationship, she explained: 'We've known each other since I was 16. So we've been friends for a long long time.'

Millie and Hugo were therefore firm friends for five years before the heiress made her debut on the new reality series at the tender age of 21.

There were break-ups, make-ups, drinks thrown and feisty jealousy while their passionate six-month love affair played out on the show in 2011.

Fashion fans: The duo were there to see the fashion of Men's brand Blood Brother

Golden: The style displayed was fashion-forward with a futuristic edge

Eclectic: The show presented a slew of unique looks, with slogans and written words being a common theme across the looks

Logo: The brand name was a key piece across the looks, with black and white also being a statement

Eyes for each other: The pair proved that it was difficult for them to keep their hands off each other as they attended the stylish event

Way back when: While fans know them as an original golden Made In Chelsea couple, Millie revealed the couple go way back as they have been friends for a 'long time' before the show

Star-studded: Joining Hugo and Millie on the front row were (L-R) Jim Chapman, Oliver Cheshire, Betty Bahz and Ben Nordberg

Suited and booted: Model Oliver Cheshire looked as dapper as ever in a grey suit and turtleneck combo

Of their relationship, Millie explained: 'We've known each other since I was 16. So we've been friends for a long long time'

But their relationship came to a dramatic end when Hugo got together with Millie's best friend Rosie Fortescue while they were still together.

The girls repaired their friendship when Millie left series five of the show and it is believed Rosie will even be a bridesmaid at her wedding.

Millie and Hugo reunited in May 2016, following her divorce from first husband Professor Green.
John Heard, best known for playing the father in the Home Alone movies, had at least seven types of prescription drugs in his system when he died of a heart attack on July 21 at the age of 71.

The toxicology results are now in on the actor, who was found dead in a hotel in Palo Alto, California.

They showed he had Tramadol, Oxycodone, Oxymorphone, Xanax, Buprenorphine, Fentanyl and Hydromorphone in his system, according to TMZ.

Tragic report: John Heard, seen at the Newport Film Festival, had at least seven narcotics in his system when he was found dead in a hotel in Palo Alto, California, on July 21

However, Heard had back surgery two days before his death, and some of these drugs are commonly used to alleviate pain. He was at the hotel to recover.

The report also suggested there was an attempt to revive the star with Narcan, a drug used to counteract the effects of a narcotics OD

The Medical Examiner has already said he died from a heart attack triggered by heart disease and there is no information in the reports as to whether drugs contributed to the cause of death.

The Washington DC native was reportedly discovered by the maid service and was pronounced dead on the scene.

A Palo Alto Police Department spokesman told People: 'I can confirm that our officers responded with the Fire Department to a hotel in our city yesterday on a report of a person in need of medical aid.

'The person was determined to be deceased. While still under investigation, the death is not considered suspicious at this time.'

Heard played Peter McCallister - the father of Macaulay Culkin's character - in the Home Alone movies.

Comedy style: He's best known for his role as the father in the Home Alone movies in the 1990s

Screen dad: Heard played Peter McCallister - the fther of Macaulay Culkin's character

He also starred in Big with Tom Hanks, Gladiator, The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica.

Heard had been married three times and is survived by three children.

In 1991 he was arrested and charged with third-degree assault for allegedly slapping his former partner Melissa Leo, according to Fox News. In 1997, he was found guilty of trespassing at her Baltimore home.
He was left heartbroken when his estranged-wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead embarked on a relationship with Ewan McGregor.

But jilted husband Riley Stearns has vowed to be more positive in the new year as he took to Instagram on Monday with a reflective post.

The snap comes one day after Ewan raised eyebrows by thanking both his wife Eve Mavrakis and his new love - Riley's ex-wife - in his Golden Globes acceptance speech.

Heartache: Riley Stearns has vowed to move on from estranged-wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead as he took to Instagram on Monday to pen an emotional post

Taking to Instagram stories, Riley seemed in a pensive mood as he reflected on the breakdown of his 15-year marriage.

He wrote: 'Remember when I used to post sad stuff ALL THE TIME?? Yeah, sorry about that.

'I'm all about not taking myself too serious in 2k18 (see above) Notice something different? (If you guessed crazy hair you're correct.)'

New romance: The 31-year-old was left heartbroken after Mary embarked on a relationship with Fargo co-star Ewan McGregor

Over the past few months, the television writer has shared a number of downcast Instagram snaps as he struggles to move on from the 33-year-old Final Destination actress.

In December, Riley admitted he was still getting used to being called a divorce  despite still being married to his estranged wife of 15-years.

Sharing on Instagram stories, he wrote: 'Just remembered I got called a divorce for the first time yesterday. Still not as bad as the word fiance tho.'

In a fresh blow, Mary's new flame Ewan was awarded best performance by an actor in a limited series for his role as twins Emmitt and Ray Stussy in Fargo at the Golden Globes on Sunday evening.

First, the 46-year-old actor thanked his estranged wife of 22 years Eve, from whom he separated in mid-2017.

He said: 'I want to take a moment to just say thank you to Eve, who always stood by me for 22 years, he said, 'and our four children Clara, Esther, Jamyan and Anouk.'

Ewan then went on to mention his Fargo costar Mary Elizabeth who plays his character Ray's girlfriend Nikki Swango and who is now his real life girlfriend.

'Awkward': Ewan McGregor thanked both his wife of 22 years Eve Mavrakis as well as new love Mary Elizabeth Winstead in his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes on Sunday

He continued: 'I've always loved being an actor and I got amazing actors to hang out with, and there wouldnt have been any Emmett without David Thewlis and Michael Stuhlbard and Carrie Coon.

'And there wouldnt have been any Ray without Mary Elizabeth Winstead,' he concluded.

Twitter users were quick to react to the Scotsman's speech, calling it 'gutsy' and 'a first'.

'There wouldnt have been any Ray without Mary Elizabeth Winstead' the actor concluded his speech with a shout out to his girlfriend after thanking his wife for 22 years of support

Controversial: Numerous people took to Twitter to comment on Ewan's choice to thank both his wife and girlfriend in his speech

'Ewan McGregor using his speech to thank both his mistress AND his wife he left for her is... gutsy,' one user wrote.

Another added: 'Thanking his wife and the woman he cheated with-thats got to be a first in a speech'

Ewan's separation from Eve, 51, came to light in October, after news of the actor's blossoming romance with Mary emerged.

Earlier in the evening Ewan took to the red carpet solo as he arrived at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.

He showed his support for the 'Time's Up' movement, which is protesting the pervasive culture of sexual abuse that has long had a grip on Hollywood, but which is now being widely exposed.

It's complicated: After announcing his split from Eve, 51 (left) in October, Ewan is now dating his Fargo co-star Mary Elizabeth, 33 (right)

Winner: The Fargo star is seen backstage posing with his award for best performance in a limited series

Solidarity: Ewan donned a 'Time's Up' badge, showing his support for the movement, founded in response to the Harvey Weinstein-led sexual misconduct scandal

Sticking with the dress code of black, the Scottish screen star - a Golden Globe nominee - cut a dapper figure in a classic tux, teamed with striped shirt and bow tie, as he joined the protest against Hollywood's many powerful figures who have been toppled in the scandal.

The Fargo star's solo appearance at the event stood in stark contrast to his other outings to the annual glamorous gala, which he was seen taking Eva to in previous years.

And as Ewan stepped out in California, his estranged wife recently shared a shot of herself enjoying her first vacation as a single woman as she shared snaps from a tropical getaway with her children.

Eve shares daughters Clara, 20, Esther, 16, Jamiyan, 16, and Anouk, six, with the star and whisked the girls off for a relaxing trip over Christmas and New Year's.

Taking to Instagram last Monday to share a snap from their holiday, the production designer showed the girls taking a dip in the sea as they beamed for the camera.

At this year's ceremony actors and actresses wore black in solidarity with victims of Weinstein and numerous other figures exposed by the harassment and abuse scandal, including Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner and Dustin Hoffman.

Joining the cause: He joined the protest against Hollywood's many powerful figures who have been toppled in the ongoing sexual abuse scandal

Estranged: The former couple's separation came to light in October after the actor's new romance with Mary Elizabeth Winstead emerged

75TH ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS WINNERS - FILM Best Motion Picture - Drama Call Me by Your Name Dunkirk The Post The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy The Disaster Artist Get Out The Greatest Showman I, Tonya Lady Bird - WINNER Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama Jessica Chastain, Molly's Game Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Meryl Streep, The Post Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread Tom Hanks, The Post Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour - WINNER Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul Margot Robbie, I, Tonya Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird - WINNER Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker Best Director Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water - WINNER Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk Ridley Scott, All The Money in the World Steven Spielberg, The Post Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver James Franco, The Disaster Artist - WINNER Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Mary J. Blige, Mudbound Hong Chau, Downsizing Allison Janney, I, Tonya - WINNER Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - WINNER Best Original Score in a Motion Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Shape of Water - WINNER Phantom Thread The Post Dunkirk Best Original Song Home from Ferdinand Mighty River from Mudbound Remember Me from Coco The Star from The Star "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman - WINNER Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture The Shape of Water Lady Bird The Post Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - WINNER Molly's Game Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language A Fantastic Woman First They Killed My Father In the Fade - WINNER Loveless The Square Best Animated Feature Film The Boss Baby The Breadwinner Ferdinand Coco - WINNER Loving Vincent Advertisement
They welcomed daughter Marlowe in 2012 but split in 2015 after three years of being engaged.

But actress Sienna Miller, 36, once again proved that co-parenting is seamless with ex-beau Tom Sturridge, 32, as the actors stepped out in New York after dropping their five-year-old to school on Monday.

The Lost City of Z star went make-up free for the outing as she wrapped up warm in a faux-fur lined khaki green jacket, big enough to hide her hands away from the icy temperatures.

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Friendly: Actress Sienna Miller, 36, looked friendly with ex-beau Tom Sturridge, 32, as the theatrical duo stepped out in New York after dropping their 5 year-old to school on Monday

Sienna touched down in the Big Apple with Marlowe in toe on Saturday, rocking her bright green beanie, and the eye-catching bobble hat made another appearance on morning school run.

The adorable accessory coated her trademark brunette tresses, which draped naturally over her chic coat.

She continued her casually clad trend with stylish grey frayed FRAME jeans, with black leather block-heeled boots, perfect for trudging through the wintry streets.

The Alfie stunner shielded her eyes from the snowy morning glare with round tortoiseshell sunglasses as grabbed a caffiene fix after saying goodbye to her little one.

Casual: The Lost City of Z star went make-up free for the outing as she wrapped up warm in a faux-fur lined khaki green parka, big enough to hide her hands away from the icy temperatures

Ex-boyfriend and fellow actor Tom looked just as casual in his winter get-up, donning a multi-coloured Colmar jacket with skinny black jeans as he chatted to his former flame.

Joining the cosy hat trend, Tom opted for his own black beanie, covering up his chocolate locks.

Despite calling off their engagement in 2015, Sienna confirmed to Harper's Bazaar in March that she and ex-fiance Tom are on great terms, and regularly spend time together with their daughter.

At the time, she gushed to the magazine that she considers the Journey's End actor her 'best friend in the entire world' - and that while they don't share a property, they often stay together to spend mutual time with their little girl.

Admitting their close bond has not broken since they cut romantic ties, she explained: We still love each other.

'I think in a break-up somebody has to be a little bit cruel in order for it to be traditional, but its not been acrimonious in a way where you would choose to not be around that person.'

No hard feelings: Despite calling off their engagement in 2015, Sienna confirmed to Harper's Bazaar in March that she and ex-fiance Tom are on great terms, and regularly spend time together with their daughter

While both stars grew up in Britain, the American Sniper star confessed that she is happy she relocated to New York City last year, in order to challenge herself both professionally and personally.

I just felt like it was so easy and all my friends are there, and wed probably drink too much wine and go to the country for the weekend, she said of her London life.

It was announced in October that Tom joined the cast of the small screen adaptation of the Stephanie Danler novel of the same name.

The film is a coming-of-age story about Tess, a 22-year-old waitress who lives in New York City. The story is based on the author's experience working in restaurants.

Tom will play Jake, a bartender who is set to be in a love triangle with Tess (Ella Purnell) and Simone (Caitlin FitzGerald).
She's become a fashion icon after a career in showbiz.

And Ashley Olsen oozed glamour as she stepped out in a sophisticated black gown to a Golden Globes after-party in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

The 31-year-old showed her support for the Time's Up movement with her pin and all-black attire.

Simply stunning: Ashley Olsen oozed glamour as she stepped out in a sophisticated black gown to a Golden Globes after-party in Los Angeles on Sunday night

Ashley's glam black gown featured a ruffled neckline and nearly floor length skirt that skimmed over her slingback heels.

She added a pop of color with her shimmering emerald green earrings, and had her sandy blonde locks slicked back into a no-fuss low ponytail.

The former Full House actress looked her radiant best with ample amounts of mascara, ensuring her hazel eyes shone bright.

Not pictured out with Ashley was her twin sister, Mary-Kate.

Showing her support: The 31-year-old showed her support for the Time's Up movement with her pin and all-black attire

Not ruffling any feathers! Ashley's glam black gown featured a ruffled neckline and nearly floor length skirt that skimmed over her slingback heels

The sisters gave up acting over 10 years ago to pursue their career in the fashion industry.

They've launched the high-end lifestyle band Elizabeth and James, and last summer opened up their first stand-alone store for the company in Los Angeles.

Ashley ended her five-month relationship with 58-year-old financier, Richard Sachs, last year.
She's currently in icy New York City, where temperatures have plummeted as a deep freeze sweeps through the metropolis.

And Blake Lively was taking zero chances on the frigid cold as she bundled up from head-to-toe during an outing in the Big Apple on Monday.

The 30-year-old layered up in a floppy midnight blue hat, matching coat, and tasseled scarf.

No chances! Blake Lively was taking zero chances on the frigid cold as she bundled up from head to toe during an outing in the Big Apple on Monday

The star also rocked a chunky pair of glossy black boots as she carried a small bottle of water.

Blonde locks styled down, the actress looked practically makeup free, save for a shade of bright pink on her lips.

The outing comes less than 24 hours after Lively took to Instagram to once again show her solidarity with the Time's Up initiative.

'WOMEN AND MEN join us,' she wrote in the caption of the Time's Up image.

Stepping out in style: The star also rocked a chunky pair of glossy black boots as she carried a small bottle of water

She also re-posted a photo posted by The Handmaid's Tale star Reed Morano, in which she declared, 'We will ALL be treated WITH THE RESPECT WE HAVE EARNED.'

Lively showed her support for the Time's Up movement days earlier on Twitter, though was called out by Dylan Farrow.

Farrow called out both Blake and Cate Blanchett for their decision to work with film director Woody Allen, the adoptive father she claims sexually abused her as a child.

After Lively shared an image stating the aims of Times Up, Farrow responded to the tweet with the words: 'You worked with my abuser, Blake Lively. Am I a woman who matters too?'

Showing her support: The outing comes less than 24 hours after Blake took to Instagram to once again show her solidarity with the Time's Up initiative

Lively, who said she was 'proud' to back the new Times Up campaign, worked with Allen on 2016's Cafe Society.

As for Blanchett, who won an Oscar for her role on Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2014, Farrow queried a description of the Australian actress, 48, as a 'vocal campaigner against sexual harassment'.

Asked Farrow: 'Can one be a "vocal campaigner against sexual harassment" and a vocal supporter of Woody Allen? Seems a tad oxymoronic.'

Hitting back: After Lively shared an image stating the aims of Times Up, Farrow responded to the tweet with the words: 'You worked with my abuser, Blake Lively. Am I a woman who matters too?'

Calling it out: As for Blanchett, who won an Oscar for her role on Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2014, Farrow queried a description of the Australian actress, 48, as a 'vocal campaigner against sexual harassment'

Farrow, now 32, has repeatedly claimed that Allen abused her when she was seven years old.

In an op-ed published last month, Farrow wrote: 'I have long maintained that when I was 7 years old, Woody Allen... sexually assaulted me. I told the truth to the authorities then, and I have been telling it, unaltered, for more than 20 years.'

For his part Allen, now 82, has denied the claims.
The line-up of American spin off series The Bachelor Winter Games was announced this week - and the cast includes several familiar international stars.

The Bachelor Australia 2016's Tiffany Scanlon will be taking part alongside Courtney Dober, who placed fourth in Georgia Love's season of The Bachelorette.

Two former contestants from The Bachelor New Zealand, Lily McManus and Ally Thompson, are also signed up - as well as season two leading man Jordan Mauger.

New role: The line-up of American spin off series The Bachelor Winter Games was announced this week - including familiar international stars. Pictured: Tiffany Scanlon and Courtney Dober

The Bachelor Winter Games, which premieres on ABC in the US on February 13, sees American and international Bachelor stars compete in 'winter-themed challenges'.

And, like other shows in the global Bachelor franchise, producers will be hoping the genetically-blessed contestants find love on the slopes.

A second chance at love? Australian Bachelor fans will remember Courtney Dober (pictured) as the likable, albeit rather indecisive, aspiring TV presenter from The Bachelorette season two

Claim to fame: Tiffany's stint on The Bachelor 2016 was forgettable, but she later made global headlines for her relationship with co-star Megan Marx (left), which fizzled out in a few months

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Tiffany and Courtney for further comment.

Australian Bachelor fans will remember Courtney Dober as the likable, albeit rather indecisive, aspiring TV presenter from The Bachelorette season two.

Georgia Love was clearly attracted to Courtney, but he wasn't able to fully commit and she grew tired of his 'ambiguity'. He was sent packing late in the series.

Making a comeback: Three former stars from The Bachelor New Zealand are also representing their country in the Winter Games. Pictured: Lily McManus (right) and Ally Thompson (left)

Meanwhile, Tiffany Scanlon had a blink-and-you'll-miss it role in The Bachelor 2016, after being dumped relatively early in the competition by Richie Strahan.

But she later made global headlines after beginning a same-sex relationship with her female co-star, Megan Marx, which fizzled out after a few months.

Three former stars from The Bachelor New Zealand are also representing their country in the 'International' category in Winter Games.

Last year's Bachelor runner-up Lily McManus is confirmed, as well as English-born yoga instructor Ally Thompson from the same season.

Will he flip a coin again? But it's the inclusion of Jordan Mauger (pictured) - New Zealand's controversial Bachelor from 2016 - that will almost certainly raise eyebrows

But it's the inclusion of Jordan Mauger - New Zealand's controversial Bachelor from 2016 - that will almost certainly raise eyebrows.

Jordan infamously revealed he couldn't decide between his final two women - Fleur Verhoeven and Nazanin 'Naz' Khanjani - so literally 'flipped a coin'.

Unsurprisingly, his relationship with the 'lucky' winner, Ms Verhoeven, didn't last.
She previously appeared on the French fashion bible alongside her supermodel mum Cindy Crawford in 2016.

And now Kaia Gerber has truly broken out of her mother's fashion shadow once and for all as she announced on social media that she has landed her first solo cover for Vogue Paris' February issue at the tender age of 16.

The American catwalk star - who made her Paris Fashion Week runway debut in September - has managed to trump her mother agewise to landing her first Vogue cover - Cindy appeared on the front of American Vogue in 1986 then aged 20.

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Fashion feat! Kaia Gerber has truly broken out of her mother's fashion shadow once and for all as she announced on social media that she has landed her first solo cover for Vogue Paris' February issue at the tender age of 16

Owning her solo cover moment, Kaia - who has previously had the cover of sister publication Teen Vogue - donned billowing hot pink Saint Laurent mini dress complemented with a pair of velvet high-waisted shorts.

The high-fashion look oozes eighties vibes as she finishes the ensemble with a pair of fringe thigh-high black boots while her brunette tresses was coiffed over to one side to showcase her statement triangle earrings.

Unable to contain her excitement over her career milestone, she shared the cover alongside a heartfelt caption: 'I MUST BE DREAMING. to @vogueparis and everyone who made this cover possible...

'THANK YOU! and to @emmanuellealt, you made me the happiest girl in the world. SO MUCH LOVE'.

Like mother, like daughter: The incredible fashion feat comes after the daughter of Casamigos Tequila founder Rande Gerber landed major campaigns with Omega and Marc Jacobs beauty last year (Pictured with mother Cindy in 2016)

Kaia's announcement came as Vogue Paris shared the cover on their official page, explaining their excitement for her to be their covergirl.

'Introducing our Feburary cover star Kaia Gerber! (Someone who hardly needs introduction having brought the house down last Fashion Week.),' they wrote.

'Posing for her first solo cover, shot by @DavidSimsOfficial and styled by @EmmanuelleAlt in @YSL by @AnthonyVaccarello, the daughter of supermodel @CindyCrawford shows shes well on her way to fashion stardom. G

Adding: 'Let your copy on January 26. the outlet with with her cover reveal on Twitter'.

Fashion's first family: Kaia has taken the catwalk by storm alongside her model brother Presley, 18, and their runway star parents Rande and Cindy (Pictured together in 2016)

The incredible fashion feat comes after the daughter of Casamigos Tequila founder Rande Gerber landed major campaigns with Omega and Marc Jacobs beauty last year.

Kaia also made her catwalk debut in September 2017 walking in the most sought after shows including Versace, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Isabel Marant, following in the model footsteps of her mother.

There's no denying it can be tough for the offsprings of famous parents to break out of their mother and father's shadow, it appears Kaia doesn't have to be worried after she was named the next big thing in fashion.

Speaking about the teenager, Vanity Fair editor George Wayne told The New York Times: 'Without question, Kaia Gerber. She is exquisite. I saw that full page Omega ad she just did, the campaign for a new watch.

Walk this way: Kaia walked for Yves Saint Laurent (L) during Paris Fashion Week and for Marc Jacob in NYFW in 2017

Sibling chic! Kaia and Presley Gerber appear together in a new Calvin Klein campaign

'She is stunning. She is like her mother, Cindy Crawford, plus more. She is the future. No question.'

Most recently Kaia landed another big modelling contract, starring in Calvin Klein's new Spring 2018 campaign with her big brother, 18-year-old Presley Gerber.

The famous offspring both posed for solo shots for the designer, as well as a loving brother-sister snap.

Photographed by Willy Vanderperre, the ads are part of #MyCalvins ads, which are titled 'Our Youth'.
The snow is still thick on the ground in Yonkers, New York.

But Julia Roberts seemed to be coping with the sub-freezing temperature of just 30F when she was spotted out filming a scene for the drama Ben Is Back on Monday after the holiday break.

The 50-year-old actress was dressed in a green parka coat trimmed with faux fur around the hood, a purple turtleneck sweater, jeans and brown leather boots as she walked along the icy sidewalk.

Wrapping up warm: Julia Roberts donned a parka trimmed with faux fur around the hood, a purple turtleneck sweater and jeans as she filmed Ben Is Back in Yonkers, New York on Monday

She pulled a knitted grey hat over her dark red tresses as she smiled at co-star Lucas Hedges, carrying a tan leather Madewell handbag over one arm.

The 21-year-old was also warmly dressed in a teal hoodie that he wore under a black and grey zip-up jacket, well-worn baggy jeans and Timberland-style boots.

The couple were no doubt relieved when filming moved to an indoor shopping mall in nearby White Plains where Julia brought two smoothies to a table where an older man was already eating.

Lucas plays Ben Burns, the beloved son of Julia's Holly Burns, who returns to his family home on Christmas Eve after a long absence, putting everyone in danger.

Mother and son: The actress, 50, plays Holly Burns opposite Lucas Hedges as Ben Burns, her beloved son who returns to his family home on a snowy Christmas Eve after a long absence

Layering up: The 21-year-old was also warmly dressed in a teal hoodie that he wore under a black and grey zip-up fleece jacket, well-worn baggy jeans and Timberland-style boots

The film is written and directed by Peter Hedges, who is Lucas' real father.

Julia is normally based in Los Angeles where she lives with her cinematographer husband Daniel Moder, 48, and their children, twins Hazel and Phinnaeus, 12, and 10-year-old Henry.

The pair first met when she was making The Mexican in 2000, in which she starred opposite Brad Pitt and Danny was the cinematographer.

Making his point: Lucas, who is the son of the movie's director-writer Peter Hedges, touched Julia's arm as he talked to her

He's a trouper: Lucas smiled despite the sub-zero temperature as he pushed his hands deep into his pockets

After dating for two years, they wed in July 2002 on her 50-acre ranch in Taos, New Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Oscar winner is also in pre-production on TV series Homecoming, a psychological thriller about employees at a secret government agency who are eager to re-enter civilian life.

Amazon gave the project a two-season order during the summer.

That's better: The couple were no doubt relieved when filming moved to an indoor shopping mall in nearby White Plains

Surprising choice: Julia, in character as Holly, brought two smoothies rather than hot drinks to a table as filming continued
A Gold Coast woman is mourning the loss of her beloved Chihuahua after it died in a David and Goliath battle with a brown snake.

Evangeline Lim, 54, believes 10-year-old Cooper was trying to save her when he took on the highly venomous snake just as she was about to step outside to hang out her washing last week.

"The snake was upside down and Cooper was on top of it and wrestling," the Hope Island woman told the Gold Coast Bulletin.

"He was obviously saving me from the snake."

Ms Lim and her partner managed to rescue Cooper, by putting a pot plant on top of the snake but the tiny pooch had been bitten, and died within about 10 minutes.

Ms Lim says locals need to be aware that deadly snakes may be lurking in their backyards, while security officers at their Riverleigh Drive gated estate have reported spotting snakes every day.
The National Party is set to pocket more than $150,000 in taxpayer money from the electoral commission following the by-election in the NSW seat of New England.

The High Court ousted Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce from parliament because of his New Zealand citizenship and a snap poll was called for December 2.

In order to qualify for election funding, candidates must obtain at least four per cent of formal first preference votes.

Mr Joyce secured more than 60 per cent of the vote to reclaim his seat.

Other political parties and independent candidates running for the seat were paid out a combined total of $52,451.
Taking a giant leap off the side of a cliff into a rock pool below was exhilarating - and a great way to kick off my time in North Africa.

Before I arrived in Morocco, my mind linked it to images of the desert. And that's exactly what you'll find. But a little bit of exploration, and a 45-minute drive, took me and my comrades well away from the dry terrain and into a paradise oasis of blue pools and waterfalls.

Paradise Valley is a hidden gem, outside the village of Tamaraght, where the desert road climbs, dips and bends into a valley of palm trees, rock pools and crystal clear water.

A bit of hard work is involved to reap the benefits of the valley. But even with a solid, 30-minute hike in the sweltering Moroccan summer heat, there are plenty of rock pools along the way to cool the sun's bite.

The trek is well worth it. We finally came across larger and deeper rock pools, and threw ourselves off heights of five, eight and 12 metres into clear waters below. If leaping from cliffs into narrow rock pools isn't your thing, don't worry - you can loll on a rock before slipping gently into the water.

Hours were spent lounging in the cool water, watching fish swim by and trying to wrap my head around where I actually was in the world.

It's not only the scenery that stole my attention. Each day in Morocco I noticed the local's relaxed attitude, something I was eager to adopt. A country with Islam as their main religion comes today with many opinionated thoughts and assumptions. My advice: put those aside and keep an open mind. As I explored this culture a little deeper, I discovered a kind, happy and relaxed place. Morocco quickly became one of my favourite places.

There seem to be less worries in Morocco than in our westernised society. They seem to have more time for life's simple joys. They seem to care less about having the latest gadgets and the biggest house.

Our driver to Paradise Valley stopped to pick up a man hitch-hiking on the side of the road. Why wouldn't we help an elderly man get from point A to B? But in the western world we would be hesitant to help.

The kindness here felt so refreshing and I encountered it throughout my journey. I found myself to be the happiest I had ever been, in a country completely foreign, surrounded by desert on one side and ocean on the other.

We survived for a few weeks on little money, enjoying the local crepes and vegetable tagines. As for possessions, all I really needed was a surfboard. I spent my days surfing, reading, doing yoga, walking through town, learning about the culture and exploring - which included driving dune buggies into the mountains. I wore the same clothes nearly every day.

My advice for travellers to Morocco is to stay away from the tourist traps and get out of the cities. I spent just one day in Marrakech, because I wanted to slow down, not feel rushed and try new things.

Coming back to a westernised society was a shock. Everything was available at our fingertips; malls were crawling with hungry shoppers. They say culture shock bites when you return home. I found this to be true.

When life gets overwhelming, I often think about my time in Morocco, where I saw how experiences mean more than possessions. When I've saved some more cash, I won't be hitting the mall. I'll return to Morocco, with my surfboard and the clothes on my back.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: Agadir and Marrakech are both six-hour flights from London, which is accessible from Australia via numerous airlines including Qantas, Emirates and Singapore Airlines. Or you can take a flight to Marrakech and Agadir from most European cities, usually with a quick stopover.

STAYING THERE: The Lunar Surf House is hostel-style accommodation with the option of shared or private rooms. The hosts, a Moroccan and Australian couple, provide a Moroccan style breakfast (free) each morning, and dinner (5 euros; $A7.50) each night. The surf house is located in Tamraght, a short taxi ride from the larger city of Agadir, or a four-hour bus ride from Marrakech. Visit www.thelunarsurfhouse.com/

PLAYING THERE: Tours to Paradise Valley can be taken with a guide from Lunar Surf House in Tamraght if you are staying there. The tour is a full day (30 euros; $A45)). Sahara desert excursions are also available through the Surf House.

If you have a short stay in Marrakech you can take a day trip with a local guide to the Atlas Mountains through Atlas and Sahara Tours. Different packages are available depending on what you would like to see and do. Visit atlasandsaharatours.com/

The writer travelled at her own expense.
More than 169,000 South Australian households will this week receive instructions on how to slash their electricity bills by 18 per cent.

South Australian Council of Social Service (SACOSS) chief executive officer Ross Womersley says the state government's Concessions Energy Discount Offer will help address cost of living pressures for low-income earners.

"At the lowest end, you might expect savings in the region of $100 a year. At the upper end, the government has calculated that savings are probably closer to $531," Mr Womersley said on Monday.
An emotional Nicole Kidman has used her Golden Globe acceptance speech to honour her mother for the work she did in Australia as an advocate for women.

Kidman won the Golden Globe on Sunday for her performance as an abused wife in the TV mini-series Big Little Lies.

The significance of Kidman's win was magnified at the Globes which became a platform for the Time's Up movement supporting all women and men silenced by abuse, harassment and discrimination in Hollywood and other industries.

Kidman and the industry's other elite actors at the Beverly Hilton wore black gowns and suits for the landmark moment in response to numerous scandals involving some of Hollywood's most powerful men.

"My mum was an advocate for the women's movement when I was growing up and because of her I'm standing here," Kidman told the A-List crowd.

"My achievements are her achievements and Antonio Kidman, my sister, and I say thank you Janelle Kidman for what you fought for so hard.

"This character that I play represents something that is the centre of our conversation right now - abuse.

"I do believe, and hope, we can elicit change through the stories we tell and the way we tell them.

"Let's keep the conversation alive.

A teary Kidman ended her speech with words for husband, Keith Urban.

"When my cheek is against yours everything else melts away and that is love," she said.

"I love you so much."
There are thousands of incredible images that come to mind when asked about my trip to Borneo. Turtles hatching and fluttering off to freedom on Libaran Island, orangutans swinging from branch to branch across Sepilok's jungle, the piercing yellow eyes of a baby crocodile glaring above the surface of the Sabah's longest river.

But no matter how hard I try to think about the incredible animals witnessed in Malaysian Borneo's wild, there are certain images that almost taint the entire experience.

After four or so hours on a bumpy ride to Tambatuon Village, we jump out and stretch our legs. Pangaloi, or "uncle", who owns the local homestay where we are due to unpack for the night, greets us and shortly after gives us a tour of the village he calls home. He is proud of his town and highly respected by the local Dusun people.

The path is freshly painted with tyre marks from those who drive from the village to Kota Kinabalu for work, food supplies and school. The road outlines a neighbourhood of brightly painted wooden homes and bamboo huts surrounded by rice paddies organised in perfect lines, and bordered by the jungle and the river.

Along the walk, uncle points out the different plants and seeds the local people use for food, including salad leaves, jungle ferns, wild ginger and cocoa. As he touches the different plants and ferns, the rainforest speaks back to us as if inviting us to join in on its chaos. I bump a mimosa pudica, a "shy lady", and watch as its leaves fold inward and droop. It re-opens 15 minutes later, but by this stage we have well moved on.

The river at the base of Mount Kinabalu doesn't wait for us either. It rushes past using the momentum of the soaring mountain above it. Giggles float in the air from a group of children and are only silenced by a large splash as they jump off a tall, wide rock into the gushing river. One, two, three of them run tirelessly in circles. Giggle. Jump. Splash. Giggle. Jump. Splash. Giggle. Jump. Splash. The joy is mesmerising and has me falling well behind the rest of the group who have already turned a corner down the path. I crave the water as the humidity drips off my skin.

I've lost those ahead but it gives me time to take in my surroundings a bit better. Local stray cats and dogs look thinner than the usual pets around my neighbourhood in Sydney. The cats are easily frightened and the dogs fidget and drag their bottoms along the ground. Worms? It must be. It makes me feel uncomfortable but it's not an image I haven't seen before.

I turn the last corner and re-connect with the group. Uncle is pointing to a vegetable he says we will use to make our dinner later tonight. On the final stretch something catches my eye and raises the hair on my arms despite the overwhelming heat.

A macaque monkey is jailed in a small bird cage. Its face is lowered as if embarrassed and its body is limp. A few steps away another macaque monkey is strangled by a metal chain leash locked around its neck. The animal paces back and forth. It's agitated and as we move forward it pounces at us only to be immediately snapped back by the chain.

The images are unforgettable - and not in a good way.

Owning a monkey as a pet is about status in Borneo, Roxy our G Adventures guides says. While the government is cracking down on locals capturing monkeys to domesticate them, the illegal action is still prominent in some regional villages.

It is no use talking to the apparent "owners", Roxy tells us. In a bid to comfort, she suggests we write to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) who carry out work in the nearby regions in a bid to educate local villagers.

We do. But despite the good intention one can't help but to think - have our concerns fallen on deaf ears?

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: Singapore Airlines and AirAsia both fly to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, Borneo. AirAsia flies with one stopover at Kuala Lumpur. G Adventures will organise an eight-day adventure for you starting from $1499. The trip includes time spent in Turtle Island National Park, Sepilok's orangutan rehabilitation centre, Kota Belud, morning and evening river safaris in Kinabatangan and much more. Visit: www.gadventures.com.au/trips/borneo-east-sabah-adventure/AAES/?ref=list-10741

STAYING THERE: Tambatuon Village Homestead is located on the foothills of Mount Kinabalu and by the Kedamaian River. The accommodation is made up of dorm-like rooms and a common area, kitchen and bathroom. The local Dunsun tribe, the biggest ethnic group in Sabah, will cook you food sourced from the nearby paddy fields and jungle. Visit: https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g1720863-d7127822-Reviews-Tambatuon_Homestead-Kota_Belud_Kota_Belud_District_Sabah.html

PLAYING THERE: The homestay runs day-time walks around the village and through the nearby jungle before an early evening cooking class with "uncle" and other locals. Guests are encouraged to go for a dip in the lake that streams down from the top of Mount Kinabalu.

the writer travelled as a guest of G Adventures and Sabah Tourism.
The foreign affairs department spent close to $100,000 of taxpayers' money on an Australian tour for European journalists which included business class flights.

Documents obtained by AAP under freedom of information, show six journalists and a think tank researcher were flown business class from Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Sweden, at a cost of close to $54,000 in March last year.

The remaining money was spent on hotel accommodation at the Stamford Plaza in Melbourne, Pullman hotel in Sydney, domestic flights in Australia, bus hire and travel allowances covering food costs.

The Office of the Information Commissioner ordered the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to release the documents after a seven-month wait.

The focus of the program was multiculturalism in Australia.

The journalists had briefings with the immigration department about Australia's asylum seeker boat crackdown Operation Sovereign Borders. They also met officials from the social services and foreign affairs.

The group spoke with the Australian Human Rights Commission, Refugee Council of Australia, Network Ten The Project host Waleed Aly, Deng Adut a former South Sudanese child soldier turned lawyer and Australia's 2017 Eurovision entrant, indigenous artist Isaiah Firebrace.

There was also a visit to Wollongong to learn about its history of resettling refugees.

The department says international media visits aim to generate "informed foreign media reporting that contributes to a balanced and positive view of Australia".

"Questions about immigration and multiculturalism are currently attracting significant attention internationally," the program document says.

"Australia has a good story to tell and a positive contribution to make to the international discussion."

The visit coincided with some criticism in Europe about the conditions in Australian-run detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea as well as the Mediterranean Sea migrant boat crisis.

At the time of the visit, Australia was campaigning for one of two seats on the United Nations human rights council against Spain and France, which later pulled out of the race.

While it's common for national governments to invite foreign journalists on study tours it is unusual for them to be flown business class.

In 2016, the department was criticised for spending $215,000 flying 23 bureaucrats business class to Paris to discuss ways to save money.
Novak Djokovic has declared himself "ready" ahead of next week's Australian Open as he prepares to return from an elbow injury.

The six-time Australian Open champion touched down in Melbourne over the weekend and immediately hit the practice court at Rod Laver Arena, posting a video on social media.

"Finally back in the land down under," Djokovic posted on Twitter.

"I feel ready! Idemo (let's go)!!"

Djokovic will play two matches at the Kooyong Classic exhibition event as he recovers from the elbow injury that has kept him out of action since July.

He will face Austrian world No.6 Dominic Thiem on Wednesday before taking part in the Tie Break Tens fast-format tournament that evening alongside Rafael Nadal and Stan Wawrinka.

Nadal and Wawrinka are battling to overcome knee injuries ahead of the Australian Open starting next Monday, while Andy Murray and Kei Nishikori have already pulled out of the year's first major.

It is not yet clear who Djokovic will play in his second match at Kooyong, expected to be on Friday.

The former world No.1 and 12-time grand slam champion pulled out of an exhibition event in Abu Dhabi at the end of the year and subsequently withdrew from the Qatar Open.

He will arrive at Melbourne Park as the world No.12, having not played a match since his quarter-final exit at Wimbledon.

But former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash said he expected the Serbian to be in the best shape of the big names under injury clouds.

"There's going to be certain players who are very underdone, and you don't expect them to do particularly well," Cash said on Monday.

"Of all the players that are coming back from surgeries or injuries, you'd think Novak would be the best one because he hasn't actually had surgery, even though there's been a niggling problem with his elbow.

"He's been able to train hard."
The Northern Territory's top cop has condemned violence against frontline police after a man allegedly seriously assaulted an officer.

The 36-year-old man was charged after he allegedly choked, punched and kicked a male officer in Alice Springs at about 11.30am on Saturday.

The man had been allegedly resisting arrest for a separate matter, during which a female officer also sustained minor injuries to her hands.

The offender was eventually arrested with the help of additional cops, while a 62-year-old woman was charged with spitting on an officer in a separate incident.

They are both due to face Alice Springs Local Court on Monday.

"This type of violence and behaviour is unacceptable and should not be inflicted upon anyone in their workplace," Acting Deputy Commissioner Lance Godwin said.

"We condemn any assault happening to our members in the course of their duties to serve and protect the community."
"Concerned" Australian Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt is awaiting with interest how Bernard Tomic shapes up on Tuesday in his opening match of the summer.

Overlooked by Hewitt for an Australian Open wildcard after snubbing last month's wildcard playoff and then withdrawing from the Brisbane International, Tomic will finally surface at the Kooyong Classic exhibition event.

The fallen star will play a best-of-three-sets Fast4 match against Yoshihito Nishioka as a pre-cursor to his appearance on Wednesday in Open qualifying.

Asked if he was pleased Tomic was attempting to qualify, Hewitt didn't appear overly convinced.

"Yeah. See how he goes. I haven't spoken to him. It's going to be interesting if he does play," Hewitt said on Monday.

"I heard that he's playing a match at Kooyong so I guess we'll see where he's at."

Once tight with Tomic, Hewitt remains frustrated that the former Wimbledon quarter-finalist opted to sit out Davis Cup last year during a dismal 2017 in which the world No.17 tumbled to well outside the grand slam cut-off mark.

The Cup captain said despite Tomic trying to qualify for his home slam, he was still worried about the direction in which the 25-year-old's career was heading.

"I'm concerned with where it's going right at the moment anyway," Hewitt said.

"He's 140 in the world and I think everybody knows that he's a lot better player than 140.

"So, at the end of the day, he's just got to commit to the sport and give himself 100 per cent chance every time he goes out to play or on the practice court."

The Open qualifying draw will be conducted on Tuesday, with Tomic needing to win three consecutive best-of-five-set matches to make the main draw at Melbourne Park for the ninth straight year.

He was Australia's last man standing last year, going out in the third round, and has reached the second week of the Open three times - 2012, 2015 and 2016.
Popular four-time champion David Ferrer has harnessed all his experience and guile to weather a storm from much-hyped Chinese young gun Yibing Wu, winning 7-6 (9-7) 6-4 at the Auckland Classic.

Eighteen-year-old Wu had a breakout 2017, claiming top spot in the junior rankings and winning the boys' singles and doubles US Open titles, while also taking out an ATP Challenger Tour event in China.

And on Auckland's centre court on Monday, he showed what all the fuss was about as he consistently troubled seventh seed Ferrer by lashing heavy groundstrokes past the tour veteran.

Despite taking Ferrer to a first-set tiebreaker, the Spanish former world No.3's class could be seen from the outset.

Wu sent down a powerful serve that Ferrer miscued and skied high in the air.

However, the ball landed in the court and Ferrer was then able to scramble and regain the advantage during the rally as he eventually forced his Chinese opponent to hit the ball long.

It's a game style Ferrer is renowned for - consistency and an ability to keep as many balls in play as possible - and it eventually showed against the brilliant Wu.

Despite pushing Ferrer deep into the opening set tiebreaker, losing 7-9, Wu could not match it in consistency as he made too many errors.

Earlier, last year's classic runner-up Joao Sousa survived a first-round scare to knock out American Donald Young 6-7 (8-10) 6-4 6-2.

Although he dominated on serve, Portuguese world No.57 Sousa battled to get past his 61st-ranked opponent as he dropped the first set in a tiebreaker.

However, Sousa refocused in the second set to claim it 6-4 before racing to victory in the third.

Like Sousa, tournament officials will have also breathed a sigh of relief to see the men's tournament get under way under bright skies after last week's women's tournament had almost been washed out by severe rain.

Earlier on Monday, men's eighth seed Andrey Rublev withdrew due to a right arm injury.

He has been replaced by lucky loser, Slovakian Lukas Lacko.
Chris Lynn has been ruled out of the one-day series against England, with scans confirming he will miss up to four weeks of action.

Lynn was injured while fielding for the Brisbane Heat last week in the Big Bash League, with a replacement set to be named for the batsman before Sunday's series opener in Melbourne.

"He reported increasing discomfort over the 24 hours that followed and the Heat's medical staff made the decision to send him for a scan," Australia's physio Alex Kountouris said.
Perth Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi says there will not be an aerial display at this year's Australia Day fireworks show following the death of two people in a plane crash last year.

Experienced pilot Peter Lynch, 52, and his Indonesian partner Endah Cakrawati, 30, died when his Grumman G-73 Mallard flying boat broke up on impact in front of horrified families gathered around the Swan River for the Skyworks last year.

Ms Scaffidi said on Monday that the final report into the incident was still pending but the fireworks would go ahead on January 26.

"The aerial show will not be proceeding, but the Skyworks is so popular and so liked by so many people. I know that people are already counting the days down to it," she told reporters.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is not expected to complete its report into the crash until May.
A woman has been charged with animal cruelty after she allegedly left a puppy in a car during scorching temperatures in Sydney's southwest.

The seven-week-old animal was left unattended in a car parked at a shopping centre in Oran Park about 2.40pm on Saturday, police say.

At the time, the temperature in the area was more than 37C.

The 28-year-old returned to the vehicle over half an hour later and was spoken to by officers, who'd placed the distressed puppy inside an air-conditioned police vehicle and gave it water.

She was issued a court attendance notice on Monday night and is expected to face Picton Local Court on February 27.
Today's Birthday, January 9: Australian cartoonist Bill Leak (1956-2017).

Controversial cartoonist Bill Leak was posthumously inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame nine months after his sudden death from a suspected heart attack in March last year, aged 61.

His death came amid an ongoing parliamentary and public debate about freedom of speech, with one of Leak's most notorious cartoons inciting a racism complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission, which was later dropped.

The cartoon depicted a police officer telling an Aboriginal man clutching a beer to talk to his son about personal responsibility.

The indigenous father is depicted as replying: "Yeah righto. What's his name then?"

Federal coalition politicians used the backlash to argue Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act needed to be changed, but an attempt to reword the legislation was defeated in the Senate just weeks after Leak's death.

Born in Adelaide in 1956, the third of four children to postmaster father Reginald and music teacher Doreen, Desmond Robert "Bill" Leak spent his first six years in Goroke before his family moved to Condobolin in western NSW.

As a kid, Leak learned to draw from a watercolour book by Australian artist Norman Lindsay.

He later honed these skills at Sydney's Beacon Hill and Forest high schools, drawing teachers in compromising positions to ingratiate himself to bullies.

After high school, he trained at Julian Ashton Art School but dropped out before travelling around Australia and Europe.

He met his first wife, German social worker Astrid Wigand, in his travels and they had two sons, Johannes and Jasper.

Leak returned to Australia in 1983 and took his first professional cartoonist role with The Bulletin that year, then crossed to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984.

By the time he'd left for The Daily Telegraph a decade later, the illustrator had already won five Walkleys and that year an Archibald Prize people's choice award for a portrait of Malcolm Turnbull.

Many of his most inflammatory works came during his years at The Australian.

In 2015, IS fighters issued a fatwa against him - forcing him to move house - after he drew a cartoon in response to France's Charlie Hebdo massacre depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

He is survived by second wife Goong, stepdaughter Tasha and his two sons.
Same-sex couples are tying the knot across Australia on the first official day of marriage equality, once again celebrating the result of a hard-fought campaign.

One of the first ceremonies took place overnight near Tweed Heads, where athletes Craig Burns and Luke Sullivan timed their proceedings so the marriage would become official minutes after midnight.

"It's a very surreal feeling," Craig told AAP in the lead-up to the event.

The pair first met three years ago and said they fell in love "straight away" before Craig popped the question at Byron Bay in March.

Same-sex marriage legislation cleared parliament on December 7, nearly a month after it was revealed 61.6 per cent of participants in a voluntary postal survey backed the change.

Amid scenes of jubilation same-sex couples were quick to lodge formal intentions to wed and while some were granted exemptions to the four-week waiting period, Tuesday is the first official day ceremonies can take place.

In Newcastle, 32-year-old Rebecca Hickson will marry her partner of nine years Sarah Turnbull, 34.

The pair said they wanted to be part of history and planned to also be one of the first couples to tie the knot in a ceremony from 8am.

"We've already had our big hoo-ha ceremony three years ago but now we get to declare our love for each other again and have it recognised as a real union," Rebecca told AAP.

She described the build-up to the postal vote deadline as "a horrible time" but said the two are now excited to move beyond it.

Melbourne couple Ron Van Houwelingen, 50, and Antony McManus, 53, echoed Ms Hickson's feelings about the postal vote and said no country should have to endure the same "horrendous" process to legalise gay marriage.

On Tuesday, the long-time activists will also look forward and tie the knot where they first met as performing arts students three decades ago - at the former Prahran College of TAFE's David Williamson Theatre.

"I'm looking really forward to celebrating the victory," Ron told AAP.

The two have already held more than a dozen commitment ceremonies, including in 1993 on their sixth anniversary when gay marriage "wasn't on the radar".

"I suppose it's been a wedding planned for 30 years but we've had really a month to get things together," Ron said.

"It's been quite hectic trying to organise that in such a short amount of time."
Federal Labor has branded as "luxury excess" a foreign affairs department decision to fly European journalists business class to Australia as part of a $100,000 tour.

Documents obtained by AAP under freedom of information reveal six journalists and a think tank researcher were flown business class from Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Sweden, at a cost of close to $54,000 in March last year.

The remaining money was spent on four-star hotel accommodation in Sydney and Melbourne, domestic flights in Australia, bus hire and travel allowances covering food costs.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner ordered the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to release the documents after a seven-month wait.

The focus of the program was multiculturalism in Australia.

While it's common for national governments to invite foreign journalists on study tours it is unusual for them to be flown business class.

Labor's Waste Watch spokesperson Matt Keogh said the program had some merit but could have been run more efficiently.

"How on earth do you justify having business flights to bring these people out for a sales pitch on Australia?" he told AAP.

Mr Keogh doubted the journalists involved had demanded business class flights.

"This is luxury excess in the portfolio from a minister (Julie Bishop) who likes spending her time doing fancy things," he said.

At the time of the visit, Australia was campaigning for one of two seats on the United Nations' human rights council against Spain and France, which both later pulled out of the race.

Mr Keogh questioned whether the department had tried to curry favour with certain nations to support Australia's bid for a seat on the council.

The journalists had briefings with the immigration department about Australia's asylum seeker boat crackdown, Operation Sovereign Borders. They also met officials from social services and foreign affairs.

The department says international media visits aim to generate "informed foreign media reporting that contributes to a balanced and positive view of Australia".

In 2016, the department was criticised for spending $215,000 flying 23 bureaucrats business class to Paris, to discuss ways to save money.
Like an AFL player recovering from a gruelling match, I traipse into the icy Tasmanian surf.

I'm usually a big sook when it comes to swimming, sans wetsuit, in chilly water.

But not today.

After a delightful afternoon trekking along the far northeastern coast of Tasmania in the Mount William National Park, I've jumped on the cold water therapy bandwagon. It's invigorating on weary muscles and after the initial temperature shock, a glorious numbness sets in and I feel very alive.

Science says a cold water dip is good for the immune system. It's also great for the soul.

Before too long, it's time to dry off and put the hiking boots back on as we finish the last leg of our nine kilometres for the day.

Our Tasmanian Walking Company guides lead us to our glamour-camping headquarters for the evening.

Tasmanian Holm Oak pinot gris and a cheese platter hit the spot on arrival.

As well as being knowledgeable about the ecology of coastal wattle, local history and identifying Tassie devil poop, our guides are whizzes in the kitchen. They whip up a feast of Thai noodle salad and barbecued salmon made with fresh local produce.

The next day, we set off on the final 14-kilometre leg.

Along the way we see Tasmanian pademelon and Bennetts wallabies munching on grass. The pink granite Eddystone Point Lighthouse marks the halfway point and our lunchtime swim spot as well as the start of the Bay of Fires.

Orange lichen makes the rocks and boulders look like they've had the Jackson Pollock splatter paint treatment.

The Bay of Fires four-day lodge walk is a perfect family holiday for baby boomer parents and their adult children.

On my tour the McCarthys from Brisbane are using the trek to celebrate their folks' 60th birthdays and enjoy some family bonding.

The bay's name refers to Aboriginal fires English explorer Captain Tobias Furneaux saw as he sailed past in 1773. Today, we enjoy walking barefoot along a white sandy beach and a few final rocky hills, before closing in on the architecturally designed, wooden Bay of Fires Lodge.

It's a steep climb to get there. But it's worth it - our lodge host greets us with Epsom salt foot spas, James Boag beers and canapes before a dinner of gourmet laksa deliciousness and an elaborate pana cotta dessert.

On day three, after a hot cooked breakfast of char-grilled mushrooms and scrambled eggs, we set out on a short forest walk.

Banksia trees shaped like candelabras dot along the track as we head to Ansons River for a spot of leisurely kayaking.

My boat buddy and I lag behind the others because we keep getting distracted admiring pelicans.

And just when we thought marshmallow toasting on the fireplace would cap off the evening - an epic lightning storm brews and puts in New Year's Eve fireworks to shame.

IF YOU GO:

GETTING THERE: The Bay of Fires is located on the northeast coast of Tasmania, north of St Helens. The Mount William National Park is a 2.5 hour drive and the Bay of Fires is a three-hour drive from Launceston. Qantas, Virgin and Jetstar have multiple flights daily out of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to Launceston.

STAYING THERE: Tasmanian Walking Company's four-day Bay of Fires Lodge Walk is $2560 per person between January 2018 - March 31 and $2,380 per person between April 1 and May 1. Trips depart daily. A moderate level of fitness is required, but if you regularly exercise and are capable of walking between nine and 14 kilometres for the first two days you'll be fine. Visit: taswalkingco.com.au

PLAYING THERE: After all that walking, soothe your aches with a Kodo massage inspired by traditional Aboriginal techniques, complete with an indigenous smoking ceremony or a Tasmanian peat mud bath at the Bay of Fires Lodge spa.

The writer travelled as a guest of Qantas, Tasmanian Walking Company and Tourism Tasmania.
A 40-year-old woman has been charged with the murder of a toddler she was caring for nearly three years ago in the state's central west.

The carer was arrested on Monday afternoon in Geurie, near Dubbo, following an investigation into the 20-month-old boy's suspicious death on March 23, 2015.

Emergency services were called to a home in Neilrex, south of Coonabarabran, following reports the boy was coughing and not breathing at 5.15am on the day he died.

He was taken to Coolah hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The woman was refused bail and is due to appear in Dubbo Local Court on Tuesday.
A police hunt is on for three men and a woman after a man was shot at a Gold Coast home.

Police say the group went to a Carrara home about 4pm on Monday, armed with a gun and a metal pole, and shot the man, leaving him with injuries to his arm and chest.

The 44-year-old victim remains in hospital as police continue to hunt for his attackers, who fled the scene in a car.

A woman and a child who were also at the Carrara home when the shooting occurred weren't hurt.

A large contingent of police spent the night searching for the attackers, but no arrests had been made by early Tuesday morning.
Lightning shows are set to continue across skies over NSW as an active system takes centre stage, causing damage in parts of Sydney, according to the weather bureau.

Weatherzone has reported 4649 lightning strikes between 3am and 6am over Sydney on Tuesday.

The city's west and northwest were most affected by storm activity overnight, with the SES receiving 150 requests for help.

Strong winds caused roofs to come off and trees to fall, particularly in Blacktown, SES spokeswoman Sharon Fox said.

The weather bureau says lightning strikes will continue over the Sydney region and most parts of NSW on Tuesday.

Passengers can expect slight delays on domestic flights out of Sydney Airport, but international and domestic arrivals are on time, an airport spokesman said.

"It's quite an active lightning system over Sydney," BOM forecaster Jordan Notara told AAP.

He said the lightning will die down in the next couple of hours and build up again on Tuesday afternoon.

"It's a typical summer scenario," he said.

The SES has warned NSW residents to take precautions as the storm activity sticks around.

Residents are warned to secure outdoor furniture, tie down trampolines and stay inside and keep away from windows.
The construction union has criticised the South Australian government for allowing work to continue on Adelaide's tram extension, despite the state sweltering through extreme heat.

Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union SA secretary Aaron Cartledge says work on the $80 million tram extension in Adelaide's CBD, should have been suspended as the city reached a temperature of 42C last Saturday.

"Once the temperature reaches 37C and beyond, workers should not be out there working on roads or on building sites," Mr Cartledge told ABC radio on Tuesday.
China appears unimpressed that Australia and Japan are set to sign a defence pact for military visits.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is expected to travel to Japan this month to sign a visiting forces agreement with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The agreement will make it easier for Australia, Japan and the US to conduct military exercises together on Japanese soil.

The agreement sets out the legal status for military personnel visits.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Canberra said China was aware of the reports about the agreement being signed.

"This is a bilateral issue between Japan and Australia," she said.

"At the same time, China believes that the military cooperation among the countries concerned should not undermine the security interests of other countries or affect the regional peace and stability."

Japan and Australia have been negotiating an agreement since 2014.
Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock will begin assessing whether there is adequate legal protection for religious freedom in Australia.

Mr Ruddock and a panel which includes Australian Human Rights Commission president Rosalind Croucher have been tasked with reviewing the issue following the passage of same-sex marriage laws last year.

The panel will meet in Sydney on Wednesday.

Conservative Liberal senator Eric Abetz said during the campaign for same sex marriage, guarantees for religious freedoms were made.

"It is now clear we need to ensure those promises are actually kept," he told ABC Radio on Tuesday.

Some MPs are keen to ensure parental rights are protected for the teaching of children in schools, and no organisation or individuals who support traditional marriage are penalised for their views.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wants the panel's findings by the end of March.
Communities along the mighty Mekong blame China for their shrinking catches

Cambodian fisherman Sles Hiet lives at the mercy of the Mekong: a massive river that feeds tens of millions but is under threat from the Chinese dams cementing Beijing's physical -- and diplomatic -- control over its Southeast Asian neighbours.

The 32-year-old, whose ethnic Cham Muslim community live on rickety house boats that bob along a river bend in Kandal province, says the size of his daily catch has been shrinking by the year.

"We don't know why there are less fish now," he told AFP of a mystery that has mired many deeper into poverty.

It is a lament heard from villages along a river that snakes from the Tibetan plateau through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea.

Nearly 4,800 km (2,982 miles) long, the Mekong is the world's largest inland fishery and second only to the Amazon for its bio-diversity.

It helps feed around 60 million people across its river basin.

Yet control over its taps rests to the north with China, whose premier Li Keqiang will land in Phnom Penh on Wednesday to lead a new regional summit that could shape the river's future.

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Beijing has already studded the Mekong's upper reaches with six dams and is investing in more than half of the 11 dams planned further south, according to International Rivers.

Environmental groups warn the blockages pose a grave threat to fish habitats by disrupting migrations and the flow of key nutrients and sediment -- not to mention displacing tens of thousands of people with flooding.

Communities in the lower Mekong countries have reported depleted fish stocks in recent years and are blaming the dams.

Experts say it is too early to draw full conclusions given a lack of baseline data and the complex nature of the river's ecosystem.

But what they do agree on is that China has the upper hand over a resource that serves as the economic lifeblood of its poor southern backyard.

The lower Mekong countries are "not able to stand up to China geo-politically," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a foreign policy expert at Bangkok's Chulalongkron University.

That allows Beijing to keep "undermining habitats and millions of livelihoods downstream."

- China rewrites the rules -

With control over the headwaters of the river -- known there as the Lancang -- Beijing can dam its section of the river while the impacts are felt downstream.

It can also modulate water levels, a powerful bargaining chip displayed in 2016 when China opened dam gates on its soil to help Vietnam mitigate a severe drought.

The regional superpower is now asserting its authority through the nascent Lancang-Mekong Cooperation forum, while appeasing its Southeast Asian neighbours with investment and soft loans.

Leaders from all six Mekong countries will attend the LMC this week in Cambodia.

Cambodian Muslim men have an haircut on their boat in the Mekong river in Phnom Penh

China's foreign ministry bills the forum, which also covers security and trade issues, as a way to foster "economic prosperity, social progress and a beautiful environment".

But environmentalists say the LMC aims to replace the long-standing Mekong River Commission -- a regional body that has tried to manage development along the river -- albeit without China.

"There is major concern that China's leading role and relative influence will see it prioritising its own interests over meaningful co-operation," warned Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia programme director at International Rivers.

Chinese companies are investing billions of dollars in many of the dams but have so far failed to carry out full environmental and social impact assessments.

Firms and state agencies from Thailand, Vietnam and Laos also stand to gain from their investments in the hydropower projects.

Environmental groups warn the dams pose a grave threat to fish habitats

"Much of the benefit will be reaped by the financial and business interests involved, with impacts to hit hardest local communities along the river," Harris said.

Calls to protect the river have largely gone unheeded in Southeast Asia, where governments are eager to meet energy needs and unwilling to stand up to China or resist its cash.

That makes the Mekong's dependents, such as fisherman Sles Hiet, an afterthought.

"We depend on the Mekong river," he said.

"Even though there are less fish we are still trying because we don't have any other jobs and we have no land to farm."
According to the UN and Pakistani authorities, between 30 and 40 percent of diseases and deaths nationwide are linked to poor water quality

Barely 15 days old, Kinza whimpers at an Islamabad hospital where she is suffering from diarrhoea and a blood infection, a tiny victim among thousands afflicted by Pakistan's severely polluted and decreasing water supplies.

Cloaked in a colourful blanket, Kinza moves in slow motion, like a small doll. Her mother, Sartaj, does not understand how her daughter became so ill.

"Each time I give her the bottle, I boil the water," she tells AFP.

But Sartaj and her family drink daily from a stream in their Islamabad neighbourhood -- one of several waterways running through the capital that are choked with filth. Boiling the water can only do so much.

They are not alone. More than two-thirds of households drink bacterially contaminated water and, every year, 53,000 Pakistani children die of diarrhoea after drinking it, says UNICEF.

Cases of typhoid, cholera, dysentery and hepatitis are rampant. According to the UN and Pakistani authorities, between 30 and 40 percent of diseases and deaths nationwide are linked to poor water quality.

And it is costing the developing country billions. In 2012 the World Bank, which has warned that "substantial investments are needed to improve sanitation", estimated that water pollution costs Pakistan $5.7 billion, or nearly four percent of GDP.

"Water is the number one problem for the country," says professor Javed Akram, vice chancellor at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad.

Rawal Lake reservoir serves Islamabad and Rawalpindi but official projections show the country, whose population has increased fivefold since 1960 to some 207 million, will be facing an 'absolute scarcity' of water by 2025

In Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city, the situation is even worse than in Islamabad.

The Ravi River which supplies the city's 11 million or so inhabitants with drinking water also serves as a spillway to hundreds of factories upstream.

River fish are eaten by locals, but "some papers show that in the fishbones, some heavy metal contamination (is) found," says Sohail Ali Naqvi, a project officer with the conservation group WWF.

The Ravi is also used to irrigate neighbouring crops, which are themselves rich in pesticides, warns Lahore environmentalist Ahmad Rafay Alam.

- 'Absolute scarcity' -

The lack of water infrastructure is glaring. In a country where the "environment is not part of the political agenda", there are "nearly no treatment plants", warns Imran Khalid, a researcher at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

More than two-thirds of households drink bacterially contaminated water and, every year, 53,000 Pakistani children die of diarrhoea after drinking it, says UNICEF

"Those who can afford it buy bottles of water, but what about those who cannot?" he says.

In Karachi, a megacity whose population could be as many as 20 million people, mafias fill the vacuum left by the creaking local network, selling the precious water they bring in by tanker trucks at high prices.

In the face of widespread indignation, Sindh along with Punjab province, together home to more than half of the country's population, have already announced measures to improve water quality, though their efficacy is yet to be seen.

But Pakistan's water is not only contaminated -- it is becoming scarce.

Northern Pakistan has Himalayan glaciers and high rainfall but so far much of the focus has been on irrigated areas in the south

Official projections show the country, whose population has increased fivefold since 1960 to some 207 million, will run dry by 2025, when they will be facing an "absolute scarcity" of water with less than 500 cubic metres available per person in Pakistan.

That's just one third the water available in already parched Somalia now, according to the UN.

- 'Lack of education' -

Pakistan, a country of massive Himalayan glaciers, monsoon rains and floods, has just three major water storage basins, compared with more than a thousand in South Africa or Canada, says Bashir Ahmad of the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council.

As such any surplus is quickly lost, said Ahmad, who denounced "a lack of political vision" to counter the nationwide water crisis.

While official statistics show that 90 percent of the country's water is used for agriculture, the massive irrigation network, built decades ago by British colonists, has deteriorated.

Much of its use appears to defy common sense. "We are neglecting the northern areas, where there (is) a lot of rainfall, to focus on irrigated areas like Sindh or Punjab," says Ahmad.

There, in arid areas where temperatures can soar up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), Pakistan grows water-intensive crops such as rice and sugar cane.

"The crisis is looming. In all urban areas, the water table is going down day by day," warns Muhammad Ashraf, chairman of the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources.

Pumps draw deeper and deeper into the water table, where the arsenic content is naturally higher, he warns. An international study in August said some 50 to 60 million Pakistanis are slowly poisoning themselves with arsenic-tainted water.

Yet waste remains the norm. In Islamabad, roads are sprinkled to drive away dust, cars are washed daily, and verdant lawns watered generously.

"We own our houses, but not our streams," Ashraf sighs. "That's why we dump our waste in the rivers."
Actress and TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey delivered a rousing speech as she accepted a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement

Oprah Winfrey on Sunday declared a "new day" for women and girls facing down abusive men as her powerful speech to the Golden Globe Awards stirred talk that she has a political future.

Within moments of the daytime television trailblazer's remarks at the Hollywood gala, effusive fans called for her to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020, although she has given no indication she is interested.

The 63-year-old Winfrey, whose former talk show ushered in an era of confessional television and helped make her a billionaire, delivered a forceful but tightly focused speech that brought together issues of gender, poverty and race as she accepted a lifetime achievement award.

She saluted the #MeToo movement that has quickly gained steam after revelations of rampant sexual misconduct by film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Paying tribute to Recy Taylor, an African American woman who daringly reported her 1944 gang rape by six white men in Alabama and died last month just short of her 98th birthday, Winfrey deplored "a culture broken by brutally powerful men."

"For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up! Their time is up!" Winfrey said to a standing ovation and even some tears in the audience.

"So I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon," Winfrey said.

"And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women -- many of whom are right here in this room tonight -- and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'me too' again," she said.

- Hailing role of media -

Oprah Winfrey poses with her lifetime achievement award received at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards

Winfrey highlighted her own life rising up from a violence-scarred childhood. She recalled her awe as a girl watching television in Milwaukee when Sidney Poitier became the first black person to win the Oscar for best actor in 1964.

She also hailed the role of the media, so often maligned by Trump as "fake news."

"It's the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice," she said.

"I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times."

At the start of the Golden Globes, host Seth Meyers playfully encouraged Winfrey to run for president against Trump, who made history by winning despite never holding a previous political or military position.

Meyers had appeared at the now infamous 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner where he and then president Barack Obama mocked the idea of Trump in the White House. The real estate mogul fumed in his seat.

"Some have said that night convinced him to run. So, if that's true, I just want to say, Oprah, you will never be president. You do not have what it takes," Meyers said, while also proposing actor Tom Hanks as a vice presidential candidate.

- Fans see White House -

For some of Winfrey's fans, a presidential run didn't seem far-fetched after her speech, with the topic quickly taking off on social media.

"As I sit here in tears...I have never ever seen such a speech," the country singer Billy Gilman wrote on Twitter.

"@Oprah, my friend. Please run for President. This world needs more of THAT. WOW."

Winfrey had generally stayed away from overt politics until the 2008 election when she campaigned vigorously for Obama in an endorsement credited with helping him secure the Democratic Party's nomination.

The then governor of Illinois briefly considered Winfrey to replace Obama in the Senate, but she did not voice interest.

With her vast audience and quickly relatable style, Winfrey has long been considered one of America's most influential celebrities.

Her show has helped raise discussion in the United States on issues ranging from gay rights to abusive puppy breeding mills, while her endorsement power is avidly sought by the publishing industry.
Former oil executive Trinh Xuan Thanh (C) has gone on trial under a snowballing anti-corruption sweep which observers say is politically driven

The corruption trial of a Vietnamese former oil executive who was allegedly kidnapped from Germany opened on Monday, a high-profile case that can carry the death sentence.

Vietnam's communist government has embarked on a snowballing anti-corruption campaign, which observers say is politically driven and mirrors a graft crackdown in neighbouring China.

Scores of former officials, bankers and state executives have been arrested or jailed, including a senior banker who has been sentenced to death.

On Monday a court in Hanoi said it had started proceedings against Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former head of state-run PetroVietnam Construction, for alleged mismanagement and embezzlement.

Thanh appeared before the court together with ex-politburo member Dinh La Thang and 20 other senior officials.

They are accused of causing $5.2 million of losses for the state during an investment by PetroVietnam in the construction of a thermal power plant.

German authorities say Thanh was kidnapped from a Berlin park in July and have decried the brazen Cold War-style seizure as a "scandalous violation" of its sovereignty.

Former politbureau member Dinh La Thang is also on trial over mismanagement at PetroVietnam Construction and could face 20 years in jail

Vietnam denies the kidnap and insists the fugitive Thanh had returned home voluntarily to face the charges.

"This is a very serious case, drawing wide public attention," said an online announcement by Hanoi's People's Court, adding the accused all held key positions at major state-owned institutions.

After a two-week trial, Thang and Thanh could face 20 years in jail for mismanagement.

In addition Thanh faces an embezzlement charge, which can carry the death penalty.

The downfall of Thanh and the other men on trial has stunned a public unaccustomed to questioning the role of officialdom in an authoritarian country which routinely quashes dissent.

But the leadership is at pains to parade its anti-graft credentials, experts say, as well as remove political enemies.

In a linked case, last week Singapore deported fugitive Vietnamese intelligence officer Phan Van Anh Vu, who held a senior rank in the secret police.

Vu was trying to seek asylum in Germany, his lawyers said, arguing he may have information about Thanh's kidnapping on German soil.

In Ho Chi Minh City the trial of 46 people -- including former banking tycoons Pham Cong Danh and Tram Be -- also began on Monday.

They are accused of violating lending regulations that caused losses of around $270 million to the Vietnam Construction Bank.

Transparency International has ranked Vietnam 113 out of 176 on its corruption index, worse than its Southeast Asian neighbours Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar.
Cambodian authorities moved to curb the surrogacy trade in 2016

An Australian nurse jailed for 18 months for running a surrogacy clinic in Cambodia had her sentence upheld Monday in a prominent case highlighting the country's role in the lucrative trade.

Tammy Davis-Charles, a nurse in her early 50s from Melbourne, was arrested in November 2016 with two Cambodian colleagues weeks after the country passed an edict forbidding commercial surrogacy.

She was convicted of sourcing clients and falsifying documents, although she said in her trial that she simply provided medical care to the Cambodian mothers.

Appeal Court Judge Kim Dany upheld the verdict during a brief hearing in Phnom Penh, saying the court had "already given a lenient sentence".

Dressed in a blue prisoner uniform, Davis-Charles did not react to the ruling or speak to reporters afterwards. She has a final chance to appeal the sentence in front of the Supreme Court.

Cambodian authorities moved to curb the surrogacy trade after prospective parents -- many from Australia -- turned to the impoverished country in the wake of bans in Thailand and India.

Critics of the practice say it leaves women with few economic choices open to exploitation.

Police said Davis-Charles moved from Thailand to take advantage of the continued demand after several scandals in the neighboring country prompted a government crackdown.

More than 20 Cambodian surrogate mothers were paired with clients in the Davis-Charles clinic, and they received around $10,000 each.

The nurse's two Cambodian colleagues were convicted of the same charges and also jailed for 18 months.

With cheap medical costs, a large pool of poor young women and no laws excluding gay couples or single parents, countries in Southeast Asia were for years attractive destinations for the surrogacy trade.

Cambodia defended its decision by saying it did not want the country to become a "factory" for making babies.

Laos has emerged as the next frontier in the "rent-a-womb" business, which still exists through shadowy unregulated networks in Cambodia and other countries.
Rescuers attempting to reach the Sanchi's 32 crew were being beaten back by toxic clouds

An Iranian oil tanker ablaze off China's east coast was at risk of exploding or sinking on Monday, as fears grew for 32 missing sailors amid warnings of a potential environmental disaster.

The huge fire was still raging Monday morning around the stricken vessel, which had been carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil, some 36 hours after it collided with a cargo ship.

But China's English-language state broadcaster CGTN later posted a video on Twitter showing the fire seemingly under control as a second vessel sprayed it with water.

Earlier the transport ministry said rescuers trying to locate the crew of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis were being beaten back by toxic clouds.

The Panamanian-flagged 274-metre (899-foot) tanker Sanchi is "in danger of exploding or sinking", the ministry said.

Rescuers had recovered one unidentified body as of Monday afternoon, said foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang.

"Conditions... are not that favourable for search and rescue work," he said, adding that "we are also investigating how to prevent any secondary disaster."

The body was found three or four miles from the tanker and "cannot be easily identified" even though the victim had a fire safety vest, Alireza Irvash, from Iran's consulate in Shanghai, told Iranian state broadcaster IRIB.

The accident happened on Saturday evening 160 nautical miles east of the city.

The tanker, operated by Iran's Glory Shipping, was heading to South Korea when it collided with a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship, the CF Crystal, carrying 64,000 tonnes of grain.

Ten government vessels and "many fishing ships" were helping with the ongoing rescue and clean up effort, the transport ministry said, adding that a South Korean coastguard ship was also on the scene.

A US Navy aircraft took part in the search on Sunday, scouring a wide area before returning to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

- Environmental fears -

As Chinese authorities raced to contain the ship's leaking oil, experts expressed fears the accident could create an environmental disaster.

Collision and tanker blaze

Greenpeace said in a statement it was "concerned about the potential environmental damage that could be caused by the 1 million barrels of crude oil on board".

If all of the Sanchi's cargo spills, it would be the biggest oil slick from a ship for decades.

By comparison, in the sixth-worst spill since the 1960s, the Odyssey dumped 132,000 tonnes some 700 nautical miles off Canada's Nova Scotia in 1988, according to figures from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation website.

"It's very possible this will kill off marine life across a wide area," Wei Xianghua, an environmental expert at Beijing's Tsinghua University, told AFP of the latest threat.

Even under a best-case scenario, it would take a "long time" for the area to get back to normal, Wei added.

"At present, the only thing to be done is make the best effort to not allow the oil to spread to other places."

China had two vessels working to contain the spill early Monday morning, the transport ministry said.

Iran's Petroleum Ministry said the tanker belongs to the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) and was delivering its cargo to South Korea's Hanwha Total. The ship and its cargo were insured, a statement said.

It was the second accident in less than two years involving a tanker owned by the NITC. In August 2016 an Iranian supertanker and a container ship collided in the Singapore Strait, causing damage to both vessels but no injuries or pollution.

Saturday's collision was the latest in a series of fatal maritime accidents in East Asia in recent years.

Last October, 13 crew on a Chinese fishing boat were killed after their vessel collided with a Hong Kong oil tanker off Japan's west coast.

This handout from China's Transport Ministry taken on January 7 shows a Chinese firefighting vessel spraying water on the burning oil tanker

US Navy vessels have also been involved in some accidents, including a collision between the USS John. S. McCain and a tanker off Singapore last August that killed 10 sailors.
The young England captain finished the demanding five-Test series debilitated by a stomach bug

Joe Root ended his troubled Ashes tour of Australia sound asleep as England surrendered to a 4-0 series loss in Sydney on Monday.

The young England captain finished the demanding five-Test series debilitated by a stomach bug which flared overnight and sent him to hospital.

Root could not resume batting at the start of the final day, but came to the crease an hour in when Moeen Ali was dismissed and batted to lunch.

He could not continue after the break as England slumped to a crushing innings defeat and missed the post-match presentations, with vice-captain James Anderson speaking on his behalf.

"He was up all night with some sort of stomach bug, some gastro thing. He is asleep in the dressing-room trying to recover," Anderson told reporters.

"He's not had any sleep, he's not eaten. He's had diarrhoea and vomiting, so I'm guessing he's not in a great state at the minute," the paceman added.

"So to get to the ground in itself is a great effort and then to strap his pads on and bat for as long as he did was a brilliant effort from him and just shows what sort of character he is."

Veteran Anderson praised Root's leadership on a troubled tour plagued by off-field distractions and the unavailability of suspended star allrounder Ben Stokes.

"He wants to lead by example for this team. He's been a fantastic captain throughout this tour," Anderson said.

"You ask any captain that has toured Australia it is not an easy place to come, not an easy place to play, especially when you're on the wrong end of results."

Root finished retired ill on 58 for his fifth half-century of the series, but crucially he was not able to convert any into a Test ton.

He finished the series with 378 runs in nine innings at 47.25, the highest average of his team.

Australian captain Steve Smith praised Root's efforts to try and save the Test for England on a testing final day.

"It took a lot of courage to come out and bat, you could see he was struggling a fair bit, particularly when he was running between wickets," Smith said.

"He's a tough character so he must have been in a pretty bad way not to come out after the break."
Sri Lankan newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunga was stabbed in January, 2009, days before he was due to testify in a corruption case involving then defence minister Gotabhaya Rajapakse

The family of a newspaper editor murdered in Sri Lanka criticised the government for failing to bring his killers to justice as they marked the ninth anniversary of his death on Monday.

Lasantha Wickrematunga, a prominent critic of the former administration, was stabbed days before he was due to testify in a corruption case involving the then defence minister Gotabhaya Rajapakse.

The killing sparked an international outcry and shone a light on human rights violations in Sri Lanka under former president Mahinda Rajapakse, Gotabhaya's brother.

President Maithripala Sirisena promised to bring the perpetrators to justice when he came to power in 2015 after ousting Rajapakse, but no one has yet been prosecuted.

In a statement, Wickrematunga's brother Lal accused the government of using the case as a political tool without ensuring justice was done.

"What about bringing the perpetrators to book," he said, adding there was a "sense of hopelessness" over the government's handling of the case.

"Justice needs to be done not as a favour. Justice needs to be done to prevent repetition."

Wickrematunga had accused the former defence secretary of taking kickbacks in arms procurements, including the purchase of second-hand MiG jet fighters.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse has been accused of giving orders to a shadowy military outfit allegedly involved in murdering journalists and political dissidents during Sri Lanka's long-running civil war, an allegation he denies.
A North Korean restaurant in Shenyang

While North and South Korean officials hold rare talks this week, in a bustling Korea town in northeast China the rival communities have little to say to each other.

Although their nations are separated by a heavily militarised border, North and South Korean restaurants operate side by side in Xita, the Korean neighbourhood in the city of Shenyang.

Billboards and signs in Korean script hang across the area, which boasts South Korean beer and fried chicken joints, cosmetics counters and clothing stores.

But North Korean businesses now face a Tuesday deadline to clear out as China enforces United Nations sanctions banning their presence following Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests.

After months of tensions that raised fears of nuclear warfare, North and South Korean officials will hold their first dialogue for more than two years on Tuesday.

But in this corner of China, relations between Koreans are tense and show no signs of thawing.

"We're one ethnicity, a big family, but they have a different way of thinking than us," said a North Korean waitress who works at the Pyongyang Rungrado restaurant.

She has lived in Xita for three years but has never spoken to a South Korean. She declined to give her name.

Across the street, the owner of a South Korean restaurant called Number 8 Storeroom said she has never had any contact with the owners of the two North Korean eateries near her establishment.

"I don't want to talk to them," said Jin Meihua, 43, whose restaurant serves eel and steak barbecue to a mostly Chinese clientele.

- Caught in the middle -

Shenyang, a city of 8.3 million, is not far from China's border with the North and houses many of China's ethnic Koreans.

In recent years it became a destination for North Koreans privileged enough to travel overseas.

North Korean eateries and small hotels popped up to feed and lodge them. South Korean boutiques became popular for shopping.

But both sides of Shenyang's Korea town have become ensnared in international disputes.

A North Korean worker inside one of her country's restaurants in Shenyang

South Korean businesses took a major financial hit after China imposed punitive economic measures on Seoul over its decision to host the THAAD US anti-missile defence system, which Beijing sees as a threat to its own security.

"The whole area is in a slump," said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences in Shenyang.

"Last year there was the THAAD issue with South Korea. Then North Korea created problems with its nuclear testing. Chinese have lost interest in spending their money in Xita."

Many South Koreans packed up and went home as their businesses failed, locals say.

"Things haven't been good since then," said 27-year old Jin Zhenyou, an ethnic Korean waiter at a South Korean restaurant.

The North's own dining establishments are likely to be hard hit by dwindling visitors and a blanket order from China's commerce ministry to shut down North Korean businesses by Tuesday.

Some estimates put their number at around 100 across China.

In Xita, only one has apparently closed so far and waitresses at other establishments said they had no plans to close come Tuesday.

- Socialists vs capitalists -

China's ethnic Koreans could bridge the divide between the two sides, but even they say making friends with North Koreans can be difficult.

"They don't like South Koreans. They won't eat in our restaurants. There's no overlap at all," Jin said.

With the shifting geopolitical situation now hitting the North, South Koreans say they won't be sad to see them go.

South Koreans and North Koreans "don't share any special relationship", said a man surnamed Gong at the local Korea Society in Shenyang.

The citizens "don't hold any events for building friendly relations, they don't know each other and don't communicate with each other," Gong said.

In 2016 the South Korean embassy told citizens to avoid the North's restaurants for safety reasons, according to Chung Young-June, a scholar with the Institute for Sinology at Yonsei University.

The government warning filtered into North Korean eateries, further straining relations between the neighbouring restaurant owners.

"The South Korean government doesn't allow them to eat our food," said the North Korean restaurant waitress.

A South Korean massage parlour in Shenyang

She had no interest in speaking with South Koreans.

"We are a socialist country, they are capitalist," she said.

"We work for each other, we work hard for each other. They are all for themselves, earning for their own lives. We are not like this."
Macron chats with Xi during a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing

French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe Monday to take part in China's massive Silk Road infrastructure project but warned against "hegemony", saying both sides should share the benefits.

Macron, on the first day of a state visit, also called on Europe and China to team up on curbing climate change in the face of the US decision to withdraw from the Paris accord.

"Our destinies are linked," he said in a keynote speech on the future of Sino-French relations during a visit to the northern city of Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road.

"The future needs France, Europe and China," Macron said, adding he would travel to China "at least once a year".

Macron started his three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's huge New Silk Road project, an initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabrics, spices and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt, One Road", the plan will see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has spurred both interest and anxiety in many countries, with some in Europe seeing it as an example of Chinese expansionism.

Macron said Europe should join the new silk road initiative but added a warning.

"They cannot be the roads of a new hegemony that will put the countries that they traverse in a vassal state," he said.

"Multilateralism means balanced cooperation."

The ancient Silk Roads were never purely Chinese, he said. "These roads are to be shared and they cannot be one-way."

The United States and Europeans often accuse China of restricting access to its vast market even though they have opened up to Chinese imports.

France has a 30-billion-euro ($36 billion) trade deficit with China.

- Climate battle -

The French president also visited the centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage in his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism.

In a French version of panda diplomacy, Macron has brought Xi a gift: a retired Republican Guard horse that is currently in quarantine in China.

On climate change, Macron said he would talk to Xi about "relaunching the climate battle" by preparing an increase in their engagements to combat global warming at the COP 24 talks in Poland later this year.

He praised China, the world's top polluter, for committing to the Paris accord after President Donald Trump gave notification of America's withdrawal.

"China kept its word," he said. "You demonstrate your immense sense of responsibility."

Cooperation will "show the world that the French and Chinese are capable of making our planet great and beautiful again", he said in Chinese.

After Xian, Macron travelled to Beijing along with his delegation which includes some 60 business executives and representatives of institutions.

Macron and his wife Brigitte met Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan on Monday night at the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where the Chinese leader praised France's foresight in being the first major Western country to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China, in 1964.

"That you have chosen China as your first destination on your first visit to Asia shows the high importance you attach to the relationship's development," he said.

On Tuesday Macron will visit the Forbidden City, meet top Chinese officials and oversee the signing of business deals.

Human Rights Watch has urged him to call publicly for human rights improvements in China during his meeting with Xi, but the French president's office said the matter would be addressed privately.

Along with Brigitte, Macron visited the famous terracotta warriors in Xian, as well as a centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda -- a Buddhist site -- and the city's mosque.

Along with his wife Brigitte, Macron visited the famous terracotta warriors in the northern city of Xian

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.
Members and supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community take part in a parade in New Delhi last November

India's Supreme Court on Monday announced a review of a hugely controversial ban on gay sex, saying no one should have to live in fear because of their sexuality.

The court said it would take up a legal challenge by five high-profile Indians who said the colonial-era law created an atmosphere of intimidation.

"A section of people... who exercise their choice should never live in a state of fear," said the court in its ruling, adding that "societal morality" was subject to change over time.

The announcement is the latest chapter in a long-running legal tussle between social and religious conservatives and the gay community over the law passed by the British in the 1860s.

Section 377 of the Indian penal code bans homosexual acts as "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and allows for life imprisonment, though prosecutions for same-sex activity have been rare.

Gay sex was effectively decriminalised in India in 2009 when the Delhi High Court ruled that banning it violated a person's fundamental rights.

That ruling emboldened the gay community to campaign publicly against widespread discrimination and violence.

But the Supreme Court reinstated the ban four years later in 2013, saying responsibility for changing the law rested with lawmakers not the courts.

That verdict was thrown into doubt again last year when the court referred explicitly to the issue in a landmark ruling upholding the right to privacy.

"The privacy of the home must protect the family, marriage, procreation and sexual orientation, which are all important aspects of dignity," it said in the ruling.
Syrian emergency personnel search for victims following an explosion in a rebel-held area of the northwestern city of Idlib on January 7, 2018

Air strikes by regime and Russian aircraft on rebel positions in the northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, including eight children, a monitor said Monday.

The strikes carried out on Sunday were the latest against jihadists and rebels in a week-old regime offensive on Idlib, the last province in Syria to escape government control.

The raid left "at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family" west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib" province, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, told AFP.
Aadhaar is a controversial government scheme that uses fingerprints and iris scans to provide users a unique identity number they can use to access services, including opening a bank account and paying taxes

Indian police are investigating the reporter behind a story on alleged leaks from a government database containing the personal details of more than a billion people, sparking accusations of media censorship.

Police said Monday they were investigating a complaint of cheating, forgery and impersonation against the journalist, who reported last week that it was possible to buy information in the Aadhaar database for just 500 rupees ($7.89).

Aadhaar is a controversial government scheme that uses fingerprints and iris scans to provide users a unique identity number they can use to access government and other services.

It was intended to reduce official corruption, but critics say it violates citizens' right to privacy.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, which administers the government identity card scheme, has denied any security breach but complained to police over the sting.

A police report documenting the complaint names the reporter, Rachna Khaira, as well as her newspaper The Tribune and "unknown persons" behind the alleged data leak.

The Editors' Guild of India said the criminal investigation amounted to an attack on press freedom.

"It is clearly meant to browbeat a journalist whose investigation on the matter was of great public interest," it said in a statement.

Harish Khare, Tribune's editor-in-chief, said he stood by the report and regretted that the authorities had "misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise".

Aadhaar was set up as a voluntary scheme, but has in recent years become compulsory for a growing number of services, including opening a bank account and paying taxes.

Opponents say that its use for what are effectively essential services means their right to privacy is being violated.

There have also been concerns about leaks, but the government has always maintained the system was secure.
A Syrian man carries an injured woman after bombardment by Syrian and Russian forces in the rebel-held town of Hamouria, in the Eastern Ghouta enclave near Damascus on January 6, 2018

Regime forces upped the pressure on two of the last rebel bastions in Syria on Monday, pounding the Eastern Ghouta enclave near Damascus and the northern province of Idlib.

Shelling and air strikes on Ghouta, which government forces have besieged for four years, killed at least 20 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The semi-rural area east of the Syrian capital is home to around 400,000 inhabitants and is targeted almost daily by regime forces trying to flush out rebel groups.

On Monday, a woman and her three children were killed in regime strikes on Douma, which is the main town in Eastern Ghouta, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Observatory, said.

In the town's morgue, medics were wrapping the children's shredded bodies in shrouds amid the shrieks of bereaved parents, an AFP correspondent reported.

Chaos engulfed the rudimentary facility as rescuers kept rushing in more wounded, some of whom died before they could receive life-saving treatment.

"I was at the market with my father, selling mint, parsley and onions. The next thing I knew, my foot was bleeding and my dad had a head injury," said Ahmed Hatem, an 11-year-old boy, as he sat on the floor wincing in pain.

Smoke rises after a reported air strike in the rebel-controlled town of Madira in the Eastern Ghouta region on January 8, 2018

A child and two other civilians were also killed in strikes on the small town of Madira, the Observatory said. The violence also left another 13 civilians dead across Eastern Ghouta.

The area, which had been designated as a "de-escalation zone" as part of an international deal last year to bring down violence levels, has witnessed major bloodshed in recent weeks.

Syrian forces also managed overnight to pin back rebels who had surrounded a regime base there.

- Idlib violence -

Rebels led by the Jaish al-Islam group had in recent days surrounded the army's only military base in the area but the state news agency SANA said Monday the siege had been broken.

"Units from the Syrian Arab Army have brought an end to the encirclement of the Armoured Vehicles Base in Harasta," it said, adding that operations were ongoing to fully secure the base.

According to the Observatory, the fighting in Harasta since the base was surrounded in late December left 72 regime fighters and 87 rebels dead.

Displaced Syrians who fled the fighting in Idlib province's southeastern town of Sinjar drive on a road in a rebel-held area near on January 7, 2018

Syrian and Russian aircraft also pounded targets in the northwestern region of Idlib, pressing a week-old operation targeting the last province in the country to escape government control.

Raids Sunday left "at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family" west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Observatory said.

"Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib" province, Abdel Rahman said.

Russian-backed regime forces launched an operation on the edge of Idlib province in the last days of 2017 and have retaken villages every day since.

After the collapse of the Islamic State jihadist group in both Syria and Iraq late last year, President Bashar al-Assad's regime is bent on restoring its grip over the country.

Idlib province, which borders Turkey, is almost entirely controlled by anti-government forces that are dominated by a jihadist outfit known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) consisting mostly of fighters from a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

Among the other groups present in the province are thousands of jihadists from Central Asian states and members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority of China's Xinjiang province.

A man cleans debris in the aftermath of an explosion at a base for Asian jihadists in a rebel-held area of the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib on January 8, 2018

An explosion on Sunday in the city of Idlib at a base for the group Ajnad al-Qawqaz, made up of men from the Caucasus wo fight alongside HTS, left at least 43 dead, including 28 civilians, the Observatory said.

The toll went up from 23 after rescuers found more bodies in the wreckage and the most critically injured died of their wounds.

It was not immediately clear whether the blast was caused by air strikes or was the result of the kind of internal clashes that sometimes break out between jihadist and rebel factions.

After shrinking to barely a sixth of the country at the height of the nearly seven-year-old conflict, the areas under government control now cover more than 50 percent of Syrian territory.

More than 340,000 people have been killed and millions have been driven from their homes since Syria's conflict erupted with anti-government protests in 2011.
Hong Kong's Secretary of Justice Teresa Cheng said Monday the rule of law in the city has not been compromised, as she spoke at the ceremonial opening of the legal year

Hong Kong's new justice secretary said Monday the rule of law in the city has not been compromised, after a string of cases raised fears the legal system is under threat from Beijing.

Semi-autonomous Hong Kong enjoys freedoms unseen on the mainland as part of the "one country, two systems" deal made when colonial power Britain handed it back to China in 1997.

Those rights include an independent British-style judiciary, viewed as one of the bedrocks of Hong Kong's identity and a key factor differentiating it from mainland China.

But a recent ruling by Beijing approving a plan to bring parts of a Hong Kong high-speed rail terminus, linking the city with the southern mainland, under Chinese national law prompted outrage among some leading lawyers.

They argue it has no legal basis and goes against Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

The city's pro-Beijing government has backed the plan and it is likely to be voted through by the legislature, which is only partially elected and weighted towards the establishment.

Last summer Hong Kong's government successfully sought to overturn non-custodial sentences against pro-democracy activists, leading to them being jailed in August.

Concerns were also raised in 2015, when a special "interpretation" of the Basic Law by Beijing led to the ousting from parliament of six publicly elected pro-independence and pro-democracy lawmakers who protested while taking their oaths of office.

"Some suggest that the rule of law in Hong Kong is under threat," justice secretary Teresa Cheng told guests at the ceremonial opening of the legal year Monday.

"If it means that it is being tested I have no qualms with such suggestions. But, with respect, I cannot agree with suggestions that our rule of law is in any way compromised."

She argued that the Basic Law was "open to different interpretations" and that some policies may require new laws to be enacted.

Cheng herself has had a turbulent start to her new role after allegations that some parts of her home were built illegally, an accusation that has dogged a number of leading politicians in space-starved Hong Kong.

Also speaking at the ceremony, Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma said courts and judges must not be affected by political or other biases.

The city's common law system is "vital to the continuing success of Hong Kong" for both business and the community, Ma added.

"This is a system that has been regarded as being appropriate for our community," he said.
Rohingya refugees queue for food at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh in October last year

A Bangladesh court on Monday upheld a government ruling banning marriage between its citizens and refugees from Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority, who have fled ethnic violence in the neighbouring country.

The High Court in Dhaka dismissed a legal challenge from a father whose son married a Rohingya teenager in a Muslim ceremony in September despite laws forbidding such unions.

Marriages with Rohingya were banned in 2014 to try to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees living in Bangladesh from seeking a back door to citizenship.

Babul Hossain, whose 26-year-old son ran away with his new wife after they married, questioned the legality of the ruling that threatens a seven-year jail term for any Bangladeshi who weds a Rohingya refugee.

But the court rejected his plea and ordered he pay 100,000 taka ($1,200) in legal costs.

"The court rejected the petition and has upheld the administrative order, which bans marriage between Bangladeshi citizens and Rohingya people," deputy attorney general Motaher Hossain Saju told AFP.

Hossain's request that the court protect his son from arrest was also rejected, Saju added.

About 655,000 Rohingya have escaped to Bangladesh since August after the Myanmar army began a campaign of rape and murder in Rakhine state.

They joined the more than 200,000 refugees already living in Bangladesh who had fled previous violence in Rakhine.

Aid groups have reported cases of Bangladeshis offering young women marriage as a way of escaping the overcrowded refugee camps along Bangladesh's southeastern border.

Hossain could not be contacted after the ruling.

But in a previous statement, he defended his son's marriage to the 18-year-old Rohingya woman and denied it was driven by a quest for citizenship.

"If Bangladeshis can marry Christians and people of other religions, whats wrong in my sons marriage to a Rohingya?" Hossain told AFP.

"He married a Muslim who took shelter in Bangladesh."
Egypt relies on the mighty Nile, seen here in Cairo, for both drinking water and irrigation

Egypt is building a major water treatment and desalination plant, the president said Monday, as the Nile-dependent nation plans for any fallout from an upstream dam being built by Ethiopia.

The North African country is constructing "the largest wastewater treatment and desalination plant", President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said live on state television.

"We are only doing what we need to do so we can solve a potential problem," he added, speaking during the inauguration of infrastructure and housing projects.

While Sisi did not elaborate, Egypt fears its water supply will be affected by Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam being built on the Blue Nile.

Egypt relies almost totally on the Nile for irrigation and drinking water, and says it has "historic rights" to the river, guaranteed by treaties from 1929 and 1959.

Cairo argues that the treaties grant it 87 percent of the Nile's flow, as well as the power to veto upstream projects.

The Blue and the White Nile tributaries converge in Sudan's capital Khartoum and from there run north through Egypt to the Mediterranean.

"We will not allow a water problem to materialise in Egypt. Water must be secured for everyone," Sisi said on Monday.

He did not give further details about the size of the Egyptian water plant or its planned output.

"In order to use water efficiently, we are building a plant. We are aware (of every eventuality) and are prepared" to face them, he added.

Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry visited Addis Ababa in December for discussions on the controversial Ethiopian dam.

It is designed to feed a hydroelectric project that would produce 6,000 megawatts of power -- the equivalent of six nuclear-powered plants.

Ethiopia began building the dam in 2012 and initially expected to commission it in 2017.

Ethiopian media reports say that only about 60 percent of the construction has taken place.
October 22, 2017: day-old Palestinian conjoined twins Farah and Haneen in an incubator at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City

Conjoined twin girls born in the blockaded Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip were separated in "successful" surgery in Riyadh Monday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said in a statement.

Dr Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Rabiah, who headed the team that operated on Farah and Haneen at the King Abdullah Specialist Children's Hospital, "affirmed the success of the separation surgery", SPA said.

The operation began on Monday morning, and involved nine stages of anaesthesia and the separation of multiple organs, including the liver, as well as restoring organs in Haneen.

The news comes months after a doctor and family member of the twins pleaded from Gaza that they be allowed to go abroad for the complex surgery.

Allam Abu Hamda, head of the neonatal unit at Gaza's Shifa Hospital, told AFP in October the girls were born joined at the stomach and pelvis and that the complicated condition could not be dealt with in the enclave.

Israel has maintained a blockade of the enclave for a decade, citing security fears over Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas.

Conjoined twins who share key organs have a low chance of survival.

Farah and Haneen, whose condition Abu Hamda said was stable, have one shared leg but separate hearts and lungs.

Conjoined twins born in Gaza in November 2016 later died.

In 2010, conjoined twins from Gaza were transferred to Saudi Arabia for surgery to separate them, but doctors in Riyadh said their condition was too delicate to operate and they died.
South African bowler Kagiso Rabada (centre) celebrates the dismissal of Indian batsman Wriddhiman Saha during their fourth day of the first Test match in Cape Town, on January 8, 2018

Eighteen wickets fell in a day as South Africa beat India in the first of three battles between Test cricket's two leading teams at Newlands on Monday with both captains hailing the pitch's contribution to the batting carnage.

"The pitch was outstanding," said Indian captain Virat Kohli after South Africa won the first Test by 72 runs with a day to spare.

"It was great for Test cricket. Both teams were in the game at different stages. As a team we really enjoyed being part of this Test match."

"This was as good as it gets in Test cricket," said South African captain Faf du Plessis.

"It was fantastic to be part of it. It definitely ranks as one of my favourite Test matches."

India were bowled out for 135 after being set to make 208 to win. Man of the match Vernon Philander led the South African attack, which was missing the injured Dale Steyn, taking six for 42.

India had earlier bowled South Africa out for 130 in their second innings. Eighteen wickets fell during the day while 200 runs were scored on a pitch which had plenty of life after being under covers for all of the third day, which was rained off.

Kohli was disappointed with the batting of his number one-ranked team - but felt they had shown they could compete with their nearest challengers in pace-friendly conditions.

He said India were looking forward to taking the South Africans head-on in the second Test starting at Centurion on Saturday.

"We needed someone to go out there and score 75 or 80 and we need to sit down and talk about stringing together partnerships. You can't afford to lose three or four wickets quickly as we did today."

Kohli gave credit to South Africas pace bowling attack.

"Their bowlers create relentless pressure. They force you to play good cricket in every over."

The Indian captain suggested the Indian batsmen might need to show more of the aggressive intent epitomised by Hardik Pandya, who hit 93 off 95 balls in the first innings.

"Hardik showed a lot of character. We need to make their bowlers come back for second or third spells."

Du Plessis admitted that he was nervous about defending a low target after South Africa lost their last eight wickets for 65 runs before lunch.

"The new ball was crucial but I knew that we have got fantastic seam bowlers."

The South African captain said that losing Steyn, who has been ruled out of the rest of the series with a left heel injury, was a big blow.

But he praised the character of the injured bowler, who came out to bat with nine wickets down in an effort to shepherd top-scorer AB de Villiers to a bigger score.

"We didnt want Dale to bat unless AB was still there because we didnt want him to make his injury worse. But he wanted to do it," said Du Plessis.

With Steyn unable to run, De Villiers needed to hit boundaries. Kohli placed eight fielders on the boundary and one of them caught De Villiers without adding to his 35 runs. "We didnt get the runs but it was the mindset that counts," said Du Plessis.

It was a match that was full of drama from the first morning when South Africa crashed to 12 for three after choosing to bat on a seaming pitch.

"Were a team that is prepared to take risk to try to win matches," said Du Plessis. "We knew the pitch would speed up. We were surprised how quick it was on the first day but today was very difficult for batsmen."

Counter-attacking batting by De Villiers and Du Plessis enabled South Africa to make a competitive 286, leading Kohli to regret that India had not taken their chances to bowl them out for a lower total.

But he said the bowlers had rectified their mistakes in the second innings, giving him confidence that they could push South Africa hard at Centurion.

"We need the batsmen to apply themselves and show more character. But if we get a lively wicket our bowlers can exploit their batting again."
A Turkish Cypriot man casts his ballot in the parliamentary election in the northern part of Nicosia in the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), recognized only by Turkey, on January 7, 2018

Northern Cyprus, a statelet recognised only by Turkey, was Monday set to be ruled by a right-wing coalition sceptical of reunifying the island after the prime minister's party won elections without gaining an overall majority.

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), established in the wake of Turkey's 1974 invasion of the island in response to an Athens-backed coup, voted Sunday in snap legislative polls forced by tensions in the previous coalition.

The vote came ahead of presidential polls later this month in the internationally recognised Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus, with peace efforts on hold until both sets of elections are over.

The conservative National Unity Party (UBP) of prime minister Huseyin Ozgurgun came out on top with 36 percent of the vote and 21 seats, short of the 26 seats needed for a majority in the 50-member house, according to provisional results.

Its most likely coalition bedfellows appear to be the nationalist Democratic Party (DP) of Serdar Denktas -- the son of the former hardline leader Rauf Denktas and -- the Rebirth Party (YDP) which is made up of Turkish mainland settlers.

They picked up just three and two seats respectively but just enough to create a right-wing coalition if the provisional results released by the election commission are confirmed.

The socialist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) vote share fell sharply to 21 percent, giving it just 12 seats. More than 190,500 people were registered to vote.

"The UBP has emerged as the biggest party by a wide margin," said Ozgurgun in a victory speech early Monday. "We are preparing for new days with the power the people have given to the UBP."

- Blow for Akinci? -

Neither of the three right-wing parties -- including the UBP -- favour a negotiated settlement with the Greek Cypriots to create a single bizonal federal state.

They want a continuation of the status quo, with two "states" on the Mediterranean island.

The People's Party (HP) -- a new party that has expressed scepticism over negotiations to reunify the island -- polled well on 17 percent and was on course to win nine seats.

President Mustafa Akinci, who came to power in April 2015 vowing to find a lasting peace, is however a strong supporter of a federal solution and reconciliation with the Greek Cypriots.

The results may complicate his life as he seeks broad backing at home for a federal solution to the Cyprus problem and convince his Greek Cypriot counterparts he means business.

However, the president has full responsibility for the talks with the Greek Cypriots and any solution that is agreed will be submitted to a referendum.

Akinci's doveish Communal Democracy Party (TDP) was set to win only three seats.

The election in the northern third of Cyprus comes six months after efforts to reunify the island collapsed at a United Nations-hosted peace summit in Switzerland over several sticking points including the withdrawal of Turkey's 45,000 troops.

On January 28, the Republic of Cyprus is set to hold a presidential election in which conservative incumbent Nicos Anastasiades is the frontrunner.

Anastasiades has campaigned on a pro-peace ticket, vowing to attempt to revive talks with Akinci, despite the souring of their relationship after two years of tough and ultimately fruitless negotiations.
A file picture of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at a news conference in Cairo on December 11, 2017

Egyptians will head to the polls on March 26-28 in the first round of a presidential election, National Elections Authority chief Lasheen Ibrahim said on Monday.

A second round will be held on April 24-26 if required, he told a news conference in Cairo.

Ibrahim said the commission would accept applications from presidential hopefuls between January 20 and 29.

"The provisional list of candidates and the numbers of their supporters will be published" in state-run newspapers Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar on January 31, he said.

Once any appeals by rejected candidates are settled, "the final list of candidate names and their symbols will be announced and published in the official gazette and Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar newspapers" on February 24, he said.

That will mark the official start of the campaign, which will run until March 23, Ibrahim said, with final results to be announced on May 1.

Egyptians living abroad can vote between March 16 and 18, he added, with second round ballots on April 19-21 if necessary.

Incumbent Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is widely expected to stand for re-election and win in the first round.

The former army chief was elected in 2014, a year after leading the military to oust his predecessor Mohamed Morsi amid mass protests against the Islamist's year-long rule.

On Sunday, former premier Ahmed Shafiq, once seen as a main challenger to Sisi, said that he would not be a candidate, reversing a previous pledge to stand.

Shafiq was appointed premier by Hosni Mubarak shortly before he was toppled from the presidency in the 2011 uprising, and only narrowly lost out in the 2012 election to Morsi.

- Years of turmoil -

After years of political, security and economic turmoil since Mubarak's ouster, many Egyptians might have voted for Shafiq, nostalgic for a continuation of Mubarak's rule, analysts believe.

Other potential candidates include Khaled Ali, a rights lawyer and 2012 presidential candidate who challenged the government over Red Sea islands Egypt gave to Saudi Arabia.

In November, Ali announced his intention to stand again in 2018.

However, he had been sentenced in September in absentia to three months in jail on accusations of "offending public decency", a ruling he appealed.

The sentence was over a photograph Ali says was fabricated and that appeared to show him making an obscene gesture while celebrating a court ruling in the case of the islands' transfer.

Ali has said only the committee organising the election can decide whether that ruling would disqualify him as a candidate.

Another hopeful, colonel Ahmed Konsowa, was given six years in prison in December by a military court after the previous month announcing his intention to stand.

Konsowa's lawyer said his client was given the sentence for stating political opinions while still a serving officer, even though Konsowa said he had been trying to resign from the military for more than three years.

Lawyer Asaad Heikal said Konsowa had only followed Sisi's example in announcing his candidacy. Sisi was in uniform when he did so, before later resigning as defence minister.
US President Donald Trump's move to cut aid to Pakistan has sparked protests as relations between the two countries sour

A Pakistani court Monday granted bail to an anti-US cleric -- the father-in-law of one of Pakistan's most wanted militants -- days after Washington suspended aid over Islamabad's failure to crack down on extremism.

Sufi Mohammad, whose son-in-law is Maulana Fazlullah, the fugitive chief of the Pakistani Taliban, was himself charged with murder, treason, terrorism and rebellion.

The elderly pro-Taliban cleric and the chief of banned group Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) was the architect of a violent movement for the enforcement of Islamic sharia law in country's northwestern Malakand Division.

He was arrested in October 2001 as he crossed the border into Pakistan with a group of armed men, accused of sending hundreds to fight against the US-led international forces seeking to topple the fundamentalist Taliban regime.

But he was released in 2008 under a peace agreement with local tribal elders which settled those charges.

Believed to be in his 90s, he was arrested again in Peshawar in 2009 over an inflammatory speech, and has been held in a maximum security prison.

His trial is ongoing. But on Monday his defence lawyer Fida Gul told AFP that a high court in Peshawar had ordered Mohammad's release.

"He was too old to move and was suffering from kidney problems and weakness, and was taken to hospital many times," Gul said.

The decision came less than a week after the US announced a freeze on aid to Pakistan that could be worth almost $2 bn.

The move is designed to force Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus to cut support for the Taliban and other Islamist groups, especially those fighting US forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has fought fierce campaigns against homegrown Islamist groups, losing thousands of lives in its long war on extremism.

That includes the Pakistani Taliban, headed by Mohammad's son-in-law Fazlullah, who became infamous when he held the Swat Valley from 2007-2009, imposing a harsh brand of sharia law and carrying out public floggings and hangings.

But US officials accuse Pakistan of ignoring or even collaborating with groups that attack Afghanistan from safe havens along the border between the two countries.
Critics say Grace Mugabe had not actually studied or undertaken research to earn the doctorate

Zimbabwean anti-corruption investigators said Monday they are probing whether former first lady Grace Mugabe fraudulently obtained a doctorate that she apparently received within months and the dissertation for which remains unpublished.

Grace, whose apparent desire to succeed her 93-year-old husband prompted the army takeover that eventually saw Robert Mugabe resign, was awarded a PhD by the University of Zimbabwe in 2014.

Critics argued at the time that Grace, 52, had not actually studied or undertaken research to earn the doctorate and that she had been handed her diploma just months after enrolling. PhDs typically require several years of full-time research and writing.

Her dissertation has never been made public, according to local media, breaking with the established policy of most Zimbabwean public universities to publish doctoral students' theses.

The state-run Herald newspaper reported in 2014 that Grace's dissertation was on the theme of "changing social structure (and) the functions of the family" and that she undertook research on Zimbabwean children's homes.

Grace was personally capped by then-president Mugabe, who was also the chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, and praised by other government officials who defended the controversial degree award.

"We confirm there is such a report and there is such a probe," said Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission spokeswoman Phyllis Chikundura who declined to provide further details.

In November 2017, Robert Mugabe fired then-vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, a move that was seen as opening the way for his wife's succession. A few days later the military took control of the country, leading to Mugabe's resignation on November 21.

Mnangagwa was sworn in as president days later and both Robert and Grace have kept a low profile since their spectacular reversal of fortune.

During the height of the upheaval, students at the University of Zimbabwe boycotted their end of term exams to call for Grace to be stripped of her PhD and Robert to be stripped of the presidency.

Grace was routinely accused of extravagant spending on luxury clothes and international travel, and of involvement in corrupt land deals.

Dubbed "Gucci Grace", "The First Shopper" or even "DisGrace", she showed her political mettle in 2014 with her ruthless campaign against then Vice President Joice Mujuru, who was then a contender to succeed her husband.

A similar briefing campaign -- conducted both publicly and behind the scenes -- against Mnangagwa is widely seen as having led to her husband's downfall.
Police arrest demonstrators in St. Louis who were protesting the acquittal of a police officer involved in a fatal shooting

Police officers shot and killed nearly 1,000 people in the United States in 2017, slightly more than the previous year, according to a tally published on Monday by The Washington Post.

A total of 987 people were fatally shot by US police last year, up from 963 in 2016 and down from 995 in 2015, the Post said.

The newspaper has been logging details of shootings by police in the United States since 2015, tracking local news reports, public records and social media.

The use of deadly force by US police has attracted increased attention in recent years, highlighted by the high-profile slayings of a number of unarmed black men.

Nineteen unarmed African-American men were killed by US police in 2017, up from 17 in 2016 but down from 36 in 2015, according to the Post.

Black males nevertheless continue to be shot at disproportionately high rates, the newspaper said.

Black men, both armed and unarmed, accounted for 22 percent of all people shot and killed by US police last year but make up just six percent of the total US population.

Overall, police shot and killed 68 unarmed people in 2017, up from 51 in 2016 but down from 94 in 2015.

"The national spotlight on this issue has made officers more cautious in unarmed situations," Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the newspaper.

According to the Post database, 735 of the people shot and killed by police last year were armed with knives or guns, up from 693 in 2016.

Forty-six police officers were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2017, down from 66 the previous year, according to FBI figures.

Deadly shootings by police in the United States are far more prevalent than in other developed countries.

According to the British group Inquest, police fatally shot four people in the United Kingdom in 2016.

Thirteen people were killed by police bullets in Germany in 2016, according to a study by Berlin's Tageszeitung newspaper.
Protests broke out in Sudan after bread prices more than doubled last week following a government decision to stop importing grain and allow private companies to do so

Hundreds of Sudanese students from the University of Khartoum threw stones at anti-riot police Monday on a third day of protests against soaring bread prices, an AFP correspondent reported.

Bread prices more than doubled last week as flour manufacturers raised prices on dwindling wheat supplies after the government decided to stop importing grain and allowed private companies to do so.

Sporadic anti-government protests have been held since Saturday in some parts of the country following the price rise.

They were staged again on Monday in the area around Khartoum university, triggering clashes between students and anti-riot police.

"No, no to high food prices," students shouted as they attempted to leave the university campus but were quickly pushed back by dozens of anti-riot police who fired tear gas at them, the AFP correspondent reported.

The protesters then threw stones at the police who closed the main road to the university as thick plume of black smoke billowed over the campus.

Dozens of police in plain clothes were deployed around the university, as the authorities warned of a crackdown.

"Police will crush any protest that results in destruction of property," Minister of State for the Interior Babikir Digna said, according to the official SUNA news agency.

In another protest at Kosti in the state of White Nile, several school children staged a demonstration but it was swiftly broken up by baton-carrying police, witnesses said.

On Sunday, a student was killed during protests in the town of Geneina in war-torn Darfur. It was still unclear how he was killed.

Leading opposition groups have called for anti-government protests after the cost of flour jumped to 450 Sudanese pounds ($25) for a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack from 167 pounds.

Similar protests were held in late 2016 after the government cut fuel subsidies.

The authorities had cracked down on those protests to prevent a repeat of deadly unrest that followed an earlier round of subsidy cuts in 2013.

Dozens of people were killed in 2013 when security forces crushed large street demonstrations, drawing international condemnation.
Vladimir Putin is poised to create a special force to protect against terrorist drone strikes on key nuclear power stations, following attacks on Russian bases in Syria.

The move - involving the development of technology to reliably zap drones - comes amid fears that terrorists could use sophisticated long-distance weapons to target nuclear bases.

Russian concerns have been heightened by jihadist attacks on its military bases in Syria using UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles.

Vladimir Putin is poised to create a special force to protect key Russian installations like nuclear power stations from drone attacks in the same week his forces came under attack from 'assault drones' at its Khmeimim air base and Tartus naval base in Syria

Russia's Ministry of Defence this week shared an image of what it claims is a drone fitted with explosives brought down before it attacked one of their military bases in Syria

Russian concerns have been heightened by jihadist attacks on its military bases in Syria using UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles. Pictured: An assault drone Russia says was used by militants in Syria

The Kremlin has demanded that the Defence Ministry, several secret service agencies and the Russian National Guard work together to find a solution to destroy drones before they reach their targets.

Technology to zap drones has been developed in Russia but needs testing, said Col-General Sergey Melikov, first deputy director of the national guard.

He made clear nuclear power plants were among the state facilities that required protection.

'We are considering an option to create groups to test experimental equipment to fight UAVs within our units,' he said.

'We have a certain device but it is not clear how easy is it to use.

'It needs to be tested first.

'If we realise that a special unit with a team of specialists needs to be created, of course we will do so.'

The move - involving the development of technology to reliably zap drones - comes amid fears that terrorists could use sophisticated long-distance weapons to target nuclear bases

He revealed the plan is being studied by experts including those from the Defence Ministry and FSB, the former KGB counter-intelligence service.

Security expert Yury Zakharchenko said there was no universal technology yet to fight sophisticated drone attacks.

Such a system or systems must recognise and identify incoming UAVs and then launch an appropriate strike by either radio electronic attack or missile.

'This task has not been resolved anywhere in the world because it's difficult, but the work is being done,' he said.

'The establishment of a separate unit of Rosgvardia (national guard) will perhaps allow us to intensify research and development in this area.'

Recent pictures of captured Jihadist drones in Syria were released.

This week Russian forces came under attack from 'assault drones' at its Khmeimim air base and Tartus naval base in Syria, said the defence ministry.

'Air defence forces detected 13 unidentified small-size air targets at a significant distance approaching the Russian military bases,' said a statement.

'Ten assault drones were approaching the Khmeimim air base, and another three at Tartus.

'Six small-size air targets were intercepted and taken under control by the Russian EW units.

'Three of them were landed on the controlled area outside the base, and another three UAVs exploded as they touched the ground.

'Seven UAVs were eliminated by the Pantsir-S anti-aircraft missile complexes operated by the Russian air defence units on 24-hours alert.

'The Russian bases did not suffer any casualties or damages.'

But Russia also fears that 'hooligans' could use drones to cause disruption, said Melikov.

The statement comes days after Moscow announced that two Russian servicemen were killed in a mortar attack by Islamist militants at the Hmeimim air base on New Year's Eve (stock)

After two years of Russian military support for the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad (pictured), President Vladimir Putin announced in mid-December the partial withdrawal of forces from the country, saying their task in the war-torn country had been largely completed

Of the 13 drones used in the attacks, seven were destroyed while the six others were intercepted by the Russian army, it said.

The statement comes days after Moscow announced that two Russian servicemen were killed in a mortar attack by Islamist militants at the Hmeimim air base on New Year's Eve.

According to the Russian Kommersant business daily, seven military planes were 'practically destroyed' in that attack, but the ministry dismissed the report as 'fake'.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Russian forces were on alert following drone attacks on the Hmeimim base, the largest Russian military base on Syrian territory.

After two years of Russian military support for the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, President Vladimir Putin announced in mid-December the partial withdrawal of forces from the country, saying their task in the war-torn country had been largely completed.

The size of the Russian deployment in Syria is not known but independent Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer told AFP that up to 10,000 troops and private contractors could have taken part in the conflict.

More than 330,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the Syrian war, which began in 2011 as the regime brutally crushed anti-government protests. Millions have been displaced.
US Vice President Mike Pence, seen here during a recent trip to Afghanistan, delayed his Middle East trip amid deadly protests in the wake of Donald Trump's decision to declare Jerusalem Israel's capital

US Vice President Mike Pence will leave next week on a high-stakes trip to Egypt, Jordan and Israel, a US official said Monday, moving ahead with a Middle East tour delayed amid anger over Washington's policy shift on Jerusalem.

Initially set for late December, the trip was pushed back as the region reeled from deadly protests triggered by President Donald Trump's controversial decision to declare the Holy City as Israel's capital -- in a break with decades of US policy.

Pence will arrive in Cairo on January 20 for a meeting with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, heading the following day to Amman for a one-on-one with King Abdullah II.

His trip will conclude on January 22-23 with a two-day visit to Israel, where he will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, deliver a speech to the Knesset, visit the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Israel occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 and later annexed east Jerusalem in a move never recognized by the international community.

The city's status is among the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its united capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state.

Trump's controversial decision sparked protests in Arab and Muslim countries and was rejected in a non-binding UN General Assembly resolution.

Tensions ratcheted up a notch this month after Trump threatened to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the Palestinians -- whose leaders responded by saying they will not be "blackmailed" and that Jerusalem "is not for sale."

Trump came to office boasting that he could achieve the "ultimate deal" that secures peace in the Middle East, something that has eluded US presidents for decades.

But efforts to harness improved Arab-Israel relations to push a peace deal have been at least temporarily derailed by Trump's Jerusalem recognition, with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas warning last month he would "no longer accept" any peace plan proposed by the United States.
An apartment building pictured on January 3, 2018 in Ottawa, Canada, where former Taliban hostage Joshua Boyle had been living with his family until his arrest on sex assault and other charges last week

A Canadian man held captive for years in Afghanistan and charged in his home country with 15 offences remained in detention on Monday awaiting a bail hearing delayed to next week.

The judge granted lawyers for Joshua Boyle, 34, more time to prepare for his possible release on bail and scheduled a new hearing for January 15.

Bail would normally include arrangements for his supervision, where he would stay and other conditions.

Boyle appeared for about one minute at the hearing via videolink from an Ottawa detention center, wearing an orange jumpsuit and sporting a wispy beard.

He let out a sigh and furrowed his brow as the judge made his ruling.

Boyle and his American wife Caitlin Coleman were held captive by a faction of the Afghan Taliban for five years. They were freed last October along with their three children born in captivity before returning to Canada.

Canadian authorities charged him last week with 15 counts including assault, sexual assault and illegal confinement.

He was also charged with uttering death threats, misleading police, and causing a person to take a "noxious substance."

Court documents allege the crimes were committed after his return to Canada.

The court has ordered a publication ban on the identities of his victims.

In an earlier statement, Coleman did not comment on the specific charges against her husband but blamed "the strain and trauma he was forced to endure for so many years and the effects that that had on his mental state."

She said it was "with compassion and forgiveness that I... hope help and healing can be found for him."

Boyle and Coleman, who married in 2011, were kidnapped by the Taliban during what they described as a backpacking trip through war-torn Afghanistan in 2012. They were later transferred to the custody of the Haqqani faction, known for its alleged ties to the Pakistani military.

Pakistan's military said the family was freed in a daring rescue operation.

But some US and Canadian officials have questioned that account, suggesting to news outlets it may have involved a "negotiated handover" with the Haqqani network which Islamabad is said to covertly back.
Tom Steyer's "Need to Impeach" campaign urged Americans to petition Congress members to impeach President Donald Trump

An American billionaire said Monday he was redoubling his campaign to remove President Donald Trump from office and will plow $30 million into Democrats' efforts to regain control of Congress.

Tom Steyer, who has spent tens of millions of dollars on political campaigns and grassroots voter outreach since 2016, said he would not run for political office this year, as some observers had expected.

Instead, he is focusing on ways to mobilize young voters and flip enough Republican seats to put the House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

The activist and environmentalist, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager, said he had another main goal.

"My job is to remove Donald Trump from office," he told reporters in Washington. "2018 is a battle for the soul of (this) country. That's why I'm all in."

Last year the 60-year-old Steyer launched Need to Impeach, a campaign that urged Americans to petition members of Congress to impeach the president.

That campaign, which now has 4.1 million signatures, began in October with a multi-million-dollar ad buy on cable television. The ad was apparently seen by Trump himself, who branded the Democratic megadonor "wacky and totally unhinged."

Steyer said he now aims to expand the impeachment campaign into a vehicle for "an unprecedented engagement effort" with young American voters in order to help bring about a wave election in November that ousts dozens of Republicans from office.

"This tide will wash away the stain of the Trump administration, and it will not recede until America lives up to its founding creed, until we guarantee equal treatment, dignity and respect to every American," Steyer said.

The new campaign, NextGen Rising, intends to reach more than three million young voters. It claims it will be the largest youth vote effort in US history.

"I am willing to do whatever it takes to help save our country," Steyer said.
US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis visited Pakistan last year and vowed to tread lightly and find "common ground" as Washington pressures its wayward ally to eliminate militant safe havens

The United States has told Pakistan what it must do if it wants Washington to resume paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid, the Pentagon said Monday.

"Our expectations are straightforward," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning told reporters.

"Taliban and Haqqani leadership and attack planners should no longer be able to find safe haven or conduct operations from Pakistani soil."

Last week, President Donald Trump froze payments from the "coalition support fund" for Pakistan, worth $900 million, saying Pakistan is not doing enough to target Afghan Taliban and Haqqani group bases.

The coalition funding is set aside to refund Pakistani spending on counter-terrorist operations.

Also in question is almost $1 billion of US military equipment that has allowed Pakistan access to advanced military technology.

"The United States has conveyed to Pakistan specific and concrete steps that it could take," Manning said.

"We stand ready to work with Pakistan to combat terrorist groups without distinction. We will continue these conversations with the Pakistani government in private."

Pentagon officials are watching to see if Pakistan is going to retaliate against the US by cutting supply lines to US troops from its port at Karachi into Afghanistan.

So far, Manning said, there was no sign Islamabad was preparing to take that course of action.

He stressed that the suspension of funding was not permanent "at this time" and that the money was not being diverted elsewhere.

US officials believe that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and other military bodies have long helped fund and arm the Taliban for ideological reasons, but also to counter rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, whose government is backed by the US.

Islamabad denies those allegations and has called Trump's decision to threaten funding "counterproductive."
Cattle owned by Fulani herdsmen graze in a field outside Kaduna, northwest Nigeria in 2017

At least a dozen people were killed over the weekend in apparent tit-for-tat clashes between farmers and cattle herders in central Nigeria, police and community sources said Monday.

The violence between Christian Bachama farmers and Muslim Fulani herders happened in the Lau district of Taraba state on Friday and Saturday.

Police spokesman David Misal said 12 people were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked Fulani settlements on Friday. A reprisal attack followed on Saturday, he added.

"We recorded four deaths in the Fulani settlements and eight in the Bachama village," he told AFP.

Residents of the affected villages put the death toll at 40. It was not possible to verify either figure independently.

The attacks are the latest in a bloody, long-running dispute over land, exacerbated by religious and ethnic tensions that have killed thousands in recent decades.

The International Crisis Group warned last September the conflict was becoming "as potentially dangerous as the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast".

Herdsman Abdullahi Hamma said suspected Bachama tribesmen launched a dawn attack on his village of Donadda and two others, Babagasa and Katibu.

"We buried 15 bodies of people killed in the attacks on our communities," he added.

On Saturday, Fulani herders stormed Bachama-populated Robi village on motorcycles and opened fire on residents.

"We lost 25 people to an unprovoked attack by Fulani gunmen on our village," said Robi youth leader Felix Uban-Doma.

"Several people were injured."

- 'Spill over' -

Police spokesman Misal said the killings were a "spill over" of similar violence last month in neighbouring Adamawa state. Lau district lies near the state border.

Then, at least 30 Fulani herders were killed by Bachama militia in an attack on four Fulani villages in the Numan district of the state.

The killings led to reprisal attacks by Fulani herders on nearby Bachama villages where several people were killed, leading to an exodus of residents from the area.

"It was those aggrieved by the attack on their kinsmen in Numan that attacked the Fulani communities in Lau, which shares border with Adamawa, and led to the reprisals," Misal said.

Police were deployed in the affected area to contain the violence, said Misal, adding the police arrested three suspects in connection with the violence.

Dozens more people are believed to have been killed in a week of violence between Fulani herders and ethnic Tiv farmers in the Guma and Logo areas of central Benue state.

Benue police spokesman Moses Joel Yamu said it was not yet established how many had died.

"Our primary responsibility is to ensure that lives are protected," he told AFP, adding that reinforcements had been sent to the affected areas.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of the Benue state capital, Makurdi, over attacks on farming communities.

The mainly Muslim nomadic cattle rearers have been clashing with largely Christian farmers over grazing rights in Nigeria for decades.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari -- a Hausa-speaking Fulani from northern Nigeria -- has condemned the deadly clashes as "wicked and callous".

But he has been criticised for not doing more to prevent the attacks.
The Supreme Court said the juror's statement "presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpe's race" played a role in his getting the death sentence

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday ordered a re-examination of the case of a black death row inmate after one of the jurors at his trial questioned whether black people have souls.

The high court in September halted the execution of Keith Tharpe, who was hours away from receiving a lethal injection, after his lawyers argued that racism had played a "pivotal role" in his death sentence.

Tharpe was found guilty of the 1990 murder of his sister-in-law Jaquelin Freeman, which took place as she drove to work with his estranged wife in the southern US state of Georgia.

In 1998, a group that provides free legal assistance to inmates interviewed members of the jury that imposed the death sentence.

One of them was a white man named Barney Gattie, who according to court records said that: "There are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. Niggers."

"Because I knew the victim and her husband's family and knew them all to be good black folks, I felt Tharpe, who wasn't in the 'good' black folks category in my book, should get the electric chair," Gattie said.

The juror also said that study of the Bible had led him to wonder "if black people even have souls."

"Gattie's remarkable affidavit -- which he never retracted -- presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpe's race affected Gattie's vote for a death verdict," the high court wrote in its 6-3 unsigned opinion instructing a lower court to re-examinee the case.

Defense attorney Brian Kammer said in a statement that there was "clear evidence of racial animus on the part of one of the jurors."

Three conservative justices of the court -- Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch -- dissented.

Thomas, the sole African-American Supreme Court justice, called the majority opinion "ceremonial handwringing" that would ultimately delay justice for Freeman.

In several cases in recent years, the US Supreme Court has established that racial prejudice has no place in the American legal system.

Last February, the high court suspended the execution of a Texan who had been cast during his trial as being potentially more dangerous because he was black.

The Supreme Court also ruled in favor of a black man in May 2016 who was sentenced to death by a jury of 12 white people from which black jurors were excluded.
Australian athletes Craig Burns (L) and Luke Sullivan kiss after their marriage ceremony at Summergrove Estate, New South Wales on January 9, 2018

Sharing a kiss as fireworks lit up the night sky, two Australian athletes tied the knot just after midnight Tuesday, in one of the first gay unions in the country following historic marriage equality laws.

Commonwealth Games hopefuls Luke Sullivan, 23, and Craig Burns, 29, said "I do" shortly after the clock struck 12:00 am in rural New South Wales state -- heralding a new chapter for same-sex couples in Australia.

While the historic reforms were given royal assent on December 8, the final step in a process that began with a national postal vote in September, most couples have had to wait 30 days before exchanging vows.

A handful wed last month after seeking exemptions due to their circumstances, including Lauren Price, 31, and Amy Laker, 29, who solemnised their vows in Sydney on December 16.

"We feel very lucky that we get to be one of the first same-sex couples married in Australia," Craig Burns told AFP at the wedding reception in Carool, a picturesque country town close to the popular Gold Coast tourist spot.

"In the past... people couldn't vote, women couldn't vote, so it's like a progression of equality and people wanting acceptance across different backgrounds."

The happy couple were joined by others across the country after parliamentarians in December voted in favour on changing the Marriage Act.

The shift came after decades of political wrangling, and followed an emphatic nationwide voluntary postal vote in support of legalising same-sex marriage.

- Learning curve -

While the historic reforms were given royal assent on December 8, the final step in a process that began with a national postal vote in September, most couples have had to wait 30 days before exchanging vows

Andrew Chatterton and James Hemphill will also marry Tuesday in Adelaide, arranging their wedding in barely a month after becoming engaged on the day the law was passed.

"We've found that some retailers are not quite ready yet for same-sex marriages -- for starters, it was difficult to explain to a jeweller that I was looking for an engagement ring for a man," Chatterton told the Adelaide Advertiser.

"But on the flip side, we have also found that despite some initial confusion, many places have been really enthusiastic about helping us."

Venues and vendors are preparing for a rush of weddings, with the pink dollar tipped to generate Aus$650 million (US$510 million) in the first year if some of the nearly 50,000 same-sex couples tie the knot.

Burns' and Sullivan's Aus$50,000 wedding on the border with NSW and Queensland states was gifted to them by local businesses.

Australia had been seen to be lagging on marriage reform as a growing number of its international peers including the United States and Ireland legalised such unions.

Rob Burns, who was at the Carool wedding reception with his wife Robyn to support their son Craig, said he was not surprised at the time it took for a "conservative country" such as Australia to embrace change.

"It was a real learning curve for us after Craig let us know that he was in fact gay, and now that we know, we wouldn't have him any other way," he told AFP.

"But at that time, it took a little while for us to get used to it because you didn't know, you didn't think about it... It's not going to be easy for everybody else to do it, so that's why it's taken Australia so long."

Gay marriage is now recognised in more than 20 countries, of which 16 are in Europe.
US President Donald Trump, seen here in Nashville, Tennessee on January 8, has also indicated he would talk to Robert Mueller, who is heading up an independent investigation into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign

The White House on Monday refused to say whether President Donald Trump would sit down with investigator Robert Mueller to answer questions about possible collusion between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential race.

"The White House does not comment on communications with the Office of the Special Counsel out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process," a statement from Trump lawyer Ty Cobb read.

Mueller, a former FBI director, is heading up an independent investigation into possible links between Russian activities and the Trump campaign last May.

He may also be looking at whether Trump and his inner circle sought to obstruct justice, which has raised speculation that the president himself would be interviewed.

Trump had said he fired FBI director James Comey in part because of his earlier investigation into Russia and the 2016 election.

Trump has also indicated he would talk to Mueller, although the political and legal risks of a sitting president being questioned by the special prosecutor are manifold.

Two of Trump's campaign aides have already admitted to lying to investigators and have become cooperative witnesses for the investigation.
The Apalachicola Bay in Florida in September 2017 after Hurricane Irma

The US Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday in a bitter fight over water pitting two American states against each other.

On one side in the decades-old dispute is the state of Georgia.

On the other is its southern neighbor, Florida.

Florida v. Georgia concerns the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers, which originate in Georgia, join to become the Apalachicola River and flow downstream into Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Florida is seeking to have restrictions imposed on how much water Georgia can use from the rivers, arguing that the state's once-lucrative oyster industry in the Apalachicola Bay is drying up.

"Florida has suffered real harm as a result of Georgia's ever-increasing consumption of upstream waters," Gregory Garre, an attorney for the state, told the nine Supreme Court justices.

"Georgia's consumption is unreasonable and largely unrestrained," Garre said.

Georgia argues that the water is needed to provide for farmers in the "Peach State" and for Atlanta, a thriving metropolis of more than five million people that is also the headquarters of Coca-Cola.

- Oyster fishery collapse -

"Florida has not made the case that it needs more water at a time when there is plenty of rain and water in the system," said Craig Primis, an attorney for Georgia.

Workers process Apalachicola oysters

"That water just will wash out to sea and won't benefit anybody," Primis said.

Justice Elena Kagan appeared to lend a sympathetic ear to the arguments of Florida but it was unclear from Monday's arguments how the court will rule.

"You have common sense on your side," Kagan told the attorney from Florida.

The Apalachicola Bay in Florida's panhandle on the state's "Forgotten Coast" was among the top oyster-producing regions in the country until recently.

The Apalachicola Bay once provided 10 percent of the oysters in the United States and 90 percent of those sold in Florida.

But the oyster fishery collapsed in 2012 because of drought, over-fishing and increased salinity in the Apalachicola Bay due to decreased freshwater flow.

To save its oyster industry, the "Sunshine State" launched a legal battle two decades ago which has cost tens of millions of dollars.

Ralph Lancaster, a court-appointed "special master" named to look into the case, found last year that Florida had suffered from the reduced flow of the rivers.

But he determined that no remedy could be found without the participation of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The corps controls five dams on the Chattahoochee River but it is not a party to the lawsuit and answers to Congress.
NEW YORK (AP) - With new options and conveniences, there's never been a better time for shoppers. As for workers ... well, not always.

The retail industry is being radically reshaped by technology, and nobody feels that disruption more starkly than 16 million American shelf stockers, salespeople, cashiers and others. The shifts are driven, like much in retail, by the Amazon effect - the explosion of online shopping and the related changes in consumer behavior and preferences.

As mundane tasks like checkout and inventory are automated, employees are trying to deliver the kind of customer service the internet can't match.

In this Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, photo, Laila Ummelaila, a personal shopper at the Walmart store in Old Bridge, N.J., collects items as she shops for online shoppers. Personal shoppers collect items on online orders and greet customers at a pickup location in the parking lot. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

So a Best Buy employee who used to sell electronics in the store is dispatched to customers' homes to help them choose just the right products. A Walmart worker dashes in and out of the grocery aisles, hand-picks products for online shoppers and brings them to people's cars.

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Editor's note: This story is part of Future of Work, an Associated Press series that explores how workplaces across the U.S. and the world are being transformed by technology and global pressures. As more employers move, shrink or revamp their work sites, many employees are struggling to adapt. At the same time, workers with in-demand skills or knowledge are benefiting. Advanced training, education or know-how is becoming a required ticket to the 21st-century workplace.

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Yet even as responsibilities change - and in many cases, expand - the average growth in pay for retail workers isn't keeping pace with the rest of the economy. Some companies say that in the long run the transformation could mean fewer retail workers, though they may be better paid. But while some workers feel more satisfied, others find their jobs are just a lot less fun.

Bloomingdale's saleswoman Brenda Moses remembers the pre-internet era, when the upscale store was regularly filled with customers ready to buy. These days, department stores are less crowded and the customers who do come in can make price comparisons on their phones at the same time as they pepper staff with questions.

"You tell them everything, and then they look at you and say, 'You know what? I think I will get it online,'" she said.

Moses has seen her commission rate rise to 6 percent from a half a percent, but her hourly wage dropped from $19 as low as $10 before it came back up to $14. Depending more on commissions means her income fluctuates, and she's competing with her colleagues for each sale.

"Now," Moses said, "you have to fight to make your money."

The same could be said for the retailing industry, overall. In 2017, 66,500 U.S. retail jobs disappeared (not taking into account jobs added in areas like distribution and call centers). In the past decade, about one out of every seven jobs have vanished in the hardest-hit sectors like clothing and consumer electronics, says Frank Badillo, director of research at MacroSavvy LLC. Though department stores have suffered the most, smaller businesses also have struggled to compete with online sellers.

Many of the survivors are rushing to adapt. Of the retail jobs that remain, over the next decade as many as 60 percent will either be new kinds of roles or will involve revised duties, says Craig Rowley, senior client partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a human resources advisory firm. He estimates the number is about 10 percent now.

How fast retail jobs will change and what they'll look like depends on three factors, Rowley said: the pace at which online shopping advances; the speed at which robotics and other technology progress; and shifts in the minimum hourly pay.

"Jobs for workers will get more interesting and be more impactful on the company's business," Rowley said. "But the negative side is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs and there will be more pressure to perform."

Some retail workers at the vanguard of the changes - like Laila Ummelaila, a personal grocery shopper at a Walmart in Old Bridge, New Jersey - speak glowingly of their new responsibilities.

Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, has scrutinized every job in its stores as it looks to leverage its more than 4,000 U.S. locations against Amazon's internet dominance.

The company now has 18,000 personal shoppers who fill online orders from store shelves, and 17,000 check-out hosts whose responsibilities are more extensive than the greeters of old, including keeping the area clean and making sure registers move efficiently. The company has also shifted workers from back-room clerical jobs and eliminated some overnight stocker positions in favor of more daytime sales help. The customers like the changes, company officials say, pointing to more than three years of sales growth at its established U.S. stores - a contrast with other, suffering retailers.

Ummelaila became a personal shopper after joining the company three years ago. To meet her store's goals, she must pick one item per 30 seconds. If she can't find something, she has to quickly get a substitute that's as good or better.

"You start to get to know the customers, you know what they like," she said, "how they like their meat ... and how long they keep milk in the fridge."

Best Buy, meanwhile, has begun a free service in key markets where salespeople will sit with customers in their own homes and make recommendations on setting up a home office to designing a home theater system. Best Buy said shoppers spend more with a home visit than they do at the stores. The project follows Amazon, which reportedly has been testing a program that sends employees to shoppers' houses for free "smart home" recommendations.

At Steve Frederick's townhouse in Chicago, Billy Schuler offered advice about speakers that can be adjusted from a smartphone. Schuler, who had previously worked at Best Buy for 14 years, returned to the company to take on the new role.

"Customers are more relaxed when they are in their home," he said. "We can do a walkthrough of the house and see their needs." He likes to "break the ice" by calling the person and chatting a day or two before the visit.

Frederick, who's spending close to $20,000 on the equipment, describes himself as "old-school" and says he needed a lot of help. He thinks it was worthwhile.

"When you are spending that kind of money, you want to have someone come in and explain it," he said.

Schuler declined to give specifics but says he is well compensated. Ummelaila says her pay went up to nearly $12 per hour from $10 when she became a personal shopper.

Target credits its strategy of assigning dedicated sales staff in areas such as clothing, consumer electronics, and beauty for helping increase sales, and says having visual merchandisers create vignettes like shoppers would see in specialty stores inspires people to buy. "You are making an outfit and telling a story on each rack," says Crystal Lawrence, who works at a Target store in Brooklyn, New York. She likes the variety in her new job, and Target says it plans to keep paying higher wages for those specialized roles.

But a survey of nearly 300 retail workers - conducted by the Center for Frontline Retail and Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center - found that of those workers whose job responsibilities have changed, more than 40 percent said they hadn't received pay increases to reflect that.

Wages for hourly retail workers have risen less than 9 percent since 1990, compared with 18 percent for overall workers in the private sector. There has been some progress recently; some of the biggest retailers, like Walmart and Target, have made moves to increase pay in the face of low unemployment and competition for workers.

"For a long period, these retail jobs were just terrible on average," said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute. "Retail stores have been following one strategy: high turnover, low wages. That strategy is no longer viable."

Mandel sees hope in technology, which he says has historically created more and better-paying jobs than it has eliminated.

The National Retail Federation trade group points to government data showing that even in large supermarket chains where self-checkout has become standard, the number of employees per store has held steady over the 15 years through 2014. And the demand for grocery cashiers increased in the past few years, says Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes labor market data.

McDonald's says the self-serve kiosks it has been rolling out won't result in mass layoffs, but will mean that some cashiers shift roles to accommodate changes like offering table service.

But a report prepared by Cornerstone Capital Group for the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute predicts that more than 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being eliminated by automation over the next several years.

Amazon is testing a grocery store in Seattle without cashiers, using cameras and shelf sensors to keep track of the items that shoppers grab and charge them. Eatsa, an automat-style restaurant in San Francisco, lacks cashiers as well - diners order at kiosks and workers prepare the food behind an opaque wall, with virtually no interaction between them.

Labor groups are trying to address some of the new issues. Under a contract reached last May between Bloomingdale's and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Moses and other members who work at the flagship store in Manhattan can also get commissions from some online sales.

And a labor group representing 1.3 million grocery and food workers is trying to combat automation by highlighting that workers' specialized skills - like the care they take in icing a rose on a wedding cake, or arranging flowers, or the ability of human workers to recognize spoiled food - provide a benefit to shoppers.

"Separating progress for the consumer, for the worker, for the economy versus the stockholders ... those are completely different things," says Erikka Knuti, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Others say automation and happy workers are not necessarily incompatible.

Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon foresees fewer sales associates at his stores, but they'll be better paid and better trained. Walmart has trained 225,000 supervisors and managers on topics like new apps and better customer service. It says managers who go through the academies have better retention rates than those who do not. Workers who report to those managers stay longer. And entry-level workers who complete a new training program are more likely to remain.

It's a shift retailers may have to speed up. Government figures show the rate of retail workers quitting their jobs in 2016 was at its highest since 2007.

Alfredo Duran, who started as a sales associate at Gap and worked at six retailers over 15 years, left the industry two years ago. As a manager at clothing chain Mango, he was making $75,000 a year. But once the store closed, he had trouble finding another job in retail because no one wanted to pay him for his experience.

"It's gone down. One person is doing three jobs. And you can't move up," said Duran, 38, of Queens, New York.

He's now a concierge at a Manhattan hotel, making half of what he used to earn - but happy he left retail.

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AP Video journalists Terry Chea in San Francisco and Teresa Crawford in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Follow Anne D'Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

In this Nov. 17, 2017, photo taken from video, Billy Schuler, Best Buy in-home advisor, left, speaks with homeowner and customer Steve Frederick, at Frederick's home in Chicago. Schuler offered advice about speakers that can be adjusted from a smartphone. Best Buy has begun a free service in key markets where salespeople will sit with customers in their own homes and make recommendations on setting up a home office to designing a home theater system. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)

In this Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, photo, Laila Ummelaila, a personal shopper at the Walmart store in Old Bridge, N.J., pulls a cart with bins as she shops for online shoppers. Personal shoppers collect items on online orders and greet customers at a pickup location in the parking lot. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

FILE - In this Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2015, file photo, people wait for their lunch orders to be ready at Eatsa in San Francisco. Eatsa, an automat-style restaurant, doesn't have cashiers, and diners order at kiosks while workers prepare the food behind an opaque wall, with virtually no interaction between them. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

FILE - In this Friday, Oct. 13, 2017, file photo, Target human resources representative Critsina Lugo, seated, talks with a job seeker at a Target store in Dallas. Shifting shopper habits spell disruption for retail workers, who have new duties, different roles, or are fighting for customers. Some of the biggest retailers, like Walmart and Target, have made moves to increase pay in the face of low unemployment and competition for workers. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

In a Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, photo, Laila Ummelaila, left, a personal shopper at the Walmart store in Old Bridge, N.J., helps customer Vicky Soler verify her order at an online shopping pickup location. Personal shoppers collect items on online orders and greet customers at the pickup location in the parking lot. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

In this Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, photo, Setal Gandhi, a department manager at a Walmart store in Secaucus, N.J., demonstrates how shoppers can pick up online orders at a tower near the entrance of the store. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

In this Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017, photo, Walmart employee Kenneth White, left, is coached by Shabazz Bonner while using an inventory app during a class at the Walmart Academy at the store in North Bergen, N.J. The retail industry is being radically reshaped by technology and nobody feels that disruption more starkly than the 16 million Americans working as shelf stockers, salespeople and cashiers. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Struggling to score goals and with several important offensive players sidelined, the Columbus Blue Jackets pulled out a gritty win - just the way coach John Tortorella wants his team to play.

Josh Anderson scored the deciding goal in the eighth round of the shootout, lifting the Blue Jackets to a 3-2 victory over the Florida Panthers on Sunday night.

"That scratching, clawing, spitting, biting doing everything you can to win the game, we did it," Tortorella said.

Columbus Blue Jackets' Josh Anderson, left, tries to take the puck away from Florida Panthers' Mark Pysyk during the second period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky stopped Jared McCann's attempt to secure the win for the Blue Jackets, who also got goals from Artemi Panarin and Jack Johnson in the tiebreaker. Aleksander Barkov, who tied the score with 1:34 left in the third period, and Mike Matheson scored in the shootout for Florida.

"It was a good point," Panthers coach Bob Boughner said after his team lost its third straight. "It was a hard fought point against a real good hockey club. Both teams had good goaltending. We've just got to take this and move on."

Nick Foligno and rookie Pierre-Luc Dubois scored power-play goals for Columbus - just the second time this season the NHL's worst man-advantage unit has come through twice, and both against Florida. Bobrovsky, who took an errant stick under his chin in the final period, had 42 saves through overtime to help the Blue Jackets win for just the fourth time in 11 games (4-6-1).

"We threw a lot of pucks at them and we were able to get a couple big power play goals," Columbus forward Boone Jenner said.

Jonathan Huberdeau also scored for the Panthers and James Reimer stopped 46 shots. Florida's streak has followed a five-game winning streak to close December.

Reimer was clutch in the third period, keeping his team within one goal while making several tough saves in the opening few minutes and later turning aside a breakaway by Dubois.

"He gave us a chance and he definitely was a big part of us getting a point," Boughner said of Reimer, who made his 14th straight start. "You always wish you had two. We had some great chances in overtime and it would have been nice to win it for him."

With the Panthers trailing late in regulation and the teams skating 4-on-4, the puck deflected off the skate of Foligno to Barkov, who slammed it past Bobrovksy for his 13th to even the score.

"The third period I thought we played really well and we just couldn't score a third goal," Tortorella said. "And you knew it was going to happen (that Florida would tie the game)."

Foligno opened the scoring at 9:47 of the first period, wristing a rebound from the slot over Reimer's glove for his first in 11 games.

Huberdeau made it 1-1 just 31 seconds into the second period on the power play with his 15th, a redirection near the crease on pass from Barkov. Huberdeau has scored six times in his last seven games.

Later in the period, Jones zipped a pass from the right side that Dubois tapped in for his ninth on a bang-bang play.

"Our power play hasn't been working this year but I think in our past couple games we're getting closer and closer," Dubois said.

NOTES: Columbus is still without injured forwards Brandon Dubinsky, Cam Atkinson and Alexander Wennberg. ... Florida RW Radim Vrbata missed his fifth consecutive game because of an illness. ...The Blue Jackets are 17-4-3 when scoring first. ... The Panthers, completing the first half of their 82-game schedule, had gone seven contests without a power-play goal.

UP NEXT

Blue Jackets: At Toronto on Monday night.

Panthers: At St. Louis on Tuesday night.

Columbus Blue Jackets' Artemi Panarin, right, of Russia, carries the puck past Florida Panthers' Derek MacKenzie during the second period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Florida Panthers' Aleksander Barkov, right, of Finland, carries the puck upice as Columbus Blue Jackets' Artemi Panarin, of Russia, defends during the third period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Columbus Blue Jackets' Jack Johnson celebrates his goal against the Florida Panthers during the shootout period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Columbus Blue Jackets' Scott Harrington, right, checks Florida Panthers' Denis Malgin, of Switzerland, during the third period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Florida Panthers' Mike Matheson, left, and Columbus Blue Jackets' Artemi Panarin, of Russia, fight for the puck during the second period of an NHL hockey game Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)
BANGALORE, India (AP) - A fire in a restaurant early Monday killed five workers who were sleeping inside the building in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, police said.

Police officer M.N. Anucheth said the fire broke out after customers left and the sleeping workers were trapped on the ground floor of the Kumbaara Sangha building.

He said the cause of the fire is being investigated.

An Indian police official inspects a burnt restaurant in Kalasipalyam district, a busy and congested area in Bangalore, India, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. A fire in the restaurant early Monday killed five workers who were sleeping inside the building, police said. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

The restaurant is located in Kalasipalyam district, a busy and congested area in the heart of Bangalore, one of India's information technology hubs, in southern Karnataka state.

The Press Trust of India news agency said the five were burned to death.

Last month, a massive late-night fire in a restaurant at a Mumbai complex killed 15 people. The fire raised questions about fire safety norms in pubs and restaurants, leading to safety checks in Mumbai and other cities.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - James Franco took what was arguably the worst performance in movie history and turned it into what was arguably his own greatest role, taking home a Golden Globe on Sunday for "The Disaster Artist" that puts him on the inside track for an Academy Award nomination.

Franco played Tommy Wiseau, Hollywood cult hero of mysterious origins and the force behind the worst-best-film-ever "The Room," in "The Disaster Artist."

"First person I have to thank is the man himself, Tommy Wiseau, come on up here Tommy!" Franco shouted when he accepted the award.

James Franco arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Wiseau darted out of his chair, ran across the room, and leapt up to the stage with his long, dyed-black hair and sunglasses looking, as Franco's friend and co-star Seth Rogen described him earlier in the show, "like Johnny Depp went to a costume party dressed as a vampire."

Franco's remarks were as much an acceptance speech for Wiseau as they were for Franco himself.

"Nineteen years ago he was stuck in traffic and saw a sign for the Golden Globes," said Franco, who then broke into Wiseau's mystery accent as he did in the film. "Golden Globz, I don't care, I'm not invited. Guy with long hair, accent. So I show them. I don't wait for Hollywood, I make my own movie."

Wiseau was among the most popular partners for celebrities posing for photos on the red carpet Sunday.

Franco, 39, a clear but not overwhelming favorite in the category, beat out fellow nominees Steve Carell for "Battle of the Sexes," Ansel Elgort for "Baby Driver," Hugh Jackman for "The Greatest Showman" and Daniel Kaluuya for "Get Out."

It was Franco's first Golden Globe for a film role in his third nomination in the movie categories.

He won a Golden Globe playing the title character in the 2002 biopic "James Dean."

His one previous Oscar nomination came in 2011 for "127 Hours."

The 39-year-old Franco later shifted to earnest in his speech, saying the movie was a sincere story of friendship, thanking Rogen and his brother Dave, who co-starred as his best friend in the film.

"I used to want my own Coen brother, someone to collaborate with," James Franco said. "I realized I had a Franco brother. Thanks to my mother for giving him to me."

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For full coverage of awards season, visit: https://apnews.com/tag/AwardsSeason
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - An appeals court on Monday upheld the prison sentence of an Australian woman convicted of providing commercial surrogacy services in Cambodia.

Judge Kim Dany said the appeals court found the lower court conviction of Tammy Davis-Charles complied with Cambodian law and therefore upheld the verdict. She did not take questions from media during the court appearance.

Davis-Charles is serving one and a half years in prison after being convicted last August. During the court appearance last year, Davis-Charles said she has "lost everything" since her arrest and wants to be reunited with her family in Australia, including her twin sons.

Tammy Davis-Charles, second left, gets off from a van at an appeals court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. An appeals court on Monday upheld the prison sentence of the Australian woman convicted of providing commercial surrogacy services in Cambodia. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodia banned commercial surrogacy in 2016 after becoming a popular destination for would-be parents seeking women to give birth to their children.

Davis-Charles was arrested in November 2016, within weeks of the ban.

She has said she launched her business in Cambodia only after consulting three local lawyers who assured her the clinic was legal. The surrogates were paid $10,000 for each pregnancy, she has said.

Surrogacy costs are much lower in developing countries than in nations such as the United States and Australia, where services cost around $150,000. The surrogacy business boomed in Cambodia after being restricted in neighboring Thailand, in India and in Nepal.

After Cambodia's crackdown, the trade has shifted to neighboring Laos.

The judge said Davis-Charles could appeal to the Supreme Court if she is not satisfied with Monday's court decision.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - They are separated by almost 40 years, grew up on different continents, and lead films that couldn't be more different, but the two best actress winners at the Golden Globes Sunday, Frances McDormand, 60, and Saoirse Ronan, 23, agreed that the night was something special - the awards themselves were just almost a side show.

McDormand, who won for portraying the vengeful and grieving mother of a daughter who was raped and murdered in Martin McDonagh's "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," said that while she keeps her politics private that, "It was really great to be in this room tonight and to be part of the tectonic shift in our industry's power structure."

"Trust me," McDormand continued, "The women in this room tonight are not here for the food. We are here for the work."

This image released by NBC shows Saoirse Ronan accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for her role in "Lady Bird," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP)

She won her first individual Golden Globe ever in the best actress in a drama category over Jessica Chastain ("Molly's Game"), Sally Hawkins ("The Shape of Water"), Meryl Streep ("The Post") and Michelle Williams ("All the Money in the World").

Backstage when a reporter asked McDormand if there was any danger of Hollywood returning to its old ways, McDormand said sternly, "What do you think?"

"No, there's no going back," she said eventually. "Go forward. In the best possible way."

"Lady Bird" star Saoirse Ronan, meanwhile, also picked up her first Golden Globe win for best actress in a musical or comedy Sunday night.

"I wanted to say how inspirational it has been to be here tonight," Ronan said in a short and sweet speech, where also said "hi" to her mother in Ireland, not on TV, but on FaceTime on a personal phone that someone in the audience held up to the podium. She hugged her movie mom, Laurie Metcalf, as she made her way to the stage.

Ronan plays the title character in the Greta Gerwig-written and directed coming-of-age film "Lady Bird," about a teenage girl in her last year of high school in Sacramento in 2002. The film also won best musical or comedy.

"It's an incredibly special thing to have a character like this exist now finally," Ronan said backstage, alongside Gerwig.

Ronan, who had previously picked up nominations for "Brooklyn" and "Atonement," was up against Margot Robbie ("I, Tonya"), Emma Stone ("Battle of the Sexes"), Judi Dench ("Victoria & Abdul") and Helen Mirren ("The Leisure Seeker").

___

For full coverage of awards season, visit: https://apnews.com/tag/AwardsSeason

Saoirse Ronan arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

This image released by NBC shows Frances McDormand, left, accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP)

This image released by NBC shows Frances McDormand accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP)

This image released by NBC shows Saoirse Ronan accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for her role in "Lady Bird," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP)
The Trump administration is ending special protections for Salvadoran immigrants, forcing nearly 200,000 to leave the country or face deportation, officials said Monday.

El Salvador is the fourth country whose citizens have lost Temporary Protected Status under President Donald Trump, and they have been, by far, the largest beneficiaries of the program, which provides humanitarian relief for foreigners whose countries are hit with natural disasters or other strife.

Two U.S. officials discussed the decision on condition of anonymity with The Associated Press because they were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the announcement.

One official said Salvadorans will have until September 2019 to leave the country or adjust their legal status.

Scroll down for video

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's decision, while not surprising, will send shivers through parts of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and other metropolitan areas that are home to large numbers of Salvadorans

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's decision, while not surprising, will send shivers through parts of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and other metropolitan areas that are home to large numbers of Salvadorans, who have enjoyed special protection since earthquakes struck the Central American country in 2001.

Many have established deep roots in the U.S., starting families and businesses over decades.

It also represents a serious challenge for El Salvador, a country of 6.2 million people whose economy depends on remittances from wage earners in the U.S.

Over the last decade, growing numbers of Salvadorans - many coming as families or unaccompanied children - have entered the United States illegally through Mexico, fleeing violence and poverty.

In September 2016, the Obama administration extended protections for 18 months, saying El Salvador suffered lingering harm from the 2001 earthquakes that killed more than 1,000 people and was temporarily unable to absorb such a large number of people.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen faced a Monday deadline to decide whether to grant another extension.

El Salvador President Salvador Sanchez Ceren spoke by phone Friday with Nielsen to renew his plea to extend status for 190,000 Salvadorans and allow more time for Congress to deliver a long-term fix for them to stay in the U.S.

The decision comes amid intensifying talks between the White House and Congress on an immigration package that may include protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the country as children and were temporarily shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program.

Trump said in September that he was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, but gave Congress until March to act.

The U.S. created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to provide a safe haven from countries affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war and other disasters, and it currently shields nearly 320,000 people from 10 countries.

Horror: Special Protected Status was introduced in 2001 in the wake of an earthquake on the country which killed 1,000, left thousands more homeless and led to a surge of migration out of El Salvador

Scenes of devastation: The 2001 earthquake devastated the country. The most recent extension to the special immigration status was 18 months ago, when the Obama administration ruled that El Salvador would be unable to absorb 190,000 people returning

There are nearly 440,000 beneficiaries from the 10 countries, including 263,000 from El Salvador, but many have obtained legal status other ways.

The benefit, which includes work authorization, can be renewed up to 18 months at a time by the Homeland Security secretary.

Critics say it has proved anything but temporary - with many beneficiaries staying years after the initial justification applies.

Nielsen said last week that short-term extensions are not the answer.

'Getting them to a permanent solution is a much better plan than having them live six months to 12 months to 18 months,' she told the AP.

In November, Nielsen's predecessor, acting Secretary Elaine Duke, ended the protection for Haitians, requiring about 50,000 to leave or adjust their legal status by July 22, 2019, and for Nicaraguans, giving about 2,500 until Jan. 5, 2019.

She delayed a decision affecting more than 50,000 Hondurans, foisting the decision onto Nielsen.

Last year, the Trump administration extended status for South Sudan and ended it for Sudan.

Other countries covered are Nepal, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

From day No. 1 of his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to take a hard-line approach to immigration, even going as far as to claim illegal Mexican immigrants living the the country were 'rapists.'

He's still pressuring Congress to allocate funds for his proposed border wall, between the U.S.-Mexico border.

The White House requested $18 billion from Congress this week to fund the beginning stages of the wall.

During the campaign he had promised that Mexico would 'pay for it.' The country has refused.

Also, during the president's first year of office he's tried to limit travel into the U.S., by backing a controversial ban that mainly targeted Muslim-majority countries.

In December, the Supreme Court allowed a revised version of the ban to go into effect while court challenges continue.

Citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Chad and North Korea are barred from entering the United States, along with some groups of people from Venezuela.
LONDON (AP) - Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to re-energize her government with a Cabinet shake-up Monday as Britain prepares for a crucial phase in the negotiations over its departure from the European Union.

But May, who heads a minority government divided over Brexit, had limited room to make changes, and the overhaul could reinforce perceptions that her authority is fragile.

The most powerful ministers remained in place, and Education Secretary Justine Greening quit the government after refusing to move to a new post.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, center, with the new Conservative Party Chairman Brandon Lewis, left and his new deputy James Cleverly, pose on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street as May begins to reshuffle her Cabinet in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Brexit Secretary David Davis, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Treasury chief Philip Hammond all kept their jobs. So did Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, a frequent target of criticism over failings in the state-funded National Health Service.

May's decision to keep them in their jobs was in part a reflection of her need to balance Brexit-backing ministers like Johnson and Davis with more pro-EU politicians such as Hammond and Rudd.

May's shuffle also was complicated by the resignation of the U.K.'s minister for Northern Ireland amid a long-running political crisis in Belfast. James Brokenshire said he was quitting because he is about to have surgery for a lesion on his lung and will need time to recover.

In a letter to May, Brokenshire said the operation meant he would not "be able to give the effort, energy and complete focus needed at this important time." He was replaced by Karen Bradley, who moved from the sports and culture department.

Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration has been suspended for a year amid a stalemate between the main Irish nationalist and British unionist parties. The parties in Belfast have missed several government-imposed deadlines to restore power sharing, and Northern Ireland faces direct rule from London if a solution is not found soon.

The status of the border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland also remains a major issue in Brexit negotiations.

Britain and the EU are set to begin discussing their future relations, with just over a year to go until the U.K. is set to leave the bloc on March 29, 2019.

May hopes to secure agreement on a post-Brexit transition period by the end of March and to draft a withdrawal agreement by the end of the year.

As Parliament returned from its Christmas break Monday, May summoned ministers to 10 Downing St. to be moved, promoted or demoted.

She removed Patrick McLoughlin, who as Conservative Party chairman oversaw last year's disastrous election campaign. The party lost its majority in Parliament after May called a snap election in what became a failed bid to consolidate her grip on power and to strengthen her hand in the Brexit talks.

May lost a key Cabinet ally before Christmas, when de-facto deputy leader Damian Green was forced to resign for making misleading statements about pornography found on his office computer.

His role as May's chief lieutenant was filled by David Lidington, who bears the grand title of minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

May is set to continue shuffling government ranks on Tuesday. While Brexit divisions have restricted her options, she is looking to make her Conservative government more representative of Britain by promoting more women, people from ethnic minorities and recently elected lawmakers to leadership posts.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May returns to 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, ahead of an expected Cabinet reshuffle. The British Prime Minister is preparing to shuffle her Cabinet as she tries to bolster her authority ahead of a crucial new phase in Brexit negotiations. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May returns to 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, ahead of an expected Cabinet reshuffle. The British Prime Minister is preparing to shuffle her Cabinet as she tries to bolster her authority ahead of a crucial new phase in Brexit negotiations. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, right, with the new Conservative Party Chairman Brandon Lewis, pose on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street as May begins to reshuffle her Cabinet in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson walks to the Foreign Office as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to reshuffle her cabinet ministers in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. The British Prime Minister is preparing to shuffle her Cabinet as she tries to bolster her authority ahead of a crucial new phase in Brexit negotiations. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson arrives at 10 Downing Street to be reconfirmed as Foreign Secretary, as Prime Minister Theresa May begins to reshuffle her Cabinet in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Britain's Health and Social Care Secretary Jeremy Hunt walks into 10 Downing Street for a meeting about his portfolio as Prime Minister Theresa May begins to reshuffle her Cabinet in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Former education secretary Justine Greening leaves 10 Downing Street in London, following her resignation from the Government Cabinet, Monday Jan. 8, 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May is known to be reshuffling her government team including Cabinet jobs and other ministerial positions. (John Stillwell/PA via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, second right, with the new Conservative Party Chairman Brandon Lewis, center, and his new deputy James Cleverly, right, pose on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, as May begins to reshuffle her Cabinet in London, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Warsaw town hall says the city mayor's husband has returned money obtained from property restitution that was found to be unlawful, a case that had burdened Poland's main centrist opposition party.

Restitution of private property previously seized by the communist authorities has bred many irregularities blamed on Warsaw Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz. She used to be a prominent member of the centrist, pro-European Union party Civic Platform - currently the main, albeit weak, opposition to the right-wing government.

Gronkiewicz-Waltz's husband obtained restitution of a house in Warsaw in a 2003 decision that - a special commission recently said - was unlawful. The commission ordered the return of proceeds the family earned in then selling the house.

FILE - In this Monday, Sept. 19, 2016 file photo, shows an apartment building freshly renovated by an international developer group that bought the house from the husband of Warsaw Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, in Warsaw, Poland. Warsaw town hall says the city mayor's husband has returned money obtained from property restitution that was found to be unlawful, a case that had burdened Poland's main centrist opposition party. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)

Warsaw town hall said Monday the money, some 1.1 million zlotys ($318,000) has been returned.
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Romania's prime minister failed Monday to deliver the government reshuffle he planned as the powerful leader of his party ruled that any changes would have to wait until the end of the month.

There has been mounting speculation in Bucharest that Premier Mihai Tudose wants to replace Liviu Dragnea, the current chairman of the Social Democratic Party who is facing corruption charges, with a committee of regional leaders.

In an open letter published in Romanian media, senior party member Nicolae Badalau urged colleagues to back efforts to make the party more democratic, to be run by "a collective party leadership."

Dragnea, who can't serve as prime minister due to a 2016 conviction for vote-rigging, still enjoys the support of most regional party bosses.

While playing down talk of rifts in the party and denying he personally had a tense relationship with the prime minister, Dragnea said any reshuffle had to be conducted through normal party channels.

Dragnea said the Social Democrats would hold another party meeting at the end of the month. Tudose said he would present his plans to reshuffle the government then.

Separately, prosecutors froze Dragnea's assets in November amid a probe into the misuse of European Union funds. He denies wrongdoing.

Last year, huge anti-government protests erupted over moves to restructure Romania's justice system, which critics say would make it harder to crack down on high-level corruption.

Dragnea and his allies back the proposals.
PRAGUE (AP) - One of Prague's major tourist attractions, its medieval astronomical clock, was stopped Monday and is to be taken away for months for major repairs.

The clock last performed its hourly show of the 12 apostles and other figures for crowds of visitors to the Czech capital on Monday at 9 a.m.

Prague officials say the clock that was installed on the City Hall's tower in 1410 will be completely disassembled and its parts taken for restoration, the first complex fix since World War II.

Tourists stand in front of the famed astronomical clock at the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. Workers stopped the famous medieval astronomical clock on Monday and parts will be taken off site for months for major repairs. Prague officials say the clock installed on the City Hall's tower in 1410 will be completely disassembled and taken for its first comprehensive restoration since World War II. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

The entire City Hall with the clock were badly damaged in the war and the some of the postwar restoration works were not done properly and need to be fixed.

"It's a necessary and responsible move to preserve it for the generations to come," city councilman Jan Wolf said.

The clock is expected to be back in its place in the late summer.

There are a number of legends linked to the clock. One of them says the entire nation will suffer when it stops running. Record flooding hit Prague and large parts of the Czech Republic in 2002, causing the clock to stop.

In 2011, it was shut down for a three-week repair, and again later that year for five minutes when Vaclav Havel died, to honor the former president.

Tourists take a photo of the famed astronomical clock at the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. Workers stopped the famous medieval astronomical clock on Monday and parts will be taken off site for months for major repairs. Prague officials say the clock installed on the City Hall's tower in 1410 will be completely disassembled and taken for its first comprehensive restoration since World War II. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Florida wildlife officials say 538 manatees were found dead in the state's waterways last year.

That's the third-highest annual death toll on record for the large marine mammals.

In a Daytona Beach News-Journal report , Volusia County's manatee protection program manager, Debbie Wingfield, said a high number of manatee deaths wasn't unexpected because there's a growing number of manatees in Florida.

Michelle Kerr, a spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's research institute in St. Petersburg, said red tide algae blooms were identified as "a significant contributing factor" to manatee deaths overall in 2017.

Statewide, 106 manatee deaths were attributed to watercraft collisions. Kerr said watercraft collisions account for about 20 percent of manatee deaths over the past five years.

___

Information from: Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, http://www.news-journalonline.com
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) - A wealthy Bulgarian businessman has been shot to death outside his company's office in the capital, Sofia.

Police say 49-year-old Petar Hristov was shot while getting into his car at 10 a.m. Monday. Eyewitnesses said the shots came from a nearby car.

Hristov was taken to a hospital but died of his wounds half an hour later.

"There are most likely business interests behind the killing," chief of national police Hristo Terziyski told reporters.

Hristov was the owner of a large dairy company but was also active in construction, real estate and tourism.

The killing comes only a week after Bulgaria took over the six-month, rotating presidency of the European Union, which the Balkan country joined in 2007. Ever since, it has been subject to criticism by Brussels for failing to efficiently fight corruption and organized crime.
LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) - A Pakistani official says 147 Indians detained for fishing illegally have been released from prison and handed over to Indian authorities.

The South Asian rivals often arrest fishermen suspected of trespassing in their territorial waters and then periodically release large numbers of them in what is billed as goodwill gestures.

Pakistan released 145 Indian fishermen last month and 220 the previous year. India reciprocated after the 2016 release, but freed a smaller number of Pakistani fishermen.

Maj. Azam Sher, spokesman for Pakistan's paramilitary rangers, said the 147 were allowed to cross the border into India on Monday.

There was no immediate comment from the Indian side.
SEATTLE (AP) - A yearlong Associated Press analysis found more than a dozen firearms sold by law enforcement agencies in Washington state since 2010 later became evidence in new criminal investigations.

Identifying guns sold by law enforcement and matching them to new crimes required extensive research and dozens of public records requests to individual agencies.

Using those records, the AP created a database of almost 6,000 firearms sold by law enforcement since 2010. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives declined to release tracking information on guns associated with crimes, so the AP collected that information from individual agencies and compared it with its own database to find firearms with matching make, model, caliber and serial numbers.

This 2014 photo provided by the Yakima Police Department shows a Smith & Wesson 9-mm pistol on a table in the apartment where Kyle Juhl used it to kill himself in Yakima, Wash. The pistol that Juhl used to kill himself was familiar to law enforcement: The Washington State Patrol had seized it years earlier while investigating a crime and then arranged its sale back to the public. It eventually fell into Juhl's hands, illegally. (Amber Ross/Yakima Police Department via AP)

Below are details about guns sold by law enforcement that were later picked up at crime scenes:

BABY SHOT IN CAR SEAT

The Washington State Patrol traded a batch of crime guns with a firearms dealer in June 2010. The batch included a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol. In April 2015, a gang member shot at a car carrying a couple and their year-old daughter. One of the bullets hit the child in the head and killed her. While searching a home frequented by the suspected shooter and many other gang members, the Kent Police Department found a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol - the gun sold by the State Patrol.

TEXT THREATS

The Pierce County Sheriff's Office in April 2014 sold a list of guns at auction that included a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun. In October 2016, Jaylen Bolar sent text messages to his mother, threatening to kill her and others. Angela Almo contacted a behavioral health center instead of the police because she knew her son had firearms, including a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and she feared he'd be killed in a standoff with authorities.

When the Tacoma police became involved, he denied it, but his aunt confirmed that she, too, had received threats. Robin Olson showed an officer her phone, which contained a message from Bolar asking his uncle to kill him because he was tired of living.

Bolar also threatened to kill a woman who used to be his boss. He was taken into custody, and a search of his home found two firearms in his bedroom. One was the Mossberg shotgun sold by the sheriff's office.

JUVENILES IN STOLEN CAR

The Aberdeen Police Department sold a Lorcin Model L380 pistol in February 2011. In May 2016, the Kent Police Department located a stolen vehicle parked at the Benson Village Apartments and found a gun under the seat - the Lorcin Model L380 pistol sold by Aberdeen police. The three juveniles who stole the car were convicted felons.

DRUNKEN FELON

The Kitsap County Sheriff's Office sold a Hi Point 9mm pistol in March 2014. In October 2015, the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office responded to a 911 call from a woman who said she heard what she thought was a gunshot and went outside to find her daughter's intoxicated boyfriend passed out on the front porch. When deputies arrived, they found a handgun, the Hi Point 9 mm pistol, on the ground next to the man. It was the gun sold by the Kitsap sheriff's office. A search found that the man was a convicted felon who wasn't permitted to have a gun. The deputy put the man in handcuffs and called for medical help.

PROHIBITED FROM HAVING GUN

The Washington State Patrol traded a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol with a firearms dealer in June 2010. In May 2015, the Kent Police Department was investigating a 911 call and encountered four people outside the house. One of the men was prohibited from having a gun, but they found he was carrying a handgun, the Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol sold by the State Patrol. The gun had been reported stolen, and he was arrested.

DRUG HOUSE ASSAULT

The Aberdeen Police Department traded a JC Higgins .22-caliber rifle with a firearms dealer in February 2011. In April 2015, the Yakima Police Department responded to a domestic violence assault involving a JC Higgins .22-caliber rifle with the same serial number. The dispute involved an elderly man who had handled his wife roughly and threatened her sister. The man was charged, and police took his firearm. In October 2015, Kent police searched a suspected drug house and arrested several people wanted on felony warrants. They found a .22 caliber rifle - the JC Higgins rifle sold by the Aberdeen police.

FACEBOOK POSTS ABOUT KILLING

The Thurston County Narcotics Task Force sold a Smith & Wesson pistol in August 2012. In October 2013, the Tacoma Police went to the University of Washington, Tacoma to investigate a report of a student who was posting photos of a gun on Facebook and said he had "vivid, colorful dreams of shooting and killing lots of people last night." Police found in his backpack a Smith and Wesson pistol, the one sold by the narcotics task force.

COCAINE PARTY FAVORS

The Bonney Lake Police Department in March 2011 traded a Davis Industries .380-caliber handgun with a firearms dealer who sold it to the public. In February 2012, Kent police stopped a man for an expired registration and discovered baggies of cocaine in his car. He said they were party favors. They also found his concealed handgun, the firearm sold by the police.

THREATS TO KILL

Longview Police Department sold a Davis Industries.22 caliber pistol in August 2016. The Thurston County Sheriff's Office responded to a 911 call in April 2017 from a man who said his father headed to a house with a gun and planned to threaten the occupants. Jesse Brown threatened to kill the men who lived there and was arrested. Officers confiscated his Davis Industries .22 caliber pistol - the one sold by Longview police - and 15 other firearms.

DRUNKEN FATHER

The Thurston County Sheriff's Office sold a Mossberg, Model 590, 12-gauge shotgun in December 2014. In March 2016, the Tacoma police responded to a call by a 12-year-old girl who said she and her sister fled their home because their father was drunk and was threatening to shoot his girlfriend and threatening to beat up one of the girls because he couldn't find his gun. The police later found a Mossberg, Model 590, 12-gauge shotgun - the gun sold by the Sheriff's Office - in the bathtub.

MAN'S SUICIDE

The Washington State Patrol traded a batch of guns to a firearms vendor in June 2010 that included a Smith and Wesson .9mm handgun. In September 2014, the Yakima Police Department responded to a report of a suicidal man with a gun. They arrived to find 24-year-old Kyle Juhl with a gunshot wound to the head. He used a Smith and Wesson .9mm handgun, the one sold by the State Patrol.

MENTAL HEALTH EMERGENCY

The Thurston County Narcotics Task Force sold a Springfield Armory .40-caliber pistol in December 2013. In February 2014, the Seattle Police Department helped take firearms from a man who was having a mental health emergency and was at the Involuntary Treatment Act court. One of the guns was the Springfield Armory .40-caliber pistol sold by the task force.

This 2014 photo provided by the Yakima Police Department shows a hole is left in an apartment wall from the bullet of a Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol used by Kyle Juhl to kill himself, in Yakima, Wash. The bullet traveled from an adjoining apartment and narrowly missed a neighbor's head as she bent to pick up her little boy. The pistol that Juhl used to kill himself was familiar to law enforcement: The Washington State Patrol had seized it years earlier while investigating a crime and then arranged its sale back to the public. It eventually fell into Juhl's hands, illegally. (Amber Ross/Yakima Police Department via AP)

In this Oct. 20, 2017 photo, signs announce auctions for both guns and an estate at Johnny's Auction House, where the company handles gun sales for about a half dozen police departments and the Lewis County Sheriff's Office, in Rochester, Wash. Law enforcement officials around the U.S. are split over the longtime practice among police departments of selling the guns they confiscate. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
ROME (AP) - Lazio has signed former Juventus defender Martin Caceres from Verona on a one-year contract.

The capital club said in a brief statement on Monday that the deal also includes the option of an extension.

Caceres joined Verona in August 2017 after being released following half a season at English Premier League club Southampton, where he made only one appearance.

The Uruguay international won four league titles and an Italian Cup in his second spell at Juventus but his contract was not renewed when it expired in June 2016 after injury problems.

The 30-year-old Caceres has also played for Barcelona and Sevilla.

Lazio is fourth in Serie A, 11 points behind leader Napoli.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - Atlantic City's most spectacular casino flop is getting another chance under new ownership and a new name.

Colorado developer Bruce Deifik said Monday he had purchased Atlantic City's former Revel casino hotel from Florida businessman Glenn Straub for $200 million. He plans to reopen it this summer, around the same time the former Trump Taj Mahal casino will reopen nearby under the Hard Rock brand.

The former Revel will be called the Ocean Resort Casino. Deifik called the purchase "a dream come true."

But the news raises a sobering question for a gambling resort that only recently regained its equilibrium following the shutdown of five of its 12 casinos: Might the sudden reintroduction of two large casinos create the same conditions that led to the wave of shutdowns in the first place?

Revel's sale was finalized Thursday afternoon, during a blizzard, a fitting development for a project with a turbulent history. It cost $2.4 billion to build, yet lasted just over two years before shutting down, never having come close to turning a profit.

Deifik is undeterred.

"We are incredibly excited that we were able to take advantage of the opportunity to acquire this tremendous property at a time when Atlantic City is seeing great economic strides," he said. "The former Revel property opened at a time when Atlantic City was still in economic recovery, and operationally it just did not cater to the customer base for this destination."

One new amenity Deifik plans is a sports book facility that would operate if New Jersey wins its U.S. Supreme Court case to legalize sports betting.

He said the casino will employ 2,500 to 3,000 people. It has 1,399 hotel rooms. The gambling area will offer 100 table games and 2,200 slot machines.

Deifik said he plans to bring back some of the restaurants that were popular at Revel, along with some new ones, including an Asian noodle bar. He also plans a high-end players' club.

Deifik is president and CEO of Integrated Properties Inc., which owns 103 commercial properties in five states, including the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort in Palm Springs, California, and several office and retail centers in the Denver and Phoenix areas.

Analysts are mixed on whether Atlantic City's seven operating casinos can handle two more competitors. Some say the reopenings could hurt smaller casinos and possibly lead one or more to close, but others are optimistic the new offerings - particularly the music-themed, globally known Hard Rock brand - can bring new customers who otherwise would not have traveled to Atlantic City.

Revel opened in 2012, with no less an aim than to rewrite the rules of success in Atlantic City's casino market. It eschewed bus-riding, buffet-patronizing day trippers in favor of a hoped-for clientele of Wall Street traders, hedge fund execs and the highest of high-rollers. It was the only Atlantic City to ban smoking.

None of it worked.

The $13 million in casino winnings it took in its first month ranked it near the bottom of Atlantic City's 12 casinos - a spot it would occupy for its two-year existence. It went bankrupt twice, choking on massive debt it couldn't come close to paying, and closed on Sept. 2, 2014.

Straub, a Polo-loving multimillionaire, bought it for $82 million from bankruptcy court and then fought with state officials over whether he needed a casino license. He said Monday he bought Revel "to keep and not to sell." But he quickly tangled with government regulations at the local and state levels that he said frustrated his plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help redevelop Atlantic City.

Straub sold the property for $118 million more than he paid for it, but he incurred large expenses while keeping it closed.

But what Straub described as burdensome red tape are rules that all Atlantic City's other casino owners comply with. And a significant portion of his expenses involved legal fees incurred in fighting government regulations with which he disagreed.

Straub said he retains more than 60 Atlantic City properties, with which he plans to "be a spark for catalyzing positive economic movement in Atlantic City."

The closest he got to reopening Revel came with the partial installation of a rope-climbing course in what used to be the casino's port cochere area. But even that modest venture failed and was ripped out while half-finished.

Before settling on a reopened casino and hotel, Straub floated a wide variety of proposed uses for the property. They included a water park; condominiums; a health-themed spa; an equestrian facility; a so-called "tower of geniuses" where the world's top minds would gather to tackle society's problems, and a temporary home for Syrian refugees.

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Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
HOUSTON (AP) - While she waits at a detention center in Texas to find out if she can stay in the United States, Laura Monterrosa fears that she put herself in danger by coming forward about sexual abuse.

Months after accusing a female guard at the facility of groping her and suggesting they have sex, Monterrosa says she still sees the guard in the dining hall and other parts of the facility. She recalled in a recent interview what the guard had said to her.

"I told her that I was going to tell the supervisor what was happening," Monterrosa said in a recent phone interview from the facility. "She sarcastically said, 'Do you think they'll believe you or me?'"

FILE - This April 22, 2008, file photo shows a dorm area of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Laura Monterrosa who is housed at the detention facility waiting to find out if she'll be allowed to stay in the United States, has accused a guard at the facility of groping her and suggesting they have sex. As the national discussion of sexual misconduct grows, advocates for immigrants say they hope the conversation will include immigrant detention facilities. They point to the FBI announcing December 2017 that it had opened a civil rights investigation into Monterrosa's case as a positive sign. (AP Photo/Donna McWilliam, File)

As the national discussion of sexual misconduct grows, advocates for immigrants say they hope the conversation will include immigrant detention facilities. They point to the FBI announcing in December that it had opened a civil rights investigation into Monterrosa's case as a positive sign.

"Our immigrant prison system thrives on secrecy," said Christina Fialho, co-executive director of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement, or CIVIC. "If more people knew what was truly happening behind locked doors, I think there would be an outcry against the immigrant detention system."

Fialho's organization sent a complaint to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in April that listed 27 allegations of sexual abuse in immigration detention over the last three years. The complaint also says that another 1,016 people reported sexual abuse in detention to the Department of Homeland Security between May 2014 and July 2016.

Fialho said many more cases go uncounted because victims are afraid to come forward or, when they do, their cases aren't fully investigated.

Based on CIVIC's analysis of federal data released through a Freedom of Information Act request, DHS investigated less than 3 percent of the sexual abuse complaints it received during that same time period.

Like many of the roughly 35,000 adults in immigration detention, Monterrosa, 23, has requested asylum. She arrived at the southern U.S. border in May after fleeing El Salvador, where she says she was forced into prostitution by her family and that an uncle raped her. The uncle was a policeman, she said.

If her asylum claim is denied, she could be deported. She is currently appealing a denial of her claim in October.

The Associated Press typically does not name victims in sexual assault investigations, but Monterrosa has come forward to encourage other women to report their stories.

The advocacy group Grassroots Leadership, which publicized Monterrosa's case, says two other women in the same facility have since written letters describing sexual harassment.

"Women are forced to do what they say or stay silent out of fear," Monterrosa said.

Bethany Carson, an immigration researcher at Grassroots Leadership, called on authorities to release Monterrosa so "she can live in peace and recover from this new trauma she experienced at the hands of those responsible for ensuring her safety."

Monterrosa is being held at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, a rural town outside of Austin. Hutto has been the target of lawsuits and criminal investigations since shortly after it opened in 2006, having been converted from a medium-security prison.

Hutto was a facility for women and children until 2009, when the U.S. government transferred families elsewhere and settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union over how children were being confined. It's now a 512-bed facility holding only women.

In 2011, a guard was accused of groping multiple women while he was supposed to be taking them to the airport or bus station. He pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and received 10 months in prison.

Advocates say problems inside immigrant detention have persisted despite years of calling attention to the topic, in part because the facilities themselves can be impenetrable to the public.

Hutto is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs detention centers across the country under contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE said it received four reports of sexual abuse at Hutto during the past government fiscal year, which ended in September.

Under policies posted on CoreCivic's website, any detainee who reports sexual violence should have "no contact with the alleged perpetrator." Both ICE and CoreCivic prohibit retaliation against a detainee who files a report.

But CoreCivic declined to answer questions about Monterrosa's report that she had seen the guard in the dining hall and referred comment to ICE, as it's required to do under its federal contract, which stipulates that private prison operators must consult with ICE before speaking to the media.

ICE previously issued a statement saying that it concluded Monterrosa's allegations "could not be corroborated and the case lacked evidence to pursue any further action." The agency says it is now referring to the FBI's statement that it had opened an investigation.

In a statement, ICE said it has implemented "strong protections" against sexual assault in its detention facilities.

"It is ICE policy to provide effective safeguards against sexual abuse and assault of all individuals in ICE custody, including with respect to screening, staff training, detainee education, response and intervention, medical and mental health care, reporting, investigation, and monitoring and oversight," the statement said.

ICE has not posted sexual abuse data for all of its detention facilities, despite the commitment it made in 2014 to publish that information online at least once a year, as part of its compliance with a federal law on prison rapes. ICE said that it was "currently working on finalizing such information."

The agency also committed to third-party audits of its detention centers. While it has released the audits of more than 20 facilities this year, Hutto has not yet been examined, though an audit is scheduled for next year.

Seventy-one members of Congress sent a letter to federal officials last month calling on the Department of Homeland Security to "be held accountable for rampant complaints of sexual assault, abuse and harassment within their immigrant detention facilities."

"Immigrants are among the most vulnerable people - many of whom are children away from their families," said Rep. Judy Chu, a California Democrat who signed the letter. "And being detained puts them completely at the mercy of others."

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Follow Nomaan Merchant on Twitter at @nomaanmerchant.

___

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OTTAWA, Ohio (AP) - An Ohio man who withdrew a guilty plea after serving part of a life sentence in the drowning of his 1-year-old son and was found guilty in a jury trial has been sentenced again.

A court official says a judge in Ottawa Monday sentenced Michael Luebrecht to 20 years to life in prison after he was found guilty of aggravated murder.

Luebrecht and his attorney argued that medications he took for mental health issues contributed to the 2005 killing. Luebrecht testified that he didn't remember much in the months before his son Joel's death, but said he recalls killing him.

A judge last May allowed Luebrecht to withdraw his 2006 guilty plea, for which he was sentenced to 25 years to life.

A message was left Monday for Luebrecht's attorney.
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - The Latest on a dispute over a book on mass incarceration and racial discrimination that was banned in at least two New Jersey prisons (all times local):

1:45 p.m.

New Jersey corrections officials say a best-selling book on mass incarceration and racial discrimination will now be available to inmates at all state correctional facilities.

The announcement came Monday after the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union questioned why at least two prisons had banned "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander. The group argued the ban amounted to unconstitutional censorship of speech on issues of public concern, which is entitled to special protection under the First Amendment.

Corrections officials noted there was no departmentwide ban on the book. They also say it's being used as a teaching tool in a state program in which inmates enroll in college-level courses while incarcerated.

Prisons and jails are allowed to ban reading materials based on some concerns, such as security.

____

11:20 a.m.

The American Civil Liberties Union wants New Jersey corrections officials to allow inmates to read a best-selling book on mass incarceration and racial discrimination.

The state chapter of the civil rights group sent a letter Monday asking why at least two prisons have banned "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander.

The ACLU calls the ban "ironic, misguided, and harmful." It says the ban amounts to unconstitutional censorship of speech on issues of public concern, which is entitled to special protection under the First Amendment.

A corrections department spokeswoman declined comment Monday and said a statement would be issued later in the day.

Prisons and jails are allowed to ban reading materials based on legitimate concerns such as security issues, but the ACLU contends officials can't claim that justification applies here.
Federal prosecutors are recommending a former Montana House majority leader be sentenced to 28 years in prison for operating a drug trafficking ring that brought large volumes of methamphetamine into the state.

Court documents filed last week by prosecutors describe former lawmaker Michael David Lange as "the central player" in a conspiracy that brought at least 20 and possibly up to 50 pounds of the drug into the Billings area over a seven-month period in 2016.

Lange, 57, pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine and possession of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute.

Sentencing is set for Jan. 18 before U.S. District Judge Susan Watters. Each count carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years to life in prison and a $10 million fine.

"Lange was responsible for polluting the Billings community and surrounding areas with a significant quantity of highly pure methamphetamine," Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sullivan wrote in the government's sentencing request. "The negative impact associated with at least 20 pounds of methamphetamine is difficult to overstate."

Lange's sentencing request was filed under seal. His defense attorney, Ashley Harada, asked the court to shield the document from public release because it contained "sensitive material related to (Lange's) case strategy and ongoing criminal investigations."

Harada did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

During his three two-year terms in the Legislature, Lange, a Republican from Billings, supported giving $4 million in state money to an anti-methamphetamine public relations campaign, the Montana Meth Project. He was ousted from his leadership position in 2007 after being captured on video in a profane tirade against then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat.

Lange did not seek re-election in 2008 following the end of his third term. He campaigned unsuccessfully that year for the Republican nomination to challenge former U.S. Sen. Max Baucus.

Prosecutors said Lange lived a crime-free life until his early 50s, when he was charged with driving under the influence in 2014. That August, he committed a second DUI in conjunction with a felony charge of possessing over an ounce of methamphetamine in California and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, according to court records.

Shortly after his release, prosecutors said, Lange began dealing in much larger quantities of the drug, which was brought in from to California for distribution around Billings. A search of his house in October 2016 turned up more than 2.5 pounds of meth along with more than 13 ounces of cocaine and $27,400, authorities said.

A co-defendant, Jose Soltero, has pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine.

Prosecutors recommended Soltero receive almost 20 years in prison. They alleged he acted as a middle man between Lange and a drug supplier in California identified in court documents only by a nickname, "Manny."

Soltero's attorney, Lance Lundvall, downplayed his client's role in the case and requested a sentence of five years in prison.

Lundvall alleged that Soltero and members of his family had been threatened with violence if they did not participate in the conspiracy.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Mexican man acquitted of murder in a San Francisco case that prompted immigration debate has been denied release from jail pending trial on federal gun charges.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate appeared in federal court Monday to face two illegal gun possession charges, which were filed after a San Francisco jury acquitted him of murder for the July 2015 fatal shooting of Kate Steinle. Garcia Zarate has been deported five times and has spent a combined 17 years in U.S. prisons for three illegal re-entry convictions before the shooting.

Garcia Zarate says he found the gun that killed Steinle under a seat on a San Francisco pier. He says it accidentally fired when he picked it up.

FILE - In this July 7, 2015 file photo, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, right, is led into the courtroom by San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, left, and Assistant District Attorney Diana Garciaor, center, for his arraignment at the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. Garcia Zarate, acquitted of murder in a San Francisco case that prompted immigration debate has been denied bail while he awaits trial on federal gun charges. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP, Pool, File)

He was transferred from San Francisco jail to federal custody over the weekend.
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Latest on the federal criminal case against a Nevada rancher accused of leading 2014 armed standoff against U.S. land management agents (all times local):

12:15 p.m.

The Nevada rancher who was accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities has walked out of a federal courthouse in Las Vegas as a free man.

Rancher and states' rights figure Cliven Bundy, center, emerges from court on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, a free man, flanked by his wife, Carol Bundy, left, and attorney Bret Whipple, right, at the U.S. District Court building in Las Vegas. The 71-year-old Bundy was freed from federal jail custody after a U.S. judge dismissed all charges against him, two sons and a Montana militia leader who were accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authority in April 2014. (AP Photo/Ken Ritter)

Supporters cheered Monday as Cliven Bundy hugged his wife. He says that he had been jailed for 700 days as a "political prisoner" for refusing to acknowledge federal authority over the land around his cattle ranch.

A judge who found what she called "flagrant misconduct" by prosecutors dismissed criminal charges against the 71-year-old states' rights figure, two of his sons and a Montana militia leader.

The collapse of the case is a stunning failure for the U.S. attorney's office in Nevada.

Newly appointed Interim U.S. Attorney Dayle Elieson (el-AYE'-eh-sun) didn't immediately respond on whether the government will take the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

____

10:08 a.m.

Criminal charges have been dismissed against a Nevada rancher and his sons accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities.

Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro ruled Monday in Las Vegas that federal prosecutors acted with willful disregard for constitutional due process rights of 71-year-old Cliven Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Montana militia leader Ryan Payne.

The judge last month declared a mistrial after a month of proceedings for the same reasons.

Navarro severely criticized prosecutors for failing to properly turn over evidence to their lawyers.

The collapse of the case is a stunning failure for the U.S. attorney's office in Nevada, where 19 co-defendants were indicted in early 2016 on charges including conspiracy, obstruction and threats and assault of federal agents in the April 2014 standoff outside Bunkerville.

___

8 a.m.

A decision is due in Las Vegas whether to end the criminal prosecution of a Nevada rancher and followers accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities.

Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro's ruling on Monday comes after she declared a mistrial last month in proceedings against 71-year-old Cliven Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Montana militia leader Ryan Payne.

The judge signaled at that time that she might dismiss the case outright.

Navarro severely criticized prosecutors for what she called "willful" violations of due process rights of defendants, including failing to properly turn over evidence to their lawyers.

Her decision is sure to reverberate among states' rights advocates in the Western U.S., where the federal government controls vast lands that some people want to protect and others want used for grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling.

File - In this Dec. 20, 2017, file photo from left, Ammon Bundy, Ryan Payne, Jeanette Finicum, widow of Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, Ryan Bundy, Angela Bundy, wife of Ryan Bundy and Jamie Bundy, daughter of Ryan Bundy, walk out of a federal courthouse in Las Vegas. A U.S. judge who declared a mistrial could on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, kill the much-watched criminal prosecution of a Nevada rancher accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities in April 2014. Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro's decision in Las Vegas is sure to echo among states' rights advocates in Western states where the federal government controls vast expanses that some people want to remain unused and others want open to grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

FILE - In this April 18, 2014, file photo, flanked by armed supporters, rancher Cliven Bundy speaks at a protest camp near Bunkerville, Nev. A U.S. judge who declared a mistrial two weeks ago could on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, kill the much-watched criminal prosecution of the Nevada rancher accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities in April 2014. Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro's decision in Las Vegas is sure to echo among states' rights advocates in Western states where the federal government controls vast expanses that some people want to remain unused and others want open to grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling. (John Locher/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, File)
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - State residents who don't identify as male or female may soon be able to choose another gender on their driver's licenses.

Vermont Public Radio reports the Department of Motor Vehicles' new computer system will allow a third gender option.

Vermont Human Rights Commission Executive Director Karen Richards said the proposed change would help protect transgender people during traffic stops.

"I think it's a major victory for folks who are transgender," Richards said. "It acknowledges who they are, and that's an important thing for us to do."

The state DMV asked a panel of public safety officials if the change would have an impact on police officers' work. The Law Enforcement Advisory Board said members aren't opposed to the idea and would remain neutral on it.

"The general opinion around the table was that it wasn't going to impede the way we conducted our business," Law Enforcement Advisory Board Chairman Richard Gauthier said.

Oregon, California and the District of Columbia offer a third gender option in their driver's license systems.

The third gender option in the Vermont system hasn't been named. DMV officials said they'd want to use something that's uniform nationally.

___

Information from: WVPS-FM, http://www.vpr.net
LONDON (AP) - Manchester United and Tottenham will play away at fourth-tier clubs in the fourth round of the FA Cup.

United was drawn on Monday to face Yeovil in southwest England for the second time in four seasons. The 12-time cup winners won 2-0 on the 2015 trip in the third round.

Tottenham will go to south Wales to play Newport in just under three weeks.

Manchester United's Romelu Lukaku celebrates scoring his side's second goal of the game against Derby County during the FA Cup, third round match at Old Trafford in Manchester, England, Friday Jan. 5, 2018. (Martin Rickett/PA via AP)

English Premier League leader Manchester City could also be playing at a League Two side if Mansfield beats Cardiff of the second tier in a replay.

There are two guaranteed all-Premier League encounters, with Liverpool hosting West Bromwich Albion, and Southampton playing Watford.

If Chelsea beats Norwich in a replay, the Premier League champion will play Newcastle.

Nottingham Forest's reward for eliminating holder Arsenal is an away game against fellow second-tier side Hull, which lost the 2014 final to the Gunners. Coventry, the 1987 cup winner who is in the fourth tier, will play MK Dons after ousting Premier League struggler Stoke.

Another shock in the third round saw Leicester held by Fleetwood to 0-0. The replay winner plays Fleetwood's fellow third-tier side, Peterborough.

___

Fourth round draw:

Bournemouth/Wigan v Shrewsbury/West Ham

Cardiff/Mansfield v Manchester City

Carlisle/Sheffield Wednesday v Stevenage/Reading

Huddersfield v Birmingham

Hull v Nottingham Forest

Liverpool v West Bromwich

Middlesbrough v Brighton/Crystal Palace

Millwall v Rochdale

MK Dons v Coventry

Newport v Tottenham

Norwich/Chelsea v Newcastle

Notts County v Wolves/Swansea

Peterborough v Fleetwood/Leicester

Sheffield United v Preston

Southampton v Watford

Yeovil v Manchester United

Matches to be played over Jan. 26-29
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - Federal prosecutors are recommending a former Montana House majority leader be sentenced to 28 years in prison for operating a drug trafficking ring that brought large volumes of methamphetamine into the state.

Court documents filed last week by prosecutors describe former lawmaker Michael David Lange as "the central player" in a conspiracy that brought at least 20 and possibly up to 50 pounds (9 and possibly up to 23 kilograms) of the drug into the Billings area over a seven-month period in 2016.

Lange, 57, pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine and possession of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute.

FILE - In this April 26, 2007, file photo, Montana House Majority Leader Rep. Michael Lange, R-Billings, speaks during a news conference in Helena, Mont. Prosecutors are seeking 28 years in prison for the former Republican lawmaker after he pleaded guilty to charges of distributing large volumes of methamphetamine in the Billings area. (George Lane /Independent Record via AP, File)

Sentencing is set for Jan. 18 before U.S. District Judge Susan Watters. Each count carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years to life in prison and a $10 million fine.

"Lange was responsible for polluting the Billings community and surrounding areas with a significant quantity of highly pure methamphetamine," Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sullivan wrote in the government's sentencing request. "The negative impact associated with at least 20 pounds of methamphetamine is difficult to overstate."

Lange's sentencing request was filed under seal. His defense attorney, Ashley Harada, asked the court to shield the document from public release because it contained "sensitive material related to (Lange's) case strategy and ongoing criminal investigations."

Harada did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

During his three two-year terms in the Legislature, Lange, a Republican from Billings, supported giving $4 million in state money to an anti-methamphetamine public relations campaign, the Montana Meth Project. He was ousted from his leadership position in 2007 after being captured on video in a profane tirade against then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat.

Lange did not seek re-election in 2008 following the end of his third term. He campaigned unsuccessfully that year for the Republican nomination to challenge former U.S. Sen. Max Baucus.

Prosecutors said Lange lived a crime-free life until his early 50s, when he was charged with driving under the influence in 2014. That August, he committed a second DUI in conjunction with a felony charge of possessing over an ounce (28 grams) of methamphetamine in California and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, according to court records.

Shortly after his release, prosecutors said, Lange began dealing in much large quantities of the drug, which was brought in from to California for distribution around Billings. A search of his house in October 2016 turned up more than 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms) of meth along with more than 13 ounces (372 grams) of cocaine and $27,400, authorities said.

A co-defendant, Jose Soltero, has pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine .

Prosecutors recommended Soltero receive almost 20 years in prison. They alleged he acted as a middle man between Lange and a drug supplier in California identified in court documents only by a nickname, "Manny."

Soltero's attorney, Lance Lundvall, downplayed his client's role in the case and requested a sentence of five years in prison.

Lundvall alleged that Soltero and members of his family had been threatened with violence if they did not participate in the conspiracy.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Special counsel Robert Mueller's team of investigators has expressed interest in speaking with President Donald Trump as part of a probe into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

The prospect of an interview with the president has come up in recent discussions between Mueller's team and Trump lawyers, but no details have been worked out, including the scope of questions that the president would agree to answer if an interview were to actually take place, according to the person. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.

When or even if an interview would occur was not immediately clear, nor were the terms for the interview or whether Trump's lawyers would seek to narrow the range of questions or topics that prosecutors would cover. Trump's lawyers have previously stated their determination to cooperate with Mueller's requests.

President Donald Trump takes the stage to speak at the American Farm Bureau Federation's Annual Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

It's not surprising that investigators would ultimately seek to interview the president given his role in several episodes under scrutiny by Mueller. Any interview of Trump would be a likely indication that the investigation was in its final stages - investigators typically look to interview main subjects in their inquiries near the end of a probe.

Mueller for months has led a team of prosecutors and agents investigating whether Russia and Trump's Republican campaign coordinated to sway the 2016 election, and whether Trump has worked to obstruct an FBI investigation into his aides, including by firing the FBI director, James Comey.

Comey has said that several months before he was dismissed, Trump told him he hoped he would end an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Mueller's team recently concluded a series of interviews with many current and former White House aides, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Four people have been charged so far, including Flynn, who pleaded guilty in December to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted on charges tied to foreign lobbying work.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment, as did Trump lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow.

Trump did not rule out the possibility of being questioned by Mueller when asked about it at a news conference Saturday. He said there had been "no collusion" and "no crime."

"But we have been very open," Trump said. "We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed and it would have taken years. But you know, it's sort of like, when you've done nothing wrong, let's be open and get it over with."

A White House spokesman pointed to a statement from White House lawyer Ty Cobb saying the White House doesn't publicly discuss its conversations with Mueller but was continuing to cooperate "in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution."

___

Associated Press writer Chad Day contributed to this report.

__

Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
SAN JUAN DE MARCONA, Peru (AP) - Nasser Al-Attiyah won a second stage three days into the Dakar Rally on Monday to remain a contender in the world's toughest rally.

Al-Attiyah dominated the almost 300-kilometer third stage through and over sand dunes in the Ica Desert to rise to third place.

The two-time champion from Qatar won the opening stage on Saturday but lost time on Sunday because of two flat tires. He endured another flat tire not long after the start from Pisco on Monday but fixed it quickly and still blew away the field en route to San Juan de Marcona.

Driver Nasser Al-Attiyah, of Qatar, and co-driver Matthieu Baumel, of France, race their Toyota during the third stage of the 2018 Dakar Rally between Pisco and San Juan de Marcona, Peru, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Al-Attiyah was just under eight minutes behind overall leader and defending champion Stephane Peterhansel of France. Countryman Cyril Despres, the stage two winner, was second, about three minutes behind.

Nani Roma, the 2014 champion from Spain, rolled his car a kilometer from the finish. Though he still managed to cross the finish line, he was taken to hospital with reported neck and head injuries.

In the motorcycle race, British rider Sam Sunderland won the stage to lead overall.

His cause was helped when Joan Barreda, who dominated the second stage, missed a turn and had to double back. He finished almost 28 minutes behind Sunderland.

Sunderland won by more than three minutes on Monday from Kevin Benavides of Argentina.

Driver Nasser Al-Attiyah, of Qatar, and co-driver Matthieu Baumel, of France, race their Toyota during the third stage of the 2018 Dakar Rally between Pisco and San Juan de Marcona, Peru, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Driver Stephane Peterhansel, of France, and co-driver Jean Paul Cottret, of France, race their Peugeot during the third stage of the 2018 Dakar Rally between Pisco and San Juan de Marcona, Peru, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Sam Sunderland, of United Kingdom, rides his KTM motorbike during the third stage of the 2018 Dakar Rally between Pisco and San Juan de Marcona, Peru, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Driver Carlos Sainz, of Spain, and co-driver Lucas Cruz, of Spain, race their Peugeot during the third stage of the 2018 Dakar Rally between Pisco and San Juan de Marcona, Peru, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)
MEXICO CITY (AP) - The governor of the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua claimed Monday that federal authorities have refused to disperse millions of dollars in funding because of a state investigation into possible embezzlement involving the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is led by President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Mexican states rely heavily on federal revenue sharing. Gov. Javier Corral, of the opposition National Action Party, said the federal government agreed to bridge funding of about 700 million pesos in December, but then refused to pay after Chihuahua state prosecutors arrested a former official of Pena Nieto's party.

The former official, Alejandro Gutierrez, is accused of diverting about 240 million pesos ($12 million) in public funds for political campaigning under former Chihuahua Gov. Cesar Duarte, also a member of the PRI.

Corral said the federal government has refused to ask the U.S. to extradite Duarte.

"They don't want to detain Cesar Duarte, but they have detained our money," Corral said.

The federal Treasury Department denied any political motive, saying it has paid out more money than originally budgeted for Chihuahua.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Same-sex couples married in midnight ceremonies across Australia on Tuesday after the country's last legal impediment to gay marriage expired.

Marriage equality became law on Dec. 9 with overwhelming support in Parliament, but Australia's requirement that all couples give a month's notice for weddings made Tuesday the first possible date for gay marriages.

Athletes Craig Burns and Luke Sullivan married at a midnight ceremony near the east coast city of Tweed Heads.

In this photo provided by Rodney Croome, Lainey Carmichael, left, Roz Kitschke, right, and celebrant Jason Betts pose as they show Lainey and Roz's marriage certificate at their home in Franklin, south of Hobart, Australia Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. Same-sex couples married in midnight ceremonies across Australia on Tuesday after the last legal impediment to gay marriage expired. (Rodney Croome via AP)

"It's another way to show your love and appreciation of your partner in front of the people in your life," said Burns, a 29-year-old sprinter who will compete in the Commonwealth Games in Australia's Gold Coast in April.

In Newcastle, north of Sydney, Rebecca Hickson, 32, married her partner of nine years, Sarah Turnbull, 34.

Hickson described the divisive build-up to a gay marriage ballot preceding Parliament's vote as "a horrible time." She said the couple wanted to be part of history by becoming one of the first lesbian couples to marry in Australia.

Lainey Carmichael, 51, and Roz Kitschke, 46, married shortly after dawn before 65 guests at their home in the town of Franklin in the island state of Tasmania.

The early ceremony was mainly to avoid the summer heat, Kitschke said. "New day; new era - and we don' like the heat that much," she said.

Wedding guest Rodney Croome, a long-time marriage equality advocate and spokesperson for Tasmanians United for Marriage Equality, said: "This morning's wedding marked the start of a new chapter in the lives of the two brides but also a new chapter in the life of the nation."

"Today we are a more equal and inclusive country that treats all loving, committed couples the same," Croome said in a statement.

The Australian Parliament overwhelming voted for same-sex marriage after a nationwide postal survey found that 62 percent of respondents wanted marriage equality.

The one-month waiting period was waived for some couples who wed in recent weeks. Those exceptional circumstances included a partner's terminal illness and overseas-based relatives booking flights to Australia before the official start date for the new law was known.

Civil celebrant Charles Foley has been campaigning for years to get Australia to drop the one-month waiting period, which he said is among the longest in the world.

The federal government imposed it at the request of churches decades ago so parishioners would have time to say why they may object to some religious unions, Foley said.

Ireland has a waiting period of three months.

Australia and Ireland are the only countries that have put the question of legalizing gay marriage to a popular vote.

Ireland held a legally binding referendum in 2015 to change its constitution. The referendum found 62 percent of respondents wanted marriage equality.

Australia's conservative government held a non-binding postal survey to avoid dividing its own lawmakers and pledged to vote on the issue if Australians endorsed equality. They did, and lawmakers quickly passed the legislation.

Civil celebrant Judy Ulich married 11 same-sex couples over five days in 2013 in the national capital Canberra before the High Court overturned a local territory law that briefly provided marriage equality. The court unanimously upheld the federal government's urgent case that the territory law was invalid because it was inconsistent with a federal prohibition on same-sex marriage.

Ulich said she was looking forward to marrying for a second time several same-sex couples whose brief marriages had been overruled. But none of her 15 gay marriage bookings was for Tuesday. Most same-sex couples preferred to wait for a suitable weekend.

"Unless people really wanted to make a statement and marry two minutes after midnight, people generally don't choose Tuesday, which is a working day," she said.

"In most cases, they want to have a celebration. They want people to be able to rejoice with them because they had such a big fight to get the right to marry," she added.
Nicola Sturgeon has said Scottish independence must remain an option as she criticised the ongoing horror show of the Conservative Brexit plans.

Scotlands First Minister said a new spirit of Scottish assertiveness is needed to deal with the threat she believes Brexit poses.

Writing in The Sunday Mail, she said: The year ahead has the potential to be one of the most significant in Scotlands recent history.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon

I believe it will be a year in which a new Scotland continues to emerge, an emboldened, more confident and assertive nation.

 @NicolaSturgeon: In 2018, a new spirit of Scottish assertiveness will be needed to fight the Tories' chaotic plans for an extreme Brexit. https://t.co/m9n5bLGApl  The SNP (@theSNP) January 7, 2018

That is perhaps not the most obvious conclusion to draw from the ongoing horror show of the Tories inept and chaotic Brexit plans, which threaten to do deep and lasting damage to our economy and society.

But it is because of that overarching threat that I believe a new spirit of Scottish assertiveness is needed and will come to the fore.

She added: Last year, I made clear we will scrutinise the detail of any final Brexit deal negotiated by the UK Government before deciding the next steps in terms of giving people a choice on Scotlands future.

However, I have been clear all along that the threat to Scotlands interests means independence must remain an option.

She said SNP MPs and MSPs would continue to oppose Conservative plans for a hard Brexit which takes the UK out of the single market and customs union.

Ms Sturgeon accused Scottish Labour of colluding in their London leaderships shamefully ambivalent attitude to Brexit and claimed Scottish Conservative MPs are lobby-fodder for the Prime Minister.

Scottish Conservative MSP John Lamont said: After last years general election, Nicola Sturgeon promised to put her plans for independence on pause and focus on her day job.

Its clear from her words today that she intends to break that promise within months, and once again put independence top of her agenda.
Tolls on the two Severn Bridge crossings have been reduced for the first time today, with car drivers now having to pay 5.60 instead of 6.70.

The fees for the crossings, linking Wales and England via the M4 and M48 motorways, are no longer subject to VAT now that both bridges are run by the UK government.

There are plans to abolish all tolls by 31 December 2018, however, some have questioned why the charge hasn't been lifted immediately now that the bridges are under public ownership.

Highway robbery: Drivers will have to pay less to cross the two Severn Bridges from today, but politicians have argued that the tolls should be scrapped completely with immediate effect now that they are run by the UK government

Former shadow Welsh Secretary Paul Flynn said the Government was involved in 'highway robbery'.

Some 25 million journeys a year are made across the Severn, official figures show. The high cost of driving between England and Wales over the crossing is bad for consumers and businesses, claim campaigners.

As of January 8, cars will pay 5.60, small buses or vans will pay a reduced fee of 11.20 (down from 13.40) and coaches 16.70 (down from 20) to drive between England and Wales.

Not only will this mean extra cash in the pockets of motorists, it will also lift an administrative burden for business users, who will no longer need to claim back VAT.

The move is predicted to save regular motorists around 1,400 a year, reducing the cost of travelling to Cardiff, Newport or Swansea, and be a welcome boost to Wales' economy.

A government study previously estimated that the abolition of VAT on the toll charges would earn the country an extra 100 million a year as more people visited Wales and businesses benefited from cost savings.

The reduction comes as the crossings return to public ownership, with Highways England - a UK-Government owned body overseeing the operation, maintenance and improvements to motorways and major A roads in England - taking over responsibility for the bridges from Severn River Crossing PLC.

The first Severn Bridge was opened in 1966 with a toll in place to cover the 8million cost to erect it

From today car drivers have to pay 5.60 instead of 6.70 to use the bridges. Small buses or vans will pay a reduced fee of 11.20 (down from 13.40) and coaches 16.70 (down from 20)

Drivers as well as the Welsh economy will benefit further when charges are abolished completely by the end of 2018.

Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns said: 'In less than a year we will see the biggest economic stimulus for south Wales and the valleys.

'This important move taken by the Prime Minister and the UK Government in regard to the Severn Crossings represents a clear symbol of breaking down the economic and historic barriers which have hindered Wales prosperity, whilst supporting the union of the United Kingdom.

52 years of the Severn Bridges The Queen photographed at the official opening of the first Severn Bridge in 1966 The first Severn Bridge - costing 8 million - was opened by the Queen in September 1966, providing a direct link from the M4 motorway into Wales, with a toll in place for use of the bridge to pay for the cost of construction. Some 30 years later in 1996 the second crossing - ringing in at 332 million to construct - opened to the public.

'My number one priority as Secretary of State was to remove the tolls, which will not only make journeys cheaper for commuters and tourists, but will also create exciting opportunities for businesses and investors looking to make their mark in Wales.

'This will boost Welsh employment and establish lasting relationships between the economies and communities of South Wales and South West England, creating the most natural growth corridor spanning from Cardiff through Newport to Bristol.'

Annual maintenance and operational costs average 15million for both bridges.

The UK government said the continuation of tolling through 2018 will help pay for their upkeep.

'Over the period between the transfer to public ownership on 8 January and the abolition of tolling, Highways England expect to collect sufficient revenue to operate the crossing, phase out tolling, and recover costs that taxpayers historically incurred in the maintenance of these bridges,' an official statement said.

'Tolls will then be abolished by the end of 2018,' Highways England confirmed.

However, former shadow Welsh Secretary Paul Flynn accused the government of 'highway robbery' by continuing the tolls in 2018 despite the bridges being publicly owned.

The Newport West MP told the BBC: 'Wales has been subjected to highway robbery by tolling from when the first bridge opened in 1966.

Wales has been subjected to highway robbery by tolling from when the first bridge opened in 1966 Paul Flynn, MP Newport West

'We have been uniquely punished. This month we should be ending the tolls altogether - to continue them is a rip off.

'It is entirely unjustified. The UK government are very reluctant to give up a cash cow.'

All 180 members of staff for Severn River Crossing became Highways England employees overnight under the deal.

However, 115 toll-collector jobs will be at risk with the abolition of charges to use the bridges at the end of the year.
Alton Towers new Wicker Man rollercoaster will feature a six-storey flaming structure in what the theme park claims is the first such ride to combine wood and fire.

The 16 million project, including a 2,028 ft track, is the first wooden rollercoaster to be built in the UK for 21 years, the Staffordshire attraction said.

A 57.5ft wicker man will appear to burst into flames as thrill-seekers race through the structure three times on a wooden track.

NEW FOR 2018: Wicker Man at Alton Towers Resort. The world's first rollercoaster experience fusing wood and fire. #wickermanride https://t.co/3UnVEc9VEX pic.twitter.com/lrNvReoTyq  Alton Towers Resort (@altontowers) January 8, 2018

The rollercoaster, which shares its name with the British 1970s classic horror film, starring Christopher Lee, is due to open to visitors this spring.

Bradley Wynne, the theme parks creative lead said: We hope visitors will be blown away by Wicker Mans breath-taking scale whilst the primal essence of the wooden coaster and astonishing effects will leave them delighted, exhilarated and eager to ride again.

Andy Hine, the chairman of the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain, said: Weve been hoping that Alton Towers would invest in a wooden coaster for a long time, and were so pleased its finally coming with Wicker Man.

(Alton Towers/PA)

Alton Towers said the safety of guests has been paramount in building the ride, which has involved rigorous testing and hundreds of training hours for ride operators.

The theme parks operator Merlin Attractions was fined 5 million for a catastrophic failure of health and safety rules over an incident on its Smiler rollercoaster in 2015 when two carriages collided.

Vicky Balch, then 19, and Leah Washington, then 17, could have bled to death from their injuries and each ended up losing a leg after the collision which injured 16 people.
Justine Greening has quit the Government after refusing to take the work and pensions post after being moved from the education portfolio, Downing Street sources said.

The move is the biggest upset of a reshuffle which saw Prime Minister Theresa May keep all the political big beasts in her Cabinet in place.

No 10 sources said Mrs May is disappointed but respects Ms Greenings decision to leave the Government.

Honour & privilege to serve in Govt since 2010. Social mobility matters to me & our country more than my ministerial career. I'll continue to do everything I can to create a country that has equality of opportunity for young people & Ill keep working hard as MP for Putney.  Justine Greening (@JustineGreening) January 8, 2018

Ms Greening was succeeded as Education Secretary by Damian Hinds, who was promoted from being a junior work and pensions minister.

The way Ms Greening left the Government could cause a headache for the PM when the Putney MP, who backed Remain in the referendum campaign, returns to the back benches.

Ms Greening had made it clear she wanted to stay in the education post in the run-up to the reshuffle amid a raft of reports that the PM was determined to move her.

Justine Greening leaves 10 Downing Street following her resignation

In an embarrassing twist to a reshuffle beset with social media mistakes, Jeremy Hunt, who was kept on as Health Secretary with an extended social care role in the shake-up, was forced to explain why he had liked a tweet stating that Ms Greening had left the Government.

Mr Hunt tweeted: Like button pressed by accident. Justine was an excellent minister and will be a great loss to govt.

Like button pressed by accident. Justine was an excellent minister and will be a great loss to govt. https://t.co/OOjZHYlPmp  Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) January 8, 2018

The post of Work and Pensions Secretary which Ms Greening turned down was given to former minister Esther McVey.

Former justice secretary David Lidington was appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office, but was not awarded the title of First Secretary of State enjoyed by his predecessor Damian Green.

It was Mr Greens resignation after he admitted lying over pornography on his office computer that prompted the reshuffle.

David Lidington

But Mr Lidington will fill in for Mrs May at Prime Ministers Questions and take on some of the responsibilities for chairing influential Cabinet committees, including some relating to Brexit.

Downing Street confirmed Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Brexit Secretary David Davis are all keeping their current jobs.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire resigned from the Cabinet on grounds of ill health, weeks before major surgery for a lesion on his right lung.

Really appreciate all of the kind messages. Standing down will allow me to focus completely on my family, my health and recovering from surgery speedily so that I can get back to frontline politics as early as I can. Not quite how I thought Id mark my 50th birthday! pic.twitter.com/EDMGBR56y6  James Brokenshire (@JBrokenshire) January 8, 2018

Mr Lidington was also named Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, replacing Sir Patrick McLoughlin, who was sacked as Conservative chairman following criticism of his role in the partys poor performance in last years snap election.

Brandon Lewis has been named the new party chairman, amid farcical scenes which saw the Tories official Twitter account incorrectly announce that the job had gone to Chris Grayling.

Transport Secretary Mr Grayling was kept on at his department despite widespread reports that he faced the axe.

Greg Clark also retained his position as Business Secretary amid speculation he could be sacked, and Downing Street announced Claire Perry would also attend Cabinet as minister of state at the business department.

Sajid Javid has had his responsibility for housing added to his existing Cabinet title in a sign of the issues increasing political importance. He is now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Housing Secretary @sajidjavid on our new name and his focus on housing following the #CabinetReshuffle https://t.co/CA90qIsSLx pic.twitter.com/8CnJCtBVZv  Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (@luhc) January 8, 2018

Gavin Williamson retains his role as Defence Secretary, which he has held for just over two months.

Former work and pensions secretary David Gauke has taken over the roles of Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary vacated by Mr Lidington.

Ex-culture secretary Karen Bradley has been moved to the politically sensitive Northern Ireland role vacated by Mr Brokenshire.

Digital minister Matt Hancock takes over from his old boss as Culture Secretary.

Thrilled to become DCMS Secretary. Such an exciting agenda, so much to do, and great people. Cant wait to get stuck in #DigitalCultureMediaSport https://t.co/HlspHnJjHG  Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) January 8, 2018

Environment Secretary Michael Gove, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox all remain in the same jobs.

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park stays on as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords.

David Mundell remains Secretary of State for Scotland, and Alun Cairns stays on as Secretary of State for Wales.

Jeremy Corbyn told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party that the reshuffle was a pointless and lacklustre PR stunt.

He said: In 2018, the impact of Tory austerity is hitting home with the public, most tragically with the most serious NHS winter crisis yet.

And yet the Governments big plan for the new year is to dodge the real issues and reshuffle the pack in a pointless and lacklustre PR exercise.

Its simply not good enough. You cant make up for nearly eight years of failure by changing the name of a department.

Sorry to see @JustineGreening leave government - she brought her non-nonsense, northern accountant's eye to every brief and is a real role model for LGBT+ Conservatives.  Ruth Davidson (@RuthDavidsonPC) January 8, 2018

Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson tweeted: Sorry to see @JustineGreening leave government  she brought her non-nonsense, northern accountants eye to every brief and is a real role model for LGBT+ Conservatives.

Former chancellor George Osborne tweeted: Glad to see many of the old Treasury team thriving (and surviving) in this unusual reshuffle  well done @DavidGauke @DamianHinds @sajidjavid @GregClarkMP and my former chief of staff @MattHancock. All competent, creative, hardworking and good to work with.

Andrea Leadsom remains Leader of the House of Commons, despite widespread speculation that Mrs May could demote her.

And Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss also stays in post.
Joe Roots bravery was in vain as England slid to an innings-and-123-run defeat in the final Test to complete their miserable Ashes campaign as 4-0 losers.

Root spent much of the morning in hospital suffering the effects of severe dehydration and was unable to rejoin his teams improbable rearguard at the SCG as they resumed on 93 for four  still 210 runs short of making Australia bat again.

The England captain did continue his innings an hour later, after his replacement Moeen Ali was dismissed, but could not do so again following the lunch break as the tourists subsided in his absence to Pat Cummins (four for 39) and finished 180 all out.

AUSSIES WIN! Cummins finishes with four wickets as Australia thrash England to seal a 4-0 series victory: https://t.co/vhFwlbdpM8 #Ashes pic.twitter.com/J7yN24kjc0  cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) January 8, 2018

Morning session

With Root unable to resume his innings in the morning due after picking up a viral gastroenteritis bug, Moeen walked out with Jonny Bairstow.

But it was a familiar story as the England off-spinning all-rounder once again fell to his opposite number Nathan Lyon for just 13 to leave England 121 for five.

Moeens dismissal brought Root to the crease after he arrived late at the ground.

HERE. HE. COMES!



Dehydration, diarrhoea and vomiting overnight but Joe Root is back in the middle fighting for England #ItsTheAshes #Ashes pic.twitter.com/asIQ0sWf9F  Cricket on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) January 8, 2018

And he moved to his fifth half-century of the series after resuming on 42 not out and was unbeaten on 58 at lunch as England went to the interval on 144 for five.

And that's 50 for the skipper...



Joe Root brings up his fifth half century of the #Ashes



Keep battling Joe #ItsTheAshes #Ashes pic.twitter.com/kOuNzElUPY  Cricket on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) January 8, 2018

The England skipper was not the only player in the wars as Cameron Bancroft, fielding at short-leg, took the full force of a Root pull.

Afternoon session

Roots illness got the better of him and he did not resume his innings after lunch, retiring hurt for a second time.

Joe Root has not resumed after lunch. Jonny Bairstow is batting with Tom Curran.



Follow: https://t.co/la4sylkRna #ashes pic.twitter.com/OK5CcDl1ko  England Cricket (@englandcricket) January 8, 2018

England then suffered a poor start to the session as Cummins quickly removed Bairstow and Stuart Broad to leave them 148 for seven  effectively eight with Root unable to bat.

Just like that Pat Cummins has Jonny Bairstow and Stuart Broad after lunch and England are 148-7 #ItsTheAshes #Ashes pic.twitter.com/Jh0U6VXzJh  Cricket on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) January 8, 2018

Mason Crane followed for two, again to Cummins, bringing last-man James Anderson to the crease with the Australians attacking to the very end.

Look at this field as the #Ashes comes to a close. Aggression to the very end pic.twitter.com/MN69CCHfJy  Sam Ferris (@samuelfez) January 8, 2018

And it was all over when Anderson edged Josh Hazlewood to Tim Paine for his third catch of the session.

Not a bad prediction from former Australia captain Ricky Ponting was it?

Australia win the #Ashes 4-0, just as the great Ricky Ponting predicted to us back in November! #Genius  https://t.co/KWcxhRaNwj  cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) January 8, 2018

No surprises on the man of the series.

And it was time for the celebrations to start.

Australia skipper Steve Smith celebrates with the urn (Jason OBrien/PA)

Australia celebrate their 4-0 win (Jason OBrien/PA)

And the congratulations roll in.

Congratulation @stevesmith49 and all the Australian team and support staff. Quality cricket all summer, very dominant!!  Aaron Finch (@AaronFinch5) January 8, 2018

Congrats Australia. You batted better, bowled better & fielded better than England. On a positive note, we were much better at head-butting & throwing beer over each other. #Ashes pic.twitter.com/Fi9kmAPJfN  Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) January 8, 2018

Congratulations to Australia on winning the Ashes back. I genuinely thought @englandcricket had a great chance before the series started but Steve Smith and his men have been a different level!! #Ashes  Ian Bell (@Ian_Bell) January 8, 2018

Australia captain Smith credited Lyon for changing the series with his run-out of James Vince at Brisbane.

After the post mortem of Englands campaign began.

 @jimmy9: "Weve tried really hard but weve not performed well enough. Australia were the far better side" #asheshttps://t.co/ixJpVrkq2I pic.twitter.com/FUCf6tLyGj  England Cricket (@englandcricket) January 8, 2018

"England built their team around their all-rounder."



The biggest thing that went wrong for England?@MichaelVaughan says it was the Ben Stokes incident...#ItsTheAshes pic.twitter.com/DbqEdjVncl  Cricket on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) January 8, 2018
Two-time Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka has become the latest star to pull out of the first grand slam of the year.

The 28-year-old won in Melbourne in 2012 and 2013, but is unable to travel to Australia this year, organisers said.

She has previously missed tournaments owing to an ongoing child custody battle.

Victoria Azarenka will not compete in Melbourne (Gareth Fuller/PA)

Two-time champion Victoria Azarenka has withdrawn from the AO.



Its unfortunate that @vika7 is unable to travel to Australia this year. The #AusOpen is her favourite tournament and shes looking forward to returning to Melbourne next year, - @CraigTiley  #AusOpen (@AustralianOpen) January 8, 2018

Azarenka, currently ranked 210 in the world, had been given a wild card entry into the tournament, which begins on January 15. Last week, reigning ladies singles champion Serena Williams said she would not play in Melbourne.

The former world number one said she was super close to being tournament-ready but reluctantly withdrew from the competition. It was due to be her first Grand Slam since giving birth to daughter Alexis Olympia in September.

Andy Murray, Kei Nishikori and Svetlana Kuznetsova have also withdrawn.
Lidl will open five new stores in and around the London area by March and build its largest British warehouse to date in Luton, Bedfordshire, which will create up to 1,000 jobs.

The German discount supermarket chain says that the move underlines the 'scale' of its expansion plans in the capital. The new sites are all within the M25 belt - Hornchurch, Rosehill, Shepherd's Bush, South Ruislip and Walthamstow.

The company says it has exchanged contracts for the 58-acre Luton site and is planning a one million square foot warehouse.

Capital expansion: Lidl will open five new stores within the M25 belt by March

This will make it Lidl's largest in the UK and double the size of any of its distribution centres in Britain.

Once completed, the warehouse will be the supermarket's fourth for Greater London and create up to 1,000 new jobs.

Lidl said the plans highlighted 'the scale of the supermarket's ambitious expansion plans in London'.

David Skinner, managing director of UK real estate at Aviva Investors  which forms part of the Houghton Regis consortium, in which the site has been secured with  said: 'We are delighted to have secured Lidl as an owner occupier on this important strategic land site.

'The wider consented scheme has consent for over 5,000 homes and, following the recent opening of the new M1 motorway junction, we intend to commence development in early 2019.'

Plans for the new warehouse form part of Lidl UK's 1.45billion investment, which has been earmarked for expansion plans in Britain between 2017 and 2018.

Ingo Fischer, the retailer's board director for expansion and development, said: 'As more London households choose to shop at Lidl we are committed to the continued investment in our operations and infrastructure to support our growth.

'With five new stores opening in the next two months alone, and further store expansion and development plans in place for the Greater London area across the new financial year and beyond, this new warehouse is vital in supporting our ambitious expansion plans in and around the M25.'

Two new regional warehouses were opened in Exeter and Wednesbury last year, while plans are in the works for further distribution centres in Doncaster, Bolton and Peterborough.

Construction has already started on sites in Avonmouth and Eurocentral, Scotland which are each set replace existing warehouses in Weston-Super-Mare and Livingston.

The German discounter's expansion is expected to solidify its standing as the UK's fastest-growing supermarket, increasing the pressure on Britain's 'big four'  Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons.

Kantar Worldpanel figures show that Lidl UK's sales rose 19.2 per cent year-on-year, reaching a market share of 5.3 per cent, while two-thirds of shoppers visited a Lidl or its rival, Aldi, in the preceding three months.

The two retailers now account for almost 1 in every 8 spent in Britain's supermarkets, up from 1 in 25 a decade ago.
Harry Kane insists he is happy at Tottenham as long as the club starts winning trophies.

Kane has also denied he is in talks with Spurs over an extension to his contract, which is worth more than 100,000 a week and expires in 2022.

Doubts surrounding the strikers future have resurfaced after Mauricio Pochettino admitted Kane could not be forced to stay if he decides to leave his boyhood team.

Mauricio Pochettino, left, says he cannot force Harry Kane to remain at Spurs (Nigel French/PA)

After scoring twice in Tottenhams 3-0 FA Cup win over Wimbledon on Sunday, Kane was asked what the club needs to do to secure his long-term future.

Ive always said, just keep progressing, keep getting better, Kane said. We want to start winning trophies so thats the aim. As long as the club keeps doing that then Im happy here.

With Philippe Coutinho set to join Barcelona from Liverpool, Pochettino was asked whether Kane could prove a one-off when it comes to players leaving for the worlds top clubs.

Philippe Coutinhos move to Barcelona led to questions being asked about Kanes future at Tottenham (Manu Fernandez/AP)

Pochettino said: The player needs to choose to stay here, you cannot force the player to stay here.

Kane was asked more generally about players now having the power to dictate their own futures.

If a player wants to go then why would you stop him? Kane said. Hes not going to be in the club, hes not going to want to play every game, hes not going to put his heart on the line.

Tottenham are reportedly preparing a new deal for Kane worth 200,000 a week but the striker was not aware of any planned negotiations. Not that I know of, Kane said.

The 24-year-old proved his worth again at Wembley by breaching a disciplined Wimbledon defence twice in two second-half minutes, before Jan Vertonghen added a third with a sensational long-range strike.

With Manchester City almost uncatchable now in the Premier League, the FA Cup would seem to represent Tottenhams best chance of winning their first major trophy since 2008.

I think this year, especially with the league kind of being out of contention  of course we want to finish in the top four  but its a chance for us to win a competition, Kane said.

Yeah, obviously City running away with it makeswe want to win a trophy somehow and this is a competition were looking at to do that.

Kane was a surprise starter against Wimbledon but the forward now has six days to recover for Saturdays Premier League game at home to Everton.

 Mauricio couldn't help but interrupt @JanVertonghen's interview to have his say on his 'goal' against AFC Wimbledon today!  #COYS pic.twitter.com/d051Q153bG  Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) January 7, 2018

The gaffer asked me yesterday  well, he didnt ask me, he said how do you feel? and I said good and he said youre going to play tomorrow, Kane said.

Its good. Being ill for the first couple of games [last week], its good to get a bit of fitness back and just get back into the swing of it, and obviously great to get two goals.
Two people were injured after a fire broke out in the heating and air conditioning system at Trump Tower in New York City.

The citys Fire Department said the blaze broke out at around 7am (noon GMT) on Monday, causing smoke to billow from the roof of the building which contains US president Donald Trumps home and business offices.

Fire officials said a civilian was treated for serious injuries and a firefighter suffered minor injuries. It took about an hour to extinguish the blaze at the high-rise building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Smoke billows from Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York

The presidents son Eric later tweeted his thanks to firefighters for doing an incredible job.
Egypt will hold a presidential election from March 26-28, with a run-off in April.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has yet to formally announce his bid for re-election, but is widely expected to run and win a second four-year term.

Authorities have waged a wide-scale crackdown on dissent since Mr el-Sissi, as defence minister, led the military overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013.

Egypt's national election authority

Lasheen Ibrahim, the chairman of the national election authority, announced the dates for the election on Monday.

A run-off will be held on April 24-26 if no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote. Egyptian expatriates will vote from March 16-18 and April 19-21.
Indie band Idlewild are to play an intimate gig in Glasgow to mark a charitys expansion in Scotland.

The band will play an acoustic set at the King Tuts venue on February 1.

The gig falls on the same day as the Help Musicians UK (HMUK) charity officially opens its permanent new Scottish operation  Help Musicians Scotland (HMScotland)  in Glasgow.

Were pleased to be playing a special acoustic show at @kingtuts Glasgow on Thu 1 Feb to mark the launch of @HM_Scot. Tickets on sale Wed at 10am  pic.twitter.com/IVv1i6DFeP  Idlewild (@IdlewildtheBand) January 8, 2018

HMUK describes itself as a leading independent charity for people working in the music industry.

Also performing at the celebratory occasion will be Scottish musicians Be Charlotte, Indigo Velvet and SKJOR, all of whom have received support from the charity in the past.

Idlewild band member Rod Jones said: Idlewild are absolutely thrilled to support the launch of Help Musicians Scotland at one of our favourite venues, King Tuts.

Weve played some really special gigs at the venue, the first 21 years ago and a five night stint in 2008, so its truly an honour to return for such a great cause.

Help Musicians Scotland do amazing work to support musicians at all stages in their career.

Were planning a special acoustic set for the evening and fans should expect a fitting set-list to mark a landmark moment for the Scottish music industry.

Idlewild will headline charity gig (Idlewild / PA)

The opening of the Scottish premises by HMUK comes after it launched a base in Northern Ireland in 2016.

Claire Gevaux, director of HMScotland, added: After a year of listening and reflecting on the needs of the Scottish music scene, Im excited to see HMScotland launch in a few weeks.

Tickets, some of which go on sale on Wednesday, are priced at 15 with all proceeds going to the charity.
In the dead of winter, diehard North Dakota anglers dont let cabin fever get the best of them. They throw on some cold-weather gear, tweak their equipment and head outdoors to compete in local ice fishing tournaments, with hopes of reeling in the prize-winning walleye.

Local fishermen  and women  can try their luck at the 16th annual Broken Oar Budweiser Marina Bay Ice Fishing Tournament, with cash prizes awarded in three categories, northern, walleye and nongame fish. The event is slated for Saturday.

Last year, about 150 anglers competed in the derby, which is limited to the first 200 registrants who pay the $25 entry fee.

We can only take 200 because of our permit from game and fish, said Stacy Keller, event chairperson. I would highly suggest people stop by the Broken Oar and prepay because once we reach 200, theres no guarantee.

There will be a 90 percent payback of entry fees to the winners in each of the three categories. The remaining 10 percent will be donated to the Lure em for Life charity, which provides aquatic and fishing education to North Dakotas youth.

Made up of North Dakota Game and Fish Department volunteers, the nonprofit organization hosts several summer fishing camps each year. Youth ages 8 to 14 learn boat and life jacket safety, and how to identify, clean, cook and store fish. They also get to try their hand at boat and shore fishing.

Lure em for Life works with disadvantaged children, as well.

If the tournament fills up, $500 will be donated to the charity.

The event kicks off Friday with door prizes and a mandatory rules meeting at 7 p.m.

Anglers will begin to sink their lines at noon Saturday.

It looks like a city out there on the ice. Its really neat, Keller said.

Cloverdale Foods will provide free hot dogs and bratwursts throughout the day. A raffle also will take place.

Anglers must pull their last fish from the frigid Missouri River by 5 p.m., when the weigh-in begins. Participants may enter one fish per category.

Spectators are welcome to come out and have a brat, and check out the weigh-in, Keller said of the event, which will wrap up with a 6 p.m. awards ceremony.

You need not be 21 years of age or older to compete in the tournament. However, to qualify for the raffle, door prizes and the weigh-in, minors must be accompanied by an adult, such as a parent or guardian. Individuals younger than 21 will not be allowed to enter the bar, Keller said.

The third time just might be the charm for fisherwoman Kelly Baker, of Minot, who plans to make the trek to Mandan to fish with friends  both old and new.

Its always one of the best times of the year, she said. Everyone who loves ice fishing comes together to celebrate and have a ton of fun.

According to Baker, the tournament is perfect for a first-time ice fisherman. She said she hopes to see more women competing at this years event.

I noticed last year there were more women competing than the year before, she said. With any hope, there will be even more fishing again this year.

The derby will take place, regardless of the weather.

Snow, blizzard or cold weather, the tournament goes on, no matter what, Keller said. People keep coming every year, so we keep doing it. Everyone seems to have a good time. The thrill of catching fish and being in the outdoors  its exciting.

For more information, or to register, stop by the Broken Oar, 4724 Pintail Loop, Mandan.
By Beh Lih Yi

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rolling up the sleeves of her long black robe to reveal a scar from a cigarette burn on her arm, refugee Sara shows how her husband pressed a pillow over her face to shut her up when he attacked her.

The abuse began as soon as they got married in 2009, just a year after Sara had fled her home in Myanmar, where her fellow Rohingya - an ethnic Muslim minority - are shunned and persecuted in the Buddhist-majority nation.

She landed in Malaysia and married her husband, a 42-year-old Rohingya man, the following year.

"I wanted to be a good wife but he was always very angry. He would not allow me to go out, he would expect me to have all the food ready, and prepare him a hot towel and a glass of water when he gets home.

"He would hit me if he was not happy. If I cried, he covered my mouth with a pillow so our neighbours could not hear me," said Sara, who used a pseudonym for fear of retaliation from her husband.

The 30-year-old eventually escaped her home with her six-year-old son and the pair have been living for five months in a shelter run by an organisation that supports migrant workers and refugees.

Stories like Sara's are not unusual among the refugee community in Malaysia, which hosts over 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers, the majority of them from Myanmar and some of whom have lived in the country for over a decade.

Rights groups say uncertainty over their future and years of living in a host country where they are considered illegal migrants have taken a toll on their mental health, and driven up cases of domestic violence among refugee families.

'SILENT IN FEAR'

Kuala Lumpur-based Tenaganita, a campaign group which works with refugees, said there was "extensive" gender-based violence against refugee women in Malaysia.

Since last year, the group has been working with the University of Colorado in the United States to conduct a two-year survey among some 500 Rohingya families in Malaysia on the prevalence of gender-based violence.

Tenaganita's executive director, Glorene Das, said although the survey is still underway, early indications showed both male and female respondents acknowledged physical and emotional abuse happened within their families.

"Not being able to resettle or taking a long time adds stress to the family," Das told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"Ultimately husbands or the male family members tend to take it out on their female partners."

She added that the fact refugees are not recognised by the government also means that victims of violence have no legal avenue to turn to when they want to seek recourse.

"Their deemed 'illegality' renders the women silent in fear," Das said.

While the refugees are recognised by the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, which means all refugees are viewed as illegal migrants awaiting resettlement in a third country.

The country also does not extend protection, job opportunities or education to them, leaving many refugees end up finding odd jobs in the informal sectors as cleaners, waiters or construction workers.

Campaigners say the lack of a formal status often leaves refugees vulnerable to abuse, and at risk of arrest as well as deportation under immigration laws.

Some refugees are resettled by the United Nations in so-called third countries, such as the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic and Australia.

Responding to a query from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the UNHCR could not say how long on average it takes for a refugee in Malaysia to be resettled because applications are handled on a case by case basis.

But its data showed number of refugees who left Malaysia for resettlement fell from over 12,500 in 2015, to about 8,100 in 2016 and plummeted to 2,338 to the end of October 2017.

"Given the limited numbers of resettlement places, UNHCR must prioritise those with acute and pressing vulnerabilities," UNHCR spokeswoman Yante Ismail said in an emailed reply.

"For those who do not have a pressing need for resettlement, the process can take much longer, or may not even be an available option," she added.

REFUGEE BAN

Although President Donald Trump lifted a temporary ban on most refugee admissions in October, the number of refugees admitted to the United States has dropped, according to a Reuters analysis of State Department data.

UNHCR's Yante said the uncertainty refugees feel about their future brings a "corrosive effect" on their mental and physical health and called on Malaysia to do more to protect them in the country.

Meanwhile violence - especially against women - continues.

Noor Arifah Bujang, who provides counselling to refugee women, said they often told her stories of how their husbands were in constant fear of being arrested and struggled to make ends meet.

"The (husbands) become stressed and they tend to beat up their wives or children. Marital rape is the most common," she said. (Reporting by Beh Lih Yi @behlihyi, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
SOFIA, Jan 8 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Monday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

-- Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said EU presidency Bulgaria will work to improve relations between the bloc and Turkey. Borissov and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attended the opening of the reconstructed Bulgarian Orthodox church in Istanbul. (Trud, Standart, 24 Chasa, Sega, Monitor)

TRUD - The Bulgarian government plans to spend 271 million levs ($166.53 million)for new fighter jets and ships for the army this year.

-- Police said it has found the man suspected of killing six people on New Year's Eve dead. The 56-year old man was found shot in the head after a four-day search. (Trud, 24 Chasa, Monitor, Sega)

CAPITAL DAILY - Bulgarian central bank reported a loss of 57.6 million euros ($69.17 million) in the first half of 2017, mainly due to negative income from its investment in bonds of euro zone countries. ($1 = 1.6273 leva) ($1 = 0.8327 euros)
By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Robert-Jan Bartunek

COPENHAGEN/BRUSSELS, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Denmark's Novo Nordisk, the world's biggest insulin maker, went public with a 2.6 billion euro ($3.1 billion) bid for Belgian biotech group Ablynx on Monday, seeking a new source of growth by bolstering its treatments for rare blood disorders.

Ablynx rejected Novo's latest takeover approach and analysts predict the Danish group, whose new chief executive is trying to expand by buying drugs developed by competitors, might face counterbidders and would need to raise its bid.

Shares in Ablynx closed up 45 percent at 30.80 euros, above the 30.50 euros per share Novo has offered. The bid represents a 60 percent premium to the Belgian company's share price on Dec. 6, which was before Novo's first approach.

The unsolicited bid comes at a time of renewed interest by large drugmakers in smaller biotech firms, with U.S.-based Celgene clinching a deal to buy Impact Biomedicines for up to $7 billion on Sunday and Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical agreeing last week to buy another Belgian biotech group TiGenix for $630 million.

Ablynx said in a statement that its board "unanimously concluded that the proposal fundamentally undervalues Ablynx and its strong prospects for continued growth and value creation".

It later said that Peter Fellner, its chairman since 2013, had decided to resign with immediate effect. It did not say why.

The Belgian group specialises in the research of novel drugs based on nano-bodies found in the immune systems of llamas and alpacas, for which it partners with several of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

The main attraction for Novo is Ablynx's experimental drug caplacizumab for the rare bleeding disorder acquired thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, which would complement Novo's line-up of blood products focused on haemophilia.

The $11 billion haemophilia market is facing upheaval and Novo stands to lose sales following approval of a new Roche drug Hemlibra.

Biopharmaceutical treatments, led by haemophilia, make up around 20 percent of Novo's sales, with diabetes and obesity products accounting for the remaining 80 percent.

"We have solid growth in our diabetes and obesity business but we are struggling a little bit to maintain the same level of growth momentum in biopharma," Novo's Chief Financial Officer Jesper Brandgaard said.

NEW NOVO CEO ACTS

The Danish company said it would pay 28.00 euros per share in cash for Ablynx and an additional 2.50 euros in a so-called contingent value right (CVR) if certain conditions related to other drugs in Ablynx's research portfolio were met.

An acquisition would be the first by Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, who took over a year ago. He has said the firm needs external innovation to broaden its product line-up.

Under previous chief executive Lars Rebien Sorensen, Novo sat out a spate of deal-making across the drugs industry and instead focused on its market-leading position making insulin and other diabetes treatments.

But in March, the company approached Global Blood Therapeutics, a U.S. biotech company focused on serious blood disorders, to discuss a potential takeover, people familiar with the situation said.

Finance chief Brandgaard said the current bid could be revised if Ablynx agreed to engage in talks.

"I think it would be natural to update the bid following a detailed discussion with the board of directors of Ablynx," he said on a conference call, adding that it would be premature to speculate on any increase.

Brandgaard also played down the threat of an interloper, saying: "In terms of counter proposals it is not our understanding that any other bidder is pursuing the target."

BELGIUM'S THRIVING BIOTECH SCENE

Ablynx had already rejected an offer by the Danish group on Dec. 14 and Novo Nordisk said the new bid, made on Dec. 22, was some 14 percent higher.

"Novo Nordisk regrets that the board of directors of Ablynx has so far declined to engage in any discussions, despite the proposals which have been put forward," it said in a statement.

Analysts at Jefferies said they had a fair value of Ablynx at 29 euros per share, rising to 36 euros under a long term upside scenario.

"We envisage Novo needing to hike the offer and could see counterbids," the analysts said.

Tax breaks and other incentives have created a thriving biotech industry in Belgium, with many companies spun off from university projects now listed on its stock exchange.

Ablynx's shares have almost doubled in price in the past 12 months, buoyed by successful clinical trial data.

Its products, which are all still undergoing medical trials, target many different diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis or cancer.

Evercore is advising Novo, while JPMorgan is working for Ablynx. ($1 = 0.8353 euros)

(Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels, Ben Hirschler in London and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Keith Weir/David Evans/Alexander Smith)
By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

LONDON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Protests that shook Iran were not just aimed at the economy, President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday, remarks suggesting the real targets were powerful conservatives opposed to his plans to expand individual freedoms at home and promote detente abroad.

The pragmatic cleric, who defeated anti-Western hardliners to win re-election last year, also called for the lifting of curbs on social media used by anti-government protesters in the most sustained challenge to hardline authorities since 2009.

"It would be a misrepresentation (of events) and also an insult to Iranian people to say they only had economic demands," Rouhani was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

"People had economic, political and social demands."

Iran's influential Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday the security forces had put an end to a week of unrest fomented by what it called foreign enemies.

The protests, which began over economic hardships suffered by the young and working class, spread to more than 80 cities and towns and has resulted in 22 deaths and more than 1,000 arrests, according to Iranian officials.

Hamid Shahriari, the deputy head of the Judiciary said that all ringleaders of the protests had been identified and arrested, and they would be firmly punished and might face capital punishment.

An Iranian lawmaker confirmed on Monday the death of one detainee in prison.

"This 22 year old young man was arrested by the police. I was informed that he has committed suicide in jail," Tayebeh Siavashi was quoted as saying by ILNA news agency.

Many of the protesters questioned Irans foreign policy in the Middle East, where it has intervened in Syria and Iraq in a battle for influence with rival Saudi Arabia.

IRANIANS CAN CRITICISE "EVERYONE"

The countrys financial support for Palestinians and the Lebanese Shi`ite group Hezbollah also angered Iranians, who want their government to focus on domestic economic problems instead.

Rouhani won re-election last year by promising more jobs for Irans youth through more foreign investment, as well as more social justice, individual freedom and political tolerance - aims questioned by his main challenger in the contest.

Echoing some of his campaign rhetoric, Rouhani said on Monday people should be allowed to criticise all Iranian officials, with no exception.

Demonstrators initially vented their anger over high prices and alleged corruption, but the protests took on a rare political dimension, with a growing number of people calling on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to step down.

The Supreme Leader is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and appoints the heads of the judiciary. Key ministers are selected with his agreement and he has the ultimate say on Irans foreign policy. By comparison, the president has little power.

"No one is innocent and people are allowed to criticise everyone," said Rouhani.

Rouhani also dismissed calls from hardline clerics who had asked the government to permanently block access social media and messaging apps.

As protests have ebbed, the government has lifted restrictions it imposed on Instagram, one of the social media tools used to mobilise protesters. But access to a more widely used messaging app, Telegram, was still blocked. The government has said the restrictions would be temporary.

"People's access to social media should not permanently be restricted. We cannot be indifferent to people's life and business," Rouhani said.

State television showed live pictures of more pro-government rallies in several cities, including Sanandaj in western Iran, as marchers carried posters of Ayatollah Khamenei and chanted slogans in his support.

Iranian Vice-President Masoumeh Ebtekar tweeted on Monday that Rouhani has insisted that all detained students should be released.

Mohammad Bathaei, the education minister said on Monday there were many school children among the detainees and he was asking for their release before exam season.

Amnesty International said last week that more than 1,000 Iranians had been arrested and detained in jails "notorious for torture and other ill-treatment over the past seven days", with many being denied access to families and lawyers.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, Editing by William Maclean)
By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Jordan said on Monday it had foiled an Islamic State plot that included plans for a series of attacks last November on security installations, shopping malls and moderate religious figures, state media reported.

State news agency Petra said the country's intelligence department had arrested 17 members of a cell and confiscated weapons and explosives that the militant group had planned to use in several operations.

"The members of the cell had planned to execute a number of terrorist attacks simultaneously to destabilise national security and sow chaos and terror among civilians," the statement said.

A security source said that members of the cell had been under surveillance from the start when they began to survey high profile civilian and military potential targets.

Security forces have been extra vigilant in recent months with warnings that sympathisers of Islamic State could launch revenge attacks after the militants were driven out of most of the territory they once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

The detainees, who were all from the working class city of Zarqa east of the capital, were being interrogated before being put on trial in a military court, the authorities said without giving a date.

The impoverished city of Zarqa, a traditional hotbed of fundamentalist jihadists, has seen dozens of youths influenced by hardline Islamist ideology joining radical groups in Iraq and Syria in recent years, according to security sources.

The statement said the cell had planned to wage a series of bank robberies and car thefts to get financing, and manufactured homemade explosives from material bought from local markets.

Militants from al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups have long targeted the U.S.-allied kingdom and dozens of militants are currently serving long prison terms.

King Abdullah, a Middle East ally of Western powers against Islamist militancy who has also safeguarded Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, has been among the most vocal leaders in the region in warning of threats posed by radical groups.

Jordan plays a prominent role in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, providing military, logistical and intelligence support, according to Western diplomats and regional intelligence sources.

Several incidents over the past few years have jolted the Arab kingdom, which has been comparatively unscathed by the uprisings, civil wars and Islamist militancy that have swept the Middle East since 2011.

In the last major incident, Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for a shootout just over a year ago at a Crusader castle in the southern city of Karak in which 10 people including a Canadian tourist were killed. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Sandra Maler)
By Thin Lei Win

ROME, Jan 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With their alpine grasslands shrinking due to erratic rainfall and glacier retreat, herders in Peru's central Andes have decided that the future lies in reviving the past.

To improve access to water and save their livestock, indigenous communities in the villages of Canchayllo and Miraflores have restored abandoned dams, reservoirs and canals that date back over 3,000 years.

Two years on from completion of the project - supported by The Mountain Institute (TMI), a U.S.-based non-profit - there are more and better quality pastures for sheep, cattle and alpaca to graze, and milk, meat, and crop yields have risen.

The project's success, benefiting 9,600 people in the Nor Yauyos Cochas Landscape Reserve, has raised hopes for thousands of highland communities in Peru and elsewhere who are facing similar climate pressures, said Florencia Zapata of TMI, which works with mountain communities.

It could also have far-reaching impacts along the desert coast, home to almost 70 percent of the population, which receives less than 2 percent of Peru's available water.

"Water that most of the population depends on comes mainly from the mountains. So, we need to take care of (that water)," Zapata, who oversaw the project, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

The western ranges of the "brown" Andes - with a marked dry season - are dotted with remains of ancient infrastructures dedicated to managing water, said Jorge Recharte, director of TMI's Andes programme.

The ranges extend to Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and while some water structures are still in use, knowledge and understanding of them had started to vanish as populations dwindled due to migration to the cities, Recharte said.

Peru's glaciers are a source of fresh water for millions of people but they have diminished by 40 percent since the 1970s, government figures showed.

The South American country is home to 70 percent of the world's tropical glaciers, which are "especially sensitive to warming temperatures", the United Nations warned.

Fears over the melting of an Andean glacier has even led to an intercontinental lawsuit that environmentalists are watching closely.

"As glacier retreat progresses and climate change kicks in... new lands are becoming available for agriculture in the Andes," said Alexander Herrera, an archaeologist and associate professor at Colombia's Universidad de los Andes.

"Learning from the past is absolutely crucial for sustainable, low-risk, productive agriculture (of the kind) the Andes have had for thousands of years," said Herrera, who was involved in the Canchayllo and Miraflores projects.

GREY AND GREEN

Peru has a long history of embarking on engineering feats to manage the flow of water for agriculture.

The Incas and the civilisations before them built terraces, cisterns and canals while modern government projects include the $500-million Olmos and the stalled Chavimochic III irrigation projects.

It was at one of the first meetings TMI organised in 2013 that locals raised the possibility of rehabilitating the neglected pre-Inca hydraulic structures.

Designed to slow the movement of water through grasses and soils, they replenished aquifers and springs and helped the grasslands retain more water, allowing biodiversity to flourish.

This way, the ecosystem acted as a buffer against flooding and drought and provided fodder for their animals, who in turn produce cheese and importantly manure, used to cultivate "thousands of native potato, corn, tuber and grain varieties", Zapata said.

The restoration and adaptation of ancient terraces and canals for modern use has been pioneered by British archaeologist Ann Kendall since the late 1970s.

But other attempts by Andean governments and aid groups in the 1980s to revive these technologies for development failed because the focus was more on techniques and less on the needs of the locals, said archaeologist Herrera.

In Canchayllo and Miraflores, the restoration has combined ancient and modern technologies to meet the demands of herders, after months of consultation.

The restored systems incorporate "grey" infrastructure such as PVC pipes, water valves and fences and "green" elements such as restoration of grasslands and wetlands.

The restoration minimised the need for regular maintenance work since labour is in short supply, with the young and able moving to cities for better jobs.

"It is not enough to just improve their infrastructure or water availability. If people are not organised to manage the infrastructure, it will collapse sooner or later," Zapata said.

NOT ANOTHER BURDEN

Julio Postigo, a Peruvian expert on pastoralism in high altitudes, said poor, marginalised communities needed support from government to revive the ancient structures - just as families were supported centuries ago.

"We tend to forget, when we romanticise these Inca or pre-Inca or ancient responses, that they were never taken by individual families," said Postigo, a senior research scientist at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center.

"You're talking about an empire that decided that that infrastructure was going to be built."

TMI said it was looking to train and work with the Peruvian government and other organisations to replicate the success of projects in central Peru.

But reviving ancient water systems must be part of a wider plan to help communities cope with climate change, said Postigo.

"The people most vulnerable to climate change effects are those who are poorer, less educated, more marginal, indigenous," he said in a phone interview.

"We should fight poverty and improve living conditions. In doing so, those populations will be on a better foot to respond to climate change." (Reporting By Thin Lei Win, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
ANKARA, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Turkey's nationalist opposition said on Monday it would back President Tayyip Erdogan in the 2019 election, signalling continued right-wing support crucial to his narrow victory in a constitutional referendum last year.

The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the smallest of parliament's four factions, backed the vote to grant Erdogan sweeping executive powers, helping it squeak by with a margin of 51.4 percent.

"The MHP will not submit a presidential candidate," MHP leader Devlet Bahceli told a news conference. "The MHP will take a decision to support Erdogan in the presidential elections." Turks will vote for both president and parliament next year.

Bahceli has said he wants a reduction in the minimum 10 percent vote required for a party to enter parliament.

Over the past two decades he has brought the MHP more towards the mainstream and away from its early reputation for ties to rightist street gangs.

The party is now looking to fend off a challenge from Meral Aksener, an ex-interior minister and prominent nationalist who last year founded her own party after breaking with the MHP.

One recent poll suggested that Aksener's party could eclipse the MHP and deprive it of the 10 percent threshold.

Bahceli said the MHP would consider an alliance with Erdogan's AK Party if such a request came from the AKP.

The MHP won as much as 18 percent in the 1999 parliamentary election but slipped below the threshold with 9.5 percent in 2002. It has exceeded 10 percent in elections since and took 11.9 percent in the November 2015 vote.

Founded by an ex-colonel involved in a 1960 military coup, the MHP espouses a mix of Turkish nationalism and scepticism towards the West. It is virulently opposed to autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish minority.

The MHP support base once included sympathisers of the "Grey Wolves", a nationalist youth group that fought street battles with leftists in the 1970s. Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, was a group member. (Reporting by Ercan Gurses and Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by David Dolan and Mark Heinrich)
By Andy Home

LONDON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Zinc has started the new year with a bang, hitting a fresh 10-year high of $3,380 per tonne in the first week of trading on the London Metal Exchange (LME).

The only historical reference point for zinc at such levels is the bull market of 2005-2007, when LME three-month metal topped out at $4,600.

Few seem to be expecting a return to such extreme pricing but, with funds adding length in both London and Shanghai, there are still many betting that zinc's two-year bull charge isn't over just yet.

They evidently agree with Goldman Sachs, which has revised upwards its price forecasts to $3,300 on a three-month basis, $3,500 on a six-month basis and $2,800 on a 12-month basis.

Even as a supply response starts to build after two years of rising prices, Goldman's view is that "the market is likely to get even tighter in the first half of (this) year." ("Zinc: tightness to persist through 1H2018", Dec. 18, 2017).

Events in the three weeks since the bank issued that forecast have served only to reinforce its core message.

Graphic on LME zinc price:

http://tmsnrt.rs/2D7SQ62

Graphic on LME zinc stocks and time-spreads:

http://tmsnrt.rs/2CE7Qrl

LME SPREADS TIGHTER AGAIN

LME time-spreads eased steadily over the last two months of 2017 to the point that the benchmark cash-to-three-months period <CMZN0-3> was valued at $10 contango in the middle of December, compared with $91 backwardation in October.

This loosening spread structure looked anomalous given the daily declines in LME-registered stocks.

Either it was signalling more metal was on its way to the LME warehouse network or it was no more than a temporary mismatch of short and long positioning across the front part of the curve.

It's the latter interpretation that now looks the most likely.

Absolutely zero fresh metal has arrived in the LME storage system and time-spreads have tightened up again.

That cash-to-three-month period, for example, closed last week valued at $26 backwardation.

More LME spread tightness looks almost inevitable.

Not only is headline inventory still ticking lower on a near daily basis but Friday's LME stocks report showed 25,075 tonnes of net new cancellations as metal is prepared for physical load-out.

All the cancellation action took place at New Orleans, which shouldn't come as a shock since the U.S. port now holds all but 1,700 tonnes of the 180,325 tonnes left in the entire system.

Excluding cancelled tonnage, LME "live" stocks are now just 139,250 tonnes.

Sure, that's still higher than last year's July low point of 69,850 tonnes, but with no arrivals since the middle of October, exchange stocks liquidity is fast becoming a focal point of zinc's narrative of supply deficit.

Graphic on China's net imports of refined zinc:

http://tmsnrt.rs/2CWEwNH

CHINESE ZINC IMPORTS BOOM

One possible reason for so little metal being available for LME delivery, despite the reappearance of a premium for cash metal, is a sharp pick-up in Chinese imports.

China's pull on metal from the rest of the world was distinctly subdued in the first half of 2017, net imports actually falling by 40 percent year-on-year to 170,000 tonnes.

Indeed, China's lack of import appetite was a significant wrinkle in zinc's bull story.

The trend turned in July, however, with imports of refined zinc accelerating sharply.

November itself saw net imports hit 122,600 tonnes, the largest monthly tally ever, eclipsing the previous record of 120,000 tonnes dating from March 2009.

The November count was boosted by the import of 50,903 tonnes of zinc from Spain, making it the second largest supplier in the first 11 months of 2017 after Australia, a more traditional source for Chinese importers.

China imported less than 10,000 tonnes of zinc from Spain in both 2015 and 2016 and even if November's flood turns out to be a one-off, there is a sense of metal moving from off-exchange statistical shadows to plug supply-chain gaps.

The Shanghai zinc contract is backwardated beyond the first three trading months and registered stocks are also close to historical lows.

There was some rebuild over the last week but at 77,383 tonnes, inventory held in Shanghai Futures Exchange sheds is 82,000 tonnes lower than this time last year and 130,000 tonnes lower than in January 2015.

China is itself a major producer of zinc, both at the mined and the refined metal level.

But the country's ability to respond to physical tightness and higher prices has been severely constrained by the ongoing environmental campaign.

While China's zinc mines "used to be the swing producers in previous cycles", Goldman Sachs analysts argue that the country's zinc production in this particular price cycle "has disappointed and is likely to only increase slowly going forward."

THE ONLY WAY IS UP?

The steady attrition of LME stocks and the sharp pick-up in Chinese imports have reinvigorated the bull argument for higher zinc prices.

But, judging by the LME options market, the optimism comes with a sell-by date.

Call options confer the right to buy and, not entirely surprisingly, there is open interest on strikes such as $4,000, $4,400 and $4,500 in each of the next five months.

Beyond June, however, open interest almost totally disappears above the $3,800 strike, suggesting Goldman is not the only one looking for prices to peak around the middle of the year.

The only outlier on the 2018 call options heat map is the four lots (100 tonnes) of open interest on the $5,000 strike in December.

It's a relatively small bet but a big call that zinc's bull charge is going to be extended for longer and further than consensus.

Bullish exuberance?

Quite possibly, but until the LME stocks trend turns, tightness in both physical and paper markets looks set to the defining feature of the zinc market over the coming weeks and months.

(Editing by David Evans)
PARIS, Jan 8 (Reuters) - France registered a record number of asylum requests in 2017, when Albanians topped the list despite far slimmer prospects of obtaining refugee status than people from war-torn places such as Syria or Afghanistan.

A more than two-year long migration crisis has caused immigration to become a major political issue in many European countries, including France. Official asylum requests rose 17 percent to exceed 100,000, the highest "in at least four decades", according to Pascal Brice, head of France's refugee office (Ofpra).

"This is not a massive inflow and we are capable of handling the situation," Brice told CNews television on Monday.

The number is sensitive after an election where President Emmanuel Macron faced off against Marine Le Pen of the anti-immigrant National Front.

Macron, who won power in May, has promised to slash the time it takes French officials take to rule on asylum requests - to two months maximum from what Brice said was now about three months on average.

Asylum requests from Albanians rose 66 percent from 2016 but the acceptance rate was low, at just 6.5 percent, Ofpra figures showed.

By comparison, the acceptance rate was 95 percent for Syrians, 85 percent for Afghans and 59 percent in the case of people from Sudan, Ofpra said.

Brice called the surge in Albanian requests "a cyclical phenomenon". Albanians rose from third place in 2016 to the front of the queue of asylum-requesters in 2017, ahead of Afghanistan and Sudan, with Syria further down the line.

The new French number -- precisely 100,412 asylum requests in 2017 - compares to 140,000 asylum requests recorded in the first nine months of 2017 in neighbouring Germany, where limits on the inflow are one key issue in talks where Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking to forge a governing coalition. (Reporting by Julie Carriat and Brian Love; editing by Richard Lough)
BUDAPEST, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Hungary's State Audit Office (ASZ) has fined the main, nationalist opposition party Jobbik 331.66 million forints ($1.29 million) for an anti-government billboard campaign funded by a wealthy adversary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Jobbik, which entered parliament in 2010 on a radical far-right agenda, is now projecting a centrist image in a bid to unseat Orban at an election due in April, where his Fidesz looks well-placed to retain power.

Confirming the findings of a preliminary report, Hungary's State Audit Office (ASZ) said Jobbik had been fined for running an advertising campaign at below market prices.

The ASZ gave Jobbik 15 days to pay the fine, equal to the price advantage the party received illegally for the campaign, which accused Orban and some of his associates of corruption.

The fine amounted to more than two-thirds of Jobbik's annual state subsidy of 475.8 million forints, and the party said the "court-martial" levy could cripple its election campaign. Jobbik has denied wrongdoing.

Jobbik's subsidy should also be cut by the same amount as the fine, ASZ spokesman Balint Horvath said. Jobbik used billboards owned by tycoon Lajos Simicska, an estranged Orban ally who has since become a supporter of the far right.

Orban says Simicska hijacked Jobbik. Both the party and the tycoon deny this.

Officials at the State Treasury and at Jobbik were not immediately available for comment.

Jobbik received public funds worth nearly a billion forints in 2015 and 2016. The ASZ said Jobbik's finances over that period were not sufficiently transparent.

The ASZ, which is led by ex-Fidesz lawmaker Laszlo Domokos, has rejected accusations of politicking against Orban's foes. It said the investigation was part of a regular biennial review of parties that receive public funding.

A rally last month against the crackdown drew about a thousand Jobbik supporters, though the turnout fell well short of similar demonstrations over the past year.

Fidesz commanded 39 percent of all voters in November, according to a survey by pollster Median published in the weekly HVG. Jobbik was backed by 11 percent, while the Socialists were a distant third with 7 percent.

($1 = 257.56 forints) (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Two local business partners are combining their love for literature and liquor to open a specialty cocktail bar on Mandans Main Street.

Thomas and Moriartys, to be located at 200 W. Main St., is named for Jerry Thomas, author of The Bar-Tenders Guide, the first cocktail book published in the United States, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Professor James Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Michael Kashey and Stacy Sturm are partnering to open the late 1800s, early 1900s literature-themed bar this month.

Sturm was an English major in college and has worked in various forms of media.

I love the classics, Sturm said. Classic cocktails, classic stories  I guess it all kind of goes together.

The Devil in the White City will be one of their first drinks. The cocktail is named for H.H. Holmes, the infamous serial killer in 1893 Chicago. The drink starts white, with gin. Kashey will add sweet vermouth and squid ink to turn it black.

Kashey has worked at a craft cocktail bar for the past couple years. When the opportunity to implement his own vision for a bar came along, he went for it.

I have an appreciation for not just drinks but alcohol as well, Kasheys partner, Sturm, said.

It was their shared focus on chemistry and combinations and what makes a good balanced cocktail that brought the pair together.

Theres an appreciation you get when you really kind of study alcohol, Sturm said. We need more bars around here that really want to teach people about cocktails and spirits  Thats kind of the goal of our bar.

Thomas and Moriartys will host alcohol education and tasting seminars, including a history of absinthe event in February.

Kashey said the events will often feature three drinks. As host, hell talk a bit about the history of the liquors involved, the distilling process and how they got their start.

I think theres a lot of misinformation about alcohol and not understanding the culture behind it, he said.

In addition, they plan to have a daily absinthe hour with a discounted price on absinthe, which Kashey calls the most misunderstood spirit, with a murky history.

Sturm and Kashey also want to keep Thomas and Moriartys small, quiet and intimate, for the social anti-social drinker who wants to go out to have a drink but not deal with a lot of people. The capacity will be 30 people.

For those wanting an even more exclusive experience, there will be a VIP program, The Main Street Irregulars, with discounts on classes, tastings and events and access to a secret menu featuring time-intensive drinks.

These will be really cool, edgy drinks you normally only see in bigger cities, said Sturm, adding that membership to the program will be limited to 50 people.

There will be some beers on tap in the bar. For nondrinkers, there will be a craft mocktail menu, Sturm said. A charcuterie menu of preserved meats and cheeses will offer light eats.

Walking in will feel like walking into the 1800s, with woodwork, wainscoting, antique-style ceiling tiles and a vintage-style bar. Hours will be 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Kashey said the feedback has been positive and they hope the bar will help diversify Mandans drinking scene.

Theres a lot of people who work in Bismarck but live in Mandan so this gives them somewhere a little closer to home to come for a drink after work, he said.

Mandan is somewhat untapped territory for high-end cocktail bars, according to Sturm, who said Mandans downtown is growing and a number of new drinking establishments will be getting a start there.

It just gives options, Sturm said. People can spend a night in either (Bismarck or Mandans) downtown rather than just doing the same thing all the time.
CAIRO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Egypt will hold a presidential election in late March, authorities said on Monday, starting the countdown towards a likely second term in office for incumbent Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Sisi has yet to announce his candidacy for the ballot, which was scheduled for March 26-28.

But he is widely expected to run, having won a landslide victory in the previous election in 2014, the year after - as a military commander - he led the overthrow of elected president Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The national election commission said candidates must register between Jan 20-29 and that, in the event of no single participant winning a majority first time around, a run-off would be held on April 24-26.

The election will be Egypt's third since the 2011 uprising that ended strongman Hosni Mubarak's long rule.

Former prime minister Ahmed Shafik, who was seen as the most serious potential challenger to Sisi's rule, said on Sunday he was no longer considering running.

Shafik returned to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates in December after announcing his intention to run, setting off a firestorm of criticism from state-aligned media and speculation that he was being held by authorities in a Cairo hotel.

Sisi's critics say his popularity has been dimmed by austerity reforms, security problems and a crackdown on dissidents.

His allies dismiss accusations of rights abuses, saying his measures are needed for security in the face of an Islamist insurgency in the North Sinai region that has expanded to include civilian targets.

Another presidential hopeful, rights lawyer Khaled Ali, faces a potential three-month prison sentence handed down in September for public indecency over an alleged rude hand gesture he made outside a courthouse last year.

He may be disqualified from standing if he loses his appeal on March 7.

Ali gained prominence in January last year when he won a case that nullified a government transfer of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, a deal that had prompted mass protests.

Lasheen Ibrahim, the judge heading the commission, told a news conference it would "spare no effort in running elections in accordance with the highest standards of fairness and international transparency."

First round results will be announced on April 2 and, in the event of a run-off, final ones on May 1. (Reporting by Omar Fahmy and Nadine Awadalla; Editing by John Stonestreet)
By Benet Koleka

TIRANA, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Albania sacked its national police chief on Monday in apparent response to rising international pressure to crack down on the cannabis trade, which rapidly expanded during his watch.

With the European Union dangling the possibility of accession talks in mid-2018, Albania is stepping up efforts to rein in rampant corruption and organised crime including cannabis cultivation.

The Tirana government gave no specific reasons for the dismissal of Haki Cako, but said in a statement it was looking for a replacement able to cope "with a bigger workload at a faster pace".

Investigators from Italy, a major market for Albanian cannabis trafficked across the Adriatic Sea, said in November that aerial monitoring had turned up just 90 cannabis plots compared with 2,086 in 2016. That prompted Cako to assert that his police had "uprooted cannabis" all over Albania.

But crime gangs continue to smuggle tonnes of cannabis on speedboats across the Adriatic to Italy, a situation the government statement indicated was unacceptable.

"Police work should indispensably be driven towards tangible results to better respond to the requirements of this new stage and the high expectations of the people and our international partners," the statement said.

Cako had no immediate comment on his firing, which came soon after the start of Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama's second term and amid an investigation against ex-interior minister Saimir Tahiri for alleged collusion with cannabis traffickers.

Cako was promoted to deputy national police chief in 2014 for his role in ending the open-air growing of cannabis on an industrial scale in the lawless southern village of Lazarat.

But over the next two years cannabis cultivation spread wildly all over the rugged Balkan country under Cako's watch - he became national police chief when his boss resigned - though police said they had cut down more plants than ever before. (Reporting By Benet Koleka; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
With many companies using finance outsourcing to add value, increase business flexibility and prepare for future growth, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) has played a significant role in being at the forefront of supporting finance outsourcing organizations to build talent by tailoring their qualification to suit the unique requirements and business capabilities needed by this industry.



Amongst such organizations in the country, is WNS Global Services, a platinum approved employer of ACCA. Dinesh Wickremanayake, Managing Director of WNS outlined some of the challenges and changes that will take place in this sector over the next decade.



Wickremanayake stated that Sri Lanka is emerging as a global BPM destination and the sector has been identified as a thrust industry. However, if it is to reach their end goal of delivering 220,000 jobs by 2020, they need to focus on becoming a center of excellence for several key sectors such as financial and accounting services, investment research, human resources services and legal services, along with IT services. Among these sectors, financial and accounting services has shown a notable growth with Sri Lanka having the worlds largest pool of UK qualified English-speaking accounting professionals outside UK. This should be further developed given their immeasurable potential.



He further explained Customers will demand digital services and experiences similar to other industries. Therefore, we need to start taking some bold steps to engage with these emerging innovations if we are we to be successful and remain competitive.



He also cited that whilst maintaining in being comparatively cost competitive than many established global sourcing destinations, Sri Lanka will need to build FinTech or financial technology expertise in the sector.



F&A outsourcing firms will need to help businesses quickly examine large amounts of financial data for better decision-making insights, from revenue assurance, to working capital analytics, to cost reduction, to running robust customer relationship management systems, as well as leveraging data to improve and maximize cash flow and drive strategic initiatives.



F&A outsourcing firms will need to deliver integration and a holistic end-to-end approach with their value proposition expanding beyond the bottom line and directly targeting the clients top line performance. The future of F&A outsourcing will belong to a workforce that is both finance and technology savvy.Professional accounting bodies such as ACCA has been very pro-active in taking such trends into account and incorporating areas such as digitization into their qualifications as a key subject, as well as conducting their examinations online.



Wickremanayake expressed that with the high turnover rate in the sector , Sri Lanka needs to showcase how finance professionals in F&A outsourcing have opportunities for faster career growth and to build experience in different industries in a more global environment. This will help promote the sector as a lucrative career option, leading to a more stable workforce with low attrition rates and building stakeholder confidence.



According to Wickremanayake, organizations selecting their F&A outsourcing firms will be based on provider skills, placing greater demands on their capabilities and service approach in the ability to create value, flexibility, providing business insights, greater efficiency and productivity, and improved governance and transparency. Overall, it will all be about developing better insights to support decision making and providing better service to business with innovation and end-to-end integration by utilizing digitalization.



Investments will need to be made in people with specific training requirements determined at each level, develop competency profiles and steer progressive professional development opportunities for employees. Training will need to cover analytical and innovative skills, business acumen and integrity. International accounting bodies such as ACCA have boldly changed their syllabus to suit such needs of employers by training their students in case study modules known as the Strategic business leader which fosters the practical skills needed in the workplace, along with their Ethics & Professional skills module that gives prominence to the areas of innovation, commercial awareness, analysis, evaluation, problem solving, leadership, team working and communication skills. 



Wickremanayake concluded Ultimately, the future success of this industry will be reliant on the government providing the ecosystem to promote the industry both locally and globally, the private sector offering lucrative career incentives and professional finance bodies training the younger generation with the skills needed by the sector.
The bilateral trade between Australia and Sri Lanka has surged to a record high of Australian dollars (A$) 1.3 billion in 2016-17, on the back of strong growth in trade in services, up more than 27 percent, the Australian High Commission said in a media communique.



Growth for the year overall was more than 15 percent year-on-year (YoY), continuing the strong trend growth of 8.6 percent over the past five years.



Education continues to grow as a pillar of the economic relationship with more than 9500 enrolments by Sri Lankan students to study in Australia and thousands more pursuing Australian-affiliated studies locally.



The rapid growth in Australian tourists visiting Sri Lankaup almost 10 percent YoY, saw Sri Lankas services exports to Australia grow by more than 36 percent YoY. Merchandise trade remained steady at around A$ 480 million, based on Sri Lankas traditional strengths in tea, textiles and rubber. Garments exports have grown strongly in the past year reflecting the decision by the Australian retailers to source garments from Sri Lanka. Australias major exports of vegetables, dairy, wheat and machinery have also performed well. There are now more high-quality Australian goods appearing on Sri Lankan supermarket shelves.



Welcoming the trade figures, Australian High Commissioner Bryce Hutchesson said, This years figures reflect the steady growth in commercial engagement between our two countries.



As close friends and Indian Ocean neighbours, were now seeing the trade and investment relationship expand as Sri Lankas economy moves forwards and the Australian companies take an increased interest in the Sri Lankan market.



During Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls visit to Sri Lanka in November 2017, the two countries signed the Australia-Sri Lanka Trade and Investment Framework Arrangement. The arrangement provides a practical forum for our two governments to address trade issues.



Our shared aim is to open up new commercial opportunities for business. Im pleased that the inaugural talks under the arrangement will take place in Canberra in April 2018.



With the recent launch of direct flights between Colombo and Melbourne, we anticipate we will see continued strong trade growth in 2017-18, Hutchesson said.
The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) today requested the Prime Minister's Secretary not to allow Temple Trees to be used for election propaganda work.

It said this in the wake of an event where the education ministry distributed mobile lab kits to school principals on Thursday.

In a statement CaFFE accused the Good Governance administration of using Temple Trees, which is the Prime Minister's office for election propaganda purposes and said the former Rajapaksa administration also did this.

The Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU) alleged that the Education ministry had distributed mobile lab kits at Temple Trees with the participation of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and and Education Minister Akila Viraj Kariyawasam.

CaFFE said the event was organised by Director of Education (Science), M.P. Vipulasena and that some 3,000 people had participated.

It said even the Rajapaksa administration had misused Temple Trees by hosting events in blatant violation of election laws and the abuse of state resources.

CaFFE said the present administration was also following the example set by the previous administration.

It is saddening to see that state officials have not learned a lesson from what befell Lalith Weeratunga and Anusha Palpita, it said. (Thilanka Kanakarathna)
By Harshana Sellahewa

The Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka (FPA Sri Lanka) recently launched the latest SKYN condom brand to its wide array of contraceptives, at a grand launch event held at the Shangri-La Hotel.



FPA Sri Lanka, founded in 1953, which pioneered family planning services in the country still remains the premier non-governmental organisation involved in promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights to all. Today, FPA Sri Lanka is headed by Chandima Gunawardena, President of the organisation.



Asiri Hospital Sexual Medicine Consultant Dr. Lasantha Malavige made the keynote address along with an informative presentation with benefits, drawbacks, as well as precautions on sexual conduct. The chief guest at the event was film producer/director and veteran actor Sanath Gunathilake.



Addressing the gathering, FPA Sri Lanka President Chandima Gunawardena stated: Usage and marketing of a condom has been to some extent a grey market. People know what a condom is but they dont want to talk about it, and that has been impediment to societys progress of the usage of this product. The mission that Im trying to give you is for all of you here to become ambassadors to take this message across and say this is no more a grey market area. This is something that is similar to buying a bar of soap before going to have a bath. You need this to make your immediate society, your family, your friends, lead a healthy and happy life.

The SKYN condom is designed using the very latest technology to give a truly intimate sexual experience. It is the first condom to be introduced to the local market that does not contain natural rubber latex, but instead is made from synthetic polyisoprene. It is therefore safe and suitable for people with a latex allergy or skin irritations.



SKYN condoms, manufactured in Thailand by Suretex Ltd and affiliated to Ansell, a global leader in protection solutions, are rigorously tested and manufactured in accordance with ISO 23409 and have been registered under the Drugs Regulatory Authority of Sri Lanka. They offer the same protection against unwanted pregnancies and HIV/STIs as regular

latex condoms.
Athek Barata Cementhi, the last major consumer campaign implemented for 2017 by INSEE Cement saw an overwhelming response from Individual house builders island-wide, with Chandika Rajapaksha from Kaleliya, Meerigama, walking away with the grand prize of Rs. 1 million worth of INSEE Sanstha Cement.



The winning prize was handed over by Jan Kunigk, Executive Vice President and Commercial Director of Siam City Cement, at a ceremony held at the INSEE Cement Colombo Warehouse recently.



A successful contractor with over 10 years of practice in the local construction industry, Chandika Rajapakshas win is testament to INSEE Sansthas standing in the market as the leading cement brand, with proven higher strength and durability compared to any other cement available locally.



As a contractor I have been using INSEE Sanstha for over 11 years now, commented Chandika Rajapaksha during the event. The, higher strength, freshness, quality and workability of INSEE Sanstha makes it the best cement for concrete available in Sri Lanka. I am extremely thrilled to have won the grand prize, and I thank INSEE Cement for introducing such campaigns to reward their loyal customers.



The Athek Barata Cementhi campaign, designed to reward loyal INSEE Sanstha customers was carried out from the 15th October  15th December 2017, where 45 lucky winners walked away with Rs. 50,000 worth of INSEE Sanstha Cement through a daily draw. Dealers and masons were also rewarded through this promotion.

While congratulating the winner, Executive Vice President and Commercial Director of Siam City CementJan Kunigk commented, INSEE Sanstha is blended cement with a long-standing legacy. One in every three houses in Sri Lanka is built with INSEE Sanstha, which proves the confidence people have placed on the brand. We are thrilled with the response received on the Athek Barata Cementhi campaign and look forward to a new year that presents more opportunities for us to serve, recognize and reward our loyal customers.
Lanka Hospitals Corporation PLC recently announced that it has successfully performed a highly specialised spine surgery called minimally invasive lumbar fusion with navigation assistant.



The internationally accredited, multi award-winning healthcare provider Lanka Hospitals has incorporated cutting edge technology and innovative techniques to transform the traditionally long, tedious and risky surgical procedure into a highly successful cost effective surgery, considerably reducing the surgical and recovery time with minimal requirement for post-operative medication. According to Chief Neurosurgeon Dr. Prasanna Gunasena, minimally invasive lumbar fusion is a procedure required to treat patients suffering from unstable spines. The condition may occur since birth in some patients or due to ageing factors for others, where it makes the surrounding tissues of the vertebral column grow thicker. This in turn constricts the nerves within the vertebral column leaving the patient to feel pain down the legs and numbness in addition to causing bladder and bowel problems. The condition if prolonged may cause the spine to collapse with time, requiring insertion of screws to stabilise it. This procedure is not only time consuming, but also makes the patient to be hospitalised for five to six days. Mobilising becomes difficult following such surgeries and recovery tends to slow down. The patient may undergo post-operative pains and discomfort and will be required to depend on lot of medications. In order to avoid the tedious surgical procedure, worlds recognised spine specialists opt for minimal invasive procedure. The minimal invasive surgeries are also used for the decompression of the nerves in conditions such as sciatica and neurogenic claudication Dr. Gunasena added. Minimal Invasive procedure has simplified the decompression of nerves to a great extent; however lumbar fusion still remains a challenging procedure. Staying abreast of worlds most modern and innovative technological advances, Lanka Hospitals has adapted the latest navigation technology to conduct the fusion with highest precision. The navigation is a method incorporated in surgeries where the system overlaps high quality camera imaging with x-ray imagery of a patient, allowing the surgeon to view where and how exactly the screws are placed. This method greatly minimises the complexity of the fusion procedure, and eliminates the possibilities of complications arising from misplacement or mal-alignment of screws. Dr. Gunasena stressed the fact that the availability of an advanced medical procedure in the country will greatly benefit the patients having to seek costly medical procedures from overseas. Furthermore, Lanka Hospitals also incorporates a continuous nerve monitoring system which greatly supports the surgeries. Maximising its own resources, Neurosurgery Department of Lanka Hospitals has not only adapted the minimal invasive procedure, but has also installed specially designed instruments compatible with their navigation system. This further reduces the length of the incision from from inches to two inches. Due to fast recovery, the patients need not remain in the hospital for more than two days. In addition, the post operative blood loss is dropped to almost zero, therefore does not require insertion of drains. Post operative pains last only for one day, and from the second day onwards pains can be conveniently managed with minimal medication.



Conducting the first minimally invasive lumbar fusion with navigation assistant for the first time successfully, Dr. Prasanna Gunasena says his team can complete the surgery within one and a half to two hours. With time, they intend to shorten the time span while increasing efficiency and precision to a great extent.



Elaborating on the benefits of the minimal invasive procedure of Lanka Hospitals Corporation PLC, Dr. Prasanna Gunasena stated: Minimal invasive is ideal for the modern day busy lives, as a patient who undergoes the procedure in the morning have the ability to return home within 24 hours. The recovery period is much faster and no post operative medication or physiotherapy is required. Instead of taking leave for months to recover, the new procedure allows a patient to quickly recover and return to work in a matter of 10 to 15 days.



Minimal invasive procedure with navigation assistant is not available in many places in India or Singapore. Only a handful of specialised medical centres in Europe, US and Australia are adopting the procedure. Were very happy that we could perform this surgery in Sri Lanka which no doubt will lead to an amazing breakthrough in neurosurgery in Sri Lanka as well as the South Asian region, Dr. Gunasena further stated.
Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda on the left with K.P. Sharma Oli on the right

Elections to the 275-member Lower House of the Nepalese parliament  House of Representatives  were held between November 26 and December 7, 2017.

Earlier, elections to the legislatures of the seven provinces had been concluded. The Left Alliance, comprising the Communist Party of Nepal - Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), and the Communist Party of Nepal - Maoist Centre (CPN-MC),swept the elections to the House of Representatives.



And yet, up to date, a new government has not been formed and the Nepali Congress (NC) headed by Sher Bahadur Deuba, continues to be in the seat of power in Kathmandu. Current indications are that a government might be formed in March.



Elections to the Upper House of parliament  National Assembly  have been delayed because of differences over the mode of election. The cabinet has only now decided to hold elections on February 7. The seven Provincial Assemblies are yet to be convened. New governments are yet to be formed at the provincial level. Governors to the provinces are yet to the appointed. Even fixing the capitals of the provinces has become a subject of agitations. A combination of administrative and political factors has created these uncertainties.



National Assembly



The 59-member National Assembly, which is the Upper House of parliament, comprises 56 members elected by the members of the seven Provincial Assemblies, the Chiefs and Deputy Chiefs of the Local Bodies, and three others nominated by the President to ensure the representation of marginal groups.



The Presidential Ordinance on elections to the National Assembly was delayed because political parties were divided on the mode of election. The still in power Nepali Congress (NC) had advised the President to use the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system so that even the smaller parties could find a place. The CPN-MC was neither here nor there but finally opted for the STV system. But the CPN-UML was pressing for the First Past the Post System (FPPS) as it would have the upper hand given the fact that it is the single largest party.



Finally, the NCs views prevailed and the cabinet decided to hold the National Assembly elections on February 7.



Issues in Merger of CPN (UML) and CPN (MC)



Government formation has been stymied also by political confusion in the CPN (UML)-CPN (MC) alliance. The issue is how to share power? In a merged Leftist party, which of the two constituents would be the chair? Will the Prime Ministers office and the chair of the merged party go by rotation?



Seeing the quarrel within the Left Alliance, other parties are fishing in troubled waters. The Nepali Congress (NC), supported by the parties of the Madhesis (who are people of Indian Origin settled in the Terai or plains of South Nepal), are wooing the CPN (MC)with the bait of a Prime Ministerial position through a system of rotation.



The problem in the Left Alliance stems from numbers as well as the self-assessment of the its two leaders  K. P. Sharma Oli of CPN (UML), and Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda of CPN (MC).



First the numbers: In the newly elected 275-seat House of Representatives, Olis party, the CPN (UML), has secured 121 (combining those who came through the First Past the Post system as well as the Proportional Representation System). The Nepali Congress (NC) has got63, and the CPN (MC) 53. The Rashtriya Janata Party has 17, and the Federal Socialist Forum, 16. The Rashtriya Prajatantra Party has 1. The CPN (UML) with 121 members, feels that it has to get the Prime Ministers post and the bulk of the positions in a unified Left party because the CPN (MC) has only 53 members and cannot claim parity.



The other issue is: which of the two leaders is a genuine communist? Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda, being a Maoist with a long revolutionary past, claims to be the more genuine one having led a violent movement for years. Oli, on the other hand, considers himself to be a more practical communist though he too had led a violent movement earlier on in the struggle against the Nepalese monarchy.



Oli considers himself pro-China and anti-India, and therefore a true Nepali nationalist resisting domination by India. On the other hand, Prachanda is seen as pro-Indian which casts a shadow over his attachment to Nepalese nationalism.



While Oli is unsympathetic to, and even against, the political demands of the Indian-origin Madhesis in the Terai region, Prachanda is generally accommodative towards them. Oli is trying to portray himself as a true Nepalese nationalist based on his resolute opposition to the Madhesis demands for greater political representation through constitutional amendments. The fact that the Madhesis invoke Big Brother India constantly, has given the Olis anti-Madhesi stand the look of Nepali nationalism.



It is therefore not certain that the Left Alliance will stay. Prachanda could join Deuba and the Madhesi leaders to form a government. The only thing that will stand in the way of his defection is the mandate of the people in the elections which was for a Left Unity government.



India-China Factor



However, Olis CPN (UML) is most likely to be in the drivers seat. Therefore, New Delhi has reasons to worry. Oli had led the Nepalese nationalist resentment against the Madhesi-implemented and India-backed border blockade in 2015 which caused immense suffering in Nepal.



Oli, who was then in power, swung to the Chinese side. India backed Deuba and Prachanda to throw Oli out. Predictably, the successor Deuba-Prachanda government cancelled a Chinese-funded US$ 2.5 billion hydropower project.



But Deubas lacklustre performance, indecisions on the Madhesi issue and inability to complete earthquake relief works, brought about Prachandas defection to Oli. The defection led to Deubas defeat in the 2017 parliamentary elections.



If Oli is going to be Prime Minister, Chinas footprint in Nepal will expand as 2018 unfolds. Even with Deuba in power, and against Indias advice, Kathmandu had signed the Belt and Road Agreement with China for infrastructural development. But India too has many projects in Nepal and has a strong hold on its power sector.



Above all, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has his Neighbourhood First policy to safeguard because,without being a force in the neighbourhood, India cannot be considered to be the regional power  a tag it needs to secure permanent membership in the UN Security Council on par with its arch rival China.



Whoever is at the helm in Kathmandu in 2018, will have to do a lot of tightrope walking both in regard to issues in domestic politics and in balancing relations between regional rivals India and China.
Rafi Group Pvt Ltd which is founded by and comprising of three brothers who have made strides and great endeavours in the world of business, celebrates 2 years in Sri Lanka.



In a press release, the Rafi Brothers announced their happiness and delight of being able to portray the company as a family owned entity in their motherland.

Talal Rafi the eldest of the brothers was educated at Colombo International School. A Graduate of City University UK, he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Business Management. He served as a Marketing Manager for a London based firm for 4 years, providing strategic direction to improve the companys brand positioning and pricing strategies. He was accepted into a competitive training programme organised by the Bank of America and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Currently Talal is a Director at Rafi Group (Pvt) Ltd which specializes in branding, social media strategy and communications and consists of several business units including a branding company called T3Follow, a coconut water brand venture called Tropiconut, and a recruitment agency called JobTalks Recruitment.

He is also a Managing Director at Nanjing and You Trading Co Limited, the exclusive national distributor for Chinas largest state owned building materials company, China National Building Materials Group.



Thasim Rafi was educated at Asian International School and holds a Degree in Business Management from the University of East London. At present, he is a Director of Rafi Group Pvt Ltd and prior to starting to starting T3Follow Social Media Management Company and Tropiconut Coconut Water with his brothers he worked in the City of London for a leading Electronic Cigarette company and after coming back from the UK he worked at Union Assurance as a Corporate Sales Manager for 2 years. Thasim was also part of a leading management trainee programme in London and was trained at the Bank of America and RBS. He is also a member of Fight Cancer Sri Lanka, an initiative started last year to ensure that cancer patients get what they deserve.



Talib Rafi the youngest of the three was educated at Colombo International School. Like his brothers, he is a Director of Rafi Group (Pvt) Ltd. He is instrumental in social media management given his skills in graphic designing and company branding. Talib currently has ambitions to leave to Malaysia to pursue a degree in Architecture.
A sex offenders state-level luring case has been moved to federal court.

Timothy Carnahan, 24, of Bismarck, was indicted in October for coercion or enticement of a minor. South Central District Judge Thomas Schneider previously dismissed his state charges of felony luring minors by computer and misdemeanor carrying a concealed weapon as the case became federal.

Carnahan allegedly responded to an undercover Bismarck police officers online ad for sex in September. Police later arrested him after he allegedly made plans to meet who he thought was a 16-year-old girl.

Officers reportedly found a large machete in Carnahans car. He allegedly admitted to the solicitation.

Carnahan is a lifetime registered sex offender. He has convictions of indecent liberties and incest in the state of Washington.

His jury trial is set to begin March 27 in Bismarck. He is held at the Heart of America Correctional and Treatment Center in Rugby.
Entrepreneur Shalin Balasuriya was awarded the prestigious TOYP award



In the category of business, economic and/or entrepreneurial accomplishment at the awards ceremony held December 16th last year.



Junior Chamber International (JCI) serves to formally recognize young people who excel in their chosen fields and create positive change around the world. By recognizing these young people, JCI raises the status of socially responsible leaders in this world.



Since 1980, JCI Sri Lanka honored nearly 300 individuals from all around Sri Lanka through the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the year award (TOYP). These winners were awarded with the Prestigious TOYP Award at the early stages of their career and they went on to achieve many more milestones in their professional life. The list of winners includes the cream of the decision makers and top game changers in many areas of the country. The list of past winners comprise of Kumar Sangakara, Arjuna Ranatunga, Otara Gunawardena, Nathan Sivagananathan and Bathiya Jayakody to name a few.



Shalin is the Cofounder of Spa Ceylon launched in 2009, and has since witnessed exponential growth both locally and internationally. The brand that re-positioned ayurveda, is currently recognized as the largest Luxury Ayurveda brand in the world with 62 locations across 12 countries, and aspirations to reach 100 stores across 18 countries by the end of 2018.



It is also the only Sri Lankan brand to have as many branded locations internationally and proudly carries the heritage of Sri Lankan through it extensive products range, packaging, store design and marketing in every country they enter into. Spa Ceylon has been recognized with several international awards for its extensive product range and signature spa concept including multiple wins at the world luxury Spa Awards 3 consecutive years.



Shalins portfolio of brands directly employs over 600 staff, contributes significantly to export revenue in Sri Lanka and engages in multiple social responsibility projects. Shalin believes strongly in giving back to the country and community and works through the multiples brands in areas such as skill development, women empowerment, community trade, elephant conservation, reef conservation, reconciliation projects in the north and the continued creation of gainful employment.

Shalin also believes in sharing knowledge and is passionate about promoting young entrepreneurship and though leadership in Sri Lanka and regularly contributes to this through key forums and presentations covering entrepreneurship, branding and thought leadership.
Finance Ministry credits achievement to efficient management of govt. coffers

In post-independent SL, budget surplus was first recorded in 1954

Treasury officials hopeful of positive development aiding efficient management of debt

State revenue in first 10 months of 2017 up 10.4 percent YoY to Rs.1473bn



For the first time since 63 years, the government has been able to a record Rs.21.9 billion surplus in the primary balance of fiscal accounts during the first 10 months of 2017, the Finance and Mass Media Ministry said yesterday.



The primary balance in the first 10 months of 2016 was a negative Rs.37 billion.



The ministry in statement credited the achievement to the efficient management of government coffers.



In the post-independent Sri Lankan history, a budget surplus was first recorded by 0.5 percent of the GDP in year 1954. Later in 1956 this budget surplus increased to 2.2 percent of the GDP, the statement said.



Sri Lanka has also recorded current account surpluses from 1955 to 1970 and later from 1973 to 1994. Since then up to now overall budget deficit, deficit in the current account and the deficit in the primary balance were in negative growth, continuously.



The Treasury officials are of the opinion that the favourable situation in the primary balance is a sign of positive growth in economic development, and it would further enhance the countrys capacity to manage the debt repayment efficiently.



Having an excess in the state revenue more than the whole state expenditure minus the interest payment is known as the surplus in primary balance.



The state revenue in the first 10 months of 2017 when compared with the first ten months of 2016 has increased by 10.4 percent to Rs.1473 billion in 2017. It was Rs.1333 billion during the same period in 2016.



The tax revenue during the same period has increased by 14.2 percent to Rs.1470 billion in 2017.



Also the state expenditure has increased by 9.5 percent from Rs.1881 billion to Rs.2060 billion.



The interest expenditure during the first ten months of 2017 alone is Rs.609 billion apart from the domestic and foreign debt repayment of Rs.856 billion.



Sri Lanka during the last two years brought in several decisive measures such as an increase in Value Added Tax and the introduction of new income tax laws aiming to boost government revenue under an International Monetary Fund Extended Fund Facility (EFF) programme.



However, despite these fiscal side improvements, some slippage in the budget deficit is likely in 2017, mainly as a result of weather-related fiscal costs and higher interest payments.



This could have an adverse impact on achieving the envisaged fiscal consolidation path, while complicating the conduct of monetary and exchange rate policies, Central Bank Governor Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy told last week during the launch of Central Banks Road Map on monetary and financial sectors.



Sri Lanka was targeting a fiscal deficit of 4.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2017.
State Pharmaceuticals Manufacturing Corporation of Sri Lanka (SPMC) and Pharma Zone (Pvt.) Ltd entered into an agreement to build the first-ever exclusive pharmaceutical manufacturing zone in Sri Lanka in the Welipenna area of the Kalutara District, at an investment in excess of US $ 10 million.



Pharma Zone (Pvt.) Ltd, located on a 50-acre plot, is a Board of Investment-approved company, the principals of which are Johor Sultan Ibrahim Ismail Ibni Sultan Iskandar and Patrick Lim Soo Kit, a leading Malaysian entrepreneur.



The sultans investment vehicle, Inti Kemuncak Sdn Bhd, is a well-established property development company based in Malaysia focusing on large-scale property development in the Asian region.



Inti Kemuncak is the innovative developer of major townships and urban regeneration projects, including Coronation Square, a US $ 1.2 billion international class urban mixed development located within the prestigious Ibrahim International Business District (IIBD) in Johor Bahru.



Health Minister Dr. Rajitha Senaratne along with other representatives of SPMC and Pharma Zone (Pvt.) Ltd participated in the agreement signing, which took place yesterday evening at Waters Edge.`



Pharma Zone will facilitate the local pharmaceutical manufacturers with sufficient land for manufacturing plants and basic infrastructure facilities for the manufacture of pharmaceutical products with a view to achieving the governments target of localising production of essential pharmaceutical items to a value of US $ 100 million, thus saving valuable foreign exchange.



Dr. Senaratne expressed his gratitude to the sultan and people of Johor, Malaysia for making Pharma Zone a reality.



He said that the establishment of Pharma Zone by the sultan of Johor would hopefully give confidence and encourage other overseas investors to follow suit.

We are delighted to enter into this agreement with the Government of Sri Lanka, which has always enjoyed warm relations with Malaysia. It is the fervent wish of His Majesty Sultan Ibrahim, that this venture not only brings commercial prosperity to Sri Lanka but also benefits the people by way of reduced pricing as well as the ready availability of drugs, said Kit.



This is a 100 percent Malaysian investment and it underlines the high regard that the sultan and people of Johor for Sri Lanka, he added.



SPMC Chairman Dr. Sayura Samarasundara said that with the completion of Pharma Zone envisaged to be in operation within one year, the countrys dependency on imported drugs will soon become a thing of the past.



The zone will be run and administered by Pharma Zone, headed by Kit, while SPMC along with the Health Ministry will set the standards and monitor quality.



Electricity, water, road infrastructure, security, waste water management, etc. will all be provided to the companies operating within the zone and it is the intention of Pharma Zone to attract overseas investors to set up operations within the zone as well.

We will be marketing Pharma Zone regionally, said Lim.
Swami Swaroopananda, Head of Chinmaya Mission Worldwide, will address devotees in Sri Lanka from January 11-14 during a scheduled tour in the island. During his visit, Swami Swaroopananda will visit five Chinmaya centres in the country established in Kandy, Trincomalee, Ramboda, Jaffna and Colombo.



The talks, scheduled after his visits to the centres, will be based on the theme Life Management Techniques which he has mastered as a senior monk.



Swami Swaroopananda took over the baton from his predecessor Swami Tejomayananda in order to continue the legacy of its founder Swami Chinmayananda. The vision of this organization is to disseminate the knowledge of Vedanta- a universal science of life-for the betterment of the society. After studying business management, Swami Swaroopananda was interested in applying those management techniques in daily life. Inspired by God Hanuman, his talks will bring ancient traditions right to your doorstep.

Swami Swaroopananda was formerly the Regional Head of Chinmaya Mission Australia, United Kingdom, Middle East, Africa and Far East.



According to followers of this mission, after being ordained as a monk in Swami Sivanandas Ashram, Swami Chinmayananda was always interested in studying ancient texts which were only available for orthodox priests. Despite various shortcomings and challenges he encountered his never give up attitude motivated him to do his first public lecture in Puna. At present at this venue stands the ChinmayaVibhuuthi, a large set-up which serves as a research centre. This is how the Chinmaya Mission was established.



Swami Swaroopananda was formerly the Regional Head of Chinmaya Mission Australia, United Kingdom, Middle East, Africa and Far East.



He has authored several commentaries on important spiritual classics such as IkOnkar, MahaMrityunjaya Mantra and SankaMochan. In addition to that he has also contributed to numerous books on contemporary lifestyle subjects such as Simplicity and Meditation, Storm to Perform, Avatar, Managing the Manager and Journey into Health. The lectures will be held from January 11-14 at the Sri Sambuddhathwa Jayanthi Mandiraya at no: 32 Sambuddhathwa Jayanthi Mawatha Colombo from 6.30pm to 8.00pm. Entrance free.
FARGO -- On a wish list full of high hopes for downtown, one item stands out not for its extravagance but a plain, practical goal.

The Downtown InFocus master plan approved by city commissioners last month to serve as a blueprint for the neighborhood includes developing a homeless day center.

Its a goal local leaders in the field have championed for years -- these experts helped get it included on the InFocus plan -- and it could become a reality sooner than imagined.

But Jan Eliassens vision isnt a luxurious setting. Instead, she envisions a basic facility where anyone who needs a place to go during the day, when emergency shelters close to guests, can get inside, enjoy a cup of coffee, take a nap or shower, browse the internet, or store some of their things.

The director of Fargos Gladys Ray Shelter said shes learned that homeless people follow an unwritten schedule to occupy their time.

They might go to the Salvation Army for breakfast until that facility needs to clear out guests. From there, they could spend time at the public library before starting a long walk to get dinner and shelter at another place, such as the New Life Center in Fargo or Churches United for the Homeless in Moorhead.

I always say that homelessness is a full-time job just trying to get from one place to another because Fargo-Moorhead is so spread out, she said.

A day center could address that by concentrating services and providers in one place, she said. The facility could also become a vital tool in the work to end homelessness here, according to other local experts.

Many reasons

Cody Schuler, executive director of the Fargo-Moorhead Coalition for Homeless Persons, said a day center could be a crucial resource for the community. While it would be a new offering here, he said several organizations and shelters have stepped up to fill in some of the gap.

That includes the Dorothy Day House in Moorhead, an overnight shelter that offers visitor services such as meals, showers and laundry during the day.

Fargo has also had a veterans drop-in center for nearly seven years at the Gladys Ray Shelter that functions a lot like a day center. That program is funded by the local Veterans Affairs health care system, with the VA paying for the city of Fargo to provide services.

Diana Hall, the Fargo VA programs manager for veterans housing and employment programs, said shed like to offer more, and thats why the agency is already planning a possible full-fledged facility in downtown Fargo.

Her goal is to get the city and other homeless service providers to collaborate in the project and make it as comprehensive as possible.

Our collective dream is that we would have services for homeless individuals maybe all in one spot, she said, adding shed like it to serve as a one-stop shop.

Hall said the VA is already starting to do some estimates and get tentative financial commitments. Its not finalized yet, but she said it could be a reality in as little as two or three years.

Eliassen said a day center could serve as different things to different people. One person might need a place to warm up, while another might want help writing a resume.

Even something as basic as a building with laundry, snacks and storage would be a dream come true, she said.

Whatever the motivation, she said a day center makes sense for downtown. Eliassen said shed like to believe locals will realize that keeping the neighborhood diverse and hip will require people from all walks of life to be there.

It could also save money, she said, because homeless people would likely have fewer criminal citations and arrests if they have a place to go during the day.

If the motivation is to make homeless people less visible, a day center thats low barrier will be a way to do it, she said. If you are worried about people that are out in the cold, a day centers the way to address that.

Schuler said its hard to know how receptive the overall community might be to a day center. Still, he said its creation could address some of the issues that come up about homelessness in downtown, such as loitering or panhandling.

It may look like its just about meeting immediate needs, but overall, its part of a critical strategy that we have to reduce and to end homelessness in a meaningful way, he said.
This is Up and Down, where we give a brief thumbs up and thumbs down on the issues from the past week.

Up

Theres no doubt North Dakotans care about their pets and other peoples pets. During the recent period of subzero temperatures a number of animals got loose, leaving their owners very worried. Some used social media to get the information out about the missing pets. Major Kelly Leben of the Burleigh County Sheriffs Department encourages people to put information about missing pets on social media. It works. Some of the pets were found because people were aware of the missing animals and called authorities when they found them. Kayla Wolf posted information about her two dogs on Facebook after they got away. Almost 1,000 people saw her posting and she encountered one person who was searching for her pets. Her dogs were found and are doing OK. It all shows we care about our animals.

Down

There are some aspects of social media that are disappointing. Recently, Rep. Roscoe Streyle, R-Minot, tweeted an insult to another Twitter user. It prompted a petition effort by a college student calling for Streyles removal from office. The student, Linden Stave, called Streyles comment insulting to people with disabilities. Streyle has used the word that many find offensive at least 10 times in the past. Even House Majority Leader Al Carlson, R-Fargo, who has been known to use colorful language in the past, suggested legislators and officials remain professional on social media. Streyle later deleted the tweet and admitted it was inappropriate. Legislators need to lead by example and that includes using the proper language on social media.

Up

The states first urea plant will begin operations this month and thats good news. The solid-form fertilizer the Great Plains Synfuels plant will produce should be popular with farmers. It took the plant three years to add urea to its line of products. The plant already produces the fertilizer ammonium sulfate and anhydrous ammonia. The plant was originally built to make synthetic natural gas from lignite coal. Urea production will provide jobs for the area and give the plant a solid footing for the future.

Down

Binge drinking among youth has been a problem in North Dakota for a long time. North Dakota State University has tackled the problem and made some progress. The number of students involved in driving under the influence has declined, so has the number of underage students who drink. Binge drinking has dropped from 55.8 percent in 2005 to 43.7 percent in 2016. Those numbers show that programs can make a difference. However, 43.7 percent who indulge in binge drinking, four drinks for women and five for men in a two-hour period within the past two weeks, remains too high. NDSU should be encouraged by the results, but the school needs to continue the push to reduce the numbers.

Up

Theres more good economic news for North Dakota. Taxable sales and purchases for the third quarter of 2017 were nearly $4.731 billion, a 2.3 percent increase over the same period in 2016. Five of the 15 major sectors in the state reported increases when compared to the third quarter in 2016. On the downside, retail trade saw a decrease of 2.4 percent. And taxable sales and purchases were down in Bismarck-Mandan. Bismarck saw a 6 percent dip and Mandan an 11.65 percent decline. The energy sector and cities in the oil patch showed increases, which bodes well for 2018 and beyond.

Down

The announcement that Sears plans to close its Bismarck store wasnt surprising, but it was disappointing. Nationally, Sears has been struggling and closing stores. The Bismarck store has served the community well for many years. Its an anchor at the Gateway Mall, 2700 State St., which means a replacement will be needed. Hopefully, a strong replacement can be found.
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Countdown to GDPR

In this weeks Computer Weekly, with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming in to force this year, we look at the challenges for businesses to comply by the 25 May deadline. We examine the future for HPE as CEO Meg Whitman steps down. And we find out how the move to hyper-converged systems affects your backup strategy. Read the issue now.
November 21, 2017

HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA - After more than nine years of support to operations in Afghanistan, ARMA Aviation (ARMA) completed delivery of the one millionth Mi-series aircraft spare part for the Afghanistan Special Mission Wing (SMW) and the Afghanistan Air Force (AAF). ARMA Aviation is a sub-contractor under the Future Flexible Acquisition and Sustainment Tool (F2AST) Contractor Logistic Support (CLS) contract. This Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract provides support services and materiel procurement in support of the Non-Standard Rotary Wing Aircraft (NSRWA) Project Management Office (PMO). Through this contract, ARMA has provided full spectrum supply chain management support that includes the forecasting, procurement, inspection, delivery, and inventory management of all spare parts and repair of repairables for the Afghan Mi-17 rotary wing fleet. These efforts have directly impacted the operational readiness of the SMW and AAF units while affording the United States Government a cost-effective and responsive logistics solution.

To recognize this historic event and significant milestone, ARMA presented commemorative tail rotor blades to the NSRWA PMO in Huntsville, Alabama and to the SMW and AAF units in Afghanistan. LTC Chris Enderton accepted the commemorative blade on behalf of the NSRWA PMO in Huntsville on November 16, 2017.

ARMA Aviation president, Steven Shugart, praised the hard work and outstanding performance of both teams. "This day marks a significant event in the sustainment effort of the Afghanistan Mi-17 rotary wing fleet. I want to thank all of our employees for their hard work and dedication as this would not have been possible without each of your efforts."

About ARMA Aviation.

ARMA Aviation is a global leader in the complex world of supply chain and logistics management, aircraft modification, repair and overhaul solutions, and training and mentoring supporting the U.S. Government and its allied partners. ARMA is designed to support our customers, regardless of the challenge, the location, or the mission. We solve the most challenging and complex problems with our most valuable asset: Our People. Our customers' needs come first, and our solutions deliver superior results.

For additional information, please visit our website: http://www.arma-aviation.com
Mumbai: Karan Johar, most popular for his controversial show Koffee With Karan, has turned an RJ. More so, he has introduced a reverse rapid fire round on the show. This means that he will be the one at the receiving end.

As per a report on Mumbai Mirror, one such incident happened when a caller asked him if he thought asking a celebrity to lose weight for a role amounted to body-shaming, he pleaded guilty.

I asked Alia (Bhatt, who debuted with his Student of the Year in 2012) to lose weight and now, when I see her hysterical about how she looks, I feel responsible. he sighed. Karan went on to tell her that she was pleasantly plump, which is why he thinks now shes obsessed with her weight. Shes in the gym every day and even if she puts on an extra kilo, she goes crazy. I think I am to blame for it. Now that I am a parent, I would never do this to Roohi and I would like to apologise to Alia.

Alia has worked with KJo in Student Of The Year, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Kapoor And Sons, Shaandaar and Badrinath Ki Dulhania.
Notwithstanding, clearance from CBFC for an all-India release on January 25, home minister Gulab Chand Kataria has categorically stated that the film will not be released in the state.

Jaipur: Despite a name change, Sanjay Leela Bhansalis controversial film Padmavati, which is now renamed as Padmavat, continues to face opposition from the Rajput community in Rajasthan. Succumbing to pressure from the community  three bypolls are going to take place later this month  Rajasthan government has decided against release of the film in the state.

Notwithstanding, clearance from CBFC for an all-India release on January 25, home minister Gulab Chand Kataria has categorically stated that the film will not be released in the state. He cited the earlier order from Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, who, at the peak of protests against the film, had written a letter to union information and broadcasting minister Smriti Irani for necessary changes to the film.

The CM also said maintaining law and order in Rajasthan was the highest priority and it will be maintained at all cost.

It is believed that the ruling BJP was playing safe because of the bypolls scheduled in the state on two Lok Sabha seats and one state Assembly seat, which have a significant presence of the Rajput community.

Only three days ago, Rajput Karni Sena chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi had called upon the community members to gather in Chittorgarh on January 27 and push for a complete ban on the movie.

He said that they will not let the film be released at any cost. A panel that reviewed the film at a special screening has expressed the view that some of the facts presented in the film can upset the Rajputs and the Muslims, but the censor board chief has ignored that, he said.

We have a very clear stand since day one that we want this film to be banned, said Karni Sena member Mahipal Singh Makrana.
Mumbai: It seems Hugh Jackman just couldn't hide his disappointment when James Franco won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for his role in 'The Disaster Artist'.

Franco took the honour over Jackman ('The Greatest Showman'), Ansel Elgort ('Baby Driver'), Daniel Kaluuya ('Get Out'), Steve Carell ('Battle of the Sexes').

During the acceptance speech, 'The Wolverine' star's 'bewildered' reaction was caught on camera, after which viewers rushed to Twitter to point out the actor's disappointment.

Hugh Jackman definitely had a reaction to watching James Franco accept the award he was also nominated for at the #GoldenGlobes: https://t.co/FIqG3l2TFJ pic.twitter.com/ddsaqHgKop  E! News (@enews) January 8, 2018

One person tweeted: "truly feeling REFRESHED by this look from hugh jackman @ james franco"

truly feeling REFRESHED by this look from hugh jackman @ james franco pic.twitter.com/r2KYyyq4pu  Aubrey Page (@aubreypage_) January 8, 2018

As he accepted the award, Franco brought up the stage, the man he plays in 'The Disaster Artist', 'The Room's writer/director/actor Tommy Wiseau.
Singapore is known as the one stop shop for shoppers. But Sandalwood actress Ashvithi Shetty recently checked-in to the luxe land in pursuit of greener pastures and discover the clean citys wild side...

Singapore is the cleanest city, no doubt. But, I wanted to digress from the norm and visit farms, reserves, smaller countryside spots and the like. Singapore has islands that house big saltwater crocs  a must-visit! The Night Safari, which is a nocturnal zoo is also another attraction thats a must visit - because this city isnt afraid of the dark! And you find too many kids, locals and even tourists active during such explorations. People need to take safaris more in Singapore, than just visit the streets dotted with shops.

As a nature lover, I ensured I didnt miss the greenery, parks and waterfalls. Singapore has a lot of smaller islands, which are worthy of visiting. A day trip is all you need to discover these small islands, either through bumboats or trails. I was strapped for time, so I couldnt tick that off my bucket list...

Shopping in Singapore is a different experience all together. Id be lying if I said I didnt shop at all. The shopping complexes have accessories at a steal, and the prices are so reasonable that you neednt haggle much. Singapore is the best place to stock up on your staples, as I realised the stuff is made of good quality too. Different streets are popular for different categories, so you need to do your research than expect to find everything at one spot.

Not sure if theres a fail-safe travel tip as such, but Singapore is such a well planned city with exquisite sky scrappers and excellent roads and traffic management that it accommodates and calms even the most hassled traveller!
A leather bound Welsh bible close to 400-years-old was recently discovered in the back of a church.

The 1620 Llanwnda Bible has survived fires, a French invasion and was even used as toilet paper, according to a report by the Daily Mail.

"The story goes that the book was rediscovered at the back of the church in the 1990s and nobody realised what it was," Vicar of the church Rev Sarah Geach told the Daily Mail. Adding, "The parish made a cabinet but of course they were not able to store it under the right conditions and over a period of time it started to deteriorate."

So two years ago, the bible was given to conservators at the University of Wales' Trinity St David's in Lampeter, West Wales. In order to revitalise it, the bible was placed in a special room with temperatures set at 15C and humidity levels at 60%.

"What makes it unique is its association with the last invasion on British soil all those years ago," retired lecturer Dr John Morgan-Guy. It will soon go on display at the National Library of Wales.
Nobody is sure what it symbolizes or exactly why parents buy the packs of cigarettes for their children (Photo: AP)

Vale De Salgueiro: The Epiphany celebrations in the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro feature a tradition that each year causes an outcry among outsiders: Parents encouraging their children, some as young as 5, to smoke cigarettes.

Locals say the practice has been passed down for centuries as part of a celebration of life tied to the Christian Epiphany and the winter solstice  but nobody is sure what it symbolizes or exactly why parents buy the packs of cigarettes for their children and encourage them to take part.

The two-day celebrations, which start Friday and end Saturday with a Mass, include dancing around bonfires, a piper playing music and an elected king who distributes plentiful wine and snacks.

The legal age to purchase tobacco in Portugal is 18, but nothing prohibits parents from giving kids cigarettes and Portuguese authorities dont intervene to stop the practice.

Guilhermina Mateus, a 35-year-old coffee shop owner, cites custom as the reason why she gives her daughter cigarettes.

I cant explain why. I dont see any harm in that because they dont really smoke, they inhale and immediately exhale, of course, Mateus said Saturday. And its only on these days, today and tomorrow. They never ask for cigarettes again.

Jose Ribeirinha, a writer who has published a book on the Vale do Salgueiro festivities, said the roots of the tradition are unknown, but may have to do with celebrating the rebirth of nature and human life. He said the village is in a region that adheres to many traditions dating back to pagan times, and that since Roman times, during the winter solstice period villagers here have taken the liberty to do things that would be out of the norm in the rest of the year.

Ribeirinha also believes the relative seclusion of the remote village  450 kilometers (280 miles) northeast of the capital Lisbon  has helped keep the tradition alive. He said that the surrounding Tras os Montes region has always been the furthest from Lisbon, the most forgotten one.

Portugal, like many other European countries, has taken steps to reduce smoking, including a partial ban on smoking indoors.
Hyderabad: In a major breakthrough, the Rachakonda police on Monday nabbed four members of a chain-snatchers gang who had been targeting women and causing panic in LB Nagar neighbourhood in the recent past. The four accused included three engineering students and a college dropout, police said.

Interrogations revealed that the gang was involved in 18 other robberies committed in a span of three months.

The suspects used to borrow bikes from friends to commit the offences. One of the suspects is the son of a police constable.

The arrested  identified as Chavan Suraj, Kommu Pavan Kumar, Mohd Owais Ahmed and Mamidi Rohit Kumar  are addicted to ganja, alcohol and a lavish lifestyle. They took to snatching and to maintain their lifestyle.

Police said none of them owned vehicles and borrowed bikes and scooters from friends on the pretext of a ride or work. They would commit robberies and return the bikes without their friends even knowing what they were up to.

More than a month ago, they four were apprehended by patrolling teams who found them moving about suspiciously, but they got away by showing their student identity cards.

Often the accused were very high on ganja and even forgot the places they committed the crimes. After detaining them, police showed the CCTV footage of different cases they were involved in, after which they confessed to their involvement in the offences. All four were found to have attended drug de-addiction counselling; one of them is in fact still undergoing treatment.

Rachakonda police commissioner Mahesh Bhagwat said that all the suspects were detained from their college campuses. They robbed elderly women or women walking alone on deserted streets, and spent the booty on ganja, alcohol etc, he said.

They are involved in nine snatching cases in LB Nagar, five in Saroornagar, two in Chaitanyapuri and one each in Meerpet and Vanasthalipuram.

Interstate burglar held

Meanwhile in another case, the Adibatla police nabbed a burglar involved in 18 or so cases in Telangana and AP and recovered valuables worth Rs 6 lakh from him. Police said the accused, Shiva, worked as a daily wage labour, stole valuables from houses that remained locked for long.

Police recovered 19 tolas of gold and Rs 50,000 cash, all worth around Rs 6,20,000, from him.

Woman robbed of gold chain at railway station

Chain snatchers on the prowl at Secunderabad railway station struck yet again when they robbed a women passenger of her 2.7 tola gold chain. The woman was about a board a train on platform no 4 when the incident occurred, police said.

This is the fifth chain-snatching incident at the railway station since December, and like in the past the accused targeted women at a spot on the platform where there were no CCTV cameras.

According to the police, the victim, 29- year-old housewife K. Kavitha, reached the Secunderabad station on Monday morning to travel to Uppal by Sirpur Khagaznagar bound Intercity Express. As the train arrived on platform 4 and Ms Kavitha tried to board it amidst crowding at the door, she felt a sharp tug on her neck. She checked, and realised that her gold chain weighing 27 gm had been snatched. Based on her complaint, the Railway Police registered a case and started investigation.

Earlier in December, four chain-snatching cases had occurred inside the railway station, where the suspects targeted women as they were boarding trains from crowded platforms. In all incidents, the accused chose spots that were not covered by CCTV cameras.
Hyderabad: The Railway Police on Monday arrested a six-member gang for robbing a private employee after confining him in an auto rickshaw for three hours. The arrested persons included a student, Shaheed Ahmed and a habitual offender, Owaiz.

According to the police the victim Rajashekar came to Vidyanagar railway station to see off a friend on Saturday night. After that he was walking by the tracks. Seeing him alone, the six member gang attacked him and drove away with him in an auto-rickshaw. The culprits stopped the vehicle at an unidentified location and robbed him of his gold chain weighing 6 gm, a mobile phone and a debit card. After three hours, the men dropped him back near the station and fled.

Police registered a robbery case and launched a hunt. Based on clues, police nabbed the six suspects and recovered the gold chain, mobile phone and debit card from them.
Visakhapatnam/Bhubaneswar: The death of first-year intermediate student Shreyash Kesharwani of Sri Chaitanya Junior College took a new turn with Odisha police deciding to transfer the case to PM Palem Police station in Vizag city to look at a ragging angle.

Shreyash (16), of Garposh area of Sambalpur district in Odisha, was a student of the Madhurawada branch of the college in Vizag.

He was allegedly subjected to ragging in the private college hostel on December 26 and died on January 6 evening while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Rourkela.

Shreyas was said to be beaten up by three to four senior students in the boys hostel where he was put up on December 26. The boy had claimed he informed the college authorities about the incident but no action was taken.

His father moved him to Rourkela for treatment. Shreyass family even recorded his statement before his death on video, in which he said that he was tortured and ragged by some senior students and the management had ignored his complaint against them.
We are committed to it (Bill) and assure the Mu-slim women that this illegal practice (of instant triple talaq) will be abolished, said Mr Naqvi. (Photo: PTI/File)

New Delhi: With the Triple Talaq Bill failing to get through the Rajya Sabha on the last day of the Winter Session of Parliament on Friday, the Narendra Modi government has now decided to bring it during the Budget Session which will commence from January 29.

Union minister for minority affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar, while asserting the governments commitment to abolish triple talaq, said that the government will now bring the Bill in the Budget Session.

We are committed to it (Bill) and assure the Mu-slim women that this illegal practice (of instant triple talaq) will be abolished, said Mr Naqvi.

The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, which criminalises inst-ant talaq and provides for up to three years of imprisonment for accused Muslim men, was passed by the Lok Sabha on December 28. Howe-ver, a united Opposition stalled it in the Rajya Sabha with the Congress moving a motion that the Bill be sent to a select committee for further scrutiny, a move strongly opposed by the treasury benches.

Slamming the Congress for stalling the bill, Mr Kumar said, The Cong-ress is doing injustice to the Muslim women by opposing the triple talaq bill. They are not thinking about ensuring justice to the Muslim sisters. They are doing injustice the same way they did in the Shah Bano case.

The Congress, in turn, held the ruling BJP responsible for the impasse in the Rajya Sabha due to which the Triple Talaq Bill could not be taken up and accused it of treating Parliament as a rubber stamp.

Budget session to begin from January 29

The Budget Session of Parliament is set to commence on January 29 and the Union Budget for 2018-19 will be presented on February 1, the Cabinet Commi-ttee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA) recommended on Friday.

According to parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar, the first phase of the session will be from January 29 to February 9.

The Winter Session of Parliament ended on Friday. After a recess, Parlia-ment will meet again from March 5 to April 6.

The Budget Session would begin with the address of President Ram Nath Kovind to the joint sitting of the two Houses on January 29 and the Economic Sur-vey will be tabled on the same day,

The recommendation for the Budget Session dates were made by the CCPA headed by Union home minister Rajnath Singh which met here. It will be sent to the President.

There will be a recess between the session so that the department-related standing committees can clear the budgetary proposals related to their respective ministries.
Srinagar: A research scholar at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and a resident of Kupwara in Jammu and Kashmir, has joined the terror group Hizbul Mujahideen.

Police made the discovery after a photograph posted on social media, on Sunday, showed Mannan Bashir Wani holding what appeared to be an AK assault rifle, with a message claiming that he has joined militancy.

26-year-old Wani was pursuing his PhD on Structural and Geo-Morphological Study of Lolab Valley, Kashmir. He had taken a break to go home, had joined the Hizbul Mujahideen on January 5.

Local media reports said his family filed a missing report after his photograph with the assault rifle emerged declaring that he had joined the terror group.

Wani joining the militant group is seen as a setback to government efforts to persuade young Kashmiris to give up violence and return to the mainstream.

Wanis brother, Mubashir Ahmad, a junior engineer told The Indian Express: We have also seen the picture on social networking sites. But we have no idea (whether he has joined militants or not). We lost contact with him on January 4 as his phone was switched off. We thought he had switched it off for some reason or lost it. As we couldnt contact him, we lodged a missing report with police on Saturday.

Wanis brother added that his brother left home for Aligarh a month ago. All this time, we thought he was in Aligarh. He would talk to us regularly. We dont have any idea where he is, he said.

Wanis decision to drop out and join the Hizbul Mujahideen somewhere in south Kashmir has come as a huge surprise to his friends and acquaintances.

According to the AMU website, Wani had received an award for the best paper presented at an international conference on Water, Environment, Ecology and Society in 2016. The site also states that he enrolled in AMU after doing his Bachelors in Geology and Earth Sciences from the University of Kashmir. He completed his Masters and MPhil in Geology from AMU, it says.

Wani has also penned several articles on student politics on an online portal, thecompanion.com. Wanis biographical sketch on the portal describes him as a research scholar at AMU who is a student activist having interest in geopolitics and Islamic revivalist movements.
An agitated protestor said, 'When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also.' (Photo: Twitter | ANI)

New Delhi/Washington DC: A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' outside the Pakistan embassy at Washington DC in US, over the misbehaviour meted out to former Indian Naval Officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife.

The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.'

An agitated protestor said, "When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also."

Washington DC: A group of Indian-Americans & Balochs held a protest by the name '#ChappalChorPakistan' outside Pakistan embassy over the misbehavior meted out to #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/iVssgetFZQ  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Another protestor said that Pakistan's narrow-mindedness has been exposed from the way it treated Jadhav's family.

"Policy makers and people here need to understand that Pakistan as a whole is also being run by narrow-minded mentality," he added.

A meeting took place between Jadhav and his family on December 25 in Islamabad, on the request of the Indian government.

Jadhav's wife was asked to remove her shoes and use another pair as she went in the Foreign Office to meet her husband.

Pakistan claimed that her shoes were confiscated on security grounds as there was "something" in it.

Jadhav is on a death row in Pakistan over charges of terrorism and spying for India's intelligence agency- Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

On May 18, 2017, the International Court of Justice stayed the hanging after India approached it against the death sentence.
A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice of India, on Monday said it would reconsider and examine the constitutional validity of section 377. (Photo: File | Representational)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court's decision to reconsider and examine revisit its 2013 verdict that criminalised homosexuality in India was welcomed by people; LGBTQ activists as well as political parties.

An LGBTQ activist said they still have hope in the judicial system.

"We still have hope from Indian judiciary. We are living in 21st century. All politicians and political parties must break their silence and support individual's sexuality," Akkai, LGBTQ activist said.

Congress too welcomed the decision of the apex court on Monday. All India Mahila Congress President Sushmita Dev said, "Congress welcomes Supreme Court's decision. Everybody has equal right to live life the way they want."

A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice of India, on Monday said it would reconsider and examine the constitutional validity of section 377.

The apex court also issued notice to the Centre seeking response on a writ petition filed by five members of LGBTQ community, who say they live in fear of police because of their natural sexual preferences.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud said the issue arising out of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

The bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by one Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare section 377 as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex.
Succumbing to pressure from the community at a time when three by-polls are going to take place later in January, Rajasthan government has decided against the release of the film in the state. (Photo: File)

Jaipur: Despite a name change, Sanjay Leela Bhansalis controversial film Padmavati, which is now renamed as Padmavat, continues to face opposition from Rajput community in Rajasthan.

Succumbing to pressure from the community at a time when three by-polls are going to take place later in January, Rajasthan government has decided against the release of the film in the state.

Notwithstanding, clearance from CBFC for all India release on January 25, home minister Gulab Chand Kataria has categorically stated that the film will not be released in the state.

He earlier cited the order from chief minister Vasundhara Raje, who had at the peak of protests against the film had written a letter to Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani and had sought necessary changes in the film as suggested by the Centre.

The CM had also said that maintaining law and order in Rajasthan was of highest priority and it will be maintained at all cost with reference to protests against the film.

Although, the home minister took excuse to threat to law and order if the film was allowed to release, it is believed that the ruling BJP was playing safe because of bypolls in the state for two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats, which have significant presence of the Rajput community.

Only three days ago, Shri Rajput Karni Sena chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi had called upon the community members to gather in Chittorgarh on January 27 and push for a complete ban on the controversial Sanjay Leela Bhansali film 'Padmavati'.

He said that they will not let the film be released at any cost. A panel that reviewed the film in a special screening has expressed the view that some of the facts presented in the film can upset the Rajputs and the Muslims, but the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chief has ignored that, he added.

"We have a very clear stand since day one that we want this film to be banned. The committee made by the CBFC watched the movie and said the movie was vulgar and the facts were distorted. The film is made just to earn money. Along with the name of the movie, the characters names should also be changed," Karni Sena member Mahipal Singh Makrana said.
Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor. (Photo: File)

Beijing: China on Monday said it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The US last week suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we dont agree to place the responsibility of anti-terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play a helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti-terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan.

Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts.

"First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down on terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.
Jay Shah's lawyer S V Raju, on the other hand, had maintained the article was 'defamatory' and the two witnesses examined by the lower court had established that the reputation of his client was tarnished due to its publication. (Photo: PTI | File)

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by news portal 'The Wire' seeking quashing of a criminal defamation case filed against it by BJP president Amit Shah's son Jay over an article related to his company.

Justice J B Pardiwala rejected the petition on the grounds that the article, "The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah", is per say "defamatory" and the trial court should proceed with the case.

The HC, which had earlier directed the trial court to complete the hearing in the case in six months, on Monday withdrew that order. This means there is no time-frame for the trial court to complete the hearing.

S M Vatsa, the lawyer for the author of the article and editors of the news portal, had maintained the news report was not "defamatory," and the facts presented in it were based on public documents.

The petitioners had maintained the article was a part of investigative journalism and filing a criminal defamation suit against it was against the freedom of the press.

Jay Shah's lawyer S V Raju, on the other hand, had maintained the article was "defamatory" and the two witnesses examined by the lower court had established that the reputation of his client was tarnished due to its publication.

Read: Jay Shah defamation case: Gujarat court summons reporter, news portal

Jay Shah had moved the lower court alleging criminal defamation by the petitioners after the article published by the website claimed his company's turnover grew exponentially after the BJP-led government came to power at the Centre in 2014.

After the suit was filed on October 9, 2017, the court initiated proceedings against them under the CrPC section 202 (to inquire into a case to decide whether or not there is sufficient ground for proceeding).

The suit has been filed against the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Siddharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and the Foundation for Independent Journalism.

The foundation publishes `The Wire'.

With the quashing of the plea, the matter is expected to come up for hearing in the lower court on Tuesday.

Jay Shah has separately filed a civil defamation suit of Rs 100 crore against the website over the article.

Read also: Amit Shahs son Jay files Rs 100 crore defamation case against website

Jay Shah had rejected the charge made in the article, insisting the story was "false, derogatory and defamatory.
The officials said that the police and other security forces have launched a manhunt for Wani.

Srinagar/Lucknow/Bhopal: At a time when the Jammu and Kashmir is painstakingly trying to persuade the Kashmiri youth to shun violence and return to their homes for living a normal life, a Ph.D. student from the Valley who was studying in Aligarh Muslim University has joined the militants ranks.

The news that 26-year-old Mannan Bashir Wani who was pursuing a doctorate in earth science-geology in AMU has joined formidable indigenous militant outfit Hizb-ul-Mujahedin has not only shell shocked his family and friends, some of the security forces officials have privately admitted that it could leave an adverse impact on their effort to keep the local youth away from the influence of gun.

A resident of Takipora village in Lolab valley of frontier Kupwara district, Wani was to return home four days back. He had reportedly left AMU before commencement of winter vacation at the university on January 6. But instead of turning up at his native place, the photographs showing him with a grenade launcher-cum-assault rifle (possibly modified AK-47) reached the family through social media, the officials said. The photographs were uploaded on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp with the messages announcing that Wani has joined the Hizb. The Hizb has not confirmed it as yet.

The officials said that the police and other security forces have launched a manhunt for Wani. These officials also said that Wanis family had also filed a missing report after he did not reach home. He was expected to reach home in Kupwara three days ago but when he did not turn up his family reported the matter to the police, said a police official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Earlier Kashmirs police chief ADGP Munir Ahmed Khan had said that he cannot confirm whether Wani had indeed joined the Hizb. While expressing caution, he had said that the photos in question could be photoshopped.

Wani has joined the militants ranks at a time when the PDP-BJP government is trying hard to persuade the local youth who have taken to the gun to shun the path of violence and return home. Khan had on Sunday said that gun-wielding boys willing to quit militancy can now contact their families, return and start their lives afresh and that they dont need to necessarily surrender before the police.

AMU authorities have expelled Wani in view of reports about his joining the Hizb ranks. Wani stands suspended until further probe is carried out into his disappearance and into social media photos that show him holding an AK-47 rifle, said AMU Proctor Prof. (Dr.) Mohd. Mohsin Khan.

The UP officials like their J&K counterparts are shocked to find that Wani has posted his photograph, holding an AK assault rifle, on the social media on Sunday. Senior police officials and intelligence agencies have reached Aligarh to investigate the matter.

SSP Aligarh Rajesh Pandey raided Wanis room in Habib hall of the AMU and seized documents and literature from the room. We will study what kind of literature has been found in the room, he said.

Some university students attempted to protest against the police entering the hostel and one student was arrested.

The officials said that Wani had been studying at the AMUs department of Geology for four-five years and had chosen to specialise in Applied Geology. He had enrolled in the universitys Ph.D. programme and won accolades for his paper on flood risk assessment in his home town Kupwara using remote sensing and GIS techniques.

While AMU officials were tight-lipped on the development, sources said on Monday that Wani had left AMU a few days back and had reached Delhi. He was said to be on his way to his home in Kupwara. His co-students who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Wani was a good student and they expected him to join the civil services.

Meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh police has launched a probe to establish links of Wani to the State.Manan visited Bhopal in 2016 to participate in an international conference organised in AISECT University and stayed in the city for three days. He had presented a paper on water conservation at the conference. We have launched a probe to find out where he stayed during his visit to Bhopal and with whom he had contacted during the period, inspector general of police (intelligence) Makrand Devaskar said in Bhopal.

He added, We will share with other investigating agencies in the country if we get any actionable information regarding his MP connections.

Intelligence sources said the MP anti-terrorist squad (ATS) sprang to action after it was alerted by its Uttar Pradesh counterpart on Wani.

The Hizb late Monday night confirmed Wanis joining the outfit. Hizb spokesman Saleem Hashmi quoted the outfit chief Syed Salahuddin as saying that Wani has joined the militant ranks and that his entry is the negation to Indias propaganda that the youth are joining militant ranks because of unemployment and economic problem.

Hashmi said that the Hizb Chief while speaking at a meeting of its command council also said, Form past several years, the educated youth joined Hizb to take the ongoing freedom movement to the logical conclusion.
Sidelined All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) leader and newly elected MLA in the Tamil Nadu Secretariat, TTV Dhinakaran slams Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Palanisamy. (Photo: ANI)

Chennai: The sidelined All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) leader and newly elected MLA in the Tamil Nadu Secretariat, TTV Dhinakaran, on Monday slammed Chief Minister Edappadi K Palanisamy over reports of special buses being arranged for the MLAs amidst the ongoing bus strike in the state.

"It clearly shows that the chief minister is only worried about the number of MLAs. He does not think about the state or the people," Dhinakaran told reporters in Chennai.

The transport unions in Tamil Nadu called an indefinite strike on Thursday, demanding pay hike among other things.

As the strike entered its fifth day on Monday, reports started doing rounds that special buses were being arranged for the MLAs.

Transport workers have been demanding for a pay revision to Rs 30,000. However, the authorities have only agreed to pay Rs 24,400.

Following the failure of talks on wage revision and clearance of pending dues with Tamil Nadu Transport Minister MR Vijayabaskar, the strike was declared much to the inconvenience of commuters.

On Sunday, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) working president MK Stalin urged Chief Minister Palanisamy to initiate talks with transport employees and take suitable actions to end the ongoing strike in the state.
Bengaluru: Setting the stage for a battle with the ruling Congress ahead of the Assembly polls, now barely four months away, the BJP's emerging mascot and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Sunday trained his guns on Chief Minister Siddaramaiah who had recently asserted that he too was a Hindu.

Addressing the BJP's Parivarthana Rally at Vijayanagar in Bengaluru, Mr Adityanath said the CM had made the turnaround seeing the growing popularity of Hindu ideology in the state.

He (Siddaramaiah) should realise that Hinduism is a way of life in India and not merely the name of a caste or religion. It is basically a culture,'' he quipped making it more than evident that a religion-based strategy would be the cornerstone of the BJP's poll campaign in the days to come.

During the tenure of the previous BJP regime, the government introduced the Anti-Cow Slaughter Bill in the Karnataka Assembly. If he (Siddaramaiah) is a Hindu, why did he and the Congress party oppose the bill?. Now with Assembly elections approaching, he has started dividing castes in the state,' remarked the UP CM.

Drawing a parallel between Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, Yogi hinted that the issue of Hanuman Jayanthi which had become controversial a few months ago after the Congress government banned a procession in Hunsur in Mysuru, may play a dominant role during the Assembly elections here.

Like Uttar Pradesh is the birthplace of Lord Rama, Karnataka is the birthplace of Lord Hanuman. So, Hanuman Jayanthi is a great issue here as everyone celebrates the day. Like Rama in Uttar Pradesh, it is Hanuman in Karnataka,'' he said.

Keeping the tirade going against the Congress government, Yogi said law and order had completely collapsed here. Earlier, riots used to take place in UP but after the BJP took over, the government has not allowed any riot to happen, he said.

There was a lot of development activity taking place in the country, which the Congress government here was hardly able to comprehend. During the tenure of the previous NDA government, the state had got the Bengaluru International Airport and the Metro project and now, it had the Smart City project. If a government, which thinks on similar lines like the Centre has to be installed in the state, it was necessary to vote for the BJP, Yogi added.
Chennai: The first address by a Governor who has been proactive in reviewing government projects and the entry of an AIADMK rebel who has promised to topple the ruling dispensation should make the first session of the Tamil Nadu Assembly in 2018, beginning on Monday, a political potboiler.

The short session  most likely to last a week  will begin Monday morning with the customary address by Governor Banwarilal Purohit in which he is expected to give a sneak preview of the EPS-OPS Governments priorities for the year 2018 and its achievements in the year gone by and will also herald T.T.V. Dhinakarans maiden entry into the Assembly.

Political observers say the current session is unlikely to bring any changes in the state since none of the AIADMKs challengers  Dhinakaran and the DMK  have given notices for no confidence motion against the Edappadi K. Palaniswami dispensation though they claim that they will send them packing at the drop of a hat.

The rebel leader has given ample indications that he will take efforts to topple the government once the Madras high court delivers its verdict on disqualification of 18 MLAs, who withdrew their support to Palaniswami in August last year. If the verdict comes in Dhinakarans favour, he will try to assert his authority during the Budget Session which is likely in March, observers said.

Nevertheless, the session is likely to be a stormy one with the Opposition DMK set to raise the issue of the ongoing strike by transport employees that has virtually brought the state to a halt, the extensive damage caused by Cyclone Ockhi that ravaged Kanyakumari district, review meetings by Purohit in districts and the proposed National Medical Commission Bill by the Centre.

Many a political eyebrow will be raised if Dhinakaran, nephew of V.K. Sasikala, supports DMK in either stalling the House or while supporting the arch-rival on any issue.

Already, Palaniswami and his deputy O Panneerselvam have spoken of a DMK-TTV conspiracy in the R.K. Nagar polls that returned Dhinakaran as the victor with a massive margin. The session is also being watched closely in political circles since it is the first time the Assembly is meeting after the EPS-OPS factions merged.

With Dhinakaran harping on his sleeper cells, the AIADMK has counselled its legislators not to get provoked by him and has also issued a whip to its members asking them to attend the session from Monday.

Political analyst Ravindran Duraisamy told DC that the session will be a smooth affair and would see a secret understanding between Stalin and Palaniswami in cutting Dhinakaran to size.

It will be a smooth affair. The ruling party will be particular in ensuring that Dhinakaran does not get undue importance. Opposition leader Stalin will also support the ruling party in this. However, Dhinakaran will try to seek attention and it is to be seen whether he is capable of scoring political brownie points inside the Assembly, he said.
General Rawat said that imports in defence technology needed to be lowered down as India should fight the next war with homemade solutions. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday called for modernisation of the armed forces, adding that the time has come to take cues from the 'Arthashastra' and 'Chanakya Niti'.

General Rawat also said that every arm and service was looking for upgrades as the future wars would be fought in more difficult circumstances.

Addressing a gathering at the Army Technology Seminar in Delhi, General Rawat said, "There is a huge requirement of modernisation of our armed forces, in every field. The future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them."

He further noted there would be proper utilisation of technology if the government assisted the armed forces.

"A good headway has been made in light weight bullet-proof material and fuel cell technology. The journey has begun and this must continue. We are confident that if we get support from industry, we will walk the extra mile to ensure that we utilise the technology they give us," he added.

General Rawat said that imports in defence technology needed to be lowered down as India should fight the next war with homemade solutions.

"We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defence technology), because for a nation like ours, the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with homemade solutions," he added.
Mr Raju contended that as long as there was no violation of law, the court cannot intervene with traditions.

Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh BJP leader Raghu Rama Krishna Raju on Monday moved the Supreme Court challenging the order of the Hyderabad High Court directing the Andhra Pradesh government not to allow cockfights during Sankranti and seize the roosters.

Mr Raju contended that as long as there was no violation of law, the court cannot intervene with traditions. He said cockfights were a part of the tradition of the coastal districts in Andhra Pradesh, and the High Court order for seizure of roosters was in violation of Article 13 of the Constitution.

Mr. Raju said roosters were reared by a few farmers as part of tradition; following the High Court order, the police was seizing roosters from every household which was against the rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

He said that the Supreme Court in its order last year on his petition had said that the police and other officials need not seize roosters but they could seize instruments like katti (knife) which are used in cockfights.

He sought directions from the Apex Court against the seizure of roosters.
HYDERABAD: The total number of deaths in Telangana state prisons has shown a decline in the past year. About 17 prisoners died in the jails in 2017 as against 24 in the previous year.

Certain measures like prohibition of smoking in prisons, physical fitness initiatives like PT, parade and yoga helped us bring down the deaths, said director general of prisons V.K. Singh.

This apart, the prisons department organises regular health checks and provides quality food to prisoners. Health screening is done every month by a team of doctors who advise the inmates on the dos and donts on health issues. Wherever necessary, they are taken to or admitted in hospitals, said Mr Singh.

Talking about the achievements of the prisons department in previous years, Mr Singh said that in last four years about 1.10 lakh prisoners were provided basic education. All those who were in prison for at least a month have acquired reading skills and are now capable of writing their own name, he said.

The department earned about `12.85 crore last year from units in the prisons and fuel stations run across the state. More fuel stations will be opened soon, he said.

The prison department also has a complaint cell where family members of prisoners can register their grievance. Suitable action is initiated against any official or staff member if the complaint is found genuine. In 2017, a total of 12 complaints were received and action was initiated in all cases, except four which turned out false.

A third-party call centre has been opened to obtain feedback of the behaviour and work at the prisons, he said.

The Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) has sought more information about the practices employed in state prisons.

Rounded-up beggars free to leave

Director General of Prisons V.K. Singh on Monday said that the prisons department was not detaining Gangireddulu. We do not treat Gangireddulu as beggars. They are part of the local culture and come out during Sankranti season. We do not detain them nor have we brought anyone in the past to the ashram in the prison, he said.

So far, 1,235 male and 553 female beggars have been picked up by the prisons department with the help of NGOs. Those who want to stay at the ashram are being accommodated. Some who are unwilling are being handed over to their family, he said. A separate room will be set aside in all prisons for special mulaqats, he said.
Trained by the best of stuntmen, this woman in leather pants, masks and capes performed such death - defying acts that, until then, could only be imagined to be acted out by male professionals. (Photo: Google)

Mumbai: The Google doodle on Monday kickstarted our day on a rather plucky note of reminiscence; it is "Fearless Nadia's" 110th birth anniversary and Google duly paid her homage.

Mary Ann Evans -- popularly known by her stage name Fearless Nadia  forayed into Bollywood as the Stunt Queen of India with her break as the protagonist in the 1935 Hunterwali.

The Google doodle has a dark background with a sketch of Nadia's face wearing a fiery smile, on the left. The actress wears her signature cowboy hat and a shirt with sleeves rolled up; straps of her leather shorts, as seen in Hunterwali, run over her shirt.

The ballet-trained, blue-eyed, Australian-origin actress was a discovery of Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia, a well - known director, screenwriter and producer of Bollywood. She has worked in half a dozen Wadia films which helped her gather the acclaim she holds even today. Apart from Hunterwali, Pahadi Kanya, Diamond Queen, and Lutaru Lalna are some of the films she starred in.

Nadia emerged as a shining star for altering the gaze of an audience smitten by usual masculinity of the silver screen.

Trained by the best of stuntmen, this woman in leather pants, masks and capes performed such death-defying acts that, until then, could only be imagined to be acted out by male professionals.

Nadia was the male-villain conqueror in a wider world of oppression. The sharp curve of her fame springs also from the 'dream-fulfillment' factor that an Indian audience could only surmise; rarely experience outside of reel.

'Woman with a whip' Nadia, was never restricted to one prop; she was seen jumping from chandeliers and rooftops and would, at times, tame lions. Before becoming Bollywood's choicest feisty character, Evans was part of a dancing troupe-cum-circus group in Bombay.

Vishal Bhardwaj also paid tribute to Nadia in his recent directorial venture Rangoon. Kangana Ranaut played the role of Jaanbaaz Julia to commemorate the Nadia's contribution to cinema.

Fearless Nadia, the focal point of Oriental costume-dramas shall always be remembered for her historic moments in Indian cinema. The actress died on January 9th, 1996 which, incidentally, marks Tuesday as her death anniversary.
CM Siddaramaiah with Deepak Raos mother at her house in Mangaluru on Sunday. (Photo: KPN)

Mangaluru: Squarely blaming the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar for raking up communal issues in the coastal region, Chief Minister Siddarmaiah on Sunday stressed the need for harmony and also visited the houses of slain Sangh parivar activist Deepak Rao and Abdul Basheer, a member of the minority community who succumbed to the injuries he sustained in an attack on Sunday.

Mr Siddaramaiah attended the inauguration of various developmental works at Belthangady, Puttur and Moodabidri and also inaugurated a musical fountain in Mangaluru.

At Deepak's house, the Chief Minister asked officials if all the promised compensation had been provided to the family.

He spoke to the family members and asked officials to work on providing a job to Deepaks handicapped brother.

He later visited the house of Bashir at Akasha Bhavana and spoke to the family members there.

Earlier in the day, the Chief Minister who arrived at Belthangady, was critical about those who played politics over dead bodies. Death is a sad thing, nobody should politicize it, he said adding that peace would prevail in the region if people raised their voices against those who play politics over dead bodies.

He blamed the BJP for trying to divide society to increase its seat tally in the forthcoming elections.

They speak of Sabh ka saath, Sabh ka Vikas, but in reality they incite hatred. Their slogan should not be restricted to speeches, they should follow it in reality, he said, adding, People need not worry. We will take tough step against elements which create problems.

At Puttur too, he took a dig at the Bharatiya Janata Party for polarising society.

The BJP is trying to divide society in the name of religion and God. Those who speak of setting fire to the district and changing the Constitution are not eligible to even become a panchayat member, he said, adding that sitting MLA Shakunthala Shetty would win again with the support of the people.
Srinagar: Bihar Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar, on Monday said that all disputes could be resolved only through talks. All disputes can be resolved only through talks, he said in an obvious reference to the Kashmir imbroglio.

Kumar who was speaking at an event organised by J&Ks ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in winter capital Jammu to commemorate the second death anniversary of its patron and former Chief Minister, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, that confrontation will not solve anything. He said Mufti also believed in peaceful resolution of issues rather than acrimony or discord.

Kumar was earlier conferred with the first Mufti Muhammad Sayeed award on Probity in Politics & Public Life.

He said that the late leader had a firm belief that issues confronting a system can be resolved only through dialogue and negotiations. He always gave a new direction to the position he occupied, he said adding that he enjoyed a long but intense relation with Mufti in whom he always found a leader who was concerned about the welfare of his people.

On the occasion, renowned economist, columnist and British Parliamentarian, Lord Meghnad Desai delivered the first Mufti memorial lecture on the subject Devolving Power: The British Experience in which he traced the legal and constitutional journey of the British society.

Governor, N. N. Vohra chaired the function which was besides others attended also by Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti and Bihar Deputy Chief Minister, Sushil Modi.

Vohra in his speech said that it seems we are not excessively engaged with the issues concerning our people...we failed our youth. He also said, There are lot of disruptions in academics, exams, results are delayed due to so-called domestic and non-domestic issues, an environment has been created which pulls entire policy back.

While paying tribute to Mufti, he said, He would call officers even during my meetings with him and get issues solved.

He said that Jammu and Kashmir has suffered on varied counts because of domestic and external factors which have been detrimental to the States progress and development. He made a passionate appeal for a firm resolve towards negating these factors and work collectively towards achieving our goals.
Hyderabad: Though the ongoing survey has detected fake pattadar passbooks issued in the name of non-existent lands and by duplication, the government has no plans to initiate immediate action against the dubious landowners who secured crop loans using the bogus pattadar passbooks. However, the state government is concerned whether the loan amount is repaid with the interest.

Revenue officials have been instructed orally not to book cases. However, the officials have been asked to verify with the banks whether the loans are being repaid.

All old passbooks cease to exist from this month and e-pattadar passbooks will be issued based on the findings of the latest survey. If the land owners repay the loan with the interest promptly, the government has no intention to book cases against them, said a senior official in the revenue department. The survey will be completed in a week.

The department is busy in compiling the survey findings. The data is being uploaded in the digital and manual formats, the official said. If the loan is not repaid for years, the government will book criminal cases. Many farmers have taken loans from Telangana Grameena Bank and other agriculture cooperative societies in the state. These government undertakings will suffer if the loan amount is not recovered, the official added.
Despite the BJPs robust and repeated criticism of dynasty politics, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhans elder son Kartikeya made his political entry on Sunday.

New Delhi: Dynastic politics is all set to dominate the forthcoming Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections expected to be held later this year. Despite the BJPs robust and repeated criticism of dynasty politics, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhans elder son Kartikeya made his political entry on Sunday.

Addressing a public rally in Shivpuri, he took on the Congress Jyotiraditya Scindia, accused by the BJP to be a beneficiary of dynastic politics.

Kartikeya, 22, who was addressing a convention of the Dhakad community while campaigning for a BJP candidate for the upcoming Assembly by-election in Kolaras, asked people not to look at the BJP candidate but vote in the name of his father, the chief minister.

The Congress, which won just 58 seats, as opposed to the BJPs 165 seats in the 230-member Assembly in 2013, has slowly been gaining ground.

In the by-elections held in Madhya Pradesh last year November, the Congress had defeated the BJP by a margin of over 14,000 votes. The Congress recent performance in Gujarat Assembly elections has also boosted the partys morale.

The Congress is expected to focus on rural distress and farmer issues in the state. The party has demanded immediate implementation of the Swaminathan Committee report and complete farm loan waiver.

In June last year, police allegedly opened fire on protesting farmers in Mandsaur, killing five. The issue had snowballed into a political controversy.
Minister K.T Rama Rao interacts with Karimnagar residents during the foundation stone laying ceremony for the IT Hub at Karimnagar as minister Etala Rajender, local MP B. Vinod Kumar, MLA Gangula Kamalakar and Mayor Ravinder Singh look on.

Hyderabad: IT minister K.T. Rama Rao laid the foundation stone for the IT Hub in Karimnagar and promised to provide jobs to 1,000 locals.

He said that immediately after laying the foundation stone for the IT Hub, six companies had come forward to set up their units and MoUs have been signed.

He said construction of the IT Hub will be completed in a year and will provide plug and play facilities for IT companies. He said it would create employment opportunities for 1,000 people in the first phase.

He said the TRS government had taken steps to establish similar IT hubs in Khammam, Mahbubnagar, Warangal and Nizamabad districts. He said IT exports which were Rs 56,000 crore at the time of formation of Telangana state had now touched Rs 87,000 crore.

Mr Rama Rao said, Our youngsters are second to none and I believe that the next Googles, Facebooks, and WhatsApps will come out of India.

He said Telangana states GSDP growth rate was the highest in the country and that was made possible due to the leadership of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. He said this was evident from Union ministers praising the TRS government for its remarkable performance.

He said the government would try to set up meetings with NRIs from Telangana state settled in other countries and request them to establish their companies.

Mr Rama Rao also launched a pylon for the Rs 250-crore Karimnagar City Renovation Project which includes the Manair river front development. He said while everyone talking about the Sabarmati river front in Gujarat, the Congress governments had forgotten to develop the Manair river front which was just a few kilometres from Karimnagar city. He said recently Government launched developmental works for improving the Lower Manair Dam and its surroundings including constructing a cable bridge. The IT Hub also will be coming as part of River front development.
TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy addresses the media outside the Raj Bhavan after submitting a memorandum to the Governor related to sand mafia and law and order situation in the state, while other Congress leaders look on in Hyderabad on Friday. (Photo: DC/File)

Nizamabad: TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy alleged that the government was behaving in an inhumane manner in the murder of village revenue assistant Sailoo in Kamareddy district.

Instead of identifying the accused, the police was trying to hide the facts of incident, he alleged. The family members of the deceased met Mr Reddy in Hyderabad on Monday.

The TPCC chief said that Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan was supporting the government in the case.

If all enforcement agencies collude on the Kamareddy incident, who will save the victims, he asked. He demanded Rs 25 lakh ex gratia for Sailoo.

Sailoo was run over by a sand lorry, it is being claimed that it is not a murder by the sand mafia, and a case of death in a road accident.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has accused Sangh Parivar of creating law and order problems in the state.

The Chief Minister said the state is known for its peaceful atmosphere and people belonging to different religions and culture lived in harmony. And the attempt is clearly to target this pluralism which is essence of democracy.

He has asked the party men to keep a close vigil on the activities of those trying to foment trouble. The divisive agenda can be defeated by mobilising the people.

Despite peace initiatives taken by the Chief Minister personally, there have been several attempts to derail the process through selective attacks. The Chief Minister called upon party cadre to strongly counter Sangh agenda by exposing their communal politics on the one hand and also the neo liberal policies of the Centre which had wreaked havoc on lives of the people.

The communal and divisive agenda is bring pushed hard to divert peoples attention from the failures of Modi Government, the CM said.
It is not wholly clear if the massive nationwide anti-regime protests, starting December 28 last year, which rocked Iran very hard indeed for under a week, officially taking a toll of 22 lives, have exhausted themselves. What we have is a Sunday statement from the countrys Revolutionary Guards, the nearly all-powerful security force, that tens of thousands of security personnel, including the police, were deployed to end the protests. This gives us an idea of the scale of the disturbances.

Unconfirmed reports for the past two days have suggested that former hardline President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who appears hostile to the present government headed by President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate inclined toward a liberal worldview, has been taken into house arrest for inciting violence.

This has lent to speculation whether the ruling unelected priestly elite of the ayatollahs, led by the 77-year-old Ali Khamenei, who has been in place for 22 years, is now seeing cracks. It is also not clear whether Mr Ahmedinejad, if really guilty of incitement, or others who may have helped provoke the protests, have foreign backing, including those of Western and Arab elements. Irans economy has done reasonably well since the sanctions were lifted in 2015 but unemployment remains high. The protesters were by and large working class people. They questioned Irans regional military involvement in Syria and Iraq  which has raised Tehrans stock  and pointed fingers not just at President Rouhani but also Ayatollaah Khameini. Given Indias close involvement with Iran economically and politically, New Delhi cannot afford to take sides between Tehran and its foreign opponents.
The Fire Department of New York says the fire started around 7 am on Monday at the building that contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices. (Photo: Twitter | ANI)

New York: New York City fire officials say a fire in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system injured two people and caused smoke to billow from the roof.

The Fire Department of New York says the fire started around 7 am on Monday at the building that contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Fire officials say a civilian was treated for serious injuries and a firefighter was treated for minor injuries.

It took about an hour to put out the fire on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The president's son Eric tweeted his thanks to firefighters for doing "an incredible job."
Dubai: An Indian man in the UAE has hit a jackpot by winning a whopping dhirham 12 million ($3.2 million) in the biggest-ever raffle prize money in Abu Dhabi.

Harikrishnan V. Nair, 42, who works as a business development manager for a firm in Dubai and has been living in the UAE with his family since 2002, won the huge amount in Big Ticket raffle draw.

I still cannot believe it. Is it me? Is it really me? an excited Nair, who is from Kerala, told Khaleej Times. He said he had bought the tickets twice before, but had never won.

Nair said he had always wanted to travel the world with his family and the time for it has come. I think 2018 is the year for that. I will plan a world tour soon, said Nair, father of a seven-year old son.

I would like to plan for my sons education and buy another house in India. I want to take good care of my mother and my wifes mother too, who are in India, he said. Charity is also on top of Nair's agenda. I have always wanted to help people in need, and by Gods grace I can do it now. That is something I will really do, he said.

His wife, a logistics support staff, said she could not believe the news. I was dump-founded when I got the call from my husband. First I thought he was playing the same prank I had planned on him, she said.

Now that he has won the jackpot, I will let him figure out what he wants to do with it. He is after all a business development manager and would know better how to manage his funds, she said.

Eight Indians were among 10 people who had won dhirham 1 million ($2.7 lakh) each in a mega raffle draw in Abu Dhabi in October last year. In August, an Indian man had won dhirham 5 million ($1.3 million) in the draw in the UAE.
The Every Student Succeeds Act may have kept annual testing as a federal requirement. But it also aims to help states cut down on the number of assessments their students must take by giving districts the chance to use a nationally-recognized college entrance exam, instead of the regular state test, for accountability purposes.

When the law passed back in 2015, some superintendents hailed the change, saying it would mean one less test for many 11th graders, who would already be preparing for the SAT or ACT. Assessment experts, on the other hand, worried the change would make student progress a lot harder to track.

Now, more than two years after the law passed, it appears that only two statesNorth Dakota and Oklahomahave immediate plans to offer their districts a choice of tests. Policymakers in at least two other statesGeorgia and Floridaare thinking through the issue. Arizona and Oregon could also be in the mix.

Thats not exactly a mad dash to take advantage of the flexibility.

Offering a choice of tests can be a tall order for state education officials, said Julie Woods, a senior policy analyst at the Education Commission of the States. They have to figure out how to pay for the college entrance exams, design a process for districts to apply for the flexibility, and find a way to compare student scores on the state test to scores on the SAT, ACT, or another test.

Thats potentially a lot more work than states are currently doing, Woods said. States have to decide what the payoff is for them.

Whats more, the prospect of allowing districts to pick between multiple testsand potentially change them from year-to-yeardrives assessment experts batty, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, which works with states to design and implement tests.



Youre just lost, youre just grasping at straws for any kind of comparability among school districts that take different tests, he said. Youre supposedly giving districts free choice and all that nice stuff. But states must decide, do they care about flexibility or do they care about a comparable accountability system? Its hard to have both.

Marion argued that districts might not make technical quality their top criteria for choosing a test. Instead, the pick may be subject to the whims of the local school board or superintendentpositions that tend to have high turnover.

For now, Woods said, most states that want to use college entrance exams for accountability are using those tests as their primary state-wide high school assessment. In fact, a dozen states use either the SAT or the ACT for accountability, according to an Education Week survey published last year.

Potential State Takers

But some states think the potential upside outweighs any concerns.

North Dakota, for instance, wants to offer its districts the chance to take the ACT instead of the state exam, said Kay Mayer, a spokeswoman for the state education department. The state will need approval from the feds for technical reasons, dealing with the federal peer review process. (More on page 2 of this memo from the state to its districts .)

And Oklahoma plans to give districts a choice between two most popular college entrance examsthe ACT and the SAT. The move is very popular with districts, according to Oklahomas ESSA plan, which was submitted to the feds in September .

Oklahomas decision to use a commercial, off-the-shelf college-readiness assessment (e.g. SAT, ACT) as the high school assessment enjoys broad support from stakeholders all over the state [and] responds to local district needs, and has been codified in state law, the Sooner State said in its plan. (Check out the language for yourself on page 27 of the plan. )

Importantly, Oklahoma doesnt currently designate either the ACT or SAT as its main assessment for high school accountability. Instead, the state plans to offer its districts a choice of either test without stating a preference. Its unclear if that that will fly with the feds. The department told the state it needs to pick one test or the other as its primary high school exam, in its feedback letter to Oklahoma.

Georgia finds the option enticing, too. In fact, the state legislature passed a bill last year calling on state board to examine this and other testing flexibility offered under ESSA. The state has started on that work now, said Allison Timberlake, the interim deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability.

Its a slow methodical process to make sure that everything is in place and well aligned, Timberlake said. Among the considerations: whether the college entrance tests offer appropriate accommodations for English-language learners and students in special education and whether they mesh with the states content standards.

State lawmakers in Florida have also expressed interest in offering their districts a choice of the ACT, SAT, or state exam . So far, though, bills that would make this possible have died in the legislature. State law prohibits the education department from making the change on its own, a spokeswoman said. Lawmakers required the state to study the issue. A report released last week concluded that it wasnt a good idea, according to the Orlando Sentinel .

Oregons ESSA plan, which has gotten the green light from the U.S. Department of Education, includes a line saying the state will pursue flexibility under ESSA to allow districts to use a nationally recognized assessment in place of the state exam. The state said it will consider a host of factors, including educator feedback, in making the change. (For more, check out page 27 of Oregons plan ).

And Arizona has also passed a law that would give its districts a choice of tests, not just in high school, but in K-8 schools, too. Offering middle and elementary schools a choice of tests would be a violation of ESSA, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., an ESSA architect, has argued . Arizona didnt include any mention of its testing law in its ESSA plan, which has already been approved by the feds, so its an open question whether the state will move forward on this.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
In the backdrop of the bundh in Hubballi city on Monday, Dalit organisations burnt tyres at Chennamma Circle in protest.



They were protesting against the atrocities committed on dalits in Koregaon last week in Maharashtra, and the rape and murder of a dalit school girl in Vijayapura last month.

They protested against Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde's 'we have come to power to change the Constitution', remark and demanded his resignation.

A similar protest with tyre-burning and a road block was held at Hosur Circle as well.
Miscreants pelted stones at the Natekal Masjid, near Ullal, early Monday morning.



Consequently, the masjid's glass windows are shattered.

The miscreants have also taken the CCTV camera installed at a nearby shop with them.

The police have seized a bike that allegedly belongs to the accused. The hunt for the accused is on.
Al Franken left the Senate at the start of this year, and that means there are only ten Democrats on the Senate education committee. Presumably the panels top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, wants someone to step into Frankens spot and reduce the GOPs majority on the committee back to one vote. (There are twelve Republicans on the panel).

So who may replace him? We came up with a few possibilities, although there doesnt seem to be a clear front-runner.

We also reached out to the four senators offices to see if they had been approached about or had any interest in joining the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. As you can probably tell from the name, the panel also deals with other big-ticket and controversial issues, in particular health care. So the senator who is ultimately chosen for the slot may not have a long record on K-12. And factors such as Democrats positions on other committees, among other things, will play also matter. Weve listed the potential new members in alphabetical order.

 Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey: Hes probably the most prominent name on this list because of the chance hell run for president in 2020, and due to his work on Newark schools while serving as the citys mayor .

Along with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., Booker has previously introduced the Leveraging and Energizing Americas Apprenticeship Programs (LEAP) Act, intended to boost apprenticeship programs with federal tax credits. (Scott is already on the Senate education panel.) Booker has also authored a bill to fund elementary and secondary schools that are open year-round.

 Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware: Coons has written several education-related bills in recent years. Late last year, for example, he introduced the Access, Success, and Persistence In Reshaping Education (ASPIRE) Act with Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. The bill is designed to help more low-income students get into and finish college.

In 2017 Coonsalong with Sen. Angus King, I-Me., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohioalso introduced legislation to provide tax relief specifically to parents of children with disabilities. And hes worked with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to back the creation of a pilot program for college savings accounts that would serve low-income students.

 Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland: Back when Van Hollen was in the House, he served on the House education committee, so hes got the relevant congressional experience when it comes to committee assignments. Elected in 2014, Van Hollen has supported the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act, which aimed to create a grant program supporting the repair and renovation of schools. Van Hollen has also backed the creation of a database of scholarships focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

 Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia: Warner has backed legislation on a variety of education and education-related topics during his time in the Senate. These include educator preparation, financial counseling for higher education, higher education outcomes, and Pell Grants for those in early college high schools. Warner has also focused on workforce issues.

BONUS: Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota: Shes Frankens replacement, shes new, and she needs committee assignments. Swapping in the newly arrived Minnesota lawmaker for the departed one would be straightforward. Smith has a business background, although shes also worked for Planned Parenthood. Since taking office, she has also highlighted pensions (which the Senate education committee also deals with) as a key priority for her. The same argument about being a rookie and needing committee assignments also holds true, of course, for Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama. He doesnt have much of a background in education.

Its also worth noting that Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire was able to get on the committee during her first term. That could indicate that no veteran senator was particularly keen to get on the committee when this Congress began in 2017.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
BJP workers, and kin of an accident victim who was brought dead to KIMS hospital here, staged a protest in front of the hospital director's office, alleging 'death due to negligence of doctors'.



Praveen Mulle (23) and Anil Renuke (23) both were seriously injured in a mishap that occurred on Monday at about 3.30 am at the Gaboor bypass Nekara Nagar bridge as the car driver lost control. Both were brought dead to KIMS.

The doctors who attended to the victims at KIMS have declared both Praveen and Anil 'brought dead on arrival' and shifted their bodies to the morgue cold storage.

The relatives of Praveen who came to see his body at KIMS claimed that they saw him 'move his limbs' and conveyed the same to the doctors. The doctors maintained that Praveen was dead.

Soonafter the relatives shifted Praveen's body to another private hospital where the doctors confirmed he was dead.

The protesters claimed that Praveen had died because KIMS doctors had been negligent and demanded a compensation.

KIMS director denied the charges stating that Praveen was brought dead and there was no negligence shown by KIMS doctors.
India and China resolved the issues related to road building in Tuting in Arunachal Pradesh, Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat said on Monday.



The two sides held a Border Personnel Meeting two days ago where the problems were sorted out, he said.

On December 28, Indian border guards saw Chinese civilians undertaking track alignment activity almost a kilometre inside the Indian territory in Tuting.

While the civilians were not accompanied by Chinese soldiers, construction equipment were brought to the Indian side of the disputed border between the two countries.

"The Tuting incident has been resolved. We had a BPM two days ago," Army Chief said on the sidelines of a seminar.

Officials in Delhi maintained only civilians were involved in the road building work in Arunachal, but media reports originated from Itanagar contradicted the claim with local villagers claiming Chinese soldiers were also involved in the road construction work.

The villagers informed a local policeman, who in turn alerted the Indo Tibetan Border Police, which intercepted the Chinese team and seized two excavators near Bising village under Tuting subdivision.

The unauthorised road construction work in Arunachal Pradesh happened months after troops from India and China had a 72 face-off at Doklam near India-China-Bhutan tri-junction on the eastern front.

Rawat said China substantially reduced its troops from the Doklam area, which is experiencing snowfall.

Earlier addressing a seminar on the technologies required by the army, the Army Chief said India would gradually move away from imports (in defense technology) because the time had come to ensure that the next war was fought with home made solutions.

"There is a huge requirement of modernisation of our armed forces, in every field. The future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them," he said.
RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, who is lodged in a jail here after his conviction by a CBI court in a fodder scam case, would move the Jharkhand High Court for bail within the next few days, his lawyer said.



"We will read the copy of the judgment and move the high court either on Friday or next Monday," Prasad's lawyer Prabhat Kumar told PTI.

To a query on whether the RJD chief would move the court for parole following his sister's death, Kumar said it was not under consideration.

"No, it is not under consideration," he said.

On December 23, the former Bihar chief minister was convicted in the case, relating to the illegal withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from the Deoghar treasury between 1990 and 1994. On January 6, he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail by the court.

This was the second conviction of the former Union minister in the scam that was reported, for the first time, 21 years ago.

On September 30, 2013, the 69-year-old RJD leader was convicted in another fodder scam case for the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 37.7 crore from the Chaibasa treasury and was awarded a five-year jail term.

He was granted bail by the Supreme Court after having spent over two-and-a-half months in jail.

Prasad is an accused in three more fodder scam cases in Ranchi, relating to the "fraudulent" withdrawal of Rs 3.97 crore from the Dumka treasury, Rs 36 crore from the Chaibasa treasury and Rs 184 crore from the Doranda treasury respectively.
My friend who owns a small piece of land on the outskirts of Tumakuru is not new to the world of human-wildlife interactions. He respects wild animals, has been involved in many rescues himself, and is sensitive to their needs and space. But what he has been observing over the last few months makes him anxious. "I would spot sloth bears on farmlands at least thrice a week. We would often hear and witness villagers chasing, screaming and pelting stones at sloth bears. The animosity is very real. There is a growing intolerance towards leopards and bears here."



This is not a fresh narrative - we have been reading and witnessing such interactions across India. In particular, more unpleasant stories have emerged from Hassan, Tumakuru and Ramanagara districts this past year. While discussing the issue with Kartick Satyanarayan, the co-founder and CEO of Wildlife SoS, an organisation that has been instrumental in rescuing and providing lifetime care for over 100 sloth bears, the issue of 'conflict' stands out. And, the stories that emerge are not pleasant.

Grim realities

Take for example some of these few incidents. In January 2017, a female sloth bear was critically injured after consuming an explosive device set up as bait by poachers in Chikoppa village located in Kanakapura taluk. She did not make it. In May 2017, a male sloth bear was found in the outskirts of a village located in Chikkamagaluru. The bomb had exploded in the bear's mouth, cracking its skull internally and there were hundreds of bone splinters embedded inside his mouth. He too did not make it.

In the same month, a female sloth bear and her two young cubs were found trapped inside a 20-foot deep dry well near Tumakuru. The mother bear succumbed to injuries and starvation. The cubs, identified as a male and a female made it after being rescued by the Bannerghatta Bear Rescue Centre (BBRC) run by Wildlife SOS. In August 2017, the team successfully rescued and released a wild sloth bear cub trapped in a barbed wire near Koratagere village. In November 2017, two more young sloth bear cubs caught in poacher's snares were rescued.

There are several such grim stories of mortality around us, but so are narratives of faith, commitment and devotion that find their bearing in the world of rescue - like the team at Wildlife SoS, which continues to strive hard to change such tragic incidents to one of hope.

Rescues give a fair picture of the state of wild animals in a given geographical area. None of these SoS calls bear any good news. "We definitely saw an increase in number of cases in 2017 compared with 2016. Our team rescued six wild sloth bears in 2017 in Karnataka that were either severely injured, caught in human-animal conflict or had fallen prey to poacher's snares and explosives used for hunting," exclaims Kartick.

Not all the bears or leopards rescued are released back into the wild. For example, a female sloth named Hamsi with a bullet wound was rescued from Bandipur. Hamsi, today, is friendly with her keeper and has made friends with fellow rescued bears. But not all that are rescued are as lucky, as most don't make it owing to grievous injuries. In Karnataka, places like Tumakuru and Ramanagara have been quite nightmarish for wildlife and humans

alike.

Getting Worse

Incidents of wildlife-human interactions have increased and continue to get worse. Kartick seconds the fact, "Karnataka is prone to several human-animal conflicts, especially cases involving sloth bears and leopards. Over the years there has been an increase in such incidents as a result of a variety of factors including habitat

encroachment, rapid deforestation, poaching and depletion of natural prey base. We have rescued several animals in the Ramanagara area in the past. In 2016, we rescued a sloth bear injured after consuming a country-made explosive, another bear that had fallen into a 20 feet deep well and a 15-month old leopard from an uncovered water tank."

Talking about the reasons behind these recurring incidents, he adds, "The primary causes we have observed over the years include animals that are caught or involved in human-wildlife conflict situations and poaching incidents. Poaching ranks quite high on the list as we often rescue animals that have fallen prey to poacher's snares and explosives used for hunting. Uncovered wells pose a major threat to the safety of wild animals residing in close proximity to human habitations."

The locals don't have it easy either - from loss of livelihood, to threat to life, the challenges are too many. But awareness programmes and constant engagement with locals do pay off, says Kartick. "Our team has been working closely with local communities to educate people, especially those living in human-wildlife conflict zones, about using techniques for avoiding and resolving conflicts as well as encouraging responsible community participation in various conservation initiatives. Over the years, we have witnessed positive responses from the communities, especially from the young generations who are keen to learn more about conservation and respecting the wildlife that reside in close proximity to their homes."

In the month of November 2017 alone, the team rescued three sloth bears that were caught in deadly hunting traps. "In all three cases, local communities were quite supportive and were quick to report the incidents to the Forest Department and Wildlife SOS. As a result of the awareness programmes that we conduct across villages in the region, we have noticed a positive change in the general attitude of the public towards wildlife," he adds.

Although the barbaric practice of dancing bears is a thing of the past, the situation for wildlife living closer to human habitat remain dire. While the attempts at finding long-term sustainable solutions continue, its rescues such as these, done on everyday basis, that add value to the phrase 'every individual matters', human or not!
Mannan Wani, a Kashmiri research scholar at the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), who had been missing for the past few days, is suspected to have joined terror outfit Hizbul Mujahideen (HM).



A post on the social media, that showed Mannan, who had been pursuing Ph.D in Geology at AMU, with an AK 47, claimed that he joined the HM on Friday, according to the police sources here.

Aligarh police chief Rajesh Pandey said on Monday that the room at the hostel, where Mannan had been living, was raided and articles, including some literature and other documents had been recovered from there.

''We have seized some articles from his (Mannan)...they are being examined,'' Pandey said in Aligarh.

He said that Mannan had been present at the AMU campus till January 2, 2017. ''He had not been since then,'' he added. AMU authorities said that Mannan had been suspended till the investigation is pending.

The varsity officials said that Mannan was a brilliant scholar and that they had no idea how was he radicalised. His friends too expressed surprise and said that he never betrayed any signs that he could join the ranks of terrorists.

Mannan, who hailed from Kupwara in Jammu & Kashmir, had been enrolled at the AMU five years back and had earlier completed M.Phil degree from there. His family had lodged a missing report on Sunday, the police said.

Police sources here said that the cops were also trying to ascertain if Mannan was in touch with some others since his disappearance.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) has convened the meetings of telecom companies CEOs on January 10, to discuss the call drops issue.



On the same day, the DOT officials will also meet the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) officials on the issue, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters here on Monday.

In the meeting, the government will inform the service providers that the issue of call drops must be addressed immediately, she said.

The Telecom Department had in a series of meetings over the last few quarters asked telcos to undertake immediate measures to improve call quality, including setting up of additional mobile towers across the country.

The call quality situation has deteriorated, she said, citing the increasing number of consumer complaints.

Over the last two years, service quality in telecom has been a burning issue. In 2016, the regulator had even ordered operators to compensate users for call drops (Re 1 for each call dropped) but the missive was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Stating that the new call drop norms have now come into effect, the secretary said the government is constantly "monitoring" the situation.

Trai's new Quality of Service (QoS) formula came to force on October 1, 2017, and telecom operators may face a maximum penalty of Rs 10 lakh for call drops which will be measured at the mobile tower level instead of the telecom circle level.
Middle school-students who were enrolled in Tulsas prekindergarten program as 4-year-olds were more likely to be enrolled in honors courses, and were less likely to be retained in a grade compared to their peers who were not enrolled in pre-K. Thats according to the latest study to find long-lasting benefits from high quality early-childhood education.

The study, The Effects of Tulsas Pre-K Program on Middle School Student Performance , was published last month in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

The researchers examined about 2,000 children who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2006. (Excluded from the study were children who attended a Head Start program run by the Community Action Project of Tulsa, or Tulsa CAP. Tulsa CAP children have been the subject of other studies by the same team, but this latest study sought to examine the impact of children who were in the school districts regular pre-K program.)

Overall, 6 percentage points more pre-K children enrolled in honors courses compared to youth who had not attended prekindergarten. There was a small positive impact on standardized math test scores, and also a 7 percentage point reduction in grade retention. (Sixteen percent of former pre-K students were retained, compared to 23 percent for youth who had not enrolled in pre-K.)

The program also showed some evidence of diminishing effects over timethe pre-K programs effects on reading test scores, letter grades, special education, designation as a gifted student, absenteeism, and suspensions were statistically zero.

But its noteworthy that the Tulsa program does have benefits that are measurable, compared to studies of other state-run preschool programs, such as the one in Tennessee , the study said.

So what makes Tulsa stand out compared to other programs where prekindergarten benefits fade after a few years? William Gormley, the studys lead author and the co-director of Georgetown Universitys Center for Research on Children in the United States, has a few hypotheses.

One is that Tulsas program is noteworthy for its quality. Oklahoma has one of the nations oldest universal prekindergarten programs, and under state law, all teachers must have a bachelors degree and be certified in early-childhood education. State law also requires child/staff ratios be maintained at 10 to 1. And in Tulsas prekindergarten classrooms, teachers spent a lot of time on academic subjects compared to other school-based preschool programs elsewhere, the researchers said.

Another important factor, Gormley said: most children in Tulsa attend preschool, and that means that kindergarten teachers were able to adapt their lessons to reflect and amplify what children had learned as preschoolers.

Tulsas pre-K program helps struggling students to keep their heads above water and helps excellent students to advance at a more rapid rate, Gormley said. A pre-K program that continues to boost math outcomes nearly a decade later is a big plus in a world that increasingly values STEM skills.
As many as 20 students have scored 100 percentile in the Common Admission Test (CAT) held under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow, in November last year.



The results of the nationwide test were declared by IIM-Lucknow on Monday.

"Like last year, 20 candidates have scored an overall 100 percentile in CAT 2017. However, the profile of these candidates has been different compared to those of CAT 2016," IIM-Lucknow said in a statement, announcing the results.

While all the top 20 candidates in CAT 2016 were men and engineers, this time there are "two women and three non-engineers," the premier-B school said.

CAT 2017 was held on November 26, 2017, in two shifts in 140 cities across the country. A total of 1,99,632 students took the test held for admissions to 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and 102 other management schools.

Karnataka has the highest number of B-schools (17), including IIM-Bangalore, which accepts CAT scores for filling their seats.

"The number of those who took the test this year was the largest in three years," IIM-Lucknow said.

The CAT determines the eligibility for admission to IIMs and other institutes which accept its scores for admitting students to the postgraduate programmes in management they offer. The Singapore Management University, a foreign institute based in Singapore, also accepts CAT scores for filling seats with Indian students.

All 20 IIMs admit nearly 4,000 students to their two-year management programmes based on CAT scores.

What next?

"With the results declared, the IIMs will now move in to release their shortlist for subsequent process considering CAT score and other criteria. The subsequent process for IIM-Lucknow comprises ability test and personal interview (WAT-PI)," it said.

Students who cleared CAT 2017 will be called for WAT-PI in February-April.

The IIM Luckow said it will release the list of shortlisted candidates soon.

Students can download their scorecards from the official CAT website, www.iimcat.ac.in.

"Individual SMSes were sent to candidates informing them of their overall percentiles," IIM-Lucknow said.

Students to be admitted to IIMs this year would be the first batch to get a degree in management, instead of postgraduate diploma.

Parliament recently passed a bill to vest degree-granting powers to IIMs and give greater autonomy to the B-schools in their functioning. The Indian Institute of Management Bill, 2017, became a law with President Ram Nath Kovind giving his assent to it on December 31, 2017.
The debate on homosexuality was on Monday reignited by the Supreme Court's decision to revisit its 2013 judgement, upholding validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.



The Narendra Modi government would now have to explain its stand with the apex court admitting a fresh plea filed by a group of eminent citizens led by Navtej Singh Johar.

A three-judge bench presided over by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, however, clarified that the court would examine only consensual sexual acts between two adults.

"The consent between two adults has to be the primary precondition. Otherwise, children would become prey, and their protection in all spheres has to be guarded and protected," the bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said.

Senior advocate Arvind Datar also agreed that he does not intend to challenge that part of Section 377 which is related to carnal intercourse with animals.

Govt stand

The order passed on Monday would throw open an opportunity for the Union government to clarify its stand.

In the Suresh Kumar Koushal case in 2013, a two-judge bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhyay (both since retired) had held that Section 377 of IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality. It had said only Parliament has the power to quash the 1861 law, which made gay sex among consenting adults as a punishable offence.

"Notwithstanding this verdict, the competent legislature shall be free to consider the desirability and propriety of deleting Section 377 IPC from the statute book or amend the same," the bench said.

The previous UPA government had come in for strong criticism with the two ministries of home and health taking contradictory stands on the subject. The home ministry supported the plea for decriminalising the penal provision, while the health ministry maintained that it would involve risk to human beings. The then attorney general had supported the plea, while several religious bodies opposed it.
After ruling BJP in Gujarat faced flak from Patel and Koli communities on portfolio allocation to their leaders in the newly-formed Vijay Rupani ministry, on Monday the virus hit the key Opposition party Congress.



The Koli community wanted the Congress to appoint their leader and Jasdan legislator Kunwarji Bavaliya as the leader of opposition in the state legislative assembly instead of Amreli MLA and Patel leader Paresh Dhanani. Dhanani was last week appointed to the post by Congress high command after a claimed consensus among its elected members of the assembly.

The BJP government had faced trouble from Patidars on non-allocation of 'respectable' portfolio to deputy chief minister Nitin Patel and later from koli community for not 'respecting' seniority of fisheries minister Purushottam Solanki.

Now, to make itself heard, the Koli community has planned a massive rally in support of Bavaliya on Wednesday in Ahmedabad. A Koli strongman, Bavaliya, has personally not yet come out in open to announce his displeasure. He had thrown his hat in the ring earlier for the post to which he was pipped by Dhanani. "I am satisified with the high command's decision. The event on the 10th is entirely social and has no connection with any demand," he told reporters.

However, observers believe that it could be a difficult task for Congress and state leadership to pacify the Koli community, a part of the Other Backward Caste (OBC) with sizeable presence in Saurashtra region. In 2017 Assembly polls, Congress had wrest 30 of the 54 seats in Saurashtra-Kutch region from BJP after a gap of over two decades.

Koli meet

The meeting has been called under the aegis of Akhil Bharatiya Koli Samaj, to which presidents and general secretaries of all the state Koli community units have been invited to discuss "about the serious issue of political parties ignoring the Koli samaj". The meeting notice has been signed by Chandravadan Pithawala, president of Gujarat state Akhil Bharatiya Koli Samaj.

"We are more than four decade-old organisation and if BJP can appoint a Koli to country's Presidential post, Congress could have considered a Koli representative for the important position of leader of opposition in the state Assembly," a senior Koli leader said.
An association of lawyers on Monday filed a petition in the Bombay High Court demanding a probe into the death of additional sessions judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, who presided over a CBI court that was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.



The main prayer from the Bombay High Court was the constitution of a commission of enquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge into the "events and circumstances" surrounding the death of Judge Loya in Nagpur in 2014, that has come to light in the wake of a report published in a news magazine.



The Maharashtra government, registrar general, the journalist and the magazine have been made respondents by the Bombay Lawyers' Association (BLA), which has requested the petition to be treated as a PIL.



BJP President Amit Shah was discharged by the special CBI court in the fake encounter case a couple of years ago.



In the petition, the BLA has quoted several several media reports since the controversy broke out. It also pointed out that Justice P B Sawant, former Supreme Court judge and retired Bombay High Court judges Justice B G Kholse-Patil, Justice B H Marlapalle and Justice A P Shah had called for an independent probe into the death of the presiding CBI judge.



"...That this news report/story has shaken the conscience of the judiciary as well as the legal fraternity. If independence and integrity of the judiciary is to be preserved, then the death of Judge Loya and the circumstances surrounding the same should be thoroughly investigated by a commission of enquiry headed by retired Supreme Court judge," the petition states.


The assurance of former chief minister S M Krishna to participate in the 'Parivartana Yatra', scheduled to arrive in the district on January 19, has brought cheers among the BJP workers of the district.



Krishna, who quit the Congress and joined the BJP, had not participated in any major party programme, so far. The party workers, who met Krishna during his private visit to Bharathinagar recently, appealed to him to be a part of the Parivartana yatra, in the district. Krishna's assurance has given a much-needed morale boost to party functionaries in Maddur constituency.

Moreover, BJP's Karnataka poll in-charge Prakash Javadekar too had met Krishna in Bengaluru recently and had requested him to attend the valedictory of the Parivartana rally to be held in Bengaluru on January 28.

BJP Maddur taluk president Lakshman Kumar said, Krishna's presence during the programme would give a shot in the arm for the party. We would again request him, by inviting him formally, he said.

Yogeshwar eyes Maddur

Channapatna MLA C P Yogeshwar has plans to contest from Maddur and is holding hobli-level party workers conventions. He has been travelling across the district, with an eye on Srirangapatna and Malavalli also, as Maddur is a strong fortress of the JD(S). As Krishna has joined the BJP, old Congress leaders will also join the party. If the party works hard, victory is possible, opined a few locals.

Meanwhile, Yogeshwar is claiming that the BJP will create a history by winning Maddur Assembly constituency. Though the party workers have been urging me to contest from Maddur, the party high command will take a final decision in this regard, he said.

Cong lacks leadership

Though there is no dearth of ticket aspirants in the Congress party, it lacks popular leaders, who can face the BJP, say Congress workers. Congress leader Madhu Madegowda said, the party is being strengthened from the grassroots level. Congress will win the Maddur seat in the upcoming elections, he said.
Former chief minister and JD(S) state president H D Kumaraswamy on Monday said that BJP leaders are behind the murder of Hindu activist Deepak Rao, who was murdered in Dakshina Kannada, recently.



Speaking to reporters here Kumaraswamy said that he has information that a BJP corporator is behind the murder. "I received the information about the involvement of a BJP leader in the murder. But the government should confirm it," he said.

Kumaraswamy said, the police have arrested four persons in connection with the murder a few days back, but, the government is not disclosing the reason behind the murder. The two-national parties - the BJP and the Congress - have come under an agreement in the murder case, he suspected.

Yettinahole project

Kumaraswamy said that he has no objection to the Yettinahole Integrated Drinking Water Project. "I never said that I will stop the project. I never opposed it. In the name of projects, including Yettinahole, the state government has indulged in various irregularities. I had said that I will stop the irregularities, but, not the project," he said.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and the Congress party leaders have been targeting me by taking up the issue as they have no other matter. The CM and Chikkaballapur MP M Veerappa Moily had said that they would provide water to Chikkaballapur and Kolar districts within a year, in 2013. But even after four years, the Congress government has failed to complete the project, he pointed out.

"I have nothing to learn from Siddaramaiah. I have learnt enough from my father H D Deve Gowda," Kumaraswamy said.
UPDATED A new study raises questions about a major shift in testing: substituting the SAT or ACT for states required high school assessments.

The study, by the Assessment Solutions Group , focuses on one slice of the testing question: whether its a good idea to let some districts substitute college-entrance exams for state tests. But the research also echoes broader questions about states decisions to use college-entrance tests, statewide, to measure student achievement.

The study concludes that letting Florida districts use the SAT or ACT instead of its own required Algebra 1 and 10th grade English/language arts tests wouldnt be a good idea, for a variety of reasons, including:

Neither college-entrance exam covered all of Floridas academic standards. The reports authors noted that districts could supplement the ACT or SAT, adding additional questions so all the standards are covered, as other states have done when they use the SAT or ACT. But that choice adds cost and complexity to using a college-entrance exam, the study said.



The college-entrance exams produce different results than Floridas own tests, which casts serious doubt on the interchangeability of the three tests, and the soundness of making accountability decisions based on them.



Lack of transparency about the ACTs and the College Boards accommodations policies leaves an open question about whether all students who need accommodations on the test can obtain scores they can use in college applications. (More on that here .)



.) Florida might not be able to back up a decision to let some districts use the SAT or ACT with the levels of evidence needed for approval by federal reviewers. (The U.S. Department of Educations peer review process evaluates, among other things, evidence that a states chosen tests are aligned to its academic standards .)

Florida requested the ASG study because it has been exploring a new kind of testing flexibility offered by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

One provision of that law says states may decide to allow school districts to skip their state accountability tests for high school and use a nationally recognized high school assessment"in other words, the SAT or ACTto measure student achievement.

We know that only a handful of states are considering granting this kind of flexibility to districts , for reasons that my colleague Alyson Klein explores today in a blog post on Politics K-12. (Even when the offer of flexibility was shiny and new, states werent showing much enthusiasm about it.)

The study raises questions that are larger than what happens if a state lets some districts substitute the SAT or ACT for its own tests. It revisits a question that has been hovering over an accelerating trend: More and more states have been dumping their high school tests and using college-entrance exams instead as their official high school achievement tests.

The question that has troubled testing experts is the one about alignment"Can a college-entrance exam accurately measure whether students have mastered the skills and knowledge in their states standards?

I had exactly that thought as I was working on the report, said Edward D. Roeber, the lead author of the ASG study. He oversaw assessment in Michigan, a state that uses a college-entrance exam for accountability, and he has consulted on the development of other large-scale tests.

States seem to have this belief that, well, we can just drop our current high school exam, whether its PARCC, Smarter Balanced, or a custom-developed test, and we can get a two-fer by using one of these college-entrance tests. But Im not sure theyve studied it carefully enough.

Its not that its impossible to use the SAT or ACT to measure mastery of state content standards, Roeber said. Its possible. But states shouldnt assume the switch will work for them. They must conduct diligent alignment studies that will identify how well a college-entrance exam covers their academic standards. Since standards differ from state to state, each state must conduct its own alignment study, or it cant claim that the SAT or ACT is fully aligned to its standards, Roeber said.

As of a year ago, a dozen states were using the SAT or ACT as their official high school achievement test for accountability purposes. Since the SAT has been redesigned, states that use it have not yet gone through the federal peer-review process. But at least a couple of states that use the ACT got letters from the U.S. Department of Education last year asking for more evidence of alignment to state standards and/or a deeper dive into accommodations policies.

Questions about using college-entrance exams instead of standards-based tests all boil down to a choice, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, which helps states with large-scale assessment.

Everything in assessment is a choice, Marion said. Do you use a test like the SAT or ACT, and focus on predicting whether students will be successful in college? Or do you use a test designed to cover academic standards? Which one are you trying to measure?

Using a college-entrance exam without verifying that it does a good job covering a states standards risks sending confusing messages to schools, Marion said. Teachers will wonder whether they should be teaching the content of the standards their state adopted, or the material covered in a college-entrance exam, he said.

UPDATED ACT spokesman Ed Colby said that the company supported the study by offering information for analysis, but added that alignment results differ based on the methodology used. ACT backs a more holistic method of alignment, he said in an email. The ACT believes that its college-entrance exam is a valid measure of college and career readiness and well-aligned to state college and career readiness standards, he said.

The College Board defended the use of the SAT as a measure of high school achievement. Company spokesman Zach Goldberg said in an email that using the test for accountability saves testing time and measures students on what theyre already learning in the classroom. He said that the SAT meets or exceeds every one of the standards for statewide assessments in the Every Student Succeeds Act, including alignment to state academic standards.

The College Board has conducted studies demonstrating the alignment of the new SAT with the current standards in all 50 states, Goldberg said. The SAT strongly aligns with Floridas own standards. We stand ready to support states who want to use the SAT for accountability.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a proposed Free Trade Agreement between the Asean countries and six other member countries that aims to boost goods and services trade by eliminating most tariff and non-tariff barriers - a move that, in theory, would provide India's consumers greater choice of quality products at affordable rates as well as boost service (and goods) exports from the nation's producers.



The RCEP, an economic partnership that includes China, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and the 10 Asean nations, has come into prominence as the world's largest trade pact after the US pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that excluded China and was meant, in part, to marginalise Chinese influence in the region. With the collapse of the TPP, the RCEP has risen in prominence as the pact that would bind Asia in terms of commerce.

As with all trade agreements, however, the RCEP remains mired in controversy in India. Sceptics across the political spectrum doubt the value of the partnership, with concerns that Indian manufacturers and farmers may be unable to compete on a global scale without some level of protection. This begs the question, if India's industry and agriculture are still nascent, when will they grow up, if ever, to face competition? Will industry be forever beholden to protectionist tariffs to survive?

Further, India's position has been that it would allow market access to most countries in the RCEP, particularly for those with which it has bilateral free trade agreements, apart from China with which it has a trade deficit of over $50 billion.

The Indian industry is understandably alarmed at the prospect of having to compete with Chinese companies that produce goods more efficiently and at a lower cost than Indian companies.

However, a time must come when one accepts China's comparative advantage in manufacturing and, instead of raising or keeping tariffs up to protect Indian manufacturing from China, in line with David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, India rather pushes for lower Chinese and Asean members' tariffs to India's specialty - IT services.

India's position in the RCEP is the most protectionist of all the nations, with New Delhi first mooting a three-tiered tariff elimination system - 42.5% of product lines to be tariff free for China, Australia and NZ; 65% for Japan and South Korea; and 80% for Asean countries.

This was rejected by all members, including Asean, who pushed for an unacceptable 92%, wherein Indian industry and agriculture would be beset with competition from foreign companies.

The Asean countries are also averse to Indian demands for liberalisation in the services sector, especially to easier movement of Indian professionals to RCEP member countries. India's proposal to make the services agreement under Asean-Australia-New Zealand FTA, signed in 2009, as the template for RCEP has been severely opposed by some members in the grouping.

Finally, India has opposed intellectual property clauses that could affect its generic drug export business. According to newspaper reports, the text of the RCEP indicates that India's Ministry of Commerce is resisting many aspects of the Japanese and Korean demands for higher intellectual property rights (IPR) standards.

The measures go beyond what is required by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), and are called TRIPS-plus provisions.

The dilemma

Therefore, the RCEP has put huge pressure on India both on the goods side as well as on the services side, and India is moving cautiously. To exit the deal would imperil and set back global trade, while agreeing to the deal means ending policies that have supported Indian industry for decades. It sounds like a Catch-22.

However, if a deal can be reached on goods tariffs vis--vis China, keeping in mind India's justified concerns over the trade deficit, as well as the pressure resisted on intellectual property provisions and, finally, member countries can be pressured to bring down trade barriers to Indian services, a deal is in the interest of all parties.

One may ask, and justifiably, how a free trade agreement sits in sync with the Modi government's stated objective of 'Make in India'. However, this would be a nave question, because to any seasoned observer, the 'Make in India' policy of the government was primarily a branding exercise rather than one meant to provide tangible results, proof of which is that there have been hardly any concrete policy formulations worth their salt to ensure that the idea translated to results on the ground.

In reality, there has been a large amount of continuity in policy between the last government and this and, in fact, any government, be it UPA or NDA, would have pursued the RCEP, with the same concerns over trade deficit with China, intellectual property and the promotion of Indian services.
For foreign policy observers, the New Year began with America blocking $225 million in military aid to Pakistan, hours after US President Donald Trump tweeted to slam the country for being a safe haven for terrorists. What made it interesting was not just that the President backed his words with action, but even more that Pakistan, too, did not let it be a monologue, but pointed fingers back at the US.



Trump's public "breaking up" with Pakistan makes one ponder what's in store for the larger realignment in light of regional and global geopolitics. Pakistan's prime minister met his army chief, perhaps worried what more damage the US could do - one speculation being that the US could stifle an IMF-led bailout of Pakistan's economy.

Earlier, Trump had paved the way for a $700 million reimbursement to Pakistan for supporting the US effort in Afghanistan. Stopping the $255 million aid tranche has only led to the realisation that Pakistan is fast becoming a Chinese client state, with Beijing facilitating easy Yuan-based bilateral trade and investment.

Trump's tirade and the fascinating exchange that has followed has only served to highlight the complexity and contradictions in geopolitics. America's tectonic shift towards India is being met with Islamabad's military and economic shift into Beijing's camp. In this Realist zero-sum game, solutions for problems like the rise of extremism and terrorism become subordinated to the global power play between a Superpower and a rising challenger.

Without an alternative base to operate from in Afghanistan, the US is bereft of choice and has to work with Pakistan if it is to remain engaged in Afghanistan. Further, any solution to the crisis in Afghanistan or the larger issues of world terrorism cannot be found in threats by nations to annihilate one another. The problems of global politics are much more complex and require steady engagement in order to be able to deal with evil on a long-term basis.

There is a clamour in Pakistan civil society that their country needs better relations with its neighbours like Afghanistan, Iran, China and even India and therefore it would be apt for it to ignore Trump's America. There is a realisation with Pakistan that it has lost more than gained from the sacrifices it has had to make to be on the right side of America.

Diplomacy cannot be situated within an ambit of on-the-spur declarations on Twitter that lack sound reasoning. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state. If the US is determined to destabilise Pakistan, has it thought about what's to happen to Rawalpindi's nuclear weapons? The whole of South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region feel the perils involved and have to think in terms of various stakeholders like India, China and Russia over the larger question of who will play the vital role of maintaining stability as Pakistan destabilises.

The complexities of Pakistan's problems are way beyond ordinary comprehension. Trump may be attempting to woo Uzbekistan in order to be able to make up for the loss of Pakistan's support, but will finding new allies work at a time when it is becoming clear that the US is systematically damaging its own value as an ally?

America's ironic situation is easy for anyone to see: only Pakistan can help or harm the US in Afghanistan. No wonder then that critics are pointing to the grave damage that Trump's impulsive tweet might have already done to that cause. Words or actions that have a loud bang but fail to generate the requisite impact prove to be rather counterproductive.

Coercive diplomacy

Pakistan is in a severe internal crisis that is only magnified by its external ambitions. While one may not want to gloss over its dealings with extremists, it is also a fact that it is fighting the largest inland war against terrorism, albeit of its own making. Coercive diplomacy at this stage cannot make its situation much worser, but it is pushing back, banking on other allies, such as China. In time, we will know whether it was America that trumped Pakistan or Pakistan dumped Trump.

Terrorism needs to condemned in the severest of terms, but dropping one ally to build up another cannot be the way forward to dealing with it. India, too, should sense this and instead of celebrating Trump's tweet, New Delhi must realise that the answer to managing its troublesome neighbour has to come of its own engagement with it.

In the quest to push Pakistan to heighten efforts to track terrorist financiers, President Trump has put forth a morally and intellectually weak way forward. Similar damage has been done to the cause of globalisation, with equally impulsive tweets, followed by policy measures that have hurt global trade and technology flows.

Such off-the-cuff remarks by a world leader puts a question mark on the rationality of peoples to tap the right processes and individuals to advance the cause of a stable world order and continued globalisation.

World leaders can, after all, cause or stoke conflicts with the use of one idea or a word that is ill-considered. It is not to say that world leaders must not publish their thoughts on platforms such as Twitter, but to ignore their propensity to cause damage on a global scale will lead to a situation when the benefits of ease of global communications are outweighed by its costs.

(The writer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Delhi)
BJP national president Amit Shah will be arriving in Bengaluru on Wednesday evening and will chair a series of meetings to review the poll preparedness of the state unit.



He will be holding two sessions - one with legislators and MPs from north Karnataka followed by those from south Karnataka. He is also likely to take part in the state core committee meeting. The meetings will be held at a private resort on the outskirts of the city.

During his last visit to Bengaluru, Shah is learnt to have taken party state legislators and MPs to task for not following his "one-plus-one strategy," wherein each elected representative not only looks after his or her constituency, but one more allotted by the party. He told them that they should have visited constituencies allotted to them by his next visit to Bengaluru.

The next day, Shah will be visiting Chitradurga, where he is scheduled to address the party's Navakarnataka Nirmana Parivarthana Yatra.
BJP national president Amit Shah and Congress president Rahul Gandhi will virtually take over election management of their respective parties in Karnataka as the arch rivals brace for a tough fight ahead of the crucial Assembly polls.



Post Sankranti, both Shah and Rahul are expected to deploy key resources to devise a poll strategy in the state. The 2018 Assembly election is a high-stakes battle for both parties. For the Congress, Karnataka is one of the last major states where it is in power whereas the BJP hopes to extend its winning streak from Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh to Karnataka.

Rahul has convened a meeting of the state party leaders on January 13 in Delhi, following which teams representing key cells - communications, social media and research - will camp in Karnataka. AICC communications wing convenor Priyanka Chaturvedi and AICC research wing chief Rajeev Gowda have already arrived in Bengaluru. AICC social media head Ramya, too will jump into the action soon. All India Professionals Congress chief Shashi Tharoor will also work in the state ahead of the polls. Rahul's own poll strategy team is expected to arrive in Bengaluru closer to the polls, sources said.

In the case of BJP, from February-March till the completion of the polls, a 40-member team of Amit Shah and his trusted lieutenants will descend on Bengaluru to finalise the party's strategy. Starting next month, Shah himself will tour the state extensively to gain command over details, a top BJP functionary said.

Shah is an expansionist unlike his predecessors, party insiders said. His core team comprises key strategists such as Bhupendra Yadav, a Rajya Sabha member known for his acumen to implement election strategy who prefers to work from the party's war room. Yadav is likely to be made in-charge of "page pramukh" initiative of the BJP.

The team also has Arun Singh, BJP national general secretary known for his organisational skills; Om Mathur, who enjoys Prime Minister Narendra Modi's confidence, is said to have prepared the groundwork for a 25-0 clean sweep in the Lok Sabha elections in his home state Rajasthan; BJP national general secretary (organisation) Ramlal is the link between the party and the RSS. He is likely to monitor all organisational affairs and ensure coordination with various Sangh affiliates. They will be assisted by a battery of dedicated party functionaries, sources said.

Congress MP Rajeev Gowda said his research department will work closely with the party's communications and social media teams. "We are the munitions factory," he said. "We will take up studies on what our government here has done. In other states, we were in the opposition and our research focus was different. Here, we are in power, so our work will be different," Gowda said.
New Orleans maturing charter school field is beginning to reveal structural differences among schools that might help spur student learning.

More than 4 in 5 public school students in the Crescent City attended charter schools in the 2012-13 school year, according to a study by University of Arkansas researcher Patrick Wolf for the Institute of Education Sciences, part of the Louisiana Charter Schools Research Alliance of the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. Charter schools tend to serve more black and low-income students than traditional district schools in the city.

Wolf and co-author Shannon Lasserre-Cortez of the American Institutes of Research analyzed student growth from 2012-2014 in language arts, math, and science at 50 of the citys 92 charter campuses (not counting those that did not produce student growth data that year).

They found that charter schools, in general, served wider grade spans within the same campus. The study was not causal, but it did find that charter schools that started in kindergarten and those with extended school years had faster student growth in students language skills than schools that started school at higher grades or with shorter years.

Schools with higher concentrations of experienced teachers were associated with faster student growth, but schools with high concentrations of teachers with graduate degrees were actually associated with lower student growth than average. However, New Orleans charter schools in general had lower concentrations of teachers rated highly effective than the state average.
Five employees of a dingy bar were killed in a fire that broke out in the early hours on Monday.



Prasad (20), Rangaswamy (23) from Gubbi, Mahesh (35), from Channarayapatna, Manjunath (45) from Hassan, and Keerthi (24) from Mandya choked to death at Kailash Bar and Restaurant in Kalasipalyam.

The bar is on the ground floor of the three-storey Kumbaara Sangha building.

Bar cashier Ramachandra received an alert around 2.45 am from Nagappa, who lives in a building adjoining the bar.

#DH_Illustration on the fire broke out at #KailashBar and restaurant in the #Kalasipalyam--KR Market area in the wee hours of Monday morning killing the five people inside. #BengaluruFire. pic.twitter.com/38oZPr6f6f  Deccan Herald (@DeccanHerald) January 8, 2018





Ramachandra then called Prasad, one of those sleeping inside the bar, to ask what had happened.

"Prasad was crying and said the bar was engulfed by smoke. He spoke for three minutes and then cut the call," he told DH.

Ramachandra tried calling Prasad a few minutes later but got no response. He informed the fire service and rushed to the spot, but it was too late.

No ventilation

Two fire tenders and a fire rescue vehicle reached the spot only around 4 am.

The fire force had a tough time opening the metal shutter as it was hot. The workers had died by the time rescue staff gained entry.

Four bodies were found near the toilet on the first floor, while the fifth was on the ground floor.

Mahesh, found near the bar counter near the shutter, had burn wounds on his hands.

The others were found near the toilet, accessed by a flight of metal stairs from the ground floor.

All five died of asphyxiation, the police suspect. The post-mortem was conducted at Victoria Hospital and the reports are awaited.

Criminal negligence

Kalasipalyam police have registered a case of criminal negligence and culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

"We have booked the bar owner and licence holder. We are checking if the bar was sublet and will fix culpability," said city police commissioner T Suneel Kumar.

He has ordered an inquiry and expects a report within four days.

The building is 70 years old, and the Class 9 excise licence holder has been identified as V R Dayashankar, whom the police learnt was a paralytic.

The bar was run by his brother Prakash and Somashekar, who holds stakes in the business.

Locked inside?

The five employees were locked inside the bar by the cashier, who retained the keys, families of the fire victims told DH.

The employees had no way to open the shutter and run to safety, they lamented.

Ramachandra, the cashier, told the police the workers had a set of keys, but couldn't explain why they had not been able to open the shutter and escape to safety.



What caused the fire?

Among the devices inside were a fridge, digital video recorder connected to CCTV cameras, and a UPS with batteries.





The police suspect the fire was caused by a short circuit.





The Electrical Inspectorate and experts from the Forensic Science Laboratory will investigate the cause of the fire, police said.





Room infested





For about a week, the five employees had been retiring at night at the bar as their room on the second floor was infested with bedbugs and rats.
By Ed OKeefe

8 January 2018

(The Washington Post)  A massive influx of Puerto Rico residents displaced by recent hurricanes is transforming communities in Florida and other states, and a conservative group is moving quickly to woo them ahead of the midterm elections.The Libre Institute, an offshoot of the Libre Initiative, a group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, is launching new outreach programs this week in the Orlando area designed to provide English-language courses and civics lessons to thousands of Puerto Ricans living at least temporarily in Central Florida as the island continues rebuilding after deadly hurricanes Irma and Maria last fall.Full power has not yet been restored on the island, and Florida officials say more than 300,000 people have at least passed through the Sunshine State from Puerto Rico in pursuit of new opportunities or temporary shelter. Thousands of young island residents have been enrolled in Florida schools while their parents seek work and housing.Residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens who can participate in presidential primaries but cannot cast a vote for president  unless they move to the mainland and register to vote. With hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans leaving the island, they are poised to transform several communities in Florida and bolster fledgling island communities in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas while adding to their already large numbers in New Jersey, New York and parts of New England. The ongoing churn has the potential to transform the political dynamic ahead of Novembers midterms, especially in down-ballot races, in which even a few hundred new voters could make a difference.The Libre Institutes Welcome to Florida classes will launch this week at the groups offices in the Orlando area, part of an initial $100,000 commitment by the group that is set to grow in the coming weeks as the program expands to centers in Miami and Tampa, two other parts of the state attracting Puerto Ricans. []Democrats and progressive organizations have sounded the alarm about Libres work in the past, accusing the group of skirting nonprofit laws by handing out ideological material; collecting names, email addresses and phone numbers; and basically doing the early legwork that Republicans should otherwise be doing to win over new voters.Doing anything to track down and even indirectly woo potential Latino Republican voters could be critical next year in Florida, which faces an open gubernatorial race, a competitive reelection fight for Sen. Bill Nelson (D) and a handful of congressional races that could tip the balance of power in the House of Representatives. [more]
Tapping Into Social's Sphere of Influence

With the rise of social media platforms like Instagram, a new category of celebrity has emerged: the digital influencer. While their names might not be as recognizable as Kim Kardashians or Justin Biebers, these influencers have built strong followings based on their expertise in particular areas.

Because of their reach, digital influencers have been employed by companies for various promotional purposes. An example is a promotion that Fiji Water ran last summer tapping fashion blogger Danielle Bernsteinwhose Instagram handle (@weworewhat) boasts 1.7 million followersand celebrity personal trainer Eric Johnson. The result was a workout program called BodyWoreWhat. For a one-time membership fee of $35, users received access to eight short workout videos and a comprehensive meal plan. In addition to sponsoring the project, Fiji kicked in a 25 percent discount off the first shipment of home delivery for its water.

Fiji is not the only company to have run an influencer-driven campaign. In fact, 60 percent of marketers commissioned influencers to make content for them in 2016, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.

At press time, 2017 figures were not yet available, but the enduring dominance of social mediawith Instagram alone boasting 800 million monthly active users as of Septemberwould seem to suggest that digital influencers will continue to have a special place in marketing strategies for quite some time.

According to the same Forrester report, influencers fall under the umbrella of word-of-mouth marketing, which the report asserts also includes customer and employee advocacy. More specifically, the report defines influencers as mainstream journalists, industry analysts, subject matter experts, independent bloggers, and certain social media celebrities who have influence in a specific topic or category and are not customers or employees of the brand.

For marketing and e-commerce consultant Kathryn Kerrigan, an influencer is a person or entity with a wide network of connections, followers, or fans, and the ability to influence, change, or alter the behaviors, acts, and style of others. She notes that there is an unspoken and unwritten acknowledgment that one who follows an influencer believes in that influencers vision. Typically, influencers are categorized by the number of followers in their networks, she says, noting that a micro-influencer might have a reach of just a few thousand, while a mega-influencersuch as Selena Gomez who, with 128.3 million Instagram followers, is the most followed person on the platformcan command audiences of tens of millions.

There are influencers specific to nearly every industry, from fashion to food to electronics, Kerrigan says, adding that within each industry there are different types of influencers, ranging from members of the Kardashian-Jenner clan to celebrity bloggers like Perez Hilton to thought leaders like Tesla founder Elon Musk.

Felix LaHaye, cofounder of influencer marketing company Open Influence, defines the phenomenon fairly broadly: An influencer is one that has garnered a reputation and subsequently a following on social media platforms for the content that they post.

Like Kerrigan, LaHaye notes that most influencers have a specialty, such as fashion, gaming, or technology. A common criterion for influencers is to have at least 10,000 followers on at least one social platform, he says, and to consistently generate a minimum of 1,000 engagements (likes, comments, reposts, shares, etc.) for each piece of content.
The IoT possibility for traditional IPCs: Q&A with Artila director of IoT Division Mike Kao

Artila Electronics is a long-term player in the IPC industry, but unlike most others that focus on developing x86 applications, Artila has chosen ARM-based systems as the main direction for its IPC road trip. Although its products are considered niche devices, the company has still managed to grow rapidly in the solar and power management sectors and are gradually expanding into some emerging sectors such as electric vehicles and charging stations.

Mike Kao, director of Artila's IoT Division, talked about the company's businesses during a recent interview by Digitimes.

Q: What products and business does Artila do?

A: Artila is a developer of ARM-based industrial PC (IPC) products and the company's founders are all from IPC-related industries.

When we started the business, the combination of x86 architecture hardware and Microsoft's operation system was the most commonly seen IPC configuration that companies were offering. To differentiate, we put our focus on ARM-based processors - which by then were used mostly in handsets products - to design and develop IPCs.

ARM-based processer's low-power-consumption advantage allowed us to create IPCs in a rather small form factor. Our main product line: the intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) gateway consisted of IPCs with sizes of a cigarette box and they were also the first device we developed when we were founded.

The IPCs are designed specifically to handle headless applications including data collection and industrial protocol conversion, that do not require a user's interaction and therefore they do not feature any display port for graphic output. After gathering the data, the IPCs then transmit it to a back-end server system for further processing, making the products suitable for device networking purposes.

We started developing the IPCs 12 years ago and by then the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) still did not exist and many traditional industrial devices still could connect to Internet. To connect these traditional devices - that can only output data via conventional serial ports - to the Internet, we have developed our computers to act as a bridge for the two, as Internet has gradually become a standard for data transmission.

Our computers use Linux operating system. With its open platform and powerful functionality, our clients are able to quickly start the application development without hassle. The built-in web server and Internet utility also make remote control of traditional industrial devices an easy task like managing regular office PCs.

For clients that are capable of designing customized networking boards for their traditional devices or wish to integrate the function into their hardware instead of adopting an add-on, Artila is also able to supply only the system on module (SoM) to the clients. The clients only need to place a paired socket for the SoM on their customized boards in order for our SoM to function.

In addition to the intelligent IoT gateway product line, we also have remote I/O products, which are similar to programmable logic controller (PLC) and can be used for auto switch or simple logic control applications such as sensor, data collection or power control.

Q: What applications can the intelligent IoT gateway be used in?

A: One of the major applications for our IPCs is solar power systems. Our device is able to calculate how much power has been generated by the system and sold to the power company.

Another major application is the energy management system. We have seen our shopping mall clients adopt our IPCs to measure each store's power consumption instead of the traditional method of having the power company put a meter for each one of them. The advantage of using our solution is that the shopping mall's management team is able to negotiate better terms with the power company as the team is the one managing the power system.

Q: What are Artila's main target regions? Does Artila have plan for expansion?

A: Currently, Europe is our main market and demand is primarily from the solar and power industries.

For Asia Pacific, our business is mainly from the solar and power industries. Since many of the countries in Asia Pacific, especially those in Southeast Asia, have been aggressively building new power-related infrastructures, demand has been gradually picking up. We are also seeing rising demand from Australia.

North America is another region where we have been expanding our presence. However, instead of the solar and power industries, which have already reached saturation, we are seeing increasing orders from the unmanned device management segment. For example, we have seen clients purchase our solutions to set up IP cameras in sightseeing attractions and sell the videos or photos the device captured to visitors.

Since our solution is based on an ARM processor, its low power consumption and low heat generation are giving it advantages in some niche sectors such as 24-hour surveillance in the wilderness.

Our products are also being adopted in emerging applications such as electric vehicles and their charging stations for measuring power and handling payment.

Q: What is the IPC market's current status based on Artila's observation?

A: We are actually not seeing many players doing solutions like ours and our products so far still have not yet become a solid market that can attract enterprises to form an ecosystem. Although we do not see much of a competition, finding clients is also not an easy task for us.

Simply put, instead of finding clients, our business model is more relying on having clients find us.

Q: What advantages do Artila's products have in competition?

Artila's specialty is actually its firmware customization services. For x86-based IPCs, companies need help from Microsoft to assist them in software, but for ARM-based IPCs, companies need a service provider that is able to write firmware to control the devices for them to perform the functions they need. Atrila's team is able to assist its clients to customize their firmware to best suit their demand.

With IoT gradually becoming a major part of the IPC industry, Artila has been devoted to developing cloud transmission technologies and standards. In the past, we simply added networking functionality to traditional IPCs for them to transmit data to a server system, but now we are also offering support on multiple cloud protocols to our devices for them to build databases in any of the third-party cloud computing platforms from players such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.

Compared to x86-based systems that could easily crash after a few power outages, Artila's system features a power outage-proof measure that can prevent system crash and prolong the devices' product life.

Artila director of IoT Division Mike Kao

Photo: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, December 2017
The Trump administration will end temporary legal immigration status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who have been living in the United States since 2001.

The decision means that immigrants from El Salvador who currently have Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows immigrants from countries in crisis to live and work in the United States legally, must return to the Central American nation by September 2019 or be subject to deportation.

The decision could upend the lives of thousands of U.S.-born, school-age children in U.S. K-12 schools. How many children would be affected is unclear, but the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research group, estimates that the decision could alter the immigration status of as many as one in every five Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States.

The federal government first granted Salvadorans temporary protected status in 2001 during the George W. Bush administration after a series of earthquakes killed nearly 1,000 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.

Bush and President Barack Obama extended those protections, finding that El Salvador had not fully recovered from the earthquakes and also suffered from violence that made it problematic to return so many people to the unstable nation.

Cutting off the protected status means that the Department of Homeland Security, under President Donald Trump, signals that the federal government now thinks that conditions in El Salvador have improved enough for the Salvadoran immigrants to return home.

Its a conclusion that immigration advocates disagree with.

Salvadoran TPS holders have been living here with work permission for nearly two decades, Frank Sharry, executive director of Americas Voice Education Fund said in a statement. Now, the Trump administration is trying to drive them back to a country engulfed in corruption, violence, and weak governance.

Even as the country recovers from the earthquake, families and unaccompanied minors have fled El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in recent years because of rampant violence there and have struggled to adjust and find a place in U.S. schools .

Besides the language barrier, with many Spanish speakers arriving in the U.S. knowing little or no English, a 2016 investigation by the Associated Press found that dozens of districts in 14 states were actively discouraging children from enrolling in schools or setting them up in dead-end alternative programs .

U.S. Census data culled by the Migration Policy institute found several metropolitan areas with significant Salvadoran-born populations, including Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Francisco in California; Dallas and Houston in Texas; and Miami, New York, and the District of Columbia along the East Coast.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist. Thus, under the applicable statute, the current TPS designation must be terminated, a press release from the agency read. In recent years, the U.S. government has been repatriating individuals back to El Salvador more than 39,000 in the last two years demonstrating that the temporary inability of El Salvador to adequately return their nationals after the earthquake has been addressed.



Phasing Out Protected Status for Other Immigrants

Temporary protected status never offered a pathway to citizenship for the Salvadoran immigrants. Previous presidents have canceled the protection for immigrants from countries across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Trump administration has been phasing out temporary protected status for immigrants from a number of countries, with El Salvador becoming the latest on the list.

All told, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that the recent decisions by the federal government will force more than 400,000 people to leave the country or risk living as undocumented immigrants.

In November, Homeland Security announced it was canceling the visas for roughly 59,000 Haitians living under protected status in the U.S. since a powerful earthquake in 2010 leveled the country. Now, they must return home by July 2019 or face deportation.

A 2017 Migration Policy study found that the nations Haitian immigrants are concentrated in central and South Florida , and the New York City and Boston metropolitan areas.

Miami-Dade schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, a fierce immigration advocate , estimated that, in his district alone, almost 12,000 students and another 5,700 enrolled in adult education courses would be affected by the decision to end their protected status , NBC 6 in South Florida reported back in November.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education estimated that there were close to 24,500 Haitian Creole English-language learners in U.S. schools.

Since Trump took office, Homeland Security has also sunset the visas for thousands of immigrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Sudan.

As the July 2019 date nears, removing the protected status for such a potentially large group of students will lead educators to explore what they can do to protect the rights of undocumented students .

Photo: CASA de Maryland, an immigration advocacy and assistance organization, holds a rally in Lafayette Park, across from the White House in Washington on Jan. 8, in reaction to the Trump administrations announcement that it will rescind Temporary Protective Status for immigrants from El Salvador. --Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
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SEATTLE  Sound Transit is seeking five volunteers to join a citizen advisory group for the West Seattle and Ballard Link light rail extensions.

Members will work with other advisory group members to help refine project alternatives for further study in the environmental review phase. The group will meet monthly through spring 2019 starting in February.





. . .
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WHITEFISH, Mont. (AP)  The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is trying to prevent a commercial building in northwestern Montana designed by the famed architect from being demolished.

The Chicago-based conservancy is trying to find someone to pay $1.7 million for the former medical center in Whitefish. The brick building was designed by Wright in 1958, a year before he died.





. . .
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ANCHORAGE (AP)  Researchers in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are looking for backcountry enthusiasts who want to aid a science mission.

A program funded by NASA is recruiting citizen scientists to measure snow levels in mountain terrain. The goal is better estimates of the water contained by snow in a watershed.





. . .
CAMEROUN :: Cameroon, Biya: Outraged by his own creature

Many Cameroonians witnessed with glee as minister and griot in Chief Jacques Fame Ndongo was treated with nothing less than a rude handshake and asked to move on as quickly as possible. The president did not hide his outrage against his creature on national television. The president has not intent to lavish on his creature the attention he does not deserve after being screwed over by the computers fiasco.

First, however, this was the most extraordinary since Mr. Biya is famous for not holding ministerial council, does not receive his ministers, many of them has never met and does not even know him personally We have to wait for a ceremony like this one to hope to deliver information to the boss. Indeed, Mr. Fame Ndongo no longer seems famous in the eyes of his creator. Implicit in the presidents rudeness and, in a normal country, Mr. Fame Ndongo should have given his demission already but we are not in a normal country.

The latest P.R with the presidents computer gift to Cameroonian students turned into a major fiasco to the point that the president did not even bother to include it in his laundry list of accomplishments during his New Year speech. Paul Biya is certainly angry because of the 500,000 computers he had promised to young people went below his own expectation. The students only received computers with 32 GB with windows 10 and updates that take more than half of the 32 GB. These are computers twenty years too late.

The students have now put these computers on sale on the market at a price range between 50,000 and 70,000 FCFA. Basically, kids tell them:  Your stuff is not worth much, but it can still provide some pocket money. 

The minister Professor Jacques Fame Ndongo is accountable for this scandal called PB netbooks with shoddy laptop gifted to students in place of real laptops that President Paul Biya had apparently instructed.

The central question is where is the money? Somebody turned the computers deal into some kind of cash grab. This is another example of a regime full of opportunistic crooks always looking to build an independent income stream from the states coffers.

In a normal country, action must be taken immediately, the Cameroonian state must denounce the contract PB Netbook with the Chinese; for fraud and corruption. If the order is for these Netbooks, the unit price should not exceed 30000 FCFA. In all cases, the scandal is so big that we must denounce the contract and the matching loan and ask the Chinese party to pay damages to the State of Cameroon. But we are not in a normal country, arent we? Nothing but good time ahead

Some begin to visibly become aware of the extent of the problem, and are no longer just saying  well do how , or celebrate the  great achievements  phantasmagorical Paul Biya.

The future of millions of young and old is singularly mortgaged by the catastrophic governance of this man, whether one is a fervent supporter of his thirty-year regime or not.

The time has come to reverse this situation!
The members of 20 organisations - including one Jewish - that advocate boycott of Israel will be banned from entering the country. Israel's ministry of strategic affairs, a governmental department, has drawn up the list created to fight the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, known as BDS. "The anti-Israel boycott campaign seeks not to promote peace but to undermine Israel's national security and existence," said minister Gilad Erdan. "The state of Israel will prevent groups working to undermine its security and core interests from entering Israel." The list comes from a March 2017 law that allows Israel to deny entry to any nonresident who promotes a boycott of the country. The final list was worked out in collaboration with the interior, foreign affairs and justice ministries. The new regulations would take effect in March 2018, one year after Israel enacted the law enabling the ban. Critics of the legislation took aim at the ban on Jewish Voice for Peace, a left-wing Jewish organisation that advocates the boycott as a nonviolent means of ending Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories even as it sought "security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians" as also a solution for Palestinian refugees. "A new crack in the wall of the occupation," tweeted Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of Israel's Knesset. "Minister Erdan has decided to ban Jewish activists who oppose the occupation, although they are entitled to Israeli citizenship by the discriminatory law of return. Oppressive regimes have collapsed because of such internal contradiction." According to a statement by the Strategic Affairs Ministry, those who have carried out ''significant, ongoing and consistent harm to Israel through advocating boycotts may be considered to have their entry barred.'' ''The boycott organisations must know that the state of Israel will act against them,'' Erdan said in a statement. ''The creation of this list is another step in our struggle against the incitement and lies of the boycott organizations.''








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The Donegal public is being asked to consult the draft version of the County Donegal Book of Honour which contains the names of all those from Donegal who died during World War I.

Donegal County Museum Curator Judith McCarthy has been working on updating the County Donegal Book of Honour for the last few years and describes the task as a labour of love and one that has allowed her to build on the great work done by Paddy Harte Snr and the County Donegal Book of Honour Committee almost 16 years ago.

I think it is really important that we remember all those who gave their lives during World War 1 - if we dont remember them who will, she said.

There were many Donegal families who lost loved ones during this war and we are planning to publish a new edition of the Book of Honour in November to mark the centenary of the ending of the war and as a tribute to all those from Donegal who died. We are keen to get information that will allow us to fill in some of the gaps that we currently have so that we can have as complete a record as possible says Judith McCarthy.

The County Donegal Book of Honour, The Great War 1914-1918 which was first published in 2002.

The date for submissions to the new edition, including amendments and new information, has been extended to 31 January 2018.

Judith is inspired for personal reasons as she too has family members who lost their lives during this war. My mothers uncle died in 1917 from injuries sustained in France during the war and last year on the 100th anniversary of his death my family and I visited his grave in Dublin. It was an emotional thing to do and even more so when you think that for nearly 100 years his story had been forgotten like so many others in Ireland. My father also lost an uncle in the war  he was only 19 years old and my grandmother never quite got over his loss as he was her youngest brother. I am sure this heartache was felt in many Donegal families as so many young lives were lost during the war.

We now have more information on the men and women who died, including those who enlisted in countries such as Canada, Australia and the USA and with more records being made available online we have discovered the names of other people from Donegal or with a strong Donegal connection that died during the war and these names will be included in the next edition of this book.

However, there are still gaps in the information that we have and that is why we are keen to get more information from the public. For example, we have details of individuals such as Hugh Boyle from Donegal Town who was killed in action on 15 October 1915 but we have not been able to confirm these details in relevant records so we would like to hear from anyone who may have more information.

Further information is also needed for T. Graham, Killymard, Donegal Town; Martin Morris, Donegal Town; Francis T. Kenny, Ardara; Reginald Belvoir, Dunfanaghy, Richard Warburton; Charles Harrigan, Muff and James O'Donnell, Moville.

Anyone who can provide more detail on these individuals should consult the draft Book of Honour available at www.donegalcoco.ie and entries that require further information are highlighted in blue in the draft book.

In updating the County Donegal Book of Honour: The Great War 1914-1918, the Museum is asking the public to consult the draft version of the Book which is available on www.donegalcoco.ie or by appointment in Donegal County Museum.

If any member of the public has any updated or new information or wish to amend any information already contained in the book, they can do so by filling in the details on the Book of Honour form (available at www.donegalcoco.ie) and post or email it to County Donegal Book of Honour, Donegal County Museum, High Road, Letterkenny Co Donegal; or email to donegalbookofhonour@donegalcoco.ie by the 31st January 2018.
Former Donegal TD and minister of State Paddy Harte has passed away this morning.

The Fine Gael politician was elected to Donegal County Council in 1960 and to the DAil as TD for Donegal North East the following year. He held the seat until 1997.

The Raphoe-based politician served as minister of state as well as spokesman on Northern Ireland.

Born in 1931, he was well-known in more recent times for his work to create a lasting memorial to Irelands First World War dead which resulted in the Island of Ireland Peace Park and Round Tower on Messines Ridge in Belgium.

Donegal TD Joe McHugh paid tribute to Mr Harte. He said he had left a lasting peace process legacy through his cross-community and cross-Border work.

"I went into politics after Paddy but was acutely aware when I entered Dail Eireann of his work before me for the people of County Donegal," said Minister McHugh.

"He also did incredible work to build bridges on this island during many dark days for our people and his lasting legacy will be the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Flanders, Belgium, which was officially opened by President McAleese in 1998.

"I want to express my deepest sympathies to his family and friends at this time. Go ndeana Dia trocaire air."
The tiny West Fermanagh village of Cashel was the subject of a major security alert today. This is the third alert of its type in the past two weeks.

A number of police jeeps, unmarked police cars and other units entered the village shortly after 8am. They set up two road- blocks, one at Cashel Cross at a link road to the county Leitrim village of Kiltyclogher and the other one at Kilcoo Cross, another link road into the county Leitrim village.

Four police vehicles and six officers were present at Cashel Cross while one unmarked police car blocked the entrance to the county Leitrim village at Kilcoo. Officers have already carried out extensive searches of the area between Cashel Cross and Kiltyclogher that is about three quarters of a mile from Cashel.

"Suspect Device"

They were acting on reports that a suspect device was found in the area. The previous security alert on Sunday December 18 caused the road between Cashel and Kiltyclogher to be closed for 48 hours causing considerable inconvenience to locals in this border area.

One local said: This is causing major disruption to people living in the area and there are rumours that there may be a bomb. Naturally this has to be checked out but it is very difficult for people who are trying to get to work and trying to get children to school. It is very worrying.

Police found nothing on that occasion. But it seems that there is still some concern that a suspect device might still be in the area.

Cashel is about two miles from the village of Garrison and seven miles from Belleek on the Donegal border.
Glenn Murdock, an Enterprise native and justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, has announced his resignation from the bench, multiple media outlets reported Thursday.

In a letter to Gov. Kay Ivey posted on the website of Birmingham ABC affiliate ABC 33/40, Murdock  who has been on the state Supreme Court since 2007  said he plans to explore other professional opportunities and other ways in which I might be of service to our state.

His resignation will be effective at midnight Jan. 16, the letter said.

According to his biography page on the state Supreme Courts website, Murdock was born in Enterprise and graduated from Enterprise High School in 1974. From there, he went to the University of Alabama, graduating summa cum laude in 1978, and the University of Virginia Law School, earning his law degree from there in 1981.

Murdock was a law clerk for Clarence W. Allgood, U.S. district judge for the Northern District of Alabama, before moving into private practice, as well as being in-house counsel for a Fortune 500 company and a state administrative law judge. He was elected to the state Court of Civil Appeals in 2000, and served in that capacity from January 2001 until January 2007 when he started his term on the state Supreme Court following his election to that bench in 2006. Murdock was re-elected to the Supreme Court in 2012, running unopposed.

Murdock is scheduled to appear at the Republican Women of Coffee County meeting at noon Jan. 17 at the Enterprise Country Club.
Mark Watson only wanted to save his employer, the Houston County Road and Bridge Department, time and money.

Little did he know he would earn some recognition and some cash.

The Houston County Commission honored Watson Monday for becoming the first employee to utilize the countys Spending Efficiency Program, which encourages employees, through incentives, to find ways to be more efficient with the entitys resources. Watsons idea of how to clean bush hogs more quickly  something he said he learned from farmers  will save the county almost $27,000 per year in time and equipment, officials said Monday.

They know their jobs, so they know whats wasting time and what they can do more efficiently  a whole lot more than we on the commission do, said District 4 Commissioner Brandon Shoupe, who initiated the program.

The beauty of the program is how simplistic it can be.

Before Watsons idea, the county used air compressors to clean each bush hog. Now the county uses backpack leaf blowers, saving between 45 minutes and one hour of time, Watson said.

It doesnt sound like much, but 45 minutes a day with a 12- or 14-man crew over 44 or 45 days is a lot of money, said county engineer Barkley Kirkland. When youve got eight tractors and four or five pickup trucks, it really is a big savings and allows us to spend that $26,000 for other stuff. Just a simple thing that Mark brought to us -- we implemented it and were using it today.

Additionally the county can dedicate regular crew cab trucks to the roadside cleanup efforts instead of the larger trucks that were needed to carry the air compressors, Watson noted.

Shoupe said the county accounted for the leaf blowers needed and their usage in determining the savings. He added the county projects to save 400 man hours because of Watsons suggestion.

Watson said the county cleans bush hogs each day to prevent rust since grass clippings can hold moisture.

Watson, an operator, said he had no idea the county had the spending efficiency program, which was implemented two years ago.

I had no idea it saved $26,000, he said. I was just finding some way for the county to save time.

Shoupe said ideas that save the county less than $10,000 in a six-month period result in a $100 bonus for employees. Ideas that save more than $10,000 earn $250.

In other action, the commission:

>> Approved requests from the Town of Cottonwood to resurface a parking lot at 12729 Cottonwood Road and to tear down a building at 10189 South County Road 55. The resurfacing project is part of Cottonwoods efforts to attract a grocery store.

>> Approved a proposal from Johnson Consulting Group to conduct a wage study, which will help the county determine if the wages it offers is competitive.

>> Approved the addition of $16,040 to the capital replacement fund for air conditioning units at the Department of Human Resources building.

>> Rejected bids and authorized the County Buildings department to complete a remodeling project that will convert the Houston County Courthouses basement to a space for the juvenile services department.

>> Approved an amendment to the elections budget to account for the costs of the Town of Gordons Feb. 13 special election.

>> Approved a request to award the bid for motorgrader blades for the Southeast Region Annual Joint Bid.

>> Approved a request to sell assorted office and computer equipment on GovDeals.com.

>> Appointed Dale Phillipe (District 2) and Aaron Rogers (District 3) to the Houston County Water Authority.

>> Re-appointed Lori Wilcoxon and Matt Parker to the Southeast Alabama Regional Planning and Development Commission.
This Blog is a digital journal for two cute pooches, Casey (A White Color Shih Tzu Dog Mix) & Peanut (A Brown Dachshund Dog Mix) who are both two complete opposites who have nothing in common except this blog and same owners.
A HUGE crowd of people attended the candle-lit vigil held in Dundalk earlier tonight for Japanese man Yosuke Sasaki who was killed on the Avenue Road on January 3.

Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) business student Veronica Tedzhoyan who is originally from Germany but is currently living at Mourneview Hall in Dundalk told the Dundalk Democrat that she had attended the vigil to "show solidarity".

Saara Salmi, a 23-year-old DkIT social studies student from Finland who also lives at Mourneview Hall said she attended the vigil to "show empathy".

"I'm here to show good will. It's important to show everyone and to support people and to stand up for good and peace and love," she said.

Catriona Watters from Doylesfort Road, Dundalk said: "I just think the town needs to show support to Yosuke and his family. It's such a tragedy."

She added: "I thought the vigil was lovely, all the music was very touching. It's nice his work mate spoke on behalf of the company Yosuke worked for."

Tina Bellew from Castlebellingham worked with Mr Sasaki at National Pen. She said: "I didn't know him well but he always had a smile on his face and seemed like a lovely guy."

She added that the staff at National Pen are "devastated" over what happened to Mr Sasaki.

"We are very supportive to one another. It has brought the two teams a lot closer. I think the vigil is a credit to the town. It was very well organised."

A second National Pen employee, Catherine Crosby from St Nicholas Avenue, Dundalk said there was a "great turn out" for the vigil.

Donna Quinn from Muirhevnamor thought it was "lovely, emotional and sad but well done". David Crosby from St Nicholas' Avenue said: "It was really nice".

Chris Ellis from Doolargy Avenue said: "I came to the vigil to show my support for Yosuke and his family and the two Dundalk lads that were injured. It was a nice turn out for a small enough town.
Splend, Australias leading supplier of rental vehicles for the ride sharing drivers, has secured a $7.2 million investment from Element Fleet Management, positioning it realise the next phase of its global expansion plans.

In exchange for the strategic investment, Element has secured a 12.5% stake in the two-year-old business, which previously received funding from Investec Australia in December 2016.

Splend founder and CEO Chris King said Elements investment in his startup will enable immediate launches in Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom, resulting in a new and growing source of revenue.

Splend and Element have an existing business relationship with Element providing a host of fleet management services to Splend and its drivers in Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

Splend currently owns and manages more than 1,700 vehicles, operating in Australias major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Canberra, with additional vehicles recently launched in Toronto, Mexico City, and London.

King said the Element investment will help Splend achieve its target of more than 15,000 vehicles, worth $220 million, under management worldwide by late 2019.

Our relationship with Element is a true partnership, and with their support we feel very confident in taking our business model global, he said.

Jim Halliday, president & CEO  International, Element Fleet Management has joined Splends board of directors. Halliday said Splend is aligned with its vision of bringing more effective, cost-effective car-sharing services to cities.

We are extremely pleased to work with Splend to service the future of share economy vehicle networks, he said. Splend is creating opportunity for drivers around the world to earn a living in the emerging gig economy, and Elements services will help Splend and the drivers it serves be safer, smarter and more productive.

Splends international expansion saw Chris King relocate to London in August 2017 to be closer to Splends new major markets. Mr Kings move paved the way for Nathan Halliday to be promoted from Splend COO to Head of Country  Australia.

Originally established to supply Uber drivers with vehicles, Splend has broadened its driver networks through partnerships with other share economy services and is in discussions with a significant global online retailer to facilitate drivers delivering parcels in major markets.

Since launching in July 2015, we have opened up new employment avenues for gig economy workers who need access to an affordable vehicle solution, King said. We provide a complete service, including training and support, to the growing number of people who earn an income driving.
With one week until the 2018 MLK Day of Service, volunteers and organizers are gearing up to complete 50 projects in the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This years day of service marks 50 years since the assassination of Dr. King.Completing 50 service projects across Chattanooga is a great way to begin 2018 and sets an example of how we can extend Dr. Kings message and teachings throughout the year. Our work on Monday is just one more way that we are breaking down barriers and improving the lives of our neighbors and our community, said Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke."New for 2018 is the addition of several special projects that also advance Dr.Kings dream of opportunity for all," officials said. "People who are looking for work are encouraged to attend a resume review session at the Edney Building. Another unique project this year is wheelchair cleaning stations at Patten Towers and Whiteside Faith Manor. Anyone who uses a wheelchair or knows someone who uses one is invited to participate in this free service. The League of Women Voters is also hosting voter registration sessions at various locations throughout Chattanooga."We are overjoyed by the number of volunteers who signed up for projects on Monday. We also want people to turn out to take advantage of these free opportunities that will enhance their lives - like the resume review, which could help you land your next job, said Vanessa Jackson, Neighborhood Program specialist for the Office of Multicultural Affairs.Hundreds of volunteers have already registered for Chattanoogas fifth year of A Day On, Not a Day Off, where the Office of Multicultural Affairs mobilizes local citizens, schools, neighborhoods, businesses and organizations to complete service projects around the city. This years MLK Day of Service will include all of Chattanoogas neighborhoods, with projects reaching every corner of the community.Next week, on the morning of MLK Day (Monday, Jan. 15), volunteers will gather on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga at Chamberlain Pavilion for the kickoff and then disperse into neighborhoods to undertake landscaping, clearing debris, trail maintenance, painting, deep cleaning, building repairs, community art projects and more.This years service projects include not only beautification, but also education and outreach. Volunteers will canvass multiple apartments and homes to equip Chattanooga residents with info on their rights under fair housing law.Shortly after the assassination of Dr. King, the 1968 Fair Housing Act became law. It prohibits housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability and family status, and protects citizens from discrimination when renting, buying, looking for a house or acquiring a mortgage.MLK Day Schedule:Volunteer Check In 8 - 9 a.m.Service Projects Begin - 9 a.m.Kickoff Location: UTC Chamberlain PavilionProjects will last until 12:30 p.m., or earlier as tasks are completed.For more info, visit http://connect.chattanooga.gov/mlkdos/
En francais

Microcred loans benefit 1,000 micro-sized firms

Kawther Bedhiafs professional dream started when she was a child in the Tunisian countryside.

I grew up in a town called Hedra, close to the mountains. Being surrounded by beautiful nature inspired me to become interested in local herbs and oils, she explained.

My friends sometimes teased me about this and called me Bio-Kawther. My interest became a passion, so I decided to learn everything possible about organic products.

Kawther is one of 1,000 micro-entrepreneurs who have benefited from an EBRD credit line that is designed to help those frequently overlooked by commercial banks. A loan of TND 4 million (1.6 million equivalent) to Microcred is on-lent to women, young entrepreneurs and people living in rural areas to develop their own businesses.

The project is supported by European Union funding under its EU Initiative for Financial Inclusion.*

Beauty parlour as market niche

I had the idea when I was at home, Kawther said. It suddenly dawned on her that her interest could be turned into a profitable business.

I started to become a hairdresser, then studied to become a beautician. I took out a loan and started working.

A small loan of TND 4,000 helped Kawther establish her dream business. Her beauty parlour uses only organic products and offers a full range of services: facial care, body massages, haircuts and treatments, manicures and pedicures.

She also added a hammam, a spa that is booked by groups of women who want to relax in private among friends.

Using natural products is not only in line with Kawthers upbringing and philosophy, but also increasingly in demand among Tunisian consumers. More and more stands and shops offer these products in the local soukh, where Kawther buys her oils, ingredients and lotions.

This has an important knock-on effect, as her suppliers benefit from her success, too.

Kawther visits us two to three times a week to buy hair and oil products for her beauty parlour, explained a supplier. She is a loyal client.

Her business is well known locally. Indeed, it has become so popular that Kawther needed to employ several people to work with her. She is particularly proud of having created job opportunities for other local women.

With a small loan of TND 4,000 weve helped Kawther establish her dream business. Her beauty parlour uses only organic products and offers a full range of services: facial care, body massages, haircuts and treatments, manicures and pedicures. More videos

Reaching out to Tunisias regions

For small businesses and for entrepreneurs, access to finance is a major challenge in Tunisia, especially in less-developed regions.

We are continuously expanding our activities all over Tunisia and increasing our operational efficiency, said Sehl Zargouni, Chief Executive Officer of Microcred Tunisia.

Our cooperation with the EBRD has helped us to provide financial support to the less developed regions of the country and to contribute to create new opportunities where they are most needed.

Through the EU Initiative for Financial Inclusion we are able to help dynamic entrepreneurs to grow and create new jobs. This is how we can concretely improve peoples lives, says Patrice Bergamini, Head of the EU Delegation to Tunisia.

Together with the EU, the EBRD is offering more loans of this kind to support women, young entrepreneurs and rural populations across the southern and eastern Mediterranean (SEMED) region, helping to ensure sustainable, inclusive growth.

Kawther believes that there is still huge potential to improve peoples lives by helping them to develop their own businesses. Its a personal and professional journey, a positive experience that has provided her with new independence and one that she strongly recommends.

I really encourage Tunisian women to take out small loans to make a living for themselves, start their own projects and succeed like me.

* The EU Initiative for Financial Inclusion is a comprehensive programme to help micro, small and medium-sized businesses in the southern and eastern Mediterranean region to become more competitive and grow. It provides finance and know-how to boost development and create jobs.
(Photo: REUTERS / Alexei Nikolskyi / RIA Novosti / Kremlin)Russia's President Vladimir Putin (2nd L, first row) attends the Orthodox Christmas service at the Holy Face of Christ the Savior Church in the Russian southern city of Sochi January 7, 2014. Most Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas according to the Julian calendar on January 7, two weeks after most western Christian churches that abide by the Gregorian calendar.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered greetings to Orthodox Christians and all Russians on Christmas as celebrated according to the Julian calendar on Jan. 7.

"My sincere congratulations on Christmas. This holiday brings joy and hope to millions of believers, disseminates spiritual traditions among them," said Putin, Russia's Sputnik news agency reported.

Putin said the Christmas celebration, "unites around everlasting Christian values, centuries-old historical, cultural heritage of our people."

Putin said he appreciated the Russian Orthodox Church and other Christian denominations for their efforts in maintaining peace and unity in Russia and developing inter-religious and international dialogue.

State television channels showed a live broadcast of the Mass from Moscow's enormous and elaborate Christ the Savior Cathedral.

The church was demolished during Josef Stalin's dictatorship, but reconstructed after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, The Japan Times citing AP and Reuters reported.

RUSSIAN PATRIARCH KIRILL

Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill conducted the ceremonies at the Moscow site before hundreds of worshippers, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as well as several other Russian government and parliamentary officials, Radio Free Europe said.

Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill conducted the ceremonies at the Moscow site before hundreds of worshippers, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as well as several other Russian government and parliamentary officials.

Kirill also sent greetings to the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) via a video linkup from the Christ the Savior Cathedral.

Addressing Russian cosmonauts Aleksandr Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov, he said, "You are our heroes. You represent Russia up there, in orbit," according to the TASS news agency.

The ISS crew also includes NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Joe Acaba, and Scott Tingle, as well as Norishige Kanai of Japan.

Orthodox Christians in Russia and most other Orthodox countries celebrate Christmas according to the Julian calendar on Jan. 7, two weeks after most Western Christian churches that use the Gregorian calendar.

FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY

This comes at the same time when Western Christians observe Epiphany to recall the three wise men who followed a star to Bethlehem find the baby Jesus .

Jan. 7 is a national holiday in Russia, as well as in Belarus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, and Ukraine. The Armenian Orthodox Church celebrated on January 6.

In Egypt, the head of the Coptic Church, Pope Tawadros II, led midnight Mass in the cathedral of the nation's new administrative capital on Saturday.

The Christmas Eve service was attended by President Abdel-Fatteh el-Sisi, who is a Muslim.

Sisi told the packed cathedral outside of Cairo on the Orthodox Christmas Eve that "you are our family. We are one and no one can divide us."

His appearance at the cathedral along with Coptic Pope Tawadros II came as tens of thousands of soldiers and police were deployed outside churches in Egypt to secure against attacks by Islamic militants.

They have targeted Christians for the past two years in bomb attacks that have killed about 100 people.

In Bethlehem, Palestinians Christians, expressed anger at church land sales to Israelis, scuffling with Palestinian police, as they attempted to block the arrival of the Holy Land's Greek Orthodox patriarch for Christmas celebrations.

Demonstrators banged on the sides of police escort vehicles, but Patriarch Theophilos III managed to safely move in his limousine to the Church of the Nativity for the traditional Orthodox Christmas eve observance.
According to this new information the Russians have known about alien civilizations for several decades, to many this comes as no surprise,...
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Alert: CLAT 2023 registration ends today, know details here Candidates can apply for the exam on the official website
With renovation and construction of Miller Park underway, First Tennessee is one of the private funders to ensure that the project moves forward. Chattanooga Market President Jeff Jackson presented a check from the bank for $125,000 to aid in project funding.

The former park was a place that was less than welcoming to families and workers looking for a place to enjoy lunch or live performances," said Mr. Jackson. "Its our hope that the new design will become Chattanoogas living room with activities and infrastructure that encourage enjoyment of the area by all types of individuals."

Along with changes to Miller Park additional renovations are also scheduled for Patton Parkway. Georgia Avenue will soon close to allow for those renovations to begin.

Were looking forward to project completion this summer, said Mr. Jackson. First Tennessee understands the importance of supporting projects that add to the fabric of our downtown. Were looking forward to a place that will welcome and provide interaction for our citizens.
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CORNELL  The newly ordained pastor wanted to spread the word. A $500 loan proved to be a good investment in doing just that for 100 years.

St. Johns Evangelical Lutheran Church at 700 Thomas St. in Cornell is marking its 100th anniversary this year, starting with a special history service Sunday, Jan. 21, which is open to everyone. Then the weekend of Aug. 4-5, the church will have a centennial celebration complete with an open house, an ice cream social and a performance of the Lutheran Ceili Orchestra.

Ron Demulling, chairman of the church anniversary committee, said on Aug. 5 the church will have morning worship at 9 a.m., followed by a 3 p.m. centennial anniversary featuring many guests and past members of the church. It will have many former pastors, including the Rev. Jerry Ewings, who will be the guest preacher.

Then on Nov. 4, the church will host a Joint Reformation Service between Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) churches with Pastor Nathan Seelow of Kearney, Neb., officiating.

The idea of the centennial celebration is to honor a century of Gods grace to St. Johns, Demulling said. The church wants to continue to reach out to the Cornell community and those people who want to hear the good news of Jesus Christ.

The church started in 1918 with members from eight families. Today, its congregation has 128 members, said Pastor Patrick Feldhus.

Dan Goller, chairman of the congregation, attributed the Wisconsin Synod church being able to reach its 100th anniversary to the message of the churchs teachings. Id like to say its the teaching the truth of the Bible, he said.

The January service will come just two days short of the actual centennial anniversary on Jan. 23, 1918, a year the U.S. was involved in World War I. For perspective, Cornell incorporated as a village on Jan. 14, 1913, just five years before the church was built.

At its start the church was served by the Rev. Immanuel H. Albrecht, who was ordained the previous July. Technically, the church was part of the Evangelical Lutheran Joint Parish of Keystone, Birch Creek, Cornell, Cobban and Jim Falls.

When church opened thanks to a $500 loan from the Evangelical Lutheran Joint Synod of Wisconsin and other states, it was at the corner of 7th and Bridge streets.

The church survived the Great Depression and World War II, and it was after that war that church membership saw a large increase. A new church was needed, and one was built at the current location, dedicated on Dec. 15, 1957. The churchs cost: About $60,000. The churchs pastor, the Rev. Elmer E. Prenzlow, would serve from 1930 to 1974.

In 1988, the church helped in starting a congregation in Ladysmith at Our Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church, and in 2015 the churches began having a joint congregation. Along the way, two other Wisconsin Synod churches, St. Peters in the town of Birch Creek and Trinity in Keystone, closed, and its members joined St. Johns.

Pastor Feldhus has been with St. Johns since Sept. 13, 2009. He said work toward the centennial began in 2013, when the church replaced its carillon bells system to a computerized system.

Goller said after that, a centennial committee was formed. We proposed to the congregation that we do some remodeling to the sanctuary, he said.

A new rock wall was installed behind the cross, a new communion rail was installed and carpets in the fellowship area replaced. We repainted the entire interior of the church, Goller said.

Over the next 100 years, Feldhus said the church is looking forward to having Gods grace continue to be lavished on its members.

Demulling said this years celebration will mark, 100 years of Gods grace to St. Johns.
In a reversal, Gov. Scott Walker is backing a plan  similar to one he recently vetoed  to let some school districts raise property taxes without voter approval to pay for programs and services.

The proposal, championed by Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, also would send millions of dollars in new funding to more than 100 rural schools next school year.

The proposal would affect so-called low revenue school districts  those that spend less than most others.

In 1993, the Legislature imposed revenue caps on school districts, which limited the amount of money the districts could spend and raise through local property taxes without a referendum.

Many districts that were spending less per student at that time have been locked in at lower per-pupil spending levels, and leaders of such districts have said this has made it difficult to keep up with other districts that can spend more on teachers and programs.

As a result of locked spending, these districts must play on an unlevel playing field, competing with higher spending districts, said Nygren, co-chairman of the Legislatures budget-writing committee. This has a negative impact on the students and educators in those districts. Affording all students the same educational opportunities, regardless of geographic location is of utmost importance.

Walker last year vetoed a similar plan included in the 2017-19 state budget over concerns that it would raise property taxes in those school districts. The veto came after the Legislature reduced the amount of money Walker initially proposed in the budget to help districts in rural areas, where many of the low-revenue districts are located.

Tom Evenson, spokesman for Walker, said the governor is backing Nygrens new plan because it includes a provision that would prohibit school districts from raising taxes if voters rejected a referendum in the last three years.

The budget provision would have allowed the increase even in places where voters voted down referenda, Evenson said. This ensures accountability to local voters who have rejected revenue increases within the last three years.

Despite Walkers veto, there is enough money left in the state spending plan for the next two years to compensate for the additional $6.4 million increase Nygren is proposing for rural schools, Evenson said.

More spending allowed

Nygrens plan would allow school districts with the low-revenue caps to increase the amount they spend from the current $9,100 per student limit to $9,400 per student next school year. The limit would increase by $100 each school year until it reaches $9,800 per student by the 2022-23 school year.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, the proposal would apply to about 120 of the states 422 school districts, including Mount Horeb, Baraboo, Milton, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Watertown, Westfield, Sparta and Tomah.

If all of the eligible school boards voted to take full advantage of the increase, property tax levies would increase by at least $22.5 million next school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Seven school districts would not be able to take advantage of the proposal because of recent referendum rejections including Chilton, Darlington, Howard-Suamico and Southern Door.

A spokesman for Nygren said he would begin seeking support from other lawmakers this week. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kim Kaukl, who oversees the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance, said the plan is definitely positive news for rural schools, if the legislation can make it through the hearings in both houses with support.

Kaukl also said he would like to see an expansion in the number of rural districts eligible for the special funding.

Bipartisan support

State Superintendent Tony Evers, who oversees the DPI and is running against Walker for governor, said the proposal is an answer to a longstanding request.

Our rural and low-spending districts have been asking for this funding for many years. Increases to sparsity aid and the low revenue ceiling were in my budgets, and I am pleased to see them considered after the governors veto cast doubt on their future, Evers said.

Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, who sits on the Legislatures budget-writing committee and last fall expressed concern over the decision to reduce funding for rural schools, praised the new plan released Monday.

The legislation ... demonstrates our commitment to find common ground among the legislature to support our K-12 schools, he said.

If approved by lawmakers, Nygrens plan would accompany an additional $649 million in new funding spread over this school year and next.

Election-year move

Walker announced support for the plan about two weeks before he is expected to give his annual State of the State address in the state Capitol. It also comes in a re-election year during which he is being challenged by Evers and more than a dozen Democratic candidates.

Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, called the announcement a re-election tactic.

Republicans must think taxpayers have a short memory when it comes to their actual priorities, she said. This is another hollow campaign gimmick from Gov. Walker to further his own political ambitions at the expense of local schools.

Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz, who represents Oshkosh, a district that would benefit from the plan, said Walker was attempting to to distract voters from the Walker administrations gross mismanagement of our public education system.

With campaign season right around the corner, itll be interesting to see what Gov. Walker changes his mind about next, Hintz said, referring to Walkers recent proposal to move juvenile inmates out of a troubled youth prison in Irma and open smaller facilities around the state, a plan long-proposed by Democrats.
Could Khloe Kardashian be quitting her full-time role in Keeping Up With the Kardashians to be a stay-at-home mom to her first child?

According to a new report, the 33-year-old reality star may be ready to walk away from her lucrative career as a television star as she prepares to welcome her first child with boyfriend Tristan Thompson later this year.

Khloe clearly has a lot of resentment towards certain family members over the way they treated her when she was fat, a family insider revealed to Radar Online on Jan. 5. Right now she isnt in constant communication with anyone in her family and they have all just kind of accepted this.

Kardashian is six months pregnant with her first child and planning to give birth in Cleveland, Ohio, where Thompson plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Although Kardashian chose to keep her pregnancy a secret from fans for several months, she confirmed she was expecting in December with a photo of her baby bump on Instagram.

As she awaits the birth of her first child, Kardashian is reportedly loving her private life with Thompson in Cleveland more and more. Hence, rather than continue to live in Los Angeles with her family, she prefers to spend the majority of her time in Ohio.

She does not want to move back to L.A. because she loves her life with Tristan in Cleveland. She is also just really tired of having to engage in fights with her sisters and mom, the insider explained.

Radar Online went on to say that Kardashian doesn't want to continue having drama with her family after her baby comes and her boyfriend doesn't want her to do so either. Instead, Thompson is reportedly insisting that Kardashian walk away from her family's reality show because they have more than enough income to live their lives comfortably without Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Kardashian and Thompson's relationship began in August of last year, months after Kardashian filed for divorce from Lamar Odom for the second time. As for a future marriage to Thompson, Kardashian recently said that she is in no rush to walk down the aisle.

To see more of Khloe Kardashian and her family, including her sisters Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, and Kendall and Kylie Jenner, don't miss new episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians Season 14 on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on the E! Network.
A breath of freedom for the new year By Richard E. Ralston

For more than a century we have learned to expect that government can only grow more powerful. No matter how big a political mistake is made, we must live with it forever. The elimination of the individual insurance mandate of ObamaCare should be celebrated as a reversal of this trend. But those free from the mandate will also need the freedom to make better choices. The individual mandate was the linchpin of the Affordable Care Acts fuzzy financial math. The only way to make insurance affordable for older citizens was to mandate that all Americans obtain insurance, forcing young people to buy insurance at unaffordable higher prices. When the constitutionality of this was legally challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court imaginatively ruled that the mandate did not force anyone to buy insurance they did not want, even if they were fined or otherwise penalized if they didnt. It was, you see, just a tax. That is why the recently passed Tax Cut and Jobs Act was so easily able to obliterate the mandate. We have been told ceaselessly and repeatedly that the end of the mandate means 13 million people will have their health insurance taken away. That is an Orwellian way of saying that 13 million people will not be forced, fined, or taxed to buy insurance that they do not want. Allowing people to choose to obtain their own insurance (or not) is intolerable to politicians who believe they know what is best for citizens. Eliminating the coercive mandate is instead a restoration of freedom for those 13 million people. No one should be comfortable with the fact that crucial national policy is determined by this kind of dueling cynicism. But it was all set in motion when ObamaCare was rammed through Congress without a single Republican vote. The then majority knew that the numbers did not add up, and only by forcing young people to buy insurance at a high premium over the actual cost of their coverage could the system break even. With the mandate now gone there is no fix for this. The result will be that an ever increasing escalation in premiums will now begin while both insurers and policy buyers flee the government exchanges. Further premium increases are on the way following a Federal court ruling that Obama-ordered premium subsidies were unconstitutional as Congress never appropriated funds for that purpose. Appeals are working their way through the court system but are not auspicious. And the Trump administration has now ordered the end of the subsidies in any case. The only real solutions to the resulting mess are more freedom and choices, more competition, more use of tax-free health savings accounts, and easier access to generics and other drugs. Allowing consumers to buy health insurance on a national basis across state lines and reforming litigation to reduce legal costs in the healthcare system would also help. These changes will no doubt be met with considerable resistance, but they are necessary to make real improvement. The elimination of the mandate through a tax bill shocked and surprised many after the GOPs embarrassing failures to reform ObamaCare earlier this yearbut it was poetic justice in response to the nonsense that the mandate was actually just a tax. That tax no longer exists and we and our health insurance are now all free to move on. We should relish the rare opportunity to actually reduce the power of government over our lives and decisions. But we still need more freedom, more choice, and more reform to take meaningful control over our own healthcare. Richard E. Ralston, Executive Director, Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, Newport Beach, California Copyright  2017 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved. Home
The biofuel crony capitalist revolving door By Paul Driessen

Yet another congressional aide is about to pass through Washingtons infamous revolving door to a lucrative private sector position. Kurt Kovarik, legislative director for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), will become vice president of federal affairs for the National Biodiesel Board. To grow and prosper, this industry relies on subsidies and mandates that require steadily increasing volumes of diesel fuel from crops and other sources. As the NBB said in a press release, Kovariks decades of experience in the Senate will serve us well, as we navigate federal policy issues that most affect our industry. His work on energy and tax legislation, familiarity with the key players in Washington and knowledge of biofuels are all reasons we are so happy to have him on our team. Translated into common English, Kovarik will help keep mandates in place and revenues flowing into biodiesel coffers  even as justifications for its special treatment become less persuasive, claims about its supposed benefits are found wanting, and harmful effects on taxpayers and consumers become obvious. Indeed, like corn ethanol, biodiesel is just one more federal program that has become a perpetual fixture, all but immune from any revisions or reductions. Thats because powerful special interests band together to block any such attempts  and make major campaign contributions to friendly legislators. Meanwhile, consumer interests adversely affected by the rules are too diverse, poorly organized and ill-funded to mount an effective campaign against the renewable fuels industry. Thus, when the Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed a minuscule reduction in the total volume of corn ethanol required for blending into gasoline, the biodiesel lobby rose up united in righteous indignation against the idea  even though biodiesel was not being affected. The legislatively created industries always take Ben Franklins warning to heart: We must indeed all hang together, Franklin said just before signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. Billions of dollars are at stake for biofuel industries, and they will not fail to aid one another. Nor will they deviate from the narrative that plant-based fuels will somehow save Earth and humanity from the alleged ravages of planet-warming fossil fuels, even as developing nations burn more oil, natural gas and coal every year  and the Northern Hemisphere suffers through another nasty, frigid winter. Biofuels from corn, oil palm, soybean or algae require vast expanses of land  dozens or hundreds of times more land than is needed to produce equivalent amounts of energy from coal, oil or natural gas. That land once was or could now be wildlife habitat  and the direct and indirect effects on wildlife populations are often profound, especially when Indonesian and other forests are sacrificed on Gaias altar to establish oil palm plantations for illusory sustainable, renewable energy. The same widespread land and wildlife impacts result from erecting wind turbine and solar panel facilities  to generate expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent electricity  and build (coal or gas-fueled) backup generators, to provide electricity the 75% of the time when there is insufficient sun or wind. Biofuels also require prodigious volumes of water, and in most cases huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and fossil fuel energy. And when biofuels are burned in vehicles or fuel cells for electricity generation, they emit enormous quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2). In fact, across their full planting, harvesting, conversion and use cycle, biofuels emit just as much carbon dioxide as fossil fuels. All that extra CO2 is good for forest, grassland, crop and other plants  and recent studies confirm that CO2 is greening our planet, by helping plants grow faster and better. That this CO2 is also causing dangerous manmade climate change is increasingly in doubt, despite what climate doomsayers continue to claim). The assertion that crop-based biofuels are sustainable is not supported by evidence. In reality  as scientist, engineer, former MIT professor and energy analyst Peter Huber observes in his book, Hard Green: Saving the environment from the environmentalists: A conservative manifesto  the best, greenest, most ecologically sound, most sustainable fuels are those that get the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, pipelined and burned. Supposedly renewable energy sources do not pass this simple test. (See here, here and here.) But in liberal policy, media and regulatory circles, they are routinely exempt from the criticism, calumny and punishment so regularly meted out to fossil fuels and companies that produce them. For poor developing countries, renewable-only energy policies demanded or imposed by World Bank, EU, environmentalist and other interests perpetuate poverty, joblessness, disease and malnutrition, ensuring nasty, brutish and short lives. Such policies are immoral, genocidal, and properly detested by nations determined to bring health and prosperity to their people. Thanks to fracking and modern exploration and production technologies, the world still has decades or even centuries of natural gas, oil and coal. For a world that still depends on these fuels for 85% of its total energy, that is good news. Its even better news for the future, when humanity will still need fossil fuels for over 75% of a 28% larger total energy supply in 2040, according to the Energy Information Agency. Fossil fuels (as well as nuclear and hydroelectric power) should be embraced, not excoriated, and used with pride until energy sources just as reliable and affordable are discovered someday in the future. It likewise makes little sense to promote biodiesel and corn ethanol while also advocating electric cars. That approach not only increases the demand for reliable, affordable electricity generation  an increasingly impossible dream if we are supposed to rely more and more on wind and solar electricity. It exacerbates problems resulting from mandates that require blending ever more ethanol into decreasing supplies of gasoline for fewer internal combustion engines: eg, having so much ethanol in gasoline for those engines that gaskets are damaged and warrantees are voided, and fraud problems associated with RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) used to ensure compliance with renewable fuel standards. Plant-based fuels that enrich regional biofuel interests increasingly cause multiple other problems for refiners that provide nearly 90% of vehicle fuels: gasoline and conventional diesel. Under pressure from Big Biofuel and corn-state senators, EPA raised its 2018 biofuel requirement to 19.3 billion gallons, a huge increase from its 16.3 billion gallon mandate in 2014. That means smaller, independent refiners will be unable to blend enough ethanol into their gasoline to meet the mandate  and will have to buy RINs, at inflated and unpredictable prices, to comply artificially with the impossible blending requirement. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Dallas-based HollyFrontier Corp. must spend over $300 million per year on RINs, forcing it freeze hiring, defer capital expenditures and investment, penalize its blue-collar workers, and transfer massive wealth from refiners to ethanol producers, who still demand more. The absurd situation caused Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to copy corn-state senators on hostage taking. (They held up EPA nominees until the agency caved in on ethanol.) Mr. Cruz is preventing action on the Agriculture Department nominee who would control a lot of biofuel money, until a compromise can be worked out between biofuel and conventional petroleum fuels. He secured a meeting but so far no deal. Under fascist-style socialism, the government doesnt own companies outright; it merely decrees how they must operate, what they must produce, who pays and who benefits. Thats where U.S. biofuel policies have taken Americas energy sector. Its time to reform these policies  to reflect todays economic, climate, oil depletion and oil import realities  and set a time certain for ethanol and biofuel mandates to expire. Let real free enterprise operate, instead of crony-corporatist government decrees. Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on climate, natural resource and environmental policy. Home
Is democracy mob rule? By J.K. Baltzersen

I was interviewed some time before Christmas by A Swede Speaks. I bluntly told the interviewer that democracy is basically mob rule. A Canadian politician, apparently from Ontario, Rob Wolvin, responded on Twitter on New Years Eve. He claimed democracy is not mob rule. @jkBaltzersen Conversation with JK Baltzersen on constitution, democracy, monarchy and liberty: https://t.co/7NmsPolgdr #monarchy #Democracy #Liberty #Constitution #monarchism #conservatism #democracysausage  A Swede Speaks (@ASwedeSpeaks) December 19, 2017 Strictly speaking, he may be right. At least when were speaking of how democracy generally is implemented as a form of government within a constitutional, institutional, bureaucratic, and procedural framework. However, as long as the people in power and positions follow the correct procedures, they can do almost anything legally and constitutionally. Basically everything is up for grabs in a democracy. Due in large part to the legitimacy that is bestowed on the government by consent of the governed, (almost) anything goes. Also, there is a confusion of the governed and those who govern. We do it to ourselves, we tend to think. Yes, there are limits, but they are grossly overrated. How the system has been rose-colored, may be a significant factor in Donald Trumps coming to power. People are fed up with how a flawed system is being overrated by the elite, and along comes a guy who says things very bluntly indeed. This is not to excuse Donald Trumps many flaws, of course, but serves as one of several explanations. The word democracy does have many different definitions; it may be one of the most misused words in our political vocabulary. If we take the classical definition, it means rule by the majority amongst politically equal citizens. It need not be a direct democracy. There are other definitions where all sorts of criteria are added. It would be more correct to call such enhancements constitutional and/or liberal democracy. Although it can arguably be claimed that conditions that allow relatively free elections to take place should be included in the definition of democracy itself. An example of such conditions is, as Wolvin mentions, freedom of speech. Wolvin also apparently states that an independent judiciary must be part of a system called democracy. I do not seek to undervalue the institution of an independent judiciary. It is important. To claim that it is part and parcel of the concept of democracy even without the constitutional/liberal modifier is, however, dubious (to the extent it is necessary to keep free elections going, it can be conceded, but not in a general sense). Also, note that very much can be done even with an independent judiciary, as long as one follows the correct procedures. Even in a so-called liberal democracy (liberal as in liberty-friendly?), one can tax (a group of) people out of 80 % of their income. As for Wolvins claim that a democracy requires an informed citizenry, there is evidence to suggest that modern mass democracy does not encourage this. It is simply not rational to spend time becoming and staying informed when the impact of ones vote is miniscule. Bryan Caplan, as an example, has written a book on this  The Myth of the Rational Voter. Wolvin seems to be a very enthusiastic proponent of the present-day Commonwealth model of constitutional monarchy, in particular that of Canada. There are several models of constitutional monarchy. We have the European principalities of Liechtenstein and Monaco of today. We had constitutional monarchy models in the 19th century, where the popular power element was less than it typically is today. But lets here keep to the present-day Commonwealth model. This model of constitutional monarchy does have some advantages. No ambitious politician may actually climb all the way to the top, as the top position is reserved. With the separation of the head of state from the political leader, you do not get the same pressure towards deference to the political leader, as you get with the American President. This may have some tempering effects on the system. When you dont have deference towards political leaders to the same extent, that may result in more encouragement towards being an informed citizen (we dont deify our political leaders to same extent, so rational argument is in higher regard). However, the single voters discrepancy between investment in being informed and the small influence through the vote is still there. We must remember, however, that the vastness of modern government is mutual to both the republican and monarchical form. Canada has a so-called welfare state. So do the Nordic countries. So do other European countries. Even the American system has this to an extent, even though it is not as well developed as in other countries. The state reaches far and wide. One can through the system reach deep into ones neighbors pockets. It may not be mob rule in its purest form. It may move slower than mob rule in its purest form. But mob rule it is. The protection given by certain human rights may be a blessing. But there are so-called positive rights, which also creates for others a duty to provide. And even with the rights that protect against certain acts of government, the level of intervention can be immense. The level of rights protections is overrated. [Here is an essay of mine with some reading tips on democracy.] Before universal suffrage there were people warning against the effects of the have-nots getting the opportunity to vote themselves that of the haves. The history of universal suffrage so far has to a great extent proven the warnings correct. J.K. Baltzersen writes from the capital of the Oil Kingdom of Norway. He is the editor of the book Grunnlov og frihet: turtelduer eller erkefiender? (in Norwegian and Swedish; translated title: Constitution and Liberty: Lovebirds or Archenemies?), with Cato Institutes Johan Norberg amongst the contributors. Follow him on Twitter. Home
Givat Hamatos: A strategic Jerusalem neighborhood By Nadav Shragai

The plan to build a Jewish residential neighborhood in Givat Hamatos in southern Jerusalem was already approved by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee in 2014. However, it has been frozen for four years. Under pressure from the United States, Germany, and other European Union countries, the issuing of the construction tenders has been suspended time after time. The project is a building plan with strategic significance. It applies to an area alongside the Green line/1949 armistice line (but outside of it), at a distance of about 300 meters from the Talpiot industrial zone and adjacent to Derech Hevron, the main traffic artery of what the world calls West Jerusalem. From the Israeli standpoint, building Givat Hamatos is one of the keys to preventing a division of Jerusalem from the south, where a Palestinian wedge could impede the planned continuity between the Gilo and Har Homa neighborhoods along the southern border of Jerusalem. In October 2017, a drilling project began for sampling soil at the site, so that the building plan could go forward. Under U.S. pressure, however, the process was frozen once again. From the Palestinian standpoint, freezing construction at Givat Hamatos is the key to preserving the option one day of urban and political linkage between Palestinian Bethlehem and Jerusalems Beit Safafa. As the Palestinians see it, such continuity will be part of the Palestinian urban fabric that, in the future, will form east Jerusalem, capital of the future Palestinian state. Givat Hamatos is one of the last reserves of land available for building for Jews within the jurisdictional boundaries of Jerusalem. The plan envisages 2,610 housing units for the Jewish population. Next to Givat Hamatos, in the Beit Safafa vicinity, approval has been given to a next phase to increase construction for Arab housing (600-900 housing units) on private lands, mainly by raising the building percentages at the site and condensing the construction within it. Seeking to avoid conflict with both the Obama and Trump American administrations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Housing Minister Yoav Galant not to promote it for now.

Memorial to Israeli pilot Dan Givon, Givat Hamatos Location Givat Hamatos is in southern Jerusalem, 813 meters above sea level south of the Green Line, northwest of Mar Elias Monastery, near Beit Safafa, and not far from the Talpiot industrial zone. Before the Six Day War, there were Jordanian outposts at the spot, and sometimes they fired from this hill at the Jewish neighborhoods of Talpiot and Baka. On the second day of the Six Day War, June 6, 1967, a Fouga Magister aircraft was downed there and its pilot, Dan Givon, was killed. Thus the hill came to be known as Givat Hamatos (Airplane Hill). The Beit Safafa residents call the hill a-Tabaliya. They see it as a land reserve that should be allotted to Beit Safafa, claiming that some of the lots there were bought by Beit Safafa residents before the Jordanian period but not registered under their names. They point to the housing shortage in the village and the many land expropriations it has undergone over the years so that nearby Jewish roads and neighborhoods could be built. The Caravan Site The year 1991 saw the establishment at Givat Hamatos of a caravan site for Ethiopian immigrants who had come to Israel in Operation Moses and Operation Solomon. The sites maximum capacity was for 400 trailers spread over about 170 dunams. Today, only a few dozen trailers are left there, mainly inhabited by homeless, non-Ethiopian Israelis. Next to the site, a monument was built to the Ethiopian Jews who died on their way to Israel. Also at the site are relics from the Second Temple period, and what remains of Jordanian communication trenches. Details of the Plan The Givat Hamatos A plan, which was approved and published in Reshumot, the official gazette of the state of Israel, envisages 2,610 government housing units, but the tenders for their construction have been frozen. The height for construction is 12 stories in the center of the neighborhood and four to six stories on its slopes, and the aim is to settle more than 10,000 residents. A shopping center, public buildings, and open public areas are envisaged. The plan creates linkage and territorial continuity with Beit Safafa, and it includes archaeological sites within and adjacent to the territory, where there are remains of buildings from Second Temple days. The Givat Hamatos B plan envisages the building of 600-900 housing units. It was approved by the District Committee and published in Reshumot. It involves increased, condensed construction in the inhabited area and a small amount of new construction on private lands next to Beit Safafa. The Givat Hamatos C plan has to do with construction north of Givat Hamatos A. The planning committees accepted the objections to it and rejected it because of defects in the unification and division process for lands under different ownerships. The Givat Hamatos D plan is a tourism-focused plan involving the building of 1,100 hotel rooms, some of which could be turned into residences in the future. The Territory for the Project About 400 dunams are owned by the state. Ten percent of the territory is privately owned by Arabs from Beit Safafa and by the Greek Orthodox Church. The territory intended for Jewish building belongs to the Israel Land Authority; the area intended for Arab building is privately owned land. The Plans Role in the Israeli Policy to Preserve the Jewish Majority in Jerusalem and Prevent the Citys Division The plan to build the Jewish neighborhood on Givat Hamatos represents a continuation of the building of 12 large Jewish neighborhoods since 1967 in the areas that were added to united Jerusalem. The establishment of these neighborhoods was designed to prevent a second division of the city and also to preserve the Jewish majority in Jerusalem. The building of the Jewish neighborhoods in the many empty lands that were annexed to Jerusalem, neighborhoods in which 212,000 Jews now live, was aimed at ensuring, both territorially and demographically, the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and preventing any possibility of the citys redivision. One of the main reasons for the decline in Jerusalems Jewish majority from 73.5 percent to 60 percent today is that many Jews have left the city. As surveys by the municipality and by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research have repeatedly found, they leave mainly because of the paucity of residential buildings in the city, the severe shortage of apartments, and the resulting high prices of apartments. Over the past 25 years, more than 400,000 Jews have left Jerusalem while only 250,000 have come to live in it. The Strategic Significance of the Plan From an Israeli Jewish standpoint, Givat Hamatos prevents continuity between Beit Safafa and the neighborhood of Tsur Baher, which would advance the Palestinians future goal of East Jerusalem, capital of the Palestinian state. Palestinian control of the land connects Sharfat with Beit Safafa, high ground overlooking the Malcha neighborhood and even cuts off and isolates the neighborhoods of Talpiot and Baka. Israel seeks its own continuity along the southern jurisdictional boundary of Jerusalem from Har Homa through Givat Hamatos to Gilo, with the aim of preserving the citys unity and averting its division. Givat Hamatos higher altitude provides Israel control over the area between Bethlehem (under Palestinian control) and Jerusalem as well as the region southeast of Jerusalem. At the 2007 Annapolis Conference, the Palestinians suggested a territory swap whereby Israel would continue to control the large Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, but excluding Har Homa and Givat Hamatos that Israel would abandon. The War for Urban Continuity The war for urban continuity is a tool for promoting national interests and one of the main facets of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over Jerusalem. It has been and remains part of both sides strategy in this contest. The Israeli building is orderly building, mainly governmental. The Palestinian building is disorderly building, mainly illegal, stemming both from the paucity of building permits for Arab parts of the city since 1967 and from the Palestinian struggle strategy in Jerusalem. The following examples from other parts of Jerusalem illustrate the war for urban continuity: The Maale Adumim area  The Palestinians are striving to create their own urban continuity from the northern West Bank southward. This planned continuity cuts through the east-west Israeli continuity, which is designed to connect Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. For years the Palestinians have been narrowing the space between the two cities, through which the main arterial road between them also runs. To obstruct the E1 area, A-Zaim and Anata have been converging for years.



Israel has refrained from building the E1 neighborhood, intended to bridge between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, because of U.S. and European pressures. The United States oppose the Israeli policy of creating west-east continuity, claiming it would preclude the Palestinian north-south continuity that is vital to a future Palestinian state. The Pisgat Zeev area  At the end of the 1970s, it appeared that the Palestinians were threatening to foreclose the Jewish option between the northernmost Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, Neve Yaakov, and French Hill to its south. Routes that had been planned for roads were obstructed by Arab building, and areas intended for Jewish building were grabbed by Arabs. Hence the Israeli government decided to expropriate the 4,600 dunams between the two neighborhoods. On this expropriated land the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood was eventually built. Today, with 43,000 residents, it is the second largest neighborhood in Jerusalem after Ramot.





The French Hill area  The initiative to expropriate 800 additional dunams south of the area expropriated for Pisgat Zeev stemmed from the fear of an Arab wedge being formed between Pisgat Zeev and French Hill.



Nevertheless, the Palestinians have managed to build considerably between the two neighborhoods. Today, from the vantage of the French Hill interchange, the nearby Palestinian construction is well evident. Har Homa  The Har Homa neighborhood, where 19,000 people now live, was intended by its planners to create Jewish urban continuity between Armon Hanatziv and Gilo and to prevent Bethlehem and Beit Sahour from extending into Jerusalem. Despite American opposition, the building of Har Homa began in 1997 on land that had been expropriated from both Arabs and Jews.

Ramot  The Israeli planning maps show a continuity of Jewish building between the Ramot neighborhood in northwestern Jerusalem and Givon and Givat Zeev, which are northwest of Ramot. The Palestinians are trying to interrupt this continuity and have purchased lands in the vicinity as part of their own Katana-Biddu-Beit Surik bloc. Building for Arabs in the Framework of the Plan The building of about 600-900 housing units for Arabs in the Givat Hamatos vicinity besides Beit Safafa was in fact approved because the Jerusalem District Court intervened. Beit Safafa residents turned to the court with the demand that the state approve their plan, which  unlike the building plan for the Jews  had not been published in Reshumot. At first, the state argued that this was a secret political decision, but when that claim was rejected, the state announced to the court that the plan would be approved, and it was. The U.S. Position during the Obama and Trump Administrations During the Obama administration, the United States openly opposed the building of the Givat Hamatos neighborhood. During the Trump administration, the United States has continued to oppose the building of the neighborhood but without publicly declaring so. In October 2014, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States was deeply concerned by reports that the Israeli Government has moved forward the planning process in the sensitive area of Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem. She added that this step is contrary to Israels stated goal of negotiating a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians. Her words were a response to the approval of the Givat Hamatos plan by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee. European Countries Position Germany is playing a central role in pressuring Israel not to build Givat Hamatos; other European countries oppose it as well. In October 2014 French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the decision to build homes in Givat Hamatos threatened the two-state solution: One cannot claim to support a solution and at the same time do things against without consequences being drawn. In October 2017, the European Union requested clarifications from Israel about plans for housing units in Hamatos, saying that such building is likely to harm severely the continuity and the existence of a future Palestinian state. Israeli Positions on the Givat Hamatos Issue Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: According to a report that was not denied, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the chairman of the Likuds Jerusalem branch, Ilan Gordo, that Givat Hamatos should be built as rapidly as possible and that he was involved in efforts to get this done. Netanyahu remarked, however, that in the municipal territory of Jerusalem that is over the Green line (the 1949 armistice line), things are more difficult and everything is done little by little. Housing Minister Yoav Galant: On October 16, 2017, Housing Minister Galant said that Givat Hamatos is vital to Jerusalems security and to maintaining Jewish continuity from Gush Etzion to Jerusalem and between Gilo and Ramat Rachel. We will promote the process until a new neighborhood has been built on the hill. Jerusalem Affairs Minister Zeev Elkin: In July 2016, against the backdrop of the approval of the building plan for Arabs in the Beit Safafa vicinity (600  900 housing units), Minister Elkin explained that he did not oppose the widening of the Beit Safafa neighborhood. That is what was supposed to happen according to the plan. What I oppose is that Arabs will be allowed to build in this neighborhood, while Jews will be restricted. If there are political problems, then it affects everyone. If under pressure from the court one has to build  then one should advance the processes for both Arabs and Jews. This is important in principle, and it is important because the Jewish sector has a grave shortage of housing units in Jerusalem. Minister Elkin added, One has to do all in ones power to create political pressure against the international pressure and nevertheless advance construction on Givat Hamatos. I was the first to call for this, and I was joined by Minister Bennett in the name of his whole party and by Minister Kahlon. I hope that my friends from the Likud will also join me and that I will not remain alone in the party on this issue. This is a strategic aspect of the struggle for the future of Jerusalem. Nadav Shragai is a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He served as a journalist and commentator at Haaretz between 1983 and 2009, is currently a journalist and commentator at Israel Hayom, and has documented the dispute over Jerusalem for thirty years. His books include: Jerusalem: Delusions of Division (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2015); The Al-Aksa Is in Danger Libel: The History of a Lie (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2012); the ebook Jerusalem: Correcting the International Discourse  How the West Gets Jerusalem Wrong (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2012); At the Crossroads: The Story of Rachels Tomb (Gates for Jerusalem Studies, 2005); The Temple Mount Conflict (Keter, 1995); and the essay: Jerusalem Is Not the Problem, It Is the Solution, in Mr. Prime Minister: Jerusalem, Moshe Amirav, ed. (Carmel and Florsheimer Institute, 2005). Home
Year One of making America great again!

By Mark Alexander



In his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan did what he would often do in the years that followed: He talked over the mainstream media cameras and spoke directly to the American people. On this particular occasion, he asked, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" They were not, of course, and they thus entrusted Reagan with two presidential terms to right our nation's course.

Today, only a leftist suffering from the deep denial associated with Trump Derangement Syndrome refuses to acknowledge how much better off our nation is today than it was just one year ago. Notably, Donald Trump has also found a way to talk over the heads of the Leftmedia propaganda machine  social media. Fortunately, Trump's chief of staff, former Marine Gen. John Kelly, is helping his boss refine his use of that message medium.

In the first week of 2017, I had concerns about what a Trump presidency would look like, but I knew for certain that our nation would be better off on his worst day in office than on Hillary Clinton's best.

Two months earlier, like most other constitutionally conservative defenders of Liberty, I had encouraged fellow Patriots to vote for the Trump ticket  as I did personally, motivated primarily by four lines of reasoning.

First, Hillary Clinton (never an option) would have taken the domestic and foreign policy catastrophes implemented by her predecessor and their statist Democrat Party and driven those stakes further into the heart of Liberty.

Second, one of the deepest stakes would have been Clinton's Supreme Court nominees, which would have further advanced her tyrannical "rule of men" agenda over our Republic's Rule of Law mandate. It is that most fundamental republican principle which all federal politicians and administrators have sworn "to Support and Defend," but which those on the Left violate constantly and contemptuously.

Third, though the ranks of genuine conservatives in the House and Senate have grown substantially, the so-called "establishment Republicans" were still in control. We were ready for a Trump detonation in the middle of that status quo "leadership," to set a course for something other than more of the same.

And last but certainly not least, I have known and followed closely the career and policies advocated by Mike Pence for 20 years. Trump's choice of Pence, versus Clinton's pathetic choice of Sen. Tim Kaine for her ticket, spoke volumes about Trump's leadership potential.

So are we better off than we were a year ago? President Reagan would, I think, be proud of the conservative agenda that Donald Trump has pushed through.

All the leftist denial notwithstanding, here is what the Trump administration's domestic policies have helped create in just 12 months.

Headline unemployment is now at its lowest mark in 17 years, though I note this benchmark with caution as there are many Americans who had to take subsistence jobs during the previous eight years.

Trump's policies are righting our nation's economic course. American businesses have created more than 1.7 million new jobs, including almost 160,000 manufacturing jobs and another 58,000 in mining and logging. Notably, the number of illegal immigrants vying for American jobs and lowering American wages has declined significantly.

GDP topped 3% for the last two quarters of 2017. (In the 32 quarters of Obama's "recovery," only twice did he register a GDP of 3% or better.)

Our economy, re-fueled in large part by enthusiasm for the future, is once again growing. The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index is at a 17-year high, and the National Association of Manufacturers Outlook Index is at its highest annual average in its history.

Even The New York Times has had to acknowledge, "A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders, and it is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth, spurs job creation  and may finally raise wages significantly." (One can only imagine the gnashing of teeth that took place prior to publishing that single sentence.)

The prospects of continued growth are being supercharged by the Republican passage of tax reform  $1.5 trillion in tax cuts  almost 60% to families, most of whom will now be able to file their IRS return on a single page.

The tax reform measures also repealed the so-called "Affordable Care Act" individual mandate burden on individuals and families.

Economic growth will be boosted by record cuts in government regulations and new accountability measures. The Trump administration eliminated 22 regulations for each new one enacted. Trump signed 15 Congressional Review Act resolutions into law, more than any other president.

The rogue EPA, which has been weaponized by Democrats to control and micromanage economic development, is being reined in. Trump has unleashed energy development to reduce our nation's dependence on foreign energy sources. And the so-called "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau" has been put on notice.

And on the coattails of the U.S. economic recovery, the global economy grew at a faster rate than it has since 2011. That's American leadership. The Trump administration has worked to close hundreds of billions in deals to sell American products abroad. And in recent months foreign companies have announced $50 billion in new U.S. projects.

Trump has put America first by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, working to modify NAFTA, and saying farewell to the utopian socialists' so-called "climate change" treaty.

While economic strength certainly bolsters Liberty, Trump nomination of more than 70 conservative federal judges, including that of now-Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch for the seat vacated by the revered late Justice Antonin Scalia, has been a critical step to ensuring Liberty for the next generation. Republicans confirmed a record-setting 12 conservative federal circuit judges.

And the year in foreign policy has been favorable, unless you're an adversary of the United States. The most notable advances in U.S. national security interests would certainly include Trump's confrontation of China's nuclear puppet, North Korea and Kim Jong-un.

Just a few short years ago, we heard that "al-Qa'ida is on the run." And when that proved untrue, we heard that "we've contained them." Today, however, we can truthfully report that al-Qa'ida's bloodier successor, the Islamic State, founded in effect by Obama and Clinton, is really on the run, having been largely eradicated from its rat holes in Iraq and areas of Syria. However, so-called "lone wolf" Islamist sympathizers remain a daunting threat to Western Europe and the U.S.

Further, there are emerging democracy movements around the world fueled by the knowledge that they will now have U.S. support. The most notable movement now underway is that challenging the terrorist-sponsoring Islamist theocracy of Iran.

Notably, despite the overwhelmingly anti-Trump media in his first year, versus Obama's overwhelmingly adoring media in his first year, their approval ratings are virtually identical, with both at 46% at the end of their first year.

Leftists have thus far failed to derail Trump's "Make America Great Again" agenda, so in collusion with their Leftmedia public relations outlets, they've created a colossal fake news farce to undermine public support for our duly elected president, most notably their claims of Russian collusion and corruption. However, now that it appears to be Clinton who orchestrated the collusion delusion, the Democrats' next line of attack ahead of this year's midterm elections will most likely be "sexual harassment" claims.

Before the end of this month, I'll be covering in detail the critical issues for maintaining control of the House and Senate this year, starting with the "Trump Effect  Good and Bad," then covering the abject corruption among Obama's deep-state operatives within the Department of Justice and the Demos' Detestable DACA strategy.

But for now, let me just say that I'm grateful for the year just passed for many reasons  and that the future prospects for Liberty are in much better hands than they might have been.

I hope you and your family had a peaceful and joyous Christmas and that many blessings, large and small, come your way throughout this New Year. Know that your Patriot team is all about resolve, not resolutions, as we remain on the wall day in and day out.

Mark Alexander is the executive editor of the Patriot Post
People mag scrubs pornographic image to hide hypocrisy By Selwyn Duke

Like most media reporting on the story, People magazine presented disgraced teacher Mateo Rueda in a flattering light. He was recently fired from Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum, Utah, for showing young children nude artwork. But hes actually, were to believe, an intrepid martyr persecuted by prudish, uncultured rubes who cant distinguish between porn and fine art. And to prove its point, People printed a couple of the pictures shown to the fifth and sixth-graders, one of which was a full-frontal female nude titled Iris Tree. Only, People obscured the womans nipples and nether region. Apparently adult readers shouldnt see what the children saw. Now the magazine is trying to obscure the truth. After I and others called it out on Twitter  I wrote, If the artwork Iris Tree really is appropriate for 10-year-olds, why are you blurring out part of the picture in your article?  the image completely disappeared from the piece. Thanks to Internet archiving and the computer function Print Screen, however, the evidence remains. The article originally appeared as shown here (thank you, Wayback Machine). And here is the deforested version, with Iris Tree sent to the e-sawmill. Here are the tweets that started it all: Utah Art Teacher Fired for Unintentionally Sharing Classical Nude Paintings Speaks Out https://t.co/TDz4JMwsbn via @people  Cathy Free (@cathyjfree) January 4, 2018 Utah Art Teacher Fired for Unintentionally Sharing Classical Nude Paintings Speaks Out https://t.co/TDz4JMwsbn via @people  Cathy Free (@cathyjfree) January 4, 2018 Unsurprisingly, People also blurred the truth behind the story (which I reported, conducting interviews with local parents), but didnt scrub from its article Ruedas posturing, moral preening and demeaning of his adopted community. Its writer, Cathy Free, quoted Rueda as saying, [E]ven though I was overqualified, I took the [teaching] position with an open heart to make a difference in a predominantly-Mormon community where there isnt much culture. I hate that this controversy happened, but I stand for art, altruism and enlightenment, and Ill never back down from that. Rueda, a native of Colombia, also said, There are a lot of skeletons in the closet of the repressed culture hereand there is very little freedom of expression, reports Free. Rueda had earlier characterized his fellow Cache Valley residents as cultural dead-ends and members of a narrow-minded community. What Free didnt report is that, according to the parents I interviewed, Rueda forced the children to view the nudes and belittled students who complained, telling them they had to grow up. (A local source tells me he is not getting his job back.) Of course, the article by Peoples Free is now free of the Tree, but observers note the hypocrisy. As the aforementioned Twitter respondent also opined: Utah Art Teacher Fired for Unintentionally Sharing Classical Nude Paintings Speaks Out https://t.co/TDz4JMwsbn via @people  Cathy Free (@cathyjfree) January 4, 2018 Its interesting that People didnt demonstrate its own enlightenment and react to the initial criticism by uncovering Iris Tree for all to see, but instead decided it didnt want to be mistaken for Hustler. The only question now is whether, using descriptions Rueda and his defenders have generously applied to opponents, the people at People are best characterized as narrow-minded, repressed prudes, puritans, Nazi-like censors or cultural dead-ends. Because the magazine knows something: Certain images are too indecent for it to publish. But are just fine for 10-year-olds. Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com. Home
The smoking gun By Dr. Robert Owens

Lets see; the Clinton campaign pays for a former British spy to work with Russian intelligence to create a bogus document that is then used as the basis for wiretaps aimed at the Trump campaign and the media is trying to tell us, Move along nothing to see here. Was the so-called dossier a hit piece from the begging? Maybe we should listen to Mary Jacoby, the wife of Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who started Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier. She said on Facebook, Its come to my attention that some people still dont realize what Glenns role was in exposing Putins control of Donald Trump. Lets be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn. According to the website Tablet, In June, three months after being hired by the lawyers for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Simpson brought on Steelebut Steele hadnt lived or worked in Russia in nearly 25 years. Since he was identified as a British spy in 1999, and was head of the Russia desk when Russian assassins killed FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in a sushi restaurant in the British capital, Steele was hardly in a position to make discreet inquiries. Still, Simpson must have thought Steeles name at a minimum would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Reportedly, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI, and journalists love spies who spill secrets. Of course having all this bogus information to accuse Trump would do no good if their candidate was indicted before the election (or after) so of course the crimes of Hillary Clinton had to again be whitewashed. Found under the heading, Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. According to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) a member of the House Judiciary Committee, I can certainly say that my impression after these interviews is that there was extreme pro-Hillary Clinton bias that benefitted her in this investigation and that she received special treatment as a consequence of her candidacy for president.  And we have email evidence from Andrew McCabe indicating that Hillary Clinton was going to get an HQ Special, a headquarters special. That meant that the normal processes of the Washington field office werent followed and he had a special. And he had a very small group of people that had a pro-Hillary Clinton bias who had a direct role in changing that investigation from one that likely should have been criminal to one where she was able to walk. What should Trump do? Roger Stone in Stone Cold Truth gives this advice, "The president must completely disempower and dismantle Robert S. Muellers fraudulent rogue prosecution gang, which is merely an extension of a larger corruption of power that is unparalleled in our history." Specifically he advises that the president must use every resource at his disposal to prosecute the almost-seditious abuses of power by lawless Clinton-Obama FBI and NSA apparatchiks who: Politically weaponized the federal governments electronic intelligence capabilities to spy on a presidential candidate and his campaign

Colluded with foreign and non-state intelligence agents to manufacture evidence used as false pretexts for securing FISA warrants that employed the national security laws of the United States to give illicit, illegal cover to this political espionage

Used the fruits of this political espionage activity to damage or otherwise hinder this candidate, once he had become president-elect and eventually President of the United States, through surreptitious releases of the criminally-procured information,

Fabricated and instigated false allegations about foreign state collusion implicating the presidents election campaign and family members, and

Perpetuated this massive criminal fraud on the American people for nearly a full year by manipulating and abusing the investigatory and prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice. He further fleshes this out with the advice to, The president must order his Attorney General to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Obama-Clinton-Mueller-Rosenstein criminal collusion that enriched the Clinton-Democrat crime syndicate by 100s of millions of dollars and further embedded the power of the deep state operators who facilitated what may be the most brazen of self-serving criminal treasons in American history: the multi-billion-dollar Uranium One pay-to-play scam. This incredible scheme perpetrated by the criminal Clintons and their coterie of minions and fellow travelers, implicates top officials of our federal governmentincluding and especially the U.S Department of Justice, including and especially Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein. According to Rep. Peter King (R-NY) on Fox News, If theres any collusion issue here, to me, its the FBI, its the Clinton campaign, its the Russians for that matter because it could be very likely that Russians were feeding Steele information to use against Donald Trump and it was fake information. And now the rats begin to abandon ship. The Justice Departments inspector general is conducting a broad investigation into how the department and FBI have handled recent matters, including the Clinton investigation. Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabes activities have been under scrutiny by the inspector general. McCabes tenure has become entangled in recent years in politically charged controversies, including the investigation into Democrat Hillary Clintons use of private email when she was secretary of State, and the ongoing criminal probe into whether Trump or his associates colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election campaign. McCabe, 49, has served as the No. 2 official at the FBI since February 2016, and would leave some time after he becomes fully eligible for pension benefits in March. So once we are liable to pay him a hefty pension for the rest of his life he leaves. I wonder if any future convictions might interfere with the delivery of that fat pay check to the prison commissary? How could any of this obviously trumped up attack have any chance of success? Just remember impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, its a political one. If the House decides to Impeach a president they can call anything they want a high crime or misdemeanor or just invent one. As former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy said, For arguments sake, lets assume the worst: Trump knew [General Michael] Flynn had lied to the FBI (i.e., that Flynn had committed at least one felony), and he leaned on Comey to close the FBIs probe. Even with those assumptions, there is still no obstruction case. The FBI and the Justice Department are not a separate branch of government; they are subordinates of the president delegated to exercise his power, not their own. Therefore as McCarthy says, There is no real crime because of the incontestable power of Trump to fire former FBI Director James Comey. One anti-Trumper author, Jennifer Rubin recently summed up the situation perfectly in the Washington Post, The president doesnt need to commit a crime to be impeached. Just the claim of obstruction of justice will be enough for the Democrats to act, even if, in a strictly legal sense, no crime actually occurred. If the Mueller fishing expedition fails to find any evidence of a real crime by Trump, or if he claims there is evidence of a process-crime such as obstruction of justice, Democrats are likely to use the special counsels report as their platform for the midterm elections. Therefore it will be the midterm elections that decide Trumps fate. It all comes down to a plot starting in the Obama White House to undermine our democracy. As Lee Smith of Tablet puts it, To date the investigation into the Fusion GPS-manufactured collusion scandal has focused largely on the firm itself, its allies in the press, as well as contacts in the Department of Justice and FBI. However, if a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other partys campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other partys candidate won, were looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergatea story not about a bad man in the White House, but about the subversion of key security institutions that are charged with protecting core elements of our democratic process while operating largely in the shadows. This is the smoking gun. Yes there was collusion. Yes there was (and is) a plot to undermine our system. And yes all the evidence is beginning to point straight at Obama, Hillary, and Democrat controlled Deep State. It is time to drain the swamp before America drowns in the filthy waters of a media enhanced whirlpool. Dr. Robert Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com  2018 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens or visit Dr. Owens Amazon Page / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens Home
The Mathews Men

Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats

Hardcover

By William Geroux

Viking

HC, 400 pgs. US$28

ISBN: 0-5254-2815-1 A county goes to war By Steven Martinovich

If there is any branch of the American military apparatus that was absolutely robbed of deserved appreciation for its role in the Second World War, it is very likely that the U.S. Merchant Marine tops that list. Not well known, the Merchant Marine  mostly comprised of civilian ships and crews that ferried supplies for the Allied war effort -- suffered causalities several times that of any American military branch  and accomplished many of its missions early in the war without any protection from the ferocious German U-boat wolfpacks that prowled the Atlantic Ocean. No community in the United States perhaps understood this better than the people of Matthews County, Virginia. William Gerouxs The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats boils down the epic story of the Merchant Marine by focusing on the Mathews Country mariners and their families. Few, if any, communities sent as large of a proportion of their men to sea than did Mathews County  seven brothers from the Hodges family alone -- and fewer still suffered as many losses. With few of those Merchant Marine men from the Greatest Generation left today, Geroux made it his mission to tell their story to a world that seems to have largely forgotten their sacrifice. As Geroux reports, the sea-faring tradition of Mathews County stretched back over two centuries as the preferred occupation of any man born there. Whether a fishing boat, commercial ship or Navy ship of war, Mathews men could be found on ships and ports around the world. Although long a sea-faring nation with a navy whose history traced back to the Revolutionary War, the United States Navy entered the Second World War with significant issues, amongst them an inability to ship personnel and supplies to theatres of war. Enter the Merchant Marine who filled the gap with thousands of ships and tens of thousands of men, hundreds of them from the tiny Chesapeake Bay county. The lack of concern by many of the US Navy brass for the Merchant Marine was immediately shown when German U-boats essentially had an unmolested opportunity to hunt ships from the U.S. shore to the Caribbean and all the way to Europe waters. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke highly of the civilian mariners risking their lives for the war effort, the US Navy thought it a poor use of their assets to provide security and defense for the ships. Day after day the ships were torpedoed, often within sight of witnesses standing on American shores, leading to a horrific loss of life  including several men of Mathews County. Eventually, however, as The Mathews Men relates, pressure from Roosevelt, European allies aghast at Navy intransigence from learning their hard-won lessons and public outrage, the US Navy instituted the convoy system. Although safer from the wolf packs, the life of a merchant mariner was still a dicey one as missions took them everywhere from northern Africa, Murmansk and unnamed islands across the Pacific. As the war progressed, the tide began to turn against the Kriegsmarine and the reputation for U-boat service to be a one-way ticket to watery grave began to become a reality for the German submariners. Thanks to the Merchant Marine, tens of millions of tonnes of supplies crossed the Atlantic in a never-ending conveyor belt that fed the Americans and their allies, and the battered peoples of Europe both during and after the war. A story as expansive as the Merchant Marines could have very easily overwhelmed a single book but Gerouxs decision to frame its story by using the men of Mathews County as the paint for the canvas took the story from global history to a personal and intimate story. The reader shares the terror of sudden attack, the relief of surviving or the sadness of families back home when a husband or son joins the countless number of sailors before them who disappear into the waters depths for eternity. Geroux takes a sprawling cast of characters and gives us time to learn who each of them are and the lives of danger they lived in the effort to feed the enormous machine that battled fascism. By the end of The Mathews Men, despite the fact that many of the principals are no longer with us, the reader likely feels that they know the families as well as their neighbours did. It is remarkable that even after seven decades that there are still so many stories left to tell from the Second World War, more amazing still that they are stories that belong not to obscure units or ostensibly inconsequential battles. The US Merchant Machine numbered over 200,000 sailors with nearly 10,000 killed, 12,000 wounded and many ships lost. Part of that is due to the American militarys efforts to keep the deadly reality a secret in order to continue attracting sailors to the effort, part of it also due to the apparent lack of romance that ferrying cargo and troops has. Gerouxs The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-boats deserves thanks for performing the valuable service of reminding us that service didnt just mean a uniform, but also brave men who left small fishing villages for little more than love of country. We may have forgotten their story but hopefully Gerouxs effort brought their story to a wider audience. Steven Martinovich is the founder and editor of Enter Stage Right. Home
There are three main reasons why Europe should be concerned about the situation in Libya  terrorism, geopolitical competition and migration. Apart from the obvious humanitarian dimension, Europes security interests are at stake including weapons of mass destruction and there are reports that not all chemical weapons have been removed from the country. Terrorism in Libya is a real threat but it is comparatively smaller than the threat of terrorism from within Europe and from Syria. The geopolitical dimension includes Russia seeking to challenge the EU in view of waning US interests but the EU leadership is mostly troubled by mass migration  the key priority from the European standpoint. Migration is a danger to Europes societal stability but it is the integration of migrants and organized crime that pose greater dangers for Europe.

While terrorism from Libya is obviously real, Europe is mostly facing an internal jihadi problem rather than imported problems from countries like Libya. Libya is susceptible to jihadism due to its position of being a gateway to Europe and the fact that the situation in the country remains a fertile ground for new expansionist jihadism. When it comes to geopolitics, it is unlikely that Russian interests are geopolitical in nature. Instead, its cautious strategy and the implausibility of backing a confrontation hint that it is motivated by very narrowly defined economic interests. Migration, in contrast, is in reality mostly about the challenge to integrate the traumatized migrants in the European society rather than about transporting terrorism.

So far, its been obvious that one of the assumptions upon which diplomatic interventions are based on is not proven: that a political agreement will not make Europe safer. A deal will include a major role for Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, which is very likely to spur a violent jihadi backlash. Moreover, if Moscow is indeed motivated by geopolitical interests, such an agreement will leave Russia in a better position to pursue interests such as a naval base and securing a solid position at the negotiating table. Last, but not the least, migratory pressures will not lessen with an agreement. The biggest danger is that a deal will focus on addressing the stream of transit migrants traveling from Libya to Europe while omitting the practices of human enslavement, forced labor and abuse that have become a major source of income for many in Libya.

Regardless of whether there is an agreement, Europe needs a strategy to limit Egypt-backed Haftars campaign designed to eradicate political Islam. As long as the countrys population is being marginalized and targeted with Jihadist ideas, it is unlikely that Europe will be safe. Brussels will have to counter Russia-Mediterranean rapprochement if the Kremlin does indeed have geopolitical ambitions. To counter migration, the EU should also work with armed groups to counter the stream of transit migrants as armed groups are increasingly involved in anti-smuggling operations. Collaboration with the international community also offers hope in tackling migration. On top of easing the migratory pressures, it is also important to increase the protection of migrants within Libya since increasing the protection of migrants could prevent some migrants from trying to reach Europe out of sheer need  while maintaining Europes commitment to human rights.

European Security Interests at Stake in Libya?  Research Paper by Kars de Bruijne, Floor El Kamouni-Janssen & Fransje Molenaar  Clingendael / Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

(The Research Paper can be downloaded here)
Morocco has condemned the new deployment of Polisario militias in Guerguarat, the demilitarized border crossing with Mauritania. Moroccos Ambassador to the UN, Omar Hilale, said that these provocations in the area are a major violation of the UN-brokered and -backed ceasefire deal. They also disregard the UN Secretary Generals calls for the withdrawal of all troops from the buffer zone. Morocco has warned the UN Security Council of these irresponsible acts impeding on the political process.

The UN official further explained that through these new actions, the Polisario proved of their readiness to repeat the same scenario of March and April last year when its armed militiamen set up checkpoints in Guergurat but then retreated in humiliation out of the fear that the Security Council might condemn the actions. Mr. Hilale also deplored that the Polisario and its paymaster Algeria, which equips it with vehicles to block Guerguarat road, have not drawn lessons from their humiliating defeat last April.

Morocco, the UN Secretary General and the International Community consider that the Polisarios provocations are detrimental to the efforts led by Mr. Kohler (UNSG Personal Envoy to the Sahara) to relaunch the political process, he added. Mr. Hilale also reminded that the political process was in the need of upholding commitments but this is obviously very unlikely in the context of the recurring Polisario provocations. While reaffirming that his country was faithful to its commitment and withdrew from the area last year in response to calls by the UN Secretary General, Mr. Hilale, however, also noted that Moroccos patience has limits.
aviatornxtgen said: Hi Users,



I am a silent observer of this forum and gained so much knowledge regards the application process.



Now I have some questions really need some valuable advise from seniors.



I applied for 189 with point 70. (details on my signature) and 190 (NSW) with points 75.

I am afraid that my points get reduced by 5 due to age by this march.



In case if I received pre invitation from NSW for 190 before march, and after 12 weeks of processing time, i might lose the age points.



1.What happens next upon approval from NSW? Do I need to go back to pool in DIPB with granted 5points for statesponsor or will receive direct invite from DIBP?



2. In the mean time what happens to my 189 EOI? Is that become void after i received the NSW invitation or still remain in pool?

Because I have same EOI ID with 189 and 190 application. Click to expand...

Hey buddy,I can answer few of the questions based on my experience in this forum.If you have the same EOI ID for both 189 and 190 then once you get an invite to apply for visa, only then the EOI freezes/goes into suspend state. If you get invited via your 190 your 189 will not be part of the pool as the process will get initiated as per your 190.Hence i have seen (and did the same) people filing separate EOIs for 189 and 190.Till the time the EOI is active as mentioned above, it will still remain in the pool.As far as the points related to age are concerned, I have read here that in case there are change in points the EOI moves back into the pool due to change in DOE. Unfortunately do not have any experience dealing with pre-invite stage. Seniors can add more.
Hello just got my spouse visa granted and I understand that I have to travel within 30 days. Just inquiring about how I will be able to travel( in the future) back and forth between UK and my country....considering that the vignette in my passport is expiring within 30days.
We are a retired couple looking to buy a house in the Lower Normandy area and would like somewhere to rent locally (initially) for one month whilst we explore the region and then, if required, re-locate and rent for a longer period, hence it MAY be for more than one month. We are currently renting a cottage elsewhere in France (less than 500 euro's per month) and were hoping to find something similar in Normandy but we have been disappointed by the booking websites (e.g. one quoted from 470 euro's per month but when I completed the form the fee was more than double the original figure - for February!). Other sites have quoted 4, 6 or 12 months lets but already have 'holiday' bookings for March/April so I cannot understand why they will not consider shorter lets as they cannot possibly meet their long term letting requirement.



We have a car so location is not too important as we just wish to continue our exploration of the area. We have visited Lower Normandy on a number of occasions before and have a list of places where we would consider living and would like to live locally for a while.



Please, can anyone provide information where we can find a suitable property (website, local paper etc.)?
Asian Spirit said: In Clark Freeport- Air Base there is or was a store named "Oriental." They always had a good stock of large rugs. It's been a long time since I've been to the duty free stores there but would assume they are still there. Also, check the duty free version of Puregold on Clark. They too have the large rugs that you are looking for. Click to expand...

I think I have seen that store Oriental when I was driving around. I'll look for it Saturday.Pure Gold Duty Free Subic hasn't had anything recently. I usually cruise the store at least once every week or two in case they got anything good inWe found one really good deal at HMR Subic a year or two ago and use it in our dining area. Name brand indoor / outdoor area rug, 7 X 10, easily cleaned. Absolutely like new. Probably a return at Costco or Home Depot, etc., in the U.S.HMR has about 90% overpriced U.S. returned junk, but we stop by a lot to look for hidden gems and have found several. Monnday we went in to look for a rug (again) and a couple were promising, but were so dirty and needed cleaning that I could not pull the trigger. On a lark, I bought an interesting one as a temporary solution, for only p5000. Perfect condition! I'll put it in the kids BR after we find a real area rug for the sala.What do you think Americanos?
For community leaders across South Texas, Omar Garcia is the face of the Eagle Ford Shale.

During the oil boom, Garcia was the one mayors and county judges complained to when grocery stores ran out of food and truck traffic created rural gridlock. Oil has since busted and recovered, but Garcia and his staff remain the go-between connecting corporations with the 26 counties of the Eagle Ford Shale.

Garcia heads the South Texas Energy & Economic Roundtable, better known as STEER, the industry group started by the major exploration and production companies working in the 400-mile oil field.

The first Eagle Ford well was drilled in La Salle County in late 2008, setting off a leasing and drilling frenzy. Former Texas Railroad Commissioner David Porter once said the Eagle Ford had the potential to be the single most significant economic development in our states history. The field had an estimated economic impact of $123 billion in South Texas in the heyday of the oil boom  a number that got sliced by more than half by the oil bust, according to the University of Texas at San Antonio.

We can make an argument its a part of Texas history, Garcia said.

More Information Quick facts about Garcia What's your morning routine: The alarm goes off at six. Get up, wake up my daughter, cook breakfast, and then it's off to school. After I drop her off depending on my day, I come into the office or somewhere in South Texas. What book are you reading right now? I just finished "Above the Line" by Urban Meyer. I really like reading sports books that go over the team concept that applies to the workplace. But when I don't find myself reading something I want, I usually find myself reading my daughter's third-grade reading list. "Sarah, Plain and Tall" was the last one I read. "Bunnicula" was the one before. What's your favorite restaurant: Two of my favorite foods are steaks and shrimp. So if it's steaks, Bohanan's in San Antonio, and if it's shrimp, it's Catfish Charlie's in Corpus. What was your first job? Believe it or not I was a baker at Sirloin Stockade. I was responsible for baking all the dinner rolls and all the baked goods. What is your passion or hobby outside of work: With kids and a busy schedule, I still enjoy going hunting and fishing when I can, but honestly my weekends are spent with the family and going to their extracurricular activities, whether it's going to a softball game, a soccer game or whatever activity they may have on the weekend. If you had to choose a totally different career in a different field, what would it be: Without a doubt I would love to have been an attorney. I think it would have been a challenge to present to a jury.... that would have been an interesting job to have. See More Collapse

The field and its workers took a major hit during the oil bust  prices peaked at $107 per barrel in June 2014 and fell as low as $26 per barrel in February 2016  but it continues to be among the busiest U.S. oil fields. The Eagle Ford pumps 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, and last week 70 drilling rigs were at work in the region, according to the service firm Baker Hughes.

STEER just celebrated its fifth year and held its annual awards event  in which it recognizes companies and organizations for things such as health, safety and environmental stewardship  in December at the Pearl Stable.

Garcias background is in economic development. Hes a former vice president of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation and previously worked at the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation. In 2010, then-Governor Rick Perry appointed Garcia to the Texas Economic Development Corporation. He grew up in Kingsville and went to college at St. Edwards University in Austin, where he studied international business and Spanish. Garcia and his wife Christine have two children.

Now Playing: Assistant business editor Jennifer Hiller sat down to chat with Omar Garcia, president and CEO of the South Texas Energy & Economic Roundtable. Video: San Antonio Express-News

Heres an edited transcript of a conversation with Garcia about the oil business, an ill-fated job move to Houston and the time he found a job in an hour:

Q: Have you ever had to fire somebody directly or handle layoffs? And if you did, how did you handle it?

A:In a situation where Ive had to layoff someone, I try to be as helpful as possible, as understanding as possible, but there really is not an easy way to handle a layoff of an individual, because it is life changing at the time.

Q: Have you ever been fired or laid off?

A: I have. It helped shape my career. It was one of my first jobs out of college. It was in Austin working for a consulting firm. We lost a contract that I was responsible for, and with that contract went the funding. The lesson that I learned from that is your career is not always going to go the way you hoped.

Q: How old were you?

A: I was 22 or 23. I was just out of college. Id say 23.

Q: Well, thats a rough intro to the real world. How long did it take you to find a job?

A: An hour.

Q: Are you kidding?

A: Ill tell you the story. So I get laid off. I go back to my office, and the phone rings, and its John Plotnik at Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation. John and Ron (Kitchens, former head of the CCREDC), are on the phone and John goes, Do you believe in God? I said, Yes. He didnt even know that Id been fired, and he goes, Well, Ron and I want to offer you a job. Can you come in on Monday for an interview? And I said, Well, I just got laid off. Your timings impeccable. I explained to him why. I was honest with him. I got laid off on a Thursday. Monday I went to meet to with Ron and John, and that was it. By the following Monday, I was at work in Corpus.

Q: Oh my gosh. Within a week and half.

A: Threw everything in the back of my truck, and were off. Its how I ended up in Corpus. Because almost three weeks prior, Corpus had a marketing contract with a company I was working with to do economic development leads. So I went down three weeks prior to get a tour of the community. They wanted to show me around, show me their real estate sites, available buildings and stuff, so I got to know them really well. I guess they saw something in me that they wanted to hire me three weeks later, and thats how it happened. It was heaven sent. It was a godsend. It was a blessing. Trust me, I went from a low to a high in it was less than an hour.

Q: Thats meant to be. Have you ever really bombed at anything or had a project go wrong or a job that didnt work out?

A: Absolutely. I had career change in 2005, moved to totally different industry from economic development. It was a large corporation, and I took a brand new role or a pilot role if you will, to do business development for this corporation. Between expectations and timelines, my personal goals were not met and that corporations were not met. It was to date one of my career failures.

Q: Was it stressful?

A: It was because I had moved to a new community, a very large community, and had to work really hard to get to know people and to network in a town that Id never lived in, and where relationships and networks were so important to make that job work. It at times became stressful trying to meet as many people as possible and get involved in the community as quickly as I could. But I was essentially an outsider looking in.

Q: How long did you stay there?

A: That job lasted a year and a half. After a year, I started to look. What would I like to do? Do we want to move back to South Texas? Thats when the opportunity arose to go to the city of San Antonio for an economic development position.

Q:Well, tell me about STEER and how STEER got started, and how they found you.

A: They started laying the groundwork in 2011. Companies came together. They wanted a trade association that was specific to South Texas and one that did not focus on lobbying. They only wanted an organization that was engaged in state stakeholder relations, community relations and local issues. In August of 2012, a recruiter called and said, Hey, your name has been given to me by a few people, would you be interested? I went through the interview process and thought really hard as to whether or not I want to leave a very, very good position at the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, an incredible organization, to come to basically a startup. There was nothing. They gave me the name of the organization, a copy of the by-laws, and the checking account, and that was it. They said go get it done. Five years later, we are all so proud of what this organization has done and what it has meant to South Texas. We truly have become the go-to organization for the industry in South Texas.

Q:. Thats a lot to get started.

A: It was like starting up my own business. I can honestly say that I have started up a startup business, even though its nonprofit trade association. I think a lot of what an entrepreneur goes through, I went through to start up this organization.

Q: When you started, it was limited to operators, right?

A: And it still is. The operators are the ones that sit on the board of directors, but we have service companies that are part of the committees, we have the Port of Corpus, Port of Victoria, engineering firms, other companies that do business with the oil and gas industry are part of STEER as well. The main core, or the governing body if you will, is still the (exploration and production) companies.

Q: What kind of things will people call you with?

A: Weve seen it all, whether it was roads at the very beginning where there was dust control issues, whether it was trash on the side of the road. Weve seen it all. Weve seen when the Eagle Ford was blooming in 2014, when the grocery stores ran out of food.

Q: You got calls about the grocery stores?

A: Yeah. Running out of food. Some of these problems we couldnt fix, like that one, but obviously the roads and the dust and the trash, we were very much involved in alleviating those situations with community leaders.

Q: What kind of changes have you seen in the region?

A: Things are manageable now. Infrastructure has caught up. The workforce is OK right now. Well always need the skilled labor, both blue collar and white collar, but were not seeing crews coming from the Bakken (in North Dakota) into the Eagle Ford, and vice versa. Weve got local talent. Were hiring talent from South Texas. I think people can predict their futures without, at this point, seeing a steep rise in oil prices or a steep decline of prices.

Q: What are the big questions that youre getting these days from folks?

A: People want to know how much life is left in the Eagle Ford? Why is everything going to the Permian Basin? Why is the Eagle Ford not getting the attention that it had three years ago? Those are all legitimate questions. The Eagle Ford isnt going anywhere. Theres still a lot of life in the Eagle Ford Shale. Theres still 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Eagle Ford. Youre seeing a lot of infrastructure, pipelines that are being connected from the Eagle Ford into Mexico to service that market. You see also the Port of Corpus Christi and their initiatives to widen the ship channel. Their exports have gone up tremendously since the export ban was lifted. Thats all Eagle Ford Shale.

Q: What do you tell people when they ask about the Permian?

A: Some companies right now have most of their financial resources going to the Permian Basin, and its not to say that theyre not drilling in Eagle Ford, because they still are. But most of their drilling programs are focused in the Permian Basin.

Q: I heard somebody at the DUG Conference talking about how the future of the Eagle Ford was really in gas.

A: Who knows what the future will hold? If oil prices go back in the $80 and $90 range, who knows? What we do know now is that its steady growth, and its manageable.

jhiller@express-news.net | Twiter: @Jennifer_Hiller
Former FourWinds Logistics CEO Stan Bates pleaded guilty Monday to eight felony charges, including securities fraud and money laundering, in the criminal case where hes a co-defendant with state Sen. Carlos Uresti.

Bates surprise plea came Monday at a hearing where his attorney was slated to ask U.S. Senior District Judge David Alan Ezra that Bates be tried separately from Uresti and a third defendant, Gary Cain. The three men were arrested in May and charged with a combined 22 counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with their work with FourWinds.

Ive had better days, a glum-looking Bates said before entering a guilty plea.

Ezra told the court that he wasnt told that Bates changed his mind on his request to sever his case until two minutes before the hearing. Bates didnt strike a deal with federal prosecutors as part of his plea. He remains free on bail pending his sentencing April 17.

The United States respects Mr. Bates decision to take full responsibility for his actions, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Blackwell said after the plea was entered, declining further comment.

Bates could testify against Uresti and Cain at their trial, which is scheduled to start with jury selection Jan. 18.

The three are accused of defrauding investors in FourWinds, a failed oil field services company that bought and sold sand used in hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas from shale rock.

Kurt May, Bates public defender, declined to comment, and it couldnt be determined what led to Bates decision not to fight the charges.

Bates faces decades in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on most of the individual charges and up to $5 million on each of two charges of securities fraud. He also may have to pay back any ill-gotten gains.

In federal court, taking responsibility for your crime is a big deal and can persuade judges to either stay within the (sentencing) guidelines or deviate lower from the guidelines, said San Antonio defense lawyer Miguel Najera, who is not involved in the case. It may be that they figured any plea deal would be harsh anyway, that by throwing themselves at the mercy of the court, they may get a little sympathy from the judge. Judges arent required to follow the federal sentencing guidelines.

What effect Bates guilty plea will have on Uresti is unclear.

Michael McCrum, a lawyer for Uresti, said his clients situation is completely different than Stan Bates, so we are looking forward to this trial and the truth coming out. The Democrat was FourWinds outside general counsel, a 1 percent owner and escrow agent. He also recruited investors. Bates held a 51 percent stake in FourWinds.

Najera said Bates guilty plea could work for or against Uresti. On one hand, Uresti can argue that Bates was the one committing the crimes and that he had nothing to do with it. Conversely, a co-defendant pleading guilty tends to make it look like youre guilty, although the prosecution has to be very careful about how they argue that, Najara said.

Its possible there was no plea deal for Bates because prosecutors couldnt rely on testimony he might offer, given previous statements he has made. After a court proceeding in Bates personal bankruptcy case where he was on the witness stand for two days in late 2015, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Gargotta said Bates was evasive, exhibited a lack of honesty about his financial affairs and often tried to cover his tracks. Bates invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself 73 times during his testimony.

Some FourWinds investors accused Bates of wasting their money on personal expenses, expensive gifts, exotic car rentals and a wild lifestyle spiced by lavish vacations and women flown in to meet him.

FourWinds entered bankruptcy in August 2015. Gargotta entered an order holding Bates personally liable for the companys $14.7 million in debts. Bates didnt contest the action. The debt cant be discharged by Bates personal bankruptcy.

FourWinds investor Richard Thum, who first went to the FBI to alert agents to potential criminal activity at the company, was pleased with Bates guilty plea.

I am glad that justice finally prevailed, Thum, president of SA Five Star Cleaners, said in a phone interview. Thats what I wanted to have happen. Hopefully, this will never happen again. Thum has said he got back only $163,000 of the $1.4 million he invested with FourWinds.

The San Antonio Express-News chronicled FourWinds demise and its FBI investigation in 2016. At the time, Uresti said he had been contacted as a witness in the probe. Bates, though, had a different take.

Theyve been after Uresti a long, long, long time, Bates said of prosecutors in an interview. Uresti fired back, Thats ridiculous, thats absurd. Its offensive.

Bates was seeking to be tried separately from Uresti and Cain because they were going to blame him for all the problems at FourWinds, according to court filings.

While the government will present evidence against all of the defendants, Bates (sic) will be the only defendant at the joint trial whose co-defendants will be reinforcing the governments position, May, the public defender for Bates, argued in a Friday court filing.

Bates is the fourth FourWinds official to plead guilty. Former Chief Operations Officer Shannon Smith, comptroller Laura Jacobs and marketing director Eric Nelson each pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and are cooperating with prosecutors. Each is scheduled to be sentenced this year.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad accepted Bates guilty plea. Guilty, your honor, was all Bates said when asked how he pleaded to the counts in a grand jury indictment.

During the plea hearing, Blackwell, the assistant U.S. attorney, recounted the charges against Bates.

Uresti and Bates touted Urestis position as a Texas state senator in sales pitches to investors, Blackwell said. Due in large part to the monetary payments that they (the defendants) were paid from FourWinds, FourWinds investors lost collectively millions of dollars.

The conspirators misused investors funds to enrich themselves and others, he added.

The Securities and Exchange Commission last summer revealed that it was investigating FourWinds. The SECs Fort Worth office opened the investigation Aug. 23, 2016, two days after the Express-News first reported on the companys demise.

Bates criminal case didnt stop him from pursuing other frac sand ventures. He and his Bates Energy Oil & Gas were accused by a Kansas company of backing out of a deal to lease frac sand. In November, a state district judge in Kansas entered a $650,000 judgment against Bates Energy for breaching a lease with Caldwell-Baker Co.

Bates Energy also is tied up in litigation with Utah-based Complete Oil Field Services in federal court in San Antonio. Bates Energy accused Complete of failing to accept delivery on more than 40,000 tons of frac sand. Complete filed its own action against Bates Energy, accusing it of failing to deliver sand on numerous occasions.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | @AlamoPD
AUSTIN  Spurred by the national opioid crisis, Texas is joining the majority of states that require medical providers to check patients prescription history before giving them powerful painkillers that can be highly addictive.

Lawmakers hope that mandating use of the states prescription monitoring program will reduce drug abuse in Texas, where more than 2,500 people died from overdoses in 2015, according to federal data.

We should be a part of trying to work with our state and those people who are impacted by this crisis to be able to do something to help them and bring the problem into control, said Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, sponsor of House Bill 2561 that was signed into law last year.

The mandatory checks, however, dont take effect until September 2019. Proponents sought the two-year delay to give pharmacists and physicians time to learn the system.

We want to make sure that  its rolled out very effectively, said Chris Wallace, president of the Texas Association of Business, which supported the bill. That is why waiting is going to be better in the long run.

Texas is one of roughly a dozen states that doesnt already mandate use of the drug-tracking databases, which can help identify over-prescribing and so-called doctor shopping among patients.

The Lone Star State created its prescription monitoring program more than three decades ago, but only a portion of eligible providers are using it, according to Allison Benz, executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.

That number has grown, however, since the pharmacy board recently took over the database from the Department of Public Safety, a law enforcement agency, and made it more user-friendly.

Over the last year, the number of provider searches has risen, while the amount of prescriptions dispensed for opioids and other powerful drugs declined slightly, according to data from the pharmacy board.

Its a far better tool than its ever been in the past and its only getting better, said Dan Finch, legislative affairs director for the Texas Medical Association. More and more physicians will use it whether or not theres a mandate, because its providing useful information for the treatment of their patients.

Rob Phelps, the pharmacist in charge at Rite-Away Pharmacy in San Antonio, said staff already check the database, especially for new patients, those who show up erratically or if something seems off. Recently, a pharmacist there elected not to fill a patients prescription just yet after searching the database and seeing it was too soon, Phelps said.

By and large we're already checking it. If I have any whiff of a suspicion then I check it, and I encourage the other staff pharmacists to do the same thing, said Phelps, who questioned the need for a blanket mandate. That is basically telling us how to practice and I am sure the physicians are going to be as unkindly opinionated to that as am I.

Bexar County in 2015 had one of the highest rates of opioid-related overdose deaths in the state, with more than 100 fatalities that year. But since a peak in 2012, opioid prescribing rates have fallen in Bexar County, a trend mirroring that at the state and national level, according to federal data.

Under the mandate, pharmacists and physicians in Texas will have to look up a patients prescription history before giving them opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates or carisoprodol. The checks wont apply when patients have cancer, or are in hospice care.

Those carve-outs could change, however, before the law even takes effect. A legislative committee is set to study the prescription monitoring program over the coming months and make recommendations for the next Legislative session, which begins at the start of 2019.

Meanwhile, other states are beefing up their prescription monitoring programs by adding more information, such as law enforcement reports on drug-related arrests or overdoses. The more data, the better able medical providers are able to flag people at risk of addiction who can be directed to treatment, said Patrick Knue, director at the PDMP Training and Technical Assistance Center.

The PMPs are just another tool  not any of them are going to be the end all, be all of solving the drug problem, he said. Ultimately, it boils down to folks in the health care community having enough information to provide proper treatment.

amorris@express-news.net
Dogs roaming the streets continue to be a common sight in some areas of San Antonio, but a heavy dose of education  along with a 12 percent increase in handing out tickets to errant pet owners  is finally making a dent in the problem.

A lot of animals we picked up ended up being owned animals, Animal Care Services Assistant Director Shannon Sims said. Its not a huge stray problem. Its a huge people problem were facing.

In 2013, there were 91,993 calls for service; for 2017, it was 98,092. But fewer animals are being impounded, and the number returned to their owners has more than tripled over the past five years from a little over 2,000 in 2013 to about 7,000 in 2017.

Taking responsibility is the key, officials say.

ACS spokeswoman Lisa Norwood said officers and staff spend a lot of time and energy educating the community that its illegal and unsafe to allow their animals to roam free of restraint. The ticket for a violation carries a $300 fine.

Its the roaming dogs that perhaps live in a front yard with a fence, and a gate, for whatever reason, is left open, allowing the dog to roam free in many neighborhoods, Norwood said. The solution is easy. Just two or three seconds to close a gate and keep the pets on their property. It comes down to one word: responsibility. Owners who allow their pets to roam are irresponsible.

ACS issued more than 11,000 citations last year, and Sims said the agency estimates that 13,000 will be issued in 2018. By contrast, there were only 5,070 issued in 2013.

Were changing peoples mentality about animals, Sims said. Its a long-term investment rather than short-term rewards. The real influence is going to be four or five years down the road.

Sims said roaming dogs are more prevalent on the South Side than on the North Side. City Council Districts 3 and 4 saw 6,200 dogs impounded last year alone  one fifth of all dogs impounded citywide. He said the biggest difference is that homeowner associations, more common on the North Side, can assign culpability, as opposed to neighborhood associations, which are often active on the South Side but dont have the authority to penalize those who let their dogs wander.

There are ongoing efforts on several fronts to address the issue. Last year, the council authorized funding for a dedicated ACS officer in each council district, such as Officer Robert Lopez in District 4, and a new spay/neuter clinic was opened at Brooks City Base.

A routine trip

Josephine Puente regularly sees dogs roaming in her Southwest Side neighborhood. Shes seen dogs of all breeds, sizes and colors during the 20 years shes been living in her home tucked away from busy traffic on Military Highway.

The 80-year-old Dallas Cowboys fan wasnt surprised when a brown and white terrier mix and her four puppies took up residence in a field across from her home. Nor was she surprised when Lopez arrived in his ACS truck. She watched from her driveway as he approached the dogs, a looped rope dangling from his belt, carrying a handful of treats.

As they nibbled at the snacks, Lopez slipped a leash over the adult dogs neck and led her to his truck. Within minutes hed secured two of her pups in kennels beside her. He spent more time rounding up the last two, who had scrambled beneath a parked Chevrolet. Sliding on his stomach, he reached under the car and retrieved the scared pups from their hiding place. He cradled each one separately as he reunited them with their siblings and mother.

They go and they come, Puente said as Lopez drove away in his truck toward the ACS campus, where the dogs would be vaccinated, microchipped and made available for adoption. Sometimes people throw them on the railroad tracks, and some just let them loose.

These are the true strays, the animals that dont have a caretaker, dont have a home or have been abandoned. But, as ACS officials point out, they arent the major problem. While Lopez catches and impounds these animals, hes spending more and more of his time talking with dog owners, trying to persuade them to be more responsible.

In many cases, he is taking more dogs back to a dog owner and educating them or fining them than taking them to the shelter, said District 4 Councilman Rey Saldana, who sees benefits of having a dedicated ACS officer in his district. That does so much to relive the stress not only on strays on the street and residents that call us, but it does so much to relieve more space at Animal Care Services for those dogs that are picked up.

The thousands of requests for picking up stray dogs and sending them to the city shelter are slowly giving way to better relationships with residents and directing roaming animals back home, the councilman noted.

I think its the best innovation we couldve come up with to make sure that someone knows the district as well as the council member who represents it, Saldana said Thats what Robert Lopez is for me.

Educating the community isnt just about publicizing the law against allowing dogs to roam or issuing tickets; its also about teaching prevention. To that end, ACS officers and animal advocates promote spay and neuter programs.

On the South Side, theres the new $1.3 million Brooks City Base Spay/Neuter clinic, which opened in February at 8034 City Base Landing. It offers low-cost surgeries, wellness clinics and educational services to South Side pet owners. The clinic also offers heartworm testing, microchipping and vaccines.

The San Antonio Humane Society operates the 2,500-square-foot clinic, which has separate holding rooms for cats and dogs, a surgery room, a surgery prep area and two exam rooms. The areas humane society is not associated with the Humane Society of the United States.

Krista Lazo, surgery services supervisor and clinic manager, said veterinarians perform an average of 45 surgeries a day at the clinic. She said they also work with the citys feral cat trap-and-release program and 20 local rescue groups.

I think what reminds us of why were here are the rescues, she said, because of the types of pets they bring in and how disheveled they may be.

She estimated that 40 percent of their sterilization surgeries are free and that the remaining 60 percent are low cost, made possible by grants from organizations such as the Petco Foundation.

Weve had an overwhelmingly positive response from the community, Lazo said. As a nonprofit, were grateful to get donations from Petco and the city.

Education continues

On a recent day, Lopez said he wrote more than 20 citations within five hours. By midafternoon he had stopped and talked to three residents about closing their gates and keeping their dogs on their property.

He said that after a year working the district and talking with residents, things have started to look up. He said hes discovered that sometimes, whether someone follows the law is a matter of resources. He promotes the shelters Four Paws program, which helps those who dont have the money to buy a dog house or the ability to fix broken fences.

It used to be a little more troubled, but after paying more attention to neighborhoods within the district it has gotten better, he said. Theres always going to be loose dogs, but education-wise, people have learned to take better care of their animals.

vtdavis@express-news.net
The Texas Senates state affairs committee will hear testimony on campus speech later this month at Texas State University, itself the site of a high-profile First Amendment conflict this fall.

The Jan. 31 Senate hearing will attempt to evaluate any restrictions on Freedom of Speech rights that Texas students face in expressing their views on campus along with freedoms of the press, religion, and assembly and recommend policy changes that protect First Amendment rights and enhance the free speech environment on campus.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican, asked the committee in the fall to discuss the issue in the interim.

The topic is not new for Texas lawmakers: State senators and representatives each introduced bills related to protecting expressive activities at public universities and colleges last session, but they died in committee.

Free speech on college campuses has been a polarizing issue in recent years as right-leaning politicians have accused universities of stifling conservative voices.

Texas State University itself was not immune. A student columnist wrote a piece viewed as anti-white called Your DNA is an abomination.

The president of the student government urged the paper to remove the columns author and several editors from staff or risk a loss of funds.

The universitys president weighed in, calling the columns theme abhorrent.

While I appreciate that the Star is a forum for students to freely express their opinions, I expect student editors to exercise good judgment in determining the content that they print, President Denise Trauth said in a statement. The Stars editors have apologized for the column and are examining their editorial process.

Free speech on campus is one of several interim topics related to higher education Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio charged lawmakers with tackling before they return to Austin in 2019. Others include sexual assault, Hurricane Harvey and dual credit.

No higher education committee meetings in either body have been scheduled.
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One cant miss the badge on the left side of the chest of a law enforcer or first responder. For them, it is an honor and reward for weeks, sometimes months, of training to earn a symbol known for authority and revered for the service and sacrifice paid by those who wear it.

Members of the San Antonio Police Department, San Antonio Fire Department and Bexar County Sheriffs Office will honor the Alamo City with special badges created to commemorate the citys 300th birthday. The badges are paid for by the people who will wear them, the agencies said.

The design work of all four was an interesting process because each of the departments came to us with designs, said Tammany Williams, owner of Celebrate Excellence, which makes medals, awards and trophies. The company made the badges for the Police Department, Fire Department and Sheriffs Office and Bexar County Constable, Precinct 1.

She said each badge is made of a zinc alloy that is similar to pewter, which allows a 3-D effect, and represents law enforcement at the earliest stage of the citys humble beginnings.

The Sheriffs Department will honor the city with a 3-inch badge rendered in 3-D that is available only to sworn deputies and retirees. Depending on rank, the badges will be offered in antique silver or brass.

Designed in part by sheriffs Sgt. Johnny Cavazos and approved by Sheriff Javier Salazar, its shape is a throwback to a historical peace officer shield. It contains an iconic five-point star atop a black field of an underlying shield. The seal of Bexar County is set into the center of the sheriffs star and a coat of arms quadrant that includes representations of Don Alvaro de Zuniga, Duke of Bexar in Spain, in the upper left; Mission San Francisco de la Espada in the upper right; an eagle representing the Aztec eagle of Mexico and the American bald eagle at lower left; and a cannon at lower right, representing battles for independence of the Republic of Texas.

I saw a rough design of the Police Departments badge, so my biggest thing was that I wanted to bring some of the old  the history from one of our previous sheriffs of the 1880s and 1890s and what we had today, Cavazos said.

Bexar County sheriffs Sgt. Tess Christensen and Cavazos have added historian to their duties at the Sheriffs Office and both conducted research to come up with designs for the badge.

We are doing this as a show of universal support, she said. We brainstormed about it and did the research.

Once the badges started showing up on deputies, the orders increased, Christensen said.

Williams said SAFDs badge, still being made, is interesting because it has three components that represent firefighters tools of the trade.

It's the only badge in town that is going to be a more contemporary badge, she said. The others all wanted to have a Western throwback look so they look old-timey.

SAFD Engineer Chris Silva designed the badge, which Chief Charles Hood authorized and is available to active duty firefighters, civilian personnel and pension retirees. The top contains a firefighter helmet and antique nozzles; the Maltese Cross, signifying an engineer rank and a universal symbol in fire service; and an officers badge shield without an eagle, where the helmet and nozzles rest.

Its a combination of all of our rank badges, said Joseph Arrington, SAFD public information officer. It will be customized with each individuals rank and badge number or the 300 for the Tricentennial.

SAPD Chief William McManus was the first to announce the badges in September. They are round, 25/8 inches in diameter and are finished in antique silver or brass, depending on rank of the officer. Designed by Sgt. Tonja Brandt and approved by McManus, it includes the Spanish coat-of-arms; the Franciscan seal; and an image of Martin de Alarcon, the governor of Coahuila and Texas, who established and named Mission San Antonio de Valero  known later as the Alamo  and the Presidio San Antonio de Bexar, a garrison to protect the mission. Officers who purchased them began wearing them Jan. 1.

Williams said she sees the badges as not just collectibles but family heirlooms that will be passed down through generations in the law enforcement and public safety family.

Its an amazing honor to help the law enforcement community in San Antonio celebrate the Tricentennial, said Williams. Its probably the most amazing thing we have ever done, and Im proud to be a part of what will now become a small piece of history for every law enforcement officer in town.

The Tricentennial badges will be worn throughout the year.

Elizabeth Zavala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | ezavala@express-news.net | @elizabeth2863
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Imagine making the nine-month trek to Mars just to have such poor vision upon arrival that its impossible to land.

That would be a nightmare for NASA astronauts headed to the red planet  but its a very real possibility if scientists dont develop a way to counteract a phenomenon that leaves men visually impaired after long-term exposure to zero gravity.

This is a big concern for astronauts, who are mostly pilots, said David Zawieja, regents professor at Texas A&M Universitys College of Medicine who is studying the problem for NASA. You have to have them be able to land and appropriately be able to see. They have to get there, land, do what they need to do and then return.

Researchers dont know why it happens or why only men have been affected and not women, Zawieja said. The leading hypothesis is that increased pressure in the heads of male astronauts is to blame.

Scientists at Texas A&M and Florida State University are studying how fluid pressure changes in a persons head, such as the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain from shock, might affect vision. Theyre also studying coronary artery function.

Space Flight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome appears to be more prevalent during long-duration missions.

Few data exist from which to determine the extent or cause of the syndrome, according to a November risk report produced by Houstons Johnson Space Center.

Researchers expect to have results this year from a study that launched 20 male mice to the International Space Station in August, with a goal of putting scientists one step closer to discovering why the vision problems happen to men.

Some scientists think zero gravity increases the cerebrospinal fluid pressure in the skull, increasing pressure in the back of the eyeballs and the optic nerve, Zawieja said.

When theres increased pressure on the nerve, it doesnt act properly, he said.

Others think the syndrome might be caused by increased vascular fluids, such as blood and lymph, in the head. About 68 ounces of this fluid  the same as a 2-liter bottle of soda  shift from an astronauts legs toward their head in space, according to NASA.

Scott Kelly, the first American to spend a continuous year in space, wrote in his book, Endurance, about the vision changes he experienced on many of his spaceflights. His vision would get blurry about 10 to 12 feet in front of him, he wrote, but eventually returned to normal back on Earth.

After his first long-duration flight, which lasted 159 days, Kelly wrote that doctors found swelling of his optic nerve as well as choroidal folds, similar to stretch marks, on his eye.

NASA researchers have identified these and other eye problems, such as the flattening of eye shape, in many male astronauts on long-duration space missions.

About 60 percent of 300 International Space Station astronauts who were surveyed by NASA said their vision had degraded, according to the Johnson report. It did not specify if the respondents were male or female.

Researchers are attempting creative ways to counteract this problem, but its difficult to do without knowing the exact cause. For example, as part of an experiment during his year on the space station, Kelly would don vacuum pants that literally sucked his body in an attempt to relieve the intracranial pressure experienced during spaceflight.

The human body is roughly 70 percent fluids, which includes blood, lymph and water contained within and around cells. On Earth, our cardiovascular system keeps those fluids distributed throughout our body despite the pull of gravity, according to a June 2015 NASA blog post from the space station. During spaceflight, body fluids accumulate in the upper body, causing a noticeable puffiness in astronauts faces.

The redistribution of fluids may contribute to vision problems in space, the post said.

Reducing the pressure on our lower bodies also reduces the amount of fluid in our heads, Kelly wrote. By studying the effects of (the Chibis pants) on our bodies, we hope to understand more about this problem.

The main problem is that measuring this type of pressure requires an invasive procedure, such as a spinal tap or drilling a hole in ones skull, which cannot safely be done in space.

Thats why the mice are a great asset for researchers.

After the mice returned from their one month on the space station, scientists extracted tissues, arteries and veins from the neck and head, for example. Those samples were tested and will be compared with samples from mice that stayed on the ground at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Zawieja and other scientists are planning a trip to Florida in April to continue their research efforts.

Rodents, obviously, are different from humans, but Zawieja believes that researchers can extrapolate from the findings. And he hopes that their findings eventually help NASA determine a way to combat the problem with astronauts vision, perhaps through medication.

Thats the goal: to figure out how to prevent this so when we go to Mars that by the time we return, we can see, he said.
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For years, Democrats tried in vain to uproot Rep. Lamar Smith from his 21st Congressional District seat, and political analysts saw little reason to suggest that 2018 would be different.

Every two years since 1986, voters in the right-leaning district endorsed the views of Smith, a skeptic of mainstream scientific views on climate change and a stalwart backer of Donald Trumps agenda, often electing him by margins north of 40 percentage points.

With Smiths announcement in November that he plans to retire from Congress, Democrats see an opportunity to regain the district they last held in 1979. Yet early polling and the nonpartisan Cook Political Reports partisan voter index give Republicans about a 10-point advantage in the district, which stretches from the North Side to south Austin and across parts of the Hill Country.

Now with 18 Republicans vying for Smiths seat and early voting for the March primaries starting in less than seven weeks, the Democratic candidates  Derrick Crowe, Joseph Kopser, Elliott McFadden and Mary Wilson  have turned their attention inward as they seek to differentiate themselves.

Its really just going to be about mobilization and turnout, said Bryan Gervais, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. If you have Democrats that are angry and frustrated, and Republicans dont have a known name theyve backed year in and year out, thats how Democrats can win. They have to be mobilized, and Republican (turnout) has to be depressed.

Strategically, the Democratic candidates have already established that they would take different approaches in the general election. Crowe, a former aide for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, plans to induce a massive Democratic turnout by hammering home a progressive agenda through a largely grass-roots campaign.

The way were going to win is by turning out the Democratic voters that typically vote in presidential elections but sit out the midterms, Crowe said.

He made a poke at Kopser, an Army veteran and Austin entrepreneur with a degree in aerospace engineering, whose campaign staff includes Joe Trippi, a longtime campaign consultant who most recently served as Doug Jones chief media strategist in Alabama.

Some of our opponents are building strategies on image consultants, but we have a really solid foundation of people power, Crowe said. I got into this race before the blue wave was discussed. My values led me to fight. And I feel very strongly that progressive values are going to win this race.

McFadden, a former executive director of the Travis County Democratic Party, echoed Crowes view, signaling that his campaign will focus on turning out progressives, not appealing to the center.

Weve looked at this race and the way the lines are drawn. In a wave election, theres probably about a 20,000-vote margin we need to overcome, McFadden said. Theres a huge wealth of voters that vote presidential but dont vote midterms, and thats where the difference is going to be made.

In 2016, Tom Wakely, a Democrat running in the mold of Bernie Sanders, lost to Smith by 73,000 votes. Smiths margin of victory of 20.6 percentage points was the narrowest of his congressional career.

This is a district more or less designed for Lamar Smith, and its designed so that you have (many) upper-class people who tend to vote Republican, Gervais said. Appealing to or adopting something along a Bernie Sanders message wouldnt gain much traction there.

Wilson said she thought all four Democrats see eye to eye on most policy issues. The crowded race should be a boon to the eventual primary winner, she said, because four Democratic primary campaigns will reach more voters on aggregate than a single operation would  possibly spurring higher turnout in November.

A pastor whos also taught math for 20 years, most recently at Austin Community College, Wilson is the only woman running in the Democratic primary. She said voters have expressed support because of her gender, but thats not why she wants people to vote for her.

Im a person whos comfortable in her own skin, and with what my values and priorities are, Wilson said. I think having that comfort level would be really helpful (in Congress)  Im an openly lesbian Baptist minister, and I can count on one hand how many people fit that profile.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Kopser held a wide cash-on-hand edge over the three other Democrats by the end of September, with $219,419, compared with Crowes $24,375, McFaddens $19,690 and Wilsons $3,232.

Kopser is therefore poised to take a different campaign approach. Where his team disagrees with the strategy of the Crowe and McFadden campaigns, said Kopsers campaign manager, Ian Rivera, is that their data show not enough Democrats live in the district to focus solely on turning out progressive voters.

Trippi echoed that idea, saying voters had reached a tipping point with the divisive partisan politics in Washington  and he billed Kopser as the best candidate to harness the public sentiment.

We certainly saw this in Alabama. People are responding to the message of rising above party and just doing whats best for their district or their state, and starting to really reject knee-jerk partisans, Trippi said.

Dean Rindy, a media consultant for McFaddens campaign, rejected the idea that running to the center would appeal to crossover voters. The strategy that will win the district is to mobilize progressives, not convert conservatives, Rindy said.

The experience Ive had is that Democrats who are Republican-lite candidates dont usually win in Texas, he said. You win elections with platforms that mobilize your base.

Much of the Democratic candidates prospects for winning the 21st District lie with who emerges from the Republican field, Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said, because a less conservative candidate could make appealing to moderate voters difficult for the Democratic nominee. The most conservative candidates might repel centrist voters, Jones said, giving the Democrat a chance to scoop them up.

Its going to take a perfect storm for Democrats to win, Jones said. But unlike (previous years), we cant say its completely out of the question.

Where Kopser falls on the political spectrum has become a key point of attack for McFadden and Crowe, who pointed out that Kopser sits on the board of the Texas Association of Business (TAB), a conservative business lobby. He has also expressed support for hydraulic fracturing, an oil and natural gas extraction method that can affect drinking water resources under some circumstances, the Environmental Protection Agency has said.

Rivera said Kopsers view about serving on the TAB board is simple: If youre not at the table, youre on the menu.

If progressive voices refuse to be present in places like that, were ceding the capacity to have our voices heard, Rivera said, noting that Kopser organized business leaders to lobby against the so-called bathroom bill, which would have prohibited transgender Texans from using bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity.

Meanwhile, Kopser sees fracking as a bridge to wean the economy off coal, Rivera said. His ultimate goal is to have an economy that runs on 100 percent renewable energy.

The reality is that we are not going to get there tomorrow, Rivera said. What Joseph sees, what we can do more immediately, is to ensure we phase out coal as an electricity resource. And whats killing coal is natural gas, and fracking is making natural gas affordable.

Local politicians and community leaders are already lining up in large numbers behind the candidates. A slew of Austin City Council and Travis and Hays County officials have put their weight behind McFadden, while several youth Democratic groups, environmentalist Bill McKibben and Our Revolution, a grass-roots group affiliated with Bernie Sanders, have backed Crowe.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has endorsed Kopser, while Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff announced his support in December, saying he planned to stay connected with Kopsers campaign through the primary.

Ive always felt the Democratic Party is missing some outstanding candidates that are still young, that have a military background, Wolff said. That he combined that with entrepreneurism, its very rare to find a candidate like that.

Rivera counted the ability of Wolff to connect with San Antonio donors as a key advantage.

Rindy called Kopser the candidate of the Washington establishment, noting that the race embodies what has become a party civil war of sorts between D.C. power brokers and grass-roots organizers. Meanwhile, McFadden and Crowe remained unfazed about Kopsers money advantage and the campaign team he has assembled.

Im not concerned about Joe Trippi, McFadden said. I think what were seeing in Kopsers campaign is a lot of excitement from D.C. insiders, but not a lot of support from District 21. And at the end of the day, its the voters who decide this.

Jasper Scherer is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jscherer@express-news.net | @jaspscherer
Mr Cooper said all the costs associated with producing and selling cattle kept going up every year but the prices he got from the stock remained about the same.
He said the blood-drinking fly had been present on his farm for years, but this year it had been irritating the young cattle so much it had caused them to bunch together for protection, while flicking sand up to ward off the flys  which has gone into the cattles eyes, causing irritation and infection.
Princess Charlotte had a huge smile on her face as she prepared for her first day of nursery on Monday (08.01.18).

Princess Charlotte

The two-year-old daughter of Prince William and Duchess Catherine smiled widely as she posed for photographs on the steps of Kensington Palace ahead of her first day at the nearby Willcocks Nursery School.

The pictures - taken by the Duchess of Cambridge - posted on the Kensington Palace official Twitter account were captioned: "The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to share two photographs of Princess Charlotte at Kensington Palace this morning.

"The images were taken by The Duchess shortly before Princess Charlotte left for her first day of nursery at the Willcocks Nursery School."

The location of Princess Charlotte's nursery school was revealed last month in a post shared on the family's Instagram account.

Alongside a photograph of Prince William, Duchess Catherine, Charlotte and her four-year-old brother George, the caption read: "Their Royal Highnesses have also announced this morning that Princess Charlotte will attend the Willcocks Nursery School in London from January 2018."

And the institution were equally "delighted" that the couple - who are expecting their third child together - have selected their nursery for Princess Charlotte to attend.

A spokesperson for The Willcocks Nursery School said in a statement: "We are delighted that The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have chosen the Willcocks Nursery School for Princess Charlotte. We look forward to welcoming Charlotte to our nursery in January."
Manic Street Preachers are eager to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of their 'This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours' album.

Manic Street Preachers

The chart-topping record, which was released in 1998, features hits such as 'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next' and 'You Stole The Sun From My Heart', and lyricist Nicky Wire has hinted at how the band plans to honour the landmark.

He shared: "It's 20 years of 'This Is My Truth', so we might do something around that.

"Only because we have so much stuff that's never been heard. In my archive, that's the one that takes up the most space. I don't know about gigs, but there's just so much stuff that no one has ever heard. It's our biggest selling album."

Nicky - who stars in the band alongside James Bradfield and Sean Moore - also revealed some details of their upcoming UK arena tour, promising it will feature "a few nice surprises".

He told NME magazine: "We'll play some more oddities. We did the Q Awards and chucked in 'A Song For Departure' and that went down really well, so there will be a few 'Lifeblood'-ers in there, that's for sure. James is desperate to get 'Prologue To History' in the set. I did tell him there are about 5,000 words in that song so his lung capacity needs to be up.

"There are going to be quite a few nice surprises. 'Slash N' Burn' is going to go back in. Maybe a few more from 'This Is My Truth' too, as it is 20 years. Maybe we'll throw in a few slightly different ones from that."
Joe McFadden is still unemployed since winning 'Strictly Come Dancing'.

Joe McFadden

The 42-year-old actor's character in BBC medical drama 'Holby City' was killed off before Christmas and the star was hoping after the holiday break the offers would start to pour in.

Joe is quoted by The Sun Online as saying: "There haven't been any job offers.

"There have been some discussions but there is nothing solid at all so I really don't know what I'm going to do.

"I know there was a lot of talk about what might happen but because of everyone being off over Christmas and New Year, nothing has come about."

The former 'Holby' star and his professional partner Katya Jones beat celebrity rivals Debbie McGee, Alexandra Burke and Gemma Atkinson to bag the Glitterball Trophy in the grand final of the dance contest in December, watched by 13 million viewers.

During his time on the show, Joe quit his role in the hospital drama as surgeon Raf di Lucca, who he had played since 2014. Fans were left shocked when Raf was dramatically shot dead by Fredrik Johanssen (Billy Postlethwaite).

After his success on the dancefloor, Joe is hoping to land a role in a West End musical.

He said: "I think that now people have seen me dance it would be a shame not to go ahead and do that again.

"Having just come off the biggest show on television, I want to make the right decision.

"And having done four years on Holby I don't necessarily want a long-term thing.

"But as an actor you never know where your next job will come along so I'll just have to see."

In the meantime, the Scottish actor is going to be busy with the 'Strictly Live Tour', performing with Katya to audiences around the UK.

Joe said: "I'm really looking forward to seeing everybody and dancing again. The Glasgow shows are the ones I'm looking forward to most, getting out in front of my hometown crowd."
Matthew S. Friedman (RMG Times) Over the past year, investigations into several major name brands have identified slavery-like conditions within their supply chains. The intent of these investigative reports was to embarrass the companies, with the hope and expectation that this naming and shaming will bring about a significant change. In some cases, a boycott of the companys products was also suggested.

The rationale for this approach is simple. The use of exploitative and forced labour is only profitable to the extent that the products produced by this labor can be sold. Remove the market for goods produced by forced labour and there is no incentive for its use. In recognition of this, the US and UK governments have taken a lead in targeting exploitative practices in the supply chains of major companies through new legislation. While there is a very little argument as to the value of targeting supply chains, there is room for discussion as to how this is best done. Naming and shaming is one approach  there are others.

At present, most campaigns against companies are what might be called incident-based, that is, there is an incident, often tragic, in a factory that supplies goods to a major corporation. While such incidents need to be addressed and all steps taken to prevent similar incidents, there are several basic problems with their use as a basis for naming and shaming.

First, it is not necessarily the worst companies that are targeted, but those who have an incident that becomes public. Second, the response to these incidents tends not to be balanced  they focus on the negative aspects without acknowledging that progress might have been made over time. For example, one prominent electronic company has received considerable bad press for exploitative working conditions in one of its factories, yet no good press for ensuring that thousands of migrant workers charged excessive fees were reimbursed. The third problem is that there is a tendency for companies to address incidents in supply chains by disassociation, immediately cutting contracts with offending factories. This is often the first advice provided by public image companies brought in to assist in managing the fall-out. Sadly, for those being exploited this may often make the situation even worse, depriving all those associated with the factory with their source of income.

If the expectation is that naming and shaming will bring about a significant change, it is not always clear how this can be achieved. In the environmental movement, where this tactic has been used extensively, the results are at best mixed.The approach itself is simple  you identify a perceived wrongful act, you identify an organization involved, and you publically expose them. You then try to initiate a discussion to bring about the desired change. While the first few steps can easily be achieved by this approach, the last, most important one, can sometimes be rendered impossible the moment the article hits the press. Human nature is very straightforward in this regard. If someone shames, embarrasses or attempts to harm you, you are not likely to sit down with them to hear their advice and guidance. Yes, some changes might be made by the corporation, but these can sometimes be short-term, reactive and insufficient. Instead of opening the door to dialogue, this shuts it forever.

While there may always be a need for naming and shaming when excessive labor violations are uncovered, and where companies repeatedly fail to address problems, there are other options. A more successful approach might include engagement with the private sector in a positive and supportive manner. For example, if slavery-like conditions are identified, the first step could be for concerned organizations to work with the company to help them to correct the problem without it going public. This would change the approach from being confrontational to collegial.

Over the past three years, I have met with countless private sector managers and directors from many major companies who really do care about this topic. They share the same world that we do and worry about the future for their own offspring. They also understand that an increased attention to the plight of workers in their companies supply chains means that addressing these problems is a business as well as a moral imperative. The private sector has extensive human and financial resources that could be brought to bear to help address the problem. They know how to identify and root out bad businesses if they look for them. They have the skills and capabilities to tackle the problem, e.g. legal, compliance, accounting, communications, and financial expertise. Thus, if the private sector were to become more active in the fight, they could play a key role in significantly reducing the number of human slavery victims, improving the lives of countless others along the way.This means working with them to bring about a positive change.

Writer: Matthew S. Friedman is the CEO of The Mekong Club, an organization of Hong Kong-based private sector business people who have joined forces to address human trafficking in Asia, which he also co-founded. From 2006 to 2012, Friedman was the Regional Manager of the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) In Thailand, an inter-agency that links the United Nations system with governments and civil society groups in China, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Prior to this, Friedman worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal. He is an international human trafficking expert with more than 25 years of experience and technical advisor to numerous governments working to address slavery and human trafficking.
Hundreds of international apparel and textile manufacturers from China, India, Bangladesh, the US, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico and many other countries and territories from across Central and South America and all around the globe will participate in the Apparel Textile Sourcing Miami (ATS-M) trade show and conference, to be held during May 21-23, 2018.Small businesses, retailers, manufacturers and designers across the United States and Latin America will get a boost for the summer with show expanding to Miami.

Hundreds of international apparel and textile manufacturers from China, India, Bangladesh, the US, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico and many other countries and territories from across Central and South America and all around the globe will participate in the Apparel Textile Sourcing Miami (ATS-M) trade show and conference, to be held during May 21-23, 2018.#

Moishe Mana, Miami-based billionaire developer and CEO of Mana Group said, We are committed to making Miami the nexus for commerce between Asia, North America, and Latin America. He continued, "Were excited to have ATS Miami join this initiative as the fashion and apparel industry is one of our core verticals.The ATS brand has established itself internationally with Apparel Textile Sourcing Canada, held every August in Toronto. In 2017 the event grew by more than 50 per cent in attendees and international exhibits.Next to the hundreds of manufacturers booths and exhibits, ATS-Miami will deliver 3-days-worth of an unprecedented platform of global connections in manufacturing and fashion.The show will give attendees new insights and information to best navigate and profit in the international sourcing process and focus on manufacturer transparency, speed and responsiveness, and benefits of near sourcing Americas.The expansion of the ATS Brand to Miami is a direct response to the market demand and fills a significant gap for the US-and-Latin American markets, said Jason Prescott, CEO of JP Communications, organiser of the event and parent-company to TopTenWholesale.com and Manufacturer.com, the most expansive network of business-to-business sourcing platforms in the US.ATS-Miami provides a unique opportunity for apparel and textile importers and retailers to intersect and access the most current importing information from the top industry insiders. Imagine the time and money saved for the local and Latin importers. The producers are coming from Asia to Miami, Prescott said, emphasising that China alone exports $42 billion in apparel a year to the US and $11 billion a year to Latin America.Clay Hickson, VP Strategy and Business Development with Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) said, The team at Apparel Textile Sourcing puts on great events and were excited to partner with them again in Miami. We have partnered with ATS since the launch of the first event in Toronto, which has quickly grown to be an important apparel and fashion industry event in North America.ATS-M will have three days-worth of seminars, panels and runway shows featuring acclaimed industry and government experts, covering topics from trade agreements to best practices with an eye on the changing Latin American market, as well as tips on how to choose overseas producers, plus new approaches on succeeding in the US market.The ATS-Miami design pods and fashion show will include international apparel producers, Latin American artisans, Made-in-Americas manufacturers and active design students, said Apparel Textile Sourcing director John Banker. The runway at ATSM will knock the socks off of summer fashion!ATS-M will also feature a Made in USA Pavilion, showcasing US-based manufacturers who source apparel and textiles from abroad for their finished goods, as well as US designers who have their designs produced into finished products overseas, the Americas Pavilion featuring products from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and a Summer 2018 Apparel and Textile Trends display, providing a first-hand look at the colours, patterns and textures that will be all the rage for the summer nights in Miami.Apparel Textile Sourcing tradeshows are supported in coordination with a range of international and domestic partnerships, including the Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Textile and Apparel (CCCT), TopTenWholesale.com, Manufacturer.com, the Bangladesh High Commission, the Export Promotion Bureau of Bangladesh, Trade Development Authority Pakistan, India Exhibitions, Pro Mexico, Pro Colombia, ProNicaragua, Proesa, VESTEX, Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, Canadian Merchandiser, Apparel Export Promotion Council, and the Sourcing Journal. (SV)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Myanmars National Committee for Minimum Wage has decided to set the basic daily salary of workers at 4800 kyat (K). State and regional committees will receive suggestions or objections to the proposed rate, study those in consultation with workers and employers, and take a final call on the figure. The minimum wage now is K3600, set in September 2012.The garment industry in Myanmar has been adversely affected over the past few years owing to the minimum wage issue. The Myanmar Labour Union Federation and the Cooperating Committee of Trade Unions (CCTU) have objected to the proposed new rate.

Myanmar's National Committee for Minimum Wage has decided to set the basic daily salary of workers at 4800 kyat (K). State and regional committees will receive suggestions or objections to the proposed rate, study those in consultation with workers and employers, and take a final call on the figure. The minimum wage now is K3600, set in September 2012.#

Workers in the country have been demanding a daily rate of K5600-6600. Ko Myo Zaw, a Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar member, argued that K5600-6600 was a more reasonable figure as workers struggle with high cost of living, especially in cities, says a report in a Myanmarese newspaper.CCTU has urged the government and employers to study the real living cost of workers and their families and decide whether K4800 is sufficient to cover their daily living costs. (DS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
The Pakistani Government has withdrawn sales tax and customs duty on cotton imports with effect from January 8, 2018 to meet the shortfall of silver fibre, a key input in the countrys textile industry. The Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet approved a proposal regarding the same at a meeting headed by Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi.

The textile sector, which contributes more than 60 per cent of the countrys total exports of $20 billion, had been demanding the abolition of 4 per cent customs duty and 5 per cent sales tax since last year to promote value addition.



The ECC meeting also approved financing plan for 1.2 billion cubic feet/day capacity of re-gasified liquefied natural gas (RLNG-III) pipeline project from Karachi to Lahore, according to Pakistani media reports.



The country set up its first RLNG plant in 2015 with a production capacity of 600 million metric cubic feet/day (mmcfd), and another with the same capacity was added recently to reduce the gap between demand and supply of around 2 billion cubic feet per day.



Despite being the worlds fourth largest cotton producer, Pakistan relies on import of cotton to meet local demand, which is estimated at 15 to 16 million tons per year. Cotton production is expected to be around 11.1 million bales of 170kg each during the 2017-18 crop year. (DS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Ten organisations have committed to the ZDHC Roadmap to Zero Programme, a coalition of over 85 contributors. These organisations will work together for widespread implementation of sustainable chemistry, driving innovations and best practices in the textile, apparel and footwear industries to protect consumers, workers and the environment.

"Its great to see the continuous ongoing support from the industry," said ZDHC executive director Frank Michel.

The ten new organisations joining as the value chain affiliates and associates belong to various industries including textile, chemical and information technology. The associates are Jollity Enterprise, Smit & zoon, ACS Textiles Bangladesh Ltd, Salirone, Santori Pellami Spa, Geo-Chem Laboratories Pvt Ltd, Modern Testing Services, Process Factory srl, Ritex Research and Textile Testing Lab and UNPAC.

Ten organisations have committed to the ZDHC Roadmap to Zero Programme, a coalition of over 85 contributors. These organisations will work together for widespread implementation of sustainable chemistry, driving innovations and best practices in the textile, apparel and footwear industries to protect consumers, workers and the environment. #

"We appreciate the help and commitment from all our contributors and are delighted to welcome these ten new organisations to our ZDHC Family," said Michel. "With the onboarding of the new contributors we also enlarge our geographic scope and depth by welcoming the first organisation headquartered in Bangladesh as well as growth in the number of contributors from Italy."

By joining ZDHC, the organisations will not only help to work on the programmes vision, but also commit to a strengthened commitment towards better chemical management practices and the adoption and implementation of ZDHC tools. These include, amongst others, the ZDHC Manufacturing Restricted Substances List (ZDHC MRSL) and the ZDHC Wastewater guidelines.

Recently, ZDHC officially launched the ZDHC Implementation HUB in Amsterdam. The Implementation HUB takes the scaling of chemical and environmental management best practices to the next level and accelerates impact along the value chains of the textile, apparel, footwear and leather industries. (RR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
PLANO, TexasandSHELTON, Connecticut, Jan. 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Research Now SSI continues to support its Davao employees in the aftermath of the December 23, 2017 fire at the NCCC Mall in which 37 of the facility's 500 call center employees perished.

Research Now SSI is continuing to pay the Davao employees despite the loss of the Davao facility and is exploring avenues toprovide them withemployment.

Efforts continue to reimburse employees for personal effects that were destroyed in the fire. Additionally, Research Now SSI continues to secure counseling for employees and victims' families.

These moves are in line with the company's top priority of ensuring the welfare of the families of the victims and the well-being of employees, while cooperating fully with authorities in the investigation of the fire.

In addition to initial financial assistance provided to the families of the employees who were lost, the follow up initiative to raise more funds has netted over US$115,000 to date. The company is now making preparations to release those funds to the families.

Gary S. Laben, CEO of Research Now SSI, says, "Our Davao employees have shown incredible resiliency and strength in the wake of the tragedy. We are committed to helping sustain them as members of our global company and as part of the Research Now SSI family."

The Davao call center operation was founded in July 2008 as part of the company's market research Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) services.

About Research Now SSI

Research Now SSI is the global leader in digital research data for better insights and business decisions. The company provides world-class research data solutions that enable better results for more than 3,500 market research, consulting, media, healthcare, and corporate clients. Research Now SSI operates globally with locations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and is recognized as the quality, scale, and customer satisfaction leader in the market research industry. For more information, please go towww.researchnow.comandwww.surveysampling.com.

Editors, for more information, contact:

Barbara Palmer

bpalmer@researchnow.com

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/621661/RN_SSI_Dual_Logo.jpg
BEVERLY HILLS, CA / ACCESSWIRE / January 6, 2018 / During a brazen daytime robbery in Cannes, France on July 28, 2013, $136 million in diamonds and other jewels were stolen from the famous InterContinental Carlton Hotel on the French Riviera. Four years later, that remains the largest heist in Europe in decades, but smaller incidents continue to occur on a regular basis in tourist destinations around the world. While these stories allow for fascinating intrigue, they also make clear the danger of traveling with expensive watches and jewelry. Steven Rostovsky, North America's exclusive Greubel Forsey watch distributor, multi brand pre-owned wholesale dealer and an avid timepiece collector, discusses the steps that should be taken to protect valuable personal items when away from home.

'Most wealthy tourist destinations attract criminals, petty or otherwise, so the first consideration must be whether to even travel with items of importance,' said Rostovsky. If one must, when booking a hotel ensure that it provides a highly secure safe deposit box. Never leave valuables unattended in a room or rental car, and don't wear it in public places where it is first visible and then you may be inclined to take it off, such as the pool or spa. In most states and countries the hotel's liability is limited, meaning they will not be held responsible for any goods lost or stolen on their property. Steven Rostovsky continued to note that theft is not the only threat to jewelry when on vacation. Fine pieces can be subject to damage, especially in transit. If packed improperly, wristwatches, diamonds, pearls or other gems can become scratched and bracelets and necklaces can get caught on one another. Travel cases, made from hard leather to silk, have various pouches designed to keep pieces separate and in their place. A jewelry roll, essentially a soft cloth with compartments that is folded over and tied up with a ribbon, is also commonly used to transport valuables.

If traveling with expensive pieces is a necessity, the best idea is often to have it insured separately from a homeowner's policy. The International Gemological Institute (IGI) works with GemShield, a provider of specialized personal jewelry insurance, to offer reasonable policies. When buying IGI-graded gemstones or other products, consumers can now obtain a plan protecting them against 'all risks' of loss, including theft and damage. Chubb also offers competitive rates for insuring collectible wristwatches. For large collections, you can distinguish between items kept in a bank vault versus those 'out' for use. This significantly lowers the rate for the entire collection. Remember however to notify your insurance provider that you have removed items for use while on vacation. Rostovsky reminded that not all policies provide coverage outside of the United States, so ensure that international travel is included if needed.

Steven Rostovsky is the owner and operator of Rostovsky Watches in Beverly Hills, California. Along with his wife, Janine, and three children - Jason, Taryn and Alexa - Rostovsky is committed to positively impacting greater Los Angeles. The philanthropic family donates regularly to various Jewish and secular groups, and they give their time generously to organizations that help the needy throughout their community.

Steven Rostovsky - Rostovsky Watches in Beverly Hills, CA: http://stevenrostovskynews.com

Steven Rostovsky - on Watches Inspired by Automobiles: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steven-rostovsky-watches-inspired-automobiles-005100652.html

Steven Rostovsky - Shares Strategies for Finding Collectible Watches: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steven-rostovsky-shares-strategies-finding-175000342.html

Contact Information:

StevenRostovskyNews.com

contact@stevenrostovskynews.com

http://stevenrostovskynews.com

SOURCE: Steven Rostovsky


PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Sanofi and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ALNY) announced a strategic restructuring of their RNAi therapeutics alliance to streamline and optimize development and commercialization of certain products for the treatment of rare genetic diseases.



Sanofi noted that it will obtain global development and commercialization rights to fitusiran, an investigational RNAi therapeutic, currently in development for the treatment of people with hemophilia A and B. Global commercialization of fitusiran, upon approval, will be done by Sanofi Genzyme, the specialty care global business unit of Sanofi. Alnylam will receive royalties based on net sales of fitusiran products. Alnylam will obtain global development and commercialization rights to its investigational RNAi therapeutics programs for the treatment of ATTR amyloidosis, including patisiran and ALN-TTRsc02. Sanofi will receive royalties based on net sales of these ATTR amyloidosis products. With respect to other products falling under the RNAi therapeutics alliance, the material terms of the 2014 Alnylam-Sanofi Genzyme alliance remain unchanged.



Fitusiran complements Sanofi Genzyme's rare hematology portfolio, and creates a focus on bringing an innovative product to market globally, upon approval, for people living with hemophilia, one of the most common rare diseases.



The restructuring will enable Sanofi to assume full responsibility for development and commercialization of fitusiran, including costs. However, during the anticipated transition period Alnylam will fund such costs. Alnylam intends to substantially complete the transition of fitusiran to Sanofi by mid-2018. Sanofi will pay Alnylam a milestone of $50 million following dosing of the first patient in the ATLAS Phase 3 program for fitusiran.



Alnylam will fund all development and commercialization costs for patisiran and ALN-TTRsc02 going forward. There will be no additional milestones due to either company with respect to patisiran or ALN-TTRsc02.



Sanofi intends to substantially complete the transition of its patisiran activities in regions outside the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, consistent with the original scope of its license rights to patisiran, by mid-2018.



Sanofi Genzyme and Alnylam will be eligible to receive tiered royalties of 15 to 30 percent on global net sales of ALN-TTRsc02 and fitusiran, respectively, upon approval and commercialization. Previously, these programs were subject to co-development and co-commercialization terms in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.



For patisiran, Sanofi Genzyme will be eligible to receive royalties, increasing over time to up to 25 percent, on sales in territories excluding the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.



Sanofi continues to have the right to opt into other Alnylam rare genetic disease programs for development and commercialization in territories outside of the United States, Canada and Western Europe, as well as one right to a global license.



Separately, Alnylam also plans to support The Medicines Company's continued efforts with respect to the ORION Phase 3 studies of inclisiran - an investigational RNAi therapeutic targeting PCSK9 in development for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia - throughout 2018. Specifically, The Medicines Company has guided to complete enrollment in the ORION 9, 10, and 11 LDL-C pivotal studies in early 2018 and to initiate enrollment in the ORION 4 cardiovascular outcomes (CVOT) study in mid-2018. Alnylam is eligible to receive milestones and royalties of up to 20 percent from The Medicines Company based on the successful development and commercialization of inclisiran.



In addition, the company plans to continue advancement of its earlier-stage clinical pipeline programs with multiple data read-outs expected throughout 2018. Alnylam also plans to file one or more new clinical trial applications (CTA) in 2018, and advance its infectious disease collaboration with Vir Biotechnology.



The company now expects to end 2017 with greater than $1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, and restricted cash and intends to provide financial guidance for 2018 in connection with its year-end 2017 financial results in February.



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Groupe PSA finished 2017 stronger, with five car brands and one mobility brand

A short film (<4 minutes) featuring the year's highlights is now available

Regulatory News:

Groupe PSA (Paris:UG):

2017 in a few minutes

Opel Vauxhall joined Groupe PSA and are now focusing on the deployment of "PACE!", theirstrategic plan to become profitable, electric and global. With these two brands, Groupe PSA is emerging as European champion.

Meanwhile, the Group's teams have been rigorously and methodically rolling out its strategic plan for profitable growth: "Push to Pass".

The worldwide product offensive continued with the Peugeot 3008 (elected European Car of the Year 2017), the Peugeot 5008, Citroen C5 Aircross, Citroen C3 Aircross, Citroen C4 Cactus, the new premium vehicle DS 7 Crossback, and a revamped product offering for light commercial vehicles. And for Opel Vauxhall: the Crossland X, Grandland X and Insignia GSI are worthy of note.

The development of innovative, efficient and useful technologies is on track with a faster shift toward electric technologies, the launch of the AVA (Autonomous Vehicle for All) programme and yet more recognition for the 1.2-litre 3-cylinder turbo PureTech, again classed "Engine of the Year" in 2017.

Groupe PSA now operates in every region of the globe and is forging new partnerships worldwide. It has even returned to the United States with the Free2Move mobility brand.

To better serve its customers, the Group is developing online purchasing services and offering 100% immersive services for customers. It has updated its line-up of used vehicles, parts and services and launched the Free2Move app. Its professional customers have their own dedicated service in Free2Move Lease.

None of these successes would have been possible without the daily commitment of all the Groupe PSA teams and the work carried out alongside employee representatives to build the Group's future.

Watch this short video to review all of the achievements from the past year and see how they have prepared Groupe PSA to face new challenges in 2018.

Video

About Groupe PSA

The Groupe PSA designs unique automotive experiences and delivers mobility solutions to meet all client expectations. The Group has five car brands, PeugeotCitroenDSOpel and Vauxhall, as well as a wide array of mobility and smart services under its Free2Move brand, aiming to become a great carmaker and the preferred mobility provider. It is an early innovator in the field of autonomous and connected cars. It is also involved in financing activities through Banque PSA Finance and in automotive equipment via Faurecia. Find out more at groupe-psa.com/en.

Media library: medialibrary.groupe-psa.com @GroupePSA

Communications Division www.groupe-psa.com/en - +33 6 61 93 29 36- @GroupePSA

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108005854/en/

Contacts:

Groupe PSA

Media contact:

+ 33 6 61 93 29 36

psa-presse@mpsa.com
BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - U.K. shares were marginally lower on Monday as weak earnings overshadowed a positive trend across Asia and Europe. Investors also looked ahead to a possible cabinet reshuffle this week. The benchmark FTSE 100 was little changed with a negative bias at 7,721 in late opening deals after rising 0.4 percent on Friday. Software giant Micro Focus slumped 11 percent after the company warned the integration of HPE software could delay the division's return to revenue growth. Mothercare shares fell as much as 26 percent after the baby goods retailer warned of substantially lower annual profits. Babcock International Group advanced 0.6 percent as it launched a bid for UK Ministry of Defence's new 1.25 billion pound Type 31e general purpose light frigate program. 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.
SHANGHAI, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Building on its success in 2017, the China International Building Decoration Fair (CBD Fair) will return to Shanghai National Convention and Exhibition Center from March 21 to 23, 2018, with more than 400 global enterprises.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/625514/CBD.jpg

CBD-IBCFT (Shanghai) is an extension of the original CBD Fair in Guangzhou, which is the world's largest building decoration exhibition. In 2017, CBD Fair (Guangzhou) covered an exhibition area of 390,000 square meters with 916,013 participants during its run from July 8-11. This March, CBD-IBCTF (Shanghai) will bring together all top-tier brands of the building and decoration sector, including Suofeiya, WISION and PIANO across an area of 80,000 square meters.

Highlights of the fair will include:

Publicly listed enterprises of Customization

Smart Home products varies from Smart Locks to Smart Hanger Systems

Leading brands of Full-home Customization from South China

Rising Premium Remodeling brands from Yangtze River Delta

Top Wooden Doors enterprises from Beijing

High-end Doors & Windows blooming here

This year, CBD-IBCFT (Shanghai) will unveil cutting-edge technologies in intelligent locks as well as smart hanger systems from top brands, including Samsung and TENON.

"With the size of the global smart home market estimated to reach US$ 122 billion by 2022, it's the biggest growth area for the home decoration industry, and presents many crossover opportunities with the electronics and high tech sectors," said president Liu of the CBD Fair. "We hope that our guests will find new product ideas and partnership possibilities at the fair."

CBD-IBCFT (Shanghai) 2018 will also gather top-tier home decoration brands, not only the leading ones from South China, but also those rising from the Yangtze River Delta. Exhibitors will bring their latest and most comprehensive products and share their concepts with participants.

In addition, Wooden Doors will display their premium remodeling products at this year's fair. Manufacturers including TATA, Holtz and Kaimo, the most famous enterprises from Beijing, showcase together with top brands originated from Yangtze River Delta. They will demonstrate new technologies, bringing the home decoration industry into the modern era, enabling buyers to explore home decoration concepts in a new, immersive way.

About the CBD Fair

Founded in 1999, the CBD Fair is hosted twice per year. CBD-IBCTF (Shanghai) is hosted by the China Foreign Trade Centre and the China Building Decoration Association.
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.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA -- (Marketwired) -- 01/08/18 -- Spectra7 Microsystems Inc. (TSX: SEV) ("Spectra7" or the "Company"), a leading provider of high-performance analog semiconductor products for broadband connectivity markets, is showcasing its new DreamWeVR products and reference designs for mobile tethered AR/VR/MR head-mounted displays ("HMDs") at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV from January 8-12, 2018.

"As the established market-leader of high-performance semiconductors for AR/VR/MR interconnects, Spectra7 intends to expand into the mobile tethered space and accelerate time-to-market for our OEM customers," said Spectra7 CEO Raouf Halim. "Backed by a very strong patent portfolio, including 36 patents in the field of active cables, our semiconductors and reference designs offer the reality industry's thinnest, lightest, and highest performing mobile solutions."

Spectra7 has established itself as the market leader providing active copper cable solutions for the AR/VR/MR HMD market. Most tethered systems shipping today connect to a PC or console. As smartphones become more powerful, a new generation of mobile HMDs are emerging that connect to a user's mobile device with a thin cable similar to what are used for audio ear-buds today. Spectra7's ICs make this possible by restoring the display and camera data signals that are attenuated and distorted by the extremely thin copper conductors.

Spectra7's Latest Reference Design Configurations

Three DreamWeVR Type-C (VRC) reference design configurations and supporting modules are now available to mobile OEM customers:

- DreamWeVR VRC 4+2 featuring 4 lanes of DisplayPort and USB 2.0 - DreamWeVR VRC 2+2 featuring 2 lanes of DisplayPort and USB 2.0 - DreamWeVR VRC 2+3 featuring 2 lanes of DisplayPort and USB 3.2

These reference designs enable mobile AR/VR/MR OEMs to quickly and cost-effectively bring products to market. These VRC configurations all feature the new USB Type-C connector that is rapidly becoming the de facto interface on virtually all new smartphones1. Active cable module sets to support these reference designs are now available for sampling with production planned for the end of first quarter 2018.

These reference designs feature the Company's latest AR/VR/MR optimized, high-performance, analog IC's that represent the reality industry's broadest range, highest performance, lowest power and smallest size devices, including:

-- VR8200 - DisplayPort HBR2 Embedded Cable Processor

- Delivers DisplayPort bandwidth of up to 21.6Gbps at 4K resolution.

-- VR8300 - DisplayPort HBR3 Embedded Cable Processor

- Delivers HDMI bandwidth of up to 32.4Gbps at 5K resolution for 15 million pixel cinema-grade video.

-- VR8050 - USB 3.2 Gen 1 Embedded Cable Processor

- Delivers up to 5Gbps of sensor/camera data for positional tracking, and gesture recognition.

-- VR8051 - USB 3.2 Gen 2 Embedded Cable Processor

- Delivers up to 10Gbps of sensor/camera data for positional tracking and gesture recognition.

SPECTRA7 HOSTING MEETINGS AT CES 2018

The Company is hosting invitation-only one-on-one meetings with customers interested in previewing these reference designs at CES 2018. Please email Annie Hoang at ahoang@spectra7.com to schedule a meeting.

ABOUT SPECTRA7 MICROSYSTEMS INC.

Spectra7 Microsystems Inc. is a high performance analog semiconductor company delivering unprecedented bandwidth, speed and resolution to enable disruptive industrial design for leading electronics manufacturers in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, data centers and other connectivity markets. Spectra7 is based in San Jose, California with design centers in Markham, Ontario, Cork, Ireland, and Little Rock, Arkansas. For more information, please visit www.spectra7.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTES

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this press release, including, without limitation, those regarding the Company's future financial position and results of operations, strategy, proposed acquisitions, plans, objectives, goals and targets, and any statements preceded by, followed by or that include the words "believe", "expect", "aim", "intend", "plan", "continue", "will", "may", "would", "anticipate", "estimate", "forecast", "predict", "project", "seek", "should" or similar expressions or the negative thereof, are forward-looking statements. These statements are not historical facts but instead represent only the Company's expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual results may differ materially from what is expressed, implied or forecasted in such forward-looking statements. Additional factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially include, but are not limited to the risk factors discussed in the Company's annual MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2016. Management provides forward-looking statements because it believes they provide useful information to investors when considering their investment objectives and cautions investors not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Consequently, all of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and other cautionary statements or factors contained herein, and there can be no assurance that the actual results or developments will be realized or, even if substantially realized, that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and the Company assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect subsequent information, events or circumstances or otherwise, except as required by law.

References

1. "USB Type-C Report " (2018 Edition), IHS Markit.

Contacts:

Spectra7 Microsystems Inc.

Sean Peasgood

Investor Relations

416-565-2805

ir@spectra7.com



Spectra7 Microsystems Inc.

Darren Ma

Chief Financial Officer

669-284-3170

pr@spectra7.com




The "European Defence Industries Authorities Directory 2018" directory has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

The European Industries Authorities Directory is the most comprehensive and accurate database on companies and executives throughout Europe and those senior defence officials that oversee the purchasing of everything from vehicles, communications equipment and clothing, to electronics, parts and ordnance.

Assisting defence contractors to identify new opportunities throughout this region, this Directory covers thousands of companies providing invaluable comprehensive business information on these companies and its leaders in this industry. Additionally the Directory lets you contact those senior officials responsible for defence procurement from the executive leadership and military and civilian defence and national security agencies down through the service branches. The Directory also gives you names, ranks, areas of responsibility and contact information.

The European Defence Industries Authorities Directory has been especially compiled to assist professionals with market research, strategic planning, as well as contacting prospective clients. It is also an indispensable guide to all of Europe's defence industries, key corporate executives and defence and law enforcement officials responsible for procurement.

Company entries in this Directory typically provide:

Name and address

Phone, fax numbers, email and website addresses

Names of senior management and board members

Description of business activities

Products and services

Brand names and trademarks

Subsidiaries and associates

Number of employees

Financial information

Import/export markets

For more information about this directory visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7blkg5/european_defence?w=4

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006091/en/

Contacts:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

Related Topics: Military Aerospace and Defense
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - January 8, 2018) - White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) ("White Metal" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has received the permit (the "Permit") to fly an airborne time-domain electromagnetic (EM) and magnetic (MAG) geophysical survey on its Gunners Cove Property (the "Property") and is expected to commence the survey within 2 weeks. The Property, located 20 km north of St. Anthony on the Northern Peninsula, Newfoundland, is easily accessible by means of local roads and trails, and consists of 682 claim units (59,402 ha or 594 sq-km). The geophysical survey will cover the entire property.

The geophysical data will assist the Company in better understanding and delineating structural and stratigraphic features which might host gold, and possibly base metal, mineralization. Initial surface grab samples from the new discovery made in September 2017 (news release: September 25, 2017), and follow up sampling recently announced (news release: November 20, 2017), outline a large area of anomalous gold and other metals associated with pyrite-nodules and pyrite stringers, hosted by black shale.

To date, 133 surface grab samples have been collected from the 10 mineralized zones at the Property. The distribution of the samples containing anomalous gold values define an area roughly 5 km x 3 km. Approximately 50% of the grab samples collected in the Gunners Cove area assayed 100 ppb Au (0.1 g/t Au) or greater, with a maximum of 5.9 g/t Au (Mossberg Zone). Silver assay results are also elevated, ranging from less than 1 g/t Ag to a maximum of 9.1 g/t Ag (Cooey Zone) [note: grab samples are selective by nature and are unlikely to be representative of average grades].

Our work to date at the Gunners Cove Property has highlighted a large area of anomalous gold values and extended the discovery area substantially. Historically, this Property has seen very little exploration work and is a recent prospecting discovery, adding to its importance. Precious metal and base metal mineralization is associated with, and appears to be largely hosted by, pyritic nodules and stringers accompanied by minor silicification and local brecciation, and hosted by an extensive black shale unit.

Following the airborne geophysical survey and associated data processing and targeting, the Company is planning to immediately begin a diamond drilling program. Targets will be based on a combination of regional and local geological knowledge, surface sampling to date, and results of the airborne geophysical survey.

Technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Scott Jobin-Bevans (P.Geo.), Vice President Exploration and a Director of White Metal, who is a Qualified Person under the definitions established by the National Instrument 43-101.

For more information in regards to the Gunners Cove Property you can visit the company's Web Page at www.whitemetalres.com.

About White Metal Resources Corp (TSXV: WHM):

White Metal Resources Corp is a junior exploration company exploring in Canada and currently has 39,742,740 common shares issued and outstanding.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of White Metal Resources Corp.

"Michael Stares"

Michael Stares, President and CEO

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEWS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projection

For further information contact:

Michael Stares

684 Squier Street

Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, P7B 4A8

Phone: (807) 628-7836

Fax (807) 475 7200
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - January 8, 2018) - Metals Creek Resources Corp. (TSXV: MEK) (Metals Creek or the "company") is pleased to announce that the company has received the permit (the "Permit") to fly an airborne time-domain electromagnetic (EM) and magnetic (MAG) geophysical survey on its 100% owned Great Brehat Property (the "Property") and is expected to commence the survey within 2 weeks. The property is located on the Great Northern Peninsula, near St. Anthony, Newfoundland. The Claims being flown are contiguous to the south of White Metals Resources Corp. new discovery where they recently announced highly anomalous gold values over approximately a 15 sq KM area in black sedimentary shale units (See WHM-TSX.V PR dated November 20, 2017). The Metals Creek claims were staked to cover favorable geology similar to that of White Metals Resources Corp. The company believes this could potentially be a very important new discovery in a unique geological environment similar to other large gold deposits hosted in black shale environments around the world. The company intends on flying 128.5 line kilometers of airborne EM and Mag.

The geophysical data will assist the Company in better understanding and delineating structural and stratigraphic features which might host gold, and possibly base metal, mineralization. Metals Creek will plan an exploration program to evaluate the targets generated by the airborne survey.

In addition, the company has granted 1,000,000 stock options to directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Corporation. All such options will have a term of five years at an exercise price of $0.10 per share, will be governed by the terms and conditions of the Corporation's stock option plan and will be subject to vesting provisions.

About Metals Creek Resources Corp.

Metals Creek Resources Corp. is a junior exploration company incorporated under the laws of the Province of Ontario, is a reporting issuer in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, and has its common shares listed for trading on the Exchange under the symbol "MEK". Metals Creek has earned a 50% interest in the Ogden Gold Property, including the former Naybob Gold mine, located 6 km south of Timmins, Ontario and has a 8 km strike length of the prolific Porcupine-Destor Fault (P-DF) that stretches between Timmins, Ontario and Val d'Or, Quebec. Metals Creek also has an option agreement with Quadro Resources on Metals Creeks and Benton Resources Staghorn Gold Project in Newfoundland as well as two option agreements with Anaconda Mining Inc. on Metals Creek's Jacksons Arm and Tilt Cove Properties also in Newfoundland. The company have also signed a LOI on its Clarks Brook property with Sokoman Iron Corp. and is engaged in the identification, acquisition, exploration and development of other mineral resource properties, and presently has mining interests in Ontario, Yukon and Newfoundland and Labrador including the recently acquired Great Brehat project on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Additional information concerning the Corporation is contained in documents filed by the Corporation with securities regulators, available under its profile at www.sedar.com.



Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Alexander (Sandy) Stares, President and CEO



Metals Creek Resources Corp

telephone: (709)-256-6060

fax: (709)-256-6061

email: astares@metalscreek.com

MetalsCreek.com

Twitter.com/MetalsCreekRes

Facebook.com/MetalsCreek
DUBLIN, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Global Adaptive Robotics Market 2017-2021" report has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

The global adaptive robotics market to grow at a CAGR of 27.20% during the period 2017-2021.

Global Adaptive Robotics Market 2017-2021, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

One trend in the market is integration of swarm technology in adaptive robots. After analysis and introspection, many engineers and scientists have tried to adapt automation to highly efficient patterns observed in nature. Worker ants are noted examples of efficient workers that execute all tasks in a focused manner, while maintaining constant communication.

According to the report, one driver in the market is increasing adoption of lean and flexible manufacturing. The global industrial robots market is expected to witness escalating growth with technological advances and R&D investments in robotic science. The adoption of robotics is on a rise owing to the implementation of robotics solutions to achieve high productivity, operational efficiency, and replace manual interventions in major industries such as metal processing, automotive, chemicals, electrical and electronics, and F&B. With changing market dynamics and intense competition among OEMs, there is a surge in the adoption of automation and robotics solutions that can optimize production costs and reduce reliance on heavy automation and manual labor.

Further, the report states that one challenge in the market is complexity in designing. Adaptive robots are very complex in their design as they need to consider dual complexity. First, these robots need to comply with the internal complexity of the design to optimize components and establish communication with various modules. Second, these robots need to maximize their capabilities to sense the environment, learn, and reconfigure themselves with functional architecture. Moreover, to design a robot that has to work in hazardous environments, robots need to provide increased dexterity to adapt to difficult terrains that complicate the programming environment even further.

Market trends

Integration of swarm technology in adaptive robots

IoT and Industry 4.0

R&D in adaptive robotics

Key vendors

iRobot

Rethink Robotics

SoftBank Group

Universal Robots

Yaskawa Motoman

Other prominent vendors

Giraff Technologies

HONDA

PaR Systems

Robotiq

Teledyne SeaBotix

Key Topics Covered:



Part 01: Executive Summary



Part 02: Scope Of The Report



Part 03: Research Methodology



Part 04: Introduction



Part 05: Market Landscape



Part 06: Market Segmentation By Application



Part 07: Market Segmentation By Product



Part 08: Regional Landscape



Part 09: Decision Framework



Part 10: Drivers And Challenges



Part 11: Market Trends



Part 12: Vendor Landscape



Part 13: Vendor Analysis



Part 14: Appendix



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7xrd2s/global_adaptive?w=5





Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716
GLENDALE, California, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Export Portal, a blockchain-enabled e-Commerce Business to Business Platform, will be meeting with the delegation from Taiwan at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Export Portal believes that no entity should be able to dictate what business should be able to succeed on the world stage.

Photo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/625935/EP_Taiwan.jpg

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will depend on businesses from around the world to promote themselves in a manner that is only conducive to honest, transparent trade. No longer will the restraints of commerce be dependent on anything other than a blockchain enabled e-Commerce. Businesses that register on Export Portal.com are able to explore new markets without the fear of fraudulent companies or transactions.

Export Portal is also looking forward to further discussing our ambitious 2018 plan with the Taiwan Delegation that includes:

Establishing Country Brand Ambassadors in over 100 countries in 2018: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/1c41cc19fdde44fe9fc3771e4d68064d): Integrating country-specific Writers, Bloggers & Vloggers from around the world into our ecosystem: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/fb0b3ef48cac4677b9079f3d0442a526) Establishing Export Portal offices in key countries around South East Asia to further expand international commerce through ExportPortal.com. Attending key trade-related events in different countries and meeting with business leaders, government representatives, and mSME groups to explore partnerships to further accelerate trade to over 120 different countries that are already represented in over 70 major industry categories on Export Portal's platform.

CEO of Export Portal, Ally Spinu is looking forward to an ambitious 2018 and Taiwan is a key ally in trade with the rest of the entire world. "Export Portal is able to take on companies of every size, but our key verification differentiator is meant to bring honest hard-working small and medium sized companies to a level playing field where buyers aren't at risk of buying from disreputable, unscrupulous and unidentifiable entities." Ms. Spinu continued, "The world is no longer willing to accept dishonest, unreliable trade. Every day, we hear about orders that are changed and companies that are not what they purport to be. The Fourth Industrial Revolution begins in 2018 with blockchain-enabled trade on Export Portal."

The world is getting smaller and now the mouse and the cat are on an even playing field. Shows like CES allow businesses to get to know people and kick the tires on new technology. Export Portal allows the reputation of a company thrive in an online environment with a company dataset that can be utilized by anyone on our platform. A proprietary blockchain enabled International Business Identification Number (IBIN) such as Export Portal's will erase both physical as well as online borders.

While at CES, International Business Development head, John Zahaitis will be meeting with the Taiwan delegation but can also be reached @ media@exportportal.com & +1 (818)965-9399.

Join us.

About Us:

Export Portal is a US-based technology company that is listening to sellers, buyers, and manufacturers the world over about NoFakeTrade. Our proprietary verification process keeps fakes, frauds, IP bandits out and makes entering new international markets a less-stressful need to be done, easy/free to join, must-do for 2018.

To learn more, go to: https://www.exportportal.com/learn_more
New Hardware Sets Standard for High-End VR Market, While All-New Viveport VR and Vive Video Dramatically Improves the way you Browse, Discover and Acquire VR Content

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HTC VIVE', the leader in room-scale Virtual Reality (VR), today announced new hardware upgrades that deliver premium VR experiences to consumers and enterprises with the introduction of Vive Pro and Vive Wireless Adaptor. In addition, the company debuted new improvements in how VR users discover, experience and acquire VR content through a radical redesign of Viveport VR and Vive Video. These advancements deliver on VR users' desire for higher resolution, improved audio, greater comfort, wireless freedom and immersive content discovery.

Vive Pro

Vive Pro is a new HMD upgrade from Vive, built for VR enthusiasts and enterprise users who want the best display and audio for their VR experiences. Vive Pro includes dual-OLED displays for a crisp picture resolution of 2880 x 1600 combined, a 78% increase in resolution over the current Vive HMD.

This premium resolution enhances immersion for VR enthusiasts, and the improved clarity means text, graphics and overall experience all come into sharper view. Vive Pro also features integrated, high-performance headphones with a built-in amplifier to offer a heightened sense of presence and an overall richer sound. Vive Pro's new headstrap was built with enhanced ergonomics and comfort, including a sizing dial for a more balanced headset that decreases weight on the front of the headset. Additional improvements include dual microphones with active noise cancellation and dual front-facing cameras designed to empower developer creativity.

"There's a clear need in the VR market for a premium VR experience with high resolution display, integrated audio and the best components available today in a headset," said Daniel O'Brien, GM U.S., VIVE. "Vive Pro offers an immediate upgrade for both VR enthusiasts and enterprises that want to utilize the best VR experience."

More details on Vive Pro availability and price will be made available soon.

Vive Wireless Adaptor

Also unveiled today, the Vive Wireless Adaptor will be the first to market with a truly wireless VR headset integration for both Vive and Vive Pro.

The Vive Wireless Adaptor features Intel's WiGig technology and offers a premium VR wireless experience that operates in the interference-free 60Ghz band, which means lower latency and better performance. The Vive Wireless Adaptor will ship in Q3 to customers worldwide.

"Wireless VR has been on nearly every VR user's wishlist since the technology was unveiled," said Frank Soqui, General Manager Virtual Reality Group at Intel Corporation. "By collaborating with HTC to commercialize Intel's WiGig technology, we will guarantee that wireless VR meets the most discerning quality bar for home users and business VR customers."

Viveport VR

In the largest upgrade to the Viveport customer experience since launch, Viveport VR redefines how users discover, experience and acquire VR content. Instead of a traditional 2D catalog, Viveport VR content is delivered in fully immersive interactive previews. Viveport is embracing a VR first approach by including VR enabled "VR Previews," which are interactive glimpses of content that give customers a room-scale preview of an experience and the opportunity to interact with content before purchasing or subscribing.

"Viveport is moving to a VR first experience model, and with the all-new Viveport VR, we are changing the way consumers discover, experience and acquire VR content," said Rikard Steiber, president, Viveport. "Until now, there has not been a shopping and browsing experience that takes advantage of the full functionality of VR. Available in early access today, Viveport VR increases interaction with content and offers developers a preview that showcases the quality of their titles and experiences."

Earlier this year, Viveport launched the world's first VR subscription service to provide a whole new way to access the best VR experiences for a great price. With more than 1,000 titles available on Viveport today, and more than 325 available for subscription, Vive is changing the way users browse and discover content through Viveport VR.

Vive Video Includes Vimeo

Today HTC Creative Labs also rolled out an upgrade to its native VR video player, Vive Video. Vive Video solves the discovery and acquisition problem for VR video content by delivering a large catalog of high quality streaming video directly to VR headsets. In addition to new features and UI upgrades, Vive Video has integrated content from Vimeo, the world's largest ad-free open video platform home to millions of creators worldwide.

In the new Vive Video experience, a curated selection of Vimeo content will be made available to browse and view in a highly optimized native VR experiences within Vive Video-compatible headsets.

"Whether we're building our own tools in-house or partnering with other innovative platforms, Vimeo is committed to the future of storytelling and finding new ways to support our creators," said Christophe Gillet, GM of Vimeo's Creator Platform. "Not only does the integration with Vive Video showcase some of Vimeo's highest quality, human-curated content within the VR experience, but it also gives those creators an exciting new way to expose their work and engage with audiences."

Vive Video has consistently been one of the most-downloaded and highest-rated apps on the SteamVR platform, enabling users to view 180 and 360-degree video content. Vive Video is available today for both Vive and Google Daydream platforms, and will arrive on Vive Wave in the near future.

For press images and assets for all Vive CES News, please visit: bitly.com/VIVEatCES.

About HTC VIVE

HTC Vive is the creator of the unprecedented PC-based virtual reality system, the Vive, which was built and optimized for room-scale VR and true-to-life interactions. The Vive ecosystem has evolved around its premium VR product portfolio, supported by Vive X, the most active global VR/AR accelerator that has invested in over 80 start-ups, Viveport, a global content platform with the world's first VR subscription model that operates in more than 60 countries, and Vive Studios, Vive's VR content development and publishing initiative. Vive is delivering on the promise of VR with game-changing technology and best-in-class content, bringing VR to consumers, developers and enterprises alike.

For more information on Vive, please visit www.vive.com.

HTC, the HTC logo are the trademarks of HTC Corporation. All other names of companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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FREEPORT, N.Y., Jan 9, 2018 - (ACN Newswire) - Enerkon Solar International, Inc. (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it is working to acquire what appears to be a profitable $40,000,000+ asset solar energy company. Enerkon expects to exchange shares in the Target early in this quarter.The Company continues to believe, if and when completed, that this is just the first important step in a change of corporate direction that could increase shareholder value over short and long term time periods. The Company is excited to be working on entering the fast-growing solar energy field. The Company expects to release further information as the execution of the plan unfolds.It is also expected that the Company will have experienced management changes to facilitate the entry into this exciting new developing area of green technology. A key figure in this new management is planned to be Mr. Benjamin Ballout who is expected to replace Dr. John Cappello as CEO.Mr. Ballout, is currently serving as a Managing Director of Diplomatic Trade Ltd., a U.S. corporation with offices out of New York, NY and Beirut-Lebanon. Benjamin is a Midcareer Executive who brings in over seventeen years of experience in various industries from Finance, Real Estate Development, Aerospace and Defense, and International Affairs with an understanding of the international trade and policies that affect global outcomes is part of his work functions.Benjamin is also involved in numerous Nation Buildings projects along with multiple Humanitarian relief effort. He had the privilege to be among forward thinkers to participate in the project on U.S. National Security Reform Act. He also has a wealth of knowledge in the solar energy field.SOURCE: Enerkon Solar International, Inc. (www.enerkoninternational.com)This press release contains certain "forward-looking" statements, defined in the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Statements, which are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements. The company, through its management, makes forward-looking public statements concerning its expected future operations, performance and other developments. Such forward-looking statements are estimates reflecting the Company's best judgment based upon current information and involve a number of risks and uncertainties, and there can be no assurance that other factors will not affect the accuracy of such forward-looking statements. It is impossible to identify all such factors, factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those estimated by the Company. This press release is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities.Contact Information:John V. Cappello, CEOEnerkon Solar International, Inc.111 West Sunrise HighwaySecond Floor EastFreeport, NY 11520Tel: 484-518-9000This press release was issued through EmailWire.Com - a global newswire with press release distribution services (http://www.emailwire.com).Source: Enerkon Solar InternationalCopyright 2018 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
MINNEAPOLIS (dpa-AFX) - Target Corp. has launched a new denim-focused women's apparel brand called Universal Thread, as the retailer continues to refresh its apparel brand portfolio. The Universal Thread brand will hit stores in early February, with prices ranging from $5 to $39.99. The collection, will include apparel--jeans, tops, dresses, shoes and accessories and will be available in an unusually wide range of sizes, ranging from 00-26W. 'This is the largest brand we'll launch in 2018 in terms of sales volume and size,' said Jessica Carlson, a Target spokeswoman, according to StarTribuen. Target plans to launch several more brands this year. 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.
Consumers Can Order Campari America's Spirits Brands via Drizly by Touching Smartphone to NFC-enabled Refrigerator Magnet

Thin Film Electronics ASA ('Thinfilm') (OSE: THIN; OTCQX: TFECY), a global leader in NFC (near field communication) mobile marketing and smart packaging solutions, today announced Campari America as a new customer. Campari America is using Thinfilm's NFC mobile marketing solution to enable consumers to purchase its spirits brands by tapping their smartphone to a 'connected' refrigerator magnet. Once tapped, the magnets which feature Thinfilm's NFC SpeedTap tags and fully integrate with its CNECT cloud-based platform take consumers to a product page on Drizly, the popular beer, wine, and spirits consumer-delivery platform. Consumers are then able to add the item to their cart and immediately check out, all in one cohesive mobile experience.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006923/en/

Campari America is using Thinfilm's NFC mobile marketing solution to enable consumers to purchase its spirits brands by tapping their smartphone to a 'connected' refrigerator magnet. Once tapped, the magnets which feature Thinfilm's NFC SpeedTap tags and fully integrate with its CNECT cloud-based platform take consumers to a product page on Drizly, the popular beer, wine, and spirits consumer-delivery platform. Consumers are then able to add the item to their cart and immediately check out, all in one cohesive mobile experience. (Photo: Business Wire)

Click here to view the press release published by Campari America.

The Campari collaboration marks a strong start to 2018 for Thinfilm and builds on the momentum the Company established through the fourth quarter of last year. Key announcements, transactions, and updates include the following:

Growing customer base Thinfilm now has a total of over two dozen in-market customers covering a range of vertical markets, including wine spirits, craft beer, beverages, OTC pharma, cosmetics, tobacco, consumer electronics, and specialty foods

Thinfilm now has a total of over two dozen in-market customers covering a range of vertical markets, including wine spirits, craft beer, beverages, OTC pharma, cosmetics, tobacco, consumer electronics, and specialty foods Compelling case studies Thinfilm has now published four case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of using NFC for mobile marketing; consumer tapping activity is on the rise and NFC has been shown to outperform conventional marketing channels like social platforms and display banners

Thinfilm has now published four case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of using NFC for mobile marketing; consumer tapping activity is on the rise and NFC has been shown to outperform conventional marketing channels like social platforms and display banners CNECT Platform enhancements Version 2.0 of the software is targeted for release in Q2 and will feature functionality enhancements and a new user interface; as of year-end 2017, 441 companies had registered on the cloud-based portal

Version 2.0 of the software is targeted for release in Q2 and will feature functionality enhancements and a new user interface; as of year-end 2017, 441 companies had registered on the cloud-based portal More conversion partners and standard NFC conversion options Thinfilm continues to add to its list of qualified conversion partners around the globe; the Company now offers more than a dozen NFC tag conversion options, including converted labels, folded cartons, ElastiTags, conventional hang tags, drink coasters, bottle neck-collars, coupons, magnets, and direct mailers

About Thin Film Electronics ASA

Thinfilm is a global leader in NFC mobile marketing and smart-packaging solutions using printed electronics technology. The Company creates printed tags, labels, and systems that include memory, sensors, displays, and wireless communication all at a cost-per-function unmatched by conventional electronic technologies.

Thinfilm offers end-to-end mobile marketing solutions that feature hardware, label/packaging integration services, and comprehensive cloud-based management, reporting and analytics. Collectively, these components deliver a powerful 1-to-1 digital marketing platform through which brands of all sizes can connect directly with consumers, all with the simple tap of a smartphone. The resulting disintermediation of search engines, online marketplaces, and social platforms empowers brands to control messaging, enhance consumer dialogue, build loyalty, increase engagement, and drive sales.

Thinfilm's roadmap integrates technology from a strong and growing ecosystem of partners to bring intelligence to everyday, disposable items. Its mission is to effectively extend the traditional boundaries of the Internet of Things to fuel the Internet of Everything.

Thin Film Electronics ASA is a publicly listed company in Norway with global headquarters in Oslo, Norway; US headquarters in San Jose, California; and offices in Linkoping, Sweden; San Francisco; London; and Shanghai. For more information, visit www.thinfilm.no.

This information is subject of the disclosure requirements acc. to 5-12 vphl (Norwegian Securities Trading Act).

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006923/en/

Contacts:

Thin Film Electronics ASA

Bill Cummings, +1 408-503-7312

SVP Corporate Communications

bill.cummings@thinfilm.no
According to data from London & Partners by PitchBook, venture capital investment into the UKs tech sector reached an all-time high in 2017 with UK firms raising 2.99 billion  almost double the total amount invested in 2016 (1.63bn).

Londons tech sector continues to accelerate the growth of the UKs digital economy, with the capitals tech firms raising a record 2.45 billion and accounting for around 80% of all UK venture capital tech funding in 2017.

Some of the largest deals last year included:

 Improbable (391m),

 Deliveroo (364m) and

 Truphone (255m).

The UK and London remain the favourite destination in Europe for tech investors. UK companies raised almost four times more funding in 2017 than Germany (694m) and more than France, Ireland and Sweden combined.

London tech companies also raised significantly more venture capital investment than any other European city, including Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris.

Fintech was the leading sector for investment in 2017, with UK financial technology companies receiving 1.34 billion in VC funding. Major funding rounds were raised by:

 TransferWise (211m),

 Funding Circle (81.9m), and

 Monzo (71m).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies also received high levels of funding. Big deals included:

 Babylon Health (47.56m),

 Callsign (26.92m) and

 Starship Technologies (13.95m).

During last year, a number of the worlds leading tech companies pledge their long-term commitment to the capital, with significant investments from Amazon, Apple and Google. In the second half of last year, Spotify announced it will expand its R&D operation in London and double its headcount, while Facebook confirmed it will create an additional 800 jobs for its new London headquarters.

FinSMEs

08/01/2018
Immusoft, a Seattle, WA-based gene therapy company, closed the first $3m tranche of its Series B funding round.

The round was led by 600 Mile Challenge Fund. In conjunction with the funding, Dr. Anthony Sun, a prifessional with extensive venture capital experience and board of director roles in multiple biotechnology companies, joined Immusofts board.

The company will use the funds to complete its Phase I/II clinical trial in MPS-I (Mucopolysaccharidoses type I) and advance its pipeline, which uses its proprietary Immune System Programming (ISP) approach to B cell modification for treating diseases.

Led by new CEO and board chairman Sean Ainsworth Immusoft is a gene therapy company which has developed a methodology designed to use a patients immune cells to treat disease. Its ISP technology reprograms B cells with the goal of treating diseases, including MPS I, a rare genetic lysosomal storage disease that is expected to be Immusofts first clinical application.

ISP, an ex vivo cell culture system that uses a non-viral system to genetically modify B cells, has its origins in a B cell culture system invented by Nobel laureate David Baltimore, Ph.D., which Immusoft has extensively improved upon.

FinSMEs

08/01/2018
The President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev announced the intention to create a world cryptocurrency that will be based not on abstract trust but will be secured by specific assets, will be democratic and transparent.

The new cryptocurrency will be called G-Global. It will help the world get rid of monetary wars, black-marketeering and decrease volatility at markets, Nursultan Nazarbayev said at the 10th Astana International Forum (AIF)

Based on the idea of President Nazarbayev in Estonia, the communication platform G-Global Business Portal is established. The essence of this platform is the development of a new type of currency  G-Global cryptocurrency.

The G-Global Business Portal is developing a new cryptocurrency, which is based on human intellectual potential. Consulting marketplace, under the leadership of Denis Tsyro, is engaged in a complex of works aimed at the modernization of enterprises in the real sector of the economy.

According to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the technical progress the most obviously will affect the state of the labor market. Hanon Barabaner, The Deputy Chairman of the Eurasian Economic Club of Scientist, said that the basis for the formation of the new cryptocurrency G-Global will become the human intellectual potential.

The founder of the company CronoBank, Sergei Sergienko has developed the TIME token that allows measuring the efficiency of the employee during his working hours and informs the employer about the usefulness of the employee at the enterprise. The TIME token will be integrated into the G-Global Business Portal system.

G-Global Business Portal is an international communication platform designed to unite experts from around the world. The project itself is a tool for robotization, creation of the smart factories and enterprises and also for digitization of the real sector of the economy.

Mikhail Korb, a Member of Parliament and the Secretary-General of the Centre party of Estonia approved the activity of the G-Global Business Portal as it corresponds with the countrys economic development policy in the field of information technology.
ProFinda, a London, UK-based AI-powered expertise finding platform, raised a total of 4.8m in funding.

Backers included Notion Capital and Nextlaw Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to strengthen its proposition and refine the technology.

Led by Roger Gorman, CEO, ProFinda aims to change the way organizations discover and tap into internal expertise and knowledge via an AI-powered platform which builds a dynamic map of all the skills, knowledge, connections and expertise available across a company. Machine learning allows users to match the people with the right expertise to others who require their assistance. ProFinda gives firms an accurate view of all the knowledge contained across their entire talent pool  including employees, alumni, freelancers and other contractors.

Launched in 2011, the technology platform has today users in 1,382 cities globally and the company has client and strategic partnerships across the top six professional services firms plus organizations and networks including Thomson Reuters Elite, LACE partners, Tech London Advocates, construction firm Multiplex, Workforce of the Future Network, CloserStill Media and more.

FinSMEs

08/01/2018
Wonderschool, a New York City  based network of boutique, high-quality child cares and preschools, raised $2.1M in new funding.

Backers included Omidyar Network, Be Curious Partners, Rethink Education, Edelweiss partners and Learn Capital.

The company intends to use the funds to expand in New York and continue to grow in the greater Bay and Los Angeles areas.

Developed by veteran entrepreneurs Chris Bennett and Arrel Gray, Wonderschool provides a platform that enables experienced educators and child care providers to start and run their own in-home businesses while providing an affordable service to families in their communities.

Partnering with Wonderschool, educators dont have to find, lease or build a new space. They use an underutilized asset, a providers own home, to enable an individual to quickly start up with minimal overhead. The company provides assistance with licensing, program setup, marketing, payment processing, and everything in between.

The software platform allows teachers to manage their program, students and parents from one place, while also providing parents a real marketplace to search for programs, schedule visits, enroll their children and make payments. Wonderschool collects a percentage of monthly tuition fees from each program to help cover costs of the software and services.

Currently, the company has partnered with 16 programs in Greater New York City and plans to expand to 150 partner programs by the end of 2018. Todays announcement brings total funding to more than $4M in the last year.

FinSMEs

08/01/2018
New Delhi: Amid outrage on the FIR lodged over the reporting of alleged Aadhaar data breach, the government on Monday said it has been filed against "unknown" accused while asserting its commitment to the freedom of the press.

A day after the Delhi Police confirmed registering of an FIR on 5 January, based on a complaint by Aadhaar-issuing body UIDAI, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad took to Twitter to clarify the government's position on the issue.

"The government is fully committed to freedom of press as well as to maintaining security and sanctity of Aadhaar for India's development. FIR is against unknown," he said.

Though the complaint by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) named four persons, including the Chandigarh-based daily The Tribune's reporter who had filed the story on alleged breach in Aadhaar database, Prasad said the FIR was against "unknown".

"I've suggested UIDAI to request The Tribune and its journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders," he said. The UIDAI also said that it is committed to the freedom of the press and will approach the newspaper and its reporter for cooperation in the investigation of alleged data breach.

"We're going to write to @thetribunechd and @rachnakhaira to give all assistance to investigate to nab the real culprits. We also appreciate if Tribune and its journalist have any constructive suggestion to offer," the UIDAI said in a tweet.

After filing the police complaint, the UIDAI had, in an earlier statement, said: "This is a case in which even though there was no breach of Aadhaar biometric database, because UIDAI takes every criminal violation seriously, it is for the act of unauthorised access, criminal proceedings have been initiated."

The UIDAI had also said that it respects free speech, including the freedom of the press, and its police complaint should not be viewed as "shooting the messenger".

The FIR had attracted strong criticism from various media organisations and bodies, including The Editors Guild of India which sought withdrawal of the case.

The Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, Harish Khare, had said in a statement on Sunday that "the authorities have misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise and have proceeded to institute criminal proceedings against the whistleblower".

He said the daily would explore "all legal options" open to it to defend its freedom to undertake serious investigative journalism.
New Delhi: The country's agriculture sector is expected to grow higher than projected 2.1 percent growth by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) for the current fiscal, following better Rabi crop prospects, the agriculture ministry said.

Last week, CSO had pegged farm and allied sector growth at 2.1 percent for 2017-18, much lower than 4.9 percent achieved in the 2016-17.

The farm sector growth comprises gross value added (GVA) of crops at 60 percent, livestock 20 percent and forestry 8.5 percent and fishing and aquaculture at 5.5 percent.

"The ministry is optimistic about achieving a high growth rate because the Rabi, 2017 is showing a very good performance in addition to good Kharif, 2017," the ministry said in an official statement.

The agriculture sector can, therefore, be expected to register a much higher GVA for the year 2017-18, when final estimate figures are released, it added.

Justifying the reasons for possible higher growth, the ministry said it is of the opinion that the lower coverage of the area by August 2017 on account of the delayed onset of monsoons has caused a poor reflection compared to the actual positive field situation by December 2017.

However, good rainfall thereafter helped increase in area coverage in accordance with the with Kharif targets.

"Despite delay in the onset of monsoons and relatively poorer rainfall vis-a-vis the previous year, the area coverage under Kharif finally rose to 106.55 million hectares against the five year average of 105.86 million hectares," it said.

It is, hence logical, that the computation based on area coverage under crops as in August 2017 had a negative impact on the CSO's advance estimate for the overall agriculture sector.

The GVA estimate is bound to get corrected upwards, if increased area coverage by December 2017 and concomitant production estimate in case of foodgrains, oilseeds, and commercial crops, in particular, are taken into account, it said.

These three account for a higher percentage of share than horticulture in the GVA computation and horticulture is showing a higher productivity estimate, it added.

The ministry further said the livestock and fishery sector was very positive till August 2017 and by December the dominant crop sector has "bounced back".

"If this amended and actual field situation is taken into account in the computation of the GVA for agriculture sector as a whole, its growth rate can be estimated to be much higher than the advance estimate of 2.1 percent," the ministry said.

Stating that the rabi prospects are good, the ministry said rabi crops have been covered in an area of 58.6 million hectares which is a "very good progress".

Considering that the Rabi sowing continues up to the first week of February, the total area under crops and resultant production will be very good, it added.

The ministry also observed that CSO estimates of farm sector growth this fiscal come on the back of a very robust GVA of 4.9 percent in the previous year.

"Considering that crop segment constitutes a dominant component of the GVA computation, its performance is very critical. However, with in elasticity of land where there exists little scope for increase in the average coverage, productivity enhancement assumes importance," it said.

Crops in particular and agriculture, in general, are highly dependent on monsoons and the overall status of weather, the ministry said, adding that even small variations in weather tend to influence agriculture adversely, as seen for example, in the area coverage by August 2017.
New Delhi: The Indian government has issued show cause notices to, and may soon blacklist, eight Chinese pharmaceutical companies found to be supplying poor quality raw material to drug manufacturers in this country.

The notices were issued after a special inspection team of the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) inspected the eight companies in China.

According to documents available with IANS, the eight companies are M/S Qilu Tianhe Pharmaceuticals, M/S Hinan Xinxiang Pharmaceuticals, M/S Zhuhai United Laboratories, M/S Guangzhao Baiyunshan Pharmaceuticals, M/S Shouguang Fukang Pharmaceuticals, M/S Qilu Antibiotics (Linyi) Pharmaceuticals, M/S Qindao Brightmoon Seawoods and M/S Shanghaoi Xiandia Hasen (Shangqiu) Pharmaceuticals.

According to sources in the DCGI, the companies on the verge of getting blacklisted are currently supplying a huge chunk of raw material to the Indian drug manufacturers.

"The allegations against the companies are of providing poor quality products and the action against them will soon be decided by the government. This will be harsh as we don't want the quality of drugs in India compromised," said a senior DCGI officer.

Sources said that with government's action against the Chinese firms, India may witness a shortage of medicines, including for vital diseases such as cancer, for a couple of months.

Data from the Ministry for Chemicals and Fertilisers states that India gets 70 percent of its raw material for drugs from China.

According to figures furnished to the Parliament, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) worth Rs 12,254.97 crore were imported in 2016-17. The figure for 2015-16 was Rs 13,853.20 crore. (API refers to the biologically active component of a drug product.)

In 2014-15, the API import stood at Rs 12,757.96 crore and at Rs 12,061.53 crore in 2013-14.

Sources in the DCGI said that following poor quality of pharmaceutical raw products from China, the Indian government has also decided to inspect API from other countries such as the United States, Italy and some European nations.

India imported APIs worth Rs 18,372.54 crore in 2016-17. This included APIs estimated to be worth Rs 820.18 crore from the United States, worth Rs 701.85 crore from Italy, worth Rs 485.11 crore from Germany and Rs 422.01 from Singapore.

Earlier, in 2014 and 2015, the National Security Advisor's office had warned the government of over-dependence on China for the supply of essential drugs and APIs.

In March 2017, Nirmala Sitharaman, then the commerce and industries minister and now the defence minister, had also said that Chinese APIs were about four times cheaper than those produced in India.

Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma too expressed concern over the issue and suggested that an inter-ministerial committee looks into it.
The government of India is working on the draft of a new social security scheme that would offer a safety cover for all workers including those from the informal sector who are not covered by the Employee Provident Fund Organisation and the Employees' State Insurance Corporation.

The new scheme aims to offer benefits like mandatory pension, insurance against disability and death and maternity coverage, along with optional medical and unemployment coverage.

Citing an unnamed official from the Ministry of Labour and Employment, The Indian Express reported that the Centre is discussing the scheme with state governments to bring them onboard. It said that the new scheme is likely to be launched this year, ahead of the crucial General Elections to the Lok Sabha.

The report quotes the official saying that the government plans to foot the entire bill for workers below the poverty line, but it has to be shared between the states and the Centre.

The new social security code will "subsume the allocation for a number of existing schemes" such as insurance schemes, disability benefits, maternity benefits, etc run by both the central as well as state governments. "A pool of money is available already but we need to work out how much extra is required, the official added.

Interestingly, in a September 2017 report, the labour ministry has cited multiplicity of schemes as one of the major hurdles in creating a universal social security policy for India.

Terming the new social security scheme as a "path-breaking initiative", the report, said that consensus among the various stakeholders is going to be a key to its success.

The new social security scheme is part of the govt of India's efforts to consolidate the 44 labour laws into four codes  industrial relations, wages, social security, and occupational safety, health and working conditions, it adds.

So far the government has managed to present the Code on Wages Bill, 2017 in the Lok Sabha. The code, which met with a lot of opposition from Lok Sabha members, is currently being reviewed by a Standing Committee on Labour.

The bill subsumes four existing Laws  the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, removing the multiplicity of definitions and authorities leading to ease of compliance.

The new social security code is expected to have a similar effect on various social security schemes in India.
Editor's Note: This is the first in a three-part series on the proposed change in H-1B visa regulation and its impact on India's IT industry, its employees and the future of offshore projects, particularly in the US. In Part-1 of the series, former director of Infosys and present chairman of Manipal Global Education, Mohandas Pai, talks about how the Indian IT sector won't be affected by change in US visa regulations.

If the proposed change in H-1B visas come into force, around 5-7 lakh Indians could be sent home. The move could directly stop hundreds of thousands of foreign workers from keeping their H-1B visas while their green card applications are pending. However, IT industry veteran Mohandas Pai demolishes that fear as a myth, stating that the move would hurt the US more because it "simply does not have the talent for the IT sector like India has".

In his bid to stay true to his campaign promise of Buy American, Hire American", boost manufacturing and protect local jobs for Americans, US President Donald Trump is considering new regulations aimed at preventing the extension of H-1B visas, predominantly used by Indian IT professionals.

Pai believes Trump is trying to reduce the 'backlog' of visa applications. Most people who are on an H-1B visa extension and applying for the green card are employees of American MNCs (multinational companies). There are very few from the Indian IT workforce who would want an extension, he says.

However, a media report quoting the Pew Research Center report said that the proposed changes in H-1B visas would have a dramatic effect, particularly on India considering more than half of all H-1B visas have been awarded to Indian nationals.

Pai believes Indian IT professionals who are working on projects in the US are keen only on work visas. If the Trump administration does not extend their visas, senior and high-quality talent will take a beating and that would detrimental to US companies, he says.

Not just the US companies but also their politicians would be affected. Pai believes that they would lobby against it, and that would be good as it may lead to a reform in the green card issuance process.

"We are not sending cheap labour to the US. Our IT talent comprises of highly talented people. They cannot be replaced," Pai said.

The US has a skill gap with over 2 million STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) jobs lying vacant, of which one million is in the IT sector, Nasscom president R Chandrasekhar told the Times of India.

If the new visa regulations come into force, the US tech industry will also be affected by the shortage of skilled professionals in the country. Tech firms in the US depend on the H-1B visas to hire tens of thousands of workforce each year from countries like India and China.

"All this goes to show the deep shortage of skilled professionals in the IT sector," says Pai, adding that not extending H-1B visas would hurt the US more.

Though the chances of IT professionals being deported en masse is a remote possibility, Pai recommends "wait and watch" approach. But even if they are deported, their return, he believes, will not impact company bottom lines negatively.

The talent has valuable experience and companies will not let them go. The US companies hire Indian tech talent paying $125,000 to $150,000 per year. Why would they pay that kind of money to hire people from abroad if they could get this talent within? The US simply does not have the talent for the IT sector like India has," adds Pai.
New Delhi: A number of insolvency-bound companies, reeling under huge unserved loans, are scouting for front entities to buy them out in a distress sale under an 'asset reconstruction' model with the help of 'friendly' IRPs, but have landed themselves under the regulatory scanner.

According to top regulatory officials, some of these firms are approaching senior NBFC executives with a good reputation in the market with a novel idea of setting up their own 'asset reconstruction startups' and then bidding for the assets being sold under the insolvency process. They are also trying to rope in some 'friendly' IRPs (Insolvency Resolution Professionals) to help achieve their motive of a 'front entity' acquiring the assets on sale, but the regulators and the government agencies have got a whiff of the whole design including with the help of some whistle-blowers, a senior official said.

The companies which are currently under scanner include those from the steel, power and textiles sectors, the official said, but refused to divulge the names as the investigation is currently underway.

There are apprehensions that more such 'frauds' may happen once the individual insolvency regime is introduced as several HNIs may want follow similar routes to get away from paying debt and still retain some of their assets.

The government is, however, aware of such possible attempts and will keep strengthening the law to check any misuse, officials added.

Around 500 corporates have been admitted for resolution and about 100 companies have commenced voluntary liquidation under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which is a little over a year old.

A tentative estimate of the total underlying default amount which formed the basis for initiation of resolution of about 500 corporate debtors is about Rs 1.3 lakh crore.

A significant number of lenders have initiated insolvency proceedings against various companies with regard to stressed assets while proceedings have also been started against realty firms and others.

The government recently amended the law to bar wilful defaulters as well as those with NPA accounts from bidding in auctions to recover bad loans through insolvency proceedings, to prevent unscrupulous persons from misusing or vitiating the provisions of the IBC. The amendment also makes certain persons ineligible for being a resolution applicant.

The ineligible persons or entities include undischarged insolvent, wilful defaulters, and those whose accounts have been classified as non-performing asset. These persons, however, can become "eligible to submit a resolution plan" if they clear all overdue amounts with

interest and other charges relating to NPA accounts.

The amendment to the IBC has been brought to address concerns that "persons who, with their misconduct contributed to defaults of companies or otherwise undesirable, may misuse this situation due to lack of prohibition or restrictions to participate in the resolution or liquidation process, and gain or regain control of corporate debtor".

Moreover, this may undermine the process laid down in theIBC as "unscrupulous person would be seen to be rewarded at the expense of creditors".

As the amendment bill was getting passed in Parliament, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said last week that the government has entered into uncharted territory as far as bankruptcy and insolvency code is concerned and would continue to modify the law dealing with the issue.

"Insolvency and bankruptcy is an area in which it is only in the recent years that we have chartered into. It is a learning experience," he said while winding up a debate on the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code Amendment Bill.

The government, Jaitley said, has been encountering situations which were not anticipated earlier and assured that it would continue to take corrective action.

Jaitley said banks and unsecured creditors will have to take some haircut during the insolvency process and if the same management comes back, nothing would change.

Jaitley said as far as asset-owning companies are concerned, fetching the best prices is the target and any bid which is not viable can be rejected. It is for creditors to decide how much haircuts they want, he said.
New Delhi: Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali Ayurved is likely to partner with eight leading e-tailers and aggregators to give a big push to online sales of its swadeshi range of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) products, said a company official.

The Haridwar-based company is expected to enter into agreements this month with major online retailers  Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, 1MG, bigbasket, grofers, shopclues and snapdeal  a step through which its range of products will be available on various online platforms.

Patanjali is organising a function on 16 January in New Delhi and representatives of all the online companies are expected to attend it along with Ramdev and its MD Acharya Balkrishna.

"We are now going into massive way. Now, we would have an organised and systematic agreement with the players to place our all product online, so that it could reach to customers to the end point," Patanjali spokesperson SK Tijarawala told PTI.

These partnerships with e-tailers will be in addition to its own portal patanjaliayurved.net, where the company is selling its products online.

"This would change the scenario of whole FMCG trade through online" he added.

Some of Patanajali's products are already available on several online platforms through various other sellers but this would allow the Haridwar-based firm to systematically place its range of products.

"The retailers and aggregators would share the dias.... They are coming and making announcement together that they would be working with brand Patanjali," Tijarawala said, adding that through this arrangement Patanjali's product could be served across the globe.

However, he refused to share further details and arrangements with the online retailers.

Recently, Patanjali had forayed into kids and adult diapers and affordable sanitary napkins segments.

Last month, it had also announced that it would venture into solar equipment manufacturing.

Besides FMCG segment, Patanjali Ayurved is present in other sectors such as education and healthcare.

In 2016-17, it had crossed a turnover of Rs 10,500 crore and aims a two-fold growth this fiscal.
New Delhi: With about three weeks left for Union Budget 2018-19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet leading economists and sectoral experts at NITI Aayog on 10 January to deliberate on steps which could be taken to boost growth and generate employment.

The meeting, according to a senior government official, will be attended by vice chairman and members of NITI Aayog, members of Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), economists and sectoral experts.

The meeting comes in the backdrop of latest estimates of national income by Central Statistics Office (CSO) which showed that India's growth is expected to slow down to four-year low of 6.5 percent this fiscal, the lowest under the Modi-led government.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 7.1 percent in 2016-17 and 8 percent in the preceding year. It was 7.5 percent in 2014-15.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will present Union Budget on 1 February, the last full budget of the NDA government before the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

For full coverage of Union Budget 2018, click here.
Tata Housing and Lodha Group are keen to own Jaypee Infratech's Yamuna Expressway, a multi-crore six-lane concrete road project that connects Greater Noida with Agra in Uttar Pradesh, media reports said.

Citing people familiar with the deal, The Economic Times said on Monday that the two real estate companies have filed initial bids for the expressway which comes with "an extensive land bank, with facilities either proposed or already functioning in the immediate vicinity of the access-controlled motorway".

"India's only operational Formula One racing track is located along the road, while the site of the capital region's second proposed airport is close to the first toll gate from the Greater Noida end. Next to the motorway is one of the biggest urban campuses of a state-run university, while the mega convention centre hosting the annual Auto Expo is also adjacent to the expressway," the report added.

Jaypee Group firm Jaypee Infratech has been taken over by a National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT)-appointed IRP (Insolvency Resolution Professional) for recovery of bad loans. The group is also facing a case in the Supreme Court due to significant delays in delivery of 24,000 pending flats and plots in its township Wish Town at Noida.

In 2007, Jaypee group started the development of 32,000 flats and plots in its township Wish Town at Noida. The project was to be developed by both Jaypee Infratech and its parent company, Jaiprakash Associates Limited (JAL).

According to a PTI report, The Jaypee group needs Rs 8,000 crore to complete incomplete flats, of which Rs 6,000 crore would come from home buyers while another Rs 2,000-2,500 crore needs to be infused.

The real estate company, in September, had requested the Supreme Court to allow it to hive-off its rights on the Yamuna Expressway to generate money, which would be used to pay back some of the money it owes to over 30,000 home buyers and creditors.

The Supreme Court, however, had rejected the request in October while barring promoters from selling or transferring assets and had extended the deadline to submit Rs 2,000 crore by November. In November 2017, JAL had deposited Rs 275 crore with apex court which asked it to deposit a further amount of Rs 150 crore and Rs 125 crore on 14 and 31 December respectively. The case is slated for next hearing on 10 January.

On 4 January, the RBI had ordered banks not to initiate bankruptcy proceedings against JIL, according to IIFL.

Jaypee adviser Ajit Kumar had revealed earlier that the real estate company is currently channeling funds generated from Yamuna Expressway, which carries heavy traffic at a toll of slightly more than Rs 2 a kilometre for a car, to complete the pending housing projects by the real estate firm.

Kumar had also said that the "Subject to orders of Supreme Court and NCLT, we intend to complete and deliver all 32,000 units by 2020."

With inputs from PTI
New Delhi: Cab-hailing major Uber is re-launching its AUTO service in India, almost two years after shutting down the offering in March 2016, starting with Bengaluru and Pune.

The US-based company, which is locked in an intense battle with homegrown player Ola, will allow customers to book autorickshaw rides through AUTO option on its platform later this month in these two cities.

Ola, which also allows booking autorickshaw rides under Auto service, had launched the offering in Bengaluru and Chennai in 2014. Ola Auto is currently operational across 73 cities with over 1.2 lakh autos associated with the company.

An Uber spokesperson said the company had "paused" the service "to see how that side of India's transport ecosystem evolves".

"Auto rickshaws are ubiquitous to mobility options in many Indian cities. To expand transportation choices for our riders, we are excited to launch AUTO in Bengaluru and Pune," the spokesperson told PTI.

In its previous attempt, Uber's AUTO offering was available in New Delhi, Coimbatore, Indore and Bhubaneshwar.

"We are re-launching AUTO starting with two cities. Gradual geographical expansion like this is common to how we operate in cities around the world and it is something that we are looking at very closely," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that AUTO will include all safety features available for Uber cab rides and riders will be able to pay via cash, Paytm and debit/credit cards.

Uber will only on-board licensed, existing auto-drivers who have been screened and accredited by the authorities and every driver partner on AUTO will be required to submit valid government documents before they are given access to the Uber app, the spokesperson said.

For Uber, India is one of its largest markets where it has seen strong growth.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which is also an investor in Ola, has recently committed investing over $1 billion in the US-based ride-sharing platform. .
It looks like a very happy new year for Aishwarya Rai' fans as they might now get to see the actress taking up another challenging role in a film on surrogacy titled Jasmine.

Aishwarya, who is currently shooting for Fanney Khan and also has been roped in for a thriller remake of Nargis starrer Raat Aur Din, India Today has now reported that the makers of Jasmine are in talks her for the film. The storyline of the film would revolve around how a surrogate mother gets attached to the child she gives birth to.

The same report states that Jasmine, which is a co-production of Toilet: Ek Prem Katha director Shree Narayan Singh and producer Prernaa Arora, will be shot largely in Gujarat and Rajasthan's Pushkar. Confirming the news of making the film on surrogacy, director Narayan said to Mumbai Mirror, "It is inspired by a real life story of a woman in Gujarat who does not want to have children but decides to become a surrogate mother for someone else. After a point she gets attached to the child and wants the child back."

The same report states that Narayan took near to three years to complete the script of this drama around motherhood and needs some more time to fine-tune the script as well as prep up to get the film rolling. Jasmine might go on the floors in post-monsoon 2018.

Though Shree Narayan has written and conceptualised the plot, he and Prerna are now looking for a debutant director to helm the film. The same report states that Prerna reasoned Narayan would be busy with the forthcoming Shahid Kapoor-Shraddha Kapoor-Yami Gautam starrer Batti Gul Meter Chalu. "Thats why we are launching two new directors. We will still have him as editor and co-producer," she said to Mumbai Mirror.

The producer also expressed her wish to rope in Aishwarya in the film for the lead role but added that it is subject to her availability.
The Golden Globes 2018 was Hollywoods first big awards show, post the Harvey Weinstein reckoning and the #MeToo movement, and it was, as expected, a show alright.

I dont necessarily mean to begrudge the just-concluded Golden Globes awards: it was the first showcase for Times Up (Hollywoods anti-harassment group consisting of over 300 women, including Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Ashley Judd, among others) and the all-black fashion on the red carpet (despite many peoples misgivings about it) did its bit to make the event seem more funereal than usual.

The not-so-invisible elephant in the room

Seth Meyers opening monologue (where he called out alleged perpetrators Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen etc.) was pretty savage, and Oprah Winfreys acceptance speech when she received the Cecil B. Demille award was inspiring and full of hope. Really, there was not much the Globes or the stars or the media could have done differently, to make it any better.

Well, except maybe the Hollywood Foreign Press (the non-profit organization of journalists and photographers who conduct the Golden Globes) couldve nominated the many deserving female directors who were outright snubbed in that category. Oh and, maybe the stars couldve brought a bit more attention to the activists that escorted them to the event, rather than making it seem more like a token gesture. And well, the media (ugh, looking at you, E! News) couldve not strayed from an activist talking about something important to instead focus on the grand entrance of a star(let).

Its so infuriating to watch E! shift focus from women like Tarana Burke and Monica Ramirez. Literally shows the extent of their commitment to this. pic.twitter.com/48bDxArzav  Emilia Petrarca (@EmiliaPetrarca) January 8, 2018

Okay so, it couldve been a lot better, sure. But, to be fair, it was a pretty decent awards show, that did manage to highlight our cultures ingrained gender-inequality, workplace and sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and oppression of minorities.

Heres to a not-altogether-crappy event. Bring on the 2018 awards season!

Red carpet shenanigans

Lets start with the beginning, with whats been (in the less-competitive and impressive years) the very reason I even watch these awards shows - the red carpet arrivals; I follow the philosophy of Jessica Morgan, of the fashion blog Go Fug Yourself that, It is not a personal or intellectual weakness to like clothes and be interested in them.

But this was no normal red carpet; this year, a horde of actresses, actors, other bigwigs vowed to wear black to show solidarity with women across industries struggling with workplace harassment. The usual frothy celebration of fashion and vapid questions about the actresses manicures had to be replaced by something more serious.

And for a large part, the all-black dress code of the #TimesUp movement managed to succeed: it forced interviewers to ask the stars why they were wearing black, instead of the usual whore you wearing? which, in turn, led to a variation of the #AskHerMore movement, i.e. more conversations about the stars and their intent, as well as drawing attention to the work done by the female activists whod accompanied a few of the female actors. Some actors managed to do this better than others, but thats expected. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, E! News goofed up, but thats expected as well. All in all, a moderately successful display of solidarity.

The Seth Meyers show

Then there was host Seth Meyers opening monologue. Meyers, arguably late-night televisions best talk-show host, also is (or seems to be) a staunch feminist. The Jokes Seth Cant Tell segment of The Late Show with Seth Meyers is funny as hell, and true to form, his no-holds-barred-towards-assholes and often-self-deprecatory opening monologue at the the Golden Globes was peppered with quite a few gems:

Oprah Winfrey made almost everyone cry with her speech

Meyers monologue may have set the tone for the evening, but nothing prepared the audience (including those, like me, watching from their homes) for the rousing brilliance of Oprah Winfreys speech. I suppose people were expecting something amazing from her anyway, because, well, Oprah.

But when she finally got onstage to accept her Cecil B. Demille award from Reese Witherspoon (her co-star in the upcoming Ava Duvernay movie A Wrinkle in Time), it was like the room was charged with an energy thats indescribable. And then there was her actual speech: she started off remembering a day in 1964 when she saw the great Sidney Poitier win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field, to recounting the moment in 1982 when he became the first black actor to win the Cecil B. Demille award, to acknowledging the fact that many little black girls were probably watching her right then being the first black woman to win the award.

Oprah spoke of harsh truths: the rape of Recy Taylor, the struggle and determination of Rosa Parks, of the many unseen-and-as-yet-unheard victims of abuse and harassment, of the importance of speaking up against oppression and abuse, and then finally, gently, she ushered the rather-stunned audience into a dawn of hope.

Her parting words, I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say Me Too again. brought everyone to their feet, hope in their hearts, and tears in their eyes. Even those who were miles and countries and continents away, like I was.

A breakdown of the awards

As for the actual awards, there were really no surprises. I was super happy that some of my personal favourites, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Master of None got the recognition and awards these shows totally deserve. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Gilmore Girls creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladinos brilliant new period show) won Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy and the awesome Rachel Brosnahan (who plays the titular character) won Best Television Actress - Musical or Comedy. Aziz Ansari won Best Television Actor - Musical or Comedy for his role as Dev Shah in Master of None, the show he co-creates and co-writes. I love both shows, and it was great to see them win!

Big Little Lies swept the awards in all the categories it was nominated in - Best Actress in a Limited Series (Nicole Kidman), Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series (Laura Dern), Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series (Alexander Skarsgard), and Best Television Limited Series. All super-worthy wins and I cant wait for season 2 to begin! Elizabeth Moss and The Handmaids Tale both won (for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama and Best Television Series - Drama, respectively), and all was right with the world.

Im at a point where movies just dont excite me anywhere near as much as television series do, so I had a pretty lacklustre interest in the proceedings when the movie awards were on. Saoirse Ronan and Frances McDormand won (Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for Ladybird and Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, respectively); Ronans lovely Irish brogue and McDormands adorable dont-give-a-damn-ness were a delight!

The rest of the Golden Globe Awards show happened and was, well, competent, I suppose.

Additional highlights:

Natalie Portman, along with Ron Howard, presented the award for best director in a motion picture. Her very-pointed dig at the lack of female representation in that category was incredible because (a) somebody had to point it out on stage, and (b) it made so many male directors uncomfortable. So this is what male privilege looks like, when its kicked in the balls.

Amy Poehlers wickedly amusing refusal to let Seth Meyers mansplain his joke set-up; she delivered the punchline by itself, said the peach in Call Me By Your Name, this scene is the pits! Classic Poehler!

One Amy to the next, as a die-hard Gilmore Girls fan, I was super-excited to see Amy Sherman-Palladino win an award for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Ill be honest, I just wanted to hear her talk and deliver some witty one-liners, and she didnt disappoint: when thanking Amazon Video for giving them the creative freedom to make their show the way they want, she also thanked them for the budget they provided saying, Every cheque cleared. Cut to Jeff Bezos face in the audience, laughing.

Stray observations:

Did anyone else hope to see Amy Poehlers face, when Aziz Ansari won for Master of None? No? No Parks and Recreation fans, wanting to see Leslie Knopes proud mother-hen face as Tom Haverford stumbled onstage? Okay, just me then.

Can we just not eviscerate everything by overthinking and being offended? Like the LOreal Elvive ad with Winona Ryder, that aired multiple times during the show. Im not just saying that because Im a huge, beyond-all-rationale fan of Ryder, but come on!

Her career isnt literally being compared to bad and damaged hair. Comebacks are of many kinds, second chances of many sorts. If Ryders fine doing the ad (as she should be!), why be offended? My favourite tweet about the ad was a positive one, and it really did make me wish LOreal had used the classic line from Heathers.
On the last day of 2017, Rajinikanth officially announced he is ready to join politics and float his own party. As soon this news broke out, rumours started doing the rounds that the 67-year-old star has finally bid adieu to acting and that Kaala will be his last film.

When we did some digging to validate these reports, we learnt that the rumours are partially true. According to trustworthy sources, Rajinikanth is contemplating leaving cinema for good but only after doing another film with Kabali and Kaala director Pa Ranjith. The project, tipped to be a political drama, is most likely slated to go on the floors later this year.

Rajini sir and Ranjith have held discussions for a new project, a political flick which will be the perfect send off to his acting career. Kaala was supposed to be Rajini sirs last film but he felt he needed to do something that leaves a lasting impact on the audience. It was Ranjiths idea to do a political film thatll be packed with ideologies Rajini sir swears by. The regular shooting is expected to commence from this year-end, a source told Firstpost and added that Ranjith is already working on the script after getting a go ahead from Rajinikanth for the idea.

The casting process, according to the source, will take a while as both Rajinikanth and Ranjith are keenly looking forward to the release of Kaala and how it gets received, especially because it will be used to endorse Ranjiths pro-dalit voice. The film will also have a strong politics reference, Ranjith revealed while addressing a gathering last year in Madurai.

In Kaala, produced by Dhanush, Rajinikanth plays a slum lord-turned-gangster. He fights for oppressed Tamils in Mumbai and takes on a politician, played by Nana Patekar, head on. Not long ago, rumours made headlines that the films story is based on the life and times of Haji Mastan, the famous Mumbai-based smuggler who later turned reformer, but the makers denied it in a statement. The story is not based on any one person or event, Ranjith had said.

Kaala, in Sanskrit, refers to colour, destiny or fate. Predominant portion of the film has been shot in Mumbai. The story unfolds in Dharavi, but the makers could not shoot in the actual slum. Therefore, they erected a set worth over Rs 5 crore in a studio in Chennai to shoot the slum sequences. Kaala also stars Huma Qureshi, Anjali Patil, Pankaj Tripathi and Samuthirakani in pivotal roles.

Although shot as a Tamil film, Kaala is believed to feature some dialogues in Marathi and Hindi. Rajinikanth is said to have mouthed some lines in Hindi in the portion set in Mumbai. The film has music by Santhosh Narayanan. Lyca Productions, the makers of Shankars 2.0, will distribute Kaala worldwide. In a two-film deal, Lyca bagged the rights of Dhanushs Vada Chennai and Kaala.
Chiyaan Vikram is slowly limping back to normalcy. His dad Vinod Raj passed away last week and the actor is fully concentrating on the work front to come out of the huge personal loss.

On Sunday, Vikram made a surprise announcement on Instagram hinting his current mindset. The National Award-winning actor wrote A sun rises as the sun sets and announced his historic period film Mahavir Karna with RS Vimal, who made his debut in Malayalam film industry in 2015 with the critically acclaimed biographical romantic-drama Ennu Ninte Moideen.

RS Vimal had plans to make a film based on Karna, the main protagonist of Hindu epic Mahabharata and announced that Malayalam actor Prithviraj Sukumaran would play the lead. Vimal also announced that the budget of the film would be around Rs 300 crore but later in the year, the films producer Venu walked out. When the film was announced, I thought could pull it off in Rs 60 crore but the final estimate was much higher and that is why I was unable to fund Karnan, said Venu in an interview.

After a lot of discussions, RS Vimal came to a conclusion that the Rs 300 crore budget can be recovered only by making Karnan as a pan-Indian film. When Vimal approached Vikram to play Karna, he readily agreed. The film will be produced by United Film Kingdom, a production house based in New York, said a source close to the director.

To be predominantly shot in Hindi, Mahavir Karna will also be dubbed in other regional languages like Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. RS Vimal is planning to rope in leading actors from various Indian languages to make sure that audiences across the country find an emotional connect and top technicians will also be working in the film.

Vikram is currently occupied with two Tamil films  Saamy Square, the sequel to his super hit cop action film Saamy and Dhruva Natchathiram, a slick spy thriller with director Gautham Menon. Vikram will complete Dhruva Natchathiram before April because the film is scheduled to release in May while the producers of Saamy Square are eyeing for a Ramzan release.

The versatile actor is also said to be in talks with Kamal Haasans erstwhile associate Rajesh M Selva, who made his debut with the action thriller film Thoongaa Vanam in 2015. Kamals Raaj Kamal Films is planning to fund the project but Vikram should complete Rajeshs film in five months because he has to shoot for Mahavir Karna from October 2018. RS Vimal is planning to release Mahavir Karna for Christmas 2019 in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.
One of the most infamous pieces of investigative journalism was the Eliza Armstrong case. In 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette, a newspaper in the UK, published a scandalous story entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. The story was about the purchase of a 13-year-old girl called Eliza Armstrong for the sum of 5.

According to the story, the reporters learnt that girls as young as thirteen could be purchased on the streets of London and shipped to the continental shores of Europe for prostitution. The problem was that in order to cover and report the story, Pall Mall Gazette editor WT Stead had to make that particular purchase. He was brought to trial and sentenced to three months imprisonment for the story.

Investigative journalism is known to have its run-ins with the law. Often times to expose a flaw in a system, a journalist has to embed themselves in the system and thus expose themselves to criminal liability. Journalists rely on the State to decline to prosecute them for exposing these flaws.

The Tribune may have placed their faith in the fact that they were acting in the public interest when they broke the story about the purported flaw in the Aadhaar programme. But the UIDAI response was to file a First Information Report (FIR) against The Tribune on the same day. This though, is understandable, given the peculiar facts of The Tribune's expose.

The Tribune did not hire an in-house hacker to expose the flaws in the UIDAI database. In fact, the breach was not something The Tribune discovered. The Tribune reported that certain persons were selling unauthorised access to the UIDAI's Aadhaar database for a fee and explained how easy it would be to purchase such access.

The FIR filed by the UIDAI is self-explanatory. It only names The Tribune as one of the many accused. The primary accused is not The Tribune, but journalist Rachna Khaira and Anil Kumar, Sunil Kumar and Raj, three people supposedly contacted for the story by Khaira. The Tribune editor was not named as an accused. Khaira was named because she was part of the transaction which led to the sale of the information. Her role, along with the others, will have to be investigated. But if she acted with only the intent of exposing a racket, no criminality should be attached to the act.

Criminal law attaches criminal liability to all those who were involved in an unlawful act. Initially, everyone who was a participant to a crime is listed in an FIR. It does not necessarily mean that they are accused of committing a crime or each one of them will suffer prosecution for that crime. It merely means that each person's role in that particular criminal act warrants an investigation.

The UIADI has a right to know about the extent of The Tribune's involvement with these persons selling Aadhaar data. How much data was accessed by The Tribune via these persons and, in particular, whose data was accessed by the newspaper? Did The Tribune check data of their own employees or enter random Aadhaar numbers? This needs to be investigated. Further, who are Anil Kumar, Sunil Kumar and Raj? How did the reporter learn about them? Does The Tribune have more information about their whereabouts?

These people were clearly not sources. The Tribune burned them when they exposed their names and mobile numbers. Therefore, there is ample room to investigate a crime, since a crime has occurred. People accessed the Aadhaar database unlawfully. These persons need to be brought to book and the only way to move the criminal law machinery is through an FIR.

The Tribune did not hack the Aadhaar database, but it was party to a transaction where the Aadhaar database was breached. If there was a breach, the UIDAI is correct in registering an FIR to investigate the breach. This is not an attack on the press for doing its job. The Tribune was correct to have reported the story. However, this is what would logically follow from any sting operation where the reporter commits a crime in order to bring out a story.

The Tribune should, ideally, fully cooperate with the police and state their bonafides during the course of the investigation. The offences that have been made out in the FIR require a dishonest intention in order to be proved and further, for there to be conspiracy, there needs to be a common dishonest intention.

In cases such as this, where people are exposed via entrapment, the person who is trapping them as well as the people being trapped are arraigned in the FIR. The extent of their involvement will only be determined after the investigation. If the prosecution of The Tribune and its reporter is not in the interests of justice, criminal law has the machinery (Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973) which empowers the high court to quash such a prosecution.

The Tribune in this case, was performing a sting operation. There was no dishonest intent. They should let the law take its own course. Calling this FIR an attack on the freedom of the press is overkill. The nation and the government have a right to know how the database was breached and only a proper investigation will reveal that.
In a major setback to the efforts by security forces to wean away youngsters from the path of militancy, a scholar at the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), who was on vacation at his home in north Kashmirs Kupwara district, has become the latest entrant in militant ranks. This development came to public knowledge after a photo surfaced on social media, showing the youngster armed with an automatic rifle, having joined the Hizbul Mujahideen outfit.

Mannan Bashir Wani, 25, a resident of Takipora village in Lolab, Kupwara, was pursuing a doctorate in Geology at AMU, and was scheduled to return home three days ago but failed to turn up. Instead, a photo went viral on Facebook and Twitter, showing him posing calmly with what looked like a grenade launcher-cum-assault rifle.

The photo described Mannan as having joined the Hizbul Mujahideen on 5 January with the codename Hamzah Bhai'. The description erroneously mentions that Mannan has a PhD in Applied Geology while he is actually pursuing the degree.

Police sources told Firstpost that the young scholar comes from a well-off family in the Lolab Valley. His father, Bashir Ahmed, is reportedly a lecturer while his brother is working as a junior engineer in the Jammu and Kashmir government. According to his father, Mannan had been a student at AMU for over four years, He was a timid boy. But an event last year when he was harassed by security forces transformed him. Our whole family is in a shock, Bashir said. The incident took place in November 2017 when the youngster was on way to Srinagar from his home and it was described in a Facebook status by Mannan himself.

In the post, Mannan said the car was stopped four times and he had to get down and prove his identity every time. The most disgusting thing was when an ordinary SOG personnel donning black uniform posed questions like, why had I grown such long hair, why didn't I trim my beard if intend to look smart, why do I wear long boots, why do I wear a shawl in such a young age?

In the chilling Facebook post, Mannan mentions that a lady sitting next to him likened their situation to that of slaves, On this disgusting day, the best moment happened when I got a compliment from the Indian Army officer (who also checked my identity card, but spared me from getting down from the car) about my looks resembling the famous Commander, who has given them sleepless nights, and me passing a gentle smile without uttering a single word, the young scholar wrote.

When he returned home, there was something amiss about him, He looked disturbed that day. I could see the anger and the sadness in his eyes. But I had never thought he will take this extreme step, his father said over phone from Lolab. A friend of Mannan at AMU, who Firstpost contacted, said he had lost touch with him since November, around the same time the incident happened.

According to a profile on AMU's official website, Manaan was awarded 'Best Paper Presentation Award' in an international conference on 'Water, Environment, Energy and Society (ICWEES) held at AISECT University, Bhopal, for his paper Flood Risk Assessment of Lolab Valley from Watershed Analysis' using remote sensing and GIS techniques. Around 400 delegates from 20 countries, including China, US and the UK, participated in the conference.

Mannan had also come to Delhi recently from his University to lend support to the campaign for seeking whereabouts of the missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed, And also I believe, protest March or Sit-ins are only successful when all forms of protest are made simultaneously by people in their own capacities. We can neither expect everyone to come on roads and walk three or four kilometers on foot or lay on ground for days nor can we expect everyone to write long pieces, but, we can at least expect it from everyone to remain protesting for any genuine cause, until the justice is not delivered, in any form which he/she deems suitable and possible, he wrote in his blog post.

Inam, another Kashmiri student at AMU, said he had had little contact with Mannan since he was his senior but the two met once over tea at the university canteen. He talked enthusiastically about Kashmir and Palestine. I met him again on 31 December at his room as I was going home. He promised that once I come back, we will meet and talk for hours. He asked Firstpost to use his first name only due to fear of reprisal by security agencies.

Expressing concern over the new development, Munir A Khan, the police chief of Kashmir region, told Firstpost that a missing report was submitted by Mannan's family on Sunday and a case has been filed. "We have taken cognisance of the case. If true, it is a tragic development, and we will use all our resources to get him back to his family so that he can continue his studies and contribute positively to the society, he said.

However, this latest entry in the militant ranks has got the security establishment worried. According to official records, since 2017, 10 youngsters surrendered after the Jammu and Kashmir Police launched a drive in which their families made appeals. "Our forces have so far rescued 75 boys who were on the verge of joining militancy. We are hopeful of getting Mannan back as well," a senior police officer said.

But many more are joining militant groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. "We are fighting a nasty war in Kashmir against an over-populous, poor nation but a true military might, Inam, Mannans friend wrote in a Facebook post. "Picking up a gun to fight the injustice is almost suicidal here. When a young man picks up a gun here, we don't expect a new dawn of freedom, we don't sing ballads of a new revolution. Elegies are written instead, and in total resignation we await the fateful news".
New Delhi: The "Tuting incident" in Arunachal Pradesh has been resolved, Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said on Monday, days after Indian troops foiled attempts by Chinese road building teams to build a track on the Indian side of the border.

Rawat suggested that a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) between the two sides in Arunachal Pradesh two days ago had resolved the issue.

"The Tuting incident has been resolved," he told reporters on the sidelines of an event.

He added that the BPM had taken place two days ago. According to the army chief, there was a major reduction of Chinese troops in the Doka La area in the Sikkim sector.

Chinese road building teams had entered about one kilometre inside Indian territory in Tuting, government sources said, adding that they had come for track alignment activities.

The teams returned when confronted by Indian troops and left behind various road building equipment, including excavators, they said.

The incident came nearly four months after the end of the 73-day Doka La standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Sikkim sector.
New Delhi: The transgression incident in Arunachal Pradesh, where Chinese workers entered Indian territory constructing a track, has been resolved, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said on Monday.

He also said that there was a major reduction in the number of Chinese troops in the Doka La area.

Speaking on the sidelines of an event in New Delhi, the Army Chief said the "Tuting incident has been resolved".

General Rawat said a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) took place "two days back" on the issue.

Talking about the situation along the India-China border in Sikkim sector, where the two countries were involved in a 73-day-long standoff in Doka La, he said there was a major reduction in the number of troops on the Chinese side.

A Chinese road construction party entered India on 26 December, 2017, and were constructing a track, around two kilometres away from the nearest Indo-Tibetan Border Police post.

An almost 600-metre-long and 12-feet wide track was constructed on the Indian territory when the Chinese party was stopped.

The Chinese labourers had entered the area inadvertently, according to a government report on the incident. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops were not involved in the incident.

Indian troops pushed back the labourers and seized their equipment.

The incident came nearly four months after the end of the Doka La standoff that went on from 16 June to 28 August, 2017.

Earlier, speaking at the Army Technology Summit here, the Army Chief pitched for modernisation of the force and said India needed to be ready for "future wars".

"There is a huge requirement of modernisation of our armed forces, in every field," he said.

"Future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them.

"We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defence technology) because, for a nation like ours, the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with home-made solutions," he said.
New Delhi: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday launched a pilot 'Delhi Common Mobility Card' which will enable commuters to travel in both Delhi Metro and 250 select city buses.

The Delhi govenrment aims to shift to a 'Common Mobility Card' which could be used to travel in Metro and all Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and cluster buses by 1 April.

Under the pilot project, Delhi Metro cards will be valid in select 200 DTC and 50 cluster buses from Monday.

During the trial, by tapping the Metro card on an Electronic Ticketing Machine or ETM in a bus, a ticket would be generated, which would also reveal the balance in the passenger's Metro card.

Currently, ETMs are used by conductors in buses to issue tickets.

The money deducted from commuters' Metro cards will go to Delhi Metro Rail Corp (DMRC), which issues the Metro cards. The money will be later transferred to the Delhi government.

Delhi transport minister Kailash Gahlot said that after the trial period, a new card would be designed which would have both DMRC and Delhi government etched on it.

Commuters would be able to purchase and recharge these cards at all Metro stations, railway stations, airports, Inter State Bus Terminals and DTC bus pass counters.
Speaking at the annual conference of DGPs and IGPs in Tekanpur on Saturday, Home Minister Rajnath Singh raised the issue of 'do-it-yourself (DIY)' terrorists and lone-wolf attackers, reported Hindustan Times. Calling them the greatest threats to communal harmony, Singh asked for the creation of a dedicated cell to monitor online radicalisation.

The Intelligence Bureau took Singh's suggestion forward as it called for a special unit which will collect data and share information in real time between security agencies. The agency also asked DGPs to study radicalisation patterns in their respective states.

In a separate report, Hindustan Times also reported that the research wing of the home ministry has undertaken a nation-wide project to find out the reasons behind the radicalisation of youth and how could religious extremism be countered in the country. Called the Rad and Derad programme, the project is under the aegis of the National Police Mission programme (NPM) which was introduced in 2005 to modernise police forces for new challenges and to use research to improve counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, and the investigation of cyber and economic crimes.

The report also quoted a senior official in the Bureau of Police Research and Development wing of the home ministry who said that the research was a "rare endeavour" by the Centre to gain insight into radicalisation and extremism. The official also said that the focus will not be on any particular religion but on radicalisation itself.

As India (and the world at large) continues to struggle with terrorist attacks, the home ministry has been keeping busy in its efforts to combat radicalism. In November 2017, it formed a new division to exclusively deal with emerging security challenges such as radicalisation. The division  called Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Radicalisation (CTCR)  also encompasses merger of some of the ministry's existing divisions.

The CTCR wing, which is basically a modified version of the home ministry's internal security-II division, will focus on tracking and assessing the online reach of global terrorist outfits like the Islamic State and devising strategies to counter their propaganda while the CIS division will monitor online crimes and threats, including cyber fraud and hacking, and suggest ways to minimise and fight them. "The need for a counter-radicalisation division and policy was felt as (Rajnath) was keen that the problem should be solved from the base," an official at the ministry had said at the time.

A little earlier, in October 2016, it appointed former IPS officer Ashok Prasad as an adviser on cyber and social media, according to The Times of India. This was done because of concerns over use of cyberspace and social media for radicalisation and recruitment of Indian youth. Prasad will help the ministry to adopt a strategy to counter radicalisation on social media as well as fight cyber threats.

The report also noted that of the nearly 60 IS-influenced youngsters arrested across the country, all had been radicalised by people actually based in Iraq and Syria but who are active on social media. The youngsters were constantly asked by their "handlers" via closed Facebook groups, Telegram etc. to pledge allegiance to terrorist organisations and take up lone-wolf attacks in India. Intelligence agencies have been actively tracking jihadi activity on social media and in many cases have managed to intervene right before the plans were executed.

The centre has also looked at ensuring a "nationalist curriculum" in Jammu and Kashmir schools to counter what it believes is a "false narrative" that is impacting youth in the state, reported The Indian Express.

In terms of clear action taken against terrorism, the defence forces killed a total of 203 militants Jammu and Kashmir in 2017 till December 10 which was the highest number in the past seven years. Those killed included some top militant commanders such as Lashkar-e-Taiba's Bashir Ahmad Wani, Abu Dujana and Junaid Mattoo, and Hizbul Mujahideen's Sabzar Ahmad Bhat.

Furthermore, the National Investigating Agency (NIA) has also stepped up its investigations into "terror funding". The arrests of separatist leaders and others by the NIA were preceded by efforts to obtain information through improved intelligence. The government has also made efforts to wean away youth from the influence of separatists by taking steps to boost investment and employment in the state.

As part of its efforts to address the sense of alienation and to improve infrastructure in Jammu and Kashmir, the government released funds under its Rs 80,000 crore (over $12 billion) package for the state announced in 2015. Rajnath too has made regular visits to the state and emphasised that the government is willing to speak to anyone in the state.

In October, the government appointed Dineshwar Sharma, a former Intelligence Bureau chief, as its special representative to "initiate and carry forward a dialogue with elected representatives, various organisations and concerned individuals in the State of Jammu and Kashmir". One of Sharma's objectives apparently is to deal with and contain radicalisation among the youth in the state.

With inputs from agencies
Dhaka: A Bangladeshi court on Monday turned down a petition to legalise marriage between its citizens and refugees from Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority.

Babul Hossain, a construction worker from the district of Manikganj, had filed the petition with the Bangladesh High Court in December, challenging a government ban on marrying Rohingyas for Bangladeshi citizens, which has been in effect since 2014, Efe news reported.

"The court dismissed the petition and fined the petitioner 100,000 taka ($1,200) for wasting its time," said deputy Attorney General Motahar Hossain.

Hossain's son got married to a Rohingya in September 2017 at the refugee camp in Kutupalong and since then the couple has been on the run, fearing that they may be arrested.

"The court said this man has committed a crime by bringing the girl outside the camp as she is not a Bangladeshi citizen. He also committed a crime by attempting to marry her since there is an administrative ban (against such marriages)," the Attorney added.

The defence lawyer, ABM Hamidul Mishbah, said that he would file an appeal to the Supreme Court against the order.

In October 2017, the country's Law and Justice Ministry ordered civil registries to thoroughly scrutinize the identity documents of couples before registering a marriage, after a significant increase in the number of mixed relationships.

According to the United Nations Inter Sector Coordination Group, some 655,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh since August 2017.

The current exodus was triggered by the Myanmar security forces launching an operation in retaliation for an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on several security posts in Rakhine State on 25 August.

The governments of both the countries earlier reached an agreement on the process of repatriation for the Rohingya refugees present in Bangladesh. The process is expected to begin within two months.
The results of the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2017 that enables candidates to opt for top business schools in the country were announced on Monday by Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow, said media reports. IIM-Lucknow was the coordinating IIM for CAT 2017.

Candidates can check their score on the official website iimcat.ac.in.

To secure admission in IIMs, the candidates who cleared CAT with the percentile criterion set by each IIM will have to appear for a group discussion and personal interview.

According to Hindustan Times report, 20 candidates have scored an overall 100 percentile in CAT 2017. While in CAT 2016 all the top 20 candidates were male and engineers, this year the top 20 list contains two female candidates and three non-engineers, IIM Lucknow officials were quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

The names of the candidates who cracked CAT 2017 will be made available on the website of the respective IIMs, said The Indian Express report. Each IIM will send interview letters to the shortlisted candidates directly, added the report. The criteria for shortlisting vary for each IIM and other business schools.

Here are the steps to check the CAT 2017 results:

Open the official website - https://iimcat.ac.in Click on 'Score Card for CAT 2017' on the homepage Enter your details Download and take a print-out of your CAT score card

The CAT 2017 examination consists of three sections: 1) Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension 2) Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning 3) Quantitative Ability

A total of 1,99,632 candidates had appeared for the exam, the largest number in last three years.

CAT is conducted by IIM every year and its scores are used for admission to various management institutes across the country. The test was conducted on 26 November, 2017 in over 140 cities.
New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Monday filed a status report on its probe into the death of twin babies at Shalimar Bagh Max hospital before a court, which has directed that the investigation be conducted expeditiously.

"Status report filed. Taken on record. Investigating Officer (IO) states that they are awaiting report from Delhi Medical Council (DMC) and they have already recorded statements of concerned persons. He further states he has given request letter and reminder to DMC to file their report at the earliest.

"Considering the facts of the case, Investigating Officer shall investigate the matter from all angles and shall do the same expeditiously," Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Rajesh Malik said.

During investigation, police claimed to have found that in the death register of the hospital, only the time of birth of the two infants was mentioned but not the time of their death, despite both being handed over in two separate tightly wrapped packages.

The police said a copy of the FIR has been sent to the DMC for expert opinion and their report is awaited.

It said the post-mortem has been conducted and the final report regarding cause of death would be ascertained after getting a final opinion from the histopathology department of Safdarjung Hospital.

The Investigating Officer told the court that they have already recorded the statement of concerned persons, following which the matter was listed for 26 February.

On 24 December, Ashish Kumar, the father of the twins, one of whom was wrongly declared dead by the hospital, had sought a court-monitored probe into the matter, alleging that the ongoing "tainted" investigation may harm the prosecution case. In his plea, Kumar had urged that the station house officer concerned be directed to share details of the progress made in the investigation.

A baby boy and his twin sister, prematurely born at the hospital on 30 November, were declared still-born by the hospital doctors.

But when the parents were on their way to the crematorium, they found the boy was still alive and rushed him to another hospital. He died later at a private nursing home.

The applicant has alleged that there was a delay of 20 hours in lodging the FIR in the matter. "We have also sought a CBI probe in the matter," counsel for Kumar said.

The plea has sought directions to the police to explain why the statements of the family members of the complainant (the father) have not been recorded by the police. It said the hospital did not provide proper care and treatment, which had resulted in the death of the two infants.

The hospital's licence was cancelled by the Delhi government on 8 December, following an uproar over the incident.

But the hospital resumed its operations 10 days later after it got relief from an appellate authority which stayed the Delhi government's order.
The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Haryana police, probing into the the violence that had erupted in Panchkula and Sirsa on 25 August after Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh's conviction, on Sunday arrested Dr Mahinder Pal Singh alias Mahender Insan, a doctor who is accused of performing castration on Dera followers, said media reports.

According to The Times of India report, Mahender was a close aide to Ram Rahim and was among those seven persons who were booked in the case registered at Sector 5 police station in Panchkula. Mahender was nabbed from the Dera headquarters in Sirsa. He was absconding after a case was registered against him on 28 August, said India Today report.

The report added that he was reportedly hiding inside the Dera complex where the police had conducted a search operation in September last year.

The Times of India report added, that Mahender was seen at the spot just before the violence and was also among those who attended the action plan meeting called by Honeypreet Insan on 17 August.

In October, five Dera supporters in police custody had confessed that Honeypreet, the adopted daughter of Ram Rahim, had masterminded and funded the Panchkula violence, News18 had reported.

Mahender is also a close associate of Dera functionary Aditya Insan, who is alleged to be a key culprit behind the mob violence on 25 August. Adiya has been on the run since registration of case against him. Haryana police in December decided to double the reward money from Rs one lakh to two lakh for information leading to the arrest of Aditya.

Most of the jailed sect chief's confidants including Honeypreet, who was on the run after his conviction, were arrested as Haryana police registered 173 FIRs with nearly 1,000 Dera followers as accused.

On 3 January, Ram Rahim Singh's relative and former MLA Harminder Singh Jassi appeared before the SIT. Assistant commissioner of Panchkula police heading the SIT had asked Jassi to appear before it earlier, but the former Congress legislator had requested for more time.

Haryana remained on edge after the Sirsa-headquartered sect chief was convicted by a special CBI court, triggering widespread violence and arson, mainly in Panchkula and Sirsa, leaving 41 dead and scores injured.

The Dera chief, now lodged in Sunaria jail in Rohtak, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for raping two disciples.

With inputs from PTI
Firozabad: In a freak accident, at least 11 people were killed on Sunday after a speeding truck hit a three-wheeler and took a tumble, crushing a car and some passers-by in Firozabad, the police said.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has expressed grief over the loss of lives in the accident and has announced a financial assistance of Rs 2 lakh to the kin of each of the deceased, an official statement said.

According to Firozabad District Magistrate Neha Sharma, those who have lost their lives include, two women, a youth, six men and two children.

The incident took place around 4 pm when the truck, on its way to Kanpur from Agra, lost balance while taking a sharp turn on a busy national highway and hit a three-wheeler, Superintendent of Police Manoj Kumar told PTI.

According to the police, a JCB machine was used to remove the debris and pull the bodies out.

"As many as 10 people died on the spot, while a critically injured man succumbed to his injuries on way to Agra," Sharma said.

"Of the deceased, identity of four have been ascertained so far. They are Manoj (35), a resident of Mainpuri, his 12-year-old son Himanshu and nine-year-old son Pranshu. The person who was critically injured and later died, has been identified as Pankaj, also a resident of Mainpuri," the district magistrate said.

The bodies have been sent for post-mortem. The truck driver is absconding and further investigation into the incident is underway, the police said.

In the statement issued by the office of the chief minister in Lucknow, Adityanath expressed his condolences to the bereaved families.
Mumbai: A fire broke out on the third floor of the sessions court building in Mumbai on Monday morning, an official said.

No casualty or injury has been reported so far, he said.

The fire brigade got a call at 7.14 am about the blaze in the court building, located near the campus of the Mumbai University in South Mumbai, the official of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's disaster management unit said.

The fire brigade personnel rushed to the spot, he said.

"Efforts are on to douse the flames," he said.

The cause of fire was not yet known, he said, adding that an investigation will be carried out into the incident.

Further details were awaited.

This is the fifth fire incident in the city in the last 20 days.

Twelve people were killed when a massive fire broke out at a snack shop in Saki Naka-Kurla area in Mumbai on 18 December.

Later, 14 people were killed in a fire at an upscale pub in the Kamala Mills compound on 29 December.

On another incident on 4 January, four persons, including two children, died and five were seriously injured after an upper floor of a residential building in suburban Marol caught fire.

Besides, a 20-year-old man, who worked for a television serial production unit, was killed in a fire at the Cine Vista film studio in suburban Kanjurmarg on 6 January.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by news portal The Wire seeking to quash a criminal defamation case filed against it by BJP president Amit Shah's son Jay over an article related to his company.

Justice JB Pardiwala rejected the petition on the grounds that the article, "The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah", is per say "defamatory" and the trial court should proceed with the case.

The high court, which had earlier directed the trial court to complete the hearing in the case in six months, on Monday withdrew that order.

This means there is no time-frame for the trial court to complete the hearing.

SM Vatsa, the lawyer for the author of the article and editors of the news portal, had maintained the news report was not "defamatory," and the facts presented in it were based on public documents.

The petitioners had maintained the article was a part of investigative journalism and filing a criminal defamation suit against it was against the freedom of the press.

Jay Shah's lawyer SV Raju, on the other hand, had maintained the article was "defamatory" and the two witnesses examined by the lower court had established that the reputation of his client was tarnished due to its publication.

Jay Shah had moved the lower court alleging criminal defamation by the petitioners after the article published by the website claimed his company's turnover grew exponentially after the BJP-led government came to power at the Centre in 2014.

After the suit was filed on 9 October last year, the court initiated proceedings against them under the CrPC section 202 (to inquire into a case to decide whether or not there is sufficient ground for proceeding).

The suit has been filed against the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Siddharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and the Foundation for Independent Journalism.

The foundation publishes The Wire.

With the quashing of the plea, the matter is expected to come up for hearing in the lower court on Tuesday.

Jay Shah has separately filed a civil defamation suit of Rs 100 crore against the website over the article.

Jay Shah had rejected the charge made in the article, insisting the story was "false, derogatory and defamatory".
Balrampur: India and Nepal have reached an agreement to resolve differences on reconstructing damaged pillars along the mutual border and clearing the encroachment on the "No Man's Land," an Indian official said on Monday.

The agreement was reached during a meeting of Indian and Nepalese officials at the SSB Group centre, Balrampur District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Misra said.

Six Nepalese officials and officials from five districts of Uttar Pradesh took part in the meeting, he said.

India and Nepal will soon start reconstructing the damaged pillars and clear the "No Man's Land" of encroachers, said Misra, the nodal officer for the Indian side.

A team to survey the border areas for the purpose has arrived in Balrampur, Misra said, adding that the work to be carried out on the border has been divided into three parts.

They include identifying the damaged pillars, reconstructing them and clearing the No Man's Land.

Misra said the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the Public Works Department, Revenue Department, and the Nepali Police will contribute to the process.

He hoped the resolution of differences will help in strengthening ties between the people of the two countries.

Hariprasad Mailani, the nodal officer of the Nepalese side, said no one will be allowed to misbehave with the Indian people and jawans in Nepal.

The SSB, which works under the the Union home ministry, is tasked with guarding the 1,751 kilometre India-Nepal border.

Uttar Pradesh shares a 599.3 kilometre open border with Nepal touching seven districts  Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Sravasti, Balrampur, Sidhharthnagar and Maharajganj.
Jerusalem: Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling "emotional and excited" as he prepares to visit his birthplace during the four day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month.

Moshe, 11, was two-year-old when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based LeT terrorists.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents' bodies, was saved in a daring move by his brave nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

"Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on 15 January. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories," an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshe's grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 5 July in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

"I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House," Moshe had told the Indian prime minister.

Modi had responded by saying, "Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere".

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on 14 January.

"Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug," Rosenberg said adding, "he is hoping to meet the Indian prime minister again during his India trip".

"He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully Prime Minister Modi 'at his home in Mumbai'," the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

"During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the site seeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment," Rosenberg noted.

Moshe's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

"It is heart warming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India haven't forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one", Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said that the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like "homecoming" for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshe's bar mitzvah in Mumbai. Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued ten year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honorary citizenship by the Israeli government.
New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Monday said that Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani's request for holding a rally in New Delhi on Tuesday is still "under consideration", even as the organisers insist it will be held on pre-scheduled time.

The 'Social Justice' rally or 'Yuva Hunkaar Rally' is planned to be addressed by Mevani and Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi.

One of the organisers and former JNU Students' Union president Mohit Kumar Pandey said, "There have been a lot of attempts to stop this event and even some media houses are spreading wrong information that the permission for the rally has been denied."

Ever since the rally was announced on 2 January "a lot of money has been spent on posters calling Mevani a deshdrohi (traitor) and urban Naxal," Pandey told PTI, adding the event will be held as per schedule.

Mevani could not be reached for his comments. In a statement, the organisers urged the prospective participants to "assemble on the Parliament Street at 12 pm on Tuesday".

A senior police officer though said, "Mevani's request for the rally is still under consideration."

The rally seeks to raise the demand for the release of Dalit outfit Bhim Army's founder Chandrashekhar Azad and emphasise on issues like educational rights, employment, livelihood and gender justice.

A large section of students from universities and colleges in Delhi, women's groups, teachers' associations and activists associated with Mevani from across the country are expected to attend the rally.

Azad, 30, was arrested in June last year from Himachal Pradesh as he was the main accused in the Thakur-Dalit clash in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district.
Chennai: Tamil Nadu chief minister K Palaniswamy on Monday took up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the plight of 15 fishermen from the state detained by Iranian authorities and sought his intervention in securing their release.

The fishermen engaged in fishing from the Emirate of Dubai fishing base were arrested by the Iranian Coast Guard on 24 October last year after they "inadvertently" strayed into their waters, he told Modi in a letter.

Natives of Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi districts in Tamil Nadu, the fishermen "are reportedly detained in their fishing boats in KISH Island, Iran for the past two months," he said.

An Iranian court imposed fine on these fishermen and the same had to be paid by them with the financial support from their local sponsors from Dubai, UAE, he added.

One of the fishermen was a diabetic and also suffering from hypertension while another " is reportedly having a heart problem and is seeking medical intervention."

The prolonged incarceration of the fishermen who went abroad for earning their humble livelihood would severely affect their families and dependents, he said.

"Hence, I request your personal intervention by instructing the Ambassadors of India in Tehran and United Arab Emirates to provide necessary medical attention and to take effective legal steps to secure the immediate release of these poor innocent fishermen from Tamil Nadu, Palaniswamy urged Modi.
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav was sentenced to three-and-half years jail in the second of the three fodder scam cases by a special CBI court. Fifteen other apart from Lalu were also convicted in the case.

The multi-million corruption case, which first broke out in the 90s was subsequently stirred up from time to time in the last 21 years. The fodder scam, as we know it, was a classic case of small-scale falsified transactions which flourished over the course of years, got systemised, and snowballed into a Rs 945-crore scam.

The scam took its notorious name from the fact that it was rooted in the Animal and Husbandry department of Bihar government and the fraudulent transactions were made in the name of procuring cattle feed over a period of 20 years, under successive regimes.

However, it took a one-line fax memo, sent by the then Principal Secretary of the Finance Department, Vijay Shankar Dubey, to bring the entire sand castle crashing down. Dubey recounted the episode to Alok Kumar of News18, that how a single-line note unearthed the fodder scam, unseating a sitting chief minister of Bihar and literally paralysing the electoral career of one of the tallest political figures in the state. Here are the edited excerpts.

"By the year 1995-96, the financial condition of the Bihar government was so bad that even government employees were not getting their salaries. I was posted as the principal secretary of finance department, a post I had taken up in July, 1995. Since we were not in a position to pay the salaries of employees, it struck my mind that where was the money going.

Then in the month of September-October 1995, we discovered that Animal Husbandry Department (ADH) was spending more than five times the budgetary allocation. I immediately got suspicious that something was wrong.

On 19 January, 1996 we came to the conclusion that AHD has again exceeded the spending budget allotted to it. It was baffling for me.

I talked to my colleagues and faxed a one-line message that very day to all district collectors. Please report expenditure under AHD for the last three years.

This is the message that opened the Pandora's box, now known as the fodder scam.

On 20 January, I dispatched one of our additional secretaries to Ranchi to find out where the money was spent during the last three years and the very next day, on 21 January, he reported back saying, They have not only exceeded budget limits but all the vouchers and bills are fake, against which the money was withdrawn.

I told him to seize all the bills and come back. He came back to Patna on 22 January. After scrutinising all the documents, I moved a file to the government the next day detailing how a big fraud has taken place in Ranchi. I recommended filing an FIR against the suspects.

Even though the government kept the report under wraps, all district collectors had already started taking actions on my instructions. On 27 January, 1996, I specifically instructed Amit Khare, the then district collector of Chaibasa, to raid the Chaibasa treasury. The finding of raids made headlines all over the country. Soon after the raid employees and fodder suppliers involved in the scam went underground. But the government had not yet taken note of my recommendations. Lalu Prasad Yadav was the chief minister of Bihar.

However, the government finally acted on my recommendations on 30 January. And in the intervening weeks, a lot of things happened. You can interpret what the political leadership could have tried to do. But during this week the media widely covered the findings of the raids in Dumka, Ranchi and in other districts.

Although nobody tried to pressurise me, people in the government certainly tried to delay the investigations. However, it was too late for that and the fact that a scam had been fermenting in the ADH was evident. It was more than a 100 crore scam.

Later that year, under pressure from Opposition, the state government had to recommend a CBI probe and more than 50 cases were filed. On 23 June, 1997 the CBI named Lalu Prasad Yadav as one of the accused, which subsequently forced him to step down from the post of the chief minister."

Vijay Shankar Dubey, 74, is a former chief secretary of Bihar and Jharkhand. A 1966-batch IAS officer, Dubey retired in 2002 and went on to serve as vice-chancellor of Nalanda Open University from 2003 to 2009.
A day after Lalu Prasad Yadav was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail in the fodder scam case, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief's elder sister Gangotri Devi died of shock on Sunday, according to several media reports.

"She did not have any disease but she was ill for the past two days and was coughing," The Telegraph quoted her cousin Ramanand Yadav as saying. "She was depressed after she heard that Lalu ji has been sent to jail for three-and-a-half years. The doctor said she died due to a heart attack."

Former Bihar chief minister and Lalu's wife Rabri Devi also said her sister in-law had died due to shock after hearing about the sentencing, The Times of India reported. "Even on Sunday, she spent whole day praying for early release of her brother. When she learnt in the evening that her brother was sentenced to jail for a long period, she was devastated. She passed away because she could not bear the shock of her brother's sentence," she told the newspaper.

"We have informed my father (about the death of our aunt) and are seeking parole for him so he can attend the funeral of his sister," Lalu's son Tejashwi Yadav was quoted as saying by Patna Daily. The report added that Yadav feared the formalities involved in obtaining a bail might not allow Lalu to attend the last rites of his sister.

Gangotri died at her son Rudal Yadav's official residence on Vetenary College campus in Patna, and is survived by two sons and a daughter, according to The Tribune.

On Saturday, a special CBI court in Ranchi sentenced Lalu, along with 15 others, to three-and-a-half years years of imprisonment and fined them a sum of Rs five lakh in connection with fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from Devghar treasury between 1994 and 1996.
Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh Police on Monday said a person detained in Mathura on suspicion of being a terrorist has turned out to be a bonafide resident of Jammu and Kashmir.

Inspector General of Police (IG) Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) Aseem Arun said: "As of now no terror link has been established."

The person in question, Bilal Ahmad Rani, was detained on Sunday after he was caught travelling without a ticket on board the New Delhi-Bhopal Shatabdi Express.

Rani was behaving suspiciously and had to be taken for interrogation, Arun said. During questioning, it was established that Rani was "a bonafide resident of Anantnag where his family runs a medical store".

The details of two other Kashmiris living with Rani in a Delhi hotel were also confirmed. They are also residents of Jammu and Kashmir. But they might face some more interrogation, an officer said.
The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) expelled Mannan Bashir Wani, a Kashmiri research scholar at the university, until further inquiry after reports of him joining militants in Jammu and Kashmir surfaced. The Uttar Pradesh Police also conducted raids at the AMU campus to search for the missing Kashmiri student.

Mannan, a 25-year-0ld who was pursuing his PhD in applied geology at AMU, reportedly joined Hizbul Mujahideen on 5 January. The news broke out after Mannan, who was visiting his home on a break, went missing. He was supposed to reach home on 3 January but he failed to turn up. Subsequently, photographs of him flaunting an assault rifle cum grenade launcher surfaced on social media.

Mannan joined AMU after completing Bachelors in Geology and Earth Sciences from the University of Kashmir. He had also completed his Master's and MPhil in geology from AMU. He had been studying at AMU for past four years. He also won an award for the best paper presentation at an international conference in 2016.

M. Mohsin Khan, the proctor of AMU said that Mannan regularly attended his classes and the university management had no clue about any suspicious activities the student may have indulged in, as reported by India Today TV.

The university sealed his room at the Mohammad Habib Hall, saying his "highly objectionable activities can hamper the peaceful academic atmosphere and create disharmony", a university spokesperson told IANS.

Khan also said since Mannan had breached the AMU Students Conduct and Discipline Rules, the matter was placed before Vice Chancellor Tariq Mansoor.

"Taking into account the gravity of the offence, the Vice Chancellor has ordered Wani to be expelled from the rolls of the University with immediate effect," said the Proctor, adding the campus and its institutions were out of bounds for Mannan from now on.

The AMU followed a policy of zero tolerance towards anti-national activities and accorded top priority to national security, the university said.

Meanwhile, his family informed the police that Mannan went missing and efforts to trace him have begun.

However, according to an India Today report, the police said it is possible that the picture was photoshopped and his last known location was New Delhi.

"He was scheduled to return home four days ago. But instead his pictures showing him with an AK-47 reached the family," a police officer said, adding that if indeed he has joined militancy, all efforts to pursuade the young man to return home will be made.

The report comes when the Jammu and Kashmir administration has been increasingly stressing upon the need to persuade and bring back young boys waylaid by extremist elements, rather than taking a tough approach against them. According to a Firstpost report, the police is using social media to expand their reach to young Kashmiris who are increasingly being attract by militant groups through the medium to join their ranks.

Mannan, a resident of Takipora village in Lolab, Kupwara, hailed from a well to do family. His father, Bashir Ahmed, is reportedly a lecturer while his brother is working as a junior engineer in the Jammu and Kashmir government. According to his father, Mannan was a student at AMU for over four years, He was a timid boy. But an event last year when he was harassed by security forces transformed him. Our whole family is in a shock, Bashir said. The incident took place in November 2017 when the youngster was on way to Srinagar from his home and it was described in a Facebook post by Mannan himself.

In the post, Mannan said the car was stopped four times and he had to get down and prove his identity every time. The most disgusting thing was when an ordinary SOG personnel donning black uniform posed questions like, why had I grown such long hair, why didn't I trim my beard if intend to look smart, why do I wear long boots, why do I wear a shawl in such a young age?

In the Facebook post, Mannan mentioned that a lady sitting next to him likened their situation to that of slaves, On this disgusting day, the best moment happened when I got a compliment from the Indian Army officer (who also checked my identity card, but spared me from getting down from the car) about my looks resembling the famous commander, who has given them sleepless nights, and me passing a gentle smile without uttering a single word, the young scholar wrote.

Meanwhile, his friends and family were shocked at the news and claimed they have no idea whether it is true Mannan's father said he was unable to reach his son and does not know if he has joined militancy. Inam, another Kashmiri student at AMU who knew Mannan, wrote in a Facebook post: "Picking up a gun to fight the injustice is almost suicidal here. When a young man picks up a gun here, we don't expect a new dawn of freedom, we don't sing ballads of a new revolution. Elegies are written instead, and in total resignation we await the fateful news".
Shillong: NCP legislator Marthon Sangma and four other Independent legislators, are set to join Meghalaya's ruling Congress to contest the upcoming Assembly polls, a party leader said on Monday.

The move of the five legislators to join Congress is significant after seven of its legislators had resigned as members of the assembly and joined other political parties.

Independent legislators  Brigady Marak, Ashahel D Shira, Michael Sangma and David Nongrum  who are supporting the Mukul Sangma government had already applied for party ticket to contest the elections.

"They (Nationalist Congress Party and four Independents legislators) have evinced interest to be part of the Congress family. They will be joining us soon and contest the elections on Congress ticket," state Congress chief Celestine Lyngdoh told IANS.

"Some of them left the Congress party the other day and we are glad that these five legislators are joining us and they would surely retain their seats in the assembly," he said.

NCP legislator Sangma said he decided to contest upcoming Assembly elections on a Congress ticket since it will retain power in Meghalaya and there is no other alternative party in the state.

"I am confident that voters in Garo Hills (24 seats in western part of Meghalaya) will not vote for the BJP due to its anti-Christian activities and the NPP too will suffer defeat since it is a part of the BJP-led NDA government at the centre and Manipur," Sangma told IANS.

However, the National People's Party (NPP) has decided not to have pre-poll alliance with the BJP in the upcoming assembly elections.

Last week, five former Congress legislators  Rowell Lyngdoh, Prestone Tynsong, Coming One Ymbon, Ngaitlang Dhar and Sniawbhalang Dhar  joined the NPP.

Former Congress legislator Alexander Hek, who was a Health and Family Welfare minister in the Mukul Sangma cabinet before being sacked last year, joined the BJP.

Incumbent chief executive member of the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council PN Syiem, resigned from the Assembly and joined the newly-floated People's Democratic Front.

Moreover, veteran Congress legislators including four-time Chief Minister DD Lapang, incumbent Deputy Chief Minister Roytre Christopher Laloo and Health and Family Welfare Minister Roshan Warjri, have been declared "retired" from electoral politics.
At the time when government has been pushing for 'Make in India' in the defence sector, the Centre has scrapped the Rs 32,000-crore project to build 12 advanced minesweepers (MCMVs) with a South Korean company, The Times of India reported.

Advanced minesweepers are specialised warships which detect, track and destroy underwater mines along the coasts. MCMVs have very low acoustic, magnetic, electrical and pressure signatures. These vessels are designed to have high shock resistance against underwater explosions.

Hindustan Times reported that the negotiations between Goa Shipyard Limited (GSL) and South Korea-based Kangnam Corporation fell apart in the final stage.

We were unable to resolve commercial complications despite our best efforts. This particular deal with the Koreans is off, GSL chairman Rear Admiral Shekhar Mital (retd) was quoted by Hindustan Times as saying.

The Times of India added that the South Koreans wanted some changes in the original tender for the project. The report also said that there were problems with the terms related to transfer of technology.

The Times of India reported that the Ministry of Defence directed GSL to restart the tender process for the minesweepers.

Thanking Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for the "quick decision", Mittal told The Times of India that the latest tender will help expedite the project.

The Centre will soon issue another Expression of Interest (EoI) for the minesweepers to Kangnam, Italy-based Intermarine and other foreign companies.

Nevertheless. this is not the first time that Kangnam has come under the scanner of the Indian government.

Hindustan Times reported that the government had scrapped a similar contract with the company in 2014 amid corruption allegations.

Had the latest deal been finalised, work on the project would have started in April 2018. The delivery of the 12 minesweepers, on the other hand, would have begun in 2021.

However, with latest deal falling apart, India could be without a minesweeper even beyond 2021, Hindustan Times reported. With a 6,000-kilometre-long coastline, India needs at least 24 minesweepers on the eastern and western coast.

Minesweepers become imperative in the larger context of India's maritime security. As noted by media reports, China has been deploying its submarines in the Indian Ocean Region, where India too is a major player. Moreover, these submarines have the capability to quietly lay mines, thus endangering India's maritime interests.

It is to be noted that the Indian Navy had decommissioned two of its oldest minesweepers  INS Karwar and INS Kakinada  after 30 years in service.

With the decommissioning of the two minesweepers, the navy is now left with a fleet of four Soviet-origin minesweeping ships will also be decommissioned by the end of 2018.

A parliamentary standing committee on defence recently criticised the government on the issue and asked it to make efforts to fill the gap in the navy's capability. The worring gap in the operational capacity of the Indian Navy prompted the government to look for more vessels.

Nevertheless, the 'Make in India' project seems to be only on paper as an October 2017 report in The Times of India noted that over half a dozen projects are stuck at various stages of negotiation due to procedural delays and political apathy.

With inputs from PTI
A Shiv Sena leader from Mumbai's Kandivali was killed by unidentified assailants on Sunday, media reports said. Ashok Sawant, a two-time corporator from Samata Nagar, was attacked while he was returning home after meeting a friend around 11 pm, reported India Today.



The Times of India reported that two men attacked the 62-year-old leader with choppers before fleeing the spot.

Sawant, who is the brother of senior police officer Subhash Sawant, was rushed to Shri Sai Hospital in Kandivali but was declared dead on arrival. According to The Times of India, police identified one of the attackers after going through the CCTV footage.

While the motive of the killings is still not clear, report in The Times of India said that Sawant, who had entered cable television business a few years ago, began receiving extortion calls days before he was killed.

An FIR has been filed under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code at the Samata Nagar police station , reported India Today.
Mumbai: Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant was stabbed to death outside his home in Mumbai late on Sunday, police said Monday, adding two alleged assailants have been arrested fro the crime.

According to police, Sawant, a former municipal corporator, was returning home around 11 pm from a meeting in Thakur Complex, to his apartment in Videocon Towers, riding pillion on a scooter.

As they nearly reached his home, suddenly, an unknown person kicked the scooter, making it go off-balance and forcing the driver to stop it. He then entered into a heated argument with this unknown person even as Sawant waited.

As per the witness accounts of the incident, two other persons, who were lying in wait on the dark road, then attacked Sawant with knives and choppers, making him collapse in a pool of blood barely 400 metres from his house.

A police team which arrived at the crime scene soon after took him to a nearby private hospital where he was pronounced dead. The 63-year-old leader suffered at least 17 serious wounds including on the neck, chest and head.

Police have checked CCTV images in the area and have identified one of the two suspected killers. The preliminary motive behind the crime appeared to be extortion.

"We have arrested two persons, and seized an autorickshaw used in the crime, while further investigations are underway," Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone XII, Vinay Rathod said.

The assailants had recced the area in advance before committing the crime at the opportune time, travelling in the autorickshaw, the sleuths have found.

Sawant served twice as municipal corporator from Poisar village area, lost the elections once, and his daughter was elected once, after which he was appointed a deputy Vibhag Pramukh by the Shiv Sena.

He is survived by his wife, politician daughter, and another daughter and a son who are both doctors.

Large parts of Kandivali east observed a spontaneous shutdown as a mark of respect and around 5,000 mourners, including representatives of various political parties, turned up for Sawant's funeral ceremonies which were completed at the nearby Borivali east crematorium in the afternoon.
Tekanpur (MP): Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday drew the attention of the country's top police officials to the problems arising out of social media and cyber crimes, saying they should be dealt with on highest priority.

Speaking at the concluding day of the annual conference of the DGPs and IGPs here at the BSF Academy, the prime minister said that there was an emerging global consensus towards greater information sharing on illicit financial dealings and India could play a key role in achieving this.

Modi said cybersecurity issues should be dealt with immediately and should receive the highest priority, according to an official release.

In this context, the prime minister particularly mentioned the importance of social media.

He said messaging should rely on local languages for greater effectiveness.

Referring to the radicalisation of youth, Modi urged the top police officers to use technology to pinpoint the problem areas.

Around 250 top officers from the state police forces and central police organisations participated in the three-day meet.

The prime minister said India is an "organic entity" and not an "assembled" one and asked the police officers from the states to open up in sharing information on illicit financial dealings.

He said while openness is getting increased acceptance worldwide, there is a need for greater openness among states too, on security issues.

Modi said security cannot be achieved selectively, or alone, and for that breaking of silos and information sharing among states can help make everyone more secure.

Following a directive of Modi, the home ministry has been organising the conference outside the national capital since the NDA government came to power in 2014.

The last three conferences were held in Guwahati, Rann of Kutch and Hyderabad.

The prime minister recalled how the nature and the scope of the conference have changed since 2014, beginning with its being shifted out of Delhi.

He appreciated the officers who have been instrumental in facilitating this change.

Modi said the conference has now become more relevant, in the context of challenges and responsibilities facing the country.

He said the new format of the conference has resulted in a marked improvement in the quality of discussions.

The prime minister commended the country's security apparatus for the work they have been doing in securing the country.

He said that the officers present at the conference have delivered leadership, despite often having to operate in an environment of negativity.

Modi said that as a result of the discussions in the conference over the last few years, now, once an objective is clearly defined for the police force, there is a lot of cohesion in the execution.

He said this conference was helping top police officers get a more holistic view of the problems and challenges. He said the range of topics being discussed has also become more broad-based over the last two years.

This has helped give a whole new vision to senior police officers, he said.

Discussing ways to add even more value to this conference, the prime minister suggested that the follow up should continue through working groups, all the year round.

In this context, he especially emphasised the importance of involving younger officers. Modi said this would greatly help in improving the effectiveness of the exercise.

The prime minister also presented president's police medals for distinguished service to Intelligence Bureau (IB) officers. During his address, the prime minister congratulated and appreciated the medal-winning officers of the IB, for their dedication and commitment to service.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and union ministers of states Hansraj Ahir and Kiren Rijiju were also present on the occasion.
Senior advocate and amicus curiae (impartial adviser to court) Amrendra Sharan, submitted his report on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination to the Supreme Court on Monday rejecting the need to re-investigate the case. He said there was no evidence to suggest that Gandhi was killed by a 'mysterious' fourth person.

The Supreme Court had appointed Sharan to examine all the 4,000 pages of trial court records related to Gandhi's killing, based on a PIL filed by Pankaj Phadnis, a researcher and a trustee of Abhinav Bharat, Mumbai, who had raised questions about the probe into Gandhi's murder suggesting it was one of the biggest cover-ups in history. He questioned the 'three-bullet theory' in the murder of Gandhi, suggesting there was a fourth bullet which was also fired by someone apart from Nathuram Godse.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated 70 years ago on 30 January, 1948. There were 12 persons named in the charge sheet. One of the accused had turned approver while five were sentenced to life. Three persons were declared as absconders in the case. Godse and Narayan Dattatraya Apte were hanged at Ambala jail on 15 November, 1949 after the High Court of East Punjab confirmed their death sentence on 21 June, 1949.

According to The Times of India, Sharan told the Supreme Court bench that there is no evidence to suggest Gandhi was killed by anybody other than Godse. The amicus curiae, assisted by advocates Sanchit Guru and Samarth Khanna who pored over all the documents including the Jeevan Lal Kapur Inquiry Commission report of 1969, informed the apex court that allegations of foreign intelligence powers having a hand at play are also baseless.

The report said that the bullets which pierced Mahatma Gandhis body, the pistol from which it was fired, the assailant who fired the said bullets, the conspiracy which led to the assassination and the ideology which led to the said assassination have all been duly identified, thereby debunking the petitioner's claim, as per The Indian Express.

Phadnis, a self-professed Veer Savarkar follower, in his petition claimed, The blame on the Marathi people in general and Veer Savarkar in particular for being the cause of the Mahatmas death has no basis in law and facts. On the other hand, there is a compelling need to uncover the larger conspiracy behind the murder by constituting a new Commission of Inquiry to look into the issue," as per Hindustan Times.

The matter is expected to come up with the Supreme Court bench on 12 January.
Bhubaneswar: Amidst debate on whether a tribunal is required to resolve the Mahanadi water dispute between Odisha and Chhattishgarh, the state Congress unit on Sunday sought immediate intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for amicable settlement of the issue.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi should intervene and ask Chhattishgarh to stop project work on upstream of Mahanadi," Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Prasad Harichandan told reporters.

Harichandan's remark came a day after Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik said that a tribunal is the only way out to resolve the Mahanadi dispute while Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan advocated for a fresh negotiation.

The OPCC president, however, blamed both the BJD and the BJP for the Mahanadi fiasco and accused them of doing politics over the sensitive water sharing matter.

"The Central government has been deliberately delaying formation of a tribunal," Harichandan said adding that Congress would intensify stir over the issue and expose the "politics" of both the BJD and the BJP.

Stating that OPCC has already organised a Odisha bandh over Mahanadi issue, Harichandan blamed the state's BJD government for keeping mum when Chhattishgarh started construction of projects.

He also accused the Centre of siding with Chhattishgarh which is ruled by the BJP.

Harichandan said the water flow in Mahanadi has already declined by 40 percent and the situation will lead to scarcity of drinking water in several cities and villages in Odisha.
Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Sunday advocated strong and friendly India- Pakistan relations, while appealing to the leadership of both the countries for steps for the betterment of ties to reduce acrimony, violence and for an atmosphere of friendship between the two neighbours.

"For how long should humanity be left to bleed? The leadership of both the countries should rise to the occasion

and change the hate mongering between the two into a peace narrative," she told a gathering at the mausoleum of her father and former chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed at Bijbehera in south Kashmir on his second death anniversary.

Mehbooba said a friendly relationship between the two

countries would have a positive bearing on the situation in

the state, which had seen enough bloodshed over the last three decades.

"Violence has inflicted only miseries upon the people and the state needs to be taken out of this vicious cycle. This is

the main objective to stitch the alliance (with the BJP) to form the government in the state and my government will

continue to pursue this goal with all seriousness," the PDP leader said.

She added that the people of Jammu and Kashmir were the worst sufferers of the India-Pakistan hostilities.

"Deaths on both sides of the border and killings inside the state rob us of peace and only the graveyards are getting filled, devouring the sons of the soil. "Dialogue is the only way out and I appeal to the governments of India and Pakistan to resume the talks and resolve the mutual issues amicably. Dialogue alone will end mayhem and destruction and bring peace," Mehbooba said.

Paying rich tributes to Sayeed, the chief minister said he was the architect of a vision and mission, the sole objective of which was to get Jammu and Kashmir out of the miseries and give its people prosperous and peaceful times.

"Opening of more routes, better neighbourly relations between the two countries and more people to people contacts

were the immediate results of this doctrine. Regretfully, these things were not taken so seriously after the late leader

demitted office in 2005.

"The vision and philosophy of the late leader are becoming more relevant with every passing day as the situation

in the subcontinent obtains," she said.

On the occasion, Mehbooba also outlined the measures taken by her government for the welfare of the people.

The chief minister said she honoured the promise of withdrawal of cases against the youth and regularisation of

60,000 casual and daily rated workers. She claimed that she had secured an adequate financial assistance from the Centre, which would change the development scenario in the state and create huge employment opportunities. "But it all requires a peaceful atmosphere. Many works could not be executed in 2016 due to the unrest and unfortunately, the funds got lapsed," she said.

Earlier, the chief minister paid floral tributes at her father's mausoleum and offered prayers there. State ministers, MPs, MLAs, senior officers and a large number of people had also come to the Dara Shikoh Park to

offer prayers to the former chief minister.
Three militants were killed in an encounter between security forces and militants in Chadoora of Budgam district in central Kashmir, according to several media reports.

#Visuals from site of ongoing encounter in Zuhama, Chadoora of Budgam district where one terrorist was killed (Visuals deferred by unspecified time) #JammuAndKashmir pic.twitter.com/ixQofF6PX0  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Security forces began a search operation in Chadoora's Zuhama village after receiving information about the presence of militants in the area, The Times of India reported. The encounter began after militants opened fire on security forces.

A police spokesman told PTI intermittent exchange of fire was ongoing.

On Saturday, four police officers were killed and two others injured in a massive improvised explosive device (IED) blast in Jammu and Kashmir's Sopore.

On 4 January, the Border Security Force (BSF) foiled an attempt by militants to sneak into Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan by killing an infiltrator.

A BSF official said alert troops noticed suspicious movement of two to three persons near the Nikowal border outpost in Arnia sector around 5.45 am.

With inputs from PTI
Mumbai: A PIL was filed on Monday in the Bombay High Court seeking a judicial probe into the 2014 death of special CBI judge Brijgopal Harikrishan Loya, who was then hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

In its plea, the Bombay Lawyers' Association has sought setting up a commission of enquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to go into the circumstances leading to Loya's death.

Loya died of heart attack in Nagpur on 1 December, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

In November last year, Loya's death was in spotlight after media reports quoting his sister fuelled suspicion about the circumstances surrounding his death and link to the Sohrabuddin case in which BJP chief Amit Shah, and senior police officials were accused. Shah and many others were later discharged for want of evidence.

"We have sought the appointment of a retired judge of the Supreme Court as commission of enquiry to look into the death of judge Loya and submit a report," the association's president Ahmad Abdi said.

Altogether 23 accused, including police personnel, are facing trial for their involvement in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, and subsequent disappearance and death of his wife Kausar Bi and their associate Tulsidas Prajapati in Gujarat in November 2005.

The case was later transferred to the CBI and the trial shifted to Mumbai.

"It is to be noted that judge Loya died on 1 December, 2014 and on 30 December, 2014, the special CBI court, which was assigned the case, discharged Amit Shah from the case," the petition said.
New Delhi: Congress President Rahul Gandhi arrived in Bahrain on Monday as part of his outreach to the Indian diaspora. Congress tweeted: "Euphoric reception for Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain."

It also said this was Gandhi's first foreign visit since his elevation as party chief in December.

"Fans and well-wishers throng the Bahrain Airport to greet Congress President Rahul Gandhi," the party tweeted.

Gandhi's visit is part of his interactions with Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs). Gulf countries have the biggest Indian diaspora of more than 35 lakh.

Gandhi will be the chief guest at the three-day valedictory function organised by 'Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin' (GOPIO) starting on Monday.

Delegates from 50 countries are participating in the event.

Apart from meeting Prime Minister Prince Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa., Gandhi is also likely to meet King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Gandhi will also have an interactive session with business leaders of Indian origin.

Gandhi's outreach is being seen as a move to popularise Congress among the large Indian diaspora.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi engages with the diaspora during his visits abroad.
New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi on Monday embarked on a visit to Bahrain  his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief  where he will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf country's prime minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

Gandhi, who will be a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al-Khalifa.

According to a statement issued by the Congress, Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) there on Tuesday.

Delegates of 50 countries are participating in the function, the statement said. He will also have an interactive session with business leaders of the Indian origin on Tuesday.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow.  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 7, 2018

Gandhi is expected to return to India on 9 January.
Rajya Sabha MP and BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday sparked off a controversy through his comments on decriminalising homosexuality, and promptly received a Twitter backlash.

Swamy made the comments after the Supreme Court on Monday said it will re-examine its verdict upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises homosexuality. "Our earlier order needs to be reconsidered," Chief Justice Dipak Misra said on Monday.

Speaking about the case, Swamy was quoted as saying by ANI that homosexual relations are not a problem as long as 'they don't celebrate it, don't flaunt it, don't create gay bars.' He argued that while there cannot be any invasion with respect to private acts, 'flaunting' it should be punished.

As long as they don't celebrate it, don't flaunt it, don't create gay bars to select partners it's not a problem. In their privacy what they do, nobody can invade but if you flaunt it, it has to be punished & therefore there has to be #Section377 of the IPC: Subramanian Swamy pic.twitter.com/hgWtw54U3P  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

The Twitterati were quick to call Swamy out for his statement.

I shall celebrate. I shall not hide. We will create bars not only to select partners but to live free and happy amongst our own. And what is "it"? Sex? That fact we are queer? The fact you can't digest it? What is the "it"? https://t.co/d4n1PeCjqU  Vivek Tejuja (@vivekisms) January 8, 2018

This man is a living Whatsapp forward. https://t.co/kA90seB6wo  Meghnad (@Memeghnad) January 8, 2018

How about not flaunting your heterosexuality, you homophobic bigot. #Section377 https://t.co/zEqAzaQsTf  Prerna Bakshi (@bprerna) January 8, 2018

If you got it, flaunt it. https://t.co/Qxmt9vehWy  V (@ivivek_nambiar) January 8, 2018

National spokesperson for the Congress, Sanjay Jha also reacted to the BJP leader's quote, asking the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi if this was the saffron party's official position on the matter.

Swamy has also made statements in support of Section 377 in the past, even going so far as to calling homosexuality "a disorder that needs to be cured." As this article by Sandip Roy mentions, Swamy has made quite a lot of contradictory statement about Section 377, and against homosexuality. Swamy has at various times termed homosexuality a 'genetic disorder' and 'genetic handicap.'

@rk_patil001 : It is a just mindset bar. Being gay is a disorder that needs to be cured.  Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) January 4, 2012

@GentleGawker : Issue is not respect. We respect handicapped persons. Homos are genetically handicapped  Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) June 30, 2015

At other times, he called for criminalisation of 'flaunting' of homosexuality,' or criminalisation of the sexual orientation altogether.

@nonie951 : Section 377 will remain and what is to be criminal used is the flaunting of sexual preference and setting up gay bars.  Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) April 11, 2014

Prior to believing it was a disorder, Swamy believed it was a offence that needed to be 'fined'. "In Kautilya's Arthasastra [4.13.236] "ayoni" sex [Homosexual intercourse] is an offence and attracts a fine. Where appropriate, "danda" or prayaaschit," he had said in 2013.

In the past, Swamy has also referred to sexual orientation as a method of attacking political opponents. He had said in 2011 that "If I informed you that one candidate for PM is a homosexual with a British partner resident in Delhi, would that be invasion of privacy ?"

With inputs from agencies
The Supreme Court on Monday decided to reconsider the constitutional validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which has been used to de-criminalise homosexuality.

LGBT Case: Three-judge bench of Supreme Court, headed by CJI said, it would reconsider and examine the Constitutional validity of section 377. pic.twitter.com/vyqOnNY2c1  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra and comprising of Justice AM Khanwilkar and Justice DY Chandrachud decided to re-examine the top court's earlier order upholding section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. "Our earlier order needs to be reconsidered," said Justice Misra on Monday.

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

The petition in the present case was moved by five people who belong to the gay community, reported CNN-News18. They have argued that they are affected by the judgment and since the Supreme Court has itself declared the Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, they cannot be denied their right to sexual privacy. They said that they live in fear of the police because of their natural sexual preferences. The petitioners also argued that most nations have decriminalised homosexuality and India should not lag behind on the issue.

The petition requires the Supreme Court to reconsider its 2013 judgment in Suresh Kumar Kaushal versus Naz Foundation which upheld the legalities of Section 377. The judgment had struck down the Delhi High Court judgment decriminalising homosexuality. The court said that the confines of law cannot trample on right to life and liberty, people who exercise their choice should not live in fear, according to NDTV. While referring the matter to a larger bench the court observed "what is natural to one may not be natural to others".

The court has also asked the Centre for its stance on the issue. This makes matters interesting as none of the political parties have stuck their head out on homosexuality, said CNN-News18. The right-wing BJP will now have to make clear its stance on the issue.

Further, since a law has been challenged in the present case, the court said that it would be appropriate to form a constitution bench to look into the matter, according to CNN-News18. It is expected that the matter will be heard along with the curative petitions in the Naz Foundation case and the case should come up for hearing after four weeks, though a concrete date has not yet been decided.

The story so far

In 2001, Lawyers Collective, on behalf of the Naz Foundation had filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court in 2001, challenging the constitutionality of section 377 on the grounds that the draconian law grossly violates the right to privacy, dignity and health under Article 21, equal protection of law and non-discrimination under Articles 14 and 15 and freedom of expression under Article 19 of the Constitution. A notice was issued to Union of India in 2002 and the Attorney General was asked to appear. In 2004, the petition was dismissed by the High Court (citing lack of action). A review petition was then filed against the dismissal, which ironically was dismissed too and then after a Special Leave to Appeal was filed in 2005, a year later the Supreme Court said, "the matter does require consideration and is not of a nature which could have been dismissed on the ground afore-stated."

In 2009, the Delhi High Court, much to the relief of the LGBTQI community passed a judgement that Section 377 indeed was violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution as it criminalised the consensual sexual acts of adults in private.

Before India could take its first steps towards progress however, the Supreme Court quashed Delhi High Court judgement in 2013 and declared that it was a judicial overreach and that it was not "for courts to create the law" according to the two-judge bench headed by Justice GS Singhvi. The Supreme Court backed out, but passed the ball to the Parliament to review a law that considered private sexual activity criminal.

Right to Privacy

When the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court declared privacy a Fundamental Right, it invited much cheer from many sections of the society, including the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community in India.

In its landmark judgment, the Supreme Court said that "sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy". "Discrimination against an individual on the basis of sexual orientation is deeply offensive to the dignity and self-worth of the individual," it said. The 547- page judgement also added that the Right to Privacy and the protection of sexual orientation lie at the core of the fundamental rights guaranteed by articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution.

Justice DY Chandrachud, one of the nine judges, said, "Privacy includes at its core the preservation of personal intimacies, the sanctity of family life, marriage, procreation, the home and sexual orientation. Privacy also connotes a right to be left alone."

"LGBT rights cannot be dismissed as so-called rights," CNN-News18 had quoted the apex court as saying.

With inputs from agencies
Chandigarh: In the wake of the UIDAI filing a case over a report in The Tribune on the breach of details of more than one billion Aadhaar cards, the newspaper on Sunday said authorities have "misconceived" an honest journalistic enterprise.

The Tribune's Editor-in-Chief Harish Khare in a statement also said that the newspaper's stories are in the best traditions of responsible journalism.

"We regret very much that the authorities have misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise and have proceeded to institute criminal proceedings against the whistleblower," he said.

He said that The Tribune shall explore all legal options "open to us to defend our freedom to undertake serious investigative journalism."

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Deputy Director BM Patnaik told the police that an input was received from The Tribune that it purchased a service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp that provided unrestricted access to details of any of the Aadhaar numbers created in India.

On 5 January, a complaint was received from Patnaik and the FIR was registered the same day.

Khare said, "Our stories are in the best traditions of responsible journalism. Our story was in response to a very genuine concern among the citizens on a matter of great public interest."

"My colleagues and I are grateful for expressions of support and solidarity from media organisations and journalists. We at The Tribune believe that our stories were in the nature of a legitimate journalistic exercise," he said.

The Chandigarh Press Club (CPC) condemned the action of the UIDAI for lodging a case against The Tribune reporter over a story on Aadhaar data breach.

"Instead of taking action against people, who were involved in the data breach, the government agency preferred to lodge a case against the reporter, who exposed the loopholes in the system.

"In an act of 'shoot the messenger', the UIDAI had filed a case against the reporter of The Tribune for an article on how anonymous users accessed Aadhaar details and sold it for a fee," CPC, secretary general, Barinder Singh Rawat said in a statement.

The CPC will also hold a protest tomorrow in the club premises, he said.
Donald Trumps decision to withhold all security assistance to Pakistan including Coalition Support Funds might not be enough to force a change in Pakistans longstanding policy of using terror as a strategic tool. Unless the Trump administration complements this move with escalatory coercive strategies and raises the cost of noncompliance for Pakistan, the 'failed state' will continue to function as a safe haven for terrorists of all stripes.

Trump is sorely mistaken if he believes that the high-value Taliban or Haqqani Network targets operating from Pakistani soil will be delivered at his doorstep just because he has refused to pay Islamabad another $2 billion. It doesnt happen like that.

That said, to suggest from here that US action will now push Pakistan firmly into Chinese lap and Beijing will emerge as Islamabads sole patron, sponsor and benefactor is patently wrong. It reflects a poor understanding of the China-Pakistan-US dynamic. That such an impression is being actively created by Chinas propaganda machinery should alert us more to its logical impossibility.

Neither has the US cut off ties with Pakistan (it continues to be designated as Americas Major Non-Nato Ally, among other things, and a major receptor of US civilian assistance program), nor does it suit Chinas geopolitical, financial and strategic objectives to take over from Washington.

In fact, a sharp downturn in US-Pakistan ties will go against Chinese interests. Beijing is likely to ensure that its iron brother doesnt antagonise the mercurial US president beyond a point. It may even use its considerable leverage over Pakistan in ensuring that a token action is taken against Haqqani or Taliban operatives.

We have already seen such an eventuality when Pakistan was forced to ban 72 home-grown terrorist organisations  including Hafiz Saeeds Jamaat-ud-Dawa  from raising funds.

The move was ostensibly triggered by a fear that Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Paris-based G7 initiative against global money laundering and terror financing, will take action if Pakistan didnt do so; but Islamabad didnt act until it was goaded by Beijing.

Pakistan-based newspaper The Express Tribune reported, China, which has so far blocked the US and Indian moves, has also advised Pakistan to take some decisive actions against proscribed organisations... Pakistan has to make a tangible move before the planned plenary meeting of the FATF. FATF meets in Paris next month.

As a country that is invested hugely in Pakistan, it is in Chinas interest not to let Pakistan spiral out of control. But the leap of logic that China will use this opportunity to turn Pakistan into another of its autonomous regions is unsustainable. The reasons, as mentioned, are strategic, geopolitical and financial.

Strategically, it makes no sense for China to wish or trigger a complete breakdown of US-Pakistan relationship because that would inevitably draw US and India even closer. For Washington, there will be very little reason to balance its strategic interests between India and Pakistan and it will be free to pivot towards New Delhi at the expense of Islamabad. India already enjoys bipartisan support in US Congress. China is sure to feel insecure over a further alignment of US-India strategic ties.

Conversely, it suggests that China would ideally want Pakistan and the US to maintain a healthy bilateral relationship so that certain implicit limits on US-India relationship are in place, as German Marshall Fund fellow and Pakistan watcher Andrew Small has pointed out on Twitter.

As China sees it, a healthy US-Pakistan relationship places certain implicit limits on the US-India relationship 6/9  Andrew Small (@ajwsmall) January 5, 2018

A collapse of US-Pakistan ties will also mean US forces at Chinese doorstep to flush out the Taliban and Haqqani Network operative and increased military activity in Pakistans restive tribal region. We only need to look as far as the Korean Peninsula to figure out how sensitive China is to this possibility. China has been very vocal against the deployment of US THAAD missile system in South Korea which it perceives to be a spying mechanism. It is therefore very unlikely that Chinese strategy will include defence of Pakistan at all costs against US pressure when the likely outcomes are stacked against its interests.

China uses Pakistan as a strategic leverage against India. As Small has pointed out, it is also in Chinas interest to ensure that Pakistans ties with the US isnt totally derailed. In absence of US economic and military aid, Chinas leverage against a rapidly growing India will considerably weaken.

Politically, theres no reason why China will attempt to fill the void left by lack of US influence over Pakistan. China remains a mercantile power and it defines bilateral and multilateral relationships through an economic prism. It is neither a democracy, nor does it take any interest in spreading the liberal democratic order as a global standard of governance mechanism. It perceives democracy as a flawed system where outcomes are often derailed due to conflicting interests. Given such a predilection, there is no reason why China would want to extend political influence over Pakistan.

Perhaps the biggest fallacy of the theory that China will be happy to bankroll Pakistan lies in the way China perceives aids and assistance programs. It is providing Pakistan with a lot of funds, as Khurram Husain has pointed out on Twitter, but these are almost entirely related to the Belt and Road infrastructure, and aimed at either creating more or safeguarding the existing assets.

Summary of external loans and grants to #Pakistan from all countries and lending agencies in last fiscal year, and budgeted for current fiscal year. Draw your own conclusions. pic.twitter.com/BE5wyIeJTw  Khurram Husain (@KhurramHusain) January 4, 2018

Chinese funds and assistance systems are opaque because the country considers these programs as state secret. In a report published last October, CNBC quotes data from AidData in revealing that Beijing disbursed $354.3 billion to 140 countries. In comparison, U.S. official finance stood at $394.6 billion. But bulk of Chinese aid was in the form of other official flows (OOF), which is primarily intended for commercial projects, while a clear majority of US spending was in the form of official development assistance (ODA), which is "the strict definition of aid."

Infrastructure and transport were the key areas of Chinese funds disbursal, according to the report. And Pakistan does not rank among the top 10 nations to receive Chinese funds.

As Georgetown University Professor C Christine Fair writes in Huffington Post, Unlike Washington which has given Pakistan mostly grant aid, the Chinese only disburse loan aid and that loan is largely designed to enable Chinese businesses to build infrastructure in Pakistan on terms set by the Chinese and favorable to them, using Chinese labor and raw materials imported from China. While Pakistan will get to use the shabby infrastructure that is produced, the projects contribute nothing to Pakistans local economy.

We find an echo of this argument in Evan A. Feigenbaums piece in Foreign Affairs where he writes, the scope and scale of future Chinese economic activity will not, in itself, produce rapid, sustained, and balanced Pakistani growth.... The bottom line is that China will not simply 'bail out' Pakistan with loans, investment, and new untied aid, as commentators watching the deterioration of relations between the United States and Pakistan seem to expect.

An understanding of this calculus presents the US with far more coercive options than it appears on the surface. It also means that China is far more circumspect about its so-called iron brother than it likes to admit.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Delhi Police on the bail plea of accused Sukesh Chandrashekar, arrested in the Election Commission bribery case involving sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud sought the police's response and directed it to file a counter affidavit in the matter by 22 January, failing which the it "shall pass appropriate orders".

Chandrashekhar, who was arrested on 16 April last year, was named in the charge sheet for alleged offences of forgery of valuable security, forgery for the purpose of cheating, making a false document and criminal conspiracy under the IPC and provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act.

The police had on 14 July last year filed a 701-page charge sheet claiming that money recovered from Chandrashekar was sent by Dhinakaran through unaccounted channels with the help of other accused persons.

Dhinakaran, accused of trying to bribe EC officials to get the "two leaves" poll symbol for the AIADMK faction led by VK Sasikala, was arrested on 25 April and was granted bail on 1 June.

The police had accused Chandrashekhar, Dhinakaran and others of hatching a criminal conspiracy to bribe the Election Commission officials.
Mumbai: Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday said those who were involved in attacks against Dalits at Bhima-Koregaon should show courage and come forward.

Speaking at a function in neighbouring Navi Mumbai, the Sena chief said that some "invisible hands" had a role in playing caste politics in the state.

"The Shiv Sena will not tolerate such people and their tricks of playing the caste card in the state. Those behind the attacks at Bhima Koregaon should show courage and come forward," Thackeray said.

The attack on Dalits at Bhima Koregaon on 1 January led to a statewide bandh on 3 January which turned violent at several places leading to large-scale vandalism of public property.

Attacking the BJP, Thackeray said that the Sena would oppose projects like the Jaitapur nuclear power plant and the mega oil refinery in Nanar, both in Konkan's Ratnagiri district.

He claimed that the 'Make in India' initiative would have a devastating impact on Konkan.

"Konkan chi raakh honaar asun Gujaratla vikasaachi rangoli kadhnaar aahet (While Konkan will be reduced to ashes, Gujarat will prosper)," Thackeray said.

He claimed that projects like the International Financial Services Centre and the bullet train were heading to Gujarat while projects which damage ecology such as nuclear plants and refineries were coming to the Konkan.

"While Israel is known in the world for transforming deserts into green belts, our dream of development is damaging the existing beauty. We will be known in the world for transforming natural beauty into deserts," he said.
New Delhi: The BJP on Monday questioned the AAP government in Delhi over the deaths of 42 homeless people in the city this month, saying that if Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal would have taken an interest, their lives could have been saved.

"At least 42 homeless people have died in the first one week of January 2018, and this information has been confirmed by the Ministry of Home Affairs," Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party President Manoj Tiwari told reporters.

He also said that since December, over 250 homeless people have died.

Hitting out at the chief minister for preferring the Rajya Sabha elections and candidates over the homeless, the BJP MP said: "If Kejriwal would have taken more interest in the homeless instead of his Rajya Sabha candidates, then we would not have heard about the deaths."

As per the reports of the Centre for Holistic Development, at least 40,633 homeless people have died in Delhi since 1 January, 2004.

The report also claimed that in December 2017 alone, 250 people died on the streets.

According to the report, 44 people died in from 1 January to 6 January, including a two-year-old child.

The BJP leader also said: "Let's leave the blame game and do an all-party meeting on how to save lives of homeless in the city."

Tiwari also said that when he got the news, he went to see the conditions of the homeless in the city during nights.

"I was shocked to see that how people were sleeping with the animals in the Yamuna riverbed and on the streets in the open sky," he said.

He also said that with the help of Sikh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, the BJP arranged a temporary night-shelter for over 650 people in the Kashmere Gate area of north Delhi.

As per the Delhi government, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) runs 251 shelters  83 of them housed in permanent buildings and 113 operating out of porta-cabins. Fifty-five temporary shelters in tents have also been put up for the winter season.

On Saturday night, the International Court of Justice Judge Dalveer Bhandari inspected the Delhi government's night shelter in south Delhi's Sarai Kale Khan area. He stressed the need to set up more such facilities.

Bhandari was accompanied by Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain.
New Delhi: The Congress welcomed the Supreme Court's decision to reconsider its 2013 verdict, criminalising gay sex, saying Section 377 of the IPC was "archaic" and had no place in the 21st Century.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said Section 377 should be decriminalised and hoped that the government would repeal it or courts read down the article.

"The time has come that either the courts must read down Section 377 or the government should repeal it from the Indian Penal Code. It is an archaic provision which has no place in 21st century India," he told reporters.

The Supreme Court referred to a larger bench a plea seeking decriminalisation of gay sex between two consenting adults.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud said the issue arising out of Section 377 required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

The section refers to "unnatural offences" and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10 years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's address to a rally in Bengaluru on Sunday, ahead of the Karnataka Assembly polls this year, drew sharp criticism from Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, who advised the visiting BJP leader to pick up "tips" during his stay to control starvation deaths in his home state.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018

In his speech, Adityanath claimed that Karnataka has been pushed five years back due to the Congress government's anti-development policies. "The party has become a burden...a problem for the nation. Because of corruption, its divisive politics and its anti-development policies, Karnataka has been pushed five years back. The corrupt Congress is using Karnataka as its ATM," he claimed at the public rally in Vijayanagar area.

According to NDTV, Siddaramaiah said, "We're solving historical challenges in HDI (human development index) with a robust welfare program, and India's most effective industrial policies," referring to what he called the "Karnataka Model of Governance". Responding to Siddaramaiah's 'welcome' tweet, Adityanath hit back at the Karnataka chief minister, raising the issue of farmer suicides and death of "honest officers". "As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies," Adityanath tweeted. He hit out at Siddaramaiah for the "deteriorating" law and order situation in the state, claiming that in five years 22 people affiliated to the RSS or the Sangh Parivar were killed.

Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.  Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018

Adityanath, who was visiting the state for the second time after the launch of BJPs 75-day Parivartan Yatra on 2 November, has become the face of the partys election campaigning after its successful run at the recent Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections.

In his speech on Sunday, he alleged that as the Assembly elections, due early this year, neared, the Congress had resorted to dividing society on the lines of caste.

The Uttar Pradesh chief minister also took a jibe at his Karnataka counterpart, saying Siddaramiah only now recalled his Hindu roots. "Siddaramaiah calls himself a Hindu just as Congress president Rahul Gandhi went to temple after temple during the Gujarat election," he claimed.

However, calling himself a Hindu will not suffice till he continues to endorse eating beef, Adityanath claimed.

With inputs from PTI
Shillong: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday said it will contest at least 35 seats in the Meghalaya Assembly elections.

Elections to the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly are due in the first half of this year as the term of the present Assembly expires on 6 March.

"We are hoping to field 35 candidates for the next election as we have good chance of winning," AAP state president Wanshwa Nongtdu told reporters in Shillong.

He claimed the chances of the AAP is "good".

The AAP leader also exuded confidence that the party will form the next government by fielding "common man" as its candidates.

"We are aam aadmi and we will have common man as candidates, we have few retired officers, few intellectuals who want to contest and we prefer our candidates be to be AAP candidates," he said.

Declaring the first list of candidates, Nongtdu said Peter Aiborlang Dohkrud will contest from Mawlai, Dorass Ramsiej from Mawkyrwat, Wonder Lapang will take on Congress president Celestine Lyngdoh from Umsning constituency in Ri-Bhoi and Debrict Binone from Nongpoh.

According to the AAP leader, the candidates have been approved by AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and party observer for North East, Rakesh Sinha.
Kohima: Nagaland-based group Against Corruption and Unabated Taxation (ACAUT) on Sunday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to defer the state's Assembly election and impose President's Rule in order to facilitate solution to the vexed Naga insurgency.

In a letter to Modi, the ACAUT said: "If elections are held in Nagaland for the sake of constitutional process before the completion of the negotiation process with the six Naga National Political Groups (or rebel groups) and the NSCN(IM), then solution to Naga problems will remain a mirage."

Expressing appreciation for Modi's "sincere desire" to resolve the Naga political issue, it reminded Modi of his promise to resolve the issue within 18 months and his great personal initiative to invite the NNPGs for talks in 2017.

"Thus, while keeping the backdrop in mind, the ACAUT Nagaland, a people's movement against corruption and illegal taxation, though appreciative, is however afraid that the much yearned Naga Solution will to continue to elude us if the 2018 State Assembly election is held as scheduled in the month of February/March," the letter said.

"Election at this juncture with a duly elected government will consign the peace talks to the backburner for years to come."

In fact, the Nagaland Assembly last year had adopted a resolution urging the central government to take emergent and extraordinary steps for an "honourable and acceptable solution" to the Naga political issues before the Assembly election.

It had also urged the Election Commission not to announce the state election till this is done.

On 3 August, 2015, the central government and the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland-Iska-Muivah NSCN(IM) signed the Framework Agreement. However, neither released its details.
Addressing a convention of NRIs in Bahrain, Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday said that there are 'serious problems' looming back at home, and that the Indian diaspora is much needed at this hour.

"I am here to tell you what you mean to your country, you are important, to tell you that there is a serious problem at home, and to tell you are part of the solution," Rahul said.

He is at a two-day visit to Bahrain, his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief. Rahul is expected to come back to New Delhi on Tuesday.

Emphasizing the importance of the Indians living abroad for the nation, he said, "Your tolerance, your patriotism is what India needs today. You have lived with people of different nationalities and you have done so by learning from them and teaching them about some of Indian culture in return." Rahul also said that the Indian diaspora was sending a huge amount of remittance back home, which was a great contributing factor to the nation's growth.

He also said, "All the great leaders of India, whether it was Mahatma Gandhi or BR Ambedkar, they were once NRI's.... It is important for all human beings to know where they come from."

The Congress president further said, "India's main problem today is the failure of our government to create jobs. Job creation in India is at an 8 year low. Many in the Indian diaspora have lost hard-earned money because of arbitrary decisions like demonetisation. India simply cannot afford this."

He said that to top it all the government was in denial. "Tragedy is, instead of focusing the attention of our people towards real issues, there's an increase in hatred. Instead of accepting that we are struggling to create jobs, instead of uniting people of all religions and communities together to face the challenge, the government is busy converting the fear being generated in jobless youth into hatred between communities," Rahul said.

He said that India has become a nation where journalists are shot at for reporting the truth, judges hearing crucial cases are found dead under mysterious circumstances. He said that the rising forces of hatred needed to be curtailed.

"We need you to help us fight these forces. We need you just as we needed you in 1947 to defeat the British forces," Rahul added.

Responding to a question from the audience, Rahul also pin-pointed three key policy sectors he would focus on, if he was in power. He said that job creation will top his priority as India is the second most populous nation and there is rising discontent in the youth about the limited opportunities they get. Secondly, he said he would like to focus on the state and quality of Indian education system, as he felt that only the top layer of educational institutes provided quality education. Rahul also said that he would like to focus upon building a healthcare infrastructure so that the Indian people could access quality healthcare services at an affordable price.

He also spoke of a 'new, shining and transformed' Congress party, while interacting to the audience as he appeared confident of a Congress win in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Interacting with the audience, Rahul said, "Gujarat BJP ka gadh hai aur wahan bhi sirf bach ke nikli hai BJP (Gujarat is a BJP bastion and there too they could just save power." He said that he has always believed that he was only human and not only has he learnt from the party's mistakes but his own as he promised to deliver a "new, shining and transformed" Congress party, which he said will show how forces like BJP can be defeated.

"We are a very powerful party. We have defeated the British, we have laid the foundation of modern India and made sure it stands on its feet. This is surely no small feat... We have experience and we have youth. And come next elections, we will show you how the BJP is defeated," Rahul said.
Barmer (Rajasthan): Independent MLA Hanuman Beniwal has attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi while announcing that Rajasthan needed a new political party to provide an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress.

Beniwal made the announcement at a huge rally of farmers in Barmer on Sunday. He said the youths had seen through both the major political outfits and "their false promises" and were looking for a change.

Beniwal asked people to refrain from getting lured by promises he said Modi would make at Pachpadra while laying the foundation stone of the Barmer Refinery.

The farmers' rally discussed issues such as loan waiver, irrigation and employment for youths. It was announced that similar rallies will be organised in Bikaner, Sikar and Jaipur.

And in Jaipur, a third front would be announced to contest the next election.

The rally was also addressed by MLA Kirorilal Meena who said: "Hanumanji and I will work together to form a new government in the state.

"We will rule the state by following the 'JM' way where 'J' stands for Jat and 'M' stands for Meena, Mali, Meghwal and Muslims.

"JM also stands for Judicial Magistrate which means that we will work as judicial magistrates to arrest the BJP and Congress in the state," he added.

Meena said Modi had earlier promised to bring home the heads of 10 Pakistani soldiers for every single Indian soldier killed by Pakistanis.

"Now, so many soldiers are dying on the border. Why is Modi not keeping his promise?"
The Tamil Nadu Assembly session on Monday began on a stormy note with Opposition DMK boycotting the proceedings and demanding a floor test claiming that the ruling AIADMK was a minority government, said a media report.

#BREAKING -- DMK boycotts Tamil Nadu Assembly, the party acting President MK Stalin says the government is a minority govt and demands a floor test | @nimumurali with more details pic.twitter.com/6m1dawAhOK  News18 (@CNNnews18) January 8, 2018

The DMK has said that the AIADMK does not have required number of MLAs to be in the power, reported News18. The party has accused the state governor Banwarilal Purohit of giving ample opportunity to the government to continue to be in power despite 18 MLAs being disqualified.

The DMK which has been boycotting the customary governors address for the past three years, citing various issues, continued the practice this year also. Purohit made his maiden address on Monday to the state assembly even as DMK along with its allies walked out of the House. Soon after he arrived, Purohit greeted all members of the House with a 'Vanakkam' and began his address.

Even as he began his speech, Leader of the Opposition MK Stalin was on his feet trying to raise some issues. The governor paused for a moment and told Stalin 'please ukkarunga' (please take your seat) in Tamil but to no avail. Stalin was supported by his party MLAs, who raised slogans demanding that their leader be allowed to speak.

A little later, Stalin led his party members and staged a walkout. Congress members and the lone Indian Union Muslim League legislator also followed suit. The governor then continued his address.

The session also witnessed sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran making his debut in the Assembly after having won the 21 December Radhakrishnan Nagar bypoll by a thumping margin of 40,000 votes against E Madhusudhanan of AIADMK.

After being sworn-in as member of the Tamil Nadu Assembly, Dhinakaran had lashed out at Palaniswamy and his deputy O Panneerselvam and claimed that the government would not last beyond "three to four months."

Brushing aside his claims, Panneerselvam had said he wouldn't reply to "those who are in dreamland."

The Speaker of the Tamil Nadu Assembly, P Dhanapal, in September had disqualified 18 MLAs loyal to TTV Dhinakaran, following their withdrawal of support to Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswamy.

These MLAs had met the then governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao and said they had lost confidence in the chief minister, a day after the formal merger of the two factions led by Palaniswamy and then rebel leader and now deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam on 21 August.

According to a government notification, the governor had summoned the Assembly to meet on 8 January at 10 am. The duration of the session will be decided by the House's Business Advisory Committee.

The DMK and other opposition parties had earlier asked Purohits predecessor Rao to order a floor test for the Palaniswamy government and also approached President Ram Nath Kovind with a similar plea.

With inputs from agencies
Reuters

A worker at a factory in China operated by iPhone maker Foxconn died on 6 January after jumping from a window, according to a statement from China Labour Watch, a US-based activist organisation, which cited information from employees.

Ming Li was a dispatch worker from an agency at the factory in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province. He lived at the factory, one of the companys largest in China.

It is still not known why he jumped, China Labour Watch said in an email.

Foxconns Chinese headquarters in Shenzhen could not be reached for comment outside of normal business hours.

The report comes after a small number of students were discovered in November working overtime in Foxconns Chinese factory, violating local labour laws.

Apple Inc and Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and a major supplier to the US firm, have been accused of poor labour practices in the past.

But the US firm has been trying to get a grip of such issues, releasing annual reviews of the iPhone supply chain.
IANS

Google is secretly reaping millions of money from vulnerable people, seeking treatment for addictive diseases, by charging advertisers secretly working for private clinics' in Britain, a media report said on 7 January.

The internet giant charges the middlemen, known as referral agents, as much as 200 pounds each time someone visits their website via search page advertisements at the top of a Google page, an investigation by The Sunday Times has revealed.

The referral agents advertise themselves as free advice helplines but receive as much as 20,000 pounds commission monthly each time a new patient is referred to private rehabilitation clinics, the report said.

"The level of payments for these referral agents via promoted links cannot be justified in my view especially as those desperate to tackle their addictions are unknowingly picking up the bill," Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative MP, who chairs the health select committee, was quoted as telling The Sunday Times.

She also reportedly called on Google, which made 59 billion pounds from advertising in 2016, to stop selling advertisements to referral agents.

Google refuses to take advertisement from referral agents in the US, where the practice is illegal, but in Britain, it spurs by creating a bidding war between referral agencies who want their advertisements appear at the top of the Google search page, said the report.

However, the tech giant, in a statement on Sunday printed in The Sun, said that they have decided to "extend" the practice of banning referral agents to Britain.

The Sunday Times report meanwhile said that huge commissions taken by these agents have been blamed for significantly increasing the cost of private care for people suffering from addictions.

The referral agents are "parasites targeting sick people at the most desperate time of their lives", said Dominic McCann, development director at the Castle Craig addiction hospital in Scotland.

The illegal practice was discovered by undercover reporters, who filmed two meetings held in 2017 between Britain's leading referral agency executives with Google and the rehabilitation clinics.

The reporters were posing as executives from a new treatment centre that was to be opened in Gloucestershire.

One business owner was reported to have said he was spending 350,000 pounds on Google advertising, to ensure addicts visited his helpline first, the daily revealed.

The Sun quoted a Google spokesperson as saying that they "work to help healthcare providers, from doctors to hospitals and treatment centres, get online and connect with people who need their help".

"Substance abuse is a growing crisis and has led to deceptive practices by intermediaries that we need to better understand."

"In the US, we restricted ads entirely in this category and we have decided to extend this to the UK as we consult with local experts to update our policy and find a better way to connect those that need help with the treatment they need," the spokesperson said.




1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
tech2 News Staff

Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa is soon coming to a Windows 10-powered laptop or desktop near you. The company confirmed that the partnership would be unveiled at CES 2018.

According to The Verge, the integration will be made available on desktops and laptops supporting Windows 10. As of now, it will available on desktops and laptops by HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer.

However, this move is unlike the former talks of a partnership between Alexa and Cortana, Microsoft's native digital assistant. In that case, both the platforms were supposed to work with the help of a cross-link to share data and information between Cortana and Alexa. According to a previous report, both the digital assistants were supposed to interact with the help of their respective devices where an Echo would be able to command Cortana on a laptop.

Here, Alexa would be available a separate app. In order to access the digital assistant, the user can activate it with the help of a shortcut on the keyboard or through a voice instruction which is common to Alexa.

The integration between the operating software and the digital assistant is expected to materialise by spring.

According to the report, HP is planning to bring Alexa to its Pavillion Wave PC while Acer will bring Alexa to select Aspire, Spin, Switch, Swift, and Aspire all-in-one notebooks from the first quarter of 2018. However, the rollout of Alexa would be limited to the United States at first and followed by a wider rollout by mid-2018.
IANS

More than 24,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites in Britain's Houses of Parliament since last June's general election, according to official data.

The figure of 24,473 attempts represents about 160 requests per day on average from computers and other devices connected to the parliamentary network between June and October 2017, The Guardian reported on 8 January.

The report comes after a sex scandal in Westminster, during which Prime Minister Theresa May sacked her de facto deputy, Damian Green after he made "misleading" statements about allegations that police found pornography on computers in his parliamentary office in 2008.

The data, released after a freedom of information (FoI) request, shows a spike in September in the number of attempts to visit the sites, with 9,467 requests from both the Houses of Lords and Commons that month.

Parliamentary authorities said a majority of the attempts were not deliberate.

The figures also showed a sharp decrease in the number of attempts to access pornographic websites in recent years.

In 2016, the parliamentary filtering system blocked 1,13,208 attempts, down from 2,13,020 the previous year.

Figures for January and February 2017 could not be provided by the parliamentary authorities due to changes in technology and the way the data was held, The Guardian reported.

However, the available data showed there were 30,876 attempts from March to October.

During this period, parliament was dissolved from late April to early June ahead of the general election on 8 June, and MPs were away during the summer recess from the end of July to early September.
tech2 News Staff

Google has just launched its latest online payment service with the name Google Pay. According to the announcement post on its blog, Pali Bhat, the VP of Product Management for Payments at Google clarified that Google is merging Android Pay and Google Wallet under this new brand to integrate the user experience so that users dont get confused.

This will significantly reduce the time spent in trying to fiddle around different payment apps by Google to pay your bill. According to the post, the company has been working since last one year to refine and integrate these experiences to ensure that the result is much simpler, faster and more consistent.

Google Pay will make it easier to users to save the payment information with their Google account so that they can make quick payment checkouts without the need to locate their credit, debit or any other payment card every time they need to make a payment on their smartphone. Google pointed out that users will start seeing Google Pay online in the store, across Google products and even when users are paying their friends.

If you are one of the impatient ones and want to check out Google Pay in action then you can head over to Airbnb, Dice, Fandango, HungryHouse, Instacart and other apps to check how this new experience works. The company is also offering a number of offers at the time of writing so that early adopters can save time as well as money while making payments.

Google has also invited developers for implementing Google Pay in their websites or apps. They can also work with Googles processor partners to make the Google Pay integration more easy and simpler. By now, you must be wondering that what about Google Tez? Well, fear not, Google clarified at the end of the post that it is working on bringing these experiences to Google Tez users in India. It is likely that Google has also added the 'Pay with Google' that it launched around October last year in the 'Google Pay' branding to make things easier.
IANS

On 8 January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told police and security agencies that "highest priority" should be given to dealing with cybersecurity threats and technology which could be used to pinpoint problem areas of radicalisation of youth.

"Cybersecurity issues should be dealt with immediately, and should receive the highest priority," he said addressing the valedictory ceremony at the conference of Directors General and Inspectors General of Police at the BSF Academy here.

The Prime Minister mentioned about the importance of the social media in this context and spoke about the emerging global consensus towards greater information sharing on illicit financial dealings.

"India had a key role to play in achieving this. Just as openness is getting increased acceptance worldwide, there is a need for greater openness among states too, on security issues."

At the Conference of DGPs and IGPs in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh, there were insightful presentations and fruitful discussions on aspects relating to our security apparatus. There was also a presentation on the implementation status of decisions taken during the last three years.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 7, 2018

He said security could not be achieved selectively or alone. "But the breaking of silos and information sharing among states can help make everyone more secure. We are not an assembled entity, but an organic entity."

The Prime Minister recalled how the nature and scope of the annual conference have changed since 2014 when he suggested that the yearly affair should be shifted out of Delhi. This annual conference is an event where top police officers share and discuss security-related issues.

The conference was held in Guwahati in 2014, Gujarat's Rann of Kutch in 2015 and at the National Police Academy in Hyderabad in 2016.

"The conference has now become more relevant in the context of challenges and responsibilities facing the country," Modi said.

He commended the country's security apparatus and said there was a lot of cohesion in managing the country's security.

The Prime Minister also presented President's Police Medals for distinguished service to IB officers.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Union Ministers of State for Home Hansraj Ahir and Kiren Rijiju also attended the conference.
Carrie Gracie, the China editor for Britains public broadcaster the BBC, has resigned from her post in Beijing due to pay disparities with her male colleagues. In an open letter, posted on her blog, Gracie  a China specialist who is fluent in Mandarin  said "the BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure."

The BBC has come under fire recently for paying male employees more and has pledged to close the gender gap by 2020.

BBC editor Carrie Gracie quits in gender pay gap row, accusing the corporation of breaking equality law https://t.co/NHajKDyqZR  BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) January 7, 2018

In July, it revealed as part of a funding settlement with the government that it paid its then top male star five times more than its best-paid female presenter, and that two-thirds of on-air employees earning at least 150,000 pounds ($203,500) were men.

In the letter, Gracie said there was a crisis of trust at the broadcaster, where she has worked for 30 years, and that it was breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

"In the past four years, the BBC has had four international editors - two men and two women. The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. But last July I learned that in the previous financial year, the two men earned at least 50% more than the two women. Despite the BBCs public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women's work was worth much less than men's."

She said she had since had been offered a pay increase that remained far short of equality and left her post in Beijing last week, returning to her former job in the BBC TV newsroom.

"I told my bosses the only acceptable resolution would be for all the international editors to be paid the same amount. The right amount would be for them to decide, and I made clear I wasn't seeking a pay rise, just equal pay. Instead the BBC offered me a big pay rise which remained far short of equality. It said there were differences between roles which justified the pay gap, but it has refused to explain these differences. Since turning down an unequal pay rise, I have been subjected to a dismayingly incompetent and undermining grievance process which still has no outcome. Enough is enough. The rise of China is one of the biggest stories of our time and one of the hardest to tell."

The BBC must admit the problem, apologize and set in place an equal, fair and transparent pay structure, she said, calling for an independent arbitration to settle individual cases at the broadcaster.

The BBC cited a BBC spokeswoman as saying that fairness in pay at the corporation is "vital", and that an audit of pay for rank and file staff led by an independent judge found there was no systemic discrimination against women. US editor Jon Sopel earned 200,000-249,999 while Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen earned 150,000-199,999.

Gracie was not on the list.

Industry support poured in for Gracie after the journalist's open letter went viral on social media.

Brava @BBCCarrie for taking a stand! I left the BBC after unequal treatment many years ago. Shocking that nothing has changed. READ #carriegracie's resignation letter here. https://t.co/BlkR9ZRIJG  Louisa Lim (@limlouisa) January 8, 2018

Letter to the BBC audience from BBC China Editor #carriegracie published in @thetimes - steps down over unequal pay #bbcwomen #istandwithCarrie #equalpay  lyse doucet (@bbclysedoucet) January 7, 2018

#carriegracie A great journalist with rock solid integrity and courage. A big loss. https://t.co/08sMwpkkhU  Fergal Keane (@fergalkeane47) January 7, 2018

1. Society has encouraged women for hundreds of years to be quiet, polite, and unambitious for the benefit of men.  Jamie Lambert (@JamieCollabro) January 8, 2018

2. Men have always been encouraged to fight other men so that they can achieve their best potential. Women have always been encouraged to fight other women so they can be the best for men.  Jamie Lambert (@JamieCollabro) January 8, 2018

3. #CarrieGracie is right in saying that she works as one of four specialist in house editors. Two men, and two women. She has recently discovered that the two men earn over 50% of what she and her female colleague earn.  Jamie Lambert (@JamieCollabro) January 8, 2018

In awe of brilliant journalist #carriegracie forced to quit as BBC China editor on inaction over #equalpay. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally Read her letter front page @thetimes https://t.co/5UJs6I3RFK

#bbcwomen #istandwithcarrie  lucy siegle (@lucysiegle) January 8, 2018

The admirable & estimable #CarrieGracie, the BBCs China Editor, has resigned over unequal pay. #BBCWomen https://t.co/uXzWzkC5vS  Sangita Myska (@BBCSangita) January 8, 2018

With inputs from agencies
Washington: A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents has protested outside the Pakistani embassy in Washington against the "inhumane" treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials.

"The trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court," said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Balochistan, which organised the unique event named as "Chappal-Chor Pakistan" (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhav's wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out "inhumane" treatment to Jadhav's wife and mother during their tightly-controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian national on 25 December in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through the intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

"The recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even bindi and mangalsutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata soubhagya nari (married Indian woman)," said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in the USA.

Carl Clemens, a volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the "petty vindictiveness and humiliation" that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

"They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to Pakistan's own destruction," said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Pakistan on 25 December had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer.

New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member bench of the ICJ on 18 May restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case. It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April.
Beijing: China on Monday said it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil. The US last week suspended approximately $2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we dont agree to place the responsibility of anti terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens. "We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti terrorism cause," Lu said. "Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists. Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for $33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan. Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts. "First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.
Washington: Nikki Haley has defended US president Donald Trump's recent "nuclear button" tweet warning Kim Jong-un of America's might, saying it was required to keep the North Korean leader "on his toes".

Trump last week warned that his "nuclear button" is "much bigger and more powerful" than the one controlled by Kim, days after the North Korean leader said that Pyongyang's nuclear weapons can reach anywhere in the US and threatened that he has a nuclear button on his desk.

Haley, the Indian-American US Ambassador to the UN said that the North Korean regime needs to take a series of steps for talks, a day after Trump said that he is open to talks with the North Korean leader.

The steps include stop testing missiles and nuclear weapons and be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons, Haley was quoted as saying by ABC News. Asked if the tweet was a good idea, she said: "I think that he (Trump) always has to keep Kim on his toes. It's very important that we don't ever let him get so arrogant that he doesn't realise the reality of what would happen if he started a nuclear war".

Asked if Trump's statement at Camp David on Saturday meant any reversal of the stated US policy with regard to talks with North Korea, she said "There is no turnaround". "What he (Trump) has basically said is yes, there could be a time where we talk to North Korea but a lot of things have to happen before that actually takes place," Haley said.

They have to stop testing. They have to be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons. Those things have to happen, she said. "What we're trying to do is make sure we don't repeat what's happened in the last 25 years. Which is them start to act like they're coming to the table, them ask for a lot of money and then them cheat their way through.

"We're going to be smart this time. We're going to make sure that whatever happens makes the United States safer and make sure that we denuclearise the (Korean) peninsula," Haley said.
Washington: US President Donald Trump on Monday postponed his much-talked about 'Fake News Awards' to the mainstream media for "dishonesty and bad reporting" to 17 January.

The awards ceremony was supposed to be held on Monday.

Trump upon his return from the presidential retreat of Camp David on Sunday tweeted about the new date of the "one- of-its-kind" awards to various media houses.

The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday. The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018

Trump had, on 2 January, announced that he would give away awards to media houses for "dishonesty and bad reporting".

"I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o'clock. This would be one of its kind media award by the US president. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!" he had tweeted.

Trump had coined the term 'Fake News' during his presidential campaign, targeting media houses for "biased" news.

He very often identifies CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post as "fake media".

In November, he tweeted about a competition among news networks for the 'Fake News Trophy', excluding the Fox News.

"We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!," he wrote on the micro-blogging site on 27 November.

In an email to supporters of the president on 28 December, the Trump campaign had sought nomination for the 'King of Fake News' trophy.

"At President Trump's request, we are holding a contest to name the 2017 KING of Fake News. And we want to hear from you," it said.

"The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people. Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEY'RE WRONG," it wrote the supporters.

Noting that Americans were "sick and tired of being lied to, insulted, and treated with outright condescension", the Trump Campaign said, "That's why President Trump is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year. There's no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda".

As per the Trump Campaign list, the competition for 'King of Fame news' is between three news organisations.

"ABC News "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election," it said.

"CNN "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J Trump, Jr had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks, it wrote.

"TIME "MISTAKENLY" reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr from the Oval Office," the Trump Campaign said, asking the participants to "let the President know if there is another story you think should be crowned as the 2017 KING of Fake News".
Acapulco: Violent clashes involving gunmen, a community police force and state police killed 11 people in the troubled southern state of Guerrero, while a separate series of shootouts the previous night left seven dead in the northern Mexico beach resort of San Jose del Cabo.

Guerrero state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said eight people were initially killed when gunmen ambushed community police before dawn in the town of La Concepcion, near the resort city of Acapulco. Two of the dead were from the community force.

Later in the morning, state police arrived to disarm the local agents, and another shootout erupted in which three people were killed. Alvarez said he did not know how they died, but local media said they were community police.

State Attorney General Xavier Olea Pelaez said 30 members of the community police were detained on suspicion of crimes including homicide and illegal weapons and drug possession.

Among those arrested was Marco Antonio Suastegui, the founder of the community force and the leader of a social movement that for over a decade has fought against a hydroelectric project in the region.

Photojournalist Bernandino Hernandez said that while covering the violence he was beaten, kicked and dragged by state police and forcibly relieved of his camera's memory cards. He also witnessed several other journalists being treated roughly.

Hernandez said he had photographed police using force against locals who tried to prevent the arrest of the community agents: "Some people were dragged by the hair to take them away."

Hernandez is a regular contributor of photographs to The Associated Press but was not on assignment for AP at the time.

Guerrero has been one of Mexico's most violent states in recent years, home to marijuana and opium poppy fields as well as warring organized crime gangs.

It's also where 43 teachers college students disappeared in 2014 after being taken by police from the city of Iguala who allegedly handed them over to a drug cartel. They remain missing.

In the northern state of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said in a statement that marines responding Saturday night to reports of gunfire in San Jose del Cabo came upon heavily armed men wearing tactical vests and riding in two vehicles with license plates from the US state of California.
ABC RadioDuring the final North American date of his World Tour, Garth Brooks revealed he was recording his performance in Nashville for a new live album. While we'll likely to have to wait a bit for the audio from Garths tour closer at the Bridgestone Arena on December 22, theres one part of the show you can experience now.

The six-time CMA Entertainer of the Year picked Chris Janson to open, and the one-man virtuoso approached the performance as he often does: accompanying himself on guitar, harmonica and drums as he sang. Perhaps the most moving moment of his set came when he sat down at the piano to play his thoughtful new single, "Drunk Girl."

The "Fix a Drink" hitmaker shared a new video of the song Monday on social media, capturing the moment Music Citys Bridgestone Arena lit up with cellphones as the Missouri native performed the second single from his Everybody album.

Chris kicks off his own trek, The Everybody Tour, on January 11 with a sold-out show in Somerset, Kentucky.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Xian: In a response to panda power, French President Emmanuel Macron is betting on equine diplomacy during his first state visit to China  presenting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping with a horse as a gift.

The animal, a retired Republican Guard horse named Vesuve de Brekka, is in quarantine. But Macron will show a photo of it to Xi when they meet later Monday in Beijing.

The French presidential office said Xi had been "fascinated" by their equestrian skills when he was escorted by the guard during his visit to Paris in 2014.

"Wishing to have friendly ties with foreign heads of state, Emmanuel Macron wants to make more than a gift  a diplomatic gesture," the presidency said.

The eight-year-old dark brown horse took part in its last presidential escort on 11 November on the Champs-Elysees. The horses are ridden by sword-wielding guards on formal occasions.

Macron will also offer Xi a sabre engraved with the phrase "Mr Emmanuel Macron  President of the French Republic  Beijing  January 2018".

The gift is Macron's answer to China's panda diplomacy. And the French leader's name in Mandarin is rendered "Ma-ke-long", or "the horse vanquishes the dragon".

The horse arrived in China on a special plane accompanied by the Republican Guard's chief veterinarian and a member of the unit on 4 January, four days before Macron.

He landed in the northern city of Xian early Monday.

The horse will remain in quarantine before joining Xi's presidential stable.

"We appreciate and express our thanks for this move," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular news briefing, adding that Macron's visit was of "great significance".

"We believe this visit will further enhance the friendship between the two leaderships" and improve cooperation, Lu said.
Xian (China): French president Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that China and Europe should work together on Beijings Belt and Road initiative, a project aiming to build a modern-day Silk Road he said could not be one-way.

The ancient Silk Roads were never only Chinese, Macron told an audience of academics, students and businessmen in Xian, an eastern departure point of the ancient Silk Road.

By definition, these roads can only be shared. If they are roads, they cannot be one-way, he said.

Unveiled in 2013, the Belt and Road project is aimed at connecting China by land and sea to Southeast Asia, Pakistan and Central Asia, and beyond to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Xi pledged $124 billion for the plan at a summit in May but it has faced suspicion in Western capitals that it is intended more to assert Chinese influence than Beijings professed desire to spread prosperity.
Xian: French president Emmanuel Macron on Monday launched a state visit to China in Xian  the starting point of the ancient Silk Road  in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route.

Macron will visit the northern city's famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of France-China relations.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient Chinese artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

Macron is beginning the three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese president Xi Jinping's colossal New Silk Road project, an ambitious initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabric, spices, and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt One Road", the plan is to see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety and France has so far been cautious on it. Observers say China is waiting for Macron to outline his views on the scheme, in his emerging role as a European leadership voice.

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord to fight climate change after the US pulled out of the deal.

After Xian, Macron will travel on to Beijing along with his delegation which takes in some 60 business executives and institutions.
Tehran: Iran warned the world to prepare for the possible withdrawal of the United States from the landmark nuclear deal agreed in 2015.

"The international community must be prepared for the US possibly pulling out of the JCPOA," said deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, using the technical name for the nuclear deal.

Iran signed the accord in 2015 with six world powers, agreeing to curb its nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of many international sanctions. US president Donald Trump openly despises the deal  a central foreign policy achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama  but has so far continued to waive the nuclear-related sanctions at regular intervals as required to stay in compliance.

The next deadline for Trump to waive sanctions falls on Friday.

"It's been more than a year that the US president has sought to destroy the JCPOA with all his efforts," said Aragchi, speaking at the Tehran Security Conference. "We in Iran are prepared for any scenario. The international community and our region will be the biggest loser, since a successful experience in the international arena will be lost," he added.

"Our region will not become a safer region without the JCPOA."

A withdrawal by the US will lead to an "appropriate and heavy response," added foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi. "The US administration will definitely regret it," he said on state television.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is due to travel for talks with the European parties to the deal  Britain, France, Germany and the EU  at the end of the week.

Zarif denied reports that the talks would focus on the recent protests in Iran that claimed 21 lives, saying such claims were "baseless and unfounded".

"Given the importance of JCPOA these days, and in particular considering the US destructive policies, based on talks we've had, we agreed to have a consultative meeting

between Iran and the three European Union members," said Zarif, according to state broadcaster IRIB.
Islamabad: The footprint of the militant Islamic State group is continuously on the rise in Pakistan as over the past year responsibility for as many as six deadliest attacks, in which 153 people were killed, was claimed by the outfit, according to a think-tank report.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) on Sunday stated that the Islamic State, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn reported.

"The Islamic State claimed responsibility for just six terrorist attacks in the country, but they were the most deadliest ones. There is a need to take the matter more seriously because there is a possibility that foreign fighters would come to Pakistan in near future as things are continuously changing in the Middle East," said PIPS offical Muhammad Ismail Khan.

"What has been quite alarming is the increasing footprint of Islamic State, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh where the group claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks," Khan said.

According to the report, despite a 16 percent decline in terrorist attacks last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its associated groups remained the most potent threats. They were followed by nationalist-insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.

It further said that concerted efforts and a revision of the National Action Plan was required to curb the terror group's activities. The report suggested a parliamentary oversight of Pakistan's counter-terror plan.

Militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of the country in 2017, the think-tank said.

These incidents, including 24 suicide and gun-and-suicide coordinated attacks, left 815 people dead. The report noted that as compared to 2016, the attacks in the country from across the Afghan, Indian and Iranian borders in 2017 witnessed a significant surge by 131 per cent.

Furthermore, security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016.

According to the report, it was quite likely that the National Internal Security Policy will take into consideration global and regional scenarios, including relations between Pakistan, China and the US.
Jerusalem: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu trod carefully on Sunday around a threatened US aid cut to Palestinians, stopping short of backing a funding halt as he repeated calls for a UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees to be dismantled.

Netanyahus public comments appeared to reflect a desire to show support for a major ally, but also concern that choking off funds would deepen Palestinian hardship and could put Israel and militants on a course for war.

With Palestinians seething over US president Donald Trumps recognition last month of Jerusalem as Israels capital, he threatened on Tuesday to withhold aid money, accusing them of being no longer willing to talk peace.

On Friday, in a report denied by a State Department official, the Axios news site said Washington had frozen $125 million in funding for UNRWA. The UN agency, founded in 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees, is a main provider of educational and health services in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu said UNRWA was an organisation that perpetuates the Palestinian problem.

It also enshrines the narrative of the so-called right of return. Therefore, UNRWA should pass from the world, he told a weekly cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu made almost identical comments about dismantling UNRWA in June  a message he said at the time he had conveyed to the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Praising Trumps critical approach on the aid issue, Netanyahu steered clear of advocating a suspension of funding for the Palestinians. He said UN money for them should be transferred gradually to its global refugee agency UNHCR with clear criteria for supporting genuine refugees and not fictitious ones, as is happening today under UNRWA.

Chris Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said the refugee crisis was being perpetuated by failure of the parties to deal with the issue...

UNRWA is mandated by the General Assembly to continue with its services until a just and lasting solution is found for the Palestine refugees, Gunness said in a statement.

Palestinian officials have said Trumps declaration on Jerusalem, overturning decades of U policy, meant he could not serve as an honest broker in peace negotiations that Washington has been trying to revive, and they condemned his remarks on a funding halt as blackmail.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they seek to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The United States is the largest donor to UNRWA, with a pledge of nearly $370 million as of 2016, according to the organisations website. Gunness said the agency had not been informed directly of a formal decision either way by the US administration on cuts.

In addition to its services in Gaza, UNRWA operates in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Washington: CIA chief Mike Pompeo has said that Pakistan continues to provide safe havens to terrorists which is not acceptable to America.

US president Donald Trump has asked Pakistan to "cease" being a safe haven for terrorists that threaten the US, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director said on Sunday.

The US has suspended about $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan for failing to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani terror network and dismantle their safe havens.

The freezing of all security assistance to Pakistan comes after Trump in a New Year's day tweet accused Islamabad of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for $33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

"We see the Pakistanis continuing to provide safe harbour, havens inside of Pakistan for terrorists who present risks to the United States of America," Pompeo was quoted as saying by the CBS News.

"We are doing our best to inform the Pakistanis that this is no longer going to be acceptable. So this conditioned aid, we have given them a chance. If they fix this problem, we are happy to continue to engage with them and be their partner.

But if they don't, we're going to protect America," he said.

The CIA director was responding to questions on the recent decision of the Trump administration to suspend approximately $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan.

"The president has made very clear that he needs Pakistan to cease being a safe haven for terrorists that threaten the United States of America, end, period, full stop," Pompeo said, reflecting the stand taken by Trump.

The security assistance can be restored if Pakistan takes decisive actions against terrorists.
The proposal by Senator Rand Paul to cut off all aid to Pakistan and use the money for building infrastructure in the United States is surely one of the most reasonable proposals to be made. After all, there is more than enough data to indicate that Pakistan is more enemy than ally, funding terrorists who kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, while its nationals are part of nearly every major terrorist attack in Europe and the United States. The approving tweet by President Donald Trump illustrates the rising resentment against a state that has proved itself traitorous several times over.

The proposal was preceded by the State Department announcing a suspension of military aid to Pakistan to the tune of a little over $200 million, which is part of a tranche of authorised aid of about $1.6 billion for FY2017 and FY2018. Though exact figures are unclear, a State Department freeze will probably affect Foreign Military Financing  the funds provided to other countries to buy US hardware  as well as the Coalition Support Fund  the money that is regularly reimbursed to Pakistan for its assistance in the war on terror. However, unnamed US officials also made the now expected statement that "exceptions" to the freeze would be made on national security considerations.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the senator's statement didn't cause an uproar in Pakistan. Barring an odd burning of the flag, and excepted official statements of "betrayal", Pakistanis seemed to have brushed off these developments, accustomed as they are to the US threatening to cut aid or worse, without anything very serious coming out of it.

This has been proved time and again in the past four decades or more. Aid dipped sharply towards the end of the 1970s as apprehension began to climb on persistent intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency on Pakistan's construction of a uranium enrichment facility. With outrage in the media, and warnings by various officials, military aid was cut off, even as food assistance continued.

Pakistan hit lucky with the invasion of the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979. Despite the United States sworn objections to nuclear proliferation, concerns on Pakistans ambitions in this area were set aside with a most convenient piece of legislation known as the "Pressler Amendment" in 1985.

Named after Senator Larry Pressler, the amendment used some very curious language. The amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 states that no military technology or assistance would be provided to Pakistan unless the president certified that Pakistan "does not possess a nuclear explosive device and that the proposed United States military assistance program will reduce significantly the risk that Pakistan will possess a nuclear explosive device".

Since Pakistan was careful not to declare a fully assembled nuclear capability, this was read in US circles as meaning that it did not yet possess a weapon. The second clause would have caused apoplexy in Indian circles since it hinted that as long as Pakistan had enough conventional military assistance from the United States, it would not go the nuclear route.

In the event, president after president provided the necessary certification for continued military assistance, even as Congressional testimonies were warning of the advent of an "Islamic bomb". The economic aid, which is always at least half of overall aid, did not even come up for discussion. Overall aid reduced, but never ever stopped entirely.

In the event, the Pakistanis did go nuclear, used its conventional strength to allow an adventure in Kargil, and routed US secret funds to arm the worst elements in the "Afghan resistance". The result is several thousand Afghans died, not to mention a good many Americans both in Afghanistan and back home.

Unsurprisingly, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 also benefitted Pakistan in financial terms, with aid rising from a mere $177 million that year to $831 million (2002), climbing thereafter to a billion a year. This also led to the beginning of the so-called "Coalition Support Funds" which were meant to be reimbursements  to mainly Rawalpindi  for expenses in support of the "war on terror".

The Pakistanis milked that dry with typical South Asian ease, and it was not until questions began to be raised in Congress that greater scrutiny was brought to bear on the accounting process. As recently as 2016, total aid spent was well above $600 million, keeping Pakistan among the top recipients of US aid.

The International Monetary Fund has also come to the rescue of Pakistan with 12 IMF programmes in the last 28 years. The Funds assistance was particularly vital at a time when Pakistan was in danger of defaulting on its foreign debts in the year 2000. The crisis was exacerbated by the countrys nuclear tests and a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf.

It was not until after 2001 and the 9/11 attacks that Pakistan came out of an economic trough with an IMF programme that included debt re-scheduling/write-offs and generous grants by the United States. Certainly, US economic assistance both direct and indirect saved Pakistan from becoming a complete economic basket case.

Senator Rands proposal, if implemented, will be a landmark step since it will affect all aid  economic and military  to Pakistan. Dont, however, hold your breath.

History has shown time and again that the bureaucratic underground and expert lobbying groups will soon get their act together, and plead national security as grounds with a view to keeping Pakistan engaged.

They will argue that aid provides leverage over Pakistani decision making  a view that has been repeatedly negated over the years  and that this will assist 'democracy' in Pakistan. The Pakistan Army, which is now running the country, read the Americans far better than the Americans, who haven't even begun to decipher them.

It is not for nothing that they prefer to pull strings from behind the prime minister of the moment to ensure the facade of democracy is maintained. Continued engagement is also ensured by the leak of a threatened terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda, or an Islamic State leader suddenly emerging from obscurity in Afghanistan. That will cause US intelligence to pause.

In the coming days, there will also be Pakistani statements of everlasting friendship with China. The proposal by Senator Rand came hot on the heels of the inking of the Long Term Plan 2017-2030 between China and Pakistan. It is this document that provides guidelines for the Pakistan-China relationship  which is updated every two years.

The present iteration seems to cover everything from power projects to currency swap and local government. While the Great Chinese Wall around Pakistan is slowly being built project by project, it forms no part of Beijings plan to bankroll the Pakistani state. Neither is it likely to want Pakistan to end access to US defence technology. China will try to soothe the waters and ensure that US aid continues. It will probably succeed. Thats the tragedy.
Washington: Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Sunday sought to back away from incendiary remarks quoted in an explosive new book that have landed him in hot water with the president he helped elect.

Bannon has found himself in dire straits since excerpts of Paul Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House  an explosive behind-the-scenes account that questions the president's fitness for office  were first published on Wednesday.

He has been abandoned by financial patrons, condemned by erstwhile political allies and ridiculed by Trump himself over his reported comments in the book, which he has not denied making.

In the book, Bannon is quoted as saying a pre-election meeting involving son Donald Trump Jr and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer was "treasonous," and that prosecutors investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia would "crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

In a statement to the Axios news website, Bannon, who was a senior Trump adviser until he was ousted in August, said: "Donald Trump Jr is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

His criticism, Bannon said, was aimed at onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, "a seasoned campaign professional" who "should have known (the Russians) are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends."

'I regret my delay'

But in Fire and Fury, Bannon is quoted as saying that "the top three guys in the campaign"  Manafort, Donald Jr and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner  attended the meeting he described as "treasonous."

The closest Bannon came to an actual apology was saying he regretted the timing of his response.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments."

Trump on Sunday continued his daily assault on Fire and Fury and its author, tweeting that the book  which paints him as disengaged, ill-informed and unstable, with signs of serious memory loss  was a "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

A day earlier, seeking to refute Wolff's suggestion that he lacked stability, Trump called himself a "very stable genius."

Senior Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller treated the book derisively while insisting that his boss was in fact "a political genius," in an interview with CNN on Sunday.

Wolff, Miller said, "is a garbage author of a garbage book." He assailed Bannon, reportedly a key source for the author, as "vindictive" and "out of touch with reality."

'Not going to succeed'

Wolff defended his work on Sunday, telling NBC he "absolutely did not" violate any off-the-record agreements in his reporting but conceding, of the total three hours he said he spent with Trump, that the president "probably did not think of them as interviews."

He also portrayed a high level of concern in the White House over whether Trump risks being removed from office as unfit, as is possible  if difficult  under the constitution's 25th Amendment.

Almost daily, he said, White House aides would say, "We're not at a 25th Amendment level yet."

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, rejected that notion, telling ABC that no one at the White House "questions the stability of the president." She suggested that Wolff was someone who would "lie for money and for power."

But Wolff insisted he did not enter the book project with an anti-Trump bias or agenda.

"I would have been delighted to have written a contrarian account here: 'Donald Trump, this unexpected president, is actually going to succeed.' Okay, that's not the story. He is not going to succeed. This is worse than everybody thought."

CIA director Mike Pompeo, appearing on Fox News on Sunday, insisted that Wolff's portrayal of Trump was "just pure fantasy."

'Hysterical coverage'

Far from being detached and unable to deal with complex policy issues, Pompeo said, "The president is engaged, he understands the complexity, he asks really difficult questions of our team at the CIA." He described Trump as an "avid consumer" of the agency's intelligence.

Pompeo added that Trump was "completely fit," saying it was "ludicrous" to suggest otherwise.

But in a probable sign of White House sensitivities over the book, Miller lashed out in an unusually raw clash with his CNN interviewer, Jake Tapper.

Miller called Tapper "condescending" and "snide," and accused CNN of engaging in "negative anti-Trump hysterical coverage" and "spectacularly embarrassing false reporting."

The two men repeatedly spoke over each other before Tapper declared, "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time. Thank you, Stephen," then turned away from Miller  who was still talking  to tersely announce the next guest.

Miller's combative performance on CNN got a thumbs up from his boss.

"Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!" Trump tweeted after the segment aired.
Beijing: The US Navy has joined the search for 32 crew members missing from an Iranian oil tanker that caught fire after colliding with a bulk freighter off China's east coast.

China, South Korea and the US sent ships and planes to search for the 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis who have been missing since the collision late Saturday. The US Navy, which sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa, Japan, to aid the search, said late Sunday that none of the missing crew had been found.

The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided late Saturday with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in the East China Sea, 257 kilometers (160 miles) off the coast of Shanghai, China's ministry of transport said.

All 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the United States to China, were rescued, the ministry said. The Crystal's crew members were all Chinese nationals.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the collision.

State-run China Central Television reported Sunday evening that the tanker was still floating and burning, and that oil was visible in the water. Photos distributed by the South Korean government showed the tanker on fire and shrouded in thick black smoke.

Chinese authorities dispatched three ships to clean the oil spill. It was not clear, however, whether the tanker was still spilling oil as of Monday and the size of the oil slick caused by the accident also was not known.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 metric tons (150,000 tons, or nearly 1 million barrels) of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.

The Sanchi has operated under five different names since it was built in 2008, according the UN run International Maritime Organization. The IMO listed its registered owner as Hong Kong-based Bright Shipping Ltd., on behalf of the National Iranian Tanker Co, a publicly traded company based in Tehran. The National Iranian Tanker Co. describes itself as operating the largest tanker fleet in the Middle East.

An official in Iran's Oil Ministry, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said 30 of the tanker's 32 crew members were Iranians.

"We have no information on their fate," he said Sunday. "We cannot say all of them have died, because rescue teams are there and providing services."

The official said the tanker was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co and had been rented by a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Co. He said the tanker was on its way to South Korea.

Hanwa Total is a 50-50 partnership between the Seoul-based Hanwha Group and the French oil giant Total. Total did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's the second collision for a ship from the National Iranian Tanker Co. in less than a year and a half. In August 2016, one of its tankers collided with a Swiss container ship in the Singapore Strait, damaging both ships but causing no injuries or oil spill.
HARRISBURG  Oh, baby. Visitors to the 102nd Pennsylvania Farm Show this week are enjoying a population explosion.

Not in people, but in the calves born before their eyes in the Calving Corner in the Northeast Hall.

The Farm Show bovine maternity center, known as the Calving Corner, offers 16 pregnant Holsteins a comfortable if totally public place to deliver their calves. It gives visitors in bleachers the opportunity to witness a birth and learn about the dairy industry.

Miriam Kelly Miller, Pennsylvania Dairymens Association Calving Corner project manager, calls it a win-win arrangement. She spends hours each day explaining the birthing process to interested spectators.

Its been phenomenal, she said. We had four births the first two days  Ricky, Jimmy, Jesse and Tyler. The crowd helped to name them. The dairy farmers are getting to tell how they produce milk. The public is learning about cows. Most of them have never seen a birth.

The 16 cows, four at a time, come from Kreider Farms of Manheim, Meadow Vista Dairy of Bainbridge, Brubaker Farms of Mount Joy and Meadow Lane Dairy of Lancaster.

What to expect

Two 24-by-24 foot pens stand side by side, one for each pair of cows. As the cows progressed through labor, Miller told the crowd what to expect.

She said theres no guarantee visitors will get to witness a birth since cows, like women, dont have an exact delivery timetable for delivery. But even if visitors miss the birth, they still can see the newborn calves.

As the time of birth nears, a cow may pace or lay down and get up repeatedly. Births often happen feet first. Newborn calves, which usually weigh around 90 pounds, can start to breath within a minute.

Right after a calf is born, the mother licks it, Miller said. Thats both to stimulate the calfs heart and lungs and to help the mothers uterus contract. Then, the mother delivers the placenta.

Within an hour of the birth, the Calving Center staff washes the cows udder and milks her to get the colostrum, a milk produced by the mother cow during pregnancy. Colostrum contains special antibodies.

We feed the colostrum to the calf, Miller said. We keep the cow and calf together for two to three hours, then we move the calf to a separate pen. We do that for calf safety. Dairy cows are large and could fall on the calves. It also helps the calf to develop its immune system.

The mother cows and their calves go back to their farms two days after arriving.

Updates

On Monday, Holsteins Sheila, Susan, Nora and Sami were ladies in waiting, with Sami appearing rather restless.

Crowds came and went, many signing up to receive Calving Corner updates. Sometimes, people sat in the bleachers to look at the cows and sometimes to watch interviews playing on the large screens overhead.

Miller, who grew up on a dairy farm in Blair County, said that the Calving Corner was inspired by similar programs at the New York and Minnesota state fairs. New York has a Dairy Cow Birthing Center where six farmers bring six pregnant cows for the 12-day event. The farmers and Cornell University veterinarians and students discuss cow births with the audience.

Since 2001, the Minnesota fair has been operating the CHS Miracle of Birth Center where visitors can watch the births of nearly 200 calves, lambs, goats and pigs during the 12-day fair.

Miller said that she hopes that Pennsylvanias Calving Center, which is co-sponsored by the American dairy Association Northeast, continues.

People today are getting far moved from farms, she said. They need to understand where they get their food.

Tanya Baldwin of Elizabethtown, herds person at Meadow Vista, said that the Calving Corner educates Farm Show visitors.

A lot of these people have never even seen a cow close up, she said. This is a great opportunity for them.
Acer today announced that it would roll out Amazon Alexa voice assistant to select PCs starting from Q1 2018. The list of PCs includes Aspire, Spin, Switch and Swift notebooks, as well as Aspire all-in-one PCs.

Alexa voice assistant will be initially available in the US via an update through Acer Care Center, and wider support is expected to be rolled out mid-2018. Acer will be utilizing the Intel Smart Sound Technology which is an integrated audio DSP (Digital Signal Processor) built to handle audio, voice, and speech interactions.

The company mentioned that the latest notebooks and desktops would support Amazon Alexa and respond to voice commands quickly while offering high fidelity audio without impacting system performance. Alexa on Acer will be able to check calendars, create lists, answer questions, play favorite music, podcasts or audiobooks; and manage smart home devices by controlling lights, thermostats, and home appliances through voice commands to Alexa.

Alexa voice assistant uses the voice and four digital microphones that support far-field voice recognition from up to nine feet (2.74 m) away, while others with dual microphones will be able to activate Alexa within three feet (0.91 m). Acer has announced Alexa support for the new V6820M/i 4K UHD projector.

The Acer V6820M/i wireless projector has a 120-inch 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution display. It is compatible with HDR and Rec. 2020 signals, supports the Rec. 709 standard for cinema-like color accuracy, and HDMI 3D2 for 3D home theater experiences. The Acer AcuMotion frame interpolation system, which calculates and generates intermediate frames, inserting them into existing ones for seamless motion. The V6820M/i can operate at an extremely low noise level of 19dBA.

Commenting on the same, Jerry Kao, President of IT Products Business of Acer Inc said:

Acer is excited to be among the first brands to bring Alexa to PCs. With industry-leading audio technology across our portfolio, were providing consumers the possibility to interact with multiple voice services on their notebook or desktop. Alexa lets users do thousands of things and were now bringing those capabilities natively to PCs.

Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa said:
After Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra & Goa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Karnataka and Chennai, Airtel has launched its 4G VoLTE services in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. This lets Airtel customers enjoy HD quality voice calls along with faster call set up time compared to normal voice calls on their VoLTE-compatible 4G handsets.

Airtel promises seamless connectivity and in the case of non-availability of 4G, Airtel VoLTE calls will automatically fall back on 3G/2G network, said the company. It will also allow customers to continue with their data sessions at 4G speeds while the call is in progress.

Airtel says that customers with Dual-SIM handsets should insert their Airtel SIM in SIM slot 1 and network mode should be set as 4G/3G/2G (Auto) for VoLTE to work properly. The company says that the handset manufacturer need to upgrade the smartphones software to support Airtel VoLTE, even though there are hundreds of 4G smartphones in the market with VoLTE support.

You can check out the complete list of Airtel VoLTE compatible smartphones here. Airtel already said that it plans to roll out VoLTE across the country over the next few months without any time frame.

Commenting on the launch, Manoj Murali, HUB CEO, Kerala & Tamil Nadu, Bharti Airtel said:

We are delighted to extend our VoLTE footprint in Tamil Nadu with the launch of services in Coimbatore. Complementing our world class 4G network, VoLTE will add to the customer experience and our range of smartphone offerings.
The growth of plant-based alternatives has been fueled by rising consumer desire for healthier food products that have less impact on the planet. Givaudans latest... Read More
HARRISBURG  As birds clucked, quacked, cackled and honked inside the 102nd Pennsylvania Farm Show, visitors flocked outside to dust snow off their cars and brave the icy roads.

This years huge agricultural exposition, marked by unending frigid temperatures and penetrating wind, on Monday got some snow and ice in the mix. As a result, attendance was lighter than usual.

Yet the Pennsylvania FFA Association Mid-Winter Convention at the Farm Show Complex attracted more than 5,000 students, including 430 who received the prestigious Keystone award and 360 first year members who received their FFA jackets.

The states largest square dance also went off without a hitch as hundreds of people twirled, whirled and promenaded their way into the hearts of the appreciative audience members. Cumberland County was well represented with such sets as the Circulate Eight, Fabulous Flutterwheels, Flirts and Skirts and Fair and Square.

Square dancing is a fun event, said Dwayne Hay, a dance co-chairman. We set up 60 squares of eight dancers each and this year we had a waiting list.

Although a smaller than usual crowd visited the poultry exhibit on the Farm Shows third day, Poultry Superintendent Tom Topper didnt complain. The Farm Show runs through 5 p.m. Saturday, waith free admission but a $15 parking fee.

We have 530 birds here ranging from a 12-ounce Serama (a bantam breed from Malaysia) to a 12.2-pound Jersey Giant chicken (one of the heaviest of all chicken breeds), Topper said. The largest number of entries are in chickens and the smallest are in turkeys. Geese and ducks are holding their own.

Topper said that most of the birds in the Farm Show are ornamental or show birds rather than commercial ones that produce eggs or roasters that provide meat. He smiled when asked if the birds mind the cold.

Many of these birds could handle cold temperatures as long as theyre not in a draft or wet, he said. Geese and ducks like the cold and would prefer sitting out in a snowstorm than sitting inside here. Old English chickens are cold weather birds, too. But some of the smaller, lighter birds dont like the cold.

Christopher Rob of Latrobe, an exhibitor and bird room helper, proudly showed his Black Cochin Pullet, the grand champion bird of this years Farm Show.

Ive been bringing birds to the Farm Show for about 10 years, he said. We have three of the 13 birds on champion row.

The poultry exhibit seems to have something for everyone: wee bantams for those who find birds intimidating, docile ducks who give off an occasional quack, gigantic geese whose honks made some visitors jump, gobbling turkeys with impressive feathers, and chickens, chickens, chickens.

Some birds have tufted coiffures while others look windswept and blown apart. A few have stilt-like legs, giving them a whimsical look reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss character. Then, theres the Polish chickens, with wild crest feathers and a sassy strut.

Rob and his mother, April Rob, operate Rob Triple P poultry farm, where they raise show birds.

We have 175 birds now but up to 500 in summer, he said.

Topper and Rob, both 4-H leaders, called show birds a fun hobby. First, April Rob said, people should check that their municipalities allow backyard poultry and how many birds.

If theyre allowed, she said, they should get poultry housing, an exercise area, water and feed. She recommends starting with a few birds, although places like Tractor Supply Co. or Rural King often sell them in lots of six.

Its fun to haves a few backyard chickens, Topper said. You can get your own eggs. Chickens are fun to watch. I know people who carry chairs out to the yard so they can sit and watch the chickens.

April Rob said that many people like the Silkies, which she washes, blow dries and trims their beaks and toenails.

Poultry are a commitment, Rob said, holding his Bearded White Silkie Pullet. They need clean pens every day. I clean the barn every week.

Topper said that Pennsylvanias poultry industry is doing well and has a promising future.

Pennsylvania ranks fourth in egg production and layers, he said. We are around 10th in broilers. Plus, were getting newer and younger members exhibiting at the Farm Show.
In recent years, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has vastly become one of Ohios largest employers, hiring more than 6,000 workers with thousands more jobs expected as the online retail giant adds three additional warehouses.

The only problem is, according to a new report, is despite the increase in jobs, many of Amazons workforce in Ohio is still reliant on food stamps.

According to the progressive policy group Policy Matters Ohio, as of August, Amazon had 1,430 workers and their family members on food stamps, which is roughly 10% of its workforce.

However, overall, Amazon ranked 19th on a list of fifty large employers in the state that still has its employees receiving federal aid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Walmart (NYSE:WMT) ranked the highest at 11,560 employees seeking aid, while McDonalds (NYSE:MCD) ranked second at 9,927 employees, according to Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Other companies mentioned included Kroger (NYSE:KR), Bob Evans, Wendys, and Dollar General. According to the report, in order to be eligible for food stamps, a family of three needs to make less than $26,208 a year, or about $12.60 an hour for a 40 hour work week.

In a statement to FOX Business, an Amazon spokesperson said, Amazons full-time hourly employees in Ohio earn between $14.50 and $15 an hour as a starting wage with regular pay increases plus Amazon stock and performance based bonuses. We also provide comprehensive benefits which include health, vision, and dental insurance coverage starting on day one, generous maternity and family leave, tuition for career education, and a network of support to succeed."

Additionally, a source told FOX Business that SNAP eligibility is multi-faceted and is not always determined solely on revenue but rather on the special needs and medical care of the dependents.

Neither Walmart or McDonalds immediately returned FOX Business request for additional comments regarding the report.

It is troubling that so many of those who qualify are working and still dont make enough to get by. The sudden emergence of Amazon as an employer of so many who need that assistance raises a question: Why is this giant, successful company offering such limited pay and hours of work that many of its workers need help buying food? Zach Schiller, Policy Matters research director said.

Schiller added that while those figures include both full and part-time workers, it is likely that mostly part-time workers are the ones who qualify for aid.

Weve appreciated having more employment, but maybe we should be focusing economic development dollars on good jobs. Its pretty clear that a lot of these jobs are not good jobs, Schiller told The Columbus Dispatch. That should raise a policy question for our public officials, and thats why we think its worth pointing out.

Additionally, Ohio has put in a bid to be the home of Amazons second headquarters, which according to The Dispatch, would generate 50,000 more jobs and over $5 billion in investment.

Schiller also pointed out that Amazon receives millions of dollars in state and local subsidies at its warehouses.

According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, in certain counties in Ohio, emergency responders have answered calls at one Amazons warehouses at least once a day without any financial support from the company.

Amazon has become something of a poster child for incentives that make it tough for public services to accommodate the added strain its facilities bring. In four deals struck through JobsOhio since 2014, the company has received at least $123 million in tax breaks, plus $2.9 million in cash grants, the Bloomberg report said.

However, Matt Englehart, a spokesperson for JobsOhio, told FOX Business, that Amazon has been nothing but a good thing for the state, by more than doubling its job commitments at its fulfillment centers in Etna and Obetz.

"These full-time associates now have jobs that include compensation that pay 30% above the national average for retail workers, opportunities for professional advancement, benefits that include health coverage starting on day one, generous maternity and family leave, and 95% tuition assistance for careers regardless if they are with Amazon," Englehart said.
Dividend stocks are a great way to earn passive income, so much so that they could even help you pay off some of your monthly bills. That's right, and it's possible if you invest in stocks that pay you a dividend every month.

To be able to cut a check each month and maintain or raise the payout requires a company to have tenable confidence in its profit-making and cash-generating capabilities. It's easier said than done, which is why while most companies pay dividends quarterly, and only around 40 publicly listed companies pay a dividend every month. Three such companies worth watching are STAG Industrial (NYSE: STAG), Realty Income (NYSE: O), and Pembina Pipeline (NYSE: PBA).

You can count on this company for larger dividends

Real estate investment trusts (REIT) dominate the small group of monthly dividend payers. As a REIT corporate structure requires paying out 90% of net income in dividends, perhaps paying every month comes easier to them. STAG Industrial and Realty Income are two such REITs that have caught my attention.

STAG Industrial, as its name suggests, is an industrial REIT that acquires and operates industrial properties -- mainly single-tenant -- like warehouses, distribution centers, and light manufacturing facilities. As of March 31, 2018, STAG owned 360 buildings across 37 states in the U.S. STAG's strength lies in its diversification.

STAG's properties are leased across diverse sectors and industries, including capital goods, automobiles, food and beverage, consumer durables, and materials. As of last quarter, capital goods was the largest, accounting for 13.6% of STAG's total annualized base rental (ABR) revenue. STAG had 312 tenants as of last count, with no single tenant accounting for more than 2.5% of its ABR.

Because STAG's fortunes aren't tied to any single industry or tenant, the company's funds from operations grew fourfold in the past five years, and annual dividends have increased every year since STAG started paying one in 2011. So, by owning STAG, you not only get paid every month, you can also expect fatter dividends with each passing year. The frequency and growth in dividends can compound rapidly: If you'd bought shares of STAG in 2011 and reinvested dividends, you'd be sitting on more than 200% gains today.

Among STAG's top ten customers are government agency General Services Administration, logistics giants XPO Logistics, FedEx and DHL, footwear designer and distributor Deckers Outdoor, and industrial conglomerate Emerson Electric. I believe exposure to the logistics industry could bring in a good chunk of growth for STAG, specifically from e-commerce. Combine that with the stock's handsome 6% yield, and you could easily bank on STAG to take care of some of your monthly expenses.

This dividend stock's been a multibagger

Realty Income is a formidable combination of dividend growth and yield, having increased its dividends for 82 consecutive quarters and grown them at a compound annual rate of 4.7% since 1994, also the year the company went public. In absolute terms, Realty Income's annual dividend amount per share has nearly tripled since 1994, though the rate of dividend growth has picked up only in recent years. If not for its regular and growing dividends, Realty Income wouldn't be a tenbagger in just 20 years!

Realty Income credits a strong portfolio of properties, diligent management, and opportunistic resale and deployment of proceeds to lucrative acquisitions for its incredible dividend record. As a net-lease REIT, Realty Income secures long-term contracts with in-built annual clauses for rent increases while avoiding several property ownership and maintenance costs. The predictable, growing cash flows go a long way in boosting shareholder returns.

Recent pressure on the retail industry has hit Realty Income shares, only to open up an opportunity for smart investors. Realty Income has more than 5,300 commercial properties, leased out to 254 commercial tenants across 47 industries. As of Dec. 31, 2017, drug and convenience stores combined -- both of which are largely recession-proof -- contributed roughly 21% to the company's rental revenue. Tenant-wise, Walgreens, FedEx, Dollar General, and LA Fitness are the top four contributors to Realty Income's revenue.

The fears appear overblown. A diversified portfolio, 98%-plus occupancy rate, a conservative balance sheet, management's focus on opportunistic growth, and dependable dividends: Realty Income packs a punch. A dividend yield of 5% is the cherry on top for income investors.

An intriguing oil and gas monthly dividend stock

Canada-based Pembina Pipeline is a diversified midstream energy infrastructure and marketing company that's primarily into transportation of various natural gas products and hydrocarbon liquids. The company expects its pipeline division to contribute 60% to its total EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) in 2018. The rest of it should come from Pembina's two other divisions, facilities -- which is into processing and fractionation of natural gas liquids -- and marketing.

The benefits of a diversified and a broadly fee-based services portfolio, which means steady and reliable cash flows, have shown up in Pembina's numbers over the years. Since 1997, Pembina has shelled out nearly 6 billion Canadian dollars in dividends and grown its dividend at a compound annual rate of 4.2% in the past decade.

In major growth moves, Pembina scooped up Canadian midstream company Veresen for CA$9.5 billion last year in its largest-ever acquisition, even as it pumped another CA$4.7 billion into expansion projects. Pembina's operating income hit record highs in fiscal 2017.

The contribution of fee-based services to Pembina's adjusted EBITDA has increased dramatically in recent years, with the company now targeting 80% contribution in the foreseeable future. That's good news for income investors as stable cash flows should also mean higher dividends. In fact, Pembina is targeting 8% to 10% growth in annual cash flow per share. That makes Pembina an intriguing monthly dividend stock -- more so with its dividend yield of 5.3%.

10 stocks we like better than Pembina PipelineWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has quadrupled the market.*

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Investors are issuing a warning to tech giant Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to curb its smartphone marketing strategy amid fears the iPhone is a mental health hazard to children.

Activist investors Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), which own about $2 billion worth of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock combined, expressed their concerns in an open letter, saying the iPhone is designed to be as addictive and time-consuming as possible.

DivaMoms CEO Lyss Stern told FOX Business Neil Cavuto Monday that the excessive use of smartphones among children is what keeps parents up at night.

It is toxic, especially for their brains that are developing so fast. Their full frontal lobes arent even developed yet, and theres just too much information being thrown at them so fast all the time, she said.

Investors point to several studies that suggest the attachment of digital devices is associated with lack of sleep, higher stress levels that may lead to a greater risk of depression and suicide.

Theyre talking about it from a point of view of an investor, particularly Jana just saying, Listen, if this is found to be true that these link kids to more anxiety, more depression, even in extreme cases suicide, thats going to be bad for the stock, FOX Business Deirdre Bolton said.

The activist investors are urging Apple to develop software that limits time use of its digital products and to fund research to look into links between anxiety levels and excessive smartphone use. The letter calls for Apple to enhance its limited parental controls to provide a more balance approach.

I would never just give my kids the keys to a car and say, Go drive, Stern said. Weve taken steps to train and teach our children, especially the youngest boy, about social media, about what you can and cannot do.
Colorado regulators are considering proposed new rules for thousands of oil and gas pipelines after a fatal explosion last year blamed on leaking gas.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission opened two days of hearings Monday on regulations for installing, testing and shutting down flow lines, which carry oil and gas from wells to nearby equipment.

The rules for thousands of oil and gas pipelines are in response to an April 17 explosion in the town of Firestone that killed two people, injured a third and destroyed a house. Investigators said the explosion was caused by odorless, unrefined natural gas leaking from a severed flow line.

Investigators said the line was believed to be abandoned but was still connected to an operating well with the valve turned to the open position.

The flow line was severed about 10 feet (3 meters) from the house, and gas seeped into the home's basement, investigators said. The well and pipeline were in place several years before the house was built.

The proposed rules are a significant expansion of existing ones. A final version will be drawn up after this week's hearings. No date has been set for the commission's seven voting members to approve or disapprove of the rules.

Colorado has nearly 129,000 flow lines within about 1,000 feet (300 meters) of occupied buildings, according to energy company reports submitted to the state last year.

The presence of homes and schools near oil and gas operations is a contentious issue in Colorado, especially in the booming Front Range urban corridor  including Firestone  which overlaps with an oil and gas field.

A 22-page draft of the new regulations says flow lines that are permanently taken out of service must be disconnected, drained and sealed at both ends and any above-ground portion must be removed. The rules also allow energy companies to simply remove the lines.

The proposal also would require energy companies to provide information on the location of flow lines to the Call 811 program, which marks the site of underground utilities at a property owner's request. That's meant to help homeowners and construction companies avoid inadvertently severing a line.

The proposed rules revise or add requirements for designing, installing, testing and documenting flow lines.

Shortly after the explosion, some state officials argued that Colorado should compile a map of all flow lines in the state and make it available online. But Gov. John Hickenlooper decided against that in August, citing concerns about security and theft.

Instead, he said the state would require energy companies to participate in the Call 811 program, saying that would make location information available to anyone who needs it.

The new rules also are intended to close some gaps in pipeline regulation.

Commission staffers noted last week that one federal agency, three state agencies and some local governments have at least some say in pipelines, but a few types of pipelines and activities don't fall within any agency's jurisdiction.

___

Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/dan%20elliott .
What happened

Pengrowth Energy Corporation (NYSE: PGH) entered 2017 in a tight spot. With CA$1.69 billion ($1.36 billion) of debt outstanding, the Canadian oil and gas producer needed to act fast to stay afloat since it had several upcoming debt maturities to address and it was dangerously close to breaching its financial covenants. As a result, the company had no choice but to unload a boatload of assets. While that plan worked, the company's stock went on a bumpy ride and ended up losing 44% of its value last year.

So what

In late February, Pengrowth Energy warned that if its lenders didn't provide it with more breathing room by amending some of the covenants on its debt, those borrowings could become due immediately, which could force the company to declare bankruptcy. The oil producer would go on to help its cause by unloading assets to give it the cash to pay down debt. By August it had sold CA$827 million ($666.3 million) in oil and gas properties, which was enough to buy it the needed relief.

Pengrowth Energy sold a couple more assets before the end of the year, which pushed its asset sale total up to nearly CA$1 billion ($810 million). That shrank the company down to just two core assets: the Lindbergh thermal oil facility and a position in the Montney shale gas region, which are both in western Canada.

With its transformation complete, Pengrowth now believes that it can grow from this stronger core position, with it hoping to sanction phase two of its Lindbergh project in the near-term. This expansion would increase its oil production capacity from that facility up to 40,000 barrels per day, which is a significant increase from the 17,700-barrel-a-day capacity it should have this year.

However, this plan has two glaring issues, which weighed on the stock last year. First, Pengrowth noted that it would need to borrow money to finance the project, which is a concern since its balance sheet is just getting back on solid ground. Second, at $55 oil, the project would only earn a 20% return. Contrast that with what fellow Canadia oil and gas producer Encana (NYSE: ECA) can do in current market conditions. For starters, its premium drilling locations in the U.S. and Canada can earn it a 35% after-tax rate of return at $50 oil. Because of those higher returns, Encana can self-fund its five-year expansion plan at $50 oil, generating 25% compound annual cash flow growth in the process, including producing an anticipated $1.5 billion in excess cash over that timeframe.

Now what

Pengrowth Energy worked hard to stay afloat last year, and it's now in a position to start growing again. Yet even with this progress, the company remains well behind other oil producers like Encana, which can grow at a faster rate within cash flow thanks to their stronger asset base. That's why Pengrowth's stock remains depressed and could continue underperforming its peers in the coming years unless oil rockets higher.

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What happened

Shares of gold miner Yamana Gold (NYSE: AUY) rose nearly 23% last month, as investors looked forward to a big 2018. While it's been one of the worst-performing gold stocks on the market in recent years, the company has some of the best growth prospects in the industry. Much of the potential will be realized in the year ahead -- with more to come in 2019.

When coupled with lower operating expenses and a relatively clean balance sheet, booming production between now and the end of the decade could lay the groundwork for delivering Yamana Gold closer to its former glory, when it boasted a market cap over $10 billion. Today it sits at less than one-third of that.

The December gains allowed the stock to deliver an 11% gain for the calendar year.

So what

Management hasn't been shy about touting the company's awesome growth potential. Both gold and silver production are expected to soar in 2018 and 2019 as the Cerro Moro mine ramps up activities. The result: a 17% bump in gold production and over 200% increase in silver production between 2017 and 2019.

The immediate influx of cash flow first will be used to lower the company's net debt-to-EBITDA ratio from 2.8 at the end of 2017 to its short-term goal of 2.0, and then eventually to 1.5. Management also promises to use some portion of its extra earnings on development-stage assets and directly creating shareholder value through increased dividend payments.

Now what

Wall Street is right to be excited about what 2018 brings for Yamana Gold stock. Mining companies usually deliver incremental production gains or simply offset production declines elsewhere. Bringing an additional 10 million ounces of annual silver production on line in just two years is almost unprecedented. And given the depressed stock price of the company recently, it promises to force an abrupt readjustment to its market cap, assuming progress is achieved without any surprises.

10 stocks we like better than Yamana GoldWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

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COPENHAGEN/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Denmark's Novo Nordisk, the world's biggest maker of insulin, went public with a 2.6 billion euro ($3.1 billion) bid for Belgian biotech group Ablynx on Monday as it seeks to bolster its treatments for rare blood disorders.

Ablynx said it rejected Novo's latest takeover approach and analysts predict the Danish group, whose new chief executive is seeking growth by buying drugs developed by competitors, might face counterbidders and would need to raise its bid.

The approach comes at a time of renewed interest by large drugmakers in smaller biotech firms, with U.S.-based Celgene clinching a deal to buy Impact Biomedicines for up to $7 billion on Sunday and Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical agreeing last week to buy another Belgian biotech group TiGenix for $630 million.

Novo has offered up to 30.50 euros per share for Ablynx, which represents a 60 per cent premium to the Belgian company's Dec. 6 share price, before its first approach. Ablynx shares were suspended until further notice by Belgium's market regulator on Monday and last traded at 21.20 euros on Friday.

Ablynx said in a statement that its board "unanimously concluded that the proposal fundamentally undervalues Ablynx and its strong prospects for continued growth and value creation".

The Belgian group specializes in the research of novel drugs based on nano-bodies found in the immune systems of llamas and alpacas, for which it partners with several of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

The main attraction for Novo is Ablynx's experimental drug caplacizumab for the rare bleeding disorder acquired thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, which would complement Novo's line-up of blood products focused on haemophilia.

The $11 billion haemophilia market is facing upheaval and Novo stands to lose sales following approval of a new Roche drug Hemlibra.

Biopharmaceutical treatments, led by haemophilia, make up around 20 percent of Novo's sales, with diabetes and obesity products accounting for the remaining 80 percent.

"We have solid growth in our diabetes and obesity business but we are struggling a little bit to maintain the same level of growth momentum in biopharma," Novo's Chief Financial Officer Jesper Brandgaard said.

NEW NOVO CEO ACTS

The Danish company said it would pay 28.00 euros per share in cash for Ablynx and an additional 2.50 euros in a so-called contingent value right (CVR) if certain conditions related to other drugs in Ablynx's research portfolio were met.

An acquisition would be the first by Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, who took over a year ago. He has said the firm needs external innovation to broaden its product line-up.

Under previous chief executive Lars Rebien Sorensen, Novo sat out a spate of deal-making across the drugs industry and instead focused on its market-leading position making insulin and other diabetes treatments.

But in March, the company approached Global Blood Therapeutics, a U.S. biotech company focused on serious blood disorders, to discuss a potential takeover, people familiar with the situation said.

Finance chief Brandgaard said the current bid could be revised if Ablynx agreed to engage in talks.

"I think it would be natural to update the bid following a detailed discussion with the board of directors of Ablynx," he said on a conference call, adding that it would be premature to speculate on any increase.

Brandgaard also played down the threat of an interloper, saying: "In terms of counter proposals it is not our understanding that any other bidder is pursuing the target."

ABLYNX SHARES SUSPENDED

Ablynx had already rejected an offer by the Danish group on Dec. 14 and Novo Nordisk said the new bid, made on Dec. 22, was some 14 percent higher.

"Novo Nordisk regrets that the board of directors of Ablynx has so far declined to engage in any discussions, despite the proposals which have been put forward," it said in a statement.

Analysts at Jefferies said they had a fair value of Ablynx at 29 euros per share, rising to 36 euros under a long term upside scenario.

"We envisage Novo needing to hike the offer and could see counterbids," the analysts said.

Tax breaks and other incentives have created a thriving biotech industry in Belgium, with many companies spun off from university projects now listed on its stock exchange.

Ablynx's shares have almost doubled in price in the past 12 months, buoyed by successful clinical trial data.

Its products, which are all still undergoing medical trials, target many different diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis or cancer.

($1 = 0.8322 euros)

(Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Ben Hirschler in London and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund Blair/Keith Weir/Alexander Smith)
The pharma and biotech industry will send billions of dollars back to the United States as a result of President Donald Trumps tax overhaul, Alexandria Real Estate (NYSE:ARE) Chairman Joel Marcus said on Monday.

In our particular niche, since we are in a very unique niche which has a high barrier to entries in these irreplaceable markets  The pharma and biotech industry will repatriate, thanks to the congressional approval, the presidents tax bill, over $150 billion of cash, Marcus told Maria Bartiromo on Mornings with Maria.

Congress passed the tax bill in December, creating the a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax systemthe largest in three decades. The legislation aims to create a more attractive environment for business by shifting to a territorial system and reducing the federal tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Marcus expects the cash surplus will go toward creating more jobs, commercial real estate expansion and continued mergers and acquisition (M&A) growth in the sector.

Youll see more M&A and a real continued growth, he said, while pointing out that only 5% of the 10,000 known diseases have been medically addressed. So thats why we were comfortable in giving the street a five-year outlook on our performance.

With a market cap of $16.1 billion and an asset base in North America of 28.6 million square feet, Marcus said the company expects to double its revenues between 2018 and 2022.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. is an urban office REIT focused on collaborative life sciences and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations.
HARRISBURG  Just in time for his re-election campaign, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is perhaps the most optimistic person in Pennsylvania.

He sees better days ahead for the state's finances, says he's satisfied with his first-term progress and shows no frustration over battling the huge Republican majorities that control the Legislature.

Four weeks before he releases his fourth and final first-term budget plan, Wolf seems to see state government's post-recession deficits in the rear-view mirror and touted his work across the political aisle.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Wolf did not foresee needing a budget-balancing tax increase in a second term.

"What deficit would I be filling with a tax increase?" he questioned Tuesday.

Negotiating budgets under Wolf has absorbed an inordinate amount of time and energy over the past three years, including two protracted partisan stalemates over how to deal with massive deficits.

Wolf remains less than halfway to his original goal of a $2 billion education funding increase, but having won enough new money for schools that Wolf says districts struggling the most under the state's 2011 cuts in aid are doing better.

Wolf also has not achieved a major first-term aim to overhaul Pennsylvania's heavy reliance on property taxes to fund schools, seen as a driving force behind inequities between wealthy and poorer school districts.

But Wolf does not discount that he has the ability to accomplish it eventually with a Republican-controlled Legislature.

"I believe that we can continue to work together," Wolf said. "Obviously it would be easier if I had a little more help from the Legislature, but I'm very proud of what I've been able to do, given what I've got."

When he took office three years ago, Wolf inherited a projected multibillion-dollar deficit and he floated a multibillion-dollar tax increase, the first of three straight annual increases he proposed, each $1 billion or more.

Republican lawmakers rejected much of it. Eventually, they approved a grab-bag tax package, anchored by a cigarette tax increase, of roughly $1 billion a year.

Meanwhile, Wolf bowed to Republican plans for an aggressive expansion of casino-style gambling and a host of one-time budgeting maneuvers, including borrowing $1.5 billion to backfill Pennsylvania's biggest cash shortfall since the recession.

It is the most money in memory the state has borrowed to finance operations, current and former state officials say.

While it wasn't Wolf's idea, he still defends the state's current fiscal condition.

"Pennsylvania is now on a very solid financial foundation in a way that it wasn't just two-and-a-half, three years ago," Wolf said.

When Wolf arrived in 2015, he inherited what he has repeatedly hammered as "smoke and mirrors" budgeting and "kicking the can down the road."

Independent analysts suggest Pennsylvania's finances are still riddled with the sort of budget gimmickry that Wolf has criticized  something that Wolf rejects  and see a more immediate deficit than does Wolf's administration.

Pennsylvania's future finances are also rife with risk: its borrowing and Medicaid costs are growing, its population is aging quickly and its economy is expected to expand more slowly than the national average.

Still, Wolf's administration has had the good fortune to see slowing increases in pension obligations, a shrinking prison population and smaller-than-expected increases in Medicaid costs.

It has squeezed out savings by closing a prison and reducing personnel across state agencies, while scrounging enough cash to give a big increase to programs for the intellectually disabled and launch an effort under Medicaid to care for the elderly in their homes, rather than nursing facilities.

When he presents his fourth budget Feb. 3, Wolf will propose a tax increase on Marcellus Shale natural gas production for a fourth straight year. Securing its passage  a prominent 2014 campaign theme  is what Wolf calls his biggest first-term challenge and a matter of fairness, rather than fiscal necessity.

Republicans who are lining up to challenge Wolf's re-election bid in November will criticize his push for tax increases.

Wolf said he will run on a record of bipartisan accomplishments.

"What I'm going to run on is actually delivering on a number of things that I said I was doing to do," Wolf said. "And yes, I didn't do it with a Democratic House or a Democratic Senate. I did it with an overwhelming Republican General Assembly. And yet I've gotten things done."
With new options and conveniences, there's never been a better time for shoppers. As for workers ... well, not always.

The retail industry is being radically reshaped by technology, and nobody feels that disruption more starkly than 16 million American shelf stockers, salespeople, cashiers and others. The shifts are driven, like much in retail, by the Amazon effect  the explosion of online shopping and the related changes in consumer behavior and preferences.

As mundane tasks like checkout and inventory are automated, employees are trying to deliver the kind of customer service the internet can't match.

So a Best Buy employee who used to sell electronics in the store is dispatched to customers' homes to help them choose just the right products. A Walmart worker dashes in and out of the grocery aisles, hand-picks products for online shoppers and brings them to people's cars.

___

Editor's note: This story is part of Future of Work, an Associated Press series that explores how workplaces across the U.S. and the world are being transformed by technology and global pressures. As more employers move, shrink or revamp their work sites, many employees are struggling to adapt. At the same time, workers with in-demand skills or knowledge are benefiting. Advanced training, education or know-how is becoming a required ticket to the 21st-century workplace.

___

Yet even as responsibilities change  and in many cases, expand  the average growth in pay for retail workers isn't keeping pace with the rest of the economy. Some companies say that in the long run the transformation could mean fewer retail workers, though they may be better paid. But while some workers feel more satisfied, others find their jobs are just a lot less fun.

Bloomingdale's saleswoman Brenda Moses remembers the pre-internet era, when the upscale store was regularly filled with customers ready to buy. These days, department stores are less crowded and the customers who do come in can make price comparisons on their phones at the same time as they pepper staff with questions.

"You tell them everything, and then they look at you and say, 'You know what? I think I will get it online,'" she said.

Moses has seen her commission rate rise to 6 percent from a half a percent, but her hourly wage dropped from $19 as low as $10 before it came back up to $14. Depending more on commissions means her income fluctuates, and she's competing with her colleagues for each sale.

"Now," Moses said, "you have to fight to make your money."

The same could be said for the retailing industry, overall. In 2017, 66,500 U.S. retail jobs disappeared (not taking into account jobs added in areas like distribution and call centers). In the past decade, about one out of every seven jobs have vanished in the hardest-hit sectors like clothing and consumer electronics, says Frank Badillo, director of research at MacroSavvy LLC. Though department stores have suffered the most, smaller businesses also have struggled to compete with online sellers.

Many of the survivors are rushing to adapt. Of the retail jobs that remain, over the next decade as many as 60 percent will either be new kinds of roles or will involve revised duties, says Craig Rowley, senior client partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a human resources advisory firm. He estimates the number is about 10 percent now.

How fast retail jobs will change and what they'll look like depends on three factors, Rowley said: the pace at which online shopping advances; the speed at which robotics and other technology progress; and shifts in the minimum hourly pay.

"Jobs for workers will get more interesting and be more impactful on the company's business," Rowley said. "But the negative side is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs and there will be more pressure to perform."

Some retail workers at the vanguard of the changes  like Laila Ummelaila, a personal grocery shopper at a Walmart in Old Bridge, New Jersey  speak glowingly of their new responsibilities.

Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, has scrutinized every job in its stores as it looks to leverage its more than 4,000 U.S. locations against Amazon's internet dominance.

The company now has 18,000 personal shoppers who fill online orders from store shelves, and 17,000 check-out hosts whose responsibilities are more extensive than the greeters of old, including keeping the area clean and making sure registers move efficiently. The company has also shifted workers from back-room clerical jobs and eliminated some overnight stocker positions in favor of more daytime sales help. The customers like the changes, company officials say, pointing to more than three years of sales growth at its established U.S. stores  a contrast with other, suffering retailers.

Ummelaila became a personal shopper after joining the company three years ago. To meet her store's goals, she must pick one item per 30 seconds. If she can't find something, she has to quickly get a substitute that's as good or better.

"You start to get to know the customers, you know what they like," she said, "how they like their meat ... and how long they keep milk in the fridge."

Best Buy, meanwhile, has begun a free service in key markets where salespeople will sit with customers in their own homes and make recommendations on setting up a home office to designing a home theater system. Best Buy said shoppers spend more with a home visit than they do at the stores. The project follows Amazon, which reportedly has been testing a program that sends employees to shoppers' houses for free "smart home" recommendations.

At Steve Frederick's townhouse in Chicago, Billy Schuler offered advice about speakers that can be adjusted from a smartphone. Schuler, who had previously worked at Best Buy for 14 years, returned to the company to take on the new role.

"Customers are more relaxed when they are in their home," he said. "We can do a walkthrough of the house and see their needs." He likes to "break the ice" by calling the person and chatting a day or two before the visit.

Frederick, who's spending close to $20,000 on the equipment, describes himself as "old-school" and says he needed a lot of help. He thinks it was worthwhile.

"When you are spending that kind of money, you want to have someone come in and explain it," he said.

Schuler declined to give specifics but says he is well compensated. Ummelaila says her pay went up to nearly $12 per hour from $10 when she became a personal shopper.

Target credits its strategy of assigning dedicated sales staff in areas such as clothing, consumer electronics, and beauty for helping increase sales, and says having visual merchandisers create vignettes like shoppers would see in specialty stores inspires people to buy. "You are making an outfit and telling a story on each rack," says Crystal Lawrence, who works at a Target store in Brooklyn, New York. She likes the variety in her new job, and Target says it plans to keep paying higher wages for those specialized roles.

But a survey of nearly 300 retail workers  conducted by the Center for Frontline Retail and Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center  found that of those workers whose job responsibilities have changed, more than 40 percent said they hadn't received pay increases to reflect that.

Wages for hourly retail workers have risen less than 9 percent since 1990, compared with 18 percent for overall workers in the private sector. There has been some progress recently; some of the biggest retailers, like Walmart and Target, have made moves to increase pay in the face of low unemployment and competition for workers.

"For a long period, these retail jobs were just terrible on average," said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute. "Retail stores have been following one strategy: high turnover, low wages. That strategy is no longer viable."

Mandel sees hope in technology, which he says has historically created more and better-paying jobs than it has eliminated.

The National Retail Federation trade group points to government data showing that even in large supermarket chains where self-checkout has become standard, the number of employees per store has held steady over the 15 years through 2014. And the demand for grocery cashiers increased in the past few years, says Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes labor market data.

McDonald's says the self-serve kiosks it has been rolling out won't result in mass layoffs, but will mean that some cashiers shift roles to accommodate changes like offering table service.

But a report prepared by Cornerstone Capital Group for the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute predicts that more than 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being eliminated by automation over the next several years.

Amazon is testing a grocery store in Seattle without cashiers, using cameras and shelf sensors to keep track of the items that shoppers grab and charge them. Eatsa, an automat-style restaurant in San Francisco, lacks cashiers as well  diners order at kiosks and workers prepare the food behind an opaque wall, with virtually no interaction between them.

Labor groups are trying to address some of the new issues. Under a contract reached last May between Bloomingdale's and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Moses and other members who work at the flagship store in Manhattan can also get commissions from some online sales.

And a labor group representing 1.3 million grocery and food workers is trying to combat automation by highlighting that workers' specialized skills  like the care they take in icing a rose on a wedding cake, or arranging flowers, or the ability of human workers to recognize spoiled food  provide a benefit to shoppers.

"Separating progress for the consumer, for the worker, for the economy versus the stockholders ... those are completely different things," says Erikka Knuti, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Others say automation and happy workers are not necessarily incompatible.

Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon foresees fewer sales associates at his stores, but they'll be better paid and better trained. Walmart has trained 225,000 supervisors and managers on topics like new apps and better customer service. It says managers who go through the academies have better retention rates than those who do not. Workers who report to those managers stay longer. And entry-level workers who complete a new training program are more likely to remain.

It's a shift retailers may have to speed up. Government figures show the rate of retail workers quitting their jobs in 2016 was at its highest since 2007.

Alfredo Duran, who started as a sales associate at Gap and worked at six retailers over 15 years, left the industry two years ago. As a manager at clothing chain Mango, he was making $75,000 a year. But once the store closed, he had trouble finding another job in retail because no one wanted to pay him for his experience.

"It's gone down. One person is doing three jobs. And you can't move up," said Duran, 38, of Queens, New York.

He's now a concierge at a Manhattan hotel, making half of what he used to earn  but happy he left retail.

___

AP Video journalists Terry Chea in San Francisco and Teresa Crawford in Chicago contributed to this report.

___

Follow Anne D'Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue on Monday said President Donald Trump must convince farmers he will come to the table and provide a revamped and modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that will benefit American agriculture.

Obviously, NAFTA has been generally good for American agriculture as well as Canada and Mexico and farmers understand that, Perdue told FOX Business Maria Bartiromo on Mornings with Maria.

Perdues comments come ahead of President Donald Trumps scheduled appearance at the American Farm Bureau Federations national convention, where he will address thousands of farmers and ranchers. Trumps appearance at the event marks the first time in roughly 26 years that a sitting president has spoken at the event.

Furthermore, over the last four or five years, farmers have felt pressure over worldwide overproduction, Perdue said, pointing out how agriculture commodity prices are currently very low and hovering around breakeven prices.

That puts a lot of stress on farmers incomes and farm families, he added.

Perdue also discussed the future of the presidents proposed border wall. In his opinion, Trump has effectively delivered his vision for border security.

The president campaigned very strongly on a border wall. He was elected president, and I think its incumbent upon Congress to figure out how to get that done, said Perdue.
The fierce revenge tale "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" was named best picture at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards which focused almost entirely on the growing topic of sexual harassment in show business.

Host Seth Meyers took the stage at the beginning of the night by greeting the crowd as Ladies and remaining gentlemen.

Its 2018, marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isnt. Its going to be a good year, he joked, highlighting the fall of several men in power and the #MeToo movement.

The Globes had long been the stomping grounds of disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose downfall precipitated allegations against James Toback, Kevin Spacey and many others. Weinstein presided over two decades of Globes winners and was well-known for his manipulation of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the 89-member group that puts on the Globes.

Harvey Weinstein isnt here tonight because, well, Ive heard rumors hes crazy and difficult to work with, Meyers said. Dont worry because hell be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person ever booed during the In Memoriam.

President Trump was also a talking point for the late night host.

List of Golden Globes 2018 winners

Were all here at the courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, he said. A string of three words that could not have been better designed to infuriate our president. The only name that would make him angrier would be the Hillary Mexico Salad Association.

Another big moment of the night came when Lady Bird" won best comedy or musical motion picture. Soon after, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon announced Gary Oldman as the winner of the best actor in a drama series for his role as Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour.

Frances McDormand won best actress in a dramatic motion picture for her role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where she highlighted the hardworking women in her category and Hollywood at large.

The women in this room tonight are not here for the food we are here for the work, she said.

Finally, Barbra Streisand, the only woman to win a Golden Globe for directing, announced Three Billboards also won the most coveted award for best motion picture.

Before the night's biggest awards were given out, The Handmaids Tale beat out dramas such as Game of Thrones and Stranger Things to take home the award for best television drama series.

Adding to the Hulu original series accolades was Elisabeth Moss, who won best performance by an actress in a television drama series for her role as June Osborne. Meanwhile, Sterling K. Brown earned himself an award for best performance by an actor in a television drama series for his role in NBCs This is Us.

Scientologist Elisabeth Moss slammed for 'hypocritical' Golden Globes speech

James Francos unexpected breakout hit The Disaster Artist earned him the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture, musical or comedy. The star brought Tommy Wiseau, the real man behind his character in the film, up to stage with him for a special thanks noting that it was the enigmatic actor, writer and producers frustration with being stuck in traffic because of the Golden Globes years ago that prompted him to write the now-infamous film The Room.

Saoirse Ronan won best actress in the same category for her part in Lady Bird.

Coco the animated Disney and Pixar film about the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos achieved the Golden Globe award for best animated motion picture.

Aziz Ansari won the coveted award for best actor in a comedy television series for his role on his show Master of None, which debuted its second season on Netflix last year. He beat out other nominees such as "Black-ish" and the "Will and Grace" revival. Meanwhile, Rachel Brosnahan won for best actress in the same category for her role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" won best comedy series.

The show also honored Oprah Winfrey with the Cecil B. DeMille award for her contributions to the world of entertainment throughout her career. In her very impassioned acceptance speech, she refocused the show on the "#MeToo" movement. She noted that she is the first black woman to win this award, which she hoped may inspire young girls.

I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon," she said. "When that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say me too again.

After that, Ron Howard and Natalie Portman presented the best director award. However, before the names were read, Portman took the opportunity to note that all of the nominees were men.

Guillermo del Toro took home the award for best director for his work on The Shape of Water.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
American Urban Radio Networks correspondent April Ryan was slammed on Monday for a tweet praising how wonderful a president Oprah Winfrey would make if she decided to challenge President Trump in 2020.

If @Oprah ran for president in 2020, she is every person. She has been poor & now rich. She is also a self made Billionaire. She has a grasp of the issues as she used to cover local politics. She can articulate any issue and she has mass appeal beyond race & gender, Ryan tweeted.

The comments beneath Ryans tweet indicate that not everyone agrees with Ryan, who is also a CNN correspondent. One user asked, In 2018 is it really too much to expect that POTUS have some minimum experience in law, governing, and/or policy making?

It appears President Trump has the left feeling that people should have some political experience before occupying the White House. Winfrey, 63, wont have a ton of time to pick up any political experience before its time to start campaigning for the 2020 election and many of Ryans followers feel that would essentially rule her out.

Some claimed the Democrats have a deep bench, while one user simply wrote, She's a celebrity. No. Thanks.

I'd like to see her run for Congressperson, Senator, or Governor and get some governing experience under her belt, another commented, and another added, Stop. This is patently ridiculous and you should know better. Shame on you.

Others were nicer about it, but most responses had the same theme: Do we really need another charismatic figure without legislative knowledge? Really?

April, I love Oprah, and everything you said is true but what the US needs is someone with governing experience. Celebrities are good for bringing light to issues and Oprah is an amazing fundraiser and surrogate but she has as much federal political experience as Trump, another follower wrote.

Ryan has been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration and regularly got into combative confrontations with former Press Secretary Sean Spicer. She also started a #piegate hashtag around Thanksgiving when she joked that a pecan pie in Press Secretary Sarah Sanders' posted tweet was fake pie, accusing her of not really making it herself.

Ryan's glowing description of Winfrey triggered plenty of pushback on Twitter.

For a Washington DC insider youd think youd be smarter. The last thing we need is another celebrity at the top, someone responded while another wrote, Sorry I wouldn't vote for someone from Hollywood and no real experience.

One user asked if people have lost their mind before declaring, I immediately lose respect for anyone gushing that Oprah should be president.

Before Winfrey officially makes a decision, she might want to poll some liberals because it appears the left thinks Trump should be the last celebrity-turned president  at least according to people who responded to Ryans tweet.
Bo Derek and John Corbett have been together for 15 years without ever walking down the aisle, but the couple insisted they dont need rings to prove their love is real.

The pair revealed to Closer Weekly Saturday the secret behind their lasting relationship has been spending quality time with each other away from Hollywood whenever possible.

We both travel so much, so for us, our favorite vacation place is home, explained Derek, 61. Thats where the romance is.

We enjoy each others company; we make each other laugh, added Corbett, 56. After 15 years we still hold hands; we still have barbecues with friends a couple times a week. [And Bo] still laughs at all my jokes even though shes heard them a million times. We just enjoy each other. Im sad when shes not around.

However, theres more to their bond than just keeping their romance indoors within their 10.5 acre property. Corbett, whos still recognized by fans as Carrie Bradshaws boyfriend Aiden Shaw on the hit HBO series Sex and the City, told Fox News in August 2017 that faith has kept him grounded over the years.

I went to Catholic school for 12 years and I was an altar boy for about seven of those years, he explained. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes in churches.

In the 80s, he dabbled in born-again Christianity before returning to his Catholic roots.

I have a strong belief in God, he explained, adding he describes himself as a gospel and brunch kind of guy.

Nothing says I love you Jesus more than gospel music and mashed potaters.
James Franco won the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy Sunday night, but his win wasnt without controversy.

Shortly after Francos win for The Disaster Artist, an unverified Twitter account for actress Ally Sheedy began slamming the win.

Her tweets garnered social media attention and were deleted after outlets like Vanity Fair and E! News began reporting that Sheedy had called out Franco. One tweet read, James Franco just won. Please never ever ask me why I left the film/tv business.

Another stated, Ok wait. Bye. Christian Slater and James Franco at a table on @goldenglobes #MeToo

An earlier tweet from the night also referenced Franco. It read, Why is a man hosting? Why is James Franco allowed in? Said too much.

Many fans retweeted and replied to the messages which they took to imply the Breakfast Club star was accusing Franco of some sort of sexual harassment or abuse.

According to Vanity Fair, Sheedy worked with Franco on the 2014 play "The Long Shrift."

Sheedy is best known for her roles in St. Elmos Fire and The Breakfast Club.

Vanity Fair reported that it reached out to both Franco and Sheedy but has not received comment.

This isnt the first time Franco has caused controversy.

In 2014, Franco made headlines when messages became public that showed he reportedly tried to arrange a meetup with a 17-year-old girl at a New York hotel. After the scandal broke, Franco admitted the messages were legitimate and apologized saying he was embarrassed and had used bad judgement.

That same year he shared a nearly nude image on Instagram that showed him posing with his underwear pulled low and his hand in the waistband.

Francos win Sunday puts him on the inside track for an Academy Award nomination.

Franco played Tommy Wiseau, Hollywood cult hero of mysterious origins and the force behind the worst-best-film-ever "The Room," in "The Disaster Artist."

Franco, 39, a clear but not overwhelming favorite in the category, beat out fellow nominees Steve Carell for "Battle of the Sexes," Ansel Elgort for "Baby Driver," Hugh Jackman for "The Greatest Showman" and Daniel Kaluuya for "Get Out."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said her jet-setting friends are embarrassed to be Americans while discussing if there was any reason for optimism in the Trump era on Monday.

I had some friends that went to Paris over the holiday and they said they were just viscerally embarrassed to be American, Brzezinski said.

The MSNBC star's co-host and fiance, Joe Scarborough, perhaps realizing she wasnt speaking to the average American, tried to intervene with a joke, asking, and Paris, Texas right?

Paris, France, she responded. They said it was the first time that it was sort of chilling.

Brzezinski said her friends didnt even want to share that they were on vacation from the United States.

Daily Caller media reporter Amber Athey didnt appreciate the comment.

Maybe Mikas friends should stay in Paris if theyre too embarrassed to admit that they are American, she wrote. We might be better off.

Last month, Brzezinski upset women who accused Mark Halperin of sexual harassment when she reported that she had tried to arrange a meeting so the now-disgraced political analyst could apologize.

Brzezinski said Halperin, who was fired from MSNBC after being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, was "more than willing to meet with his accusers and apologize with them face-to-face."

The MSNBC star said she actually tried to offer him to them but the women don't want to talk to him.

Ten of Halperins accusers, including Emily Miller, Katie Glenn, Dianna May, Ella Spektor McManus and Lara Setrakian, sent a letter to MSNBC following Brzezinskis comments. The letter, signed by Ten victims of Mark Halperin, was posted on Facebook and states that Brzezinski was inappropriate for suggesting such a meeting and that she has a conflict of interest because of her personal friendship with Halperin.

Sexual harassment and assault is illegal in the workplace, and represents a violation of the policies and standards of NBC News," the letter said. "It is an unethical and harmful request to ask that sexual assault victims confront their accusers in person and, in particular, on live TV.

The letter went on to ask that Brzezinski practice higher standards of editorial judgment, compassion and human decency.

Brzezinski issued a statement after the backlash:

"We have been trying our best on Morning Joe to have an honest conversation about sexual harassment and sexual assault. The issue has hit close to home given that Mark Halperin was on our show. I have spent a lot of time talking to some of his accusers and to Mark himself. Often I bring up the issue on our show because I think it would be less than genuine to talk about the growing number of cases without recognizing that a former member of our team acted very badly.

"In our discussion about sexual harassment this morning, I said some things that hurt people. In the case of Mark, my goal today was to start a conversation about hearing from the men whenever we can, but I realize that it is not my place. It isnt my call to make, and for that I am truly sorry. As a victim of sexual assault, I understand that each individual's case is different. This is up to the victims, some of whom I've been in contact with. My hope is for all of us to come together to support the brave women who speak out and help make workplaces safer as we continue this difficult conversation in the months and years ahead.
Recy Taylors life changed in 1944 when she was abducted and raped by six white men as she walked home from church. But nearly 75 years later, Taylors story  of tragedy, of hope, of perseverance  has renewed interest, including in the form of a new documentary.

Taylor, who would have been 98 on Sunday, was recognized by powerful media mogul Oprah Winfrey at the 2018 Golden Globes Awards. In her acceptance of a lifetime achievement award, Winfrey highlighted the transgressions against Taylor, a black woman, who lived as we all have lived  too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men.

Taylor was just 24 years old when she was walking home from church in Alabama. A group of white men pulled up and ordered Taylor into their car at gunpoint, according to the New York Times.

Taylor was taken into the woods where, despite her protestations, she was gang-raped by six men. Taylor was blindfolded, threatened and left on the side of the road after the attack, according to reports.

The NAACP assigned Rosa Parks to investigate the case, and she rallied support for justice for Taylor at the height of the Jim Crow era.

Two all-white, all-male grand juries ultimately declined to indict the men. Some had admitted to having intercourse with her (although they said it was consensual); one attacker admitted that Taylor was crying and asking us to let her go home to her husband and baby during the attack, the New York Times reported.

After the attack, Taylor said she didnt go out at night. And she became scared of living, too, she told NPR in a 2011 interview.

"And then I got afraid of living right there after that happened too, 'cause I was afraid that maybe something else might happen."  Recy Taylor

I didn't go out at night. And then I got afraid of living right there after that happened too, cause I was afraid that maybe something else might happen, she said.

But she also said she tried to live happy and did her best to be nice to people despite what happened to her.

And then again, I get to thinking  I said, Lord, they couldve killed me anyway. They was talking about killing me, but they couldve killed me with their gun. They couldve taken their gun and bust my brains out, but the Lord is just with me that night, Taylor said.

Taylor's story, along with those of other black women attacked by white men during the civil rights era, is told in "At the Dark End of the Street," a book by Danielle McGuire released in 2010.

Shes also the subject of a new documentary, The Rape of Recy Taylor, which was presented at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2017.

Our film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks intimate role in Recy Taylors story, the movies website said.

Taylor died on Dec. 28 in a nursing home in Abbeville, Ala., just before her 98th birthday. Her brother said Taylors death was sudden, and she had been in good spirits just the day before.

The Alabama Legislature passed a resolution apologizing to Taylor in 2011. And on Jan. 7, 2018, Taylor was recognized by Winfrey as an inspiration and someone you should know.

For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men, Winfrey said. But their time is up. Their time is up.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Despite eating his very first slice of pizza at the ripe old age of 72, English thespian Sir Patrick Stewart  now 77  has reportedly declared New Haven-style pizza to be the best hes ever eaten.

Stewart, along with his wife Sunny Ozell, made a trip to New Haven, Conn., last week and stopped at the citys famed Frank Pepes Pizzeria Napoletana for a couple of pies, according to Ozells Instagram account. And while Ozell, 38, claimed to be quite impressed by her mighty and compelling white clam pizza, she wrote that Stewart was far more enamored with the olive-topped pie he ate with a knife and fork.

THE TOP 5 PIZZAS IN AMERICA

[Stewarts] was also so tasty he proclaimed it the best pizza hed ever eaten (and, knowing him like I do, I know WHY he made that claim: the crust. Thin and crispy all the way through. Hes unnerved by doughiness, and fails to see the merit in the pliant and supplicant yield of a proper Napoletana pie. I digress), wrote Ozell.

Stewart also posed for a photo with the staff while "passing through" the city, reports the Connecticut Post, and his wife added that she and Stewart were still talking about their garlicky, salty pizzas well after they had finished.

Yay Frank Pepes and yay #newhavenpizza, wrote Ozell.

SEE PATRICK STEWART EAT A CHICAGO-STYLE PIZZA FOR THE FIRST TIME

Stewarts strange relationship with pizza first made headlines in 2013, after he tweeted a photo of himself enjoying his first ever slice at a New York pizza parlor. Stewart, however, was later forced to clarify that he had eaten pizza before  just never by the slice, with his bare hands.

In Stewarts defense, Frank Pepes, which opened in 1925, doesnt sell pizza by the slice, either. Furthermore, its only one of several popular New Haven pizzerias to serve New Haven-style pizza  or, as its regionally known, apizza (pronounced ah-beetz)  which is traditionally made in coal ovens, characterized by a thin, charred crust, and sold by the pie rather than by the slice.

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Pizza purists would have a hard time arguing with Stewarts assessment of Pepes apizza, too. The Daily Meal voted Frank Pepes white clam pizza to be the best in America in 2017. Meanwhile, several other pies from nearby New Haven restaurants  including Modern Apizza the now-closed Sallys Apizza  ranked third and eighth on Daily Meals 2017 list.
We all know the story.

Wise men come from the east, following a star to Jerusalem. They tell King Herod theyre looking for the king of the Jews.

Like the rest of Jerusalem, Herod is troubled, not thrilled, by the news. To Herod, another king must be a rival for his throne. He knows how to handle rivals.

Herod sends the magi to Bethlehem, Davids city and the birthplace of the Messiah. He tells them to report back, enlisting them as unwitting spies.

The cross was the most radical political act of all. Jesus resisted Jewish rebellion and Roman brutality not by killing but by being killed.

When they trick Herod and return home by a different route, Herod sends thugs to Bethlehem to slaughter every male infant and toddler.

Herod reasons, If you have to sacrifice innocent children to protect your throne, so be it. Thats how the world works.

Its another Passover, but upside down. Herod, the king of the Jews, acts like Pharaoh, slaughtering Jewish babies.

Theres lamentation in Bethlehem as there was when the angel of death killed Egypts firstborn sons. But now Jewish women mourn.

All that blood, yet Herod fails anyway. An angel warns Joseph and he escapes the pogrom with Mary and Jesus. They find refuge  in Egypt of all places!

This is the topsy-turvy world Jesus is born into. Israel has turned into Egypt, while Egypt has become a safe haven for the Jewish savior.

Wise men are part of every Christmas creche and Sunday School pageant. Its the event that Christians commemorate every January 6, Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ.

We know the story, but we may miss the point.

Many Christians think that Herods ruthlessness is based on a misunderstanding. Jesus poses no political threat, they say. Didnt He say, My kingdom is not of this world?

Jesus didnt play politics by Herods rules. He changed the rules. He inspired new political hopes and new forms of political action.

Thats a misreading of Jesus mission. In fact, Herod had a better grasp of Christmas than many Christians. Herod was right: Jesus is a political threat.

We have a hard time seeing this. Modern Christians spiritualize Christianity. But a large chunk of the Bible is political history and political prophecy, which inspire political hopes.

Gods promises lay out what God will do in history on earth among the nations. They are political promises.

We hear them every time we listen to Handels Messiah.

Unto us a Child is born . . . and the government shall be upon his shoulder.

The Lord will set a king on Zion who shall dash [nations] in pieces like a potters vessel.

The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. And he shall reign forever and ever.

Mary sang about it. The birth of her son would bring the proud down from their thrones and raise the humble and fill the hungry.

We may not hear these as political promises, but they obviously are.

Everyone in Herods Palestine understood this. This is one of the reasons first-century Palestine saw nearly as much turmoil as todays Middle East.

At the time of Jesus birth, Rome had ruled Judea for several decades. First-century Jews were divided about how to respond.

Some, like the Jewish convert Herod, prospered from the Roman occupation. But many resented Romes presence, which, they thought, defiled the holy land.

They hoped that God would expel the Romans, restore temple worship, and raise Israel to ancient greatness.

We see Pharisees, for instance, as people obsessed with arcane purity rules. Actually, they were political activists. If they lived strictly by Torah, they hoped, God would rescue them.

They didnt just hope. They agitated. Some Pharisees were fanatical freedom fighters. Riots, terrorism, and symbolic demonstrations were common. So were Roman shows of force.

Jew couldnt be apolitical in this highly charged world. Keeping peace with Rome was as much a political stance as plotting revolution. Peacemakers were liable to be seen as traitors.

In particular, Jesus didnt even try to avoid politics. He preached incessantly about Gods kingdom, and he told Pilate he was born to be a king.

When he said, My kingdom is not of this world, he meant that it doesnt come from earth. His kingdom challenges earthly politics because it comes from heaven.

Even the word gospel has political connotations. It refers to the announcement of a military victory. As N. T. Wright has put it, Jesus proclaimed the victory of God.

Jesus didnt teach his disciples to withdraw from the rough and tumble of Jewish-Roman or Jewish-Jewish conflict. He taught them a different politics.

He had ferocious battles with Pharisees. The Pharisees werent wrong to believe that God made political promises to Israel. They simply practiced the wrong politics.

Jesus taught his disciples to turn the other cheek rather than take vengeance. He instructed them to carry a Roman soldiers luggage a second mile.

He emphasized what he called the weighty things of the law  mercy, justice, and truth. He taught his disciples to overcome evil by doing good, even to their enemies.

The cross was the most radical political act of all. Jesus resisted Jewish rebellion and Roman brutality not by killing but by being killed.

Herod was right, but only partly right. He recognized that another king of the Jews was a threat to his throne. He didnt realize how deep the threat was.

Jesus didnt play politics by Herods rules. He changed the rules.

He inspired new political hopes and new forms of political action. He taught a politics of truthful witness, justice, and mercy, rather than one of fear, violence, and vengeance.

As Wright puts it, Jesus preached a revolutionary way of being revolutionary. Thats the new politics manifested at Epiphany. Nothing is more threatening to the Herods of the world.
HARRISBURG  Registered Democratic voters suing to overturn Pennsylvanias Republican-crafted map of congressional districts asked the state Supreme Court in a new filing to redraw the district borders if the Legislature and governor cant do it within a two-week window.

The plaintiffs outlined their arguments in a 76-page brief filed Friday with the state Supreme Court, ahead of oral arguments planned for Jan. 17.

They suggested the court give lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf two weeks to redraw lines using nonpartisan criteria, then review the map with the help of a court-appointed special master to make additional changes. If that process does not work, they suggest the justices and the special master adopt their own map.

Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf face a Wednesday deadline to respond.

At stake in the case is whether the high court, with a 5-2 Democratic majority, will follow a recommendation made by a lower court judge about a week ago and reject the challengers argument that the map violates existing law by unfairly favoring Republicans.

The challengers argued that the states map of 18 congressional districts is among the most partisan in American history, saying it has proven to be impervious to the will of voters.

They said legislative Republicans sought to predetermine the outcome of congressional elections for a decade with the map, accusing them of retaliating against constitutionally protected political expression and association.

The 2011 map was drawn in secret by Republican leaders and approved by then-Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican. It passed the Senate on party lines but a few dozen Democrats voted for it in the House.

The result has been a GOP advantage of 13-5 in all three congressional election cycles since then, even as Democrats have won the governorship and all three statewide row offices, and only narrowly lost the state in 2016 to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Republicans also hold commanding margins in both chambers of the General Assembly, legislative maps that are not part of the pending litigation.

In late December, Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson produced his analysis of the case, submitted for the high courts consideration after a five-day bench trial. Brobson, a Republican, concluded the plaintiffs had not shown the map clearly violates the state constitution.

The plaintiffs argued in the new filing that partisanship was the predominant consideration by Republicans in developing the maps, in some places drawing districts only as wide as a building so that targeted population areas could be connected into a single district. The result, they said, has been to discriminate against Democratic political voices.

That petitioners can donate, campaign or vote for a doomed candidate is no answer, they argued.

Brobson saw an effort in the maps to intentionally advantage Republicans, according to the Democratic challengers, but said map makers had traditionally sought a partisan edge.

But a historical pedigree is no reason to perpetuate invidious discrimination, the Democratic plaintiffs lawyers told the high court.

In a separate challenge to the map, a three-judge panel in Philadelphia is considering how to rule after a trial last month. The U.S. Supreme Court also is expected to rule in the coming months about whether Wisconsins legislative redistricting was constitutionally proper, a case that could set new national standards for redistricting.
Proverbs 26:11 admonishes us not to repeat past failures, warning like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.

Frustration with Republican Congressional leaders reached a fever pitch in 2017 as little progress was made on longtime promises of repealing ObamaCare and funding the border wall. Thankfully, the party finally came together to pass badly needed tax cuts and repealed ObamaCares individual mandate.

But surely, Republicans arent foolish enough to quickly squander this positive momentum by repeating past failures? And one year removed from electoral victories based on promises of Drain the Swamp! they wouldnt be so foolish to engage in swamp politics again? Apparently, they are.

A recent Fox News report suggests some Republicans want to return to earmarks, one of the most embarrassing Congressional follies in recent history.

Scratching each others backs is how we got $20 trillion in debt. Returning to earmark follies would be a victory for the swamp and a defeat for taxpayers.

Earmarks are simply when members of Congress direct federal spending to local projects in their state. For instance, in a large highway spending bill, the transportation committees would divide a multi-billion dollar bill, and give politicians a few million or billion dollars for their state or district based on seniority or political power. Then these congressmen could choose to spend that money on whichever road or local project they chose.

In theory, no one knows their home state better than the member that represents that area. In practical reality, this led to rampant waste, fraud and corruption. Billions of taxpayer dollars went to frivolous projects with no merit, members built monuments to me with roads and libraries named after themselves, and some even went to jail for pocketing money through earmarks.

You might be thinking: Could earmarks have been that bad? No, it was worse.

It wasnt just that individual earmarks wasted billions of dollars, they were the grease used to speed the tracks for runaway spending bills. Leadership and committee chairs used earmarks to buy votes for bad policy and big spending bills.

Some of the most wasteful earmarks included: $320 million for a Bridge to Nowhere in a small town in Alaska to connect to an island with 50 residents; $500,000 for a teapot museum in North Carolina; $3.4 million for a turtle tunnel under a highway in Florida; $1 million for a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival.

Monuments to me included: Former Congressman Charlie Rangel, D-NY, earmarked $2 million to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service in New York. It seems half the state of West Virginia has roads and buildings named after the most prolific earmarker of his day, former Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Also, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., earmarked $38 million to a Kentucky park that includes a Mitch McConnell Loop Trail and $14 million to a University of Louisville library that now includes the McConnell Center and Elain Chao Auditorium.

And dont forget the corruption! Former Congressman David Wu, D-Wash., used a $2 million earmark to force the Marine Corps to buy shirts from a company in his district that gave him campaign contributions, but turns out the material could cause severe burns during battle. Former Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham from California was convicted and jailed for taking bribes from lobbyists in return for directing earmarks for them. And former Pennsylvania Democrat Congressman Chaka Fattah got 10 years in prison for using earmarks to enrich himself.

Those who like earmarks claim the White House gets to direct spending through their budget requests, so why cant Congress do it as well? Because painful experience has proven the failure of Congressional earmarks and appropriation bills can be written to reduce and eliminate bureaucratic earmarks. Congress role is supposed to provide oversight of the federal agencies, not join them in adding more wasteful requests.

Earmarks were eliminated in 2010 after a Tea Party wave built on disgust with overspending. The next year, conservatives forced Congressional leaders and President Obama into the first real government cuts in decades through spending caps in the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011. And now, Congress is considering ending even these meager spending controls and promising members the ability to start the earmark gravy train all over again.

Congressmen and Senators are in Washington to do whats best for the country, not get stuff for their states and districts. There is nothing in our oath of office that says we will protect and defend parochial projects.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1796 concerning funding for road improvements for mail delivery:

Have you considered all the consequences of your proposition respecting post roads? I view it as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money it will be a scene of eternal scramble among the members who can get the most money wasted in their state, and they will always get most who are meanest.

Scratching each others backs is how we got $20 trillion in debt. Returning to earmark follies would be a victory for the swamp and a defeat for taxpayers.
Anyone who tuned into the Golden Globes Sunday night hoping to be entertained instead got another dose of Hollywood hypocrisy. What could have been mistaken as a prime time blackout on your television screen was instead celebrities, dressed all in black to show solidarity for victims of sexual misconduct.

To many of us it looked like yet another contrived attempt at a lot of pomp and circumstance void of any real credibility.

Harvey Weinstein had a 30-year pattern of abuse that was well known among those in Hollywood. In a town filled with women who call themselves feminists and liberals who claim to champion women, nobody  nobody  who witnessed his abusive behavior said a word. Not one word.

Now that its safe - and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood is no longer a threat to any of their careers - their answer is to dress in black and pat themselves on the back to show they support the very victims of sexual misconduct who they ignored.

Hollywood hypocrisy has hit a new low.

To say celebrities live on their own little elite island detached from the reality most of the country experiences is a tremendous understatement.

Perhaps if they really wanted to elicit change they could have spoken up about a culture of behavior in Hollywood that was permitted to continue for far too long.

Women used the time they had on stage to talk about sexual harassment and sexual assault and eliciting change.

Perhaps if they really wanted to elicit change they could have spoken up about a culture of behavior in Hollywood that was permitted to continue for far too long.

Perhaps they could consider that change doesnt happen from a stage in a room full of their peers congratulating and applauding each other all night.

And maybe  just maybe  they should start talking about changing something when they see it happening, instead of waiting to talk about it on TV, with cameras rolling, while getting accolades from the audience.

On Twitter Sunday, actress Rose McGowan called out the Hollywood fakery, responding to a tweet from Italian Actress Asia Argento, who, like McGowan, has said that she was assaulted by Weinstein. Argento tweeted that nobody should forget that McGowan was the first one to break the silence on Weinstein, and McGowan replied: And not one of those fancy people wearing black to honor our rapes would have lifted a finger had it not been so. I have no time for Hollywood fakery, but you I love.

Sexual misconduct in Hollywood isnt going to be fixed by celebrities making a fashion statement or congratulating themselves for supporting women because it happens to be trendy. Nor is it going to be fixed by an eloquent made-for-TV speech.

A giant of Hollywood, the late George Burns, once famously said, Sincerity - if you can fake that youve got it made. If there was ever a marquee for last nights show, unfortunately that is it.
Now that Steve Bannon has carried his political jihad to its logical conclusion, martyrdom never looked so meaningless. A bright and talented man has sacrificed himself over nothing more significant than anger and vanity.

Consider a recent report that Bannon was mulling the idea of running for president in 2020. Presumably that was part of his plan to elect a batch of Roy Moores, depose Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and reshape Congress to match his own definition of economic nationalism.

As such, Bannons decision to go out in a blaze of personal attacks on the president and everybody else in the White House does Donald Trump and the GOP a giant favor. Bannon may live to fight another day, but, thankfully, Bannonism is dead.

But what of Trumpism? Is Fire and Fury, the Michael Wolff book where Bannon leaks and vents, the beginning of the end of Trumps presidency?

Maybe  but probably not. After all, every previous media-hair-on-fire moment has come to a forgettable dead end.

This time could be different, but more likely, the latest explosion of gossip and sniping marks just another day on the razors edge. This is the essential nature of the Trump presidency, where catastrophe is always a heartbeat away. It will be like that as long as hes in the Oval Office.

Take Iran. Clinton shared Obamas fantasy that there are moderates among the mullahs eager to play nice, so she backed the nuclear deal that is helping to finance Iranian war and aggression in the mideast.

This is who Trump is, and a year into his presidency, there is no reason to believe he will change. A penchant for creating melodrama seems essential to his being.

One result is that reports of his imminent demise have been near-constant ever since he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015. Those predictions have been nonstop  and always wrong.

Of course, this time could be different. Or maybe the next time will. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, his is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency.

So much so that, despite my own frustration over his missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president. Not one.

Indeed, as Trumps accomplishments accumulate, the mere thought of Clinton in the White House, doubling down on Barack Obamas failed policies, washes away any doubts that America made the right choice.

This was truly a change election  and the changes Trump is bringing are far-reaching and necessary.

The economic boom is the most obvious difference voters got by electing him. The tax law he campaigned on, fought for and signed promises to add new dimensions to the boom and should fuel growth and new opportunities for millions of people.

Generations of families will lead better lives as a result, while a Clinton presidency would have been an orgy of regulations aimed at strangling capitalisms last animal spirits. How many thousands of points lower would the Dow be?

But the Trump effect is not limited to the economy. Think of the difference between Neil Gorsuch and a supreme court justice Clinton would have picked, now multiply that difference throughout the judicial food chain.

Think of Trumps policy toward Israel. Would Clinton dare to right historic wrongs and declare Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish state?

Never. Like Obama, she would have given the Palestinians a hecklers veto  and paid them millions more for their obstinance.

And what of North Korea? While Trumps taunting of Rocket Man makes me uneasy, the big difference is that he refuses to accept a nuclear North Korea. Clinton, on the other hand, would have adopted the Obama policy of containment, which is a diplomatic fig leaf for appeasing a madman with nukes.

Take Iran. Clinton shared Obamas fantasy that there are moderates among the mullahs eager to play nice, so she backed the nuclear deal that is helping to finance Iranian war and aggression in the mideast. Similarly, Clinton probably would repeat Obamas 2009 mistake and remain silent during the current demonstrations against the regime, while Trump is making it clear America stands with the demonstrators.

If Clinton had been elected, we would not know that top FBI leaders conspired against Trump to help her. Her financing of the Russian dossier would still be a secret, and there would be no knowledge that the FBI used her dirtiest trick to spy on Trump associates. Russian collusion would have been accepted as fact without a shred of evidence.

Even with Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, getting the truth about the deep states political meddling is proving difficult. But with Clinton in the White House, there would be no search and the truth of what looks like an unprecedented scandal would remain hidden forever.

Likewise, Clinton as president would face no further scrutiny over the classified email mess despite the rigged FBI probe that cleared her. And the revived examination of her pay-to-play arrangements as secretary of state would never have been considered.

There is another potential consequence of the election, too. With Bill and Hillary in the White House, would The New York Times have outed Harvey Weinstein as the sexual monster he seems to be?

I think not, for that would have embarrassed the Clintons because of their own sketchy past on the subject. In that case, the #MeToo movement would not exist and the predators, most of them media and Hollywood liberals, would still be in power.

These are just some of the many reasons why a Trump presidency, chaos and all, continues to be the course correction America needed. Heres hoping, then, that the latest predictions of his demise, like all those that came before, turn out to be premature.

Keep reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post.
On Inauguration Day 2017, the Obama administration left President Trump a severely weakened and constrained military. For the better part of a decade, President Obama allowed his administrations sequestration to destroy the capabilities and readiness of our armed forces. He forced our Americans in uniform to take the risk that a weaker military would not further endanger their lives and our own national security.

In 2017, we witnessed North Koreas aggressive nuclear action, Russian meddling in democratic systems (including our own), and an Iranian regime dedicated to expanding its sphere of influence at the expense of their neighbors peace and freedoms. On top of all that, our men and women in uniform fight against violent radicalism around the world.

Given the scope of these challenges our military faces, remarkably, Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified, No enemy in the field has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration. Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford, added, Eight years of continuing resolutions and the absence of predictable funding has forced the [Defense] Department to prioritize near-term readiness at the expense of modernization and advance capability development.

In the final four years of the Obama presidency, our militarys ability to deploy around the world and win wars deteriorated. To right this wrong, in May, an overwhelming 140 of my Republican colleaguesthe majority of the majorityjoined me in asking Speaker Paul Ryan to bring a vote to repeal the sequestration of national defense to the floor. Congress can and must undo the devastation of the Obama era to our defense.

The president also called for this while signing the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 (FY18 NDAA) and again in his speech on the National Security Strategy. The first step in ensuring national security is funding our armed forces at the full $700 billion FY18 NDAA requirement.

Our Armed Forces are charged with securing not only our nation but our ideals of freedom and democracy around the world. Sadly, that force eroded during the Obama administration to one that has too many troops that cannot deploy, too many planes that cannot fly, and too many ships that cannot sail.

Our Armed Forces are charged with securing not only our nation but our ideals of freedom and democracy around the world. Sadly, that force eroded during the Obama administration to one that has too many troops that cannot deploy, too many planes that cannot fly, and too many ships that cannot sail.

During the last administration, our Army let nearly 90,000 soldiers go and fewer than 10 percent of our brigade combat teams are now ready to deploy.

We have 41 fewer ships than in 2001, over half of the Navys aircraft are grounded, and the tragedies of the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain show our sailors are pushed to the breaking point.

A full 80 percent of our Marine Corps aviation units lack the minimum number of ready aircraft.

The Air Force needs 2,000 more pilots to fly aircraft that are on average 27 years old.

The FY18 NDAA is a bipartisan effort of the House and Senate Armed Forces Committees to address these serious issues and provide our military the means necessary to regain their readiness. It is a good faith attempt from the Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats, who know the national security landscape best, to regain the preeminence of our military.

Some of my colleagues in Congress are struggling to recognize the risk of continuing to weaken our armed services. We ask our service men and women to do more with less. Each time we defer our responsibility to fund our defense, we fail those willing to protect this nation with their lives.

Expecting our military to successfully operate on this system of fictional and unreliable budgeting is incredibly irresponsible, unrealistic, and gambles with our safety. We cannot continue to neglect our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen and expect them to be ready to answer the nations future calls. We need a fiscal deal to replace the devastating Budget Control Act and end the effects of sequestration.
Reversing Obama era policy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has given federal prosecutors the discretion to prosecute marijuana traffickers. Thats good news for those who believe in the rule of law. And good news, too, for those concerned about public health and the safety of our nations youth.

On Jan. 4, Sessions revoked the Cole Memo, a 2014 Justice Department directive issued by then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The memo essentially gave marijuana producers and distributors in states that had legalized the drug immunity for violating federal drug laws.

Sessions directive gives the 94 U.S. Attorneys all over the country clear guidance for deciding when to prosecute those who violate federal law prohibiting marijuana cultivation and distribution.

The Baby Boomers reading this column should realize that the marijuana being produced today is many times stronger and more potent than what we saw in the 1960s. The science today is also much clearer: we have far greater knowledge of the long-term, deleterious effects of marijuana on the physical and mental health of users, particular children and teenagers.

Todays pot pushers are just Big Tobacco 2.0. Why else would they be infusing THC, the active ingredient, into everything from cookies to ice cream to Gummy Bears?

The bottom line: todays pot is a potentially dangerous substance. Thats why it is classified as a Schedule I controlled drug along with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy  it isnt alcohol. While alcohol can be abused, it is not addictive for most people. Moreover, most consumers stop well shy of the point of intoxication. Moderate amounts even have some positive health benefits such as reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Compared to alcohol, we now know that long-term marijuana use can cause physical disorders such as respiratory disease, social problems such as anomie, and mental health problem such as schizophrenia, something we didnt know about in the 1960s.

Its effect on the young may be more pernicious. It may impair the brain development of children and teenagers. It is associated with lower test scores and lower education attainment. Teenagers who use pot are also much less likely to graduate from college and much more likely to attempt suicide.

Todays pot is genetically modified to boost the high a user can get. The goal, naturally, is to get more people hooked on pot, just like Big Tobaccos goal was to get more people hooked on cigarettes.

Todays pot pushers are just Big Tobacco 2.0. Why else would they be infusing THC, the active ingredient, into everything from cookies to ice cream to Gummy Bears?

States like Colorado that have legalized marijuana use have seen huge increases in marijuana-related traffic accidents and fatalities as well as accidental poisonings of both children and pets.

These products directly target the young, creating serious risks for children who may not know what they are ingesting and teenagers who use these products to hide what they are doing from their parents.

States like Colorado that have legalized marijuana use have seen huge increases in marijuana-related traffic accidents and fatalities as well as accidental poisonings of both children and pets. Pot use by teenagers, who are most vulnerable to its damaging effects, has also greatly increased, as have school suspensions and expulsions for pot use.

The Cole Memo ignored all of this information, directing federal prosecutors to back off enforcement.

So does Sessions directive mean federal prosecutors are now going to go after the college kid who smokes a joint in his dormitory? Of course not. U.S. Attorneys have limited resources. They dont prosecute misdemeanors. The only criminals they will take to court are the large-scale manufacturers and distributors.

Revenue-hungry lawmakers in states like California and Colorado may be willing to trade the problems created by marijuana legalization for the tax bonanza they expect to reap. But its a very raw deal for their neighbors. States like Nebraska and Oklahoma have complained that Colorados legalization has increased trafficking into their states, with all of the myriad problems associated with increased drug abuse.

As Sessions memo notes, Congress determined that marijuana is a dangerous drug and that marijuana activity is a serious crime. The Attorney General has no authority to simply decide not to enforce a law, which is exactly what the Holder/Lynch Justice Department did. States cannot authorize parties to engage in conduct that federal law prohibits and as long as the Controlled Substances Act is on the books, states cannot tell their citizens to disregard it.

From a policy standpoint, it is wise to battle the growth of an industry that distributes a potentially dangerous drug in what is a national market and thus a national, not just a local, problem. But Sessions has also done the right thing from a legal standpoint. He has acted to preserve a constitutional government in which Congress determines what the law is, and the president and the attorney general fulfil their duty to enforce the law  not ignore it.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday he'll be taking new trips across the country in support of the left, sending out new signals of White House hopes while denying it's a dry run for a presidential bid.

Since coming to City Hall in Jan. 2014, de Blasio has traveled outside the U.S. at least 11 times, including trips to Italy, Germany and France, and has taken trips outside the city at least 53 times  not including trips to Albany and Washington, D.C., The New York Post reported.

Looking to become a national leader in progressive politics, de Blasio has stated that Democrats must embrace a progressive agenda to win elections in the future.

He even offered muted praise for President Donald Trump in how he conveyed an economic vision for fairness.

Thats something Bernie Sanders did a great job with in 2016, and bluntly, Trump got a lot of that message out and attracted a lot of people, he said during a radio interview with John Catsimatidis. That should not be a message that someone like Trump can beat Democrats on.

Democrats have to have the strongest most progressive message of economic change and fairness, so I think thats even more important than a single leader emerging, de Blasio continued. Im going to go all around the country helping to support the folks who will be part of that change and the folks who believe in that kind of vision for the party.

De Blasio previously said hes not running for president and will serve all four years of his second and final term in office.

He won re-election handily in November, becoming the first Democrat to return to City Hall in New York since Edward Koch won a third term in 1985.

He boasted about the city recording the lowest number of annual homicides since the early 1950s. The police departments preliminary count is 290 homicides for 2017, a 14 percent drop from the year before.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Trump suggested Sunday that he, top administration officials and congressional Republicans made progress at their weekend retreat on such key 2018 issues as the budget, infrastructure and immigration but also continued to slam the new White House tell-all book as more fake news.

Ive had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President, Trump tweeted. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!

The president repeatedly has tried to discredit author Michael Wolff and his book Fire and Fury, even before the tell-all officially hit store shelves Friday.

Trump has tweeted a handful of on the matter, including calling Wolff a total loser. And at a Saturday news conference at Camp David, the president calling the book a work of fiction.

The book -- which Wolff claims is based on hundreds of interviews with people close to Trump and at least one recent talk with the president -- suggested Trump lacked the intellectual and emotional capacity to run the country.

Trump also tweeted Sunday: Leaving Camp David for the White House. Great meetings with the Cabinet and Military on many very important subjects including Border Security & the desperately needed Wall, the ever increasing Drug and Opioid Problem, Infrastructure, Military, Budget, Trade and DACA.

The presidents comments again have suggested the GOP-controlled Congress cannot strike a bipartisan deal on immigration, particularly protection for young illegal immigrants, unless Democrats agree to fund his U.S.-Mexico border wall.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May shot down concerns about President Trumps mental fitness on Sunday, saying he acts in the best interests of his country.

May was forced to comment on Trumps mental state following the release of Michal Wolffs explosive book claiming some Trump advisers openly questioned the presidents mental capacity for the job.

Speaking with the BBC, the prime minister shot down any accusations against Trump, saying no to question if concerns about Trumps mental fitness were serious.

When I deal with President Trump what I see is somebody who is committed to ensuring that he is taking decisions in the best interests of the United States, she added.

May also reiterated that Trump will be coming to Britain for a visit, but come up short of providing exact date and details.

There have been questions whether Trump will visit the country as a full state visit, which would include meeting the Queen, or if he will opt out for a lower-key working trip amid probable mass protests.

Trump has previously come under fire from British lawmakers after they deemed some of his statements might have violated the countrys hate speech laws  prompting countrys members of the Parliament to debate whether he should be granted a full state visit.

In November, May criticized Trump after he retweeted inflammatory videos from a British fringe far-right political group, saying it was wrong to have done so.

The president, tweeted in response: Dont focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce on Monday became the latest influential Republican lawmaker to announce plans to retire from Congress at the end of his term.

In this final year of my Foreign Affairs Committee chairmanship, I want to focus fully on the urgent threats facing our nation, including: the brutal, corrupt and dangerous regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran, Vladimir Putins continued efforts to weaponize information to fracture western democracies, and growing terrorist threats in Africa and Central Asia, the California Republican said in a statement.

With this in mind, and with the support of my wife Marie, I have decided not to seek reelection in November, Royce said.

RETIREMENTS POSE CHALLENGE AS REPUBLICANS FIGHT TO KEEP CONGRESSIONAL MAJORITIES

He represents a district Democrats would love to flip and could be a problem for California Republicans to hold. Analysts at the Cook Political Report changed their view of the race in that district from "lean Republican" to "lean Democratic" after Royce's announcement.

Still, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Steve Stivers said Republicans "are fired up and ready to hold this seat."

"We have just one message for Democrats who think they can compete for this seat: bring it on," he said.

Royce was first elected to Congress in 1992.

Other Republicans who arent running for re-election include Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee; Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the former chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce committee; Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Fox News Bret Baier, Mike Emanuel and Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is back at the populist Breitbart News and the administration's former chief of staff Reince Priebus is back at his old law firm.

Bannon and Priebus arent alone in needing to brush off their resumes after working briefly for the Trump administration; in the months after Donald Trump became president, more than one dozen high-level officials have been fired or resigned from the administration.

Read on for a look at what some former Trump administration officials are up to now.

Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon, a hardcore populist, was removed as the presidents chief strategist on Aug. 18, 2017. And it wasnt long before the former Breitbart News chief was back at his old conservative publication.

If theres any confusion out there, let me clear it up: Im leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents  on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in corporate America, Bannon told Bloomberg following his departure.

Bannon returned to Breitbart as its executive chairman on the same day his ouster from the White House was announced and led its evening editorial meeting, the site said.

And he immediately began to bump heads with his old boss.

Bannon and Trump first clashed during the Alabama special election as both men initially backed different candidates. Bannon backed the beleaguered former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, and Trump campaigned for incumbent Sen. Luther Strange. Moore won.

Bannon had an even greater falling out with Trump and his cohorts when unflattering comments were attributed to him in a recent White House tell-all book, Fire and Fury. In the highly controversial book, Bannon is quoted as calling a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer as treasonous and unpatriotic.

Trump said Sloppy Steve has lost his mind, and Bannon attempted to backtrack from his comments. He said they were directed at Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign chairman.

My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda, Bannon said in a statement.

James Comey

In less than a year, James Comey went from FBI director to college faculty.

Comey, who was unceremoniously fired by Trump in May 2017, joined Howard University as part-time lecturer.

The King Chair is part of the Washington, D.C., colleges push to provide students access to experienced, senior public service executives who developed and advanced public policy initiatives, according to a university press release.

Comey, who was sacked from his job at the FBI just two months after he announced the agency was looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russias meddling in the presidential election, said he was honored to be at Howard.

Howard has a longstanding history of being a vibrant academic community and the perfect place to have a rich dialogue on many of the most pressing issues we face today, Comey said in a statement.

Comeys time at Howard got off to a rough start after his convocation address was overtaken by raucous protestors.

Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci was the White House communications director for only 10 days, but he caused quite the shake-up in less than two weeks.

During his tenure, the Goldman Sachs alumnus ranted about his coworkers in an infamous and crude interview with the New Yorker  specifically slamming former chief of staff Reince Priebus as a paranoid schizophrenic and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Since hes left the White House, Scaramucci has been quite active on social media  including tweeting some vaguely self-deprecating images.

In August, Scaramucci tweeted a cartoon depicting a cartoonist banging his head against the wall in frustration as Trump seems to fire White House misfits at a rapid pace. A computer screen in the cartoon reads, New flash! Mooch out!!  invoking Scaramuccis common nick name, The Mooch.

He also tweeted an image of a t-shirt that read, I was communications director for 10 days and all I got was this lousy shirt.

Scaramucci has also appeared on a variety of talk shows, including The View and Stephen Colberts Late Show.

Michael Flynn

Trumps former national security adviser is no longer part of the White House, but he still remains under multiple investigations for his dealings with foreign governments, particularly Russia, during the presidential campaign.

The embattled former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn resigned under harsh scrutiny in February 2017 after it was revealed that he misled the administration when it came to his ties to and conversations with Russian officials.

Since his firing, Flynn registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department in March.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether Flynn was involved in the push to obtain former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons emails from Russian hackers during the presidential campaign.

Several of Flynns allies and appointees in the White House have been slowly pushed out as well.

Sean Spicer

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer could have been a star  a dancing star, that is.

After Spicer resigned as Anthony Scaramucci was hired as the White Houses short-lived communications director, he reportedly turned down an opportunity to be a contestant on ABCs Dancing with the Stars.

Sources told TMZ that Spicer turned down the gig because he has an overwhelming number of commitments in the fall and because hes not a good dancer.

Since he announced he was leaving the Trump administration, Spicer has been photographed with fans at Fenway Park and is angling to appear on Saturday Night Live. Spicer was also able to finally meet the pope. The former press secretary was infamously denied the opportunity to meet Pope Francis during Trump's trip to the Vatican in May.

Spicer joined the Worldwide Speakers Group as a paid speaker.

Melissa McCarthys depiction of his press briefing performances earned him a spot in Saturday Night Live lore, but it was his role as the architect of the Republican National Committees PR strategy that earned him a reputation as one of the partys most effective and hardest-charging strategists and communicators, his bio states.

His speaking topics include: navigating crises, a conservative viewpoint, an objective look at the philosophies, people and policies making the news and the Trump administration.

Spicer has continued to consistently share Trumps tweets and messages of support for the administration on Twitter.

Spicer also made a surprise appearance at the Emmy Awards in September, seemingly poking fun at his own claim about the size of the inauguration audience.

Reince Priebus

The former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus has rejoined his old law firm, he announced on Twitter.

Priebus said he has joined the Michael Best & Friedrich, a Milwaukee-based firm, as its president and will work from Washington, D.C. Priebus worked for the firm for about 13 years before he was the Republican National Committee chairman, according to the Associated Press.

Priebus also announced that he has joined the Washington Speakers Bureau.

Trump tweeted his congratulations to his former chief of staff and called him a really good and talented man.

Were proud of you, Reince! Trump said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Trump administration is planning to rescind a set of Obama-era policies that promote using race to achieve diversity in schools, a source familiar with the plans tells CNN.

While the decision does not change current US law on affirmative action, it provides a strong illustration of the administration's position on an issue that could take on renewed attention with the departure of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court.

"The executive branch cannot circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law and  in some instances  stays on the books for decades," Justice Department spokesperson Devin O'Malley told CNN in a statement. "Last year, the Attorney General initiated a review of guidance documents, which resulted in dozens of examples  including today's second tranche of rescissions  of documents that go beyond or are inconsistent with the Constitution and federal law. The Justice Department remains committed to enforcing the law and protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination."

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

The move, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes as the administration has thrown its weight behind a student group that accuses Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-Americans in its admissions process.

Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was ending the practice of the Justice Department issuing "guidance documents" that have the "effect of adopting new regulatory requirements or amending the law," without going through the formal rulemaking process. As a result, 25 documents were rescinded in December.

The guidance that will be reversed Tuesday provided examples of different educational contexts within which institutions could permissibly consider race.

Tuesday's reversal also does not affect what a school decides to do on its own within the confines of current Supreme Court precedent, but civil rights groups swiftly reacted with disappointment.

"We condemn the Department of Education's politically motivated attack on affirmative action and deliberate attempt to discourage colleges and universities from pursuing racial diversity at our nation's colleges and universities," said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "The rescission of this guidance does not overrule forty years of precedent that affirms the constitutionality of a university's limited use of race in college admissions. This most recent decision by the Department of Education is wholly consistent with the administration's unwavering hostility towards diversity in our schools."

CNN's Juana Summers contributed to this report.
Vice President Mike Pence will visit Egypt, Jordan and Israel later this month after postponing a trip to the Middle East in December following President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The White House says Pence will travel to the region Jan. 19-23, starting with a meeting in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Pence will also confer with King Abdullah II of Jordan and then hold two days of meetings and events in Israel.

Pence's agenda in Israel includes meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an address to the Knesset, and visits to the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Pence postponed his visit to Israel and Egypt in mid-December because of a Senate vote on Trump's tax overhaul.
The U.S. admitted significantly fewer refugees in the first three months of fiscal year 2018 as the Trump administration implemented tougher vetting procedures and banned refugees from countries generating most of them.

The Wall Street Journal reported that 5,000 refugees were admitted to the country during the months of October, November and December. The figure is far below similar periods in recent years  with 25,671 refugees admitted in the same period during the Obama administration.

If the current rate of admission continues, the number of people given asylum in the U.S. will not reach the 2018 refugee ceiling of 45,000 set up by President Trump last year. The limit is already at its lowest since the program to resettle the refuges was started in 1980.

The downfall of the number of refugees admitted indicate the broader effect of the administrations crackdown on immigration, including the controversial decision to suspend admission from 11 countries such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and creating tougher screening process of applicants.

The administration said the figures reflect its attempt at trying to find a balance between protecting legitimate refugees and the need to protect the countrys security.

Our job is to balance the need to protect legitimate refugees with the need to protect our security, Jennifer Higgins, associate director for refugee, asylum and international operations at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, told the newspaper.

With admissions suspended from 11 countries, where most refugees tend to come from, nearly a quarter of admissions in the last period were from Bhutan, a tiny country in Asia with fewer than a million people, according to the Journal.

The publications review of the refugee admission data also showed that there has been a significant decline in Muslim refugees coming to the U.S. in the last period, while the proportion of Christians, Buddhists and Hindus has risen. In recent years, almost half of the refugees identified as Muslim, but only 14 percent of people identified as such in the last three months of 2017.

The decreasing number was criticized by advocates of refugees, who said the country is failing to take the leadership.

Its enormously discouraging and dispiriting, and it is another reflection of this administrations march away from the principle of humanity, president of Refugees International Eric Schwartz, who also ran the refugee program at the State Department during the Obama administration, told the Journal.

But the State Department dismissed the allegations that the U.S. is turning back on refugees, saying the number of admitted refugees tend to fluctuate and it remains premature to speculate whether the number will be below the 2018 ceiling.

The premise that we are turning our backs on them is patently wrong, Higgins told the Journal, noting that tougher vetting procedures slowed down due to new initiatives, including rescreening refugee applicants who had already been through the process.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was treated over the summer after a prostate cancer diagnosis, Fox News has confirmed.

An aide said Romney was surgically treated by Dr. Thomas Ahlering at UC Irvine Hospital. The treatment was successful and Romneys prognosis is good, the person said.

"Last year, Governor Mitt Romney was diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer," an aide said. "The cancer was removed surgically and found not to have spread beyond the prostate."

The disclosure comes as Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is believed to be preparing to launch a campaign for Senate in Utah. GOP Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch recently announced he wont seek re-election.

Romney  who owns homes in both states  changed the location on his Twitter account from Massachusetts to Utah the day Hatch announced his retirement.

The 70-year-old Romney hasnt announced plans to run for the seat, but issued a statement last week praising Hatch.

I join the people of Utah in thanking my friend, Senator Orrin Hatch for his more than forty years of service to our great state and nation, Romney said.

Romney served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president in 2008. He then was nominated by the Republican Party for president in 2012, but lost to then-President Barack Obama in the general election.

Romney and President Trump have had a tumultuous relationship. Trump endorsed Romney during the 2012 race, but Romney became a vocal critic of Trump during the 2016 election.

Romney was considered by Trump to serve as secretary of state last year, but the president passed him over for now-Secretary Rex Tillerson.

Amid reports of Romney's interest in the Utah seat, Trump publicly encouraged Hatch to seek another term. Since Hatch's announcement, however, Romney and Trump spoke by phone to discuss Hatch and the Senate seat, a White House official said.

Fox News' Kristin Brown and Amy Fenton contributed to this report.
The Supreme Court is refusing to intervene in a legal fight over a Mississippi law that permits government workers and private businesses to cite their own religious beliefs to deny services to LGBT people.

Opponents say the law will likely lead to discrimination against those who support same-sex marriage.

The justices did not comment Monday in their decision to leave in place a federal appeals court ruling that allowed the law, known as HB 1523, to take effect. A three-judge panel held that the law's challengers failed to show they would be harmed by it. The appellate judges did not rule on the law's substance.

"Two years ago Mississippi passed one of the strongest religious freedom laws in the country," state House Judiciary B Chairman Andy Gipson, R-Braxton, told the Clarion-Ledger. "I was pleased to read today that the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene, allowing our law to remain in full effect. Congratulations to Gov. Phil Bryant and his legal team."

The Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT civil rights group, calls it the "most sweeping and devastating state law to be enacted against LGBTQ people in the country."

AG DIRECTIVE PROTECTS RELIGIOUS OBJECTORS TO LGBT RIGHTS

The legal battle is not over, however. A federal judge has allowed the law's challengers to try to find people who have been denied services under the law because they would be able to make a strong legal claim that they have been harmed.

The Mississippi legislature drafted and approved the measure after the Supreme Court's 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the country. Gov. Phil Bryant signed it into law in 2016, but it was blocked for more than a year amid several legal challenges. It took effect Oct. 10.

The law claims to protect three beliefs: that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that sex should only occur in such a marriage and that a person's gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered.

The law allows county clerks who object to same-sex marriage on religious grounds to avoid issuing licenses to gay and lesbian couples. It also protects merchants who refuse services to LGBT people, and might also affect adoptions and foster care, business practices and school bathroom policies. Opponents say it also allows pharmacies to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions for unmarried women.

Mississippi is one of 28 states that does not have a law prohibiting businesses from discriminating against people because of their sexual orientation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Some 200,000 people could have to leave the U.S. or face deportation as the Trump administration announced it is ending special protections for Salvadoran immigrants, officials said Monday.

Many people from El Salvador have been in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, a designation that allows certain nations' citizens to remain in America due to a variety of safety concerns. But that temporary status will end in 2019, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

El Salvador is by far the largest beneficiary of the program, according to the Associated Press.

What is Temporary Protected Status?

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a special designation that provides humanitarian relief for foreigners whose countries are hit with some unsafe condition  such as a natural disaster or war.

These protections could be granted to entire countries or parts of countries, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). TPS can also be granted to immigrants who are already in the U.S.

Circumstances that could warrant TPS include: ongoing armed conflict, civil war, environmental disaster or an epidemic.

Those who have TPS status cannot be detained by Homeland Security because of his or her immigration status, USCIS said. These individuals are also not removable from the U.S., can receive travel authorization and can obtain an employment authorization document, according to USCIS.

People who have been convicted of a felony or at least two misdemeanors are not eligible for this protection. Additionally, individuals who are found to be participating in the persecution of another individual or engaging in or inciting terrorist activity, may not be eligible for TPS, according to USCIS.

Why was it granted to Salvadorans?

Salvadoran immigrants were granted TPS following the devastating earthquakes that struck Central America in 2001. Many immigrants have since established deep roots in the U.S., starting families and businesses over decades.

TPS for El Salvador had been extended through March 9, 2018, according to USCIS.

However, the status will be officially terminated as of Sept. 9, 2019, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen said Monday, giving immigrants 18 months to leave the country or face deportation.

Why would the Trump administration cut it?

DHS said the decision to terminate TPS for Salvadoran immigrants was made following a review of the situation that prompted the initial designation.

The unsafe conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes are no longer an issue, DHS said in a press release, citing a significant amount of international aid to assist [El Salvador] in its recovery efforts.

"Getting them to a permanent solution is a much better plan than having them live six months to 12 months to 18 months (in the U.S.)," Nielsen told the Associated Press last week.

What other countries have lost TPS under the Trump administration?

Protections have already been ended for Haitians by Nielsens predecessor, then-acting Secretary Elaine Duke. About 50,000 Haitians are required to leave the U.S. or adjust their legal status by July 22, 2019.

Duke also ended protections for Nicaraguans, giving some 2,500 people until Jan. 5, 2019 to make a decision about their futures.

And last year, the Trump administration extended status for South Sudan and ended it for Sudan. Other countries still covered are Honduras, Nepal, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Trump is known for using Twitter to communicate his thoughts  but hes also known for the spelling and grammar errors throughout his tweets.

Heres a look at some of Trumps more interesting online spelling and grammar errors.

Enormously consensual presidency

In an effort to share some praise for his administration from a New York Post columnist, Trump inadvertently referred to his administration as an enormously consensual presidency.

His is turning out to be an enormously consensual presidency. So much so that there has never been a day that I wished Hillary Clinton were President, Trump tweeted on Jan. 7, 2017, referencing a New York Post column by Michael Goodwin.

The problem: Goodwin didnt call Trumps presidency consensual. Instead, he called it consequential.

Trump eventually deleted the tweets and republished a corrected version, but not before Twitter took notice. As Politico reported, the error seemed particularly egregious as the president has been accused of sexual misconduct.

In the original tweets, Trump left out a clause that was critical of the White House from the column. The amended tweets included the phrase, despite my own frustration over his missteps. Additionally, Trump also added Goodwins email address to the original tweet. The corrected tweets included a link to the column, instead.

Covfefe

Trump turned one of his more famous spelling mistakes into a contest of sorts when he asked his 46 million followers to figure out what exactly is a covfefe.

Despite the constant negative press covfefe, Trump tweeted just after midnight on May 31, 2017, in a post that was eventually deleted.

Later that morning, Trump asked which of his followers can figure out the true meaning of covfefe.

Loose

Before Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was dubbed Lyin Ted during the 2016 presidential election by Trump, the Manhattan businessman predicted his GOP opponent would loose to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Ted Cruz is totally unelectable, if he even gets to run (born in Canada). Will loose big to Hillary. Polls show I beat Hillary easily! WIN! Trump tweeted in January 2016.

The tweet was not deleted.

Payed

All of the phony T.V. commercials against me are bought and payed for by SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS, the bandits that tell your pols what to do, Trump said in a still-live March 2016 tweet.

In nautical terms, the past tense of pay is payed. But when it comes to finance, its paid.

Barrack

In multiple instances, Trump added an additional letter to his presidential predecessors name.

The dying [National Review] has totally given up the fight against Barrack Obama. They have been losing for years. I will beat Hillary! Trump tweeted in January 2016.

Just another desperate move by the man who should have easily beaten Barrack Obama, Trump said in March 2016 in a tweet about Mitt Romney.

Unpresidented

It took Trump and his team more than an hour to fix the atrocious spelling of the word unprecedented in a December 2016 tweet.

China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act, Trump tweeted.

The corrected tweet was retweeted more than 18,000 times.

The Guardian dubbed "unpresidented" to be its word of the year.

Honered

The day after he was inaugurated, Trump misspelled the word honored.

I am honered to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States, he said.

As the British newspaper Metro reported, that wasnt the first time Trump struggled with a variation of the word honor in tweets. Following a February 2016 debate, Trump tweeted, Wow, every poll said I won the debate last night. Great honer!

Both tweets have been deleted.

Gas and Thr

Trump has often decried the press coverage he has received throughout the course of his presidential campaign and young presidency. And his frustration with the media was glaringly evident with a January 2017 typo-ridden tweet.

Thr coverage about me in the [New York Times] and the [Washington Post] gas been so false and angry that the times actually apologized to its.., Trump said on January 28, 2017.

Aside from not capitalizing the Times, Trump misspelled the words the and has.

Hearby versus Here by

As the Washington Posts Mike Madden pointed out, Trump twice struggled with the word hereby on March 3, 2017.

I here by demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it, Trump said.

That tweet was deleted, and Trump tried again.

I hearby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it, Trump said.

Trump eventually got hereby right that afternoon, and the correct tweet garnered more than 39,000 retweets.

Tapp

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during this very sacred election process, Trump tweeted on March 4, 2017. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

Despite the blatant spelling error the tweet has not been deleted. It has more than 52,000 retweets.
After months of shying away from the toxic topic, Democrats increasingly are embracing political rhetoric that flirts with the impeachment of President Trump  signaling a strategy that could work its way into the mainstream in the 2018 midterms.

From the base, the party sees encouragement. A petition with 4 million signatures demanding Trumps impeachment and a survey showing 70 percent of Democrats backing at least hearings on the matter could nudge Democrats further into the impeachment camp in the new year.

The publication of the Fire and Fury tell-all, meanwhile, has only emboldened Trumps critics, by seeming to raise questions about his stability  which the president openly confronted in a weekend tweet-storm declaring he is a very stable genius.

Democrats must win 24 House seats and two Senate seats to regain control of Congress in 2018, but have a historically tough time motivating their voters in non-presidential years.

'Smart Democrats know its a dumb idea.'  legal commentator Andrew McCarthy, on impeachment push

Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, a liberal activist group that endorses and raises money for Democratic candidates, claimed the impeachment push has public support.

Democrats should run on an inclusive, populist agenda of free college and paid family leave, but shouldnt shy away from supporting impeachment, Sroka told Fox News.

HOUSE REJECTS TRUMP IMPEACHMENT RESOLUTION

Millions of people around the country support impeaching the president. Democratic candidates in deep blue districts can and should be for impeachment, Sroka continued. It would be politically stupid for any Democrat to come out against impeachment.

Last month, 58 House Democrats voted to bring an impeachment resolution up for debate. While party leadership has publicly shunned the idea, Democrats recently tapped Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York to be ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, replacing disgraced ex-Rep. John Conyers. Washington Post columnist Paul Kane described the choice as a move to ready themselves for a battle with President Trump that could end with impeachment proceedings, given Nadlers expertise in constitutional law.

Some impeachment advocates say it doesnt matter that Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia isnt complete.

In November, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and four other Democrats introduced five articles of impeachment against Trump. Reps. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., and Al Green, D-Texas, were the first to introduce an impeachment resolution in July, alleging obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., ended one speech last year with an "impeach 45" chant.

Even Sherman, though, expressed caution against making impeachment a campaign issue.

This is a matter of constitutional principal, not politics, Sherman told Fox News. Members should look at the actions of the president and determine whether they believe he obstructed justice or committed other acts warranting impeachment.  Talk of impeachment has already had an effect. Imagine how President Trump would behave if he thought there was absolutely no risk of impeachment. We need not wait until all the various investigations give us a complete catalog of all of Trumps wrongdoings.

The publication last week of Michael Wolffs Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House fueled the impeachment fever.

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who has spent $20 million to promote impeachment, sent a copy of the Wolff book to all 535 members of Congress. Steyers NeedToImpeach.com petition collected 4.1 million signatures. He told a California radio station KQED Friday: It is an open-and-shut case, that he has met the criteria for impeachment. We're supportive of the Mueller investigation, he is investigating two out of the nine criteria that this president has met.

Steyer has said in TV ads that past presidents have been impeached for lesser crimes.

But where Trump critics see an open-and-shut case, others see a major pitfall for the party.

Steyers assumption is that Trump committed espionage with Putin. If proven, he would be quite right, but it hasnt been proven, conservative legal commentator and author Andrew McCarthy told Fox News. The country will not broadly find it attractive if there is a lack of evidence. Fair-minded people will not want to impeach. Smart Democrats know its a dumb idea.

McCarthy nevertheless believes Democrats will feel pressure from a rabid base to run on impeachment, and some members could fear a primary if they arent on board.

The base can make Democrats do politically stupid things, said McCarthy, former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York. If the Democrats front and center issue is impeachment, they will not win in the midterms. It would be a bad strategy to run on.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll last month found 41 percent of Americans want Congress to hold impeachment hearings. Of that, 70 percent of Democrats, 40 percent of independents and 7 percent of Republicans back a House inquiry.

Only Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached in the House, where it takes just a majority, and both were acquitted in the Senate, where it takes a two-thirds supermajority to remove. Clintons 1998 impeachment was for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, while Johnsons 1868 impeachment was about violating the Tenure of Office Act after he fired War Secretary Edwin Stanton. President Richard Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment over Watergate, to avoid impeachment and removal. Article II of the Constitution says impeachment can be based on "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors."

Many Democrats will want to impeach Trump even if they dont have anywhere near the numbers in the Senate, McCarthy said. Thats in part because they hate Trump and in part because theyre still sore about the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago.

But Sroka is taking a just-you-wait approach on the Senate numbers.

Well see what two-thirds looks like, Sroka said. Given the range of impeachment-worthy offenses by Donald Trump, its difficult to compare with what Republicans tried to impeach Bill Clinton over, or what Andrew Johnson was impeached for.
Stunning images show the moment that a 50,000-pound humpback whale pushed a snorkeler through the water to protect her from a nearby shark.

The pictures of Nan Hauser, 63, show how the massive sea creature pushed the whale biologist with his head and his mouth, then tucked her under its pectoral fin and even lifted her out of the water on one occasion.

However, lurking near the mammal and Hauser was a 15-foot tiger shark, as well as another whale that was moving its tail to ward off the shark.

SHARK SINKS TEETH INTO SURFER'S LEG IN TERRIFYING ATTACK

The whale biologist told the Daily Mirror that she believes the moment in September reveals the whales intuitive instinct to protect another species of animal.

As Hauser returned to the safety of the boat, in the waters off Muri Beach, Rarotonga, the Cook Islands, the whale even came back to check on her.

Hauser, who lives on the Cook Islands, said to the Daily Mirror: I wasnt sure what the whale was up to when he approached me, and it didnt stop pushing me around for over 10 minutes.

GREAT WHITE SHARK TRACKED FOR YEARS HAS FALLEN OFF THE RADAR

I didnt want to panic, because I knew that he would pick up on my fear, Hauser told the Daily Mirror. I feel a very close kinship with animals, so despite my trepidation, I tried to stay calm and figure out how to get away from him.

Hauser had never seen the whale before she entered the water that day.

On the biologist's nearby research vessel, Hauser's team was worried about her, abandoning their drone footage because, as Nan describes the moment, they "did not want to film my death."

SHARK ATTACKS NEWLYWED ON HER HONEYMOON, VIDEO GOES VIRAL

Dolphins have been known to exhibit protective behavior and many stories have been told, but Hauser had never experienced something like that with a humpback.

For over 10 minutes, Hauser said, she was focused on the whale, unaware of the shark nearby.

They truly display altruism - sometimes at the risk of losing their own lives.

A surfer in Hawaii was recently left with a large gash in her leg after she was attacked by a tiger shark on New Years Eve.
Hypothermic sea turtles that were on the brink of death last week along the Texas Gulf Coast are recovering and being released back into the wild.

More than 2,000 cold stunned turtles were rescued out of frigid gulf waters from New Years Day through Friday, in what is now the largest cold stunning event since 1980.

I havent had much sleep, said Donna Shaver, Texas Coordinator of the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network.

NEARLY 1,000 SEA TURTLES RESCUED ALONG TEXAS GULF COAST

Shaver organized the enormous rescue effort that spanned almost the entirety of the Texas Gulf Coast. The National Parks Service led the rescues with help from Sea World San Antonio, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, ARK and the Texas Sea Life Center.

The effort was especially difficult Thursday and Friday because many turtles had been exposed to 40-degree water for almost a week.

I put on Facebook a post asking for help from my volunteers, I was desperate, said Shaver.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER OVER 100 NEW SPECIES, INCLUDING CROCODILE LIZARD, SNAIL-EATING TURTLE

The turtles recovered at three local animal rehablitiation facilities -the Texas State Aquarium, Texas Sea Life Center, and ARK.

Nearly 400 turtles were released back home Sunday afternoon. The event brought 2,500 people to Padre Island National Seashore to watch, much like the popular sea turtle hatchling releases. Hundreds more turtles will be released Monday and Tuesday.

Its just release after release, said Shaver.

PYTHON HUNTER KILLS MONSTER 17-FOOT SNAKE IN FLORIDA EVERGLADES, SETS NEW RECORD

Conditions should be much more favorable for the sea turtles this week. After air temperatures dropped below freezing and wind chills hit the teens last week, Corpus Christis forecasted high was above 70 for Monday. Warm air will quickly increase shallow water temperatures where many of the turtles live.

While most of the turtles will go back into the wild, approximately 500 were found dead, or died soon after being rescued. The breadth of the cold made it very difficult to get the turtles out of the water, and some were stuck for many hours if not days.

Its really hard to get to them all before some perish because our events are state wide, said Shaver. Other areas of the country are also having cold stunning but thats in pockets.

The remaining turtles that survived but arent ready to be released will likely have a slow recovery. According to Shaver, some of them will have to be put down.

The likelihood of them surviving and being able to survive in the wild is minimal, said Shaver.
** Editor's note - This is the latest installment on our ongoing series looking back on 2017 and how the year impacted area communities.

The city of Bismarck saw a year of progress as it planned additional projects to improve the community. The fire department took over several community events after the city's chamber of commerce folded due to membership and financial woes. Finally, an election for Ward 2 alderman ended in a tie and a special election was held to determine the winner.

January

A resident complained to the board of aldermen about stray dogs he said are chasing after children and adults in his neighborhood.

Mayor Seth Radford reported the Missouri Department of Transportation had confirmed that the city had been selected to receive funding for the Transportation Alternative Program.

February

After a busy 2016, Radford said the city government intends to continue giving back to its residents this year in the form of infrastructure growth and other improvements.

The board of aldermen approved an ordinance authorizing the mayor to enter into an agreement with the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission for receipt of an 80/20 Transportation Alternative Funds grant in the amount of $100,000 for the improvement of sidewalk infrastructure along sections of Walnut Street and N Highway.

A committee in the formation stage will be tasked with planning the city of Bismarck's 150th birthday taking place in 2018. Mayor Seth Radford said he wants the event to be one that's in keeping with the importance of reaching such a milestone.

March

Police Chief Kyle Colyott submitted his resignation to the Bismarck Board of Aldermen after it went into closed session. He planned to return in April to the Fredericktown Police Department where he worked previously.

Bismarck Chamber of Commerce member Michael Randazzo approached the board to tell them of the civic organization's declining membership, but also offered an idea that could provide the chamber another path forward.

John Colwell was appointed by the board of alderman as the city's new fire chief.

April

In the April 4 municipal election, incumbent Sioux Young - who was running unopposed - retained her Ward 1 seat. Incumbent Carol Baker and her opponent Keith Colwell tied with 37 votes each. Baker requested that a special election be held to determine the Ward 2 victor.

May

Incumbent Carol Baker won another two-year term on the Bismarck Board of Aldermen in a runoff election held May 9 against her opponent, Keith Colwell.

The Bismarck Board of Aldermen certified the results of the special election and City Clerk Garner Kitchen swore in incumbent Baker as Ward 2 alderman.

Mayor Radford signed the annual Buddy Poppy Proclamation while surrounded by Auxiliary Poppy Chairman Roberta Jones and Post Poppy Chairman Mike Greer.

June

Robert Sanzotera took on the position of Bismarck police chief.

A city resident fed up with neighbors causing a nuisance by racing their 3-wheelers, 4-wheelers and a truck on a small field adjacent to his home asked the board of aldermen if there is something the city can do to alleviate the problem.

July

Bismarck's 2017 Freedom Fest celebrated Independence Day under partly cloudy skies, warm temperatures and a lot of patriotic spirit.

August

A portion of the city of Bismarck was under a boil water order due to the need for repairs.

The board of aldermen approved a contractor's bid for wastewater improvements on a piece of land along Highway 32 for the enhancement of future commercial development.

The board heard complaints from city residents about rundown homes and unkempt yards on West Main Street they say are a hazard and lowering the property values of other homes in the area.

September

Bismarck VFW Post 6947 held a ceremony in recognition of National POW/MIA Recognition Day at the Bismarck War Memorial.

A Bismarck resident was among three local men arrested and charged with scamming an elderly couple out of thousands of dollars for a job they were hired to do.

October

Bismarck Development Committee members Evelyn Wallis and Valeria Craig asked for permission from the board of aldermen to install tree benches in Sundale Park. They also asked if reassembling the city's park and recreation board would be possible.

The annual Bismarck Fall Festival returned to the Bismarck School campus, featuring a range of activities and events to help Parkland residents welcome in the fall season.

November

Firefighter Keith Colwell appeared before the board of aldermen to speak about plans for the city's annual Fourth of July Freedom Fest, as well as the upcoming 150th anniversary of the city, 100th anniversary of the train depot and 50th anniversary of the burial of a time capsule.

The board approved Bismarck Fire Chief John Colwell looking into the cost of purchasing new turnout gear for city firefighters.

December

"Christmas at the Depot" returned to Bismarck on Saturday evening. Along with the usual activities that included lighting the Christmas tree and visits with Santa Claus, the evening also featured the city's second annual Christmas parade.

The Bismarck Board of Aldermen took a step back from demolishing a house on North Cedar Street that has been a long-time eyesore in the community.

Baker spoke directly to several city employees present at the monthly board meeting about the importance of complying with the city budget during tough times.
James Damore, the onetime Google employee who was fired after he wrote a memo criticizing the firm for pushing diversity, has filed a class action lawsuit against the tech giant.

The suit was filed Monday in Santa Clara Superior Court. Damore is joined in the lawsuit by another former Google engineer, David Gudeman.

READ DAMORE'S LAWSUIT HERE.

Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males, the lawsuit alleged. This is the essence of discriminationGoogle formed opinions about and then treated Plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics.

EX-GOOGLE EMPLOYEE JAMES DAMORE: 'UNDERGROUND CONSERVATIVE NETWORK' IN SILICON VALLEY BEING HUNTED BY LEFTISTS

Damore told Fox Business that Google still engages in harassment and career sabotage of anyone that expresses a conservative viewpoint, and theres constant shaming and attacks against white men within Silicon Valley.

Google employees and managers strongly preferred to hear the same orthodox opinions regurgitated repeatedly, producing an ideological echo chamber, a protected, distorted bubble of groupthink, the lawsuit continued. When Plaintiffs challenged Googles illegal employment practices, they were openly threatened and subjected to harassment and retaliation from Google.

Damore was fired last summer after he wrote a memo criticizing Google for pushing mentoring and diversity programs and for alienating conservatives. He also blamed biological differences for the relative lack of women in tech.

GOOGLE FIRES EMPLOYEE BEHIND ANTI-DIVERSITY MEMO, REPORTS SAY

"We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court," a Google spokesman told Fox News, via email.

The search giants employment practices have been in the spotlight recently. In September, three women who previously worked at Google filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming gender-based pay discrimination. Last month Google scored a win in the lawsuit when a California state judge dismissed class action claims. However, a revised suit seeks class-action status against Google, claiming that the search giant for asking new hires about their prior salary, a practice now banned in California.

The suit, filed last week, also adds a fourth complainant, a preschool teacher with a masters degree. The four women claimed Google underpaid them compared with their male counterparts.

GOOGLE PAYS HIGHER SALARIES TO MEN THAN MORE-EXPERIENCED WOMEN: SUIT

The lawsuit came on the heels of a three-year federal investigation into pay practices at Google. Last year, Labor Department regulators accused Google of underpaying female workers. The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm vehemently denied the charges.

According to Googles most recent workplace data, 69 percent of the companys global workforce is male. In the U.S., 56 percent of the companys employees are white.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
An American tourist in Phuket, Thailand, was arrested and transported to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation after allegedly overdosing on Viagra and causing a disgusting scene at the Phuket International Airport.

Steve Cho, a 27-year-old man from New York, was subdued by no less than six security guards  as well as additional airport staff  after he was observed wandering nude through the departures area of the airport while waiting for a flight to Incheon, South Korea, on Jan. 4, The Mirror reports.

PEE-HAPPY PASSENGER ARRESTED AFTER URINATING ALL OVER PLANE BATHROOM

Witnesses say Cho was also babbling incoherently and throwing his own feces at terrified onlookers.

"This was the scariest and most disgusting thing I ever saw at an airport, said one witness who spoke with The Mirror. I stayed away from the man in case he attacked anybody."

Once apprehended by security, Cho was removed to the less populated area of the terminal, where he eventually regained his composure and admitted to ingesting too much Viagra, according to airport officials.

UNITED PASSENGER SMEARS FECES IN PLANE'S BATHROOM, GETS FLIGHT GROUNDED

"He accepted responsibility to reimburse for any damages that he caused. His trip to Incheon was cancelled and he was brought to Saku Police Station for further investigation, said HKT officials in a statement obtained by The Mirror.

''However, we would like to insist that the officers did not harm the man when arresting him and a strict code of conduct was followed, they added.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

Meanwhile, Jan. 4, 2018, is shaping to go down in history as perhaps the grossest day in aviation history: That same day, a man aboard a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Hong Kong managed to get the plane diverted to Alaska after smearing his own feces in the planes bathrooms. And in Florida, a man waiting to depart on a Spirit Airlines flight to Michigan was arrested after urinating all over the toilet and carpeting of the aircrafts bathroom.
Disney is facing a wave of online criticism for the Black Panthers skin tone on a new collector's pin.

Word of the pin first began circulating on social media after an unofficial website called Disney Pins Blog wrote about its release ahead of the upcoming movie based on the Marvel character. The blog tweeted out a now-deleted photo of the $12.99 pin, available for purchase at Walt Disney World parks, which showed the masked Black Panthers face on a green background. But what people noticed most about the design was the color of the characters skin.

H&M APOLOGIZES FOR 'COOLEST MONKEY' SWEATSHIRT AD FEATURING BLACK CHILD

...uhh... Disney? Yeah... one.......... small........ problem.......... Black Panther isnt.................................. white, one Twitter user wrote in response to the photo. Others agreed, noting how light the characters skin looked under the mask, despite the fact that the Black Panther is African.

Following the initial criticism, Disney Pin Blogs later sent out a second tweet with a new photo of the pin, noting how the stores lighting contributed to the pins original appearance. Sorry for any confusion the previous photo may have caused. It was unaltered, but shot under a bright light at the pin store and may have caused differences in color. We are constantly posting all of the many new pin releases and sometimes make mistakes. Thank you, the blog wrote.

However, despite the second photo, reactions on Twitter largely remained the same, with many pointing out that, regardless of lighting, the characters skin still looks too light.

Omg even the correct lighting version looks white, one user commented.

More brown than light, but TChalla is black, another added.

If it can be confused under different lights it[,] means the designers didn't do their job, another person wrote.

I understand they need the paint to be different enough to be recognizable at a distance, but then why not just have his eyes like [they're] supposed to be? a Twitter user commented, referring to the comic book characters appearance.

Ryan Mondics, the owner and editor-in-chief of Disney Pin Blog, told Polygon there was a large quantity of the pins still available at the World Spring Marketplace as of Sunday

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

A representative for Disney World Resorts declined to comment on the matter.
A belligerent Spirit Airlines passenger was arrested at the Southwest Florida International Airport after allegedly urinating all over the lavatory floor during a flight from Fort Myers to Michigan while intoxicated.

Dante Bencivenga, of Fort Myers, Fla., was charged with disorderly intoxication and trespassing on Thursday. He has also been banned from returning to the Southwest Florida International Airport for a year, according to WBBH-TV.

BEAR SPRAY, SICKLES AND ROCKETS: THE STRANGEST THINGS EVER SEIZED BY THE TSA

An attendant had reportedly smelled alcohol on Bencivenga, 58, before he had even boarded the plane, while he was sleeping near the gate. Shortly after Bencivenga boarded, flight attendants learned that he had urinated all over the carpet and toilet in one of the airplanes lavatories while waiting for the flight to take off, and they asked him to leave the aircraft, the Associated Press reported.

Once back at the gate, Bencivenga cursed out an airport agent, who subsequently called in the airport police. He was rebooked on another flight scheduled for Friday, but refused to leave the concourse and continued to cause disruption in the terminal.

He was also adamant that he wasnt intoxicated, and demanded that the responding officer administer a breathalyzer test, which the officer refused, according to WBBH.

UNITED PASSENGER SMEARS FECES IN AIRPLANE BATHROOM, GETS FLIGHT GROUNDED

Bencivenga was ultimately arrested after telling the officer to go ahead and put the bracelets on me, because Im not leaving. He was later booked into Lee County Jail.

Bencivengas arrest occured the same day United Airlines suffered a similar incident on a Hong Kong-bound flight from Chicago, during which a man smeared feces all over two of the aircrafts bathrooms and tried to flush his shirt down a toilet. The United flight was diverted to Alaska, and the passenger was transported to a nearby hospital for evaluation.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

A representative for Spirit Airlines was not immediately available for comment.
A JetBlue flight departing from Boston on Saturday afternoon had to return to Boston's Logan Airport after an unusual odor was detected on board.

JetBlue flight 1095 from Boston to Punta Cana departed Logan Airport at around 5:00 p.m. but was diverted back to the departure site and landed at 6:24 p.m.

An official statement from the airline says the crew on board reported an unusual odor on the plane, which caused customers and crew members to feel ill.

As a safety precaution, the plane returned to Boston where everyone on board received medical attention and the aircraft will be inspected.

Read the full statement below:

"Shortly after departure from Boston the crew on board JetBlue Flight 1095 to Punta Cana reported an unusual odor and customers and crewmembers feeling unwell. In an abundance of caution, the crew elected to return to Boston and was met by medical personal. The aircraft will be inspected."

More from FOX 25 Boston.
Its been more than four years since her son died during a fraternity hazing, but the wound is still fresh for mother Mary Deng.

I feel like theres a cat clawing and scratching at my heart, hurting me persistently and relentlessly, Deng wrote in a statement to be read in court Monday. I wake up and I pray for deliverance.

Dengs son, Chun Michael Deng, was a 19-year-old freshman at the City of New Yorks Baruch College in 2013 when he died while pledging Pi Delta Psi at a rented house in the Poconos.

EX-BARUCH COLLEGE FRATERNITY BROTHERS PLEAD GUILTY IN HAZING DEATH

Michael was blindfolded and forced to wear a heavy backpack before he was repeatedly tackled during a hazing ritual known as glass ceiling.

He became unconscious and was carried inside the house while fraternity members changed his clothes. The frat brothers did a Google search of his symptoms, and hid banners and other fraternity memorabilia in an attempted cover-up, prosecutors said.

Three fraternity members eventually took Deng to the hospital, where he died a day later. Police charged 37 people with crimes ranging from aggravated assault to hazing to third-degree murder.

Four fraternity brothers will be sentenced Monday. The men  Kenny Kwan, Charles Lai, Raymond Lam and Sheldon Wong, all of the Queens borough of New York City  pleaded guilty to felony manslaughter and hindering apprehension charges.

The fraternity itself, convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a trial, also will be sentenced.

One of the frat brothers lawyers, Jim Swetz, told The Associated Press that Michael should not have lost his life.

This was totally unnecessary. But we have to emphasize one thing: Nobody intended for that young man to die, Swetz said, but noted: Whatever Im going to argue at sentencing does not mitigate the loss suffered by the Deng family.

21 NY COLLEGE STUDENTS CHARGED WITH HAZING FRAT PLEDGES WITH ALCOHOL, VOMIT, URINE

Baruch College banned Pi Delta Psi following Michaels death, and school President Mitchel B. Wallerstein said that, Sadly, deaths and injuries as a result of hazing remain a national problem, and the ramifications are frequently devastating.

Prosecutors are seeking the maximum penalty against the national fraternity, including a fine of more than $110,000 and a 20-year ban from Pennsylvania. Prosecutors also want the fraternity to notify every college where it has a chapter around the country of its conviction and sentence.

While prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo that Pi Delta Psi has engaged in illegal hazing ... throughout its history, a lawyer for the fraternity, who plans to appeal the conviction, said the district attorneys office is asking for a death penalty to destroy Pi Delta Psi.

PENN STATE FRATERNITY GAVE PLEDGE 18 DRINKS IN NEARLY 90 MINUTES, CHARGES UPGRADED, PROSECUTOR SAYS

Michaels family has sued dozens of criminal defendants, including the fraternity, for civil damages. Three of the cases have settled.

Founded as an Asian-American cultural fraternity in 1994, Pi Delta Psi has 25 chapters in 11 states  including one at Penn State University  and Washington, D.C. The fraternity has said its Baruch College chapter performed an unsanctioned ritual.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A former California high school teacher was sentenced to probation after allegedly sleeping with one of his students.

Craig Branstetter, who once taught math at Dos Palos High School, was arrested in January 2016 after the victim told police she had sex with Branstetter three times in his car, KFSN-TV reported, citing a police report.

The former teacher also allegedly sent sexually explicit photos to the student, who told police she sent him photos of her stomach after she would exercise.

FEMALE COACH OF BOYS TEAM FACES FELONY SEX CHARGES, REPORT SAYS

Branstetter, who was the victims math teacher at the time, actively pursued the girl through social media, according to the Los Banos Enterprise. The victim also claimed her teacher pursued her through physical contact both during and after school, and he also gave her credit for missing assignments.

In January of last year, Dos Palos Police Chief Barry Mann told the Enterprise Branstetter was highly regarding by many of the students and the professionals in the community, including myself.

Branstetter initially pleaded not guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor and sending harmful material, KFSN reported, but he later changed it to a no contest plea which sparked immediate probation.

Merced County Deputy District Attorney Harold Nutt told the news station that Branstetters sentence is a fair disposition for this case.

EX-TEACHER HELD ON LEWDNESS CHARGE; 7TH ARREST AMONG SCHOOL STAFF THIS YEAR, AUTHORITIES SAY

The former teachers attorney, Jeff Hammerschmidt, said that even though his client was only sentenced to probation, it does not mean they got off easy.

The reality is for a felony probation, a person can do a year in jail. Theres numerous restrictions on the persons freedom, just because someone gets probation does not mean they got off easy, Hammerschmidt told KFSN.

Hammerschmidt added Branstetter will not have to register as a sex offender as part of his plea deal, and the sheriffs office plans to decide if Branstetter will serve time in jail or be electronically monitored.

Its not clear how long Branstetter was sentenced to probation.
Two young men in Washington state, who reportedly bragged to friends that they shot up an empty elementary school in the middle of the night, have been charged with malicious mischief, police said.

Teven Callan, 18, of Tulalip, and Samuel Olson, 19, of Marysville, were arrested Thursday after police found reason to arrest them for first-degree malicious mischief, The Herald reported.

Marysville Police said it appeared more than 60 shots had been fired at Pinewood Elementary School, causing up to $55,000 worth of damage.

HERO TEACHER SAVED 17 LIVES DURING NEW MEXICO SCHOOL SHOOTING

The two apparently went to a New Years Eve party afterwards to brag about what theyd done.

They came back to the party shortly after midnight bragging that they had shot up Pinewood Elementary School, Marysville Police said in a statement.

While police believe the shooting was an act of vandalism, and not targeted to anyone in particular, Police Commander Mark Thomas expressed concern to the newspaper that since blinds on many of the buildings windows were drawn, they easily couldve hit someone.

This was upsetting to us, that somebody would act out in such an aggressive manner, Thomas said. And for what?

Four classroom buildings, and the school library, office and gym reportedly had sustained damage from the shooting, and bullet casings were found discovered near a playground. A parking lot light was shot out.

RETIRED CALIFORNIA SHERIFF'S EMPLOYEE SHOT WHILE ANSWERING DOOR, POLICE SAY

Olson, according to The Herald, allegedly told investigators he took a gun from his fathers gun bag, which he and Callan both fired. He also allegedly said the two were both intoxicated at the time.

A school district spokesperson told the newspaper that while they cant address allegations against students, the typical course of action would be some type of consequences."

An Everett District Court Judge set both students bail at $10,000.
Four people are dead in Galveston, Tx., Monday after an incident involving gunfire took place at the popular San Luis Resort, which police are calling a murder-suicide.

Two people were found dead and two others  a woman who was found critically wounded and a child  later died at a hospital.

Authorities received calls about gunshots coming from the eighth floor around 4:30 a.m. When they arrived, they found the hotel room's door dead-bolted and later found four people inside had been shot.

POLICE: COUPLE MAY HAVE PLANNED MURDER-SUICIDE TOGETHER

The woman and one of the children were "unresponsive but still appeared to be alive" when police found them, Captain Joshua Schirard of the Galveston Police Department said. They were taken to the hospital, where they died.

The victims were identified as a 37-year-old woman, a 39-year-old man and two boys ages 10 and 5.

"A motive is unknown at this time, but forensic data collected at the scene indicated the female is believed to be the shooter at this time before apparently taking her own life with a 9 mm handgun found adjacent to her body," Schirard said. "There's no indication or evidence that there are any other persons involved or that there are any other suspects still at large."

"Right now, investigators with our Major Crimes Unit, as well as with investigators with our crime scene unit are currently in the room processing the room for forensic evidence that can be collected," Schirard told KPRC.

CALIFORNIA FAMILY DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE

He had previously called the incident, which authorities believe to be a murder-suicide, an "obviously horrible event."

Paul Schultz, vice president of hospitality for Landry's Inc., said in a statement that "Our thoughts are with the victims and their family members during this difficult time."

"We are still gathering information about this isolated incident, however it appears to have been a murder suicide amongst a family in their room. We are fully cooperating with the Police Department during their investigation and will assist them in any way we can," Schultz added.

MOM, 41, KILLS DAUGHTER, 9, AND SELF IN 'SHOCKING' MURDER-SUICIDE

Authorities said there were no apparent issues before the family checked into the resort, and nothing in the room indicated there was a struggle.

"My heart goes out to the rest of their family, their extended family, their community and our community, the ones that don't have the training to deal with this and have to be exposed to an event like this," Schirard said.

Fox News' Nicole Darrah and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ten students graduated from Mineral Area Colleges MoSTEMWINs Pharmacy Technician program, participating in a Dec. 21 ceremony held at the Community Education Building at MACs Park Hills campus.

The graduates included Cynthia Lee Breakfield, Potosi; Kristen Lee Brunk, Fredericktown; Sarah Michelle Cooper, Bismarck; George Frederick Coy, Potosi; Tonie R Dion, Cadet; Diane Marie Linnenbringer, Farmington; Nathan Ross, Desloge; Tonya Nacole Scholl, Chaffee; Jessica Ann Shelton, Farmington; Shawnda Reshay Torrez, Fredericktown. They were taught by Jennifer Majeske, Pharmacy Technician Program Coordinator and Instructor.

Majeske congratulated the graduates and their supportive family members and friends, and told them she hoped they would stay in touch with her following the program.

Ive seen more than 100 students cycle through this program, and I am grateful to all of them for the privilege of teaching them, she said. Thank you for letting me get to know you, be a part of your life and vice versa for the last 18 weeks.

Cooper spoke on behalf of her fellow students, and observed many in her class were already familiar with healthcare settings. Through this program, and in working with my father when he was sick, I know pharmaceuticals can make peoples lives a lot better. Im excited to be entering the pharmacy field.

Career & Technical Education Dean Roger McMillian reminded the graduates theres another program in place when theyd like to continue their education to reach the next level. He commended the graduates on their hard work in this condensed program, which packs 20 credit hours and two weeks of full-time clinicals into a space of 18 weeks. A normal workload for a semester is 12-15 credit hours over 16 weeks.

It has been tough, yes, but youll remember how you succeeded as you progress in your career and watch other students and fellow employees follow in your footsteps, he said.

Pam Watkins, who assists in overseeing the grant that makes the program possible, pointed out the graduates were part of an elite group. This is a highly-selective program, she said. When a new program begins, its not uncommon for 70 to apply, and we end up with 12-14 students. However, theyre only allowed minimal leeway for mistakes and failure, so usually, the program loses a few students along the way. You should feel proud of your accomplishments.

MAC is among the 13 colleges in the state of Missouri that were awarded federal funds from the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program. The federal awarding agency was the Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration.

The program is designed for students who want an entry-level position in a pharmacy, and who want to prepare for the National Certification exam offered by the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board.
A federal judge dismissed all charges against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his two sons and another man on Monday after accusing prosecutors of willfully withholding evidence from Bundys lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro cited "flagrant prosecutorial misconduct" in her decision to dismiss all charges against the Nevada rancher and three others.

"The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated," Navarro said.

Either the government lied or [its actions were] so grossly negligent as to be tantamount to lying."  Judge Andrew Napolitano

Bundy's supporters cheered as he walked out of court a free man, hugging his wife. He said he'd been jailed for 700 days as a "political prisoner" for refusing to acknowledge federal authority over the land around his cattle ranch.

On Dec. 20, Navarro declared a mistrial in the high-profile Bundy case. It was only the latest, stunning development in the saga of the Nevada rancher, who led a tense, armed standoff with federal officials trying to take over his land. The clash served as a public repudiation of the federal government.

The Brady rule, named after the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case known as Brady vs. Maryland, holds that failure to disclose such evidence violates a defendants right to due process.

In this case the failures to comply with Brady were exquisite, extraordinary, said Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano. The judge exercised tremendous patience.

The 71-year-old Bundys battle with the federal government eventually led to what became known as the Bundy standoff of 2014. But it began long before that.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. government limited grazing rights on federal lands in order to protect the desert tortoise habitat. In 1993, Bundy, in protest, refused to renew his permit for cattle grazing, and continued grazing his livestock on these public lands. He didnt recognize the authority of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over the sovereign state of Nevada.

The federal courts sided with the BLM, and Bundy didnt seem to have a legal leg to stand on. Nevertheless, the rancher and the government continued this dispute for 20 years, and Bundy ended up owing over $1 million in fees and fines.

Things came to a head in 2014, when officials planned to capture and impound cattle trespassing on government land. Protesters, many armed, tried to block the authorities, which led to a standoff. For a time, they even shut down a portion of I-15, the main interstate highway running through Southern Nevada.

Tensions escalated until officials, fearing for the general safety, announced they would return Bundys cattle and suspend the roundup.

Afterward, Bundy continued to graze his cattle and not pay fees. He and his fellow protesters were heroes to some, but criminals to the federal government. Bundy, along with others seen as leaders of the standoff, including sons Ammon and Ryan and militia member Ryan Payne, were charged with numerous felonies, including conspiracy, assault on a federal officer and using a firearm in a violent crime. They faced many years in prison.

The Bundy case finally went to trial last October. But just two months later, it ended with Navarro angry, the feds humiliated and Bundy  at least to his supporters  vindicated.

Navarro had suspended the trial earlier and warned of a mistrial when prosecutors released information after a discovery deadline. Overall, the government was late in handing over more than 3,300 pages of documents. Further, some defense requests for information that ultimately came to light had been ridiculed by prosecutors as fantastical and a fishing expedition.

Either the government lied or [its actions were] so grossly negligent as to be tantamount to lying, Napolitano said. This happened over and over again.

Navarro said Monday it was clear the FBI was involved in the prosecution and it was not a coincidence that most of the evidence that was held back  which would have worked in Bundys favor  came from the FBI, AZCentral reported.

The newspaper said after the courtroom doors opened following Navarros ruling, a huge cheer went up from a crowd of spectators that had gathered outside.

Fox News Greg Norman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The battle brewing over the estate of Charles Manson entered court Monday, though it remains unclear where it will ultimately be fought or whether others will join a pen pal and purported grandson laying claim to the cult leader's possessions and body.

The issue of venue is clouded because Manson, 83, died at a hospital in Kern County in November but was incarcerated in Corcoran State Prison in neighboring Kings County. His body is still being held at the coroner's office in Bakersfield.

Attorney Alan Davis, representing the proposed administrator of the estate for purported grandson Jason Freeman, said Los Angeles County is the proper venue because Manson lived there before he was imprisoned for orchestrating the 1969 killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and eight other people.

Judge David Cowan said it was premature to make the determination and he scheduled a hearing Jan. 26 to determine where the two separate matters  who controls his estate and who gets his remains  should be decided.

Michael Channels, who said he became friends with Manson decades ago after repeatedly writing him in prison, challenged the Freeman claim. He holds a will that he said Manson signed and sent him 16 years ago.

The two-page document said Manson disinherited two known sons and any unknown children and leaves Channels the entire estate, which includes potentially lucrative rights to his image and music he wrote and recorded.

Guns N' Roses 1993 recorded a Manson song, "Look at Your Game, Girl," though royalties went to victims under a court order. Manson was also an acquaintance of Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in 1968, and the band recorded a variation of a Manson song under the title "Never Learn Not To Love."

Channels, a contractor who said he has troves of Manson memorabilia including clothing and letters, and has sold autographed cassettes and CDs of the convict's music, disputed there's much value to the estate.

"I feel sorry for the other side if they do win because there's a lot bad juju that comes along with Charles Manson," Channels said. "It's not all roses."

Others have suggested Channels intends to profit off Manson's will if he prevails.

Channels, who said he couldn't find a lawyer willing to take the case and represents himself, said his mission is only to make sure his friend can rest in peace. He said Manson feared his body could be mutilated and tattoos put on display and ashes worn in pendants.

Court documents filed by Davis claim Freeman is the son of the late Charles Manson Jr. and the grandson of Charles Manson and his first wife, Rosalie Willis.

A man who believes Manson fathered him during a Wisconsin orgy in the late 1960s also plans to make a claim to the estate.

Matt Lentz, a Los Angeles-area musician who goes by the name Matthew Roberts, has a will Manson purportedly signed in January 2017 naming him as beneficiary, said his agent, Mike Smith. He said Manson gave the will to friend and memorabilia collector Ben Gurecki, who is named as executor.

Lentz was expected in court, but didn't show up Monday. Smith said Lentz was also having trouble finding a lawyer to take the case.
Three people -- including one firefighter -- were injured when a fire broke out at Trump Tower in New York City on Monday, officials said.

A small electrical fire started in the cooling tower on the roof of the Fifth Avenue high-rise, which was built by President Trump when he was a businessman, just before 7 a.m., the FDNY said. The flames were put out about an hour later.

More than 126 firefighters responded to the scene. Video footage showed several firefighters on the roof while smoke spewed forth.

The building was not evacuated. A firefighter sustained minor injuries when debris fell on him. The building's engineer and another person suffered injuries that were not life threatening. They were treated at the scene and refused further medical attention.

Trump's son, Eric Trump, thanked the New York City fire department for the "incredible job" they did containing the flames before the fire spread.

"There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower," Trump tweeted. "The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

Trump Tower has been protected by heavy security presence since President Trump was elected in November 2016. The building houses both businesses and luxury apartments.

First lady Melania Trump and their son Barron lived in the New York City residence for the first few months of Trumps presidency before officially moving into the White House.
A Florida couple couldnt getaway with keeping their treehouse up.

The Supreme Court declined to take Lynn Tran and Richard Hazens case, a decision which forces them to tear down their elaborate two-story treehouse beachfront getaway. The treehouse was built on their Holmes Beach property on Floridas Anna Maria Island. The couple brought the case to the Supreme Court after a Florida court ruled they needed a permit to build the house.

Ironically, in order for the couple to take down the treehouse, they will also need to obtain a city permit, WTSP reported.

Tran and Hazen said they built the treehouse in 2011 after city officials told them they didnt need a permit to construct it. They spent six months and $30,000 to construct the beachfront treehouse  complete with hammocks, working windows and a view of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Its hard to describe," Tran told WTSP. "It brings the inner child inside you out."

However, someone complained about the structure and after some digging, the city determined the couple needed a permit to build it. The treehouse was also located in an area where building is prohibited because of a city setback. The couple tried to take the fight to local voters but they were ultimately stopped.

Tran and Hazen have paid thousands of dollars to keep the treehouse from getting torn down, including paying a daily $50 fine. Their lawyer, David Levin, said his clients rights were violated when a Florida court rubber stamped a ruling proposed by Holmes Beach officials without any evidence of independent consideration.

Tran previously told WTSP it would be hard to think about the possibility of the Supreme Court not taking their case, adding the couple didnt do anything wrong.

The likelihood of the Supreme Court taking the treehouse case was slim to begin with. The justices only hear about 80 of the thousands of cases that are requested yearly.

Fox News Elizabeth Zwirz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Florida authorities are investigating after a mother and her two children were found dead in their minivan on Sunday after it was found submerged in a pond.

The body of Shatoria Brown, 27, was found outside the vehicle, while the bodies of her two children  3-year-old Ra'Layah Johnson and 5-year-old Ra'Majesty Johnson  were found inside.

FLORIDA GIRL, 11, WEARING HEADPHONES, LOOKING AT PHONE HIT AND KILLED BY TRAIN

The crash occurred in Immokalee just before midnight Saturday night, Fox 4 reported, citing Florida Highway Patrol. Troopers said that rather than stopping the car at the end of a street, Brown allegedly continued to drive until the van hit the water.

RaLayah was pronounced dead at a hospital, and RaMajesty was pronounced dead at the scene.

A woman named Michelle, identified by Fox 4 as Browns best friend, said that neighbors witnessed Brown running door to door, asking people for help but was unable to find anyone.

Michelle said thats when Brown ran back to the sinking vehicle to save her children herself.

COLD FLORIDA TEMPS CAUSING IGUANAS TO 'FREEZE,' FALL OUT OF TREES

A number of residents in the Immokalee neighborhood told the Naples Daily News that they didnt hear the car braking or tires squealing before Browns van hit the water.

State highway patrol is investigating the incident.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A national fraternity has been banned in Pennsylvania and ordered to pay a six-figure fine, and four of its former members were sentenced to jail Monday after a 19-year-old freshman pledge died during a hazing ritual in 2013.

Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American cultural fraternity, was sentenced Monday for the role its Baruch College campus members had in 19-year-old freshman pledge Chun Michael Dengs death.

In Monroe County court, the fraternity  convicted of involuntary manslaughter  was banned from Pennsylvania for 10 years. It was also ordered to pay a fine of more than $110,000.

FRATERNITY BROTHERS TO BE SENTENCED AFTER ALLEGEDLY COVERING UP PLEDGE HAZING DEATH

Four of the fraternity's former members  Kenny Kwan, Charles Lai, Raymond Lam and Sheldon Wong  who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, hindering apprehension and other charges, were sentenced to jail time.

Kwan got 12 to 24 months in county jail, while Lam and Wong were sentenced to 10 to 24 months each. Lai, who spent 342 days in jail after he was unable to make bail, was sentenced to time served.

All four defendants apologized, and Lam, who was the most emotional, said his "guilt will never go away, and I think about Mr. Deng every day." He also said he's attempted to kill himself.

These four men faced the most serious charges. Dozens of other defendants have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to probation.

STATE OFFICE TAKES OVER PENN STATE FRATERNITY-FALL DEATH CASE

"It's the epitome of a lack of acceptance of responsibility, Assistant District Attorney Kim Metzger said in court. It's their rituals and functions that led us here today.

A grand jury said Pi Delta Psi members physically abused Deng before his death in a hazing ritual at a rented house in the Poconos.

The teen was blindfolded and forced to wear a heavy backpack before he was repeatedly tackled during a ritual known as "glass ceiling."

He became unconscious and was carried inside the house while fraternity members changed his clothes. The frat brothers did a Google search of his symptoms, and hid banners and other fraternity memorabilia in an attempted cover-up, prosecutors said.

In a written statement, Pi Delta Psi said its now-disbanded Baruch chapter had brought "shame and dishonor" to the national fraternity, while the fraternity also called itself in part a victim  which Monroe County President Judge Margherita Patti-Worthington scolded.

"I would never label the national fraternity as a 'victim,'" the judge said.

"Not one person out of 37 picked up a telephone and called an ambulance. I cannot wrap my head around it," Judge Patti-Worthington said. "So there's something greater going on here, and I think it's probably really prevalent. We see across the country these issues in fraternities."

Pi Delta Psi has 25 chapters in 11 states, including one at Penn State University that will now have to be disbanded.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An Ohio man who withdrew a guilty plea after serving part of a life sentence in the drowning of his 1-year-old son and later was found guilty in a jury trial was sentenced again on Monday.

A court official said a judge in Ottawa sentenced Michael Luebrecht to 20 years to life in prison. A Putnam County jury on Friday found Luebrecht guilty of aggravated murder. Luebrecht and his attorney had argued that medications he took for mental health issues contributed to the killing at his northwestern Ohio home in 2005.

Luebrecht had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2006 in the drowning of his son, Joel.

A message seeking comment was left on Monday for Luebrecht's attorney.

Luebrecht testified at trial that he did not remember much in the months before his son's death, but said he clearly recalled killing him.

"There was a mission to kill Joel and that mission had to be done," he said, describing how he felt like there was an outside force pushing him.

The boy's mother testified that she blamed doctors who kept changing her husband's medication that he was taking for depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Amy Luebrecht said medications her husband took from 1994 to 2004 were working until his medication was changed.

County Prosecutor Gary Lammers noted that Luebrecht lied several times on the day of his son's death, including telling a neighbor that the boy fell into a bathtub.
Hundreds of mourners have gathered for the funeral of three family members killed in a New Year's Eve shooting at a New Jersey home that also claimed the life of a family friend.

Monday's funeral for Steven and Linda Kologi and their 18-year-old daughter, Brittany Kologi, was held at St. Jerome Roman Catholic Church in West Long Branch. It came two days after mourners had gathered there to remember the fourth victim, 70-year-old Mary Schulz.

Monmouth County prosecutors say the Kologis' 16-year-old son shot the victims at close range with a semi-automatic rifle in their Long Branch home. But they haven't disclosed a motive for the shooting.

Schulz was the longtime partner of Steven Kologi's father, who was in the house but escaped unharmed with two other people.
A teenager who sought to avenge the death of her boyfriend and told a 15-year-old girl she would "see her in hell" before stabbing her 13 times pleaded guilty Monday to the brutal slaying that raised the spotlight on MS-13's presence in the suburbs of the nations capital.

Venus Romero Iraheta, who was 17 at the time of the January 2017 murder, pleaded guilty in a Virginia courtroom as an adult in the murder of Damaris Alexandra Reyes Rivas, the Washington Post reported.

Iraheta, now 18, faces a a maximum of life in prison plus 20 years when she is sentenced on May 25.

The January 2017 killing of Reyes Rivas, which ultimately resulted in the arrest of 18 young people, highlighted the brutal nature of one of the nations most violent and powerful street gangs. According to the prosecution,

Reyes Rivas was taken from Maryland to a Virginia park where she was stabbed with a knife and jabbed with a stick by a large group of MS-13 members. Her body was eventually discovered after it was dumped under a highway overpass on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

Federal prosecutors said Iraheta was the primary attacker, stabbing the 15-year-old 13 times and slicing off one of her tattoos, according to NBC Washington.

MS-13 COHORTS PLEAD GUILTY IN VICIOUS REVENGE KILLING OF 15-YEAR-OLD VIRGINIA GIRL

"She told the victim she would never forgive her, FBI Agent Fernando Uribe said in courtroom testimony. She would 'see her in hell.' She would never forget her name."

Uribe testified in July that Jose Cerrato, a 17-year-old alleged gang member, filmed and narrated the killing on a cellphone with the intention of sending the footage to MS-13 leaders in El Salvador.

Its unclear if the video was ever sent to El Salvador, but Uribe testified that Cerrato was promoted in the gang for his role in the murder, The Washington Post reported at the time.

MS-13 GANG MEMBER FILMED, NARRATED TEEN'S KILLING, FBI AGENT TELLS JUDGE

In October, three MS-13 affiliates pleaded guilty to their roles in the savage death.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, Cindy Blanco Hernandez, 19, Aldair J. Miranda Carcamo, 18, and Emerson Fugon Lopez, 17, pleaded guilty to a host of charges that included abduction and, in two instances, gang participation. They are expected to be sentenced May 5, 2018.
A group of Family Career and Community Leaders of America students recently took a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend a national conference and experience the nations capital.

Its like a meeting for all the chapter to go to a big conference, West County FCCLA Member Matthew Clifton said. There are workshops to learn leadership skills, and some of us participated in a tournament-style knowledge bowl.

FCCLA State President Jacob Briley said the national cluster meeting is held every year in two U.S. cities. This year, the West County students were at the cluster meeting from Nov. 10-14.

National cluster meeting is hosted every year in two spots in the United States because some people have to travel a long way, Briley said. This year it was hosted in Washington, D.C. and Oklahoma City.

Briley said the national cluster meetings allow students to meet a greater variety of people from different states, as opposed to state conferences which only involve FCCLA members from within the State of Missouri.

The students attended various workshops during their time in Washington, with each focusing on a different aspect of the mission of FCCLA.

Hayleigh Marlow of West County said she attended a workshop teaching leadership skills, while Mikayla Sherrill said she learned about healthy cooking and ways to improve ones lifestyle. Evan Knox said he learned about building character and the different traits of a good leader.

Apart from the actual cluster meeting, Clifton said the students were able to explore and experience Washington.

We did pretty much all of the things you think of when you think of D.C., he said. We got to see the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial and the White house.

We got a tour of the Capitol Building, which was really cool. We got to see the Library of Congress, Arlington Cemetery with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Changing of Guards and a wreath ceremony with Taps played.

The students also got the chance to visit the Holocaust Museum and the National Archives, where they were able to see the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Before the main group of FCCLA students arrived in Washington, Briley attended a Capitol Leadership Program sponsored by FCCLA as a delegate from Missouri.

For the first couple of days, we went to workshops that taught us advocacy skills, like how to go and actually talk to your representatives and senators and talk to them about their job and the bills that are in Congress right now.

On our last day we actually got to go and meet with all the senators and representatives from Missouri and we advocated for career and technical funding. We got to actually go and advocate on behalf of that, because thats the funding that funds the Family and Consumer Sciences programs, which are the foundation of our organization.

Briley said he and other Missouri delegates had the opportunity to meet with Senators Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill about educational funding, as well as their respective educational staff. As a group, the local students met with Representative Jason Smith on the steps of the Capitol.
A person jumped into a New Jersey Transit police SUV and drove it into the Hoboken terminal doors during Monday morning rush hour at the major transportation hub, police said.

A suspect was arrested shortly after the 8 a.m. incident occurred, transportation officials said. The doors, which led to the terminals waiting room, were significantly damaged. There were no reported injuries.

The motive of the driver was not immediately clear.

Social media users reported seeing the police car stopped at the ferry entrance to the waiting room. Police tape cordoned off the area as officials investigated the scene and the ticketing window was closed.

Hoboken terminal sees thousands of commuters daily who travel through the area between New York City and New Jersey.
An hours-long manhunt to find the second man involved in the deadly shooting of a Washington state sheriff's deputy late Sunday has ended after the suspect was captured, police announced Monday.

The deputy, identified as 34-year-old Daniel A. McCartney, was responding to a home invasion about 11:25 p.m. when he began chasing two burglars, Q13 Fox reported. Dispatchers heard screaming and a scuffle during the initial 911 call.

Several shots were fired during the chase, striking McCartney. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Heartbroken to report Deputy Daniel McCartney, #484, lost his life overnight while courageously protecting citizens of Pierce Co., Pierce County Sheriffs Office tweeted.

Its unclear if the deputy was able to return fire at the suspects, who were not immediately identified.

One of the suspects was found dead near the scene, and a handgun was recovered. The second was in police custody Monday afternoon. It was unclear which of the suspects shot the deputy, or if both fired at him.

McCartney, a Navy veteran, joined the force in 2014 and left behind a wife and three young sons, police said.

"Deputy, Father, Husband, Son, Friend, Brother. Hero," police said. "We are heartbroken but steadfast in our pursuit of justice."

Piercce County Sheriff Paul Pastor said, "There's a sadness that will be felt and should be felt in the community" following McCartney's death.

"He is a young deputy who signed up to watch over other people. He had an ethic in his heart for doing something for other people," Pastor said. He told KING-TV he doesn't call McCartney's death "a tragedy," but rather "a murder and a horrible loss."

The incident prompted Bethel schools to be canceled amid the hunt for the second suspect.

Fox News' Nicole Darrah contributed to this report.
English is being banned in primary schools in Iran, according to a top official, after the regimes Islamic leaders warned that learning the language of America too early would trigger a cultural invasion of Western civilization.

Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations, Mehdi Navid-Adham, head of the state-run high education council, told state television, according to The Guardian. The assumption is that in primary education the groundwork for the Iranian culture of the students is laid.

The teaching of English usually starts in Iran in middle school, at the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools below that age also have English classes, according to The Guardian. Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day, while children from more privileged families attending non-government schools receive English teaching.

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, previously voiced his outrage and said in a speech to teachers, according to The Guardian: That does not mean opposition to learning a foreign language, but [this is the] promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children, young adults and youths.

A wave of anti-government protest demonstrations began on December 28 in Iran, exploding tensions between the Islamic republics hardline government and its fed-up populace.

Tehran has moved swiftly to quell the most serious protests since 2009s Green Movement, cutting off social media and mobilizing police and military forces to deal with the spreading demonstrations.

Iranian officials said 22 people were killed and more than 1,000 arrested during the protests that spread to more than 80 cities and rural towns, according to The Guardian.

The current protests could have enormous significance for the future of Iran and are focused on a number of issues. One motivation for the protests is the institutionalized discrimination against Irans ethnic minorities and the greater economic hardship in Irans periphery.

President Donald Trump has voiced encouragement for the anti-government demonstrations. The U.S. called a U.N. meeting on Friday, portraying the protests as a human rights issue that could spill over into an international problem.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane joined the hunt Sunday for 32 sailors after an Iranian tanker collided with a Chinese freighter off Chinas eastern coast, catching fire and spilling oil into the sea.

The crew  30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis  on the tanker Sanchi was traveling from Iran to South Korea when it crashed into the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in East China Sea, 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai, Chinas Ministry of Transport said. All 32 people on the Sanchi were missing as of Sunday, but the 21 crew members of the Crystal  carrying grain brought from the United States  were rescued.

"We have no information on their fate," an official in Irans Oil Ministry told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. "We cannot say all of them have died, because rescue teams are there and providing services."

The U.S. sent a P-8A aircraft which searched nearly 3,600 square nautical miles -- but did not find any of the missing crew, the Navy reported.

The Chinese Ministry of Transportation sent at least four rescue ships and three cleaning boats to the collision scene Sunday morning, according to Reuters. The South Korean Coast Guard also assisted with rescue efforts by sending an airplane and ship for the search.

Sanchi, run by Irans top oil shipping operator, was carrying nearly 1 million barrels of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, Chinese authorities said. The tanker went ablaze shortly after the collision, sending plumes of black smoke into the air as oil spilled into the sea. Its unclear how much oil was leaked and if it was still pooling out of the tanker as of Sunday.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.

An official told the AP the tanker was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co. and had been rented by a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Co.

Saturdays collision was the first major maritime incident since January 2016, when international sanctions on Iran were lifted, Reuters reported. It was the second one for a ship from the National Iranian Tanker Co. in less than a year and a half.

In August 2016, one of its tankers collided with a Swiss container ship in the Singapore Strait, damaging both ships but causing no injuries or oil spill. No one was killed in the incident.

The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group left San Diego Friday on its way to the western Pacific.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Talks aimed at thawing the frigid relations between North and South Korea are set to start in a few hours.

The first formal high-level talks in over two years will be held in Panmunjom, on the demilitarized zone between the two countries.

Primarily aimed at discussing North Koreas participation in next months winter Olympics in South Korea, Seoul is hoping the talks go beyond that.

We expect the discussion to focus on the mutual interest of improving North-South relations, said Baik Tae-Hyun of the South Korean Unification Ministry.

Clearly, Kim Jong Un does, too.

Ever since his New Years message, the combative leader of the Hermit Kingdom has been talking up warmer ties with the South while keeping his nuclear arsenal trained on the U.S.

Some fear the North is trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the US. Or that a dovish Seoul could give away too much.

Still, the U.S. did delay U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises until after the Olympics, as requested by the South.

And President Trumps recent references to the talks have been generally positive.

The South Koreans opening this channel could have positive side effects that would make it easier for Americans to talk to North Koreans at a senior level, leading Seoul-based Korea expert John DeLury told Fox News.

Washingtons caveat for U.S.-North Korea talks is a pause in nuclear and missile testing by the North. After a very nervous 2017, the residents in Seoul are merely wishing for more talk, and less provocative action in the region.

I believe any kind of communication is good, one local told Fox News. And, as I understand it, President Trump is behind this as well.

Many in South Korea are torn. They want peace with their feisty neighbor  but dont want to unsettle Uncle Sam.

But they are trying to be optimistic.

Im very hopeful, another resident said. It is a chance to communicate.
Italy is warning of extreme avalanche danger in its northwest Piedmont region, while an avalanche already has blocked a road in the neighboring region of Valle d'Aosta.

Italian news agency ANSA says no injuries were reported from Monday's avalanche that isolated Cogne, an Alpine town popular with tourists. Firefighters and others were trying to clear the road.

Also Monday, the regional environmental protection agency ARPA said the threat of avalanches in northwestern Piedmont was "very strong" and rated at the maximum Level 5 on the danger scale.

The agency warned of "possible spontaneous avalanches of medium and large dimensions that could impact roads or infrastructure in the valleys below."

It said snow would be most unstable between Monday night and Tuesday morning.
A British mother accused her daughters academy of discrimination after the teen apparently ran afoul of the school's extreme haircuts policy by shaving her head for a charity that makes wigs for children with illnesses.

Anneka Baldwin said her 14-year-old daughter Niamh was placed in isolation at the Mounts Bay Academy in Penzance on Thursday after cutting her hair over the Christmas break and donating it to Little Princess Trust.

I think this is the most courageous and amazing thing to do and makes me so proud, that's why I am so upset that the school has made her feel so low and put her in to isolation because her hair needs to be 1cm longer to be able to join in with classes and be allowed to see her peers in the playground, Baldwin wrote in a Facebook post.

Baldwin said Niamh has always received positive reports and feedback from her teachers at the school, located in the southwestern tip of England.

This doesn't change because of a hair style and to me it is discrimination !!! I'm actually fuming ! Baldwin wrote.

The family told Cornwall Live that Niamh didnt attend school on Friday after the incident, but the school, which describes itself on its website as a place where the rigid schooling models of the past are giving way to an exploration of 21st century learning and living, is doubling down on their policies.

"The policy on extreme haircuts in school is very clear and has been published in our behavior policy for many years, Principal Sara Davey told Cornwall Live. Extreme haircuts including head shaving have never been allowed and this is common for schools across the UK.

A behavior policy document on the academys website that outlines its hierarchy of consequences says students will be placed in the inclusion room if they have extreme hair styles (principals discretion).

The academys website says nothing below a grade two haircut is allowed for boys, according to Cornwall Live.

Davey said the school supports students who want to raise money for charities but said she was surprised the Baldwins didnt approach them before Niamh shaved her head.

"Since returning to school Niamh has had access to her lessons in the inclusion room as we have extensive materials available to students, Davey said. This includes lesson activities and resources via digital technology.

Davey added: "All students know that this is the school policy and they also know that the consequence is to complete school work in the inclusion room until the hair grows so that is it no longer extreme."

Davey said she plans to meet with Anneka Baldwin on Monday to try to resolve the situation, but suggested to Cornwall Live that Niamh should wear a headscarf while her hair grows back.
An Iranian oil tanker that's burning out of control off the coast of China reportedly may explode and sink, even as authorities work to recover 31 missing crew members.

At least one crew member has been reported dead on the burning vessel, and there are concerns there may be an explosion, state broadcaster China Central Television reported Monday.

The Sanchi tanker run by Irans top oil shipping operator, National Iranian Tanker Co, had been sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal late Saturday in the East China Sea, about 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai, China's Ministry of Transport said.

The remains of one of the 32 mariners on board was discovered on the blazing wreck Monday afternoon, Iranian and Chinese officials confirmed to Reuters.

Mohammad Rastad, head of Irans Ports and Maritime Organization, told the ISNA news agency the body had been sent to Shanghai for identification. The fate of the remaining 31 sailors is not known.

Search and cleanup efforts have been hampered by fierce fires and poisonous gases that have engulfed the tanker and surrounding waters, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The South Korean coast guard said Monday that thick smoke is still billowing from a burning oil tanker in the East China Sea and bad weather is also worsening visibility.

China, South Korea and the U.S. have sent ships and planes to the area to search for the Sanchi's crew. The U.S. Navy sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa, Japan, to aid the search.

"The Chinese government takes maritime accidents like this very seriously, and has already dispatched many search and rescue teams to the scene to carry out search and rescue, Lu Kang, a spokesman at Chinas foreign ministry, told reporters at a news briefing.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the initial collision, but all 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the U.S. to China, were rescued, the Chinese ministry said. The Crystal's crew members were all Chinese nationals.

Kwon Yong-deok, a Korea Coast Guard official, told the Associated Press thick black smoke was still billowing from the ship on Monday afternoon and bad weather was worsening visibility at the scene. The Sanchi was carrying 150,000 tons, or nearly 1 million barrels of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities, who have dispatched three ships to clean the spill.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989, badly damaging local ecology and the area's fishing-based economy.

US NAVY PLANE JOINS HUNT FOR 32 SAILORS AFTER IRANIAN TANKER COLLIDES WITH FREIGHTER OFF CHINA

The size of the oil slick from the Sanchi  and the scale of the environmental toll  may be smaller. Unlike the thick crude that gushed out of the Valdez, much of the light, gassy condensate from the Sanchi may have evaporated or burned immediately, Kwon said.

The Sanchi's own fuel that leaked during the collision will be more difficult to clean, officials said.

South Korean petrochemical company Hanwha Total Co., a 50-50 partnership between the Seoul-based Hanwha Group and French oil giant Total, said in an email to the AP it had contracted the Sanchi to import Iranian condensate to South Korea.

A Hanwha Total spokesman, who asked not to be named citing office policies, said there is "little possibility" that condensate would leave traces in the ocean after it burned. He added the losses would be covered by an insurance company. The Sanchi's cargo was estimated to be worth more than $60 million.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Country

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Ireland United States Minor Outlying Islands United States of America Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
Poland's new prime minister is looking to improve strained relations with partners in the European Union when he arrives in Brussels on Tuesday.

Mateusz Morawiecki, who replaced Beata Szydlo last month, is expected to stand his ground over several thorny issues that have raised concerns across the EU.

The Polish government's stance on justice reform and immigration has prompted so much unease within the EU that a procedure to strip the country of voting rights in the 28-nation bloc has been started.

Ahead of the introductory bilateral dinner between the new prime minister and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Poland's deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Szymanski said he expects "Brussels to understand our position."
A North Korean boater was found near the coast of South Korea in the Sea of Japan on Monday, the Souths Coast Guard said, more than a month after a spate of fishermen and boats from the Hermit Kingdom washed up along the Japanese coast.

The North Korean citizen was found in a small boat near Ulleung Island, just before 8 a.m., according to Yonhap News Agency. Authorities are investigating if the North Korean was attempting to defect to the South.

The North Korean boat was abandoned at sea.

About 1,000 North Korean defect to the South yearly, but the number of defectors began to drop last year compared to previous years, according to the BBC.

A series of odd Hermit Kingdom finds in late November began washing ashore in Japan, including a skeleton-filled ghost ship and a body with North Korean words scribbled on it. Boats filled with North Korean fishermen were discovered several times, but they were ultimately sent back to the regime.

BOAT WITH 10 SUSPECTED NORTH KOREANS FOUND OFF JAPANESE COAST, COAST GUARD SAYS

Officials linked the increase in North Koreans found at sea to a reported campaign by the North to send fishermen farther out for more catches. However, its unclear if people aboard those boats that drift near Japanese shores each year intend to defect or are simply unable to make their way back in unseaworthy wooden vessels.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Kenneth Lee Scruggs was due to be released from prison in February, just more than 14 years after raping a woman outside a Fredericksburg homeless shelter.

But the 53-year-old wont be set free next monthand may never be freed at all.

The state Attorney Generals Office is trying to have Scruggs declared a violent sexual predator, a move that would allow the state to civilly commit Scruggs to the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation, a secure facility in Nottoway County for sex offenders deemed a danger to society.

While inmates can be held indefinitely at the center, they receive treatment and are evaluated yearly to determine whether they are fit to be released.

During a hearing Monday in Fredericksburg Circuit Court, a psychologist testified for the Attorney Generals Office that Scruggs is a man with psychopathic traits who struggles to control his impulses and that he is highly likely to commit another violent sexual offense if set free.

Scruggs attorney, James Ilijevich, said there was no evidence that his client presented a threat, either during his 14 years in prison or during his life before the 2003 rape.

While cross-examining the psychologist, Ilijevich noted that Scruggs averaged about one infraction per year while in prison, none of which were sexually related. He also pointed out that his client had no other violent sexual offenses on his record.

Scruggs has a lengthy criminal record, mostly drunk in public and trespassing offenses, but also burglary and assault convictions.

Ilijevich said nothing presented by prosecutor Keisha DillardBrady gave the state any reason to be worried Scruggs would commit another sex crime upon being released.

But the psychologist for the state portrayed Scruggs as a man with numerous psychological red flags.

She testified that Scruggs never accepted responsibility for the 2003 rape of his former girlfriend outside the former location of the Thurman Brisben Center on Essex Street.

The assault happened on a May afternoon in 2003. Scruggs, who was homeless at the time and a former resident of the shelter, was arrested later that day after fleeing the area on a bicycle, according to a Free LanceStar report at the time.

Scruggs eventually pleaded guilty to rape and forcible sodomy and was sentenced to 40 years, with all but 15 suspended, according to court records.

The psychologist said Scruggs told her the sex was consensual, not forced.

She said tests and interviews indicated that Scruggs displayed traits of antisocial personality disorder, meaning he used others for his own gratification without considering the impact on them.

While she testified that it was difficult to gauge Scruggs truthfulness during interviews, she said he had an over-inflated perception of himself and that he displayed evidence of hypersexuality. She also found that he had a high level of psychopathic traits and that Scruggs was a well above average threat to commit another violent sexual offense.

Judge Gordon Willis said there was enough evidence to proceed to trial, which is scheduled to be held April 18.
Voters who say they were disenfranchised in the error-marred 28th District House of Delegates contest announced Sunday that they will appeal a federal judges decision not to order a do-over election in the Fredericksburg-area contest.

In a hearing Friday evening in Alexandria, Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia declined to order a special election in the 28th District. He said he would not issue a preliminary injunction blocking Republican Bob Thomas from being seated Wednesday when lawmakers convene in Richmond for a 60-day legislative session.

The judges ruling appeared to clear a hurdle for House Republicans to seat Thomas on Wednesday and proceed with a vote on the new speaker of the House. Republicans, clinging to a much-narrowed 51-49 edge in the chamber, have designated Del. M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights, as their choice to succeed retiring Speaker of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford.

Republicans say they will proceed on Wednesday as planned.

This is a last-ditch effort by Democrats that will fail just like every other legal challenge theyve brought since Election Day, Cox communications director Parker Slaybaugh said Sunday.

We believe Judge Ellis decision was the correct one and we look forward to seeing Delegate-elect Bob Thomas sworn in on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the current speaker noted on Twitter Sunday that the judge has not yet entered an order on his Friday ruling, which means it is unclear how soon the appellate court will take up the issue.

In the 28th District contest to succeed Howell, Republican Thomas has been certified as a 73-vote winner over Democrat Joshua Cole, but at least 147 voters cast ballots in the wrong district.

House Democrats said Sunday that Kenneth and D.D. Lecky of Fredericksburg, two of the 147 voters, will appeal the judges decision to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A Democratic fundraising pitch sent Sunday afternoon said a third voter, Phil Ridderhoff, also is part of the appeal.

With the serious errors in this election and a margin this narrow, there is no way to determine the rightful winner of this election, said Democratic lawyer Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, who is representing the voters.

We cant say in Virginia that every vote counts and then tell 147 people except yours. 

In a video supplied by Virginia Democrats, D.D. Lecky said she initially considered running for the 28th District seat representing parts of Fredericksburg and Stafford County, but that she and her husband were excited to hear about Coles candidacy and to volunteer on his behalf.

D.D. Lecky teared up when recalling that she was wrongly given a ballot to vote in the 88th District instead of the 28th.

It was really hard to sit there and fill out this ballot and vote for a candidate that wasnt in my district, she recalled. It was so disappointing.
Between late January and February of 1968, Lawrence Moter and fellow surgeons at the 2nd Surgical Hospital in Chu Lai, Vietnam, performed 341 operationsincluding 39 amputations.

The North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet offensive, a wave of attacks on military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam, on Jan. 30. The 2nd Surgical Hospital was the first stop for many service members injured in the fighting.

You dont see anything here like you see there, Moter said, comparing his 25-year career as a surgeon in Fredericksburg to his two-year stint as an Army surgeon half a century ago. People would come in top to bottom with 50 wounds on them, it seems. Lots of people would come in with parts of their limbs already gone.

Nine out of 10 of the patients would have to be evacuated, with some wounds still open, to fixed hospitals for further operations, Moter said. What he did at the 2nd Surgical Hospital was life- and limb-saving surgery.

The injured would come in by helicopteroften from what the surgeons called search and be destroyed missions, Moter said. Because of the rapidity of helicopter evacuation, they could be seen by a doctor within one or two hours of sustaining the injury.

The wounded were usually suffering from multiple fragment wounds from semiautomatic rifle fire, booby traps and land mines. Surgeons would debride the woundcut away dead tissueclear it of debris and dress it. They could perform blood transfusions and some vascular surgery. They would set fracturesand amputate if needed.

Twice, Moter had to operate on soldiers with unexploded grenades still inside them.

Moter, who grew up in Bowling Green and graduated from Caroline High School in 1952, had just set up practice in Fredericksburg when he was drafted into the Army. As the war in Vietnam escalated, more troops were being injured and the Army needed doctors.

Then 34, Moter left his wife, Alice, and four young children in Fredericksburg and deployed to Chu Lai on the South China Sea, where he arrived in August of 1967. The 2nd Surgical Hospital, where he was posted, was the most northern Army hospital and the busiest, he said.

All the surgeons wanted to get up to Chu Lai, he said, because there they would usually be the first to treat the wounded.

The seven surgeons at the 2nd Surgical were on-call 24 hours a day and there was always something coming in, Moter said.

At one time, during the height of the Tet offensive, the four operating rooms at the hospital were in continuous use for five days.

Moter also treated non-battle injuries, such as those from tanks or other motor vehicles, and Vietnamese civilian injuries. Once, he removed the appendix of a soldier from Fredericksburg. Photos in his scrapbook show him treating a Vietnamese child with knife lacerations on his back.

Moter left Vietnam in July 1968 and returned to the U.S. He was awarded a bronze star for meritorious achievement as a surgeon and was promoted from captain to major.

After working at Fort Belvoir for a year, his military service was over and he returned to civilian life.

Fifty years on from his wartime experience, Moter, who returned to Bowling Green after he retired, shares a quote from Christophers Textbook of Surgery, a book he studied as a student at the Medical College of Virginia, which he says perfectly describes his experience as an Army surgeon:

Regrettable as wars are, they provide the surgeon with his great opportunity for service to his fellow men. The surgeons life is never quite complete without the experience of warfare. If he is advantageously suited, he can do more good in the course of two or three years of military service in the saving of life and limb than he can in a score of years in civilian practice, for he has the opportunity of serving the young rather than the aged.

The surgeon is the only victor in war.
Within a couple of years, Spotsylvania County could be home to one of the largest solar energy facilities on the East Coast.

Utah-based Sustainable Power Group is proposing a 3,500-acre solar farm in western Spotsylvania as similar projects take shape in the Fredericksburg region. The site near Fawn Lake includes 29 tracts of mostly timberland off West Catharpin Road.

The company has not submitted its application for a special-use permit, but recently sent letters to nearby residents announcing an informational meeting 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Craigs Baptist Church at 14123 West Catharpin Road.

The company hopes to begin construction on the 500-megawatt solar generating facility in August and wrap up in late 2019, Sustainable Power Group Permitting Manager Adam Furman wrote in the letter dated Dec. 29.

The Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors each must hold public hearings and take a vote on the proposal. Supervisors set the stage for the project late last year by unanimously passing an ordinance that allows solar facilities on certain agricultural property if developers obtain a special-use permit.

Officials with Sustainable Power Group, or sPower, did not immediately return calls for comment. The company describes itself as the largest private owner of solar facilities, with customers that include the Southern California Public Power Authority.

This past summer, AES Corp. and Alberta Investment Management Corp. purchased sPower for $1.6 billion.

We built a highly profitable business that will drive skilled worker job creation, local economic activity, and reduced environmental damage, Jeffrey Tannenbaum, the companys board chairman, stated in a news release announcing the sale. We achieved this in spite of many obstacles that appear when a new industry challenges the status quo.

Dominion Energy has also developed solar projects in recent years, though none have been as large as the proposed facility in Spotsylvania.

Sustainable Power Groups plan could face resistance from some homeowners in western Spotsylvania, a rural area near the Orange County line.

The Spotsylvania Hunt Club has leased much of the property from Riveroak Timberland Investments for the past two decades, and hunters have been using it for at least 60 years. Hunt Club President Paul Minter, who also lives near the site, said much of the land looks like a desert now that many of the oaks and other trees have been cut.

He said he opposes the plan, but thinks supervisors will support it because of the additional revenue the solar farm would generate.

How you gonna stop big money? he asked. Thats big money.

On the upside, he added: Its probably better than 4,000 homes going up there.

Its unclear exactly how much Sustainable Power Group would invest in the project, though the price tag will be substantial. The King George County Board of Supervisors last month voted in favor of a 610-acre solar farm near Hopyard Farm, with developer Community Energy expecting to invest $30 million on the project.

Culpeper County recently approved a solar farm, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was in Fauquier County in late October to install the last of 235,900 solar panels at a Remington facility.

And last week, McAuliffe attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a solar energy system atop a textile printing plant in Gordonsville. Those solar panels will power almost half of the plants energy use, according to a press release.

Output from solar facilitieswhich convert sunlight into electricityincreased nearly 47 percent from October 2016 through October of last year, according to a recent federal report. The U.S. Department of Energys website states that the industrys growth is paving the way to a cleaner, more sustainable energy future, noting that the cost of the technology has dropped significantly in recent years.

Spotsylvania resident James Leigh, who lives near the proposed solar facility, said hes worried the project will be an eyesore, hurting property values. He said he hopes the company keeps some of the propertys evergreen trees, which could act as a buffer between the solar panels and homes.

Im not against green initiatives, solar, wind and everything else, he said. But youve got to take care of the folks that live around it.

Supervisor Greg Benton, whose Livingston District includes the site, said company officials told him they plan to do just that. They dont want it seen, he said, referring to the solar panels.

In an interview, he expressed support for the project, which he said would increase tax revenue while retaining western Spotsylvanias rural character. Benton noted that the state recently purchased a 2,900-acre forest nearby to establish a wildlife preserve. For that side of the county, were going to have our little rural area there for quite a while, he said. He also said sPower wants to help hunt clubs find other, similar property to use.

The company will generate several hundred jobs during construction and have 10 to 15 full-time employees after that, Benton said.

They really come across as a very legit, very straightforward, we-do-what-we-say company, he said.

An earlier version of this article has been corrected.
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POLICE REPORTS  Someone stole a tire and rim from a vehicle at a child learning center recently. According to the police report on file, the rear passenger side tire and rim...

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News

centerpiece

New housing rules put segregation study in question

GALVESTON

New federal housing rules revealed Friday wont stop plans for the construction of new public housing in Galveston, but could delay a fair housing study the city, the Galveston Housing Authority and others have been working on for months.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Friday announced a rule change giving cities around the nation more time to study racial segregation in their communities and to come up with plans to correct it.

Such plans were ordered by the housing department in 2015 during the Obama administration. Cities that receive Community Development Block Grants from the federal government were required to complete the studies to continue receiving funding.

Over the past year, the Galveston Housing Authority has worked with the cities of Galveston, Pasadena, Missouri City and the Harris County Housing Authority to conduct its version of the study, which was originally scheduled to be completed by June.

But, with Fridays announcement, the date when that study is to be completed is now unclear, said GHA Executive Director Mona Purgason.

Im interpreting it as its going to be postponed, Purgason said. She added that she believed the study would still be completed, unless the housing department ordered a full stop to the study.

The housing authority has already paid more than $11,000 toward the study, Purgason said. In May, the Galveston City Council voted to pay $20,250 toward the study.

City officials did not respond on Friday to questions about how much of that money had already been spent.

Since funding for the project was approved, the city and housing authority had held public hearings and convened focus groups to develop parts of the plan, Purgason said.

Its a huge process, Purgason said. Its a big, long process. Weve done quite a bit of work on it so far.

In announcing the extension of the studys deadline, the housing department said that cities need more time and assistance to complete their studies to the federal governments standards.

But some housing advocates said the move could also be the first salvo by the Trump administration to roll back progress in federal housing policies.

This is an attempt to roll back fair housing, said Maddie Sloan, the director of Texas Appleseeds disaster recovery and fair housing project. Appleseed is a nonprofit group of attorneys who provide legal assistance on social and civil rights issues.

There has been some indication that the White House plans to make more changes to housing rules. In July, housing Secretary Ben Carson said he believed in fair housing, but thought that existing rules needed to be reinterpreted.

In reacting to the change, jurisdictions need to remember that the housing department has not changed any parts of the Fair Housing Act, Sloan said.

They still have an obligation to follow the rules that were in place before the 2015 order.

That means current, ongoing fair housing projects, including the construction of new public housing in Galveston, is unchanged for now.

The Texas General Land Office is in the middle of a program constructing hundreds of public housing developments in Galveston as part of an agreement with HUD reached during the Obama administration to rebuild housing that was destroyed during Hurricane Ike in 2008.

The areas of the city where the new housing can be built were selected, in part, because of fair housing rules. The land office chose 11 census tracts where the new public housing could be built.

Two census tracts near Broadway in Galveston, and where the citys old public housing was once located, are not eligible for the new housing because building there would not further fair housing, advocates say. Rebuilding on those tracts would concentrate poverty, housing advocates say.

On Friday, a land office spokeswoman said the changes in the federal rules would not change plans for where future public housing can be built in Galveston.

It is our preliminary determination that this decision has no effect on placement of the scattered sites locations, which are based on a conciliatory agreement that determined the criteria for replacement housing in Galveston, Brittany Eck said.

As of December, the land office had plans to build 97 scattered site public housing units in Galveston. Plans for another 288 units, which would complete the rebuild of the public housing lost after Ike, have not been announced.
On The Water: You might need a bigger boat for Transpac 2023
webguy4 said: Nah, American public schools today mostly teach hate for white people. Click to expand...

That is ridiculous, schools today mostly teach needless information which will never be used after it is learned. While a couple teachers here and there may have radical left views, most are fine people trying their best.
Corvallis residents will have several chances this week to hear more about Measure 101, the health care financing initiative that will appear on the Jan. 23 ballot.

If Measure 101 passes, an elaborate health care financing package approved by the 2017 Legislature stays intact. If the measure fails, several elements of the package would be repealed, including a 1.5 percent tax on insurance premiums and a 0.7 percent tax on hospitals to help pay for the Oregon Health Plan, the states version of Medicaid.

On Tuesday, the City Club of Corvallis will sponsor two forums on the subject.

The first begins at noon at the Boys & Girls Club, 1112 NW Circle Blvd. Dr. Mike Huntington, a Measure 101 supporter, and Douglas Boysen, the new president and CEO of Samaritan Health Services, will speak. There is no cost to attend, but lunch is available at a cost of $10 for City Club members or $15 for non-members.

At 7 p.m., the club will sponsor a free forum at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, 645 NW Monroe Ave. State Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, will join Huntington and Boysen on the podium.

At 7 p.m. on Thursday, the Corvallis League of Women Voters will sponsor a free Measure 101 discussion at the library. Panelists will include Gelser, Janet Bauer of the Oregon Center for Public Policy and state Rep. Cedric Hayden, R-Fall Creek, a Measure 101 opponent. Former state legislator Tony Van Vliet will moderate the discussion.
SALEM  Five groups have submitted pre-proposals seeking $25 million from the ODOT Connect Oregon program to develop a transloading site in which cargo is transferred from trucks onto rail cars, ultimately reducing transportation costs, wear and tear on roads and carbon output in the mid-valley.

A similar project in the Treasure Valley based in Ontario, received one application.

Applications were due Dec. 13.

The transload projects are part of HB 2017, the 2017 Oregon Legislatures $5.8 billion transportation funding package.

Mid-valley applications came from Linn County, the city of Lebanon, Brooks-Hopmere, Northwest Container Services and Greenhill Multimodal Facility-Eugene.

The pre-proposals will be reviewed by a group including ODOT planners and staff from Business Oregon to ensure applicants have all the key elements in place to move forward.

Well look for things like, do they have an organizational structure thats viable? Do they have experience in delivering a complex, multimodal project? said Erik Havig, Planning Section manager at ODOT. Most importantly, do they have local support and the support of the partner railroad?

By mid-January, the team will complete its reviews and forward recommendations to ODOT Director Matt Garrett. Recommended applicants will then be invited to submit a project plan. Those project plans will provide more detail about future timelines.

Mid-valley applicant proposals include:

Linn County

Linn Countys application was submitted by the Linn Economic Development Group, a branch of the Albany-Millersburg Economic Development Corporation.

The project has received bi-partisan support from elected officials including Rep. Andy Olson, a Republican from Albany, and Senator Lee Beyer, a Democrat from Springfield.

I strongly support Linn Economic Development Groups proposal because I am confident they will use the $25 million appropriated by the Legislature to deliver a successful reload project our region and state can be proud of, noted Senator Sara Gelser, D-District 8. Their proposal will help reduce congestion, pollution and bring efficiency to Oregons transportation system.

The plan is to develop the 190-acre former International Paper plant in Millersburg. It includes a 60,000 square foot warehouse with rail siding and both rail and freeway access at its door. The property lies next to another 135 acres of industrially zoned land owned by the city of Millersburg.

Products that would pass through the facility include straw, hay, pulp, lumber, wood products, seeds, grains, potatoes and nursery stock. It is estimated that 25,000 40-foot containers of straw are shipped from the Willamette Valley to the ports in Seattle and Tacoma annually.

The Linn Economic Development Group has hired Gregory Smith & Company LLC to manage the project. The company has constructed an industrial park in Fossil; built more than 1,000 acres of industrial land in Malheur County; developed cold storage facilities at the Port of Morrow; and manages commercial and residential development properties in 10 communities around the state.

Total estimated price tag is $25 and includes $9,175,000 for property acquisition; $1 million for engineering and design; $425,000 permitting; $250,000 earthwork; $1.7 million for road and pedestrian improvements; $2.25 million for rail development; $7 million intermodal facility construction; $1.5 million in utility improvements; $1.25 million for contingency fund; and $450,000 for project management.

City of Lebanon

Working with the Oregon Shipping Group, the city of Lebanon submitted an application to develop 47 acres south of the Lowes Distribution Center along Highway 34 and adjacent to the Albany & Eastern Railroad.

The Oregon Shipping Group supports the development of road, rail and marine shipping systems. Frank Salerno is the managing member and Kevin Mannix is the executive director.

I feel that Lebanon would be a perfect location geographically, with our rail capabilities and the available land, wrote Mayor Paul Aziz. Not only will the intermodal facility benefit our community, it will benefit the entire Willamette Valley region by providing expanded shipping capabilities for agricultural producers, manufacturers and retailers.

City Council president Bob Elliott noted in letter of support that the project has been adopted by the council as a top priority and is listed in the Lebanon 2040 Strategic Action Plan.

Community Development Director Walt Wendolowski noted in a memorandum to City Manager Gary Marks that the property is shovel-ready.

It is within the citys enterprise zone, so it could qualify for tax exemption for three to five years.

It might also qualify for a reduction in sanitary sewer, park, water, streets and drainage system charged by one percent for each full-time, permanent job created.

It may quality for a maximum reduction in the citys sanitary sewer use charge and water use charge beginning at 90 percent for the first two years declining to 20 percent in years 11 to 15.

It could see building permit fees reduced by up to 25 percent.

There could be a waiver of all planning, zoning and engineering permit fees for applications filed within the first year.

There would be no business license fee for the duration of the enterprise zone designation.

Brooks-Hopmere

The Oregon Shipping Group also prepared and submitted an application on behalf of the Oregon Port of Willamette, whose project is known as the Brooks-Hopmere Intermodal Facility.

The facility would be sited on land owned by NORPAC and the Oregon Shipping Group has also been working with Antique Powerland, which owns 62 acres north of Brooklake Road, plus controls another 19 acres adjacent to the Portland & Western rail line in Hopmere.

Total capital costs are estimated at $18.98 million.

Greenhill Multimodal Facility-Eugene

The Greenhill Multimodal Facility is an active organization that includes business interests in Veneta and Creswell, with a reload facility in southwest Eugene.

The business is owned by Lost Creek Rock Products and is located on Greenhill Road. The site includes a rail spur that is 1,300 feet long. Greenhill also leases 2,200 feet of track from Coos Bay Rail. Overall, the site encompasses 33 acres.

The applicants noted that the proposed site is ideally located to serve shippers in southern Oregon, the Klamath Falls area, the Eugene/Springfield area and the Willamette Valley, south of Salem.

Total estimated cost is about $18 million and private investors will add another $8 million.

Estimated capacity is about 62,400 containers per year.

Proponents believe the facility could be operational in 2018 and is scalable as demand increases.

We will be able to respond quickly with less investment than other sites under consideration, Jeff Demers, general manager of Greenhill Reload LLC noted in a letter of support. Our team has been involved in facility development in Oregon, Washington, Montana and North Dakota.

Northwest Container Services

Northwest Container Services has been promoting a mid-valley rail facility for more than 10 years. The company has contracted with the Union Pacific Railroad for more than 25 years and transports more than 90,000 containers annually.

Northwest Container Services has developed similar operations in Portland, Boardman, Tacoma and Seattle.

The concept is to start with 20 acres and eventually expand to 60 acres. Container capacity would start at 1,000 and grow to 3,000.

Estimated project cost is $18 million.
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.
Plittersdorf fire : Fire breaks out at Caesar research center

Bonn A fire broke out late Sunday evening at the research center Caesar on Ludwig-Erhard-Allee in Plittersdorf. The fire department was on the scene with 30 firefighters.

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Bonn firefighters rushed to the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (Caesar) on Ludwig-Erhard-Allee in Plittersdorf on late Sunday evening. The center is a neuroscience research institute affiliated with the Max Planck Society.

The fire department reported that an automatic fire alarm system had triggered an alarm at 11:21 pm. Apparently, a fire had broken out in a seminar room, resulting in heavy smoke.

On the scene were 30 firefighters from Bonn, Bad Godesberg and Beuel. The fire was extinguished shortly before midnight. Parts of a blanket were opened and used to put out the embers. Because of how the building is constructed, extracting smoke from the center was time-consuming.

The seminar room and two adjoining rooms cannot be used for the time being. At 1:40 am on Monday, the fire department finished its work and pulled out.
Junction City/Harrisburg/Monroe Habitat for Humanity (JCHM Habitat) is holding an informational meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 10, at 6 p.m. at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore at 177 W. Sixth Ave. in Junction City. The meeting will explain how low- and moderate-income families can apply to become a Habitat for Humanity partner family.

For families who live or work in the Junction City, Harrisburg, or Monroe area, this is an opportunity to learn more about Habitat for Humanitys unique program, said Executive Director Cindy Decker.

JCHM Habitat will be accepting applications for homeownership from Jan. 10 to Jan. 24. If families have lived or worked in the service area for at least six months, are in unaffordable or unsafe housing, are willing to partner in the building process and are able to pay a monthly mortgage payment, they may be eligible to become Habitat for Humanity homeowners.

For more information about Habitat for Humanity and the program, call 541-998-9548 or see www.jchmhabitat.org.
Extending shopping hours : Protestant church calls for resistance

Bad Neuenahr/Dusseldorf Shopping laws are notoriously restrictive in Germany and the churches and trade unions would like it to remain that way. A political proposal to expand shopping hours is being met with much resistance.

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The Protestant Church in the Rhineland has appealed to the North Rhine-Westphalian state government to refrain from the planned expansion of shop opening hours. In social media, it is calling for protest against the plans. Leaders of Germany's second largest church criticized the CDU/FDP political coalition in a paper distributed on Sunday in Bad Neuenahr, saying it sent a fatal signal. It said, "With further weakening of the NRW laws protecting against Sunday shop opening, an increasing economization of all areas of life takes place."

According to plans of the CDU and FDP political parties, the number of Sunday shopping days in NRW is to be doubled from the current four to eight. In addition, it calls for shops to be permitted to open until midnight on Saturdays. The project is part of a CDU/FDP plan for economic liberalization which favors fewer restrictions.

The draft law faced massive criticism when it came before the Dusseldorf Parliament for a hearing in December. The three Protestant state churches and five Catholic dioceses rejected an expansion of shop opening hours as well as the DGB (German Trade Union Confederation), which fears a deterioration in working conditions in retail.

In the coming days, the bill will also be under review by the synod of the regional church, which has been meeting in Bad Neuenahr since Sunday.
An opportunity for foodies and beer lovers to get lost in a world of food and drink from a hand-selected range of food trucks and breweries from around New Zealand.
LEBANON  Dale Talbot, 98, had an oral health dental exam late last week, and he didn't even have to leave his home.

The World War II veteran received the checkup from Kyle Isaacs in the barber room at the Edward C. Allworth Veterans Home on Thursday. Isaacs is an expanded practice dental hygienist, who has been visiting long-term care facilities in east Linn county along with Molly Perino, oral health supervisor for Benton County.

Isaacs chose not to perform a cleaning on Talbot because of the veteran's increased infection risk after his hip replacement.

Perino helped pilot the program that brings limited dental care to 14 long-term care facilities in the Benton and east Linn County areas. The veterans home provided a specialized dental wheelchair to help Isaacs examine patients.

The Lebanon veterans facility is the first place Isaacs and Perino visited in September, and they have returned on a monthly basis since.

"We're changing the way heath care is delivered," Perino said.

Perino said she noticed people were not leaving long-term care facilities to go see a dentist.

"We know they're not accessing services," Perino said. "So we need to know why, and what we can do to change that."

The funding for the program is coming from InterCommunity Health Network CCO, Perino said.

Often, patients may not articulate their dental needs when they are staying in a care facility, Perino said.

"There's tremendous need, and they're not seeking dental services through the traditional manners; they're not making dental appointments regularly, so we're coming to them," Perino said. "This is just breaking down the access."

As a hygienist, Isaacs can provide several dental treatments, but a few procedures, such as fillings, can only be performed by a dentist, she said. However, Isaacs would like to see the mobile program expand so that an area dentist comes to the facilities.

As an expanded practice hygenist, Isaacs can provide oral cancer exams, overall assessments, cleanings and she can apply silver diamine fluoride to cavities, which stops decay and turns cavities black, Isaacs said.

"It's been really crucial because if these people aren't going to go somewhere, or if it's delayed, we can stop it (by using that substance) and slow the progression," Isaacs said.

Isaacs said when patients have a high amount of bacteria in their mouths, they have a higher chance of heart attack, stroke, cancers and aspiration pneumonia.

"Aspiration pneumonia is a huge problem in long-term care facilities," Isaacs said. "So they aspirate bacteria into their lungs, then they have to go to the hospital."

With regular oral hygiene, patients are three times less likely to die from aspiration pneumonia, she said.

Perino added that while the patients they are seeing are often higher risk due to age and a variety of other factors associated with staying in a long-term care facility, everyone needs dental care.

"It doesn't matter how young or how old you are, everybody should still see the dentist," Perino said. "Everybody can benefit from preventive measures like this."
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kacylee at 8-01-2018 07:12 AM (4 years ago) (f)

Daughter of the Esama of Benin kingdom, Chief Igbinedion, Ora Mantu and her hubby, Umar Mantu, have both welcomed a baby .



The couple who tied the knot here are said to have welcomed a baby boy. Congrats to them.

Daughter of the Esama of Benin kingdom, Chief Igbinedion, Ora Mantu and her hubby, Umar Mantu, have both welcomed a baby .The couple who tied the knot here are said to have welcomed a baby boy. Congrats to them.

Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 8-01-2018 07:12 AM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero
SHOCKER! Buhari and Tinubu's APC Is a Fraud On Nigerians - Atiku Abubakar

bohlah at 8-01-2018 08:41 PM (4 years ago) (m)

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has described the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which he left few months ago, as a fraud.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has described the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which he left few months ago, as a fraud.

He made the declaration in Kaduna, where one of his supporters, Miss Zainab Musa Pindar, organised a reception for him at the Arewa House to welcome him back to the PDP over the weekend.



The Waziri Adamawa urged members of his new party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to spread the message of the party as the only party that can transform the nation.



Atiku, who was represented by the Chairman of Atiku Care Foundation, Ambassador Aliyu Ibn Abbas, said, PDP still remains the only national party in Nigeria. It is the hope of the common man to be free from the fraud called the APC. He made the declaration in Kaduna, where one of his supporters, Miss Zainab Musa Pindar, organised a reception for him at the Arewa House to welcome him back to the PDP over the weekend.The Waziri Adamawa urged members of his new party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to spread the message of the party as the only party that can transform the nation.Atiku, who was represented by the Chairman of Atiku Care Foundation, Ambassador Aliyu Ibn Abbas, said, PDP still remains the only national party in Nigeria. It is the hope of the common man to be free from the fraud called the APC.

Post Reply I have been reporting on latest news from Nigeria for almost 10 years now. I report on every possible news area I come across, but always ensure my reports are compiled with dignity and fact to uphold my personal values and duty as a journalist Posted: at 8-01-2018 08:41 PM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero

arusmu at 8-01-2018 08:55 PM (4 years ago)

(m) The worste PDP so far loot at Zainab Musa Pindar still Miss at that age that show they are wicked planning another ground style of sharing PDP atiku go and rest allow people with reasonable character to work even he was slow but changes are showing economic is coming up . Posted: at 8-01-2018 08:55 PM (4 years ago) | Upcoming The worste PDP so far loot at Zainab Musa Pindar still Miss at that age that show they are wicked planning another ground style of sharing PDP atiku go and rest allow people with reasonable character to work even he was slow but changes are showing economic is coming up . Reply

slimber at 8-01-2018 09:01 PM (4 years ago)

(f) Really abeg make we hear word all of una the same Posted: at 8-01-2018 09:01 PM (4 years ago) | Hero Really abeg make we hear word all of una the same Reply

Mykie010 at 8-01-2018 09:03 PM (4 years ago)

(m) PDP pls come and take power back, Posted: at 8-01-2018 09:03 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac PDP pls come and take power back, Reply

willyking at 9-01-2018 01:42 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Quote from: arusmu on 8-01-2018 08:55 PM The worste PDP so far loot at Zainab Musa Pindar still Miss at that age that show they are wicked planning another ground style of sharing PDP atiku go and rest allow people with reasonable character to work even he was slow but changes are showing economic is coming up .

there is no change anything u see from hence forth is nothing but a political strategy to hold on to power 4 the second tenure and if mumu like u should fall 4 it..believe me after the election u are going to jump into the lagoon out of frustration..sorry just trying to kick u out of ur gullible mind b4 is too late..we wont allow aaffliction to arise the second time apc or pdp none is good but atlist let kick buhari out to send some message.. Posted: at 9-01-2018 01:42 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac there is no change anything u see from hence forth is nothing but a political strategy to hold on to power 4 the second tenure and if mumu like u should fall 4 it..believe me after the election u are going to jump into the lagoon out of frustration..sorry just trying to kick u out of ur gullible mind b4 is too late..we wont allow aaffliction to arise the second time apc or pdp none is good but atlist let kick buhari out to send some message.. Reply

gogoman at 9-01-2018 02:15 AM (4 years ago)

(m) silly old burger atiku Posted: at 9-01-2018 02:15 AM (4 years ago) | Grande Master silly old burger atiku Reply

favourita at 9-01-2018 03:36 AM (4 years ago)

(f) Idiot fellows Posted: at 9-01-2018 03:36 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Idiot fellows Reply
Yusuf Buhari Sneaked To Buy N112M Powerbikes From Germany Without Buhari's Knowledge

nametalkam at 8-01-2018 10:38 PM (4 years ago) (m)

Following President Muhammadu Buharis only son, Yusufs incident in a deadly power-bike accident, whilst racing on Tuesday, December 26,2017. Details have surfaced of how Yusuf Buhari secretly acquired the multi million naira bikes.

Following President Muhammadu Buharis only son, Yusufs incident in a deadly power-bike accident, whilst racing on Tuesday, December 26,2017. Details have surfaced of how Yusuf Buhari secretly acquired the multi million naira bikes.

Gistmania gathered from a reliable source that Yusuf bought the bikes after a suggestion from his friend, Bashir Gwandu for N56m ($157, 000) each. The 2 BMW power bikes were imported from Germany around June, 2017.



The two power bikes were kept secretly in Gwarinpa District, in the Bwari Local Government Area at Gwandus residence.



Yusufs three security operatives seconded from the Department of State Service (DSS) allowed Yusuf to go out at night to race with the bikes, breaking their protocol a move which infuriated the President. The agents proceeded to submit their daily reports but without mention of Yusufs night movements compromising their duty.



Gistmania has learnt that the 3 agents have been removed from service. Gistmania gathered from a reliable source that Yusuf bought the bikes after a suggestion from his friend, Bashir Gwandu for N56m ($157, 000) each. The 2 BMW power bikes were imported from Germany around June, 2017.The two power bikes were kept secretly in Gwarinpa District, in the Bwari Local Government Area at Gwandus residence.Yusufs three security operatives seconded from the Department of State Service (DSS) allowed Yusuf to go out at night to race with the bikes, breaking their protocol a move which infuriated the President. The agents proceeded to submit their daily reports but without mention of Yusufs night movements compromising their duty.Gistmania has learnt that the 3 agents have been removed from service.

Post Reply I specialize in investigative reportage across several subject matter and sectors but mainly focus on metro events and investigation. Do leave your thoughts and opinion on my reports to let me know what you think about them. Thank you Posted: at 8-01-2018 10:38 PM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero

slimber at 8-01-2018 11:16 PM (4 years ago)

(f) Hmmmmmm interesting okooooo Posted: at 8-01-2018 11:16 PM (4 years ago) | Hero Hmmmmmm interesting okooooo Reply

Asterimou at 8-01-2018 11:25 PM (4 years ago)

(m) Thought this Buhari claims he is poor. How manage his son can purchase bike worth this much? Hmm Posted: at 8-01-2018 11:25 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Thought this Buhari claims he is poor. How manage his son can purchase bike worth this much? Hmm Reply

james987 at 9-01-2018 01:59 AM (4 years ago)

(m) People we dey fight corruption... Posted: at 9-01-2018 01:59 AM (4 years ago) | Hero People we dey fight corruption... Reply

gogoman at 9-01-2018 02:12 AM (4 years ago)

(m) which bike be that amount ... una too dey lie jare Posted: at 9-01-2018 02:12 AM (4 years ago) | Grande Master which bike be that amount ... una too dey lie jare Reply

favourita at 9-01-2018 03:32 AM (4 years ago)

(f) Idiot fellows Posted: at 9-01-2018 03:32 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Idiot fellows Reply

willyking at 9-01-2018 04:58 AM (4 years ago)

(m) I hear say he brain don destroy...him and he papa na the same now.. Posted: at 9-01-2018 04:58 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac I hear say he brain don destroy...him and he papa na the same now.. Reply

ebuatuegwu at 9-01-2018 06:44 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Where did he get 112 million from ? Posted: at 9-01-2018 06:44 AM (4 years ago) | Newbie Where did he get 112 million from ? Reply

kacylee at 9-01-2018 06:54 AM (4 years ago)

(f) Quote from: gogoman on 9-01-2018 02:12 AM which bike be that amount ... una too dey lie jare

oga bike wey cost more than that dey, if u dont know does not mean they are lying I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 9-01-2018 06:54 AM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero oga bike wey cost more than that dey, if u dont know does not mean they are lying Reply

kacylee at 9-01-2018 06:55 AM (4 years ago)

(f) so much for fighting corruption.... abeg how a boy that is not working have such money I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 9-01-2018 06:55 AM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero so much for fighting corruption.... abeg how a boy that is not working have such money Reply

morganaldore at 9-01-2018 08:03 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Quote from: kacylee on 9-01-2018 06:54 AM oga bike wey cost more than that dey, if u dont know does not mean they are lying

shut up....yea they are lying....if you no know ....know now...yea there are bikes that expensive but bmw has none that price....they should tell us the name of the bike if it true....abi na those $5000 bike when dey that pic ... useless post Posted: at 9-01-2018 08:03 AM (4 years ago) | Upcoming shut up....yea they are lying....if you no know ....know now...yea there are bikes that expensive but bmw has none that price....they should tell us the name of the bike if it true....abi na those $5000 bike when dey that pic ... useless post Reply

Deltaboy1 at 9-01-2018 09:41 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Quote from: gogoman on 9-01-2018 02:12 AM which bike be that amount ... una too dey lie jare

Muslim Hausa idiot Posted: at 9-01-2018 09:41 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Muslim Hausa idiot Reply

euwilliams at 9-01-2018 10:08 AM (4 years ago)

(f) Quote from: gogoman on 9-01-2018 02:12 AM which bike be that amount ... una too dey lie jare



Gogoman, na because say na Buhari son? If na another people, you go shout it loud to lo condemed it. Posted: at 9-01-2018 10:08 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Gogoman, na because say na Buhari son? If na another people, you go shout it loud to lo condemed it. Reply

Zaki68 at 9-01-2018 10:13 AM (4 years ago)

(m) LIES I SAW THE BIKE AFTER THE ACCIDENT THE BIKE IS NOT MORE THAN 2000 DOLLARS MAYBE NOT EVEN, MY IGBO BROTHERS IN THIS FORUM WILL BE HAPPY WITH THIS KIND OF NEGATIVE NEWS.(NEGATIVE PEOPLE) Posted: at 9-01-2018 10:13 AM (4 years ago) | Upcoming LIES I SAW THE BIKE AFTER THE ACCIDENT THE BIKE IS NOT MORE THAN 2000 DOLLARS MAYBE NOT EVEN, MY IGBO BROTHERS IN THIS FORUM WILL BE HAPPY WITH THIS KIND OF NEGATIVE NEWS.(NEGATIVE PEOPLE) Reply

Mykie010 at 9-01-2018 10:40 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Quote from: Zaki68 on 9-01-2018 10:13 AM LIES I SAW THE BIKE AFTER THE ACCIDENT THE BIKE IS NOT MORE THAN 2000 DOLLARS MAYBE NOT EVEN, MY IGBO BROTHERS IN THIS FORUM WILL BE HAPPY WITH THIS KIND OF NEGATIVE NEWS.(NEGATIVE PEOPLE)

look at you,are u not ashamed now,when I write abt his lifestyle in UK yesterday, u were complaining. There are bikes of 200k dollars if u don't know,buhari and his family have squandered our money Posted: at 9-01-2018 10:40 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac look at you,are u not ashamed now,when I write abt his lifestyle in UK yesterday, u were complaining. There are bikes of 200k dollars if u don't know,buhari and his family have squandered our money Reply

cypanyahucha at 9-01-2018 11:02 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Na so Nigeria de loose money. Who givam N110 million? Still we are fighting corruption. No wahala. Posted: at 9-01-2018 11:02 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Na so Nigeria de loose money. Who givam N110 million? Still we are fighting corruption. No wahala. Reply

smart61 at 9-01-2018 12:33 PM (4 years ago)

(m) I know he is the president's son but I don't believe the motorcycle worth 56 millions. Where did they get the receipt with which he bought the power bike from? Let them prove it to us he bought it for 56million naira. Posted: at 9-01-2018 12:33 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac I know he is the president's son but I don't believe the motorcycle worth 56 millions. Where did they get the receipt with which he bought the power bike from? Let them prove it to us he bought it for 56million naira. Reply

ruthie at 10-01-2018 09:13 AM (4 years ago)

(f) na so...we haff heard Posted: at 10-01-2018 09:13 AM (4 years ago) | Hero na so...we haff heard Reply
WASHINGTON  Though events in Iran are murky, their direction is historic.

The Iranian regime  which has made a project of destabilizing others through terrorism and regional adventurism  has been revealed as deeply unstable. Many Iranian citizens thought that the election of the "moderate" Hassan Rouhani as president would bring more sensible and effective governance. Those hopes have fizzled. Many Iranians thought that the nuclear deal's sanctions relief and unfrozen assets would improve their lives. For the most part, they haven't.

The result  put in terms President Trump would appreciate  has been a broad revolt against the Iranian political establishment. The Iranian government's problem is no longer a matter of performance but of legitimacy. Routine corruption, vicious oppression and economic mismanagement are increasingly seen as essential to the regime itself.

The breadth of this sentiment is what distinguishes the current revolt from the Green Movement of 2009. Instead of mainly involving the upper middle class, discontent has taken root in the lower middle class  in the labor movement and among the unemployed. Instead of being concentrated in Tehran and a few other cities, current unrest can be found across the country in smaller cities and rural areas. (If it comes to it, this would complicate the imposition of martial law, because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would need to be deployed more thinly.)

"In 100 years," Iranian dissident Mohsen Sazegara told me, "we've never had such a movement all around the country." The geographic and demographic scope of the protests is what makes them so remarkable  and so damaging to the long-term prospects of the regime.

The short-term prospects are a different matter. Those who hope that the Iranian national revolution will succeed in a single, big push  like the crowd turning against the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Palace Square  are likely to be disappointed. In most civil resistance movements, the purpose of mass protest is not to overthrow the government directly. It is to convince observers  and especially elements of the police and army  that they can turn against the regime without imprisonment or death. Protests act as a signal to potential defectors that their risk is reasonable. If enough people join them, the chance of violence diminishes.

This depends on the protesters rejecting violence themselves. In a study of civil resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006, researchers Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent efforts succeeded 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent campaigns. And nonviolent approaches generally succeeded in less than half the time (an average of about three years). Why this difference? Because violence reduces public participation, which makes defections less likely.

With this in mind, what should America be doing? U.S. policy has generally had two objectives: lengthen the Iranian regime's nuclear timeline and shorten Iran's democratization timeline. Nuclear proliferation isn't particularly good anywhere. But such weapons are far less dangerous in the hands of democratic governments. For proof, just compare India to North Korea.

There is significant disagreement on the best way to lengthen the Iranian nuclear timeline. In the 2015 Iran nuclear framework, the Obama administration made huge concessions to buy some delay. But whatever your view on that agreement, the matter at hand is supporting democratic change. And since direct meddling in Iranian affairs by America is toxic, this task requires some creativity.

If the objective is to give the Iranian opposition the time and space to encourage recruits and defections, then the Trump administration needs to increase the cost to the regime of a comprehensive crackdown. This would need to be done in concert with the Europeans, making clear that repression will bring a return to economic isolation and sanctions. An effective U.S. response would also attempt to increase the access of Iranian citizens to the internet and social media  which is effectively blocked  through public pressure or (some have suggested) satellite internet access. This would permit the spread of information about the regime  how about better publicizing the cost of Iranian interventions in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza?  and reveal regime violence to the world in real time. In a struggle like this one, information is ammunition.

Implicit in all this is something often dismissed and completely undeniable: the strategic value of democracy promotion in a strong foreign policy. Much about the future of the Middle East, and the nature of the nuclear threat, now depends on it.
MARTINSVILLE  Democratic U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine officially kicked off his bid for a second six-year term on Friday with a visit to the New College Institute (NCI) in Martinsville.

I have so many good friendships and memories in Martinsville, the former governor told a standing-room-only crowd of about 75 people, mostly supporters, who gathered in a classroom at the institute to hear him speak. Campaign staff members said they expected a crowd only about one-third of that size.

Kaine strongly criticized Republican President Donald Trump, estimating that he disagrees with the presidents positions on issues 75 percent of the time. Yet he said he is willing to work with Trump on legislation benefiting the nation if the president will show interest in working with Democrats.

Were dealing with some really intense issues with this president, Kaine said, indicating one of them is Trumps involvement in relations with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Being president is not just about talking tough to leaders of hostile nations but also about being diplomatic, he said.

The senator emphasized that he has strived to work with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers to enact legislation to benefit Americans. He pledged that he will continue to do so if he is re-elected in November.

A young man in the crowd did not identify himself but indicated that he is a member of the Young Republicans. He told Kaine that young people today want to see bipartisanship among congressional leaders. They do not want members of Congress to balk at potential legislation simply because it was proposed by someone who is not within their particular political parties, he said.

Kaine recalled drafting bills with help from Republicans. When he puts forward legislation, he said, I try to convince a Republican to come on board with me as a co-sponsor. That way, the legislation can get support easier from Republicans, who currently make up the majority of Congress.

Kaine served as lieutenant governor under former Gov. Mark Warner, who now is Virginias other United States senator, from 2002 to 2006. He succeeded Warner as governor from 2006 to 2010. Two years later, he was elected to the Senate and began serving as a federal lawmaker in January 2013.

In the Senate, Kaine serves on the Armed Services, Budget, Foreign Relations and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees.

We want a Virginia that works for all of the states residents in terms of access to health care, jobs and education, as well as equal treatment for everyone, he said.

Kaine mentioned that he and a Democratic lawmaker from Colorado have introduced the Medicare-X Choice Act, which would enable working Americans to receive health insurance via the federal program providing coverage to people ages 65 and older as well as disabled younger people.

Every American should be able to buy into Medicare, Kaine said. There are still too many people who dont have health insurance.

Fridays event at NCI was designed to enable Kaine to meet area residents and get reacquainted with those he already knows, as well as for people to give him advice about issues to tackle in Washington.

Naomi Hodge-Muse, president of the Martinsville-Henry County NAACP and an NCI board member, voiced concern about the Federal Communications Commission recently repealing net neutrality rules enacted during former President Barack Obamas administration. Republicans significantly supported the repeal.

Net neutrality involves Internet service providers not hindering or blocking customers from seeing any websites or other online content, or imposing different fees to see different types of information.

Hodge-Muse expressed concern that only those who can afford to pay more for Internet service will be able to, for instance, do Google searches. She said that would hurt small businesses and chambers of commerce as well as less-wealthy people.

Repealing the repeal of net neutrality rules is a great opportunity for Democrats on Capitol Hill, Kaine said. He noted that lawmakers can revisit the issue under the Congressional Review Act. But to achieve neutrality again, Democrats will have to get more Republicans on their side, he said.

The Rev. Tyler C. Millner Sr., pastor of Morning Star Holy Church in Axton, told Kaine that Congress needs to work to ensure that financially-strapped people do not go hungry and have access to nutritious food. He said that nonprofit food pantries cannot solve the problem alone.

Kaine indicated he would take that under advisement. He recalled hearing about a child in another part of Virginia who, during a recent snow event, said she hoped that her school would not be closed because she was hungry  she would be able to eat only if the school cafeteria could serve her.

According to Kaine, he apparently is the only Democrat so far seeking his Senate seat, but there are about five Republicans who are vying for it. He said they essentially are striving to be Donald Trumps yes man in Washington.

Republicans will choose their official candidate later this year.

Although he is optimistic that he will be re-elected, Kaine predicted that it will be a very intense campaign.
At the same time that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was rescinding the Cole Memorandum, which told federal prosecutors to go easy on marijuana cases in states that had legalized the recreational use of pot, he also took a shot at medical marijuana.

Sessions last week also rescinded the Ogden Memorandum of 2009, which instructed federal prosecutors not to pursue cases against medical marijuana patients and distributors who had complied with state laws. In essence, that's the same guidance that was included in the Cole document, which came four years later. The order of the memos makes sense in that medical marijuana started making inroads among the states before recreational marijuana.

That's still the case: In all, 29 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam have passed laws allowing the use of the plant for medicinal purposes. An additional 17 states allow for use of marijuana products for medical reasons in limited situations or as a legal defense. Eight states, including Oregon, have legalized recreational use. Of course, that sets up a conflict between laws in those states and the federal government, which still treats marijuana as not just illegal, but among the most dangerous of all narcotics.

The Ogden and Cole memos were meant in part to chart the way through those conflicts for federal prosecutors. The Cole memo, for example, directed prosecutors to focus on "enforcement priorities"  trafficking to states where pot isn't legal, sales to minors, and so forth. The general idea was to give users and producers who followed the laws in their states a bit of assurance that federal agents wouldn't be knocking on their doors.

The U.S. attorney for Oregon, Billy Williams, said last week that the enforcement priorities listed in the Cole memo would continue to be the priorities of his office, but it's unclear if or for how long that stance will satisfy his superiors. In the meantime, a big shadow looms over the fast-growing marijuana industry.

A couple of notes are worth repeating here: First, although this action by the Trump administration will slow the rising tide toward legalization, it will not stop it: Recent Gallup polls suggest that 64 percent of Americans support legalization.

Second, Congress might be able to take steps to blunt the impact of these pronouncements from Sessions. It's not at all out of the question that Congress can act on this issue, which doesn't break down strictly along party lines. In fact, two Republicans  Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California and Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado  spoke out last week against Sessions. For these Republicans, marijuana legalization is an issue of states' rights.

Of course, it's the administration's job to enforce legislation that Congress passes. So Congress could get to work on a number of fronts:

 The Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment restricts U.S. attorneys from taking legal action against people who use or produce medical marijuana. (Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer is the other sponsor.) The measure was included in the stopgap bill that kept the government running, but it expires Jan. 19. Congress should renew it.

 Rohrabacher has introduced legislation to amend the Controlled Substances Act so that it doesn't apply to people who produce, possess or deliver marijuana in compliance with state laws.

 Congress also should remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I drugs, those drugs deemed to have the highest potential for abuse and no medical use. This designation, which has been ludicrous for decades, also has had the effect of limiting badly needed medical trials and research.

Sooner or later, Congress will repeal the federal ban on pot and will leave enforcement questions (properly) to the states. We can prepare for that day. Or we can resume a particularly futile chapter of this nation's war on drugs. (mm)
A record number of students earned bachelors degrees in Virginia last year, state data show.

The states colleges awarded a total of 54,508 bachelors degrees in 2016-17, the most in state history, according to research released Friday by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Included in that figure is 24,405 science, technology, engineering, math and health (STEM-H) degrees, which was also a state record.

The majority of the bachelors degrees (37,988) were conferred by Virginias public colleges, with George Mason University and James Madison University seeing the largest increases. Seven public four-year colleges  Norfolk State University, Old Dominion University, Christopher Newport University, University of Virginia-College at Wise, Virginia State University, University of Virginia and Radford University  saw decreases in the number of degrees they awarded, according to SCHEV.

The three most popular bachelors degree majors at the public colleges stayed the same: psychology, biology and business administration. Public universities awarded 24 fewer bachelors degrees, while private colleges conferred 71 more, according to the state analysis.

Of the 54,508 bachelors degrees total, a little more than 31,099 were obtained by in-state students.

The combined undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees and certificates total of 118,837 last year is a drop from the 2015-16 record of 119,934.

According to the analysis, Virginia is still on track to meet its goal of awarding an additional 100,000 degrees to in-state undergraduates at public colleges by 2025 as part of The Virginia Plan for Higher Education.

The states higher ed strategic plan calls for 1.5 million degrees and workforce credentials between 2014 and 2030, improving the percentage of Virginians with a workforce credential or degree after high school from 51 percent to 70 percent.

While challenges remain for the Commonwealth to meet goals around student access and completion, this years degree report indicates that Virginia remains on pace to meet The Virginia Plan goal of being the best-educated state in the nation by 2030, the analysis says.

The state is also working toward a comparable increase in the number of degrees awarded at private colleges. The current growth is more than adequate to meet the goal, according to SCHEV.

The Commonwealth needs a well-educated workforce to succeed in the world economy, said SCHEV Director Peter Blake in a prepared statement. Virginians need to keep their skills sharp to succeed in work and life. For all these reasons, The Virginia Plan sets a goal for Virginia to become the best-educated state by 2030. These results show we are on the way.

Enrollment this fall at public colleges is up 2 percent over fall 2016, according to SCHEV. A total of 219,300 students are enrolled at the states public four-year schools, a record number.

The council meets Tuesday at 9 a.m. at its offices in the James Monroe Building in Richmond. Governor-elect Ralph Northam is scheduled to speak during the meeting.
VANCOUVER, B.C. , Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MX Gold Corp. (TSX-V:MXL) (FSE:ODV) (OTCQX:MXLGF) (the Company or MX Gold) is pleased to announce, further to its news release dated November 13, 2017, the delivery of 360 AvalonMiner 741 cryptocurrency mining systems (each, a Mining Rig), purchased from Canaan Creative Co. The purchase of the Mining Rigs equips the Company with a fleet of state of the art, digital currency extraction hardware. Each Mining Rig contains 88 x A3212 16 nm ASIC chips and boasts an in field Reliable Hashrate Per Second (RTHS) of up to 7.8. The Mining Rigs are housed in high-grade aluminum cases and employ innovative Airforming Cooling Technology, allowing more efficient heat dissipation. Coupled with access to contracted low-cost energy sources, the Company expects that the Mining Rigs set up will result in a competitive digital currency extraction environment.



For additional information on the AvalonMiner 741, please see the following link: https://canaan.io/product/avalonminer-741/

Dan Omeniuk, CEO of MX Gold, stated, "Our company is looking forward to developing a pilot project involving a cryptocurrency mining operation to determine whether further investment in the growing cryptocurrency industry is warranted.

The Company is excited to have the Mining Rigs landed and onsite, and is currently completing various testing procedures to ensure optimal operating efficiencies. The Company will disclose in upcoming announcements when the Mining Rigs are installed and fully operational.

For more information on cryptocurrency, please see the following link:

https://clients.haywood.com/uploadfiles/secured_reports/BCOct242017.pdf?inf_contact_key=579b43223c79ee11357ecfc6b62ebaae942374871c40ac756f37211bcc125ddb

About MX

MX Gold is a junior mining company focused on the exploration and development of advanced projects located in Mexico and British Columbia, Canada. The companys primary focus, is the Magistral del Oro tailings project located 392 km SW of Chihuahua and includes a fully permitted, 500 tonne-per-day dynamic cyanide countercurrent system plant constructed in 2013. The company is currently expanding to 1000 tonne-per day which is scheduled to be completed by the 1st quarter of 2018. The Company also owns 50% of the IDS Project, which includes a fully permitted smelter that was completed in 2014 for a throughput capacity of 50 tonnes per day. The smelter was built to receive and process high-grade direct-ship ores and concentrates from small-scale miners across the state of Durango and beyond.

MX Gold Corp. is also focused on the exploration, development and mining of advanced projects located in British Columbia and Mexico. The Companys primary focus in British Columbia is its Willa gold and copper project located 12 kilometers south of Silverton, B.C. In 2015, MX Gold Corp. completed the accretive acquisition of the Willa project and the Max Molybdenum Mine and Mill Complex. This acquisition removed major costs and shortened timelines typically associated with mine project development. The Willa mine is located 135 kilometers south of the Max Mill. MX Gold Corp. can also elect to reopen the Max Molybdenum mining operation once world Moly prices improve. For updates on the Magistral Project please visit our website. www.mxgoldcorp.com

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Akash Patel

For further information, please contact

Dan Omeniuk, CEO

Email: dano@mxgoldcorp.com

Or at: info@mxgoldcorp.com

Statements in this news release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical, and consist primarily of projections - statements regarding future plans, expectations and developments. Words such as "expects", "intends", "plans", "may", "could", potential, "should", "anticipates", "likely", "believes" and words of similar import tend to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include the expectation that, with access to contracted low-cost energy sources, the Mining Rigs set up will result in a competitive digital currency extraction environment, and statements respecting the future installation and operation of the Mining Rigs. All of these forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied, including, without limitation: that the Mining Rigs will not enable a competitive digital currency extraction environment; that the Company may not successfully install or render operational the Mining Rigs; that the Company may not be able to attract and retain qualified personnel and management; and that the Company may not be able to fund its operations, as well as other risks and uncertainties identified under the heading Risk Factors in the Companys continuous disclosure documents filed on SEDAR. You are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive of all factors and assumptions which may have been used. MX Gold cannot assure you that actual events, performance or results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements, and managements assumptions may prove to be incorrect. These forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof and MX Gold does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or managements beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable law. For the reasons set forth above, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

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.




TORONTO, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Seabridge Gold (TSX:SEA) (NYSE:SA) announced today that drilling will commence next month at its 100%-owned Courageous Lake Project in Canadas NWT. The planned 36 hole, 7,200 meter program will test seven separate targets along a geophysical and stratigraphic break that hosts the Walsh Lake Deposit which Seabridge discovered in 2012 (see September 10, 2012 news release).

The Courageous Lake Project covers almost all of the 53 km long Mathews Lake Greenstone Belt (MLGB) which hosts Seabridges Felsic-Ash-Tuff (FAT) deposit and was estimated in a July, 2012, pre-feasibility study to contain 6.46 million ounces of proven and probable gold reserves as follows:

Courageous Lake Mineral Reserves

Reserve Category Tonnes (000s) Diluted Grade (g/T) Contained Gold

(000s Ounces) Proven 12,300 2.41 960 Probable 78,800 2.17 5,500 Total 91,100 2.20 6,460

Mineral resources (inclusive of mineral reserves) for the Courageous Lake FAT deposit are as follows:

Courageous Lake Mineral Resources

Resource Category Tonnes (000s) Diluted Grade (g/T) Contained Gold

(000s Ounces) Measured 13,401 2.53 1,090 Indicated 93,914 2.28 6,884 Measured+Indicated 107,315 2.31 7,974 Inferred 48,963 2.18 3,432

The Walsh Lake deposit was discovered as part of a campaign designed to extend the Courageous Lake Projects mine life, thereby improving capital efficiency for this remote project. Drilling confirmed a near surface inferred resource at Walsh Lake, estimated in March, 2014, of 482,000 ounces of gold (4.6 million tonnes grading 3.24 g/T). Subsequent metallurgical testing demonstrated that the material is free milling with cyanide recoveries as high as 95%. Based on these factors, the Walsh Lake deposit could be mined prior to constructing the processing plant required for the larger, refractory FAT deposit. This order of development could have significant economic benefits for the Courageous Lake project not only by extending mine life but also by generating cash flow to pay for some capital costs as the FAT deposit ramps up.

Seabridge Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk noted that, Our aim is to find more Walsh Lake-style deposits which could be added to the front end of a revised mine plan at the Courageous Lake Project where they have the potential to make a significant economic impact. We have a lot of confidence in this program which we have been planning for several years, but spectacular results at KSM kept pushing it back in the queue. Winter is the best season for moving in supplies on the ice road and also moving drills around the property. The Courageous Lake program will be funded from current cash on hand.

Walsh Lake is located about 10 km south of the FAT deposit and is connected to that deposit by a local road network. The Walsh Lake resource appears to be the southern extension of the historical Tundra Mine, a high-grade producer that was abandoned in 1999 as the gold price fell to a 25-year low. Well developed and laterally continuous structural zones are found stratigraphically above and below the extension of the Tundra Mine zone and it is these features that host multiple gold-bearing zones at Walsh Lake. These same structural zones have been traced for about 5 km to the north of Walsh Lake toward the FAT deposit and about 3 km to the south using geophysical techniques, geological mapping and historical drill holes.

The targets in this program are shear zones located near the stratigraphic contact between mafic volcanic rock and clastic sedimentary rocks. The initial drilling is to determine which of the targets are gold-bearing and have strike and width continuity within 200 meters of surface. If these requirements are met, Seabridge expects to proceed with infill drilling to support a resource estimate. See map for target locations.



Exploration activities by Seabridge at the Courageous Lake Project will be conducted under the supervision of William E. Threlkeld, Registered Professional Geologist, Senior Vice President of the Company and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Threlkeld has reviewed and approved this news release.



Seabridge Gold holds a 100% interest in several North American gold resource projects. The Companys principal assets are the KSM and Iskut properties located near Stewart, British Columbia, Canada and the Courageous Lake gold project located in Canadas Northwest Territories. For a breakdown of Seabridges mineral reserves and resources by project and category please visit the Companys website at http://www.seabridgegold.net/resources.php.



Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, nor their Regulation Services Providers accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

All reserve and resource estimates reported by the Corporation were calculated in accordance with the Canadian National Instrument 43-101 and the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Classification system. These standards differ significantly from the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Mineral resources which are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

This document contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This information and these statements, referred to herein as "forward-looking statements" are made as of the date of this document. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to: (i) the timing and extent of the proposed program; (ii) the estimated amount and grade of mineral reserves and estimates underlying the reserve determination, including estimates of resources, the capital costs of constructing mine facilities and bringing a mine into production, the amount of future production and estimates of operating costs, net cash flow and economic returns from an operating mine; (iii) mining activities possibly taking place at the Courageous Lake Project, the mining of the Walsh Lake deposit before construction of the larger processing plant for the FAT deposit, the earlier mining of the Walsh Lake deposit possibly yielding significant economic benefits for the Courageous Lake project; (iv) finding more Walsh Lake-style deposits that could be mined at the front end of the mine plan and the potential for them to have a significant economic impact; (v) the Walsh Lake resource appearing to be an extension of the historical Tundra mine; and (vi) completing additional infill drilling and whether it could support a resource estimate. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects", "anticipates", "plans", "projects", "estimates", "envisages", "assumes", "intends", "strategy", "goals", "objectives" or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements.

All forward-looking statements are based on Seabridge's or its consultants' current beliefs as well as various assumptions made by them and information currently available to them. These assumptions include: (i) the presence of and continuity of metals at the Project at observed or modeled grades; (ii) the capacities of various machinery and equipment; (iii) the availability of personnel, machinery and equipment at estimated prices; (iv) exchange rates; (v) metals sales prices; (vi) appropriate discount rates; (vii) tax rates and royalty rates applicable to the proposed mining operation; (viii) financing structure and costs; (ix) anticipated mining losses and dilution; (x) metallurgical performance; (xi) reasonable contingency requirements; (xii) success in realizing proposed operations; (xiii) receipt of regulatory approvals on acceptable terms, (xiv) the negotiation of satisfactory terms with impacted Treaty and First Nations groups; and (xv) continuity of observed mineralization and its association with other geological structures. Although management considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available to it, they may prove to be incorrect. Many forward-looking statements are made assuming the correctness of other forward looking statements, such as statements of net present value and internal rates of return, which are based on most of the other forward-looking statements and assumptions herein. The cost information is also prepared using current values, but the time for incurring the costs will be in the future and it is assumed costs will remain stable over the relevant period.

By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important factors could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements. These risk factors may be generally stated as the risk that the assumptions and estimates expressed above do not occur, but specifically include, without limitation: risks relating to variations in the mineral content within the mineralized material identified, in particular mineral reserves or mineral resources, from that predicted; variations in rates of recovery and extraction; developments in world metals markets; risks relating to fluctuations in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar; increases in the estimated capital and operating costs or unanticipated costs; difficulties attracting the necessary work force; increases in financing costs or adverse changes to the terms of available financing, if any; tax rates or royalties being greater than assumed; changes in development or mining plans due to changes in logistical, technical or other factors; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; risks relating to receipt of regulatory approvals or settlement of an agreement with impacted Treaty and First Nations groups; the effects of competition in the markets in which Seabridge operates; operational and infrastructure risks and the additional risks described in Seabridge's Annual Information Form filed with SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com) for the year ended December 31, 2016 and in the Corporation's Annual Report Form 40-F filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR (available at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). Seabridge cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive.

When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to Seabridge, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Seabridge does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by Seabridge or on our behalf, except as required by law.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Rudi Fronk"

Chairman and C.E.O.

For further information, please contact:

Rudi P. Fronk, Chairman and C.E.O.

Tel: (416) 367-9292  Fax: (416) 367-2711

Email: info@seabridgegold.net
____________________________ 1 Total Measured + Indicated Resource: 362.0 MMT containing 0.26% Ni, 0.14% Cu, 0.231 g/t Pt, 0.244 g/t Pd, 0.04 g/t Au, and 150 ppm Co

TORONTO, Jan. 8, 2018 - Wellgreen Platinum Ltd. ("Wellgreen") is pleased to announce a corporate rebranding and name change to Nickel Creek Platinum Corp. ("Nickel Creek" or the "Company") to reflect the new direction of the Company and the uniqueness of its asset, which is one of the largest undeveloped nickel sulphide and Platinum Group Metals ("PGM") deposits in North America. "We are thrilled to complete our corporate rebranding to Nickel Creek Platinum, a name which reflects our company's significant endowment of nickel and PGMs, particularly in an environment of rapidly growing demand for electric vehicles that require extensive use of these metals," said Diane R. Garrett, President and CEO. "We are also extremely gratified by the fact that our principal project is located in the Yukon, a Canadian Territory with a well-established culture and support for responsible mining, a factor which is particularly important to all of our stakeholders."The new name is effective immediately; however, the Company will begin trading on the TSX under its new name and new ticker  NCP  on or about January 11, 2018. The Company expects to begin trading under its new name and a new symbol on the OTCQX at or about the same time. Our domain name and website address has changed to www.nickelcreekplatinum.com. Any visitors to our current website address and any communication to our current electronic mail addresses will be redirected accordingly.Concurrent with our rebranding, we have renamed our 100%-owned Ni-Cu-PGM project to Nickel Shaw (from Wellgreen). The project name recognizes our partnership, commitment and close community ties with the Kluane First Nation. The word "Shaw" (pronounced "sho") in Kluane means "big"  thereby translating to "big nickel"  a very suitable name for a project which is host to over 2.0 billion pounds of contained nickel (in Measured & Indicated resources). The Nickel Shaw project contains the Wellgreen deposit, as well as the Arch, Quill, Burwash, and Formula targets, comprised of 786 mineral claims totaling 14,382 ha. Our entire property package lies within the settled land claims of the Kluane First Nation, as defined by their treaty with the Canadian and Yukon Governments.Nickel Creek Platinum Corp. (TSX: NCP) is a Canadian mining exploration and development company focused on advancing its 100%-owned Nickel Shaw project with a view to creating Canada's next world-class nickel sulphide mine. The project has exceptional access to infrastructure, located three hours west of Whitehorse via the paved Alaska Highway, which further offers year-round access to deep-sea shipping ports in southern Alaska.The Company is led by a management team with a proven track record of successful discovery, development, financing and operation of large-scale projects. Our vision is to create value for our stakeholders through development of the Nickel Shaw project into a leading North American nickel, copper and PGM producer.The technical information disclosed in this news release was reviewed and approved by John Marek of IMC. Mr. Marek is a "Qualified Person" as defined in National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, and an independent consultant to the Company.Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information: This news release includes certain information that may be deemed "forward-looking information". Forward-looking information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "believe", "continue", "plans" or similar terminology, or negative connotations thereof. All information in this release, other than information of historical facts, including, without limitation, regarding the commencement of trading under the Company's new name and trading symbols, the growing demand for electric vehicles, the potential for growing demand for nickel and PGMs, the undertaking of future activities, work programs and development at the Nickel Shaw Project, realization of the potential of the Wellgreen deposit, converting inferred resource material to measured and indicated, and general future plans and objectives for the Company and the Nickel Shaw Project, are forward-looking information that involve various risks and uncertainties. Although the Company believes that the expectations expressed in such forward-looking information are based on reasonable assumptions, such expectations are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking information. For more information on the Company and the key assumptions, risks and challenges with respect to the forward-looking information discussed herein, and about our business in general, investors should review the Company's most recently filed annual information form, and other continuous disclosure filings which are available at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.Graeme Jennings, CFA, VP Corporate Development and Investor Relations1-416-304-9322gjennings@nickelcp.com
RENO, January 8, 2018 - Magellan Gold Corp. (OTCQB: MAGE) ("Magellan" or "the Company") announced that effective December 31, 2017, it had agreed with Rio Silver Inc. ("Rio Silver") to mutually terminate the Company's option to earn an interest in Rio Silver's Ninobamba exploration property in Peru. Magellan previously announced entering into the option agreement in news releases on July 5, 2016 and October 25, 2016.

In connection with termination of the agreement, Rio Silver agreed, subject to regulatory approval and under certain conditions, to apply to the TSX Venture Exchange for an 18-month extension of 2,750,000 warrants that Magellan holds in Rio Silver stock, which otherwise would expire in February and July 2018. There can be no assurance the warrants will be extended.

Also in connection with the termination of the agreement, Magellan agreed to grant Rio Silver a right of first refusal on any sale of the 2,750,000 shares of Rio Silver stock that Magellan currently holds. The stock and warrants in Rio Silver held by the Company relate to two Cdn$75,000 private placement unit financings subscribed by the Company in 2016 and 2017.

About Magellan Gold Corporation

Magellan Gold Corp. (OTCQB: MAGE) is a US public enterprise focused on the exploration and development of precious metals. In November 2017 Magellan completed the purchase of the SDA Mill in the State of Nayarit, Mexico. Magellan also owns an advanced silver exploration property located in Arizona.

The SDA Mill is a fully operational flotation plant that also includes a precious metals leach circuit and associated assets, licenses and agreements. Currently the Company is focused on acquiring sources of high-grade gold and silver ore that can be trucked to the mill for processing. Several attractive properties have been identified and are being evaluated for potential acquisition.

The 100% owned Silver District Property in southwest Arizona comprises over 2,000 acres covering the heart of the historic Silver District. The property contains a near-surface historical drilled resource of 16 million ounces of silver and exhibits exploration promise for significant expansion.

To learn more about Magellan Gold Corporation, visit http://www.magellangoldcorp.com.

Cautionary Statement

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission permits mining companies, in their filings with the SEC, to disclose only those mineral deposits that a company can legally extract or produce. Under SEC Industry Guide 7 standards, a "final" or "bankable" feasibility study is required to report reserves. Currently we have not delineated "reserves" on any of our properties. We cannot be certain that any deposits at our properties will ever be confirmed or converted into SEC Industry Guide 7 compliant "reserves." Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of any "resource" estimates will ever be confirmed or converted into reserves or that they can be economically or legally extracted.

Forward Looking Statements

This release contains "forward-looking statements." Such statements are based on good faith assumptions that Magellan Gold Corp. believes are reasonable but which are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and business risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated are discussed in Magellan Gold Corporation's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.







Contacts:



Magellan Gold Corp.

Pierce Carson: (505) 463-9223

John Power: (707) 884-3766

Peter Nesveda (INT IR): +61-4-1235-7375





SOURCE Magellan Gold Corp.


Agreement with Gecko Namibia (Pty) Ltd ("Gecko Namibia") to acquire a majority interest in seven projects ranging from exploration opportunities to near term feasibility stage





Diversifies Namibia Rare Earths Inc.'s single commodity focus from heavy rare earths on the Lofdal project into a broader portfolio of critical metals and minerals crucial for electric vehicle industry including cobalt, lithium, graphite, tantalum, niobium, and gold





Initial focus will be on cobalt project following discovery of stratabound cobalt-copper mineralization on neighboring license in northern Namibia





Strategic partnership formed with mineral development and mining group, Gecko Namibia, strengthens operational capacities for mineral processing and mine development





Pine van Wyk (NHD Met. Eng. B.Com, MBA), Managing Director of Gecko Namibia, will be appointed CEO of Namibia Rare Earths Inc.





Gecko Namibia and Gerald McConnell, Chair of the Board of Namibia Rare Earths Inc., to complete CDN$550,000 private placement

HALIFAX, Jan. 8, 2018 /CNW/ - Namibia Rare Earths Inc. ("Namibia Rare Earths" or the "Company") (TSXV: NRE) today provided an update on its progress towards completing the acquisition of a portfolio of critical metal properties (the "Properties") from Gecko Namibia (Pty) Ltd. ("Gecko Namibia") in consideration for the issuance of 64,000,000 common shares of Namibia Rare Earths ("Property Acquisition") and on its progress towards completing a $550,000 private placement ("Private Placement") both of which were announced in the Company's press release of November 10, 2017. Pursuant to the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange"), the Company is required to issue a news release every 30 days following its initial news release to provide an update on the status of the Property Acquisition.

The Company is focused on the regulatory process to obtain the consent of the Exchange for the Property Acquisition and the Private Placement. Exchange conditional approval of the Property Acquisition and the Private Placement has been received and the Company is working to fulfill all conditions for final approvals. These conditions include the completion of background searches by the TSXV on representatives of Gecko who will become insiders of Namibia Rare Earths.

In accordance with the policies of the Exchange, the Namibia Rare Earths shares are currently halted from trading and it is expected that they will remain halted until receipt and review of acceptable documentation regarding the Property Acquisition, pursuant to Exchange listings Policy 5.3.

Property Acquisition and Private Placement

Namibia Rare Earths has entered into an agreement with Gecko Namibia to acquire its 95% interest in a portfolio of exploration properties consisting of 14 exploration prospecting licences ("EPLs") four of which are pending, one mineral deposit retention licence ("MDRL") and Gecko Namibia's rights under an option agreement to acquire a 60% interest in a further exploration prospecting licence which interest may, subject to the terms of the option agreement, be increased to 80%.

This transaction provides Namibia Rare Earths with a high quality, diversified portfolio of critical metals and at the same time has secured a highly experienced strategic partner. Gecko Namibia and its subsidiaries are substantial participants in the Namibian resource sector with 327 employees and a proven track record in the mining industry. The Gecko Namibia portfolio of properties (see Table 1 Projects 2-8) will expand the Company's commodity base from solely rare earths to a variety of highly critical commodities including cobalt, copper, zinc, lithium, graphite, tantalum, niobium, nickel, and gold. Ground holdings in Namibia will increase from 221 km2 (Lofdal) to over 6,850 km2.

In conjunction with the Property Acquisition, Gecko Namibia and Gerald J. McConnell, Chair of the Board of Namibia Rare Earths, have each agreed to complete a private placement with the Company in the amount of $275,000 at $0.05 per share for total gross proceeds to the Company of $550,000 ("Private Placement"). A total of 11,000,000 common shares of Namibia Rare Earths will be issued pursuant to the Private Placement.

The Property Acquisition and Private Placement are expected to close on or before January 31, 2018 and are subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the final approval and acceptance by the TSXV. Upon completion of the Property Acquisition and Private Placement, Gecko Namibia will own 69,500,000 common shares of the Company representing 43.80% of the outstanding common shares of the Company. The Property Acquisition is conditional upon receipt of the approval of shareholders as required by the TSXV which has been obtained.

The proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to carry out work on the properties acquired from Gecko Namibia with an initial focus on advancing the Kunene cobalt-copper project and to fund general corporate requirements. The common shares of the Company issued pursuant to the Private Placement will be subject to a four-month hold period.

Namibia Rare Earths and its insiders are at arm's length with Gecko Namibia and there are no finder's fees payable in connection with the Property Acquisition or the Private Placement.

Following the closing of the Acquisition, Gecko Namibia will nominate two members to the five-member board of Namibia Rare Earths with Gerald McConnell remaining as Chair. Pine van Wyk will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of Namibia Rare Earths based in Namibia and Donald Burton will remain as President.

The Portfolio  Diversification into Critical Metals in Namibia

The transaction dramatically increases the Company's exposure to a wide variety of critical metals and minerals at various stages of development, providing a pipeline of projects spanning the spectrum from near-term discovery to preliminary economic assessment. All the projects are located in Namibia, a stable mining jurisdiction in which the Company has operated for the past seven years and where in-coming senior management have worked for over 20 years. This diversification will provide the Company with considerable flexibility in targeting those commodities which can provide immediate shareholder value. The portfolio of eight projects (which includes Lofdal), their principal commodity targets and development stage are summarized in Table 1 and more fully described below. Project locations are shown in Figure 1. Total expenditures of $84,000 in year one and $422,000 in year two are required to keep the entire portfolio of properties in good standing.

1. Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth Project

Lofdal was already held by the Company prior to this transaction and in terms of project maturity, is the most advanced with a 43-101 resource in place and completed Preliminary Economic Assessment1. In 2016 the Company completed an Environmental Impact Assessment and filed for an Environmental Clearance Certificate from the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, and concurrently filed for a Mining Licence with the Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Environmental Clearance Certificate was received in December, 2017 as announced in the Company's press release of December 18, 2017.

2. Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project

In terms of commodity interest, the Kunene cobalt-copper project will be assigned highest priority given the high level of investor interest in cobalt and current high cobalt prices. The Kunene project builds upon the recent exploration success led by Dr. Rainer Ellmies (General Manager, Gecko Exploration) to explore for "copper belt" style deposits in northern Namibia. This work led to the first recorded discovery of Copperbelt-type stratabound cobalt-copper mineralization in Namibia in a sedimentary horizon termed the dolomite ore formation ("DOF"). The mineralization is uniformly 5 to 10 meters thick, stratabound within a dolomitic shale horizon, and averages around 0.5% copper and 1000-2000 ppm cobalt. The initial discovery (which is on a contiguous property and is not a part of this transaction) is currently under intense exploration by Celsius Resources (ASX:CLA) including a 15,000 meter drill program to complete a maiden JORC resource estimate by February 2018. As per Celsius Resources' press release dated May 18, 2017 "Data from the first 20 holes drilled across this 11 km zone has enabled the Company to generate an Initial Exploration Target of between 33 and 41 million tonnes, grading approximately 0.13% - 0.17% cobalt and 0.45% - 0.65% copper. It is noted that the potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature, and that there has been insufficient exploration to estimate a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource."

The Kunene cobalt-copper project comprises a very large area of favourable stratigraphy contiguous with the DOF discovery adjacent to the ground held by Celsius Resources. Secondary copper mineralization over a wide area points to preliminary evidence of a regional-scale hydrothermal system. Exploration targets on EPLs held in the Kunene cobalt-copper project comprise direct extensions of the DOF style mineralization to the west, sediment-hosted cobalt and copper, orogenic copper, and stratabound Zn-Pb mineralization. Most of the occurrences are likely spatially related to what Dr. Ellmies' geological team has interpreted as a large hydrothermal center termed the Steilrand hydrothermal system. There is considerable scope for further discoveries both along strike of the Celsius discovery and in equivalent stratigraphy elsewhere on the property. Initial investigations will trace the western extension of the DOF which may continue for over 10 km in the project area, and will follow up on numerous copper-cobalt targets drilled in the past but never analysed for cobalt.

3. Black Range Graphite Project

The Black Range flake graphite prospect was discovered in the late 1980's and was explored by Rossing Uranium Ltd. between 1988 and 1992. Rossing interpreted the graphite horizon in a fold structure with a total strike length of about 8 km. Based on 3,821 m of percussion drilling and 3,931 m of diamond drilling from a 1 km segment of the horizon, employing a cut-off grade of 2% graphitic carbon and using the polygonal section method, an historical estimate of 12.46 MT grading 4.63% graphitic carbon was utilized by Rossing to assess the project (reference "The Black Range Graphite Deposit, Feasibility Study Final Report" dated August 1992). This historical estimate does not cite reference to CIMM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. Additional drilling and sampling will be required to validate the historic database. A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves and this historical estimate is not being treated as a current mineral resource or mineral reserve. Preliminary mining plans were drawn up and preliminary metallurgical work was carried out by Mintek of South Africa but the project was terminated before the flowsheet was fully optimized when the decision was made to focus instead on the graphite deposit at Okanjande. Okanjande was brought into production in 2017 by Gecko Namibia in a joint venture with Imerys.

There has been insufficient exploration at Black Range to estimate a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource or the development of an economically viable mining operation. The data cannot be used in its present form for reporting under JORC or NI 43-101. The near-term focus will be on metallurgical test work and, with a viable flowsheet, the project could be taken rapidly to a PEA stage.

4. Warmbad Lithium Project

The Warmbad project is located in southern Namibia near the South African border in an area of historic small-scale pegmatite mining known as the Tantalite Valley. The Tantalite Valley pegmatites have been mined since about 1946 for beryl, columbite-tantalite, lithium and bismuth minerals. Mining has been re-activated by Kennedy Ventures Plc who control African Tantatite (Pty) Ltd. and are producing concentrates of >40% Ta 2 O 5 being sold into global markets. Initial production of 20M tpa concentrate is ramping up to 120M tpa (Kennedy Ventures Corporate Presentation "Meeting Market Demand and Resource Expansion" dated July 27, 2017). An initial lithium resource estimate is being prepared by MSA Group for early 2018 following the sampling of lepidolite bearing pegmatites grading >1.6% Li 2 O. The mineralization hosted on the Kennedy Ventures Pic property is not necessarily indicative of the mineralization hosted on the Warmbad Lithium Project.

The Warmbad EPL covers 605 km2 and hosts three pegmatite occurrences of undetermined extent from government maps. There are no records of any systematic exploration over the EPL. The area has recently been mapped by the Geological Survey of Namibia and the Council of Geosciences (South Africa) which has provided updated geological information. A key result of the mapping campaign is the delineation of previously unknown extensive pegmatite swarms of up to 13 km strike length. None of these pegmatites have ever been sampled and assayed. This new data will be utilized to undertake systematic sampling of the pegmatites.

5. Epembe Tantalum-Niobium Project

Epembe is an advanced stage exploration project with a well-defined, very large multiphase carbonatite dyke that has been mapped and sampled at surface over a strike length of 10 kilometers of which at least 7 km of strike length is mineralised. Gecko Namibia has completed detailed mapping and over 11,000 meters of drilling on the dyke, with preliminary mineralogical and metallurgical studies. The carbonatite contains variable concentrations of pyrochlore which is unusually enriched in tantalum. The other commodities of interest are niobium (hosted in pyrochlore) and apatite. Drilling covered only 15% of the pyrochlore hosting carbonatite. Grades of the drilled portion of the carbonatite average on the order of 150 ppm Ta 2 O 5 , 1,300 ppm Nb 2 O 5 and 2.4% P 2 O 5. Initial sorting tests (XRT) indicate the potential for significant physical upgrading. Planned work will focus on improving grade by optimizing XRT sorting and investigating amenability to XRF sorting. Further work will be undertaken to explore for extensions of mineralized zones along strike and at depth.

6. Grootfontein Nickel-PGE Project

Grootfontein is an early stage conceptual target based on geophysical and historical evidence for a large buried mafic-ultramafic intrusive complex. It is a poorly explored geological complex due to the extensive coverage with Kalahari sands and calcrete.

Based on historic drill holes and airborne magnetic survey interpretations, Grootfontein constitutes a huge mafic complex covering 360 km2 with the potential to host magmatic nickel, copper, vanadium, platinum group elements and chromite mineralisation as cumulates or late magmatic disseminations and stockworks. Previous work by Ongopolo Mining proved that the main intrusive phases are depleted in nickel and copper. The metals were likely fractionated as sulphides during the intrusive phase, gravitationally accumulated in the magma and intruded in the adjacent, preexisting rocks. Only two shallow drill fences (total of 1,386 m) were drilled by Anglo American in 1988 leaving 55 km of strike length untested.

There is also potential for zinc-lead-vanadium mineralisation of the Berg Aukas type where dolomite-hosted deposits bordering the mafic complex, which according to historical records, produced 1.6 MT of ore grading 16.77% Zn, 4.04% Pb and 0.93% V 2 O 5 during the period 1967-1975.

7. Otjiwarongo Carbonatite Project

Otjiwarongo is another early stage conceptual target based on remote sensing data in proximity to known alkaline intrusive complexes, most notably the Okorusu complex which hosts the Okorusu fluorspar deposits. The area of interest is completely hidden by cover. The circular anomaly measures one kilometer in diameter and can be easily tested by drilling to determine if in fact a carbonatite body is the source and what styles of mineralization might be associated with it (fluorspar, rare earths, tantalum, niobium etc.).

8. Erongo Gold Project

The Erongo gold project covers an area of over 600 km2 within the Navachab-Ondundu gold trend. There are numerous mineral occurrences within the project area including at least two gold occurrences. The area has been prospected but not systematically explored. Potential targets include skarn and greisen gold-(copper-bismuth) and tin-tungsten mineralization; pegmatites formed during the late Damaran orogeny hosting lithium minerals and semi-precious stones and structurally controlled gold mineralisation. Historical figures indicate small scale mining for all of those deposit types on the property.

Project Management Strengthened  Operational Experience Focused on Namibia

Operations in Namibia for all projects will continue under Namibia Rare Earths (Pty) Ltd., the Namibian operating company of Namibia Rare Earths. Project management will be streamlined through utilization of Gecko Namibia's in-country administrative and service and the appointment of Pine van Wyk as Chief Executive Officer.

Pienaar-Schalk (Pine) van Wyk (NHD Met. Eng. B.Com, MBA), Managing Director of Gecko Namibia will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of Namibia Rare Earths based out of Namibia. Pine joined Gecko in 2008 bringing over 25 years of extensive process and project management experience to the Gecko Group. Prior to joining Gecko Namibia he worked for Rossing Uranium as Engineering Manager and later with Paladin Energy at the Langer Heinrich uranium mine where he held the positions of Operations Manager and Business Development Manager. As Managing Director for Gecko Namibia, Pine has developed a strong network of contacts throughout the mining sector and with government agencies in Namibia. In addition to his professional qualifications as a Metallurgical Engineer from Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria), Pine holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of South Africa and Masters of Business Administration from University of Bloemfontein with a focus on project management.

About Gecko Namibia  A Strategic Partner

Gecko Namibia is a private, Namibian-owned, fully integrated exploration and mining company with diversified interests in Namibia. Headquartered in Windhoek, the company and its subsidiaries operate with a work force of 327 employees with a professional management team of 24 people dedicated to every stage of mineral resource development including exploration, mining, mineral beneficiation and processing, and the provision of mine services (drilling, blasting, laboratories, plant construction, processing and contract mining).

Gecko Namibia and its sister company Genet South Africa (Pty) Ltd. ("Genet") were founded by Kobus Smit who is the Chairperson of both groups. Genet is a similar resource focused company providing mining and mineral processing services in South Africa with 703 employees and a team of 20 professional managers. Genet Mineral Processing introduced an innovative dry process, using air clarification to upgrade coal for the South African market, including to clients like Exxaro and Eskom. Mr. Smit's entrepreneurial spirit has led to the establishment of a diversified portfolio of business interests that include some of the most valuable mining and tourism assets in private ownership within the Southern African region. The group also employs 285 people in its various tourism related businesses.

Most notably, in 2003 Mr. Smit and his partners established a new coal mining company, namely Umcebo Mining, which grew into a significant coal producer in South Africa with annual production of approximately 9MT. Over a period, 7 coal mines were developed as greenfield projects, all with in-house capacity. The success of Umcebo was mainly the result of innovative technology in coal processing developed in-house that gave Umcebo Mining a significant competitive advantage over other coal producers. In 2011 Glencore acquired a 41% share in Umcebo Mining. Umcebo Mining was valued R2.2 billion at that time. During 2017, Mr. Smit disposed of all his interest in Umcebo Mining in order to focus on the expansion of his business interests in Namibia.

Graphite Mine in Production

Gecko Namibia was instrumental in bringing the 500,000 tpa run of mine Okanjande Graphite Mine into commercial production in 2017 through a joint venture partnership with Imerys, a global leader in the production of mineral-based, high value specialty products. Gecko Namibia re-designed a portion of the crushing, milling and flotation facilities at the Okorusu Mine for graphite processing of up to 20,000 tpa of graphite concentrate.

Fluorspar Mine and Processing Facilities

Gecko Namibia acquired all the mine and processing facility assets of the Okorusu Fluorspar Mine from Solvay in 2016. A comprehensive test program has been developed with the objective of re-opening the fluorspar operations at Okorusu. Okorusu produced close to 1.8 million tons of fluorspar concentrates over a 27-year period between 1998-2014, when Solvay made the corporate decision to close down its global mining division.

Various Salts and Limestone Operations

Gecko Salt, a subsidiary of Gecko Namibia, operates a small-scale salt production plant located approximately 120 kilometers north of the coastal town of Swakopmund. The project is currently operating at a rate of 200,000 tpa and targeting to increase to 1,000,000 tpa. The first shipment of 25,000 t of salt for the North American market was exported in August 2017.

An internal assessment has been completed over portions of the Otjivalunda salt pans, located north of Etosha National Park, which comprise natural deposits of burkeite, thenardite and sodium sulphate. Gecko Salt intends to initially produce approximately 100,000 tpa of sodium sulphate as well as washing powder, soap and other salt products for sale into the South African market.

An internal resource of 5 million tons of high-quality white marble with >98% calcium carbonate has been defined by drilling near Swakopmund together with an internal resource in excess of 25 million tons of calcitic marble rock for a calcining project. An Environmental Impact Assessment for the project has been completed and the company has received the Environmental Clearance Certificate.

Industrial Corporate Vision

Gecko Namibia envisions substantial industrial growth for Namibia, in part through the realization of its multi-faceted resource portfolio. To this end, Gecko Namibia has initiated two high level projects related to industrial development in the Swakopmund-Walvis Bay area.

An application for the development of a 200 ha industrial park named Nonidas Industria to be located 11km east of Swakopmund is at an advanced stage. The site is uniquely situated between the B2 National Highway and the main TransNamib railway leading inland from Walvis Bay and Swakopmund. The Vision Industrial Park (VIP) is a much larger concept that has been proposed by Gecko Namibia to develop a new deep-water port with an associated industrial development zone to be situated 25 km north of Swakopmund. The Namibian Cabinet awarded Gecko Namibia the right to develop a private port together with 700 ha of industrial land for the development of chemical and mining related industries. The port will be designed to accommodate Panama size vessels and have the capacity to handle 5-10 million tons of cargo volume per annum. The concept is very similar to the Coega Project of South Africa where an industrialized development zone was created with a dedicated port facility in 2009. Since its inception, Coega has attracted 54 industrial firms that have brought in over R30 billion in investments.

Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Rare Earths Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release.

About Namibia Rare Earths Inc.

Namibia Rare Earths Inc. is focused on the accelerated development of the Lofdal Rare Earths Project and on building a critical metals portfolio in Namibia. The common shares of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NRE".

Web site: www.NamibiaRareEarths.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions.





1 Preliminary Economic Assessment on the Lofdal Rare Earths Project Namibia dated October 1, 2014 authored by David S. Dodd, B. Sc (Hon) FSAIMM - The MDM Group, South Africa, Patrick J.F. Hannon, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. and William Douglas Roy, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. - MineTech International Limited, Canada, Peter Roy Siegfried, MAusIMM (CP Geology) and Michael R. Hall, B.Sc (Hons), MBA, MAusIMM, Pr.Sci.Nat, MGSSA - The MSA Group, South Africa

SOURCE Namibia Rare Earths Inc.
Thunder Bay, January 8, 2018 - Benton Resources Inc. (TSXV: BEX) ("Benton" or "the Company") would like to announce that it has received its permit from the Government of Newfoundland to complete an airborne survey (magnetic (Mag) and electromagnetic (EM)) over its 100%-owned GNP project located near St. Anthony in northwestern Newfoundland. The proposed survey is to the south of White Metal Resources Corp. and Metals Creek Resources Corp. 's projects. A recent discovery of anomalous gold values over approximately 15 sq km in black sedimentary shale units (See White Metal Resources PR dated November 20, 2017) is considered to be significant by the Company's management and could represent a new geological model for the island of Newfoundland. The Company will be flying 156 line-kilometres of airborne Mag-EM. During the late fall of 2017, the Company identified pyritic and graphitic black shales in several locations on its GNP project and limited sampling returned assays from 7ppb to 239ppb gold (Au). The 239ppb Au sample was collect near the southern boundary of Metals Creek's project and is located more than 10km south of White Metal's Gunners Cove discovery and is believed to be the same geological unit.

In addition, Benton also controls the Cape Ray gold deposits located near the southwest coast of Newfoundland and is working on various ways to advance the project in the best interests of shareholders. The Company will inform shareholders of upcoming plans when a material decision has been made.

The previously announced results of the Cape Ray PEA include a pre-tax net present value ("NPV") at a 7% discount rate of $48.5 million with a pre-tax internal rate of return ("IRR") of 31% and a post-tax NPV at a 7% discount rate of $32.4 million with a post-tax IRR of 25%. The reader should be cautioned that the PEA is preliminary in nature. It contains inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves.

Benton also holds multiple gold and base metal projects that are available for option which can be viewed on the Company's web site. Most projects have an up-to-date NI 43-101 report available. Interested parties can contact Stephen Stares from the contact below.

About Benton Resources Inc. (TSXV: BEX)

Benton Resources Inc. is a well-funded Canadian-based junior with a diversified property portfolio in Gold-Silver, Nickel, Copper, and Platinum group elements.

Clinton Barr (P.Geo.), V.P. Exploration for Benton Resources Inc., is the qualified person responsible for this release has prepared, supervised the preparation or approved the scientific and technical disclosure in the news release.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Benton Resources Inc.,

"Stephen Stares"

Stephen Stares, President

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections

For further information contact Stephen Stares @:

684 Squier Street,

Thunder Bay, ON

P7B 4A8

Phone (807)475-7474

Cell (807) 474-9020

Fax (807) 475-7200

Web www.bentonresources.ca

Email sstares@bentonresources.ca


Students from De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) felt on top of the world when they visited a New York landmark as part of their #DMUglobal experience.

A group from across all four faculties ascended 70 floors to enjoy views of the famed skyline from the Top of the Rock Observation Deck at the Rockefeller Center.

The Midtown Manhattan activity was one of a selection students could choose from to enhance their cultural understanding of the city.

Amy Transfield described the experience as "breathtaking and definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity".

The English Language and English Literature student said: "You get a bird's eye view of what life is like in New York rather than being on the ground and living in it.

"It adds to your understanding of the city because you get to see everything."

Her English Literature classmate Ella McGill could directly relate the experience to her course.

"The way that New York has been built there are so many different cultures in it and you can find relevancy everywhere.

"The Rockefeller Center is so ornate, I love the style of it, and then being able to see New York from up high is just the best view I've ever seen in my life."

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Psychology student Hamza Mir enjoyed getting a different perspective of the city.

"Being down on the floor in Manhattan you're always looking up at the sky and seeing how the towers are leaning over you," he said. "Coming up here you get to see how everything is on the same level as you and it's literally an amazing sight.

"It's something that I'm going to take away with me for the rest of my life."

The 360-degree views, taking in the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty to the south and Central Park to the north, proved inspirational for Architecture student Chang Chern Loh.

"This is benefitting my studies," he said, "as the skyline is improving my visuals".

Students also had a chance to explore an exhibition of photographs and artefacts from the Rockefeller Center, famed for its Art Deco style, before taking the Sky Shuttle elevator to the viewing area.

Ryan Cook had never seen anything like it before.

"It is amazing as well as cultural and you don't see many things like this in your life," said the Business and Law student, who is also getting a lot from his academic activities.

"It's good to see American law, the differences and how we can compare our own to theirs. It's very beneficial."
Unemployment is back down to near-historic lows -- 4.3 percent nationwide and a bit lower in my own city of Columbia, S.C. Why, then, are so many of my hard-working constituents, and Americans nationwide, so anxious about money? Stagnant wages and rising inequality are parts of the story, but there is an equally pernicious trend that gets almost no attention: income volatility.We live in an economy increasingly dominated by just-in-time workers, and the swings can be wrenching. Think of the hourly worker whose hours are slashed when business slows down, the parent who gets hit with an unexpected hospital bill, or the Uber driver who has a slow week. Think of all of the "independent contractors" who have no sick leave, no health insurance and no job security. Income volatility also affects millions of full-time employees, from salespeople who work on commission to factory workers who get laid off during slow periods.According to an Urban Institute report , roughly a quarter of American families suffer a major disruption to their income each year. Nearly one in five of those families suffer an income drop of 50 percent or more. Volatility is especially traumatic for low-wage workers. And according to studies by the Aspen Institute, about half of low-wage workers are subject to precarious scheduling: they get little advance notice of changes in shifts or the number of hours they will work. For people living paycheck to paycheck, even short swings can cause long-lasting disruptions.I saw this stress firsthand last summer when the city of Columbia hosted a conference on income volatility in coordination with the Aspen Institute's Financial Security Program and LendUp, a socially responsible financial-services firm.We brought together elected officials, local business leaders, community advocates and policy experts. But we also heard from residents. "Stress is at the top of the list," one mother recounted. "You can't even think through in a rational way to work things out because you don't have the energy or focus.""I can't even afford to get sick," said a resident working his way through college. "I had to quit going to school just so I could afford to pay rent."One young mother recounted how she got fired after trying to care for her sick child. "They didn't want to hear the excuse," she said. Another mother with a sick child said she was forced to take out a high-cost "title loan" secured by her car. "I am still paying it off,'' she said. "I think I'm going to give the car back."What can we do? We can't erase income volatility, but we can tame its impact. This will require bold thinking and collaboration across all sectors: elected officials, the business community, the financial-services industry, community advocates, nonprofit leaders and our own public employees.As the mayor of Columbia, I oversee a municipal enterprise that employs more than 2,000 people. To that end, we are exploring a range of new strategies that could serve as a model for other employers. One simple idea: offer employees training in money management. There are a number of useful tools to help people prepare for volatility, but employees are often too busy or tired to think about those issues after work.We also are looking at a pilot program to spur savings and homeownership among city employees. The plan is to offer "lunch and learn" seminars on a wide range of topics, from budgeting to credit management, and to link that with financial incentives for saving and support for down payments on homes purchased in targeted areas.Employers need to think creatively about ways they can improve financial stability. Something as easy as switching from biweekly to weekly paychecks can help. But why stop there? Perhaps it's possible to smooth the monthly income of people who earn uneven but predictable amounts of overtime pay. If electricity customers can average out their bills over the year, why couldn't employees average out their overtime? Employers could also give their workers more advance notice about changes to their schedules or the number of hours they can expect. New York City recently enacted a law that requires exactly that.Financial-services companies can help too. As Sasha Orloff, co-founder and CEO of LendUp, has noted, today's financial-services industry doesn't serve the needs of more than half of Americans, those who don't have access to things like debit or credit cards. Financial-services companies have a huge opportunity to innovate on behalf of these consumers, and some are already working on new ideas. Among them: safer alternatives to "payday" loans.Government also should do more to adapt safety-net programs to the needs of today's workforce. Unemployment insurance helps only about one in five people who lose their jobs, and it does absolutely nothing for people whose hours are cut back. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit provides thousands of dollars to low-income working families -- but only once a year.Neither the just-in-time labor economy nor the other causes of income volatility are likely to fade anytime soon. The good news is that creative solutions are possible, but they require bold thinking on all sides.
Commercial marijuana, I think, is really in jeopardy. If the [federal government is] taking a different stance on it, I don't want to be involved in something they are going to come down on.
From optimist to vocal critic

Homeland Security's future role unclear

President Trump's decision last week to pull the plug on his troubled voter fraud commission was partly the result of Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap's effort to force the body to behave in a transparent and bipartisan manner, a struggle that gained intensity Saturday, when Dunlap learned the administration would not be turning over working documents to him as a federal judge had ordered.Trump killed the commission -- which was mired in lawsuits, infighting among commissioners, and an organizational culture so secretive it had refused to tell its own membership if and when it would meet again -- "rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense," according to a White House statement.The president's decision, announced Wednesday, also came less than two weeks after a federal judge ordered the commission to share working documents and scheduling information with Dunlap, who had sued the body in November after he and three other Democrats serving on the 11-member commission had been frozen out of its deliberations. American Oversight, a Washington-based ethics advocacy group that represented Dunlap in the suit, said this was "no coincidence," as the decision had made it "clear it wouldn't be able to operate in the shadows."But in a surprise move revealed Saturday, the Trump administration is resisting turning over the documents. On Friday evening, Dunlap's attorneys received a letter from the Justice Department informing them that it would not be providing the records on the rationale that because the commission no longer exists, Dunlap is no longer a member of it and therefore not entitled to receive them. "The balance of the equities and the public interest have now shifted," explained the letter's author, Joseph Borson, a Justice Department attorney representing the now defunct commission, who added they intended to ask the judge to lift the order on account of the changed circumstances.Dunlap blasted the Justice Department in a written statement released Saturday afternoon, characterizing its response as a "rich blend of arrogance and contempt for the rule of law." He said it was "unthinkable, unconscionable and un-American that the administration would engage in actions that demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for a court ruling and the rule of law" and said he was "more committed than ever" to securing the documents.In an interview before the latest developments, Dunlap said he thought his legal action played a role in Trump's decision to close the commission. "I kind of wondered after the decision if that would be the direction they would take," he said, adding that he would continue to pursue the documents the court said he was entitled to receive. "I think it's more critical now than it's ever been. The president didn't just roll out of bed and say, 'I'm going to dissolve this commission.' This was something they discussed that we were not involved in."Election integrity experts say Dunlap's lawsuit almost certainly played a part in the demise of the commission, which Trump created by executive order in February to substantiate his evidence-free assertion that he had only lost the popular vote because millions of fraudulent ballots were cast for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton."I don't think there's any question that Secretary Dunlap's view from inside the commission and his shining a light on their lack of transparency contributed to its ultimate demise," said David Becker, former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C. "He got criticism for even being willing to join the group and to work with an open mind toward something he thought was going to be constructive. I think he's been vindicated."Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said separate lawsuits by Dunlap and more than a half-dozen other parties combined to block overreach and illegal acts by the commission, which was formally chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and led week-to-week by vice chairman Kris Kobach, a voter fraud activist and Kansas secretary of state."It wasn't as though the lawsuits took so much time that the commission didn't have the bandwidth to be able to do its job," Hasen said. "It's that the lawsuits and related scrutiny indicated that the commission was going to have to operate with a certain level of transparency and evenhandedness which I think would have stymied their ability to have come forward with a sham report to justify a crackdown on alleged voter fraud.""The loss of the commission takes away the bipartisan veneer that Kobach tried to create which included bringing on Secretary Dunlap, which is one of the reasons I opposed his participation," Hasen added.Neither Kobach nor Andrew Kossack, the commission's executive director, responded to requests for comment. Kobach told the Kansas City Star that the blame lay with a "barrage of meritless lawsuits ... all trying to stop the commission in its tracks."Trump, for his part, tweeted that the "system is rigged" and accused "Democrat states" of stonewalling the body's request for detailed voter registration records. "They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally," Trump asserted.Over the summer, Dunlap had been under fire from fellow Democrats for participating in a commission that from its first meeting had made clear it would focus almost entirely on voter fraud, a problem numerous studies and probes by administrations headed by both parties have shown is vanishingly rare. One study by Loyola Law School, Los Angeles professor Justin Levitt found just 31 credible allegations of identity fraud in all primary, general, special and municipal elections between 2000 and 2014, out of more than a billion votes cast. A 2011 voter fraud probe in Maine by Republican Secretary of State Charlie Summers and backed by Gov. Paul LePage found just one instance of fraud.Dunlap repeatedly defended his participation, saying it was a mistake to prejudge the commission's intentions and that, if it were acting improperly, he would be in a position to expose it "with a bullhorn in my hand." But he began to express concern and alarm after the body's second and, as it turned out, last meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, Sept. 12.Ahead of the meeting -- which was hosted by New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner, one of the other Democrats on the commission -- Kobach asserted in an article in Breitbart News that the Granite State's U.S. Senate race had been "stolen" from Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte via voter fraud. His evidence was that college students had voted in the election without having acquired a state driver's licenses, even though this is explicitly legal under that state's laws. Dunlap derided Kobach as "reckless," while Gardner defended the integrity of the vote.While the meeting was underway, news broke that one of the Republican members of the commission, Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative, had written Attorney General Jeff Sessions in February to express anger that Democrats and "mainstream Republicans" would be allowed to serve on it, claiming they would seek to obstruct the investigation. The revelation outraged Dunlap, causing him to seriously question the body's intentions.After the Manchester meeting, Dunlap said, he ceased to receive any communications from the group, which for weeks ignored his requests for working documents, scheduling information, and to be included in ongoing deliberations. In October he learned of the arrest of a commission staff researcher on child pornography charges from a reporter; he said he hadn't even been aware the staffer had been hired. He sued to receive working documents Nov. 9.By then it was also clear that the commissioners had no powers. Kobach had sent two controversial requests to election administrators in all 50 states asking them to turn over detailed voter registration information to the commission, including party affiliation and partial Social Security numbers. Neither of the requests -- which were rejected by many blue and red states alike -- was made with the prior approval or consultation with the commissioners. Maine did not provide the requested information, as Dunlap said it would violate state law.A federal judge ruled largely in Dunlap's favor Dec. 22, ordering the commission to turn over the documents. Dunlap said it has neither done so nor communicated with him since."Dunlap was under a lot of fire from Democrats for being on the commission in the first place, and I do think ends up smelling like a rose," said Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. "Because of the lawsuit and his insistence on being included in the commission's work, I think he acquitted himself well."There were conflicting messages coming out of Washington as to what the Trump administration intended to do next.Initially, the White House and Kobach said they were not abandoning their efforts to establish the existence of widespread voter fraud. Trump supposedly directed the Department of Homeland Security to review the commission's initial findings -- the existence of which has yet to be made public -- and "determine next courses of action," according to a White House statement Wednesday. Trump's press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declined to explain to reporters Thursday why Homeland Security was taking over the data rather than the Department of Justice.Kobach, who is running for governor in Kansas, told the Kansas City Star last week that Trump's decision to end the commission came after weeks of discussion, and that DHS was chosen because it oversees immigration and could help identify noncitizens on voting rolls."This is a tactical shift by the president, who remains very committed to finding the scope of voter fraud," Kobach said.But subsequently, attorneys for the administration denied that the documents were going to be transferred to Homeland Security or anyone else. In its letter regarding Dunlap's lawsuit, the Justice Department saidit was "authorized to report that the state voter data collected by the Commission is not being transferred or utilized." On Friday, Reuters reported that multiple officials within Homeland Security said they were unaware of any plans for the department to begin investigating voter fraud, while department spokesman Tyler Houlton said Kobach was not serving as an adviser to them on the issue, as Kobach had claimed in interviews with reporters.If Homeland Security does take up the issue, election experts are concerned it may damage the newly forged trust between the department and state and local election officials, who have been working together in recent months to improve cybersecurity for voter registration databases and other crucial electoral infrastructure in the face of Russian hacking and infiltration attempts."Election officials are already voicing their concern about this shift and if it will somehow divert resources and attention away from the critical infrastructure work that has been taking place," Tammy Patrick, a former member of President Barack Obama's commission on election administration, said by email. "That work is tantamount to ensuring the security of the (2018) midterms and is already under-resourced."Stewart of MIT agreed. "Nothing good can come of moving this to DHS, and I think the secretary of DHS will have to make a decision about what is most important to the agency's mandate," he said. "There was a lot of work to mend fences between DHS and election officials. Why would you want to throw a monkey wrench right when the work is being done?"Speaking to the Press Herald late Wednesday night,, Dunlap said a shift to Homeland Security would also mean a loss of transparency, which is why he considers it more important than ever to obtain the records documenting what the commission has been planning behind closed doors."I think we need to know what has been discussed and what their blueprint is for what happens next," he said. "I'm still entitled to that information, and I will see what efforts we can pursue to make that happen."
Description

GIS  08 January, 2018: The Ministry of Arts and Culture would organise a series of activities to mark the 183rd Anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in Mauritius, commemorated on 1st February. In the context of the celebrations, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Andrew Michael Holness, ON, MP, will be the Chief Guest.

Mr Holness became Jamaicas ninth Prime Minister in 2016. He is a holder of a Master of Science in Development Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Management Studies from the University of the West Indies.

Prime Minister Holness has pledged to build partnerships with the private sector, the civil society, the Diaspora, and International Partners in order to achieve the vision of shared prosperity for all Jamaicans through inclusive economic growth and meaningful job creation.

Prior to assuming the responsibility of leading the nation, Mr Holness has worked at various levels of the political and governance systems. He has focused on several key areas comprising: social welfare, community development, housing and education.

Prime Minister Holness has also brought national attention to literacy and has instituted several programmes to place Jamaica on the path to universal literacy at the primary level.
Filling a need

Hutchinson discussion?

State assistance?

(TNS)  The city of Chanute is one of only two Kansas towns to build its own fiber-optic communications network open to businesses in its community.While unique for Kansas, a quick search of the internet shows it's not at all unique in the U.S., with municipally run broadband at locales from Florida to California.It's also an idea some Hutchinson community leaders believe should be explored as a way to promote economic development here.In Chanute, the city first began using fiber optics back in 1984 to support the city's electric utility operations."We had three locations we were trying to keep track of, but without SCADA it was a nightmare," said Chanute Utilities Director Larry Gates, referring to the acronym for a computerized monitoring system that records data from multiple remote locations and tells equipment how to operate.In 2001, when the system needed upgrading, they decided to overbuild it, Gates said."We have an awful lot of city services  lift stations, water intake, water treatment, sewer treatment, even Wi-Fi in the parks," he said. "Those are all connected by fiber optic. We also do a lot of security monitoring, with cameras in key locations.""The routes we took are where we put junction boxes," he said. "We did it next to the schools and junior college and the hospital. For the simple reason we started talking about getting them onto our fiber optic network is how we got started being an ISP (internet service provider.)"That was 2005. Since then, Gates said, "we've expanded that quite a bit," offering it to businesses within the community."It's something we did not have here  ultra-high-speed bandwidth  and it's highly reliable," he said. "Once you're connected to the city of Chanute network, you don't have issues anymore."The city has built its system, which now encompasses about 50 miles of cable, "one piece at a time," Gates said, noting it's the most expensive way to do it but was "pay as you go."While not created for that purpose, it has served as an economic development tool, he believes.For example, a drive-through restaurant in town wasn't able to take debit or credit cards because its connection was inadequate and unreliable, "and they were losing a lot of customers," Gates said. "It's a plastic world. People use cards to buy stuff."Others use the system for voice-over-internet, which "is very popular," Gates said."The network provider was having real issues with reliability, continuously having calls drop."The city was exploring building a city-wide system, to offer service to residential customers, when it became a political issue during a city election. The proposal was to bond the project, adding about another 140 miles of line."Some people ran (for City Council) on the basis of fiber optics, putting it to a vote of the people," he said. "We were two weeks away from authorizing a bond issue to do fiber-to-home for everyone on the electrical system when it was stopped."That was in April 2015."We're still waiting on that public vote," he said.Most of Chanute's lines are strung from poles and not buried, "but we have our own utilities" so that's not an added expense and a significant benefit for running its own system."We're a full-service city," Gates said. "We have electric, with our own electric generators. We have water, sewer, even our own gas. We have city trash routes and a landfill. We don't have telephone or cable TV."The community is served by AT&T, which "is reliable," Gates said, but charges more than the city for internet service. They also have a cable provider, which Gates said is "not good service." Being a small community, "I don't think we'll ever see 5G networks.""I don't know that by itself it's an economic development tool," Gates said. "But if you don't have that information highway, you won't see economic development. Everyone is demanding it. ... I think it's a big leveling item for our community. It allows us to compete."Hutchinson city officials had a brief discussion about the city building a fiber-optic system about five years ago, said City Manager John Deardoff, but it never went further than that."We looked at the possibility of doing something like Chanute was doing, but at that time, there was huge up-front money," Deardoff said. "Certainly the payoff was there, but we didn't look into it far enough to see what it would look like."At least one City Council member has expressed an interest in the issue, the city manager said, but "we haven't gotten into any serious conversations about a city utility.""It would take a lot of investigation," he said. "A lot of information would have to be gathered."There's also the issue, he said, of the "free enterprise thing."The city this month is looking at its wide-area network plan, Deardoff said, linking city facilities without relying on an outside provider, "but that's about how far we've gone in terms of building our own."That plan, said Hutchinson IT Director Todd Davis, actually involves very little fiber optics but mostly point-to-point communication using wireless radios, called "air-fiber." Building fiber-optic cables from just City Hall to the Public Works building, he said, would cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.Hutchinson lawmaker Jason Probst, however, believes developing some type of high-speed fiber-optic system for Hutchinson is important for economic development."This is like any other infrastructure," said Probst, D-102nd District. "We build highways to move goods and services and treat them as tools of economic development. I believe the way to continue to move goods and services in the future is through high-capacity internet connections. If the community is not investing in that, and leaving it to private industry, it's subject to pricing mechanisms of the market, which is even more concerning now with what the FCC has done on internet neutrality.""This is like the railroad," Probst said. "If the railroad came to town, the town grew. If it didn't, it died or started to decline. The same thing with highways. If we don't start thinking for the next 50 or 100 years and don't treat internet capacity as a means of economic development, we'll see the same fate as those communities."Noting how internet technology expanded in a relatively short time "from when I was in high school and you had a 2400 baud modem that could only send text" to today's online international marketing that is reshaping retail trade, Probst suggested "we ought to step up to leverage that and take advantage, to make our community a part of it.""I haven't had the chance to research it thoroughly, but I think a community like Hutchinson ought to start looking at what it would cost to build its own infrastructure, to bring in a company like IdeaTek, to use their expertise and maybe work with them under contract," he said. "We need to explore how much those things cost and what good can be gained."Even something like a fiber system just along Main Street, available at low or no cost to entrepreneurs and retailers downtown or for the public using a coffee shop, could be a potential economic boon, helping draw businesses in to fill empty storefronts."I think at the state level, something could be looked at in terms of creating economic incentive, some assistive legislation that would help communities finance this, whether through a bonding mechanism or helping leverage locally raised money to pay for high-capacity infrastructure," Probst said. "We never seem to have a problem coming up with the money if a big corporate firm is looking to come to Kansas. This could be used to develop local talent and skills. To recruit high technological industries into the state, you need high-speed internet."The Minnesota Legislature last year allocated $20 million in state funds for a "Border-to-Border Broadband" grant program, with a focus on assisting new and existing providers to invest in building infrastructure into unserved and underserved areas of the state.The grants can provide up to half of project development costs, with a grant cap of $5 million.And in October 2017, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announced a second round of broadband grants for that state, awarding up to $7.5 million from funds previously approved in the state budget.Kansas briefly had a Statewide Broadband Initiative, managed by the Department of Commerce. When federal funds for the program ran out in 2014, however, the program ended also.
Fiber optic expansion?

Sorry, Hutchinson

Gold standard

Other upgrades

(TNS)  Nate Oswald works for a local fiber-optic network company. Even for him, though, it wasn't easy to get internet service to his rural Reno County home.He first had to convince two dozen neighbors to commit to contracting with his employer, IdeaTek, before the small but growing independent company agreed to string lines to the rural cluster of houses north of Hutchinson at the end of last year."It's 8 miles from here to Hutchinson, and there is a black hole in there for internet service," said Oswald, who lives 4 miles from Hutchinson and was speaking from IdeaTek's downtown Buhler offices. "It is extremely underserved. ... My wife, Terra, works from home. The best we could get was a Verizon hotspot that many times drops service. This will enable her to continue to work from home."Before getting a connection, Oswald was among the nearly two-thirds of rural Reno County residents without internet access except through high-cost cellular data services.Figures from a national organization called Broadband Now show some 12,000 Reno County residents, or 63 percent of the county outside of population centers, have no broadband access other than potentially by phone.For urban areas in the county, just 5 percent, or about 2,500 people, don't have access, though, truth be told, even in urban areas, available service falls well below state and national averages.That same source rates Hutchinson  the 11th largest city in Kansas by population  as the 79th most connected city in the state, with an average broadband download speed of just 25.33 megabytes per second (Mbps).That's nearly a third slower than the average speed across Kansas  which itself is ranked a lowly 40th in the nation for broadband service  and more than 67 percent lower than the national average.The Federal Communication Commission's "benchmark speed" to consider a community served by broadband requires minimum download speeds of 25 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps. The average internet download speed in Kansas is 32.24 Mbps, and for the nation, the average is 42.5 Mbps, according to data compiled by Rick Neese of Broadband Now.IdeaTek was building an extension of its fiber lines relatively close to his home, extending the overhead cables along 30th Avenue nearly to Hutchinson, so Oswald, who is engineering coordinator for the company, was able to convince his employer to tap that line, extending a branch up Willison Road to 69th Avenue.The company is open to extending service to other rural housing clusters in the county without access to internet service if it pencils out, said Daniel Friesen, chief innovation officer at IdeaTek. They're now looking, for example, at extending a line at their 30th Avenue terminus farther north to the Rice County line."We have what we call our 'Champions of the build,'" Friesen said. "They are typically the ones who reach out first, and we say, 'If you can get a neighborhood together.' We enable them with marketing materials to gather interest. If they meet an interest-level requirement, we'll do an initial build cost analysis and determine how many customers in an area we have to sign up to make a business case. As soon as it hits that trigger point, we'll start the investment.""WIFCO Steel is a perfect example, where we found an anchor entity to start the process," Friesen said. "Josh Stubbs at WIFCO said 'We rely on good internet service for our business and we need you out here.' We said 'It's going to be tough, but if you can sign up some residential customers, then we'll have the synergy to benefit both sides. It took about six months for the process."They will look at extending service to any businesses in Hutchinson, Friesen said, but Hutchinson residents watching the service coming ever-so-close are out of luck.The 15-year-old company, which has focused on fiber optics for the past decade, has residential customers primarily in Buhler, Inman, Haven, Moundridge, Mount Hope, Andale, most of Yoder and Bentley. It also provides high-speed internet for school districts in Nickerson and Fairfield and has commercial customers in Hutchinson, Newton, McPherson and as far west as Stafford."We've been focusing a lot lately on underserved," Friesen said. "Not formal communities, but underserved groups of rural neighborhoods. We've been very successful outside of Andale, with bedroom developments, and in the Wichita area.""A lot of times, when we have public forum meetings in areas where we're deploying, we get a lot of contact from the outskirts where we hadn't intended to go, but where it might make sense to hop over there," said Jade Piros de Carvalho, director of marketing for IdeaTek. "It made better sense, with a higher subscription rate."Where they are located, said IdeaTek CEO Jerrod Reimer, "we see a 70 percent or 80 percent take rate, which is very high for the industry. That tells us everyone likes our product, and we think they're going to be loyal, long-term customers."The company is not interested, however, Friesen said, in going into larger metro areas like Hutchinson "to get in a nickel and dime fight.""You see in metro areas where customers will switch between AT&T and Cox over 10 bucks," he said. "We want long-term relationships with our customers. We don't really want in that fight. They don't even know who their customers are; they don't care who they are. That's not our mission."Still, only about 6 percent of Reno County residents and less than 2 percent of connections in Hutchinson, the Broadband Now data shows, have access to fiber.IdeaTek has approached rural electric providers about allowing it to share the electric lines under a franchise agreement, which would allow wider and more economical expansion, but so far has been unsuccessful, Friesen said."If you draw a line around Buhler, our 5- to 10-year plan is serving more communities within that 60-mile radius," he said.Fiber optic is the "gold standard" for broadband service. It works by lasers shooting pulses of light across thin strands of glass. The technology offers nearly unlimited expansion and has fewer points of failure than copper wire and cable networks."Nothing is faster than the speed of light," notes IdeaTek's Reimer."It's very future-proof," Friesen said. "And it's very scalable. When we started in Buhler 10 years ago, those same lines will be scalable (allowing expansion) for decades to come."Fiber optic signals can travel farther than signals over copper lines or cables because it doesn't have electromagnetic interference from the lines degrading it. Also, IdeaTek's lines aren't delivering multiple signals, like telephone and television, along with the internet."It's a non-shared, dedicated connection to the customer," Friesen said. "We can deliver the same product in front of our central office as 20 to 30 kilometers away. Because we have a pristine transmission medium, the effort it takes to upgrade the technology is less. We're so far ahead with gigabyte services vs. cable modem."Most of their customers can receive gigabyte service, Friesen said, which is 1,000 megabytes of data  or 1 billion bits  per second. With 1 Gbps, a high definition movie can be downloaded in about 10 seconds.The next step up, Friesen said, is 10 Gbps, which a few of their commercial connections are already delivering.The cost of installing fiber optics, however, is substantially higher than traditional DSL (digital line service) and cable. That's because most of those services use the existing copper telephone or coaxial cable lines installed decades ago.Companies providing those services have been able to boost signals over time, but that's accomplished primarily by installing new technology at the sending and receiving ends and sometimes in-between.While residential fiber optics aren't coming to Hutchinson, for those unsatisfied by the speed of services in town, there are a couple of upgrades in progress by the two primary providers.Also, for unserved or underserved rural residents, a couple of other technologies that could reach them at a more moderate cost are in pilot studies, though it appears fixed wireless through phone and satellite service remain the primary options for the foreseeable future.According to Broadband Now, there are nine residential provider networks in Hutchinson or Reno County. The two primary providers are Cox Communications and AT&T."We definitely have plans for fiber across the state as we look through 2018 and early 2019 that would include Reno County," stated Mandy Wilbert, senior manager of public affairs at Cox Communications in Wichita.The system is not true fiber-optics but uses a technology called DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) to send higher speeds over hybrid fiber-coaxial cable.First released in October 2013, and updated several times since, DOCSIS 3.1 technology supports broadband capacities of at least 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream.Cox began offering 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to residential customers in this area earlier this year, with nearly 40 percent of its customer base having access to it by the end of the year, Wilbert stated."We are on track to reach 99 percent by the end of 2019," Wilbert stated in an email. "Our commitment is to provide gigabit options to all homes and businesses, not just chosen neighborhoods."AT&T launched U-verse, its newest technology, in Hutchinson in 2013, offering speeds of up to 75 Mbps in limited areas.Data shows its average residential speed in Hutchinson is 19.6 Mbps; however, for many customers speeds of just 3- to 6-Mbps are the norm."We would like to provide high-speed internet to as many customers as possible," Chris Lester, lead public relations manager/mid-states market, stated in an email exchange with The News. "At this time, we do offer our 100 percent fiber network powered by AT&T Fiber service to parts of south-central Kansas, in addition to non-Fiber High-Speed Internet Access (HSIA) in and around Reno County. We will share more updates about additional locations as we expand access to service."Fiber service in the region, however, the company later confirmed, was limited to Wichita, with no immediate plans to expand it into Hutchinson."We're committed to using multiple technologies to expand internet access to more locations," Lester stated. "In September we launched our innovative Fixed Wireless Internet service in parts of Kansas. By 2020 we plan to connect over 1.1 million locations across the U.S."The company also announced last week it has started testing new technology in Georgia on "Project AirGig," which uses low-cost plastic devices attached to power poles to deliver "last mile access" through 4G and 5G wireless technology.There was no public timeline, however, for how the long testing will proceed and when the technology might be released.
Romain Grosjean has tipped McLaren to have a strong year in formula one after dumping Honda power.

The Ferrari-powered Haas driver said the works team of McLaren's new engine supplier - Renault - has "developed the project well and is already in front of us".

And so the Frenchman expects McLaren to be strong with Renault power in 2018.

"McLaren will be very strong," Grosjean is quoted by Italy's Autosprint.

"They have huge resources and probably the biggest structure in formula one," he said.

"The Renault is a respectable engine -- they've had reliability problems but in terms of power they are there now," Grosjean added.

"The bigger question is about Williams, Force India, us and Toro Rosso with their new power unit. I think McLaren will be there with Red Bull, then there will be Renault," he said.

(GMM)
China-based GAC Motor will feature its existing sedan, SUV, minivan and NEV at the 2018 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit. A new sedan model and a concept car will also make their world debuts during GAC Motors press conference.

GAC Motors exhibition at 2018 NAIAS will feature high-end models including the GA8, GS8 and GM8, which provided safe and reliable service for attendees at the Fortune Global Forum 2017 as the events official service vehicles.

GAC Motor will debut the GA4, an all-new signature sedan at 2018 NAIAS. This GA4 is a mainstream sedan built on GAC Motors own A-Class sedan platform. GAC will also release its first compact new-energy concept SUV designed for the North American market, called the Enverge.

In 2017, GAC motor met its target of annual sales volume of 500,000 for the year in China, with a 37.2% year-on-year increase. GAC Motor has received top quality ratings from JD Power for five consecutive years.
The electric aircraft then went on to complete another seven hours of flying over the following two days before being handed over to Electro.Aero, the aircrafts operator. The Alpha Electro can be registered in Australia as either a recreational aircraft or with CASA. In both cases it can be used for training, even to obtain a private pilot license (PPL). The Pipistrel Alpha Electro is the first electric aircraft that offers the possibility of PPL training.

On 2 January 2018, the first serially-built Pipistrel Alpha Electro took flight in Australia. The aircraft, which received a Special Certificate of Airworthiness from Australias Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in October 2017, took off from Perths Jandakot Airport and conducted two circuits around Jandakot (the 5 th busiest airport in the southern hemisphere with more than 375,000 movements last year).





Richard Charlton, the finance director of Electro.Aero said that it was a smooth, no-drama first flight. Charlton said the aircraft was much quieter and cheaper to operate than equivalent-sized aircraft, powered by piston engines.

The main issue with petrol is the maintenance costs of what is a more complex engine. The electric engine is really simple. It has one moving part, its a very small piece of equipment and it is a solid-state motor. Richard Charlton

For now, the Electro.Aero company is offering trial instructional flights with the Alpha Electro, with a view to eventually offering ab-initio flight training all the way to recreational pilot certificate in the near future.

Alpha Electro is Pipistrels fifth electric aircraft project and the second to result in a commercial product.

The prototype (named WATTsUP) was developed in partnership with Siemens AG, which provided the electric main propulsion components, and represented the next generation of Pipistrels electric aircraft.

Every element of aircraft was refined to be lighter, more efficient and more reliable. The initial 85 kW electric motor only weighed 14kg and was more powerful than the popular Rotax 912 series, typically used on microlights and LSAs. The 17 kWh battery pack was dual-redundant and designed to be either quickly replaceable within minutes or charged in less than one hour, using to the next generation of Pipistrels Battery Management technology.

The serially produced Alpha Electro is an improvement of the WATTsS UP prototype. The airframe uses proven features from hundreds of Pipistrels aircraft flying worldwide. The electric powertrain is operated with one simple lever, enabling the crew to focus on learning piloting skills.

The production version features a 50+ kW motor with a ground-adjustable three-blade 1.65m diameter propeller and a 21 kWh battery pack. Empty weight (with batteries is 350 kg); maximum take off weight (MTOW) is 550 kg; payload is thus 200 kg. Endurance is up to 60 minutes (plus reserve).
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On Dec. 19, just hours before voting to spend up to $30 million on a downtown parking deck, Greensboro City Council members got an update on the hotel proposed to be built on top of it.

Zack Matheny, president of Downtown Greensboro Inc., sent council members what he called an "Elm Street Hotel Center Fact Sheet." The email is a public record, as are all emails to council members.

Developers and city leaders had warned that without the deck, the hotel wouldn't get built.

About 10 or 11 hours after receiving the fact sheet, council members voted to approve the $30 million for the deck. The city is now planning to raise parking rates in decks across downtown to pay for construction and operation.

Developers haven't said much publicly about the details of the hotel, which is led by local businessman and philanthropist Randall Kaplan.

Because much of the information contained therein is new to citizens, Scoop thought we'd share some of it  with some additional information and some fact-checking.

COMPARISON TO CHARLOTTE

The sheet says the "full-service Westin conference hotel" will be "an exciting addition to the growth of Greensboro's downtown district just as it was in Charlotte. The Greensboro Westin will bring visitors and conferences to Greensboro supporting other businesses and museums in the community."

Let's compare:

The city of Charlotte in 2003 spent $16 million on the Westin and accompanying deck, approximately 10 percent of the total cost.

The hotel has thrived, but hasn't brought the economic boon the city had hoped. According to the Charlotte Observer:

The citys deal with the Westin included a parking deck and required the hotel to set aside rooms each month for conventions, ensuring the (Charlotte) Convention Center would have room blocks to offer clients. The opening of the Westin produced some short-term increase in business (at the convention center), though nowhere near projections. Bookings (at the convention center) then receded to levels before the hotel opened.

Greensboro has pledged to reimburse developers up to $30 million for cost of the two decks, which will be joined by a bridge above February One.

The fact sheet estimates construction cost of the hotel and parking deck at $75 million. That would put the city's contribution at 40 percent of the total cost.

JOBS

The fact sheet says, "Once open, the hotel will create over 170 full-time equivalent jobs, including approximately 25 management positions and 145 hourly positions."

Jobs are jobs  especially when you're unemployed. But most won't be the high-paying ones Greensboro leaders say the area desperately needs. Consider these average (mean) wage figures in North Carolina, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Lodging managers: $26.34 an hour/$54,570 a year

Hotel clerks: $10.39 an hour/$21,620 a year

Waiters/waitresses: $10.08 an hour/$20,970 a year

Maids and housekeeping staff: $9.85 an hour/$20,480 a year

ECONOMIC IMPACT

"The hotel will generate $2.5 million in annual tax revenue for our state and community once it's fully operational," the fact sheet says.

"This includes $945,000 in sales taxes, $840,000 in occupancy taxes and $525,000 in property taxes."

The sheet doesn't provide a source, so it's unclear how this was calculated.

PARKING SPACES

The fact sheet says that the Westin "will pay full market rates for 120 to 180 parking spots for its hotel guests with no preferential treatment from the city of Greensboro. The hotel's commitment for parking spaces supports the city's financial of the parking deck through parking fees."

Unless something has changed in the new year, Scoop knows of no commitment from the Westin for any spaces.

The agreement with the city says the hotel will lease up to 180 spaces at regular parking rates, but it doesn't specify a minimum.

INCENTIVES RETURNED?

According to the fact sheet, the Westin developers "returned nearly $2 million in economic incentives so that the city of Greensboro can use those funds for the construction of the public parking deck."

It's true that the council voted in 2014 to give the developers $1.975 million in incentives to build what was then going to be a Wyndham

But they didn't exactly "return" the money, since they never got it to begin with.

The council's vote called for the developers to get $395,000 per year for five years  granted they created the equivalent of 168 jobs that earn at least $9.12 per hour, including tips.

The city estimated then that the hotel would bring $1.03 million in property taxes in the first five years.

Also, economic incentives usually come in the form of tax breaks, or in reimbursements for projects already completed  again, something that can't be "returned."
In the 1950s, when Charlotte-born evangelist Billy Graham preached in England, he would sometimes have an audience with Queen Elizabeth II. She invited him to give sermons at Windsor Castle and became his lifelong friend.

Now, Grahams son Franklin, who is scheduled to speak in Britain later this year, is facing calls for him to be banned from the country because of his past condemnations of Islam and LGBTQ persons.

A petition calling for the government to deny the younger Graham a visa has been signed by more than 7,500 people. Also weighing in, according to the Guardian newspaper, are some members of Parliament.

I think frankly the evidence is piling up that his visit to the UK ... would not be a good thing and not probably in my view a very Christian thing, said Gordon Marsden, a member of Parliament from Blackpool, where Graham is planning to stage a festival, or crusade, Sept. 21-23. Marsden charged on BBC Radio Lancashire that Grahams statements against Muslims and against gays, lesbians and transgender persons were incompatible with what Jesus said in the Bible, the Guardian reported.

A spokesman for the Charlotte-based Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which Franklin Graham now heads, said in a statement that the group is working in partnership with local churches and that the event will be positive and encouraging.

Theres also a counter-petition to support Grahams plan to headline what is being advertised as the Lancashire Festival of Hope.

Contrast this controversy with the uplifting way Billy Graham is being portrayed in The Crown, a popular Netflix series dramatizing Queen Elizabeths reign, starting in the early 1950s.

Queen and evangelist

Graham and the queen, the titular head of the Church of England, developed a spiritual connection, which plays out in The Crown during a private meeting between them after he preaches at the royal familys chapel at Windsor.

I enjoyed that very much, the queen tells Graham (played by actor Paul Sparks) in episode six of season two. You do speak with such wonderful clarity and certainty. ... In an increasingly complex world, we need certainty. And you provide it.

Elizabeth (played by actress Claire Foy) tells Graham that the great joy I felt today (in hearing Graham preach) was that of being a simple congregant, being taught, being led.

Though screenwriters take liberties in fashioning dialogue, the scene seems consistent with Grahams own writing about his friendship with Queen Elizabeth. In his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am, he wrote about her deep Christian faith and about his warm, informal meetings with her. Graham is now 99; Queen Elizabeth is 91.

Who will be the next Billy Graham? Thats been a question for decades. But no American religious figure commands as much fame, impact, and respect as Graham did through dozens of years of preaching.

In The Crown, the queen stands up for Graham in the face of condescending put-downs from other members of Englands royal family.

Watching Grahams London crusade on black-and-white TV with her daughter, the Queen Mother is distressed that so many of her countrymen have turned out to hear the then-young American evangelist, whod dabbled in sales before going into the ministry.

I think moral authority and spiritual guidance should come from someone with a little more life experience, she says. Not from someone who learned their trade selling brushes door-to-door in North Carolina.

Later, the Duke of Windsor, the queens uncle, in a letter to his wife, expresses outrage at Grahams appeal among so many Brits.

What has happened to the people of this country? he reads. Turning like lemmings to this crusading showman from Charlotte for their inspiration?

But the queen is clearly taken with Grahams preaching, his style, even his movie star-looks.

After she compliments his speaking, Graham tells her about the first time he spoke in public, as a shy 12-year-old at his Charlotte school.

The school principal told my mother he thought I was a natural (speaker), he tells the queen. That, of all things, I had a gift.

Uproar over sons words

Meanwhile, the uproar over Franklin Grahams upcoming visit to England is showing no signs of letting up.

The Blackpool Gazette reported that the local town council will honor the booking of a local venue for Grahams festival. But the council also made clear that its opposition to discrimination is robust and clear. The newspaper reported that the council is forwarding concerns about Grahams history of comments to the countrys Home Office to decide whether the evangelists words have violated Englands law against inciting hatred.

The petition seeking to ban Graham cited his 2001 comments calling Islam a very evil and wicked religion. It also quoted Graham as approving of Russian President Vladimir Putins crackdown of LGBTQ people in that country.

Grahams condemnation of Islam caused the Pentagon to disinvite him from speaking there in 2010. But, last year, Graham was invited by President Donald Trump to give one of the prayers and Scripture readings at his inauguration.

Grahams spokesman said in the statement that, at the festival in England, Graham will offer a message about the hope that can be found through a relationship with Jesus Christ. It will be free and everyone is invited to attend.
MAYODAN  Mayodan Town Manager Michael Brandt announced to town council that he will be resigning to take an assistant manager position for a larger city in the state.

The announcement was made at the conclusion of last Thursdays town council agenda meeting.

Brandt, whose contract requires a 60-day notice, will likely work until March 2, according to Mayor Jeff Bullins.

The entire council and I expressed the sentiment that we would like for him to stay but understand that its difficult to turn down a career opportunity that will benefit him and his family. Michael has earned that opportunity, Bullins said in an email to RockinghamNow.

Brandt was hired in December 2011 to replace longtime manager Debra Cardwell, who retired at the end of the year after serving the town in various roles for more than 34 years.

Since being hired, the former Summerfield town manager has played a major role in growth, with the launch of several downtown projects.

His efforts have also brought recreational growth and the expansion of several downtown initiatives.

With Brandts vision, other seasonal events such as Hayodan and the Mayodan Mountain Bike Classic have helped an area with mill town roots also mold into a stopping place for tourists and outdoor enthusiasts statewide.

He has done a great job for Mayodan. Our town has gained a reputation in the last few years as being innovative and progressive, Bullins said. That innovation and progress is largely due to Michaels ideas, energy and hard work along with a supportive staff and town council.

Bullins said the town will begin its search for a new town manager very soon and that the next town administrator will have big shoes to fill.

Officials anticipate the hiring process to extend past Brandts exit date. In the meantime, Town Clerk Lessa Hopper will be appointed as interim manager.

We dont want to rush the hiring process because we want to take the time needed to find the right person to continue our ongoing projects and bring new ideas and energy for future endeavors, said Bullins, who told citizens in a Facebook post on Saturday that he is not interested in the town manager position and wont be applying for the job.

Lessa is a long time employee of the town and the town council and I are confident in her abilities to keep things running smoothly, Bullins said.

Its still unclear what municipality has hired Brandt as an assistant manager.

The North Carolina City and County Management Association lists four assistant manager openings at towns or cities larger than Mayodan in the latest membership support committee report, updated on Jan. 2.

Hickory, Hope Mills, Huntersville and Thomasville are all looking to fill assistant manager positions.
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GREENWICH  When Liz Murray was growing up in the Bronx, her family observed 12 holidays a year, one on the first day of each month.

Living in a small apartment with two parents addicted to drugs, gang violence in her neighborhood, fleas in her hair and little more than a bottle of ketchup in the fridge, the first of the month was when the welfare check came. The money meant they would eat  for however long their $30 of groceries would last them. Her parents could buy again. It felt like a holiday.

At least, that was the joke Murray would make years later to her Harvard classmates when they innocently asked her about her familys holiday traditions. Murray would laugh, and her classmates shocked faces would show her just how far she had come from that childhood of struggle.

Murray, who graduated from Harvard in 2009, is the author of New York Times bestseller Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard. She spoke at Greenwich Academy on Monday morning.

I think no one really knows what is possible until you do it, Murray told students.

Murray was born addicted to heroin, like her mother who used it during pregnancy. Before her birth, her parents hippie disco dancing phase had escalated to intense drug addictions. In fact, her father was in prison for three years when she was born.

Her parents were loving, devoted and educated  her father pursuing a doctorate before addiction debilitated him  but mental illness and drug use impaired their parenting. Murrays father would take her and her sister to the library every Saturday. Her mother, who battled schizophrenia, would sit at the end of her bed and paint her daughter pictures of one day: One day we will have a house, Lizzie, she would say, before going to shoot up at the kitchens Formica table.

When their parents were high, Murray and her sister spent much of their childhood fending for themselves. They knocked on neighbors doors  the ones with good smells wafting from under them  to beg for food. And when their tenement neighbors couldnt give, they chewed on ice cubes and ate ChapSticks and toothpaste.

For their unclean appearances, their clothing with holes, the Murray girls were teased at school until they became chronically truant. Murray went to class just enough to pass the test, get a hot meal and leave.

For so many years, Murrays life was no bigger than survival, she said. But her survival skills were really just being primed.

When Murray was a teenager, her mother was diagnosed as HIV positive. She contracted the disease from sharing needles, and malnourished and drug-addled, her health quickly declined. The family lost their apartment and Murrays father moved into a homeless shelter. Murrays sister moved in with friends, and Murray sunk into the first phase of youth homelessness, couch surfing.

For a while, Murray could crash with a friend here or there, but quickly she was placed into a group home, and just as quickly, the homes violence and its staffs derision made Murray move to the streets. She slept on the D train. She slept in Central Park. She shoplifted food and begged for change. She effectively dropped out of school, attending just enough to get her hot meals, a metro card and sometimes, to sleep in a forgotten stairway.

Murray spent her days putting plants in the window of her mothers hospital room and washing her mothers hair in the sink as it fell away in clumps in her hands. In her backpack, Murray carried around a black and white photo of her mother as a teenager, when she, too, was homeless.

On a Wednesday morning in the Bronx, Murrays mother died. The family buried her the day after Christmas in a pine box in a public grave. The meter was running on the taxi  that Murray had begged for change to take  as her mother was lowered into the ground.

Later, Murray was sitting on the couch of a friend named Bobby. As he complained about his mother burning the pork chops for dinner, Murray thought about her own mother, a beautiful woman with a truck drivers sense of humor and an instant warmth. She had dreams. Now, she was in a box.

Murray thought with gratitude of the things she had: health, friends, a free public high school, a father, love.

And she thought, What if?

What if she went after her own dreams, instead of complain?

There is no later. Your life is now, she realized.

Over the next month, Murray, then 17, interviewed at many public high schools in New York. With her failing transcript and dirty clothes, she was rejected again and again, until interviewing at Humanities Preparatory Academy in Manhattan.

There a ragged Murray met a bow-tie wearing, sunshine-spreading teacher named Perry, who complimented her skull-and-bones pin and accepted her to the school. His tough-love mentorship helped Murray complete high school in two years with straight As.

Perry helped Murray apply to colleges and for scholarships. That spring, she was accepted to Harvard and chosen for a New York Times-sponsored scholarship, her story was told on the front page of the newspapers Metro section. When the story ran, Murray received an outpouring of support from generous community members who rented her an apartment, gave her food and even did her laundry.

I never slept another night out on the streets thanks to those folks, Murray said.

She studied psychology at Harvard and after graduating, released Breaking Night. Murray, who now lives in Manhattan with her husband James and two young children, co-founded the nonprofit Arthur Project, which brings full-time mentors to struggling middle school students. She is currently working on a second book.

Throughout her emotional lecture, she urged Greenwich Academy students to be grateful for the people in their lives, to pursue their what if moments and give back in whatever small ways they can.

Its not success unless it creates opportunities for other people, she said.

emunson@greenwichtime.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson
I am a retired newspaperman. I am 69 and live in Poca, WV, with my wife of 45 years, Lou Ann. We grew up in Cleveland. Three kids. Grandfather.

More on who I am is here.

Report all errors to DonSurber@GMail.com
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HARTFORD  First, he flew the rainbow flag over the Governors Residence.

Then Connecticuts Dannel P. Malloy clashed with his Indiana and North Carolina gubernatorial counterparts, one of them being Mike Pence, over their states religious freedom and bathroom laws.

Now, the Malloy doctrine on LGBT rights has another cornerstone  appointing the nations first openly gay chief state Supreme Court chief justice, Andrew J. McDonald.

The governor revealed plans Monday to nominate his longtime Stamford ally and friend to succeed retiring Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers on the seven-member court. The choice of McDonald, a former state senator and one-time general counsel to the governor, is subject to legislative approval.

McDonald, 51, has been an associate justice since 2013, the second of seven state Supreme Court picks of Malloy. Five of the current seven justices are Malloy appointees, a number that could grow to six if McDonald is confirmed.

The historical significance of his rise in the judicial branch was not lost on McDonald, who resides in Stamford with his husband, Charles Gray.

When I was born here in Connecticut, a little more than 50 years ago, loving relationships like the one Charles and I cherish were criminal in 49 states, including Connecticut, McDonald said. And when I came out in the early 1990s, I had family members who loved me counsel me against pursuing either a career in law or public service because of deeply ingrained prejudices held by some people. But now, because of changes brought about by the evolving understanding of people, new statutes passed by legislators and important court cases - indeed, by the rule of law - this day was made possible.

The governor characterized McDonald, a former corporation counsel for the city of Stamford when Malloy was mayor, as a revered jurist.

He has a deep understanding of the role and the impact that the justice system has on the everyday lives of Connecticut residents, and the value of ensuring equality and fairness through the courts many responsibilities, Malloy said.

The emergence of McDonald as the new face of the scales of justice in the state was not without controversy, however.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Herbst, the former Trumbull first selectman, criticized the pick as political and said that McDonald has tried to legislate from the bench. When Malloy was sworn-in to a second term as governor in 2015, it was McDonald who administered the oath of office.

The interpretation of our laws should always remain blind to the influence of politics or even the appearance of influence and that is why I am calling on legislators, of both parties, to support a different nominee for chief justice, Herbst said. Justice McDonalds record demonstrates a propensity for taking positions that have been deemed to be unconstitutional, and in some instances, positions that have been influenced by personal and political opinions that are in contravention to the law.

Herbst said McDonald sided with the majority when the state Supreme Court ruled Connecticuts death penalty law unconstitutional in 2015 by a 4 to 3 vote. The law had repealed capital punishment for those convicted of the most violent crimes after its passage in 2012, but did not apply to those already on death row.

The courts majority ruled that there could not be two levels of justice.

McDonald was the deciding justice in State vs. Santiago, which disregarded the intent of the legislature and the people of Connecticut by allowing the perpetrators of the gruesome Cheshire home invasion to escape the death penalty, Herbst said.

No timetable has been set for McDonalds confirmation hearing before the Legislatures Judiciary Committee, a panel he once headed as a member of the General Assembly. The committees co-chairman is fellow Stamford Democrat William Tong, who is exploring a run for state attorney general.

I see it as a landmark moment for our state for equality and civil rights, Tong said of the choice of McDonald. This nomination has nothing to do with one person. It has to do with breaking down an unjust barrier that has been there for a long time, and its a proud moment for our state.

When McDonald was appointed by Malloy to the bench, there were just seven LGBT justices in the nation. The one-time Stamford Board of Finance chairman appears to have support on the other side of the aisle.

Andrew McDonald will be a fair, balanced and transparent chief justice, said Republican state Rep. Livvy Floren, who represents parts of Stamford and Greenwich. I have known Andrew as a colleague in Stamford and in the General Assembly and as a friend. He is a consummate professional with impeccable credentials - as a lawyer, legislator, and jurist. This is a great day for Andrew and for the people of Connecticut.

http://twitter.com/gettinviggy; nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436
The new cafe is scheduled to soft-open as early as next week. Photo: Milla Chappell

This summer, the residents of New York City learned that, at long last, the city would get its very own puppy cafe. In a world that looks more toxic and strange with each passing day, it was the rare bit of good news. Now, there is even better news: We are just weeks away from the moment we have been waiting for. The East Villages Boris & Horton, on 12th Street and Avenue A, is slated to open in a matter of days, with a soft-launch in mid-January and plans to be fully up and barking by the end of the month.

The idea, explains Coppy Holzman, who owns the shop with his daughter, Logan Mikhly, is a place where you can have great coffee, eat, have wine and beer, hang out, and  the most crucial detail  also bring your dog inside. It is meant to be friendly and chill, like an exceedingly well-designed living room that also serves pastries. What it is not, its worth noting, is a canine version of the citys Japanese-style cat cafes, which feature staffs of residential cats up for adoption. Were shooting for a different look and feel than the cat cafe, Mikhly says. We want it to feel as much as possible like your typical coffee shop, but you have the added benefit of hanging out with your dog.

Named for the duos own dogs  Boris is Holzmans soulful two-year-old pit bull mix; Horton, who has been with Mikhly since college, is a snaggle-toothed poodle-Chihuahua combo (no ones totally sure)  Boris & Horton is a BYOD situation, an indoor place you can get a latte with your border collie, and perhaps meet your neighbors. Its not just a coffee shop where people sit there with headphones on their laptops, Holzman says. They want to build a sense of community  and figure the pups will help: Dogs sort of break the ice. And so, the cafe is very intentionally located in the former Ost space near dog-hub Tompkins Square Park, and, sure, every design choice has been made with dogs in mind. There is a dog-centric shop and a puppy Instagram booth; the drinks will be stenciled with Boris or Hortons face. And there will be dog-adoption events on weekends.

For human patrons, there will be pastries from Balthazar and Bien Cuit, plus gluten-free options from Husk Bakeshop, and coffee from City of Saints, as well as a more substantial menu of toasts (sweet and savory), and, in the evening until the 11 p.m. closing time, wine and beer.

Owners Coppy Holzman and Logan Mikhly, along with Boris and Horton themselves. Photo: Milla Chappell

In a surprise to no one, it is difficult and expensive to build a space that is appropriate for both food service and retrievers. To that end, they started working closely with the Health Department from day one  we met with them I dont know how many times Holzman says  to make sure they were building a space that would pass muster, because if your thing is that youre a dog-friendly cafe, you need to be really, extremely positive that you have actual approval to allow dogs.

And so to stay on the right side of code, the space will be formally divided into two very distinct spaces: a cafe side, with food and drink sales, and a dog side, featuring tables and dog-focused retail. There will be an outdoor walk-up window for solo owners to order, so dogs themselves will never have to enter the cafe space, and if you want to doglessly buy a muffin on the cafe side and then cross through the vestibule to the dog side to eat it amid terriers, well, thats up to you.

Needless to say, the Boris & Horton team expects dogs to keep it classy keep it classy is in fact a house rule, governing humping and mounting  and staff members will be trained by the School for the Dogs to read canine body language and anticipate issues. It is important to know your customer.

Non-dog-owners, take heart; you can still be a part of the action: If you just want a good cup of coffee, Holzman says, theyre here for that, too. We want to be a destination for wonderful food and beverages in addition to the dogs. The dog sweaters are just a bonus.
Jeremy Tooker has agreed to leave the company. Photo: Four Barrel Coffee

One of third-wave coffees biggest names has stepped down. Over the weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that eight former employees have accused Four Barrel founder Jeremy Tooker of various kinds of misconduct in a new lawsuit, from joking explicitly at work to forcibly groping workers at company parties.

Like with almost all of the other reports of misbehavior in the hospitality world, the women say Four Barrels workplace was overtly sexual, and that they felt powerless because their complaints were dismissed by HR. The lawsuit has two plaintiffs who accuse Tooker of sexual assault and seek damages from him and the company. Among the lawsuits claims: Tooker pulled one womans pants down to her thighs and got on top of her on a hotel bed, and tried to kiss another with such force that it caused soreness on her neck. One adds that she visited the ER after one party, fearing shed been roofied, and there are reports of Tooker making staff play games like Kiss or Slap, in which everyone had to choose which action they wanted to do to him.

Those alleged incidents all occurred at alcohol-fueled parties in 2015, but the Chronicle describes a rampant sexual misconduct in the actual workplace, too  Suck It mugs in the merchandise section, and off-menu items like the Dickens Cider, apparently so named because it sounds like the customer is saying dick inside her.

Tooker was one of the founders of Ritual, an early third-wave roaster in San Francisco, and was also behind the artisanal toast craze that erupted back in 2013, when he introduced it at a cafe that he opened with Josey Baker Bread. Four Barrel has three physical locations, does wholesale to restaurants and cafes, and runs a thriving coffee-subscription business.

Tooker hasnt issued any sort of public statement, but he divested from the company on Saturday. Four Barrels other two co-owners, Tal Mor and Jodi Geren, say theyre deeply saddened by the lawsuit and are taking it very seriously. Theyre accused by employees of knowing about Tookers behavior and not doing enough to stop it, but their official statement promises to take prompt action to address any and all employee concerns, and it appears that theyve temporarily shuttered locations.
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Haiti - Security : Towards the creation of a university police force





Considering that a small group prevents the normal functioning of the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Faculty of Ethnology for several months, that these individuals do not cease to pose a set of acts detrimental to the security of the people frequenting the space and of its property : fire attempts, physical and verbal aggression, attempted sequestration, death threats, etc... and that these same individuals are accompanied by questionable people in the walls of the FASH and the Faculty of Ethnology...



The Communication Unit of the State University of Haiti (UC / UEH) meeting in extraordinary session at the end of December 2017 adopted, after consideration, a resolution asking the Executive Council to take all the necessary measures to give the entry and control of the premises to the legitimate authorities of these entities and to guarantee their safety and that of their community and to request, as soon as possible, a police presence in the premises of the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Faculty of Ethnology to restore order, until further notice.



Download the resolution : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/resolution-CUEH-27-12-2017-1.pdf



Fritz Deshommes, Rector and President of the Council of the State University of Haiti confirms that the University is in the process of building a real university police force. This force will be initially formed by University security officers who have been selected on a basis of competence and credibility. He indicates that these security officers are currently undergoing training at the National Police Academy, after having successfully passed an examination and a process of verification of their antecedents by the National Police of Haiti (PNH). Pointing out that until the end of their training, the PNH will be present at the Faculty of Human Sciences and at the Faculty of Ethnology in support of the security service of the University.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19229-haiti-education-illegal-occupation-ueh-announces-first-sanctions.html



HL/ S/ HaitiLibre


























"My love for travelling helped me find words for my books," said, Ms Mridula Sinha, Hon'ble Governor of Goa at a book release function held at Lekhak Manch. She was happy to note that she could see a large number of women browsing through the books at the book fair. On this occasion, Ms Sinha's book Reflections which is the English translation of the Hindi title Samajik Sarokar was released. In addition, the books Rastriya Chetna Ke Vividh Aayam, authored by Shri Baldeo Bhai Sharma, Abhimanyu Anant Kavya Rachnawali by Dr Kamal Kishore Goenka, Sant Sahitya Ki Samajh by Shri Nandkisore Pande and Mahamanav Abraham Lincoln by Shri Ramesh Patange were released. Shri Baldeo Bhai Sharma, Chairman, NBT remarked that book fairs are significant as they help large number of book lovers to acquire knowledge through books.



Theme Pavilion

A powerful message on global warming was enacted in the form of street play in Hindi at the Theme Pavilion. Titled 'Jeevan Hamara, Zindagi Hamari' , the play was directed by Bablu Jha and was performed by the artists from Shri Kumar Veer Bhushan and troupe. The session was organised by Babu Shivji Rai Foundation.





Children's Pavilion

A number of activities for children were organized at the Children's Pavilion in which several children from various schools and voluntary organizations participated. Today 'Youth Parliament' was organized by Amity University Press where students discussed about 'Interlinking of Rivers: A Boon or Bane'. In this occasion, Dr. Madhuphul; Amity Children Science Foundation; Dr. Tarun Jindal, Professor and Director of Amity Institute of Environment Science, and Executive Vice President of Amity University Press and Shri Raghuram Krishna Iyer were present. A puppet show on 'pollution caused by digital devices' was also organised at the pavilion.









International Events Corner

A book release function was organized at the International Events Corner by Royal Collins Publishing Group, Canada. On this occasion, Shri Baldeo Bhai Sharma, Chairman, NBT released the series of 11 Hindi and 20 English translations of Chinese books. The books launched on the occasion included Cheen Ka Itihaas, Cheen Ki Lok Kala aur Shilp, Cheeni Sabhyata aur Samaj, among others.









Literary Activities

Kamal L Anand, author of the book Natural Health and Healing interacted with the booklovers at Reflections (Authors' Corner). He talked about the lifestyle of the people in recent times and gave tips to tackle health hazards. He also discussed about the basic habits that one should adopt to stay fit and healthy. He was of the view that meditation along with yoga and walking bare feet can cure any disease.



In another session at Reflections, Arun Anand, author of the book Body Organ Donation talked about how, where and why to donate organs. He said that earlier people used to donate eyes, blood, etc. but now people have also started donating hair for cancer patients. He also expressed his concern over illegal organ transplantation.



At Conversations (Authors' Corner), Prachi Gupta, author of the book Super Siblings gave an insight into her journey as an author.



New Delhi Rights Table

New Delhi Rights Table is being organised at the book fair from 8 - 9 January 2018. The Rights Table is a two-day event which provides a platform to publishers, literary agents, translators, authors and editors from India and abroad for business opportunities. During the event, the publishers interact with each other, share their interests, negotiate and discuss about selling/buying copyrights. It is a unique platform that helps participants present their products and ideas to each other, and transfer rights of books available in English, Hindi, and other Indian and foreign languages. This year, more than 70 publishers from India and abroad including Egypt, Japan, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia and USA.

Though a working day, the third day of the New Delhi World Book Fair remained busy. A large number of children along with their parents and teachers, students from college and universities and general readers could be seen visiting the Fair. Regardless of new developments in technology, the fascination for books will continue. The theme of the fair 'Environment and Climate Change' is attracting book lovers and helping them understand the need to protect environment.




Haiti - News : Zapping...





North West: Back to school delayed

Because of the rain, the back to classes that was scheduled for January 8 is postponed in the North West Department until new announcement of the Departmental Delegation of North-West.



Decrease in exports, increase in imports

Jean Baden Dubois, the Governor of BRH, informed that Haiti's imports for goods and services during the past fiscal year reached $ 4.7 billion, compared to $ 4 billion for 2015-2017. While the country's exports in the same year fell 5% to $980 million.



France : Haiti 3rd in TOP 5 asylum seekers

In 2017, Albania was the first asylum seeker in France with 7,630 requests, 2nd Afghanistan 5,987 requests (+ 6%), 3rd Haiti 4,934 (due to the large number of Haitians in French Guiana https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22402-haiti-flash-large-scale-haitian-migratory-wave-in-french-guiana.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22525-haiti-flash-illegal-young-haitian-students-in-guyana-threatened-with-deportation.html ), 4th Sudan 4,486 and 5th Guinea with 3,780 applicants.



Donation of 8 million dollars from Taiwan

On Friday, Chen-Hao Hu, the Ambassador of Taiwan (Republic of China) in Haiti and Andre Carmel Beliard, the Minister of Agriculture initialed a memorandum of understanding as part of a project to strengthen the production of rice in the plain of Les Cayes, financed by Taiwan to the tune of 8 million dollars. At the end of this four-year project, the Haitian-Taiwanese cooperation expects an increase in annual production of about 10 metric tons of rice per hectare over an area of about 1,200 hectares.



Collapse in Port-de-Paix, 9 victims

The Directorate of Civil Protection informs us of the collapse, Sunday morning, three houses in the neighborhood of Deux Melisses, Port-de-Paix, who made three slight injuries. In addition, the wall of the Brothers' library collapsed on two small houses in Miryam (a neighborhood of Port-de-Paix), killing a man in his twenties, Peeterson Darcile, and injuring 5 others between 18 at 20 years. The latter are treated at the Beraca hospital where they were transported.



Moise generous with young people

As part of the closing of the Forum of Local Youth Committees https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-23187-icihaiti-social-forum-for-innovation-and-socio-professional-integration-of-young-people.html President Jovenel Moise distributed to the various local committees; a laptop, a USB key, a smartphone and a motorcycle to facilitate their development "To change sustainably the country or the benefit of the greatest number, we must first believe that this is possible. This requires a firm commitment to help young people to face the challenges they face every day," or the benefit of the greatest number, we must first believe that this is possible. This requires a firm commitment to help young people to face the challenges they face every day, https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23204-haiti-politic-intervention-of-jovenel-moise-at-the-youth-forum.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Hawai'i Free Press Current Articles | Archives Sunday, January 7, 2018 Why save the Hawaii Aquarium Fishery?

By Selected News Articles @ 5:26 PM :: 5558 Views :: Environment, Small Business Why save the Hawaii Aquarium Fishery Aquarium Fish Collectors and what we do by Ron Tubbs, RT Distributors The September 6, 2017 Hawaii Supreme Court HEPA (Hawaii Environmental Protection Act) ruling has nearly shut down Hawaiis aquarium fishery . It will take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to get HEPA filings finished even though the studies proved our fishery sustainable long before the courts considered the issue. Based on the Court ruling, all Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) ocean business permits will be facing HEPA permit requirements. As with the Thirty Meter Telescope, we expect to face legal challenges to the aquarium fishery after completing the HEPA filings. Resale of aquarium imports will keep the fishery alive but not for long. We need legislation to save the fishery and all DLNR ocean issued-permit businesses. SB1240, phasing out of the fishery, vetoed by Governor Ige last year, reflected an unscientific nearside approach to Hawaiis Marine resources . Sustainable practices can be used to increase Hawaiis businesses with no or little impact to the environment. Instead of shooting itself in the foot with fishing bans on our proven sustainable fisheries the State needs to continue to explore sustainable management and harvest its vast ocean resources to ensure Hawaiis economic future. Large ocean closures and the forcing of fishers to less sustainable methods are not scientific. FRA and MPA and management areas do work. It took us five years but working directly with state DLNR resulted in laws to make sure in the future the fishery will always sustainable. Hundreds of restrictions and laws were created to protect Hawaiis resources. The Kona rules became effective in 2014 and the Oahu rules in 2015. All this done at the prompting of the fishermen. Many commended us for this and we continue to work with many state officials, the Hawaii State Legislature, and researchers worldwide. It is illegal according to the State of Hawaii Constitution to restrict public access to its ocean resources. The States role is to manage and ensure sustainability and DLNR has done that effectively. To close a fishery as some suggest just to benefit their own ocean tourist business is biased and unscientific. Tourism and fisheries can coexist and have for many years. Hawaii's fish travel the world as our little ambassadors increase awareness to the wonderful amazing fish that exist here in Hawaii. Many consider Hawaii the best vacation destination and Hawaii's fish help increase tourism by making others aware of Hawaii's beauty. Aquariums worldwide educate and empower their owners with an understanding to the world's oceans that no other hobby can provide. The benefits of public and private aquariums are far reaching. Reef fish are the most efficient breeders in the world. Most produce at least 10 to 20,000 fry per spawning with some doing this 7 times a year. Some produce 1 million fry per spawning daily over many days. They are the most renewable resource on the planet. The fishery can actually help save the oceans. Our fishers collect marine fish for studies and public aquariums. Fishermen help monitor and provide information about the resource. Here is a short list of what we do to give back to the oceans we love so much: For years fish collectors have provided fish to educate schools across the nation. In Hawaii schools are taken on field trips to local aquarium fish wholesalers or children to ocean field trips by some of our collectors. One program brought live fish to the classrooms for children education. Fish collection for major public aquariums locally and worldwide educate many on ocean ecology.

I am currently collecting seaweed for a Princeton University Study for run off pollution. My dive partner is a Marine Biologist. Every year we monitor the seaweed in certain areas and take samples for them.

Rare species are left alone and protected by collectors. Collectors have repopulated fish to areas where populations have declined due to extreme warm summers. Fish population issues are reported to researchers.

Turtles caught in nets are removed. Hooks and fishing line around turtles are removed. A hook found in a monk seals mouth was reported by collectors and NOAA captured the seal and removed the hook. Garbage and nets are removed by many collectors. Some even collect the old bottles found in the ocean. Illegal dumping grounds are reported. Old downed planes and wrecks are reported and identified by researchers.

Many boat rescues and ocean users have been aided by tropical fish collectors. Ocean abuses have been reported by aquarium collectors. Many aquarium fish collectors are Marine Biologists, Zoologist, and Ichthyologists. Information is shared by most collectors with other researchers to aid in ocean ecology. Black coral infestation of an invasive species was reported for observation. It has since become a mute issue resolving itself on its own. Dive data pictures and video are shared to further research by many aquarium fishermen.

The recent toxic killing of puffer fish in Hawaii led to a self-imposed no collection of all puffers. Researchers were brought samples and taken to normally abundant puffer locations to help with the problem. The population has since recovered and with our help it was determined that it was a natural toxin causing the problem.

Pregnant reef fish are collected with our help for researchers to aid breeding projects. Ocean food is supplied for captive breeding stocks.

Trigger fish have been supplied for US Naval ocean propulsion studies.

Invasive species like Argus groupers and blue line snappers are targeted and eliminated with the help of the tropical fish collectors. These invasive species eat more marine fish than the aquarium fish collectors take for live aquariums.

DNA samples to study different ecosystems and fish species have been collected and shred with DNA ocean researchers at no cost.

Aquarium fish collectors have gone on TV shows to speak for ocean ecology and share information to protect our ocean. NOAA researchers and others studying fish are educated in fish collecting techniques for research purposes. Tourism is too vulnerable to be a sole source for an economic income base for the state. We need to wisely mange--not shut down--our renewable resources. We are running out of non-renewable resources and need to wisely utilize sustainable. Hawaii can lead the way in ocean resource management (and already was with the aquarium fishery), ocean business development, and decrease its dependence on imported goods. Sea weeds, cultured and wild caught fish and many other ocean resources can supply nutrition and fuels for our state. Clam, lobster, pearl, fish farms, ocean based business could flourish here with the right incentive and help the environment at the same time. Wave or current to power energy and deep cold water cooling of buildings are just a few examples of our ocean resource potentials. If the aquarium fishery closes then sources for breeding stock, research studies and public aquariums also stops. The importance of the economic impacts to Hawaii and to the nations $70B pet industry should not be underestimated. Many jobs have already been affected. The economical cost to Hawaii of eliminating or not saving the Aquarium Fishery is very far reaching. Local dive shops, pet stores, public aquariums, tourism, boating stores, gas stations and the airlines will suffer major income declines due to the fishery. The airlines alone is estimated to make over 7 million in freight charges per year for fish transport. It could mean potential cut backs in flights and flight choices directly hindering the tourist industry. Ticket prices will rise due to lost freight income. Fish and Wildlife inspectors, USDA inspectors and veterinarians will also lose big with inspection declines. The 70 billion dollar pet industry hinges it aquarium supply brands, tanks, foods, filters and many other products on the fishery. Many pet stores especially ones with large salt water sales may and already have gone out of business. It is not the fishery being effected here! Many agree that the worlds healthiest and highest quality fish come from Hawaii. Aquarium fish populations are on the rise. The Hawaii tropical fish collector has been known as the best for ecologically-friendly collecting for over 50 years. The worlds fishermen and ecologists have looked to Hawaii for development of industry collecting methods. The scientific and economic cost of eliminating or not saving the aquarium fishery is very far reaching. Please support Hawaiis sustainable fisheries. Jesus and George Washington where fishermen! I am proud to be one too.
YLE on Friday reported that voter support for the incumbent has fallen by eight percentage points over the past month but remains more than two times as high as that for the seven other candidates combined, at 72 per cent.

President Sauli Niinisto remains a strong favourite to win re-election with less than three weeks of campaigning left before the presidential elections.

Jari Pajunen, the managing director of Taloustutkimus, estimated in an interview with the public broadcasting company that support for the incumbent candidate is surprisingly high given that voters tend to revert to their party loyalties as the elections edge closer.

Youd have to predict based on these results that one round of voting will be enough, he commented to YLE.

Taloustutkimus interviewed a total of 1,364 people for the opinion poll between 19 December and 3 January. The poll has a margin of error of approximately 1.9 percentage points.

The poll also discovered other changes in the popularity of the presidential candidates. Pekka Haavisto, the candidate of the Green League, has recorded an increase of one percentage point in support to 11 per cent, while Laura Huhtasaari (PS) and Paavo Vayrynen (ind.) have put some distance between themselves and the remaining candidates with support ratings of five and four per cent, respectively.

Tuula Haatainen (SDP) would win three per cent, Matti Vanhanen (Centre) and Merja Kyllonen (Left) each two per cent, and Nils Torvalds (SFP) one per cent of the vote if the elections were held today, according to YLE.

The first round of voting in the presidential elections will take place on 28 January and the second round, if necessary, on 11 February.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Jussi Nukari  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
THE owner of a Henley vineyard wants to put up a sign to make his business easier to find.

Jan Mirkowski says visitors and suppliers struggle to find the entrance to Fairmile Vineyard, which is off Fair Mile.

He needs permission to have the sign on the grass verge, which is owned by the town council.

Mr Mirkowski bought the vineyard in 2012 and planted 12,000 vines the following year, giving him his first harvest in 2015.

Now he wants to develop the business as a tourist attraction.

The double-sided sign would be about 1m wide, 60cm high on wooden end posts. It would be painted green and have the company logo, an exploding bottle crossed with a rowing blade.

The sign could be temporarily removed when the grass was being cut by council workmen.

Speaking at a meeting of the councils planning committee, Mr Mirkowski said: Out of respect for the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and to maintain the sightlines along the road, we are proposing to keep the sign as unobtrusive and low as possible.

The problem is nobody can find the place. Even the people of Henley struggle and a satnav lands you 200 yards short.

The traffic passes at 60mph at that point so the sign should be large if people are going to see it.

He added that even people who did find the entrance didnt realise they then had to go through what appeared to be a private gate.

Mr Mirkowski lives in a house on the site with his wife Andrea and daughters Eloise and Verity.

Councillor Lorraine Hillier said the council had previously banned signs on Fair Mile because it would spoil its appearance.

She said: Now it is about doing it in a tasteful way. I know it is difficult to find the entrance to the vineyard.

Mayor Kellie Hinton said: I am not going to make a decision based on a decision of this council 20 years ago. That is not progressive and it is not a valid reason. Perhaps if the vineyard becomes more of a tourist attraction it could then have a brown sign.

She said the vineyard was included on the tours given to the judges of the Britain in Bloom competition.

We got in touch with Jan and found out about the bat boxes and the bees and the wonderful things he does there for the environment, she added.

Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak said: I am minded to grant permission for a year or two - not in perpetuity  to get used to it and to say if we dont like it.

Councillor Jane Smewing said: It is a really nice sign and I understand the need for it but the photographs indicate that it does interrupt the line of trees.

Councillor David Nimmo Smith said he was concerned about the effect of the sign on the open aspect of Fair Mile, which he wanted to protect.

Asked if the sign was needed all year round, Mr Mirkowski said it was required from the end of February to harvest time in October, adding: I have no objection to lifting it out for three months.

The committee did not support a proposal by Cllr Hinton to approve the sign and review it after a year.

Instead, it suggested having a sign against the vineyards boundary wall or in front of it.

Meanwhile, the committee recommended that an application to replace wooden window frames at a flat in Boathouse Reach with uPVC is refused.

Flat owner Laura Blackmore says the frames have rotted and the replacement grained white uPVC frames would blend in with the traditional frames in neighbouring properties.

However, the Henley Society and neighbour Pilar Carpenter have objected.

Mrs Carpenter said: I have no problem with changing the windows for new. However, they must be of wood construction and the same design as the rest of the block.

If we allow an owner to fit uPVC-type frames it will change the whole frontage of Boathouse Reach from what it looks like today, which is a riverfront building associated closely with Henley river social life and the regatta.

Cllr Gawrysiak said: It should be wooden windows  end of.

South Oxfordshire District Council will make a final decision by January 15.
AN OFFICE complex in Henley town centre could be converted into flats.

Ressance of Newbury has applied for permission to redevelop The Hub at Hallmark House, off Station Road, into 23 flats, mostly with two bedrooms.

The developer does not need full planning consent as converting offices into homes is permitted development under a law introduced in 2013.

The three-storey complex, which was built in 1991 on land previously owned by British Rail, is owned by a management company in Portsmouth and divided into about a dozen suites.

These are occupied by a number of businesses, including science consultancy Quintessa, accountants HMT and software firms KitchenCUT, Dendrite Clinical Systems and New Star Networks.

The companies are aware of the proposals but would not comment when approached by the Henley Standard.

South Oxfordshire District Council, the planning authority, could only refuse permission if there was a risk of flooding or contamination on the site or if Oxfordshire County Council, the highways authority, believes there would be an adverse impact on traffic or road safety.

Furthermore, a developer with permitted rights does not have to make payments towards improving infrastructure such as roads, schools or GP surgeries or to include a proporation of affordable homes.

The site is not earmarked for development in the joint Henley and Harpsden neighbourhood plan, which names the sites where about 500 homes should be built to meet Government targets.

The plan says Henley should meet the needs of start-up and technological companies by encouraging the provision of shared office space hubs and service centres.

It also backs the Henley town centre action plan, which says commercial premises should be retained rather than converted to residential use.

Stefan Gawrysiak, a town, district and county councillor, said Ressances proposals were yet another blow to the neighbourhood plan.

He said: The problem is that the district council has to approve it and theres no money coming in to offset the impact on the community. It also doesnt have to include any affordable homes, which is absolutely shocking and goes against everything we set out to achieve in putting the plan together.

As it stands, the neighbourhood plan provides enough homes to meet Henleys future need and we need those existing offices to provide jobs much more than we need another 23 flats.

Ken Arlett, chairman of Henley Town Councils neighbourhood plan committee, said: The one advantage is that those flats would be part of the final figure for Henleys quota and Im sure the district council will be pleased to see extra homes built.

Im not sure how well-used those units are, although if this is going to affect any businesses that does cause a problem.

Thats the trouble with Government guidelines just granting planning permission on an ad-hoc basis. We used to say each application is considered on its own merits but that no longer appears to be the case.

In 2016 the district council allowed the former Jet garage in Reading Road to be converted into 53 extra care flats for the elderly.

The site was originally earmarked for 55 regular units, 22 of which were to be affordable.

Ressance did not respond to requests for comment.
LEANDER Club will hold events across the world to mark its 200th anniversary.

The first will be the launch of a book about the clubs history at No 11 Downing Street on Wednesday.

Next month there will be a meet the athletes dinner at the club with several Olympic champions. There will also be a celebration in Dublin followed by one in Sydney in March.

On May 2 there will be a service at St Pauls Cathedral while on May 22 there will be a reception at the club and a dinner in New York hosted by club president Jeremy Randall and his predecessor Sir George Cox.

The celebrations will conclude with a bicentenary banquet on October 10 at the Guildhall in London.
PLANS to either move or improve Goring Primary School are coming closer to fruition.

The Diocese of Oxford, which is responsible for the Church of England school, has agreed to part-fund an independent study into whether the existing Sixties premises off Wallingford Road are worth refurbishing.

If the study finds that renovation is economical, then this could go ahead.

The school could also be expanded on to the neighbouring Bourdillon Field as the governors say it is running out of space and the building is increasingly dilapidated.

However, if the study concludes that renovation is not viable, the governors could consider moving the school to a new site, probably somewhere on the outskirts of the village.

Last year, the school launched a campaign to relocate to the field east of Wallingford Road and behind the houses off Springhill Road, about half a mile north of the existing site.

The Hildred family, which owns the land, and developer McAdden Homes had agreed to build a larger 6.5 million school there free of charge.

In return, they wanted to build 56 houses next door plus 46 more on a field west of Wallingford Road and 34 flats on the current school site. The governors wanted the scheme to be included in the villages neighbourhood plan, which names the sites where new housing should be built in order to meet Government targets and will go to a referendum next year.

But the parish council, which is overseeing the process, and the neighbourhood plan steering group said this wasnt possible as it was beyond the plans scope and the developers hadnt put those sites forward for housing when invited to do so.

Instead, it agreed to make improving the school a strategic project within the plan.

Oxfordshire County Council and South Oxfordshire District Council, the education and planning authorities, requested more evidence that refurbishment was uneconomical and that the benefits of building a new school in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty would outweigh the impact on the landscape.

The governors agreed to commission the study after forming a working group with the parish council, which owns Bourdillon Field and has agreed in principle to let the school expand.

The council has agreed to pay half the cost while the diocese will pay the remainder.

A consultant will be appointed shortly and their findings should be published within about two months.

If the school decides to relocate, all landowners will be invited to offer sites.

In a joint statement, the governors said: It is appreciated that the schools importance to the community has been recognised within the neighbourhood plan and is acknowledged that a specific land allocation cannot be made in this plan.

All has been going very well with great strides being made to explore all options for the school and to work through the necessary process.

It is expected that the results of the study will be reported by early March.

From that point, the next steps will be considered and agreed and the outcome reported to parents and the whole village.

Helen Scurr, who chairs the governors, said: Its all looking very positive and quite exciting. Weve shortlisted providers for the study and will be appointing them very soon.

What has become clear is that, being in an AONB, we would need a strong evidence base to justify moving the school.

Depending on the outcome, the study will either provide us with that or show how we can make the necessary improvements on the current site.

The school is meant to take up to 212 pupils but the governors say it is already over that number and many applicants are being turned away even if they live in the village.

They say children are being taught in portable cabins, which take up space that could be used for outdoor play. Last year, the school kitchen developed a series of faults which meant that pupils went without hot food for months.

 Electronic signs warning drivers of the 20mph advisory speed limit outside the school have been installed in Wallingford Road. The parish council paid 2,640 towards the two signs, which the schools parent-teacher association will repay through fund-raising. In 2016 a pupil suffered a broken leg when he was struck by a car as he crossed the road further south, near the village centre.
A WOMAN was fined more than 200 after parking at Townlands Memorial Hospital in Henley while taking her young son for hearing tests.

Charlotte Currie was twice issued with parking notices after attending appointments with four-year-old Finley, who has hearing problems.

Her appeals were refused andshe was even warned by bailiffs about failing to pay.

Mrs Currie, a digital marketer, is warning other patients to beware of getting caught out if they have to visit the hospital off York Road.

She said: I dont want this to happen to other people as it can be quite scary.

Mrs Currie is the latest in a long line of patients who have been fined by Smart Parking, the company that enforces the hospital car park and also used to monitor the neighbouring car park for the Bell and Hart Surgeries until it was sacked following a string of complaints.

The company uses automatic number plate recognition cameras to log cars entering and leaving the hospital site.

Patients can enter their registration details on a keypad at reception to receive free parking and there is meant to be a 20-minute grace period for those passing through or dropping off patients.

Mrs Currie, who lives in Valley Road with her husband Dave, Finley and the couples other son Luca, six, used to attend appointments at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading before switching to Townlands last year.

Finley had repeatedly failed his infant hearing test and required appointments every three to six months to check his ears.

The first visit was in July when Mrs Currie says she was not aware that she needed to register her cars details when parking.

She was fined 60 and then lost her appeal before being told by the bailiffs that her credit rating would be affected unless she paid. She eventually paid more than 150.

The next appointment was on Thursday, November 16, when Mrs Currie says she was careful to enter her details correctly for fear of getting another fine and even asked the receptionist if she had done it properly.

She said: She said she thought it was fine, although she didnt actually come round the desk and look.

In July I didnt know about the system so I had to pay the fine. I spoke to the bailiffs who said if I didnt pay I would be blacklisted. I got a bit upset and just went online and paid it.

Thats why this time I asked the receptionist and joked with her that because Id had a fine I wanted to make sure this time.

I was even thinking about taking a photo and I thought the CCTV would show me entering my details.

Mrs Currie was happy after the visit as Finley had passed his test only to receive another fine in the post six days later.

She said: It just feels unfair. I have some friends who have had the same thing happen to them. There are so many complaints and you come to wonder if its about making money.

Its not like I didnt have as serious an appointment as someone else who might need a space.

She had to pay by today (Friday) after her appeal failed but has also been back to the hospital to ask for help and was told that a manager would ask for the fine to be rescinded.

She said: Ive asked them to wait and give me a bit of grace. There is the original fine but if an appeal is refused it can quite easily go up to 150. If you cant afford that, its quite worrying.

The Henley Standard has reported on a number of patients who say they have been given fines after parking at the hospital and entering their details correctly.

Others residents say they have been fined for just driving through the site.

Smart Parking also monitors parking at the neighbouring Chilterns Court Care Centre.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.
. . .
So I was recently in a hospital room visiting and a person who lets call the main eventer, because patient sounds so sickly. The main eventer was getting attention from the staff of minions that scurry about when there are needs that need to be tended to. Thats a round-about way of saying it was time to do vitals, meds and other hospital stuff. At the same time a gal stopped by from the kitchen to fill out the next days menu for the main eventer.

This is quite a big deal it seems, this menu planning. I can see that. When youre in a bed in the hospital and you get attention from anyone that isnt wanting to poke or prod or do some other unmentionable thing to you, you are more than happy to comply with their requests! So the gal stands at the door and I as a visitor stopped talking and moved towards the wall. That is what happens when you visit a main eventer in the hospital, you shift towards the wall when theres about to be some sort of hospital medical event performed. This event was the filling out of the menu for the next days meals.

I dont know if you have ever been a main eventer in a hospital or how long it has been since you visited someone who was, but I was amazed at this process. The last time I was in a hospital I remember l having a tray of brown stuff, a plastic fork and spoon and the ever present green jello served, all so very yummy. But in this hospital there were no less than three to five choices in several categories to choose from. For breakfast there were five juices, four different cold cereals, and a choice of different fat laden milks. Then fruit, hot breakfast stuff with or without three choices of meats. Lastly toastor bagel, muffin, and she went on and on. Then she moved on to the extensive lunch and impressive dinner menus.

About half way through the dinner menu, which was way more than just asking-beef or chicken, I just couldnt keep quite any longer. Imagine that, me needing to say something extra! Now in the tiny room there was the main eventer in the bed, the gal reading off the nearly never ending list of meal choices, an RN aka the nurse doing nurse things on the in-room computer, a CNA aka nursing assistant attending to the bedding of the patient and of course yours truly. I spout off that the list of choices really makes a mockery out of the old standby of getting asked, Whats for dinner? Well that got the ball rolling.

There was a grand round of giggles and then an audible groan from knowledgeable heads that had have heard that question more times than there are lights on Broadway! The nurse kind of snorted and said she no longer even asked. She said her kids got food set in front of them and if they didnt want it too bad. It was that eat or go hungry theory. She said they usually ate.

The CNA said there was no way she would ever offer choices to her kids. She even said they dont even get a choice when they get fast food. Her voice of experience said that after spending an unruly and infuriating few times in a car at a drive through with three kids all trying to decide what to have and out do the other kids and then change their little minds at the last minute while she was trying to talk to the boxwell rather quickly she became the dictator and decided for everyone what the meals were going to be!

Soon the conversation died down enough for us all to reflect within ourselves what we thought of the other ideas we had just been privy to. I had time to remember a recent conversation I had with a new husband I know. I mentioned that when he got home he should ask whats for dinner and I laughed. So he did just that. How do I know? A few days later I ran into the bride and asked her how marriage was treating here. She smiled happily and told me that all was great except she hadnt gotten use to the question, Whats for dinner, and we both giggled. Boy howdy does she have a long, long way to go huh?

You know, since some households are run by wives and mothers who have had to deal with this one question over years and years and they have come out of that decision making mode unscathed, well just think of how easy it would be to rule the world!
ELKO  The 17 counties of Nevada joined forces to tell the U.S. Forest Service that they want land management plans to be restored to a previous status pertaining to the conservation of greater sage-grouse. The Nevada Association of Counties, including Elko County, submitted comments to the agency Jan. 4.

By working together, we can maybe increase or magnify our voice when it goes to the federal agency so that they know it is not just an isolated comment, said Elko County Manager Robert Stokes.

The Forest Service is seeking public comment through Jan. 19 regarding greater sage-grouse land management issues that could warrant land management plan amendments in the forests of Western states, including Nevada. On Jan. 4, the agency filed a 14-day extension for the public comment period originally ending Jan. 5 because it may be insufficient for comment preparation from all interested parties, according to a notice in the Federal Register.

The agency will prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement based on a March 2017 decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. The courts found that the Forest Service did not provide enough information for meaningful public participation in the process that led to land management amendments in 2015. To comply with the court order, the Forest Service is considering amending the 2015 sage-grouse plans.

The public is encouraged to help identify any issues, management questions, or concerns that should be addressed in plan amendment(s) or policy or administrative action, the Forest Service states.

In response, NACOs letter outlines six specific issues that Nevada counties would like addressed.

You dont always know what the reception will be, Stokes said, but hopefully it will open up the lines of communication.

NACO requested that the Forest Service consider state-specific plan amendments rather than a one-size fits all decision, the letter states.

The group also requests the removal of sage-grouse focal areas, which were arbitrarily designated without public involvement between the draft and final [environmental impact statement], according to NACO.

Eliminating the net conservation gain requirement in favor of site-specific mitigation is also on the list.

The counties asked that the supplemental environmental impact statement include a socioeconomic analysis for the sage-grouse focal area mineral withdrawal.

Another issue presented was the reduction or elimination of livestock grazing in the name of sage-grouse conservation. Lack of grazing, the letter states, led to fuel buildup that contributed to large-scale fires.

The counties also request that the Forest Service analyze the effect of depredation and disease on the bird population. Many changes throughout the west have created artificial conditions that have increased predator populations, according to the letter.

In conclusion, Elko County and the other NACO members strongly disagree with the decisions that led to the 2015 land use amendments, and they write to request any amendments and decisions related to sage grouse decisions be revoked and forest plans be restored to a prior status before the sage grouse debacle occurred.

At the Jan. 3 meeting when the Elko County commissioners approved submitting the draft comments from NACO, commissioner Jon Karr encouraged individuals to submit comments.

Its surprising how few people send in comments, he said.

Public comments can be sent to:

Sage-grouse Amendment Comment

USDA Forest Service Intermountain Region

Federal Building 324 25th St.

Ogden, UT 84401

Comments also can be submitted via email to comments-intermtn-regional-ffice@fs.fed.us or faxed to 801-625-5277.
CHESTNUT HILL, Tenn.  In Chestnut Hill, Tennessee, you can walk through a giant bean can and spy into Dukes doghouse.

Once there, youll be able to see if that red-colored retriever is trying to sell the secret family recipe for Bushs Baked Beans.

Look! said one young boy. Look at what Duke is doing!

Duke did some tricks for this 110-year-old company, thats for sure.

Dating back to 1995, the marketing campaign featuring Jay Bush and his dog, Duke, has kept Bushs Beans on top of the canned-bean market, said Max Fultz, the manager of Bushs Visitor Center in Chestnut Hill.

And it has led to about 160,000 visitors each year wanting to visit the center near Dandridge.

They enjoy seeing all the various products that we make and the wide variety, said tour guide Audra Watkins.

This center, along U.S. Highway 411, offers an 18-minute documentary film  in a theater-type setting  but no actual factory tours, which are not allowed due to company regulations, Fultz said.

Inside the museum, dozens of panels and pictures provide history lessons seasoned with nostalgia. On site, you can also savor samples of beans  something new each day  in the Bushs Family Cafe, which serves entrees like fried catfish and its signature dessert, Bushs Pinto Bean Pie.

Pork and beans

In 1908, Bushs began as a multifaceted company that offered various vegetables and fruits in cans: tomatoes, blackberries and peaches. It started out canning tomatoes, Fultz said.

At Chestnut Hill, the visitor center is actually housed in the original general store operated by company founder A.J. Bush as early as 1897  a business Fultz called a Super-Walmart of its day.

In the beginning, prior to World War I, the earliest products included cans of green beans harvested from the farms of East Tennessee.

Yet, by the end of World War I, the company struggled as the tomato market crashed, nearly forcing its doors to close.

Bushs proved resilient by taking on new business in the 1920s and surviving the Great Depression, offering inexpensive foods like sauerkraut.

What also proved popular: pork and beans, introduced in 1934.

Secret family recipe

Company founder A.J. Bush and his wife, Sallie Bush, both died in 1946.

Still, the company continued to grow with A.J. Bushs descendants, including Condon Bush, who hatched a plan to perfect the taste of baked beans. That came to fruition in 1969: Bush introduced the companys now-legendary formula for Bushs Baked Beans  based on a secret family recipe made by Condons mother, Kathleen Bush.

Turns out, the taste of those baked beans helped the companys sales skyrocket in the 1970s and 80s  and made company officials look for a clearer focus in the 1990s.

About that time, Bush Brothers & Co. transformed itself from a regional cannery to a national brand  thanks to the television advertising campaign featuring Jay Bush and his talking dog, Duke.

To catch you up: Jay Bush is a great-grandson of company founder A.J. Bush and the one who famously says, Roll that beautiful bean footage, on TV.

Still, while his picture is on the wall at the museum  along with Duke, of course  Jay Bush is not here. And Fultz actually keeps his whereabouts as secret as the recipe for Bushs Baked Beans.

Millions of pounds

Today, about 75 percent of the companys total production is handled here in Tennessee  with about 400 employees on site in Chestnut Hill.

We make all our products here, Fultz said. All of our products are strictly in cans.

That includes Bushs Baked Beans as well as cans of Chili Magic.

Yet the beans actually come from growers in North Dakota and Michigan.

And just how many beans is that?

Well, because this remains a family-owned company, Fultz isnt exactly saying. Yet he did offer a statement, noting, Bush Brothers & Co. is the largest manufacturer of branded bean products in the U.S., producing millions of pounds of beans annually.
If It Dont Make Dollar$, It Dont Make Sense: Adapting in a World of Change is the theme for the Virginia Forage and Grassland Council (VFGC) and Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) winter forage conferences. This years conference highlights the realities of grassland farming and what it takes to adapt to the changing circumstances.

This years keynote speaker is Dennis Hancock from the University of Georgia, where he is an associate professor in the Crop and Soil Sciences Department and the forage extension specialist. Better Grazing: Lessons on Efficient Forage Management from the Best in the World will be the morning keynote, and the afternoon presentation will be The Technical Revolution: Tools and Techniques Worth Considering in 2018 and Beyond.

Participants will also hear from Keith Tuck, who currently farms in the Moneta community in southern Bedford County. He transitioned from tobacco production years ago and now owns and operates a commercial beef cattle operation with around 100 cow calf pairs on a total of 250 acres between owned and rented land. His presentation is From Tobacco, to Cattle, to Grazier: Making it Work in the Real World.

The VFGC and VCE will feature local livestock producers speaking to the afternoon theme of Solutions for your farm and future. Conference participants will hear and see discussion of cooperators experiences of grazing demonstrations under the title, Changes in Management Provides Opportunities for Production, Marketing and Soil Health.

To wrap up, Deidre Harmon will address the participants with practical economic considerations for several of the tools and techniques covered in the earlier presentation, under the title, Economics of Change. Harmon is originally from Galax, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Tech, and recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Georgia. She is starting her career in forages and livestock nutrition as the livestock extension specialist for NC State University.

The Southwest Conference will be held at the Wytheville Meeting Center located at 1000 East Main St. in Wytheville, Virginia, on Monday, January 29. Registration will begin at 8:30 a.m. The cost for the program is $50. Call me at 276-676-6309 for more information.

These conferences have been approved for Continuing Education for Virginia Nutrient Management Certification Renewals and CCA Credits.
Looking back at significant events of previous year 18s

At the turning of the new year, its always customary to look back on the milestones of previous years. Its also natural to muse on what events the coming year may bring.

Looking ahead to 2018, people can anticipate the Winter Olympics, which are scheduled for February in South Korea. In addition, NASA plans to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission to seek out planets beyond the solar system.

Looking back to past year 18s, what events might have been captivating people in past ages? Heres a look at some of the people and events significant from a century ago to a thousand years ago.

1018

 Buckfast Abbey in England is founded.

 Harald II, King of Denmark, dies. King Cnut the Great, famous as a conquerer of England, ascends the throne.

1118

 John II Comnenus crowned as Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.

 Pope Paschal II dies on Jan. 21 after a papal reign of nearly 20 years.

 Matilda of Scotland, wife and queen of King Henry I of England, dies May 1 at age 38.

1218

 Various European rulers under the banner of the Catholic Church launch the Fifth Crusade that ends in an eight-year truce between the Europeans and the Ayyubid state in Egypt.

 Genghis Khans Mongolian cavalry destroys the forces of the Kara-Khitan Khanate.

 Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV dies May 19 at age 43.

1318

 Emperor Go-Daigo succeeds Emperor Hanazono on the throne of Japan.

 Rampant disease hits cattle and sheep, reducing the herds and flocks in Europe.

 Qalaun Mosque in Cairo, Egypt, is founded by Al-Nasr Muhammad.

 Marguerite of France, queen of Edward I of England, dies Feb. 14 at age 39.

1418

 English forces lay siege to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. This major event in the Hundred Years War between the French and English would end the following year with the city surrendered on Jan 19, 1419.

 Katherine of Lancaster, an English princess and queen of Henry III of Castile, dies June 2 at age 45, leaving her 13-year-old son at the mercy of self-interested courtiers.

 Ixtlilxochitl I, ruler of the Mesoamerican city-state of Texcoco, and ally of the Aztecs, dies in battle with the Tepanecs.

1518

 Desiderius Erasmus publishes his Colloquies.

 The African slave trade begins. The Spanish were the first Europeans to use enslaved Africans in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, largely because the native populations of the islands had been decimated by introduced diseases.

 Two-year-old Princess Mary of England, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, contracted to marry Francois, the Dauphin of France, just a few months old at the time, on Oct. 2, 1518. The marriage was meant to seal the Treaty of London, a universal peace crafted by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. The treaty and the engagement would be broken a few years later.

 The so-called Dancing Plague emerges in July. The strange plague caused dancing mania in Strasbourg, in which many people died from constant dancing. Modern theories to explain the dancing epidemic include stress-induced psychosis or ingestion of grains infested with a type of fungus that produces psycho-active chemicals.

1618

 Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion on March 8.

 An avalanche buries the Alpine town of Piuro, claiming 2,427 victims.

 English adventurer, writer and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded on Oct. 29 at the Palace of Westminster, for allegedly conspiring treasonably against James I of England in 1603, following pressure from the Spanish government, over Raleighs attack on their settlement on the Orinoco, on his last voyage to the New World.

1718

 English pirate Blackbeard leads 400 sailors in four ships, to blockade the port of Charleston, South Carolina, in May of 1718.

 The city of New Orleans is founded on May 7, 1718.

 White potatoes, brought over from England, are planted in New England. Ironically, the potato hailed from the Andes mountains of South America. The Spanish took potatoes back to the Old World in the late 1500s.

 The pirate Blackbeard, or Edward Teach, dies during a naval skirmish on Nov. 22 after British Lieutenant Robert Maynard found Blackbeard and his pirates anchored on the inner side of Ocracoke Island in North Carolina and cut off their escape.

1818

 Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein is published anonymously in London on March 11.

 General Andrew Jackson and his American army invade Florida as part of the First Seminole War.

 On April 4, the United States Congress adopts the flag of the United States as having thirteen red and white stripes, and one star for each state (20), with additional stars to be added when-ever a new state is added to the Union.

 Paul Revere, American patriot and silversmith by trade, dies May 10 at age 83. American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Revere in the poem Paul Reveres Ride, which tells the story of his brave ride to warn colonists of an impending attack by British forces.

 Abigail Adams, First Lady of the United States and wife of President John Adams, dies Oct. 28 at age 73.

 Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen of King George III of the United Kingdom, dies Nov. 17 at age 74.

1918

 The first cases of the Spanish flu is first observed in the United States in Haskell County, Kansas. The 1918 flu pandemic would result in the deaths of 50 to 100 million people, which was three to five percent of the entire world population. The unusually deadly influenza pandemic would infect 500 million people, including those living on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic. In the United States, about 28 percent of the population became infected, and 500,000 to 675,000 died.

 President Woodrow Wilson delivers his Fourteen Points speech on Jan. 8.

 Westmoreland Morley Davis inaugurated as 48th governor of Virginia on Feb. 1.

 The last captive Carolina parakeet (the only species of parrot native to the eastern United States) dies at the Cincinnati Zoo on Feb. 21. The bird, a male named Incas, died about a year after the death of his mate, who had been named Lady Jane by their zookeepers.

 Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, on March 29.

 Betty Ford, future First Lady, is born Elizabeth Ann Bloomer in Chicago, Illinois, on April 8.

 The Great Train Wreck of 1918 takes place on July 9 in Nashville, Tennessee, when an in-bound local train collided with an outbound express, killing 101.

 Quentin Roosevelt, youngest son of President Theodore Roosevelt, killed in action as a World War I fighter pilot on July 14.

 Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra of Russia are executed on July 17 with several members of their family by Bolshevik forces.

 Albert H. Roberts elected Governor of Tennessee on Nov. 5. He is best remembered for calling the special session of the Tennessee General Assembly that ratified the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, in August 1920. Roberts support for the amendment and his unpopular tax reform initiatives divided the state Democratic Party and doomed his reelection chances.

 World War I ends with the signing of the Armistice with Germany on Nov. 11.
My name is Cheryl Russell, and I currently reside in Bristol, Tennessee. I am a mother of four children  Adrienne, Bethany, David and Victoria. In 1984 I graduated from Baptist Nursing School, and I am a retired Open Heart Surgery nurse. For many years, I have been active in the community and schools volunteering at such organizations as Healing Hands, BTCS, Bristol Republican Women and the Sullivan County Republican Party. I belong to Liberty Baptist Church in Bristol, and my hobbies include reading, fitness and travelling. My greatest joys are my children.

What was your first job?

My first job was being an assistant at my dads decorating store in Knoxville. This was a small family owned business, which had been his dream for many years. As soon as I was old enough, I joined my brother and my sister helping out my dad in his store. We carried paint, wallpaper and general home maintenance supplies.

Tell us a bit about your responsibilities at this job.

When I was young, I was just responsible for stocking shelves. As I got older, my dad trusted me more. I could actually assist customers in finding wallpaper, mixing paint and tallying the receipts daily.

How did you get this job?

My dad was a high school dropout. Employment was sporadic for him, but he was an awesome home decorating worker. When my sister and I were in high school, we all sat at the kitchen table and had a family meeting discussing the pros and cons of running our own place. The idea was crazy, but its what he loved doing and wanted to give it a try. With a small loan and luck, we opened the business. Pretty soon everyone in the family became the store workers. My Dad found his children as cheap reliable workers, and we were in the store every day after school and every Saturday.

What did you love or hate about it?

The aspect I loved the most was meeting and interacting with the customers. I grew up as an extremely shy child. I did not meet new people or make new friends easily, but this business gave me the opportunity to practice and overcome this fear. At some points, my dad would make me responsible for helping customers match colors or decide on decorating ideas. Being forced to interact with so many strangers helped me to overcome this fear, and I grew to love meeting and assisting them with their decorating needs.

I disliked the pay the most. We were his children, so instead of a wage, my dad saw a roof over our heads and beds to sleep in as a paycheck. The rest of our pay was a Krispy Kreme doughnut for breakfast, and a Hardees roast beef sandwich for lunch. Since this was a family business, all profits were returned to the shop to help with making it a success.

What do you do now?

Currently, I am a Sullivan County Commissioner. I would not be where I am today without my dad and his decorating store. Working around the store and helping customers not only helped me overcome my fear of strangers, but also helped me to develop a passion for it. I found that I loved helping people, and I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others improve theirs.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time?

My greatest advice would be to always follow your dreams. I saw my dad have a dream, take all of our savings and then use this to make a successful small business. Even in the toughest days of when we didnt have one penny of profit, I wouldnt trade the family bond that developed from this business. There were so many reasons for my dad not to pursue his dream  his level of education, the difficulty of running a store, or the lack of a guaranteed profit. But he ignored all of that logic to pursue something he was passionate about, and that became a dream for the entire family. I wish I could say my dads dream ended in a success story. Unfortunately, five years after opening his decorating store, we did have to close. And thats when I learned my second piece of advice about dreams. In life it is not guaranteed you will succeed, so have a plan for the future.
Many people are actively worried about global warming. And it frustrates them that skeptics and deniers refuse to acknowledge the science of such an urgent, manmade problem.

But there may be valid reasons to dispute the theory that man is responsible for climate change. And to demonstrate why the issue isnt so clearcut, heres a basic climate question to ponder:

As the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere increases, does its ability to absorb heat increase, decrease, or remain the same?

Most people will assume the answer is increase. After all, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Adding more of it to the atmosphere should mean more heat being trapped.

The correct answer, however, is decrease.

How do we know this? Because the UNs very own, Al Gore-friendly Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged in its reports that CO2 loses the ability to absorb heat as its concentration increases. The IPCC explains that CO2 follows a logarithmic dependence, which means that it takes ever-doubling amounts of CO2 to keep adding the same amount of heat absorption in the atmosphere. In fact, CO2 absorbs only a certain narrow spectrum of infrared radiation, and the IPCC recognizes that the middle of this band is already saturated.

People who fret about manmade warming may find it hard to believe that CO2 actually loses heat trapping ability. But they should know that even the very climate-concerned IPCC admits to such limitations. They still argue that we need to fear manmade warming, however. And their reason is simply that they believe any additional heat absorbed by CO2 will be greatly amplified by water vapor feedback.

This begs the question  are they right? The answer is No.

Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas of the atmosphere  and responsible for most of the warming that keeps the Earth habitable. In order to make their case, the IPCC theorizes that any additional warming from CO2 will lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere. And this water vapor will trap more heat, raising temperatures further. It is this feedback loop that is used to justify their predictions of catastrophic, future warming.

Its an interesting concept, but it contains an inherent problem. Water vapor added to the atmosphere inevitably transitions to clouds. And cumulus clouds not only reflect solar radiation back into space but also produce rain. And rainfall not only cools surface temperatures but also scrubs CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is why water vapor feedback remains heavily debated in the scientific community, and even the IPCC admits that an uncertainty range arises from our limited knowledge of clouds and their interactions with radiation.

One thing we can all agree on, though, is that the Earth has warmed over the past 150 years, and by roughly 0.85 degrees Celsius. But the cause of this warming may well be the significant increase in solar activity during that time. In 2016, Norwegian scientists Harald Yndestad and Jan-Erik Solheim reported that solar output during the 20th Century reached the highest levels in 4,000 years. And also in 2016, at least 132 peer-reviewed scientific papers suggested a solar influence on climate.

The IPCC rejects claims of solar variability, though. They argue that changes in solar irradiance (brightness) are relatively small. But recent research from scientists like Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark demonstrates that variations in the suns output also affect the solar magnetic field and solar wind  which directly influence ionization in the troposphere and cloud formation.

As the IPCC observed in its first assessment report in 1990, global climate in recent millennia has fluctuated over a range of up to 2 degrees Celsius on time scales of centuries or more. Its very possible that the heightened solar activity of the past century has driven recent global warming. As such, there are valid reasons to question the theory of manmade climate change, and to urge greater study of the issue.
Ucoms mobile customers will benefit from the best internet roaming rate of 8 AMD/MB when travelling to Georgia, Egypt or the UAE

Ameriabank Launches Google Pay and Google Wallet Support for Card Users in Armenia

Karen Vardanyan donated 112 million drams for the medical equipment for National Center for Infectious Diseases.

UCOM HAS INTRODUCED FUTURE NETWORK WI-FI 6E ROUTERS

Statement by the Spokesperson on the conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts

Foreign Minister of Armenia to participate in the Fifth Paris Peace Forum

Armenia: EU and Armenia Hold annual Dialogue on Human Rights

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Ookla, the the global leader in internet testing and analysis has awarded Ucom

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STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARTSAKH

SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

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Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces
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Grand Prize Winner: Donna Rickey Blog Winners: A Song for her Enemies by Sherri Stewart: Mary Ann Hake Spies & Sweethearts by Linda Shenton Matchett: Connie Ruggles Sword of Trust by DebbieLynn Costello: Brenda Walters Justice for Julia by Donna Schlachter: Natalya Lakhno Party Prize winners: Sherri Stewarts Winners A Song for her Enemies: Angie Pool Bottle of Dutch Syrup: Carol Koch Alscheff Corrie ten Boom book: Deb Gramie Burgess Linda Shenton Matchetts winners: $5.00 gift card to online retailer or choice (Kobo, B&N, AppleBooks, Amazon): Karen Hadley A Bride for Seamus: Carol Osterhouse Wotring DebbieLynn Costellos winners: Sword of the Matchmaker: Melissa Planas Sword of Forgiveness: Paty Hinojosa Gomez Shattered Memories: Charlene Zall Capodice Sword of the Perfect Bride: Licha Haney Donna Schlachters winner: Leather Journal: Lisa Turley

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Winners must leave their email address and will be notified by email and the winners name will be announced in the days comments. No one under 18 can enter our giveaways. No purchase is necessary. All winners have one week to claim their prize. USA shipping only. Offer void where prohibited. Odds of winning vary due to the number of entrants.
Ucoms mobile customers will benefit from the best internet roaming rate of 8 AMD/MB when travelling to Georgia, Egypt or the UAE

Ameriabank Launches Google Pay and Google Wallet Support for Card Users in Armenia

Karen Vardanyan donated 112 million drams for the medical equipment for National Center for Infectious Diseases.

UCOM HAS INTRODUCED FUTURE NETWORK WI-FI 6E ROUTERS

Google Ad

Statement by the Spokesperson on the conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts

Foreign Minister of Armenia to participate in the Fifth Paris Peace Forum

Armenia: EU and Armenia Hold annual Dialogue on Human Rights

Todays Shushi, Occupied and Cleared of Armenians, is a Real Example of Turkish-Azerbaijani Policy of Ethnic Cleansing of Artsakh

Ookla, the the global leader in internet testing and analysis has awarded Ucom

Sweden will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union

Ameriabank: At the Vanguard of Armenia's Banking Sector

STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARTSAKH

SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Google Ad

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces
The Parliaments decision to send the draft National Medical Commission Bill, 2017, to the standing committee of health has raised hopes for a constructive debate among political parties to remove the draconian clauses in the proposed bill. If not modified, the bill will replace the Medical Council of India (MCI) by a near-total central government department called the National Medical Commission (NMC). Devoid of a federal character, this non-representative body will be a poor substitute for the MCI.

counterpoint Replacing the Medical Council of India with a National Medical Commission is a good idea

The proposed NMC is not representative of the medical profession in India. The MCI has one representative each from state and practising doctors. With this being taken away, it remains to be seen how the ethics of practising doctors providing care to 80% of the population can be managed without having representatives from their own tribe.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA) is the collective consciousness of more than three lakh doctors from modern medicine, yet it was not consulted when the Union Cabinet took this decision to replace the MCI with the NMC.

The bill is not national as it does not represent all states. Although, each state government does have the presence of a vice-chancellor in the body, the official will be appointed by the governor in through the Centre. It isnt medical either as it allows the mixing of Ayush with modern medicine. Combining the two in the same treatment by the same doctor will constitute a new treatment and hence necessitate a trial, which would require the approval of the ethics committee.

The NMC is not a commission as any commission requires the provision for a developmental grant in the five-year plan. Its also not representative as there is no representation of doctors from every state but only five elected zonal members in the commission with only an appellant authority. The so-called four autonomous boards, with full powers, will have 12 nominated salaried full-time members with no representation from elected members. The bill is not community-friendly; the bill will make medical education expensive in the future. This is because the bill will increase the percentage of fee to be decided by the private colleges from 15% to more than 60% of seats.

One of the main contentions for replacing the bill was to get a new corruption-free mechanism but the NMC has the potential to breed corruption. Full powers are given only to three full-time nominated members in the board appointed on salary by the government. The commission has only appellant powers; more than 60% medical seats in private colleges will have no fee restriction and the penalty for violating norms will vary from 1/2 to 10 times (for example, from 5 crore to 100 crore). Also, the central government vests total control on waiving off penalty, giving permissions, and allowing doctors to practice without fulfilling all norms. The bill is also not students friendly. Those medical students who pass MBBS by grace but fail in the licentiate exam will not be allowed to practice. The so-called autonomous boards are not really autonomous as all boards are under direct control of the government and the commission. And, the commission has regulatory as well as directional powers. The secretary of the commission can be a non-doctor appointed by the government.

The bill is not IMA-friendly, which was not made a part of discussions despite being the largest stakeholder comprising government and private doctors, students, teachers, and hospitals. It is not state medical council-friendly either as it takes away their autonomy to function. Not only this, the NMC will even have directional power over state governments. I hope the standing committee on health will rectify these anomalies by either amending the present NMC act or bring in a better act that takes into account IMAs concerns.

KK Aggarwal is vice president, Confederation of Medical Associations in Asia and Oceania and former National President IMA

The views expressed are personal
Google doodle on Monday celebrated the 110th birthday of Bollywood actress and stunt queen Mary Ann Evans, popularly known as Fearless Nadia. The doodle showed the illustration of Fearless Nadia wearing a hat.

The blue-eyed blonde actress, who was born on this day in 1908 in Perth, Australia, is remembered as the masked and cloaked adventurer in a 1935 movie Hunterwali, in which she played the lead role. Mary came to Bombay in 1913 at the age of five with her father Scotsman Herbert Evans, a volunteer in the British Army.

After learning the ropes of outdoor living in Peshawar, she first joined a touring dance troupe in Bombay, then the Zarco Circus. On the advice of a fortune teller, she changed her name to Nadia.

In her first lead role in Hunterwali, Nadia was seen wearing leather shorts, a mask and cape, performing all of her own stunts. In late 1960s, she also appeared in a James Bond spoof called Khiladi (The Players).

Over the years, she swung from chandeliers, sprang from speeding trains and even tamed lions.

Nadias great-grandnephew, Riyad Vinci Wadia in 1993 made a documentary on her, Fearless: The Hunterwali Story. Nadias doodle has been created by Bangalore-based comic illustrator Devaki Neogi.
After many hiccups, the Central Board Of Film Certification, popularly known as censor board, has finally cleared Sanjay Leela Bhansalis film for a pan-India release, but thats not good enough for the state of Rajasthan. The state government is still not ready to let the film hit the screens on its territory.

On Monday, ANI tweeted a statement by Rajasthans home minister Gulab Chand Kataria which reads, Following earlier orders of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, movie Padmavat will not be released in the state.

Following earlier orders of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, movie '#Padmavat' will not be released in the state: Gulab Chand Kataria, Rajasthan Home Minister pic.twitter.com/rDQVltZSeo  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

After facing several roadblocks, Sanjay Leela Bhansalis controversial film Padmavati retitled Padmavat, seems set for a January 25 release, sources in Viacom18 Motion Pictures said today.

In November, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje had written a letter to Union information and broadcasting minister Smriti Irani, seeking necessary changes in the movie before its release, so that the sentiments of any community are not hurt.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, has been cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which has asked the makers to change the title and suggested other modifications.

The film was earlier scheduled to be released on December 1. Though Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and Sanjay Leela Bhansali have not released an official statement yet, sources in the production house said the film will release on January 25, a day before Republic Day. The film is releasing on January 25. There is no clarity when the official statement will be out regarding this, sources in Viacom18 Motion Pictures told PTI.

Padmavat stars Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in pivotal roles. The film will clash with Akshay Kumars Padman.
Since 2011, Sajjad Delafrooz has been on a mission to make it big in Bollywood. His portrayal of the menacing villain, Abu Usman, in Salman Khan-starrer Tiger Zinda Hai has finally given him a sense of having arrived in the industry.

The 34-year-old Iranian actor is ecstatic about having garnered praise from all corners for his performance in the film that released in December 2017. I was trying to make this (recognition) happen for years. It feels good to get beautiful messages from people. Directors and producers are congratulating me, and thats the best thing, says Sajjad, who is also gaining popularity among women for his good looks. How does that feel? Its beautiful, he giggles.

Sajjad as the antagonist, Abu Usman, in Tiger Zinda Hai.

Sajjad hopes to only grow from here, and he treasures Salmans advice. After the screening of the film, bhaijaan told me, Be careful about the projects you choose because your life will change now, says Sajjad. About working with Salman, he adds, I met him while I was preparing for the film. He shared tips about working out. He shares his experiences with you, which is the best thing about him.

Years in between him being a PR manager to bagging Tiger Zinda Hai were all about working hard irrespective of results. I still remember the exact date  July 29, 2011  when I decided that I dont want to continue with a 9-to-5 job and instead take up acting. I started by sending my videos and e-mails to people who are in-charge of such things. I even came to Mumbai in 2014 to try my luck, but that didnt work. n 2015, I landed a small role in Baby (starring Akshay Kumar)... But I knew I would have to work harder to be in a better place. I never stopped working. Till 2016, I did international projects, movies, television shows. I speak five different languages, so I got to work in different parts of the world, but nothing worked for me, says Sajjad.

And then, one day, he got a call for the Salman starrer. I would email my work 24/7 to directors and producers, till one day, out of the blue, I got a call for this film. I didnt know what movie it was, and who else was going to star in it. They told me that they liked my audition, and wanted me to give another one. The entire audition process went on for two-and-a-half months, he recalls, now hoping that more such opportunities keep coming his way.

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The government will invite expressions of interest from those interested in buying state-owned Air India Ltd, after the budget presentation on 1 February, a top government official said.

The move is intended to demonstrate that the National Democratic Alliance is going ahead with the privatisation of Air India despite a parliamentary panel suggesting a five-year pause.

We will be seeking expressions of interest certainly in February, civil aviation secretary Rajiv Nayan Choubey said in an interview on Monday.

The invitation calling for expressions of interest from potential bidders is being drafted, and will be submitted to a ministerial group that has been tasked with Air Indias privatisation, added Choubey.

In a draft report, the parliamentary standing committee on transport, tourism and culture suggested that the Union government put the privatisation plan on hold for at least five years and write off the national carriers debt, the Press Trust of India reported on Sunday.

The government has appointed EY, formerly known as Ernst and Young, to advise it on the privatisation exercise, in which the invitation seeking expressions of interest from would-be bidders is the first step. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas will be the legal adviser.

The government will vet the responses to evaluate the eligibility of the potential bidders before floating a so-called request for proposal, a detailed document that will be more precise than the document seeking expressions of interest.

IndiGo, run by InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, and Tata Sons Ltd have shown interest in Air Indias operations.

Turkeys Celebi Aviation Holding, Bird Group, Menzies Aviation Plc and Livewel Aviation Services Pvt. Ltd have shown interest in the national carriers subsidiaries.

Last week, Leslie Thng, chief executive officer of Vistara, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines Ltd, said the latter has an open mind on looking at Air India, noting that the national airlines has a strong brand presence globally.

If you look at the history, Air India was in fact one of the pioneers in many of the aviation launches. Air India actually has a very good reputation in some of the markets. People know about Air Indiathere are a lot of NRIs (non-resident Indians) who live overseas, who know about Air India. It flies to many international destinations. The brand awareness of Air India is not weak, he Leslie Thng added.

Air India had total debt of about Rs48,877 crore at the end of March 2017Rs17,360 crore of aircraft loans and Rs31,517 crore of working capital loans.

The airline has a fleet of about 140 planes, with a 17% share of traffic on routes linking India to international destinations and about 13% of the domestic market.

The national carrier, which is part of the worlds biggest airline grouping, Star Alliance, also has prime slots at airports across the world as also land banks and buildings among its assets.
The way the flames of violence recently engulfed more than half of Maharashtra is bound to cause fear and anxiety. During this period the frenzied mobs didnt even spare the buses of children returning from school and pelted them with stones. Shaking with fear, the children had to seek shelter along with their classmates even as their parents were helplessly waiting for them in various parts of Mumbai. All the modes of transport that could have brought their children home were stalled. For some time, the entire governance had become paralysed. This is only one chilling example among many of the lawlessness which spread in large parts of the countrys commercial capital.

It will take some time before the complete damage caused by the protests and the violence can be assessed. But for now, it has raised some disturbing questions. Was the plot for this bloodshed being scripted for a long time? Or is it part of the next stage of conflict likely to grip the country?

To get an answer to these questions, let me take you to Bhima Koregaon. Members of the Dalit community assemble here for a celebration every year. They commemorate the day Peshwa soldiers were defeated here. The victorious army comprised a majority of Mahar soldiers and a few Britishers. That is why Dalits view it as a symbol of the defeat of Brahminical power. I am not going into the details of this clash as many pieces of contradictory information are being fed into the roaring sea of social media.

This issue is an offshoot of a malaise that is rapidly spreading across the country in which self-appointed historians have mushroomed. Ignoring scientific facts, they swear by anecdotes and urban legends. While doing this, they conveniently forget the lessons of history where fictitious definitions can prove hazardous for humanity. The recent incidents in Maharashtra are another example of this.

The tradition of celebration at Bhima Koregaon is not a new development. People have been assembling here for decades. Since it was the 200th anniversary of the incident, so the crowds were expected to be bigger than usual. This was not done in any secret manner. If the state government so desired, it could have made the necessary arrangements. But that wasnt done. Not just this, even when the mobs were running amok, the police didnt display the enthusiasm required to stop them. The TV journalists attacked in Mumbai allege that the police at the spot didnt attempt to protect them. Stories such as these create an atmosphere of suspicion.

If you look closely, you will discover that attempts to stoke caste and religious sentiments have been made periodically over the last few years. Before this, the battleground was in Uttar Pradeshs Saharanpur. Here Bhim army chief Chandrashekhar Ravan made some really provocative comments. The result? Two people were killed, many injured and property worth crores set afire. For months after this, the entire region felt the repercussions.

Before this, as part of a conspiracy, a communal colour was lent to the beating up of Dalits in Gujarats Una and the Rohit Vemula suicide in Hyderabad. The Jats in Haryana and the Gujjars in Rajasthan turned violent demanding reservations. You may recall that this phenomenon captured the countrys imagination after a few people raised anti-India slogans in Afzal Gurus memory at Delhis Jawaharlal Nehru University. Rather than deal with them at the administrative level, these incidents were sensationalised more than was required. This was like showing a light to old dynamite. Its tragic effects are now being felt.

From JNU to Bhima Koregaon, the way the marketplace of hatred is assuming the shape of a well-planned strategy raises some disturbing questions. India is a nation of unity in diversity. Our ancestors adopted this principle after testing it for thousands of years. So, whenever religious or caste passions were unleashed, we were able to successfully douse them. But in the age of social media and exploding political aspirations, traditions are coming in handy to create unrest rather than harmony.

Unfortunately, our politicians are trying to further fan these fires. If you dont believe me, just have a look at the proceedings in the Parliament. Even as Maharashtra was burning, our lawmakers were busy trading charges and counter-charges. They forgot that the people of Maharashtra were looking at them with hope. Our honourable MPs even forgot that every such incident leaves a scar on the face of social harmony.

This doesnt behove a nation emerging as a global superpower.

Shashi Shekhar is editor-in-chief Hindustanletters@hindustantimes.com
It may be well over nine months since the assembly election results put a spanner on the Congress dream to retain power in Uttarakhand, but unrest over the electoral fiasco has refused to die down in the party.

Congress president Rahul Gandhis decision to let presidents of party state units to continue on their posts even after the organisational polls has sparked a fresh round of tug of war in the partys Uttarakhand unit over what led to its crushing defeat in 2017.

With the latest announcement, senior leaders including former chief minister and current and ex-PCC (Pradesh Congress Committee) chiefs engaged in a war of words over responsibility for the partys loss in the last years assembly polls.

This comes at a time when the civic polls, scheduled in the state in April, are barely three months away.

While former PCC chief Kishore Upadhyay put the blame on the (erstwhile) Congress governments policies and not the party organization for the loss, former CM Harish Rawat said his government did everything possible to ensure the partys victory, though he accepted the moral responsibility for the partys defeat.

Notably, the Congress had battled a wave of anti-incumbency, exit of over a dozen senior leaders and internal factionalism ahead of the polls. As a result, it could go on to win only 11 assembly seats against 57 of the BJP in the February 2017 polls.

State Congress president Pritam Singh, meanwhile, said every leader and member of the party was aware about their responsibility for strengthening the party.

Whatever happened (partys defeat), is past nowit is high time we moved on and worked afresh for the upcoming urban local body polls and later Lok Sabha polls (in 2019) instead of playing a blame game over what or who led (to the assembly polls) fiasco, Singh said.

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More than 22,000 madrasa students have not been eligible to compete for government jobs and pursue higher education for the last five years since Uttarkhand has not yet recognised Madarsa Education Board certificates for class 10 and 12 as equivalent to those of the state board.

In 2010, Uttar Pradesh  the parent state of Uttarakhand  accorded equivalence to Munshi and Moulvi curriculum taught in Class 10 and Alim in Class 12 under madrasa boards, but this is not the case in the hill state. Madarsa board certificates are not even accepted by the National Institute of Open School (NIOS).

Madarsa Welfare Society chairman Sibte Nabi has been pursuing for recognition to madrasa courses since the education board was formed in 2013. Congress government, whose major vote bank comprised Muslims and minorities, didnt move an inch in this regard (recognition to courses). We are hopeful that the BJP government might take a decision and safeguard the future of Muslim students, Nabi told Hindustan Times.

After the Madarsa Education Board was formed in 2013, madrasas were asked to register themselves with it. Of 297 madrasas in the state, the one in Roorkee is government-aided. But the board certificates of this school are also not equivalent to those of the state board.

In June 2017, a letter written by director general, education, Alok Shekhar Tiwari mentioned that the then government has given nod to grant equivalence to madrasa courses. But no government order (GO) has been issued in this regard.

We were on the verge of issuing the GO during the previous government. Then the government changed and the matter remained in the backburner. We will take up the matter again with the present government, Uttarakhand Minorities Commission chairperson NS Bindra told HT.

Insiders said the approval wont come sooner and the batch of nearly 5300 students appearing for Madarsa Board examinations will face the same fate.

School education secretary Bhupinder Kaur Aulakh said, The minorities commission should get in touch with us on this matter.

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Expansion of urban local bodies (ULBs) and simultaneous delimitation of wards in municipal areas barely three months ahead of the civic polls has left the Congress in a tizzy in Uttarakhand.

Looking to strike back in the ULB polls due in April, the Congress state unit has alleged that the BJP-led state government was carrying out faulty delimitation (carving out of new or modification of areas in existing wards) to suit its own equation in the upcoming elections.

On Monday, Congress leader Rajkumar led a protest to oppose what the party has termed severe anomalies in the way new wards have been chalked out or existing wards altered in the proposed delimitation of the Dehradun Municipal Corporation (DMC).

The district administration has already received over 150 objections against the proposed delimitation of the DMC. Similar protests are being held by the Congress in other parts of the state as well.

There is no clear mention of boundaries of new wards and maps, said former MLA Rajkumar, who was joined by other Congress leaders and corporators in his protest.

There are wide disparities in the delimitation of wards in terms of distribution of population, former cabinet minister Dinesh Agarwal said.

A delegation of party leaders recently urged the state election commission to take over the delimitation exercise in its hand.

First, the government went ahead with expanding ULBs by adding rural areas in them without taking the stakeholders concerned into confidence. And now, the BJP government is trying to influence the delimitation process to suit its own political motive in the civic polls, Congress state unit president Pritam Singh alleged.

So far, the government has officially announced final delimitation for over 75 of the states 92 ULBs. This includes delimitation that has been finalized for five municipal corporations -- Haldwani, Haridwar, Rudrapur, Kotdwar and Rishikesh, while that of the other ULBs remains to be done.

It is worth recalling that there was a court stay on elections in local bodies of Bhatrojkhan in Kumaon and Roorkee in Garhwal administrative region.

Urban development minister Madan Kaushik, however, rebuffed the Congress allegations, saying there was no intervention from the government in the process at all.

It is their (Congress) insecurity talking... the government has not interfered with the process which is being carried out at the departmental level. Moreover, objections are being invited and heard wherever delimitation is taking place so they (Congress leaders) should present their grievances at the right platform instead of playing blame game over it, Kaushik told HT.

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Armenian Ambassador against Armenia

On January 11, the European Court of Human Rights will announce another verdict against the Republic of Armenia. The applicant is Alexander Arzumanyan, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Armenia to the Kingdom of Denmark, who filed a lawsuit before his appointment .He was appointed Ambassador to Armenia in 2017. Alexander Arzumanyan, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and leader of the Civil Disobedience Movement, appealed to the fact that he had been detained for alleged "money laundering." Alexander Arzumanyan was arrested in May 2007 and detained on suspicion of legalization of illegal income. The courts ordered his detention on the grounds of the gravity of the offence and the risk of his absconding, obstructing justice or reoffending. They then repeatedly extended his detention on similar grounds, despite Mr Arzumanyans objections, until his release in September on an undertaking not to leave his residence. Relying on Article 5  3 (right to liberty and security / entitlement to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial), Mr Arzumanyan complains that the domestic courts failed to sufficiently justify his detention. It should be reminded that in 2007 the National Security Service of Armenia stated that "Vahan Shirkhanyan and Alexander Arzumanyan were in Moscow and ,coming to an agreemet with Levon Markos, the citizen of Russia, who was wanted for financial fraud since 2005, transfered a suspicious amount of money to Armenia." Alexander Arzumanyan does not accept the accusation.
The discontent among senior BJP legislators is apparently visible even as the ruling party faces pressure from ministerial berth aspirants.

Former BJP state unit president Bishan Singh Chufal on Monday demanded cabinet expansion of the 9-month-old Trivendra Singh Rawat government to maintain regional balance.

Chufal is a Rajput leader and a five time legislator from Didihat constituency in Pithoragarh district. He was a minister in the BC Khanduri government. Later, he was appointed as the party state unit president.

Chufal was expecting ministerial berth after the BJP won 57 seats in the 70-member Uttarakhand assembly early last year. But his name was dropped to accommodate Prakash Pant, a Brahmin legislator from neighbouring Pithoragarh seat.

A large number of party workers are disappointed owing to regional imbalance of the cabinet, Chufal said in Pithoragarh. Not even a single Rajput leader from Kumaon represents the government, he added.

Chief minister Rawat has nine ministers in his cabinet. As far as caste combination is concerned, three ministers  Satpal Maharaj, Dhan Singh, Harak Singh - are Rajput while Madan Kaushik, Subodh Uniyal, Arvind Pande and Prakash Pant are Brahmin.

Rekhya Arya and Yashpal Arya represent Scheduled Caste community.

As far as representation from the region is concerned, five ministers and chief minister hail from Garhwal while Pant, Pande and both SC ministers are from Kumaon.

Chufal feels Kumaon has been slightly ignored in the cabinet.

Uttarakhand can have maximum 12 members, including chief minister, in the cabinet. Going by the number game, two positions are vacant in the cabinet.

Chufal accepted that he was also one of the aspirant for the ministerial berth and it was not him but the party workers who complain about the negligence of region and caste.

Chufals open claim to the ministerial berth has not gone well with the party which claims to be disciplined.

Party state unit president Ajay Bhatt said cabinet expansion was the chief ministers prerogative. The party will take right decision at the right time, he told HT when asked about the Chufals statement.

Besides Chufal, party has senior legislators like Bansidhar Bhagat, Harbans Kapoor, Munna Singh Chauhan, Harbansh Cheema who are also in the queue.

Moreover, supporters of the two MLAs  Rajesh Shukla and Swami Yatishwaranand - have been seeking respectful accommodation as Shukla and Yatishwaranand defeated then chief minister Harish Rawat from Kiccha and Haridwar (rural) constituencies, respectively.

The party insiders say it was not possible to keep everyone happy therefore some of the senior legislators could be accommodated in the government corporations as the chairpersons and vice-chairpersons.

Between a section of the senior leaders are also in favour of keeping the cabinet expansion issue lingering as accommodating some and leaving many could have adverse affect on the party prospects in local body polls scheduled to be held in April.
Inspired by Hollywood movie Gone in Sixty Seconds, two men, who were arrested on Sunday with 22 motorcycles, had set a target of stealing a two-wheeler everyday.

South East district police on Sunday said it had arrested two men  25-year-old Manmeet and 18-year-old Sumit  for their alleged involvement in a spate of such thefts since November. Earlier, the two were in jail for theft and had been released on bail in November. Once Manmeet was released, the two regrouped and decided to go on a stealing spree. They both were fascinated by movies on thieves and used to watch such movies. They were especially fond of Hindi dubbed version of Hollywood movies with such plots and looked for innovative ways to steal, said DCP south east Chinmoy Biswal.

He added that the duo had planned to steal 50-60 motorcycles and then sell them to buy an auto rickshaw to ferry passengers during the day and smuggle liquor and ganja at night.

On how they were finally nabbed, Biswal said, they were gathering intelligence about auto lifters and also keeping a close vigil over the activities of recently released persons.

We received a tip off about the movement of notorious auto lifters namely Manmeet alias Monu and Sumit alias Sonu or Sukka near Kalkaji Mandir on Saturday and also learnt that they would come on a stolen motor cycle. A special picket was set up near the foot-over bridge at outer ring road for vehicle checking, said Biswal.

The two were later seen riding a motorcycle and coming from Nehru Place side. They were signalled by the staff to stop the vehicle for checking but they tried to slip through. However, the staff overpowered and apprehended them, Biswal added.
Their numbers dwindle with each passing year, which is understandable. Old derelict homes do collapse after decades of benign neglect.

But this is more than merely sad  given their distinct character. Aged homes in neighbourhoods such as Shahjahanabad and Mehrauli issue their own singular statements of grace, while most modern housing complexes arguably have nothing to say at all.

The other morning, we were lucky to run across a remarkable example of a time- worn structure on a street going up from the Old Delhi neighbourhood of Pahari Bhojla. We found ourselves standing in front of an arched door as thick as a fortress rampart, while two sets of taaks ran along the sides.

A young man approached the door and opened it, and we followed him inside. It was like entering a destroyed world. The roofs had collapsed, and the walls were fading into surreal shades of blue. Switchboards were missing switches. A picturesque window was half-boarded. Rats emerged from a hole in the ground.

A grey cat slunk around a disfigured pillar. There was grime everywhere, including in a small courtyard that stood desolate. A shopkeeper told us that a merchant family lived in the house 25 years ago or so. Those people moved to another part of the city, he guessed.

What sort of lives did this elegant home once harbour? We had somehow joined that lost world by simply entering through the grand doorway. With one fleeting visit, we became a part of something ethereal that gives our city its special melancholic beauty.
Jet Airways air hostess, who was caught smuggling $480,200 (valued at 3.25 crore) wrapped in aluminium foil, had reportedly smuggled foreign currency on at least seven previous occasions before she was caught on Sunday late night on board a Delhi-Hong Kong flight.

The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), who have arrested Deveshi Kulshreshtha (25) along with her agent Amit Malhotra (39), said the duo are part of a bigger international hawala syndicate.

A city court on Tuesday sent Kulshreshtha and Malhotra to two-day judicial custody and directed the DRI to produce them before the concerned metropolitan magistrate on January 11.

Sources said that Malhotra met Kulshreshtha in August last year when he was returning from Hong Kong by a Jet Airways flights. Malhotra had a chat with her while she was serving the meal to him. They exchanged contact details and later met to discuss the plan. She made four-five domestic trips before going to Hong Kong. Before going there, she used to meet the supplier and collect the currency from him, said a DRI official on condition of anonymity.

Investigators said she used to get 1% of the total money she laundered as commission.

In August last year, she travelled for the first time with $50,000. Thereafter, she travelled with $1,00,000 and this was her eighth trip with the Hawala money. Another person used to come to the hotel in Hong Kong to collect the money. Malhotra, who runs a tour and travel business in east Delhis Vivek Vihar, has also been arrested, said the DRI official.

Official said that Amit too had travelled to Hong Kong on multiple occasions on the same money laundering business. The DRI has raided Malhotras house in east Delhi and recovered 3.3 lakh in Indian currency and $2,500 along with other evidence.

The DRI said that some businessmen and colleagues of the airline crew were also on their radar and will be interrogated soon.

Malhotra knew several businessmen and promised to convert their black money into white. Now, we have to work on the leads given by them and more arrests are likely to happen soon, the officer added.

Investigators also said that crew member was well trained in hiding money and used to wrap the currency bundles in aluminum foil, which the scanner at the airport was not able to detect easily.

A Jet Airways spokesperson had confirmed the incident. Based on the investigations and inputs from law enforcement agencies, the airline will take further action, the spokesperson said in a statement on Monday. There was no fresh statement from the airlines on Tuesday.

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The Supreme Courts decision to review Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalises activities against the order of nature, arguably including homosexual sexual activities, has renewed hopes of the Lesbian-Gay-Bi-sexual-Transgender-Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) community.

Decriminalisation of sexual activities under section 377 is what the community has been fighting for. I am made to feel like a criminal because Im gay. Ive always been a centre of jokes because I am open about my sexual orientation. I have participated in all Pride paradea, shows and protests in Delhi-NCR. This decision of SC has validated my struggle, it all makes sense to me now. I am sure things will change and the right to sexuality will win, I am very hopeful, says Dev Singh, 20-year-old student of Delhi University.

Like Singh, other members of the LGBTQ community, too, are optimistic and expecting a fast forward judgment. Mohnish Malhotra, an activist and one of the organisers of the annual queer pride parade, says, It has been 17 years that we have been fighting and struggling for equality and freedom. The apex court has decided to constitute a bench to review the IPC section; it is a positive response. However, speedy judgment is required.

Section 377 criminalises something which is so natural for our community. I have full faith in the jury. I am sure they will give justice to my community which has been living in the margins and in fear. And when they do correct this angrezo ke zamane ka section 377 (which dates back to 1861), I will celebrate and shout long live Supreme Court from the rooftops, till then I would be very discreet with who I come out to, says Swati.

Bollywood film director Onir, who won the National Award for his film I Am, too, has voiced support of the decision. Last year, the Supreme Courts judgment on privacy was a welcoming move and now, the recent statement that people or individuals who exercise their choice should never remain in a state of fear is a great move. Its heartening news and I am hopeful that it will lead to a favourable judgment in the end, says Onir, who is also an LGBTQ activist.

Follow @htTweets for more

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Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal launched the countrys only common mobility card system on Monday, allowing commuters in Delhi to use the same prepaid card to travel on Metro as well as DTC and cluster buses. The initiative has been introduced in 250 buses out of Delhis total fleet of 5,421 and the government plans to extend the facility to all public buses in Delhi by March this year.

Common mobility cards are widely used in cities such as London, Hong Kong and Singapore as it provides an integrated ticketing system for different modes of public transport. In Delhi, the government is hoping that buses will become popular among Metro users with smart cards once they realise they can switch smoothly between the two mobility systems. There are 13 lakh active Metro smart card users in Delhi. And, the ridership of DTC buses has come down to 30 lakh from over 45 lakh in just a span of three years.

A DTC bus conductor gives a demo to @htTweets on how a metro smart card can be used in buses. Only a tap on the machine will automatically deduct the journey fare from the card. The common mobility card service was launched by CM @ArvindKejriwal a while ago @htdelhi pic.twitter.com/5kYsbu0x97  Sweta Goswami (@sweta_goswami) January 8, 2018

Here are five things you should know about the common mobility card:

1. Metro smart card holders will be able to travel cashless on 200 DTC buses and 50 cluster buses for now. Just give your smart card to the conductor when you board a bus. He will swipe it on the device for you. Youll be given a paper ticket, which will have the serial number of your Metro card and the remaining balance in it.

2. As of now, the buses that start from Rohini I, Rajghat and Banda Bahadur Marg depots will have this feature. This means buses plying on routes from Mori Gate to Mayur Vihar Phase III, Jahangirpuri to Anand Vihar and Mukherjee Nagar to Inderpuri will offer this service.

3. Delhi is the first city in India to introduce an e-purse travel system that can perform transactions as low as Rs 5. Dont expect a discount in fare though if you are using the smart card on the bus. Such an incentive is offered only in the Metro network so far. The bus fares will remain unchanged.

4. Did you even notice the ETMs in DTC and cluster buses before? Well, they were already installed there. The transport department only added the Secure Access Modules (SAMs) chips that to these machines to equip them to read the Metro cards. The chips that cost Rs 2,000 per bus were imported from South Korea.

5. If the system becomes popular, the government may consider extending it to Metro feeder buses as well. Hong Kongs Octopus card, Londons Oyster card and Japans Suica card is not only used on buses and the Metro but are also accepted for making payments in retail shops.

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Delhis Kirti Nagar police station  ranked 10th best in the country  is the only one in the Capital with its own website that displays a complete list of all its 135 police personnel and their contact numbers. From the station house officer to the junior-most constable, the website displays the name and details of every cop on its roll.

Senior officers said the aim of the initiative is to make people in the west Delhi police stations jurisdiction area feel that a cop is just a call away.

Kirti Nagar police station had figured in the list of 10 best police stations tweeted by home minister, Rajnath Singh, on Saturday. The survey conducted by Intelligence Bureau through Quality Council of India team identified the police stations after an eight-month exercise. The police stations were evaluated on about 80 parameters involving performance, infrastructure and amenities. The three top police stations in the list were RS Puram Police Station (Coimbatore City), Panjagutta Police Station (Hyderabad) and Gudamba Police Station (Lucknow).

Inspector Anil Sharma, the station in-charge, told HT that he was happy to learn about the news. It is a proud moment for all of us. The idea is not just to increase competitiveness among police stations but also to improve policing, he said.

Senior police officers said that after Sharma took over, he focused on cleanliness of the station premises apart from routine law and order duties. Kirti Nagar police station was also adjudged the best in Delhi for 2016 by a team of senior Delhi police officers.

I credit the team for the recognition. Kirti Nagar was already the best police station in our internal survey. In the past couple of years, the staff has worked to improve all aspects of policing. This includes facilitation of complaint registration, better and welcoming infrastructure and improved conduct dealing with complainants, said DCP (West) Vijay Kumar. Kumar added that the police station was equally alert in preventing crimes and investigating the ones reported. Due to this we have seen a decline in the number of cases registered and more cases being solved, Kumar said.

Last week, Kirti Nagar police station officers started a drive to check tenant verification and booked two landlords for failing to comply. Besides this, a man was booked for encroachment and two burglaries were reported on January 3 and 5.

Apart from nabbing criminals, the station officers have also been using the YUVA programme  a skill development scheme under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana  to help youths in the area. Senior officers said that at least 300 vulnerable youths who were jobless were trained and provided employment. Kirti Nagar station is among the five stations where the YUVA programme was started by Delhi Police.

In a first, a job fair for youths was also organised at the police station. Our beat constables contacted many young men and women who were jobless. We identified those with a clean record and offered to help them find jobs. More than 30 youth were hired by local companies with a verification record by police, said a senior officer.

Another first for this police station is setting up of an alarm system for elderly residents. As elderly residents living alone often fall victim to crime and violence, the local police have assisted in installation of over 200 alarm bells in Kirti Nagar. Many a times old people do not have cell phones or the call doesnt get connected. With these alarm bells in place now, all that they have to do in case of an emergency is to press the switch and alert their neighbour who will in turn inform us. Help at Kirti Nagar is just a call away, a senior officer said.

Two years ago, the dump yard inside the station premises was cleared to make a badminton court for the personnel. A library was also started with a collection of books on criminal justice. Our idea was to make it friendly not just for residents but also for police personnel. Any cop should want to work here and give it his or her best, an officer said.

Residents can also download all forms and register crimes online at the Kirti Nagar police stations website that is also linked to the parent Delhi police site. Forms such as servant, tenant or police verification can be easily filled and submitted on the website. People can also file missing person reports, find helpline numbers, of report stolen vehicles through the website.
India and Pakistan have held no substantive talks for close to a decade even as their relations have been buffeted by one storm after another, including a string of cross-border terror attacks that put paid to efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his former Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif to restore a semblance of normalcy to ties. The affair of Kulbhushan Jadhav, sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for alleged involvement in espionage, has the potential to add to the chill that currently characterises relations, especially if there is any precipitate action by Islamabad.

Experts and diplomats on both sides have suggested several times that efforts at a breakthrough will have a greater chance of success if New Delhi and Islamabad make a conscious effort to keep dialogue separate from domestic politics. But Pakistani politicians will soon begin preparing prepare for a crucial vote, one that is expected to see Sharifs PML-N party emerge victorious but considerably weaker than in the 2013 election. In such circumstances, hardly any Pakistani politician is likely to make a public pitch for better relations with India. It remains to be seen whether Shehbaz Sharif, being projected as the PML-Ns prime ministerial candidate and who is known to be closer to the military than Nawaz Sharif, will be as committed as his elder brother to the peace process. Soon after the Pakistani polls, expected by June, Indian politicians will begin preparing for next years general election, thereby considerably narrowing the window of opportunity for any talks.

There are several other factors that influence any dialogue or any effort to put relations on an even keel, and which have not been adequately addressed. For decades, India has been loath to hold any kind of talks with the Pakistani military establishment, which has its imprint all over the countrys security and foreign policies. The civilian set-up in Pakistan remains weak despite two successful elections while the military has moved from coups to quietly pulling the levers from the background, sometimes through political proxies and sometimes in concert with the increasingly powerful judiciary. India has never come to grips with this conundrum.

The Indian government has also had a perplexing approach towards Pakistan  talking tough in public while maintaining secret contacts, the latest being the meeting of National Security Advisers in Thailand. Such a course may satisfy its domestic constituency but could make any attempt at detente harder to sell.

Then there are the jihadi groups in Pakistan that remain fully capable to carry out another Mumbai-like attack, the consequences of which would be devastating. Things could get a lot worse before they get better.
Even as Hollywood engages in singing self-congratulatory odes to each other for wearing black at the 2018 Golden Globes, one of the worlds most glamorous award functions, the gesture feels empty. The women dressed in black at the event are some of the richest and most powerful women in the world but it has taken a long and painful campaign by many women with comparatively little power to shake them out of their silence.

The #MeToo campaign that became a cascade in 2017 after film producer Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault and harassment was initiated in 2006 by Tarana Burke as a grassroots campaign of empowerment for women of colour who had been sexually assaulted. The campaign gained speed in October 2017 when actor Alyssa Milano encouraged women to tweet their experiences with the tag #MeToo after a New York Times investigation revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein. The campaign quickly spread across countries, languages, and industries. Academia, music, politics, science  women were speaking out everywhere, across social media, accusing assaulters and naming names.

The courage of the whistleblowers is as commendable as the silence of the powerful is shameful. It has taken the pain and courage of many women who have sacrificed much in their personal lives and professional careers for the scandal to finally break. For the glamorous set to now jump on board the #MeToo bandwagon without ever having used their power and authority to call out the assaulters and harassers while they could have is, to put it mildly, hypocritical. Wearing black to award functions is one thing. Making systemic change happen in workplace attitudes, eliminating gender pay gaps, and creating an environment in which the shame of sexual abuse and assault no longer falls on the victim, they might find, is quite another.
Think Italian fashion and you are likely to think of chic central, Milan. But Made in Italy actually has its roots in Florence, where the hotly anticipated Pitti Uomo trade fair opens this week. The most famous men here may be naked  from Michelangelos David to the sea-god Neptune  but every year, the Tuscan city becomes the capital of mens fashion, putting on four heady days of ready-to-wear shows.

The event, which kicks off on Tuesday, is a must for buyers, journalists and fashionistas  drawing some 36,000 people last year  who gather to gawp, gossip and go mad over the latest trends at the citys imposing Fortezza da Basso fortress.

Some 1,200 brands are expected to present their Autumn-Winter collections at the 93rd edition under headliner Karl Lagerfeld, with old hands like Paul&Shark alongside newcomers such as M1992 by Italian DJ Dorian Stefano Tarantini. It was Tuscan businessman Giovanni Battista Giorgini who organised the first Italian fashion show, hosting a gathering with US and Canadian buyers, journalists and distributors at his home in 1951  largely in a challenge to French fashion.

Antico Setificio Fiorentino is a silk factory founded in 1786. (Instagram/Antico Setificio Fiorentino)

Then relatively unknown labels such as Simonetta, Pucci, Fontana and Cuppucci went down a storm and Giorgini replicated the shows the following year in a grand hotel, before they became a fixed feature at the majestic Pitti Palace. It was under the Pittis glass chandeliers that the biggest houses  Gucci, Schiaparelli, Ferragamo  showed off their creations until the 1980s, making Made in Italy a byword for the highest quality and most sought-after fashion.

Florences relationship with fashion is rooted in its economic, political and cultural history, dominated by powerful craft guilds, says Angelo Cavicchi, president of the Pitti Discovery Foundation and the Florence Center for Italian Fashion.

Antico Setificio Fiorentino produces jacquard weaves and damasks by hand on looms that once belonged to the citys noblest families. (Instagram/Antico Setificio Fiorentino)

Preserving ancient skills

From the 12th to the 17th century, the city boasted 21 such bodies protecting the interests of the rich and influential in the art and crafts world, the most powerful of which were known as the Arti Maggiori. The elite Arte di Calimala, the guild of cloth finishers and foreign cloth merchants, was among them. It imported raw fabrics before transforming them into refined materials and exporting them in a trade that drove the citys economy.

The Calimala competed with other guilds  like the wool or silk merchants  over who could finance the greatest architectural and artistic works in the city, from the bronze doors of the Baptistery to the Cathedrals famed dome. It was comparable to the key support private companies, including many fashion houses, bring today to cultural projects, says Saverio Pacchioni, a member of the Associazione Partners Palazzo Strozzi, which persuades firms to promote the arts in Florence.

The modern-day city manages to defend its position as a fashion leader by preserving local craftmanship and working in partnership with its close neighbour Prato, the countrys leader in supplying fabrics to the ready-to-wear industry.

Florence boasts historical gems such as the Antico Setificio Fiorentino, a silk factory founded in 1786 which still produces jacquard weaves and damasks by hand on looms that once belonged to the citys noblest families. And the citys traditional skills are protected from the march of time thanks to fashion schools like Polimoda, which ranks among the top 10 such institutes in the world.

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As the government continues to caution people against tobacco and e-cigarettes, a study by the North East Hills University (NEHU) has stated that Electronics Nicotine Delivery System (ENDS) or vaping has minimum health and safety concerns compared to the high risk associated with conventional cigarettes. However, previous studies had suggested that e-cigarettes could double risk of tobacco addiction among teens.

According to the study, researchers, who undertook an evidence-based audit of published scientific literature on the issue, came to the same conclusion in their paper titled Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) as a substitute for conventional cigarettes.

Our systematic meta-analysis of published literature compares the health and safety aspects of vaping using ENDS with smoking conventional cigarettes. We find that ENDS have minimum health and safety concerns compared to the high risks associated with conventional cigarettes, said the study.

According to the recently published study, people who have been wanting to quit cigarettes can also switch to ENDS, which is gradually much less harmful. A similar study by University of Catania in Italy revealed no evidence of lung injury amongst even the heaviest e-cigarette users, in the form of physiological, clinical or inflammatory measures. The study stated that no changes were observed in the blood pressure or heart rate of young e-cigarette users.

There was no evidence of health concerns associated with long-term use of e-cigarettes in relatively young users who did not smoke tobacco, said Riccardo Polosa, Director at the University of Catania. For the research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the team conducted a three-and-a-half-year-long comparative study on a group of daily e-cigarette users aged between 23 and 35 years, and another group of young adults who have never smoked.

The researchers examined health factors like blood pressure, heart rate, body weight, lung function, respiratory symptoms, exhaled breath nitric oxide (eNO), exhaled carbon monoxide (eCO) and high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) of the lungs in both groups. No pathological findings could be identified on HRCT of the lungs and no respiratory symptoms were consistently reported in the e-cigarette users, Polosa added.

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The 75th Golden Globes kicked off Hollywoods awards season at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, California early Monday morning with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird, Big Little Lies and The Handmaids Tale taking home the major film and TV awards, and highlighting the important year it has been for women in the industry. Each of these films and shows feature women in prominent roles, and together with Oprahs stirring speech and the Times Up protest which saw attendees dressed in all-black, the overarching theme of this years show was the empowerment of women.

Here the updates from the show:

9:41 IST: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ends a remarkable run, wins the Best Picture - Drama award.

9:32 am IST: Frances McDormands performance in Martin McDonaghs Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was honoured with the Best Actress - Drama Golden Globe. The film previously picked up awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Sam Rockwell).

9:23 am IST: Gary Oldman wins the Best Actor - Drama for his performance as Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour. It was a tough race, one that also saw Daniel Day Lewis, Timothee Chalamet, Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in contention. The actor quoted Churchill, saying he was surrounded by the very best people in the industry, while working on the film.

A massive congratulations to Gary Oldman for being awarded the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama award for his role in @DarkestHour! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/YyPfI7iBNl  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

9:06 am IST: Saoirse Ronan wins the Best Actress Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for her performance in the coming-of-age comedy drama, Lady Bird, which was immediately announced as the winner of the Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. Greta Gerwigs directorial debut beat out the like of The Disaster Artist, Get Out, The Greatest Showman and I, Tonya.

A round of applause for Saoirse Ronan taking home the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for her role in @LadyBirdMovie! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/fXm4pygZ41  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

9 am IST: HBOs Big Little Lies continues its dominance in the TV category. The show took home the Best Limited Series or TV Movie award. It follows a group of mothers in Northern California who each have their own secrets threatening them and their families. The show won the Emmy Award last year for best limited series and will return for a second season on HBO. The show dominated the Globes in the limited series category on Sunday, with wins for Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgard.

Reese Witherspoon, who starred in and produced the series, said of women who have been abused, We see you, we hear you, and we will tell your stories.

8:50 am IST: Guillermo del Toro wins the Best Director award for his Cold War fantasy, The Shape of Water. The film stars Sally Hawkins as a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with an amphibious creature kept confined in a government lab. The film has become of the front-runners for best picture at Marchs Academy Awards. Del Toros acceptance speech, which was interrupted by the orchestra at one point, was an ode to his love affair with monsters.

He thanked the films cast, before continuing: My monsters thank you.

8:40 am IST: Oprah accepted the Cecil B DeMille Award at Sundays Globes ceremony and received a lengthy standing ovation, which she tried to calm down.

She spoke about the feelings she had as a young girl watching Sidney Poitier win the best actor Academy Award in 1964. She likened the pride she felt watching Poitier, the first black man to win the best actor Oscar, to the impact she hoped she could have on young women.

Winfrey also addressed the sexual misconduct scandal roiling Hollywood and beyond, telling those watching speaking your truth is the most powerful tool you all have.

Reese Witherspoon introduced Winfrey and described their friendship, forged over long sessions in a makeup trailer while filming A Wrinkle in Time. Witherspoon said sitting in the room with Oprah was like taking the best business classes, and her hugs could end wars.

Watch Oprahs speech here

"I want all of the girls watching here now to know, that a new day is on the horizon." @Oprah accepts the 2018 Cecil B. de Mille award. #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/hbquC1GBjm  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

8:25 am IST: Amazons The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, about a 50s woman to decides to pursue a career in stand-up comedy, wins Best TV Series - Comedy. Star Rachel Brosnahan had already picked up her acting Globe. Aziz Ansari won the Best Actor in a TV Comedy for the second season of Netflixs Master of None.

And the winner of Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy at the #GoldenGlobes is... @azizansari for @MasterofNone! pic.twitter.com/UgwpCH45yd  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

8:15 am IST: Diane Krugers In the Fade wins Best Foreign Language film and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri writer-director, Martin McDonagh wins for Best Original Screenplay. Ewan McGregor took home the Best Actor in a Limited Series Globe for his dual performance in the third season of Fargo.

8 am IST: Allison Janneys performance as Tonya Hardings tough-as-nails mother in the dark comedy biopic I, Tonya wins her the Best Supporting Actress - Musical or Comedy award.

.@AllisonBJanney is awarded Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture for her outstanding work in @ITonyaMovie. Yay!  pic.twitter.com/tgg72x8p30  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

7:55 am IST: Disney/Pixars Coco wins Best Animated Feature. The film is considered a leading contender for an Academy Award for best animated feature. It tells the story of a Mexican boy who dreams of being a musician despite his familys wishes and falls into the realm of the dead. Coco has drawn widespread praise for the culturally authentic way it presents Mexicos Day of the Dead culture.

The winner of Best Motion Picture - Animated goes to the one-and-only @pixarcoco! A well deserved honor, congrats! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/zxaec9dxEp  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

7:40 am IST: James Franco wins for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his performance as Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, which he also directed. The film is based on the making of The Room, a film that is considered by many to be the worst ever made. Franco opened his speech by inviting Wiseau up on stage and giving him a hug and reading a passage he said Wiseau wrote 19 years ago.

Oh, hai! It took a while, but @TommyWiseau just made it on the stage at the #GoldenGlobes as James Franco accepts his award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. pic.twitter.com/9ticZ4cHVb  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

Laura Dern picked up the third acting award for Big Little Lies after Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgards wins.

7:30 am IST: On to the music categories now, and Alexandre Desplat wins for his score for Guillermo del Toros fantasy, The Shape of Water and Hugh Jackmans The Greatest Showman picks up the award for Best Original Song.

7:25 am IST: Alexander Skarsgard wins Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series or TV Movie for Big Little Lies. Skarsgard plays an abusive husband in the HBO show. His onscreen wife Nicole Kidman also won a Golden Globe.

The #GoldenGlobes award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a TV Series or TV Movie goes to Alexander Skarsgard for 'Big Little Lies'! Congratulations.  pic.twitter.com/s92Yoyu3pV  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

7:15 am IST: Hulus The Handmaids Tale wins Best TV Series - Drama, repeating its Emmy win from earlier. The show is based on Margaret Atwoods best-selling novel of the same name.It is the series second win of the evening. Elisabeth Moss won the best actress in a television drama earlier in the ceremony.

Sterling K Brown wins Best Actor in a TV Drama for This is Us.

We're so excited that @HandmaidsOnHulu was awarded Best TV Series - Drama tonight! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/9TtHKBSVnC  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

7 am IST: Elisabeth Moss wins Best Actress in a TV Drama for her performance in The Handmaids Tale. Moss plays one of the few fertile women left in a world ruled by a totalitarian regime where women are considered property. She dedicated her award to Atwood, reading some of the authors words and saying that women are now writing the stories ourselves.

Rachel Brosnahan won the Best Actress in a TV Comedy Globe for her performance in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Brosnahan plays a 1950s mom who decides to pursue a stand-up comedy career. The show is also nominated for best comedy series at the awards.

Elisabeth Moss is awarded with Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama for her role in @HandmaidsOnHulu! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/36BJuO1pp2  Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 8, 2018

6:45 am IST: Nicole Kidman wins the first award of the evening - Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series for her performance in HBOs Big Little Lies.

She referenced her abused character in her acceptance speech, urging others to keep the conversation about abuse and the treatment of women alive.

The actor also thanked her Big Little Lies co-stars, saying she was sharing the honour with fellow nominees Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Reese Witherspoon.

Sam Rockwell wins Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Picture for his performance as a racist cop in Martin McDonaghs Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

6:32 am IST:Host Seth Meyers kicks things off amid a sea of black. Almost everyone in the audience was dressed in black in protest of the ongoing sexual harassment scandal and as part of the Times Up movement, which has over a thousand industry personalities endorsement. Ladies and remaining gentlemen... Meyers opened his monologue. Its 2018 and marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment isnt, he said. Addressing Weinstein directly, Meyers said that the disgraced producer would return to the Globes in 20 years when he would become the first person to be booed at the In Memoriam.

Director Guillermo del Toros Cold War fantasy The Shape of Water leads the race with seven nominations, while HBOs Big Little Lies scored six nods in the television category. Del Toro won the Best Director award and Big Little Lies dominated the TV category with three acting Globes and the Best Limited Series honour.

Ahead of the show, all eyes were also on Christopher Nolans World War II epic, Dunkirk, Steven Spielbergs timely tribute to journalism, The Post, Jordan Peeles runaway horror success Get Out, and a slew of critically acclaimed indies such as the romance, Call Me By Your Name, coming of age film, Lady Bird, the Orlando-set drama, The Florida Project and the dark comedy, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

The event, hosted by Seth Meyers, is the first major Hollywood gathering since the Harvey Weinstein scandal brought about an industry-wide cleanse.

Read our predictions here

Check out pictures from the red carpet event here

Catch the complete list of nominations here

(With agency inputs)

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Gary Oldman starrer Darkest Hour will release in Indian theatres on January 19. Oldman today won his maiden Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama for his portrayal of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Joe Wright-directed film.

After his win, Oldman said, There are certain figures that are indispensable. And really, looking at Churchill more specifically and closely than just being a figure in British history... really diving into it, our world order weve sort of enjoyed over the past 70 years is arguably down to one man. As I said out there, Im proud of the movie because it shows and illustrates the power of words and actions  that words and actions can literally change the world. And the courage (Churchill) had... he took on this racist thug, this dictator, it showed extraordinary courage. I look at people like Washington and Lincoln, thats who I believe you could compare him to.

Darkest Hour, the film focuses on the early days of World War II. With the fall of France imminent, Britain faces its darkest hour as the threat of invasion looms. As the seemingly unstoppable Nazi forces advance, and with the Allied army cornered on the beaches of Dunkirk, the fate of Western Europe hangs on the leadership of the newly-appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The film also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup and Ben Mendelsohn.
Number of Oscars won do not decide talent or creativity, Sir Charles Chaplin once said. Veteran Hollywood actor Meryl Streep has received maximum Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Her polished performance in The Post helped her to establish this. Iconic performers ruled Hollywood and international cinema prior to Meryl Streep. Vivian Leigh, Katherine Hepburn and Sophia Loren are only a few. Meryl Streep herself stated, It is very difficult to match the inimitable Katherine Hepburn.. Here is a comparative study of three cult actresses, along with Meryl Streep, with an effort to assess if she is the greatest Hollywood actress of all time.

Greta Garbo

A scene from the film 'As You Desire Me', starring Greta Garbo (1905 - 1990) and Melvyn Douglas (Getty Images)

No other actress had the charisma Greta Garbo did. She built around her a mystic aura which made her legion. Though not a classic actress, Greta Garbo was brilliant in author-backed characters, such as Mata Hari and Anna Karenina. Her low-pitched dialogue delivery accompanied with calculated body language made her a demigod to her countless fans. Greta Garbo was never a conventional method actress. She was spontaneous. Her love scenes were serene. She quit at a time no one thought she would.

Ingrid Bergman

A still from Casablanca (1942), in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman play lovers separated by war and destiny.

Initially she was termed a Swedish cow because of her height. The ravishing beauty mingled intelligence with fluidity to become an all-time great. Gregory Peck, Humphrey Boggart and Omar Shariff marvelled at her ability to react with multiple expressions. When she cried, Oh Jesus being burnt alive in Joan of Arc, Ingrid Bergman shed real tears. As Anastasia, she proved a perfect foil to the confident Yul Bryner. In Wild Stomboli, Ingrid Bergman scaled peaks of histrionics inspiring Ingmar Bergman to term her an authority of method acting.

Meryl Streep

ROME, ITALY - OCTOBER 20: Meryl Streep attends a party honouring Meryl Streep on October 20, 2016 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images) (Getty Images)

As she stood smiling stark naked in a night sequence of Still of The Night, Meryl Streep became the most desirable female for millions of male admires. Blessed with talent, confidence and beauty, she has transcended barriers of acting. No other contemporary or junior has experimented with such a variety of characters like Meryl Streep. Her intensity in Sophies Choice is peerless. As Iron Lady, Meryl Streep is faultless. In Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep combines solid substance with style superbly. With maximum acting accolades, she is great. That she is the best is debatable as her performances are yet to touch souls as much as Ingrid Bergman or Sophia Loren could. Meryl Streep seems conscious in front of a movie camera, sometimes. Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn or Sophia Loren never bothered about camera angles and performed with an ideal combination of their heads and hearts.

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Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling emotional and excited as he prepares for his homecoming during the four day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week.

Moshe, 11, was two when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists.

The attack on the Nariman House and other locations like the Taj Hotel left 166 people dead.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents bodies, was saved in a daring move by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on January 15. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories, an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshes grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5 in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House, Moshe had told the Indian Prime Minister.

Modi had responded by saying, Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere.

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on January 14.

Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug, Rosenberg said adding, he is hoping to meet the Indian Prime Minister again during his India trip.

He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully PM Modi at his home in Mumbai, the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the site seeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment, Rosenberg noted.

Moshes parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

It is heart warming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India havent forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one, Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said that the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like homecoming for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshes bar mitzvah in Mumbai. Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued ten year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honourary citizenship by the Israeli government.
Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh have been critical of the TDP-led government for failing to build anything other than the Interim Government Complex (IGC) in the last three years in the new capital Amaravati.

The IGC contains five blocks of the Secretariat and one of the Legislature.

But the government has submitted utilisation certificates (UCs) to the Centre, which granted Rs 1,500 crore, stating the money was spent on building structures as mentioned, according to a bureaucrat.

The Raj Bhavan and the High Court are yet to be built as also the permanent Secretariat and the Legislature Complex though 43 months have elapsed since APs bifurcation.

Though the Centre released funds, the state government grossly failed in developing even basic infrastructure in the capital, Pradesh Congress Committee president and former minister N Raghuveera Reddy said.

The Centre granted a sum of Rs 1,500 crore during the financial years from 2014 to 2017 to Andhra for building the Raj Bhavan, the HC, Secretariat and the Legislature buildings and also creating such other essential infrastructure.

Asked on what structures was this money spent, the AP Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) Commissioner Cherukuri Sreedhar said, As it was mentioned.

This implied the grant was utilised for building the Raj Bhavan and other structures specified by the Government of India (GoI).

While releasing the first instalment of the grant in terms of the relevant provision of AP Reorganisation Act, 2014 the Centre specified that Rs 500 crore was for the Raj Bhavan and the Assembly building.

In 2015-16, it released Rs 350 crore for construction of the new capital city and another Rs 200 crore for creation of essential urban infrastructure, including the Raj Bhavan, the HC, the Secretariat and the legislature complex.

Further, Rs 450 crore was released in 2016-17 for creation of essential urban infrastructure.

When pointed out that no such structures exist, except the IGC, Sreedhar said, They are all structures which are under development. Some are under design stage, some under execution stage, some are completed, some are being developed. We have details.

Asked how UCs were submitted when construction of these structures (Raj Bhavan and HC among others) has not even started, the Commissioner maintained, You say they are not yet started, I am saying they are already started.

You are seeing only whats on the ground. There are a lot of preparatory activities for which we have spent the money.

Union Minister of State for Finance P Radhakrishnan told the Rajya Sabha the AP government furnished utilisation certificates for an expenditure of Rs 1,583 crore to NITI Aayog.

Radhakrishnan gave a written reply to a questioned raised by YSR Congress member V Vijayasai Reddy last week.

In its latest status report on the Amaravati project, the CRDA said it has forwarded detailed project reports of government buildings for disbursement of the GoI grant.

The GoI has already released an amount of Rs 1,500 crore to the state government and an additional Rs 1,000 crore is expected to be released, the status report added.

The report said Rs 6,705 crore is required to build the government complex (including the Secretariat, HC and Legislature, among others) over the next three years.

With the Central grant already spent on other purposes, the AP government is now left with no other option but to borrow heavily from outside sources, officials said.

Andhra Pradesh has time till 2024 to build its capital before the current joint capital, Hyderabad, is transferred to Telangana.
Convicts undergoing life imprisonment at the Puzhal Central Prison here are giving a fresh lease of life to demonetised currency, converting the shredded notes into customised stationery.

A senior official said the stationery is being used in state government departments and their agencies.

Everyday, a specially-trained team of about 25-30 convicts undergoing life imprisonment at the Puzhal Central Prison here make stationery called file-pads, at the niche hand-made stationery making unit.

While the Reserve Bank of India has offered 70 tons of shredded notes to us, Puzhal jail officials have so far taken delivery of nine tons...We will bring the rest of it in a phased manner, TN Prison Department, DIG (in charge), A Murugesan told PTI.

So far about 1.5 tons of banned currency has been used to make the file-pads, he said.

Using the demonetised currency about 1,000 file-pads are made everyday at Puzhal.

Shredded notes are first made into pulp, then solidified by pouring it into a die-mould and eventually the notes are made hard pads, all in a manual process.

Besides using the banned notes, file-pads are also made using specially procured hard pads from Khadi, the official said.

Used in government offices, a file pad is a type of semi-corrugated, hard pad with corners embellished with red coloured cloth material.

Its cover tag has Urgent and Ordinary markings, typical of the stationery used in government office.

While the convicts get 25 days of file pad making work in a month, they get wages ranging between Rs 160 to Rs 200 (for eight hours a day) depending upon whether they are skilled, semi-skilled or skilled.

There is a proposal to upgrade the hand-made stationery making unit at Puzhal into a semi-automated facility which will enhance the productivity, the official said.

Though six other jails in Tamil Nadu including Vellore, Salem and Madurai make such file-pads, Puzhal is the only centre to make such stationery out of demonetised currency.

Approximately 1.5 lakh file-pads are produced every month in Tamil Nadu.

Central jails in the state specialise in other areas of production apart from stationery-making by using convicts as its labour force.

While Puzhal has a shoe polish making unit, Vellore leads in leather-based accessories such as belts and Tiruchirappalli has a soap bar making unit while Cuddalore makes caps, he said.
A Bihar man, who was allegedly abducted and forcibly married to a woman against his will in December last year, on Monday moved a court seeking stringent actions against the culprits.

Binod Kumar, a junior engineer at Jharkhands Bokaro Steel Plant, has alleged he was abducted by unidentified masked men on gunpoint from Mokama, around 80km east of Patna, where had gone to meet his friend.

Kumar said he was driven to an isolated place in Gopekita village near the state capital Patna and forcibly made to tie the knot with a woman, Kundan Kumari, on December 3 last year.

He managed to record the incident on camera and circulated the video, which has gone viral on social media, to his friends and family. The incident eventually came to the notice of the police, who rescued him a day after the forcible wedding.

Pakadua vivah or forcible wedding was a common practice in southeast Bihar but saw a decline after government initiatives and police tightening its grip on people abducting eligible bachelors for marriages to avoid paying dowry.

Kumar has alleged in his petition to the additional chief judicial magistrate (ACJM) in Barh that his abduction and the wedding was planned and executed by Surendra Yadav, the elder brother of the woman he was forcibly married to.

He said he has requested the court to initiate criminal proceedings against the culprits and order stringent actions so that such evil and heinous practice does not reoccur.

Kumars elder brother, Awadesh Kumar, said the family has also approached the National Human Rights Commission and other bodies in Delhi after they failed to get justice from Patna Police.

The police had taken its own sweet time to rescue my brother when he was in captivity. Perhaps, they were influenced by the culprits, Awadesh, an employee with the Indian Overseas Bank in Patna, said.

The station house officer of Pandarak police station, Diwakar Vishwakarma, declined his allegations. He said they promptly rescued Kumar and handed him into the safe custody of his relatives as soon as they got the information about his abduction. He said Kumars friend was also present when he was rescued.

Yadav, the womans elder brother, countered Kumars allegation as baseless. He said both families know each other for over a decade and the wedding was being planned since last year when Kumars father Suryug Rai suddenly fell ill.

He said he had paid for Rais treatment and his sisters wedding was finalised with Kumar when his father was in the hospital. He alleged that after his father died, Kumar turned his back and the family started demanding dowry.

Kumar eventually agreed to marry his sister on December 3 after a lot of coaxing, he said.

I wonder why they are creating a fuss after the marriage and defaming my sister by making a fudged video of the wedding viral, Yadav said, adding, his sister has also moved the National Commission for Women (NCW) for justice.

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Five employees sleeping inside a bar and restaurant in the busy and congested Kalasipalyam area of Karnatakas Bengaluru were killed in a fire that broke early on Monday, officials said.

Police said the fire started at the Kailash Bar and Restaurant located in the Kumbara Sangha Hostel building in the heart of the city at around 2.30am and three fire engines were pressed into service after they received a complaint.

Fire brigade personnel retrieved the charred bodies of the victims after dousing the fire by 4am. The bodies were sent to the state-run Victoria Hospital for an autopsy.

The dead have been identified as Swami (23), Prasad (20), Mahesh (35), all from Tumakuru; Manjunath (45), who hails from Hassan; and Keerthi (24), a native of Mandya.

The cause of the fire is unknown, Bengalurus deputy commissioner of police (West) MN Anucheth said. Short circuit is suspected to have sparked it, he added.

New agency IANS reported that fire and smoke were seen emanating from the bar on the ground floor of the building in the crowded vegetable market area. It cited witnesses as saying the alcohol bottles and other inflammable items stored in the premised fuelled the fire and gutted it.

We have registered a case of criminal negligence amounting to culpable homicide against bar owner RV Dayashankar, who obtained the trade and liquor licences to run it, Anucheth was quoted as saying by IANS.

Bengaluru mayor Sampath Raj, who inspected the burnt bar, told reporters that he had ordered an inquiry to find out why the victims were sleeping in the premises after downing the shutters after 1am.

The mayor said it was a complete violation of rules to allow the workers to reside on the premises.

In such cases, permission has to be sought from the labour department, which was not done, he said.

We are trying to trace the owner because he has flouted multiple rules, including a lack of fire safety measures. We will definitely bring him to book, Raj said.

A compensation of Rs 5 lakh has been decided for the families of the deceased, he added.

Raj said since a fire broke out in a restaurant in Mumbai a crackdown on pubs, bars and restaurants that flouted fire safety laws had been undertaken. He was referring to the fire at a restaurant that sparked a deadly blaze in Mumbais Kamala Mills area, killing 14 people on December 29 last year.

So far, we have issued notices to around 150 establishments, he said.

The Karnataka government allowed pubs, bars, restaurants and eateries in the cosmopolitan city to remain open till 1am almost a year ago to cater to the thousands of tourists and employees of software firms and call or data centres, which operate 24x7 through the year.

Mohammad Abrar, who owns a tea stall nearby, said the Kumbara Sangha Hostel is used by men working in the surrounding shops in the market.

All those who died were regular customers of mine, Abrar said.

According to him, the labourers had worked out a deal with the owner to live inside the Kailash Bar and Restaurant.

(With agency inputs)

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Former Nepalese king Gyanendra Shah on Monday paid a courtesy call on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who has long-standing ties with the erstwhile royal family, with aides describing it as a personal meeting.

Adityanath is also head priest of Gorakhpurs Gorakhnath Mutt, which is revered by the former royals of Hindu-majority Nepal. The Nath sect to which Adityanath belongs has a huge following in Nepal.

The two have known each other for decades and it was a personal meeting between them. The visiting dignitary is on a private visit to Lucknow, Awanish Awasthi, UPs principal secretary (information), told HT.

The chief ministers office tweeted a photo of the meeting during which Adityanath is believed to have invited Gyanendra to visit the Kumbh Mela to be held in Allahabad in 2019. Adityanath presented a logo of the mela and gifted the former king a white shawl, believed to destroy all types of pain and agony, according to Hindu mythology.

Gyanendra, accompanied by his wife Komal and daughter Prerana, is staying at a hotel in Lucknow and it could not be ascertained if he would visit Gorakhpur on the occasion of Makar Sankranti on January 14.

Former Nepalese king Birendra, who was assassinated in 2001, regularly visited the Gorakhnath Mutt during the Makar Sankranti festival. In 1992, Birendra drove from Kathmandu to the Gorakhpur mutt.

King Gyanendra had organised a Virat Hindu Mahasammelan a few years back in Nepal and had specially invited Adityanath. The mutt is located in an area on the India-Nepal border and Adityanath commands great respect among the erstwhile Nepalese royals, who as Gorkhas trace their origins to Guru Gorakshnath, who founded the Nath monastic order in the Himalayan region, an official said.

As Gorakhpur MP, Adityanath made occasional visits to Nepal, during which he spoke about the restoration of the countrys status as a Hindu kingdom. Gyanendra was Nepals last king. He stepped down in 2008 after parties voted to abolish monarchy.
Home minister Rajnath Singh has asked for the creation of a dedicated cell to monitor online radicalisation, warning the security establishment that do-it-yourself (DIY) and lone-wolf attacks were among the greatest threats to communal harmony, a ministry official said on Sunday.

Singh, who was addressing an annual three-day conference of the countrys top police officials at Madhya Pradeshs Tekanpur, cited lone-wolf attacks that hit France, Germany and the UK last year as examples of new forms of terror.

The minister spoke on Saturday about mowing down civilians and stabbings that have been witnessed across the world. In India, such acts can take a deadlier dimension, the official said.

Taking Singhs suggestion forward, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on Sunday called for a special unit that would collect data and share information on a real-time basis with central security agencies and state police, an official at the conference said.

The IB made two presentations on counter radicalisation and integrated approach, stressing the need for a national counter-terrorism strategy with a special focus on online propaganda by terror organisations.

The countrys domestic intelligence agency also asked the director-generals of police to study radicalisation patterns in their respective states. The idea is to create a better understanding of radicalisation and emerging patterns in international terrorism, the MHA official said.

Security experts said a substantiated distinction between a DIY attacker and lone wolf had not been formulated. But a DIY attacker may have a handler, which is typically not the case with a lone-wolf assailant. Both have been known to use knives, machetes and high-speed vehicles  like in Nice, Berlin and London.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on Monday expected to address the meeting, which is being attended by state DGPs and inspector-generals of police from all central police forces.

On Sunday, Modi held day-long deliberations with the countrys top security brass. Had focused discussions with groups of officers on specific areas of policing and security, he tweeted, adding that there were insightful presentations and fruitful discussions on aspects relating to our security apparatus.

Officials privy to the closed-door meeting said that the prime minister stressed the need for further tightening countrys security apparatus, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast and the Naxal-affected areas, PTI reported.

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Indias envoy to China Gautam Bambawale on Monday held talks with Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) secretary general Rashid Alimov and discussed measures for strengthening multi-faceted interaction in the China-led regional security grouping.

The Indian ambassador met Alimov and held talks on Indias participation as a member of the SCO and cooperation with its other member countries.

Both sides discussed further development and strengthening of multifaceted interaction in the SCO framework, said a statement by the SCO.

The next SCO Summit will be held in coastal city of Qingdao in East Chinas Shandong province. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend the summit.

The SCO, headquartered in Beijing, was founded in 2001.

Comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India and Pakistan, the SCO aims at military cooperation between the member states and involves intelligence sharing, counter-terrorism operations in Central Asia and joint work against cyber terrorism.

India and Pakistan were admitted last year into the organisation in which China plays an influential role.

Officials say both India and China look to the SCO as a major platform for improving the bilateral ties bogged down by host of differences and standoff at the Dokalam last year.
In his first address to NRIs outside India after taking over as Congress president, Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused the government of dividing people on the basis of caste and religion, alleging it was converting the anger of jobless youth into hatred among communities.

Gandhi also assured the NRI community here that he would give a new shining Congress party in the next six months, hinting that there will be dramatic changes in the organisation, in which the people will believe in and trust.

Noting that there was a serious problem in the country, he urged NRIs help solve the problem and be a part of this restructuring.

He also exuded confidence that the Congress will defeat the BJP in 2019 as it had the strength and capability to do so, while noting that the saffron party merely scraped through in recent elections in Gujarat, which is their fortress.

Addressing NRIs at the meeting of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), the Congress president gave his vision for the country saying his top three priorities would be to create jobs, good health infrastructure and an education system.

India today is free, but once again it is under threat. There are two clear threats that face our country today. Our government has failed to create jobs for the people.

Instead of uniting people of all religions together, the government is busy creating the anger due to lack of jobs into hatred between communities, he said.

There is a serious problem in the country and you can solve this problem. I have come here to build that bridge, he told the gathering, while seeking their support in helping change India.

Gandhi claimed that the governments failure to create jobs is resulting in tremendous unrest in India and this anger is visible in the streets and is rising with each passing day.

Instead of removing poverty and creating jobs, what we see instead is a rise in the forces of hate and division, he said.

The Congress chief, who received applause from NRIs who had come from various parts of the Middle East as well as other countries, said he has not come to tell them anything but, Ive come here to ask for your help. We need you to fight these forces of anger and hatred.

Noting that Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar were also NRIs, he said Our ancestors needed you in 1947 to protect the idea of India and I have come to seek your help to transform India now.

Gandhi is here as a state guest of Bahrain.

He said that Indian politics is quite a strange experience and noted that signalling by politicians in the country is wrong that leads to incidents of hate and violence against people.

He said when such hate incidents take place, the government is silent on them and that should not happen.

Today the problem is that the signalling is wrong. There is violence against somebody, there is silence. There should not be silence. The government of India should make its position clear. We cannot imagine an India that does not belong to all of us, he said.
The opposition Congress on Sunday condemned West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjees recent remarks on updating National Register of Citizens (NRC), saying it was unwanted, immature and not based on facts.

Banerjee had on Wednesday accused the BJP-led central government of hatching a conspiracy to drive out Bengalis from Assam by excluding their names from the first draft of the NRC.

We do not know why Mamate Banerjee made that statement. Congress do not support it and we condemn it. It is unwanted, immature and was not based on facts, Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president Ripun Bora said at a press meet here.

Till the final list of NRC is published, nobody should make such statements, he added.

Such statements only provoke people, but do not help anyone. NRC is for genuine Indian citizens. Where is the question of Bengali or Bihari? How can someone throw Bengalis out of Assam? I think, she (Banerjee) was not properly briefed, Bora said.

He said that the Congress will keep a close watch so that no genuine Indian citizen is left out and no foreigner is included in the final NRC.

If any genuine Indian citizen is not included in the NRC, Congress will take all necessary legal steps to ensure that his or her name is included, Bora said.

The Congress MP said that only 10% of the residents in 13 districts, which have more people of linguistic and religious minority, have found their names in the first draft of the NRC as against around 60-70 per cent in other districts.

Addressing a rally at Ahmedpur in West Bengal on Wednesday, Banerjee had said the Central government was planning to drive out around 1.25 crore people from Assam.

The much-awaited first draft of the NRC was published on December 31 midnight containing 1.9 crore names out of a total application of 3.29 crore people in Assam. The authorities had stated that the rest of the applications are at various stages of verification.
A 45-year-old civilian was injured after being hit by a bullet near the Line of Control (LoC) in Naushera sector of Jammu and Kashmirs Rajouri district, the police said.

Mohammad Yousuf, a resident of Pukherni village, was injured apparently from sniper fire from across the border around 7.30 pm Sunday, a police official said.

The man was hit by a bullet in the leg and was admitted to a sub-district hospital for treatment, he said.
The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) suspended a Kashmiri research scholar on Monday and constituted an inquiry committee, following reports that he had joined the militant group Hizbul Mujahideen on January 5.

Mannan Bashir Wani, a research student of Applied Geology, was last seen on the campus on January 2. A missing persons report was filed on January 5.

Following his disappearance, a picture of him holding a grenade launcher, was shared on social media. News reports said he had joined the Hizbul.

We suspended him following reports that he had joined Hizbul Mujahideen. A committee will look into his activities  both in the department and outside, Prof M Mohsin Khan, the varsity proctor, said, adding that vice-chancellor Prof Tariq Mansoor had taken a very serious view of the matter.

UP police sealed Wanis room at Habib Hall after recovered literature from it, in the presence of the proctor.

Later, senior superintendent of police (SSP) Rajesh Pandey told media persons, The literature found in room no 237 (of Habib Hall, AMU) has been seized for further investigation. University proctor and other officials were present during the raid.

Police and intelligence agencies have been scrutinising Wanis activities and his contacts in Aligarh, senior superintendent of police (SSP) Rajesh Pandey said.

Stating that the matter was related to national security, SP (city) Atul Srivastva said the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) were investigating it. The Aligarh police will cooperate with them and report to them, he said.

Police is also trying to determine the authenticity of the photograph shared on social media.

Family Shocked, Wants Him To Return

Wani hails from Lolab area of Kupwara district in north Kashmir.

Kashmir police said they have not yet ascertained whether he has joined Hizbul.

His father came and informed the police. He was in Aligarh and then disappeared. We also know of some photo being shared on social media, and we are investigating the matter, a senior police officer said.

Wanis family has said that he had last left home a month ago for Aligarh and then disappeared.

Mubashir Wani, brother of Mannan and a government engineer, told HT that the entire family is in a state of shock. We will be glad if he returns.

All we want now is for him to come back, his mother is seen wailing in a video clip that surfaced on Monday.

In a video uploaded on local news platforms, Mannans father Bashir Wani is seen saying, He is a mature person and I was never expecting this from him. If he has any issues, he could have addressed it some other way. I have no words to express what we are going through.

His reported joining militancy comes at a time when the Jammu and Kashmir police are encouraging local militants to shun the gun and return home.

Was Awarded For Flood Risk Assessment

Wani was awarded the Best Paper Presentation Award in an International Conference on Water, Environment, Energy and Society (ICWEES) held at AISECT University, Bhopal in 2016.

The award, AMUs website says, was conferred to Wani for his paper Flood Risk Assessment of Lolab Valley from Watershed Analysis Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques.

Wani, had via social media and blogs, raised voice on issues such as the opposition to Kerala woman Hadiyas conversion to Islam and her marriage to a Muslim, demonetisation, the case of missing JNU scholar Najeeb Ahmed, and the encounter killing of eight alleged SIMI activists in Bhopal.

He also raised issues of killings of hundreds of Kashmiris every year and had criticised moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq for his statements against the hardline separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

Kashmiri social media circles were abuzz discussing how a research scholar from a reputed university ended up joining the militant ranks and users are sharing his Twitter posts and blog posts.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday held focussed discussions regarding internal security with heads of state police and paramilitary forces here.

After landing in Gwalior, Modi reached the venue of the Annual Conference of Director Generals of Police (DGPs) and Inspector Generals of Police (IGPs) at the BSF Academy here.

The Prime Minister tweeted that there were insightful presentations and fruitful discussions on aspects relating to our security apparatus. There was also a presentation on the implementation status of decisions taken during the last three years.

Had focussed discussions with groups of officers on specific areas of policing and security. I also inaugurated five new buildings at the BSF Academy.

As per reports, there were presentations and discussions on various subjects relating to internal security at the meeting.

According to one account, the Prime Ministers interactions lasted a total of over nine hours.

The Prime Minister will address the valedictory ceremony on Monday afternoon before leaving for Delhi.

Earlier, shortly after Modis arrival in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that Modi was the first Prime Minister to give so much importance to internal security.

Chouhan, after receiving Modi at the military air base, told reporters: Earlier, the annual conference of DGPs and IGPs would be conducted in New Delhi and the Prime Minister would inaugurate the event and leave.

But Modi shifted these functions outside the national capital. This time, the function is being held at the Border Security Force Academy in Tekanpur where the Prime Minister will be present for two days. The countrys internal security is very important for him.

Since Saturday, the three-day function of chiefs of state police forces and paramilitary forces has been going on in Tekanpur, around 400 km from the state capital Bhopal.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Union Minister of State for Home Hansraj Ahir, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba are already in Tekanpur. A total of 205 senior police officers are attending the event.
Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Monday said majority of Muslims were in the favour of banning the practice of triple talaq.

Triple talaq is un-Islamic and is a bad tradition. We want the empowerment of women. It (banning talaq-e-biddat) is not a Hindu or Muslim issue. We cannot leave out Muslim women in empowerment programmes being undertaken by our government, the minister told reporters on the sidelines of a function here.

In recently-concluded winter session of Parliament, Lok Sabha passed a landmark bill making talaq-e-biddat or instant triple talaq a cognisable and non-bailable offence.

The bill recommends maximum three-year imprisonment for any Muslim man who gives instant divorce to his wife by uttering the word talaq three times in quick succession. The bill also provides for subsistence allowance to Muslim women and custody of minor children as may be determined by the magistrate.

Though the bill was tabled in Rajya Sabha, it could not be passed as the Parliament was adjourned till budget session. Opposition members in Upper House had demanded that the bill be referred to a select committee.

Naqvi said majority of Islamic communities and groups have welcomed the Centres move to criminalise tribal talaq.

He said the Central government wanted to offer an economical option of travel to Indian Muslims as Haj subsidy was getting reduced.

The minister said the government of Saudi Arabia accepted the Indian governments request of allowing Haj pilgrims to take the sea route to reach Jeddah.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Switzerland on January 22 on a two-day visit during which he will deliver the keynote address at the plenary session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

This will be the first participation by an Indian prime minister in the WEF in over two decades. In 1997, the then prime minister H D Deve Gowda had attended the Davos Summit.

Announcing the prime ministerial visit today, the external affairs ministry, in a statement, said the prime minister will also have a bilateral meeting with Alain Berset, the President of the Swiss Confederation on January 22.

The theme for this years WEF is Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.

Prime Minister will deliver the keynote speech at the plenary session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos- Klosters, Switzerland, on January 23, 2018, the ministry said.

The plenary session will be moderated by Prof. Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman, WEF.

To be attended by over 3,000 global leaders, including CEOs, heads of state and government, artists and civil society members, the Davos Annual Meeting of WEF will conclude on January 26.

The WEF, which describes itself as an international organisation for public-private cooperation and was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation, hosts its annual meeting in Davos every year in January.

In a statement last month announcing its co-chairs for the 2018 meeting, the WEF had said that over 3,000 leaders, representing 100 countries, will gather in a collaborative effort to shape the global, regional and industry agendas, with a commitment to improve the state of the world.

Desi cuisine and yoga will mark the start of the five-day annual jamboree of the rich and powerful from across the world in the snow-laden Swiss ski resort town of Davos. This is the first time India will host the welcome reception at the summit.

The Indian presence is set to be the largest-ever with as many as six Union ministers, two chief ministers, several top government officials and over 100 CEOs, figuring among the registered participants.

The official sessions at the WEF will also have special India-focused discussions including one on Indias role in the world, how it is rethinking economics with the use of big data in policymaking and the countrys role in securing peace and stability in the Asian century.

The registered participants from India, include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar and Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region of India Jitendra Singh.

Others expected to be present at the elite global gathering are Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi along with a number of his cabinet colleagues, as well as Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

China is also expected to have a significant presence and its Belt Road Initiative will feature as a key theme in a number of panel discussions, including those attended by Pakistani leaders.
Senior advocate Amrendra Sharan told the Supreme Court on Monday that there was no evidence to prove Mahatma Gandhi was killed by anybody other than Hindu radical Nathuram Godse.

Sharan was asked by the court to examine all documents pertaining to the incident after Pankaj Phadnis, a self-professed Veer Savarkar follower, filed a petition insisting that a mysterious person was responsible for firing the fourth bullet that killed the freedom fighter.

Sharan, an amicus curiae in the case, said there was no need to re-investigate or constitute a fresh fact-finding commission in the assassination case. He was assisted by advocates Sanchit Guru and Samarth Khanna in examining nearly 4,000 pages of trial court records, besides the Jeevan Lal Kapur Inquiry Commission report, in this regard.

The earlier probe conducted into the case had correctly identified the assassin, his ideology and bullets used for the crime, Sharan said, ruling out the existence of a second assailant or the firing of four bullets on Gandhi. The report also junked the alleged involvement of a foreign intelligence agency in the assassination, and stated that the petitioners claim was not substantiated by any evidence.

The plea filed by Phadnis in the apex court had termed the investigation into Gandhis assassination as the biggest cover-up in the history of India. The blame on the Marathi people in general and Veer Savarkar in particular for being the cause of the Mahatmas death has no basis in law and facts. On the other hand, there is a compelling need to uncover the larger conspiracy behind the murder by constituting a new Commission of Inquiry to look into the issue, it said.

Gandhi was shot dead by Godse in New Delhi on January 30, 1948.
A new name and all-clear from the censor board are still not enough for Sanjay Leela Bansalis period drama Padmavat to get a screening in Rajasthan.

Chief minister Vasundhara Raje said on Monday the Deepika Padukone-starrer, expected to release on January 25, would not be shown in cinemas in the state, even as the Rajput community demanded a nationwide ban on the film.

Queen Padminis sacrifice is linked to the honour and pride of Rajasthan. Queen Padmini is not just a chapter in history but our pride and self-respect. We will not let her dignity be maligned, she said in a statement.

Rajasthan was the epicentre of violent protests by the Rajput community against the alleged distortion of history in the film that was earlier named Padmavati after the Rajput queen whose place in history is disputed.

The Rajput community warned of opposing the BJP in the three by-polls to be held on January 29 and threatened to burn down movie halls if the film was not banned across the country film.

Padmavat will be released four days before polling for Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha seats and the Mandalgarh assembly segment. All the three seats have a significant Rajput presence and the BJP wouldnt want to lose its traditional voters.

Deepika Padukone (right) plays the Rajput queen Padmavati in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial. Shahid Kapoor (left) co-stars in the film with Ranveer Singh.

On December 30, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) allowed the films release after asking the producers to change the title to Padmavat. It had also suggested modifications in the disclaimer of the film, making it clear that it did not glorify the practice of sati, and relevant changes in the song, Ghoomar.

Queen Padmini is considered by Rajputs as a symbol of the communitys tradition of putting honour above everything else.

A section of historians, however, doubt the existence of the queen and say she is a fictional character first portrayed in a 16th-century poem as having committed jauhar, the medieval practice in which female royals walked into funeral fires to embrace death over the dishonour of being taken captive.

Addressing a joint press conference in Jaipur on Monday, various Rajput outfits warned of violent protests if the film was released and said they would oppose the BJP in the bypolls.

Giriraj Singh Lotwara said the committee invited to see the film had unanimously rejected it. Then why do they want to show the film? It indicated that there is some underhand deal between the censor board and the film-makers, he said.

Sukhdev Singh Gogamedi of the Rashtriya Karni Sena, which led the protests, threatened to torch cinema halls. Our organisation is active in 19 states. We will not let the film release, he said.

State BJP chief Ashok Parnami said no tampering with history would be tolerated. But added if the censor board had removed objectionable content then there would be no opposition.

His Congress counterpart Sachin Pilot criticised the state government for mishandling the issue and said it was trying to gain political mileage. He said a middle ground should be found so that peoples sentiments were not hurt.

The film, which was to be released on December 1, has been renamed Padmavat after Malik Mohammed Jayasis epic poem and cleared by the censor board that asked the makers to change the title and suggested other modifications.

Though Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and Bhansali didnt release a statement, sources in the production house said the film would be release on January 25, a day before Republic Day.

The film is releasing on January 25. There is no clarity when the official statement will be out regarding this, sources in Viacom18 Motion Pictures told PTI.
More than a year before the ruling BJP faces the next general election, one of its supporters has launched a private website seeking volunteers who will attempt to gather support for the party to win over 360 seats in the Lok Sabha.

The 44-year-old Vijay Chada, who is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and finance minister Arun Jaitley on Twitter, launched the website on January 2 asking for supporters to enrol for the 2019 election campaign.

The Lok Sabha elections are expected around April-May next year.

The 2014 campaign was to defeat the Congress after a decade of misrule. The 2019 campaign is to ensure that the good work continues and that the Congress doesnt return back directly or indirectly, Chadas post on the Mission 360+ homepage said, asking volunteers to provide their names, email IDs, Twitter handles and indicate how they want to get involved in the mission.

I mentioned the target of 360+ because the two-third majority mark in the House is 362. BJP has achieved a clear majority. We have to now strive for two-thirds majority in Parliament, Vijay, who is not a member of the BJP, told Hindustan Times on Sunday.

The civil engineer who works as a consultant in IT industry had actively participated in the BJPs 2014 campaign, when the party won an unprecedented 282 seats in the Lok Sabha.

Along with its NDA allies, the number swelled to 336 in the 543-member lower house.

I started this initiative on my own to test the waters. I did not consult any BJP leader. My thinking behind the portal was to see how many people are willing to commit to support Prime Minister Modi when elections are due next year, said Chada, who has over 73,000 followers on Twitter.

The man behind the portal said he has met Modi twice. He added that his attraction for the BJP grew after he heard the speeches of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former BJP chief LK Advani. Now I want the BJP to reach the next level, he said.

BJP spokesperson Sanjay Mayukh said the initiative, though not taken by the party, shows how popular Modi is. There is overwhelming support for the PM and his development agenda. Such initiatives prove his popularity and we respect that.
A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents protested outside the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC over the inhumane treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials.

The trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court, said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Baolchistan, which organised the unique event named as Chappal-Chor Pakistan (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhavs wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out inhumane treatment to Jadhavs wife and mother during their tightly- controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian national on December 25 in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

#WATCH: Indian-Americans & Baloch held #ChappalChorPakistan protest outside Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC, over misbehavior of Pakistani authorities with #KulbhushannJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/o6ugCr2NQL  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

The recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt. Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even Bindi and Mangal Sutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata Soubhagya Nari (married Indian woman), said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in USA.

Carl Clemens, volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the petty vindictiveness and humiliation that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to Pakistans own destruction, said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Pakistan on December 25 had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer.

New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member bench of the ICJ on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case. It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi met on Monday Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa in Manama and discussed a variety of bilateral issues of interest during his first foreign trip after becoming the party chief.

Gandhi, who is here as a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa.

He will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf countrys Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, HRH Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain, Gandhi said in a tweet.

The Congress president also met with foreign minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Gulf Daily News reported.

Thank you, Your Excellency, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, honourable Foreign Minister of Kingdom of Bahrain for being a gracious host at lunch today, Gandhi tweeted after the luncheon meeting.

According to a statement issued by the Congress on Sunday, Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) today.

Delegates of 50 countries are participating in the function, the statement said.

He will also have an interactive session with business leaders of Indian-origin on Tuesday.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow, Gandhi tweeted ahead of his trip yesterday.

Gandhi is expected to return to India on January 9.
Union home minister Rajnath Singh has told heads of state police that the rising rate of cybercrime in India is among the latest challenge for law enforcement agencies and both state and central authorities in India must be prepared to deal with the issue effectively.

Singh made the comments during the three-day conference of the countrys top police officials at the Border Security Force (BSF) Academy in Madhya Pradeshs Tekanpur.

Singh cited the data by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), which says there cybercrime has increased by 21% every year, during his speech at the Annual Conference of Director Generals of Police (DGPs) and Inspector Generals of Police (IGPs).

CERT-In, an office within the ministry of electronics and information technology, is the nodal agency to deal with cybersecurity threats.

Mr Rajnath Singh said that social media is increasingly being used to spread rumours and defame public personalities. He also said that social media was being used to disturb the peace and spread terror propaganda, a home ministry official told the Hindustan Times.

Officers present at the conference were asked to hold discussions on effective monitoring of social media, the officer added.

The home minister also spoke about the misuse of social media and internet, a home ministry official told the HT earlier.

The government told the Rajya Sabha last week that cyber crimes cases in the country have grown in the last three years, with the number rising from 9,622 and 11,592 to 12,317 during 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Minister of electronics and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad told the Upper House that according to CERT-In, 79 phishing incidents affecting 22 financial organisations, 13 incidents affecting ATMs, Point of Sales (POS) systems and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) were reported.

The Reserve Bank of India has registered 13,083, 16,468, 13,653 and 12,520 cases of frauds involving credit cards in 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17 and between April-September 2017 respectively, he added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval are also taking part in the conference that is being attended by officers of DGP and IGP rank from all the states and central police organisations.

Modi, who is expected to speak on Monday, is likely to address issues related to law and order including cybersecurity.

(With PTI inputs)

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The Supreme Court said on Monday it will revisit its 2013 verdict upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that bans homosexual sexual acts, and referred a petition against the controversial colonial law to a larger bench.

A three-judge bench of the SC led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said the 2013 judgment, which overturned a 2009 Delhi high court verdict that decriminalised consensual same-sex acts, was guided by the perception of majority and concept of social morality.

Concept of consensual sex may have more priority than a group right and may require more protection. A section of people or individual who exercise their choice should never live in a state of fear, the court said.

What is natural to one may not be natural to the other.

The petition, which challenges the legal validity of Section 377 on the ground that it is not a reasonable restriction because the law has the potential to destroy an individuals choice and sexual orientation, was filed by five prominent members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) community.

The determination of order of nature is not a constant phenomenon. Societal morality also changes from age to age. Law copes with life and accordingly change takes place, the SC said, asking the petitioners to provide a copy of the petition to the central governments office so that the Centre can be represented in the case.

Read | SC refers Article 377 to larger bench: A timeline of legality of homosexuality in India

The petitioners  bharatnatyam dancer Navtej Johar, culture expert Aman Nath, restaurateurs Ritu Dalmia and Ayesha Kapur and mediaperson Sunil Mehra  had said they lived in fear because of Section 377 and the 2013 judgment ignored harassment and problems arising out of the law.

It is a small victory but it has brought back some hope, for the first time. I am very happy about the development and have full faith in the court, the judiciary system and the Constitution, Dalmia told Hindustan Times. I think it (repealing of Section 377) is just a matter of time now.

Section 377 punishes carnal intercourse against the order of nature with man, woman or animal with life imprisonment, though formal prosecution is rare. But activists allege the law forces LGBT people to live in fear and face blackmail, intimidation and pervasive discrimination.

The court noted it will not judge that portion of the law that criminalises intercourse with an animal. It also specified the discussion would be restricted to consenting adults so that children remain protected. Consent between two adults has to be primary pre-condition otherwise children would become prey, which the constitution does not allow. Protection of children in all spheres has to be guided, it said.

In 2009, Section 377 was read down by the Delhi high court, which decriminalised consensual adult same-sex relationships. But this was overturned in December 2013 by the top court, which asked Parliament to bring a law.

A two-judge bench headed by justice GS Singhvi had said a miniscule fraction of the countrys population constitutes lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders.

A review petition against the decision was dismissed but a curative petition, the last available judicial recourse against an apex court decision, is pending in the SC. The top court has said that the curative will be decided on the limited grounds as raised in the petition. But the petition by the eminent LGBT personalities raised larger issues that needed consideration, it added.

Mondays order holds out hope for LGBT activists as arguments in the case will be heard afresh and petitioners can draw support from last Augusts right to privacy judgment that had upheld the right to sexual orientation and choice of sexual partners. A nine-judge bench of the court had observed that the chilling effect of Section 377 poses a grave danger to the unhindered fulfillment of ones sexual orientation, as an element of privacy and dignity.

The CJIs bench said natural and sexual orientation and choice could not be allowed to cross the boundaries of law. But the confines of law cannot trample or curtail the inherent right embedded in an individual under article 21 (right to dignity), the top court added.

While the court noted that Section 377 punishes carnal intercourse against order of nature, it added that the determination of order of nature is not a common phenomenon. Individual autonomy and individual natural inclination cannot be atrophied unless the restrictions are determined as reasonable.

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In an apparent retort to Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma said on Monday that those raising questions over Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were afraid of facing the 2019 elections.

We are making progress in a big way and this has caused jealously among some people...Opposition is terming the peoples mandate as fault in the EVMs...there is a move to present ones own shortcomings and wrong policies as the fault of EVMs, Sharma told newspersons here.

He said that going by the claims of these critics, there was nothing wrong in the EVMs in the past 15 years when other parties formed governments.

Now EVMs have started developing faults...what can be more humiliating for the people that their mandate is being challenged by raising a question mark on the EVMs ...This is like making a mockery of democracy, Sharma pointed out.

He said that some people were making fun of all the works being undertaken by the government and presenting an inaccurate picture before the people as they were afraid of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

I remember the statement of former J and K chief minister Omar Abdullah in which he had advised the Opposition parties to prepare for 2024 elections instead of 2019, Sharma said.

On Saturday last, Yadav had convened a meeting of opposition parties to mobilise opinion for demanding that the upcoming bye-elections in Gorakhpur and Phulpur be conducted through ballot papers instead of EVMs. But the Congress and BSP decided to stay away.

Sharma also attacked Yadavs statement on Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths recent visit to Noida saying that BJP does not believe in any jinx and the chief minister will repeatedly go to Noida.

During a press conference yesterday, Yadav had taken potshots at Adityanath over the Noida jinx.

The impact of Noida jinx was visible. I have seen in pictures that he (Yogi) could not flag off or press the button for starting metro services, Yadav said.

To a question on potatoes being thrown on roads allegedly by farmers as a mark of protest,Sharma said the government was committed to safeguard the interests of farmers and there was no report of any farmer committing suicide in the state.
Almost 80 years after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi on January 30, a Mumbai-based engineer has claimed the investigation and trial was a cover-up and has requested the Supreme Court to order a fresh probe.

Senior advocate Amrendra Sharan told the court on Monday there was no proof that Gandhi was killed by a person other than Hindu radical Nathuram Godse and there was no need for a fresh investigation.

But the petitioner, Pankaj Kumudchandra Phadnis, is convinced there was another assassin and a foreign power was involved in the murder.

Speaking to Hindustan Times over the phone from Mumbai on Monday, Phadnis said he had not seen Sharans report but had heard that he told the court there was no proof to back the claim made in the petition.

But it has to be kept in mind that evidence is of two types -- evidence that helps investigation and another is prosecutable evidence. So I do not know what the amicus is pointing to.

An engineer by training, Phadnis, who is also an MBA, is a trustee of the Mumbai wing of Abhinav Bharat, a right-wing Hindu organisation.

Phadnis has distanced himself from the Pune branch of Abhinav Bharat, one of whose founders, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, is facing trial in Malegaon blast case.

He was not the first person to raise questions over the investigation and trial into Independent Indias most-talked about murder, Phadnis said.

In fact, a book, Who Killed Gandhi, written in 1963, raised the issue and the allegations that I have made are echoed in the book.

The book was banned and his petition to lift the ban was pending with the Bombay high court, Phadnis said.

He also dismissed allegation that through his petition, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP, was seeking to clear itself of the accusation of its involvement in Gandhis murder.

There is no basis to the allegation. I have been filing petitions since 2004, he said.

What his petition says:

Two assassins and four bullets

Other than Godse, the petition claims, there is a suspicion that a second assassin was involved in Gandhis killing.

Four, not three, shots killed Gandhi. Phadnis in his public interest litigation says the freedom icon suffered not three but four bullet wounds and lower courts ignored that monumental evidence in determining the real people behind the murder. Journalists who were eye witnesses claimed to have heard four shots, he says.

The pistol with which Godse shot Gandhi had a seven-bullet chamber, says the PIL. Three shots were fired and four unspent bullets were recovered by police. There was no way the fourth shot could have come from Godses weapon. It had to be from the gun of a second assassin, no trace of whom survives in records.

The PIL also says an examination of the blood-stained shawl that Gandhi wore at the time of his death would reveal the truth behind the number of gunshot wounds and expose the inherent inconsistencies in the murder trial.

Foreign hand

Indias ambassador to erstwhile USSR was informed in February 1948 that the British had organised Gandhis murder, says the PIL. The trial was an eyewash as it was conducted by a court under the control of the British government.

The Kapur commission report of 1969 that examined the assassination had many lacunae and failed to look deep into the real culprits and reasons behind the murder, says the PIL.

Also, there was no post mortem examination of Gandhis body.
For at least one of them, it is the intent and not the result that matters. For the other it is both the intent and the result. They are two independents who have thrown their hat into the ring making the Alwar by-elections more interesting.

Kisan Mahapanchayat president Rampal Jat and Rajasthan Berozgar Ekikrat Mahasangh (association of unemployed) president Upen Yadav will be filing their nominations on January 10.

Jat could make a dent in the vote share of both BJP and Congress as there are about 2 lakh farmers in Alwar constituency that has about 18 lakh eligible voters. Rajasthan has witnessed prolonged farmers agitation for the past nine months. While the state government had announced a partial loan waiver in September, farmers are upset that loans have not been formally waived off even more than three months after the announcement.

At a farmers meeting held in Jaipur on Sunday, Jat got the support from 45 different farmers unions.

While Yadav has made his intentions of defeating the BJP clear, Jat said that he will be fighting the elections on a positive agenda.

Our objective is to ensure justice for farmers. I will not indulge in negative campaign, as we have seen that in the past the governments that came to power on negative campaigns did not sustain, Jat told HT.

Yadav, on the other hand, will be targeting the BJP government. BJP has done nothing to generate employment. While unemployment is rampant, no new jobs are being created and the existing vacancies in the government are not being filled. The countdown has begun for the BJP government in state, he said in a Facebook post.

The main fight in the Alwar bypolls is between two qualified doctors  Congresss Karan Singh Yadav and BJPs Jaswant Singh Yadav  as both the national parties look to play the caste card in a constituency where Yadavs and Brahmins make up a significant chunk of votes.

Karan Singh Yadav is a former MP from Alwar while Jaswant Singh Yadav is labour minister in Vasundhara Raje cabinet.

The bypoll to the seat was necessitated following the death of BJP MP Chand Nath, who had defeated his Congress rival Jitendra Singh in the 2014 Lok Sabha election by a margin of over 2.8 lakh votes.

The by-elections to Alwar and Ajmer Lok Sabha seats and Mandalgarh Assembly seat will be held on January 29. The last date for filing nominations is January 10. More independent candidates are expected to jump into the fray.

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Alleged cow smugglers opened fire when a police team tried to stop them in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, in the wee hours of Monday.

Police said they arrested a suspect, Irsad Mev, under the Rajasthan Bovine Animal (Prohibition of Slaughter and Regulation Temporary Migration or Export) Act-1995, although three of his accomplices managed to escape. A mini-truck and 13 heads of cattle were also seized.

Mev, a resident of Utawad village in Haryana, was allegedly armed with a countrymade gun.

A countrymade gun was seized from the possession of Irsad Mev, a resident of Utawad village. (HT Photo)

Kaithwara station house officer Yogendra Singh said police barricaded the road on a tip-off earlier that night. The cow-smugglers opened fire at us, forcing us to retaliate. We finally managed to stop the vehicle at Angarawali village, he said, adding that the animals were being transported from Bandikui in Dausa to Haryana.

The seized truck (RJ 05-GB-1680) was registered at Ghatmika village in Mewat region. Its owner, Abdul Ramham, is absconding.

The state government has set up six police outposts across the district to curb smuggling of cattle to neighbouring Haryana. According to police data, 65 cases were registered against cow smugglers in 2015, a similar number in 2016, and 27 until May 2017.
Rajput leaders on Monday threatened to boycott the BJP in the byoplls for handing over to the CBI cases of violence by community members during a condolence meeting for slain gangster Anandpal Singh.

Addressing a press conference here, Giriraj Singh Lotwara accused the government of going back on its agreement reached with Rajput leaders that only two FIRs would be given to the CBI for probe.

In a meeting with state home minister Gulab Chand Kataria, Panchayati Raj minister Rajendra Rathore and state BJP president Ashok Parnami it was agreed that the FIR regarding Anandpals encounter and the FIR regarding Surendra Singhs killing would be given to the CBI, Lotwara said.

He said the government had assured that the cases against Rajput leaders would be withdrawn but they had gone back on their word and handed over those 18 FIRs to the CBI. He said the Rajasthan government had taken back case against Gurjars for violence during various agitations.

He said various Rajput outfits have come together to demand that cases against the Rajput community be taken back or the BJP would face the music in the coming bypolls.

Representatives of the Shri Rajput Karni Sena, Rashtriya Karni Sena, Rajput Sabha Ravana Rajput, Sangh Shakti, Marwar Rajput Sabha, and Kshatriya Mahasabha were present in the press conference.

Our aim is to defeat the BJP in all the three bypolls, said Lotwara.

Bypolls will be held in Ajmer, Alwar and Mandalgarh on January 29. The three seats have presence of Rajputs who have traditionally voted for the BJP. Their opposition to the BJP could prove crucial in the poll results.

On July 12, 2017, a condolence meeting for Anandpal Singh in his village Sanvarad in Nagaur district attended by thousands of Rajputs had turned violent leading to the death of a civilian and injuries to 16 policemen.

FIRs had been filed in different police stations against several persons including Rashtriya Karni Sena leader Sukhdev Singh Gogamedi and Shri Rajput Karni Sena president Mahipal Singh Makrana.

Addressing the press conference, Gogamedi said the government had foisted false cases on Rajput community.

It is the Rajput community that has reared the BJP but now we will we will boycott the party. We will not vote for it, claimed Gogamedi.

He also said the community would boycott the 23 Rajput MLAs of the BJP as they did not speak for community.
For the success of the parliamentary democracy, the quality of debates should be healthy and in public interest, chief minister Vasundhara Raje said Monday.

We need to ensure that the bills, which are in public interest, do not get stuck due to the ruckus in the House. In the House, we have to agree to disagree and respect the views presented by the members, Raje said.

She was addressing the 18th All India Whips conference in Udaipur on Monday. The two-day meet is hosting around 90 delegates representing the Centre and 19 states. A whip is the member of a political party tasked with enforcing the organisations discipline on its members in the legislature.

The debates held in the legislatures should be cordial and graceful and not personal attacks, she said, adding one should respect their political opponents views.

Remembering her stint as an MP in Lok Sabha, Raje said former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and late Meenu Masani had set the best examples in parliamentary democracy.

The CM said the role of whip is important in the parliamentary system. As a floor manager, the government chief whip has to do away with differences and consult the members of opposition to run the House smoothly.

Union minister for parliamentary affairs Ananth Kumar said the duty of a whip is not only to monitor the members of the party in legislature but also to moderate and motivate them.

He said the Centre has made provision of Rs 750 crore to make all legislative assemblies and legislative councils digital and paperless. Under e-Vidhan, all legislative assemblies will be made digital and paperless in the next five years. The center would bear the expenditure for e-Vidhan of Rajasthan legislative assembly, he added.

Kumar termed the conference a rainbow of political parties and also that of states. He said the parliamentary democracy is the best form of governance.

Union minister of state for parliamentary affairs Vijay Goel advocated simplification of rules of the procedure and changes according to the requirements of present time.

Raje also released a coffee table book New India - We Resolve to Make -- showcasing exhibitions held at 39 destinations across the country on the freedom movement from 1857 to 1947.

The conference would take up and discuss various issues pertaining to smooth and efficient working of Parliament.

Union MoS for water resources Arjun Ram Meghwal, BJP Chief Whip in Lok Sabha Rakesh Singh, Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria, state Parliamentary Affairs Minister Rajendra Rathore and others were present during the inaugural ceremony.
Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Dwaraka Sharda Peeth, on Sunday said there should be no ban on loudspeakers at places of worship of any religion.

If at all such a ban had to be imposed, it should be enforced on loudspeakers at the mosques first, he added.

He made the comment even as the Uttar Pradesh government ordered the removal of all loudspeakers from religious structures and other places where these were being used without proper permission.

Speaking at a press conference at Sri Vidya Math (a monastery) in Varanasi, Swami Swaroopanand said,  If a ban on loudspeakers at religious places is implemented, loudspeakers at all religious places should be banned. This ban should not be restricted to the places of worship of any single religion, he said.

He also came down heavily on pseudo sadhus, saying they were a major threat to the Sanatan Dharma (Eternal Faith or Hinduism).

These sadhus had not only disobeyed Sanatan Dharma but were also making attempts to change both shruti and smriti, he said. Shruti refers to sacred literature considered to be the product of divine revelation. In Hinduism, the revealed texts encompass the four Vedas, the Brahmanas (ritual treatises), the Aranyakas (forest books) and the Upanishads (philosophical elaborations on the Vedas).

The Smritis are a body of Hindu texts usually attributed to an author. They include the epics the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas among others.

He said the onus was on the true sadhus and sanyasis to carry forward the tradition of sanatan dharma as per its dignity.

As long as the true sadhus and mahatmas (great souls) were committed to their duty with complete devotion, the victory of sanatan dharma will continue, he said.

To a question, he said Kashi had always given light of knowledge to the world. This was the essential nature of Kashi and it still existed. Kashi will show the way to make India Vishwa Guru (world leader), he said.
The Lucknow University(LU) has declared demonstrations and slogan shouting on the campus illegal. The decision was taken in view of the employees decision to go on strike from Monday.

Demos not allowed LU VC SP Singh directed proctor Vinod Singh not to allow any demonstration or slogan shouting on the campus. The proctor was also asked to ensure that no employee was forced to join the strike. If employees violate this rule, appropriate action would be taken, informed LU spokesperson NK Pandey.

The demands of the employees include regularisation of contractual staff and rollback of transfer order.

LU vice-chancellor SP Singh directed proctor Vinod Singh not to allow any demonstration or slogan shouting on the campus. The proctor was also asked to ensure that no employee was forced to join the strike.

If employees violate this rule, appropriate action would be taken. The proctor was directed to arrange for photography and videography on the campus as per need, informed LU spokesperson NK Pandey.

From Monday, all regular attendance registers of the employees will be sealed by respective deans and heads. Signatures of employees reporting for duty will be taken on plain sheets and sent to the registrar by 10:30 am.

All the deans, head of departments, provosts and other officials of the university expressed solidarity with the decisions of the VC.

The VC asked officials to ensure that the examination/evaluation/practical examinations/teaching must not be halted or disturbed in any manner due to the strike by employees.

The VC informed that most of the demands of the employees were already accepted and therefore there was no justification for the strike.

Singh informed that he had already talked to the two unions of employees.

Regarding transfer order, views of employees had already been invited. If they have any grievances, those would be settled on a case-to-case basis. Hence, the strike called by employees was completely unjustified, claimed LU officials.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and his Karnataka counterpart Siddaramaiah sparred on twitter on Sunday. Both tweeted barbs at each other on a day when Yogi visited Bengaluru for the BJPs Parivartan Yatra rally, his second in three weeks in the southern state.

Soon, the twitter-war between the two chief ministers turned into a full fledged political controversy with both the BJP and the Congress taking to the social media platforms to target each other.

The BJP that has been getting the UP chief minister to campaign in election-bound states has now decided to get Adityanath to canvass in Karnataka, the state where BJP is hoping to wrest power from the Congress.

In fact more than his speech in which he accused the Congress of ruining Karanataka, it was his tweets that started trending on the social media.

Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.  Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018

Soon after Adityanath landed in Bengaluru, Siddaramaiah started the twitter war by tweeting that the UP CM had a lot to learn from the Congress-ruled state.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us sir. When you are here, please visit an Indira canteen and a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state, tweeted Siddaramaiah signing off his tweet with #YogiInBengaluru

Indira canteens, modelled on the lines of the hugely popular Amma canteens in Tamil Nadu, are mandated to provide hygienic, nutritious food such as idlis and rice dishes with the usual accompaniments to the urban poor. The prices are as low as Rs 5 for breakfast and Rs 10 for lunch and dinner. Designed by a former Taj Group chef, the rotational menu has 25 items, which includes brinjal rice, sambar rice, pongal, khara bath, methi rice, and kesari bath as the lone sweet item. A similar canteen with subsidised food has also been envisaged by the BJP government in UP.

@INCKarnataka, the twitter handle of Karnataka unit of the Congress too targeted the Adityanath government. It cited NCRB data to claim that Adityanath-ruled UP, tops India in crime signing off the tweet.

Within hours, Adityanath responded. Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies, he tweeted.

The tweet like the one by Siddaramaiah soon went viral with supporters on each sides joining in.

Adityanaths post was retweeted 4239 times and had 7436 likes against Siddaramaiah whose comment was retweeted 1528 times with 2625 likes.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018

The BJP Karnataka units twitter handle @BJP4Karnataka got active. Thank you, @inckarnataka for putting out a report card of your allies  SP and BSP who ruled UP for the last 14 years and supported the UPA between 2000-14. Do you realise that Yogi has been CM for ONLY 10 months and things are already improving! Being out of power for so long must be hard, went the tweet in response to the Congress listing statistics on poor law and order in the state.

The social media cell managing @INCUttarPradesh, the twitter handle of the UP unit of the Congress joined the war.

Who are you trying to fool. We live here and know how bad the current law and order situation is. Do you want us to list all the rapes, murders, larceny etc in just 2017!, the Congresss UP unit retorted as BJPs Karnataka chief and former chief minister BS Yedyurappa joined what had by now become a free-for-all.

Thanks CM @siddaramaiah for welcoming Shri @myogiadityanath ji to our state. Election eve at least has made you courteous. Inaugurating Indira canteen @officeofRG admitted Amma canteen inspired it. Hope BLR roads turned potholes under your leadership dont impact Yogiji!

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As part of its drive to free up public spaces and prevent security risks, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) moved 745 abandoned cars, bikes, autos to its warehouse in the last two weeks of December. The vehicles will be auctioned if not claimed by the owners within three months of being towed away.

The 15-day campaign started on December 15. With citizens complaining about a high number of abandoned vehicles encroaching and posing security risks, the BMC has been seizing unclaimed vehicles under Section 314 of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act, 1884.

Before towing vehicles to the godown, the civic body waits for 48 hours for the owners to remove them. If nobody reclaims the vehicle within three months of being taken to the warehouse, the BMC auctions it under Section 490 (3) of the Act. If owners come forward, they have to pay a penalty.

Nidhi Choudhari, deputy municipal commissioner (removal of encroachments), told the Hindustan Times, From January 1, zonal deputy municipal commissioners have been empowered to get work done on the zonal level. Areas with abandoned vehicles are to be identified and contractors are to be hired for towing with traffic departments help. If owners do not show up and pay towing fees within three months, these vehicles will be auctioned.

The BMC, which has 10 towing vehicles, acted against about 3,000 abandoned and unclaimed vehicles last year from January to October 2017 and collected a fine of Rs1.38 crore.
Around 100 commuters waiting at Umroli station in Palghar were shocked to see the 69164 Up Dahanu-Panvel Multiple Electric Moving Unit (MEMU) whiz past their station around 6am on Monday without making its scheduled halt.

Locals who regularly commute by this train include many school- and college-going students, office-goers and vegetable vendors.

The train left Dahanu at 5.30am and missed Umroli at 5.55am, where it has a scheduled one-minute halt.

Passengers inside the train pulled the alarm chain when they realised that the train had not stopped, which forced it to halt a few metres ahead of Umroli station. Train guard Bipin Patel also pulled the hand brake in his cabin, but by then the train had already crossed the platform, a Western Railway (WR) official said, requesting anonymity. The train could not go back and resumed its onward journey.

Following this, irate commuters at Umroli forcibly held back the next train, a Dahanu-Andheri local, for five minutes instead of its usual one minute.

Members of the Dahanu Vaitarna Pravasi Sevabhavi Sanstha lodge a complaint with the station manager at Palghar station.

Umroli is an unmanned station, meaning that it has no WR staff. It has only a ticket vendor, appointed through a private contractor. There is no communication system to contact Umroli, Palghar and Boisar stations.

The motorman, Prashant Jena, was ordered off the train at Vasai station, and replaced by another motorman, after which the train proceeded to Panvel.

We have ordered an inquiry into the incident, said Ravinder Bhakar, chief public relations officer, WR. Action against the motorman, such as suspension, will be taken only after the inquiry is completed.

Sources said Jena may have been over-confident and lost judgement while approaching Umroli station, because of which he was unable to halt the train at the station.

Prathamesh Prabhutendolkar, an activist from the Dahanu Vaitarna Pravasi Sevabhavi Sanstha (DVPSS), a commuters group, said the motorman failed to report the incident at the next station. The DVPSS has since lodged a complaint at Palghar station.

The motorman is experienced and it was sheer negligence that led to the train skipping Umroli station. It has cost office-goers a days pay, students have had to miss schools and colleges, thanks to the glitch, Prabhutendolkar said. We demand an inquiry into the incident.
A fire broke out on the third floor of the sessions court building in south Mumbai, near the University of Mumbai, on Monday morning, an official said. No injuries have been reported.

The fire began around 7 am and was doused by 9.25 am. Six fire engines, five water tankers and an ambulance were rushed to the spot. The court premises were empty as it was early morning, which prevented casualties.

The fire started from a courtroom on the third floor and spread rapidly, gutting the courtroom entirely, an official from the fire brigade said, on condition of anonymity. The wooden benches, chairs and railings proved a challenge as fire officials fought to contain the blaze from spreading to other courtrooms and damaging documents, he added.

Fire officials said the cause of the fire appears to be welding work going on in the court premises. The fire official said: Our prime concern was to stop the fire from spreading as the courtrooms have a lot of wooden furniture and many bundles of documents. Now, we will assess if any documents have been gutted.

This is the fifth fire incident in the city in the past 20 days.

Twelve workers were killed when a fire broke out in a farsan shop in Saki Naka while they were fast asleep, on December 18.

On December 29, 14 people were killed after a fire broke out in an upscale pub in Kamala Mills compound and spread.

On January 4, four members of a family, including two children, died and five others were injured after short circuit triggered a fire in a flat in Marol, Andheri (East).

A 20-year-old man, who worked for a television serial production unit, was killed in a fire at the Cinevista film studio in Kanjurmarg on January 6.
The Samta Nagar police have arrested two of five accused men after a former corporator from the Shiv Sena, Ashok Sawant, 62, was stabbed to death near his house in Kandivli (East) late on Sunday. Sohail Dodhia, 30, and Ganesh Jogdand have been arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy.

Ashok Sawant, a resident of Thakur Complex in Kandivli, was returning home with his friend Vinod Sonawane after having dinner at a restaurant in the vicinity when he was attacked around 10.45pm.

Dodhia had allegedly approached Jogdand, an auto driver, and offered him Rs2,000 to drive three others around on Sunday.

On Sunday evening, when Sawant and Sonawane reached the lane near his house, Jogdands auto blocked the bike. Following this, one of the accused kicked down the bike and the other two repeatedly attacked Sawant. According to the police, Sawant was stabbed at least 20 times.

The three, along with the auto driver, then fled the scene. Sawant was rushed to the hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

One of the accused, identified as Jagdish Pawar alias Jagga, had previously had a fallout with Sawant over a financial dispute. Pawar wanted a job as a bodyguard and had approached Sawant for help. However it did not work out.

Three years ago, Sawant had complained to the police that he had been receiving death threats.

There were no recent threats reported to the police, said Anil Mane, senior inspector, Samta Nagar police station.

The police have recovered CCTV footage from the area. The auto driver was traced with the help of the footage from Dahisar. Between Sunday night and Monday evening, the police questioned at least six persons.
In view of the Kamala Mills fire that killed 14, Congress leaders on Monday demanded an inquiry into the construction permissions given by the civic body to several commercial establishments in the mills area.

Sanjay Nirupam, Congress city chief, alleged the civic body has allowed restaurants like 1Above and Mojo Bistro to extend structures illegally over the last few years. At least 96 eateries have been running in the Kamala Mills in connivance with the municipal corporation. Civic chief Ajoy Mehta must be held responsible for allowing owners of these establishments to construct in the mills illegally, Nirupam told reporters.

He alleged the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) allowed a recreational centre to build a shed, an elevated racing track and an eating area in Kamala and Victoria mills for a penalty of Rs468 for a sqm. The BMC recently faced flak for failing to take strict action against eateries flouting safety norms prior to the fire incident.

In response to the allegation, Mehta said, I am following the Chief Ministers orders for an investigation into the fire. I cannot comment on this allegation as we are working on the report.

Nirupam also demanded that Mehta resign or be suspended, adding that a comprehensive inquiry into his involvement in the matter is necessary.

Gold units at Kalbadevi, Mumbadevi may be shifted

Gold units at Kalbadevi and Mumbadevi may get shifted in the days to come.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has asked the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to look into the possibility of shifting these units within city limits. He also asked the civic body to check implementation of fire safety norms at the gold units and issue notices to them.

The directives were issued while hearing complaints from citizens on the occasion of Lokshahi Din (Democracy Day) at Mantralaya on Monday. Kalbadevi resident Harkishan Goradia has approached the chief minister complaining about ignorance of fire safety norms at the gold units situated at Kalbadevi and Mumbadevi.

According to Goradia, the owners of these units use furnace for making gold ornaments, but dont follow fire safety norms, making the place extremely dangerous for the residents. Moreover, use of furnace also results in pollution.

Considering this, Fadnavis ordered to issue notices to these gold units within next three months. He also asked BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta to hold a meeting of all people concerned and lookin to possibilities of shifting these units within Mumbai, said a senior official from the chief ministers office.

Three fire officers were killed in a major fire at the four-storey Gokul Niwas building in Kalbadevi on May 9, 2015.
The Mumbai crime branch has launched a parallel probe to trace the missing owners of pubs 1Above and Mojo Bistro in the Kamala Mills fire case, in which 14 people were killed on December 29.

The ones still to be arrested in the case include owners of 1Above Kripesh and Jigar Sanghvi and their partner Abhijit Mankar; and owner of Mojo Bistro Yug Tulli. Tullis name was recently added, after the BMCs fire brigade report pointed the fire started at Mojo.

So far, the probe is being carried out by the local police station. The crime branch usually gets involved in important cases and helps local police trace the accused, as it is a specialized branch with a good track record in detecting cases.

The NM Joshi Marg police station have filed a case under section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), section 337 (causing hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others) and 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others), along with section 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention).

Sources said so far police teams have gone to several places and are also relying on technical surveillance to nab the suspects. Police teams have searched for the suspects in Pune, Gujarat, Mumbai.

The police have also declared a reward of Rs1 on those giving information on the Sanghvi brothers and Mankar.

Sources said the trio has switched off their phones and are lying low, however the police were confident of nabbing them anytime soon, based on tip-off and informer networks. A look out circular (LOC) has already been issued against the accused to ensure they do not escape from the country.

So far, the police have arrested two managers of 1Above Kevin Bava, 35, and Lisbon Lopez, 34, and Mojo Bistro owner Yug Pathak, son of former IPS officer.

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Two days after the fire brigade report into the Kamala Mills fire, which claimed 14 lives, revealed that the blaze started in Mojo Bistro, the focus of the police probe into the mishap has now shifted to finding witnesses from the restaurant.

Initially, the police investigating was focused on 1Above, the restaurant adjoining Mojo, as the bodies of victims were found there. The fire brigade report, however, said the fire started from hookah coals in Mojo and then spread to 1Above owing to combustible material and illegal alterations made at both the eateries.

The police have now urged people, who were present at Mojo when the fire broke out on December 29, to come forward and record their statements.

We need statements of the people who were present in Mojo Bistro we are trying to trace them to know what exactly happened and how they escaped, said Suryakant Naikode from the NM Joshi Marg police station.

According to sources, while 14 people who were at 1Above died in the blaze, all 35 patrons of Mojo had escaped with the help of staff after the fire broke out.

Meanwhile, Yug Pathak, the co-owner of Mojo, who was arrested on Saturday, was produced before Bhoiwada court on Sunday and remanded to police custody till January 12. Pathak is the son of former IPS officer KK Pathak.

Pathak and his partner Yug Tulli, a Nagpur-based hotelier, have been booked on charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The police are yet to track down Tulli.

Also, the owners of 1Above  Kripesh Sanghvi, Jigar Sanghvi and their partner Abhijit Mankar  who have been booked, are still absconding.
The primary inquiry report on Kamala Mill fire, which claimed the lives of 14 people, is expected to be out by Friday, said civic chief Ajoy Mehta on Monday.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has urged citizens who were witness to the fire to submit any information in the form of statements, videos or pictures relevant to the mishap.

On December 29, a major fire broke out in two high-end restaurants in Kamala Mills at Lower Parel, Mojo Bistro and 1Above. Some of the witnesses of the incident had approached the civic body on Monday. Mehta said, We have been receiving information on the fire through emails and on WhatsApp. We are expecting more people to come forward and report anything related to the fire. The details of the information will be incorporated in the primary inquiry report.

Mehta said people are seeking an appointment in the next two to three days to report about the fire.

Recently, the Mumbai fire brigade submitted its inquiry report to Mehta, wherein it was found that the burning embers from the charcoal came in contact with the combustible material at Mojo Bistro and led to the massive fire. The report also said the combustible thatched roof on the rooftop restaurant was unauthorised.

Mehta said the fire brigade report has technical part regarding the fire, whereas, the primary inquiry report will be a comprehensive report. He said, Officials are visiting every structure in the city premises in order to conduct fire audits and will evacuate the structures immediately if any lapses found in them. The officials will also issue notices and seal these places.
The death of Major Prasad Mahadik on December 30 last year in a fire incident in Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh near the Indo-China border has instilled single-minded determination in his 30-year-old wife Gauri Mahadik to pay tribute to her husband. And she wants to do that by joining the Indian Army.

Gauri, who lives in Bolinj, Virar, is a qualified Company Secretary (CS) and a lawyer. She has been working with a reputed law firm in Worli since May 2017 and has also worked with the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce. She wishes to join the Indian Army in whatever capacity she gets employed in, after qualifying the mandatory interviews and other tests. My joining the Indian Army would be the best tribute to my husband, she said.

Major Mahadik, who graduated from Bhawans College, Andheri, had moved with his family to Virar in 2003. Prasad wanted to start a military academy in our native village in Guhagar district so youths could join the Indian Army. His dream will be fulfilled some day, said Shivaji Mahadik, his uncle. Major Mahadik had joined the Army in March 2012. His colleagues also remember him as a dedicated and tough officer, a great sportsman and an excellent guitarist who was fond of music.

Army sources said that on December 30, there was a fire incident in a shelter where Major Mahadik used to live and he passed away as he was trapped. Army officers, who attended the funeral last week, said he was stationed at forward post along the border at a height of above 15,000ft and temperatures going as low as -15 degrees. An internal investigation is on by the Indian Army to ascertain the cause of the fire.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) on Monday invited bids for the operation and maintenance of the monorail corridor, for the third time in a year. The planning authority received a very poor response in the first two attempts to find a new contractor.

When tenders were floated for the first time in early 2017, bidders had reverted with problems in tender conditions, owing to which the conditions were relaxed. However, after tenders were floated the second time in October, the MMRDA received just a single bidder - ILFS. On November 9, two rakes of a monorail were charred in a fire at the Mysore colony station, after which the operations have been suspended till date.

A senior official from the MMRDA said, Since we got (only) a single response even after changing tender conditions, we had to bid again. We are expecting a good response now as once the entire corridor is functional, the monorails ridership will also see a boost.

The ridership for monorail phase-I (Chembur-Wadala) has been pegged at 17,000 -18,000 passengers per day and the MMRDA expects this to increase once the entire corridor is functioning. The second phase is from Wadala to Jacob Circle. However, till now, there is no clarity on when phase-1 will resume operations.

Since its inception in 2014, the monorail has been marred by disruptions and delays. Due to the delay in operationalising phase-2 of the corridor, as per initial agreements, the MMRDA has also slapped a fine of

Rs7.5 lakh per day on the current contractor - Malaysia-based Scomi. The penalty is being charged since January 1, 2018.

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The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) demolished illegal extensions of four popular restaurants in Bandra (West) and Andheri (West) over the weekend, freeing up 4,500 square meters of space.

The eateries are Cafe Bandra and Lacuna Bar in Bandra; and China Gate and Tap in Andheri (West). They were sent notices by officials during their routine inspection around three months ago. Cafe Bandra at Pali Hill had encroached about 600 sqm of open space, said an official

In November, the BMC took action against Lacuna Bar for building a dining area measuring 2,000 sqm. The owners encroached upon the space again and went to court, which struck down their petition. So, we have taken action against them again, said a civic official.

The BMC on Saturday demolished two eateries on New Link Road at Lokhandwala.

Assistant municipal commissioner Prashant Gaikwad told HT, Three months ago, we sent notices to China Gate and Tap located in the same building for illegal extensions. On December 30, we razed the front extension of Tap, and on Saturday, we removed the back extension and other illegal modifications. Unauthorised extensions at China Gate were also demolished.

While a manager at China Gate denied demolition and violations, a representative of Tap said only the smoking area was cleared. Despite repeated attempts , representatives of Cafe Bandra and Lacuna Bar remained unavailable for a comment.

After the Kamala Mills fire in which killed 14 people were killed on December 29, the civic body razed 722 illegal structures from December 30 to January 1.

Civic chief suspended the demolition drive and gave establishments a 15-day deadline to remove unauthorised extensions. The civic body has asked commercial establishments to follow the 35-point Fire Codified Requirement Manual within 15 days.
As the ongoing semester will end in the next few months, students are busy preparing for their examinations and the next phase of their academic and professional lives.

Not to be left behind, colleges are doing their bit to ensure that their students excel. From helping them update their curriculum vitae (CV) to putting together applications for higher education, institutes are leaving no stone unturned to make sure that their students prosper.

Towards the end of the academic year, we conduct workshops on different courses, especially for final year students. These workshops not only give career guidance to students, but also prepare them for job interviews, said Dinesh Panjwani, principal, RD National College, Bandra.

He added that the college put together a placement cell two years ago, which works throughout the year to help students find jobs they are interested in.

Many colleges are inviting experts from different fields to interact with students and guide them on life after graduation.

Students are aware of what they want and are always open to more information in those specific fields. Getting first-hand experience of any particular field from someone who has invested years in it is something that most students look forward to, said Madhu Nair, principal, Nirmala College, Kandivli.

He added that the college will be holding a series of interactive sessions between students and experts till February.

While preparing students for job interviews is an important aspect of these workshops, colleges have also realised that several students are eager to launch their start-ups.

Keeping this in mind, a handful of city colleges are mulling introduction of skill development workshops and part-time certificate courses for the benefit of students.

We are planning to start skill development certificate programmes in collaboration with other institutes to encourage entrepreneurship skills in students, said Sobhana Vasudevan, principal, RA Podar College, Matunga.

More colleges are being approached by their students seeking help in putting together their applications for admissions at international universities and colleges.

It is mandatory for colleges to be equipped with answers for questions students ask, especially for higher education and research-based courses. Our teachers help students struggling with recommendations they need to seek admission at international universities and colleges, said Naresh Chandra, principal, Birla College, Kalyan.

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The anti-corruption bureau (ACB) on Sunday arrested a police sub-inspector at the Meghwadi police station for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs10,000 from an accused who was arrested in a crime case. This is the second case within a fortnight of a police officer accepting bribe inside the police station premises.

According to the ACB, the complainant is a 38-year-old man who was arrested by Meghwadi police in Jogeshwari (East) in a case registered under section 326 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for grievous assault.

The man alleged that the investigating officer Sandeep Badhe, 35, a police sub-inspector from Meghwadi police station who had arrested him, was now demanding a bribe.

The complainant said Badhe asked him to cough up Rs30,000, failing which he would increase the charges against him from grievous assault to attempt to murder under section 307 of the IPC. Booking the complainant under section 307 would have attracted a more stringent punishment for him.

The ACB verified his complaint and then laid a trap. The victim went to the police station with Rs10,000 and after Badhe accepted it, the ACB team swooped in and arrested him.

Badhe has been booked under relevant sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The police are conducting a house search to find out if the accused has amassed valuables that are disproportionate to his known sources of income.

On December 27 last year, the Mumbai ACB had arrested a 37-year-old assistant police inspector (API) from Powai police station for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs50,000 from an accused to favour him in a crime case by filing a weak charge sheet in court.

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Inching closer towards commencement of the Navi Mumbai international airport, GVK Power & Infrastructure Ltd (GVKPIL), which won the contract, signed a concession agreement with City and Industrial Development Company (CIDCO), on Monday, at Mantralaya. Sources said construction of second airport is likely to begin in the six months.

The agreement was signed through a special purpose vehicle [a subsidiary company] Navi Mumbai International Airport Pvt Ltd (NMIAL).

GVKPIL through its subsidiary MIAL holds 74% shares of NMIAL, while CIDCO has the rest [26%]. The initial concession period is 30 years from the appointed date, which is extendable for another 10 years. This means that CIDCO has given us the authority to go ahead and build the airport, said a spokesperson from GVK.

The agreement was signed between GVK Reddy, executive chairperson of Mumbai International Airprot Pvt Ltd (MIAL), and Bhushan Gagrani, vice-chairperson and managing director, CIDCO, at Mantralaya. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis was present while signing the agreement.

Reddy said, With the continued support of the Central government, Maharashtra government, CIDCO and all our stakeholders, we are confident of creating and delivering the much-needed second airport for the twin cities of Mumbai and Navi Mumbai.

MIAL won the bidding process for the Navi Mumbai airport in February 2016. However, it received the letter of award (LoA) from CIDCO on October 25, 2017. The airport is said to become operational by 2019. Though the airport, with an area of 2,320 hectares, has been is the pipeline for several years, various permission and property dispute delayed the project.
Last week, the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) trust, the largest representative body of Indias Parsi-Zoroastrians, announced that its trustees and the officials of the B D Parsee General Hospital have unanimously decided to promote a new secular wing in the compound of the hospital.

The announcement said that a Zoroastrian couple, members of a business family based in Hong Kong, has agreed to donate 22.5 million dollars (about Rs142 crore) for the construction of the new hospital that will be operated by a prominent Indian hospital chain. The money earned from the secular hospital, which as the name suggests, will be open to all communities, will finance the old hospital which is exclusively for Parsis. As a clarification, the trust added that the land on which the new hospital is constructed will remain the property of the Parsi trust.

The explanation did nothing to pacify fears that the community was on the verge of losing another trust-held property to outsiders. The announcement has set off a furore among members of the worldwide Parsi diaspora. One person posted a comment on social media saying that the trusts were gifting away the property to a private company and wondered whether the donor was the broker who negotiated the deal. Another message on social media said that the community was kept in the dark about the transaction. To make things worse, in spite of three written requests, sent to the trustees of the Bombay Parsi Panchayet, they are refusing to make the agreement public another person wrote.

The hospital is located in Kemps Corner, one of the most expensive areas in south Mumbai, and the land, according to one estimate that is doing the rounds, is worth Rs2,000 crores. But the century-old hospital, set up to provide subsidised in some cases, free- medical treatment to Parsis, has been struggling to match its expenses to revenues and donations. Many community members are worried that the hospital will meet the same fate as the Parsi Lying-In Hospital, Fort, which has been closed for decades. The maternity hospital fell into disuse after the Parsi birth rate plummeted. The hospital was shut down and there is a proposal, similar to the one signed up for the Kemps Corner hospital, to allow a private agency to run it. At one time, there were announcements that the citys largest orthopaedic facility will come up in the premises.

At the B D Parsee General Hospital, the first plans for a secular wing was made around five years when a different set of trustees managed the BPP, but at that time the idea was to create a new trust to look after the section. The entry of a corporate hospital chain has set off suspicion that trust land belonging to the community has been signed off to a private company.

BPP trustees were not available for a comment. Former BPP chairman Dinshaw Mehta said that the deal was good. It is the need of the hour; we want to give Parsis the best medical facilities, said Mehta. But there has to be some transparency. They (trustees) can reveal just the highlights of the deal; otherwise the perception is that they are hiding things.

The deal is reportedly for 45 years. There is a confidentiality clause in the agreement, so the trustees have reasons for not making the deal public. There is no clarity on the terms and how Parsis are going to be affected, said Mehta. In the absence of information, all kinds of rumours unfortunately are floating around.

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The Shiv Sena on Monday continued its diatribe against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government over the law-and-order situation in Maharashtra following the Bhima Koregaon violence and the Kamala Mills compound fire.

An editorial in the Sena mouthpiece Saamana slammed Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for saying the law-and-order in the state was fine when the government has so far failed to arrest the accused in the Bhima Koregaon and Kamala Mills fire incidents.

Fadnavis, while addressing a curtain-raiser for an upcoming investment summit in Mumbai on Saturday, had said: Even today, the law-and-order situation in Maharashtra is absolutely good, there is no problem with it. Several industrial hubs across the state had witnessed unrest during last weeks Dalit protests.

Even after the riots in Bhima Koregaon and the subsequent protests that went out of control, the chief minister is saying with confidence that law and order in the state is good, and theres nothing to worry. We are happy, but the accused in the Kamala Mills compound fire are still at large, and who is putting pressure on the municipal commissioner? The state government has to give a reply to the people, the editorial in the Marathi daily said.

Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Saturday had raised questions about the ability of the states police machinery to apprehend the accused. There is a need to check whether the government is under political pressure to not the arrest the accused, Thackeray said. This statement came after civic chief Ajoy Mehtas statement that he was under political pressure to not take action against restaurants violating fire safety norms.

The Sena also took on the state government for announcing rewards for the three accused in exchange for information on the three partner-owners of the pub 1Above in Kamala Mills. The owners of 1Above are absconding after such an incident, and the police and the government have announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh to mock the victims of the fire. It means that the government is putting the responsibility of catching the accused on the people, it said.

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For better protection of Maharashtras wetlands, the state government has begun the process to declare at least one wetland in each district along the Konkan coastline as eco-tourism destinations.

Konkan commissioner Jagdish Patil directed collectors from Mumbai Suburban Palghar, Thane and Raigad to survey and select one wetland site each earlier this month. The collectors need to submit the location during the next meeting of the wetland grievance redressal committee (constituted by the Bombay high court (HC) in August 2016) later this month. After preliminary discussions, proposals for each location will be submitted and identified as eco-tourism zones.

Natural wetlands comprise creeks, estuaries, marshes, riverbanks, seashores, backwaters, and coral reefs. Manmade lakes, saltpans, reservoirs, abandoned quarries and dams are also considered as wetlands. Wetland destruction was banned in the state by the HC in 2012.

Wherever tourists come in contact with eco-sensitive zones, they get educated about the importance of such sites. With the right infrastructure and support from our tourism ministry, once these zones become tourist hotspots, we will be able to preserve these wetlands much better, said Patil adding, A clear example of such a zone is Melghat in Amravati, where poaching was rampant a decade ago and still is in some areas. However, after the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve was developed, such problems ceased to exist.

He added that there were three conditions for the selection of these wetlands  the area should be at least 60 hectare in size, it should host migratory bird or resident wetland bird population, and should be home to peculiar floral and faunal species. Satellite maps and wetland atlases are available to the district collectors to prioritise and choose the sites by the next meeting. Once proposals are ready, the state tourism department or regional tourist organisations will be roped in for infrastructure establishment, said Patil.

Other officials from the wetland committee said employment opportunities for local residents was an added benefit. The locations need to be accessible to a large number of tourists, and the current population residing there can help protect the site, assist tourists and generate revenue, said JR Gowda, member secretary of the HC appointed committee.

Environmentalists welcomed the move. Albeit the decision to do this is a decade late, but this is a good move. The best means for conservation is to draw people closer to such areas, by making them attractive and accessible, said Stalin D, director, NGO Vanashakti and member of the committee.

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There are two objects of medical education; to heal the sick, and to advance the science

- Charles H Mayo (Founder of the Mayo Clinic)

The bill to replace the Medical Council of India (MCI) with a National Medical Commission (NMC) has been referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health, for review within a month. Fierce debates on the intent and content of the bill continue to rage, as critics decry it as an assault on the medical profession, enthusiasts hail it as a long awaited redemption of medical education and supporters of reform seek revisions to remove infirmities in the bill.

As health systems world over move from physician-centric to patient-centric models of health care, medical education has to become responsive to the health needs of the people, while adopting innovations in pedagogy and practice and stimulating path breaking research. While the quality of medical education and research need improvement, the major failure in India has been in producing the medical graduates and specialists required to support the health system at all levels of care. While we also need to correct the shortages of nurses, allied health professionals and community health workers, the NMC provides an opportunity to commence reform of health education to provide health care with greater outreach, effectiveness, equity and empathy.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) was embroiled in controversy for several years before the Supreme Court intervened to dismantle an entrenched power structure. Attempts to recast medical education, by proposing a National Commission for Human Resources in Health (NCHRH) or amending the MCI Act, failed during the past decade. The NMC bill is a fresh attempt to remove the regulatory cobwebs that cling to medical education and repurpose it for strengthening the health system and stimulating productive research.

The bill envisages a 25-member commission, with mostly nominated members, operating through four subsidiary boards regulating undergraduate education, postgraduate education, medical assessment and rating, and ethics and medical registration. A Medical Advisory Council (MAC) guides the NMC and provides representation to states and union territories. The presence of all members of the NMC in the MAC, with a common chairman, endangers its independent advisory role.

A common National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET) will determine entry to undergraduate courses, while a National Licentiate Examination (NLE) at exit will both provide the permit to practice and determine selection to post-graduate courses. While the NLE enables standardisation, NEET will face the challenge of providing a level playing field to students schooled in diverse languages and varied curricula across the country. The parallel track of post-graduate education, governed by the National Board of Examinations (NBE), has been preserved with autonomy and equivalence.

The largely nominated nature of NMC membership has drawn criticism from the IMA, which espouses the ideal of self-regulation by elected representatives of the profession. However, the harsh reality of skewed elections and tarnished governance in the MCI has exposed the frailty of self governance. In contrast, the nominated boards of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the NBE have performed well. However, the federal structure of India must be better reflected in NMC membership.

Most controversy around NAC concerns the proposal to provide cross learning pathways between Allopathy, Ayurveda and Homeopathy. While cross learning is useful to promote complementarity, the IMA denounces bridge courses that draw non-allopathic graduates to allopathic practice, without the requirement of the NLE. Instead of undermining traditional medicine and treating non-allopathic healers as easily available substitutes for absent allopathic doctors, they should be adequately supported to practice what they were trained for. What is missing in the NMC is an inter-professional education platform, which connects medical, nursing and allied health professionals education. Our health system needs nurse practitioners, nurse anaesthetists , physician assistants, community health assistants, dialysis technicians and the like. Primary health services in particular should become less doctor-dependent.

The NMC overreaches in some assigned functions. Medical research is to be regulated, ignoring the role of the department of health research, the Indian Council of Medical Research, other science agencies and institutes, and universities in basic, translational, public health and clinical research. Strangely, the NMC has been asked to prepare a roadmap for healthcare infrastructure in the country, usurping the role of state and central health ministries.

The IMAs concerns include procedural relaxations related to the opening of new medical colleges; the nature and periodicity of inspections; the number of seats; fee fixation for only 40% of private medical college seats and recognition of foreign medical graduates.

There is clear government intent to encourage private investment in new medical colleges and increase production of medical graduates and specialists. While the objective is laudable, it is doubtful if these incentives will encourage private investment in the states that have very few medical colleges. The government has to accept responsibility for investing in new medical colleges, linked to upgraded district hospitals in these states.

K. Srinath Reddy is president, Public Health Foundation of India

The views expressed are personal
Even as the city registered 56 organ donations in 2017, the number of recipients in the waiting list continues to outnumber the number of organ donations in Pune.

According to the Zonal Transplant Coordination Committee (ZTCC), Pune branch, in 2017 there were 56 organ donations which saw 79 kidney donations, 53 liver donations, two donations of kidney and pancreas and nine heart donations. Yet the number of recipients in the waiting list continues to increase with doctors stressing on the need for more people to come forward and opt for organ donation.

As per statistics available with the ZTCC, presently, there are 780 people in the waiting list for kidney transplant, 280 for liver transplant, 13 for heart and 30 for kidney + pancreas. This highlights the deficiency in the number of organs donated and the ever-increasing waiting list.

In 2017, Pune was second in the state with 56 organ donations, while in 2016, the city was ranked number one in the state with 58 organ donations. The total number of organ donations in 2015 was as low as 16 in Pune which grew significantly to 58 in 2016.

Aarti Gokhale, central coordinator of Punes ZTCC, said that in the past two years, the body had worked extensively, both in public and private hospitals. Earlier, when we visited hospitals to sensitise people about organ donations, we found that most people did not have any clue about it. Many transplant coordinators said that they had trouble when they talked to relatives of brain dead patients about organ donation. They said most had trouble accepting the idea, she said.

Gokhale added, We started conducting regular medical education programmes for the hospital staff, especially the intensivists (a physician with advanced training and experience in treating critical illnesses). This may have resulted in the increased number of organ donations."

With a view to continue to creating awareness about organ donations, many hospitals have been conducting various programmes in the city emphasising on the importance of organ donation.

Recently, Aditya Birla Memorial Hospital felicitated both living donors and deceased donor families, who saved lives of the needy with end stage kidney, liver and heart disease. The families of deceased donors were lauded for their selflessness in turning their moments of personal tragedy into an occasion for saving lives.

Lt Gen Dr Akhil Nagpal, chief of clinical services at Aditya Birla Memorial Hospital said, "There is still severe deficiency in the number of organs donated and the ever-expanding waiting list. The decision taken by people for donating their organs must be lauded and many more should join this social movement.

21-year-old brain dead patient saves three lives

A 21-year-old brain dead patient helped save the lives of at least three people by donating his organs. The patient on Saturday donated his two kidneys and one liver to save lives. The retrieval of the organs was done at Sassoon General Hospital (SGH) making it the first retrieval of the year for the government-run medical establishment.

According to information from the officials of Sassoon General Hospital, the 21-year-old donor died of brain damage after suffering from an electric shock. The boy was admitted at Sassoon General Hospital since January 3 and was declared brain dead on January 6. The medical staff and doctors at the hospital convinced his family to donate his vital organs to save three more lives, said a statement released by the hospital.

Ajay Chandanwale, dean of BJ Medical College said, In the past one and half years, Sassoon General Hospital witnessed six organ retrievals, among which three were women and three were men. The major operation of retrieval as well as donation happened for free at Sassoon General Hospital giving respite to economically-challenged families.

On Saturday, the retrieved kidney was donated to Sassoon General Hospital, while the other was given to Aditya Birla Hospital in Pune. The liver was taken to Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital in Pune.

Doctors at Sassoon General Hospital said that the 40-year-old recipient at Sassoon General Hospital who received the kidney was in a critical stage as both his kidneys were not functional anymore.
Eight years ago, Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) had acquired 15-acre land of Gurmeet Singh and other members of his family in Bakarpur village on the Aerocity Road under the land pooling scheme to build IT City adjacent to Aerocity. Under the scheme, against each acre of his acquired land GMADA was to give him 1,100 yards of land in the developed area of IT City or Aerocity.

As the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) is preparing to acquire 4,500 acres in the periphery of the Chandigarh International Airport, the lines of worry have started deepening on the face of Bakarpur villages Gurmeet Singh and other residents here.

In the package of 1,100 yards, Singh was to be given plots measuring 500 yards, 300 yards , 200 yards, besides a showroom measuring 100 yards. But till date I dont have any idea which plots have been allotted to me and where is the location of my showroom, said Gurmeet Singh.

GMADA officials had to beat a hasty retreat at several places where villagers asked them about the promised plots in lieu of land.

Like me many others  Amarjeet Singh, Sohan Singh , Balihaar Singh, to name a few  are also suffering the same fate. A strong wave of resentment is building up in the villages on the periphery of Aerocity and Chandigarh international airport against the decision of the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) to acquire their land under the land pooling system.

GMADA has already announced its decision to acquire 4500 acres of land around the international airport. It is also conducting a social impact assessment of this initiative.

For the last several days, GMADA officials are trying to convince villagers to give their land to the authority. The 15 villages from which land will be acquired include Manoli, Chhatt, Badi, Sau, Kurdi, Kishanpur, Paton, Chau Majra, Matran, Bakarpur, Rurka, Safipur, Sainimajra (Premgarh), Naraingarh, and Kishanpura.

The GMADA chief administrator, Ravi Bhagat, said, This land is being acquired to develop the area as a commercial, residential and Institutional hub. Since the international airport is located nearby, there will be a lot of demand for commercial activity and big institutions in the area.

Those who opted for cash got it

Gurbachan Singh, former sarpanch of Sainimajra village said,  The land of many farmers of my village was also acquired and some of them had opted for land pooling system under which they were to be given plots in the developed area. Till now, they have not got the plots and have been visited GMADA office many times . 

He further said the ones that opted for the money have already got cash and purchased land elsewhere. GMADA officials now are embarrassed when people ask to first tell them about their previous plots, said Gurbachan. Besides, the land was acquired by several colonisers with the active collaboration of Punjab government for expansion of Mohali, from Sectors 80 to 115. Land of several villages was acquired for this purpose.

GMADA officials had to beat a hasty retreat at several places where villagers asked them about the promised plots in lieu of land.

Bitter experience

Amrik Singh, sarpanch of Paton village, fumed, Most of the small farmers are illiterate and want compensation in cash, which the authorities are not willing to provide. GMADA has no cash, it wants to do business without spending a paisa on the acquisition of land through the land pooling system.

Calling land pooling financially unviable for small farmers, he said it will take several years before the area gets fully developed and the real estate starts commanding a profitable price. The farmers will have to wait for many years to sell their land. What will small farmers who have barely two to three acres of land do to survive in the interregnum? Also, the government might take several years to allot the plots to them, he said.

Sources in GMADA said this opposition to land pooling is prompting the authorities to introduce a component of cash compensation of up to 15% for farmers. The proposal will be sent to the cabinet for approval in the coming months. Villagers said the Aerocity may take many years to develop. It takes a minimum of five years to develop a city, a farmer cant wait that long, said Satinder Singh of Manoli village.

Only property dealers support the land pooling system, the farmers are against it, he alleged.

We are clearing backlog

We have cleared a large backlog of cases in which farmers didnt get residential plots in the land pooling scheme and the process is still on. Its because of this that all the draw of lots that we have conducted recently have been done for farmers who opted for the land pooling scheme, said Ravi Bhagat. He added, We will make sure we dont repeat the mistakes that were made in the past.
Punjabi families dont look after their elders nor does the Punjab government.

These are findings of a HelpAge India study released on Monday. The study was conducted in eight districts of Punjab, Haryana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which were selected due to the large number of cases filed under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, a pioneering law meant for the welfare of the elderly.

We wanted to get a 360-degree view on this law, its working at the ground level, and understand how it was being implemented in the states, said Mathew Cherian, chief executive officer of HelpAge India.

The study, which selected the districts of Ludhiana and Amritsar due to the large number of cases filed there, found Punjab had the highest number of petitioners in the age group of 80-plus compared to only 9% in Haryana.

Most cases of physical abuse were also reported from Punjab.

Almost 70% of the cases in Punjab and Kerala were filed against sons, while in Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Kerala, 21% of the cases were against daughters. Most of the cases were filed at the office of the sub-divisional magistrate. The maintenance-related petitions were the highest in Punjab, while property-related petitions were high in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Half of the elderly surveyed reported experiencing abuse. The perpetrators were none other than their own offspring. 83% of the petitioners had already transferred their immovable property in favour of their children.

Almost 57% of the elderly attributed the reason for filing the petition to neglect by children (in Punjab, Haryana and Kerala), while 36% said they were propelled by physical abuse and mental torture (in Kerala and Tamil Nadu).

Also read | Chandigarh worst in India in crime against elderly

Punjabs poor record

Bhavneshwar Sharma, the state head for Punjab, Haryana and J&K, said Punjab has one of the lowest old age pensions in the country  its been recently revised to Rs 750 a month. Himachal Pradesh and Haryana provide old age pension of Rs 1,200 and Rs 1,600 a month, respectively.

Both Punjab and Haryana lack an old age policy, which entails a home for the aged in every district. As of now, Punjab has only one state-sponsored home for the elderly in Hoshairpur.

HelpAge has two homes in Patiala and Gurdaspur with 37 residents, who are housed free of cost.

The study found how Satwanti Kapoor (name changed), a 70-year-old widow living in a posh locality of Delhi with her only son, was forced to leave home for an ashram in Haridwar following constant verbal abuse by her daughter-in-law. She left in a huff, hoping that her son would try to trace her. But when he failed to do that, she got in touch with her brother-in-law. He too had been thrown out by his sons, who labelled him mentally unstable. Both filed a petition in the tribunal in Amritsar. Her son came for the first hearing from Delhi and agreed to pay her Rs 10,000 a month. Her eyes brimming with tears, she has made peace with life in an old age ashram in Amritsar. I have a family and grandchildren, but I have been banished, she says.

Justice denied

But not everyone is able to get justice. A 76-year-old hosiery unit owner from Ludhiana, who filed a case against his two sons asking them to vacate his two-storeyed house in 2016, is yet to get a response. He says it was on September 7, 2016, that he filed the case in the office of SDM (E), but his sons havent turned up for even one of the six hearings. The senior citizen has lost all hope. My sons must have been able to influence the system, says the old man, who was often physically abused by them.

In some cases, the administration turns a blind eye to the abuse and sides with the abusive children. This happened in the case of Sujan Singh (name changed), a 90-year-old juice seller of Amritsar. He approached the deputy commissioner after his son beat up his mother and threatened to kill Sujan. The DC sent him to the SDM, who finally ordered his sons to pay the couple Rs 2,000 a month each. The sons came back with a photo showing Sujan selling juice and the SDM told the sons to stop making the payments.

The solutions

Sharma blames the rising abuse of the elderly on the nuclear family setup. The elderly are treated as spent force. Many feel their parents are a financial burden they had rather not shoulder.

Sharma says HelpAge is seeking a universal pension of Rs 2,000 per head and highly subsidised or free medical treatment for seniors so that they are not treated as a burden by their families.

RK Garg, a Chandigarh-based RTI activist who has started Second Innings, a platform for senior citizens, says the government must set up special courts to do justice in such cases. I know of a senior citizen who cant muster the guts to approach the DC. There should be a helpline for such people. The executive powers given to the DC should be streamlined and coordinated with courts. The DC, the social welfare department and police stations should work in tandem.
After a rap from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) high command and apology from its official candidate Davesh Moudgil, outgoing mayor Asha Kumari Jaswal on Sunday backed out from the mayoral elections.

Even Ravi Kant Sharma, who filed his nomination for the post of senior deputy mayor as an Independent, has pulled out, bringing the five-day-long drama to an end. Both will withdraw their candidature before voting on Tuesday.

Speaking to HT, Jaswal said, Davesh is like my son and had deviated from the path. Now that he has apologised in written, I feel like a lucky mother who was able to put her son on the right path.

Cross-voting still a concern Even as Jaswal decided to withdraw her candidature, fears of cross-voting still remain. The BJP has 20 elected councillors in the 36-member House. While the nine nominated councillors wont be voting, MP Kirron Kher, who is the ex officio member, the Akali councillor and Independent councillor are in Moudgils favour. If the rebel BJP councillors indulge in cross-voting, Congress candidate Devinder Singh Babla  who has just his own and three other party councillors votes  might get catapulted to the post of mayor.

While claiming that she and other rebel councillors will vote in Moudgils favour, Jaswal said she will keep an eye on him so that he doesnt go on the wrong path.

Expressing his happiness, Moudgil said: From day one, I have been saying that she (Jaswal) is a motherly figure to me. Now, all BJP councillors will work towards winning all three seats.

Supported by at least 10 BJP councillors, Jaswal had filed her nomination for the post of mayor, soon after the party finalised Moudgils name on Wednesday. Even the partys official candidate for the post of deputy mayor, Vinod Aggarwal, had staged a coup and said he had filed his papers on behalf of the rebel group.

All these councillors belong to the camp of Chandigarh BJP chief Sanjay Tandon, who wanted to field former mayor Arun Sood.

Attacks Kirron, Jain

Earlier in the day, Asha held a meeting with 11 rebel councillors at her house in Sector 21.

During the meeting, which went on for nearly six hours, she is learnt to have accused Davesh of being corrupt and even called MP Kirron Kher and former MP Satya Pal Jain liars for misleading the party high command.

Later in the evening, Moudgil and Tandon also reached her house. Moudgil handed over a letter to her, in which he mentioned that he apologises for his mistakes and will not repeat them in future.

In fact, some councillors from Tandon camp had earlier lodged a complaint against Moudgil, accusing him of being involved in anti-party activities. This happened after Moudgil did not invite mayor Jaswal for inauguration of a sehaj safai kendra in Sector 47 in October last year and got it inaugurated by the municipal commissioner.

Tandon had also accompanied Jaswal to Delhi on Saturday to apprise the party high command of the situation, but it is learnt that senior BJP leaders told Jaswal to withdraw her nomination or face expulsion.

A senior party leader, not wishing to be named, said Tandon camp was just using pressure tactics as they want the next city BJP president to be from among them.

Both Tandon and Kher want a councillor owing allegiance to them to become the mayor as it will help them in getting the Lok Sabha ticket from Chandigarh for the 2019 elections. In 2014, Tandon was a strong contender but due to infighting in the party, Kher got the ticket.

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APALA MANDAL

Born: September 22, 2000

Badge of honour: Head girl, Delhi Public School, Chandigarh

Taking the initiative: She believes her generation is intelligent but stifled by injustice, corruption and cut-throat competition in society; she hopes youngsters will overcome these challenges to steer India ahead for we are capable of achieving far more with far less

What turning 18 means to me

Eighteen is just another number for me. Its a number that legally and socially confirms what our parents and teachers have been trying to instill in us: That our thoughts, ideas, actions and behaviour have repercussions and consequences. We have to be responsible for them.

What I want to be and why

I want to be a diplomat. I could be an Indian Foreign Service officer or Indias representative at the United Nations. I have a knack for resolving and preventing conflicts. Friends count on me as Im good at peacemaking so why not play that role at the highest level where it matters the most?

My idea of India

The youth of India have brilliant, amazing minds but they are stifled by the injustice, corruption and cut-throat competition in our society. They are frontrunners when it comes to demanding change but when asked to be the agents of that change, Indias youth takes a collective step backward. That fear, that apathy, that lethargy, scares me.

What makes me happy

My family is super supportive. Conversations with my mother, who is a scientist, sharing stories with my dad, who is also a biologist, and cracking jokes with my 13-year-old sister make me happy. Music makes me happy and Im fond of South Korean boy band BTS (the Bangtan Boys). Im learning Korean through online apps to appreciate the lyrics better. Im a humanities student and am fond of history and languages. I like reading historical fiction and The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple is a favourite.

What makes me angry

Im level-headed and dont lose my cool easily but if you insist Id say when people fail to keep their promise, it is upsetting. I give my word with a lot of gravity and I expect others to do so too.

Fear and fantasy

I fear that I wont be able to live up to the expectations of people and sometimes even myself.

Its my fantasy that one day I will return to Delhi Public School, Chandigarh, as a chief guest. I also want to travel the world and see the places Ive read so much about and already fallen in love with such as London, Athens, Seoul and Melbourne. Most people tend to skip Africa but I want to go there and discover Ghana.

Am I happy where I am?

Im happy now with my family but I know that following my dreams will take me to someplace happier. Im looking to take up a course in political science and international relations in Singapore. Ill return to India for sure because I want to take the civil services and opt for the Indian Foreign Service. To me, happiness is not something you have to achieve. You can feel happy during the process of achieving something.

What money means to me

Anyone who says that money is not important is living in denial. Money helps in fulfilling dreams and also filling the stomach. But there are some things more important than money. When it comes to choosing a job, Id rank satisfaction and security over the package Im offered.

What makes me proud of India

Im proud of how innovative, intelligent and resourceful Indians are. Once the Mars Orbiter Mission succeeded, we proved to the world that in science, like in every other field, Indians are capable of achieving far more with far less.

What I cant live without

I cant do without my friends and family. In this crazy, confused and occasionally terrifying world, they provide me confidence, clarity and support.

What social media means to me

Social media is a tool that can be used to achieve miracles. Crowdfunding is an example. Social media was created to facilitate human conversation not replace it. If used judiciously, it is a vital link.

The change youd like to see in your city

Chandigarh SSP (Traffic) Shashank Anand was at my school recently as a chief guest. I would urge our representatives in positions of power to be more open to meeting and interacting with the aam aadmi. It gives us the feeling that they are there for us and willing to help. I would also want Korean language lessons to be taught in Chandigarh and a restaurant that serves Korean cuisine.

What religion means to me

Religion is the path one chooses to be closer to ones God. Its a personal choice and should be respected as such. Different religions are like different paths to the same goal, that of inner peace. Religious chauvinism makes no sense. The idea that one path is better than the other is baseless. Even not having faith in any religion is a choice.

My role model and why

My mom Lolitika Mandal, an associate professor of biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Mohali, is my role model. As a scientist, she has one of the toughest and most demanding jobs but she never fails to balance home and work. She is always in the mood for a quick smile or a silly joke. I value what she once told me: If you want to get something done, youll find a way. But if you dont want to do something, youll find an excuse.

Change I want to see in India

I want the youth of India to shake off the lethargy and fatalistic approach towards changing the system. I want us to become the change we demand so vigorously. Theres a dearth of effective young leaders. Today, the leaders focus on economic minorities, caste, religion rather than the demands of the youth.

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Over the last four-five years, Rana Daggubati has been gaining and losing weight like its no big deal. After beefing for the Baahubali franchise, he lost muscle to play a navy officer in Ghazi. He lost some more weight to look leaner to play a money lender in Nene Raju Nene Mantri. Soon after the films release, he got back into fitness to complete some leftover portion of his upcoming period film 1945. For his upcoming trilingual film Haathi Mere Saathi, Rana has shed around 15 kg to play a mahout. He plays a character called Bandev and the films first look was unveiled on January 1, 2018.

After finishing Baahubali, I was aware that Id have to lose weight to play any character. So, I started the process slowly. To get in shape for Haathi Mere Saathi, I didnt eat non-veg for almost six weeks. I stopped weight training and did simple cardio exercises to shed the muscle. I lost almost 15 kg, Rana told Mid-Day. To be directed by Prabhu Solomon, the film is said to be a modern-day adaptation of Haathi Mere Saathi and itll be shot in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi.

Rana has an interesting line up of projects. He recently announced that hell play Travancore king Marthanda Varma. To be directed by K Madhu, the pre-production work on the project is already underway. In his other period film 1945, he plays a soldier in Netaji Subhash Chandra Boses Indian National Army.

Entering the new year with a great new story to tell. Introducing #Bandev from #HaathiMereSaathi #HaathiMereSaathiFL pic.twitter.com/7jITiEc82K  Rana Daggubati (@RanaDaggubati) December 31, 2017

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After vacationing with his wife Namrata Shirodkar and kids in Oman, superstar Mahesh Babu is back home and is ready to rejoin the sets of Bharath Ane Nenu, his next outing with director Koratala Siva. In the film, Mahesh plays a chief minister and hes paired with Kiara Advani, who makes her Telugu debut. Mahesh, whose last four out of five films bombed at the box-office, has bet big on the project and hes confident of striking gold at the box-office.

A fresh schedule starts from later this week in Hyderabad. A few scenes and a couple of songs will be shot in this schedule, a source told Hindustan Times. The entire shoot will be wrapped up by this month-end or by early February. Slated to hit the screens on April 27, the film will take Allu Arjuns Naa Peru Surya head on at the box-office. From March, Mahesh will commence work on his 25th film with Vamshi Paidipally, whose last outing was the heartwarming Oopiri. Mahesh also has a project with Trivikram Srinivas in his kitty. However, this project will only materialize towards the end of this year or early next year.

Mahesh had a ball of a time on his vacation. The pictures from the vacation are proof to the quality time he spent with his kids. Namrata took to her Instagram account to share the pictures. He paraglided with his son, and being the entertainer that he is, he also struck some goofy poses for the camera.

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Deep divisions have emerged within gurdwara managements in the Canadian province of Ontario over a decision by the Ontario Gurdwara Committee (OGC) to bar Indian officials from the places of worship, with several groups saying they will not back the move and calling for more consultations.

The Ontario Sikhs and Gurdwara Council (OSGC) held a meeting on Saturday at the Gursikh Sabha gurdwara in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, during which the ban on Indian officials figured in the discussions.

Former OSGC president and council member Harbans Singh Jandali, who was at the meeting, told the Hindustan Times, We have not imposed any ban because this isnt issue for us.

Asked about the OGCs decision, he said, That is their opinion, it is up to them. We have never seen this interference.

He was referring to the OGCs claim that Indian officials were interfering in the affairs of gurdwaras and the Sikh community and making it one of the reasons for the ban.

The OGC, meanwhile, has doubled down on the ban. In a statement, it said that due to increased interference from Indian consular and government officials, it was felt that this notice be put in writing so gurdwaras can place this in plain view.

There also appears to be differences within the community on this matter.

Yudhvir Singh Jaswal, group editor of Y Media Group and host of popular talk shows, said audience members who called in had a mixed response to the OGCs decision. Its safe to say that opinion is divided, he said.

He said certain people are welcoming (the decision), some opposing. He added, They want more consultation on the issue. People are fearing more visa issues and they wonder whether this will further affect relations between India and Canada.

The OGC statement, though, underscored one reality of the decision: That representatives of India were not welcome at many gurdwaras for years and the announcement on December 30 was to formalise a long-standing policy. As far as Indias engagement with many hardline gurdwara managements goes, the situation on the ground is unlikely to alter.

The OGC move may set off a chain reaction within Canada and beyond its borders. Other than gurdwaras in Ontario, a statement issued by the OGC also stated that three gurdwaras in Quebec province are part of the coordinated effort to boycott Indian officials. OGC office-bearers believe similar measures could be undertaken by gurdwara associations in provinces such as British Columbia and Alberta.

Meanwhile, the hardline group Sikhs for Justice has claimed that 96 managements of gurdwaras across the US have passed a resolution banning the entry of Indian diplomats and individuals representing Indian interests in the gurdwaras.

A statement said the Sikhs in America, the Sikh Coordination Committee of East Coast (SCCEC) and American Gurdwara Prabhandik Committee (AGPC) spearheaded the resolution.

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Swedish clothing giant Hennes and Mauritz on Monday apologised and removed an advertisement of a black child after the company was accused of being racist on social media.

A photo on the companys online website of a black boy wearing a green hoodie with the inscription coolest monkey in the jungle triggered outrage among observers.

Whose idea was it at @hm to have this little sweet black boy wear a jumper that says coolest monkey in the jungle? style blogger Stephanie Yeboah tweeted on Sunday.

You do know that monkey is a known racial slur to black people right? she added.

The image has now been removed from all H&M channels and we apologise to anyone this may have offended, the company told AFP.

A generic photo of the hooded sweatshirt without the modelling child is still available online.

H&M is not the only major company to be hit by an advertisement scandal in recent years.

Spanish clothing brand Zara in 2014 removed a striped pyjamas with a yellow star after facing outrage over its resemblance to clothes worn by Jewish prisoners in concentration camps.

And in October last year, personal care brand Dove apologised after it was accused of racism for airing a commercial showing a black woman turning into a white woman after removing her top.
There were no major surprises as Prime Minister Theresa May began the process of tweaking her cabinet on Monday at the start of a new year that will see defining talks in Brussels on the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.

May, who had a difficult 2017  described as annus horribilis  when she lost the Conservative partys majority in the general election and then lost as many as three cabinet ministers, among other setbacks, hopes to give a fresh look to her team.

Downing Street called it a refresh of her ministerial team, but key ministers responsible for Brexit talks  David Davis, Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond  remained unchanged in their posts. Home secretary Amber Rudd too remained in her position.

There was speculation that two Indian-origin Conservative MPs, Rishi Sunak and Suella Fernandes, would be inducted as junior ministers to give wider representation to ethnic minorities. Sunak and Fernandes were first elected in 2015 and re-elected in the 2017 polls.

MP Rehman Chisti, a former advisor to late Pakistan Peoples Party leader Benzair Bhutto, was named one of nine new vice-chairpersons of the ruling party. He shares the communities role with Helen Grant.

According to schedule, the UK is expected to leave the EU by March 29, 2019, which makes 2018 a crucial year to put in place several legislative and other measures, including norms for the post-Brexit stay of 3 million EU citizens here and about 1.5 million Britons in EU countries.

Justice secretary David Lidlington was made Cabinet Office minister, a post held until recently by Mays confidante Damian Green, who was sacked following a row over his accessing porn on office computers and his related statements.

Communities secretary Sajid Javed was retained in the post but housing was added to his portfolio, reflecting Mays intention to focus more on the sector in view of a growing crisis of social housing.

Brandon Lewis, who was immigration minister, was moved as chairman of the Conservative Party.

The reshuffle was continuing on Monday evening and appointments at the junior ministerial level were expected to be made on Tuesday.

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Iran on Sunday urged Muslim nations to forge closer cooperation to counter the US policy of seeking to create division among them.

The US dishonest, duplicitous and divisive policy towards Muslim countries, including Iran and Pakistan, requires that they bolster cooperation against the US in addition to maintaining vigilance and taking preventive measures, Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Irans Supreme National Security Council, was quoted by the Press TV as saying.

Shamkhani made the remarks during a meeting with Pakistans National Security Adviser Nasser Khan Janjua, whose country has recently come under criticism by US President Donald Trump.

We will not allow some countries to affect relations between the two countries through sending weapons and hiring terrorists to create insecurity on their borders, Shamkhani said.

He also highlighted the need of lifting the Saudi Arabia blockade on Yemen, saying Muslim countries and the international community support political talks among Yemeni groups as a way to end the bombardment and siege of the country by the Saudi-led military coalition.

For his part, Janjua urged Muslim countries to exercise vigilance against foreign conspiracies hatched to increase the rift among them.

He emphasized that Islamabad would seek to develop its security and economic cooperation with Tehran.
The activities of the Islamic State are on the rise in Sindh and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan but most of the terror attacks in the country in 2017 were carried out by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), according to a new report from a think tank.

The Pakistan Security Report 2017, released by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) on Sunday, said the IS claimed responsibility for six of the deadliest attacks that killed 153 people.

The IS has claimed responsibility for just six terrorist attacks in the country, but they were the most deadliest ones, such as attacks on the convoy of Senate deputy chairman Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, Sehwan shrine, Shah Noorani shrine in Lasbela, Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta and Dargah Pir Rakhyal Shah in Fatehpur area of Jhal Magsi district and the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals, PIPS official Muhammad Ismail Khan told the Dawn newspaper.

There is a need to take the matter more seriously because there is a possibility that foreign fighters would come to Pakistan in near future as things are continuously changing in the Middle East, he added.

The report further said that despite a 16% decline in terror attacks in 2017 as compared to the previous year, the TTP and its affiliates posed the strongest threat, followed by separatist groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.

The report said such realities require concerted efforts and a revision of the controversial National Action Plan, which was framed by the government to fight terror after Taliban fighters stormed an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014 and killed nearly 150 people, most of them children.

According to the report, militant, nationalist or insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terror attacks in 64 districts of Pakistan last year. A total of 815 people were killed and 1,736 were injured by these attacks.

There was, however, a decrease of 16% in the number of attacks over the previous year while the number of people killed decreased by 10%.

As many as 213, or 58%, of these attacks were carried out by the TTP, its affiliates such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other religious militant groups. A total of 186 people were killed in these attacks.

Separatist groups, mostly in Balochistan, were responsible for 138 attacks, or 37% of the total, killing 140 people. As many as 19 terror attacks were sectarian-related, in which 71 people were killed and 97 injured.

Compared to the figures for 2016, cross-border attacks in the country increased by a daunting 131%, according to the report. A total of 188 lives were lost and around 348 people were injured in these attacks.

Security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016.

National Security Adviser Nasser Khan Janjua, in an interview in the report, revealed that a national security policy has been documented and circulated internally in the government. Another interview with the national coordinator of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (NACTA), Ihsan Ghani, revealed that a new counter-extremism policy will be announced this year.
An Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted Giuseppe Orsi, the former president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, over charges of alleged bribes paid in exchange for a Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal to sell 12 AgustaWestland helicopters to the Indian government.

Milans third court of appeal also acquitted Bruno Spagnolini, former CEO of the companys helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, who had also been handed a four-year jail term on the same charges, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Orsi was arrested in 2014 and resigned as chief executive of Finmeccanica which was later renamed as Leonardo.

He was at the helm of AgustaWestland when the deal was struck and was suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes.

Orsi had been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for false accounting and corruption.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of 12 luxury helicopters to India.

The two were accused of international corruption and false invoicing in relation to bribes exchanged for the contract with India.

Both were cleared on charges of committing international corruption at the first-instance trial in 2014 but convicted of false invoicing and sentenced to two years in prison.

In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considered definitive until the appeals process has been exhausted.

Both appealed against the conviction, while the prosecution appealed against the acquittal on the corruption charge.

In December 2016, the supreme court of cassation ordered a repeat of the appeals trial.

India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanicas British subsidiary AgustaWestland in January, 2014 for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

Indias defence ministry had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after the arrest of Orsi and Spagnolini by Italian investigators in connection with the case.

In 2010, India had inked the deal to acquire 12 three- engine AW-101 helicopters from AgustaWestland for VVIP use.

In view of the corruption charges, India also barred Finmeccanica and its group companies from participating in any new programme of the defence ministry.

The CBI in September last year charge sheeted former IAF Chief S P Tyagi in a Delhi court along with nine others for bribery in the case.

They were charge sheeted for offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the IPC in the case relating to alleged bribery of Rs 450 crore.

The CBI alleged there was an estimated loss of Euros 398.21 million (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on February 8, 2010, for the supply of VVIP choppers worth Euros 556.262 million.
The deep foundation testing for Dubai Creek Tower, which is set to eclipse the Burj Khalifa, the worlds tallest structure, was successfully completed last month as experts cleared the skyscrapers complex design.

Fugro, a Dutch multinational company that provides geo-technical and survey services, completed the testing for the 928-metre (3,045-foot) structure being built by Emaar Properties in the Dubai Creek Harbour complex.

It is designed to be almost 100 metres (322 feet) taller than the 828-metre (2,717-foot) Burj Khalifa, which has been the worlds tallest building since it was completed in 2010.

Emaar Properties released photos last year showing parts of the new towers 236-foot-deep foundation that will be topped with 1.59 million cubic feet of concrete. Reports have suggested that the structure will be completed in time for the Dubai Expo 2020.

The testing and monitoring for the foundation of the Dubai Creek Tower, which will have a central concrete column supported by a network of steel cable stays, was done between June 2016 and August 2017 by Fugro.

Fugro carried out one of the most comprehensive geotechnical investigations in the region. We then tested the in-situ performance of the proposed foundations in order to optimise the final design of the core and the cable anchorage foundation design, said Joyshwin Sumputh, the service line manager for Fugro.

Emaar awarded the contract for the Dubai Creek Tower to France-based Soletanche Bachy in June 2016.

This is probably one of the most challenging and demanding buildings under construction in the world, said Vincent Leblois, the project manager for Soletanche Bachy.

Emaar Properties have described the Dubai Creek Tower as a monument to the world whose design was inspired by the lily flower and traditional minarets. The tower was designed by neo-futuristic Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava. Every day following sunset, the tower will emit a beacon of light from its peak.

The pile foundations for the gravity-defying structure, a joint venture of Emaar Properties and Dubai Holding, have been completed and the developers say the tower will elevate the citys position as a world-leading metropolis of the future.

Located minutes away from Dubai international airport, the Tower will have several observation decks with 360-degree views of Dubai Creek Harbour and the city. The tower also overlooks the Ras Al Khor wildlife sanctuary and will be close to the worlds largest shopping mall, which too will be built by Emaar Properties.

The total built-up area of the mall is expected to be 3 million square metres, including 1.7 million square metres of retail area. By comparison, the worlds current largest mall  Emaars Dubai Mall  has a total area of 1.12 million square metres.
No one in the White House questions the mental stability of Donald Trump, US top envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said in response to an allegation against the American President in a controversial book.

Indian-American Haley, the first-ever Cabinet-ranking official in any presidential administration, defended staffers in the Trump administration as loyal and respecting.

Haleys defence of Trump comes after the publication of the book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by journalist Michael Wolff, in which he claims to have interviewed more than 200 people familiar with the purported chaos inside the Oval Office.

In the book, Wolff writes that people around Trump regularly question his intelligence and fitness for office.

I know those people in the White House. These people love their country and respect our president... No one questions the (mental) stability of the president, Haley said Sunday.

I cant vouch for anything like that. I dont know if it was 200 interviews with Steve Bannon, or if it was 200 interviews with himself, but I can tell you, I know these people. I work with these people, she said.

Trump, 71, has repeatedly slammed the book as fake, describing it as full of lies.

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! Trump said in a tweet.

The Trump administration has been dealing with the fallout of the book since it hit the stores on Friday.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week, this is a man, he didnt become the president by accident, Haley said.

We need to be realistic at the fact that every person, regardless of race, religion, or party, who loves the country, should support this president. Its that important, she said.

Haley said she was in constant communication with not only with the president but also with people around him.

Im around them all the time. I see these people put everything they have got into their jobs and into respecting and trusting the president. If they didnt, they wouldnt be there, she said.

Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart, Trump tweeted on Saturday.

Earlier, White House aide Stephen Miller described the book a grotesque work of fiction.
A suspected militant on Monday divulged that there was a plan to storm the Akshardham Temple and disrupt the Republic Day parade on January 26 in the national capital.

During his hours long interrogation by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), Bilal Ahmad Wani revealed about the terror-attack plan.

The ATS said, Wani disclosed that he along with two of his companions were planning to attack Akshardham temple and disrupt the January 26 parade.

The trio lodged into the Al Rashid Guest House on January 2 near Jama Masjid.

The Uttar Pradesh ATS and Delhi Police reached the hotel and found that Wanis friends, identified as Mudsir Ahmed Wah and Mohammad Ashraf, vacated the room on January 6 night.

A high alert has been sent in search of the alleged absconding terrorists.

Security has also been beefed up in Delhi-NCR, ahead of the Republic Day celebrations.

Wani, 32, a resident of Dialgam, Anantnag tehsil of South Kashmir, was detained by the Government Railway Police (GRP) for travelling without a ticket in Shatabdi Express.

He was handed over to the ATS on Sunday.

Police have recovered Aadhaar cards and several documents from his possession.
US President Donald Trump postponed Monday his much-talked about Fake News Awards to the mainstream media for dishonesty and bad reporting to January 17.

The awards ceremony was supposed to be held Monday.

Trump upon his return from the presidential retreat of Camp David Sunday tweeted about the new date of the one- of-its-kind awards to various media houses.

The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday, he tweeted.

The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated! he said.

Trump had, on January 2, announced that he would give away awards to media houses for dishonesty and bad reporting.

I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 oclock. This would be one of its kind media award by the US president. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned! he had tweeted.

Trump had coined the term Fake News during his presidential campaign, targeting media houses for biased news.

He very often identifies CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post as fake media.

In November, he tweeted about a competition among news networks for the Fake News Trophy, excluding the Fox News.

We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!, he wrote on the micro-blogging site on November 27.

In an email to supporters of the president on December 28, the Trump campaign had sought nomination for the King of Fake News trophy.

At President Trumps request, we are holding a contest to name the 2017 KING of Fake News. And we want to hear from you, it said.

The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people. Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEYRE WRONG, it wrote the supporters.

Noting that Americans were sick and tired of being lied to, insulted, and treated with outright condescension, the Trump Campaign said, Thats why President Trump is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year. Theres no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda.

As per the Trump Campaign list, the competition for King of Fame news is between three news organisations.

ABC News MISTAKENLY reported that candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election, it said.

CNN MISTAKENLY reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks, it wrote.

TIME MISTAKENLY reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, the Trump Campaign said, asking the participants to let the President know if there is another story you think should be crowned as the 2017 KING of Fake News.
President Donald Trumps former strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday sought to back away from derogatory comments ascribed to him about Trumps son in a controversial book that sparked White House outrage and could threaten his job.

Bannon, who was ousted from the White House in August, was quoted in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by journalist Michael Wolff, as saying a June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians attended by Donald Trump Jr. and his fathers top campaign officials was treasonous and unpatriotic.

The president said Bannon had lost his mind, and the White House suggested the hard-right news site Breitbart News should part ways with him as its executive chairman.

Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, Bannon said in a statement released on Sunday, adding that his comments were directed at Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign manager, and not aimed at the presidents son.

I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency, Bannon said.
The US government announced Monday the end of protected status for about 200,000 Salvadorans in the country since before 2001, a move that threatens tens of thousands of well-established families with children born in the United States.

Homeland Security Department secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced the end of the 17-year-old temporary protected status (TPS) for the Salvadorans, which had shielded them from deportation ever since two major earthquakes rocked El Salvador in early 2001.

They were given 18 months to leave or be deported, enough time that a legislative solution could be crafted by Congress to allow them to stay.

Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years, said the DHS.

The move came in the wake of the termination of similar TPS protections for 59,000 longtime resident Haitians and 5,300 Nicaraguans late last year, after having been allowed to set deep roots inside the United States for decades.
Labour Youth is calling on the Minister for the Environment to reconsider his reappointment of Conor Skehan as Chair of the Housing Agency.

Labour Youth Chairperson, Chloe Manahan has expressed "extreme concern over the appointment of anyone who considers the current housing and homelessness crisis as normal and accuses families of 'gaming' the system".

Commenting on the reappointment of Conor Skehan as Chair of the Housing Agency, Chloe Manahan said: To see Mr. Skehans reappointment for another year is frankly frightening.

"Normalising homelessness and victim blaming those who live on the streets and in hotels are not the types of behaviour the Irish people expect to see from a person whose role was created to resolve the housing crisis in Ireland.

"Following a year where the government underdelivered on promises of building new homes and housing people living in hotels and family hubs, this move has confirmed our fears that a blase policy on housing is set to continue in 2018.

The comments made by Conor Skehan over the last weeks and months were both incorrect and deeply offensive. In reappointing him, Minister Eoghan Murphy and an Taoiseach Leo Varadkar have tacitly endorsed those totally unacceptable remarks.

Mr Skehan has not effected adequate progress in his role and has continuously offended victims of homelessness, those working to alleviate the crisis as well as wider Irish society. We strongly encourage Minister Murphy to reconsider his reappointment."
The former attorney general and businessman, who passed away last night, has been described as having been "one of the most outstanding personalities in modern Irish life".

The 71-year-old Dubliner was a member of the Fine Gael party and at one time back in the early 1970s ran for the party but failed to win seat.

He was a qualified barrister and was the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration until last year.

Sutherland, who once scooped the European Person of the Year Award, was founding Director-General of The World Trade Organisation and was also a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs International (19952015).

Irish President Michael D. Higgins leads the tributes this morning, describing Peter Sutherland as a great advocacy on behalf of migrants.

Labour Leader Brendan Howlin said: "Peter was an Irish giant on the international stage but a man who never forgot where he came from.

"While we may have had political differences his commitment to internationalism and multilateralism through his career was consistent and deeply felt.

"At this difficult moment I and the Labour Party send our condolences to his family, his friends and his political family."



Fianna Fail leader Michael Martin all paid tribute, saying: I was very saddened to learn of the passing of Peter Sutherland this morning. Peter made an outstanding and distinguished contribution to public life in his capacity as an Attorney General, European Commissioner and first Director-General of the World Trade Organisation.

"In more recent times as the UN Special Representative for International Migration he was uncompromising in highlighting the rights of migrants and refugees.

He was a champion of free trade and fair competition. He had a keen intellect and understood the changing nature of global trade and economy.

Peters dedication to public service was not only confined to his work here in Ireland. In his capacity as European Commissioner for Competition he revolutionised competition and trade laws.

"For example, the liberalization of the EU aviation sector owes much to his work as EU Commissioner."

He adds: Personally, in my capacity as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Minister for Foreign Affairs I had the opportunity to meet with Peter on many occasions. His commitment to Ireland was always constant.

"He advised successive Governments on global trends and always looked out for opportunities for Ireland.

"When I established the Global Irish Economic Forum he was an early and committed participant.

"He was a true patriot who had a great love for his country irrespective of his success on the world stage."

Here's a video clip of Peter being interviewed by Gay Byrne:


It was both an emotive and triumphant night at the Golden Globes, as the awards show was dominated by the Time's Up campaign against sexual harassment, abuse and gender discrimination. Women at the awards show wore black to show their support for the #MeToo campaign, and many of the speeches referenced the recent revelations that have racked Hollywood, starting with Seth Meyers opening speech, where the late night host declared Its 2018, marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isnt. Its gonna be a good year!

Meyers continued, For the male nominees in the room tonight, this is the first time in three months it wont be terrifying to hear your name read out loud. Did you hear about Willem Dafoe? Oh, God, no! He was nominated. Dont do that! Dont do that.

Meyers poked fun at Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, and paid homage to some of the nominated films of the night, including Jordan Peele Daniel Kaluuya is nominated for best actor for his work in Get Out. Daniel plays a young man lured to an event full of aging white people desperate to reclaim their youth, and  The host paused, looked around the room and dramatically cried Oh, my God, Daniel, its a trap! Get out!

Oprah was receiving the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille award last night, and in the true spirit of Oprah, Meyers decided to put some good intentions and aspirations out into the universe, saying, in 2011 I told some jokes about our current president at the White House Correspondents Dinner  jokes about how he was unqualified to be president  and some have said that night convinced him to run. So if thats true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes! And Hanks! Where is Hanks? You will never be vice president! You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.

Oprah was the first Black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award, and her speech was triumphant and empowering, paying homage to other women of colour who had fought to overcome oppression.

Her inspirational, uplifting speech discussed race and gender and the fight for equality, and began by remembering watching Sidney Poitier winning an Oscar, becoming the first Black man to do so. She continued, In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille award right here at the Golden Globes and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award.

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Oprah also told the story of Recy Taylor, a woman who fought for justice in the Jim Crow era after she was raped, and linked Taylors fight for justice with the #MeToo campaign, and women everywhere, in all industries, who had survived gender discrimination and sexual violence.

I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue, Oprah said passionately. They're the women whose names we'll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they're in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They're part of the world of tech and politics and business. They're our athletes in the Olympics and they're our soldiers in the military.

As she was cheered on by the audience, Oprah asserted that "I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me too' again."

As the awards were handed out, it turned into a triumphant night for the Irish, as Saoirse Ronan deservedly won Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her role as the ambitious, angsty and assertive teen in Greta Gerwigs Lady Bird, giving a shout-out to her mother who was Face Timing into the awards during her acceptance speech. I just want to say how inspirational it's been to be in this room tonight," said Ronan. She thanked "all of the women who I love so much in my own life who support me every single day".

Lady Bird also won Best Picture  Musical or Comedy at the awards show, and director Greta Gerwig thanked Ronan and co-star Laurie Metcalf, calling them both goddesses.

London-Irish director Martin McDonagh also had a fantastic night, as his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was nominated for six awards and was the biggest winner on the night, winning four awards, including Best Motion Picture - Drama.

McDonagh also won the Best Screenplay award for his searing study of a mother angrily grieving the rape and murder of her daughter, with actors Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell winning Best Actress - Drama and Best Supporting Actor respectively for their performances in his Oscar-tipped film.

When Frances McDormand accepted her award for Best Actress, she gave a fiery feminist speech, saying, As many of you know, I keep my politics private. But it was really great to be in this room and to be part of a tectonic [shift] in our industry power structure. Trust me, she continued, the women in this room tonight are not here for the food. Were here for the work.

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Gary Oldman won Best Actor - Drama for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in WWII biopic Darkest Hour, while Allison Janney won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of LaVona Golden, the mother of controversial ice skater Tonya Harding, in I, Tonya. Actor-director James Franco was the Best Actor - Musical or Comedy winner for his film The Disaster Artist.

And the main directing award of the night came with a nicely placed dig from Natalie Portman, who calmly said And here are all the male nominees, before introducing the five men up for the award.

Guillermo Del Toro took home the award for Shape of Water, beating out Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Ridley Scott (All the Money in the World), Steven Spielberg (The Post.)

Barbara Streisand also called out the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for their historical lack of recognition of women directors, coming onstage to present the final award of the night, Best Picture  Drama. Backstage I heard they said I was the only woma to get the best director award, mused Streisand, and you know, that was 1984: That was 34 years ago. Folks, times up! she said, invoking the movement of the same name. We need more women directors and more women to be nominated for best director. There are so many films out there that are so good directed by women.

Streisand did finish on an inspiring note, remarking Im very proud to stand in a room with people who speak out against gender inequality, sexual harassment, and the pettiness that has poisoned our politics, she said. Im proud that our industry, faced with uncomfortable truths, has vowed to change the way we do business.

See the full list of winners below:

Best Motion Picture  Drama

Call Me By Your Name

Dunkirk

The Post

The Shape of Water

WINNER: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy

The Disaster Artist

Get Out

The Greatest Showman

I, Tonya

WINNER: Lady Bird

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Best Motion Picture  Animated

The Boss Baby

The Breadwinner

WINNER: Coco

Ferdinand

Loving Vincent

Best Motion Picture  Foreign Language

A Fantastic Woman

First They Killed My Father

WINNER: In the Fade

Loveless

The Square

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture  Drama

Jessica Chastain, Mollys Game

Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water

WINNER: Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Meryl Streep, The Post

Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture  Drama

Timothee Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name

Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread

Tom Hanks, The Post

WINNER: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour

Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy

Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul

Helen Mirren, The Leisure Seeker

Margot Robbie, I, Tonya

WINNER: Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird

Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture  Musical or Comedy

Steve Carell, Battle of the Sexes

Ansel Elgort, Baby Driver

WINNER: James Franco, The Disaster Artist

Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman

Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture

Mary J. Blige, Mudbound

Hong Chau, Downsizing

WINNER: Allison Janney, I, Tonya

Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird

Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

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Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture

Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project

Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name

Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water

Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World

WINNER: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Director  Motion Picture

WINNER: Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk

Ridley Scott, All the Money in the World

Steven Spielberg, The Post

Best Screenplay  Motion Picture

Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, The Shape of Water

Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird

Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, The Post

WINNER: Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Aaron Sorkin, Mollys Game

Best Original Score  Motion Picture

Carter Burwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

WINNER: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water

Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread

John Williams, The Post

Hans Zimmer, Dunkirk

Best Original Song  Motion Picture

Home, Ferdinand

Mighty River, Mudbound

Remember Me, Coco

The Star, The Star

WINNER: This Is Me, The Greatest Showman

Best Television Series  Drama

The Crown

Game of Thrones

WINNER: The Handmaids Tale

Stranger Things

This Is Us

Best Television Series  Musical or Comedy

Blackish

WINNER: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Master of None

SMILF

Will & Grace

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Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

WINNER: Big Little Lies

Fargo

Feud: Bette and Joan

The Sinner

Top of the Lake: China Girl

Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Jessica Biel, The Sinner

WINNER: Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies

Jessica Lange, Feud: Bette and Joan

Susan Sarandon, Feud: Bette and Joan

Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies

Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Robert De Niro, The Wizard of Lies

Jude Law, The Young Pope

Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks

WINNER: Ewan McGregor, Fargo

Geoffrey Rush, Genius

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series  Drama

Caitriona Balfe, Outlander

Claire Foy, The Crown

Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce

Katherine Langford, 13 Reasons Why

WINNER: Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaids Tale

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series  Drama

Jason Bateman, Ozark

WINNER: Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us

Freddie Highmore, The Good Doctor

Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul

Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series  Musical or Comedy

Pamela Adlon, Better Things

Alison Brie, GLOW

WINNER: Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Issa Rae, Insecure

Frankie Shaw, SMILF

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series  Musical or Comedy

Anthony Anderson, Blackish

WINNER: Aziz Ansari, Master of None

Kevin Bacon, I Love Dick

William H. Macy, Shameless

Eric McCormack, Will & Grace

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Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

WINNER: Laura Dern, Big Little Lies

Ann Dowd, The Handmaids Tale

Chrissy Metz, This Is Us

Michelle Pfeiffer, The Wizard of Lies

Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

David Harbour, Stranger Things

Alfred Molina, Feud: Bette and Joan

Christian Slater, Mr. Robot

WINNER: Alexander Skarsgard, Big Little Lies

David Thewlis, Fargo
WASHINGTON - If President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are right, the $1.5 trillion tax cut plan they sped into law last month will make individuals and businesses more prosperous. Paychecks will grow. Stocks will surge further. Consumers will spend more. The economy will accelerate.

Critics counter that the tax plan will mainly enrich the already wealthy and swell corporate profits while leaving most ordinary households with comparatively modest tax cuts - and, eventually, tax hikes.

So how best to judge who's right?

As soon as summer, it may become clear whether the tax cuts have unleashed stronger consumer spending. But it could take years to know whether many people are enjoying the generous pay raises.

Here are five ways to assess whether the tax plan is delivering on its promises:

Are you spending more?

The tax cuts were sold as a way to turbocharge spending on cars, appliances, home projects and splurges out at restaurants. All that is tracked by the government as retail sales, which are up a decent 4.2 percent year to date.

By February, workers should begin receiving more take-home pay because the tax cut means that a lesser portion of their income will be withheld for taxes. With more money in their pockets, consumers typically spend more. If that pattern holds true again, spending at retailers could begin rising within months.

Yet there's also the risk that the tax cuts - spread out over 26 paychecks this year - might feel too paltry for some Americans to notice or care enough to step up their spending. Others might be inclined to use their tax savings to pay health care or child care costs, in which case the boost to retail spending - the economy's primary fuel - might not budge much.

More stock gains?

Trump, a billionaire businessman, treats the stock market as an emblem of his success. He boasts frequently about record high stock indexes as proof that his economic agenda has already cheered investors, emboldened businesses and enriched most Americans.

The Standard & Poor's 500 stock index has climbed more than 22 percent since Trump's 2016 election. Many stock analysts have suggested that the stock market has likely priced in much of the higher profits that might result from slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. But Gary Cohn, Trump's top economic adviser, has asserted that the stock market had yet to fully account for how much the tax cuts would boost profit margins.

Even if stock market keeps rising, it would intensify what critics say the tax cuts would do overall: reward the rich and neglect pretty much everyone else, thereby further widening the nation's wealth gap. Less than half of U.S. households own any stocks, even in retirement accounts.

A more robust economy?

Trump administration officials have asserted that the tax cuts would propel the economy ahead at a sustained 3 percent annual rate year after year, up from a recent annual pace of roughly 2 percent.

Their idea is that companies would invest in new equipment, which would increase worker productivity and wages. Those workers would then spend their windfalls and help accelerate the economy.

Trump has gone so far as to forecast annual growth of as much as 6 percent a year - a boast that draws widespread skepticism among mainstream economists.

Cranking out more goods?

Trump has said that lower corporate tax rates will draw factories back to the United States from overseas Last month, the president cited an example: The owner of the New England Patriots would be investing in a paper mill.

"A friend of mine, Bob Kraft, called me last night, and he said this tax bill is incredible," the president said. "And he said, based on this tax bill, he just wanted to let me know that he's going to buy a big plant in the great state of North Carolina, and he's going to build a tremendous paper mill there."

The government monitors the manufacturing sector's performance, so any changes will become evident in that data over the next few years.

Is your pay up?

Trump says lower business tax rates will lead to handsome pay raises for workers. An average household would receive an additional $4,000 a year, according to Trump's top economist, Kevin Hassett. That's equivalent to a nearly 5 percent pay hike.

Almost no mainstream economist envisions anything close to that much pay growth. A number of companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Wells Fargo, have recently paid bonuses to employees - as a result, they said, of the lower tax rates. But most Americans will know if the corporate tax cuts are helping them only if some of the tax savings goes into significant pay increases, not just one-time bonuses. The best measure on a month-by-month basis comes from the government's jobs report: Average hourly earnings.

Some economists say it could take more than a year to assess whether the tax cuts have raised pay broadly. But Hassett said the tax cuts could be the very spark needed to ignite higher wages.

"It's precisely now that we buy insurance for that wage growth with a big tax reform," he said.
Federal taxes can be confounding in any typical year. But the GOP-led Congress' dash to approve the most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades has left many households unsure of what changes might await them come Jan. 1 and what they should do - if anything - before or after then.

Here are some things to know.

Rate change

For individuals, the legislation generally lowers rates across income levels. It retains the number of tax brackets - seven - but changes the rates that apply to particular income levels. For a couple filing jointly, the brackets will be 10 percent for taxable income up to $19,050, 12 percent on $19,050 up to $77,400, 22 percent on income to $165,000, 24 percent up to $315,000, 32 percent to $400,000, 35 percent to $600,000 and 37 percent on income above $600,000.

These rates don't include the effects of deductions, which could change someone's marginal tax rate. The marginal rate is the highest rate that applies to a taxpayer's income. But under the bill, the individual tax rate cuts aren't permanent; they're set to expire in 2026.

Taxpayers, on average, would receive a $1,600 tax cut in 2018, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, though about 5 percent of households would pay more. The policy center says middle-income households would receive a tax cut of about $900, while the top 1 percent would get a tax cut of about $50,000.

By 2027, after most individual income tax provisions expire, more than half of taxpayers would pay more tax than under current law.

One way to take advantage of next year's lower tax rate would be to defer income, if possible, from 2017 into 2018. An employee could, for example, ask her employer to defer an annual bonus until next year. Or freelancers or business owners could delay submitting invoices until 2018, so that the eventual payment would become part of next year's income and be subject to a lower tax rate.

Standard deduction

The bulk of Americans don't itemize their tax deductions. They instead benefit from claiming the standard deduction. Under the bill, the standard deduction will roughly double to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples. As a result, a greater share of these taxpayers' income will be shielded from tax. And because of the new cap on itemizing state and local tax deductions, households that previously itemized may now fare better by taking the standard deduction. (The increased standard deduction is also scheduled to expire in 2026.)

Taxpayers who have itemized their deductions but will likely take the standard deduction next year might consider making full use of their deductions during 2017. This could include making charitable contributions or paying for unreimbursed business expenses before year's end.

But if a household's deductions - for charitable giving, mortgage interest, state and local taxes of up to $10,000 and other items - exceed $12,000 (or $24,000 for a couple), it can still itemize and claim the higher amount.

Yet the bill doesn't just provide new benefits; it also takes away some. An example is the personal exemption. A taxpayer can now deduct from his income a $4,050 exemption for himself, his spouse and each dependent. So while the standard deduction is doubling, that benefit could be offset for families by the elimination of the personal exemptions.

Child tax credit

The child tax credit, which helps parents offset the cost of raising children, will double from $1,000 per child to $2,000. The bill also makes up to $1,400 of the credit refundable. This means you can claim that portion of the credit even if your income if too low for you to owe tax.

This is a credit, so it's particularly valuable because it directly reduces your tax bill - not just your taxable income. Taxpayers don't have to itemize to receive it. The credit will begin to phase out once a household's adjusted gross income hits $200,000 for individuals, or $400,000 for couples.

Still, because of how it's written and because of other tax changes, the increased child credit won't provide much help for low- and middle-income families. About 10 million children in the lowest-income working families would receive a token increase of $75 at best, if any at all, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That's because the size of the credit depends on a taxpayer's income; lower-income workers don't earn enough to receive much of a credit. And about 1 million children will be denied the credit because they lack a Social Security number, another new addition to tax law under the bill.

On top of that, the child tax credit also expires in 2026.

Mortgage interest

The bill limits the deduction to interest paid on the first $750,000 of a loan for a newly purchased first or second home. The current limit is $1 million. That means people who would like to buy a home in an expensive market may encounter a tax disincentive to do so. This could also make it harder for home owners in those markets to sell their houses.

A homeowner who is affected by this tax change might consider making an extra mortgage payment in 2017 before the tax changes reduce the portion of their mortgage interest that they can deduct next year.

State and local taxes

The tax plan ends the unlimited federal deduction for state and local income and sales taxes. Taxpayers will now be allowed to deduct only up to $10,000 in combined property and state and local income taxes.

This could hurt people with heavy tax burdens in such high-tax states as New York, New Jersey and California. And the architects of the Republican bill barred taxpayers from prepaying in 2017 any state or local income taxes that will face next year.

While the bill doesn't expressly address the prepayment of property taxes, doing so might be ill-advised.

You can only pay property taxes that you have already been assessed for, says Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt. Every taxing authority runs on a different schedule, so the timing of your assessment will vary by location.

So if you have a bill for property taxes due now or early next year, go ahead and pay it now, he says.

What you shouldn't do, Steber says, is pay this year for taxes that haven't been assessed yet because that runs against the intent of tax law.

Check with your local taxing authority to see what your options are.

Pass-through income

The legislation cuts taxes on business income - specifically for business people whose profits are "passed through" and taxed at their personal tax rate.

Many experts argue that his will provide an incentive for taxpayers to become independent contractors and restructure their salaries as business income. A high-income earner who would otherwise have to pay the top rate of 37 percent would pay roughly 30 percent on pass-through income.

The bill tries to prevent the abuse of this provision through various measures.

One will bar some occupations, such as lawyers, from exploiting this provision. Still, clever accountants may find a way around those rules. If so, it might be worth checking with your accountant next year to see if it makes sense to set up an LLC or other partnership and reap the benefits.

Health care

The bill retains deductions for medical expenses not covered by insurance for 2018 and 2019 once expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. That rises to 10 percent starting in 2020.

And it repeals the requirement in Barack Obama's health care law that people pay a tax penalty if they don't buy health insurance.
Archway Properties has kicked off Park Air 59, a 111-acre mixed-use development at the northeast corner of U.S. 59 and Will Clayton Parkway in Humble. The project, announced in conjunction with a new medical building, is designed to include retail, restaurant, industrial and services.

Vital Heart & Vein has purchased 4.2 acres in the park for a 65,000-square-foot, three-story medical office building, NewQuest Properties announced. Houston-based Archway Properties has started construction for the cardiology group and plans to complete the building in mid 2018.
Camden Property Trust has received building permits for the company's planned downtown high-rise development, Camden Conte.

The permits for the project at 1515 Austin total more than $52 million, and include a tower and parking garage, according to city of Houston records collected by real estate data firm Build Zoom.

The site of the 21-story project is a block from Toyota Center.

RELATED: River Oaks apartment tower underway after developer secures financing

Ziegler Cooper, the architecture firm that designed the tower, said it will be built in an east-west orientation, "creating a more energy-efficient exposure of the facades and maximizing views to downtown and the adjacent Root Square Park."

The placement of the tower will also minimizes the tower's shadow onto the building's amenity deck.
As with any awards show, The Golden Globes can be viewed by who didn't win as much who did.

This year, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements were not only reflected in the acceptance speeches and choice of clothing during Sunday night's ceremony -- black was worn by many in solidarity -- but in the movies that won as well. Best picture drama winner "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" and best picture comedy/musical winner "Lady Bird" have women at the heart of their stories as do the most honored TV series such as best drama winner "The Handmaid's Tale," best musical or comedy series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," and best miniseries or TV film "Big Little Lies."
Who: Shanon Scott, owner of Sud Italia

Background: Scott has been helping shape Houston-area Italian wine lists as a restaurant manager for nearly a quarter of a century - at Arcodoro, Da Marco, Simposio and Arturo's, to name four of his previous postings - but this Rice Village spot is his own.

What: 2016 Planeta Chardonnay and 2011 Mastroberardino Radici Taurasi

Why: Scott acknowledges that, even with a restaurant that's as obviously Italian as his is, customers still come in requesting California chardonnays and cabernets. Rather than throw them out head first, he sells them on alternatives such as these, remembering how he "fell in love with both the Planeta and Mastroberardino wineries while on my yearly pilgrimages to Italy." The former's chardonnay vineyard is in Menfi, Sicily. The wine, he says, "is yellow straw in color with note of light fruits and nuts with a crisp finish. Unlike most Italian white wine, this bottling is aged up to eight months in oak." Mastroberardino, arguably Campania's most famous producer, is in the hilly countryside near the ancient city of Atripalda, 30 miles from Naples. It's made from aglianico, a grape that's possibly Italy's oldest varietal and one that was likely brought from Greece in ancient times. Scott describes the Taurasi as being "dark red with the rich flavors of black fruit, tobacco with lingering notes of dark berries and a very clean finish."

Price: $99 for the Planeta and $118 for the Taurisi at Sud Italia, 2347 University

Dale Robertson
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You know our drill here in the Chronicle wine department. The tasting panel convenes, we sample everything blind and come up with a collective score, placing a high emphasis on unanimity, ready availability and value. It's not a perfect system because food pairings and the conviviality of the dining experience get factored out of the equation, and our recommendations are limited to only those wines the panel members taste together.

Obviously, I have the pleasure of sampling many others that don't go through the formal vetting process. So today I'd like to share a few that have turned my head and turned on my taste buds recently. Had I been formally tasting them, I'd have scored each of them at least a 9 on the 10-point scale, but all were consumed in social settings. I wasn't taking notes, just celebrating friendships. Hence, the assessments here are provided by others.

Also, unfortunately, you're not likely to find them sitting on shelves around town, but they're definitely worth tracking down. I wouldn't hesitate to try different vintages or similar wines from any of the producers either.

2005 Jordan Winery Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

The famous California cab is three-fourths cabernet with merlot (19 percent) and petit verdot (5 percent) making up the rest. The wine spent six months in large upright oak tanks, then aged in French and American oak barrels for 12 months. Prior to release, the wine was bottled and held for another 20 months.

From the winemaker: "The palate exudes flavors of red currant, dried cherry, and blackberry with a hint of vanilla and coconut from oak aging. Round tannins balance and support this medium-bodied wine, which will continue to age gracefully for several more years."

Price: $89 from jordanwinery.com

Cameron Hughes Lot 528 Napa Valley Meritage NV

It's about a third cab and a third merlot with the rest of the Bordeaux grapes in the blend, too. The vintage blend is 75 percent 2014 and 25 percent 2013.

From the winemaker: "The beautiful perfume suggests the presence of ample mountain fruit, with violets and ripe bing cherry married with darker berry fruit and chocolate mocha oak notes. Very complex already with more to come. The amply weighted palate has good tension between the mountain fruit components and the plumper benchland fruit  balanced and complex on the palate with a deliciously supple finish."

Price: About $16

2013 Lagone Aia Vecchia Toscana

It's a blend of merlot, cabernet and cab franc from Tuscany's Bolgheri region. Aged for 12 months in oak, then another six months in the bottle.

From the winemaker: "On the nose, the wine is delicate with notes of cherry, vanilla, raw beef and herbs. On the palate, it is dry, structured and elegant with flavors of plum, ripe cherries, wild berries and a hint of spice, followed by a lengthy and smooth finish that begs for food."

From wine critic James Suckling, who awarded a score of 92: "A rich, flavorful red full of ripe fruit and new wood. Full-bodied and intense but shows an underlying freshness and depth."

Price: About $15

2015 Masseria Li Veli Susumaniello Salento

The susumaniello grape is an ancient variety in far south Italy that has a very close genetic relationship to Sangiovese, crossed with another as-yet-unidentified grape, although this particular susumaniello is much riper and richer than any sangiovese you'll taste.

From the winemaker: "On the nose it presents a distinct red berries aroma, from raspberry, sour cherry, to blackcurrant, followed by liquorices, rhubarb and rawhide leather. On the mouth it tastes soft with a good fatness, very elegant and well balanced by a tannins party. The long finish on the palate shows a touch of acidity and a great freshness."

Price: $22.97 from WineChateau.com

2014 Vignetti il Passo Zabu

It's a blend of nerello mascalese and nero d'avola from a team of young winemakers who planted the vineyards in the hills above Lake Arancio in southwestern Sicily only 12 years ago. The grapes were dried naturally in the sun, then underwent long maceration on the skins. Aging lasted six months in barriques.

From the winemaker: "Bright ruby red with a vivid aroma of red fruits, spices and red flowers. Warm, full, soft and well-balanced, with aftertaste of red fruits on the finish."

Price: $19.24 from spiritboss.com

2011 Siro Pacenti Brunello di Montalcino Vecchie Vigne

Winemaker Giancarlo Pacenti is one of the most progressive and forward-thinking cellar masters in Brunello's prime sangiovese country.

Winemaker's notes: "Structured and elegant with silky tannins and a long finish."

From Wine Advocate Robert Parker, who awarded a score of 93: "Shows great balance that is due, in part, to the advanced age of the vines (most of which were planted between 1967 and 1972). The wine delivers a very fine silky quality of tannin and an elegant approach. The bouquet exhibits elements of forest fruit, crushed mineral, balsam herb and wild mushroom. The effect is graceful and nuanced."

Price: $99.99 from klwines.com

2014 Davis Estate Zephyr Private Reserve Napa Valley

The estate is in Calistoga and once won a Houston Rodeo Grand Champion Best of Show saddle. The wine is 85 percent cabernet with cab franc, petit verdot and merlot making up the rest. Barrel aging (60 percent new French oak) lasts 28 months.

From the winemaker: "Rich, ripe aromas and flavors of sweet berry complemented by attractive tones of oak, chocolate, and anise fill the glass. With two full years of barrel age, this wine is well structured and shows good tannin depth and weight. The result is a well-integrated wine showing silkiness and finesse with overall balance and harmony."

Price: $105 from shop.davisestates.com
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A second suspect arrested in Montgomery County during a nationwide human trafficking sting in 2017 was indicted Thursday.

Luis Mario Pena, 34, of Houston, is accused of running a prostitution enterprise of more than two people, according to court documents. He was arrested on a second-degree felony aggravated promotion of prostitution, which could land him in prison for up to 20 years. He was on parole at the time of his October arrest.

Pena is one of several people arrested in Montgomery County during an FBI sting, dubbed Operation Cross Country XI, on Oct. 12-15. The sting took place in major cities and regions throughout the country, including the Houston area. Nationwide, 84 children were recovered from human trafficking, including one from the Houston area.

KATY: Couple ordered to prison for 'enslaving' nanny

During the sting, law enforcement in Montgomery County arrested about 15 people, including some charged with prostitution, tracking or solicitation of sex. While some of those arrested were victims of human trafficking, prosecutors charged seven of them for allegedly paying for prostitutes or promoting a prostitution ring:

Jose Martin Gutierrez-Mendez, 37, of Pasedena  prostitution

Luis Mario Pena, 34, of Houston  aggravated promotion of prostitution

DeShawn Aaron Crawford, of Las Vegas  promotion of prostitution

Joseph Sylvester Hernandez Jr., 22, of Cleveland  prostitution

Dorcell Juvar Hightower, of Conroe  aggravated promotion of prostitution

Horace Lewis, 53, of Conroe  prostitution

Christopher Alexander Gibson, 26, of Houston  promotion of prostitution, possession with intent to deliver, theft of a firearm

Gutierrez-Mendez pleaded guilty days after his arrest in exchange for a 45-day jail sentence. Pena was indicted Thursday but has not received a trial date yet. Crawford has not yet been indicted.

Prosecutors claim Hernandez, who was out on bond at the time, failed to appear for a Dec. 6 court date and has a warrant out for his arrest. Hightower was released on a $1,500 bond and is awaiting trial.

Lewis pleaded guilty and received no jail time but had to pay a $1,500 fine. Gibson was indicted Dec. 21.

Pena is being held in the Montgomery County Jail with no bond.
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AUSTIN  Despite pleas for more diversity and less of a big-money presence, Gov. Greg Abbott's appointments to state boards and commissions remain mostly Anglo, largely male and liberally sprinkled with donors to a giant campaign war chest years in the making, a San Antonio Express-News analysis shows.

Since taking office as governor in January 2015, Abbott has appointed 889 people to boards or elevated them to chairmanships.

Two hundred fifty-nine of those picks  and their spouses in some cases  have donated roughly a combined $14.2 million to Abbotts campaigns since June 2001, according to an Express-News analysis of documents from the governors office and Texas Ethics Commission.

That was when Abbott left the Texas Supreme Court and successfully ran for attorney general, a move that put him on the path to becoming governor.

About 29 percent of the Republican governors appointees are donors, with their contributions ranging from $25 to more than $1 million. Their tally is part of more than $130 million in donations from 2001 through last October.

The analysis included contributions from appointees spouses if the appointees and spouses also had given jointly to Abbott.

Geographically, San Antonio yielded the third-largest number of picks, at 54, following Austin (152) and Houston (102).

Looking at the gender and ethnicity of Abbotts appointees, nearly 72 percent are Anglo and more than 63 percent are men  and more than 45 percent are both Anglo and male. About 16.4 percent of his appointees are Hispanic, 6.6 percent African-American and 3.3 percent Asian-American.

By contrast, Hispanics make up about 39 percent of the Texas population, while African-Americans account for 12.6 percent of the population. Women make up just more than half of the Texas population. Minorities make up the majority of the population in every major Texas city, except Austin.

This appointment pattern didnt start with Abbott.

Governors before him appointed a significant percentage of Anglo men and picked supporters for key posts  although the late Democratic former Gov. Ann Richards more than two decades ago appointed a larger percentage of women, African-Americans and Hispanics than the Republicans who followed her.

Abbotts staff said he looks for the best-qualified individuals, never takes contributions into account in making appointments and pushes for diversity.

His appointees typically appear qualified for their posts and include people with track records of noteworthy business success. Some draw broad praise, while others have stirred opposition in some quarters due to their records or views, or because of a desire for more diverse representation in key spots.

Several African-American and Hispanic Democratic senators raised the diversity issue in the 2017 regular legislative session, when no African-Americans were named to the plum spot of University of Texas System regent.

The House, meanwhile, approved a bill by a Republican lawmaker to curtail the appointment of large donors. The measure died in the Senate in the regular session.

Abbotts spokeswoman, Ciara Matthews, emphasized that most of those appointed by Abbott arent donors and said his office has ongoing efforts to recruit appointees who represent the states gender, racial and geographic diversity.

The governor and his office are constantly encouraging qualified individuals of diverse backgrounds to get involved in the appointment process and that process is yielding results, she said.

Abbott and his team did a presentation on appointments at a Hispanic leadership conference that Abbott hosted in San Antonio in October and encouraged people to apply.

One factor never considered is whether a potential appointee has contributed to the governors campaign. Proof of that is that more than 70 percent of Gov. Abbotts appointees have never contributed to him. To suggest otherwise would be false and a disservice to the character and quality of the individuals who are appointed to selflessly serve the state without compensation, Matthews said.

Matthews said Abbott has more than 66,000 individual donors and less than 1 percent of those donors have been appointed to positions of service.

Seeking more diversity

Abbotts record has come under increasing scrutiny as he heads toward his re-election contest, an effort in which he has an advantage as a Republican incumbent with a campaign piggy bank that topped $40 million at last count.

His cash on hand is expected to increase substantially with the finance report thats due Jan. 15.

The senators who pushed for more diversity in early 2017 didnt take issue with the quality of the people chosen by Abbott for the UT board. But the governors choices left the oversight panel without an African-American, as it has been since 2013.

That prompted Democratic Sens. Royce West of Dallas and Borris Miles of Houston to abstain from voting in 2017 on the confirmation of former board vice chairwoman Janiece Longoria of Houston, former Sen. Kevin Eltife of Tyler and Rad Weaver of San Antonio, chief executive officer of McCombs Partners.

Longoria is Hispanic, while Eltife and Weaver are Anglo  and all are donors. All are well-regarded, but the senators said their concerns went beyond the individuals at hand.

The only thing that we can do right now as an African-American is stand in the room, ask to speak when appropriate, but we cant be involved in the deliberation process. Think about that, West said before the nominees were confirmed 29-0 by the Senate.

West in a December interview said that hed had a conversation with the governors office and would work with Abbotts team to help diversify appointments to key boards.

I have the offices pledge to do that, West said, adding that he would recommend qualified people to be considered.

Suffice it to say that Im a Democrat and hes a Republican. Im not going to have a bunch of Republican names that Ill be able to give him for consideration, West said, but Im going to do my best to give him quality persons regardless of their political affiliation for consideration.

Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, also spoke in the Senate that day and added in a December interview that a better effort can be made to have more balance.

The diversity of our state is what makes us strong. Adding more diversity to the gubernatorial appointees would make us stronger, said Menendez, who added that diverse appointees by the governor would serve as a sign to agency heads that their teams also should be diverse.

At the same time, Menendez pointed to Weaver as a regent appointee whose background has prepared him to be receptive to students needs.

Weaver has recounted that after his father died when he was 16, he applied to a Ford scholarship program in an effort to help his mother with expenses. He came to the attention of auto magnate Red McCombs, who offered him a job washing cars and became a mentor and more to him.

Menendez said Weavers experience will allow him to empathize with the struggles of students.

Abbotts other UT regent appointees also have won praise. In 2015, his first UT nominees were widely seen as calming animosity directed at the flagship campus in Austin over issues including admissions. They did, however, draw concern from some tea party and grassroots conservatives who wanted more of a probe of campus practices.

Pay to play bill dies

There have been other criticism as well.

When Abbott appointed energy billionaire Kelcy Warren to the Parks and Wildlife Commission, environmental advocates protested because of controversies over the Tran-Pecos and Dakota Access pipelines built by his company.

Similarly, Abbotts appointment of pension-reform advocate Josh McGee to lead the Pension Review board was likened by Texas AFL-CIO spokesman Ed Sills in 2016 to appointing Godzilla to guard Tokyo.

More than a year later, AFL-CIO President Rick Levy said McGee hasnt torn the town apart, although he still thinks McGee would like to do so. McGee in the past has said workers should get the pensions theyve been promised and emphasized that the state board doesnt have the authority to make plan changes.

Levy had praise, however, for Julian Alvarez II, a chamber of commerce president whom Abbott named to a Texas Workforce Commission spot designated for a labor representative.

The AFL-CIO initially criticized the appointment because of his background, and Levy said he still believes Alvarezs experience wasnt appropriate for the position.

But Levy said Alvarez has worked really hard. He has reached out to us  I will certainly give him credit for working to basically serve working people.

Neither Alvarez or McGee is listed as an Abbott donor.

Senate Nominations Committee Chairman Brian Birdwell, a Granbury Republican whose panel is a crucial stop for appointees facing Senate confirmation, said Abbott and his team have clearly worked hard to nominate some of the best and brightest Texans  a fact evidenced by the overwhelming support these men and women have seen through the rigorous Senate confirmation process.

The appointment of donors has been spotlighted in part because they show up on the choicest boards, including top university boards of regents and the Parks and Wildlife Commission.

Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, won House approval of a bill that would have barred the appointment of gubernatorial campaign donors if they had given more than $2,500 in the previous year.

It also would have prohibited appointees from giving more than $2,500 annually while serving.

Theres no such bar on contributions now. As one example, two Abbott appointees who have given Abbott more than $1 million apiece overall  energy executives Warren and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board appointee Javaid Anwar  each gave $250,000 to him this year alone.

The so-called pay-to-play legislation died in the Senate, and Larson blamed Abbotts displeasure with the measure for the governors decision to veto a number of his bills. Abbott since has had turnover in staff, and Larson professed hope for the future.

Larson said he will look forward to working with the governors new staff to see if we can find a way to fix an issue that goes back several decades and multiple administrations next session.

The lawmaker repeatedly has said that his measure wasnt aimed at Abbott, but at the long-standing practice by governors of appointing donors.

Perrys appointment of donors was quantified in a 2014 analysis compiled by Texans for Public Justice for the Austin American-Statesman, which found nearly one-fourth of those named by Perry gave money to his campaign either before or after their appointment.

The appointment of Anglos and of men also isnt so different from previous governors, especially Abbotts Republican predecessors, George W. Bush and Rick Perry.

Abbott so far has appointed a larger percentage of Hispanics and Asian-Americans, and a smaller percentage of African-Americans, than Bush or Perry, the states longest-serving governor.

Abbott has appointed a smaller percentage of Anglos than both Bush, who named 77 percent, and Perry, 75 percent.

But Richards, the last Democrat to serve as governor, appointed a larger percentage of Hispanics and African-Americans.

Richards, who made it her avowed mission to open the doors of government to a wider variety of people, appointed 59 percent men and 67 percent Anglos during her 1991-94 term.

Thirteen percent of her appointees were African-American and 18 percent Hispanic. There were no Asian-Americans listed on a Richards tally previously provided by the governors office, but her other category was 2 percent, compared with 1 percent for Perry and Bush, and 1.6 percent for Abbott.

Will it change?

Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, which tracks money in politics, didnt hold out much hope for change with regard to appointment of donors.

Campaign contributions buy a lot of things. And appointments, just by looking at the numbers, seem to be one of them, McDonald said. We think its a motivation for donors who want something out of government, who want to buy not just access to a politician, but a prestigious spot in Texas government.

But Eltife, who has contributed nearly $70,000 to Abbott, mostly through his campaign account, said he didnt give campaign donations with the expectation of getting an appointment.

I give to a lot of Republican candidates in the state of Texas, so its not just limited to someone who can appoint me, Eltife said, adding that he also has fundraisers for a variety of candidates at his Tyler home. I did that when I was in the Senate, when I couldnt get an appointment. I never expected an appointment out of any of my donations. I just want good people to serve in office.

Eltife also said that from his perspective as a senator under Perry and Abbott, I thought they both have done a good job of finding qualified people to serve.

At the same time, Eltife said, he understands the concerns voiced by senators ahead of his own confirmation.

I fully understand their position, Eltife said. Their concern is to make sure we have proper minority representation on our boards in the state, and I fully support their position  You want a broad range of views. Its in the best interest of the boards that were serving on to have those broad range of views. Its healthy for our state, its healthy for the agency or institutions we serve.

Peggy Fikac is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | pfikac@express-news.net | @pfikac

Methodology: Data for this story was collected via Texas Public Information Act requests. One dataset contained roughly 16 years of information  including names, professions and city and state of residence  on those who have donated to Abbotts campaigns. The other dataset contained the name, race, gender and appointment of nearly 900 of his appointees. The two datasets were meticulously compared, but analyzing records in this way leaves a small room for error, and the Express-News was conservative in its analysis where necessary. Questions about the analysis for this story can be sent to datateam@express-news.net.




WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump expressed misgivings about his administration's infrastructure plan Friday at Camp David, telling Republican leaders that building projects through public-private partnerships is unlikely to work - and that it may be better for the government to pursue a different path.

Then on Saturday morning, Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser, delivered a detailed proposal on infrastructure and public-private partnerships that seemed to contradict the president. He said the administration hoped $200 billion in new federal government spending would trigger almost $1 trillion in private spending and local and state spending, according to people familiar with his comments. Cohn seemed to present the plan as the administration's approach, although the president had suggested such an approach might not work.

The seemingly contradictory statements, made within 24 hours of each other, show the uncertainty of the administration's approach to its top legislative priority in 2018: building roads, bridges and highways. Trump and his White House have been determined to pitch an infrastructure plan in 2018, despite Republican misgivings about the cost, a rapidly rising deficit and a preference to consider others matters first.

White House officials and Hill aides confirmed the president's comments. Another White House official briefed on the comments said that Trump was musing aloud and that the administration still planned to pursue public-private partnerships for infrastructure. This person, though, said Trump had continually expressed skepticism behind the scenes about such a plan.

"He doesn't think they will work," this person said.

Trump and Cohn have had a rocky relationship after the economic adviser criticized the president's comments about white-supremacist riots in Charlottesville, suggesting that there were "many fine people on both sides." Several White House advisers have said recently that the former Goldman Sachs banker may exit. Asked about that Saturday, Trump pulled Cohn up to a news conference stage and asked if he was staying. The economic adviser said yes and that he was having fun.

"Gary, hopefully, will be staying for a long time," Trump said. "Now, if he leaves, I'm going to say: 'I'm very happy that he left.' OK? All right?"

"I'm happy," Cohn said.

Republicans are loath to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, as the deficit is expected to grow considerably after the tax plan passed in December. Trump did not specifically delineate how he would pay for the projects without the partnerships.

During the campaign, Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan that he said would create millions of jobs through a combination of investments from the federal government and private companies. Staff members at the White House have spent months assembling a package of ideas, though his first budget just allocated $20 billion a year over 10 years for the mostly unspecified projects.

In September, though, Trump began musing to Democrats and others that the public-private partnership idea might not work. He referenced at least once, for example, some projects in Indiana that he believed did not work out the way the private sector had promised. In 2014, then-Gov. Mike Pence arranged a deal with Isolux Corsan, a Spanish construction firm, to extend a stretch of interstate in the southern part of Indiana. The firm had turned in the lowest bid but never completed a project in the United States before, and it fell behind schedule. The state of Indiana had to eventually dissolve the partnership and issued public debt to finish the project, though it still remains incomplete.

Trump's repeated complaints about the effectiveness of public-private partnerships have infuriated and surprised some administration aides who have worked on the plans for months. They were hoping to propose a package of infrastructure goals later this month, though that timetable remains fluid.

Democrats have often said they would support more infrastructure spending, and many labor unions have also said they would like to work with Trump on these plans. But they have remained wary of how Trump would plan to pay for any of the projects, and those questions appear to remain unresolved.

The weekend, White House and legislative leaders said, was largely marked by bonhomie - even if many key decisions on issues such as immigration, infrastructure and funding the government were not made. Trump had clashed with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., earlier in his tenure and had been at times critical of House Speaker Paul Ryan, (R-Wis. The intent of the weekend was to build camaraderie, officials said.

Trump vented about former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to the pleasure of McConnell and others, and criticized a tell-all book on his administration from the author Michael Wolff, saying the author barely knew him and had made up large parts of the story.

Wolff spent considerable time in the West Wing and talked to Trump, although others have pointed out factual issues in the book.

There was little talk about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act or launching a campaign to curb entitlement spending - issues that are now unlikely to come up legislatively in 2018.

Trump had previously said he wanted to return to health care early in 2018, but he has instead told advisers in recent weeks that he can sell repealing the individual mandate. Top officials have also convinced him that there is no path to repealing the law.

Trump has also decided that pursuing cuts to the country's entitlement spending in 2018 is not a good bid for him, and he purposefully left it out of public comments, advisers said.

White House officials complained that their nominees weren't going through the Senate quickly enough - much of the government is unfilled - and pushed McConnell to do more, people briefed on the summit said. The White House has been criticized for its slow pace of nominating people to key jobs.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen briefed legislators on what the administration wanted on border security in exchange for a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and there was a consensus that it needed to happen before March, when a deadline set by the White House expires.

Trump told the leaders that they needed to focus on selling their 2017 accomplishments and continued to cast his administration in historic terms, even in private. The president has the lowest poll numbers of a first-year president in decades, and leading Republicans fear privately that the midterm elections could be damaging.

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The Washington Post's Damian Paletta contributed to this report.

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Video: President Trump called the director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, to the podium to ask if he was happy with his role in the Trump administration during a news conference at Camp David on Jan. 6.(The Washington Post)

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Video: The GOP is starting 2018 with a lofty legislative agenda. Here are ten of its top priorities this year.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

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A Harris County death row inmate convicted for his role in a 1994 murder-for-hire lost out Monday on an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Joseph Prystash was sentenced to death more than two decades ago for acting as the middleman in the murder of Farah Baquer Fratta, a Missouri City police officer's wife.

"Today's decision sends a ray of hope to the Baquer family who have waited painstakingly for over 20 years seeking justice for their murdered mother and daughter Farah," said city of Houston victim advocate Andy Kahan.

BACKGROUND:Attorneys attack former prosecutor in another high-profile murder trial

Now Playing: Texas News & Crime Video: Houston Chronicle

The 34-year-old mother was shot in the head while stepping out of her car inside her garage.

The couple was in the midst of a contentious divorce and slated for a child custody hearing less than three weeks after the killing.

Her estranged husband was at church at the time of the crime, but investigators immediately zeroed in on him as a prime suspect. Before the slaying, he'd reportedly asked around for a hit man and on the night of the murder he repeatedly retreated to the church office to make phone calls, according to authorities.

Records later showed those calls went to Prystash's girlfriend, who later offered up details to police in exchange for immunity. In the end, police arrested Fratta for planning the slaying, Howard Guidry for carrying it out and Prystash for acting as middleman between the two.

Prosecutors said Prystash set up the killing in exchange for a Jeep.

All three men were convicted and given death sentences. They are still on death row.

While Guidry and Fratta both saw their initial convictions reversed and sent back to a lower court, Prystash's case has continued moving forward.

The former auto mechanic's appeal to the nation's highest court revolved around jury selection questions as well as references to unajudicated offenses in the determination of future dangerousness, a key factor in doling out a death sentence.

Prystash's lawyer did not immediately offer comment. Although often a Supreme Court loss can signal the setting of an execution, the 61-year-old does not currently have a scheduled death date.

A spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney said prosecutors will meet later this month to discuss the case.

Kahan expressed hope that a date could be near.

"One would certainly hope this puts the Baquer family one step closer to the final resolution," he said.

The court also rejected without comment on Monday an appeal from a San Antonio man convicted of killing a store owner during a robbery. Christopher Young does not yet have an execution date for the 2004 slaying of Hasmukh Patel.
A Houston couple's $20 million gift will create a first-of-its-kind regional mental health policy center, aimed at improving access to the best treatments and initially focusing on those affected by Hurricane Harvey.

The Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute will announce Monday the establishment of the center, funded by a donation from Maureen and Jim Hackett, longtime philanthropists and mental health advocates. The center will align institutional strategies and particularly target children, projected to be one of Harvey's hardest hit and most overlooked victims.

"For some time, we've recognized the need for a dedicated presence in Houston to coordinate mental health practices," said Andy Keller, president and CEO of Meadows, a 4-year-old statewide institute with offices in Austin and Dallas. "The Hackett Center for Mental Health in Houston will provide data-driven insights into what works and mobilize health system and government leaders to make hard decisions of how best to provide those treatments to more people."

The gift, to be paid in full by 2020, is believed to be one of the largest ever for a mental health endeavor.

The focus on children affected by Harvey follows Meadows research that in the storm's worst affected areas, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder could be as much as five times more than pre-hurricane rates in youth 5 to 11 years old; three times more in those 12 to 17 years old; and six times higher in parents and caregivers and school personnel.

'Part of city's agenda'

More Information Texas mental health needs - 3 out of 4 Texans has a friend or family members who has experienced a mental health issue. - An estimated 310,000 children and youth in Harris County have mental health needs each year. - Harvey is projected to cause a 20 percent increase in new mental health problems in the worst affected areas. Source: Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute The numbers $20M Amount of Houston couple's gift for mental health policy center. 2 in 10 Of more than 1,600 Harvey-affected Texans who say their mental health is now worse. 2020 Year by when the gift will be paid in full. See More Collapse

The center, scheduled to become operational Jan. 15, was lauded by Mayor Sylvester Turner, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and Texas Medical Center President Bill McKeon for the mental health policy expertise and resources it will bring the region. In addition, numerous mental health leaders praised the direction it should provide to currently scattered services.

"Harvey didn't create every problem we have in Houston, but it both exposed and elevated the need for behavioral health services," Turner said in a statement. "This will be part of the city's agenda and we look forward to working with the Hackett Center in Austin next session."

Long history of giving

The gift comes at a most opportune time, Keller said, given that mental health needs typically begin to increase at 60 to 90 days after natural disasters, peak at about 18 months and slowly drop after 24 months. In December, nearly 2 in 10 of more than 1,600 Texans in 24 Harvey-affected counties said their mental health is worse, according to a survey by the Washington-based Kaiser Family Foundation and the Houston-based Episcopal Health Foundation.

Maureen Hackett said the need for better post-Harvey services was driven home by her family's experiences. She was out of town when Harvey hit but found it fairly traumatic just not being able to immediately return to Houston, where her daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren lived in their pantry for a few days, and flooded roads blocked access to her husband, hospitalized at the time in the medical center.

"Even so, when I thought about it, my family was safe," she said. "But that thousands had to obtain shelter at NRG (Stadium) and George R. Brown (Convention Center) was remarkable. Maybe better care would have made a difference. I thought, 'what can we do?' "

Emmett applauded the Hacketts for creating the center. "We need all the help we can get," given that "the county jail currently serves as the state's largest mental health facility," he said.

The Hacketts have a long history of giving to mental health causes, from the Harris County Felony Mental Health Court and the Harris Center for Intellectual and Developmental Disability to such national groups as the Alzheimer's Association and American Psychiatric Foundation. Their philanthropy helped bring the famed Menninger Clinic from Kansas to Houston.

The Meadows gift is the couple's largest ever and the latest example of oil money funding Houston medical needs. Jim Hackett was the CEO of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., one of the world's largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies, and before that he was president and COO of Devon Energy Corp., also a Fortune 500 company.

Maureen Hackett, a one-time pharmaceutical sales rep turned philanthropy executive, attributed the couple's interest in mental health to issues in their own family, in friends and in students she used to instruct as a substitute teacher.

"We're no longer whispering that mental health matters, but we're not shouting either," she said. "It's time to make some noise."

Hackett said the center will evaluate mental health programs on the ground and map delivery systems, "where they're good and where collaboration would make them better." It also will fund brain health research, raise public awareness and work to try to prevent mental health from being cut from insurance plans.

The center will attempt to build mental health services capacity in Harris County schools, an effort that Meadows already is engaged in as part of a state task force, requested by Gov. Greg Abbott, charged with increasing such services in educational settings affected by Harvey. Houston leaders also noted the area's shortage of pediatric providers, including at hospitals, where, for instance, both Texas Children's and Children's Memorial Hermann do not have in-patient psychiatric units.

Houston is 'perfect'

Meadows plans to lease space for the Hackett Center in the medical center. Susan Fordice, the former president of Mental Health America of Greater Houston, has been hired as its executive director, and plans call for it to contract with several research fellows.

Keller said Houston is the perfect place for the program because it has such "a wide array of exciting systems and such big mental health needs."

"There really isn't a research-based mental health policy center focused on one area anywhere in the country," said Keller. "We think it can create systemic change and be a model for other cities to create similar centers."
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AUSTIN - Despite pleas for more diversity and less of a big-money presence, Gov. Greg Abbott's appointments to state boards and commissions remain largely Anglo men - many of whom have donated to a giant campaign war chest years in the making, a San Antonio Express-News analysis shows.

Since taking office as governor in January 2015, Abbott has appointed 889 people to boards or elevated them to chairmanships. Nearly 72 percent are Anglo and more than 63 percent are men - and more than 45 percent are both Anglo and male. About 16.4 percent of his appointees are Hispanic, 6.6 percent African-American and 3.3 percent Asian-American, much skewed from the state's population.

According to an Express-News analysis of documents from the governor's office and the Texas Ethics Commission, 259 of those picks - and their spouses in some cases - have donated roughly a combined $14.2 million to Abbott's campaigns since June 2001.

About 29 percent of the Republican governor's appointees are donors, with their contributions ranging from $25 to more than $1 million. Their tally is part of more than $130 million in donations since 2001 - when Abbott left the Texas Supreme Court and successfully ran for attorney general, a move that put him on the path to becoming governor.

Abbott's staff said he looks for the best-qualified individuals, never takes contributions into account in making appointments and pushes for diversity.

"One factor never considered is whether a potential appointee has contributed to the governor's campaign," said Ciara Matthews, Abbott's spokeswoman. "Proof of that is that more than 70 percent of Gov. Abbott's appointees have never contributed to him. To suggest otherwise would be false and a disservice to the character and quality of the individuals who are appointed to selflessly serve the state without compensation."

"The governor and his office are constantly encouraging qualified individuals of diverse backgrounds to get involved in the appointment process, and that process is yielding results," she said.

Abbott has more than 66,000 individual donors, "and less than 1 percent of those donors have been appointed to positions of service," Matthews said.

Push for diversity

The governor's record has come under increasing scrutiny as he heads toward his re-election contest, where his $40 million campaign piggybank gives him great advantage. And his cash on hand is expected to increase substantially with the finance report due Jan. 15.

The senators who pushed for more diversity in early 2017 didn't take issue with the quality of the people chosen by Abbott for the University of Texas Board of Regents. But the governor's choices left the oversight panel without an African-American, as it has been since 2013.

That prompted Democratic Sens. Royce West of Dallas and Borris Miles of Houston to abstain from voting in 2017 on the confirmation of former board vice chairwoman Janiece Longoria of Houston, former Sen. Kevin Eltife of Tyler and Rad Weaver of San Antonio, chief executive officer of McCombs Partners.

Longoria is Hispanic, while Eltife and Weaver are white - and all are donors. All are well-regarded, but the senators said their concerns went beyond the individuals at hand.

"The only thing that we can do right now as an African-American is stand in the room, ask to speak when appropriate, but we can't be involved in the deliberation process. Think about that," West said before the nominees were confirmed 29-0 by the Senate.

West in a December interview said that he had a conversation with the governor's office and would work with Abbott's team to help diversify appointments to key boards.

"I have the office's pledge to do that," West said, adding that he would recommend qualified people to be considered.

"Suffice it to say that I'm a Democrat and he's a Republican. I'm not going to have a bunch of Republican names that I'll be able to give him for consideration," West said, "but I'm going to do my best to give him quality persons regardless of their political affiliation for consideration."

Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, also spoke in the Senate that day and added in a December interview that "a better effort can be made to have more balance."

"The diversity of our state is what makes us strong. Adding more diversity to the gubernatorial appointees would make us stronger," said Menendez, who added that diverse appointees by the governor would serve as a sign to agency heads that their teams also should be diverse.

Abbott's other UT regent appointees also have won praise. In 2015, his first UT nominees were widely seen as calming animosity directed at the flagship campus in Austin over issues including admissions. They did, however, draw concern from some tea party and grassroots conservatives who wanted more of a probe of campus practices.

Criticism of picks

There has been other criticism as well.

When Abbott appointed energy billionaire Kelcy Warren to the Parks and Wildlife Commission, environmental advocates protested because of controversies over the Tran-Pecos and Dakota Access pipelines built by his company.

Similarly, Abbott's appointment of pension-reform advocate Josh McGee to lead the Pension Review Board was likened by Texas AFL-CIO spokesman Ed Sills in 2016 to "appointing Godzilla to guard Tokyo."

More than a year later, AFL-CIO President Rick Levy said McGee "hasn't torn the town apart," although he still thinks McGee would like to do so. McGee in the past has said workers should get the pensions they've been promised and emphasized that the state board doesn't have the authority to make plan changes.

Levy had praise, however, for Julian Alvarez II, a chamber of commerce president whom Abbott named to a Texas Workforce Commission spot designated for a labor representative.

The AFL-CIO initially criticized the appointment because of his background, and Levy said he still believes Alvarez's experience wasn't appropriate for the position.

But Levy said Alvarez "has worked really hard. He has reached out to us.  I will certainly give him credit for working to basically serve working people."

Neither Alvarez nor McGee is listed as an Abbott donor.

Senate Nominations Committee Chairman Brian Birdwell, a Granbury Republican whose panel is a crucial stop for appointees facing Senate confirmation, said Abbott and his team "have clearly worked hard to nominate some of the best and brightest Texans - a fact evidenced by the overwhelming support these men and women have seen through the rigorous Senate confirmation process."

Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, won House approval of a bill that would have barred the appointment of gubernatorial campaign donors if they had given more than $2,500 in the previous year.

It also would have prohibited appointees from giving more than $2,500 annually while serving.

There's no such bar on contributions now. As one example, two Abbott appointees who have given Abbott more than $1 million apiece overall - energy executives Warren and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board appointee S. Javaid Anwar - each gave $250,000 to him this year alone.

Decadeslong issue

The so-called pay-to-play legislation died in the Senate, and Larson blamed Abbott's displeasure with the measure for the governor's decision to veto a number of his bills. Abbott since has had turnover in staff, and Larson professed hope for the future.

Larson said he will "look forward to working with the governor's new staff to see if we can find a way to fix an issue that goes back several decades and multiple administrations next session."

The lawmaker repeatedly has said that his measure wasn't aimed at Abbott, but at the long-standing practice by governors of appointing donors.

Former Gov. Rick Perry's appointment of donors was quantified in a 2014 analysis compiled by Texans for Public Justice for the Austin American-Statesman, which found nearly one-fourth of those named by Perry gave money to his campaign either before or after their appointment.

The appointment of Anglos and of men also isn't so different from previous governors, especially Abbott's Republican predecessors, Perry and George W. Bush.

Abbott so far has appointed a larger percentage of Hispanics and Asian-Americans and a smaller percentage of African-Americans than Bush or Perry, the state's longest-serving governor.

Abbott has appointed a smaller percentage of Anglos than both Bush, who named 77 percent, and Perry, 75 percent.

But Ann Richards, the last Democrat to serve as governor, appointed a larger percentage of Hispanics and African-Americans.

Richards, who made it her avowed mission to open the doors of government to a wider variety of people, appointed 59 percent men and 67 percent Anglos during her 1991-94 term.

Thirteen percent of her appointees were African-American, and 18 percent were Hispanic.

There were no Asian-Americans listed on a Richards tally previously provided by the governor's office, but her "other" category was 2 percent, compared with 1 percent for Perry and Bush, and 1.6 percent for Abbott.

Will it change?

Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, which tracks money in politics, didn't hold out much hope for change with regard to appointment of donors.

"Campaign contributions buy a lot of things. And appointments, just by looking at the numbers, seem to be one of them," McDonald said. "We think it's a motivation for donors who want something out of government, who want to buy not just access to a politician, but a prestigious spot in Texas government."

But Eltife, who has contributed nearly $70,000 to Abbott, mostly through his campaign account, said he didn't give campaign donations with the expectation of getting an appointment.

"I give to a lot of Republican candidates in the state of Texas, so it's not just limited to someone who can appoint me," Eltife said, adding that he also has fundraisers for a variety of candidates at his Tyler home. "I did that when I was in the Senate, when I couldn't get an appointment.

"I never expected an appointment out of any of my donations. I just want good people to serve in office."
City and county officials are dealing with what they say is an unprecedented surge of property owners paying taxes early, as homeowners - particularly in predominantly Democratic states with high local tax rates - try to avoid the effects of the tax-code overhaul signed last week by President Donald Trump.

That bill, which takes effect in 2018, limits the amount of state and local tax payments people can deduct from their federal taxes to $10,000. The provision was one of the most contentious in the tax bill shaped by Congressional Republicans, with critics saying it would unfairly penalize residents of blue states and cities with a heavy local tax burden.

Those fears have been dramatically illustrated this week in the Washington, D.C., region, as hundreds of homeowners have lined up at tax offices to pre-pay their property taxes for 2018 before the limit on deductions kicks in.

There is no guarantee this ploy will work: The tax bill is silent on whether 2018 property-taxes paid in 2017 will avoid the deduction cap that applies to income-tax filings for 2018 and beyond. (Income tax prepayments of this kind are specifically barred under the bill.)

A spokesman for D.C. Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey S. DeWitt said the District's tax attorneys presume the Internal Revenue Service will decide in the coming months whether property-tax prepayments can be deducted in 2017 filings.

But that hasn't stopped people - those with the ability to come up with a few thousand dollars on short notice - from trying.

More than 1,700 taxpayers lined up outside the Fairfax County, Va., government center Tuesday to pre-pay their property taxes, while 750 people sent wire transfers and about 650 dropped off payments in a government lockbox that normally gets two or three pieces of correspondence a day, said director of revenue collection Scott Sizemore.

"There is simply no comparison" to previous years, said Sizemore. "It's unprecedented."

Arlington County, Va., treasurer Carla de la Pava said about 30 people were waiting when her office opened at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

As of 10:45 a.m., the county had accepted more than $5 million in early payments from 644 taxpayers.

"This is completely unusual. They've been coming in for weeks," said de la Pava, adding that some taxpayers were paying up to three years of taxes in advance.

Homeowners were advised to seek professional tax advice before making a decision.

"We're making sure we tell people we can't guarantee it's deductible" on their 2017 federal tax forms, said Roger Zurn, treasurer in Loudoun County, where a steady stream of 10 people at a time have been waiting at the Sterling and Leesburg government offices.

Virginia, along with D.C. and Maryland, is among the places hardest hit by the loss of the deduction for state and local taxes. More than 37 percent of tax returns filed in Virginia in 2015 included the deduction, according to data from the Tax Policy Center.
Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle

Harris County Commissioners Court is slated to vote Tuesday to authorize the buyout of 39 flood-prone homes in the city of Houston.

The properties would be clustered in north, northwest and southwest Houston in Independence Heights, Braeburn Glen and Langwood neighborhoods.
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All national elections are hyped as seminal. The midterms of 2018 are the real deal.

If Democrats win at least one branch of Congress, there will be an investigative feast - with rich targets - of the ethically challenged administration of President Donald Trump, plus a check on presidential actions. If Republicans retain full control, expect renewed attacks on Obamacare, efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, and one or two more right-wing Supreme Court justices.

Equally significant will be gubernatorial and state legislative contests. These will serve either to complement or counter national policies and will set the table for redistricting following the 2020 census.

In race for House of Representatives: Most polls suggest that Democrats will gain the two dozen seats they'd need to take control.

Democrats start with an advantage in contests for 14 Republican-held seats in the deep-blue states of California, New York and New Jersey. They expect to win most of those. They see promising opportunities in more than a dozen other states, multiple ones in a couple.

In Senate races: The electoral map is daunting for Democrats when it comes to senators. They have to defend 26 seats, the Republicans only eight. To take over, Democrats need a net gain of two.

At the moment, six Democratic incumbents face difficult challenges, though two of them - Montana's Jon Tester and West Virginia's Joe Manchin - appear to be in good shape. Three Republican seats look competitive, and Democrats think at least one more will be in play either because a right-wing challenger supported by the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican party will rough up a safe incumbent, or because of a surprise in Texas or some other demographically fluid state.

Even if all those factors break in the Democrats' favor, they'd still be at a disadvantage. They'd have to win eight of the 10 competitive races - all but one (Nevada) in states carried by Trump last year. A must-win for Democrats is Tennessee, where former Governor Phil Bredesen will mount a strong challenge in a heavily Republican state. (Incumbent Senator Bob Corker is retiring.) Republicans would be concerned if they can't unseat Senator Claire McCaskill in Republican-friendly Missouri.

In races for governor: There are 35 gubernatorial offices up for grabs, with 26 held by Republicans and one, in Alaska, by an independent. For Democrats, there's a Big Five: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All but Pennsylvania are now in Republican hands.

What happens in these states can influence national politics. For one thing, they're all battleground venues in presidential elections. But the biggest factor is the influence they will have on redistricting after the 2020 census.

Beyond the Big Five states, a fierce battle is brewing in North Carolina, where gerrymandering has given Republicans almost a 2-to-1 majority in the legislature and 10 of 13 U.S. House seats. In moves Vladimir Putin would admire, Tar Heel Republicans ruthlessly changed rules and procedures in 2016 after voters elected a Democratic governor, stripping him of many executive powers.

The nationwide outcome will be affected by legal rulings on challenges to the way many states draw legislative districts and a Supreme Court decision this session on gerrymandering cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. There are also efforts underway to set up ballot referendums in Michigan and, less likely, Ohio to create nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

Hunt, a Bloomberg View columnist, is former executive editor of Bloomberg News and one-time executive Washington editor at the Wall Street Journal.
One person was arrested Saturday following a shooting incident in western Texas County, authorities said.

Two persons arrived Saturday at the Mountain Grove Police Department, who reported that shots had been fired from a revolver in an incident in the Austin Lake area west of Cabool.

They named a suspect and a vehicle description. Later, Texas County deputies and a state patrol officer arrested one person, who was transported to the Texas County Jail.
Two Texas County teenagers were arrested Friday following a drug investigation by the Licking Police Department.

Along with the departments K-9 unit, a Licking officer who made a traffic stop found about a half-pound of marijuana, one gram of methamphetamine and 22 DEA schedule 2 controlled substance prescription pills. An electronic scale, baggies and other drug paraphernalia also were found inside the vehicle.

Thomas L. Stanton, 18, of Houston, was arrested on charges of possession with intent to distribute, deliver, manufacture, produce a controlled substance and possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

David M. Coats, 18, of Licking, was arrested on charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Houston Police Department:

Jesse L. Houston, 30, of P.O. Box 254 in Houston, and William J. Keller, 29, of 5256 Hubbard St. in Houston, were each issued citations for peace disturbance after allegedly fighting at the Corner Express Shell station on U.S. 63 about 11:30 p.m. Jan. 1.

An officer was dispatched at about 4:10 p.m. Jan. regarding a report of a vehicle parked an unoccupied on Sycamore Street.

The officer determined the maroon 2010 Ford Escape belonged to a Mountain Grove man and was listed as stolen. It was towed to a local lot.

Carol M. Dicarro, 54, of 424 S. King St. in Houston, was arrested Dec. 28 at her residence for having an active City of Houston warrant for failure to appear on an assault charge.

While two officers were waiting for her to put clothing on to leave her house, Dicarro reportedly became verbally aggressive toward the officers and attempted to get away by slamming a door in an officers face.

As an officer attempted to put handcuffs on Dicarro, she reportedly pulled away several times after being advised not to resist. Upon arrival at the Texas County Jail, she was place in the rubber room for being combative and issued a citation for resisting arrest.

An officer on Dec. 3 investigated a report of burglary at a Chestnut Street residence.

A 58-year-old woman who lives there told the officer that numerous items with a total value of $3,440 had been stolen.

After an investigation, three Houston men (ages 36, 33 and 22) were identified as suspects. A probable cause statement was sent to the county prosecutor seeking charges against the men.

Lloyd R. Hill, 59, of 11998 Highway 38 at Cabool, was arrested Dec. 28 for having an active Texas County warrant for stealing  fourth or subsequent offense within 10 years. An officer made the arrest after conducting a traffic stop at the Corner Express Gas Station on U.S. 63 and discovering that the driver had a warrant.

Hill was taken to the Texas County Jail where he was unable to post $500,000 bond.
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It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
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Pittsfield City Councilors Given Committee Assignments

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Council President Peter Marchetti has handed out committee assignments to the City Council.

The president is tasked with appointing the council's six subcommittees with five members each. Marchetti, Vice President John Krol, and Ward 7 Councilor Anthony Simonelli will serve on two committees each. The other councilors will serve on three and of those, all but the two newest councilors will have chairmanships.

Marchetti will chair the Finance Committee and be the vice chairman of Public Health and Safety  taking on one extra committee than he had last year. Krol will be the vice chairman of Community and Economic Development and sit on Ordinance and Rules, the same two roles he had the last term.

Ward 3 Councilor Nicholas Caccamo was tapped to chair the Community and Economic Development Committee. He sat on it last term and fills the chairmanship vacated by former Councilor Kathleen Amuso, who did not seek re-election.

"It's one of the most exciting committees we have, its most important task is the block grant appropriations. It's a great chance to make some meaningful improvements across our city," Caccamo said.

"I hope to work closely with the Community Development Office to create a meaningful spending plan. It's also driven by community needs through public hearings which is a great way to get the pulse of each new year."

Caccamo said he's quickly gearing up for a meeting regarding the development of the former St. Mary's the Morningstar Church property  for which the mayor will be proposing a tax increment financing package to assist. And he is looking at accepting the PACE program from the Department of Energy to help small and medium-sized businesses and non-profits.

Overall the Ward 3 councilor is "very happy" with his committee assignments. He also retains a seat on Ordinance and Rules and is vice chairman of Buildings and Maintenance  a committee he chaired this last year. He is one of the councilors who will be returning to the same committees as the last term.

Simonelli is also returning to familiar committees. He will serve on Public Works and Buildings and Maintenance. He had the same two last year as well as Public Health and Safety, which he was not appointed to this time. He said he got what he asked for with the appointments to Public Works and Buildings and Maintenance.

"As a ward councilor, I believe Public Works is very important to serve on, as it deals with issues a ward councilor faces regularly," he said.

He'll serve on that committee with Ward 5 Councilor Donna Todd Rivers. Rivers shares Simonelli's view that Public Works is a good committee for ward councilors but she hoped to give it up and move into finance. Rivers felt the new councilors would benefit from Public Works while she could dive deeper into the city's finances.

"I felt I would give up the seat. I really wanted to learn finance and learn that committee," Rivers said.

Marchetti didn't honor her request. But Rivers isn't that upset about it. She says she can still learn about the issues and have her voice heard on the committee even if she isn't a member. She plans to attend the meetings as a member of the audience and pay close attention to the discussion at that level before the topic is sent to the full committee.

"Whether you are sitting in the five chairs or in the black chairs, if it is something you care passionately about you can still be involved," Rivers said.

While Rivers may not have gotten Finance, she is excited about her chairmanship of Buildings and Maintenance. She says the city's buildings are a major priority but that committee hadn't had much life to it in recent years.

"I think that committee needs more action. I would like to meet more," she said. "I'd like to bring it to life."

Rivers isn't the only one who didn't get what she wanted. Councilor at Large Melissa Mazzeo wanted to be on Community and Economic Development but wasn't assigned it.

"A few things that concerned me was putting the two new councilors on Community and Economic Development. I felt that I would better serve the public on that committee. I have been through three administrations and felt my experience with economic development issues and ideas are needed," Mazzeo said.

The former council president also got ousted from the chair of Ordinance and Rules, one of the more coveted committees to be on, to the chagrin of some of her colleagues. In her place is last term's committee vice chairman, Peter White. Mazzeo will still have a seat on Ordinance and Rules as the vice chair and she will also sit on Finance and Public Health and Safety.

"I was discouraged Melissa Mazzeo wasn't chair of Ordinance and Rules," Ward 4 Councilor Christopher Connell said.

Connell had even hoped to join Mazzeo on that committee as well but he wasn't appointed. Instead, Connell will chair Public Works, vice chair Finance, and sit on Building and Maintenance.

Connell is happy with his chairmanship of Public Works, where he can get even more involved with a topic he had been delving into heavily over the course of the last year.

"I really want to get into the water and wastewater treatment plant upgrades. And really get into the enterprise fund accounts," Connell said.

Simonelli also feels Mazzeo would have been a better chair for Ordinance and Rules.

"I found it strange that Councilor Mazzeo, who arguably is the most knowledgeable councilor regarding ordinance and rules, or Councilor Rivers (who has a law degree) should not be given the chairmanship of O&R," Simonelli said.

White, meanwhile, considers being tapped to head Ordinance and Rules an honor. He's also looking forward to the work on the Community and Economic Development Committee.

"I am honored to be chosen to chair Ordinance and Rules for this term. My plan is to run fair and orderly meetings and just help keep the process moving forward," White said. "I am hoping that the newly created business development manager might have some more items going before Community and Economic Development and also housing projects like the former St. Mary's project."

White will also sit on Public Health and Safety and says all three of his committee assignments will serve a role in the implementation of recreational marijuana.

The newest at-large councilor, Earl Persip, feels Marchetti did a good job assigning him to committees that fit with his skills and expertise. He'll sit on Building Maintenance, Community and Economic Development, and Finance.

"I'm happy with my assignments and I believe I was assigned to committees where I can have a strong impact and bring solid experience. I think President Marchetti was thoughtful when giving committee assignments, and he put councilors on committees where they can do the best work given their particular skills," Persip said.

"I've managed tight budgets for over 10 years in circumstances where every dollar counts, and I'm currently responsible for building facilities at both Berkshire Family YMCA properties. My career and volunteer work also give me a lot of experience working with the community, and that should give me a good handle on issues facing the Community Development committee."

It is the Economic and Community Development position that excites Persip the most because of the wide range of topic he'll handle.

The other newcomer to the council, Moon, will have seats on Public Works, Public Health and Safety, and Community and Economic Development.

Vice President Krol is happy with returning to the same committee positions as last year. But, he'd like to have seen Persip and Moon take on even bigger roles.

"I would have liked to have seen our new councilors better represented on the two most active, and in many ways, most important committees: O&R and Finance," Krol said.

Meanwhile, Ward 2 Councilor Kevin Morandi is particularly happy about taking over the chairmanship of Public Health and Safety. He had last served as the vice chairman but former chairwoman Lisa Tully did not seek re-election. He'll also stay on Finance and Public Works, two committees he had sat on during this last term.

Morandi doesn't mind serving on the same committees as last year. He believes that it is important to have the most experienced councilors on each committee.

"I think it is very important to have consistency on all of these committees for the next two years as every committee is going to have real important and essential items referred to it. Having the most experienced and informed members that have been on these committees and are familiar with the process and items that are referred to them is essential," Morandi said.

Caccamo agrees that there are benefits to having consistency with the committee assignments, but he said there are also benefits to having new voices. Making those decisions and finding that balance is the responsibility of the council president.

"There are some benefits to being on the same committees, but it's also important to have new views. Selecting committee assignments really allows the president of the council to set a vision for the legislative branch based on prior experiences," Caccamo said.

Overall, White thinks Marchetti had created "a good mix given that there are only six committees for 11 councilors to serve on." And Morandi said everyone on every committee has a vital role in city government this term.

"Every subcommittee from O&R to Building and Maintenance will play important roles in the next two years as I really expect and hope that many initiatives and ideas will be brought forward as we continue to try and make Pittsfield a vibrant and thriving economically driven city once again. With only two new councilors coming onto these committees I feel it will be a lot easier of a transition for everyone," Morandi said.

Ordinances and Rules

Peter White, Chair

Melissa Mazzeo, Vice Chair

John Krol

Nicholas Caccamo

Donna Todd Rivers

Community and Economic Development

Nicholas Caccamo, Chair

John Krol, Vice Chair

Peter White

Earl Persip

Helen Moon

Buildings and Maintenance

Donna Todd Rivers, Chair

Nicholas Cacccamo, Vice Chair

Anthony Simonelli

Christopher Connell

Earl Persip

Finance

Peter Marchetti, Chair

Christopher Connell, Vice Chair

Earl Persip

Kevin Morandi

Melissa Mazzeo

Public Health and Safety

Kevin Morandi, Chair

Peter Marchetti, Vice Chair

Helen Moon

Melissa Mazzeo

Peter White

Public Works

Christopher Connell, Chair

Kevin Morandi, Vice Chair

Anthony Simonelli

Donna Todd Rivers

Helen Moon
The deteriorated roof over the boiler room at Hoosac Valley Elementary has been reconstructed.

Hoosac Valley Elementary Boiler Room Roof Repairs Completed

ADAMS, Mass.  The Hoosac Valley Elementary School finally has a structurally sound roof over its boiler room.

"This has been around for a while now, but we did allocate money for it and we knew it needed to be done," Chairman John Duval said at last week's meeting of the Selectmen.

Discussions about repairing the roof go back to 2016, when the Adams-Cheshire Regional School Committee began the process of closing one of its two elementary schools.

The roof on the formerly named C.T Plunkett boiler room was in disrepair and with the cost likely to have some effect on the School Committee's decision, the town of Adams pledged to fund the repair.

Initially, the project was estimated to cost nearly $400,000, however, then town Administrator Tony Mazzucco thought this amount was not realistic. The project was held up until this past fall, when the town brought on Souliere & Zepka Construction who could do the repair for $198,000.

With Cheshire Elementary School's untimely closing, this delay did deepen the rift between the two towns. Cheshire had concerns that Adams did not actually intend to repair the roof.

Interim Town Administrator Donna Cesan's written report to the Selectmen stated that the lengthy project is essentially complete. She wrote that a final punch list needs to be formed and after those items are completed, the project can be closed out.

Another project Cesan listed in her report was the upcoming demolition of the 50 Commercial St. property the town recently received permission from housing court to take down.

"If you have been by there, I am sure that you have seen the fence surrounding that building," Duval said. "We thank the [Department of Public Works] for taking care of that for us and it is coming down."

Cesan, who did not attend the meeting, wrote that the demolition will go out to bid this week.

Late last year, the town gave owner Charles Ransford 30 days to demolish the building on his own because it was a public safety concern. Ransford did not do this.

Cesan wrote that the town is still waiting on approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection because the building does contain hazardous materials and whoever is awarded the demolition bid will have to remove all the debris.

The demolition will be paid out of the slum and blight removal line item in the budget, however, a lien will be placed on the property in an attempt to recoup costs.
Unionized nurses from BMC delivered a petition to trustee Jerome Jay Anderson at Pittsfield Co-op on Monday.

Talks Continue Between BMC, Nurses; 2nd Strike Authorization Vote Set



Nurse Leilani McCardle-Hover gives Pittsfield Co-op staff the petition, asking that it be passed along to bank president J. Jay Anderson. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  The unionized nurses at Berkshire Medical Center will be voting again to give the bargaining committee the authority to call a one-day strike.

Berkshire Medical Center management and the hospital's Massachusetts Nurses Association chapter have been at an impasse in negotiations for a year and a half.

In October, a one-day strike was held, followed by a four-day lockout by BMC when the two sides couldn't reach a settlement.

Since then there have been three negotiation sessions with one more scheduled for Tuesday. The union says there has been some consensus on a few of the issues during those sessions, but not on the two major points of contention: staffing and health insurance.

Hospital officials say they believed that the "cooperative and collaborative tone" of the sessions meant progress toward a settlement.

The union has once again called for a vote to give the bargaining committee the authority to call another one-day strike should the committee feel it is needed. The vote doesn't necessarily mean there will be a strike, nor does it set a timeline.

On Monday, a group of nurses tried to get the hospital's board of trustees aware of the nurses' issues in hopes they'll urge management to settle.

"What we were hoping to accomplish is just trying to make contact with the board of trustees. They've been a little elusive. Those that we've been able to talk to seem receptive to the plight of the nurses. But what they need to understand is our management at BMC is not listening to us. We are not being heard," said Leilani McCardle-Hover, who works as a nurse in the critical care unit.

A half dozen or so nurses went to the Pittsfield Cooperative Bank to give a petition with nearly 600 signatures to trustee Jerome Jay Anderson, president and chief operating office of the bank. But in the nurses' second attempt to hand deliver petitions to trustee members, Anderson was not available. Nor was John Bissell when the nurses attempted to deliver the petition to his work at Greylock Federal Credit Union in August.

The petition reads: "As trustees, you are stewards tasked with overseeing Berkshire Medical Center. BMC and the patient care that nurses and other staff provide are among our community's most valuable assets. Since BMC is funded primarily through public money  tax dollars and generous donations  trustees have an obligation to take the time and listen to the patient safety concerns being raised by the community and nurses. This is your job. Therefore, we are asking you to intervene NOW and convince BMC's administration to settle a fair contract with nurses. There can be no further delay. Patient safety is, and has always been, our No. 1 priority. Please demonstrate through your swift action that it is yours as well."

Since the October strike, three negotiation sessions were held  on Nov. 14, Nov. 28, and Dec. 20  and consensus has been reached on workforce safety proposals. But, the union says the main sticking points hadn't been settled.

"We always go into bargaining with hopefulness that they will come to the table. That they'll enter the room, speak with us, and want to get down to business and finish this off," McCardle-Hover said of the next bargaining session.

"We're not asking for a whole lot. We're asking for charge nurses without a group. We're asking for them not to make staffing any worse than it is and quite honestly since we've come back from the strike things have gotten worse."

Brenda Cadorette, BMC's chief nursing officer, responded in a letter to nurses about the past three negotiating sessions. The first had focused on staff safety and security and the second on a review of actions taken to date along with discussion about concerns and suggestions, she said. "As a result of that sharing of ideas, at the third post-strike session, we responded to the bargaining committee's safety proposals with some modified language that, after some discussion, the hospital and the union were able to find a way to resolve these important safety and security issues," she wrote, but added further on that "we have continuing disagreements about how the charge nurse function is addressed in the MNA collective bargaining agreement."

McCardle-Hover, who works in critical care, said there have been issues since the strike with paid time off and vacations being denied. And the floors remain short staffed. BMC, however, says it has cut its nurse vacancy rate by 45 percent with expectation of more improvement in that area.

Hospital officials also remain hopeful and agreed there has been progress made toward a settlement.

"Our positive experience in the three negotiating sessions since October led us to believe that we could work collaboratively with the union to resolve the remaining outstanding issues with our registered nurses," Cadorette wrote. "We were, therefore, both surprised and disappointed to learn that the MNA had scheduled votes on January 11 and 16 to authorize a second strike. "We remain hopeful that the cooperative spirit that the bargaining committee showed at the most recent negotiating sessions will continue in future ones and will result in a fair and reasonable agreement that serves the interest of the registered nurses, the other hospital employees, the hospital itself and, most importantly, the community that we all, collectively, serve."

The contract talks have now entered their third calendar year. The previous contract expired in September 2016 and talks spanned all of 2017  with the help of a federal mediator. The sides have had differences in opinions regarding staffing and health insurance.
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When I started at Penguin 20 years ago, as part of an entirely new team, there was a real sense that change was needed and that we had been brought in to achieve it. One of our challenges was to reinvigorate the likes of Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, James Joyce and Evelyn Waugh and appeal to a new generation by showcasing this amazing Penguin backlist in a more relevant way. The collection of re-branded classics would be called Penguin Essentials: we aimed to persuade new readers to discover these books as well as re-ignite existing readers love for them.

The brief from my managing director at the time was to ignore everything that had been done before and completely reinvent the covers. This was an exhilarating challenge. I was new at Penguin, full of ideas and felt like I needed to prove myself. I thought of it as a rebirth, a shake-up of a great brand with a long and respected design history.

Coe's critique of Thatcher's Britain was redesigned by UNGA (Broken Fingaz), Israeli graphic artists

It was also really exciting trying to capture the attention of young people who wouldnt necessarily pick up The Dubliners or A Room with a View, redesigning the covers to convey that the stories had contemporary relevance. I started thinking about what was turning young people on, and looked everywhere for inspiration: skateboard shops, record covers, street art and fashion.

As I was personally very inspired by music I turned to designers in the music industry, people who could produce a fresh and interesting cover. The first commission I made was Intro, an agency that was doing cool design work for Manchester-based record label, Blood and Fire, creating jackets for bands such as Primal Scream. When I called them up and asked if theyd like to do a book cover they replied that theyd never done one before. I said it didnt matter, that was the whole idea, and told them to choose whichever book they wanted from the list I gave them. My only instructions were: Do what you want. Treat it like its a record.

Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous 1955 novel reimagined by Katharine McNaughton

I then approached design collective Tomato and told them that Intro was doing a cover. Before I knew it, lots of people wanted to design an Essentials cover for me. I think these creatives were drawn in by the Penguin brand and that the titles up for grabs were fantastic; people were queueing up to do a George Orwell or a Jack Kerouac cover. Plus, they were all excited about having creative freedom with no boundaries. We were initially meant to publish ten but, because of the buzz, we extended it to 20 titles in the first year.

Our commissions became increasingly unexpected and brave and we started contacting up-and-coming creatives from further afield. For example, we found two Israeli skateboarders online, now known as UNGA (Broken Fingaz), and asked if they wanted to redesign the cover of Jonathan Coes What a Carve Up!. We had to get a synopsis translated and sent over to Israel as they couldnt get the book in Hebrew.

One of my highlights is Hatch Show Prints design of A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. They are Nashville-based printers who designed Elvis Presleys show posters in 1956 and many well-known country-western adverts. I am also thrilled that we were able to get Banksy involved, who reimagined the cover of Nick Caves And the Ass Saw the Angel. I approached him through a friend of a friend in a bar, and never expected hed do a cover for us.

Hatch Show Print also designed Elvis Presleys show posters in 1956

The Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft is steeped in design history and, as its not far from my home, I often visit for inspiration. When they mentioned their plans for an Elizabeth Friedlander exhibition, a designer who designed book covers for Penguin in the 1950s and 1960s, I suggested I could pull together something contemporary to tie in with the show. Friedlanders daring approach to book design and her free spirit in going against convention reflect the energy and ingenuity of all the artists who have collaborated with us on the Essentials since 1998.

Napoleon dynamite: Orwell's 'Animal Farm' by Pete Fowler

The 20 Years of Penguin Essentials exhibition is significant as the covers have never been recognised as a body of work before and it is moving to see the work of so many talented individuals displayed together. Working on the Penguin Essentials was a real career high and I am very proud that the series remains as energised and exciting as when it was first launched 20 years ago. The philosophy of the series still remains the same today: we want to continue to redesign the classics to capture the imagination of all kinds of people whilst showcasing creatives from around the world.

Designers Intro were more used to creating album sleeves for bands such as Primal Scream than covers for Orwell books

The diversity of the artists weve commissioned is quite incredible, and when we put together the exhibition and looked at the covers as a whole for the first time, its clear that they are standing the test of time. Designers look back all the time for inspiration  Id like to think that in another 20 years, design students will look back at the Penguin Essentials and draw inspiration from this body of work.

John Hamilton is Art Director at Penguin Random House UK and the founder of the Penguin Essentials series. The '20 Years of Penguin Essentials' and 'Elizabeth Friedlander' exhibtions are on display at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, East Sussex, until 29 April (ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk)
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American actor Kirk Douglas was honoured last night at the Golden Globes, the 101-year-old appearing on stage alongside daughter-in-law Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Douglas, who was sat in a wheelchair, was given a standing ovation by the star-studded audience following a short video tribute to the iconic actor.

"What do you say? Zeta-Jones, who is married to Douglass son, Michael Douglas, began. The veteran actor replied: "Very good!"

Zeta-Jones continued: In 1991 my father in law, this living Hollywood legend Kirk, was recognised by the Writer's Guild Of America for his role in ending the Hollywood Blacklist.

 Golden Globes 2018 highlights

She proceeded to tell the audience how Douglas hired famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo  one of many blacklisted communist-aligned Hollywood writers  to write the screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick-directed Spartacus.

Catherine, you said it all, Douglas said with a smile. I worked on a speech but I dont want to say it because I could never follow you.

Douglas celebrated his 101st Birthday last month with friends and family.

Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Show all 30 1 /30 Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Margot Robbie The Australian actor is renowned for her sartorial prowess and this ornate Gucci gown is no exception. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Maggie Gylenhaal The American actor offset the minimalism of her custom Monse jumpsuit with dramatic drop earrings reaching down to her decolletage. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alilison Janney Before taking home the award for best supporting actress for her role in I, Tonya, Janney turned heads on the red carpet in a graphic Mario Dice fishtail gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Reese Witherspoon & Eva Longoria While the Big Little Lies producer opted for a off-the-shoulder Zac Posen number, Eva Longoria donned a custom Genny gown, complete with a thigh-high slit. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alison Brie The Glow star opted for a billowing trouser suit by Vassilis Zoulias. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Jessica Chastain The Molly's Game star donned a custom Armani Prive off-the-shoulder gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Mandy Moore The This Is Us star chose a halterneck gown from Rosie Assoulin's Fall 2017 collection, paired with a Tyler Ellis clutch. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Catherine Zeta-Jones Not one to shy away from a daring design, the Welsh actor donned a sheer plunging gown from Zuhair Murad's couture collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Penelope Cruz Ralph & Russo know a thing or two about dressing high-profile celebrities (remember that Meghan Markle dress?) making the Australian design duo a perfect fit for Cruz, who stunned in an ornate couture gown from their latest collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Meryl Streep and Ai-jen Poo Streep donned a custom Vera Wang gown with a sweetheart neckline at this year's ceremony. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alexis Biedel The Handmaid's Tale star wore a dynamic strapless jumpsuit by Oscar De La Renta, complete with a leaf-like sash and a classic burgundy lip. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Allison Williams Bringing a splash of colour to the Globe's all-black-everything aesthetic, the Get Out actor wore a strapless Armani Prive couture gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Oprah Winfrey Winfrey opted for a form-fitting Atelier Versace gown as she took to the stage to accept the Cecil B. de Mille award. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Lily James The British actor went all-out glamour puss in this Valentino couture gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Naomi Campbell The British model kept it classic in an off-the-shoulder pleated number by Jean Paul Gaultier paired with Neil Lane jewellery. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Saoise Ronan The Irish actor might have taken home the prestigious gong for best actor, thanks to her stellar performance in Ladybird, but her custom Atelier Versace gown is no less noteworthy. Paired with Cartier jewellery, Ronan is the epitome of elegance in this award-worthy look. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Zac Efron If anyone can make an all-black suit their own, it's the Disney heartthrob-turned-bonafide-talent Efron, who took to the red carpet in a sleek Hugo Boss tuxedo. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Angelina Jolie A strong contender for best-dressed, Jolie paired her Atelier Versace dress with Forevermark jewellery and Stuart Weitzman shoes. The effortlessly chic up-do perfectly compliments the actor's sheer neckline while proudly showing off her diamond earrings. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kerry Washington The Scandal star channelled rock'n'roll glamour in this sequin Prabal Gurung gown, complete with a thigh-high slit. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Millie Bobby Brown She may only be 13 years old, but the Stranger Things actor has already firmly established herself as a red carpet pro and this custom Calvin Klein mini is no exception. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kendall Jenner When it comes to red carpet fashion, the reality star-turned-model is known for her regal tastes and this Giambattista Valli gown is the perfect fit for Jenner's perennial princess aesthetic. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Justin Timberlake and Jessie Biel While Timberlake oozed sophistication in a Dior Homme tuxedo, Biel opted for a strapless tulle gown from Dior's Spring couture 2017 collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Dakota Johnson The American actor is a longstanding Gucci girl so it's no surprise she chose a belted velvet number from the Italian design house. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Nick Jonas Showing his support for the Times Up campaign, the singer donned an all-black tuxedo on the red carpet. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Zoe Kravitz If anyone can pull off paired-back simplicity on the red carpet, it's Zoe Kravitz. The Big Little Lies star paired her stunning custom Saint Laurent gown with emerald drop earrings and a striking red lip i.e. an exemplar in the 'less is more' aesthetic. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Emilia Clarke The Game of Thrones star turned heads in a strapless Miu Miu gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman If there's one couple that knows how to master the art of red carpet coordination, it's Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, whose ornate custom Givenchy gown perfectly complimented the simplicity of her husband's all-black ensemble. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Gal Gadot The Wonder Woman star made her mark on this year's red carpet with a fitted strapless Tom Ford complete with a touch of androgyny thanks to a cropped tailored blazer. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Daniel Kaluuya The Get Out frontman glided across the red carpet in a classic Gucci tuxedo. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kate Hudson If anyone can pull off a plunging sheer Valentino gown, it's Kate Hudson. The actor completed her look with a dramatic pendant necklace while keeping her hair and makeup fairly simple, allowing the dress to take centre stage. Rex Features

Meanwhile, the Golden Globes were cause for much celebration, many worthy nominees taking home prizes including Oprah, who gave an incredible speech. Read the full winners list here.
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Recy Taylor was the woman at the heart of Oprah Winfrey's powerful Golden Globes speech - a woman who suffered so brutally, but battled tirelessly for justice.

"In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she'd attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church," Winfrey said, accepting the annual Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

"They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn't an option in the era of Jim Crow."

"The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up."

"Their time is up. And I just hopeI just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on."

Taylor died in her sleep on 28 December at a nursing home in Abbeville, her brother Robert Corbitt said. He said Taylor had been in good spirits the previous day and her death was sudden. She would have been 98 on Sunday. Taylor was 24 when she was abducted and raped as she walked home from church in Abbeville. Her attackers left her on the side of the road in an isolated area.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) assigned Rosa Parks to investigate the case, and she rallied support for justice for Taylor. Two all-white, all-male grand juries declined to charge the six white men, who had admitted to authorities that they assaulted her.

Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Show all 55 1 /55 Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Meryl Street and Ai-jen Poo Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Rosa Clemente and Susan Sarandon Getty Images Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Shailene Woodley and activist Calina Lawrence NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Emma Watson and Marai Larasi Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Laura Dern and Monica Ramirez Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Michelle Williams and Tarana Burke Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Debra Messing Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Caitriona Balfe Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Allison Williams Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Zoe Kravitz Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Viola Davis and Julius Tennon Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Tracee Ellis Ross Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Sarah Paulson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Sadie Sink Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Rita Moreno Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Millie Bobby Brown Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Michelle Pfeiffer Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Margot Robbie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Mandy Moore Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Maggie Gyllenhaal Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Lily James Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kendall Jenner Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kit Harrington Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kerry Washington Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kelly Clarkson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Dakota Johnson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kate Hudson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Jessica Biel Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Jamie Chung Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes James Franco and Dave Franco Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Issa Rae Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Isabelle Huppert Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Heidi Klum Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Gwendoline Christie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Geena Davis Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Claire Foy Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Elisabeth Moss Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Diane Kruger Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Catherine Zeta-Jones Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Angelina Jolie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Nicole Kidman Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Mary J. Blige Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Mariah Carey Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Katherine Langford Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Gillian Anderson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Gal Gadot Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Emilia Clarke Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Alicia Vikander Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes America Ferrera and Natalie Portman Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Sally Hawkins Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Saoirse Ronan Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Reese Witherspoon and Eva Longoria Rex Features



In a 2010 interview, Taylor said that she believed the men who attacked her were dead, but she still would like an apology from officials. It would mean a whole lot to me, Taylor said. The people who done this to me ... they cant do no apologising. Most of them is gone.

The Alabama Legislature passed a resolution apologising to her in 2011. Taylors story, along with those of other black women attacked by white men during the civil rights era, is told in At the Dark End of the Street, a book by Danielle McGuire released in 2010.

A documentary on her case, The Rape of Recy Taylor, was released this year. It is Recy Taylor and rare other black women like her who spoke up first when danger was greatest, Nancy Buirski, the documentarys director, told NBC News. It is these strong womens voices of the Forties and early Fifties and their efforts to take back their bodies that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other movements that followed, notably the one we are witnessing today.

Additional reporting by AP.
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The red carpet at this years Golden Globes was amass with black gowns and tuxedos as actors and actresses united to protest sexual misconduct in Hollywood in light of the Times Up campaign.

While the likes of Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon, Justin Timberlake and many more donned their best all-black ensembles, some attendees shunned the protest entirely by wearing brightly-coloured dresses.

Whether they received the memo or not, those who failed to turn up in their best all-black-everything look have been widely criticised online.

Blanca Blanco was one of the attendees who did not conform to the implicit dress code and instead turned up in a slashed scarlett gown by Atria.

Social media users were quick to accuse the 36-year-old of purposefully rejecting the Times Up movement by donning an outfit that some deemed inappropriate.

Blanca Blanco doesn't necessarily have to conform to the #WhyWeWearBlack dress code, yet to show up in a gown that's not only bright red but extremely skimpy seems like a crass f*** you to the whole movement, wrote one social media user.

Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Show all 30 1 /30 Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Margot Robbie The Australian actor is renowned for her sartorial prowess and this ornate Gucci gown is no exception. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Maggie Gylenhaal The American actor offset the minimalism of her custom Monse jumpsuit with dramatic drop earrings reaching down to her decolletage. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alilison Janney Before taking home the award for best supporting actress for her role in I, Tonya, Janney turned heads on the red carpet in a graphic Mario Dice fishtail gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Reese Witherspoon & Eva Longoria While the Big Little Lies producer opted for a off-the-shoulder Zac Posen number, Eva Longoria donned a custom Genny gown, complete with a thigh-high slit. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alison Brie The Glow star opted for a billowing trouser suit by Vassilis Zoulias. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Jessica Chastain The Molly's Game star donned a custom Armani Prive off-the-shoulder gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Mandy Moore The This Is Us star chose a halterneck gown from Rosie Assoulin's Fall 2017 collection, paired with a Tyler Ellis clutch. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Catherine Zeta-Jones Not one to shy away from a daring design, the Welsh actor donned a sheer plunging gown from Zuhair Murad's couture collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Penelope Cruz Ralph & Russo know a thing or two about dressing high-profile celebrities (remember that Meghan Markle dress?) making the Australian design duo a perfect fit for Cruz, who stunned in an ornate couture gown from their latest collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Meryl Streep and Ai-jen Poo Streep donned a custom Vera Wang gown with a sweetheart neckline at this year's ceremony. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Alexis Biedel The Handmaid's Tale star wore a dynamic strapless jumpsuit by Oscar De La Renta, complete with a leaf-like sash and a classic burgundy lip. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Allison Williams Bringing a splash of colour to the Globe's all-black-everything aesthetic, the Get Out actor wore a strapless Armani Prive couture gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Oprah Winfrey Winfrey opted for a form-fitting Atelier Versace gown as she took to the stage to accept the Cecil B. de Mille award. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Lily James The British actor went all-out glamour puss in this Valentino couture gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Naomi Campbell The British model kept it classic in an off-the-shoulder pleated number by Jean Paul Gaultier paired with Neil Lane jewellery. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Saoise Ronan The Irish actor might have taken home the prestigious gong for best actor, thanks to her stellar performance in Ladybird, but her custom Atelier Versace gown is no less noteworthy. Paired with Cartier jewellery, Ronan is the epitome of elegance in this award-worthy look. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Zac Efron If anyone can make an all-black suit their own, it's the Disney heartthrob-turned-bonafide-talent Efron, who took to the red carpet in a sleek Hugo Boss tuxedo. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Angelina Jolie A strong contender for best-dressed, Jolie paired her Atelier Versace dress with Forevermark jewellery and Stuart Weitzman shoes. The effortlessly chic up-do perfectly compliments the actor's sheer neckline while proudly showing off her diamond earrings. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kerry Washington The Scandal star channelled rock'n'roll glamour in this sequin Prabal Gurung gown, complete with a thigh-high slit. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Millie Bobby Brown She may only be 13 years old, but the Stranger Things actor has already firmly established herself as a red carpet pro and this custom Calvin Klein mini is no exception. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kendall Jenner When it comes to red carpet fashion, the reality star-turned-model is known for her regal tastes and this Giambattista Valli gown is the perfect fit for Jenner's perennial princess aesthetic. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Justin Timberlake and Jessie Biel While Timberlake oozed sophistication in a Dior Homme tuxedo, Biel opted for a strapless tulle gown from Dior's Spring couture 2017 collection. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Dakota Johnson The American actor is a longstanding Gucci girl so it's no surprise she chose a belted velvet number from the Italian design house. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Nick Jonas Showing his support for the Times Up campaign, the singer donned an all-black tuxedo on the red carpet. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Zoe Kravitz If anyone can pull off paired-back simplicity on the red carpet, it's Zoe Kravitz. The Big Little Lies star paired her stunning custom Saint Laurent gown with emerald drop earrings and a striking red lip i.e. an exemplar in the 'less is more' aesthetic. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Emilia Clarke The Game of Thrones star turned heads in a strapless Miu Miu gown. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman If there's one couple that knows how to master the art of red carpet coordination, it's Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, whose ornate custom Givenchy gown perfectly complimented the simplicity of her husband's all-black ensemble. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Gal Gadot The Wonder Woman star made her mark on this year's red carpet with a fitted strapless Tom Ford complete with a touch of androgyny thanks to a cropped tailored blazer. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Daniel Kaluuya The Get Out frontman glided across the red carpet in a classic Gucci tuxedo. Rex Features Golden Globes 2018 Best Dressed Kate Hudson If anyone can pull off a plunging sheer Valentino gown, it's Kate Hudson. The actor completed her look with a dramatic pendant necklace while keeping her hair and makeup fairly simple, allowing the dress to take centre stage. Rex Features

Other guests to defy the sartorial blackout included German model Barbara Meier, actress Zenobia Shroff and president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Meher Tatna, who also donned a red outfit.

While many complained that failing to comply with the #WhyWeWearBlack movement indicated a lack of support to victims of sexual harassment, others were quick to point out the hypocrisy of criticising women for their outfit choices.

How hypocritical of people to criticise Blanca Blanco for wearing a dress that they say supports sexual misconduct. I thought it doesn't matter what you wear?? If you're going to believe in something, believe it at all times, not when it's convenient for you, wrote one user.

Writing in a tweet to Blanco, another added: Women who are shaming you and questioning your integrity based on the colour of your dress and the style are part of the problem. We should support one another.

In response to the vitriol, Blanco proceeded to share her support for the Times Up campaign, writing in a tweet: The issue is bigger than my dress color #TIMESUP  before adding shaming is part of the problem.
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A restaurant has been fined 50,000 in addition to other costs for serving food on unhygienic wooden boards and putting the health of their customers at risk.

Ibrahims Grill and Steak House restaurant is based on Warwick Road in Birmingham.

In October 2016, the restaurant received a visit from Birmingham City Councils Environment department to assess the hygiene levels of the establishment.

Recommended Office teabags contain 17 times more germs than a toilet seat

This came after a party of 14 were allegedly left with food poisoning after dining at the restaurant.

At the time, Birmingham City Council found that the cleanliness of the restaurant was not up to par.

They recorded that employees chose to wear disposable gloves instead of washing their hands, failed to clean the premises efficiently and served food on wooden plates that could not be properly cleaned.

After serving the restaurant improvement notices, Birmingham City Council returned two months later only to find that the same unhygienic wooden plates were still being used to serve food.

Last week, the Birmingham Magistrates Court fined Ibrahims Grill and Steak House 50,000 for their failure to comply with the improvement notices, with an additional 670 in costs and 120 as a victim surcharge.

Mark Croxford, head of environmental health at Birmingham City Council, has spoken about the responsibility that culinary businesses must bear to look after the health of their customers.

It is completely unacceptable for businesses to put the health of people eating at their restaurants at risk, he said in a statement tweeted by the Birmingham City Council.

The owners were given sound advice which they chose to ignore.

I am pleased magistrates supported our efforts with a large fine and hope advice we give on improving businesses to protect health will not be ignored in future.

According to the Food Standards Agency, there isnt strong evidence to suggest that wooden chopping boards are less hygienic than plastic ones, as long as theyre cleaned properly after use.

The Independent has reached out to Birmingham City Council and Ibrahims Grill and Steak House restaurant for comment.
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Chinas space station is not out of control and people living under it arent in danger, a leading Chinese engineer has said amid fears it could soon slam down to Earth.

Repeated warnings have suggested that the space agency has lost control of its station and that it could plummet down to Earth. But it has told the public that it knows exactly what is going on with it.

Tiangong-1, which translates as heavenly palace, was launched into orbit in 2011. Since then it has been undertaking experiments, in large part as a test to have a permanent station in space by 2023.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 1 /30 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427  more commonly known as WR 124  and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago Nasa's most stunning pictures of space The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead  sharing pictures of black holes Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later  having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station Nasa/Scott Kelly Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called draa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

It was supposed to be decommissioned in 2013, with a controlled destruction. That has been repeatedly delayed, however, leading to fears that it could be out of control and the Chinese space agency is simply waiting for it to fall back to Earth.

If it did so and managed to land over a populated area, the remains of the space station that dont burn up on re-entry could cause serious damage.

Recommended Out of control Chinese space station about to fall to Earth

Zhu Congpeng, a top engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the state-backed Science and Technology Daily newspaper that the space station was not crashing and did not pose a safety or environmental threat.

We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to allow it to fall within the first half of this year, Mr Zhu told the newspaper.

It will burn up on entering the atmosphere and the remaining wreckage will fall into a designated area of the sea, without endangering the surface, he said.

Re-entry was delayed in September 2017 in order to ensure that the wreckage would fall into an area of the south Pacific Ocean where debris from Russian and US space stations had previously landed, the paper said.

The California-based Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit group that conducts federal research, said the Tiangong-1s re-entry was unlikely to be controlled but was highly unlikely to hit people or damage property, according to a post on its website last updated 3 January.

Although not declared officially, it is suspected that control of Tiangong-1 was lost and will not be regained before re-entry, it said. There may be hazardous material on board that could survive re-entry, it said.

Advancing Chinas space programme is a priority for President Xi Jinping, who has called for China to become a global space power with both advanced civilian space flight and capabilities that strengthen national security.

Beijing insists that its space programme is for peaceful purposes, but the US Defence Department has said Chinas programme could be aimed at blocking adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.

Reuters
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A map of the UK which reveals the worst hit area for flu has shown that cases are rising across the country.

Created by online tool Flusurvey, the red zone map is updated every three minutes to reflect the growing number of Influenza like illnesses reported by members of the public who are registered on the site.

Red zones reflect areas with high numbers of cases, while blue zones reveal areas that have not been affected.

As the latest map shows, there are currently less than five areas in the UK with no cases of influenza, showing a significant increase in the last three days.

(Flusurvey.org.uk (Flusurvey.org.uk)

So far, the City of London seems to have been spared while Leeds, Bath and Plymouth are some of regions with reported cases.

The number of reported cases has surged in 24 hours, reports the Evening Standard, with some attributing this spike to the surge in one particular strain of flu: Aussie Flu, also known as H3N2.

The deadly strain has already reportedly taken the lives of some people in Ireland.

Dr Richard Pebody, acting head of respiratory diseases at Public Health England, has said that the flu vaccine is the best way to protect yourself from the illness, reports The Sun.

"As we would expect at this time of year, flu levels have increased this week," he said.

"Our data shows that more people are visiting GPs with flu symptoms and we are seeing more people admitted to hospitals with the flu.

"The vaccine is the best defence we have against the spread of flu and it isnt too late to get vaccinated."

He pointed out that while Flusurvey's map is a useful tool, it currently only contains data for 7,500 Britons and should be interpreted with caution, particularly because it simply reflects data for flu-like illnesses and does not specifically reveal the rising number of cases of the Aussie Flu strain.

According to the NHS, symptoms for flu can include an aching body, exhaustion, loss of appetite, sudden fevers, nausea and headaches.

"People suffering with flu-like symptoms should catch coughs or sneezes in tissues and bin them immediately, wash their hands regularly with soap and warm water and frequently clean regularly used surfaces to stop the spread of flu.

"Avoid having unnecessary contact with other people if you or they have symptoms of flu."
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US brewing giant Molson Coors has bought Aspall, the British cider brand founded in Suffolk in 1728, for an undisclosed amount.

Molson Coors said it aims to develop Aspall into the UKs top-selling premium cider brand.

The UK currently accounts for almost half of the global cider market, according to the National Association of Cider Makers.

The Chevallier family, which has been been brewing cider at Aspall Hall in Suffolk for almost 300 years, will continue to play a role in the companys future, Molson Coors said in a statement. The company added Aspall would remain a cornerstone of the surrounding community in Suffolk.

The firm will also acquire Aspalls organic cider vinegar range, which it says is made using a fermentation process that is the only one of its kind it claims is unique in the world.

Barry Chevallier Guild, chairman of Aspall, said: There is a real opportunity to elevate and grow the status of English cider in the UK and abroad both as a beverage and as an excellent partner for food.

We believe that Molson Coors investment will provide the catalyst to grow Aspall and build the recognition for quality cider worldwide.

The total UKs cider market value grew by more than a quarter between 2010 and 2015 and is projected to continue that growth until 2020, according to data from Nielsen.

Molson Coors makes a number of well-known drinks brands, including Miller and Britains best-selling beer, Carling. The company operates three UK breweries at Burton-upon-Trent, Tadcaster and Burtonwood, as well as one in Cork, Ireland.

It bought Cornwall-based Sharps brewery for 20m in 2011.
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A former Royal Bank of Scotland trader has been fined 250,000 and banned from regulated trading by the City watchdog over his role in the Libor-rigging scandal.

Neil Danziger, who was a derivatives trader at the state-backed bank, improperly and routinely asked RBS Libor submitters to change the rates they submitted in order to benefit his positions, the Financial Conduct Authority said on Monday. The misconduct took place between 2007 and 2010.

Mr Danziger is not a fit and proper person because he acted recklessly and lacks integrity, the FCA said.

He submitted RBSs yen Libor rate himself on occasions where other employees responsible were absent. On those occasions he took into account requests of other RBS derivatives traders [and] trading positions for which he and other derivatives traders were responsible, the FCA stated.

The Libor rates submitted by the major banks are used to price billions of dollars of loans and trillions of dollars of derivatives. A small movement either way could provide large gains or losses for a trader.

The FCA said that Mr Danziger had also recklessly entered into 28 wash trades  deals that effectively cancel each other out  which had no legitimate commercial rationale. The purpose of these trades was to pay fees to brokers in return for personal hospitality that they had provided Mr Danziger, the FCA said.

Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: Proper standards of market conduct reflect the interests of the whole community in the well-being of our financial markets.

Mr Danzigers reckless disregard of these standards has no place in the financial services industry.

Market participants cannot turn a blind eye to what the community, through its laws and regulations, expects, nor apply their own, lower standards. This substantial fine and ban should reinforce that message.

The watchdog added that Mr Danziger acted recklessly and with a lack of integrity in deliberately closing his mind to the risk that his actions were improper.

Mr Danzigers lawyer Ben Rose, of the law firm Hickman & Rose, said: Mr Danziger continues to dispute the FCAs findings and feels strongly that he is being scapegoated for the systemic problems relating to Libor.

However, the last five years have been incredibly challenging. He is emotionally exhausted and financially drained. He leaves it to others, better resourced, to press the FCA for answers, hopeful that, one day, the real truth will come out.
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Japanese firm Takata has called back another 3.3m faulty airbags in what has become the largest auto parts recall in history.

Paperwork filed in the US with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) revealed the latest recalls concerned frontal airbags fitted to certain vehicles made in 2009, 2010 and 2013.

Models manufactured by Honda, Toyota, Audi, BMW, Daimler Vans, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar-Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Tesla are affected.

Notices of the expanded recalls were posted on Saturday on the NHTSA website and car makers are expected to give details on exact models hit by the recall later this month.

Transport authorities worldwide have deemed Takata inflators containing the chemical ammonium nitrate are unsafe.

The chemical is used to create a small explosion to fill airbags quickly in the event of a crash.

However, it can deteriorate when stored at high temperatures or humidity causing it to burn too fast and blow apart its metal canister.

This explosion can then spray hot shrapnel at drivers and passengers inside the vehicle.

The parts have been linked to at least 20 deaths worldwide and are thought to have left another 180 people injured.

In a statement posted on its website, the company said: Takata Corporation apologises to the driving public for the widespread concern and inconvenience caused as a result of our inflators.

We urge US drivers to visit the NHTSA website to check if your vehicle is under recall, and to take immediate action if your vehicle is identified as requiring repair.

Biggest business scandals in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Biggest business scandals in pictures Biggest business scandals in pictures Volkswagen emissions scandal VW admitted to rigging its US emission tests so that diesel-powered cars would looks like they were emitting less nitrous oxide, which can damage the ozone layer and contribute to respiratory diseases. Around 11 million cars worldwide were affected. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli became known as the most hated man in the world after his drug company, Turing, increased the price of a 62-year-old drug that treated HIV patients by 5,000% to $750 a pill. He was charged with illegally taking stock from Retrophin, a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. Shkreli, who maintains he is innocent, and says there is little evidence of fraud because his investors didn't lose money. Biggest business scandals in pictures Panama Papers: Millions of leaked documents expose how worlds rich and powerful hid money - April 2016 Millions of confidential documents have been leaked from one of the worlds most secretive law firms, exposing how the rich and powerful have hidden their money. Dictators and other heads of state have been accused of laundering money, avoiding sanctions and evading tax, according to the unprecedented cache of papers that show the inner workings of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is based in Panama. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Google's tax avoidance Google reached a deal with the HM Revenue and Customs to pay back 130 million in so-called back-taxes that have been due since 2005. George Osborne championed the deal as a major success. But European MEPs have since called for the Chancellor to appear in front of the committee on tax rulings to explain the tax deal. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Rogue trader A French court cut the damages owed by rogue trader Jerome Kerviel from 4.9bn (4.2bn) to just 1m (860,000). The court ruled on that Kerviel was partly responsible for massive losses suffered in 2008 by his former employer Societe Generale through his reckless trades. Kerviel has consistently maintained that bosses at the French bank knew what he was doing all along. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Barclays CEO under investigation for trying to identify whistleblower - Monday Paril 10 Authorities have launched an investigation into Barclays chief executive officer Jes Staley for trying to identify a whistleblower, the bank said on Monday. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are both investigating Mr Staley after the bank notified them that Mr Staley had tried to identify the author of two anonymous letters, which were sent to the board and a senior executive in June 2016. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures UK to crack down on bank money laundering after reports of 65bn Russian scam, City minister says - March 2017 The Economic Secretary to the Treasury has vowed that the Government will crack down on money laundering practices, after several of the UK's biggest banks were accused of processing money from a Russian scam, believed to involve up to $80bn (65bn). Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former HBOS bankers convicted of bribery and fraud over 245m loan scam - February 2017 Two former HBOS bankers were among six people found guilty of bribery and fraud that cost customers and shareholders hundreds of millions of pounds, the BBC reports. Lynden Scourfield, 54, a manager at HBOS, forced struggling clients to use the services of his friends David Mills, 60, and Michael Bancroft, 73. In return, the two businessmen arranged sex parties, cash and lavish gifts. On Monday, the three were convicted at Southwark Crown Court on accounts including bribery, fraud and money laundering. Mark Dobson, another manager at HBOS, Alison Mills, and John Cartwright were also convicted. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Lloyds chief apologises for damage caused by affair allegations - August 2016 Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank, has broken his silence over allegations about his private life admitting he regrets any "damage done to the group's reputation". In a message sent to the bank's 75,000 employees, the banker said that anyone can make mistakes while insisting that staff had to maintain the highest professional standards. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Christine Lagarde faces court over 340m Bernard Tapie payment - July 2016 The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, must stand trial in France over a payment of 403 million (now 340m, then 290m) to tycoon Bernard Tapie, a France's highest appeals court has ruled. The court rejected Ms Lagarde's appeal against a judge's order in December for her to stand trial over allegations of negligence in her handling of the affair. Ms Lagarde could risk a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of 15,000 euros if convicted. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures HSBC senior manager arrested in FX rigging investigation at JFK airport in New York - July 2016 A senior executive at HSBC has been arrested at New York's JFK airport for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks, according to reports. Mark Johnson, global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was reportedly arrested on Tuesday. He will appear before a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Bloomberg said. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Former PwC employees found guilty in 'Luxleaks' tax scandal - June 2016 Two ex- PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers were found guilty in Luxembourg of stealing confidential tax files that helped unleash a global scandal over generous fiscal deals for hundreds of international companies. Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet face suspended sentences of 12 months and 9 months and were ordered to pay fines of 1,500 (1,230) and 1,000 (822) for their role in the so-called LuxLeaks scandal. Despite the minimal sentences, the ruling was described by Deltours lawyer as shocking and a terrible anomaly. The ruling puts on guard future whistle-blowers, Deltour told reporters.The LuxLeaks revelations sped beyond Luxembourg, causing European Union regulators to expand a tax-subsidy probe and propose new laws to fight corporate tax dodging, while EU lawmakers created a special committee to probe fiscal deals across the 28-nation bloc. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Goldman Sachs dealmakers lavished Libyan officials with prostitutes to win contract - June 2016 A former Goldman Sachs dealmaker trying to persuade Gadaffi-era Libya to invest $1 billion with the investment bank procured prostitutes and invited Libyan officials to lavish parties in the hope of winning the business, the High Court heard on Monday June 13.The Libyan Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund is suing Goldman Sachs for inappropriately coercing its naive staff into giving its sovereign wealth fund cash to the bank to invest in products they did not understand. The products were designed to generate big profits for Goldman, the LIA claims.Goldman denies wrongdoing and says the LIA was treated as an arms-length customer Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former boss of BHS said his life was threatened - June 2016 Darren Topp, the former boss of BHS, has said former owner Dominic Chappell threatened to kill him when he challenged him over a 1.5 million transfer out of the business. MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee asked Mr Topp about a 1.5 million transfer Mr Chappell made from BHS to a company called BHS Sweden. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley admits paying workers below the minimum wage - June 2016 Mike Ashley admitted paying Sports Direct employees below the minimum wage at a hearing in front of MPs. The company founder said that workers were paid less than the statutory minimum because of bottlenecks at security in an admission that could result in sanctions from HMRC. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Mitsubishi admits improper fuel tests - April 2016 Mitsubishi has admitted to using false fuel methods dating back to 1991. The scale of the scandal is only just coming to light after it was revealed in April that data was falsified in the testing of four types of cars, including two Nissan cars. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Quindell, the scandal-ridden insurance firm Quindell was once a darling of AIM but its share price fell in April 2014 when its accounting practices were attacked in a stinging research note by US short seller Gotham City. In August the group was forced to disclose that the 107 million pre-tax profit it had reported for 2013 was incorrect, and it had in fact suffered a 64million loss. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Toshiba Accounting Scandal The boss of Toshiba, the Japanese technology giant, resigned in disgrace in the wake of one of the countrys biggest ever accounting scandals. His exit came two months after the company revealed that it was investigating accounting irregularities. An independent investigatory panel said that Toshibas management had inflated its reported profits by up to 152 billion yen (780m) between 2008 and 2014. Biggest business scandals in pictures FIFA Corruption Scandal Fifa, football's world governing body, has been engulfed by claims of widespread corruption since the summer of 2015, when the US Department of Justice indicted several top executives. It has now claimed the careers of two of the most powerful men in football, Fifa President Sepp Blatter and Uefa President Michel Platini, after they were banned for eight years from all football-related activities by Fifa's ethics committee. A Swiss criminal investigation into the pair is ongoing. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Libor fraudster City trader Tom Hayes, 35, has become the first person to be convicted of rigging Libor rates following a trial at London's Southwark Crown Court. Hayes worked as a trader in yen derivatives at UBS before joining the American bank Citigroup in Tokyo. He was fired from Citigroup following an investigation into his trading methods. He returned to the UK in December 2012 and was arrested following a two-and-a-half year criminal investigation by the SFO. Getty

The latest round of recalls form part of the largest operation of its kind in the auto industry.

In the US, 19 manufacturers have issued recalls for 69m faulty airbags fitted to around 42m vehicles, while recalls have also been issued in Japan, China and Oceania.

The scandal forced the company to file for bankruptcy in June 2017 amid spiralling debts.

Many automakers have been slow to replace the potentially deadly inflators, with a report in September last year suggesting less than half had been repaired.
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A major breakthrough in Brexit negotiations scored at the end of last year is likely to have bolstered confidence across the UKs business community, a new report suggests.

Accountant and business advisor BDO said on Monday that its monthly Optimism Index, which measures how firms expect their order books to develop over the next six months, increased from 102.05 in November to 102.15 in December.

The rise in business optimism is also being reflected in the jobs market, BDO said.

Recommended Brexit drags on UK services firms in December

The companys Employment Index, which indicates firms hiring intentions, rose by 0.2 points to 111.26 in December.

Despite the positive outlook for 2018, the Output Index, which measures how much companies produce across the manufacturing and services sector, fell from 98.99 in November to 98.45 in December, the lowest reading in almost two years. Business output growth has now fallen for five consecutive months.

BDO said that the UKs falling output growth is being driven by the slowdown of the dominant services sector, which has been weighed down by Brexit uncertainty.

A breakthrough deal between Britain and the EU on Brexit was reached in December after months of stalled negotiations, paving the way for future trade talks.

Peter Hemington, partner at BDO, said UK business leaders were now more confident about the year ahead and were bolstering their recruitment efforts as a result.

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.

However, despite unprecedented levels of employment, business output continues to slow, he said.

While the Government prioritises securing our future outside of the EU, it must not overlook the immediate challenges stifling the growth of our economy. The perennial productivity problem must be addressed by accelerating investment in infrastructure and training before we fall further behind our G7 counterparts, he added.

BDOs data is based on a weighted average of the UKs main business surveys from the Confederation of British Industry, the Bank of England and IHS Markit.
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Finland's repeated success in national education rankings suggests there are at least a few lessons the US can learn.

For one, the tiny Nordic country places considerable weight on early education. Before Finnish kids learn their times tables, they learn simply how to be kids - how to play with one another, how to mend emotional wounds.

But even as kids grow up, the country makes a concerted effort to put them on a track for success.

Here are some of the biggest ways Finland is winning in global education.

1. Competition isn't as important as cooperation.

Finland has figured out that competition between schools doesn't get kids as far as cooperation between those schools.

One reason for that is Finland has no private schools. Every academic institution in the country is funded through public dollars. Teachers are trained to issue their own tests instead of standardised tests.

There's no word for accountability in Finnish, education expert Pasi Sahlberg once told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. Teachers are trusted to do well without the motivation of competition.

And that's because...

2. Teaching is one of the most-respected professions.

Teachers aren't underpaid in Finland like they are in the US. In fact, they're valued a lot since Finland puts a lot of stock in childhood as the foundation for lifelong development.

To become a teacher in Finland, candidates must have first received at least their master's degree and complete the equivalent of a residency program in US medical schools. Student teachers often teach at affiliate elementary schools that adjoin a university.

The result: Teachers can be counted on to know the best pedagogical research on education that's out there.

3. Finland listens to the research.

In the US, research studies looking at what works in the classroom and what doesn't often get stuck in the mud of local school-board politics. Parents argue certain policies aren't right for their kids.

In Finland, research comes with no such political baggage. The government makes its education policy decisions based almost solely on effectiveness - if the data show improvements, the federal Ministry of Education and Culture will give it a shot.

Overall, education in the United States is much more political than it is in Finland, where it's much more of a professional issue, Sahlberg told Business Insider.

In short, Finland gets things done.

4. Finland isn't afraid to experiment.

One big benefit of listening to the research is you're not beholden to outside forces, like money and political clout. Finland's teachers are encouraged to create their own mini-laboratories for teaching styles, keeping what works and scrapping what doesn't.

It's a lesson for the US: An experimental mindset at the top can lead teachers to think outside the box.

5. Playtime is sacred.

Compared to the US, where free playtime has been dwindling in kindergarten for the last two decades, Finnish law requires teachers to give students 15 minutes of play for every 45 minutes of instruction.

The policy stems from Finland's deep, almost storybook belief that kids ought to stay kids for as long as possible. It's not their job to grow up quickly and become memorisers and test-takers.

The results speak for themselves: Study after study has found that students given at least one daily recess for 15 minutes or more behave better in school and do better on assignments.

6. Kids have very little homework.

For all the things Finnish schools offer kids, what they seem to lack is homework. Many kids receive only a small amount of it each night.

The philosophy stems from a mutual level of trust shared by the schools, teachers, and parents.

Parents assume teachers have covered most of what they need in the confines of the school day, and schools assume the same. Extra work is often deemed unnecessary by everyone involved.

Time spent at home is reserved for family, where the only lessons kids learn are about life.

7. Preschool is high-quality and universal.

Some of the only opportunities many American kids get to stretch their imagination, get dirty, and play games come in preschool. The trouble is, parents are often expected to pay for that early education, setting up disparities that could last through the child's later years.

In Finland, parents are guaranteed everything. Preschool and daycare are both universal until age 7, and more than 97% of three- to six-year-olds take advantage of at least one, NPR reports.

More than that, though, the preschools are good. They align their curricula with one another and prepare kids along similar tracks. By the time kids start getting actual work, parents can rest assured the same lessons are getting elsewhere taught across town.

8. College tuition is free.

Unlike American students, who rack up tens of thousands in college-loan debt, Finns pay nothing to go to college. For bachelor, master, and doctoral programmes alike, their education is subsidized by a combination of taxpayer dollars and the federal government.

This takes a huge burden away from young people's minds when they don't need to wonder whether they can afford to pay for their studies, Pasi Sahlberg, Director General at the Centre for International Mobility, told Business Insider.

Sahlberg said the system comes from a belief that education, including higher education, is a human right and also a great equalizer in our society.

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Read the original article on Business Insider UK.  2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.
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Every day since 5 February 1924, the Royal Greenwich Observatory has made the pips available to the BBC, every 15 minutes. If youre a radio listener youll generally hear them on the hour, just before the news.

Otherwise known as the Greenwich Time Signal, the pips arent just some aural window dressing. You can, indeed, set your watch by them; the six short beeps at one-second intervals are the world standard from which all time ravels out on Earth; everywhere is relative, plus or minus, give or take, to Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.

Today (8 January) is the birthday of the man responsible for the pips, Sir Frank Watson Dyson. He was born 150 years ago, in 1868. Were his only contribution to British life the beloved pips, then his place in history would be assured. But there was much more to Dyson than that. In fact, Jodie Whittaker taking controls of the Tardis on Christmas Day aside, Sir Frank might be the nearest thing we have to a real-life Time Lord.

He served as Astronomer Royal from 1910 until 1933, and perhaps his most significant gift to science is effectively proving Einsteins Theory of General Relativity by observing the behaviour of stars seen near the sun during the eclipse of 1919 and providing evidence for how, as Einstein had theorised, light bent in gravitational fields.

Eclipses were of great interest to Dyson. According to his obituary in the astronomy journal The Observatory, he had organised expeditions to farflung corners of the globe to observe them, including travelling to Portugal in 1900, Sumatra in 1901 and Tunisia in 1905.

But The Observatory calls his expeditions to view the 1919 total eclipse of the sun, on May 29, as the most remarkable incident in Dysons whole career. Einsteins Relativity: The Special and General Theory was published in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, and as strange as it seems to us in this instant information age, copies of the US-published document were hard to come by in the UK because, as The Observatory put it, of the cessation of normal scientific exchanges brought about by the war.

The theory of general relativity states, in simple terms, that what we think of as the force of gravity arises from the curvature of time and space; it explains the motion of planets around stars, the whys and wherefores of black holes, and theorises on the origins of the universe.

Dyson thought that the best way to test the theory would be by observing light from stars during a total eclipse, with the best one on the horizon in 1919. There was only one problem and that was when Dyson started planning his trips, the Great War was in full force, and no-one could say for certain when it was going to finish.

In the face of great discouragement from the authorities and the astronomical community, Dyson went ahead and began to organise two expeditions to observe the eclipse from the best positions  Brazil and the island of Principe, off the coast of Liberia. Dysons obituary points out that the Armistice was signed just three months before he was due to set off.

Theres a romantic, almost Indiana Jones-esque quality about the idea of Dyson bullishly organising his expeditions at the height of the worst conflict the world had ever seen. But it wasnt just the imperial spirit of one born in the Victorian era. Science, especially astronomy and our understanding of the universe, was at a crossroads, just as the world had been at a crossroads with the war.

The old empires and European houses that had thrived for centuries had collapsed into conflict, paving the way for a new world to emerge f. Similarly, Einsteins theories had set the world of science at each others throats. As The Observatory said: Many eminent men of science had refused to accept Einsteins theory; this was probably due in part to the upsetting of old and ingrained ideas that it caused.

Dyson was born near Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and his parents  his father was a Baptist minister  moved when Dyson was very young to Yorkshire. He was schooled at Heath Grammar School in Halifax, later winning scholarships to Bradford Grammar School and ultimately Trinity College, Cambridge.

(Yorkshire, and the West Riding in particular, has a long tradition of turning out famous scientists; Joseph Priestley, born in Birstall, the man who discovered oxygen; Todmordens Sir John Cockroft, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1951 for his work on splitting the atom; Bradfordian Fred Hoyle, who rose to prominence in astronomy after Dysons death. Perhaps theres something in the water up there, some dogged determination to not believe a thing until its been seen with your own eyes.)

The machine used to generate the pips in the 1970s (Getty)

After studying maths and astronomy at Cambridge, Dyson joined the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1894. He served as Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1905 until 1910, when he took up the position as Astronomer Royal for Britain, coinciding with becoming Director of the Greenwich Observatory. He held both posts until his retirement in 1933.

In 1945, after seeing the effects of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein famously spoke of how scientific discoveries can be twisted not for the good of humanity, but for its destruction. One quote often attributed to him is: If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

Dyson died in May 1939, before the Second Wold War had even begun, sailing back from Australia, where he had been in ill health.

Funnily enough, it was his interest watches, clocks, and time itself, that led to his development of the famous pips. The very idea for a permanent, accurate, audible time-keeping signal was Dysons. Having spoken to the head of the BBC, John Reith, Dyson set to work with Frank Hope-Jones, the clockmaker, to come up with two free-pendulum clocks which marked time via two weight-driven astronomical regulators  and sent the time, as pulses of sound, to Broadcasting House in London where they were converted into the recognisable pips.

The two clocks  one was a back-up  were actually built in 1874, and served until 1949, when advances in timekeeping meant they were replaced several times until the BBC installed two of its own atomic clocks in the basement of its London headquarters, which operate to this day.

The pips have been used and adapted for all manner of things. So recognisable are they as a symbol of British life that they were incorporated into the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In 2014, to mark their 90th birthday, the pips were remixed to play Happy Birthday for the Today programme on Radio 4.

It would be fitting if the BBC had plans for something similar to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the man who was such an important figure in British science and astronomy, but perhaps nothing can top the eulogy delivered by the vicar of Greenwich during Dysons funeral in 1939: If I were asked to say what I believe was the outstanding feature of his life I would say his friendliness, beautifully natural, without a trace of patronage; it was never hard work for him to be friendly, it was part of him.
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An Isis-supporting couple have been found guilty of preparing to launch a terror attack using a homemade bomb and chemical weapons in the UK.

Security services feared Munir Mohammed and Rowaida el-Hassan were ready to strike before they were detained in December 2016, with police saying a significant loss of life had been averted.

Mohammed, 36, had already amassed two out of three core components for triacetone triperoxide (TATP), the unstable explosive used in recent Isis attacks, including in Paris and Brussels.

He had also downloaded manuals on how to make mobile phone detonators and ricin, a deadly poison that can kill an adult victim with just a few grains.

Mohammed, of Leopold Street in Derby, and El-Hassan, of Willesden Lane in north-west London, denied preparing terrorist acts between November 2015 and December 2016 but a jury found them both guilty.

Judge Michael Topolski QC remanded them in custody and warned them they faced jail when they are sentenced next month.

He said Mohammed had been convicted of planning a potentially devastating terrorist attack by creating an explosive device and deploying it somewhere in the UK targeting those you regarded as enemies of Isis.

Rowaida El-Hassan, you share the extremist mindset with Munir Mohammed and you were ideologically motivated to provide him with support, motivation and assistance, the judge added.

 MI5 chief warns that Britain is facing an unrelenting terrorist threat

You knew he was engaging and planning an attack. You knew he was planning an explosion to kill and maim innocent people in the cause of Isis.

The Old Bailey heard that El-Hassan, a pharmacist, became a willing participant in the plot after meeting Mohammed on dating website SingleMuslim.com.

She had advertised for a simple, very simple, honest and straightforward man who fears Allah who she could vibe with on a spiritual and intellectual level.

Recommended Terrorist manuals to make New York bomb remain online

Prosecutors said Mohammed was specifically drawn to her profile in late 2015 after seeing she had a masters degree in pharmacy, aiming to use her chemical knowledge in the attack.

Jurors were told the pair had a rapidly formed emotional attachment and a shared ideology and were in regular contact on WhatsApp by spring 2016, meeting in a London park near El-Hassans home.

Records of their messages show they shared extremist views and videos, while Mohammed was put in touch with a man he believed was an Isis commander via Facebook.

Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC said Mohammed resolved upon a lone wolf attack, while working making sauces for supermarket ready meals, and El-Hassan was well aware of his plan.

He pledged allegiance to the man, known as Abubakr Kurdi, and offered to participate in a new job in the UK  a phrase jurors were told referred to a terror attack.

In September 2016, Mohammed complained he had not received his instructions, telling his contact: If possible send how we make dough [explosives] for Syrian bread [a bomb] and other types of food.

Munir Mohammed looking at pressure cookers at a shop in Derby, during the time he was attempting to build a bomb (North East Counter Terrorism Unit)

El-Hassan, a 33-year-old divorcee with two children, advised Mohammed on what chemicals to buy for a bomb, the court heard.

That November, Mohammed got hold of a video containing information on how to manufacture ricin, and days before his arrest he was captured on CCTV buying acetone free nail polish from Asda, in the mistaken belief it was a component of TATP.

He also looked at pressure cookers at Ace Discounts, which the prosecution said could be used to contain the explosives, according to several terrorist manuals.

Police found hydrogen peroxide in a wardrobe and hydrochloric acid in the freezer of his home during a raid on 12 December 2016 but Mohammed claimed they were for domestic purposes.

He told the Old Bailey he sent El-Hassan extremist videos mainly for the news and claimed his intention was to marry her.

But Mohammed had an arranged marriage in Sudan with a woman he had never met called Fatima, who he was hoping to bring to England on a student visa.

He had arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and claimed asylum in February 2014, the court heard.

After awaiting a decision for more than two years, he appealed to his local MP Margaret Beckett for help, but she was told his case had been referred to a specialist unit for consideration.

El-Hassan, who came to Britain from Sudan at the age of three, told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat.

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Asked if she had feelings for Mohammed, she said: It was mixed feelings at the time. Yes, there was emotional attachment.

There were feelings developing and we were getting to know each other. I was grateful for things he helped me with. And he was grateful for things I helped him with. I liked the attention he was giving me.

Police said it could not be proven that El-Hassan was an extremist before she met Mohammed, but could have been in no doubt about his jihadi beliefs.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Greenwood, who led the investigation, said the website they used was a normal place to look for a relationship.

But Mohammed used it to get advice on where to source chemicals to manufacture TATP from El-Hassan, who was previously unknown to the security services.

Munir shared with her some really graphic and brutal execution videos, lots of other ideological material, including children executing Isis prisoners and children involved in military training in the name of the Islamic State, DCI Greenwood said.

She appeared to be very receptive to that and they seemed to encourage each other with their shared mindsets... irrespective of whether she was influenced by him, she knew fully his mindset and contributed to a set of circumstances that, had we not intervened, could have resulted in significant loss of life in the UK in the lead-up to Christmas 2016.

Sue Hemming, the head of of the Crown Prosecution Services counter-terror division, said the couple were clearly attracted to each other through their support for Daeshs violent ideology and its intolerance of those who do not subscribe to its views.

They planned to kill and injure innocent people in the UK and had the mindset, the methodology and almost all the material needed, for Mohammed to carry out an attack, she added.

Both will be in prison, where they cannot plot together and will no longer be a danger to the public.

Additional reporting by PA
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A 17-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to launching a spate of acid attacks in attempts to steal mopeds in London.

Derryck John, who previously could not be named because of his age, doused six delivery riders with corrosive liquid in just 90 minutes in a rampage through London on 13 July.

One of his victims was left with life-changing injuries and others bear long-term mental and physical scars from their ordeal.

John, from Croydon, managed to steal two of the six mopeds he targeted from their owners before being arrested at 3am the following morning.

He pleaded guilty to six counts of throwing a corrosive liquid with intent to disable, burn, maim, disfigure or cause grievous bodily harm, two counts of robbery and four counts of attempted robbery at Wood Green Crown Court.

The defendant originally denied the charges and had been due to stand trial, but changed his plea on the first day of the hearing.

 Men on mopeds hurl acid at five victims in 90-minute London rampage, say police

An indictment lists another unidentified person, who is believed to have been on the same moped as the defendant, as involved in the attacks.

In a note read to the court by judge Noel Lucas QC, John said the guilty pleas were entered on the basis that the acid was thrown to incapacitate the victims and that the other male involved was much older than me.

I really didn't appreciate the damage that would be done, the boy added.

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I'm terrified of the sentence that I will receive and I'm very sorry for what I did and realise I will receive a significant sentence of imprisonment.

Reporting restrictions had banned John's identity being released because of his age until Monday's hearing.

But Judge Lucas told the court there was an "overwhelming, huge public interest" in naming the teenager following his guilty pleas.

The substance used is thought to have had a PH of one or two  making it the strongest acid available  the court heard.

John did not enter a plea on a further charge of robbery on 25 June and his mother sobbed and shouted as she left court.

His first victim was Jabed Hussain, who was working for UberEats at the time and credits his melted helmet for deflecting the acid and saving his life.

Delivery riders during a demonstration in Parliament Square on 18 July (PA)

He told The Independent he was concerned that the courts powers will be insufficient to punish the 17-year-old when he is sentenced on 9 March.

I just want to see the time in prison he gets, Mr Hussain added. A lot of these criminals are under 18 so are we going to let them do whatever they want to? That makes me angry.

The guilty plea came a day after the Government announced major retailers had signed a voluntary commitment to stop selling corrosive products to under-18s in shops or online.

But Mr Hussain claimed attackers will seek other ways of obtaining the substances, adding: Theyll get it from the kitchen, theyre going to get it from the garage. They will try something else.

I dont know what the Government are doing. They are cutting a lot of police, there are long waits for ambulances and for doctorsI think acid attacks are getting worse now.

Mr Hussain has been unable to return to work since the attack, where he sustained damage to his lungs by accidentally inhaling water tainted with acid as his face was rinsed off.

He joined hundreds of delivery drivers protesting to demand improved safety measures earlier this year and has met with MPs and police on the issue.

Mr Hussain is calling for more high-visibility police patrols and a boost in frontline policing, as officer numbers remain at their lowest level since 1985 despite a 13 per cent rise in recorded crime.

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The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA

Figures collated by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) found more than 400 acid or corrosive substance attacks were carried out in England and Wales in the six months up to April 2017.

Assistant Chief Constable Rachel Kearton, its lead on corrosive attacks, revealed last month that the UK now has one of the highest rates of acid attacks per capita in the world  and the number is rising.

It appears that in 2017 we will again exceed previous records for the number of attacks [but] I strongly feel that this is an under-reported crime at this time, she said at the time.

Investigators have warned corrosive substances are being used as an alternative weapon by gang members and robbers, who have also used them on pedestrians to steal phones.

But delivery drivers are being overwhelmingly targeted by assailants attempting to steal their scooters, who have also deployed weapons including knives and hammers.

The Government has responded by proposing stricter controls on the sale of acid and a law making it illegal to carry the fluid in a public place without a good reason.

But the consultations on new laws, including on increasing sentences by classifying acid as a dangerous weapon, have just finished and the measures have not yet come into effect.

Police are currently carrying out a survey of attacks across England and Wales, with the results due in February, and the Home Office has commissioned separate research seeing convicted attackers interviewed to learn more about their motivations.

Additional reporting by PA
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A new police watchdog has launched with strengthened powers to investigate alleged wrongdoing by forces across England and Wales.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has replaced the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) amid anger and mistrust over the investigations into the deaths of several men in custody.

The Home Office said its structure would ensure greater accountability to the public by empowering the watchdog to launch its own investigations without referrals from police and making its probes completely separate from those carried out internally by forces.

Michael Lockwood, the former chief executive of Harrow Council, is heading the IOPC alongside deputies and regional directors.

Public confidence in policing is best served by robust and independent oversight, he said. People need to know that when things go wrong, or serious allegations are made about police officers, they will be thoroughly investigated by a truly independent body.

Relatives of suspects killed and injured in police custody have previously expressed doubt about the IPCCs independence and powers.

The family of Rashan Charles, one of four black men who died after police contact last year, hit out at the lack of prompt and effective action after Scotland Yard refused to suspend the officer who restrained him.

Rashan Charles is one of four black men who died after police contact in 2017 () (Facebook)

Protests demanding justice for Mr Charles and another black man, Edson Da Costa, spilled into rioting over the summer in London.

The ongoing investigations are among those being transferred to the new IOPC, which is charged with investigating deaths and injuries involving police, as well as complaints against bodies including the Home Office, National Crime Agency and HM Revenue and Customs.

Mr Lockwood said the watchdog will probe alleged corruption and oversee the complaints system in England and Wales to set the standards by which police handle internal investigations.

The IOPCs powers were expanded by the Policing and Crime Act 2017, with reforms led by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary.

Unlike the IPCC, it can initiate its own investigations without relying on a police force to record and refer a case, reopen probes where new evidence has emerged and investigate all disciplinary claims against chief officers.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

There will no longer be managed and supervised investigations, which formerly saw the IPCC oversee those carried out by police forces, with the separation aimed to safeguard its independence.

The IOPC will also be able to bring disciplinary cases against police officers even if their home force disagrees with its findings and takes no action.

We are absolutely determined to make the police complaints and discipline systems simpler and more transparent for the benefit of the public, said the minister for policing, Nick Hurd.

We want confidence in policing to continue to grow and be underpinned by the vital role the reformed IOPC will play.

Under the leadership of Michael Lockwood and the newly appointed board, it will provide powerful scrutiny for policing, with new powers to begin investigations when they are deemed appropriate and be decisive in concluding cases.
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For an hour and a half they just about managed to keep the Today programme on the straight and narrow as a serious news programme.

Then, just after the 7.30am news, the Today programme went the full W1A.

For those who dont know, W1A is the BBCs satire of management culture at the BBC. Its fiction, but real events constantly conspire to make it look more like a documentary.

As Mondays Today programme  broadcast in the wake of an almighty row caused by the BBCs China editor resigning in protest at a secretive and illegal gender pay gap  was about to prove.

Lets pick up that story about the woman sitting next to me, said John Humphrys, male, 600,000-650,000 salary, in the studio beside  Yup, co-presenter, very much ex-BBC China editor, Carrie Gracie, female, pay 135,000 and flipping angry.

Not that Mr Humphrys could just turn his chair slightly and, you know, interview Carrie Gracie about the row concerning Carrie Gracie.

Because if Carrie Gracie is presenting the BBC programme discussing the row about Carrie Gracie, Carrie Gracie cant discuss the row about Carrie Gracie on the programme discussing the row about Carrie Gracie.

Or, as Mr Humphrys earned some of his hefty salary by succinctly explaining: Now, BBC rules say presenters of a programme arent allowed to use that programme to declare their own views. A presenter cant suddenly turn interviewee... So I need to talk to another presenter.

So it was that John Humphrys, with Carrie Gracie sitting beside him, discussed the row about Carrie Gracie with Mariella Frostrup, who was not next to him, but talking down a bad line from rainy Somerset.

Not to worry, though, this is the BBC. Other media organisations might keep their skeletons in triple-locked cupboards, never to be mentioned on-air, online or in print, ever. Not the Beeb.

Rather gloriously, pretty heroically, they were going to give this Carrie Gracie thing another go, on Womans Hour.

Now, because of BBC impartiality rules, began presenter Jane Garvey.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

Ms Garvey, who criticised the BBC after the disparity between male and female stars was revealed in July, and who has also joined colleagues in describing Ms Gracie as brave and brilliant, could not discuss the issue.

But now, an hour after the Today programme finished, Carrie Gracie could discuss the row about Carrie Gracie because she was no longer presenting the programme discussing the row about Carrie Gracie, and the BBC had devised a cunning plan.

Jane Martinson, explained Ms Garvey, Is a freelance journalist. She is in our radio car and she is going to speak to Carrie Gracie. (Location unstated, but presumably fairly close to the BBC studio.)

So what, finally, did we learn once Gracie could speak unfettered by BBC impartiality rules about hers BBC pay?

Well, if you will send a fearless reporter to examine the actions of a secretive, heavily censored one party state [as she put it in her resignation letter] 

I could NOT go to China and collude, knowingly, in what I considered to be unlawful pay discrimination, said the dissident Gracie.

NOR, she added, could I stay silent and watch the BBC perpetuate a FAILING pay structure by discriminating against women.

I chase around being surveilled the whole time, she explained (talking about China not the BBC), dealing with intimidation, dealing with police harassment.

She added: Every day I go out without fear or favour, facing intimidation in China, facing censorship, actually telling the story and shining a light.

I am not going to NOT shine a light when I find a problem in my home organisation.

I didnt want more money, she said. I wanted equality, and there was still a big gap between myself and my male peers.

She didnt name those male peers, but they were presumably her international editor counterparts, Jon Sopel the US editor who was revealed in July to earn 200,000-249,999 a year, and Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, 150,000-199,999.

And yes, Ms Gracie did have the self-awareness to add: I believe in public service broadcasting. I do think salaries at the top are unacceptably high, for presenters, and stars and also the managers.

Which might not have been music to the ears of BBC director-general Tony Hall (450,000-499,999).

They had already tried a judge-led audit of rank-and-file BBC staff pay that found no systemic discrimination against women.

On Monday the BBC added a statement that declared: Fairness in pay is vital. A significant number of organisations have now published their gender pay figures showing that we are performing considerably better than many.

But journalists and presenters, male and female, within the BBC and at other organisations, were still speaking out in support of the dissident Gracie.

And the dissident Gracie was now doing a pretty fine job of talking for herself.

Maybe it was time for Tony Hall and chums to have a meeting, try a bit of good old managerial blue-sky thinking?

Ms Gracie has already said she is returning to the BBC newsroom, presumably as a presenter: so what about telling wonderful Carrie she can have that presenting job for life (while gently reminding her about those BBC impartiality rules for presenters)?

There may, alas, never be another series of W1A, but the Today programme is back again tomorrow morning.
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The number of people requesting charitable grants to pay for household appliances and other basic needs has surged since the government abolished its emergency grants scheme in 2013, The Independent can reveal.

New figures show requests to one of the UKs leading poverty charities  from people needing help to afford basic items such as fridges and washing machines  has soared by 244 per cent since community care grants (CCG) were axed by the coalition government. Charity Turn2us, which helps people in financial hardship to access charitable grants and support services, received 55,601 enquiries last year, compared with 16,018 before the state aid was slashed in 2013. More than 700 enquiries have been made to the charity in the first five days of this year alone.

Other smaller charities supporting households in financial need also saw heightened demand after CCGs were scrapped. Figures from End Furniture Poverty, a charity in Liverpool which provides furniture for families in need, show demand increased by 68 per cent in the two years from 2013, from 36,775 to 61,826. Separate figures from Turn2us show more than half of people making the requests had turned to expensive forms of credit to buy home appliances because they do not have the means to pay up front. Others simply went without, with one in three using a household appliance that was faulty, broken or old.

One elderly woman said she was only able to afford a tabletop fridge for 70, which she paid in instalments, and in which she could only store milk and maybe butter and cheese. Another person with financial difficulties said their cooker was not working properly and was overheating, adding: Im scared it could cause a fire.

Previously, CCGs were available to vulnerable people, including domestic violence victims or those leaving care, to help them buy goods needed to return to independent living under the governments social fund. But under the Welfare Reform Act 2012, the social fund was abolished, and responsibility for provision of emergency funds was handed down to local councils. However, as a result of significant cuts to local authorities in recent years, providing crisis payments to those in need of support was proving a stretch too far for many councils, according to the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents local authorities in England and Wales.

Campaigners have said the localisation of emergency assistance schemes has led to funding levels being lower and provision patchy. An upcoming analysis by charity Child Poverty Action Group shows some London councils were spending 61 per cent less on local welfare assistance than was being spent in their areas under the national social fund prior to its abolition in 2013, while others had stopped the funds altogether.

In response to the subsequent soaring demand, the amount of charitable grants and donations given to households on low incomes has increased. In order to plug the gap left by the 2013 legislation, Turn2us introduced a response fund in April of last year, which has given 504,000 to people in grants so far, on top of the usual sums it gives out, which average at 3m a year. Items donated to people in need by End Furniture Poverty also increased, with the charity having given out 26,346 worth of furniture before CCGs in 2011-12, rising to 61,826 three years later.

Simon Hopkins, chief executive of Turn2us, told The Independent: Our grants have been helping people in poverty buy essential household appliances for decades, but weve seen a surge in demand for them since the abolition of the CCGs. This hidden form of poverty can have a snowball effect on peoples lives, impacting their health and wellbeing, and often leading to them using high-cost credit to purchase home appliances.

Paul Colligan, campaigns officer at End Furniture Poverty, echoed his concerns, saying: Since the social fund was abolished and replaced with devolved local welfare provision, we have definitely seen an increase in people coming to us for help. The squeeze on household budgets over the last few years has left many struggling to furnish their homes to even a very basic standard.

Patchy provision of, and cuts to, devolved local welfare schemes mean that a lot of people do not know where to turn to for help, or simply cannot access help that existed previously, he added.

Damon Gibbons, director of the Centre for Responsible Credit, meanwhile told The Independent it was unsurprising that more people are having to turn to charities for help to obtain basic items.

Government is simply not funding local authorities in England adequately to provide the support that many vulnerable people need to live independently in their homes, he said. Cuts to local welfare schemes are particularly affecting people with long-term illnesses or disabilities, young people leaving care, women fleeing domestic violence, people with prior experience of homelessness and frail elderly people returning to their homes after a stay in hospital or who are struggling to remain independent and avoid going into care homes.

Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group said the new figures showed the level of need for emergency aid was huge. She said: Where once the national social fund scheme provided CCGs or interest free budgeting loans to help deal with unexpected costs like having to replace a fridge or a cooker, preventing struggling families from being tipped into a financial crisis, now there is often nowhere to turn except high-cost creditors or hire-purchase shops which charge up to three times the normal price. This puts families at risk of spiralling debt.

Emergency assistance schemes have been localised and funding is no longer ring-fenced, with the result that funding levels are lower and provision patchy. Today, if your oven breaks down and you havent spare money there may or may not be any help to apply for, depending in part on your postcode. If we are concerned to support struggling families and to reduce the risk of destitution we should be investing in a clearer delivery framework and ring-fenced funding for local welfare provision for those in acute need, as still exists today in Scotland.

A spokesperson for the LGA said: Councils will see their core funding from central government further cut in half over the next two years and local government faces an overall funding gap of 5.8bn by 2020.

Faced with significant cuts to the money they receive to look after the elderly, protect children, repair the roads and collect the bins, providing crisis payments to those in need of support is proving a stretch too far for many councils, they added. The Government needs to use the final Local Government Finance Settlement to provide new funding for all councils over the next few years so they can protect vital local services from further cutbacks. Without this additional funding, many will continue to be unable to afford to continue to run local welfare assistance schemes.

A Government spokesperson said: Our welfare reforms are restoring fairness to the system and we continue to spend around 90bn a year supporting people of working age, including those who are out of work or on a low income.

Changes to the social fund mean that local authorities can ensure help is targeted to support the most vulnerable people in our local communities.
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Fluffy could be Britains biggest rescue puppy - and shell grow to the size of a small tiger.

The cuddly-looking Caucasian Shepherd is only ten-months old but already tips the scales at 44kg.

She is 5ft 6in tall on her back legs and when fully grown she will stand at around 2ft on all fours.

The giant puppy is likely to reach between 60kg and 80kg as an adult, putting her on a par with a small adult tigress.

Fluffy is currently being looked after by Dogs Trust in Ilfracombe, Devon, after she was picked up as a stray.

The Shepherd, also known as a Caucasian Ovcharka and Russian Bear Dog, is among the largest and most powerful dogs.

Regarded as brave and strong-willed, they are extremely strong and originate from the Caucasus Mountains where they were used to protect livestock from wolves and bears.

On her back legs she is as tall as the average Dogs Trust employee and will need to live in an adult-only home with owners who are experienced with giant breeds.

Elise Watson, rehoming centre manager at Dogs Trust Ilfracombe, said: When Fluffy first arrived, we couldn't believe how big she was for her age.

As a ten-month-old pup she is going to continue growing, so we would love to hear from potential owners who have a lot of space in their heart and home for this loveable larger lady.

The dogs from Instagram Show all 6 1 /6 The dogs from Instagram The dogs from Instagram Noodle the Dachshund is just over a year old and comes with her own hashtag (#OodlesOfNoodle) The dogs from Instagram Three-year-old Staffie Ramsey was malnourished when he was adopted as a puppy but is now big and boisterous with ripped muscles and a cheeky grin The dogs from Instagram Winny the Welsh Corgi has been credited with the breed's upsurge in popularity The dogs from Instagram Bruno the miniature Dachshund has 66,700 followers The dogs from Instagram Mika the Husky has 58,900 followers The dogs from Instagram Elle the French Bulldog has 8,868 followers

Fluffy loves to play but sometimes forgets how big she is which is why we would recommend an adult only home with owners who can provide her with all of the training and socialisation she needs to grow into a confident loving adult.

Owners should also be aware that Fluffy is a large, strong dog that has lots of growing left to do so experience of caring for larger breeds would be beneficial.

SWNS
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The Rail, Maritime and Transport union has called for a special summit to try to break the deadlock on the dispute over driver-only trains which threatens to cause mass disruption to the train network as thousands of drivers walk out.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash has written to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling proposing the meeting with the Department for Transport and the train companies to resolve the dispute over driver-only trains.

The suggestion came as union members working for Southern, Arriva Rail North, Merseyrail, Greater Anglia and South Western Railway launched a fresh wave of strikes on Monday morning which will disrupt services.

Commuters on Southern Rail have been warned that staff will be out on strike on 8 January for 24 hours. RMT members on South Western Railway, Greater Anglia, Merseyrail, Arriva Rail North and the Isle of Wights Island Line will also walk out on Monday for 24 hours but will hold additional strikes on 10 and 12 January.

The RMT said the meeting could consider how the principles of the agreements the union has reached in Scotland and Wales, which will keep guards on new trains, can be applied to the current disputes while meeting any concerns the Department for Transport and train companies have about future train services.

Mr Cash said: I last met Chris Grayling on 12 December, where we were told the train companies were free to negotiate deals like we have reached in Scotland and Wales where the guard has been retained but I then subsequently received a letter from Chris Grayling asking the union to accept the principle of driver-only trains.

In light of this lack of clarity, and the contradictory messages emanating from the Government, I have been seeking further talks with the Secretary of State but unfortunately have not had a positive response to that request.

I have therefore written to Chris Grayling proposing a summit which could also be presided over by an agreed independent chair and which would consider how the principles of the agreements RMT have recently reached in Scotland and Wales, which will keep the guard on new modern trains, can be applied to the current disputes whilst at the same time meeting any concerns the Department for Transport and train companies have about future train services.

I have told the Secretary of State that agreements have been reached in Scotland and Wales for safe, secure and accessible modern services and that with good will on all sides we can reach an agreement in England as well.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group 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centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

The RMT has previously said it has made every single effort to resolve the dispute which it says is about safety. It says plans to make trains driver-only  meaning drivers will need to get off the train and ensure all doors are shut before departure  are unsafe and the additional presence of guards is safety critical.

But rail companies such as Southern have previously said that giving drivers responsibility for closing doors gives guards more time to help passengers and keep them safe. They also say it will allow trains to depart promptly when no guards are available.

In Junw 2016, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch said they had found no evidence to suggest that driver-only operated trains cannot be dispatched safely.

TUC general secretary Frances OGrady said: The way to resolve any dispute is through talks. We urge the Government to respond positively to the RMTs proposal for a summit involving the RMT, relevant companies and the Department for Transport.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: Despite the best efforts of the RMT to cause misery for passengers, the train companies will keep passengers moving with the majority of services running as planned.

This dispute is not about safety and no-one is losing their job  employees have been guaranteed jobs and salaries for several years.

At Southern Rail, where these changes have already been introduced, there are now more staff dedicated to working on trains than previously.

The independent rail regulator has stated unequivocally that driver-controlled trains, which have been used in this country for more than thirty years, are safe.

Additional reporting by PA
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A Royal Navy frigate was sent to intercept two Russian warships sailing through the English Channel.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed the HMS Westminster escorted the pair, along with two supporting vessels after they came into the Royal Navys area of national interest.

It said the Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate joined them as they passed close to UK territorial waters in stormy conditions.

The frigate will remain at sea as it escorts as the two Steregushchiy-class frigates, Soobrazitelny and Boiky along with support vessels Paradoks and Kola as they head north.

Commander Simon Kelly, the Commanding Officer of HMS Westminster, said his ship's "role as the Royal Navys Fleet Ready Escort is to be at very high readiness to respond to anything the British government requires."

He added: While today most people are returning to work for the first time in the New Year, HMS Westminsters ships company has been at sea and at readiness as part of the Royal Navys commitment to keep Britain safe at all times.

The English Channel is an absolute lifeline for the UK, and it is very important HMS Westminster and the Royal Navy maintains a watchful eye on this key strategic link.

It is believed the ships were returning to the Baltic after carrying out operations in the Middle East.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

The English Channel is one of the worlds busiest shipping lanes and contributes 10bn to the British economy annually.

The incident is one of several interventions the Royal Navy has made against Russian ships in recent weeks.

HMS St Albans was deployed to escort another Russian ship, the Admiral Gorshkov, through the Channel over the Christmas period while the HMS Tyne escorted a Russian intelligence-gathering ship through the North Sea and onto the Channel on Christmas Eve.

The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force have been kept busy by incursions into British airspace and territorial waters in the few years as tensions with the Kremlin has increased.

Recommended Britain to deploy missiles to Estonia as Russian threat looms

The West has been at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putins regime since its annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent repeated incursions in Ukraine.

Tensions have increased over the past due to Russian involvement in the war in Syria and allegations that it meddled in the US presidential election in 2016.

Some analysts have suggested that Russia's repeated incursions into UK territory could be designed as a "distraction" from its military operations in the rest of the world.

Russian security analyst Keir Giles told The Independent the focus on the UK distracts attention from the country's activity in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as well as bring attention to its military capability  possibly making it appear stronger than it actual is.
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British people are more concerned about terror attacks than most of their major neighbours, with more than six in 10 concerned that a major incident will take place in 2018, new research shows.

Almost two thirds (65 per cent) fear an attack this year, the survey by pollster Ipsos MORI found. This compares with 60 per cent of respondents in Turkey, 53 per cent in France, 51 per cent in Germany and 51 per cent in the US.

Among the 28 countries surveyed, Chinese people are among the least likely to fear a terror attack, with only 15 per cent worried that one will happen.

Only 13 per cent of Argentinians fear an attack and just 11 per cent of Serbians are worried about being hit.

The study, which surveyed 21,548 adults around the world, also revealed that four in ten British people think a war between North Korea and the US is likely.

But this proportion was considerably higher in the US, Turkey and Colombia  where the figure stands at 47 per cent, 49 per cent and 55 per cent respectively.

Despite widespread concerns about terror and war, people in most countries are largely optimistic that their personal lives will improve over the coming year.

Seventy-six per cent of all respondents agreed with the statement: "I am optimistic that 2018 will be a better year for me that it was in 2017".

(Ipsos MORI (Ipsos MORI)

Colombians were the most optimist with 65 per cent of people strongly agreeing that this year would be better than last.

Peru, Chile and China were also among the most optimistic countries.

The UK was meanwhile among the bottom five for this optimistic outlook, with two thirds of Britons disagreeing with the statement. Only Belgium, Italy, France and Japan were below Britain.

Britons were the third most likely to say Donald Trump is likely to be impeached in 2018, at 43 per cent, below only Turkey and Canada. In the US, a third of people said they were of the view that the impeachment of their president was likely.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

The British public is looking forward to 2018 with a mixture of hopes and fears," said Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos MORI. "Most of us think that 2018 will be a better year than 2017, but otherwise we have worries both at home and abroad.

Britons are the most likely to expect a major terrorist attack in 2018, while two in five think a war between the US and North Korea is likely.

"Britons also expect global temperatures to keep on increasing, and, like several other European countries, are relatively less optimistic about the global economy than people in emerging economies (although not quite as pessimistic as last year).
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The EU would help the UK abandon Brexit if it changed its mind, according to the Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who has held private talks with most EU governments.

In a new weekly column for The Independent, Mr Umunna said the 27 EU members saw Brexit as a damage limitation exercise and did not want to punish the UK, as some Brexiteers claim. They believe Brexit is bad for them and us, he wrote. If, when we see what the Brexit deal actually looks like, we want to change our minds and fight to reform the EU from within, they would be delighted.

Dismissing claims by some lawyers that the exit process could not be halted, he added: There is unanimous acceptance that Article 50 is revocable and they would be very very happy for the UK to continue as a member of the club. That is why it makes sense to keep an open mind on what we do at the end of these negotiations.

Recommended This is what 27 EU representatives really think of Brexit

Mr Umunna, who met EU government representatives in recent months as co-chair of the all-party Parliamentary Group on EU Relations, revealed that some officials privately describe the Governments view of the EUs position as a fantasy and a delusion.

He warned the UK will not be able to have its cake and eat it, saying: The problem is that most EU governments are not clear what May thinks a bespoke UK arrangement would look like. He said no diplomat he had spoken to believes it would be possible to strike a trade agreement by the time a two-year transitional period ends in 2021.

One senior EU representative told Mr Umunna the UK lacks a national position on how to approach Brexit. He said EU members had noted the backseat driving by Brexiteers ministers such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove as they undermined Ms May by setting out their own red lines.

The former Shadow Business Secretary contrasted the Governments incoherence with the iron discipline of the EU27 in the talks. He said the Prime Ministers charm offensive, including one-to-one dinners with EU leaders, in Downing Street has in the main been rebuffed.

Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Show all 10 1 /10 Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is welcomed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker Reuters Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders EU President Jean-Claude Juncker greeting Theresa May at the EU Commission in Brussels PA Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May poses for a picture with European Council President Donald Tusk REUTERS Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker walks behind British Prime Minister Theresa May EPA Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker address a press conference at the European Commission in Brussels AFP/Getty Images Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at a press conference with EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Britain's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis (L) and Michel Barnier (2-L), the European Chief Negotiator of the Task Force for the Preparation and Conduct of the Negotiations with the United Kingdom under Article 50 enter the room by the emergency exit to attend British Prime Minister Theresa May press briefing on Brexit Negotiations in Brussels. EPA Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders Britain's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis (L), Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May (2-L), European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (2-R) and European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier (R) in a meeting on Friday morning AFP/Getty Images Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier speaks during a media conference at EU headquarters Brexit bonhomie as May finally seals agreement with EU leaders European Council President Donald Tusk addresses a media conference at the Europa building in Brussels AP

However, Ms May and her ministers insist they should aim high in the negotiations to forge a deep and special partnership with the EU. They argue that the UK can win a much more ambitious trade deal than the EU-Canada agreement because it starts from a position of full alignment with EU regulations. They are confident they can ensure that services, including financial services, will be covered by the deal, and believe that differences between EU members will surface when trade talks begin.
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Looming disruption to the flow of medicines after Brexit means Britain must seek to stay under EU regulation, senior Government figures have conceded.

Ministers are already pushing for the chemicals and aviation industries to remain under Brussels supervision  despite it clashing with Theresa Mays pledge to end oversight by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

Now three leading Government figures have told the Financial Times that Britain will also need to stick with the EUs rules on standards and safety for medicines.

The move follows a stark warning by the drug giants of significant disruption to the supply chain for medicines and that customs delays would damage time and temperature sensitive materials.

Meanwhile, Britain's biggest drugmaker said it would have to divert up to 70m from developing new cancer drugs in order to prepare for the impact of Brexit.

Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) estimated that 1,700 of its products would be directly affected by the need for new regulation processes and approval systems  leaving less money for clinical trials.

Staying under EU regulation would be welcomed by the industry, but would be a headache for Mrs May if it crosses her red line that the ECJ must play no role in settling disputes.

Furthermore, Britain will lose 900 skilled jobs when the body regulating the sale of drugs, the European Medicines Agency, is required to move from London to Amsterdam  because of Brexit.

One Government official told the Financial Times that the ECJ red line had been blurred and was not quite so rigid now.

Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA

Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative chairman of the Commons health committee, has said she hoped that common sense will prevail on medicines regulation.

However, Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator, has warned Britain it cannot cherry pick parts of the EU single market it wishes to remain within.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), the body representing the UK's 63bn life sciences sector, has led criticism of the potential impact of Brexit on the flow of medicines.

Drugmakers AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Roche and Merck also set out their concerns in evidence submitted to an investigation by the Commons business select committee.

The fears threaten to cast a shadow over the Government's launch of a deal giving millions of pounds worth of support for life sciences firms, under the Prime Ministers industrial strategy.

Steve Bates, chief executive of the UK's BioIndustry Association, said, late last year: Businesses now need certainty. The best way to do this is by an early agreement to a transition timeframe and continued close regulatory cooperation.

We must now ensure Brexit does not disrupt the safe supply of vital medicines to tens of millions of families in the EU 27 and the UK.

Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, is backing demands from UK firms to stay within the EU's Chemicals Agency, while Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said aviation in Britain would continue to be regulated by the EU.
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Leading Brexiteer Nigel Farage has met with the European Commissions chief negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels.

The former Ukip leader, who is still an MEP, warned Mr Barnier that unless Brussels offered compromise then support for quitting the bloc without any trade deal would increase.

His comments come as Theresa May appoints a new minister at the Brexit Department specifically in charge of preparations for a no-deal Brexit, as part of a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle.

A European Commission spokesperson said that the EU had for months now been busy on planning for all possible outcomes.

Commenting on the meeting between Mr Barnier and Mr Farage, he added: As you can imagine, the two men discussed the state of play of Article 50 negotiations.

Following the meeting, Mr Farage said: Mr Barnier clearly did not understand why Brexit happened. I left with the impression that it has not been previously explained to him that the Brexit vote was primarily about controlling mass immigration and democratic self-determination.

Brexit Secretary David Davis and Michel Barnier at a meeting in Brussels (EPA)

Unless Mr Barnier can compromise somewhat and be prepared to give on services and financial services, the calls to go out of the EU under WTO [World Trade Organisation] rules will increase.

He added: I wouldnt say its a happy new year for the Brexit deal.

The move to emphasise the possibility of a hard Brexit on the UK side is the latest example of brinkmanship in the talks, which made headway in December after the Prime Minister worked around concerns from her Northern Irish allies, the Democratic Unionists, about the future of the provinces border.

Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA

Economists have warned that a no-deal Brexit would be catastrophic for the UK economy.

US think tank the Rand Corporation has said no deal could cost the UK $140bn (103bn) over the next 10 years, while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has put the figure at 40bn in 2019 alone due to sluggish economic growth.

Business investment would seize up, and heightened price pressures would choke off private consumption, the OECD said.
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Theresa May has been warned that appointing a minister for no deal in todays reshuffle would be fresh evidence of her veering towards hardline Tory Brexiteers.

A minister charged with preparing for Britain to crash out of the EU without an agreement is tipped to be handed a seat at the Cabinet table, although he or she would not be a full member.

The move would inflame Tories urging the Prime Minister to reject a no deal outcome, by giving the option a higher profile, although it is unlikely to change government policy.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, said Mrs May should be focusing on negotiating the best exit terms, not on how to salve ideological arguments in her deeply divided party.

The Government should not even be considering leaving the EU with no deal - that is the worst of all possible options, he said.

However, this shows the journey the Conservatives are taking, steering the country further and further into a highly damaging hard Brexit.

For the good of our economic future, a no deal Brexit must be ruled out immediately.

And Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP First Minister, tweeted: If this is true (lets hope not), it will show yet again that the views of hardline Tory Brexiteers are more important to the PM than the interests of the country. No deal is unthinkable. No Brexit should be the clear preference over no deal.

Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 1 /8 Brexit: the deciders Brexit: the deciders European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty Brexit: the deciders French President Emmanuel Macron Getty Brexit: the deciders German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters Brexit: the deciders Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA Brexit: the deciders The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty Brexit: the deciders Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images Brexit: the deciders Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA Brexit: the deciders After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA

The Daily Telegraph reported that a minister for no deal" will be appointed, a decision that would delight anti-EU Tory ministers and backbenchers.

Steve Baker, a hardline Eurosceptic MP and a leading figure in the Leave campaign in the EU referendum - who is already a Brexit minister  is likely to take on the role.

However, in practice, Mr Baker is already the minister preparing for no deal  for which the Government has, controversially, set aside hundreds of millions of pounds.

Furthermore, the no deal outcome is now seen as less plausible after Mrs May promised full alignment of regulations if necessary to prevent the return of a hard land border in Ireland.

Britain will be required to make that a legal commitment before the EU agrees to negotiate the transitional deal which the Prime Minister is seeking, to cushion the impact of Brexit for businesses.

Full alignment is likely to mean Britain effectively remaining within the EUs economic structures, after Brussels rejected new technology solutions to the border controversy as magical thinking.
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Jeremy Corbyn has attacked Theresa Mays Cabinet reshuffle, branding it a pointless and lacklustre PR exercise.

The Prime Ministers New Years reshuffle follows her partys poor result at last years general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority.

It also comes as Ms May has fielded attacks over her administrations handling of the NHS winter crisis.

The Labour leader accused Ms May of using the reshuffle to dodge the real issues, and said people are dying because of this Governments decisions.

He said: In 2018, the impact of Tory austerity is hitting home with the public, most tragically with the most serious NHS winter crisis yet. And yet the governments big plan for the New Year is to dodge the real issues and reshuffle the pack in a pointless and lacklustre PR exercise.

Its simply not good enough. You cant make up for nearly eight years of failure by changing the name of a department.

Back in the real world, outside Westminster, our health service is on its knees: with patients dying as they wait for ambulances to arrive, ambulances stacking up outside hospitals, and corridors full with trolleys and patients.

Mr Corybn also took aim at rising rail prices and the Governments chaotic Brexit negotiations.

He said: Were not only seeing growing problems across the NHS; the cost of travel is going up; our social security system is being dismantled; our housing crisis has been cruelly exposed by the terrible Grenfell Fire, and by the Conservatives in Windsor who want to sweep rough sleepers from the streets; and the Governments threat to jobs and living standards from its chaotic Brexit negotiations.

But yesterday Mr Corbyn was accused of a lack of leadership after rejecting calls to join a cross-party coalition to keep the UK in the single market after Brexit.

Ian Blackford, the SNPs leader in Wesminster, said it was utterly pathetic that Mr Corbyn had rejected the offer.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

Last year Mr Corbyns own protracted shadow Cabinet reshuffle was the subject of intense scrutiny after mass front bench resignations following the partys EU referendum campaign.
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Jeremy Hunt has kept his job as Health Secretary, despite overseeing what is widely viewed as a winter crisis in the NHS.

However, Theresa May has added social care to his responsibilities, to signal her determination to sort out one of the biggest issues facing the country.

Mr Hunt had been tipped for a sideways move to a different department, perhaps business, after becoming hugely unpopular with many patients and health staff.

But, after a lengthy meeting in Downing Street, No 10 announced he would head up a new, rebranded Department of Health and Social Care.

The Government has spoken repeatedly of its wish to integrate health and social care, but the programme has only begun on a small scale, in some areas.

The impact of adding to Mr Hunts list of responsibilities appears limited, given that his department already oversaw social care policy, although funding is delivered through local councils.

There was speculation that he refused a move to business, where Greg Clark remains as the Secretary of State.
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Justine Greening has quit her job as education secretary after Prime Minister Theresa May tried to move her to another department in her latest reshuffle.

After a standoff during a gruelling three-hour meeting in Downing Street on Monday, Ms Greening walked out of the Cabinet.

The former minister was pushing to stay in her education brief and was unwilling to accept a different job offered to her by the Prime Minister.

Downing Street aides said Ms May was disappointed but respected Ms Greenings decision to leave.

Ms Greening had been promoting her achievements at the Department for Education in recent days after facing criticism from Ms Mays allies.

She had been attacked for not being as loyal to Ms May as others and not being on the same wavelength as her over her education reforms.

But as Ms Greening received word that she was being pushed out of her department, she began a counteroffensive at the weekend touting rising school standards and new measures to boost literacy.

 Justine Greening refuses to comment ahead of cabinet reshuffle

The Prime Minister offered Ms Greening a job at the Department for Work and Pensions, but failed in her attempt to keep the minister from quitting in protest at the move from education.

Ms Greening was succeeded as Education Secretary by Damian Hinds, who was promoted from being a junior Work and Pensions Minister.

The way Ms Greening left the Government could cause a headache for the PM when the Putney MP, who backed Remain in the referendum campaign, returns to the backbenches.
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Sinn Fein has said a video of one of its MPs with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre was inexcusable and indefensible.

Party chairman Declan Kearney said West Tyrone MP Barry McElduff had fallen well short of the standards Sinn Fein expects of its members.

Mr McElduff has apologised for the post, insisting it was not meant as a reference to the Republican murders of 10 Protestant workmen in 1976.

Recommended Sinn Fein MP under police investigation following Kingsmill loaf tweet

He has been summoned to a crunch meeting with the Sinn Fein leadership in Northern Ireland on Monday afternoon.

The well-known Kingsmill brand of bread shares a name with the south Armagh village that witnessed one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles, when gunmen stopped a van carrying textile workers on their way home, identified the Protestant occupants, lined them up at the side of the road and shot them.

Mr Kearney became the first senior leadership figure to comment on the weekend furore on Monday morning.

What has happened is absolutely inexcusable and indefensible and the party is taking this matter very seriously indeed, he said.

He added that Sinn Fein wished to express deep and sincere regret.

What happened is absolutely irresponsible, he told BBC Radio Ulster.

Barry McElduff has already made an unreserved apology and that was the correct thing to do in the circumstances.

The reality is huge offence has been caused and I and Sinn Fein strongly disapprove of what has happened.

Mr Kearney said Sinn Fein accepted that the incident had caused maximum hurt to the Kingsmill families.

Sinn Fein expects the highest standards of not only our members but also our very senior elected representatives and what has happened here clearly falls well short of those standards, he added.

Sinn Fein's former Stormont finance minister, Mairtin O Muilleoir, has also apologised for retweeting the video. Mr Kearney said Mr O Muilleoir had offered the party a fulsome explanation for the retweet.

The storm around the social media post is threatening to further disrupt faltering efforts to re-establish a power-sharing executive at Stormont, with the Democratic Unionists characterising it as an affront to victims.

Mr McElduff has offered to meet relatives of the sectarian outrage but a number of them, including the only survivor of the gun attack, Alan Black, have rejected the invitation outright.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland is examining the video after receiving a number of complaints, while the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at Westminster has also been alerted.

In the short video, Mr McElduff, who is known for his light-hearted social media contributions, is filmed walking around a shop with a Kingsmill loaf on his head, asking where the store kept the bread.

It was posted around the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmill outrage.

He has faced multiple calls to resign in the wake of the controversy.

On Saturday the republican MP deleted the video and apologised.

When I posted the video I had not realised or imagined for a second that there was any possible link between the brand name of the bread and the Kingsmill anniversary, he said.

It was never my intention to hurt or cause offence to anyone and in particular to victims of the conflict who have suffered so grievously.

I apologise unreservedly for the hurt and pain this post has caused.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

Mr Black, who survived the gun attack despite being shot 18 times, rejected Mr McElduff's apology.

It was like a punch to the stomach, it was so callous, he said of the video.

To mock the dead and dance on their graves is depraved.

PA
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Theresa Mays bid to renew her Government with a Cabinet reshuffle fell flat on Monday after key minsters refused to be moved from their jobs and one walked out of her Cabinet.

The Prime Minister had wanted to keep Justine Greening in her top team, but failed to stop her quitting with the former education secretary rejecting a transfer to another department.

Ms Mays authority was further called into question after Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt not only rebutted an attempt to move him, but managed to secure an enhanced role in his current post.

One senior Conservative MP said: If this was meant to show she has the power to reshuffle her Cabinet, it has shown the complete opposite.

Changes made to the set up at Conservative HQ were at least well received, with new Party Chairman Brandon Lewis and his deputy James Cleverly expected to have a positive impact on the Tories campaign machinery.

But the day started with a botched statement, naming the wrong person being given a top job, and was then characterised by a series of announcements confirming Ms May would allow people to keep posts.

The Prime Minister had already conceded there would be no move for her most senior ministers  Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Chancellor Philip Hammond, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Brexit Secretary David Davis  despite talk last year that some might be transferred or sacked.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news 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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

But she did want to shift Ms Greening and Business Secretary Greg Clark, both who had been criticised by her allies, and also Mr Hunt.

Ms Greening left Downing Street around 8pm on Monday night after a gruelling three-hour meeting in which she rebuffed attempts by Ms May to make her stay at the Cabinet table.

The Prime Minister had wanted to move her from the Department for Education for some time, with Ms Mays allies claiming the former minister was disloyal and had not fully embraced the spirit of the PMs desired reforms.

But Downing Street also wanted to avoid the instability of a long-serving minister quitting and heading to the backbenches, where she is now free to join forces with rebels who like her voted to stay in the European Union.

The plan was to offer her a job at the Department for Work and Pensions, but Ms Greening refused and had already made her intentions clear days before as she started tweeting about her achievements at the DfE.

Aides said Ms May was disappointed, but respected Ms Greenings decision to leave. Damian Hinds will replace her as the new Education Secretary.

 Jeremy Hunt arrives in Downing Street for the Cabinet reshuffle

Ms Greening said on Twitter: I'll continue to do everything I can to create a country that has equality of opportunity for young people & Ill keep working hard as MP for Putney.

Mr Hunt also refused a move proposed to him and instead argued he stay in post at the Department of Health to fully merge the NHS and social care.

Its meant to be about the Prime Minister asserting her power, but its served to underline her weakness Senior Tory MP

One party source told The Independent: It is apparently just possible that Jeremy Hunt was speaking the truth when he said that the health job was the last one big job he would do in politics.

It seems that was his intention, and he didnt feel leaving during the winter pressures on the NHS in particular was the right thing.

Mr Hunt apparently argued his case for staying so passionately, that he now takes responsibility for the drive to reform the NHS, gaining a new job title  Health and Social Care Secretary  and departmental name to reflect the enormity of the job ahead.

Sajid Javid will also head a department with new name, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, in an attempt to underline Ms Mays commitment to tackling the housing shortage.

 Norman Smith on the confusion surrounding Chris Grayling's position in cabinet reshuffle after Tories post wrong tweet

In both cases officials said the costs of changing stationery, signs, business cards and branding for the newly named departments would be kept to a minimum.

Ms May had planned to move Mr Hunt to the Department for Business, where critics claimed Mr Clark had failed to live up to the job.

But after being kept waiting at Downing Street, Mr Clark was told he would keep his post and will now push through Ms Mays pledge to cap energy bills.

Another minister Ms May is said to have wanted moved, Andrea Leadsom, will also keep her job as Leader of the Commons.

One Senior MP said: I hadnt appreciated that reshuffles were about people turning up to Downing Street and telling the Prime Minister what job they wanted.

Its meant to be about the Prime Minister asserting her power, but its served to underline her weakness.

Another MP said it would not inspire people to think the Government had renewed vision, adding: Theres not very much there which is meaty.

The Work and Pensions post was eventually taken by Esther McVey who wins her first Cabinet post, with the former holder of that role David Gauke going to the Ministry of Justice.

Ex-Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke moves to the Ministry of Justice (Getty)

Ex-Justice Secretary David Lidington moved to the Cabinet Office to take up responsibilities left by Damian Green, who quit last year following an investigation into breaches of the ministerial code.

Mr Lidington will deputise for Ms May at Prime Ministers Questions and chair critical Cabinet committees, including those on Brexit, but will not receive the prestigious First Secretary title Mr Green had.

The day started badly when Conservative HQ announced on social media that Chris Grayling would be the new party Chair, only for the message to be deleted moments later.

That job went to Mr Lewis, who with his deputy Mr Cleverly, will head a team of party vice-chairs designed to bring on new talent and show a fresher more diverse face to the Tories.

James Brokenshire resigned from his Northern Ireland secretary job on grounds of ill health, weeks before major surgery for a lesion on his right lung, and was replaced by Karen Bradley.

Her old slot was filled by Matt Hancock, who was promoted to be the new Culture Secretary.

Others who remained in post included Liam Fox at International Trade, Michael Gove at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mr Grayling as Transport Secretary and Penny Mordaunt at International Development.

David Mundell stays on as Scottish Secretary and Alun Cairns as Welsh Secretary, while Jeremy Wright keeps his job as Attorney General.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson and Chief Whip Julian Smith keep their roles having only recently been appointed.
 Close Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle: Key positions

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Theresa Mays attempts to reassert her authority through a Cabinet reshuffle ran into difficulties after senior ministers refused to move from their jobs.

Education Secretary Justine Greening dramatically quit the Government when Ms May tried to move her to the Department of Work and Pensions, leaving the Prime Minister scrambling to promote junior ministers to her top team.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt also spent more than 90 minutes in Downing Street where he resisted Ms May's attempts to persuade him to switch to Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and allow Business Secretary Greg Clark to take on his role.

Recommended Justine Greening quits job in reshuffle blow for Theresa May

Cabinet big beasts such as Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd all kept their jobs, which led to critics quoting the PM's widely mocked election campaign claim that "nothing has changed" - when she made a major U-turn on a social care pledge.

Earlier, the shake-up descended into chaos when the Conservatives official Twitter account accidentally put out that Transport Secretary Chris Grayling would become party chairman  before Immigration Minister Brandon Lewis was officially appointed shortly after.

Former Justice Secretary David Lidington was appointed to replace the PM's close ally Damian Green, who was sacked as the Cabinet Office minister and de facto Prime Minister last month for misleading statements over pornography found on his office computer.

A younger and more diverse team of MPs was appointed to hold various Conservative party posts, although the appointment of pro-life MP Maria Caulfield to a prominent women's role attracted controversy.

Please see the live updates below
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Human rights campaigners are calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ghana after a new report found violence towards LGBT people by mobs and family members is on the increase.

The report, No Choice but to Deny Who I Am: Violence and Discrimination Against LGBT People in Ghana, has revealed the retention of a colonial-era provision in the countrys Criminal Offences Act prohibiting and punishing unnatural carnal knowledge, coupled with a failure to actively address violence and discrimination, is relegating LGBT Ghanaians to effective second-class citizenship.

The Human Rights Watch, which published the 72-page report, has also said LGBT people are continuing to be attacked by mobs or even by their own family members.

For example, in August 2015, in Nima, a town in the Accra region, members of a vigilante group known as Safety Empire brutally assaulted a young man they suspected was gay. And in May 2017, in a village outside Kumasi in the Ashanti region, the mother of a young woman organised a mob to beat up her daughter and another woman because she suspected they were lesbians in a same-sex relationship.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 114 LGBT people for the report, as well as representatives for human rights organisations based in Ghana, a Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) complaints officer, the assistant police commissioner and three diplomats.

Although LGBT people are rarely, if ever, prosecuted under the countrys anti-gay laws, Wendy Isaack, LGBT rights researcher for the Human Rights Watch, said it directly contributes to the climate in which violence against LGBT people is common.

Homophobic statements by local and national government officials, traditional elders, and senior religious leaders foment discrimination and in some case incite violence, she added.

LGBT Ghanaians should have the same protection from the government as everyone else.

And the government should work to address the stigma that subjects people to violence in their own homes, the place where they should feel safest.

Lesbians, bisexual women and transgender men are frequently victims of family violence, the Human Rights Watch found, with many being beaten, threatened and driven out of their homes.

LGBT+ rights around the globe Show all 9 1 /9 LGBT+ rights around the globe LGBT+ rights around the globe Russia Russias antipathy towards homosexuality has been well established following the efforts of human rights campaigners. However, while it is legal to be homosexual, LGBT couples are offered no protections from discrimination. They are also actively discriminated against by a 2013 law criminalising LGBT propaganda allowing the arrest of numerous Russian LGBT activists. AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Brunei Brunei recently introduced a law to make sodomy punishable by stoning to death. It was already illegal and punishable by up to 10 years in prison AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Mauritania Men who are found having sex with other men face stoning, while lesbians can be imprisoned, under Sharia law. However, the state has reportedly not executed anyone for this crime since 1987 Alamy LGBT+ rights around the globe Sudan Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal under Sudanese law. Men can be executed on their third offence, women on their fourth Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Saudi Arabia Homosexuality and gender realignment is illegal and punishable by death, imprisonment, whipping and chemical castration Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Yemen The official position within the country is that there are no gays. LGBT inviduals, if discovered by the government, are likely to face intense pressure. Punishments range from flogging to the death penalty Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Nigeria Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal and in some northern states punishable with death by stoning. This is not a policy enacted across the entire country, although there is a prevalent anti-LGBT agenda pushed by the government. In 2007 a Pew survey established that 97% of the population felt that homosexuality should not be accepted. It is punishable by 14 years in prison Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Somalia Homosexuality was established as a crime in 1888 and under new Somali Penal Code established in 1973 homosexual sex can be punishable by three years in prison. A person can be put to death for being a homosexual Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Iraq Although same-sex relationships have been decriminalised, much of the population still suffer from intense discrimination. Additionally, in some of the country over-run by the extremist organisation Isis, LGBT individuals can face death by stoning Getty

LGBT people in Ghana say that the violence against them has been getting steadily worse since President Nana Akufo-Addo said in an interview for Al Jazeer that the law criminalising homosexuality in Ghana remained because he did not believe there was a sufficiently strong coalition across public opinion calling for a change.

Leading Ghanaian activist LGBT Mac-Darling Cobbinah told The Independent the community would remain resolute and continue to sensitise people to understand LGBT issues.

I think we need to employ a lot more allies who will speak on the issues and not hide behind screens as existing currently, he said.

Speaking out will help people know and better understand that humans rights of sexual minorities is not based on the type of sex people prefer but its instead about humanity and dignity for all persons.

I support any move to create a rainbow nation for all persons than to throw the few minorities out of their country of birth because of their orientation.

And one gay man from Ghana  who asked us to keep his identity anonymous out of fear for his own safety  told The Independent the key to surviving in Ghana when you identify as LGBT is by staying strong.

Daily life for the perceived and known LGBT community in Ghana is characterised with a number of negative experiences which come from all corners, he said.

We continue to face a high level of stigma and discrimination from health facilities, family, communities, with pockets of people facing daily physical, verbal and emotional abuses  including injustice, extortion, blackmail and rejection.

There is a fair number who also experience dismissal from work as a result of their sexuality, legal injustice, healthcare inequalities, maltreatment and neglect.

Countless people have considered suicide, seeking asylum or total isolation as a possible solution to help them deal with their sexuality.

As Ghanaians we need to start rigorous discussion around promotion of human rights [for LGBT people], redefining legal terms and, if possible, repealing laws that criminalise homosexuality.

Whether we are lawmakers or ordinary citizens we need to come to terms and accept the undeniable fact that LGBT people are human being who belong to families. They are our sons, our daughters, our teachers and our pastors. They are human just like any other person hence they deserve to be accorded dignity, respect and love.

And one lesbian who also asked to remain anonymous said that the government needed to stop treating LGBT people as outcasts in our own society.

We want to be free so we can stand tall in public and not deal with obstacles and harassment daily  this will make it easier for us to get an education, learn a trade, get jobs and be useful and productive Ghanaians, she said.

Homophobic sentiment is rife throughout the Ghanaian government, however. In February 2017, Speaker of the Parliament of Ghana, Mike Ocquaye, referred to homosexuality as an abomination and equated it with bestiality, calling for stricter laws against same-sex conduct.

This is in spite of the fact the anti-gay law is inconsistent with basic tents of the Ghanaian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law, respect for human dignity and the right to privacy.

It also violates several human rights treaties that Ghana has ratified, including the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, which adopted a groundbreaking resolution in April 2014 calling on African governments to prevent and punish all forms of violence targeting people on the basis of their real and imputed sexual orientation or gender identity.
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Maurice Owiti is 47 years old and works as a caregiver in a rural Kenyan village. In a poor community such as his, Owiti is lucky to have a job. But until late 2016, spending even $20 a month on school fees for his son was a struggle.

Then a charity called GiveDirectly showed up in October and announced to Owiti and dozens of other residents that they'd be receiving $22 a month for the next 12 years. It was part of an experiment in basic income, a system that involves giving people a standard salary just for being alive, no strings attached. (At GiveDirectly's request, Business Insider has concealed the Kenyan village's name and location to protect the recipients there.)

As basic income has gained mainstream interest as a way to reduce poverty, people have started speculating how it might play out on a large scale. Would the system make people work more or less? Would they spend all the money immediately? Where would the funds come from?

A myth gets proven wrong, one transfer at a time

In the 13 months since GiveDirectly began its experiment, Owiti and his fellow villagers have slowly and quietly been disproving the biggest misconception about basic income - that people who receive free money will stop working and waste the cash on vices like gambling, drugs, or alcohol.

Anecdotal evidence and nearly all empirical research has shown that unconditional cash transfers help people help themselves. Recipients often use the income to pay for their kids' school fees, buy medicine, repair their homes, and invest in their small businesses to further grow their wealth. While some use the money for so-called temptation goods, as economists call them, the majority of recipients defy the stereotype that people in poverty somehow lack moral character or responsibility.

As advocates often claim, what the poor seem to suffer from is actually a lack of cash.

If this money were to be given to everybody, this would be a very good thing, Edwin Odongo Anyango, a 30-year-old recipient in Kenya, told Business Insider.

Anyango earns money mostly through manual labour jobs. He said the basic income money has enabled him to buy milk on a more consistent basis and pay for his child's preschool fees. His wife, also a recipient, has put the money into her business selling secondhand clothes.

What this money does is it creates hope, Anyango said. And when people have hope, they are happy.

Caroline Teti, the field director for GiveDirectly, works with villagers on a near-daily basis to make sure the experiment is running smoothly. The study expanded to include dozens more villages and thousands more people in mid-November, but so far Teti has only observed a few people who seem to misuse the money.

Even those, she said, tend to split the money between practical purchases and indulgences.

People have needs, Teti said. Especially in poor communities such as this, if they get a basic income, it goes directly into those needs.

The abuses are few and far between

Agrippa Agida Onywero Krispo, a 40-year-old day labourer, said he's used the money for small home repairs and new shoes. He's also used it for gambling and to record a CD of him singing. Recently, the money he put towards the CD was stolen by his recording partner, who disappeared when it came time to sell the freshly made copies.

I think for my next project, I am going to be more careful, Krispo said. I'm not going to make the same mistake, because I think about that money that I put into the production, that I can't now get back. And I feel very angry.

Other research has found that people's spending on alcohol and cigarettes actually went down when they received direct cash transfers. Faced with a brighter future, many people stop using temptation goods as a way to cope with a hopeless situation, researchers have discovered. In the village GiveDirectly is working with, interviews with nearly a dozen recipients showed that most people have actually worked more since the study began.

The research isn't conclusive, however. There is still a possibility that follow-up studies will find GiveDirectly recipients used their cash on vices after covering their basic needs.

But so far, the findings are hopeful. When people in need are given the means to improve their lives, that's exactly where the money goes.

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Read the original article on Business Insider UK.  2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.
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A man has been jailed for marrying a woman and then wedding her daughter, without first getting a divorce.

Christopher I Hauptmann, 44, married Shannon Deitrich in Florida in November 2015.

The following September, he tied the knot with her 18-year-old daughter, Kaylee Durovick, without divorcing her mother first. He remains in a relationship with the teenager.

Recommended National divorce day is coming

Authorities in Pennsylvania first became suspicious of Hauptmann  who worked as a bail bondsman  after receiving reports he was using an alias and possessed a gun, despite being prohibited from doing so because of a previous drug conviction.

Detectives in Northumberland County discovered Hauptmann used the name Christopher Buckley on some legal documents, according Penn Live which originally reported the story.

Hauptmann, from Shamokin in Pennsylvania, pleaded no contest to bigamy, forgery to authorities and owning a firearm as a convicted criminal charges at Northumberland County Court.

By pleading no contest, he admitted there was enough evidence to find him guilty of the charges, but he did not admit guilt.

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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

"There was an opportunity to give him certainty and closure," Hauptmann's defence attorney Peter Kay told The Daily Item newspaper. "He's been sitting a long time in jail." He said his client was looking forward to "closing this chapter of his life".

Judges sentenced him to between a year minus a day to two years minus a day in prison followed by 10 years' probation. He is barred from contact with Ms Deitrich.

He was given credit for the 332 days he had already spent in jail, after he was unable to post his $300,000 (221,500) bail.
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A couple got engaged amid friends and family and within hours were married after the groom had planned the entire event to make life easier for his bride.

Nicole Rios, nee Carfagna, has lupus  a condition with no cure that can be exacerbated by stress, such as that which accompanies planning a wedding.

Her husband Danny, decided to ask if she wanted to have the wedding immediately at their home in Smithtown, New York, instead.

Recommended Hundreds of couples tie knot in Indonesia mass wedding to ring in 2018

Ms Rios has undergone chemotherapy to help with her lupus and told the BBC that it has been a tough time for the couple with her illness.

Stress is not good with lupus. I would have been sick the majority of the time, I wouldnt have enjoyed it, she said.

What if wed planned the wedding then on the wedding day Im sick? So this took all that stress away, the new bride explained.

Mr and Ms Rios were returning from a trip from Walt Disney World when she noticed their home decorated with lights.

Underwater wedding photography Show all 7 1 /7 Underwater wedding photography Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com Underwater wedding photography adamoprisphoto.com

I thought Dannys mom and stepdad had decorated our house for Christmas...But Danny took me by the hand and I saw a big tent in our backyard, with our family lined up outside it, Ms Rios said, describing the scene.

All who were gathered thought it was an engagement party as Mr Rios got down on one knee and proposed. They were in for a surprise as Mr Rios took Ms Rios aside and said: If you want, I have everything set up to get married.

Ms Rios said she didnt need to think about it. Suddenly all my jitters and anxiousness went away because I knew I wanted to marry him. I just said yes.

There were already a tuxedo and wedding dress hanging up as well as a backyard tent full of guests and food. In addition, Mr Rios father was ordained earlier in the day in order to marry the couple.

The brides brother served as her man of honour as well.

Ms Rios said it was like a fairytale and that her wedding went perfectly.
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Police in Hartford, Connecticut charged a woman Thursday with animal cruelty in connection with a grim scene reported by a neighbour on New Year's Day: A dog chained to a small shelter outside a home - and frozen solid.

The incident was one of several similar deaths reported in recent days as bitter cold grips the eastern United States, prompting animal rescue organisations and local authorities to issue warnings about giving pets shelter.

Several of the deaths occurred in Ohio. In Toledo, a dog was found frozen to death on a front porch last week. Three other frozen dogs were discovered over two days this week in Franklin County, Ohio, a shelter told a local television station. Authorities in Butler County, north of Cincinnati, said Wednesday that they had charged the owners of one deceased dog with cruelty to a companion animal.

"The dog was found in an outside dog house with no insulation. The dog was frozen to death due to the severe cold weather," read a Facebook post from the office of county sheriff Richard K. Jones. "Sheriff Jones would like to remind everyone that freezing to death is a horrible way for an animal to die."

In Michigan, Detroit Dog Rescue said a Pomeranian mix left outside its offices Monday night was found dead the next day. The group said on Wednesday that it managed to rescue another dog that was found cowering and shivering in a barrel outdoors - but not before its paw pads and penis got frostbite.

"Trying to escape the frigid temperatures he curled up and crouched down, but even his underbelly and penis began to freeze," Detroit Dog Rescue said about the pooch, which it called Joey, in a Facebook post. "His feet are so painful he doesn't want to stand."

With weather forecasters predicting more days of snow and brutal cold across much of the east, animal protection groups urged people to report any animals seen left outside to local law enforcement authorities.

"Dogs, cats and horses depend on our care, especially during life-threatening cold snaps. Take the animals in, or somehow provide a safe environment for them," Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement.

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

Several states and local jurisdictions have in recent years stepped up penalties against pet owners who leave animals exposed to extreme weather, both hot and cold. The laws vary, but in some cases offenders face fines or cruelty charges, and even felony charges if the animal perishes.

Animal protection groups and veterinarians say that although dogs, cats, horses and other animals grow thicker coats in the winter, the fur doesn't make them able to withstand subfreezing temperatures. Fluffy huskies can do better than smooth Chihuahuas, but experts say the general rule is that if it's too cold for you outside, it's too cold for pets.

Not sure whether it's too cold to walk Fido outside? Here are seven tips on keeping pets cosy from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals:

Towel-dry your pet's paws after it comes in from the snow, and remove any snowballs from its fur. Don't shave your dog in the winter - let it grow out its long coat to keep it warm. If your dog has short fur and obviously did not evolve for wintry weather, consider a coat or a sweater vest to provide an extra layer of "fur." Ice, salt and chemicals from the ground will get stuck in your pet's feet and fur; wash its paws when it comes in to remove these potential hazards. Use pet-friendly ice melts on your sidewalks and driveways - even if you don't have pets. Giving your pet plenty of fresh water will prevent its skin from flaking and itching in the dry weather. Car coolant and antifreeze are lethal to animals, so clean up any spills or leaks immediately.

The Washington Post
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The Trump administration has told lawmakers that it wants $18 billion (13 billion) over the next decade for the initial phase of a Mexico border wall, laying out for the first time a detailed financial blueprint for the president's signature campaign promise.

The money would pay for 316 miles of new fencing and reinforce another 407 miles where barriers are already in place, according to cost estimates sent to senators Friday by US Customs and Border Protection. If the work was completed, more than half of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico would have a wall or other physical structure by 2027.

Democratic lawmakers blasted the $18 billion request, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and it arrived in the middle of delicate budget negotiations that include the risk of a government shutdown 20 January if no deal is reached.

"President [Donald] Trump has said he may need a good government shutdown to get his wall. With this demand, he seems to be heading in that direction," said Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee.

CBP provided the funding outline at the request of Durbin and other senators preparing to launch negotiations this month on several contentious immigration issues, including a potential deal to protect the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who will be subject to deportation when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program expires, beginning in March.

With their votes needed to keep the government open, Democrats are looking to use their leverage in the spending talks to force the Republicans who control Congress to reach a deal on DACA.

Though Trump ran for office on a promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, the spending plan indicates American taxpayers would fund it for at least the foreseeable future.

Trump has told Democrats he is unwilling to reach an agreement unless they fund his wall plan, among other measures, but the CBP document is the first time his administration has sketched out what that might cost.

In addition to the $18 billion in wall funding, the CBP also requested $8 billion for additional personnel and training, $5 billion for new border technology and at least $1 billion to build more access roads. The final price tag for the CBP spending plan would exceed $33 billion over the next decade, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.

The $33 billion would not include what are likely to be additional funding requests for the other Department of Homeland Security agencies central to Trump's plans for an immigration overhaul, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is looking to add 10,000 more officers and dramatically expand the number of beds it has available for immigration detention.

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

Benjamin Cassidy, the DHS assistant secretary for legislative affairs, said in a letter to Durbin that the funding requests "were developed through a rigorous assessment and are derived directly from the experience and insight of US Border Patrol Agents in the field, supported by operational data and analysis."

"It is essential to note that this submission represents only one element of the President's overall immigration priorities," Cassidy wrote. "Effective border security will not be successful unless we close dangerous legal loopholes that enable illegal immigration and visa overstays. If these loopholes are not closed, and enforcement capabilities are not enhanced, our immigration system and border cannot be secured."

Democrats have repeatedly said they will not pay for a wall. Even though on a year-over-year basis the CBP request would not represent a dramatic funding increase over current border spending levels, it would represent a long-term commitment to a physical structure that Trump would be able to claim as a political trophy.

Democrats and immigration activists have recoiled at the administration's other enforcement plans, including proposals to expedite the deportation of unaccompanied minors, tighten asylum standards and crack down on so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not allow local police to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

"Trump can have a shutdown fight over his stupid wall that pleases the nativists in his base, or he can have a breakthrough that pairs the Dream Act and border security so he can brag he did something Obama couldn't get done. He can't have both," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, an immigrant advocacy group. "This move by the White House does not bode well."

Republican reaction was muted Friday. Even many Republicans have deemed a physical wall along the entire border unnecessary and impractical, saying that more effective border security could be achieved through other means, including better surveillance and technology.

Recommended Trump administration being sued for dumping waste in Gulf of Mexico

CBP said it would like to add more than 2,000 miles of what it called a "total Border wall system" that would eventually encompass 864 miles of new primary wall on land where no barrier currently exists. It would add 1,163 miles of replacement wall or secondary wall, which DHS officials said could consist of a wall backed by a fence or two fences.

Some of the new barriers would have to be installed along the winding banks of the Rio Grande, where landowners have protested construction of new fencing on their ranches and farms.

The $18 billion would cover only the initial phase of the CBP plan. About 650 miles of the border with Mexico currently has some form of physical obstacle, from vehicle barriers to taller steel fencing designed to prevent people from climbing over.

CBP is evaluating several prototypes, all of which are significantly taller, but the funding request sent to senators does not specify what type of barrier would be used.

Trump has said he may travel to San Diego to inspect the prototypes, which range in height from 18 to 30 feet and combine different formulations of see-through steel bars, concrete slabs and metal spikes.

The Washington Post
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Donald Trump has said his Fake News Awards, which he first mentioned four days ago, and in which he has promised to proclaim the most dishonest and corrupt media organisation, will apparently go ahead over a week later than the President earlier planned, due to increased interest.

On 3 January Mr Trump said he would be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday 8 January at 5.00pm.

His tweet prompted international bemusement and amusement, but now the President has said he is delaying the honours citing the interest in and importance of the awards.

Writing on Twitter he said: The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday. The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!

The US President also indicated what kind of award categories the public can expect to see.

Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned! he tweeted.

The Presidents announcement comes as his administration is dealing with significant allegations from journalist Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury, detailing Mr Trumps first year in the White House.

Amongst countless revelations, the book claims former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon described a meeting between Donald Trump Jr and a group of Russians was treasonous.

It also says the Trump campaign did not expect to win the US election and Trump himself was befuddled by the result, that he was angry A-list stars snubbed his inauguration, and that he found the White House scary.

Other parts of the book described how White House staff and the Presidents own family are forced to treat Mr Trump like a child, that he often repeats himself and that the people around him frequently question his suitability for the role.

Mr Trump dismissed the book as phony, adding the author is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book.

The books publication renewed debate on Mr Trumps mental health.

Mr Trump hit back on Twitter, writing: I think [I] would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!

During his tenure as President, Mr Trump has repeatedly claimed the media has been unfair to him. In particular he has lashed out at what he calls the failing New York Times, as well as CNN and NBC describing them as fake news.

Mr Trumps awards have been met with widespread mirth with US talk show hosts offering themselves up for consideration for the awards.

On Thursday The Late Shows Stephen Colbert released a spoof ad asking the President to consider his show in all categories, including Least Breitbarty, Fakest Dishonesty, Dishonestest Corruption, and for The Eric Trump Memorial Award for Disappointment.

On Friday the Daily Show with Trevor Noah took out a full colour Oscar-style advert in the New York Times also apparently aimed at sealing a victory in Mr Trumps awards.

For your most dishonest & corrupt media awards of the year consideration, the ad began, including various real quotes, including from Breitbart calling the show political propaganda, and the New York Post describing it as monotonousliberal dogma.

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 is unclear how Mr Trumps awards will be judged.
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James Damore, a former Google engineer, has filed a lawsuit against the tech giant for alleged discrimination against him for his conservative political views.

Mr Damore and lawyer Harmeet Dhillon held a news conference in San Francisco and said the company discriminated against white men who held political views different from those of Google executives.

He has been joined in the class action suit by another former Google engineer, Dave ,Gudeman according to the complaint filed in Santa Clara Superior Court in northern California.

Recommended Google bans people from posting negative reviews of former employers

The lawsuit says: "Google employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google's employment policies and its business, such as 'diversity' hiring policies, 'bias sensitivity,' or 'social justice' were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights.

Mr Damore was sacked last August when his 10-page internal memo criticising the companys diversity policies - specifically questioning the biological capability of women to be in engineering roles - and has been unemployed since.

The document had, according to Ms Dhillon, been with Google Human Resources department or circular file well before being exposed by Motherboard and then published in full by Gizmodo.

Ms Dhillon said that in California your political views are a protected characteristic and that what Google has allegedly done to Mr Damore and others is illegal.

She said during the news conference: I dont want people to get fired for their liberal views.

But, added that Mr Damore was fired within 48 hours of the internal memo leaking because a mob on the internet determined his views unpopular.

Many of our laws are drafted for the unpopular, argued Ms Dhillon, who added that in her view Google thinks the only way to achieve parity in the workplace is through quotas.

Mr Damore said he would open to going back to work at Google and it is his hope that the lawsuit really help[s] Google [become] a truly inclusive place.

He also noted that about half of the people at Google who responded to an internal poll actually agreed with his divisive memo.

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

Ms Dhillon noted that Googles motto is dont be evil but there is nothing more evil than managers refusing to hire or work with employees who voted for President Donald Trump, for example.

She said the company was not uniquely hypocritical and pointed to the recent Golden Globes awards ceremony and Hollywood in general as the center of...liberal virtue signalling.

One of the other purposes of the lawsuit is to push back on the one story of Google, Ms Dhillon said.

The company is currently handling another lawsuit filed by four former female employees against it for that story - that the company does not have enough female engineers and that there is a great pay disparity between men and women in the tech industry as a whole.

The US Department of Labour is investigating the issue as well, though Google has said it has not found any pay or job duty disparities.

Ms Dhillon argued on behalf of Mr Damore that it is entirely possible for Google to hire a bunch of women and pay them less, adding that it is illegal in the state to reserve jobs for women and protected minorities.

Though unemployed, Mr Damore made the rounds on several news programmes in the wake of the leaked memo. He claimed on CNBC that discrimination at the company against white, male conservatives was akin to being gay in the 1950s.

Google has not publicly responded to Mr Damores lawsuit.
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Last May, Jared Kushner accompanied President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, on the pairs first diplomatic trip to Israel, part of Kushners White House assignment to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Shortly before, his family real estate company received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer that is one of Israels largest financial institutions, according to a Menora executive.

The deal, which was not made public, pumped significant new equity into 10 Maryland apartment complexes controlled by Kushners firm. While Kushner has sold parts of his business since taking a White House job last year, he still has stakes in most of the family empire - including the apartment buildings in and around Baltimore.

The Menora transaction is the latest financial arrangement that has surfaced between Kushners family business and Israeli partners, including one of the countrys wealthiest families and a large Israeli bank that is the subject of a US criminal investigation.

The business dealings dont appear to violate federal ethics laws, which require Kushner to recuse himself only from narrow government decisions that would have a direct and predictable effect on his financial interests. And no evidence has emerged that Kushner was personally involved in brokering the deal.

But the deal last spring illustrates how the Kushner Cos' extensive financial ties to Israel continue to deepen, even with his prominent diplomatic role in the Middle East. The arrangement could undermine the ability of the United States to be seen as an independent broker in the region. The Trump administration already inflamed tensions there when it said last month that it recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and would move the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

I think its reasonable for people to ask whether his business interests are somehow affecting his judgment, said Matthew T. Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington who specialises in government ethics and was general counsel to Senator Rand Pauls presidential campaign.

Raj Shah, a deputy White House Press Secretary, said the Trump administration has tremendous confidence in the job Jared is doing leading our peace efforts, and he takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration.

Christine Taylor, a spokeswoman for Kushner Cos, said the company has partners around the world. It does no business, she said, with foreign sovereigns or governments, and is not precluded from doing business with any foreign company simply because Jared is working in the government.

Menora, which is also Israels largest manager of pension funds, has done numerous other real estate deals, including several in the United States, said the Menora executive, Ran Markman, who is the companys head of real estate. He said he had never met Kushner. In negotiating the deal with Kushner Cos, Markman said, he worked with Laurent Morali, the firms president.

The deal was not done because of the so-called connections of Jared Kushner or Donald Trump, Markman said. The connection to the president was not an issue. It didnt make us do the deal, it didnt make us not do the deal.

Kushner resigned as chief executive of Kushner Cos when he joined the White House last January. But he remains the beneficiary of a series of trusts that own stakes in Kushner properties and other investments. Those are worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings, and most likely much more: The estimate nets out the significant debt accumulated by the firm, which has done about $7 billion of deals in the past decade.

Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement: Jared Kushner has not been involved in, nor spoken about any Kushner Companies activities or project, since shortly before the Inauguration. He has an ethics agreement, reviewed by lawyers, with which he is in full compliance. Connecting any of his well-publicised trips to the Middle East to anything to do with Kushner Companies or its businesses is nonsensical and is a stretch to write a story where none actually exists.

But Sanderson, the lawyer who specialises in government ethics, said, Their standard seems like some version of Its a conflict when I think its a conflict, and Ill make that judgment myself.'

Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Show all 22 1 /22 Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Supporters of Difa-e-Pakistan Council a coalition of right wing Islamic parties, burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump, during a protest in Quetta, Pakistan EPA Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Israeli police scuffle with a Palestinian protester outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City Getty Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protesters burn pictures of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu following Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Israeli forces disperse Palestinian protesters outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City on 7 December 2017 AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Supporters of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC), an Islamic organization, chant slogans as they burn Israeli and US flags during a protest against Donald Trump in Peshawar REUTERS Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinians paint an 'X' over the face of a picture of US president Donald J. Trump which was painted on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem EPA Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protestors burn the Israeli flag and a poster of US President Donald Trump in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Supporters of a Pakistani religious party rally against Donald Trump in Lahore AP Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protesters burn the US and Israeli flags in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital A poster depicting U.S. President Donald Trump is burnt during a protest against Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah REUTERS Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Israeli forces detain a Palestinian protester during clashes that followed protests against US President Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Hebron AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protesters burn an effigy of U.S. President Donald Trump AP Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protesters shout slogans against Donald Trump EPA Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital A Palestinian protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask used by the anonymous movement during clashes with Israeli troops in Hebron AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops during protests AFP/Getty Images Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Supporters of a Pakistani religious party chant anti-American slogans during a rally in Islamabad, Pakistan AP Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Pakistanis burn a representation of the U.S. flag during a protest rally in Hyderabad AP Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Young Palestinian women look on as smoke billows from burning tyres as fellow Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops AFP/Getty Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Protesters burn a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump at a protest in Islamabad REUTERS Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Protestors shouts slogans against US President Donald Trump as they hold Palestinian and Turkish flags during a protest near the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey EPA Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Palestinian protestors put their feet over a picture of US president Donald Trump during a protest in the West Bank City of Nablus EPA Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Pakistani protesters burn tires at an anti-Donald Trump rally in Multan AP

One issue, said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics group, is that the ethics laws were not crafted by people who had the foresight to imagine a Donald Trump or a Jared Kushner.

No one could ever imagine this scale of ongoing business interests, not in a local peanut farm or a hardware store but sprawling global businesses that give the president and his top adviser personal economic stakes in an astounding number of policy interests, Weissman added.

The New York Times
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Firefighters have responded to a fire at Trump Tower, the Manhattan home of US President Donald Trump.

One person suffered minor injuries, while another sustained serious and possibly life-threatening injuries, New York Fire Department said. Mr Trump was in Washington at the time of the blaze.

Footage of the incident showed around a dozen firefighters on the roof of the tower, while white smoke billowed from one corner of the top of the building.

Donald Trump was not in the tower at the time of the blaze (REUTERS)

A blaze was reported at 7am local time from the top floor of the building, the New York Fire Department said.

A fire official told ABC the fire was inside one of the vents on the roof of the building.

"This building has two roofs  a low roof, where all the mechanical equipment is ... and a top roof ... with some vents to cover that equipment so you don't see it from the outside," the official said.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. 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In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. 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"So we had flames coming out of those vents  again no fire inside the building."

About 84 firefighters attended the scene and brought the blaze under control in about an hour, the fire service said.

Eric Trump, one of the president's sons, described the blaze as "a small electrical fire".

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job," he said.

"The men and women of the #FDNY are true heros and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

The tower houses businesses and luxury apartments, including Mr Trump's penthouse, which reportedly occupies the top three floors.
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Three people have sustained non-life threatening injuries after a fire was reported in Trump Tower, the New York residence of President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump was in Washington at the time of the fire, which was quickly extinguished.

Footage of the incident showed around a dozen firefighters on the roof of the tower, as white smoke billowed from one corner of the top of the building.

Recommended Ivanka Trump opens fashion shop in Trump Tower

A blaze was reported from the top floor of the building at 7am local time, the New York Fire Department said. Secret Service agents had first noticed the fire, and had informed building management about the issue.

About 84 firefighters attended the scene and brought the blaze under control in about an hour, the fire service said. A spokesman with the Fire Department of New York called it a quick, easy, and routine situation.

The fire wasnt in the building, it was on top of the building, the fire department wrote on Twitter. We had flames coming out of the vents, no smoke condition or fire was on the inside.

Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Show all 30 1 /30 Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Threatening to shut down Twitter after being fact-checked After the president tweeted that voting by post would be "substantially fraudulent", Twitter attached a warning label to his tweet and referred readers to a site which explained how the claim was "unsubstantiated". Trump then said Twitter was "stifling free speech" and that he may have to shut it down, something which he would not have the power to do AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Flippantly dismissing a serious allegation of sexual assault When author E Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, the president responded: Number one, shes not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?" AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Insulting the Mayor of London as he landed in London Just before touching down at Stansted Airport for his state visit, Trump took time out to @ the London mayor Sadiq Khan on twitter. He said that Khan has done a "terrible job"as mayor and that he is a "stone cold loser" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Taking plenty of "Executive Time" The president's official schedule sets aside the hours from 8 to 11am daily for "Executive Time". Further intermittent periods of "Executive Time" are scheduled throughout any given day, ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours. His duties in these hours have not been officially disclosed, though Axios reports that he spends them watching TV, reading the newspapers and tweeting Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Shutdown the government for over a month in an effort to secure funding for his wall With Mexico declining to pay for the wall, the president has faced difficulty in raising the required $5bn at home. Due to his demand that the money for the wall be included in the budget, and Congress's refusal, the government partially shut down on 22 December 2018. It remained shut for over a month, the longest period in history Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Joking about the Nazi occupation of France to President Macron In this tweet from 13 November 2018, the president mocks Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "true, European army" by invoking the conflict between France and Germany in the world wars Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Railing against the Mueller investigation The president has repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is a "rigged witch hunt" Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting a US intelligence report on Russian meddling in the presence of Vladimir Putin In the press conference that followed his landmark meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump stated that he saw no reason why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 US election. This contradicted a 2017 report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found evidence of Russian interference in favour of Trump Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Contradicting his contradiction of a US intelligence report on Russian meddling Following furious backlash in the US, the president claimed that he meant to say that he saw no reason why it would not have been Russia who meddled in the 2016 US election. As to why he would have intended to use such bizarre phrasing, he did not comment Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Colouring in the US flag wrong The president coloured in the US flag wrongly during a visit to a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added a blue stripe where in tradition, and statute, there have been only white and red stripes AFP/Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing a Secretary of State over Twitter The president announced on Twitter that he was appointing Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, much to the surprise of then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Quoting a catchphrase from a reality TV show when discussing police brutality While addressing the issue of black athletes not standing for the national anthem in protest of police brutality, the president made reference to his catchphrase from reality TV show "The Apprentice": you're fired! Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Calling African nations "S***hole Countries" Ever one for diplomacy, the president reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole countries". Asked to confirm this when meeting with Nigeria's President Buhari, Trump stated that there are "some countries that are in very bad shape". Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Defending Russian President Vladimir Putin Trump appeared to equate US foreign actions to those of Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying: There are a lot of killers. You think our countrys so innocent? Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Asking for people to 'pray' for Arnold Schwarzenegger At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump couldnt help but to ask for prayers for the ratings on Arnold Schwarzeneggers show to be good. Schwarzenegger took over as host of The Apprentice  which buoyed Trumps celebrity status years ago Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Hanging up on Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull Early in his presidency, Trump reportedly hung up the phone on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after the foreign leader angered him over refugee plans. Mr Trump later said that it was the worst call he had had so far Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... The 'Muslim ban' Perhaps one of his most controversial policies while acting as president, Trumps travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries has bought him a lot of criticism. The bans were immediately protested, and judges initially blocked their implementation. The Supreme Court later sided with the administrations argument that the ban was developed out of concern for US security Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Praising crowd size while touring Hurricane Harvey damage After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeastern Texas, Trump paid the area a visit. While his response to the disaster in Houston was generally applauded, the president picked up some flack when he gave a speech outside Houston (he reportedly did not visit disaster zones), and praised the size of the crowds there AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... 'Little Rocket Man' During his first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried out a new nickname for North Korea leader Kim Jong-un: Rocket Man. He later tweaked it to be little Rocket Man as the two feuded, and threatened each other with nuclear war. During that speech, he also threatened to totally annihilate North Korea Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Attacking Sadiq Khan following London Bridge terror attack After the attack on the London Bridge, Trump lashed out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising Khan for saying there was no reason to be alarmed after the attack. Trump was taking the comments out of context, as Khan was simply saying that the police had everything under control Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming presenter Mika Brezinkski was 'bleeding from the face' Never one not to mock his enemies, Trump mocked MSNBCs Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying that she and co-host Joe Scarborough had approached him before his inauguration asking to join him. He noted that she was bleeding badly from a face-lift at the time, and that he said no MSNBC Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming the blame for Charlottesville was on 'both sides' Trump refused to condemn far-right extremists involved in violence at 'the march for the right' protests in Charlottesville, even after the murder of counter protester Heather Heyer AP Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Retweeting cartoon of CNN being hit by a 'Trump train' Trump retweeted a cartoon showing a Trump-branded train running over a person whose body and head were replaced by a CNN avatar. He later deleted the retweet Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Tweeting about 'slamming' CNN Trump caught some flack when he tweeted a video showing him wrestling down an individual whose head had been replaced by a CNN avatar. Trump has singled CNN out in particular with his chants of fake news Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Firing head of the FBI, James Comey Trumps firing of former FBI Director James Comey landed him with a federal investigation into Russias meddling in the 2016 election that has caused many a headache for the White House. The White House initially said that the decision was made after consultation from the Justice Department. Then Mr Trump himself said that he had decided to fire him in part because he wanted the Russia investigation Mr Comey was conducting to stop Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Not realising being president would be 'hard' Just three months into his presidency, Trump admitted that being president is harder than he thought it would be. Though Trump insisted on the 2016 campaign trail that doing the job would be easy for him, he admitted in an interview that living in the White House is harder than running a business empire Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Accusing Obama of wiretapping him Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wire tapping him on twitter. The Justice Department later clarified: Obama had not, in fact, done so Reuters Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Claiming there had been 3 million 'illegal votes' Trump was never very happy about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million ballots. So, he and White House voter-fraud commissioner Kris Kobach have claimed that anywhere between three and five million people voted illegally during the 2016 election. Conveniently, he says that all of those illegal votes went to Clinton. (There is no evidence to support that level of widespread voter fraud.) Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Leaving Jews out of the Holocaust memorial statement Just days after taking office, Trumps White House issued a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but didnt mention jews or even the word jewish in the written statement Getty Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far... Anger over Inauguration crowd size Trumps inauguration crowd was visibly, and noticeably, smaller than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. But, he really wanted to have had the largest crowd on record. So, he praised it as the biggest crowd ever. Relatedly, Trump also claimed that it stopped raining in Washington at the moment he was inaugurated. It didnt, the day was very dreary Reuters

Eric Trump, one of the presidents sons, said on Twitter that it was a small electrical fire in the cooling tower on the buildings roof.

The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job, he said. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!

The tower houses businesses and luxury apartments, including Mr Trumps penthouse, which reportedly occupies the top three floors. No evacuations were reported in the building

Just hours after the fire was reported, the streets below had calmed down, and just one fire truck remained nearby with its siren lights still spinning. Tourists passed by in the frigid New York weather, snapping photos of the building, unaware that a plume of smoke could have been seen earlier in the day. Some said that they had stumbled across the shining, black tower as they walked around Midtown Manhattan, but didnt initially intend on visiting the famed metropolitan home.

No, no, no, Hilda Bandiera, who was visiting New York with her husband, Alfred, from Australia, said when asked if she had ventured down Fifth Avenue specifically to see Mr Trumps building. Were not adding to his economy.

The area around the tower had a notably smaller security footprint than is seen when members of the first family are staying at the skyscraper. Metal barricades remained at the site, their bases covered in snow, but foot traffic hardly warranted even that. Traffic on Fifth Avenue  which was a tangled mess during the presidential transition period last year, and while First Lady Melania Trump still lived at the tower  appeared to run smoothly, even with the lingering presence of the New York Fire Department.

Matt Mahoney, a construction worker in the area, stood catty-cornered from the tower with a cigarette, and recalled the commotion of the morning. Mr Mahoney said he lives in Staten Island -- one of the few hotspots of Trump supporters in New York City  and that theres generally congestion near the tower now that Mr Trump is president. Fire or no, theres always a little bit more congestion than there was before.

As for Mr Trump, who Mr Mahoney says he voted for, the fiery rhetoric of the campaign - fuelled by frequent tweets and big promises  hasnt cooled down to something more statesman like, as Mr Mahoney said hed like to see.

The way he acts, the tweets... Hes a little bit of a loose cannon than youd like, Mr Mahoney said, indicating that it has been an accumulation of questionable behaviour over the past year that has soured him a bit on Mr Trump.

Overall, the conduct has been non-presidential, Mr Mahoney said. But, theres still time for the President to contain the blaze that has been his presidency, he said.
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The Trump administration has declined to renew the temporary protected status of Salvadoran immigrants to the US, giving an estimated 263,000 people less than two years to leave the country or be deported.

The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation has allowed immigrants from El Salvador to live and work in the US since 2001, when a pair of earthquakes crippled much of the Central American nation.

Immigrants will have until September 2019 to leave the country or find other means of lawful residency, according to multiple news reports.

In a letter to Congress members, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said conditions in El Salvador had improved significantly since 2001, rendering the original justification for the protected status void.

Congress now has 18 months to pass legislation protecting Salvadoran immigrants or their legal status will be revoked, according to a letter first seen by The Washington Post.

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 US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) occasionally grants protected status to immigrants from countries where conditions prevent the countrys nationals from returning safely, or where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately. The designation must be renewed in six, 12 or 18-month periods.

Every president since George W Bush has extended the protected status of Salvadorans, allowing many to create permanent lives within the US. More than half of all Salvadoran immigrants have lived in the US for 20 years or more, according to the Centre for Migration Studies. 10 per cent are married to a legal resident.

 Donald Trump's immigration crackdown encapsulated in poignant footage of father being deported

Amanda Baran, a consultant to the Immigrant Legal Resource Centre, called Mondays decision reckless and heartless.

El Salvador is one of the worlds most dangerous countries, and will be unable to absorb the return of these thousands of people whose lives are inextricably intertwined with those of ours here in the United States, she said in a statement.

Amnesty International also decried the decision, claiming the US "could be sending people to their deaths".

More than 1,000 people died and thousands more lost their homes in the 2001 earthquake in El Salvador. While the country has since rebuilt, poverty and gang violence remain rampant.

El Salvador was ranked the third most dangerous nation on the globe by the World Economic Forum in 2017. The countrys homicide rate remains one of the highest in the world, with a reported 80.94 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016.

The Obama administration cited drought, poverty and widespread gang violence  among other things  as reasons for renewing the TPS in 2016.

El Salvadorans were the largest group receiving protected status in the US, followed by some 86,000 Hondurans, whose fate is still unclear. The Trump administration rescinded protections for approximately 45,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans last year.
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In August last year two staffers from the US House Intelligence Committee arrived in London and turned up unannounced at the office of Christopher Steele. Not finding him there, they went to the office of his lawyer demanding to see him.

The timing of the visit was of importance. It took place when special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee were making progress in their attempt to speak to the former MI6 officer who had produced the dossier on Donald Trumps Russian connection. The two men had been sent by Republican members of the House Committee with the aim, it was suspected, of intimidating Mr Steele.

Last Friday, at the end of a week which had been dominated by highly damaging and humiliating revelations about Mr Trump in Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury, two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsay Graham and Chuck Grassley, asked the US Justice Department to start an investigation of Mr Steele over his contacts with the media. It is highly unlikely to come to anything, accompanied as it was with the acknowledgement that it is not intended to be an allegation of a crime.

But this is part of a far wider pattern of action to damage the investigations into the Trump teams Russian connection, something which is only likely to gather more pace and scale after the announcement that preliminary discussions have already been held for the President to be interviewed by the FBI.

Recommended Trump lawyers preparing for possible Mueller interview over Russia

The attempt at undermining the inquiries had begun soon after they were announced, with Devin Nunes, the Republican chair of the Houses own inquiry into Russian meddling, being forced to step down over secret contacts with the Trump White House.

Mr Nunes, who refused to recuse himself temporarily from the chair and was subsequently cleared by the House Ethics Committee over the passing of information, has declared to Fox News that I am in charge, I have always been in charge of the investigation. Mr Nunes, it is believed, was one of those who sent the staffers to see Mr Steele last summer without telling the Democrats in the committee.

Mr Nunes has been pursuing alleged bias against Mr Trump in the Justice Department and FBI, issuing subpoenas for confidential documents in the Russia inquiry. Mr Nunes has charged that it seems the Department of Justice and FBI need to be investigating themselves. The senior Democrat in the House Committee, Adam Schiff, has complained from the beginning of this investigation theres been an effort to circle the wagons around the White House by the chairman and some of the Presidents allies. Mr Nunes, he held, wants to investigate anyone but the Russians.

A whole range of FBI and Justice Department officials, from Robert Mueller and acting FBI Director Christopher Wray to deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who has been vocally supportive of Mr Mueller, have come under attack from the Republican right.

Some of the focus is now on Jeff Sessions. The attorney general recused himself from the Russia investigation after revelations of a meeting he had with the Russian ambassador to the US in 2016. Mr Trump is reported to have been furious with Mr Sessions and had asked White House counsel Don McGahn to urge him to change his mind.

Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against Mr Rosenstein. Even last July he was annoyed that Rosenstein is from Baltimore: there are very few Republicans from Baltimore, if any, he is a Democrat. Mr Rosenstein, it has been pointed out, is neither from Baltimore nor a Democrat. But Mr Trump continues to see him as a threat.

Soon after the news broke of Mr Trumps projected interviews with investigators, messages began to appear in social media from the Presidents supporters of the need for changes in the Justice Department. Tom Fitton, the head of a conservative lobbying group called Judicial Watch, tweeted: Sessions should unrecuse himself and clean house. Republican congressmen Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan have demanded recently that Mr Sessions should resign.

The removal of Mr Sessions, Trump supporters have pointed out, would enable the appointment of a new attorney general who could take back the Mueller investigation from Mr Rosenstein, then give it a time limit and start cutting back on funding with the hope it will peter out.

The net may appear to be closing around the Trump White House, with the Presidents former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn already charged, and Jared Kushner under intense scrutiny  but the campaign to protect Mr Trump will not end anytime soon.
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After losing supporters and donors, Steve Bannon apologised for his alleged remarks about President Donald Trumps son in the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

According to the books author Michael Wolff, the former White House strategist and current Breitbart News executive said Donald Trump Jr was treasonous and his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the height of the 2016 campaign was unpatriotic.

Mr Bannon told Axios in a statement that Mr Wolff misquoted him: My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort.

The bombastic editor was effusive in his praise of the Presidents son after billionaire and Breitbart news financial backer Rebekah Mercer threw her support behind Mr Trump.

Mr Trump Jr is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, said Mr Bannon in his apology.

Theyre going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV, Mr Bannon is quoted as saying in the book as special prosecutor Robert Mueller carries on with the FBI investigation into alleged collusion between Russian officials and Trump campaign team members.

Mr Manafort, the former campaign manager, has been indicted on several counts of financial crimes in the investigation.

 Donald Trump says Michael Wolff is a fraud denying the contents of book Fire and Fury

Mr Bannon said in his apology that Mr Manafort is a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.

He also explained this his comment about the June 2016 meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Mr Trump Jr, Mr Manafort, and the Presidents son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner stemmed from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines as well as his stint at the Pentagon during President Ronald Reagans administration.

Mr Bannon also snuck in a dig at Hillary Clinton, making sure to mention his films about Reagans war against the Soviets and [Ms] Clintons involvement in selling uranium to them.

His apology comes on the heels of several tweets by the President about the made up stories in the book, a few in particular in which he referred to his former staffer as Sloppy Steve.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was, the White House statement read.

Still, in the apology Mr Bannon described his support for the Presidents agenda as unwavering and said he was the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. 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Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. 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

To perhaps further prove his role as a surrogate for the President, Mr Bannon repeated Mr Trumps claims that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt.

I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency, Mr Bannon said.

Though, he appeared to hold back any apology for his comments about Mr Kushner and the Presidents daughter Ivanka Trump, whom he allegedly referred to as Javanka in the book. Mr Bannon had called the pair the railhead of all bad decisions, according to Mr Wolff.

Mr Wolff, for his part, said on MSNBC that Mr Bannons comments were certainly directed at the Presidents son and not Mr Manafort.

Fire and Fury went on sale days earlier than planned and publishers are rushing to print more copies in order to meet high demands.

Mr Wolff gathered the reporting in the book by spending time with the transition team and at the White House over 18 months with the freedom to record conversations.

He conducted 200 interviews including Mr Trump and took, according to him, something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing to do so.
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An Iranian oil tanker that caught fire after colliding with a freighter off the east coast of China is at risk of exploding or sinking, Chinese state media reported.

Rescuers from three countries have struggled to find the 32 missing crew members and contain oil spewing from the wreck, which could pose an environmental hazard.

State broadcaster China Central Television, citing Chinese officials, said the ship was manned by 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis.

Search and cleanup efforts have been hampered by fierce fires and poisonous gasses, which have engulfed the tanker.

The body of one crew member out of the 32 thought to be on board has been found (Getty)

The body of one crew member has been found aboard the ship, an Iranian official said. Mohammad Rastad, head of Irans Ports and Maritime Organisation, was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency that the body was sent to Shanghai for identification.

The Panama-registered tanker, the Sanchi, was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided with the Hong Kong-registered freighter, CF Crystal, in the East China Sea, 160 miles (257km) off the coast of Shanghai, Chinas Ministry of Transport said.

China, South Korea and the US sent ships and planes to search for the Sanchis crew. All 21 crew members of the crystal were rescued, the Chinese ministry said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the collision.

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

Kwon Yong-deok, a Korea Coast Guard official, said thick black smoke was still billowing from the ship on Monday afternoon and bad weather was worsening visibility at the scene.

There are also concerns the oil blaze could be an environmental risk. The Sanchi was carrying nearly one million barrels of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil Mr Kwon said may have evaporated or burned immediately.

But any of the highly toxic condensate that leaked into the sea could be a lot harder to detect, contain and clean up, John Driscoll, of JTD Energy Services, told the BBC.

Chinese authorities have dispatched three ships to clean the spill.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989, badly damaging local ecology and the areas fishing-based economy.

The seas around China have been compared to the Bermuda Triangle after research by German newspaper Die Welt found them to be the most dangerous in the world.

The paper said at least 33 ships were lost in 2016 alone.

Additional reporting by AP
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Austria's president Alexander Van der Bellen has intervened after the first child born in Vienna in 2018 was subjected to a torrent of Islamophobic abuse.

Asel Tamga was named "the first Viennese baby" of the year and photographed in the arms of her hijab-wearing mother.

Rather than being greeted with good wishes, articles about the birth were bombarded with hundreds of anti-Muslim and racist comments.

Mr Van der Bellen, Austria's left-wing leader, noted the birth in a Facebook post, saying: "Welcome, dear Asel!"

He quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying: "All men are free and born equal in dignity and rights."

Public announcements of New Years Babies" are customary in the German-speaking media, but anti-hate groups say they have become the focus of racist abuse, which has risen following an influx of refugees.

More than 145,000 people have applied for asylum in Austria since 2015, according to government figures.

Secretary general of the Vienna chapter of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, Klaus Schwertner, commented on the abuse Asel received.

In the first hours of her life, this sweet girl was already the target of an unbelievable wave of violent, hateful online commentary, he said in a Facebook post.

It is a completely new dimension of online hate, targeting an innocent newborn."

One comment on an article reacting to the birth on Austrian daily Heute said: Im hoping for a cot death, the site reported.

Deport the scum immediately, another comment said.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The incident comes two weeks after the country's far-right Freedom Party entered into the coalition government for the first time and seized control of several powerful ministries, including foreign, interior and defence. The development is expected to toughen Vienna's stance on immigration and asylum seekers.

Mr Van der Bellen, a former Green Party leader who narrowly beat a far-right candidate to take office in January last year, has spoken against racism on a number of occasions.

Last March, he called on all women to wear headscarves in solidarity with Muslims to fight what he called "rampant Islamophobia".
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A senior German politician has apologised after pledging to enact a final solution to the refugee question in Europe.

Manfred Webers political opponents pointed out that the top MEPs language on the refugee crisis bore a striking resemblance Nazi terminology used during the Third Reich in relation to Jews.

But the CSU MEP, who is a member of Angela Merkels political alliance and who heads up the centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP) in the European Parliament, said he now regretted making the comments.

My choice of words yesterday was wrong and I regret it. But accusing me of intending any further associations is dishonest and completely mischaracterises my personal view and position, he said.

This is where I remain on the issue: We need in 2018 a European answer to the migration challenge. We Europeans must offer further protection for people in need and at the same time stop illegal migration.

Speaking at a party retreat in the Bavarian monastery town of Seeon, Mr Weber had said, according to German newspaper Bayerischer Rundfunk: In 2018, the central European issue will be the final solution to the refugee issue.

Mr Weber described the policy as a "finale Losung", a very similar term, especially when translated into English, to the word "Endlosung", used by the Nazis to describe the Holocaust.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was at the meeting

German media such as the magazine Der Spiegel said the wording clearly recalls the Nazi era.

The comments were particularly contentious because the meeting happened to be attended by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban  who has been repeatedly accused of deploying antisemitic tropes in his campaign against refugees and Jewish businessman George Soros.

Mr Weber pledged an alliance with the so-called Visegrad states of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The countries have formed an anti-refugee bloc and European level, and Poland in Hungary in particular have elected increasingly authoritarian and illiberal governments.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The CSU, which is technically a separate party to Angela Merkels CDU despite a long-term electoral alliance, lost out to the rise of the far-right AfD and has long called for a more hardline right-wing direction to win back voters, especially on immigration.

As leader of the EPP Mr Weber commands the largest bloc of votes in the European Parliament.
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A Quaker organisation which received the Nobel Peace Prize for rescuing refugees from the Nazis during the Second World War is among 20 activist groups whose members will be barred from entering Israel over their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The blacklist follows up on a controversial law enacted by Israel last year which bans any activist who "knowingly issues a public call for boycotting" the country.

Responding to the list, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) said it would continue to work for "peace and justice."

Recommended Israel publishes list of organisations banned from entering country

The group, together with the Friends Service Council, a British Quaker organisation, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for assisting Second World War refugees, primarily Jews.

"We answered the call for divestment from apartheid South Africa and we have done the same with the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions from Palestinians who have faced decades of human rights violations," said Kerri Kennedy, an AFSC official.

Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Show all 18 1 /18 Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli forces scuffle with Palestinians at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City AFP/Getty Images Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A Palestinian protester hurls stones as tear gas is fired by Israeli troops Reuters Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A Palestinian protester runs during clashes with Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli forces scuffle with Palestinians at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City AFP/Getty Images Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Palestinian protesters run during clashes REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli border policemen and a Palestinian protesters clash REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Palestinian protesters react to tear gas REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli border policemen hold on to a Palestinian protester REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Palestinian protesters react to tear gas fired by Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli border policemen and Palestinians scuffle after Friday prayers in Jerusalem's Old City REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A Palestinian protester moves a burning tire during clashes with Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Worshippers chant as they hold Palestinian flags after Friday prayers Reuters Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A Palestinian protester hurls back a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A wounded Palestinian protester is evacuated during clashes with Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli border policemen and a Palestinian youth scuffle REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Israeli border policemen detain a Palestinian man REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' A Palestinian protester uses a sling to hurl stones towards Israeli troops REUTERS Palestinians clash with Israeli troops during 'Day of Rage' Journalists react to tear gas fired by Israeli troops REUTERS

The listed groups, primarily from Europe and America, count thousands of people as members. It includes the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and War on Want.

Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want, said the blacklist is "a desperate attempt to silence a growing movement that is holding Israel to account for its systematic abuse of Palestinian rights, and persistent violations of international law."

Mr Rehman said: "This measure is typical of Israels ongoing repression of the Palestinian people.

"The UK government must condemn this latest crackdown on human rights defenders. They must also take immediate steps to hold Israel to account for its continuing violations of Palestinian rights through measures such as the immediate suspension of its trade relations with Israel, including the arms trade".

He added: "This blacklist is a repressive tactic borrowed from the same playbook used by the apartheid regime in South Africa, when it tried to censor critics. Such attempts to silence human rights defenders through blacklisting and targeted harassment failed then as they will now."

 Rock star Roger Waters says Radiohead should not be playing in Israel due to the BDS movement

Hugh Lanning, chair of the PSC, said in a statement: "This latest announcement should be a wakeup call for the UK government and all those who continue to describe Israel as a normal liberal democracy. Liberal democracies do not prevent entry to individuals whose only offence is to draw attention to human rights abuses and to call for non-violent action to address them. Only states that wish to protect their ability to act unjustly behave in this way.

"Boris Johnson must take robust action to protect the rights of UK citizens to protest peacefully and to cross borders without illegitimate restriction. He should make clear that the UK Government will not cooperate with these measures."

The US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, which was also blacklisted, said in a Facebook post: "Israel's decision to specifically ban JVP is disconcerting but not surprising, given the further erosion of democratic norms and rising anxiety about the power of BDS as a tool to demand freedom."

Responding to news of the blacklist, Gary Spedding, a British cross-party consultant on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, told The Independent the blacklist was merely an excuse to legally justify barring activists and human rights observers from entering the country.

The boycott movement has thousands of supporters around the world (AFP/Getty Images)

A statement by Israel's Strategic Affairs Ministry said those who have carried out "significant, ongoing and consistent harm to Israel through advocating boycotts may be considered to have their entry barred." It said "central figures in key boycott organisations" risked being prevented entry.

"The boycott organisations must know that the state of Israel will act against them," Gilad Erdan, the minister for strategic affairs said in a statement. "The creation of this list is another step in our struggle against the incitement and lies of the boycott organisations."

The BDS movement has urged businesses, artists and universities to sever ties with Israel and includes thousands of supporters around the world.

Supporters of the movement say the tactics are a nonviolent way to promote the Palestinian cause, while Israel says the campaign goes beyond fighting its occupation of territory Palestinians claim for their state and often masks a more far-reaching aim to delegitimize or destroy the nation of Israel.

Last year, Hugh Lanning, chair of the PSC, became the first British citizen to be refused entry to Israel under the law, and Professor Kemal Hawwash, a British-Palestinian man, was also forced to fly back to the UK.

In a statement, the Israeli embassy in London said: "Like all other democracies, Israel will deny entrance to organisations and individuals working to undermine and harm Israel's national security. The organisations named in the list released yesterday have undertaken ongoing, consistent and significant action to promote and advance a boycott of Israel."

It said the regulation excludes political criticism of Israel as criteria for an organisation appearing on the list, and added that several other counties had taken steps to counter boycotts against Israel.
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A British man who faced years behind bars in Dubai after being found with too many anti-depressants, has been freed.

Maritime security officer Perry Coppins, 61, was arrested in November after being stopped at Fujairah sea port with a six-month supply of prescribed medication.

The father-of-three, from Nottingham, was later diagnosed with prostate cancer and his family feared his detainment would mean a death sentence if he was not released to seek treatment.

Recommended Taking these prescription drugs into Dubai could get you arrested

Mr Coppins was held in jail for for five weeks despite having GP prescriptions for three types of anti-anxiety drug, all legal in the United Arab Emirates, and explaining to customs officials and police that he needed enough medication for a half-year sea voyage.

Detained in Dubai (DiD), a legal organisation which had taken up his case, said Mr Coppins learned on Sunday that charges against him had been dropped. His passport has been returned and he has been told he is free to return home.

DiD chief executive Radha Stirling said: We welcome the decision by Dubai authorities to take the humane and sensible course with Perry.

This case should never have escalated to the point of criminal charges, but without the scrutiny of the international media, it is unlikely that Perry would be a free man tonight.

In the absence of such attention, what was essentially a misjudgment by one customs official turned into a literally life-threatening situation for Perry.

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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. 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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. 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Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

DiD claimed Mr Coppins was denied his medication in custody, and his condition deteriorated rapidly as he suffered severe withdrawal, including hallucinations, bouts of blindness and weight loss.

His hands and feed were shackled in prison and he spent all of his savings on legal costs and living expenses while awaiting a 15 January trial, the organisation added.

Mr Coppins arrest is the latest in a string of cases in which Britons have been incarcerated in Dubai, often over disputed accusations of minor crimes.

Ms Stirling said: We advise caution to all visitors, including those transiting through the UAE to utilise caution when doing so.

As we have seen in many cases recently, such as Asa Hutchinson, who was merely in the vicinity of an alleged crime, even if someone has not broken the law, they can still find themselves facing prosecution.
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Iraqi security forces are forcibly returning civilians from refugee camps to unsafe areas in the predominantly Sunni Anbar province, exposing them to death from booby-traps or acts of vigilantism, refugees and aid workers say.

Managing more than two million Iraqis displaced by the war against Isis is one of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's most daunting tasks. But critics say he is more interested in winning elections in May than alleviating the suffering of displaced Iraqis and returning them safely home.

Authorities are sending back people against their will, refugees and aid workers say, to ensure that the election takes place on time. People must be in their area of origin to vote and if they do not get home, this could delay the election.

Abadi is riding a wave of popularity after defeating Isis in Iraq and is anxious the election should not be held up.

His strategy is not without its hazards. Abadi risks alienating Sunni voters if displaced Sunnis are seen to be suffering from being sent home to dangerous areas.

Abadi is seeking a second term in which he plans to fight corruption and maintain national unity in the face of Kurdish separatism. He will need all the votes he can muster to face down a challenge from candidates linked to Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias.

Interviews with aid workers and dozens of displaced people at camps in the town of Amriyat al-Falluja, located in the Sunni heartland of Anbar province, 25 miles from Baghdad, as well as with several families who were returned to other areas in the province, reveal that many were forced to go home and several suffered death or injury.

Aid workers said military trucks arrive at camps unannounced and commanders read out lists of people, who have one hour to pack their belongings and go.

The aid workers, who all spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated that between 2,400 and 5,000 people were forcibly returned between 21 November and 2 January.

"These returns are not safe," said one aid worker. "Even those who don't openly resist really have no other choice. They cannot really say no to a bunch of people with guns."

An Iraqi military spokesman said the claim that the military forced displaced civilians to return against their will was an exaggeration.

"Our primary concern is the safety of our citizens, our job is to protect people," Iraqi Joint Operations Command Spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told Reuters.

However, "citizens have to go home" now that Isis had been defeated, he said.

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

Some aid workers said local military commanders told them the orders came from Abadi's office. The prime minister's spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

On 25 November, security forces arrived at a camp in Amriyat al-Falluja and told Saleh Ahmed, 37, and his family to return to their home town of Betaya, his father, Mahdi Ahmed, said.

They refused because contacts at home told them the area was filled with booby-traps left by retreating Isis fighters and their houses had been destroyed.

A local commander assured them the area was safe, saying it was "better to go live in a tent in your home town than live in a tent in the camp".

Saleh reluctantly took his wife and some of his children and got on the truck. Mahdi Ahmed, 72, remained at the camp with his sick wife, another son, and some of Saleh's children as their names were not on the list.

"They gave him a tent. He went back to our destroyed house and tried to pitch it in our yard," Mahdi Ahmed told Reuters at the camp in Amriyat al-Falluja.

An explosive went off. Saleh's wife was killed instantly and his daughter sustained full body burns. Saleh lost one eye and was seriously injured in the other, according to one of his sons, who witnessed the incident.

The Ahmeds' case is not unique. Abdallah, 17, told Reuters his family was forced to return to the town of Jweibeh on 26 November.

A week later masked men arrived at the family home at 2 am demanding to speak to the father. When he refused to open the door, they burst in and started shooting. Abdallah's father suffered leg injuries and his mother lost a finger.

The family do not know what the men wanted.

"It's not that we don't want to return but it has to be safe," said Abdallah, who is now the family breadwinner, working at a shop in the city of Falluja.

For many it is not economically viable to leave the camps, where they can set up barber shops or fruit stands at makeshift markets, making about $50 a month.

That sum would not be possible back home where jobs, basic services, and schools are non-existent.

"I can't afford to return," said camp resident Alaa Hussein.

Recommended Iraq executes 38 Isis suspects on terrorism charges

One man whose father suffers from kidney failure said leaving means losing access to the camp's dialysis machine. His village, 280 miles from the camp, does not have one.

"I will return once there are adequate health services there, but why should I go before then?" said Jassem Ali, 37.

Five camp residents told Reuters separately they were forced to leave but had to turn back because checkpoints manned by Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias were demanding bribes of up to $400 to let people through, a sum none could afford.

They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Reuters was unable to independently verify the claim.

A US diplomat in Baghdad said she had heard reports of forced returns, which the embassy had brought to the attention of the Iraqi government.

She said the government had stressed its commitment to safe and voluntary returns but also said that "there is a real desire to get people home as quickly as possible".

The United Nations says more than half of displaced Iraqis have already returned. More than 3.2 million people were back home at the end of December, with 2.6 million still displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration.

For Mahdi Ahmed, the government has achieved the reverse of what it intended.

"They are doing this because of the election, but if I go back and see my house destroyed, my money gone, and my life ruined, why would I vote for them?" he asked.

Reuters
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As British Airways prepares for its biggest summer programme of flights from Gatwick for a decade, The Independent has learned that thousands of passengers will find themselves buying BA tickets but flying on a different carrier.

The airlines parent company, IAG, paid over 50m for slots at the Sussex airport previously owned by Monarch, which closed in October.

Permission to land and take off at specific times is granted on a use it or lose it basis, so BA will be expected to operate 28 per cent more flights to fill the slots. The airline has already announced plans for more than 15 per cent additional arrivals and departures, including increased flights to Spain and Portugal.

Without a commensurate increase in the number of aircraft and staff based at Gatwick, the airline will have to bring in planes and crews from elsewhere  a practice known as wet leasing.

A spokesperson for British Airways said: Some routes will be operated by BA planes, other services will be operated by BA CityFlyer aircraft and other wet lease carriers on our behalf.

Customers will be notified ahead of their flight which of these carriers will operate their flight.

One of the airlines will be Titan Airways, based at Stansted airport. It has covered for British Airways on an ad-hoc basis, for example during last years Mixed Fleet cabin crew dispute at Heathrow.

Titan is expected to operate some longer-distance European services from Gatwick, including routes to Larnaca and Paphos in Cyprus, Dalaman in Turkey, the Canary Islands and Madeira.

In pictures: British Airways disruptions Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: British Airways disruptions In pictures: British Airways disruptions A passenger looks at a British Airway plane at John F. Kennedy (JFK) international airport in New York Getty Images In pictures: British Airways disruptions British Airways planes are seen at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions Passengers stand at the British Airways check-in desk after the London's Gatwick and Heathrow airports suffered an IT systems failure, at the 'Leonardo da Vinci' airport in Fiumicino, near Rome, Italy EPA In pictures: British Airways disruptions Arrivals notice boards are displayed at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions People wait with their luggage at the British Airways check in desks at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions Thousands of passengers face a second day of travel disruption after a British Airways IT failure caused the airline to cancel most of its services Getty Images In pictures: British Airways disruptions A woman covered in a blanket sleeps in Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 Getty Images In pictures: British Airways disruptions People sleep next to their luggage at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions People sleep at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions A woman sleeps on a luggage trolley at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions People queue to enter the terminal at Gatwick Airport Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions People wait with their luggage at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 Getty In pictures: British Airways disruptions Thousands of passengers face a second day of travel disruption after a British Airways IT failure caused the airline to cancel most of its services Getty In pictures: British Airways disruptions People queue with their luggage outside Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 Getty Images In pictures: British Airways disruptions People queue for check-in at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. Thousands of passengers face a second day of travel disruption after a British Airways IT failure caused the airline to cancel most of its services Getty Images In pictures: British Airways disruptions People sleep next to their luggage at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters In pictures: British Airways disruptions People wait with their luggage at Heathrow Terminal 5 Reuters

The airline flies Airbus A320 and A321 jets, matching BAs short-haul fleet, as well as Boeing 737s, 757s and 767s. BAs current two-class system will be operated on the Gatwick flights.

One member of British Airways cabin crew at Gatwick, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: Passengers are already angry about Buy on Board [the switch to paid-for food and drink in economy class], and itll be even worse when they find theyre flying on an airline they dont know.

A frequent flyer on BA, who also asked for anonymity, said: Many people will have made an active choice to fly BA because they have faith in their pilots.

But Victoria Moores, European editor for Air Transport World, said: Wet leasing is a perfectly normal for airlines. If airlines kept spare aircraft in their fleets, that would be expensive, potentially pushing ticket prices up.

By bringing in aircraft from elsewhere when they need them, airlines can stay agile, seize opportunities and add flights when there is demand. That is what BA is doing here; they are seizing the opportunity of these slots to grow their business.

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It is better for the airline and the customer when they fly their own aircraft, so this is likely to be a short-term solution until they can fly the routes themselves.

Malcolm Ginsberg, editor in chief of Business Travel News, said: When passengers arrive to board and aircraft through an airbridge the majority have not a clue what they are getting on.

Last summer during the cabin-crew dispute, British Airways covered some flights using aircraft and crew from Qatar Airways  which owns one-fifth of IAG, BAs holding company. BA had applied to the Civil Aviation Authority to deploy the Qatari airline again this year, but the application has now been dropped.

The Monarch slots can be used for any destination, but British Airways has chosen to add flights to a number of destinations previously flown by the defunct carrier, with new flights from Gatwick to Palma, Menorca and Gibraltar duplicating old Monarch routes.
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Travel from New Yorks JFK airport has been disrupted for the fifth day running, after a burst water pipe compounded the issues caused by extreme weather in the city.

At around 5.30pm (GMT) on 7 January, the airport tweeted: Due to a water main break at JFK Terminal 4 there are flight delays. Please check with your airline prior to coming to the airport.

The burst pipe flooded the arrivals area of Terminal 4, which serves 30 international airlines, with three inches of water. It also spilled onto the road outside and froze over.

The incident shut down arrivals and Customs and Border Patrols for more than four hours; electricity to the entire terminal was switched off to prevent short circuiting the building.

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This led to more flights being delayed and increasing numbers of passengers being stuck at the airport.

We will thoroughly investigate why this pipe burst and thoroughly investigate why it was not adequately protected and thoroughly investigate the contingency plan for this event, Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which manages the airport, said at a press conference.

He called the closing of the arrivals area for several hours totally unacceptable, saying: It is not what the Port Authority expects in terms of providing service to its passengers, and it is totally not what the Port Authority expects from its private operators.

The problem has been now been fixed. However, the airport is still issuing regular alerts saying: There may be delays at JFK. Please allow extra time and contact your airline.

Heavy snow, ice and harsh winds in the area led to all flights being suspended at various points on 4 and 5 January, with many passengers stranded in the city for several days.

As of Sunday night, more than 500 flights had been cancelled or delayed, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.

Many UK travellers due to fly home with Norwegian were affected by the storms. Brigida Downing, whose son was scheduled to fly from JFK on 4 January, told The Independent that the experience has been a nightmare. After her sons flight was cancelled, Norwegian transported him and his fellow passenger to a hotel, telling them they would fly the next day instead. However, when this flight was also cancelled, passengers were told the airline was not prepared to pay for another night in the hotel, nor transportation back.

My son and others had to pay for a taxi back to the hotel where they were told that if they wished, they could have a refund for their flight and could try to get on another flight, she said. My son checked and the cheapest flight back, if indeed one was going, was 2,000 plus pounds.

Snow and heavy winds have caused disruption at JFK over the last week (Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Jan Coates told The Independent that some of her family are still stuck in New York after they enjoyed a group trip there over the New Year. She said: My husband and I flew out after a delay of six hours on a Virgin flight to Heathrow. Two of our sons flew out two hours later, also after a delay (and a couple of hours on the tarmac!) on BA.

Our remaining two sons, daughter-in-law and new fiancee have just got off an aircraft after two hours waiting and are going to a hotel for a THIRD night.

Independent travel correspondent Simon Calder advised those stuck in New York during the storm: Airlines have a clear and unlimited obligation to provide a hotel room and all meals, as well as transport to and from the airport, until they can get you home. Thats the law.

Although the situation has improved, the weather and backlog of cancelled flights is still causing havoc today at JFK, with 27 of the 40 scheduled departing flights between 12am and 5.59am delayed.

Meanwhile 38 of the scheduled departing flight between 6am and 11.59am are currently delayed, and a further nine have been cancelled.
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A couple from Florida has been charged with animal cruelty after their pet cat was discovered in checked luggage when they were attempting to fly from Erie International Airport in Pennsylvania to Tampa, Florida, on New Years Day.

Olivia Sari and Nicholas Larrison, both 21, were heading home after the Christmas holidays on 1 January when their six-month-old cat, named Slim, was found stowed in a piece of luggage filled with clothes.

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The airport baggage inspection system alerted Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials that the bag required extra checks, reports the Erie Times-News. Staff opened the bag to find the feline inside.

Ian Bogle, the airports director of public safety and facilities, called the incident: A poor decision made on the customers part.

Bogle told the Erie Times-News that each airline has its own system for flying with pets; packing an animal into a piece of checked luggage is not the recommended way, he said.

The pair faces fines for transporting animals in a cruel manner and packing the cat without food, air or water according to police.

Sari and Larrison have not yet entered pleas to the charges.

Bogle said Slim the cat was given to the Humane Society of Northwestern Pennsylvania, an animal shelter in Erie County, to look after.

Its not the first time passengers have tried to check in an unusual item. The Independent reported on the strangest things travellers have tried to take on Virgin Atlantic flights. These included live goldfish, a car bumper, a fridge freezer, a bath tub, a bed headboard, tyres and an entire cow carcass.
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Former US special envoy to Northern Ireland George Mitchell  who chaired the negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998  says the key to successfully concluding any negotiation is to gain the best possible understanding of what we routinely call the bottom line, or the basic objectives for each party.

In their less guarded moments, fantasy and delusion are words commonly used by other EU member states ambassadors to describe our Governments understanding of the EUs negotiating position in the ongoing Brexit talks.

Another Mitchell dictum is that when people arent really clear about their own bottom line or objectives and theyre just trying to get as much as they think they can, that makes it very hard to bring about an agreement. Step forward Prime Minister Theresa May.

In 2017, May repainted so many of her red lines during the first phase of the talks that its no longer clear what her bottom line really is. Her eventual acceptance of a divorce bill of up to 39bn, having ruled out such vast payments last January, is just one example.

In contrast, I and other members of Parliaments All-Party Parliamentary Group on EU Relations (which I co-chair) have followed Mitchells advice and have been meeting representatives of EU Governments (the EU27) over the last few months to better understand their motivations and to inform how we vote on the Withdrawal Agreement, having forced the Government to grant Parliament a meaningful vote last month.

So what is the view from the other side of the negotiating table?

A senior representative of one government told me the UK lacks a national position on how to approach Brexit. This is self-evident. Calling a general election in 2017 and losing her majority has meant May cannot be sure to carry the Commons on Brexit matters.

In the Cabinet, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Environment Secretary Michael Gove have set out their own red lines at variance with Mays. This very public backseat driving and undermining of May has been noted in other European capitals.

The incoherence of our Government is in stark contrast to the iron discipline of the EU27  which has undoubtedly strengthened the EUs hand. May has sought to break their unity and lobby individual heads of EU governments  for example, by inviting fellow Prime Ministers for one-to-one private dinners at Downing Street  but I am told such offers have in the main been rebuffed.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 18 November 2022 Kevin Sinfield on day six of the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge from to York to Bradford. The former Leeds captain is set to complete seven ultra-marathons in as many days in aid of research into Motor Neurone Disease, finishing by running into Old Trafford at half-time of the Rugby League World Cup tournaments finale on 19 November PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2022 Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt leaves 11 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons to deliver his autumn statement PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2022 Emma Woolf, great niece of British author Virginia Woolf, and her son Ludovic sit next to a new bronze statue of Woolf, unveiled in Richmond, London Reuters UK news in pictures 15 November 2022 Lesley Sutcliffe shelters from the rain next to a life-sized replica of the innermost coffin of King Tutankhamun by artist Amanda Stoner as it goes on display inside a traditional red telephone box which has been converted into a museum, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire PA UK news in pictures 14 November 2022 Members of the hospitality sector demonstrate outside parliament in London. The head of the Confederation of British Industry is urging the UK government to relax immigration rules to help British companies with severe staff shortages, ahead of the chancellors autumn statement EPA UK news in pictures 13 November 2022 England celebrate winning the mens T20 World Cup in Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia AAP Image/Reuters UK news in pictures 12 November 2022 The City of London Pride Group take part in the parade during the Lord Mayor's Show PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city 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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

To get to the second phase of negotiations, the future of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland was deliberately fudged. By common consent, it is nowhere near to being resolved.

Ireland, which effectively holds a veto on any deal reached by the EU27 with the UK, will not sanction any breach of the principles set out in Mitchells Good Friday Agreement. The bottom line: no physical border.

UK ministers believe that, in the absence of the UK being a member of the EU single market and customs union (ruled out by May), this can be achieved through the use of new technology; very few people Ive spoken to think this is possible.

Frontbenchers from both our main parties have at times talked about aiming to have our cake and eat it. At the start of the process, Brexit Secretary David Davis said the goal was an agreement with the EU which will deliver the exact same economic benefits which we enjoy as a full EU member. Brexiteers asserted the EU27 would make special exception for the UK because the French want to sell us their cheese, the Italians their Prosecco and, above all, the Germans their cars.

But all those countries have many other global customers. For them, maintaining the integrity of the EU and its single market override these commercial considerations. So: no cake, and no eating of it.

Despite this, May continues to insist we will extract a bespoke deal appropriate for the UK, insisting that therefore talk of adopting the agreements Norway or Canada have with the EU as models to follow is not helpful.

The problem is that most EU governments are not clear what May thinks a bespoke UK arrangement would look like, and any such agreement on our future trading relationship with the EU will need to be finalised before the expiry of the transition period, less than two years after the scheduled March 2019 exit date.

No diplomat I have spoken to believes it is possible to do this in such a short timeframe.

This perhaps explains why Davis has conceded the Governments starting point is the Canada model and it wants what he calls a Canada plus-plus-plus model. The EU free trade agreement with Canada took seven years to finalise and, in the main, covers goods  however, 80 per cent of our economy is services.

Davis believes we can secure a Canada-style arrangement that extensively covers services too (hence the plus-plus-plus label). However, other member states say it is notoriously difficult to get their national parliaments to ratify FTAs that cover services due to domestic political challenges.

Overall, the dominant sentiment is that far from seeking to punish the British people for voting to leave the EU, the EU27 see this whole Brexit process as damage limitation. They believe Brexit is bad for them and us.

If, when we see what the Brexit deal actually looks like, we want to change our minds and fight to reform the EU from within, they would be delighted.

There is unanimous acceptance that Article 50 is revocable and they would be very, very happy for the UK to continue as a member of the club. That is why it makes sense to keep an open mind on what we do at the end of these negotiations.

Chuka Umunna is the Labour MP for Streatham and former Shadow Business Secretary
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When I awoke this morning, I thought about the world we are currently living in and, for the first time in my life, I was scared. But during my morning commute to work, I was delivered an unlikely flurry of hope.

Oprah Winfrey delivered one of the most powerful and iconic speeches at the Golden Globes Awards last night after she became the first black woman to be awarded the Cecil BDeMille Award.

She addressed racism, sexism and the #MeToo movement, which have been hot topics since the exposure of Harvey Weinsteins alleged heinous crimes last year.

Her monologue, which even honoured Rosa Parks and the late civil rights icon Recy Taylor, paid homage to all the women who have come forward to share their story, share their truths and expose their abusers, and to those who continue to fight for equality.

Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Show all 55 1 /55 Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Meryl Street and Ai-jen Poo Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Rosa Clemente and Susan Sarandon Getty Images Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Shailene Woodley and activist Calina Lawrence NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Emma Watson and Marai Larasi Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Laura Dern and Monica Ramirez Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Michelle Williams and Tarana Burke Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Debra Messing Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Caitriona Balfe Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Allison Williams Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Zoe Kravitz Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Viola Davis and Julius Tennon Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Tracee Ellis Ross Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Sarah Paulson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Sadie Sink Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Rita Moreno Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Millie Bobby Brown Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Michelle Pfeiffer Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Margot Robbie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Mandy Moore Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Maggie Gyllenhaal Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Lily James Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kendall Jenner Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kit Harrington Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kerry Washington Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kelly Clarkson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Dakota Johnson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Kate Hudson Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Jessica Biel Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Jamie Chung Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes James Franco and Dave Franco Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Issa Rae Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Isabelle Huppert Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Heidi Klum Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Gwendoline Christie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Geena Davis Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Claire Foy Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Elisabeth Moss Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Diane Kruger Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Catherine Zeta-Jones Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Angelina Jolie Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Nicole Kidman Rex Features Wearing black for women  activists and actors at the Golden Globes Mary J. 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It is not lost on me that, at this moment, there is some little girl watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award, Winfrey said in her powerful speech. It is an honour and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them.

For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.

So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say me too again.

As I listened to her speech on my phone, droplets forming round my eyes whilst waiting for the typically delayed circle line, I felt the urge to stand up on the platform and chant along with her: Their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.

It is. And they should be scared.

For years, women have been at the hands of their abusers and have been shunned, ignored and dismissed. But in 2017 we saw the biggest scandals of Hollywood unravel as Harvey Weinsteins victims bravely came forward to share their stories.

 Golden Globes 2018 highlights

But more importantly, and disturbingly, the leader of the free world is still allowed to roam free, despite having a number of sexual assault claims to his name. And while the conversation surrounding those claims is still active, he does his best to use Twitter as a filibustering tool to realign the attention of the press.

Rather than using his platform and powers to instil positive change, he abuses it. If celebrities and media moguls like Donald Trump can be voted in as the President of the United States, why cant Oprah Winfrey run for office too?

Instead of supporting a president whom, in a 2005 conversation with a television host, boasted of his stardom by stating that when he meets beautiful women he feels able to grab them by the pussy, we should be condemning him.

Instead of supporting a president who publicly endorsed embattled Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, discounting the sexual assault allegations against him, we should be condemning him.

Instead of supporting a president who uses social media to belittle and bully, we should be condemning him.

This is why we need Oprah.

Its about time we had a strong, independent and intelligent woman leading the way and encouraging young women like me to follow suit. In racist America, she was a black woman who came from a life of abject poverty and abuse, dealt with her own teenage pregnancy, was a single mother and became one of the most powerful household names in the world. Her journey has been an inspiring one  and one we can all look up to.

As a 25-year-old woman who has survived sexual assault and rape, for once in my life, a celebrity-made speech made me feel supported. It made me feel heard. It made me feel like the pain I have endured over the last six years is finally being recognised. The #MeToo and the #TimesUp campaigns have highlighted how, when executed collectively, female solidarity can stand up against sexual harassment.

Changing the colour of your outfit wont change how people think or behave, but using your voice will.

I praise Oprah for using her speech to address such poignant issues. I praise Oprah for continuously using television as a medium to make her voice and the voices of others heard.

We can all learn from Oprah, but what can we learn from Donald Trump other than how to behave like a petulant man-child? Im getting behind Oprah for president in 2020.
RALEIGH  While 2017 was a good and productive year for many public and private institutions in North Carolina, it was a tragic year for our prison system.

Five staffers were killed by inmates, one during an April incident at a Bertie County prison and four more during an October escape attempt at Pasquotank Correctional Institute. Five inmates committed suicide during 2017, as well.

The first and foremost duty of any government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Law enforcement, correctional programs, and the courts are primarily responsible for performing this function. When public-safety employees err, misbehave, or fall short at their assigned task, they must be held responsible. But when they lack the tools and resources to do the job, thats on the rest of us.

Theres enough blame to go around. You should expect to hear a lot about this issue during the 2018 and 2020 elections. In the meantime, however, policymakers in Raleigh and correction officials across the state need to pursue reforms. A new report produced for the Governors Crime Commission by a team of researchers at Duke Universitys Sanford School of Public Policy may serve as a useful starting point.

The reports authors included Sanford School lead researcher Caitlin Saunders, senior research scholar Joel Rosch, and Susan Katzenelson, a member and former executive director of the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission. Their team reviewed scores of documents and research studies, consulted national organizations, and interviewed public-safety personnel across North Carolina as well as in seven other states.

Context is important when considering prison-safety issues and what to do about them. For example, North Carolinas prison population is shrinking, not growing. Since the bipartisan adoption of the Judicial Reinvestment Act in 2011  which stepped up the use of treatment programs, intensive probation and parole, and other means to steer nonviolent offenders away from lengthy prison stays  enrollment in state prisons has dropped by nearly 10 percent.

The number of correctional institutions has correspondingly dropped from 66 to 55. State expenditures on prisons went down, too, but not as much as the prison population did. Of the eight states studied by the Sanford School researchers, North Carolina had the lowest incarceration rate at 371 inmates per 100,000 state residents. The incarceration rates are much higher in neighboring Georgia (521) and Tennessee (438).

Nevertheless, North Carolina has been struggling to staff its prisons. Vacancy rates vary, but exceeded 25 percent in both of the institutions where prison staffers were killed in 2017. Overworked, undertrained corrections officials are a safety risk to themselves, their coworkers, and the inmates they supervise.

Should we increase average salaries to help attract and retain more prison guards? Certainly. Appropriations for the Department of Public Safety, which includes the prison system, represent about nine percent of North Carolinas $23 billion General Fund budget. We can make prison pay a higher priority without unduly burdening other agencies or the taxpayers.

As the Duke University team explains in its report, however, average pay isnt all or even most of the story. Their recommendations include a more thoughtful and creative approach to recruiting new personnel, signing bonuses and non-wage incentives such as housing assistance (which may be particularly attractive in the rural areas where many of our prisons are located), a lengthier and more effective period of basic training, opportunities and incentives for acquiring additional skills, and wellness programs to combat the physical and mental fatigue that make guards inattentive or prone to corruption.

The prison system also needs to step up its adoption of modern management techniques and technologies to detect contraband, discern emerging conflicts, and deter inmate misbehavior. While there will be a cost in the short run, the seriousness of these problems must not be dismissed or underestimated, the researchers observe. Without constant monitoring, innovation, and front-end investment, these inherent struggles spiral into crises that can only be managed at an even higher cost.

Both public safety and fiscal prudence are at risk. Lets act.

John Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation and appears on the talk show NC SPIN. You can follow him @JohnHoodNC.
Our representatives are hiding behind the promise that we will see a great tax cut in our February pay checks. Baloney. I think that we might see $15 a week, if even that ($750 a year). Compare this to the 6% richest people who will see $700 a week ($35,000 a year). In one week they will get as much as the middle class will get for the entire year. Compare also to the lowest income people, who pay no taxes all, yet they will get back twice as much as the middle class ($1400).
Main opposition New Democracy (ND) party on Monday reacted angrily to the latest judicial "twist" involving one of eight Turkish servicemen that has asked for political asylum in the country, calling on the Tsipras government to "finally realize that Greece remains a rule of law state and an EU member ."
Whats Behind the Disappearance Of 420,000 Palestinians in Lebanon?

By Franklin Lamb

Rashidieh Palestinian camp, on the border of Occupied Palestine:

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The first ever official census of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon was finally released on 12/21/2017 in Beirut. The village by village and camp by camp survey by 500 specialists found that only 174,422 Palestinian refugees are living these days in the country. Counted were al Palestinians living in the 12 official camps and 156 informal settlements known as gatherings and those living outside these areas across Lebanon. This figure is shockingly lower than the previous estimate of 469,331 Palestinians by UNWRA and as many as 600,00 by others for political purposes.

Lebanon is a country where demographics have long been a politically sensitive subject to be approached with extreme caution. For the past nearly 85 years (since 1932) Lebanons leaders have refused to allow a count of the population out of feelings of terror that a rival sect, among the 17 other rival sects, might gain power at their expense were there to be an honest count. Consequently, plenty of political lords have used fake population figures, without fear of contradiction by a forbidden official government count, to secure benefits-political and financial- for their own sect.

With respect to Lebanon and regional endemic tribalism, one is reminded of the words of Hannah Arendt from her volume, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by a world of enemies, one against all, that a fundamental difference exists between these people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

The reason for UNWRAs own higher figures since it was created by General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) 69 years ago this month to help feed and care for refugees forced out of their homes in Palestine, its mandate has always been to register all Palestinians who, since the 1948 Nakba, apply for its help. This UNWRA has faithfully done to the best of its ability while facing many obstacles-political and financial-over the decades. Affecting its record keeping, starting in 1950s, scores of thousands of Palestinian refugees left Lebanon for a better life abroad. Just as more than 1,780,000 Lebanese have done since the onslaught of Lebanons civil war in 1975. Hence the larger number of UNWRA recorded registrants. UNRWA does not have a headcount of every Palestinian refugee who currently resides in Lebanon. What they do have are official registration records for the number of registered Palestine refugees in Lebanon. If a Palestinian registered with UNRWA in Lebanon should decide to live outside Lebanon, as countless thousands have, they dont normally advise UNWRA that they are moving.

As a gentleman this observer admires, Hassan Mneimneh, chairman of the Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Committee, which coordinated the census, told the media a couple of weeks ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians left Lebanon when the Palestinian Liberation Organization withdrew from the country in 1982. This observer knows something about this firsthand as he was on one of the August 1982 boats than left Beirut harbor by boat for Tunis courtesy of an invitation from Yasser Arafat along with the American journalist, Janet Lee Stevens. Unfortunately, Janet missed the boat as she was assuring a group of Palestinian women in Burj al Barajneh camp in South Beirut that all would be OK as they worried about losing their PLO protection. The next month was the Sabra-Shatila massacre and seven months later April 18, 1983 Janet and our unborn child, Clyde Chester Lamb III were killed in the bombing at the American Embassy.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians left Lebanon when the PLO withdrew from the country in 1982.

Like the Lebanese over the past 3 decades, many Palestinians try to leave Lebanon at the first opportunity. And why wouldnt they? Lebanese seemingly leave their birth country any chance they get these days and during Lebanons civil war more than one million left and hundreds of thousands have until today. There are fewer than 3.5 million Lebanese remaining with many of them searching for the first opportunity to begin a new life elsewhere because they realize that there is little future here for their children given the deep prevailing corruption of the former warlords who appointed themselves political lords. Other reasons include the growing Iranian occupation of Lebanon and the failure of the Sunni and Christians to counter the takeover of their country.

According to this seminal study, undertaken by both Lebanese and Palestinian statistics bureaus and the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee, 45.1 percent of the 174,000 Palestinians in Lebanon live in refugee camps, while the remaining 54.9 percent live in other gatherings. According to the census taking teams spokesperson: We would see huge numbers used, 500, or 600 thousand, and these would be used in politics. But this demographic project was able to define things, and thank God today we have results,

Prime Minister Saad Hariri said in an address at the event where the figures were released. The survey sheds much needed light on the living conditions of 174,422 Palestinian refugees, as well as another 18,601 Palestinians who fled the neighboring conflict in Syria to camps in Lebanon. The survey found that the number of Palestinian in Lebanon were split essentially evenly between men and women, with half of the total being 24 years or younger. The percentage of Palestinian youth is nearly identical to the numbers of youth across the Middle East.

Dear reader can imagine what these demographics and living conditions portend for this region as the bright, energetic and acutely aware youth seek justice and empowerment from dictatorships who have cynically denied them empowerment for countless decades. Revolution is in the air across in Lebanons Palestinian camps and across this region.

The survey sheds light on the living conditions of 174,422 Palestinian refugees, as well as another 18,601 Palestinians who fled the neighboring conflict in Syria to camps in Lebanon. The painstakingly conducted count found the Palestinians evenly divided between men and women with half of the total 24 years or younger. While 7.2 percent are illiterate, 93.6 percent of children aged between three to 13 were enrolled in schools. Also documented is the well-known fact that Lebanons Palestinian camps suffer serious problems, with varying degrees of poverty, diseases, overcrowding, unemployment, poor housing and lack of any functioning infrastructure. The census found that the rate of unemployment among young Palestinians aged 20 to 29 is 28.5 percent whereas for Lebanese it is currently 6.8 percent.

Announcing the population survey results, Prime Minister Saad Hariri said Lebanon had a duty towards Palestinians. He pointed to exaggerations as for the number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon which estimated the count at 600,000. He said the actual number is 174,422, assuring that the State will adhere to its responsibilities.

Hariri lamented how some parties in the international community wish to offer no help to UNWRA but instead want to disrupt UNRWA. Pointing to the UNRWAs financial crisis, he said: It directly affects the basic requirements of refugees in Lebanon. We call upon donor countries to increase their contributions and support to enable UNRWA fulfill its financial obligations to meet the needs of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. With a total of $644,701,999 in contributions, the US, EU, UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands and Japan pay 71% of the annual UNRWA budget. Mr. Hariri omitted mention of the fact that Lebanon, like Israel, donates zero dollars to UNWRAs budget.

Assuming the PM is sincere, and this observer does, then Lebanon adhering to its responsibilities can be quickly demonstrated by its Parliament granting Palestinians the half-century overdue elementary civil rights to work and to own a home granted to every refugee on earth by every country but Lebanon.

Why do many Lebanese politicians inflate the number of Palestinians in Lebanon?

Plenty of Lebanese and regional political lords have used the inflated Palestinian population figures seeking political advantage.

Lebanons anti-Palestinian block that consistently mispresents the number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is led by more than one Christian militia who committed the 1982 massacre at Sabra-Shatila and by the Amal Shia militia that carried out the 1985-89 massacres at three camps which they servilely, on orders from the east, labeled wars of the camps. There were no wars but rather massacres of Palestinian civilians who were without weapons to protect themselves since the PLO left Lebanon in August of 1982.

Among others with a long history of misrepresentation of the number of Palestinians, is Lebanons Iran appointed President, Michel Aoun. When this observer last met with Aoun as part of a delegation of pro-Palestinian Americans, Aoun stressed the point as he has done dozens of times before and since, that there are 600,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who, he implies are sucking Lebanon dry. Sometimes Aoun, who this past week, 12/26/2017, was accused by Ashraf Rifi former General Director of the Lebanons Internal Security Force (ISF) (2005-2013) and Minister of Justice (2014-2016), of stealing $ 26 billion uses the figure of 500,000 Palestinian refugees.

In Aouns defense re the $ 26 billon theft charge by Rifi, to date its unproven and if he did it Aoun would by no means be setting a record for theft of public money among Lebanons political lords, some of whom continue their decades work of bleeding Lebanon dry. Also accused by Mr. Rifi of the same crime as Aoun is his anti-Palestinian son-in-law JebranBassil , who Aoun, in Lebanese got appointed Foreign Minister despite Bassil having admitted he has no qualifications for the post but is close to Hezbollah and Iran like his father-in-law. This week Bassil is again facing calls to resign. This time for remarks he made this week about Israel being no threat to Lebanon. Speaking on Iran funded Al-Mayadeen on 12/26/2017, Bassil in his position as Lebanons Foreign Minister, stated: For Lebanon, [Israel] isnt an ideological cause. We are not against Israel existing in security. We accept it. We are not against it. We just want all people to live in peace and to recognize each other. This is not a blind cause. Adding We are a people who accept and want the Other, despite our differences.

In response to Bassils statements, former Environment Minister Mohammad Machnouk called on Bassil to immediately be fired, declaring: If JebranBassil does not find an ideological difference with Israel and demands security for it, Cabinet should dismiss him because he violates the Constitution. Is this Lebanons position in international forums? This is shameful!

As do some other anti-Palestinian politicians in Lebanon, including the former Minister of Education and Aoun partner, Elias Bou Saab as he a few months ago incited his Christian supporters with the 600,000 Palestinians in Lebanon gross exaggeration at an event at the American University of Beirut (AUB) which this observer attended. Mr. Saab knows that many of his and Aouns Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) political party supporters worry about Muslims swamping them politically and socially much as was the case in the run-up to the 1975-90 civil war.

Truth told Mr. Saab is probably not all that wild about this observer because at the above-noted event earlier this year in the presence of the UNs elegant Special Coordinator for Lebanon Sigrid Kaag and a number of officials and directors of NGOs and plenty of media, this no-account observer proceeded to deliver a short- well so it seemed to me- lecture with ample details and statistics to the then Minister of Education Bou Saad on the subject of inflating the number of Palestinians in Lebanon for political purposes. I also painstakingly addressed the subject of the right to work and home ownership for Palestinian refugees forced into Lebanon against their will seven decades ago. Despite the Ministers public assurance that he would meet with me and we can fix the problem about the right to work I still not heard from the gentleman.

But as life instructs us, there is plenty of good in all of us and during his three years as Minister of Education, Elias Bou Saab did, to his great credit, work to get a significant number of the 200,000 Syrian refugee kids now scattered across Lebanon into its public-school system employing a double session innovation whereby Syrian child could study using the same classrooms during split shift afternoon-evening time slot.

Some of the same political motivations have led to fake statistics regarding the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. As of the end of November 2017, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) tallied 997,905 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. A clear majority of them being women and children who fled their country to Lebanon from the outbreak of the civil war in March of 2011. More than 70% live in extreme poverty, struggling to eke out a living while sheltering in informal tented settlements or unfinished buildings because Parliament has refused to authorize refugee camps where they could receive more organized assistance.

The highest number of Syrian refugees who were ever in Lebanon from the ongoing war next door was 1,011,366. From 2011 until September 2017, nearly 49,000 Syrians departed Lebanon for third countries under the UNs resettlement program including the United States, Sweden, and France. Others left on their own, making the dangerous sea journey to reach Europe.

As with the Palestinian refugees count, the UN Syrian refugee tally has been shown to be 500,000 fewer than the 1.5 million scare tactic number some Lebanese politicians and their media have hyped for political purposes. By buying food and necessities, made possible with international humanitarian aid, partly in the form of food stamp ATM cards the Syrians are growing Lebanons economy and Lebanon shopkeepers are generally thrilled with them.

But Syrian refugees are not growing Lebanons economy according to experts at the International Labor Organization (ILO) as fast as the Palestinian refugees would grow this countrys ailing economy if they were allowed the elementary civil right to work and home ownership as required by international humanitarian law and Lebanons constitution. Lebanese law targets Palestinians that denies them the right to work, social security, or joining a union. There are at least 25 banned areas of work for Palestinians including medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy. Also outlawed for Palestinian is ownership of land, property or a home.

As Fathi Abu al-Ardat, a representative of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, noted this past week: when Palestinians have the rights to work and can live a decent life, they will improve the country on the level of economics, on the level of community, even on the level of security and stability for the country.

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Iran & Hezbollah know better but also use inflated Palestinians population numbers to keep the increasingly restive Shia population loyal by inflating the size of the Palestinian Sunni Takfiri threat to Lebanon. Approximately 92-96% of Palestinians are Sunni and many resent Irans efforts at colonization for several reasons. One is that in Syria, Irans funded and trained 12 militia including Hezbollah and the Al Quds force that have killed nearly four thousand Palestinians, and have targeted a majority of Syrias ten Palestinian camps. Including the destruction of Yarmouk in Damascus which before the civil war began was home to 120,000 and another Palestinian camp in Latakia last month. The most recent demolished camp, over the past two weeks, was in the Southern Ramal district of Latakia, which residents claim Iran wants to develop. For nearly 70 years, Ramal has been located along Latakia citys southern coastline, on a strip of land that slopes down towards the Mediterranean Sea. The district was settled as an informal encampment in the 1950s by Palestinian refugees fleeing Jaffa and other coastal towns. Approximately 10,000 Palestinians in Syria have lost their homes in Ramal.

By slinging inflated figures for the number of Sunni Palestinians in Lebanon at the Shia community, Irans leadership reportedly hopes to help Hezbollah whose primary bases, South Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and South Lebanon increasingly believe that their sons, brothers and fathers are dying in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan for no reason except the whims of Irans Wali al-faqih. Iran also seeks to instill fear among its own population to quell the growing number of protests from its own population spreading across Iran.

Iran, according to even neighborhood Hezbollah sources, has vastly overreached in the region with its hegemonic objectives and the people of the region, including increasing numbers of Shia, including thousands of fed up Iranians. Many Hezbollah leaders have long objected to what they have been ordered to do in Syria and the region. Moreover, thousands of Iranian citizens have taken to the streets of the countrys second-largest city, Mashhad and other towns this week to once again protest high prices, unemployment, and the fact that their government is spending countless billions funding militia across the Middle East while our women are selling themselves on the streets for money to feed their families and our young men are forced to steal! Videos on Nazars Telegram channel showed citizens in Mashhad, an important religious center in the northeast of Iran, not chanting Death to America but rather Death to the dictator (Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) and protesting about their rulers efforts at regional hegemony, rather than improving conditions at home. Not Gaza, not Syria, not Lebanon, my life for Iran was one of main chants.

Irans brutal theocratic rulers have a problem as many Iranian believe and hope that the current rebellion will rapidly spread and become for their rulers what Benghazi in February 2011 was for Gadaffi and Deraa, Syria was a month later for Assad.

The claimed Resistance has also long used the inflated figure for political advantage as they seek to rein in many of their hard-core Shia supporters with claims that Palestinians in Lebanon comprise another 600,000 Sunni so why empower them with the civil rights to work and own a home? Given Hezbollahs political power it would take just 90 minutes in Parliament to grant Palestinians the right to work and home ownership. But the tribal Resistance axis has chosen to block these elementary civil rights.

Hopefully growing pressure from the new generation of young Palestinians vying for leadership positions in the camps and the growing number of young Shia in the region who no longer want to be fodder from their leaders seeking revenge for the events at Karbala 1,500 years ago, can persuade the Resistance that true Resistance begins with improving the Palestinian camps and being allowed to seek a job. Not killing and being killed crossed this region, with no end in sight nor any cogent rationale.

Franklin Lamb volunteers with the Lebanon, France, and USA based Meals for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon (MSRCL) which seeks to provide hot nutritional meals to Syrian and other refugee children in Lebanon. http://mealsforsyrianrefugeechildrenlebanon.com . - fplamb@gmail.com.

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Home No More Worshiping Of The Military Time to Call out US Militarism for What It Is: The Key Threat to Americas Security By Dave Lindorff January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - I was in the grocery store a while back when, after my items were tabulated, the checkout clerk asked, Would you like to contribute to the Wounded Warriors fund? I glanced at the line of people to my left  a little cross-section of America  and feeling a little skeptical about how theyd respond, I said, No I dont think so. Id rather put my money towards some anti-war organization working to try and make sure that there are no more wounded soldiers, and to relief organizations that are supporting the hundreds of thousands of victims of Americas illegal wars abroad. The clerk looked a little taken aback and muttered okay, but to my surprise, nobody spoke up in the line. I was expecting at least one person to call me out as a terrorist supporter or a commie or who knows what, but instead there was just silence. Maybe people were thinking about it. Maybe they just didnt know how to react. But in any case I think its past time that we on the anti-war left started making it clear that this glorification of American wars, the thanking of people in uniform for their service, and the blind acceptance of the prevailing argument that everyone in the military is defending our freedom, has to be challenged at every opportunity. Look at the map of the globe. According to Nick Turse, writing in the Nation magazine and quoting information from Ken McGraw, a spokesman for troops are fighting in the Pentagons Special Operations Command, US Special Forces are stationed in 177 countries, and on any given day are conducting missions  actual or training missions  in 80-90 of them. As we saw recently with the deaths of several Green Berets in Niger, even members of Congress with a need-to-know responsibility, like those on the Intelligence Committees and Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, dont know (or claim they dont know) where all those operations and those Special Forces are. As well, US troops are fighting hot wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, most of them completely illegal, like most of the Special Operations actions, and the drone wars in a host of other countries from Pakistan and Yemen to Somalia, Sudan and, of course, Syria again. Not a single one of those operations involve anything that remotely threatens the security of the United States, nor are those troops  regular or Special Forces  in any way defending our freedom, which is not under serious threat by any country in the world which cannot be addressed by foreign and domestic police and the FBI. There are terrorist groups that might like to blow something up in the US, but actually, the threat of terrorism has only grown exponentially the more war-making the US has engaged in. Even many military experts say that the US drone killings and the special ops attacks abroad, which tend to kill more innocent people than actual terrorists, only produce more angry people willing to try to take revenge on Americans within their reach, so that approach is clearly doing nothing to defend our freedom or our safety. Meanwhile, many of the people deemed to be terrorists are actually more accurately described as freedom fighters themselves. Take the Taliban. We may not agree with their medieval religious views, particularly about women, but the fact is that they have never sought to attack America as terrorists, foreign and especially domestic, have done, but have been fighting to drive foreign fighters  primarily American, out of their country. (While the US refers to Taliban attacks on US forces and private contractors in Afghanistan as terrorism they are actually acts of war by an armed national resistance.) Indeed the Taliban more closely resemble our own celebrated anti-colonial rebels of 1776 than they do the terrorists of Al Qaeda. Furthermore, if the truth be told, the US, through the Pentagon and the CIA, has long been providing arms and training to Al Qaeda-linked groups in both Libya and Syria for years, and actually created or helped create Al Qaeda in the first place. How is that defending our freedom? National security is a lot of things. The intermediate range nuclear missile treaty negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 represented a huge improvement in the national security of both the US and the USSR, and didnt involve any fighting at all. The same could be said about the recent agreement negotiated by the Obama administration and the government of Iran, guaranteeing as it does (at least so far despite opposition and threats by the Trump administration not to honor its commitments), that Iran will not seek to develop nuclear weapons for at least a decade. The evidence clearly shows that national security is far better achieved by intelligent diplomacy than by war. The current Korea crisis provides a good example. The fact is that over half a century of overt and aggressive hostility by the US towards the mere existence of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (North Korea to Americans) has led not to more security for either the US or its client state, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), but rather to the DPRKs long and ultimately successful effort to protect itself by becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, with both nuclear bombs and missiles capable of delivering them across the Pacific to US targets. Hows that for defending our freedom? Had the US, years or decades ago, agreed to finally negotiate an end to the Korean War, instead of leaving it in an unstable limbo with no formal conclusion, all the while calling for an end to the government in the north, the government in Pyongyang would never have felt it necessary to achieve nuclear power status. If we had wanted to convince Kim Jong-un of the urgency of the DPRKs becoming a nuclear power, we couldnt have done it better than by launching an undeclared war to oust the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafy, from power, brutally killing him in the processa campaign that destroyed one of the most modern states in Africa or the Middle East and left it in a state of bloody chaos, spreading deadly weapons all across the Middle East. Never Miss Another Story Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter National security also means having a society that functions well for all its citizens, providing them with jobs that pay a living wage, with health care, with education, with a safe, sustainable environment, and with a secure old age. On all those counts, the US is a catastrophic failure. Hell, I just heard a report that 1.5 million school children in this country do not have a home to live in, and are going to school each day from shelters or from the homes of friends or relatives who have taken them in because theyve lost their homes. This in the richest country in the world! In 2016, over 40 million of 320 million Americans were classed as food insecure, meaning they dont have enough food for an active and healthy life. Again, this is in the richest country in the world. The US is also one of the few developed countries in the world where college is not free or virtually free to all those who are admitted. Instead, we have college grads or people who have had to drop out of college who hold a total of $1.48 trillion (yes thats a T) in outstanding college loan debt, much of it carrying extortionate interest rates of 6% or more. The reason we have these outrages in the US should be obvious, but isnt, because the corporate media never really mention it, and when they do, dont mention it relates to the above, and other, national crises. It is military spending, which, when fully counted to include Veterans benefits and health care, the huge secret intelligence budget, the budget for the Energy Department, which is mostly for the huge US nuclear stockpile, and of course interest on the debt for the funds borrowed to pay for Americas military and its endless wars, ads up to some $1.3 trillion a year and rising. That figure represents 54% of all discretionary spending in the federal budget. So no. Im not supporting private charity funding for Americas wounded soldiers. That is a cost that should properly be borne by the US taxpayer. Nor do I agree that our men and women in uniform are defending our freedom, and I feel no need to thank them for their service. I would like to tell them I feel sorry that they were misled into joining, and if they were injured, am all the sorrier, but I hope they will warn other young people not to make the same mistake they did. And I do believe that the American public should support adequate care for them, though it would be far better and more cost-effective to achieve this important goal by simply establishing a medicare for all single-payer health care system in which all Americans have access to free, taxpayer-funded health care. Countries where such an approach, or something like Britains National Health System, dont need a special Veterans Administration to finance and provide medical care for military veterans. Their veterans simply get first-rate care like the rest of the citizenry. Its time to get the US out of the empire business, out of the endless cycle of wars and special operations actions and targeted drone attacks, out of promoting war and insurgency by providing arms to one or both sides of foreign conflicts, and out of the insane nuclear weapons business. The way to national security is through peace and negotiation, not through war. Lets tear down the Pentagon and replace it with a small rectangular building, bring home the 200,000 troops stationed abroad, and shrink the US military budget back to a small fraction of its present size  a size appropriate for a country at peace with the world and secure in its borders. Lord knows that with all the 300 million-plus guns in private hands in the US, no country would ever dare to invade this place! And once weve eliminated that deadly and insidious military-industrial-complex that the retiring President Dwight Eisenhower so presciently warned us all against, we can start to really tackle the real threats to Americans security: poverty, ignorance, disease and climate change. Note: For those who might fret that America's gun owners might not actually have the skills or courage to thwart some invasion by a professional military (coming across the border from Canada, Cuba, Grenada or Mexico, for example), I'm not averse to retaining the National Guard, but only as a true volunteer force of weekend soldiers, or perhaps draftees serving a one-year stint as weekend soldiers, and only if those Guard Units are rigorously under the command of each state's governors, with nationalization requiring an act of Congress, and only in the event of a true national emergency, like an invasion. They would not be permitted to be dispatched abroad, and, like soldiers in Germany, they should have a right to be unionized. As a way of ensuring that their numbers stayed small, I would propose that such Guard units be funded 25% by the states, which would be reimbursed only if the whole National Guard were nationalized. http://thiscantbehappening.net Dave Lindorff is an American investigative reporter. His work was highlighted by Project Censored 2004, 2011 and 2012. ==== Join the Discussion It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. This website encourages readers to use the "Report" link found at the base of each comment. When a predetermined number of ICH readers click on the "Report" link, the comment will be automatically sent to "moderation". This would appear to be the most logical way to allow open comments, where you the reader/supporter, can determine what is acceptable speech. Please don't use the report feature simply because you disagree with the author point of view. Treat others with respect, remembering that "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still."- Benjamin Franklin. Please read our Comment Policy before posting - Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
New Book on Trump Reveals Plan to Cede Control of West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and Egypt



'Fire and Fury' also sheds light on rivalry between Kushner and Bannon on Israel policy



By Amir Tibon

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - A new book chronicling U.S. President Donald Trump's rise to power and first year in office presents Israel as a major point of contention between two of the president's closest advisors  Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. Details regarding the Trump administration's internal debate in Israel are revealed in Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House." The book, which is currently at the center of a political storm, also details casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson's behind-the-scenes involvement on this issue.

Adelson is the owner of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom, widely considered a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is known for his strong right-wing positions on Israel. During the 2016 U.S. election, he was one of the most significant donors to Trump's presidential campaign. Wolff's new book states that Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief political adviser, was "the only person" in the White House that Adelson "trusted on Israel."



According to the book, Bannon was pushing to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Trump's first day in office. He also wanted to finally kill the two-state solution by announcing that Jordan will take back the West Bank and Egypt will assume control over the Gaza Strip. In the book's first chapter, he is quoted telling Roger Ailes, former head of Fox News, this plan, adding that Adelson, Trump and Netanyahu were all "on board" with the idea.

The U.S. Embassy was not moved on Trump's first day in office. In fact, almost a year later, the president has yet to move it, and has signed two presidential waivers, each delaying the move by half a year. With regard to Bannon's plan on the West Bank and Gaza, it is highly unlikely that Jordan and Egypt would agree, since both countries are already dealing with many other internal problems and would not benefit from taking millions of Palestinian under their control.



Later in the book, Wolff details how Trump decided to give Kushner, his son-in-law, responsibility over the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations portfolio, and how this immediately created tension between Kushner and Bannon over competing over who is "better" for Israel  from a right-wing policy point of view. This competition was part of a larger feud between the two senior aides over the direction of the Trump presidency, with Bannon pushing the agenda of the far-right and Kushner pushing for a more "normal" Republican way of governing.



"One of Bannons accusations against Kushner, the administrations point person on the Middle East, was that he was not nearly tough enough in his defense of Israel," Wolff writes, adding that the accusations were a "complicated and frustrating business" for Kushner. Wolff also writes that "Bannon did not hesitate to ding Kushner on Israel, that peculiar right-wing litmus test. Bannon could bait Jews  globalist, cosmopolitan, liberal Jews like Kushner  because the farther right you were, the more correct you were on Israel."



According to Wolff, "Bannons effort to grab the stronger-on-Israel label was deeply confounding to Kushner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew. For Kushner, Bannons right-wing defense of Israel, embraced by Trump, somehow became a jujitsu piece of anti-Semitism aimed directly at him. Bannon seemed determined to make Kushner appear weak and inadequate  a cuck, in alt-right speak."



Wolff adds: "on Israel, Bannon had partnered with Sheldon Adelson, titan of Las Vegas, big-check right-wing contributor, and, in the presidents mind, quite the toughest tough-guy Jew (that is, the richest)."

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According to the book, Adelson came out in Bannon's defense when Trump considered firing him last summer, at one point telling the president that the far-right adviser was "the only person he trusted on Israel" in the Trump White House. Later, the book also touches on Adelson's decision to support a campaign orchestrated by Bannon against Trump's National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, claiming that he was hostile to Israel.



Eventually, Bannon was fired from the White House and lost the president's faith, while McMaster is still a senior member of the administration  perhaps proving some possible limits to Adelson's influence.



Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018



In the book, Wolff describes a conversation between Bannon and one of his own closest advisers, in which Bannon is quoted saying that Kushner's father, billionaire Charles Kushner, is worried that the FBI investigation into the Trump-Russia connection will somehow lead the investigators to his family's finances.



....to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018



The full paragraph reads: "'Charlie Kushner,' said Bannon, smacking his head again in additional disbelief. 'Hes going crazy because theyre going to get down deep in his shit about how hes financed everything. The rabbis with the diamonds and all the shit coming out of Israel and all these guys coming out of Eastern Europe all these Russian guys and guys in Kazakhstan. And hes frozen on 666 [Fifth Avenue], when it goes under next year, the whole things cross-collateralized hes wiped, hes gone, hes done, its over. Toast.'"



The book, released on Friday, became an instant bestseller upon its release. Trump has dismissed the book on Saturday, calling it a "really boring and untruthful book" in a Tweet. He added that Wolff "used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!"



Later on Saturday, Trump said in a tweet that his "two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," further calling himself "a very stable genius."

This article was originally published by Haaretz -

====

Rami Khouri interview with Aljazeera tv on the Middle East portions of Michael Wolff's book on the Trump White House

- See Also -

Tapes Reveal Egyptian Leaders Tacit Acceptance of Jerusalem Move

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Home Iran 'Ground Zero' for US Regime Change By Finian Cunningham January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - There seems little doubt that the surge in New Year protests across Iran was, at least in part, following a regime-change agenda set by the United States. Public statements issued by US President Donald Trump and his senior officials all made strident calls in support of protesters while denigrating the Iranian government as a "brutal oppressor." Arguably, that amounts to audacious incitement of sedition in a foreign state, and such American misconduct should be legally sanctioned. Whats remarkable too is just how close the recent turmoil in Iran seemed to follow a well-worn US formula for regime change, including political statements of condemnation; biased media coverage to undermine the legitimacy of the target government; and the apparent hijacking of peaceful protests by violent provocateurs. Such a formula has been used by Washington and its allies in dozens of countries over the decades, including more recently in Syria during the 2011 unrest that led to an all-out war. What is acutely resonant is the historical background. Iran was probably the first nation to have been subjected to American regime-change operations in the post-Second World War period, with the CIA-led coup carried out in 1953. But first, lets look at the flagrant attempts by the US to destabilize the Iranian government through highly pejorative and misleading public statements. Last week, the American ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley even claimed that "the Iranian people are crying out for freedom against their dictators." A senior official in the US State Department also admitted that his government was communicating via social media with demonstrators in Iran. Washingtons top diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, openly said in a media interview this weekend that his government is seeking "political transition in Iran  or, in other words, regime change. Also this weekend, the US called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in an attempt to censure the Iranian government for the dozens of deaths incurred during the week-long protests. Haley declared: "The world is watching what Iran does." Iran, Russia, and China have berated the US for violating Iranian sovereignty by interfering in the countrys internal affairs. The brazen attempt by the US to fuel protests in Iran is indeed a serious breach of the UN Charter forbidding interference in any nations political matters. US regime-change policy is arguably criminal conduct. It remains to be seen just how actively involved on the ground US agencies were in stoking the recent protests in Iran. The initial demonstrations that first broke out on December 28 in the city of Mashhad quickly spread to dozens of other urban centers. Iranian authorities have blamed the US and other foreign enemies for being behind the disturbances. A legitimate part of the rallies was motivated by genuine economic grievances among the population. But at the same time, the rapid escalation of violence and armed attacks on police stations suggest that a subversive plot was being orchestrated. The role of the US news media, and to lesser extent European, in covering the Iranian unrest was also indicative of a geopolitical agenda. The American media, in particular, tended to portray the protests in a benign light as an uprising against an autocratic regime. Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the UN, dismissed Iranian claims of foreign subversion. Haleys dismissal contradicts the public statements and admissions of the US president and other senior officials. However, Iran has sound reason to suspect a pernicious agenda seeking to exploit social protests. In 2013, some 60 years after the 1953 coup in Iran, the CIA was obliged to disclose classified documents that prove the agency was behind that infamous event. The CIA worked covertly with its British counterpart MI6 to carry out Operation Ajax to overthrow the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh intended to nationalize Irans oil industry, thereby threatening American and British interests. The coup ushered in the rule of the pro-Western Shah Pahlavi who opened up Iranian oil fields to American and British companies. The CIA and US military were lynchpins in the Shahs regime and its brutal repression of Iranians until he was finally overthrown in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For this reason, Washington has never forgiven the Iranian people and is why the US political establishment is driven by regime-change obsession in Tehran. What is telling are the similarities between events then and now. The CIA-led coup in 1953 involved a propaganda campaign using news media outlets to undermine the government. The New York Times labeled Mosaddegh a dictator and compared him to Hitler and Stalin. Britains state broadcaster, the BBC, was also involved in the campaign to undermine the Iranian authorities, as Mark Curtis recounts in his book Web of Deceit. Back in Washington and London, the political leaders implemented an economic embargo on Tehran and denounced it as a Soviet stooge. When the coup got underway, the CIA is now on record admitting that it paid thugs and provocateurs to launch street violence in Tehran, which was blamed on the authorities ostensibly showing a heavy-hand. Never Miss Another Story Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter From the CIA and MI6s point of view, the coup was a stunning success. The regime change opened up big oil interests. For the Iranian people, it meant years of vicious repression under the Shah and his CIA-trained SAVAK secret police. In 1953, the CIA was only newly formed in the aftermath of the Second World War. What the Iran coup marked was a fateful turning point for the agency, and the nature of American governments ever since, with global repercussions. In its original formation, the CIA was only intended to serve as an intelligence gathering service to aid US presidents to formulate foreign policy. What the coup in Iran marked was the beginning of a "secret government" within the US; one that was above the law and unaccountable. US presidents would come and go in elections, but the "deep state" of the CIA would remain. It assumed the powers to carry out regime change against any foreign government regardless of international law. Subversion and political assassination would become tools of this new US statecraft. Once the CIA got the habit of regime change in Iran it could not stop. Since 1953, the American secret government has gone on to conduct dozens of such dirty operations around the world with deadly and horrific consequences for masses of people. While the recent social protests in Iran have subsided, nevertheless there also seems to be another, more sinister dimension to the Iranian disturbances  an illegal agenda of regime change promoted by Washington. Given that Iran is "ground zero" for Americas historical worldwide practice of regime change, the threat to national security from foreign interference is an understandable concern. Russia and China have taken the correct position in warning the US to cease adding instability in Iran. The Iranian people must be safeguarded from external meddling to resolve their own internal problems. The laughable irony is that while American politicians and media complain hysterically about others meddling in their country, they have no qualms about brazenly poking into Iran. Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. ==== Rami Khouri interview with Aljazeera tv on the Middle East portions of Michael Wolff's book on the Trump White House Join the Discussion It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. This website encourages readers to use the "Report" link found at the base of each comment. When a predetermined number of ICH readers click on the "Report" link, the comment will be automatically sent to "moderation". This would appear to be the most logical way to allow open comments, where you the reader/supporter, can determine what is acceptable speech. Please don't use the report feature simply because you disagree with the author point of view. Treat others with respect, remembering that "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still."- Benjamin Franklin. Please read our Comment Policy before posting - Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
Iran in 2018

By Paul Craig Roberts

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - In 1953 Washington and Britain overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a dictator to rule Iran for the benefit of Washington and the British. In declassified documents, the CIA has admitted its role in overthrowing the Iranian government. The overthrow pattern is always the same. Washington hires protesters, then introduces violence, controls the explanation, and unseats the government.

Ever since the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Washington-installed dictator in1979, Washington has been trying to regain control of Iran. In 2009 Washington financed the Green Revolution, which was an attempt to overthrow the Ahmadinejad government.

Today Washington is again at work against the Iranian people. It is difficult to believe that any Iranian, after watching what Washington-organized protests have done to Honduras, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, have attempted to do to Iran in 2009, and is attempting to do today to Venezuela, could possibly in good faith go out into the streets against their own government. Are these Iranian protesters utterly stupid or are they hired to commit treason against their country?

Why does Iran permit foreign-funded operatives to attempt to destabilize the government as Ukraine did and as Venezuela does today? Are these governments so brainwashed by the West that they think that democracy means permitting foreign agents to attempt to overthrow the government?

Are governments so intimidated by the Western presstitutes that they find it challenging to defend themselves against foreign-paid provocateurs?

Having succeeded in causing violent protests in Iran, Washington now intends to use an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Iran in order to set the stage for more intervention against Iran. The Washington-incited violence has been turned into a human rights issue against Iran. Will Washington get away with it?

Irans fate is up to Russia and China. If Washington succeeds in destabilizing Iran, Russia and China are next. Russia seems to understand this. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said yesterday: We warn the US against attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Just as the Russian government comprehended that Russia could not permit Washingtons destabilization of Syria, Russia understands she cannot permit the destabilization of Iran.

The leader of Turkey has aligned with Russia, declaring obviously some people from abroad are provoking the situation.

That is obvious to everyone but Americans, who are constantly lied to by their government and by the presstitute lie factories such as CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC.

Trump and Haley are the type of loudmouths who are likely to break Washingtons power and influence over the world. They take names, admit that they bribe foreign leaders, and issue insane threats. If this doesnt wake up the rest of the world, nothing will.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .
Mapping a World From Hell

76 Countries Are Now Involved in Washingtons War on Terror

By Tom Engelhardt

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced,  shrouded in secrecy , flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country.

More than 16 years after an American invasion liberated Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise . Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as the worlds greatest force for good, boasted that American air strikes had recently been dramatically increased, swore that their country was here to stay, and insisted that victory is closer than ever before. As an observer noted , however, the response of his audience was subdued. (Several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.)

Think of this as but the latest episode in an upside down geopolitical fairy tale, a grim, rather than Grimm, story for our age that might begin: Once upon a time -- in October 2001, to be exact -- Washington launched its war on terror. There was then just one country targeted, the very one where, a little more than a decade earlier, the U.S. had ended a long proxy war against the Soviet Union during which it had financed, armed, or backed an extreme set of Islamic fundamentalist groups, including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.

By 2001, in the wake of that war, which helped send the Soviet Union down the path to implosion, Afghanistan was largely (but not completely) ruled by the Taliban. Osama bin Laden was there, too, with a relatively modest crew of cohorts. By early 2002, he had fled to Pakistan, leaving many of his companions dead and his organization, al-Qaeda, in a state of disarray. The Taliban, defeated, were pleading to be allowed to put down their arms and go back to their villages, an abortive process that Anand Gopal vividly described in his book, No Good Men Among the Living .

It was, it seemed, all over but the cheering and, of course, the planning for yet greater exploits across the region. The top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were geopolitical dreamers of the first order who couldnt have had more expansive ideas about how to extend such success to -- as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated only days after the 9/11 attacks -- terror or insurgent groups in more than 60 countries. It was a point President Bush would reemphasize nine months later in a triumphalist graduation speech at West Point. At that moment, the struggle they had quickly, if immodestly, dubbed the Global War on Terror was still a one-country affair. They were, however, already deep into preparations to extend it in ways more radical and devastating than they could ever have imagined with the invasion and occupation of Saddam Husseins Iraq and the domination of the oil heartlands of the planet that they were sure would follow. (In a comment that caught the moment exactly, Newsweek quoted a British official "close to the Bush team" as saying, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.")

So many years later, perhaps it wont surprise you -- as it probably wouldnt have surprised the hundreds of thousands of protesters who turned out in the streets of American cities and towns in early 2003 to oppose the invasion of Iraq -- that this was one of those stories to which the adage "be careful what you wish for" applies.

Seeing War

And it's a tale that's not over yet. Not by a long shot. As a start, in the Trump era, the longest war in American history, the one in Afghanistan, is only getting longer. There are those U.S. troop levels on the rise ; those air strikes ramping up ; the Taliban in control of significant sections of the country; an Islamic State-branded terror group spreading ever more successfully in its eastern regions; and, according to the latest report from the Pentagon, more than 20 terrorist or insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Think about that: 20 groups. In other words, so many years later, the war on terror should be seen as an endless exercise in the use of multiplication tables -- and not just in Afghanistan either. More than a decade and a half after an American president spoke of 60 or more countries as potential targets, thanks to the invaluable work of a single dedicated group, the Costs of War Project at Brown Universitys Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, we finally have a visual representation of the true extent of the war on terror. That weve had to wait so long should tell us something about the nature of this era of permanent war.



Americas war on terror across the globe (from the Costs of War Project). Click on the map to see a larger version.

The Costs of War Project has produced not just a map of the war on terror, 2015-2017 (released at TomDispatch with this article), but the first map of its kind ever. It offers an astounding vision of Washingtons counterterror wars across the globe: their spread, the deployment of U.S. forces, the expanding missions to train foreign counterterror forces, the American bases that make them possible, the drone and other air strikes that are essential to them, and the U.S. combat troops helping to fight them. (Terror groups have, of course, morphed and expanded riotously as part and parcel of the same process.)

A glance at the map tells you that the war on terror, an increasingly complex set of intertwined conflicts, is now a remarkably global phenomenon. It stretches from the Philippines (with its own ISIS-branded group that just fought an almost five-month-long campaign that devastated Marawi, a city of 300,000) through South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and deep into West Africa where, only recently, four Green Berets died in an ambush in Niger.

No less stunning are the number of countries Washingtons war on terror has touched in some fashion. Once, of course, there was only one (or, if you want to include the United States, two). Now, the Costs of War Project identifies no less than 76 countries, 39% of those on the planet, as involved in that global conflict. That means places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya where U.S. drone or other air strikes are the norm and U.S. ground troops (often Special Operations forces ) have been either directly or indirectly engaged in combat. It also means countries where U.S. advisers are training local militaries or even militias in counterterror tactics and those with bases crucial to this expanding set of conflicts. As the map makes clear, these categories often overlap.

Who could be surprised that such a war has been eating American taxpayer dollars at a rate that should stagger the imagination in a country whose infrastructure is now visibly crumbling ? In a separate study , released in November, the Costs of War Project estimated that the price tag on the war on terror (with some future expenses included) had already reached an astronomical $5.6 trillion. Only recently, however, President Trump, now escalating those conflicts, tweeted an even more staggering figure: After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country! (This figure, too, seems to have come in some fashion from the Costs of War estimate that "future interest payments on borrowing for the wars will likely add more than $7.9 trillion to the national debt" by mid-century .)

It couldnt have been a rarer comment from an American politician, as in these years assessments of both the monetary and human costs of war have largely been left to small groups of scholars and activists. The war on terror has, in fact, spread in the fashion todays map lays out with almost no serious debate in this country about its costs or results. If the document produced by the Costs of War project is, in fact, a map from hell, it is also, I believe, the first full-scale map of this war ever produced.

Think about that for a moment. For the last 16 years, we, the American people, funding this complex set of conflicts to the tune of trillions of dollars, have lacked a single map of the war Washington has been fighting. Not one. Yes, parts of that morphing, spreading set of conflicts have been somewhere in the news regularly, though seldom (except when there were lone wolf terror attacks in the United States or Western Europe) in the headlines. In all those years, however, no American could see an image of this strange, perpetual conflict whose end is nowhere in sight.

Part of this can be explained by the nature of that war. There are no fronts, no armies advancing on Berlin, no armadas bearing down on the Japanese homeland. There hasnt been, as in Korea in the early 1950s, even a parallel to cross or fight your way back to. In this war, there have been no obvious retreats and, after the triumphal entry into Baghdad in 2003, few advances either.

It was hard even to map its component parts and when you did -- as in an August New York Times map of territories controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the imagery was complex and of limited impact. Generally, however, we, the people, have been demobilized in almost every imaginable way in these years, even when it comes to simply following the endless set of wars and conflicts that go under the rubric of the war on terror.

Mapping 2018 and Beyond

Let me repeat this mantra: once, almost seventeen years ago, there was one; now, the count is 76 and rising. Meanwhile, great cities have been turned into rubble ; tens of millions of human beings have been displaced from their homes; refugees by the millions continue to cross borders, unsettling ever more lands; terror groups have become brand names across significant parts of the planet; and our American world continues to be militarized .

This should be thought of as an entirely new kind of perpetual global war. So take one more look at that map. Click on it and then enlarge it to consider the map in full-screen mode. Its important to try to imagine whats been happening visually, since were facing a new kind of disaster, a planetary militarization of a sort weve never truly seen before. No matter the successes in Washingtons war, ranging from that invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the taking of Baghdad in 2003 to the recent destruction of the Islamic States caliphate in Syria and Iraq (or most of it anyway, since at this moment American planes are still dropping bombs and firing missiles in parts of Syria), the conflicts only seem to morph and tumble on.

We are now in an era in which the U.S. military is the leading edge -- often the only edge -- of what used to be called American foreign policy and the State Department is being radically downsized . American Special Operations forces were deployed to 149 countries in 2017 alone and the U.S. has so many troops on so many bases in so many places on Earth that the Pentagon cant even account for the whereabouts of 44,000 of them. There may, in fact, be no way to truly map all of this, though the Costs of War Projects illustration is a triumph of what can be seen.

Looking into the future, lets pray for one thing: that the folks at that project have plenty of stamina, since it's a given that, in the Trump years (and possibly well beyond), the costs of war will only rise. The first Pentagon budget of the Trump era, passed with bipartisan unanimity by Congress and signed by the president, is a staggering $700 billion . Meanwhile, Americas leading military men and the president, while escalating the countrys conflicts from Niger to Yemen , Somalia to Afghanistan, seem eternally in search of yet more wars to launch.

Pointing to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, for instance, Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller recently told U.S. troops in Norway to expect a bigass fight in the future, adding, I hope Im wrong, but theres a war coming. In December, National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster similarly suggested that the possibility of a war (conceivably nuclear in nature) with Kim Jong-uns North Korea was increasing every day. Meanwhile, in an administration packed with Iranophobes, President Trump seems to be preparing to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, possibly as early as this month.

In other words, in 2018 and beyond, maps of many creative kinds may be needed simply to begin to take in the latest in Americas wars. Consider, for instance, a recent report in the New York Times that about 2,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security are already deployed to more than 70 countries around the world, largely to prevent terror attacks. And so it goes in the twenty-first century.

So welcome to 2018, another year of unending war, and while were on the subject, a small warning to our leaders: given the last 16 years, be careful what you wish for.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture . He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com . His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World . The map in this piece was produced by the Costs of War Project at Brown Universitys Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power , as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II , John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands , Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead , and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World .

Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt

====

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Are our Leaders Really that Stupid? Or...

By John Perkins

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - News about civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries where US military forces are involved takes us back to the Vietnam War. Makes us ask: how stupid are our leaders?

A relevant question as we end this year and begin a new one.

2017 saw the airing of Ken Burns PBS series The Vietnam War. It leaves no doubt that massive air strikes, bombings and napalm that killed civilians turned the citizenry against the US. Even those people whom we purported to be helping grew to hate our presence in their country. Our military commanders and political leaders came to understand that we were so despised by the Vietnamese  including our allies in the South  that ultimately, we could not win and had to get out. Perhaps more than anything else, it was the killing of civilians that brought about the USs ignominious defeat.

Yet, here we ago again! The numbers are debated, but the fact is that our drones, planes, missiles, bombs and on-the-ground soldiers are killing thousands of innocent civilians throughout the Middle East.

Although estimates vary, even the most conservative suggest that for every civilian killed at least ten more people turn against the US. Disillusioned by Washington, they look to others  ISIS, China, Russia. Not only are we losing another war (wars), we are also strengthening the very people we profess to oppose.

Are our leaders really that stupid? Or is there another motive?

There is a great deal of talk these days about cutting back on Big Government and trying to balance the budget. Strikingly absent from such talk is the simple fact that Big Governments most impressive office is the Pentagon and the most effective budgetary items to cut are the incredibly wasteful amounts spent on military equipment and strategies that fail to accomplish the goals and instead turn millions of people against us.

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Washingtons recently passed 2018 military budget was touted as $700 billion; however, it actually surpasses $800 billion when relevant sections of the State and Energy Departments and intelligence agencies are included. This is bigger than the combined military budgets of the next seven  nine (depending on how it is measured) largest countries. (1)

Where does that money go? Who profits from these expenditures? How many of our elected officials own stock in Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and the other merchants of death, as well as the banks and Wall Street firms that finance them? (2)

You, Ken Burns, and I may think that we lost the Vietnam War. But investors in war profiteering corporations came to a different conclusion. They did then and they do now.

How stupid are they?
Trump After Saudi Palace Coup: Weve Put Our Man on Top



By Spencer Ackerman



January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year old Saudi crown prince in the process of purging his blood-relation rivals for the throne, is an inveterate player of video games, in Michael Wolffs explosive book Fire & Fury. A lesser-explored section of the book shows MBS throwing himself into cultivating Trump as a step toward consolidating his own power. His path was to ignore Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in favor of son-in-law Jared Kushner  looking to family channels instead of formal ones is a characteristic of most authoritarian countries  like meeting someone nice at your first day of boarding school, a Kushner friend observed. Leveraging Trumps ignorance, Kushners inexperience, a shared hostility toward Iran and the administrations allergy to Obamas foreign policy, MBS dangled a shiny orb in front of the White House: Middle East peace, to satisfy Trumps longing for a grand victory. Its MBS who brokers Trumps Louis XIV-like reception in Riyadh, a gaudy spectacle of adulation in which the Saudis assembled a host of Middle Eastern strongmen to seal a symbolic allegiance with Trump through touching a bizarre glowing sphere. Jareds gotten the Arabs on his side, Wolff quotes Trump. When MBS moved in November to purge his opposition, Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered a Saudi coup, Wolff writes, with Trump boasting: Weve put our man on top!

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The immediate question for the Trump-MBS relationship is whether MBS can actually deliver the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab peace entente Trump desires, a herculean task under any circumstance and one complicated even more by Trumps formal recognition of Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli. But MBS, now entrenched as crown prince, already got what he wanted from Trump.

This article was originally published by Daily Beast -

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"You Cant Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House

By Michael Wolff

Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book. Editors Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolffs new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th presidents election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking , Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury. Image by Luke McGarry

January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked  or not disliked  the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication  journalistically, as a fly on the wall  which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?" author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around  checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare  everybody passes by. Assistants  young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair  as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment  with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well  most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.

Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him  he demanded it  and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day.

"You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers  and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show  commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.

The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet  Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.

There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation  half comic, half desperate  Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco  Low-Energy Jeb  the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg  fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else  came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool."

Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated " he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.

The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.

On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.

While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.

The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.

Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump  who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.

One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call.

With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day  and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day  when they would be out.

And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.

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Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York  he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci  as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any  to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories  now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions  he just couldn't stop saying something.

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep  more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months  almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller  for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing  was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff  without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president  if that is comfort.

As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.

As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would  or, in many cases, should  have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all  100 percent  came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.

This article was originally published by Hollywood Reporter -

====

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Home Trump Would Do The Palestinians A Favour By Cutting Off Aid To The PA By Abdel Bari Atwan January 07, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Like many other Palestinians, I pray and implore God that US President Donald Trump makes good on his threat to cut off the Palestinian Authority (PA)s $300 million annual grant  and also that the European donors follow suit. For that would mean the collapse of the PA and the Oslo accords that brought it into being in exchange for ceding 80% of Palestines territory and recognizing the Israeli state. Trump took a leaf out of the book of some of the Arab Gulf states on Tuesday night when he took to Twitter to accuse the Palestinians of ingratitude and insubordination. W e pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They dont even want to negotiate a long overdue, he declared. With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them? This is something of an inversion of Trumps policy towards the Gulf states. From them, he has been demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in return for their military protection. From the Palestinians and the PA, he is demanding concessions over Jerusalem and the West Bank in exchange for a paltry $300 million per year. A more shameless act of blackmail is hard to imagine. Trump excels at this extortionist method of doing business and knows no other way of operating. It is all about deal-making and profit-taking with no regard to morality or values, international law, political considerations or the minimal rights of others. Either submit to the dictates of Netanyahu  as conveyed by Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner  or else. US aid to the PA is aimed at pacifying the Palestinian people and bribing them to abandon all forms of resistance to the occupation by preoccupying them with seeking to improve their living conditions under the rubric of economic peace, while deluging their ruling elite in Ramallah with loans, mortgages, flashy cars and other trappings of luxury. Living conditions for the majority of Palestinians were much better before the advent of the PA and the signing of the Oslo Accords. They were not more prosperous in material terms, but they upheld the concept of bread and dignity, and launched a popular uprising that gained the respect of the entire world, laid bare the inhuman practices of the occupation and put into question the very existence of an Israeli state. That is why Western neo-colonialist minds devised a lifeline for it in the form of the Oslo Acords. PA spokespersons have said that they will not submit to blackmail and that Jerusalem is not for sale, for however many billions of dollars. These are commendable words. But what really matters is the practical actions that the PA takes to counter these two stances: Israels, in passing legislation aimed at the ceding of any inch of Jerusalem or the West Bank settlements in any future peace deal; and Washingtons, in recognizing the conquest and annexation of the Holy City as the occupation states capital. The one step the PA has taken is to invite the Palestine Central Council (PCC) to convene next week  in Ramallah, of all places, under the spears of the occupation  to devise a response to Netanyahu and Trumps blackmail. Its spokesmen  such as chief negotiator Saeb Erekat  have also urged countries to move their PA-accredited embassies to East Jerusalem, as though they have a choice in the matter or would be free to do so. What kind of deficient thinking is this? The PCC is supposed to be the intermediary body between the Palestine National Council  the Palestinian parliament-in-exile  and the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The latters mandate expired two decades ago, and the majority of its component factions  with the exception of Fateh and the Popular and Democratic Fronts (PFLP and DFLP)  long ago ceased to have any meaningful following among the Palestinian public. Around half of the PCCs membership has gone to meet its maker, and the other half are waiting their turn and are well past retirement age. Critical views are rarely aired, and are unwelcome on the occasions when they are, for no voice can be allowed to rise above that of the anointed leader Mahmoud Abbas. Around a year ago, the PCC  meeting in the PA compound in Ramallah  took a headline-grabbing decision to halt security cooperation with Israel. The move was greeted with loud applause, as delegates congratulated each other on the PLOs act of reassertion and on the resultant reversion to resistance to the occupation. But that decision remains a piece of paper in Abbas desk. Its practical impact was zero. The Palestinian people long ago lost confidence in the PA and its institutions and leadership. They have been reduced to relying on Trump and his decisions to arouse them from the comatose condition that has afflicted them since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and to rid them of the PA that has been humiliating, subjugating and selling them illusions for the past 20 years. Again, we reiterate that we fervently hope that Trump does not back down from his threats, and goes ahead and cuts off his poisoned chalice of aid to the PA. That could deal a death blow to the US influence in the Middle East and perhaps the entire Islamic world, and signal the start of a new phase in which the Palestinians find their feet again and reunite around a platform of resistance and self-respect, under a different leadership capable of shouldering the historic responsibility. This article was originally published by Raialyoum - ==== Join the Discussion It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. This website encourages readers to use the "Report" link found at the base of each comment. When a predetermined number of ICH readers click on the "Report" link, the comment will be automatically sent to "moderation". This would appear to be the most logical way to allow open comments, where you the reader/supporter, can determine what is acceptable speech. Please don't use the report feature simply because you disagree with the author point of view. Treat others with respect, remembering that "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still."- Benjamin Franklin. Please read our Comment Policy before posting - Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
The number of Nigerians that have been kept captive in Libya can not be quantified, looking at the number of those that returned back home in 2017.

About 490 Nigerians returned from Libya on Sunday, at the Port Harcourt Airport at about 4.55 p.m.

The returnees are among 5,027 expected to return from the West African country.

Source: ( Premium Times )
10 Human Skulls were recovered from the home of Prince Johnson Igwedibia, popularly known as General Don Waney, in his Aligwu community, Omoku, in Ogba/-Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area (ONELGA) of Rivers State. The NigerianArmy also recovered decomposing human remains.

According to reports, General Don Waney, was to be recognized as the Paramount Ruler of Aligwu by Gov Nyesom Wike until the notorious kidnapper met his waterloo after being linked with the killing of worshipers on New Year day in Omoku, River State.

Vanguard says wild jubilation erupted in Rivers State, yesterday, following military confirmation that notorious kidnapper, cultist and killer, Don Waney, has been killed by security operatives.
A Yaba Chief Magistrates Court, Lagos State charged a father, Segun Durojaiye, and his brother, Emmanuel Durojaiye, with incest after they allegedly raped his 16-year-old daughter for four years.

Segun, 52, who resides at Baba-Benja Street, and Emmanuel, 44, of No. 10, Durojaiye St., all in Oreyo area of Ikorodu, Lagos State, are facing a charge of defilement.

According to the prosecutor, ASP Ibijoke Akinpelu, the accused committed the offences between 2014 and 2017 at their residences.

Akinpelu told the court that the father started sleeping with his daughter in 2014 after she confined in him about her uncles inappropriate show of affection.

He added that after the death of the victims stepmother in the same year, she was asked to go and stay a few weeks with her uncle and he began to molest her sexually.

The victim broke her silence after she had had a series of abortions and was helplessly losing weight from the trauma.

The case was reported at a police station and the accused were immediately arrested, she said.

The prosecutor said the offences contravened Section 137 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (Revised).

Section 137 prescribes life imprisonment for child rape.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In her ruling, the magistrate, Mrs Oluwatoyin Oghre, granted the accused bail in the sum of N1m each with two sureties in like

She said one of the sureties should be a Level 15 officer who has a titled document or a traditional ruler.

Oghre said the sureties should show evidence of three years tax payment to the Lagos State Government.

She adjourned the case until March 12 for mention.

(NAN)
The Mexican man who claims to have the worlds longest penis has been accused of being a cheat after a doctor disclosed that his manhood is only 6-inches long.

Robert Esquivel Cabrera, 54, from the northern town of Saltillo who is said to have worked on his penis by stretching it using weights, boast of 18.9inch manhood and cannot have sex because of the size.

A radiologist, Dr. Jesus Pablo Gil Muro, who examined Mr. Cabrera, said that the man refused to take off all of the bandages around his penis and wouldnt let the doctor see the skin.

Speaking to the Sun Online, Dr. Muro said: When he came here to do a CT scan, my first impression was that it was a unique and unusual case. I had never seen a patient like Roberto.

He said he had become suspicious, and conducted a CT scan, saying: What the CT scan showed was that there is a very large foreskin. It goes just before the knee.

But the penis itself is about 16 to 18cm from the pubis.

He explained: So, it doesnt go all the way through the foreskin.

The rest of the tissue found there is just foreskin, blood vessels, and some inflammation of the skin.

According to Dr. Muro, his penis is actually only six inches long.

This shocking claim comes just weeks after 47-year-old Jonah Falcon from New York who formerly held the record of the worlds longest penis for having a 13.5-inch, accused him of being a fraud because he has been weighing his genitals down and stretching the foreskin to grow his penis.

Mr. Falcon told The Sun Online in December 2017 that Mr. Carbreras was not 19 inches, saying he could have a normal sex life if he got circumsized.

The man stretched his foreskin constantly, from what I understand, but its normal underneath, he said.

I think its ridiculous and he seems kind of desperate. No matter how big he is, its not going to change the fact that Im 13.5inches.

Mr.Cabrera who has since been registered as a disabled since he can no longer have sex is currently receiving government handouts, despite refusing to get a reduction because he hopes to find work in the American porn industry.

-Dailymail
Nollywood actor and model, Chris Okagbue took to social media to complain about the way models are treated in Nigeria.

According to him, Upcoming comedians are paid better than experienced models

The actor took to Instastory to lament about the situation, he wrote;

Its only in Nigeria that models are the least wealthy people in Showbiz. Even an upcoming comedian of today is richer than model with 5years experience. #fact #shameonyouagencies

And after you branch off to other fields like film or music n become successful, some random stupid agents will open their rotten garlic gutter smelling mouths n say we made him who he is.

The thunder that will strike you pple is still doing rehearsals for the main show!! Delusional retards!!

source: Gistreel
Real Madrid went 16 points behind league leaders as the galaticos and Celta Vigo both shared the spoils and their host, in a game that ended 2-2 on Sunday night.

Two first half goals from Gareth Bale cancelled the first by Celta Vigo before the hosts equalised in the second half.

The hosts also missed a penalty as Iago Aspas spot kick was saved by Keylor Navas.

Source: ( Premium Times)
Sadiq Daba visited the Secretariat of the Women Arise and Centre for Change in Lagos, accompanied by two of his sons.

Mr. Daba was full of excitement, and said, his visit was to appreciate the President of Women Arise and Centre for Change Dr Joe Okei Odumakin and all Nigerians, who rallied support towards towards securing medical care, for him.

Mr. Sadiq Daba described Dr Joe Odumakin as an indefatigable woman of esteem and high standards, sincerity, honesty ,love, care ,adoration and an Angel.

source: Theinfong
The Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai has warned any teacher in public primary schools who decide to join the indefinite strike today, (Monday) will be dismissed from duty.

The Chairman of the Kaduna State branch of the Nigeria Union of Teachers, Mr. Audu Amba, confirmed to one of our correspondents on phone on Sunday that teachers in public primary schools would embark on indefinite strike on Monday to force the state to reverse the sack of over 20,000 of its members the state government claimed had failed its competency test.

However, the NUT chairman refrained from making comments on the latest threat by the governor, saying I will not comment on this now.

El-Rufai, through his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mr. Samuel Aruwan, in a statement said any strike embarked upon by the teachers would be considered illegal and would be treated as such.

The governor noted that strike or no strike, nothing would derail the education reforms being implemented by the state government.

He said the state would neither be blackmailed by the action of the teachers nor mortgage the future of two million primary school pupils.

The governor insisted that as an employer, the government has every right to determine who its employees are or can be, and the minimum qualifications they must possess.

Source: ( Punch Newspaper )
Andover Properties LLC, which operates the Storage King USA self-storage brand, has acquired AAA Storage Hwy 27 & Postal Center in Minneola, Fla. The property at 995 US-27 comprises 75,000 square feet of storage in more than 600 units. Andover plans to modernize the facility by rehabilitating the older structures and adding security and lighting, according to a press release.

The site is near existing and planned residential developments as well as retail stores and fast-food eateries. The population of Minneola, a suburb of Orlando, has been experiencing strong growth, and the city recently received its own exit on Floridas Turnpike, according to Michael Wachsman, Andovers director of acquisitions.

In November, Andover purchased a 3-acre parcel in Homestead, Fla., on which it plans to build a 110,000-square-foot self-storage facility. The property will feature one multi-story, climate-controlled building as well as several single-story structures with drive-up units. Its expected to be complete late next year.

Founded in 2003 and based in New York City, Andover owns and operates 28 self-storage facilities in nine states, totaling nearly 1.9 million rentable square feet of storage space in 15,650 units. The firm focuses on the acquisition, development and management of industrial, retail and self-storage facilities, primarily in the North and Southeast.
The fat tax is a new entry this year

Let them drink soda! Tempers came to a head in 2017 when local committees in US cities and counties began wrangling over levies on sugary fizzy drinks.

The sugary drinks tax is intended to provide buffers for the public health systems bearing the results of the health repercussions such as diabetes, and to curb consumption as a form of prevention, although the effectiveness of the latter remains questionable.

Across the US, more than one in three adults and one in six children, aged two to 19, are obese, according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which result in more than $150 billion in healthcare costs annually.

"Investing in obesity prevention provides a significant return on investment for the American taxpayer," the CDC advises. Nearly half (49%) of American adults drink a sugar-sweetened beverage on a given day and to undercut these habits health officials have demanded a tax on sugary beverages.

Opponents of the controversial tax consider it a manifestation of a nanny state in which the government interferes too much with personal choices.

"The beverage industry is a major economic contributor to the global economy, and selective taxation can have negative economic results," a spokesperson for the International Council of Beverage Associations tells International Tax Review.

A global wave of taxation for sugary drinks is likely to alter beverage company strategies to include less sugar in products and ultimately lower any potential impact from additional taxation.

The toast of the town was certainly the overturning of the sugar tax in Chicago in October, which repealed the year-old sweetened beverage tax ordinance in Cook County, shortly after it was introduced in 2016.

Former New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed $3 million in support of a campaign to uphold the measure in the fight against Big Soda, after failing to implement the tax in New York.

Berkeley, California, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were among the first cities to pass the tax on sugary drinks, followed by Albany, San Francisco and Oakland, all in California; and Seattle, Washington; Boulder, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon.

Industry associations have argued the tax will cause mass chaos and confusion for customers.

In Cook County the tax rate was $.01 per ounce of sweetened beverage  simple enough.

But what happens when it's a syrup?

The Cook Country Sweetened Beverage Tax specified: "Sweetened beverages produced from syrups using a beverage dispensing machine and powders using a beverage dispensing machine or by hand mixing (fountain drinks, lemonade, etc.)  tax is applied to the total amount of beverage that the syrup or powder will make per the manufacturers' directions."

For example, a 5 gallon bag of syrup will make 3,840 ounces of beverage  at tax rate of $.01 per ounce of sweetened beverage, the tax for that bag of syrup is $38.40.

The tax is also thought to be an easy money grab for governments. The most obvious example is the probably the UAE, which in October instated a 50% tax on soda and 100% on energy drinks.

The sin taxes, levied on goods deemed as part of unhealthy lifestyles such as alcohol and tobacco, are nothing new. American comedian Paula Poundstone famously said: "The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling."
January 8, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) On Thursday, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced it will seek to allow offshore drilling. This proposal would be the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling in history. Areas targeted for exploration and possible drilling would be the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Eastern Seaboard, and over 100 million acres in the Alaskan Arctic.

The following statements from education policy experts at The Heartland Institute - a free-market think tank - may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Media Specialist Billy Aouste at media@heartland.org and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 847/445-7554.

"With Secretary Zinke's exciting plan to unleash America's offshore oil and gas potential, President Donald J. Trump is leading the United States forward in a successful quest for world energy dominance."

Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D.

President

The Heartland Institute

thuelskamp@heartland.org

312/377-4000

Dr. Huelskamp represented Kansas' 1st District in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.

"During the eight years of the Obama administration, a nation trying to become independent of Middle Eastern oil was deprived of that possibility - namely by placing more and more of its vast off shore oil deposits off limits to the detriment of industry and the public.

"At last President Trump is righting this disastrous policy and granting the nation the use of our valuable natural resources. President Trump should be commended for no longer kowtowing to the demands of the green lobby, which wishes to deprive citizens of the world's most inexpensive fuel and farmers from their plants' primary fertilizer - carbon dioxide - which is their 'breathe of life'.

"It's time for the public to understand that utilizing fossil fuels has no negative impact on the environment. They don't affect the temperature of our planet, and they do improve the standard of living of every American."

Jay Lehr

Science Director

The Heartland Institute

jlehr@heartland.org

312/377-4000



"Even as Al Gore claims a cold winter is exactly what we should expect from global warming, President Trump ignores this nonsense and proceeds with his America First Energy Plan. The move to allow offshore drilling is a profoundly positive policy that will benefit all Americans. Thank you Mr. President."

Fred Palmer

Senior Fellow, Energy Policy

The Heartland Institute

fpalmer@heartland.org

312/377-4000

"This is great news. One more step in President Trump's plan to make American energy dominant. The Trump administration recognizes fossil fuels are the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, provide high paying jobs, and benefits the nation as a whole.

"Though the dividends in terms of oil produced may not be paid for years, starting the exploration and leasing now, means more oil and gas will be delivered in a timely fashion to keep the economy humming along as production from existing platforms in the Gulf, off the coast of California, and the Arctic decline over time."

H. Sterling Burnett

Senior Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy

The Heartland Institute

Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News

hburnett@heartland.org

214/909-2368

"According to the International Energy Agency, there is a continued large-scale need for investment to develop a total of 670 billion barrels of new resources to 2040, mostly to make up for declines at existing fields rather than to meet the increase in demand. Developing offshore resources will be crucial to meeting this goal.

"Offshore oil production is a large part of American oil production, with the Gulf Coast producing approximately 1.5 million barrels per day, which is approximately 17 percent of total U.S. oil production.

"It generally takes several years before offshore oil fields can be developed, therefore the Trump administration is giving energy producers the option to explore for oil and gas reserves and develop leases should high oil prices return in the coming years and decades.

Isaac Orr

Research Fellow, Energy and Environment Policy

The Heartland Institute

iorr@heartland.org

312/377-4000

"Once again we see good things from Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. With yesterday's announcement, he took the next step for developing the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program (National OCS Program) for 2019-2024, which proposes to make over 90 percent of the total OCS acreage and more than 98 percent of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources in federal offshore areas available to consider for future exploration and development.

"The Draft Proposed Program (DPP) includes 47 potential lease sales in 25 of the 26 planning areas - 19 sales off the coast of Alaska, 7 in the Pacific Region, 12 in the Gulf of Mexico, and 9 in the Atlantic Region. This is the largest number of lease sales ever proposed for the National OCS Program's 5-year lease schedule.

"As this moves forward, we should see economic growth, new high-paying jobs, and increased energy security."

Bette Grande

Research Fellow, Energy Policy

The Heartland Institute

governmentrelations@heartland.org

312/377-4000

Ms. Grande represented the 41st District in the North Dakota Legislature from 1996 to 2014.

"Realistically, opening an area for 'drilling' that has been closed for decades, really means starting the process of evaluating the resource potential of an area using state of the art seismic data. It is in the interest of any nation to have an accurate assessment of offshore energy reserves. To incentivize industry to start the process, there must be the opportunity to actually capture the resources via drilling if the seismic data and geology indicate the potential reward is worth the cost. At a minimum, the Trump administration is doing the right thing by initiating that process.

Joseph Leimkuhler

Vice President, Drilling

LLOG Exploration L.L.C.

Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute

media@heartland.org

312/377-4000

"Opening up offshore oil and gas drilling will be a boon to the American people. It will not only be several times more cost effective than wind and solar energy, it will enable our energy industry to increase the exporting of fuels."

Walter Cunningham

Apollo 7 astronaut and author

Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute

walt@waltercunningham.com

312/377-4000

"Being true to its goal of energy independence and energy domination, the Trump administration provides the mechanism for this goal by opening up the nation's vast store of oil and natural gas in offshore waters. This will create thousands of high paying jobs, billions of dollars in taxes and royalties, and makes America an energy provider for nations unable to supply themselves.

James H. Rust

Professor of nuclear engineering (ret.), Georgia Tech

Policy Advisor, Energy & Environment

The Heartland Institute

jrust@bellsouth.net

404/875-3874

"I wholeheartedly applaud the proposal to increase off shore drilling. In light of the enormous uncertainties surrounding the CO2 - global warming link, U.S. energy independence should be this country's top priority."

Arthur Viterito, Ph.D.

Professor of Geography

College of Southern Maryland

Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute

arthurv@csmd.edu

312/377-4000

The Heartland Institute is a 34-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312/377-4000.

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Ryanair has announced changes to its baggage system which will come into place next Monday, writes Cillian Sherlock.

You will no longer be able to bring two carry-on bags with you onto the plane unless you are a priority boarding customer.

From Monday, your second, larger wheelie bag must be placed on hold at the boarding gate, still free of charge.

Non-priority customers will still be allowed to bring one smaller carry-on bag onto the aircraft.

Regular fliers may already be accustomed to being asked to place their carry-on luggage on hold.

Ryanair said too many customers were availing of the two free carry-on service which lead to not enough overhead cabin space.

The airline said this caused boarding and flight delays.

As part of its "Always Getting Better" programme, the airline also announced that the check-in bag allowance has increased from 15kg to 20kg for all bags while the fee has been cut from 35 to 25 for the 20kg bag.

Priority Boarding comes at a cost of 5 at the time of booking, or 6 if added on the Ryanair app up to 30 minutes before scheduled departure, or two hours before your scheduled departure on Ryanair.com

"Were reminding our customers that from Monday, only Priority Boarding customers will be allowed to bring two carry-on bags on the aircraft," said Ryanair's Kenny Jacobs.

"All other customers will be allowed to bring one smaller carry-on bag on board, while their second (bigger) wheelie bag will be placed in the hold (free of charge) at the boarding gate.

"This will speed up the boarding of flights and eliminate flight delays, alongside our new checked bag policy which offers our customers lower bag fees for a 33% increase in their checked bag allowance.
Dancing with the Stars judge Lorraine Barry has said she is going to auction off her DWTS dresses for charity.

Speaking on The Ryan Tubridy Show on RTE Radio 1 this morning, Barry said she plans to use the auctions to help raise money for dementia.

Barry told Tubridy that she gets all her dresses made in Italy.

"I fly to Italy and I have a stylist over there. I also have Clementine, my stylist here.

"Together we work on the outfits, which is so exciting for me because its like me preparing for my competitions all over again. So I used to design my own dance dresses and now Im doing it for the judges."

Barry has decided each month, one dress that she has worn will be auctioned for charity.

"I want to actually auction each month, one dress...one of the dresses I will wear.

"At the end of the month we are going to then do an auction and that will then go to a lovely charity for dementia."

Barry decided to raise money for dementia as "its in the news and it happens to a lot of the older generation.

"Dancing has helped dementia tremendously, it really keeps the brain going, the coordination of the body as well, so it has been proven to be very good."

While on the show, she also chatted to Tubridy about the returning show, where the men took to the dancefloor last night.

Getting ready for Show 1 tonight. Its hair and make up time ..... this brings back great memories of me getting ready to compete....  Loraine Barry (@loraine_barry) January 7, 2018

Barry said she felt the judges were very honest and found last nights dancers "were all on quite an even par, some parts were good and some parts were not so good."

You can listen to the full interview below.
Update 3.15pm:

A Sinn Fein MP has been suspended by his party for three months for posting a social media video of himself balancing a loaf of Kingsmill bread on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre.

West Tyrone MP Barry McElduff said he accepted the sanction imposed by the Sinn Fein leadership but reiterated his insistence that the contentious post was not meant as a reference to the sectarian murders of 10 Protestant workmen at the village of Kingsmill in 1976.

Announcing the punishment, Sinn Fein's Stormont leader Michelle O'Neill apologised to the Kingsmill families.

She said the tweet was "ill-judged and indefensible" but said she did not believe it was intentionally malicious.

Mrs O'Neill also confirmed that her party colleague would continue to get paid his Sinn Fein party salary during his suspension.

In a statement Barry McElduff said: "Although I genuinely meant no offence, I accept that my actions were ill-judged and, while unintended, caused deep and unnecessary hurt and pain to the Kingsmill families.

"I apologise unreservedly for this.

"In recognising the serious consequences of my actions, I fully accept the partys decision to suspend me from all party activity for a period of three months."

Update 2.50pm: Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff has arrived for a meeting with the party leadership to explain a video of him with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre.

Sinn Fein has described Barry McElduff's social media post as "inexcusable and indefensible".

Mr McElduff had been summoned to meet senior party figures, including Stormont leader Michelle O'Neill and party president Gerry Adams, at party offices in west Belfast.

West Tyrone MP Barry McElduff arriving at Sinn Fein's headquarters on the Falls Road in Belfast ahead of a meeting with party officials. Pic: Niall Carson/PA Wire

The storm around the social media post is threatening to further disrupt faltering efforts to re-establish a powersharing executive at Stormont, with the Democratic Unionists characterising it as an affront to victims.

Mr McElduff has offered to meet relatives of the sectarian outrage but a number of them, including the only survivor of the gun attack, Alan Black, have rejected the invitation outright.

Mr McElduff has faced multiple calls to resign in the wake of the controversy.

Mr Black, who survived the gun attack despite being shot 18 times, rejected Mr McElduff's apology.

"It was like a punch to the stomach, it was so callous," he said of the video.

"To mock the dead and dance on their graves is depraved."

Sinn Fein TD Pearse Doherty said he did not believe Mr McElduff should resign.

"The Kingsmill massacre was a terrible tragedy... and we should always be mindful of the families, and there's no doubt that this upset them terribly and it was a silly thing Barry McElduff did, but I don't think he intended to hurt the families," Mr Doherty told RTE Raidio na Gaeltachta.

Mr Doherty said he did not believe there was any intent behind the video.

"I don't think he should resign, I don't think he did it to upset the families or draw attention to the matter, it was just a stupid thing he did," he said.

"But he should have known better, as an MP, that that particular day (the anniversary) and that that was very important."

Earlier: Sinn Fein has said a video of one of its MPs with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre was "inexcusable and indefensible".

Party chairman Declan Kearney said West Tyrone MP Barry McElduff had fallen well short of the standards Sinn Fein expects of its members.

Mr McElduff has apologised for the post, insisting it was not meant as a reference to the republican murders of 10 Protestant workmen in 1976.

He has been summoned to a crunch meeting with the Sinn Fein leadership in Northern Ireland this afternoon.

Have deleted video post. Had not realised or imagined for a second any possible link between product brand name and Kingsmill Anniversary.  Barry McElduff (@BarryMcElduff) January 6, 2018

Further, I apologise for any hurt or offence caused. Never my intention to offend anyone who has suffered grievously.  Barry McElduff (@BarryMcElduff) January 6, 2018

Mindful of unintended hurt caused to victims' families I would be very willing to meet with Kingsmill Massacre families if they were willing  Barry McElduff (@BarryMcElduff) January 6, 2018

The well-known Kingsmill brand of bread shares a name with the south Armagh village that witnessed one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles, when gunmen stopped a van carrying textile workers on their way home, identified the Protestant occupants, lined them up at the side of the road and shot them.

Mr Kearney became the first senior leadership figure to comment on the weekend furore this morning.

"What has happened is absolutely inexcusable and indefensible and the party is taking this matter very seriously indeed," he said.

He added that Sinn Fein wished to express "deep and sincere regret".

"What happened is absolutely irresponsible," he told BBC Radio Ulster.

"Barry McElduff has already made an unreserved apology and that was the correct thing to do in the circumstances.

"The reality is huge offence has been caused and I and Sinn Fein strongly disapprove of what has happened."

Mr Kearney said Sinn Fein accepted that the incident had caused "maximum hurt" to the Kingsmill families.

"Sinn Fein expects the highest standards of not only our members but also our very senior elected representatives and what has happened here clearly falls well short of those standards," he added.

Sinn Feins former Stormont finance minister, Mairtin O Muilleoir, has also apologised for retweeting the video. Mr Kearney said Mr O Muilleoir had offered the party a fulsome explanation for the retweet.

The storm around the social media post is threatening to further disrupt faltering efforts to re-establish a powersharing executive at Stormont, with the Democratic Unionists characterising it as an affront to victims.

Mr McElduff has offered to meet relatives of the sectarian outrage but a number of them, including the only survivor of the gun attack, Alan Black, have rejected the invitation outright.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland is examining the video after receiving a number of complaints, while the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at Westminster has also been alerted.

In the short video, Mr McElduff, who is known for his light-hearted social media contributions, is filmed walking around a shop with a Kingsmill loaf on his head, asking where the store kept the bread.

It was posted around the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmill outrage.

He has faced multiple calls to resign in the wake of the controversy.

On Saturday the republican MP deleted the video and apologised.

"When I posted the video I had not realised or imagined for a second that there was any possible link between the brand name of the bread and the Kingsmill anniversary," he said.

"It was never my intention to hurt or cause offence to anyone and in particular to victims of the conflict who have suffered so grievously.

"I apologise unreservedly for the hurt and pain this post has caused."

Mr Black, who survived the gun attack despite being shot 18 times, rejected Mr McElduffs apology.

"It was like a punch to the stomach, it was so callous," he said of the video.

"To mock the dead and dance on their graves is depraved."
The Health Minister says it is time to break the cycle of overcrowding in the health service.

Simon Harris was speaking after it was agreed all non-urgent elective procedures are to be curtailed in a bid to tackle the problem.

The emergency department taskforce met this afternoon to discuss the ongoing crisis and to set out measures to deal with it.

There are 555 patients waiting on trolleys around the country today, compared to last Wednesday's record high of 677.

General Secretary of the INMO Phil Ni Sheaghda says there is a concern we havent seen the worst of it yet.

She said: "Its been confirmed that the flu spike is probably not with us yet, and we are concerned about the availability of acute beds.

"The HSE have confirmed that they have notified hospital groups that they should curtail all non-urgent elective work, particularly as we are going to be facing a bigger crisis in the area of the flu in this week and next week."

Patients representatives have expressed their concern over the move to curtail some procedures.

Stephen McMahon with the Irish Patients Association said: "The issue of planned electives being cancelled, I did raise it as a concern and I am to provided with a report of the numbers of patients who have been affected by that.

"Obviously then from that, is to ensure that those patients are rescheduled back in quickly to get the necessary treatment, mindful of the fact that in some cases, they have been waiting for years."
Maurice McCabe had reason to believe the worst was past by late 2016, until false reports of child sex abuse blighted 2017, says Michael Clifford.

Last year wasnt supposed to be major in the story of Sergeant Maurice McCabe.

He had been through the ringer and had come out the other side, it had seemed.

However, an incident in September 2016 proved vital in his unfolding story.

McCabe and Superintendent David Taylor had both made protected disclosures after a meeting between the two of them.

At the meeting Taylor, who by then had been suspended from the force for over a year on an unrelated matter, told the sergeant that he had been part of a conspiracy to smear McCabe.

This, he said, had taken place when Taylor was head of the garda press office, a position he held between 2012 and 2014.

Taylors role was to brief journalists that McCabe had questions to answer in relation to child sexual abuse. This was entirely scurrilous, but Taylor said he was only doing his job.

He also claimed that he was acting on instructions from then commissioner, Martin Callinan. Mr Callinan denies any such activity.

Taylor also claimed that Noirin OSullivan, who was deputy commisisoner at the time, was aware of the campaign. She denies any such knowledge.

Following on from the meeting between McCabe and Taylor, the former made a protected disclosure about this information. He informed Taylor about this and Taylor made his own disclosure.

Retired judge Iarfhlaith ONeill was appointed to examine the disclosures. He reported back to the then Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, on December 6. There was no further development until late January, when word seeped out that a decision was imminent.

Frances Fitzgerald

Meanwhile, away from the glare of the media, McCabe and hiw wife, Lorraine, were coming to terms with another shocking development. Through their solicitor, they had applied for the file on McCabe held at Tusla, the child and family agency.

This came about following a letter received the previous year, which had suggested that McCabe was suspected of serious child abuse.

This was completely false and would eventually be discovered as the result of a series of shocking errors at the agency.

The problem originated when Ms D, the daughter of a colleague of McCabes, attended a counselling session in July 2013.

In 2006, she made an allegation against McCabe that he had touched her inappropriately some eight years previously, when she was six.

The allegation came some months after McCabe had reported her father for ill-discipline. Her father had also unsuccessfully applied for the job McCabe held, sergeant-in-charge at Bailiborough garda station.

The allegation was investigated and found not to have substance. The local state solicitor said if the alleged incident had even occurred, it amounted to horseplay.

The DPPs ruling was equally emphatic. The ruling questioned the credibility of the allegation, adding that it was vague and then stated: Even if there wasnt a doubt over her credibility, the incident, as described, does not constitute a sexual assault or, indeed, an assault.

McCabe assumed that was the end of the matter, but, unbeknownst to him, it surfaced again in 2013. In July of that year, Ms D attended counselling. At the time, McCabe was engaged in highlighting malpractice in the penalty points system.

Ms D said that the emergence of his name had brought up for her the issue from the past. By July 2013, McCabe had not been publicly identified in the media, but his name would have been known to gardai in Co Cavan.

Following the counselling session, the counsellor wrote up her notes and thereafter mixed up the file. McCabes name was mistakenly inserted into a completely unrelated file, one that involved an allegation of child rape.

The mistake was discovered eight months later, in May, 2014, but McCabe was never informed of its existence. Then, in January 2016, he received a letter from Tusla, saying he had to be interviewed to check whether he was a danger to children.

He followed it up and, all of 12 months later, on receiving his file, he could see what had occurred. Lorraine McCabe contacted the Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, and demanded a meeting over how this could have been perpetrated against her husband by a state agency.

Maurice McCabe

The couple met the minister on January 25. Zappone resolved to find out what exactly had happened.

On Tuesday, February 7, in a separate development, the Cabinet agreed that a commission of inquiry should be set up, on foot of Judge ONeills recommendation. The Cabinet was not informed that another element of the story had come to the fore through Tusla, nor that the minister for children had met the McCabes.

Then, the following day, in the Dail, Brendan Howlin dropped a bombshell. He told the House that he had, that morning, received information from a journalist that OSullivan had, in the past, forwarded information to journalists alleging that McCabe was guilty of sexual crimes.

This was the first time that McCabes name had been publicly associated with such matters. The commissioner issued a press release, denying, in the strongest possible terms, the suggestion that she had engaged in the conduct alleged against a serving member of An Garda Siochana.

Within 24 hours, the story of what McCabe had been subjected to in Tusla had begun to emerge. The story broke in the Irish Examiner and, later that evening, on RTEs Prime Time.

There was an immediate public and political outcry. McCabe had been widely commended for his actions and now it looked as if he had been the subject of a major smear campaign.

At the heart of the matter was the question as to whether elements within Tusla had conspired with elements in An Garda Siochana to smear McCabe.

A few days later, the McCabes issued a statement through their solicitor, Sean Costello.

We have endured eight years of great suffering, private nightmare, public defamation, and State vilification, arising solely from the determination of McCabe to ensure that the Garda Siochana adheres to decent and appropriate standards of policing in its dealings with the Irish people.

Our personal lives, and our family life, and the lives of our five children, have been systematically attacked, in a number of ways, by agencies of the State, they said.

The statement pointed out that the family did not have faith in another behind-closed-doors inquiry, after their experience at the OHiggins commission.

Under the circumstances, the Government had little choice but to accede to the request.

Instead of a commission of inquiry, there would now be a public tribunal, chaired by Judge Peter Charleton, to investigate all the issues around whether there had been a campaign to attack McCabes character.

The tribunal began public hearings in June to deal, initially, with the generation of the false allegation against McCabe in Tusla.

What emerged over the course of a months evidence was a series of mistakes in the agency that pointed towards extremely slipshod practice, rather than conspiracy.

A litany of errors was uncovered. At one point in the hearings, the area manager for Tusla in Cavan/Monaghan was asked about the errors.

There isnt an error in his [McCabes] favour, Patrick Marrinan, lawyer for the tribunal, put to the witness. Nobody made a mistake by which he benefited, do you understand?

And there are those who may say that this litany of grave errors cant just simply be the coincidence after coincidence after coincidence that is being suggested, do you understand?

Lowry replied that he understood.

I think they are terrible errors, consistently, but they were absolutely coincidences, he said. Bad file management.

The other matter to emerge from the tribunal hearings is that there was knowledge of the false allegation within the gardai, all the way to up headquarters. Yet nobody thought to inform McCabe, a serving garda, that this had occurred. Judge Charleton has already stated that he regards this as a serious matter.

The tribunals report on Tulsa has not been issued, as of yet, and most likely wont be, until all of the other modules are completed.

In September, the tribunal heard evidence in a separate, unrelated module concerning a different garda, Keith Harrison. He and his partner had alleged that there had been collusion between the gardai and Tusla in an attempt to target him.

Judge Charleton issued his report in November, which dismissed the allegations in their entirety.

In reality, the Harrison stuff should never have been included in the tribunal and was only there because, initially, it appeared as if it might be similar in some way to what the McCabes had gone through. The tribunal certainly dismissed the notion of any such similarities.

Elsewhere, there was further fall-out. In September, OSullivan resigned, citing the pressures of being accountable to various bodies.

It has become clear, over the last year, that the core of my job is now about responding to an unending cycle of requests, questions, instructions, and public hearings, involving various agencies, including the Public Accounts Committee, the Justice and Equality Committee, the Policing Authority, and various other inquiries, and dealing with inaccurate commentary surrounding all of these matters, her resignation letter read.

OSullivan had been under pressure on a number of fronts, but her handling of the Maurice McCabe story was particularly questionable.

In December, Fitzgerald, resigned. She had become embroiled in a controversy over how much she knew about an attempt to smear Sergeant McCabe at the OHiggins tribunal.

OSullivan is due to give evidence at the Charleton Tribunal tomorrow and Wednesday, while Fitzgerald is scheduled to appear before the tribunal on Tuesday, January 16.
The digitalisation of National Library of Ireland papers will shine a light on the pre-independence era, writes Niall Murray.

THE letters, official documents, secret military orders, and other papers from figures in Irelands political and military revolution are to be made available online.

A project to digitise some of the most important manuscript collections held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI) will mean the documents are easily accessible to researchers and others interested in the history of the period that led to Irish independence.

The NLIS Towards A Republic project will see large tranches of documents made available in a number of phased releases.

These may be linked to the commemoration of significant events during the remainder of the Decade of Commemorations through to 2023. It will include, for example, the digitisation of personal papers of signatories to the December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty that secured Irish independence, but which also led to partition and the Irish Civil War the following year.

Other key moments likely to be marked are the December 1918 general election in which Sinn Fein secured most Irish seats, the genesis of Dail Eireanns formation in January 1919. The NLIs collections include the personal papers and archives associated with many leading figures in the revolutionary government.

Among those likely to have their material digitised are Sinn Fein founder and early Dail minister Arthur Griffith, and Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, whose Home Rule campaign was overtaken by Sinn Fein after the Easter Rising.

Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.

But the papers of people lesser-known to the general public will also help tell the story of what happened behind the scenes.

The items held by the NLI from Sean M ODuffy, for example, mainly relate to the operation in Wexford and Wicklow of the courts operated by Dail Eireann as part of the republican governments efforts to undermine the British justice system in Ireland.

The centenary of womens suffrage will be celebrated in 2018, as the general election of 1918 was the first in which women  although not all  had a vote. It was also the vote in which Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to Westminster, though she took part instead in the first Dail.

The papers of both prominent and lesser-known women active in the period may also be digitised by the NLI. It has a collection, for example, of papers relating to Annie OFarrelly, who was involved with the IRA and Cumann na mBan, including her letters home while a prisoner of the Irish Free State in the Civil War.

Papers of JJ OConnell and Ernie OMalley give an insight into the operations of the IRA during the War of Independence, and into both sides in the subsequent Civil War during 1922 and 1923.

The importance of publicity and propaganda to the campaign for independence, and how those tactics were deployed, should be evident in papers of figures such as Erskine Childers and Piaras Beaslai. While both worked in that area, they took opposing views during the Civil War, and Childers was executed by the National Army in November 1922.

The NLI said the personal papers of many figures provide complex insights into the events and personalities that shaped the period.

They go beyond the experience and perspectives of the individuals themselves through their correspondence and interaction with diverse and opposing figures and organisations, a spokesperson said.

The NLI expects the digitised resources in its Towards A Republic project to be of great interest to historians, researchers, school, third-level, and lifelong learning programmes.

They will also appeal to family researchers, media, those engaged in podcasting and video focusing on archival materials, public talks and discussions, and digital humanities projects.

The project is being undertaken as part of a 2m investment in cultural digitisation approved in November by then-culture minister Heather Humphreys to support initiatives at the NLI and other national institutions and cultural heritage organisations.

Among the themes that Towards A Republic will allow researchers to explore, without having to visit the NLI reading rooms in Dublin, is the international dimension to the independence campaign.

An archive of thousands of items associated with Art O Briain tells the story of the Dails work in London as it sought international recognition and funding for an Irish republic.

The same collection features hundreds of letters and replies in relation to Irish prisoners in England during the War of Independence, and in support and sympathy around the 1920 hunger strike and death of Corks Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney in Brixton Prison.

For affairs on the other side of the Atlantic, insights can be gleaned from papers likely to be put online in relation to the work of Irish-American leaders and those who toured the US from Ireland.

Irish republican leaders with John Devoy, seated, in America, probably in 1919 or 1920. Standing, left to right: Harry Boland, Liam Mellows, Eamon de Valera, Patrick McCartan, and Diarmuid Lynch. Picture: National Library of Ireland

John Devoys papers include notes and correspondence in relation to his work seeking support for Irish independence among the Irish-American community, and from officials in the US administration.

The veteran republican had helped organise funding and attempts to arm the 1916 Rising. But he clashed with Eamon de Valera when Dev toured the United States during the War of Independence on a mission for political and financial support.

Dev was accompanied on the tour by the Dails representative in the US, Patrick McCartan, whose papers in the NLI detail his part in that clash which split the Clan na Gael movement.

Other figures whose papers are being considered for online publication include Florence ODonoghue, one of the key figures in the Cork IRAs major role in the War of Independence.

With hundreds of folders of documents from the period, as well as later testimonies given to him when he became a historian of the revolution, Kerry-born ODonoghues collection helps paint a particularly vivid picture of the IRAs use of intelligence in the conflict with British Crown Forces.

A collection of letters used by ODonoghue and historian Meda Ryan for their biographies of anti-Treaty IRA chief Liam Lynch is also held separately by the NLI.

It contains many insights into the progress of the War of Independence, and the situation leading to the Civil War, which came to an end shortly after Lynch was shot dead on a mountain near the Cork-Tipperary border in April 1923.

But one letter, written in the final weeks before the July 1921 Truce led to the end of the War of Independence, reveals the ordinary strifes that beset even the leading revolutionaries.

He closed a letter to his mother with the usual guidance on which safe-house address to send her reply, but not without also issuing an important instruction.

I am after breaking my rimless glasses, so for heavens sake send me on by post my other goldrimmed ones, wrote Lynch.
The Decision Support Service will implement the Assisted Decision-making (Capacity) Act, enabling people who are physically or mentally diminished to have a say in how they live, but its terms will inevitably be set and reset by the messiness of human need, says Caroline ODoherty.

ITS the new state agency that few will people have heard of, but which many will come to entrust with some of the most personal aspects of their life and death.

The Decision Support Service (DSS), consisting of a director and a large, empty office floor, will be built up over the coming year for the implementation of one of the most reforming pieces of human rights legislation of recent times.

The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act has been law for two years, but it has yet to be commenced (apart from the appointment of a director).

Aine Flynn, formerly a senior solicitor at KOD Lyons, a law firm specialising in criminal law and human rights, is that director. She headed up the human rights side of KOD Lyons and says she sees the act primarily as human rights legislation.

Im hoping to market, so to speak, the DSS as a human rights agency. It has human rights very much at its core, she says.

So what are those rights? They are the right to have input into decisions about how you live your life, when your capacity to make those decisions, and make them known, is diminished by illness or disability.

The ward-of-courts system was set up for such cases, but it stems from the archaic and insultingly titled Lunacy Act of 1871. It concentrates on people with property or other assets, is run by the courts, and is applied in the most extreme cases.

It has been an all-or-nothing situation: you either become a ward of court (where a court-appointed committee handles your affairs, as is currently the case for 2,800 people) or you rely on an ad hoc arrangement (where well-intentioned family members, carers, and other professionals do what they think is in your best interest).

For many people, their capacity to make decisions varies with the nature of their condition, the kinds of decisions they face, and when they face them.

Ms Flynn says traditional mental status examinations do not allow for such subtleties. There has been a move away from them, but, I think, it possibly still is happening that people would be asked do you know who you are?, where you are?, who the Taoiseach is?, can you spell this word backwards?, and so on, and then, following that algorithm, a decision is made that you dont have capacity and, potentially, dont have capacity in relation to anything.

The act introduces the functional test of capacity, which is time-specific and issue-specific, so its a recognition that you may have capacity to decide about one matter, but perhaps not about something that is more complex or grave.

So, if you have an intellectual disability, you might be very well-equipped to say what you want to do with your income or your social welfare payment, or where you want to live and with whom, but, at the same time, you may need greater support around dealing with an inheritance or something like that.

To ensure the person gets the right balance of assistance and freedom, the act provides for a range of supports.

A person who is aware they have difficulties handling their own affairs may appoint a decision-making assistant  typically a family member or carer  to help them get the information and explanations they need to make a decision for themselves, or they can appoint a co-decision-maker to make the decision jointly with them.

Assistants and co-decision-makers will be registered with, and supervised by, the DSS, which has powers to intervene and investigate, if there is any complaint or doubt about how they are handling their responsibilities.

A further tier of support will come from the appointment, by the Circuit Court, of a decision-making representative, who will make decisions on behalf of someone who, even with help, does not have the capacity to do so themselves. Those decisions must reflect the will and preference of the person, rather than what may be considered to be in their best interest.

Yet another tier comes in the form of enduring powers of attorney, whereby a person can, at a time when they have full decision-making capacity, appoint someone who will take over when they no longer have that capacity. Again, the DSS will supervise.

Once the act is implemented, people who are currently wards of court will be assessed to see what, if any, arrangement best suits their needs.

But, simultaneously, many more people will begin to enter the various different arrangements provided for. In many cases, that will be prompted by a healthcare issue, but the impetus can come from many different sources.

It could fall to a solicitor, to the bank manager, to an insurance professional  to all sorts of people  to perform a functional-capacity test and decide whether or not they think the person in front of them has the capacity to take the decision that is on the table. If they think capacity is an issue, theyll need to get us involved.

It sounds like a big responsibility and Ms Flynn doesnt downplay its significance, but she says there will be codes of practice for different professions to follow.

Aine Flynn, the first director of the new Decision Support Service, which will be built up over the coming years.

The National Disability Authority is drafting 11 suites of code on the non-health side, and then HSE has a group working on a guide to the act for all social and healthcare professionals. And, certainly, I know the Law Society has been doing work on it.

But she believes the level of understanding among professionals in commercial fields is probably patchy and that there is a wariness about the changes.

I fully understand that a lot of professionals are saying this is all about exposure for me, that its a whole new way to have to do things, so I want resources and training, that I want an absolutely cast-iron explanation of how this is going to work, so that Im not going to land myself in trouble.

I absolutely get that and I think thats something that we all have a responsibility to work towards.

The last thing I want is for someone to think, if I am charging a small fee to do a small piece of work for a vulnerable person  say, as a solicitor  why would I bother, if its going to involve so many complicated new processes?

So, it does require education, but its coming and I think we just need to embrace it and accept that what we have, at the moment, is not satisfactory. What we have, at the moment, is, she says, lots of ad hoc processes.

The healthcare profession know that next of kin has no basis in law, for example, and so the act brings certainty as to who is responsible for what.

I appreciate, entirely, that families dealing with, perhaps, intellectually disabled adults, might think, I dont need this hassle. Theyve been caring for somebody since childhood, they know exactly how to handle the situation, and to say to them theres now a new way of doing things, I think, presents difficulties and challenges.

But this isnt about finding fault with people who have the best interests of their loved-ones at heart.

They, above all, have the human rights of their loved-ones as a central consideration, so I think the act and the DSS has to be sold to them as a force for good.

While the act is the result of years of campaigning by disability rights groups, its application is universal  particularly the section dealing with advance healthcare directives (AHDs), or living wills, as they are sometimes called.

AHDs have become more common in recent years and doctors do their best to honour them  especially where they are made by people with terminal illness who know their prognosis.

An AHD allows them to set out how far they want doctors to go in saving or prolonging their life, and can address issues such as resuscitation and life support.

But there is no legal basis for them and if a fit-and-well person was to make one, on the off-chance they were to become suddenly and critically ill or injured, its not clear how much weight their AHD would carry in the emotionally charged setting of an intensive care unit, with a distraught family maintaining a bedside vigil, begging doctors to do everything in their power to keep their loved-one alive.

Ms Flynn has considered such scenes and believes having an AHD registered with the DSS would, in most cases, help families deal with the tragedy they are facing.

Everybody should have an advance healthcare directive and enduring power of attorney, she says.

People fear that its an awful burden on somebody to make them their attorney, but it means they have the seal of approval to proceed with decisions, rather than have a situation where there might be a group of siblings and theyre left wondering who should take charge and whether they have to have family conferences about everything. The nature of families is that, perhaps, you dont all see eye-to-eye, but if youre simply following a directive, that can be better for relations and put you under less pressure.

Practical issues arise with the creation of registers of AHDs and decision-makers. They may need to be accessible on a 24-hour basis, so a bespoke IT system, with linkages to hospitals and other institutions, will have to be developed, and there are data-protection questions around who will be allowed to access them.

All that has to be worked out, but its a doable exercise, if a complicated one, Ms Flynn says.

Nothing can be worked out until the right people are in place, however, and, in the coming weeks, a human resources manager will be appointed to start recruiting the IT, legal, administrative and other professionals necessary to get the agency ready for business.

Ms Flynn estimates that she will need upwards of 50 people, but they may not all be full-time or in one location, as panels of solicitors may be created around the country who can be called upon to help on a case-by-case basis.

These are just the practicalities and, having overseen the merger of two law firms, to create KOD Lyons, she is confident that the right structures and systems can be put in place.

What she is more concerned about, however, is getting mindsets right. The new act places the will and preference of the person who is the subject of an assisted decision arrangement at its centre.

In Ireland, up to now, and even in Britain, where assisted decision-making has been law for some time, the guiding principle is the best interest of that person.

Thats a big change, because that sort of paternalism has informed policy for generations, she says.

It may be in the best interests of a vulnerable person that they enter residential care for their own health and safety, for example, but if their will and preference is to remain living independently, then thats what must take precedence.

A proportion of older people living in nursing homes could stay in their own homes, if they had sufficient supports and, anecdotally, the view is that many of them would prefer that.

The act could prove a lifeline for them, because they will have to be asked for their consent to be moved to, or retained in, a nursing home, and if they are unable to give consent, a DSS-registered decision-maker, assistant decision-maker, co-decision-maker, or attorney will have to step in and give their honest appraisal.

If the persons will and preference are to be at home, then efforts will have to be made to honour their wishes.

That could put pressure on the HSEs stretched home-care packages and community supports, but Ms Flynn says resources should not be the decider of human rights. The new procedures will apply to all new residents  not just of nursing homes, but other residential care units, too  but they will also apply retrospectively to existing residents, who did not give full consent to their care arrangement.

Effectively, they are being contained, Ms Flynn says. They are subject to constant supervision and their movements are curtailed, so they dont have their liberty and they are not consenting to that arrangement.

What safeguards are there around that, who is monitoring that, who has give their approval to that deprivation of liberty? Its not provided for in law.

Something like 80% of the nursing home population would have capacity issues, because they would be dementia sufferers and, in a great many cases, steps need to be taken to safeguard them and, therefore, doors are locked and movements are restricted. But who says its alright to lock that door? Thats whats going to be regulated.

New Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, or DOLS, will be written into the act to ensure the proper procedures are gone through, before a person is placed in a setting where freedom is restricted.

Those already in residential care will have their case reviewed either by the courts or a specially convened tribunal  the mechanism has not been worked out, yet. Upwards of 25,000 cases may have to be reviewed. It would require, Ms Flynn warns, an awful lot of work.

In many cases, the existing care arrangement may be found to be working perfectly well for all concerned, but Ms Flynn wont second-guess what scenarios might arise  under the DOLS or any other provision in the 137-page act.

One section may have to be rewritten, depending on the outcome of the next abortion referendum, and any ensuing legislation. It states that where a pregnant woman lacks capacity and has an AHD that stipulates refusal of certain treatments, but which doesnt specify what should happen if she is pregnant at the time it is consulted, then it should be set aside and treatment continued for the sake of the unborn.

Where the woman lacks capacity and has an AHD that stipulates refusal of certain treatments, even if she is pregnant, an application must be made to the High Court to decide how to proceed.

So, despite the groundbreaking nature of the act, as it is currently written, it probably would not have made much difference in the tragic case of Miss P, the young woman in the early stages of pregnancy who was declared brain dead, but kept artificially alive, against the wishes of her parents and partner, for three weeks in 2014, while legal argument raged over what to do about her foetus.

The act cant cover everything. There are codes of practice which will attempt to cover as much as we can envisage, but not all the answers will have occurred to me, yet, and not all the answers are contained in the act. Thats why we will have litigation over this, Ms Flynn says.

She makes this prediction in a matter-of-fact manner and says it is nothing to be afraid of. There are solicitors just like me  probably former colleagues of mine  who will be going through this with a fine-toothed comb and who will, undoubtedly, challenge aspects of it.

Thats okay. If a law is going to work well, it has to be robust and, for it to be robust, we have to find out if it has weaknesses and address those.
On the 50th anniversary of Terence ONeills meeting with Jack Lynch, Ryle Dwyer examines the two leaders efforts to improve relations between North and South

Fifty years ago today, Prime Minister Terence ONeill of Northern Ireland called on the Taoiseach Jack Lynch at Iveagh House, Dublin.

There had been no advance publicity, largely to ensure that Ian Paisley would not be able to upstage the meeting with his antics.

ONeill arrived in Dublin, unannounced on January 8, 1968. Lynch came out to the car to greet him. The dozen reporters present were impressed at the friendly informality.

How are you Jack? ONeill said as he alighted from the car, extending his hand to the Taoiseach.

ONeill was accompanied by his wife, Jean, and a number of officials. They had lunch in Iveagh House with the Taoiseach and his wife, Maureen, together with a number of official staff, and five of Lynchs cabinet colleagues and their wives.

The ministers were Tanaiste Frank Aiken, Charles Haughey of Finance, George Colley of Industry and

Commerce, Neil Blaney of Agriculture and Fisheries, and Transport Minister Erskine Childers.

The official statement at the end of the four-hour meeting stated that progress had been made in areas of consultation and co-operation.

The Taoiseach said they discussed industry, tourism, electricity supply, and trade, as well as tariff concessions, and measures taken by both governments to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease from Britain.

Afterwards, ONeill returned to the North, by a different route in order to avoid any possible demonstration. Ian Paisley had been developing a high profile for himself with his attacks on ONeill in recent months. But he missed the opportunity to protest on this occasion.

Next day he issued a statement regretting ONeills return home. I would advise Mr Lynch to keep him, Paisley announced.

Five years earlier, in 1963, ONeill had become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. From very early on, he tried to break down sectarian barriers between the two Northern communities.

He also sought to improve relations with the Republic by eradicating the impasse in relations that had existed since the 1920s. He invited Taoiseach Sean Lemass to meet him at Stormont on January 14, 1965.

Lemass courageously accepted the invitation. At their initial meeting, when they were briefly alone, Lemass said to ONeill, I shall get into terrible trouble for this!

No, Mr Lemass, the Northern premier replied, it is I who will get into terrible trouble.

ONeill made his return visit to Dublin on February 9, 1965, and the two leaders agreed to co-operate on tourism and electricity. It was Lemass who made the most significant concessions, because the Irish Constitution did not recognise the existence of the North.

Article 2 of the Constitution actually claimed sovereignty over the whole island. Thus, by formally meeting the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, ONeill claimed that Lemass accorded him a de facto recognition.

The Taoiseach then bolstered this at their follow-up meeting in Iveagh House, Dublin, three weeks later.

The place card in front of me at Iveagh House bore the inscription, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, ONeill proudly explained. Surely this was tantamount to formal recognition. But many Unionists still had grave reservations about dealing with the Republic of Ireland.

In 1966 Ian Paisley established the Protestant Unionist Party to oppose ONeill. He roused sectarian tension by holding mass demonstrations at which he branded ONeill as the Ally of Popery.

Nevertheless, public opinion polls indicated support for ONeills leadership from both communities in the North.

After Jack Lynch replaced Lemass as Taoiseach in late 1966, ONeill continued with his efforts to improve relations with the Dublin government by inviting Lynch to Stormont Castle. The Taoiseach travelled to Belfast by car on December 11, 1967.

There was no formal announcement of his visit, but word was leaked to Paisley after the Taoiseachs car crossed the border.

Paisley arrived at Stormont with his wife and a handful of supporters, just minutes before the Taoiseach. With snow on the ground, two of Paisleys church ministers  Rev. Ivan Foster and Rev. William McCrea  began throwing snowballs at Lynchs car.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) promptly grabbed the two ministers. While they were being bundled into a police car, Paisley was bellowing, No Pope here! 

Which one of us does he think is the Pope? Lynch asked his travelling companion, T.K. Whitaker.

Paisley demanded to be arrested by the RUC, and actually tried to get into the police car with his two colleagues, but he was pulled away. The two clergymen were taken to an RUC station and quickly released.

Lynch ridiculed the protest. It was a seasonal touch, he said. It reminds me of what happens when I go through a village at home and the boys come and throw snowballs.

Paisley said he had come to protest against the smuggling of Lynch into Stormont. If he had known about the visit earlier, he said that he would have brought along 10,000 people to protest. Denouncing ONeill, as a snake in the grass, he went on to accuse Lynch of being a murderer of our kith and kin.

There is no doubt that Capt. ONeill has the full support of his colleagues and of the country, the Unionist Newsletter proclaimed in an editorial.

ONeills four formal meetings with Lynch and his predecessor had contributed to a thaw in relations at the summit between Belfast and Dublin, but the whole process was exploited by others to fan the flames of Northern sectarianism.

People did not realise it in early 1968, but Northern Ireland was about to explode. On October 5, 1968, people gathered in Derry for a civil rights march that had been banned by Stormont.

When the march began, it was viciously attacked by the RUC. This ignited a series of further protests, which ultimately led to Bloody Sunday, and the eruption of the Troubles for the next quarter of a century.
Maurice McCabe and his family are hoping to finally learn in the coming weeks what, if any, lengths were gone to by agents of the State to attack him, shut him up, or even destroy his character, writes Michael Clifford.

Did elements and agents of the State collude to attack the character of Maurice McCabe?

This is the principal question to be addressed when the Disclosures Tribunal resumes public hearings today.

The issue was the focus of the first module of the tribunal last year, but now it moves into a different phase.

Its a matter of immense importance. If the State colluded in any way to attack a citizen, particularly a member of An Garda Siochana, then serious accountability is required.

There have been instances when agents of the State may have been responsible for attacking citizens, usually where the target was suspected of serious criminal offences.

The McCabe case, however, is of a completely different order. His offence in the eyes of the States agents was to highlight how An Garda Siochana was not doings its job properly, and the lengths to which some were willing to go to cover up malpractice.

The issue to be opened today involves what happened behind the closed doors of a Commission of Investigation in May 2015.

The OHiggins commission was set up on foot of a report in 2014 from senior counsel Sean Guerin.

He had investigated Sergeant McCabes allegations of malpractice in Cavan/Monaghan and found that a full commission would be required to properly investigate the matter.

Guerin went even further. I have seen extensive documentation which gives cause for concern about the personal and professional consequences for Sergeant McCabe of his having made the complaints examined in this report and other similar complaints.

It is not for me to express any view of those matters, except to say that Sergeant McCabes experience calls for examination.

Retired high court judge Kevin OHiggins was appointed to chair the commission. He began work in December 2014 and commenced hearings on May 14, 2015. The Commission of Investigation model was introduced by then minister for justice Michael McDowell in 2004 to alleviate the huge costs of public tribunals.

By 2004, the planning and payments to politicians tribunals had been sitting for seven years  and both were only roughly halfway through their eventual life spans. There was, among the public, outrage at the cost as lawyers drank deeply at the tribunal trough.

McDowells model was to put an end to this expensive method of inquiry. It was to be conducted in private, alleviating the need for everybody to be lawyered up. Prior to OHiggins, the model was used a number of times, most successfully in inquiries into clerical sexual abuse.

But just as holding inquiries behind closed doors cuts down on cost, it also cuts down on transparency. While inquiries are usually set up in response to public concerns, the public do not have sight of the inquiry in progress. Instead, just a report is published.

Notwithstanding this reservation, the model was regarded as a success. Then along came the OHiggins commission and some of what went on behind the inquirys closed doors would eventually elicit major controversy.

The Disclosures Tribunal will examine whether there was an attempt in the early days of OHiggins to portray McCabe as a man with a grudge. If the turbulent sergeant had a grudge, this would cast his complaints of malpractice in a different, darker light.

It would portray him as a man not intent on highlighting malpractice but one who was out to do harm to the reputation of the force. If successful, it would also call into immediate question the high opinion that the public, and much of the body politic, had of McCabe at the time.

The issue that was about to impinge on OHiggins concerned an allegation by the daughter of a colleague of McCabes dating from 2006. The girl, now known as Ms D, claimed that McCabe had touched her inappropriately some eight years previously when she was six.

Some months before she made her complaint, McCabe had reported her father for indiscipline and he in turn had been demoted from his post.

The allegation was investigated and found to have no basis. However, the aspect of the case that was about to explode on the OHiggins commission concerned how the DPPs directions were regarded and dealt with.

On day two of the OHiggins hearings, May 15, 2015, retired chief superintendent Colm Rooney was in the witness box. On foot of questioning about meetings with McCabe he told of a meeting which he dated to May/June 2007, he claimed McCabe had requested the meeting.

Mick Wallace recently gave the Dail a summary of the evidence given by Rooney on that occasion.

Chief superintendent Colm Rooney said Maurice was angry and vicious and wanted the DPP to overturn the directions from the Ms D file, not realising that Maurice had already seen them, agreed with them and wouldnt be looking for them to be overturned.

As Wallace pointed out, Rooney was unaware that McCabe knew the directions and that the directions could not have been more favourable to him. (McCabe had been furnished with the directions by the local state solicitor once they arrived back from the DPP).

McCabe gave evidence to this effect on the next day the commission sat. Why, then, was he described as being angry in Rooneys original evidence?

Rooney was recalled to respond. At this point, he was not as emphatic as he was originally about McCabes emotional state at the meeting. There was a reference to an interpretation of McCabes anger through his body language.

Rooneys evidence on the issue, any inconsistencies and any possible explanation of why he may have provided an apparent inaccurate portrayal of McCabe in his original evidence will all be examined by the tribunal.

While Rooney was giving evidence on the first occasion, another meeting was introduced by counsel for the garda commissioner, Colm Smyth. He said there would be evidence McCabe expressed a grudge at the second meeting, which occurred in Mullingar in August 2008, associated with the DPPs directions in the Ms D case.

The meeting was between McCabe and two other officers, a superintendent and a sergeant. McCabes counsel Michael McDowell said that his client was being ambushed. He demanded some basis on which this allegation was to be introduced.

The following Monday, OHiggins and McCabes legal team were furnished with a document laying out how McCabe expressed this grudge. The document was prepared by the chief state solicitors office, which in turn comes under the aegis of the attorney general.

The five-page document went through a sequence of events, including the meeting with Rooney and leading up to the meeting in Mullingar. It stated that at Mullingar, Sgt McCabe conveyed that the only reason he made a complaint against Superintendent Clancy (McCabes district officer) was to force him to allow Sgt McCabe to have the full details of the DPP directions conveyed to him.

Again, this ignored that McCabe had possession of the DPPs directions. But in any event, McCabe was adamant that he never said any such thing, he never expressed any grudge as laid out in the chief state solicitors document. And he could prove it.

He had recorded the meeting in question at a time when he had come to believe he couldnt trust anybody. His precaution turned out to be prescient. This was one of at least four occasions on which he would be forced to revert to a recording in order to dispute another version of the meeting.

The recording was handed in and OHiggins had it verified. The superintendent was called to give evidence, which turned out not to coincide with the CSSO document.

Nothing more was heard of this matter until a year later days after the OHiggins report was published. On May 15, 2016, the Irish Examiner broke the story of what had occurred behind the closed doors of the commission.

The Disclosures Tribunal will now examine in detail what transpired during those hearings at OHiggins. In particular, it will examine how the commission could have been informed that there were two meetings in which McCabe had expressed anger or a grudge, which would have portrayed him as a man ill disposed towards An Garda Siochana for personal reasons.

This stuff is deadly serious. It may be attributable to misunderstandings, mix-ups, mistakes. If so, the carelessness shown to somebody who had been through what McCabe had endured, and a complete subsequent failure to even contact him to explain or apologise, was inexcusable.

The alternative explanation  that a person or persons were out to attack McCabes character on a false premise  is even more arresting. The tribunal will have some very serious deliberating to undertake.

Noirin OSullivan

Among the witnesses scheduled to appear in the first two weeks of the hearings are Noirin OSullivan, the senior counsel who represented her at OHiggins, Colm Smyth, and Anne Marie Ryan, a solicitor who worked in the Chief State Solicitors office.

Maurice McCabe is also scheduled to give evidence in relation to his module.

The tribunal will also examine the extent of the knowledge of what was happening at the commission around May 2015. The civilian head of human resources in An Garda Siochana, John Barrett, has told the tribunal that a colleague informed him in the weeks before the commission hearings began that, we are going after Maurice at the commission.

The other person who had some knowledge of what was occurring was then minister for justice, Frances Fitzgerald. She resigned over the issue in November and has claimed that she will be vindicated at the tribunal.

How far Judge Charleton intends to go in relation to Fitzgeralds position, and whether he considers her possible vindication to be included in the terms of reference remains to be seen.

The final module of the Disclosures Tribunal, which will follow the OHiggins module, concerns whether or not there was a smear campaign against McCabe conducted by senior Garda management.

This allegation originated with a protected disclosure made by the former head of the Garda press office, Superintendent David Taylor.

He has alleged that he briefed journalists on foot of instructions from then commissioner Martin Callinan that McCabe had questions to answer in relation to child sexual abuse.

Taylor says he was acting on instructions, and claims that Noirin OSullivan, who was deputy commissioner at the time, was fully aware of the campaign.

Both Callinan and OSullivan deny vehemently any knowledge of a smear campaign.

A number of high-profile journalists will be called to give evidence in relation to briefings from Supt Taylor, and/or other senior gardai.

Taylor has waived any right to privilege as a journalistic source.

Whether or not journalists are willing to give evidence about the briefings remains to be seen.

There will also be evidence from TD John McGuinness. He claims that he was briefed by Callinan about McCabe in a meeting in a car park outside Dublin in January 2014. This was a few days before McCabe was due to give evidence before the Dail Public Accounts Committee, of which McGuinness was chairman.

John McGuinness

The Kilkenny TD has provided the tribunal with a statement about the car park meeting. He claims Callinan asked him was he aware of issues surrounding McCabe.

The TD replied he had heard rumours about child sexual abuse but that he had been assured by McCabe that there was no truth to it.

Mr Callinan stated to me that the rumours were true, that Mr McCabe had sexually abused someone and that he was not a credible person, according to John McGuinness statement.

He went on: Mr Callinan stated that an investigation into Mr McCabes activities was underway.

Mr Callinan then asked me was I aware that Mr McCabe had abused family members.

I was shocked and extremely troubled by what Mr Callinan was telling me because the allegations being made were extremely serious and the person relaying them to me was the commissioner of An Garda Siochana.

Martin Callinan

Callinan denies ever saying any of these things. All such allegations about McCabe are completely untrue and scurrilous.

Judge Charleton will have to decide whose version of the meeting he accepts.

The comptroller and auditor general Seamus McCarthy, who keeps a very low public profile, has also provided a statement to the tribunal over what he alleges were comments made to him by Callinan. These comments differed only in emphasis from those that McGuinness claims were made to him.

There will also be evidence from RTE presenter Philip Boucher Hayes on foot of a statement he has made about what he alleges Callinan said to him about Sgt McCabe.

Judge Charleton has indicated that he hopes to finish public hearings before Easter, but these things have a habit of taking on a life of their own. The hearings are bound to be dramatic and may even be sensational.

However, far more important is the substance of the issue. Sgt McCabe and his family are entitled to know what, if any, lengths were gone to by agents of the State to attack him, shut him up, or even destroy his character.

On a broader front, the matter at issue goes to the heart of the operation of a democracy and the rights that citizens are supported to have therein.
A new book on Donald Trump's White House has brought matters to a head between the US president and his former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon. But Elizabeth Drew argues the book mostly tells us what we already knew: that Trump is unqualified to be president and incapable of staffing his administration with competent aides.

THE new book about Donald Trump and his dysfunctional US presidency (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff) has left much of Washington reeling.

Despite the White Houses constitutionally dubious threat to quash the book, the publication date was moved up four days.

But the bulk of Fire and Furys disclosures, though deeply disquieting, arent surprising.

Its not yet clear how Wolff, the books controversial author, obtained information, but it must be assumed that he taped interviews, particularly the long conversations throughout the book.

What Wolff has achieved is to get attributed quotes from high officials about how the president functions, or doesnt.

But the book mostly tells us what political-journalistic Washington already knew: that Trump is unqualified to be president and that his White House is a high-risk area of inexperienced aides. The only surprise is that there havent been more calamities.

A good portion of what was released before the books publication concerns a battle between two of the most talkative, argumentative, self-regarding braggarts US politics has ever seen: Trump and his one-time chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.

In the summer of 2016, with his campaign lacking a leader, Trump made Bannon  a scruffy, scrappy former businessman, who was then the executive chair of Breitbart News, a website preaching white nationalism  the campaigns chief executive. Bannon was full of big ideas about what a right-wing populist campaign would look like.

In many ways, however, Bannons ideal campaign closely resembled what Trump was already saying and doing: appealing to blue-collar workers by attacking immigration  for example, saying that hed build a big, beautiful wall along the border with Mexico, for which the Mexicans would pay  and trade agreements that Trump alleged were unfair to the US.

These voters came to form the core of Trumps base, and his success in wooing them, combined with Hillary Clintons stunning failure to do so, goes a long way toward explaining why he is president and she is not.

The problem for Trump is that the citizens he was wooing have never added up to a near-majority of voters. His famous base is less than 40% of the public.

But Trump and Bannon preferred not to think about that.

Trump is prone to taking out his frustrations on others  he is never to blame for his failures  and, inevitably, these landed on Bannon, who bragged more than was good for him about his power in the White House and who asserted more than he should have.

Bannon was ousted from the administration and left in August. Though he and Trump stayed in touch, in retrospect, an eventual falling-out seems to have been inevitable.

Trump and Bannon were like two overweight men trying to share a single sleeping bag. Their political world wasnt big enough for both.

They disagreed bitterly over whom to back in the race to fill a Senate seat from Alabama; but, at Bannons urging, Trump backed the erratic former state Supreme Court judge, Roy Moore, whod been removed from the bench twice, and who lost the race.

Bannon wanted to shake up the Republican establishment by backing similar outsider candidates in this years mid-term elections, which, if successful, could make it all the harder for Trump to obtain victories in Congress.

Despite his denials, it was Trump who more or less agreed to allow Wolff, whose reputation for slashing his subjects Trump presumably would have known from his years in New York City, to interview the White House staff for a book.

Some aides say they believed they were talking to Wolff off-the-record. But, even if that were true, it was hardly soothing to a furious president: they had said these things.

In Trumps view, Bannons great sin, with regard to Wolffs book, was to say highly negative things about the presidents family. Trump was particularly infuriated by Bannons description of a now-famous meeting that his son, Donald Jnr, and other senior campaign staff held in Trump Tower in June, 2016, with some Russians who said that they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Bannon told Wolff that the meeting was treasonous. But, depending on what actually transpired in that meeting, Bannon might not have been so far off. (Trump himself participated in a meeting aboard Air Force One, as he returned from his second presidential trip abroad, to draft a statement to cover up what happened in that Trump Tower meeting.)

Trump was also reportedly furious that Bannon had described the presidents favourite child, Ivanka, as dumb as a brick.

Wolff also reports that Ivanka and her husband, White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had agreed that, after their expected success at the White House, it would be Ivanka who would run for president.

Overstating matters, as is his wont, Trump claimed, in effect, that Bannon had had nothing to do with his election victory, and that the two had almost never talked one-on-one.

And, as is his wont, Trump threatened to sue Bannon. Trump has a long track record of threatening lawsuits without ever filing them, but even the threat can be costly to the putative target.

Yet the momentary obsession with the feuding within the Trump camp shouldnt obscure other realities. Behind the drama, Trump has certain, clear goals, and cabinet and agency heads who share them  and who dont get distracted by the publication of a juicy account of the presidents behaviour.

While much of Washington and its press corps were discussing the latest revelations, the US Department of Justice, which is supposed to be somewhat independent of the White House, was being turned into a partisan instrument for pursuing the presidents grudges.

Indeed, last week, it was disclosed that the DoJ was reopening an investigation into the already thoroughly investigated matter of Hillary Clintons emails. The FBI, it was also disclosed, would be looking into the Clinton Foundation.

The use of a government agency to punish a presidents previous opponent recalls the behaviour for which Richard Nixon was impeached in the 1970s, and suggests a very different form of government than a democratic one.

Elizabeth Drew is a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixons Downfall.
That is the most challenging element, said one minister. While it is a straightforward way of dealing with it as an issue legally, that will cause most concern at Cabinet, from a political perspective.

The Irish Examiner has learned that the most likely date for a referendum is Friday, May 25, should the Cabinet agree to put the question to the people.

The committees report, which was published before Christmas, will be discussed by the Cabinet for the first time when it gathers on Wednesday.

While Health Minister Simon Harris will recommend to the Cabinet that abortion up to 12 weeks should be legalised, several other Cabinet ministers, speaking to the Irish Examiner, have expressed their deep discomfort with such a suggestion.

In an interview with the Irish Examiner, Mr Harris said the report of the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment should be taken seriously and acted upon.

I will be supporting, he said. I have come on my own journey. I cannot ignore that abortion is a reality for women in this country. Irish women go abroad and women access the abortion pill in an unregulated fashion in Ireland.

My own, personal view is that we should legislate along the lines of what the committee is recommending.

My own view is that the committees report should be taken very seriously and acted upon.

As minister for health, and as a Government, our job is to put the question.

Mr Harris and his officials have been developing various legal possibilities, since Leo Varadkar has become Taoiseach, and have been anticipating whatever scenarios the committee could have recommended.

Mr Harris said he was aware of concerns within Cabinet, but he could not say if individual ministers would campaign against a motion to repeal.

However, one senior Government source said the committees report gave the Cabinet a huge amount of political cover.

The benefit of the report is that it is all-party and we would be loath to deviate from it, a source said.

Once we deviate, it becomes our problem, but if we stick to the report, there is political cover.
The Western Islamic Cultural Centre has lodged an objection with An Bord Pleanala, against the refusal, by Galway City Council, to grant it retrospective planning permission for the use of a house at Mincloon, Rahoon, on the western outskirts of the city, as a place of worship.

The application would have allowed the centre to continue to use the building for assembly for prayer in November.

The application had been opposed by a number of residents in the Rahoon area, who complained that there had been intensification of the use of the building, which was in a rural area without any public lighting or footpaths.

They claimed that a high level of traffic visited the mosque, on a road that was inadequate for such volume.

Locals said the suggestion, by the Western Islamic Cultural Centre, that the use of the building as a mosque was ancillary to its main use as a dwelling was incorrect.

The primary use is as a place of worship, involving, at times, a large number of persons, meeting a number of times throughout the day, said one resident.

The residents complained that a loudspeaker was used for some meetings and that the centre was open from 5am to 2am.

Galway City Council acknowledged that councillors had voted, in 2016, in favour of a material contravention of the Galway City Development Plan, against the advice of council planners to allow consideration of the use of specific lands in Mincloon as a place of congregation and worship for the citys Muslim community.

However, the council said it was also obliged, under planning legislation, to consider all potential impacts of the development.

It ruled that the use of the building as a place of worship would pose a public health hazard, because its effluent- treatment system was inadequate for the numbers using the centre.

The council said the level of noise and traffic associated with its use as a mosque would adversely affect local residents in a quiet, rural area, while the capacity of the local road network was deemed inadequate to cater for the number of vehicles using the premises.

In its appeal to An Bord Pleanala, the Western Islamic Cultural Centre claims that special zoning allows for the use of the building as a place of worship.

It claims the building is used primarily as the residence of the local Imam.

As is normal in a Muslim community, people call in to see the Imam, sometimes with their children, for prayer, advice, and to have the children blessed.

There are gatherings at prayer times, although people call in socially throughout the day and evening, said Niall Kearns, an architect advising the centre.
Two senior judges were also told Dublin-based Hayes may separately be spoken to by lawyers acting for the coroner in the currently suspended inquests into the deaths of the 21 victims.

Hayes previously told a BBC interview he took collective responsibility for the organisations activities in England, including the pub bombings. He also claimed to have defused a third bomb placed outside Barclays Bank on the citys Hagley Road, when the scale of the bloodshed on November 21, 1974, became clear.

Speaking in July, when asked if he had planted either bomb in the Tavern in the Town or the Mulberry Bush, he replied: No comment. No comment.

Hayes had also made remarks about the explosives timers and the telephone warning given prior to the blasts, Lord Justice Simon and Mrs Justice Carr heard.

Late last month, West Midlands Police secured a court order to obtain un-broadcast material from the BBC interview as part of the continuing criminal investigation.

Ten of the victims families were at the High Court in Birmingham yesterday, in a legal bid to overturn coroner Peter Thorntons ruling banning the identification of suspects at fresh inquests. They are asking for a judicial review, in order to widen the inquests scope and include the perpetrator issue.

Progress on the hearings is currently suspended, pending a legal ruling.

In submissions for the coroner opposing the families application, his barrister Peter Skelton, said it was an important distinction in law that coronial and criminal processes were entirely separate. In court, Mr Skelton said the criminal process was continuing, and raised Hayes as an example of the polices ongoing work.

He said: The West Midlands Police must go about their own function and the coroner will not seek to in any way compromise that. He added: It is conceivable that if there was a criminal lead during the coroners hearing the inquest would again be suspended.

A person could be charged and prosecuted during those proceedings. For example, Michael Hayes.

That is a possibility and it will will remain a possibility throughout the inquest.

Lord Justice Simon asked what the aim of the coroner would be in viewing the un-broadcast BBC footage, given the perpetrator issue had so far been ruled out of the inquests scope.

Mr Skelton said: No, the coroner isnt investigating whether Mr Hayes perpetrated the attacks, but whether the IRA perpetrated the attacks. It may be Mr Hayes is interviewed in due course by the coroners legal team in order to further those issues.

After two days of legal submissions, Lord Justice Simon told the hearing

: This may seem to some to have been rather dry legal analysis. But we have not overlooked the background and concerns of those in court over these issues. We will however reserve our judgment. I dont think theres any serious possibility of a judgment being made before the new year.
A spokesman for the hospital last night confirmed that up to 15 non-complex patients were being moved to various hospitals, with the majority going to beds bought in the Mater Private in Mahon, while others went to South Infirmary and Clonakilty Community Hospital.

He confirmed the transfer of the patients was down to overcrowding pressures.

He also intimated that similar moves had been made by other hospitals around the country in recent days.

Extra paramedics were brought in to move the patients from CUH.

News that the hospital was having to move the patients came as a two week closure of elective (non-urgent) surgeries was due to come to an end today.

That fortnights closure  the hospital met resistance from surgeons and anaesthetists when it tried to make it three weeks  came at a time when there were 1,431 people on the in-patient/day-case waiting list.

The hospital had claimed it was standard policy to curtail routine elective surgery to allow for a surge in trauma cases over the Christmas period.

Tony McNamara, chief executive of Cork University Hospital, wrote on the hospitals website calling for more honest national debate on the trolley crisis and queried figures published by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.

He said many patients were appropriately on trolleys in assessment units, awaiting a decision as to whether they needed to be admitted.
Attorney general under Garrett FitzGerald by the time he was 35, Sutherland went on to a glittering career in international industry, banking and, in later years, as an advocate for dealing with the migrant crisis.

A devout Catholic, his death yesterday morning at the age of 71 at St James Hospital in Dublin, in the presence of his family, was greeted with sadness and a slew of warm tributes from political leaders both at home in Ireland and across Europe.

Yet, his critics say, he was the face and defender of big business and integration at the expense of ordinary citizens, taxpayers and nations, a charge he vehemently denied.

Survived by his wife Maruja, children Shane, Natalia and Ian, and 10 grandchildren, Sutherland had suffered ill health in recent years.

He suffered a cardiac arrest in London in September 2016 on his way to Mass at Brompton Oratory, and also survived throat cancer.

He was substantially impacted by this and was in hospitals in London and Dublin since then, his family said in a statement. Despite great efforts by his medical staff and his own indomitable spirit, he succumbed to an infection.

We are consoled that in his last year we were able to repay some of his love and kindness.

Sutherland was born in Dublin in 1946 and, as the son of a well-known insurance broker in South Dublin, was sent to Gonzaga College.

He claimed later that the hand of the Jesuits influenced him greatly.

He was a devout Catholic, his family said. This didnt make him doctrinaire. Instead, it gave him a lifelong instinct for charity and volunteerism. It wasnt just about writing the cheque  he wanted to be with people.

He studied law in UCD before becoming a barrister. He was also on the legal team defending Capt James Kelly in the 1970 Arms Trial, and represented the owners of the Stardust nightclub in the inquiry that followed the disastrous fire there in 1981.

He unsuccessfully stood for Fine Gael in Dublin North-West in the 1973 general election.

He later said that this defeat changed my life  if I had got into the Dail, I would have given up everything.

Under Fitzgerald, he was chosen as attorney general in the Fine Gael-Labour coalition in the early 1980s. As attorney general, he voiced strong concern over the wording of the 1983 Eighth Amendment, which brought him into conflict with some Cabinet ministers, including Michael Noonan.

In September 1984, he was nominated to be Irelands next EEC Commissioner and went on to occupy senior roles in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization).

He went onto become the chairman of Goldman Sachs International and also took on the chair of British Petroleum, having also served a period as chairman of Allied Irish Bank.

He received an honorary knighthood from Britains Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 for services to industry.

Despite making London his home, he maintained very strong links with Ireland.

In 2006, he donated 4m to a new law school in UCD that was subsequently named after him.

The same year he was appointed as an expert adviser on Vatican finances by Pope Benedict XVI.

President Michael D Higgins yesterday led tributes to Mr Sutherland, saying he learned of the news of his passing with great sadness and describing him as a passionate European.

Throughout his career, Peter Sutherland remained deeply committed to peaceful co-operation and integration in Europe, promoting greater awareness of the importance and possibilities of Irish engagement in European decision-making, said President Higgins.

His loss will be felt most acutely by his family and friends, and as President of Ireland I wish to express my deepest sympathies to them.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar too paid a warm tribute to Mr Sutherland.

He was a statesman in every sense of the word; an Irishman, a committed European and a proud internationalist, said Mr Varadkar. Throughout his life, he was a champion for individual and economic freedoms.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney said Mr Sutherland enjoyed an extraordinary career and was a strong believer in rules based globalisation, as well as a committed European. He held a firm belief in the promise of the EU, and served as a European Commissioner in the late 1980s.

I knew him as a compassionate, driven, global thinker who was always willing to challenge views, said Mr Coveney. His intellect was extraordinary, and he used his talents to be one of Irelands most influential people, in business, politics and across human rights globally.

Irelands EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, described him as a very distinguished European Commissioner for Competition from 1985 to 1989.

Peter was probably Irelands most distinguished international statesman and leaves behind a rich legacy of achievement, whether in the legal or business worlds or, more particularly, in public service, said Mr Hogan. In all of the roles he performed, he did so with professionalism, enthusiasm and accomplishment.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin described Mr Sutherland as a true patriot who made an outstanding contribution to public life not just in Ireland but around the world.

Peters dedication to public service was not only confined to his work here in Ireland, said Mr Martin. In his capacity as European Commissioner for Competition he revolutionised competition and trade laws. He was a true patriot who had a great love for his country irrespective of his success on the world stage.
The total number of people working in the sector has almost halved since the economic downturn in 2008.

Figures published by the National Transport Authority show there was a total of 26,012 licensed taxi drivers at the end of 2017.

It indicates there was a net reduction of 408 individuals working as taxi drivers over the previous 12 months and an annual decrease of 1.5% in driver numbers.

The total number of drivers has now fallen by 45% since levels peaked in 2009 when there were 47,222 working in the sector.

Taxi representative bodies have complained that operational costs have soared in recent years largely as a result of large increases in motor insurance premiums.

Jim Waldron, spokesman for the National Private Hire and Taxi Association said some drivers were finding it more lucrative to return to their former professions.

Many people from trades in the construction sector became taxi drivers when building work dried up and they are now going back to their old jobs as they are providing more regular work and pensions, Mr Waldron said.

He claimed that the cost for new entrants to the industry was prohibitive as first-time applicants had to buy wheelchair accessible taxis which are considerably more expensive than standard vehicles.

Taxi drivers have welcomed a 3% increase in fares announced last summer which is due to be implemented on February 1  the first price increase since 2015.

There were a total of 20,581 taxis and hackneys licensed at the end of December  223 fewer than at the end of 2016.

More than half of all licensed vehicles operate in Dublin, with 10,688 registered taxi cabs in the capital, followed by Cork (1,780) and Meath (1,091).
The technique involves equipping fishing nets with electrodes which send an electric current through the seabed. This causes a muscular convulsion in fish which forces them out of the seabed and into the net.

Electric pulse fishing has been banned in Europe since 1998 but a decision by the European Commission and Council at the end of 2006 has authorised it via certain exemptions. In November, the EU Fisheries Committee voted to allow electric pulse fishing by a small percentage of ships on a trial basis and under strict conditions.

The technique was pioneered by the Dutch in the early 1990s and they remain its biggest advocates, claiming it allows trawlers to catch more of their target species in better condition, causing less damage to the seabed than traditional trawling.

However, environmental organisations dispute this, calling the technique the marine equivalent of fracking and pointing out that Europe is the only place in the world to allow the use of pulse fishing.

Now, in response to Novembers vote, a European-wide group of NGOs and fishing organisations has written to the European Commission calling for the original 2006 decision of the European Commission and Council to be revoked. It also outlined what it says was the questionable morality of this decision.

The organisations point out that the decision was taken against scientific advice and under the pressure of Dutch fishing lobbies.

This dubious 2006 decision has had serious consequences for both marine ecosystems and humans, said the group. Not only is the seabed impacted by huge industrial nets, but marine organisms are brutalised  electrocution causes fracture of the spine, bruising, and burns.

Following the vote last month, Sinn Fein MEP Liadh Ni Riada said: We simply dont know the long-term effects it will have on stocks or the environment. All we have are anecdotal, and often conflicting reports from various proponents from the industrial sector, many who have vested interests in the practice.

It would be highly irresponsible at the best of times to allow any such practice to go ahead unfettered without first thoroughly researching it, but with Brexit posing the biggest threat to our fishing industry in history, we have to be more protective of Irish waters than ever.
THE aftershock of the Harvey Weinstein scandal was felt in some unexpected places, including the furthest reaches of Federation space. Several weeks after the studio boss was unmasked as a serial sexual criminal, Anthony Rapp, a relatively obscure actor starring on Star Trek: Discovery, went public with details of an unwanted sexual advance hed received as a 14-year-old from a then 26-year-old Kevin Spacey, Netflix star and doyen of high-class acting.

This brought to a crashing end Spaceys 30-year career. It also plunged Netflixs cash-cow drama House of Cards into crisis (Spacey is gone but House of Cards is to return for one final season). Though the point seemed lost amid the calumny, Spaceys overnight descent into ignominy was, along with everything else, supremely ironic. While Star Trek: Discovery originated on CBS in the United States, in the rest of the world it is carried by Netflix.

Were so very proud of Anthony and what he had the courage to do, says Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays the lead Discovery character of science specialist Michael Burnham. We love him, we stand by him and with him.

It was appropriate that Star Trek should be involved, however peripherally, in exposing the toxicity of Hollywood. As far back as its original 1960s iteration, Trek has wrapped itself in progressivism.

Famously, the first interracial kiss on American television was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura. Later, under Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), the Next Generation would similarly champion diversity and predict an optimistic future for mankind (in addition to prophesying Irish renunciation in 2024).

Discovery is different, being darker, more a slow-burn and with the iconic Klingon alien race controversially re-imagined as grumpy ogres.

However, with Martin-Green given chief billing at Burnham, the conflicted daughter of contrasting human and Vulcan cultures, the sci-fi sagas commitment to celebrating diversity endures. Rapp, for is part, plays the first openly gay Star Trek TV character (in the new JJ Abrams movies, Hikaru Sulu is gay).

We like to believe our show can make change, says producer Aaron Baiers. Anthony Rapps courage has made change. I am so proud of him, because he has made change that we can see in this moment. Very few people can say that.

Discovery, set several years before the original Captain Kirk Trek, furthermore arrives when Americans traditional of tolerance is under attack as never before. One year into the Trump presidency, the shows message of universal peace and brotherhood feels increasingly like wish fulfilment.

Every Star Trek has tackled its time, says Martin-Green. The original was leading into the Civil Rights Movement. None of us expected to have a Civil Rights Movement 2.0 in America.

Martin-Green, who initially achieved fame as Sasha on The Walking Dead, tries to look to the positives as Hollywood and America take the measure of themselves. In lifting the lid on the dark side of Tinsel Town, especially, an opportunity for reckoning  and healing  has presented itself.

I like to say it is a time of enlightenment, she says.There is an awakening of these issues. We need to have a light shown on such things.

When we first meet Lt Burnham, she is headstrong and narrow-minded. A human raised by Vulcans and step sister of Mr Spock, the character is initially encountered endangering her fellow-crew mates when she responds rashly to a Klingon face-off. This is fresh territory for Star Trek which, though capable of remarkable nuance, usually presents its chief protagonists as conventionally moral and courageous. Burnham is more grey than black and white, a sensibility which chimes with the mood of contemporary drama says, Baiers. He cites sword and sorcery blockbuster Game of Thrones as a major influence.

I came late, very late, to Game of Thrones, he says. The goal for us with the new Star Trek was something that fans would love, but that was also for people who didnt think they would like Star Trek. We have more hope than Game of Thrones, which is very bleak.

Star Trek: Discovery, it should be acknowledged, is not universally beloved. A not insignificant number of Trek fans sees this gritty, often bleak saga as a repudiation of everything the original stood for. The old, shiny utopianism is gone, replaced by a murky sensibility that arguably has more in common with Das Boot or the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica.

What was interesting about Star Trek in the past is that it often looked abroad for inspiration, towards the Cold War and what have you, says Baiers. Many of us are pained by what is happening politically in the United States at the moment. As writers on the show, it has been fascinating to look into our own backyard.

This has itself caused controversy. Quick to anger and governed by a simple, almost childish, moral code, the Klingons have been perceived by some as embodying Donald Trump and his followers.

Unfairly, some people have tried to say: Oh, the Klingons represent Trump supporters, acknowledges Baiers. They are just as importance to us this season as what happens to the Federation. The Klingon leader has a very Christlike philosophy. He wants to start a war of racial purity. And yet he accepts outcasts and strangers.

The journey to screen was occasionally torturous. Bryan Fuller, a wunderkind show-runner behind Hannibal and American Gods, had been initially lined up to oversee the project.

However, he departed early on, with Baiers part of the team stepping in.

Theyve held true to Fullers original vision of a series headed by a strong female role-model. Baiers and company even stuck with the name Michael, a nod to Fullers tradition of giving his lead female characters a male handle.

This is where I tear up a little, says the chatty Martin-Green. When I think about the younger generation of girls watching this and gleaning from it the possibilities [in their own lives and careers]. Because [Discovery] is serialised we are able to explore diversity in a way other Star Treks werent.

I am this strong, bad-ass woman going through an identity crisis. To have a strong female character, who is also vulnerable. I am so grateful to be able to portray that on screen.
Instagram and YouTube are two platforms that blogger Katie Brennan from Dublin is embracing wholeheartedly.

The digital consultant posts about travel, fashion, food and beauty on her blog, okaybee.net, and social media sites, but says YouTube is an interesting new platform for her.

Ive been moving more toward YouTube lately as its a new challenge for me that I want to explore, she said.

Katie focuses on a range of topics online, having started out discussing only fashion.

It started out as solely fashion, but has moved into a lot more travel as I have travelled a lot these past two years. Id say its a mix of travel and lifestyle.

An avid user of social media, Katies says she uses it more often than I should but loves being inspired by what she finds there.

I most enjoy the inspiration I get from different people, whether its places to travel, trends, food to try, theres always something new online.

Although balancing her full-time job and her blog can be a challenge, Katie says she has learned invaluable skills online that she can apply to her career.

I think its definitely taught me how to multitask more. Its tough to juggle a full-time job and keep up with my site and YouTube.

It has also taught me that I can teach myself to do lots of different things  like video editing  and thats a skill I bring into work all the time, she says.

The main problem Katie encounters is having too many ideas for online content and struggling to find time to act upon them.

I have 10 post ideas currently and five videos to edit, with more content on the way.

Its not a bad problem, but it can get on top of you if you dont keep churning out content, she says.

Luckily, Katie has found support from people in a similar position  other Irish bloggers.

Irish bloggers are a very supportive community. Theres several bloggers that Ive physically not met before, but because we support each other online, I feel like I know them!

I also find plenty of bigger bloggers who are very willing to support small bloggers like me, which is lovely, says Katie.

I should have started my blog when I had the idea. It took me four years of doubting myself before I started it, and even then, I kept it secret from family and friends for nearly a year.

My advice would be to go for it, find your niche, and be proud of what you create, she said.
This Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.
AN 84-YEAR-OLD man involved in a car crash in Ryde yesterday (Sunday) has died.

He was taken to St Mary's Hospital with life threatening injuries after his car, a Mitsubishi Space Runner, collided with a shop wall at St John's Road, near the junction with Player Street, shortly after 11am.

No other vehicles were involved.

The man, from Ryde, died later that day.

His next of kin have been informed and are being supported by specialist officers.

Police are appealing for witnesses to the fatal crash.

A police spokesperson said: "Officers are investigating the exact circumstances of the collision and would like to hear from anyone who saw what happened. Anyone with information is asked to contact us on 101, quoting 44180008248, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111."
Militants have carried out one shelling of Ukrainian armed forces in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in Donbas in the past 24 hours, and one soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been wounded, the press center of the ATO headquarters has reported.

"The Christmas truce lasted for almost a day, but in the evening the enemy could not resist provocations and thwarted the agreements of the Trilateral Contact Group on the ceasefire... During the execution of the combat mission in the Luhansk sector, one soldier of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was injured during the past day. He was promptly taken to the military hospital," ATO HQ said in a message on its Facebook page on Monday morning.

In particular, in the Donetsk sector, the enemy using 82-mm mortars and small arms fired at the fortifications of ATO forces near Verkhniotoretske. The militants fired a dozen mines at the Ukrainian defenders. Ukrainian military servicemen did not open fire.

"There were no violations of ceasefire in other sectors," the press center said.
The commute home Monday may be a little dicey depending on when and where a minor cold front rumbles through, according to a National Weather Service forecaster.

Meteorologists are forecasting a 50 percent chance of precipitation before the Triad begins to thaw out beginning Tuesday.

The precipitation could include freezing rain and sleet between 1 and 4 p.m. Monday before the temperature rises just enough to turn it into a cold rain.

The National Weather Service forecast is for a high of 33, while Accuweather is calling for a high of 37.

Winston-Salem Forsyth County and Guilford County schools will dismiss two hours early Monday because of the threat of freezing precipitation. Rockingham County and Davidson County will dismiss three hours early.

School officials noted that school buses are active until 6 p.m. and the dismissal is out of extreme caution for buses, staff and student drivers.

Schools will open at their usual time.

In both forcasting scenarios, the Triad appears on the edge of a cold front coming from the Southwest and another cold front coming through the Appalachian mountains.

We have a winter weather advisory for Iredell, Surry and Wilkes counties, where there could a slight accumulation of freezing rain and sleet because the roads and ground have been so cold for so long, said Patrick Wilson, a meteorologist with the Blacksburg, Va., office of the National Weather Service.

Alex Sosnowski, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, said that although air temperatures are forecast to approach and surpass the freezing mark in many locations, moisture falling from the sky or forming on these surfaces due to condensation may freeze for a time.

The good news, Wilson said, is that Tuesday brings with it a warming spell that could reach in the mid-50s. The forecast for Friday is 62.

The normal for early to mid January for the Triad is a high of 50 and a low of 30.

The thawing is expected to be accompanied by chances of rain on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, which would be welcome news for the Triad, Wilson said.

The Winston-Salem area is in moderate drought territory, so the rain would provide some relief, Wilson said.
A Turkish textile companys pledge to create at least 260 local jobs appears uncertain following its decision not to pursue the local incentives it was made eligible for in June.

HPFabrics Inc. said June 29 it had committed to reopening the former Winston-Salem plant of defunct Microfibres Inc. and add the jobs over three years.

It was made eligible for up to $125,000 each in performance-based incentives from the Winston-Salem City Council and Forsyth County Board of Commissioners.

The company, a subsidiary of Tukek Holding Inc., also was made eligible for up to $250,000 from the One North Carolina Fund, which requires local matches.

However, Assistant City Manager Derwick Paige confirmed Friday that the company has chosen not to execute the (incentive) agreement.

Bob Leak Jr., president of Winston-Salem Business Inc., said the company is just not getting the incentives. They are operating their research and development, but are not planning to scale up their production at this time.

On Monday, state Commerce spokesman David Rhoades confirmed that HPFabrics has chosen to forgo state incentives.

HPFabrics officials have not responded to calls requesting details on their current operational status. Neither Leak nor Paige said they had a work force count for the company.

The Winston-Salem Journal recently has received several messages from non-employees saying the plant had been closed.

The company initially told local economic officials that it could provide up to 390 jobs at the plant  totals included in legal notices.

However, the statement from Gov. Roy Coopers office accompanying the state incentive announcement cited 260 jobs.

HPFabrics was formed Feb. 21, according to the N.C. Secretary of States website.

Tukek told Winston-Salem economic development officials it would spend $3.85 million over five years to upgrade the facility at 3821 Kimwell Drive, along with buying new equipment and machinery.

The statement from Coopers office listed a $1.1 million capital investment over two years with the company expecting to create additional jobs and investment at the facility over a five-year period.

Tukek told Winston-Salem economic development officials the average salary for the local jobs would be $30,310, plus benefits.

By comparison, the median individual wage for Forsyth County was $33,153 in 2014  the latest data available.

That could be the main reason why the incentive request is low compared with other recent economic projects with similar or larger job pledges such as Herbalife Ltd., Corning Optical Communications LLC and the defunct North State Aviation LLC.

Typically, companies whose average wages pledge falls below a county average are limited in what they can request in local and state incentives.

Microfibres, which was based in Pawtucket, R.I., filed for Chapter 7 voluntary bankruptcy protection Jan. 27, 2016  the same day it closed its Pawtucket, Winston-Salem and Lee County, Miss., facilities and ceased production.

Microfibres said it ended its U.S. manufacturing presence in response to domestic and global textiles challenges. The company made high-performance, stain-resistant flocked fabrics for the upholstery, furniture and specialty-products markets.

The Winston-Salem plant had 125 employees when it closed. The local workforce was at 270 as recently as 2004.

The Pawtucket facility had 58 employees, and the Mississippi facility had two.

Its a pleasure to see an idle facility come to life again, opening new opportunities for North Carolinas talented workers, said Anthony Copeland, the states Commerce secretary.
Heres some unsettling news: A 19,000-pound Chinese satellite will soon come hurtling back to Earth and no one knows where it will land.

According to a Jan. 3 CBS News article, scientists expect the satellite Tiangong-1 to crash this year, but they cant say exactly when or where.

Even a couple of days before it re-enters we probably wont know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when its going to come down, Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told The Guardian last year. Not knowing when its going to come down translates as not knowing where its going to come down.

I will attempt to answer some commonly asked questions about this event in case you are worried about being crushed by a Chinese satellite.

Q: Hey, Scott, Im worried about being crushed by a Chinese satellite. What are the odds I walk out to the mailbox to find a postcard from my neighbor Brenda who is driving out to the Grand Canyon in March with her boyfriend Jeff  you know, that fellow who works down at the asbestos plant  and I am squashed flatter than a possum on a four-lane by a Chinese satellite before I have a chance to feed Brendas dogs, Jesco and Lil Bit?

Answer: According to the CBS News article, theres a 1-10,000 chance the satellite will crash into a populated area  any populated area. Considering how many populated areas are on the planet, the chances that you would be crushed before giving Jesco and Lil Bit their kibble are astronomical.

Q: Lets say the satellite misses me but makes a big hole in my yard. I nearly broke my back sowing grass and fertilizing and now some Chinese satellite makes a hole big enough to swallow a Mack truck and Im going to have to hire Kenny and his backhoe to dig it out and drag it down to the scrap yard where I hope I can get enough out of it to fix my yard. Do you think thats fair?

Answer: I do not. Fortunately, by international law, China would have to compensate you. A 2011 story in LiveScience explains that damage caused by objects from space is regulated by the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects.

The treaty specifies that you have to present your claim no later than one year following the damage. Once that is done, China would be responsible for hiring Kennys backhoe and all of the reseeding.

Q: What if it lands across the street at the Jenkins place and their boy Dakota runs out of the house and starts licking it. Hed do it, too. The boy aint right. Is licking the satellite going to hurt him even worse?

Answer: Probably.

Potentially, there may be a highly toxic and corrosive substance called hydrazine on board the spacecraft that could survive re-entry, warns the Aerospace Corporation (as reported by Space.com.) For your safety, do not touch any debris you may find on the ground nor inhale vapors it may emit.

Finally, for those who cant help but worry, the best advice is this: Dont panic, dont touch and have Kenny on standby.
Friends, I regret to say, I still remember Steve Bannon. This is, I am sure, a glitch.

I do not think I made him up. I could swear that, for a while, he was President Trumps chief strategist. Trump has issued a statement to say that he was a staffer who worked for him after I had already won the nomination, which is, I guess, a way of describing your chief strategist, a person you put on the National Security Council, whose picture even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

I am writing this in case anyone else remembers. I could swear he was a significant figure. He was always talking to the media, and other people talked about him, too. Anthony Scaramucci (also a real person, I think) said that he possessed a, er, flexibility and self-regard that most human beings lack. Would I have made that up? That seems like a mental image I wouldnt choose to have. Similarly, if I were making someone up, I would have made him look more like Oscar Isaac.

I looked at Saturday Night Live, but they just had a man in a Grim Reaper suit, which seems like a weird choice and gave me no clues as to whether the physical form I remember Bannon possessing is the right one. It cant be.

No, I am starting to doubt. On Wednesday news broke that he had given a quote to Michael Wolff calling the meeting in Trump Tower with ostensibly dirt-bearing Russians treasonous and insisting that soon, on television, Donald Trump Jr. would be cracked open like an egg.

So now he is vanishing. We are learning that Steve Bannon was a nobody, just like Paul Manafort and Whats His Name before him. The Trump White House was apparently staffed entirely by invisible men, nobodies and people who may have gotten coffee one or two times. The campaign was a ghost ship, manned by no human hand, that drifted into port with Trump strapped to the mast. There was no discernible strategy, just a roving cloud of nepotism, dog whistles and a few loose bats. Why bother with a chief strategist?

Trump boasted that he would surround himself with the best people, and he made Steve Bannon his chief strategist? Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart, the alt-right platform. The Steve Bannon I remember was given to pronouncements like Darkness is good and I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors. They thought this Steve Bannon was a man with the strategic capacity to play 18-dimensional chess and give six interviews a day.

This does sound made-up, to be quite frank with you. I am starting to doubt my own mental capacity.

Then again, Trump put Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, in charge of the Middle East, a fact I think is still true, so who knows!

Disappearances like Bannons happen regularly. One morning, you are the presidents chief confidant and blood brother. The next, it turns out that you were just a low-level staffer. Then it turns out that you didnt even go there. You wake up one morning and your fingers are gone. Then your torso starts to fade away. Soon your screaming voice is only audible to AM radio listeners and the occasional Fox News viewer in that frozen moment after the channel has changed.

But I still remember some of them. Manafort. Flynn. Bannon. I could swear that they were real, and in charge of things, and everyone was very worried about it.

Probably someone is just fiddling with the timeline, trying to fix it. Maybe what I remember is a past that no longer exists. Maybe this is why people disappear from the White House memory at a rate previously reserved for Soviet official portraits or boardrooms on the Death Star.

If whatever traveler is doing this takes the whole presidency, then, go in peace. I would gladly forget Steve Bannon. I would gladly forget all of this.
WASHINGTON -- After visiting Tehran in 2013, I wrote that the Iranian capital seemed suspended somewhere between Pyongyang and Los Angeles. We've seen this past week how passionately Iranians want the latter, not the former -- as they denounced their impoverished garrison state and demanded a prosperous, modern future.

Asking whether Iran's demonstrations create a "pre-revolutionary" situation may miss the larger point. The process of change has already begun. The regime will use its instruments of repression, and the unrest may wane. But the protests have been so widespread, in what a former U.S. intelligence officer says are 80 cities, that it will be impossible to put the whole country back in a box.

The Iranian protests have dramatized the contradictions that have been deepening since the 1979 revolution -- between aged theocratic rulers and a restless young country, between Iran's immense economic capabilities and its poor performance, and between its foreign adventures and domestic needs. The government is split, with President Hassan Rouhani expressing sympathy with the protesters and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hoping to crush dissent.

In today's world, it's hard to argue that repression won't work in the short run. But this is a long game, and while the mullahs have the guns, they seem to have lost the public's trust. As the regime weakens, there's space for a popular leader who speaks for an unhappy country. A week ago, that might have been Rouhani, but he seems to have lost his chance.

Western governments are split about how vigorously to support the Iranian protesters. President Trump's boisterous tweets have offended European governments, which argue they make it easier for the regime to blame the "Great Satan" and other outside meddlers. Last week, France, Germany and Britain balked at a U.S. request for a joint statement on Iran. Although Trump's rhetoric is often recklessly irresponsible, on this question he's right.

The West certainly should be careful about statements that encourage Iranians to open rebellion. There's moral hazard in such cheerleading. But silence is wrong. The West should urge Iranian protesters to remain peaceful (they're more likely to succeed that way) and also warn the regime that it will be held accountable for violence against its citizens. If the government cracks down hard, as it did during the 2009 Green Movement, it must face real consequences.

The West should also help keep communications open with Iran. The regime is restricting messaging, but they'll have trouble blocking it entirely. Iran has an estimated 48 million smartphones today, compared with 1 million in 2009. Iranians can access more encrypted messaging apps than the regime can block. From some southern points, cellphones can reach networks in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. The number of cellphone videos posted from Iran seems to have declined sharply through this week, but a total digital blackout will probably be impossible.

With the world focused on the repressive, destabilizing nature of the Iranian regime, the Trump administration would be idiotic to shift the subject to the Iran nuclear agreement. Trump should leave the pact in place and concentrate on Iranian meddling abroad. With Tehran distracted at home, this is an ideal time to squeeze Iran's logistical pipeline to its proxy forces in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. In challenging Iranian proxies, the U.S. and its allies will amplify the protesters' chant: "Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, I give my life for Iran."

Iran's leaders undoubtedly will blame America and its allies, regardless of what Trump and the Europeans say. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's supreme national security council, declared in a television interview last week, with spurious precision, that 27 percent to 29 percent of the protest hashtags were generated by the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia is certainly delighted by the protests, but the idea that nationwide demonstrations are the result of a foreign conspiracy is self-deluding, and also logistically impossible.

What's the lesson of the past week for the Middle East? I put that question to Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi king's son and ambassador to Washington, and here's his answer: "The Iranian regime tried to block the future. They're waging a backwards revolution. We want to go the other way." If the Saudis really are betting on youth and modernization, they're going in the right direction.

The Iranian regime was rocked last week, and it will fight back ruthlessly. But it's hard to imagine the theocracy prevailing indefinitely in a society so hungry for change. The West can't wage this fight. But it shouldn't be afraid to say who's right and wrong.

David Ignatius can be reached via Twitter: @IgnatiusPost.

The Washington Post
Collusion has become the Democrats Benghazi. Just as Hillary Clinton and her aides told some lies but werent ultimately to blame in the Benghazi tragedy, President Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russians. Too bad for the Democrats that they cant learn from how Republicans mishandled and overplayed the Benghazi affair. In the same way Benghazi became an obsession for many in the GOP, the idea of collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin is now baked into the Democratic psyche. No matter what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finds, Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media will never accept that Trump didnt collude with the Russians.

Democrats are already operating on the basis that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is a foregone conclusion  but not because they believe it. Just as it would have been heresy for a Republican to admit that Hillary was not to blame for Benghazi, Democrats are now in a position where they will draw the ire of the partys most zealous members and risk primary challenges from the left if they question the certainty of Trumps collusion with Russia. Democrats who want to avoid intra-party trouble are relying on dishonest hyperbole and tangential facts to build their defenses.

If Democrats win one house in Congress this year, they are likely to form a special committee that will investigate Trump and Russia just as Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) did with Benghazi. The result will be a massive waste of time that will serve no useful purpose. The Democrats compulsive collusion quest will not only inhibit our ability to right-size the United States relationship with Russia, but fuel the cynicism that weakens the American political fabric.

Already, Democrats are suggesting they may publish a minority report from the House Intelligence Committee detailing what they see as the inadequacies of the Russia probe. Even occasionally rational Democrats like Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) have said investigators are getting closer and closer to connecting the dots. Really? Connecting the dots to what exactly? The fact is, Democrats are obsessed with Trump generally and Russia specifically. And it appears unlikely that anything Mueller ultimately reports will give the Democrats pause. They arent going to move on and pick another battle.

As Ive said before, the quest for collusion is dead and done. If there was collusion, we would know it by now. But liberals just cant admit it. They ignore facts, distort reality and cheer each other on. It is the mirror image of what the GOP did with Benghazi. Republicans flogged that horse for too long. Ultimately, the partisan clamoring around the Benghazi incident became a disservice to the party and to the country. Democrats are unable to recognize that they are doing the same thing, and nobody will win as a result.

Ed Rogers is a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and several national campaigns.
The Trump administrations plan revealed Thursday to permit drilling in most U.S. continental shelf waters is a threat to North Carolinas well being in terms of tourism and our environment, which are intertwined. We join Gov. Roy Cooper and other government officials in opposing such a plan.

The Interior Department cited more than 3 billion barrels of oil and more than 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas it believes is present and recoverable in the Atlantic Ocean, from New Jersey to Florida, and in the Arctic, Darryl Fears of The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Responsibly developing our energy resources on the Outer Continental Shelf in a safe and well-regulated way is important to our economy and energy security, and it provides billions of dollars to fund the conservation of our coastlines, public lands and parks, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said in press release Thursday.

But its never been that easy. As the Post noted, Offshore drilling caused one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill of 215 million gallons of crude into the Gulf that fouled beaches from Louisiana to Florida. The effects of the spill are still being felt more than seven years later.

This is not a chance to be taken with our pristine North Carolina coast.

This is not a partisan issue, nor should it be. Republican governors Larry Hogan of Maryland, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Scott of Florida strongly oppose drilling off their states coasts, the Post reported. Theyre joined by nearly a dozen attorneys general, more than 100 U.S. lawmakers and the Defense Department, the Post reported.

It doesnt engender confidence that in April President Trump tried to ease safety measures for offshore drilling put in place by the Obama administration. Nor does it help that, two weeks ago, the Interior Department suspended a study conducted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on the safety of offshore oil and gas drilling platforms, as the Post reported.

Its also unnecessary, considering the energy were currently producing.

Tourism along our North Carolina beaches and coastal cities draws in about $3 billion a year, generates jobs and supports local economies. The environment should be kept as pristine as possible for the enjoyment of future generations. The Trump administration must abandon this wrong-headed plan.
The decisions on the possible extradition of leader of the Movement of New Forces party, ex-President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili would be made by the Justice Ministry after receiving conclusions of the extradition check being underway, Spokesman of Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) Andriy Lysenko has said.

"According to the European Convention on the extradition of offenders, the extradition of a person occurs under the condition of committing a crime for which, under the legislation of a party that requires extradition, a sentence of imprisonment of at least one year can be imposed. We now know that the status of Saakashvili has changed. He has already been convicted, but the Kyiv city prosecutor's office, at the request of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine ... is conducting an extradition check on Saakashvili at the request of competent Georgian authorities. With the purpose of verification and clarification of all the circumstances ... which may become the basis for refusing the extradition of the said person to another state, Saakashvili is invited to the Kyiv city prosecutor's office to provide appropriate explanations," Lysenko said on 112.Ukraine TV channel on January 5.

According to him, the extradition check has already begun, but there are no specific standards regarding the duration of this verification.

According to him, within the framework of this extradition check, the Kyiv city prosecutor's office sent inquiries to other state authorities of Ukraine, and the conclusions on the results of this check will be provided to the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine for making the final decision on extradition.
The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit [official website] ruled unanimously [opinion, PDF] Friday that a Baltimore law [text] that requires pro-life pregnancy clinics to post signage in their waiting rooms stating that they do not offer or refer women for abortions, is unconstitutional.

The court found the law violates the First Amendment [text], ruling in favor of the Greater Baltimore Center for Pregnancy Concerns [advocacy website], which provides prenatal services and counseling for women regarding alternatives to abortions.

The city had argued that the law was meant to address concerns of deceptive advertising and reduce potential health risks from delayed abortions.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III opined that the citys law did not satisfy its reasoning, calling it too loose a fit:

Baltimores chosen means here are too loose a fit with those ends, and in this case compel a politically and religiously motivated group to convey a message fundamentally at odds with its core beliefs and mission. The ordinance forces the center to utter in its own waiting room words at odds with its foundational beliefs and with the principles of those who have given their working lives to it. What the record does show is affirmative advocacy of abortion alternatives by a lawful non-profit group. None of the public advocacy of alternatives, however, suggests that the center would provide help or assistance in obtaining an abortion. Without proving the inefficacy of less restrictive alternatives, providing concrete evidence of deception, or more precisely targeting its regulation, the city cannot prevail.

The decision upholds the ruling [opinion, PDF] by Judge Marvin Garbis of the US District Court for the District of Maryland [official website] made in October 2016.

According to Baltimores attorney, the city may appeal to the US Supreme Court as well as submit a brief in the upcoming Supreme Court case [JURIST report], regarding whether California violates First Amendment rights of pro-life private crisis pregnancy centers by requiring signs on how to obtain state-sponsored services, including abortion and contraception. California argues that the Reproductive Facts Acts [text], which in October 2016 was upheld [opinion, PDF] by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website], simply informs women of their options.
The US Supreme Court [official site] on Monday blocked the execution of Georgia inmate Keith Tharpe, ordering [opinion, PDF] the federal appeals court in Atlanta to examine claims that a juror voted for the death sentence because Tharpe was black.

By a 6-3 vote, the court questioned a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit not to consider Tharpes latest appeal involving claims of racial bias on the part of the juror.

Tharpe was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of his sister-in-law. Seven years later, Tharpes attorneys obtained a signed affidavit by juror Barnie Gattie, who used racial slurs to refer to black people and stated that after studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls.

The majority reasoned that, Gatties remarkable affidavit, which he never retracted, presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpes race affected Gatties vote for a death verdict. At the very least, jurists of reason could debate whether Tharpe was shown by clear and convincing evidence that the state courts factual determination was wrong.

Justice Clarence Thomas authored a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch in which he accused the majority of bending the rules to show their concern for racial justice. Thomas argued the court should not be in the business of ceremonial handwringing. Thomas said that Gatties comments are disturbing, but the courts ruling will only prolong the inevitable, while further delaying justice for the victim and her family.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 22,500 people have passed the biometric control when crossing the Ukrainian border, of which almost 15,500 are citizens of the Russian Federation, the assistant to the head of the State Border Service of Ukraine Oleh Slobodian has said.

"More than 22,500 people have passed biometric control since the beginning of the year. This is the citizens of 70 countries that, according to the decision of the NSDC [National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine], must undergo biometric control. Out of 22,500 almost 15,500 are citizens of the Russian Federation," he said on 112.Ukraine TV on Saturday, January 6.

Slobodian said that the database of biometric control has just begun to be filled. Therefore, it is premature to link the fact that citizens of other countries are not allowed to Ukraine with its functioning.

According to the State Border Guard Service, the biometric control system works efficiently, "no serious problems have been noted."
The decision of Tbilisi City Court about finding leader of the Movement of New Forces party Mikheil Saakashvili guilty in the case on "malicious abuse of power" as Georgian president at present does not give legal grounds for Ukraine to extradite him, defending lawyer of Saakashvili Ruslan Chornolutsky has said.

"We believe that all the cases that are opened in Georgia against Saakashvili are charges over political reasons, but I want to emphasize that even if the authorities of Ukraine somehow wants to use this case to press on Saakashvili, then any actions for extradition or expulsion of him from Ukraine, even on the basis of the so-called decision of the Georgian court, will be illegal," he said on NewsOne TV Channel on Friday, January 5.

Chornolutsky said that Saakashvili today has "enough legal status that forbids Ukraine to extradite or expel him."

The lawyer said that the ex-president of Georgia has been living in Ukraine for several years, and is now in the status of a person who is suing the State Migration Service for refusing to grant him the status of a protected person after the deprivation of Ukrainian citizenship, and in accordance with criminal procedural legislation this does not allow Ukraine to extradite him.

Chornolutsky said that Saakashvili has an official certificate from the State Migration Service that he is allowed to stay in Ukraine until at least March 1, 2018, and in the future this term should be extended while the trials with the migration service are going on.

He also said that the defense of Saakashvili in Georgia has the opportunity to continue defending his interests and after the decision of the Tbilisi City Court, in particular, to file an appeal.
PHNOM PENH, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's upcoming official visit to Cambodia will be of great significance to Lancang-Mekong cooperation and China-Cambodia ties, Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Xiong Bo said in a recent signed article.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Cambodia. Li's visit to Cambodia is significant in consolidating the two countries' traditional friendship, expanding pragmatic cooperation, comprehensively promoting the development of the Lancang-Mekong River Cooperation (LMC) mechanism and jointly building a community of shared future by China and its neighbors, the ambassador said.

The friendship that was forged and cultivated by Chinese and Cambodian leaders of previous generations has grown stronger, Xiong said, adding that the historical visit of Chinese President Xi Jinpingto Cambodia in October 2016 opened a new era for the two countries to develop their comprehensive strategic partnership.

Li will attend the second LMC leaders' meeting in Phnom Penh and pay an official visit to Cambodia from Jan. 10 to 11. The LMC comprises six countries -- Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

Li's upcoming visit will inject impetus into the development of China-Cambodia ties in the new era, Xiong said.

China and Cambodia are highly complementary in their economies and share closely aligned development strategies, with great cooperation potential in the fields of global production capacity, trade and investment, infrastructure interconnectivity and energy resources, he said.

According to statistics, as of October 2017, China has been the biggest source of foreign investment for Cambodia, with the agreed investment amount to Cambodia standing at 12.57 billion U.S. dollars which accounts for 36.4 percent of the country's total foreign investment, Xiong said, while stressing China's contribution to the social and economic development of Cambodia.

China and Cambodia have maintained close cooperation on global and regional issues, understood and supported each other on issues concerning their core interests and major concerns, and jointly preserved regional peace, stability and development, he added.

The LMC mechanism has grown rapidly in less than two years and demonstrated strong vitality and robust development momentum under the political guidance of the leaders of the six countries, Xiong said.

China highly values Cambodia's contribution to the development of the LMC mechanism and is willing to build an economic development zone in the Lancang-Mekong region and promote the establishment of a community of shared future with related countries, the ambassador said.

Xiong said he expects that the upcoming LMC leaders' meeting will achieve fruitful results, chart the course for the future development of the mechanism and inject impetus, so as to benefit the people in the region.

The Communist Party of China successfully held its 19th National Congress in October 2017, identifying the direction and goal of China's foreign policy in the new era which is holding high the banner of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit, promoting the establishment of a new type of international relations and a community of shared future for mankind, he said.

"We believe that, under the guidance of the leadership of China and Cambodia, as well as joint efforts of regional countries, the Chinese premier's visit will make new contributions to the further development of the China-Cambodia comprehensive strategic partnership, and regional peace, stability and prosperity," Xiong said.
Steve Bannon (Xinhua file photo)

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Steve Bannon, former White Housechief strategist, apologized on Sunday for comments he had made and was quoted in a new controversial book calling U.S. President Donald Trump's eldest son's 2016 meeting with Russians "treasonous and "unpatriotic."

"Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around," Bannon said in a statement to news website Axios, breaking five days of silence since his comments were revealed.

"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate," Bannon said. "He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends."

"My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda," Trump's ex top strategist said, adding he regrets his delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Trump's eldest son.

Britain's The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday first revealed that Bannon, quoted from excerpts of the book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," described the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer and Trump' s son and son-in-law as " treasonous" and " unpatriotic."

Later on Wednesday, Trump said in a White House official statement that Bannon had "lost his mind" and had "no influence" within his government.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also fiercely slapped Michael Wolff's book -- Fire and Fury, saying that it is "filled with false and misleading accounts," adding that Trump felt "furious" and" disgusted" about Bannon's comments in the book.

Since then, Bannon has been greatly isolated from his political allies and conservative donors, including billionaire Rebekah Mercer and her father Robert Mercer.

Bannon was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months during the 2016 U.S. elections. He became the White House chief strategist after Trump took office in Jan. 2017 and left the White House in August before returning to his perch as chairman of right-wing Breitbart News.
LINCOLN  Last month at the Tecumseh State Prison, staff and management discussed whether to close areas of the prison due to a shortage of workers, and that a recent $2,500 hiring bonus had not attracted as many new corrections officers as expected.

At least 100 job vacancies existed as of Dec. 13, according to a state prison memo about the meeting, and each day, five or six prison employees from Omaha were traveling to fill empty posts at the rural prison.

Warden (Brad) Hansen said it is constantly being discussed ... how to manage with the lower staffing levels, the memo said.

A group of state senators said Friday that memos like the one from Tecumseh make it clear that Nebraskas prison troubles are far from over.

While progress has been made, the Department of Corrections still faces significant and concerning challenges, said State Sen. Kate Bolz of Lincoln.

Bolz joined nine other senators at a Friday press conference to discuss legislation introduced this session to address long-running problems in the state corrections system, including overcrowding, understaffing, violent uprisings and attacks on staff.

Among the measures is Legislative Bill 871, introduced Friday by Lincoln Sen. Anna Wishart and 13 other senators, to allocate an unspecified amount of money to corrections to provide longevity raises for workers systemwide.

Wishart said that some newly hired employees earn more than longtime corrections officers, which is unfair and works to fuel the high turnover rates among prison workers. Turnover rates have been 25 percent for all workers and even higher among security staff.

State corrections spokeswoman Dawn-Renee Smith said that its no secret that Tecumseh has struggled with staffing issues, but said that using staff from Omaha, adopting 12-hour shifts and shutting down nonessential posts at times are among the strategies being used to deal with it.

In recent months, the agency also has offered hiring bonuses and wage increases to improve retention of staff at some prisons.

But some senators want more action. They have introduced proposals to study staffing levels at state prisons and to plan for the release of parole-eligible inmates if the state doesnt reduce overcrowding to less than 140 percent of capacity by July 2020, triggering an overcrowding emergency. One bill would move up the emergency to July of this year.

Nebraska prisons currently hold about 155 percent of their design capacity, and the senators said that public safety would be threatened if theres no plan for the possible emergency, which might require the release of about 1,000 inmates.

One lawmaker who serves on a legislative prison oversight committee, Lincoln Sen. Suzanne Geist, said that moving up the emergency date is a mistake.

Corrections, she said, is making progress in reducing overcrowding, and though its been slower than expected, the department deserves more time to work it out.

Longevity raises, Geist added, are an issue for labor negotiations, not the Legislature.
The Nebraska Hospital Association is the unified voice for Nebraskas hospitals and health systems, providing leadership and resources to enhance the delivery of quality patient care and services to Nebraska communities. Our hospitals employ more than 42,000 people across the state and provide care to more than 11,000 patients each day.

As health care professionals, we clearly recognize that motorcycle helmets have been proven to save lives, prevent serious head trauma, and lower medical care costs. For these reasons, we strongly oppose any attempt to weaken our current state law that requires all riders to wear protective head gear.

LB368, introduced by state Sen. John Lowe of Kearney and prioritized by Sen. Bob Krist of Omaha, threatens to significantly weaken our law by removing the protective head gear requirement for any rider over the age of 20. In Nebraska, fewer than 1 percent of all licensed motorcycle operators are age 20 or younger.

Those who survive motorcycle crashes often rely on state and federal programs to cover expensive long-term care costs. Studies show unhelmeted riders involved in crashes are less likely to have adequate insurance coverage and more likely to have higher hospital costs than helmeted riders. From 2008 to 2014, the total charges for all Nebraska riders hospitalized as a result of a motorcycle injury was over $74 million.

Our hospitals are continually focused on the education and prevention of injuries. Requiring all motorcyclists to wear a helmet is a simple, preventive law that makes a proven difference in the cost and type of care necessitated by brain injury patients.

We urge our senators to vote no on any legislative action that would weaken our current universal (all-rider) motorcycle helmet law.

Andy Hale, Lincoln

Some helmet facts

Our state policymakers are once again considering a legislative bill to remove the requirement for motorcyclists to wear a helmet. Senators are being led to believe that Nebraska is losing millions of dollars because motorcyclists on their way to Sturgis, S.D., avoid our state due to our helmet law.

Here are facts that need to be examined:

- Recommended Route: For most travelers across the U.S. heading to South Dakota, recommended routes will bypass Nebraska. Even for those living in Omaha and other communities along our eastern state border, I-29 through Iowa is likely the recommended route.

- Lodging Revenue: Since the Sturgis Rally is in August, peak travel period, lodging options along central Nebraska roadways may be limited. Lodging revenue must be based on room availability. Some properties may be booked at full capacity at that time.

- Gas, Restaurant Revenue: With the numerous concerts and events scheduled, we can expect that riders heading to Sturgis are anxious to get to their destination. Along the way, motorcyclists may need to purchase a few gallons of fuel or stop for a meal.

- Supporting Tourism: States do not need to repeal a helmet law to demonstrate support of tourism. Rolling Thunder is one of the largest bike rallies in the country attracting some 500,000 riders to Washington, D.C., where helmets are required. All-rider helmet use states such as California, Nevada, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee, North Carolina, Washington and Georgia host big bike events and races.

Florida hosts several major bike events, including the Daytona Bike Rally. Although Florida does not require riders to wear a helmet, all surrounding states do.

Nebraska lodging tax revenues hit an all-time high in 2015 and since that time have continued to see positive growth. The number of licensed motorcycle operators in Nebraska has nearly tripled during the past three decades. Rather than repeal our law that saves lives and helps to prevent needless injuries, we encourage Nebraska to host motorcycle events to support tourism.

Rose White, Omaha
A new year is a time for us to reflect on the progress weve made, look ahead and recommit ourselves to our goals.

With thousands of talented students and faculty returning to campus, and important initiatives underway across our University and state that will grow Nebraska for the future, Im filled with gratitude and anticipation for what 2018 will bring.

The past year was a period of remarkable transformation for our University.

There were challenges, yes  and those arent going away. Chief among them is the difficult reality that we are dealing with budget cuts at a time when the role of our public university in growing our states economy and quality of life has never been more important. We understand the states fiscal situation, but I will continue to advocate for a strong, affordable university that serves all of Nebraska and changes lives here and around the world.

Amid challenges, there was also success, and there was opportunity. There were inspiring stories of impact and partnership that showed me Nebraskans have their eyes on the horizon.

We celebrated a record-high enrollment  53,000 future nurses and doctors, farmers and ranchers, teachers and entrepreneurs across our four campuses. That wouldnt be possible without strong partnerships with the state and private sector that help keep our tuition affordable and the support of students and parents who believe in the power of a university education.

We produced another 11,000 graduates for the workforce  talent on which Nebraska companies rely and who will someday create jobs and businesses that we cant even envision yet.

We completed the boldest public-private partnership in Nebraska history, the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, a shared venture between the university, private donors, Legislature and governor, city, county and people of Nebraska. This facility will transform cancer care and research for the one of every two Nebraskans who will be diagnosed at some point in their lives. The images of the cancer centers first patients  like a woman named Helen, an adenoid cystic carcinoma patient who got up at 3:30 a.m. to drive from her home near Falls City to receive treatment  are ones I wont soon forget.

We continued to lead the way in research that matters to Nebraska and the world. Our facultys work in water and agriculture, powered by partnerships with farmers and ranchers across our state, is helping to feed a growing global population that will require twice as much food by 2050. The work our faculty are doing to keep our war fighters safe is meeting the needs of our partners at USSTRATCOM and the Department of Defense. And those are just a few examples.

What keeps me up at night is that we are facing fiscal challenges during a period of such momentum. Were in the process now of cutting our spending by $30 million, a rethinking of the way we do business that has yielded efficiencies that we can be proud of. But we will not close our shortfall without impacting academic programs and losing jobs. And the cuts would be more significant if we had not already raised tuition this year and next. Further cuts would only deepen the impact, limiting our ability to educate the future workforce.

But I hear from Nebraskans who are convinced theres never been a more important time to join on a plan for our states future.

Hank Bounds is president of the University of Nebraska.

A new year is a time for us to reflect on the progress weve made, look ahead and recommit ourselves to our goals.With thousands of talented students and faculty returning to campus, and important initiatives underway across our University and state that will grow Nebraska for the future, Im filled with gratitude and anticipation for what 2018 will bring.The past year was a period of remarkable transformation for our University.There were challenges, yes  and those arent going away. Chief among them is the difficult reality that we are dealing with budget cuts at a time when the role of our public university in growing our states economy and quality of life has never been more important. We understand the states fiscal situation, but I will continue to advocate for a strong, affordable university that serves all of Nebraska and changes lives here and around the world.Amid challenges, there was also success, and there was opportunity. There were inspiring stories of impact and partnership that showed me Nebraskans have their eyes on the horizon.We celebrated a record-high enrollment  53,000 future nurses and doctors, farmers and ranchers, teachers and entrepreneurs across our four campuses. That wouldnt be possible without strong partnerships with the state and private sector that help keep our tuition affordable and the support of students and parents who believe in the power of a university education.We produced another 11,000 graduates for the workforce  talent on which Nebraska companies rely and who will someday create jobs and businesses that we cant even envision yet.We completed the boldest public-private partnership in Nebraska history, the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, a shared venture between the university, private donors, Legislature and governor, city, county and people of Nebraska. This facility will transform cancer care and research for the one of every two Nebraskans who will be diagnosed at some point in their lives. The images of the cancer centers first patients  like a woman named Helen, an adenoid cystic carcinoma patient who got up at 3:30 a.m. to drive from her home near Falls City to receive treatment  are ones I wont soon forget.We continued to lead the way in research that matters to Nebraska and the world. Our facultys work in water and agriculture, powered by partnerships with farmers and ranchers across our state, is helping to feed a growing global population that will require twice as much food by 2050. The work our faculty are doing to keep our war fighters safe is meeting the needs of our partners at USSTRATCOM and the Department of Defense. And those are just a few examples.What keeps me up at night is that we are facing fiscal challenges during a period of such momentum. Were in the process now of cutting our spending by $30 million, a rethinking of the way we do business that has yielded efficiencies that we can be proud of. But we will not close our shortfall without impacting academic programs and losing jobs. And the cuts would be more significant if we had not already raised tuition this year and next. Further cuts would only deepen the impact, limiting our ability to educate the future workforce.But I hear from Nebraskans who are convinced theres never been a more important time to join on a plan for our states future.Hank Bounds is president of the University of Nebraska.
We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to form
Maple Street resident Kevin Bos, centre, was happy to see Liberal MLA Norm Letnick, left, and Ben Stewart, the partys candidate in the Kelowna West byelection, show up at his house on Sunday.
Thirty-two crew members -- 30 Iranians and two Bengalese -- have gone missing after two vessels collided off China's east coast Saturday evening, China's Ministry of Transport said on Sunday.

The accident happened at about 8 pm Saturday, when the Panama-registered oil tanker SANCHI and the Hong Kong cargo ship CF CRYSTAL collided 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze Estuary.

The oil tanker caught on fire after the collision and the 32 crew members onboard went missing, while 21 crew members on the cargo ship were rescued, as the damage to the ship did not compromise safety, the statement said.

By 9 am Sunday, a maritime law enforcement vessel and two special rescue vessels arrived at the site to conduct search and rescue operations.

The South Korean coast guard also sent a vessel and rescue helicopter to the spot.

Fire experts, the Chinese coast guard, three specialized cleaning vessels and a high-power tug were on their way to the accident site to assist with rescue and investigation work.

The floating oil tanker is still burning with oil spilling into the sea, the statement said.

The 274-meter-long oil tanker, which belongs to Bright Shipping of Iran, was heading from Iran to South Korea, carrying 136,000 tons of gas condensate with 32 crew members.

The Hong Kong cargo ship, 225 meters in length, belongs to Wenlin Changfeng Shipping from Zhejiang province. Carrying 64,000 tons of food, the ship was bound for Guangdong province from the United States with 21 Chinese crew members onboard.

[email protected]
The remains of a house destroyed in an early morning fire are seen in Pubnico Head, N.S. on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. The close knit fishing village of Pubnico Head, Nova Scotia has been shaken to its core by a house fire that killed four people early Sunday, including at least two children. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
A CN locomotive moves in the railway yard in Dartmouth, N.S. on February 23, 2015. The potential dismantling of the North American Free Trade Agreement poses the biggest risk to Canada's railways not benefiting this year from healthy economies and higher demand to move crude oil, say industry observers. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
Experts slam Bannon for likening China to Nazi Germany

Steve Bannon (Xinhua file photo)

The comparison of China to Nazi Germany made by Steven Bannon in an explosive book about the Trump presidency was met with a hail of criticism from Chinese experts who said his comments showcased anxiety among the US elite toward a rising China.

US President Donald Trump's former chief political strategist was quoted as saying that China is on the verge of becoming a new Nazi Germany in the controversial book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White Houseby journalist Michael Wolff.

"China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930," Bannon was quoted as saying. "The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the '30s. You're going to have a hyper nationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

Bannon also referred to China as the real enemy of the US and the first front in a new Cold War. "We don't get China right, we don't get anything right," he said.

"Bannon's extremist expression shows that the elite in the US regard China as a big threat to the US-led global order. They treat China as a potential destroyer of world prosperity and stability and distort China's diplomatic policies," Diao Daming, an associate professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times.

It reflected anxiety among the elite over the US recession and the rise of China in the past few years, Diao asserted.

Bannon has long been critical of China and spreads the China threat theory, said Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University's Institute of International Relations.

As a radical in the political arena, he is dedicated to shaping strong anti-China rhetoric and calling on the US to take a tougher strategy toward China, he noted.

Since China and the US have established diplomatic ties in 1979, the US has been providing investment, technologies and markets to China in the hope of integrating the country into the Western international order. However, as China ascends to a major global power, the elite in the US policy community have gradually lost their confidence in their own power and call on the US government to define China as a strategic competitor, Li said. Bannon was calling for a shift in strategy while criticizing Trump's attitude toward China as "not tough enough," he said.

According to Breitbart News, a far-right American website managed by Bannon himself as executive chairman, he compared China to Nazi Germany and referred to the US as "a de facto 'tributary state' to China" in a speech during his visit in Japan in early December. He also reportedly called for the US and East Asian allies to unify and constrain China's "frightening," "audacious" and "global" ambitions.
China has dispatched several vessels to search for and rescue crew members after a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter collided Saturday evening, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Sunday.

Spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks in Beijing in response to a question about the collision of the two vessels off the east China coast.

The Panama-registered oil tanker is seen on fire in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze River's estuary, Jan. 7, 2018. Thirty-two crew members, including 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis, have gone missing after two vessels collided off China's east coast on Saturday evening, China's Ministry of Transport said Sunday. (Xinhua)

"China attaches great importance to the accident," said Geng, adding that some of the crew members have been rescued while others are still missing.

Geng said China also dispatched several specialized cleaning vessels to prevent secondary disasters.

According to reports, the collision occurred at around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze River's estuary.

Reports say 32 crew members from the oil tanker, including 30 Iranian nationals and two Bangladeshi nationals, have gone missing.

Geng said the cause of the accident is still under investigation.
A PLA navy pilot prepares to fly over the Bohai Sea in 2016. Photo: VCG

As China's aircraft carrier fleet expands, the Chinese navy is exploring ways to streamline the training process for its pilots by introducing a new generation of aircraft to aeronautical university training programs, Chinese military experts said on Thursday.

According to the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) official website 81.cn, China's Naval Aeronautical University deployed a third generation domestically-made training plane for its pilot cadets in the skies of Bohai Bay on Tuesday.

Although the report did not specifically name the aircraft used in the training, Song Zhong, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times it was likely to be the Navy JL-10H, also known as the L-15B Falcon supersonic jet.

It marks the first public reported deployment of the L-15B jet trainer, which was developed by Hongdu Aviation Industry in Nanchang, East China's Jiangxi Province.

The use of such an advanced trainer jet at university-level training programs shows the PLA Navy is exploring a more streamlined training system which will conclude after only two stages at the university and the navy. This is a significant streamlining of the previous process, which involved a three-level system consisting of training at military bases between the two, Song said.

"The PLA Navy has indeed been devoting increasing efforts to training its pilots, especially for aircraft carrier-based planes," Zhang Ye, a research fellow at the People's Liberation Army Naval Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Testing the waters

China currently has only one aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which was commissioned into service in 2012. The country's second carrier and the first domestically-built one, widely known as the Type-001A, is expected to soon undergo sea tests.

The sea trial for the Type-001A could be conducted as early as the beginning of 2018, Zhang Ye previously told the Global Times.

The Type-001A is similar in appearance to the Liaoning, and also has a ski jump-style launch ramp on its flight deck where aircraft are launched and recovered. It is thought to be able to carry about 40 jets, roughly the same number as the Liaoning, Yin Zhuo, a senior researcher at the PLA Naval Equipment Research Center, told a China Central Television (CCTV) military program in December.

"The number of pilots for fixed wing shipboard aircraft should be around twice as many as the carrier can carry, that is to say, it will be somewhere between 80 and 100," Xu Guangyu, a retired major general and senior adviser of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Recruits needed

The Naval Aeronautical University opened in 2017, the result of merging the navy's aviation academy and its aeronautical and astronautical university, according to the PLA Navy official WeChat account on May 31. The university recruited 450 pilot cadets in its first round of admissions.

The Chinese navy will urgently need about 400 pilots, as China is expected to roll out at least four aircraft carriers in the near future, Song noted. He also stressed that instead of using pilots from the PLA Air Force who fly from ground bases and have developed a different flying experience than that needed for shipboard flights, it was better to train new pilots for aircraft carrier-based tasks.

The subjects for the navy-trained pilots cover the ski-jumping launch style for China's current aircraft carriers with upward decks, as well as catapult take-offs for the country's future straight-deck aircraft carriers using an electromagnetic launcher system, Xu said.

The catapult take-off training includes both ground-based and shipboard exercises. By the time the shipboard training is completed, China will have its third aircraft carrier with an electromagnetic launcher system ready, Xu noted.

The university has its main campus in Yantai, East China's Shandong Province, and three other campuses in Northeast China's Liaoning, North China's Hebei and Northwest China's Shaanxi Provinces.

The PLA Navy's pilot-training university facilities are mainly located in northern China because the region has better weather conditions and longer training-friendly hours for the pilots than the south of the country, Song said.

The first batch of navy-trained pilots successfully completed night missions over the South China Sea in a new type of fighter jet in August 2017.

Independently trained by the PLA South China Sea Fleet, the pilots underwent multiple night flight mission training, including solo flights, multi-fighter coordination, target search and strikes over the South China Sea, CCTV reported. All training missions were accomplished in one operation, it said.
Kilkennys Aut Even Hospital was celebrated by the Irish Heart Foundation for leading the way in heart health at the charitys annual Healthy Eating and Active@Work Awards.

The charitys flagship health programme recognises efforts to improve healthy eating practices and physical activity among staff across the country.

According to the national charity fighting heart disease and stroke, there are real bottom line benefits to workplace health promotion that provide wins for both the employer and the employee in terms of reduced absenteeism, increased productivity and improved employee morale.

A pioneer in the field of workplace health, the IHF has been boosting the heart health of almost half a million employees in more than 400 companies nationwide for over 20 years through its annual Workplace Awards.

Workplaces can apply for Bronze, Silver or Gold levels in both awards.

An example of Gold Healthy Eating Award criteria is that fish is offered at least 50% of the week on the hot/cold menu, and an example of Gold Active@Work Award criteria is that a company develops a workplace policy encouraging physical activity.

This year, Aut Even Hospital was presented with a Bronze Healthy Eating Award by the IHF for its ongoing commitment to providing and promoting healthy meal options in its restaurant.

Ultimately, the charity hopes to support companies to achieve as high a level as possible over time.

Presenting the awards, Tim Collins, CEO of the Irish Heart Foundation, said: 80% of premature heart disease and stroke is preventable through lifestyle change.

This represents a huge opportunity to positively influence peoples cardiovascular risk though encouraging and supporting active living, healthy eating and other healthy behaviours.

The workplace is an ideal setting for health promotion and the promotion of physical activity as a positive health behaviour.

Professor Donal OShea, Clinical Lead for Obesity with the HSE, said: Low levels of physical activity have a detrimental impact over time, increasing risk of heart disease and stroke, the leading cause of death and disability.
A local councillor has called for more investment in primary care in light of the ongoing overcrowding crisis at St Luke's Hospital in Kilkenny.

Last week, the hospital was consistently among the worst affected in terms of patients on trolleys and wards, according to figures from the INMO. While the beginning of this week has seen a reduction on that of last week, today's figure of 25 people on trolleys and wards is still at the higher end of the scale.

Local councillor Pat Fitzpatrick says we need to invest properly in primary care facilities to help solve the problem.

"It is fair to say that about 99% of care is delivered at the primary level by well trained, professional health care practitioners, yet this Government only commits around 2% of the annual health budget to primary care," he said.

"It clearly doesnt make sense. In the UK 9% of the budget is dedicated to primary care, such a level of funding in Ireland would have a transformative effect of the health service."

The communities I represent across North Kilkenny are in urgent need of proper investment in local medical infrastructure. The development of more primary care centres in county Kilkenny both north and south would allow local people suffering from medical problems to be cared for in their own community where they can build a relationship with their medical advisors at all levels, it would undoubtably improve patient outcomes and importantly, would reduce the pressures being experienced in St Lukes Hospital presently.

Cllr Fitzpatrick said the delivery of a world class primary care model is critical if overcrowding in St Lukes Hospital and other regional hospitals is to be tackled.

Working to deliver a world class primary care model is so important to the future of health care in this country, I believe that we need to establish a special office tasked with the responsibility of delivering a world class primary care model," he said.

"This office needs to be resourced and made up of the best medical minds currently involved in developing the primary care model. Take it out of the political sphere and allow the experts get on with it.
Gan Wei, the wife of Jia Yueting, founder of debt-laden technology company LeEco, posted on her Weibo account on Sunday a summary of her efforts to resolve the company's debt problems by working with a task force.

Gan said that e-commerce platform LeMall.com, a subsidiary of LeEco, had been sold to Leshi's Tianjin unit, subsidiary of the listed company Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp, at 92.9 million yuan ($14.32 million). This transaction involving core assets partly resolved the debt of the listed company, the post said.

The main business of the Tianjin unit is marketing smart and internet TVs.

Shares in smartphone maker Coolpad Group worth HK$807 million ($103 million) were transferred to China Merchants Bank (CMB) in a partial debt-equity swap. The debt owed to CMB amounted to about HK$1.4 billion, so almost 60 percent was settled in this way, the post said. Gan will seek communication with CMB to un-freeze other assets so that more debts could be paid, the post added.

Jia resigned from Coolpad as executive director on November 17, 2017.

Gan expressed her gratitude to investors in LeEco and Coolpad Group, saying more understanding and time was needed, the post said. Gan was entrusted by Jia to settle the debts. Jia has been ordered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission's Beijing branch to return to China and settle the debt.
(Kitco News) - A famous and likely the most expensive bottle of vodka made out of gold, which appeared on one of the House of Cards episodes, was stolen from a bar in Copenhagen last week.

But, as it turned out, the thief was only after the alcohol, as the bottle itself was found discarded three days later.

The unique Russo-Baltique bottle  worth about $1.3 million  is made out of 6.6 pounds of gold, 6.6 pounds of silver and has a diamond-encrusted replica of the Russian Imperial Eagle on its cap.

It was stolen from Denmark's trendy Cafe 33 on Tuesday and found on Friday by a building site six miles (10km) north of Copenhagen, still intact but empty, said local police.

The bottle appeared on season three of the popular Netflix House of Cards show. The episode depicted the U.S. President Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, being served the bottle.

After its appearance on the show, the vodka bottle was loaned to Cafe 33 by the Latvia-based Dartz Motor Company and was displayed uninsured, according to reports.

The bar released the video footage of the theft, which shows a masked man looking for the bottle with a flashlight and quickly making his escape after locating it.

Owner of the bar, Brian Ingberg, told AFP that somebody most likely stole a set of keys from a former employee.
By Wayne Cole and Charlotte Greenfield

SYDNEY/WELLINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - The Australian and New Zealand dollars held firm on Monday as optimism about the global economy underpinned commodity prices and riskier assets, encouraging bulls to steadily wear away at chart resistance.

The Australian dollar was steady at $0.7861 and just off a three-month high of $0.7875.

The currency has been having trouble clearing a chart barrier around $0.7884/7892, a double top from October, though that means a break higher would be all the more bullish.

Sean Callow, a senior currency strategist at Westpac, noted leveraged funds had sold a net 55,700 Aussie contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the past three weeks.

Indeed, positions have turned net short for the first time in six months, suggesting the risk those shorts would have to be covered if the currency kept rising from here.

"Curious to see net sales despite the commodity rally and U.S. dollar weakness," said Callow. "It's a helpful backdrop for further Aussie gains."

Prices for some of Australia's major commodities have been rallying on a combination of concerted global economic growth, resilient demand from China and a soft U.S. dollar.

Iron ore futures climbed 5.8 percent last week alone and the steel-making mineral is Australia's single biggest export earner.

Domestically, the market will have to navigate data on jobs ads and approvals to build new homes on Tuesday and retail sales on Thursday. The latter disappointed for much of last year and another poor result could set the Aussie back.

The New Zealand dollar has also benefited from recent gains in dairy prices, as well as the appetite for risk trades in general.

The kiwi had edged up to $0.7178 on Monday, just under last week's three-month top of $0.7187. Resistance comes in at $0.7217, which was a peak from October.

The currency had eked out gains of around 2 percent against the U.S. dollar since the week before Christmas.

"With risk appetites remaining solid, market positioning short, the domestic data calendar light and the U.S. dollar on the back foot, the bias is for upward moves to continue in the near-term," said Philip Borkin, senior economist at ANZ Bank, in a research note.

New Zealand government bonds eased, sending yields 3 basis point higher at the long end of the curve.

Australian government bond futures were little changed with the three-year bond contract off half a tick at 97.890. The 10-year contract was steady at 97.3600.

(Editing by Sam Holmes)
SEOUL, Jan 8 (Reuters) - South Korea's government was suspected of buying U.S. dollars around the 1,050 won mark on Monday, two foreign exchange traders told Reuters.

"The (foreign exchange) authorities probably took actions to show that they will not allow the won to rise beyond the 1,050 level," one trader told Reuters.

The won touched as high as 1,058.8 against the greenback in early trade on Monday, its highest intraday level since October 2014. The currency sharply extended losses to 1,069.9.

(Reporting by Kyungho Lee, Dahee Kim; Editing by Sam Holmes)
Urumqi Railway Bureau said 700 China-Europe trains ran through the capital of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017.

Westbound freight trains from other parts of China stopped in Urumqi for goods adjustment before exiting the country through Horgos or Alataw Pass for destinations in Central Asia or Europe.

Thanks to streamlined procedures and better communication with railway authorities in other countries, the transportation time for China-Europe trains has been shortened and departure frequency has increased, according to the bureau.

Last year, 70 percent of China-Europe trains exited China from Xinjiang.

"Urumqi plans to send 1,400 China-Europe trains in 2018, further improving connectivity with Central Asian and European cities," said Nan Jun, vice general manager of Xinjiang Xintie International Logistics Company.
BUDAPEST, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Hungary's State Audit Office (ASZ) has fined the main, nationalist opposition party Jobbik 331.66 million forints ($1.29 million) for an anti-government billboard campaign funded by a wealthy adversary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Jobbik, which entered parliament in 2010 on a radical far-right agenda, is now projecting a centrist image in a bid to unseat Orban at an election due in April, where his Fidesz looks well-placed to retain power.

Confirming the findings of a preliminary report, Hungary's State Audit Office (ASZ) said Jobbik had been fined for running an advertising campaign at below market prices.

The ASZ gave Jobbik 15 days to pay the fine, equal to the price advantage the party received illegally for the campaign, which accused Orban and some of his associates of corruption.

The fine amounted to more than two-thirds of Jobbik's annual state subsidy of 475.8 million forints, and the party said the "court-martial" levy could cripple its election campaign. Jobbik has denied wrongdoing.

Jobbik's subsidy should also be cut by the same amount as the fine, ASZ spokesman Balint Horvath said. Jobbik used billboards owned by tycoon Lajos Simicska, an estranged Orban ally who has since become a supporter of the far right.

Orban says Simicska hijacked Jobbik. Both the party and the tycoon deny this.

Officials at the State Treasury and at Jobbik were not immediately available for comment.

Jobbik received public funds worth nearly a billion forints in 2015 and 2016. The ASZ said Jobbik's finances over that period were not sufficiently transparent.

The ASZ, which is led by ex-Fidesz lawmaker Laszlo Domokos, has rejected accusations of politicking against Orban's foes. It said the investigation was part of a regular biennial review of parties that receive public funding.

A rally last month against the crackdown drew about a thousand Jobbik supporters, though the turnout fell well short of similar demonstrations over the past year. Fidesz commanded 39 percent of all voters in November, according to a survey by pollster Median published in the weekly HVG. Jobbik was backed by 11 percent, while the Socialists were a distant third with 7 percent.

($1 = 257.56 forints)

(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; editing by Mark Heinrich)
BUDAPEST, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Hungary posted a 334.9 billion forint ($1.30 billion) budget deficit in December, the Economy Ministry said on Monday, adding that the cash-flow based deficit widened to 1.974 trillion forints by the end of December.

In its statement, the ministry did not provide any further details on the preliminary figures.

In December the Economy Ministry said it expected hundreds of billions of forints worth of additional European Union development funds to flow in by the end of the year, adding that there was a possibility of undershooting its 2017 deficit target. The 2017 target was 2.4 percent of economic output. ($1 = 257.28 forints)

(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs and Sandor Peto)
DUBLIN, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Ireland will hold two bond auctions during the first quarter, on Feb. 8 and March 8, after kicking off its funding drive for the year with the sale of 4 billion euros of 10-year debt last week, the debt agency said on Monday. The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) plans to issue between 14 billion and 18 billion euros of long-term debt in 2018 and covered around a quarter of that with last week's sale via a syndication of banks. Ireland will also hold a treasury bill auction on March 15, the NTMA said in a statement.

(Reporting by Conor Humphries; Editing by Peter Graff)

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.
HANOI, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Following is a snapshot of Vietnamese dong exchange rates in the official and unofficial markets, indicative SJC gold prices in Hanoi and interbank offered rates at 0502 GMT.

January 8 USD/VND mid-point 22,401 USD/VND interbank 22,709/22,710 USD/VND unofficial 22,690/22,720 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 36.42/36.64

Interbank offered rates Overnight 1.4-2.0

1 week 1.6-2.1

1 month 3.2-3.6

3 months 4.4-5.0

NOTES: As of Jan. 4, 2016 the State Bank of Vietnam has begun setting the mid-point rate on daily basis, allowing dollar/dong transactions to move in a band of +/- 3 percent around the mid point. The dong's exchange rate against other currencies is not restricted by a band. Interbank offered rates are the latest indicative bid/ask prices, quoted from market sources.

One tael is equivalent to 37.5 grams or 1.21 troy ounces. SJC gold prices are quoted by state-owned Saigon Jewelry Co.

For more interbank rate fixings released at 0400 GMT, click on .

For Vietnam market overview click on: Vietnam's bonds market auctions: Bonds auction results: (Compiled by Hanoi Newsroom; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath)
By Shihar Aneez

COLOMBO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka aims to raise $500 million this month via development bonds and is in the process of divesting two state-owned hotels, the central bank and a ministry said on Monday, as the government faces unprecedented debt repayment this year.

President Maithripala Sirisenea's administration must repay an estimated 1.97 trillion rupees ($12.85 billion) in 2018 - a record high - including $2.9 billion of foreign loans, and a total of $5.36 billion of interest.

The central bank announced plans to raise $500 million in 2-year, 3-year, 4-year, and 5-year Sri Lanka Development Bonds (SLDB) out of planned $3 billion for this year at both fixed and floating rate arrangement, the central bank said in a posting on its website.

The cabinet last week approved plans to borrow some $5 billion in 2018, including $2 billion of sovereign bond sales and $3 billion of development bonds to refinance big debts that fall due this year. A total of about $2.5 billion worth of SLDBs mature this year.

The government has also called for a request for proposal (RFP) to find investors for 45 billion rupees ($293 million) worth of Grand Hyatt Colombo property that includes a 458-room, 5-star hotel and 100 apartments.

The government has offered 100 percent shares in Grand Hyatt Colombo property and said an investor would be selected through a competitive process, the Ministry of Public Enterprise Development said in a posting on its website.

The government has entered into a 20-year management contract with the Hyatt Group to run the hotel, which is due to be completed and to begin operations this year.

The government also said it was seeking investors for a 51 percent controlling stake in a 350-room 5-star hotel in the heart of the capital, Colombo, which Hilton International runs under a management contract.

The ministry said Hilton International had indicated its desire to renew the contract after the current one ends in 2019.

The divestment of state-owned hotels comes as the repayment of expensive infrastructure foreign loans starts this year, which has left the island nation facing a debt crisis.

Central bank governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy said last week the government should go for the sovereign bond as early as possible as there was ample money in global capital markets ahead of expected rate increases by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The government is trying to pass a Liability Management Act that would allow it to borrow more than budget limit as it tries to manage a debt repayments over the next two years. It also plans to reschedule some loans. The $81 billion economy expected foreign currency outflows of $5.6 billion in the next 12 months including loans, securities, and deposits, compared with a current $8 billion in foreign exchange reserves, according to central bank data. ($1 = 153.6000 Sri Lankan rupees)

(Reporting by Shihar Aneez; Editing by Robert Birsel)
(Updates with details)

LISBON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Portugal's IGCP debt agency said on Monday that the government's net borrowing requirement in 2018 is around 10.9 billion euros and that it plans on gross issuance of 15 billion euros worth of bonds.

It said bond issuance will be carried out through regular auctions as in previous years, to be held on the second, fourth or fifth Wednesday of every month. It will also sell new bonds via syndication through banks.

IGCP said it will carry out debt buybacks in order to reduce "excessive concentration of redemptions over time".

Treasury bill auctions will continue to be held on the third Wednesday of every month, and on the first Wednesday if there is sufficient demand.

In the first quarter IGCP will hold T-bill auctions on Jan. 17, Feb. 21 and March 21. A total of up to 4.5 billion euros of bills will be issued in the quarter, IGCP said.

Portuguese bonds put in one of the strongest performances in the euro zone last year as the country's economy grew rapidly and it regained investment grade status from rating agencies after several years being classed as junk.

(Reporting By Axel Bugge; Editing by Catherine Evans)
(Adds hopes to list in early February in paragraph 5)

MADRID, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Spanish residential developer Metrovacesa, which was taken over by creditors during the country's property crash, said it plans to list on the stock market, highlighting renewed investor faith in Spanish real estate.

Residential construction in Spain is now thriving with foreign investment pouring into developments in cities and coastal resorts, a decade after a property bubble burst and wreaked havoc on the country's financial system.

The sector has become one of the hottest in Spain for investor activity in recent years. House builder Neinor Homes listed last year, the first flotation by a Spanish residential builder in a decade.

Metrovacesa, with a net asset value of 2.7 billion euros ($3.2 bln), has already appointed banks for its IPO and said the flotation on Spanish stock exchanges was aimed at widening its shareholder base to ease access to capital markets and financing for projects.

The company did not say in the statement when it intended to list, but a source close to the matter said it hoped to float in early February.

The company, which owns the largest land bank in Spain, will look to sell existing shares owned by Spanish banks Santander and BBVA in the offering, it said in a statement released to the market regulator.

Santander and BBVA own the majority of the company which they obtained in 2009 in exchange for Metrovacesa's massive debt, built up during an unsustainable expansion during Spain's decade-long property boom.

BBVA, Santander, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley are acting as the joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners for the offer.

Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale are acting as additional joint bookrunners, the company said in the statement. ($1 = 0.8353 euros)

(Reporting By Sonya Dowsett; Editing by Angus Berwick, Susan Fenton and David Evans)
(Adds more detail, FCA evidence)

By Emma Rumney and Kirstin Ridley

LONDON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Britain's financial watchdog fined ex-Royal Bank of Scotland trader Neil Danziger 250,000 pounds ($338,000) on Monday and barred him from working in financial services.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said in a statement it had found that between 2007 and 2010 Danziger, who traded products referenced to the Japanese Yen variant of Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), was knowingly involved in the bank's manipulation of the benchmark rate.

Danziger disputes the FCA's findings and feels he is being "scapegoated for the systemic problems related to Libor", his lawyer, Ben Rose, a partner at law firm Hickman and Rose, said.

However, the ex-trader is too emotionally and financially drained to fight further, Rose said in a statement, adding: "He leaves it to others, better resourced, to press the FCA for answers, hopeful that, one day, the real truth will come out."

Danziger was dismissed over Libor-rigging at the end of 2011, after just over nine years with RBS, which was fined 390 million pounds by UK and U.S. authorities for its part in the global scandal that engulfed some of the world's biggest banks.

"Mr Danziger's reckless disregard of these standards (of market conduct) has no place in the financial services industry," Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said.

Libor underpins hundreds of trillions of dollars of transactions and is used to set rates on credit cards, student loans and mortgages.

'WASH TRADES'

The FCA said Danziger had routinely made requests to RBS's primary Libor submitters to benefit his trading positions, and took those positions into account when acting as a substitute submitter. On two occasions, it said, he enlisted help from brokers to manipulate Libor.

Between 2008 and 2009, the watchdog said he entered into 28 "wash trades", two identical trades that cancel each other out.

The trades had no legitimate purpose other than to pay two broker firms as thanks for personal hospitality Danziger had received, the FCA said in its statement.

Danziger has denied that the trades and hospitality were connected.

In a notice of its decision on Danziger, the FCA detailed a phone call that one broker made to a colleague of Danziger's at RBS on June 26, 2009.

The broker said he had been out with Danziger the previous evening, and asked whether Danziger was in the office. He "owes me a little switchy today", the broker is alleged to have said.

The FCA said that in a separate phone call with another individual on the same day, the broker said he had run up a 2,000 pound drinks bill that evening and that Danziger had told him to "put a switch through".

The FCA said 'switch' was a term used for wash trade, and that Danziger executed one later that day.

The regulator first proposed action against Danziger in 2014, but this was put on hold due to a then ongoing investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

(Reporting by Emma Rumney and Kirstin Ridley; Editing by Keith Weir and Alexander Smith)
Yang Zhengqing, 52-year-old village cadre in Guizhou Province, died in an accident while en route to provide relief and support to villagers in an impoverished area.

Widespread reaction and sympathy flooded Chinese social media as thousands posted tributes to the memory of Yangs life and work while offering their condolences to his family and friends.

Yang Zhengqing, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Party Branch of Xiaohe Village in Guizhou Province, was a native of the village.

Yangs wife discovered her husbands body next to his motorcycle on December 25, 2017.

He called to ask if a water pipe had been installed, said one of the villagers. It would be the last phone call Yang would ever make. He said that and he and some other cadres had discovered a water source and they were talking about ways to divert it, the villager said.

During Yangs meeting on how best to divert the water source, his wife called and asked him to come home. Yang said that he still had two homes he needed to visit, and asked her not to wait up.

It was reported that government officials had recognized Yangs passing as a death in the line of duty. During his 13 years of service as the village cadre, he helped villagers build bridges, repair canals, plant fruit trees, and establish a village council to resolve issues among the locals.

(Compiled by Hu Xiaoyu)
A hand grenade explosion resulted in one fatality at Varby Gard metro station in Stockholm, Swedend on January 7, 2017.

Stockholm (Peoples Daily)  An explosion at Varby Gard metro station in Stockholms residential Huddinge district resulted in one fatality and at least one injury on January 7.

Local media reported that a hand grenade exploded as the victim, a 60-year-old man, tried to pick it up.

Police officers cordon off the area outside Varby Gard metro station, where two people were injured in an explosion, in Stockholm, Sweden, January 7, 2018. Photo: Reuters

Swedish authorities said the incident was unrelated to terrorism and evidence indicating as such had yet to emerge.

The victim was rushed to the hospital where he was later pronounced dead. Officials have not released his identity.

Police investigate the explosion outside Varby Gard station in a Stockholm suburb. Photo: Rex

A 40-year-old female who was with the victim sustained minor injuries.

Varby Gard station remained closed while bomb squads scanned the perimeter for explosive devices.
By Kim Yoo-chul



The top financial regulator will partner with authorities in China and Japan to curb speculation using digital tokens, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said Monday.



FSC Chairman Choi Jong-ku said the three nations have discussed how to regulate cryptocurrencies.



Choi did not elaborate but he expressed concern over the recent bitcoin craze among Koreans.



"After inspection of cryptocurrency accounts, we've decided to impose new regulations to deal with anonymous accounts and possible money laundering," he said.



Choi noted that the country lacks concrete information on what exactly is going on in the "digital currency space" as there are no direct rules on virtual money trading.



The top financial regulator is set to carry out a joint in-depth inspection of six leading local banks that provide virtual currency accounts to investors.



The six are Nonghyup, the Industrial Bank of Korea, Shinhan, Kookmin and Woori banks, and the Korea Development Bank. Shinhan, Kookmin and Woori are among the country's top four lenders alongside KEB Hana.





Over concerns surrounding anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, the FSC asked local banks to implement "know-your-customer" rules, a time-honored principle in the financial sector.



Meanwhile, investors having active accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges are required to link those accounts with a separate bank account.



It's mandatory to offer identification information if they wish to either deposit or withdraw funds.



"We will pay extra attention on whether those banks apply protective measures for those involved in cryptocurrency trading," Choi said.



If banks fail to comply with the guidelines, he noted they will be forced to shut down their digital token accounts.



Choi said the regulator will team up with the justice ministry and tax agency to set up a legal base, allowing the regulator to inspect cryptocurrency exchange operators directly.



"We aim to track where the money for cryptocurrency deals came from," he said.



The regulator also pledged to take steps to toughen punishment against crimes involving cryptocurrency transactions. More than 2 million Koreans are known to own bitcoins.





It remains to be seen whether such measures and the strong stance will work. But analysts said the effect, if there is any, will be short-lived.


By Yoon Ja-young



The U.S. Trump administration will toughen pressure in the upcoming talks to amend the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement (KORUS FTA), but Korea would not accept revisions that hamper development of technology or hurt future generations, Trade Minister Kim Hyun-chong said Monday.



Kim cited Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "It is better to have no deal than a bad deal," he said, making it clear that the country will stand up to unacceptable demands.



Following the U.S. pressure to revise the five-year-old trade deal, the two countries had the first round of revision talks in Washington, Friday, examining areas sensitive for each other.



Korea suggested investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause as the sector that needs a revision while the United States wants measures to increase its automobile exports to Korea.



"We have just started negotiations, but it won't be easy. There will be lots of work to do in a short period of time," the minister said.



"Ahead of the first anniversary of his inauguration, the Trump administration will add pressure to consolidate his supporters."



Kim also pointed to the U.S. protective measures on imports from Korea, which include safeguard actions on washing machines from Samsung and LG as well as anti-dumping duties on steel.



It even used ambiguous criteria such as "adverse facts available" in imposing them. The United States will also publish investigations on steel on national security grounds around the end of January, and the U.S. President will decide on safeguard measures on Korea's washing machines following a recommendation by the U.S. International Trade Commission.



Kim said Korea should continue its outreach in the United States to minimize damage on the industry. "We will take firm measures against U.S. actions breaching global norms, including taking the case to the WTO."



He also stressed talks with China to expand that FTA to the services sector.



"China is generally regarded as a manufacturing country, but services make up 60 percent of its economy."



He said that Korea should expand its share in tourism, healthcare and culture where it has strengths, and also stressed protection for Korean companies that invest in China.



"The services sector is more effective than manufacturing in job creation, which is the key agenda of the current administration."



He said that Korea should go beyond the G2 countries, diversifying to countries like the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asian countries.
By Park Jae-hyuk



Celltrion has surpassed Hyundai Motor in terms of market capitalization Monday, as the third largest company on the country's stock market, after Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.



The Korean pharmaceutical firm's market capitalization reached 37.1 trillion won ($34.8 billion) on the day _ higher than that of the country's largest carmaker with 33.2 trillion won. Celltrion has already overtaken POSCO with 32.2 trillion won and Naver with 31.3 trillion won.



The company's stock on the day rose 13.3 percent from the previous session, closing at 302,500 won on the KOSDAQ market.



Last month, the top ranking company on the junior tech-heavy index filed an application to the Korea Exchange so as to move to the KOSPI market, the nation's main bourse on which the above mentioned conglomerates are listed.



It is expected to make its KOSPI debut next month at the earliest, considering the process typically takes about 45 days.



If Celltrion continues to keep up this pace, the company will take the fourth spot on the benchmark index, following Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and the preferred stock of Samsung Electronics.



Because of the biosimilar producer's bright outlook on the expansion of its presence in the European and the U.S. markets, analysts said Celltrion will continue to remain strong.



"Celltrion will face various favorable factors for a few years," said analyst Kang Yang-ku at Hyundai Motor Investment & Securities.



"The company plans to release Herzuma, a biosimilar for the treatment of breast cancer, in the European market in the first quarter of this year. Also, it is expected to win approvals for Herzuma and Truxima, a biosimilar for treatment of haematological cancers, in the North American market in the second quarter."



In addition to Celltrion, the group's other affiliates have enjoyed the performance of their stocks from the beginning of this week.



Shares of Celltrion Healthcare, the company that conducts worldwide marketing, sales and distribution of biological medicines developed by Celltrion, closed at 117,500 won, up 7.8 percent from the previous session. Those of Celltrion Pharm, another subsidiary of Celltrion, closed at 66,800 won, up 4.38 percent from the previous session.



Against this backdrop, Celltrion Chairman Seo Jung-jin has recently become the nation's fourth-richest man in stock holdings, followed by SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Mong-koo.



The value of stock held by Seo surpassed 5 trillion won as of Friday, because of the rapid hike in Celltrion Healthcare shares, according to Chaebul.com, a conglomerate information provider.



Seo holds a 36.18 percent share of Celltrion Healthcare, but he does not own any Celltrion stocks.



Those richer than Seo in stock holdings were Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee, Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong and AmorePacific Chairman Suh Kyung-bae.


By Jun Ji-hye



United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan's key aide arrived in Seoul, Monday, amid high hopes that his visit will contain allegations about a possible rift in bilateral nuclear cooperation and economic relations.





Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, a key aide to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi, arrives at the National Assembly, Monday, for a meeting with Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun. / Yonhap

The visit by Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi, comes about a month after Im Jong-seok, presidential chief of staff, visited the Middle East country in December.



Al Mubarak is one of the closest aides to the UAE crown prince. He was present at meeting with Im.



During his high-profile two-day visit, the UAE official is expected to pay a courtesy call on President Moon Jae-in in an apparent bid to address speculation about a bilateral feud. The government is expected to explain the results of the meeting to the press afterward.



Im's visit to the UAE, which Cheong Wa Dae claimed was aimed at boosting the morale of Korean soldiers stationed there and enhancing bilateral relations, has caused speculations that his mission was to handle complaints from the UAE.



The opposition bloc claimed that the visit might have been aimed at mitigating the UAE's concerns over the possible impact of President Moon's nuclear phase-out policy on a $40 billion bilateral deal. Under the deal, signed in 2009 under the Lee Myung-bak government, Seoul was to build and operate four nuclear reactors in the Middle Eastern country.

Eyes are on whether the visit of Al Mubarak will be able to remove various allegations about bilateral relations.





President Moon Jae-in and his chief of staff Im Jong-seok attend a meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, Monday. / Yonhap
French right groups commemorated Charlie anniversary at the Les Folies Bergeres theatre in Paris on January 6. (Photo: Christophe Archambault/ AFP)

January 7 is the third anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Some French groups hosted events to remind people of Je suis Charlie or the I am Charlie campaign.

Groups all over the country hosted memorial events celebrating freedom of expression and commemorating the victims on Saturday.

The attackers recorded by monitor on January 7, 2015. (Photo: AFP)

In 2015, the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were stormed by two masked gunmen, killing 12 for a cartoon featuring the Prophet Muhammad. Two days later on January 9, the attackers killed at least two people in East Paris.

In response, more than 4 million people marched across the country in support of the victims under the slogan Je suis Charlie.

The sales of the magazine returned to their pre-2015 levels, according to an interview with a kiosk keeper by France 24. The magazine sold out 1 million copies right after the attack while average sales before were 60,000.

The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo.

The Islamic State calendar?

Weve already given, referring to the French tradition of selling New Years calendars door to door. (Photo: AFP)

Graffiti of the smiling faces of murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous were defaced by Hitler moustaches. The moustaches were removed just in time for the anniversary of the attack.

Sixty-one percent of French still identify with "Je suis Charlie," 10 percent less than in 2015, a French Institute of Public Opinion poll found. For some, that 10 percent is significant.

Some people in the neighborhood of former Charlie Hebdos Paris office told French media that freedom of expression also implies the right to be, or not to be, Charlie.

"Terrorism is now the main source of concern for the French," the National Observatory of Delinquency said.

One out of three people see terrorism and attacks as the most worrying problem for today's French society, which was "almost non-existent before the attacks of January 7 and 9, 2015," the article said.

With military operations in Syria, Iraq and the Sahel region, France has become a major target of terrorist attacks.

The Charlie Hebdo attack seemed to signal the start of a series of terror attacks all over the country.

As atrocities have mounted in France, Je suis Charlie today has evolved into a more complex feeling among French, meaning more than that single attack, more than the fight against terrorism and more than a defense of free speech.
By Yi Whan-woo



An opposition lawmaker raised allegations, Monday, that South Korea signed at least six secret military deals with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) under the governments of conservative Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye.



Rep. Kim Jong-dae of the Justice Party claimed the Lee government signed five of the deals on military cooperation, while the Park administration signed at least one.



Kim said such deals are believed to be closely linked to Lee's "energy diplomacy," a controversial investment project in overseas energy that ended up reporting lower-than-expected profits and severe losses.



The legislator also said the military deals are suspected to be related to Korea's landmark $18.6 billion nuclear reactor project with the UAE during Lee's term in 2009.



Korea then beat the more favored U.S. and French rivals to one of the Middle East's biggest ever energy contracts.



During the Park government in 2016, Korea also won another nuclear plant bid worth $49.4 billion.



The Justice Party lawmaker called the six alleged secret deals "unjust," saying "They were in violation of our law."



He criticized the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) as well, pointing out that its predecessor, the Saenuri Party was, the ruling party under Lee and Park.



"The LKP must repent its past and sincerely apologize to the people," Kim said. "I plan to visit the UAE to investigate the case and will disclose every single truth concerning the LKP if it does not repent."



The allegations coincided with the visit of UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan's trusted aide Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak to Seoul, Monday.



He arrived here amid rumors that Korea recently had a diplomatic row with the UAE over President Moon Jae-in's nuclear phase-out policy, and that Moon hurriedly sent his chief of staff Im Jong-seok to the UAE last month to restore relations.


By Kim Hyun-bin



The Ministry of Education (MOE) plans to ban English classes at daycare centers and kindergartens, following its recent controversial decision to scrap afterschool English classes at elementary schools.



In December, the ministry said it will abolish afterschool English classes for first and second graders when the 2018 term begins in March.



Officials believe starting English at a young age has little benefit and claim that it creates a great deal of stress for children.



"There are two main reasons the ministry is working to get rid of the program. Many experts believe the process of learning English is too stressful and less effective for young children." said Kwon Ji-young, a director of early childhood education, at the MOE. "Secondly, English will be provided in classes starting in the 3rd grade, so English classes before this only become early preparation for elementary school."



A daycare enforcement regulation under the Ministry of Health and Welfare allows foreign language classes to be taught at daycare centers. However, the government is now aiming to make changes.



"An enforcement regulation at the ministry allows foreign language classes after school; we need to get rid of it," said Kwon Byung-ki, a director of the division of childcare policy at the ministry.



"Since it's not law, all we need is the minister's approval to take out the enforcement regulation."



The ministries are both onboard to ban English classes at daycare centers and a final decision is expected to be made within the month.



There are around 40,000 daycare centers in Korea and 70 percent are members of the Korea Edu-care Association (KEA), which are strongly opposed to the ban.



"Banning the classes overall without the consent of parents or their views is absurd. We are against the move." said Ryu Ho-young, a manager at (KEA) "We are scheduled to open a board of directors meeting Jan. 11 to come up with countermeasures."



Many parents are worried that the ban will leave them no choice, but to put their children through private education.



"Even with the government ban on English classes, there is a good chance parents might consider sending their kids through private education, because most parents believe English is an important factor for them." said Choi Sun-hee a teacher at a daycare center in Seoul.



Many experts are worried the ban could cause a balloon effect toward private education as more parents might choose this as an alternate option.




By Jung Min-ho



Tens of thousands of English teachers across the country are in danger of losing their jobs as the government is set to ban English education for children from preschool to second grade.



About 7,000 afterschool English teachers at elementary schools will lose their jobs in March when the new policy comes into force for first and second graders.



When the Ministry of Education applies the policy to 50,000 kindergartens and daycare centers later this year as announced, tens of thousands more teachers will suffer the same fate.



Kim Min-jung, 34, a part-time English teacher at one kindergarten and three daycare centers in northern Gyeonggi Province was recently notified the kindergarten decided to terminate her contract owing to the policy.



"I will probably lose three other jobs as well. Many teachers are concerned and feel insecure about their careers," she told The Korea Times Monday.



Many English teachers at kindergartens and daycare centers  institutions partly sponsored by the government  have already started to look for jobs at private academies or in completely different fields, she noted.



Hundreds of English teachers have posted on a petition on the Cheong Wa Dae website urging the government to reconsider the policy, but the ministry remains firm in its decision.



The ministry said the policy is in line with the Constitutional Court's 2016 ruling that found its prohibition of intensive English education for first and second graders constitutional. The court said teaching them Korean and English simultaneously may hinder their development of Korean proficiency.



Then the ministry decided to expand the policy to kindergartens and daycare centers as many policymakers pointed out there was no point implementing the policy if kindergartens and daycare centers continued to teach English to younger children.



But teachers and parents alike have criticized the ministry, saying demand for English education will remain strong. They believe many parents will send their children to more expensive private institutions if they can afford it.



"On the other hand, children from poor families will no longer be able to learn English. This will deepen the English gap between children," said another English teacher, 28, who refused to be named. "What the ministry is trying to do is to simply cut the investment for English education for all. The policy will only make private academy owners smile."






By Kang Aa-Young, Park Si-soo







A man was accused of allegedly spending 1.6 million won ($1,500) using a credit card he had stolen from his ex-girlfriend.







Busan Dongnae Police Station said the man, 26, surnamed Kim, broke into the woman's home on May 27 and fled with her credit card. He allegedly used the card 117 times over six months, buying goods worth 1.6 million won.







The victim realized her card was missing in December and reported it to police. She told police she had not realized the card was missing for some time because she did not sign up for a transaction messaging service to her mobile phone.







Police traced the card's transaction history, but it is not known whether the ex-boyfriend has admitted any wrongdoing.







The two met through a chatting website.






By Oh Young-jin





US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is expected to be deployed near the Korean Peninsula ahead of the Feb. 9-25 PyeongChan Winter Olympics.





The carrier is en route to the Western Pacific, the ROK Navy said Sunday.





The battle group includes the nuclear-powered super-carrier and guided-missile destroyers and other warships. It left San Diego last week for the "regularly scheduled deployment" to the region.





The battle group's move is aimed at supporting the operations of the Japan-based Seventh Fleet in its area of responsibility.





"The deployment marks the second time the Carl Vinson Strike Group will operate throughout the Indo-Pacific region under U.S. 3rd Fleet's command and control," the Navy was quoted by Yonhap as saying. "The strike group became the first in recent history to demonstrate the command and control construct called 3rd Fleet Forward when units completed a six-month deployment last year."





The Vinson is expected to reach the waters near the Korean Peninsula ahead of the opening of the PyeongChang Olympics on Feb. 9.


By Oh Young-jin



The governmnt will inspect six major local banks over virtual accounts offered to cryptocurrency exchanges.



The move is another in a series to prevent speculation and money laundering, while putting a damper on the hot new money market.



According to Yonhap news agency, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) will carry out inspections -- Woori Bank, Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, NongHyup Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea and Korea Development Bank -- from Monday through Thursday.



The number of accounts in cryptocurrency exchanges came to 111 and their combined deposits are estimated at 2 trillion won ($1.8 billion).



Each account may have spawned millions of virtual accounts.



The authorities will check whether the six banks carried out their obligations to prevent money laundering in managing virtual accounts.



They are seeking to cut off fund inflows into cryptocurrency exchanges and shutter cryptocurrency exchanges that have loopholes in their system.



The government plans to issue another warning message this week against cryptocurrency speculation.



The government also said only real-name bank accounts and matching accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges can be used for deposits and withdrawals in a move to curb a frenzy of speculative investment into cryptocurrencies.



Despite a boom in cryptocurrency transactions, their exchanges go largely unregulated in South Korea, as they are not recognized as financial products. There are also no rules for protecting virtual currency investors.




By Choi Ha-young



A group of People's Party lawmakers opposing Chairman Ahn Cheol-soo's plan to merge the minor liberal party with the minor conservative Bareun Party said Monday they will leave and create a new party if the merger goes through.



Ahn is pushing for the merger with the Bareun Party in preparation for local elections in June, but around 18 lawmakers primarily from the liberal Jeolla provinces are against it, calling for the maintenance of the "reformist" values of the party.



"If our efforts to interrupt the collusion of the conservatives fall apart, the only possible way is to create a new party," said Rep. Cho Bae-sook, a four-term lawmaker and leader of the group. "If Ahn sticks with the merger, we don't have effective countermeasures."



In a separate meeting, the anti-merger People's Party members lashed out at Ahn's "dictatorship." Reps. Chun Jung-bae and Chung Dong-young  advocates of ex-President Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy  attended the meeting.



On Dec. 31, last year, Ahn won a party-wide vote on whether to merge with the Bareun Party. However, he still has to undergo a party convention, the final decision-making body regarding the merger. "Unfortunately, if the party leadership unreasonably pushes ahead with the merger, that's out of my control," Rep. Cho said.



For the anti-merger faction, creating their own party is the only possible choice, since the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is unlikely to embrace the Jeolla lawmakers. However, a bumpy road is ahead for the anti-merger lawmakers, since they cannot organize a negotiation body without at least 20 lawmakers.



According to a Gallup Korea poll issued Friday, the merged party's support rate stood at 17 percent  a combined 10 percentage points higher than the People's Party with 7 percent and the Bareun Party with 5 percent. Further, political bigwig Sohn Hak-kyu said he backs the merger.



However, Cho noted the soaring popularity of the new merged party is "pointless," saying the move was not "sustainable."



"The party will be trapped in an ideological dispute due to their differences in identities. I think they will be divided before the next general election," Cho said. "The merged party is likely to attract conservative voters, but it won't be able to appeal to them, as long as there's the Liberty Korea Party (LKP)."



Ahn has reiterated the necessity of the centrist party, to absorb those fed up with the hegemony of the two major parties  the DPK and the LKP.



On Wednesday, pro-merger lawmakers from the People's Party and the Bareun Party held their first official meeting. There, they decided to create a new party that pursues "reform and political change."



However, concerns linger over the internal unity of the merged party, considering their differences of opinion on national security. Bareun Party Chairman Yoo Seong-min is known as the most hawkish figure in politics here, while the People's Party has welcomed inter-Korean dialogue.


By Kim Hyun-bin







A patent court ruled against Starbucks on Monday, dismissing its claim that the Japanese-based dairy company Morinaga copied its iconic trademark logo.





The Patent Court of Korea ruled against the plaintiff, the world's largest coffee franchise, dismissing its argument that Morinaga, widely known for its brand of Mt Rainier milk coffees, copied the Starbucks logo.





Starbucks opposed the registration, claiming that Mt Rainier's logo looked similar to Starbucks' famous circular, green and white mermaid logo.





Mt Rainier's black and white circular logo with a mountain bearing the name Seattle, a U.S. city, came under contention.



Starbucks pointed out that Morinaga's logo made a direct reference to Seattle, the "Birthplace of Starbucks" and famous for coffee and the cafe culture.





The Seattle-based company said the Japanese brand benefited from the Starbuck's trademark logo known around the world.





However, the patent court rejected Starbucks' claim, stating that in 2005 the Morinaga brand beverage made more than 258 billion won ($241 million). Since then through 2014, the Japanese company has recorded 438 billion won in sales each year.





"The two logos' exteriors and designs are considered different, one highlighting the word Mt Rainier, the other Starbucks," the patent court said. "Consumers have different images when looking at the two logos."





Mt Rainier coffee was registered for sale in Korea starting February 2015.




By Doug Bandow





The long-suffering American hope that economic liberalization would yield intellectual and political freedom in China is officially dead after President Xi Jinping's coronation at last year's party congress. He emphasized party control, strengthened personal power, and stifled intellectual dissent.



Xi appears to be the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping if not Mao Zedong. At the congress Xi outlined his vision for the future: The People's Republic of China is to develop into a "fully modern economy" and become "a global leader of composite national strength and international influence."



The PRC already is arguably close to achieving both objectives. Although the country faces significant economic and political challenges, so far it has confounded the doomsayers.



Beijing is likely to pose a substantial challenge to U.S. interests and values. That doesn't make conflict inevitable or even likely, but to effectively respond policymakers should better prioritize Washington's objectives.



Indeed, America's leaders, if they deserve to be called that, should start by rescuing the U.S. political system from laughing-stock status. Compare presidents and America loses. By all appearances, President Xi is serious, determined, and competent; he knows both privilege and hardship; he even lived in America, now his country's chief adversary. Even Chinese inclined toward democracy have trouble defending the American system these days.



The operation of Congress, too, fails to live up to what the world's most powerful nation requires. The democratically elected U.S. body should easily outdistance China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress, but the inability of American legislators of both parties to work effectively with each other also seems to discredit America's democratic experiment.



Moreover, Washington needs to restore its economic self-confidence. The U.S. should emphasize opening Chinese commercial and investment markets, not closing the American economy, as President Donald Trump would prefer. Low cost foreign goods benefit both consumers and producers, including exporters. The U.S. economy needs to become more competitive and efficient.



The administration also should press President Xi to live up to his past emphasis on market reforms, which would benefit American businesses and Chinese consumers. Not incidentally, doing so would help counteract the Xi regime's expansion of state control over the economy. To achieve further liberalization the president should drop his counter-productive threats of a trade war.



Politically, Washington should treat the PRC as a serious competitor. Depending on the issue, China may be adversary or ally. The U.S. should emphasize areas where the two nations' interests coincide and look for compromises where interests diverge. Washington cannot dictate: negotiation over contested issues is inevitable.



North Korea may be the most important current controversy between Washington and Beijing. The PRC desires neither a failed state on its border _ consider how Americans view Mexico _ nor a reunited Korea allied with America hosting U.S. troops. The Trump administration should offer concessions to win China's cooperation.



Overall, Washington must channel the two nations' rivalry away from military confrontation. The PRC would be a formidable opponent even now. It would not win a global war with America, but has demonstrated no interest in matching the U.S. around the world.



Rather, China hopes to deter Washington from intervening against the PRC in its own neighborhood. While the Pentagon hopes to counteract China's anti-access/area denial strategy, deterrence is much cheaper than power projection. A few missiles or torpedoes are far less expensive than the aircraft carrier they might sink.



Moreover, even victory for the U.S. would not mean the end of conflict. A resentful, still growing PRC would be an even more formidable foe in the future. The American people aren't likely to fund endless conflict far from the U.S. when their own defense is not directly at stake. Limiting Beijing's influence in its own neighborhood is not worth catastrophic conflict.



However, Americans in and out of government should do what they can to expand the free information flow to Chinese citizens. The administration should not launch an official propaganda campaign _ they rarely turn out well.



Telling nationalistic Chinese what to believe would be counter-productive. Widening their access to information while allowing them to draw their own conclusions would be a better approach. Washington should cooperate with private organizations to blow holes in the Great Firewall and use the access of Chinese media to the U.S. to address Beijing's restrictions on American journalists.



Although the PRC's climb to greatness is not assured, it is likely to pose an ever more serious challenge to the U.S. The Trump administration must demonstrate maturity and sophistication if Washington is going to respond effectively.





Doug Bandow (chessset@aol.com) is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including "Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire."




By Kwon Yulejung





The previous year has gone, and the New Year has arrived. Many people spent the holidays by traveling to scenic destinations, such as a beach, hill or mountain, to watch the first sunrise of the year; going to church to attend the first worship or other religious service of the year at churches; or to their hometown to spend time with friends and families.

In contrast, from 2009 to last year, I spent the moment of transition to the New Year at the Memorial Tower of the Daejeon National Cemetery, to honor fallen sailors and marines. While I was usually at the tower with many junior officials, in 2014, when I led the Veterans Entitlement Commission, I visited the tower alone and showed my heartfelt respect for the fallen sailors and marines.



Before the yearend season began in early December, I considered making some changes in the informal annual ritual and asking some charitable organization members to join us the meaningful event. To my relief, they accepted the invitation and responded with great expectations.



However, I felt anxious about the event; while I extended the invitation to more people, the event was still exclusive. I felt the significant ceremony should be open to the public. Thus, about 10 days before the New Year, I asked some junior officials to publicize the event by posting invitations on websites and notices in many bustling areas.



Such gradual changes led to the creation of the first New Year's Moment of Respect at Midnight at the Memorial Tower of Daejeon National Cemetery, a public event that welcomes the prosperous New Year. In addition to attending the memorial service at the tower, those present left their new year resolutions on the registers. The resolutions of some participants will be on display in an exhibit at the Patriotism Hall.



The event was attended by more than 50 members of the charitable organization, , as well as by many elementary and secondary school students, who overcame their drowsiness, and their parents. Seeing the students participate have me hope about our country's bright future, as they represent future excellent leaders in many fields. An hour later, the charitable organization members participated at another important ceremony at the location of the sailors and marines' bronze reliefs, about 1 kilometer away. The 55 bronze reliefs were made in tribute to the navy sailors and the marines who sacrificed their lives to defend the Northern Limit Line on the West Sea.



Nevertheless, I was a little upset that the number of attendees ? about 120 ? fell short of the expected 150. This low attendance might be due to the lack of concerted public relations efforts in a short period of time.



I make every effort to attract as many daytime visitors to the cemetery as possible to let them feel the patriotic spirit and to let them thank the honorees for their selfless contribution to the nation. After official opening hours, the cemetery is restricted to bereaved families who visit their loved ones' graves, following a strict process of identification. Only during that New Year's Eve event was the cemetery open to the public, which was a privilege.



I hope that the next event will be attended by much more people.





The writer is the chief director of the Daejeon National Cemetery. Write to him at england6227@hanmail.net.






US President Donald Trump arrives with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to speak to the media following the Congressional Republican Leadership retreat at Camp David, Maryland, US, Jan. 6, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)

Washington (People's Daily) - US President Trump said at Camp David during the US presidents retreat on January 6 that he would not refuse "a phone call" with Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un.

"Sure, I always believe in talking," he answered at the press conference when asked if he was open to having a phone conversation with DPRK's Kim Jong Un. "Absolutely I would do that, no problem with that at all," he added.

Although Trump competes on Twitter with Kim regarding the "nuclear button" earlier this week, after this speech, some believe the phone lines at the White House are open if Kim wants to talk.

DPRK and Republic of Korea (ROK), known as North Korea and South Korea, plan to hold high-level diplomatic talks for the first time next week. Trump told the press he had a phone call with Moon Jae-in, ROK president, and mentioned he would like to see North Korea "getting involved" in the Pyeongchang Olympic Games. "I hope it works out. I very much want to see it work out between the two countries," he said.

Cautiously he added that the willingness to talk doesnt mean there are no prerequisites coming to the table. He declared that the stance of the US is already well known to the world, and the US is and will be very firm on the issue.

Trump pointed out to Kim Jong Un that, "He knows I'm not messing around. I'm not messing around. Not even a little bit. Not even 1 percent. He understands that."
By John Burton





Many things divide North and South Korea. But the two appear to share the same growing fear that a possibly mentally unstable U.S. president could plunge the Korean Peninsula into a horrendous conventional war and even a nuclear one.



North Korean leader Kim Jong-un spotted that opportunity to win over South Korea when he proposed in his New Year address holding direct talks with Seoul, which will result in today's scheduled meeting between the two sides in Panmunjeom, their first high-level dialogue in two years.



Kim's clever diplomatic move underscores that this year could determine the future relationship between Washington and Seoul. It will also provide a test of how willing President Moon Jae-in is to stand up to the Trump administration and whether that will force the U.S. to take a less aggressive approach to Pyongyang.



Kim is pushing hard the nationalist button to win support in the South. He referred in his speech to "uriminzokkiri" (among us Koreans only) in creating peace on the Korean Peninsula and he reached out to Koreans overseas as well. It is the type of appeal that won favor among South Korea's leftist students and labor unions in the past.



My money is that today's meeting will result in North Korea participating in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics next month because Kim is betting that South Koreans will be shown on global TV rooting as much for the North Korean athletes (however few there will be) as South Korean ones in a show of ethnic solidarity against outside forces, i.e. the U.S.



Some believe that Kim will try to overplay his hand by staging missile tests in the next few weeks. But I believe that Kim will resist such moves in the near-term since he wants to stage a propaganda coup at the Olympics in front of the world.



Indeed, Kim has already won a victory of sorts since Washington is expected to postpone its annual joint military training exercises with South Korea until after the Olympics are over in mid-March.



North Korea's participation in the Olympics could set the stage for more wide-ranging discussions with Seoul later. With Kim's announcement that his country has completed its nuclear program, he may pivot toward seeking some form of economic cooperation with South Korea that would undermine the "maximum pressure" sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Moon might be tempted to reopen the Gaeseong Industrial Complex given the controversial circumstances of its closure under former President Park Geun-hye.



If he does so, in the belief that it will ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Moon will face criticism by conservatives at home as well as the U.S., which could potentially weaken relations with Washington. But the U.S. has only itself to blame for a more independent stance by Moon in the face of Trump's deliberately provocative language against Pyongyang.



Whether the momentum toward engagement will last after the Olympics remains to be seen. A lot will depend on the actions of Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul.



On Pyongyang's part, it must refrain from continuing nuclear and missile tests to avoid antagonizing South Korea and the U.S. If it does so, then Washington needs to sit down for talks with North Korea without demanding the precondition of Pyongyang committing itself first to denuclearization, something that it is unlikely to happen. A show of good faith on the U.S. part would be scaling back its joint military exercises with South Korea.



And this is where Moon needs to play a crucial role by persuading the U.S. to agree to take such an action. If Washington refuses to do so, then Moon should remind Trump that the U.S.-South Korean alliance should be a collaborative one.



If Trump refuses to pay any attention and continues to tweet insults aimed at Kim that threaten to disrupt the signs of detente on the peninsula, then perhaps it's time for Moon to stand up to the U.S. president and pursue a policy of engagement on his own.



Moon should argue that dialogue with the North is more urgent than ever since North and South Korea, not the U.S., would bear the brunt of any conflict and the next several months could prove crucial in preventing a war. If Moon is blamed for weakening the sanctions regime against North Korea by reopening Gaeseong, for example, his response should be that the U.S. should be offering a diplomatic exit ramp for Pyongyang to de-escalate its nuclear program.



Moon, of course, would be rightly faulted for making concessions if North Korea continues testing its nuclear arsenal, but if Pyongyang decides on a moratorium, then the South Korean president would be in his rights to pursue detente on his own if necessary.



Kim has been very skillful in trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea, but it is really the responsibility of Washington to correct the situation.





John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.


By Nam Hyun-woo



With fears over massive data leaks rising following reports that Intel's central processing units (CPUs) have "the worst-ever" security flaws, concerns are rising that bitcoins and other digital coins stored in personal computers or cloud servers using those chips can be stolen by cyberattackers.



According to CoinKorea, one of the leading cryptocurrency online communities, hackers might use the bug called Meltdown to steal cryptocurrencies in computers and servers used by exchanges and traders.



By using the Meltdown bug, attackers can break the fundamental memory isolation between user applications and the computer's core memory. By bypassing the barrier, hackers can peep into data processed by the CPUs, including passwords and other secrets, according to a paper issued by researchers who discovered the flaw.



Michael Schwarz, one of the researchers, posted on Twitter video footage of the bug in action, stealing a password in real time.



"The biggest problem of Meltdown is that no encryption or vaccine program can prevent or defend against those attacks because the flaw stems from vulnerability in hardware architecture," CoinKorea said. "We strongly recommend that software patches against Meltdown should be installed in personal computers and servers which store cryptocurrencies. Especially, we believe urgent responses are required for exchanges."



The bugs are already affecting the digital token scene, though indirectly. On Friday, several cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bittrex, were taken offline as Azure cloud services offered by Microsoft were being patched for the fix.



Concerns are also growing over some exchanges using centralized ledgers because they keep investors' private keys and data stored in one place.



Earlier this week, a group of researchers announced they have discovered "one of the worst CPU bugs ever found" and named them Meltdown and Spectre. Those two bugs affect nearly all processing chips made by Intel, AMD and ARM, meaning almost every modern computer, smartphone and cloud service in the world may be vulnerable to attacks through those flaws.



Unlike Meltdown, which is so far known to affect only Intel chips, Spectre affects not only Intel but also AMD- and ARM-manufactured chips. It allows hackers to trick error-free programs running best practices into giving up secret information, according to the Spectre paper issued by the researchers.



Following the announcement, Intel and other chipmakers have released a patch for users to update their operating systems.



However, a number of info-tech experts have claimed those patches may slow down computers, while Intel denied it in its statement, saying: "Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time."



Suspicions are also growing that Intel may have delayed reporting about the bug, even after becoming aware of the flaws months earlier.



Google, whose Project Zero team joined the discovery, said it informed the affected companies about the flaws in June 2017.



Business Insider reported that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold $24 million in stocks and options in November after Intel was informed of the vulnerabilities. Intel said Krzanich is "unrelated" and he will "continue to hold shares in line with corporate guidelines."


By Jung Min-ho





Eastar Jet CEO Choi Jong-gu
The snowstorms have forced cancellation of some high-speed train services. / Courtesy of Reuters



By Kinling Lo, Mimi Lau





A second wave of blizzards is expected to hit central and southern China this week, compounding transport woes from last week's heavy snowfalls.

The National Meteorological Centre said snow had already started falling again on Sunday in the provinces of Henan, Hebei, Hubei and Anhui, and further falls were expected this week in the northeast provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang.

Light falls were forecast for mountainous parts of Fujian and Guangdong in the south.

The centre said rainstorms had hit northern areas of Guangxi and Guangdong, as well as Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, and would continue until Tuesday morning.

Heavy snow paralysed public transport and energy supplies in central and eastern China last week, killing at least 15 people in the most severe weather so far this winter.

Anhui was particularly hard hit, reporting 1.26 billion yuan (US$194 million) in direct economic losses from the wild weather since Tuesday, according to Anhui Daily.

By Saturday, more than half a million people in Hubei province had been affected, hundreds of whom had to move out of their homes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

On Sunday, 19 high-speed train services from southwestern regions  including Chongqing and Chengdu  were cancelled because of the conditions.

Dozens of highways in nine provinces  Shanxi, Shandong, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, Anhui, Guizhou and Gansu  were also closed, according to a highway monitoring website Chinahighway.com.

Beijing remained largely unaffected, with only light snowfalls in mountain areas in its western and northern regions. Shanghai reported rain on Sunday but the rest of the week was expected to be clear.

In Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province, a waitress said business at the restaurant she worked at had halved because of the heavy snow.

"Everyone is talking about the snow this year  it's been some of the worst in the last few years," she said.

"Not many customers are dining in and we have had to turn down delivery orders too because the roads are too slippery for vehicles. Sanitation workers and snowploughs are working non-stop to clear the icy snow to make way for traffic."

Although the next wave of snow would be less severe than last week's, there was the risk of sleet in Hunan, Guizhou and Jiangxi provinces, according to the Public Weather Service Centre.

In January 2008, central and southern China was thrown into chaos for weeks when unexpected blizzards and sleet inflicted widespread damage to transport networks.
Half of all its new cars sold in China are expected to be smart cars by 2020, according to a document released by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on Jan. 5 which is soliciting public opinions.

According to the NDRC, China will be a smart-vehicle power before 2035, whose standards of smart vehicle manufacturing will be used worldwide.

The NDRC considers the upgrading of the automobile industry an urgent need, calling the transformation from mechanic products under manual operation to smart devices a priority of the industry.

It believes China is holding institutional advantages, because through national-level planning, the allocation of resources would be easier to achieve.

In addition, the overall scale of the Chinese automobile industry, internationally leading communication technologies, and the rapid development of infrastructure will all contribute to the effort to implement the smart car strategy.

The NDRC said that 90% of major cities and expressways will be covered by vehicular with a wireless network that can support smart vehicles by 2020, and the China-developed Beidou Navigation Satellite System will achieve full coverage of the country.

In the future, smart vehicles are expected to be interconnected by a system that integrates not only automobiles but also traffic lights.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday arrived in Xian, capital of Shaanxi province, as the first European leader to visit China since the conclusion of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

According to information released by Elysee Palace, the French president would visit the famous Terracotta Warriors in Xian and the Forbidden City in Beijing. During his very first visit to China, Macro will be welcomed by his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping with a series of events, while the two heads of state will further strengthen bilateral ties by reviewing past achievements and outlining a direction for future cooperation in political, economic, and cultural fields.

As the first major Western country that established diplomatic relations with China, France has been long considered as an important partner to help China boost its relations with the European Union, especially after Brexit. Experts noted that Macrons China visit may promote the Belt and Road Initiative, helping China to deepen its cooperation with European countries.

[File photo]

France may take a leading role in the promotion of Belt and Road Initiative among Western countries. Enterprises in France hope to expand their business in China, while China wants to make Sino-French relations as a role model [for other European countries]. Better bilateral relations would be a win-win solution for both sides, Liu Zuokui, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences scholar, told Xinhua.

China-France ties are currently at their peak, with Paris being Beijing's fourth largest trading partner in the EU and Beijing ranking the first among Frances Asian trading partners.

[File photo]

In addition to bilateral trade, experts noted that the two leaders will also exchange opinions on major international and regional issues, reaching positive consensus on multilateralism and globalization in the face of growing U.S. isolationism.

Xi and Macron will discuss strengthening cooperation to safeguard multilateralism, build an open world economy, improve global governance, and work jointly to tackle global challenge, said Geng Shuang, a spokesperson for the Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Chinese scientists on Monday dismissed rumors of possible dangers caused by the countrys retired space station Tiangong-1, noting that most of its components will burn up safely while re-entering earth, posing no threat to Earth.

Weve been keeping an eye on Tiangong-1s movement. The space lab is expected to return to the Earth in the first half of 2018, with most of its components being burning up during the course of its re-entry. What is left of the space lab will fall into the ocean, without causing damage to the Earths surface, Zhu Congpeng, chief designer of the Tiangong-2 space lab, told the Science and Technology Daily.

The remarks are Chinas latest response to the rumors that the retired space station may pose an environmental threat to earth. Several Western media outlets, including CNN and The Guardian, have reported that the space lab is out of control and that pieces weighing up to 100 kg could fall to the surface when the space lab breaks apart.

Chinese experts and engineers have dismissed such reports, noting that China has rich experience in controlling falling spacecraft. According to statistics from China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), the last controlled fall took place in September 2017, when Tianzhou 1, Chinas unmanned cargo spacecraft, successfully plunged into Earths atmosphere and burned up after a series of braking maneuvers by ground control.

Unlike reusable spacecraft, a controlled descent requires the space station to burn as much as possible when entering the atmosphere. Compared to Mir, Russias 20-tonne space station, which safely plunged to Earth in 2001, almost all of the 8.5-tonne Tiangong-1 will burn up, said space expert Pang Zhihao.

Chinese authorities have been making promises to keep a close eye on the re-entry of Tiangong-1. According to a note sent to UN in May 2017 by the Permanent Mission of China to the UN, Chinese authorities reiterated that the probability of the re-entry causing damage to aviation and ground activities is very low, and promised that its orbital status and other information relating to Tiangong-1 will be publicized both in Chinese and English regularly.

According to the latest statistics released by CMSEO on its official website, the Tiangong-1 had run at a height of 286.5 km high from December 17 to 24, 2017, without any noticeable issues.

As Chinas first space lab, Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011 and ended its data service in March 2016. It was in service for 4.5 years, 2.5 years longer than its designed life, and had docked with Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9, and Shenzhou-10 spacecraft and undertaken a series of tasks, making important contributions to Chinas manned space cause, Xinhua reported.
Chinas express delivery industry hit a new record in 2017, handling 100 million parcels each day, China National Radio reported on Jan. 7.

The industry has become a highlight of Chinas economy. For instance, the number of logistics orders of the country surged to 812 million on December 11, 2017, Chinas largest annual online shopping craze, from 152 million 4 years ago.

Fang Zhipeng, general manager of China Postal Express & Logistics, said that e-commerce is driving the rapid growth of the logistics industry. The delivery volume generated from online shopping accounted for nearly 70% of the total amount, he said, adding that the compound growth of the industry has hit 54% from 2010 to 2016.

In 2017, 15 million environmentally-friendly packages and tens of billions of electronic express sheets were used, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 136,000 tons.
Exercising during holiday season combats calories, improves mental health The cookies are baked and that glass of milk has been set out for Santa but you find yourself low on energy and need to combat those holiday blues. The...

Winter an ideal time to beef up lawns, plant new additions The recent week-long visit of late-summer warmth may have been a distraction from the seasonal change on the horizon, but the piling up pin oak and maple droppings  combined...
This transcript appears in the December 22, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The Coming Collapse of Russia-Gate:

We Need LaRouches Four Laws

To Move Forward!

This is an edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouches weekly webcast of Dec. 14, 2017.

[Print version of this transcript]

Harley Schlanger: Hello, Im Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this weeks international strategic briefing from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and President of the Schiller Institute. I have to say this has been an extraordinary last couple of days, in terms of the unravelling of the so-called Russia-gate investigation, the exposure of the web of corruption surrounding Robert Mueller and his investigation. As weve been saying since the outset of the attacks on Trump, during the campaign last year, this is coming from the highest levels of British intelligence; it includes the networks of Mueller and Comey at the FBI, Justice Department and others. Its quite extraordinary, including the statement from the Deputy Attorney General yesterday in the House Judiciary Committee, when he said it doesnt matter if theres bias, as long as theyre able to do their job.

White House/Peter Souza Robert Mueller

Helga, this is exactly what we pointed out in the special dossier we did on Robert Mueller. Why dont you catch us up on these developments in the last couple of days?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: This is very fascinating because what is now happening is exactly the opposite of what the intention was: Namely that those people who tried to prove collusion between Trump and the Russian government, are now the targets of a potential investigation themselves, with quite incredible implications. There are already calls out that all of these peopleMueller, McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, and various other individualsthat they should all be led away in handcuffs. This is the demand of former judge and prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, on Dec. 9 on Fox Television, and what she referred to is the fact that now it is becoming very clear in the hearings in the House and in the Senate, that there was collusion among people who were clearly a task force against Trump even before he was elected, who wanted to have a sort of life insurance policy against the possibility that Trump might be elected, and they worked together with the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele on his dirty dossier.

Now, it turns out that the degree of corruption is even much deeper. For example, the wife of the recently demoted Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr worked for the very firm which was dealing with Christopher Steele on behalf of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton election teamnamely Fusion GPS.

So there is very clearly conflict of interest, to say the least, and what happened in the hearing was that the situation became so hot that FBI Deputy Director McCabe, at the last moment, discovered a so-called conflict in his schedule, and he didnt appear. House Intelligence Chairman Congressman Nunes immediately said that he didnt believe that for a second, because it was not credible. The cover-up no longer works, because the questions asked of these individuals were about things that they should already have volunteered themselves. If there were signs of bias in the investigation, they should have volunteered this themselves without waiting to be asked.

I think this is turning the whole situation around. Russia-gate is crumbling, and this has incredible strategic implications, because this whole thingif we recall how this developedwas all intended from the very beginning, by the Obama administration, and the leftovers from the previous Bush administration, to prevent President Trump from developing a positive relationship with Russia. And now that it has turned against those who are the accusers, that opens a whole new strategic dimension.

Schlanger: What Id like to do is go through a couple of the things that came out, including these incredible text messages that were sent from Peter Strzok, who is the former number-two counterintelligence official for the FBI, who was involved in the interrogation of HillaryI should say the friendly investigation of Hillary Clinton on the emails. He actually softened Comeys conclusions on Hillary Clinton so there would be no legal problem for her. He was involved in the Flynn interviewthis guy Strzok is a walking conflict of interest! But the Inspector General of the Justice Department put out 90 pages of SMS messages, and in one of themthis is the one thats most damningStrzok said to his girlfriend Lisa Page, who is an attorney who worked directly under FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andys office, that theres no way Trump gets elected, but Im afraid we cant take that risk. Andy is Andrew McCabe: There was a meeting in McCabes office to discuss how to keep Trump from getting elected, by top officials of the FBI! I think this is absolutely unprecedented.

Peter Strzok

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes! It is a coup. And there was a congressman from Florida, Gaetz, who warned Trump that this is a coup against him. I think that that is absolutely the case. President Putin of Russia had said several months ago, that what is going on against Trump is exactly a MaidanI mean the kind of coup which occurred against the Ukrainian government in February 2014. And I think if you look at the dramatis personae, the relevant figures, then its very clear that it is exactly the same apparatus which was also responsible for the Maidan in Kiev. So I think this is not the end of the story, but an incredible crime is just being discovered and being brought into the open.

Schlanger: On the whole question of Mueller and his role, we played a major role in exposing that in our dossier, which were now going to reprint. People can get that and use it. This is an unfolding story of a coup that were ahead of! We can cut it off, we can end this attempted coup if we do our job, instead of letting them go ahead unimpeded.

One of the other really striking things in this whole thing is where you see that Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele were brought in by Bruce Ohr, the Associate Deputy Attorney General, for discussion. This shows that the Justice Department and the FBI, back in August of 2016maybe even in July of 2016were working out an operation against Trump. Now, is any of this getting out in the media in Europe as far as you know, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: No! We are putting it out, but so far, I have not seen anyanycoverage of this at all. What the media are playing up here is the election result in Alabama, as a big blow to Trumpsaying that the end of Trump is already in sight. So the picture the European population gets is quite the opposite of what is happening.

Schlanger: The thing thats being kept out of the media because of the focus on all these other kinds of things, is the recent developments around North Korea. Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, said that the U.S. is ready for negotiations without preconditions, in cooperation with Russia and China. There have been some other developments around the whole North Korea question. What do you have on that?

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U.S. State Department

Zepp-LaRouche: Somebody in the State Department felt it necessary to immediately correct Tillerson, by saying yes, thats true, but now is not the right time. So you can see an ongoing battle on every issue, even in the State Department, with Tillerson being contradicted.

But otherwise, the situation looks hopeful. Certainly the whole North Korean issue is extremely dangerous, because clearly North Korea now is a full-fledged nuclear power; it has ICBMs which can reach everywhere in the United States and many other places as well, and therefore, we are sitting on a powderkeg as long as the U.S. and South Korean, and Japanese military maneuvers are still scheduled.

But there is hope right now, because you had high-level representatives of the United NationsUnder-Secretary-General Feltman, who is an American, and from Russia and Chinain Pyongyang. Therefore, if Pyongyang would send a signal that it wont do any tests for the next 60 days, and if the United States calls off this big maneuver which is supposed to start at the beginning of the year, then conditions would be right. Especially if the Tillerson approach of sitting down at the table without preconditions is actually maintained, there is, indeed, hope.

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UN/Rick Bajornas

And I think it shows once more, how extremely important it is that the big powersthe United States, Russia, Chinawork together. Because there are several conflicts in the world which cannot be defused if those powers are on a confrontation course against each other. So I think it is dangerous, but it is also hopeful right now.

Ukraine Narrative Failing

Schlanger: And on this question of the battle against Trumps attempt to bring us into a relationship with China and Russia, we saw two things in the last couple of days: One was Joe Bidens comments against the Russians in Italy. But then, also this crazy speech from National Security Advisor McMaster, who spoke at a British-American think tank thats committed to keeping the so-called special relationship together, and he said, geopolitics are back with a vengeance. I think hes answering you on that one, Helga, because youve made the point that we have to get beyond geopolitics. He went on to talk about Russian military aggression, and Chinese economic aggression. This shows these coup-plotters are still making clear what their intention is.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, Biden also claimed that the Russians intervened in the outcome of the referendum concerning the change of the Italian Constitution last year, and he was immediately refuted by the Five-Star party, by the Lega Nord, and by former Prime Minister Berlusconi. Most of the political spectrum in Italy said Biden is completely off.

But I think the truth is about to come out in many places. One other thing on this Russia question is an ongoing trial against the Berkut special police battalion which is standing trial for supposed criminal activity during the Maidan coup in Kiev in early 2014. Now the lawyer for this battalion has two or three witnesses, Georgians, who claim that they had been hired as snipers by Mikheil Saakashvili, from Georgia, at the time; and that they were ordered to shoot on both the demonstrators on the Maidan as well as at the police. And that confirms, again, our analysis of how this thing was completely orchestrated to create chaos and the condition for the coup against Yanukovych.

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youtube

This is very interesting, because these people will provide testimony in a court case by telephone hookupobviously, they dont want to appear and admit their deeds, but they are basically admitting what they didand that means that the whole narrative on Ukraine is also crumbling.

Putin once said that if Ukraine had not happened his opponents, would have invented some other problem, some other story, and I believe that thats true. But as history unfolded, it was Ukraine: first, the $5 billion that Victoria Nuland admitted was spent by the State Department in order to finance the color revolution in Ukraine, starting in 2004the Orange Revolution and then the Maidan. The whole narrative hinges on the fact of the referendum in the Crimea, when the population decided to be part of Russia. And that development was used to demonize Putin, and to impose the sanctions.

However, if you take it back and see that the actual trigger point was not the annexation of Crimea, as it is always portrayed, but that there was a staged coup in which snipers fired on people from both sidesthat unravels the whole narrative.

I want to point our readers and viewers to a dossier we published about the Ukraine story as well, because I think the narrative, as it is called, is failingyou know, narrative means its not the truthand I think the truth also has to come out on Ukraine. And then the whole pictureits almost like a catharsis which is taking place, or were seeing the beginning of it, but sometimes, such real cleansings are absolutely necessary.

Schlanger: Also the proof that this had nothing to do with the well-being of the people of Ukraine, is the complete dysfunction of the current government, and the fact that Saakashvili, whom you mentioned, led Georgia in a rebellion against Russia and triggered another crisis much earlier. Recently theyve been trying to arrest him in Ukraine, and his own organizers have been saying theyre going to overthrow the current government of Ukraine!

I would like to call our listeners attention to a very powerful report given by Natalia Vitrenko, a good friend of yours and the Schiller Institutes, at the recent Schiller Institute conference in Bad Soden. Its available on the New Paradigm Schiller Institute website, https://schillerinstitute.com/media/chinas-initiative-view-ukraine/.

We talked a little bit before about the Italian situation: You mentioned to me before the webcast, a new documentary on the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank case, and the implications of this for the situation in Europe. What can you tell us about this documentary?

Zepp-LaRouche: I can only advise our viewers to absolutely try to watch this movie. Its a documentary by ARTE, which is the German-French TV channel; it exists so far only in German and in French, but the story told there is absolutely mind-boggling. The title of it is Death of a Banker, and it refers to the supposed suicide of a banker named David Rossi, on March 6, 2013. He was the communications manager for Monte dei Paschi, the oldest bank in the world. This all occurred in the context of the big financial crisis of 2007-2008, in the circumstances in which a small bank called Antonveneta was taken over by Santander and Monte dei Paschi was drawn into this. There was an incredible amount of wheeling and dealing, covering up losses with derivativesthis looks like another case of Mario Draghi saying he would do whatever it takes to save the euro, which he said as ECB head, in terms of buying up bonds and quantitative easing. However, this is a case where that question comes up. Because it was Draghi in his function as head of the Banca dItalia, who agreed to this wheeling and dealing, even if much was completely dubious.

Now clearly this David Rossi knew about criminal activities inside and outside of the bank. The thing that makes this documentary so absolutely suspenseful, is video footage which shows the end-phase of his fall from his office building, and then shows him lying dead on the street. Then a man, another banker from the same bank, comes by without even looking closely or trying to help him, walks away, comes back, and makes a call on his mobile phonethis is all very, very suspicious.

There is now a new forensic investigation in Italy into the circumstances of this supposed suicide. The initial findings say that he could not have fallen by himself, and end up in the position in which he landed on the street. His wife is very active, and his family does not believe it was suicide at all; she has already posted this movie on her Facebook page, even though its only in German and French so farand its going viral. The mainstream media are not yet reporting it, but this is an unbelievable story.

One implication is that a banker from Deutsche Bank who was also found dead in London one year later [in January 2014], a person called William Broeksmit, was involved in similar financial arrangements.

This is a case where it has been said that the Italian banking crisis created a risk to the European system, but as the authors of this movie have pointed out, the Italian banking system was completely fine, including Monte dei Paschi, until Italy was forced to have a huge privatization of its banking sector to supposedly make Italy ripe for the euro.

I would guess that this is not the end of it, because there are now criminal investigations into the circumstances, and this is clearly another case where you see the criminal activity around this banking system. I think our viewers should really watch this movie.

European Union Flounders

Schlanger: This just underscores the whole point that whats going on in Italy, and whats going on with the investigation into the Maidan, exposes how the total instability of Europe is part of the reason for the coup against Trump: Because beginning with the Brexit, we have been seeing the disintegration of political parties in Europe, and the loss of any approach to a real production policy. We see the Chinese becoming very much involved in Europe right now.

And Id like you to give us a quick update on whats going on in Germany: Because it appears as though theres still a very significant problem in putting together a new government after the recent elections.

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, its now already two and half months since the elections, and the first effort by Merkel to form a government with the [Free Democratic] liberal party and the Greens failed. Now, theyre trying again, a Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), but in the Social Democracy there is a lot of opposition against the continuation of the policy which almost destroyed the SPD in the earlier coalition. The crazy proposal by Martin Schulz, the head of the SPD, is now to form another Grand Coalition, but this time it will be a cooperation coalition, which is the idea that they only agree on certain particular points, and then place ministers into the cabinet on that basis; and on the points they dont agree on, each side can be free to form opposition coalitions in the Bundestag, in the parliamentwhich obviously is ridiculous. Because how can you be in the government and oppose your own government at the same time? And that would also mean that on certain issues, the CDU/CSU could only get a majority by relying on the AfD, the Alternative for Germany, which is an extreme right-wing party which has very dangerous elements within it.

So I think this is total instability. As long as you dont have a government in Germany, all the plans for Europe are null and void, because without a German government those plans cannot be implemented.

What is on the table right now are various proposals which only differ in nuances: One is by French President Macron, which is to have a European Finance Minister, and a European budget. Then you have [EU Commission] President Juncker, who wants to put everything under the European Union Commission, and build that bureaucracy up as a European government; and German SPD leader Martin Schulz, who says, yes, we must have a United States of Europe.

This is a very absurd proposal; it was absurd all along, because there is no European people. There are many different cultures, traditions, and languagesand people in one part of Europe have no inkling whats going on in another part of Europe because they cant read the newspapers, they dont understand the history, and they are totally uninformedso theres no European people.

But if this scheme was already dubious many years ago, it is completely impossible now, because the East Europeans, the Central Europeans, and people from the Balkans have a completely different attitude towards Chinas New Silk Road. There is Austria, where the new coalition government program even includes a paragraph that Austria will cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative. Switzerland is excited to be cooperating with China in this respect. Hungary just now blocked a NATO/Ukraine commission meeting, because they dont agree with the policy of NATO encircling Russia. And so there is no unity. But clearly, this is all because they dont want to look at the axioms of their policy failures.

In the rest of the world, there is a growing awareness that Europe is not functioning, but I think it requires a real policy discussion: What are the principles of economy? What is in the interest of the people? How should we form a policy, a vision for the future? And none of these things has been addressed by the present coalition discussions in Germany.

But there is a growing demand, coming from industry, from the Mittelstand [small and medium-sized industry, especially high technology]and the Schiller Institute is holding events to try to make the policy of the Silk Road better known. People must know more about the real advantages of cooperating with the Belt and Road Initiativefor example, in the reconstruction of Syria which is now seriously on the table, especially because of the roles of Russia and China; and also the need to cooperate in the development of Africa. The problem is, rather than joining hands in win-win cooperation with China, what Brusselsand unfortunately also Berlinare saying, is they feel that they have to be in geopolitical competition with China.

And I think this problem of thinking in geopolitical terms is the main obstacle. If you look at the long arc of human history, it is very clear that unless we develop a vision of one, single, humanity working towards the common aims of mankind, we are not going to make it, and we will always be in danger of war. In the time of thermonuclear weapons, this could be fatal for the human race.

So we have to develop a different perspective on how nations can cooperate.

Schlanger: I think we have a perfect example of that coming from China right now. Theres a discussion about investment in providing electricity for more than one billion people in mostly Africa and South Asia. The Chinese are talking about $1.5 trillion investment to do that! Thats obviously aimed at precisely what youre talking aboutthe improvement of the future for people who otherwise have no hope.

Id like to come back to one final point here, which again, gets at this question of why theyre trying to get rid of Trump. There was an announcement a couple of days ago by President Trump about the U.S. space program, and his commitment to take the United States back to the Moon, and beyond to Mars and to other planets, other galaxies, even. This kind of optimism was also seen in a China-U.S. conference on space, where there was discussion about collaboration for the futurewhich by the way, right now is not allowed, because of the rules against the U.S. scientists talking to the Chinese, enforced by the same FBI that weve seen in this conflict of interest.

So, what are your thoughts on this great potential for the space cooperation?

Zepp-LaRouche: There is also an agreement between the United States and Russia to build a lunar space station together, a decision by Trumpyou can really see who is who when you see how people react to that. ESA, the European Space Agency, was completely enthusiastic and welcomed that; the Chinese government expressed happiness about this decision. The European media covered it as though Trump were completely crazy to go back to the Moonthis is really incredible! The people who have been in space, the astronauts, come back and say, this is an incredible experience, because in space, it doesnt matter what nationality you are, because you have to rely on each other, otherwise you cant carry our such an extremely challenging mission. And a Russian cosmonaut just said: We should develop an attitude of solving problems on Earth with the same spirit with which we cooperate in space.

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White House/Joyce N. Boghosian

That is a point we have been making for a very long time, that once you take the view that man is not an Earth-bound earthling, but that we are continuing the process of evolution, not only by developing infrastructure across all continents, and developing a World Land-Bridgebut that the next natural step in infrastructure development is in nearby space. Industrializing the Moon is the precondition for longer space-flights to other planets; and that is the natural identity of man, that we are part of that universe, and not just earthlings with limited resources.

So I think its a very optimistic thing that President Trump has reconnected to the spirit of John F. Kennedy. This is exactly what we have been fighting for, to put an end to the negative cultural paradigm of the period between John F. Kennedys assassination and the end of the Obama administration when space was really on the back burner, and no fundamental progress was made.

I think this is all reason for optimism, and you should really help to get this message out, because the mass media are keeping the lid on a lot of positive developments which would give people enormous optimism if only they knew about them.

Schlanger: And to close with that thought, we are now releasing a new pamphlet titled, Americas Future on the New Silk Road, which outlines why, as you said, this is not just necessary, but how Lyndon LaRouche, your husband, developed the economic policy, his Four Laws, on how we can do it. Without those four basic laws, were not going to be able to take advantage of this, and thats a central part of this fight.

So Helga, this has been a very rapidly moving discussion today. I thank you for giving us this update, and Im sure that events are going to continue at this accelerating pace. Well be back again next week, with the next Schiller Institute international webcast. Thank you.

Zepp-LaRouche: Bye-bye.
This article appears in the December 29, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Time To End the Reign of Geopolitics

[Print version of this article]

This is an edited transcript of the Dec. 21 weekly webcast of the founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video of the webcast can be found at newparadigm.schillerinstitute.com.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, Im Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this weeks Schiller Institute International Webcast, featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institutes and also the president of the German Schiller Institute.

We have been in the forefront of the very significant developments that took place this week. We will discuss them today to get our audience abreast of these issues and strategic developments, including the continuing evidence of the corrupt and immoral practices of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller. There are now Congressmen calling for shutting down the investigation and even putting some of these people in jail. This is occurring just as we are expanding our distribution of the Mueller dossier.

Xinhua

Its also a moment of very grave danger. Theres a good reason why wars and terrorist events, and false flag attacks often occur at the end of the Summer and during the Christmas seasonmainly because people arent paying attention. So we have to make sure that people are paying attention as we enter this crucial period at the end of 2017.

Now, Id like to begin with the national security strategic doctrine that was just released by the President and the administration. Helga, youve pointed to the differences between what Trump said and the language of the doctrine. There are some differences, but one of the key problems, as you identified, is that this is part of the old geopolitics. So Id like you to discuss what you mean by that and why thats a significant problem.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The paper was written by a woman named Dr. Nadia Schadlow, who is said to be close to H.R. McMaster, and worked earlier in the vicinity of Bush and Cheney. She comes from an army background. This document looks at the world from the standpoint of, as you said, geopolitics,and if you look at it from that standpoint, then of course China and Russia, but especially China which is rising, are regarded as rivals or enemies. Trump, in a very unusual move, insisted that he present the paper, rather than the National Security Advisor who normally presents such a report. It seems that he did that in order to soften certain formulations. For example: Apart from going through some of the language of the report, he also said that he wants to build a very strong partnership with Russia and China. This had the ridiculous effect with some European newspapers commenting, he cant even read the paper, because he said things which are different than the report. It reflects the fact that the faction fight in the Trump administration is far from being overthat there is still an effort by the neocons and by leftovers of previous administrations, in various parts of this administration, which expressed themselves in this report. And Trump, who after all had a very successful state visit to China a little while ago and who has talked successfully on the telephone with Putin in the last week, defeating a terrorist attack that was planned for St. Petersburg. Trump still has the inclination that he wants to work with Russia and China.

But I think if you look at the extremely sharp reactions coming from the Russian Foreign Ministry, from Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman of the Kremlin, from Chinas Global Times newspaper, from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and from the Chinese Embassy in Washingtonthey all say that this doctrine reflects an outmoded kind of thinking. They point to the fact that there is a completely new era shaping especially the West Pacificone of the six regions discussed in this paper. This is one of the areas which has been changed completely through the Belt and Road Initiative, where all the countries in the region are cooperating with China in win-win cooperation to the mutual benefit of each of them. And therefore, since the offer has been made many times to the United States, and to Europe, to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, there is actually no reason to go into such an adversarial position. The Russians called it an imperial document, and insist that it still reflects the desire to insist on a unipolar world, which is long gone, so its a completely futile effort. And the Chinese were also extremely critical, saying that this is an outmoded way of thinking and cannot lead to anything positive.

It shows you that the world is still very far from being out of the danger zones. I normally give credit to Trump, because unlike his predecessors Bush and Obama, he has extended his hand to Russia and China, and he still has the potential to move the world in a different direction. Nevertheless, when he does something which Im not so happy about, I take the liberty to say so.

It is interesting that of all places, the Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday, The New Era of Global Stability, by Arthur Herman, who is still thinking in geopolitical terms. He says that given the fact that you have three menTrump, Xi Jinping, and Putinwho are all working in what he calls a balance of power,which I dont think is the right expressionbut he says, therefore we have left behind the Wilsonian age of permanent wars which led the world to almost continuous wars, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Libya, Syria, and so forth. He says that age is now over because of these three men.

I think there is a completely different quality to that relationship, and the potential of that relationshipnamely, what Xi Jinping calls a community for a shared future of mankind. What we normally call humanity united for the common aims of mankindthat is the potential.

We are in one of these areas, and one of the commentaries in one Chinese paper said that there are many different conceptions about how the future of mankind should be shaped, and that it is not yet a settled question. And I think that that is absolutely true, but that is why it is so absolutely important to overcome the geopolitical view which insists that groups of countries, or one country, have a legitimate interest against the others. That is the kind of thinking which led to two world wars in the Twentieth Century, and I think it should be obvious to anybody that in the age of thermonuclear weapons, that thinking can only lead to the possible annihilation of the human species: We should get rid of it.

Schlanger: Ive received several emails from viewers who have said they agree with a lot of what we say, but they dont understand why youre so focussed on this question of geopolitics, because they say, isnt geopolitics the natural order? in international relations. Youve basically answered that question, but is there anything else youd like to say on that? Because I think this is the crucial issue, coming up as it does around this national strategic document.

Zepp-LaRouche: The only way to look at it is from the long arc of the evolution of the human species. In the beginning, when you still had tribal formations and little ethnic groupings, people had various ways of settling conflicteither diplomacy or negotiationsand if that didnt work, conflict and war. That was a characteristic of human development for a very long time. I dont think that is the true nature of mankind, because if you continue with the idea that if all negotiations and diplomacy fail, you still can resort to warin the age of thermonuclear weapons this would be the end of civilization. This idea of using war as a means of conflict resolution, corresponds to the age of maybe four-year-old little boys who think its all right to kick each other in the knee. I think humanity has the potential of becoming adult, that you can, indeedthrough negotiation, and especially through the establishment of a higher order of collaboration in the interest of everybodythat you can establish a way of the human governance worldwide, where war is no longer a method of resolving conflict.

Much of this way of thinking comes from the great thinker of the Fifteenth Century, Nicholas of Cusa, who is the father of modern science, and who is also the father of the idea of the sovereign nation-state. He developed a method of thinking which he called the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. He said that because man is capable of creative reason, that you can think on a higher order where conflicts on a lower order disappear. This is the argument that the One has a higher power than the Many. That thinking went into the Peace of Westphaliathe idea that you can overcome conflict by establishing a common interest. And even if perhaps Nicholas of Cusa is not very well known in China, yet still I think that probably because of the Confucian tradition, the idea of the New Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative of Xi Jinping, reflects exactly that philosophical approach.

So, if mankind were to become adult, we would not waste any more energy on stupid things like chasing money, stock market speculation, and other things which are really a waste of time. People would become creative and relate to the creativity of the other, and that not only between people, but also among nations. So I think that that is the right way to look at things, and not from the standpoint of eternal Aristotelian conflict between A and B, one geopolitical group against another. Instead, the Cusan view of the coincidence of opposites, the one humanity first, is the better way to look at it.

Schlanger: I had some experience recently resolving conflict between three and four year-olds, and I can assure you that adult supervision is absolutely necessary, and thats what youve been talking about in terms of the Cusan approach.

We saw something completely crazy in the last days, from Newsweek magazine and Bildzeitung, again, bringing up the specter of the Russian army overrunning Europe. Whats wrong with these people?

Christmas Surprise for Bob Mueller?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, it is very clear that the Russian maneuvers, Zapad 2017, which the Newsweek article and also the Bildzeitung referred to, was a demonstration on the side of Russia that they intend to defend their country. It is a reaction to the whole NATO policy of encirclement, of moving more and more troops to the Russian border. But the idea that Russia would move to occupy the three Baltic states, bomb Poland with Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad, and bomb infrastructure of Germany, Sweden and Finlandthats just completely absurd! This would never happen.

Its just a scare story, among other things to create a motivation for a conventional buildup. These articles also come in the context of the decision of the European Council to create a European defense union, which is a completely ridiculous idea. This will not make the EU more integrated. On the contrary, it will only cause more opposition.

Its an expression of those people who absolutely oppose the new paradigm, who want to use geopoliticsits the old British manipulation, divide and conquer, play the weaker against the stronger and vice versa, and in that way keep control. So its really a tool of the oligarchists and imperialists to keep to the old order, but I dont think it has any chance of success.

Schlanger: Speaking of the old order, weve seen the continuation of the Mueller investigation. But we now are seeing something different emerge: There were the scandals around Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI; Strzok and his mistress writing text messages to each other about the necessity to prevent Trump from becoming President, or to have an insurance policy were he to become President. Theres also Bruce Ohr and his wife who are part of the Fusion GPS crowd.

Now, this led to comments from Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who said these scandals demonstrate unprecedented bias. Jim Jordan, the Republican Congressman from Ohio, said Everything points to the fact that there was an orchestrated plan to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the President of the United States. Senate Judiciary chair Chuck Grassley is calling for firing some of these people. What is it going to take to shut down the Mueller investigation, given all these exposes coming out right now?

Zepp-LaRouche: There are rumors circulating that Trump may come out with a Christmas surprise. If that were to happen, it would be an interesting thing. It could be the appointment of somebody to investigate this whole complex, in the form of a special investigator. But I think also, already now, these congressmen and senators you mentioned, Nunes, Grassley in the Senate, Gowdy, and Gaetz, and various othersI think theyre quite fired up already about what theyre finding.

CSPAN

Even the European media are not entirely covering it up any more. There was a quite good article in Denmark, in the conservative daily Berlingske Tidende, which said that Obama bureaucrats conspired to prevent the election of Trump, and after that failed theyre trying to topple him; and then they go through the whole story of who the culprits are. So it is coming out. Even the major German daily FAZ could not avoid reporting it, even though, in their typical way, they tried to downplay it and say, all these people who say there is a Deep State, are conspiracy theorists, and so on. But the truth is coming out.

FBI

We in the United States, that is, our colleagues from LaRouche PAC, have launched a full mobilization with many activists; they distributed the dossier about Mueller to all the Congressional offices. They had many in-depth discussions, amidst increasing interest. It seems that some people in the Congress realize that whats at stake is the Constitution of the United States. Congress has oversight rights over the intelligence agencies, and if these agencies are loyal to a previous administration which was involved in such incredible schemes, they are aware of the fact that if they dont act right now, then you can throw the Constitution of the United States in the wastepaper basket.

CSPAN

But I think it will require a continuous effort and mobilization, because the people on the other side are quite desperate. They see that their whole system is coming down. Several people said that what was done by the Department of Justice, or some people in it and in the FBI, were felonies. They are trying to twist the situation to avoid the consequences of their acts. Its reaching a very, very serious point, the tide is already turning. But it is a fight, so stay tuned with us, and dont be complacent. Dont eat too many cookies over Christmas: Stay tuned and stay mobilized.

Schlanger: And I also think its important that we provide a certain kind of leadership thats essential, which is to identify not just the connectos and the names and the corruption, but the intent. This again gets to the thing you were talking about in the beginning, the attempt to stop President Trump from having a strategic-cooperation alliance with Russia and China. James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, stuck his foot in his mouth once again, saying, Putin knows how to handle an asset, and thats what hes doing with the President.

So I think its crucial that we get people to understand that this is not just about Trumps character, or people not liking Trump, but it has to do with the whole shift into a new paradigm, as weve been discussing.

Now, on that, you talked a little bit before about the situation in Europe. Theres a whole series of crises brewing, in East Europe, and the banking situation. Theres been a statement from a prominent Italian economist that the euro is fascist. Whats going on? Whats the latest on the situation in Europe?

Zepp-LaRouche: This Italian economist is very critical of the euro, for similar reasons to why we have been critical, or for example, the late Professor Hankel who had laid out the argument quite well, that the Eurozone was never an optimal currency zone, because some countries which had a rural character, and you had industrialized countries. And further, Europe is not a country, there is no European people. Its not like the United States, and its not even like Latin America; because you have almost 30 nations, cultures, traditions. People in one country, in Slovenia for example, know absolutely nothing about people in Alsace-Lorraine. There is just no way that you can even know, because you cant read their newspaperseven if the newspapers dont report much anyway. So there is no European people.

And what this Italian Professor Bagnai said is that even if the supporters of the euro dont wear black shirts, nevertheless, anybody who plans to implement his goal through violence represents a form of fascism. And what hes referring to is that everybody knows the euro does not function; he said its written in all the textbooks, that its only a question of time until this euro construction collapses; and then, that crisis is intended to lead to a further, forced European integrationand he says, that is fascism.

Now, that is not as far-fetched as some people may think. Because for example, Jacques Attali, who was the key advisor and eminence grise of France in the time of Mitterrand, had said many times that the fathers of the euro deliberately created it with a birth defect, so that it would come to a crisis, and then that crisis would be used to implement the political union which could not be put through otherwise. That is, there is very clearly a big opposition against the idea of a United States of Europe, for the reason that I said earlierthat there is no European people.

So there are these calls right now: French President Macron, European Council President Juncker, German social-democratic leader Martin Schulz, they all have given only slightly different versions of an idea that, now, because of all of these crisesthe refugees, the tensions among the different East and West European countriesthat one should impose a United States of Europe. I think this has as much chance as a snowflake in hell, because all these efforts to impose a supranational construct which eliminates even more sovereignty, will only cause more opposition and more reaction. So I think it will not work.

I find it quite significant that several advisors of Hungarian Prime Minister Orban have said that this discussion about a United States of Europe reminds them of Hitler. So the tone has become quite sharp, and I think its very far from unity.

And the latest atrocity, so to speak, is the fact that the European Union has decided to apply Article 7 to Poland, taking its voting rights away. Now, first of all, this will also not work, because this could only be implemented if there were unity among the other 26 states, but Hungary already said they will not back the decision of the EU against Polandand theyre now talking about similar measures against Romania. I think all of this will just lead to more controversy, and more disunity, and if they keep doing this, Poland may even leave the EU, because under no circumstances will they back down.

Schlanger: And just quickly, on the crisis in Europe, anything on the non-government situation in Germany?

Zepp-LaRouche: Oh, that is a terrible situation, because, you know its now almost three months since the election, and first, the so-called Jamaica [black, gold, green] coalition talks failed. Now, theyre talking about a Grand Coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social-Democrats of the SPD. Merkel says only that she will only accept a coalition as the outcome, while the SPD says, no, they want to have an open-ended discussion, maybe resulting in support for a minority governmentwhich Merkel has ruled out. All of this is going on and on and on, and I think the biggest problem with this is that none of the participating parties has any vision of what the future of Germany should bewhere should Europe be in 10 or 100 years from now? So its all about power politics; its about position; its about little issues, and it just means theres no government in sight before Easter, theyre now saying.

But naturally, no decision will be made for Europe until you have a German government, so the whole situation in Europe is extremely fragile right now. And you know, many more countries are taking that as a reason to ally more and more with the Silk Road. Austria, Switzerland, the East Europeans, the Balkan countries, Italy, Spain, and Portugalthey are all strengthening their ties with the Belt and Road Initiative, and that is a very good thing. And it means the position of resistance maintained by Brussels and Berlin will not be tenable for very long.

A Meltdown of the System

Schlanger: From the United States, this last couple of days, there was the passage of so-called tax reform bill. I know you have some thoughts on this. This is not going to solve any problems: What do you have to say about it, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is celebrated as the first big victory of President Trump. I dont think it will solve anything, if you dont put it in a package of other measures, including Glass-Steagall, and a credit system like Roosevelts Reconstruction Finance Corporation or the National Bank of Alexander Hamilton, and end the speculation in the derivatives sector. If you only lower taxes under these circumstances, without curbing the other factors I just mentioned, what it probably will do, is it will attract some investment in the United States for sure, but people in Germany are already saying, well, we have to protect ourselves, and take countermeasures against it, so it will lead to an increased tension internationally. Probably in the United States, todays big corporations and banks will just use these tax cuts to invest more in the stock market, in buying up their own shares, which they have been doing since the crisis of 2008 with Quantitative Easing and the zero-interest-rate policy. One reason why this is to be feared, is that Jamie Dimon, for example, laughed, and said: This is wonderful, this is Quantitative Easing 4.

I think it just requires a continuation of our mobilization. I know our colleagues in the United States from LaRouche PAC have produced a new pamphlet with the demand implementing the Four Laws of my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, and showing why the United States must join with China in building the New Silk Road, both domestically and internationally. This pamphlet, LaRouches Four Laws & Americas Future on the New Silk Road, is out. I would encourage you, our viewers and listeners, to get hold of this document: Read it, because it has all the solutionsthe correct economic conceptions for the United States and the rest of the world to get out of this present crisis.

This is all extremely urgent, because we could have a meltdown of the system any minute.

Let me mention briefly, this bitcoin mania which is going on, is really a reminder of the Dutch Tulip Bubble in 1637 before it burst. China has recognized that danger, theyre banning speculation in bitcoins. And all of these mad crazes just make clear, the urgent need to implement Glass-Steagall, and the entire Four Laws of Mr. LaRouche, which include a massive increase in the productivity of the workforce through a crash program in fusion technology, in space cooperation, and in high-tech investments in general, including high-technology infrastructure.

The recent Amtrak accident in Washington State just underlines that this is absolutely necessary. Unless this is all done as a package, I dont think the world will get out of this crisis.

Schlanger: Helga, Id like to conclude with a question that again has come up from several viewers: People fall prey to this idea that somehow China is a threat, and one of the things that people have picked up on is this concept of Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Now, youve written extensively on this, and its not fair to ask you to summarize it in a couple of minutes, but thats what Im going to do!

What does Xi Jinping mean by Socialism with Chinese characteristics?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think you also find right now, a growing self-confidence among the Chinese, who point to the fact that nobody can debate the incredible success of the Chinese model of economy. And they point to the fact that their model is clearly very, very much superior and more successful than the Western model, which they refuse to follow.

Now, there is such a thing as the determinative value of facts. And people should ask themselves, why is the Chinese model more successful? Well, the answer is very simplethat it is primarily devoted to the common good. This is always criticized by the West, with claims that China is suppressing freedom and human rights, and so forth. But in reality, if you ask yourself, is this complete mega-individualistic hedonism of the Westis that really a value which is so desirable? Values which have reached a point, where everything goes, everything is allowed. There are no more criteria for truth, or for the acceptance of the common good, everything is the survival of the fittest, and those who are rich become richer, and those who have the misfortune to be poor become pooreris that really so desirable?

In China, Im convinced that while there is debate about Marx, and there is a debate about socialism with Chinese characteristics, yet Im absolutely convincedand I have looked at it for a long time and from many aspectsthat what is meant by Chinese characteristics, refers to the two and half thousand years of Confucian tradition in China. I have written an article at the beginning of this year, actually, pointing to the affinity of the ideas of the German poet Friedrich Schiller and Confucius, who both have an image of man, that man has the moral obligation to self-perfect his entire life or her entire life, in order to serve the common good better and more efficiently.

Obviously, sometimes that means that individual rights are curtailed a little bit for the common good. One very good example was the building of the Three Gorges Dam, where people in the West were completely hysterical and said, oh, these poor peasants, who have to be moved so this dam could be built, this is trampling on freedom and human rights. Well, but what if you take the view that with this dam you had an enormous gain of hydropower, and that thousands and thousands of people would not drown every time the river flooded? Maybe it is better to act in the common good, and indeed these very peasants got other living quarters that were much more modern and much better. So this is a typical example of what can be done if you put the common good first. That is what China has very clearly done, and they have lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty. They also have a very clear plan to move the remaining 42 million poor people out of poverty by 2020, and theyre acting very effectively to do that. We may have mentioned that already, but Ill say it again: They locate where the poor people are, which regions they live in, and then they ask what are the reasons for the povertywhat has to be done to address it, to get them out of it? They use e-commerce, for instance, to allow the farmers in far distant rural areas to market their products. Theyre moving very, very efficiently to uplift the entire population out of poverty.

Now, how many poor people are there in the United States, how many homeless? We heard figures in the last period, the unbelievable figure that 10% of all schoolchildren in New York come from homeless backgrounds. That doesnt mean they live on the streets, but they dont have their own home. In Europe there are 90 million poor, and nobody is talking about lifting them out of poverty. The rate of poverty in Greece, just increased, whereby I think two-thirds of the whole population is below the poverty line and have incomes of below 1,000 euros; and a very high percentage of that, again, have only part-time jobs, earning something like 450 euros per month. And there is no plan to change thaton the contrary, the EU is implementing more vicious austerity all the time.

cc/Giannis Angelakis

I think that people should not look at this China question with prejudice. The Chinese model is completely different: Its based on 2,500 years of tradition, and there is something to this Chinese way of approaching things through peaceful approaches, through a win-win offer which is really a better model of governance. And people shouldnt be so prejudiced. I have found that most people know nothing about China. You have a few, a handful of people who have been there, who do business there, and they are completely excited about the options which the New Silk Road is offering to the world. They are really transformed and totally excited.

Because of the negative media, there are many people who still believe in the Chinese threat, who believe in the yellow peril, and other decades-old propaganda campaigns. I think its a shame: Because if you look at China without prejudice, it is an incredibly interesting cultureits rich, its 5,000 old, it has produced beautiful things in music, in poetry, and in philosophy. Its already one of the vanguard countries in scienceits an innovative country. So I would suggest that people, rather than simply believing what Im sayingstart to investigate China and look for yourself. And you will find that it is completely different from what the Western media or some of the geopolitical think-tanks are trying to tell you. And you will discover beautiful things, I promise.

Schlanger: On that uplifting note, Helga, on behalf of the Schiller Institute, Id like to wish people a Merry Christmas, but with your suggestion: Dont just eat cookies and drink rum punch. Use your holiday as an opportunity to reflect on the great opportunities for mankind today, and what it means to have the Christmas Spirit, and in that sense the Christmas Spirit and the Silk Road Spirit should be one and the same.

So Helga, well see you next week! Thanks a lot.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, Merry Christmas.
Jordan on Sunday said it had agreed to a UN request to deliver humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Syrians stranded near a border crossing between the two countries.

Foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Kayed said, however, it will be a "one-off" operation to send "humanitarian aid across the Rukban border crossing" towards a desert area where the Syrians are struck.

He said it was in response to a request by the United Nations and that the aid would be lifted across the border using special equipment.

Kayed did not elaborate on the kind of humanitarian aid that would be sent to the Syrians or when they were expected to receive it, nor did he say how many Syrians are stranded in the desert.

According to UN estimates based on satellite images, between 45,000 and 50,000 Syrians have been stuck for months on the Syrian side of the frontier near the Rukban border crossing.

Conditions are worsening for them as winter grips the region -- which Jordan declared a "closed military zone" after a 2016 suicide attack claimed by the Islamic State group killed seven Jordanian soldiers.

In October, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi had insisted that aid to those stranded near Rukban should come from Syria itself after the UN said deliveries were difficult to make because of the war.

The UN refugee agency says it has registered more than 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan since the conflict in Syria began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.

However, Amman says it is hosting 1.3 million Syrian refugees, and has repeatedly called for more assistance to do so.

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This article appears in the August 16, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Bust the London-Riyadh

Global Terror Axis

by an EIR Investigative Team

[PDF version of this article]

Aug. 13If another major terrorist attack like the Sept. 11, 2001 hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or the Sept. 11, 2012 armed assault on the Benghazi, Libya U.S. Mission occurs, you can blame it on George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the British and Saudi monarchies. The wellspring of all significant international terrorism today is the Anglo-Saudi imperial alliance, expressed most vividly in the 1985 Al-Yamamah arrangements between London and Riyadh that persist to this day.

Al-Yamamah ("The Dove") was ostensibly an arms-for-oil barter deal, first brokered by then-Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, and then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Under the cover of the arms-for-crude-oil deal, over the succeeding 28 years, hundreds of billions of dollars in cash have been squirreled into offshore bank accounts in such notorious havens as the British and Dutch Caribbean Islands, Switzerland, and Dubai.

Those funds have bankrolled nearly 30 years of global terrorism and coups d'etat, dating back to late-1970s British and American sponsorship of the Afghan "mujahideen" which spawned al-Qaeda and every other Muslim Brotherhood offshoot now imposing a reign of terror across the entire Islamic world, and into Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Al-Yamamah slush funds bankrolled the Afghan "resistance," separatist wars in Africa, and the 1990s conflicts in the Balkans following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. An honest and thorough investigationyet to be accomplishedwould all-but-certainly reveal that Al-Yamamah funds bankrolled the 9/11 terrorists.

The existence of an Anglo-Saudi top-down command over al-Qaeda and every other jihadist front group is well known within some circles at the highest levels of the U.S. governmentdating back decades. But the successive Bush (41 and 43) and Obama administrations have presided over a brutal coverup of this Anglo-Saudi treachery, making them complicit before, during, and after the fact, in terrorist atrocities that have claimed tens of thousands of lives globally, and provided the pretext for every police-state tyranny that has been wrought on the United States over the past dozen years.

The single most glaring case of coverup of the Anglo-Saudi terror is the refusal of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations to release the 28-page chapter from the final report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry probing the 9/11 attacks, which catalogued the roles of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Directorate (GID), and then-Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, in the financing and protection of teams of 9/11 hijackers (see accompanying documentation).

Had Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama released those 28-pages, and allowed a thorough investigation into the role of British and Saudi intelligence in the September 2001 attacks, it is quite possible that Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the other American diplomats and security officers who were killed or injured in the 2012 attacks on the Benghazi Mission and CIA Annex, would still be alive today. Thousands of others, killed or injured in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Mali, and other frontline battlegrounds, too, might have avoided their fate. And the enormous buildup of the Big Brother espionage state that has now finally been partially exposed by the Edward Snowden, IRS, and other recent revelations, could never have been allowed or justified.

In addition, as the result of the failure to expose and wipe out the Anglo-Saudi authorship, funding, and protection of the global jihadist- and narco-terrorist nexus, the so-called "Global War on Terrorism" has been turned into one of the biggest criminal hoaxes in modern history.

Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf has gathered the signatures of more than 160 House Republicans demanding the creation of a Congressional Select Committee to probe the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the American facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The Obama White House is desperate to block any such investigation. In tandem with the release of the buried 28 pages from the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry into the original 9/11 attacks, such a Benghazi inquiry could unearth the actual roots of the two greatest terror atrocities against the United States since the British sacking of Washington and the burning of the White House in the War of 1812.

An Open Secret

The suppression of those 28-pages has been repeatedly cited by former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Lyndon LaRouche, authors Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan, and others, as the crucial element in a far-broader coverup of the roots of modern irregular warfare and terrorism.

Much of the evidence of the deeper oligarchical roots of global irregular warfare is hidden in plain sight.

In December 2000, the editors of EIR submitted a memorandum to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, calling for a formal investigation to determine whether Great Britain should be put on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. The EIR document was based exclusively on formal complaints and evidence submitted by governments from every continent, all detailing the fact that Great Britain had provided safe haven and logistical support to terrorist organizations, including the Chechen separatists (Russia), the narco-terrorist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Sendero Luminoso (Peru), the Kurdish Workers Party (Turkey), Gamma al-Islamiya (Egypt), Ansar al-Sharia (Yemen), the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (Libya), and the Islamic Guerilla Army (Algeria).

The EIR memorandum named Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was maintaining a home in Wembley, England, and operated a propaganda office in London under the protection of the British Crown, as a subject for investigation.

In 2007, EIR published exclusive evidence about the true nature of the Al-Yamamah-BAE Systems project and the offshore terror funds. Among the evidence presented by EIR was material drawn from a semi-official biography of Prince Bandar, which detailed the offshore sequestration of Al-Yamamah profits and their use to arm the Afghan mujahideen, African governments, and other agencies engaged in "the fight against communism." Prince Bandar boasted in that book that the Al-Yamamah deal was a product of the unique relationship that existed between the British and Saudi monarchies, which allowed for the build-up of a massive "black fund" with no governmental oversight.

That EIR expose included details, provided in public locations by Senator Graham and others, detailing some of the evidence of the Saudi official funding of 9/11.

When the investigations into the BAE-Saudi program threatened to blow up the Anglo-Saudi controlling hand over al-Qaeda and other jihadist terror, British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the Attorney General to shut down the probe on "national security grounds." To this day, Al-Yamamah barter deals between BAE and the Saudi Defense Ministry continue to feed the offshore terror slush funds.

In 2010, Ian Johnson wrote a book-length account of the British and American intelligence services' long-running sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood, A Mosque in Munich, which catalogued the 1960s emergence of the Muslim World League as the international recruitment arm of the Saudi-funded global jihadist terror. The Johnson account demonstrated that the Anglo-Saudi intelligence "special arrangements" predated Al-Yamamah by decades.

Also in 2010, British researcher Mark Curtis wrote another book-length account, Secret AffairsBritain's Collusion With Radical Islam, based largely on declassified British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and MI6 documents, showing that the British Crown intelligence service has been the sponsor and controlling force behind the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and all of its even more violent offshoots, dating back to the organization's founding in the British-occupied Suez Canal Zone in Egypt in the 1920s.

The History Commons, a little-known but important online archive (www.historycommons.org), has assembled over 20,000 news entriesall from public sourcesdetailing the Anglo-Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers and other brutal acts of mass terror. It is an open secret, frequently publicized in the British media, that "Londonistan" is the capital of global jihadist terrorism. Despite the EIR effort in late 2000 to shut down the British Crown's transparent alliance with Saudi Arabia in sponsoring worldwide terrorism and separatist insurgency (Chechnya, Kurdistan, Kashmir, etc.), London remains the protector and recruitment hub for terrorism on every continent to this day.

The issue before us is not the availability of evidence. The issue is that leading government circles in Washington, London, and Riyadh are committed to covering up the Anglo-Saudi responsibility for 9/11, Benghazi, and other atrocities. Until and unless that coverup is broken, no one is immune from attack. The fact that two successive American PresidentsGeorge W. Bush and Barack Obamahave put their personal imprimatur on the coverup of the British and Saudi monarchies' role in funding and orchestrating terrorism is grounds for prosecution and impeachment.

Anglo-Saudi 'Thirty Years War'

The British alliance with Saudi Arabia to promote global terrorism and genocide has been a dominant policy for more than 30 years. Back in the mid-1970s, Dr. Bernard Lewis, a leading British intelligence "Orientalist," called for an "Arc of Crisis" extending across the southern tier of the Soviet Union, from the Caucasus to Central Asia and into Western China's Xinjiang Province. Lewis called for Western intelligence sponsorship of an Islamic fundamentalist jihad against the "Godless communist monolith."

The "Bernard Lewis Plan," as it came to be known, gridded precisely with the official policy of the British monarchy to reduce the world population to below 1 billion people, through war, disease, and famine. Lewis was dispatched to the United States in the mid-1970s, where he sold the British new Thirty Years War scheme to such prominent American national security figures as Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dick Cheney, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and the entire coterie of neoconservatives who would come to populate two Bush administrations.

In effect, the "Bernard Lewis Plan," promoted by the British Crown and adopted by the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, fostered a Thirty Years War that rages to this day. Starting in Afghanistan, London and Riyadh, with the complicity of dupes and traitors in Washington, created a global "dark age" legion of fanatical suicide fighters, who have gone from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and beyond.

The sponsorship of this "new dark age" project is a top-down affair. The policy of the British monarchy is vast population reduction. They have a witting ally in Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that some of the very jihadist forces unleashed with London sponsorship and Saudi funding will ultimately bring down the Saudi monarchy itself.

Senior U.S. intelligence sources have confirmed that the "new" British policy for the entire Islamic world is the promotion of a permanent sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, exploiting a 1,000-year-old split within Islam, with the goal of mass genocide.

One of the most important British assets in this global genocide scheme is Prince Bandar. Trained in Britain, Bandar was not only the Saudi interlocutor with the British Crown and BAE in forging the original Al Yamamah deal. As Saudi Ambassador in Washington (and as practically an adopted son of George H.W. Bush), Bandar presided over the Saudi intelligence officers who shepherded the 9/11 hijackers for a year, leading up to the September 2001 attacks. His wife, Princess Haifa, provided cover for Bandar's direct financing of at least one team of the hijackers.

Today, Bandar is in an even more prominent position, as national security advisor to King Abdullah, and as head of the Saudi GID intelligence service. It is Bandar who is behind the deployment of thousands of "dark age" suicide fighters into Syria and Lebanon, to guarantee that the Sunni versus Shi'ite conflict reaches a critical mass of killing and hatred to last a century.

Bandar, however, is a foolish pawn in a much bigger game, a game controlled from London, not Riyadh. That oligarchical game is one of divide-and-conquer. Ultimately, it is a game of mass population reduction on a scale never before seen in history.

It is that British policy that must be stopped. The suppressed 28 pages from the Congressional Joint Inquiry are the crucial entry point for exposing the true nature of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and all that followed. Open that door and the entire Anglo-Saudi war against civilization can be exposed. From Bandar to BAE to the British Crown, the true masterminds of the heinous crime of 9/11 can be revealed. Those in the United States who have been complicit in the coverup of that crime can and must, as well, be brought to justiceincluding those currently occupying the highest office in the land.
This article appears in the December 22, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Trumps Space Directive:

Back to the Moon

with a Renewed Purpose?

by Kesha Rogers, independent candidate for Congress from the Texas 9th CD

[Print version of this article]

Dec. 18 (EIRNS)Space Policy Directive 1, signed by President Trump on Dec. 11, represents a change in our national space policy, to return human beings to the Moon and then carry out a mission to Mars and beyond. In his address during the signing ceremony, the President declared,

The directive Im signing today will refocus Americas space program on Human exploration and discovery. It marks an important step in returning American Astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972 for long term exploration and use. This time we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint. We will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond. This directive will ensure Americas space program, once again, leads and inspires all of humanity.

The signing of this directive came only nine months after the President signed the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, in March. Shortly after that, the President relaunched the National Space Council, with Vice President Pence at its head. The first meeting of the council, on October 5, unanimously recommended a plan to return human beings to the lunar surface.

View full size

NASA

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 17 Moon landing on December 7, 1972, the last time that human beings walked on the surface of the Moon. Apollo astronaut. Harrison Schmitt, the last living crew member of that Apollo 17 mission, was present at the signing of the space policy directive on Dec. 11. He has not only advocated a national mission to return to the lunar surface, but has been a strong proponent of mining helium-3 on the Moon for advanced propulsion and other energy uses.

During the ceremony, the President pledged that we will return to the Moon. Addressing Schmitt, he said,

Exactly forty-five years ago, almost to the minute, Jack became the last American to land on the Moon. Today we pledge that he will not be the last, and I suspect that we will be finding other places to land, in addition to the Moon.

This new policy under President Trump shuts down the ridiculous plan of sending human beings to an asteroid, and commits the USA to making lunar exploration a national priority.

In 2010 this author launched her campaign as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, to save our national space program from the hideous and destructive cuts of former president Obama, who declared, in reference to the need to send human beings back to the lunar surface, that we had been there, done that. President Obamas policy did not merely reject the relaunching of a lunar mission; he rejected the future progress that a full lunar development missionrequiring and enabling the breakthrough to thermonuclear fusion powerwould mean for humanity as a whole. Obama condemned the very idea of the quality of national mission that would restore optimism to the country and unify it around a real science driver and economic recovery program, as expressed in a national space mission coherent with Krafft Ehrickes Three Laws of Astronautics (see below).

A national space mission renews the opportunity to launch a real physical economic recovery program for the nation. Such a real recovery program requires the adoption of Lyndon LaRouches four economic laws to save the United Statesspecifically, abandoning the use of Wall Street to generate profits from speculation, and employing a federal credit system, through which credit is issued to

generate high productivity trends in improvement of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity, and living standards of the persons and households of the United States.

Examples include upgrading to high-speed rail for freight and passenger transportation, upgrading to nuclear fission and fusion for abundant electrical power, and upgrading to a full human space program that brings our Moon into the economic grasp of mankind, garnering all the spin-off technologies of all of these upgrades to every sector of our economy, including agriculture, medicine, machine tool design, and supply-chain logistics.

In essence, this requires a crash science-driver program to develop a fusion energy economy, and the exploration and development of space, which is also key to the productive cultural and economic future of our nation, and the world.

Remember the unifying words of President John F. Kennedy:

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the Moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

The instruments of knowledge and understanding must be our renewed commitment today to peaceful cooperation in the development and exploration of space with all nations. We must abolish any laws that prevent our national space agency from working in cooperation with any nation, including China. China has taken a leading role in space exploration through its national space program, and responded very positively to the announced plans of the United States to send human beings back to the surface of the Moon and on to Mars. In a press briefing, China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said, China is glad to see countries making progress in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes. He said, China hopes members of the international community will reach an agreement on preventing the weaponization of outer space.

It is time for President Trump to commit our nation to join with all leading nations of the world in a community of shared destiny in the exploration and development of space, as the basis for meeting the challenges and solving problems facing all mankind.

The President of the United States will address the nation on January 30 in his first State of the Union Address. We must see to it that nothing gets in the way of him fulfilling a commitment to renew our national mission and restore optimism to our nation.

Krafft Ehrickes Three Laws

Ehricke summarized his philosophy of astronautics in three laws (1957):

First Law. Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself.

Second Law. Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar System, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are mans rightful field of activity.

Third Law. By expanding through the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.

The first law is astronautics challenge to man to write his declaration of independence from a priori thinking, from uncritically accepted conditions, in other words, from a past and principally different pre-technological world clinging to him. This can be done.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of this country prove it.
PRESS RELEASE

Haiti:

LaRouche Demands Urgent U.S. Action

To Prevent Rainy Season Devastation

Feb. 22, 2010 (EIRNS)Lyndon LaRouche today issued an urgent call for the United States to send the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work with the Haitian government to help relocate up to a million Haitians, now homeless and living amid the rubble of shattered Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed some 300,000 Haitians.

This has to happen before the rainy season, which will begin soon, he stated. He noted that the immediate emergency is that the rainy season is upon us, and under current conditions, Port-au-Prince within a month or two will be subjected to floods, hit by mudslides, and become inundated in deadly sewage from the 1.5 million people who are now homeless and destitute in that city. These are people who have no choice but to live in the streets and slums under ramshackle pieces of plastic, and amid human excrement that is not being removedbecause there is no ability to do so, nor even a place to take it.

Haiti did not have a single sewage treatment plant even before the earthquake. It has long the victim of the globalization and free trade policies of London-centered financial predators.

LaRouche stressed that if we do not act, Haiti will soon face conditions in which dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid and other epidemics will spread, with devastating consequences. Haiti is the image of what awaits all of humanity under the current, bankrupt British-imperial international financial system: it is the face of the New Dark Age. We must stop it in Haiti, if we are to have the moral fitness to survive on this planet.

To prevent another wave of mass deaths and total national disintegration, LaRouche advocated that a bilateral treaty agreement between the United States and Haiti should be promptly reached, designed to evacuate up to a million people from this potentially deadly situation into the United States on an interim basis, and possibly into inland parts of Haiti as well. Under a reasonable Presidency, the U.S. can mobilize the capacity to do that, and he stated that the United States can further use its military capacity, through the Army Corps of Engineers, to either rebuild semi-permanent housing, or reopen military bases with barracks, including those shut down under the BRAC commission.

Full reconstruction in Haiti will take up to 25 years, LaRouche has pointed out, but in the short term it is possible to build new relocation camps and even cities outside of Port-au-Prince, where the essentials of life can be provided: food, water, sanitation, a roof over their heads, and sufficient energy and electricity to make all this possible. Even under a dysfunctional, impeachable President Obama, the United States must act, and act quickly, LaRouche stated.

In his Jan. 30 international webcast, LaRouche responded to a question about Haiti, saying that the United States has to take the kind of approach that Presidents like Lincoln and Roosevelt did:
PRESS RELEASE

German High Court Confirms

Duggan Death a Suicide:

Ruling Exposes British Lies

Against LaRouche

Feb. 24, 2010 (EIRNS)The German Constitutional Court, the highest court in Germany, issued a ruling on Feb. 23, upholding the March 2003 finding of German police officials that British national Jeremiah Duggan committed suicide by running into a busy highway in Wiesbaden, Germany in March 2003.

For the last seven years, the circles of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the British monarchy have used the Duggan case for an international smear campaign against American statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Despite all the evidence, the original determination of the German investigating officials, and previous lower court rulings in both Germany and England, these British enemies of LaRouche have fraudulently insinuated that LaRouche or his associates were somehow responsible for Duggan's death.

At the behest of these circles, Mr. Duggan's mother and father, Erica and Hugo, filed a legal challenge in Germany claiming that the original investigation was flawed and incomplete. They claimed to have new evidence that cast doubt on the original determination by the German police. These wild and unfounded assertions formed the basis for an international propaganda campaign against LaRouche. See this release and this one.

The Constitutional Court ruling dismissed all of the Duggans' claims. Further details will be posted shortly.

[Background on the Duggan case]
PRESS RELEASE

LaRouche PAC Releases

NAWAPA XXI Special Report:

Reviving the Economy, Creating

Jobs, and Restoring Public Credit

April 14, 2012 (EIRNS)The Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee has just released a 100-page economic special report: NAWAPA XXI, a 21st-century advancement of the continental water management project, the North American Water and Power Alliance. The Special Report contains a detailed plan designed to employ well over 4 million people in productive labor and manufacturing. The program is also designed to re-establish water, food, and power security for the North American continent. NAWAPA XXI will generate 42 gigawatts of surplus power for the United States and Canada, and supplement the existing water flows of the four major river basins in the U.S. Southwest while potentially doubling the amount of irrigated farmland in the southwestern United States from 22 million acres presently to approximately 41 million acres.

Additionally, nearly half of the NAWAPA XXI report is dedicated to a proposal to fund NAWAPA through the restoration of the historic U.S. system of public credit. This proposal begins by separating valid debts from gambling debts under a new Glass-Steagall act, and continues stepwise to the establishment of a National Bank and the funding of NAWAPA XXI. The national policy precedents are then illustrated in detail, discussing Alexander Hamilton's establishment of the first National Bank, John Quincy Adams system of U.S. internal improvements, Abraham Lincoln's Greenback policy, and the most recent precedent for a sound system of public credit, Franklin D. Roosevelt's RFC and TVA.

According to the principal author, Michael Kirsch, the project itself not only encompasses continental resource management, power generation, and water transfer routes, but is integral to national sovereignty. "Because we look at a national credit system approach," Kirsch said on April 7, "we are looking at the nation's interest, and therefore the government's interest, in making such projects feasible due to this long-term credit institution."

The first edition run of NAWAPA XXI is the result of 2 years of investigation and planning by LaRouchePAC researchers, in collaboration with a team of experts in the fields of nuclear science, agriculture, transportation, engineering, project planning, and geology. According to the LaRouchePAC research team, the March 2012 first edition will soon be followed by a second edition based on the input provided by professionals reached during the just-commenced phase of intensive outreach by LaRouche PAC and associates.

Currently there are 10,000 print copies of NAWAPA XXI (first edition) being distributed across the United States. Dave Christie, LaRouche PAC-endorsed congressional candidate in Washingtons 9th District, noted that there is a significant, positive change in outlook among unions, engineers and other experts, compared to 2010 when the NAWAPA Overview was initially released. Christie noted,

"With our original NAWAPA outreach, a lot of the unions and professionals were tricked, the stimulus had them tricked. Now they have seen how terrible Obama is, that the stimulus was a hoax, and they're upset. The country is falling apart and they are more susceptible to big ideas."

LaRouche PAC and associates have been holding extensive meetings with unions, industry experts, government officials, as well as contacting congressional candidates with the full implications of the NAWAPA XXI platform. Kirsch insists that making NAWAPA XXI a reality means that leaders in government as well as in industry, technology, and science must commit themselves now, to define the upcoming 2012 election with this patriotic, national mission. Invoking the spirit of John F. Kennedy, to whom the report is dedicated, Kirsch states that the theme of NAWAPA XXI is the unity of the nation. "It's every state," said Kirsch. "It's a union of states. Every increase in productivity in one place is an increase in another. NAWAPA XXI increases the power of the nation as a whole."

This report is available from LaRouche PAC.
PRESS RELEASE

MEMO TO THE U.S. CONGRESS ON OBAMA GUN-RUNNING TO SYRIA:

It's Already Happening

by William F. Wertz, Jr.

July 1, 2013 (EIRNS)This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.

June 29Three recent articles published by Reuters (June 18) and the New York Times (June 22 and June 29) now confirm what LaRouche PAC has asserted for months: Contrary to law and without authorization, the Obama Administration has been running guns from Benghazi to Syria, starting several months prior to the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission and CIA annex on Sept. 11, 2012.

The guns were being run, and continue to be run, by a cut-out of the February 17th Brigade, a "former" member by the name of Abdul Basit Haroun. Haroun is a close associate of the head of the February 17th Brigade Ismael Al-Sallabi and the commander of the February 17th Brigade Fawzi Bukatef, both of whom are quoted in the first two of above-cited articles in defense of Haroun's gun-running.

The February 17th Brigade, founded by the Emir of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Abdelhakim Belhadj, is the militia that was hired by the U.S. to protect the mission in Benghazi. When the attack occurred the February 17th Brigade was nowhere to be found.

The most recent New York Times article confirms that Qatar has been shipping weapons to Syria since 2011, including at least one shipment of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADS) from Libya.

Prior to these articles, there was already an abundance of evidence strongly suggesting that the Obama administration,under the auspices of John Brennan, had been running guns to the Syrian opposition from Benghazi since at since 2011. We provide that evidence below.

Following President Obama's June 16 announcement of his decision to openly provide weapons to the Syrian opposition, several bills have been submitted in the Congress to prevent him from doing so, arguing that such a decision requires the approval of Congress in accordance with the War Powers Resolution and the U.S. Constitution. Legislation introduced by Rep. Walter Jones threatens that to provide weapons thus is an impeachable offense. It has also been reported that a number of Congressional committees have rejected proposals by the Administration to fund the arming of the Syrian opposition with funds already allocated for intelligence purposes.

Yet President Obama has already been providing weapons to the Syrian opposition, including weapons from Libya, in collusion with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E., Turkey, and Jordan for over a year. In doing so, he has already committed an impeachable offense in violating the U.S. Constitution. And in the case of weapons shipped to Libya, and from Libya to Syria, he has violated the UN arms embargo.

As perhaps even John Kerry will recall, during the 1980s, when the U.S. Congress cut off funding to the Contras in Nicaragua, Vice President Bush prevailed upon his good friend Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to secretly fund the Contras. This is the same Prince Bandar who funded the first two 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the U.S. And it is the same Prince Bandar, now Director of Intelligence in Saudi Arabia, who has been arming al-Qaeda in Syria.

Obama and his current CIA Director, John Brennan, have been using that same Iran-Contra method, first to illegally arm the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, headed by Abdelhakim Belhadj, and then to arm the al-Qaeda-dominated opposition in Syria. As the authors of the book Benghazi: The Definitive Report point out, "From Oliver North to John Brennan, this is just the way that the system works regardless of the administration. The dead bodies they leave in their wake ... are, at the end of the day, just collateral damage in a war waged by those with political ambitions."

The Evidence of Obama's Gunrunning

On March 7, 2011, the London Independent reported that Obama asked Saudi Arabia to supply arms to the Libyan opposition. He did this despite the fact that the UN Security Council had unanimously imposed an arms embargo to and from Libya on Feb. 26, 2011.

In addition, in the Spring of 2011, Obama approved the provision of weapons by Qatar and the U.A.E. to the Libyan opposition, according to the New York Times (Dec. 5, 2012). Those weapons did not go to the Libyan Transitional National Council (TNC), but directly to the LIFG, according to an Oct. 17, 2011 Wall Street Journal article.

The UN Panel of Experts confirmed that Qatar and the U.A.E. violated the UN arms embargo, in reports to the President of the Security Council on March 20, 2012, Feb. 15, 2013, and April 9, 2013.

In respect to Qatar, the UN report states that despite that country's denials, "the Panel stands by its findings that Qatar supplied arms and ammunition to the opposition during the uprising in breach of the arms embargo." The report also points to the collusion of NATO in violating the UN-imposed no-fly zone and arms embargo. Citing flights organized by the U.A.E., the report states that the flights "received deconfliction numbers from NATO, the existence of the no-fly zone and the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council in resolutions 1970 (2011) and 1973 (2011) notwithstanding."

The report confirms that, since the overthrow of Qaddafi, "The Syrian Arab Republic has presented a prominent destination for Libyan fighters. A number of them have joined brigades as individuals or through networks to support the Syrian opposition." ... [M]ilitary mat,riel has also been sent out from Libya to the Syrian Arab Republic through networks and routes passing through either Turkey or northern Lebanon.... Transfers of military mat,riel have been organized from various locations in Libya, including Misrata and Benghazi. The significant size of some shipments and the logistics involved suggest that representatives of the Libyan local authorities might have at least been aware of the transfers, if not actually directly involved."

During the same month that Qaddafi was assassinated, October 2011, according to the Daily Telegraph and other sources, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of the Libyan TNC, and Burhan Ghalioun, the head of the Syrian National Council, reached an agreement for military support to the Syrian opposition from Libya. The Emir of the LIFG, Abdelhakim Belhadj, then traveled to Turkey in November 2011 to meet with the Syrian Free Army to provide training and weapons.

That same month, according to the website Albawaba.com and the truthseeker.co.uk, 600 LIFG terrorists went to Syria to commence military training and operations. They were led by Mahdi al-Harati, deputy commander of the Tripoli Military Council under Belhadj. Then, according to Ahmed Manai, President of the Tunisian Institute of Internatonal Relations, and a member of the Committee on Arab Observers in Syria, on Dec. 11, 2011, an agreement was signed in Tripoli among Jalil, Belhadj, Rashid al-Ghannushi (head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia), Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hamad Jabber bin Jassim al-Thani, and the number two of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, to provide weapons and fighters to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Stevens Secures MANPADS; Brennan Exports Them

According to Benghazi: The Definitive Report, by Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy (New York: William Morrow, February 2013), the operation was run by now-CIA Director John Brennan outside of the traditional command structure, with Obama's approval.

The book reports that the United States had been facilitating, or, at the very least allowing, large weapons transfers from Libya to rebel fighters in Syria. The authors maintain that this did not fall under the purview of a Foreign Services officer in the State Department, such as Ambassador Stevens, but rather, "Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict."

On Feb. 2, 2012, Andrew J. Shapiro, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, said in a speech that the United States was engaged in Libya in the most extensive effort to combat the proliferation of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) in U.S. history. Libya had acquired 20,000 MANPADS, and, according to Shapiro, only 5,000 could be accounted for as of that date. He further reported that many of the weapons were taken by militias, and that many of the militias remain reluctant to relinquish them. Furthermore, he said that "we cannot rule out that some weapons may have leaked out of Libya."

In August 2011, the LIFG's Belhadj led the takeover of Tripoli, thanks to the backing of Qatar, and became the commander of the Tripoli Military Council, in charge of coordinating defense on a national level, under the TNC. On Sept. 4, 2011, he was appointed to the Supreme Security Council. One week after he was appointed to command the Tripoli Military Council, Belhadj (founder of the February 17th Brigade), Ismael al-Sallabi (head of the February 17th Brigade), and TNC head Jalil went to Qatar, where they met with the financiers of the revolution and NATO officials, according to Kronos Advisory, LLC.

On Sept. 27, 2011, ABC News reported that Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch had taken pictures in Libya of pickup truckloads of missiles being carted off by the Libya opposition. He said: "I myself could have removed several hundred if I wanted to, and people can literally drive up with pickup trucks or even 18 wheelers and take away whatever they want. Every time I arrive at one of these weapons facilities, the first thing we notice going missing is the surface-to-air missiles." Richard Clark, former White House counterterrorism advisor and now a consultant to ABC News, said, "I think the probability of al-Qaeda being able to smuggle some of the Stinger-like missiles out of Libya is probably pretty high."

UN Panel of Experts Documents Two Shipments

On April 27, 2012, according to the UN Panel of Experts report, Lebanese authorities seized a shipment of arms and ammunition destined for the opposition forces in the Syrian Arab Republic. The Panel inspected the shipment and concluded that "the shipment consisted of Libyan arms and ammunition that were transferred to the Luftfallah II in breach of the arms embargo." The shipment included "SA-24 short range surface-to-air missiles and SA-7b manportable air defense systems, anti-tank guided missiles," etc.

Yet already on Sept. 14, 2012, three days after Stevens was killed, the Times of London reported that a Libyan ship carrying weapons, including SAM-73 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) for the Syrian opposition, had docked in Turkey. The UN has confirmed that the ship was the al-Entisar. It sailed from Benghazi to Iskenderun, Turkey, where it docked on Aug. 25, 2012, returning to Benghazi on Sept. 3.

Both of these documented shipments to Syria from Libya, and undoubtedly others, occurred after Obama reportedly signed a secret order authorizing the CIA to help coordinate the shipment of weapons by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the Syrian opposition (See below).

So, on the one hand, beginning in August 2011, the U.S. and U.K. were reportedly trying to secure the MANPADS in Libya; but on the other, the Obama Administration, which approved the illegal provision of weapons by Qatar and the U.A.E. to the LIFG, had enlisted those allies to provide arms and jihadists in the effort to overthrow Assad.

Obama Signs "Finding;" Involvement of Senior White House Officials

Sometime in early 2012, or perhaps earlier, Obama signed a "finding" that permitted the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support to the Syrian opposition, Reuters reported on Aug. 1, 2012. The news agency added that the U.S. was collaborating with a secret command center operated by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar near the Syrian border, in Adana, Turkey, which is five miles east of Incirlik, a U.S. air base where U.S. military and intelligence agencies maintain a presence.

The arms airlift expanded after the November Presidential elections, according to the New York Times of March 24, 2013 ("Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, with Aid from CIA"): "More than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes land[ed] at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports."

The CIA has been directly involved in this operation, the Times reported: "From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia.

"Qatar and Saudi Arabia had been shipping military materials via Turkey to the opposition since early and late 2012. Simultaneously, arms and equipment were being purchased by Saudi Arabia in Croatia and flown to Jordan on Jordanian cargo planes for rebels working in southern Syria and for retransfer to Turkey for rebels groups operating from there. "On a string of nights from April 26 through May 4 [2012], a Qatari Air Force C-17a huge American-made cargo plane made six landings in Turkey, at Esenboga Airport. By Aug. 8 the Qataris had made 14 more cargo flights. All came from Al Udeid Air Base 4 in Qatar, a hub for American military logistics in the Middle East. "American officials have confirmed that senior White House officials were regularly briefed on the shipments. "Through the fall [of 2012], the Qatari Air Force cargo fleet became even more busy, running flights almost every other day in October.... Soon other players joined the airlift: In November, three Royal Jordanian Air Force C-130s landed in Esenboga, in a hint at what would become a stepped-up Jordanian and Saudi role. Within three weeks, two other Jordanian cargo planes began making a round-trip run between Amman, the capital of Jordan, and Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where ... the aircraft were picking up a large Saudi purchase of infantry arms from a Croatian-controlled stockpile."

The Jordanian planes bore the logo of the Jordanian International Air Cargo firm, which, the article reports, is a front company for Jordan's Air Force.

A Gun-Runner Confesses

On June 18, 2013 Reuters published an interview with Abdul Basit Haroun ("Adventures of a Libyan Weapons Dealer in Syria") in which he admitted that he is involved in shipping weapons from Benghazi, Libya to Syria. Haroun said that his first shipment of weapons to Syria was successfully delivered aboard the Entisar in August 2012. An earlier shipment on the Luftfallah II was intercepted on April 27, 2012 by Lebanese authorities. According to Haroun, he now delivers weapons to Syria on chartered flights to neighboring countries, and then smuggles them over the border to Syria.

On June 22, the New York Times published an article entitled "In Turnabout, Syria Rebels Get Libyan Weapons" that reports that the chartered flights are being financed and provided by Qatar: "Many of the same people who chased [Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi] to his grave are busy shuttling his former arms stockpiles to rebels in Syria.... Evidence gathered in Syria, along with flight-control data and interviews with militia members, smugglers, rebels, analysts and officials in several countries, offers a profile of a complex and active multinational effort, financed largely by Qatar, to transport arms from Libya to Syria's opposition fighters."

The Reuters article then quotes Ismail al-Sallabi, the head of the Feb. 17th Brigade, who says: "Abdel Basit Haroun was with us in the February 17 brigade before he quit to form his own brigade." Haroun said that he can collect weapons from around Libya and arrange for them to be delivered to the Syrian rebels because of his contacts in Libya and abroad. "They know we are sending guns to Syria. Everyone knows."

According to the article, Haroun runs his operation with an associate, who helps him coordinate about a dozen people in Libyan cities collecting the weapons. Both said several flights had been chartered to Jordan or Turkey to deliver the weapons. Haroun's associate runs a relief organization, the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support. Haroun said he had no control over which groups received the weapons. However, both he and his associate traveled with their first successful delivery in August 2012 over the Syrian border, to ensure it reached its destination.

The New York Times quotes Fawzi Bukatef, who was the commander of the February 17th Brigade in Benghazi, that the Libyan militias have been shipping weapons to Syrian rebels for more than a year.

The article also states that the weapons are sent on ships or Qatar Emiri Air Force flights to a network of intelligence agenices and Syrian oppostion leaders in Turkey. Qatari C-17 cargo aircraft have made at least three documented stops in Libya this year, the Times writes, including flights from Mitiga airport in Tripoli on Jan. 15 and Feb. 1 and another that departed Benghazi on April 16. The planes returned to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The cargo was then flown to Ankara, Turkey.

Al Udeid Air Base, as of 2010, was the home of 10,000 U.S. personnel and 100 Qataris.

Another article in the New York Times on June 29 entitled "Taking Outsize Role in Syria, Qatar Funnels Arms to Rebels," further confirms that Qatar has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels since 2011. "Qatar's covert efforts to back the Syrian rebels began at the same time that it was increasing its support for opposition fighters in Libya." The article further confirms that "a shipment of Eastern bloc missiles [MANPADS] had come from former Qaddafi stockpiles."
The furor over journalist Michael Wolffs bestselling book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House showed no sign of abating, with publisher Henry Holt and Co. rushing to print more copies of the book, and responding to a cease-and-desist letter from President Trumps lawyer on Monday.

CNN reports that Henry Holt has ordered more physical copies of the book after evidently being caught flat-footed by high demand. Since last week, Fire and Fury has been the No. 1 bestselling book on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites. Amazon is advising customers that orders for the book will be fulfilled within 2 to 4 weeks, while Barnes and Noble says it expects to ship orders on Jan. 19.

Demand for the book has affected brick-and-mortar bookstores as well, with retailers either selling out of the expose within hours, or still waiting to receive copies of the book from distributors. In Southern California, Eso Won books has sold out and ordered additional copies of the book, as has Vromans, reports the Orange County Register.

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Fire and Fury, which goes behind the scenes at the White House, first caught the nations attention last week. Wolff makes several shocking claims in the book, asserting that Trump never expected to win the presidency, prefers to eat fast food because hes afraid of being poisoned, and appeared not to know who former Speaker of the House John Boehner was.

The book also claims that former Trump advisor Steve Bannon believed that a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and several Russians at Trump Tower was unpatriotic and treasonous, and that he referred to Trumps daughter Ivanka Trump as dumb as a brick. After the excerpts were published, Trump slammed both Wolff and Bannon on Twitter, calling author Wolff a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book and referring to his former chief aide Bannon as Sloppy Steve.

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

On Thursday, Trumps attorney Charles J. Harder sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff and Henry Holt, demanding the book be pulled from publication. First, Henry Holt moved up the books release date, and on Monday morning, John Sargent, the CEO of parent company Macmillan, shared a letter saying that the publisher planned to stand behind Wolff and his book.

"[A] demand to cease and desist publication  a clear effort by the President of the United States to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government is an attempt to achieve what is called prior restraint, Sargent wrote. That is something that no American court would order as it is flagrantly unconstitutional.

There is no ambiguity here, the letter continued. This is an underlying principle of our democracy. We cannot stand silent. We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court. We need to respond strongly for Michael Wolff and his book, but also for all authors and all their books, now and in the future. And as citizens we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

While physical copies of Fire and Fury are, at the moment, exceedingly hard to come by, e-book versions and the downloadable audio book are available immediately for those who cant wait for the books next print run.

A pirated version of the book has been making the rounds. On Monday night, Wikileaks Twitter account posted a link to a PDF version of the book hosted on Google Drive, which was since taken down.

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Michael Wolff, author of new Trump book, not one to shy away from controversy
PEN Center USA, the Los Angeles branch of the literary and human rights organization PEN International and a vital force in the citys literary community, will join forces with the New York PEN in 2018.

The new combined entity will be known as PEN America and will be overseen by Suzanne Nossel in New York.

Michelle Franke, executive director of PEN Center USA, will continue her role in Los Angeles.

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PEN America reached out with a hope that we could unify the writers coast to coast and in doing so better serve the complimentary missions of both organizations, Franke told The Times.

The unification, she said, comes at a moment of critical need for writers and readers in the country. For two branches that typically competed for funders and competed for members, we will be able to create a unified community.

A statement released by Nossel echoed her sentiment: The decision to join forces was born of a shared sense of urgency to fortify our collective efforts at a time of unprecedented challenges to free speech here at home.

Existing Los Angeles programs, including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, PEN in the Community and the annual fundraising gala and literary awards, will continue.

As a member of the L.A. literary community, I feel really excited, said Franke. I think it gives our members and PEN at large an opportunity to rise to the challenge of this moment. She added that the new structure will allow the Los Angeles PEN to expand its scope and make contact and assess and deliver on regional needs for writers who are living in the western United States.

PEN Center USA professional members have been asked to vote in favor of unification, which, pending approval, will become official on March 1.

agatha.french@latimes.com

@agathafrenchy
Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has denied media reports that Egypt sought to sideline Sudan in discussions on Ethiopia's dam project, calling on media outlets to be more 'objective' in their coverage

Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has denied media reports that Egypt demanded the exclusion of Sudan from negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project, which has been the source of tension between the two neighbouring nations.

In a live interview on ON ETV channel's Kol Youm talk-show on Sunday, Shoukry denied media reports in recent days that Egypt wanted the World Bank to replace Sudan in the GERD talks.

In late December, Egypt recommended that the World Bank act as an impartial technical mediator in the GERD talks between Shoukry and his Ethiopian counterpart Workenh Gebeyehu in Addis Abba.

"We did not recommend the exclusion of Sudan. On the contrary, I spoke with Sudanese Foreign Minister Ibrahim El-Ghandour concerning our recommendation the next day," said Shoukry.

Egypt's foreign ministry sent an official letter to the Sudanese foreign ministry concerning its World Bank recommendation, but there has been no reply so far, Shoukry said.

He called on the Egyptian media to be objective in discussing issues affecting Egypt-Sudan relations and to avoid disrespect to either side.

Commenting on Sudan's decision to recall its ambassador to Cairo for consultations on Thursday, Shoukry said the move was related to the region of Halayeb and Shalateen, which both Egypt and Sudan claim as sovereign territory.

"The Sudanese ambassador was recalled because of the Halayeb and Shalateen issue," he said, adding that due to the sensitivity of the issue, the leaderships of the two countries had agreed to deal with it alone.

Sudan has long maintained that the area of southern Egypt known as the Halayeb Triangle belongs to Sudan and is being occupied by Egypt.

Shoukry said that Sudan is among the most important countries for Egypt, with a whole foreign ministry department dedicated to Sudanese affairs, led by one of his assistants.

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With every passing day, it becomes clearer whos reaping the benefit of the huge tax cut handed over to American corporations by the Republican-dominated Congress in December.

Spoiler alert: Not workers or customers, but shareholders, especially the rich ones. (Dont be fooled by those $1,000 bonuses handed out by a few big companies anxious to curry favor with the Trump White House  if they were serious about improving their employees lot theyd distribute the money in the form of permanent raises, not a bonus that you can safely bet will be a distant memory by this time next year.)

The big drug company Pfizer seems intent on being a pace-setter in cranking out the benefits of the tax cut to stakeholders who need them the least. In an announcement over the weekend, Pfizer said it was shutting down its research efforts on treatments for Alzheimers and Parkinsonism. The company didnt say how much it was spending on the two conditions, but said about 300 researchers will lose their jobs as it redirects its research and development budget elsewhere.

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Its really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system.  James Beck, chief scientific officer, Parkinsons Foundation

Pfizer routinely reviews its R&D pipeline, the company said in its formal statement of the change. It said it was continuing its R&D programs for the drugs tanezumab and Lyrica. Thats a bit of non sequitur, since the first is a treatment for chronic pain from osteoporosis and other conditions and the latter is a drug for nerve pain caused by diabetes, shingles and spinal cord injury and is an anti-seizure medication for epilepsy patients. They do both fall within the neurology field, however, which also encompasses Alzheimers and Parkinsons.

Pfizers announcement dismayed advocates for victims of central nervous system diseases, which have presented researchers with some of the most intractable challenges in the healthcare field.

Its really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system, James Beck, chief scientific officer at the Parkinsons Foundation, told me Monday. Its telling for how difficult it is to do research into neurodegenerative diseases. Of even greater concern, he said, is that having Pfizer exit does not augur well for what other companies are likely to do.

Pfizers move also raises questions about what role Big Pharma should play in drug R&D, especially for conditions without known treatments or those with relatively few sufferers.

Research into these two diseases is about as risky as one could imagine, since no treatment thus far has been shown to have any promise in curing either disease or averting its onset; some drugs may delay symptoms for up to a year or temporarily alleviate symptoms, but patient advocates consider those to be modest advances at best.

On the other hand, an Alzheimers cure would be the very definition of a blockbuster drug, since 5.5 million Americans are known to suffer from the disease and the patient base is expected to expand markedly as the population ages. Parkinsons afflicts about 1 million Americans, the Parkinsons Foundation says.

Normally, that would place this research right in Pfizers wheelhouse. The company is explicit about basing its R&D strategy on drugs with multi-billion dollar blockbuster potential, as its R&D chief, Mikael Dolsten, told a J.P. Morgan healthcare conference on Monday.

No one would say that drug companies should engage in research as a philanthropic exercise, but within the context of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, Pfizer looks risk-averse. The second-biggest U.S. drug company by sales (after Johnson & Johnson), Pfizer in recent years seems to have devoted more effort to financial engineering than biomedical engineering. In 2015, for instance, it announced a $160-billion merger with Allergan, the maker of Botox. The deal was a so-called inversion, aimed transparently at cutting Pfizers tax bill in part by eliminating U.S. tax on $147 billion in profits it had stashed overseas.

Although the company denied that the deal was simply a tax transaction, the truth emerged in 2016 when the deal was canceled; the only thing that had changed was that the U.S. Treasury had implemented new rules that all but eliminated the tax savings. So, bye-bye, Allergan.

Pfizer is expected to be among the prime beneficiaries of the corporate tax cut. The measure allows companies to pay a tax rate as low as 8% on foreign earnings they bring home, a big discount from the 21% top rate the law assesses on domestic earnings, itself a big cut from the previous rate of 35%. By some estimates, that could be worth more than $5 billion to Pfizer alone, not counting any gains from the lower tax rate.

As it happens, Pfizer signaled how it would apply the tax savings even before the final passage of the tax bill: The company announced a $10-billion share buyback on Dec. 18, four days before President Trump signed the tax cut into law. That buyback was on top of $6.4 billion left to be spent from a previous buyback plan, and was accompanied by a 6% increase in the companys stock dividend, which will be worth roughly another half-billion dollars a year.

For comparisons sake, Pfizers entire research and development budget averaged about $8 billion a year from 2014 through 2016.

Pfizers diversion of its tax break to shareholders parallels its behavior the last time American companies received a tax holiday on repatriated foreign earnings. That was in 2004, after corporations promised to apply their tax savings to hiring more workers and investing in their business. Instead, they laid off workers, bought back their shares, and pumped up their CEO compensation.

Pfizer brought home more than any other company in that amnesty, $35.5 billion, according to a 2007 investigation by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. From 2004 through 2007, Levin reported, Pfizer bought back more than $27 billion in stock and reduced employment by 11,748 workers.

This time around, the company is again gifting its shareholders and laying off workers. Abandoning a challenging research field is a new wrinkle, however.

Whats most discouraging to patient advocates is the dearth of alternatives to big pharmaceutical companies in brain research. Pfizers withdrawal, especially if it prompts other big pharma companies to flee the field, places more of the burden on small biotech firms, academia, foundations and government. The news reinforces the urgent need for additional federal investment in Alzheimers research, a spokesman for the Alzheimers Foundation of America told me. But the Trump administration has placed funding for government research projects in almost all scientific fields on the chopping block.

Some experts recognize that the big drug companies may have been less than sturdy partners all along. Many groups have been hoping for quick wins in the [central nervous system] space and we havent succeeded, Beck of the Parkinsons Foundation says, so theres some frustration from the viewpoint of management that were not getting the progress we need.

He says his organization and others will still focus on the most promising pathway to a cure: Trying to understand the mechanisms of these diseases, which are still very murky. Only once those riddles are solved can drug research truly move ahead.

But as long as purely economic considerations drive drug R&D, the prospects for progress are dim. The Republicans who drafted the corporate tax cut promised that it would lead to more business investment and therefore economic growth. But as Pfizer demonstrates, all the incentives run in the opposite direction: More investment in shareholder welfare, less economic growth, and less attention to what corporations are supposed to exist for  improving peoples lives.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
The publishing sensation of this young year is Michael Wolffs inside-the-West-Wing tell-all, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Within days of its publication date, which was moved up by several days to meet frenzied demand, the book was sold out at stores; it dominated the Sunday cable talk shows; provoked President Trump and his minions to a string of furious attacks; and has the official chroniclers of White House dysfunction at big East Coast newspapers crabbing about trivial inaccuracies (a sure sign that it has struck a nerve).

Fire and Fury was destined for success for several reasons. It fits the prevailing narrative about the Trump administration as perfectly as the last piece fits a jigsaw puzzle. It goes down easy, slathered over with the moist lubricant of gossip. Its not too heavily freighted with serious stuff like policy, and whats there is given a once-over-lightly treatment that affords readers the sensation of knowing just enough about that stuff for dinner-party conversation.

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[Working for Trump] is like trying to figure out what a child wants.  Former White House aide Katie Walsh, according to Fire and Fury

But having spent hours this weekend absorbing the book cover-to-over (figuratively speaking  my version was on a Kindle), I can tell you that theres absolutely nothing new of any importance in Fire and Fury. If youve been following the Trump administration over the last 12 months, you already know everything in it.

Oh, sure, there are a few fresh nuggets here or there, sprinkled about like the hard bits in the Christmas fruitcake you cracked a tooth on over the holidays, but most are scarcely more interesting than the one about the internal architecture of Trumps hairdo (page 79 on Kindle).

None of that may be important, however, because the proper way to think about Fire and Fury is not as a book, but as an event. The vast majority of people discussing it over the next few weeks  assuming the furor lasts that long  will not have read it. When the Sunday cable talk shows went into full cry over it, they focused largely on the West Wings reaction to it.

The drama was all about whether Trump would throw a conniption, or did Stephen K. Bannon permanently blot his copybook by getting quoted saying stuff not too far from what hes said in public, etc., etc. It was no longer even necessary to read Fire and Fury, because you could learn all you needed to know about its text from the bare context provided by the Sunday hosts before they brought in their roundtables of Washington insiders and political pundits to masticate the gristle of what it all means.

But having done the reading homework myself, I can tell you that the first 30% of Fire and Fury is an engaging read, full of little frissons of revelation. Its not badly written, though portions show the effects of hasty editing to meet a deadline.

After the first third, however, it becomes boring, repetitious and, ultimately, depressing. There just isnt much for Wolff to say about the White House after hes said it once, and the discouraging thought that his cast of characters are in place because of a quirk of the American presidential electoral system that surprised them as much as it shocked outsiders soon outweighs any pleasure one might get from watching them bite each others heads off.

Lets take a quick look at the basic narrative threads of Fire and Fury. Stop me if youve heard these before.

Trump didnt want to win the election, and no one around him thought he would. Duh. If it wasnt evident from the performance-art nature of his election campaign, the notion that Trump was serious about governing couldnt survive his immigration executive order, issued seven days after the inauguration. There was the slipshod drafting of the order, the failure to run it past the people who would be responsible for implementation, and its taking immediate effect, which created massive chaos at major airports coast-to-coast and around the world. No one who cared about governing would do anything this way.

Then theres the ludicrous collection of numbskulls and vandals walking the hallways and heading government departments and agencies. Its one thing to put people in place with the intention of refashioning government health, environmental and educational policy; quite another to give the job to people who have absolutely no executive experience or, in fact, knowledge about their jobs, and who instantly go to war with their own staffs. Step forward, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Now please sit down again.

In any event, Wolff isnt much more interested in government than Trump; important issues such as healthcare repeal, education policy and the environment make walk-on appearances in Fire and Fury mostly in the course of the books real topic, which is the internecine squabbling over them.

Everyone around him treats Trump like a child. Duh. One of the money quotes from the book retailed endlessly by commentators is that dealing with Trump is like trying to figure out what a child wants. Wolff attributes it to Katie Walsh, a Republican Party functionary who spent a brief period on the White House staff before being exiled, ostensibly to her own relief, to a post at the Republican National Committee. But is this apercu supposed to be new? To my recollection, scarcely a single anonymously sourced inside-the-White-House story appearing over the last 12 months lacks a similar quote, or at least the same implication.

Everyone around him thinks Trump is an idiot. Duh. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones had fun last week by posting a quiz in which readers were asked to match a description of Trumps intellect (fool, idiot, moron, with various profane qualifiers appended), to the person who uttered it. A few came from the book, but a few were preexisting. The sources included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, and 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch. Anyway, clearly not news.

Trumps eruption over the weekend to the effect that hes real smart and a stable genius may have had the air of Fredo Corleones equivalent pleading in The Godfather, Part II, as numerous cinema experts pointed out, but that wasnt the first time that hes tried to establish his intellectual bona fides by assertion, rather than action. Anyway, theres been plenty of reporting over the months about the need to present information to Trump in pictorial form rather than via the written word. Nor are questions about his reading ability new; a friend of mine who brought a lawsuit against Trump over a business deal came away from a deposition convinced Trump was illiterate, and that was decades ago, when he was still swanking around as a big shot in New York real estate circles.

The White House is rent by war among advisors. Wolff identifies the principal camps during his time as a fly on the wall as those of Bannon; first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner; and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who was replaced by John F. Kelly at the end of July. This started to be widely known even before inauguration day.

But Wolff may actually have made a signal contribution to Trumpology here by making clear how much each gang leaked to undermine the others. Despite the obligatory paragraphs in all those inside-the-West-Wing scoops in the big papers about how many sources they were based on (how many people work in the White House, anyway?), it appears from Wolffs book that those stories really all emanate from the power jockeying among those three groups; sometimes its one camp leaking against the other two, sometimes two camps in temporary alliance against the third.

This just tells you that the correct rule of thumb to apply when reading any of these yarns is the Latin term Cui bono? (Who gains?) The one notable aspect of all this is Wolffs obsession with Bannon, which almost approaches Bannons obsession with himself. Bannon emerges as the hub around all the White House intrigue spins, which may or may not have been true. But its Bannons view, which makes it a teeny bit suspect as it comes through Wolff.

The bottom line is that much of Fire and Fury reads like warmed-over gruel. Some anecdotes have been widely reported in the past  high-level disagreement over Afghanistan policy, the hash Trump made of his response to the Charlottesville racial violence, the 10 days of Anthony Scaramucci  and are repeated by Wolff with a soupcon of insider spin as though being seasoned to make them appear to be his own discoveries.

None of this makes Fire and Fury unimportant. For one thing, its notable that the book has ticked off everybody in or near the White House. Trump is incensed for obvious reasons. Bannon and others directly quoted are embarrassed to the point they fear for their futures in the Trump-iverse.

The official chroniclers of Trump dysfunction are worried about their book contracts and sales because Wolff got there first  more so because he stripped the inside story of the decorous veneer that weighs down the accounts appearing in the serious press and applied the shiv to his sources with maximal viciousness and cruelty. After Fire and Fury, no one will need another inside-the-White-House book. Wolff collected all the stories and let it rip.

The last thing to be said about Fire and Fury is the curious vacuum at its center. One character fails to emerge from its pages with any color: Donald Trump. Wolff claims to have interviewed him directly, but that doesnt come through at all. The Trump around whom all these satellites orbit remains a black hole. No one really explains what he thinks, what he does, who he is.

As a result, the book ends up being mostly about everyone elses interactions with each other, and very little about their interactions with the president of the United States. Maybe Trump meant it that way, or maybe theres simply no one there. That wouldnt be news, either.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
With new options and conveniences, theres never been a better time for shoppers. As for workers  well, not always.

The retail industry is being radically reshaped by technology, and nobody feels that disruption more starkly than 16 million American shelf stockers, salespeople, cashiers and other workers. The shifts are driven, like much in retail, by the Amazon effect  the explosion of online shopping and the related changes in consumer behavior and preferences.

As mundane tasks such as checkout and inventory are automated, employees are trying to deliver the kind of customer service the internet cant match.

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So a Best Buy employee who used to sell electronics in the store is dispatched to customers homes to help them choose just the right products. A Wal-Mart worker dashes in and out of the grocery aisles, hand-picks products for online shoppers and brings them to peoples cars.

Yet even as responsibilities change  and in many cases, expand  the average growth in pay for retail workers isnt keeping pace with the rest of the economy. Some companies say that in the long run the transformation could mean fewer retail workers, though they may be better paid. But while some workers feel more satisfied, others find their jobs a lot less fun.

Bloomingdales saleswoman Brenda Moses remembers the pre-internet era, when the upscale store was regularly filled with customers ready to buy. These days, department stores are less crowded and the customers who do come in can make price comparisons on their phones at the same time as they pepper staff with questions.

You tell them everything, and then they look at you and say, You know what? I think I will get it online, Moses said.

Moses has seen her commission rate rise to 6%, from 0.5%, but her hourly wage dropped from $19 to as low as $10 before it came back up to $14. Depending more on commissions means her income fluctuates  and that shes competing with her colleagues for each sale.

Now, Moses said, you have to fight to make your money.

The same could be said for the retailing industry overall. In 2017, 66,500 U.S. retail jobs disappeared (not taking into account jobs added in areas such as distribution and call centers). In the last decade, about 1 in 7 jobs have vanished in the hardest-hit sectors such as clothing and consumer electronics, said Frank Badillo, director of research at MacroSavvy LLC. Though department stores have suffered the most, smaller businesses also have struggled to compete with online sellers.

Many of the survivors are rushing to adapt. Of the retail jobs that remain, over the next decade as many as 60% either will be new kinds of roles or will involve revised duties, said Craig Rowley, senior client partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a human resources advisory firm. He estimated the number is about 10% now.

How fast retail jobs will change and what theyll look like depends on three factors, Rowley said: the pace at which online shopping advances; the speed at which robotics and other technology progress; and shifts in the minimum wage.

Jobs for workers will get more interesting and be more impactful on the companys business, Rowley said. But the negative side is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs and there will be more pressure to perform.

Some retail workers at the vanguard of the changes  such as Laila Ummelaila, a personal grocery shopper at a Wal-Mart store in Old Bridge, N.J.  speak glowingly of their new responsibilities.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nations largest private employer, has scrutinized every job in its stores as it looks to leverage its more than 4,000 U.S. locations against Amazon.com Inc.'s internet dominance.

Wal-Mart now has 18,000 personal shoppers who fill online orders from store shelves, and 17,000 checkout hosts whose responsibilities are more extensive than the greeters of old, including keeping the area clean and making sure registers move efficiently. The company has also shifted workers from backroom clerical jobs and eliminated some overnight stocker positions in favor of more daytime sales help. The customers like the changes, company officials say, pointing to more than three years of sales growth at its established U.S. stores  a contrast with other, suffering retailers.

Ummelaila became a personal shopper after joining the company three years ago. To meet her stores goals, she must pick one item per 30 seconds. If she cant find something, she has to quickly get a substitute thats as good or better.

You start to get to know the customers, you know what they like, she said, how they like their meat and how long they keep milk in the fridge.

Best Buy Co., meanwhile, has begun a free service in key markets in which salespeople will sit with customers in their own homes and make recommendations on setting up a home office or designing a home theater system. Best Buy said shoppers spend more with a home visit than they do at the stores. The project follows Amazon, which reportedly has been testing a program that sends employees to shoppers houses for free smart home recommendations.

At Steve Fredericks townhouse in Chicago, Billy Schuler offered advice about speakers that can be adjusted from a smartphone. Schuler, who had previously worked at Best Buy for 14 years, returned to the company to take on the new role.

Customers are more relaxed when they are in their home, he said. We can do a walk-through of the house and see their needs. He likes to break the ice by calling the person and chatting a day or two before the visit.

Frederick, who is spending close to $20,000 on the equipment, describes himself as old school and says he needed a lot of help. He said it was worthwhile.

When you are spending that kind of money, you want to have someone come in and explain it, he said.

Schuler declined to give specifics but said he is well compensated. Ummelaila said her pay went up to nearly $12 per hour, from $10, when she became a personal shopper.

Target Corp. credits its strategy of assigning dedicated sales staff in areas such as clothing, consumer electronics and beauty for helping increase sales, and it says having visual merchandisers create vignettes like shoppers would see in specialty stores inspires people to buy. You are making an outfit and telling a story on each rack, said Crystal Lawrence, who works at a Target store in Brooklyn, N.Y. She said she likes the variety in her new job, and Target says it plans to keep paying higher wages for those specialized roles.

But a survey of nearly 300 retail workers  conducted by the Center for Frontline Retail and Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center  found that of those workers whose job responsibilities have changed, more than 40% said they hadnt received corresponding pay increases.

Wages for hourly retail workers have risen less than 9% since 1990, compared with 18% for private-sector workers overall. There has been some progress recently; some of the biggest retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, have made moves to increase pay in the face of low unemployment and competition for workers.

For a long period, these retail jobs were just terrible on average, said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute. Retail stores have been following one strategy: high turnover, low wages. That strategy is no longer viable.

Mandel sees hope in technology, which he says historically has created more and better-paying jobs than it has eliminated.

The National Retail Federation trade group points to government data showing that even in large supermarket chains where self-checkout has become standard, the number of employees per store has held steady over the 15 years through 2014. And the demand for grocery cashiers rose in the last few years, said Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes labor market data.

McDonalds says the self-serve kiosks it has been rolling out wont result in mass layoffs, but will mean that some cashiers shift roles to accommodate changes such as offering table service.

But a report prepared by Cornerstone Capital Group for the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute predicts that more than 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being eliminated by automation over the next several years.

Amazon is testing a grocery store in Seattle without cashiers, using cameras and shelf sensors to keep track of the items that shoppers grab and charge them. Eatsa, an automat-style restaurant in San Francisco, lacks cashiers as well  diners order at kiosks, and workers prepare the food behind an opaque wall, with virtually no interaction between them.

A labor group representing 1.3 million grocery and food workers is trying to combat automation by highlighting that workers specialized skills  such as the care they take in icing a rose on a wedding cake, or arranging flowers, or the ability of human workers to recognize spoiled food  provide a benefit to shoppers.

Separating progress for the consumer, for the worker, for the economy versus the stockholders  those are completely different things, said Erikka Knuti, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Others say automation and happy workers are not necessarily incompatible.

Wal-Mart Chief Executive Doug McMillon foresees fewer sales associates at his stores, but says theyll be better paid and better trained. Wal-Mart has trained 225,000 supervisors and managers on topics such as new apps and better customer service. It says managers who go through the academies have better retention rates than those who do not. Workers who report to those managers stay longer. And entry-level workers who complete a new training program are more likely to remain.

Its a shift retailers may have to speed up. Government figures show that in 2016, the rate of retail workers quitting their jobs was at its highest since 2007.

Alfredo Duran, who started as a sales associate at Gap and worked at six retailers over 15 years, left the industry two years ago. As a manager at clothing chain Mango, he was making $75,000 a year. But once the store closed, he had trouble finding another job in retail because no one wanted to pay him for his experience.

Its gone down. One person is doing three jobs. And you cant move up, said Duran, 38, of Queens, N.Y.

Hes now a concierge at a Manhattan hotel, making half of what he used to earn  but happy he left retail.

A look at retailers new jobs

Confronting changing shopper habits and increased competition from online sellers, retailers are creating new jobs at their stores and redefining employee duties. Heres a look at some new positions and shifting roles at major retailers.

Wal-Mart

 Personal shoppers: These workers fill online grocery orders from store shelves, in some cases finding one product every 30 seconds, and take the items to shoppers cars at the curb.

 Checkout hosts: Not just greeters, theyre responsible for overseeing the self-checkout and scan-and-go areas and helping customers navigate them. They also keep the checkout area tidy, judge if more registers need to be opened, and help customers with questions as they come and go.

Target

 Visual merchandisers: They create the kinds of fashion or home design vignettes that shoppers may be more used to seeing in specialty stores than discount chains. Target says this inspires shoppers to buy more.

 Dedicated sales associates: These employees work only in a particular area, such as clothing, electronics, beauty and grocery, rather than shifting from department to department. They get extra training on the brands in their areas; their focus is helping shoppers.

Best Buy

 In-home advisors: They visit shoppers homes and recommend products suitable for their spaces to help them create a home office or set up a home theater. The service is free.

Bloomingdales

 Personal stylists: Some stylists now pull options for shoppers ahead of time based on their answers to an online questionnaire about price, favorite brands, style and sizes, and make refinements based on text conversations. Thats similar to the styling services offered by online companies such as Stitch Fix. But instead of receiving clothes to try on at home and possibly send back, shoppers then work with stylists in person, at the store. Bloomingdales is testing the service at its Manhattan SoHo store and says the online component offers speedier service. Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue also have personal stylists, as well as an online component.
Two big shareholders of Apple Inc. are concerned that the entrancing qualities of the iPhone have fostered a public health crisis that could hurt children  and the company as well.

In a letter to the smartphone maker dated Jan. 6, activist investor Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers Retirement System urged Apple to create ways for parents to restrict childrens access to their mobile phones. They also want the Cupertino, Calif., company to study the effects of heavy usage on mental health.

There is a growing body of evidence that, for at least some of the most frequent young users, this may be having unintentional negative consequences, says the letter from the two investors, which combined own about $2 billion in Apple shares. The growing societal unease is at some point is likely to impact even Apple.

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Addressing this issue now will enhance long-term value for all shareholders, the letter says.

The letter cited early research showing some negative effects phone usage has had on children, such as being distracted in the classroom, higher risks of depression and suicide, and sleep deprivation.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the letter, which was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

Its a problem most companies would kill to have: young people liking a product too much. But as smartphones become ubiquitous, government leaders and Silicon Valley have wrestled for ways to limit their inherent intrusiveness.

France, for instance, has moved to ban the use of smartphones in its primary and middle schools. Meanwhile, Android co-founder Andy Rubin is seeking to apply artificial intelligence to phones so that they perform relatively routine tasks without needing to be physically handled.

Apple already offers some parental controls, such as the Ask to Buy feature, which requires parental approval to buy goods and services. Restrictions can also be placed on access to some apps, content and data usage.

The letter asks that Apple go further in its efforts to understand the effect its products have on children, including:

Creating a committee of child development experts to study the issue.

Using the latest research to create tools that give parents more control over their childrens technology usage, such as allowing parents to input a childs age and being offered age-appropriate phone setup options that limit screen time, restrict usage hours and reduce the available number of social media sites.

Publishing annual progress reports, much like Apple does for environmental and supply chain issues.

The activist pressure is the latest in a series of challenges for the tech giant. Last week, Apple said that all of its Mac computers and iOS devices, which include iPhones and iPads, faced security vulnerabilities due to flawed chips made by Intel Corp. At the tail end of 2017, the company apologized to customers for software changes that caused older versions of its iPhones to run slower than newly introduced editions.

Times staff writer Tracey Lien contributed to this report.

UPDATES:

8:20 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details from the shareholders letter.

This article was originally published at 6:45 a.m.
James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after writing a widely circulated memo arguing women were biologically inferior to men in coding, has sued the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant alleging discrimination against his political views.

In a class-action complaint filed Monday, Damore argued that he was harassed at Google for being a white male. Another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, is also a member of the suit.

Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males, the suit says.

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Diversity training was supposed to reduce bias at Google. In James Damores case, it backfired. 

Damore raised a furor at Google when he released a 10-page memo in August slamming the company for liberal bias, complaining about diversity training and blaming biological shortcomings for the dearth of women in tech.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai quickly denounced Damores memo for advancing harmful gender stereotypes. The company said it fired Damore for violating its code of conduct.

We look forward to defending against Mr. Damores lawsuit in court, a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.

The company is currently fighting claims by the U.S. Department of Labor that it discriminates against women by systematically paying them less than their male counterparts.

The Damore memo emerged as a symbol of Silicon Valleys dysfunction at a time when reports of sexual harassment and abuse abounded at some of the biggest companies and venture capital firms.

In addition, Damores memo has become something of a litmus test for liberal and conservative views. The engineer has received support from the likes of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and members of the alt-right (though Damore told CNN he does not support the alt-right).

Damores attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, is the Republican National Committees committeewoman for California. She did not respond to a question about whether Damore was funding his suit alone or receiving support from a benefactor.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in state Superior Court in Santa Clara, Damore and Gudeman allege that they were treated like second-class citizens because of their gender and race. They said white men were booed during company-wide weekly meetings and that hiring managers were instructed to discriminate against people with conservative views.

The complaint says Google promoted all manner of lifestyles except for Damores.

Google furnishes a large number of internal mailing lists catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality, for the purpose of discussing sexual topics, the suit says. The only lifestyle that seems to not be openly discussed on Googles internal forums is traditional heterosexual monogamy.

Damore said he received threats from his co-workers after his memo was distributed. One of them came from a fellow engineer who emailed to say Damore was a misogynist and a terrible human and vowed to keep hounding him until one of them was fired, before signing off with an expletive.

Companies do not have to abide by the 1st Amendments free-speech guarantees, which are only aimed at the government. That gives Google the right to fire employees it deems incompatible with the companys values, legal experts say.

david.pierson@latimes.com

Twitter: @dhpierson

UPDATES:

1:35 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with staff reporting.

11:45 a.m.: This article was updated throughout with additional information.

2:35 p.m.: This article was updated with comment from Google.

This article was originally published at 11:20 a.m.
VTech Electronics, a maker of electronic toys, has agreed to pay $650,000 to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission that it collected personal information on hundreds of thousands of children without their parents knowing.

VTech  a Hong Kong company whose North American operations are based in Arlington Heights, Ill.  says that it did notify parents and that the allegations are based on technical provisions of a childrens privacy law.

According to the complaint, the company also failed to protect the data it collected, enabling a hacker to gain access in late 2015.

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The childrens privacy case was FTCs first involving internet-connected toys, said Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTCs Bureau of Consumer Protection. It shines a light on the growing market, which is expected to reach $15.5 billion by 2022, up from an estimated $4.9 billion in 2017, according to a report from England-based Juniper Research.

This settlement sends a message to parents, Pahl said. Parents should read a companys privacy practices, make sure that companies get their permission to collect their childrens information and be aware of their other rights.

VTech makes toys such as smart watches and handheld smart devices for children.

The FTC alleges that the Kid Connect app used with some of VTechs toys collected information on children without notifying parents or getting their consent. That practice is required for children younger than 13 by the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act.

VTech also collected information from parents via its online platform Learning Lodge Navigator, where the Kid Connect app was available for download. As of November 2015, parents had registered and created accounts with Learning Lodge for almost 3 million children, including about 638,000 Kid Connect accounts.

VTech spokeswoman Kaleigh Steinorth said that the company did give notice and get parents consent, and that it designed Kid Connect in a way that ensured parents knew how the system worked and what information would be collected.

The allegations were based on technical requirements of the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act regarding how parents must be notified and how companies must verify that the consenting person is the parent, she said in an email. We have taken steps to ensure compliance with these technical requirements.

The Consumers Union, a nonprofit organization that does product testing and research, has asked the FTC to look into privacy and security concerns related to smart and connected toys.

Parents have a right to know and a right to choose how their childrens personal data is collected, Katie McInnis, technology policy counsel for Consumers Union, said in a statement.

The FTC launched its investigation in late 2015 after the hacker gained access to VTechs networks, exposing the information, photos and audio of Kid Connect users. The FTC also alleged that VTech falsely stated in its privacy policy that personal information would be encrypted when it was not.

As part of the settlement, VTech is required to put a data security system in place that will be subject to independent audits for 20 years.

Theres not a consistent practice over time of companies making sure they are always staying one step ahead of the hackers, Pahl said. This settlement, Pahl said, will help to make sure that kind of program they develop is in place and works.

amarotti@chicagotribune.com
Read the full transcript of Oprah Winfreys speech that fired up the Golden Globes

Oprah Winfrey won the Cecil B. DeMille Award at Sundays Golden Globes, making history as the first black female recipient. Her fiery acceptance speech will no doubt go down in history too, igniting speculation that maybe she has political aspirations.

Winfrey declares a new day on the horizon, stirs hope (in some) of a presidential run>>

Heres the full transcript:

Thank you, Reese [Witherspoon, who presented the award].

In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mothers house in Milwaukee, watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: The winner is Sidney Poitier. Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. I remember his tie was white and, of course, his skin was black. And Id never seen a black man being celebrated like that.

And I have tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats, as my mom came through the door bone-tired from cleaning other peoples houses. But all I could do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidneys performance in Lilies of the Field: Amen, amen. Amen, amen.

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given the same award. It is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women whove inspired me, whove challenged me, whove sustained me and made my journey to this stage possible: Dennis Swanson, who took a chance on me for A.M. Chicago, Quincy Jones, who saw me on that show and said to Steven Spielberg, Yes, she is Sofia in The Color Purple, Gayle [King], who has been the definition of what a friend is, and Stedman [Graham], who has been my rock, just a few to name.

Id like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., because we all know that the press is under siege these days. But we also know that it is the insatiable dedication and the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and injustice, to tyrants and victims and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And Im especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories.

Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell. And this year we became the story. But its not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. Its one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed, bills to pay and dreams to pursue.

Theyre the women whose names well never know. They are domestic workers. And farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and theyre in academia, and engineering, and medicine, and science. Theyre part of the world of tech and politics and business. Theyre our athletes in the Olympics and theyre our soldiers in the military. And theres someone else: Recy Taylor. A name I know and I think you should know too.

In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from a church service shed attended in Abbeville, Ala., when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case. And together, they sought justice.

But justice wasnt an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never [prosecuted]. Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up.

But their time is up. Their time is up! Their time is up. And I just hope  I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on.

It was somewhere in Rosa Parks heart almost 11 years later when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and its here with every woman who chooses to say, Me too. And every man who chooses to listen.

In my career, what Ive always tried my best to do, whether in television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere and how we overcome.

Ive interviewed and portrayed people whove withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon!

And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight. And some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say Me too again. Thank you.
The 75th Golden Globes were the first major awards show of Hollywoods #MeToo movement, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. didnt miss its cue.

The procession of black dresses that began at the Beverly Hiltons red carpet moved to the winners podium as films and television shows driven by women  Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Handmaids Tale, Big Little Lies and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel  prevailed at a ceremony marked mostly by serious speeches focusing on months of allegations and admissions of sexual harassment within Hollywood.

Theres a new era underway, host Seth Meyers said moments into his opening monologue, and I can tell, because its been years since a white man was this nervous in Hollywood.

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GOLDEN GLOBES 2018: Full coverage | Winners | Red carpet photos

By the way, he continued, a special hello to hosts of other upcoming awards shows that are watching me tonight  like the first dog they shot into outer space.

If this years Globes marked a new age for awards shows, it wasnt remarkably different from previous editions, save for the monochromatic evening wear, the on-point #MeToo messaging and, for the most part, the jettisoning of snark, though the show did have a few priceless, snide moments. (Natalie Portman, presenting the director category: And here are the all-male nominees.)

The evening, long marketed as the looser, less inhibited answer to the stodgy Oscars, actually felt a lot like the Academy Awards with plenty of effusive and heartfelt acceptance speeches, with particular note being paid to the front-row presence of Oprah Winfrey, the recipient of the HFPAs Cecil B. DeMille honor. (Meyers did one bit pegged to Winfrey running for president in 2020.)

All that attention proved prescient as Winfrey delivered the evenings big powerhouse moment with nearly everyone in the Beverly Hiltons ballroom hanging on every word.

Ive interviewed and portrayed people whove withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning  even during our darkest nights, Winfrey said. So I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon. And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, Me too, again.

MORE: Read the full transcript of Oprah Winfreys speech

If Winfreys speech (one she had been asked to trim by three minutes  nope) was a stirring, spiritual call to arms, Frances McDormand used her moment, a win for lead drama actress for Three Billboards, to deliver a couple of caustic broadsides, even, as she noted, I keep my politics private.

McDormand praised the HFPA because they managed to elect a female president. And then she addressed the women in attendance.

It was really great to be in this room tonight and to be a part of a tectonic shift in our industrys power structure, McDormand said. Trust me, the women in here tonight are not here for the food. We are here for the work.

Theres no going back, McDormand added backstage. No, we just go forward, in the best possible way.

Three Billboards, with McDormand playing a grieving mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter, took the most movie awards, with trophies for drama film, screenplay and supporting actor Sam Rockwell. Guillermo del Toro won for directing The Shape of Water, a sweet, sincere fantasy about a romance between a mute cleaning woman and an Amazonian river god.

The mother-daughter coming-of-age story Lady Bird took feature film honors for comedy/musical with Saoirse Ronan winning for her lead turn as the extraordinarily ordinary high school senior.

Get Out, nominated in that category and also for Daniel Kaluuyas lead turn, did not win any awards. The Post and Dunkirk were similarly shut out.

Two of the years biggest television events premiered shortly after last years Globes ceremony, and the HFPA, a group that takes delight in beating Emmy voters to the punch, had little choice but to follow their more esteemed counterparts and recognize Hulus drama The Handmaids Tale and HBOs limited series Big Little Lies.

Elisabeth Moss, herself an Emmy winner for playing a baby-making slave in a near-future patriarchal society, took the lead actress Globe, dedicating the honor to Handmaids Tale author Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood, this is for you and and all of the women who came before you and after you who were brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice, and to fight for equality and freedom in this world, Moss said. We no longer live in the blank, white spaces at the edge of print. We no longer live in the gaps in the stories. We are the stories in print, and we are writing the stories ourselves.

Moss wasnt the only one honoring an iconic woman. Carol Burnett earned a standing ovation, with fellow presenter Jennifer Aniston asking if she could imitate Burnetts legendary sign-off move and pull on the legends ear. (Kinky! Burnett joked, asking, Was it everything you dreamed it would be?)

Barbra Streisand received a standing ovation too, and roaring applause when she noted that she remains the only woman to win the Golden Globe for directing  an honor she received 34 years ago.

Folks, times up, she said, repeating the nights prevailing message: Women are no longer content to remain on the margins.

See the most-read stories this hour 

glenn.whipp@latimes.com

Twitter: @glennwhipp
A post-mortem report on Mohamed Afroto showed 'severe laceration of the spleen and abdominal bleeding'

A Cairo prosecution office has ordered the detention of a police officer and a low-ranking policeman over the death of a young man in police custody on Friday.

The young man, nicknamed Mohamed Afroto, was arrested on Friday on charges of drug dealing and taken to a police station in Cairo's Moqattam district.

The two policemen are accused of "murder and use of brutality," a source from the prosecution office told Ahram Online.

Prosecutors have also ordered the detention for four days of 43 people arrested on charges of storming the police station on Saturday following the man's death.

Clashes erupted between protesters and police on Saturday when news of the detainee's death spread. Protesters set fire to tyres and vehicles near the police station and police fired teargas and birdshot.

Protesters blamed police for the death, while his family said that he was tortured to death in custody.

Several unnamed security sources were quoted by local media as saying that Afroto died of a drug overdose.

The prosecution said the man's body "showed no outward injuries."

However, a post-mortem report said the death was caused by "severe laceration of the spleen and abdominal bleeding."

Egypt's Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar ordered his ministry's department of inspection to launch a probe into the incident.

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The 75th Golden Globes are in the rearview mirror, but a handful of moments are worth remembering, at least for a little while. Whether you missed the broadcast Sunday night or just want to revisit the good stuff, here are seven moments that stood out.

1. James Franco fends off Tommy Wiseau onstage

The first person I have to thank is the man himself, Tommy Wiseau!" said James Franco, who dragged brother Dave Franco to the stage and also summoned the director of The Room after winning actor in a motion picture  musical or comedy. He almost regretted his decision though: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, he said as he stuck out his arm and blocked Wiseau, whom he portrayed in The Disaster Artist, from taking the microphone in his stead. (But you can read what Wiseau would have said onstage here.)

2. Oprah Winfrey rallies the troops

3. Elisabeth Moss gets literary

Elisabeth Moss set the bar high early in the ceremony with her acceptance speech for actress in a TV series  drama. The star of Hulus The Handmaids Tale invoked the words of Margaret Atwood in her message, celebrating the uprising against the marginalization of women. We no longer live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print, Moss said. We no longer live in the gaps between the stories. We are the story in print, and we are writing the story ourselves.

4. Frances McDormand gets bleeped  but not really

Frances McDormand had a lot to say  the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri star said so herself  but not all audiences got to hear all of it. Seemingly random bleep-outs around words like tectonic shift marred her victory speech for actress in a motion picture  drama. Looks like it was a technical glitch, though, as her words can be heard above in full. I'm gonna keep it short, because weve been here a long time, McDormand said before settling into a sassy speech, and we need some tequila.

5. Natalie Portman and Barbra Streisand have issues with the directing category

Natalie Portman and Ron Howard present the 2018 Golden Globe for director. (Paul Drinkwater / Associated Press)

OK, this was actually two moments. And here are the all-male nominees, Natalie Portman deadpanned as she (and male director Ron Howard  awkward) presented the directing contenders. Eventual winner Guillermo del Toros whaddya gonna do? facial expression in response was priceless. And as Barbra Streisand introduced the nominees for best picture  drama, she marveled that she was the only woman in the Globes 75-year history to win for directing. You know that was 34 years ago, she said. Folks, time's up.

6. Greta Gerwig speaks for Lady Bird

Normally, when a film wins for motion picture  musical or comedy, a producer does the honors. But after Eli Bush got his hands on the trophy, he ceded the spotlight to the movies writer-director. The only person who should speak for 'Lady Bird' is Greta Gerwig, Bush said. In her thank-yous, the effusive, breathless Gerwig included her mom, her dad and the people of Sacramento, who gave me roots and wings and helped me to get where I am today. Just thank you, thank you, thank you!

7. Seth Meyers scores with a high-stakes monologue

We didnt forget: The show opened on a high note. Seth Meyers had a lot to lose by hosting Hollywoods first nationally televised event since the Harvey Weinstein scandal and all that followed it. By the way, Meyers said early on, a special hello to hosts of other upcoming awards shows who are watching me tonight like the first dog they shot into outer space. (Jimmy Kimmel laughed at that one.) Getting by with a little punch-line assistance from audience members who were not white men, he successfully navigated the monologue minefield.

Times staff writer Libby Hill contributed to this report.

ALSO

Glenn Whipp's The Gold Standard: Led by Oprah Winfrey, women take center stage at the Golden Globes

Commentary | Oprah, Barbra, Elisabeth, Nicole: Women in black take over the Golden Globes

Beyond wearing black, Hollywood stars discuss how they can improve their industry

Photos: All-black style on the red carpet shows solidarity

Not one man mentioned the #MeToo movement in his acceptance speech
The Golden Globes are known for celebrating the best in movies and television, but during the 75th Annual Golden Globes on Sunday (January 7), another art form was celebrated: Italian cuisine. After winning the award for Best Actor in a Television Series (Musical or Comedy), Master of None star Aziz Ansari gave thanks to the entire nation of Italy.

I genuinely didnt think I was going to win, because all of the websites said I was going to lose. Also, Im glad we won this one because it would have really sucked to lose two of these in a row. It would have been a really sh---y moment for me, but this is nice, Ansari said in his acceptance speech.

The 34-year-old actor then went on to thank his fellow cast members and collaborators on Master of None, but then he thanked the most important cast member of all: Italian food. I want to thank Italy for all of the amazing food we ate in season two.

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Indeed, the first two episodes of the Netflix shows second season heavily featured Italian food. Ansaris character Dev traveled the Italian countryside and learned to make pasta by hand. He also visited some top Italian eateries, including Via Luigi Carlo Farini and Via Stella. The food porn didnt end there; Master of Nones second season also included visits to some of New York Citys hottest dining spots, such as The Four Horsemen, Sauvage, PDT, and Il Buco.

Watch Ansaris acceptance speech below. (Warning: foul language.)

https://twitter.com/goldenglobes/status/950201376369295362

Ansaris shout-out to Italy and its food wasnt the only big food and drink moment of the 2018 Golden Globes. The night also included Tom Hanks brining out martinis for his entire table (perfectly filling his role as Americas fun uncle) and Frances McDormand declaring that she was getting a round of tequila shots for all her fellow Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama) nominees.

Who knows? The food-centric Golden Globes could be one of the biggest celebrity food news stories of the year - and its only January. While we wait to see what the rest of this year cooks up, check out the biggest celebrity dining moments of 2017.

View slideshow

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Jeanne Pepper Bernstein has been searching for her 19-year-old son since he went missing in Lake Forest last Tuesday. On Sunday afternoon, she had a message for him.

If theres any way you can come home, whatever has happened, wherever youve been, whoever youve talked to  it doesnt matter, she said in an interview with The Times. We love you so much that we would give up everything we have to have you back.

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As she offered her wrenching plea, family and friends used drones to canvass the Foothill Ranch area of Lake Forest, where authorities believe Blaze Bernstein was last seen by a friend in Borrego Park. Meanwhile, Orange County sheriffs investigators were actively following leads to solve his mysterious disappearance.

Sheriffs officials said Blaze Bernstein, a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania, never returned to his parents home in Foothill Ranch late Tuesday night after visiting the park with a friend.

The friend told investigators that he went into a restroom at the park and when he came out, Blaze Bernstein was gone, said Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Sheriffs Department. The friend last saw him about 11 p.m. Officials dont believe foul play was involved and said the friend is not a suspect in the disappearance.

Blaze Bernstein left belongings behind  including his keys, wallet, credit cards and eyeglasses  when he left his parents home to see the friend without saying goodbye  we didnt even hear him leave, said his father, Gideon Bernstein.

Jeanne Pepper Bernstein and her husband, Gideon, in Orange Countys Borrego Park, where their 19-year-old son, Blaze, was last seen. (Maria Alejandra Cardona / Los Angeles Times )

Pepper Bernstein felt something was off the next afternoon, when Blaze, the oldest of three children, didnt show up for a dentist appointment. Shed hoped to have lunch with him before driving with him to the appointment. When Blaze didnt come home, she and her husband assumed he would meet her at the dentist.

The teenager was scheduled to catch a flight back to Pennsylvania early Sunday, Pepper Bernstein said, though theres no sign he returned on his own. She said her son was excited to return to school. Over the weekend, she found a note on his computer describing how important it was to be an optimist. Blaze, she said, managed his stress with school by cooking and writing.

Hes a phenomenal, unique, interesting person, she said. Blaze was like any normal kid his age at an Ivy League school.

Before leaving home, Blaze Bernstein had been in lengthy communication with his friend on social media apps that do not leave a permanent record, authorities said.

Blaze Bernstein was described as white, 5 feet 8, 130 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a dark-colored jacket, a dark-gray long-sleeved top and white Adidas sneakers when he disappeared, authorities said.

Search efforts were expected to continue Monday. Sheriffs investigators are urging anyone with information about Bernsteins whereabouts to call (714) 647-7000.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were involved in a shooting while executing a search warrant in Los Angeles early Monday morning, authorities said.

The shooting took place after agents had an altercation with someone around 5:40 a.m. in the 10300 block of Horse Haven Street in Sun Valley, according to Mike Gifford, a spokesman for the FBI in Los Angeles.

One person was shot and taken to an area hospital, according to Gifford, who could not offer details about that persons condition. No law enforcement officers were injured, he said.

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The FBI and LAPD were executing a search warrant at a residence on the block, Gifford said. He declined to comment on the case the warrant was related to, and could not say if the person who was shot was armed.

No LAPD officers opened fire, Gifford said.

james.queally@latimes.com

Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for crime and police news in California.

UPDATES:

10:10 a.m.: This story was updated with comments by an FBI spokesman.

This article was originally published at 7:35 a.m.
Since Kevin Hoor emigrated from Iran a decade ago, he said the price of groceries, housing and gas in his home country has sharply increased. Young people there are facing a dearth of economic opportunities and many residents are living in poverty.

People cannot live over there  its not habitable, said Hoor, a 38-year-old Encino resident. You cannot afford your basic needs, like food, like housing.

Hoor was one of about 2,000 demonstrators who descended on Westwood on Sunday afternoon to show support for anti-regime protests that erupted in Iran late last month.

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Some waved or wrapped their bodies with Iranian flags, while others held up signs that read Free Iran. They chanted in Persian and in English as they marched past the federal building on Wilshire and through surrounding neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, home to a large Iranian expatriate community commonly referred to as Tehrangeles.

A large crowd of people marched thru Westwood today to show support for anti-regime protests in Iran. Theyre suffering from poverty, absolute poverty, one demonstrator said. This is the least we can do to show were with them. pic.twitter.com/1ly7q7wwcO  Alene Tchekmedyian (@AleneTchek) January 8, 2018

The uprising in Iran began Dec. 28 in Mashhad, Irans second-largest city, and spread quickly to more than 30 other cities, showing the deep frustration among working-class Iranians coping with high unemployment, rising prices and official corruption.

Theyre suffering from poverty, absolute poverty, that exists in Iran because of the not appropriate policies of the government, Hoor said. We are living in a very different, very safe country  we cannot feel their suffering. This is the least we can do to show were with them.

Demonstrators gathered at the federal building about 1 p.m. Los Angeles police had expected a crowd of about 2,000, and officers at the event said it appeared about that many people showed up. Some protesters followed the group with plastic bags, picking up trash as officers guided traffic.

Also demonstrating was Nanaz Baghai, a doctor who said she left Iran in 1976 and was studying medicine at USC during the revolution. She said she was marching Sunday for womens rights and education for all in Iran, and against government corruption.

Were going to do everything in our power to help democracy, she said.

Times staff writer Sarah Parvini contributed to this report.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchek
The fight over Charles Mansons body and property became more complicated after a hearing in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Monday.

Saying that dispensing the killers property and his remains were two different legal decisions, Probate Judge David J. Cowan told the killers longtime pen pal and an attorney for Mansons grandson that a decision was weeks away.

Both men have to file paperwork on why they should receive Mansons body and in which county they believe that decision should be made. Attorneys for Kern County  where Manson died on Nov. 19  are awaiting the decision since they have the killers body on ice.

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The judges order Monday further delays the conclusion of the Manson saga.

Attorney Alan Davis, representing Mansons grandson, Jason Freeman, has until Friday to file a claim for Mansons remains, as well as arguments on the proper court venue. Michael Channels, a pen pal of Mansons for 30 years who says he has a last will and testament from the killer, has to respond to Davis filing by Jan. 19.

A judge will then decide Jan. 26 where the respective cases should be heard.

Kern County said it wasnt sure how to decide that because Manson lived in Los Angeles County before he was arrested and in Kings County when he was behind bars. State code says those decisions are made in the county where the decedent domiciled, or lived, and theyre not sure if that means before he was in prison or after.

With these legal intricacies in mind, the judge Monday told Channels that he should hire a lawyer to help.

I called 50 of them, Channels replied. Half of them hung up on me, the other half laughed.

Channels said his relationship with Manson blossomed some 30 years ago out of morbid curiosity that led to him to first write the killer. About 15 years ago, he claims, Manson sent him a last will and testament awarding him everything.

In his spare time, he also operates the website Mansonsbackporch.com, an online museum of the killers photos, writings and stories. There used to be recordings of phone conversations between Channels and Manson on there, but Channels said he took them down after Manson died.

A note under the canteen section of the site said that it was under construction as it developed payment options to purchase limited editions and hard to find items of the Manson family. It was not immediately clear how long that note had been on the site.

Manson was the mastermind of the gory rampage that claimed the life of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others during two August nights in Los Angeles in 1969. The killings both terrified and fascinated the nation.

Freeman, the killers grandson in Florida, said if he received Mansons remains, he would cremate them and spread them secretly so the location couldnt be turned into a morbid tourist destination. Channels said he would do something similar and had no plans for the killers remaining property.

At least two other people are poised to enter the fray as well  a man in Santa Monica claims to have another final will and testament from Manson and the mans colleague claims to be Mansons biological son. But neither had filed court documents for their claims as of Monday.

joseph.serna@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.
Ahead of a strong winter storm that could trigger flash flooding and mudslides, authorities have ordered evacuations of Santa Barbara County neighborhoods that sit below areas recently burned by wildfires.

Residents who live in the following areas were told to evacuate by noon Monday: north of Highway 192, east of Cold Springs Road, and west of Highway 150/the county line, as well as along Tecolote Canyon, Eagle Canyon, Dos Pueblos Canyon, Gato Canyon and in the Whittier fire burn areas near Goleta.

A voluntary evacuation warning was issued for all areas south of Highway 192 to the ocean and east of Hot Springs Road/Olive Mill Road to Highway 150/county line, Santa Barbara County officials said.

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People in these areas should stay alert to changing conditions and be prepared to leave immediately at your own discretion if the situation worsens, the county said in a statement.

Almost 4 inches of rain is expected in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties  where the massive Thomas fire has scorched more than 281,000 acres  from Monday evening through Tuesday morning. Authorities warned of the potential for heavy rain, strong winds and extremely dangerous flash flooding and debris flows.

The nearly extinguished wildfire, which erupted Dec. 4, is the largest fire on record in California. Residents who live in areas burned by the Whittier, Sherpa and Rey fires are also affected by the evacuations.

To read the article in Spanish, click here

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchek
A suspect has been arrested in the stabbing of a Los Angeles County sheriffs deputy on Monday morning, officials said.

The deputy, described as a 26-year veteran of the department, was attacked around 10 a.m., said Nicole Nishida, a spokeswoman for the department. Authorities said the deputy was taken to a hospital and was in good condition.

The deputy was in the parking lot of a restaurant in the 18900 block of Soledad Canyon Road, in Canyon Country, when he was confronted by by Donald Chinchilla, 21, according to authorities.

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Chinchilla reportedly asked the victim if he was a deputy, and when he said that he was, Chinchilla allegedly stabbed the deputy in the torso and fled.

Chinchilla, a Canyon Country resident, was later found in the backyard of a residence in the 18900 block of Nearbrook Street, authorities said. He has been taken to the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriffs Station and was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder on a police officer.

A large kitchen knife was recovered at the scene of the stabbing, the department said.

james.queally@latimes.com

Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for crime and police news in California.

UPDATES:

2:30 p.m.: This article was updated with the suspects name and details of the attack.

12:35 p.m.: This article was updated with information about the suspects arrest.

11:25 a.m.: This article was updated with additional information from the Sheriffs Department.

This article was originally published at 10:30 a.m.
Thousands were evacuated in burn areas Monday as the first major rainstorm in nearly a year moved into Southern California, triggering stern warnings from authorities about flash flooding and debris flows.

The rain is of greatest concern in the mountains of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties burned in the massive Thomas fire, where officials said mudslides are possible.

It does look like the heaviest rainfall amounts would be within or near the Thomas fire burn area, said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

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By Monday night, showers had fallen throughout the region, but the main storm front was expected to move in early Tuesday, bringing heavy rain, damaging wind gusts and possible thunderstorms, the weather service said.

The slopes that provide such ample views of the California coastline are also forcing up moisture from the storm, further squeezing out heavy rain. The same topography is responsible for the dreaded sundowner winds that pushed flames downhill into homes last month.

1 / 48 Contractors for the city of Ventura work to clear a huge tree toppled by wind on South Chestnut street between Main and Santa Clara Streets in downtown Ventura on Tuesday morning. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 48 A car was stuck in a mudslide early Tuesday morning on Topanga Canyon Blvd., in Topanga. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 48 Mario Romero looks at mud debris covering Maricopa Highway 33 North of Ojai that has several closures due to mud and debris slides covering the roadway Tuesday morning. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 48 Debris and mud cover the entrance of the Montecito Inn after heavy rain brought flash flooding and mudslides to the area. (Daniel Dreifuss / Associated Press) 5 / 48 A rainbow appears over the deadly mudslide in Montecito along Olive Mill Road. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 48 A man walks by destruction along Olive Mill Road in Montecito. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 48 A sheriffs deputy stands near a body covered by a tarp near Hot Springs Road in Montecito after a deadly mudslide swept through the area. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 48 Mangled cars are stuck near Olive Mill Road in Montecito after a major storm hit the burn area Tuesday. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 48 A mangled car along with other debris is wrapped around a tree along Hot Springs Road in Montecito. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 48 Scene from the 300 block of Hot Springs Road in Montecito following debris and mud flow due to heavy rain Tuesday morning. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 48 Sheriffs deputies carry a body from the debris near Hot Springs Road in Montecito after a major storm hit the burn area Tuesday. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times ) 12 / 48 Orange County search-and-rescue crews look for missing people along Olive Mill Road and Hot Springs Road in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 48 A house is left among boulders and mud along Glen Oaks Drive in Montecito. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 48 The 101 Freeway is covered with mud and debris at Olive Mill Road in Montecito. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 48 Montecito resident Terry Connery, second from left, is assisted on Wednesday by, from left, firefighters Mark Todd, John Cecena and Jeff Shea after the storm. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 48 A home off of Romero Canyon Road in Montecito is inundated with mud. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 48 Crews work to clear debris from the closed 101 Freeway at Olive Mill Road in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 48 The 101 Freeway remains closed as mud and debris clog the roadway at the Olive Mill Road overpass in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 48 A member of the search and rescue team inpsects property near a home along Glen Oaks Drive in Montecito. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 48 Ventura County fire Capt. Clay Cundiff searches a home for a woman who was reported missing by friends and family on Lilac Drive and Tollis Avenue in Montecito. She was later found safe. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 48 A member of the San Bernardino Search and Rescue holds a picture that was found along the East Cold Springs Creek in Montecito after a major storm hit the burn area Wednesday. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 48 Tim ODonnell, a member of the L.A. County Search and Rescue team, searches under Ashley Road along the East Cold Springs Creek in Montecito after a major storm hit the burn area Wednesday. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 48 Travis Zehntner looks over the wreckage of a Glen Oaks Drive home where family friend Rebecca Riskin was killed. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 48 A home on West Park Lane along San Ysidro Creek in Montecito on Thursday. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 48 A Cantin family holiday card in a pile of debris in the 300 block of Hot Springs Road in Montecito. From left, Kim, mother who survived; father David, who was killed; son Jack, who is still missing; and daugher Lauren, who was pulled from the family home early Wednesday. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 48 A structure sits in a tree Friday on East Valley Road in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 48 A dog and its handler from Riverside County search the rubble of a Hot Springs Road home Friday in Montecito. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 48 Water rises high near a home on East Valley Road on Friday in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times ) 29 / 48 A dog helps rescue workers search through rocks, mud and debris for bodies Saturday in Montecito. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 48 Firefighters look for missing people along Hot Springs Road in Montecito on Saturday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 48 Los Angeles City firefighter Jeffrey Neu gives water to Faith, a cadaver dog, while searching in a wood pile in Montectio Creek. (Michael Owen Baker / For The Times) 32 / 48 A Montecito freeway sign sits in mud on Highway 101.= (Michael Owen Baker / For The Times) 33 / 48 A view of the Thomas Fire burn zone and San Ysidro Creek in the Santa Ynez Mountains which brought mud and debris into Montecito neighborhoods. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 48 Los Angeles City firefighter Hollyn Bullock uses a rescue tool to pry open a car door along Montecito Creek. (Michael Owen Baker / For The Times) 35 / 48 Montecito neighbors hug at a candlelight vigil outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 48 Mourners gather for a candlelight vigil outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunday for victims of the Montecito mudslides. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 48 Geness Lorien listens to speakers during a candlelight vigil outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 48 Mourners gather for a candlelight vigil outside the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunday for victims of the Montecito mudslides. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 39 / 48 Mark Vance shovels mud away from his house on Olive Mill Road in Montecito, California. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) 40 / 48 Jesse Rudnick, with the Regional Task Force 1 out of Marin County Fire and Rescue, searches for missing people around a Montecito home. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) 41 / 48 Hugo Bautista, left and Jose Garcia, contractors with Union Pacific Railroad make sure track is clear at the Olive Mill Road crossing in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 42 / 48 Amtrak has added extra trains and cars for passengers trying to get around the 101 Freeway closure in Montecito. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 43 / 48 Crews continue to clear mud and debris from the 101 Freeway near Olive Mill Road on Tuesday, January 16, 2018. Officials said they hoped to have the freeway opened by next Monday. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 44 / 48 Cal Trans crews work on clearing a drain along the 101 Freeway in Montecito on Tuesday, January 16, 2018. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 45 / 48 A worker takes a breather from directing a bulldozer driver who clears mud from the 101 freeway in Montecito. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 46 / 48 Progress is slowly being made as a worker and trucks traverse a recently cleared portion of the the 101 freeway at Olive Mill Road in Montecito. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 47 / 48 Santa Barbara Supervisor Joan Hartmann, from front left, Jefferson Litten, Hartmanns Chief of Staff, and San Barbara City Councilman Eric Friedman, pink shirt, join others as they applaud first responders, fire fighters and law enforcement whove been aiding in the aftermath of the Montecito mudslide during a community meeting at the La Cumbre Junior High School in Santa Barbara. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 48 / 48 Margaret Stewart, with the Los Angeles City Fire Department, watches as her dog, Veya, tries to locate a victim of the mudslide along Highway 101 at Olive Mill Road in Montecito. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

On Monday afternoon, Los Angeles County issued evacuations in Kagel Canyon, Lopez Canyon and Little Tujunga Canyon, all of which were hit by fires in December. Officials in Duarte also ordered those who live in the Fish fire burn area to evacuate at 7 p.m. A shelter will open at 1600 Huntington Drive.

Evacuations were also ordered in Santa Barbara County neighborhoods that sit below areas recently burned by wildfires.

Residents who live in the following areas were told to evacuate by noon Monday: north of Highway 192, east of Cold Springs Road, and west of Highway 150/the county line, as well as along Tecolote Canyon, Eagle Canyon, Dos Pueblos Canyon, Gato Canyon and in the Whittier fire burn areas near Goleta.

A voluntary evacuation warning was issued for all areas south of Highway 192 to the ocean and east of Hot Springs Road/Olive Mill Road to Highway 150/county line, Santa Barbara County officials said. In Los Angeles County, Burbank officials issued a voluntary evacuation warning for residents who live in areas burned by the La Tuna fire.

People in these areas should stay alert to changing conditions and be prepared to leave immediately at your own discretion if the situation worsens, the county said in a statement.

Teri Lebow, 65, of Montecito, stayed with friends in Los Angeles for 12 days during the Thomas fire. Her San Ysidro Lane home suffered ash and smoke damage from the blaze.

On Monday, she was preparing to evacuate once again, but this time in heavy rain. I feel like its insane, she said.

Im just tired. I cant seem to get my life kick-started, Lebow said.

I dont have any hills behind my house, Lebow said, so shes not nervous about the mudslides doing damage to her home.

While her husband is traveling for work, Lebow had gardeners put sandbags around her home. She plans to head to a Four Seasons hotel.

The storm was initially forecast to produce up to 4 inches of rain over the south-facing mountains and foothills, but forecasters Monday increased those totals again.

Some communities  particularly within the Thomas fire burn area  could see up to 9 inches of rain between Monday and Tuesday, with rain dropping at a rate of up to 1 inches an hour, Munroe said. Debris flows begin at about a third of that rate, he said.

The best chance for thunderstorms throughout the region will fall on Tuesday.

When a fire sweeps through an area, it not only burns the vegetation but damages the soil itself. The intense heat makes the soil unable to absorb water the way it normally would.

Downtown L.A. is expected to get about an inch of rain over a 12-hour period beginning at midnight Monday.

A major storm is also hitting Northern California. That is causing concerns about flooding in the wine country fire zone, where more than 10,000 homes were burned in October.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for the burned north Bay Area that begins Monday afternoon and lasts through Tuesday morning.

Good news: #AtmosphericRiver is bringing a much-needed statewide soaking through Tuesday.

Bad news: Heightened concern for debris flow and mud/rock slides over recent burn areas, especially in SoCal pic.twitter.com/BAfHIfsfCG  NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) January 8, 2018

In Southern California, residents who fled the 15,000-acre Creek fire in Los Angeles County were bracing themselves for possible mudslides.

Over the weekend, Patricia Beckmann Wells, her husband and their 5-year-old son began putting out extra sandbags around their property in upper Kagel Canyon, where theyve lived since 2008. On Monday afternoon, the L.A. County Sheriffs Department began mandatory evacuations for their area.

The Wells family evacuated to a Motel 6 for three days during the Creek fire, but they arent planning to leave this time.

No more Motel 6 for us, Beckmann Wells said.

Residents in the community received emails from a neighbor over the weekend, with maps outlining the damage from the Creek fire and potential mudslide areas. Each time, the neighbor signed off with: #KagelStrong!

Most of us are aware that the lower part of the canyon is going to be a mudslide, Beckmann Wells said. Were expecting to just be trapped in the canyon. Everyone is just out getting supplies and holing up to stay here. Nobody wants to evacuate. They dont see this as the threat the fire was.

The attitude of this group is very rebellious, she said, adding that neighbors have been checking in with one another to help prepare for the storm. Its really such a caring, unique community, in that were all aware of who needs what and were going to rush over if something happens, Beckmann Wells said.

She said the family bought gasoline on Sunday and that theyre thinking about getting another generator battery. Beckmann Wells said she is also planning to get food that doesnt need refrigeration, so that they arent too reliant on the generator.

She said her son isnt worrying about the storm.

Hes not stressed out, but he is learning how important nature is, she said. Hes learning that there are dangerous things in nature that we need to be prepared for.

 Storm preparation in Kagel Canyon

Times staff writer Michael Livingston contributed to this report.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

brittny.mejia@latimes.com

UPDATES:

9:25 p.m.: This article was updated with information from the National Weather Service.

5:10 p.m.: This article was updated with information from the National Weather Service.

4 p.m.: This article was updated with information about evacuation orders and advisories in Duarte and Burbank.

1:45 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Montecito resident Teri Lebow.

12:45 p.m.: This article was updated with details about evacuations.

10:30 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from Kagel Canyon resident Patricia Beckmann Wells.

This article was originally published at 8:47 a.m.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said on Monday that the Egyptian state would not allow the nation to be hit by a water shortage, pointing to steps taken to protect water resources and ensure they are properly managed.

El-Sisi made the comments as he announced the construction of Egypt's biggest water treatment and desalination project, costing almost LE70 billion.

"We won't allow a water-shortage crisis to occur in Egypt. We have not only to keep our share of the Nile, but but also to use our share to the maximum," he said during a short statement.

"Egypt is currently carrying out the biggest water treatment and desalination project, just in case of any circumstances concerning the sharing of water."



The water treatment and desalination project was highlighted by El-Sisi at the inauguration of several national transportation and residential projects in Cairo's 10th of Ramadan Cty.

"This is not for luxury but to resolve a possible situation," he said, adding that he did not want to elaborate more.

Egypt has expressed concerns over Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project, saying it will affect Egypt's share of Nile River water, a claim rejected by Ethiopia.

Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have been involved in talks for the past three years concerning the dam and its effect on the downstream countries. The Nile River is the main source of fresh water in Egypt.

El-Sisi said that the government started implementing the water treatment and desalination project three months ago.

"This is our country, and water for agriculture and drinking must be secured for citizens from Aswan to Alexandria, so that no problem will occur later and we say that we are not ready for it," he added.

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It started four years ago, when Cliven Bundy and his sons refused to pay federal grazing fees and stared down government agents in an armed standoff outside their Nevada ranch.

The Bundys dared the federal government to arrest them. The government did, charging them with a range of felonies.

On Monday, a federal judge in Las Vegas set them free.

The decision left federal prosecutors swallowing another defeat at the hands of a family whose defiance has become a rallying cry for Westerners who believe the federal government has no business managing public land. Four times now  in high-profile cases in Nevada and Oregon  the Bundy family and its allies have beaten the federal government in court.

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For the latest showdown, supporters set up banners and signs on Las Vegas Boulevard. One drove from Montana to provide Facebook updates for devotees of the cause.

At least 100 Bundy backers filled the courtroom Monday. Some wore shirts with American flag motifs. Others carried pocket Constitutions in their button-down shirts. More than a few wore cowboy boots.

Their heroes sat looking up at U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro. Cliven Bundy, 71, wore a jailhouse jumpsuit. His son Ryan, 44, who led a large group of supporters in prayer before entering the courtroom, removed his cowboy hat. Another son, Ammon, 42, and a militia member, Ryan Payne, barely moved.

It was their moment.

1 / 7 From left, Ammon Bundy, Ryan Payne, Jeanette Finicum, widow of Robert LaVoy Finicum, Ryan Bundy, Angela Bundy, wife of Ryan Bundy and Jamie Bundy, daughter of Ryan Bundy, walk out of a federal courthouse in Las Vegas. Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the case against Cliven Bundy, his sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy and self-styled Montana militia leader Ryan Payne. (John Locher / Associated Press) 2 / 7 Ammon Bundy, left, hugs is aunt Lillie Spencer outside of a federal courthouse in Las Vegas after U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the case against Cliven Bundy, his sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy. (John Locher / Associated Press) 3 / 7 Rancher Cliven Bundy, 67, looks over the Virgin River on some of his 150 square miles of property in Bunkerville, Nevada on August 20, 2013. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 7 The Bundy family and their supporters fly the American flag as their cattle is released by the Bureau of Land Management back onto public land outside of Bunkerville, Nev. (Jason Bean / Associated Press) 5 / 7 Rancher Cliven D. Bundy, 67, is reflected in a mirror that rests on a mantle place in his home in Bunkerville, Nevada. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 7 Army Veteran Jason Bullock, left, Booda, middle, and Socks, right, volunteer as a personal security guard standing at the entrance to Cliven Bundys ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada July 30, 2014. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 7 Jerry DeLemus, a 59-year-old self employed construction man from Rochester N.H., has been appointed the commander of a camp where armed supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy live and patrol his ranch and cattle in April 2014. (John M. Glionna / Los Angeles Times)

Navarro rebuked federal prosecutors  using the words flagrant and reckless to describe how they withheld evidence from the defense  before saying that the universal sense of justice has been violated and dismissing the charges.

Supporters dabbed their eyes with tissues. Outside in the hall, there were cheers.

The four defendants were charged with threatening a federal officer, carrying and using a firearm, and engaging in conspiracy. The case had once looked like a slam-dunk to some.

The images that had made the Bundys heroes to some  armed supporters facing down federal agents as contractors with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management tried to seize cattle  seemed to be compelling evidence.

Mondays dismissal was hinted at last month when Navarro ordered a mistrial. But she offered prosecutors a chance to make their case for why she should grant another trial.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven Myhre wrote in his brief that the government had shared 1.5 terabytes of information with defendants and noted that it was by far the largest review and disclosure operation in this [U.S. attorneys office] history.

Myrhe also argued the government needed to protect some witnesses from leaks that might lead to threats, so it culled the database with witness protection in mind.

Unprecedented database volume and witness concerns aside, the government never let these obstacles stand in the way of diligently working to fulfill its discovery obligations, he wrote.

Navarro didnt buy it and shredded the government for a reckless disregard for Constitutional obligations. She said she was troubled by the prosecutions tardiness in delivering information about the governments placing of surveillance cameras and snipers outside the ranch.

After the decision, Cliven Bundy emerged from an elevator at the courthouse dressed in jeans, button-down shirt and gray blazer.

Im not used to being free, put it that way, he said. Ive been a political prisoner for right at 700 days today. I come into this courtroom an innocent man and Im going to leave as an innocent man.

He also seemed ready to resume his role as a leader on the issue of local control of federal land. Its a decades-long fight for Bundy, who first tussled with the Bureau of Land Management in the 1990s by refusing to pay grazing fees for his cattle using federal land.

As he and his wife, Carol, walked out into a spitting rain, hundreds of supporters cheered. A Not Guilty sticker had been stuck to his lapel. The rancher took off his hat and waved it to the crowd before posing for pictures.

He criticized Clark County commissioners, the Clark County sheriff and Nevadas governor for not coming to his defense.

My defense is a 15-second defense: I graze my cattle only on Clark County, Nev., land and I have no contract with the federal government, he said. This court has no jurisdiction or authority over this matter. And Ive put up with this court in America as a political prisoner for two years.

His attorney, Bret Whipple, said there would be a news conference Tuesday in front of Las Vegas police headquarters to talk about control of public land.

U.S. Atty. Dayle Elieson of Nevada, who was appointed by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions last week, released a short statement after the decision. We respect the courts ruling and will make a determination about the next appropriate steps.

Ian Bartrum, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that while the court decision was a defeat for the Justice Department, it could be seen as a victory for Trump administration policy to shrink national monuments and push for local control of federal land.

Most of Trumps base are Bundy supporters, Bartrum said in an email. This plays right into the larger Trump narrative about the Swamp versus the People. I think you might be right to say they arent that unhappy  and will likely make some political hay out of it.

Advocates for federal enforcement of land regulations were quick to criticize the governments handling of the case.

Federal prosecutors clearly bungled this case and let the Bundys get away with breaking the law, Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. The Bundys rallied a militia to mount an armed insurrection against the government. The failure of this case will only embolden this violent and racist anti-government movement that wants to take over our public lands.

Twice last year, Las Vegas juries acquitted or deadlocked on felony charges against Bundy supporters. Then Ammon and Ryan Bundy each beat federal felony charges in a case stemming from a 41-day standoff in 2016 at an Oregon wildlife preserve.

david.montero@latimes.com

Twitter: @davemontero

UPDATES:

8:15 p.m.: The story was updated throughout with details of the court proceedings and background on the case.

The story was originally published at 10:20 a.m.
The marijuana movement is charging ahead.

To date eight states  California, Colorado, Nevada to name a few  have legalized weed for recreational use since 2012. And the trend continues.

This year, several states all across the country are looking to legalize and, in turn, rake in millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Even with the Trump administrations announcement last week that it would scrap an Obama-era policy offering legal shelter for state-sanctioned marijuana sales, organizers and lawmakers are forging forward with legalization efforts.

Here are some of those states:

Vermont

This month the state is poised to make history, becoming the first to legalize marijuana through a legislative measure and not a state-approved ballot initiative.

Last week, lawmakers in the Vermont House of Representatives passed H.511. The bill allows individuals to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and to grow up to two mature plants. The Senate is set to vote on it in the coming days, where supporters have said they have enough votes for its passage.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott indicated last month he would sign the legislation if it arrives on his desk.

Matt Simon, New England director for the Marijuana Policy Project, a group dedicated to ending cannabis prohibition nationwide, said it was an important step for the state where polls have shown that voters support legalization.

We applaud lawmakers for heeding the calls of their constituents and taking this important step toward treating marijuana more like alcohol, Simon said.

Rhode Island

Last year, lawmakers in Rhode Island debated a bill that would legalize pot. It was the third time in three years that state Sen. Josh Miller, a Democrat from the Providence area, introduced a pot legalization bill. Although it died in a committee, supporters remained undeterred.

A commission was formed last year to look into best practices for legalization and another bill is expected to be debated this legislative session. Supporters in the state say it is missing out on tax dollars that are being raked in by other New England states such as Massachusetts and Maine that have recently legalized.

In recent months, members of the commission have visited with Colorado officials to learn about how they implemented legal sales.

Michigan

Organizers in the state are working to secure enough signatures to get legalization on the ballot in November.

The Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is leading the effort and needed to gather 252,523 valid signatures of registered Michigan voters by late last fall. The group said it submitted more than 360,000 signatures and is awaiting confirmation from the state.

The state will generate substantial tax revenue and see a lot of new jobs created, said Mason Tvert, who has helped pass legalization efforts in several states. Other states have demonstrated the benefits of replacing prohibition with regulation. Michigan voters appear to be ready to follow their example.

New Jersey

With Republican Gov. Chris Christie on his way out, it seems legal pot is on its way in.

Democratic Gov.-elect Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive, has pledged to sign legislation into law that would allow for the possession and sale of recreational marijuana. Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Legislature said a bill could be passed by early spring.

Murphy has said legal pot could bring in an estimated $300 million in tax revenue.

Legalize marijuana so police can focus resources on violent crimes, Murphy says on his campaign website.

Connecticut

Lawmakers in support of pot legalization have said  like their counterparts in Rhode Island  that they dont want to lose tax dollars to their neighbors in Massachusetts. Even so, the allure of such revenue only goes so far.

Four bills to legalize and tax the sale of marijuana were introduced last year, but each died in committee hearing rooms.

This year legislators have  yet again  vowed to present legalization bills.

kurtis.lee@latimes.com

Twitter: @kurtisalee
Former 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was treated for prostate cancer last year, says an unnamed aide to Romney.

The spoke on the condition of anonymity because the aide was not authorized to discuss a sensitive health issue publicly. The aide said Monday that Romney was diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer last year. The cancer was removed surgically and found not to have spread beyond the prostate, the aide said.

The news comes as Romney, 70, weighs whether to run for a Utah Senate seat occupied by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Hatch announced last week that he would not seek another term this fall.
President Trump and Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis should be congratulated for contributing to the steady decline of Islamic States territorial claims.

Several years ago, in October 2014, Islamic State controlled land from central Syria to the fringe of Baghdad  territory that included large key cities such as Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit in Iraq and Raqqah in Syria. Today, it controls only a sparsely populated chunk of desert on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border.

Its shrinking territory notwithstanding, Islamic State continues to fly a black flag of aggression rather than a white flag of surrender. It flies this flag most effectively online, using the internet to promote warped religious views, recruit fighters, inspire deadly acts of terrorism and encourage disruption and chaos.

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The battle against Islamic State will not be won until it is defeated in the cyber arena. The acting director of intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center, Lora Shiao, acknowledged this in early December when she testified before the Senate: We dont see ISIS loss of territory translating into a corresponding reduction in its ability to inspire attacks.

Building the capacity to inflict cyber destruction requires tools that are far easier to obtain than other forms of WMD.

To beat back Islamic States virtual caliphate, the U.S. and its allies must develop two separate but interlinked strategies.

The first must focus on defeating Islamic States online propaganda and recruitment operations, including its use of the internet to instigate attacks in the physical world.

As Andrew Byers and Tara Mooney wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, this will require close coordination and information-sharing across U.S. governmental agencies, including the National Security Agency, Cyber Command, the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA and other components of the Department of Defense. Countering Islamic States propaganda will require particular creativity  and experts with language and dialect fluency, sophisticated cultural awareness and social media savvy.

It will also require cooperation from the private sector. In some respects, such cooperation has already begun, with Facebook and Twitter removing Islamic State material and deleting related accounts. But tech companies will need to go further and share information about accounts that disseminate Islamic State propaganda. In return, the government needs to make educational resources and training available to tech companies, allowing them to better police hateful and dangerous messages.

The second strategy must focus on Islamic States ability to carry out actual cyberattacks on network infrastructures.

Last June, an Islamic State sympathizer group called Team System Dz hacked Ohio Gov. John Kasichs website to display the message, I love the Islamic State . . . . You will be held accountable Trump, you and all your people for every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries.

In November, Swedish radio stations were reportedly hacked to play a song, For the Sake of Allah, that encourages people to join Islamic State.

Some analysts describe these events as a form of cyber graffiti and dismiss the notion that Islamic State has the capacity to wreak real havoc online. The problem with this view is that it risks assuming past performance is an indicator of future capability.

Islamic State wants to see our destruction, and the world has paid a deadly price for assuming it was the terrorist equivalent of a junior varsity team.

While Islamic State and its adherents may not possess the cyber sophistication of North Korea or Russia, building the capacity to inflict cyber destruction requires tools that are far easier to obtain  and more difficult for intelligence agencies to trace  than other forms of WMD.

When an enemy wants your defeat, you have to assume they will find the means to achieve it. The U.S. needs to actively monitor, identify and prevent attempts by Islamic State to use cyber tools to cause harm.

While the two strategies address different risks, they reinforce each other. Disrupting Islamic States recruiting and propaganda efforts will work to block its access to human expertise, capital and cyber tools. Preventing cyberattacks by Islamic State limits its attractiveness to would-be followers. The failure to carry out either strategy could be devastating.

Matthew R. A. Heiman is a visiting fellow with the National Security Institute at George Mason Universitys Antonin Scalia Law School. He served as an attorney with the national security division of the Department of Justice and as a legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
Customs and Border Protection last year awarded a $297 million contract for assistance in recruiting and hiring the 5,000 border patrol agents President Trump believes we need to combat the recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico.

Those bold numbers may please the Make America Great Again crowd, but it will be exceedingly difficult to find qualified agents, or to deploy them effectively since the border is actually quieter than ever.

Under the Clinton administration, it took 27 applicants to yield one Border Patrol officer. And the hiring ratio has gotten worse. This spring, when Customs and Border Protection requested bids for private contractors to help fulfill Trumps order, it wrote that it now takes 133 applicants to hire one full-time employee.

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A private contractor may improve on those figures by designing a new recruitment strategy and implementing it in labor markets that Customs and Border Protection hasnt previously tapped. The contractor may not repeat the agencys past mistakes, like spending millions on polygraph tests for applicants who have already admitted to disqualifying offenses like human trafficking. Still, its a tough task. The contractor needs to find men and women who will be willing to work in remote areas, can pass the physical fitness requirements and havent touched marijuana in at least two years.

But lets imagine that Customs and Border Protection succeeds in hiring, training and equipping all 5,000 of new officers and manages to hang on to the roughly 20,000 agents it already has (which hasnt been easy up to this point). Are they as urgently needed at the border as the executive order would have us believe? The best evidence available tells us the answer is absolutely not.

In 2017, the number of people apprehended at the border fell 26% compared with the previous year, and they havent been this low since the Nixon administration. The recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico, the presidents basis for his border security push, reflects only a temporary rise in apprehensions from 2015 to 2016. If you zoom out, thats a blip in a long, downward trend, from more than 111,000 in 2004 to fewer than 30,000 last year.

Besides, Customs and Border Protection doesnt even seem to know where it would be optimal to deploy additional personnel or whether theyre needed at all. According to a special report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General, Neither CBP nor ICE could provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional  agents and officers they were directed to hire.

A suddenly larger law enforcement agency, with numerous new recruits and without a clear deployment strategy, isnt just a financial liability, but a safety risk.

Another Homeland Security Inspector General report found numerous problems with DHS agencies keeping track of and securing their equipment. Customs and Border Protection, for instance, did not have an accurate firearm inventory and one agent left his gun in a backpack at a gym, where it was stolen.

Adding an enormous number of employees to an agency that faces administrative dysfunction and has no coherent plan to detail new agents will create a scenario in which costs will be high and benefits may be quite low.

Theres negligence and inefficiency, and then theres actual malfeasance. In the spring of 2016, around the time Trump was starting to make inflammatory speeches about immigrants, the Homeland Security Advisory Council cautioned that Customs and Border Protections disciplinary process was broken. It urged CBP to hire an adequate number of internal investigators and described serious dysfunction in the handling of complaints and disciplinary cases. For major areas of concern like domestic violence and alcohol abuse, it found that the agency lagged behind standard law enforcement practices. A host of harmful activities, from bribery to alleged sexual assault, have come to light and caused problems for Customs and Border Protection in the past.

The risk is that Trumps hiring surge at the border will make the news and please his base, while accomplishing little and increasing the possibility of policy failure.

Christine Stenglein is a research assistant at Brookings. John Hudak is a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings.

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We knew that Golden Globes night would be different this year. In fact, if you were watching the E! channel Sunday, you saw red-carpet coverage of actresses wearing only black to signify their solidarity with the #MeToo movement and the #TimesUp initiative against sexual harassment in Hollywood. Then you saw an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in which Kim Kardashian decides she wants to do something about homelessness and tours a homeless encampment. I wasnt sure which show Id seen was more  upending. (Oh, of course, it was the Kardashians.)

The Globes show is always irreverent, relatively speaking  a big, kooky, slightly boozy Hollywood love-in hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., the obscurity of which stars like to make fun of even as they accept its awards. Even in this years different climate, Frances McDormand, the brilliant, no-nonsense actress who so terrified the NBC censors when she took to the stage to accept an award that they bleeped her before she needed bleeping, made a joke about not knowing who the members of the HFPA are.

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But, it was a different show  and possibly a harbinger of what we will hear at the Oscars in less than two months. Actresses, and actors, spoke of the profound belief that the banishment of many of Hollywoods sexual predators and harassers was more than a passing outrage. This was, they said, a sea change for women, for minorities, for anyone outside the traditional white male power structure who had been harassed or marginalized. I really hope that they are right. But consider all the work that has yet to be done. After Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award and gave a bravura speech that had the Beverly Hilton room on its feet and launched a profusion of tweets drafting her for president, the next award was for best director. And, as actress and award presenter Natalie Portman pointedly noted, here are the all male nominees

As everyone has said repeatedly, Hollywood wont change until women and people of color are a bigger part of its ranks, and with bigger roles. Cant wait for the night that Natalie Portman gets to announce that all the nominees for director are women. Or, how about just some of them are?

carla.hall@latimes.com

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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

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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

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John Cox begins California barnstorm with the delivery of gas tax repeal signatures By Javier Panzar 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein wont participate in pre-primary debate By Sarah D. Wire 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Gavin Newsom gets backing from doctors group, despite differences over single-payer healthcare By Melanie Mason 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 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

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Billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer endorses Kevin de Leon in his insurgent bid against Sen. Dianne Feinstein By Seema Mehta 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

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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

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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

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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

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Newest member of the California Assembly arrives ready to work on criminal justice issues By John Myers 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 and there is only one committee that can do that. Allen rejected the request, noting that the active initiative drive is co-chaired by wealthy businessman John Cox, a Republican also running for governor whose campaign has donated $250,000 to the initiative drive. I would be doing the gas-tax-repeal contributors a huge disservice if I was to transfer any funds to a campaign committee involving John Cox, Allen said. John Cox has spent millions of dollars campaigning for office and he has lost every single time. Cox ran unsuccessfully for three offices in Illinois before he moved to California. Allen said he will use the donations received by his ballot measure committee to campaign for approval of the gas tax 
It sounds simple enough: If Donald Trump can win the presidency, why couldnt Oprah Winfrey?

A day after her rousing speech on the #MeToo movement at Sundays Golden Globe Awards, a Winfrey 2020 boomlet suddenly dominated American politics.

The idea of a television talk show host, even one as popular as Winfrey, making a viable run for the White House would have struck many as absurd not long ago.

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Not so in the era of Trump.

The chatter about Winfrey did, however, spark debate on the paramount role of fame in a presidential campaign.

Oprah gave one of the best political speeches since Obama left the stage, but does that mean Americas longing for another celebrity novice? asked Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic campaign consultant in Los Angeles.

Is it good for democracy if 100% name ID and one good speech make you the presidential front-runner?

Good or bad, its all but inevitable that a famous candidate would dominate a race.

The name of the game in elections is name recognition, and you get that from celebrity, said Martin Kaplan, a USC professor who specializes in the impact of media and entertainment on society.

Pundits quickly started handicapping Winfreys odds, starting with a scramble for the Democratic nomination.

Winfrey, 63, is younger than some of the top Democrats who might run, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, told followers on Twitter.

Sounder on economics than Bernie Sanders, understands Middle America better than Elizabeth Warren, less touchy-feely than Joe Biden, more pleasant than Andrew Cuomo, more charismatic than John Hickenlooper, he wrote.

Winfrey meets all three constitutional tests to run for president: Shes over 35 years old, shes a U.S. citizen born in the United States, and she has lived here for more than 14 years.

Her wealth would be an enormous asset, just as Trumps was. Winfreys net worth is $2.8 billion, according to Forbes.

Oprah Winfrey campaigns for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama at a rally in Los Angeles on Feb. 3, 2008. (Ric Francis / Associated Press )

But much of the Oprah 2020 chatter ignores the hard realities of running for president, even for one of the nations best-known celebrities.

You have to want to do it, because its an enormous challenge, an enormous trial, an enormous test of your soul, said J. Ann Selzer, an Iowa pollster.

To millions of Americans, Winfrey might seem familiar after decades appearing on TV, acting in Hollywood movies and reporting now as a special correspondent on CBS 60 Minutes.

But presidential candidates face a vetting far more invasive than anything Winfrey has ever endured.

Beyond the news medias scrutiny of her personal and professional life, opponents  including a large field of Democrats  would compile dossiers on her past, timing the release of embarrassing details to inflict maximum damage.

My experience with celebrities is theyre enamored with the talk and with the thought of being president or governor or what have you, but when they step up to the line and they understand the scrutiny they have to go through  they back away, said John Weaver, a top strategist in the presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, both Republicans.

Weaver also questioned whether voters would see a campaign run out of Bel-Air as a suitable antidote to Trumps disruptive presidency.

Winfreys candidacy would indeed defy the historical pattern of voters picking presidents they expect to correct a predecessors flaws, said Katie Merrill, a Democratic strategist in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the starker examples: President Carter, widely seen as weak, was ousted by tough-talking Ronald Reagan.

I think it is far more likely that the American public will go to the opposite of the current occupant of the White House, picking a traditional elected official seasoned in public policymaking  not another celebrity outsider, she said.

Winfrey, who supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president, has shot down past speculation that she might run.

There will be no running for office of any kind for me, she told her best friend, Gayle King, in October on CBS This Morning.

Is @Oprah running for POTUS in 2020? "There will be no running of office of any kind, for me." pic.twitter.com/2T0PJnGDFG  CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) October 18, 2017

But after Winfreys Golden Globes speech Sunday on the national upheaval over sexual harassment, her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, told The Times: Its up to the people. She would absolutely do it.

It would not be easy. Thousands of hours of video, some never seen by the public, would instantly become fodder for attacks.

In the context of a campaign, little-noticed banter from years ago can turn toxic.

Trump once told radio shock jock Howard Stern that he enjoyed seeing naked women backstage at his beauty pageants.

He also told Stern that he backed President George W. Bushs invasion of Iraq, a statement he later denied making despite the audio evidence.

And Trumps campaign nearly collapsed when a recording surfaced of him telling Access Hollywood anchor Billy Bush that he got away with sexually assaulting women because he was famous.

In the end, Winfreys fame could well help her weather controversies, just as it did for action movie superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger when, days before he was elected governor of California, multiple women accused him of groping.

At a certain point, celebrities become transcendent, said political scientist Ross Baker of Rutgers University. People are just blinded by the glitter.

Some Hollywood stars, including Meryl Streep and Sarah Silverman, called on Winfrey to run, but public enthusiasm is no sure thing. A Quinnipiac University poll last March found 52% of voters viewed Winfrey favorably, but 69% said she should not run for president in 2020.

Winfrey, who lives in a mansion in Montecito, Calif., would inevitably be pegged by Republicans as a Hollywood elitist. On Monday, the attacks were swift.

Mocking Winfrey online, some conservatives posted photos of her at glitzy banquets with former movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who was disgraced by the multiple allegations of sexual abuse against women that helped set off the #MeToo movement.

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Twitter: @finneganLAT

UPDATES:

9:13 p.m.: This story was updated with additional details and quotes throughout.

6:35 p.m.: This story was updated with context and a quote.

This article was originally published at 1:35 p.m.
The Supreme Court voted Monday to give a black inmate convicted of murder in Georgia a chance to overturn his 27-year-old death sentence because of racist comments made by a white juror years later.

The unsigned opinion prompted a dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas and two other justices, who derided their colleagues for ceremonial handwringing that callously delays justice for the black woman who was the murder victim.



For the record: An earlier version of this report referred to Pena-Rodriguez vs. Colorado as Pena-Rodriquez vs. Colorado.

In 1990, Keith Tharpe ambushed and assaulted his ex-wife and shot and killed her sister, Jacquelin Freeman. A few months later, a jury convicted him of those crimes and unanimously voted in favor of a death sentence.

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He was set to be executed on Sept. 26 when his lawyers presented to the Supreme Court a statement from Barney Gattie, one of the jurors in Tharpes case.

Gattie had spoken to defense lawyers in 1998 and said he saw two types of black people, some of whom were nice black folks like Freeman and her family. He used the n-word to characterize the others.

I felt Tharpe, who wasnt in the good black folks category in my book, should get the electric chair for what he did After studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls, according to Gatties statement.

The Supreme Court issued a late-night order to stop Tharpes execution. And Monday, the justices issued a three-page ruling that told the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta to reconsider Tharpes plea for a new sentencing hearing.

The appeals court had previously rejected Tharpes request, noting that state judges reviewed what Gattie had said and found no evidence Tharpe had been a victim of a racial bias in the jury room.

Our review of the record compels a different conclusion, the justices said in Tharpe vs. Sellers. They said Gatties affidavit presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpes race affected Gatties vote for a death verdict.

The opinion stops well short of reversing Tharpes death sentence, however. He still faces a high bar in overturning a state judges ruling that Gatties racist views did not play a role in the jurys deliberations, the court wrote.

The high court has long struggled with the question of whether and when federal judges should intervene to reopen old death penalty cases that were resolved in state courts.

Since the 1990s, both the Supreme Court and Congress have said federal judges should generally defer to the factual rulings of state courts and reverse them only for extraordinary reasons.

But last year, the high court changed course somewhat in two decisions involving race. It reopened the case of a black death row inmate in Texas whose sentencing hearing included testimony from a crime expert who said blacks are more likely than whites to commit future crimes.

Some toxins can be deadly in small doses, said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in Buck vs. Davis, explaining why that testimony called for a new sentencing hearing.

And in the case of a Mexican American convicted of a sexual assault, the court in Pena-Rodriguez vs. Colorado said trial judges should reconsider a jurys verdict if they learn that a juror made racist comments during the deliberations.

Lawyers for Tharpe cited both decisions in the emergency appeal that spared their clients life.

We are thankful that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the serious implications for fundamental fairness of the clear evidence of racial animus on the part of one of the jurors who sentenced Mr. Tharpe to death, Brian Kammer, a lawyer for Tharpe, said Monday. We look forward to pressing Mr. Tharpes case in the 11th Circuit.

Lawyers for Georgia had told the court that Gattie, who is deceased, had disavowed his initial statement to the defense lawyers and said he had been drinking heavily. He later testified before a judge and said his views on race did not affect his decision as a juror. The judge also heard from the other jurors, two of whom were black, and they insisted race played no role in their deliberations.

In a 13-page dissent, Thomas, a Georgia native and the courts only African American, said Gatties views are certainly odious. But their odiousness does not excuse us from doing our jobs correctly.

The court must be disturbed by the racist rhetoric in that [first] affidavit and must want to do something about it. But the courts decision is no profile in courage, he said. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch joined his dissent.

Major questions before the Supreme Court this year 

david.savage@latimes.com

On Twitter: DavidGSavage
Egypts National Elections Authority (NEA) announced on Monday that voting in the upcoming 2018 presidential elections will begin in March.

In an official announcement during a Cairo press conference, NEA head Lasheen Ibrahim announced the timetable for the highly anticipated elections, with proceedings to take place between late January and 1 May, when the NEA will announce the winner and new president of Egypt.

The NEA is set to receive requests for nominations from 20 January till 29 January in its headquarters on downtown Cairos Qasr El-Einy Street.

During the first week of February, the authority will disqualify some of the candidates, announcing the reasons for doing so on 6 February. It will also accept official complaints on 7 February and rule on them on 9 February.

The official list of candidates is set to be announced on 23 February, 2018.

Voting by Egyptian expats is set to begin on16, 17 and 18 March, with an electoral silence due on 14 and 15 March.

Elections nationwide are set to start on 26, 27 and 28 March, with electoral silence set for 24 and 25 March.

In the case of no run-offs, the winner of the elections will be announced on 2 April, 2018.

However, in the case of a run off, a second round of voting will be held on April 19, 20, and 21 for expats abroad and on 24, 25, and 26 April for voters within Egypt. In the case of a run-off, the winner will be announced on May 1.

The upcoming presidential elections are Egypt's third since the January 25 uprising. The latest were held in 2014, resulting in Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi assuming office that June after he secured 96 percent of the vote over his sole competitor, leftist politician and leader of the Egyptian Popular Current, Hamdeen Sabahi.

President El-Sisi has not yet announced if he intends to run for re-election, though others have announced their candidacies, including prominent human rights lawyer Khaled Ali in November 2017.

However, Ali is currently awaiting a final verdict for a previous sentencing of three months in prison for offending public decency after making an "obscene hand gesture" during a demonstration outside the State Council headquarters in January 2017.

The final decision is set to be handed down on 7 March.

If Ali's conviction is upheld, he will be ineligible to run in the 2018 elections according to Egypt's Presidential Elections Law.

In November, former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq also announced his intention to return from the United Arab Emirates, where he had resided since 2012, in order to run in the 2018 Egyptian elections.

Shortly following his return to Egypt in early December, the 76-year-old former air force general stated that he would make a decision whether he should run for president after assessing the situation on the ground.

In a surprise move, Shafiq announced on Sunday that he would not run, stating that he "would not be the best person to lead state affairs in the coming period."

The 2018 elections are the first to be supervised by the recently-established NEA, an independent authority with the sole responsibility of supervising general elections and referendums in Egypt.

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In all likelihood, Utah will have a new U.S. senator next year by the name of Mitt Romney.

The question isnt why so many here eagerly embrace the peripatetic former presidential hopeful, who grew up in Michigan and made his public life in Massachusetts. Hes the closest thing possible to a native son who wasnt actually born on Utah soil.

The greater mystery is how Romney, given his evident disdain, would get on with President Trump: as another in the lockstep Republican ranks or, some hope, a leader of resistance from within the GOP?

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There is ample support for either tack; voters in few, if any, states view Trump with the deep ambivalence felt in Utah.

Theres a very strong tribal pull to the Republican Party that has many loyal to the president, said Jim Bennett, whose father and grandfather  both members of the GOP  represented Utah in the Senate for a combined 42 years. Bennett quit the party when Trump became its White House nominee.

Anticipating a Romney candidacy, Bennett suggested that there is a large contingent of the electorate that wants him to go back to Washington and be that thorn in the side of the Trump administration.

The fact [that Trumps] capable of starting a nuclear war on Twitter, Bennett said, far outweighs anything positive he might achieve.

But Jeff Hartley, a longtime GOP strategist, said many Utah voters are quite pleased with Trumps policies, high among them the recently enacted tax cut, even if they sometimes find his personal behavior repugnant.

I dont think they want to see Mitt Romney go back there and be the strident leader of any opposition, Hartley said. Theyll want him to disagree on some issues but agree on a lot of other issues.

I dont think [Utah voters] want to see Mitt Romney go back there and be the strident leader of any opposition.  GOP strategist Jeff Hartley

Romney, 70, a former Massachusetts governor who keeps two homes in Utah, has yet to publicly announce his intentions. Most, though, consider it a foregone conclusion he will seek the Senate seat held by the retiring Republican Orrin G. Hatch. And should he run, it seems a virtual certainty he will win.

He understands the Washington political arena, said Jack Sturgeon, 60, a military recruiting officer and enthusiastic Romney backer in Lehi, a fast-growing bedroom community and tech hub about half an hour south of downtown Salt Lake City. Hatch has a great reputation, but it took years for him to build up. Romney already has the contacts and the reputation.

Jack Sturgeon said Romney wouldnt have to start from scratch like others who might be elected Utah senator. (Mark Z. Barabak/Los Angeles Times )

Utah Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 4 to 1, and Romney, who attended Brigham Young University in Provo, gained lasting hero status by helping rescue the scandal-tarnished 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics.

Romney also was the first Mormon to win a major party presidential nomination, and his 2012 campaign remains a singular point of pride in a state dominated, culturally and politically, by the church.

Hes the one guy that could get away with moving into the state and becoming immediately a long-term citizen, Hartley said.

Utah has been far less enamored of the president, whose boorishness, antagonistic approach to immigration and strident anti-Muslim rhetoric loudly clash with the churchs values of modesty, outreach and religious tolerance.

Trump won Utah with barely 45% of the vote, the poorest showing in any state he carried, and a recent survey showed 53% of residents viewed his presidential performance negatively. Nearly 4 in 10 strongly disapproved.

Patricia Hall is among those who cant abide Trump. She voted for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and hopes Utahs next senator wont defer to the president out of party loyalty, the way Hatch, who has voted in line with Trump more than 95% of the time, seems to do.

Thats why Im glad he quit, said Hall, 60, who ventured out on a cold, dismal day  a pall of brown haze hung over the Salt Lake Valley like a dirty blanket  to return Christmas gifts at an outlet mall in Lehi.

Patricia Hall thinks Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch has been a bit too chummy with President Trump. (Mark Z. Barabak/Los Angeles Times )

Marty Przybyla couldnt disagree more.

There are things  his tweeting mainly  she doesnt like about Trump. But the 70-year-old retired state worker said she voted for him precisely because he wasnt a standard-issue politician, and she finds Romneys criticisms unhelpful.

Hes too much of an establishment Republican, Przybyla said of the former Massachusetts governor. He needs to support the president.

Marty Przybyla said Romneys criticisms of Trump show hes too much a part of the GOP establishment. (Mark Z. Barabak/Los Angeles Times )

Romneys relationship with Trump has been a tortured mix of insult, antagonism and accommodation, starting when Romney, playing elder party statesman, sought to thwart his nomination.

Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud, Romney said in a March 2016 summons-to-the-barricade speech at the University of Utah. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.

Trump responded  via Twitter, naturally  that Romney had no guts and choked in 2012. A total joke, and everyone knows it!

Still, Trump was said to be considering Romney to be secretary of State, or at least appeared to, discussing the job over dinner at one of his Manhattan hotels. Afterward, Romney effused over the president-elect  I can tell you Ive been impressed by what Ive seen.

Trump, however, ended up choosing Rex Tillerson, and the exercise seemed intended more to humble Romney than serve as serious tryout.

Romney renewed his public criticism of the president after his equivocal response to the racist and anti-Semitic violence last summer in Charlottesville, Va., and, more recently, after he endorsed accused sexual predator Roy Moore in Alabamas Senate race.

Trump responded by publicly urging Hatch, 83, to seek an eighth Senate term. We hope you will continue to serve your state and your country in the Senate for a very long time to come, Trump said, in remarks widely seen as an attempt to block Romneys candidacy.

After the courtship failed  Hatch announced his intention to step aside earlier this month  Trump and Romney had a cordial phone conversation and, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, the president encouraged him to run.

One intimate said Romney has learned not to take Trumps disparagement personally. If he says something evil about you, as long as you dont overreact, hell forget, said the longtime associate, who asked not to be identified to avoid riling either Trump or Romney.

Another person close to Romney said, if elected senator, hes not going to be the voice of never Trump.

The more productive path I think he sees is, Where can I try to influence the president? said the Romney advisor, who also requested anonymity because he did not want to speak out before the former governor announced his candidacy. And in cases where that doesnt work, hes going to express his opposition.

Romney himself has kept mum about his plans. But he dropped what seemed like a big hint: Hours after Hatchs announcement, he changed the location of his Twitter biography from Massachusetts to Holladay, Utah, a Salt Lake suburb in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains.

Times staff writer Noah Bierman in Washington contributed to this report.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

@markzbarabak
If the events of last week didnt convince you that California will enter its second year of self-proclaimed resistance to President Trump with gusto, the Golden Globes made it ever clearer that the most powerful forces on the West Coast are not in line with the administrations priorities.

Trump reiterated some of those priorities over the weekend, speaking alongside Republican congressional leaders about his plans to insist on a border wall while coming up with a fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. We want DACA to happen. We all  everybody, I think I can speak for everybody  we want John Cornyn from Texas. We all want DACA to happen. But we also want great security for our country, Trump said.

For the record: An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly called John Cox a billionaire. Hes a multimillionaire.

And those werent even the biggest headlines of the weekend. More on the Fire and Fury in Washington is below. Well start with the Russia investigation.

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NEW DETAILS ABOUT TRUMP TOWER MEETING

David Cloud scoops that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has recalled for questioning at least one participant in a controversial meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016, and is looking into Trumps misleading claim that the discussion focused on adoption, rather than an offer to provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Some defense lawyers involved in the case view Muellers latest push as a sign that investigators are focusing on possible obstruction of justice by Trump and several of his closest advisors for their statements about the politically sensitive meeting, rather than for collusion with the Russians.

Cloud also reports that investigators are exploring the involvement of the presidents daughter, Ivanka Trump. Details of the encounter were not previously known.

NUNES TARGETS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Rep. Devin Nunes first strode into the spotlight last year by suggesting the Obama administration may have improperly spied on Trumps team. The episode backfired, but the Tulare Republican is still working to show Trump has been unfairly treated. Chris Megerian and Joseph Tanfani look at how Nunes is targeting the Justice Department and raising questions about how it has conducted the Russia investigation, a parallel probe that has Democrats crying foul.

CRIMINAL PROBE FOR DOSSIER AUTHOR?

Many Republicans have spent the last year brushing off concerns about the Russia investigation. But now two of them, Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham, say there might be grounds to prosecute someone  the former British spy who tried to expose Trumps alleged ties to Russia. They say the former spy, Christopher Steele, may have lied to investigators about his contact with reporters.

NATIONAL POLITICS LIGHTNING ROUND

-- Will Oprah Winfrey run for president? Its up to the people, Winfreys longtime partner, Stedman Graham, told The Times on Sunday night after the idea was floated repeatedly at the Golden Globes. She would absolutely do it. And from Winfrey herself: Okaay!

-- Read her speech.

-- Michael Wolffs Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House book dominated political conversation over the weekend, as the White House on Sunday pressed its defense of the presidents fitness to govern and as fired former aide Stephen K. Bannon reversed course and apologized for his role in the books explosive portrait of Trump.

-- For his part, Trump defended his intelligence and went after the press.

-- Jackie Calmes looked at how response to the book over the last few days metaphorically fits the warring and chaos within the White House which Wolff recounts.

-- Read the juiciest excerpts.

Get the latest about whats happening in the nations capital on Essential Washington.

THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME FOR BROWNS NEXT CHAPTER

A year from today, he will begin his first full day as a private citizen. And chances are, Gov. Jerry Brown will be walking the grounds of his familys Northern California ranch  a place the veteran politician says is the right place at the right time.

The governor gave The Times an exclusive look at the home he and First Lady Anne Gust Brown are building on the property in rural Colusa County. As Brown told Sacramento bureau chief John Myers for Sundays story, he doesnt intend to just disappear from politics altogether.

My ambitions, they have some vitality to them, he said.

Dont miss the video of Brown talking about his great-grandfather, who bought the ranch in 1877, and the governor touring the property with his dog, Colusa.

Myers also offers some excerpts of his interview with Brown in his weekly column about current politics  including the governors sharp critique of House Republicans who voted last month for the tax overhaul.

GOVERNORS RACE HEATING UP

A new year and a new Republican candidate have cracked open Californias sleepy race for governor, unleashing predictions of a splintered GOP vote that could sink Republicans and lead to a November election between two Democrats.

Former Northern California Rep. Doug Ose jumped into the race Friday, becoming the third major GOP candidate in an already crowded field. His decision comes as front-runner Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom faces an uptick in attacks by the Republicans, who see him as the Democrat headed for the November ballot and hope to paint him as a liberal bogeyman to lure more GOP voters to the polls in the June primary.

In response, GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox, a multimillionaire, pledged to spend up to another $1 million of his own money on his campaign to match donors to Oses campaign.

Prior to Oses announcement, the two other GOP candidates for governor  Cox and Assemblyman Travis Allen  clashed in a fiery debate in front of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots at a barbecue restaurant in Mentone. In an informal straw poll before and after the event, both men gained support, but Allen had the clear edge.

Meanwhile, Democratic front-runner Gavin Newsom courted California Democratic Party delegates for their endorsement in advance of their convention in February and took a shot at a company that has employed his main rival.

A POLICY ABOUT-FACE ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT RECORDS IN SACRAMENTO

In November, leaders of the California Senate and Assembly refused to make public records of some of the most serious sexual misconduct investigations in recent years.

On Friday, with The Times and others insisting there was no legal justification to keep those documents private, officials decided to change the policy. It remains unclear exactly when the documents will be released.

When they are, well be covering the news on our Essential Politics news feed about California politics.

MORE HARASSMENT FALLOUT IN SACRAMENTO

Faced with the threat of an embarrassing Senate vote to suspend him, state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia) agreed Wednesday to take a one-month paid leave of absence.

Mendoza said he made the decision after a four-hour closed session with Senate Democrats who were considering a rare vote of suspension because of concern over allegations that he harassed three former aides.

Rep. Brad Sherman is changing some policies after learning about sexual harassment allegations made against Matt Dababneh, who was a staffer in Shermans office before being elected to the Assembly.

And in an update to our investigation about accusations against Raul Bocanegra, who resigned as The Times prepared to publish a report, one of his accusers is running for his seat. Dakota Smith writes that Yolanda Anguiano said she didnt have political aspirations, but changed her mind and is now preparing a bid for the Assembly district in San Fernando Valley.

WEED WARS

As the Trump administration targets recreational pot, it has placed thousands of marijuana businesses in California at risk, prompting one Democrat to revive a proposal to make California a sanctuary state for the marijuana industry.

Borrowing an idea from a new state law on immigration enforcement, the measure would prohibit state and local agencies, absent a court order, from assisting in federal drug enforcement efforts targeting those who have state licenses to grow and sell marijuana.

Patrick McGreevy explains how state leaders are preparing for possible political and legal battles in response to the DOJ decision.

BLUNTING THE TAX BLOW TO CALIFORNIA

Calling a state income tax payment a charitable contribution so it can be deducted on a federal tax return seems nutty, even for California government, George Skelton writes in his Monday column. Last week, the idea was introduced as legislation by state Senate leader Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles). And its probably a justifiable tax dodge in an effort to defend millions of California taxpayers from Trump and the Republican Congress, Skelton says.

BIDEN SPEAKING IN L.A.

Theres still time to get your tickets to The Times Ideas Exchange event with former Vice President Biden.

The Democrat, out with a new book, will sit down with Patt Morrison in downtown Los Angeles Wednesday night.

Join us.

MARIN COUNTYS HOUSING AND SEGREGATION WOES

Marin County is the most racially inequitable in the state, according to a new study, a problem that researchers attribute to disparities in housing affordability and homeownership rates between whites and blacks and Latinos.

County residents have long been hostile to new development, and Marin has some of the most naturally beautiful landscapes in the state. But it also has some of the nations highest housing costs as well as housing segregation patterns dating back decades, Liam Dillon reports.

BOOM IN NEW HOUSING PROMISED IN NEW LEGISLATION

A new bill from a Bay Area lawmaker could bring millions of new homes near transit lines across California.

The measure from Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would loosen most zoning restrictions within a half-mile of transit, including Metro lines in Los Angeles. Wiener says the measure will help with the states housing affordability problems and meet its environmental goals. But those opposed to the bill are concerned that it might dramatically alter the character of neighborhoods.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

-- This weeks California Politics Podcast takes a look at the mood of the Legislature as it returns to work with sexual harassment debate hanging over the state Capitol. The episode also examines the Trump administration actions hitting California on everything from pot to offshore oil.

-- A Los Angeles-area GOP organization sparked controversy by inviting a local John Birch Society leader to headline their meeting.

-- A California legislator wants to better track prescriptions of opioid medications to try to curb abuse of highly addictive drugs.

-- There are few formal racial profiling complaints filed against California police officers and even fewer of them are proven, according to new data released by the state Attorney Generals Office.

-- Brown blasted plans by the Trump administration to expand oil and gas drilling off Californias coastline.

-- New legislation would bar the sale of gasoline-powered cars in California starting in 2040.

-- Rep. Duncan Hunter called the FBI investigators looking into his campaign spending biased and accused them of political motives in an interview with a local TV station.

-- The Congressional Leadership Fund, a conservative super PAC endorsed by GOP leadership, has opened up a fifth California office in the district of Rep. Mimi Walters ahead of the midterms.

-- Meet the newest state Assembly member from L.A.: Wendy Carrillo.

-- ICE is increasing its presence in California because of its sanctuary state law, according to Trumps immigration chief.

LOGISTICS

Essential Politics is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

You can keep up with breaking news on our politics page throughout the day for the latest and greatest. And are you following us on Twitter at @latimespolitics?

Miss Fridays newsletter? Here you go.

Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

Did someone forward you this? Sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox.
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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Watch live: Vice President Pence and lawmakers honor George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol before he lies in state Facebook

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Watch live: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a media briefing amid tensions at the border By Los Angeles Times Staff Facebook

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is heading to Newport Beach for a $1,000-per-person campaign fundraiser Thursday.

The luncheon will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Pacific Club, 4110 MacArthur Blvd.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Costa Mesa, is one of the top organizers of the fundraiser, and former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina will attend. Jeb Bush, who also made a bid for the Republican nomination but has dropped out, was invited but said he is unable to attend. Both Bush and Fiorina have endorsed Cruz.

Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, also made a fundraising appearance in Newport Beach in December.

Cruz is trailing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in California, according to a USC and Los Angeles Times poll. Trump had the support of 37% of GOP voters surveyed, while Cruz had 30%.

For more information about the fundraiser, visit the Republican Party of Orange Countys website, ocgop.org.
Ten Years Ago

A series of three winter storms that began on a Friday in January 2008 and continued for four straight days brought 6.39 inches of rainfall to the city. The only damages reported by the public works director involved boulders that washed off a hillside onto Corona Drive in the Flintridge area and some new leaks in the roof of the Community Center on Chevy Chase Drive.

Twenty Years Ago

La Canada Presbyterian Church culminated a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary with two morning services in its sanctuary that honored charter members.

Thirty Years Ago

A power outage that left 2,000 La Canada homes without electricity for several hours was reportedly caused by a peacock that had become entangled in power lines off Harter Lane.

Forty Years Ago

Faced with declining enrollment and a depleted reserve fund, La Canada Unified School District officials were seriously considering the closure of Oak Grove Elementary School, adjacent to La Canada High School. Oak Grove had first opened its doors in the fall of 1952.

Fifty Years Ago

When new postage rates went into effect on Jan. 7, 1968, raising the cost of first class stamps from 5 cents to 6 cents, La Canada residents made an unprecedented run on 1-cent stamps at the local post office, depleting the entire supply of 40,000 in a single day. In the words of then-Postmaster Dick Mason, the run that took place Jan. 8, 1968 was worse than Christmas.

Sixty Years Ago

The front window of the Cornet variety store in the 400 block of Foothill Boulevard (near where McDonalds restaurant is today) was boarded up awaiting repairs after a car driven by a Georgian Road resident crashed through it on a Thursday at about 10:30 a.m. The vehicle left behind more than $2,000 in damages. The three employees and two customers in the store at the time of the accident were not injured, nor was the driver, who said her car accelerated when she thought she was hitting the brakes.

Compiled from the Valley Sun archives by Carol Cormaci.
The Viking Sun sailed into the Port of Los Angeles last week with a full contingent of passengers who, fittingly enough, spent two sunny days exploring Southern California.

The ships visit marked a number of firsts: It was Viking Cruises first world cruise, its first West Coast port of call, and the first opportunity for the lines U.S.-based employees, who work in Woodland Hills, to see one of the ships they help to market and create.

The Sun, which was launched in September, is the companys newest ship. It left Miami on Dec. 15 on a five-month, 141-day itinerary with 64 port calls and rates that started at $50,000 per person.

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After it left Los Angeles on Friday, the Sun set sail for Papeete, French Polynesia.

Viking, a 20-year-old company, is known for its fleet of 64 river boats, which command about 50% of the market in Europe. The company now has four ocean-going ships and has four more under construction.

Despite its relatively recent entry into the ocean-going cruise ship market, it scored well this year in annual popularity contests sponsored by CruiseCritic.com and other cruise websites and publications.

Its river and ocean ships feature modern Scandinavian design. They are a departure from some of the more flamboyant looks that can be found on other ships.

We call it understated elegance, said Viking chairman Torstein Hagen, addressing ship visitors in Los Angeles. No neon, no casinos, no umbrella drinks.

Among Vikings other departures from standard cruise lines: It doesnt allow children younger than 18; has no giant slides or other huge activities for guests; has no inside rooms or formal nights; and doesnt charge for Internet usage.

We dont try to be all things to all people, said Hagen, noting that the companys target audience is made up of experienced travelers 55 and older.

Vikings recent awards include being rated a top ocean cruise line in Travel + Leisures 2016 and 2017 worlds best awards, Cruise Critics 2017 Cruisers Choice Awards; and Luxury Travel Advisor magazines 2017 Awards of Excellence, where it picked up best cruise line for luxury ocean cruises and best luxury river cruises awards.

ALSO

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Try these 18 destinations for 2018

What travelers must know for 2018

Let the events of 1918 shape your travels in 2018

travel@latimes.com

Twitter: @latimestravel
Pope Francis on Monday urged concerted international efforts to rebuild trust on the Korean peninsula and in Syria, using his annual foreign policy address to demand that political leaders put the dignity of their people before war, profit or power.

In a wide-ranging speech to ambassadors from about 185 nations, Francis reaffirmed the need to respect the status quo of Jerusalem and refrain from any initiative that exacerbates hostilities.

Francis didnt cite the United States by name, but many elements of his speech could have been read as an implicit appeal to the Trump administration: He called for governments to provide universal healthcare for all, demanded that they respect commitments made in Paris in 2015 to curb global warming, urged them to better integrate migrants and to participate in a serene and wide-ranging debate on nuclear disarmament.

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Speaking on the 100th anniversary of President Wilsons proposed League of Nations, Francis said todays leaders can learn two lessons from the ashes of World War I: That victory never means humiliating a defeated foe, and that war isnt deterred by the law of fear, but rather by the power of calm reason.

Francis has voiced rising alarm about the threat of nuclear conflict in North and South Korea, asserting at a special Vatican nuclear conference in November that there simply is no reason for an atomic arms race and every reason to destroy existing stockpiles. On Monday, he listed the threat of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula at the top of his rundown of global hot spots.

He said it was of paramount importance to support every effort at dialogue in order to find new ways of overcoming the current disputes, increasing mutual trust and ensuring a peaceful future for the Korean people and the entire world.

He also called for confidence-building measures in Syria and for the international community to facilitate the return of all refugees, particularly Christians who have fled communities that have had a Christian presence since the time of Christ.

He didnt refer to the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, but he cited recent tensions in the Holy Land in renewing what he called the Vaticans pressing appeal that every initiative be carefully weighed so as to avoid exacerbating hostilities. He urged a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and for Jerusalems status quo to be respected, noting the city is sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Francis sole mention of his native Latin America was over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Venezuela, where the Holy See had tried  but failed  to facilitate talks between the government and the opposition. The Argentine pope said he hoped elections this year in Venezuela would resolve the existing conflicts and give residents hope for the future.
In the Gaza Strips impoverished refugee camps, the United Nations blue-and-white flag is ubiquitous, fluttering over schools, clinics and food distribution centers.

It is in these teeming streets and alleys that President Trumps threat to block millions of dollars in funding for Palestinians probably would be felt the most. Much of that aid goes to the U.N. agency that works with Palestinian refugees, and almost everyone here relies on the services it provides.

Palestinian leaders accused the administration of blackmail after Trump and his U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, suggested last week that the administration might freeze U.S. aid if they dont resume peace talks with Israel. But the threats also raised alarm among Israelis who have been some of fiercest critics of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA.

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Members of the Israeli defense establishment warned that any sudden loss of aid to Palestinians could undermine Palestinian leaders who cooperate with Israel on security matters and could help extremists by worsening the already desperate conditions faced by more than 2 million people registered as refugees in Gaza and the West Bank.

Sacks of flour, some of which were part of U.N. and U.S. humanitarian aid but are now offered for sale by a vendor, sit outside a food store in Gaza City. (Lefteris Pitarakis / Associated Press )

If the funds to UNRWA stop, this will be a death sentence for my family, said Huda Talba, 46, whose family of nine is packed into a two-bedroom house in Gazas Beach refugee camp.

Talbas husband, a builder, hasnt been able to work since a fall on a job site 15 years ago. So the family depends on monthly food packages and about $514 in cash assistance that UNRWA provides every three months. Five of the couples seven children attend schools operated by the U.N. agency. And family members go to an UNRWA health center for treatment whenever they get sick.

Why do we have to pay the price of the American-Abbas problems? Talba said, referring to the standoff between Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Its collective punishment.

Trumps decision last month to formally recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital caused outrage among Palestinians, who claim part of the city as the capital of a future independent state. The announcement, which upended decades of U.S. policy, led Abbas to declare that Washington no longer has a role to play in brokering what Trump has called the ultimate deal: peace between Israel and Palestinians.

We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect, Trump complained in a pair of tweets Tuesday. With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

...peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

Trump did not specify what aid he had in mind. The U.S. also provides support to Palestinians through the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But when Haley was asked Tuesday about U.S. aid for UNRWA, she said the president doesnt want to give any additional funding until the Palestinians agree to come back to the negotiation table.

An official familiar with the matter said the administration failed to make an expected $120-million disbursement to UNRWA that day. But the U.S. has not formally notified the organization of a final decision on whether funding would be discontinued or maintained.

There are still deliberations taking place, and we have missed no deadline, a State Department official said Saturday.

The U.S. is UNRWAs largest single donor, contributing about a third of the organizations budget, or more than $350 million annually.

Some Israeli politicians have pressed Washington to curtail the funding, arguing that UNRWAs schools have been used by Hamas militants in Gaza to conceal tunnels and rockets intended for use in attacks on Israel.

Its very existence perpetuates the dire situation of Gazas population, who suffer under the rule of Hamas, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Home party, said in a statement last week.

Others, however, worry that without help from UNRWA, Palestinian refugees will become more susceptible to recruitment efforts by Hamas and other militant factions.

While UNRWA is far from perfect, the Israeli defense establishment, and the Israeli government as a whole, have over the years come to the understanding that all the alternatives are worse, Peter Lerner, a former spokesman for the Israeli military, wrote in an opinion piece in Haaretz newspaper.

Behind the scenes, Israeli and Palestinian officials have worked closely to prevent terrorist attacks in Israeli territory, and Israel does not want to see that cooperation compromised. Some Palestinian factions already accuse Abbas, who is struggling politically, of colluding with the enemy.

On Sunday, in another sign of cooperation, Israel announced that it would renew electricity supplies to Gaza, six months after cutting them off.

But Israel would not welcome having to provide the kinds of services financed by U.S. aid to UNRWA. The organization runs 359 schools, providing an education to 290,000 children in Gaza and the West Bank. Its doctors provide 6.2 million consultations annually, and it distributes food and cash assistance to more than 1 million vulnerable refugees.

Gershon Baskin, who is co-chairman of the think tank Israel-Palestine: Creative Regional Initiatives, argues that Palestinian officials should take charge of Palestinian schools. But he questions the wisdom of any cuts that could jeopardize education.

Palestinian children attend a soccer training session given by the Spanish club Real Madrid in the West Bank city of Ramallah on March 23, 2015, as part of a project organized through the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. (Abbas Momani / AFP/Getty Images )

These are schools that are already at a breaking point, running on double shifts, he said. So the principal population to suffer if this goes through would be kids. And also, from an Israeli security point of view, Im not sure that having hundreds of thousands of kids at loose ends is very good.

Even with U.S. support, UNRWA has faced chronic shortfalls in funding over the years and in 2015 came perilously close to delaying the start of the school year. The agencys spokesman, Chris Gunness, said the fallout from a funding cutoff could be profound, long-lasting, dramatic and unpredictable.

The human impact of this could be catastrophic; the implications of this on regional stability are incalculable, he said in an email.

In addition to its work in Gaza and the West Bank, the organization provides services to about 3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where camps have evolved into de-facto neighborhoods, albeit ones beset by chronic overcrowding, sub-par housing and rickety infrastructure.

From the Times archives, 1988: U.N. Aid Agency Walking a Tightrope in West Bank, Gaza 

In Shatila, a camp in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, residents navigate a maze of narrow streets riddled with potholes, walking past ramshackle buildings of exposed cinder block, walls plastered with posters of Abbas and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Suspended above the streets is a shambolic canopy of electric wires that deliver a few hours of power a day.

Palestinians live in terrible conditions here, and its already a catastrophe, said Amina Hassanein, a 45-year-old resident. Without UNRWA, well go down to zero.

For others, UNRWA serves a more existential purpose.

There is no witness to the tragedy of the Palestinian people other than UNRWA, said Mohammad Afifi, a 58-year-old shopkeeper who was born and raised in Shatila. I hold on to UNRWA because I hold on to my right of returning to Palestine.

Indeed, most of those currently registered as Palestinian refugees are descendants of those displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, with little personal connection to the land that Israel now claims, even if their families still hold on to the keys of their former homes.

This absurdity needs to stop, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday. UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem.

Still, he said he would prefer that funding for UNRWA be gradually shifted to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. This is how to rid the world of UNRWA and deal with genuine refugee problems, to the extent that such remain, Netanyahu said.

UNRWA officials reject the contention that the agency has contributed to the conflict. What perpetuates the refugee crisis is the failure of the parties to deal with the issue, Gunness said.

ALSO

Organizations that promote a boycott of Israel are no longer welcome there

Q&A: U.S. declaration of Jerusalem as Israels capital has sparked worldwide anger. But theres been plenty of precedent

Israels transportation minister offers Trump a gift: A train station at the Western Wall

Times staff writer Zavis reported from Beirut and special correspondents Tarnopolsky and Abu Alouf from Jerusalem and Gaza City, respectively. Special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Beirut and Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Twitter: @alexzavis
Air strikes by regime and Russian aircraft on rebel positions in the northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, including eight children, a monitor said Monday.

The strikes carried out on Sunday were the latest against jihadists and rebels in a week-old regime offensive on Idlib, the last province in Syria to escape government control.

The raid left "at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family" west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib" province, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, told AFP.

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An SUV driver died Sunday afternoon when the vehicle became wedged underneath a tractor trailer along Interstate 78 in Upper Macungie Township, state police said.

Pennsylvania State Police in Fogelsville said the 12:29 p.m. crash occurred on the shoulder of the highway in the eastbound lanes -- about 1.5 miles west of Exit 48.2, near Route 100 South.

The 68-year-old male driver of a black Ford Flex ended up crashing into the back of the truck, with the SUV becoming pinned underneath, police said. A front passenger had to be freed by mechanically by fire crews while the driver, whose identity is being withheld pending next of kin, was pronounced dead at the scene by Lehigh County Deputy Coroner Gabrielle Riley.

The passenger was taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Salisbury Township with injuries unknown. Police said the tractor trailer was disabled and unoccupied at the time of the accident.

Police shut down the eastbound lanes between Exit 45 and 48 during the accident.

Also responding to the crash was the Fogelsville Fire Dept., Upper Macungie Fire Dept., Weisenberg Fire Dept., Cetronia Ambulance, V&M Towing Company ad Yocum Towing Company and Recovery.

The accident remains under investigation by state police in Fogelsville and the Lehigh County Coroner's Office.

What you can do:

Those who witnessed the crash are asked to call Pennsylvania State Police in Fogelsville at 610-395-1438.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
By Tony Rhodin and Rudy Miller | For lehighvalleylive.com

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The Lehigh River on Jan. 8, 2018, in Easton had a large amount of ice after a deep freeze that has seen the region not escapee 32 degrees since Dec. 25.

Tony Rhodin | For lehighvalleylive.com

A threat of ice and snow early Monday afternoon has led to schools in the Lehigh Valley and northwest New Jersey announcing early dismissals. The following list is compiled from school websites and Twitter accounts and WFMZ's updating list. We'll update as information comes in.

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Allentown School District

The middle and high schools will dismiss at 11:15 a.m. and the elementaries will shut at noon.

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Alpha Public School

Dismissal is at 12:25 p.m.

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Bangor Area School District

The high school and middle school will dismiss at noon. The elementary schools will dismiss at 1 p.m. All after-school activities are postponed.

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Belvidere School District

All students being dismissed at noon.

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Bethlehem Area School District

High schools will be dismissed at 11 a.m. Middle schools will be dismissed at 11:35 a.m. Elementary schools will be dismissed at 12:05 p.m. Child care centers will remain open. All after-school and athletic events canceled.

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Bethlehem Catholic High School

Noon dismissal.

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Catasauqua Area School District

Catasauqua High School and Catasauqua Middle School will dismiss at 10:30 a.m. and Sheckler Elementary at 11:15 a.m. All evening activities are cancelled.

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Easton Area School District

A heating unit at Easton Area Middle School is malfunctioning and cannot be fixed quickly. Due to this problem and the forecast for freezing rain, schools will close early. Middle school students will board buses at 9:45 a.m. High school students will boarding buses at 11:20 a.m. Elementary students will boarding buses at noon.

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Easton Arts Academy Elementary Charter School

Noon dismissal.

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East Penn School District

Secondary students will be dismissed at 11:30 a.m. and elementary students at 12:30 p.m. There will be no PM kindergarten

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Greenwich Township School District

Middle school dismissal is at 12:20 p.m. and elementary school dismissal is at 12:55 p.m. Afternoon prekindergarten and kindergarten and after-school activities are canceled.

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Hackettstown School District

The high school and middle school will dismiss at 12:15 p.m. Hatchery Hill and Willow Grove schools will dismiss at 12:30 p.m.

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Harmony Township School

Dismissing at 1 p.m. Parents are asked to update Pick Up Patrol by 12:15 p.m. All after-school activities are cancelled. The board of education reorganization meeting is still on at 6 p.m.

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Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts

11 a.m. dismissal. Afternoon and evening activities cancelled.

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Lopatcong Township School District

Elementary school dismissal is at 12:45 p.m. The middle school dismisses at 1 p.m. Aftercare, afternoon prekindergarten and kindergarten and all after-school activities are canceled.

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Moravian Academy

Noon dismissal. All after-school activities are canceled. Extended care in Bethlehem will remain open.

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Nazareth Area School District

Elementary schools dismiss at 11:30 a.m. The middle school dismisses at 11:37 a.m. The high school dismisses at 12:15 p.m. The intermediate school dismisses at 12:40 p.m. Afternoon and evening activities are canceled.

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Northampton Area School District

High school and middle students will be dismissed at 11 a.m. Elementary students will be dismissed at noon. All activities are cancelled for this evening.

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Northern Lehigh School District

The high school and middle school will dismiss at 10:30 a.m. High school students who were arriving late because they were non-testers for Keystone do not need to report. Slatington Elementary will dismiss at 11:30 a.m. and Peters Elementary at 12:30 p.m. Lunches will not be served. All after-school sports and activities are canceled. Monday nights school board meeting is canceled.

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North Warren Regional School District

Dismissal will be at 12:30 pm. Student after-school activities are cancelled.

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Northwestern Lehigh School District

Middle school 10:25 a.m.

High school 10:35 a.m.

Elementary 11:35 a.m.

There will be no afternoon kindergarten or afternoon LCTI. Lunches will not be served.

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Notre Dame High School (Green Pond)

11 a.m. dismissal.

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Palisades School District

High school and middle school dismissal: 11 a.m.

Elementary school dismissal: noon

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Parkland School District

Secondary schools dismiss at 11:30 a.m. Elementary schools dismiss at 12:15 p.m. Students leaving via non-public transportation are dismissed at 11:30 a.m.

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Pen Argyl Area School District

High School and Plainfield Elementary dismissal is at 11:45 a.m. Wind Gap Middle School dismisses at 12:30 p.m.

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Phillipsburg School District

All schools closing early according to the half-day schedule.

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Pohatcong Township School

Dismissal is at 12:45 p.m.

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Salisbury Township School District

Secondary schools dismiss at 11 a.m., elementaries at 11:45 a.m. Non-public transportation begins at 11 a.m. Evening activities are canceled. The operations meeting scheduled for Monday night is moved to Jan. 17.

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Saucon Valley School District

Grades 6-12 will dismiss at noon. Grade 5 will dismiss at 12:45 p.m. with the elementary school. Lunches will be provided prior to dismissal.

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Southern Lehigh School District

Secondary students will be dismissed at 11.30 a.m. Elementary students will be dismissed at 12.30 p.m. Morning kindergarten students will remain in school, be served lunch and be dismissed at 12.30 p.m. There will be no afternoon kindergarten. All after-school and evening events and activities are cancelled.

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White Township Consolidated School

Dismissal is at 1:30 p.m. All after-school activities are canceled.

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Whitehall-Coplay School District

The middle school will dismiss at 11 a.m., the high school at 11:30 a.m. and all elementary grades at noon. There will be no afternoon kindergarten and all after-school activities are cancelled.

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Wilson Area School District

Wilson Area Intermediate School will dismiss at 11:25 a.m. Wilson Area High School will dismiss at 11:45 a.m. The elementary schools will dismiss at 12:30 p.m.

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Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A young Rathangan man was sentenced to 11 months in prison after he pleaded guilty at Naas District Court last Thursday, January 4, to charges of possession of cannabis and cocaine.

Adam Daly, 26, with an address listed as Apartment 2 Fordes Flats, Rathangan, was charged with possession of the drugs at his own address on April 16, 2016. Evidence was heard he had 7,100 of cannabis and 460 of cocaine. However, defence counsel Sarah Connolly said she understood there was so little cocaine it could not be given a value.

The drugs were discovered at the mans house after Gardai obtained a search warrant. Judge Desmond Zaidan was told that the defendant claimed he was minding it for others.

This is a man who has never abused alcohol, Ms Connolly told the court, adding that cannabis was simply what he did. She added that he had accumulated some debts over time and had to do favours, if I can put it like that.

She said that he had made great changes to his life in the meantime, and a letter of testament was handed in from his partner to the effect that he helped her greatly with their child. The couple are expecting a second child. And he is beginning a training course shortly.

She noted that a probation report considered him at a moderate risk of re-offending. At the ripe old age of 26 he has finally grown up and copped on, she added.

However, Judge Desmond Zaidan opted not to give Mr Daly a chance. Noting his 16 previous convictions, including for similar offences, he said that if I gave him a slap on the wrist it would just be sending out the wrong message.

The judge sentenced the defendant to 11 months on the cannabis charge, and a four month concurrent sentence on the cocaine charge.
Tina Kenny (nee Casey)  Mansfield Grove, Athy / Dublin

Passed away peacefully on January 7 2018. Sadly missed by her husband Dave, daughter Amy, grandchildren Ciara, Leah and Sean, son-in-law Anto, relatives, neighbours and friends. Reposing at Thompsons Funeral Home, Chapel Hill, Athy today Monday January 8 from 5pm  7pm. Removal on Tuesday morning January 9 to Newlands Cross Crematorium for Service at 1pm. No Flowers Please

Edward (Ned) Dwyer  Celbridge / Slane, Meath

January 7, 2018 (peacefully) surrounded by his family. Beloved husband of Mary (May), dear father of David, Celine, Mary and Eamonn and a devoted grandfather of Rachel, Matthew, Ruth, Elliott and Alison. Sadly missed by his loving wife, sons, daughters, grandchildren, daughters-in-law Mary and Mairead, brother Mick, brother-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, relatives and friends. R.I.P. Reposing at his son Davids home on Monday evening January 8 from 5pm to 8pm. Removal to St. Patricks Church, Celbridge on Tuesday morning, arriving for Requiem Mass at 11am followed by burial in Donacomper Cemetery, Celbridge. Family flowers only, please.

Ross Alan Mahon  Mullacash, Naas

January 6 2018, following a short illness in Beaumont Hospital. Adored son of Alan and Anne-Marie, cherished brother of Robert, Simon and Rebecca. Sadly missed by his parents, brothers, sister, sister-in-law Sarah, nephew and godson Hugo, Rebeccas partner Darren, grandmother Evelyn Reidy, extended family and many friends, and colleagues in Google. Requiem Mass in St. Peters Church, Two Mile House, Naas, on Wednesday January 10 at 11am with burial afterwards in the adjoining cemetery. House Private.

Pat O'Neill  Knocknacree, Castledermot

January 7 2018 peacefully at Naas Hospital; Deeply regretted by his loving wife Kathleen, daughters Caroline and Lorraine, sons Patrick and Ray, daughters-in-law Sinead and Louise, sons-in-law Patrick and Killian, sisters Bridie, Betty, Sheila and Fran, brothers-in-law, grandchildren Chloe, Sarah, Ryan, Ruby, Lucy, Jack and Lexie, nephews, nieces, relatives and many friends. Reposing at his residence from 12 noon on Monday January 8 until 9pm. that night. House private thereafter please. Removal on Tuesday morning January 9 to The Church of The Assumption, Castledermot arriving for 10.30am requiem Mass with burial afterwards in Coltstown Cemetery. Family flowers only please. Donations if desired to The Irish Cancer Society. Donation box in church.

Joseph (Joe) Smith  Dublin 8, Dublin / Monasterevin

January 5 2018. (suddenly), Joseph (Joe), beloved husband of the late Maura, cherished father of John, loving grandfather of Eimear and dear brother of Pat. Deeply regretted by his loving sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, relatives, neighbours and friends. R.I.P. Reposing in Cunninghams Funeral Home, Clonsilla on Tuesday evening January 9 from 6pm to 8pm. Removal to St. Teresas Church, Clarendon Street on Wednesday morning January 10 arriving for Requiem Mass at 11.30am followed by burial in St. Marys Churchyard, Clonsilla. Family flowers only, please. Donations if desired to the Irish Heart Foundation.
A POST-mortem is to take place due this Monday following the discovery of a mans body in Limerick city.

The man, who is aged in his 40s and has been named locally as Martin Clancy, was discovered at a flat on Little OCurry Street in the city centre on Sunday evening.

Gardai at Henry Street are investigating all the circumstances surrounding the discovery, and have been at the scene since around 6pm on Sunday.

Gardai remain at scene of discovered body in Limerick city. For more, follow @Limerick_Leader and pick up tomorrows Limerick Chronicle for full coverage. pic.twitter.com/GK8WCTYvyt  Fintan Walsh (@FintanYTWalsh) January 8, 2018

It is understood that the body had a number of injuries when it was discovered.

The scene has been preserved and the entire street, which adjoins Windmill Street and OCurry Street, has been cordoned off.

A post-mortem is due to take place sometime this Monday, and it is understood that the Garda Technical Bureau is due to arrive at the scene shortly after 11am.

The State Pathologist has also been notifiied of the discovery.

Gardai in Limerick city remain at the scene of the discovered body. Full Street is cordoned off. For more coverage, follow the @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/vslSOFHiHI  Fintan Walsh (@FintanYTWalsh) January 7, 2018

There has been widespread surprise and shock felt by residents living in the area, which has been described by locals as very quiet.

Garda are appealing for witnesses or to anyone who may have seen anything unusual or suspicious in or around Little O'Curry Street to contact Henry Street Garda Station on 061-212400, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
THE UL Hospitals Group has urged at-risk members of the public to avail of the flu vaccine, as the outbreak continues to circulate in Limerick.

This comes as University Hospital Limerick was the most overcrowded in the country on Monday morning, with 55 patients on trolleys, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.

And to add to its overcrowding problem, it has been treating 11 flu cases at UHL with a number of other cases showing flu-like symptoms, as of Monday afternoon.

As a result, the group has imposed visiting restrictions on the Dooradoyle hospital.

We regret any inconvenience caused to patients and relatives by these necessary measures, which are being taken in the interests of patient care.

As flu can be carried in to the hospital by patients or visitors, it is necessary to restrict visitors to one person per patient only and to remind members of the public that visiting hours are from 2pm to 4pm and from 6pm to 9pm only and are to be strictly adhered to. Members of the public are reminded not to bring children on visits anywhere in the hospital. Parents visiting children are unaffected by the restrictions but are advised not to bring siblings, a spokesperson said.

He added that people with flu-like symptoms are advised to contact their GP by phone in the first instance and avoid presenting at the emergency department at UHL.

Any patient presenting in any part of the hospital for any reason should also advise staff if they or a family member has been showing symptoms of flu or indeed of norovirus (winter vomiting bug).

People in at-risk groups include those who are 65 and older; children with chronic illness; all cancer patients; pregnant women; people with morbid obesity; nursing home residents; and healthcare staff.

In relation to overcrowding at University Hospital Limerick, the spokesperson said that it apologises for any distress or inconvenience caused to patients or their loved ones who have experienced long wait times in recent days.

We acknowledge this is a particularly difficult situation and wish to reassure patients and their families that we are working to alleviate the situation. We also acknowledge the difficult situation for our staff and thank them for their continued dedication and commitment to patient care.

UL Hospitals Group has urged people to avail of the local injuries units at St Johns, Ennis and Nenagh Hospital in the event of a non-emergency.

However, if you are seriously injured or ill or are worried your life is at risk the ED will assess and treat you as a priority.
BOOKS of evidence have been served on five men who are charged in connection with a shooting incident on the southside of Limerick city last summer.

A 23-year-old man sustained wounds to his chest, abdomen and elbow when he was shot near a house in Kennedy Park at around 2.15pm on July 11, last.

The shooting was allegedly connected to a feud between two criminal gangs involved in the drugs trade.

The defendants are Emmett Kiely aged 26, of Maple Court, Kennedy Park; Ray Dore, aged 25, of Dromroe, Rhebogue; Keith Lillis, aged 24, of Galvone Road, Kennedy Park; Stephen Grace, aged 26, who has an address at McGarry House and William Woodland, aged 24, of Shanabooly Road, Ballynanty.

Kiely, Woodland and Dore are each charged with assault causing harm and with possession of a 410 gauge Spanish made double-barrelled breech loading sawn-off shotgun.

Keith Lillis is charged, under the provisions of the Criminal Law Act, with the unlawful possession of the same firearm and with impeding the garda investigation by disposing of the a firearm.

The fifth defendant  Stephen Grace  is accused of setting fire to a gold Suzuki Vitara belonging to the victim shortly after the shooting as well as three charges of acting with the intention of impeding the apprehension or prosecution of a suspected offender by moving a vehicle, disposing of keys and a petrol can.

Previously Limerick District Court was told it will be alleged the injured man was phoned and deliberately lured to the area and that he and two associates fled on foot after he was shot.

A double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun and a number of cartridges were seized by gardai in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The Director of Public Prosecutions previously directed trial on indictment and last week, Sergeant Donal Cronin says books of evidence  each totalling three volumes  had been served on each of the defendants.

Judge Marian OLeary noted this and having issued the alibi warning in each case she formally sent the matter forward for trial at Limerick Circuit Court.

Each of the accused men, who are in custody, were granted legal aid to include the cost of a solicitor and barrister.
Russia said on Monday militants had used drones to attack its naval and air bases in Syria on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported.

The Russian Defence Ministry said there were no casualties or damage as a result of the attacks, which involved thirteen armed drones, on its Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base in western Syria, the agencies reported.

The ministry said last week that two Russian service personnel were killed in a mortar attack on the Hmeimim base on Dec. 31.

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A JUDGE expressed her sympathies with a young Limerick man who caused a car crash, due to the location where it happened.

Paul McMahon, aged 19, of Clonee, Ballyagran, pleaded guilty to driving without due care and attention at ORourkes Cross, Bruree.

Sergeant Donal Cronin said it was a very challenging driving environment.

Sgt Cronin said on February 25, 2017, Mr McMahon was exiting the service station and was caught short with regard to oncoming traffic.

Considerable material damage was done. There is also a personal injury claim. He is a young man with no previous convictions and has no penalty points. He met gardai and co-operated fully. He appreciates his error, said Sgt Cronin.

Judge OLeary said she sympathises with Mr McMahon.

It is a dreadful place to try and get in and out. I know it well. I can sympathise, said Judge OLeary.

Marie Forde, solicitor for Mr McMahon, said her client is a from an excellent family background.

He is driving for three years. He started on tractors. He works full-time. His insurance is 5,000, said Ms Forde.

What will that go to now? asked Judge OLeary.

Ms Forde said: Thats the difficulty. Theres a material damage and injury claim. Judge OLeary fined Mr McMahon 300.
WHEN Eamon de Valera was arrested for his role in the 1916 Rising, he was wearing a uniform produced at the old Limerick Clothing Factory on Lord Edward Street.

It was a fact he remarked upon when he later visited the Limerick city site, once labelled the biggest clothes manufacturer in the world.

Generations of Limerick people worked at the factory from the 1850s through to the 1970s. Built in 1853, the manufacturing plant was known worldwide for pioneering mass production techniques and technologies until its closure in 1975.

In 2015, a rejuvenation project was undertaken on the site, creating 80 new social housing units geared towards older people and community facilities.

As new residents start to receive the keys to their new homes, they are also presented with a copy of A Stitch in Time: A History of Limerick Clothing Factory to mark a new beginning for the historic site.

The book is the result of two years of extensive research carried out by independent historian Sharon Slater.

The beginnings of the book came about with the Planning and Development section of the council who were working on the redevelopment of the site, Ms Slater tells the Leader.

Ive worked a lot in Limerick history, especially19th century,that is my key area, so it was really a glove that fit.

What was interesting about the factory even from the earliest days, was that they had set up a conveyor belt system of operation.

Each person who was in the factory had their own job. They only had to train one women, one girl as shed start out, in sewing cuffs. So she didnt need to know how to put a button on. She had one skill and she could learn that one skill quickly.

This was in the really early days of the assembly line, it was quite unique to do it. People would come from all over the world to see it.

It would another 40 years before Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to his factories, according to Ms Slater.

The vast majority of employees at plant were women.

Women had a massive unemployment rate in Limerick, it wasnt normal for women to be working.

So having this income coming in from the daughters, or the sisters or the mothers was a huge bonus to the area, to all of Limerick.

The company itself was founded by businessman Peter Tait and the factorys first secure contract was supplying the British army with uniforms during the Crimean War.

The factory is still associated with Tait, even though he had no association with it during the last 100 years of its existence, Ms Slater explains.

The factory went on to become a major military uniform supplier, even producing the uniform worn by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.

There was a huge debacle over that.As we look back on that time today, they were arming the bad guys, pretty much, laughs Sharon.

In some parts they were considered almost war criminals, Peter Tait was brought up later on charges by the American government but the case was thrown out.

Material for A Stitch in Time was sourced from multiple depositories, including the national archives of both England and Ireland.

The oral histories of former workers before the closure of the factory were also vitally important, Ms Slater adds.

Theres never just a source in these projects. Like weaving the story together, pulling all the threads and trying to make it mesh.

A Stitch in Time is available from OMahonys and the Celtic Book Shop.
ENTERPRISE Ireland, the agency responsible for developing Irish business globally, has revealed a 9% increase of jobs in its Limerick client companies.

A total of 8,269 people are now employed by firms supported by the agency in Limerick alone.

Nationally, a total of 19,332 new jobs were created by companies supported by Enterprise Ireland in 2017.

Some 209,388 people are now employed in companies supported by the agency, the highest total employment achieved in the history of the agency.

Two thirds of the new jobs in 2017 were created were outside Dublin. The west, mid-west and north west saw the largest level of increases at 7% in 2017.

Enterprise Ireland hailed this strong performance as a tribute to the continuing growth of an entrepreneurial climate for start-ups, plus strong jobs growth in various sectors including construction, engineering, life-sciences, digital technology, electronics and food sectors.

Enterprise Ireland chief executive Julie Sinnamon said the figures represent another year of strong performance by our client companies who now employ over 209,000 people and are a barometer of the robust health of Irish businesses. Despite the challenge and uncertainty created by Brexit, Irish companies have continued to grow their global exports, supporting strong job creation across all of the regions of Ireland.

In Limerick, the net change in jobs in the county is 664 last year, when job losses are also taken into account.

In Tipperary, there was an increase of 427 in jobs to 5,907. In Clare, there was a net increase of 136 jobs, up to 3,709.

The highest percentage increase in jobs across the country, 12% was recorded in Co Leitrim, whose Enterprise Ireland backed roles now stand at 559, up 61 from last year.
A DRUG addict has admitted using a counterfeit 50 note to buy a DVD worth 1 from a charity shop in Limerick.

Limerick District Court was told Louise Mason, aged 30, who has an address at Larch Court, Kennedy Park tendered the note in an effort to get money to buy heroin after she relapsed and went back on drugs.

Sergeant Donal Cronin, prosecuting, said Ms Mason, who was identified as a suspect from CCTV, entered the store on September 29 last and left with the change having tendered the fake note to a worker.

Judge Marian OLeary heard the money has not been repaid and that the charity remains at a loss.

The defendant made admissions when subsequently questioned about the matter by gardai.

Solicitor Sarah Ryan said her client, who has a number of previous convictions, was accompanied by another person on the day who had asked her to offer the counterfeit note as payment as he believed he would have been apprehended.

She accepts she took part in the enterprise to get heroin. It was due to drug addiction, she said, adding that the 30-year-old accepts the charity shop was a vulnerable target and that her actions were mean.

She said Ms Mason had been off drugs for a considerable period of time but had started taking them again a number of months before the offence.

She has an addiction, she puts up with it, said Ms Ryan, who described her client as a private and quiet individual who says very little to anybody.

Judge OLeary was told the defendant, who has a number of convictions for begging in the city centre, is currently on a methadone programme but is attempting to deal with her addictions on her own without the assistance of any agency.

The judge commented it is obvious that Ms Mason needs some help and she will not be able to do it on her own.

In the circumstances, she adjourned the matter to later this month to facilitate the preparation of a pre-sanctioned probation report.

This, she said, would determine what penalty she will impose.
SOME OF Limericks up-and-coming researchers will travel to the capital this week to showcase their scientific research to the masses at the prestigious BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition.

Students from 18 secondary schools across the city and county will commence their presentations for judges and some science fanatics this Wednesday for the four-day event at Dublin's RDS.

More than 50 local students will cover the science, technology, engineering and maths spectrum at the exhibition.

The categories include technology; chemical, physical and mathematical sciences; biological and ecological; and social and behavioural sciences.

Gaelcholaiste Luimnigh principal Donncha OTreasaigh, whose students have been involved in the exhibition for 11 years, said that is a great achievement for Limerick schools to get involved.

Its always a great start to the New Year when you have so many students involved in a competition that is so prestigious as the BT Young Scientists. They have had thousands of entries and they accept just over 500 projects, he said.

One group of fact-checkers at Colaiste Iosef, Kilmallock will present their fake news algorithm, entitled Filter, in a bid to better educate people on current affairs.

Castletroy College will showcase a rugby helmet that can detect a concussion, which then notifies the team doctor.

Students at Laurel Hill Secondary School have developed a device, called Baby on Board, that alerts parents if they have left their child in their car by accident to prevent hot car deaths.

And a group of young researchers at John the Baptist Community School hope to find a link between late-life depression and Alzheimers disease.

Noel Kelly, Colaiste Iosef principal said that students have been working very hard and show great enthusiasm in exploring their chosen subjects.

The BT Young Scientist exhibition is expecting a footfall of more than 50,000 visitors, with 82 judges examining 1,100 students projects, from January 10 to 13.

There will also be special events including a Q&A with an astronaut in training, a 3D space journey, the popular World of Robots show, and many more.

Tickets are available online, costing 6 for students, 12 for adults and 25 for a family pass which includes two adults and two children. For more info, visit btyoungscientist.com.

- The most recent edition of the Limerick Leader broadsheet (in shops now and available as e-paper) features a two page spread on some of the schools taking part in this week's exhibition
LIMERICK gardai have confirmed that they are treating the location of the discovery of Martin Clancy's body as a crime scene.

Gardai have been granted a further 48 hours to examine the apartment where the body of the man in his 40s was found.

The body of Martin Clancy, 45, was discovered in his upstairs flat on Little OCurry Street on Sunday evening.

The body was removed to University Hospital Limerick at 3pm for a post-mortem examination, following a preliminary examination carried out by State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy.

Since 6.30pm on Sunday, gardai have preserved the scene and have cordoned off Little OCurry Street, on both OCurry Street and Windmill Street.

There is a visible presence of gardai in the surrounding area, including Henry Street, where a number of locals and businesspeople are being contacted in connection with the death.

Following the discovery of the body, there has been widespread shock felt by the community.

Daniel Nedelcu, pictured below, who resides downstairs in the same building, said that the body was first discovered by a woman, who knew Mr Clancy, between 5pm and 6pm on Sunday.

The 50-year-old said that he last spoke to Mr Clancy when he asked him to mind his apartment while he was attending his mothers funeral in Romania in late December.

He said that he had known Martin Clancy since he moved into the flat two months ago.

When he arrived home at Little OCurry Street on January 5, he noticed that Mr Clancy was not at home, but could hear his dog barking.

He said that he fed Mr Clancys dog that evening and returned to his apartment downstairs. Mr Nedelcu said that on Sunday, two woman arrived outside the building, looking to speak to Mr Clancy.

He said that the two women told him that they were trying to contact him for the last few days and he doesnt answer.

He said that one woman entered Mr Clancys flat, where she discovered his body.

An Garda Siochana and the National Ambulance Service later arrived at the scene.

Gardai at Henry Street are investigating all the circumstances surrounding the discovery and have been at the scene since around 6pm on Sunday.

Garda are appealing for witnesses or to anyone who may have seen anything unusual or suspicious in or around Little O'Curry Street to contact Henry Street Garda Station on 061-212400, the Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800-666111 or any Garda Station.
THE State has been given additional time to secure directions in the case of a man who is accused of raping a woman in Limerick.

The 29-year-old defendant, who is originally from Romania, is accused of raping the woman at an address in Dooradoyle on September 9, last.

Concerns were expressed last month that the State was not doing its best to progress the case with solicitor Ted McCarthy pointing out that his client has been in custody since he was charged.

While he was previously granted bail, the defendant has not been in a position to take it up and remains in custody.

During a review of the case in early December, Mr McCarthy raised concerns about the delay in securing directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Limerick District Court was told the charge was quite complex and that there was a forensic element to the investigation which takes time.

Its a very modest and short period of time in investigative terms, said Sergeant Donal Cronin at the time.

Expressing his dissatisfaction with the delay, Mr McCarthy submitted the State was not being sympathetic towards his client who, he said, enjoys the presumption of innocence.

The State is obviously not doing its best, he said, submitting delays of three or four months should not be allowed.

During a review of the case in recent days, Judge OLeary was told directions were still not available.

Sgt Cronin insisted the matter is being progressed as quickly as possible. Quite a lot of work has been done on it, he said.

Mr McCarthy reiterated his concerns again pointing out that his client remains in custody  four months after the offence is alleged to have occurred.

The matter has been adjourned for further review later this month.
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Five Muslim rebels and a soldier were killed during a weekend ground and air assault by Philippines security forces on militants supportive of the Islamic State group in a restive southern region, the military said Monday.

The Philippine army pounded some 50 militants with artillery in a five-hour attack on the island of Mindanao Saturday, according to regional military spokesman Captain Arvin Encinas.

One soldier and at least five members of the rebel Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) were killed in the clash, he said, adding that while small and fragmented the militant group was a threat in the region.

"They have enough people to conduct atrocities, and they are actively recruiting," he said.

The Muslim minority of the mainly Catholic Philippines considers Mindanao as its homeland. Decades of armed rebellion in the region has claimed more than 100,000 lives by official estimates.

Last year another group pledging allegiance to IS occupied the Mindanao city of Marawi and fought a bloody conflict with US-backed Philippine government forces for five months, leaving more than 1,100 people dead.

In response to that violence, President Rodrigo Duterte put Mindanao under until the end of 2018.

But sporadic fighting has continued as a network of rebel groups operating on the island splinters, even after the main militant organisation the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) engaged in peace talks.

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A fire broke out at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, but there were no injuries reported, NBC News and CBS News said on Monday.

U.S. President Donald Trump was in Washington at the time.

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Out of the $190 million, 75% will be financed through a non-recourse project debt from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.



The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency is covering the remaining 25% of the projects cost which is financed with equity capital.



Construction of the three power plants will begin in Q1 2018 and the projects will be operational by Q4 2018.



We are very excited that our first projects in Egypt have not only achieved financial close but are three photovoltaic power plants supporting the Egyptian government in its pursuit of securing 20% of renewable energy in the power generation mix by year 2022, Paddy Padmanathan, president & CEO of ACWA Power said.



The projects will power 80,000 houses and will save 156,000 tons of CO2 per year, the company said.



ACWA Power is partnering with the Chinese group Chint and the Egyptian groups Tawakol and Hassan Allam Holding, two of the most reputable local companies in Egypt on the project, highlighting the companys commitment and belief in the Egyptian Market, the press release read.



ACWA Power is also contracted for other energy development projects in Egypt, including the Dairut 2250 MW combined-cycle gas turbine power plant, and a series of more than 500 MW wind projects and 1 GW of photovoltaic projects.

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The state Fair Political Practices Commission is recommending that AC Transit Director Mark Williams be fined $60,000 for failing to file legally required campaign finance reports for five years.

The commission, which enforces the states campaign finance laws, will consider imposing the judgment at its Jan. 18 meeting.

Typically, an officeholder or candidate and the FPPC staff will negotiate a settlement when investigators find a finance law has been violated. But Williams had not responded to 14 notices to contact the commission.

Attempts by The Chronicle to reach Williams on Monday also were unsuccessful.

Williams, 31, of Castro Valley, was elected to the AC Transit board in 2010, representing Ward 4, which includes Ashland, Castro Valley, Cherryland, San Lorenzo and parts of Hayward and San Leandro. He was re-elected in 2014, capturing 58.1 percent of the vote.

He serves on the boards external affairs committee, according to the transit districts website, and serves on the City of San Leandro Redevelopment Successor Agency Oversight Board, The American Public Transportation Association Transit Board Members Committee and the Transit Board Members Legislative Subcommittee.

In a 108-page order, the commission found that Williams failed to file 10 semi-annual disclosure statements that report how campaign funds are raised and spent. He also failed to file two additional reports during his 2014 re-election campaign.

The failure to comply with these obligations denied the public important information regarding contributions and expenditures made in support of a candidate before the election, the order concluded.

In Williams last filed report, at the end of 2010, his campaign had $6,297.

The recommended fine is the maximum allowed under the law  $5,000 for each violation.

This goes to the heart of California campaign finance law, said spokesman Jay Wierenga, referring to the mission of the commission. People are supposed to be able to see how candidates are raising and spending their money.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
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Former FourWinds Logistics CEO Stan Bates pleaded guilty Monday to eight felony charges, including securities fraud and money laundering, in the criminal case where hes a co-defendant with state Sen. Carlos Uresti.

Bates surprise guilty plea came Monday at a hearing where his attorney was slated to ask U.S. Senior District Judge David Alan Ezra that Bates be tried separately from Uresti and the other defendant, Gary Cain. The three men were arrested in May and charged with a combined 22 counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with their work with FourWinds.

Ive had better days, a glum-looking Bates said before entering a guilty plea.

Ezra told the court that Bates changed his mind two minutes prior to the hearing. Bates didnt strike a deal with federal prosecutors as part of his guilty plea. He remains free on bond pending his sentencing on April 17.

Now Playing: State Sen. Carlos Uresti speaks after his hearing at the federal courthouse on Wednesday, May 31, 2017, following his indictment relating to a fraudulent scheme at now-defunct oil-field services company FourWinds Logistics. Video: Billy Calzada /Express-News

The United States respects Mr. Bates decision to take full responsibility for his actions, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Blackwell said after the guilty plea was entered, declining further comment.

Bates could still testify against Uresti and Cain at their trial, which is scheduled to start with jury selection on Jan. 18.

The three are accused of defrauding investors in the failed oil field services company, which bought and sold sand used in fracking to extract oil and gas from shale rock.

Kurt May, Bates public defender, declined to comment, so it couldnt be determined what led to Bates decision not to fight the charges.

Bates faces decades in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on most of the individual charges and up to $5 million on each of the two charges of securities fraud. He also may have to pay back any ill-gotten gains.

In federal court, taking responsibility for your crime is a big deal and can persuade judges to either stay within the (sentencing) guidelines or deviate lower from the guidelines, said San Antonio defense lawyer Miguel Najera, who is not involved in the case. It may be that they figured any plea deal would be harsh anyway that by throwing themselves at the mercy of the court, they may get a little sympathy from the judge. Judges arent required to follow the federal sentencing guidelines.

What impact Bates guilty plea will have on Uresti is unclear.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | @AlamoPD
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Former San Antonio TV anchorwoman Ainsley Earhardt, now a co-host on Fox News Channels signature morning news block Fox & Friends, has a starring role in a new Stephen Colbert Showtime series  well, sort of.

Earhardt, who drew killer ratings here when she co-anchored the morning news on KENS from 2005 to 2007, has been animated for the new half-hour cartoon comedy that lampoons the Trump administration. Shell be featured alongside animated versions of her co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.

RELATED: San Antonio weather TV vet Albert Flores exits WOAI

"Our Cartoon President" is set in a virtual White House. It's co-executive produced by Colbert and reflects the far-from-flattering opinions of the president he shares nightly on his CBS "Late Show." The 10-episode series bows at 7 p.m. Feb. 11 on Showtime.

Saturday, Colbert showed television critics the trailer. Although Earhardt and the gang weren't on hand to comment, their animated versions react positively to the show at the end of the preview clip.

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Im just glad Showtime is getting out of the smut business! Doocy opines approvingly.

With a show that funny, who needs affordable health care! Kilmeade adds.

Smiling from ear to ear, the cartoon Earhardt agreees: Not me!

Will the famously right-leaning Fox News team be regulars on the show? Colbert and fellow executive producer R. J. Fried said yes.

Theyre very much a part of the White House, we believe, Fried said.

RELATED: San Antonio native's TV soap still sinfully strong

I think theyre the very first image of the first episode, Colbert said.

We have a president who is hyper-interested in television, and so those characters and Hannity, Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, they will all make appearances, but perhaps none more than Fox & Friends. It appears to be his favorite show, Fried said.

As for who voices the trio, Colbert couldnt recall off the top of his head. People do multiple voices.

Colbert then quipped: I think we actually got Steve Doocy and Ainsley and the brown-haired guy whos not Doocy to do it.

We have a really wonderful cast of people, but. . .I think Jeff Bergmans Trump is what centers the whole thing, Fried said.

Trump, naturally, is the lead, but the show is not just about him. It also portrays the interpersonal relationships of the people around the president. The relationships you imagine they have  animated  which I think at this point is the only way to truly accurately capture what it must be like to be inside the White House. I think Michael Wolff stole all ten of our episodes to write that damn book of his because theres nothing in that book thats not in our show, Colbert quipped.

RELATED: Two more leave San Antonio TV in year-end exodus

Colbert and Fried looked at hundreds of different Trump impressions, before deciding on Bergman. A highly respected voice-over artist/actor and cartoon impressionist, Bergman has provided voices of various classic cartoon characters, including Bugs Bunny, after Mel Blanc died in 1989.

We felt like his (Trump) was the most real and had the most humanity within it, Fried explained..

Each episode will reflect up-to-the-minute White House news, Fried said, on top of more fleshed-out interactions amid the players. These include Trumps wife, Melania, his children, his staff and others. .

This show is a combination of long-term narrative and also has what were going to do is have a cold open scene. (Thats) something that were going to animate that week  and, hopefully, update it right up until airtime. So, yes, the news cycle will certainly be a part of the show, but, as Stephen said, its about relationships. Its about the narrative of the White House. And we want people who watch this show months from now to still look back and enjoy it as well.

RELATED: S.A. native Carol Burnett to Jennifer Aniston: You're kinky!

Texas also will be represented. Sen. Ted Cruz will be animated and voiced, thanks to a brilliant performance by James Adomian, who is genius and always delivers amazing characters, Fried said.

When one critic worried that such a comedic cartoon would somehow cutify or normalize the president and his administration, Colbert promised that wouldnt happen.

I dont think were complimenting him, Colbert said. And I dont think theres anything normal about his behavior as a cartoon. And I think that the subjects were picking are dark enough that they reflect the stakes of truly cartoonish behavior in the actual 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

That why we want to include the topical things. . .to keep reminding the audience that, while were doing a comedy and its always going to be comedy, and its a cartoon, this behavior is really not what you want in the White House. And the stakes are reminded by the topical pieces well be putting in.

Jeanne Jakles column appears Thursdays and Sundays in mySA. Read more of her columns here. | jjakle@express-news.net | @JakleJ
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Like many of his peers, James Franco turned up at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday night wearing the black-and-white pin to support the evening's Times' Up anti-sexual harassment message.

But shortly after winning best actor for "The Disaster Artist," the actor's name was lighting up Twitter - and not just because some people were annoyed that he didn't let Tommy Wiseau, the eccentric director and inspiration behind his "Disaster Artist" performance, speak.

Actress Ally Sheedy found Franco's presence upsetting enough that she tweeted about it. Her tweets were cryptic, and she quickly deleted them after they gained notice by Vanity Fair and other publications, but they hinted at something sinister. People wondered if she was referring to anything related to the ceremony's theme around combatting sexual harassment and inequality in Hollywood and in other professions.

One of Sheedy's tweets read, "James Franco just won. Please never ever ask me why I left the film/tv business." A tweet from her earlier in the night also referenced a problem with Franco's presence. It read, "Why is a man hosting? Why is James Franco allowed in? Said too much."

Many users retweeted and replied to the messages, which they took to imply that the "Breakfast Club" star was accusing the actor of some sort of sexual misconduct.

Franco in 2014 directed Sheedy in an Off-Broadway production of "The Long Shrift," Vulture reported. But there is nothing in her tweet that indicated she was referring to that experience. The Cut and other publications reached out to the actress for comment.

Others on Twitter wondered if Sheedy's comments referred to headlines Franco made, also in 2014, for reportedly trying to arrange a meet-up with a 17-year-old girl at a New York hotel.

Franco, 39, had tried to contact the girl, visiting New York City from Scotland, via social media after encountering her outside his Broadway production of "Of Mice and Men," the Business Insider reported. He allegedly offered to rent a room to spend time with the "almost 18"-year-old.

After the girl went public with their online exchange, Franco appeared on "Live With Kelly & Michael" and acknowledged he had messaged her. He said that he was "embarrassed," had "used bad judgment" and that "social media is tricky," Fox News reported.

He also posted a semi-joking tweet, saying he hoped that parents would "keep their teens away from me," the Business Insider said. That same year he also shared a nearly nude image on Instagram that showed him posing with his underwear pulled low and his hand in the waistband.

But in the wake of the nation's post-Harvey Weinstein reckoning with sexual harassment in Hollywood - and the #MeToo theme of Sunday night's Golden Globes - many women Sunday on Twitter cried foul over Franco's "bad judgment" excuse over the incident with the teen girl, as well as his unspecified actions regarding other issues.

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti wrote:

"Whatever I still remember James Franco trying to pick up a teenager on Instagram."

BuzzFeed News culture writer Anne Helen Peterson added:

"quick ask Franco about the difference between skeezing on undergrads and sexual harassment."

BuzzFeed News senior tech writer Doree Shafrir was among those who pointed out some kind of irony in Franco wearing the pin celebrating the Time's Up initiative.

"It's rich of James Franco to be wearing a Time's Up pin," she wrote.

Actress Sarah Tither-Kaplan also had a problem with Franco wearing the Time's Up pin, suggesting that Franco exploited her when she agreed to appear nude in two unnamed films she did for him.

"Hey James Franco, nice #timesup pin at the #GoldenGlobes, remember a few weeks ago when you told me the full nudity you had me do in two of your movies for $100/day wasn't exploitative because I signed a contract to do it? Time's up on that!" she wrote.

When another user suggested to Tither-Kaplan that she had no right to complain about doing the nude scenes after she signed a contract, Tither-Kaplan responded that the Time's Up initiative is designed to fight abuses of power by male directors and producers. She suggested that this is what happened with Franco:

"Sweetheart, the movement is about abuse of power, not just sexual abuse. If you don't know what it's like to be a struggling actor and how people in power take advantage of women in the industry, then educate yourself. Sending love," she wrote.

"I have to think about how I'm going to be able to afford to feed myself and pay rent before I turn down any job.

"If a famous actor who has the ability to make or break my career with the snap of his fingers offers me a part, I don't have bargaining power. I need work. I need to eat. I need a career. I can't afford to say 'no.'

"And if I do say 'no' to an offer, or even try to negotiate for myself, I risk getting labeled as 'difficult,' 'ungrateful,' a 'diva,' and never getting another opportunity again.

"I hope that the system of exploiting people under the guise of giving them opportunities changes now that #TIMESUP, but only time will tell if it does."
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The sexual advances began within the first three months of her new job with Dimmit County, Maria Luisa Perez said.

"I think it happens more than people think," Perez, 54, said. "I have to say I never thought I would be in this position, this predicament. But it happened."

A settlement was recently reached after Perez alleged that Eloy Rodriguez, the county's regulatory and compliance director, sexually harassed her. Perez started working for Dimmit County in April 2016 as the events coordinator. A year later, in June, she filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Rodriguez, who was her supervisor.

RELATED: Zapata official accused of sexual misconduct kissed women on the neck, reports say

It had grown to the point, Perez said, where she was uncomfortable going to work because of the lewd comments made by Rodriguez a daily basis. Perez said Rodriguez asked her to expose herself and on several occasions made indecorous comments about her salary, insinuating she wouldn't receive a raise without engaging in sexual acts with him.

"He would tell me, 'well you're not getting a raise Ms. Perez because you're not doing me yet,'" Perez said. "The tipping point for me was when he said, 'I'm going to rape you, you're going to love it and I feel in my heart that you won't tell on me.' That was back in January 2017."

A phone number for Rodriguez could not be located. He is no longer employed at the county. Dimmit County Attorney Daniel Gonzalez declined to comment.

Perez said she had told Rodriguez to stop multiple times, however, the comments continued.

"I just had enough. I was emotionally drained. I couldn't sleep, just wondering what action can I take, this is not right, I feel powerless not having any type of control because he's my superior," she said.

READ MORE: Local law enforcement raids three maquinitas, home in north Laredo

Before she brought the allegations to the human resources department, Perez went to the Texas Rangers. She inquired about the legalities of recording a conversation.

"We're such a small community that I really didn't know who to trust. I knew that it was going to come down to my word against his word," she said. "He had been there for about 15 years. Who am I? I'm just coming in."

Perez said she was able to record Rodriguez making an inappropriate comment.

When Perez met with a human resources employee, who happened to be her cousin, she said she was told to not rock the boat or she would be blackballed and have difficulty finding another job. Perez moved forward nonetheless.

RELATED: Rape records shed light on TAMIU sexual assault incidents

"And now I know how it really feels," she said. "How there's a lot of women that hold back and not saying anything because yes they feel hopeless, 'I need my job. What am I going to do?' They fear retaliation. They fear being blackballed, not being able to find another employment, tainting their professionalism, their career.

""I just want women to know that they do have a voice and they can be heard. They shouldn't feel ashamed because they've done nothing wrong and there are laws that protect the victims."

As of December, Perez no longer works for the Dimmit County.
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A man has been arrested for allegedly having improper communication with a juror during his murder trial in December.

Michael Molina, 26, was arrested Wednesday on two counts of improper influence, according to Webb County Sheriff's Office records. The charge is a Class A misdemeanor punishable with up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

The Webb County District Attorney's Office and Molina's attorney, Jose Tellez Jr., declined to comment on the allegations Wednesday.

READ MORE: Home raided as part of maquinita investigation belonged to UISD football coach

Molina was charged with murder in connection to the shooting of 19-year-old Rodolfo M. "Rudy" Garza in 2015.

Mistrial

His trial began Dec. 11 with jury selection. The following day, before opening statements, the courtroom was sealed off to the public so jurors could be questioned individually, the court's docket states.

49th District Court Judge Jose Lopez declared a mistrial in the case after Molina allegedly contacted a family member of a juror during the trial. Court records state that he contacted an unnamed person outside of the courtroom. That person then communicated with a sister of one of the jurors. In turn, she contacted the juror in question, records state.

The defense asked the court to issue a subpoena for the person who was allegedly contacted by Molina and a motion for mistrial was granted at the urge of the defense, the court docket states. Molina was admonished and reminded that cellphone use is prohibited during the trial, including breaks, according to the docket.

Also, a request to revoke Molina's bond was denied by the court. A new trial date is set for March 5.

Murder case

Laredo police said the homicide case unfolded at around midnight July 3, 2015, when officers responded to an injured person report in the 2000 block of Mallorca Drive.

First responders discovered that Garza had been shot in the head. He was rushed to a local hospital and later taken to San Antonio, where he died.

Molina was seen running from the scene, according to court documents. He was the last person to see Garza, records state.

RELATED: Mall del Norte store employee accused of embezzling money to pay child support

Police detained Molina after a lookout was issued.

Molina told LPD that he was inside Garza's room playing Xbox when he learned that he was missing and later found shot in the backyard, the complaint states.

"Molina stated that he went to give (Garza) chest compressions and provide medical aid until the paramedics took over," according to the document.

His statement contradicted what Garza's mother told police, according to LPD. He also denied owning a firearm.

Molina could not explain to police a box of shotgun shells that were found by detectives in his black gym bag. The bag was located in a living room in the 2000 block of Mallorca.

In addition, Molina had no explanation for an empty gun case found inside of his room and two boxes of live ammo for a .22-caliber, which was the same make and model found at the crime scene, according to police.

READ MORE: Woman in South Laredo struck by stray bullet on New Year's Eve

"Molina stated that the ammo was old and that he got it in 2012 during the Zombie Apocalypse era," the complaint states.

Police said they recovered a .22-caliber semi-handgun and a cut-off shotgun in the attic of Molina's parent's home in the 2000 block of Mallorca.

The complaint states that the .22-caliber firearm could have been used in the homicide.

Joana Santillana may be reached at 956-728-2528 or jsantillana@lmtonline.com
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8:08 All right: Signing off now. Time to do the actual writing of the GLOBES story. Look back here in about an hour. And to anyone who has been reading along, let me say it has been a pleasure and a distinct sensation. Goodnight.

8:07 Wow. Three Billboards wins best picture, drama. All right, there we go. I said it six minutes ago, and now its even more true. The strength of this movie is the story of the night and the surprise.

8:04 Seen at the Golden Globes: Tonya Harding gives Barbra Streisand a standing ovation.

8:01: Frances McDormand wins best actress in a drama for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: She praises the Hollywood Foreign Press for managing to elect a female president. (Thats a tequila shot for sure.) The strength of this movie is the story of the night.

8:00: Wow: Isabelle Huppert is there.

7:51: Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis present actor in a drama: And the winner is Gary Oldman. As it should be. For The Darkest Hour. Thanks Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill for putting up with all those awful cigars. Thanks his wife who told people, I got to bed with Winston Churchill, but I wake up with Gary Oldman. Says that his movie shows that words can change the world, and Boy, oh, boy can it use some changing. If we were doing the Trump drinking game, would that count?

7:44 Best picture musical or comedy: Lady Bird wins. Wrong choice. It should be I, TONYA.

7:37: One Good Thing About This Show: None of the song nominees were sung. Oscars take note.

7:34: Best actress in a musical or comedy: Presented by Jessica Chastain and a tall Australian actor. Saoirse Ronan wins for Lady Bird.

7:28 BIG LITTLE LIES: Best TV movies or limited series.

7:27 Oprahs speech: For two or three seconds after, people thought maybe Trump wasnt president anymore.

7:25 Greta Gerwig introduces her own movie, LADY BIRD: This is a director with a future.

7:19 Guillermo del Toro wins best director: For The Shape of Water. Says directors trade three years of their life for one entry on IMDB. These movies are their life. As the music comes in to cut him off: Lower the music guys, he says. Its been 25 years. Give me a minute. Also says, Somewhere Lon Chaney is smiling at us. And no, he doesnt mean Lon Chaney Jr.

7:08 Reese Witherspoon presents Oprah Winfrey with the Cecil B. DeMille Award: Oprah pays tribute to Sidney Poitier, who inspired her when she was a little girl, watching him win best actor for LILIES OF THE FIELD. We all know that the press is under siege these days. Pays tribute to the press. I value the press as never before, as we navigate ... these times. Also pays tribute to the #MeToo movement. This year we became the story.

6:53 Halle Berry: Seriously under-used actress. She should be hitting her stride right now, not limping from one bad X-Men movie to another. (Even if theyre good, who cares, in terms of what Halle Berry can actually do on screen?)

6:46 The Golden Globes used to be fun: Remember? Theyd all sit there and get drunk? Now its the mini-Oscars. Just a few years ago, in fact, they didnt even broadcast the Globes live on the West Coast. Once I wrote about them on deadline by having my mother, in New York, leave the phone in front of the TV. In recent years, unfortunately, they have to be regarded as important, and that has been the kiss of death.

6:42 In the Fade win best foreign film: Interesting choice. From Germany. Not the usual art film. More or less a thriller, about a woman (Diane Kruger) whose husband and child are killed in a terrorist attack, and so she starts figuring out how to get back at the terrorists.

6:36 Martin McDonagh wins best screenplay: For Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This is good to see. I didnt expect this movie, which I really liked and put in my top 10, to get much traction at awards time. It seemed too tough and arch to get widespread support. Its good to be wrong sometimes. If I were wrong about the prospects of This is me, it would be even better.

6:33: Wow. Kirk Douglas: Catherine Zeta Jones, his daughter-in-law, pays tribute to his breaking of the blacklist 58 years ago. What a great actor  and a great movie star. By the way, at one point, they cut to a close-up of Christopher Plummer in the audience and he suddenly looked like a young guy.

6:29: ALLISON JANNEY wins supporting actress for I, TONYA: And comes to the stage to the accompaniment of (SHES JUST A) DEVIL WOMAN. Very appropriate considering the role she played. She thanks Tonya Harding. Says this is a movie about class in America. It sure is. Janney is great in the film. The best guess is that she is going to walk very easily toward an Oscar nomination and to, most likely, a victory.

6:21: COCO wins best animated film.

6:19: Allison Janney has a fake bird on her shoulder: A reference to her role in I, TONYA. Very funny.

6:16: More TV stuff. Laura Dern wins for BIG LITTLE LIES. Supporting actress.

6:12: Oscar Rumination #1: Just for the record, Franco winning best actor for THE DISASTER ARTIST isnt going to mean anything in terms of the Oscars  he probably wont even be nominated. The winner in the musical or comedy category is usually not a factor.

6:09: James Franco wins best actor in a musical or comedy: For The Disaster Artist. And brings onstage Tommy Wiseau, the man he mercilessly imitates in the movie.

6:01: THIS IS ME wins best song: I love it. This is not only the worst song nominated; its the worst song in The Greatest Showman. And serious, that is saying something. This song is so dreadful I knew when I heard it that it would win all kinds of awards.

5:58: Alexander Desplat wins best score for SHAPE OF WATER.

5:55: Alexander Skarsgard wins for something. Oh, yeah, BIG LITTLE LIES: Looking forward to the movie stuff. In the meantime, Skarsgard wins supporting actor. Says working with Nicole Kidman was the greatest experience of his career.

5:46: Best drama TV: THE HANDMAIDS TALE : The shows creator thanks everyone in the country whos doing everything they can to keep THE HANDMAIDS TALE from becoming real. Nice and succinct and we get the point.

5:43: Sterling K. Brown wins: My wife taught him acting at Stanford, when he was a freshman, and tells me his talent was unmistakable then.

5:37: Political speeches: So far, everybody seems obligated to turn their win into a political speech, or at least to relate their victory to the issue of women in the workplace or to the importance of telling womens stories. These are worthy causes and sentiments, and in the case of Elisabeth Moss and THE HANDMAIDS TALE, the connections are real. But it would be a regrettable byproduct of the age of Trump if the left were to become suddenly and completely humorless and self-serious. In any case, it would make for a very long night. And a very long awards season.

5:31: Elisabeth Moss wins for TVs THE HANDMAIDS TALE: Best actress in a TV series, drama. Margaret Atwood, this is for you . . . Talks about the importance of womens stories. Carol Burnett and Jennifer Aniston presented.

5:26: A tribute to THE GREATEST SHOWMAN: Wow, is this bad. So, so bad. Soooo bad.

5:18 Best supporting actor: Now this is good news. Sam Rockwell wins for THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSISDE EBBING, MISSOURI. Rockwell is a GREAT actor, and until this minute, I wasnt altogether sure that anyone else knew it. Its nice to be in a movie that people see, he says. I had no idea Bill Esper was his acting teacher  Rockwell just thanked him.

5:10 Seth Meyers Monologue: My original idea was to create a drinking game, where I drink a shot of Tequila every time someone makes a veiled or overt reference to Trump. Good thing I didnt. There were four references in Meyers monologue alone.

4:36 Pre-Show Arrivals: All right. Im vaguely watching the annual exercise in weird priorities and spiritual error known as the Golden Globes receiving line. Ill be live-blogging from 5 p.m. on, commenting on the winners, the nominees and counting how many veiled thinly-references are made to Donald Trump. Last year Meryl Streep stole the show when she devoted her speech to criticizing Trumps mocking of a handicapped person. Lets see who tries to top that.

 Mick LaSalle
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CHONGQING, China - For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial recognition camera that allows access to her apartment house is simply a useful convenience.

"If I am carrying shopping bags in both hands, I just have to look ahead and the door swings open," she said. "And my 5-year-old daughter can just look up at the camera and get in. It's good for kids because they often lose their keys."

But for the police, the cameras that replaced the residents' old entry cards serve quite a different purpose.

Now they can see who's coming and going, and by combining artificial intelligence with a huge national bank of photos, the system in this pilot project should enable police to identify what one police report, shared with The Washington Post, called the "bad guys" who once might have slipped by.

Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China. Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify people's identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.

The pilot in Chongqing forms one tiny part of an ambitious plan, known as "Xue Liang," which can be translated as "Sharp Eyes." The intent is to connect the security cameras that already scan roads, shopping malls and transport hubs with private cameras on compounds and buildings, and integrate them into one nationwide surveillance and data-sharing platform.

It will use facial recognition and artificial intelligence to analyze and understand the mountain of incoming video evidence; to track suspects, spot suspicious behaviors and even predict crime; to coordinate the work of emergency services; and to monitor the comings and goings of the country's 1.4 billion people, official documents and security industry reports show.

At the back end, these efforts merge with a vast database of information on every citizen, a "Police Cloud" that aims to scoop up such data as criminal and medical records, travel bookings, online purchase and even social media comments - and link it to everyone's identity card and face.

A goal of all of these interlocking efforts: to track where people are, what they are up to, what they believe and who they associate with - and ultimately even to assign them a single "social credit" score based on whether the government and their fellow citizens consider them trustworthy.

At this housing complex in Chongqing, "90 percent of the crime is caused by the 10 percent of people who are not registered residents," the police report said. "With facial recognition we can recognize strangers, analyze their entry and exit times, see who spends the night here, and how many times. We can identify suspicious people from among the population."

Adrian Zenz, a German academic who has researched ethnic policy and the security state in China's western province of Xinjiang, said the government craves omnipotence over a vast, complex and restive population.

"Surveillance technologies are giving the government a sense that it can finally achieve the level of control over people's lives that it aspires to," he said.

In this effort, the Chinese government is working hand-in-glove with the country's tech industry, from established giants to plucky start-ups staffed by graduates from top American universities and former employees of companies like Google and Microsoft, who seem cheerfully oblivious to concerns they might be empowering a modern surveillance state.

The name of the video project is taken from the Communist slogan "the masses have sharp eyes," and is a throwback to Mao Zedong's attempt to get every citizen spying on one another. The goal, according to tech industry executives working on the project, is to shine a light into every dark corner of China, to eliminate the shadows where crime thrives.

The Sharp Eyes project also aims to mobilize the neighborhood committees and snoopy residents who have long been key informers: now, state media reports, some can turn on their televisions or mobile phones to see security camera footage, and report any suspicious activity - a car without a license plate, an argument turning violent - directly to the police.

To the eyes of the masses, in other words, add the brains of the country's fast-growing tech industry.

By 2020, China's government aims to make the video surveillance network "omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable," combining data mining with sophisticated video and image analysis, official documents show.

China is not alone in experimenting with these new technologies. The FBI's Next Generation Identification System uses facial recognition to compare images from crime scenes with a national database of mug shots. Police forces across the United States have been using algorithm-based techniques for several years to predict where crimes are likely to occur.

Chicago police identified and a court convicted a thief using facial-recognition technology in 2014, and Britain used a Japanese program called NeoFace Watch to spot a wanted man in a crowd in May.

The United States, with around 62 million surveillance cameras in 2016, actually has higher per capita penetration rate than China, with around 172 million, according to Monica Wang, a senior analyst in video surveillance and security at research consultants IHS Markit in Shanghai.

Yet it is China's ambition that sets it apart. Western law enforcement agencies tend to use facial recognition to identify criminal suspects, not to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire ethnic groups. China seeks to achieve several interlocking goals: to dominate the global artificial-intelligence industry, to apply big data to tighten its grip on every aspect of society, and to maintain surveillance of its population more effectively than ever before.

"Deep learning is poised to revolutionize the video surveillance industry," Wang wrote in a recent report. "Demand in China will grow quickly, providing the engine for future market growth."

In the showrooms of three facial-recognition start-ups in Chongqing and Beijing, video feeds roll past on big screens, with faces picked out from crowds and matched to images of wanted men and women. Street cameras automatically classify passersby according to gender, clothes and even hair length, and software allows people to be tracked from one surveillance camera to the next, by their faces alone.

"The bigger picture is to track routine movement, and after you get this information, to investigate problematic behavior," said Li Xiafeng, director of research and development at Cloudwalk, a Chongqing-based firm. "If you know gambling takes place in a location, and someone goes there frequently, they become suspicious."

Gradually, a model of people's behavior takes shape. "Once you identify a criminal or a suspect, then you look at their connections with other people," he said. "If another person has multiple connections, they also become suspicious."

The start-ups also showcase more consumer-friendly applications of their technology. Companies like SenseTime, Megvii and Cloudwalk provide the software that powers mobile apps allowing people to alter, "beautify" or transform their faces for fun.

Much of their business also comes from banks and financial companies that are using facial recognition to check identities, at ATMs or on phones. Some airports in China already employ facial recognition in security checks, and hotels are doing the same at check-in; a Chinese version of Airbnb promises to use it to verify guests' identities, while China's version of Uber, Didi Chuxing, is using it to verify those of its drivers.

Some of the applications have a slightly gimmicky feel. A lecturer at a Beijing university was said to be using a face scanner to check if his students were bored; a toilet roll dispenser at a public facility outside the Temple of Heaven in Beijing reportedly scans faces to keep people from stealing too much paper, while a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Hangzhou allows customers to simply "smile to pay."

Other ideas are struggling to move beyond the pilot stage: a plan to identify jaywalkers in Chongqing has already been abandoned, while residents have responded to facial-recognition gates on some apartment buildings in Chongqing and Beijing by propping the doors open.

Yet facial recognition is not going away, and it promises to become a potent tool for maintaining control of Chinese society.

So far, the technology doesn't quite match the ambition: It is not foolproof.

"There will be false positives for the foreseeable future," said Jim Dempsey, executive director of UC Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology. This raises two critical questions, he said: Does a country's due process system protect people from being falsely convicted on the basis of facial-recognition technology? And are the false positives disproportionately skewed toward certain minority groups, such as Chinese Muslims?

In China, the tech companies claim many times greater accuracy rates than, for instance, the FBI, and probably justifiably so, experts say: after all, they have been able to draw on a huge pool of photos from government records to improve their algorithms, without any pesky concerns about privacy.

More than anything else, experts say, deep learning technologies need huge amounts of data to come up with accurate algorithms. China has more data than anywhere else in the world and fewer constraints about mining it from its citizens.

"Now we are purely data driven," said Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime. "It's easier in China to collect sufficient training data. If we want to do new innovations, China will have advantages in data collection in a legal way."

Smart technology backed by artificial intelligence will be a tool to assist the police forces of the future. Chinese IT and telecoms giant Huawei says its Safe Cities technology has already helped Kenya bring down urban crime rates.

But who's a criminal? In China, documents for the Police Cloud project unearthed by Human Rights Watch list "petitioners" - people who complain to the government about perceived injustices - as potential targets of surveillance, along with anyone who "undermines stability" or has "extreme thoughts." Other documents cite members of ethnic minorities, specifically Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang, as subjects of scrutiny.

Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said what sets China apart is "a complete lack of effective privacy protections," combined with a system that is explicitly designed to target individuals seen as "politically threatening."

"In other countries, we are often concerned about the use of big data for deepening existing policing bias - for example, for targeting historically disadvantaged groups like African Americans in the U.S. context - but for the Chinese systems, the targeting of people of certain ethnicity is a fundamental function of the system," she added.

In Muslim-majority Xinjiang, where a spate of violent incidents has been blamed on separatists or Islamist radicals, facial-recognition cameras have become ubiquitous at roadblocks, outside gas stations, airports, railway and bus stations, and at residential and university compounds and entrances to Muslim neighborhoods, experts say. DNA collection and iris scanning add extra layers of sophistication.

At Megvii, marketing manager Zhang Xin boasts that the company's Face++ program helped police arrest 4,000 people since the start of 2016, including about 1,000 in Hangzhou, where a major deployment of cameras in hotels, subways and train stations preceded that year's G-20 summit.

Very likely among that number: some of the dozens of dissidents, petitioners and citizen journalists who were detained in and around the city at that time.

Frances Eve, a researcher for Chinese Human Rights Defenders in Hong Kong, argues that China's tech companies are complicit in human rights abuses.

"It's basically a crime in China to advocate for human rights protection," she said. "The government treats human rights activists, lawyers and ethnic Uighurs and Tibetans as criminals, and these people are being caught, jailed and possibly tortured as a result of this technology."

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Shirley Feng contributed to this report.

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Video: China is pursuing an ambitious plan to make an omnipresent video surveillance network to track where people are and what they're up to. The Washington Post's Simon Denyer looks at the technology that will make this possible.

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In November 2008, a Turkish man named Yilmaz Altun crashed to the floor of the airport in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. The 23-year-old had been waiting for a flight home when he collapsed. In checking on the ailing young man, authorities discovered a large fresh wound snaking down his abdomen. His left kidney was gone.

Altun told police he had donated the organ at a clinic called Medicus on the city's outskirts. A broker in Istanbul had offered Altun a generous sum for the kidney. He would later recount lying in the same room as the man - a 74-year-old Israeli - who had paid about $145,000 for his organ, the Guardian reported in 2010. The two men, donor and recipient, locked eyes before the anesthetic kicked in.

The young man's collapse was the first domino to go in a complex investigation into an international organ black market operating out of the Balkan country. Desperate donors, mostly from Turkey and the former Soviet Union, provided the organs. Buyers, many from Israel, paid between 80,000 and 100,000 euros for the kidneys. International prosecutors would later determine at least 23 victims had their organs removed at Medicus in an eight-month run in 2008.

"The sole and driving motive for this exploitation of the poor and indigent was the opportunity for obscene profit and human greed," Jonathan Ratel, the prosecutor with the European Union's rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, told the Irish Times in 2013. "This was a cruel harvest of the poor."

Despite the investigation, the main players behind the Medicus operation have continued to slip from justice - until last week. On Friday, authorities in Pristina announced Moshe Harel, an Israeli national, had been arrested in Cyprus, Reuters reported. Accused of being the fixer who found donors, Harel has been wanted by Interpol since 2010 on charges of human trafficking and intentional infliction of grave injuries. He is also wanted on a warrant for the same crimes in Russia.

Organ harvesting is a particularly sensitive topic in the region due to Kosovo's war-scarred recent history. An international court was set up after a 2010 report from the Council of Europe accused guerrilla fighters of harvesting organs from Serbs in the 1998-1999 Kosovo War, Reuters has reported. The charges have yet to be substantiated, although the rumors remain part of the war's haunting legacy.

Local authorities raided Medicus within hours of Altun's 2008 airport fall. Inside the clinic, investigators discovered records detailing numerous kidney exchanges, with many clients traveling from across the world, including Canada, Germany and Poland, for the illegally harvested organs.

According to the Guardian, Medicus was allegedly run by Lutfi Dervishi, a prominent Kosovo urologist, and his son, Arban. The procedures at the clinic were allegedly performed by Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, a Turkish surgeon know as "Doctor Vulture" in his homeland after he was banned from practicing medicine in the country for his role in the illegal organ trade. Harel was "a key figure in the trafficking and organized crime aspect of this case, as the prominent facilitator or 'fixer,'" judges later determined, the Irish Times reported.

"Medicus was one of a constellation of clinics operated by Sonmez, Harel and others," lead prosecutor Ratel told the Times in 2013. "We found clinics in Azerbaijan and other places and we believe there may be one in South Africa."

Harel was arrested in 2008 in connection with the Medicus investigation. He was later released and disappeared. Sonmez also could not be located. In 2010, both men were indicted by European Union prosecutors, according to Haaretz; Dervishi and his son were also indicted and both pleaded not guilty. In 2013, judges found both Dervishis guilty of organized crime and human trafficking. In their ruling, the judges noted the men behind Medicus purposely lured poor individuals into the operation.

"They were promised modest sums of money, usually in the range of $10,000 . . . in return for their kidney. Most were deceived into thinking that kidney transplantation was legal in Kosovo, when in fact it is not," the judges said in their verdict, according to the Irish Times. "Several donors were not paid as much as they had been promised, and at least two were cheated out of the entire amount and went home with no money and only one kidney. Some have encountered ongoing health problems."

Following the verdicts, Dervishi and his son Arban were sentenced to eight and seven years in prison, respectively. They ran. In 2016, Dervishi was rearrested. His son remains missing, as does the Turkish surgeon, Sonmez. In a twist last year, the Kosovo Supreme Court overturned the 2013 convictions due to "procedural irregularities." Prosecutors are currently retrying Dervishi, and he could soon be joined by the alleged fixer, Harel.

Last Friday, Kosovo authorities confirmed to Reuters an official request for Harel's extradition has been filed with Cyprus. Harel's has not commented or entered a plea.
A Washington state sheriff's deputy who was the first to respond to a 911 call about a home invasion was fatally shot late Sunday - and a suspect is still on the loose, authorities said.

The Pierce County Sheriff's Department identified the deputy as Daniel McCartney, 34. He was a U.S. Navy veteran and a married father of three sons.

"Overnight our department, our community, and especially one of our families suffered an incredible loss," the sheriff's department said on its Facebook page. "We are heartbroken. . ."

Someone called 911 just before 11:30 p.m. Sunday saying an intruder was inside a home in Frederickson, a suburb just southeast of Tacoma.

During the call, according to the Tacoma News-Tribune, dispatchers heard screaming and the sounds of a scuffle. They alerted deputies, and McCartney arrived about six minutes later.

The responding deputy encountered two burglary suspects, the department said. During the ensuing chase, police believe, at least one of the suspects fired shots.

When other law enforcement officers arrived, they found one of the suspects dead of a gunshot wound. Nearby, they discovered the fatally wounded deputy.

McCartney was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead around 2 a.m.

Authorities have launched a manhunt for the other suspect and blocked off several roads in the suburb.
Every 45 seconds or so, oystermen plunge their long-handled tongs into the shallow blue-gray waters of Apalachicola Bay, rake the bottom and deposit meager-looking piles on the bow of their flat-bottomed boat. A gloved co-worker culls the keepers from the empty shells and immature oysters, which are tossed back.

"See these guys here?" asked Shannon Hartsfield, whose family has fished and oystered and crabbed and shrimped here for four generations. He pointed to a nearby boat.

"Three tongers and one culler? Usually you'd have one tonger and two or three cullers. That's the flip-flop. Used to, that man right there'd keep two cullers busy all day long."

Apalachicola Bay, an estuary recognized by the United Nations for its uniqueness, once produced 10 percent of the nation's oysters and 90 percent of those from Florida. Why it doesn't anymore - why its oyster production has fallen so dramatically - has been the subject of decades of litigation, which now has landed before the Supreme Court.

Florida v. Georgia, which is to be argued Monday, is a water fight that pits the thirsty megalopolis of Atlanta and the farmers of southeastern Georgia against conservationists and seafood producers in this stretch of the Florida Panhandle called the Forgotten Coast. Both states need the fresh water that starts in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains - as well as in a spring just south of the Atlanta airport - and meanders hundreds of miles before finding its way into the Gulf of Mexico via the Apalachicola River.

So far, Georgia has been the big winner, aided by decisions from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that allow it to keep the lion's share of the water.

Often in such Supreme Court fights, each state wants water for growth. But in Apalachicola, leaders say getting a greater share is necessary to allow the place to stay as it is. The fresh water provides the perfect degree of bay salinity required to sustain the seafood industry, they say, and thus a way of life.

Rural Franklin County has as much coastline as the state of Alabama but fewer than 12,000 residents, "and only one traffic light that changes color," said county Commissioner Joseph "Smokey" Parrish.

"There's no theme parks, there's no movie theaters, there's no shopping malls. There's no 10-story condominiums," said Parrish, whose day job is overseeing the processing of shrimp at Buddy Ward & Sons Seafood in the town of Apalachicola. "Everybody who comes here says, 'Man, keep it just the way you have it.' "

Dan Tonsmeire of the conservation group Apalachicola Riverkeeper noted that the area's significance has received international, national and state accolades. If state and local officials in Florida have often squandered its natural resources in the name of growth, they've done the opposite here, he said.

"You can't come up with an area that has more designations of its ecological importance," Tonsmeire said. "And we're going to lose it, knowingly. That's what's at stake here for the Supreme Court."

The legal fight has been raging for three decades; Florida has spent nearly $57 million in legal fees on the current lawsuit alone. Georgia has spent upward of $40 million and says it is time for the Supreme Court to end the fight.

"Florida would have this court put at risk the economic foundation of the country's ninth largest metropolitan area, as well as a multi-billion dollar agricultural sector that provides key crops and generates thousands of jobs," Georgia says in one of its filings with the justices.

Florida has not proved that dramatic cutbacks in Georgia's water usage are necessary to save the bay, Georgia's lawyers said.

"It is one thing to make allegations - and Florida has made plenty of them - but it is another thing altogether to back them up," the brief states. "On that score, Florida's case fell woefully short."

At stake is the water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, which drains roughly 19,600 square miles in parts of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

The Chattahoochee River flows from north of Atlanta, and there are five federal dams that provide flood control, hydropower and recreation. Especially important is Lake Sidney Lanier, which provides drinking water for many of the nearly 6 million residents of metro Atlanta.

The Flint flows from a spring near Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest in the world, and sweeps through southwestern Georgia, where farmers depend on irrigation for growing cotton, corn, soybeans, peanuts and pecans, among other crops in a more than $4 billion industry.

The two rivers converge at the state border to become the Apalachicola, which runs for 106 miles to the bay. Its wide flood plain through the Florida Panhandle serves as a spawning ground for crabs and Gulf fish, and it nourishes the largest stand of tupelo trees in the world. In the spring, beekeepers bring their hives upriver to collect tupelo honey, which is prized not only for its unique taste but because it does not crystallize.

Florida argues that the ever-increasing water consumption by its neighbor to the north endangers an estuary that is home to the highest density of amphibian and reptile species in North America, and which supports hundreds of endangered or threatened animal and plant species.

The state blames the lack of fresh water for leading to a collapse of the Apalachicola Bay oyster fishery in 2012. A higher degree of salinity in the bay supported predators, such as conchs, that devastated the oysters.

Georgia says Florida made its own mess, by allowing the bay to be over-harvested, and says studies question the role the reduced fresh water played in the declining oyster population.

Disputes between states are called cases of original jurisdiction at the Supreme Court. Having the high court decide the equitable apportionment of natural resources, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, was the alternative to the states taking up arms against each other. Before hearing the dispute between Florida and Georgia on Monday, the justices will review a fight that pits Texas against Colorado and New Mexico.

To hear Florida's complaint, the court assigned Ralph Lancaster of Maine to be special master. He processed years of conflicting expert reports, conducted a five-week trial and begged the states to settle the fight themselves. Seventy lawyers converged; no compromise emerged.

Lancaster ultimately delivered, from Florida's perspective, a good news/(very) bad news decision.

"As the evidentiary hearing made clear, Florida points to real harm and, at the very least, likely misuse of resources by Georgia," Lancaster wrote. "There is little question that Florida has suffered harm from decreased flows in the river" and "Georgia's upstream agricultural water use has been - and continues to be - largely unrestrained."

Lancaster followed that with a big but. Even if he ruled for Florida, Lancaster said, there was no guarantee that reduced consumption in Georgia would result in more water in Florida. That decision would be made by the Corps of Engineers. And because the Corps enjoys sovereign immunity, Florida could not force it to be a party to the lawsuit.

Georgia tells the Supreme Court to accept the special master's bottom line.

"Florida failed to prove, by clear and convincing evidence (or any other plausible standard), that the relief requested would effectively redress its alleged injuries," its brief states.

Because it is the Corps that regulates the water in the basin, it said, "any potential benefits to Florida from a consumption cap on Georgia would be either speculative or nonexistent."

Florida tells the justices it is only common sense that restrictions in Georgia would yield more water downstream. It contends the special master made a mistake of law by requiring Florida to "guarantee" its proposed remedies would work, and asks the court to send the case back for more work.

In an amicus brief, the U.S. government sides with Georgia. But Florida points to somewhat vague language in the brief to argue that the Supreme Court's decision could influence the federal regulation of the riverflow.

Back on the river, a bald eagle glided overhead, and the marshes appeared lush and wild. But Tonsmeire spots plants that tolerate salt water too far upstream, and remembers the loss of tupelo trees. He has been the Apalachicola "riverkeeper" since 2004, and will soon retire with its future in doubt.

"I know we can get better conditions in the bay without having to starve the farmers off the face of the Earth up there and without having Atlanta having to stop growth," he said. "It's possible to do."

Hartsfield, president of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association, knows that it is not as simple as getting more fresh water.

It used to be that 90 percent of Apalachicola's oysters were shucked in the processing plants, and their shells returned to the bay where they formed a bed for the next generation. But Americans now want their oysters raw, not fried or stewed, and the oysters leave here with their shells.

The oystermen on the bay were once limited to 20 bushels a day - about 250 oysters in each. "The limit now is three bags per person" and each bag brings about $70, he said. "Nobody catches their limit."

Hartsfield believes the bay should be closed to oystering for a couple of years, a view that is not popular with all of his peers. Maybe that would show whether the bay could recover on its own.

But Apalachicola is used to talking in superlatives about its most famous product, and Hartsfield said: "We have the fastest-growing oyster in the world, with the right conditions."
WASHINGTON - Vice President Mike Pence's office has announced new dates for his delayed trip to the Middle East: Jan. 19-23.

Pence was originally scheduled to travel the week before Christmas, but postponed the trip so that he could remain in Washington in case his vote is needed to pass tax legislation. At the time, White House aides insisted that the move had nothing to do with uproar in the region over the Trump administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Many U.S. allies disagreed with Trump's decision, as no other country has its embassy in Jerusalem, under a long-standing international consensus that the city's status should be decided in a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Pence plans to leave Washington on Jan. 19 and arrive in Egypt on Jan. 20 to meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Pence will then travel to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II on Jan. 21, a meeting that was not on his original itinerary. Pence will then spend Jan. 22 and 23 in Israel, where he will participate in a bilateral discussion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, and give a speech at the Knesset. While in Israel, Pence also plans to visit the Western Wall and Yad Vashem.

"At President Trump's direction, the Vice President is traveling to the Middle East to reaffirm our commitment to work with the U.S.'s allies in the region to defeat radicalism that threatens future generations," Pence's press secretary Alyssa Farah said in a statement on Monday morning. "The Vice President is looking forward to meeting with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Israel to discuss ways to work together to fight terrorism and improve our national security."

This trip, which has been in the works for months, was originally supposed to include meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the grand imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar mosque and the pope of the Egyptian Coptic Church, who leads the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East. Pence had also planned to visit Bethlehem.

But after Trump announced on Dec. 6 that his administration had decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking with decades of U.S. policy, Abbas and others canceled their meetings. At the time, Abbas's diplomatic adviser, Majdi Khaldi, said Abbas would not meet with Pence "because the U.S. has crossed red lines" with its decision on Jerusalem. Sissi has agreed to meet with Pence, despite the deep unpopularity of Trump's decision.

Originally, Pence had planned to focus heavily on the persecution of Christians and religious minorities during his visit. Following the Jerusalem decision, the focus of the trip sharply shifted to rebuilding relationships in the region and on the collective problem of terrorism. In particular, Pence plans to make clear that Egypt continues to be an "incredibly important" partner in the region, according to aides. Ahead of the original trip last year, a senior administration official said the Trump administration understands that "the Palestinians may need a cooling-off period," and Pence did not plan to put any pressure on them during his trip.
Harris County Sheriff's Office

A Baptist pastor charged with prostitution earlier this year will spend a year on probation after admitting guilt in a plea deal Monday, according to court officials.

Eddie Hilburn, a pastor at The Woodlands First Baptist Church, was arrested July 19 by the Harris County Sheriff's Office and charged with prostitution, court records show.
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A South Side gift shop that went up in flames Sunday night was declared a major loss by the San Antonio Fire Department.

About 13 units responded to the fire at the Three Diamonds Gift Shop at 2503 Commercial Ave. The business was vacant and closed for the day.

Apartments that are attached to the business but were currently used for storage survived the blaze, officials said.

RELATED: Head-on collision kills two in South Bexar County

SAFD Battalion Chief Brian ONeill said the building was considered a major loss.

About 80 percent of the structure is damaged, its not a total loss, but a major loss, ONeill said. The one area we were able to salvage is where the apartments are supposed to be; that area is still OK.

A neighbor who lives on the next street stated a witness told him she saw a male jump over the gate that is located on the side of the business before it went up in flames.

RELATED: Quarrel between couple leads to stabbing on the North Side

I rushed over here when I saw the smoke and heard the sirens, Samuel Uresti said. The young lady that lives next door to the business got scared because when she rushed outside, a guy ran into her and she told him What are you doing? And she heard the explosion in the building and he took off running.

Arson personnel were called out to the scene to investigate the cause of the fire.

Jdelvalle@express-news.net
The Lincoln-Boone Conference awards were voted on by coaches within the conference. Here are
A hotel owner has been ordered to pay 50,000 after he continued to take guests despite being issued with a prohibition notice for serious fire safety failings.

2:00 PM Barking and Dagenham Safety warnings
New Delhi : The Supreme Court today referred to a larger bench a plea seeking decriminalisation of gay sex between two consenting adults. A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said the issue arising out of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

The bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by one Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare section 377 as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex. Senior advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for Johar, said the penal provision was unconstitutional as it also provided prosecution and sentencing of consenting adults who are indulging in such sex.

"You can't put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex," Datar said and referred to a recent nine-judge bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight the point that the right to choose a sexual partner was part of fundamental right. PTI
TODAYS WORD is brunt (bruhnt). Example: When Jerry tripped over his own feet at the party, his pride took the brunt of the impact.

SUNDAYS WORD was mar. It means to damage or spoil to a certain extent; render less perfect, attractive, useful, etc. Example: Jills trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats was marred somewhat when the tour guide wouldnt let her bring her bottle of margarita mix.

Rotary meets

The Martinsville UpTown Rotary Club will meet at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. That's located at 21 Starling Avenue in Martinsville. The guest speaker will be financial planner Mike Waddell, who will be talking about investing in the current political climate.

TODAY IS: National Winter Skin Relief Day

After last weeks brutally cold temperatures and high winds, its time to give your skin a little TLC. There are a few different ways to keep your skin hydrated when the weather gets cold. While its tempting to warm up with a long, hot shower, its best to avoid that temptation, because the heat strips skin of its natural oils and causes inflammation. Instead, take shorter, lukewarm showers and use gentle cleansers. Harsh soaps with surfactants and claims of pH balance are tough on dry skin. Also, dont scrub; let the water and lather do the work. It also helps to run a humidifier in your bedroom. Finally, if you have dry, cracked skin, look for a cream or ointment with light petrolatum, hyalauronic acid and ceramides, which are natural fats that fit between your skin cells like grout between tiles.

TRIVIA QUESTION: In 2011, British intelligence agents working for MI6 discovered that terrorists with ties to Al-Qaeda were producing a recruitment magazine and distributing it digitally. The online magazine included propaganda as well as recipes for home-made explosives such as pipe bombs. MI6 hacked the organizations website and replaced the bomb recipes; what did they replace them with?

SUNDAYS TRIVIA ANSWER: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classifies people who work in nuclear industries as radiation workers. However, because they are exposed to low doses of radiation over an extended period of time, workers in an industry that has nothing to do with nuclear power are also classified as radiation workers by the CDC. What is that industry? The answer: The airline industry. Every time that youre aboard an airplane, youre exposed to a tiny dose of cosmic radiation at a higher level than you would be exposed to on the ground. For the average traveler  or even for someone who travels coast to coast each week for work  the radiation exposure is trivial and nothing to worry about. For airline crews who spend nearly every day in the air, however, the exposure is more significant. The annual exposure for a pilot, flight attendant or crew member is so high that not only does the CDC classify airline crews as radiation workers, but among all the radiation workers in the U.S., airline crews receive the highest annual dosage of radiation. The good news, however, is that industry regulations are so stringent that even people who work with radioactive materials every day are exposed to an incredibly tiny amount of radiation. While airline crews are exposed to more radiation than most, according to CDC studies, the amount of radiation these crews receive is not necessarily dangerous.
Look for a different sort of Golden Globes red carpet Sunday night.

Fashions critics will once again be sharing their thoughts on the best and worst of the attire worn by celebrities arriving at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, which begin at 8 p.m. Eastern from the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

But there is a new twist this year: Out of solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault, many women have said they will be dressing in black for the Globes.

Eight actresses, including Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Emma Stone, announced Sunday that they will be bringing gender and racial justice activists as their guests, including MeToo founder Tarana Burke and the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Ai-jen Poo. The advocates and activists said Sunday that their hope in walking the red carpet is to shift the focus back on survivors and solutions, and away from perpetrators of sexual misconduct.

Red carpet arrivals were scheduled to be streamed live on Facebook beginning at 6 p.m. Eastern. The ceremony will be live-streamed on NBC's website and its app for viewers with a paid television subscription.

Check back often for the latest in photos and other updates from the red carpet.

Meryl Streep & Ai-jen Poo, a leader in organizing female immigrant workers for more than 20 years, walk the #GoldenGlobes red carpet. pic.twitter.com/l04Xh8WNp7  Who What Wear (@WhoWhatWear) January 7, 2018

Claire Foy is in a suit, solidifying her place as queen of my heart. #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/6np1AoXnsq  Kate Halliwell (@Kate__Halliwell) January 7, 2018

Incredible. @DebraMessing, while being interviewed by E!: "I was so shocked to hear that E! doesn't believing in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts." #GoldenGlobes #TimesUp pic.twitter.com/7G64HLtw3C  Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) January 7, 2018

As for the awards themselves, the Golden Globes honor the best in film and American television in 2017. The closely watched race for best picture is considered wide open, with contenders including Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water," Steven Spielberg's "The Post" and Martin McDonagh's "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri."

Here is a full list of nominees.

Hosting duties will fall a Globes rookie: late-night host Seth Meyers. He will have his hands full trying to match last year's broadcast, hosted by Jimmy Fallon. It was watched by 20 million viewers, an eight percent increase.

Last year's broadcast also roped in one notable viewer: then President-elect Donald Trump. He was critical of Streep after the actress's forceful political acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. This year, the honor will go to Oprah Winfrey.

Sarah Paulson and Amanda Peet at the #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/mWn0jWzCOy  Sarah Paulson Pictures (@paulsonpics) January 8, 2018

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This is the first in a series of articles about wineries in Burgundy, France visited by the author.



BEAUNE, FRANCE - The church bell chimes twelve times.

The sound of the bell drifts down into the soaring, barrel-vaulted cellar deep beneath Collegiale Basilique Notre Dame, a small stone church in the walled city of Beaune.

You can barely hear the bell standing near the far end of the cellar's arched, stone ceilings. And throughout the cellar, neatly arranged in rows, stand stacks of oak barrels filled with wine.

"This is the cellar that used to belong to the church," says Frederic Drouhin, president of Maison Joseph Drouhin and the great grandson of the legendary Burgundy winery's founder. "It's from the 13th century where you see the architecture is more Gothic."

"It's quite an emotional cellar," Frederic adds. "My cellar people, they love to come here and work here at 7 a.m. in the morning. You have some operation to do, some racking the casks. You come down. It's quiet. You hear the bells of the church. And they always say to me, 'It's emotional because I'm doing something that someone has been doing the same job for a century, two centuries, three, four, five, six, seven centuries.' People have done the same job in more difficult conditions. Because there was no light, just a candle. It was a challenge but it's emotional. So they fight almost to be the ones working here."

Walk down a narrow, dimly-lit maze of hallways and you find other stone cellars, some of them dating back thousands of years, all of them filled with barrels and bottles of Joseph Drouhin wine.

And long before Maison Joseph Drouhin owned these cellars, they belonged to the Dukes of Burgundy, the Kings of France and the monks who made and stored wine in them.

"By walking through the cellar, you can go through the history of France, two thousand years of history," Frederic says.

He pauses and looks around the dimly-lit cellar. "Those stones, if they could talk, they would have years of stories to tell," Frederic says.

Fortunately, Frederic knows many of these memorable stories.

And he loves telling them as

he walks through the winery's vast cellars.

Like the one about his grandfather, Maurice Drouhin, a member of the French Resistance during World War Two. Maurice narrowly escaped from the Nazis through the "liberty door," a hidden door in the wine cellars. From there, Maurice made his way underground to the Hospices de Beaune, the city's iconic hospital located several blocks away. There, the hospital's nuns hid Maurice for four months until the allies liberated Beaune in September 1944.

After the war, Maurice gave the Hospices de Beaune 6 acres of vineyards to thank them for helping him. And every year since then, Frederic Drouhin buys much of wine from the Hospices de Beaune's vineyards at the world-famous annual auction held the third weekend in November in Beaune - to thank the Hospices for hiding his grandfather.

There's also the story about the rollerskating races Frederic and his three siblings used to have in the cellars when they were kids.

"When I was young, Philippe and Veronique, we used to race, roller skating around here, the full blitz," Frederic says. "And the pavement was not so great. There were lots of pebbles and rocks. So we often fell down and we missed a few turns and broke a few bottles."

"And the electricity in those years was tricky," Frederic adds. "Sometimes, you were in the dark. And you had no cell phone, no light. So we knew by heart the architecture of the cellar, how to walk out of the cellar if you were completely in the dark great. How many steps straight and then turn right then a few steps straight to find your way out. Otherwise, you were in trouble."

Playing around in the cellars also exposed them to the wine business in a fun way, Frederic says, "without noticing it - the ambiance, the caves, the wine... That's clearly the thing that got us the virus, the passion about wine."

That's probably why all of them went into the family business. Frederic is the company's president. Veronique is the head winemaker. Philippe manages the estates. Laurent manages marketing in the United States, the winery's top export market.

And each Joseph Drouhin wine Frederic pours one Friday morning in November in the historic cellars in Beaune has a story to tell. And here they are, in Frederic's own words with a few tasting notes added by myself. Hope you enjoy.

JOSEPH DROUHIN WINES TASTED

WHITE WINES

2014 ROSE ROCK CHARDONNAY

(Chardonnay from Oregon)

"Thirty years ago, we started our venture in Oregon. The question we are often asked, 'Why did you go to Oregon? Well, it's a combination of several factors. A vision, clearly my father had. He had traveled and visited Oregon in the past."

"The wine world is a small village so we met with some people in 1987. A hill was put for sale. My father said, let's go on holiday there, visit and we had to stop the car at the bottom of the hill because there was no road, no nothing. So he climbed with a wine maker through a wheat field and when they reached the top of the hill, they saw the scenery. They felt it. Clearly, it's as simple as that."

"You have a lot of tiny broken pieces of volcanic rock at the site and that gives the wine, which is very unique, a kind of saltiness, a little bit like Chablis. There's no chalk. And the way the vineyard vinifies the Rose Rock, is half in barrel and half in tank. And the blend of the two keeps the freshness. So the complexity and the freshness of Rose Rock gives it its balance. It's a Drouhin wine. Because what we like in our wine is balance. And when it's balanced, it's elegant."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Flinty, salty, exquisite.

2015 JOSEPH DROUHIN CHABLIS PREMIER CRU MON DE MILIEU

(Chardonnay from Burgundy, France)

"At Joseph Drouhin, we have 80 hectares (200 acres) of property. Half is in Chablis, half is in Cote D'Or. 90 percent of the properties are Premier Cru or Grand Cru. That represents 60 different appellations. Overall, we produce 90, 95 appellations so all the others are from purchased grapes.... They also give advice to grape growers during the growing season. .... That way, we have control of the quality."

"The characteristic of Chablis is chalky soil, very chalky soil, almost no earth, all rocks. And the climate cool, cold. And you can have frost, like you did this year. But because it's a cooler climate, you have more freshness. This wine is on the Right Bank of the River Chablis. This is from an estate of about 2 hectares (5 acres) next to the Grand Cru."

"2015 was a good year, a warm year in Burgundy. You have lemon zest, the nice texture and the saltiness at the end that's typical of Chablis. A little bit of dryness, a little bit of flintiness, a rocky texture. It's very classic for Chablis. Perfect with oysters or filet sea bass. Keep it simple. No sauce. Grilled cheese. Linguini with seafood."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Beautiful bouquet, floral aromas. Hints of lemon, salt, chalky.

2015 JOSEPH DROUHIN POUILLY VINZELLES

(Chardonnay from Burgundy, France)

"This wine is from next to Pouilly Fuisse. It's a small appellation in terms of size but Pouilly Fuisse has become much more of a commodity and Pouilly Vinzelles is a great alternative to Fuisse. And we now have a contract with the producer - 30 acres, facing east and you can see Mont Blanc in the morning if the weather is clear."

"It's clay, limestone soil but the climate is warmer. To me, this is the kind of wine that's a good introduction to Burgundy. Some of the villages are getting more expensive but Burgundy can remain affordable and Pouilly Vinzelles is one of them."

"This one is partly vinified in barrel, partly vinified in tank to keep the freshness and concentration. Nice texture, with apricot flavor and freshness. It's fresh, almost like cypress. Nice complexity and clean. It's a wine that works very well in restaurants in France."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Ripe apricots, tastes like a toned-down Chablis. Subtle.

2014 JOSEPH DROUHIN PULIGNY-MONTRACHET CLOS DE LA GARENNE

(Chardonnay from Burgundy, France)

"Now we will go in the heart of Cote D'Or. It's north of the appellation of Puligny, full of small walls, bushes. It's not one single vineyard. You have eight different small parcels and because you have bushes and rocks there, rabbits used to hide in the area and there's a specific breed of rabbit called 'lapin de garenne' that used to live in that area, hence the name of the vineyard."

"We will try the 2014 vintage because I thought it was interesting to try to a warm year and a cold year just to show you the influence of what is going. It's a cooler year. The mouth is more focused at the end, more rich, more precision and this is what we like about the vintage, the precision. At Drouhin, we say it's the most elegant because they are naturally elegant."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Lovely, buttery wine. Full, long aftertaste. Elegant. Precise.

RED WINES

2014 JOSEPH DROUHIN FLEURIE HOSPICES DE BELLEVILLE FLEURIE

(Gamay from Burgundy, France)

"So we will go now to the south, the Beaujolais. The region is completely rejuvenating with new investors and most important, their terroir, their potential. And the reputation of the region will grow again by showing the best terroir."

"We have been selling wines of Beaujolais for generations, starting with Joseph Drouhin. We were looking for the right way to invest in the Beaujolais. We never got the right fit until the Hospices de Belleville, a very small charity hospital which got some donations of vineyard buildings."

"So handshake agreement in 2014 and we began the work. On my way back, I cross my father in the street and said that we just signed an agreement with Hospices de Belleville. And he said, you're not aware of what happened with Maurice Drouhin at Hospices de Belleville? And I said no but you're going to tell me."

"We go in the office and he said Maurice Drouhin was very involved with the management of the Hospices de Beaune and the auction itself and as he was doing a good job, the Hospice of Nancy up north and the Hospice de Lyon in the south said can you come and help because we have some questions, some management questions. But on the way to Lyon, there is that small hospital, Belleville, in a tiny community, 3,000 inhabitants. So he was there between the end of World War Two and maybe the mid 50s."

"And then it became very emotional again to me because I am walking in the corridors, in the rooms where my grandfather walked 70 years before... It's a great story. I love it."

"This is a Gamay. And we wanted to have a slightly different approach when making the wine... We want a little bit more complexity and density... So we are experimenting. I believe we gave it better dimension. I think it will show to the markets that Beaujolais have aging capacity."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Floral aromas, soft fruit flavors (including dried cherries), good length, long aftertaste.

2014 ROSE ROCK PINOT NOIR EOLA AMITY HILLS

(Pinot Noir from Oregon)

"So we fly back around the world to Oregon with Rose Rock. The domaine is on the top of the hill. There's a lot of energy in the wine. We try to look for a lot of elegance. The challenge for us is to keep the elegance and the model is Chambolle Musigny. We try to get closer to Chambolle Musigny style. What I like about the wine is that in the nose it's both floral and fruity."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Light fruit, cherries, elegant long aftertaste.

2013 JOSEPH DROUHIN PREMIER CRU BEAUNE GREVES

(Pinot Noir from Burgundy France)

"So now we go back to Cote D'Or in the Cote de Beaune district. A Premier Cru, a single vineyard, facing east, very slopey. When you harvest, you have to go from the top to the bottom because you can't climb like this with the cases. It has the morning sun. It has a lot of big rock."

"As a result the wines from Beaune Greves always show more structure, more backbone with a slow evolution. Beaune Greves has that sort of austerity. The 2013 vintage was difficult vintage in terms of weather. And now after four years, it's a nice evolution. It's nice with vegetables, a nice rib eye steak or even barbecue as well. This is a wine that requires food."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Spicy, licorice taste. Big, meaty wine. Long, clean finish.

2013 JOSEPH DROUHIN CHAMBOLLE-MUSIGNY PREMIER CRU

(Pinot Noir from Burgundy France)

"I have to explain a little bit the history of this wine. My father made some donations to all of us. When there was the first (child), a boy, business was good. Then Veronique arrived, a girl, another great vintage. Then another brother was born, difficulty in the business. Then I arrived, another boy, another disaster, revolution in France (in 1968), it rained every single day of the summer of the vintage so I was given some vineyards of the Chablis."

"Then I grew up and I said, 'Oh dad, can I drink my wine?' and he said no, there was a frost, no crop. The following year, I said to my dad, 'Can I drink my wine?' and he said no, we had frost again. So I said thank you for the donation from Chablis but it's far away for a weekend. I prefer red wine to white wine, Cote de Nuits to Cote De Beaune. I prefer Chambolle-Musigny. And he said, well, you have expensive taste and I said well, I was trained at the right school."

"So he made a donation of Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru. But the vineyards are too small to be vinified apart in a single vineyard so we blend them together. There are four parcels and two of them are from my vineyard. But I kept Chablis."

"When people describe the wines of Chambolle Musigny, they often say it's silky. And I say no, because silk is thin and cold. And I say no, it's cashmere. It's the perfect texture, the warmth and the softness. And that softness of tannins is very typical of Chambolle Musigny and especially at Drouhin."

"It goes well with quail, duck, filet mignon, veal, local mushrooms in season, that would be ideal. Lamb goes very well with Pinot Noir... I like them when they're between five and nine years of age."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Best wine of the tasting. Outstanding. Smooth, long, lush finish. Fantastic now with aging potential. Classic cashmere character!

2014 DOMAINE DROUHIN OREGON LAURENE PINOT NOIR

(Pinot Noir from Oregon)

"When we produced this wine, my father brought a bottle in the cellar that bottle, (Joseph Drouhin Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru). And he said we will not copy this wine but we will try to get as close as possible to this wine. So that was the objective when we started to produce Laurene."

"Laurene is the name of Veronique's daughter, her oldest daughter. She has three children - Laurene, Louise and Arthur. And each of her selections bears the name of her children. Marketing is very simple at Drouhin."

"2014 in Oregon was very strange weather. The growing weather was very nice, we started the harvest in beautiful sun. And in the middle of the harvest, our manager came to us and said, 'Did you check the weather forecast?' And you look at the sky, crystal clear, not a single cloud. We expect tomorrow more than 100 millimeters of rain and it will last three days. How come? We are going to have the tail of a tornado that hit Japan."

"We said this is a disaster. We're going to lose the crop. So we wait another three days, it clears and back to normal weather but in the meantime, the grapes are like this (big) because of all the water. Rot was not yet an issue but we had to harvest quickly... And yet when you taste the wine, you don't imagine this wine went through the trouble."

"It's very elegant. To me, it's one of the greatest vintages Veronique ever produced. The length is there."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Elegant wine with long aftertaste. Ripe fruit taste, cherries.

2011 JOSEPH DROUHIN NUITS ST. GEORGES VAUCRAINS PREMIER CRU

(Pinot Noir from Burgundy France)

"2011, just to show you a more mature Premier Cru from Burgundy. 2011 was a good year, not a large crop. The vintage was a little bit forgotten because 2010 had a great reputation, the focus was there so we began to sell 2011 a year later than expected."

"Nuits-Saint George is probably one of the most well known appellations worldwide... This is a single vineyard, Vaucrains. It can be a little austere young, a little closed. They don't really reveal themselves. But when you go north, you get closer to Vosne-Romanee. There, you get more floral, more opening than the south where it is really very tight."

"As you see with an older vintage, you get the secondary aroma. You get more mushroomy, earthiness, a little bit of licorice as well. You find backbone, the profile is Nuits-Saint George. With this wine, you need a boeuf bourguignon. You need texture. That's the diversity of Burgundy."

"Technically, we could make all the wines perfect and erase all that but then it's just a Pinot Noir. Let's keep that diversity."

Writer's Tasting Notes: Austere food wine with hints of licorice. Restrained wine with age-worthy potential.

(Next Week - Review of wines from The Farm Winery and interview with winery owner, plus the Wine Of The Week Under $10.)

Wine Press by Ken Ross appears on Masslive.com every Monday and in The Republican's weekend section every Thursday.

Follow Ken Ross on Twitter
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, on Monday called Attorney General Jeff Sessions' elimination of rules that allowed states to legalize marijuana "an incredibly destructive thing to do."

Sessions last week rescinded an Obama-era memo that said the Department of Justice would not prosecute marijuana users and businesses who were conforming with state law in states that legalized recreational marijuana use. Instead, Sessions is leaving it up to each U.S. Attorney how to prosecute marijuana crimes.

Massachusetts legalized marijuana on the ballot in 2016 and is currently in the process of creating rules to govern the new industry, with the first retail shops expected to open in July.

"States like Massachusetts are working hard to put sensible rules in place to deal with marijuana," Warren said, speaking to reporters after an unrelated event at a Boston community health center.

"Jeff Sessions has left it up to the individual U.S. attorneys, but that creates a whole new level of uncertainty that makes it much more difficult for a state like Massachusetts to be able to finish and implement rules that Massachusetts believes are the safest rules and the best ways of dealing with marijuana," Warren said.

Warren said during the 2016 ballot campaign that she was open to legalizing marijuana in order to more tightly regulate it.

U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling said he will focus on prosecuting cases that involve "bulk cultivation and trafficking cases, and those who use the federal banking system illegally."

Jim Borghesani, a spokesman for the Yes on 4 coalition that advocated for legalizing marijuana, on Monday called on Lelling to provide an unambiguous statement about whether his office will prosecute marijuana businesses or banks providing services to marijuana businesses that are complying with state law.
Congress Street was a slushy, slippery mess Monday morning after a pipe burst and flooded parts of downtown Boston overnight.

The Boston Water and Sewage Commission told commuters to expect delays in the area Monday morning after a pipe break involving a "fire hydrant lateral pipe" on Congress Street flooded multiple streets in downtown Boston, from City Hall to Faneuil Hall.

Congress St. incident involved a hydrant lateral. Crews will remain on scene for repairs. Water service should not be affected. Pedestrians and commuters should avoid the area throughout the morning. https://t.co/iHRI93PgSa  BWSC (@BOSTON_WATER) January 8, 2018

Pedestrians were urged to avoid the area altogether as cleanup crews worked on removing the pools of water. The mess created slick conditions in an area that typically sees heavy foot traffic before work hours.

The incident rerouted traffic off of the Interstate 93 ramp and closed connecting streets in the heart of Boston, causing major delays and traffic headaches Monday morning.

Water Break Update:



Traffic southbound on Congress is closed at Merrimac. Eastbound is open from North Street in Faneuil Hall.



Best routes are down New Sudbury from Cambridge Street.



South on Merrimac from the Garden, or from the Northbound Expressway to North St and Congress.  Gov't Center Parking (@GCGParking) January 8, 2018

Spreading salt along North Street in #Boston as pedestrians try to make their way after #CongressStreet water pipe break overnight. Leftover water freezing up making for a slick walk around the area. pic.twitter.com/BP6j6dbHLS  Ben Parker (@radiobenparker) January 8, 2018

Flooding Shuts Down Congress Street Near Boston City Hall https://t.co/6Z4A8n1IY5 pic.twitter.com/geM7CGUVD6  Boston Informer (@boston_informer) January 8, 2018
Cultivating, distributing and possessing marijuana is a federal crime and marijuana businesses can't be assured they won't be prosecuted, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts said Monday, after legalization advocates.

"I understand that there are people and groups looking for additional guidance from this office about its approach to enforcing federal laws criminalizing marijuana cultivation and trafficking," Andrew Lelling, the US Attorney in Massachusetts, said in a statement. "I cannot, however, provide assurances that certain categories of participants in the state-level marijuana trade will be immune from federal prosecution."

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week rescinded an Obama administration memo that allowed a marijuana industry to flourish in states that have legalized the substance. He is reportedly leaving further action up to local US attorneys.

Massachusetts voters broadly legalized recreational marijuana through a 2016 ballot question. Medical marijuana became legal in Massachusetts after a 2012 ballot question.

The new state agency, the Cannabis Control Commission, is setting up a framework for the regulatory oversight of retail pot shops that are due to open in July 2018.

But Lelling said Congress "unambiguously" made marijuana an illegal drug.

"As a law enforcement officer in the Executive Branch, it is my sworn responsibility to enforce that law, guided by the Principles of Federal Prosecution," Lelling said in a statement. "To do that, however, I must proceed on a case-by-case basis, assessing each matter according to those principles and deciding whether to use limited federal resources to pursue it."

Acknowledging that he has been asked for details on how he plans to enforce federal laws criminalizing marijuana cultivation and trafficking, Lelling placed the ball back in Congress' court.

"Deciding, in advance, to immunize a certain category of actors from federal prosecution would be to effectively amend the laws Congress has already passed, and that I will not do," he said. "The kind of categorical relief sought by those engaged in state-level marijuana legalization efforts can only come from the legislative process."

Marijuana advocates said Sessions' move "created a procedural vacuum" and has done "no favors" to US attorneys like Lelling.

"We understand the reluctance to provide categorical answers but moving forward under a vast cloud of uncertainty is difficult for all stakeholders, including the residents of Massachusetts," Jim Borghesani, spokesman for the group behind the 2016 marijuana legalization ballot question, said in an email to MassLive.
Prospera Business Network is the lead non-profit organization advancing and supporting community-centered economic development in southwest Montana. Our focus is helping people start and grow their business  in turn strengthening our regions economy and communities.
Deserved or not, the assumption in election years is that Idaho lawmakers want to keep things simple: Steer clear of big, controversial issues, quickly wrap things up and get back to their districts to start campaigning.

But 2018 is shaping up to be a gangbuster political year for Idaho, for two particular reasons.

BY CYNTHIA SEWELL

[email protected]dahostatesman.com

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article193412264.html
At the end of the year, the Federal Communications Commission released data that it knows to be inaccurate, which will damage the lives and livelihoods of millions of our fellow citizens who live and work in rural America.

Across the country, the Federal Communications Commission wants millions of rural Americans to think they have broadband at home and the workplace  when they dont. The self-reported claims of service are very convenient for large telecommunications companies, which might face more competition otherwise.

By Jonathan Chambers

***

The current state of broadband Internet access in rural Montana http://www.matr.net/article-80750.html
"This is a recipe for sabotaging the census," said one. The administrations stated reason for the controversial move: protecting civil rights.

by Justin Elliott

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-justice-department-pushes-for-citizenship-question-on-census-alarming-experts
A requirement that Portlanders selling their houses disclose the results of a home energy audit took effect this week, though it appears to be off to an uneven start.

The requirement, approved by the Portland City Council in 2016, is intended to give buyers a better idea of their maintenance costs in the long run. Its modeled off programs in cities including Austin, Texas; Berkley, California; and Boulder, Colorado.

By Elliot Njus

[email protected]

The Oregonian/OregonLive

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2018/01/portland_home-sellers_must_dis.html#incart_m-rpt-2
Senators Questioning of Wells Fargo CEO Forces Bank to Drop Forced Arbitration Motion Against Victims of Fraud

U.S. Senator Jon Testers high profile grilling of the Wells Fargo CEO has resulted in justice for fraud victims following the banks scandal involving the opening of more than 3.5 million fake bank accounts for its customers.

During a Senate Banking Committee hearing in October, Tester secured assurances https://www.facebook.com/senatortester/videos/10155752724731665/ from CEO Tim Sloan that the bank was not requiring victims of Wells Fargos fraudulent actions to enter into forced arbitration and eliminate their right to sue the bank.

In contradiction to Sloans testimony to Tester, Wells Fargo was actively attempting to block a class action lawsuit in a federal Utah court https://www.tester.senate.gov/files/Letters/Motion%20and%20Memo%20in%20Sup%20of%20Renewed%20Motion%20to%20Compel%20Arbitration.pdf by requiring the victims to enter into forced arbitration. As a direct result of Testers questioning, Wells Fargo on Thursday withdrew its motion to require forced arbitration. Now customers who had fake Wells Fargo accounts opened in their name have the right to sue the bank for its fraudulent actions.

"Wells Fargo must be held accountable," Tester said. "This is a step in the right direction to ensure that victims of fraud are made whole again and I will keep fighting relentlessly for the millions of families that were deliberately lied to and bullied by Wells Fargo so they can receive justice."

Before Wells Fargo withdrew its forced arbitration motion, Sloan was scheduled for a deposition on January 5 and the judge had scheduled a two-day trial set to begin on January 22 to specifically determine whether Sloan waived Wells Fargos right to seek forced arbitration during his testimony with Tester. Rather than cooperate with the deposition, Wells Fargo chose to drop the motion.

Forced arbitration clauses block consumers from suing a company over fraudulent actions and require them to seek recourse through a third-party arbitrator.

Tester has sponsored legislation https://www.tester.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=4884 to eliminate the ability of any bank to force customers into arbitration on any issue associated with fraudulent accounts, and he opposed legislative efforts to repeal the ban on forced arbitration clauses in banking contracts.

Tester also successfully demanded https://www.tester.senate.gov/files/Letters/2017-10-04%20IRS%20Equifax%20Contract.pdf the IRS rescind a $7 million contract with Equifax after the companys major data breach that jeopardized the personal financial information of tens of millions of Americans.
The marked low pressure area evolving to the north north east of St Brandon has intensified into a tropical depression over night while moving slowly in a general south-south-easterly direction . At 0900 hours this morning it was located at about 350 km to the north east of St Brandon.

The tropical depression is evolving in a favourable environment and therefore, it will continue to intensify and become a Moderate Tropical Storm this afternoon. It will then be named JOANINHA.

The system will continue to track south-south-west passing within 150 km to the East of St Brandon Island on Saturday 23 March 2019 around mid-day. As from Sunday 24 morning, most Weather Prediction Models are recurving the system towards the south, then towards the southeast.

On this new trajectory, it will approach both Mauritius and Rodrigues and represents a potential threat to both Islands.

There is still lot of uncertainties as to it final track. But there are some indications that it will pass between Mauritius and Rodrigues on Monday early morning  with a strong likelihood that it will be closer to Rodrigues on Monday evening  passing to the south west of Plaine Corail, Rodrigues. Weather in Mauritius will gradually become cloudy with passing showers as from tonight (Friday) night. The Showers will become more frequent during the week-end. Wind will strengthen gradually with gusts of 65 km/h on Saturday 23 March 2019. Gusts will increase to reach 80 km/h on Sunday 24 March 2019.

Weather at Rodrigues will be cloudy with passing showers. The showers will be moderate to heavy as from tonight with isolated thunderstorms. Gusts will increase gradually to reach 65 km per hour on Saturday and 85 km per hour on Sunday.

The Meteorological Services is closely monitoring the evolution of this system and will regularly inform all concerned.

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For the second year in a row, Marion citizens will have the chance to learn what it means to be a police officer.

The Marion Police Department is taking applications for their second annual Citizens Police Academy, to run every Thursday from March 1 to April 19.

The Citizens Police Academy program is designed to provide citizens with firsthand information on how the police department operates. The academy does this by giving citizens the opportunity for hands on experience in law enforcement.

Its going to be an opportunity for (the police department) to invite you guys in and see what it is that we do on a daily basis  the good, the bad and the ugly, said Marion Police Chief Allen Lawrence during last years class graduation.

The program is an eight-week course with a wide variety of topics, including patrol operations, crime prevention/community watch, 911 communications, traffic enforcement, criminal investigations, narcotics, defensive driving and firearms.

Last years inaugural program, which had 20 students, included activities such as mock crime scene investigations, defensive driving in police cruisers and shoot, dont shoot simulations.

Interested applicants will be subject to a background check prior to entering the program. The deadline to apply is Feb. 5.

Citizens Police Academy will run from March 1 to April 19 and start each night at 6 p.m. at the Marion Police Department. Interested applicants can contact the Marion Police Department in person or by phone at 652-5205. Applications are available at www.marionpd.org.
School officials alerted parents Sunday evening that a Snapchat post threatening a school shooting at MHS was not directed at students in McDowell County.

Snapchat is a popular image messaging and multimedia mobile application, especially with younger people.

The post pictured with several assault rifle-style weapons said, Dont go to school tomorrow @MHS Students. Loaded up bout to head out.

According to The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Virginia, the threat was directed at Monticello High School in Charlottesville, also known as MHS in that community. A juvenile has been detained by Albermarle County police, the newspaper said, adding the threat was a hoax. Charges are pending against the juvenile.

Superintendent Mark Garrett said in an email that when he learned of the post, he alerted local authorities to determine if the threat was toward McDowell High School.

Earlier this evening, I was contacted about a potential threat making the rounds on social media that made reference to a school with the initials MHS, part of the message said. Even though it did not mention McDowell High School specifically, we began investigating in order to try to pinpoint the information.

With the help of the McDowell County Sheriffs Office, they determined the origin of the threat came out of another MHS high school in Virginia.

Our local law enforcement officers have determined McDowell High School and McDowell County Schools are not the target of any known threat. Communication between the McDowell County Sheriff's Office and Virginia authorities confirm they are currently investigating this specific incident, Garrett stated in his message.

Monday morning, school officials continued to say, Any potential threat is taken seriously until it is clearly not a threat to MCS students or staff. We work closely with local law enforcement to evaluate any potential or perceived threat. Know that we take safety very seriously and encourage people to contact us with information regarding any potential dangers that may arise. We want to be proactive. 

Sheriff Dudley Greene said local authorities still took precautions.

We appreciate people in the public letting us know these things and want them to continue to do as such, said Greene. We were in contact with school officials and made them aware of the findings and what to do moving forward.

Greene said the Sheriffs Office periodically prepares in the event a potentially violent incident at local schools.

The Sheriffs Office routinely coordinates with school personnel and other emergency agencies in lockdown drills in an effort to prevent or mitigate any injuries or deaths related to an active shooting at a school, he said. The drills are done twice a year at each school, and we also periodically review our emergency plans relating to an active school shooter. I hope thats something we never have to face.
Uber's rivals are stepping up the battle for ride-sharing dominance in Europe, with local startups raising funds and global adversaries increasing contact with local regulators as they seek to gain a toehold in the region.

Taxify OU is looking to raise $50 million in the first quarter to fund expansion plans, according to a person familiar with the matter. The move comes after the Estonia-based startup revealed in October that it received backing from Chinese giant Didi Chuxing.

Mytaxi -- a black-cab taxi app backed by Daimler -- is also looking to expand the number of cities it serves across Europe, including a handful of new cities in the U.K., said General Manager Andy Batty.

Interest in London, Europe's most lucrative market, has also increased from providers outside Europe. In late October, Ola board member and former Vodafone Chief Executive Officer Arun Sarin and Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal met with Michael Hurwitz, Transport for London's Director of Transport Innovation, to discuss developments in the industry in London and India, according to meeting records seen by Bloomberg News.

From November 2016 to November 2017, executives at Uber's main U.S. rival, Lyft Inc., met with TfL seven times, most recently with an October phone call between TfL Managing Director Leon Daniels and Lyft Head of Global Policy Mike Masserman to discuss the Mayor of London's transport strategy. While both sides won't elaborate on matters discussed, these meetings are typically designed to pave the way for doing business in the U.K. capital. Previous entrants have spent time forging ties to London regulators before submitting transportation licenses.

"We regularly talk to companies around the world about innovation that could improve transport in London," TfL's Hurwitz said in a statement.

A spokeswoman from Lyft declined to comment. Ola didn't respond to a request for comment.

Much of the perceived opportunity stems from Uber's recent conflicts with regulators. The European Union's top court in December ruled Uber must be regulated as a transportation service, a blow to the company's attempts to avoid taxi rules and licensing requirements. Uber is also appealing Transport for London's surprise decision in September to ban the app on safety and regulatory concerns. The court hearing is set for either April or June. Uber is hoping that it can settle its issues with TfL outside of court, a person familiar with the matter said.

A spokesman from Uber declined to comment.

The recent ruling narrows the difference between companies such as Uber and Taxify -- which rely on connecting an ever-growing pool of self-employed drivers to pick up passengers -- and rivals such as Mytaxi and Gett, which allow users to hail local licensed black cabs.

"All depends how the cases that are currently pending will deploy," said Matteo de Renzi, CEO of Gett UK. "In the short term it has been definitely an opportunity for the whole industry I think, a big wake-up call for the traveling public and corporates."

Taxify is concentrating on winning over drivers. "This year our main value prop is the same -- treating drivers better," said Markus Villig, founder and CEO of Taxify, who cited a commission of 15 percent versus Uber's 25 percent. He added that the startup is targeting $1 billion in revenue in 2018.

Other rivals are looking at M&A opportunities. A few days before Christmas, Daimler -- the German maker of Mercedes and Smart automobiles -- bought a majority stake in French private-hire limousine operator Chauffeur Prive. Daimler already owns Mytaxi and Car2Go, a car-sharing service that lets consumers pick up a car on the street.

Despite Uber's latest setbacks, rivals still have some way to go to catch up. Gett operates in about 100 cities, including New York, London and Moscow. Taxify operates in 19 countries, while Mytaxi is active throughout Germany and the U.K.

By comparison, Uber is active in various guises throughout almost all of Europe, and is the dominant player in both London and Paris. Taxify is still waiting for approval from TfL to operate in the U.K. capital after the regulator in October halted operations less than a week after they started.
Just six months ago, after Michael Diebold lost his left hand and part of his arm in a fireworks accident, he became a local celebrity.

The police chief of the small Pennsylvania town of Leechburg drew sympathy from community members, some of whom raised funds to help with Diebold's medical expenses. A church hosted a fundraising dinner, while others sold T-shirts that said: "We Stand By Ours. #teamdiebold1565."

Just 18 days after the accident, Diebold got married and about 200 people attended the ceremony. He smiled at his bride, who was dressed in an off-the-shoulder white dress, as she placed a wedding band on his right ring finger, and attendees raised their phones to catch the moment.

Diebold made the news again recently. This time, he wasn't smiling - and it's unlikely that anyone in the town of 2,000 was.

The 40-year-old has been accused of soliciting sex from a teenage girl online. He was arrested Friday on felony charges, including unlawful contact with a minor and criminal attempt to commit involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. Both are first-degree felonies.

"This case is particularly heinous because the perpetrator is a public official, sworn to serve and protect the community," Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement. "We have a zero tolerance for the sexual abuse of children and my office will prosecute any offender to the fullest extent of the law, no matter who they are."

The arrest followed an investigation that involved an undercover officer who posed as a 14-year-old girl, authorities said. The investigation began after Diebold, using the username KuteCop4You, posted an ad on a social media app, CBS affiliate KDKA reported, citing the criminal complaint. Authorities said he and the undercover agent talked multiple times, with Diebold sending inappropriate photos and asking to meet for sex.

Diebold was arrested after he showed up at the meeting location. He then admitted that he'd been posting personal ads online for several years and acknowledged talking about sex with the purported 14-year-old, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, citing the complaint.

"Diebold admitted that he knew that sexual contact with a 14-year-(old) child was wrong and illegal and that his life was totally over," the complaint said.

Leechburg Mayor Wayne Dobos said the allegations shocked many in the town, including him, who did not know that Diebold may have had a secret life.

"We've had enough notoriety in town, and something like this, we didn't need at all," Dobos told The Washington Post.

Media coverage around Diebold began in June, when he was handling fireworks during an event, and one piece misfired and exploded on him, his mother, Karen Diebold, told the Post-Gazette. Michael Diebold, who is also a fireworks business owner, lost nearly his entire left arm.

Controversy followed as Diebold tried to get back on duty months later. He told KDKA in December that he was ready to return to work. Doctors had cleared him and the state had recertified his firearms license, but town officials told him that he couldn't go back just yet and placed him on paid leave. Diebold threatened to sue.

Dobos said the Leechburg Borough Council wanted Diebold back at the police department, which employs only three full-time officers, including the chief, and several part-time employees. But he said Diebold needed to first take a physical test to ensure he's able to perform his duties. Lawyers representing Diebold and the town were finalizing what those tests would be when he was arrested, Dobos said.

Diebold, who's in the Westmoreland County Jail on a $500,000 bond, is scheduled for a hearing on Jan. 16. Online court records show that he did not ask for a public defender but do not list an attorney for him.

Town officials have not figured out who will fill Diebold's job. Dobos said the other two full-time officers have been sharing Diebold's duties over the past months.

"This is a very, very rare instance," Dobos said. "We got to play everything by ear."
Niagara Falls might be at its most spectacular in winter.

Over the recent holidays, the icy cascade captured the public's imagination: numerous newspapers ran stories about the frozen wonderland, and social media posts about the falls were widely shared.

But this is business as usual. Niagara Falls is replete with icicles and a glistening layer of ice every winter. As of now, the waterfall is still unfettered. Later in the winter, it will likely be fronted by a buildup of congealed ice.

Even that, though, will be just a vestige of what used to occur before Niagara Falls was remade in the 20th century. Much of what seems natural at Niagara Falls - ice formation, and the actual waterfall itself - is manufactured. Put differently, one of North America's most celebrated natural wonders is, in many ways, unnatural, the product of decades of human intervention and manipulation.

Now, Niagara Falls never actually freezes over completely (though ice jams upstream can temporarily still the waters). Ice does form or gather at the base of the waterfall, building upward and outward, creating what is called the "ice bridge." But water keeps flowing underneath the two main cataracts - the bigger Horseshoe Falls and the smaller American Falls - that make up the frozen facade.

Now Playing: Parts of Niagara Falls in Canada and the United States were frozen amid frigid temperatures on Tuesday, January 2. Credit: Instagram/Thomas Bvrd via Storyful Video: Fox 13 Tampa

Up until the early 20th century, the two eponymous communities of Niagara Falls, one Canadian, one American, would congregate on the ice bridge for transnational ice parties. Kids would climb the ice mountains and slide down.

But these frozen festivities came to a tragic end on Feb. 4, 1912. The ice broke up and three people perished. Excursions onto the ice bridge were banned.

The ice would continue to cause problems in the following years, taking out the famed Honeymoon Bridge in January 1938.

How could such an unruly and unpredictable environment be tamed? By the time ice destroyed the bridge, experts were on the cusp of providing some answers.

Since the late 19th century, there has been a tension between beauty and power at Niagara Falls. On the one hand, it was considered the epitome of the natural sublime. On the other, Niagara was also the cradle of large-scale hydroelectric production and distribution. Successively larger generating stations were built, several taking turns wearing the mantle of biggest in the world. Industries such as aluminum and electro-chemicals arrived to take advantage of the cheap electricity.

As more power turbines came online, more water had to be diverted from the river. Various groups worried that siphoning off water harmed the scenic beauty of the cascades, along with the naturally occurring erosion that annually moved the Horseshoe Falls upstream some seven feet. Industrialists responded by disingenuously suggesting that diverting more water would protect the falls by slowing erosion.

Agitation for the preservation of Niagara Falls led governments to pass legal limits on diversions during the first decades of the 20th century. The U.S. and Canada formed engineering boards to study how to best replumb Niagara Falls to maximize water abstraction while veiling the impact on the waterfall's appearance. They schemed to curtail the annoying spray and mist that left visitors soaking.

The result of these diplomatic talks was the Niagara River Diversion Treaty in 1950, which determined that during tourist hours half of the river's volume would be diverted around the falls to the downstream generating stations. The rest of the time - that is, at night and in the winter - three-quarters of the water was diverted.

But taking the majority of the water would have an unmistakable impact on the aesthetic appeal of the waterfall. This wouldn't be good for the local tourism industry, not to mention all those claims about Niagara as the sublime.

The solution? Shrink and reshape Niagara Falls.

The 1950 treaty called for the binational construction of the International Niagara Control Works. These consisted of various weirs, dams, excavations and fills meant to halt erosion and "beautify" the Horseshoe Falls by reapportioning the flow of water over the lip. In the words of the technocrats, the overarching goal was creating the "impression of volume" with an uninterrupted "curtain of water."

The crest of the Horseshoe was reduced by several hundred feet, and the V-shaped notch in its riverbed was chiseled out. Islands and shoals were removed, while others were added. Above the waterfall, a control dam with movable gates was installed across the river. Reclaimed areas at the flanks of the cataract were landscaped, fenced and turned into the main public viewing points, while the face of the falls was riveted with cables and anchors.

Niagara Falls was changed - but in order to look more like itself. In the process it was also transformed into a tap. Nowadays, the hydropower intakes at Niagara have the capability to completely turn off the falls.

Seeing as how Canadian and American engineers had given this great - and powerful - natural icon such a facelift, dealing with ice might seem like small potatoes by comparison. Yet controlling ice in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin had long been marked by scientific uncertainty. Despite the use of the ice-deterring control dam aided by ice-cutter boats, ice still threatened to jam up the "organic machine" that Niagara had become.

One of the biggest worries was that ice would interfere with the water intakes for the new hydroelectric generating stations. The solution: the Niagara River Ice Boom. First installed in 1964, the boom was initially made of timbers. Now it consists of several hundred 30-foot pontoons, usually put in place around mid-December. (A video feed of the boom is available online.)

Despite the boom, and depending on winter conditions, Niagara Falls can still become encrusted in ice. But the large ice bridges of the past, as well as the full-throated flow of water over the falls, are no more.

Like the waterfall, the ice regime of Niagara has become, in the parlance of academics working at the intersections of environmental and technological history, a hybrid infrastructure that blends the artificial and the natural. Arguably, the real waterfall now drops down the penstocks of the power generating stations, far from public view.

Granted, drawing a stark distinction between the "artificial" and the "natural" is itself a problem. So is the hubris that leads to engineering enormous waterfalls.

The history of manipulating Niagara Falls conveys powerful messages about our willingness to reorder nature. And one of those messages is this: Remaking one of the continent's premier natural symbols to fit our notions of progress gives license and encouragement to do the same to any other part of the nonhuman world. If we alter and commodify even those celebrated features of the natural world we claim to cherish, aren't we sure to undervalue and exploit the rest of it?

---

Macfarlane is an assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University who is completing a book on the history of modifying Niagara Falls.
PORTLAND, Ore. - The simplest question among pot smokers - is this stuff legal? - doesn't have a crystal-clear answer anywhere in America. It many places it is now simultaneously legal and illegal, the same way physicists will tell you (shifting here to a 3 a.m. dorm room discussion) that light is both a particle and a wave.

Eight states have legalized recreational marijuana for people age 21 and older, with California joining that group on Jan. 1. Other states allow the cultivation and distribution of pot for medicinal use, and many have taken steps to decriminalize marijuana possession.

But under the federal Controlled Substances Act, it's the same weed it's always been, a "Schedule 1" drug that is illegal to possess, much less grow or distribute.

And the situation just became a whole lot foggier.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week took on the marijuana industry by rescinding enforcement guidelines that had been issued by the Obama administration. Those guidelines had finessed the state-federal conflict by saying, in effect, that federal prosecutors wouldn't go after people who complied with state laws, but would instead concentrate on drug cartels, money laundering and other high-priority targets.

In canceling the Obama policies, Sessions gave U.S. attorneys across the country full discretion to pursue criminal cases involving marijuana. In a memo, he said the federal pot statutes "reflect Congress' determination that marijuana is a dangerous drug and that marijuana activity is a serious crime."

But proprietors, activists and consumers said such words aren't going to shut down the burgeoning marijuana industry.

In Portland, Oregon, sales manager Kevin Yearout of Stone Age Farmacy - where the marijuana sells for $10 a gram and you can buy pot-infused gummies, caramels, jellies, lemonades, taffy, chocolate and cakeballs with "cannabutter" - said he smells corporate influence behind the Sessions announcement: "It goes back to pharmaceuticals. They want people to take pills and they can make money."

Nearby, at Five Zero Trees - a pun invoking Oregon's first area code - the heavily tattooed store manager, Josh Sisco, proudly showed off some of the store's most-popular strains, including Cherry Kush and Mt. Hood Magic Durban Poison. He said Sessions' decision will boost sales.

"It's like back when people said Obama was coming for everyone's guns and gun sales spiked," he said.

In Los Angeles, at New Amsterdam Naturals, a licensed medical marijuana shop, the management declined a request for comment. But customer Deborah Harrison was happy to opine on Sessions as she entered the store.

"I could care less what he thinks," Harrison said. "This is California, and we are going to do what we do here. He can push it if he wants to, and we can secede from the union."

Tom Miller, a pipe layer in the natural gas industry, spent part of Friday morning at Boulder Botanics in Colorado, examining canisters of cannabis with strains named Gorilla Glue, Big Bubba Diesel, and Dawg's Waltz. The weed sells for $150 to $250 an ounce, and Miller said he wanted to try it all. He had just arrived in the state, which has embraced legal sales.

"It helps more than opioids," he said, citing his home state of West Virginia's struggle with opioid abuse. "They could use this instead of being hooked on opioids. Everyone's on pills."

Marijuana is now legal in much of the West, as well as in Massachusetts and Maine. In the District of Columbia, people 21 and older can grow, possess or give away modest amounts of it, and smoke it legally at home. Medical marijuana is legal and strictly regulated in the District, but selling pot for recreational use is still illegal. It also remains illegal on federal property.

State laws vary, with some treating marijuana as if it were no more a drug than alcohol. There are still major kinks in the law for marijuana entrepreneurs, who struggle to find banks willing to take their money - and wind up carrying brown paper bags of cash to pay their utility bills, said Jonathan Robbins, an attorney with Akerman LLP, where he is chair of the Cannabis Practice Group.

Robbins emphasized that the decision by Sessions does not change any of the nation's marijuana laws; this was purely a policy change at the Justice Department.

"There certainly is less clarity," Robbins said. "We don't know as we sit here today what the practical effect of Mr. Sessions' pronouncement is going to be."

His legal advice to marijuana growers and distributors: "It's very, very important that any folks who are operating in this space go to great lengths to make sure they are fully compliant with the laws of the states in which they operate."

Patrick Moen, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who is now general counsel for Privateer Holdings, which invests in the legal cannabis industry, said the Sessions move is largely symbolic, noting that the Justice Department did not send out a directive to crack down on marijuana. Nor does Moen think the DEA will ramp up marijuana enforcement, particularly given how closely the federal agents rely on their local and state partnerships in drug task forces.

"I would be shocked if there is anyone at the agency that is interested in prioritizing cannabis investigations," Moen said. "It is not an effective use of time and resources. And it's fraught with political peril."

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, asked Friday if marijuana use is legal in his state despite the federal law, was emphatic: "In the state of California, it is legal."

But what about the federal statutes?

"The federal government is not the state of California," he said.

Becerra said he has reached out to the four U.S. attorneys in California, hoping to discuss the issue, and to seek ways to work together to focus on black-market marijuana operators and people who do not obide by the state's laws, which made recreational marijuana legal this week. "There's no need for us to butt heads," he said.

Speaking by phone from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Serge Chistov, an investor in northwest Colorado's Honest Marijuana Company, said the three local marijuana dispensaries had opened for business and no one seemed paranoid about being raided by the feds.

Chistov said of the Sessions announcement: "This is nothing but a bark. Genie's out of the bottle. Ain't going back in the bottle. Too much money."

- - -

Blakemore reported from Boulder, Colorado, and Achenbach reported from Washington. Rob Kuznia in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Once upon a time, people had phones hard-wired in their houses. These phones were called "landlines," and they relied on wires strung throughout their communities to operate. It was an effective technology, but one that necessarily meant that your ability to place and receive a telephone call was limited to a particular vicinity. Over time, inventors came up with a thing called a "cordless phone," which extended that range slightly, but not much.

For pollsters, this was useful. There was a phone number that was connected to a house where you knew certain people lived, and so you could call that number and have a good sense that you were talking to Joe Smith, registered Republican.

Then capitalism got in the way. The invention of the cellphone and the rapid adoption thereof meant that people were no longer tied to a particular physical location when making calls. About a decade ago, as more Americans began relying solely on cellphones, pollsters began incorporating those numbers into their pool of contacts. This was tricky for several reasons, including that federal law mandates that cell numbers be hand-dialed. As The Washington Post's Scott Clement explained a few years ago, this means that it can cost twice as much to call cell numbers. In the already-tight economics of polling, that's a problem.

A decade ago, though, only about 1 in 8 adults lived in wireless-only households, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. As of the second half of 2016, though, slightly more than half of American adults fit that description for the first time. The most recent figure, for the first half of 2017, established that 52.5 percent of adults live in wireless-only households.

Generally speaking, pollsters are ill-advised to ignore cellphone users, if only because they'd be missing half of the country. But there's another reason that pollsters need to include cell users: The demographics of those with and without access to landlines is stark.

Consider race and ethnicity. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic adults in the United States live in households that are wireless-only. More than half of black adults and Asian adults do, as well. But fewer than half of white Americans do.

Including only landlines in polling - which, we will note, is not common practice at this point - means you're much less likely to reach Hispanic voters.

Or younger ones. Nearly three-quarters of adults ages 30 to 34 live in wireless-only households. Those younger than 25 are less likely to - probably because some chunk of that group lives in a household with someone age 45 or older (that is, a parent). Among those 65 and up, fewer than a quarter live in a wireless-only household.

There's a trend undergirding this. Those under the federal poverty level are much more likely to live in wireless-only households than those earning at least twice that level.

Income, age and race all correlate to another factor: homeownership. If you own a house, you're much more likely to have a landline in that house, both because older Americans still have landlines/are more likely to own houses and because people who rent are less likely to have a landline installed.

Owning a home tends to correlate to another characteristic: being likely to vote. If you have lived in the same place for a decade, you're probably pretty familiar with where you need to go to cast your ballot - and it has been a long time since you've had to register at your new address.

The idea that the mode of reaching someone in a poll affects the results isn't just a theory. In December 2015, we looked at research that showed spreads of more than 20 points in presidential and congressional polling depending on whether the respondent was reached on a cellphone or a landline.

That discrepancy, incidentally, is precisely why the National Center for Health Statistics collects this data. In an interview in 2015, an associate director for the agency explained to NPR that there were significant differences between the two populations.

"People who are wireless-only are more likely to smoke, they're more likely to binge drink, they're more likely to be uninsured," he said. "In effect, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors."
Forty-six states permit naloxone to be purchased without an individual prescription. Laws in the remaining states vary, with some permitting naloxone to be prescribed only for use on a patient of the prescriber, while others permit it to be prescribed for use on other people, such as friends and family members of the patient.

In the District of Columbia, Narcan is available at retail pharmacies only via prescription. At least three community health organizations - HIPS, Family Medical and Counseling Service and Bread for the City - disburse it free without a prescription to clients and family members.
U.S. customs agents conducted 60 percent more searches of travelers' cellphones, laptops and other electronic devices during the government's 2017 fiscal year, according to statistics released Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The agency said it searched 30,200 devices, but the inspections affected 0.007 percent of the 397 million travelers - American citizens as well as foreign visitors - who arrived from abroad during the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30.

CBP published the figures as it issued new guidelines formalizing the way its officers conduct searches and handle the information they obtain.

The agency said the increase was not the result of a policy directive but, rather, an indication that electronic devices are increasingly viewed as critical sources of information on potential security threats.

"In this digital age, border searches of electronic devices are essential to enforcing the law at the U.S. border and to protecting the American people," CBP official John Wagner said in a statement.

American citizens and other travelers have expressed astonishment and alarm in recent years at requests to hand over their cellphones from U.S. customs officials at airports and border crossings.

But CBP said the practice is justified and its standards have been thoroughly reviewed to ensure they are not an unreasonable violation of privacy rights.

The agency said it sometimes needs information it obtains from devices to determine the admissibility of foreign visitors, viewing them as potential sources of intelligence on terrorism, child pornography or other criminal activity.

Under the new guidelines, travelers who are selected by its officers for additional screening could be asked to unlock their electronic devices for inspection or provide passcodes. They will be asked to disable the devices' data transmission, according to a senior CBP official who briefed reporters on the changes Friday.

Only information physically stored on the device - such as photographs or phone numbers - would be subject to search, said the official, who the agency would not allow to be quoted by name. CBP agents would not be allowed to seek information stored externally or on a "cloud" linked to the device.

Such inspections would constitute a "basic search," the agency said. But in cases where officers determine they have reasonable suspicion of a criminal act or potential threat to national security, they may, with a supervisors' authorization, conduct an "advanced search" by connecting it to other applications and potentially copying its information.

Passwords provided by travelers would be destroyed and not retained by the government, the CBP official said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a key ally of privacy rights groups, called the new CBP guidelines "an improvement" but said they're still too intrusive for U.S. citizens.

"Manually examining an individuals' private photos, messages and browsing history is still extremely invasive, and should require a warrant," Wyden said in a statement. "I continue to believe Americans are entitled to their full constitutional rights, no matter where they are in the United States."

Last year U.S. civil rights groups filed suit against the federal government in an attempt to curb device searches.

According to the senior CBP official, about 20 percent of the travelers whose devices are inspected are U.S. citizens. The rest are permanent residents, visitors or other travelers whose admissibility to the United States is subject to CBP discretion.

American citizens who refuse to allow their devices to be inspected cannot be denied entry into the United States, but their devices could be retained for as many as five days, the official said.

In cases where noncitizens refuse the search, they could be denied entry and sent home.

CBP said the decision to review a travelers' electronic device would not be made at random, and would be requested by officers as part of their broader effort to evaluate whether to allow someone into the U.S.

Imagery and information that is noncriminal, including political or sexual content, could also be used by CBP officers to determine whether to admit a foreign visitor, the CBP official said.
For the first time, Ford will release its best-selling F-150 truck with an optional 3.0-liter diesel Power Stroke engine that will come with an EPA-estimated 30 mpg later this year.

The Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker will start taking dealer orders on the new 2018 Ford F-150 diesel in mid-January, with deliveries expected to start this spring. With the addition of the diesel engine, Ford now offers its F-150 with six different engine options.

The first-ever diesel engine offered for the F-150 comes as a 3.0-liter powerstroke with an 10-speed automatic transmission. Ford reports that it is capable of 11,400 pounds of towing, a 2,020 payload, and making 250 horsepower and 440-pounds of torque.

Per the estimated EPA fuel economy rating, Ford says the final figures will be released this spring.

"For every truck owner who wants strong fuel economy while they tow and haul, we offer a new 3.0-liter Power Stroke V6 engine that dreams are made of," Dave Filipe, Ford's vice president global powertrain engineering, said.

"The more you tow and the longer you haul, the more you'll appreciate its class-leading towing and payload capacity and how efficient it is at the pump."

Ford's F-Series has been America's top-selling vehicle for 40 straight years.

The 2018 F-150's frame will come made of high-strength, military-grade, aluminum-alloy which helped decrease its weight by 700 pounds. Ford says this weight-reduction allowed its engineers to invest in new areas aimed at generating better towing capacity paired with the improved fuel economy rating.

This new diesel option is available in 4x2 and 4x4 trucks, and in the Lariat, King Ranch and Platinum editions. For fleet customers, Ford will offer the diesel option on all trims with SuperCrew 5.5-foot or 6.5-foot beds, and SuperCabs with a 6.5-foot bed.

The 2018 Ford F-150 Diesel was unveiled at a tight-lipped media event the same day the automaker announced it was moving 220-plus employees back into Detroit proper.

The automaker will move its autonomous and electric vehicle business and strategy teams back into Detroit in early 2018. More than 220 employees will work out of the Detroit location, which will reportedly focus on "mobility challenges and solutions in an urban setting."

Another aspect of the Power Stroke diesel option is the segment-exclusive 10-speed "SelectShift" automatic transmission that Ford expects to maximize "shift points and gear ratios to optimize power." What this all means is that the transmission can select the right gear for the right time regardless of sequential order.

For those curious about its weather testing and capabilities, the Dearborn-based automaker says it tested the F-150 diesel in Davis Dam, Arizona. The Power Stroke-equipped F-150 climbed 13 miles at a 6 percent grade in temperatures at levels hotter than 100 degrees. The F-150's 3.0-liter Power Stroke comes with an engine-driven fan and dual radiator shutters to help in those high-temperature conditions.

"We know that competing diesels with electric cooling fans have to dial back on power under extreme heat and altitude, so we decided on a viscous-controlled mechanical fan that has the capacity to move much more air across the radiator and intercooler in extreme conditions," David Ives, Ford diesel engine technical specialist, said.

"This gives F-150 Power Stroke owners more power and more passing capability in harsh conditions."

As for the upcoming North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Ford was tight-lipped about anything coming with them other than its new F-150 models. The automaker's press conference is currently scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 14 at an offsite location.

Before the 2018 NAIAS opens to the public from Jan. 20 to Jan. 28 at the Cobo Center in Downtown Detroit automakers show off new models and make world debuts in scheduled press conferences. Press preview days are scheduled for Jan. 14 to Jan. 16, which is when to check in with MLive for any breaking news or coverage of fresh reveals.
ZEELAND, MI - Automotive supplier Gentex Corp. is moving inside the home with a $5 million investment with Yonomi, a 5-year-old software company that focuses on smart home applications.

The relationship will allow Gentex to use Yonomi's software applications in more than 70 popular smart home applications, the companies said in an announcement on Monday, Jan. 8.

Gentex is using Yonomi software to launch HomeLink Connect, an new home automation app that pairs with the vehicle and allows drivers to operate home automation devices from the vehicle's center console display or rearview mirror controls.

Drivers of HomeLink Connect compatible vehicles will be able to download and configure the app to control individual home automation devices, or set up entire home automation "scenes," the announcement said.

"For instance, when heading home, one HomeLink button press could adjust a thermostat, turn on home lighting, disarm the security system, unlock the door, and begin playing music."

The new HomeLink Connect leverages Gentex's cloud infrastructure and customized apps to integrate Yonomi technology so that automakers can offer vehicle-to-home connectivity.

"Over the past year, Gentex and Yonomi worked together to pilot Yonomi One, a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that handles the complex tasks required to integrate products and services with all the top smart home devices and platforms."

Gentex CEO and President Steve Downing also will join Yonomi's board of directors, according to the announcement, released at the outset of the giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

"Our exclusive partnership with Yonomi helps ensure that HomeLink Connect is compatible with the ever-expanding list of smart home devices," said Downing.

"Our combined capabilities will help us provide automakers with a versatile, comprehensive and robust home automation platform that opens HomeLink to new markets and users by providing an ever-expanding number of use cases."
A sign posted outside a nature area in northeast Ann Arbor on Dec. 30, 2017, indicating shooting of deer will be occurring here in January 2018. (Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

By Ryan Stanton | ryanstanton@mlive.com

Ann Arbors third-annual deer cull is getting started, and it could be the biggest one yet.

Its scheduled to last more than three weeks and sharpshooters hired by the city are tasked with killing up to 250 deer.

Continue reading for a quick overview of which parks and nature areas are closed for the cull and other important information.

Don't Edit

1. What is a cull?

Culling refers to the act of killing wildlife by firearm or bow, the city states on its deer-management website.

In this case, the citys hired sharpshooters from Connecticut-based White Buffalo Inc. will be using rifles, not bows, to shoot deer in the city this month.

The city has a permit from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to conduct the cull in designated parks, nature areas and other areas using firearms.

Don't Edit

2. When is the cull happening?

The cull is scheduled to last from Monday afternoon, Jan. 8, through Jan. 31, with shooting taking place in different areas daily from afternoon until midnight.

Don't Edit

The city of Ann Arbor released this map showing areas where deer management activities will take place in January 2018. The red areas show the zones where nonlethal sterilizations occured from Jan. 2-7. The orangish yellow area is the University of Michigan's Nichols Arboretum, which is expected to close select days for lethal shooting. The green areas show city parks and nature areas, and the blue areas show UM and Concordia University properties, all of which will be closed from 3 p.m. to midnight from Jan. 8-31 for lethal shooting.(City of Ann Arbor)

3. Which city parks will be closed?

The following city parks and nature areas will be closed from 3 p.m. to midnight each day, including weekends:

Arbor Hills Nature Area

Barton Nature Area (only the area north of Warrington Drive)

Bird Hills Nature Area

Foxfire West Nature Area

Glazier Hill Nature Area

Huron Parkway/Braun Nature Areas

Leslie Park Golf Course

Leslie Woods Nature Area

Narrow Gauge Way Nature Area

Oakridge Nature Area (east of Huron Parkway only)

Oakwoods Nature Area

Olson Park (dog park and parking lot will remain open)

South Pond Nature Area (only the area in the vicinity of NAP office at 3875 E. Huron River Drive).

Stapp Nature Area

Sugarbush Park (north of Rumsey Drive only)

Traver Creek Nature Area

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A plaque at the entrance to the University of Michigan's Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor on Dec. 30, 2017. (Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

4. Will there be shooting on university properties?

The University of Michigans Nichols Arboretum will be closed for culling from 4-9 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 11; from 3 p.m. to midnight Tuesday, Jan. 16; from 4-9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 19; and from 3 p.m. to midnight Tuesday, Jan. 23.

In addition, from Jan. 8 through Jan. 31, some other University of Michigan and Concordia University properties will be closed every day from 3 p.m. to midnight. See those locations on the map above.

According to the city, several safety protocols are in place and a city security contractor, in communication with White Buffalo, will perform a roving patrol of closed public areas when sharpshooting activities are occurring. City police also are expected to coordinate with the University of Michigans Division of Public Safety and Security for all sharpshooting activities on university property. The city notes the professional sharpshooters also are responsible for following safety protocols.

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A deer in a backyard near Huntington Drive and Apple Way on Ann Arbor's east side on March 2, 2015. (Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

5. Will shooting occur on private property?

The city says it's expected that shooting will occur on a small number of city-selected private properties with owner permission in wards 1 and 2, which include the north and east sides of the city, and also around Mary Beth Doyle Park on the south side of the city in Ward 3.

The city says immediately adjacent neighbors in those areas are being notified, but the city is not notifying other nearby neighbors and is not posting signage warning of the shooting on private property.

At the advice of the citys contractor who performs sharpshooting activities in other communities, it is safer to not publicize specific private property addresses. Their experience has been that they can operate safely within the confines of pre-selected private parcels, the citys deer-management website states.

According to the city, there will be no shooting on private property without owner permission and residents do not need to modify their normal routines during culling activities on private property.

The sharpshooters no longer have to keep a 450-foot distance from people's homes and other occupied buildings, as the safety-zone rule that was in effect for previous culls has been lifted. That has prompted backlash from some residents who are concerned there will be shooting close to homes without people knowing, though city officials maintain everything will be done safely.

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A map showing the locations of reported deer-involved traffic crashes in the Ann Arbor area in 2016. (Courtesy of MichiganTrafficCrashFacts.org)

6. Why is the cull happening?

The city is trying to get a handle on what city officials and some residents consider to be a deer overpopulation problem.

They argue deer browsing is adversely impacting nature areas and people's private landscaping and gardens, and they're also concerned about deer-vehicle crashes.



See a September 2017 memo from ecologist Jacqueline Courteau regarding deer browse levels in Ann Arbor.

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A deer-crossing sign near Huron High School along Huron Parkway in Ann Arbor on Dec. 30, 20177. (Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

7. What will happen to the venison?

According to the city, the deer will be processed and the venison will be donated to Food Gatherers to be distributed to local food pantries.

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A "heat map" posted on the city's deer-management website indicating where deer populations are believed to be the highest in Ann Arbor.

8. How many deer are in Ann Arbor?

There has been a handful of official counts conducted via helicopter over the last few years, with the results reported by the city with the disclaimer that its not expected every deer was counted.

During a limited count that did not cover the entire city, 116 deer were spotted on Feb. 10, 2015.

During an expanded count that covered all of the city and some areas just outside city, 168 deer were spotted on March 6, 2015.

Nearly a year later, after the first cull was underway and after 51 deer already were killed, 202 deer were spotted on Feb. 18, 2016.

A total of 156 deer in Ann Arbor were killed during the citys first two culls in 2016 and 2017.

A total of 315 deer were detected in Ann Arbor during another population count conducted in early February 2017.

A report from White Buffalo last March estimated detection rates for the 2017 count ranged from 28 percent to 60 percent, depending on the area, and overall it estimated there were about 450 deer in wards 1 and 2, which include the north and east sides of the city. That's where the city has focused its population-reduction efforts.

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A trail-cam image provided by White Buffalo showing deer in Ann Arbor in February 2017.

9. When will the city stop killing deer?

This is another one of the questions the city answers on its deer-management website. The City Council in 2015 approved a four-year program that anticipated annual culls, though the program could continue after the initial four-year period if theres support.

Once a community begins deer management activities to address deer browse damage, it requires some level of actions to continue unless the tolerance of the community changes, the city states on its deer-management website, noting the city is using a mix of methods to control the deer population, including non-lethal sterilization, and that mix could change in the future.

Because deer dont have natural predators in urban environments and they reproduce at a rate that rapidly increases their population, it is necessary to remove 30 to 40 percent of the deer population annually in order to maintain a stable population size, the city website states. The sooner a large population of deer is brought to an acceptable level, the fewer deer that will have to be removed annually and cumulatively. The citys future deer management efforts include deciding which method is appropriate for maintaining an acceptable level of deer impacts in the community.

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A sign outside the Oakridge Nature Area along Huron Parkway in Ann Arbor on Dec. 30, 2017, warning of the upcoming deer cull. (Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

10. How much is all this costing?

The city is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get a handle on the deer population in the city.

The City Council originally approved a $260,000 budget for this years deer-management activities, including the lethal cull, non-lethal sterilizations, vegetation-impact studies, and signage/education efforts.

Using some of those funds, the City Council voted last July to approve a two-year contract with White Buffalo for continuation of surgical sterilization and sharpshooting services at a cost of up to $170,000 per year. The council later voted in October to increase this year's contract amount with White Buffalo by another $35,940, while taking an extra $110,000 from the city's cash reserves. As a result, the 2018 deer-management program budget is now $370,000.



See the city's budget breakdown.

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Read more

19 deer in Ann Arbor sterilized after week of ovary removals

Behind the scenes of Ann Arbor's deer sterilization effort

Ann Arbor's plan to shoot deer in neighborhoods has some residents in fear

Ann Arbor protesters spell 'Save The Deer' in lights outside city hall
UPDATE: Party store customer fought armed robber who wished him a merry Christmas

BAY CITY, MI -- A local man has been arrested and charged with robbing a Bay County party store mere days after he was released from jail and a few days before Christmas.

Bay County Sheriff's deputies on the night of Jan. 6 responded to a tip that 25-year-old Michael J. Sauve was in a Kawkawlin house with his girlfriend. Deputies found Sauve at the location and arrested him without incident. They also arrested the girlfriend on an outstanding warrant, said Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham.

Two days prior, authorities had issued a warrant for Sauve on charges related to the recent armed holdup of the Cass Avenue Party Store, 1500 Cass Ave. in Portsmouth Township.

Sauve on the afternoon of Monday, Jan. 8, appeared before Bay County District Judge Timothy J. Kelly for arraignment on two counts of armed robbery. The charge is punishable by up to life in prison.

Sauve asked the judge to appoint him an attorney, saying he's not employed and cannot afford to hire one of his own. He added he had dropped out of high school in ninth grade.

Kelly asked Sauve if he is on bond on any other offense.

"Yeah, I think so," Sauve replied. "I think it's driving with no ops (operator's license). I don't even remember. I'm on bond, though; I know that."

Cunningham previously said that a man at about 8 p.m. on Dec. 21 entered the party store and brandished an airsoft gun. He robbed both the clerk and a customer of an undisclosed amount of cash before fleeing, the sheriff previously said.

Deputies on Dec. 22 posted Sauve's mug shot on their agency's Facebook page, describing him as a "person of interest" in the robbery. Cunningham has not elaborated on what led investigators to link Sauve to the crime.

Sauve's criminal record dates back to 2008, when he was still a juvenile. In March, he was sentenced to two years' probation on a conviction of illegal possession of a financial transaction device. His rap sheet also includes convictions of third-degree home invasion, domestic violence, second-offense domestic violence, assaulting police, and assault with a dangerous weapon, the last two of which landed him in prison for a few years.

The Michigan Department of Corrections discharged Sauve from Circuit Court probation in December. He was released from the Bay County Jail on Dec. 18, just three days before the Portsmouth Township store was robbed.

Sauve still owes $250 in fines related to two domestic violence convictions in 2016 and 2017.

Kelly set Sauve's bond at $250,000 cash-surety. He is to appear for a preliminary examination at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 24.
FLINT, MI -- Attorneys for two top officials at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services have been spending more time in court on the Flint water crisis, and the proof is in the invoices being picked up by state taxpayers.

Records requested by MLive-The Flint Journal from DHHS show billings by Willey & Chamberlain PLLC to represent department Director Nick Lyon have already topped $776,000, and invoices from Pear Sperling Eggan & Daniels PC for work on behalf of State Medical Executive Dr. Eden Wells have reached $297,915.

Lyon and Wells are the first Flint water defendants to start preliminary examinations, which are continuing in Genesee District Court, but their cases still may have far to go.

Exams for the pair and nine other current and former city and state employees charged with criminal wrongdoing related to the water crisis are all scheduled to start or restart within the next 30 days.

Costs will rise further as attorneys attempt to convince district court judges the cases against their clients should not be bound over for jury trials in Genesee Circuit Court.

As long as they go on, state taxpayers are paying for both the prosecution and the defense attorneys in each of the cases.

Although total spending on law firms related to the water crisis was not immediately available, costs had already exceeded $16 million in early October, including $5.5 million through the end of the last fiscal year for Attorney General Bill Schuette's investigation and prosecution.

State Rep. Sheldon Neeley, D-Flint, said the high cost of defending those accused of criminal wrongdoing is another injustice for taxpayers.

"We're paying for the defense and the prosecution," Neeley said. "It's a total molestation of dollars. The victims are the tax-paying citizens."

State employees have continued to be paid after having been charged with water crisis crimes, and Lyon and Wells have remained on the job while colleagues have been placed on paid leaves.

Lyon's legal bill from Willey & Chamberlain is by far the highest at DHHS, already surpassing the total contract amount agreed to by the state for his representation.

Lynn Sutfin, a spokeswoman for DHHS, said the department is in the process of obtaining additional money to add to that and other contracts -- changes that must be approved by the State Administrative Board.

Lyon and his attorneys have been in court for 10 days during his preliminary examination so far compared to nine for Wells.

He faces charges of involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office.

Wells is charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a peace officer for her role in the water crisis. Special prosecutor Todd Flood has also said he will seek additional charges of involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office against her.

Wells and Lyon are not the only state employees who have compiled hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses.

At the state Department of Environmental Quality, attorneys for five employees had already run up individual bills of more than $400,000 as of September, including former district supervisor Stephen Busch, represented by Kotz Sangster Wysocki of Detroit, at more than $1 million, and more than $1.6 million for lawyers representing two executives who resigned from their jobs and who were never charged with criminal wrongdoing.

Busch is among four current and former DEQ employees scheduled to begin hearing evidence against them at preliminary examinations Monday, Jan. 8.
GENESEE COUNTY, MI - The race for Genesee County's next judge is on.

With at least two longtime Circuit Court judges exceeding the state age limit to run for their seats in the November election, the county bench is bound to see some fresh faces this year - and local attorneys aren't wasting any time in staking their claims on the ballot.

On Monday, Jan. 8, attorney Brian Pickell - son of Genesee County Sheriff Robert J. Pickell - declared his run for the bench at a press conference at the Flint Township Police Station.

In a room filled with the county's legal who's who, Brian Pickell announced his bid for the 7th Circuit Judicial Bench, leaning on his twenty-plus years of law and experience in elder abuse litigation.

"I've experienced several facets of the law, and have experience in the job, ready to hit the ground running on day one," Pickell said. "As an attorney, I've fought vigorously to protect individuals from all walks of life - most recently, the elderly, some of our most cherished loved ones ... If elected as your next judge, I will work hard to protect the rights of senior citizens and other vulnerable people in our community, dedicated to getting justice for seniors who have been victimized and protecting from predators who prey on their kindness. The elderly have given so much to us. Those who try to harm them will be dealt with harshly and swiftly."

Pickell, who said he's lived in Genesee County nearly all his life, comes to the campaign with 17 years of experience working in Oakland County in intellectual property law and 3 years in elder abuse and probate cases.

"I want to serve the community in a big, big way ... I have the judicial temperament for this job," Pickell said. "I'm compassionate, kind, I have patience, and I believe I can deal with those who come before me and can treat them with fairness and with respect."

Richard McNally

Another Genesee County lawyer -Richard McNally - has also thrown his hat in the ring for 7th Circuit judicial seat.

A nearly lifelong county resident with trial experience as a former assisting prosecuting attorney in Grayling and over 35 years of private practice dealing in Genesee Circuit Court cases, McNally said he will bring unrivaled experience and balance to the bench.

"I've been in private practice for over three decades, so I'm not beholden to any special interests," McNally said. "We've got a lot of challenges in Genesee County that will affect circuit court in years to come. The Flint water crisis litigation, for example, is going to affect a whole generation of kids, kids who have been permanently damaged neurologically ... I'm ready to help make the important decisions that will affect our county."

Pickell and McNally are some of the earliest public bids vying to fill the seats of longtime Genesee County Judges Geoffrey L. Neithercut and Judith R. Fullerton, who will be over age 69 by campaign season and thus barred from running for re-election, according to state law.

The law was recently challenged by another Genesee County Judge - Michael Theile - in federal court, arguing that the age restriction is outdated and unconstitutional. The lawsuit was dismissed based on previous Sixth Circuit and Supreme Court rulings.

Neithercut will leave his spot on the bench in November after 24 years as a county circuit judge and eight years on the district court bench.

Fullerton will step down after 36 years on the circuit bench and two years as district court judge.

All non-incumbent judicial candidates are required to file with the Secretary of State no later than Tuesday, April 24, per the state's website. Primary elections will be held on August 7, and the general election will be held on November 6.

Since December 2017, the seat of another longtime Genesee County Circuit Judge - Archie L. Hayman - has been vacated after the judge retired to go into private practice. Per the Michigan Constitution, Gov. Rick Snyder will appoint Hayman's replacement - an announcement which is still forthcoming, a Snyder spokesperson said.
Temperatures across mid-Michigan managed to break out of their recent arctic chill on Sunday.

But the increasing temperatures do not mean that Mother Nature will be giving residents a long break from wintery conditions.

A winter weather advisory issued by the National Weather Service runs from 9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 7 until 8 a.m Monday, Jan. 8 for a number of counties, including Huron, Tuscola, Sanilac, Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, and Oakland.

Two to four inches of snow by Monday morning may slicken roads for those commuters heading to work, school, and other points in between. Reduced visibilities will also be possible during the snowfall.

Some of the snowfall may begin to melt over the next few days, as high temperatures are forecast to reach into the mid-30s on Monday and Tuesday before topping 40 degrees on Wednesday.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - After months of discussion and review, four strategies aimed at addressing affordable housing issues in Grand Rapids appear to be moving forward.

The city commission will host a public hearing on the strategies at its 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 9, meeting on the ninth floor of city hall.

The four strategies are among 11 that the commission has been reviewing since November, and were identified by the city manager as the steps that could be most easily addressed first. City staff are referring to the package of potential policies as "Housing NOW."

The goal of the housing strategies is to identify ways that the city can work with nonprofits and private developers to provide affordable housing, said First Ward Commissioner Jon O'Connor, who helped to lead the most recent housing task force in 2017.

"Given the limited resource environment, we know we're not going to be the sole provider of affordable housing," O'Connor said.

Residents have been pressuring city officials to take action when it comes to the rapidly changing affordability of Grand Rapids neighborhoods as the city's development booms. City officials have heard reports from two different housing work groups in the past two years on the issue that have yet to be adopted.

Here are the four strategies that the commission is seeking public input on Tuesday:

-A change in PILOT fees for housing developers to pay for the Affordable Housing Fund (#1 of 11)

The payment in lieu of taxes program applies to housing projects that are financed with federal or state housing aid; that serve low-income families, the elderly or the disabled and that are owned by a qualifying nonprofit or association.

Instead of paying property taxes, the property owner pays a service charge on their mortgage to the city.

The city is proposing to give property owners the option of continuing to pay the standard four percent service charge -- or to pay a one percent service charge to the city and a two percent service charge into the city's affordable housing fund.

The newly established fund is designated for investments in affordable housing incentives and initiatives, and has yet to be used in a significant way by the city due to its small size. The commission set aside $1 million last year to kick-start the fund.

O'Connor said he believes the change in PILOT fees will potentially have the biggest impact out of the four strategies the commission is tackling first.

Projects that qualify to pay the fee instead of paying traditional property taxes typically have better financial projections, which makes them more attractive to the state's Low Income Housing Tax Credit program for selection.

The state program is the biggest source of new affordable housing units in Grand Rapids, O'Connor said.

-A change in zoning incentives to guide new construction (#4 of 11)

Neighborhood Enterprise Zones are a zoning tool that allow developers to apply for tax incentives for new construction of rental units or repairs to existing units.

The criteria needed for a developer to qualify for a zone would be changed to put a more specific emphasis on affordable housing, and would shorten the base tax exemption period from 12 to nine years to provide a greater incentive for complying.

-Create an equitable development policy that developers could choose to follow (#5 of 11)

The city is considering a policy that would allow it to strike voluntary equitable development agreements with interested developers.

The agreements would be between the city, an investor and a community organization that would allow all three to agree on a joint set of goals and interests for a project.

The policy would apply to any private development on city-owned property, public or private projects that cost more than $10 million and any project seeking assistance from the city's new affordable housing fund.

Violation of the agreement would allow the city to rescind its financial incentives.

-Create a city policy to guide future property purchases (#7 of 11)

As a way to increase the number of housing units at affordable prices, the city could partner with a developer to invest in part of a property in order to control the cost of the units.

Though the city cannot legally dictate rents in private developments, it can control rents in properties that it owns.

After the hearing Jan. 9, the commission will likely vote on the four policies at its next meeting Tuesday, Jan. 30.

Grand Rapids has dedicated a special section of its new city website to its work on affordable housing, including links to the draft policies for all 11 proposals.

The city deems housing to be "affordable" when the annual cost to a renter or homeowner is no more than 30 percent of their annual income.

Area Median Income is a federal definition that varies based on the size of a household.

Generally, "low-income" means households that make half of the AMI. For a single person in Grand Rapids, that's an annual income of $23,250.

Grand Rapids has a goal to create rental housing for people with household incomes at 60 percent or less of the Area Median Income, and to help residents with household incomes at 80 percent AMI attain home ownership.
Ashwani Gujral of ashwanigujral.com told CNBC-TV18, "Titan Company is a buy with a stop loss of Rs 915 and target of Rs 950. Bharat Forge is a buy with a stop loss of Rs 740 and target of Rs 765. Mindtree is a buy with a stop loss of Rs 620 and target of Rs 645."

"MCX India is hanging around recent supports of about Rs 900. So maybe keeping an Rs 900 type of stop loss you could expect a rally back towards the 200 day which is Rs 1,060."

"Bharat Electronics (BEL), PTC India are all Budget type stocks. So chances are that the defence stocks will pick up going into the Budget. Nothing significant on BEL."

"PTC, maybe looks a bit better than BEL although a lot of PSUs will go up in anticipation. So I think Rs 110 is a fairly decent stop loss and maybe you can look at Rs 130-135," he said.
The other IPO which also received huge responses were Happiest Minds Technologies and Chemcon Speciality Chemicals, which was subscribed 150.98 times and 149.3 times respectively. Interestingly, both these stocks have seen bumper listing gained over 100 percent. Let's see how the IPO subscription and listing happened in 2020 so far, considered only IPOs issue size over Rs 100 crore.

Dream Gateway Hotels Ltd, an arm of Kolkata-based real estate developer Jain Group, is planning to dilute 25 percent stake with its maiden IPO on BSE's small and medium enterprise platform by March 2018.

The company operates the Holiday Inn hotel in Kolkata under a management contract with Intercontinental Hotels Group.

"We are at an advanced stage of launching an IPO and the issue will be completed over the next two months," Dream Gateway director Rishi Jain told PTI.

"We are looking at raising Rs 35-37 crore from the public issue to fund an expansion of the property, diluting 25 per cent stake," he said.

The hotel has been operational since February 2017 and the company is expecting a revenue of Rs 20 crore in the current fiscal, Jain said.

The company is optimistic of a valuation of around Rs 150 crore.

However, according to an analyst tracking the hospitality sector, the expected valuation is on the "higher side".

"With limited data available, the hotel would ideally be valued at Rs 110-120 crore based on replacement cost estimates," Managing Director-India (Hotels & Hospitality Group) JLL, Mandeep S Lamba, said.

Given the hospitality industry has been stressed for a while and as Kolkata is expected to see a continued increase in the inventory of hotel rooms, the market is likely to see some corrections in rates going forward, he said.

Hotels are typically valued by Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) methodology which is considered the gold standard. Other methodologies include EBIDTA multiples and replacement costs.

Jain said that the cash raised through IPO will be used in expanding the 137-room Kolkata property to 215 rooms with an investment of Rs 60-70 crore.

The company also has two hotels in Siliguri and Durgapur in the pipeline.
The fee hike is set to be implemented from October 2, 2020

Even as the H-1B visa issue continues to make headlines here, Indian techies in the US say they are not worried about being asked to return back home just yet  a stark contrast from the uncertainty they faced around the same time last year.

Several Indian H-1B visa holders in the US that Moneycontrol spoke to pointed out that unlike in India, mainstream media outlets in the US were not talking about the self-deportation proposal that McClatchy reported in December.

The news portal said the US government was considering new regulations that could potentially stop hundreds of thousands of foreign workers from keeping their H-1B visas while their green card applications are pending.

I haven't seen any single mainstream news channel here publishing it, said a 34-year old Indian techie whose husband is an H-1B visa holder and works for one of the largest US-based technology companies. Stress is always there about the new rules, but this news about extension or self-deportation being reported in India was over the top, she added.

Most hold the view that while the Trump administration is making good on his campaign promise to curb the misuse of the H-1B visa regime, any large scale change will not come into effect overnight.

There are no H-1B woes really. We (Indian techies) are all at a stage where we dont want to keep worrying about this. We will see what to do if at all an order gets passed or this proposal becomes law, said another engineer who has been in the US for eight years now, and is working with a hardware giant on an H-1B visa.

Agreed a New York-based executive at a US-based financial firm. The mainstream media (in the US) is mostly looking at wider immigration reforms, which includes H1B, as well as immigration of Mexicans into the country,

The H1-B visa programme, with Indian techies beings its biggest recipients, has been an important reason for the Indian IT industrys success over the past two decades.

A foreign worker with an H-1B visa can stay in the US for a maximum of six years, with an initial validity of three years that can then be extended for another three years, according to legal advice site nolo.com.

The total number of Indian engineers on H-1B visas in the US, according to industry insiders, is between 300,000-350,000. This includes employees of Indian IT services and global companies/MNCs.

Last year, when President Donald Trump took office, Indian techies were shaken and worried about their future as uncertainty loomed large over the fate of the H-1B visa programme.

Nothing related to H1B is being prominently reported and they are looking at immigration issues at a holistic level. Sometimes the H1B issues is seen by the liberals as a tool for filling technology requirements, while for the right wing conservation side, it is seen as something that is being misused by foreigners, specifically Indians, said the New York executive quoted above.

The Indian IT industry has often been accused of misusing the H-1B visa system, a claim it has consistently denied. The

Over the course of the last year, the US government has attempted to fix some parts of the H-1B regime, including policy memoranda through the legal immigration agency and an executive order named Buy American and Hire American to suggest reforms to help ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the most-skilled or highest-paid beneficiaries.
Concerned about the deteriorating call drop situation, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will meet service providers on January 10 to discuss the burning issue as also the new service quality norms that have been implemented in the sector.

"We want to convey to the operators, the government's concerns on state of call drops. Service providers have to get their act together," Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters here today.

She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference to mark the completion of the first phase of Bharat Net project.

The meeting with telecom industry CEOs will be chaired by the DoT Secretary.

The meeting is also slated to discuss the new stringent call drop norms that were enforced by telecom regulator TRAI in October last year.

On the same day, DoT will also hold a separate meeting with the telecom regulator on the call drop issue.

The Telecom Commission, meanwhile, will meet tomorrow to discuss multiple issues including some recommendations by Interministerial Group (IMG) on relief measures for the stressed industry, importantly, the raising of spectrum caps.
Representative image

South American country Peru generated its highest export sales to India during January- October 2017 with shipments totalling USD 1.57 billion, as compared to other Asian economies like China, South Korea, Japan and the UAE.

According to the country's Exports and Tourism Promotion Board, Peruvian sales to Asian markets went from USD 10.53 billion (January-October 2016) to USD 15.59 billion in the same period last year.

The target markets included China, South Korea, India, Japan, the UAE, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

"In particular, Peru's sales to India registered the highest growth rate by totalling USD 1.57 billion between January-October 2017, a 126.78 per cent increase over the same term in 2016 (USD 694.16 million)," a statement said.

Also, Indian importers have shown a growing interest in Peruvian avocados, leading to a steady increase in its consumption since 2016, it said.

In 2015, Peru became the second largest exporter of table grapes- Red Globe variety- to India, a position it holds even today. These grapes are typically available in Indian supermarkets between December and April every year.

Peru's exports to India also include gold, silver, copper, Sacha Inchi, Quinoa, Camu Camu, among others.

"With the India-Peru trade agreement discussions, India will be able to move ahead of the stereotype of seeing Latin America through the Brazilian lens.

Open trade barriers between the two countries provide Peru with a new and significant trade partner, because of which the economy is enjoying a surge," said the statement issued by the Commercial Office of the Embassy of Peru.
live bse live

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Shares of companies referred to National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) for bankruptcy proceedings are now a favourite among punters, as per a report in Business Standard.

Last year in June, the Reserve Bank of India has identified 12 companies and come out with a second list comprising 28 accounts worth over Rs 1.5 lakh crore for resolutions under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

The report said these firms shares have risen from 40 percent to 100 percent in the last three months, despite them incurring huge losses and defaulting on their loan repayments.

High net worth individuals are showing a lot of interest in trading the shares of stressed companies on anticipation that these firms have some intrinsic value left in them and many of them are trading below book value.

Some verticals of firms such as Lanco Infratech and Videocon are doing well, giving a return of 100 percent and 65 percent respectively in the last three months. The scrip of infrastructure major Jaypee Infratech is up 70 percent although it is struggling to deliver flats to homebuyers in Noida.

However, analysts have cautioned investors saying that dabbling in these stocks is very risky.
Markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has put in place stricter norms wherein clearing corporations are now required to keep a close tab on losses made by members during intra-day trades.

The move follows discussions about the risk arising out of accumulation of crystallised obligations or profit/loss on trade due to intra-day squaring off of positions.

"The intra-day crystallised losses shall be monitored and blocked by clearing corporations from the free collateral on a real-time basis only for those transactions which are subject to upfront margining.

"For this purpose, crystallised losses can be offset against crystallised profits at a client level, if any," SEBI said in a circular on Monday.

Besides, the regulator said that crystallised losses would be calculated based on weighted average prices of trades executed.

In case, the crystallised losses exceed the free collateral available with the clearing corporation, then the entity concerned would be put under risk reduction mode.

"Adjustment of intra-day crystallised losses shall not be done from exposure free liquid net worth of the clearing member," the circular said.

Currently, the margining system of clearing corporations levies margin based on net buy value of unsettled trades in the cash segment and on the net open positions in the derivatives segments.

"As such, the risk of crystallised obligations (profit/ loss on trade) incurred due to intra-day trades does not get fully captured in the margining system and consequently in the clearing corporation's risk management system for the purpose of providing further exposure to the clearing member," the circular said.

The issue of risk arising out of accumulation of crystallised obligations incurred on account of intra-day squaring off of positions was discussed at SEBI's Risk Management Review Committee meeting.
With an eye on state and general elections, the government is set to roll out a social security scheme across the country for the unorganised sector.

While the organised sector is already covered by various social security laws like those governing provident funds, pension funds and insurance schemes, employees in the unorganised sector have to fend for themselves.

The scheme reportedly aims for universal coverage that is outside the ambit of the EPFO (Employee Provident Fund Organisation) and the ESIC (Employee State Insurance Corporation).

The central government is working with states to bring them on board for part-financing the scheme. In the current scenario, in a company in the organised sector, the employee and employer contribute equal amounts towards EPFO and ESIC. But in the unorganised space, both the central and state governments are expected to be the only contributors and employees will not be made to share the burden.

When implemented, the scheme would be a big boost for employees working in the unorganised sector. The scheme will cover mandatory pension, insurance against disability and death, and maternity coverage, alongside optional medical and unemployment coverage. In short, it will take care of the risks that an employee working in the unorganised sector is exposed to.

However, the move will have repercussions on the economy  some positives and some negative.

Firstly, it will increase government spending and bloat its finances, leaving lesser room for developmental work. Since the coverage is expected to increase multifold, as 83 percent of workers are in the unorganised space, the impact on the overall economy will be huge. The government is yet to work out the cost of this move.

On the other hand, money will flow from the governments account into the provident funds, pension funds and insurance accounts of the individuals. This money will reside in the funds which generally invest in government bonds. In other words, most of the money will come back to the government but there will be an added cost to it as the government will have to repay the amount to the employees along with an interest cost.

The biggest beneficiary will no doubt be the employees as their risk is getting covered. Many employees in the unorganised sector use the Public Provident Fund (PPF) as a proxy for provident fund investments that are available to organised players. With the government taking care of the risk, money will be freed for these employees either to invest in higher yielding investments or can be utilised in spending on consumables or non-consumables, which are both beneficial for the economy.

Apart from these direct impacts, an indirect benefit of the move will be that it will throw up data points like employment and other economic parameters which were not available. It will also help in weeding out a number of non-existent employees that many promoters use to show higher expense and file lower taxes.

A social security scheme for the unorganised sector was long overdue. However, the timing of implementation suggests it is political in nature as the cost of the move will be felt over the next few years but the government can claim a moral victory.
21:13 Siemens bags contract worth Rs 579 cr for Gujarat Metro Link

Siemens on Monday said that it has bagged a contract worth Rs 579 crore for electrification work of Gujarat Metro Link Express.

"Indian mass-transit operator Metro Link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad (MEGA)

Ahmedabad

Company Ltd has awarded an order of approximately Rs 579 crore (Euro 76.04 million) to the consortium of Siemens Ltd India and Siemens AG, Germany for electrification of the 39.2-kilometer Metro Express Link in, Siemens said in a statement.

According to the statement, the line, currently under construction, will run in Ahmedabad city in two corridors.

21:56 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.

20:48 JUST IN | RBI seeks SC permission to initiate insolvency proceedings against Jaiprakash Associates Ltd

RBI on Monday approached the Supreme Court to seek permission for initiating insolvency proceedings against JAL. Homebuyers worried that if insolvency proceedings against JAL is allowed, who will deposit Rs 2000 crore with the Supreme Court registry: Sources

21:55 Nalco eyes Rs 31,000 crore turnover by 2032

State-owned Nalco on Monday announced formulation of a long-term corporate plan, which envisages the aluminium maker to reach a turnover of Rs 31,248 crore and a PAT of Rs 3,010 crore by 2032.

With the release of corporate plan, Mines Secretary Arun Kumar appreciated the efforts of Nalco in formulating a plan that provides a strategic way forward for the company up to 2032The long-term strategy foresees the company to reach a turnover of Rs 31,248 crore and a PAT of Rs 3,010 crore by 2032, the company said in a BSE filing.

The new plan expects the company to reach a turnover of Rs 18,171 crore with a PAT of Rs 1,693 crore by 2024 with the augmentation of the smelting capacity to 1.1 million tonnes and refining capacity to 3.27 million tonnes, it said.

21:53 SEBI tells clearing corps to monitor intra-trade losses

Markets regulator SEBI has put in place stricter norms wherein clearing corporations are now required to keep a close tab on losses made by members during intra-day trades.

The move follows discussions about the risk arising out of accumulation of crystallized obligations or profit/loss on trade due to intra-day squaring off of positions.

The intra-day crystallized losses shall be monitored and blocked by clearing corporations from the free collateral on a real-time basis only for those transactions which are subject to upfront margining. For this purpose, crystallized losses can be offset against crystallized profits at a client level, if any, SEBI said in a circular.

21:47 "Instead of accepting that we are struggling to create jobs, instead of uniting people of all religions and communities together to face the challenge, the govt is busy converting the fear being generated in jobless youth into hatred between communities," Rahul Gandhi said at convention of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin in Bahrain, reports ANI.

21:45 "Your talent, skills, tolerance, patriotism is what India needs today. You have shown us how you have built the countries you have journeyed to," says Rahul Gandhi while addressing Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin in Bahrain, reports ANI.

21:44 Achhe din have arrived in Himachal Pradesh, says Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur

Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur on Monday said that achhe din (good days) had arrived in the state and that his government would not tolerate corruption at any level.

He also said that there was no scarcity of funds for developmental works.

Corruption would not be tolerated at any level and my government would make sincere efforts to fulfil the wish of party leaders to break the jinx and retain power in the next assembly polls, he said at a gathering in Dharotdhar in his home constituency Seraj.

21:41 BMC chief asks hoteliers to strictly follow fire safety norms

The municipal chief on Monday asked restaurant and hotel owners to strictly follow rules related to fire safety at their establishments.

Representatives of the Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association (AHAR) had met Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Commissioner Ajoy Mehta on Monday against the backdrop of the Kamala Mills fire that killed 14 people in the early hours of December 29.

A senior BMC official told PTI that the stern advice was well received and the AHAR representatives assured the civic chief of full cooperation in making restaurants and hotels in the city safe for its patrons.

21:40 Supreme Court stays High Court verdict against 85% pictorial warning on tobacco products

The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the Karnataka High Court order quashing the 2014 government regulation that packets of tobacco products must carry pictorial warning covering 85 percent of the packaging space, saying that "health of a citizen has primacy".

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud was "unimpressed" with the submissions of the Tobacco Institute of India (TII) that the interim stay would harm the fundamental right to do business of tobacco manufacturers.

"Considering the ...submission advanced at the Bar and keeping in view the objects and reasons of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003 and the measures taken by the state, we think it appropriate to direct stay of operation of the judgement and order passed by the High Court of Karnataka," the bench said.

21:35 Congress attacks govt for scrapping defence projects

The Congress on Monday accused the government of compromising national security following reports claiming that it has scrapped various defence projects including the Rs 32,000-crore minesweeper project.

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the scrapping of Make in IndiaMinesweeper Project and the governments opaqueness on INS Arihant are two glaring examples of this compromise.

Indias maritime security is compromised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi government as Chinese threats loom large.

21:25 Gujarat High Court rejects The Wire's plea against Jay Shah's defamation suit

The Gujarat High Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by news portal 'The Wire' seeking quashing of a criminal defamation case filed against it by BJP president Amit Shah's son Jay over an article related to his company.

Justice J B Pardiwala rejected the petition on the grounds that the article, "The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah", is per say "defamatory" and the trial court should proceed with the case.

The High Court, which had earlier directed the trial court to complete the hearing in the case in six months, on Monday withdrew that order.

21:20 Urgent need to raise tax base to achieve fiscal target: SBI report

SBI

India needs to urgently raise its tax base to meet the fiscal deficit target without curbing essential expenditure, says areport.

The country's gross fiscal deficit as percentage of GDP, started shooting up after the 2008 financial crisis, said the report  'India's Public Finance Trends'.

However, with economic recovery gaining pace, the government embarked on the path of fiscal consolidation and has brought down its fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of GDP in 2016-17.

"The states' fiscal deficit, however, has increased. To reach the combined target of 6 per cent fiscal deficit for the Centre and states an alignment of the policies of the Centre and states is required," it said.

21:10 Air India terminates over 400 contractual employees

Disinvestment-bound Air India has terminated the services of over 400 employees who were hired by the airline on contractual basis after their retirement.

The employees affected are those hired for non-technical roles and the move follows an order from the airline's Chairman and Managing Director Pradeep Singh Kharola. The latest directive follows a similar order issued in August, which put on hold proposals for employing recently retired officials as well as renewing contracts for those former employees who were due for an extension.

"The CMD has directed that contract of the retired employees under non-technical category (i.e. excluding pilots, flight dispatchers, service engineers, OPT, OTT instructors, flight safety) be terminated with immediate effect," as per a circular issued by Executive Director-Personnel on January 5.

21:07 Bitcoin is an asset, not a currency: Israels central bank

Israels central bank said on Monday it would not recognize virtual currencies such as bitcoin as actual currency and that it was difficult to devise regulations to monitor the risks of such activity to the countrys banks and their clients.

Deputy Governor Nadine Baudot-Trajtenberg said there had been public complaints Israeli banks were making it difficult for some customers to transfer money from their accounts to buy bitcoin. But this was something the central bank would not be able to address. Other central banks faced the same problem.

The Bank of Israels position is that they should be viewed as a financial asset, Baudot-Trajtenberg told a meeting of Israels parliamentary finance committee, noting that there was no government responsibility for investors in bitcoin.

21:06 Congress Karan Singh Yadav files nomination for Alwar Lok Sabha bypoll

Accompanied by former Union minister Bhanwar Jitendra Singh and supporters, Congress candidate Karan Singh Yadav today filed his nomination for Alwar Lok Sabha bypoll to be held on January 29.

The last date for filing of nominations is January 10. The scrutiny of the nomination papers will take place on January 11 and the last date of withdrawal of nomination is January 15.

After filing his nomination, Yadav said, There is resentment among the public due to bad governance in the state and the Congress is going to win the bypolls.

21:04 Supreme Court to hear on February 6 plea to bring CBI under ambit of RTI Act

The Supreme Court on Monday fixed February 6 for hearing a plea challenging the government's 2011 decision to keep the CBI out of the ambit of the Right to Information Act.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud posted the matter for final hearing after the parties said that they need time to make detailed submissions on the issue.

21:00 G-sec investment limit oversubscribed, FPIs bid for Rs 12K crore

Government bonds attracted bids worth nearly Rs 12,000 crore from foreign investors in Monday's auction, as against the debt investment limit of Rs 6,666 crore on offer, exchange data showed.

The auction for investment limits for such securities has been receiving a good response from foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) in recent past.

The auction was conducted on BSEs ebidxchange platform from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm, after the close of market hours.

20:58 Rahul Gandhi meets Bahrain Crown Prince; discusses bilateral issues

Rahul Gandhi on Monday met with Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa here and discussed a variety of bilateral issues of interest during his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief.

Gandhi, who is here as a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa. He will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf countrys Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, HRH Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain, Gandhi said in a tweet.

20:56 Expect hike in minimum pension to Rs 7.5K per month under EPS-95

Pensioners under EPS-95 may get a minimum of Rs 5,000 a month as interim relief, and Rs 7,500 eventually, in view of the assurances by the Labour Ministry, the organisation pushing for the cause said on Monday.

The pension is Rs 1,000 a month at present, provided under the Employees Pension Scheme 1995 (EPS-95) managed by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

The All India EPS-95 Pensioners Sangharsh Samiti said in a statement that the Labour Minister had assured its delegation, on December 6, 2017, of meeting its demands.

20:51 Supreme Court to hear on February 6 plea to bring CBI under ambit of RTI Act

The Supreme Court on Monday fixed February 6 for hearing a plea challenging the government's 2011 decision to keep the CBI out of the ambit of the Right to Information Act.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud posted the matter for final hearing after the parties said that they need time to make detailed submissions on the issue.

The case was first filed in the Delhi High Court, but later transferred to the top court after the Centre had said that several petitions in this regard have been filed in different high courts across the country.

20:41 Lalu Prasad Yadav to move Jharkhand High Court for bail

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, who is lodged in a jail here after his conviction by a CBI court in a fodder scam case, would move the Jharkhand High Court for bail within the next few days, his lawyer said.

Prasad's lawyer Prabhat Kumar told PTI that Prasad's lawyers will move the high court either on Friday or next Monday.

An official of Birsa Munda Central jail said certified copies of the CBI court's judgement sentencing the 16 fodder scam convicts, including Prasad, were handed over to them on Saturday.

20:38 Trade setup for Tuesday: Top 15 things you should know before Opening Bell

The Nifty which started with a gap on the higher side rose to a fresh record high of 10,631.20 in morning trade on Monday and made a small bull candle on the daily candlestick charts.

The index is now trading well above its crucial short-term moving averages which suggest strength in the ongoing momentum. Investors are advised to stay long with a target of 10,650-10700 in the next few trading sessions.

But, even though the momentum is strong, most of the technical indicators are trading in an overbought zone which suggests that markets could face some selling pressure near key resistance levels.

Read the full report here

Misa

Bharti's

PMLA

The Enforcement Directorate on Monday sought cancellation of the bail to a chartered accountant, accused in a money laundering case and alleged to have links with RJD chief Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharti.

The ED's counsel alleged before Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva that CA Rajesh Agarwal laundered money for various persons through shell companies.

The counsel said Agarwal, the main accused in the case, was wrongly granted bail by the trial court while co-accused  two Delhi-based businessmen brothers Surendra Kumar Jain and Virendra Jain  are in jail under judicial custody.

It sought cancellation of the bail granted to Agarwal, saying since it was an economic offence he should not have been granted the relief.

Iran said on Monday it might reconsider its cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog if the United States failed to respect its commitments in the nuclear deal Tehran struck with world powers in 2015.

US President Donald Trump must decide by mid-January whether to continue waiving US sanctions on Iran's oil exports under the terms of the nuclear pact that eased economic pressure on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear programme.

In October, Trump refused to certify that Iran was complying with the deal, also known by its acronym JCPOA, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was.

20:26 Bengaluru fire update: A case has been registered against 4 persons under the section 304 IPC in connection with fire incident at Kailash bar restaurant in Kumbaara Sangha building that killed five people last night. FSL, Electrical Inspectorate and fire services team inspected the spot of the incident, reports ANI.

Saudi Aramco has invited banks pitching for roles in its stock market listing, including Citi and Goldman Sachs, for meetings in the kingdom in the coming weeks to make their case, according to three banking sources familiar with the matter.

The meetings are an indication that preparations for a 2018 initial public offering, which could be the biggest IPO in history, are progressing despite market speculation it could be delayed or even shelved.

Executives from Citi, Goldman and Deutsche Bank, which are all bidding to be global coordinators for the share sale, are among the teams invited to present their pitches in person, said the three sources, including two bankers who expect to attend the meetings.

The talks will be held at the end of January or beginning of February in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran, where the state oil company is headquartered, they added.

20:23 South Africa trounce India by 72 runs, Vernon Philander wrecker-in-chief with six wickets.

Sukhbir

Badal

A day after Punjab's Congress government launched its farm debt-waiver scheme, the opposition Shiromani Akali Dal on Monday accused the ruling party of defrauding farmers by waiving only a part of their loan.

"Debt-waiver (scheme) is a massive fraud with the farming community. There cannot be a bigger fraud than this," SAD president Sukhbir Badal told reporters here.

The opposition party has decided to meet Punjab Governor V P Singh Badnore on January 12, seeking the dismissal of the Amarinder Singh government. It will also hold a meeting of the core committee of the party on the same day on the issue.

20:19 Bitcoin drops below USD 15,000 as South Korea reviews accounts

Bitcoin fell below USD 15,000 on Monday after South Koreas financial regulator said it and other agencies are inspecting six local banks that offer digital currency accounts to institutions.

Bitcoin, the worlds biggest virtual currency by market value, was last down 7.57 pct at USD 14,902.99 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange.

20:17 Bhima Koregaon violence: RPI workers take out morcha in Sangli

Thousands of Republican Party of India (RPI) workers on Monday participated in a morcha seeking action against perpetrators responsible for the last weeks violence against Dalits in Bhima Koregaon in Pune district.

Local RPI leaders demanded that the judicial inquiry ordered by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis into the violence be completed within a stipulated time and the culprits be awarded punishment.

The morcha was taken out from Vishrambaug locality of the city to the new Collectors office, a distance of around 4 kms.

20:14 Kapil Mohan, the creator of Old Monk, passes away at 88

Brigadier (retd.) Kapil Mohan, former Chairman and MD of Mohan Meakin Ltd and the man behind the rum Old Monk, passed away on January 6. He was 88 years old.

As per reports, Mohan, who was keeping unwell in his last years, died of a cardiac arrest in Ghaziabads Mohan Nagar area. He is survived by his wife Pushpa Mohan.

Recipient of Padma Shri in 2010, Kapil Mohan led the much-needed diversification of the company after he took over the reins of the erstwhile Dyer Meakin Breweries.

Before 1966, Mohan was at the helm of Trade Links Pvt Ltd.

20:13 Nabard plans to almost double balance sheet to Rs 7 trillion in 5 years

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) is looking to almost double its balance sheet to Rs 7 trillion over the next five year from Rs 3.9 trillion now.

The development finance institutions chairman Harsh Kumar Bhanwala said the just legislated Nabard Bill will help in growing its balance sheet size.

Last week, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Amendment) Bill, 2017, was passed by Parliament after the Rajya Sabha okayed it and the new law allows the institution to increase the authorized capital by six times to Rs 30,000 crore from Rs 5,000 crore now. The Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha last August.

20:10 Affordable home-loans next threat to banks: Moodys-ICRA report

Even as a lot of thrust is being given to the affordable housing segment, a report has flagged concerns about the growing delinquencies in this segment, which are expected to continue in 2018.

Competitive pressures and larger exposure to the self-employed are the prime reasons for the build-up of stress in the segment, a joint report by Moodys and its domestic affiliate ICRA said on Monday.

While asset quality is expected to remain stable in the traditional housing segment, delinquencies could further build up in the affordable segment in the calendar year of 2018, ICRAs structured finances head Vibhor Mittal said.

20:01 Centre changes tack on national anthem in cinemas

The central government on Monday changed its stand on playing the national anthem in cinema halls and asked the Supreme Court to modify its order making it mandatory to play the anthem before the start of every movie, sources told CNN-News18.

The government informed the court that it has formed an Inter-Ministerial Committee to frame new guidelines, and said it would decide further action once the panels recommendations come out.

The affidavit said that the Inter-Ministerial Committee, which will be headed by the Additional Secretary (Border Management) in the Ministry of Home Affairs, has been set up by an order on December 5.

The matter is scheduled for hearing on Tuesday.

19:52 Bharat Net phase-2 may be completed by December 2018

The government on Monday expressed hope that second phase of Bharat Net project to provide broadband connectivity and services to 1.5 lakh gram panchayats will be completed ahead of schedule by December this year.

The original timeline for completion of the second phase is March 2019. Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said financial incentives and disincentives should be built into contract clauses to reward players for on-time delivery, and ensure speedy execution of the second phase of the project.

For the second phase, financial incentive and disincentive clauses should be incorporated, Sinha said at an event to mark the completion of the first phase of Bharat Net project and felicitate its implementation partners.

19:49 Wheat output may touch all time high of 100 million tonnes this year: Agriculture Secretary

The country's wheat production is expected to touch an all-time of over 100 million tonnes in the current 2017-18 crop year (July-June) due to likely increase in acreage and yields, Agriculture Secretary SK Pattanayak said on Monday.

In the 2016-17 crop year, wheat production had reached a record 98.36 million tonnes. The previous high was 95.85 million tonnes in 2013-14.

The government has kept a target of 97.50 million tonnes wheat output for the current year. Sowing of wheat, the main rabi (winter) crop, begins from October and harvesting from March.

19:47 Crisil retains 7.6% growth estimate for FY19 on lower base

Attributing the continuing slowdown to the impacts of the demonetisation, GST implementation and weakness in agriculture, rating agency Crisil has maintained its FY19 growth estimate at 7.6 percent on the low base.

"The pace of economic growth has slowed down this fiscal year, which is attributable mostly to the lingering impact of the demonetisation, transitory disruptions caused by the implementation of the goods and services tax (GST), and weak agricultural growth," it said in a note today.

The note comes days after the Central Statistical Office came out with its advanced estimates of growth for FY18 suggesting a slowdown in GDP expansion to 6.5 percent, the lowest in four years.

19:43 Would like tax-free status for term insurance plans: Bajaj Allianz Life chief Tarun Chugh

Private life insurance company Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance is looking for a tax-free status for term insurance plans in the upcoming union budget. In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Tarun Chugh, MD & CEO, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, said that they have also sought a separate section of tax incentives for pension products, similar to what is available for the National Pension Scheme (NPS).

Chugh said that in terms of the businesses, the company has seen a 58 percent group in rated new business and a 65 percent growth in individual rated premiums. In terms of the business mix, the company has 65 percent unit-linked insurance plans while 35 percent comprises of traditional products.

He said that the spurt in the equity markets has also led to millennials entering the space. Millennials are getting into the market and the equity cult is getting better, added Chugh.

Read the full report here

19:39 International Olympic Committee extends the deadline for North Korea participation in Winter Olympics, reports AFP news agency.

19:36 Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje says Padmavat will not be released in the state, keeping in view the sentiments of the people. Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria has been instructed for the same, reports ANI.

19:28 PM Modi asks top police officials to deal with cyber crime on priority

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today drew the attention of the country's top police officials to the problems arising out of social media and cyber crimes, saying they should be dealt with on highest priority.

Speaking at the concluding day of the annual conference of the DGPs and IGPs here at the BSF Academy, the prime minister said that there was an emerging global consensus towards greater information sharing on illicit financial dealings and India could play a key role in achieving this. (PTI)

19:15 Nvidia partners with Uber, Volkswagen in self-driving technology

Nvidia Corp will partner with Uber Technologies Inc and Volkswagen AG as the graphics chipmaker's artificial intelligence platforms make further gains in the autonomous vehicle industry.

The company, which already has partnerships in the industry with companies such as carmaker Tesla and China's Baidu, makes computer graphics chips and has also been expanding into technology for self-driving cars. (Reuters)

18:49 Ahead of Budget 2018, PM Modi to meet economists, sectoral experts on January 10

With about three weeks left for Union Budget 2018-19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet leading economists and sectoral experts at NITI Aayog on January 10 to deliberate on steps which could be taken to boost growth and generate employment.

The meeting, according to a senior government official, will be attended by vice chairman and members of NITI Aayog, members of Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), economists and sectoral experts.

18:37 Jaguar Land Rover global sales up 6.5% in 2017

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover today reported 6.5 percent increase in global sales at 6,21,109 units in 2017.

Sales of Jaguar brand of vehicles during the year were at 1,78,601 units, a growth of 20.1 percent, the company said in a statement.

Land Rover range posted sales of 4,42,508 units in the year, an increase of 1.8 percent, it added. (PTI)

18:19 Rural economy, monsoons to boost FMCG companies in 2018, says report

In the next 12 months, consumer goods companies would see a revival, both in volume and margin terms, with an anticipated revival in the rural sector, said a report.

With a few state elections and expected populist budget, the rural sector is anticipated to be prime beneficiary. This, coupled with improving macros and good monsoon after two consecutive droughts, also augur well, said the report on the consumer goods sector brought by Edelweiss. (PTI)

18:09 VVIP chopper deal: Dubai-based businessman evading probe, ED tells Court

A director of two Dubai-based firms has been "non-cooperative" and evading probe in a money laundering case connected with the Rs 3,600-crore VVIP chopper deal, the Enforcement Directorate(ED) today told a court here.

The probe agency was opposing the plea of Rajeev Saxena, one of the directors of UHY Saxena and Matrix Holdings, seeking cancellation of the non-bailable warrant (NBW) issued against him by the court last year. (PTI)

17:51 Awaiting concrete proposal from Apple: Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu

The commerce and industry ministry is awaiting a concrete proposal from iPhone maker Apple to set up manufacturing unit in India, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu said today.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from Apple...Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu told reporters here.

During a recent meeting with Apple officials, the minister has asked them for a proposal. (PTI)

17:31 L&T shares up nearly 2 percent as arm wins orders worth Rs 2,265 crore

Shares of Larsen & Toubro (L&T) today rose by nearly 2 percent after the company said its construction arm has won orders worth Rs 2,265 crore from Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority.

The stock went up by 1.80 percent to end at Rs 1,338.10 on BSE. During the day, it gained 2.35 percent to Rs 1,345.50 - its 52-week high. On NSE, shares of the company rose by 1.77 percent to close at Rs 1,338.25. (PTI)

17:16 Mercedes tops Indian luxury car market in 2017; sells 15,330 units

Mercedes-Benz continued its hold on the Indian luxury car market, maintaining top position for a third year in a row in 2017 with record sales of 15,330 units, beating rivals BMW and Audi.

The company, which sold 13,231 units in 2016, said it was able to clock 15.86 percent increase in sales on the back of new products and a robust customer centric approach in 2017, which was otherwise a "challenging and a year of missed opportunities" for the industry. (PTI)

17:02 Safe havens to terrorists in Pakistan not acceptable to United States: CIA

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Mike Pompeo has said that Pakistan continues to provide safe havens to terrorists which is not acceptable to America.

US President Donald Trump has asked Pakistan to "cease" being a safe haven for terrorists that threaten the US, the CIA Director said yesterday.

The US has suspended about USD 2 billion in security aid to Pakistan for failing to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani terror network and dismantle their safe havens. (PTI)

16:51 SBI to raise up to USD 2 billion via overseas bonds

The State Bank of India (SBI) plans to raise up to USD 2 billion (over Rs 12,600 crore) by issuing bonds in US dollar or other convertible currency over two fiscals to fund overseas expansion.

"The executive committee of the Central Board.. has approved long term fund-raising in single/multiple tranches up to USD 2 billion," State Bank of India (SBI) said in a regulatory filing.

It said the fund-raising will take place through a public offer and/or private placement of senior unsecured notes in US Dollar or any other convertible currency during 2017-18 and 2018-19. (PTI)

16:42 Tata Motors to show 26 smart mobility solutions at Auto Expo

Homegrown auto major Tata Motors today said it will showcase 26 smart mobility solutions across its passenger and commercial vehicles at the upcoming Auto Expo in February.

The company also said it will have the global premiere of models of some key passenger vehicles (PV) and commercial vehicles (CV) with a new design language. (PTI)

RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, who is lodged in a jail here after his conviction by a CBI court in a fodder scam case, would move the Jharkhand High Court for bail within the next few days, his lawyer said.

"We will read the copy of the judgment and move the high court either on Friday or next Monday," Prasad's lawyer Prabhat Kumar told PTI.

15:47 BJP

Jyotiraditya

Scindia's

A BJP leader in Madhya Pradesh has said that he would break senior Congress leader Jyotiradiya Scindias hands and chop off his tongue if he dares to challenge Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

The threat came from Madhya Pradesh BJP leader Radhe Shyam Dhakad, who is also the president of Kirar Seva Samaj.

15:24 NGT

Haryana

The National Green Tribunal has directed the Haryana government and civic bodies in Palwal district to submit a time-bound action plan with regard to collection, segregation and disposal of solid waste generated in the city.

Siddaramaiah

A Twitter war between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath, mocking each other on the issue of development and governance, has gone viral on the internet.

BJP

Three youths have been arrested in Odisha's Jajpur district for allegedly posting derogatory remarks against a BJP leader on social media.

The trio was held on the basis of a complaint lodged by BJP's state unit secretary Simantini Jena, the officer in-charge of Barachana police station, Anita Sahoo, said.

15:12 Padmavat

Leela's

Bhansali's

Padmavat

Padmavat

Padmavati

Sena

Fadnavis

Sanjaycontroversial film '' is slated to release on January 25, according to India Today. The movie's release has been put off by a couple of months now owing to a few controversial scenes in it and the approval comes after the name of the movie was changed tofromearlier.

The Shiv Sena today said Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' claim that the law and order situation was under control rings hollow as most culprits of the Kamala Mills compound fire here were still at large.

The BJP ally, a partner in the Fadnavis government, also raised the issue of alleged political pressure on BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta to not act against 10-15 illegal pubs and restaurants in the compound after the December 29 blaze in its premises.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today launched a common card for rides on public buses and the metro, terming it a big step in the city's transport sector.

Delhi is the first city in the country to have a common mobility card, which can at present be used on 200 DTC and 50 cluster buses plying on different routes, apart from metro trains.

Drones will now monitor railway projects, aid in crowd management and oversee maintenance work across its zones, railway officials said today.

Cameras (UAV/NETRA) will be used for various railway activities especially project monitoring and maintenance of tracks and other railway infrastructure, the national transporter said in a statement.

14:41 Pragati

NGT

The Delhi government has assured the National Green Tribunal that there would be no felling of trees without requisite permission for carrying out redevelopment work at Pragati Maidan exhibition ground in New Delhi.

The government today expressed hope that the second phase of Bharat Net project to provide broadband connectivity to 1.5 lakh gram panchayats will be completed before time by December this year.

Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said financial incentives and disincentives should be built into clauses for the second phase of the project to reward players for on time delivery.

cos

ISMA

The government has assured that it would consider hiking import duty on sugar from the current 50 per cent to check any cheaper shipments from neighbouring Pakistan, the Indian Sugar Mills Association said today.

In view of steep fall in global prices, Pakistan has not been able to export its surplus sugar and is mulling a subsidy to make outward shipments viable.

Sikar

Fatehpur Shekhawati in Rajasthan's Sikar district shivered under a minimum temperature of minus 1.8 degree Celsius as mercury dropped by nearly one degree Celsius at most places of the state today.

Severe cold reportedly claimed the life of a man in Sikar whose body was found lying near Palsana bus stand.

Two Apple investors are urging the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone addiction among children.

Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, or CalSTRS, said today in open letter to Apple that the company must offer more choices and tools to help youngsters fight addiction to its gadgets.

13:51 DoT

telcos

Concerned about the deteriorating call drop situation, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will meet service providers on January 10 to discuss the burning issue as also the new service quality norms that have been implemented in the sector.

Amid a boycott by opposition parties led by the DMK, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today made his maiden address to the state assembly, urging the Centre to sanction Rs 4,854 crore towards Cyclone Ochki rehabilitation work.

The Central government reduced its energy subsidies  financial benefits provided to boost energy production and consumption  by over Rs 82,000 crore ($15 billion) between 2013-14 and 2015-16, a drop of 38 percent, IndiaSpend reported.

During the same period, carbon-emitter fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas remained the largest beneficiaries.

Amicus

A senior lawyer, appointed as amicus curiae by the Supreme Court, has said that there is no need to reopen Mahatma Gandhi's assassination case, News 18 reported.

On Monday, senior advocate Amarendra Sharan mentioned the matter before a bench headed by Justice SA Bobde. He informed the court that his report has concluded there is no necessity to re-investigate the assassination after six decades.

No one in the White House questions the mental stability of Donald Trump, US' top envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said in response to an allegation against the American President in a controversial book.

Haley, the first-ever Cabinet-ranking official in any presidential administration, defended staffers in the Trump administration as loyal and respecting.

13:22 JNU

The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU) has decided to go ahead with its plan to not mark their attendance as the administration insisted on introducing a mandatory attendance rule.

During a meeting with the JNU vice chancellor this morning, JNUSU president Geeta Kumari said, "we explained to the administration how such a surveillance is going to curtail academic freedom and destroy JNU culture".

The Supreme Court of India has said that it will revisit its verdict on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises consensual gay sex in the country. A Supreme Court Constitution bench will hear the plea filed by a group of LGBT activists.

Chappal

Chor

Jadhav's

A protest by the name of 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' was held outside the Pakistan embassy by a group of Indian-Americans and Balochs over the misbehaviour dispensed to former Indian Naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's kin, Times Now reported.

Aadhaar

The journalist booked by Unique Identification Authority of India for the Aadhaar database breach story said she has earned this FIR and was happy about the development.

"I think I have earned this FIR. I am happy that at least the UIDAI has taken some action on my report and I really hope that along with the FIR, the government of India will see what all breaches were there and take appropriate action, she said.

Naqvi

Saudi Arabia has given its nod to India's plan to revive the option of ferrying Haj pilgrims via sea route to Jeddah, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said in a statement today.

Naqvi made the comment after the signing of annual Haj agreement between India and Saudi Arabia in Mecca.

The Enforcement Directorate today said it has attached assets worth Rs 472 crore, including one in Australia, in connection with its money laundering probe in the PACL ponzi scam case.

The ED had registered a criminal case against the firm in 2015 based on a CBI FIR against the group, its directors and officials.

Kathua

A live mortar shell allegedly fired by Pakistan Rangers earlier this month was found in a field in a village in the border belt of Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua district, leading to panic in the area, police said today.

Security forces recovered the live shell yesterday from Bobiyan village, an official said.

BRD

A major fire broke out today at the state-run BRD Hospital, infamous for deaths of scores of children last year allegedly due to shortage of oxygen, fire department said. No loss of life has been reported so far.

12:10 BJP

bypoll

TMC

The West Bengal unit of the BJP was left red-faced after former TMC MLA Manju Basu turned down the saffron party's offer to contest the upcoming Noapara assembly bypoll.

The BJP central leadership had announced Basu's name as the party's candidate for the byelection yesterday evening. Hours later, Basu told reporters that she is still with the TMC.

DMK

Tami Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today made his maiden address to the state assembly even as the main opposition DMK along with its allies walked out of the House boycotting his speech.

Soon after he arrived, Purohit greeted all members of the House with a 'Vanakkam' and began his address. Even as he began his speech, Leader of the Opposition MK Stalin was on his feet trying to raise some issues.

A sessions court today rejected the bail plea of a 16-year-old student, accused of killing 7-year-old Pradhuman Thakur at the Ryan International School here.

Additional Sessions Judge Jasbir Singh Kundu declined relief to the accused, who is presently under custody.

Imran

Makki

Despite Pakistan losing out on American aid over support to terror groups, Pervez Khattak, a prominent leader of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khans Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), attended a public meeting of the Difa-i-Pakistan Council in Peshawar on Sunday.

Among those present was Abdul Rahman Makki, who was filling in for his brother-in-law and 26/11 attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed, who was barred from attending the meeting by the Punjab government in Pakistan.

Beating England by an innings and 123 runs in the fifth and final Test in Sydney, Australia today sealed the 2017-18 Ashes series 4-0. Steve Smith's side regained the Ashes by winning the first three Tests - the hosts have won seven of the past eight series down under as well as 15 of their past 20 home Tests against England.

NDMC

At least, 30 leading restaurants in Delhi's Khan Market are to be sealed by the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) on Monday for alleged misuse of land, media reports said.

The NDMC has been mandated by a Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee to take action against those using land in contravention of the 2021 master plan, The Times of India reported.

French President Emmanuel Macron today launched a state visit to China in Xian - the starting point of the ancient Silk Road - in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route.

Macron will visit the northern city's famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of Franco-Chinese relations.

Muzaffarnagar

Shamli

Two people have died due to intense cold wave conditions in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, according to the administration.

A 42-year-old man, identified as Pritam Singh, collapsed due to cold at his home in Wajidpur village yesterday. He was rushed to the hospital where he was declared dead, a report from the district headquarter said.

Siddaramaiah

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath engaged in a war of words on Twitter on Sunday after the UP CM entered the poll battleground with a mega rally in Bengaluru.

It all started as the BJP star campaigner launched a scathing attack against the Congress CM for calling himself a Hindu and Siddaramiah replied by teaching Yogi about the Karnataka model of governance with a reference to a reported starvation death in UP. Yogi took the jibe in his stride and reminded Siddaramiah of failings in his own state by pointing at farmer suicides.

Mohan

Bhagwat

After a spat over the unfurling of the national flag in Kerala on 15 August, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is all set to hoist the tricolour again in the Left-ruled state on Republic Day.

He will hoist the flag on 26 January in a school on the outskirts of Palakkad, RSS members said.

UIDAI

Aadhaar

UIDAI

Aadhaar

Firstpost

In the wake of thefiling a case over a report in The Tribune on the breach of details of more than one billioncards, the newspaper on Sunday said authorities have "misconceived" an honest journalistic enterprise, according to a report by

The Tribune's Editor-in-Chief Harish Khare in a statement also said that the newspaper's stories are in the best traditions of responsible journalism.

10:05 Jammu

Bandipora

Four Kashmiri boys were arrested on Sunday in Jammu and Kashmir's Bandipora district for lining up as Pakistan's national anthem was played before the start of a cricket match.

Police said they were looking for the organisers of the match who arranged the shooting of the video.

A former Shiv Sena corporator was killed by unidentified assailants here last night, a police official said today.

Ashok Sawant, 62, a two-term corporator from Samata Nagar in suburban Kandivali, was attacked with choppers while he was returning home after meeting a friend around 11 pm, he said.

6th

A massive fire broke out in the Mumbai City and Sessions Court building in Fort, southern part of the city here on Monday near the University of Mumbais South Mumbai campus next to Rajabai Towers.

According to BMC disaster control 8 fire tenders were rushed to the spot and efforts to douse the fire were on. No casualties were reported so far.

Modi

Rahat

Sushma

One direct phone call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Saudi King in 2015 turned out to be a decisive game changer and facilitated a massive evacuation of Indians and foreigners stranded in war-torn Yemen, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said today.

'Operation Rahat' was launched by Indian Armed Forces to evacuate more than 4,000 Indian citizens and other foreign nationals from Yemen during the 2015 military intervention by Saudi Arabia and its allies. The 11-day evacuation by sea started on April 1, 2015 from Aden port.

Rajya

Sabha

The Rajya Sabha lost half of its working time due to disruptions in the Winter Session during which the contentious triple talaq bill also could not be passed with the government and the opposition trading barbs over it.

The truncated session started on a stormy note with the opposition creating an uproar over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks against his predecessor Manmohan Singh.

US President Donald Trump has asked Pakistan to "cease" being a safe haven for terrorists that threaten the US, the CIA Director Mike Pompeo said today.

The US has suspended about USD 2 billion in security aid to Pakistan for failing to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network terror groups and dismantle their safe havens.

Aadhaar

The Editors Guild of India has expressed concern over an FIR filed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) against the newspaper The Tribune for running an article that allegedly exposed a data breach of the Aadhaar project.

In a statement, the Guild condemned UIDAI's action "to have The Tribune reporter booked by the police as it is clearly meant to browbeat a journalist whose investigation on the matter was of great public interest". It added that the action is "unfair, unjustified and a direct attack on the freedom of the press".

Lodha

Jaypee's

Real estate developers Tata Housing and the Lodha Group have filed initial bids for debt-laden realtor and road builder Jaypee Infratech, the fate of which is now being decided at the Supreme Court and the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), The Economic Times reported.

Two people familiar with the bidding process told ET that both property companies are keen to own Jaypee's Yamuna Expressway, a prime concrete road project that starts at the eastern end of Noida-Greater Noida Expressway and runs up to Agra. The Yamuna Expressway carries heavy traffic at a toll of slightly more than Rs 2 a kilometre for a car.

08:32 Rahul

Rahul Gandhi today embarked on a visit to Bahrain--his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief--where he will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf country's Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

Gandhi, who will be a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Agitating transport unions have been misled about the wage hike, Tamil Nadu Transport Minister MR Vijayabhaskar said, as the indefinite strike call given by them entered its fourth day today.

The unions, which launched the strike on January 4 over wage revision, declared that their agitation would continue till their demands were met.

Aadhaar

The Congress on Sunday accused the NDA government of destroying the Aadhaar programme and called the FIR against The Tribune and its reporter "unfortunate", Firstpost reported.

Alleging that the government had "dictatorial" tenancies, Congress said that the NDA has been silencing every voice of dissent.

Mahanadi

Amidst debate on whether a tribunal is required to resolve the Mahanadi water dispute between Odisha and Chhattishgarh, the state Congress unit today sought immediate intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for amicable settlement of the issue.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi should intervene and ask Chhattishgarh to stop project work on upstream of Mahanadi," Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Prasad Harichandan told reporters.

08:05 Bengaluru

Five employees of a bar-cum-restaurant were charred to death when a major fire broke out at Kumbaara Sangha building in Kalasipalya here in the early hours today, police said.

The incident occurred at 2:30 AM at Kailash Bar and Restaurant when the employees were asleep.

08:00 China December forex reserves rise to $3.14 trillion, highest since September 2016

Chinas foreign exchange reserves rose $20.2 billion in December to $3.14 trillion, beating economists' estimates. This is the highest level since September 2016 and the biggest monthly increase since July, reports Reuters.

In November, the reserves increased by $10 billion.

The increase in December is on the back of tight regulations and a strong yuan, which continued to discourage capital outflows, central bank data showed on Sunday.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected reserves to rise by $6 billion to $3.125 trillion.

07:40 Trump administration believes it should try new policies for Pak

The Trump administration believes that it is time to try something new other than maintaining strategic patience and offering inducements to Pakistan to prevent it becoming a safe haven for terrorists from where they can attack the US and its allies, a senior official said today.

He said the polices followed by the successive US administrations post 9/11 vis-a-vis Pakistan have not worked, reports PTI.

The US is committed to not allowing either Pakistan or Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists from where they can attack the US and its allies, said the senior Trump administration official who spoke to a group of reporters on condition of anonymity.

"These sanctuaries really threaten stability in the region and they continue to fuel the overall terrorism problem that we're facing," he said.
India Economy

Singapore can provide a good base for Indian companies as a civil aviation, trading and financial hub, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean said.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of the two-day ASEAN India Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) 2018 held here, Teo made a vigorous pitch on the opportunities available for Indian businesses in Singapore.

"As a civil aviation, trading and financial hub, we are a good base for Indian companies to work from in order to expand to South-east Asia and beyond," he said at the PBD gala dinner.

The annual conference, that celebrates the achievements and contributions of the Indian diaspora, is being held with an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) theme this year, to mark 25 years of dialogue partnership between India and the regional bloc.

Singapore, the ASEAN chair, is hosting the meeting for the first time in South East Asia.

ASEAN is India's 4th largest trading partner, accounting for 10.2 per cent of Indias total trade.

India is ASEAN's 7th largest trading partner. Trade is back on track and registered an 8 per cent increase in 2016- 17, as compared to the previous year.

Many multinational companies have their headquarters in Singapore, noted Teo.

Today, Indian companies form the largest contingent of foreign companies here: there are more than 8,000 of them, double the number in 2009.

Singapore, he said, plays a key role in connecting many companies from all corners of the world who use the country as an operational base, among them more than 7,500 Chinese ones registered here.

These Singapore-based companies form a vibrant community, and can work together to tap on the country's business infrastructure and its network of 20 implemented free trade agreements with 31 trading partners to help them expand abroad, said Teo.

Noting the strong turnout from Indian and Singapore businesses - many of which operate across the region - at the conference, Teo also made a pitch for businesses to urge governments to facilitate the ease of doing business and to enact policies to attract greater investments and cross-border partnerships.

"Businesses can play an important role by encouraging governments, both at national and state levels, to be more competitive, responsive and plugged into global value chains," The Straits Times quoted the deputy premier as saying.

He added that, as ASEAN chair, Singapore is committed to deepening the group's relations with its key partners, including India.

Two events on the horizon will help further enhance ties: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's trip to India later in the month for the ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit - his first ASEAN-related summit as 2018 chair - and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Singapore later in the year to deliver the keynote address at the Shangri-la Dialogue.

Teo also detailed three key areas in which ASEAN and India can work together more closely: economic integration, connectivity and digital technologies.

Southeast Asia and India represent a quarter of the world's population - 1.8 billion people - and a combined GDP of more than USD 4.5 trillion.

By 2025, India's consumer market is expected to become the fifth largest in the world, while South-east Asia will see a doubling of middle-class households to 163 million.

"Against this backdrop, we are starting from a modest base," said Teo, noting that ASEAN-India trade accounted for only 2.6 per cent of the bloc's external trade in 2016.

"There is much scope to strengthen our linkages and trade ties," the daily quoted Teo as saying.

He called for ASEAN and India to press on with economic integration, pledging that Singapore, as ASEAN chair, will do what it can to secure the support of India and all other Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership countries to advance negotiations on the pact.

Connectivity can be boosted too, said Teo, noting that with India's strategic location, maritime and air connectivity can be expanded to bring the country closer to the rest of ASEAN.

He noted that India has many airports ready and available to connect many more points in ASEAN.

"The key to unlocking this potential is to further liberalise air services as Singapore has done," said Teo, adding that India could start, as a pilot project, to allow one or two of its key cities to have open skies with those in ASEAN.

Thirdly, ASEAN and India - both fast-changing markets with an appetite for innovative solutions - can cooperate in digital technologies.

There are opportunities for platforms such as India's e- payment and digital identification systems to be harmonised with those in the region.

On the security front, Teo, who is also Coordinating Minister for National Security, was heartened to see that defence cooperation between India and ASEAN has intensified.

India, which is located strategically along important sea-routes from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, is integral to the security in the region, he noted.

"ASEAN and India share a common interest to keep these vital conduits of trade and economic exchange open," said Teo.

"And it is crucial that we continue to uphold our shared principles of the freedom of navigation and respect for the rule of law."

Earlier today, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is on two-day visit to Singapore, said that India's dialogue partnership with ASEAN has evolved into a strategic partnership and the Indian diaspora provides a platform for stronger ties with the grouping.
Durba Ghosh

The first post-GST budget, potentially the last one for Modi-led central government, is expected to be a populist one for obvious reasons.

The startup ecosystem is expecting to feature heavily in the upcoming budget by a government which is adamant on promoting a digital economy.

On top of their minds are issues related to taxation. Several startups have faced unfair scrutiny from Income Tax department since last year overvaluations at which capital was raised from angel investors. At the heart of the matter is the "angel tax" clause introduced in the Income Tax Act in the 2012 budget.

The Indian Income Tax Act states that any consideration that if a company receives from a resident in excess of a fair value, then such shares will be taxed as 'income from other sources'.

But the critical question boils down to what can be considered a fair value?

At present, the angel tax rate stands at a whopping 30 percent, which according to Nasscom has resulted in a 53 percent drop in angel funding during the first half of 2017.

We have spoken about this issue. The methods of assessment in India are flawed, which creates a mismatch between how investors assess a startup and how tax authorities do the same. It is very arbitrary, says prominent angel investor Mohandas Pai, who has invested in over 40 startups startups such as Zoomcar, Tripoto, Tracxn, GoCoop, LetsVenture, HomeLane, Zimmber and others.

Startup investors are hopeful that the government will resolve the issue of angel tax in the upcoming budget, which is one of the major key reasons for a sharp fall in angel investment for startups in 2017.

Another prominent angel investor Sharad Sharma, who is also the co-founder of Indian Software Products Industry Round Table  iSPIRIT, feels the angel tax is arbitrary, but it isnt the only factor that is pulling down angel investment in the country.

The startup ecosystem is witnessing a seismic change. Policies will evolve accordingly. iSPIRIT is strongly pushing for the abolition of Angel Tax, but that is not necessarily a budget issue. The government recognises it so we hope it will happen in due course, Sharma says.

In the quarter ending June for instance, venture capital investments in startups in India declined by over 25 percent from a year ago. The amount slid to USD 275 million in 78 deals from last years USD 309 million in 104 investments, according to a report by research firm Venture Intelligence.

Ishan Singh, an angel investor part of Mumbai Angels Network agrees with iSpirt's Sharma. Singh is optimistic about 2018 and says that the cautious sentiment among investors is due to other macro factors such as demonetization and GST, while angel tax is just part of the problem.

Some reports suggest a 30 percent drop in startup and Series A investments in 2017. Most reports suggest this due to lack of Series A exits and investors being wary of the sector. However, this is not entirely true. The fact is that 2017 saw exits of USD 2.55 billion, which is nearly 40 percent higher than the previous year, Singh says.

But no doubt, Angel Tax remains to be a bone of contention between authorities and investors, even after the government exempted 'innovative' startups from this tax in 2016 budget.

Whether a startup is innovative or not, currently depends on a certification by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), which is further weighed down by several other riders. This has led to several companies not being incubated inside government registered incubators or eligible for government grants.

I as an investor have submitted a mammoth amount of documentation to support the funding and valuation reasoning. Its kind of harassment. Angel Tax must go... We require more angel capital. But angel tax has a reverse effect, Manish Singhal, founder of Pi Ventures says.

While investors are hope to get more clarity on the innovation clause, the solution to safeguard angel investment, Pai says, is to allow only accredited angel investors to be part of the system.

Angel tax is to prevent unsafe money entering the system. Since there are concerns that investments in startups may not be necessarily made by genuine investors, angel groups and genuine high net worth individuals can be accredited just like venture capital funds are. (The government should) allow HNIs to register as accredited angel investors, advises Pai.

Venture investor Ankit Totla, who recently launched a unique platform Investimonial to connect genuine investors with aspiring start-up entrepreneurs feels that tax authorities must be educated and made aware of the valuation process to avoid a mismatch between calculations.

Tax authorities have a very narrow view of any entity that is earning profits. That legacy point of view has to change to let startups flourish, he adds.

The investors are expecting the upcoming budget to also announce concrete measures for continued push and incentive for digital payments.

Expanding the coverage of Mudraa and other credit guarantee schemes to cover new age business models and fintech platforms will help the sector to get more access to credit and digital existence. Secured API access to customer information using GST system and simplification around GST will be an additional benefit, Totla says.

Investors have also raised concerns over complicated rules of taxation on employee stock options.

Currently, a tax is levied on exercising the employee stock option, which makes it difficult to hold on to the stocks.

Tax should rather be levied on the sale of such stock options. We want people to hold on to their stocks, but the current tax format prevents that, Pai says.
CNBC-TV18 brings you a brand new week of Bull's Eye. It's the 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, Vishal Malkan and Kunal Saraogi battle it out for top honours.

Below their top stock picks and analysis:

Ruchit Jain of Angel Broking

Buy Kolte-Patil Developers with a stoploss at Rs 358 and target of Rs 400

Buy Caplin Point with a stoploss at Rs 640 and target of Rs 740

Buy Sintex Plastic with a stoploss at Rs 82 and target of Rs 100

Buy PG Electroplast with a stoploss at Rs 415 and target of Rs 490

Vishal Malkan of malkansview.com

Buy Hexaware Technologies with a stoploss at Rs 345 and target of Rs 375

Buy JSW Energy with a stoploss at Rs 91 and target of Rs 98

Buy L&T Finance Holdings with a stoploss at Rs 173 and target of Rs 185

Buy Syndicate Bank with a stoploss at Rs 78 and target of Rs 87

Kunal Saraogi of Equityrush

Buy India Cements with a stoploss at Rs 196 and target of Rs 205

Buy Bajaj Finance with a stoploss at Rs 1800 and target of Rs 1850

Buy United Spirits with a stoploss at Rs 3850 and target of Rs 4050

Buy Just Dial with a stoploss at Rs 540 and target of Rs 570
live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

Shares of Hindustan Construction Company gained 5 percent intraday on Monday as investors cheered a recent order win by the company.

The companys joint venture has been awarded a contract worth Rs 484 crore for the metro rail project in Pune.

HCC is the lead partner in the JV with AL FARA'A and has 51 percent stake in the JV. "The contract is for construction of eight elevated metro rail stations viz. Vanaz, Anand Nagar, Ideal Colony, Nal Stop, Garware College, Deccan, Sambhaji Park and PMC on Line II of Pune Metro Rail Project," the company said in a filing to the exchanges on Monday morning.

Further, it added that the work involved general and structural civil works of the station buildings and architectural and site development.

This is the second order that the firm has received from the project, with the earlier one being construction of nine elevated stations on Line I.

At 10:01 hrs Hindustan Construction Company was quoting at Rs 43.45, up Rs 1.55, or 3.70 percent, on the BSE. It touched an intraday high of Rs 44.00 and an intraday low of Rs 42.05.
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries shares closed at Rs 591.60, rising 2.22 percent after sources told CNBC-TV18 that the US Food and Drug Administration is expected to inspect company's Halol facility for 2 weeks.

The re-inspection of plant by the US Food and Drug Administration is likely to begin on February 12 and end on February 23, according to reports.

Sources said the US FDA inspection dates could change on account of technicalities.

In December 2015, the USFDA had issued a warning letter to Halol unit (Gujarat), which accounts for around 20 percent of US Sales for Sun Pharma.

The plant was re-inspected by USFDA in November-December 2016 & issued 9 observations.

Sun Pharma has no comment w.r.t re-inspection of Halol facility.
The Enforcement Directorate on Monday sought cancellation of the bail to a chartered accountant, accused in a money laundering case and alleged to have links with RJD chief Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharti.

The ED's counsel alleged before Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva that CA Rajesh Agarwal laundered money for various persons through shell companies.

The counsel said Agarwal, the main accused in the case, was wrongly granted bail by the trial court while co-accused  two Delhi-based businessmen brothers Surendra Kumar Jain and Virendra Jain  are in jail under judicial custody.

It sought cancellation of the bail granted to Agarwal, saying since it was an economic offence he should not have been granted the relief.

Meanwhile, Agarwal's counsel claimed that he has not yet received the complete paperbook after which the court asked the ED to supply the documents.

The court listed the matter for consideration on February 13 and directed Agarwal's counsel to file his response to ED's plea seeking cancellation of bail.

Additional Solicitor General Sanjay Jain, appearing for the ED, had earlier told the court that the anti-money laundering agency was probing a separate graft case against Bharti, with whom Agarwal is suspected to have had links.

The ED has claimed that Agarwal was associated with some transactions involving a firm, allegedly linked to Rajya Sabha member Bharti, which is under the scanner for suspected tax evasion.

Agarwal, who was arrested on May 23 last year in connection with a Rs 8,000 crore money laundering racket allegedly involving two Delhi-based brothers, was granted bail on September 4 by the trial court, which said no purpose would be served by keeping him in custody.

The case had emerged after the ED filed a criminal complaint in February last year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

It was based on a charge sheet filed by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office against certain individuals and firms "for providing accommodation entries by accepting funds from their beneficiaries through mediators and converting the same into share premium transactions in the beneficiary company".

The ED claimed that the entire racket could be worth about Rs 8,000 crore.

It recently filed a second charge sheet against Misa Bharti and her husband in the case before the trial court.

In July last year, ED filed the first charge sheet in the case against various accused, including Agarwal, but it did not make Lalu's daughter an accused. However, the document contained her name.

It had raided the farmhouses of Bharti and her husband Shailesh Kumar in Delhi in relation to the case being probed against Agarwal, the Jain brothers and others, who are alleged to have laundered money using over 90 shell companies.

Besides Agarwal and the Jain brothers, it included the names of around 35 people and the firms as accused.

The ED also claimed that Agarwal was instrumental in providing accommodation entries to many high-profile people and political entities to help launder their slush funds. These include those being probed by the Income Tax Department in a Rs 1,000 crore dubious land deal case.

The ED had in May last year filed a charge sheet against the Jain brothers. It had also attached agricultural land worth Rs 1.12 crore belonging to them in Bhatti village in the National Capital Region.
Pensioners under EPS-95 may get a minimum of Rs 5,000 a month as interim relief, and Rs 7,500 eventually, in view of the assurances by the labour ministry, the organisation pushing for the cause said today.

The pension is Rs 1,000 a month at present, provided under the Employees' Pension Scheme 1995 (EPS-95) managed by the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

The All India EPS-95 Pensioners Sangharsh Samiti said in a statement that the labour minister had assured its delegation, on December 6, 2017, of meeting its demands.

It said the minister had assured the Samiti that their demands including a minimum pension of Rs 7,500 would be taken up for discussion with the Prime Minister as well as the finance ministry.

It had demanded that all the 60 lakh pensioners under the EPS-95 scheme should be provided with a minimum monthly pension of Rs 7,500 and as an interim relief, all of them should be given Rs 5,000 per month.

The Samiti said the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Labour also discussed their demands in their meeting held on January 5.

There are around 60 lakh pensioners out of which around 40 lakh are getting less than Rs 1,500 per month at a time when the government has about Rs 3 lakh crore of pension funds, the Samiti had said earlier.
Nadia (image courtesy: Google)

Google India is paying a tribute to Mary Evans Wadia on her 110th birth anniversary with a special Doodle. Wadia, Indias first stuntwoman and late actress, was also known as Fearless Nadia.

She was born on January 8, 1908, to a Scottish father Herbert Evans and a Greek mother Margret in Perth, Western Australia. Her birth name was Mary Ann Evans.

Nadia came to Bombay at the age of five when her father was transferred to India but had to move to Peshawar after the untimely death of her father. She acquired skills such as horse riding, hunting, fishing, and shooting during her stay there.

In 1928, she moved back to Bombay with her family and started working as a salesgirl in the Army & Navy Store. She then came in contact with Russian dancer, Madame Astrova, who runs a ballet dance school who recognised Marys natural talent and selected her to be a part of her travelling troupe.

Her talent was first spotted by Eruch Kanga, a Lahore-based cinema owner and recommended her to JBH Wadia and Homi Wadia, the brothers who owned the production called Wadia Movietone.

They asked her to learn Hindi and gave her a small role in their movies called Desh Deepak and Noor-e-Yaman which were well received by the audience.

The brothers launched her as a lead heroine in 1935 film Hunterwali. She was given the nickname Fearless Nadia after the movie by the future husband, Homi Wadia. The film proved to be a huge success and she later went on to act in a number of stunt movies.

The character Jaanbaaz Julia from the movie Rangoon featuring Kangana Ranaut in lead role is inspired by the life of Fearless Nadia.

She married Homi Wadia in 1961 and became Nadia Wadia.
The Gujarat High Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by news portal 'The Wire' seeking quashing of a criminal defamation case filed against it by BJP president Amit Shah's son Jay over an article related to his company.

Justice J B Pardiwala rejected the petition on the grounds that the article, "The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah", is per say "defamatory" and the trial court should proceed with the case.

The High Court, which had earlier directed the trial court to complete the hearing in the case in six months, on Monday withdrew that order.

This means there is no time-frame for the trial court to complete the hearing.

S M Vatsa, the lawyer for the author of the article and editors of the news portal, had maintained the news report was not "defamatory," and the facts presented in it were based on public documents.

The petitioners had maintained the article was a part of investigative journalism and filing a criminal defamation suit against it was against the freedom of the press.

Jay Shah's lawyer S V Raju, on the other hand, had maintained the article was "defamatory" and the two witnesses examined by the lower court had established that the reputation of his client was tarnished due to its publication.

Jay Shah had moved the lower court alleging criminal defamation by the petitioners after the article published by the website claimed his company's turnover grew exponentially after the BJP-led government came to power at the Centre in 2014.

After the suit was filed on October 9 last year, the court initiated proceedings against them under the CrPC section 202 (to inquire into a case to decide whether or not there is sufficient ground for proceeding).

The suit has been filed against the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Siddharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and the Foundation for Independent Journalism.

The foundation publishes 'The Wire'.

With the quashing of the plea, the matter is expected to come up for hearing in the lower court tomorrow.

Jay Shah has separately filed a civil defamation suit of Rs 100 crore against the website over the article.

Jay Shah had rejected the charge made in the article, insisting the story was "false, derogatory and defamatory".
India's dialogue partnership with ASEAN has evolved into a strategic partnership and the Indian diaspora provides a platform for stronger ties with the grouping, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said today.

Addressing the Indian diaspora at the ASEAN-India Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here, Swaraj reaffirmed India's commitment to ASEAN.

"We are here to reaffirm our commitment and to share the course of our journey ahead to the future of India and ASEAN in the world," Swaraj told some 3,000 delegates.

"Our diaspora provides a platform for a stronger relationship between India and ASEAN countries," she said.

Noting the 25-year milestone of ASEAN-India partnership, she said, "Our dialogue partnership has evolved into a strategic partnership."

"India's engagement with the ASEAN region lies in the clarity of the principles that we share. We believe that when all nations adhere to international rules and norms and when we conduct on the basis of sovereign equality and mutual respect, our nations feel secure and our economies prosper, Swaraj said.

"As India's economy grows its ties will deepen, its trade and investment flow will grow, she said, emphasising that ASEAN was a part of Indias Act East Policy.

She said states play a vital role in India's progress and advancing the country's economic ties with the world.

She highlighted the presence of Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal at the gathering and underlined that the North East will grow and become a bridge to South East Asia.

"Our North East region will prosper when it is better connected to South East Asia and when the North East becomes our bridge to South East Asia, we will be closer to realising our hopes for India and ASEAN ties," she said.

She called for addressing the common challenges in the region like creating skills for the digital age, generating jobs in the age of disruption, meeting the need of rapid urbanisation, protecting the bio-diversity and making the energy sources cleaner.

"We are moving from industrial age to information age. The global power balance is shifting, and the relation between nations are changing, said Swaraj.

"There is interesting new technology but unsettled question of history still divides us. At the same time, we see progress and opportunities as never before, said the minister.

"It is the time for India and South East Asia to work for prosperity for its people and secure a peaceful future for new generation," she stressed.

ASEAN is India's 4th largest trading partner, accounting for 10.2 per cent of Indias total trade.

India is ASEAN's 7th largest trading partner. Trade is back on track and registered an 8 per cent increase in 2016- 17, as compared to the previous year.

New Delhi will host a commemorative summit on January 25 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Dialogue Partnership between India and the ASEAN in which all the leaders of the grouping are expected to participate.

ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
One direct phone call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Saudi King in 2015 turned out to be a decisive game changer and facilitated a massive evacuation of Indians and foreigners stranded in war-torn Yemen, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said.

'Operation Rahat' was launched by Indian Armed Forces to evacuate more than 4,000 Indian citizens and other foreign nationals from Yemen during the 2015 military intervention by Saudi Arabia and its allies. The 11-day evacuation by sea started on April 1, 2015 from Aden port.

Addressing the Indian diaspora at the ASEAN-India Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) here, Swaraj said that relentless Saudi bombing of Yemenese locations had made evacuation of Indian civilians next to impossible.

She gave a blow-by-blow account of how the 'Operation Rahaat' in Yemen was successfully carried out.

Swaraj said that she approached Modi and suggested that the excellent rapport he enjoyed with Saudi King (Salman) be put to good use.

Modi then made a direct phone call to the King in Riyadh, requesting a safe passage for Indian nationals and evacuation efforts and sought a halt in bombings for a week, she said.

According to Swaraj, the Saudi King replied that India's request was too important to be ignored but also expressed his inability in bringing about a total halt to the bombings.

The Saudi King, due to the friendship with Modi, agreed to halt bombings between 9 AM and 11 AM daily for a week, the minister said.

Seizing the opportunity, Swaraj claimed that she requested the Yemenese authorities to open their Aden port and airport in Sanaa, so that civilians could be evacuated to Djibouti with alacrity for two hours daily for a week.

"Yemenese told me they will do anything for the Indians," Swaraj said, addressing the gathering of over 3000 people, mostly belonging to the Indian diaspora, in the presence of Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean.

This coordination set in motion a critical evacuation exercise of not only 4,800 Indians but also 1,972 people from other countries in 'Operation Rahat' which was led from the front by Minister of State for External Affairs and former army chief General (retired) VK Singh, she added.
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The Road and Transport Ministry is likely to push for 'mandatory' phasing out of old truck and buses from Indian roads, reports CNBC TV-18.

According to sources, the Ministry is considering hardening its stand on scrapping old trucks and buses by setting 15-years or 20-years as upper age cap. However, it is yet to take final call.

The move will affect over 11 lakh trucks and buses plying on Indian roads. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has already imposed ban on trucks, buses above 15 years in New Delhi.

Old cars will remain out of the ambit of this new policy, which is likely to be announced in next six to eight weeks, according to sources.

Sources say the Road Ministry may write to the Finance Ministry for GST benefits for replacements of old CVs "with or without incentives".

While the Road Ministry is still mulling over the upper age cap limit, sources say that majority of the Voluntary Scrappage Policy is likely to remain voluntary.

The move is likely to be a big boost for Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra & Mahindra as it would create new demand for trucks and buses.

Earlier, Road and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari had said that a draft policy for scrapping old vehicles was prepared and presented to the Cabinet. The government had also appointed a management consultancy to come up with a policy which entitles those disposing their old vehicle to a discount while buying a new one.

In September last year, Gadkari had said that the government would start a vehicle scrappage scheme as soon as it gets a go-ahead from the GST Council.

We have requested the Finance Ministry to find a way out for including the scrapping policy in GST council. Once that comes into effect we can further develop the Kandla auto cluster in Gujarat, added Gadkari.

The Society of Indian Automobile Manufactures (SIAM) has been pushing strongly to implement a scrappage incentive scheme that will push out 15-year-old polluting trucks and buses out of the market and generate demand for new trucks.
Armed with a high court order, the Yogi Adityanath government today banned the use of loudspeakers at temples, mosques and other public places without permission and set January 15 as the deadline to remove the amplifiers.

After receiving flak from the Allahabad High Court over noise pollution in Uttar Pradesh, the state government also issued detailed directives on the use of permanently installed loudspeakers at these places.

The high court had last month asked the state government whether the loudspeakers or public address systems at mosques, temples, churches and gurdwaras, among other places, were installed after obtaining a written permission from the authorities concerned.

Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said, "On the directions of the court regarding ensuring implementation of noise pollution control rules, a government order giving detailed instructions has been issued."

This practically implies that sound should not go beyond the periphery of the public or private place, Kumar said.

The 10-page-order has directed a survey of permanently installed loudspeakers and issuance of show cause notice to those using them without requisite permission.

If the permission to install loudspeakers at religious or public places was not sought before January 15, the government would start removing these from January 20. After that, action will be initiated under noise pollution control laws.

A format for applying for permission, issuance of permission and action against those who neither apply for permission nor comply with terms and conditions of permission has also been issued.

It also requires the district magistrates to categorise areas into industrial, commercial, residential and silence zones. Each area has separate maximum limits for permissible sound levels.

The loudspeakers installed in public places cannot have a sound level more than 10 decibels above the ambient noise level at the periphery of a public place and 5 decibels above the ambient noise level at the periphery of a private place, Kumar said.

The Lucknow bench of the high court had on December 20 sought to know as to what action has been taken against such unauthorised installations and also against the officers who failed to ensure mandatory requirement of obtaining written permission in their area.

It directed the principal secretary (home) and the chairman of the UP Pollution Control Board to file their personal affidavits along with the information sought on February 1.

The division bench of justices Vikram Nath and Abdul Moin issued the directions on a PIL moved by lawyer Moti Lal Yadav, seeking strict compliance of the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules that had been framed in 2000.

Noting that the right to live in freedom from noise pollution and the right to sleep was a facet of Article 21 of the Constitution, the bench cautioned the officials to appear in person before it, if their personal affidavits were not filed till the next hearing.
Mithulal Bafna, a Thane resident, has filed a complaint with the Maharashtra Medical Council against the doctors of Mumbai's Hinduja Hospital for convincing him to take to a new and expensive heart valve procedure for his ailing wife that they claimed was "200 percent safe", reports the Times of India.

Despite the assurance, Bafna lost his wife a fortnight ago. The procedure was unsuccessful because the heart valve "fell" into her heart during a procedure carried out in the presence of the hospital's top heart specialists.

The new procedure - transcatheter mitral valve repair - costed Bafna Rs 43 lakh. With the doctors giving him the assurance that his wife will be back home in five days, he was ready to pay the hefty fee. But his wife went into a coma for nearly two months and died a few minutes after she left the hospital in an ambulance on December 19.

The hospital refunded Rs 12.47 lakh to Bafna on "humanitarian grounds" with authorities claiming the patient was taken care of without any negligence.

The family, however, claim they were not informed of how risky the procedure was and said they never met the cardiologist Ravinder Singh Rao before the procedure. Bafna told the paper he would have never gone forward with the procedure had he known how risky it was. He also said his wife's condition did not really warrant an immediate fix.

The imported valve, of which the family paid Rs 11 lakh, actually costed Rs 1.5 lakh as per the sale papers.

One of the doctors told the paper the family had apparently threatened him over the expenses.

Apart from Rs 12.47 lakh refund received from Hinduja, Bafna got an insurance claim of Rs 11 lakh.

"We were told the total expense would be Rs 20 lakh, but it ballooned," said Bafna's son-in-law Bharkatiya.

On the other hand, the doctors responsible for the case disagree on the family's claims. The ones involved were Medical Director Sanjay Agarwala, Cardiac Surgeon Kushal Pandey and Rao.

Pandey had been the doctor to the deceased when she was operated on six years ago for an unusually small mitral valve. He said she was very sick and had hardly six months to live.

Agarwala told the paper, "The valve failed to deploy but the surgeons saved the day and fixed a mechanical valve."

Dr Rao, who carried out the procedure, said, "Valves slip away after placement in 20 percent of these cases. This is valve embolism, a well-documented entity."He also said that he had waived his charges for this case.

The doctors said the patient did not have an option but to undergo the surgery as she had slim survival chances. Pandey said if and when the valve failed to be deployed they do a 're-do surgery'. "She was critical for the first 48 hours. But she made it back to the ward. She was recovering till she vomited and that triggered an infection," he said.
New Delhi: A view of Parliament in New Delhi on Sunday, a day ahead of the monsoon session. PTI Photo by Kamal Singh (PTI7_16_2017_000213B)

The Rajya Sabha lost half of its working time due to disruptions in the Winter Session during which the contentious triple talaq bill also could not be passed with the government and the opposition trading barbs over it.

The truncated session started on a stormy note with the opposition creating an uproar over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks against his predecessor Manmohan Singh.

The remarks, made during the Gujarat elections campaign, led to acrimonious exchanges between the two sides in the Upper House with the Congress-led opposition demanding an apology from the prime minister on the issue.

The matter was, however, resolved with the intervention of Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu, who helped both sides sit together and amicably resolve the dispute.

The matter ended with the sides making statements in the House, stressing that they respected the high posts of the prime minister as well as the former prime minister, and would not say anything to denigrate them.

The opposition also raised the issue of remarks made by Union minister Anantkumar Hegde against the Constitution and the attacks on Dalits in Bhima-Koregaon in Pune district on January 1, which led to uproarious scenes and disruptions.

However, when the triple talaq bill was introduced for consideration in the Rajya Sabha, the opposition brought two amendments in it for sending it to the Select Committee.

The House saw sharp exchanges over the issue, with the treasury benches blaming the opposition for stalling the key legislation seeking to empower women's rights and make triple talaq a cognisable offence with jail up to three years.

However, the opposition led by the Congress was adamant to send the bill to the Select Committee for further scrutiny.

The bill would now be taken up in the Budget Session which starts later this month.

The Rajya Sabha lost 34 hours working time to such disruptions.

Chairman Naidu urged members to seriously introspect and not treat Parliament as an extension of politics, which is marked by deep divisions and acrimony.

The session which started on December 15 had 13 sittings in all. The House, however, tried to make up this loss by sitting late for about three hours to complete legislative and other important businesses.

It worked for 41 hours that saw the passage of nine Government Bills.

The bills that were passed in the House included the Companies (Amendment) Bill, the Indian Institutes of Management Bill, the Indian Forest (Amendment) Bill, the Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy Bill and the National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Second (Amendment) Bill.

Besides, the Repealing and Amending Bill, the Repealing and Amending (Second) Bill, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Bill, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Amendment) Bill were also passed.

There were 51 special mentions on matters of public importance which were made during the session. Fifty-one matters were also raised with the permission of the Chair.

The House also discussed during short duration discussions the issues of excessively high levels of air pollution in Delhi, the state of the economy, investment climate and job creation in the country and the need to address the challenge of rising unemployment.

During the session, 19 Private Members' Bills were introduced and one Private Members' Bill namely the Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2016 (insertion of new article 16A) was discussed and motion for consideration of the Bill was negatived.

However, no Private Members' Resolution could be discussed during the Session. During the Session, 110 reports/statements of various parliamentary committees were also tabled.

The issue of disqualification of two former JD-U members Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar Ansari from the membership of the Rajya Sabha with effect from December 4, 2017, under the tenth schedule of the Constitution, also came up.

The House was informed by the Chair about the resignation of three sitting members - Manohar Parrikar, Mukul Roy and M P Veerendra Kumar

During the session, the House made references to the passing away of Shri Arjan Singh, Marshal of the Indian Air Force and 12 former members of the Rajya Sabha.

Twelve new ministers, inducted into the Union Council of Ministers, were introduced by the prime minister and the new secretary general, Rajya Sabha, was also introduced by the chairman to the House.

The House bid farewell to three members, Karan Singh, Janardan Dwivedi and Parvez Hashmi, representing the NCT of Delhi, whose term of office would expire on the January 27.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj made a statement regarding the meeting of the family members of Kulbhushan Jadhav with him in Pakistan and the situation arising there. Members of various parties and groups also expressed their concern.

The Minister of Commerce and Industry also laid a statement regarding 'India's stand in the WTO'.

Fifty statements on the status of implementation of the recommendations contained in the reports of various DRPS Committees were also laid on the Table of the House.

A Report of the Inquiry Committee in respect of Justice S K Gangele, Judge, Madhya Pradesh High Court were presented on the Table of the House.

During the Session, 210 Starred Questions and 2,239 Unstarred Questions were admitted and answered. Of these 46 Starred Questions were orally answered.
Samsung has patented a 3D touch system possibly for its unannounced bendable Galaxy phonethe Samsung Galaxy X.

Reported by GSMArena, the patented material bends when it is pressed by a finger it allows the screen to measure the force of the press. This is similar to the resistive touchscreen of previous generation smartphones.

However, Samsung is not the first company to come up with 3D touch. Apple had introduced the feature in 2015. Android users have been waiting for it ever since.

From Android Nougat onwards, the most popular operating system in the world started supporting pressure sensitive displays. Though, not many major phone makers came ahead to take advantage of this.

The bendable phones by Samsung are due to release this year. The company had earlier said that there were certain hurdles which needed to be resolved for 2018 release.

The future itself: Samsung files patent for palm-reading technology for user recognition

"As the head of the business, I can say our current goal is next year (2018)," Koh Dong-jin, president of mobile business at Samsung Electronics had told Associated Press. "When we can overcome some problems for sure, we will launch the product."

Samsung has been toying with the idea of a bendable smartphone since 2013. Throughout the year, the company exhibited a prototype called Youm at technology conferences and media events. Post Galaxy Note 7 debacle, the desire to try and come up with something different will be keenly watched.

In September, in a filing from the company with the Korean National Radio Research Agency (NRRA), the phones model number had appeared.

Also Read: Samsung's foldable smartphone just received its final certification, may launch soon

Interestingly, the filing adds N0 to the model number of the phone SM-G888, which according to LetsGoDigital points towards its release in South Korea. However, almost certainly, after the launch of Apple iPhone X, it will be introduced globally.
US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on Saturday, the White House said on Sunday, and Trump provided Macron with an update on developments on the Korean Peninsula and the two discussed demonstrations in Iran.

The White House said the conversation was intended "to underscore" U.S., South Korean and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea.

"The Presidents also agreed that the widespread demonstrations in Iran were a sign of the Iranian regime's failure to serve its people's needs by instead diverting the nation's wealth to fund terrorism and militancy abroad," the White House said in a statement.
US President Donald Trump's tweet about having a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong Un's has kept the North Korean leader "on his toes" and made clear the risks of a nuclear standoff, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Sunday.

After Kim asserted that he had a nuclear button at the ready, Trump last week dismissed the taunt by saying in a tweet that the U.S. button at his disposal was bigger and more powerful.

The comment drew criticism, including from former Vice President Joe Biden, who said it caused allies to lose confidence in Washington.

Asked on the ABC program "This Week" whether the president's tweet was a good idea, Haley said: "I think that (Trump) always has to keep Kim on his toes. It's very important that we don't ever let him get so arrogant that he doesn't realize the reality of what would happen if he started a nuclear war."

Haley said North Korea should be clear that the United States will not reduce pressure on Kim.

"We're not going to let them go and dramatize the fact that they have a button right on their desk and they can destroy America," she said. "We want to always remind them we can destroy you too, so be very cautious and careful with your words and what you do."

ClA Director Mike Pompeo also defended Trump's nuclear button comment on the CBS "Face the Nation" program, saying it was "consistent with U.S. policy," which was denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

Pompeo said he still believed, as he had said in October, that North Korea is just a few months away from crossing the threshold to putting a U.S. city at risk of nuclear attack. But he declined to be more precise.

The Central Intelligence Agency head also rejected a New York Times article on Sunday that reported U.S. intelligence agencies had been unable to foresee the North's rapid nuclear strides over the past several months.

Pompeo said U.S. intelligence had provided an understanding of North Korea's capabilities and intent, and got the pace of the nuclear program "mostly right."

In a separate appearance on the "Fox News Sunday" TV program, Pompeo asserted that North Korea was being "strangled" by Trump and this was the reason why it had agreed to hold official talks soon with South Korea.
Rebel AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran listening the speech of Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit on his maiden appearance as MLA after winning the Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar bypoll last month, in the State Assembly in Chennai (PTI)



Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu addresses a press conference, in New Delhi (PTI)

Indian bowler Jasprit Bumrah, centre, celebrates the wicket of South African Captain Faf du Plessis on the fourth day of the first test between South Africa and India at Newlands Stadium, in Cape Town, South Africa (AP)

Para-military personnel patrol in ITO area, ahead of the Republic Day parade in Delhi (PTI)



Enthusiasts flying kites in the shapes of various animals and birds on the second day of International Kite Festival, in Ahmedabad (PTI)

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, delivers his keynote address at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada (Reuters)



Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma and Secretary of Justice Teresa Cheng attend a ceremony to mark the beginning of the legal year in Hong Kong, China (Reuters)

Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage leaves a meeting with European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier (unseen) at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium (Reuters)



Guillermo del Toro poses backstage with the award for Best Director - Motion Picture for "The Shape of Water" (Reuters)
Leaving everything for the one you love may sound romantic but it may also end up being counter-productive. A man from Saudi Arabia discovered this the hard way after his wife divorced him for loving her more than his mother.

According to a report in Saudi Gazette, a Saudi court granted divorce to a woman from her husband after she claimed that the man was not trustworthy as he had left his family for her. "I can never trust a man who does everything to keep his wife happy while he denies even a small favour to his mother," the woman was quoted as saying to the judge in the report.

The 29-year old man was reportedly left devastated following his wifes decision and had declined to grant her a divorce. He tried to defend himself in front of the judge by claiming that he had loved his wife above everything and had left everything for her. "Didn't I abandon my own family for you?" he was quoted as asking her in the report.

The woman too agreed to this claim and accepted that there were no problems in their relationship and he was keeping her happy. She stated that her husband had done everything for her, from taking her to foreign trips to buying her expensive gifts. However, she was appalled by the way he treated his family.

Claiming that she feared that her husband could leave her also the same way he left his own family she returned the dowry her husband had given her.

The court, after carefully going through arguments from both the husband and wife sided with the woman and to the shock of the husband granted a divorce. Adding to this, an anonymous judicial source reportedly applauded the woman's decision to leave the husband who had abandoned his mother and family.
The US Navy has joined the search for 32 crew members missing from an Iranian oil tanker that caught fire after colliding with a bulk freighter off China's east coast.

China, South Korea and the US sent ships and planes to search for the 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis who have been missing since the collision late Saturday.

The US Navy, which sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa, Japan, to aid the search, said late yesterday that none of the missing crew had been found.

The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided late Saturday with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in the East China Sea, 257 kilometers (160 miles) off the coast of Shanghai, China's Ministry of Transport said.

All 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the United States to China, were rescued, the ministry said. The Crystal's crew members were all Chinese nationals.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the collision. State-run China Central Television reported Sunday evening that the tanker was still floating and burning, and that oil was visible in the water. Photos distributed by the South Korean government showed the tanker on fire and shrouded in thick black smoke.

Chinese authorities dispatched three ships to clean the oil spill. It was not clear, however, whether the tanker was still spilling oil as of today and the size of the oil slick caused by the accident also was not known.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 metric tons (150,000 tons, or nearly 1 million barrels) of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.

The Sanchi has operated under five different names since it was built in 2008, according the UN-run International Maritime Organization. The IMO listed its registered owner as Hong Kong-based Bright Shipping Ltd, on behalf of the National Iranian Tanker Co, a publicly traded company based in Tehran.

The National Iranian Tanker Co. describes itself as operating the largest tanker fleet in the Middle East.

An official in Iran's Oil Ministry, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to reporters, said 30 of the tanker's 32 crew members were Iranians.

"We have no information on their fate," he said Sunday. "We cannot say all of them have died, because rescue teams are there and providing services."

The official said the tanker was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co. and had been rented by a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Co. He said the tanker was on its way to South Korea.

Hanwa Total is a 50-50 partnership between the Seoul- based Hanwha Group and the French oil giant Total. Total did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's the second collision for a ship from the National Iranian Tanker Co. in less than a year and a half. In August 2016, one of its tankers collided with a Swiss container ship in the Singapore Strait, damaging both ships but causing no injuries or oil spill.
Morgan Hill Police arrested a San Jose man this morning who is accused of scamming hundreds of dollarsor morefrom employees of local businesses by telling a sad story about recent personal unfortunate circumstances that can be solved with a loan of a few dollars.

After the suspect conned more than half a dozen unsuspecting strangers in this manner in recent months, Bay Area television station KSBW last week ran a series of news reports about the alleged scammer and his methods.

Following the media coverage, MHPD identified the suspect as Jayson Wayne Goodrich. MHPD Sgt. Troy Hoefling said officers arrested Goodrich on a $40,000 felony warrant out of San Jose the morning of Jan. 8, as Goodrich was leaving a motel in San Jose. MHPD also booked him on suspicion of four misdemeanor counts of theft by false pretenses.

Goodrich allegedly approached employees at four Morgan Hill businesses, at different times, and told his targeted victims that he had lost his wallet and his car had broken down, according to police and victims. To top it off, Goodrich would even tell the victim that his father-in-law had recently become sick. He would then ask the victims if he could borrow some cash so he could tow his vehicle, promising to return shortly to pay them back.

Except he never returned each time a victim handed him the cash, according to police. Goodrich allegedly succeeded in scamming employees of GVA Cafe, Le Pooch Grooming, Quilts and Things and Coffee Guys in Morgan Hill, from late 2017 to the first days of January.

A follow-up report on KSBW last week noted that after their initial story on Goodrich, they heard from victims in Gilroy, San Jose, Santa Clara, Hollister and other communities who claimed he scammed them in a similar way.

Hoefling added that Goodrichs fraudulent scheme spans a much larger region, highlighting the need for other victims to come forward.

Over the last six months, he has gone everywhere from Sacramento to King City doing this on a daily basis, trying to get $1,000 a day to support a drug habit, and to live on, Hoefling said.

Christina Wong, a barista at Coffee Guys, said she was working when Goodrich perpetrated the scam at the shop on East Third Street. He entered the shop looking frazzled and confused, and relayed the tale about his lost wallet and broken-down vehicle. He also told the coffee crew that he worked at a construction site next door. Wong said her co-worker fell for the scam, and gave Goodrich $150 of her personal money, which she expected to be reimbursed later that day.

After receiving the cash at Coffee Guys, Goodrich even wrote down a name (John Thompson) and a fake phone number if they needed to reach him, Wong said. After Goodrich didnt return for a while, the baristas began calling the phone number, but the suspect never answered their calls.

Wong said the suspect was totally convincing because he presented himself as a nice, genuine, humble man.

It sucks for people who are nice, and trying to be a Good Samaritan, Wong said.

She didnt remember exactly when Goodrich played the scam at Coffee Guys, but she estimated it was in late summer or early fall 2017.

Anyone with information about Goodrichs alleged crimes can contact MHPD at (669) 253-4984.
In January, I enjoy reflecting on books I've read during the past year. Of the 48 commercially published novels and works of nonfiction I read in 2017, 11 stand out.

 No. 11  "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, 1985. I first read this feminist dystopian novel 30 years ago and re-read it for a book club last year. Despite the depressing narrative of a young woman imprisoned by religious fanatics, Atwood's prose brightens each page. This excellent, lyrical writing by a masterful author made me realize early in my reading career that all fiction writing is not equal.

 No. 10  "Binti" by Nnedi Okorafor, 2015. A young girl from Africa with no family support travels on an interstellar journey to a university. First in her family to attend college, her dreams are interrupted by a terrorist attack on the ship, and she's challenged to survive, needing all her knowledge and gifts to do so without violence. Fast-paced and engaging.

 No. 9  "Old Filth" by Jane Gardam, 2013. Gardam tells of the wretched childhood of a "raj orphan," a British boy born in an Asian colony who must be torn from every person and thing familiar and sent back to England before age 5 or be exposed to life-threatening illnesses. A concise and poignant novel in 257 pages of a nearly 80-year-old man's life.

 No. 8  "Sleeping on Jupiter" by Anuradha Roy, 2015. (Author not to be confused with Arundhati Roy, who wrote "The God of Small Things.") Immersive imagery highlights the intertwining stories of three Indian women on a difficult holiday. I was struck by this passage about fishers out to sea: "They would be at work all night killing thousands of gasping creatures."

 No. 7  "The Humans" by Matt Haig, 2013. A clever and humor-infused tale of an alien sent to Earth to eliminate knowledge of a mathematical breakthrough. The creature takes on human form and struggles not to be seduced by the passion and roller coaster ride of living a human existence.

 No.  6 "A Man Called Ove" by Frederik Backman, 2012. Compelling story about a curmudgeonly old Swedish man who has suffered everything the world could throw at him. Gentle humor and hopefulness abound.

 No. 5  "Girl Waits With Gun" by Amy Stewart, 2015. Stewart graces the page with fun, upbeat fiction in sparkling prose and populates her story with strong and quirky women characters based on real people. Three sisters in the early 1900s try to right a wrong.

 No. 4  "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014. Twenty years after a pandemic which decimates humanity, a stalwart group of actors and musicians travels the countryside to entertain those who've survived. The author masterfully weaves past and present in this social science fiction novel gathering narrative tension till the end. The human insights at first seem to be anchored in the present with a futuristic plot superfluous to the story but, ultimately, humans responding to life in a "new world" becomes the overpowering theme. This excellent novel doesn't deserve a jokey comment, but I can't help but wonder if "Station Eleven's" setting is the world we'd have if 99.99 percent of the population dies and only liberal arts majors are left.

 No. 3  "1776" by David McCullough, 2005. (Nonfiction) I loved this history of the beginnings of the Revolutionary War. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, McCullough focuses on George Washington and early battles in a very difficult year for patriots. My favorite section recounted arguments in the British Parliament for and against going to war with the colonists. The Honourable Charles James Fox, in his late 20s at the time, addressed the House of Commons Oct. 26, 1775: "I cannot consent to the bloody consequences of so silly a contest . . . and from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat, and ruin." That minority sentiment lost out.

 No. 2  "New York 2140" by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2017. What if in less than 125 years, New York City is half underwater? In this speculative fiction tale, new technologies and "diamond wrap" keep dry the lower floors of buildings below the tide line. New York becomes a fascinating Venice-like setting, with the stock market and investment banking ever-vibrant, using the "intertidal zone" below 46th Street for speculation.

 No. 1  "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren, 2016. (Nonfiction) This scientist's memoir is a rip-roaring story of the trials and tribulations of an anxiety-prone woman trying to succeed in the grizzly world of male-dominated earth science. The beautiful language is a bonus. I loved the author's readable explanations of science, tree and plant life. She asks that each of us plant a tree, a solid hardwood that will be here a while. She writes that if humans keep destroying trees at the current rate, all Earth's forests will be gone in 600 years.

I trust you read some good books in 2017 and will keep reading!

Gwen Veazey is a member of the Morganton Writers' Group.
55 GALLON LIQUOR STILL DESTROYED

Officers destroyed a 55-gallon wooden still and equipment at around 2 pm Wednesday located in the Sunnyside section five miles south of Morganton.

ATTU Officer Jack C. Williams of Hickory and Burke County ABC Officer Fred Henessee said that the equipment was in the process of being moved when they discovered the operation and destroyed it with dynamite.

Equipment and supplies included 500 gallons of mash two 400 gallon boxes, and three cases of jars.

Deputies Gene Huffman, Manuel Brittan and James Davis Jr. assisted. There were no arrests but the investigation continues.

LT DEVINEY TO BECOME ABC OFFICER

The Morganton ABC Board today announced that Robert E. Deviney has been appointed an enforcement officer effective Jan *.

He will replace Harry M. Feminster, who resigned effective Jan 8.

Deviney has served with the Morganton Police Department for the past eight and  years and currently holds the rank of Lieutenant and shift commander.

Fred L. Hennesee, chief enforcement Officer for the ABC Board said that he was extremely pleased to have a man of such experience with his team; the ABC Board has worked with the Morganton Police many times in their investigations.

Morganton Police Chief Bill J. Hamrick said that he regretted to lose such a fine officer from the Morganton Team but wished him well in his new position.

IN THE SERVICE OF THE USA

Home on Leave- Airman first class Paul A. Buff, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Buff of Route 6, Morganton is spending 30 days leave with his parents and family before reporting Jan 31 to Takhli Royal Thai AFB in Thailand, A 1965 graduate of Salem High School, Buff was employed at Shadowline before enlisting in the Air Force in April 1966. Before his assignment to Thailand he was an administration specialist with the 507 th Maintenance Squadron at Kinchloe AFB MI.

In Photography- Airman Teddy W. Pittman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Hayden D. Pittman of 116 East Avenue has completed basic training at Lackland AFB TX. He has been assigned to the Air Force Technical Training Center at Lowry AFB in Colorado for specialized training as a photographic specialist. Pittman is a graduate of Morganton High School and attended the University of North Carolina.

SWIM CLUB PLANS FOR WORKOUTS

Regristration for winter practice for the Morganton Swim Club will be held Saturday at the Collet Street Recreation Center club officials announced today.

Actual practice will begin later this month.

Members of the team who have already participated in AAU completion and prospective members who have completed the minnows classes in the cities learn to swim program are invited to participate. The registration will have a second registration on January 13 at the Recreation Center.

Born Jan 5 1868

BURKE WOMAN MARKS ONE HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY

Today is an important day for Mrs. B.J. Temple of Route 5 Hickory, as it marks her 100 th birthday anniversary. Her children, relatives and many friends rejoice with her in attaining her goal she set for herself early in life.

Mrs. Temple, the former Miss Cora Belle Warlick is the eldest daughter and only surviving member of the family of Ann and Lewis Warlick of Eastern Burke County. She grew up on a farm with her two sisters and a brother near Warlicks Baptist Church where she still holds her membership.

After their marriage March 6 1888 Mr. and Mrs. Temple lived for several years in Raleigh but later moved back to eastern Burke County and bought a farm where there long resided and reared a family of eleven children six boys and five girls, nine of whom are still living.

Mr. Temple, a prominent farmer, died in June 1941.

Mrs. Temple is acclaimed by her family and friends as an industrious home maker, good mother, practical doctor and nurse, a kind neighbor who enjoyed helping others and a good citizen. She also enjoyed canning fruits and vegetables for her family and the townsfolk before Cans and Frozen food was so readily available.

This article is sponsored by the History Museum of Burke County where the archives of the News Herald are stored, Jimmy Rhyne is the researcher of the Archives.
A woman told police Sunday that cold weather was the reason she stole a car from Walmart Neighborhood Market.

Deonna Journee Sanford, 39, of Hickory, was charged with felony larceny Sunday afternoon for stealing a 2002 Ford Mustang from the grocery store around 7:30 a.m., according to a Morganton Department of Public Safety arrest report.

Sanford was stopped by police around 3:30 p.m. after officer C.A. Miller noticed the vehicle, which had been reported stolen, driving on Stonebridge Drive, the report said.

Sanford handed Miller the vehicles title but did not have a drivers license. Miller then called the owner of the car, who said he did not know Sanford or the other occupant, Sara Laws, according to the report.

Miller asked Sanford to exit the car. Sanford began speaking with Miller, despite being told her rights.

Sanford said she was at the Walmart Neighborhood Market and was tired of being in the cold weather, according to the report. She then said she saw the Mustang was still running and decided to take it for a joyride.

Sanford was taken into custody and placed in a local jail under a $15,000 bond. She was scheduled to appear in court Monday. Her only previous conviction in North Carolina is for possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a state offender search.
Is it because of the extremity of his hypocrisy between espousing a balanced budget (amendment to the constitution, no less), but instead voting for the new law that adds a trillion and one-half dollars to the US deficit that Congressman Meadows seems advocating a cozy protection cocoon for our Mr.Trump? On Friday, Rep. Mark Meadows announced loudly that Attorney General Sessions needs be removed from office.

Maybe in his duplicitous mind Meadows thinks that the dirty Russian money laundering that the Trump Organization has been scheming to move from Europe and Asia to America and back to Europe, since at least 2013, is some money that could help our dear desperate corporate conglomerate bigwigs, and thereby solve our working and middle class woes by the magic of trickle-down voodoo economics.

That Trump's campaign manager has been booked on international money laundering charges doesn't seem to bother Meadows. He would rather have Sessions (who finally did remember talking with some Russians during the campaign) removed from office because he has recused himself from a very legitimate FBI investigation into those Russian actions. Meadows apparently wants an Attorney General in office serving as Trump's personal protector.

Have any of these party-first loyalists remembered how Russians so wickedly put their dirty hands on our election process? Where are the continued howls for getting to the full story? There should be abhorrent outrage. (Yes, our system has become corrupted and weakened by too much money in politics  both Dems and 'Publicans) Now the Russians! People arise. I say let Mueller follow the money trail. Tell Meadows his duty resides with keeping an independent judiciary. It is our peril otherwise.

Money is not free speech.

Corporations are not the people.
Now that so called "tax reform" has been passed , what we are hearing from our elected officials is that next on their list to tackle in 2018 is "entitlement reform."

As part of that so called entitlement reform is cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

I started working when I was 15 delivering papers. At the age of 15, they started taking Social Security and Medicare out of my check. When I turned 16, I got a better job, and guess what, they took Social Security and Medicare out of my check. When I turned 18, I again got a better job, and well you get the picture. Every since I started working I have been paying into Social Security and Medicare, and for every dollar I contributed, my employer matched it.

I worked for almost 50 years, paying into Social Security and Medicare. How is this an entitlement? It is my money, and the money my employers over the years contributed in my name.This is not a "gift" from the government, it is not something that I did not contribute to for 50 years, it is mine.

This is disturbing that Mr. Mark Meadows would even think like this. I'll bet when he is finally booted out of office, he will take his pension, and not consider it an entitlement.

The tax cuts were for the wealthy, the entitlement is for the wealty, now that we have cut taxes, we have to cut spending somewhere, and guess who bears the brunt of those cuts?

When did our government go from "Of The People, By The People, and For The People," to "Of The Wealthy, By The Wealthy, and For The Wealthy." This has got to stop.
Testimonials

"Tomi serves ... with love and a huge smile"

Tomi Reyes is a sweet, kind and caring woman who gives and gives all with a smile. Midland RSVP is honored to nominate Tomi for her dedication to the various areas she serves. Tomi is one of the hard workers at the annual Texas-Size Garage Sale, where she sorts and organizes donations.

Tomi is a dedicated "Pink Lady" for Midland Memorial Hospital and helps package meals in Senior Link Midland's Meals-on-Wheels kitchen. Tomi is also part of the RSVP's SWAT (Seniors with Available Time), where she and others in the group prepare mailings for more than a dozen local nonprofits.

In addition, Tomi finds time monthly to make calls for RSVP to collect volunteer hours. Tomi serves well at all of these areas -- all with love and a huge smile. We are blessed to have Tomi as our volunteer and special friend.

Saul Herrera, director of Retired Senior Volunteer Program

---

"She knows how to make people feel right at home and comfortable"

Midland Memorial Hospital is blessed to have Tomi Reyes volunteer at the Information Desk. She has a warm and inviting smile that instantly makes people feel welcome.

She brings such a touch of happiness with her each Wednesday morning she volunteers. Tomi meets and greets patients and their families as they come in the front door. In addition to meeting and welcoming guests to MMH, she also delivers flowers and gifts to patients. She also escorts patients and families to their destinations within the hospital. This makes for a wonderful patient experience for MMH patients and their families.

One of her favorite things to do is to take gifts to new mothers. The auxiliary has a group of ladies who make blankets, hats, booties and other small items that are given to the new mothers. "I just love making new mothers happy. It is a highlight of my day," Tomi says. "I know that these items were made with care and love, so I give care and love when I deliver these to the new parents. It is delightful to watch their expressions when I arrive in the patient room with gifts, especially ones of this handmade quality."

Another duty Tomi likes to do is to deliver pillowcases to patients who have birthdays while they are in the hospital. "The pillowcases are also made by volunteers. When I take them to a patient, it just makes their day. It is an unexpected treat for the patients and makes them feel special," she says.

Tomi has volunteered more than 250 hours of time with the volunteers at the hospital. She works a four- hour shift on Wednesday mornings and sometimes will substitute for another volunteer who cannot make their shift.

Tomi is such a wonderful person. It shows in her smile and her warm friendly nature. She immediately makes friends and knows how to make people feel right at home and comfortable. Our hospital patient experience leadership is teaching staff how to make the most of every patient encounter by excellent "power moves." Tomi just loves to make great power moves, and her moves make a difference for patients.

Kim Modisett
Brad Pitt almost had a chance to watch Game of Thrones with Emilia Clarke.

At Sean Penn's annual gala for Haiti last Saturday, Jan. 6, at the Milk Studios in Los Angeles, the movie star and producer offered to donate $120,000 to go on an HBO date with the 31-year-old actress.

Clarke and her co-star Kit Harington was in attendance at the said charity event.

According to Variety, the auction to watch one episode of the award-winning fantasy series with Clarke started at $20,000. However, the race quickly escalated. Pitt bid $80,000 and then outbid himself and offered $90,000.

When Harrington offered himself to sit in and watch the episode with Clarke and the winning bidder, Pitt raised his bid to $120,000.

Unfortunately, the actor was outbid by another attendee who offered to pay $160,000 for the unique and rare opportunity.

Mother Of Dragons Fan

Another gala attendee told Us Weekly that the 54-year-old was all laughs despite losing the chance to watch Game of Thrones with Clarke and Harrington.

"When the auction announced Emilia Clarke, they called her out in the crowd and Brad literally turned his whole neck to find and look at her and enthusiastically clap," shared the anonymous source. "Emilia was covering her mouth and giggling. [Leonardo DiCaprio] enthusiastically watched the whole auction, turning his head back and forth between Brad and Emilia."

Pitt was out when the bid reached $150,000. He chuckled when the host called him out for giving up too easily.

'Game of Thrones' Celebrity Fans

Pitt is not the only celebrity who, like the rest of the world, is obsessed with the HBO drama. Hollywood stars are also feverishly awaiting and anticipating who will take the throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms.

Kristen Bell threw a party with a themed menu to celebrate the premiere of Game of Thrones season 7 in July 2017.

Madonna once dressed as Clarke's now-iconic character, Daenerys Targaryen (complete with her own little dragons), at a festival in 2014.

Beyonce was outed as a massive fan when Clarke stated that she could not take home her own character's dragon eggs because, apparently, rapper Jay-Z bought one for his wife.

Anna Kendrick of Pitch Perfect 3 is enthusiastic whenever the award-winning television series is on.

Just watched Game of Thrones and now I'm in a GREAT mood. Who wants shots?!?!?  Anna Kendrick (@AnnaKendrick47) April 14, 2014

Meanwhile, the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's novels almost tested Blake Lively's marriage with Deadpool star, Ryan Reynolds.

"He did everything he could to pirate episodes that hadn't even been shot yet," Lively revealed in a previous interview. "So that was a little tough point in our marriage. Now we're through it because there's a new season coming out."

Game of Thrones Season 8 will premiere in 2019 on HBO.

 2015 MusicTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
People's Liberation Army personnel across the nation began military training on the land, water and in the air starting on Wednesday. President Xi Jinping, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, urged the military to continue to improve its combat-ready training so it will be able to win modern wars. The photo is taken on Jan 4, 2018. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's military has conducted more than 4,000 realistic combat exercises since President Xi Jinping, chairman of the Central Military Commission, launched the annual training program on Wednesday.

More than 4,000 training grounds nationwide from all branches of the People's Liberation Army, including the Ground Force, Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Armed Police and logistic forces, have begun their annual exercises, Xinhua News Agency reported.

On Wednesday morning, after a short ceremony, Ground Force battalions and aviation corps from the snowy forests in northern China's Heilongjiang province immediately began a realistic war game exercise.

"It's unprecedented to jointly train with aviation units on the same day of the launch," said Xu Jiqiang, a tank specialist who has participated in annual training 15 times.

The Ground Force training is also moving from sole ground combat to a comprehensive system that incorporates both ground and air units, he added.

At a naval dock in the South China Sea, officers and soldiers loaded troops and equipment onto vessels, immediately dispatched ships, and practiced repelling plane and missile attacks from the air, according to Xinhua.

At the same time, officers onboard submarines in the East China Sea were shouting combat commands, simulating a real attack scenario where they had been detected by an enemy submarine.

Thousands of meters above ground, dozens of fully loaded Chinese warplanes from northern China practiced dogfights, ground-target missile strikes and long-distance travel in the blistering cold.

Yang Junqi, an officer with the PLA Air Force who led the flight team, said all the training was based on real combat standards. "The battle starts the moment the plane takes off," he said.

The Rocket Force practiced emergency formation and volley firing using missile carriers, aiming to become a strategic force that is accurate and devastating whenever necessary.

At a logistics base, more than 360 troops pledged their allegiance to the national flag before a day of intensive repair training. Sheng Wugang, a military engineer from the base, said the training added new malfunctions and other emergencies to test troops' ability to deal with the most dire and extreme situations.

In the cold Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, armed police officers were conducting wilderness survival and reconnaissance training across the barren desert, snowy plateaus and mountainous valleys.

While all the exercises were going on, all five theater commands of the PLA were on duty and closely monitoring the training in their regions. Zhang Qingfeng, an officer from the Western Theater Command, said: "The military is only as effective as the command it receives."

The commanders should focus on strategy, research and training for wars, and must understand how to cooperate and win wars with other branches of the military, he said.
About 120 members of the Florida National Guard are being deployed to the Middle East.

Florida National Guard unit deploying to Middle East



Troops will be deployed for one year

Hundreds attended a ceremony in Lakeland on Sunday



The soldiers are members of the 3rd of the 116th Field Artillery Battalion. They'll be supporting Operation Spartan Shield, which includes defending the United States against the threat of terrorism and extremism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, according to the United States Army.

This is the first field artillery combat mission within the Florida Army National Guard since WWII, according to the battalions high ranking leaders.

Hundreds attended the troops deployment ceremony in Lakeland on Sunday, held at Publix Field at Joker Marchant Stadium.

These [troops] are going to be going into harms way. My wife and I will be praying for them every day just to make sure they come back safe, said Gov. Rick Scott, who attended the ceremony.

The soldiers will be deployed for one year. Its a long time for their loved ones.

Im sad about having to be alone for a whole year with our babies. Thats the worst part I guess, said Julia Beeson, whose husband is being deployed for the second time.

Its definitely going to be hard. This whole year was hard just thinking about it. Im hoping it will go by quickly, said Nicole Abrams, whose fiance is being deployed.

The couple plans to wed soon after he returns.

Governor Scott, a Navy veteran, said he knows first-hand what these families are going through.

You know it is nice now that theyll have a better time to talk to them through FaceTime, through Skype and things like that but still theyre not home, theyre not able to put in the bed, give them a hug. You really feel sorry for the families, Gov. Scott said.

Scott said the Florida National Guard has been deployed more than 100 times since September 11, 2001.
SpaceX is looking ahead to its test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket after a successful launch of a top-secret government payload Sunday night.

SpaceX launched 1st rocket of 2018 on Space Coast

Now, company turns its attention to Falcon Heavy test launch



RELATED: SpaceX launches mysterious Zuma mission

See all Florida launch schedules here

The launch of the "Zuma" payload marked the first launch of 2018 on the Space Coast.

A Falcon 9 rocket soared into the night sky after launching from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The Zuma mission is so secret that the government has not disclosed what agency the payload will be used for.

Less than 10 minutes after launch, SpaceX landed its first-stage booster back on land at the Air Force station.

The rocket, traveling at the speed of sound, created a sonic boom as it touched down.

Now, SpaceX will turn its attention to its Falcon Heavy rocket launch. SpaceX founder Elon Musk calls it the world's most powerful rocket.

A test firing is set for this week, and the test launch is set for the end of this month from the Space Coast.

"It will be not quite as big as the shuttle, but it's able to put a payload into space significantly larger than the shuttle, and it will be the biggest payload capability since the Saturn V that took us to the moon," said Dale Ketcham, vice president of Space Florida. "The neat thing about that is Elon Musk hasnt guaranteed it's going to work, but he has guaranteed its going to be exciting."

The Falcon Heavy will be capable of sending humans to the moon or Mars one day. To prove that, the Falcon Heavy will send a red Tesla Roadster to the orbit around Mars. Musk is also the founder of Tesla.

Not to be outdone, United Launch Alliance is also preparing for its first Space Coast launch of 2018 this month. An Atlas V rocket with an early-warning missile detector satellite is scheduled to launch Thursday, Jan. 18.
A North Carolina school district is requiring students to have a doctor sign a medical form before they can apply lip balm on themselves.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools mom says son's lip balm confiscated

Email said lip moisturizer was considered medication, she says

Pediatrician: It's common to have parents sign forms for lotions, balms



A mother of a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools student was advised this week not to make an issue of what her son looked like after his lip balm was confiscated.

"His entire mouth is red, just raw from him licking his lips all day," the mother said.

A teacher later sent an email saying that her son's ChapStick had been confiscated.

"My child's lip moisturizer was considered a medication, and [they said] that I would need to complete a form," the mother said.

She said she was told that the school district requires a medical authorization form with a doctor's signature as well as a questionnaire indicating how often the student should take the medication.

The mother said a school nurse told her that ChapStick has ingredients to soothe and heal cracked lips, and therefore is medication.

The school district did not respond to repeated requests by Spectrum News for comment.

Dr. Holly Smith, a concierge pediatrician with Signature Health in Charlotte, said it's common to sign forms for lotions and lip balms.

"These over-the-counter products get classified as over-the-counter medications in the school's mind," Smith said.

Smith says dry skin is more a side effect of bitter cold, not necessarily a medical condition, "and it doesn't really require a doctor to make the diagnosis," Smith said.

Despite that, she said it's common to sign these type of forms when it comes to lotions and lip moisturizers.

"It takes time out of our day of taking care of patients to have to stop and fill out a form. ... Some practices will charge for various forms to be completed," Smith said.
MEXICO CITY, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Mexican marines exchanged gunfire with a group of gunmen in the popular beach resort of Los Cabos, in North Mexico's Baja California Sur state, leaving seven dead, officials said on Sunday.

The state's Attorney General's Office (PGJE) said the clash took place late Saturday, as the marines headed to a neighborhood in San Jose del Cabo, one of two towns that comprise the resort, to investigate the sound of gunfire.

On the way, the marines detected armed men riding in two vehicles, both with U.S. license plates, in the road ahead of them and ordered them to stop, but they sped up in an attempt to flee while the occupants fired their guns.

As the chase continued, both vehicles eventually crashed into walls or barricades, though the four occupants of the second vehicle got out and continued to fire on the marines until they were killed.

Marines seized high-caliber weapons and vehicles in the operation.

The PGJE said it opened an investigation into the incident it said was "allegedly linked to criminal events that have taken place in the state."

In late December, authorities found bodies hanging from bridges near Los Cabos, in a sign that violent crime sparked by rival drug trafficking organizations is plaguing the state.
JERUSALEM, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- A total of 35 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel in 2017, compared with 15 in 2016 and 21 in 2015, according to the statistics from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) issued said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the number of "terror" attacks either in the West Bank or by "terrorists" who came from the West Bank totaled 99 in 2017, a substantial drop from 269 in 2016 and 226 in 2015, the IDF statistics reported.

The IDF said that 20 people were killed and 169 wounded in "terror" attacks in 2017, while 17 killed and 263 wounded in 2016. In 2015, in total, 28 people were killed and 360 wounded.

A total of 42 weapon workshops which were believed to have been used to manufacture firearms were uncovered or sealed, while 455 guns that were illegally owned by Palestinians were confiscated by the Israeli army, according to the IDF figures.

In retaliation to the rocket attacks, the IDF struck 59 targets in the Gaza Strip in 2017, including rocket launches and training camps, weapons production sites, observation posts and more, according to the IDF's figures.

As for the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, the IDF said it holds Hamas responsible for all rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.
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In the weeks after Stephen K. Bannons ouster from the Trump White House last August, his flagship organization Breitbart News verged, at times, on a Bannon vanity project.

Ads on the website promoted fidget spinners emblazoned with Bannons likeness ($7.95 each) and a 212-page hagiography  Bannon: Always the Rebel, by Keith Koffler. Breitbart writers were dispatched to Alabama to boost the Senate bid of Bannons preferred candidate, Roy S. Moore.

But as Moores loss last month suggested, Bannons influence only stretches so far  a lesson that he is now confronting in humbling terms, as his leadership of Breitbart, arguably the most influential right-wing website, is suddenly in doubt.

Bannons belief that his own cult of personality could satisfy Breitbart readers has run into the fallout from his brazen criticisms of President Donald Trump, published by Michael Wolff in the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Once seen as a champion of Trumpism, Bannon has been reduced to Sloppy Steve, as Trump phrased it, with the White House urging Breitbart to consider removing Bannon. The quoted remarks have roiled not just members of his pro-Trump Breitbart audience, but also a major patron, heiress Rebekah Mercer, who controls a minority stake in the site, where Bannon serves as executive chairman.

The question now: Does Bannon need Breitbart News more than Breitbart News needs Bannon?

People who go to Breitbart dont go there everyday because they give a damn about Steve Bannon, said Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesman. We could be looking at a new world order here in terms of who will occupy the space of Donald Trumps preferred conservative platform.

Bannon appears to be trying to stay at Breitbart. His penance began on Sunday, with a public statement in which he attempted to distance himself from his portrayal in Wolffs book. For one thing, he claimed, his description of a 2016 meeting between Russians and Donald J. Trump Jr. as treasonous was intended to criticize Donald Trumps former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, not the presidents son.

Media figures more famous than Bannon have learned the hard way that audiences tend to remain loyal to institutions, rather than individuals. For Bannon, the possibility of losing control of Breitbart  the vehicle that propelled him into the national spotlight, and eventually the highest echelons of power  could present a significant test to his potency as a leader of a political and cultural movement.

Among the most unsettling developments for the Bannon camp was losing the support of Mercer, a hard-line conservative donor, who said on Thursday that her family had ceased communicating with Bannon and denounced his statements in the Wolff book. I have a minority interest in Breitbart News and I remain committed in my support for them, Mercer said in a statement.

Perhaps luckily for Bannon, Mercer cannot unilaterally dismiss him from his company. Bannons fate was probably in the hands of Breitbarts other owners  the family of Andrew Breitbart, the founder, who died in 2012, and its chief executive, Larry Solov, the former Breitbart News general counsel and childhood friend of its founder.

Representatives of Bannon and Breitbart News did not respond to inquiries over the weekend about Bannons future at the site.

Under Bannon, who assumed stewardship after Breitbarts death, Breitbart News moved from a scorched-earth fringe site  known mostly for publishing incendiary articles that were deemed sexist, racist and xenophobic  to an unlikely voice for disaffected conservatives and a rallying place for passionate supporters of Trump.

Its readers remain faithful to the president, a fact that Bannon seemed to acknowledge in his statement on Sunday.

I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism, and I remain ready to stand in the breach for this presidents efforts to make America great again, he wrote.

Bannons aggressive style and creative agitprop were clear factors in Breitbarts recent success. On Facebook, its reach now rivals news organizations like Yahoo and The Washington Post. The site hired correspondents in Europe and the Middle East, and poached reporters from establishment news organizations like The Wall Street Journal.

In Washington, Bannon kept a residence at the so-called Breitbart Embassy, a Capitol Hill townhouse controlled by the site, where he courted candidates and threw VIP-filled soirees. A recent book party for Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, attracted prominent journalists and White House officials.

But as Bannon nurtured his real-world aspirations, Breitbarts audience waned from the heights of last years presidential race. In November, the site received 13.7 million unique visitors in the United States, according to data from comScore, down about 20 percent from last January. It also lost advertisers who did not want their brands to appear alongside Breitbart articles.

The site struggled for acceptance in other ways, too. Despite employing a full-time reporter in the White House, Breitbarts application for congressional press credentials was denied. Its hunt for a larger headquarters in Washington was stymied by some commercial landlords who were uncomfortable about housing the business.

Bannon, a tenacious and shrewd operator, may yet cling to his Breitbart chairmanship, and Trump is known to re-embrace associates even after public defenestrations. The campaign manager whom he fired in 2016, Corey Lewandowski, remains a close adviser.

On Sunday afternoon, a blaring, all-capital-letters headline on Breitbart.com announced to readers that, reports notwithstanding, its leader was sticking with their cause. Steve Bannon Issues Statement, the headline read. My Support Is Unwavering for Trump and His Agenda.
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ALIGARH, India  Signs and banners for Paytm, Indias biggest digital payments service, festoon Pooran Singhs cellphone shop, where people drop in all day to add data or talk time to their prepaid phones.

Yet few of these people actually use Paytm at the store, which straddles two dusty streets in this sleepy north Indian city in which tractors jostle with cows for space on the narrow roads.

People recharge in cash, Singh said, after a young man handed him 20 rupees (about 32 cents) to top up his mothers phone.

The scene in Singhs shop underscores a persistent reality of Indias economy: People prefer cash for most routine transactions, despite intensive efforts by the government and global technology companies to lure them onto digital platforms.

Indias reluctance to give up paper money poses challenges for the firms that are vying to offer electronic payments, including local players like Paytm, which has received financing from the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and American tech companies, like Facebook, Google and PayPal.

Cash is convenient, said Caesar Sengupta, who oversees Googles products for emerging markets. Its anonymous. You can use it everywhere.

Even so, tech companies see Indias low rate of digital payments as an opportunity. They all cite China, where in just a few years, mobile payments became so popular that it is now difficult to get through the day with cash alone.

In India, were going to see a similar rise, Sengupta said in November, shortly after Google introduced Tez, a payments app for India.

One reason for tech companies optimism is that digital payments in India have increased during the past year. The value of transactions using digital wallets, the business on which Paytm was built, rose 64 percent from December 2016 to December 2017. Transactions made with the Unified Payments Interface, a government-backed technology used by Tez and many other mobile apps, went from virtually nothing a year ago to $2.1 billion last month.

Leading Indias budding payments shift are Paytm and its chief executive, Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Sharma founded the company seven years ago as a way for cellphone users to pay their bills online. It is now Indias largest consumer-payments app, with 302 million account holders and 90 million active users.

Customers can use it to buy goods at physical stores, book movie or airline tickets, send money to each other or order items from Paytms online mall. A transaction requires a quick scan of a merchants bar code or a few taps on a smartphone, rivaling Apple Pay or Venmo in simplicity.

Sharma aspires to put his company at the center of Indians financial lives, and he has pledged to spend $1.9 billion over the next two years toward that goal.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Our truest ambition is for Paytm to be known as the bank for this new-age, digital, mobile world, he said in an interview at the companys headquarters in Noida, just outside Delhi.

Merchants like Singh are crucial to Paytms plans.

The company pays Singh a bounty of 20 rupees for each of the eight or so customers he signs up each month, with additional payments if a newcomer continues to use the service. He earns an additional 18 rupees each time he verifies the identity of an existing Paytm user with his fingerprint scanner, a new requirement imposed by the government on all digital wallet companies.

Singhs phone shop has also become a virtual ATM for Paytms nascent banking division, which plans to turn 100,000 shops across India into mini-branches where customers can deposit and withdraw cash, get a loan and buy insurance policies.

We really want to reach the underserved, underbanked customer, said Renu Satti, who leads the Paytm bank.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Paytms strategy dovetails with the goals of Indias central government. Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014, has sought to recast his country as digital India, and his government has heavily promoted cashless transactions.

In November 2016, Modi suddenly banned most of Indias currency. The edict forced people to exchange their rupees for new notes at banks, setting off a short-term cash crunch and prompting many Indians to consider digital options.

Still, the countrys cash economy has endured.

Only one-third of Indias 1.3 billion residents have access to the internet. Of those who are able to go online, just 14 percent make mobile payments at least once a week, according to Kantar TNS, a research firm based in London.

Consumer trust is a big issue. Ghani Khan, who was finishing a snack with his wife at Aligarhs lone McDonalds, said that someone had once stolen 3,300 rupees, what would be about $52 now, from his Paytm account.

People feel scared to use these apps, Khan said. Although he got his money back, he now avoids payment apps, preferring to use cash or his debit card. (Paytm says that most such problems are related to thieves who call users and persuade them to turn over sensitive account data.)

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Merchants also worry that officials are promoting digital transactions as a way to better track commerce  and collect more taxes.

Anusheel Shrivastava, a top Kantar executive in India, said his firm found that 6 percent of mobile phone users made at least one digital transaction a day in 2017, up from 2 percent in 2016.

That number is likely to increase further when WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Facebook, adds payments to its service in the next few months.

Paytm stands out in part because of the 10,000 employees that it has in the field to help new businesses use the service, educate existing ones about new features and troubleshoot problems. There are about 6 million merchants in its network, from giant multinationals like Uber to tiny neighborhood sweet shops.

We have to train them, we have to retrain them, we have to visit them, said Yashwin Gupta, who oversees a team of 65 Paytm representatives in the region that includes Aligarh. Thats our daily job.

The job is getting easier now that Paytm is better known.

Last month, Mukesh Gupta sought Paytms help in setting up the service for his toy shop here after 10 to 20 percent of his customers asked to pay with Paytm. People like to spend money on more than just needs, he said.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Aligarh, with 1.2 million residents, is a barometer for Paytms progress because it is a midsize city, and because Sharma, the companys chief executive, grew up nearby.

On one visit home, he said, he met a Hindi-speaking merchant who did not know how to get money out of Paytm and into his bank.

The problem? Paytms app for merchants was in English, and the icons were not clear enough for those who did not speak the language. Paytm soon developed a Hindi version.

In recent months, skeptics have questioned whether Paytm can maintain its growth. The new regulations requiring customer verification could turn off some customers. The company is also spending heavily on incentives, such as giving cash back on certain purchases and free credit-card processing for merchants.

Sharma said such expenses were necessary investments.

The only way to grow digital transactions is to make them free, he said. This is a culturally different country being built.
Details have been released on the city of San Antonios first seven CivTechSA projects  a new partnership with Geekdom aimed at finding ambitious startups to help solve some local problems, for free.

While the winning companies dont get paid, they get a 16-week residency with the city where they can embed with officials and access city data to tackle the problem. They can also sell their products back to the city or to other municipalities.
Oprah Winfrey accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes by saying she hopes, as the first black women to accept the honor, that it has an impact on all young girls watching the award ceremony.

The actress and media mogul accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award on Sunday, Jan. 7, and received a lengthy standing ovation. Then she spoke about the feelings she had as a young girl watching Sidney Poitier win the best actor Academy Award in 1964. Winfrey likened the pride she felt watching Poitier, the first black man to win the best best actor Oscar, to the impact she hoped she could have on today's youth.

RELATED: Golden Globes red carpet transformed by black dress protest

Winfrey also addressed the sexual misconduct scandal roiling Hollywood and beyond.

"I want to say I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times," she said. "Which brings me to this: What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. I'm especially proud and inspired by all the women who felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories."

Winfrey also alluded to the story of Recy Taylor, an African-American woman who was beaten and raped in 1944 in Alabama after she left church.

"Recy Taylor died 10 days ago," Winfrey told the audience. "She lived too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. Women were not believed." Then, referencing sexual abusers and harassers in Hollywood and everywhere today, she warned, "their time is up."

RELATED: Recy Taylor: Here's the Story of the Woman Oprah Praised at the Golden Globes

She then thanked the "magnificent women" and "phenomenal men," both in the room and not, who she said are "fighting hard to make sure they are the leaders to take us to the time where nobody has to say 'me too' again."

Winfrey's powerful speech also inspired those watching to tweet about her running for president in 2020.

Reese Witherspoon introduced Winfrey and described their friendship, forged over long sessions in a makeup trailer while filming "A Wrinkle in Time." Witherspoon said sitting in the room with her was like taking the best business classes, and her hugs could end wars.

SFGATE's Alyssa Pereira contributed to this report.
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The big news out of the 2018-19 season announcement for The Playhouse San Antonio is that the theater is getting a new name: The Public Theater of San Antonio.

We want San Antonio to know were their theater, said George Green, the theaters CEO and artistic director. If you go back to the inception of the organization, it was built for the citizens of San Antonio. Over 100-plus years, this organization has evolved to serve the needs of the time and of the city.

And we want to make sure that we push access as a major part of who we are, so thats the vision statement  theater for all.

Green was to make the announcement at a party at the theater Sunday evening. The new name takes effect immediately.

The idea of rebranding has been in the works since Greens first day on the job in the summer of 2016, he said.

Weve gone through almost two years of ideas, he said. Weve done lot of work. Its not just, Hey, lets change our name.

The companys home base in San Pedro Park opened in 1930 as the San Antonio Little Theater, but the organizations roots go back a few decades earlier, to the San Antonio Dramatist Club, which began in 1912.

Omar Leos, president of the board, said the new name reflects the organizations history.

It was the first city-owned, publicly built theater in the country. Since it was created by the city and of the city, I think its so appropriate that the name says that, Leos said. Thats what the intention was.

The spaces previous names  San Antonio Little Theater, the San Pedro Playhouse and The Playhouse San Antonio  will be honored with metal signs depicting each logo that will be displayed in the lobby. The new name and logo will also be featured.

Hopefully, people can recognize that and understand we are not throwing away the past, said Green, adding that the theater is also creating an online archive tracing its history.

The theater is continuing its transition toward becoming a professional Actors Equity company, a move that began last year. Equity represents actors and stage managers across the country. Among the steps that will be taken next season is that every production will have an Equity stage manager, and more Equity contracts will be offered to actors.

Another element new to the theaters programming is a cabaret series that is under development. It will include Broadway Nights, the weekly series that Rebecca Trinidad created and hosted at the Woodlawn Theatre for five years. She announced in December that the Woodlawn run was ending but that the show was being reformatted and would resurface in 2018.

The Publics 2018-19 season on the Russell Hill Rogers stage is as follows. All but two of the five shows have come through on tour but have never been staged by a San Antonio company. A sixth show will be announced Feb. 8.

Disneys Newsies: The much-adored musical is adapted from the 1992 movie based on the real-life newsboys strike of 1899. A touring edition played the Majestic Theatre in 2015. Green is directing this one. Sept. 14-Oct. 14.

All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914: The third go-round for this revue, a powerful look at the real-life armistice that occurred on the front lines during the first Christmas of World War I. The Marcsmen, the mens a cappella ensemble that has participated every year, will once again take part in the production. Bill Gundry directs. Nov. 23-Dec. 23.

Rent: The rock musical has been done in San Antonio  its come through on tour, and its been staged at the Woodlawn Theatre and at the Sheldon Vexler Theatre  but it has never been done at The Public. The show follows a group of 20-something artists struggling to support themselves as they follow their respective muses. David Nanny directs. Jan. 25, 2019 -Feb. 17, 2019.

Once: The musical is adapted from the 2007 movie about a couple of musicians who meet cute and wind up falling hard for one another. The score includes the Oscar-winning song Falling Slowly. A touring edition played the Majestic Theatre in 2015. Molly Cox directs. May 17-June 9, 2019.

Matilda: The Musical: The musical is adapted from Roald Dahls tale about a neglected little girl who discovers that she has surprising powers and puts them to use to combat the many bullies in her life. A touring production played the Majestic last year. Ken Urso directs. July 12-Aug. 11, 2019.

The Cellar Theater season holds:

Fun Home: A touring production played at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts last year, but The Public will be the first San Antonio theater to produce it. The musical is based on Alison Bechdels graphic memoir dealing with, among other things, her coming out and her discovery that her father had been closeted. Molly Cox directs. Oct. 19-Nov. 18.

An Infinite Ache: David Schulners one-act begins with an awkward first date then speeds through the couples possible life together. The director will be announced later. Dec. 28, 2018-Jan. 20, 2019.

Daddy Long Legs: The musical is about a young orphan whose schooling is paid for by an anonymous benefactor, to whom she is required to write monthly letters. Through her correspondence and her growing relationship with a roommates uncle, she gradually transforms into an independent woman. The director will be announced later. March 1-17, 2019.

Freuds Last Session: Mark St. Germains play offers a far-ranging discussion between Dr. Sigmund Freud and writer C.S. Lewis. David Rinear directs. April 19-May 12, 2019.

Sink, Florida, Sink: This world premiere will be the first offering in the theaters Fresh Ink Theater Program, which aims to nurture the creation of new work. Playwright David Kimple will begin workshopping the script in the next few months, Green said. Lana Russell directs. June 14-30, 2019.

Real Women Have Curves: Teatro Audaz, the Latinx company in residence at the theater, will stage Josefina Lopezs play in which a group of Latinas talk about their lives while sewing in a Los Angeles factory. Omar Leos directs. July 12-Aug. 11, 2019.

Deborah Martin is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | dlmartin@express-news.net | @DeborahMartinEN
BRIDGEPORTDuck hunters ran afoul of Black Rock residents Monday after their gun blasts sounded near Captains Cove.

Reports of gunfire arent unheard of in the area, but the blasts usually come from inland.

Police responded to the reports around 1:45 p.m. in what is an annual spate of complaints about duck hunters.

Captains Cove employees are used to the hunters.

We just kind of tolerate it, said Bruce Williams, VP of Captains Cove. It does get your attention ... bang, bang.

Connecticut hunters are barred from firing their weapons within 500 feet of structures, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Bridgeport police did not find any wrongdoing, according to department dispatch reports.
Army Pfc. Ryan Brisson of Waterford has received a Soldier's Medal, the highest award for noncombat heroism.

Brisson received the award from Gen. Mark Milley, Army chief of staff, during a ceremony at 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Headquarters in Fort Campbell, Ky.

Brisson was one of six soldiers assigned to C Troop, 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team who earned the medal in recognition of heroic actions rescuing four crew members following a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crash at Fort Campbell.

"I'm very humbled to be a part of this," Milley told the medal recipients. "I've been in the Army for 40 years and I've only seen a few Soldier's Medals. It's a very rare thing. What you (soldiers) did took tremendous courage. You knew it was very likely you would be hurt yourself, but you did it anyway. You make anyone who has been associated with the 101st enormously proud."

The aircraft, flown by four crew members from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade crashed into a forest on the installation shortly after takeoff. According to eyewitness accounts, the location of the crash, and the fact that the aircraft suffered major fuselage damage and was inverted, created a complex scene.

"The way it landed upside down in the ravine made it very difficult to access the crew," said 1st Sgt. Adolfo Dominguez. "It also began to catch fire very quickly. The whole experience opened our eyes that these emergencies can happen. But it was amazing to see the soldiers' mentality of: 'I will do anything I have to do in order to save these pilots' lives.'"

Brisson and the other soldiers used water, fire extinguishers and soil to control the fire, which allowed them to remove and treat three of the injured crew members. They then performed multiple immediate and inventive actions to remove the trapped crew chief from the still-burning wreckage.

"What this unit (rescuers) did, from the time the incident happened, was pure agility and pure instinct," Lt. Col. Adisa King, squadron commander, said. "When you know that your brother is down, nothing is going to stop you. We talk about leaving no soldier behind, and they proved that. It didn't matter what it took to get that crew and those pilots out, these soldiers were going to do it."

Families, friends and fellow soldiers attended the awards ceremony. One individual had an extremely close connection to the incident. Spc. Grant Long, 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st CAB crew chief, was on board the helicopter and was injured in the crash. In a touching moment, Milley invited Long to help him pin the medals on the soldiers who saved his life.

Col. Derek Thomson, 1st BCT commander, described the actions taken by the soldiers.

"Brisson displayed exceptionally courageous initiative when he, without orders or guidance and complete disregard for his own safety in the face of life-threatening danger, cut free two crewmen from the crashed UH-60 Black Hawk," Thomson said. "Brisson also crawled into the wreckage to help dislodge one of those crewmen who was trapped, ultimately saving his life."

Brisson moved into intense flames, heavy smoke and violent explosions to help rescue the crew, according to Thomson. First, he moved to the right side pilot who was in pain and stuck upside down with his harness still on. Brisson immediately pulled his own knife out, cut the pilot's harness, and with the assistance of others, pulled him from the aircraft.

"When I first got there, I saw a couple soldiers hanging upside down. They were still strapped in," Brisson said. "I used my Gerber to cut his belt, and he fell down from the seat."

Brisson then quickly moved to the left side crew chief, who, was stuck in his harness, and also cut him free. The crew chief dropped to the ground but his foot was pinned between the collapsed engine and aircraft paneling, only inches from the spreading fire. During this initial attempt to recover the crew chief, Brisson was mere feet from the flames and was breathing in dense smoke.

"The second soldier was also trapped, and I could see the flames were nearing his back," he said. "I just acted on instinct, when I saw he was in pain. I wasn't thinking about how dangerous it was, I just thought if it was me, I hope they would help get me out. I have a brother in the Army and I hope someone would help him out in a situation like that."

Brisson then joined the group effort to free the fourth crew chief, showing extreme bravery by crawling into the burning wreckage to try to cut the boots off of the crew chief. Brisson aided in the rescue efforts longer than any other soldier on the scene.

The other soldiers who earned the medal are Staff Sgt. Beau Corder, Memphis, Tenn.; Staff Sgt. Richard Weaver, Indianapolis; Staff Sgt. Engel Becker, Miami; Sgt. Damon Seals, Sparta, Tenn.; and Spc. Christopher White, Harmony, Pa.

News of your troops and units can be sent to Duty Calls, Terry Brown, Times Union, Box 15000, Albany, NY 12212 or brownt@timesunion.com.
French President Emmanuel Macron's first state visit to China begins Monday, as Chinese experts express hope the young and energetic leader will help enhance China-EU relations.

China attaches great importance to its relations with France, which has recently become a more prominent leader in Europe and global affairs, Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs of Renmin University of China, told the Global Times.

At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, Macron will pay a state visit to China from Monday to Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said Friday.

"This is Macron's first state visit to China, which is of important significance as it will carry on the past and open the future. During the visit, the two heads of state will comprehensively review and look into the future of China-France relations," and "bring the close and enduring China-France comprehensive strategic partnership to new heights," Geng said.

Macron is a symbol of the future for Europe and to some extent even representative of the West, Wang said. With Angela Merkel struggling to form a cabinet and Teresa May preoccupied with Brexit, Macron and France have moved to a more prominent position in Europe, he said.

France's role

"Both China and France are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and China-France relations extend far beyond their bilateralism and have global significance," Geng said at a press conference.

After Brexit, France will become the only nuclear power and the only permanent member of the UN Security Council in the EU. Compared to Merkel, young Macron represents the future of the EU and his visit also represents the pragmatic cooperation between China and the EU, Wang said. "France can help China explore more diplomatic space in the EU."

A delegation of 50 business executives, from nuclear giants EDF and Areva, aircraft maker Airbus and hotels group Accor, as well as representatives of the French beef, pork and milk lobbies are expected to travel with Macron. Airbus is in talks to sell 100 or more jetliners to China, Reuters reported on Friday.

"Although France's role and influence in the West has been suddenly enhanced due to Trump and Brexit, it doesn't mean France will dominate the Sino-French relationship," said Song Luzheng, a research fellow at the China Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai.

Apart from trade issues, jointly safeguarding globalization and free trade, cooperation on climate change and terrorism, Song says there are other issues Macron should consider. Making France the first major Western power to provide visa-free entry to Chinese tourists and declaring France a strong partner to promote the Belt and Road initiative are important issues, Song said.

Without such breakthroughs, "the visit would be just showing that the two countries have maintained their relationship and demonstrate their shared stance in safeguarding globalization and free trade to the US and the world," he said.

During the visit, Xi will host state events for Macron. Premier Li Keqiang and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Zhang Dejiang will also meet him separately. The two sides will exchange in-depth views on China-France relations and issues of common interest.

Apart from Beijing, Macron will also visit Xi'an, the capital city of Shaanxi Province.

Visiting Xi'an, an ancient capital of China, is a tradition of previous French presidents' state visits to China.

"Apart from showing respect to Chinese culture, the arrangement may also represent France's attitude to the Belt and Road initiative, because Xi'an is the origin of the ancient Silk Road," Wang said.
Frozen pipes and heating problems have closed a number of schools in southwest Connecticut.

Fairfield Ludlowe High School is closed Monday due to frozen water pipes.

Park City Magnet School, at 1526 Chopsey Hill Road in Bridgeport is also closed due to burst pipes, according to Av Harris, Bridgeports director of legislative affairs and public policy.

Harris said some pipes burst in a second-floor bathroom, causing flooding in a hall way, one or two classrooms and the schools cafeteria.

Fairfield Wheeler School in Bridgeport is also closed because of heat related problems in the building.

A burst pipe has also closed Dunbar Elementary School in Bridgeport.

The Gaelic-American Club in Fairfield is also closed Monday because of a burst water pipe.

In Norwalk, following the extreme cold this weekend, Wolfpit Elementary School had no heat Monday morning.

All arriving students, both those on buses and walkers, were transported by school buses to Norwalk High School for classes Monday.

Students will return to Wolfpit for dismissal this afternoon was usual, school officials said.
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College presidents today must be prepared to manage their campuses reputations and maintain student safety amid man-made and natural crises, a report out this fall from the Journal of Education Advancement and Marketing found.

Crisis-prone universities are vulnerable to threats of violence, due to their open access to the public, and other risks in an era of student protest and political division, State University of New York at Albany professor Eric Stern and communications administrator Joseph Brennan wrote in the report.

This has significant implications for the way that universities select and prepare not only their leaders, but also those who advise and support top leadership in crisis situations, they wrote.

Texas campuses in 2017 perhaps typified the crises  both man-made and natural  that universities must navigate.

Universities and colleges in Houston feared the worst when Hurricane Harvey approached in August. Though largely physically unscathed, campuses here had to assist their students, many of whom suffered damaged homes, and reorganize course schedules.

Presidents and other university administrators communicated often with students and their families in an effort to ease concerns and spread important information.

Violence near the University of Virginias campus in August put schools nationwide on edge as students and staff feared that protests would turn violent at their colleges, too.

A white nationalist shortly after announced a White Lives Matter event at Texas A&M University for Sept. 11, which the university later canceled. Regents supported the university's decision to call off the event.

One University of Texas at Austin student died in a stabbing by a fellow student in May as rumors spread on social media about a potential second attacker.

UT-Austin President Greg Fenves validated students feelings in a news conference after the attack: There is fear, and that fear is justified We have lots of emotions, including fear and distrust, and we recognize there is tremendous pain among the student body.

Colleges long recruited academics to lead their institutions, but in recent years, boards have hired leaders with business experience, recognizing that leading institutions with massive budgets and thousands of employees takes management expertise.

But the fall report indicates that apart from business acumen, crisis communications expertise may be a commodity that search committees should also seek in college presidents.

The authors recommend that university leaders study reputational threats in addition to safety preparedness as they consider how to respond to crises.

Colleges and universities sometimes seem to almost purposefully have been designed to produce crises, the authors wrote, citing open access to criminals and the passionate debate that occurs on college campuses.

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 a yellow-brick farmhouse, down a rural road in southwestern Ontario, Grant and Ada Triebner lived a quiet life together.

A collection of family photographs offers glimpses into their decades-long marriage: Ada, posing in her white, lace-trimmed ballgown and Grant in his suit on their wedding day. The smiling couple holding children, then grandchildren, in their arms. Ada and Grant sharing a kiss for the camera in their later years, their graying hair a testament to the durability of their love. Grant playing the violin, riding a motorcycle, or driving a tractor around their property.

It was outside their beloved farmhouse in the small municipality of Bluewater, after a bitterly cold night last week, that Grant and Ada Triebner died together within hours of each other, police told Canadian news outlets.

Grant Triebner was found dead inside an open barn on his snow-covered property Wednesday morning, having suffered a fatal "medical event," provincial police told the Canadian Press in a statement.

Wanting to check on her husband, police said, Ada Triebner stepped out of her farmhouse and into the frigid cold, amid temperatures that dropped to about 14 degrees Fahrenheit. She died from exposure to the extreme cold, police said.

"The kind and loving husband and father suffered from a massive heart attack," an obituary read, "and his loving and supportive wife died trying to save the love of her life."

Police found the couple during a welfare check at about 9 a.m. Wednesday morning and released their causes of death on Thursday.

Their deaths came amid an "unseasonable deep freeze that's gripped Southwestern Ontario," local newspaper the London Free Press reported. The tragic ending stunned members of their small rural community. But their story also reached strangers far beyond Ontario, underscoring the dangers of the unusually cold temperatures sweeping across Canada and the U.S.

The municipality of Bluewater mourned the deaths of the Triebners on Facebook, and warned residents to help safeguard their neighbors during this time of extreme cold, "particularly those who are elderly, with health issues, or simply living alone."

"Let's blanket this community with all the warmth Bluewater is capable of and keep each other safe," the municipality posted on Facebook.

Relatives described the Triebners as an inseparable couple that loved their church, their family and their home. Before they both retired, Ada Triebner worked as a schoolteacher, and Grant Triebner as a cash crop farmer, their longtime neighbor Jim Rowe told the London Free Press. Grant Triebner also drove a school bus, and many of his long-ago students shared memories of him in condolence notes on the funeral site.

"Grant was my bus driver for years," a note from Jackie Westelaken reads. "He was a kind man with a great sense of humour. We always had nice chats as I was often the last to be dropped off."

The couple lived "unencumbered in a world that sometimes has an appetite for greed," their niece, Ethel-Lori Triebner, wrote in a tribute in the London Free Press.

Through the years, they took care of each other, overcoming the death of their son, Mark, in 1987, to cystic fibrosis.

A family friend, Annette Gilbert, recalled in a condolence note on the funeral home site how Grant Triebner would be "joking, teasing and singing while doing Mark's therapy," and how Ada Triebner would be "busy at the wood stove just trying to keep us out of trouble."

"What a privilege I didn't recognize as a child to have spent time in the home of such a resilient couple," Gilbert wrote.

"Our families have been connected from the 60s through sad times and happy times," another family friend wrote on the funeral site. "(Now) your parents are with Mark who welcomed them with open arms and his devilish grin so like your Father's grin."

Rowe, the couple's neighbor, remembered Triebner as an active lover of the outdoors. He was "always building something" and could play several instruments, Rowe said. He could often be found outside, riding his bicycle in the summer or clearing snow out of the driveway in the winter.

He was "always fiddling with something, he was a master at building things, or working on a motor or making something work or getting an old tractor to run," Rowe said.

Most of all, their relatives and friends recalled, the couple showed a devotion to their faith and to each other.

Martha Heywood, a member of their church, told the Toronto Star that Grant had medical issues and Ada "suffered a little" from dementia. "He was determined that he could take care of Ada as she had taken care of him all those years," she said.

A niece, Elizabeth Jolly, described Grant Triebner's "mischievous nature" and Ada Triebner's "gentle serenity."

"We so loved listening to Uncle Grant's wonderful tales of days gone by, his boisterous laugh and to Aunt Ada saying "Oh, Grant!" recounted another relative. "They were, to us, an amazing example of how a marriage should be. They very obviously adored each other."

"They never did much apart from each other," Rowe said. "They were so close, together all their lives."

Their funeral service will be held this week, and the couple will be buried at the cemetery just down the road from their house.

They will share the gravestone with their late son, Mark. The marker, arranged before they died, is inscribed with a reference to a bible verse: John 11:25. "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die."
For the past week, all of Washington has been chewing over Michael Wolff's new book about President Donald Trump and trying to assess which damning conclusions are actually true. But one of the bleakest scoops about Trump popped up elsewhere on Sunday night.

Axios' Jonathan Swan reports that Trump has significantly curtailed his official schedule as president - to the point where his first meeting is often held at 11 a.m., and he spends almost the whole morning in his White House residence watching TV, tweeting and making phone calls. That chunk of his day, generally between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., is dubbed "executive time" - a phrase that is bound to become the butt of plenty of jokes. Trump then has other periods of "executive time" sprinkled in throughout his official work schedule, which is usually between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Nice work if you can get it. And a short commute, too!)

The idea that Trump spends plenty of time on nonofficial pursuits isn't completely groundbreaking. A simple perusal of Trump's Twitter feed shows how much time he spends prosecuting feuds and responding to things he has clearly seen on TV, and it has been reported that being president hasn't been a particularly joyful pursuit for Trump.

But the extent to which he is not engaged in the very serious matters of being president has never been so firmly quantified. As the New York Times's Maggie Haberman noted in response to Swan's piece, the White House has bristled at such questions and lashed out at The New York Times for suggesting Trump watched four to eight hours of TV in a given day.

Notably, Sarah Huckabee Sanders's response to Swan's story doesn't exactly read like an ironclad denial. Instead, she insists that Trump includes official business during his morning routine, which she concedes includes time in the residence.

"The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time," Sanders told Swan. "The president is one of the hardest workers I've ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him."

It's true that the Trump presidency can be exhausting, but it's mostly because of Trump's penchant for controversy, which he often stokes through his Twitter feed during off-hours. And Trump's Twitter habit only seems to have increased as a portion of his day in recent weeks.

And the reason Swan's scoop paints such a bleak picture of Trump is because it suggests he's not particularly interested in the official duties of being president. Whatever you think about Trump's policies or his fitness for the job, the job requires one to be fully engaged, to be processing information (preferably from sources other than cable news), and to always be, for lack of a better word, on. The idea that Trump doesn't take his daily intelligence briefing until 11 a.m. is shocking just by itself. And whoever leaked his official schedules to Swan seems to be concerned that Trump just isn't up to the job right now.

It also is completely counter to Trump's brand and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Trump said he wouldn't even take vacations as president. "I would rarely leave the White House, because there's so much work to be done," he told the Hill newspaper in June 2015. "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off."

He added in January 2016: "Somebody says, 'Why don't you take a vacation before you become president?' I said because I like doing this."

The question increasingly is what "this" is. And judging by the Axios report, "this" is increasingly spending time outside the Oval Office and tweeting. It suggests that, relative to past inhabitants of the Oval Office, we have a part-time president.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump's former chief strategist offered a semi-apology Sunday after days of withering castigation from the White House over his scathing comments in a new book, praising Trump in a public statement that aimed to soften his earlier criticism.

Steve Bannon's mea culpa came as Trump and his senior aides continued a barrage of public insults against him. The president's top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, on Sunday called Bannon an "angry, vindictive person" whose "grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality."

In a written statement, Bannon asserted that passages in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff in which he was quoted as being critical of Donald Trump Jr.'s contacts with a Russian lawyer - calling their 2016 meeting at Trump Tower "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" - were a mischaracterization.

Bannon insisted his criticism was aimed not at the president's eldest son but rather at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was fired and is facing charges in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. Manafort, who also attended the meeting along with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, should have known "how the Russians operate," Bannon said.

"Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man," Bannon said. "He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

Bannon was quoted in the book speculating that Trump Jr. told his father about the meeting shortly after it took place but offered no evidence. In Sunday's statement, however, Bannon emphasized that he believes there "was no collusion" between the campaign and Russian operatives, who have been accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of meddling in the presidential election.

"The investigation is a witch hunt," Bannon said. "I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments."

But the White House did not appear eager to forgive Bannon or welcome him back into Trump's good graces. And Trump on Sunday continued to lambaste Wolff on Twitter, denouncing the "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

Amid questions raised in the book about his mental fitness for office, Trump wrote in the tweet that "Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!"

On CNN's "State of the Union," Miller repeatedly slammed both Bannon and Wolff, calling the book a "betrayal of the president" that is "so contrary to the reality of those who work with him."

Miller added that "the book is best understood as a work of poorly written fiction. The author is a garbage author of a garbage book."

Wolff defended himself on NBC's "Meet the Press" and suggested the chaos and uncertainty in the White House is worse than his book described.

"If I left out anything, it was probably stuff even more damning. It's that bad," he said. "It's an extraordinary moment in time. The last several days focused on my book are proof of this. What happened here? What's going on here?"

Wolff went so far as to raise the specter of the 25th Amendment, which allows a president's Cabinet to remove him from office for being unable to perform his duties, although experts said that amendment was designed with the idea of a president being incapacitated by, for example, a coma.

"It is not an exaggeration or unreasonable to say this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff," Wolff said.

Bannon's statement came after Trump berated him in public and private, mocking the often disheveled Breitbart News chairman on Twitter as "Sloppy Steve" and belittling him as "poor" and "a liar" to Republican leaders during weekend meetings at Camp David, Maryland.

The ugly falling out between the two men - Bannon served as campaign chief executive after Manafort was dismissed and was widely credited with helping Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton - has threatened to distract the White House from its policy agenda in an election year.

Although Bannon was forced out of the White House in August amid escalating feuds with Trump's family members and other senior aides, Trump remained close to him, speaking to him occasionally by phone over objections from advisers.

Bannon had planned to use his continuing clout with the president, along with the news pages at Breitbart, to advance his own nationalist agenda, including threatening to try to unseat Republican incumbents who did not support Bannon's hard-line immigration and anti-globalization positions.

Instead, Trump has sought to punish Bannon, and the former insider appears isolated, not only from the West Wing but also from his outside supporters, including financier Rebekah Mercer. Mercer, who had helped finance many Bannon initiatives, issued a rare public rebuke of him in which she said she would to sever ties with him.

At Breitbart, company leaders have debated whether they could force Bannon from his top perch.

"Bannon's apology had nothing to do with repairing the relationship with Trump," said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax and a Trump confidante. "It had everything to do with repairing his relationship with Trump supporters who read Breitbart and big donors he depends on."

Inside the West Wing, aides said Trump and his top advisers quickly issued an ultimatum: Allies had to choose sides - they either supported the president or they supported Bannon. There could be no middle ground.

Bannon's statement, one person close to him said, was as much about stanching the tide of supporters and potential backers distancing themselves as it was appeasing the president. He continues to privately criticize Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, who, according to the book, he referred to as "dumb as a brick."

Bannon also has continued to call Trump a "vessel," a Bannon ally said, while casting himself as something of a revolutionary in the conservative movement.

He has tried to convince allies in recent days that all will be fine - even texting one "onward!" - but he seems jolted and "even more manic than normal," in the words of one person who spoke to him. He has remained ensconced in his Capitol Hill townhouse, with a rope on the steps blocking people from approaching. "STOP!" a large red sign reads, urging visitors to check in downstairs.

"He knows he is at his lowest point," said one associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. "He won't tell you that, but he knows it."

In his statement, Bannon declared that his "support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda. . . . President Trump was the only candidate that could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus. I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism; and remain ready to stand in the breach for this president's efforts to make America great again."

Almost as soon as excerpts from Wolff's book leaked last week, many Bannon associates urged him to issue a statement defending himself. But before he could do so, the White House released a personal statement last week from Trump saying his former adviser had "lost his mind."

At first, Bannon did not want to apologize, people who spoke to him said. But after meeting with allies and advisers, he grew convinced that things would worsen unless he did. Those close to Bannon said that as the controversy unfolded, he seemed eager to find a way to try to repair his relationship with the president.

Bannon has told others that Trump will eventually come back around to him when the president needs him, and that he plans to use his Breitbart platform to wage battles with the Republican establishment over spending and immigration this spring.

But whether Bannon will have the clout - or any allies - to launch a fight remains unclear.

Miller and Bannon were once considered kindred spirits - both immigration hard-liners who sought to exploit Trump's populist rhetoric to advance a nationalist agenda. But as Bannon lost favor in the West Wing, Miller reportedly realigned himself with a faction led by Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Asked on CNN whether the president knew about Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer when it occurred, Miller said Bannon was not present and therefore "is not even a remotely credible source on any of it."

Growing frustrated as Miller praised the president while evading questions and repeating his talking points, CNN host Jake Tapper cut him off early and went to a commercial. "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time," Tapper said as Miller attempted to keep talking.

"Welcome back to planet Earth," Tapper said to viewers after the show returned.

But Trump was eager for the last word.

In a tweet, the president wrote: "Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"

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Video Embed Code:

Video: President Trump used to have kind words for his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, but things changed after Bannon's comments in "Fire and Fury." (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

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PORTLAND  The accident on the Arrigoni Bridge in November that took the life of a 22-year-old Middletown man remains a priority for the Portland police officer conducting the investigation into Daquan Moores death.

Moore was riding a moped east across the bridge en route to Portland late on the night of Nov. 4 when he was struck from behind by a speeding car traveling east . The vehicle pushed/carried the moped for several hundred feet before the scooter disengaged from the car, according to authorities.

But instead of stopping, the car accelerated, crossed the bridge, and then turned around in a Main Street service station and headed back toward Middletown, according to the accident report. As the car passed the wreckage of Moores moped, the driver slowed near the scene before continuing on his way, police said.

Police recovered the vehicle, a white 2001 Audi sedan, which was turned over to them by an attorney representing the cars owner.

In the weeks since then, Officer Paul Liseo has remained in contact with Moores family as he continues to gather statements and compile additional details about the accident.

As he sat at a desk in police headquarters last week, Liseo held up a bulging file folder. Its every bit of five inches (thick), Liseo said, and it contained supportive documentation as he works to build the case against a suspect.

Meanwhile, Liseo continues to search for the driver of a second car recorded on surveillance video crossing the bridge when the accident occurred. Police have identified that vehicle as a silver or champagne-colored 1999 to 2001 four-door Chrysler LHS sedan with Connecticut license plates.

Were looking for the driver of that car as a witness, Liseo said. Were looking for that person to come forward to provide us with any information he can about the other vehicle.

Like the Audi, the driver of the Chrysler also crossed the bridge into Portland, turned around in the service station and then doubled back across the bridge toward Middletown. Liseo secured surveillance video of the Chrysler as it turned around and uploaded the video onto the Middletown Police Department Facebook page.

Anyone with information about either the Chrysler (and its driver) and/or the accident is asked to come forward and contact Liseo at 860-342-6780 or through Middletown Central Dispatch at 860- 347-2541.

Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Portland and Cromwell. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com.
DAMASCUS, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army captured on Sunday a key stronghold of al-Qaida-linked militants in the country's northwestern province of Idlib, as part of a major military offensive to capture a strategic air base in that province, a military source told Xinhua.

The town of Sinjar fell to the army after the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee (LLC), otherwise known as the Nusra Front, was defeated in nearby towns and villages in the southern countryside of Idlib, a major stronghold of the LLC and like-minded militant groups.

Also, the towns of Mutawasita, Khiara, and Kafrya al-Ma'ara have fallen to the army west of Sinjar, the military source said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, activist groups said the LLC militants withdrew from the town after all of the surrounding areas had fallen.

Sinjar is the latest major stronghold to fall in the southern countryside of Idlib since the army unleashed an operation in that part of the country over two months ago.

The town will be a key launching pad for further military operation in Idlib, and it's only 14 km from the key Abu al-Duhur Air Base, whose recapture is a major goal behind the military operations in Idlib and it would enable the Syrian army to regain the upper hand in carrying out airstrikes in Idlib.

Idlib has emerged as the main destination of the rebel groups, which have evacuated several positions across Syria after surrendering to the Syrian army.

The area has become a home to several rebel groups from different affiliations, some of which are supported by Turkey, while others, such as the Nusra Front, are designated as terrorist groups.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group said recently that over 70 towns and villages in southern Idlib have fallen back to the Syrian army forces during the current operation in Idlib.
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Hardin County's oldest capital murder trial, which began with jury selection today, could be delayed again after a last-minute request by the defense for a change of venue.

Ryan Gertz, one of Jason Wade Delacerda's two defense attorneys, said he filed a change of venue motion on Thursday requesting the trial be moved out of the county. Gertz said he doesn't think his client can get a fair trial in Hardin County because of the media coverage surrounding the case.

Delacerda, 40, of Kountze was indicted in 2011 on a capital murder charge along with his then-girlfriend Amanda Nichole Guidry, 36, in connection with her 4-year-old daughter's death. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in Delacerda's case.

Gertz said a hearing on Friday will determine whether the case moves forward in Hardin County or is moved to a neighboring county.

Jury summons were mailed to 500 Hardin County residents for the trial, Gertz said. About 130 of those potential jurors will be given a 10-page questionnaire today, which will include questions aimed at determining whether Delacerda can receive a fair trial in Hardin County, he said.

The results of those questionnaires will be reviewed at the Friday hearing, he said.

The preference of courts is to move a trial to a county adjacent to the original jurisdiction. In Delacerda's case, those would include Jefferson, Orange, Jasper, Tyler, Polk or Liberty counties.

"The argument that we would make at that point is that all of those counties get their news from the same source, so we run into the same issue," Gertz said.

Gertz said many Southeast Texans are familiar with the death of 4-year-old Breonna Nichole Loftin.

Loftin died at a Beaumont hospital from blunt force trauma on Aug. 17, 2011. Hospital staff told Hardin County investigators the girl had burn marks, bruises and signs of sexual abuse, a sheriff's investigator wrote in a 2011 arrest affidavit for Guidry and Delacerda.

Guidry, the girl's mother, was released from jail in December 2014 on a reduced $250,000 bond. Her original bond was set at $1.5 million.

Hardin County District Attorney David Sheffield said in November that he plans to prosecute Guidry in 2018 but is not seeking the death penalty. She faces life in prison if convicted.

MGstalter@BeaumontEnterprise.com

Twitter.com/morgGstalt
NEW DELHI - An Indian government agency has filed a police complaint against a journalist who exposed a possible security breach in the country's vast biometric database that contains the personal details of over a billion citizens, raising fresh concerns about shrinking press freedom in India.

The complaint against journalist Rachna Khaira came after she wrote an article in the Tribune newspaper saying that reporters were able to buy access to addresses, emails, and phone numbers of a billion citizens for about $8. For an extra $5, reporters purchased access to a software that allowed them to print unique identity cards, which enables people to access a host of government services such as free school meals and fuel subsidies.

Khaira's investigation created an outcry in India as it suggests the data of a billion citizens may not be protected as well as the government had previously claimed. The breach she uncovered, the article said, exposed almost every Indian citizen to identity fraud and intrusions of privacy.

The police complaint against Khaira is the latest in clashes between India's government and media. India ranks 136 in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, down three points from the previous year. Killings of prominent journalists such as Gauri Lankesh and Sudip Datta Bhowmik have sparked protests around the country.

Speaking to NDTV, Khaira said the revelations in her story were just the "tip of the iceberg." She said, "We have almost completed our entire investigation... We have got much more than what we have exposed so far and which we are going to bring up in the next few days."

In response to Khaira's story, the Unique Identification Authority (UIDAI), which oversees the biometric program sent a letter to the Tribune's editor saying, "It is the UIDAI's position that there was absolutely no access to the biometric details (i.e. fingerprints and iris scans) of any individual whatsoever on the said UIDAI portal." The letter then asked the newspaper's editor to clarify if the reporter had accessed fingerprint and iris data and the number of individuals whose data the reporter had accessed for the story.

India's minister of law, Ravi Shankar Prasad, however suggested that the government did not support the Unique Identification Authority's heavy-handed approach to the journalist's investigation. In a tweet, Prasad wrote: "Govt. is fully committed to freedom of Press as well as to maintaining security & sanctity of #Aadhaar for India's development. FIR is against unknown. I've suggested @UIDAI to request Tribune & it's journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders."(sic)

And in a turnaround late Monday, local time, the Unique Identification Authority said it would work with the Tribune to identify wrongdoing.

"UIDAI is committed to the freedom of Press. We're going to write to @thetribunechd & @rachnakhaira to give all assistance to investigate to nab the real culprits. We also appreciate if Tribune & its journalist have any constructive suggestion to offer."

In light of the tweet, it was unclear if the agency would continue with its police complaint against Khaira.

The governing Bharatiya Janata Party had earlier tweeted from its official account that Khaira's report was "fake news." In another tweet, it quoted tech titan Nandan Nilekani who created the biometric program known as Aadhaar saying: "The security concerns raised around Aadhaar are complete nonsense, figment of imagination and a deliberate attempt to create an alarmist talk."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government champions the biometric database as a way to tackle welfare fraud and corruption in India. In the past year, the Modi government has tried to make Aadhaar cards mandatory to access a number of essential public services but was held back by activists who filed cases against the government in the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, government officials have visited remote parts of the country to encourage people to sign up to the biometric database voluntarily. So far, its efforts have worked - over a billion Indian citizens have signed up. However, thousands of Indians are still not on the database.

India's Editors Guild said in a statement that the Unique Identification Authority's decision to pursue criminal action against the journalist was "unfair, unjustified and a direct attack on the freedom of the press." In a statement, it said, "Instead of penalising the reporter, UIDAI should have ordered a thorough internal investigation into the alleged breach and made its findings public."

The Tribune's editor Harish Khare issued a statement saying, "Our story was in response to a very genuine concern among the citizens on a matter of great public interest.

"We regret very much that the authorities have misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise and have proceeded to institute criminal proceedings against the whistleblower."
WASHINGTON -

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has told President Trump's legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mueller raised the issue of interviewing Trump during a late December meeting with the president's lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.

The special counsel's team could interview Trump soon on some limited portion of questions - possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

"This is moving faster than anyone really realizes," the person said. Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election, the person added.

However, the president's attorneys are reluctant to let him sit for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some of the questions from Mueller's investigators, as President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller's team to demonstrate that it could not obtain the information ite seeks without interviewing the president.

The legal team's internal discussions about how to respond to a request for an interview were first reported Monday morning by NBC News.

Dowd and Sekulow declined to comment.

In a statement, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the administration's response to the Mueller investigation, said that "the White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process," referring to the special counsel's office.

"The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution," Cobb added.

Cobb had repeatedly said all interviews of White House personnel by Mueller's office were on schedule to be completed by the end of December or early this year. On Monday, he said he remains confident that any portion of the investigation related to the president or the White House will wrap up shortly.

Mueller and Trump's legal team plan to meet again soon to discuss both the possible terms and substance of the interview, as well as Mueller's timeline for the investigation, according to one person familiar with the plan.

Trump's lawyers hope to obtain from the special counsel's team a clear idea of the categories of questions that would be posed to the president.

For months, Trump's legal team has been researching the conditions under which the president would be required to submit to an interview with the special counsel, who is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

"No lawyer just volunteers their client without thinking this through," said one of the people familiar with the talks.

It has long been expected that Mueller would seek to interview Trump, in part because the special counsel is scrutinizing whether actions he took in office were attempts to blunt the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with questions posed to witnesses.

In May, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey after Comey testified on Capitol Hill that he could not comment on whether there was evidence that Russia had colluded with the Trump campaign.

The president also dictated a misleading statement later released by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., about a meeting that Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign.

Veteran prosecutors said it is unlikely that Mueller would agree to have any witness, even the president, submit a declaration or provide written answers to questions to avoid a sit-down interview.

Some experts said a presidential interview could signal that Mueller's investigation into the Trump's actions is nearing its end, but they cautioned that the special counsel might have a different strategy.

"It would certainly seem they would be close to wrapping up as it relates to the core matter they are investigating," said Solomon Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel who questioned President Bill Clinton in 1998. "You would want to know as much as possible before you go to the president. "

Asked on Saturday if he had agreed to be interviewed by Mueller, Trump said he had nothing to hide.

"Just so you understand, there's been no collusion, there's been no crime, and in theory everybody tells me I'm not under investigation. Maybe Hillary [Clinton] is, I don't know, but I'm not," Trump told reporters at Camp David. "But we have been very open. We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed, and it would have taken years. But you know, sort of like when you've done nothing wrong, let's be open and get it over with."

"Because, honestly, it's very, very bad for our country," the president added. "It's making our country look foolish. And this is a country that I don't want looking foolish. And it's not going to look foolish as long as I'm here."

In June, after Comey told a congressional panel that Trump had privately asked for his loyalty, the president said he would be willing to testify under oath to dispute the fired FBI director's claims.

"One hundred percent," Trump said when asked if he would give a sworn statement to Mueller.

Sitting presidents have been interviewed by prosecutors in the past, though courts have urged government investigators to seek such interviews only when they cannot obtain relevant information another way.

Clinton's attorneys repeatedly fought independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's attempts to interview their client until investigators obtained a subpoena to force his testimony. It was the first grand jury subpoena served on a sitting president. Clinton then negotiated to testify before a grand jury via video and audio link from the White House Map Room.

In the videotaped interview in August 1998, which lasted four hours and saw questions from three prosecutors, Clinton admitted to inappropriate sexual activity with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but he claimed he had been legally correct in denying that he had had sexual relations with her. He also denied having committed perjury in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

Not all presidential interviews with prosecutors have come at the end of an investigation.

In 2004, President George W. Bush sat for an in-person interview with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was investigating whether senior White House aides leaked a CIA operative's identity and broke her cover as punishment for her husband's criticism of the Iraq War. Bush volunteered for the interview, which lasted 70 minutes and was conducted in the Oval Office. Bush was far from the last one interviewed in the probe; Fitzgerald later questioned several more central witnesses.

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at the time, adding that Bush was "pleased to do his part" to aid the investigation.

Reagan testified in the Iran-contra investigation while in office and twice more after he left office. He also answered in writing some written questions presented to him by the grand jury and the independent counsel in the probe.

In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford was interviewed as part of a grand jury investigation into an assassination attempt. In a taped session in the Old Executive Office Building, Ford shared his recollections of events when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, tried to shoot Ford at close range in Sacramento in September 1975. The tape was used at her trial that year.

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The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
MEXICO CITY - The Trump administration's decision to eliminate residency permits for some 200,000 Salvadoran migrants could cause far-reaching disruptions in the small Central American country, including a steep decline in remittances from abroad and a destabilizing wave of returning citizens to a homeland still racked by violence, according to immigration experts.

But Salvadoran officials took a more optimistic view Monday. They characterized the U.S. decision as an 18-month grace period, giving the government time to lobby Washington to find a permanent solution to avoid deportation for these Salvadorans.

"We are going to focus on the United States Congress, so that they pass legislation that allows our compatriots" to become residents, Hugo Martinez, El Salvador's foreign minister, said in a phone interview. "We think we have sufficient time and will work hard for this alternative."

If no legislation materializes, Monday's decision could result in the deportation of Salvadorans who have lived in the United States for decades, whose children are U.S. citizens and who send home billions of dollars a year to relatives in El Salvador. They would be returning to a country that has had one of the highest murder rates in the world in recent years, as well as a rampant gang problem.

The Salvadoran government has lobbied the Trump administration for months to find a solution that would allow these people to stay in the United States, rather than end the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, that has been in effect since 2001. Over the weekend, El Salvador's Foreign Ministry continued tweeting about the benefits that Salvadorans bring to the U.S. economy and culture, saying that 95 percent of Salvadorans in the program are employed or own their own businesses.

The Salvadorans with TPS status "have become important members of their communities in the United States, and their contributions are key to the development of that nation," the ministry wrote Sunday on Twitter.

Martinez, the foreign minister, predicted that even if no solution is reached after 18 months, the number of deportees will be "far fewer than 190,000," as Salvadorans can try other paths to regularize their immigration status. The government is also planning a "very intensive program" for deportees, including loans and job training, he said.

"We have in the immediate future a great challenge," Martinez said at a news conference Monday.

Under the terms of the decision announced Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, the administration will notify Salvadorans who benefit from the program that they have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave or find a way to obtain legal residency.

In 2001, after two deadly earthquakes struck El Salvador, the George W. Bush administration allowed undocumented Salvadorans who were residing in the United States before February 2001 to apply for protected status, which allowed them to obtain work permits and spared them from deportation. The temporary program has been renewed several times in the ensuing years.

"Salvadorans have been beneficiaries of this program for so long it created an illusion that this would lead to a permanent residency," said a Latin American diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The prospect of losing this status is "going to be very, very disappointing, not only back in El Salvador."

According to the DHS statement, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen decided that conditions in El Salvador have improved significantly since the earthquakes, erasing the original justification for the program. The announcement also comes in the context of the Trump administration's wider efforts to cut legal immigration to the United States and deport more of those who enter the country illegally.

The estimated 200,000 Salvadorans who enjoy this protected status also have roughly as many U.S.-born children, who are now at risk of seeing their parents and other relatives deported. "Families will be torn apart," the diplomat said.

If all TPS holders return or are deported, it will impose an enormous strain on a country of 6.2 million people where poverty is widespread and gang violence remains a serious problem. Although homicides have fallen over the past two years, El Salvador still had nearly 4,000 killings last year, giving it the highest murder rate in Central America, at more than 60 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2001, the year of the earthquakes, there were about 2,300 homicides.

Another major impact of the decision could be a decline in the amount of money that Salvadorans in the United States send home. Remittances now surpass $4.5 billion a year, accounting for about 17 percent of the country's GDP, according to the World Bank, and ranking as its single greatest source of income.

"The economic impact is going to be undeniable," said Roberto Rubio-Fabian, executive director of FUNDE, a nonprofit research organization in San Salvador. Remittances are the "pillar that supports an economy with serious structural problems," he said.

Experts said there are no good estimates yet about the potential loss in remittances, as it remains unclear how many migrants with TPS might end up returning to El Salvador. If large numbers do return, voluntarily or by being deported, they could push others out of the workforce.

"They're going to come back as pretty qualified, bilingual people," said Geoff Thale, a Central America expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. "What this is going to do is displace people there" and potentially cause "another surge in people leaving the country and looking for work here."

The administration's decision could also mean political trouble for President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former guerrilla commander during El Salvador's civil war who has been in office since 2014. His leftist political party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), could suffer in local and congressional elections in March, as well as a presidential contest next year, as a result of the TPS decision, according to political analysts.

"This will have a cost," said Sandra de Barraza, a columnist with La Prensa Grafica, a Salvadoran newspaper. "The government could have had a more aggressive policy of assisting" those in the TPS program.

Some Salvadoran officials noted that other countries, such as Honduras, received a shorter grace period before their TPS program ended.

"I see this time they've given us as positive, so that we can fight for another status, and I don't expect a massive deportation in the short term," said Hector Antonio Rodriguez, the head of El Salvador's immigration agency.

He predicted that if TPS holders are deported, many will try to return to the United States.

"They are not going to want to stay in El Salvador," he said. "They are going to try again to go by land into the U.S."
DAMASCUS, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The Turkish army is preparing to unleash an offensive against the Kurdish-controlled Afreen region in northern Syria, pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV reported on Sunday.

The Turkish army has set up field hospitals in a Turkish border area of Kumlu close to Syria's Idlib province in northwestern Syria as part of the preparation to wage an offensive on Afreen in the countryside of Aleppo province in northern Syria, said the report.

Citing sources, the report said 15,000 Turkish soldiers have been amassing in the Kilis area in Turkey to take part in the offensive.

Turkey has for long expressed its stance regarding the growing Kurdish influence in northern Syria. Afreen is a strategic Kurdish-controlled area, whose capture will deal a strong blow to the Kurdish Syrians and their plan to have an autonomy stretching along the Syrian-Turkish border.

The Syrian government has repeatedly condemned both Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has vehemently condemned the Turkish role in Syria on several occasions, while also slamming the SDF and their plans to play outside the umbrella of the Syrian government.

Late last month, Syria's Foreign Ministry held Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responsible for the bloodbath in Syria.

In a statement, the ministry said the "aggression of Erdogan and the entry of his forces into Syria is one form of supporting the terrorists."

On Dec. 20, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad described the SDF as "new Daesh (Islamic State)," saying the SDF should be a part of Syria.

The sharp comments came as the government perceives the Kurdish activities as separatist, despite the repeated remarks from the Kurds that they were not seeking independence.
WASHINGTON - The Trump administration announced Monday that it will terminate the provisional residency permits of about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the country since at least 2001, leaving them to face deportation.

The administration said it will give the Salvadorans until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or find a way to obtain a green card, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. After earthquakes hit the country in 2001, Salvadorans were granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, and their permits have been renewed on an 18-month basis since then.

Monday's announcement is the latest step by the administration to cut the number of foreigners living in the United States - by squeezing the flow of legal immigration and intensifying efforts to expel those who arrived illegally.

The efforts span nearly every facet of the American immigration system. Arrests by immigration enforcement agents have increased 40percent. Trump has slashed the number of refugees accepted by the United States to the lowest level since 1980. And last week his administration sent lawmakers an $18 billion blueprint for the first phase of a Mexico border wall.

The 200,000 Salvadorans are among the nearly 1 million immigrants whose lives in the United States have been upended and set to a deadline under President Trump. The largest group, nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, are set to begin losing their temporary work permits in March at the rate of nearly 1,000 per day.

Democrats and immigrant rights groups denounced the Trump administration's TPS decision, which they characterized as another attack on the United States' tradition of humanitarianism toward immigrants and refugees. On Monday, however, DHS officials resisted suggestions that the decision by Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was part of a broader anti-immigrant agenda. They described it in narrower legal terms, as a recognition that conditions in El Salvador have improved enough since the earthquakes to no longer warrant the TPS designation.

"Based on careful consideration of available information, including recommendations received as part of an inter-agency consultation process, the Secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist," the DHS statement read.

The statement noted that the U.S. government has deported more than 39,000 Salvadorans in the past two years, demonstrating, it said, "that the temporary inability of El Salvador to adequately return their nationals after the earthquake has been addressed."

Nielsen recently met with El Salvador's foreign minister and spoke with President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, according to the DHS.

In total, DHS officials said, 262,500 Salvadorans have been granted TPS permits, but recent estimates indicate that closer to 200,000 people with that status reside in the United States.

Immigrant advocates, Salvadoran government officials and others had implored Nielsen to extend the TPS designation, citing the country's gang violence and the potentially destabilizing effect of so many people being sent home. El Salvador's homicide rate - 108 per 100,000 people in 2015 - was the world's highest for a country not at war, the most recent U.N. data shows.

Others urged Nielsen to consider the approximately 190,000 U.S.-born children of Salvadoran TPS recipients. Their parents must now decide whether to break up their families, take their children back to El Salvador or stay in the United States and risk deportation.

Senior DHS officials told reporters Monday that Salvadoran parents would have to make that choice. "We are not going to get involved in an individual family's decision," said the official, who the agency did not allow to be quoted by name.

The potential economic impact on American companies and businesses was not a factor either, officials said. The mayors of Houston, Los Angeles and other cities with large number of Salvadorans had urged Nielsen to taken into account the wider contributions of TPS recipients, a third of whom are U.S. homeowners, according to recent surveys.

"Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years," Monday's DHS statement read. "The 18-month delayed termination will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative solution."

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said they considered the TPS program an example of American immigration policy gone awry, noting that when Congress created the designation in 1990, its purpose was to provide "temporary" protection from deportation following a natural disaster, armed conflict or other calamity.

In November, the DHS ended TPS for 60,000 Haitians who arrived after a 2010 earthquake and for 2,500 Nicaraguan migrants protected after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

A six-month extension was recently granted to 57,000 Hondurans, a decision made before Nielsen's arrival, by then-acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke. That move frustrated White House officials who wanted Duke to end the program.

Lawmakers from both parties who represent cities and states with large immigrant populations blasted the DHS decision. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., called it a "cynical move" whose purpose is to "score political points with the extreme right-wing Republican base."

On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., urged the Trump administration to reconsider, warning that it would be "devastating" to send Salvadorans home "after they have created a humble living for themselves and their families."

The TPS decision came as Congress deliberates DACA's fate. Some lawmakers see the looming Jan. 18 deadline for a must-pass government spending bill as leverage to forge a DACA solution.

Trump is demanding significant concessions. He wants to beef up border security and scale back legal immigration channels in exchange for supporting permanent legal residency, and possibly citizenship, for DACA recipients.

The president is scheduled to meet with a bipartisan group of lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday to continue the talks.

There were new signs Monday that TPS could end up as a bargaining chip in the DACA negotiations. A person familiar with the talks said Congress could step in to help the Salvadorans, Haitians and other groups whose TPS permits are now set to expire in 2019.

Democrats and Republicans have been privately discussing the possibility of curbing the diversity visa lottery program - which grants about 55,000 green cards each year to people from nations with low immigration rates to the United States - in exchange for sparing TPS recipients from deportation. Trump has insisted that any DACA deal must get rid of the lottery.

One aide on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations said Democrats would prefer a narrow deal to legalize DACA recipients. But this person added that if Trump insists on seeking significant border security upgrades and cuts to legal immigration, then Democrats will insist on extending TPS.

Some Republicans fear that if a DACA deal falls through, it could harm the party in immigrant-heavy voting districts during a midterm election year. Meanwhile, immigration hawks are urging Trump to motivate his base by holding a harder line, as he did throughout the 2016 campaign. The president's top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has been opposed to continuing DACA, and he is said also to have championed ending the TPS program.

"The fix has been in for these TPS decisions, regardless of the facts on the ground in these countries," said Kevin Appleby of the New York-based Center for Migration Studies.

"The decision on El Salvador is particularly damaging," he said. "It not only will uproot families and children who have lived here for years; it also will further destabilize an already violent country."

The DHS said in its announcement that it conducted extensive outreach to Salvadorans living in the United States, including "community forums on TPS, panel discussions with Salvadoran community organizers, stakeholder teleconferences, regular meetings with TPS beneficiaries, news releases to the Salvadoran community, meetings with Salvadoran government officials, meetings at local churches, and listening sessions."

Jaime Contreras, vice president of Local 32BJ, the largest property-service local in the Service Employees International Union, called Monday's decision "shameful." In the Washington area, he said, TPS recipients clean Reagan National Airport, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and "every major landmark you can think of."

"They have families here. A lot of these people own homes," said Contreras, whose union represents about 160,000 commercial office cleaners, security officers and others nationwide. "It's time for Congress to do the right thing."

---

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

---

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Video: DHS announced on Jan. 8 that it will end protected immigration status for about 200,000 migrants from El Salvador. This is what you need to know about TPS.(Melissa Macaya,Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

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WASHINGTON -

The Trump administration announced Monday that it will terminate the provisional residency permits of about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the country since at least 2001, leaving them to face deportation.

The administration said it will give the Salvadorans until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or find a way to obtain a green card, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. After earthquakes hit the country in 2001, Salvadorans were granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, and their permits have been renewed on an 18-month basis since then.

Monday's announcement is the latest step by the administration to cut the number of foreigners living in the United States - by squeezing the flow of legal immigration and intensifying efforts to expel those who arrived illegally.

The efforts span nearly every facet of the American immigration system. Arrests by immigration enforcement agents have increased 40percent. Trump has slashed the number of refugees accepted by the United States to the lowest level since 1980. And last week his administration sent lawmakers an $18 billion blueprint for the first phase of a Mexico border wall.

The 200,000 Salvadorans are among the nearly 1 million immigrants whose lives in the United States have been upended and set to a deadline under President Trump. The largest group, nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, are set to begin losing their temporary work permits in March at the rate of nearly 1,000 per day.

Democrats and immigrant rights groups denounced the Trump administration's TPS decision, which they characterized as another attack on the United States' tradition of humanitarianism toward immigrants and refugees. On Monday, however, DHS officials resisted suggestions that the decision by Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was part of a broader anti-immigrant agenda. They described it in narrower legal terms, as a recognition that conditions in El Salvador have improved enough since the earthquakes to no longer warrant the TPS designation.

"Based on careful consideration of available information, including recommendations received as part of an inter-agency consultation process, the Secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist," the DHS statement read.

The statement noted that the U.S. government has deported more than 39,000 Salvadorans in the past two years, demonstrating, it said, "that the temporary inability of El Salvador to adequately return their nationals after the earthquake has been addressed."

Nielsen recently met with El Salvador's foreign minister and spoke with President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, according to the DHS.

In total, DHS officials said, 262,500 Salvadorans have been granted TPS permits, but recent estimates indicate that closer to 200,000 people with that status reside in the United States.

Immigrant advocates, Salvadoran government officials and others had implored Nielsen to extend the TPS designation, citing the country's gang violence and the potentially destabilizing effect of so many people being sent home. El Salvador's homicide rate - 108 per 100,000 people in 2015 - was the world's highest for a country not at war, the most recent U.N. data shows.

Others urged Nielsen to consider the approximately 190,000 U.S.-born children of Salvadoran TPS recipients. Their parents must now decide whether to break up their families, take their children back to El Salvador or stay in the United States and risk deportation.

Senior DHS officials told reporters Monday that Salvadoran parents would have to make that choice. "We are not going to get involved in an individual family's decision," said the official, who the agency did not allow to be quoted by name.

The potential economic impact on American companies and businesses was not a factor either, officials said. The mayors of Houston, Los Angeles and other cities with large number of Salvadorans had urged Nielsen to taken into account the wider contributions of TPS recipients, a third of whom are U.S. homeowners, according to recent surveys.

"Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years," Monday's DHS statement read. "The 18-month delayed termination will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative solution."

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said they considered the TPS program an example of American immigration policy gone awry, noting that when Congress created the designation in 1990, its purpose was to provide "temporary" protection from deportation following a natural disaster, armed conflict or other calamity.

In November, the DHS ended TPS for 60,000 Haitians who arrived after a 2010 earthquake and for 2,500 Nicaraguan migrants protected after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

A six-month extension was recently granted to 57,000 Hondurans, a decision made before Nielsen's arrival, by then-acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke. That move frustrated White House officials who wanted Duke to end the program.

Lawmakers from both parties who represent cities and states with large immigrant populations blasted the DHS decision. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) called it a "cynical move" whose purpose is to "score political points with the extreme right-wing Republican base."

On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) urged the Trump administration to reconsider, warning that it would be "devastating" to send Salvadorans home "after they have created a humble living for themselves and their families."

The TPS decision came as Congress deliberates DACA's fate. Some lawmakers see the looming Jan. 18 deadline for a must-pass government spending bill as leverage to forge a DACA solution.

Trump is demanding significant concessions. He wants to beef up border security and scale back legal immigration channels in exchange for supporting permanent legal residency, and possibly citizenship, for DACA recipients.

The president is scheduled to meet with a bipartisan group of lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday to continue the talks.

There were new signs Monday that TPS could end up as a bargaining chip in the DACA negotiations. A person familiar with the talks said Congress could step in to help the Salvadorans, Haitians and other groups whose TPS permits are now set to expire in 2019.

Democrats and Republicans have been privately discussing the possibility of curbing the diversity visa lottery program - which grants about 55,000 green cards each year to people from nations with low immigration rates to the United States - in exchange for sparing TPS recipients from deportation. Trump has insisted that any DACA deal must get rid of the lottery.

One aide on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations said Democrats would prefer a narrow deal to legalize DACA recipients. But this person added that if Trump insists on seeking significant border security upgrades and cuts to legal immigration, then Democrats will insist on extending TPS.

Some Republicans fear that if a DACA deal falls through, it could harm the party in immigrant-heavy voting districts during a midterm election year. Meanwhile, immigration hawks are urging Trump to motivate his base by holding a harder line, as he did throughout the 2016 campaign. The president's top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has been opposed to continuing DACA, and he is said also to have championed ending the TPS program.

"The fix has been in for these TPS decisions, regardless of the facts on the ground in these countries," said Kevin Appleby of the New York-based Center for Migration Studies.

"The decision on El Salvador is particularly damaging," he said. "It not only will uproot families and children who have lived here for years; it also will further destabilize an already violent country."

The DHS said in its announcement that it conducted extensive outreach to Salvadorans living in the United States, including "community forums on TPS, panel discussions with Salvadoran community organizers, stakeholder teleconferences, regular meetings with TPS beneficiaries, news releases to the Salvadoran community, meetings with Salvadoran government officials, meetings at local churches, and listening sessions."

Jaime Contreras, vice president of Local 32BJ, the largest property-service local in the Service Employees International Union, called Monday's decision "shameful." In the Washington area, he said, TPS recipients clean Reagan National Airport, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and "every major landmark you can think of."

"They have families here. A lot of these people own homes," said Contreras, whose union represents about 160,000 commercial office cleaners, security officers and others nationwide. "It's time for Congress to do the right thing."

---

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

---

Video Embed Code

Video: DHS announced on Jan. 8 that it will end protected immigration status for about 200,000 migrants from El Salvador. This is what you need to know about TPS.(Melissa Macaya,Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

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President Donald Trump Sunday night misquoted in a tweet a flattering column in the New York Post as lauding his "enormously consensual presidency." He then corrected it to reflect the real word: "consequential."

In the New York Post column, Michael Goodwin spoke highly of Trump's year in office, writing that it "is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency." He also wrote that "despite my own frustration over his missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president."

In a late-night string of tweets, Trump directed his millions of followers to the column but misquoted it, replacing the word "consequential" with "consensual." He also left out the author's references to the president's "missteps." Instead of linking to the article, Trump tweeted out an email address for Goodwin.

Trump or someone acting on his behalf deleted the tweet shortly after posting it, replacing it with a new tweet correctly quoting the article and linking to it.

The president's apparent error, however short-lived, was quickly captured in screen shots - and promptly mocked across social media.

The deleted tweet stirred memories of the famous late-night "covfefe" incident - the president's garbled tweet about the press that became an instant worldwide joke.

The president's reference to consent also happened to coincide with the Golden Globe Awards, where Hollywood stars wore black to protest sexual misconduct in the workplace - as some Twitter users pointed out.

Joy Reid tweeted "He also coined the soon-to-be trending term 'consensual presidency,' on the night of the black dress, #TIMESUP#goldenglobes no less. Yeah this show won't make it to season two. . ."

Others on Twitter brought up the fact that more than a dozen women accused President Trump of sexual misconduct during the 2016 presidential campaign. Amid the #MeToo sexual harassment movement, three women last month launched a renewed public push to gain attention for their allegations, which the White House dismissed. The president has denied any improprieties.

Pe Resists tweeted "Which, considering the allegations of multiple women against you, is rather Freudian. . ."

Nita Chaudhary tweeted "It's almost as if he doesn't know the definition of consensual."
Chinese peacekeepers patrol around the perimeter of UN House in Juba on 27 January 2016 (UNMISS Photo)

Source: sudantribune.com

The incident reportedly occurred at the same location where two Chinese peacekeepers were killed during fighting in South Sudan 18 months ago.

Peacekeepers at the United Nations compound in the capital Juba were told armed militants had entered a restricted zone on Thursday afternoon, South China Morning Post reported in its Saturday edition.

Fifteen militants carrying rifles and pistols were found in a restricted area ... chasing civilians after two gunshots were heard at about 4pm, the paper, quoting the official newspaper PLA Daily, said.

It also said Lt. Yang Yongqiang, one of 15 Chinese peacekeepers, rushed to the restricted zone where civilians are usually protected.

I told the armed men that they were in a place where weapons are prohibited, but they became agitated and started firing shots into the sky, Yang told the newspaper.

The situation reportedly worsened as more militants appeared in the restricted area and some of them  numbering about 30 at that stage  had their weapons allegedly aimed at the peacekeepers.

This was a very tense stand-off and the armed group was extremely hostile. It wouldve been very easy for us to lose control of the situation, Yang was quoted as saying.

According to the report, however, the peacekeepers negotiated with the militants, who agreed to lower their weapons and left the area.

South Sudans civil war, now in its fifth year, has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than two million people. Several ceasefire agreement signed by the warring parties have not held.

China, according to the United Nations, has more than 2,600 peacekeepers serving around the world with most of them serving military engineers and logistics staff, police and medical personnel.

At least 18 Chinese have reportedly died on peacekeeping missions, with half of them in Africa, from disease, traffic accidents, extreme weather and due to armed attacks.
A greenway trail linking two main parks in Converse is closer to reality after City Council unanimously accepted advance funding from a grant for the $1.51 million project.

We have been successful in acquiring funding for this project, but now we have to make our match, said City Manager Lanny Lambert, whose retirement became effective at the end of the Jan. 2 meeting.

The vote authorizes interim City Manager Le Ann Piatt to sign an agreement with the Texas Department of Transportation for the citys $450,000 share of the cost.

In January 2017, City Council authorized staff to apply for the Greenway Trail grant to link Converse City Park, at School Street near FM 78, and Converse North Park, at 8200 Spring Town off Toepperwein Road.

Manny Longoria, city public works superintendent, told the council that the project was conceived as part of the Parks and Environmental Commissions recreation vision master plan, adopted in 2015, which set out to develop a plan to link all the citys parks with a greenway trail system.

In July, the city was notified by MPO officials that its grant had been selected for funding.

The city has identified a potential route that follows a creekway north and west from Converse City Park to Binz-Engleman Road, and goes under the Union Pacific railroad tracks to FM 1976. From there, the route would go north along Janice Lane to connect to property just south of Converse North Park.

Longoria explained that a preferable option would require the city to acquire right-of-way from a private landowner. Attempts to negotiate with the landowner have been problematic to this point, Longoria added.

Under the grant, there is no ability for condemnation or eminent domain of any land needed for the right of way from the landowner. So without progress in talks with the landowner, this option will not be viable.

The grant provides federal transportation grant funding in the amount of nearly $1.09 million to construct the Converse greenway trail. Longoria said the federal money can only be spent on construction, and cannot be used for such actions as design, right-of-way purchase or environmental studies. The city is responsible for the rest of the funding, which will cover those project essentials.

The project comes from TxDOTs 2018 funding cycle. Longoria estimated a three-month month engineering-and-design phase, followed by about six months of construction.

In other action, the council gave the go-ahead for the city to file two applications with the Federal Emergency Management Agency ) on behalf of Fire Department.

The first grant request concerns staffing. Lambert said the city filed a similar application last year but was unsuccessful. The citys application asked for six positions.

The three-year grant would be similar to the program the city currently uses to fund staff on the Police Department. If approved, the city pays 25 percent of all associated costs in the first year, while FEMA pays 75 percent. In year two, the cost is split 50-50, and in year three, the city pays 65 percent while the agencys share drops to 35 percent. The following year, the city assumes total funding responsibility for the staffing costs.

If the city is successful, Lambert said, it would be notified in mid- to late 2018 and funding would begin in 2019.

Council also approved a second FEMA resolution for replacement of the Fire Departments 21-year-old pumper truck. This is the second year for the application, which was also turned down last year.

If approved, FEMA would pay 90 percent of the estimated $650,000 cost of the pumper. The city would only have to contribute 10 percent, or $65,000. A decision on the application, due next month, will be announced in September.

The fire departments pumper, purchased in 1996 for $200,000, has accumulated 100,000 miles. We ran the wheels off it when it was first out, Fire Chief Richard Wendt said.

The pumper is due to be replaced sometime in the 2019-2020 time frame, Wendt said. It will be placed in the capital improvement plan to be replaced, through the annual budgeting process. But landing the grant, he said, would mean a way less drastic amount that youre going to have to cough up to get it.

jflinn@express-news.net
Federal agents and San Antonio police worked together Sunday to track down a man who allegedly threatened shootings in the city's movie theaters.

San Antonio police posted an officer safety bulletin on Friday after police in West Monroe, Louisiana, contacted them about a threat they saw on social media, authorities said.
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A suspected armed robber with multiple facial tattoos was taken into custody Saturday by San Antonio police after an officer recognized him during an unrelated call, officials said.

David Marek, 37, who is from Arizona, was arrested on suspicion of aggravated robbery and theft. His tattoos include horns over each eye, "713" under his left eye, and a tear drop to the side of his left eye.

The arrest stems from a Dec. 5, 2017, robbery of a convenience store in the 900 block of West Hildebrand Avenue. Officers responded there around 3 a.m., according to an arrest affidavit.

RELATED: Former Spurs player arrested in S.A. on drunk driving charge

The clerk told them a man wearing a black jacket and black cap pulled out a handgun and demanded money, lottery tickets and cigarettes. The clerk also noted the man had tattoos on his face, including a tear drop by his eye, authorities said.

Later that morning, the stolen lottery tickets were cashed at a different convenience store in the 1200 block of Babcock Road for a total of $100. The man who cashed those tickets matched the same physical description given by the clerk, according to the affidavit.

The man visited a Valero gas station in the 7200 block of Blanco Road a few hours later, cashing two other stolen lottery tickets for a total of $50, police said.

Investigators still couldn't identify the suspect, however. On Wednesday, San Antonio Crime Stoppers released surveillance images of him and offered a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest.

RELATED: Neighbor details man's bizarre behavior before S.A. shop erupts in flames

Police did not receive tips on the suspect, according to the affidavit, but an officer recognized Marek during a call for service on Friday.

Marek was taken in for questioning and allegedly confessed to the robbery and detailed the items he stole from 7-Eleven.

His bail was set at $76,000.

Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here. | fsabawi@mysa.com | Twitter: @FaresInSA
By Guo Yuandan

China's Central Military Commission (CMC) held an annual military training kicking-off ceremony in the year of 2018 on the morning of January 3. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), gave instructions and orders to all Chinese armed forces in the ceremony.

This was the first ever ceremony held by China's CMC. What are its implications? We interviewed some experts to learn the answers.

The main venue of the ceremony was a shooting range of an army regiment under the Central Theater Command of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). More than 7,000 fully armed military members lined up, and nearly 300 pieces of equipment were positioned in a rapid and orderly manner.

Meanwhile, in response to Xi Jinpings orders, a total of 4,000-plus sub-venues were also set up across the military, including field-oriented sub-venues for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force, and the Chinese People's Armed Police Force.

The annual military training of 2018 began shortly thereafter. Various troops launched their exercises as planned. According to the official microblog of the PLA Air Force, multiple J-11B and JL-10 fighters were engaged in a real-combat air confrontation and live-fire air-ground assault training at an airport in north China on January 3. The highlight of the training was live-fire operations.

Stress on combat readiness

An insider with 30 years of military experience told the reporter on January 3 that this annual military training kicking-off ceremony held by the CMC was the first of its kind in Chinas military history. It signals to members of the armed forces a clear intention to comprehensively elevate the troops combat readiness.

The insider added that the presence of all military leaders from the CMC chairman to its members demonstrated the importance that the leadership attaches to the military training. The ceremonys being set at the very beginning of 2018 manifests the leaderships determination to make good progress in the New Year to come. In addition, the venue, a vast shooting range, indicates the CMCs intention of creating an awe-inspiring impression with fully armed soldiers.

Highlight of real-combat training

After the ceremony, the official Internet accounts of the Southern Theater Command, the Northern Theater Command and the Western Theater Command of the PLA successively released their coverage of starting military training, with all of them stressing real combat readiness.

A Marine Corps brigade of the PLA Southern Theater Command organized a real-combat-oriented confrontation exercise between red and blue sides of mechanized infantry platoons in mountainous regions in the brigades first training this year.

In 2018, the PLA will roll out training campaigns following the new version of Military Training Outline, one of the guidelines of which is to increase training intensity, difficulty and length to meet real combat requirements.

Another official media release said that an aviation brigade under the 79th Group Army required its soldiers to stretch their fighting performance, including that of weaponry, to the extreme in difficult and complicated weather and terrain conditions.

Some analysts said that the high attention the CMC attached to the military training may curb some impractical showy moves in military training.

The promotion of censorship and accountability in military training has been in full swing across the armed forces in recent years.

Last March, 57 military units involving 99 military officials were called to account, punished and criticized.

In June, 107 military training experts were hired as the first batch of CMC military training inspectors.

In November, the first censorship campaign on military training was carried out in joint campaign training of services and arms. This also guaranteed progress in real-combat-oriented military training.

Real combat training and peaceful development do not conflict

China always adheres to a defensive national defense policy. Chinas military development is meant only to safeguard national security without targeting any country or object.

The PLAs determination to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity is unshakable. Wu Qian, spokesman for China's Ministry of National Defense, said at a regular ministry press conferencein November 2017 that military training must stay aligned with international strategic layout changes and Chinas security situation to ensure that China can decisively cope with various threats and emergencies.
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From San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to San Antonio to Germany, Indiana and Panama, Phyllis Neumann lived all over the world, teaching and opening up her homes.

Last count, she moved over 100 times, said Kay McInnes, daughter of Phyllis Neumann.

Neumann died Jan. 4 due to complications from Alzheimers. She was 87.

Born in El Paso, Neumann was raised in San Luis Potosi until her mother died when she was 14.

Her father just couldnt keep her in Mexico, McInnes said, so Neumann moved to Texas to live with her aunt and uncle.

At boarding school, she had to take a foreign language but already knew Spanish and English, so she took French. Her love of the languages and teaching grew and she got her degree in education at the University of Texas at Austin.

After graduation, she married Donald Neumann, who served in the military and led her all over the world.

She made learning fun, McInnes said. For the most part, she taught in lower-income schools. She would do a massive fundraising event making tamales so anyone who wanted to go to the Pan American Spanish Forum in San Antonio in the spring would be able to go.

About 20 to 30 students would attend the convention of Spanish speakers every year, in large part to Neumanns support.

My parents sought out low income places without a lot of access to resources, McInnes said, adding that her parents aided foster children, foreign exchange students and anyone who needed help coming through their house.

More Information Phyllis Jean Bateman Neumann Born: June 13, 1930, in El Paso Died: Jan. 4, 2018, in San Antonio Preceded by: Parents Ralph Lowell and Meta Ormsbee Bateman; stepmother Anice Bateman; husband, Donald; and brother, Ralph Bateman Jr. Survivors: Daughters Terry Felux and Kay McInnes; sons, Loring, Paul and Michael Neumann Sr.; sister Sue Crawford; 15 grandchildren; 14 great-grandchildren and multiple nieces and nephews. Services: Visitation Jan. 12, 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Porter Loring Mortuary North, 2102 N. Loop 1604 East. Service Saturday, 10 a.m., at Crown of Life Lutheran Church, 19291 Stone Oak Pkwy. See More Collapse

God had called them to help, McInnes said. You can tell that by how they were always involved.

In their 60s, Neuman and her husband left for Panama where they planted churches and raised up pastors for seven years.

The Panamanians were their people, McInnes said. They went through the Lutheran church and thats where there was an opening.

The couple returned home after a head-on collision in Panama that put them both in the hospital.

We went to visit them in the ICU and everyone waiting was there to see them, McInnes said. A group spent a weeks wages to come up and hold a last service with them.

They were eventually transported back to San Antonio by their five children, but not before Donald Neumann could say, it took an accident to get you to Panama.

jpolcyn@express-news.net
It should not come as a surprise. We certainly have had enough hints that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was planning on repealing the Obama administrations 2013 hands-off policy  known as the Cole memo  regarding enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states where recreational use is legal. That covers eight states and the District of Columbia. The most recent convert is California, which legalized recreational marijuana use Jan. 1.

Here is the bottom line: The criminal justice response to drug use has failed. And Sessions repeal of the Cole memo is simply another page from that tired old playbook that has no basis in fact.

Sessions has a long history of concerns about marijuana. As attorney general of Alabama in 1996, he supported a mandatory death penalty bill for a second conviction for marijuana trafficking (including marijuana dealing). He has since made no secret that he is dubious about marijuana, that good people dont smoke marijuana, and that it is a very real danger.

Scientific evidence does not appear to be a high priority for Sessions or the Trump administration.

So we either just say no, or we ramp up the war on drugs. How well have those approaches worked in the past? Not well.

Prior to the announcement about repeal of the Cole memo, the key drug policy initiative has been to require U.S. attorneys to charge the most serious offense in federal drug cases, with the goal being the maximization of punishment. It is obvious that the only response that the Trump administration has to drug use is punishment. It seems they have not seen the memo that reports that the recidivism rate of drug offenders is 77 percent.

I want to be clear. I am not a marijuana advocate. I dont really have an opinion about whether someone should use marijuana recreationally, just as I dont have a position on recreational use of alcohol. I would add, however, that there are potential harms associated with any substance use, harms that include abuse, dependence and addiction, and a variety of behavioral and physical health implications.

One issue opponents of marijuana legalization, including Sessions, claim is that marijuana is a gateway drug, meaning it leads to the use of harder drugs such as crack or heroin. The evidence they cite is that among users of harder drugs, the majority used marijuana at some point. What they fail to appreciate is that the gateway argument also requires that among marijuana users, the majority of them use harder drugs. That is not the case, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

In 2015, 1.6 million people were arrested on drug charges, and nearly half of those were for possession of marijuana. The war on drugs is alive and well despite the fact that the vast majority of experts and the majority of the public have concluded it is a dismal failure. In fact, a recent poll from the Pew Research Center indicates that nearly three-quarters believe that the government should provide treatment for people who have drug problems rather than prosecuting them for drug use. Moreover, between 55 percent and 65 percent believe marijuana should be legalized.

Of course, Sessions does have an explanation for why public opinion supports a different course of action for the drug problem: I do believe  that the public is not properly educated on some of the issues related to marijuana.

Simply put, the criminal justice response does not work. Legalization takes the cartels out of the marijuana business (a good thing), provides revenue to states (a good thing), and keeps hundreds of thousands of individuals out of the criminal justice system (a good thing).

If we are concerned about the fact that people use marijuana, or that some users will eventually abuse it and thus develop substance use disorders, federal enforcement will help neither of these concerns. Drug abuse is a medical disorder that requires a public health response. Sessions ought to keep that in mind.

William R. Kelly is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Bookstores have long been an anomaly along West Commerce Street, past the railroad tracks leading into the heart of the West Side. One of the first privately funded West Side bookstores was operated by Rolando Cortez and Rodolfo Ramirez, two entrepreneurs who dabbled in the consciousness-raising philosophy of an indigenous Weltanschauung, a cultural and political worldview.

Books sold there elicited a cultural awareness of La Raza Cosmica, a collective synthesis that blended Africans, Asians, Europeans, Indios and Mestizos, all transforming a new cultural order.

Penca Books was located at 1817 W. Commerce St. near Centeno Supermarket. It was a real eye-opener. The term Penca translates from Nahuatl to Great Stalk.

COMMENTARY: Education is the engine that drives us, but it doesn't get enough attention in San Antonio

La Raza Cosmica (1925) was a striking manifesto written by Jose Vasconcelos, a Mexican intellectual who asserted that the Mexican Revolution heralded a new cultural synthesis of ideas. Like Vasconcelos, co-owner Ramirez was a dedicated intellectual with a predilection for literary theory and the history of marginalized peoples of the Southwest. His partner, Cortez, had a knack for accounting and meeting with booksellers and venture capitalists hoping to make a fast buck in the rising Latino book market.

Together, they exhibited acumen for acquiring culturally relevant literature reflecting the community.

One of the first authors to read and sign books at Penca Books was Rudolfo Anaya, who had just published Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a Bildungsroman about a young, restless Chicano boy growing up in New Mexico. He was the first novelist to set foot at the bookstore. And many people packed the small place just to bear witness to his success.

Sporting a black turtleneck and jet-black hair, the soft-spoken Anaya signed books and tallied how many rejection slips he had accumulated. But he never gave up on his dream. His novel was published by Tonatiuh Quinto Sol International, founded by Octavio Romano and a group of University of California, Berkeley intellectuals. They formed a publishing outlet because they wanted to publish unknown Americans ignored by the Eastern literary establishment.

READ MORE: Express-News selects the best books of 2017

Months later, in the Aug. 31, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Harvard historian John Womack Jr. wrote a long essay covering 15 books under the title,  A special Supplement: The Chicanos. They had finally been recognized by an elite highbrow journal.

Anayas novel was a template for other writers who saw in Bless Me, Ultima an affirmation of the Mexican-American experience.

Penca Books soon afterward ventured into its own publication imprint with Jose Reynas Raza Humor, a book about joking and the unconscious. It was linguistic ethnography of Southwest humor with a focus on recent immigrants coming to America. As demand grew for cultural books, more bookstores began making them available to readers.

What Penca Books did back then was organize poetry readings, give voice to Chicano intellectuals whose ideas were changing old belief systems, and provide a new forum for change. West Side residents visited the store for its colorful pinatas, posters, and walls of paperbacks, novels and Mexican history books, in both Spanish and English.

Although the bookstore closed its doors before the decade was over, its short-lived success created other venues for emerging writers and thinkers. Penca Books quickly faded from memory without even a historical marker to recognize its existence in the burgeoning literature of the Southwest.

The antediluvian dark days of literary exclusivity was slowly receding as more Mexican-Americans were experimenting with writing and self-expression. Despite its short experiment in selling Latino books, Penca Books deserves a chapter in the literary history of the West Side.
JERRY LARA /San Antonio Express-News

They say that with age comes wisdom. And for the most part, thats true. At 68, I like to think I have most things in my life figured out. I raised one daughter, and studied and worked in the molecular biology field, teaching biology, chemistry and dual credit chemistry to high school students for many years.

But I will readily admit that as I age, I also am more honest with myself about the things I may not know. I have found Im not truly prepared for some of the things that come with the older years. Navigating the older years takes planning and deliberate choices we dont always have the foundation to understand. As children, were taught to be adults, but no one teaches us how to be elders in our community.
BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- China has made the utmost efforts in the search and rescue operations after two vessels collided off China's east coast,a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday in Beijing.

Rescuers found one body this morning at around 10: 30 am, spokesperson Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing.

The collision, between a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered freighter, occurred at around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze estuary.

Thirty-two crew members, including 30 Iranian nationals and two Bangladeshi nationals, are missing.

"We have sent several rescue vessels to the scene," Lu said, while expressing gratitude for other countries' assistance in the rescue mission.
It was easier to cross the River Suir bridge in Thurles during the War of Independence than it has been over the past few weeks, thanks to the inexcusable condition of roads in the town, according to Sinn Fein councillor David Doran.

Describing the street conditions in the Cathedral Town as being worse than Syria, Cllr Doran told members of Tipperary County Council this Monday that all members of the local authority should be permitted to meet with Transport Infrastructure Ireland at the annual briefing which will take place in late January/early February.

The condition of the streets in Thurles, especially the River Suir bridge, was an embarassment to me as a public representative. We were all out encouraging people to come to Thurles to do their Christmas shopping and yet the streets were worse than Syria.

It would have been easier to cross the Suir Bridge during the War of Independence, than it has been over the last few weeks. It is totally unacceptable and somebody has to take responsibility for it, Cllr Doran said.

However, despite the issues highlighted in Thurles, there was widespread welcome for very significant allocations for Tipperary Town and for Golden, as well as an allocation of 654,000 for Slievenamon Road in Thurles to be totally overhauled.

Director of Services Mr Marcus O'Connor said that the annual meeting with TII in January would follow the format of the last number of years and shot down Cllr Dorans suggestion that any councillor who wishes to attend be permitted to do so - the Chairpersons of the Municipal Districts, Chairperson of the County Council, and officials are the agreed representatives from Tipperary who attend the meeting. He added that the success of the previous meetings is now being recognised in the allocations received  a sentiment echoed by Chief Executive Officer, Mr Joe MacGrath.

I am very much in touch with the conditions of the roads of Tipperary and I accept totally that they are not in the condition that they should be  I have said this in the past. This is as a result of the reduced allocations over the last five-six years, but we are now seeing for the first time, an increase in the allocations and this is to be welcome and acknowledged. We are going to see improvements in road conditions over the next while and we need to try and do all in our power to find further investment and allocations for our roads, Mr MacGrath said.

Cllr Jim Ryan had suggested raising a loan to undertake the necessary resurfacing works required for the roads, but this too was shot down by Mr O'Connor who said that the department would not sanction such actions for ongoing maintainence.

While the TII has taken major criticism for the condition of roads in Thurles town and other towns around the county also, Cllr Seamus Hanafin pointed out that the loss of the block grant for urban areas following the wipeout of the Town Councils is where the real issue rests. Instead of fighting with the TII, we should be writing to the department to try and have the block grant resored for urban roads. In Thurles alone, we have lost 500,000 over the last three years for streets and footpaths  that would have made a huge difference to the urban roads and it is the same in all the other towns, Cllr Hanafin said.

The allocations for Golden and Tipperary town were welcomed broadly by members including Cllrs Roger Kennedy, John Crosse, Denis Leahy and Michael Fitzgerald who said that he too had been embarrassed by the condition of the roads in these areas, similar to the embarrassment felt in Thurles and Borrisokane in recent times.
JUBA, Jan. 8 (ChinaMil) -- "I am not afraid to face the muzzle because we are here to protect the land," said Yang Yongqiang, a platoon leader of the 3rd Infantry Company of the 4th Chinese peacekeeping infantry battalion to South Sudan, upon recalling the incident that happened a day ago.

On the afternoon of Jan 4, local time, Lieut. Yang and his men successfully expelled tens of armed militants from the weapon exclusion zone delimited by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).

At about 4 p.m., Yang and 14 Chinese peacekeeping infantrymen were patrolling the restricted areas outside the UN House camp located in Juba, capital of South Sudan when two shots were heard from afar.

The 15 Chinese peacekeepers spared no time driving their assault vehicle towards the direction from where the shots were fired.

"Fifteen unidentified people were found, fourteen were armed with rifles and one was armed with a pistol, and they were pursuing a civilian in the weapon exclusion zone," reported the No 5 guard post though the wireless intercom.

The UNMISS requires the peacekeepers on patrol duty should make sure that no armed personnel enters the weapon exclusion zone.

Yang and his patrol team arrived at the scene at 16:04. "I immediately negotiated with the armed militants and told them that they intruded into the weapon exclusion zone where no firearms were allowed," Yang recalled.

While Yang was negotiating with the fifteen militants, more armed men flocked towards them and in less than a minute, the number of unidentified militants reached thirty. They aimed their guns at the Chinese peacekeepers. A conflict might break out at any moment.

Yang and some peacekeepers made their utmost efforts to argue reasonably with the armed militants. Meanwhile, on the patrol team's assault vehicle and infantry fighting vehicle, the operators of heavy machine guns and cannons were in combat readiness.

"At the time of the confrontation, the armed militants kept carrying their loaded rifles and were hysterical. The situation was very likely to get out of control at any time," Yang said.

Eventually, under the mighty deterrence of the Chinese peacekeepers, the commander of the militants beckoned to his men to holster their weapons and said they would immediately leave the weapon exclusion zone.
U.S. President Donald Trump and aides on Sunday heaped scorn on a new book detailing his chaotic first year in the White House and suggestions that he is not mentally fit to be the U.S. leader.

Trump, in a Twitter comment, said, "Ive had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

Trump's ire was aimed at journalist Michael Wolff, who, based on 200 interviews with Trump and numerous of his aides, described a dysfunctional White House in his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, released Friday.

Trump said that three decades ago, another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, was also faced with stories questioning his mental acuity "and handled it well. So will I!"

Stephen Miller, Trump's top policy adviser, assailed Trump's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon for comments in the book alleging that Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a key White House adviser, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort were "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" for meeting in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign with Russians claming to have incriminating information about Trump's challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Miller on CNN described Bannon as an "angry, vindictive person" whose "grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality." Miller said the "whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments" in the book.
By PTI

BENGALURU: A Twitter war between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath, mocking each other on the issue of development and governance, has gone viral on the internet.

Adityanath took part in the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally organised by the BJP's Karnataka unit here yesterday, as part of the party's ongoing state-wide 75-day campaign to "expose misdeeds" of the Siddaramaiah government.

Welcoming the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Siddaramaiah tweeted that there's a lot Adityanath can learn from Karnataka to address the reported starvation deaths in his state.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018

Adityanath promptly responded.

Thanking Siddaramaiah for the welcome, he cited an increase in farmers' suicides and alleged ill treatment to honest government officials under the Congress dispensation.

He also pointed out that he was trying to "undo the misery" unleashed by Congress' allies in Uttar Pradesh.

Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.  Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018

The "welcome" barb between both the chief ministers has gone viral, with supporters of political parties they represent taking sides and trolling each other with hashtags "#YogiInBengaluru" and "#HogappaYogi" (go Yogi).

Addressing the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally yesterday, Adityanath alleged that the Congress government in Karnataka was pushing the state five years back "due to corruption, divisive politics and anti-development policies".

Accusing the Congress of trying to divide the society on caste lines, keeping assembly elections in mind, he said: "The party has become a burden...a problem for the nation." Assembly elections are due in Karnataka early this year.

This is the second visit of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to the state in less than a month to campaign for his party.

His last visit was to Hubbali on December 21, 2017 to address a rally.

Adityanath has also attacked Siddaramaiah personally for endorsing eating beef.

BENGALURU: A Twitter war between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath, mocking each other on the issue of development and governance, has gone viral on the internet. Adityanath took part in the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally organised by the BJP's Karnataka unit here yesterday, as part of the party's ongoing state-wide 75-day campaign to "expose misdeeds" of the Siddaramaiah government. Welcoming the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Siddaramaiah tweeted that there's a lot Adityanath can learn from Karnataka to address the reported starvation deaths in his state. I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018 Adityanath promptly responded. Thanking Siddaramaiah for the welcome, he cited an increase in farmers' suicides and alleged ill treatment to honest government officials under the Congress dispensation. He also pointed out that he was trying to "undo the misery" unleashed by Congress' allies in Uttar Pradesh. Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.  Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018 The "welcome" barb between both the chief ministers has gone viral, with supporters of political parties they represent taking sides and trolling each other with hashtags "#YogiInBengaluru" and "#HogappaYogi" (go Yogi). Addressing the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally yesterday, Adityanath alleged that the Congress government in Karnataka was pushing the state five years back "due to corruption, divisive politics and anti-development policies". Accusing the Congress of trying to divide the society on caste lines, keeping assembly elections in mind, he said: "The party has become a burden...a problem for the nation." Assembly elections are due in Karnataka early this year. This is the second visit of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to the state in less than a month to campaign for his party. His last visit was to Hubbali on December 21, 2017 to address a rally. Adityanath has also attacked Siddaramaiah personally for endorsing eating beef.
By ANI

WASHINGTON: A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' outside the Pakistan embassy here, over the misbehaviour meted out to former Indian Naval Officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife.

The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.'

An agitated protestor said, When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also.

Another protestor said that Pakistans narrow-mindedness has been exposed from the way it treated Jadhavs family.

Policy makers and people here need to understand that Pakistan as a whole is also being run by narrow-minded mentality, he added.

A meeting took place between Jadhav and his family on December 25 in Islamabad, on the request of the Indian government.

#WATCH: Indian-Americans & Baloch held #ChappalChorPakistan protest outside Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC, over misbehavior of Pakistani authorities with #KulbhushannJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/o6ugCr2NQL  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Jadhavs wife was asked to remove her shoes and use another pair as she went in the Foreign Office to meet her husband.

Pakistan claimed that her shoes were confiscated on security grounds as there was "something" in it.

Jadhav is on a death row in Pakistan over charges of terrorism and spying for India's intelligence agency- Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

On May 18, 2017, the International Court of Justice stayed the hanging after India approached it against the death sentence.

WASHINGTON: A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name 'Chappal Chor Pakistan' outside the Pakistan embassy here, over the misbehaviour meted out to former Indian Naval Officer Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife. The protestors also donated used shoes to the embassy saying that 'protest is in solidarity with Jadhav's family.' An agitated protestor said, When they stole the chappal of a woman (Jadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they can use these also. Another protestor said that Pakistans narrow-mindedness has been exposed from the way it treated Jadhavs family. Policy makers and people here need to understand that Pakistan as a whole is also being run by narrow-minded mentality, he added. A meeting took place between Jadhav and his family on December 25 in Islamabad, on the request of the Indian government. #WATCH: Indian-Americans & Baloch held #ChappalChorPakistan protest outside Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC, over misbehavior of Pakistani authorities with #KulbhushannJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/o6ugCr2NQL  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018 Jadhavs wife was asked to remove her shoes and use another pair as she went in the Foreign Office to meet her husband. Pakistan claimed that her shoes were confiscated on security grounds as there was "something" in it. Jadhav is on a death row in Pakistan over charges of terrorism and spying for India's intelligence agency- Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). On May 18, 2017, the International Court of Justice stayed the hanging after India approached it against the death sentence.
By ANI

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani Urdu newspaper has issued its annual 2018 calendar with United Nations-designated terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed on it.

The revelation was made by a Pakistan-based journalist, Omar R Quraishi, who mentioned it on his Twitter handle.

In a tweet, Quraishi mentioned, "Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it."

Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it pic.twitter.com/6LiyHnOxA8  omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) January 8, 2018

Saeed was recently released from house arrest after a Pakistani court cited lack of evidence against him in the 26/11 Mumbai attack case.

The JuD chief 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).

Earlier this week, Saeed invited all Islamic states to launch 'Jihad' against the United States and Israel.

The event was conducted in the wake of US President Donald Trump-led administration unilaterally identifying and declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Meanwhile, Pakistan recently prohibited Saeed's Jamaat-Ud-Dawah (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) from collecting donations.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) ordered to prohibit all companies from donating cash to JuD and FIF, as well as several other such organisations named in a list of banned outfits by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

India has, time and again, protested against Pakistan for harbouring Saeed, who is wanted for allegedly plotting the Mumbai attacks.

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani Urdu newspaper has issued its annual 2018 calendar with United Nations-designated terrorist and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed on it. The revelation was made by a Pakistan-based journalist, Omar R Quraishi, who mentioned it on his Twitter handle. In a tweet, Quraishi mentioned, "Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it." Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it pic.twitter.com/6LiyHnOxA8  omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) January 8, 2018 Saeed was recently released from house arrest after a Pakistani court cited lack of evidence against him in the 26/11 Mumbai attack case. The JuD chief 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). Earlier this week, Saeed invited all Islamic states to launch 'Jihad' against the United States and Israel. The event was conducted in the wake of US President Donald Trump-led administration unilaterally identifying and declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Meanwhile, Pakistan recently prohibited Saeed's Jamaat-Ud-Dawah (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) from collecting donations. The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) ordered to prohibit all companies from donating cash to JuD and FIF, as well as several other such organisations named in a list of banned outfits by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). India has, time and again, protested against Pakistan for harbouring Saeed, who is wanted for allegedly plotting the Mumbai attacks.
Arab states will soon embark on a diplomatic drive to persuade the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war, Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said.

Six Arab foreign ministers met in Amman on Saturday to follow up on earlier decisions taken by the Arab League to counter U.S. President Donald Trump's move in December to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a decision that overturned decades of U.S. policy on the Middle East.

A committee made up of Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinians and headed by Jordan was set up after an emergency meeting of the Arab League in Cairo shortly after Trump's decision that called on Washington to abandon its decision.

The Arab League said at the time the move would spur violence throughout the region and described Trump's announcement as a "dangerous violation of international law" which had no legal impact.

Safadi said the ministers would recommend a series of moves to a full ministerial meeting of the Arab League due later this month. "We will confront the decision by seeking a [UN] resolution, an international one, to recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital," said Safadi.

He did not elaborate on the timing of the diplomatic moves nor say whether he was referring to a UN Security Council or General Assembly resolution.


Former U.S. President Barack Obama is set to make his first talk show appearance on Jan. 12, on the first episode of a new show featuring longtime late-night host David Letterman.

This will be Obama's first on-camera talk show interview since he left the presidency Jan. 20, 2017. He has largely stayed out of the media spotlight since then.

Letterman's show, titled My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, is his first project since he retired from the long-running Late Show with David Letterman in 2015. His new Netflix series is expected, as the title suggests, to feature high-profile guests for in-depth interviews, both in and out of the studio.


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).
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. High 28F. Winds W at 15 to 25 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. Low 17F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph.
In the 1980s and 90s it appeared buyers and collectors couldn't go wrong with classic cars as their values appeared to be rocketing by the day. That all stopped with the global financial crisis of a decade ago, but now things appear to be getting onto a more even keel. Although current and relatively modern cars can still be something of a risky investment, there are two going under the hammer at the Barrett-Jackson auction on January 20where depreciation won't be a concern for their eventual buyers.

The two cars in question are the very first example off the production line of the new Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and a new Ford GT that will have the honor of being the first one to be auctioned. The proceeds of the sales of both cars will go to charity.

Even though you could order a new Ford GT from Ford directly, this one going up for auction will mean an easier route for getting your hands on one than hoping to get an application to buy one from Ford accepted. Although no GT comes cheap, this one is expected to go for considerably more than a new one from Ford would cost as it offers the chance to get one without jumping through the application hoops, and of course, there's the charity aspect too. Proceeds from the sale of the GT will go to the Autism Society of North Carolina.

Proceeds from the sale of the ZR1 will go to the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports seriously injured emergency first responders. Although the Corvette will go for a lot of money for the same reasons as the Ford, the eventual buyer will be able to specify the ZR1 to their own requirements as this model isn't out yet. That means it can be ordered as a coupe or as a convertible, and with either a seven-speed manual or an eight-speed automatic gearbox.

Also Watch: Kevin Flynn, President & MD, FCA India | Interview
North and South Korea will hold the first high-level talks in two years in the border truce village of Panmunjom on Tuesday.

North Korea on Sunday informed South Korea who will be representing it at the talks, a day after the South sent a list of its own delegation. It will be the first meeting between the two sides since December 2015.

Unification Ministry spokesman Baek Tae-hyun said, "The agenda includes matters regarding the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang as well as other issues of mutual interest such as improving inter-Korean ties."

A Cheong Wa Dae official said, "Those negotiations must succeed in order to make room for the remaining issues." But there are concerns that North Korea will make demands that are unacceptable for South Korea, like a permanent halt to U.S.-South Korean military drills.


New Delhi: India will consider initiating preliminary talks with neighbouring Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to seek lower import duties for its sugar exports to prevent a glut next season, a top government official said.

In the current 2017/18 season sugar mills in India, the world's biggest consumer of the sweetener, is expected to produce just enough to meet its annual consumption of about 25 million tonnes.

However, output is expected to jump next season, which starts in October, raising the possibility of a drop in domestic prices. That could make it difficult for mills to pay millions of cane farmers on time, just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares for a national election in early 2019.

Preparing for the potential glut, the Indian government will ask both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to lower their import tariffs for sugar exports from India, said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorised to talk to media.

About half a dozen Bangladesh refineries, which turn raw sugar into refined, or white, sugar could be interested in securing supplies from India, said Abinash Verma, director general of the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA).

Bangladesh, which currently imports raw sugar from Brazil, the world's biggest producer, will find it easier and more economical to import from neighbouring India, Verma said.

Sri Lanka, which allows duty-free sugar imports from Pakistan, could also be keen to import white sugar from India, he said.

"Between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, India can look at exporting about 3 million tonnes, provided Colombo and Dhaka agree to India's request of concessional tariffs," Verma said.

India, the world's biggest sugar producer behind Brazil, is likely to churn out more than 25.1 million tonnes in the current marketing season, according to the ISMA.

However, plentiful rains in western and southern India are expected to boost 2018/19 output.

"We'll get some concrete sense about next year's production in July," Verma said.

India is likely to start the new marketing year on Oct. 1, with an opening stock of 4 million tonnes of sugar, almost unchanged from a year ago, he said.

Verma played down talks of large-scale imports from Pakistan into India.

"Since there is hardly any price parity, we do not foresee bulk imports from Pakistan, with barely 2,000 tonnes shipped into India so far," Verma said.
Attari: A total of 147 Indian fishermen crossed over to India through the Wagah border on Monday after spending eight months in captivity in Pakistan, officials said.

In a goodwill gesture, Pakistani authorities had released 147 fishermen on Sunday.

The fishermen crossed over to India this evening through the land transit route of Wagah/Attari border on the basis of the 'Emergency Travel Certificate' issued by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, officials said.

Their release followed a December announcement by Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal that nearly 300 Indian fishermen would be freed in two phases till January 8.

On December 28, Pakistan had released the first batch of 145 Indian fishermen, who were held there on similar charges. The fishermen travelled from Karachi to Lahore and then crossed the border on Monday, the officials said. After crossing over to the Indian side, a medical examination of the prisoners was conducted by a team of Indian doctors, they said.

The travel expenses of the fishermen were reportedly borne by the Edhi Foundation, a Pakistan-based not-for-profit welfare organisation.

Fishermen from Pakistan and India are frequently detained for illegally fishing in each other's territorial waters since the Arabian Sea does not have a clearly defined marine border and the wooden boats lack the technology to avoid being drifting away.

Owing to prolonged bureaucratic and legal procedures, the fishermen usually languish in jail for several months. A number of non-governmental organisations in both India and Pakistan have raised the issue, pressing their governments to release arrested fishermen without much delay.
Srinagar: on Monday, several protesters marched on the border area of Tangdhar along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

But this was not protest for azadi, jobs, electricity or to keep surroundings clean. Instead, it was a demonstration for a bypass to avoid a risk-laden route which claims lives every winter.

The residents of this border area marched to push for the construction of a proposed 6km tunnel bypassing Sadhana Top - a high point on the Kupwara-Tangdhar road vulnerable to avalanches and road sinks.

Last week, 11 residents, including four women and a one-year-old baby perished in snow slides. Their frozen bodies were recovered several hours later after locals, police and Army carried a herculean rescue mission.

This became the fresh trigger for agitated residents longstanding demand of an all-weather tunnel bypassing the dangerous stretch on Sadhana top.

While several people were seen marching on Tangdhar township's centre, many more came out in solidarity in Srinagar and Jammu as well in support of the demand.

Hum kaya chate  tunnel. Hamari maange poore karo (We want tunnel. Accept our demands), shouted the people as they marched through the Tangdhar market.

Situated at the altitude of 3000 meters, Sadhana Top is prone to avalanches and road accidents. Snow closes the pass for more than six months in winter, restricting the movement of people of the area. Last year, a patient had to be ferried on a cot by the people to reach to the hospital because the road was closed.

Seventy thousand people of Karnah remain cut off from the rest of world six to seven months due to snowfall on the pass. Every year, we suffer casualties. People of the area are demanding a tunnel. Only fake promises were made in the past, said Ahsan-ul-Haq, a scientist from the area.

Jammu and Kashmir public works minister, Naeem Akthar, said they have taken up this issue with the Centre. We have taken up the issue with the centre. This is one of the areas which remains cut off. You have already got major tunnels sanctioned. At least three are completing and for other three DPR (detailed project report) are being prepared, he said

Last summer, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti promised the residents that a tunnel would be constructed in the area which is surrounded by Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on three sides.

''Either open the road to Muzaffarabad for us to give us better connectivity or construct the tunnel. We cannot remain in cage for six months every year,'' a senior citizen told CNN-News18 in Srinagar.
Milan: An Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted two former Leonardo executives who were accused of paying bribes to Indian Air Force officials in exchange for a Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal to sell 12 AugustaWestland helicopters to India.

Giuseppe Orsi, the former president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica that was later renamed Leonardo, and Bruno Spagnolini, former CEO of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, were cleared of charges as "there isn't sufficient proof", according to the sentence read out in court.

Orsi was at the helm of AugustaWestland when the deal was struck and he is suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes. He had been sentenced to four-a-half-years years in jail for false accounting and corruption. Spagnolini, who had also been handed a four-year jail term on the same charges, was also cleared.

In December 2016, Italy's highest court had ordered a re-trial of the case.

The CBI, however, said the acquittals will have no bearing on their case as it is based on an independent investigation with strong evidence. The officials said the same set of evidence had resulted in their conviction earlier.

The UPA government had in February 2010 signed a contract with UK-based AgustaWestland to purchase 12 AW101 helicopters for the Indian Air Force for Rs 3,600 crore.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of the helicopters to India. These choppers were supposed to be used for flying the President of India, the Prime Minister, and other such VVIPs.

India scrapped the contract with AugustaWestland in January, 2014 over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

India's defence ministry had ordered a CBI probe into the allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after the arrest of Orsi and Spagnolini by Italian investigators in connection with the case.

Several IAF officers, including its former chiefs, came under the scanner. Former Air Force chief SP Tyagi, his cousin Sanjiv alias Julie Tyagi and lawyer Gautam Khaitan were also arrested by the CBI for alleged corruption in the case.
Karishma Hasnat

Gangtok: Academy Award winning music composer AR Rahman was named the official brand ambassador of the north eastern state of Sikkim, one of the favourite destinations of tourists preferring the upper reaches.

Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Chamling announced Rahmans name at the inauguration of the state Red Panda Winter Carnival at Paljor Stadium in Gangtok on Monday.

The maestro, who would also compose the tourism anthem for the state, wore the traditional Khada and lit the festivals inaugural lamp. Chamling presented him with a hand-woven carpet.

This was Rahmans first visit to Sikkim. Sources told News 18 that Rahmans team would be organising a concert in the state sometime in March.

A number of Bollywood celebrities, including actor Sridevi and her producer-husband Boney Kapoor, are scheduled to take part in the 11-day-long winter carnival. Another global celebrity and Assam tourism ambassador Priyanka Chopra is scheduled to visit Sikkim in April for the premiere of her home production Pahuna-The Little Visitors. The film has been shot exclusively in Sikkim.

Besides interacting with journalists, Rahman would also take part in the official dinner hosted by Chamling.
Bengaluru: Five employees of Bengalurus Kailash Bar and Restaurant were killed when a fire broke out at the establishment while they were sleeping early on Monday.

The incident occurred around 2:30am when people noticed smoke billowing from the restaurant, which is located on the ground floor of the Kumbara Sangha Building in Kalasipalya area of the city.

Two fire trucks and one rescue vehicle were pressed into service and the fire was put out by the time of publishing this report. The cause of the fire was yet to be ascertained.

"An incident of fire has occurred at Kailash Bar and Restaurant located in the ground floor of Kumbaara sangha building (in the vegetable market area). Fire and smoke was noticed by some persons at around 2.30 am and fire services were pressed into action. Two fire tenders and one fire rescue vehicle attended to it and it has been doused," a senior police officer said.

The deceased were identified as 23-year-old Swami, 20-year-old Prasad, 35-year-old Mahesh, 45-year-old Manjunath and 24-year-old Keerthi. While the first three were natives of Tumkur, the latter belonged to Hassan and Mandya, respectively.

The Kailash Bar and Restaurant is licensed to one VR Dayashankar.

The incident comes days after a massive blaze claimed the lives of 14 people in a Mumbai rooftop pub, bringing into question the licensing norms and inaction of civic authorities against flouting of fire safety rules.
Bengaluru: A 20-year-old Hindu woman allegedly committed suicide after being hounded for sending a WhatsApp message that said I love Muslims. A local BJP youth wing leader has been arrested and police is on the lookout for four others.

Dhanyashree, a 20-year-old B.Com student, was found hanging in her room on Saturday, the police said. The incident took place at Mudigere town near Chikkamagaluru, also known as Indias coffee bowl.

The woman was chatting with her friend, Santhosh, on Friday when the conversation veered towards the futility of fighting over caste and religion. In a reply to a question posed by him, she had replied I love Muslims.

Anilraj, who is BJP Yuva Morchas Mudigere town president, went to the woman's house to warn her against befriending Muslims, police said.

Infuriated by her message, Santhosh warned her against having any kind of relationship with Muslims. He had also shared the screenshot of their conversation with local Bajrang Dal and VHP members. The screenshot of the message went viral, causing mental agony to Dhanyashree and her mother.

Chikkamagaluru SP M Annamalai said that some youths, including the BJP youth wing leader Anilraj, then visited her house on Friday evening and threatened her and her mother against being friendly with Muslims.

Dhanyashree committed suicide the next day. A note found near her body said the incident had ruined her personal life and education.

Police have arrested Anilraj, who is BJP Yuva Morchas Mudigere town president. The police have also launched a massive manhunt for the main accused Santhosh and three others.

Five people had gone to her house. We have taken this incident seriously. All of them will be punished. Please dont call it moral policing. Call it moral goondagiri, the SP said. He added that action will be taken against others who shared the screenshot of the WhatsApp message.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre and the Election Commission to consider with "due seriousness" a plea seeking that convicted persons be barred from forming political parties and becoming their office-bearers for the period they are disqualified under the election law.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud directed the Centre and the poll panel to file their response.

"Please take this matter with due seriousness," the bench observed while noting that the government and the Election Commission have not filed their reply despite notices being issued to them.

The top court has posted the matter for further hearing on February 12.

It had earlier agreed to examine the constitutional validity of Section 29A of the 1951 Representation of the People Act (RPA) which deals with the power of the poll panel to register a political party.

The plea claimed that under the statutory schemes, the poll panel was empowered to register political parties, but it lacked the authority under the RPA to de-register them. The petition, filed by a lawyer and Delhi BJP spokesperson Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, has said that if a person on conviction in a criminal case was barred from contesting elections, it would be incongruent to allow such person to form or head a political outfit.

The plea said convicted politicians, who are barred from contesting elections, can still run political parties and hold posts in them, besides deciding as to who will become a lawmaker.

It has sought a ban on convicted persons from forming a political party and becoming office bearers for the period they are disqualified under the election laws. It has sought a direction to declare Section 29A of the RPA as "arbitrary, irrational and ultra-vires" to the Constitution and to authorise the poll panel to register and de-register political.

The plea has also sought a direction to the EC to frame guidelines to decriminalise the electoral system and ensure inner party democracy, as proposed by the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (NCRWC). The petition said that currently, even a person who has been convicted for heinous crimes like murder, rape, smuggling, money laundering, loot, sedition, or dacoity, can form a political party and become its president or office bearers.

The petition named several top political leaders who have been convicted or have charges framed against them and were holding top political posts and "wielding political power". It said the proliferation of political parties has become a major concern as Section 29A of the Representation of of the People Act, 1951, allows a small group of people to form a political party by making a very simple declaration.

"Presently, about 20 percent of registered political parties contest election and remaining 80 percent parties create excessive load on electoral system and public money," the plea said and sought implementation of the 1990 Goswami Committee on Electoral Reform.

The plea also claimed that in 2004, the poll panel had proposed amendment to Section 29A, authorising it to issue apt orders regulating the registration or de-registration of political parties.
New Delhi: India and China averted another Doklam kind standoff and resolved a dispute over intrusion by Chinese troops into Arunachal Pradeshs Tuting area.

Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said the Chinese side agreed to stop road construction activity on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control and returned the two excavators and other equipment seized from workers last month.

Government sources said an amicable solution to the Tuting incident was found at a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) between the two sides in Arunachal.

They said the Indian side had conveyed its concerns over the incident to China, which said that the teams had crossed into India by mistake and would no longer engage in such activities

"The Tuting incident has been resolved," Gen. Rawat told reporters on the sidelines of an event, adding that a meeting of border personnel was held two days ago.

The Army chief also said there was a major reduction of Chinese troops in the Doklam area. Troops from the two countries were engaged in a 73-day long standoff in Doklam in the Sikkim sector last year.

On December 28, Indian troops had foiled attempts by Chinese road building teams to build a track around 1km inside Indian territory in Tuting, government sources had said.

They had said the civilian teams went back when confronted by the Indian troops, but left behind two excavators and some other equipment.

"The two excavators were returned to the Chinese side following the BPM on January 6," the sources said, adding that India's objection to the incident was conveyed to China.

In an address at an event on modernisation of the armed forces, Gen. Rawat said future wars would be fought on difficult terrains and circumstances and the forces would have to be prepared for them.

His comments were seen as an apparent reference to China. Days after the end of the Doklam standoff, the Army chief had said India should be prepared for a two-front war, noting that China had started "flexing its muscles".

He had also said China was trying to take over Indian territory in a gradual manner, and cautioned the forces to guard against such attempts. "Future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances. We have to be prepared for them," Gen. Rawat said.

He further said the armed forces needed major modernisation and that the country must fight the next war with indigenous solutions. He said the Army was ready to induct equipment and platforms made by domestic defence firms.
New Delhi: An Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted two former Leonardo executives who were accused of paying bribes to Indian Air Force officials in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal.

Giuseppe Orsi, former chief executive of the state-controlled defence group, formerly known as Finmeccanica, and Bruno Spagnolini, once at the head of helicopter unit AgustaWestland, were cleared of charges as "there isn't sufficient proof", according to the sentence read out in court.

In December 2016, Italy's highest court had ordered a re-trial of the case, after the former executives of the Rome-based group were found guilty on corruption charges related to a Rs 3,600 crore contract to supply a dozen helicopters to the Indian government

The scale of the AgustaWestland scam was around Rs. 3,600 crore, however, by June 2014 the Central Government had managed to recover Rs. 2,068 crore of the total losses. The scam dates back to February 2010, when the Indian Government signed a contract to purchase 12 AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters for the Communications Sqaudrons of the Indian Air Force (IAF).

These were meant as transport for VVIP passengers such as the President and Prime Minister of India. However, it became apparent only three years later on February 12, 2013 when Orsi, the CEO of Finmeccanica, AgustaWestland's parent company, was arrested by Italian authorities. It emerged that several top Indian politicians and officials were accused of accepting bribes from AgustaWestland middlemen as kickbacks for the awarding of the contract.

Christen Michel, a middleman, had reportedly instructed an AgustaWestland employee to target people close to former Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Michels note to Peter Hulett, an AgustaWestland employee, reportedly contained the names of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Ahmed Patel, Pranab Mukherjee, M. Veerappa Moily, Oscar Fernandes, M. K. Narayanan and Vinay Singh as potential targets.

A day after Orsis arrest, then Defence Minister AK Antony ordered a probe in the case, which opened a Pandoras Box. In that same month, the CBI started a preliminary inquiry against 11 people, including former IAF Chief SP Tyagi and three of his brothers. The FIR also mentioned Italy-based Finmeccanica, UK-based AgustaWestland and Chandigarh-based IDS Infotech and Aeromatrix.

In March, Defence Minister AK Antony admitted that there had been corruption and bribes had exchanged hands. In April 2016, an Italian court said there was "reasonable belief that corruption took place" and by December, SP Tyagi had been arrested by the CBI in the case.
Annual South Korea-U.S. drills will not be shortened now that they are being postponed until after the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, the military here insisted Friday.

The schedules of other joint exercises will also likely be affected. But there may be some adjustments to scale and procedure. "Normally, U.S. military officials arrive here ahead of drills to make preparations," a military officer here said. "But it seems there will be a snag in their schedules this year."

The U.S. is carrying out joint drills not only with South Korea but with Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, so the ones here could be scaled back to conduct the other exercises on a normal scale. There could also be obstacles to the participation of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and other high-end U.S. weaponry.

Moon Chung-in, President Moon Jae-in's special security adviser, said "The joint drills could be scaled back by circumstances even if it isn't done intentionally."

In a statement last week, the South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command said the two countries will "work together to determine the actual dates of the exercises."

The exercises are normally conducted in March and April, but will likely kick off in late April this year. The "Key Resolve" drill is a command post exercise using computer-based simulations, while the "Foal Eagle" drill is a field training exercise mobilizing troops and equipment. They normally take about two months.

Last year, Key Resolve ran from March 13-24 and Foal Eagle from March 1 until April 30. This year the Paralympics end on March 18, so the drills will have to wait until after that.

The postponement is expected to cause a domino effect on other joint South Korea-U.S. exercises.


New Delhi: Manipurs once-dreaded encounter specialist, head constable Herojit Singh has now moved the Supreme Court with a sensational disclosure that he was witness to a large number of fake encounters in Manipur between 2003 and 2009.

Herojit, who has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court, has further alleged that all of these fake encounters were carried out on the direct orders of the superior officers.

Singh was one of the main encounter specialists among Manipur commandos in those six years.

According to NHRC data, Manipur has the dubious distinction of the maximum number of fake encounters in 2008-09, only after Uttar Pradesh.

Over six years after the killing of PLA militant Sanjit Meitei, Herojit Singh had first confessed on News18 in 2016, of killing Meitei.

Singh went on record to say that he pumped bullets into the former PLA militant while acting on orders from his senior, the then Additional Superintendent of Police in Imphal. He said that he shot Meitei on the chest with a 9mm pistol.

Singh had also claimed that the Manipur DGP and Chief Minister were in the know about the execution.

Commandos of Manipur Police were in July 2009 accused of killing Sanjit, who was shot dead on a busy road in Imphal, even after surrendering. The killing of the unarmed youth led to protests across the state.

Herojit now claims that after his tell-all interview in 2016, when he wanted to file an affidavit in the trial court regarding the same, lawyers supposedly acting in my defence abandoned me saying that since I had given an affidavit to the trial court (in Imphal), they could not defend me. Apparently, the court appointed an amicus but it was not verified. In any case, I was never given a chance to appoint a lawyer of my choice and I went unrepresented.

His affidavit in the Supreme Court that is up for hearing on Monday, further mentions that there was a plan to kill him and that he survived an assassination bid.

The affidavit says, On 30.4.16 at 8.30 p.m. a TATA pickup truck without lights and number plate deliberately slammed into my car about a kilometer from my house with the intention of killing me. I was seriously injured with multiple fractures and had to take 38 stitches. I continued to pose a threat to all the officers who gave orders and routinely continued to give orders without hesitation and without reason for the extrajudicial executions of innocent citizens of India and this is why I fear that I will suffer the same fate. (sic)

#EXCLUSIVE -- Manipur Encounter specialist Herojit has moved the Supreme Court, claiming to be involved in fake encounters | @SubhajitSG with more details pic.twitter.com/6Vu31V0R3I  News18 (@CNNnews18) January 8, 2018

His affidavit is particularly harsh on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), where he says in spite of asking the agency to record his fresh statements in front of the magistrate and disclose the identity of the senior officers who had ordered the extrajudicial executions, the CBI seemed completely disinterested and wanting to cover up the crimes that have taken place.

Also, one of the important prayers mentioned by Herojit is to recover the 3 or 4 diaries where he had made notes about all the fake encounters. By his own admission, he made the entries serially.

The incidents were noted down with the names of the victims, their addresses and other details in the following order: (i) the name of the victim (ii) his age (iii) parentage (iv) address (v) place of occurrence (vi) date of the killing or arrest (vii) remarks such as killed or done or arrest and (viii) the call sign code of the superior officer who gave the order to kill.

These diaries were seized by the CBI from Herojits government accommodation at the Manipur Police Commando Complex at Minuthong, Imphal in 2010. He now believes that the CBI will destroy or suppress these diaries.

Hence, one of the reasons for my making of this affidavit is to ensure that these diaries are produced before this court. I am also making this affidavit to tell the Supreme Court that I can contribute to the investigation since I was present at many of these fake encounters in respect of which this court has asked for investigation.

Babloo Loitongbam, the Executive Director of Human Rights Alert calls Herojit's decision brave and historic. He added that the case will help in deconstructing the killing machine that the Manipur forces have become.

The Supreme Court had in July, ordered a CBI probe by a special investigating team (SIT) into the 98 fake encounter killings in Manipur over the last decade.

A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Uday U Lalit passed the order on a writ petition filed by the Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association (EEVFAM), who had alleged that there were 1,528 fake encounter deaths in Manipur in the past decade. The group further demanded an SIT probe.

The bench then asked the CBI director to nominate a group of five officers to go through the records of the cases, lodge necessary FIRs and complete the investigations into the same by December 31, 2017 apart from preparing the necessary charge sheets. The bench had then directed the CBI to probe into the 98 encounters and submit a report within the first week of January 2018.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Switzerland on January 22 on a two-day visit during which he will deliver the keynote address at the plenary session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

This will be the first participation by an Indian Prime Minister in the WEF in over two decades. In 1997, the then Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda had attended the Davos Summit.

Announcing the prime ministerial visit on Monday, the external affairs ministry, in a statement, said the Prime Minister will also have a bilateral meeting with Alain Berset, the President of the Swiss Confederation on January 22. The theme for this year's WEF is 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World'.

"Prime Minister will deliver the keynote speech at the plenary session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, on January 23, 2018," the ministry said.

The plenary session will be moderated by Prof. Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman, WEF. To be attended by over 3,000 global leaders, including CEOs, heads of state and government, artists and civil society members, the Davos Annual Meeting of WEF will conclude on January 26.

The WEF, which describes itself as an international organisation for public-private cooperation and was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation, hosts its annual meeting in Davos every year in January.

In a statement last month announcing its co-chairs for the 2018 meeting, the WEF had said that over 3,000 leaders, representing 100 countries, will gather in a collaborative effort to shape the global, regional and industry agendas, with a commitment to improve the state of the world.

Desi cuisine and yoga will mark the start of the five-day annual jamboree of the rich and powerful from across the world in the snow-laden Swiss ski resort town of Davos. This is the first time India will host the welcome reception at the summit.

The Indian presence is set to be the largest-ever with as many as six Union ministers, two chief ministers, several top government officials and over 100 CEOs, figuring among the registered participants.

The official sessions at the WEF will also have special India-focused discussions including one on "India's role in the world", how it is rethinking economics with the use of big data in policymaking and the country's role in securing peace and stability in the Asian century.

The registered participants from India, include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar and Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region of India Jitendra Singh.

Others expected to be present at the elite global gathering are Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi along with a number of his cabinet colleagues, as well as Pakistan People's Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. China is also expected to have a significant presence and its Belt Road Initiative will feature as a key theme in a number of panel discussions, including those attended by Pakistani leaders.
Lucknow: Welcoming the Uttar Pradesh governments order on the removal of illegal loudspeakers from religious places, Muslim clerics have termed it a move in the interest of the nation.

Sufiyan Nizami, a cleric, said, "The Allahabad High Court's order should be welcomed by everyone as it is in the interest of the nation. But if the government has to act it should first check on the loudspeakers used in private functions such as marriages and political rallies. The use of loudspeakers at religious places is done for a very limited period of time.

After being pulled up by the HC over noise pollution, the UP government on Sunday issued detailed directives on the use of permanently installed loudspeakers at public places.

The HC in December 2017 had asked the UP government whether the loudspeakers or public address systems installed at mosques, temples, churches, gurdwaras etc. were installed after obtaining a written permission from the authorities concerned.

The Yogi Adityanath government has set a deadline of January 15 to obtain permission from authorities on loudspeaker usage.

The government has also directed action against the authorities who fail to ensure compliance.

The division bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Abdul Moin issued the directions on a PIL moved by lawyer Moti Lal Yadav, seeking strict compliance of the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules that had been framed in 2000.

Reiterating that right to live in freedom from noise pollution and right to sleep being a facet of Article 21 of the Constitution, the bench cautioned the officials to appear in person before it, if their personal affidavits were not filed till the next hearing.

As per rule, loudspeakers installed in public places cannot have a sound level more than 10 dB (decibel) above ambient noise level at the periphery of a public place and 5 dB above ambient noise level at the periphery of a private place.
New Delhi: A senior lawyer, appointed as amicus curiae by the Supreme Court, has said that there is no need to reopen Mahatma Gandhi's assassination case.

On Monday, senior advocate Amarendra Sharan mentioned the matter before a bench headed by Justice SA Bobde. He informed the court that his report has concluded there is no necessity to re-investigate the assassination after six decades.

The bench said it will take up the matter on January 12, when it would examine a PIL that has sought a re-investigation into the murder on the ground that evidence, which might point at involvement of a foreign agency, had been overlooked.

But Sharan, in his report, maintained that allegation raised regarding involvement of some foreign intelligence agency in the assassination was baseless and not substantiated by any evidence.

Bullets which pierced Gandhis body, pistol from which it was fired, assailant who fired bullets, conspiracy and ideology which led to assassination have all been duly identified. No material has come to light to throw any doubt. There is no need either of a re-investigation or to constitute a fresh fact finding commission with respect to Mahatma Gandhi assassination case," stated the report.

It further told the court that there is no evidence to prove that Mahatma was killed by a mysterious person other than Nathuram Godse.

Sharan also trashed the petitioner's theory that it was a fourth bullet fired by a mysterious person that took the Mahatma's life.

In October, the Supreme Court had wondered whether it will be wise and legal to reopen Mahatma Gandhis assassination case after six decades.

The court had raised several questions over the legality and maintainability of the PIL but agreed to examine various aspects of it before taking a final call.

It had then asked senior advocate Amarendra Sharan to go through the petition and several documents relied upon by petitioner Dr Pankaj Phadnis, a researcher and a trustee of Abhinav Bharat, Mumbai.

Phadnis has sought the re-opening of the investigation into Mahatma Gandhis murder, suggesting it was one of the biggest cover-ups in history.

In the petition, Phadnis has also questioned the three bullet theory relied upon by various courts of law to hold the conviction of accused  Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte who were hanged to death on November 15, 1949, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who was given the benefit of doubt due to lack of evidence.

He has claimed that the Justice JL Kapur Commission of Inquiry set up in 1966 was not able to unearth the entire conspiracy that had led to the killing of Gandhi.

Inspired by Savarkar, Abhinav Bharat, Mumbai, was set up in 2001 and it claims to work for socially and economically weaker sections with a focus on bridging the digital divide.
New Delhi: A research scholar at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) who had taken a break to visit his family in Kashmir, has instead joined militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, months after complaining of harassment by armed forces in a Facebook post.

A photograph of Mannan Bashir Wani, holding what appeared to be an automatic assault rifle, surfaced on social media on Sunday. According to the photographs caption, Wani joined the militant group on January 5 and his code name is Hamzah Bai.

A local news agency in Srinagar named GNS quoted official sources as saying that 26-year-old Wani, the son of Bashir Ahmad Wani of Takipora village in North Kashmirs Kupwara district, was to return home three days ago.

He was pursuing PhD in Geology at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). However, he didnt report back home, sources told the news agency.

Wani, who has an M Phil in Applied Geology, comes from a well-to-do family in the Lolab Valley. His father is reportedly a lecturer, while his brother works as a junior engineer in the Jammu and Kashmir government.

This photo of Mannan Bashir Wani, holding what appeared to be an automatic assault rifle, surfaced on social media on Sunday.

As per the information on AMU website, Wani was awarded the 'Best Paper Presentation Award' in an International Conference on 'Water, Environment, Energy and Society' (ICWEES) held at AISECT University, Bhopal, in 2016.

A close friend of Mannan said on condition of anonymity that the AMU student was pushed to militancy by an event last year when he was harassed by armed forces on his way to Srinagar.

He was rattled by that incident. He shared with me how he was harassed, but I never knew Mannan will take such an extreme step, the friend said.

The incident the friend was talking about reportedly took place in November 2017 when Wani, on way to Srinagar from his home, was harassed by the armed forces. A day later, Wani himself recounted the incident on Facebook.

In the post, Wani said the car he was travelling in was stopped four times by armed forces and he had to get down and prove his identity every time.

The most disgusting thing was when an ordinary SOG personnel donning black uniform posed questions like 'why had I grown such long hair, why didn't I trim my beard if intend to look smart, why do I wear long boots, why do I wear a shawl in such a young age? (sic) the Facebook post said.

Wani further wrote how an army officer mocked him for his resemblance with a militant commander.

On this disgusting day, the best moment happened when I got a compliment from the Indian Army officer (who also checked my identity card, but spared me from getting down from the car) about my looks resembling the famous Commander, who has given them sleepless nights, and me passing a gentle smile without uttering a single word (sic), he wrote.

His friend said Wani was a staunch supporter of human rights.

Last year, he had travelled from Aligarh to Delhi to support a campaign for missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed, who has not been seen since October 2016 after a clash with ABVP members.

In a blog post later, Wani had said: I believe, protest March or Sit-ins are only successful when all forms of protest are made simultaneously by people in their own capacities. We can neither expect everyone to come on roads and walk three or four kilometers on foot or lay on ground for days nor can we expect everyone to write long pieces, but, we can at least expect it from everyone to remain protesting for any genuine cause, until the justice is not delivered, in any form which he/she deems suitable and possible.

Jammu and Kashmir Police told News18 on Monday that were investigating the case. We are trying to ascertain how the student left his studies to join the militant group, a senior police official said.

Senior Superintendent of Police Kupwara Shamsher Hussain confirmed that the police had received a report from Wanis family that they were unable to contact the PhD student and yet there is no confirmation about his joining militancy.
Lucknow: Controversy over painting the Lucknow Hajj office walls in saffron doesnt seem to be anywhere near an end even after authorities repainted them. Now, noted actor Prakash Raj has taken to Twitter to take a jibe at the UP chief minister.

Prakash Raj, in reference to the reports of the UP government painting the walls of the Lucknow Haj office in saffron, asked, Is changing colour of walls vikas?

The governments move to paint the walls of the Hajj Committee office in saffron invited a lot of criticism from opposition leaders and clerics. The walls were earlier painted in green and white. Facing a lot of flak over the change in colour, authorities rushed to save face and blamed the contractor and soon the walls were repainted in their original colour.

The actor even took note of potato farmers dumping truckloads of potato in front of the CMs residence. He said, What about the farmers dumping potatoes in your front yard?

Meanwhile, former Uttar Pradesh CM and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav wasted no time in supporting Rajs jibe and shared his Twitter post.

Is changing colour of a wall VIKAS....?? What about the farmers dumping potatoes in your front yard...#justasking pic.twitter.com/v1OOJfYPRd Prakash Raj (@prakashraaj) January 7, 2018

Farmers have expressed their distress by dumping potatoes in front of your house. And your agriculture minister says... the potatoes are of not of good quality and hence the protest is politically motivated... Is this the way you perceive farmers anguish. If changing colour of a wall is Vikas. Then is vikas Mr. Vikas the painter? Prakash Raj tweeted on Sunday.

This is not for the first time that the National Award-winning actor has hit out at the UP CM. When Yogi Adityanath was appointed as the chief minister of UP, Prakash Raj had tweeted that CM Yogi is confused if he is the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh or a Rajpurohit.
Washington: A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents has protested outside the Pakistani embassy here against the "inhumane" treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials.

"The trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court," said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Baolchistan, which organised the unique event named as "Chappal-Chor Pakistan" (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhavs wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out "inhumane" treatment to Jadhavs wife and mother during their tightly- controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian national on December 25 in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

"The recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt. Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even Bindi and Mangal Sutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata Soubhagya Nari (married Indian woman)," said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in USA.

Carl Clemens, volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the "petty vindictiveness and humiliation" that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

"They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to Pakistans own destruction," said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Pakistan on December 25 had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer.

New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member bench of the ICJ on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case. It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court reignited the homosexuality debate on Monday, saying a Constitution Bench will review its 2013 judgment upholding the validity of Section 377 of the IPC which criminalises gay sex.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud said the issue arising out of Section 377 required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

The bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by one Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare Section 377 as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex.

Senior advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for Johar, said the penal provision was unconstitutional as it also provided prosecution and sentencing of consenting adults who are indulging in such sex.

"You can't put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex," Datar said and referred to a recent nine-judge bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight the point that the right to choose a sexual partner was part of fundamental right.

The relook comes months after some judges on a nine-judge Constitution Bench, which had held Right to Privacy as a fundamental right, denounced discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

During the historic Right to Privacy hearing in August, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul had said that relationship and lifestyle were the individuals choices. It is an individuals choice as to who enters his house, how he lives and in what relationship. The privacy of the home must protect the family, marriage, procreation and sexual orientation which are all important aspects of dignity.

A two-judge bench had in 2013 ruled that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code will continue making gay sex  irrespective of age and consent  an offence.

The court had held that Section 377 did not suffer from any constitutional infirmity and that it was for Parliament to consider the desirability and propriety of deleting Section 377 from the statute book or amend it. Under Section 377, voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal," is punishable with imprisonment from 10 years to life.

This judgment had turned the clock back on the rights of homosexuals in the country, as the Supreme Court had set aside the historic 2009 Delhi High Court judgment that decriminalised gay sex by holding that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code violated the principles of equality and non-discrimination in the Constitution.

The review petition filed by Naz Foundation against this judgment was dismissed in 2014. But the case is still alive since the curative petition is still pending before the top court.

(With PTI inputs)
Gurugram: A Sessions Court on Monday denied bail to a 16-year-old Ryan International student who has been accused of killing seven-year-old Pradyuman Thakur in the school premises and is now being tried as an adult.

Judge Jasbir Singh Kundu had reserved his order on the teens bail application on January 6. During the hearing, the counsels advocating for the CBI and Pradyuman's father Barun Thakur had submitted that the investigation was at a crucial juncture and that the statements of all witnesses were yet to be recorded.

The CBI counsel had also argued that if the juvenile is released on bail, evidence could be tampered with and witnesses could be intimidated.

The Sessions Court on Monday also dismissed the defence counsels argument that the accused be given default bail since the CBI failed to file a chargesheet within a month.

Sandeep Aneja, lawyer for the accused, had argued that under Section 10(5) of the Juvenile Justice (Care & Protection of Children) Model Rules, 2016, the chargesheet should have been filed within a month. "As the CBI has failed to complete the probe within the given time, the child should be given the benefit of default bail," said Aneja.

The CBI objected to this, saying that rules nowhere spoke about completion of the investigation within a month. The agency maintained that since the accused is involved in a heinous crime, it was not bound to file the chargesheet within 30 days.

The defence lawyer has filed two more applications  one opposing the Juvenile Justice Board's decision to allow the CBI to record the teenagers fingerprint. The second application challenges the legality of the teens CBI custody between November 8 and 11. The court will hear these appeals on January 22.

Pradyuman Thakur was found with his throat slit in the Gurugram school's washroom on September 8. The Gurgaon Police had initially claimed that the crime was committed by a school bus conductor, which was later refuted by the CBI.

The CBI has alleged that the teenager killed Pradyuman so the school would be forced to postpone examinations and a parent-teacher meeting.
New Delhi: Underlining that "health of a citizen has primacy", the Supreme Court, on Monday stayed an order which had quashed the rule for 85% pictorial health warning on cigarette packets and other tobacco products.

The bench, headed by the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, held that business considerations will have to give way to issues of health, more so when the activity in question may lead to "destruction of health".

The bench stayed the Karnataka High Court order that had quashed the 2014 rule for 85% pictorial health warnings on the ground that it lacked any basis or scientific reasoning. The HC had also said that such pictorial health warning should be reduced to 40%, as it was earlier.

But the Court allowed the request made by Attorney General K K Venugopal, that public health consideration warranted an immediate stay of the HC order.

"Keeping in view the objects and reasons of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003 and the measures taken by the State, we think it appropriate to direct stay of operation of the judgment and order passed by the High Court of Karnataka," ordered the bench.

It added: "Though a very structural submission has been advanced by the learned counsel for the respondents (tobacco companies) that it will affect their business, we have remained unimpressed by the said proponement as we are inclined to think that health of a citizen has primacy and he or she should be aware of that which can affect or deteriorate the condition of health".

The Court will now hear the case on March 12.

The High Court of Karnataka last month struck down the central government rules requiring 85 per cent of a tobacco pack's surface to be covered in health warnings. The rules had been in force since 2016.

An RTI reply from the government convinced the Karnataka High Court that the ministry lacked reasons why the pictorial health warning should cover 85% and not 40%, as it was before the 2014 regulation, and hence the regulations were quashed.
Just one day remains until the deadline for the closure of North Korean businesses around the world under a UN Security Council resolution from September.

China's Ministry of Commerce confirmed that North Korean companies in China, either joint ventures or sole investments, must close by Jan. 9. Yet a lot of them were still open on Sunday.

A staffer at the Haedanghwa restaurant in Beijing, which is wholly North Korean-owned, said both branches will still be open for business after Tuesday. "You can still eat North Korean kimchi and see our staff perform after that date," the staffer said.

And a staffer at Okryugwan, another North Korean restaurant in Beijing, replied to questions about the closure, "I don't know what you're talking about. That will not happen."

The Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang, the only hotel North Korea operates in China, said it is taking reservations after Tuesday. A symbol of cross-border cooperation, the hotel is believed to be a haven for North Korean agents. North Koreans own a 70-percent stake and Chinese the rest.

The Chinese co-owners, a trading arm of Liaoning Hongxiang Group, were blacklisted by the UN Security Council last year for helping North Korea's missile development and nuclear weapons programs.

Little is known about North Korean businesses in China. Most of the 100 or so North Korean restaurants there seem to be nominally owned by Chinese citizens but run by North Koreans.

In Shenyang, where there are a lot of them, at least half have apparently been told to shut down. Some North Korean restaurants in Beijing changed staff and menu to Chinese to stay open.


New Delhi: The acquittal of former top executives of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland -- Giuseppe Orsi and Bruno Spagnolini -- will have no bearing on the CBI case as it is based on an independent investigation with strong evidence, senior central agency officials said on Monday.

The comments came after Orsi, ex-president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, and Spagnolini, a former CEO of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, were acquitted by an Italian court on Monday.

The officials said the same set of evidence had resulted in their conviction earlier.

The sources said the case in Italian courts is based on the evidence gathered by the Italian authorities whereas the CBI carried out a completely independent investigation in the matter.

They said there is an option of appeal with Italian authorities even after the order of the Milan court of appeals.

"We have had a completely different probe. We have very strong case," CBI Spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said in New Delhi. In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considered definitive until the appeals process has been exhausted. The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 by Italian authorities looking into alleged corruption into the sale of 12 helicopters to India for the use of VVIPs worth Rs 3600 crore.

The two were accused of international corruption and false invoicing in relation to bribes exchanged for the contract with India.

Both were cleared on charges of committing international corruption at the first-instance trial in 2014 but convicted of false invoicing and sentenced to two years in prison. Both appealed against the conviction, while the prosecution appealed against the acquittal on the corruption charge.

In December 2016, the supreme court of cassation ordered a repeat of the appeals trial.

Milan's third court of appeal on Monday acquitted Orsi and Spagnolini, who were serving four-and-a-half years and four years sentences under the charges.
Late night talk show host David Letterman is returning to television next week with an interview of former US president Barack Obama, streaming giant Netflix announced Friday.

Letterman, 70, who officially retired in 2015 after a 22-year run as the host of Late Show with David Letterman -- a very American melange of celebrity interviews, monologues and sketches -- had said in August that he would be back in 2018 on Netflix.

The streaming platform teased the new show's January 12 launch in a tweet with a lineup topped by the former US leader: "Obama. Clooney. Malala. Fey. Stern. Jay-Z. #MyNextGuestNeedsNoIntroductionWithDavidLetterman."

Actor George Clooney, Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, actress Tina Fey, shock jock Howard Stern and rap superstar Jay-Z complete the lineup. This would be Obama's first televised interview since his departure from the White House a year ago. He is certain to be asked about Donald Trump, even though the former Democratic president has been extremely reticent about his successor.

The new show will consist of six hour-long episodes built around Letterman's star guests. One will be released per month. Nearly 14 million people watched Letterman's final show on CBS in May 2015. Known for his acid wit, the 10-time Emmy winner has made only fleeting appearances on US television since then.
California: The Golden Globes, once the stomping grounds of Harvey Weinstein, will belong to someone else this year.

The 75th Golden Globe Awards is considered wide open, with contenders including Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, Steven Spielberg's The Post and Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

But whoever takes home the hardware Sunday, the spotlight is unlikely to stray far from the sexual misconduct scandals that have roiled Hollywood ever since an avalanche of allegations toppled Weinstein. Out of solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault, many celebrities are dressed in black including Michelle Williams in an embellished off-the-shoulder look and "Me Too" founder Tarana Burke at her side.

Turning the Globes dark on the fashion front had been anticipated for days after a call for massive reform following the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and numerous others in Hollywood, media, fashion, tech, publishing and other industries. The new initiative Time's Up, backed by more than 300 women in Hollywood, doled out pins intended for those who might already have locked in more colorful looks.

Not everybody supports the protest. Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of rape, has loudly and persistently called the effort an empty gesture.

Williams has brought #MeToo founder Tarana Burke to the awards show to help highlight gender inequality. Seven other actresses, including Emma Stone and Meryl Streep, are bringing activists to the ceremony, which is the first major awards show since the sexual misconduct scandal roiled Hollywood.

Streep will attend with Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Williams with Tarana Burke, the founder of the "Me Too" movement; and Watson will bring Marai Larasi, the executive director of Imkaan, a black-feminist organization.

In a statement Sunday, the advocates say they were inspired by the Time's Up initiative. They say the goal in attending the awards will be to shift focus away from the perpetrators and back on survivors and creating lasting change.
The much-awaited 75th annual Golden Globe Awards concluded at Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California with the red carpet buzzing with celebrities turning in large numbers. The highly anticipated wear-black protest was the highlight of the event with the likes of Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Emma Watson, Gal Gadot, Katherine Langford, Michelle Williams, Kelly Clarkson, David Harbour, Sterling K Brown and others opting for dark fashion. In the light of the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and several others in Hollywood, the 75th edition of the prestigious awards became all the more important.

The night belonged to Big Little Lies, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Oprah Winfrey. Heres all that happened at the award ceremony.

Read all the Latest News , Breaking News , watch Top Videos and Live TV here.
Shillong: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday said it will contest at least 35 seats in the Meghalaya Assembly elections.

Elections to the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly are due in the first half of this year as the term of the present Assembly expires on March 6.

"We are hoping to field 35 candidates for the next election as we have good chance of winning," AAP state president Wanshwa Nongtdu told reporters in Shillong.

He claimed the chances of the AAP is "good". The AAP leader also exuded confidence that the party will form the next government by fielding "common man" as its candidates.

"We are Aam aadmi and we will have common man as candidates, we have few retired officers, few intellectuals who want to contest and we prefer our candidates be to be AAP candidates," he said.

Declaring the first list of candidates, Nongtdu said Peter Aiborlang Dohkrud will contest from Mawlai, Dorass Ramsiej from Mawkyrwat, Wonder Lapang will take on Congress president Celestine Lyngdoh from Umsning constituency in Ri-Bhoi and Debrict Binone from Nongpoh.

According to the AAP leader, the candidates have been approved by AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and party observer for North East, Rakesh Sinha.
Suri (WB): A senior leader of the Trinamool Congress today organised a massive "Brahmin and Purohit Sammelan" (a Brahmin convention) in Bolpur town of Birbhum district, a move seen by the opposition BJP to arrest consolidation of Hindu votes in favour of the saffron party.

The day-long sammelan is being organised by the party's Birbhum district president, Anubrata Mondal, in his home district.

Mondal said the convention aims to highlight "misinterpretations" of the Hindu religion made by the BJP and discuss what the Hindu religion stands for. "The Hindu religion is being misinterpreted by the BJP. Today we will discuss the real meaning of Hindu religion," Mondol told reporters.

A source in the ruling party said around 12,000-14,000 Hindu priests are attending the meet that started around 12.30 pm today.

The priests will be felicitated with a copy of the Gita, shawl, and pictures of Sarada Maa and Ramakrishna, he said.

The saffron party has accused the Trinamool Congress leadership of practicing "soft Hindutva" to stop the Hindu voters from uniting under the BJP.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's recent visit to Sagar Island to take stock of arrangements for the January 14 Makar Sankranti festival also came under attack from the saffron party.

"The so-called secular leaders are practicing Hindutva because they are well aware that Hindus are uniting under the BJP. They have realised that they will no longer be able to win elections by appeasing Muslims," BJP state president Dilip Ghosh said.
Kolkata: Former Trinamool Congress MLA Manju Basu on Monday rubbished reports that she is contesting on a BJP ticket for the Noapara Assembly bypolls, scheduled to take place on 29 January this year.

Basus statement came hours after the West Bengal unit of BJP announced her name as its candidate for the West Bengal bypoll. I am not contesting on behalf of BJP. I am with our party supremo Mamata Banerjee and I am with her in every decision, she said.

Later in the day, BJP announced Sandeep Banerjee as their candidate from the Noapara Assembly seat.

TMC rebel and now BJP leader Mukul Roy claimed Basus name was decided after consulting her. He alleged that she changed her stand due to pressure from Mamata.

Basu's name was finalised by BJP's secretary of Central Election Committee on Sunday afternoon and a copy of draft letter was sent to party president Amit Shah.

Basu is a two-time Trinamool MLA and has been vocal about the way the party was functioning in her district. Speculations about her switchover to the BJP were rife after she met BJP leaders Kailash Vijayvargiya and Mukul Roy.

Her decision not to contest on a BJP ticket seems to have left the partys top leadership red-faced. The partys national general secretary, Ramlal, has sought a report from state president Dilip Ghosh on why Basu suddenly backed out.

Arjun Singh, TMC MLA from the adjacent Bhatpara constituency, however, maintained that there is no pressure on Basu from the party.
Mumbai: Former Shiv Sena corporator Ashok Sawant was killed by unidentified assailants while returning home late on Sunday, police said.

Sawant, 62, a two-term corporator from Samata Nagar in suburban Kandivli, was attacked 200 metres from his home while returning after meeting a friend around 11 pm, a police official said.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital in Kandivli but was declared dead on arrival, the official said.

Sawant had entered the cable television business a few years ago, and according to media reports had been receiving extortion threats.

A case under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code was registered and police were trying to ascertain if any CCTV cameras nearby recorded the attack.

(more details awaited)
New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Monday said Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani's request for holding a rally in New Delhi on Tuesday is still "under consideration", even as the organisers insist it will be held on pre-scheduled time.

The 'Social Justice' rally or 'Yuva Hunkaar Rally' is planned to be addressed by Mevani and Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi.

One of the organisers and former JNU Students' Union president Mohit Kumar Pandey said, "There has been a lot of attempts to stop this event and even some media houses are spreading wrong information that the permission for the rally has been denied."

Ever since the rally was announced on January 2, "a lot of money has been spent on posters calling Mevani a deshdrohi (traitor) and urban naxal," Pandey told PTI, adding the event will be held as per schedule.

Mevani could not be reached for his comments. In a statement, the organisers have urged the prospective participants to "assemble on the Parliament Street at 12 pm on Tuesday".

A senior police officer though said, "Mevani's request for the rally is still under consideration."

The rally seeks to raise the demand for the release of Dalit outfit Bhim Army's founder Chandrashekhar Azad and emphasise on issues like educational rights, employment, livelihood and gender justice.

A large section of students from universities and colleges in Delhi, women's groups, teachers' associations and activists associated with Mevani from across the country are expected to attend the rally.

Azad, 30, was arrested in June last year from Himachal Pradesh as he was the main accused in the Thakur-Dalit clash in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district.
Bengaluru: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah continued his war of words with his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday, asking him to read what Swami Vivekananda has to say on cow slaughter before questioning his credentials as a Hindu for promoting beef.

Taking to Twitter once again to hit back at Yogi, Siddramaiah wrote in Kannada that the Hindutva he follows is defined by the principles of Swami Vivekananda, and not those of Nathuram Godse, who had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.

Before giving us lessons on gau-hatya, read what Swami Vivekananda says about the issue. This is what I ask of CM Yogi Adityanath, the Karnataka CM tweeted.

In another tweet, he said, Who are these people to question our food choices? A lot of Hindus eat beef. If I want to eat it, I will. Who are they to object to it? I don't eat beef only because I don't like it.

The sharp retort came in response to the UP CMs scathing attack against Siddaramaiah for his recent assertion that he was a Hindu at a mega rally in Bengaluru on Sunday.

He cannot be a Hindu and promote consumption of beef. When the BJP was in power here, we enacted a law prohibiting cow slaughter. The Congress government repealed that law, he said to loud cheers from BJP supporters.

Yogi said Siddaramaiah has only now remembered his Hindu roots because of the approaching election. "Siddaramaiah calls himself a Hindu just as Congress president Rahul Gandhi went to temple after temple during the Gujarat election," he claimed.

Siddaramiah had responded to the searing jibe with his own barb on Twitter, teaching Yogi about the Karnataka model of governance with a reference to a reported starvation death in UP.

In his tweet on Sunday, he welcomed Yogi to Bengaluru and asked him to tour the Indira canteens and other ration shops started by his government to learn" from them. "It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state, the Karnataka CM wrote, sharpening his attack as the state heads to a high-pitched election in April.

The barbs did not end there as Yogi was not the one to take the taunt lying down. He reminded Siddaramaiah that the number of farmer suicides had been highest in Karnataka during his tenure. not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies, Yogi wrote.
Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon will meet on Tuesday his quasi-counterpart from North Korea, Ri Son-gwon, who chairs the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland. The first high-level inter-Korean talks in two years will discuss North Korea's participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and "other issues of mutual interest."

International reaction has been largely positive. U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed the talks and characteristically took all the credit, saying, "If I weren't involved they wouldn't be talking about Olympics right now." The Chinese government said South Korea and the U.S.' decision to halt joint military drills during the Winter Olympics would be reciprocated by a cessation in North Korea's nuclear and missile tests during that period.

The official [North] Korean Central News Agency said Sunday that North and South Korea must "mutually" head toward cooperation, but the U.S. insists that the pressure on the North must be maintained via sanctions.

Seoul must go into the talks with a clear sense of objectives. Its guiding principle must be that any dialogue must be geared toward solving the North Korean nuclear issue, and no agreements must be entered that make it harder to resolve the standoff. For example, no international principles must be compromised just to ensure a bit of glory for the Pyeongchang Olympics. There can be no promise to halt joint South Korea-U.S. military drills simply for a mere North Korean promise to freeze its nuclear program, because that would simply buy North Korea more time as it tries to perfect a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile.

Seoul would be reduced to a tool in realizing Pyongyang's evil schemes. It must not allow itself to get sucked into concessions that weaken international pressure on the regime.


Germany's opposition parties on Sunday called for the abolition of a new law that aims to rid social media of hate speech, saying it was wrong for private companies to be making decisions about whether posts are unlawful. The legislation, which came into force on January 1, can impose fines of up to 50 million euros ($60.1 million) on sites that fail to remove hate speech promptly, raising fears that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms could block more content than necessary.

So far Twitter has deleted anti-Muslim and anti-migrant posts by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and also blocked satirical magazine Titanic's account after it parodied the AfD's anti-Muslim comments. Nicola Beer, the general secretary of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), told Welt am Sonntag newspaper that prosecuting authorities needed to be equipped with tools to enforce the law on the internet rather than leaving decisions about the legality of posts to platform operators.

"The past few days have clearly shown that private providers aren't always able to make the right decision about whether suspected criminal statements made online are unlawful, satirical or a tasteless expression of opinion that nonetheless needs to be tolerated in a democracy," she said. Beer added that the existing law needed to be replaced with a "proper" one.

Simone Peter, the leader of the Greens, told the same newspaper that it was not acceptable that U.S. companies such as Twitter were able to influence freedom of opinion and the press in Germany, referring to the suspension of Titanic's account. She said networks such as Twitter need to take some responsibility for posts on their platforms but "without being given the role of a judge".

After the Titanic account was blocked a Twitter spokesman said the company did not comment on individual accounts for reasons of privacy and security. Sahra Wagenknecht, the parliamentary leader of the radical Left, told the Funke group of newspapers that her party supported initiatives to abandon the law. "The law is a slap in the face for all democratic principles because, in a constitutional state, courts rather than companies make decisions about what is unlawful and what is not," she said.

The AfD has already announced that it will consider filing a complaint against the law. On Thursday Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper also called for the law to be scrapped, saying it was stifling free speech and making martyrs out of anti-immigrant politicians whose posts are deleted.

Watch: Bose QuietComfort 35 ii Review | Noise-Cancellation Meets Google Assistant
Google sold more than one Home smart speaker every second since it started shipping in mid-October, taking the sales numbers to over six million, the company has announced. "We sold more than one Google Home device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October," Rishi Chandra, VP, Product Management, Google Home, said in a blog post on Friday.

"Google Home usage increased 9X this holiday season over last year's, as you controlled more smart devices, asked more questions, listened to more music, and tried out all the new things you can do with your Assistant on Google Home," added Scott Huffman, Vice President, Engineering, Google Assistant. The tech giant currently offers three Home devices -- the original Home, the Home Max, and the Home Mini. However, it did not reveal the sales figures for the individual devices.

Meanwhile, Amazon, Google's main rival in the smart speaker space has not revealed exactly how many Echo smart speakers it has sold but it pegged the number of its competing Echo Dot sales in the millions, according to Businessinsider.com. Google in November rolled out an update that will allow you to use Home speakers as intercom systems in your house.

People can now broadcast their voice from Google Assistant on smartphones or voice-activated speakers like Google Home. "When you need to round up the family in the morning, just say 'Ok Google, broadcast it's time for school!' and your message will broadcast to all Google Assistant-enabled speakers in your home," Alex Duong, Product Manager, Google Home, said in a blog post.

To get the feature work, sign in with the same Google Account for all devices. The feature is currently available in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.

Watch: Bose QuietComfort 35 ii Review | Noise-Cancellation Meets Google Assistant
In a bid to block the repeal of net neutrality, the Internet Association, a US political lobbying body representing Google, Facebook and other tech giants, will join the legal battle to sue the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). According to a report, the Internet Association also reiterated its call for Congress to come up with a legislative replacement for the new FCC rules released by its Indian-origin Chairman Ajit Pai this week.

"The final version of Chairman (Ajit) Pai's rule, as expected, dismantles popular net neutrality protections for consumers," said Michael Beckerman, President and CEO, Internet Association. "This rule defies the will of a bipartisan majority of Americans and fails to preserve a free and open internet," he added. The new FCC rules get rid of the Barack Obama-era net neutrality regulations that prevented broadband service providers from blocking or slowing down websites or creating the internet "fast lanes".

"The rules were intended to create a level playing field on the internet," the report added. In its final document, the FCC also argued that the US had lost billions of dollars worth of investment to build out better broadband infrastructure. Members of the Internet Association also include Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft and Netflix. Pai has dubbed Twitter as "part of the problem".

"When it comes to an open internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate," Pai has told a gathering at an event in the US. "Twitter blocked Representative Marsha Blackburn from advertising her Senate campaign launch video because it featured a pro-life message. Before that, during the so-called Day of Action, Twitter warned users that a link to a statement by one company on the topic of internet regulation 'may be unsafe'," he added.

"And to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users' accounts as opposed to those of liberal users. This conduct is many things, but it isn't fighting for an open internet." Over 200 businesses have asked the FCC to reconsider its plan to end net neutrality.

Watch: Bose QuietComfort 35 ii Review | Noise-Cancellation Meets Google Assistant
Beijing: China today said it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The US last week suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we dont agree to place the responsibility of anti-terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play the helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crack down on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti-terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since the US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran, and Afghanistan. Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter-terrorism efforts. "First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down on terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter-terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.
An Iranian oil tanker ablaze off China's east coast was at risk of exploding or sinking on Monday, as fears grew for 32 missing sailors amid warnings of a potential environmental disaster.

The huge fire was still raging on Monday morning around the stricken vessel, which had been carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil, some 36 hours after it collided with a cargo ship.

But China's English-language state broadcaster CGTN later posted a video on Twitter showing the fire seemingly under control as a second vessel sprayed it with water.

Earlier the transport ministry said rescuers trying to locate the crew of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis were being beaten back by toxic clouds.

The Panamanian-flagged 274-metre (899-foot) tanker Sanchi is "in danger of exploding or sinking", the ministry said.

Rescuers had recovered one unidentified body as of Monday afternoon, said foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang.

"Conditions... are not that favourable for search and rescue work," he said, adding that "we are also investigating how to prevent any secondary disaster."

The body was found three or four miles from the tanker and "cannot be easily identified" even though the victim had a fire safety vest, Alireza Irvash, from Iran's consulate in Shanghai, told Iranian state broadcaster IRIB.

The accident happened on Saturday evening 160 nautical miles east of the city.

The tanker, operated by Iran's Glory Shipping, was heading to South Korea when it collided with a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship, the CF Crystal, carrying 64,000 tonnes of grain.

Ten government vessels and "many fishing ships" were helping with the ongoing rescue and clean-up effort, the transport ministry said, adding that a South Korean coastguard ship was also on the scene.

A US Navy aircraft took part in the search on Sunday, scouring a wide area before returning to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

Environmental Fears

As Chinese authorities raced to contain the ship's leaking oil, experts expressed fears the accident could create an environmental disaster.

Greenpeace said in a statement it was "concerned about the potential environmental damage that could be caused by the 1 million barrels of crude oil on board".

If all of the Sanchi's cargo spills, it would be the biggest oil slick from a ship for decades.

By comparison, in the sixth-worst spill since the 1960s, the Odyssey dumped 132,000 tonnes some 700 nautical miles off Canada's Nova Scotia in 1988, according to figures from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation website.

"It's very possible this will kill off marine life across a wide area," Wei Xianghua, an environmental expert at Beijing's Tsinghua University, told AFP of the latest threat.

Even under a best-case scenario, it would take a "long time" for the area to get back to normal, Wei added.

"At present, the only thing to be done is make the best effort to not allow the oil to spread to other places."

China had two vessels working to contain the spill early Monday morning, the transport ministry said.

Iran's Petroleum Ministry said the tanker belongs to the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) and was delivering its cargo to South Korea's Hanwha Total. The ship and its cargo were insured, a statement said.

It was the second accident in less than two years involving a tanker owned by the NITC. In August 2016 an Iranian supertanker and a container ship collided in the Singapore Strait, causing damage to both vessels but no injuries or pollution.

Saturday's collision was the latest in a series of fatal maritime accidents in East Asia in recent years.

Last October, 13 crew on a Chinese fishing boat were killed after their vessel collided with a Hong Kong oil tanker off Japan's west coast.

US Navy vessels have also been involved in some accidents, including a collision between the USS John. S. McCain and a tanker off Singapore last August that killed 10 sailors.
New York: Three people were injured in an early-morning fire at the top of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, the New York Fire Department said on Monday.

US President Donald Trump was in Washington at the time. Trump's primary residence was in the building before his election victory and inauguration nearly a year ago.

One firefighter was hospitalized with nonlife-threatening injuries, while two people received minor injuries that were treated at the scene, including a building worker whose injury was initially described as serious, the Fire Department said.

Eric Trump, one of the president's sons, said on Twitter that it was a small electrical fire in the cooling tower on the building's roof.

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job," said the younger Trump. "The men and women of the #FDNY are true heros and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

[caption id="attachment_1626435" align="alignnone" ] Smoke rises from Trump Tower in New York, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. The department said the fire started Monday in the heating and air conditioning system of the building. (Jeff Levi via AP)[/caption]

The Fire Department said the fire was not inside the building, but on top of it.

"We had flames coming out of the vents. No smoke condition or fire was on the inside," Manhattan Borough Commander Assistant Chief Roger Sakowich said on Twitter.

The cause of the blaze is being investigated by the city fire marshal, a department spokesman said. Once the investigation is complete, the results will be released, the spokesman, Firefighter Jim Long, said.

As firefighters battled the blaze, a plume of smoke spewed from the roof of the 68-story structure.

The fire was reported by phone shortly before 7 am EST (5.30pm IST) on the top floor of the building, and was declared under control about an hour and 15 minutes later, the department said.

Some 84 firefighters and medical crews responded as 26 emergency units with lights flashing converged on the crowded midtown Manhattan location, it added.

In addition to the president's 66th-floor penthouse, Trump Tower houses the headquarters of the Trump Organization as well as other residences, offices and stores.
Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron laid a wreath on Monday in honour of the slain journalists of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which faces falling sales and stifling security measures three years after it was attacked.

At a low-key commemoration ceremony to mark January 7, 2015, massacre, Macron was joined by journalists from the magazine, members of his government and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.

Two French jihadists who had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda killed 11 people at Charlie Hebdo's offices in 2015 over the staunchly atheist magazine's satirical coverage of Islam and the prophet Mohammed.

The assault, which saw a policeman executed at a point-blank range nearby, profoundly shocked France and marked the beginning of a series of jihadist attacks that have claimed 241 lives in total, according to an AFP toll.

"We must never forget these terrible days," Francois Hollande, president at the time of the attacks, wrote on Facebook on Sunday while saying France could be "proud" of its reaction to the bloodshed.

Charlie Hebdo, which prides itself on being provocative, returned to the murder of its famed cartoonists and writers in its latest issue which laid bare the struggles of the surviving staff.

"The 7th of January 2015 propelled us into a new world of armed police, secure entrances and reinforced doors, of fear and death," wrote contributor Fabrice Nicolino in a column.

"And this in the heart of Paris and in conditions which do not honour the French republic. Do we still have a laugh? Yes," he added.

The magazine pays between 1.0-1.5 million euros (1.2-1.8 million dollars) in security costs annually at its heavily protected offices which are at a secret location, its editor Riss wrote.

Sales meanwhile have fallen sharply since a wave of popular support -- a "Je suis Charlie" defence of press freedom -- following the bloodshed. It revived the financial fortunes of a business that has faced regular difficulties in the past.

Company revenues fell to 19.4 million euros in 2016, down from more than 60 million in 2015, according to figures first reported by the BFM news channel and confirmed to AFP by the magazine.

Its journalists and editors still regularly receive death threats and the magazine courted fresh controversy in November with a front-page on the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan who has been accused of sexually assaulting women.

The Swiss academic, who is widely read and followed in France, was depicted with a huge erection above the line: "I am the sixth pillar of Islam."

The magazine also regularly mocks Christian and Jewish leaders as well as politicians of all stripes.

Two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack, another French extremist took hostages at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, killing four people before elite police raided the premises and shot him dead.

Anti-terror magistrates investigating the incidents are expected to finalise their probe in the next few months but have been unable to determine how the Charlie Hebdo killers -- Cherif and Said Kouachi -- coordinated with the supermarket shooter, Amedy Coulibaly.

Le Monde newspaper reported Sunday that 14 people had been charged in connection with the attacks and that investigators had traced the weapons to arms traffickers in north-east France and Belgium.

Relatives of the victims of the attacks had requested low-key commemorations on Sunday.
New Delhi: Indian and Baloch activists protested outside the Pakistani Embassy in Washington DC on Monday.

While India-American protesters were protesting Islamabad's ill-treatment of jailed Indian National Kulbhushan Jhadav, the Baloch exiles were protesting the mistreatment of the ethnic Baloch population in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province in terms of area.

Protesters united under the slogan "Chappal Chor Pakistan" (She-thief Pakistan) and deposited footwear outside the Pakistani Embassy in Washington DC.

"When they stole the chappal of a woman (Kulbhushan Jhadav's wife, who went to Pakistan to visit him) who was in distress, I hope they use these also. I want to say one thing- Pakistan ka matlab kya? Amreeka (America) se dollar la, Hindustan ke joote kha. (What does Pakistan stand for? Getting American dollars and incurring India's wrath)," one protester told ANI.

"Pakistan's narrow-mindedness was exposed with how they treated Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife. What policy makers and people here need to understand is that Pakistan as a whole is also being run with the same narrow-minded mentality," said another protester.

This comes at a time when Islamabad is facing increasing international pressure, particularly from the United States, which had recently asked Pakistan to do more in the fight against terrorism and stop providing safe haven to terrorists. The US, after a terse tweet from its President Donald Trump, had decided to stop further aid to Pakistan.
Islamabad: The footprint of the Islamic State terror group is continuously on the rise in Pakistan as over the past year responsibility for as many as six deadliest attacks, in which 153 people were killed, was claimed by the outfit, according to a think-tank report.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) has stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn online reported.

"The IS claimed responsibility for just six terrorist attacks in the country, but they were the most deadliest ones. There is a need to take the matter more seriously because there is a possibility that foreign fighters would come to Pakistan in near future as things are continuously changing in the Middle East," said PIPS official Muhammad Ismail Khan.

"What has been quite alarming is the increasing footprint of IS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh where the group claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks," Khan said.

According to the report, despite a 16 per cent decline in terrorist attacks last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its associated groups remained the most potent threats. They were followed by nationalist-insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.

It further said that concerted efforts and a revision of the National Action Plan was required to curb the terror group's activities. The report suggested a parliamentary oversight of Pakistan's counter-terror plan.

Militant, insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of the country in 2017, the think-tank said.

These incidents, including 24 suicide and gun-and-suicide coordinated attacks, left 815 people dead. The report noted that as compared to 2016, the attacks in the country from across the Afghan, Indian and Iranian borders in 2017 witnessed a significant surge by 131 per cent.

Furthermore, security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016.

According to the report, it was quite likely that the National Internal Security Policy will take into consideration global and regional scenarios, including relations between Pakistan, China and the US.
Washington: The head of the Central Intelligence Agency said on Sunday that Russia and others are trying to undermine elections in the United States, the next major one being in November when Republicans will try to keep control of Congress.

US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to try to help President Donald Trump win, in part by hacking and releasing emails embarrassing to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and spreading social media propaganda.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo told CBS that the Russian interference is longstanding, and continues. Asked on "Face the Nation" if Moscow is currently trying to undermine US elections, Pompeo responded: "Yes sir, have been for decades."

"Yes, I continue to be concerned, not only about the Russians, but about others' efforts as well," Pompeo said, without giving details. "We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy."

Moscow denies any meddling in the 2016 elections to help Republican Trump win. US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether any crimes were committed. Two Trump associates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign aide George Papadopoulos have pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in the probe. Trump denies any campaign collusion with Russia.

Trump has at times suggested that he accepts the US intelligence agencies' assessment that Russia sought to interfere in the election but at other times has said he accepts Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials that Moscow meddled.

Trump has frequently spoken of wanting to improve relations with Putin, even though Russia has frustrated US policy in Syria and Ukraine and done little to help Washington in its standoff with North Korea.

Pompeo told CBS that the CIA had an important function as a part of the national security team to keep US elections secure and democratic. "We are working diligently to do that. So we're going to work against the Russians or any others who threaten that very outcome," he said.

Trump said on Saturday that he planned an active year on the campaign trail on behalf of Republican candidates running in the mid-term elections, in which all of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will be up for election. Republicans hold majorities in both.
Washington: Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Sunday sought to back away from incendiary remarks quoted in an explosive new book that have landed him in hot water with the president he helped elect.

Bannon has found himself in dire straits since excerpts of Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" -- an explosive behind-the-scenes account that questions the president's fitness for office -- were first published on Wednesday.

He has been abandoned by financial patrons, condemned by erstwhile political allies and ridiculed by Trump himself over his reported comments in the book, which he has not denied making.

In the book, Bannon is quoted as saying a pre-election meeting involving son Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer was "treasonous," and that prosecutors investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia would "crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

In a statement to the Axios news website, Bannon, who was a senior Trump adviser until he was ousted in August, said: "Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

His criticism, Bannon said, was aimed at onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, "a seasoned campaign professional" who "should have known (the Russians) are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends."

'I regret my delay'

But in "Fire and Fury," Bannon is quoted as saying that "the top three guys in the campaign" -- Manafort, Donald Jr. and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner -- attended the meeting he described as "treasonous."

The closest Bannon came to an actual apology was saying he regretted the timing of his response.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments."

Trump on Sunday continued his daily assault on "Fire and Fury" and its author, tweeting that the book -- which paints him as disengaged, ill-informed and unstable, with signs of serious memory loss -- was a "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

A day earlier, seeking to refute Wolff's suggestion that he lacked stability, Trump called himself a "very stable genius."

Senior Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller treated the book derisively while insisting that his boss was in fact "a political genius," in an interview with CNN on Sunday.

Wolff, Miller said, "is a garbage author of a garbage book." He assailed Bannon, reportedly a key source for the author, as "vindictive" and "out of touch with reality."

'Not going to succeed'

Wolff defended his work on Sunday, telling NBC he "absolutely did not" violate any off-the-record agreements in his reporting but conceding, of the total three hours he said he spent with Trump, that the president "probably did not think of them as interviews."

He also portrayed a high level of concern in the White House over whether Trump risks being removed from office as unfit, as is possible -- if difficult -- under the constitution's 25th Amendment.

Almost daily, he said, White House aides would say, "We're not at a 25th Amendment level yet."

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, rejected that notion, telling ABC that no one at the White House "questions the stability of the president." She suggested that Wolff was someone who would "lie for money and for power."

But Wolff insisted he did not enter the book project with an anti-Trump bias or agenda.

"I would have been delighted to have written a contrarian account here: 'Donald Trump, this unexpected president, is actually going to succeed.' Okay, that's not the story. He is not going to succeed. This is worse than everybody thought."

CIA director Mike Pompeo, appearing on Fox News Sunday, insisted that Wolff's portrayal of Trump was "just pure fantasy."

'Hysterical coverage'

Far from being detached and unable to deal with complex policy issues, Pompeo said, "The president is engaged, he understands the complexity, he asks really difficult questions of our team at the CIA." He described Trump as an "avid consumer" of the agency's intelligence.

Pompeo added that Trump was "completely fit," saying it was "ludicrous" to suggest otherwise.

But in a probable sign of White House sensitivities over the book, Miller lashed out in an unusually raw clash with his CNN interviewer, Jake Tapper.

Miller called Tapper "condescending" and "snide," and accused CNN of engaging in "negative anti-Trump hysterical coverage" and "spectacularly embarrassing false reporting."

The two men repeatedly spoke over each other before Tapper declared, "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time. Thank you, Stephen," then turned away from Miller -- who was still talking -- to tersely announce the next guest.

Miller's combative performance on CNN got a thumbs up from his boss.

"Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!" Trump tweeted after the segment aired.
A house built on a rock on the river Drina is seen near the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta, about 160km (99 miles) from the capital Belgrade May 22, 2013. The house was built in 1968 by a group of young men who decided that the rock on the river was an ideal place for a tiny shelter, according to the house's co-owner, who was among those involved in its construction. (Image: Reuters)
GOP plans to host a speaker at the Amherst County Sheriffs Office were canceled Monday when the agency became aware the event featured an anti-Islam crusader who has built a reputation on accusing prominent Muslim organizations of plotting jihad against the U.S.

Chris Gaubatz was scheduled to speak Tuesday following the regular monthly meeting of the Amherst County Republican Committee, which is held in the basement of the Sheriffs Office.

A representative from the Amherst County Sheriffs Office said he was unaware of the event until contacted about it by The News & Advance on Monday.

Captain John Grieser noted the local GOP chapter is one of several organizations that meet regularly in the basement of the sheriffs office. He said the county Republican committee, which has met in the building for two years, does not provide an agenda prior to its meetings.

We haven't typically screened the content, but we're looking at revising that after this incident came up, Grieser said.

In a follow-up text message, Grieser said the Sheriffs Office has no control over GOP operations, but can decide how the building is used and did not want to give the perception to the public that we would allow a particular group to hold a forum thats contradictory to our mission statement of treating each citizen with respect, equity, and compassion.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations also issued a statement Monday calling for the Sheriffs Office to put a stop to the event.

After the Sheriffs Office declined to provide space, Amherst County Republican Committee Chairman Vance Wilkins found a new venue for the GOP event. Now the monthly meeting will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Second Stage Amherst at 194 Second Street in Amherst, with Gaubatz scheduled to speak at 8 p.m.

We will not be denied our right to peaceably assemble and to discuss whatever we choose, no matter the pressure from the Council on American-Islamist Relations, Wilkins wrote in an email.

Gaubatz did not respond to a request for an interview.

Gaubatz surged into the public eye in 2009 following his infiltration of the nonprofit CAIR  a Muslim advocacy group  as an intern while posing as a Muslim convert. In the employ of CAIR, Gaubatz copied thousands of documents and secretly recorded employees. His six-month stint with CAIR was later published as a book, alleging the organization supports jihad efforts against the U.S.

He also alleged CAIR was a front for the Arabic political group Muslim Brotherhood, and claimed 80 percent of mosques in the U.S. are under control of Muslim Brotherhood.

Wilkins said he first heard Gaubatz speak at a Lynchburg Tea Party event and invited him to share his insights into the Muslim faith.

I heard him speak, I didnt hear anything particularly xenophobic in his speech, [and] I would like for him to tell us what he found out inside the Muslim community, Wilkins said.

CAIR spokesperson Ibrahaim Hooper said rather than insights, Gaubatz shares conspiracy theories fueled by anti-Muslim bigotry.

Hooper denied CAIR has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood or jihad ambitions, as Gaubatz claimed, stressing it is a civil rights organization with a 24-year history of advocating for American Muslims.

Hooper expressed his concern that a mainstream political party was giving Gaubatz a platform and doing so in a law enforcement building.

Weve got bigots, all the time, that speak and spew their invective all over the place, but you normally dont have them hosted by law enforcement authorities or mainstream political parties, Hooper said. Thats the troubling part.

Wilkins said he books speakers as often as he can to talk about current events. He added that meetings regularly draw about 20 people.

Gaubatz was scheduled to speak after Tuesdays regular meeting.

Events featuring Gaubatz often draw protestors, though Wilkins did not consider that a concern.

According to The Daily Nonpareil  a newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa  a speech from Gaubatz in Oakland, Iowa, last summer was met with protests. The local GOP chapter distanced itself from the event sponsored by Omaha-based Global Faith Institute and 88 Tactical Elite Training Organization.

A summer event in South Dakota featuring Gaubatz was met with similar protests.

In addition to his research for the book Muslim Mafia  which was written by his father and a co-author, using documents Gaubatz had taken from CAIR headquarters  Gaubatz also is vice president of Understanding the Threat, a small limited-liability company.

Founded by former FBI agent John Guandolo, Understanding the Threat describes itself online as an organization dedicated to identifying the threat and training leaders, elected officials, law enforcement, military personnel, and citizens, about the Global Islamic Movement and the jihadi networks in communities around the nation.

Hooper said CAIR recently filed a complaint with the FBI against Guandolo regarding a tweet sent out that Hooper said he interpreted as a call to bomb the Muslim organizations headquarters.

Like Guandolo, Gaubatz has taken to Twitter to attack Islam in all forms.

When you understand the threat, you understand that there is no such thing as 'radical islam', just islam. #IslamIsTheProblem, Gaubatz tweeted July 6, 2017.

In the past, Gaubatz has claimed Muslims have taken over entire sections of Minneapolis.

You have entire enclaves that are essentially no-go zones, for not only law enforcement, but also citizens, Gaubatz told WorldNetDaily, a fringe conservative news and opinion website.When informed of Gaubatz statements, Wilkins said Friday it was the first time he had heard the claims.

What a speaker says does not define the values of the Amherst County Republican Committee, Wilkins said.

He added he believes Gaubatz has valuable inside knowledge from his time inside CAIR, and he had hoped to hear about the experience inside the organization and his thoughts on Islamic terrorism.

CAIR welcomes the swift response of the Sheriffs Office not to lend the appearance of law enforcement support for Gaubatz anti-Muslim agenda, said Robert McCaw, government affairs director for CAIR who hoped the organization would be unable to find another venue to host Gaubatz.
There are plenty of shocking bombshells in Michael Wolffs new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, but is there anything actually new?

I havent read it yet, but I have been following the crowdsourced effort by other journalists to recount every salacious tidbit. The quotes from staffers and Cabinet secretaries are indeed shocking by the standards of your typical inside account of an administrations first year. I dont recall so many White House luminaries competing to out-insult the commander in chief before.

For [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [then-Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, he was an idiot, Wolff writes. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as st. For H.R. McMaster he was a dope.

Wolffs sourcing methods leave much to be desired, and it seems likely that some of the quotes and incidents were fed to him at best secondhand. Some flatly deny saying what Wolff ascribes to them. Others do not dispute their damning statements. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon doesnt dispute the myriad statements he made about Trump, his family and  his word  the campaigns treasonous meeting with a Russian emissary.

As for Trump himself, Wolff describes the president as an easily bored narcissist with a hair-trigger attention span and a thin-skinned ego.

But this has been reported countless times already. Last month, The New York Times described a president who spends, daily, somewhere between four and eight hours in front of a television, albeit sometimes with it muted.

You can call such things fake news  as the president himself often does. But even a normal citizen can follow Trumps Twitter feed or listen to him speak and see that he is, by any conventional standard, obsessed with TV coverage. Weve known for years  and the White House has never denied  that the only print news clips the president regularly reads are the curated stories about himself.

Similarly, if youve watched or read virtually any interview with the president  never mind listened to him at a rally  youve observed how the president struggles to complete a line of thought without being distracted. Diagramming his sentences often requires a grammatical Rube Goldberg machine to connect verbs and nouns, subjects and predicates.

In short, even discounting for hearsay and exaggeration, the Trump in Fire and Fury seems utterly plausible save for those who have chosen not to believe their own lying eyes.

Trump has benefitted from a tendency among both his biggest fans and his biggest foes to see more than meets the eye. For the true believers, there must be a method behind the madness. The Trump we see on Twitter and TV conceals a strategic thinker who keeps his enemies off balance by controlling the narrative or some such treacle.

When Trump says he understands tax policy better than anybody. Better than the greatest CPA, his fans want to believe thats true, or at least that theres some truth to it. Likewise all of his other bizarre boasts (I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth; Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump; Because nobody knows the [immigration] system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me).

And yet, not once in hundreds of speeches and interviews has the president ever slipped and actually talked expertly for more than a minute on any public policy without the benefit of a teleprompter. For a president not known to avoid showing off, its a remarkable accomplishment to keep his policy chops so well hidden.

Trumps biggest enemies have something of a mirror-image delusion. In order to justify perpetual resistance, they must believe that the president has some long-term evil scheme in mind for overthrowing the democratic order. Its a cartoonish exaggeration of the hysteria some on the left once had with regard to George W. Bush. They simultaneously believed he was a criminal mastermind and a dunce. When you want to dedicate your life to opposing some villain, its only human to want to believe the villain is worth the effort.

The truth may not be as horrifying as Wolff and others describe, nor as terrifying as the resistance fears. All it takes is a willingness to see the obvious: The president is a man out of his depth, propped up by a staff and a party that needs to believe more than what the facts will support.

Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. Email him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @JonahNRO.
Government has turned down a request by cash-strapped urban local authorities to use the Zesa pre-paid platform to collect revenues.



Urban Councils Association of Zimbabwe (UCAZ) president and Harare mayor Councillor Bernard Manyenyeni had requested for a new system where water and electricity bills are jointly paid at Zesa offices.



The envisaged system was expected to help recover debts from defaulting residents, who owe local authorities more than $1 billion.





At a meeting held at Town House on Tuesday last week, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister July Moyo told the UCAZ president that it was not possible for the city to use that option.





Cllr Manyenyeni confirmed the development last week. The new minister feels it is ceding authority, he said. For now, we might get to do a trial in one ward (Harare) if the Zesa board agrees.





Local Government, Public Works and National Housing permanent secretary Mr George Magosvongwe said Minister Moyo was best placed to comment on the reason why Government declined the proposal.





It is a direct delivery from him (Minister Moyo), he said. It is better for him to comment on the issue. We are, however, looking at various options to improve revenue collection, which balances the interests of local authorities and councils.

Minister Moyo could not be reached for comment.

Last year, Cllr Manyenyeni said the proposal had the potential to improve municipal finances and facilitate better service delivery.





Right now the message to residents is pay up, he said then.

We expect those who are making noises against pre-paid water meters (resident associations) to be louder about the payment of bills.





If there was greater compliance, we would not be wasting money in finding alternative solutions. We are looking for these solutions because of defaults in payment and ballooning debtors books. Residents should pay and get the required services.





Harare is owed more than $700 million, with the city now employing various strategies, including evictions, to those who are leasing council properties.





Council has also resorted to issuing summons to defaulters in an attempt to recover outstanding debts.

Mutare City Council is now resorting to debt collectors to recover more than $41 million from ratepayers.





Chitungwiza ratepayers owe the local authority close to $60 million in unpaid rates and bills, while other local authorities are also owed millions by ratepayers. Herald
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Iran's primary schools are no longer permitted to teach English over fears that such early lessons could open the door to a Western "cultural invasion," reports Reuters. An education official announced on state-run TV Saturday that the rule applies to both public and private institutions. "Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations, declared Mehdi Navid-Adham. Iran's students are typically taught English starting around age 12, but the new concerns appear to surround schools where the foreign language curriculum begins earlier. In 2016, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei complained about the "promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children."

Saturday's announcement came at a conspicuous time for the Iranian government, whose Revolutionary Guard said the same day that security forces had ended the wave of anti-government protests that erupted last month. Officials did not link the English lesson announcement with the protests, but the Guard blamed the unrest on foreign entities, including the US. Some were skeptical about enforcement of the new ban. It is not even do-able, with [many] families prioritizing English in their childrens education," one reformist politician tells the Financial Times. In his 2016 speech, the ayatollah warned that foreign nations looking to expand their "colonization" can do so most easily by shaping the thoughts and culture of young people. (Read more Iran stories.)
"Bravo Debra Messing for dragging E! news while appearing on E! news," People news editor Nigel Smith tweets. "I think she just set the tone for the night." The San Francisco Chronicle reports that last month Catt Sadler left E! after more than a decade while revealing that she was paid half what her E! News co-host Jason Kennedy was paid. Messing didn't hold her tongue when interviewed by E! on the red carpet ahead of the 75th annual Golden Globes on Sunday. I was so shocked to hear that E! doesnt believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I mean, I miss Catt Sadler, the Will & Grace star told correspondent Giuliana Rancic. We stand with her."

Messing added: "Thats something that can change tomorrow. We want people to start having this conversation that women are just as valuable as men. Messing's boldness got a reaction online, with the praise on social media being summed up by one tweeter: "Debra Messing for POTUS." Messing wasn't the only star to bring up Sadler. We support gender equity and equal pay, and we hope that E! follows that lead with Catt as well," the New York Times quotes Eva Longoria as telling Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet. "We stand with you, Catt. (Read more Golden Globes stories.)
Jared Kushner's family real estate firm has continued to extend its business ties to Israel despite his role leading the administration's peace efforts in the Middle East, raising concerns that he may be breaking the spiritthough not the letterof conflict-of-interest laws. The New York Times reports that shortly before President Trump's son-in-law departed on a diplomatic trip to Israel last year, Kushner Companies received a $30 million investment from Israeli insurer Menora Mivtachim; that investment went to Maryland apartment complexes that Kushner still has a stake in despite stepping down from the company after accepting a White House job last year. The company has also taken out large loans from Israeli banks.

With Kushner playing such a big role in the peace process, "I think it's reasonable for people to ask whether his business interests are somehow affecting his judgment," government ethics expert Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer who advised Rand Paul's campaign, tells the Times. Kushner's lawyers and White House officials, however, stress that he is in full compliance with ethics rules. We have "tremendous confidence in the job Jared is doing leading our peace efforts, and he takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration," White House spokesman Raj Shah tells the Jerusalem Post. (Read more Jared Kushner stories.)
It started with a half-kidding plea at the beginning of the Golden Globes for Oprah Winfrey to run for president, but by the end of the night, that thought was gaining steam. As the awards show opened, host Seth Meyers joked that if his stint as host at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner had somehow prompted Donald Trump to run for president, "I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes." He also not-asked Tom Hanks to be vice president, calling him "mean and unrelatable." The crowd laughed, but then Winfrey dropped a bombshell speech as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award later in the eveningand that has now renewed whispers about the mega-star actually running, per the Washington Post.

Winfrey has said in the past she would "never run for public office," but she's given other hints she's not 100% against the prospect. The Post notes it's "no longer all that far-fetched to think that someone known primarily for their work on TV and with absolutely no governing experience could not only run for president but also win." Per the AP, Twitter was abuzz after her speech Sunday, with comedian Sarah Silverman tweeting: "Oprah/Michelle 2020." Winfrey's longtime beau and her best friend also weighed in. "I thought that speech was incredible. I got goosebumps," BFF Gayle King told the Los Angeles Times, and Stedman Graham, who's been with Winfrey for decades, added: "It's up to the people. She would absolutely do it." One other who thinks she's a winner: her potential rival. "Oprah will end up doing just fine with her networkshe knows how to win," Donald Trump tweeted in 2012. (Read more Oprah Winfrey stories.)
New York City fire officials say a fire in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system injured two people and caused smoke to billow from the roof. The Fire Department of New York says the fire started around 7am Monday at the building that contains President Trump's home and business offices. WPIX reports the rooftop fire was noticed by the Secret Service, who alerted building officials who were able to track the blaze to its source in a vent.

WPIX says a building engineer tried to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher and suffered smoke inhalation in the process; fire officials say the civilian was treated for serious injuries, reports the AP. A firefighter was treated for minor injuries, reportedly sustained when debris fell on him. The Washington Post notes the building wasn't evacuated over the one-alarm fire.

(Read more Trump Tower stories.)
The Supreme Court gave a death-row inmate a potentially life-saving reprieve on Monday because of racist comments made by one of his jurors. Keith Tharpe has been sentenced to death in Georgia for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, but the court ordered a new look at his request for an appeal of that 1991 death sentence, reports USA Today. It's all because his lawyers obtained a signed affidavit years after the case from one of his jurors in which the man complains about "n------" and adds that after studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls. Tharpe is black, and the Supreme Court declared in a 6-3 opinion that juror Barney Gattie's views may have tainted his ability to deliver a fair verdict.

"Gatties remarkable affidavitwhich he never retractedpresents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpe's race affected Gattie's vote for a death verdict," the decision states. The court's lone African-American, Clarence Thomas, wrote the dissenting opinion, which was signed by justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. "The court must be disturbed by the racist rhetoric in that affidavit, and must want to do something about it," Thomas wrote, per SCOTUSblog. "But the court's decision is no profile in moral courage." He added that the decision "callously delays justice for Jaquelin Freeman, the black woman who was brutally murdered by Tharpe 27 years ago." The case now moves back to the federal appeals court in Atlanta. (Read more US Supreme Court stories.)
A judge in Las Vegas has decided to dismiss criminal charges against a Nevada rancher and his sons accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities in 2014. Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro signaled when she declared a mistrial last month that she might dismiss the case outright against 71-year-old Cliven Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Montana militia leader Ryan Payne. The judge severely criticized prosecutors for what she called "willful" violations of due process rights of defendants, including failing to properly turn over evidence to their lawyer. But she gave the government a chance to submit written documents opposing dismissal of all charges.

The tense armed standoff outside Bunkerville, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, stopped a federal Bureau of Land Management roundup of Bundy cattle from public land including what is now Gold Butte National Monument. Several gunmen among the protesters who had assault-style rifles were acquitted of criminal charges in two trials last year. Ryan and Ammon Bundy also were acquitted of federal criminal charges in Oregon after an armed occupation in early 2016 of a national wildlife refuge to demand the government turn over public land to local control. In Las Vegas, Navarro declared a mistrial Dec. 20, leaving Cliven Bundy as the only one of the four defendants still jailed after refusing the judge's offer of release to house arrest.

(Read more Cliven Bundy stories.)
A judge in Pennsylvania has banned a fraternity from operating in the state for 10 years after the organization was found criminally liable for the death of a pledge four years ago. In December 2013, Chun Hsien Deng, a student at Baruch College, died after falling unconscious during a hazing ritual to get into Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American fraternity. At the time, prosecutors said Deng had suffered from "major brain trauma" following a game of "Glass Ceiling," in which he was blindfolded, made to carry a backpack filled with sand, and assaulted by fraternity members. Prosecutors also said there was a "considerable delay" between the time Deng fell unconscious and when he was taken to a hospital.

Five frat members and Pi Delta Psi were charged with third-degree murder. Four of the men pleaded to lesser charges and will likely be sentenced later today, while the fraternity was acquitted. But Pi Delta Psi was found guilty of aggravated assault and involuntary manslaughter, the New York Times reports. In addition to the 10-year ban, the judge ordered the fraternity to pay $112,500 in fines. The fraternity says it will appeal the decision, but the very fact that prosecutors chose to charge the fraternity, and the fact that a guilty verdict came down, could be a sign of the law taking a more aggressive approach to college hazing rituals that result in death. (Read more hazing stories.)
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The survivor suffered serious injuries and is being treated at Kalamassery Medical College.
New Delhi:

A fire broke out at the premises of Mumbai Session Court in Karamveer Bhaurao Marg on Monday morning, reported news agency ANI.

At least five fire engines were rushed to the spot to douse the fire. As per last reports coming on the incident, the fire was brought under the control. No casualties have been reported.

The fire brigade got a call at 7.14 am about the blaze in the court building, located near the campus of the Mumbai University in South Mumbai, the official of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's disaster management unit said.

The fire brigade personnel rushed to the spot, he said. "Efforts are on to douse the flames," he said. The cause of fire was not yet known, he said, addingthat an investigation will be carried out into the incident.

This is the fifth fire incident in the city in the last 20 days. Twelve people were killed when a massive fire broke outat a snack shop in Saki Naka-Kurla area here on December 18.

Later, 14 people were killed in a fire at an upscale pubin the Kamala Mills compound on December 29. On another incident on January 4, four persons, including two children, died and five were seriously injured after anupper floor of a residential building in suburban Marol caughtfire.

Besides, a 20-year-old man, who worked for a television serial production unit, was killed in a fire at the Cine Vistafilm studio in suburban Kanjurmarg on January 6.

This is sixth incident of fire reported in Mumbai, since the Kamala Mills fire incident on December 29, which left 14 people dead. The other fire incidents in the financial capital of India were in Marol in Andheri East, killing a family of four, Nagpada in Mumbai Central, Cinevista film studio in Kanjurmarg, and another fire in Lower Parel.
New Delhi:

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's upcoming period drama 'Padmavati', which has been into the limelight since its inception, is given U/A certificate after several modifications, suggested by the Central Board of Film Certification.

While speculations have been rife about the Deepika Padukone-starrer releasing worldwide on January 25, sources closed to the industry said uncertainty still prevails over the release date of Padmavati.

In its 28 December meeting with the makers, the review committee of CBFC and a special panel of historians recommended five modifications to the film.

While the first suggestion was to rename the film as 'Padmavat', several other changes were made in the scenes related to Sati and Jauhar.CBFC has also asked Bhansali to modify the song 'Ghoomar' featuring the Mewar queen Padmini, played by Deepika Padukone.

Also Read: Former Mewar royal slams changes suggested by CBFC in 'Padmavati' as cosmetic

'Padmavat' is happened to be the first Indian feature film to get a simultaneous global release across 60 countries by global studios-Paramount Pictures, while sources closed to the film suggest that the film will not hit the screens in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

Moreover, Karni Sena and several other Rajput outfits are continuing to hold out their protests against the film despite the changes.

The film, which was earlier scheduled to hit cinema houses on December 1, features Shahid Kapoor, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone in the lead.

Also Read | Padmavati: Push for complete ban, Karni Sena chief to community members

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Aligarh:

A research scholar hailing from Kupwara of north Kashmir was on Monday expelled by Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) authorities in the wake of reports alleging that he may have joined a terror group after his photo appeared in the social media showing him with an AK-47 rifle.



A team of senior AMU officials sealed the room of Mannan Basheer Wani, 26, on Monday morning immediately after they received a letter from the Superintendent of Police, Aligarh regarding the alleged "nefarious" activities of the student, university officials said.



Wani was a researcher in the Department of Geology and was last present in his department on January 2, according to AMU officials, who said that the university has initiated an inquiry into the matter and intensified security checks including in all its hostels in view of the incident.



According to the officials, Wani hailed from Kupwara district in Jammu and Kashmir and had left for his hometown shortly before the commencement of the winter vacations at AMU on January 6.



A senior AMU official said that prior to the police department's letter, the university had not received any intimation from the students family that he had not arrived at his home after leaving Aligarh.



Suspicion over Wani's antecedents was triggered after his photograph showing him holding a gun appeared on various social media sites. It was suspected that the scholar from Tikipora in Lolab area might have joined the Hizbul Mujahideen.



However, police in Jammu and Kashmir said it was too early to confirm if Wani had joined militancy. A police official said Wani's last known location was Delhi a few days earlier and they are ascertaining where he went after that.



Meanwhile, the AMU Proctor, Professor Mohsin Khan, told PTI that the University had set "up a comprehensive inquiry into the entire matter" and is also taking further necessary steps for beefing up security in hostels of the university.



The Proctor said nothing whatsoever suggesting that Wani was in any way involved in radical activities had come to their notice before this episode. The inquiry committee would, however, fully probe this matter, he said.



Khan said that even before the incident came to light, the University Vice Chancellor, Tariq Mansoor, had issued a directive to the security staff to step up vigil on all entry and exit points of the university.



Checking of identity cards of all youths entering the campus and different hostels had also been intensified.



Khan said that university authorities have also decided to conduct surprise checks in different hostels of the university during night hours to ensure that no external elements, including expelled students, are taking shelter in hostels in connivance with any of the inmates.



A weekly check of all video footage of close circuit television will henceforth be undertaken to keep a vigil.



Prof Shafey Kidwai, member-in-charge, public relations and media advisor to the AMU vice-chancellor, said that the universitys "zero tolerance" policy towards any anti-national activity on the campus was "very clear".



"We have zero tolerance to any such activity and as far as we are concerned, we are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to inculcate a sense of patriotism and commitment to the task of nation-building.



"As a responsible institution of higher learning, we utilise every platform in the institution to promote the values of pluralism and tolerance in the institution," he added.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Amid criticism of action by authorities over a newspaper report on Aadhaar data breach, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said that the government is committed to the freedom of the Press and the FIR has been filed against unknown entities.

Government is fully committed to freedom of Press as well as to maintaining security and sanctity of Aadhaar for Indias development. FIR is against unknown, Prasad said on social media platform Twitter.

The Delhi Police has registered an FIR (First Information Report) on a UIDAI officials complaint over the newspaper report on alleged data breach of Aadhaar details even as the daily said it will defend its freedom to undertake investigative journalism.

Also Read | I have earned the FIR, says Tribune journalist booked for report on breach of Aadhaar details

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Deputy Director B M Patnaik told the police that an input was received from The Tribune that it has purchased a service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp that provided unrestricted access to details of any of the Aadhaar numbers created in India, the police had said on Sunday.

On January 5, a complaint was received from Patnaik and the FIR was registered the same day, the police said.

The Editors Guild Of India sought government intervention for the withdrawal of the case and called for an impartial investigation into the matter.

Criticising the lodging of the FIR, the guild said it was deeply concerned over reports that the UIDAI deputy director had registered a complaint in which the reporter of The Tribune, Rachna Khaira, has been named.

Prasad said: Ive suggested UIDAI to request Tribune & its journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Rahul Gandhi embarked on a visit to Bahrain on Monday, his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress president. Rahul shall be addressing a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf countrys Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

Gandhi, who will be a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa.

According to a statement issued by the Congress, Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) there on Tuesday.

Delegates of 50 countries are participating in the function, the statement said.

Also Read: Venkaiah Naidu sends privilege notice against Rahul Gandhi, Congress says send one to PM Modi too

He will also have an interactive session with business leaders of the Indian origin on Tuesday.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow, Gandhi tweeted ahead of his trip.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow.  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 7, 2018

Gandhi is expected to return to India on January 9.

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New Delhi:

Congress President Rahul Gandhi, who is on a two-day visit to Bahrain, launched a scathing attackA against Modi government during his address to the Indian diaspora in Manama on Monday.

While addressing NRIs, Rahul Gandhi said, aThere is a serious problem at home, and you are part of the solution. Instead of accepting that we are lacking in job creation, the government is dividing the country on religion basis.a

aPeople are killed in India because of religious issues, judges die mysteriously, journalists are killed, and the PM has nothing to say,a Rahul said.

Invoking NRIs to participate in countryas development, Rahul said, aYour patriotism is what India needs today.a

Rahul said the global vision for India cannot be built without brothers and sisters living abroad as they send almost 3.5% of India's GDP.

Rahul also attacked the Modi government on increasing incidents of violence in India and said, aWe have to make India a centre of aAhimsaa (Violence) and not violence.a

aI am here to seek your help, we need you to fight these forces of hatred as every single Indian, who is anywhere in the world, is our asset, added the Congress President.

The Congress president also met with foreign minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Gulf Daily News reported.

aThank you, Your Excellency, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, honourable Foreign Minister of Kingdom of Bahrain for being a gracious host at lunch today,a Gandhi tweeted after the luncheon meeting.

Thank you, Your Excellency, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Hon. Foreign Minister of Kingdom of Bahrain, @khalidalkhalifa for being a gracious host at lunch today. pic.twitter.com/zDtwBaqpQ0 a Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 8, 2018

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New Delhi:

Ashok Sawant, a Shiv Sena leader and ex-corporator in Mumbai was stabbed to death on Sunday around 10:45pm near his house by two unknown assailants.

Sawant, a two time corporator from Samta Nagar in Mumbai was attacked near his residence just as he was returning after meeting a friend.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead on arrival. Police filed a case under IPC section 302 and were investigating the matter.

Media reports said that the deceased had entered a cable business and had been receiving extortion calls for the last few days.

They also said that he had brought the matter to their notice. Media reports said the murder was probably connected to these extortion threats.

Sawant is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.

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Washington:

SpaceX Zuma secretive government spacecraft launched into low orbit Washington, Jan 7 (AFP) John Young, a legendary US astronaut who went into space six times, orbited the moon and then walked on its craggy surface, has died, NASA has announced.

He was 87 and died late Friday of complications from pneumonia, the space agency said. He lived in a Houston suburb just minutes from the NASA Space Center.

NASA and the world have lost a pioneer, agency administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement. We will stand on his shoulders as we look toward the next human frontier.

Young was a man of many firsts: the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programmes (and the first to command a shuttle flight); and the first to fly into space six times.

He once held the world record for total time spent in space, NASA said.

Young joined Gus Grissom on the Gemini 3 mission, then commanded the first space shuttle mission in what some people called the boldest test flight in history.

He commanded Gemini 10, the first mission to rendezvous with two other spacecraft during a single flight.

Young orbited the moon in Apollo 10, and made a lunar landing with Apollo 16. In an iconic display of test pilot cool, he landed the space shuttle (STS-9) with a fire in the back end, NASA said.

He was in every way the astronauts astronaut, Lightfoot said. But he was also described as a savvy engineer and a test pilots test pilot.

While in the navy, Young set world records for the fastest ascension from a standing start in an F-4 Phantom II jet.

Once, during an air-to-air missile test, Young and another pilot approached each others aircraft at a potentially calamitous speed of Mach 3 (2,300 miles per hour, or 3,700 kilometers per hour), according to Youngs website.

I got a telegram from the chief of naval operations, Young said in his understated way, asking me not to do this any more.

Fellow astronaut Charles Bolden called Young and Robert Hoot Gibson the two best pilots he had ever known.

Never met two people like them, he said. Everyone else gets into an airplane; John and Hoot wear their airplane. Theyre just awesome.

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Beijing:

China on Monday said it is opposed to the US finger pointing at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

Chinas support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The US last week suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we dont agree to place the responsibility of anti-terrorism on a certain country, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House officials remarks that China could play a helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti-terrorism cause, Lu said.

Also Read | Donald Trump walks the talk as US suspends over USD 1.15 billion security aid to Pakistan

Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts, he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Years Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but lies and deceit and providing safe haven to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trumps efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a military base at Jiwani located close to Irans Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan.

Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter-terrorism efforts.

First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community, he said.

Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter-terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect, he said.

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Beirut:

An explosion at a base for Asian jihadists in northwestern Syrias Idlib city on Monday killed 23 people including seven civilians, a monitor said.

Extremist groups fighting in Syria count thousands of Asians among their ranks, including many from central Asian states and members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority of Chinas Xinjiang province.

A large explosion this evening hit the base of the Ajnad al-Qawqaz faction in Idlib, said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head Rami Abdel Rahman, adding that most of the non- civilian casualties were fighters from the group.

He did not specify the cause of the blast, but activists on social media said a car bomb was responsible. Dozens of people were wounded, particularly fighters, according to Abdel Rahman who said the base was almost completely destroyed and that nearby buildings were damaged.

The Ajnad al-Qawqaz group includes hundreds of Caucasian fighters and is battling alongside the Fateh al-Sham Front, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, to repel a Syrian regime advance in the southeast of Idlib province.

The area has seen intense clashes following a regime offensive aimed at seizing a strategically vital highway between Damascus and second city Aleppo.

The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of activists across Syria, said regime forces had seized more than 60 villages in the area since December 25.

An alliance dominated by Fateh al-Sham controls much of Idlib province where there are regular car bombings, often blamed on disputes between armed factions.

Some residents blame the Islamic State group for such attacks, although the group has no open presence in the province.

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Washington:

A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents has protested outside the Pakistani embassy here against the ainhumanea treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials.

aThe trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court,a said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Baolchistan, which organised the unique event named as aChappal-Chor Pakistana (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhavas wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out ainhumanea treatment to Jadhavas wife and mother during their tightly- controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian national on December 25 in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

aThe recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt. Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even Bindi and Mangal Sutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata Soubhagya Nari (married Indian woman),a said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in USA. Carl Clemens, volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the apetty vindictiveness and humiliationa that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

aThey have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to

Pakistanas own destruction,a said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar. Pakistan on December 25 had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer. New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member bench of the ICJ on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case. It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April.

Washington DC: Indian-Americans & Balochs at #ChappalChorPakistan outside Pakistan Embassy donated used shoes to the embassy in protest against misbehavior of Pakistani authorities towards #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife, say, 'protest is in solidarity with #Jadhav's family.' pic.twitter.com/Zka5nLDXkr a ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Pakistan's narrow-mindedness was exposed with how they treated #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife, what policy makers & people here need to understand is that Pak as a whole is also being run w/same narrow-minded mentality-Protester at #ChappalChorPakistan protest in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/E62v0t3LsJ a ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

When they stole the chappal of a woman (#KulbhushanJadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they use these also. I want to say one thing- Pakistan ka matlab kya? Amreeka (America) se dollar la, Hindustan ke joote kha!: Protester at #ChappalChorPakistan protest in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/nky7TrsRoD a ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Washington DC: A group of Indian-Americans & Balochs held a protest by the name '#ChappalChorPakistan' outside Pakistan embassy over the misbehavior meted out to #KulbhushanJadhav's mother & wife. pic.twitter.com/iVssgetFZQ a ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

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Beijing:

The US Navy has joined the search for 32 crew members missing from an Iranian oil tanker that caught fire after colliding with a bulk freighter off Chinas east coast on Saturday.

China, South Korea and the US sent ships and planes to search for the 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis who have been missing since the collision.

The US Navy, which sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa, Japan, to aid the search, said on late Sunday that none of the missing crew had been found.

The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in the East China Sea, 257 kilometers (160 miles) off the coast of Shanghai, Chinas Ministry of Transport said.

All 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the United States to China, were rescued, the ministry said. The Crystals crew members were all Chinese nationals.

It wasnt immediately clear what caused the collision. State-run China Central Television reported Sunday evening that the tanker was still floating and burning, and that oil was visible in the water. Photos distributed by the South Korean government showed the tanker on fire and shrouded in thick black smoke.

Also Read: China to spend over USD 2 billion in R&D in 2018

Chinese authorities dispatched three ships to clean the oil spill. It was not clear, however, whether the tanker was still spilling oil as of Monday and the size of the oil slick caused by the accident also was not known.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 metric tons (150,000 tons, or nearly 1 million barrels) of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.

The Sanchi has operated under five different names since it was built in 2008, according the UN-run International Maritime Organization. The IMO listed its registered owner as Hong Kong-based Bright Shipping Ltd, on behalf of the National Iranian Tanker Co, a publicly traded company based in Tehran.

The National Iranian Tanker Co. describes itself as operating the largest tanker fleet in the Middle East.

An official in Irans Oil Ministry, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to reporters, said 30 of the tankers 32 crew members were Iranians.

Also Read: Ship collides with oil tanker off Chinese coast, 32 crew members missing

We have no information on their fate, he said on Sunday. We cannot say all of them have died, because rescue teams are there and providing services.

The official said the tanker was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co. and had been rented by a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Co. He said the tanker was on its way to South Korea.

Hanwa Total is a 50-50 partnership between the Seoul-based Hanwha Group and the French oil giant Total. Total did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Its the second collision for a ship from the National Iranian Tanker Co. in less than a year and a half. In August 2016, one of its tankers collided with a Swiss container ship in the Singapore Strait, damaging both ships but causing no injuries or oil spill.

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Washinton:

The widespread protests in Iran was a sign of failure of the government, US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron have agreed, the White House said on Monday.

The two leaders spoke over phone on Sunday during which they also discussed the developments in the Korean Peninsula.

North and South Korea are scheduled to hold talks on Tuesday.

Trump spoke to Macron to provide an update on developments on the Korean Peninsula, and to underscore American, South Korean and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearisation of North Korea, the White House said in a readout of the call.

The presidents also agreed that the widespread demonstrations in Iran were a sign of the Iranian regimes failure to serve its peoples needs by instead diverting the nations wealth to fund terrorism and militancy abroad, it said.

At least 21 people have been killed in Iran after anti- government began on December 28.

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paraklisi

VersesKarterios of old towards fire and spear,You showed yourself steadfast towards the match against both.This Saint contested during the reign of Emperor Diocletian and Governor Urban of Caesarea in Cappadocia in the year 298, and he was a priest and teacher of the Christians.St. Karterios the Hieromartyr(Feast Day - January 8)He built a house of prayer, namely a small church, and there the Christians would gather, where he taught them to revere Christ alone as the true God, and to not recognize any other god besides Him. For this he was accused to the governor, and he hid. However the Lord appeared to him and said: "Go, O Karterios, and reveal yourself to those who seek you, for I am with you. You must suffer many things for My name. For many through you will believe in Me and be saved." The Saint was then filled with joy and thanked God, and he emboldened himself. Therefore he was first shut up in prison. Then he stood before the governor, and was ordered to sacrifice to the false god Serapis. Instead the Saint had the idol cast to the ground by his prayers. Because of this sixteen soldiers beat him with clubs, just as drums are struck. They then suspended him on a wooden stake, and with razors they removed his nails from his hands and feet, and with iron claws they tore at his entire body. By means of a divine Angel however, he was exalted above these torments and became healed. But the governor again ordered that the ankles of the Martyr be pierced through with iron, and a fiery plowshare was placed on his chest. After this he was made to sit on a red-hot stool of iron, then again he was cast into prison.At night the Lord again appeared to him, and freed him from his bonds. When many of the unbelievers saw him healthy, they went to him and were baptized by him, and they were liberated from their sicknesses. For this the Saint again received punishment. They hung large rocks from his hands and feet, and with clubs they beat him in the stomach. Then with lit lamps they burnt him, and sprinkled on him tar and pitch. They then forced him to drink molten lead. Lastly he was put in burning fire, but he remained unharmed, sending up hymns and thanks to God. Then a certain Jew who stood there became very enraged, and the villainous one took a spear and passed it through the side of the Saint. And at first, so much water came out of his side, that it extinguished the fire of the furnace, and then blood issued forth. In this way the brave struggler delivered his soul into the hands of God, and received from Him the crown of the contest.
Each year, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare tallies the number of marriages that took place in Japan between January and October. In 2017, approximately 607,000 couples tied the knot during that period, which was roughly 13,000 less than the same time frame in 2016.

This was the fifth straight annual decline, and the lowest number of people getting married since the end of World War II.

The ministry says the dropping marriage number is due to the decreasing population of young adults, and that in order to reverse the declining birth rate, changes must be made to Japanese society in order to make marriage easier for couples. While no specific proposals accompanied the release of the statistics, critic often blame Japanas high childcare and educational costs, as well as some companies considering marriage and motherhood to be limiting factors on a working womanas professional commitment.

Although not mentioned by the ministry, another likely reason for declining marriage numbers is Japanas rapidly increasing acceptance of unmarried couples living together. In modern times, the stigma of two consenting adults sharing a home without being wed has largely disappeared, removing much of the urgency to get married, at least if the couple isnat planning to have children anytime soon (unwed pregnancies are still largely frowned upon in Japan).

Cohabitation, and thus the ability to essentially sample married life without being legally married, may also be a contributing factor in another development. It wasnat just the number of marriages that dropped last year, as the ministryas survey also showed that only 212,000 couples divorced during the period for 2017. That figure, down 4,800 compared to 2016, was the lowest in 20 years, which suggests that, at least in some cases, Japanese divorces are being prevented by incompatible couples not getting married in the first place.
The U.S. Marine Corps said Sunday one of its helicopters made an emergency landing on an islet in Okinawa the previous day after an instrument reading indicated the main rotor was amoving at too high a speed.a

None of the four crew members aboard was injured when the UH-1 helicopter landed on a sandy beach on Ikeijima Island. U.S. military personnel continued checking the aircraft Sunday morning and removed the main rotor.

aWe are grateful that a no one was hurt and no property was damaged. The Marine Corps will rigorously investigate the cause of the incident,a a Marine Corps officer said.

The incident is the latest in a series of accidents and mishaps involving U.S. aircraft stationed in Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of U.S. military forces in the country. The chopper belongs to U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on the main island of Okinawa.

Koichiro Nakajima, the Defense Ministryas local bureau chief, told reporters after inspecting the helicopter that safety remains the priority.

aFlight safety is above everything else. We want (the U.S. military) to work toward that end,a he said.

Nakajima also met the head of the Ikeijima Island residentsa association, who strongly protested the accident.

The chopper apparently landed about 100 meters from a house, a resident said.

Jan 08 (ANNnewsCH) - ccaaSeaaaaaaaeaaaaaaaaacaaYaaaaaaaaaca aaaaaaeaYaaaazecaaaSaaaaaaaaaaaaa
A guitarist for avisual-keia band Codomo Dragon has gone missing, the group revealed via its Twitter account last week.

In a series of tweets on Friday, the band said guitarist Kana did not arrive for an appointed meeting and has been out of contact since earlier that day. It also mentioned that he would not be appearing on stage for a show in Kashiwa City, Chiba Prefecture later that night.

Members of bands in the visual-kei genre are known for sporting gaudy hairstyles and ostentatious costumes on stage.

Codomo Dragon formed in 2010. The five-piece has released three full-length albums.

In a tweet on Saturday, the band said that police had received a missing persons report from Kanaas family.

Codomo Dragon is scheduled to play shows in Yokohama and Tokyo on Sunday and January 13.
Tatsuro Toyoda, the former Toyota Motor Corp president who led the company's climb to become one of the world's top automakers, has died. He was 88.

Toyoda, a son of the company's founder, died Dec 30 of pneumonia, the Japanese automaker said Saturday.

Toyoda, the automaker's seventh president, stepped down as president in 1995, while continuing in other posts, such as adviser, a title he held until his death.

He was instrumental in setting up the California joint venture with U.S. rival General Motors called NUMMI, or New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., which began production in 1984. At that time, it was heralded as a pioneer in international collaborations in the industry.

With a career focused on international operations, Toyoda served as NUMMI's first president, and is known for his efforts to bring together Toyota's corporate culture of super-efficiency, teamwork and empowering workers with American culture, including introducing a new style of labor-management relations.

Toyoda's father, Kiichiro Toyoda, founded the company. His brother Shoichiro Toyoda, whom he succeeded as president, is current President Akio Toyoda's father. When Tatsuro Toyoda handed the helm to an executive outside the Toyota family, there was speculation he may be the last Toyoda family member to lead the company.

But Akio defied skeptics to become president in 2009, underlining the family's legacy for the automaker. The rural house that marks the automaker's humble beginnings serves as a monument today. Toyota employees still repeat the sayings handed down by the family leaders about hard work and hands-on approaches.

The company name is spelled and pronounced with a "T," instead of the "D'' as in the family name, because it was considered to bring luck, according to fortune-telling.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will start developing a new high-efficiency radar system in fiscal 2018 to monitor space debris as small as about 10 centimeters, as part of its efforts to avoid collisions between debris and artificial satellites, according to sources.

JAXA plans to begin full-scale operations of the new radar as early as fiscal 2023 in cooperation with another radar system separately designed by the Defense Ministry, the sources said.

The agency currently uses a radar system deployed in Okayama Prefecture to monitor space debris that travels over Japan in low Earth orbit at an altitude of several hundred to 2,000 kilometers. However, the current system only covers debris that is 1.6 meters across or larger. It cannot track particles of about 10 centimeters, which comprise the majority of space debris.

JAXA is to build the new radar system adjacent to the existing one. The agency aims to achieve 200 times the detection capability of the current radar, by significantly increasing the output of electric waves cast onto space debris and utilizing a processing technology for special signals.

As a result, JAXA will be able to monitor about 10-centimeter-sized space objects in low orbit, where many Earth observation satellites and others travel, they said.

If data analysis suggests the possibility of collisions between space debris and JAXAas about 10 satellites operating in low orbit, the agency will use the new system to change the satellitesa orbit from the ground by remote control.

The Defense Ministry is also preparing to install a radar system in Yamaguchi Prefecture to monitor space debris in stationary orbit at an altitude of about 36,000 kilometers. Satellites traveling in stationary orbit include communication and meteorological satellites that are important for activities of the Self-Defense Forces.

JAXA intends to create a system in fiscal 2023 to monitor space debris pieces by using two radars in cooperation with the ministry as well.

The number of pieces of space debris a including broken pieces of artificial satellites whose operations were terminated, and wreckage from rockets a has been increasing yearly with the progress of each countryas space development.

About 20,000 space debris particles that are larger than 10 centimeters are mainly in low orbit.
Taiyo Middle School, located in the Kanagawa Prefecture city of Hiratsuka, is celebrating the 71st anniversary of its founding this year. To mark the occasion, the school is introducing new uniforms for students enrolling in April, when the 2018 school year begins.

But while uniforms are usually designed to implement sameness, Taiyoas girls will actually be able to show more variety in their mode of dress, as the new uniforms officially allow girls to freely choose between wearing a skirt or slacks.

This wonat be the absolute first time for girls at Taiyo to wear long pants on campus. During the winter months, for example, some girls opt to wear slacks because theyare warmer than a skirt. However, with the new uniforms principal Yugo Kuriki is stressing that slacks are not an aalternatea or amodifieda girlsa uniform, but have full standing equal to the skirt version.
Consumer groups and farmers in Japan fear the repercussions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which is quickly moving forward on the heels of Prime Minister Shinzo Abeas conference of the other 10 nations (including Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam) now involved in talks.

Japan is calling for a possible signing in March after working diligently to lead the agreement forward even after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States, sending the trade pact negotiations into chaos. Japanese citizens' groups and farmers, though, are concerned that the agreement may weaken some of Japan's existing laws regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs), as well as open Japan's domestic agriculture sector to competition from large multinational firms.

Citizen campaigns against GMOS

The story of GMOs in Japan is one that has been largely advanced through citizens and consumer campaigns. Topping the list of groups working on the issue is the Citizens Union of Japan (CUJ), which has been actively advocating for GMO labeling since the early 1990s, after the Japanese government approved the domestic sale of imported genetically modified soybeans, corn and other grains. CUJ started the campaign to demand mandatory labeling, and members of CUJ created an organization committed solely to the GMO issue, called the Non-GMO campaign.

Along with the CUJ, the Non-GMO campaign has the goal of a GMO-free Japan and like the CUJ opposes Japan's move to advance the TPP. Public aversion to GMOs around the world, along with the high percentage of imported foods in Japan's domestic market, reached a water mark in 1998 when rainbow papaya became available in Japan. When Japanese consumers became aware that the papaya was genetically altered, citizens' groups protested and the public and media led an outcry against the genetically modified fruit.

The Japanese government responded to these concerns by creating its own regime that controls and monitors Japan's imported food. The system works; in September 2000, for example, Japan's inspectors detected StarLink corn in a U.S. shipment bound for use as food. The detection of the GMO corn, which was not even approved as animal feed in Japan ( although it was authorized for such use in the U.S.), caused a nationwide recall of more than 300 corn-based foods.

It is this very set of laws that consumer groups feel are in jeopardy, as Japan scrapped its 1952 Seed Law, which was the legal foundation for Japan's agricultural experiment stations, in advance of TPP negotiations last fall. These stations create budget requests for prefectural governments' seed expenses. The experiment stations name seeds that are recommended to local farmers and make budget requests to assist with production costs of the seeds, which are then sold to farmers at a cheaper cost. The seeds have all been grown domestically until now, but the abolishment of the law means that private companies may produce and sell seeds that come from outside of Japan.

Moreover, some commentators argue that seeds are likely to become more expensive as the abolishment of the Seed Law undermines the budget requests that experiment stations create on behalf of prefectural governments.
As Israel has shot to the top of President Donald Trump's agenda, world leaders have looked for the perspective of one of Trump's biggest and most reliable voting blocs. And Johnnie Moore, the White House's evangelical gatekeeper, has been there to provide it.

Moore, a wunderkind PR executive, has served through the Trump candidacy and presidency as the shepherd for many conversations between Trump aides and conservative evangelical leaders who, like Moore, consider the Jewish state - and the status of Jerusalem in particular - to be at the top of their priority list. At 34, Moore has been consulted about the topic at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and at private meetings with Arab leaders. He was in the Oval Office a few weeks ago for a private ceremony honoring Trump for saying the United States officially considers Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

For evangelicals, "those who bless Israel will be blessed," Moore said he tells White House officials.

Asked how America recognizing contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital furthers peace, Moore responded with a long pause and then a short answer: "There are better people to ask that question." And after Trump recently threatened to pull U.S. funding for the Palestinians? "I'm not tracking that closely because I just got back" from vacation, he said.

This is classic Moore: Pushing and maneuvering passionately for his goals and then deflecting or going silent on matters he views as peripheral to them. With a pragmatism he learned years ago at the knee of Moral Majority icon the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., he goes for the priorities he thinks he can achieve and leaves the rest alone.

The Senate race in Alabama and Christian nationalist Roy Moore? "I'm not involved." Trump's penchant for lying? "I don't want to get into it. Because I don't focus on those things." The GOP tax law that bitterly divided religious leaders? "I don't think there's an answer."

"For me, that's all noise," he said. "It's not that it isn't important, but I don't have time for all that. . . If I did dig into it, I might have stronger opinions, and that would be a distraction for me."

Moore sees his approach as savvy pragmatism; others see it as opportunism. Either way, it explains a lot about the rapid upward trajectory of his career. In just a few years, the cheery former youth pastor rocketed from a young competitive debater in rural Virginia to a protege of Falwell, then to chief of staff for reality TV mogul and Christian activist Mark Burnett, and now to adviser to Trump. As the point man for evangelicals seeking White House access, Moore is often the one who picks which leaders get to participate on the advisory council, an unofficial and loosely organized group of conservative evangelicals that is the only significant pipeline of religious feedback into the White House.

To some, Moore's pragmatism is overdue, and also shrewd - a ditching of Religious Right-era litmus tests combined with a Trumpian willingness to make deals. To others, however, Moore's calculations symbolize the disintegration of Christian witness and a willingness to let the churches stand for nothing as much as political power. It also reflects an era when religious institutions have lost influence, making way for the Christian power broker who has no clear constituency - no church, nonprofit or television audience - but one of the thickest Rolodexes in conservative Christianity.

"Johnnie is walking a line," said Chris Seiple, a longtime evangelical advocate and government adviser on international religious freedom who once worked with Moore and Burnett. "He might say, 'Hey I'm called to love everyone,' and that public condemnation [of Trump] doesn't do anything. But there are thresholds of public integrity. Right now, it's only evangelicals that have access, and it makes people say, 'Those damn evangelicals, all they do is worship at the altar of political access and expediency.' "

(That characterization lacks nuance. While white evangelical voters overwhelmingly support Trump, many prominent conservative evangelical leaders, especially millennial ones, have stayed away or condemned the president for lying, targeting immigrants and refugees, and bragging about sexual abuse, among other things.)

Moore's pragmatism appeals to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group. Cooper has become tight with Moore since Moore moved with his family from Virginia to Orange County, California, a couple of years ago. Now the pair travel together to places that include D.C. and Bahrain to promote religious tolerance, particularly of Jews and Christians.

These days, Cooper said, alliances are shifting - anti-Semitism is rising in Europe and on U.S. college campuses, he says, and sometimes new partners emerge, even in places you might not expect.

"With Johnnie, he has access [to power] and is also a doer, is fair, doesn't have an ax to grind. . . . I'm looking for more Johnnie Moores, and wherever we find them, we will work with them."

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Moore was a champion high school debater in Lynchburg, Virginia, when he says a debate judge penalized him after he advocated for the Ten Commandments in his public school classes. Moore passed the incident on to his local pastor - Falwell, a famous televangelist and conservative activist at the time. A bond grew between them, and a couple of years later, when Moore was just 20, Falwell made him campus pastor at Liberty University, then head of communications for the giant school, then head of it global outreach program. In the latter position, Moore took hundreds of Liberty students to countries from India to Tunisia.

But the position that most made Moore was when Falwell charged him with picking speakers for convocation, Liberty's weekly student gathering. In recent years, convocation has gone from a massive chapel service to a high-profile weekly talk before thousands that has featured nearly every GOP presidential candidate - as well as some Democratic ones, including Bernie Sanders. (Moore says most Democrats turned Liberty down.)

At first, Moore wasn't interested in bringing politicians, and chose more pastor-type speakers. But in 2008 he saw how Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee shot up in the polls after appearing at a Liberty convocation.

"I was like: Wow, we are of national consequence," he said.

Falwell taught Moore about pragmatism, he says. "The greatest lesson I learned from him was: Don't worry about what you disagree about, worry about what you agree about and work on those things" with others, he says.

Moore's focus on Mideast Christians began randomly, in 2013, when he was traveling with megachurch pastor Rick Warren, a mentor (and now Moore's pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California), and wound up in Jordan. Moore was struck, and humbled, by how little he knew about Christianity in the Middle East - overwhelmingly Orthodox and Catholic - the birthplace of his faith.

Within a year or two, Moore began reading and writing about violence and persecution of Middle East Christians, primarily by Sunni Islamic extremists who target all opponents, from Shiites to Yazidis to Kurds, and who have dramatically decreased religious diversity in the region. At lightning speed, Moore became a kind of de facto celeb-spokesman.

That's because, longtime activists said, so few U.S. evangelicals were publicly taking up the issue, and even fewer who had the public charm and communications skills of Moore, who wears an easy smile and a chic suit and who brings the emotional, accessible, preaching style of your typical American evangelical megachurch to the dense topic of Middle Eastern religion.

Some longtime activists on Mideast religious tensions say Moore has no role in shaping policy or even advising on it, and rather serves as a kind of passionate, extremely well-connected advocate.

The difference between Moore and some others is "to be frank, a lot of them don't leave the Beltway. . . . There are a lot of people who do the work, but you also need people who seek and attain a public platform," said Andrew Doran, vice president of the board of the advocacy group In Defense of Christians, which has honored Moore.

Moore describes his whole life changing as he delved deeper into his Middle East work, a feeling of understanding Christianity for the first time - through persecution. In his latest book, "The Martyr's Oath," which was published in the fall, he holds up Christians whose lives are at risk as the real believers and lambastes American Christians as "self-medicating on religion so we don't feel quite so bad about our total self-centeredness."

"I don't think you can fully understand Christianity if you're not persecuted or helping people who are persecuted," he said during a recent interview in Washington.

---

That Moore said this sitting in the luxurious Trump International Hotel lobby, which serves as an unofficial office for him during his frequent trips to the District of Columbia, while being served hot popovers by the constantly present waitstaff, is exactly the kind of irony his critics note. Moore presents himself as an advocate for religious freedom, they note, even as he serves Trump, who hesitated to criticize Nazis after the violent rally in Charlottesville in August and called for a ban on Muslims coming to America.

This contrast is at the heart of the controversy around Trump's evangelical advisory group. While informal and ad hoc, it is the president's only known religious advisory body, and is homogenous in its makeup - no other faith groups are represented. While there was a specific evangelical advisory board of around 25 people during the campaign, since the election its membership has been fluid, and Moore says hundreds of evangelicals have been brought into the White House for group meetings on topics from Israel to mental health.

It's difficult to gauge the group's real power, but there is no question that the members have regular access and that their political opinions and friendship are sought by the White House. The leaders are understood to be Moore, Florida megachurch pastor Paula White and Tim Clinton, head of the world's largest association of Christian mental health counselors.

About seven or eight of the current regulars are clients of the communications firm Moore founded in 2015. The firm, which serves religious clients, is named Kairos, the Greek word for "an opportune moment."

As a gatekeeper for the White House, Moore's supporters say his role is to connect people, to be the guy who can make things happen.

"He's surfacing the agenda items of others," said James MacDonald, a Chicago-area megachurch pastor who was on the council in 2016. Robert Jeffress, a Texas megachurch pastor on the council, said Moore's "value" is being the one who picks specific issues for council members "to see if it's something we'd like to speak into or not."

The Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., current president of Liberty University and a regular in the White House evangelical group's conversations, says Moore shows evangelicals they can be "good Christians" and be involved in politics. "His role is less about influencing policy as it has been about influencing evangelicals," Falwell said. "He's been a good rebuff to the evangelicals who criticize Trump."

Moore's gift is being able to speak to different types of people, to exude warmth and collaborative energy during one of the most divisive periods in modern America.

"I think he makes himself useful in D.C., and in D.C. it's rare to get emails like: 'How can I be helpful to you?' " said Michael Wear, an evangelical consultant who worked for President Barack Obama.

But Moore's close affiliation with the divisive president complicates his desired image as a bridge-builder. Moore is a frequent target of Christian Trump critics; they note that he and members of the council are silent on many justice issues roiling evangelicals, such as racism and Trump's demeaning comments about women, but that some took the time to issue statements defending the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner (when he was being questioned about Russia contacts), and on behalf of Trump's God-given right to attack North Korea.

Moore seems largely unburdened by the controversy around his work with Trump, possibly because it also allows him to pursue what he views as his larger purpose of combating Christian persecution. Moore sounds proud as he talks about helping to lead a group of evangelical pastors - including a bunch of Trump advisers - earlier this fall for a warm visit with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who has been more friendly to Egypt's Christian minority but whose jails are filled with political prisoners.

In his own view, he's just exhibiting pragmatism evocative of Falwell Sr., or Trump - even if it means making compromises to get the job done.

"I'm not ashamed at all of my association with President Trump - not an ounce. In fact, I'm grateful for President Trump, especially the promises he's fulfilled to our community," Moore said, citing Trump's support for religious freedom exemptions. The administration supported a baker who was at the Supreme Court last month defending his refusal to bake for a same-sex couple's wedding.

Yet at times it appears Moore is quite aware that he is working in the unsteady eye of a cultural and political storm - not the best vantage point from which to see clearly.

"I may look back and be totally wrong in the way I've engaged in the public square," he said. " If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I don't want to look back and say I wasted the opportunity to help people."
After the snow from last week's "bomb cyclone" melts, cities and towns across the northeast will find their roads and sidewalks still a ghostly white.

That fine white powder is salt, America's favorite de-icing chemical. More than 15 million tons of the stuff is applied annually only to wash away with snowmelt or spring rains. But just because it's gone from your block doesn't mean it's gone for good. In fact, it may end up in your faucet.

Road salt is an influential part of a decades-long chemistry experiment local governments have unwittingly conducted on soil, waterways, and infrastructure. Studying river data nationwide, a study published Monday explains that 37 percent of all U.S. river systems have greater salinity, and 90 percent have seen a decrease in acidity, compared with a century ago. The two trends are related, scientists conclude, as urbanization and widespread use of chemicals such as road salt damage America's water and soil quality while corroding infrastructure.

Why is less acid bad? Here's how nature usually works. Raindrops absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, turning them slightly acidic. It's the same reaction that makes drinking a lot of seltzer potentially bad for your teeth. When that rain hits the ground, specifically rock and soil, the acid frees up ions from mineral salts-and washes things like magnesium and calcium into rivers and out to sea, a process that scientists call "weathering."

Humanity has put this process on steroids. First, we've increased the amount and types of acid in rain. Industrial pollution turned precipitation so ecologically harmful by the middle of the last century that Congress had to amend the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions. The move worked, which means there's less acid pounding the pavement. But there's still plenty.

Second, manmade environments such as cities are often made of materials much more easily "weathered" than natural ones-the manmade "rocks" of roads and buildings are washed away into rivers more easily. Infrastructure is an easier target for stronger acids to dislodge calcium, magnesium, sodium, manganese and other positively charged ions from otherwise stable salts.

Finally, winter storm managers take what's already an easily weatherable, salt-rich urban and suburban environment and slather it in road salt. North American rivers take in this additional salt, wreaking slow-moving havoc on drinking water and infrastructure in the process.

Road salt, sewage, irrigation run-off, and briny water from fossil-fuel production and mining all change the chemical composition of soils, dislodging the calcium, potassium, and magnesium that are supposed to be there, and replacing them with sodium, which isn't.

Put simply, a lot more salt is being pushed into our water, and that's bad. Easier weathering and the resulting increase in the alkalinity of waters (the opposite of acidity) across the North American continent is a process that now has a name-"freshwater salinization syndrome"-according to the authors of the new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sujay Kaushal, lead author and associate professor at the University of Maryland, said that his research hit home, literally. A few years ago, a neighbor knocked on his door asking him why his tap water had turned black, hours after a local journalist had come to his house reporting a story on the very topic.

The culprit, he suspected, was manganese and iron released from aging Washington cast-iron pipes, and probably helped along by decades of periodic pulses of road salt. Manganese is a potential neurotoxin, and has been linked to Parkinson's disease and impaired child neurological development, he said.

Kaushal said chemists talk of the process by which water becomes less acidic, or more "base," as "mobilizing a strong base," a bit of dark humor among beltway scientists. Only it's probably certain there's little political support for the wrong kind of minerals in your drinking water.
Summary As a result of technical interpretation and additional field work, a new, possible bulk tonnage, gold target named Santa Teresa is being advanced by the IMPACT exploration team. Channel, chip and grab samples of bedrock have returned grades ranging up to 114.5 g/t gold, with 17 samples having more than 10 g/t gold and 197 greater than 1 g/t gold. Additional rock sampling and geological mapping has been initiated to designate drill targets.

Santa Teresa is located in the Valle de Oro sub-district of dominantly gold veins located four kilometers southwest of IMPACT's producing Guadalupe mill and immediately to the south of IMPACT's past producing Nochebuena (silver) and Carlos Pacheco (gold) mines. To the northeast is the large Coronas mine, one of the oldest and better known past producers of the Zacualpan district.

Background

The Royal Mines of Zacualpan Silver District of west-central Mexico is arguably the oldest silver-gold mining district of Mexico. It is located 100 kilometers southwest of Mexico City. IMPACT has a dominate land position of some 357 square kilometers and last year celebrated ten years of continuous production in the district.

To date over a thousand silver and/or gold bearing veins have been recognized through IMPACT'S exploration efforts in the district (such veins having at least one assay sample exceeding 100 g/t silver or 1.0 g/t gold). As well some 5,000 old mine or exploration workings have been located and catalogued. These old workings, along with geological maps, geophysical surveys, 75,000 soil samples and some 48,500 rock samples form the basis of a GIS Database (Geographic Information System) that has been utilized for the past ten years to "organically discover" production tonnage for IMPACT's Guadalupe and Capire mills.

Geology

Numerous north-south striking veins similar to the Nochebuena or Carlos Pacheco veins transect the Santa Teresa area. Elsewhere in the Zacualpan district veins of this orientation have the greatest degree of structural and grade continuity, producing many of the district's better mines historically. In addition, there are number of northeast trending, northwest dipping veins that resemble the historic Coronas mine in structural style. Rock sampling by IMPACT has produced gold grades ranging up to 114.5 g/t, with 17 samples having more than 10.0 g/t, and 197 greater than 1.0 g/t gold. In proximity to the historic Coronas Mine some sizable old underground workings exist. However elsewhere in the Santa Teresa area there is little evidence of historical exploration or mine development, which the low sulphide content of these auriferous veins may have caused these veins to be overlooked by the historical prospecting.

Roughly half of the veins hosting the better gold grades have extremely low sulphide contents. Native gold or electrum would be the most likely host minerals and would likely be amenable to gravity concentration methods. These veins are most abundant in the southwestern portion of the Santa Teresa area where the density of these north-south striking veins is the highest of the entire Zacualpan district. In addition, this portion of the Santa Teresa area contains the only known outcrops of an Eocene Feldspar Porphyry within the Zacualpan district, which are the only known magmatic intrusive rocks on the property. Fifty-two porphyry outcrops have been mapped over a one kilometer square area with the southern and western boundaries currently undefined. Previously this rock type had been observed as clasts within the gold-bearing portions of the Nochebuena-type hydrothermal breccias of the Nochebuena and Carlos Pacheco mines. These Eocene Feldspar Porphyries are thought to be similar to the Tilzapotla Rhyolite, an enigmatic intrusive stock located midway between the Taxco and Zacualpan Districts that is considered to be the heat source responsible for the formation of the Zacualpan Southeast and Taxco veins. It has been dated at 32 million years, the same age as a vein in the Taxco District, and by inference a similar age has been assigned to the Zacualpan veins. Associated with this Feldspar Porphyry are the highest gold/silver ratios for the entire Zacualpan District, again suggesting an environment of localized, very high heat flow with the Feldspar Porphyry the heat engine for the formation of these gold veins.

Brecciation and silicification of the older host rocks immediately surrounding this Feldspar Porphyry is a common feature, suggesting the formation of a brecciated cupula similar the 5.0 Moz Kidston gold deposit of Australia and a number of gold deposits in Nevada. Rock samples from this Feldspar Porphyry itself return very low values for precious and base metals, however silicified and brecciated portions of the host rock adjacent to and above this Feldspar Porphyry have numerous high gold values (up to 17.95 g/t) presenting a potentially very intriguing bulk tonnage exploration target.

Future Plans

For 2018 in preparation for drilling an extensive geological mapping and rock sampling program will be conducted on the brecciated cap rocks overlying this Feldspar Porphyry, as well as the many north-south trending veins that transect the Santa Teresa area.

Brian V. Hall, M.Sc., P.Geo., a Qualified Person under the meaning of Canadian National Instrument 43101, has approved the technical content of this news release. A map of the Santa Teresa area is attached to this news release or can be found on the Company website at www.IMPACTSilver.com.

About IMPACT Silver:

IMPACT Silver Corp. is successful silver-gold explorer-producer with two processing plants on adjacent districts within its 100% owned mineral concessions covering 357km2 in central Mexico. Over the past ten years over 7.7 Moz of Silver has been produced, generating revenues of $160 million, with no long-term debt. In the historic Royal Mines of Zacualpan Silver District three underground silver mines feed the central 535 TPD Guadalupe processing plant. To the south, in the Mamatla District the Capire processing plant is currently rated at 200TPD, but is expandable. It is adjacent to an open pit silver mine with a a NI-43-101 compliant resource that is awaiting higher silver prices to be restarted. Given the challenging markets last few years, IMPACT has focused its exploration efforts on high success rate silver targets, with quick production profiles and proximity to Guadalupe processing plant. Following a successful decade of exploration success to production cash flows, IMPACT has proven the Zacualpan District to be prolific in generating high grade epithermal silver-gold production feeds. With markets more perceptive to early exploration results, in 2018 IMPACT continues to add emphasis to exploration work. Additional information about IMPACT and its operations can be found on the Company website at www.IMPACTSilver.com.

On behalf of IMPACT Silver Corp.

"Frederick W. Davidson"

President & CEO

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.

Forward-Looking and Cautionary Statements

This IMPACT News Release may contain certain "forward-looking" statements and information relating to IMPACT that is based on the beliefs of IMPACT management, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to IMPACT management. Such statements reflect the current risks, uncertainties and assumptions related to certain factors including but not limited to, without limitations, exploration and development risks, expenditure and financing requirements, title matters, operating hazards, metal prices, political and economic factors, competitive factors, general economic conditions, relationships with vendors and strategic partners, governmental regulation and supervision, seasonality, technological change, industry practices, and one-time events. Should any one or more risks or uncertainties materialize or change, or should any underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results and forward-looking statements may vary materially from those described herein. IMPACT does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

The Company's decision to place a mine into production, expand a mine, make other production related decisions or otherwise carry out mining and processing operations, is largely based on internal non-public Company data and reports based on exploration, development and mining work by the Company's geologists and engineers. The results of this work are evident in the discovery and building of multiple mines for the Company and in the track record of mineral production and financial returns of the Company since 2006. Under NI43101 the Company is required to disclose that it has not based its production decisions on NI43101compliant mineral resource or reserve estimates, preliminary economic assessments or feasibility studies, and historically such projects have increased uncertainty and risk of failure.

SOURCE IMPACT Silver Corp.

For further information: Jerry Huang, MBA, Manager Investor Relations, (604) 681 0172 or [email protected]

Related Links

www.impactsilver.com


MONTREAL, Jan. 8, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - LGC Capital Ltd. (TSXV: LG) ("LGC") is pleased to announce that it has successfully finalized the transaction with Quebec-based Tricho-Med Corporation (doing business as "AAA Trichomes"). As reported in prior news releases, LGC entered into a four-year secured convertible loan agreement with AAA Trichomes in an amount of $4 million CDN (the "Loan"), which will be disbursed in accordance with a pre-agreed milestone disbursement schedule. Upon AAA Trichomes obtaining a license to produce medical cannabis from the relevant regulatory authorities, the Loan will convert into common shares of AAA Trichomes representing 49% of AAA's then-issued and outstanding shares. LGC will also receive a 5% royalty on AAA Trichomes' net sales.

This transaction represents LGC's first investment into the Canadian cannabis sector and paves the way for further related opportunities in Canada. Weather permitting, excavation and foundation work of Phase 1 will begin within weeks of this closing and the 30,000 square foot state of the art growing and processing facility is expected to be completed by the fall of 2018. While construction is underway, plans for Phase 2 and Phase 3 expansions will be taking shape with a view to and will lead to having in excess of a million square feet of cultivating and processing capacity within a few years. Key elements of this expansion are already in place, including signed land purchase options, favorable zoning, as well as a 25KVA power line running over the properties.

John McMullen, CEO of LGC Capital states, "We have learned throughout our due diligence process that AAA is not just a solid investment for LGC shareholders, but an excellent one. The team at AAA Trichomes has laid the foundation to establish itself as one of the largest growing operations of medical cannabis in Quebec and Canada. When we factor in anticipated land, power and water costs, we truly believe that AAA will stand above many Canadian competitors. We look forward to updating the market on this opportunity as things progress.

Michel Gaucher, CEO of AAA Trichomes stated, "AAA Trichomes welcomes the investment and association with LGC's experienced team, scope of vision and reach within the worldwide cannabis market. AAA is now ready to accelerate the construction of its facility in Brownsburg, Quebec. Once we have constructed our facility we fully expect that it will satisfy Health Canada's requirements for the approval of a "License to Produce." Construction completion is planned for the last quarter of 2018. AAA is set to become one of the lowest cost large-scale producers of high-grade cannabis in Canada. The execution by AAA of its acquisition strategy of a substantial inventory of strategically zoned and serviced land areas will drive the development in future phases of two new large-scale controlled environment facilities, supported by the most competitive power costs in Canada."

About LGC Capital Ltd. (www.lgc-capital.com)



LGC Capital Ltd. is a Canadian incorporated public company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: LG). LGC's objective is to become a diversified business group with core business divisions that provide shareholders with exposure to a diverse range of businesses, products and services.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release may contain forward-looking statements with respect to LGC Capital Ltd. ("LGC"), its operations, strategy, investments, financial performance and condition, and the Investment Agreement referred to above. These statements generally can be identified by use of forward- looking words such as "may", "will", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "intends", "believe" or "continue" or the negative thereof or similar variations. The actual results and performance of LGC could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Some important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include, among other things, general economic and market factors, competition, government regulation and the factors described under "Risk Factors and Risk Management" in LGC's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2016, as filed on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). The cautionary statements qualify all forward-looking statements attributable to LGC and persons acting on its behalf. Unless otherwise stated, all forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and LGC has no obligation to update such statements, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws.



Caution Regarding Press Releases

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE LGC Capital Ltd

For further information: John McMullen, Chief Executive Officer, Tel.: (416) 803-0698, Email: [email protected]; London contact: Anthony Samaha, Chief Financial Officer, Tel.: +44 (0) 20 7440 0640; Investor Relations: Dave Burwell, The Howard Group Inc., Tel.: (403) 221-9015, Toll Free: 1-888-221-0915, Email: [email protected]
As a non-profit, federally-designated OPO, Gift of Life serves 11.2 million people across the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. Its annual donation rate continues to rank among the highest in the world, equating to 50 organ donors-per-million-population.

In 2017, Gift of Life also recovered tissue from 2,468 donors including 1,281 musculoskeletal donors and 2,112 cornea donors. These life-enhancing donations can benefit as many as 88,000 people, with bone donations to improve mobility, heart valve donations to repair life-threatening defects, skin donations for reconstructive surgery and to heal burn patients, and approximately 2,575 individual corneas to provide the gift of sight.

"Our growth is possible only because of the selflessness of the donors and donor families who consistently make this the most generous region in the country. This year, they saved and improved the lives of nearly 90,000 people," says Gift of Life President and CEO Howard M. Nathan. "We are so grateful to them for providing their precious gifts, often in the face of overwhelming loss." This profile tells one family's story of grief, life-saving generosity and ongoing advocacy.

Nathan continues, "This important work takes tremendous compassion and around-the-clock commitment by our staff, transplant centers and hospital partners. I am so proud of them. Together, they ensure that we provide desperately-needed organs and tissue to those who need it most." A young father talks about his gratitude and "second chance" in this blog post.

Gift of Life works closely with 130 acute care hospitals and 15 transplant centers across its region. Abington  Jefferson Health President Meg McGoldrick talks about the collaboration and compassion this life-saving work requires: "Gift of Life provides invaluable expertise and support as we help families considering organ donation through one of the most difficult experiences they will ever have to face."

OPO and hospital partnerships are addressing a critical  and escalating  public health issue. With ongoing advancements in transplantation, the need for organ donation grows. Approximately 20 people die each day in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant. There are more than 5,300 men, women and children waiting in Gift of Life's region and almost 116,000 nationally.

According to Donate Life America, 95 percent of people support donation, yet only 54.7 percent of adults  142 million people - are registered nationwide as organ donors either on their drivers' licenses or online. In Gift of Life's region, registration rates vary, ranging in Pennsylvania from a low of 31.4 percent in Philadelphia County to a high of 58 percent in Centre County, with an average of 47.8 percent across the state. The average registration rate is 40.2 percent in southern New Jersey and 51.6 percent in Delaware.*

Underscoring the need for more people to register, a 42-year-old woman talks in this video about her battle with Scleroderma and her wait for a double lung transplant at the Gift of Life Family House.

The Gift of Life Family House provides affordable lodging and supportive services to those who travel to Philadelphia for transplant-related care. In 2017, Gift of Life Family House staff and volunteers provided 9,439 lodging nights of care for 16,226 guests, 32,452 meals, and 1,554 rides to and from hospitals. Since its founding in July 2011, the Family House has provided more than 46,179 lodging nights for 87,042 guests and served more than 174,084 meals.

Gift of Life is recognized internationally for its leadership and scholarship in the field of organ and tissue donation. The Gift of Life Institute is the international leader in organ and tissue donation education, training close to 9,000 professionals from 37 countries since 2004. The Institute's Transplant Pregnancy Registry International (TPR) studies post-transplant parenthood and the effects of medications on fertility and pregnancy. Since 1991, TPR has tracked more than 4,000 post-transplant pregnancies, sharing information so that the legacy of donation can continue for generations.

This year, Gift of Life will send a contingent of transplant recipients and living donors to compete in the 2018 Transplant Games of America in Salt Lake City, Utah, August 2-7. They will be accompanied by donor families and supporters. "Team Philly" is always one of the largest teams at the Transplant Games of America, proudly representing the "most generous region in the country."

About Gift of Life Donor Program

Since 1974, Gift of Life has coordinated more than 46,000 organs for transplant and approximately one million tissue transplants that have resulted from Gift of Life donors. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people, and a tissue donor can enhance the lives of up to 75 others. For more information or to register, visit donors1.org.

SOURCE Gift of Life Donor Program

For further information: Karen Muldoon Geus, 215.557.8090, ext. 1133, [email protected], http://www.donors1.org

Related Links

http://www.donors1.org


The Company is focused on the regulatory process to obtain the consent of the Exchange for the Property Acquisition and the Private Placement. Exchange conditional approval of the Property Acquisition and the Private Placement has been received and the Company is working to fulfill all conditions for final approvals. These conditions include the completion of background searches by the TSXV on representatives of Gecko who will become insiders of Namibia Rare Earths.

In accordance with the policies of the Exchange, the Namibia Rare Earths shares are currently halted from trading and it is expected that they will remain halted until receipt and review of acceptable documentation regarding the Property Acquisition, pursuant to Exchange listings Policy 5.3.

Property Acquisition and Private Placement

Namibia Rare Earths has entered into an agreement with Gecko Namibia to acquire its 95% interest in a portfolio of exploration properties consisting of 14 exploration prospecting licences ("EPLs") four of which are pending, one mineral deposit retention licence ("MDRL") and Gecko Namibia's rights under an option agreement to acquire a 60% interest in a further exploration prospecting licence which interest may, subject to the terms of the option agreement, be increased to 80%.

This transaction provides Namibia Rare Earths with a high quality, diversified portfolio of critical metals and at the same time has secured a highly experienced strategic partner. Gecko Namibia and its subsidiaries are substantial participants in the Namibian resource sector with 327 employees and a proven track record in the mining industry. The Gecko Namibia portfolio of properties (see Table 1 Projects 2-8) will expand the Company's commodity base from solely rare earths to a variety of highly critical commodities including cobalt, copper, zinc, lithium, graphite, tantalum, niobium, nickel, and gold. Ground holdings in Namibia will increase from 221 km2 (Lofdal) to over 6,850 km2.

In conjunction with the Property Acquisition, Gecko Namibia and Gerald J. McConnell, Chair of the Board of Namibia Rare Earths, have each agreed to complete a private placement with the Company in the amount of $275,000 at $0.05 per share for total gross proceeds to the Company of $550,000 ("Private Placement"). A total of 11,000,000 common shares of Namibia Rare Earths will be issued pursuant to the Private Placement.

The Property Acquisition and Private Placement are expected to close on or before January 31, 2018 and are subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the final approval and acceptance by the TSXV. Upon completion of the Property Acquisition and Private Placement, Gecko Namibia will own 69,500,000 common shares of the Company representing 43.80% of the outstanding common shares of the Company. The Property Acquisition is conditional upon receipt of the approval of shareholders as required by the TSXV which has been obtained.

The proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to carry out work on the properties acquired from Gecko Namibia with an initial focus on advancing the Kunene cobalt-copper project and to fund general corporate requirements. The common shares of the Company issued pursuant to the Private Placement will be subject to a four-month hold period.

Namibia Rare Earths and its insiders are at arm's length with Gecko Namibia and there are no finder's fees payable in connection with the Property Acquisition or the Private Placement.

Following the closing of the Acquisition, Gecko Namibia will nominate two members to the five-member board of Namibia Rare Earths with Gerald McConnell remaining as Chair. Pine van Wyk will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of Namibia Rare Earths based in Namibia and Donald Burton will remain as President.

The Portfolio  Diversification into Critical Metals in Namibia

The transaction dramatically increases the Company's exposure to a wide variety of critical metals and minerals at various stages of development, providing a pipeline of projects spanning the spectrum from near-term discovery to preliminary economic assessment. All the projects are located in Namibia, a stable mining jurisdiction in which the Company has operated for the past seven years and where in-coming senior management have worked for over 20 years. This diversification will provide the Company with considerable flexibility in targeting those commodities which can provide immediate shareholder value. The portfolio of eight projects (which includes Lofdal), their principal commodity targets and development stage are summarized in Table 1 and more fully described below. Project locations are shown in Figure 1. Total expenditures of $84,000 in year one and $422,000 in year two are required to keep the entire portfolio of properties in good standing.

1. Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth Project

Lofdal was already held by the Company prior to this transaction and in terms of project maturity, is the most advanced with a 43-101 resource in place and completed Preliminary Economic Assessment1. In 2016 the Company completed an Environmental Impact Assessment and filed for an Environmental Clearance Certificate from the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, and concurrently filed for a Mining Licence with the Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Environmental Clearance Certificate was received in December, 2017 as announced in the Company's press release of December 18, 2017.

2. Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project

In terms of commodity interest, the Kunene cobalt-copper project will be assigned highest priority given the high level of investor interest in cobalt and current high cobalt prices. The Kunene project builds upon the recent exploration success led by Dr. Rainer Ellmies (General Manager, Gecko Exploration) to explore for "copper belt" style deposits in northern Namibia. This work led to the first recorded discovery of Copperbelt-type stratabound cobalt-copper mineralization in Namibia in a sedimentary horizon termed the dolomite ore formation ("DOF"). The mineralization is uniformly 5 to 10 meters thick, stratabound within a dolomitic shale horizon, and averages around 0.5% copper and 1000-2000 ppm cobalt. The initial discovery (which is on a contiguous property and is not a part of this transaction) is currently under intense exploration by Celsius Resources (ASX:CLA) including a 15,000 meter drill program to complete a maiden JORC resource estimate by February 2018. As per Celsius Resources' press release dated May 18, 2017 "Data from the first 20 holes drilled across this 11 km zone has enabled the Company to generate an Initial Exploration Target of between 33 and 41 million tonnes, grading approximately 0.13% - 0.17% cobalt and 0.45% - 0.65% copper. It is noted that the potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature, and that there has been insufficient exploration to estimate a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource."

The Kunene cobalt-copper project comprises a very large area of favourable stratigraphy contiguous with the DOF discovery adjacent to the ground held by Celsius Resources. Secondary copper mineralization over a wide area points to preliminary evidence of a regional-scale hydrothermal system . Exploration targets on EPLs held in the Kunene cobalt-copper project comprise direct extensions of the DOF style mineralization to the west, sediment-hosted cobalt and copper, orogenic copper, and stratabound Zn-Pb mineralization. Most of the occurrences are likely spatially related to what Dr. Ellmies' geological team has interpreted as a large hydrothermal center termed the Steilrand hydrothermal system. There is considerable scope for further discoveries both along strike of the Celsius discovery and in equivalent stratigraphy elsewhere on the property. Initial investigations will trace the western extension of the DOF which may continue for over 10 km in the project area, and will follow up on numerous copper-cobalt targets drilled in the past but never analysed for cobalt.

3. Black Range Graphite Project

The Black Range flake graphite prospect was discovered in the late 1980's and was explored by Rossing Uranium Ltd. between 1988 and 1992. Rossing interpreted the graphite horizon in a fold structure with a total strike length of about 8 km. Based on 3,821 m of percussion drilling and 3,931 m of diamond drilling from a 1 km segment of the horizon, employing a cut-off grade of 2% graphitic carbon and using the polygonal section method, an historical estimate of 12.46 MT grading 4.63% graphitic carbon was utilized by Rossing to assess the project (reference "The Black Range Graphite Deposit, Feasibility Study Final Report" dated August 1992). This historical estimate does not cite reference to CIMM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. Additional drilling and sampling will be required to validate the historic database. A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves and this historical estimate is not being treated as a current mineral resource or mineral reserve. Preliminary mining plans were drawn up and preliminary metallurgical work was carried out by Mintek of South Africa but the project was terminated before the flowsheet was fully optimized when the decision was made to focus instead on the graphite deposit at Okanjande. Okanjande was brought into production in 2017 by Gecko Namibia in a joint venture with Imerys.

There has been insufficient exploration at Black Range to estimate a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource or the development of an economically viable mining operation. The data cannot be used in its present form for reporting under JORC or NI 43-101. The near-term focus will be on metallurgical test work and, with a viable flowsheet, the project could be taken rapidly to a PEA stage.

4. Warmbad Lithium Project

The Warmbad project is located in southern Namibia near the South African border in an area of historic small-scale pegmatite mining known as the Tantalite Valley. The Tantalite Valley pegmatites have been mined since about 1946 for beryl, columbite-tantalite, lithium and bismuth minerals. Mining has been re-activated by Kennedy Ventures Plc who control African Tantatite (Pty) Ltd. and are producing concentrates of >40% Ta 2 O 5 being sold into global markets. Initial production of 20M tpa concentrate is ramping up to 120M tpa (Kennedy Ventures Corporate Presentation "Meeting Market Demand and Resource Expansion" dated July 27, 2017). An initial lithium resource estimate is being prepared by MSA Group for early 2018 following the sampling of lepidolite bearing pegmatites grading >1.6% Li 2 O. The mineralization hosted on the Kennedy Ventures Pic property is not necessarily indicative of the mineralization hosted on the Warmbad Lithium Project.

The Warmbad EPL covers 605 km2 and hosts three pegmatite occurrences of undetermined extent from government maps. There are no records of any systematic exploration over the EPL. The area has recently been mapped by the Geological Survey of Namibia and the Council of Geosciences (South Africa) which has provided updated geological information. A key result of the mapping campaign is the delineation of previously unknown extensive pegmatite swarms of up to 13 km strike length. None of these pegmatites have ever been sampled and assayed . This new data will be utilized to undertake systematic sampling of the pegmatites.

5. Epembe Tantalum-Niobium Project

Epembe is an advanced stage exploration project with a well-defined, very large multiphase carbonatite dyke that has been mapped and sampled at surface over a strike length of 10 kilometers of which at least 7 km of strike length is mineralised . Gecko Namibia has completed detailed mapping and over 11,000 meters of drilling on the dyke, with preliminary mineralogical and metallurgical studies. The carbonatite contains variable concentrations of pyrochlore which is unusually enriched in tantalum. The other commodities of interest are niobium (hosted in pyrochlore) and apatite. Drilling covered only 15% of the pyrochlore hosting carbonatite. Grades of the drilled portion of the carbonatite average on the order of 150 ppm Ta 2 O 5 , 1,300 ppm Nb 2 O 5 and 2.4% P 2 O 5. Initial sorting tests (XRT) indicate the potential for significant physical upgrading. Planned work will focus on improving grade by optimizing XRT sorting and investigating amenability to XRF sorting. Further work will be undertaken to explore for extensions of mineralized zones along strike and at depth.

6. Grootfontein Nickel-PGE Project

Grootfontein is an early stage conceptual target based on geophysical and historical evidence for a large buried mafic-ultramafic intrusive complex. It is a poorly explored geological complex due to the extensive coverage with Kalahari sands and calcrete.

Based on historic drill holes and airborne magnetic survey interpretations, Grootfontein constitutes a huge mafic complex covering 360 km2 with the potential to host magmatic nickel, copper, vanadium, platinum group elements and chromite mineralisation as cumulates or late magmatic disseminations and stockworks. Previous work by Ongopolo Mining proved that the main intrusive phases are depleted in nickel and copper. The metals were likely fractionated as sulphides during the intrusive phase, gravitationally accumulated in the magma and intruded in the adjacent, preexisting rocks. Only two shallow drill fences (total of 1,386 m) were drilled by Anglo American in 1988 leaving 55 km of strike length untested.

There is also potential for zinc-lead-vanadium mineralisation of the Berg Aukas type where dolomite-hosted deposits bordering the mafic complex, which according to historical records, produced 1.6 MT of ore grading 16.77% Zn, 4.04% Pb and 0.93% V 2 O 5 during the period 1967-1975.

7. Otjiwarongo Carbonatite Project

Otjiwarongo is another early stage conceptual target based on remote sensing data in proximity to known alkaline intrusive complexes, most notably the Okorusu complex which hosts the Okorusu fluorspar deposits. The area of interest is completely hidden by cover. The circular anomaly measures one kilometer in diameter and can be easily tested by drilling to determine if in fact a carbonatite body is the source and what styles of mineralization might be associated with it (fluorspar, rare earths, tantalum, niobium etc.).

8. Erongo Gold Project

The Erongo gold project covers an area of over 600 km2 within the Navachab-Ondundu gold trend. There are numerous mineral occurrences within the project area including at least two gold occurrences. The area has been prospected but not systematically explored. Potential targets include skarn and greisen gold-(copper-bismuth) and tin-tungsten mineralization; pegmatites formed during the late Damaran orogeny hosting lithium minerals and semi-precious stones and structurally controlled gold mineralisation. Historical figures indicate small scale mining for all of those deposit types on the property.

Project Management Strengthened  Operational Experience Focused on Namibia

Operations in Namibia for all projects will continue under Namibia Rare Earths (Pty) Ltd., the Namibian operating company of Namibia Rare Earths. Project management will be streamlined through utilization of Gecko Namibia's in-country administrative and service and the appointment of Pine van Wyk as Chief Executive Officer.

Pienaar-Schalk (Pine) van Wyk (NHD Met. Eng. B.Com, MBA), Managing Director of Gecko Namibia will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of Namibia Rare Earths based out of Namibia. Pine joined Gecko in 2008 bringing over 25 years of extensive process and project management experience to the Gecko Group. Prior to joining Gecko Namibia he worked for Rossing Uranium as Engineering Manager and later with Paladin Energy at the Langer Heinrich uranium mine where he held the positions of Operations Manager and Business Development Manager. As Managing Director for Gecko Namibia, Pine has developed a strong network of contacts throughout the mining sector and with government agencies in Namibia. In addition to his professional qualifications as a Metallurgical Engineer from Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria), Pine holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of South Africa and Masters of Business Administration from University of Bloemfontein with a focus on project management.

About Gecko Namibia  A Strategic Partner

Gecko Namibia is a private, Namibian-owned, fully integrated exploration and mining company with diversified interests in Namibia. Headquartered in Windhoek, the company and its subsidiaries operate with a work force of 327 employees with a professional management team of 24 people dedicated to every stage of mineral resource development including exploration, mining, mineral beneficiation and processing, and the provision of mine services (drilling, blasting, laboratories, plant construction, processing and contract mining).

Gecko Namibia and its sister company Genet South Africa (Pty) Ltd. ("Genet") were founded by Kobus Smit who is the Chairperson of both groups. Genet is a similar resource focused company providing mining and mineral processing services in South Africa with 703 employees and a team of 20 professional managers. Genet Mineral Processing introduced an innovative dry process, using air clarification to upgrade coal for the South African market, including to clients like Exxaro and Eskom. Mr. Smit's entrepreneurial spirit has led to the establishment of a diversified portfolio of business interests that include some of the most valuable mining and tourism assets in private ownership within the Southern African region. The group also employs 285 people in its various tourism related businesses.

Most notably, in 2003 Mr. Smit and his partners established a new coal mining company, namely Umcebo Mining, which grew into a significant coal producer in South Africa with annual production of approximately 9MT. Over a period, 7 coal mines were developed as greenfield projects, all with in-house capacity. The success of Umcebo was mainly the result of innovative technology in coal processing developed in-house that gave Umcebo Mining a significant competitive advantage over other coal producers. In 2011 Glencore acquired a 41% share in Umcebo Mining. Umcebo Mining was valued R2.2 billion at that time. During 2017, Mr. Smit disposed of all his interest in Umcebo Mining in order to focus on the expansion of his business interests in Namibia.

Graphite Mine in Production

Gecko Namibia was instrumental in bringing the 500,000 tpa run of mine Okanjande Graphite Mine into commercial production in 2017 through a joint venture partnership with Imerys, a global leader in the production of mineral-based, high value specialty products. Gecko Namibia re-designed a portion of the crushing, milling and flotation facilities at the Okorusu Mine for graphite processing of up to 20,000 tpa of graphite concentrate.

Fluorspar Mine and Processing Facilities

Gecko Namibia acquired all the mine and processing facility assets of the Okorusu Fluorspar Mine from Solvay in 2016. A comprehensive test program has been developed with the objective of re-opening the fluorspar operations at Okorusu. Okorusu produced close to 1.8 million tons of fluorspar concentrates over a 27-year period between 1998-2014, when Solvay made the corporate decision to close down its global mining division.

Various Salts and Limestone Operations

Gecko Salt, a subsidiary of Gecko Namibia, operates a small-scale salt production plant located approximately 120 kilometers north of the coastal town of Swakopmund. The project is currently operating at a rate of 200,000 tpa and targeting to increase to 1,000,000 tpa. The first shipment of 25,000 t of salt for the North American market was exported in August 2017.

An internal assessment has been completed over portions of the Otjivalunda salt pans, located north of Etosha National Park, which comprise natural deposits of burkeite, thenardite and sodium sulphate. Gecko Salt intends to initially produce approximately 100,000 tpa of sodium sulphate as well as washing powder, soap and other salt products for sale into the South African market.

An internal resource of 5 million tons of high-quality white marble with >98% calcium carbonate has been defined by drilling near Swakopmund together with an internal resource in excess of 25 million tons of calcitic marble rock for a calcining project. An Environmental Impact Assessment for the project has been completed and the company has received the Environmental Clearance Certificate.

Industrial Corporate Vision

Gecko Namibia envisions substantial industrial growth for Namibia, in part through the realization of its multi-faceted resource portfolio. To this end, Gecko Namibia has initiated two high level projects related to industrial development in the Swakopmund-Walvis Bay area.

An application for the development of a 200 ha industrial park named Nonidas Industria to be located 11km east of Swakopmund is at an advanced stage. The site is uniquely situated between the B2 National Highway and the main TransNamib railway leading inland from Walvis Bay and Swakopmund. The Vision Industrial Park (VIP) is a much larger concept that has been proposed by Gecko Namibia to develop a new deep-water port with an associated industrial development zone to be situated 25 km north of Swakopmund. The Namibian Cabinet awarded Gecko Namibia the right to develop a private port together with 700 ha of industrial land for the development of chemical and mining related industries. The port will be designed to accommodate Panama size vessels and have the capacity to handle 5-10 million tons of cargo volume per annum. The concept is very similar to the Coega Project of South Africa where an industrialized development zone was created with a dedicated port facility in 2009. Since its inception, Coega has attracted 54 industrial firms that have brought in over R30 billion in investments.

Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Rare Earths Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release.

About Namibia Rare Earths Inc.

Namibia Rare Earths Inc. is focused on the accelerated development of the Lofdal Rare Earths Project and on building a critical metals portfolio in Namibia. The common shares of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NRE".

Web site: www.NamibiaRareEarths.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions.





1 Preliminary Economic Assessment on the Lofdal Rare Earths Project Namibia dated October 1, 2014 authored by David S. Dodd, B. Sc (Hon) FSAIMM - The MDM Group, South Africa, Patrick J.F. Hannon, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. and William Douglas Roy, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. - MineTech International Limited, Canada, Peter Roy Siegfried, MAusIMM (CP Geology) and Michael R. Hall, B.Sc (Hons), MBA, MAusIMM, Pr.Sci.Nat, MGSSA - The MSA Group, South Africa

SOURCE Namibia Rare Earths Inc.

For further information: Namibia Rare Earths Inc., Don Burton, President, Tel: +01 (902) 835-8760, Fax: +01 (902) 835-8761, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.namibiarareearths.com


"The automobile industry is clearly amidst its most dramatic period of change as technologies like electrification, connected and automated driving are making significant progress. Toyota remains committed to making ever better cars. Just as important, we are developing mobility solutions to help everyone enjoy their lives, and we are doing our part to create an ever-better society for the next 100 years and beyond. This announcement marks a major step forward in our evolution towards sustainable mobility, demonstrating our continued expansion beyond traditional cars and trucks to the creation of new values including services for customers," said Akio Toyoda.

Unveiled at CES, the new e-Palette Alliance will leverage Toyota's proprietary Mobility Services Platform (MSPF) to develop a suite of connected mobility solutions and a flexible, purpose-built vehicle. The new alliance will create a broad-based ecosystem of hardware and software support designed to help a range of companies utilize advanced mobility technology to better serve customers. Launch partners include Amazon, DiDi, Mazda, Pizza Hut and Uber, who will collaborate on vehicle planning, application concepts and vehicle verification activities

In the near term, the Alliance will focus on the development of the new e-Palette Concept Vehicle, also unveiled at CES. The concept reflects one of Toyota's visions for Automated Mobility as a Service (Autono-MaaS) applications. It is a fully-automated, next generation battery electric vehicle (BEV) designed to be scalable and customizable for a range of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) businesses. What's more, the e-Palette Concept demonstrates Toyota's continued commitment to partnership and flexibility.

In addition to supporting the services provided through Toyota's MSPF, the e-Palette Concept Vehicle's open vehicle control interface and a set of software tools to allow partner companies to install their own automated driving system and vehicle management technology. When a partner company's automated driving system is installed, Toyota's Guardian technology will act as a safety net to help ensure appropriate operation.

Together, the e-Palette Alliance and e-Palette Concept Vehicle reflect Toyota's continued global momentum in developing and delivering new connected mobility businesses and data services through Toyota Connected, the company's data analysis and services subsidiary.

The e-Palette Alliance: A New Ecosystem for Mobility-Powered Business

As an emerging provider of mobility hardware and services to business, Toyota is focused on creating new and attractive features for partners that help them to expand their value chain and improve customers' lives.

The e-Palette Alliance will leverage the power of Toyota's MSPF to build a new ecosystem for mobility-powered businesses. Announced in 2016, the MSPF is Toyota's framework for a range of connected vehicle applications, providing a full suite of services needed to support MaaS ranging from vehicle leasing and insurance to fleet management and big data.

e-Palette Alliance service provider partners, including Amazon, DiDi, Pizza Hut, and Uber will explore various applications of the e-Palette Concept and the MSPF to support their existing business needs. DiDi, Mazda and Uber will also join as technology partners.

Toyota continues to discuss the creation of new mobility services with other service providers and technology development companies.

e-Palette Concept Vehicle: An Automated, Electric Vehicle Purpose-Built for MaaS

With the e-Palette Concept, Toyota has built a new approach to Autono-MaaS mobility that will empower Alliance partners to support their customers' lifestyles with increased convenience, productivity and efficiency.

With its open interior design layout, the vehicle can be outfitted with purpose-built interiors in accordance with the user's needs, whether it be parcel delivery, ride sharing, or on-the-road e-commerce. Its flexible framework is also designed for usage optimization, allowing the e-Pallet Concept to be shared to support various business needs and transition seamlessly from one application to another. Toyota envisions that the e-Palette Concept will be made available in three sizes, allowing not just need-specific applications, but also right-sized and right-place mobile solutions.

Going forward, e-Palette Alliance partners will be able to leverage the e-Palette Concept in coordination with the full range of MSPF services, or to incorporate the vehicle into their own technology development program. The e-Palette Concept's design reflects this commitment to flexibility and partnership, with an open control interface and a set of software tools to allow partner companies to mount their own automated driving system as desired.

Toyota plans to conduct feasibility testing of the e-Palette Concept in various regions, including the United States, in the early 2020s. It also hopes to contribute to the success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 by providing mobility solutions like the e-Palette and other innovative mobility offerings.

Main Features

Extensive interior space with a low floor/cube shape design

There are three sizes of e-Palette Concept, with different lengths* (depending on the purpose-built specification). Thanks to a flat and extensive barrier free interior space layout designed with a low floor, equipment can be installed in accordance with the user's needs, such as ride sharing specifications, hotel room specifications and retail shopping specifications.

* Lengths vary from 4m to 7m approximately. Dimension of CES 2018 Design model is L 4,800mm, W 2,000mm, H 2,250mm.

Next-Generation vehicle control interface:

Vehicle control technology is being used as an interface for technology providers. Technology providers can receive open Application Programming Interface (API) such as vehicle state and vehicle control, necessary for development of automated driving systems (automated driving control software and cameras/sensors, etc.). The e-Palette Concept also leverages the power of the MSPF to enable over-the-air updates of the automated driving systems.

MSPF Enabled:

Vehicle information is gathered from the Data Communication Module (DCM) fitted to the e-Palette Concept and accumulated in the Toyota Big Data Center (TBDC) through a global communication platform. The e-Palette Concept will capitalize on this vehicle information to support a variety of finance options, as well as high-level maintenance in cooperation with Toyota dealers. The API required by service providers, like vehicle state and dynamic management, can be viewed on the MSPF.

SOURCE Toyota Canada Inc.

For further information: For more details, including a full list of media contacts, digital images and product details please visit media.toyota.ca.

Related Links

http://www.toyota.ca


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NEWTOWN  Oz Griebel understands that running as an independent candidate for governor this year is not without its challenges  namely the inability to apply for millions in public campaign funds or to receive money from one of the major parties.

Griebel, along with his running mate, Monte Frank, also needs to collect 7,500 signatures to be included on the Nov. 6 ballot. On Saturday afternoon, they held an event in Edmond Town Hall to get the process rolling.

But Griebel, who ran for governor as a Republican in 2010, and Frank, a lifelong Democrat, ultimately decided their unaffiliated campaign is the path to victory.

The people weve talked to are looking for a different approach thats more focused on whats good for the state, as opposed to whats good for the party, Griebel said.

When deciding to run again, Griebel said, he wanted to ensure that his time and energy was spent getting on the ballot, rather than trying to win the nomination of a specific party.

And as for the decision to forgo public funding, it was more of a philosophical statement than a political one. Griebel didnt apply for public funding during his 2010 campaign, arguing that the $30 million spent by the state in most gubernatorial election years could be better spent.

I dont think thats the right thing to do with taxpayer money, he told a small crowd of residents during the Newtown press conference.

The candidates also said that, if elected, their first priority would be to create jobs.

Griebel said his business experience, including 17 years leading the MetroHartford Alliance, an organization of business leaders, would help his goal to reignite the private sector.

But these economic priorities, he added, will go hand in hand with the social justice issues championed by Frank, an attorney and Newtown resident. Frank represents business and municipal clients in state and federal courts and is a former president of the Connecticut Bar Association.

Frank told the crowd he would continue, as he did at the CBA and in his own initiatives, to address issues such as the opioid crisis, the treatment of refugees, promotion of diversity and gun-law reforms.

He is the founder of Team 26, a group of bicyclists who make an annual ride to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness about gun violence in memory of the Sandy Hook massacre victims.

"As the first candidate for statewide office from Newtown since (the Sandy Hook massacre), I promise that I will carry that special Newtown spirit to Hartford, Frank said, noting how the community came together without regard to party after the 2012 shootings. We know the people of Connecticut are exhausted by the political rancor and bickering and are ready for a new way forward....No party, no politics, just solutions.

This year, Griebel is one of three unaffiliated candidates who have registered for the gubernatorial race so far, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission. The race is also crowded with nearly 25 candidates from the major parties.

Griebel and Frank join a long list of third-party or unaffiliated hopefuls who have tried to become the states top elected official in the last few decades.

Most have not fared well. In recent elections, independent candidates have typically claimed no more than 1 and 2 percent of the vote, less than the margins separating the major-party candidates.

One exception was in 2010. Some Republicans believe the 18,000 votes won by Independent Party candidate Tom Marsh cost the GOPs Tom Foley in his loss to Democrat Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Malloy beat Foley by about 6,400 votes.

The only successful run for governor by a third-party candidate in recent history was in 1990, when former Republican Lowell Weicker Jr. won running under the banner of A Connecticut Party. He served one term.

A Connecticut Party ran another candidate in 1994, who received nearly 20 percent of the vote but lost to Republican John G. Rowland.

Griebel and Frank said Saturday they couldnt be sure how many of the necessary 7,500 signatures they collected so far, since the press conference was one of the first events since they announced in late December. But Frank said they were hoping for a few hundred by the end of the day.

Our approach is going to have to be a lot more imaginative, a lot more grass-roots and (will depend on) a lot of people feeling good about what they heard and their willingness to go out and spread the word, Griebel told the crowd.

aquinn@newstimes.com
Its invisible, odorless and is responsible for more than 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas, is the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers. Yet people are often unaware its in their homes.

January is National Radon Action Month, and the Connecticut Department of Public Health is urging state residents to test their homes for radon as soon as possible.

Formed from the natural decay of uranium, radon is found in rock, soil and water. While radon in outdoor air poses a relatively low risk to human health, it can enter homes from the surrounding soil and become a health hazard inside buildings.

Because you cant see or smell radon, people are often unaware that this silent killer could be in their homes.

The states Radon Program recommends that all Connecticut homes be tested for radon, especially recommended in the winter months. Connecticut residents may obtain a free radon test kit by completing an online form on the DPH Radon Program website at ct.gov/radon. The online link will be available through Jan. 12 and while supplies last. Local health department/district partners were provided 1700 test kits for distribution in their local communities to support radon awareness. Test kits can also be purchased from the American Lung Association by calling 1-800-LUNG-USA or at your local hardware store.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends that homes with radon levels at or above 4.0 pCi/L be fixed. Homeowners should consider reducing their potential lung cancer risk by fixing homes with radon levels between 2 pCi/L and 4 pCi/L. Smokers exposed to radon have a much higher risk for developing lung cancer.

Radon problems can be corrected by qualified radon contractors, with costs typically ranging between $1,200 and $1,500. A homeowner should hire a qualified radon mitigation (reduction) contractor to decrease airborne radon levels. To learn more about radon and to obtain a list of qualified radon mitigation contractors, visit the DPH Radon Program web site at ct.gov/radon.
Here we come, waddling out of 2017 and right into the new years first major dump.

Speaking of dumps, Connecticuts bedraggled, part-time General Assembly will be back in the Capitol on Monday, with their duct tape and dreams, trying to solve the latest crisis in the never-ending saga.

Yep, they got caught offending a voter group of more than 100,000 elderly participants in the Medicare Savings Program. Its tough nickel-and-diming your way through a $5-billion deficit in a $20-billion annual budget, so lawmakers  approving a proposal by the governor  cut income limits by half.

When the state Department of Social Services sent letters describing the new income requirements that would take effect Jan. 1, the criticism of legislative leaders was strong.

Gov. Dan Malloys DSS bought them some time, extending the old income levels through June.

In the Capitols new bipartisan landscape, with Republicans actually taking responsibility instead of pointing fingers at Democrats, political expediency called for them to act.

Malloy, making a sensible but more-challenging request, wants them to tackle the bigger issue of a projected $220-million deficit in the budget that runs through June 30.

But lets take bipartisan baby steps.

So, on Monday state lawmakers will shake and bake their way to restoring $54 million in the current budget to help about 161,000 people in all (the governors budget office estimates) to pay for Medicare Part B premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

Theyll also find $130 million to keep the income levels in the next biennium. This will all swirl around in the crucible of a big election year.

Malloy, the Democratic lame duck, wont go gently into that political night. Its legacy-building time and hes essentially become a party unto himself, pouring water  or gasoline  as the occasions may require, on various legislative schemes, during a year that will be remembered as a turning point in Connecticut history.

On Friday, he tried to deflate lawmakers.

This isnt a long bill, and yet it embodies of all the bad practices that have imperiled Connecticuts state budget for decades, Malloy said Friday. In terms of budget gimmickry, it shoots the moon: wishful thinking, pushing problems off into the future, and shoddy math  most egregiously in the form of double-counting savings in our already underfunded teachers pension system.

Republicans havent enjoyed a majority in the state House or Senate since before John Rowland, the good-time Charlie of state politics now lingering in his second federal-prison stint, won the governors race in a three-way contest back in 1994.

That GOP control of the state Senate lasted only two years.

Now, Republicans are as close to grabbing back the executive and legislative branches as they have in 30 years or longer. The current flat-footed 18-18 tie in the Senate, with Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman as the Democratic hammer who broke about 14 tie votes last year, is fragile at best.

The 79-72 Democratic lead in the House is a bit of a reach for the GOP this fall, but every day House Minority Leader Themis Klarides of Derby doesnt make a move toward running for governor, brings her closer to becoming the first female Republican Speaker of the House.

And nothing is easier, or more true, than Republican charges that Malloy and his Democratic enablers enacted the states two largest tax hikes since the 1991 income tax. Forget the billions in state employee givebacks. Forget the investments in the states under-funded pensions. Taxpayers, taxpayers, taxpayers have such short attention spans and the only people who watch the gubernatorial debates, where such nuance will be aired, are the Democrat and Republican bases.

For whatever reasons, maybe hes not soft and cuddly enough, Malloy has an approval rate of under 25 percent. Rowland was a very likable pol, a young up-and-coming congressman, a schmoozer, an entitled crook who doled out an unnecessary $56 million contract for a juvenile prison that is headed for closure.

Democrats with some sense of scope hope that President Donald Trump hangs on, without starting a nuclear war, because he can definitely become an issue in the 2018 elections.

And if Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim doesnt become their candidate, forcing voter apathy and a 20-percent party turnout, they can play their Trump card into possibly maintaining control of state government.

Some history: In 1957, at the height of Republican President Dwight Eisenhowers two terms, the GOP controlled the Connecticut House of Representatives by 249 to 30.

In 1967, after the states Constitutional Convention of 1965, while Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed post-JFK popularity, Democrats took control 117-60.

In 1973 and 74, at the zenith of Richard M. Nixons imperial presidency and his Silent Majority, Republicans were back to a 93-58 edge in the House. After Watergate and Nixons resignation, Democrats held a 118-33 majority.

Finally, during the sweet spot of the Ronald Reagan administration, 1985-86, House Republicans held a 85-66 majority. Little did they know that it would be their last for more than three decades.

The House GOP finally reached their low ebb, a 37-114 minority, during 2009-2010, President Barack Obamas first term.

Yep, theres a lot at stake in 2018.

Ken Dixon can be reached in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or at kdixon@ctpost.com. See twitter.com/KenDixonCT. His Facebook address is kendixonct.hearst.
When it comes to gubernatorial races, Republicans say they're a victim of their own success from two great election cycles in a row. Going into 2018, Republicans control a near-record high of 33 governor's mansions, including a number in blue and swing states. Democrats, meanwhile, hold a near-record low.

Which means in 2018, the only place to go may be up for Democrats.

And Democrats will have a lot of opportunities to chip away at their deficit. Of our top 10 governor races, eight are GOP-held seats. Most of those Republican governors are term-limited out in 2018.

Any seat Democrats win back is critical for the future of the party. Many of the governors will be able to veto electoral maps drawn by state legislatures with new census data in 2021. And because Republicans also currently control a majority of state legislatures, the governor's mansion may be the only way for Democrats to stop maps that lock them out of power for the next decade.

Here are the top 10 governor posts most likely to flip parties, ranked in order of least (10) to most (1):

10. Maryland (Republican incumbent): This is one of several blue states that Republicans now control, and it won't necessarily be easy for Democrats to wrestle it back. Polls show that two-thirds of the state approves of Gov. Larry Hogan, R, and Democrats are mired in a crowded primary to unseat him. But anti-Trump sentiment in this liberal state may be too strong for even a politically skilled governor like Hogan to overcome.

9. Ohio (Open): This is the first of several governor's mansions in Trump states that Democrats are targeting. Gov. John Kasich, R, is term-limited, and Democrats hope that Republicans' domination of the state mansion, plus anti-Trump sentiment, plus a liberal hero of sorts in former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray running for the Democratic nomination, could give them the edge. But it's not clear whether Ohio will go Democratic, given that it went for President Trump by nearly 10 points.

8. Connecticut (Open): Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy, D, will not seek a third term, and with good reason: More than two-thirds of the state disapproves of him, according to a 2016 Quinnipiac poll, and the state is struggling financially. Republicans sense an opening, saying Connecticut probably will be their top offensive target next year. First, they must pick a candidate. There are nearly a dozen on either side, and no one in particular stands out.

7. Michigan (Open): Democrats are bullish about taking back the governor's mansion here for a few reasons. Trump won the state by less than a percentage point, and outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder, R, is highly unpopular; his handling of the Flint water crisis might taint any GOP nominee. Democrats are excited about Gretchen Whitmer, a former party leader in the state Senate.

6. Florida (Open): This perpetually competitive governor's race just got a lot more interesting thanks to Trump, who endorsed Rep. Ron DeSantis, R, to replace outgoing Gov. Rick Scott, R, setting up a potentially expensive primary on the Republican side against front-runner Adam Putnam, the state's agriculture commissioner.

Democrats have their own primary. Former congresswoman Gwen Graham, the daughter of a popular governor, hasn't been able to stamp out lesser-known challengers. A competitive Senate race could overshadow and shape the governor's race.

5. Nevada (Open): Nevada Democrats have found electoral success when the rest of their party struggled. Voters here went Democratic down the ballot in 2016. This time, term-limited Gov. Brian Sandoval, R, is one of the most popular politicians in the state, and he has declined to back the front-running Republican, Attorney General Adam Laxalt. A potential front-runner on the Democratic side is Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, a well-known figure in the Las Vegas area. Also watch a competitive Senate race here to try to unseat vulnerable Sen. Dean Heller, R.

4. Illinois (Republican defending): What happens when two billionaires clash? We're about to find out. Gov. Bruce Rauner, R, is running for reelection in one of the bluest states in the Midwest and has given his campaign $50 million. But that's peanuts to fellow billionaire J.B. Pritzker, who has said that if he wins the nomination (in a field that includes a member of the Kennedy family), he'll spend whatever it takes to win the general election. The Illinois race is shaping up to be the most expensive nonpresidential race in American history, which both sides say make it extremely unpredictable.

3. Alaska (Independent): Gov. Bill Walker is the only independent governor in office right now, and he could soon realize the perils of not having a major-party backer. Republicans are planning to make an effort to oust him, while this race in a Republican state isn't really on Democrats' radar.

2. Maine (Open): Term-limited Gov. Paul LePage, R, is one of the most controversial governors. He's also one of the least popular, which makes any Republican effort to replace him an uphill battle. Both sides acknowledge this governorship is likely to flip to Democrats, especially since Sen. Susan Collins, R, decided not to run for it.

1. New Mexico (Open): Alongside Maine, New Mexico is Democrats' best pickup opportunity in 2018. State voters went for Hillary Clinton by nearly 10 points, and outgoing Republican Gov. Susana Martinez (one of just six female governors in office now) isn't very popular. She's leaving behind a high unemployment rate and struggling education system. This race could come down to two members of Congress: Reps. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D, and Stevan Pearce, R.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Geoffrey Onyeama, has reassured Federal Governments commitment to return all stranded Nigerians from Libya.

Onyeama gave the assurance when he received 491 Nigerian returnees from Libya at Port Harcourt International Airport, alongside Rivers Government officials.

The minister said there were stories of exploitation and suffering by stranded Nigerians in Libya, which compelled Federal Government to act decisively.

He added that we made it clear to the Libyan Government that we want to see all Nigerians there. We insisted that we should see all of them, instead of hearing from them.

We made it clear that they ( Libyans ) are signatories to international conventions and we expected them to have control of those who guard our children.

They cooperated with us because of respect for Mr President, there were people who were making money from these children and did not want them to return home.

We carried out rigorous outreach to ensure that we have everybody back.

The minister noted that the programme was a continuous process that would return all stranded Nigerians from Libya.

The minister explained that the Libyan Government got the message that as far as they are Nigerians, we have zero tolerance for molestation.

The Secretary to the Rivers State Government (SSG), Sir Kenneth Kobani, who led the state delegation, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for making efforts in returning the stranded Nigerians.

He said as a state government, we had no choice really, let me say that the Rivers State Governor made it clear to me that we should do everything possible to make sure that this exercise was handled smoothly.

The Rivers State Government would do everything in its power to assist federal agencies handling this programme, because above everything else, we are all Nigerians and this programme is a clear indication that when we work together, we can achieve anything.

What you are seeing here today clearly shows that our governor and indeed the President feel same about this issue.

On behalf of the Rivers State Governor, Mr Nyesom Wike, I will like to thank President Muhammadu Buhari, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and his team who worked tirelessly to make the return of our brothers and sisters successful.

Reports say that all the returnees were profiled at designated booths at the airport.

The minister was accompanied by officials from the Nigerian Immigration Service, NEMA NAPTIP and military personnel.
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Lagos State has called for the disqualification of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode in the coming 2019 governorship election over alleged violation of the Electoral Act.The party faulted the recent three million man march for Governor Ambode insisting that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has not lifted the ban on political campaigns in the country.In a statement by its publicity secretary, Mr Taofik Gani, the party said: Unless INEC and Police exert their powers to guarantee credible election by at least giving their opinions on the recent three million man march for Governor Ambode, we shall deem the 2019 Lagos governorship election as already rigged for APC.The party also called on INEC and the Police to be unbiased, nonpartisan and assertive as we go into the 2019 general elections by using the disqualification and needful arrests of all those who are initiators, perpetrators and intended beneficiaries of pre-election malpractice capable of also overheating the polity and provoking confrontations and violence.But reacting, Lagos State Government has described statements by Lagos Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, that it would defeat the All Progressives Congress, APC, in 2019 governorship poll as infantile and highly inconsequential.The states Commissioner for Home Affairs, Dr Abdul-Akeem Abdul-Lateef, made the remark at the weekend, during the third Iju-Ishaga Health Day held in Lagos.He said the Governor Akinwunmi Ambode-led administration would not be distracted by statements made by the PDP.He said: I want to assure Lagosians that Governor Ambode will not be distracted by the statement by the PDP. He will not be distracted by political Lilliputians whose current retrogression has compelled them to operate as dysfunctional silos.The party said it is hinging the said call to disqualify Governor Ambode and APC from participating in the 2019 Lagos governorship election on the heels of the self-confession of a group itesiwaju ipinle Eko vanguard led by one Mr. Seyi Bamigbade that they organised a 3 Million Man March for Governor Ambodes reelection in 2019.According to the party, such exercise at this period is a breach of the electoral act and elections guidelines as INEC has not declared political campaign permissible.It stated that we strongly believe that the exercise must have been directly induced, midwife and sponsored by the state government, using Lagos tax to overreach other persons and political parties in the 2019 elections.It is also laughable that an acclaimed performing governor can be so jittery of reelection that over 12 months to the contest, he is already using state funds to jump-start campaign even against the Electoral Act and good conscience.Though we know that the claimed 3 Million Man March is a fluke and propagandists, since they have made the self-confession, then Mr. Seyi Bamigbade and his members of the organising group should be arrested for electoral misconduct.
General Overseer of The Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, yesterday, admonished Nigerians to live a lifestyle of praising God, even in the face of challenges confronting them.Speaking during the Churchs annual thanksgiving at its national headquarters, Throne of Grace Parish, Ebute-Meta, Lagos, Pastor Adeboye assured the congregation that a conscious attitude of offering thanksgiving to God for what he has done in the past would guarantee a better future for them.Preaching on message titled: The Power of Gratitude, he admonished: Do allow what you dont have to blindfold you to what you already have. Do not forget where you started from and how far God has brought you.There are few people among us who cannot understand why God is so good to us. Considering our background, parents, our abilities, we find it difficult to understand how God has been so gracious to us.Let us learn to appreciate God. In what ways are we better than those that have died? How can we explain Gods safety while traveling without any record of accident, provision of food, for sound sleep and good health? Was there any special thing we did last year to experience Gods favour and mercy?Declares 80 days prayer and fastingEarlier, he declared an 80- day prayer and fasting spiritual exercise of the church, during the annual Ministers Thanksgiving held at the redemption camp.He explained that the first phase of the spiritual exercise would kick off on January 11, 2018 and ends on March 1, 2018, while the second phase would commence from July 1, 2018 through July 30, 2018.
The Rivers State Chapter of All Progressives Congress APC has described the reappointment of Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi as the Director General, Presidential Campaign Council of President Muhammadu Buhari as not only a good omen, affirmation of the greatness of Amaechi in terms of his ability in human organisation but also acceptance of the fact that Amaechi has all it takes to once again lead the party to victory.We are totally convinced that Amaechi will succeed in this onerous task not minding the arduous nature of this present task in view of how far PDP have gone in poisoning the minds of some Nigerians against the present administration on her efforts to ratify the wrongs of the party during her 16 years misfortune leadership of Nigeria.The party described the request by the PDP leadership that Amaechi should resign his Transportation Ministry portfolio not minding the revolution he is igniting in the sector as ranting of a frightened and defeated foe who are cowed by the person and the capability of Amaechi to once again see to the woeful defeat of PDP come 2019.We sympathise with PDP as it will take them to do more than they are currently doing to wrestle power from APC. Besides, Amaechi need not to resign his office as there is no constitutional backing to effect that only that PDP and his cohorts are totally afraid of the visionary and revolutionary trends of AmaechiThe party in a press statement circulated on Monday by Chief Eze Chukwuemeka Eze the SSA Media and Public Affairs Consultant to the APC Rivers State Chairman, Dr Ibiamu Davies Ikanya further reiterated that if Amaechi could led APC to victory in 2015 when PDP was in power, defeating the party now that the party is in disarray and in the hands of those that impoverished our people through looting our common patrimony with impunity the task before Amaechi and his Team becomes easier to achieve.The APC reiterated that the task of ensuring PDP and her co-looters are kept at bay from the centre of power should not be left in the hands of Amaechi and his team but every patriotic Nigerian must assist and cooperate to ensure the success of this venture so that President Buhari will continue in his mission of rebuilding Nigeria to a better country as envisioned by the founding fathers of our nation.The statement congratulated Amaechi and urged him not to be deterred by the PDP propagandists and un-progressive forces positioned to frustrate the efforts of this administration.The party pleaded with the APC chieftains to close ranks and ensure the victory of the party come 2019 knowing that PDP has only one single agenda of returning to power in order to safeguard their looted funds and continue to plunder our common patrimony with impunity and in this regard, it will be suicidal to allow such a group that put us in our present sorroy state to stage a come-back to power. The fact remains that no sane Nigerian will sit and allow such a group to come to power once again in our life time.The APC reiterated that President Buhari, the APC leadership and the entire Nigerians can count on the support of all the good people of Niger Delta region as the region have fared better under this administration than what the region got from the 16 years misfortune of PDP leadership.The party enumerated the following as some of the gains that the Niger Delta region has benefitted from this administration:1.The allocation of over one Hundred and twenty five billion Naira (N125b) out of the N8.612 trillion appropriation bill presented by President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 to the National Assembly to fund capital projects in 2018 in the Niger Delta region. This to us is unprecedented and a total demonstration of the unalloyed desire of President Muhammadu Buhari to right the wrongs the region suffered in the hands of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) particularly during the villainous regime of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan whose regime was a misfortune for the region as he ensured that no project was situated in the region throughout his infamous six years of lootocracy2.Earmarking of N53.89 billion for Niger Delta Ministry and N71.2 billion for Niger Delta Development Commission for capital projects in the 2018 budget. The region is also to benefit from the budgetary allocation for the Niger Delta amnesty programme retained at N65 billion3.The East-West Road abandoned by the Jonathan Administration will be completed hopefully by this year with the budgetary allocation of N17.32 billion4.The inclusion of N5bn in the 2018 budget for the formal take off of the Maritime University located at Okerenkoko in Delta State once again affirms the unflinching commitment of the APC led Federal Government under the leadership of President Buhari to develop the Niger Delta region. The party commends the President for his directive for the immediate release of N1b to the university to support essential infrastructure works and staff recruitment separate from the N5B take off grant.With commencement of full academic activities of this university that will go a long way to assist in the development and emancipation of our region.5.The APC explained that the region will also benefit from the huge allocations of N555.88 billion, for the ministry of power, works and housing and that of the ministry of Transportation with N263.1 billion plus other ministries as the 2018 budget estimates also contains the extension of Rail line to Warri in Delta State and the completion of the Uyo-Calabar Express Road.6.The inclusion and full implementation the Ogoni clean-up exercise and the execution of the Multi-Billion Naira Bomu-Bonny road project which when completed would open up the economic potentials of the Niger Delta Region beyond the shores of Nigeria. These projects will surely open not only the Niger Delta region but attract the elusive investments to the region. Based on this revolutionary trend by President Buhari who has proved that he is a true son of the region; the party after due thought and deliberation on the 2018 budget estimates rechristened the budget the budget of hope, peace, emancipation and unity of Niger Delta region.7.The formal flag-off of the construction of the Bonny/Bomu Road/Bridges in Rivers State on 12th October, 2017 by the APC led Federal Government which is monumental, historical and unprecedented. By this event, he has demonstrated that he is not like Dr Goodluck Jonathan and Gov. Nyesom Wike who claim to be sons of the region but did/doing everything humanly possible to frustrate the development of the region.8.President Muhammadu Buhari Administration recently release a whopping sum of N900 billion owed the Niger Delta Development Corporation (NDDC) by previous federal administrations including the administration of Dr. Jonathan.9.The successful kick-off of the Ogoni Clean-up exercise, the Calabar  Lagos Rail Line that cuts across the region, the renovation/reconstruction of both Enugu  Port Harcourt, Uyo  Calabar Highways and the West-East Road, the renovation of the Afam Power plant in Rivers State, resumption of work on the Port Harcourt International Airport, renovation and reconstruction of the Enugu  Port Harcourt Rail Line, among other projects.10.Inaugurated a world-class fertilizer plant built by Indorama Eleme Fertilizer and Chemicals Limited, in Port Harcourt which has capacity for 1.5 million Metric Tons of Urea fertilizer, this worlds largest single-train Urea plant and one of the ambitious green field projects of Indorama in Nigeria and has a production capacity of 4000 metric tons (MT) of nitrogenous fertilizers per day or 1.5 MT per annum demonstrates the desire of this administration to rebuild the Niger Delta region and once again demonstrates the concern of the APC led Federal Government towards the emancipation and rapid development of the State and region contrary to the erroneous insinuation that APC is not doing much to improve the State.11.The 40-kilometre road from Bodo to Bonny Island. In between it are three bridges  a 1000 metre bridge across the Opobo creek, a 640 metre bridge against the Nanabie Creek and a 550 metre bridge against the Afa Creek. This will ultimately connect all of the communities and hopefully in a time not too far away, we can drive to Bonny Island from Bodo Through this project Industries have also gotten a gateway and coupled with the uninterrupted power supply enjoyed by residents and indigenes of the community, the improvement in the economy of Rivers State will know no bounds.Indeed President Buhari have shown true leadership cum statesmanship, not just expressed, but conspicuously put into action and giving the people firsthand experience of what democracy is and should be. A rare gem and a true leader whose love for the region is infectious and we wish to urge him not to trouble himself about campaigning in the region as his works and feats in the region have finished his campaign for him the APC further averred.With this development, we rejoice with Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, the Minister of Transportation, for his patriotism and national outlook and for proving that we are a trusted breed that will take Nigeria to the desired promise land the statement concluded.ENDSLong Live APC!Long Live Rivers State!!Long Live Federal Republic of NigeriaLong Live President Muhammadu BuhariChief Eze Chukwuemeka Eze,SSA Media and Public Affairs Consultant to the State Chairman, APC Rivers State.
The Senate Minority Whip, Senator Biodun Olujimi has said the endorsement of the Deputy Governor of Ekiti State, Prof Kolapo Olusola as sole candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, was a wishful thinking.She also described the killings of innocent Nigerians across the country and sundry hardship being experienced by the citizens as evidence of a failure of governance.Senator Olujimi said this at the weekend when she hosted her constituents in Ekiti South senatorial district to a thank you get together party in Omuo Ekiti, where she distributed items worth N200 million.Olujimi said her ambition to govern Ekiti State remained intact, adding that the endorsement of the Deputy Governor as the sole candidate of the party was a wishful thinking.The lawmaker said the partys national leadership will conduct free and fair primary and the best candidate will emerge as opposed the one that has been endorsed.She said: It is the business of the party at the national level to conduct a primary. What happened is just wishful thinking. The party had already said that there would be a free and fair primary and that is where I stand.The five of us that are aspirants have come together to say that there must be free and fair primaries. If the primary is fair, only the best will win, not the one that has been anointed.The former Deputy Governor, who said that the PDP handed over a good government to the APC in 2015, said people have seen the difference today.She said for the past two years the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, has demonstrated crass incompetence and lack of profound grasp in the running of a great nation like Nigeria, hence the unprecedented hardship and suffering the citizenry are being subjected to.Speaking further on what she described as APC wasteful years, she said, In the last 18 years of this Democracy, I have not seen a government that is poorly managed like this APC-led government. They rode to power on the pretext of populist ideology. They did not have a blueprint on how to govern the country.They dont know what to do up till now. We are just drifting, everybody is just doing what he likes and so, we went into a recession. They say we are technically out of it, but I dont know what they mean because people are still in recession.No jobs anywhere, prices of goods have skyrocketed. The roads are bad. Electricity is zero. A man who cannot put food on his table who cannot send his children to school is in recession. People that are begging are too many, that is not the Nigeria we knew. The Nigeria we knew is the one everybody will eat and drink and some would even travel at Christmas. But right now, it is no longer so.We handed over a good government to APC. Forget all the lies and half truth, the bulk passing and the razzmatazz. People have now seen the difference. I am not one to speak evil about a government. This one has failed all of us.So people must follow the PDP. The party knows how to govern and have people at heart. Yes, I admit we made mistake. But we know how to regulate ourselves and deliver good governance to the people, she said.
A set of 481 Nigerians evacuated from Libya arrived at the Port Harcourt International Airport in Rivers State on Sunday with sad storie...

A set of 481 Nigerians evacuated from Libya arrived at the Port Harcourt International Airport in Rivers State on Sunday with sad stories.While some of the returnees (females) were pregnant and looked tired, a large number of them, especially the young men, appeared emaciated ostensibly due to the lack of adequate food inside their detention camp in the North African country.This is just as the Federal Government promised to rehabilitate the returnees, who flew in with a chartered Max Airline at exactly 4.55pm.One of the returnees, who spoke with newsmen, 42-year-old Lucky Iyanusa from Edo State, said he went through hell after he was arrested by the Libyan police.Iyanusa explained that many Nigerians were killed by Libyan security agents for no reason, adding that the entire N850,000 he spent in order to get to Europe through the North African country had gone down the drain.The returnee, who was an artisan before he left Nigeria, recalled that he had to sell all his tools before he could embark on the journey to Libya from Kano State through the desert.I travelled to Libya on June 9, 2017. My aim was to travel to Europe and the only way I could achieve that was to get to Libya first. The financial condition with me and my family in Nigeria was bad and I had to sell all my work tools to travel to Libya by road.I moved to Libya from Kano State and through the desert. I could not get to Europe because I was arrested by the Seaside (Marine Police in Libya). The day I was arrested, 290 blacks were killed by the Libyan policemen; that was in November, 2017. Nigerians, Ghanaians and Malians were killed. Some had their legs shot and amputated.We were arrested and kept in an underground cell since last month. Inside the prison, we met some of our Nigerian brothers, who had been there for up to three years, four years, six months, nine months. Nigerians are going through hell in that place. We were fed once a day with something that looked like the bottom of a water bottle.People have been travelling through the desert; I am not the first person. We have burgers we pay to enhance our move. I paid N850,000 to a burger for me to travel to Libya and to Europe. I was washing cars to feed when I got there, Iyanusa, who was in tears, added.Addressing the returnees, who were served rice immediately they were ushered into the Hajj camp near the airport, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, explained that apart from rehabilitating them, government would ensure they (returnees) were gainfully employed.We saw the inhuman condition you went through; we saw the traumatic condition. Despite the inhuman conditions you were subjected to, you comported yourselves in a very responsible manner.We know that many of you were trafficked. We will make provisions to rehabilitate you to enable you to get good jobs. You have exhibited self-control. We will not abandon you.We will do everything possible to rehabilitate you. We want you to become advocate of the youths. We want you to go out there to share your experiences with the youths out there on what you encountered as to discourage them from embarking on such trip.The minister commended the Rivers State Government and other Federal Government agencies for the role they played in bringing back the returnees.In his remark, the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, said the state was in support of the Federal Governments efforts to bring Nigerians back from Libya.Wike, who was represented by the Secretary to the Rivers State Government, Mr. Kenneth Kobani, stated that there was a common concern when it the issues concern Nigerians irrespective of tribe or state.Among Federal Government delegation to Libya are the Director General of the National Emergency Management Agency, Mustapha Maihaja, Senior Special Adviser to the President on Diaspora, Mrs. Abike Dabiri Erewa.Maihaja said, In line with the mandate from President Muhammadu Buhari, we have started repatriating Nigerians who are trapped in Libya. We are using Max Air and Medview Airlines with a target of completing the process in three weeks.The first batch in the inaugural flight included 481 returnees. We have put necessary logistics in place for a hitch-free evacuation.The returnees will undergo profiling, medical examination and other processes before reuniting them with their families.We are collaborating with relevant state governments to receive these returnees at the Reception Centre.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has said the inability of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led Ministry of Petroleum Resources to find viable solution to the incessant fuel crisis in the country has wrecked the nations economy.





Long Queque at Total Fuel Station beside Total Village along Aba Road in Port Harcourt weekend. Photo: Nwankpa Chijioke

This is just as the party chided the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu over his proposals to trade away the nations resources to other interests under sneaky subsidy deals.





The party in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, also expressed sadness that President Buhari had refused to heed wise counsel from Nigerians to quit as Minister of Petroleum Resources and allow competent hands to effectively manage the sector, adding that his aloofness has left the nation with no hope of any way out of the current fuel crisis and its attendant hardship on Nigerian citizens.





It is now clear to all that President Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) government is bent at wrecking the nation. Instead of abating, the situation is getting worse under the APC administration, which on December 6, 2017 promised to end the fuel crisis within one week.





What is more frightening is the atrocious proposals by the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu which amounts to trading away the nations resources to the mercy and vagaries of international interests through questionable subsidy plans that is completely against national interest.





This same Minister who denied that there are plans to increase the price of fuel is also plotting an indirect hike through a wicked price modulation plan where the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC will be allowed to continue to sell at N145 per liter in its few mega stations across the country while the independent marketers should be allowed to sell at whatever price that is profitable to them in all their outlets, the statement read in part.





According to the PDP, it is now clear to all that the APC government is only being perfidious with our oil sector, particularly in its promise not to increase fuel prices. We all know that there are very few NNPC stations and that most of such stations will not even have the products. What this means is that after ruining the system, the APC administration is now contemplating handing Nigerians over to unspeakable whims of independent marketers, while attempting to cover shady subsidy regime through which billions of naira could be frittered away daily under their watch.





This proposal will leave our economy, which is already weakened by the incompetent and corrupt APC government, in complete comatose and result in more hardship on the already impoverished Nigerians.





With the poor purchasing power of the naira, also due to bad polices of the APC government, any additional anti-people policy will ultimately spell doom for our dear nation.





Nigerians are now aware that the same government that boasts of zero tolerance for corruption has been engaged in unspeakable grafts, including unabated siphoning of our national resources through underhand subsidy deals, direct diversion of public funds in various sectors and depletion of our foreign financial instruments, and this must stop.
After a holistic examination of the power sector problems, the Federal Government is taking gradual but aggressive measures in short and...

After a holistic examination of the power sector problems, the Federal Government is taking gradual but aggressive measures in short and long-terms. The incremental power policy initiated by the Minister of Power, Works & Housing, Babatunde Fashola is the short-term solution. The mega projects, such as the Mambilla project expected to generate over 3000 megawatts (mw) is the long-term solution.To Fashola, it makes no economic sense to concentrate on building new power projects and abandon the idle completed but faulty power plants as well as those on the verge of completion but abandoned for one reason or the other. He said the country has over 12,000mw idle capacity.Fashola said: Lets get these idle megawatts on stream by making rehabilitation of the power a priority. Lets make use of what we have first before looking for new ones, he said. It is this conviction that led to embarking on the incremental power policy.We cannot have 12,000Mw installed and be concentrating on new ones without optimizing the existing ones  Egbema and Gbarain power plants are not finished, Olorunsogo, Omotosho, and Geregu are not optimised because there is not enough gas.In some places there are transmission problem. This is what the ministry is now tackling. The Federal Governments focus now is on what will help on immediate contribution to increased power, whether it is on generation, transmission or distribution segment of the value chain. It is this priority that will determine the project government will award the contract.If it is transmission project, we will award the contract. It is the one that goes to a power plant that is ready to deliver power? Some have gas and the power is there, but they cannot evacuate. So, lets build the transmission line. Some have the transmission facility but dont have gas. So, lets build the gas pipeline.That is what is happening in places like Omoku plant in Rivers State. We will complete Omoku by March this year and it will give us about 270mw. We will finish Gbarain any time from now and it will give us over 115mw, Alaoji by June this year.The minister went further: We will get more power from Kaduna, 215mw. We will get 10mw from wind plant in Katsina State this year. Zungeru project would have given us 700mw but was locked up in court for three years before we came on board. We have got the parties out of court but have lost three years. It will deliver by early next year another 700mw. Azura in Edo State, they refused to sign the partial risk guarantee but the Buhari administration has signed it.Azura project is on track and will be finished in June this year and will give us 450mw. So, we have to prepare to evacuate Azura and I have submitted the memo to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to approve the funding. We have to quickly build a 14-km 330kv line so we can evacuate power produced there to the grid.We are also trying to complete some rural electrification projects using Rural Electrification Agency (REA). There are many rural electrification projects from 1999 including various constituency projects. All of that will translate to more power.At the last all-stakeholders monthly meeting in Kogi State last month, it was reported at the meeting that Geregu Power Plant owners whose majority shareholder is Forte Oil Plc, invested $94 million and raised the generation capacity from 414mw to 434mw.Stakeholders at the meeting acknowledged significant improvement on generation capability from what it was in January/March 2017, when it was constrained by gas and debts to GenCos and Gas Suppliers.They acknowledged that the N701 billion guarantee programme has helped in securing the production side of the value chain by enabling the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading (NBET) Plc to pay generating companies and gas suppliers.The running of the three turbines in Gergu I is part of the successes recorded by the intervention on generation. Only one out of turbines in Geregu I and II were running when the minister visited in 2016. The new challenge is that the turbine output is curtailed due to insufficient distribution infrastructure to take the power from the power plants.They said: Available nationwide generation capacity has reached over 7000mw, which cannot be evacuated due to the Transmission Company of Nigerias (TCNs) efforts to improve and complete transmission facilities with the support of state governments such as Kogi State. Distribution Companies have pledged to match the transmission capacity in order to deliver the additional 2000mw to consumers.On Friday December 8, 2017, a peak generation of 5155mw to the grid was reached, surpassing the previous peak of 5074mw in February 2016, which was the product of team work from the Presidency, TCN, and all government agencies, as well as private generation and distribution companies and the support of the various communities, such as Ajaokuta, which plays host to our vital power infrastructure.Fashola also held discussions with the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), and various chambers of commerce and industries in the states on how to deliver the unutilised 2000mw generated power.The Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) is also providing assistance to improving generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. For instance, its intervention has brought tremendous improvement in power supply in Okene, Idah, Confluence Beach, Ankpa, Felele, Ohunene, and Ayingba areas of the state, among others.NDPHC noted that construction on Okija and Omotosho community connection project is complete and was planned for energization by December 31, 2017The Benin Electricity Distribution Company noted that all 36 communities in Ondo North are now connected after signing the Memorandum of Understanding with the DisCo, and that connection in Ode-Aiye in Benin DisCo in Ondo South will be completed early this year.The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company also confirmed that the 60MVA substation at Aba has been restored while TCN noted progress of projects in Obajana, Egbe, Kabba and Okene to improve supply in Kogi State. TCN is also proposing a 330kV line from Makurdi to Ayingba to ensure Kogi State benefits from the upcoming Mambilla Hydro projectThe GenCos, DisCos and TCN restated committed to improving customer service in the power sector by informing customers at least seven days in advance of any planned repair or maintenance outage of infrastructure to the affected communities.According to Fashola, the DisCos are behind other segments of the value chain  generation and transmission, even as he noted the governments effort at boosting DisCos capacity.Fashola said: The problem is that DisCos dont have capacity to expand the way it is expected. We have talked about their challenges  exchange rate, liquidity and population growth, among others. The meter roll out that was expected has not happened in the way we expected it. Some have happened. The second problem is that most of the equipment they bought were old enough, nobody can dispute that. So, they must expand, that is the problem. But we will be able to know what each DisCo needs and what it costs. When get FECs approval, they (DisCos) will inject the idle 2000mw into the grid.The World Bank Group also acknowledged the efforts and improvements in the power sector. The World Bank Group and the Federal Government after a two-day high-level consultation on the Power Sector Recovery Programme (PSRP), reached some agreements. The PSRP is a comprehensive programme of policy, legal, regulatory, operational and financial interventions that will restore service efficiency and long-term power sector viability.The measures that will be implemented through 2021, are aimed at improving transparency, service delivery and re-establishing investor confidence, and hence, investment in the sector. Accelerating electricity access including through off-grid public private partnerships is an important component of the PSRP.They assessed progress in implementing the programme and followed on similar high-level talks that took place in Abuja in December 2016 and in Washington during the World Bank/ IMF Spring meetings.The Federal Government has prepared a financing plan to ensure financial sustainability of the power sector and included it in the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper submitted to the National Assembly in October last year. The plan will be monitored regularly and incorporate contingencies should the sector shortfall deviate from the base case assumptions until retail tariffs are adjusted in line with improved service delivery to attain cost recovery by 2021.The PSRP envisages measures to contain costs and carefully manage contingent liabilities to ensure cost-reflective and affordable tariffs. In this context, it was agreed that existing generation infrastructure assets will need to be optimised before the sector assumes new financial obligations that could not be supported.The World Bank is committed to assisting the Federal Government with programme implementation, working closely with the PSRP Implementation Monitoring Team, which reports directly to the Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.The World Bank will continue the preparation of the proposed $1 billion Performance Based Loan (PBL) to support the programme. The Federal Government and the World Bank Group agreed on the necessary steps to present the PBL to the World Banks Board of Executive Directors for consideration.
Some teachers in Kaduna state refused to return to work on Monday in compliance with the directive of the state chapter of the Nigerian Uni...

Some teachers in Kaduna state refused to return to work on Monday in compliance with the directive of the state chapter of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT).





The union had asked its members to stay away from work in protest of the decision of the state government to sack over 21,000 teachers who failed a competency test last year.





But Nasir el-Rufai, governor of Kaduna, warned teachers to ignore the directive or comply with it at the risk of losing their jobs.





TheCable observed that while some schools were open after the Christmas and New Year break, others were under lock and key.





Schools like Aliyu Makanma Model Primary School, Barnawa, LEA Primary School, New Millennium City and LEA Primary school, Narayi, among others were deserted when this newspaper visited on Monday.





An official of the NUT, who did not want to be mentioned, said a task force constituted by the union was set up to ensure total compliance.





But at LEA primary school in Sabon Tasha, GRA, teachers were seen discussing in groups while pupils played inside the school compound, around 8:3oam.





We are aware of the strike, but we have not received any letter. We are waiting for an official letter from our union, as soon as we received it, we will leave one of the teachers said.





Also at the Government Secondary School, Kakuri near St. Gerald Catholic hospital, teachers reported to work.





We came to school because today is resumption date. We heard about the strike, but we have not received any circular regarding the strike. As soon as we receive the circular, we will comply a teacher, who refused to be named, said.





The NUT official said it was possible that some of the teachers who reported to work did not receive the circular.




Ahead of the 2019 general elections, the federal government has expressed concerns over the growing wave of violent altercations between pastoralist and sedentary farmers, saying the trend must be halted before the elections.At a meeting between the Minister of Interior, Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau, five state governors and security chiefs, the Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh however conceded that the federal government has not done enough to cater for the needs of the herdsmen.The farmer and herdsmen must not have his life threatened by circumstances surrounding his profession. We do not want the farmer to lose his crops nor would we want anyone to. Over the years we have not done much to look seriously into the issue of livestock development in the country. People ask the question why should government get involved?Why shouldnt the herdsmen manage their own livestock? I am sad to tell you that in the last 50 years until recently we may have done enough for the rice farmer, the cassava farmer, the maize farmer, the cocoa farmer, but we havent done much for herdsmen and that inability and omission on our part is resulting in the crises we are witnessing today.In Europe, every cow that is farmed gets a subsidy of Six Euros per day; we have done next to nothing for the cattle rearers here and as a result its operation has become a threat to the existence of our farmers and that is what this communique will seek to resolve, said Ogbeh.Cattle ColoniesWe are planning a programme called cattle colonies not ranches but colonies where at least 5, 000 hectares of land would be made available, adequate water, adequate pasture would be made available. We also want to stop cattle rearers from roaming about; the culture of cattle roaming about will be stopped. The cattle will be provided with water and adequate security by the rangers, adequate pasture milk collection even security against rustlers to enable them lead a normal life. This has been done elsewhere in India, Ethiopia and even Brazil, Ogbeh explained.Declaring the meeting open, Dambazau had earlier established a nexus between communal and electoral violence, stating that; Knowing that general elections are fast approaching and considering the history of political and election violence in Nigeria, all necessary steps must be taken to ensure that the recently witnessed crimes and violent conflicts are curtailed with utmost dispatch.The meeting which is ongoing was convened by Gen. Dambazau and has governors of Benue, Kaduna, Niger, Nasarawa and Taraba in attendance as well as the Inspector General of Police, DG DSS, and Commandant General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps NSCDC.Speaking further, he said; I wish to express the appreciation of the FG for your (governors) individual commitment and cooperation with the federal security agencies in addressing the menace of rural crimes particularly kidnapping, rustling and the most recent violent clashes between herdsmen and farmers.Threats to peace and public safety in any form at any location will not be tolerated. It is the responsibility of governments at all levels to provide, unconditionally, sustainable peace and public safety within their territorial boundaries. Against this background, the meeting is convened to primarily bring us together to share our experiences on the aforementioned security challenges. The meeting will then agree on necessary measures to be taken and apportion responsibilities.The immediate repercussion of this menace include hunger due to acute shortage of food, diseases, criminal activities and deepening animosity between ethnic and religious groups. The current situation is very dangerous for the northern part of the country in particular and the country in general.The meeting is currently in a closed session.
The Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami, SAN, on Monday, failed to persuade the Federal High Court in Abuja to grant an interim injunction stopping the Senate from probing the controversial reinstatement of former Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms, Mr. Abdulrasheed Maina, into the Civil Service.The AGF had gone before the court to challenge the powers of the National Assembly to investigate circumstances that led to Mainas recall, four years after he was dismissed by the Federal Civil Service Commission for absconding from duty.Maina who was dismissed from service in 2013 following a recommendation by the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation, was recalled last year and deployed to the Ministry of Interior under controversial circumstances.His reinstatement was purportedly based on a memo from the office of the AGF.Malami had in a letter with Ref. No. HAGF/FCSC/2017/Vol. 1/3, directed the FCSC to give consequential effect to a judgment he said voided the process that led to Mainas dismissal from service.On the strenght of the letter, the FCSC, at the end of a meeting it held on June 14, 2017, requested the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, OHCSF, vide a letter marked FC.4029/82/Vol. III/160, and dated June 21, 2017, to advise the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior to consider the AGFs letter and make appropriate recommendations regarding Mainas case.In line with the directive, the Ministry of Interior, at its Senior Staff Committee meeting held on June 22, 2017, placed reliance on the AGFs letter and recommended that Maina be reinstated into the Service as Deputy Director on Salary Grade Level 16.Consequently, the FCSC, on August 16, 2017, approved the reinstatement of Maina with effect from February 21, 2013 (being the date he was earlier dismissed from ServiceThe FCSC further okayed Maina to sit for the next promotion examination to the post of Director (Administration) with Salary Grade Level 17.However, recall of the former pension boss into the civil service sparked-off a public protest that forced President Muhammadu Buhari to order his immediate sack, with the Head of Service, Winifred Oyo-Ita queried.Meanwhile, in the heat of the situation and leakage of several memos that traced Mainas recall to the office of the AGF, Malami, insisted that he acted in the national interest.Determined to get to the root of the saga however, both the Senate and the House of Representatives constituted different panels to investigate the matter.Following AGFs claim that the letters could not have legally emanated from him, the Senate, which had already commenced its own probe, decided to carry out forensic examination of all the correspondences that led to Mainas reinstatement.In a bid to stop the process, the AGF, filed the ex-parte motion that was declined by the court on Monday.Specifically, the AGF prayed the court to among other things, determine whether the National Assembly has the right to probe issues relating to the employment, attendance at work, disengagement, reinstatement and or promotion of a civil servant.He wants the court to declare that: The employment, attendance at work, disengagement, reinstatement and or promotion of a civil servant are matters outside the exclusive and concurrent legislative lists contained in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended).That the National Assembly cannot legitimately regulate the employment, attendance at work, disengagement, reinstatement and or promotion of a civil servant, which are matters exclusively within the purview of the Federal Civil Service Commission under the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria1999 (as amended).As well as to declare That the National Assembly lacks the legislative competence to investigate the employment, attendance at work, disengagement, reinstatement and or promotion of a civil servant which are matters exclusively within the purview of the Federal Civil Service Commission under the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria1999 (as amended).The AGF contended that the power of investigation vested on the National Assembly by section 88 (1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) is limited and such that can only be exercised within the confines of Section 88 (2) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended).He argued that being the chief law officer and Minister of Justice of the federation, that he was bound to ensure compliance by the Federal Government of Nigeria and or any of its cognate organs/agencies with the express or implied contents of extant Judgements and Orders of competent courts in Nigeria.According to the AGF, The defendant cannot constitute itself into a quasi-appellate court, tribunal or panel with a view to reviewing any executive action taken in compliance with the adverse judgment in the said Suit No: FHC/ABJ/CS/65/2013.Meantime, instead of granting the ex-parte order to halt further investigation into the matter, Justice Binta Nyako who heard the application in chambers on Monday, ordered the AGF to go and put the National Assembly on notice.Justice Nyako further directed that all the court processes should be served on the National Assembly to enable it to appear before the court to show cause why the orders sought by the AGF should not be granted.The suit was adjourned till January 15 for the National Assembly to show cause why the ongoing probe should not be stopped.It will be recalled that Maina who is currently in hiding, was accused of complicity in pension fraud running into over N100 billion.The Senate had at the end of an earlier investigation by its joint committee on public service and establishment and state and local government administration, issued a warrant of arrest for Mainas arrest.The former pension boss was subsequently declared wanted by the Police, following which he reportedly fled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a development that led to his dismissal from service in 2013.
Armed robbers on Saturday attacked Nollywood comedian, John Okafor, popularly known as Mr Ibu, at his Lagos residence, carting away about N...

Armed robbers on Saturday attacked Nollywood comedian, John Okafor, popularly known as Mr Ibu, at his Lagos residence, carting away about N14.3m cash as well as properties.

Mr Ibu reported the matter to the Lagos state police at the weekend.





According to him, his wife was at home when the robbers invaded his house.





According to my wife, the operation started at about 3am and lasted till about 4:25am this morning after which they left with all my property and cash, Mr Ibu said on Saturday.




The wife of the President, Mrs. Ai-sha Buhari, has thanked Nigerians for the prayers offered for her ailing son, Yusuf. Yusuf was invo...

The wife of the President, Mrs. Ai-sha Buhari, has thanked Nigerians for the prayers offered for her ailing son, Yusuf.Yusuf was involved in bike accident on December 26, last year around Gwarimpa, Abuja. He sustained a head injury and broken limb.According to a message posted on her Instagram page, @aishambuhari, Mrs Buhari thanked all Nigerians for their prayers and also the medical team whom she said ensured that Yusuf remained stable while receiving treatment.Minister of Health Prof. Isaac Adewole, she noted, headed the medical team attending to her son.The message read: On behalf of my family, I will like to thank well-meaning Nigerians for their prayers in the past weeks.Special thanks to the team of doctors and specialists who have worked tirelessly to ensure that my son, Yusuf remains stable, most especially Nurse Eze Doris Eberechukwu of Nisa Premier; the medical team chaired by the Honourable Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Folorunsho Adewole; the team of neurosurgeons, Prof. Temitayo Sokunbi; Prof. B.B. Shehu; Dr. Biodun Ogunbo and Assistant Prof. M.Raji Mahmud; the team of orthopaedic surgeons, Dr. Felix Ogedengbe and Dr. Akinola; the intensivists, Dr. Simon Esangbedo; the personal physician to the President, Dr. Suhayb Sanusi; my personal physician, Dr. M. Kamal and the nurses have all ensured that he remains stable while receiving treatment.Also many thanks to Dr. Jaf Momoh, CMD of National Hospital Abuja and his team for their continuous support.
Benue born Nollywood actress, Meg Otanwa has reacted to the killings in her home state.

Benue born Nollywood actress, Meg Otanwa has reacted to the killings in her home state.

Meg, who is from the Idoma tribe, spoke on the bloodletting in an open letter she penned on Monday.





The star thespian of Emem Isongs Ill take my chances lamented that attack on her kinsmen by Fulani herdsmen has been going on for years.





She also recalled her personal encounter during an attack on a community.





Meg, a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, appealed to President Buhari to be on the right side of history by choosing to defend and protect the innocent and defenseless citizens.









Full text of her letter below





Dear President Muhammadu Buhari, One fateful day I received numerous calls from home: A u Fulani! A u fulani!! E ku pewa eh, meaning, The Fulanis! The Fulanis! Theyve come again! It was Jan 17th last year, the herdsmen had attacked a neighbouring village and the villagers had run into our village for safety.





The marauders took lives and left a trail of destruction behind them. These attacks have been going on as far back as I can remember. I remember my grandmother hiding some of my siblings and I under the bed because a u fulani were coming. That was well over 20 years ago.





We had travelled home for Christmas and on this fateful day, villagers ran back from their farms covered in blood and tears from herdsmen attacks. That was my first memory and encounter with the name Fulani. In June of 2017, I lost my cousin, Sunday Fabian Otanwa, in the hands of these same herdsmen in Makurdi.









Sunday was in the police force, he was deployed to a village to protect the people. He and his colleagues became a target for the herdsmen, they launched another attack just to kill the security personnel in the villages. Sunday was killed. Please tell me Mr President, are we second class Nigerians? Why must we continue to suffer in the hands of these faceless barbaric criminals?





They come to kill and claim our ancestral land. The people of Benue State are predominantly farmers. That is what they know. Benue State did not become the Food Basket of the nation for nothing. Farming is the means of livelihood for most people in Benue State. So when they attack our crops, they attack our very existence. The Open Grazing Prohibition and Establishment of Ranches law has been signed since May 2017.





So why are we still left to fight these criminals off our lands? These attacks and killings have persisted and worsened over the years in places as disparate as Plateau, Kaduna, Enugu among other parts of the country. Mr President Sir, with all due respect, we do not need your condolences anymore. Weve received enough of that for over 20 plus years.





Open grazing is now against the law. The governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, has cried out to the federal government for help. He is not the Commander In Chief; you are, sir. So please deploy the army to protect and secure Benue, Kaduna, Plateau, Enugu and every other part of Nigeria that has experienced these vicious attacks and yet still remains under threat.





Why send the army to stop protesters? They are only speaking out in a bid to protect their lands and livelihood. If you are indeed for all Nigerians, please do what is required of a leader: let the affected communities see and feel that the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria cares about them, not only through words, but also through action. The activities of these mysterious Fulani herdsmen continue to oppress my people and my home, Benue.





I also believe that it is necessary to point out at the same time that this isnt a fight between Fulani people and other ethnicities of this great country, because not all Fulanis perpetrate such wicked acts, in the same way that not all Nigerians are out to cheat or scam people; this is a war between good and evil, between light and darkness, between men bent on destroying lives and properties and those who wish to live in peace and a shared prosperity.




The All Progressive Congress (APC) says the People Democratic Party (PDP) is a dying party with no hope of redemption.Delta state chapter chairman of the party, Jones Erue said this in a statement while calling for the cancellation of Saturdays local government polls in the state.According to Erue, PDP thwarted the peaceful electoral process to revealed their dying state and cause chaos in the state. Erue said the PDP were scared and amazed at the APC preparedness, organization and mobilization which informed their action to go against due process.He said the APC were not surprise at the outcome of the election because of mass irregularities that mar the election.The Statement in part:This election was conducted in substantial non-compliance with the provisions set out in the DSIEC Law 2017 because sensitive election materials were not delivered as expected to most of the polling units where the actual elections were due to take place.The bastardization of this simple election that ought to be peaceful shows that PDP is now a dying party in the state, and that they were totally amazed by the level of preparedness, organization and mobilization that APC mustered across the entire state.Many Returning Officers were not at the polling units to conduct the elections nor to announce the outcome. For example, a DSIEC Returning Officer at Ozoro in Isoko North Local Government Area was arrested at a Hotel Annex in Ozoro facilitating illegal thumb-printing of votes, and was handed over to the Nigeria Police at Ozoro.We are not shocked by the outcome of the election because we had issued out a note of caution previously, warning about the potential for active connivance between DSIEC and PDP officials or agents.
Stakeholders in the power sector believe that only steady electricity can guarantee economic growth and stimulate industrialisation. In t...

WITHOUT steady power supply through effective electricity generation, transmission and distribution networks, turning the industrialisation plan of the Federal Government into reality may remain mirage for a very long time.Reason: the three chains of generation, transmission and distribution have always posed serious challenges from the outset.Observers note that long before the privatisation of the sector by the government, the challenges have lingered from the era of power managements under the defunct Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), the National Electricity Power Authority (NEPA) and Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) Plc.In a move to tackle the challenges head-on, President Muhammadu Buhari set an agenda for the sectors development with a road map for achieving uninterrupted power.As of the last count, the Buhari administration has provided N701 billion payment assurance guarantee to operators to stimulate investment in the sector. The vote is among other interventions made by the government to reposition the sector.According to the government, the fund has brought confidence to the production side of the power business. The Presidency explained that the intervention is partly responsible for the increased power production to 7,000 megawatts.Available records also show that governments action in transmission service expansion through Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has also increased transmission capacity to more than 5,000 megawatts to make power relatively steady.Critics, nonetheless, observe that the feat recorded in power generation and transmission has not been fully replicated in the distribution chain.The critics described as unfortunate that 2,000 megawatts of the power been generated are not being distributed due to inadequacy of distribution networks.But, the Minister of Power, Works & Housing, Babatunde Fashola, insists that the incidents of total and partial grid collapse have reduced, preparing grounds for effective distribution.He said: The fact that we can produce more than 7,000 megawatts and put more than 5,000 megawatts on the grid means that we have 2,000 megawatts of unused power left.This is a new problem that we must resolve; we must get those 2,000 megawatts out to the people who need power.More power generation is coming in 2018 from power projects such as Gbarain Generation Company Ltd; 115 megawatts, Kashimbilla in Taraba; 40 megawatts, Afam III in Rivers; 240 megawatts, Gurara in Niger; 30 megawatts, Dadin Kowa in Gombe State; 29 megawatts and Kaduna; 215 megawatts, among others.All of these do not include mini-grids and solar systems that are in various stages of development.The minister spoke of plans to ensure the distribution of the remaining 2,000 megawatts of power to industrial customers.He said: If we can produce 7,000 megawatts and we can only distribute about 5,000 megawatts, the problem has changed from lack of power to locating where the need is.It involves designing a solution that takes the balance of 2,000 megawatts to those who need it and can pay.We must act to build the bridge that connects this gulf of supply and demand; that bridge is a bridge of data and information about finding the location of the businesses and industries that need power and getting the 2,000 megawatts waiting for deployment.Fasholas explanation notwithstanding, analysts identify deficiency in distribution infrastructure, poor utilisation of existing distribution networks and inadequate power evacuation at newly completed Independent Power Projects (IPP) as reasons for the unutilsed 2,000 megawatts.However, the Niger-Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) says it will help to improve distribution of electricity to consumers by embarking on the construction of distribution networks.The NDPHC Managing Director, Chiedu Ugbo, said the company was developing 296 distribution projects across the country.Ugbo said: We also have to work with the government for the minister to make sure that we complete a number of our distribution projects.We have completed more than 20 distribution projects to improve the ability of distribution companies to take more power to the people.We have seven distribution infrastructures in Kogi and these are completed projects yet to be taken over by the distribution companies.We cant leave this projects idle, the projects are being vandalised, some of the parts have been stolen, we need companies to start using this project to supply electricity to communities.Besides the efforts by government agencies, the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANEDS) has been working to boost the electricity distribution network.Despites, the various interventions, stakeholders in the electricity sector, are pushing for more efforts to further expand distribution infrastructure and make use of the unused energy.They call on relevant agencies to give adequate attention to power generation, transmission and distribution to ensure steady power supply.
A human rights lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN), has called on the Federal Government to immediately release the seven Cameroonian separatists that were arrested by the Department of State Services in Abuja on Saturday.Falana said in a statement that the arrested freedom fighters  Mr. Sikiku Tabe, Prof. Che Awasum, Mr. Nalowa Bih, Dr. Fidelis Che, Dr. Nfor Nfor, Dr. Henri Kumeng and Dr. Cornelius Kwanga  who are calling for the secession of the Southern region of Cameroon, entered Nigeria legally and thus should not be treated as criminals.He said the agitators, who are calling for the creation of the independent state of Ambazonia, had been held incommunicado and denied access to their lawyers, doctors and relatives contrary to the provisions of the United Nations Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners.Falana said, Since the Cameroonians entered Nigeria legitimately their arrest and detention by the Federal Government cannot be justified under the law. As Africans, the detainees are entitled to human rights to personal liberty, freedom of association and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Nigerian constitution.Furthermore, their unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination is protected by article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights which has been ratified by both Nigeria and Cameroon.The human rights lawyer urged the Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Abubakar Malami (SAN), not to extradite the agitators as Nigeria had no extradition treaty with Cameroon.He further advised the Federal Government to consider the safety of Nigerians in Bakassi who might suffer attacks from supporters of the arrested freedom fighters.Falana said, Having failed to crush the ideas which recently led to the demand for the state of Biafra by the members of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, the Federal Government should not attempt to provoke the marginalised people of Southern Cameroon by frustrating their legitimate demand for an independent state of Ambazonia.Since the Federal Government has not succeeded in completely defeating the dreaded Boko Haram sect it should not declare war on the people of Southern Cameroon and thereby further expose the displaced people of Bakassi to reprisal.We are therefore compelled to call on President Muhammadu Buhari to order the immediate release of the detained Cameroonian freedom fighters without any further delay. Since Nigeria has no extradition treaty with Cameroon, the Attorney General of the Federation lacks the vires to initiate extradition proceedings under the Extradition Act (E25) Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 for the extradition of the detained Cameroonian freedom fighters.Falana added that although the Federal Government was under pressure from President Paul Biya of Cameroon to hand over the detainees to the security forces in Cameroon, it must be realised that the detainees were entitled to reside or visit Nigeria without any molestation.
Two members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria otherwise known as Shiites were reportedly killed during a protest against the continu...

Two members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria otherwise known as Shiites were reportedly killed during a protest against the continued detention of their leader, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, in Kaduna on Sunday.Also, three persons were said to have been wounded and said to be receiving medical attention at an undisclosed hospital in the state.However, the State Police Command confirmed that only two civilians were injured, adding that nobody died in the clash.The spokesman for the police in the state, ASP Mukhtar Aliyu, said policemen were at the Leventis roundabout after receiving reports that the Shiites were about to embark on a protest march.He noted that the police were on ground to disperse the protesters because of government ban on such protest in the state.According to him, in the course of doing that however, there was an altercation between the protesters and the police.He added that two civilians and one policeman were injured as a result of the disagreement.Aliyu said the situation had been brought under control, adding that the police made some arrest.However, Aliyu did not give the number of those arrested but said that they would soon be charged to court.But the Shiites spokesman, Ibrahim Musa, confirmed that one person was killed while several others were injured.It has been confirmed that one person was killed and several others were injured by the police, he said.The Free Zakzaky Protests broke out in Kaduna along the Ahmadu Bello Way on Kano Road at 5pm on Sunday.The police shot sporadically to disperse the protesters thus forcing motorists and other road users as well as residents to scamper into safety.Our correspondents observed that some traders hurriedly locked up their shops and fled the scene for fear of stray bullets.Earlier, Musa had issued a statement to explain that the processions were held in major towns of the North to protest their leaders continued detention.He added that their action became necessary in view of the deteriorating health condition of El-Zakzaky.He said, Free Zakzaky processions were carried out in major towns of northern Nigeria to press for the freedom of Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky because of the news of his deteriorating state of health.Protests had taken place in Kaduna, Kano and Bauchi among several other places yesterday (on Saturday) night.
By Noah Cohen and Marisa Iati | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

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Driven by a historically low homicide total in Newark and a drop in violence in Camden County, homicides in New Jersey fell by about 7 percent in 2017 over the prior year, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis.

An informal survey of county prosecutors found there were 335 homicides in the state in 2017, compared with 362 killings in 2016.

"Though final numbers are still not available, we know that there has been a significant reduction in violent crime overall in New Jersey, including a very significant reduction in the total number of homicides, with certain cities seeing dramatic reductions," Attorney General Christopher Porrino said in a statement.

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He credited bail reform, which created a presumption of detention for serious gun offenses and for repeat offenders, with keeping high-risk offenders behind bars. More than 7,400 people were detained without bail from January through November, Porrino said in a statement.

(State Judiciary data in July showed a 20 percent decrease in the number of people held in jail awaiting trial under the new bail system.)

Porrino said his office also created a new policy to combat victim and witness intimidation, caught 466 dangerous fugitives, enhanced community policing, referred certain high-risk offenders for federal prosecution and took almost 5,000 guns off the street this summer in a gun buyback program.

In 2017 there is nothing that we worked harder on than reducing violent crime, and thankfully those efforts have yielded results," Porrino said.

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Jon Shane, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, cautioned against drawing conclusions from comparing homicide totals in 2017 and 2016.

That information alone, he said, is not enough to determine whether homicides are down because of law enforcement strategies, or other factors typically tied to crime, including unemployment, high school graduation rates and the availability of affordable housing, he said.

In order to empirically measure long-term trends  you need many years worth of data, and you also need to know what has been going on that might be responsible for those things," Shane said.

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Below, see a county-by-county breakdown of homicide numbers. All data was collected by NJ Advance Media from prosecutors' offices across the state, and reflect counts as of Dec. 28, 2017, or later.

Some law enforcement agencies that reported homicide totals included incidents in which a police officer fatally shot someone. The numbers are preliminary, as they are collected ahead of the Uniform Crime Report, which is verified by the New Jersey State Police against federal guidelines.

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Atlantic County

2017: 22 homicides

2016: 20 homicides

Thirteen of the county's homicides, or just over 60 percent, took place in Atlantic City, according to city police.

In a particularly deadly 10-day span, three men were shot to death in separate incidents in a downtown neighborhood. David Blackwell Jr., 31, of Hammonton, was killed May 5 on N. Virginia Avenue. Anthony A. Jordan, 28, of Atlantic City, on May 11 was found shot to death in a car on Brigantine Boulevard. Less than four days later, Atlantic City resident Keith Cundiff Jr, 32, was killed on N. Maryland Avenue.

Police have charged Lorin Wright, 31, of Atlantic City, in Cundiff's death.

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Bergen County

2017: 4 homicides

2016: 7 homicides

Bergen County had one homicide each in Bergenfield, Hackensack, Edgewater and Paramus. The suspects in all four killings knew the victims. Three were domestic violence incidents, and authorities say another was the culmination of a dispute between two residents of the same building.

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Burlington County

2017: 13 homicides

2016: 19 homicides

The slayings of Sasikala Narra, 38, and her 6-year-old son, Anish, were some of the county's most brutal killings this year. Narra's husband told police he discovered the bodies March 23 in their Maple Shade apartment.

The case remains unsolved, and authorities have offered a $25,000 reward for tips in the investigation.

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Camden County

2017: 34 homicides

2016: 55 homicides

This year's homicide count in Camden County represents a steep decline from the previous year.

"Police involved shootings that result in a death, as well as vehicular homicides that fit within the New Jersey manslaughter statute, are included in the Camden County Prosecutor's Office homicide statistics for the sake of transparency," an agency spokeswoman said.

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Cape May County

2017: At least 2 homicides

2016: 0 homicides

The prosecutor's office was unable to provide the number of homicides for 2017 by deadline, but there were at least two killings in the county.

Herbert Tozer, 51, of Middle Township, is accused of stabbing 45-year-old Robert Niemezura in a Rio Grande motel in January. Tozer was indicted on murder charges in March.

An Ocean City woman, Denise Webber, was found dead by strangulation at a hotel in July. Her roommate and romantic partner, 49-year-old Paul Kline, is charged in her killing.

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Cumberland County

2017: 12 homicides

2016: 12 homicides

Half of the Cumberland County homicides occurred in Bridgeton, a city of approximately 25,000 residents that saw five slayings and a fatal police-involved shooting.

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Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Essex County

2017: 111 homicides

2016: 126 homicides

County records list all homicides, which include fatal shootings by police officers. Newark police, however, provided a total of murders, which does not include officer-involved shootings.

Newark saw homicides fall to a historic low this year, city officials said at a December press conference. The state's largest city saw 72 murders in 2017, a roughly 25 percent decline from the year prior.

"Obviously, this is not a victory. We're not claiming that we won here. We recognize that we still have a long way to go," Newark Mayor Ras Baraka told reporters.

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Gloucester County

2017: 7 homicides

2016: 5 homicides

Clayton, Elk, Glassboro, Paulsboro, Washington Township, Woolwich and Woodbury had one homicide each in 2017.

In the Woolwich case, a man is accused of murdering his wife, dumping her body in the pool and then driving to get Applebee's takeout. In Woodbury, investigators say a burglar beat a woman to death while she was house-sitting for a friend.

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Patrick Villanova | The Jersey Journal

Hudson County

2017: 25 homicides

2016: 29 homicides

Hudson County's homicides included 19 killings in Jersey City. Hoboken, Union City, Kearny and Guttenberg accounted for the remaining killings in the county. A review by The Jersey Journal in October, depicted in the graph above, found the bulk of the county's homicides were the result of shootings.

Officials said 2016 marked a decline in killings for the county, the Jersey Journal reported.

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Hunterdon County

For the fourth consecutive year, there were no homicides in Hunterdon County.

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Mercer County

2017: 25 homicides

2016: 25 homicides

The state's capital, Trenton, accounted for 21 of this year's homicides in Mercer County, according to the county prosecutor's office. Ewing, Hamilton, Hopewell and Lawrence each logged one killing this year.

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Facebook photo of Devin Smith

Lawrence saw its first slaying since 2001 in November, when 23-year-old Devin Smith was shot in the back of his head as he sat at the bar in an Applebee's on Route 1.

"It's very unusual to have a homicide in an establishment like an Applebee's  a family restaurant," Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri previously said. "It goes to illustrate how violence has proliferated and that no community is exempt from violence."

Prosecutors charged Noel Powell III, 27, of Lawrence, in the shooting. Sources told NJ Advance Media the killing stemmed from a decades-old dispute involving the two men and their families.

Defense attorney Robin Lord said Powell maintains his innocence.

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Middlesex County

2017: 12 homicides

2016: 8 homicides

Desiree Alvarado, 38, was fatally shot in broad daylight on a New Brunswick street in July. Christian Cortes, 25, of North Brunswick, was quickly charged in the killing of the mother of four. Alvarado's family said they had no idea what motivated the shooting.

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Cindy Capitani | NJ Advance Media

Monmouth County

2017: 12 homicides in 9 incidents

2016: 6 homicides

The count for this year included the stabbing death of 11-year-old Abbiegail Smith, whom prosecutors say was killed by her upstairs neighbor, Andreas Erazo, on July 12 in Keansburg. Her body was found in a rear area of the Hancock Arms apartments after her mother reported her missing.

On New Year's Eve, a 16-year-old killed his parents, sister and a family friend with a semi-automatic rifle, prosecutors said. The teenager, whose name has not been released because he's a juvenile, is charged with four counts of murder and a weapons charge.

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Authorities searched the woods behind the Lakeland Bus depot in Rockaway Township on Sept. 8 as part of a death investigation. (Justin Zaremba | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Morris County

2017: 2 homicides

2016: 2 homicides

A U.S. Marine was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend at her Morris Plains apartment complex in August, Mayor Frank Druetzler said. A month later, a homeless man from Dover was charged in the Labor Day killing of another homeless man in Rockaway.

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Ocean County

2017: 5 homicides in 4 incidents

2016: 7 homicides

This year's toll included an August double murder-suicide in Lacey. In that case, prosecutors say Gregg Scott, 51, beat to death his 48-year-old wife, Kimberly Dunphey, and their 7-year-old son, Owen Scott, before killing himself. The slayings, authorities said, stemmed from a marital dispute.

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Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Passaic County

2017: 23 homicides

2016: 20 homicides

A double homicide in Paterson in March was connected to Kim DePaola, a cast member on the TV show "The Real Housewives of New Jersey." Aaron Anderson, 27, and Antonio Vega Jr., 25, were shot in the head and found inside an Audi, belonging to DePaola, that was set on fire. Authorities said they were killed during a robbery.

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Salem County

2017: 3 homicides

2016: 5 homicides

The homicides in Salem County this year included two stabbings and a shooting, according to authorities. Fatal stabbings occurred in Pennsville and Salem, while the deadly shooting was in Penns Grove.

Salem County Prosecutor John T. Lenahan said it was unusual that there were more stabbing deaths in 2017 than there were shooting deaths because there is a proliferation of guns here and in other neighboring counties. He said authorities believe drug and alcohol use have contributed to the countys homicides.

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Somerset County

2017: 3 homicides

2016: 3 homicides

Killings in Bridgewater, Franklin Township and Bound Brook marked the three homicides this year in Somerset County.

In Bridgewater, a son is accused of stabbing his mother to death and seriously injuring his father. An 18-year-old man is accused of fatally shooting an 18-year-old woman near a deli in Franklin. A Paterson man faces charges in the death of another man in Bound Brook.

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Sussex County

There were no homicides in Sussex County for the second year in a row, according to the county prosecutor's office.

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Authorities investigate the fatal shooting of Anishalee Cortes in Roselle on June 13, 2017. (Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Union County

2017: 19 homicides

2016: 22 homicides

There were eight homicides in Elizabeth, five in Plainfield, two in Roselle, two in Union Township, one in Hillside and one in Linden.

Anishalee Cortes, 22, in June was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend, Dominick Richards, in his Roselle driveway before he turned the gun on himself, authorities said. Richards, 49, had previously been charged in Essex County with assaulting Cortes at gunpoint, but a judge found there was not enough evidence to hold him behind bars.

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Warren County

2017: 1 homicide

2016: 2 homicides

A murder-suicide in White Township was the only homicide of the year in the county of approximately 106,000 people. Authorities said the two men involved were residents of Easterseals group home, which serves homeless people with mental health diagnoses.

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Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc and on Facebook.

Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Marisa_Iati or on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips
UPDATE: Man found keys in SUV before crashing into terminal

A man is in custody after stealing a police SUV and crashing it into the waiting room at the Hoboken Terminal this morning, NJ Transit officials say.

No one was injured in the incident, which occurred around 8 a.m., when the man got into an NJ Transit K9 vehicle and crashed it through the doors that lead from the ferry slip to the terminal's waiting room, causing "significant damage," NJ Transit spokeswoman Lisa Torbic said.

The man, whose identity has not yet been released, was arrested at the scene. Authorities are still investigating the incident and are trying to determine the man's motive, Torbic said.

NJ Transit train service in and out of Hoboken is not being affected by the crash, Torbic said, adding that the normal on-board ticket purchasing surcharge is being waived.

Meanwhile, the terminal's waiting room is closed while authorities continue their investigation. A train is currently serving as a temporary waiting room on track 8, the spokeswoman added.

NBC4 New York is reporting that the FBI's New Jersey office is aware of the incident and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force are responding to the scene as a precaution.
Aqua Survey, Inc., based in Flemington, and the Stockton Presbyterian Church have collaborated to donate funds to build a school in a remote area in the very impoverished village of Vieng Xai, Laos.

Currently the 263 elementary school students attend a tattered, bamboo-hut school without electric.

They have worked hard to provide the funds for all materials and four professionals to oversee the villagers' construction of the school. The villagers have been very involved with the school's construction.

The country is poor largely due to the 80 million, fully-fused, yet unexploded Vietnam-era bombs that remain in their topsoil. History books call it "The Secret War." Accidental detonations still occur weekly. Income in this village ranges per family from $30 to $50 per month.

Aqua Survey, a unexploded ordinance detection and survey company, works in Laos, and was aware of the critical shortage of adequate school buildings.

The school will be dedicated on Jan. 27.

"I was inspired to build the school in memory of Hunterdon County's Jason Fuhr and to honor the Viegn Xai village children," said Ken Hayes of Aqua Survey. "Jason was a great supporter of kids and education in South Hunterdon School District. 'The most important industry in any community is education,' Jason (said).

"I have traveled and worked in Lao PDR, Southeast Asia, twenty times. On Jan. 23, I will lead a group of Americans to participate in the dedication festival, including U.S. school teachers, Jason's widow (Irma, 84-years-old), three Aqua Survey UXO specialists and school supporters. ... Our Lao Team will return to JFK on Feb. 2."

Submitted by Ken Hayes
A man was killed early Monday morning (Jan. 8) in an Algiers shooting, New Orleans police said. He was found on the driveway of an apartment complex in the 6300 block of Woodland Highway. (File photo by Chris Granger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
No, aliens aren't the reason for this star's unusual qualities, LSU professor says
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A Powerball ticket sold at a Metairie store was a big winner in Saturday's drawing, according to the Louisiana Lottery Corp. It's worth $150,000. (File image, Louisiana Lottery Corp.)
Arcade Fire performs on the Altar Stage at Voodoo Fest at City Park in New Orleans on Sunday, October 30, 2016. (Photo by Chris Granger, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)(CHRIS GRANGER)
This image released by NBC shows Oprah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP)
This image released by NBC shows Oprah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. (Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP) (Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC via)
by Stephanie Russell

The Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic minority living in Myanmars western Rakhine state, have been described as one of the worlds most persecuted minorities. Myanmar, which is 90 percent Buddhist, has denied the Rohingya citizenship and the right to free movement and higher education.

Last August the Myanmar military and police began a crackdown against the Rohingya in retaliation for alleged insurgent attacks on Myanmar border posts. Since then the Myanmar security forces have committed wide-scale human rights violations, including executions; mass killings of men, women and children; gang rapes; torture; and the burning of more than 288 Rohingya villages. The violence and brutality caused more than 600,000 Rohingyas  more than half of the 1 million Rohingya who lived in Myanmar  to flee across the border to Bangladesh by the end of October.

Myanmar has not granted U.N. human rights monitors access into the worst affected areas, because they want to avoid the scrutiny, explains Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications alumna Ravina Shamdasani 00, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Of course, we cant let them avoid the scrutiny, so we do remote monitoring from across the border.

In mid-September the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, sent a team to Bangladesh near the Myanmar border to interview refugees who fled Myanmar. In a report issued in early October the U.N. human rights office concluded that the brutal, well-organized attacks have been carried out against the Rohingya community with the intention of not just driving them away but also preventing their return. The high commissioner described the Myanmar government operations against the Rohingya in northern Rakhine state as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Theres virtually no part of the world where human rights is not a concern for the U.N. office for human rights. In addition to Myanmar, the office is zeroing in on other countries with grave violations, including Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines and Venezuela.

Shamdasanis role at the U.N. human rights office is to shine the spotlight on the governments committing the worst abuses and expose them to international scrutiny. I am passionate about ensuring that the U.N. human rights office has a robust public voice so that were able to amplify the voices of the victims, speak truth to power and alert the international community about the commission of serious human rights violations, so they can address or prevent them from occurring, she explains.



Ravina Shamdasani was 11 years old and living with her family in Hong Kong when right outside her school she saw massive student protests in 1989, just before the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Then in 1997 she witnessed the handover of the former British colony to China. So I grew up at a time in Hong Kong when human rights and politics were very much at the top of our minds, because we were going to be handed over from the U.K. to China and would have to face all the uncertainties that come with that.

It was during the handover that Shamdasani decided to go into journalism. She thought, Im good at writing, I have an interesting perspective on things, given my background, and Im interested in social issues. And, most importantly, this is a time when you need watchdogs to make sure that when this delicate transition is happening, the rights of people are protected.

Shamdasani opted to go to the States for college because no country values freedom of expression as much as the United States, she says. Just as she was beginning to look at schools, she met Medill professor Abe Peck when he was in Hong Kong on business, and their conversation convinced her that Medill was the school for her.

After graduation, Shamdasani worked briefly in public relations in Chicago but soon went back to journalism when she a got a job in her hometown with the South China Morning Post. She naturally gravitated toward covering human rights issues and ended up creating a human rights beat at the newspaper, particularly relating to refugees, discrimination and national security laws. It was during this time that she first began to interact with the United Nations.

I decided eventually that I didnt just want to write about human rights, she recalls. I wanted to go work in the field of human rights. Shamdasani earned a master of laws in human rights at the University of Hong Kong, shortly after marrying McCormick School of Engineering alumnus Amit Wadhwa 00 (they met as students the summer before their junior year  at the Northwestern Arch on the day that Ravina was learning to ride a bike). When her husbands employer transferred him to New Zealand, Shamdasani left the South China Morning Post and took a job with a nongovernmental organization in Auckland that worked with ethnic minority immigrants and refugees.

I want to make young people aware how important their role is as young Americans, as students, as young global citizens, to really reshape the direction of the world.  Ravina Shamdasani

While Shamdasani found it rewarding to help people on a day-to-day basis, she was frustrated with the limited impact of working at the grassroots level. There was an institutional shortfall that was causing many of the problems the immigrants and refugees were facing, she says. So I decided that I wanted to work at a higher level to be able to affect policy, to be able to affect systemic change.

After her husband was accepted into an executive MBA program at INSEAD outside Paris, Shamdasani decided on one of her visits to France to travel to Geneva to network at the United Nations. Her journalism background and masters in human rights were the right fit for the U.N. human rights office. In 2008 they offered a three-month stint, which then turned into a full-time job that shes held for nine years.

When Shamdasani returned to Northwestern last April to speak at a student conference, she sat down with Northwestern magazine editor Stephanie Russell to talk about her work at the United Nations.

SR: What brought you back to campus for the first time since you graduated in 2000?

RS: Northwestern students decided to host a Model United Nations for about 600 high school students from around the U.S., mostly from the Midwest. It was late January when they invited me to speak, when a lot of us in the world were a bit uncertain about the direction where things were headed and what was happening with populist movements everywhere and recent elections. I immediately thought, Yes, absolutely, I want to go back to the U.S., and I want to speak to the students there. And I want to make young people aware how important their role is as young Americans, as students, as young global citizens, to really reshape the direction of the world.

And I thought back to when I was a student and recalled that you really arent aware of the power that you have as a young person to change the world. Its kind of an abstract concept.

Lately the U.S. has been questioning its role globally at a very fundamental level. And this is very worrying for those of us who are not Americans and who live in the rest of the world. The United States has been a champion internationally. And the United Nations relies a lot on the U.S. for its support, both financially but also in terms of its moral and political support in pushing the human rights agenda. And should the U.S. withdraw from this completely, that would be a catastrophe.

The rhetoric around that was just very worrying for us, so I welcomed this opportunity to come back and to speak about the importance of the U.N., the work that we do with the support of the U.S. and why its so important that we keep doing this work.

Tell me about your job.

My job is to be the mouthpiece of the office and to speak out on human rights issues around the world. The great thing about the U.N. human rights office is that were based in Geneva. The U.N.s political headquarters are in New York  thats where the secretary-general and the Security Council are  but the humanitarian headquarters are in Geneva. That distance gives us a lot more freedom. We are able to speak out on human rights issues, and were less bound by political considerations, in a sense, which is what makes the job quite satisfying.

Where is the U.N. human rights office active today, and what is its role?

The U.N. human rights office has a global mandate. So we have a presence in about 60 countries where we cooperate very closely with the governments. Its not all naming and shaming. We work a lot with governments to build institutions, to do trainings, for example, with police officers, to train them on what their duties are under international human rights law and under their own laws as well. For example, you do not torture to interrogate  there are other methods to use. So we advise on law reform in post-conflict societies. We also advise on constitutions.

For example, in Tunisia  which was really the only success story of the Arab Spring  soon after the former president was deposed, we were invited to set up an office there. So weve been there since 2011 working hand in hand with the government in crafting the constitution, making sure that NGOs, civil society, people from all walks of life are involved in the process and that they have ownership of that process. So the institution building, law reform, training  all of that, were very much active on in these 60 countries. Apart from that, there are the places where we just engage with NGOs and governments, and we try to persuade. Where persuasion and constructive advice and offers of assistance dont work, then we go public.

What do you find most worthwhile about your work?

For example, last April we issued a very strong press release on Burundi. The president is not respecting the term limits of his presidency, and the youth wing of his party is stoking up ethnic hatred. These youth groups are chanting songs, urging or threatening their opponents with rape, saying, We will rape these women and impregnate them to create more of our own. Its reminiscent of the genocide in Rwanda and in Burundis history as well.

So its very shocking and alarming stuff. But theres been nothing in the world media about this at all because, you know, its this little African country that most people dont even know about or where its located. So its our job to put this country on the map and to raise the alarm bells.

After we issued the press release we did a press briefing and did a lot of interviews on this issue. And its been in the headlines  if you look it up, youll see there are a lot of stories about this. And its partly the language that we use, because we use language that journalists understand. Quite often, well do a press release, and it will appear in AP, Reuters, wherever, almost copied and pasted. And we love that, of course, because that way our message is getting out there unadulterated. Now what ends up happening is that sometimes youre a voice in the wilderness. You get your headlines for a few days, and then people forget about it and they move on.

Theres a lot of criticism of the United Nations and calls from some countries such as the United States to cut its budget. Whats your take on this?

Theres a lot of talk of reforming the U.N. to make it more effective. Its clear that the U.N. is far from perfect. It does need reform. It does need to be made more effective. And even the secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, has agreed to this. But it all has to be done in a constructive manner. It all has to start from the premise that the U.N. is a very important institution and multilateralism is very important.

The United Nations was set up after the Second World War, so that never again would there be such a war. Any reform of the U.N. has to start from the premise that that goal is still a valid one and that this institution needs to be strengthened to better serve that goal.

What does the United Nations Human Rights Council do?

The Human Rights Council is an intergovernmental body, so its a body of states. When they pass a resolution setting up an investigative mission or a fact-finding mission into a particular country, its naming and shaming in an international forum by your peers. You are being held to account. So its a pretty big deal for states when a commission is set up to review something in a country. Eventually, we might call for the situation to be referred to the Security Council or even to the International Criminal Court. So there are results. You see the impact of your work, which is quite satisfying.

The public pressure sometimes does work. But it often doesnt. Syria is a key example of the failure of everyone.

What are some of the other trouble spots that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is closely monitoring?

Yemen is another one thats been a priority for us. More than 5,000 civilians have been killed since war broke out in 2015. And a cholera outbreak has claimed more than 2,000 lives since April. Millions of people are at risk of famine. And yet all of this was avoidable; its completely man-made. The cholera and famine are due to the blockades and sieges that have been imposed, which have resulted in a lack of humanitarian assistance and medical care.

For three years we at the U.N. human rights office were calling for an independent international investigation into the conduct of the hostilities, including the conduct of the coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia. But there was a lot of reticence in the international community. They were more than happy to set up an international inquiry into Syria and Burundi. But on Yemen there was a lot of reticence because of the parties involved. Finally, in September this year, our persistence paid off and an international inquiry was set up. We hope this will put on notice the parties to the conflict that the international community is watching them closely.

Venezuela is another hot spot. The situation continues to deteriorate. The constituent assembly has been getting rid of human rights defenders and watchdogs, including the attorney general, who was the one person in government who seemed to be holding the government to account.

Can you tell me about one of the successes of the U.N. human rights office of which youre most proud?

When the Obama administration joined the Human Rights Council, it made a tremendous contribution over eight years. One issue that was a very difficult one was discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex, or LGBTI people. This is an issue that was so contentious, so controversial that the U.N. Human Rights Council had never been able to act on it. But during the past eight years, with a lot of behind-the-scenes work, we managed to get a resolution passed in the Human Rights Council to create a special rapporteur [an independent expert or investigator] on discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

The high commissioner had conducted and released a mandated report that was groundbreaking  it was the first time in a U.N. setting that we were able to expose the kinds of human rights violations that people are subjected to merely on the basis of their sexual orientation. And the Obama administration played a very important and key role in making this happen. This is the kind of thing that you can see with that leadership role. We need more of that.

Putting it in the U.N. context helped us make it a human rights issue. This is not about whether you think that its OK for people to have consensual same-sex relationships. Its about people being killed, people being subjected to violence, people not getting jobs or access to their fundamental human rights simply because of whom they choose to love. Theres a lot that can be done once the U.N. takes up an issue.
A complaint about the heat at a rental unit in a downtown Hammond apartment complex last month was one of several in communities around Northwest Indiana, where residents were dealing with the extreme cold weather the past few weeks.

Several communities such as Hammond, Gary, Michigan City and Valparaiso have regulations that require temperatures be maintained at a certain level, although that is not true in all municipalities.

In the last month, the Hammond Code Enforcement Division has responded to at least seven complaints of low temperatures in residential units.

Code Enforcement Commissioner Jaime Prieto said rental units, as well as other "habitable dwellings," need to be maintained at 68 degrees, 3 feet from the floor of the units.

City inspectors don't randomly check units to ensure they are adequately heated, but instead need to receive a complaint first, according to Hammond Corp. Counsel Kris Kantar.

"We can always inspect (and do) if there is a complaint, but the Indiana General Assembly specifically stated in the rental laws that we cant inspect apartment complexes in general," wrote Kantar by email when asked about the city's policy.

Hammond's building code in regard to temperatures is consistent with the state building code, which requires that heating facilities in buildings must be able to maintain an interior temperature of at least 68 degrees when the temperature outside is 2 degrees.

Valparaiso Building Commissioner Vicki Thrasher and others said the state building code, however, only deals with new construction and that local communities need to have their own regulations in place to deal with existing structures.

Standards can vary

A look at some cities and towns shows a variety of regulations:

 Whiting: The city's housing code states heating facilities must be capable of adequately heating habitable rooms to at least 65 degrees when the outside temperature is 10 degrees below zero. From Sept. 15 to June 1, each dwelling unit heated from a common heating plant has to be able to be kept at a minimum of 65 degrees at 7:30 a.m. and 70 degrees at 8:30 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. on average throughout the unit.

 Valparaiso's Rental Housing Code sets minimum inside temperatures from Oct. 1 to May 1 at 68 degrees from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. and 60 degrees from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Thrasher said earlier this week that her office had received one complaint of inadequate heat so far this winter.

 Michigan City: A city ordinance said those renting out dwelling units need to supply heat between Oct. 15 and April 30 to maintain the room temperature of not less than 68 degrees between 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. and not less than 65 degrees during other hours.

 Munster: From Oct. 1 to May 1, a minimum of 65 degrees from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and 60 degrees during other hours.

 LaPorte: A city ordinance states the temperature in habitable rooms must be 65 degrees at a minimum.

 Highland: The town's property maintenance ordinance require a room temperature of 65 degrees be maintained between 6:30 a.m. and 10 p.m. and 60 degrees between 10 p.m. and 6:30 a.m..

 East Chicago: A city ordinance states all dwelling units must be furnished with heating facilities capable of safely and adequately heating all rooms and maintaining a temperature of 70 degrees from Sept. 15 to June 1.

 Gary requires temperatures to be maintained at 68 degrees between Oct. 1 through May 1. The city's building department received five complaints about heating since Dec. 27.

Residents can call Gary city officials at 219-881-1311 with heat-related concerns. Gary and other communities, however, indicated that residents may want to contact their emergency dispatch center during weekends.

Michigan City Building Commissioner Sue Downs said last week that her city had only three complaints regarding temperatures this winter.

Of those three, she said, one person did not return calls to set up an appointment and the second did not answer the door when officials arrived for an appointment. The third case, she said, was a confirmed complaint related to a damaged NIPSCO gas meter.

Portable heat alternatives not good

Downs said "it's far too cold and dangerous for anyone to be without sufficient heat right now" and said Michigan City has warming centers throughout the city for people in need.

She said while she understands these may not work for everyone, especially if pets are involved, for some people they will work in the interim until sufficient heat can be restored.

Downs also emphasized that using stove burners or multiple space heaters is not a safe alternative when it comes to lack of heat in a structure. Portage Building Commissioner Douglas Sweeney said there dangerous levels of carbon monoxide can build up in such cases.

In addition, Downs said tipping and tripping hazards are related to the use of space heaters as well as possible dangers involving kids and pets. There also can be concerns about the device being located too close to combustibles, the use of extension cords that are inadequate to handle the high current, and cords overheating when placed under rugs or carpet.

Even if a community does not have a local code or ordinance establishing minimum heat standards, it likely can provide some type of assistance to residents having problems with heat in their structures or referrals to where they can obtain help.

Portage's Sweeney, for instance, said while his community does not have local regulations in place concerning heat, city officials can provide contact information for different agencies that can assist residents depending on their situation. Portage residents can call his office at 219-762-4204 for more information.

Hammond's Prieto indicated people should initially try to contact their landlord or landlady to resolve the issue with their heat prior to contacting officials.

If they can't resolve the issue, tenants in Hammond can file a complaint through the city's 311 application or call the city's Code Enforcement Division at 219-853-6447, although phoning is the preferred method to make sure someone is quickly notified.

Prieto said officials will contact the building's owner to have the situation resolved. He said officials also have the ability to issue fines of up to $2,500 per violation.

In some cases, officials are able to take care of a problem without even contacting the building owner. Prieto said he went out with inspectors to a rental unit the other day and discovered while the heater was running, the vents were closed. He said he merely had to open the vents and when he went back to check later, the temperature was fine.
MICHIGAN CITY  A virtual life sentence has been given to a Michigan City man for molesting a 12-year-old girl.

Eugene Tschopp, 45, will be 90 at his earliest release date after receiving a 60-year prison sentence Thursday in LaPorte Superior Court 1 on two level 1 felony counts of child molesting.

Most felons must serve no less than 75 percent of their sentences, prosecutors say.

According to court documents, Tschopp was living with the girls family in December 2016 when the molestation, almost daily for about six weeks, began.

The victim's mother and the victim's 8-year old sister left for work before the other girls had to get up for school. Their father, described as a hard sleeper, would still be upstairs in bed, police said.

Tschopp was acquitted in October by the same jury of molesting the victims 8-year-old sister but convicted on four other felony counts, including criminal confinement, and received 18 years on those convictions.

That time was ordered to be served concurrently with the 60-year sentence.

According to court documents, he would go inside the girls bedroom at night and use a chair to keep the door from being opened on the outside.

The oldest sister, initially too scared to tell anyone, eventually told her father after her younger sister encouraged her to do so, police said.

Tschopp, who lived there for two years without a job, was immediately kicked out of the residence, according to court documents.

LaPorte County Prosecutor John Espar said there was no substantial physical evidence, but testimony from the younger sister and experts in the sexual assault field corroborated the victims claims.

"We were very pleased with the courts sentence and pleased, obviously, with the outcome of the case," Espar said.
CROWN POINT  The U.S. attorney's office is asking a judge to impose what could become a life sentence on former Sheriff John Buncich next week.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Benson is asking U.S. District Court Judge James Moody to impose a prison term of between 15 and 20 years on the 72-year-old veteran of Lake County Democratic politics for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from towing firms doing business with county government.

Benson is asking the judge to put Buncich in chains immediately after the sentencing hearing, now scheduled to take place Jan. 16, because "given Buncich's age, a sentence imposed at this level raises serious doubts as to Buncich's desire to appear to serve out this sentence."

Benson adds Buncich is Facebook friends with Frank Kollintzas, a former East Chicago city councilman who fled the country 13 years ago to avoid a lengthy federal prison sentence for his role in East Chicago's sidewalks corruption case. Kollintzas has been living safely in Greece, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

Benson also reveals in a new court filing Buncich attempted to use the power of his office to locate potential government witnesses against him, but was stopped by "more virtuous and courageous members of the Lake County Sheriff's Department."

A federal grand jury indicted Buncich, Timothy Downs, the sheriff's former second-in-command at the Sheriff's Department, and William Szarmach, a Lake Station towing firm owner, in November 2016 on bribery and fraud charges.

The government alleged Szarmach and an undercover government informant, later identified as Scott Jurgensen, owner of Samson's Towing of Merrillville, paid Buncich more than $35,000 from 2014 to 2016 to secure the most lucrative towing work the Sheriff's Department provided.

Downs pleaded guilty a month later, and admitted he collected much of that money on behalf of the sheriff. Szarmach followed last July, and both testified as government witnesses against Buncich.

Benson states that shortly after Downs' guilty plea, Buncich called Dennis Matthew Eaton, one of his top five department commanders, into his office and asked Eaton to look up Downs', Jurgensen's and Szamrach's names in the department's "CP clear system."

County Police Chief William Paterson said Monday the department uses the CP clear system to locate criminal suspects through utility billings and the cellphone records as well as suspects' family, and past and present associates.

Benson said the CP clear system also contains financial and other data on members of the public.

Benson said Eaton refused to do it on grounds it would be illegal witness-tampering and warned others in the department with access to the system not to run the names, either.

Eaton had this and a second database shut down to avoid their illegal use by Buncich, despite the fact it slowed the work of legitimate investigations.

Benson argues the former sheriff also deserves a longer prison term for violating state campaign funding laws by refusing to report cash paid to his Buncich Boosters election committee and for holding himself out as a moral authority.

"Buncich's hypocrisy is overwhelming," Benson said. "The false image he projected the entire time he was himself violating the law is disgusting and despicable. Buncich not only lied to the very people who elected him sheriff, the citizens of Lake County, but also to his fellow law enforcement officers and in all likelihood, even himself."
INDIANAPOLIS  The chances Indiana will legalize Sunday retail alcohol sales increased significantly Monday when Senate Republican leaders announced the measure is one of their top priorities for the 2018 legislative session.

Senate President David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said Senate Bill 1, which permits carry-out alcohol sales between noon and 8 p.m. on Sundays, isn't the most important proposal of the year  but "its time has come."

"It seems there's a consensus building around that in the private sector among all the players and certainly the (Alcohol Code Revision) commission believed that this summer, so it recognizes that," Long said.

He declared the most important issues are workforce development and education, which also top the Senate GOP agenda, as well as fixing the Department of Child Services, which Long said likely will wait until 2019 after an outside review of the agency is finished.

Concerning workforce, Long indicated that Senate Bill 50, incentivizing companies to participate in worker training efforts, and Senate Bill 172, requiring all schools offer a computer science course by 2021, are needed to maintain Indiana's competitive business climate.

He said those measures work in conjunction with Senate Bill 189, increasing education funding by some $17 million to account for greater-than-expected public school enrollment, and Senate Bill 177, reducing Indiana's four high school diplomas to one to comply with federal education requirements.

Senate Republicans also plan to combat the opioid drug epidemic by phasing in a requirement in Senate Bill 221 that all doctors verify their patients haven't recently been prescribed opioids by another medical professional.

"We do hope this will help to curb the over-prescribing of these very addictive drugs," state Sen. Erin Houchin, R-Salem, said.

In addition, the GOP caucus wants to alter civil forfeiture laws in Senate Bill 99 to balance law enforcement interests with the constitutional rights of property owners accused of misusing their homes, vehicles and other items for criminal purposes.

"Indiana has made great strides over the last decade, but as our world continues to change, there will always be ways for us to improve upon the work done here at the Statehouse on behalf of Hoosiers," Long said.

"There is a lot of work to be done in the coming months on all of these issues, but our caucus is ready to take on those challenges."

Republicans control 41 of the 50 seats in the Indiana Senate.
DYER  Joe Sannasardo loves being an old-fashioned straight-razor barber, a profession he first embraced in 1958.

At age 79, the Schererville resident recently reopened Your Style Barber Shop at 1514 Joliet St. after spending June and July at Rush Medical Center in Chicago being treated for heart problems.

In August, Im home trying to recuperate. I asked the doctor about going back to my shop. He let me work from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sannasardo recalled, adding with a chuckle, That lasted two weeks.

Back behind the barber chair since then, Sannasardo relishes giving haircuts and shaves from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays as does his employee, Roger Niemeyer.

Roger is the closest thing to an old-fashioned barber in his age group, Sannasardo said of the 35-year-old licensed barber.

This is just the latest chapter in a career that began when Sannasardo went to barber school and worked in downtown Chicago for many years.

However, when The Beatles invasion of the 1960s made mop-haired men the rage, many barber shops closed, he said. "But no matter what business I was in, I always had a barber chair," he said.

While he worked in the construction industry, Sannasardo set aside one Sunday a month to cut the hair of regular customers.

"One guy would bring lunchmeat, another would bring beer. They would come over to my house; we would watch a game, and I'd give 30 haircuts," he said.

In 1990, Sannasardo began thinking about going back to his first love full-time when a barber friend asked him to fill in for one week at a shop in Chicago. He ended up working there until 1997  until the building was converted to condominiums.

Sannasardo then moved to Indiana and took over a South Holland barbershop from a relative who had a heart attack.

After selling that South Holland shop, he opened Your Style Barber Shop in Dyer, five minutes from his home.

"I call my shop by that name because that's what I do. I give the people whatever style they want," he said.

Today, Sannasardo said, customers are often asked by hair stylists what number clippers they want used.

Pulling out a long black plastic comb, he said, a comb is our numbers. I give an old-fashioned facial and straight-razor haircut.

Classic tools, philosophy

One of the straight razors Sannasardo uses has a 1/2-inch-wide blade made of surgical steel and manufactured in Germany. Another made in France features a 1/4-inch-wide blade.

When these straight razors become dull, Sannasardo hones them on a special stone.

I put lather on and use a figure-8 stroke, he said.

Attached to a barber chair is a strap that has canvas on one side and Belgian horse leather on the other, which Sannasardo uses to put the edge back on his razors.

I set a customer down and put a towel around his neck. I take my badger brush, lather on soap and hot water. I put a hot towel on the face. That gets the whiskers up, he said.

It takes 14 strokes or less to give that man a shave thats as smooth as a babys butt.

When he started as a barber 60 years ago, Sannasardo said haircuts cost 75 cents.

Times have changed, he said.

I do senior citizens haircuts for $16 before 1 p.m. After 1 p.m. its $18, he said. We dont take appointments. Our customers are all walk-ins.

Although housed in a modern setting along U.S. 30, Your Style Barber Shop serves as an iconic salute to the past.

One ceiling-high shelf above the mirrors features Sannasardos collection of miniature cars. Another on the opposite side of the shop holds barbering products from bygone eras, including a box of Brylcreem manufactured in England and an antique bottle that reads, Lilac Vegetal Toilet Water, which served as aftershave. Old Brylcreem TV ads used to say: "A little dab'll do ya."

I use lilac aftershave, Sannasardo said. For many people, Old Spice is the aftershave they remember.
HANNA  A LaPorte County man was badly hurt in an overnight snowmobile crash.

Charles Zbuka, 38, of Hanna, was listed in serious but stable condition Monday at Memorial Hospital in South Bend.

Alcohol is believed to be a factor in the accident in Hanna Township, according to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and LaPorte County sheriff's office.

Conservation officer Tyler Brock said the results of a blood alcohol test must be obtained before moving forward on possible charges of operating while intoxicated. Speed and poor visibility were also cited by DNR as factors in the accident.

"Its still an active investigation," Brock said.

According to LaPorte County police, Zbuka and Anthony Marcus, 38, were returning home from a tavern on separate snowmobiles at about midnight. It was snowing with poor visibility as they darted across a large field near County Road 1300 South.

Zbuka was traveling 30 to 40 miles per hour, several lengths ahead of Marcus, when he drove into a large ditch and struck the steep embankment on the other side, DNR said.

Zbuka was unconscious, floating face up in the ditch, when Marcus found him, police said. He was bleeding heavily, and his breathing was shallow. Marcus, a volunteer firefighter for Hanna Township, pulled Zbuka out of the water.

"He was really fortunate that person was there," Brock said.

Brock said Zbuka was wearing a helmet, which possibily kept his injuries from being more serious.

Emergency responders used ropes to help get Zbuka to a waiting ambulance above the very steep embankment, he said.

The weather kept a medical helicopter from coming out.

Zbuka was taken to LaPorte Hospital, then later by ambulance to South Bend.
VALPARAISO  Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday for a former Hammond and Gary police officer accused of murdering his children's mother Nov. 18, 2015, at her Portage apartment.

Kevin Campbell, 33, faces a single count of murder in the shooting death of Tiara Thomas, 30.

Campbell is charged with killing Thomas, who was found covered in blood about 7:30 a.m. in her home at Park Place Apartments, 5970 Old Porter Road in Portage. She died later at the hospital.

Police believe Campbell shot Thomas sometime between 4:37 and 5:55 a.m. that same morning, then took their three children to school.

Court documents indicate Campbell kept the three children overnight at his home in Hobart the night before Thomas was killed. It also alleges Campbell requested his oldest child bring him a key to the apartment nearly two weeks before the homicide.

There was no forced entry into Thomas' apartment the morning she was killed, according to court documents.

Campbell paid Thomas nearly $1,500 per month in child support, and the two often argued about the money and how it was spent, according to charging information. The charges indicate Campbell was in debt and his vehicle had been repossessed.

A plea of not guilty was entered during Campbell's initial court appearance.

Four weeks of court time have been set aside for the trial, in part to allow Porter Superior Court Judge Roger Bradford to stay on top of his weekly court calls on Monday and Friday, according to the court. The trial will take place Tuesday through Thursday each of those weeks.

Campbell is represented by defense attorneys Roy Dominguez and Susan Severtson.

Porter County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Matt Frost and Deputy Prosecutor Cheryl Polarek will argue the case against Campbell.

Campbell, who remains behind bars without bail, as is standard with a murder charge, has been ordered by the court to avoid contact with his children.

Campbell, a Hammond probationary officer, was fired from the job in the wake of the killing after being identified as a person of interest in the case.

He was also a police officer on the Gary Police Department from Aug. 3, 2011, to Jan. 11, 2015, when he left to join the Hammond department.

Campbell, a probationary officer at the time with Hammond, was fired after he had been identified by authorities as a person of interest.
CHESTERTON  Marcus Malapanes' fingers flew Sunday afternoon turning the sides of an unsolved puzzle cube.

Right. Left. Up. Down.

In less than a half minute the puzzle cube was solved.

Malapanes' personal best is solving the iconic puzzle in 16 seconds. The 12-year-old seventh-grader at Chesterton Middle School has qualified for the World Cubing Association national competition in July in Salt Lake City, Utah.

He and his father, Eric, who has also become hooked on the cube puzzles, have started a Chesterton Cubing Club, which met for the first time Sunday at the Thomas Branch of the Westchester Public Library.

"I just like it," said Marcus Malapanes about the cube, the most famous brand named after Hungarian architect Emo Rubik, who invented the toy in 1974 and found its way into nearly every child's Christmas stocking in the 1980s.

In the last decade it has made a resurgence, said Eric Malapanes, an engineer, with local, regional, national and world competitions that bring together hundreds of people racing against the clock to solve the scrambled puzzle.

The Malapaneses got Victor Ames interested in the hobby. He brought his daughters, Jessica and Samantha, to the club's initial meeting.

"There are so many people who are faster at it. That is a challenge," said Ames, adding it gives him a chance to challenge himself. "The community of gamers is really great. It is low cost and the kids are having great fun with it."

James Lee, 17, of Valparaiso, said he was introduced to cubing about five years ago by a fellow Boy Scout and got hooked.

"I have ADD. It really helps with keeping my hands busy, keeping me calm," he said, adding it took about a month to learn to solve his first cube. His personal best now is 20 seconds.

The cubers all said it is a matter of learning algorithms and moves, turning the sides of the cube  no matter the number of layers or even if the cube is a pyramid  until the moves become entrenched in the mind and muscle memory.

"You have to have patience. Patience is a key to this," Lee said.
The Valparaiso Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 76 has named their patrol officer, investigator and supervisor of the year for 2017.

Each award is voted on by the members of Valparaiso FOP Lodge 76. This year, Officer Jonathan Watson was named patrol officer of the year, Lt. Jerame Simpson was named supervisor of the year and Sgt. Dave Castellanos was named investigator of the year for 2017.

Watson has been with the department for two years, Castellanos is a 16-year veteran of the department and Simpson is an 11-year veteran of the department.
IMPORTANTVILLE, Ind.  During the sensational 2016 presidential race, Republican Donald Trump barnstormed our state and in one impromptu moment, deemed himself to be in a fictitious city that becomes this columns dateline.

Our president doesnt always adhere to the normal conventions of truth, but I borrow his imaginary city to pose the Indiana of 2018 as stationed at the center of the political universe, just as it was two years ago.

As we head into 2018, this state stands at a nexus that eclipses the nation and world. Indiana is poised for what Ive been calling the $100 million U.S. Senate race that could determine which party controls the upper chamber.

U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly is seeking a second term and will likely face either U.S. Reps. Todd Rokita, Luke Messer or former legislator Mike Braun, of Jasper.

Many observers rate Donnelly one of the most vulnerable Democrats, but he has cris-crossed this state over the past five years and felt comfortable enough to vote against the Republican tax reforms last month. Rokita and Messer, who once consistently warned of saddling children with towering national debt, just voted to add $1.5 trillion more.

If in the coming months Hoosiers deem the tax cut worthy and jobs and wages grow, it may prove to be good politics.

Braun is the outsider, who built a big corporation in his hometown and may provide the best contrast to Donnelly, given the approval of Congress stands below 20 percent.

We watch in fascination Vice President Mike Pence and Director of National Security Dan Coats attempt to keep President Trump within the guardrails, as his volatility via Twitter rattles everywhere from Congress to capitals around the world. This surfaced once again this past week when Trump goaded North Korea tyrant Kim Jong Un via tweet, bragging about that the size of his nuclear button.

Trump should be a wildly popular president as the economy hums, unemployment is low and Wall Street roars. But his tweets and lack of discipline are responsible for almost all of his legal and political problems, from Robert Muellers Russia collusion probe of the Trump campaign to his assaults on U.S. intelligence agencies and our allies.

Reporter Mike Allen, of Axios, reports West Wingers are startled.

Every war in history was an accident, said one administration insider.

The danger here is Kim also is an unpredictable actor  not one fully understood by U.S. intelligence.

We are in a hair-trigger environment. And this is potentially a shooting war with nuclear risk, the insider told Axios.

Some describe Pence as Trumps bootlicker, but its possible future accounts of history will conclude that Pence exudes loyalty and crooning deference to keep the president on the reservation. Thats a tough task when former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon tells Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff that Trumps children and campaign manager may have committed treason when they met with Russian henchmen connected to President Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Indiana is mired in an opioid epidemic, and this places Gov. Eric Holcomb and key members of his administration on the front lines of one of the most compelling and lethal health dilemmas to hit this state in a generation.

Failure on this front means swamped county jails, which have become akin to drug treatment facilities. It means local schools with limited budgets, unable to keep up with a flood of special needs children, many who are being raised by their grandparents. Prosecutors are beginning to charge heroin dealers with murder.

Holcomb and Pence often talk about the state being the best laboratory of innovation. With the opioid epidemic, our leaders and our research institutions and our advanced manufacturing and bioscience sectors face daunting, yet thrilling, challenges. A pandemic, such as polio that once haunted America, can forge some brilliant breakthroughs.

Are Hoosiers up to the challenge?

Because this is an election year, Indiana Democrats face a monumental task. They control less than a third of General Assembly seats, three of 11 congressional seats and none of the Statehouse constitutional offices.

If Democrats cant make inroads in a potential 2018 wave, Indiana could remain, essentially, a one-party state. Chairman John Zody tells me he has conducted 15 town halls, trained more than 1,000 volunteers and potential candidates and believes his party will end the super majorities.

We have entered an era when norms are being shattered in Trumps disruptive presidency. Mark Schoeff Jr., who is Howey Politics Indianas longtime Washington correspondent, points to the dangers facing the GOP.

Republican members of the Indiana congressional delegation have done nothing to put any distance between themselves and Trump with the possible exception  but only in a relative sense  of Rep. Jim Banks. When the Trump administration collapses, none of them will have so much as a courageous statement, let alone a courageous vote, to give them political cover. In this case, silence erodes integrity.

An electoral wipe out would change Trumps cult of personality hold over the GOP, possibly by the November elections.

So here we are in Importantville, Indiana. The whole world will be watching.
While 2017 was a challenging and politically divisive year, United Ways, partners and supporters stepped up to advocate for the communities we serve and managed to accomplish several policy wins to improve opportunity for all. The United Way Network advocated in a variety of ways this year  Capitol Hill Days, letters to Congress, targeted outreach, site visits, social media and more. It made the difference. We will continue the fight for families in 2018  particularly on tax reform and possible cuts to entitlement programs. Here are just a few things we accomplished this year:

1. Restored funding for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA):

This summer, the House Financial Services Subcommittee voted to cut the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program (VITA) by 50 percent (from $15 million to $7.5 million) in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 appropriations bill. Fortunately, due to targeted outreach to members of Congress on the Appropriations Committee, local United Ways and supporters communicated the value of this critical program and worked with several congressional offices to restore funding to $15 million for VITA in a technical fix to the bill. The amended bill was passed by the full Appropriations Committee on July 13.

2. Met with nearly 300 members of Congress and sent over 9,500 letters to Capitol Hill:

This year, the United Way network met with and communicated the organizations priorities to hundreds of members of Congress. Facing threats to the charitable deduction, budget cuts to safety net programs, and political uncertainty on health reform, United Way CEOs, staff and volunteers stormed Capitol Hill, met with members in district offices, and sent thousands of letters to Congress to fight for the health, education and financial stability of the communities we serve.

3. Fought for robust funding for Health, Education and Financial Stability:

Given the administrations proposed budget cuts this year and the current political environment, we expected an uphill battle to maintain funding for health, education, and financial stability programs. Fortunately, the United Way network and supporters rallied support for funding for critical community services and programs in the FY 2017 and FY 2018 appropriations bills. The FY 2017 appropriations bill, which funded the federal government through September, was largely a success for United Way priorities, allocating level funding for programs such as EFSP, VITA, Head Start, CCDBG, and the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program.

4. Launched the first Advocacy Week of Action:

During August recess, the United Way network and supporters around the country participated in a social media campaign to raise awareness about United Ways top priorities. The weeklong campaign, held on Aug. 21-25, aimed to increase congressional and public support for United Ways priorities in health, education and financial stability. As a result of this effort, 241 unique Twitter accounts contributed to the digital Advocacy Week of Action, garnering over 1.9 million social media impressions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. In addition, 50 United Way CEOs in the most influential congressional districts participated in a special policy call to strategize about communicating with their members of Congress during the August recess.

5. Protected critical health programs from funding cuts and structural changes:

Through call-in days, action alerts, sign-on letters and digital advocacy campaigns, the United Way Health Advocacy Cohort coordinated grasstops and grassroots advocacy in support of the network's health priorities. The Cohort now has over 95 local and state United Ways actively engaged in health policy-advocacy efforts. Despite attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, United Ways successfully advocated to ensure that these attempts did not result in a reduction of coverage for working Americans. In addition, United Ways worked to protect Medicaid from structural changes that could potentially have devastating consequences for state budgets and health care coverage and access for vulnerable populations.

Learn more about advocacy efforts in your local community by contacting your local United Way at www.unitedwaypc.org in Porter County, www.lauw.org in Lake County, or www.unitedwaylpc.org in LaPorte County.
Sure, President Donald Trump might really like the military option, maybe a pre-emptive strike on selected targets. Or maybe not. Thats why whatever he thinks or fantasizes is ambiguous, strategically speaking.

This term, strategic ambiguity, has been around for a while. South Korean President Moon Jae-in nearly a year ago defended his acceptance of the deployment of a counter-missile battery for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, saying it was necessary to maintain strategic ambiguity.

He was roundly criticized for what seemed like a waffling response, but one might justify this policy, strategically, as another way of saying, Keep em guessing.

I was reminded of the term in an article by Anthony Paul, an Australian journalist who once roamed Asia for the Readers Digest and Fortune. Whats to be done? Paul asked. In anything-can-happen mode, he noted you cant rule out a coup in Pyongyang instigated by China or a strike by some still-secret, non-nuclear U.S. weapon. Realistically, though, he had to acknowledge no recourse other than continuing diplomatic talks.

These words are timelier than ever in view of Kim Jong-uns call for North-South dialogue and hopes for North Korean participation in the Pyongcheong Winter Olympics. The United States now faces a policy dilemma. What if Kim insists on cancellation of annual U.S. and South Korean war games? And how about those sanctions as toughened last month by the U.N. Security Council?

No way would the United States want to get on the wrong side of President Moon, who has appeared quite cooperative with his American interlocutors since winning the special election as the liberal hero in the wake of the Candlelight Revolution that led to the demise of the arch-conservative Park Geun-hye.

Its that uncertainty promting Anthony Paul to conjure U.S. policy drifting into a period of what may be dubbed strategic ambiguity, meaning strategic patience at risk of becoming impatience and a consequent enhanced threat of military action.

The fact is Americans dont know what to do. Theyre debating among themselves how to appear broad-minded, cooperative, yet strong-willed and non-compromising.

OK, it will be easy for Washington not to get too excited over Kim Jong-uns rhetorical flourish about that nuclear button on his desk. Hes not going to order a nuclear strike against the United States. Its too obvious what would happen as a result, that is, the destruction of his regime, the end of the Kim dynasty and a lot of other holy hell that no one can predict.

At the same time, Kim is not about to abandon his nuclear program. Hes made that so clear, so often, in so many ways, that only a fool would think hed abandon the whole show if given proper incentive. Granted, quite a few fools do dream of a deal whereby, yes, if only wed stop those war games, those shows of naval and air superiority in the seas and skies so close to North Korea, then hed surely say, fine, no more nukes and no more talk about missiles hurtling warheads toward the White House.

In the real world, though, all anyone can imagine is freeze for freeze, a cessation of missile and nuclear testing in response to the United States and South Korea canceling the annual war games that were supposed to begin while the Olympics are in full sway, but thats not a good idea either. Having won this concession, Kim would not stop there. He would also be demanding an end to sanctions while refusing, as always, to negotiate an end to his nuclear program.

In the Olympic spirit, however, relief from tensions is still possible. Moon is so eager to bring about reconciliation and dialogue that he may be amenable to a deal that at least ensures the Olympics will be free from missile testing, let alone terrorism. The Americans, anxious to preserve the alliance, may have to go along, to appear cooperative and supportive.

If strategic ambiguity is not the final answer or solution, its still preferable to the suffering and hardship that all sides need to avoid.
We are a nation of 325 million people. We have a bit of control over the behavior of our 535 elected representatives in Congress, the president and the vice president. But there are seven un-elected people who have life-and-death control over our economy and hence our lives: the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board.

The Federal Reserve Board controls our money supply. Its governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate and serve 14-year staggered terms. They have the power to cripple an economy, as they did during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Their inept monetary policy threw the economy into the Great Depression, during which real output in the United States fell nearly 30 percent, and the unemployment rate soared as high as nearly 25 percent.

The most often stated cause of the Great Depression is the October 1929 stock market crash. Little is further from the truth. The Great Depression was caused by a massive government failure led by the Federal Reserve's rapid 25 percent contraction of the money supply.

The next government failure was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which increased U.S. tariffs by more than 50 percent. Those failures were compounded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Leftists love to praise New Deal interventionist legislation. But FDR's very own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal, writing, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work...We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started..."

The bottom line is that the Federal Reserve Board, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and Roosevelt's New Deal policies turned what would have been a two, three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 16-year affair.

Here's my question never asked about the Federal Reserve Act of 1913: How much sense does it make for us to give seven un-elected people life-and-death control over our economy and hence our lives?

While you're pondering that question, consider another: Should we give the government, through the Federal Communications Commission, control over the internet?

During the Clinton administration, along with the help of a Republican-dominated Congress, the visionary 1996 Telecommunications Act declared it "the policy of the United States" that internet service providers and websites be "unfettered by federal or state regulation."

The act sought "to promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies."

In 2015, the Obama White House pressured the FCC to create the Open Internet Order, which has been branded by its advocates as net neutrality. This move overthrew the spirit of the Telecommunications Act. It represents creeping FCC jurisdiction, as its traditional areas of regulation  such as broadcast media and telecommunications  have been transformed by the internet, or at least diminished in importance.

Fortunately, it's being challenged by the new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, who has announced he will repeal the FCC's heavy-handed 2015 internet regulations.

The United States has been the world leader in the development of internet technology precisely because it has been relatively unfettered by federal and state regulation. The best thing that the U.S. Congress can do for entrepreneurs and consumers is to send the FCC out to pasture as it did with the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regulated the airline industry, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated the trucking industry.

When we got rid of those regulatory agencies, we saw a greater number of competitors, and consumers paid lower prices. Giving the FCC the same medicine would allow our high-tech industry to maintain its world leadership position.
It sounds like a good plan, and Jeff Lynn of Auburn knows how to sell it.

Alabama is taking a long, hard look at its community college system and how it can better prepare students to find good jobs, and likewise, how it can better recruit more jobs by proving the state has a capable, ready workforce.

Thats where Lynn enters the picture. He is the vice chancellor of Workforce and Economic Development at the Alabama Community College System, which is a long title that means he recruits jobs, develops a suitable workforce, and primarily plays matchmaker between employers and employees.

The right direction

Industries that hire by the hundreds and pay good salaries want a big and talented employee pool from which to recruit.

Job-seekers, meanwhile, want something that pays well and can help them better their lives.

The community college system, if administered in a wise manner and treated fairly by industry, seems like a logical recruiting ground. Equally important, however, is the college systems dedication to advancing those students seeking higher education, and often with it, higher salaries and more options.

Lynn, who spoke recently at the Opelika Chamber of Commerce business breakfast, acknowledged the higher-education mission, touting the 2 plus 2 system for those wanting a four-year degree or more and begin that journey at a community college, such as our own Southern Union campus.

He also shared that he and Auburn University President Steven Leath have met to discuss the community college-university relationship.

Were moving in the right direction, Lynn said.

A fresh approach

Previous efforts only a year or two ago to move the college system in this right direction misfired out of the gate, at least in Southern Unions case, when talks of college mergers ignored local inclusion and smacked of bad politics with questionable administrative moves.

Southern Union, with an overall enrollment of around 5,000, was threatened with having its name changed and its administration moved to Alexander Citys college, despite the latter being less than half the size in students and facilities.

Southern Union also has gone years without a sitting president who did not have the interim tag in his or her title. Thus, issues remain that require smoothing out the wrinkles.

Lynns talk, however, seemed much more inclusive, matter-of-fact and laced with encouragement. And, opportunistic.

Want a better life, with a good-paying job? Learn and earn.

Getting certified pays

Alabama has developed various certifications that qualify job-seekers as ready to work when they meet the criteria of their chosen profession and of the employer looking to hire, whether that be an automobile-related plant needing a robot operator, or an aviation facility needing technicians for engine assembly.

Community colleges are helping to fill that role of meeting certification, and though not the norm, jobs requiring special skills can pay as high as $65,000 a year for starters, Lynn said.

Meanwhile, for current and prospective industries, We must make sure we are taking care of all the companies in this region, he said. We are feeding that pipeline like weve never done before.

There are 450,000 Alabamians without a diploma or degree, and a huge existing workforce from military veterans in the state. Getting them into the labor pool is a win-win for everyone.

Furthermore, many of the jobs provided by the manufacturers and industries being recruited to Alabama offer clean, safe, lucrative work environments, Lynn said, pointing out that its different from what generations before found with such jobs.

Welcome to Alabama

Any stigmatism about working in a facility associated with manufacturing seems to come more from the parents than the kids, Lynn said. Instead, younger students today find the work environment more pleasant and the pay more rewarding at many new companies. New technology helps.

Dream it. Do it. What we used to do with our community colleges is old news. What we do now is refreshing to companies, he said.

He followed that with talk of a new partnership with Apple, which can help teach skills using virtual reality.

Aviation also is and will be getting more attention.

The combination of what Auburn University and Southern Union State Community College offer in our community is nothing less than stellar. Any industry or business looking to locate here should find plenty of encouraging signs, with wide-ranging quality-of-life factors providing a strong foundation for a growing, more-skillful workforce.

Good jobs are here and more are coming.

Want better pay? Learn and earn.

Troy Turner is editor of the Opelika-Auburn News. He can be contacted at tturner@oanow.com.
A busy year has arrived for Opelika as the city embraces 2018 and the multiple projects that are coming with it, ranging from the construction and opening of new facilities, to roadway and sidewalk developments.

Im excited about 2018 for a number of reasons, said Mayor Gary Fuller. We have several ongoing projects. Some will be completed this year, and some will be starting this year.

Fire Department

Among projects expected to reach completion include construction of the new headquarters for the Opelika Fire Department, Fuller said. Expected to be complete in February, firefighters will relocate from 1015 Avenue B to be stationed between 7th and 6th streets, directly behind City Hall.

And this is something that all our firefighters have been waiting for, and theyre excited about it, Fuller said. And its going to be a new larger facility and much, much nicer.

Due to its age, the departments current headquarters has become more expensive to maintain, explained Chief Byron Prather. The fire department is excited about getting new, modern headquarters, which will enhance efficiency in daily operations once central staff members are relocated to a single location, rather than remain scattered among multiple stations.

We plan to move sometime early this year, and were excited about getting a new headquarters, Prather said. Were hoping to be more efficient at the new station by bringing all of our key, essential personnel under one roof.

Police Department

By springtime, drawings are expected to be completed and a bid placed for the construction of a new Opelika police headquarters and municipal court building, Fuller highlighted as well.

This will be 37,000 square feet, to be constructed on the same piece of property that the current police department and municipal court are located, he said, but a slightly different footprint because they will continue operating out of their existing facilities until the new building is complete, which we expect it to be complete in 2019. But construction should begin in 2018.

City Administrator Joey Motley also discussed the city projects for 2018, during which he highlighted the need for a new police headquarters and municipal court building.

Were into the design process, so well be getting some renderings and some floor plans and some things to look at on the police department, and get that construction started by the end of the year, Motley said. And thats a huge project for the project for the city, a much-needed police department. Were out of space, weve moved things around. Weve taken jail cells out where we need more storage.

Opelika, Auburn and the county inmates are held at the Lee County Jail as part of an agreement reached several years ago, Motley said, and the city pays a daily fee for housing inmates there.

Our municipal court also needs a lot more room and a lot more area for court dates, Motley continued. Unfortunately, our municipal court business has grown. I dont know that thats a good thing or not. But it is what it is, and we have to address that and have the capacity to move people through municipal court. So that will be part of the new building as well.

Officials with the Opelika Police Department are looking forward to the development of a new facility.

On behalf of the department, Capt. Bobby Kilgore wrote in an email, Everyone here at the Opelika Police Department is very excited about a new, modern and up-to-date Headquarters building. This new building will fit our current and anticipated needs for many years to come. We're all excited about the increase in space and work area, particularly in our Central Evidence room.

"This new building will allow us to better serve and accommodate the citizens of Opelika. We are very grateful for all of the support from Mayor Gary Fuller and the Opelika City Council. Without their commitment, this new building would not be possible.

Sidewalks, connector roads and bridge

The city will also be ensuring sidewalks and public buildings are compliant with federal regulations set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Fuller said. Allocating $200,000 in this years budget for sidewalk repair, officials expect to address these matters over the next two or three years.

Adhering to ADA regulations is a priority for the city, Motley said, and officials will focus on funding as these matters are addressed.

We did an ADA assessment [in 2017], Motley said. And so that refers to all our public buildings and our infrastructure, our sidewalks and roads and crossings. And well be putting that program together and submitting it to the proper authorities.

Construction on a new connector road for the Opelika SportsPlex & Aquatics Center is also anticipated to begin in the next several weeks, Fuller noted. The road will be developed between the SportsPlex on Andrews Road and West Point Parkway at Exit 64 on I-85.

And this will make it much more convenient for many folks traveling to the SportsPlex to be able to get there, Fuller said. Plus it opens up several hundred acres for residential development.

The Frederick Road extension involving South Long and Auburn streets, as well as Martin Luther King Boulevard, is slated for completion in a few weeks, Fuller said.

And there will be a large roundabout there, which is going to really improve the traffic flow between downtown and Tiger Town, and vice-versa, the mayor added.

Regarding another project, opening bids with the Alabama Department of Transportation will likely be made this month or early February for the construction of a new bridge at Cunningham Drive, Fuller also highlighted.

Cunningham Drive has been closed for several months because the bridge was not safe, Fuller said. And we will be constructing a new bridge there, but thats going to still be a few months even after the contractors left for the contractor to get in there and actually do the work of replacing that bridge so we can open Cunningham Drive up.

'Very busy' year ahead

The new King Honda dealership, located at the intersection of Gateway Drive and Pepperell Parkway across from Golden Corral, will be opening in a few months, Fuller noted. Development is continuing on the incoming Firestone on Interstate Drive, and planning is currently underway for new retail shops in Tiger Town.

Several new houses are being permitted and built as well, Fuller said.

In 2017, we permitted over 200 new single family homes, he added. And then a lot of commercial projects are underway or about to get started. So our building inspectors have been extremely busy.

Opelika is expecting a very busy year, Fuller remarked, but city representatives are geared up for it.

Were going to be busy, but thats okay, Fuller said. Were all about that. Were prepared for it. Weve got a great team of professionals here with the city. And so we look forward to working with citizens and business and industry to help them be successful. And we think itll be great here for all of us.
Mohammed Ssemanda, a 50-year-old Muslim man from Uganda, made news headlines all over Africa last month, when he married three women in a single ceremony, because he couldnt afford to marry them separately.

Ssemanda, a food vendor from the town of Katabi, in Ugandas Wakiso district, caused quite a shock when he showed up at the local parish with three women, all wearing white wedding gowns. He told reporters on the scene that his wives all know that he isnt doing very well financially, but they all agreed to marry him out of love. The 50-year-old added that the women arent jealous of each other and know that he will work very hard to support them.

Photo: Watchdog Uganda

My wives are not jealous against each other. Good enough, each has got a home and I promise to work harder and support them, the man said, adding that he opted for a single wedding ceremony because he just couldnt afford to pay for three weddings.

His brides, 48-year-old Salmat Naluwugge, 27-year-old Jameo Nakayiza and Mastulah Namwanje, 24, were all overjoyed during the ceremony and seemed to enjoy all the attention. Interestingly, Naluwagge has already been married to Mohammed for the last 20 years, so this was just a renewal of their marriage. The couple have five children together. If you couldnt tell from the photo, the other two women are actually sisters, and also have children of their own.



Asked how she feels about the 3-in-1 wedding, Salmat Naluwugge told Uganda Vision: I thank our husband for marrying us all at once; it is a sign that he will not discriminate or take sides with any of us.

Poligamy is frowned upon even in most Muslim countries, with many believing that it is only acceptable for the sake of widows and orphans with no means to support themselves, so Mohammed Ssemanda has drawn some criticism. However, there were also those who applauded his idea for the simple reason that it saved money.
Since unemployment is the lowest since 2000, the stock market is setting records, and businesses talk of expanding, Americans are perplexed at the continued sniping at President Trump.

Trump and his staff are battling a wave of negatives in Michael Wolffs new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Trump used a press conference and Twitter to denounce the book and slam the media for focusing on it.

Pro-Trump forces quote Maggie Haberman of The New York Times as saying Wolff gets basic details wrong; Alisyn Camerota of CNN as saying the book is sloppy; John Podhoretz, New York Post, calling it blithe ignorance, and Rich Lowry, National Review, saying it is too stupid and malicious for words.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-back-slamming-calling-author-total-loser-book/story?id=52176166

Trump's "shoot from the hip" communications habits give the media plenty to write about.

David Harsanyi

Conservative economists, including David Harsanyi, senior editor of The Federalist, says not enough credit is being given to deregulation and corporate tax cuts as factors that have resulted in a 4.1% jobless rate including driving unemployment among blacks to 6.8%, lowest in 44 years.

Employment gains for 2017 totaled 2.1 million according to the Jan. 5 report of the Labor Dept. of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was the seventh straight year of increases of two million-plus, it noted.

The Dow-Jones average rose 220 points Jan. 5 to a record 25,295.

The first year of Trump, coupled with the end years of Obama, will go down as one of the greatest periods of job growth in recent decades, Prof. Joseph Foudy of New York University told the New York Post.

Admittedly, helping the low jobless rate is that some workers have given up seeking jobs at the present time.

The business community, however, is solidly behind the Trump Administration and will do everything in its power to back policies that spur economic growth. A growing economy is good for PR, marketing and advertising.

Regs Blocked or Taken off Table

Hundreds of Obama Administration regulations have been blocked from implementation and thousands of others will never even be considered, says Harsanyi.

His complaint is that the liberal-oriented press props up economists who tell them what they want to hear. Economists who obsess over inequality rather than economic growth, about the future of labor unions, or climate change, are the ones whose comments get picked up, he says.

Plenty of economists are making good arguments for the free market but will never be members of the economists say, clique that gets quoted, he adds.

NYT Schizoid on Trump and Economy

Harsanyi is mystified at the contradictory messages that mark New York Times coverage of Trump and the economy.

He notes that after having bombarded readers with news of a homicidal Republican tax plan for so many weeks, NYT then said, at the start of a page one article: A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders and is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth and spurs job creationand may finally raise wages significantly.
Boston-based March Communications has been hired by digital performance management company Dynatrace as its North American PR agency of record. Dynatrace provides artificial-intelligence powered, full-stack automated monitoring. March will work with the companys global marketing team to support brand campaigns, thought leadership programs and general awareness building. Weve needed an agency onboard to help us build great relationships, get our story out there to important stakeholders and become more widely known, said Dynatrace senior director of brand and comms Frances Ward. Were thrilled to have March onboard to do that for us.







Diffusion has been named PR agency of record for Burrow, a company offering modular, customizable couches. Diffusions integrated communications campaign for Burrow will focus on telling the Burrow evolution story, building the companys overall brand awareness and spotlighting the company as well as its founders entrepreneurial story. The campaign will also position Burrow as one of the few companies offering luxury furniture at an affordable price point. Diffusion not only proved their media mastery in the consumer space, assuring they could get us the media we wanted, but they also went above and beyond to understand our story and core values, said Burrow co-founder Stephen Kuhl







BML Public Relations has brought on Mountain Creek Resort and kosher-food brand The Manischewitz Company as clients. The agency will assist Mountain Creek Resort as it works to overcome challenges left behind by previous ownership and change its consumer profile during the peak winter sport season. As agency of record for Manischewitz, BMLPRs remit is to help the company increase its brand awareness during holiday purchasing seasons as well as promote the launch of new additions to its food lines. In addition, BMLPR has added several new staffers: Jennifer Petrella and Chelsea Newberg have been brought on as assistant account execs and Kelsey Moran will serve as account coordinator. It is an exciting time in our agencys tenure and we are delighted to have the opportunity to announce positive growth from both the client and staffing sides of our business, said BMLPR president and CEO Brian M. Lowe.
Finn Partners today announced that it has acquired London-based travel and tourism firm Brighter Group.

Financial terms of the acquisition, which is effective immediately, were not publicly disclosed.

One of the UKs largest independent travel and tourism PR firms, the Brighter Group represents clients across the travel sector and also provides crisis, media training and event production offerings.

The Brighter Groups Debbie Flynn with Finn Partners founding partner Peter Finn.

The agency, which staffs 22, was founded in 1995 by CEO Debbie Flynn. Clients include Belize, Dubai, Intrepid Travel, Jordan, Air Europa and South African Tourism.

In light of the acquisition, the agency will now be known as The Brighter Group, a Finn Partners Company, and will physically move its operations into FPs existing London offices.

Flynn takes the position of managing partner and reports to Chantal Bowman-Boyles, who leads Finn Partners Europe, and Gail Moaney, who heads FPs travel practice. Brighter Group chairman Steve Dunne becomes senior partner of strategy and non-executive director Fiona Jeffery takes the role of Finn Partners global tourism advisor.

No other staff changes were reported.

Finn Partners founding partner Peter Finn told ODwyers that the acquisition bolsters the global independent agencys tourism practice, which continues to be a high-growth area, while simultaneously providing an opportunity to extend its US-based tourism practice into London.

The move means well be able to offer support in EMEA to our existing client base composed of world-class destinations, global airline and hotel brands, and travel services companies, Finn told ODwyers. The acquisition is also another important step in our overall growth in Europe, as my vision is for Finn to become one of the worlds top three independent marketing and communications firms with offices on every major continent.

Global M&A advisor SI Partners advised Brighter Group in the deal.


Roger Stone

Former Trump adviser Roger Stone says the president should make good on his campaign-trail vows to let individual states decide on the legality of marijuana.

In an e-mail Stone sent out on Jan. 6 under the heading Protect State Legalized MarijuanaStop Jeff Sessions Now, there is a link to a video that shows previous statements the President has made regarding medical marijuana and juxtaposes those statements with the sharply divergent opinion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

While Jeff Sessions and his Justice Department moved last week to rescind an Obama-era policy used as a protection for states that have legalized marijuana, the video shows Trump telling an audience I think medical should happendont you agree? Sessions, however, is shown making the statement, Good people dont smoke marijuana, and a Newsweek headline seen in the video refers to the Attorney Generals war against legal marijuana.

The video is part of a fundraising drive for the United States Cannabis Coalition, a pro-cannabis project formed by Stone that is dedicated to influencing federal level decision makers so they honor States Rights and state mandated marijuana laws as well as reform our antiquated and failed federal drug laws, according to its website.

Last June, Stone told VICE News that his first and foremost goal was persuading Trump to keep his pledge and direct the Justice Department to reflect the views you stated in the campaign.

For 30 years, Stone says in another video, made to inaugurate USCC, I have marched, written about, spoken about, and advocated drug law reform. He goes on the say that as a candidate, my friend Donald Trump said that he supported states rights in the matter of whether the states could legalize marijuana.


Samantha Barry

By hiring Samantha Barry as its new editor-in-chief, Glamour is making a dramatic break with the past. Barry, who comes to the magazine from CNN Worldwide, where she was executive producer for social and emerging media, has never worked at a magazine before. Barry will take over the reins from departing EIC Cindi Leive on Jan. 15. Sam is Glamours first digital-native editor, which is to say she arrives from the future rather than the past, Conde Nast artistic director Anna Wintour said. Barrys hiring comes as the company is placing more emphasis on its digital products, such as Vanity Fairs The Hive and them, a site aimed at the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender audience. It has also reduced the frequency of several titles, with GQ, Architectural Digest and Glamour going from 12 issues a year to 11, and Teen Vogue discontinuing its print version altogether.



James Langford

The Washington Examiner has hired James Langford as business editor. He will report on the impact legislative and regulatory action in the federal capital has on corporate revenues, share prices, deals and planning. In addition, the Examiner is launching a business section on its website, and Langford will soon be joined by a second business reporter to increase the papers business coverage both online and in print. Langford previously was banking & finance editor at TheStreet, and he has also served as deputy editor for Americas aerospace/industrial news at Bloomberg News. Washingtons impact on business is an area of news Ive wanted to cover better for some time, said Examiner editorial director Hugo Gurdon, and its great that it is now ready for takeoff.



Sean Moran

Viacom has signed an agreement to acquire influence-marketing company WHOSAY. The companys reach into next-generation advertising and marketing platforms and solutions is meant to boost Viacoms capabilities across advertising, marketing and digital content. WHOSAY has executed more than 50 campaigns for MTV, BET and other Viacom brands over the past two years. In addition, the company has built a bricks-and-mortar-focused WHOSAY Shopper team, which will open up potential new retail opportunities for Viacom brands. Were excited about a deeper integration with WHOSAY and the strength of our combined capabilities, said Viacom head of marketing & partner solutions Sean Moran. This partnership will add to our linear, digital and mobile arsenal by bringing us further into the world of social media and shopper marketing.
The blue bungalow with its cheerful yellow door is impossible to miss.

But when Bryan Frost and Luka Gonzalez first looked at the Benson property four years ago, they werent sure if a house even existed behind the row of overgrown cedar trees in the front yard. Painted in a worn green and brown, the home blended with its surroundings.

Their real estate agent was already inside, so despite their misgivings they crossed the threshold. The size  under 1,000 square feet  was almost another deal-breaker.

Why are we doing this? Gonzalez remembers asking.

Then they took in the wood floors, original doors and unpainted built-ins.

The charm and character were too much to resist, along with the right price and a chance to move into an up-and-coming neighborhood.

Theyve been working on the house ever since.

Its been transformed, Frost says.

Frost, who owns Black Awning Vintage, has decorated in what he calls a natural bohemian vibe.

Definitely plants, he says, along with handmade items. Layering of rugs, soft textures such as sheepskin, and jute. Theyre all incorporated.

Frost says he has embraced the fun aesthetic he picked up from The New Bohemians by Justina Blakeney.

Handmade Turkish rugs cover the dining room and living room floors, with the one in the front room layered over another of cowhide. Sheepskins rest on a dining room chair and a console in the living room.

Original fiber tapestries by Don Freedman hang in the dining room and bedroom.

A day of junking in Walnut, Iowa, yielded a vintage chandelier Frost rewired and installed above the dining room table.

It was hiding in a corner, Frost says. I saw it and just loved it.

An Eastlake bedroom set, a gift from his mother when they moved in, has been split up, with the headboard in the sunny corner bedroom and the dresser with its marble top in the dining room, doubling as a buffet. It sits next to a fiddle leaf fig that Frost with some exasperation has renamed a fickle leaf fig. It can be a challenge to maintain, but its popular in design circles. He had to have one.

They are just so pretty.

Frost considered wallpaper, but the task was too complicated with the homes textured plaster walls. Instead, he stenciled one wall in the dining room with an Ikat design, then carried that motif into the only bathroom.

The house itself wasnt in bad shape. They had the floors polished and spent hours redoing popcorn ceilings in half the house. The other rooms have to wait until the homeowners can find the motivation.

A landscaper tamed the trees in the front, and frequent parties are held in the spacious backyard. Frost is known for lavish Halloween parties, and this years event was done in a Wizard of Oz theme, complete with tornado.

Theyve done some remodeling in the kitchen, adding Ikea cupboards with wainscot molding on the doors, but still have the original appliances.

Thats something they want to work on when the budget allows, along with cosmetic improvements in the bathroom. Frost, for starters, would like to swap the laminate flooring for something more authentic to a 1920s home.

The clawfoot bathtub wont budge. Thats another item that sold them on the house.

After its transformation, though, friends are encouraging them to move. Theyve had more than one offer.

The pair admits another house is in their future. They enjoy the challenge of bringing a place back to life, and are ready to tackle something larger. Rehabbing, Frost says, is a passion.

I think well find an old house that needs all the love.

MEET BRYAN FROST

Bryan Frost, once involved with Wallflower fashions, has turned his passion for vintage in a new direction with Black Awning Vintage, an interior design endeavor. Frost says he haunts local thrift stores for amazing finds for his clients. His tip? You can often find the best stuff at church thrifts. His basement is stuffed with must-haves. Im a crazy thrifter, he says.
Several years ago, retired U.S. Marine Corps Col. John Folsom was touring Bethesda Naval Hospital at the holidays when he encountered a young soldier whod suffered a brain injury when an improvised explosive device detonated near his head in Iraq.

With the soldier were his sister and his mother, who cares for him.

What never left me is, his mother is his primary caregiver, Folsom said. Whats going to happen to him when his mother is no longer able to care for him?

Now Wounded Warriors Family Support, the Omaha-based national nonprofit that Folsom founded to support families of those wounded or killed in combat, has begun planning a 24-bed residential home in rural Douglas County for combat-wounded veterans who, for whatever reason, have no one in their lives capable of providing day-to-day care.

The organization has hired a project management firm and committed up to $150,000 for initial planning and preparation, to be completed by late spring. The Mount Calvary Commandery No. 1 in Papillion, an appendant Masonic body, has agreed to donate 10 acres for the facility north of Rainwood Road, near the Omaha Public Safety Training Center.

The organization hasnt yet secured funds to construct the residence. But Hal Daub, who serves on the groups board and on its building committee, said hes confident that the organization will be able to raise an estimated $6 million to $10 million. That money would cover the cost of building the residence and create an endowment to guarantee ongoing operations and help cover gaps between benefits veterans bring with them and the cost of care.

This is an exciting, unique living accommodation for a very special group of men and women who have served and sacrificed for our country right in the middle of the United States, said Daub, a University of Nebraska regent and former Omaha mayor and Nebraska congressman.

Folsom, the organizations president, is also confident that the money can be raised. The organization, which has a four-star rating on Charity Navigator, plans to start with foundations in Omaha, across Nebraska and nationally. Members already have had preliminary conversations with some. But ultimately, he said, they will reach out to potential donors large and small. His hope is to open by Christmas 2019. The organization has launched a website specifically for the project at dunhamhouse.org. More information about the organization is available at www.wwfs.org.

Its a mission thats not being done, Folsom said. And I truly believe people looking to support our veterans, once they understand our vision, the generosity of the American people will come through and help us build it.

The facility would be known as Dunham House, named in honor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, who served with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Dunham, a New York native and recipient of the Medal of Honor, died of injuries he suffered when he smothered a grenade with his body to protect fellow Marines on April 24, 2005, at Husaybah, Iraq.

The residence would be designed for men and women who need help with activities of daily living, such as cooking, bathing and dressing. It would not be geared toward those who need skilled nursing care, although the group is working to make provisions for those who come to need it. Residents would be divided into smaller groups in a family living setting in order to provide the kind of camaraderie that service members come to rely on while theyre on active duty.

While the group hasnt done a formal study to determine the need for such a facility, Folsom said, members experience working with families across the country  providing retreats, respite care and other assistance  shows that the need is there.

Parents of such veterans are aging, siblings often are scattered across the country and divorce rates  fueled by the stresses of dealing with life-changing injuries  run high. The alternatives for combat-wounded veterans with no family support are assisted living centers and veterans homes, which tend to be populated by older residents and those without the same combat experiences. All four Nebraska veterans homes had waiting lists at the end of December.

Daub said he believes the proposed residence has the potential to be a model for more. We think a lot of folks will want to build more right away, he said.

Anthony AJ Johnson of the Mount Calvary Commandery said the Masonic group has given the wounded warriors organization an option on additional land, at a reasonable rate. It owns a total of 80 acres, currently farmland. The donation of the 10 acres is contingent on the organization raising the funds to build the residence.

Johnson, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant, said he, too, believes there is a need for the residence the group has planned, and then some. There are assisted living facilities out there ... but nothing set up strictly for the combat veterans. I think hes meeting a need that nobodys thought about yet.

Daub said Omahas central location would provide easy access for family members to visit. The residence would include some rooms to accommodate visitors for short stays.

Daub said the group plans to work with Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital to provide assistance on an outpatient basis.

The project also offers the potential for a number of public-private partnerships, such as in-kind donations from building suppliers and trade groups, as well as veterans groups.

We think Omahans will be pleased to know this kind of project is being developed right here, he said.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  President Donald Trumps plan to open Americas oceans to petroleum drilling was condemned by West Coast and Florida governors but welcomed in the state where most lease sales could be held.

Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, an independent facing re-election this year, embraced Interior Secretary Ryan Zinkes proposed 19 lease sales in the state, including six in the potentially oil rich but environmentally sensitive Arctic Ocean waters.

The Department of Interiors draft five-year offshore leasing plan is an important step toward allowing Alaskans to responsibly develop our natural resources as we see fit, Walker said Thursday.

But the big question is whether oil companies will commit the substantial resources it would take to invest in a frontier area where the cost of drilling is extremely high compared with other regions  and simultaneously face the wrath of environmental groups fiercely opposed to Arctic offshore drilling.

Royal Dutch Shell spent $2.1 billion on Chukchi Sea leases in 2008, invested another $5 billion overall in U.S. Arctic waters, and pulled out after drilling a dry hole in 2015. Oil companies closely watched Shells experience, said Mark Barteau, director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute.

Theres lower-hanging fruit elsewhere, Barteau said. Its all about going after the easy stuff first.

Shell has no plans for offshore Alaska exploration, Shell spokesman Curtis Smith wrote in an email. It was too early to know how Trumps draft five-year plan would play into future portfolio decisions.

Given the desire to keep pace with natural field decline and the inherent uncertainty associated with exploration, more options are always preferable when it comes to potential lease acreage  both on and offshore, he said.

The Beaufort Sea, off Alaskas north coast, holds an estimated 8.9 billion barrels of oil, and the Chukchi, off Alaskas northwest coast, holds an estimated 15.4 billion barrels.

But Arctic waters also provide habitat for threatened polar bears, walruses and whales, and are the home of Inupiat coastal villages. Hanging over any drilling in Arctic waters is the question of whether spills  which drilling critics say are inevitable  can be cleaned up in ice-choked water along coasts with negligible infrastructure compared with the Gulf of Mexico and other drilling regions. Alaskas bitter cold, fierce storms and winter darkness compound the challenge.

With an oil spill impossible to contain or clean up in these remote waters, todays decision needlessly places in harms way the wildlife, cultures and communities that have long called this region home, said Brad Ack, the World Wildlife Funds senior vice president for oceans.

Environmental groups delayed Shells exploratory drilling with successful lawsuits challenging the federal governments inadequate environmental review of Arctic waters preceding the 2008 sale. Two years later, after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, federal regulators negotiated strict Arctic operating rules to prevent a similar disaster off Alaska.

The requirements include a shortened drilling season, second drilling rigs stationed nearby that could drill relief wells after blowouts, and an armada of support vessels ready to cap blowouts or clean up spills.

The aftermath of Shell drilling in 2012 gave critics another Alaska drilling problem to highlight. A Shell drilling barge, the Kulluk, broke loose from its towing vessel and ran aground near Kodiak Island. And the company Shell hired to drill at a second site paid $12.2 million after pleading guilty to eight maritime pollution and safety counts.

Shell finally completed an exploratory well in 2015, but it was dry. Citing those results and a challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment, the company abandoned drilling in U.S. Arctic waters.

The Trump administration could loosen Arctic drilling operating rules, but bidders would still face environmental opposition. Protesters in 2015 boarded a Shell drilling rig as it crossed the Pacific Ocean and hung from a bridge in Portland, Oregon, to block a company vessel from leaving for Alaska. Companies drilling off northern Alaska could face similar public relations headaches.

I suspect thats one of the things they would consider, Barteau said.

With Shells departure, former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell suspended additional planned Arctic lease sales and left them out of the Obama administration five-year drilling plan, citing a lack of interest.

Walker, overseeing an oil-dependent state desperate to find ways to refill the trans-Alaska pipeline that once transported 2.1 million barrels daily but averaged 527,000 in 2017, took hope from Zinkes announcement.

Walker said he looked forward to exploring Alaskas energy potential while taking into account environmental and safety concerns.
A Seward County sheriffs deputy on Saturday shot a man who had become violent and tried to drive away in the deputys cruiser, authorities said.

Cody Nielsen, 31, of York was shot after the deputy was unable to subdue him with a stun gun. Nielsens wounds were not life-threatening, the Sheriffs Office said.

Nielsen had crashed a stolen vehicle about 9:15 a.m. in a rural area of Seward County and soon after attempted a home invasion near County Road 238 and Adams Road, the Sheriffs Office said.

After being confronted by a deputy, Nielsen became violent and tried to leave in the cruiser, the Sheriffs Office said. The Sheriffs Office did not describe the way in which Nielsen was violent.

The deputy ordered Nielsen to the ground multiple times before deploying a stun gun twice, the Sheriffs Office said. The deployments failed to incapacitate Nielsen.

Nielsen was again ordered to the ground, and the deputy shot him.

Neilsen was taken into custody on suspicion of a parole violation and multiple felonies.

The deputy, whose name the Sheriffs Office did not release, was placed on administrative leave pending a review.
Two open seats on the Westside school board have attracted plenty of candidates who want to help the district tackle its ongoing budget crunch, retain quality teachers and maintain its reputation for academic success.

Six people submitted letters of intent to participate in Westside Community Schools caucus process Feb. 1. Up to four candidates will be selected at the caucus, and voters will pick two to serve on the board at the final election May 15. The terms last six years.

The caucus will be held at Westside High School, 8701 Pacific St. Voter sign-in starts at 6 p.m., and the caucus is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.

Interested candidates who did not submit a letter of intent to the district can still try to get on the ballot through the nomination process at the caucus.

The seats up for election are currently held by David Williams and Doug Krenzer. Krenzer, who was appointed to a board vacancy last year, will run again. Williams, who was elected in 2012, is not running for re-election.

The candidates:

 Sean Conway, a civil and criminal law attorney who is the former chairman of the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission. He and his wife, Jill, have three daughters, two of whom attend Loveland Elementary. Hes interested in Westsides community engagement and financial stability.

 Tyler Gloe, a financial industry consultant who said Westside needs to help prepare the next generation of Omaha workers and young professionals. He is a member of the Knights of Columbus at St. John Vianney Catholic Church and volunteers at the Open Door Mission.

 Doug Krenzer, an attorney who was appointed to the board in 2016. Krenzer has three children in Westside schools and said he wants to continue Westsides trend of offering innovative education.

 Jill Novotny, a science teacher at Northwest High whose child will begin attending school in Westside next fall. Novotny, who previously served on the Fairacres Condominium Association, said she wants to be a voice for teachers.

 Steven Taylor, a Westside graduate and CEO of Anvilhead Studios Inc., a video game company. His family lives in the Sunset Hills area. He said hed like to push for programs that help students connect with local businesses and work opportunities.

 Meagan Van Gelder, the academic program coordinator for the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is the current president of the Westside Alumni Association. She is a former elementary teacher and is interested in teacher recruitment and retention.

For more detailed caucus rules, call the superintendents office at 402-390-2105 or visit westside66.org.
DES MOINES (AP)  Iowa lawmakers return to the State Capitol today with a to-do list ranging from overhauling state taxes to possibly addressing issues with the privatized Medicaid program. Republicans, entering a second year of complete Statehouse control, will work amid another budget crunch and a looming election year. Heres a look at key issues:

Taxes

Gov. Kim Reynolds and Republicans have long said overhauling Iowas tax system is a priority. They have enough votes to make it happen without Democrats.

Few details have been shared publicly, though Reynolds has indicated wanting to cut taxes for individuals and corporations. Shell give more information in Tuesdays Condition of the State address.

Water quality

Reynolds wants to sign legislation early this year that addresses pollution in Iowas waterways.

But Republicans are at odds over water quality legislation that passed in the Senate last session.

Pollution from industrial facilities and farm runoff is linked to high levels of nutrients in Iowas waterways and the Gulf of Mexico. A Des Moines water utility elevated the matter with a 2015 lawsuit claiming that drainage districts in three counties didnt properly regulate the release of nitrate pollution into rivers. The Iowa Supreme Court determined that the drainage districts have immunity from such lawsuits.

Budget

Lawmakers are expected to soon address a shortfall in Iowas $7.2 billion budget, and a possible deficit in the next spending plan.

In 2017, lawmakers addressed previous shortfalls by cutting agency spending and borrowing about $144 million from emergency reserves. Legislators expect to pay back that borrowed money by the next budget year.

A nonpartisan agency estimates that the budget is expected to be below projections by about $37 million. The state has an expected shortfall of about $65 million for the budget going into effect July 1, the agency says.

Medicaid

Medicaid, the health care program for poor and disabled Iowans, has been under scrutiny since it was privatized in 2016 without legislative approval. Its expected to be debated this year because of complaints from health care providers and patients about reduced services. Reynolds maintains problems can be addressed without legislative action.
One of Omaha Mayor Jean Stotherts top deputies is resigning.

Cassie Paben, Stotherts deputy chief of staff for economic development, is leaving for a private-sector job, according to a news release from the Mayors Office.

Paben was Stotherts point person in dealing with developers.

Pabens last day will be Jan. 19 and the search for her replacement will begin immediately.

She was paid $81,600 in 2016.
Roberta Roach initially wanted to be a medical missionary nun. She got all her vaccinations and was ready to leave the country when a nun pulled her aside and told her to wait a few months.

Within that time, Roberta met Hubert Roach and her plan to be a nun soon turned into plans to be a wife and mother.

Her plans changed again in 1966, when the plane that Hubert was piloting crashed near Glenwood, Iowa. Suddenly, Roberta was a single parent to nine children, ranging in age from 1 to 13.

Mom had to go from not even knowing how to write a check to being the chief cook and bottle washer and the breadwinner, said Robertas daughter, Jean Roach, now 65. She quickly became our everything.

Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, Roberta, who had colon cancer, died on Christmas Eve after about 10 days in hospice care. She was 88 years old.

She was ready to die because she was at peace with it, Jean Roach said. She just wanted to be with her husband. At the end, she kept telling me she was knocking on Jesus door, but he wasnt answering yet.

In addition to being a busy single mother, Roberta Roach also worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Bergan Mercy Hospital, where she was named Caring Kind Employee of the Year in 1989.

In the 1970s, she fulfilled her dream of becoming a missionary in east Africa. She loved to travel and also took trips to Scotland, Rome, Israel and Switzerland.

Throughout her life, Roberta Roach was also a staunch advocate for both civil rights and erasing the stigma of mental illness.

She held onto that faith all of her life and spent much of her retirement reading the Bible and praying for her family  her nine children, 16 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. She also joined a writers club and spent time writing down her memories and stories.

On her deathbed, knowing she wouldnt make it to Christmas, Roberta looked at her family and said, Ive done everything I wanted to. God wanted me to be a role model for my children and I hope I was.
WASHINGTON  Special counsel Robert Mueller has raised the likelihood with President Donald Trump's legal team that his office will seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mueller brought up the issue of interviewing Trump during a late December meeting with the president's lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.

The special counsel's team could interview Trump very soon on some limited portion of questions  possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president who was granted anonymity to describe internal conversations.

"This is moving faster than anyone really realizes," the person said, who said Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election.

However, the president's attorneys are reluctant to allow him to sit down for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some portion of the questions from Mueller's investigators, as then-President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller's team to demonstrate they could not obtain the information they are seeking without interviewing the president.

Dowd and Sekulow declined to comment.

In a statement, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the administration's response to the Mueller investigation, said: "The White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process," referring to the special counsel's office.

"The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution," Cobb added.

Cobb had repeatedly said all interviews of White House personnel by Mueller's office were on schedule to be completed by the end of December or early this year. On Monday, he said he remains confident any portion of the investigation related to the president or the White House will wrap up shortly.

Mueller and Trump's legal team plan to meet again soon to discuss both the possible terms and substance of the interview, as well as Mueller's timeline for the investigation, according to one person familiar with the plan.

Trump's lawyers hope to obtain from the special counsel's team a clear idea of the categories of questions that would be posed to the president.

For months, Trump's legal team has been researching the conditions under which the president would be required to submit to an interview with the special counsel, who is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

"No lawyer just volunteers their client without thinking this through," said one of the people familiar with the talks.

The legal team's internal discussions about how to respond to request for an interview was first reported Monday morning by NBC News.

It has long been expected that Mueller would seek to interview Trump, in part because the special counsel is scrutinizing whether actions he took in office were attempts to blunt the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with questions posed to witnesses.

In May, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey after Comey testified on Capitol Hill that he could not comment on whether Russia had colluded with the Trump campaign.

The president also dictated a misleading statement later released by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., about a meeting Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign.

Veteran prosecutors said it was unlikely Mueller would agree to have any witness, even the president, submit a declaration or provide written answers to questions to avoid a sit-down interview.

Asked on Saturday if he had agreed to be interviewed by Mueller, Trump said he had nothing to hide.

"Just so you understand, there's been no collusion, there's been no crime, and in theory everybody tells me I'm not under investigation. Maybe Hillary [Clinton] is, I don't know, but I'm not," Trump told reporters at Camp David. "But we have been very open. We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed, and it would have taken years. But you know, sort of like when you've done nothing wrong, let's be open and get it over with."

"Because, honestly, it's very, very bad for our country," the president added. "It's making our country look foolish. And this is a country that I don't want looking foolish. And it's not going to look foolish as long as I'm here."

Sitting presidents have been interviewed by prosecutors in the past, though courts have urged government investigators to only seek such interviews when they cannot obtain relevant information another way.

After extensive negotiations between the independent counsel and his attorney, then-President Bill Clinton agreed to testify before a grand jury via video and audio link to the White House in August 1998. The videotaped interview lasted four hours, and during questioning from three prosecutors, Clinton admitted to inappropriate sexual activity with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but claimed he had been legally correct in denying that he had had sexual relations with her. He also denied having committed perjury in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

In 2004, then-President George W. Bush sat down for an in-person interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating whether senior White House aides leaked a CIA operative's identity and broke her cover as punishment for her husband's criticism of the Iraq War. Bush volunteered for the interview, which lasted 70 minutes and was conducted in the Oval Office.

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at the time, adding Bush was "pleased to do his part" to aid the probe.

Reagan testified to a grand jury in the Iran-contra investigation, but he also answered some questions in writing that were presented to him by the grand jury and the independent counsel in the probe.

In 1975, then-President Gerald Ford was interviewed as part of a grand jury probe into an assassination attempt. In a taped session in the Old Executive Office Building, Ford shared his recollections of events when Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, tried to shoot him at close range in Sacramento in September 1975. The tape was used at her later trial.
WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump will lay out an economic road map for rural America today that includes an emphasis on innovation and technology, including expansion of high-speed Internet access.

Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen said he hopes the president also emphasizes the dire situation now facing farmers and ranchers.

First and foremost we need a president who knows and understands just how much financial trouble production agriculture is in, Hansen said, citing the toll that years of low crop prices have taken.

Trump will speak at the American Farm Bureau Federations Annual Convention in Nashville. Administration officials previewing the speech said it will be the first time in 26 years that a president has addressed the convention.

While many economic sectors have recovered from the economic downturn, the nations rural areas have lagged in almost every indicator, said Ray Starling, special assistant to the president for Agriculture, Agricultural Trade and Food Assistance on the National Economic Council.

The administration recognizes that those challenges exist and is committed to not overlooking them or ignoring them, Starling told reporters on Friday. So thats number one. Theres challenges there. Its real.

Starling went on to say theres agreement that a great potential economic driver for rural America is increased connectivity and that the administration will make a priority of expanding access to high-speed Internet.

That is the seminal finding, but its not the only one, he said. Youll also hear and read about quality-of-life issues, the rural workforce, the technological innovation, and in particular for ag, the biotechnology possibilities that we have and other tools well have at our disposal to develop the rural economy.

Hansen said improving Internet access has been and remains an important issue for rural America, but he stressed that the top priority right now is to keep those who make a living from the land in business.

While we really support any kind of efforts to actually help us be able to achieve the long-promised dream of high-speed Internet broadband access, it wont do any good if we dont have anybody left out in the country to produce food and fiber, Hansen said. We are in trouble, and we need a president who understands that and is going to be our advocate.

He said that means pressing for robust funding in the next five-year farm bill, with the current one expiring later this year.

Nebraska Farm Bureau President Steve Nelson cited the importance of the farm bill, as well, particularly areas such as crop insurance.

Nelson also said he would like to hear the president talk about creating a good trade environment for agriculture and noted that the White House has employed harsh rhetoric on trade.

We know how important trade is to agriculture and even those comments can send a signal to our foreign buyers that were not as reliable as they had thought we were, Nelson said.

Craig Hill, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, said by email that hell be looking to see how the administration talks about the next farm bill and how it can open overseas markets.

But he also suggested that farmers and ranchers are concerned about the status of health care, saying rural areas are facing unaffordable or simply unavailable health insurance policies.

Iowa farmers want to hear how soon a healthy health insurance market can be restored, Hill said.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administrations decision to cancel provisional residency permits for 200,000 Salvadorans came with an 18-month delay that ultimately punts the issue to Capitol Hill.

But Republican lawmakers from Nebraska and Iowa were not rushing to say those affected should be allowed to stay.

This program is based on Americas generosity to help with urgent crises  it is not a long-term immigration program, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry said in a statement.

Or as Rep. Adrian Smith put it: Temporary Protected Status was not designed to be permanent.

Both Nebraska congressmen cited the need for broader action on immigration, but neither said explicitly what should be done about the Salvadorans.

Smith compared the Temporary Protected Status awarded to the Salvadorans to President Barack Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields from deportation millions of other immigrants who were brought into the country illegally when they were young.

Smith said both approaches have become a bandage for the countrys broken immigration system. He said the country needs policies that restore the rule of law and uphold principles of freedom and opportunity.

Salvadorans are by far the largest group with protected status nationwide. They have held it since two earthquakes struck the Central American country in early 2001.

In the 17 years since, the shelter of temporary status has allowed Salvadorans to put down roots and work legally, and they have built careers or businesses, gotten mortgages and given birth to about 200,000 U.S. citizens.

Since the original designation, the U.S. has extended the protections 11 times. The last time, in 2016, the Obama administration found that the fiscal unemployment and security situations in El Salvador remain poor.

Monday, in a notice to Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she has determined that conditions in El Salvador have improved significantly, ending the original justification for the deportation protection.

Advocates argue that it would be a catastrophe to send long-term residents and their children back to El Salvador, a country struggling with a weak economy and racked by gang violence. El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world, measured by its homicide rate.

There are an estimated 4,800 natives of El Salvador living in Nebraska, according David Drozd, a demographer at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Using a different census measure, he said about 3,350 were classified as noncitizens. People with Temporary Protected Status are not citizens; advocates have estimated the number of TPS holders in Nebraska to be about 3,000.

A Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce representative said she hoped that Congress would come up with a solution before the September 2019 deadline for Salvadorans to lose protected status.

Talent is our business communitys biggest need, said Sarah Moylan. Any loss of a worker is hard on a business. We want this workforce to stay legally in the country and work.

The National Association of Home Builders is lobbying Congress to extend TPS to keep a workforce going in places like California and the Gulf Coast, where wildfires and hurricanes had created urgent rebuilding needs.

Leigh Claffey, a spokeswoman for Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, suggested in a statement that the future of those with Temporary Protected Status still lies with the Department of Homeland Security, which she said is tasked with evaluating countries on a case-by-case basis to ensure that those with protected status would not face life-threatening situations upon return.

However, TPS protections were created to provide only temporary humanitarian relief and it is determined by the administration as to when these individuals may safely return to their home countries, Claffey said.

The issue is likely to be rolled up into the ongoing debate about immigration, which centers on what should be done with DACA participants, whose protections already are starting to end.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday that the Senate is no closer to a deal on immigration.

Grassley said he and other Republicans have introduced legislation that includes border security, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, workplace enforcement, a move toward a merit-based immigration system and a temporary protection for those DACA participants. He accused Democrats of refusing to negotiate, however, and suggested that they instead insist on nothing less than simple passage of full protection for DACA recipients.

That isnt good faith, Grassley said. That isnt negotiation. And that approach is doomed to failure.

Lazaro Spindola, executive director of the Nebraska Latino-American Commission, a government agency in Lincoln that advises the Nebraska Legislature, said he could not understand how uprooting working families and deporting them would improve the United States. He called it a tricky way, an evil, mean way to deport whole families.

Deacon Tim McNeil, chancellor and spokesman for the Archdiocese of Omaha, said there was ample evidence to suggest that TPS recipients from El Salvador and Honduras cannot return safely to their countries of origin. The more merciful response is to extend TPS, he said.

Nebraska Appleseed also criticized the decision, saying El Salvador remains a country so unsafe that the State Department advises Americans not to travel there.

Cesar Magana Linares is a 20-year-old junior at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with TPS. He was hoping to start law school in the fall of 2019.

Born in El Salvador, Linares came to the U.S. at age 2. He speaks English with no trace of an accent and hes on UNOs speech team. The only home he knows is in Fremont, where his family lives and works. His mother works at the Hormel plant and his father works for a lumber business. Cesar works at a downtown Omaha law firm as a legal clerk.

Mondays announcement shocked him.

He said he is banking on Congress to pass some kind of immigration reform to deal with people like him. Right now, he has no plans to return to a place that is so foreign to him.

Everyone in our family has pretty much agreed that going back to El Salvador is not something that would be very good for us, he said. Every TPS recipient would tell you that.

This report includes material from the Associated Press and the Washington Post.
Its possible that Nebraskans will see a $1.1 billion tax relief proposal on the statewide ballot this fall. A significant portion of voters would no doubt applaud the idea.

The measures promoters, however, would do well to pause and fully consider the cautionary note sounded by a legislative analyst at the State Capitol.

The tax relief proposal, as currently worded, deserves study on whether aspects of it might violate the Nebraska Constitution, concluded Joanne Pepperl, the revisor of statutes.

The proposal  which also has been introduced as legislation by State Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard  would give income tax credits to Nebraskans equal to 50 percent of the school property taxes they pay. Each year, the credits would total about $1.1 billion.

In her review, Pepperl pointed to two aspects that warrant scrutiny in regard to constitutionality:

 Under the Nebraska Constitution, the Legislature has no authority to commute taxes or release taxpayers from their duty to pay taxes. That provision might mean the Legislature cant use an income tax credit to offset property tax payments.

 Giving the credits to certain taxpayers may run afoul of the Constitutions equal protection and due process provisions. Such issues arose in several tax cases during the 1990s. As currently proposed, property owners who do not file Nebraska income tax returns would receive no credits.

Pepperl made clear that she wasnt firmly concluding that the proposal violates the Constitution. Rather, she said these aspects need to be properly understood and studied as the state processes the legislation. Thats exactly right.

Introducers and promoters of legislation and ballot petitions have an all-important obligation to get the wording right. Past experience in Nebraska state government shows how significant problems can arise when legislative drafting falls short.

Legislators and petition boosters need to explain things squarely to the public, including possible legal uncertainties.

It would be a remarkable situation if Nebraska voters approve a $1.1 billion tax relief ballot measure, only to find it ruled invalid by the courts.

The Nebraska Secretary of States Office also has a key role in this process. That office is legally obligated to analyze the constitutionality of each petition proposal.

If the tax-relief petition received enough valid signatures, that office would need to closely study the points raised by Pepperl before Secretary of State John Gale could decide whether to place the petition on the fall ballot.

The Legislatures Revenue Committee will hold a hearing this session on Erdmans bill, and that will provide a worthwhile occasion for the legal details to be examined and debated.

Maybe the current proposal passes constitutional muster. Maybe not. In any case, Nebraska officials should conduct proper, thorough scrutiny of the particulars, especially since the promised tax relief is so sweeping and ambitious.
Michael Schmidts report in the New York Times contains so many blockbusters that its hard to know where to begin. Here are the most critical claims:

 Special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence, including a memo from former chief of staff Reince Priebus, confirming at least some of the allegations that former FBI Director James Comey made and documented in contemporaneous memos. For instance, Priebus documents President Donald Trumps attempt to get Comey to publicly clear him, something Comey recounted at the time.

 The original draft of the letter firing Comey reportedly contained an introductory statement claiming that the Russia investigation was fabricated and politically motivated. The presidents aides prevailed upon him not to send it, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took an original copy of the letter. He nevertheless drafted a memo setting out entirely different grounds for firing Comey (i.e., Comeys handing of the Hillary Clinton emails and the false allegation that FBI morale was low).

 Trump was frantic to keep Attorney General Jeff Sessions in place to protect him in the Russia probe, dispatched the White House counsel to lean on Sessions not to recuse himself and then blew his stack when Sessions did recuse himself. He demanded an attorney general who would protect him the way that he imagined Robert Kennedy protected his brother President John F. Kennedy and the way Eric Holder protected President Barack Obama.

 A Sessions aide reportedly went looking for dirt on Comey, going to a congressional office for evidence several days before Comey was fired. Sessions apparently wanted one negative story a day on Comey in the media.

 A White House lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, reportedly lied to the president, telling him he could not fire Comey without cause, because he was afraid of what Trump would do.

Lets look at what each item tells us.

First, Comey, as many suspected, appears to have taken accurate notes that can at least in part be corroborated. The idea that discrediting Comey or the FBI would somehow protect Trump was always daft. Now it should rightly be seen as a ridiculous, transparent attempt to again meddle in the investigation.

Republicans engaged in this gambit should cut it out. Theyre enabling a grossly inappropriate plan to smear a key witness to possible criminal activity.

As for the first draft of the letter, it not only shows the real motivation for the firing but also suggests a deliberate attempt by Trump and others present at his Bedminster, New Jersey, property to conceal the real reason for firing Comey. Those advisers include Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller. All are now arguably implicated in a potential obstruction scheme, as is Rosenstein, who knew the real reason for the firing. Everyone from the president on down who sought to fire Comey to stymie the Russia probe, if that is the case, and come up with a false rationale arguably committed obstruction of justice.

The effort to keep Sessions in place may in and of itself be problematic. But Trumps insistence on personal loyalty bolsters Comeys claim that Trump demanded the same of him. It also reveals an intent to remove or interfere with the Justice Departments actions, as if it were his personal law firm. The idea that the Justice Department should be protecting him and not the country goes to the essence of abuse of power.

If Sessions was looking for dirt on Comey, that makes him a thug and an unfit character to be attorney general. If he did that knowing the real reason Trump wanted to get rid of Comey, its a potential obstruction-of-justice problem.

As for Dhillon, this actually confirms author Michael Wolffs ongoing refrain in his tell-all book that White House advisers considered Trump to be mentally and/or temperamentally incapable of doing his job. To continue to enable and defend him, knowing he is not capable of carrying out his oath, is a moral abomination and a violation of these advisers own oaths to defend the Constitution and country.

Moreover, if Mueller has this information, it is because Dhillon and/or White House counsel Donald McGahn are talking to Mueller. Trump will now know that he is surrounded, in his mind, by disloyal people who are helping Mueller to make a case against him.

The walls are closing in on Trump, at least with respect to an obstruction-of-justice claim. Literally everyone mentioned above may have evidence that incriminates the president. Some of these people will have personal liability and therefore be ready to cut a deal with prosecutors.
The Nebraska Hospital Association recognizes that motorcycle helmets have been proven to save lives, prevent serious head trauma and lower medical care costs.

For these reasons, it strongly opposes any attempt to weaken current Nebraska law that requires all riders to wear protective headgear.

Legislative Bill 368 threatens to significantly weaken our law by removing the protective headgear requirement for any rider over the age of 20. In Nebraska, fewer than 1 percent of all licensed motorcycle operators are age 20 or younger.

Those who survive motorcycle crashes often rely on state and federal programs to cover long-term care costs.

Studies show that unhelmeted riders involved in crashes are less likely to have adequate insurance coverage and more likely to have higher hospital costs than helmeted riders.

From 2008 to 2014, the total charges for all Nebraska riders hospitalized as a result of a motorcycle injury was over $74 million.

Requiring all motorcyclists to wear a helmet is a simple, preventive law that makes a proven difference in the cost and type of care necessitated by brain injury patients.

We urge a no vote on any action that would weaken our current universal (all-rider) motorcycle helmet law.

In addition to the harm it would cause to injured parties and their families, legislators must consider the additional burden this would place on our health care system, our state and the taxpayers, who ultimately bear the costs.

Andy Hale, Lincoln

vice president of advocacy

Nebraska Hospital Association
Tuesday 9 January 2018 11:19am



Professor Neil Gemmel (left) and Professor Tony Merriman.

Two University of Otago academics have received Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Awards to undertake research in the United States.



Professors Neil Gemmell and Tony Merriman have been awarded up to $US37,500 to support research for three to five months in the US.



Professor Gemmell, head of the Universitys Department of Anatomy, will research the usefulness of new "gene drive" technologies for the control of predatory pests, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute.



Professor Merriman, of the Department of Biochemistry, will research the genetic basis of urate control and gout in African-Americans, at the University of Alabama Birmingham.



Gout, which affects 6 to 8 per cent of Maori and Pasifika adults, is one of his primary research areas.



Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Awards are for New Zealand academics, artists or professionals to lecture and or conduct research at US institutions. Their aim is to promote mutual understanding through educational and cultural exchanges between New Zealand and the US.



More than 3000 people have benefited from the programme, jointly funded by the US and New Zealand governments, along with sponsors and donors, since it was established in 1948.



The 2018 Fulbright New Zealand Scholars will be honoured at the annual Fulbright Award Ceremony in June.
Data from last summer shows 12 of the 13 upstream tributaries of the Pine River contaminated with E. coli bacteria. The Healthy Pine River citizens group will hear the data explained at a meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Alma Public Library. The public is invited.

Senior Aquatic Biologist Molly Rippke of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will speak about the sampling project conducted by MDEQ last summer. Her presentation will explain the results, and there will be questions and answers afterwards.

Streams that flow into both the Pine and Chippewa rivers were sampled in July and August to help determine the sources of the bacterial contamination. Streams sampled were in Mecosta, Isabella and Gratiot counties.

DNA analysis of the samples is under way at a bacteriological research lab at Saginaw Valley State University. The analysis will determine if the E. coli bacteria are human are bovine.

"We expect to see both," said Gary Rayburn, chair of the Healthy Pine River group. "We know there are leaking septic tanks along the river, and our group is working to address that issue. We also know that agricultural runoff is a big problem in our county with 23 CAFOs and other large farms located here."

The Mid-Michigan District Health Department determined two summers ago that signs should be put up warning people about the contaminants in the river to help prevent illnesses caused by E. coli and other bacteria present in the Pine River. There are signs in Alma and Arcada Township at access points near the river.

About 25 percent of the drinking water for Alma and St. Louis is drawn from the Pine River, the Healthy Pine River citizens group stated.
As the tax season quickly approaches, the Michigan Department of Treasury has issued the following warning as cybercriminals typically increase their tax scams through phone scams and email phishing schemes.

These scammers try to obtain personal information using different tricks and tactics so they can file income tax returns and claim refunds on behalf of unsuspecting taxpayers. Some scammers may also allege a taxpayer owes taxes and aggressively demand payment for a quick payout.

"When taxpayers proactively look for scams, they are less likely to be a victim of a tax-related identity theft and other cybercriminal activities," said Deputy State Treasurer Glenn White, head of Treasury's Tax Administration Group.

Treasury will never:

 Initiate a phone call or email to ask for personal information.

 Call or email to demand immediate payment using a specific payment method, such as a prepaid debit card, gift card or wire transfer. Generally, the department will first send a bill through the U.S. mail to any taxpayer who owes taxes.

 Threaten to immediately bring in local police or other law-enforcement groups to have the taxpayer arrested for not paying.

 Demand that taxes be paid without giving the taxpayer the opportunity to question or appeal the amount owed.

 Ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone.

Cybercriminals often alter caller ID numbers and emails to make it look like the state Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service or another official agency is contacting a taxpayer. Scammers may use employee titles, a person's name, address and other personal information to sound official.

Taxpayers who are contacted by a scammer should immediately cease the call or delete the email.

Taxpayers who have received a call or email from a scammer should report the case to the IRS through the web or by calling 800-366-4484. To learn more about tax-related identity theft, go to www.michigan.gov/identitytheft
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Midland County Sheriff Scott Stephenson has announced two recent promotions in leadership at the Midland County Jail.

Now serving in new roles are Capt. Jeff Derocher and Lt. Amy Randall.

Derocher was promoted to his new position on Nov. 14, upon the retirement for former jail Capt. Rich Harnois.

Derocher began his career with the sheriff's office on March 1, 2002, and has worked as a corrections deputy, corrections shift leading and jail lieutenant.

"Capt. Derocher has earned this position and will continue to elevate the standards that the Midland County Jail is known for," Stephenson said in a media release.

Randall is replacing Derocher's former role.

She joined the sheriff's office on Jan. 22, 2003, and has served as a corrections deputy and corrections shift leader prior to her promotion.

"Amy Randall brings a fantastic skill set to this position as she knows all of the day to day operations of our jail," Stephenson said. "Over the years, Lt. Randall has earned the respect of her co-workers. She will be an excellent addition in her new role."
Were All Owners, not Attendees. Were All Followers, not Fans. Were Spiritual Contributors, not Spiritual Consumers.

THE CHURCH

GracePoint in Valparaiso, Indiana

THE CHALLENGE

To be a place where Christian grow and the unchurched are welcomed and loved.

THE BIG IDEA

Create a church that shares one common vision and set of values.

In 2000, Ben Lamb was a student pastor at a traditional church in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he had worked for almost nine years. Over time, Lamb noticed that the return rate on visitors was zero.

People wouldnt come back. Not only that, but sometimes folks would leave during the service, recalls Lamb.

As time marched on, the congregation continued to dwindle until there was practically no one left.

We were this amazing social club for ourselves, but who does that serve? asks Lamb. Church business meetings turned ugly with lots of tears, raised voices and heartache because nobody wanted to budge on their agendas. Ultimately, they decided to shut the church down and start fresh.

There comes a time when you cant adjust. You have to completely change, says Lamb.

In 2009, GracePoint Church started out with just 24 people, then dropped to 18. As they infused high-quality music with heartfelt teaching, the numbers quickly began to grow. Now Lamb guides an average of 900 worshippers each Sunday as GracePoints lead pastor. He attributes the booming growth to the fact that the church encourages people to come as they are.

There are so many churches in our town, but there wasnt one that felt comfortable for unchurched people. We feel like Jesus heartbeat is for the unchurched, says Lamb, who estimates that 87 percent of the people in his community dont attend church. Thats 146,000 who are unchurched.

Lamb and his staff focus on the people theyre trying to reach rather than those theyre trying to keep.

Pastor Craig Groeschel, senior pastor of Life.Church, said, To reach people no one is reaching, we have to do things no one is doing, says Lamb. We agree with that philosophy.

Therefore, on Sundays the congregation rallies to create a comfortable environment. That means intentionally not looking or sounding like a church. It also means expressing genuine love and acceptance for all who enter, and creating a casual atmosphere so that everyone can feel relaxed and welcome.

We dont think were the church. Were simply a church, says Lamb. Traditional churches in the area send people to us. We send people to them. We want folks to find the right fit for their needs.

For eight years, GracePoint operated out of an elementary school, which required more than 150 volunteers to show up each Sunday at 4:45 a.m. to transform it into a worship and Sunday school space.

It goes to show the ownership our folks feel, says Lamb. Here are people who werent even going to church and now are willing to give most of their Sunday to serve.

A man named Cyrus knows firsthand what that evolution feels like. His story is the reason GracePoint exists. He was completely unchurched and had been battling drug use, depression and addiction when three years ago, he received a DUI. Sentenced to perform community service, Cyrus began coming to GracePoint to help with morning setup. Over time he developed a brotherhood with his fellow volunteers. Touched by the love and lack of judgment, Cyrus began attending church at GracePoint and even got baptized. He now leads a mens Bible study and serves as a volunteer team leader at church.

In November 2017, GracePoint opened the doors of their brand-new building. Though its wonderful to no longer be operating in a mobile capacity, some members were sad to give up their Sunday morning bonding time.

After the disintegration of the first church, Lamb knew the importance of having his team unite around one common vision and set of values. They also made a conscious choice not to offer a membership class because they didnt want church to feel like an exclusive club.

Were all owners, not attendees. Were all followers, not fans. Were spiritual contributors, not spiritual consumers, says Lamb. Church isnt a spectator sport.

Even though GracePoint targets unchurched people, a number of churched people enjoy being a part of the fabric of the church. They also love having a place where they can comfortably invite their friends.

Lamb admits that it can sometimes be tough to move forward, especially when faced with harsh criticism by naysayers. Its all good, he says, because in the end, Jesus will say, Well done, good and faithful servant.
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Bloomington-Normal

Bio-Lab #13; through Jan. 15, Jan Brandt Gallery & Studio B, 1305 Morrissey Drive, Bloomington; textile installation by Jan Brandt; viewing by appointment at janbrandtgallery@gmail.com.

Sensing Synonyms; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon.-Thu., Fri. by appointment, through Jan. 26; Heartland Community College Joe McCauley Gallery, 1500 W. Raab Road, Normal; paintings and fabric works by Whitney Johnson and Alissa Palmer. Reception, 4-5:30 p.m. Jan. 25.

Suzette Boulais; 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-noon Sat., through Feb. 28, IAA Credit Union lobby, 808 IAA Drive, Bloomington; abstract paintings; free.

Serving Students: The Legacy of Milner's Library; through Feb. 19, ISU Milner Library second floor; historical exhibit; free.

ISU University Galleries; noon-4 p.m. Mon., 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Tue., 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed.-Fri., noon-4 p.m. Sat.-Sun., Uptown Station, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal; rotating exhibits in three galleries; free; 309-438-8321.

IWU Merwin and Wakeley Galleries; school hours, noon-4 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat.-Sun., 7-9 p.m. Tue.; 302 E. Graham St., Bloomington; rotating exhibits; free; 309-556-3391.

McLean County Arts Center; 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tue., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Fri., noon-4 p.m. Sat.; 601 N. East St., Bloomington; rotating exhibits, sales, rentals, art classes and lectures; free; 309-829-0011.

Dann Nardi: from the studio; Jan. 12-Feb. 17, McLean County Arts Center, see above; sculptures. Artist reception, 5-7 p.m. Jan. 19; gallery talk, 6 p.m. Feb. 15.

Boundary Layer/Fewkes & Primozic; Jan. 12-Feb. 24, McLean County Arts Center, see above; photographs by Nancy Fewkes and sculptures by Laura Primozic. Artist reception, 5-7 p.m. Jan. 19.

Molly Markow; Jan. 12-Feb. 24, McLean County Arts Center, see above; prints/collages. Artist reception, 5-7 p.m. Feb. 19.

McLean County Museum of History; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. (until 9 p.m. Tue.), 200 N. Main St., Bloomington; permanent and rotating exhibits; adults $5, seniors $4, students, children under 12 and members free; 309-827-0428.

Challenges, Choices and Change: Making a Home; McLean County Museum of History, see above; permanent exhibit exploring experiences of people from around the world who made McLean County their home.

Abraham Lincoln in McLean County; McLean County Museum of History, see above; permanent exhibit on Lincoln's life in Bloomington.

Challenges, Choices and Change: Farming in the Great Corn Belt; McLean County Museum of History, see above; new permanent exhibit on McLean County's agricultural history.

Prairie Aviation Museum; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thu.-Sat., noon-4 p.m. Sun., 2929 E. Empire St., Bloomington; permanent and rotating exhibits and displays with aerial history themes; adults $5, ages 6-11 $3, 5 and under free; 309-663-7632.

Central Illinois

U of I Krannert Art Museum; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. (until 9 p.m. Thu. during fall and spring semesters), closed Sun., 500 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign; paintings, porcelain, historical artifacts, traveling art exhibits; $3 donation suggested; 217-333-1861.

World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean; through March 24, Krannert Art Museum, see above; various media, including jewelry, architectural elements and photographic portraits.

Provenance: A Forensic History of Art; through June 2, Krannert Art Museum, see above; exhibit examining history of ownership of six 15th-19th-century paintings.

Postwar Printmaking in the United States, 1945-1955; through March 17, Krannert Art Museum, see above; works in a range of printmaking techniques.

Amity Township Museum; 1-3 p.m. first Sunday of month or by appointment, 510 Main St., Cornell; displays and artifacts relating to history of Cornell and Amity Township; free; 815-358-2973.

Eureka College Burgess Hall Art Gallery; 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. weekdays and by appointment on weekends, third floor of Burgess Hall, Eureka College, Eureka; rotating exhibits; free; 309-467-6866.

Simpkins Military History Museum; 1-5 p.m. Tue., Thu., Sat., or by appointment; 605 E. Cole St., Heyworth; permanent and rotating military history exhibits; free (donations accepted); 309-473-3989.

100th Anniversary of World War I; through Nov. 30, Simpkins Military History Museum, see above.

Dickson Mounds Museum; 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, 10956 N. Dickson Mounds Road, Lewistown; displays, special exhibits; free; 309-547-3721.

Lincoln Heritage Museum; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat., Lincoln Center at Lincoln College, 300 Keokuk St., Lincoln; Lincoln-era items, audio-visual displays, tours, exhibits, more; adults $7, children/tours $4; 217-735-7399.

Contemporary Art Center of Peoria; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., Riverfront Arts Center, 305 S.W. Water St., Peoria; rotating exhibits in two galleries; free; 309-674-6822.

The Shape of Air; Jan. 12-Feb. 16, Contemporary Art Center of Peoria, see above; Chicago Sculpture International member works. Opening reception, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Jan. 13.

Gary Justis: Luminous Objects; Jan. 12-Feb. 23, Contemporary Art Center of Peoria, see above; sculptural/video works. Opening reception, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Jan. 13.

Peoria Art Guild; Foster Arts Center, Harrison and Washington streets, Peoria; rotating exhibits, gift shop; free; 309-637-2787.

Peoria Riverfront Museum; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Jan. 16 and Feb. 20, Tue.-Wed. and Sat., 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Thu.-Fri., noon-5 p.m. Sun., downtown riverfront Peoria; permanent and rotating exhibits, planetarium shows, Giant Screen Theater and events; $9-$11 (free parking in museum garage); 309-686-7000.

Emergence: The National Arts of Central Illinois; through Jan. 14, Peoria Riverfront Museum, see above; contemporary works by 50 nationally/internationally artists.

Penelope Umbrico: Screen Light; through Jan. 7, Peoria Riverfront Museum, see above; photographic installations sourced from social media sites.

Private Public: Artists, Audience and Intention; through Jan. 7, Peoria Riverfront Museum, see above; exhibit contrasting art intended for private enjoyment and public display

Museum of the Gilding Arts; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sun., April-Oct., and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon.-Sun., Nov.-March, 217 N. Mill St., Pontiac; displays, history and hands-on exhibits dedicated to the art of gilding and gold beating; free (donations welcome); 815-842-1848.

Pontiac Community Art Center; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat., noon-4 p.m. Sun., 209 W. Madison St., Pontiac; rotating exhibits; 815-419-2472.

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sun., 212 N. Sixth St., Springfield; Lincoln-themed exhibits, historical displays, special events, more; adults $12, seniors and students $9, ages 5-15 $5, under 5 free; 217-558-8844.
BLOOMINGTON  People can learn about adult education in Illinois and provide feedback on ways to improve it at an information session Wednesday in Bloomington organized by the Illinois Community College Board.

The information session on the final draft of the Illinois Adult Education Strategic Plan will be from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday at Holiday Inn and Suites, 3202 E. Empire St.

Online registration is required to attend. Sign up at the board's website, www.iccb.org, by clicking on the registration link.

The five-year plan was produced by the Task Force on the Future of Adult Education and Literacy. Its goal is to provide a road map that leads to better educational and employment opportunities, explained Karen Hunter Anderson, task force chairwoman and ICCB executive director.

A copy of the draft plan will be available on the ICCB website, but there will not be printed copies at the information session.

The ICCB also is seeking written comments on the specifics of the plan from individuals, groups and organizations. They should be emailed to nora.l.rossman@illinois.gov. Comments will be accepted through Friday.

Information on the vision, guiding principles, goals and objectives of the plan will be presented at Wednesday's session in Bloomington.

Community input from past and present adult education students, educators and community leaders is essential to the development of an Illinois Adult Education Strategic Plan that challenges conventional thinking and long-held beliefs, said Anderson.

Kerry Urquizo, director of adult education at Heartland Community College in Normal, is planning to attend the information session. Urquizo said previously she is looking forward to recommendations to strengthen public-private partnerships and improve the transition from basic skills to career training and the workplace.

About 645 students took adult education courses in the 2016-17 academic year at Heartland, according to Urquizo. That number was down from previous years because of cutbacks related to the state's budget impasse.

The task force, which was created by the ICCB after legislative action, met for the first time in October. Its final report to the governor and General Assembly is due Jan. 31.
Kelsey R. Bridgwater-Fottler, 21, of Foosland, died Thursday (Jan. 4, 2018) from injuries sustained in an automobile accident in Ford County. Her funeral service will be held 11 a.m. Friday at the Gibson City Bible Church with Pastor Jake Raymer officiating.

Visitation will be held two hours prior to the service at the church. Burial will be in Greenwood Cemetery in rural Arrowsmith.

Kelsey was born Aug. 8, 1996 in Normal, a daughter of Kelli Bridgwater and Michael Fottler. She is survived and loved by her mother, Kelli Bridgwater of Foosland; her father, Michael Fottler of Champaign; her sister, Karley Bridgwater-Fottler of Wisconsin; her boyfriend, Steven Mathes of Sibley; and paternal grandparents, Michael Fottler and Sarah Mateunus.

She was preceded in death by her maternal grandparents.

Kelsey was a free spirit. Her contagious smile lit the room with her effortless beauty. She was an artist, a Leo, a self-described lion. Kelseys generosity and kindness never went unnoticed helping anyone she could in need.

In lieu of flowers, memorial tributes may be made to the family.

Lamb Funeral Home in Gibson City is assisting the family with the arrangements.
NORMAL  Central Illinois is out of the deep freeze but freezing rain and some snow has led to slick roads, forcing area schools to cancel classes on Monday.

Among the Twin City schools calling classes off are Central Catholic High School, and Epiphany and St. Mary's schools. Prairie Central and Pontiac aschools in Livingston County also are closed.

Unit 5's Teacher's Institute Day is cancelled; classes resume on Tuesday. The Normal Township Activity and Recreation Center (ARC) in Normal also is closed Monday.

The McLean County Sheriff's Department has a collision alert in effect until further notice. Drivers are urged to drive slow, turn lights on, and be aware of emergency vehicles. If a crash occurs with no injuries, drivers should exchange information and call the Sheriff's Department within 48 hours.

Classes in Bloomington-based District 87 and at the Illinois State University lab schools, University High and Metcalf schools, resume Monday morning; neither cancelled classes.

The National Weather Service said fog will persist until mid-morning for all of Central Illinois, and may be locally dense for a few hours, producing visibility as low as a quarter mile at times.

For Javier Gutierez, Sunday was warm enough to put away the heavy coat and take a walk outside. There he was in uptown Normal, wearing a black T-shirt and sleeveless vest, on his way to get a piercing with his friend, Alma Murphy.

I prefer the cold weather to the summer, said utierez, of Streator. I mean, it was uncomfortable a little bit at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. Im just glad to be able to be out without a coat.

Several Bloomington-Normal residents got outside for the first time this winter on Sunday, enjoying the beginning of a January thaw after two weeks of being in a deep freeze. On Sunday, the temperature reached above the freezing mark for the first time since Dec. 23. The temperature reached 36 degrees in Bloomington-Normal Sunday afternoon, even as road crews were kept busy with slick roads, particularly in rural areas.

And that wasnt all. A wintry mix arrived early Sunday evening, creating travel issues throughout Central Illinois into the overnight hours. But, better  and warmer  days are ahead, said Eric Laufenberg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln.

Mondays high will be around 37 degrees and we could even be up to around 50 degrees by Wednesday, he said.

Gusty winds and possibly some rain is also in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday, he said, but the long cold snap is finally over.

Its still winter, and our average high temperature for this time of the year is around the mid 30s and we have been well below that for two weeks, he said. We are finally going to get above that for a period of time.

The coldest temperature during that time, according to the NWS, was a -21 degree reading in Minonk on the morning of New Years Day. The coldest wind chill in Bloomington-Normal was a -38 degree reading at 8:11 a.m. that same day.

The extreme cold temperatures caused problems for homeowners and businesses. The Illinois Route 66 Museum in Pontiac was closed over the weekend, said Director of Tourism Ellie Alexander.

The subzero temperatures pushed the heating unit to its breaking point, she said.

The required parts were ordered and are expected to be installed and the museum hopes to be back open for business on Monday.

In Chicago, a water pipe in the building that houses the Illinois Department of Public Health Chicago Laboratory burst on Sunday morning, damaging several areas of the lab and pieces of equipment. The lab performs testing for environmental hazards, arboviruses, pathogens, newborn screening, novel diseases and potential biological threat agents. Some of those tests may now be moved to Springfield and Carbondale.

Even though the weather is expected to warm up, keep in mind it is only temporary, Laufenberg said. Temperatures are likely to drop again on Friday, with a high of only 25 degrees expected, and another round of snow could be on the way for next weekend.

Its too early to tell, but it is something we will be tracking over the week, he said.
100 years ago

Jan. 8, 1918: The almanac predicts three solar eclipses in 1918: June 3, June 24 and Dec. 7. But well see only one partial eclipse here. Thatll be on June 3: partial here and total farther south. The remaining two will be seen only in the Southern Hemisphere.

75 years ago

Jan. 8, 1943: The Bloomington postmaster job is officially open and posted. The salary is $4,500 per year, and the job will likely go to a Democrat. Retiring postmaster Fahey, now 70, is a Democrat. President Roosevelt will make the appointment.

50 years ago

Jan. 8. 1968: A Towanda shopkeeper shot a suspected burglar Saturday night. Dead is a Kansas City truck driver who had been in the Asian Arts shop earlier in the day. The owner was aroused by the sound of glass breaking and shot the 30-year-old suspect twice in the heart.

25 years ago

Jan. 8, 1993: An ex-Chicago policeman was sentenced to 60 years for murdering his girlfriend, Carlette Walton, also of Chicago. He dumped her body near Gillum, southeast of Bloomington. Defendant Gregory Chambers is believed to have killed her so she couldnt testify against him.
As children, most of us grew accustomed to a common daily routine known as bathtime. Somewhere along the messy road to adulthood, we stopped taking baths and that's a damn shame because they are way more fun than showers. To this day, I still regret the moment when I decided to make the switch. While it's important to practice good hygiene on the regular, there's so much more to feeling clean than just rubbing soap all over your body and then rinsing it off. Now that self-care is a trendy topic, baths are bubbling up to the mainstream again and adults are relapsing to their favorite childhood pastime  minus the rubber duckies.

I am one of the few New Yorkers who is fortunate enough to have a bathtub in my apartment so I always make time to indulge in this glorious, solitary activity. I also happen to live alone in a studio so the prospect of soaking my body in other peoples' filth never crosses my mind. (Yes, I know it's a privilege!) In honor of National Bubble Bath Day, I've selected 26 items that are guaranteed to provide you with the best bath of your entire life. Because nobody deserves to have the most outrageous and luxurious me time more than you. Remember, your body is a temple so worship it!

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Umbra, Me Time Bamboo Bath Tray Caddy ($49, available at Urban Outfitters)



For the person who wants to partake in activities during their bath, this bamboo caddy is essential. In addition to holding drinks and snacks, this sturdy unit can support the weight of a book or tablet. (Please proceed with caution if you choose to bring electronics into the tub though).

SipCaddy, Bath & Shower Portable Suction Cupholder ($13.95, available at Amazon)



I may be doing a Dry January, but that doesn't mean that you have to follow my lead. This mini caddy is perfect for when you just want a glass of your favorite beverage and nothing else. (No more accidentally knocking things over on the edge!) Cheers to drinking responsibly  safety over everything!

Urban Outfitters, Bamboo Bath Mat ($35, available at Urban Outfitters)

Because you should only step out on the finest of mats! Bamboo is a better material for a mat because it's a natural, eco-friendly product that is immune to mold, bacteria and fungi. Plus, its decorative and makes your space look way more stylish. Keep it clean and cool.

Fresh, Rice Sake Bath ($82, available at Sephora)

The fact that this costs more than an actual bottle of sake has me giddy. Fresh states that this natural soak was inspired by the traditional Japanese Geisha bathing routine though, and I firmly believe that it's very important to know yourself and your worth so go ahead and spill those coins.

Antica Farmacista Prosecco Bubble Bath ($38, available at Nordstrom)

A little bubbly for your bubble bath! C'est la vie cherie.

Unbound, Bean vibrator ($29, available at Unbound)



This WATERPROOF vibrator will have you rub-a-dub-dubbing in all the right places if you catch my drift... If you really want to give yourself a BIG splash, consider opting for Squish. The rubber ducky retired for a reason, y'all.

Deluxe Comfort, Bath Luxury Full Body 3 Panel Bath Pillow ($35.99, available at Wayfair)

The fact that this pillow has the word luxury in its name is a sign that this is a product worth purchasing. Seriously though, it's important to be super comfortable when you take a dip in your tub so go buy a bath pillow ASAP.

Ultimate Ears, WONDERBOOM Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker ($100, available at Urban Outfitters)

A waterproof speaker is crucial for a bathroom anyway, so you might as well get one now. This bad boy can be hung from anywhere and last up to 10 hours before you have to hook up the USB charger. You'll want to create a special playlist for this occasion as well  I highly recommend sprinkling Rhye in the mix.

SHHHOWERCAP, The Minx ($43, available at SHHHOWERCAP)



Normally, I wouldn't suggest that anyone pay more than $5 for a plastic shower cap that can easily be purchased at any local convenience store, but this list is all about doing the most and treating yourself so why not invest in a chic cap that completely repels moisture? If you're not trying to get your hair wet, this cap really is a life saver.

Herbivore Botanicals, Coconut Soak ($18-32, available at Nordstrom)

All of your troubles will float away as you descend into paradise with this organic coconut milk powder. It's like bathing in a tub full of pina colada.

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Sakara Life, Detox Tea ($20, available at Free People)



Let the unwinding begin with a piping hot cup of this delicious detox tea, a caffeine-free blend of herbal goodness. If you want to stock up on snacks, you can browse from Sakara Life's entire clean boutique too!

LEIF, Herbal Bath Tea Soak ($42, available at LEIF)

For those moments when you want to have your tea and spill it too ;-) You can choose from lavender rose and chamomile sage.

Cannabis Beauty Defined, Therapeutic Soak ($55, available at Medical Marijuana Inc.)

This cannabinoid-infused soak not only enhances the therapeutic experience that the average bath provides, but it's also good for your skin which is a bonus! According to Medical Marijuana Inc., bath products with hemp oil contain "essential nutrients that protect and rejuvenate the skin" including "vitamins, minerals, proteins, and fatty acids." Obviously, consult your doctor if interested in using this type of product.

Olverum, Original Bath Oil ($52, available at Follain)

Less is more when it comes to applying this bottle of essential oils. The moment it makes contact with your skin, your body will feel changed forever.

Diptyque, Baies Large Candle ($165, available at Nordstrom)

Nothing sets the mood quite like a burning wax candle with a heavenly scent of roses and blackcurrant leaves. This luxurious french perfumer is famous for its signature candles and is absolutely worth the splurge.

Province Apothecary, Lavender Essential Oil Incense ($16, available at Province Apothecary)

Because aromatherapy is cheaper than retail therapy all day every day. Don't forget the fancy incense holder!

Mullein & Sparrow, Rose Bath Salts ($44, available at Mullein & Sparrow)

You're going to feel like a million bucks after soaking in these salt crystals, rose petals and essential oils.

May Lindstrom, Honey Mud ($90, available at Follain)

I guarantee that you'll feel 100% better after you wipe this mask off your beautiful face.

Grown Alchemist, Body Cleanser in Chamomile, Bergamot & Rosewood ($28, available at Amazon)

This Australian brand knows a thing or two about how to take care of what's down under. Your skin will feel nourished to the bone after this cleansing.

Frank Body, All That Shimmers Gift Set ($49.95, available at Urban Outfitters)



Shine bright like a diamond, babe! This cute kit comes with a shimmer scrub, shimmer oil and illuminator that will make your skin even more radiant. Bomb cyclone, who?

Omorovicza, Gold Sugar Body Scrub ($99, available at Omorovicza)



Your body will be ready to glow all the way up after you scrub off all those dead skin cells with this fancy potion.

Baudelaire, Small Wool Sponge ($18, available at Anthropologie)

Toss out your loofah and upgrade to a sponge! In the tub, no one will shame you for being your baddest and bougiest self. While you're at it, don't forget to pick up a cedar and sisal bath brush.

[instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BK8z9N0hKT6/?hl=en&taken-by=parachutehome expand=1]

Parachute, Classic Bathrobe ($99, available at Parachute)



The cozy vibes don't have to stop when you step out of the tub! Wrap yourself in this glorious robe made of 100% Turkish cotton and continue to wear nothing underneath for the rest of the day.

Pai, Head To Toe Hero Buriti Balm ($30, available at Pai)

Sensitive skin has met its match with this blend of buriti oil, kukuki and calendula. Apply it after you've finished drying off and let the moisturizing begin.

Palermo Body, Hydrating Body Oil ($36-56, available at Palermo Body)

The last thing you want to be post-bath is a prune, so massage this botanical oil into your skin for some much-needed deep hydration.

[instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/Bb8HEncHTMj/?hl=en&taken-by=tatcha expand=1]

Tatcha, Gold Camellia Beauty Oil ($95, available at Sephora)



Once you're done with your first layer of post-bath moisturizing, slather on this 23-karat gold oil for an au naturel glow. Your body will thank you for the royal rehydration treatment.

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Splash Photo via Getty
It's a great day for brujas: Loquita Bath and Body just relaunched its online shop. Made in California by Yamira Vanegas, the vegan and cruelty-free line is a favorite for Chicanx and Latinx folks  the bruja bath bomb, modeled after Sweethearts conversation hearts, especially. It's always in high demand, Vanegas says, and hard to keep in stock.

That bath bomb is newly available, and on Friday, she's unveiling additional snark-bearing hearts: Chingona, chismosa, mala hierba, mejor sola, me vale. For Spanish speakers, these are basically the bath bombs we didn't know we were missing.

Related | 26 Things You Need For The Most Luxurious Bath Experience Ever

"The whole brand started because I was looking for items for self-care and I wanted something that spoke to me, and I couldn't find anything like that," Vanegas says. "There was nothing that was Latino related at all. Maybe a few things here and there, but there was no brand that was specifically that and encompassing their whole brand."

And what better way to soothe than a soak that boosts your independence? Mejor sola is part of a longer idiom that translates roughly to "better alone than in bad company." After a breakup, hearing that is like a salve for the soul  and Loquita boosts its power with a corresponding bath bomb.

Promoting self-care is major part of the brand's mission. Vanegas notes it's not a novel concept; in Latinx culture, it's omnipresent.



"I feel like a lot of people don't realize that our grandmas and tias have been telling us about self-care. They say cuidate [take care]... Whether it's to put on a sweater or make sure you're eating  you know how your grandma's always like, have you eaten? Even if they don't realize it, they're telling you to practice self-care. That's what they're telling you," she says.

VapoRub, a mainstay cure-all in Latinx culture, is in the Loquita mix too, as a shower steamer. Sana Sana  culled from the traditional rhyme in Spanish to encourage healing  gets the steamer treatment, as well. Loquita's catalog hits pretty much every item in the bath-and-body spectrum: Hand scrubs (Manos Sucias) face masks, bath teas with herbs and leaves to complement the bruja bombs, whipped soaps (El Burrito Sabanero), mani bombs for nail health, face masks (Bate Bate Chocolate, named for a reggaeton song), loofah soaps (Estropajo, not your Abuelita's variety), and loads more.

Vanegas also incorporates a lot of '90s references; it's the decade during which she grew up. Now, with two kids of her own, she's witnessing the era's fun-loving timelessness firsthand. Loquita will feature more of that this year, she says. (We're hoping for a revival of the limited-edition Selena-inspired Bidi Bidi bath bomb and Como la Flor shower fluff, of course).

In everything Loquita creates, there's always a bit of wit, and a heaping helping of self-love.

"The name of the brand, Loquita, that's what my whole life has been from beginning to the point I'm at now. I've always been crazy, and to me, that's a reclaimed term," she says. My dad would tell me, Estas loca, estas loquita, what are you thinking?' But I own it, and I'm like telling the world, yeah, I am a loquita, but that's the best part about me, that I'm crazy enough to follow my dream."

More more information on Loquita, visit loquitabath.com.
Patna: Jan Adhikar Party (JAP) leader Pappu Yadav, who has waged a war against Bihar doctors and hospitals for providing poor service and exploiting underprivileged patients, held a kangaroo court of sort outside the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) in Patna to hear from the disgruntled patients and their family members.

Calling it 'Aapka Sevak, Aapke Dwar', the Madhepura MP held his 'durbar' under a tree as patients and their family members surrounded him to tell their harrowing accounts with the hospital or the doctors.

People attending the 'court' told Yadav how the doctors did not make routine rounds in the hospital and nurses ignored them all the time. On Sundays, things are even worse as there are hardly any doctors on duty to attend to the patients. Pathologists are also not available and sometimes it takes days to get a blood or urine test result. People with serious illness also have to wait hours, sometimes days, to get admitted in the Emergency, patients or their family members told the MP.

During his show and tell, Yadav paid for the treatment of 66 patients.

Meanwhile, IGIMS officials expressed their resentment against Pappu Yadav's latest stunt saying he had no official permission to hold his 'court' inside the hospital premise.

Hospital Director Prof. N R Biswas, in a letter to Home Secretary, lodged his complaint against the JAP leader saying neither he had acquired proper permission to hold a meeting at the hospital nor had he informed the hospital in advance about his visit.

Patna District Magistrate (DM) Kumar Ravi, however, said that Yadav did have permission to hold the meeting on two conditions  one prohibiting him from using any megaphone and second, he could not hold a political meeting inside the hospital premises.
News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism.
Iran and the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline

01/08/18

By Bahman Aghai Diba, PhD Int. law





Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCP) is a project to transport natural gas through a submerged pipeline in the Caspian seabed from Turkmenistan and partly from Kazakhstan to Baku in Azerbaijan and eventually to Europe, circumventing Russia and Iran (1). Turkmenistan has one of the biggest gas resources in the world, the third biggest after Russia and Iran (2). Since its independence (1991) and discovery of large gas resources in Turkmenistan, it has tried to construct the TCP. Construction of this pipeline will end the monopolistic status of Russia in export of gas to much of EU. Iran has opposed it for several reasons but both Iran and Russia claim that the reason for their opposition to the TCP is protection of environment in the Caspian Sea. The US and EU have supported construction of the TCP in the past in order to diversify their supplies and also end the Russian exclusive situation.

Rejection of the TCP by Russia has several important reasons:

Russia makes a lot of money from export of gas to the EU. The Russians have the higher hand in determining the gas prices in the lack of serious rivals and they do not want Turkmen (and Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) resources to be in the Eu market through EU. The EU gets one fourth of its entire gas needed for consumption from Russia. Export of gas from Russia to the EU region is part of the most important tools of Russia for putting pressures on and also rejecting the pressures from the Western countries (including the US, indirectly). The recent crisis in Ukraine on Crimea showed how important is this tool for Russia. Naturally the Russians do not like to facilitate the emergence and progress of a rival in this market. Russia prefers that Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan use the routes through Russia for exporting their gas. The TCP will open the way for more presence of the West in the Caspian region especially for construction of a pipeline favored by the EU and the US. Turkmenistan will surely prefer (even forced) to use the Western sources for this project. This is what the Russians do not want.

Iran as the country with second largest gas resources in the world, is in the best position to act as a rival to Russia in the EU markets but so far it has not taken any step in this direction. At the same time, the gas projects in the south of Iran (in the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman) are directed towards India and China with the assistance from Russia and China. Iran is facing difficulties in getting its gas resources to the global markets due to the political issues in the relations of Iran with other countries, especially the West. (3)

The pipeline of Iran to Pakistan and India, called Peace Pipeline, has been stagnant due to the economic sanctions against Iran and at the moment, the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (called TAPI) is moving faster to replace it (construction stage of it starts in early 2018). Russia supports it too because it is part of the plans that get the rival resources towards far away places in India and China and away from the EU market.

Irans opposition to TAP has several reasons:

Iran is opposed to plans that increases the role of Azerbaijan Republic in the Caspian Sea both as the ally of the US and Israel and also the main challenger of Irans positions in the legal regime of the Caspian Sea (which directly affects the share of Iran in the Caspian Sea). Azerbaijan has been supporting establishment of the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline because it sees opportunities to both add its resources to it and get transit rights and play a more important role in the supply of energy to the EU region. Azerbaijan has been a strategic partner to the West since its independence in 1991. (4) and (5). Trying to help its ally, the Russians, in this case. Iran has gone so far in this field that despite its national interests, it is not ready to use this way and others (such as the Nabucco project) (6) to harm the monopolistic domination of Russians in the European gas market. This policy is connected to the close relations and reliance of the Islamic Republic of Iran in combatting the West and its allies in the region (cooperation of two countries in Syria and their activities to circumvent the unilateral, and multilateral sanctions, cooperation in the nuclear energy projects, investment of Russia in Iranian energy sectors and so on.) The deputy minister of energy of Iran has said: Iran is not after competing with Russia in the European gas market. (7) Putting pressures on Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to pay more attention to the positions of Iran (regarding the share of Iran from the Caspian Sea). Iran has been talking about 20 percent but now it is ready to cut those demands. (8). However, Iran will try to get anything more than 13 percent that others are trying to give Iran out of the Caspian Sea. This could mean something between 15 to 17 percent. Adding anything to Irans share of the Caspian Sea, requires cutting something from the extent demanded by others especially the so-called southern Caspian Sea states (Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan in this case). Turkey is one of the serious customers of Iranian gas and reaching of cheaper Turkmenistan gas from the Trans-Caspian route may affect that market fundamentally for Iran. Iran has been trying seriously, along with Russia, to keep the Western countries out of the military and civilian activities in all of the Caspian Sea region. At the same time, the newly established countries in the coats of the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), especially Azerbaijan Republic, have been trying to increase the cooperation with the EU and US on security and energy issues if the Caspian Sea (9) Iran and Russia have insisted that a part of the exiting and future legal regime of the Caspian Sea is keeping the non-coastal states out of the Caspian affairs. Construction of trans-Caspian pipeline needs the investment, technology and presence of the Western countries and their companies because Turkmenistan is interested to use the Western resources in the project that support establishment of the TCP. Therefore, one of the reasons of Iran (and Russia) in opposing the Trans-Caspian pipeline favored by the EU and US is this issue. Putting pressure on Turkmenistan to use the route from Iran. Although Iran is not really interested to play the role of a facilitator for the export of gas from a potential rival in the market (10), it is interested in the case of failing to find proper ways for its exports (which is having difficulties due to the political problems of Iran and its bad relations with the West) to boost the role of transit country. To ask for a better price of Gas from Turkmenistan (11). Turkmenistan can provide cheaper gas for Iran, even as compared to the domestic productions of Iran. Persuading the EU to ask Iran for the gas supply. This may put a pressure on the EU to push for facilitating Irans participation in the regional gas projects and even disregard or cancellation of some the sanctions against the oil and gas sector of Iran.

Of course, this kind of projects are always a threat to the environment all over the world and in order to reject the arguments of Iran and Russia about the environmental issues, Turkmenistan has announced that:

The issue of laying a submerged gas pipeline in the Caspian Sea is related only to the countries that the pipeline crosses their territories. Apparently, now that Modified Median Line (MML) is getting the upper hand in division of the Caspian Sea, it may be inserted in the draft convention for the Caspian legal regime that will be reviewed and possibly adopted in the next summit conference of the Caspian Littoral states in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, in the middle of the 2018. The path of this pipeline in the Caspian seabed may not pass the Russian and Iranian territories. Turkmenistan will observe strictly the contents of Framework Convention for Protection of Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea (called Tehran Convention of 2006). However, the contents of this convention are not very clear and since there is no general convention on the Caspian legal regime, it is not clear on the responsibly for pollution.

The issue of Trans-Caspian Sea Pipeline is more important now that Turkmenistan is getting under pressures from other markets. Iran stopped getting gas supplies from Turkmenistan after some disputes on gas prices. (12) Russians are not letting them to use the Russian route as before. China is now the only important way.

The issue of this pipeline in the Caspian Sea is so important they some analysts are telling: a unilateral action of Turkmenistan or in cooperation with Azerbaijan, may lead to armed conflicts. a professor of Russian history has said: Russia is strongly against the project for Trans-Caspian pipeline carrying gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan and may threaten to use military force should the two former Soviet republics decide to go ahead regardless. (13). Also, an analyst has said Russia could resort to old-fashioned saber-rattling techniques to disrupt the construction of any pipeline that Moscow opposed.... conflict could take place, most likely, in less civilized forms.... And in that case, the Russian Caspian Flotilla, which de facto dominates the sea, does not require the agreement of other countries. (14)

Although some officials from the coastal states of the Caspian Sea are talking about finalization of the Draft Convention on the Legal Regime of the Caspian Sea, and agreement on the criteria to delimit the Caspian Sea among the littoral states (15), it seems the problem is still not resolved and parts of the draft convention are blank. Iranian officials have indicated that this issue may even be followed out of the context of the Convention on the Legal Regime of the Caspian Sea. (16). This means that the issue of TCP will remain a subject of conflict in the Caspian Sea. At the same time, Islamic Republic of Irans approach to this issue is yet another dimension of compromising national interests of Iran in favor of political and ideological games. Many policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region, including Caspian, has nothing to do with national interests of Iran as a country with the huge gas resources and they are mostly related to the conflicts of Iranian current government with the Western countries especially the US and their allies in the region.

sources:

About the author:

Bahman A Diba, PhD International Law of the Seas, is the author of several books. His latest books were published in 2011:



Problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran & Iran and the International Law of the Seas and Rivers
US shamed itself by targeting Iran at UNSC: President Rouhani

01/08/18

Source: Press TV

President Hassan Rouhani says the United States shamed itself by trying to target the Islamic Republic at a UN Security Council (UNSC) meeting it had called on the recent events inside Iran. "A gathering and protest may be exploited by certain sides. This is natural and happens all over the world," said Rouhani at a meeting with staff of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance in Tehran on Monday.



"A failed attempt"

Nikki Haley, US Ambassador to the United Nations

(source: Iranian daily Nasle Farda)



Rouhani pointed to the new US administration's mistakes in dealing with Iranian people, noting that the White House "keeps hitting rock bottom in the wrong approaches it has chosen to deal with the Iranian nation."

"Over the past days, the US's political reputation has been destroyed at the UN Security Council," Rouhani asserted.

Washington, Rouhani said, "abuses its permanent membership at the Security Council and calls for a meeting [on Iran], and there, the world countries slap the US in the face."

Last week, Iran witnessed peaceful protests against recent price hikes and the overall economic condition of the country. However, limited numbers of violent individuals, some of them armed, sought to turn the peaceful protests into street riots.

Some foreign media outlets, meanwhile, tried to depict the entire situation as an uprising targeting Iran's Islamic establishment.

Mindful of how the violent individuals sought to hijack the peaceful rallies, however, the original protesters soon heeded calls by authorities to leave the streets, paving the way for law enforcement officials to deal with the vandals and armed elements.

On Friday, the Council gave into a US push for a meeting on the events inside Iran. The session, though, did not go as planned as the Council's veto wielders and Washington's own allies used the debate to criticize the White House for involving the body in Iran's domestic affairs.

At the meeting, several UNSC members defended Iran's 2015 nuclear agreement with world countries, including Washington, and warned the US against attempts to exploit the recent developments inside Iran to undermine the accord.
The Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) has congratulated the country for marking her 25th Anniversary as a Republic.



The CCG said 25 years under a Fourth Republic, in peace and stability, was no mean achievement.



Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Sunday, the Reverend Dr. Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong, General Secretary of the CCG, said: We give thanks to God for how far He has brought us.



We want to give thanks to God for his grace and mercy towards us, especially in leading us to a new year in 2018.



He said moving forward as a nation, and with 25 years without any military interference, the people and the Government of Ghana must glorify the Lord and use the lessons learnt to guide the present and the future, especially during elections.



We have a lot to learn, especially during elections. Whenever we are close to an election, it is like our country is about to break due to instances of violence, which cause fear and panic, Rev. Opuni-Frimpong said.



He said Ghana could have peaceful election devoid of fear and panic while the political parties must demonstrate to the people that they had learnt something as leaders over the 25 years.



Rev. Opuni-Frimpong said the vigilante groups must be talked to, to channel their energies into productive ventures rather than engaging in vandalism, which retarded progress.



The CCG has, meanwhile, commended the current administration for its resolve to better the lots of Ghanaians through the laudable social intervention programmes.



It however, advised the Government to depoliticise those interventions and make them national ideas and projects, especially the Free Senior High School Policy.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The son of late Managing Editor of Al-Hajj newspaper; Alhaji Bature, Mubarak Bature has indicated that his father died as a result of high blood pressure (Hypertension).



Immediately, the death of the veteran journalist was announced, a publication that circulated within the media fraternity indicated that, he died of stroke.



The reports indicated further that, Alhaji Bature collapsed at his bathroom prior to the Christmas festivities and was rushed to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital where he was on admission receiving treatment before his sudden demise on Friday January 5, 2018.



The spokesman for the family, Amos Blessing Amorse had debunked that the media reports about the late Managing Editor Of Al-Hajj newspaper are untrue and thus the public should disregard it.



But speaking in an exclusive interview with Razzonline.com in line with what killed his Father, the first son of the late veteran Journalist Mubarak Bature who is based in the United States revealed candidly that:



First of all, what I know is my father died of bp... he was admitted at the surgical ward of the Korle Bu teaching hospital for two weeks ...thats what I know, Mubarak told Razzonline.com



Mubarak explained extensively that, though the post mortem is not yet out, the doctors actually told him his late dad died of BP



The late Alhaji Bature Iddrisu was laid to rest around 3pm on Saturday, January 6, 2017, after Jannaiza Prayers was observed at his family house at Nima, Gorillas; adjacent UNIBANK in accordance with the Islamic faith.



He was an outspoken political commentator on Adom TVs morning show, Badwam, and a member of the National Democratic Congress.

Source: razzonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the 4th Republic is to the great credit of the Ghanaian people, the ordinary men and women who make up the fabric of the Ghanaian nation.



According to President Akufo-Addo, 25 years ago, the Ghanaian people resolved to build, under God, a united nation, grounded in democratic values and the rule of law, and, largely, have gone a long way towards realising it.



President Akufo-Addo made this known on Sunday, 7th January, 2018, at the Independence Square, at an inter-faith thanksgiving service held to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the establishment of the 4th Republic.



It will be recalled that the Constitution of the 4th Republic came into force, and the 4th Republic duly inaugurated on 7th January, 1993, i.e. its Silver Jubilee.



The Constitution became effective, following the decision of the Ghanaian people, given in overwhelming numbers, to adopt it as the fundamental law of the land in the Referendum of 28th April, 1992. The vote was three million, four hundred and eight thousand, one hundred and nineteen (3,408,119), representing 92.59%, in favour, with two hundred and seventy two thousand, eight hundred and fifty five (272,855) against, i.e. a mere 7.41%.



The 4th Republic was, thus, promulgated with immense, popular backing, and, on 7th January, 1993, His Excellency Jerry John Rawlings was sworn into office as the 1st President of the 4th Republic.



It is for this reason that President Akufo-Addo commended the erstwhile Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), the 1991 Consultative Assembly, the Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ), the pro-democracy organisations, civil society and religious bodies, whose collective efforts and agitations led to the birth of the 4th Republic.



He also paid tribute to Parliament, under the leadership of successive Right Honourable Speakers  Justice D.F. Annan, Peter Ala Adjetey, Ebenezer Sekyi Hughes, Justice Joyce Bamford-Addo, Edward Doe Adjaho, and, currently, Prof. Aaron Mike Oquaye  for growing stronger in stature, and in its contribution to good governance.



In ensuring that the commitment made twenty five years ago to embark on the journey of multiparty democracy resounds strongly, one of the most important actors in the preservation of this has been the Judiciary, he said.



The President continued, Today, I pay tribute to their Lordships Philip Archer, I.K. Abban, E.K. Wiredu, George Acquah, Georgina Wood, and, the incumbent, Sophia Akuffo, the Chief Justices of the 4th Republic, who have ensured, and are still ensuring that the Judiciary plays its role as the defender of the rights and liberties of the people, and as an independent arbiter, which aims to inspire confidence in the citizenry.



President Akufo-Addo also remembered with with gratitude the contribution of the Council of State, under its various leaders, in helping to steer the ship of state to this happy day, and also to past and current officials in the public service, and to the active and retired members of the security services  the Armed Forces, the Police Service, the Fire Service, the Immigration Service, the Prisons Service  who have played their part in helping to preserve the security and the stability of Ghana.



This survey cannot be complete without mention of the Electoral Commission (EC), National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), political parties, trades unions, civil society organisations, traditional authorities and religious bodies in the success of the 4th Republic, he added.





Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is confident that with a spirit of reconciliation, fairness, integrity and hard work, the best days of Mother Ghana lie ahead of us.



According to President Akufo-Addo, our goal has to be constant  to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of Ghanaians, who yearn for improvements in their living standards, in conditions of peace, security and solidarity, and to put Ghana onto the path to sustained progress and prosperity.



We can hope for a brighter future, because we are blessed with enormous wealth and human potential.



President Akufo-Addo made this known on Sunday, 7th January, 2018, at the Independence Square, at an inter-faith thanksgiving service held to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the establishment of the 4th Republic.



With the country experiencing the longest, uninterrupted period of stable, constitutional governance in our history, he stated that this period has banished the spectre of instability that disfigured the early years of Ghanas existence, and the benefits are showing.



Cataloguing some of the benefits, the President noted that Ghana has witnessed sustained growths in the size of the economy; rising levels of per capita real incomes; systematic expansion of the private sector; and taken strong measures to try to protect our lands, water bodies and environment from the menace of environmental degradation.



Additionally, over the last 25 years, efforts to meet the most basic elements of social justice, i.e. education from kindergarten through to secondary school, and accessible healthcare to all our citizens, are ongoing.



The President indicated further that the under the 4th Republic, media freedom has been entrenched; attachment to the rule of law, probity and accountability, respect for individual liberties, human rights, the principles of democratic accountability and social justice have been deepened; and an environment in which government and regulatory policies attempt to enhance, rather than inhibit or frustrate, trade, commerce and investments is being created.



Democracy, equality of opportunity and respect for human rights, ideals which have stood the test of time, President Akufo-Addo said, have now found firm anchor in the countrys body politic.



This, he added, is evidenced in the election of 5 Presidents in the history of this Republic, and even when there was disagreement with the outcome of an election, it was the Supreme Court, rather than the streets, that determined its result.



Despite all these gains, the President indicated that Ghana has not reached the potential she should have.



The biggest challenge we face continues to be eradicating widespread poverty. We still have challenges in the performance of our public services; we face threats, traditional and contemporary, to our nations security and social stability, in the form of chieftaincy conflicts, land disputes, ethnic conflicts, vigilantism, cyber security issues, youth unemployment, economic hardships, and corruption in our public life, he said.



In addressing these challenges, the President told the gathering that we have begun to take a deep look at the structure of our economy, and transform it, from a raw material producing and exporting one to a value-added, industrialised economy, with a modernised agriculture, to serve better our needs.



He continued, The era of Ghanas industrialisation has dawned, so that we can trade in the global marketplace, not on the basis of raw materials, but on the basis of things we make, inspired by our sense of enterprise, creativity and innovation. It is the most effective way we can generate jobs and wealth for the masses of our people, and join the ranks of the developed, prosperous nations of the world.



With Ghanas obligation to the unity and integration of the region and continent remaining, President Akufo-Addo stressed that achieving functioning, common regional and continental markets will help consolidate the process of structural transformation of our economy, on which we are engaged, and will, thus, help open up the space for accelerated development.





Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Former President Mahama has challenged the Akufo Addo Administration to arrest him and his wife, Lordina Mahama, if the government believes they were in any way involved in the DKM scandal.



John Mahama said he and his wife were vilified by the NPP during the 2016 electioneering period and wondered why its members had suddenly gone quiet over the matter after winning the election.



Thousands of customers of DKM Microfinance Company lost their investments, running into millions of cedis, after the owners of the company invested in unapproved ventures and lost their funds.



The Bank of Ghana subsequently confiscated the assets of the company and appointed the Registrar Generals Department to commence the liquidation process to refund customers of the company in 2016. While some of the customers are yet to receive any pesewa from the official liquidator, others have complained that the amount of money they have been given is not a representation of their investments.



Speaking at the NDCs Unity Walk in Techiman in the Brong Ahafo Region Region on Saturday, the former President said the governments silence on claims that he owned the company had vindicated him.



When the DKM issue came up, the NPP accused my wife and I of owning that company. So they said when they come into power, they will retrieve the money from us and give it back to those it was taken from. By Gods grace today, they are in now power. I challenge them to investigate the ownership of DKM. If DKM is owned by my wife and me, arrest us but they are now very quiet.



For lies, if you tell one, you have to keep telling lies to save yourself. It is said that you can lie to win power but you cant govern a nation with lies, he added.



Ill investigate DKM  Akufo-Addo



President Akufo-Addo while campaigning ahead of the December general elections promised to investigate the DKM scandal if he gets the nod.



I will investigate governments inability to pay the monies owed as well as investigate the DKM scandal and to ensure that there would be total restoration to all affected in both scandals, said Nana Akufo-Addo, in November 2016 when he addressed NPP supporters in the Brong Ahafo Region.

Source: citifmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Deputy Minister of Information and Member of Parliament (MP) for Ofoase-Ayirebi, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has called on government appointees to desist from actions that embarrass the government and have the potential to bring down the image of the current administration in the eyes of Ghanaians.



According to him, it is becoming embarrassing when you "continuously have to explain" that government is "not aware" of a particular issue, which has incurred the wrath of the public.



What I can agree with is that this is embarrassing . . . it gets embarrassing as you continuously have to explain that we were not aware of this . . . and I would like to say to all of us as government appointees, Chief Executives, Deputy Ministers, Ministers that these actions we are taking that are embarrassing the government, are the actions that will bring us down in the eyes of the Ghanaian who is watching us and viewing us . . . we are chipping away governments credibility if we continue to do this . . . 



His comment follows various actions and decisions of some government agencies especially the payment of TV license (click to read) as well as the compulsory charge of first aid kits by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) (click to read).



Even though government intervened in some of these actions, the former radi broadcaster says it is important for appointees to seek clearance before doing anything.



Kojo Oppong Nkrumah who was contributing to a panel discussion on Joy FMs newsfile programme indicated that there are a lot of state owned agencies that sometimes forget that the job they are doing is not as of right unto them, they have been appointed into some of these roles by political head . . . if you are going to do something to charge the people some amount of money, it is important in the first place to clear with the channels up . . . It is not the mere fact that youre a Deputy Minister, a Chief Executive officer of something, then literally you have space to do as you decide.



According to him, the issue is not whether or not Ghanaians are willing to pay, however when something doesnt make sense, it doesnt make sense no matter how you rap it, toast it, burn it, it doesn't make sense.



We cannot continue (with) this level of embarrassment for the government . . .  he opined.

Source: Rebecca Addo Tetteh/Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Former Ghana High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Ireland, Victor Smith, has accused his former boss, Jerry John Rawlings of not paying heed to wise counsel given him by his peers.



Former President Jerry John Rawlings is noted for his blunt criticism and swift response to issues. The current incident was when he criticized former President Mahama for continuously keeping him waiting at functions.



Rawlings, who was speaking at the 36th anniversary of the 31st December 1981 revolution in Ho, expressed his disappointment in the fact that official programmes are held up in wait for Mr. Mahama before commencement.



He has not learnt the lesson of how not to be late for functions. Each time they keep me waiting just because of him. Ladies and gentlemen, dont worry he will learn it, he said.



Speaking to Ekourba Gyasi on Atinka AM Drive, Victor Smith stated that, Mr Rawlings has resorted to bluntly throwing undeserving comments at peers meant to disrespect them.



According to Victor Smith, the former Presidents utterances are appalling, adding that there are several decent ways of expressing frustrations at issues and situations.



He stated that, it was obvious that the former President does not listen to wise counsel offered him by people around give him.



Former President Jerry John Rawlings is the only President who uses public platforms to chastise and ridicule people, even his party people. He has attained the position of a headmaster who only chastises but refuses to be chastised, he charged.

Source: atinkaonline









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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James Kwabena Bomfeh has called on President Akufo-Addo to steer the affairs of the country effectively in the year 2018.



To him, the President has no excuse this year but to work hard to ensure Ghana succeeds.



He was speaking on the New Year edition of Kokrokoo on Peace FM.



Making his submission on the programme, James Kwabena Bomfeh popularly called Kabila urged the President not to slack in his duties, emphasizing that "2018, Ghana must succeed. 2018, Ghana must work again. 2018, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo must work to make Ghana work and succeed. 2018, we must be responsible citizens to support President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.



Kabila also commended President Akufo-Addo for celebrating Ghana's Silver Jubilee of the Fourth Republic together with Former Presidents John Dramani Mahama, J.A Kufour and J.J Rawlings.



He noted the presence of all the former Presidents during the occasion would solidify the country's democracy.



According to him, it is about time Ghanaians let go of their bitterness towards the former Presidents and one another; a lesson he believed has been demonstrated by President Akufo-Addo.



Touching further on the 25th anniversary of Ghana's Fourth Republic, Kabila advised that some provisions in the 1992 Constitution should be reviewed because they're archaic.



He singled out the indemnity clauses in the constitution which provide legal exemption from liability for wrongdoing should be removed to make the Heads of State accountable for their actions and inactions.



President Akufo-Addo on Sunday led Ghanaians in a Thanksgiving Service at the Independence Square in Accra to mark the Silver Jubilee of the Fourth Republic under the theme "25 Years of the Fourth Republic - Celebrating the Goodness of the Lord".

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Marking another setback for LGBTQ civil rights following oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear arguments in the cases challenging Mississippis controversial HB 1523  also known as the anti-LGBTQ license to discriminate law.

Back Story

As we reported last year, [Mississippi HB 1523] enables legal discrimination against same-sex couples, transgender men and women, and any unmarried couple who engages in sexual relations outside the boundaries of marriage. After two legal challenges failed to stop the law from taking effect last year, a legal battle made its way up through the courts to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

That court refused to issue an injunction against the law citing a lack of existing harm. Under this current record, the plaintiffs have not shown an injury-in-fact caused by HB 1523 that would empower the district court or this court to rule on its constitutionality, wrote Judge Jerry E. Smith in the Fifth Circuits majority opinion. Smith added, We do not foreclose the possibility that a future plaintiff may be able to show clear injury-in-fact  but the federal courts must withhold judgment unless and until that plaintiff comes forward.

Following that decision last summer, plaintiffs in the case decided to petition the Supreme Court  and did so in October 2017.

The organizations petitioning the court  Lambda Legal and the Mississippi Center for Justice  said at the time that HB 1523 was a transparent attempt to undermine the equal dignity of LGBT citizens established in this courts decisions. They added that the law was an equally transparent attempt to endorse particular religious beliefs as state policy.

Today, the high court refused to hear the case (meaning the Fifth Circuit decision will stand and the law will remain in full effect).

Todays Supreme Court Decision

In their refusal, the Supreme Court agreed with the Fifth Circuit that plaintiffs in the case against HB 1523 did not have sufficient standing to bring the case before the high court.

In the refusal the court argued  without commenting on the merits of the case (which is important)  that no one could show actual injury from the law. This isnt uncommon, but it is a punt that will delay substantive examination of the laws effects on LGBTQ people in Mississippi.

Reacting to the case, the ACLU of Mississippi released a statement expressing disappointment.

We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Courts refusal to hear challenges to HB 1523, the anti-LGBT law that allows religion to be used as a way to discriminate based on specific beliefs about gay marriage, transgender individuals, and sex before marriage, said Jennifer Riley Collins, Executive Director for the ACLU of Mississippi. This law very simply is a license to discriminate. While the right to ones religious belief is fundamental, a license to discriminate is not. Same-sex couples deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect as anyone else.

Collins added:

However, the fight is not over. The ACLU of Mississippi expects that our narrower challenge will now move forward. Our case was filed on behalf of a same-sex couple planning to marry in Mississippi in the near future. We will continue to proceed on behalf of our members  Nykolas Alford and Stephen Thomas  to protect them and other same-sex couples from this harmful and discriminatory law. This law should not allow state employees to withhold marriage licenses from same-sex couples. While we are disappointed in the Courts decision, the ACLU of Mississippi will not stand quietly by while discrimination is sanctioned. We believe in the rule of law, and we are concerned that harm is already done when any citizen is treated as second class. We want to hear from anyone who experiences discrimination in marriage, health care, or any other context. House Bill 1523 cannot trump the Constitution or other federal anti-discrimination statutes. We stand ready to ensure that those rights are enforced and that all Mississippians are protected from discrimination. Again, we urge the community to contact us if they or someone they know experiences any discrimination.

While the news is disappointing, its not without a silver lining: the court offered no opinion on the merits of the case since they ruled exclusively on standing. That means the high court  much like the Fifth Circuit  may be willing to hear a case after someone injured by the law files a case against the state.

Mississippi Today analyzed this possibility last year after the Fifth Circuit three judge panel ruling also excluded the merits of the case:

For the original plaintiffs, however, the judges decision to avoid any discussion of the merits of the religious freedom law is telling. Rob McDuff, the lead attorney on one of the two cases to challenge the law, said Thursdays decision does not make House Bill 1523 constitutional. Even though this is an adverse decision I am pleased that we were able to stop HB 1523 from going into effect for the past year, and hopefully our efforts to see further review will prevent it from going into effect in the future. But whatever happens, it is clear that this law is unfair and intolerant and unconstitutional and the Fifth Circuits decision based on the doctrine of standing does not change that, McDuff said.

To that end, Lambda Legal is already seeking plaintiffs for a new case. If you are in Mississippi and you have faced or fear anti-#LGBTQ discrimination, PLEASE get in touch. We and @justice4ms are here to help, they wrote on Twitter today. The tweet contained a website where anyone affected by the law can notify the two organizations in order to move forward with a case containing actual injury.

PREVIOUSLY

Peacock Panache readers:

Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time hes worn several hats including leading on campus LGBTQ advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website.

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Want to know more about Food Network's Alex Guarnaschelli?

Miss Pennsylvania Katie Schreckengast chatted with t he frequent "Chopped" judge as she visited the Pa. Preferred Culinary Connection stage on Jan. 7. Guarnaschelli did two cooking demonstrations, at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on the stage, located in the Main Exhibit Hall.

Guarnaschelli, who is executive chef at Butter restaurant in New York City, won the 'The Next Iron Chef: Redemption" in 2012, earning the coveted title of Iron Chef. She recently published her third cookbook, "The Home Cook: Recipes to Know by Heart."

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LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Oprah Winfrey's moving speech at the Golden Globes has some fans and fellow celebrities calling for her presidential run.

The actress accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at Sunday's ceremony, and it didn't take long for Twitter to start lighting up with the hashtag #Oprah2020.

Comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted "Oprah/Michelle 2020." Leslie Odom, Jr., who played Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical "Hamilton" tweeted "She's running. A new day is on the way."

Y'all want #Oprah2020 so bad? Prove it. Spend this year electing Black women to office in 2018. Put in the work. Show some receipts. Then we can talk about the presidency in 2020. Deal? pic.twitter.com/6zX0rpTJJ3  April is at Sundance (@ReignOfApril) January 8, 2018

For more than three decades, @Oprah has been inspiring others, giving a voice to the voiceless, and telling stories that had the power to change lives. Her speech at the #GoldenGlobes tonight was presidential. #Oprah2020 pic.twitter.com/MvCcyq3V5s  Joseph Amodeo (@josephamodeo) January 8, 2018

#OprahWinfrey, thank you for giving a little Mexican American girl, from the wrong side of the tracks, a chance to DREAM. Now please run for President. #Oprah2020! pic.twitter.com/LIsuZ8JKK7  DanaCortez (@DanaCortez) January 8, 2018

Winfrey's longtime partner Stedman Graham tells the Los Angeles Times "It's up to the people" whether she will be president, adding "she would absolutely do it."

Winfrey brought the typically rowdy crowd to silence and tears with her speech.

She spoke of seeing Sidney Poitier win an Academy Award when she was a girl, and weaved it into the #MeToo movement.
Five residents were displaced after a house fire in York County, but no injuries were reported.

York Daily Record reports the fire occurred at approximately 3 p.m. Sunday in the 100 block of Edgar Street in York.

Four dogs and two cats were also safe, according to a Facebook post by York City Department of Fire/Rescue Services.

Crews (C Platoon) are taking up from the fire in the 100 blk. of Edgar St. American Red Cross Central Pennsylvania... Posted by York City Department of Fire/Rescue Services on Sunday, January 7, 2018

The American Red Cross also responded to assist the residents, according to the post.
A state appeals court has refused to overturn the suspension of the state medical license of a Camp Hill doctor who admitted illegally prescribing pain-killers from a pizza shop.

The Commonwealth Court panel did rule, however, that Dr. Joseph T. Acri doesn't have to wait at least five years to seek reinstatement of his license.

Acri, 60, was charged by the state attorney general's office nearly two years ago. Investigators said Acri wrote bogus Oxycodone prescriptions to four people on prescription pads taken from Carlisle Regional Medical Center. Acri wasn't working for the center at the time.

Also, he was accused of writing drug prescriptions from a Camp Hill pizza shop to people he didn't even examine. Acri issued illegal prescriptions between 2011 and 2014, investigators said.

In September 2016, Acri pleaded guilty in Cumberland County Court to four felony charges of prescription drug fraud. Two months later, county Judge Albert H. Masland sentenced him to 3 to 23 months in prison, followed by two years of probation.

In his appeal to Commonwealth Court, Acri claimed his civil rights were violated because the state Board of Osteopathic Medicine suspended his medical license without granting him a hearing to defend himself.

Judge Patricia A. McCullough found in Commonwealth Court opinion that the board's action was proper because state law requires automatic license suspensions for physicians who illegally prescribe drugs. That mandate "bears a real and substantial relationship to the goal of safeguarding the public," McCullough wrote.

Her court did overrule the medical board's decision that Acri must wait five years to request reinstatement of his license. The wording of state regulations on that issue is "confusing," McCullough found, so Acri can seek reinstatement at any time.

The state judges made no recommendation regarding whether he should get his license back, though.
A driver who may have had been experiencing a medical emergency crashed into a Lebanon County pizza shop Sunday, injuring two workers.

Steven Landes, 65, of the 400 block of Homestead Drive, South Lebanon Township, drove his SUV into Pucillo's Pizza & Pasta, 1032 S. Fifth Avenue, at 12:12 p.m. Sunday, police say.

Two workers in the kitchen at Pucillo's suffered moderate injuries and were taken to the hospital for treatment.

As many of you have already seen or heard already we had an accident today at Pucillos. We had a vehicle go into the... Posted by Pucillo's Pizza & Pasta on Sunday, January 7, 2018

South Lebanon Township police say they believe Landes suffered a medical condition prior to and during the accident. Witnesses said they saw his blue Mazda SUV run north through a field at a high rate of speed toward Pucillo's, running into the building.

The restaurant had damage to the building and kitchen and remains closed, says Pucillo's Facebook page.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau takes questions as the Liberal cabinet meets in St. John's, N.L. on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017. The federal ethics commissioner has cleared Finance Minister Bill Morneau of insinuations that both he and his father benefited from insider information to save half a million dollars on the sale of shares in the family-built company. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
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S. Arabia changes Aramco status from national oil company to joint-stock company -official bulletin

By Reuters

DUBAI

Petroleumworld 01 08 2018

Saudi Arabia has changed the status of its national oil giant Aramco to a joint-stock company as of Jan. 1, in a key step for an initial public offering (IPO) planned for later this year.

The sale of up to 5 percent of Saudi Aramco, expected to go ahead in the second half of 2018, is a centrepiece of Vision 2030, an ambitious reform plan to reduce the dependence of the Saudi economy on oil. The plan is championed by Saudi crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

The change, which was published in a cabinet decree in the kingdom's official bulletin on Friday, is a requirement for local companies in Saudi Arabia ahead of listing, a senior Aramco source, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

As a customary step in the preparation process for a Saudi IPO, Saudi Aramco has converted to a joint stock company, the source said.

This establishes the framework to allow future investors to hold shares in the company alongside its shareholder, the government.

But it is an important step as it shows the IPO process, which could be the biggest in history raising up to $100 billion, is moving ahead despite market speculation it could be delayed or totally shelved.

Prince Mohammad told Reuters in October it was still on track for 2018.

Aramco has a fully paid capital of 60 billion riyals ($16.00 billion) divided into 200 billion ordinary shares, according to the company's bylaws published in the official bulletin.

The firm's board will have 11 members and the power to list the company in domestic and international markets, it said. The government will propose 6 members of Aramco's board, but shareholders with a more than 0.1 percent stake will have the right to propose a member to the general assembly.

The government will have the right to appoint or change the company's chairman, a position currently held by Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih.

The government will remain the major shareholder of Aramco and retain the ultimate decision on output levels and production capacity, it said.

The state will remain the only responsible entity to make the final decisions regarding the maximum levels of hydrocarbons that can be produced at any time, it said.

Saudi officials have said domestic and international exchanges such as New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong have been looked at for a partial listing of the state-run oil firm.

They also left the door open for other options including an exclusive listing on the kingdom's bourse Tadawul and an IPO coupled with a private placement to a strategic investor as a precursor to an international IPO.

Aramco's IPO will comply with regulations of the Saudi stock exchange and also regulations of the international market where it will be listed, the official bulletin said.

Investors have long debated whether Aramco could be valued anywhere close to $2 trillion, the figure announced by the crown prince, who wants to raise cash through the IPO to finance investment aimed at helping wean the world's biggest oil exporting nation off its dependency on crude.

A kingpin of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Saudi Arabia is also leading members and other rival oil producers such as Russia to restrict oil supplies under a global oil pact to drain inventories and boost oil prices.

In November, OPEC and non-OPEC producers agreed to extend oil output cuts until the end of 2018 as they try to finish clearing a global glut of crude while signalling a possible early exit from the deal if the market overheats. ($1 = 3.7502 riyals)






Analysis: Trump energy policy riles competing sectors

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON

Petroleumworld 01 08 2018

When the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump proposed new subsidies for coal and nuclear plants, it seemed like an obvious way to deliver on campaign promises to boost the nation's energy industry.

And yet the plan, announced in September, set off sharp criticism from other sectors that Trump has also vowed to help, such as natural gas and utilities.

Subsidies don't make you competitive - and don't make you great again, said Robert Flexon, the president and chief executive of Dynegy Inc, a Houston-based utility that owns both coal- and gas-fired power plants.

Squabbling over the proposal exemplifies the administration's larger struggle to deliver on promises of a sweeping energy renaissance across the coal, oil, gas and nuclear industries.

Trouble is, policies that help one of those sectors often hurt another, illustrating the complexity of energy regulation and the difficulty in appeasing competing interests. While election campaigns often seek to neatly divide voters into two camps - those supporting energy vs. those supporting the environment - such rhetoric fails to capture the messier policy impacts on profits, hiring and emissions reductions across the energy landscape.

There is little evidence that Trump's moves so far have aided energy firms of any stripe; some administration proposals have languished amid divisive politics, while other regulatory changes have seen their impact muted by market forces.

Utilities, for instance, have shown little interest in buying more coal-fired power despite the regulatory rollbacks in Trump's pro-coal push.

A broader measure of investor sentiment on the energy industry - the Standard & Poor's 500 energy index - lost more than 7 percent in 2017 even as stock markets soared.

White House and Energy Department officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Another political flashpoint has been the administration's waffling over proposed changes to biofuels policy.

Trump's Environmental Protection Agency initially entertained a plan from oil refiners to upend regulations requiring them to blend ethanol into their gasoline - then rejected it after a backlash from the ethanol industry, rooted in Midwest corn-growing states that supported Trump's election.

The dispute sparked open warfare among the congressional backers of various industry interests, including threats to block Trump's agency nominations and accusations he had welched on campaign promises.

Even the coal industry, which played a starring role in Trump's campaign, has seen a marginal return on its lobbying efforts. It has, for instance, had little success so far in attacking subsidies for wind and solar power.

Trump and others in his administration have criticized renewable energy as expensive and dependent on government support. But the White House has not sought to repeal tax breaks expected to provide $12.3 billion to renewable energy firms by 2020, which other Republicans continue to support.

Fossil-fuel firms clearly have more influence on policy under Trump and easier access to decision makers. Coal, oil, and gas company executives have met regularly with senior administration officials, according to official agency schedules.

Their policy victories include rollbacks of regulations limiting emissions of carbon, methane and other pollutants; the opening of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; and the lifting of a coal-mining moratorium on federal lands.

But the impact of these moves on production, profits and jobs remains uncertain. Demand for additional drilling and mining leases on federal lands has been thin , and top U.S. oil and gas companies have told shareholders in regulatory filings that environmental regulations have little impact on their business.

While coal advocates have generally cheered Trump's ascension, White House policies have so far had little effect on U.S. coal consumption.

Robert Murray, chief executive of private coal company Murray Energy Corp., said Republican efforts to boost coal have addressed only the low hanging fruit of overturning a few environmental regulations while avoiding tougher issues.

The oil and gas industry, also championed by Trump, similarly feels let down by an administration it had hoped would strip away government interference, said Susan Ginsburg, a senior vice president of regulatory affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents small oil and gas companies.

The industry, she said, expected that markets would be allowed to work.

HELP FOR COAL HURTS NATURAL GAS

For the coal industry - which has seen a decade of decline amid competition from cheap natural gas - the wish-list for the Trump administration is long.

In the months after Trump was elected, Trump and senior cabinet members including Energy Secretary Rick Perry met with mining executives such as Murray. Other administration officials met with lobbyists for coal firms including Peabody Energy Corp, the nation's largest miner.

Murray handed the White House a long list of recommendations, including rescinding pollution controls, slashing the EPA's size and ending green energy incentives.

Emails obtained by the Sierra Club in October revealed that Peabody had also given the administration a list of proposals, including a controversial electricity pricing measure based on the argument that coal and nuclear plants improve grid reliability.

Perry proposed in September that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reward coal and nuclear plants that have 90 days of fuel supply in reserve by covering their operating costs through power pricing changes. FERC is expected to decide on the request by Jan. 10.

That proposal irritated oil and gas producers, along with renewable energy firms. Both were caught off guard, said a Washington-based oil-and-gas lobbyist who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern over offending the administration.

Nobody in the oil and gas industry, or in the renewables industry for that matter, was consulted, the lobbyist said. It just came out of nowhere.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents major U.S. oil and gas companies, wrote that the plan upsets the very foundations of the competitive wholesale electricity markets.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Affordable Energy Coalition, which has oil major BP as a member, called the proposal an unfair subsidy.

The Department of Energy is trying to pick winners and losers in a way that will raise costs for consumers by billions of dollars, Steel said.

BROKEN PROGRAM'

The political dustup over biofuels policy provides another telling example of the difficulty appeasing competing industry camps.

The Renewable Fuel Standard was introduced under former President George W. Bush as a way to help farmers and reduce oil imports. But refining companies say it costs them a fortune and threatens their survival.

Refiners expected changes to the policy after Trump named billionaire investor and refinery owner Carl Icahn as an unofficial adviser on regulation. Icahn and others proposed shifting the blending requirement to other businesses and reducing biofuels blending quotas.

But the proposals drew heavy fire from the ethanol industry and its backers. Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa in October threatened to block a key EPA nomination until the administration rejected the proposals - which it did days later, at Trump's direction.

The refining industry, in turn, was outraged by the reversal. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and other lawmakers from states with refineries demanded a meeting with Trump. Cruz later said he would block a nomination to the Department of Agriculture over the issue.

The White House is now mediating talks between both sides.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman, asked if the agency could have handled the situation differently, said: It is good public policy to vet our options with all stakeholders, which is what we have  and will continue  to do.

Follow Trump's impact on energy and environment at The Trump Effect www.reuters.com/trump-effect . For an interactive graphic charting the policy changes, see: here






OPEC problem, U.S. shale returns to growth: Kemp





By John Kemp

LONDON

Petroleumworld 01 08 2018

U.S. crude oil prices have risen above $60 per barrel which should accelerate shale drilling and production in the next few months, provided the price increase is sustained.

U.S. crude futures are trading over $60 for all delivery months between February and August 2018, an increase of about 40 percent since the middle of 2017 ( tmsnrt.rs/2CW5DIt ).

And the futures strip for 2019, the benchmark against which U.S. shale producers can execute hedges for next year's output, is trading over $56, up almost 20 percent on the last six months.

Harold Hamm, chief executive of Continental Resources, one of the largest producers in North Dakota and Oklahoma, said last year that prices needed to be above $50 to be sustainable.

Analysis of earnings statements and drilling behaviour of the shale firms confirmed most were not breaking when futures prices were below $50.

Breakeven prices for shale vary tremendously between different companies, different basins and even different wells within the same play.

But with futures prices above $60, a much wider range of wells and shale plays should now be profitable.

Futures prices are sending a clear signal to shale firms that they should step up drilling programmes and boost output.

Experience shows changes in drilling rates generally follow changes in futures prices with a lag of about 16 to 20 weeks.

Futures prices have been rising fairly consistently for 27 weeks since hitting a trough around $43 in late June 2017.

Drilling rates, as measured by the Baker Hughes rig count, started turning up 19 weeks later, consistent with normal behaviour.

The rig count unexpectedly stalled in the second half of December, but the continued increase in futures prices strongly suggests the rig count will start increasing again and should rise at least through March and April.

Shale production is already increasing strongly as a result of the growing number of wells drilled earlier in 2017 and completed in the second half of last year.

Monthly completion rates across the seven major shale plays climbed from 700 in January 2017 to 921 in June and 1,086 in November, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Production from the Lower 48 states excluding the Gulf of Mexico, much of it from shale formations, has surged from 6.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in January 2017 to 7.0 million bpd in June and 7.7 million bpd in October.

Production from the Lower 48 excluding federal waters in the Gulf is forecast to top 8 million bpd before the end of 2018, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The continued rise in prices makes it more likely the forecast will prove correct and onshore output will top 8 million bpd even earlier this year.

The more U.S. crude prices rise, the bigger the eventual production response is likely to be, which could significantly complicate OPEC's attempt to draw down global oil inventories.

OPEC must decide how far it is willing to allow prices to rise before increasing shale output threatens both its market share and its plan to reduce inventories.






Russia launching an influencing campaing on Mexican election: White House





By David Alire Garcia and Noe Torres

MEXICO CITY

Petroleumworld 01 08 2018

The Russian government has launched a sophisticated campaign to influence Mexico's 2018 presidential election and stir up division, a senior White House official said in a video clip published by Mexican newspaper Reforma.

U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said in a speech last month to the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation that there was already evidence of Russian meddling in Mexican elections set for July.

We've seen that this is really a sophisticated effort to polarize democratic societies and pit communities within those societies against each other, said McMaster in a previously unreported video clip from Dec. 15 that was posted on Twitter by a reporter with Mexican daily newspaper Reforma on Saturday.

You've seen, actually, initial signs of it in the Mexican presidential campaign already, said McMaster, a former Army general. He did not elaborate in the clip on how Russia was seeking to influence the election.

Reforma published a story on Saturday on the comments, which have since been shared many times on social media.

President Donald Trump's senior national security aide added in the clip that the U.S. government was concerned by Russia's use of advanced cyber tools to push propaganda and disinformation.

A request for comment sent to McMaster's office at the White House and a request for comment from the Russian government in Moscow were not immediately returned on Sunday.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied accusations by U.S. intelligence officials and others of interfering in foreign elections.

In July, Mexico will elect a new president to succeed Enrique Pena Nieto, who is barred by law from seeking a second six-year term. Congressional seats plus some governors' races will also be up for grabs.

According to opinion polls, the frontrunner in the presidential contest is the leftist former mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is running on an anti-corruption platform.

Lopez Obrador, a two-time runner-up for the presidency and a divisive figure in Mexican politics for over a decade, is seen by some analysts as the Kremlin's favorite, given the positive coverage he has received from government-funded media outlets like Sputnik and Russia Today.

Both China and Russia are taking an increasing interest in Latin America as the United States, under Trump, has adopted a more protectionist stance and the future of the North America Free Trade Agreement looks uncertain.

Lopez Obrador has been a fierce critic of Pena Nieto's sweeping energy overhaul, which was favored by U.S. officials and oil companies. He has said he would seek friendly relations with the U.S. government but would demand respect.

In 2016, Russia Today's Spanish-language YouTube channel began running a weekly video blog entitled The Battle for Mexico, hosted by a prominent supporter of Lopez Obrador, according to David Salvo at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, who has written about Russian attempts to influence politics in Latin America.

Pena Nieto's office and the foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McMaster's statement.

Some Mexican political commentators said that there was little reason yet to fear Russian involvement in the election.

The point is that Washington hasn't provided any solid proof for this, said Marco Cancino, head of Mexico City-based consultancy Inteligencia Publica.

So far, it's just speculation.






Oil tanker carrying 136,000 tons of light oil ablaze off Chinese coast at risk of explosion

CCTV via Reuters TV



Smoke and fire billow from the Panama-registered tanker Sanchi, carrying 950,000 aprox. of Iranian oil, after it collided with a Chinese freighter in the East China Sea, in this still image taken from a video Sunday.

By AFP-JIJI, REUTERS

BEIJING/SEOUL/LONDON

Petroleumworld 01 08 2018

An Iranian oil tanker ablaze off the Chinese coast was at risk of exploding or sinking, authorities said Monday, as they reported there was no sign of survivors 36 hours after the vessel erupted in flames.

A huge fire was still raging around the stricken ship, which had been carrying 136,000 tons of light oil, with fierce heat and thick black smoke billowing from the vessel and the surrounding sea.

The body of one crew member was found aboard the tanker, an Iranian official said.

Mohammad Rastad, head of Iran's Ports and Maritime Organization, was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency that the body was sent to Shanghai for identification.

Rescuers were attempting to reach the other 29 Iranian and two Bangladeshi crew members but were being beaten back by toxic clouds, authorities said.

The Panamanian-flagged 274-meter tanker Sanchi is in danger of exploding or sinking, the ministry said.

The U.S. Navy sent a military aircraft to assist with the search, which spanned an area of about 12,350 square km but said in a statement it did not locate any of the tanker's 32 missing crew members.

The Sanchi tanker, run by Iran's top oil shipping operator, collided Saturday evening with the CF Crystal about 300 km off China's coast near Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze River Delta.

Chinese state media showed pictures of the tanker ablaze and billowing plumes of thick dark smoke on Sunday. China sent four rescue ships and three cleaning boats to the site, while South Korea dispatched a ship and a helicopter.

The Panama-registered tanker was sailing from Iran to South Korea carrying 136,000 metric tons of condensate, an ultra light crude. That is equivalent to just under 1 million barrels, worth about $60 million, based on global crude oil prices.

The freighter, which was carrying U.S. grain, suffered limited damage and the 21 crew members, all Chinese nationals, were rescued.

The extent of the environmental harm and size of the spill were not yet known, but based on the tanker's tonnage, it has the potential to be the worst since 1991 when 260,000 metric tons of oil leaked off the Angolan coast.

Hanwha Total Petrochemical Co. Ltd. in South Korea was due to receive the cargo and was looking at ways to replace the lost barrels, a spokesman said.

The company may use its own stock, ask Iran for another shipment or seek alternative condensate supplies from Qatar, he said. The accident was not affecting its operations on Monday, he added.

Poor weather conditions Sunday night made it hard for the rescue crews to get access to the tanker.

Trying to contain a spill of condensate, which is extremely low in density, highly toxic and much more explosive than normal crude, may also be difficult.

It is only liquid in certain pressure and temperature conditions and often evaporates into air or dilutes into water when exposed to the atmosphere or during uncontrolled spills.

When liquid, condensate is colorless and virtually odorless. Surface spills of condensate are therefore difficult to detect visually, making them hard to manage and contain.

Shanghai Maritime Bureau's navigation department said the collision did not impact traffic in and out of Shanghai, one of the world's busiest and biggest ports, or ports along the Yangtze River.
In general, men are twice as likely to cheat on a spouse than women are. That frequency increases over the lifespan, peaking among the elderly. Among men 18 to 29 who have ever been married, about 1 in 10 is
Tim Piazza died after falling down a flight of stairs during pledge night. Read more

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has agreed to take over the manslaughter case against former Pennsylvania State University fraternity members accused in last February's hazing death of a pledge.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro's office announced Monday that it would take the case from the new Centre County district attorney, Bernard Cantorna, who said he had a conflict of interest that prevented him from prosecuting it.

In a statement, Shapiro promised "an independent review" of the death of sophomore Tim Piazza, which leaves open the possibility that the charges could be dropped, increased or changed.

Twenty-six members of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity remain charged in the death of the New Jersey engineering major after a booze-fueled party at which prosecutors have alleged hazing occurred. Eight of the members are charged with involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault; other charges include hazing, reckless endangerment, and furnishing alcohol to minors.

Cantorna, who was sworn in as districtaAttorney this month, had refrained from commenting on the case after he was elected. After consulting the State Bar Ethics Committee, he last month requested that the attorney general take over the matter because he had "previously served as counsel" to some of the participants.

His predecessor, Stacy Parks Miller, who lost a bid for re-election, initially charged 18 members of the fraternity in Piazza's death, and later charged 12 more. Four members initially charged had their cases dismissed. Piazza became intoxicated, fell down the fraternity stairs, and later succumbed to a brain injury, ruptured spleen and collapsed lung. Fraternity members didn't call for help until nearly 12 hours later.

Following a lengthy preliminary hearing that spanned multiple days and weeks, a Centre County judge gutted the case and dismissed the most serious charges.

Parks Miller last fall refiled them against eight of the members and continued to press the case until she left office.

Defense attorneys in the case have argued that Parks Miller overcharged and that there was insufficient evidence to prove that their clients forced Piazza to drink or that their actions led to his death.

Frank Fina, an attorney who represents Beta Theta Pi chapter president Brendan Young, said he welcomed the review by the attorney general.

"I think that's entirely appropriate," said Fina, a former prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office, though not under Shapiro.

Tom Kline, an attorney for Piazza's parents, said they have "full confidence in the Attorney General's Office and look forward to the continued prosecution of those who are responsible for the death of their son."

.
Patricia Randzo gave 34 years of her life to city kids, retiring as principal of the school system's Philadelphia Military Academy in April.

Randzo didn't like to spend much time away from the students she worked with, so she had plenty of unused sick, personal, and vacation days when she left the district: roughly $69,000 worth. She was going to use the money to buy a house.

But nearly a year after Randzo left the system, she hasn't bought the house because she's still waiting for her money. And she is not alone: The Philadelphia School District is sitting on a years-long backlog of unpaid termination payouts, some dating to the early 2000s.

One recent retiree was told she would have to wait for two years to get the funds she is owed, despite union contracts that say employees are entitled to the payments in a timely manner  most within 90 days of leaving the district.

"It's ridiculous," Randzo said.

Terms vary for the various labor unions that work within the district, but typically, School District employees are paid out for 100 percent of their unused personal time and 25 percent of their unused sick time during their tenure. The reasons behind the struggle to promptly pay them are complex, blamed on old back-office systems that make it tough to do the needed verifications before checks are cut and an unusually heavy workload for the district's human resources and payroll departments.

The effects of the 2012 doomsday budget also still linger. That year, the school system laid off thousands of employees, including half the staff devoted to processing the payout checks. New labor contracts for most unions also meant a crush of new work for already overburdened departments, officials said.

Uri Monson, the district's chief financial officer, said the problem is improving. An August report by then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz identified a backlog of $6.6 million in payouts owed to more than 5,000 former School District workers; Monson said that, as of November, the number was closer to 4,000 workers, despite the departure of 1,200 staffers who retired or resigned at the end of last school year.

The average wait for a check, Monson said, is down to 14 months from 17, and the total owed is also less.

Still, he said, "this is a bad problem. We know it; we're not where we need to be. But for the first time in years, we're looking at systemic ways of making it better."

Two new employees have been added to help address the backlog, he said. And an outside audit of the termination pay process is expected by the end of the month so that when new financial systems are finally adopted, the district won't be automating bad processes.

"This is as high a priority for me as it's possible to be," Monson said.

Albert Poppa hopes so. Poppa retired in June after nearly 42 years as a school police officer.

"I was a good employee, too," he said in an interview. "When I left, I had a lot of time. That meant I always came to work."

Poppa expected a prompt payment  his contract said within 60 days  of the $23,000 he earned. So far, he hasn't gotten a dime.

"I've gotten a runaround," said Poppa. "I'll call, and they'll say they're shorthanded. They say, 'Let me put you through to somebody,' and then it goes through to a machine, and I never get a call back."

It stings, Poppa said.

"I put almost 42 years in, and they turn around and slap me in the face," he said. "Where's our money?"

Also waiting is Arlette George, who left the district in June 2016 after almost 20 years as a school counselor. Eighteen months in, she's still waiting for the $20,000 she's owed.

"They're cheating me out of my retirement money," said George. "They're violating our contract, and they're making interest on our money."

Lisa Ciaranca Kaplan earned national accolades for her work as principal of Jackson Elementary in South Philadelphia. She retired in June after 37 years as a teacher, central office staffer, and principal.

When Kaplan asked someone in payroll when she might expect her term pay  somewhere north of $40,000  the answer astonished her: Two years, she was told.

"I said, 'Excuse me, are you joking?' and she said, 'No, two years. We're very short-staffed,' " Kaplan said.

Kaplan knows as well as anyone the effects of the awful budget cuts of the early 2010s, having absorbed the jobs of many when times got tough. "When they lay off people at schools, we still have to do their work," Kaplan said.

When the money finally does come through, it won't come with interest. (Kaplan asked.)

"How do you just not pay people?" Kaplan said. "You devote 37 years of your life to a job, and then they tell you they can't pay you the money they owe you."
Jackass star and West Chester natieve Bam Margera was arrested in California over the weekend for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol and was released after posting $15,000 bail.

Margera, 38, was arrested by California Highway Patrol officers just before 8 a.m. Sunday in Los Angeles. According to People magazine, officers stopped Margera because he was talking on his cellphone while driving. Police then conducted standard field sobriety tests.

Officers arrested him and booked him around 10 a.m. According to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department records, Margera was released just after 2:30 p.m. on Sunday.

As brother Jess Margera told Page Six, the Margera family is "trying to help him from across the country."

"He's with a friend out there, and we're trying to see if he wants to go to rehab or anything," Jess said. "We're trying to help him."

The arrest, Margera's first for DUI, comes after the birth of his first son, Phoenix Wolf Margera, with wife Nicole Boyd in December. The child was born as Margera was mounting a return to professional skateboarding after years of alcohol abuse, as chronicled in the Vice series Epicly Later'd last year. Margera also spoke with the Inquirer about his struggle with alcohol, saying his success on Jackass encouraged his addiction.

"It took me four beers to even feel normal. People go to rehab because drinking made them lose their job and their wife. My job is to do dumb, jackass s , and the more shots of Crown Royal I'd do, the braver I'd be. Drinking helped me get paid," he said. "I've come to terms with the fact that it doesn't take drinking to be funny, but it took me a long time to figure that out."

Margera's friend and fellow Jackass star Ryan Dunn was killed in a drunk driving crash in West Chester in June 2011. Zachary Hartwell, a production assistant on Jackass Number Two, was also killed in the accident.

"This definitely woke me up. Coming from a 'Jackass,' I recommend to everybody, don't get behind the wheel if you've been drinking. Just don't," Margera said in an interview on 93.3 WMMR's Preston & Steve Show after Dunn's death. "Whenever you're drunk you think you're not. If you even drink at all, don't get behind the wheel."
Temple University senior Kalen Allen, who accepted a deal from Ellen DeGeneres in an appearance on her show last week, now has more information about what it means for his budding viral video fame.

"Basically, 'Kalen Reacts' is moving to The Ellen DeGeneres Show," he said. "Now, all the videos will be distributed through Ellen."

Allen, 21, says he doesn't remember much of his appearance on the show.

"It was surreal," he says. "Honestly, once I stepped on stage, I don't remember any of the interview. When I watched it on television, it was like watching it for the first time. I was on an adrenaline rush."

The Kansas City, Kan., native was invited on the show last Tuesday because of his YouTube channel, which features videos of him wittily poking fun at weirdly popular (and just plain weird) recipes for classic dishes on websites like Buzzfeed's Tasty. Think mac and cheese with Brussels sprouts, or potato salad cake lined with hot dogs, and you'll have got a good idea of what Allen does.

The videos have been a hit online since Allen started releasing them in November. His YouTube account has earned more than 5 million views since. In December, they caught the attention of DeGeneres, who called them "the best thing on the internet right now."

Allen says he is unsure whether the videos will be released online or via The Ellen Show, or both. The ultimate fate of the "Kalen Reacts" channel is similarly unclear, as Allen says details are still in the works. However, he plans to continue making his recipe reation videos for the show and hopes to branch out to other topics in the future.

"This is like a dream come true," he says. "The best part is knowing that I haven't even graduated, and I already know what's next."

He says he will move to Los Angeles from Philadelphia on Saturday. He plans to finish his degree through Temple's study-away program by taking classes in the L.A. area. He will return to Philadelphia for graduation in the spring before heading back to LA.

Grad school, though, is off the table. In December, Allen said he was considering pursuing further education and had applied to Yale, New York University, and the Juilliard School. He has since withdrawn his applications.

"That was surreal to me because, oh my god, it's Juilliard, but this is happening," Allen says.

Allen held five jobs to help support himself in school, but he has since quit all of them in order to pursue DeGeneres' offer.

He says he is thankful for the security the opportunity provides. Most artists, he says, don't have that luxury.

"It's hard being a struggling artist, because you never know what your next step is going to be. Now, I know," he says. "That's the most powerful thing for me."
PLEASE NOTE: Because of wintry weather, the Poet Laureate reading at the Free Library has been postponed until 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 9.

Philadelphia's new poet laureate is a bridge-builder.

Raquel Salas Rivera is the new adult poet laureate of Philadelphia for 2018-2019, succeeding Yolanda Wisher. In a ceremony scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Monday in Room 108 of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Beth Feldman Brandt, who chairs the selection committee, will make the announcement. The new laureate will read, as will Husnaa Hashim, announced in September as the new youth poet laureate.

Rivera, 32, is a networker, bridging people of different geographical situations (as a Puerto Rican and Philadelphian), languages (writing in Spanish and English), and races ("I'm a very white-passing Puerto Rican, with a very fair father and a mother much blacker than I am"). As a person identifying as queer and nonbinary (that is, not fitting traditional categories of male or female), Rivera bridges sexual/gender identifications, as well as social/economic classes ("my mother has slavery in her background, my father much more wealth and access to privilege"). The new poet laureate talks about the great news and plans for the laureateship.

How does it feel?

After that first "What just happened?" sort of shock, there was definitely excitement about what this meant, my being a bilingual poet, what it means for migrant communities, what it means symbolically, and the work I want to do in Philly, and I got hyped. What a great thing to happen.

You were born in Puerto Rico, came to the United States at 6 months old with your parents, then moved to Puerto Rico  one can't really say "back"  at 14 to live with your mother. You came to Philadelphia when you were accepted to Penn. That makes for a very complex relationship with country and city.

I had never really considered going back to the United States. But of all the places I visited, I really liked Philadelphia and the idea of being here. It was important that I feel at home, really comfortable. I'm queer, nonbinary, and I needed to be in a place where I wouldn't feel isolated. And when I came here, I was lucky to find so many different spaces where my work was welcomed. I didn't expect that. Often, the United States is seen as monolingual, and that's not the case at all. I was writing a lot of poetry around identity and being a migrant in the United States, and the politics of language, and I found people were super-receptive. I usually read the Spanish first and then the English. And people were super into it.

I also just really thought the city was really beautiful. My plan was go back eventually to Puerto Rico, but then I fell in love with a Philadelphian, Philly-raised. I learned a lot about Philly through her.

As a Puerto Rican, and as a person self-identifying as a migrant, you have very mixed feelings about this country, with its burdened colonial past, its prejudices, its class structure. Yet here you are.

I don't identify as an American, but I identify as a Philadelphian! That's a common experience for a lot of people, often unspoken. This is a huge country, and every place is really different, and beyond the U.S. political borders, many people identify with regions, with cities and towns. To say "I'm an American" is a political statement, and "I'm a Philadelphian" is an identity locator.

You're going to be a poet laureate, meaning you're about to get really into Philadelphia, a city of neighborhoods.

I've never seen anywhere else the post of a city's poet laureate be what it is in Philly  a position of such significant social service. There is so much to do, neighborhood to neighborhood and culture to culture. We do have bridge-builders here: Poets like Kirwyn Sutherland and Yolanda Wisher are moving between spaces. Yet Philly is still very segregated along racial lines, and people often stay within their communities. There are ways of changing that, putting people into spaces they wouldn't ordinarily be in. And that's something I put in my application that I wanted to do. I want to do a series called We, Too, Are Philly, based on Langston Hughes' poem "I, Too," in which we involve poets of color and poets of more than one language in different activities.

Philly has so many incredible poets here for a city of its size. There's so much going on in the sanctuary movement, this being a sanctuary city, so much good stuff being written about the immigrant and sanctuary experience. Maybe it's the time for it.
Pastor Gloria White-Hammond officiates a Sunday service at Bethel AME Church on Dec. 3, 2017, in Boston. Pastor White-Hammond conducts workshops with her parishioners around end-of-life issues to help them talk about death, name a health care proxy and fill out their end-of-life wishes. Read more

"It would feel like murder to pull her life support," a young woman tells the doctor.

The woman sits by a hospital bed where her mother, Selena, lies unresponsive, hooked up to a breathing tube. The daughter has already made one attempt to save her mother's life; she pulled Selena out of the car and performed CPR when her heart stopped en route to the hospital  an experience she calls "beyond terrifying."

Now the doctor tells the family that Selena will never wake up in a meaningful way. But the daughter says she can't let her mother go: "I'm always looking for another miracle."

The scene, captured in the documentary Extremis, took place in a hospital's intensive-care unit in Oakland, Calif.

Three thousand miles away, at Boston's Bethel AME Church on an evening this past fall, the Rev. Gloria White-Hammond watched the film with a group of women from her predominantly black congregation. As they gathered around a long table in the church's youth center at 7 p.m., White-Hammond offered oranges and chocolate chip cookies  and a warning that the film might be very hard to watch.

White-Hammond, a 67-year-old physician, activist and minister who also teaches at Harvard Divinity School, is accustomed to broaching difficult subjects. She often speaks out about having been sexually abused by her father during childhood  an experience that motivated her to work with survivors of sexual violence in Sudan. Now, she's using her unusual credentials as a pastor  and a pediatrician  to take on a new subject: death.

As the film ended, White-Hammond and her congregants sat quietly as letters on the screen revealed Selena's fate: The family had Selena surgically attached to a breathing machine. She lived that way, drifting in and out of consciousness, for nearly six months.

White-Hammond broke the silence with a prayer.

"We know Selena," she said, speaking metaphorically. "Her brothers are our brothers."

Like Selena, most of the people in the room were black women. They are grappling with the question: If they end up like Selena, what would they want their families to do?

"God, guide us and direct us," said White-Hammond as heads bowed. After they die, she said, her parishioners may see the face of Jesus, and "sit at his feet and be blessed."

But first, they have work to do.

White-Hammond is determined to get all of her 600 congregants to write down their end-of-life medical wishes and discuss them with their doctors and families.

White-Hammond treated patients until about seven years ago, and her husband and co-pastor, Ray Hammond, is a doctor, too. But when an organization called the Conversation Project approached her a few years ago about leading death-and-dying workshops with her congregation, she discovered she hadn't planned for her own death or serious illness.

"I didn't have my own documents" outlining medical wishes, she said. "I was kind of embarrassed."

Nationwide, only a third of Americans have documented their end-of-life wishes, according to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation. For black adults 65 or older, rates are much lower: Only 19 percent have documented their end-of-life wishes, compared with 65 percent of whites. Older black adults are half as likely as whites to have named someone to make medical decisions on their behalf if they became incapacitated, the poll found. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Another KFF poll found that blacks are more likely than whites to say that living as long as possible is "extremely important," and that the U.S. medical system places too little emphasis on extending life.

As part of the discussion at Bethel AME, White-Hammond asked attendees to look through the "Five Wishes" end-of-life planning document. At monthly workshops over the last two years, White-Hammond has introduced more than 100 parishioners to the document. She said people often get stuck when filling out the second wish, which asks whether they want life support in certain grim scenarios that they may not be familiar with, such as permanent brain damage.

White-Hammond screened Extremis to illustrate what ventilators and feeding tubes are really like  and what it's like for families to make decisions without explicit instructions. The documentary, which lasts an intense 24 minutes, provoked a strong response.

Janine Hackshaw, 35, an immigrant from Trinidad who works in microfinance, told the group she felt anger toward one ICU doctor in the film. She thought that the doctor was rushing a family to make a life-or-death decision about whether to put their loved one on a ventilator.

"Why is she rushing?" Hackshaw asked. "Do you need the machine for something else?"

Mistrust of the medical establishment is one major reason black Americans are less likely to write down their end-of-life wishes and more reluctant to end life support, White-Hammond later said. That mistrust stems partly from historical racism, including segregated hospitals, forced sterilization of black women, and the infamous, government-led Tuskegee syphilis experiment that denied effective treatment to black men.

The mistrust persists today as "race becomes more tense" across the country, and as people continue to experience disparities, White-Hammond said. Like some other black church leaders across the country who are trying to change perceptions around hospice, White-Hammond says she believes that cultural change can start at church.

"We're capitalizing on our credibility as an institution of faith" to drive conversations around end-of-life care, she said. The goal, she said, is to make these discussions "part of the culture."

Another obstacle, White-Hammond said, is that people don't want to talk about death.

Rhona Julien, another parishioner who hails from Trinidad, said she regrets avoiding the discussion with her mother before she died three years ago. When her mother started to talk about dying, Julien would change the subject.

"I never wanted to deal with it," she said.

But she said she learned a lot from her mother's death, including the pressure families could create to keep a person alive. Julien, a 58-year-old environmental scientist, was the sole caretaker for her mother, who had pulmonary fibrosis. At the very end, Julien said, her siblings wanted to put their mother on a ventilator, to keep her alive long enough so that they could fly from Trinidad to say goodbye. Julien refused.

"She's not going to be connected to a machine to keep her alive for other people's benefit," Julien recalled thinking.

"Nobody should be hooked up to this and that, like Frankenstein," she said.

A 23-year-old Haitian-American woman in the group said she has not been comfortable speaking up to her family about her grandmother's care. (She declined to give her name, for fear of upsetting her family.)

She described her grandmother, who moved to the U.S. from Haiti, as an independent, strong-minded woman who would regularly walk an hour to church instead of taking a bus. She raised three kids on her own and made a life in the U.S., even though she didn't speak English, couldn't read, and had no formal education.

Her grandmother was so prepared for death that she had a drawer in her room with clothes that she planned to wear at her funeral  an elegant white suit and white, wide-brimmed hat. She would check the drawer every couple of weeks.

But when the grandmother had a stroke a couple of years ago in Randolph, Mass., doctors asked if she should be kept on feeding tubes or offered only comfort care. The family chose feeding tubes. The grandmother, who is 85 and cannot walk or talk, has been living in a bed ever since.

The young woman said she feels frustrated that her family didn't prioritize what her grandmother would want.

"We were hoping for a miracle," she said. But she knew her grandmother "wouldn't have decided to live a life where she would be bound to a bed."

Alice Coombs, one of three black female doctors participating in the evening's discussion, turned to the young woman and gently suggested that she speak up on her grandmother's behalf.

"I took it as a challenge," the young woman later said, "to talk about this topic."

Julien said she was initially reluctant to talk to her own kids about her end-of-life wishes  "Are you jinxing yourself?" she wondered  but she successfully broached the subject as part of homework for the workshop.

After watching the film Extremis, she said, she felt motivated to take the next step: "I'm going to fill out these forms!"

As the discussion ended, White-Hammond prayed to God for help filling out those end-of-life forms. "Put the fire under us," she asked, so the task doesn't languish "on the to-do list."

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Flu shots are encouraged for most people, such as this patient in Brownsville, Texas, but new data show that sometimes doctors and nurses do not follow the advice. Read more

Doctors and nurses often suggest that patients get an annual flu shot. But do they roll up their own sleeves?

At a handful of area hospitals, the answer is often no. In the most recent data compiled by the federal government, 13 facilities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware reported that fewer than 60 percent of health-care workers had received a flu vaccination.

>> SEARCH: See how your hospital did on flu shots and other quality measures

Among them were four in the Philadelphia area, including the three hospitals in the Inspira Health Network in South Jersey: Inspira Medical Center Elmer (at 35 percent, tied with a hospital in North Jersey for the lowest flu-shot rate in the three states), Inspira Medical Center Vineland (45 percent), and Inspira Medical Center Woodbury (57 percent).

But since the end of the six-month period represented in the data  Oct. 1, 2016, through March 31, 2017  the network has started requiring flu shots for all employees, both in hospitals and outpatient settings, said Paul Lambrecht, vice president for quality and patient safety.

Frequent hand-washing, another recommended preventive measure, requires constant effort. But flu shots are a commonsense way to reduce the risk of infection without day-to-day action, he said.

"It's protection you don't even have to think about," Lambrecht said. "You get your vaccination, and you go about your life. You're protecting yourself and others."

The fourth Philadelphia-area facility with a flu vaccination rate below 60 percent was Barix Clinics of Pennsylvania, a bariatric surgery center in Langhorne, at 38 percent. A Barix spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The highest vaccination rate in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware was 99 percent, a figure reported by these area hospitals:

Bucks County. Doylestown Hospital, Grand View Hospital, Jefferson Bucks Hospital (formerly Aria), and Rothman Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital.

Montgomery County. Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health, Lansdale Hospital, and Holy Redeemer Hospital.

Philadelphia. Jefferson Frankford Hospital, Jefferson Torresdale Hospital (both formerly Aria Health), and Roxborough Memorial Hospital.

The three former Aria hospitals started requiring flu vaccines in the 2011-12 season, said Kelli Wiercinski, director of infection prevention and employee health. Most employees get the shot during special "blitz days." For others who may be unable to leave their work station, such as emergency-room physicians, the hospitals administer flu shots from mobile carts, she said.

The vaccination-rate figures are compiled by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on its Hospital Compare web site, at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare.

The evidence is mixed as to whether vaccinating doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers reduces the number of patients that get sick, but the prevailing wisdom is that the shots are a good idea. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all health-care workers get an annual flu shot, both to protect patients and employees.

Some hospitals encourage vaccination, while others, like Inspira, have instituted outright requirements. At hospitals with vaccination mandates, there has been occasional resistance among employees who have no contact with patients. Others may object for religious reasons or because they are allergic to an ingredient in the vaccine.

Concocting the annual flu vaccine requires educated guesswork, so getting a shot does not guarantee you won't get flu. But the CDC says recent reports that it is only 10 percent effective this year are wrong  as that figure refers to just one strain, and is based on Australia's experience. Overall effectiveness is more likely closer to last year's, 39 percent.

And the vaccine is the best option medicine offers to reduce the risk of contracting the illness. Even in those who do get sick, having had the vaccine can reduce the severity of symptoms. Most patients recover after a week of misery, but flu viruses are blamed in thousands of deaths each year.

As in any workplace, doctors and nurses who get the flu are advised to stay home, but some of them nevertheless decide to drag themselves in to work. In a recent CDC survey, four in 10 health-care professionals said they came to work while suffering flu-like symptoms.
The owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles prepares his monthly tax payment. Marijuana businesses may become even more dependent on cash thanks to recent action from Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Read more

By rolling back an Obama-era memo that shielded legal marijuana users, growers and distributors from federal prosecution, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions may compel many banks and credit unions to stop working with marijuana businesses.

That's because the memo Sessions rescinded, drafted by former Deputy Attorney General James Cole, is the foundation of Treasury Department guidance that created legal space for banks and credit unions to offer accounts to marijuana dispensaries, grow operations, distributors and manufacturers.

Without access to the banking system, the rapidly growing marijuana industry  valued at $6.7 billion in 2016  would have to rely on cash. That would make cannabis businesses, owners and employees vulnerable to theft and complicate state efforts to collect taxes on drug sales.

Taking away the banking guidance could have a bigger impact on the state-sanctioned cannabis industry than giving federal prosecutors more leeway to bring legal action against it, said Andrew Freedman, a consultant who previously served as Colorado's "pot czar."

While prosecutions depend on a number of factors, from prosecutors' desire to go after cannabis businesses to the volume of cases courts can handle, many  if not all  of the 390 banks and credit unions that currently provide accounts to marijuana businesses would drop those accounts if the Treasury bureau in charge of safeguarding the financial system, called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, changed its directives, say banking and cannabis industry insiders.

"The FinCEN guidance was the one place they went to mitigate risk," Freedman said of financial institutions.

Banking has always been a challenge for the cannabis industry in states that allow sale and possession of the drug. Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, and federal law requires banks to steer clear of participating in illegal activity. Still, thanks to the Obama-era guidance, a growing number of financial institutions have started to serve the industry.

Rachel Pross, chief risk officer for Maps credit union in Oregon, where recreational marijuana sales are legal, says her institution has a plan in place to drop their marijuana-related accounts if the federal government pulls both the Justice and Treasury guidance. "If we didn't have that guidance and framework to follow, we could in theory be prosecuted for federal money laundering," she said.

Maps is one of the few financial institutions in Oregon that have been openly serving marijuana businesses. Without it, businesses may have no other option but to rely on cash. "In the worst-case scenario, if we faced federal prosecution for continuing to serve these businesses, we're talking like $30 million being put back into the streets of the Willamette Valley," Pross said.

Pross said she expected the Justice and Treasury department guidance to be changed at the same time, because the 2014 Treasury guidance tells banks and credit unions to monitor marijuana-related accounts for any activity listed as an enforcement priority in the Justice Department memo.

But Sessions' marijuana enforcement memorandum made no mention of the Treasury guidance, and the Treasury department has yet to announce any changes to its policy.

"FinCEN works closely with law enforcement and the financial sector to combat illicit finance and provide relevant information that allows law enforcement to pursue their priorities. We will continue to work with DOJ and other stakeholders on this issue," Steve Hudak, chief of public affairs for the Treasury bureau, said in a statement.

Lawyers who advise banks are now scrambling to clarify the rules. "The Sessions rescission technically states that it is business as normal, and hence it is possible for FinCEN not to rescind its guidance, but rather, to clarify it by deleting the references to the Cole Memorandum," Joseph Lynyak, a banking regulation expert and partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, said in an email. That would allow Treasury to maintain some version of the guidance that permits marijuana accounts.

However, now that the Justice Department has given federal officials more leeway to go after the marijuana industry, banks and credit unions that are following the Treasury guidance and filing regular reports on their marijuana-related accounts run a higher risk of prosecution, he said.

That's a risk some banks and credit unions may not be willing to take  regardless of the fate of the Treasury guidance.

Hilary Bricken, cannabis business attorney and head of the Los Angeles office of the firm Harris Bricken, said financial institutions currently working with marijuana businesses may keep doing so for now, but banks and credit unions that were thinking about entering that line of business may steer clear. "I am positive that it will chill participation for those who are thinking about it," she said.

The financial institutions that serve the industry have always known that the Obama-era guidance was fragile and they might have to eject marijuana clients in a hurry. Sessions, a longtime foe of marijuana legalization, became attorney general last February and hinted in December that change was coming.

"From day one when we started this business, we had an exit strategy. We've always kept an eye on the Cole memo," said Shane Saunders, chief experience officer at Maps.

Saunders said the credit union will survive if it has to drop its marijuana accounts. He's more worried about how the surrounding community will handle an influx of cash. "That's really our greatest concern," he said.

Stateline is a project of the Pew Charitable Foundation.
The Darby Borough priest sent to prison for embezzling more than a half-million dollars to help fuel his gambling habit raises questions about the role of his two co-conspirators: the casinos and the state.

No doubt Msgr. William A. Dombrow is responsible for his actions and will serve his time in prison. But the casinos and lawmakers in Harrisburg share some responsibility for enabling the gambling addiction of Dombrow and thousands of others like him.

It is not enough to advertise gambling hotlines and issue canned statements telling customers to gamble responsibly. Nor is it enough to set aside a paltry .002 percent of casino revenues to treat gambling addicts.

The jobs and tax revenue generated by casinos come at a cost.

One national study found that living within 10 miles of a casino increases the odds of a person's becoming a problem gambler by 90 percent. Other studies have found that anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of casino revenues come from problem gamblers.

A casino executive at Parx once famously said at an industry conference that most of its customers visit 200 times a year, or an average of four times a week. An executive at the Harrah's casino in Chester  which Dombrow frequented  said a "segment" of its customers came six times a week.

In short, the success of Pennsylvania's casinos depends in large measure on repeat and problem gamblers. And unlike Las Vegas, which attracts tourists from all over, the casinos here cater mainly to locals who visit again and again. (On the other hand, Nevada ranks first in gambling addiction.)

Casinos are complicit. They aggressively market to gamblers by emailing them free-play vouchers, food coupons and other incentives to get them to keep coming back. In fact, casinos can track gamblers' activity through reward cards many plug into slot machines, which generate most of the revenue.

Studies show modern slot machines are designed to addict gamblers. Indeed, the casino industry spends lots of time and money trying to influence consumers' behavior through technology and the design of casinos  down to the seats, carpet and layout.

The state plays a role in pushing more gambling as well. State lawmakers  led by former Gov. Ed Rendell  legalized slots in 2004. Six years later, the state added table games.

In October, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a major expansion of gambling by allowing gambling online and in airports, bars and truck stops as well as smaller "satellite" casinos.

Since the state taxes slot machine revenue at 55 percent, Harrisburg could be considered a majority partner in the casinos. As such, lawmakers have a duty to look out for the safety and welfare of residents, and not just maximize tax revenues.

In addition to stripping wealth from residents, casinos (and the lottery) create an unaccounted social cost seen in addicts like Dombrow, who stole life insurance funds from dead priests to gamble at Harrah's.

Thanks to the efforts of the state, Pennsylvania is second only to Nevada in casino gambling. Lawmakers need to take more responsibility for preventing and treating the gambling addiction they help enable.
As a longtime Philadelphia resident born in Korea, I am deeply concerned about loose talk of nuclear war with North Korea. We should be de-escalating tension with North Korea, not trading insults about the sizes of each other's nuclear buttons.

As 58 retired U.S. military leaders recently reminded us, any unilateral attack by our country on North Korean soil would put countless lives of South Koreans and Americans at risk, and wreak havoc on the global economy. It's time for Congress, including the Pennsylvania delegation, to listen to the American people and avoid miscalculations that could turn war of words into war of fire and fury.

Like many immigrants, I feel a deep sense of loyalty and patriotism to a country that has given me so much. In 1981, my mother and I left South Korea with $300 in our pocket and two bags of clothing. I entered the sixth grade in public school not speaking English and graduated from high school as a valedictorian with a scholarship to MIT. My first job out of college was at Merck's Pennsylvania research facility. In 2000 I founded my own biotech company.

My job has taken me across the world, including back to South Korea, home to technological innovations, the world's 12th largest economy, and next door to the world's second and third largest economies, China and Japan. I have seen firsthand the incredible advancements by South Koreans, who painstakingly rebuilt their country after the armistice that halted (but never ended) the Korean War in 1953. It is the first country that went from being a recipient of foreign assistance to a major donor country with a thriving democracy. By any measure South Korea is a remarkable success story.

So that is why talk of military option against North Korea is so disturbing. A military strike by the United States would immediately put the 10 million people living in Seoul, South Korea's capital, at risk. For me, that's not just an abstract number; my extended family lives in Seoul, and so do tens of thousands of American men and women who are stationed in South Korea to protect our ally.

Disturbingly, no one who says only military action will change North Korea's behavior has explained what happens after the first strike.

Who among them have seen what war does to a country? Ask any older Korean who lived through the war and they will tell you that it brings out the worst in humanity. About 1.2 million South Koreans perished as a result of the Korean War and the GDP fell by 80 percent, making the already poor country at that time even poorer. Those lucky enough to survive the immediate impact of war dealt with unimaginable poverty and lasting health issues.

My father's family came down from North Korea during the Korean War. But hundreds of thousands of people just like me and my father still languish in North Korea under a totalitarian regime hell-bent on arming itself for survival. Without talking to the regime, we risk miscalculating each other's intentions and stumbling into confrontation. It's time for the United States to pursue direct talks with North Korea without pre-conditions.

I urge everyone to call or write your member of Congress and demand talks, not war, with North Korea before it's too late.

J. Joseph Kim is president and CEO of Inovio Pharmaceuticals and on the board of the Council of Korean Americans, a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of successful Korean American leaders.
Oprah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018. Read more

Oprah Winfrey for president? A memorable speech during the Golden Globes on Sunday night is fueling speculation that the popular talk show host and current 60 Minutes correspondent might be interested in running for president.

According to CNN, the interest could be more than just speculation. Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter is reporting that Winfrey is "actively thinking" about running for president in 2020, according to two of Winfrey's close friends.

The sources told Stelter that they had been privately encouraging Winfrey to run, dating back several months. In the past, Winfrey has repeatedly denied interest in running for president, telling CBS This Morning in October 2017, "There will be no running for office of any kind for me."

The speculation about Winfrey's presidential aspirations went viral following her emotional acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award, in which she vigorously defended journalism and spoke passionately about sexual harassment. Her remarks, my colleague Ellen Gray wrote, "sounded like a stump speech."

"I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon," Winfrey said. "And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me too' again."

NBC was criticized for sending a message from its official Twitter account during the speech declaring Winfrey "OUR future president." NBC has since deleted the tweet, blaming the post on a third party agency hired to send out social media messages in real time during the Golden Globes.

"It is in reference to a joke made during the monologue and not meant to be a political statement," NBC said in a message on Twitter Monday morning.

Following her speech, Winfrey's longtime partner Stedman Graham told the Los Angeles Times a presidential bid was certainly possible.

"It's up to the people," Graham said. "She would absolutely do it."

In light of the reaction to Winfrey's speech, Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep told the Washington Post she thought Winfrey had no choice but to run for president.

"She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president," Streep told the Post's Steven Zeitchik after the show ended. "I don't think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesn't have a choice."
Alison Malmon was wrapping up the end of her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 when she got the news: Her older brother Brian, a student at Columbia University, had killed himself.

He'd struggled for years with mental illness, Malmon said, but concealed his symptoms. Determined to help, Malmon formed a group at Penn a year and a half later to empower students to talk openly about mental health. Her group, Active Minds, blossomed into a national organization that today has more than 450 campus chapters. Leaders with the organization spend their time planning programming and talking with college students about the now well-documented pressure today's young people face.

"What you hear often is just a need to be perfect," said Malmon, now the group's executive director, "and a need to present oneself as perfect."

A new study out of the United Kingdom shows just that  today's college students want to be perfect, and more so than their parents did. But the reasons behind that, the researchers say, are deeply ingrained in today's culture.

Two British researchers studied more than 40,000 students from the United States, Canada and Britain in what they believe is the first study examining perfectionism across multiple generations. They found that what they called "socially prescribed perfectionism" increased by a third between 1989 (when Gen Xers attended college) and 2016 (with a mix of millennials and Gen Zers), and that culture could be driving up rates of mental-health disorders.

Lead researcher Thomas Curran said that while so many of today's young people try to curate a perfect life on Instagram, social media's grip isn't the only reason for perfectionist tendencies. Instead, he said, it may be driven by competition percolating more into modern society, meaning young people can't avoid being sorted and ranked in education and employment. That comes from new norms like greater numbers of college students, standardized testing, and parenting that increasingly emphasizes success in education.

"We now have forms of competition where it never used to be," said Curran, of the University of Bath. "Forcing [college students] to compare, compete, and keep up with social comparisons in turn is forcing them to develop perfectionist tendencies."

Curran and coauthor Andrew P. Hill, an associate professor at York St. John University, analyzed college students between 1989 and 2016 who completed the "Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale," a survey that puts a figure on perfectionism. The survey asks respondents to agree or disagree on a scale with statements like: "When I am working on something, I cannot relax until it is perfect," or "Anything that I do that is less than excellent will be seen as poor work by those around me."

The study, published Dec. 28 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, concluded that three categories of perfectionism, which they define as "a combination of excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations," increased since 1989:

Self-oriented perfectionism  a self-imposed desire to be perfect  increased by 10 percent. Other-oriented perfectionism, or the practice of holding others to irrationally high standards, increased by 16 percent. Socially prescribed perfectionism, or the perception that there are unrealistically high expectations from others, increased by 33 percent.

It's the latter dimension that gives researchers the most concern. Curran and Hill describe socially prescribed perfectionism as "the most debilitating" and said it's a better predictor of depression and suicide than the other two.

So where's that socially prescribed perfectionism come from? Curran said it would be "easy" to attribute the rise to social media, and while he admitted those platforms "put the problem on steroids," he said there are other factors, like an increase in meritocracy among millennials.

The researchers say today's hypercompetitive society tells young people: Have the highest grade point average, get into the best school, obtain the highest-paying job, and the perfect life can be yours.

For example, in 1976, half of high school seniors expected to get a college degree of some kind. By 2008, more than 80 percent expected the same, but actual degree attainment didn't keep pace. The researchers say this suggests expectations are increasingly unrealistic. They also said changes in parenting style over the last two decades might have had an impact. Curran and Hill wrote that as parents feel increased pressure to raise successful children, they in turn pass their "achievement anxieties" onto their kids through "excessive involvement in their child's routines, activities or emotions."

Those in the mental-health community like Malmon say they're concerned about the impact the culture of perfectionism has on mental health on campuses. She's comforted, she said, by students working to destigmatize the issue.

"Mental health has truly become this generation's social justice issue," she said. "It's our job to equip them with the tools, to let people know that it's not their fault, and that seeking help is a sign of strength and not weakness."
The falafel was crispy on the outside, folded into warm pita with char lines from a grill, and accompanied by a crunchy green salad. Baristas standing before a pristine wall of white subway tiles poured hot La Colombe coffee. Steamed shrimp dumplings were juicy and firm in translucent wrappers alongside a bowl of vegetable ramen with edamame, seaweed, and a soft egg. Sunlight poured in from windows on all sides, the departing gate was steps away, and outlets for phone charging were everywhere.

Seasoned travelers can summon memories of Philadelphia International Airport as it was decades ago: the dark, ill-lit corridors, grim terminals, yellowed fluorescent lights, and palettes of brown and gray. As renovations have started taking the terminals away from the atmosphere of the old PHL, executives say the infusion of new eateries is a crucial step toward shaking off the airport's age-old reputation as one of the nation's worst.

"What we've always heard is people get here early," James Tyrrell, chief revenue officer of PHL, said as he stood in the newly renovated Terminal B. "So many of those people  everyone from families going to Disney World to business travelers to young people with disposable income  they end up with extra time here, and they want choices. They haven't always had that."

In Terminal B, much of the gate seating has been replaced with high-top tables and chairs, and bars were moved right into the waiting areas at some gates. Instead of cramming into plastic chairs that put them shoulder-to-shoulder with other travelers, passengers can order drinks and food from cushioned stools, charge phones and laptops, pay with touchscreens without waiting for checks, and order to-go meals. Vegan and vegetarian options are plentiful, and drinks can be customized using a range of liquor.

"It's a modern setup," Tyrrell said. "People don't want to sit next to each other in those traditional gate seats, but they will here. It creates a whole different environment. People interact with each other more, like you'd see in a bar."

The restaurants are part of an estimated $900 million in improvements planned for PHL, a project that includes new roofs, elevators, technology, and other infrastructure upgrades. In order to attract more discerning diners, airport executives and New York food and beverage provider OTG management brought on the city's highest-profile chefs and restaurateurs.

La Colombe opened last spring in Terminal A, the first of what will eventually be four locations throughout PHL. That terminal also is the site of American Express' new Centurion Lounge, where elite cardholders can enjoy specialty cocktails and an Israeli-influenced menu designed by Michael Solomonov.

Most of PHL's newest destinations are in Terminal B, which last year underwent a $30 million redesign financed by OTG. The 60,000-square-foot facelift brought six new restaurants into the gate areas, with 1,000 iPads for placing orders.

Germantown Biergarten mimics the brewpubs that have taken root in the city and suburbs, with a menu offering a wide range of beer and snacks, like pretzels and brats. Nearby is Nomad pizza's Stalin Bedon-approved Mezzogiorno, which sells thin-crust pizzas, charcuterie, and antipasti. The LOVE Grill, with a menu from former Percy Street BBQ chef Erin O'Shea, serves comfort food, like hot dogs and cheesesteaks.

The Mediterranean menu at Baba Bar was created by Nicholas Elmi, the Top Chef winner behind South Philadelphia's Laurel and ITV. The falafel was well-seasoned and tasted much fresher than one might associate with airport food. At Boule Cafe, frittatas, soups, and pastry are bathed in rose-gold lighting. Noobar, created by chef Hiroyuki "Zama" Tanaka of Zama sushi in Center City, offers sushi, ramen, dumplings, and Japanese snacks that, like the Baba Bar food, came out looking just like the photos on the iPad menus.

Like less-sophisticated airport fare, these eats aren't cheap; at Baba, the falafel sandwich is $11 before tax and tip, and by-the-glass wines range from $11 to $35. At Noobar, the vegetarian ramen and an order of shrimp dumplings came to about $25 with tip.

Terminal D is now home to two gourmet burger spots: Bar Symon, Food Network chef Michael Symon's gastropub; and Mo' Burger. In Terminal F, there's the Jose Garces-affiliated Local tavern, which resembles Village Whiskey and which was one of the airport's earliest forays into iPad ordering.

More restaurants are coming to Terminal C in the years to come, Tyrrell said. Even the airport's four Chickie's & Pete's locations are expected to undergo renovations soon.

On a recent afternoon, travelers passing through PHL said they were largely impressed with the new dining options. Some said they weren't totally sold on the touchscreen ordering, but Melissa Thomas of Boston, who frequently travels to Philadelphia for work and who has spent time in the new Terminal B, said she welcomed the convenience.

"It's all overpriced, but that's just something you can't get away from at the airport," she said, leaving the airport on a recent trip. "But in terms of quality, it's a lot better than it ever was."
Adrianne Gunter sits on the steps outside her Philadelphia apartment holding a steel cane that helps her get around due to her Multiple Sclerosis. Gunter waited 788 days for a hearing in Philadelphia, all while her Multiple Sclerosis worsened and she continued to be unemployed and dependent on her mother. The Social Security Administration says it doesnOt have enough judges and support staff to keep up with the pace of applications and appeals. Jose F. Moreno/Staff Photographer Read more

Four Philadelphia-area congressmen sent a letter Monday to the acting chief of the Social Security Administration asking that the agency address the sometimes years-long delays for Philadelphia-area residents seeking disability-benefits hearings.

The letter to acting Commissioner Nancy Berryhill, signed by U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle, Dwight Evans, Robert Brady, and Donald Norcross, all Democrats, came in response to an article in Sunday's Inquirer that reported that applicants in the city are waiting an average of 26 months for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) appeal hearings. That's the longest average waiting time for any city in the country. Applicants in adjacent counties in South Jersey and Pennsylvania also are experiencing average wait times of 20 months or longer.

"While we are certainly sympathetic to the budgetary constraints of your agency, we are deeply concerned by the number of individuals subject to undue stress and health risks brought on by reports of bureaucratic inefficiency," the letter said.

Across the country, more than 1 million people are waiting for appeal hearings after being denied disability benefits. Philadelphia's two hearing offices each have 5,000 pending cases. The Elkins Park and South Jersey offices each have about 10,000 people waiting for decisions.

The administration has acknowledged it has a problem and said it does not have enough administrative law judges and support staff to handle the backlog, which started years ago. Hiring freezes made it hard to catch up.

"We therefore request that your agency detail the number of such staff members that would be necessary to begin to reverse this problem," Monday's letter said.

The administration previously said its goal was to hire 250 judges each year for three consecutive years starting in 2016. But in the last two years combined, only 396 judges were hired.

The congressmen also asked Berryhill how much funding would be required to address the backlog "so that we may do all we can to fight for this additional funding for fiscal year 2019."

The Inquirer story highlighted the wait for Adrianne Gunter, a 33-year-old West Philadelphia native and University of the Arts graduate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2015. She waited 788 days  more than two years  for an SSI appeal hearing. Since her Dec. 13, 2017, hearing, she is still waiting for a decision.

"This is simply unconscionable," Boyle, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Northeast Philadelphia and Montgomery County, tweeted Sunday. He vowed then to write a letter to the administration asking for improvements.

Brady and Evans issued a joint letter to Berryhill in August complaining about the long wait times and what they perceived as understaffing in the Philadelphia offices.

"We are writing with great concern about the staffing of the two main Social Security Office of Disability Adjudications and Review (ODAR) hearing offices serving our disabled constituents  constituents who are largely of low or no income," the congressmen wrote, noting that the Philadelphia office had six judges and the Philadelphia East Office eight. "The understaffing at the two Philadelphia ODAR offices requires a prompt response."

Stanley White, Brady's chief of staff, said his office has yet to receive a response from Berryhill or the SSA.

The Philadelphia hearing office, however, has seven judges now.

Monday's letter from the four congressmen also asks Berryhill for a meeting with her and her staff to discuss "specific needs and goals."
On the outskirts of Chinatown, nestled between an accountant's office and a liquid nitrogen ice cream shop, a glass case holds a line of products that some women believe can stop time.

Made of seemingly fantastical ingredients including deer antler extract, wild ginseng and snow lotus herb, and bottled in royal-purple jars with a phoenix atop the lid, the History of Whoo's Hwanyu line claims to bring you closer to immortality, or just look like it. It's among the top tier of Korean skincare products, with a price tag to show for it: 25 milliliters of eye cream costs $420, while a 60-milliliter jar of face cream is $750. But the crown jewel is the signature ampoule, a long golden tube filled with a concentrated serum that's said to be akin to Botox  minus the botulism.

"My skin is vibrant, alive and glowing," said one fan on Reddit's thriving AsianBeauty forum. "Now I can finally see what it means to take perfection beyond perfection."

It costs $1,100.

The craze around Korean beauty, or K-beauty, has barreled forward in the last few years, with mainstream Western retailers like Sephora, Target and CVS all selling and marketing Asian beauty products, and Korean 10-step skincare routine YouTube videos being produced by the hundreds. Here in Philly, Jeanne Lee is betting the trend will stick: She opened Ga-In BeautyZone in March 2015, a store that, with a few exceptions, exclusively sells Korean beauty products. The Chinatown location was strategic  China is a massive market for Korean beauty companies.

(Looking for Asian beauty products in the Philly region? Here's our insider's guide.)

A native of Jinju, South Korea, who moved to Philadelphia with her family when she was 18, Lee, now 45, has yet to sell the ampoule (she just started stocking it), but her older customers do come for the other creams and serums of the History of Whoo's pricey purple Hwanyu line. Her most popular History of Whoo products are the slightly more affordable Cheongidan line, which she refers to as the "yellow line," $680 for a 10-piece set. Lee also stocks a range of other brands for varying budgets, like Su:m37, Isa Knox and Beyond, all owned by Korean chaebol LG, plus stacks and stacks of sheet masks  pieces of face-shaped fabric drenched in serum that you unfold and leave on your face for 20 minutes.

Outside of partnering with Western retail giants, Korean brands test demand within the U.S. market by selling through ecommerce sites like Soko Glam and Peach & Lily, said K-beauty consultant Ju Rhyu. But you can't get everything online, and even then, the threat of fakes abound.

Patrapan Juntavee, a fledgling orthodontist and 31-year-old mother of two whose 14-step skincare routine mostly comprises products she purchased at Ga-In, says she prefers to shop at the Chinatown boutique because she knows she's getting the real thing. (Lee says that sometimes customers ask to see her invoices as proof that what she's selling is legit.) Plus, Juntavee said, Lee and sales associate Linda Xu are patient, helpful and generous with gifts and samples. In the dizzying world of K-beauty, sometimes you need a guide.

But can a brick-and-mortar store that only sells K-beauty survive?

Despite the Korean skincare buzz, Lamei Zhang of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation says the neighborhood has not seen a proliferation of beauty stores, though shops offering beauty services are becoming more common. (Ga-In, like its fellow Asian beauty stores 931 Skincare in Chinatown and 2050's Beauty & Cosmetic on Washington Avenue, offers services like facials and eyelash extensions in private rooms at the back of the store.)

There are other Philadelphia stores that sell the high-end Korean products stocked by Ga-In  in the H-Mart at 69th Street and in the plaza at Sixth and Washington Avenue  but they appear to cater specifically to Asian customers, while Ga-In's central location taps a wider audience. Xu says in the earlier days, Ga-In's clientele was largely Asian, but that has since changed. She remembers how one morning she came to open the shop at 10:30, as she usually does, and was surprised to find a white woman waiting for her. "Is this the Korean cosmetics store?" the woman asked.

Lee, a former property manager who once ran a cosmetics and health food store at 69th Street, thinks an image change will boost the store's visibility. Next month, she'll rebrand as a Nature Collection franchise, hoping to capitalize on the brand of a well-known (and also LG-owned) Korean cosmetics store that's been opening U.S. locations, including one in North Wales' Korean mega-grocer Assi Plaza. Lee's store will be the first Nature Collection spot in the city.
Three days after new District Attorney Larry Krasner fired 31 people in a dramatic office shakeup, the impact began to ripple through Philadelphia's court system on Monday.

One judge took the bench and criticized the prosecutor's office for asking to postpone a murder trial  scheduled to begin Monday  because the assistant district attorney handling the case was among those handed a pink slip.

"This court has been placed, because of the management decisions by the new district attorney, in an exceedingly difficult position today," said Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara A. McDermott.

In a different courtroom, another judge agreed to delay a vehicular homicide trial because the prosecutor on that case had also been forced out. Lawyers were asked to return Tuesday to figure out the next step. The judge, meanwhile, ordered the defendant's house arrest lifted immediately  saying that to maintain the restriction because of staffing issues in the prosecutor's office was "not fair."

And while scheduling delays are hardly a rarity at the Criminal Justice Center, a supervisor in the District Attorney's Office acknowledged "scrambling" to adjust to the changes.

The developments were the latest aftershocks from Krasner's staffing announcement Friday. A career defense attorney until he was sworn in as district attorney this month, Krasner had vowed to make sweeping changes to the office, which he criticized as "off the rails" during his campaign.

And while it was not clear whether the fallout from the firings would last for days or weeks, Krasner signaled Monday that he was continuing to reorganize the office.

He announced the appointment of a new victim-services supervisor, Movita Johnson-Harrell, a Philadelphia-based anti-violence activist, calling her a crucial link between his office and victims and witnesses. Johnson-Harrell lost her father, son, brother, and cousin to gun violence, Krasner said in a statement, spurring her to create a foundation in her son's name and become an advocate on issues relating to public safety.

A spokesman said Krasner also spent part of Monday appointing new interim chiefs in certain units affected by departures.

The new district attorney has yet to publicly comment on last week's forced resignations or explain why certain prosecutors were asked to leave. His spokesman, Ben Waxman, said in a statement Friday that the changes were part of a desire "to take the office in a different direction," something Krasner stressed repeatedly on the campaign trail.

The impact did not sit well with the relatives of Marquan Royster, who came to court Monday for the scheduled trial of his alleged killer, Ameer Murphy, and instead learned it would be rescheduled. Royster, 18, was shot dead in March 2015 in West Philadelphia.

The delay was necessary because Krasner ousted Andrew Notaristefano, the assistant district attorney who had been handling the case.

"It makes it very hard to move on and grieve properly," said one family member, who asked not to be identified criticizing the prosecutor's office. "It's like we're basically starting from scratch again."

On Monday, Notaristefano sat in the back of the courtroom  to support the victim's family.

McDermott was critical of the impact of his firing, though she acknowledged Krasner had the right to do so. Still, she said, the District Attorney's Office exhibited "bad management" by not developing a contingency plan earlier to replace Notaristefano. The last-minute request to delay the trial was "devastating" for both families, she added.

McDermott agreed to postpone the prosecution until April, but apologized to the packed courtroom, saying the decision brought her "dissatisfaction and unhappiness." She also said she was planning to schedule a hearing to see whether the District Attorney's Office could or should bear the costs of the delay  including the price of keeping Murphy behind bars for another three months.

At one point, with her frustration over several unrelated cases bubbling, she summoned Brian Zarallo  chief of the district attorney's homicide unit  to her courtroom. Zarallo told the judge he was "scrambling" to make necessary adjustments given the sudden reduction in his staff.

"Figuring out the fallout is an ongoing process," he said.

Royster's supporters said Johnson-Harrell, the new victim coordinator, stopped into the courtroom with Krasner on Monday and talked to them, but that Krasner did not personally address them. They left the courtroom upset, saying the entire process left them feeling "re-victimized."

Waxman, Krasner's spokesman, said the new district attorney understands there will be confusion and bumps in the road during the transition, which is why he moved to quickly appoint Johnson-Harrell and brought her to court on Monday.

On a different floor, Judge Glenn Bronson had to reschedule a vehicular homicide trial because the assigned prosecutor, Thomas Lipscomb, was also a casualty of Krasner's reorganization. In that case, defendant Hector Torres Jr. is accused of participating in a street race in August 2016, resulting in a crash and the death of a 3-year-old girl in North Philadelphia.

Bronson was not as explicit as McDermott in his reaction to the firings, but acknowledged them in agreeing to postpone the proceeding.

"It was extraordinary circumstances," the judge said.

Staff writer Julie Shaw contributed to this article.
Chester police are investigating two nonfatal shootings that occurred Sunday evening within minutes of each other.

At about 5:40 p.m., police were dispatched to the Sun Village area for a report of shots fired. The officers found the victim, a 14-year-old boy who is a city resident, with what appeared to have a graze wound to his right foot.

The boy was taken by paramedics to Crozer-Chester Medical Center, where he was treated for his injuries and later released.

He told police that an unknown vehicle was driving by the area when he heard shots and saw numerous flashes of light, which he believed to be gun-muzzle flashes.

At about 5:48 p.m. Sunday, police were dispatched to the area of Third and Lamokin Streets for a report of shots fired. Shortly after, a second report was made that a person had been shot and was being helped into a vehicle.

The victim, Tyleel Scott-Harper, 21, another city resident, arrived at the medical center with a graze wound to his right arm. He told police that he had just left a store at Third and Lamokin when he heard shots fired. The victim was listed in good condition Sunday night.

Anyone with information about the first shooting is urged to contact Det. Benjamin Thomas at 610-447-8426 or bthomas306@chesterpolice.org. Information about the second shooting should be given to Det. Brian Pot at 610-4476-8431 or bpot302@chesterpolice.org.
Jerusalem Old City is seen through a door with the shape of star of David, in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2017. The Israeli government on Sunday banned 20 international advocacy groups from entering the country, including one based in Philadelphia. Read more

Israeli officials have banned the Philadelphia-based Quaker organization the American Friends Service Committee from entry into the country.

The organization, which has worked on social justice issues for nearly 100 years, is among 20 advocacy groups on a blacklist published Sunday by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The ban follows a law passed in March to deny visas to those who support any boycott of Israel. The AFSC and most of the groups on the list have supported the BDS or "boycott, divestment, sanction," movement, started in 2005.

The movement discourages international companies from doing business with Israel, and discourages people from buying Israeli products. It's an attempt to put economic and political pressure on Israel to comply with international laws regarding its policies with Gaza and the West Bank.

Organizers of the movement also have urged celebrities not to visit or perform in the country. Pop artist Lorde canceled her Israel concert this summer.

"Motivated by Quaker belief in the worth and dignity of all people, AFSC has supported and joined in nonviolent resistance for over 100 years," president Joyce Ajlouny said in a statement. "We answered the call for divestment from apartheid in South Africa, and we have done the same with the call for BDS from Palestinians who have faced decades of human rights violations."

Ajlouny said the Quaker group has a long history of economic activism dating back to the "Free Produce Movement," a boycott of American goods produced using slave labor during the 1800s.

"This ban only feeds those who are saying that grassroots support for nonviolent social change movement is the way in which change will be brought," said Michael Meeryman-Loetz, Middle East Program director for the AFSC. "It's a sign of the success of BDS and to a certain extent the desperation of the government."

The ban will create some complications for the Quaker organization, which was founded in 1917. AFSC has offices in Jerusalem and Gaza. The organization runs a youth civic engagement program for Palestinians and partners with various Israeli human rights groups.

"We're feeling disappointment that speaking out for human rights and pushing for equality for all has resulted in a situation where some of our staff may be denied entry to the country and cut off from relationships with partners we work with in Israel and Palestine," he said.

Rabbi Albert Gabbai, who heads Congregation Mikveh Israel in Center City, said BDS discriminates against Israel. He wouldn't comment on individual groups blacklisted, but said the movement as a whole unfairly targets the country.

"These are people against Israel [who want] to destroy Israel. It's not really to force Israel to do things," Gabbai said. "What about Syria, where they killed more than a million people? Why not discriminate against North Korea? BDS as a movement is racist and discriminates against one group and one country only, and that's very bad."

Of the 20 groups banned, six were based in the United States and at least three have chapters in Philadelphia, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has a chapter at the University of Pennsylvania; Code Pink, a female-led peace organization; and Jewish Voices for Peace.

Marta Guttenberg, who is on the steering committee for the Philadelphia Chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, said several of the 50 or so volunteer members have family in Israel and visit frequently. While she said the ban was discouraging, she's unsure how it will be enforced.

"We're an all-volunteer chapter, we're pretty much all-volunteer nationally," Guttenberg said. "So it's not going to be that easy for the Israeli equivalent of the TSA to figure out who actually is a member and hold them."

She said she was pleased to be on the same blacklist with the AFSC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for helping World War II refugees, many of them Jews.

"We are trying to speak against a totalitarian system that silences people for speaking up in a nonviolent way," she said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a home in Atlanta during a targeted enforcement operation in 2017. Read more

Activists are opposing Bensalem officials' plan to have township police officers assist federal authorities in identifying and detaining undocumented immigrants.

At issue is the Bucks County township's potential participation in a program known by the legislative clause that brought it to life  287(g). That's a partnership initiative between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, and state or local police agencies that agree to help enforce federal immigration laws within their jurisdictions.

If approved, Bensalem would be the first Pennsylvania police agency to join with ICE.

Members of Buxmont Inclusive and Progressive, a year-old grassroots advocacy group, had planned to speak out, along with representatives of the Bucks County NAACP, Make the Road Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, a justice organization, at Monday night's Bensalem Township Council meeting. The meeting has been postponed, due to weather conditions.

Township Public Safety Director Fred Harran said law-abiding undocumented immigrants have nothing to fear. Officers would not be checking the immigration statuses of people who work at local businesses or with whom they come into routine contact. The ICE partnership would come into play only when a crime is committed for which an officer would make an arrest, Harran said.

For instance, he said, a motorist who was pulled over for an expired inspection or broken headlight would not be questioned about immigration status. But a driver stopped and arrested for drunken driving, if undocumented, would be turned over to ICE, and from there possibly deported.

"Here's the trick not to get deported: If you're in this country undocumented, obey the law," he said. "Don't commit a crime, and you're not going to have a problem in Bensalem Township."

Why, he asked, would he not use any tool at his disposal to remove criminals from the community?

"My job is to prevent a victim tomorrow, and if I can do that by keeping a criminal off the street today, I'm going to do it," Harran said. "I don't know why anybody would be upset with what we're doing here, once they understand."

Efforts to reach Bensalem Mayor Joseph DiGirolamo were unsuccessful.

Activists said a partnership with federal authorities would have unintended and harmful consequences.

"It creates a culture of fear, it destroys the police-community relationship. It also opens us to lawsuits," said Laura Rose, a leader of Buxmont Inclusive. "We don't want 287(g) to get a toehold in Bucks County."

The program largely went dormant under President Barack Obama, but has been revived since President Trump was elected.

ICE now has agreements with 60 law-enforcement agencies in 18 states, and has trained and certified more than 1,822 officers, according to the agency. The tally includes 18 local agencies in Texas, five in North Carolina, and four each in New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Arizona.

An ICE spokesperson said the agency does not identify local police departments that may be seeking a partnership until a formal memorandum of agreement has been signed. An earlier application from Bensalem was turned down during the Obama administration.

Bensalem, bordered by Philadelphia to the west and south, is home to 60,354 people. The population is 75 percent white, 11 percent Asian, 8 percent Latino and 7 percent black, census figures show.

Nearly 11,000 are foreign-born, more than one out of five residents.

Money magazine named Bensalem one of the nation's 50 best places to live in 2014, citing gorgeous state parks, gambling at Parx Casino & Racetrack, and concerts at the TD Bank Amphitheater, now the Penn Community Bank Amphitheater.

Nationally, moves to make local police work in concert with ICE have been hugely contentious. While some jurisdictions have been eager to aid the federal government, saying it helps remove criminals, others want no part.

The latter group includes Philadelphia.

City officials went to court  and won a preliminary injunction in November  to block the Trump administration's effort to withhold grant money from "sanctuary cities."

The administration aimed to withhold $1.5 million from Philadelphia unless the city agreed to more actively help federal agents arrest and hold people who had entered the country illegally. City officials argued that local police are not part of federal immigration forces, and more, that they're trained to treat everyone who comes in contact with the criminal justice system the same.

Broadly defined, a sanctuary city limits cooperation with federal authorities who enforce immigration law. Leaders of those cities seek to ease fears of deportation among undocumented residents, believing members of immigrant communities will then be more willing to report crime.

Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions argue that sanctuary city policies allow dangerous criminals to be released into local neighborhoods. They want more help from police agencies, not less.

ICE officials say the 287(g) program strengthens public safety and helps build consistency in immigration enforcement across the country.

After a memorandum of agreement is signed, local officers undergo a four-week basic training program, and then a once-every-two-years refresher course, at the ICE Academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center ICE Academy in South Carolina.

The program took root in 1996, when the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act added Section 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act. That allowed the director of ICE to forge partnerships with state and local agencies. In 2009 ICE revised the program to make the arrest and detention of criminal aliens a priority.

"Our state and local law-enforcement partners have become a force multiplier," ICE officials say on the agency website, "allowing ICE to actively engage more officers/agents into ongoing enforcement operations nationwide."

Opponents say many people in Bensalem and Bucks County are upset, certain that a police-ICE partnership will be divisive.

"It's very disturbing, because we have a large immigrant community of many nationalities," said Theresa Conejo, a local activist. "We pride ourselves on that."
A woman was killed early Monday in a fire that that ripped through a West Philadelphia row house.

The fire at 819 N. Holly St. was reported about 3:45 a.m. and firefighters quickly brought the blaze under control while contending with bone chilling cold and icing of their equipment.

A spokesman for the Medical Examiner's Office identified the victim as Yvonne Floyd, 68. She was found inside the house. Public records indicate that she lived there.

The home was tucked between two vacant row houses and officials said that may have delayed the fire being reported. The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

The victim was the third person to die in a fire in Philadelphia in three days. On Saturday, Fire Department Lt. Matthew LeTourneau was killed while battling a blaze in a North Philadelphia home where a resident also died.
Funeral arrangements have been made for the Philadelphia Fire Department lieutenant who died Saturday after being trapped under rubble and debris while battling a blaze that engulfed a two-story North Philadelphia rowhouse.

The department announced Monday that viewings for Lt. Matthew LeTourneau will be held from 4:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday and 9 to 11 a.m. Friday at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul at 18th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

A Funeral Mass will follow at 11 a.m. Friday at the cathedral. LeTourneau will be buried at SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery in Marple Township, Delaware County.

LeTourneau, 42, of Springfield, Delaware County, died Saturday morning after he was pulled from the rubble at 2240 N. Colorado St. He was an 11-year veteran of the department, most recently assigned to Engine 45 Platoon A at 26th Street near York Street in North Philadelphia. He was also a volunteer firefighter with the Springfield Fire Company.

His body was escorted by fellow firefighters to O'Leary Funeral Home in Springfield on Saturday night.

The blaze, reported at 8:51 a.m. Saturday, also claimed the life of the man who lived inside the rowhouse. A spokesman for the Medical Examiner's Office said Monday that the man had yet to be identified. Two other firefighters were also injured in the blaze.

The cause of the two-alarm fire has yet to be determined. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Monday said that its National Response Team was assisting the Fire Department and the Fire Marshal's Office.

In a statement, the ATF said that when firefighters responded, they found the man's body near the front door.

"During firefighting operations, the second floor of the structure collapsed, trapping PFD Lt. Matthew LeTourneau," the statement said. LeTourneau was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital that morning.

Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said Saturday afternoon outside the hospital that it took firefighters and paramedics about 30 minutes to free LeTourneau following the structural collapse.

While trapped, LeTourneau "was never alone," Thiel said. "The rescue effort started almost immediately."

Neighbors on Colorado Street said Saturday that they didn't know the full name of the resident who died, but said he was in his 50s and lived alone. Some called him Andre or Drew.

One next-door neighbor said that about 2 a.m. Saturday, she saw the man returning home, clutching a box that contained a heater.

She said the victim told her he didn't have any heat in his house. "He said he was going to turn on his heater and stay in the house," said the neighbor, Sherel Smith, 30.

Fire Department spokesman Capt. William Dixon said he was not able to comment Monday on whether the heater was a cause of the fire.
After years of hard work towing tourists through historic Philadelphia, eight horses that belonged to the Philadelphia Carriage Co. are getting the retirement they earned.

The company, which had drawn city attention for numerous code violations at its stables and concerns over the poor condition of the horses, ceased operations Jan. 1 under a consent decree with the city. That leaves just one stable, 76 Carriage Co., operating horse-drawn carriage tours in the city.

The horses were transferred Saturday to Gentle Giants Draft Horse Rescue, a 139-acre farm in Mount Airy, Md., that, according to the city, has assumed all financial responsibility for the horses. Two more horses will arrive this week.

Christine Hajek, the director of the sanctuary, confirmed the arrival of the horses and said the sanctuary would invest about $1,000 in routine care for each horse before determining whether to offer them for adoption or allow them to retire at Gentle Giants. She said the horses did not appear to have been maltreated.

"All of the horses are in excellent condition," she said. "They are at the perfect weight. They have lovely hoof care. No part of this case revolved around the neglect of the horses."

Previously, inspectors from the Animal Care and Control Team, which investigates violations of the city's animal-welfare code, reported that the horses appeared malnourished and filthy, that at least one was lame and that another suffered from a respiratory condition likely caused by poor ventilation in the stable.
Owner Jeff Harris, right, and apprentice mechanic Kevin Bass hold up cut bike locks at Frankinstien Bike Worx on Spruce Street on Dec. 17. Read more

To Taylor Henry, a bike is a way of life. It's how he pays his rent. It's how he affords groceries.

So when Henry, a 20-year-old courier for the food delivery site Caviar, gets his bike stolen, he's left powerless.

That's happened "plenty of times" during his 12 years living in Philadelphia, said the Mayfair resident, and the impact is always dire.

"My bike is my paycheck.  Once you get your bike stolen, you have to make up for it by paying for a new lock and equipment," Henry said. "It makes you start falling behind on bills."

For those who don't use their bike as a way to make a living, it still can be essential  bikes are the primary source of transportation to work for more people per capita in Philadelphia than in the other 10 biggest cities in the United States, according to the 2016 American Community Survey.

And it's disabling when these ways of getting around, which cost several hundred dollars on average, are stolen. As of Dec. 25, there were about 1,560 reported bike thefts in the city in 2017, with the most thefts occurring in parts of Fairmount, Center City West, and North Philadelphia, according to data provided by Philadelphia Police. Nearly 1,800 bike thefts were reported in 2016 and about 2,000 the year before.

Those numbers pale compared to the actual bike thefts, according to John Boyle, a research director at the Bike Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. He puts the real number four to five times higher.

And once they're stolen, they're difficult to get back.

Captain Krista Dahl-Campbell of the 26th district, concedes that bike theft is a low-priority call, and one that won't get immediate attention if a homicide or armed robbery occurred nearby.

There's a slim chance of finding a stolen bike too, Dahl-Campbell said.

Bike owners' sense of frustration could be eased by Philadelphia Stolen Bikes, a Facebook group of more than 5,300 members who use it as an alternative reporting service and source of support when their bikes go missing.

Posting there is the first thing Henry does, having had a bad experience reporting a theft to police when he was a teen.

Jeff Harris, one of the group's administrators and owner of Frankinstien Bike Worx on Spruce Street near 16th, said the Facebook group fills a need spurred by the city's inadequate response.

"It's like the Wild West out here," he said.

Every day about five people post about a stolen bike on the page, which was started in 2011, though only about 5 percent of the posts lead to owners' reunions with their bikes, Harris added.

Cyclists have reached out in vain to City Councilmen Allan Domb, Kenyatta Johnson and Mark Squilla to press for a greater police response, he added. Representatives for Domb and Squilla said the councilmen don't remember discussing bike theft, and Johnson's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Besides providing income and transportation, bikes carry sentiment for many riders  like Monika Creidie, who rode a green Raleigh for 43 years until it was stolen Oct. 19 from 15th and Pine Streets. Her parents gave it to her when she turned 9.

Creidie, 53, of Northern Liberties, didn't report the theft because it "wouldn't have been helpful," she said. Per a friend's suggestion, she turned to the Facebook group.

Members of the page were supportive, but she's not optimistic about its recovery, she added.

"People would say that it's nice, and I would say I've had this since I was 9," Creidie said. "The amazement on their faces  I'll miss that."

Finding a bike through the group isn't impossible, though  Josa Lazas, 32, of Pennsport, credits the page for the return of his Surly Steamroller.

Lazas posted in the Facebook group in August after his blue and pink bike was stolen near The Dolphin Tavern on Broad and Tasker streets. It was worth more than $1,000, he said.

Three months later, someone replied with a link to his bike for sale on Craigslist. Lazas coordinated with police to stage an undercover pickup, leading to a reunion just after Thanksgiving.

"[The] Philadelphia Stolen Bikes group is a gem and  I think as soon as it was stolen, I went and posted in there because that's always been  [a] reliable community."

Dahl-Campbell urges people to report bike thefts to police. The Bike Coalition lists it as the first step in its quick guide of "What to do if your bike is stolen," and Philadelphia Stolen Bikes' description also encourages it.

But there are preventative measures that Dahl-Campbell suggests, too, including documenting the bike's serial number and any distinguishing features.

"The easier it is for us to identify it's your bike, the easier it is to give back to you," Dahl-Campbell said.

Officer Shaun McPhillips of the 9th District has reunited 12 people with their bikes by monitoring the Facebook group. He said a detective is assigned to every reported theft, but having a "solvability factor," like a video of the crime or a witness, increases the chances of recovery.

"We investigate as much as we can," McPhillips said. "A lot of it is, bikes are stolen and there's nothing to go on. It's just like a dead end."

Proper locking can also help avoid bike theft. Shelly S. Walker, owner of Fairmount Bike Works, knows from costly experience that it's wise to loop a cable through the bike's front wheel, as well as a use a U-lock to cement the bike's frame and rear wheel to a bike post. The Bike Coalition also has a guide on how to properly lock a bike.

Citywide solutions, though, are more ambiguous. Walker said bike shops play a role in spotting stolen bikes and suggested someone ought to create a privately run database for shops to search if they suspect a bike is stolen. Similarly, Boyle of the Bike Coalition thinks a citywide database for registering bikes would increase rates of recovery.

"I think that could really help," Walker said.

Until city officials become more proactive, Harris said, cyclists will maintain the same attitude toward bike theft: resignation.

"If someone who owns a million-dollar condo gets ripped off or one of their buddies from City Hall gets ripped off, they'll pay attention," he added. "But I feel like we're second-class citizens as bikers.  This is a major problem."
Andy Williams, founder and CEO of Medicine Man Denver poses for a photo in Denver on Jan. 4. Colorados top federal prosecutor said his office wont alter its approach to enforcing marijuana crimes after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew a policy that allowed pot markets to emerge in states that legalized the drug. Read more

WASHINGTON  Much of Congress was up in arms when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced changes last week that opened the door to more federal marijuana prosecutions, undercutting a growing number of states that have legalized the drug for medical or recreational purposes.

But will the GOP-led body defy President Trump's top law enforcement officer? And will prosecutors given them reason to?

One initial test is pending in the coming days, when lawmakers will attempt to pass a sweeping government funding bill  the kind of measure that for years has included bipartisan language barring prosecutors from pursuing cases against medical marijuana use in states that permit the practice.

Some, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, want to make sure that policy is renewed, and perhaps expanded to cover recreational marijuana use.

The so-called Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment has been in place  and regularly renewed  since 2014. Its fate is up for consideration again because it is scheduled to expire on Jan. 19, along with the most recent federal spending package.

"Extending the rider that prevents the Department of Justice from interfering in states' ability to set medical marijuana policies really is a no-brainer," Booker, a Democrat, said in a statement to the Inquirer and Daily News. "What's more, Congress should act to pass a permanent law that ends the federal prohibition of marijuana. We can't afford to allow Attorney General Sessions to reinvigorate the failed War on Drugs."

The rider prevents prosecutors from bringing charges against people who legally use medical marijuana in the 29 states that allow it plus Washington, D.C. Among them are New Jersey and Delaware. Pennsylvania plans to make medicinal cannabis available in the coming months. Eight states and Washington, D.C. have legalized marijuana more broadly.

But the rider has limitations, said Sean O'Connor, a University of Washington law professor who leads the school's Cannabis Law and Policy Project. It doesn't protect unauthorized medical marijuana use or adults who use the drug recreationally.

"It gives [Sessions]  and any U.S. attorneys that want to be aggressive  plenty of folks to go after if they want to," O'Connor said.

Much will depend on individual U.S. attorneys, many of whom are still awaiting Senate confirmation. Colorado's U.S. attorney, for example, said his office would not change its approach. The drug is legal there for medical and recreational use.

But in western Pennsylvania, Scott Brady, the top federal prosecutor, told a Pittsburgh TV station that he would "vigorously enforce federal law," and "protect the citizens of western Pennsylvania from those individuals and criminal organizations which traffic in all illegal controlled substances, including marijuana."

Lawmakers hoping to short-circuit such prosecutions could try to legalize marijuana entirely, O'Connor said. "That overrides everything."

Booker introduced a bill to do that last year, arguing that marijuana prosecutions unfairly punish minority communities without improving public safety. The plan hasn't gained much traction, and medical use has more bipartisan support than recreational legalization. Some advocates think Sessions' move could build support for the idea as lawmakers react to a move that might undermine laws in their states and potentially disrupt legal marijuana businesses that have flourished.

"Prosecute Hillary Clinton, not medical marijuana businesses and patients!" tweeted U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, one of a number of Republicans who reacted harshly to Sessions' announcement.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii), tweeted, "There is a growing bipartisan group of senators that is not going to stand by while Jeff Sessions takes us back several generations on marijuana policy."

The public view on marijuana has softened. A Gallup poll in October found that 64 percent of Americans favor legalization, including 51 percent of Republicans.

But in Congress few specific plans have emerged in the days since Sessions' announcement, and it's unclear if Republicans have the appetite for fully legalizing the drug or counteracting a president who has made law and order central to his agenda.

Another option could be expanding the budget amendment to cover recreational marijuana, and attaching that to a must-pass spending bill to keep the government running, which might leave Trump with little choice but to accept it.

The new Department of Justice guidelines wiped out Obama-era rules that directed federal prosecutors to take a hands-off approach in states that legalized marijuana. The change does not order prosecutions, but opens the door for prosecutors to pursue charges tied to marijuana use if they choose, since the drug remains illegal under federal law.

Lawmakers have several tools they can use to push back and protect state laws and programs. Sen. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) said he is prepared to block Justice Department nominees until Sessions reverses course. U.S. attorney nominees could also face sharp questions about marijuana prosecutions  and their intended approaches  at confirmation hearings. Lawmakers could try to block nominees if they don't like the answers.

"Devoting our limited resources to prosecuting medical marijuana use that is permitted under Delaware state law is a poor allocation of federal time, money, and manpower that should be focused on more important things, such combating violent crime on our streets," said a statement from Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Among the many U.S. attorney nominees still awaiting Senate approval is Bill McSwain, chosen to be the top federal prosecutor in Philadelphia. New Jersey has an interim U.S. attorney, Craig Carpenito, but no one has been nominated yet for a full appointment.

Another less drastic step, O'Connor said, could be to "reschedule" marijuana, moving it off the Drug Enforcement Administration's list of the most dangerous narcotics  like heroin  and regulate it more like a prescription or over-the-counter drug.

Until there is clarity, however, he said the new guidelines could discourage investment in medical marijuana businesses, since banks, insurance companies or delivery drivers may be reluctant to work with such enterprises if they face the possibility of a federal prosecution.

"The real fear is that U.S. attorneys could prosecute anyone who is at all involved," O'Connor said.
White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller (left) had to be removed by security after a contentious interview with CNNs Jake Tapper on Sundays State of the Union. Read more

On CNN's State of the Union Sunday morning, President Trump's senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, engaged in a tense, 12-minute interview with host Jake Tapper in which he tried to defend his boss' comments on Twitter about being a "very stable genius" and "like, really smart."

But it appears Miller's on-air anger wasn't just for show.

A CNN source has confirmed a report by Business Insider's Linette Lopez that Miller had to be escorted off the set after the interview. According to the source, Miller was politely asked to leave the set multiple times, but refused. Eventually, security was called and escorted the agitated Miller off Tapper's set.

Neither CNN nor the White House immediately responded to request for comment.

Miller was dispatched to CNN amid the fallout over Michael Wolff's best-selling new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The juicy, high-in-demand book quotes former Trump strategist Steve Bannon calling a 2016 campaign meeting at Trump Tower between three top campaign officials  Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.  and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."

Bannon also suggested to Wolff that Trump himself met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, after she met with the top campaign aides. Miller sidestepped repeated questions from Tapper on whether that claim was true.

"I have no knowledge of anything to do with that meeting," said Miller, who was a senior policy adviser on Trump's campaign at the time the meeting took place.

Trump has repeatedly denied claims he was aware that his eldest son, as well as his son-in-law, had met with the Russians at Trump Tower.

Despite suggestions on Fox News that CNN attempted to silence Miller, the top Trump staffer was given more than 12 minutes to defend the president. He repeatedly praised Trump as a "political genius" and bashed Bannon's quotes as "grotesque" and "vindictive." Miller also refused to answer most of Tapper's questions, leading the host to suggest Miller's comments were aimed at one individual  Trump himself.

"There is one viewer that you care about right now," Tapper said. "And you're being obsequious, you're being a factotum, in order to please him."

Miller's refusal to answer Tapper's questions led the host to wrap up the segment early, over Miller's objections, while saying, "I think I have wasted enough of my viewers' time."

Watch:

Despite declaring last February that "I don't watch CNN," Trump himself appeared to confirm Tapper's suspicions about an hour later, when he blasted the CNN host on Twitter as a "flunky."

"Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration," Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday morning. "Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"

Trump said in November that he doesn't have time to watch TV "primarily because of documents," but according to a new report by Axios' Jonathan Swan, the president has pushed back the start of his workday to 11 a.m. to accommodate more "Executive Time," which includes watching TV and posting on Twitter in his official residence.

"The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time, but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, Cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote in response to the Axios story. "The president is one of the hardest workers I've ever seen, and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him."
Steve Bannon's apology for his comments trashing President Trump's family did little to tamp down the president's anger at his former chief strategist, as aides describe the president demanding a stark choice from supporters of both men: you're either with Bannon, or with me.

Trump's aides are tracking who came out with full-throated criticism of Bannon over the weekend, and they put out the word that the president is keeping score.

Trump remains irritated over losing the first week of the year to titillating excerpts from the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, which is focused on the president and his dysfunctional White House.

One person who was judged as being insufficiently critical of Bannon was David Bossie, president of Citizens United. On Friday night, Bossie came out with a forceful condemnation of Bannon, his longtime friend, in an op-ed in The Washington Post.

Bannon may have hoped his apology would begin to put the episode behind him. A half dozen sources describe almost the exact opposite: Trump remains angry at the disloyalty of his former strategist, and is forcing a him-or-me moment inside Trump World and the Republican Party as a whole.

"I don't know if it's ever repairable," said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who has been friends with Bannon for two decades. "These wounds are pretty deep."

The implications for Trump's agenda are stark: at a moment when he needs maximum coordination to push through infrastructure, welfare reform, and funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall, he's at war with the leader of the party's activist base  the very voters who propelled Trump to the White House in 2016.

Bannon's lengthy apology followed days of scorching responses from the president, both in public and privately to aides, to comments attributed to Bannon in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

It also comes after key financial backers Rebekah Mercer and Sheldon Adelson cut ties, and questions simmered about Bannon's continued role at Breitbart, the conservative news website. These could doom his efforts to oust mainstream Republican incumbents in Congress and replace them with nationalist or anti-establishment alternatives. And those very mainstream GOP lawmakers, furious among other things at Bannon's role in a losing Senate campaign in Alabama in December, won't shed any tears.

"He may or may not know it, but the only way he is relevant to anyone other than the people he pays is if Trump lets him be," said Fred Brown, a crisis communications strategist and former GOP spokesman. "The fact that Bannon was dumb enough to make people choose between him and the president shows he has a more delusional opinion of himself than even Trump does."

Wolff's explosive book, publication of which was moved up four days to Jan. 5 despite  or because of  a cease-and-desist order from Trump, asserts that many of the president's own top advisers think the former New York real estate developer is unfit to serve. Trump, 71, who on Saturday declared himself a "very stable genius" in a tweet and later held a press conference at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland to drive the point home, said Bannon had "lost his mind" after being forced out of the White House in August.

The president has minimized Bannon's role in Trump's 2016 election win, characterized him as self-interested and destructive, and nicknamed him "Sloppy Steve." At the same time, Trump denounced Wolff's book as "fiction," as well as "really boring." On Sunday he bemoaned a "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

While Trump is known for resuming ties with former advisers he has ousted, Bannon's transgressions cut so close to the nerve that they probably can't be reversed. As of Sunday evening, no one from the White House had directly reached out to Bannon since the fallout, three people familiar with the matter said. White House officials instructed television surrogates over the weekend to swing harder at Bannon, noting that Trump would be watching. Among those following the order to the letter was senior adviser Stephen Miller, who said Bannon's comments were "vindictive" and "out of touch with reality" and that his importance to the campaign and administration had been greatly exaggerated. Miller was once among those most closely aligned with Bannon.

Wolff's book says Bannon labeled as "treasonous" Donald Trump Jr.'s and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's 2016 meeting with Russian nationals, held in an attempt to dig up dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton, and called Trump's daughter Ivanka "dumb as a brick." Bannon also predicted in the book that the special counsel investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia would "crack" Trump Jr. "like an egg on national TV."

In his apology on Sunday, Bannon didn't specifically deny the comments. Bannon said his support for the president and for Trump's agenda was "unwavering" and that his comments about the Russian meeting were aimed at Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort rather than Trump's son, whom he described as "both a patriot and a good man."

Corey Lewandowski, who preceded Manafort as campaign manager, said on Fox News Sunday that "I can't justify what Steve said." If what Bannon was reported to have said was accurate, he owes "the entire Trump family" an apology. At the same time, Lewandowski, who himself has floated in and out of Trump's orbit over the last two years, suggested a path for Bannon's rehabilitation.

"If Steve Bannon wants to get on the Trump team and join with the president to make sure that we hold the House in 2018, and we hold the Senate or expand our majority, then he'll be welcome to do that," Lewandowski offered. "But if you want to run an agenda which is antithetical to the president's agenda, then there's no place in the Republican Party for you because Donald Trump is the head of the Republican Party."

Bloomberg contributors: Ros Krasny Ben Brody and Jordan Yadoo.
Here's how badly six Democrats want Mike Stack's job.

On Saturday, they endured a deep freeze, a packed opening day at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, three hours of a Penn Ag Democrats luncheon (meatloaf, gravy, veggies, a potato thing), awards presentations, and speeches by Bob Casey and Tom Wolf.

All to get five minutes each to tell a couple hundred folks why they should be Wolf's running mate this time around.

So it goes when you screw up, as Stack did, one of the sweetest gigs in American politics.

Stack spoke Saturday, too. But he came late, long after lunch, awards and speeches. Even after some of the crowd had left. Long after Wolf had made his exit.

(I'm pretty sure Wolf's security is under orders to keep them apart. Stack, you may recall, no longer has security.)

Need a quick refresher on Stack's uniquely Pennsylvania head-shaking saga?

Well, the Philly boy/lieutenant governor's high-perk post  nation's highest LG salary ($162,373); only LG with a mansion  is in a bit of jeopardy.

This due to bad behavior by him and his wife toward mansion staff and security that led to Wolf pulling both last year after ordering an investigation, findings of which Wolf (who claims to be all about transparency) refuses to release.

Stack, a longtime member of the Screen Actors' Guild (evidenced anytime he presides over the Senate), chalks this up to a "private family health issue" for which his wife, Tonya, sought mental-health treatment.

Anywho.

Stack's in the race for reelection. There's legislation to abolish the office. And Stack, so far, has six challengers.

As Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre), who emceed Saturday's event, put it, "Each one of these candidates brings something to the table."

(I immediately thought meatloaf, gravy, veggies, some potato thing.)

Yet, despite the fact it's all but certain none would be in the race without the Stack flap, not one of them brought to the table any reference to it, or to Stack.

They played nice.

The biggest name (and presence) in the mix is Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, a U.S. Senate candidate in 2016. He made clear he'd use the office to expand his efforts in social justice and equality that brought him national attention as an Allegheny County small-town mayor.

Montgomery County Rep. Madeleine Dean stressed her understanding of the legislature and nudged at Stack stuff, saying she's not in public service for perks. She pledged, if elected, not to live in the LG's stone mansion (with swimming pool). She suggested it be used as an opioid treatment facility.

Aryanna Berringer, an Iraq War vet, mom of three, and IT contractor from Allegheny County, touched the crowd with her life story: "I grew up poor (the youngest of 10) with a dad who was black and a mom who is white." She said anyone in her family should be generations away from running for office, "Yet, here I am."

She drew big applause suggesting public school cafeterias buy much more of their food from Pennsylvania farmers.

Chester County Commissioner Kathi Cozzone said she's running because "local government needs a voice at the table."

Lancaster County Commissioner Craig Lehman wants to attack state budget woes with "policies that make sense" (which, come on, are often better than those that don't).

And Ray Sosa, Montgomery County banker/insurance broker, wants to cut the costs of prison recidivism by giving more opportunity to those who served time.

Stack, too. Speaking of his work as chairman of the state Board of Pardons, he stressed reducing incarceration costs, then (ironically, pointedly, or intentionally) said, "I've always believed in giving people second chances."

He might well get one. Multiple opponents help. If they share big chunks of the statewide vote, Stack could win with his Philly base.

When I ask him about the field, he says, "The more the merrier.  I'm confident in how I do in competition."

The competition ends May 15. The Farm Show ends Jan. 13. Those who can should visit the latter and vote in the former.
Malaysia Airlines Is Flying to Brisbane Australia in 2018

Good news travellers! From our reliable sources, Malaysia Airlines will be flying back to Brisbane, Australia. BNE is the third busiest airport in Australia. It will be four times weekly from KLIA to BNE (Brisbane Airport).

Malaysia Airlines had a long-time partnership with BNE. Malaysia Airlines flew to Brisbane for 25 years. Hence in August 2015, Malaysia Airlines stop flying from Kuala Lumpur to Brisbane Australia due to its restructuring.

Australia welcomed over 400,000 Malaysian travellers in 2017 period, a new record for Tourism Australia Malaysia. The double digits growth of Malaysian travellers to Australia could be a reason to reignite the Kuala Lumpur to Brisbane route. Currently, AirAsiaX is from Kuala Lumpur to Gold Coast in Queensland. With this new route, Queensland will expect more tourists from Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia Airlines will commence its flights to BNE in June 2018. It will be four times a week. The timetable is as below.

Days Departure Arrival MON/WED/THUS/SAT KUL 0950 BNE 1955 MON/WED/THUS/SAT BNE 2320 KUL 0550

It is an awesome news if you ask us. Since we never been to Queensland, maybe we should start planning to visit the sunshine state in 2018?

Wilson Ng A Father and traveler who enjoys to eat, shop, travel and taking pictures with Samsung S22 Ultra and Sony ZV-1. Im a full time blogger, youtuber and father for two. I used to travel around 17 International trips per year but now staying at home. Remember to follow us at www.instagram.com/placesandfoods and www.youtube.com/placesandfoods. For advertisements or features, contact me at [email protected] See author's posts
Officer Christopher Beaudion (Photo: Monroe PD)

A Monroe, LA, police office died about 3 a.m. Sunday when his patrol vehicle crashed into a tree.

Louisiana State Police Troop F said its troopers responded to a report of a single-vehicle crash at the intersection of South 2nd and Winnsboro Road in Monroe. The preliminary investigation revealed that Officer Christopher Beaudion, of the Monroe Police Department, was traveling south on South 2nd in his assigned Ford Crown Victoria.

For reasons still under investigation, the vehicle veered to the left. His vehicle then traveled across both northbound lanes and struck a tree, according to the Magnolia Reporter.
Ekin Bike Patrol performs automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), speed detection, and parking violation detection on the move. Photo: Ekin

Ekin, known for its safe city technologies, has now launched its full line of mobile and versatile security products in the United States. Ekin provides police departments, airports, shopping centers, and municipalities with sophisticated, comprehensive security technology. Ekin's award-winning mobile and fixed product offering includes: Ekin Bike Patrol, a smart patrol product for bicycles; Ekin Patrol G2, a smart patrol product for use on authorized vehicles renowned for its design and superior technology; Ekin Micro Spotter, a compact, high-resolution video recording device; and Ekin Face, facial recognition technology developed with deep learning. Information from all Ekin products across a city is collected and centrally managed using Ekin's proprietary Red Eagle Safe City Operating System, which offers a new way of looking at city safety and surveillance.

While a city controlled by a traditional surveillance system is secure to some extent, Ekin's smart, connected system is proven to dramatically enhance safety citywide: after employing the use of Ekin's Safe Traffic system, Abu Dhabi police saw a 34% reduction in traffic accidents in 2014 when compared with 2013. In total, Ekin products detected over 20,000 traffic violations in Abu Dhabi in 2014. Ekin currently works with more than 20 municipalities and has built over 500 City Safety Control Centers around the world.

Ekin Bike Patrol is made to be easily installed on any police bicycle. It is one of Ekin's many safe city products designed to work together. Photo: Ekin

Orkunt Yozgat, Director of Business Development and Marketing at Ekin, said: "We are excited to extend our promise of safety and security to cities across the United States. For the past 20 years, Ekin has been dedicated to improving city safety and regulating traffic with our innovative approach to safety. After demonstrating our products starting in Texas and Florida, we look forward to partnering with local law enforcement agencies and private corporations to provide citizens with a greater sense of security."

Ekin's safe city products available for the first time to the U.S. market include:

Ekin Bike Patrol performs automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), speed detection, and parking violation detection on the move. Bike Patrol is easily installed on any police bicycle and enables law enforcement to prevent disorder caused by parking violations. Click for photos and product information.

performs automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), speed detection, and parking violation detection on the move. Bike Patrol is easily installed on any police bicycle and enables law enforcement to prevent disorder caused by parking violations. Click for photos and product information. Ekin Patrol G2, the second generation of Ekin's internationally renowned Patrol product, can be installed on any authorized car to enhance city safety with its mobile ALPR, facial recognition, and speed and parking violation detection technology. Powered by Ekin Face, Ekin's proprietary facial recognition software, Patrol G2 captures all faces within its field of view and compares them with a police department's database of wanted suspects. Click for photos and product information.

the second generation of Ekin's internationally renowned Patrol product, can be installed on any authorized car to enhance city safety with its mobile ALPR, facial recognition, and speed and parking violation detection technology. Powered by Ekin Face, Ekin's proprietary facial recognition software, Patrol G2 captures all faces within its field of view and compares them with a police department's database of wanted suspects. Click for photos and product information. Ekin Micro Spotter , Ekin's most compact and versatile product, is easily mounted on a pole, tripod, or any point on a vehicle, including a roof or hood. Micro Spotter's high-resolution video surveillance ensures traffic safety by automatically and continuously detecting license plates, vehicle speed, and red light violations. Click for photos and product information.

, Ekin's most compact and versatile product, is easily mounted on a pole, tripod, or any point on a vehicle, including a roof or hood. Micro Spotter's high-resolution video surveillance ensures traffic safety by automatically and continuously detecting license plates, vehicle speed, and red light violations. Click for photos and product information. Ekin Face, a face detection and analysis system, recognizes faces with high accuracy to ensure continuous safety. When searching for a suspect, Ekin Face provides law enforcement with a list of possible time zones, images, and videos where specified individuals might have appeared, delivering important results in a timely manner.

The Kissimmee (FL) Police Department had the opportunity to test out Ekin Patrol and praised the device for its ability to combine several elements - like multiple cameras, a radar unit, automatic vehicle location and automatic license plate recognition systems, plus the wiring for each - into one simple, easy to maintain system.

While most city safety systems feature several disconnected products, Ekin Red Eagle (OS) central management software provides users with a distinct advantage and ease of use, according to the company, in addition to the company's distinctive facial recognition technology and products like Ekin Patrol and Ekin Bike Patrol smart patrol products. Law enforcement agencies and private corporations interested in Ekin solutions can email Orkunt Yozgat at [email protected] to learn more about Ekin's product offering and to schedule a demonstration in their city.

To learn more about Ekin and its line of safe city products now available in the United States, visit www.ekin.com.
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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee said two words about Trumps behavior in relation to firing Comey that should terrify the White House. Schiffs talked about the potentially corrupt intent behind the presidents actions.

Video:

Schiff said, It is certainly appropriate, and I think even necessary, that we investigate this, and I do think that it is evidence that bears on the intent of the president in urging White House Counsel to urge Jeff Sessions to ignore the advice of the ethics lawyers at the Justice Department. It certainly appears consistent with what the President has said about his firing of James Comey  and that is, he had Russia on his mind. He wanted loyalty from James Comey, he wanted loyalty from Jeff Sessions, and the way the President interprets loyalty is not loyalty to country, not loyalty to justice, but rather loyalty to him and having his back when it concerns the Russia investigation. I think this could very well be evidence that goes to the Presidents intent, and of course, one of the elements of obstruction is having a corrupt intent that accompanies these acts.

Republicans have argued since Comey was fired that Trump didnt know what he was doing, and didnt understand politics. The GOP defense has been that Trump had no corrupt intent, but the evidence is piling up that Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing. Trump was trying to kill the Russia investigation from the first moment that he took office. By wanting Jeff Sessions to stay in charge of the Russia investigation, Trump showed that he was trying to obstruct the investigation through the Attorney General.

Trump has been his own worst enemy. If he ends up being charged with obstruction of justice, he will only have himself to blame.

If Democrats take back the House in 2018, it may not matter what Robert Mueller finds, because Adam Schiff will be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and investigating Trump for obstruction of justice.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)  The head of the Central Intelligence Agency said on Sunday that Russia and others are trying to undermine elections in the United States, the next major one being in November when Republicans will try to keep control of Congress.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to try to help President Donald Trump win, in part by hacking and releasing emails embarrassing to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and spreading social media propaganda.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo told CBS that the Russian interference is longstanding, and continues. Asked on Face the Nation if Moscow is currently trying to undermine U.S. elections, Pompeo responded: Yes sir, have been for decades.

Yes, I continue to be concerned, not only about the Russians, but about others efforts as well, Pompeo said, without giving details. We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy.

Moscow denies any meddling in the 2016 elections to help Republican Trump win. U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether any crimes were committed. Two Trump associates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign aide George Papadopoulos have pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in the probe. Trump denies any campaign collusion with Russia.

Trump has at times suggested that he accepts the U.S. intelligence agencies assessment that Russia sought to interfere in the election but at other times has said he accepts Russian President Vladimir Putins denials that Moscow meddled.

Trump has frequently spoken of wanting to improve relations with Putin, even though Russia has frustrated U.S. policy in Syria and Ukraine and done little to help Washington in its standoff with North Korea.

Pompeo told CBS that the CIA had an important function as a part of the national security team to keep U.S. elections secure and democratic. We are working diligently to do that. So were going to work against the Russians or any others who threaten that very outcome, he said.

Trump said on Saturday that he planned an active year on the campaign trail on behalf of Republican candidates running in the mid-term elections, in which all of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will be up for election. Republicans hold majorities in both.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; editing by Grant McCool)
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By David Alire Garcia and Noe Torres

MEXICO CITY (Reuters)  The Russian government has launched a sophisticated campaign to influence Mexicos 2018 presidential election and stir up division, a senior White House official said in a video clip published by Mexican newspaper Reforma.

U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said in a speech last month to the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation that there was already evidence of Russian meddling in Mexican elections set for July.

Weve seen that this is really a sophisticated effort to polarize democratic societies and pit communities within those societies against each other, said McMaster in a previously unreported video clip from Dec. 15 that was posted on Twitter by a reporter with Mexican daily newspaper Reforma on Saturday.

Youve seen, actually, initial signs of it in the Mexican presidential campaign already, said McMaster, a former Army general. He did not elaborate in the clip on how Russia was seeking to influence the election.

Reforma published a story on Saturday on the comments, which have since been shared many times on social media.

President Donald Trumps senior national security aide added in the clip that the U.S. government was concerned by Russias use of advanced cyber tools to push propaganda and disinformation.

A request for comment sent to McMasters office at the White House and a request for comment from the Russian government in Moscow were not immediately returned on Sunday.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied accusations by U.S. intelligence officials and others of interfering in foreign elections.

In July, Mexico will elect a new president to succeed Enrique Pena Nieto, who is barred by law from seeking a second six-year term. Congressional seats plus some governors races will also be up for grabs.

According to opinion polls, the frontrunner in the presidential contest is the leftist former mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is running on an anti-corruption platform.

Lopez Obrador, a two-time runner-up for the presidency and a divisive figure in Mexican politics for over a decade, is seen by some analysts as the Kremlins favorite, given the positive coverage he has received from government-funded media outlets like Sputnik and Russia Today.

Both China and Russia are taking an increasing interest in Latin America as the United States, under Trump, has adopted a more protectionist stance and the future of the North America Free Trade Agreement looks uncertain.

Lopez Obrador has been a fierce critic of Pena Nietos sweeping energy overhaul, which was favored by U.S. officials and oil companies. He has said he would seek friendly relations with the U.S. government but would demand respect.

In 2016, Russia Todays Spanish-language YouTube channel began running a weekly video blog entitled The Battle for Mexico, hosted by a prominent supporter of Lopez Obrador, according to David Salvo at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, who has written about Russian attempts to influence politics in Latin America.

Pena Nietos office and the foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McMasters statement.

Some Mexican political commentators said that there was little reason yet to fear Russian involvement in the election.

The point is that Washington hasnt provided any solid proof for this, said Marco Cancino, head of Mexico City-based consultancy Inteligencia Publica.

So far, its just speculation.

(Reporting by David Alire Garcia and Noe Torres in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington and Jack Stubbs in Moscow, Editing by Rosalba OBrien)
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Trump adviser Steven Miller was asked if the President met with any Russians. Miller responded by attacking the book Fire and Fury but never denying that Trump met with Russians during the campaign.

Video:

Miller said, Its tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments out of touch reality and so vindictive and the whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments which were grotesque and with respect to the Trump Tower meeting hes talking about, he wasnt there when this went down, so hes not a credible source on any of it. It reads Luke an angry vindictive person spouting out to a highly discredible author. The book is a poorly written fiction. I also will say the author is a garbage author of a garbage book. The tragic thing about this book and there are many things that are unfortunate but the portrayal of the president in the book is so contrary to reality, to the experience of those who work with him, to my own experience having spent the last two years with him. 

Miller never denied that Trump met with Russians.

If the President didnt meet with any Russians, Miller could have answered no. A one-word denial would have been worked.

By dodging the question, and going off on a rant about the book, Miller made it look like the White House has something to hide. Special Counsel Robert Mueller may already know the answer to the question of whether or not Trump met with Russians, but if he doesnt, he now should want to talk to Stephen Miller ASAP.

The White House claims that Trump did nothing wrong, but when offered the opportunity on the record to say that Trump did nothing wrong, they dodge the question.

Before Miller got kicked off of CNN, he may have put his boss in a world of hurt with what he didnt say on national television.

The more the White House tries to defend the President the worse things get for Trump.
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In a late night tweetstorm, Trump quoted an article that praised his presidency as a way of proclaiming himself a better president than Hillary Clinton.

Trump tweeted:

His is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency. So much so that, despite my own frustration over his missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president. Not one. Indeed, as Trumps accomplishments accumulate, the mere thought of  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2018

Clinton in the WH, doubling down on Barack Obamas failed policies, washes away any doubts that America made the right choice. This was truly a change election  and the changes Trump is bringing are far-reaching & necessary. Thank you Michael Goodwin! https://t.co/4fHNcx2Ydg  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2018

Trump is so insecure that he is sitting up at night tweeting quotes from a New York Post op-ed column because he knows that he still doesnt measure up to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

A stable genius president would not be tweeting on a Sunday night about how great of a president he is. Deep down inside, Trump knows he is failing. He knows that he will never be a good president, much less a great one.

The President Of The United States is coming unglued in real time in front of the entire world on social media. He is trapped in the 2016 election and still trying to prove that he deserves something that he never really won.

Donald Trump continues to show that even he doesnt believe that he is a legitimate president.
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By Ginger Gibson

WASHINGTON (Reuters)  Democrat Tom Steyer, who has spent millions on national ads calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, will spend $30 million this year trying to get members of his party elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to win control of the chamber from Republicans, he announced on Monday.

Steyer, who also said he will not personally run for office, added that he will also continue his national campaign calling for impeachment.

My fight is in removing Donald Trump from office and removing Donald Trump from power, Steyer said.

The House impeaches, or brings formal charges against an official, in what would be the first step in removing Trump from office. The U.S. Senate tries the case.

Steyer said his organization is working to have constituents deliver to members of Congress copies of the controversial book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, which challenges Trumps fitness for office.

Steyer will not, however, require House candidates whom he supports to pass a litmus test supporting impeaching Trump, he said.

The $30 million will be used to mobilize young voters in 10 key states: Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Arizona, Steyer said.

Americans will head to the polls in November when 34 seats in the Senate and all 435 House seats will be up for grabs. Democrats are hoping to ride wins last year in Alabama and Virginia to victory in those elections, potentially taking control of Congress.

The task which I feel called to do is organizing and mobilizing Americas voters  they have got to be the most powerful forces in American politics, Steyer said at a Washington, D.C. press conference.

Steyer said he knows that some Democrats think talking about impeachment is a distraction but that he feels it remains important to focus on ousting Trump.

We know this makes some of our friends and allies in this city uncomfortable, Steyer said. We believe this is a false choice  the fact is the two are fundamentally intertwined.

(Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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Michael Wolff, author of the book Fire and Fury covering the behind-the-scenes drama within the White House during the first year of the Trump administration, doubled down on his claim that Steve Bannon described Donald Trump Jr.s meeting with a Russian lawyer as treasonous and unpatriotic.

Bannon, former White House deputy chief of staff, backtracked on Sunday in a statement to Axios. In addition to insisting he still supports Trump and his agenda, he said the treasonous comment was aimed at former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is currently under investigation for his communication with Russians during the campaign and was indicted in October.

My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years when our focus was the defeat of the evil empire and to making films about Reagans war against the Soviets and Hillary Clintons involvement in selling uranium to them, he said.

He added, My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.

But in an appearance on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Wolff contradicted Bannons statement.

I like Steve, Im grateful for the time he gave me, the insights he gave me and I dont want to put him in more hot water than he is already in, but it was not directed at Manafort, it was directed directly at Don Jr., he said.

Bannons backtracking came after he was abandoned by several of his most important allies following the uproar caused by the treasonous quote, including the billionaire Mercer family, which has been one of his most crucial financial backers over the years. There have even been reports that the board of directors of the alt-right news site Breitbart, one of Bannons most effective tools at reaching conservatives, was considering getting rid of him.

Enter here to win a free digital copy of Fire and Fury.

Wolff claims to have recorded hours and hours of his conversations with the interview subjects for his book, including Bannon, so hopefully hell be able to prove who the former Trump staffer was referring to.
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Fire broke out on the roof Trump Tower, the 68-story New York City skyscraper that serves as The Trump Corporations headquarters and the location of the presidents beloved penthouse, on Monday morning.

The New York Fire Department received a call reporting the one-alarm fire at around 7:30am. A spokesman said there had been no evacuations and that the flames were under control.

At the time of this writing, there are conflicting reports as to whether there are any injuries. While police said there were none, a reporter with WPIX said there were two confirmed injuries.

#BREAKING: Two injuries reported at Trump Tower due to a fire that has been knocked down, per @FDNY  Morena (@morenabasteiro) January 8, 2018

DEVELOPING: Fire at New York City's Trump Tower; aerial views show firefighters on the roof pic.twitter.com/LBqYMCa1kG  CBS News (@CBSNews) January 8, 2018

The presidents son Eric Trump was the first member of the family to comment on the incident.

There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower, he tweeted. The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!

The Trump Organization released a similar statement confirming the cause of the fire and praising the firefighters who responded.
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Oprah Winfrey is seriously considering running for president in 2020, as Trump biggest nightmare could come in the form of Oprah 2020.

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CNNs Brian Stelter reported, For the past few hours since that speech last night Ive been calling, reaching out to some of Oprah Winfreys close friends, business associates, counterparts trying to found out how real this is. The #oprah2020 trending on Twitter, chatter her speech at the Golden Globes sounded presidential. According to two of her close friends, she is actively thinking about running for president in 2020. That doesnt mean shes made up her mind. Im told she has not made up her mind. While it seems premature to make any decision given we havent seen the midterm elections. She is being told by the inner circle to consider it seriously. One described the conversation with Oprah where they were trying to urge her to go ahead and think about running, laying out the case for an Oprah Winfrey presidency. Of course, some of it is obvious. She is a self-made woman, of course, a very rich, wealthy woman, well-known all around the world, in some ways what president trump is not in terms of her status, her stature, her celebrity, especially among women and minority groups. Shes the anti-Trump, but shes also a TV star like trump, a lot of factors here but the headline is that these close friends have been urging her to run for months and she is actively thinking about it.

Oprah with her connection to the Obamas would be a difficult candidate for any Democrat to beat in a primary. She has the kind of potential that could quickly thin the 2020 Democratic primary field.

Obamas Iowa 2012 campaign manager has already reached out to Winfrey:

Call me @oprah. I've got some Iowa county chairs who would love to hear from you. https://t.co/NcmTGce2ud  Brad Anderson (@BradAndersonIA) January 8, 2018

A speech like this doesnt happen by accident:

Oprah gave the sort of soaring speech full of history, hope, and vision that the country hasnt seen since Obama left office. Oprah Winfrey has the potential to electrify the country if she runs. If Democrats are looking for a candidate who can blow Trump meager celebrity out of the water, and restore hope to America, it wouldnt be surprising if the movement to draft Oprah swept the nation like wildfire.
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While trying to discredit Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury Sebastian Gorka accidentally blew up Trumps claim that Wolff never had White House access.

In an op-ed for The Hill, Gorka wrote:

So, when I met Michael Wolff in Reince Priebus office, where he was waiting to talk to Steve Bannon, and after I had been told to also speak to him for his book, my attitude was polite but firm: Thanks but no thanks.

The problem is that Gorkas admission contradicts Trumps tweet:

I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that dont exist. Look at this guys past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018

Wolff had zero authorized access, but he was in then White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus office in the West Wing. What is a man who doesnt have White House access doing in the Chief of Staffs office, and who told Gorka that he had to speak to Wolff? Gorkas boss was Steve Bannon, so it doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out who ordered Gorka to speak to Wolff.

This Keystone Cops administration cant even keep their story straight among themselves. Not only did they give Wolff access to the White House, but they ordered staff to talk to him. The whole Fire And Fury debacle is another self-inflicted wound from an incompetent administration that cant stop falling flat on its face.
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Trumps lawyers are trying to do everything that they can to keep their client away from sitting down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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Kristen Welker reported on MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell Reports, We spoke to three sources familiar with the matter who say the talks are preliminary and they are ongoing. With the presidents legal team considering a range of options which include how the president would be interviewed directly by special counsel Mueller or potentially his investigators, the legal standard for when a president could be interviewed, things like the location, the duration, potential topics and then this really caught our attention, potential compromises including written responses instead of a formal sitdown with one source even saying there are talks of submitting an affidavit.

Trumps lawyers know that the fastest way for their client to end up in jail or impeached would be to sit him down to answer questions from Robert Mueller. The Special Counsel doesnt have to agree to any of Trumps conditions, and Trump doesnt have to agree to an interview. The danger for the White House is that if Trump doesnt submit to questions, Mueller could subpoena him to appear in front of the grand jury, and the last thing that the Republican Party wants to see is their pathologically lying president placed under oath.

The President claims that the Russia scandal is a hoax while behind the scenes, his lawyers are trying to cut a favorable deal for his testimony.

Trump has embraced the delusion that the Russia scandal is not real, but those fantasies will be shattered when he finally has to answer questions from the Special Counsel. Mueller is following the leads to Trump, and the presidents survival may depend on whether or not his lawyers can cut a deal.
ST. PAUL  Census Bureau estimates say more people moved to Minnesota than moved out of the state last year.

The state gained about 7,500 residents through domestic migration for the year ending July 1.

The numbers break a 15-year streak of more people leaving the state than entering it. On average the state has lost about 6,600 people annually over the past decade and a half.

But last year, the state's population grew by nearly 52,000 overall. The state gained nearly 16,500 from international net migration and almost 27,400 from natural growth.

Experts aren't sure what's spurred the new trend and the Census Bureau hasn't yet released specific data on movement between individual states.

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"It's hard to pinpoint any clear trend from any one year but it's great to see a positive number," said Susan Brower, the state demographer.

Minnesota's low unemployment rate and low cost of living may have contributed to the population gains, experts said.

"In those terms, Minnesota has an advantage. Historically, we would have talked about where are the winters less extreme," said Jack DeWaard, a University of Minnesota sociologist who studies migration. "Now we're talking more about affordability."

The numbers offer hope for employers that Minnesota's labor force could grow faster than expected.

"I sure hope that it's a turning point and not a one-time blip in the data," said Steve Hine, labor market information director for the state's Department of Employment and Economic Development.

The state projects the number of workers in the state will only grow by 5,000 annually for the next decade, Hine said. If that happens, the state will see "a prolonged period of pretty stagnant employment and economic growth here."
Dylan Sutter, the 19-year-old Rochester man who was arrested after leading a chase through the Apache Mall earlier this month, was arrested again Sunday night for alleged assault.

Authorities said that the incident began as a social media dispute at around 7 p.m. when an 18-year-old woman posted a mugshot of Sutter on her Facebook page. Sutter and the victim began exchanging arguments over the post, according to Rochester Police Capt. John Sherwin.

The victim and Sutter had mutual friends, according to authorities.

Sutter then appeared at the victim's apartment complex in the 2900 block of Charles Court NW. The victim came outside to confront Sutter who ran toward the victim with a hammer and a switchblade. The two then got into a physical confrontation. The victim was reportedly thrown to the ground and beaten and kicked by Sutter.

Sherwin said that the victim reported being kicked in the head, but a witness said they had seen Sutter hit the victim in the head with the hammer. The victim refused medical treatment.

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Police found Sutter inside a vehicle at the 5200 block on Duval St. NW, and arrested him without incident. Officers found the hammer inside the vehiicle but could not locate the knife.

Sherwin said Sutter was taken into custody and could face charges of second-degree assault and making terroristic threats.
Rochester Community and Technical College announced that it has been granted $35,000 to award to students pursuing high-demand careers in the fall of 2018.

The grant, part of Minnesota State's Workforce Development Scholarship program, will provide 14 students that enroll in "specific, high-demand" program areas with scholarships.

The program was the result of the 2017 state Legislature appropriations that set aside $1 million to Minnesota State to encourage students to enroll in high demand programs at state colleges. Minnesota State is piloting the program in the 2018-19 school year by awarding 400 new students $2,500 scholarships.

The criteria include:

 Students must be admitted to RCTC for fall 2018

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 Students must maintain a GPA of 2.0 or higher

 Scholarships will be released in two payments  fall and spring. Students in one-term programs will receive and award of $1,250 for fall semester only

 Students must enroll in at least 9 credits each semester to be eligible

 Students must be majoring in high demand areas, including: Advanced Manufacturing, Agriculture, Healthcare Services or Information Technology. The full list of eligible programs is available at the http://www.rctc.edu/financialaid/.

To apply, visit the RCTC Foundation's website: http://www.rctc.edu/foundation/scholarships/. Applications are open through Feb. 16

For more information about the Workforce Development Scholarships, contact Beth Diekmann, RCTC's director of financial aid at 507-285-7467 or beth.diekmann@rctc.edu.
An outspoken critic of Islam made his second Rochester area speaking appearance on Sunday, this time at the Rochester Public Library.

Usama Dakdok, an Egyptian Coptic Christian who's created his own translation of the Quran and considers himself a "specialist in Islam and evangelism to Muslims," gave a presentation called "Revealing the Truth about ISIS."

The two-and-a-half hour event drew about 80 people to the library's auditorium, including Rep. Cindy Pugh, R-Chanhassen , and Phillip Parrish, a Republican gubernatorial candidate .

The event's purpose, Dakdok said, was to draw attention to Islam, which he called a violent religion; he said that ISIS was a "true representation of Islam."

"There are plenty of Muslims here and we need to reach out with the truth of the gospel," Dakdok said.

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Dakdok's critics say he delivers a negative and distorted view of Islam. He is known for telling listeners that Muslims are in the U.S. to behead Christians and Jews.

The speaking engagement comes just months after he was set to speak at the Stewartville Sportsman's Club  an event that was canceled after the venue learned of Dakdok's controversial message.

But supporters booked the Cascade Township town hall as a last-minute venue on Oct.29. Gary Froiland, of Stewartville, rented the township hall under the auspices of hosting a family event, without mention of Dakdok's three-hour presentation.

"He (Froiland) sent me an application (to rent the hall) under the auspices of a family event," said Sara Rudquist, acting township clerk told the Post Bulletin .

Booking the library wasn't a problem  though the event wasn't listed anywhere on the library's website. Dakdok's flier for the event also carried this disclaimer, as required by library policy: "This event does not occur in partnership with, nor is it endorsed by the Rochester Public Library or the City of Rochester."
A letter from the commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has a pair of state lawmakers crying foul over the agency's treatment of a hog producer in Goodhue County.

MPCA Commissioner John Linc Stine sent a letter dated Dec. 8 to several individuals who have been battling a proposed hog confinement feedlot to be located about five miles northeast of Zumbrota. In the letter, Stine said the MPCA will conduct continuous air monitoring  something the agency has not done at any feedlot in Minnesota since 2009  at existing feedlots owned and operated by Circle K Family Farms.

Politics and money

State Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-District 21A, said the MPCA's decision is politically motivated. "This is government overreach at its worst," he said. "Why do we have a government agency giving credibility to a group opposed to something where the business has followed the law?"

The MPCA, as part of its mandate to keep the environment clean and the public safe from pollutants from industries ranging from mining and manufacturing to transportation and agriculture, is tasked with monitoring the air, water and soil. There are essentially two kinds of monitoring for air quality near feedlots: survey monitoring and continuous air monitoring.

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Survey monitoring, which involves getting a 30-minute average reading several times over a week or two, generally costs less than $1,000. At a Circle K feedlot in October, the MPCA spent $550 to get readings over a nine-day period, according Cathy Rofshus, a spokeswoman with the MPCA.

The continuous air monitoring planned by the MPCA for next spring and summer at a Bellechester-area Circle K feedlot owned by three Kohlnhofer brothers  Yon, Jeff and Mike  will cost $32,000, Rofshus said.

Not everyone is opposed to the more stringent form of testing for the hog facilities. Kristi Rosenquist, one of the neighbors of the proposed feedlot near Zumbrota, said that by not conducting continuous air monitoring, the MPCA has been putting people's health at risk. "There will be monitoring starting in March," she said. "The good news is the state will finally start doing its job."

Results thus far

In the letter, Stine states that the MPCA is "concerned about potential violations of the hydrogen sulfide (H2S) air quality standards ... at two hog facilities in Goodhue County  Holst I Finishing and Jeff Finishing  operated by the Kohlnhofer family."

Stine also noted that Gov. Mark Dayton was involved in preparing the letter to the opponents of the Zumbrota project. Those opponents also conducted their own hydrogen sulfide air quality tests at the Kohlnhofers' farms last summer. Those tests showed hydrogen sulfide levels up to, but not exceeding, state standards.

Yon Kohlnhofer said the MPCA's plans to conduct continuous air monitoring next spring and summer after conducting survey monitoring last October is a case of the state agency singling him out without a good cause. "It's not because of the (Zumbrota) project but because of the opposers and their political contacts," he said.

Circle K Family Farms has battled neighbors of the proposed Zumbrota-area facility for more than a year. Opponents of that site fought the MPCA's environmental review, claiming it did not adequately evaluate the potential dangers of the feedlot. The group also protested the issuing of a conditional-use permit by Goodhue County  including an appeal to the Minnesota Court of Appeals that was found in favor of the Kohlnhofers. Now, the group is urging testing at the Kohlnhofers' existing sites.

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"At what point do we follow the laws of the state, the counties and the townships," asked state Sen. Mike Goggin, who represents District 21 where the feedlot would be built. "From what I understand, the Kohlnhofers went through all the proper procedures to document what they are doing for the Goodhue County commissioners."

Like Drazkowski, Goggin said he is concerned the issue has become political in an election year.

Land Stewardship

However, Bobby King, a policy program director with the Land Stewardship Project, said the MPCA's interest is just a natural progression of the citizens of Goodhue County having legitimate concerns about what he describes as a factory farm to be built in their midst.

"The members there are leading that fight," said King, whose organization has helped those landowners organize and strategize for their fight against the Kohlnhofers and the proposed Zumbrota-area feedlot. That fight has included rallies outside of Kohlnhofer Insurance in Lakeville, Minn. The company, owned by the Kohlnhofers' sister, Beth Raskovich, also employs Jeff Kohlnhofer.

Up until a few months ago, he was listed on the company website as a vice president, although Raskovich said he only works at the agency part time, having sold his interest in the company a few years ago.

The rallies were held to ask how Jeff Kohlnhofer can say he is providing for the security of families at the agency when he endangers the safety of his neighbors in Zumbrota, King said.

"We were there because Jeff Kohlnhofer was a vice president or works there," King said.

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Katie Doody, the policy organizer for LSP who has worked most closely with the hog farm opponents, said the organization is standing with its members against "this dangerous proposal."

"We're shifting our attention to the Kohlnhofers, calling on them to withdraw their proposal," she said. "We need to be louder and clearer that people don't like factory farms."
While there is plenty DFL Rep. Tim Walz and GOP Rep. Jason Lewis disagree on, the two are united in their concern about a Trump administration shift in marijuana policy.

Both Walz and Lewis issued statements last week opposing Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to rescind an Obama-era policy that kept federal prosecutors from cracking down on the sale of pot in states where it has been legalized. Minnesota is one of 29 states that has legalized medical marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Seven states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing recreational use of marijuana.

Lewis, who represents Minnesota's 2nd District, said in a statement he supports states' rights to set their own marijuana laws.

"As I've said before, especially in regard to medical marijuana, the federal government has no business sending in the FBI and Department of Justice to prosecute people in full compliance with their own state's law," Lewis said. "Congress has previously passed legislation as it pertains to marijuana, prohibiting the enforcement of federal laws that infringe on the sovereignty of the states. That's federalism, and I have always supported those efforts  but unfortunately, they've recently been blocked."

The GOP congressman said he will work with Republicans and Democrats to make sure Minnesota's marijuana laws are respected.

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Walz is also concerned about the policy change. In a statement, the 1st District Democrat noted the Department of Veterans Affairs had recently decided to allow doctors to discuss medical cannabis with veteran patients.

"It is disappointing to see that while the VA moves in the right direction, however slowly, AG Sessions is determined to take our country backwards. What's more, the AG's decision risks further facilitating the extremely dangerous and misguided practice of overprescribing opioids, a practice that overwhelming hurts veterans," said Walz, who is also running for governor.

Sessions defended the policy change, saying in a statement that it simply enforces federal laws, which prohibit the use of marijuana.

"It is the mission of the Department of Justice to enforce the laws of the United States, and the previous issuance of guidance undermines the rule of law and the ability of our local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement partners to carry out this mission," Sessions said. "Therefore, today's memo on federal marijuana enforcement simply directs all U.S. Attorneys to use previously established prosecutorial principles that provide them all the necessary tools to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country."

No-frills bonding tour

Members of the Senate Capital Investment Committee plan to tour the state, looking at potential construction projects after all.

Typically, the committee members board a bus in the fall to get an up-close look at projects vying to be part of a construction borrowing bill, also known as a bonding bill. But the committee's chairman, Rochester GOP Sen. Dave Senjem, scrapped the tour last year amid budget concerns. At that point, the Legislature and Gov. Mark Dayton were still battling in court over the governor's veto of the Legislature's funding.

The Legislature has been able to tap into some other funds to keep operations going until the Feb. 20 start of session. The governor has said he is willing to sign a funding bill without any conditions for the Legislature. So Senjem said he decided it was worth going ahead with the tour. However, this tour will be abbreviated, with fewer stops and overnights, to cut down on costs.

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"I'm trying to be a little bit more austere and cost conscious," Senjem said.

The tour kicks off today in southwest Minnesota. Committee members are expected to visit Southeast Minnesota on Feb. 12 and 13. The agenda for the tour has not yet been finalized. However, Senjem said he expects the committee will hear about requests for funding for Rochester Community and Technical College, Oronoco wastewater improvements and U.S. Highway 14 expansion  just to name a few. He said he expects the Senate will be putting together an $800 million bonding bill.

"The priorities of this bill are going to be roads and bridges and wastewater infrastructure and higher education," he said.

Chamber sponsors legislative preview

Local lawmakers will share their insights about the upcoming legislative session during a luncheon sponsored by the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce.

The legislative preview will be from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Jan. 19 at the DoubleTree by Hilton, 150 S. Broadway, in Rochester. The cost is $25 for members and $35 for nonmembers and will include a meal. To register, go to rochestermnchamber.com.
Blue state governments are reeling following enactment of the tax reform bill, which among many other virtues, corrects an injustice: residents of low-tax states like South Dakota will no longer be forced to subsidize residents of high-tax states like New York. Or at least, not to the same extent. State and local taxes will still be deductible, up to $10,000.

The Associated Press reports: States exploring tax changes in response to federal overhaul.

In New Jersey and California, top Democratic officials want to let people make charitable contributions to the state instead of paying certain taxes.

Sure, thatll work.

In Connecticut and New York, officials are exploring a switch from income taxes to new ones on payroll. A few governors have even called for tax cuts.

Even! You have to read quite a bit farther to learn any more about this radical approach.

This week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used his state-of-the-state speech to pledge to sue over the GOP tax plan, which he called an assault by the federal government.

***

Im certainly not a constitutional lawyer, but the notion that this is not constitutional is something we want to pursue, said Phil Murphy, New Jerseys Democratic governor-elect.

You really have to laugh about that one. It is an assault to say that taxpayers in South Dakota only have to subsidize New Yorkers up to $10,000? And the State of New York will sue, alleging that the Constitution requires South Dakotans to subsidize them? What provision of the Constitution might that be? I somehow missed that one when I studied constitutional law.

More on turning taxes into charitable deductions. (Actually, it has always been possible to donate money to the federal government, but few have been moved to do so.)

California state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate, introduced legislation this week that would allow people to make charitable donations to the state instead of paying income taxes. That would allow them to claim a charitable deduction on federal taxes. Our hard-earned tax dollars should not be subject to double-taxation, especially not to line the pockets of the Trump family, hedge fund managers and private jet owners, de Leon said in a statement.

Its nice to know that Democrats are now opposed to double taxation! If they had told us this sooner, we could have eliminated taxes on dividends and permitted repatriation without applying the U.S.s onerous and redundant corporate income taxsomething the Democrats fought tooth and nail.

The AP turns to one conservative commentator for a moment of sanity on the proposal to replace income taxes with payroll taxes:

Nicole Keading, an economist at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, said that change also could mean that states would replace progressive income tax structures with flat payroll taxes. You would be raising taxes on low-income people, she said.

Not that the Democrats have ever minded doing that. But the issue here is a simple question of fairness. If voters in a particular state think it is worthwhile to enact high taxes to support high spending by their state, fine. But they cant expect residents of states that have made different policy choicesand whose governments are, in all probability, more efficientto subsidize their choice.
Steve Bannons days as an influential player may be over. If so, what is his legacy?

Its not the election of President Trump. This was down to Trump himself, as the president likes to remind us.

Nor is Bannons legacy hanging tough on Billy Bush weekend, though at times this seems to be what he is most proud of. And his legacy is not blowing a safe Senate seat in Alabama. Roy Moore gets the credit for that.

In my view, Bannons legacy will be the Trump administrations assault on the administrative state. Readers may recall that early in the Trump presidency, Bannon identified deconstruction of the administrative state as one of the administrations three core policy goals (protecting national security and reviving the economy, including trade, were the other two). He was referring to our runaway bureaucracys threat to constitutional government  a threat posed by a lazy and complicit Congress, a liberal judiciary, and an aggressive left-wing bureaucracy.

A little less than a year after Bannons pronouncement, Team Trump has taken significant steps to combat the administrative state. Stanley Kurtz describes these steps:

Th[ey] include working with Congress to rescind many Obama-era regulations via the heretofore little-used Congressional Review Act; introducing regulatory budgeting designed to remove several outdated rules for each new one put in place; as well as major deregulatory moves at the FDA, FCC (ending net neutrality), EPA (ending the Clean Power Plan), the Departments of Education (withdrawing guidance documents on Title IX), and Interior (reducing federal restrictions on public land use).

And, with the guidance of his legal team, Trump has appointed judges  most notably Justice Gorsuch  who grasp the constitutional critique of the administrative state.

Kurtz suggests that battles over the size, scope, and constitutional legitimacy of the administrative state may become the centerpiece of our politics, energizing populist movements on both right and left. Indeed, he suspects that this process is already underway.

Kurtz directs our attention to a new book  Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty  by Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle. McGroarty and Robbins helped lead the grassroots movement against the Common Core education standards. Tuttle is one of the Indiana mothers who helped ignite the anti-Common Core movement in the states.

Drawing on this background, the authors highlight the frustrating and sometimes ugly day-to-day politics of the administrative state, examining the state and local levels, as well as the federal. In so doing, they draw attention to the administrative states assault on the constitutional authority of the states. It turns out that, in Kurtzs words, vast swathes of state policy are now effectively controlled by anonymous federal technocrats. As former Nebraska governor Ben Nelson once said, I honestly wondered if I was actually elected governor or just branch manager of the state of Nebraska for the federal government.

The books most controversial theme may be its discussion of businesss role in expanding the administrative state. Kurtz points out that, while business favors the Trump regulatory rollback at the federal level, many businesses are allied with progressive activists seeking to expand the federal bureaucracys hold over states and localities:

Businesses favor an unconstitutional federal takeover of education because they want national markets for textbooks and testing software. Businesses support the dumbed-down Common Core standards advocated by many progressives because theyre more interested in workforce development than classic liberal education for citizenship. Businesses favor federal attempts to force dense housing and public transportation on the suburbs when that means access to federal subsidies for building projects.

The political class, including the GOP, promotes these interests. McGroarty, Robbins, and Tuttle show how desirable committee assignments and leadership positions are tied to fundraising, which in turn pulls the GOPs congressional leadership in the direction of businesses that benefit from the largesse of the administrative state. Thus, says Kurtz, if business opposition to regulation at the national level separates Republicans from Democrats, the affinity of business for the regulatory state, especially at the state and local levels, separates the GOP establishment from the base.

Thats why populism has a major role to play in the deconstruction of the administrative state. Indeed, Kurtz contends that the administrative state is already a populist rallying cry, even if not by that name. Steve Bannon can take some of the credit.

If President Trump follows his 2017 successes against the administrative state with major moves against federal control of localities  e.g. via common core and HUDs affirmatively furthering fair housing regulation  he will further energize his populist base. If not, Stanley predicts that this base will energize itself once the next Democratic president re-seizes pen and phone on the Obama model

Either way, Kurtz concludes:
Today, Steve Bannon issued a statement expressing regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding [Donald Trump Jr.] has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency. Bannon rejected the idea, attributed to him by Michael Wolff, that Trump Jr. did anything treasonous by meeting with Russians during the presidential campaign. He said his remarks were directed at Paul Manafort.

Bannons statement of regret followed sharp attacks against him by President Trump and the decision by his principle financial backer, Rebekah Mercer, to cut him off. They also came shortly after Stephen Miller bashed Bannon during an interview with Jake Tapper. Miller was a protege of Bannon, at least in Bannons view.

Here is Bannons statement:

Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around. My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda  as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama. President Trump was the only candidate that could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus. I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism, and I remain ready to stand in the breach for this presidents efforts to make America great again. My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years, when our focus was the defeat of the evil empire, and to making films about Reagans war against the Soviets and Hillary Clintons involvement in selling uranium to them. My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr. Everything I have to say about the ridiculous nature of the Russian collusion investigation I said on my 60 Minutes interview. There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt. I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency.

Rich Lowry characterizes this statement as groveling and he isnt wrong. However, I consider it a limited, modified grovel, as Richard Nixon might say.

Keep in mind that Donald Trump Jr. wasnt the only Trump family member blasted by Bannon, at least in Wolffs telling. Bannon also ripped Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Wolff says Bannon described Ivanka as dumb as a brick and predicted that she would bring down her father. He also says Bannon told him Robert Mueller will end up digging up dirt on money laundering involving Kushner. The Kushner shit is greasy; theyre going to go right through that, Bannon is quoted as predicting.

Bannons statement of regret doesnt mention Kushner or Ivanka (Jivanka, as he supposedly called them). It only mentions Donald Jr. I suspect thats because Bannon doesnt have anything against Jr. but continues to hold a grudge against Jivanka.

But what of Bannons claim that his charge of treason was directed only against Manafort? He explains that Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. . .should have known they are duplicitous. The inference is that Donald Jr. had no reason to know this, so his participation was not treasonous. (Its not clear whether Bannon thinks the same defense applies to Kushner, who was also at the meeting).

Bannon is saying that Donald Jr. wasnt smart or experienced enough to realize what the Russians were up to. Jr. was, in effect, a babe in the woods.

This is not a flattering picture of the presidents son. Nor is the naivety defense Trumps position on the Russia meeting. Trump rejects the idea that there was anything treasonous about the meeting (and he is right).

I imagine the president will be gratified to see Bannon retreating. However, I doubt he will deem this limited, modified grovel sufficient.
Teacher collective bargaining is a highly debated feature of the education system in the US. This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework. Using American Community Survey data linked to each respondents state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds, separately by gender. We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces male earnings by $1,493 (or 2.75%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.52 hours per week. Estimates for women do not show consistent evidence of negative effects on these outcomes. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $149.6 billion in the US annually. Among men, we also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men, although white and Asian men also experience sizable negative impacts of collective bargaining exposure. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining law exposure leads to reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults, and these effects are larger for men.
WHO IS HE: Trevor Noah is a comedian, actor and talk show host, originally from South Africa. After initially having success in his native land, Noah moved to the United States in 2011 began making appearances on The Tonight Show and The Last Show with David Letterman. In 2014 he joined the cast of Comedy Centrals The Daily Show, eventually taking over as host for the departing John Stewart in September of 2015. In 2016, Noah released the book Born a Crime.

WHAT TO EXPECT: Comedian Trevor Noah brings a certain undeniable wit and intelligence to his comedy as well as charisma which should translate well to the audience at Borgatas Event Center Sunday night. Noah had big shoes to fill when he took over for John Stewart on The Daily Show, but hes done more than an admirable job, presenting a fresh new voice of a younger generation. Politics, race and societys abnormalities are all on the table and will make for a hilarious night to remember.
Victims and survivors of domestic violence should expect more support going forward with new state laws that call for housing assistance and workplace policies.

Gov. Chris Christie signed into law Monday two bills that focus on providing rental and emergency housing assistance to individuals and families suffering from domestic violence and creating a uniform domestic violence policy for all public employers and their employees.

The first law will provide rental assistance to those who have become or are in imminent danger of homelessness or living in a temporary housing arrangement due to domestic violence that engagers the health and safety of individuals or a family.

No one should feel trapped in an abusive situation because of the fear that leaving will mean being out on the street, Assemblyman Nicholas Chiaravalloti, D-Hudson, said in a statement.

Assistance will be given only to recipients of the Work First New Jersey program and people receiving supplemental security income in emergent situations, the bill states.

Emergency rental assistance could be provided to a person or family up to 12 months unless a state commissioner overseeing the assistance program provides an extension for another six months of rental funding for families with dependent children.

People who are granted emergency assistance must take all reasonable steps to end dependency on the assistance and take all other actions required by the commissioner, according to the law.

A second bill signed into law Monday calls for employers to establish protocol to support employees who are victims of domestic violence.

According to the new law, the state Civil Service Commission will develop a uniform domestic violence policy outlining how public employers and their human resources departments should handle and support employees who report domestic violence.

The uniform policy would have to include a declaration encouraging employees who are victims of domestic violence to contact their human resource officer for help, a way employees could report domestic violence incidents to those offices, and a confidential policy for officers to follow.

The law also requires that a listing of available state and local support services, treatment options, legal, medical and counseling services and law enforcement assistance be made to victims.

An employees record of related to domestic violence incidents, reports and counseling would have to be kept separate from that employees other personal records. The employer would also have to develop a plan to identity, respond to an correct employee performance issues that may be caused by a domestic violence incident.

Employers can play a vital role in helping domestic violence victims leave a dangerous situation, Assemblywoman Patricia Egan Jones, D-Camden, Gloucester, said in a statement, but the first step is fostering environments in which employees feel comfortable and safe enough to report whats happening.
Most children across South Jersey returned to school Monday for the first time since more than a foot of snow fell across the region Thursday.

The exceptions were the Atlantic City School District and International Academy of Atlantic City Charter School, which remained closed as city and state crews continued clearing snow from roads.

In Middle Township, the school district had a 90-minute delay. Margate announced a late opening as well.

Middle Township Schools Superintendent David Salvo said the decision to open late was made Sunday afternoon after touring roads.

The safety of our children is our first priority, Salvo said.

The district serves students from preschool through 12th grade.

Were in a unique situation. Our township is 72 square miles, Salvo said. I have student drivers and young kids. We have a half-day a.m. and p.m. program, so it makes it sometimes challenging for transportation.

Salvo said attendance did not appear to be affected Monday by the weather. However, a morning anti-bullying presentation at the middle school featuring New Jersey Teacher of the Year Amy Andersen was canceled.

Students in Somers Point returned for a normal day Monday after snow closings Thursday and Friday. The district rescheduled its Board of Education meeting to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Jordan Road School.

The decision to close or not due to inclement weather is probably a little more involved than people realize, Interim Superintendent Thomas Baruffi said.

He said factors that play into the decision include the time the storm hits, road conditions and the districts ability to get the schools ready.

Some calls are obviously easier than others. For example, with the amount of snow they were calling for accompanied by the high winds for Thursday, we were able to make the call the day before, Baruffi said. If we are confident we can get everyone in and back home safely for the day, we will keep the schools open.

Baruffi said there is also a lot of coordination with other school districts, many of which use the same bus companies and in some cases the same buses to transport students.

We also have regional districts, such as Mainland Regional, with siblings attending both the regional elementary schools and the high school, he said.

The Egg Harbor Township School District opened on time Monday but warned parents via social media that some buses might be late arriving to bus stops and to use caution. Superintendent Kim Gruccio said the decision was not made lightly, but because of the timing of its school days and the number of school buses available, delayed openings are not an option for the district.

Not everybodys going to be happy with the call. Were all the streets picture perfect? They were not, Gruccio said.

She said the district, which includes 10 buildings, had been working around the clock and communicating with the townships Public Works Department to get the streets ready for buses.

Our crew was in all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, Gruccio said. Everybody pulled it off.

The loss of instructional days will mean a longer school year for some districts. Middle Township will now end school June 20. Somers Point students last day is now June 15.

Egg Harbor Township students will be in school through June 19.

The Greater Egg Harbor Regional High School District, which includes Oakcrest, Absegami and Cedar Creek high schools, has emergency closing days built into its calendar.

Due to the closings last week, the students will no longer be off on the days before and after Memorial Day, May 25 and 29, or on March 29, as previously scheduled. One of the emergency closings was due to the escape of four convicted juveniles from the Harborfields Youth Detention Center in November. The last day of school in the district remains June 13.
CAPE MAY  Cape May is known for its Victorian architecture, white sandy beaches and its iconic lighthouse. And now it will be known for educational success, as the local school district was named a Lighthouse District by the New Jersey Department of Education in the fall.

Cape May City Elementary School was one of seven districts in the state to receive the inaugural honor this year  a designation to recognize its academic achievements, especially on the statewide standardized test, with a diverse student body.

Local educators said the positive test results are derived from good practices in and out of the classroom, which they will share with others throughout the state as part of the Lighthouse District program.

For the students at Cape May City Elementary, it means a lot. Theyre very proud of the honor, said Anne Borger, director of elementary education in the district. They understand it has to do with them all doing well.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, test is administered to almost all students in the state from third- through eighth-grade, as well as in high schools. When the NJDOE released the results in September of the third round of PARCC testing, it also released a three-year proficiency comparison for every grade level in every district. Cape May City Elementary students had increases in overall proficiency in every year for both math and English except for sixth grade.

Cape Elementary is one of the smaller districts in the state, with just over 200 students in preschool through sixth grade, many of whom come from the local Coast Guard community. Classes are small, and the teachers get to know parents and students personally.

Superintendent Victoria Zelenak said thats a good thing.

The teachers know their interests, they know their family backgrounds and they can address their individual needs, Zelenak said.

Recently, the district hosted representatives from the state Department of Education to tour the school and speak with students. The students greeted the state officials with a rendition of The Little Light of Mine, while all holding battery-powered candles. During the visit, the representatives also heard from students on how they are developing a love of learning because they are challenged and supported, including second-grade student James Krautler.

Its not just these teachers that make this a great school, but everyone helps along the way, Krautler said of all his past and present teachers. Everyone made learning fun, exciting and, well, different.

Krautler said he hasnt taken the PARCC test yet but isnt too nervous because his teachers help him prepare with practice tests.

Zelenak said student engagement is very important to the district, which is why all of the teachers have trained in a technique called Total Participation Strategies. Zelenak said the technique provides 32 suggestions on how to engage students in their learning.

Every child is engaged at every moment, she said, adding it is also tied to the teacher-evaluation score.

Borger said one technique is to emphasize movement for the students during a lesson or activity and during the transition between activities.

The two school leaders said other programs such as Brain Train (where students are given individualized learning time) and Mind Up (meditation over punishment) help motivate the students to learn.

Borger said safety is big, too.

When they feel safe, they are able to learn, she said.

In addition to teaching techniques, the district uses data analysis of its PARCC scores to drive instruction. They also offer a free after-school PARCC preparation class for students from January through March.

Victorias leadership is one of empowering teachers, Borger said.

The New Jersey Department of Education agrees. Education Commissioner Kimberley Harrington applauded the districts use of benchmark assessments to develop specific support plans for students. She said she was also impressed by the collaborative development of professional learning for educators.

Cape May City has established student-centered classrooms and uses data to create support structures that allow differentiated and individualized instruction and teacher collaboration. Superintendent Victoria Zelenak and her staff have a focus on providing all students with an inclusive, warm and welcoming environment that helps develop the whole child, Harrington said.
Star power attracted a crowd of more than 1,500 people Saturday (Aug. 31, 2013) to see Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King and Newark's Cory Booker at the 25th annual Whitesboro Reunion.

The celebrities came to pay tribute to the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro organization. Their appearance was driven by the connections among them.

Stedman Graham is a Whitesboro native and executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro. He is the longtime partner of Winfrey, chairwoman of the Oprah Winfrey Network, commonly known as OWN. Winfrey is best friends with Gayle King, who is co-host of CBS This Morning. And King is one of the best friends of Cory Booker, the Newark mayor and U.S. Senate candidate who has a national profile.

Booker is running against Republican Steve Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota, to fill the seat of the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg. A special election will be held Oct. 16.

Winfrey, 59, who appeared at the 20th Whitesboro Reunion in 2008, introduced Booker, 44, the keynote speaker.

A talk-show host and philanthropist, Winfrey revealed that the first political check she ever wrote in her life went to Booker when he ran for mayor of Newark, Essex County. Booker has the it factor, she said.

Hes intelligent. He went to Yale. He went to Stanford. Hes a Rhodes Scholar. I dont even know what Rhodes Scholar means, Winfrey joked.

When she was a TV reporter, Winfrey said she spent one night in the projects to see what it was like and do a story about it. Booker moved into the projects and stayed there for the next seven years, Winfrey said. Because of this, Booker understands the lives of everyone gathered at the reunion Saturday, Winfrey said.

I believe in Cory Booker. When he is elected to the United States Senate on Oct. 16, he will be only the fourth African American to hold that position since Reconstruction, Winfrey said.

Booker saluted the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro by saying, When we are together as a people, we can do incredible things.

The Newark mayor spent most of his time talking about the forces that shaped him, particularly his parents. His father, Cary Alfred Booker, would never allow him as a young man to forget where he came from.

Son, you are, you have to understand, the physical manifestation of a conspiracy of love, Booker said his father told him.

Bookers father was born to a poor single mother in the mountains of North Carolina. When his mother couldnt take care of him anymore, the people in his town stood up and put food on the table and a roof over his head.

But for them, there would be no you, said Booker, quoting his father talking about the people in the neighborhood who helped Bookers grandmother.

Booker also talked about the discrimination his parents faced in trying to buy their first home in Harrington Park, Bergen County. Any home they wanted to buy they were told was already sold, but when a white couple would come immediately after them, the home was available. His father had to get a volunteer lawyer to accompany him to a real estate office to tell the Realtor that he was in violation of New Jersey Fair Housing Law.

Dont act like you hit a triple. You were born on third base, said Booker of what his father told him when he got too full of himself.

Booker told the audience at the end of his remarks that everyone has to decide whether to accept things they way they are or to take on the responsibility to make them better. He specifically mentioned giving women equal pay for equal work and bringing down the incarceration rate.

You can consume all the blessing you have, or you can become a force for change, Booker said.

Contact Vincent Jackson:

609-272-7202
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Oprah Winfrey's rousing speech at Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award has spurred talk of a potential presidential run by the 63-year-old billionaire. Winfrey is no stranger to the campaign trail, as residents of Whitesboro in Cape May County discovered when she stumped for the then-Newark mayor during the 25th annual Whitesboro Reunion in 2013. Winfrey's longtime partner, Stedman Graham, is a native of Whitesboro, and in 2008 Winfrey donated $1 million to the Concerned Citizens scholarship fund. Read this story about her 2013 appearance in Whitesboro.

Star power attracted a crowd of more than 1,500 people Saturday to see Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King and Newark Mayor Cory Booker at the 25th annual Whitesboro Reunion.

The celebrities came to pay tribute to the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro organization. Their appearance was driven by the connections among them.

Stedman Graham is a Whitesboro native and executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro. He is the longtime partner of Winfrey, chairwoman of the Oprah Winfrey Network, commonly known as OWN. Winfrey is best friends with Gayle King, who is co-host of CBS This Morning. And King is one of the best friends of Cory Booker, the Newark mayor and U.S. Senate candidate who has a national profile.

Booker is running against Republican Steve Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota, to fill the seat of the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg. A special election will be held Oct. 16.

Winfrey, 59, who appeared at the 20th Whitesboro Reunion in 2008, introduced Booker, 44, the keynote speaker.

A talk-show host and philanthropist, Winfrey revealed that the first political check she ever wrote in her life went to Booker when he ran for mayor of Newark, Essex County. Booker has the it factor, she said.

Hes intelligent. He went to Yale. He went to Stanford. Hes a Rhodes Scholar. I dont even know what Rhodes Scholar means, Winfrey joked.

When she was a TV reporter, Winfrey said she spent one night in the projects to see what it was like and do a story about it. Booker moved into the projects and stayed there for the next seven years, Winfrey said. Because of this, Booker understands the lives of everyone gathered at the reunion Saturday, Winfrey said.

I believe in Cory Booker. When he is elected to the United States Senate on Oct. 16, he will be only the fourth African American to hold that position since Reconstruction, Winfrey said.

Booker saluted the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro by saying, When we are together as a people, we can do incredible things.

The Newark mayor spent most of his time talking about the forces that shaped him, particularly his parents. His father, Cary Alfred Booker, would never allow him as a young man to forget where he came from.

Son, you are, you have to understand, the physical manifestation of a conspiracy of love, Booker said his father told him.

Bookers father was born to a poor single mother in the mountains of North Carolina. When his mother couldnt take care of him anymore, the people in his town stood up and put food on the table and a roof over his head.

But for them, there would be no you, said Booker, quoting his father talking about the people in the neighborhood who helped Bookers grandmother.

Booker also talked about the discrimination his parents faced in trying to buy their first home in Harrington Park, Bergen County. Any home they wanted to buy they were told was already sold, but when a white couple would come immediately after them, the home was available. His father had to get a volunteer lawyer to accompany him to a real estate office to tell the Realtor that he was in violation of New Jersey Fair Housing Law.

Dont act like you hit a triple. You were born on third base, said Booker of what his father told him when he got too full of himself.

Booker told the audience at the end of his remarks that everyone has to decide whether to accept things they way they are or to take on the responsibility to make them better. He specifically mentioned giving women equal pay for equal work and bringing down the incarceration rate.

You can consume all the blessing you have, or you can become a force for change, Booker said.

Contact Vincent Jackson:

609-272-7202

For more information from the Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro Facebook page, click here.
LINWOOD  Leaders in addiction prevention, treatment and recovery will head a rally Thursday to discuss new Atlantic County resources and strategies to address opioid abuse.

Recovery Force of Atlantic County, a nonprofit recovery community organization, will host A Time for Action, A Reason for Hope at Mainland Regional High School in Linwood. The event, open to the public, will feature speakers who are in addiction recovery and who have worked in law enforcement and recovery centers.

The event will provide critical information on what family, friends and allies can do to start reducing the suffering immediately, said Bob Catalano Jr., founder and CEO of Recovery Force.

Organizers said community members can learn about existing and emerging resources in Atlantic County for people seeking recovery and those already in recovery from a substance-use disorder.

Atlantic County Sheriff Eric Scheffler will speak at the rally.

Other speakers include Tracy Smith, president and owner of Speakers for Change; Patty McCarthy Metcalf, executive director of the national Faces and Voices of Recovery organization; Brian Mooney, executive director of Hope for New Hampshire Recovery; Vanessa Vitolo, outreach coordinator and recovery advocate for Victory Bay Recovery Center; and Patrick Roff, director of peer recovery services for CARES-Morris County.

Recovery Force was selected as one of four recovery community organizations nationwide to participate in a pilot program called Building Strength through Mentorship, run by Faces and Voices of Recovery and the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Catalano started the Atlantic County-based organization a year and a half after his younger brother, Dennis Catalano, 45, of Atlantic City, died of an overdose Nov. 3, 2013. He left behind a young son and daughter.
The frigid temperatures South Jersey has experienced over the last two weeks has frozen the Delaware Bay, and now interested residents are using the ice to walk out to the sunken S.S. Atlantus.

This weekend, several local residents took pictures and recorded themselves walking up to the sunken ship, while others took selfies on the frozen Cape May Canal.

Authorities say it takes about 4 inches of ice to form before people can start walking on it, but warn that no ice is completely safe, especially because salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water.

Saturday night, the Lower Township Police Department released a statement warning residents to stay off the ice, even if it appears to be safe.

"Even though the Bay and Ocean Waters may appear frozen, please be advised that the ice is not stable on the Bay and Oceans and walking on it is NOT safe and the ice can and will separate causing the separation of ice patches and a very severe danger of falling in to freezing water and the danger of hypothermia and worse," police said in a statement. "The risk is not worth it. Police will be patrolling these areas. Please adhere to this warning."
ATLANTIC CITY  Five days after a coastal storm dumped more than a foot of snow on South Jersey, the city was still digging out Monday.

The remaining snow and ice was enough to make some sidewalks and streets impassable; it also was enough to close the citys public schools for another day.

Plowing pushed snow onto the sidewalks, which made the sidewalk not walkable for students, Mayor Frank Gilliam said. He said maintenance, custodial and grounds personnel were asked to report to clear snow from school areas.

Schools Superintendent Barry Caldwell said the school district plans to open at regular time Tuesday.

The biggest concern is student safety, Caldwell said. I felt (staying closed Monday) was in the best interest of the students.

Caldwell said the roads and walkways were not clear enough by Monday morning to allow students to walk safely to school. In addition, the areas around the schools where staff normally park were not clear, he said.

Gilliam asked for residents to stay calm and said plows will finish clearing snow during the week.

Were asking residents to be patient  about 80 percent of roads are cleared. The rest of the week, Public Works will continue to clear streets and remove snow banks, Gilliam said.

Major roadways and emergency routes have been cleared, creating safe lanes for traffic, but some city streets still needed attention.

On Monday, the normally heavily traveled Fairmount Avenue, leading to and from the Brigantine Connector, was a tight one-and-a-half lanes, with 4-foot-high snow banks on either side of traffic. Cars were parked next to snow banks, which took up city parking spots, limiting traffic on south Atlantic Avenue to one lane. Overall, Thursdays storm seemed to leave Atlantic City with more snow than it could handle.

In total, 5,000 tons of snow have been removed from city streets and 90 tons of salt have been used to treat roads, Gilliam said. The 80-person crew helped remove 1,131 truckloads of snow from 100 city blocks, according to a statement issued Monday by the state Department of Transportation.

But despite weekend efforts, some resort residents felt the snow was not disappearing quickly enough.

Were definitely an after-thought, said Phil Van Wickle, a Boston Avenue resident in the Chelsea section of the city. They always forget about North Boston Avenue.

The street, near ODonnell Park, consists of residential properties and muti-family homes with street parking. Van Wickle, whos lived on Absecon Island for nearly 50 years, said this storm may be one of the worst he remembers.

Its usually a day or so until they clear the area, but theres just a lot of snow, Van Wickle said.

Atlantic City Public Works crews could be seen Monday pushing snow into banks along city streets and piling mountains of snow into city dump trucks. Later Monday, streets were becoming cleared of snow mounds, after the overwhelming snow-removal project was handed up to state officials.

Over the weekend, Gilliam held a press conference detailing how the city would receive help from the DOT.

We reached out to the county first, but of course they were dealing with their end of the storm, Gilliam said Monday. So, we went to the state, and they came in with the support. So I am very grateful for that.

The largest issue the city faced was clearing major roads in and out of the city, as well as to emergency buildings.

The major focus was on emergency routes around the AtlantiCare Medical Center, snow routes and schools, said DOT spokesman Stephen Sharpiro.

The DOT began its snow-removal project at 11 a.m. Saturday and wrapped up operations at 6 a.m. Monday.

As for residential roads, many of which are down to tight lanes with snow-covered cars on either side, Gilliam said Public Works is making headway.

Crews in Gardners Basin took advantage of residents returning to work Monday morning, with street-parked cars out of the way of snow-removal efforts.

Atlantic City police issued a statement Friday advising city residents to move vehicles when convoys of plows and salt trucks are making their way through residential streets.

The city has 10 working snow-removal vehicles and 24 full-time Public Works employees, as well as an additional four front-end loaders and several Bobcat construction vehicles, Gilliam said.

Dump trucks full of snow have been moved to locations across Atlantic City; snow from the Inlet sections and Gardners Basin was moved to open areas near the Boraie Project, and snow from around the city center was moved to Bader Field.

Large snow banks were consolidated and planned for removal by construction vehicles throughout the week.

I believe most of the snow issues were resolved, Gilliam said.

As for future forecasts, the cold weather Code Blue remains in effect by Atlantic County. Gilliam said he is considering looking at what can be done, through grants or budget restructuring, to better prepare the city for future winter weather events.
WILDWOOD  Special Olympics New Jersey will return to the Wildwoods on Saturday for the annual Polar Bear Plunge at 1 p.m. on the beach behind the Convention Center.

The plunge is free to watch, but plungers must raise $100 in pledges to participate, with all proceeds going to Special Olympics New Jersey. Early registration is available at njpolarplunge.org. Additional registration and donations will be accepted on site the day of the event.

Check-in will take place from 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. inside the Convention Center before the event. Immediately following the plunge, participants and children under the age of 12 can warm up with a free lunch inside the Convention Center. For those who are not participating, lunch can be purchased for $10.

The night before the plunge, Special Olympics New Jersey will host a Beef n Brrr Benefit at the Bolero Resort, 3320 Atlantic Ave., from 7-11 p.m. A $20 donation will raise money for the event and includes roast beef sandwiches, salad, wings and draft beer, as well as a 50/50 raffle, live auction and live music. You do not need to be a participant in the plunge to attend the Beef n Brrr.

Saturdays forecast calls for a high of 53 degrees and a low of 23, with rain in the morning.

Several polar plunges scheduled for earlier this year were either canceled or postponed due to frigid temperatures, including in Ocean City, Ventnor and Margate.

Brigantines plunge was rescheduled from New Years Day to Saturday.

The New Jersey Law Enforcement Torch Run sponsors the Wildwoods Polar Bear Plunge and is composed of law-enforcement officers who volunteer and raise funds for Special Olympics.

For additional information regarding Special Olympics New Jersey, visit sonj.org.

For additional information regarding the Wildwoods Polar Bear Plunge, call 609-896-8000 or visit njpolarplunge.org.
It was a night of passionate speeches, weird wins and lots of commentary about the current culture of Hollywood. Here are 15 things you need to know about Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards.
Road design to maximize safety and the flow of traffic isnt as simple as it looks, which is why traffic engineers are needed to do it.

Most drivers, we suspect, think all intersections in the shape of a circle are the same. But one is a problem New Jersey has been eliminating for many years and another is an improvement being appreciated and implemented more.

The problem is the traffic circle, a large circular intersection governed by traffic lights and/or stop signs.

South Jersey got the states first traffic circle in Pennsauken in 1925, and there were about 100 by the 1950s. But as their propensity to cause accidents and impede traffic flow became apparent, their number was cut by two-thirds by 1995 and is now down to about 20.

Atlantic County, unfortunately, created a new one in 2011, the much-maligned airport traffic circle in Egg Harbor Township.

The newly appreciated and historic form of the circular intersection is the roundabout  much smaller and with no traffic lights or stop signs to halt the flow of vehicles.

The N.J. Department of Transportation has proposed converting the intersection of Pitney, Mill and New roads in Absecon to a roundabout, and we think its a good idea.

Studies show that roundabouts are safer than regular stop-sign or signal-controlled intersections, which is what is there now. A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 75 percent at intersections where stop signs or signals were previously used.

One big benefit is they reduce rear-end crashes from drivers speeding up to make a yellow or green light or abruptly stopping at a red light, the institute found. The crashes that do occur at roundabouts generally arent severe because vehicles move more slowly  but constantly  than they do at conventional intersections.

Information from the state Transportation Research Board suggests a roundabout at the Absecon intersection would reduce crashes by 35 percent and injuries by 76 percent.

Roundabouts can also reduce congestion, depending on the particular configuration and traffic flows of the roads intersecting. TVs Mythbusters, for example, tested a roundabout against a four-way-stop intersection and found the roundabout increased traffic flow 20 percent.

The airport traffic circle has damaged the reputation of round intersections locally. That intersection  of Delilah and Tilton roads and Amelia Earhart Boulevard to airport  previously was a roundabout, which became unsuitable as traffic increased on the high-speed roads and at rush hour for FAA Hughes Tech Center workers.

The traffic circle replacement included a bisecting highway (Delilah), giving the ill-fated intersection the exact shape of the International Prohibition Sign, a circle with a line through it. Maybe thats not a coincidence. (We think the county should consider using the traffic signals to prioritize through-road Delilah during rush hours only and bar its use and allow the circular path to function as a roundabout at other times.)

Absecon Mayor John Armstrong visited roundabouts in Glassboro at Rowan University and in Swedesboro and saw their benefits.

The state will present its plan again and answer questions from the public at a Jan. 16 meeting at the city Municipal Complex.

Were already convinced a roundabout would be a significant improvement.
Self-blame is over for sexual harassment

Regarding the Dec. 19 digital comment, What I dont get is why people say nothing for years and as soon as someone comes forward, they come out of the woodwork.

The commenter asks why women are coming out now about sexual harassment. Anita Hill told her story of sexual abuse by Clarence Thomas and he was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice anyway.

When women joined the workforce, men assumed they wanted to play. And girls were raised to be compliant, nice, polite. My mother, in her 1950s mentality, admonished me for directing a kids game with You know, nobody likes a bossy girl. So we put up with the crude, the rude and the jerks because if we left that job, there would be the same attitude and treatment at the next. It was pervasive.

Watch Mad Men. That was what women walked into when they went to work. Being labeled a bitch didnt get you good references or promotions. If a woman wanted a career, she kept her mouth shut. There were no regulations in place to protect employees. There was no place to go for help. Put up or shut up. And power was the ticket.

Women quickly look inside of themselves to see what they coulda, shoulda, woulda done differently to have prevented the behavior. However, when Donald Trump openly bragged about his behavior, a long burning fuse finally hit its mark. He admitted to doing to women what they were blaming themselves for happening. He believes his celebrity, power and wealth gives him the right! Self-blame is over. Its not our fault after all.

Valerie George

Galloway Township

Legalizing pot conflicts with fighting opioids

No candidate for public office will ever please all of the people all of the time. That said, candidates campaign on a platform that represents their beliefs and those of their party.

It is beyond my comprehension how anyone who votes has not taken the initiative or the time to explore the candidates and know and understand what their campaign promises are.

Our new Gov.-elect Phil Murphy has stated he wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. He wants to legalize recreational marijuana and make New Jersey a sanctuary state. Each of these issues is an immediate no vote for me. However, the voters of New Jersey have given his platform the green light to proceed.

We have been told by our elected officials and the medical community that we are having an opioid crisis, which is escalating and killing citizens on a daily basis. We are told we need millions of dollars to deal with this. Meanwhile, Murphy wants to legalize recreational marijuana. Is this an oxymoron or is he planning to use the tax dollars obtained from the revenue to help pay for the opioid crisis?

I dont see the sanity in fighting an opioid epidemic while legalizing marijuana.

Eileen G. Wood

Egg Harbor Township

Jesus remains relevant

In this modern society, Jesus has been set aside as irrelevant by increasing numbers of individuals. I do not believe in, nor more importantly, feel a sense of irrelevance.

Quite the opposite, Jesus remains relevant, his teachings being formative of the fundamental ethics that guide our lives and behavior.

Jesus taught that his father above loves all people regardless of their shortcomings, a somewhat radical concept for his time. He taught that by tending to the least of us, ones spirit trickles upward, permeating all of our daily precepts and actions, thus expanding, by example, human goodness, even if in small, seemingly insignificant amounts, which, all together, powerfully accumulate.

Jesus tapped into the part of an inborn human spirituality that cannot be taught, but can be influenced, and that is why his memory still prevails over all these centuries. So for yet another year, his birthday gives me a sense of peace and comfort, during a difficult purgatory-like journey back to my everlasting home.

Owen Sheekey

Millville

Nuclear power risky, costly

History is repeating itself. When we lived in Pennsylvania, the Limerick nuclear generation plant was built by Philadelphia Electric, a unit of PECO. Thereafter, PECO customers saw their electric rates soar although they were promised nuclear would save money.

PECO is now Exelon. Incidentally, while serving on an evacuation committee, I learned that 75 percent of the Limerick plants output was being purchased for New York.

Now Atlantic City Electrics parent company, Pepco Holdings, has been purchased by Exelon.

There are lots of TV ads about how we need nuclear power, a clean source of energy. Seldom mentioned is that nuclear waste is still on site at Limerick. Radioactive spent rods are stockpiled there even though residents were promised they would be stored at Yucca Mountain. Nevada has rejected their storage there.

Spent rods are extremely dangerous and their radioactivity has a half-life of thousands of years. Wish the Legislature here in New Jersey would show concern about this aspect. Plus, why dump the subsidy on the backs of ratepayers?

Jacqueline Crahalla

Brigantine
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will depend on businesses from around the world to promote themselves in a manner that is only conducive to honest, transparent trade. No longer will the restraints of commerce be dependent on anything other than a blockchain enabled e-Commerce. Businesses that register on Export Portal.com are able to explore new markets without the fear of fraudulent companies or transactions.

Export Portal is also looking forward to further discussing our ambitious 2018 plan with the Taiwan Delegation that includes:

Establishing Country Brand Ambassadors in over 100 countries in 2018: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/1c41cc19fdde44fe9fc3771e4d68064d): Integrating country-specific Writers, Bloggers & Vloggers from around the world into our ecosystem: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/fb0b3ef48cac4677b9079f3d0442a526) Establishing Export Portal offices in key countries around South East Asia to further expand international commerce through ExportPortal.com. Attending key trade-related events in different countries and meeting with business leaders, government representatives, and mSME groups to explore partnerships to further accelerate trade to over 120 different countries that are already represented in over 70 major industry categories on Export Portal's platform.

CEO of Export Portal, Ally Spinu is looking forward to an ambitious 2018 and Taiwan is a key ally in trade with the rest of the entire world. "Export Portal is able to take on companies of every size, but our key verification differentiator is meant to bring honest hard-working small and medium sized companies to a level playing field where buyers aren't at risk of buying from disreputable, unscrupulous and unidentifiable entities." Ms. Spinu continued, "The world is no longer willing to accept dishonest, unreliable trade. Every day, we hear about orders that are changed and companies that are not what they purport to be. The Fourth Industrial Revolution begins in 2018 with blockchain-enabled trade on Export Portal."

The world is getting smaller and now the mouse and the cat are on an even playing field. Shows like CES allow businesses to get to know people and kick the tires on new technology. Export Portal allows the reputation of a company thrive in an online environment with a company dataset that can be utilized by anyone on our platform. A proprietary blockchain enabled International Business Identification Number (IBIN) such as Export Portal's will erase both physical as well as online borders.

While at CES, International Business Development head, John Zahaitis will be meeting with the Taiwan delegation but can also be reached @ media@exportportal.com & +1 (818)965-9399.

Join us.

About Us:

Export Portal is a US-based technology company that is listening to sellers, buyers, and manufacturers the world over about #NoFakeTrade. Our proprietary verification process keeps fakes, frauds, IP bandits out and makes entering new international markets a less-stressful need to be done, easy/free to join, must-do for 2018.

To learn more, go to: https://www.exportportal.com/learn_more

Related Links

https://www.exportportal.com



SOURCE Export Portal
LONDON, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Male Condoms, Female Condoms, Diaphragms, Sponges, Vaginal Rings, Subdermal/Contraceptive Implants, Intra-uterine Devices (IUDs), Copper IUD, Hormonal IUD

The global contraceptive devices market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5% in the first half of the forecast period. In 2016, the market was estimated at $12.1bn and dominated by the condoms submarket followed by the IUD submarket.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/523989/Visiongain_Logo.jpg )



How this report will benefit you

Read on to discover how you can exploit the future business opportunities emerging in this sector.

In this brand new 186-page report you will receive 67 tables and 84 figures- all unavailable elsewhere.

The 186-page report provides clear detailed insight into the global contraceptive devices market. Discover the key drivers and challenges affecting the market.

By ordering and reading our brand new report today you stay better informed and ready to act.

Report Scope

 Global Contraceptive Devices Market Forecast to 2027

 This report also breaks down the revenue forecast for the global contraceptive devices market by type:

- Condoms: Male and Female

- Diaphragms

- Sponges

- Vaginal Rigs

- Subdermal/Contraceptive Implants

- IUDs: Copper IUD and Hormonal IUD

 This report provides individual revenue forecasts to 2027 for these regional and national markets:

- North America: US & Canada

- Europe: the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Rest of Europe

- Asia-Pacific: China, Japan, India, Rest of Asia-Pacific

- Rest of the World (RoW): Latin America, Middle East & Africa

 This report discusses the SWOT Analysis and PEST Analysis of the global contraceptive devices market.

 Our study discusses the selected leading companies that are the major players in the global contraceptive devices market:

- Bayer AG

- Reckitt Benckiser Group plc

- Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp.

- Church & Dwight Co., Inc.

- Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd.

- Allergan plc

- Ansell Limited (Now Humanwell)

- The Female Health Company (a division of VERU Inc.)

- Karex Industries

- Mayer Laboratories

- Kessel Medintim GmbH

- Okamato Industries, Inc.

- Agile Therapeutics, Inc.

- Eurogine S.L.

Visiongain's study is intended for anyone requiring commercial analyses for the global contraceptive devices market. You find data, trends and predictions.

Buy our report today Global Contraceptive Devices Market Forecast to 2027: Male Condoms, Female Condoms, Diaphragms, Sponges, Vaginal Rings, Subdermal/Contraceptive Implants, Intra-uterine Devices (IUDs), Copper IUD, Hormonal IUD.

To request a report overview of this report please contact Sara Peerun at sara.peerun@visiongain.com (+44-(0)-20-7336-6100) or refer to our website:

https://www.visiongain.com/Report/2094/Global-Contraceptive-Devices-Market-Forecast-to-2027

List of Companies Mentioned in the Report

7Med Industrie

Actavis PLC.

Agile Therapeutics

Almirall, S.A

Andromaco

Ansell Limited

Anterion Therapeutics

APCOR R&M, Belgium

Assembly Biosciences, Inc.

Bayer HealthCare

Beiersdorf AG

BioRings

CEMAG

Chongqing Medical Equipment Factory Co., Ltd.

Church & Dwight, Co. Inc.

CITIC Capital

CONRAD

ContraMed, LLC

Cupid Ltd.

Evestra, Inc.

FEI Technologies

Femsays Inc

Gedeon Richter Plc.

GeSea Biosciences

Grunenthal

HLL Lifecare Limited

HRA Pharma

Humanwell

Hydra Biosciences

Hypermarcs

Implementos Plasticos, Ltd., Mexico City

Innova Quality S.A.S

Karex Berhad

Karex Industries

Kessel Marketing & Vertriebs GmbH

Kessel Medintim Gmbh

Mayer Laboratories, Inc

Medicines360

Merck

Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp.

Meril Life Science Private Ltd

Microchips Biotech, Inc.

Mimetogen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Mona Lisa N.V.

Naurex, Inc.

OCON Medical Ltd.

Okamato Industries

Origami Healthcare Products, Inc.

Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI)

OvaTech

PATH

Poly-Med Inc

Pregna International Limited

ProMed Pharma

Prosan International B.V.

QPharma

Raymond Limited

Reckitt Benckiser Group

ReProtect Inc.

Shanghai Dahua Medical Apparatus Co., Ltd;

Shenyang Liren Medical & Technological Co.

Shepherd Medical Company

SILCS, Inc.

Teva Pharmaceuticals, Ltd.

The Female Health Company

Theramex

Tianjin Condombao Medical Polyurethane Tech. Co. Ltd

Tianjin Medical Instrument Factory

Veru Inc.

Vitality Medical Products

Yantai Family Planning Medicine & Apparatus Co. Ltd., China

Reckitt Benckiser Group, PLC

To see a report overview please email Sara Peerun on sara.peerun@visiongain.com

SOURCE Visiongain
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion (CFI) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), with the support of MetLife Foundation, today released a new report detailing the factors spurring inclusive insurance around the world. It reveals how both traditional and new insurers are breaking open new markets and reaching underserved customers through the use of innovative technologies, business models, product design, and partnerships, enabled by effective regulatory environments.

The report, "Inclusive Insurance: Closing the Protection Gap for Emerging Customers" is based on extensive interviews with commercial insurers and insurance experts who are making inclusive insurance work as a successful business model. With insights from players at the frontlines, the report identifies the main challenges of providing insurance to lower income populations, as well as the solutions companies are using to overcome them. For example, companies are:

Using new distribution channels and aggregators  from telcos to farmer cooperatives  to identify and connect with low-income customers

Implementing new business models and products to provide and administer the risk mitigation solutions that low-income customers need

Deploying "insurtech" innovations and digital channels to connect with, and service, low-income customers

The market for inclusive insurance is vast, largely untapped, and potentially profitable. The confluence of rising incomes in emerging markets, and new technologies that reduce risk assessment and distribution costs, offer an opportunity for more insurers to meet the needs of the estimated 3.8 billion people who remain underserved or unserved.

"Even among people with very little disposable income, insurance can be a vital tool to manage financial risks and mitigate the effects of shocks," said Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion. "Rising incomes around the world create new market opportunities, making long-term investment in inclusive insurance both profitable for insurers and meaningful in terms of social benefits."

The inclusive insurance strategies highlighted in the report include eliminating costly verification screenings to identify "exclusions," offering insurance policies without any fine print, triggering payouts based on verifiable events or data instead of claim submissions, and engineering more frequent payouts to consumers. The report also features examples of protective life and health insurance products designed to serve low-income customers, as well as newer products related to climate change, natural disasters, and food security.

"This report invites us to re-think the concept of insurance and its fundamental role in society. It is our hope that this report enables our diverse membershipparticularly those financial institutions not yet active in insuranceto leverage their expanding work with underserved customers to help close the insurance gap," said Conan French, Senior Advisor for Innovation and Fintech at the Institute of International Finance.

The new report is part of a two-year initiative from CFI and the IIF, with support from MetLife Foundation, to help advance the financial services industry's ability to reach unserved and underserved populations. The project, titled "Mainstreaming Financial Inclusion: Best Practices," facilitates learning and action on how financial institutions can respond to the specific challenges of reaching lower income market segments.

About the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion

The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion (CFI) is an action-oriented think tank that engages and challenges the industry to better serve, protect and empower clients. We develop insights, advocate on behalf of clients and collaborate with stakeholders to achieve a comprehensive vision for financial inclusion. We are dedicated to enabling 3 billion people who are left out of  or poorly served by  the financial sector to improve their lives.

www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org

www.cfi-blog.org

@CFI_Accion

About the Institute of International Finance

The Institute of International Finance is the global association of the financial industry, with close to 500 members from 70 countries. Its mission is to support the financial industry in the prudent management of risks; to develop sound industry practices; and to advocate for regulatory, financial and economic policies that are in the broad interests of its members and foster global financial stability and sustainable economic growth. IIF members include commercial and investment banks, asset managers, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, central banks and development banks. For more information visit www.iif.com.

Related Links

http://www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org



SOURCE Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion
As a non-profit, federally-designated OPO, Gift of Life serves 11.2 million people across the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. Its annual donation rate continues to rank among the highest in the world, equating to 50 organ donors-per-million-population.

In 2017, Gift of Life also recovered tissue from 2,468 donors including 1,281 musculoskeletal donors and 2,112 cornea donors. These life-enhancing donations can benefit as many as 88,000 people, with bone donations to improve mobility, heart valve donations to repair life-threatening defects, skin donations for reconstructive surgery and to heal burn patients, and approximately 2,575 individual corneas to provide the gift of sight.

"Our growth is possible only because of the selflessness of the donors and donor families who consistently make this the most generous region in the country. This year, they saved and improved the lives of nearly 90,000 people," says Gift of Life President and CEO Howard M. Nathan. "We are so grateful to them for providing their precious gifts, often in the face of overwhelming loss." This profile tells one family's story of grief, life-saving generosity and ongoing advocacy.

Nathan continues, "This important work takes tremendous compassion and around-the-clock commitment by our staff, transplant centers and hospital partners. I am so proud of them. Together, they ensure that we provide desperately-needed organs and tissue to those who need it most." A young father talks about his gratitude and "second chance" in this blog post.

Gift of Life works closely with 130 acute care hospitals and 15 transplant centers across its region. Abington  Jefferson Health President Meg McGoldrick talks about the collaboration and compassion this life-saving work requires: "Gift of Life provides invaluable expertise and support as we help families considering organ donation through one of the most difficult experiences they will ever have to face."

OPO and hospital partnerships are addressing a critical  and escalating  public health issue. With ongoing advancements in transplantation, the need for organ donation grows. Approximately 20 people die each day in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant. There are more than 5,300 men, women and children waiting in Gift of Life's region and almost 116,000 nationally.

According to Donate Life America, 95 percent of people support donation, yet only 54.7 percent of adults  142 million people - are registered nationwide as organ donors either on their drivers' licenses or online. In Gift of Life's region, registration rates vary, ranging in Pennsylvania from a low of 31.4 percent in Philadelphia County to a high of 58 percent in Centre County, with an average of 47.8 percent across the state. The average registration rate is 40.2 percent in southern New Jersey and 51.6 percent in Delaware.*

Underscoring the need for more people to register, a 42-year-old woman talks in this video about her battle with Scleroderma and her wait for a double lung transplant at the Gift of Life Family House.

The Gift of Life Family House provides affordable lodging and supportive services to those who travel to Philadelphia for transplant-related care. In 2017, Gift of Life Family House staff and volunteers provided 9,439 lodging nights of care for 16,226 guests, 32,452 meals, and 1,554 rides to and from hospitals. Since its founding in July 2011, the Family House has provided more than 46,179 lodging nights for 87,042 guests and served more than 174,084 meals.

Gift of Life is recognized internationally for its leadership and scholarship in the field of organ and tissue donation. The Gift of Life Institute is the international leader in organ and tissue donation education, training close to 9,000 professionals from 37 countries since 2004. The Institute's Transplant Pregnancy Registry International (TPR) studies post-transplant parenthood and the effects of medications on fertility and pregnancy. Since 1991, TPR has tracked more than 4,000 post-transplant pregnancies, sharing information so that the legacy of donation can continue for generations.

This year, Gift of Life will send a contingent of transplant recipients and living donors to compete in the 2018 Transplant Games of America in Salt Lake City, Utah, August 2-7. They will be accompanied by donor families and supporters. "Team Philly" is always one of the largest teams at the Transplant Games of America, proudly representing the "most generous region in the country."

About Gift of Life Donor Program

Since 1974, Gift of Life has coordinated more than 46,000 organs for transplant and approximately one million tissue transplants that have resulted from Gift of Life donors. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people, and a tissue donor can enhance the lives of up to 75 others. For more information or to register, visit donors1.org.

Photo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/625152/Gift_of_Life_Region_Infographic.jpg

Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/625153/Gift_of_Life_Logo.jpg

Related Links

http://www.donors1.org



SOURCE Gift of Life Donor Program
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wail Alkahtany, a corporate attorney who focuses his practice on capital markets, corporate governance, regulatory compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and contractual disputes, has joined the Law Office of Looaye M. Al-Akkas, in association with Vinson & Elkins, as Counsel.

Alkahtany, who is based in Riyadh, joins the firm's Energy Transactions and Projects practice group.

"Wail is a leading Saudi attorney whose broad experience will greatly benefit the firm and its clients," said Al-Akkas. "We are pleased to have him as a colleague and are looking forward to his future contributions."

Prior to joining V&E, Wail served as a board member of the Saudi Arabian Capital Market Authority (CMA) from 2016 to 2017. His major responsibilities included setting internal rules and regulations, overseeing the development of regulations and market policies, leading the CMA's strategic planning, reviewing and deciding on violations of the Capital Market Law and regulations. He also served as the Chairman of the Audit Committee.

From 2010 to 2016, Alkahtany served as General Counsel and Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Saudi Arabian Investment Company (Sanabil Investments), where he advised on various high-profile investment transactions as well as a variety of legal and contractual matters locally and internationally.

Alkahtany began his legal career as legal counsel at Saudi Aramco, advising on several high-profile projects including the establishment of joint venture petrochemical and refinery companies, gas exploration companies, as well as the establishment of a large national endowment investment program.

"As a world leading energy law firm, V&E is the ideal platform for me to launch the next phase of my career," said Alkahtany. "I am thrilled to be a part of the outstanding team in Riyadh."

Alkahtany earned his law degree from The Ohio State University in 2003.

CONTACT: Jeremy Heallen, jheallen@velaw.com, 713-758-2079

SOURCE Vinson & Elkins
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
New Delhi, Jan 4 : An incident of a Chinese road construction party entering Indian territory and Beijing's statement on not recognising Arunachal Pradesh was raised in the Lok Sabha on Thursday.

Revolutionary Socialist Party member N.K. Premchandran urged the government to make a statement on the incident.

"Chinese entered Indian territory, there were attempts to construct a road. Upto one kilometre they constructed. They were then stopped by people and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police force.

"They had come up till the Siang river basin, so my point is upper Siang basin is being aggressed upon," Premchandran said.

"Further the Chinese spokesperson openly stated that Beijing has never recognised the state of Arunachal Pradesh. It is a provoking statement on China's part," he added.

"I would like to know the response of government of India on the Chinese aggression," he said.

A road building party from China entered Indian territory in a remote part of Arunachal Pradesh in December-end and were sent back by the Indian troops.

Around December 26, they were found constructing a track around two kilometres away from the nearest Indo-Tibetan Border Police post.

A nearly 600 metre long and 12 feet wide track was constructed on Indian territory when the Chinese party was stopped.

The area where the Chinese workers entered is close to the place where Brahmaputra river enters India.

Indian troops pushed back the labourers and seized the equipment. While there was no confrontation between troops on both side, Indian troops have barricaded the area since and have been guarding it.

Asked about the incident, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said: "First of all, on border issues with India, China is clear and consistent.

"We never acknowledge the existence of so-called Arunachal Pradesh," Geng said.
New Delhi, Jan 7 : The recent Chinese intrusion into Arunachal Pradesh was an "inadvertent border crosswalk" by some labourers and did not involve Chinese troops, according to a report by the National Security Council, an apex body that advises the Prime Minister on security-related issues.

According to highly placed sources, the report said the group was tasked with construction work and was unaware they were on Indian territory before they were confronted by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). It added the group had no involvement with the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

The area where the intrusion occurred is in Bishing of Upper Siang district, along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and the two countries do not have a agreed border in this area. Given the mountain terrain and winding topography, the road construction group entered the Indian side where they built a track more than 600 meters long.

The report that analysed the incident that took place around December 26 said the intrusion was not planned. When the road building party was confronted by the ITBP, they left the equipment and ran away.

China has approached the Indian side and requested that the equipment be returned, which includes a JCB and a water tanker.

Sources said the Indian side was likely to return the equipment whenever the next meeting at the border was held.

India and China share a 4,000-km boundary and except for a small portion of boundary in the middle, the borders have not been settled.

In the east, China claims India's Arunachal Pradesh as its own while New Delhi lays claims to Aksai Chin in the west now with Beijing.

Both Defence and Home ministries have on several occasions called the lack of a fixed boundary the reason behind incidents of transgression by Chinese troops.

The incident had raised concerns similar to what happened along the India-China-Bhutan tri-junction in Doklam where China tried to build a road in territory claimed by Bhutan, and was stopped by India, resulting in a 73-day stand-off.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi admitted the stand-off put a "severe" strain on bilateral ties.

In December, Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese State Councillor and Communist Party of China leader Yang Jiechi held the 20th Meeting of Special Representatives of India and China on border issues.

The two sides called the talks "positive and focused" and agreed to seek "mutually acceptable resolutions of their differences.
Srinagar, Jan 7 : The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Sunday arrested two persons here and seized demonetised currency worth Rs 50 lakh from their possession.

The two, identified as Nazir Ahmad, resident of Baramulla district, and Akeel Ahmad, resident of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, were arrested during a routine check in Srinagar.

"Demonetised currency notes worth Rs 50 lakh were recovered from their possession. They have been booked under the relevant sections of law and would be presented in the court," a police statement said.
Jerusalem, Jan 8 : Palestinian officials on Sunday said they had been making an effort to gain European Union's (EU) recognition of the state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, after the US recognised Jerusalem as Israeli capital.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet with EU's foreign ministers on January 22 in Brussels, during which he is expected to ask them to recognize the Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

It is believed that EU's recognition would revive the internationally-backed two-state solution and help the Palestinian bid to get a full UN membership, Xinhua reported.

A committee from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has been preparing documents for discussion during the meeting of the organization's Central Council next week, deciding the future Palestinian political steps.

"The moves to be discussed include defining the relations with Israel in addition to the political and legal steps the Palestinians may take," said Ahmed Majdalani, member of the PLO Executive Committee.

The Palestinian official stressed that next steps are based on the reality that the interim period with Israel had come to an end, and there must be a new political formula with multilateral sponsorship for the peace process.

"The general trend is to focus on how to deal with the emerging situation, considering Palestine as a state under occupation and requesting full UN membership for Palestine, which requires extensive international support," he said.

Joining the UN as a member state requires support by nine out of the 15 Security Council members, while the five permanent members have the veto power.

Meanwhile, Secretary of the Revolutionary Council of Abbas' Fatah Party, Majid al-Fitiyani said that political and technical preparations are underway in full swing to make the Council's meetings successful.

"The Council has a number of major challenges facing the Palestinian cause and the political process following the US President Donald Trump's decision on Jerusalem," he said.

He pointed out that the Council will comprehensively review the entire political process, including the form and content of Palestinian relations with Israel and the development of a strategy for the future Palestinian action.

The Fatah official added that future Palestinian approach is based on the declaration of the State of Palestine under occupation, after discussing all aspects of legal and possible consequences.

Last December, Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and decided to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the disputed city.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future independent state, while Israel wants an integral Jerusalem to be its eternal capital.

While Israel took over East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and declared the whole city as its eternal indivisible capital in 1980, it has not been recognized by the international community.

Under the previous Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, the status of Jerusalem should be determined through the final-status talk between Israel and the Palestinians. All countries have so far located their embassies in Tel Aviv, in order to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The Palestinians have repeatedly warned that changing the legal and political status of Jerusalem would undermine the peace process.

On Sunday, a meeting of foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Morocco, in addition to Arab League Chief, supported the rights of the Palestinians in preserving their legal and historic rights in Jerusalem and in creating their independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

They also stressed the necessity to confront Trump's decision.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are expecting the response of Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements to the invitation of the Palestinian Central Council to take part in its upcoming convention next week.

Hamas has announced that the movement's leaders are studying on their response to the invitation.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements are not represented in the PLO and had never participated in any of the meetings of its institutions.
Washington, Jan 8 : US President Donald Trump and his advisers are continuing with their campaign against a new controversial book which expresses serious doubts about the president's ability to govern the nation.

Both Trump and his spokesperson spent all this past week harshly attacking Michael Wolf and his book "Fire and Fury" which reopened the nationwide debate about the president's mental health and stability, Efe reported.

"I've had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!" Trump wrote on his Twitter on Sunday.

On Saturday, the president stirred things up on Twitter and in political circles by fully entering into the debate about his mental health and intelligence, touting himself as "a very stable genius" and "really smart".

One of Trump's closest advisers, Stephen Miller, was especially harsh on Sunday on former White House strategy chief Steve Bannon, with whom the president angrily broke relations this past week.

Wolff had quoted Bannon criticizing his son Donald Jr. for his June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians, ostensibly to receive political "dirt" on his father's Democratic rival in the presidential election, Hillary Clinton.

It is "tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive," Miller said.
Washington, Jan 8 : US President Donald Trump spoke to his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron over the phone and discussed the Korean Peninsula and Iran, according to the White House.

Trump updated Macron on the developments of the situation on the Peninsula, underscoring the "international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearisation" of the Peninsula, Xinhua news agency quoted the White House as saying.

The two leaders also talked about the demonstrations in Iran.

Iran had earlier blasted the US' stance on the demonstrations in the country, with its Ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo slamming the Trump administration's attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Islamic Republic.

Trump on Saturday said that he was willing to talk with Kim Jong Un and that he supports the upcoming talks between the two Koreas slated to take place on Tuesday.
Los Angeles, Jan 8 : Indian-American actor-comedian Aziz Ansari won the Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Musical or Comedy for "Master of None" at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, making history for an Asian, here.

According to etonline.com, Ansari's win marked the second time an actor of South Asian descent has won a Golden Globe in 35 years. Ben Kingsley, who is of Indian descent, won for Best Actor - Motion Picture, Drama in 1982.

"I genuinely didn't think I'd win because all the websites said I was going to lose. Also, I am glad we won this one because it would have really sucked to lose two of these in a row," Ansari said in his acceptance speech at the gala on Sunday night.

"The only reason my acting is good in that show is because everyone else holds me up," Ansari quipped before thanking the cast and crew of "Master Of None", his parents and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

On the Netflix original series, Ansari not only stars as Dev Shah, the pasta-loving, cupcake show host, but also serves as co-creator, writer, and director.

This is Ansari's second Golden Globe nomination and first win. He was previously nominated in 2016 also for "Master of None".

He beat Anthony Anderson ("Black-ish"), Kevin Bacon ("I Love Dick"), William H. Macy ("Shameless") and Eric McCormack ("Will & Grace").

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, to a Muslim family from Tamil Nadu, Ansari started his career as a stand-up comedian and acted on television in the comedy series "Parks and Recreation".

He then created the "Master of None", based on his personal experiences.

Indian-American actor Kal Penn congratulated Ansari on his win via Twitter.
New Delhi : Title: The Misfit's Manifesto; Author: Lidia Yuknavitch; Publisher: TED Books/Simon and Schuster: Pages: 148; Price: Rs 350 In a materialistic world which emphasises more on conformity, convention and success, those who prefer not to abide by these rules of "normalcy" are rarely lauded. They can expected to be labelled mavericks, even weird, but usually "misfits". But what do they think of themselves, how did they get that way, and do they have any use?

But first we must know what the word "misfit" means exactly -- and what it does not -- says American author Lidia Yuknavitch, who holds her eventful life qualifies her to be called one, and is a badge she wears with pride.

There is a "lot packed into that little word", she holds in this book form of her acclaimed TED Talk "The Beauty of Being a Misfit", but clarifies that misfit doesn't mean anyone who occasionally feels weird, lonely a failure or left out. Nor does it mean feeling out of place, resenting social roles, or caught in a midlife crises "though these states of being are important".

While the Urban Dictionary definition, which, among others, says misfits are individuals "who do not fit into any one clique quite right", "tend to be outcast for no reason", have few good friends, usually intelligent and mature, and "sometimes sort of insane and depressed...", Yuknavitch says she uses the term for those who "never found a way to fit in at all, from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense".

And in this book, she chronicles cases of those who "experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly can't make it in life" and quite a few give up in desperation. But, as she stresses, her intention is not to draw pity but substantiate how and why the world needs misfits.

Drawing from her own case -- of an abusive parent, failed marriages, loss of a child, near-fatal accidents, addiction and rehabilitation, dismissal from jobs before success as a novelist -- Yuknavitch goes on to dwell on how realising and acknowledging her "misfittery" and "understanding it as a way of being and seeing in the world, saved my goddamn life".

And in telling her own story, and of many others she has come across with stories akin to hers with experiences of failing to enter the domains of cultural and social organisations (relationships, families, communities, et al), she says this would have something important that "might help the rest of us get by, if our stories could be amplified".

It is scarcely a comforting journey, with abusive parents, dysfunctional families, dashing expectations, other traumas, alienation, lack of success in most aspects of life relationships and work, addictions, kinks, confused sexual identities, feelings of inadequacy, the death of all hopes and more disheartening stuff.

At the same time, Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", which also became a cult movie, also makes an appearance, while there are a wealth of insights into the human condition.

One misfit recalls how his efforts to blend in with the others at school by acquiring knowledge about a common interest led them to think he was "so much weirder for my efforts", how one saw everything they did treated with derision, many show the observation that suffering makes you stronger is a myth -- and even more lethal.

And above all, the importance of humanity, given that the questions that misfits ask themselves cannot be answered by Google.

There are heartening stories of how misfits never lost their humanity or discovered how the dismal patterns of their lives could motivate themselves to seek refuge and release in creativity, artistic, literary or other. As Yuknavitch cites some key advice she got: "Don't listen to anyone who tells you to change your voice..." and "Sometimes telling the story IS saving your own life".

There is a also powerful strand of hope and redemption, as well as the salutary point that misfits give each other a second (and third or more) chance. Shouldn't those who fit look up from their satisfied lives, their money fixations or smartphones to do to the same?

(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
Bengaluru, Jan 8 : Five employees of a Bengaluru bar-cum-restaurant were charred to death while they were sleeping inside the premises on Monday, police said.

All five men died as the Kailash Bar and Restaurant in the city centre caught fire around 2.30 a.m., Bengaluru Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) M.N. Anucheth told reporters here.

Two fire engines were rushed to the spot after an eyewitness alerted the Police Control Room.

Fire and smoke was seen emanating from the bar on the ground floor of the building in the crowded vegetable market area.

According to eye witnesses, many of the alcohol bottles and other inflammable items stored in the bar-cum-restaurant to serve customers had also fuelled the fire and gutted the premises to cinders.

The cause of the fire was unknown. It was being investigated. "Short circuit is suspected to have sparked it," said Anucheth.

"We have registered a case of criminal negligence amounting to culpable homicide against bar owner R.V. Dayashankar, who obtained the trade and liquor licences to run it," added Anucheth.

Fire brigade personnel retrieved the charred bodies of the victims after dousing the fire by 4 a.m.

The victims were identified as Swami, 23, Prasad, 20, Mahesh, 35, Manjunath, 45, and Keerthi, 20.

The bodies were shifted to the state-run Victoria hospital for autopsy.

The fire incident in the pub city and tech hub occurred about 10 days after a fire in a rooftop pub claimed 14 lives in Mumbai on December 29.

It has been almost a year since the Karnataka government allowed pubs, bars, restaurants and eateries in the cosmopolitan city to remain open till 1 a.m., ostensibly for catering to hundreds of tourists and thousands of techies from software firms and call or data centres, which operate on 24x7 basis through the year.

Bengaluru Mayor Sampath Raj, who inspected the burnt bar, told reporters that he had ordered an inquiry to find out why the victims were sleeping in the premises after downing the shutters post 1 a.m.
London, Jan 8 : A BBC editor has resigned from her post, citing pay inequality with male colleagues, a media report said on Monday.

In an open letter, BBC China's editor Carrie Gracie, accused the corporation of a "secretive and illegal pay culture".

Gracie, who has been at the BBC for more than 30 years, said it was facing a "crisis of trust", after it was revealed that two-thirds of its stars earning more than 150,000 pounds a year were male.

She said she would return to her former post in the TV newsroom "where I expect to be paid equally".

In the letter, Gracie, a China specialist who is fluent in Mandarin, said "the BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer.

"I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure."

Last July, the BBC was forced to reveal the salaries of all employees who earnied more than 150,000 pounds a year.

Gracie said she was dismayed to discover that the BBC's two male international editors earned "at least 50 per cent more" than its two female counterparts.

US editor Jon Sopel earned 200,000-249,999 pounds while Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen earned 150,000-199,999 pounds.

Gracie was not on the list.

"Despite the BBC's public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women's work was worth much less than men's," she added in the letter.

In a statement, a BBC spokesperson said "fairness in pay" at the corporation "is vital".

"A significant number of organisations have now published their gender pay figures showing that we are performing considerably better than many and are well below the national average.

"Alongside that, we have already conducted a independent judge led audit of pay for rank and file staff which showed 'no systemic discrimination against women'.

"A separate report for on air staff will be published in the not too distant future."
Chennai, Jan 8 : The DMK and Congress on Monday boycotted Governor Banwarilal Purohits inaugural address to the Tamil Nadu Assembly and their MLAs trooped out of the House after accusing him of letting a "minority" AIADMK government remain in office.

The DMK, along with the Congress, demanded an immediate floor test in the legislature.

As soon as Purohit addressed the MLAs with a 'Vanakkam" in Tamil, the opposition legislators began raising slogans. In no time, the DMK MLAs walked out, led by their leader M.K. Stalin, followed by the Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League.

Stalin told the media that the government did not enjoy majority support in the House as it had only 111 MLAs when it needed 117 in a house of 234.

Stalin said that despite repeated requests, the Governor was not taking a decision on the need for a floor test. "How can the Governor allow a minority government to run the state?"

Even among those with the ruling AIADMK, many MLAs were inclined to oppose the government in the wake of the feud within the ruling party, he said.

Stalin said he hoped that the Madras High Court would soon come out with a ruling regarding the case of 18 disqualified AIADMK MLAs opposed to the ruling faction.

Disregarding the opposition protest, the Governor continued his address, detailing the government's achievements and its efforts to promote welfare measures.

The government is set to build a grand memorial for late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa and turn her house, Veda Nilayam, into a memorial, Purohit said.

He lauded the efforts of the state and central governments in resolving the Tamil fishermen issue.
Kohima, Jan 8 : With the Assembly polls in Nagaland likely to be announced this week, pressure groups have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to defer the elections due to the seven-decade-old Naga insurgency.

The term of the 60-member Nagaland assembly expires on March 13, 2019.

Against Corruption and Unabated Taxation (ACAUT), the powerful people's movement against corruption, urged Modi to impose President's Rule in order to facilitate a peaceful solution.

Apart from ACAUT, other groups including the Nagaland Tribes Council (NTC), Central Nagaland Tribes Council (CNTC) and Gaon Burrah Federation of Nagaland (GBFN) also submitted separate memorandums on Sunday.

On August 3, 2015, the central government and the separatist group, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland Issac-Muivah (NSCN-IM) signed the Framework Agreement to end the insurgency.

Last year, the government had also signed an agreement with a Working Committee comprising six Naga National Political Groups.

Noting that a solution to the protracted political issue was of paramount importance, the NTC stated that it was deeply distressed at the prospect of Assembly elections, as it could be a distraction from the peace process.

In the memorandum, the NTC informed Modi that more than 40 NGOs had gathered on December 9, 2017, at Dimapur and unanimously resolved to prefer a solution to election.

"All these voices of the people were being raised for one single objective of eradicating chaos and confusion and having lasting peace and progress," the NTC stated.

Appreciating the Prime Minister's commitment to solve the Naga insurgency issue, the GBFN said, "Elections at this hour would most likely jeopardise the Prime Minister's desire for peace. A political solution to the seven-decade long Indo-Naga political issue must be given greater importance over the democratic electoral exercise."

The ACAUT said: "If elections are held in Nagaland for the sake of constitutional process before the completion of the negotiation process with the six Naga National Political Groups (or rebel groups) and the NSCN-IM, then solution to Naga problems will remain a mirage."

The Nagaland Assembly last year had adopted a resolution urging the central government to take emergent and extraordinary steps for an "honourable and acceptable solution" before the Assembly election.
Islamabad, Jan 8 : The footprint of the militant Islamic State (IS) group is continuously on the rise in Pakistan as over the past year responsibility for as many as six deadliest attacks, in which 153 people were killed, was claimed by the outfit, according to a think-tank report.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) on Sunday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn online reported.

"The IS claimed responsibility for just six terrorist attacks in the country, but they were the most deadliest ones. There is a need to take the matter more seriously because there is a possibility that foreign fighters would come to Pakistan in near future as things are continuously changing in the Middle East," said PIPS offical Muhammad Ismail Khan.

"What has been quite alarming is the increasing footprint of IS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh where the group claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks," Khan said.

According to the report, despite a 16 per cent decline in terrorist attacks last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its associated groups remained the most potent threats. They were followed by nationalist-insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.

It further said that concerted efforts and a revision of the National Action Plan was required to curb the terror group's activities. The report suggested a parliamentary oversight of Pakistan's counter-terror plan.

Militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of the country in 2017, the think-tank said.

These incidents, including 24 suicide and gun-and-suicide coordinated attacks, left 815 people dead. The report noted that as compared to 2016, the attacks in the country from across the Afghan, Indian and Iranian borders in 2017 witnessed a significant surge by 131 per cent.

Furthermore, security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016.

According to the report, it was quite likely that the National Internal Security Policy will take into consideration global and regional scenarios, including relations between Pakistan, China and the US.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The transgression incident in Arunachal Pradesh, where Chinese workers entered Indian territory constructing a track, has been resolved, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said on Monday.

He also said that there was a major reduction in the number of Chinese troops in the Doklam area.

Speaking on the sidelines of an event here, the Army Chief said the "Tuting incident has been resolved".

General Rawat said a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) took place "two days back" on the issue.

Talking about the situation along the India-China border in Sikkim sector, where the two countries were involved in a 73-day-long standoff in Doklam, he said there was a major reduction in the number of troops on the Chinese side.

A Chinese road construction party entered India on December 26, 2017, and were constructing a track, around two kilometres away from the nearest Indo-Tibetan Border Police post.

An almost 600-metre-long and 12-feet wide track was constructed on the Indian territory when the Chinese party was stopped.

The Chinese labourers had entered the area inadvertently, according to a government report on the incident. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops were not involved in the incident.

Indian troops pushed back the labourers and seized their equipment.

The incident came nearly four months after the end of the Dokalam standoff that went on from June 16 to August 28, 2017.

Earlier, speaking at the Army Technology Summit here, the Army Chief pitched for modernisation of the force and said India needed to be ready for "future wars".

"There is a huge requirement of modernisation of our armed forces, in every field," he said.

"Future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them.

"We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defence technology) because for a nation like ours, the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with home-made solutions," he said.
Washington, Jan 8 : Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks posted the full text of author Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House", an explosive tell-all about President Donald Trump and his administration, on Twitter in an apparent attack on the profitability and sales of the book.

"New Trump book 'Fire and Fury' by Michael Wolff. Full PDF," WikiLeaks posted on Twitter on Sunday, along with a link to a Google Drive containing the full text of the book.

The PDF showed hundreds of pages of what appeared to be Wolff's book without page numbers, although it was unclear whether it was the final version that went to publication.

It was later deleted and replaced with another tweet and link to the Google Drive that read: "Full text of the controversial book on Trump, 'Fire and Fury', by Michael Wolff, leaks onto the Internet."

The book has become an instant bestseller since it went on sale on Friday, with hard copies sold out in many stores within an hour.

Trump has begun legal action against the author, seeking to discredit the book's allegations against him as "fake" and disputing Wolff's claim that he personally interviewed the President before writing the book. The author had said that he conducted over 200 interviews with key White House staffers, the New York Daily News reported.

It is unclear whether WikiLeaks was seeking to undermine the book's sales or simply provide an alternative copy of the book, since it sold out.

The book quoted former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as saying that the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the President's son Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was "treasonous".

"They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV," Bannon was quoted as saying in the book, referring to the ongoing investigation into Russian interference and ties between Trump's campaign and Moscow. Bannon also reportedly called Trump's daughter Ivanka "dumb as a brick" in the book.

Trump slammed the book last week along with his former aide whom he called "Sloppy Steve" saying Bannon "lost his mind" after losing his job.

Bannon later attempted to make amends saying Trump Jr. was a "patriot" and a "good man".

"Fire and Fury" also raised serious concerns over Trump's mental stability and his ability to carry out his duties as President. Trump responded to those questions on Twitter saying he is a "very stable genius".

WikiLeaks head Julian Assange has not yet publicly commented on the website's tweet or Wolff's new book. However, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said WikiLeaks' post does violate copyright law.
Shanghai, Jan 8 : Human Rights Watch on Monday called on French President Emmanuel Macron, currently on his first official visit to China, to urge Beijing to improve its human rights situation.

Macron was expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and sign various bilateral agreements, Efe new agency reported.

He is the first European leader to travel to China after Xi renewed his five-year mandate as head of the Communist Party in November 2017.

According to HRW France Director Benedicte Jeannerod, Macron must follow through on his commitment to demand greater respect for human rights as he himself said that "France's diplomatic and economic imperatives with China cannot justify cover-up of the question of human rights".

"If Macron is serious about promoting liberty and democracy worldwide, he should arrive with a long list for President Xi and other Chinese leaders," Jeannerod said in a statement.

HRW also urged the French President to publicly reiterate call for full freedom of movement for Liu Xia, widow of the late dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who is still under house arrest.

Macron, as part of his state visit was also urged to discuss that how French companies can operate in China given rising Internet censorship and the restrictions on virtual private networks that allow users to circumvent the digital blockade.

HRW also said that Macron must further express concerns about China's anti-rights conduct against the UN and Interpol.

Official French sources told Efe that rebalancing trade relations with Beijing is a major priority of the visit as France has a deficit with China of around $36 billion, the largest of its foreign trade.
Shimla, Jan 8 : Journalists here staged a demonstration on Monday to protest against the UIDAI's decision to register a case against The Tribune newspaper and one of its reporters for exposing illegal data leak of Aadhaar details.

The protest was organised on behalf of the Press Club of Shimla.

Later, its President Dhananjay Sharma called on Governor Acharya Devvrat and submitted a memorandum, which termed as unfair, unjustified and a direct attack on the freedom of the press, the registration of a case by Delhi Police against the reporter for publishing news regarding breach of secrecy of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) scheme.

It said the action of the UIDAI was uncalled for and the journalists would fight it out.

After a January 3 report by The Tribune over breach in Aadhaar data with a headline "Rs 500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar details", the Unique Identification Authority of India (UID AI) registered an FIR against the newspaper and reporter Rachna Khaira.
Seoul, Jan 8 : South Korea's top nuclear envoy will visit the US this week to discuss the Korean peninsula's nuclear issue, an official said on Monday.

Lee Do-hoon, special representative for the Korean peninsula peace and security affairs, will visit Washington from Wednesday to Friday, South Korea's Foreign Ministry was cited as saying by Xinhua news agency.

During the visit, Lee will meet his US counterpart Joseph Yun, a chief negotiator at the six-party talks for the denuclearised Korean peninsula.

Lee will also meet key figures of the US government in charge of North Korea affairs, the Foreign Ministry said.

The South Korean envoy will make an indepth discussion with the US officials on ways to peacefully resolve the peninsula's nuclear issue and improve inter-Korean relations.

Lee's visit to Washington would come a day after the high-level talks between South and North Korea on January 9 in the truce village of Panmunjom.
Bengaluru, Jan 8 : The death of five employees in a bar-cum-restaurant blaze here on Monday stirred the civic body and police to crack down on all bars, pubs and eateries to ensure fire safety norms are followed, a top police official said.

"We have directed the BBMP and the police to inspect all bars, pubs, restaurants, hotels and eateries across the city to check for fire safety norms," Karnataka Director General for Fire and Emergency Services M.N. Reddi told reporters here.

Reddi, who inspected the Kailash Bar and Restaurant where the fire broke out killing the five men trapped inside its compound and the Victoria Hospital, said prima facie the bar in the congested city centre had no fire extinguisher and did not follow the safety norms.

"The premises where the fire accident took place had no exit door, ventilation, exhaust fans or any escape route from behind," said Reddi, an IPS rank officer.

Reddi, a former Bengaluru police chief, also said that preliminary inquiry revealed that the victims died due to asphyxia than severe burns as they suffocated to death due to lack of fresh air, ventilation and no exit point.

"The victims seem to have tried to escape from the dark premises but could not as they failed to break the iron grill windows. No fire precautionary measures were in place at the bar," said Reddi.

Bars, pubs, restaurants and eateries across the city are required to follow safety norms by providing clearly marked exit doors in case of a fire along with fire fighting equipment, said Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy.

"The premises where the fire accident took place didn't even have a fire extinguisher. The police will be inspecting all bars, restaurants and eateries," he told reporters.

The rules laid down by the civic body Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) state that public buildings should be provided with exits to allow safe escape of occupants in case of fire along with installation of alarm devices to alert people and that the buildings must be equipped with fire extinguishers.

After the deadly fire at a rooftop bar in Mumbai on December 29 claimed 14 lives, the BBMP has raided several bars, pubs, restaurants and eateries here.

According to Excise Department data as of March 2017, Bengaluru has a registered total of 866 liquor shops, 1,375 bar-cum-restaurants, 74 pubs and 189 hotels and boarding houses selling liquor.

The city has 3,130 registered liquor-selling outlets, including all the liquor shops, restaurants, pubs and hotels as per the Excise Department.

Last week, as many as 57 rooftop pubs and restaurants were served closure notices by the civic body for operating without required licenses.

Karnataka State Fire and Emergency Services Department had also issued notices to nearly 70 bars, pubs and eateries in the city for flouting the fire safety rules. The establishments were given a 15-day notice to comply with the norms.
Mumbai, Jan 8 : Actress Sonam Kapoor, who is gearing up for the release of her forthcoming film "Pad Man", says that she wants to do good work and be a part of good films.

Recipient of Special Mention Award at the 64th National Awards for her role in the 2016 film "Neerja", Sonam was asked if she thinks "Pad Man" would help her achieve another National Award and she said: "I don't do films for awards, I just want to do good work and be part of good films."

Sonam, along with Akshay Kumar, was present on the set of Grand Finale of Zee Marathi's Show "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa" on Sunday to promote "Pad Man".

During the media interaction, Sonam also revealed that she will be shooting for Vidhu Vinod Chopra's film after which she will start her next film "Zoya factor".

"I am going to shoot in February, March and April for Vinod (Chopra) Uncle's production. Then I will start preparing for 'Zoya Factor'," she said.

"Also there are three releases this year, first 'Pad Man' this month, then 'Veere Di Wedding' in May and then Dutt biopic, so I will be busy with films. So, there is no time for other plans." said Sonam.

Talking about Marathi cinema, Sonam said she is glad that the industry is being recognised for its worth.

"Marathi films and songs have become very trendy right now. But people aren't aware of the years of hard work and quality work that happened earlier. But I am so glad that it has become so popular now that even we have to come and promote our films on the Marathi platform," she said.

Directed by R. Balki, "Pad Man" is scheduled to release worldwide on January 26.
Barmer (Rajasthan), Jan 8 : Independent MLA Hanuman Beliwal has attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi while announcing that Rajasthan needed a new political party to provide an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress.

Beliwal made the announcement at a huge rally of farmers here on Sunday. He said the youths had seen through both the major political outfits and "their false promises" and were looking for a change.

Beniwal asked people to refrain from getting lured by promises he said Modi would make at Pachpadra while laying the foundation stone of the Barmer Refinery.

The farmers' rally discussed issues such as loan waiver, irrigation and employment for youths. It was announced that similar rallies will be organised in Bikaner, Sikar and Jaipur.

And in Jaipur, a third front would be announced to contest the next election.

The rally was also addressed by MLA Kirorilal Meena who said: "Hanumanji and I will work together to form a new government in the state.

"We will rule the state by following the 'JM' way where 'J' stands for Jat and 'M' stands for Meena, Mali, Meghwal and Muslims.

"JM also stands for Judicial Magistrate which means that we will work as judicial magistrates to arrest the BJP and Congress in the state," he added.

Meena said Modi had earlier promised to bring home the heads of 10 Pakistani soldiers for every single Indian soldier killed by Pakistanis.

"Now, so many soldiers are dying on the border. Why is Modi not keeping his promise?"
Sanaa, Jan 8 : The party of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh has named a new leader after he was killed last month by Shia Houthi rebels, his one-time allies in the countrys civil war.

The General People's Congress party (GPC) elected 65-year-old Sadiq Abu Ras, a former Agriculture Minister, as the new chief of the party, Xinhua news reported on Monday.

The election took place in central Sanaa, the rebel-held capital, amid a tight security presence.

"The position of the party remains steadfast against the aggressors (Saudi-led military coalition) on the soil of the Yemeni people," the party said in a statement.

The statement did not mention Saleh's death, but demanded the release of his family members, party's leaders and journalists of Saleh-owned television channel Yemen al-Yawm from Houthi-run prisons.

However, senior leaders of the party rejected the party's statement and the election.

"Any statement that does not publicly break relations with Houthi murderers and declare war against them does not represent us and is not our party," the GPC Secretary-General Yasir al-Awadhi tweeted.

On December 4, Houthi fighters killed Saleh, many of his family members and party's leaders after a week of deadly clashes that erupted after the former President switched sides of allies and declared "opening new page with the Saudi-led coalition".

Saleh, who ruled the country for 33 years and stepped down following 2011 popular protests, had waged six wars against Houthi movement that ended in 2010.

However, Saleh allied with Houthis and supported them when they advanced from their far north stronghold of Saada province and stormed the capital Sanaa in September 2014, where they overthrew Saudi-backed government and forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.

In March 2015, the Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen to restore Hadi to power and roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi-Saleh rebels.

Three years now into Yemen's civil war, over 10,000 Yemenis, mostly children, have been killed and three million others have been displaced, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : National passenger carrier Air India's new chief Pradeep Singh Kharola on Monday said his priority would be to improve the airline's efficiencies and to keep a tab on cost.

"My mandate is to manage the airline, provide good services, improve efficiencies and keep a tab on cost," Kharola said at the airline's New Delhi-based headquarter Airline House.

According to Kharola, the airline will forthwith focus on providing better services to the "Business Class" passengers, along with commencing some more direct connections to the US and Australia.
London, Jan 8 : Thousands of commuters across the UK are set to endure up to three days of travel mayhem as staff at five train firms began a fresh wave of strikes in separate disputes over "rail safety".

Rail, Maritime and Transport union members at Northern, Merseyrail, South Western Railway (SWR) and Greater Anglia were striking on Monday, with further walkouts planned for Wednesday and Friday, the BBC reported.

RMT members at Southern Rail were also staging a 24-hour walkout. A Department for Transport spokesman said the five franchises would "keep passengers moving" during the strikes.

The 24-hour walkouts were called over separate disputes, all concerning rail safety, the RMT said. It said the disputes were over issues including the role of train guards and the extension of driver-only services.

SWR is expected to be the worst-hit railway throughout the three days of strikes.

"RMT members remain solid and united in each of the separate disputes across the country over rail safety this morning as we continue to fight to put public safety, security and access before the profits of the train operating companies," said Mick Cash, the union's General Secretary, in a statement.

All of the affected firms said they will be running services during the strikes.

Northern Rail services, which runs trains in northwest and northeast England, said it will run around 1,350 trains on strike days -- about 60 per cent of its normal service.

SWR, which operates out of stations including London Waterloo, Reading, Exeter and Southampton, planned to run about 70 per cent of its normal service.

Merseyrail said it will run a reduced service on its lines in and around Liverpool, with a break during the middle of the day. Southern said it planned to run a normal service on most of its routes across south England.

Greater Anglia planned to run a normal service with no alterations.

RMT General Secretary Mick Cash wrote to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling calling for a summit with the Department for Transport and the train companies.

He said agreements had been reached in Scotland and Wales to keep guards on new modern trains.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The lone publisher who was supposed to represent Pakistan at the ongoing 26th annual New Delhi World Book Fair didnt turn up at the event.

Al Hasanat Books Private Ltd, a distributor of some of the publishers from Pakistan, is representing the country in the international pavilion.

"We are aware of the prevailing tension between the countries. It is difficult to acquire a visa. Also our publishers are busy attending book fairs in other countries," Faisal Faheem of Al Hasanat told IANS.

Last year also no publisher from Pakistan attended the event and the same distributor had represented the country at the World Book Fair.

However, a press conference last week, event co-organser National Book Trust (NBT) had specifically mentioned that a publisher from Pakistan will be attending this year.

"There might have been some issue regarding visa. World Book Fair is open for all. We don't choose any publisher. Anyone from any country is free to submit their nomination," an NBT official stated.

Unlike other countries, Pakistan's name was missing from its billboard at the stall and merely stated "Children's Books". The only mention of the country is on a board outside the international pavilion. Asked about this, an NBT official said this might have happened "by mistake" and "we will soon add the name".

Faheem said that the billboard was given by the organisers, adding this won't affect them much as it is the books on display that matters.

"Name of a country or publishing brand doesn't matter us much. If our books are good and worth reading, readers and book lovers will be anyway drawn towards our stall. We have books from different publishers from Pakistan, children's books, literature, shayari and religious. Hope visitors will like it," he pointed out.
Mumbai, Jan 8 : Healthy buying from foreign funds, along with optimism over the upcoming quarterly earnings result season, on Monday catapulted the key equity indices -- NSE Nifty50 and S&P BSE Sensex -- to their record closing highs.

Index-wise, the buoyant global cues lifted the wider Nifty50 of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) to close above the 10,600-points-level. It gained 64.75 points or 0.61 per cent to 10,623.60 points.

The Nifty50 touched a fresh intra-day high of 10,631.20 points.

The barometer 30-scrip Sensitive Index (Sensex) of the BSE too closed at a fresh high of 34,352.79 points -- up 198.94 points or 0.58 per cent from its previous close -- after it scaled a new intra-day high of 34,385.67 points.

The BSE market breadth was bullish as 1,792 stocks advanced compared to 1,158 declines.

"Markets rallied higher on Monday to close with gains for the fourth consecutive day. The Nifty touched record highs in intra day trade," Deepak Jasani, Head, Retail Research, HDFC Securities, told IANS.

"The rally came on the back of positive global cues," added Jasani.

Apart from key indices, even the broader market indices closed at fresh highs.

The S&P BSE mid-cap index closed higher by 0.98 per cent at a new high of 18,247.55 points. The small-cap index edged up 0.97 per cent to close at a record high of 19,895.77 points.

On the NSE, the Nifty50 mid-cap index edged higher by 1.19 per cent to close at a record high of 5,702.70 points.

"Asian shares ex-Japan traded towards all-time peaks on Monday after Wall Street posted its best start to a year in over a decade," Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls, told IANS.

On the currency front, the Indian rupee weakened by 14 paise to close at 63.51 against the US dollar from its previous close at 63.37.

Provisional data with the exchanges showed that foreign institutional investors purchased scrips worth Rs 692.83 crore, while the domestic institutional investors divested funds worth Rs 206.30 crore.

Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services, said: "Supportive global market and optimism ahead of earnings season took the market to a new high. A cut in FY18 GDP growth estimate by CSO did not impact the movement since it was overtly conservative."

"Revival in earnings, incremental Q-o-Q growth in GDP and budget expectations are sustaining the momentum," Nair added.

All the sub-indices of the BSE ended with substantial gains barring the telecom index which declined by 45.33 points.

Sectorwise, the S&P BSE capital goods index surged by 243.37 points, followed by healthcare index by 179.60 points and IT index by 157.03 points.

Major Sensex gainers on Monday were: Coal India, up 3.26 per cent at Rs 287.85; Infosys, up 2.33 per cent at Rs 1,035.65; Sun Pharma, up 2.28 per cent at Rs 591.95; Larsen and Toubro, up 1.80 per cent at Rs 1,338.10; and Hero MotoCorp, up 1.37 per cent at Rs 3,790.35.

Major Sensex losers were: Bharti Airtel, down 4.43 per cent at Rs 516.10; ONGC, down 0.28 per cent at Rs 197.15; State Bank of India, down 0.18 per cent at Rs 305.65; Tata Steel, down 0.18 per cent at Rs 768.95; and Adani Ports, down 0.07 per cent at Rs 424.15.
Barcelona, Jan 8 : Barcelona's recently-signed midfielder, Brazil midfielder Philippe Coutinho, is suffering from a right thigh injury that will keep him on the sidelines for three weeks, the club said on Monday following medical examinations.

Coutinho recently made the move from Liverpool to Barcelona and was presented to fans at the Camp Nou on Monday, reports Efe.

"I am very happy. I have always said I am living a dream, we are very happy to be here," the Brazilian star said on his arrival in Barcelona.

The thigh injury had already prevented him from playing in his final few games at Liverpool.

Coutinho signed his contract Monday at Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium, posing with his jersey alongside the club's president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, who recounted how Coutinho has been pursued by BarAa for months.

"We were trying it last summer. We had known for some time that it was necessary for him to come," Bartomeu said.

"Coutinho wanted to come here, it was one of his objectives. His desire, his effort and his patience have been decisive for him to be here today, because there were other clubs that had an interest in signing him," said the leader.

On Saturday, Barcelona announced it had reached an agreement with Liverpool FC for the transfer of the 25-year-old player, and would sign him for the rest of the 2017-2018 season and five more.

BarAa, which currently leads the La Liga standings and has qualified for the knockout stage of the Champions League tournament, said Coutinho's contract would include a 400 million euro ($481 million) buyout clause.

Although the club did not reveal further details, British media reported that Barcelona had agreed to pay Liverpool a 120 million euro transfer fee, as well as up to 40 million euros in "variables," to acquire the Brazilian player.

This makes Coutinho the most expensive player in Barcelona's history.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The Supreme Court on Monday was told that there was no "substantive material" that can cast doubt on the probe into the assassination of father of nation Mahatma Gandhi, including its conspiracy angle, to warrant any re-investigation.

"No substantive material has come to light to throw any doubt on any of the above requiring either a re-investigation of the Mahatma Gandhi murder case or, to constitute a fresh fact finding commission with respect to the same," amicus curiae Amarendra Sharan told the top court in his report filed on Monday.

Not favouring any fresh investigation into Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by Nathuram Godse, the amicus curiae said: "The bullets which pierced Mahatma Gandhi's body, the pistol from which it was fired, the assailant who fired the said bullets, the conspiracy which led to the assassination and the ideology which led to the said assassination have all been duly identified."

Referring to evidence that was brought before the trial court, Sharan said that Mahatma Gandhi was hit by three bullets which were fired from the same revolver.

The report says that there is no evidence of any British influence including that of alleged British secret service 'Force 136' in the assassination.

"There is no documentary evidence in contemporary literature to prove that, there even existed such a secret service by the name of 'Force 136' and that, it was mandated to carry out the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. Thus, any reliance upon such theories would be unwarranted," says the report submitted by Sharan.

No evidentiary value can be given to the statement made to the then Ambassador to USSR Vijaya Laxmi Pandit by the ambassadors of the various other countries regarding the involvement of the British, it said.

Furthermore, the report says that it is difficult to give any evidentiary value to the submissions regarding apprehension of Nathuram Godse by CIA agent named Herbert Reiner at the place of assassination.

Rejecting the material being relied upon by the petitioner Pankaj Kumudchandra Phadnis for re-investigation into Gandhi murder, Sharan said: "Further, (all) these cannot derogate the solid evidence laid before the court in the Gandhi murder case comprising of oral and documentary evidence and material exhibits."

The report came in pursuance to the apex court's October 6, 2017 order appointing him amicus curiae to examine the material produced by the petitioner to ascertain whether there was need for further inquiry into the larger conspiracy behind the assassination.

The court had however on October 6 itself said that prima facie they don't find the material to be sufficient to order fresh inquiry.

Phadnis moved the top court challenging the Bombay High Court's June 6, 2016 order junking his plea for the fresh inquiry into larger conspiracy behind the assassination in the wake of fresh evidence that has surfaced now.

Pointing fingers at 'Force 136', the petitioner has said that the Indian Ambassador to USSR was informed in February 1948 that the British had organized the assassination.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : National passenger carrier Air India's new chief Pradeep Singh Kharola on Monday said his priority would be to improve the airline's efficiencies and to keep a tab on cost.

"My mandate is to manage the airline, provide good services, improve efficiencies and keep a tab on cost," Kharola said at the airline's New Delhi-based headquarter Airline House.

According to Kharola, the airline will forthwith focus on providing better services to the "Business Class" passengers, along with commencing some more direct connections to the US and Australia.

The senior bureaucrat took charge as Air India CMD on December 11, 2017, before which he was the Managing Director of the Bengaluru Metro.

Kharola replaced Rajiv Bansal, Financial Advisor to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry, and also holding additional charge of Air India CMD.

Kharola's mandate becomes difficult given that a ministerial group has been formed to look into the modalities of Air India's divestment process.

The Air India-specific Alternative Mechanism, headed by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, has been mandated to guide the strategic divestment process and to decide on key issues such as treatment of the airline's debt and hiving-off of its assets.

The demerger and strategic divestment of its three profit-making subsidiaries, the quantum of disinvestment and the universe of bidders is also on the group's agenda.

Recently, the government appointed consultancy firm EY as the transaction advisor for the strategic divestment.

Till now budget passenger carrier IndiGo has evinced interest in buying the airline's international operations and its subsidiary Air India Express.

In addition, aviation industry majors SATS, Bird Group and Celebi have shown interest in buying Air India's ground handling unit.

Currently, the airline is under massive debt burden of Rs 50,000 crore, had posted an operating profit of Rs 105 crore in 2015-16.

For the last fiscal (2016-17), the company was expected to report an improved operating profit margin.

The national flag carrier in April 12, 2012, got a new lease of life when the then UPA government had approved a Rs 30,000-crore turnaround and financial restructuring package spanning up to 2021.
Thiruvananthapuram, January 08 : Central board of film certification (CBFC) regional officer A Prathiba has been removed from the post allegedly over the film certifying bodys refusal to grant a censor certificate to a Malayalam documentary on Emergency.

The documentary titled 21 months of hell reportedly lionises the struggles of the RSS swayamsevaks against the imposition of the Emergency and also dwells on the torture methods used by the police against them.

Ms. Prathiba was removed by the union ministry of information and broadcasting reportedly based on a complaint by BJP/RSS workers from Kerala.

Earlier, BJP state president Kummanam Rajasekharan had come out against the denial of certificate to the documentary, alleging that CBFC officials refused to certify the film only because it dealt with the struggles of RSS workers during the Emergency.

The censor board denied the certificate to the documentary reportedly on the ground that it contained fictional elements and hence cannot be classified as a documentary but only as docu-fiction.

A film certification panel headed by Ms. Prathiba which watched the documentary reportedly took the view that the violence depicted in the movie did not conform to known facts.

A report in The Hindu also quotes the director of the documentary Yadu Vijayakrishnan as saying that the CBFC took exception to certain scenes in the film which, according to them, showed disrespect towards Mahatma Gandhi and the national flag.

The irony of BJP/RSS workers raising a banner of revolt against the CBFC is not lost on anyone. They had steadfastly supported the film censor body on numerous occasions when it had kicked up controversies by denying certification to several films.

Most recently, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan-directed Sexy Durga was denied certification on the ground that the movies title hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus.

BJP and RSS workers had come out strongly to defend the CBFC then against charges of denial of freedom of speech and expression, saying that the constitution permitted imposition of reasonable restrictions on freedom of speech.
Jammu, Jan 8 : Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday said that violence can never be a solution to any problem and all the issues should be resolved through dialogue.

He was speaking after receiving the first Mufti Muhammad Sayeed probity in politics and public life award at a function in Zorawar Singh Auditorium of Jammu University organized on the second death anniversary of late Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed.

Governor N.N. Vohra presented the award to Nitish Kumar in presence of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

Nitish Kumar expressed gratitude to Mehbooba Mufti, daughter of Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, for the award saying that the award was an honour for people of Bihar.

British politician and economist, Lord Meghnad Desai delivered the first Mufti Muhammad Sayeed memorial lecture, while Vohra spoke about Sayeed's contribution towards development of the state.
Dhaka, Jan 8 : A Bangladeshi court on Monday turned down a petition to legalise marriage between its citizens and refugees from Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority.

Babul Hossain, a construction worker from the district of Manikganj, had filed the petition with the Bangladesh High Court in December, challenging a government ban on marrying Rohingyas for Bangladeshi citizens, which has been in effect since 2014, Efe news reported.

"The court dismissed the petition and fined the petitioner 100,000 taka ($1,200) for wasting its time," said deputy Attorney General Motahar Hossain.

Hossain's son got married to a Rohingya in September 2017 at the refugee camp in Kutupalong and since then the couple has been on the run, fearing that they may be arrested.

"The court said this man has committed a crime by bringing the girl outside the camp as she is not a Bangladeshi citizen. He also committed a crime by attempting to marry her since there is an administrative ban (against such marriages)," the Attorney added.

The defence lawyer, ABM Hamidul Mishbah, said that he would file an appeal to the Supreme Court against the order.

In October 2017, the country's Law and Justice Ministry ordered civil registries to thoroughly scrutinize the identity documents of couples before registering a marriage, after a significant increase in the number of mixed relationships.

According to the United Nations Inter Sector Coordination Group, some 655,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh since August 2017.

The current exodus was triggered by the Myanmar security forces launching an operation in retaliation for an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on several security posts in Rakhine State on August 25.

The governments of both the countries earlier reached an agreement on the process of repatriation for the Rohingya refugees present in Bangladesh. The process is expected to begin within two months.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday made its debut entry in the Rajya Sabha when its candidates Sanjay Singh, Sushil Gupta and N.D. Gupta were elected unopposed from Delhi.

Chartered accountant and AAP Accounts Manager N.D. Gupta's candidature was challenged by the Congress saying he held an office of profit but the complaint was quashed by Returning Officer Nidhi Srivastava.

On Monday evening, the AAP candidates got 'Certificate of Election' confirming their election to the Upper House.

The election to the three Rajya Sabha seats from Delhi was necessitated as the tenure of the Congress members now holding the membership is set to expire later this month.

The nomination of the AAP candidates was marred by controversy after party leader Kumar Vishwas publicly expressed disappointment that he was not picked for a Rajya Sabha seat and opposed the nomination of businessman Sushil Gupta.

There was universal acceptance of Sanjay Singh's nomination and there was no major objection to N.D. Gupta.

Informed sources told IANS that after N.D. Gupta's candidature was approved, the two covering candidates of the AAP withdrew their nomination, making the three the only ones in the race.

The opposition parties did not nominate any candidate for the seat as the AAP enjoys a brute majority in the 70-member Delhi Assembly.

On Saturday, the scrutiny of N.D. Gupta's nomination was put on hold till Monday by Srivastava after two complaints by Congress stating that he held an office of profit.

The Congress first stated that he was appointed a Trustee of the National Pension Scheme (NPS) Trust on March 30, 2015. Gupta told the panel that he resigned from the Trust on December 29, 2017.

In a second complaint, the Congress said Gupta had not resigned as Chairman of the Audit Committee of the NPS Trust.

But the Returning Officer said Gupta's Chairmanship of the Audit Committee was not a violation of the election code.

"It seems an internal arrangement that the Trust had made for its working and not an independent office of Chairman. In view of this the objection on this account was not found valid," Srivastava said in her order.

AAP veteran Sanjay Singh termed the Congress allegations a "cheap publicity stunt".

The AAP came to power in Delhi in February 2015 but has been caught up in a running feud with the city's centrally-nominated administrators, the Lt Governor. The AAP is also the main opposition party in both the Punjab Assembly and the municipal corporation in Delhi.

The party has four members in the Lok Sabha, all elected from Punjab, but only two are loyal to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : Strongly opposing the proposed blanket Safeguard Duty on import of solar panels and cells, the All India Solar Industries Association (AISIA) has said the levy will badly impact solar manufacturers operating out of the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) across the country.

The SEZ units are treated on par with foreign manufacturers and any Safeguard Duty will be detrimental to the Indian solar industry as a whole, said AISIA General Secretary Gyanesh Chaudhary.

AISIA also made a strong case for specific anti-dumping duty on imports from China which is flooding the Indian market with its cheap solar modules thus making domestic industry nonviable.

"If we take the case of solar modules and cells, India has 3.1 GW of installed capacity of solar cells out of which 2 GW, more than 60 per cent, is situated in SEZs. It should be noted that out of 8.3 GW of solar module manufacturing facilities, 3.8 GW are situated in SEZs. Hence, the indigenous manufactures situated in SEZ will come under the ambit of any blanket duty that will be imposed on solar cells and modules which will make them noncompetitive," Chaudhary said in a statement.

In 2016-17, the estimated demand of solar modules was around 6 GW while the demand is expected to go up to 10 GW in 2017-18.

Under the WTO framework, a member country can impose a Safeguard Duty if the increased quantity of imports may be either an absolute increase or an increase relative to domestic production which is causing serious injury or a threat of serious injury to the domestic industry. 'Serious injury' is defined as a significant overall impairment in the position of a domestic industry.

In determining whether serious injury is present, investigating authorities must evaluate all relevant factors having a bearing on the condition of the industry, include the absolute and relative rate and amount of increase in imports, the market share taken by the increased imports, as well as changes in level of sales, production, productivity, capacity, utilisation, profit and losses, and employment of the domestic industry, Chaudhary said.

India created Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in 2005 with single-window clearance and tax holidays to facilitate manufacturing in India. Under the custom laws, SEZ units are considered to be outside Indian customs territories. Thus, goods manufactured in SEZs, if sold in India, are treated deemed exports with no customs duty applicable.

Indigenous manufacturers located in SEZs will caught on the wrong foot in case a Safeguard Duty is imposed on all imported solar modules and cells.

The purpose of imposing Safeguard Duty should be to protect the domestic industry from goods which are being dumped at below-market prices, but in case of domestic manufacturers situated in SEZs, the levy yields counter-productive results. This could also lead to increase in cost that will discourage the domestic industry, Chaudhary observed.

The imposition of differential anti-dumping duty (ADD) -- higher on solar modules and lower on solar cells -- for imports from China, Taiwan and Malaysia will encourage growth of domestic manufacturing. This will help both solar cell and module manufacturers to compete in the local market and encourage the Make in India mission, he said.

Protective measures such as Safeguard Duties, ADD and Basic Customs Duty (BCD) are meant to help the domestic industry but they can cripple SEZ units and go against the theme and spirit of Make in India policy. At a time when GDP growth is declining in a constant manner, manufacturing industry has a huge role to play in India's growth story. We need to re-evaluate the duty structures to facilitate the survival and growth of domestic industry, Chaudhary added.
Beijing, Jan 8 : India's envoy to China, Gautam Bambawale, on Monday met Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Rashid Alimov and discussed the agenda and preparation of the annual summit of the grouping in China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend the summit, likely to be held in June.

Bambawale, who took over as India's envoy to China in November last year, presented his credentials to Alimov.

Both sides discussed issues of further development and strengthening of multifaceted interaction in the SCO framework in a constructive atmosphere.

There was a detailed exchange of views on the main agenda items of SCO and preparation for the upcoming events of SCO in 2018.

Bambawale assured Rashid of India's readiness to closely cooperate on all important areas of SCO activities.

India and Pakistan entered the Chinese-led grouping last year. With their admission, the number of member countries stands at eight.
Jaipur, Jan 8 : Going by the popular mood in Rajasthan, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia on Monday said Sanjay Leela Bhansali's movie 'Padmavati', now rechristened as 'Padmavat', will not be released in the cinema halls of the state.

"The sacrifice by Queen Padmini (also known as Padmavati) is a matter of honour and respect for all of us and hence we will not allow anyone to show disrespect to this honour," Scindia added further.

Queen Padmini, she said, "is not just a historical character for us, but a pride for all of us and we will not allow anyone to disrespect this pride in any away".

Scindia has also written to state Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria in this regard.

Bhansali's period saga Padmavati, which was mired in controversy, is finally going to see the light of day and it will now be released on January 25 as Padmavat across the country but not in Rajasthan.

Vasundhara Raje said the film would not be released in the state "respecting the sentiments of the people of Rajasthan".

"Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has already written to Smriti Irani (Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting) in this regard. As it touches the emotions of people of Rajasthan, we will not allow it to be released in Rajasthan," Home Minister Kataria told media persons.

Replying to a question as to why it was being released in India then, he said that the controversial part had been removed from the film.

"Although no one has seen it as of now, the CBFC (Central Board for Film Certification) and producer are claiming the same (removal of controversial part). Once it is released, the facts will come to the fore," he added.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president Ashok Parnami also said that the film Padmawat would not be released in Rajasthan.

"If there is tampering with the history in any film that affects the sentiments of people of Rajasthan, then it will not be released in the state," he added.

Later in the day, the Rajput Samaj also called a press conference to announce that the central as well as the state governments would lose a major share of their vote bank if they chose to allow the release of the controversial film.

Rajpur Sabha chief Giriraj Singh Lotwada said: "Queen Padmini is our honour and we will not allow our honour to be desecrated at any cost."

Shri Rajput Karni Sena, however, still remains firm on its stand, disallowing release of the movie. It is now demanding that the names of the characters in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie be changed.
Udaipur, Jan 8 : Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Anantha Kumar on Monday said the purpose of the Whips' conference is to deliberate on how to strengthen parliamentary democracy and its institutions.

The Minister's remarks came as he inaugurated a two-day 18th All India Whips Conference here.

In his inaugural address, Kumar said the duty of a Whip was not only to monitor the members of the party in legislatures but also to moderate and motivate them.

"Parliamentary democracy is the best form of democracy. The whole purpose of this conference is to strengthen the parliamentary democracy, its institutions and ultimately serve the people at large," Kumar said.

The conference is hosting around 90 delegates from 19 states and the Centre.

On this occasion, a coffee table book, "New India - We Resolve to Make", showcasing exhibitions held at 39 destinations on India's freedom movement from 1857 to 1947, depicting various activities initiated to attain freedom from the British, was released by Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who also presided over the inaugural session.

On the final day, the delegates will deliberate on rolling out of e-Vidhan in state legislatures to digitize and make their functioning paperless.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : A city-based NGO's study that 44 homeless have died due to cold in the past six days in the national capital led Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to blame Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal here on Monday for the deaths.

Kejriwal said the Lt. Governor did not consult the government before appointing the CEO of Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), which looks after night-shelters for the homeless in the city.

Kejriwal tweeted on Monday: "Media reporting 44 deaths of homeless due to cold. Am issuing show-cause notice to CEO, DUSIB. Negligible deaths last year. This year, LG appointed a useless officer. LG refuses to consult us before appointing officers. How do we run govt like this?"

Meanwhile, DUSIB CEO Shurbir Singh rubbished the media reports on the deaths and said that "DUSIB has no reported case of death due to cold in the city".

Different from Kejriwal's statement, AAP leader Atishi Marlena said she was "surprised as the number of deaths is consistent across all months".

"Surprised at story being run by several channels on cold wave deaths. If the number of deaths of homeless/ unidentified persons is consistent across all 12 months, how can they be attributed to the cold wave?" the leader tweeted.

Sunil Kumar Aledia of the Centre for Holistic Development (CHD), which conducted the study, said that they arrived at the number by collecting data from Zonal Integrated Police Network, Ministry of Home Affairs.
Rabat, Jan 8 : Egypt will be guest of honour at the 24th edition of Casablanca's international publishing and book fair to be held in February.

The book fair will take place from February 8-18, according to the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The programme will focus on Moroccan-Egyptian relations, the issues of culture and philosophy as well as on the works of Egyptian writer Jamal El Ghitani.

The fair will be attended by eminent writers, novelists and researchers from both the countries.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The India is awaiting an appropriate proposal from US tech giant Apple to set up a manufacturing unit in the country, Union Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Monday.

Briefing reporters here after a meeting of the Council for Trade Development and Promotion, the Minister said India was looking to manufacture more of products it currently imported and was eager to partner with Apple in this regard.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from Apple... Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu said.

"We are users, and we should be manufacturers... We should be partners of Apple," he added.

While the matter of the American iPhone maker setting up a unit in India had been discussed during Chief Executive Tim Cook's visit to India over a year ago, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Alphons Kannanthanam had, in October, also spoken favourably about the proposal.

In March last year, then Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had informed the Rajya Sabha that the government had not accepted most of the demands of the company for setting up a local unit.

Apple has sought concessions, including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for a period of 15 years. It also wants relaxation in the statutory 30 per cent local sourcing of components.
Gandhinagar, Jan 8 : Trouble seemed to brew for the Congress in Gujarat with the state's Koli community, which is a strong support base of the party, demanding its leader Kunwarji Bavaliya head the party in the assembly instead of Amreli lawmaker Paresh Dhanani.

The Koli community, which comes under the Other Backward Classes (OBC), have planned a massive rally in support of Bawaliya in Ahmedabad on Wednesday.

Dhanani has been Saturday named as the Congress Legislature Party leader, making him leader of opposition in the assembly, by Congress President Rahul Gandhi with the party saying there was consensus on his name from the elected legislators.

Bavaliya, Mohansinh Rathwa and others were also among the other contenders.

Bavaliya, who won the Jasdan constituency assembly seat after defeating his BJP rival Bharat Boghra by over 9,000 votes, however sought to distance himself from Wednesday's protest, saying that he was satisfied with the party high command's decision regarding Dhanani.

"I am satisified wih the high command's decision. The event on the 10th is entirely social and has no connection with any demand," he said.
Bengaluru, Jan 8 : Five employees of a bar-and-restaurant here died early on Monday as a blaze swept the premises leaving them no way of escape, police said. Two persons, including the establishment's manager, have been arrested for alleged violation of safety norms.

"All the five men died when the Kailash Bar & Restaurant (in the city centre) caught fire around 2.30 a.m.," Bengaluru Deputy Commissioner of Police, West M.N. Anucheth told reporters here.

"We have registered a case of criminal negligence amounting to culpable homicide against bar owner R.V. Dayashankar, 58, who obtained the trade and liquor licences to run it," he added.

Even as the bar owner was not traceable, his elder brother V.R.Prakash, 60, and manager Somashekar, 59 were arrested after police filed a case of criminal negligence amounting to culpable homicide under section 304 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), according to a police statement.

A case has also been registered against the building owner, the statement added.

"We have arrested Prakash, who has been running the bar along with his brother for the past two years, and Somashekar and are on the lookout to locate and arrest Dayashankar," Assistant Commissioner of Police (West) Niranjan Urs told IANS here.

Karnataka Director General of Fire and Emergency Services M.N. Reddi said the victims died due to asphyxia than burns, as they suffocated in the absence of fresh air, ventilation and no exit door to escape.

"Preliminary inquiry revealed that prima facie the bar had no fire extinguisher or other fire precautionary measures like an exit door, ventilation, exhaust fans or an escape way," Reddi told reporters after inspecting the spot.

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and police have been directed to inspect all bars, pubs, restaurants, hotels and eateries across the city to check for safety norms, Reddi added.

The cause of the fire was, however, still unknown even 14 hours after it broke out. "Electrical short circuit is suspected to have sparked it," said Anucheth.

Fire brigade personnel had retrieved the charred bodies of the victims after dousing the fire by 4 a.m and had later shifted them to the state-run Victoria Hospital for autopsy.

The victims were identified as Swami, 23, Prasad, 20, Mahesh, 35, Manjunath, 45, and Keerthi, 20.

Swami, Prasad, Mahesh were from Tumakuru,while Manjunath is from Hassan and Keerthi from Mandya.

State Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy, Bengaluru Development Minister K.J. George and senior police and civic body officials visited the bar and inspected its gutted premises.

"The state government has decided to give Rs 5 lakh compensation to each of the victims' bereaved families," said George.

Admitting that commercial establishments should have two doors so that customers could rush out in case of fire, the Home Minister said Kailash Bar had one shutter door.

The fire in the pub occurred about 10 days after a fire incident in a rooftop pub claimed 14 lives in Mumbai on December 29.

Bengaluru Mayor Sampath Raj, who inspected the burnt bar, told reporters that he had ordered an inquiry to find out why the victims were sleeping in the premises after downing the shutters post 1 a.m.

The BBMP has raided several bars, restaurants, pubs and eateries here after the Mumbai pub blaze.

"We have been conducting raids since January 2 to check if fire safety norms were in place. We have also shut down 10 bars and served notices to many others," said Raj.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : The Delhi High Court on Monday asked the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) to come up with an action plan to address the issue of sewage problem in the national capital, after it was informed that 45 per cent of the city is not connected to the sewage system.

A division bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar asked the DJB to inform it about the plan on availability of sewage facility in the whole of Delhi.

The plea, filed by advocate S.B. Tripathi, sought direction for the DJB to provide 100 per cent sewage facility in the entire city and the Central government to provide financial assistance to the DJB for the work.

The plea said that in 2016, the DJB had told the court that only 55 per cent of the Delhi population is covered with sewage facility and there is no sewage facility available to the remaining 45 per cent.

The DJB had also stated that sewage generated from the remaining 45 per cent areas is flowing into drains and ultimately into rivers, the lawyer added.

"Sewage of 45 per cent unsewered area is not only being wasted but also causing pollution in river Yamuna," said the plea.

The petition added: "Irrespective of the fact as to whether an area has sewage facility or not, sewage is generated from every area where people are living and only 55 per cent sewage is being recycled and the remaining 45 per cent sewage of unsewered areas is flowing into drains and ultimately into the river."

Tripathi contended that the DJB had said that there is a Sewage Treatment Plan-2031, implementation of which has also been started subject to availability of funds.

He suggested that since the Central government has been running different programmes such as Namami Gange Programme, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the DJB can seek funds from the government.

The court also sought response from Haryana and the DJB on plea seeking direction to supply 330 cusec per day water through Munak canal for Delhi.

Tripathi said as 330 cusec of water is supplied by Haryana through Delhi branch, which is "kaccha" canal, 50 per cent of water is being lost due to seepage and Delhi gets only about 170/180 cusec of water per day.

"If 330 cusec of water is supplied through Munak canal, Delhi will get about 313 cusec of water per day instead of 170/180 cusec per day, hence, Delhi will have additional 143 cusec water per day (which is about 93 MGD) at its disposal and probably 2-3 Water Treatment Plants can be made functional," said the plea.

The bench asked the Haryana government and the DJB to file an action plan on the issue and also directed the DJB to see if the "kaccha" canal be repaired without disturbing the supply of water.

The court sought records and status and condition of the "kaccha" canal and improvement which may be necessary, and posted the matter for 13.
Panaji, Jan 8 : Two Oman-bound passengers, including a foreign national were arrested by customs officials at the Dabolim international airport on Monday morning, for possession of foreign currency to the tune of Rs. 43.70 lakh.

"The search of baggage carried by the passengers resulted in recovery of foreign currency equivalent to Rs. 43.70 lakh. The said passengers had been moving suspiciously in the departure hall before check-in formalities and could not give satisfactory answers when confronted by customs sleuths," a Customs spokesperson told IANS.

The cash was found in multiple foreign currencies, including US dollars.A

The identity of the persons arrested under the Foreign Exchange Management Act have not been declared by the enforcement agency yet.

The duo were booked on an Oman Air flight and were working in tandem, the official said.
Vatican City, Jan 8 : Pope Francis on Monday appealed for international efforts towards dialogue on the Korean peninsula, Syria and other world flashpoints in a wide-ranging annual address to the ambassadors of some 185 nations.

"Peace is not built by vaunting the power of the victor over the vanquished," he said in the foreign policy speech that backed disarmament and multilateralism.

Any disputes between nations must be resolved by negotiation and agreement, not by war, the Pope said in the speech which prioritised human rights over power and profit.

"In this regard, it is of paramount importance to support every effort at dialogue on the Korean peninsula, to find new ways of overcoming the current disputes, increasing mutual trust and ensuring a peaceful future for the Korean people and the entire world," he said.

The speech also focused on conflict-wracked Syria, where a devastating civil war has raged for almost seven years.

"It is also important for the various peace initiatives aimed at helping Syria to continue, in a constructive climate of growing trust between the parties, so that the lengthy conflict that has caused such immense suffering can finally come to an end," Pope Francis said.

"Our shared hope is that, after so much destruction, the time for rebuilding has now come," he said, calling for the inclusion and protection of religious minorities including Christians "who for centuries have made an active contribution to Syria's history".

The pontiff urged a political solution to achieve "peaceful coexistence" between Israelis and Palestinians "despite the difficulties" and upheld respect for the "status quo" on the holy city of Jerusalem, calling for "every initiative be carefully weighed".

Among the lessons taught by the devastating conflict of World War I, which ended a century ago, is that war isn't deterred by the "law of fear," but rather by "calm" reason, he said.

"Future acts of aggression are not deterred by the law of fear, but rather by the power of calm reason," he said.
Patna, Jan 8 : President Ram Nath Kovind will inaugurate the 4th International Dharma-Dhamma Conference on "State and Social Order in Dharma-Dhamma Traditions" in Rajgir of Nalanda district in Bihar on January 11, officials said on Monday.

Nalanda University Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh told the media here that the varsity, in collaboration with the Centre for Study of Religion and Society, India Foundation, Ministry of External Affairs and the Vietnam Buddhist University, is organising the conference from January 11 to 13 at Rajgir International Convention Centre, Rajgir -- about 100km from here.

The event is being organised as part of the commemorative events to celebrate the Silver Jubilee year of ASEAN-India Dialogue Partnership, with active support of the Ministry of External Affairs.

Besides President Kovind, Bihar Governor Satya Pal Malik, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Sri Lankan Minister of Foreign Affairs and Development Assignments Tilak Marapana and Kingdom of Thailand's Minister for Culture Vira Rojpojchanarat, among others, will attend the conference.

The overall theme of the Conference -- State and Social Order in Dharma-Dhamma Tradition -- which aims to facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and foster harmony at the global level and also seeks to explore the shared values of the dharmic traditions that may provide the guiding light to the world and a vibrant sense of inter-connectedness.

As one of the defining principles of the human civilization, Dharma-Dhamma provided the structure upon which the broad array of human existence and cosmic life was built across the globe.

The notion of Dharma-Dhamma, in its manifold manifestations, including truth and non-violence, peace and harmony, humaneness and spiritual linkages and universal fraternity and peaceful co-existence, served as a moral compass that guided people in the Indian sub-continent through ages and continues to shape and sustain the Indian cultural ethos.
New Delhi, Jan 8 : State electricity distribution companies (discoms) that have adopted the Centre's Uday debt restructuring scheme are on the way to recovery from accumulated losses and should be able to "break even" in around two years, a senior government official said on Monday.

Power Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla told BTVI in an interview here that the discoms had brought down their aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses since the Centre's Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (Uday) for debt restructuring had been in operation for a year and hoped to "break even" by the remaining two years of the scheme.

"The results of Uday during fiscal 2016-17 have definitely been promising, the discoms' AT&C losses have come down," he said.

"Besides, their energy build-up has gone up..it has grown by over 9 per cent. Once the billing losses are reduced and the cost of power purchase goes down, discoms' will certainly reduce their losses," he said.

"The Uday trajectory envisages a three-year time frame. The first year is over, the second is going one and by the end of the third the discoms hope to break even," he added.

Bhalla said that as part of their efforts to reduce losses, the discoms are regularly "filing petitions with the regulator for tariff revision".

"UP (Uttar Pradesh) has done so recently. So tariff increases and revisions are taking place regularly.

"We are also promoting metering..not only simple metering but also smart and prepaid," he added.

State-run Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) has tendered for buying smart meters in bulk for use in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, the Secretary said.

"Presently, the various parameters on discom performance is showing improvement, but losses have not gone away. They will take another 2 years to do it," Bhalla added.
Islamabad, Jan 8 : Afghanistan has pressed Pakistan to grant up to one year extension of the stay of over 1 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Afghan diplomats said on Monday.

The demand came days after Pakistani Cabinet decided to grant only one month extension to the stay of nearly 1.4 million registered refugees in Pakistan, Xinhua reported.

The Pakistani cabinet in its January 3 meeting granted the extension in the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards that allow registered refugees to stay legally in the country.

The PoR cards expired on December 31, 2017 and under the Cabinet's new decision, registered Afghan refugees can legally stay in Pakistan until January 31.

The Cabinet had also decided that the issue of early repatriation of Afghan refugees should be raised with the UN refugee agency and with the international community.

Afghanistan Deputy Ambassador to Pakistan Zardasht Shams said over a million refugees cannot be sent back home in one month time.

Shams told Xinhua late on Monday that the Afghan government is in contact with the Pakistani officials to extend the stay of the registered refugees by one year or at least six months.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has already suspended voluntary repatriation of the refugees from Pakistan for winter break until March, he said.

The Cabinet has taken the decision at a time when the documentation of the hundreds of thousands of unregistered refugees is underway in Pakistan.

The Afghan Deputy Ambassador said about 700,000 unregistered refugees had been documented until January 5. The documentation process, which is going on in 21 centres across Pakistan, is scheduled to conclude on January 31.
Manama, Jan 9 : Highlighting how job creation in India is at an eight-year-low, Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the two threats facing India under the Narendra Modi government are inability to create jobs and the rise in the forces of hatred and division.

Addressing the Indian diaspora in Bahrain here, he said: "Tragically the conversation in our country today is not about jobs, healthcare or education. The only thing India talks about is what you are allowed to eat, who is allowed to protest and what we can say or rather what we cannot say.

"India today is free, but once again it is under threat. There are two clear threats facing our country today. The first is our government's inability to provide jobs for our people. Our main competitor China produces 50,000 jobs every 24 hours. India currently produces 400 jobs in the same amount of time."

"It is an important figure. What China does in two days, it takes India one year to do. These are not my figures, these are figures of the government of India given in the Parliament. Job creation in India is at an eight-year-low," Gandhi said in his address at an event organised by Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin.

"New investments have been lowest in 13 years. Bank credit growth has sunk to a 63-year low. To make matters worse, many in the Indian diaspora have lost hard-earned money because of arbitrary decisions like demonetisation. It landed a crippling blow to India's overall economic growth. The fact is that India can simply not afford this," he added.

Underlining India was the second-most populous country with 30,000 new youngsters coming daily into India's job market, he said that not providing education and jobs to these youngsters was "a recipe for disaster".

"The government's failure to creating jobs is resulting in tremendous anger and unrest in India. The youth are asking a very simple question, what are we going to do in future. This anger is visible in the streets and is rising rapidly," he said, adding the "tragedy" is that instead of focusing on what is critical issues like poverty alleviation, job creation and building a world class education system, "we see instead rise in the forces of hatred and division".

Gandhi also said that activists and journalists are threatened in India. "They are shot dead for expressing their views. People are killed because of their religious beliefs, Dalits are beaten into submission, judges investigating sensitive cases die under mysterious circumstances. And through all this the government has nothing to say."

Claiming India has been taken off its path of progress, he said: "We need to bring our conversation back from violence and hatred to one of progress, jobs and love between our people. And we cannot do that at home without our largest skill base on the planet - all you people in this room.

"Together, we must steer India back to its original strengths, we need to make India the centrepiece of ahimsa, of non-violence, of compassion."

He also said that he was in Bahrain for a purpose and that is "to tell you what you mean to your country".

"That you are important. To tell you that there is a serious problem at home, to tell you that you are part of the solution and that I am here to build the bridge between your world and home," he added.
Brussels, Jan 9 : European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday lauded the role played by Italy in the migration crisis and the bloc's stability pact, heaping praise on its Economy Minister Carlo Padoan.

"Italy has been extremely useful to the EU in respect of migration policy and the stability pact," Juncker told a Brussels conference on the EU's 2021-2027 budget, which Paduan also attended.

"I pay special tribute to Italy's economy minister Mr Padoan, who has been extremely cooperative," he added.

The EU made available 17 billion euros in 2016 and 2017 from its current budget to help member states like Italy - which have an external border - meet their migration policy obligations, said Juncker.
Juba, Jan 9 : South Sudan's former army chief Paul Malong Awan has rebelled against the government, officials said on Monday.

Presidential Spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said the former Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) chief of staff ordered his followers to attack government positions in several parts of the country, Xinhua reported.

Ateny said between December 26 and 28 last year, the former military chief instructed his fighters to attack the towns of Aweil and Wau, adding that last week's clashes near the capital Juba were also ordered by Malong.

"We can confirm without reservations that the audio has born the true voice of General Paul Malong, the former chief of general staff of the SPLA," Ateny said.

The government bases its accusations on leaked audio tapes circulating on social media. The audio tapes recorded in the Dinka language could not be independently verified.

"I can verify the voices of the people he spoke to. I know him (Malong); I know those who were speaking to him... therefore, there is no reason why I should not belief that it was Malong," Ateny added.

Malong was widely regarded as a key ally of President Salva Kiir after he mobilized an ethnic militia to fight for the Kiir administration.

But in May 2016, Malong was sacked and put under house arrest before being allowed to leave the country in November to seek medical attention in Kenya.

Human rights groups have on several occasions accused Malong and his militia of committing atrocities on civilians across the war-torn country.

The former army chief is also among three South Sudanese officials sanctioned by the US and Canada last year for allegedly obstructing peace efforts and benefiting from the ongoing civil war.

South Sudan has been embroiled in four years of conflict that has created one of the fastest growing refugee crises in the world.

A peace deal signed in August 2015 between the rival leaders under United Nations pressure led to the establishment of a transitional unity government, but was shattered by renewed fighting in July 2016.

The UN estimates that about 4 million South Sudanese have been displaced internally and externally.
DemandLab partners with Informatica to extend its data capabilites to enterprise business leaders Our world is increasingly driven by data and our partnership with Informatica emphasizes our commitment to unleashing datas true value."

DemandLab, a technology-focused marketing consultancy based in Philadelphia, has joined the Informatica Partner program as a Foundation Partner.

As a partner, DemandLab will leverage Informaticas deep expertise in data architecture, data integration, data quality, data governance, master data management (MDM), and reporting/analytics to enhance DemandLabs offerings for its customers and beyond. DemandLab will capitalize on Informatica's extensive product suite delivered through the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, which combines metadata intelligence and artificial intelligence, fully integrated across all aspects of data management.

The partnership will extend DemandLabs data capabilities relating to big data, data governance, data architecture, and data science. As a result, DemandLab will provide in-depth expertise to enterprise business leaders, enabling organizations to use data to generate deeper business insights, accurately track and attribute revenue to marketing activities, and specifically enable marketers to construct and deliver more rewarding customer experiences using big data analysis and storage tools.

Our world is increasingly driven by data, said DemandLabs CEO Rhoan Morgan. "And our partnership with Informatica emphasizes our commitment to unleashing datas true value. It's a great fit, perfectly complementing the data services we already provide to our clients."

Morgan said that many companies fail to capitalize on the wealth of data that flows through their organization on a daily basis. She added that the data is only valuable if it is captured, stored, validated, integrated, analyzed and monetized. "We use a mix of technical acumen, hard science, and creative thinking to create data architectures, connect systems, develop standards and implement data governance policies that reveal the true value of data so that companies can realize its potential."

As marketing becomes an increasingly data-driven discipline, we recognize the need to partner with marketing experts like DemandLab to bring solutions like the intelligent marketing data lake into enterprise organizations, said Terry Moses, regional director, North America Channel Sales, Informatica. By combining Informaticas powerful technology with DemandLabs marketing expertise, organizations will gain in-depth insight into their customers that ultimately improves customers experiences, increases sales, and delivers a greater ROI.

This partnership is a key enabler in DemandLabs vision to deliver the 360 degree view of the customer as part of its overall Revenue Ecosystem framework. DemandLab will deliver exceptional value to organizations looking to better leverage data that powers digital transformation.

About DemandLab

DemandLab is a technology-focused marketing consultancy that accelerates revenue for its clients by aligning marketing, sales, and customer success functions through customized strategic solutions that leverage system architecture, data science and analytics, and end-to-end customer journeys. With solutions designed to scale, DemandLab helps clients advance their digital transformation strategy and create competitive differentiation that advances business goals and drives revenue. Learn more about this award-winning consultancy at http://www.demandlab.com.

Note: Informatica and Intelligent Data Platform are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.
"It is always wonderful news when an award-winning company such as Orases re-commits itself to our county through expansion, new investment and job creation, Helen Propheter, Director, Frederick County Office of Economic Development.

Orases, Marylands top award-winning custom software development company, announces plans today to move into a new office space in the burgeoning Industry Lane business district. Co-founders Nick Damoulakis and Amy Damoulakis signed an agreement for a nearly 10,000-square-foot office located at 5728 Industry Lane. The firm plans to renovate the original building plans with a custom design in time for an April 2018 occupancy.

Were experiencing tremendous growth as an organization and it was time to find a larger space to accommodate our team - a space we can call our own that better reflects the intensely creative and collaborative way we work, said Damoulakis, Orases President. This is a great opportunity for us to build our own unique presence in one of the most exciting cities in Maryland  a presence that represents the bold passion of Orases and our commitment to remaining in the Frederick County area.

It is always wonderful news when an award-winning company such as Orases re-commits itself to our county through expansion, new investment and job creation, said Helen Propheter, Director of Frederick County Office of Economic Development. As part of Frederick County's diverse corporate community, I congratulate them on their continued growth.

Orases has always called Frederick home. The firm inhabited its current office at 7101 Guilford Drive since 2008, when the agency moved from the SOMAR building in downtown Frederick which they had occupied from 2004 to 2008. Orases leadership team spent several months evaluating options for the firms office expansion, including remaining in its current location, before choosing the single standing building opportunity at 5728 Industry Lane, an off-market property presented by Tony "C" Checchia, President of Verita Real Estate. The firm has partnered with Archive Design Services and Summit Construction to design a space that conveys Orases vibrant energy and creative personality and that provides a customized, innovative work environment for its current 25 member team. The building will include space for future expansion, as the company expects double-digit growth by 2020 and beyond. It will be a total contrast from what Orases has occupied in the past  a distinct differentiator being a UI/UX Lab component and public Meet Up space for other tech companies to use will be announced in the near future. The firm plans to invest approximately $2 million in the project.

We have the best employeestheyre innovative, driven, and continuously push the limits of creativity and hard workwhich is why exceptional companies continue to seek out our firm, said Nick Damoulakis, Orases co-founder and President. Were staying ahead of workplace trends by creating an innovative environment that will compliment our people, our culture and our process, allowing us to continue to revolutionize our clients businesses on a national and global scale.
KWizCom, Platinum Sponsor of SharePoint Fest DC

SharePoint Fest confirmed KWizCom as a Platinum Sponsor of the conference. KWizCom Corporation is a leading developer of SharePoint Forms, Workflows, Wiki, Mobile as well as numerous other turn-key SharePoint add-ons and apps for Office 365.

KWizCom invites the attendees of the conference to visit the companys booth where they will meet the team and be able to discuss their SharePoint requirements and find solutions for their SharePoint challenges. Additionally, the attendees visiting KWizCom booth will get the opportunity to play fun and simple Forms Superhero trivia games and win gift cards and other prizes, while familiarizing themselves with the groundbreaking add-ons and SharePoint apps KWizCom offers.

At SharePoint Fest DC, an exclusive SharePoint and Office 365 technology conference, attendees will learn from the brightest minds in the SharePoint universe! SharePoint Fest DC will begin with two days of pre-conference workshops on March 26 and March 27, followed by a three-day conference (including an expo hall) March 28 - 30.

About KWizCom

Since 2005, KWizCom has provided innovative solutions and services to make SharePoint even better for over 7,000 companies worldwide. KWizCom is a leading provider of SharePoint Forms, Mobile, Wiki solutions, and over 70 other add-ons for SharePoint on-premises and apps for Office 365. KWizCom is a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner is headquartered in Toronto, Canada to find out more about the company visit http://www.kwizcom.com.

About SharePoint Fest

The SharePoint Fest series will be entering their 8th year in 2018. SharePoint Fest DC offers a three-day conference (with two optional pre-conference workshop days) that brings together SharePoint enthusiasts and practitioners, with many of the leading SharePoint experts and solution providers in the country.

Attend SharePoint Fest DC where attendees will be able to attend workshops and seminars  taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft MCM's and MVPs  covering Enterprise Content Management, Implementation/Administration, Business Value, Search, Business Intelligence, Office 365 and SharePoint Development. Attendees will be able to choose one complete learning track or mix and match based on what content best meets their current needs.

At SharePoint Fest DC, there will be sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, business analysts, information architects, and knowledge workers, which will ensure that attendees walk away with as much knowledge as they desire to truly leverage SharePoint in their current environment.

Web Site: http://www.sharepointfest.com/DC
Award recognition can be the key to turning a page-turner fiction into a bestselling novel. Outskirts Press, the No. 1-rated self-publishing company according to Top Consumer Reviews, wants to help independent authors get the recognition they deserve with a win in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. The deadline to register through Outskirts Press is Jan. 12, 2018.

Authors who published in 2016, 2017 or 2018 are eligible to compete against others in the prestigious annual book competition, which recognizes excellence in independently published books. When authors register by January 12, Outskirts Press will ensure they are entered on time according to competition rules, and in one or more of the 70 book categories that offer the best shot at winning. A Next Generation Indie Book Award win comes with the following prizes:



Up to $1,500 in cash prizes and a trophy

Recognition as an award-winning author

Listing in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards Catalog distributed to thousands of readers and media

Invitation to Gala Awards Ceremony

New York literary agent review for top award winners

In addition to these incentives, Outskirts Press will give winning authors a free award-win seal for their book cover and publicity on the Outskirts Press Self-Publishing News blog and all social media channels. To submit a book for a Next Generation Indie Book Award, Outskirts Press authors should log into their Publishing Center to add the option to their shopping cart  Outskirts Press will handle the rest

For more information about this and other self-publishing and book marketing services from Outskirts Press, visit the company at http://www.OutskirtsPress.com.

About Outskirts Press Inc.: Outskirts Press helps authors develop and publish high-quality books by offering exceptional design, printing, publishing, distribution and book marketing services. Top Consumer Reviews ranks Outskirts Press No. 1 because they are passionate about delivering outstanding customer service, affordable pricing, industry-leading royalties, and a team of hands-on, U.S.-based publishing experts. At http://www.outskirtspress.com authors can publish their book, their way, today.

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MonarchFx & NFI Signing I am excited to announce our partnership with NFI and to announce our first location in Chino. This state-of-the-art fulfillment center will allow us to provide huge benefits to our clients and their customers.

MonarchFx, a Tompkins International company, partners with leading supply chain solutions provider, NFI, to select the first Rapid Deployment MonarchFx Center (RDMC), located in Chino, California. The RDMC is imbedded within the NFI distribution center campus, having the capacity to provide 19 million consumers with same day delivery, 22 million with one-day delivery, and 51 million with two-day delivery.

Executives from MonarchFx and NFI came together recently to sign the agreement to begin implementation of the RDMC. The Chino location is the first of five locations around the United States, slated to open within the next six months.

The Chino RDMC will include Tompkins Robotics, the SensorThink IoT platform, the Softeon technology platform, and the Tompkins Warehouse Execution System, all working together in a seamless manner. Along with the NFI team, this solution provides a powerful unichannel distributed logistics capability.

MonarchFx was created to give brands and retailers a highly credible fulfillment solution, superior to other alternatives. MonarchFx provides quality services at reasonable prices, requiring low capital investment.

I am excited to announce our partnership with NFI and to announce our first location in Chino. This state-of-the-art fulfillment center will allow us to provide huge benefits to our clients and their customers, stated Jim Tompkins, CEO, MonarchFx.

MonarchFxs decision to partner with NFI is a validation of the world-class supply chain solutions we provide, stated Ike Brown, Vice Chairman and President, NFI. Our combined expertise and vision will deliver new levels of innovation that will help our clients leverage their supply chains to enhance the customer experience.

About MonarchFx

MonarchFx is the coming together of world class supply chain and logistics companies with world class sellers of products to form a reinvented logistics ecosystem that is new, smart, and innovative. MonarchFx offers a local automated fulfillment network and local/regional final delivery services at a competitive price, providing great customer service. The vision of MonarchFx is to be the preferred direct-to-consumer logistics provider, operating with the lowest cost, while delivering the highest levels of customer service, and providing superior value for MonarchFx sellers. The mission of MonarchFx is to create, build, and manage a substantial logistics ecosystem that establishes MonarchFx partners to become the preferred unichannel logistics solution in the United States. For more information about MonarchFx, visit: http://www.monarchfxgo.com.

About NFI

NFI is a fully integrated North American supply chain solutions provider headquartered in Cherry Hill, N.J. Privately held by the Brown family since its inception in 1932, NFI generates nearly $2 billion in annual revenue and employs nearly 10,000 associates. NFI owns facilities globally and operates 41.5 million square feet of warehouse and distribution space. Its dedicated and drayage fleet consists of over 4,000 tractors and 8,300 trailers, operated by more than 2,600 company drivers and 1,600 owner operators. Its business lines include dedicated transportation, warehousing, intermodal, brokerage, transportation management, global logistics, drayage, and commercial real estate services. For more information about NFI, visit http://www.nfiindustries.com or call 1-877-NFI-3777.
MediStreams fills the niche of remittance processing in the revenue cycle of healthcare providers.

Healthcare is likely the most difficult example of accounts receivable on the planet. In other industries, invoices go out, and either some or all the money for that invoice comes back and gets posted. Then you move on.

In healthcare, you almost never receive the amount invoiced. For example, you go to the doctor and he does something that is billed to an insurance company at $100. What comes back is a check for $27, along with two pages explaining why.

That explanation of benefits (EOB) is very difficult to parse to determine what was denied, what was reduced due to provider contracts, what part is the responsibility of the patient to pay and so on. It all must be reconciled back to the amount of the check before posting to the practice management system at the hospital.

Not only do payments have to match the claims, but also healthcare billers must reconcile the days deposits to the amount of cash that came into the bank. They cannot post electronic information that has not been funded.

MediStreams, a healthcare revenue cycle management (HRCM) solution fills the niche of remittance processing in the revenue cycle of healthcare providers. The companys HIPAA-compliant solutions dramatically lower the cost of processing payments in the billing office where often a $2 human driven process can be reduced by 75 percent or more for paper payments.

IBM Cloud for redundancy

Initially, MediStreams owned all its hardware and infrastructure and was more than proficient in managing it. So when the idea of cloud-based services and infrastructure came along, the company wasnt quick to go there.

MediStreams took a wait-and-see approach. As the technology matured, it became obvious that service providers such as IBM, who make their living by keeping hardware up and running, could offer us more reliability and scalability at less cost than we could continue doing for ourselves. Buying into the cloud is exactly the concept that MediStreams sells its own customers: Why process payments in house, when MediStreams can do it in our cloud more efficiently? We simply followed our own advice.

As MediStreams grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a multisite solution of dedicated servers for redundancy, disaster recovery and compliance. In the world where HIPAA strictly governs the protection of patient healthcare information, auditors frown on companies that co-mingle data on cloud-based services where multitenancy is used to offer cut rate pricing.

With IBM, we know we are the only company using the capacity and resources of the hardware on which we sit. Yet, the cost per virtual server remains market competitive as we deploy dozens of servers on each physical server.

The IBM Cloud supports the entire MediStreams architecture of networking and servers in a virtualized environment with subscription based pricing. Virtualization with VMware allows us to quickly deploy servers with the correct amount of CPU power and data storage needed.

Enjoying the benefits of IBM Cloud

The MediStreams migration to the IBM Cloud is going smoothly. We remain impressed at the level of assistance we receive from IBM. They come to the table with the human and technical resources to help us solve problems.

Our growth demands that we have a scalable infrastructure. MediStreams is confident that it can rely on the IBM team to deliver on-demand cloud infrastructure that keeps up with our rapidly expanding enterprise.

The services that MediStreams sells to our customers come with a promise of process improvement. To deliver on that promise, MediStreams must embrace that same goal of operational efficiency as we build our solutions. Moving from a traditional data center to the IBM Cloud has been pivotal in helping us go to market with a rock-solid solution that can grow rapidly, but keep incremental operating costs in sync with new revenues instead of incurring costly capital expenditures in advance of that growth.

Being able to buy infrastructure by the slice is one of the competitive advantages that allows us to win business from our competition.

As a bonus, we enjoy a compliance win by having IBM as a partner with their model of single tenant hardware. And MediStreams enjoys the reputation by association gained when the IBM name is a part of our story. This speaks volumes to our healthcare customers that MediStreams is a company that takes seriously the security and protection of their sensitive data.

About MediStreams

MediStreams, LLC, a cloud based solutions company specializing in Streamlining the Complex Remittance Process, offers a suite of products and services to automate the entire remittance payment process. For more information visit http://www.MediStreams.com or call 866-836-2835.

Written by: James Coyle, CEO, MediStreams
Debra Box, Executive Director Support KC "Through our partnership with Shipley Communications, we are excited to offer this opportunity for our clients to do a deeper dive into their fund development and communications practices and learn new techniques to support them in these efforts, says Debra Box, executive director at Support KC.

Shipley Communications, LLC has announced that it is collaborating with Support KC to organize workshops, called Mission Ready Monday, tailored to nonprofits business needs in Kansas City metro area. These workshops will be held on Mondays each month for one-hour from 4 to 5 p.m. The workshops will start on Jan.22, 2018 and will be conducted through December, 2018.

The first workshop in this series of Mission Ready Monday is on Jan. 22. The workshop will focus on how to schedule grants and effectively manage a grants pipeline.

Each workshop will be designed around nonprofits needs to find solutions for nonprofit business. Workshops are focused on grants, successful event planning; creating time for building strategy; how to build successful corporate relationships and successful branding. Each workshop is limited to five participants and cost $56.00. To apply, contact Ellen Bergstrom at Support KC.

The workshops are:

Jan. 22, 2018 - Building a Grants Management Calendar

Get ahead of your grants and get organized. This session will give you tips on how to schedule grants and effectively manage your grants pipeline. Create a Grant Workflow to visualize when (Letters of Intent) LOIs are due and to give your team a predictable schedule.

Feb. 12, 2018 - Fit or Fantasy: Reviewing Foundation Guidelines to Identify Good Prospects.

Sometimes you have to swipe right. Work to create a Grant matrix so you can make a quick, mission-based decision.

March 5, 2018 - Event Planning 101.

Tips for creating, managing and tailoring a successful (and profitable) event to your audience. Not everyone wants a gala  some people like goat yoga. Create events that your audience will love.

April 9, 2018 - Make some time - No really make some time.

Make some Time - No really make some time. How to set time aside for strategy, making connections and personally thanking donors.

May 7, 2018 - Grant Reporting Dos and Donts.

Grant Reporting should not be anxiety inducing especially if you are following your Grant Management Calendar. Create an easy to follow grant report that is clean, concise and foundation ready.

June 11, 2018 - Branding 101.

Let your end user be the guide. How branding can support mission success. We will review some nonprofit branding disasters.

July 23, 2018 - How to give feedback.

Learn how to give direct feedback for employee improvement and success. Learn how to help employees and your mission grow.

August 13, 2018 - Sponsors Needed.

A guide to building successful corporate relationships.

September 17, 2018 - Government Grants.

Ready for federal funding? How to get ready to apply for these grants.

October 22, 2018 - Once Upon a Time: Telling your story and making it stick.

Stories are great -- if we can get people to remember them. How to make a story stick.

November 19, 2018 - Maintaining Your Social Media

What channel, what message and how to stay focused.

December, 2018 - Program Evaluation (Date TBD)

Writing realistic outcomes that are meaningful for the client, foundation, board and donor.

Fund development and communications are critical to nonprofit success, says Debra Box, executive director at Support KC. Through our partnership with Shipley Communications, we are excited to offer this opportunity for our clients to do a deeper dive into their fund development and communications practices and learn new techniques to support them in these efforts, adds Box.

The workshops will help train the nonprofit personnel in day to day management of business tasks such as grant management, grant reporting, storytelling, program evaluation, social media and branding so they can become more efficient in such tasks and have time to focus on strategy and their missions.

Support KC

Support KC provides nonprofit organizations with business and development expertise, empowering them to focus on their missions. We help organizations with limited resources and staff in necessary tasks such as accounting, data management, fundraising and managing strategy. By helping manage these tasks, Support KC helps nonprofits do what they do best, change lives. And in the process of helping, we too change lives...behind the scenes. For more information visit http://www.supportkc.org.

Shipley Communications, LLC

Shipley Communications specializes in you. Your company, your brand and your market. We are your go-to experts for public relations, market strategy, speech writing, fundraising, public engagement, campaign planning and crisis communication. At Shipley Communications, we believe in communication that is simple, honest and has the power to change the world.For more information, please visit http://www.shipleycommunications.org.
Dr. Amarik Singh Welcomes Patients with Bleeding Gums in Elmhurst, IL, for Peri-Implantitis Treatment Laser therapy can eliminate bacteria, and regenerate the gum and the bone that support the dental implant.

Respected periodontist, Dr. Amarik Singh, now accepts new patients with swollen or bleeding gums in Elmhurst, IL, with or without a referral to receive a peri-implantitis consultation at his state-of-the-art practice in Oak Brook. When infection attacks the area around a dental implant, the chance of the implant failing is increased as bone and gum tissue is destroyed. Dr. Singh offers the minimally invasive REPaiR Implant protocol, to treat infection around dental implants.

If bacteria infects the gum and the bone that supports a dental implant, a disease will form known as peri-implantitis. Peri-implantitis, however, can be treated with laser therapy, said Dr. Singh. Today with advancements in dental technology and the use of minimally invasive laser techniques, we are able to vaporize the bacteria that affects the gum and the bone that holds the implant in the mouth. And as a result, eliminate the bacteria and more importantly, regenerate the gum and the bone that support the dental implant.

Symptoms of peri-implantitis are similar to that of periodontal (gum) disease, including gum recession, bad breath, or bleeding gums, around the site of a dental implant. The laser REPaiR treatment provides gentle and effective treatment for peri-implantitis. The laser light eliminates bacteria without harming healthy tissues. Another major benefit of REPaiR is that it assists in the regeneration of gum and bone tissue that surrounds the dental implant. Healthy attachment of gum and bone tissue, as well as proper at-home care, ensures dental implants last for many years.

Dr. Singh is a leading periodontist in the Chicago area. He remains on the cutting-edge for technologies to provide an improved patient experience and more effective treatment techniques. Due to his extensive experience in complex cases and technology, Dr. Singh is a trusted authority in periodontology in the Chicago area as well as across the country.

Those with symptoms of peri-implantitis, such as swollen and bleeding gums in Elmhurst, IL and surrounding areas, are encouraged to call Dr. Singh for a consultation to receive the REPaiR Implant protocol. His Oak Brook practice, Periodontal Implant Associates, can be reached at 630-424-9404 or by visiting http://www.pidentists.com.

About the Doctor

Periodontal Implant Associates is a periodontal practice offering personalized dental care for patients in Oak Brook, IL and the Chicago area. After graduating from Northwestern University Dental School, Dr. Amarik Singh went on to obtain his Specialty Certificate in Periodontics and earn his Masters from Northwestern University. Dr. Singh is deeply committed to continuing education and prides himself on remaining on the cutting-edge of the newest techniques and technology in dentistry. Dr. Singh has placed over 15,000 dental implants using minimally invasive techniques and is part of an elite group of dental professionals at the forefront of the Chao Pinhole Surgical Technique (PST), a revolutionary new approach to repairing gum recession. To learn more about the periodontal services available at Periodontal Implant Associates, please visit http://www.pidentists.com or call 630-424-9404.
Z-Medica, LLC, a leading developer and marketer of hemostatic devices, announces today that QuikClot Control+ is now commercially available. The announcement is being made in advance of the 2018 EAST Annual Scientific Assembly of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST), January 9-13 at the Disney Contemporary Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, where Z-Medica will be exhibiting.

Cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June of 2017 under the de novo classification process, QuikClot Control+ is the first and only hemostatic dressing cleared for temporary control of internal organ space bleeding for patients displaying class III or class IV bleeding.

Full commercial availability of QuikClot Control+ adds an additional life-saving tool to the arsenal of Z-Medica products that surgeons can use to help save lives and fill the unmet need of hospitals across the country, says Z-Medica President and CEO Stephen J. Fanning. Uncontrolled bleeding continues to be a major cause of preventable deaths. Devices like QuikClot Control+ can improve hemorrhage control, potentially savings lives and reducing healthcare costs.

QuikClot Control+ is indicated for temporary control of internal organ space bleeding for patients displaying class III or class IV bleeding. It may also be used to control severely bleeding wounds such as surgical wounds and traumatic injuries.

What: Official launch of QuikClot Control+

When: January 9-13, 2018

Where: 2018 EAST Annual Scientific Assembly of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST), January 9-13 at the Disney Contemporary Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.  Booth 101

About Z-Medica, LLC

Z-Medica, LLC is a privately-held medical device manufacturer based in Wallingford, CT that is focused on the development, sale, and marketing of innovative hemorrhage control products for healthcare providers, military personnel, the law enforcement community, first responders, and consumers around the globe. For over a decade, Z-Medica has helped save lives and improve medical outcomes with a growing portfolio of QuikClot hemostatic products that includes the recently FDA-cleared QuikClot Control+, 4x4 Hemostatic Dressing, Radial, Interventional, Combat Gauze, Belt Trauma Kit, and Bleeding Control Bag. QuikClot products are manufactured in the United States. For more information, visit QuikClot.com and Z-Medica.com. Follow us on Twitter @QuikClot and Facebook @QuikClotFans.

Company Contact:

David Schemelia, Senior Vice President

Tiberend Strategic Advisors

dschemelia(at)tiberend(dot)com

212-375-2686 office

609-468-9325 mobile
We look forward to the formal launch of Power 10 Parts at Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week 2018 in Las Vegas.  Annik Smith, President of The Universal Group

A New Year, A New Brand from The Universal Group  Power 10 Parts.

The Universal Group, LLC announces today the launch of its new Power 10 Parts brand of products. Like all Universal Group products, Power 10 Parts are premium aftermarket parts designed and manufactured to meet and exceed Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) requirements. The new Power 10 Parts brand will provide comprehensive coverage for the light, medium and heavy-duty truck and trailer parts markets.

Power 10 Parts will provide hundreds of products like torque rods, brake chambers, air springs, leaf springs and other chassis parts for the truck and trailer industries. Its mission  to create a trusted brand to serve a wide variety of suspension, steering, and brake needs for servicing all makes of vehicles.

Annik Smith, President of The Universal Group, said, The Universal Group has grown dramatically in the last three years and greatly expanded its product range, we wanted to introduce a new brand name that would create a stronger and clearer presence in both new and existing markets. We look forward to the formal launch of Power 10 Parts at Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week 2018 in Las Vegas.

About The Universal Group, LLC

The Universal Group, LLC, was founded in 1979 and is headquartered in Pennsauken, New Jersey. The Universal Group is a leading national distributor for the truck and trailer industry.
Dr. Stanley and I are honored to have been chosen as the only two dentists on the NCADV Advisory Council. Being part of a team of experts committed to helping survivors of domestic abuse recover and move on is a real reward for us, says cosmetic dentist Matt Nejad of Helm Nejad Stanley Dentistry.

Dr. Matt Nejad and Dr. Kyle Stanley of Helm Nejad Stanley Dentistry have been appointed to the Cosmetic and Reconstructive Support Medical Advisory Council of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV). This is a highly-esteemed honor that is reserved for the most qualified and respected doctors. The program works in collaboration with the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) and benefits domestic abuse survivors who would otherwise be unable to afford such crucial reconstructive care.

Dr. Stanley and I are honored to have been chosen as the only two dentists on the NCADV Advisory Council, stated leading cosmetic dentist Matt Nejad of Helm Nejad Stanley Dentistry. "Being part of a team of experts committed to helping survivors of domestic abuse recover and move on with their lives is a real reward for us. This is an excellent opportunity to give back and make dramatic improvements in the lives of people in real need. We are very excited to provide our expertise in dental rehabilitation, and in some cases, dental surgery and full-mouth reconstruction."

The NCADV is the voice of victims and survivors who have experienced domestic abuse. The coalition is a nationally recognized voice for "zero tolerance" for domestic violence. To drive this movement, the NCADV believes in taking steps to affect public policy, helping others understand the impact of domestic violence and providing programs and educational opportunities to promote awareness of domestic abuse.

As newly elected members of the council, Drs. Nejad and Stanley will help promote the Cosmetic & Reconstructive Support (CRS) Program of the NCADV, which offers survivors the needed cosmetic surgery or reconstructive surgeries to repair head, mouth, neck and facial injuries caused by an abusive partner.

Domestic abuse and violence, including physical assault, battery and murder, continues to be a serious problem in the United States. According to NCADV statistics, one person every three seconds is physically abused by an intimate partner, which equates to more than 10 million Americans. Furthermore, it is estimated that fully one in four of women and one in eight men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner. The Cosmetic & Reconstructive Support (CRS) Program of NCADV works with facial plastic surgeons from across the country who volunteer their services to assist survivors in removing the physical scars of abuse.

About Drs. Nejad and Stanley

Dr. Matt Nejad is the leading partner at Helm Nejad Stanley dental practice in Beverly Hills. He is renowned for his advanced biomimetic and cosmetic dentistry expertise. Dr. Nejad grew up in Calabasas, California and graduated from the prestigious University of Southern California School of Dentistry  world renowned for its advanced cosmetic and restorative training. During his tenure, Dr. Nejad was selected to work with dental pioneer, Dr. Pascal Magne. He was the youngest dentist to become a member of the USC faculty.

Dr. Kyle Stanley, also a partner at Helm Nejad Stanley, focuses on restoring and reconstructing missing teeth and enhancing smiles through gum and implant surgery. Dr. Stanley is also a dedicated researcher who has published in top international dental journals, and a Key Opinion Leader for leading dental implant companies, helping to teach the latest and best techniques, and develop new and improved products. A professor at the University of Southern California School of Dentistry, Dr. Stanley lectures on digital implant treatment planning.

To learn more about The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence please visit ncadv.org or call 800- SAFE (7233).

To learn more about Helm Nejad Stanley Dentistry please visit HNSdentistry.com or call 310 278-0440.
"It was clear that they were extremely grateful for what was happening in their area and embraced the Water Mission team for what they were doing in their village.

Employees of DATAMARK, a global provider of Business Process Services (BPS) and Contact Center Services, recently teamed up with Water Mission, a Christian engineering nonprofit ministry that builds sustainable safe water solutions in developing countries and disaster areas, to build latrines for a community in Xanil, Chiapas Mexico. For this particular effort, Employees of multiple DATAMARK operational facilities competed to raise money to facilitate the construction of a water pump and pipeline to reach a supplementary water source to sustain year-round safe water for drinking and household use to about 2,200 inhabitants of this region.

In July, the fundraising efforts began and generated an overwhelming amount of funds, exceeding the target dollar amount for the event. The money collected was directly used to support the clean water system and community latrines for life. Additionally, four top-fundraising employees from DATAMARK received the opportunity to travel to Xanil to personally observe the latrine projects alongside a team from Water Mission that is currently stationed in Chiapas.

Last month, DATAMARKs winning team traveled from El Paso, Texas to Palenque, Mexico where they journeyed by bus for 1.5 hours into the indigenous village of Xanil. We took some time to understand how the members of the community worked to maintain the water filtration system and how they worked to develop a safe drinking water education and delivery system, said Executive Services Administrator, Michelle Hayes. The team saw the various phases of the latrines, as there were several in the neighborhood either already built or in the process of being built. They also took part in a community education event that involved instruction on sanitary practices, with respect to hand-washing and understanding the importance of safe drinking habits. They did this through a fun clown show for the children and played games that incorporated drinking water and hand washing techniques. Additionally, the event allowed the team to witness and share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the interesting revelations of this trip was the communities unease about accepting the safe drinking water; many families did not take to it immediately. Because the water goes through various processes of filtration to eliminate bacteria and other harmful elements, the taste was hard for them to accept. They preferred the river or rain water because it was what they have been accustomed to and it took Water Mission many months of reaching out and educating the community on the importance of drinking clean water. However, this educational component continues to be something the Water Mission team strives to work toward with the community and in spite of their initial hesitation, the people of Xanil are very welcoming and embrace the support of Water Mission and their efforts.

Personally, the opportunity to visit the community of Xanil was life changing, stated Michelle Hayes. The families were so warm and welcoming and despite not being able to speak the language of Tzeltal, it was clear that they were extremely grateful for what was happening in their area and embraced the Water Mission team for what they were doing in their village.

To learn more about the water crisis and Water Missions solutions and efforts, visit watermission.org.

About DATAMARK

DATAMARK, Inc. is a leading business process outsourcing company specializing in high-volume digital mailroom management, document processing/document management, contact center services, and process improvement consulting for Fortune 500 companies and other large enterprises.

Headquartered in El Paso, Texas, DATAMARK employs nearly 2,500 people in its U.S., Mexico, and India facilities. For more information, visit http://www.datamark.net or contact Marketing Manager Martin Rocha at info.datamark.net.
We went through a rigorous search for the best solution and we felt that Xybions partnership and their industry leading Pristima software platform is the right fit for our organization.

Xybion Corporation, a US-based global technology solutions provider for companies operating in the highly regulated industries, announced today that Level Biotechnology Inc., a leading Taiwan-based biotechnology company, has signed a software subscription agreement for Pristima, Xybions flagship pre-clinical solution, and Savante, its popular module for production of FDA compliant SEND submissions.

This agreement follows an extensive analysis of all competitors in the preclinical space and allows Level Biotechnology Inc. to leverage Pristimas core components, such as Clinical Pathology, Animal Room, Necropsy Room, and Histopathology to support its pre-clinical laboratory services.

Xybion will be providing Pristima Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, utilizing hosted (private cloud) services from its Singapore data center. Importantly, Pristima will be interfaced to support real-time communications with clinical pathology instruments at Level Biotechnology. Level Biotechnology was looking for a comprehensive integrated SaaS solution, which would help us push compliance across our business functions and allow us to optimize our pre-clinical operations, stated Emerson Chiu, President of Level Biotechnology. We went through a rigorous search for the best solution and we felt that Xybions partnership and their industry leading Pristima software platform is the right fit for our organization.

Expressing confidence in this partnership, Carlos Frade, Vice President of Preclinical R&D Solutions at Xybion said, We are excited about being selected by Level Biotechnology for our pre-clinical suite. I am confident in Xybions decades of expertise in the pre-clinical market and certain that deployment of our Pristima and Savante solutions will immediately benefit Level Biotechnologys efficiency, productivity and reporting timelines.

Xybions Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Pradip Banerjee went on to say At Xybion, we strive to earn the trust and support of our clients and create a lasting position of valued partner. Dr. Banerjee continued, We see Xybions footprint and reputation expanding globally and seek to set an industry benchmark in the APAC market. We look forward to a long-term business relationship with Level Biotechnology.

About Xybion Corporation

Xybion is the leading provider of software, services and consulting for global corporations operating in highly regulated industries. Our unique solutions focus on regulatory compliance, GRC, quality management, GLP, integrated preclinical lab management, early-stage drug discovery, content migration and systems validation. Xybion specializes in helping companies improve their overall compliance processes and provides a complete view into organizational risk across global organizational models.

Xybion's combination of software, business process management, services, validation, and staffing enables us to cover a broad spectrum of critical business needs for companies and we deliver our solutions on a global scale. Since its founding in 1977, Xybion Corporation has supported, through software, services and consulting, 100% of the top 20 global life sciences companies. Our leadership in this dynamic and ever-changing industry has been a cornerstone of our high-value reputation.

About Level Biotechnology Inc.,

Founded in 1989, Level Biotechnology Inc. has been providing the best pre-clinical CRO services and end-to-end solution for biomedical research and drug development in Taiwan. Apparently, its CRO services support more than 9,900 square yards of laboratory space.
RidgeCrest Herbals' 2018 Almanac The Almanac captures the company's character, personality, and culture delightfully. Customers have raved about the stylishly old-fashioned booklet that is a window into the culture of a DIY homesteading, outdoor-loving, family-friendly company in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains."

RidgeCrest Herbals, the maker of the #1 selling natural herbal lung formula, ClearLungs, is happy to announce the release of the third annual RidgeCrest Herbals Almanac.

Nichole Carver, RidgeCrest Herbals' Chief Marketing Officer, says, "The Almanac has always been inspired by the people we love, the things we love, and, ultimately, our love of herbal traditions both new and old. Because it is our passion, we hope to inspire you to continually seek out knowledge and to learn and apply the tools so that this sacred information isn't ever forgotten. Also, it's fun and awesome at the same time. It's FAWESOME!"

In 2016, RidgeCrest Herbals printed its first Almanac with huge success. The reception of the Almanac exceeded all expectations, and the popularity led to a twelve-fold print increase for 2017. The 2018 Almanac marks continued growth with a 25,000 copy print. Will Christensen, RidgeCrest Herbals' President and the creative force behind the Almanac concept notes, "We believe in transparency in every aspect of what we do, and the Almanac acts as a way to share ourselves and our dedication with our customers. This increased print will help us do that. The first article in our Almanac, written by our Chief Botanical Officer Brittini Gehring, lays out our commitment to Quality, Testing, and Transparency. It acts as our first volley as we work towards 100% transparency with our customers. It is going to be a major endeavor and will take some time, but they can look forward to continued efforts throughout 2018 and beyond to increase the amount of information made public by RidgeCrest so our customers can know absolutely everything about the products they are using for their health."

The Almanac captures the company's character, personality, and culture delightfully. Customers have raved about the stylishly old-fashioned booklet with up-to-date content that acts as a window into the culture of a DIY homesteading, outdoor-loving, family-friendly company in the shadows of the Wasatch mountains. RidgeCrest Herbals' CEO, Matt Warnock, says, "We are a pretty close company, and we feel that moral and spiritual values are important. The Almanac hopefully acts as a reflection of our dedication." The Almanac provides customers with a planning calendar packed with helpful tips, articles, recipes, and beautiful photographs, compliments of RidgeCrest Herbals' team. It also has information on monthly sales, product ingredients, and more.

RidgeCrest Herbals has partnered with Whole Foods Magazine for their January 2018 edition, and a copy of the Almanac has been distributed to Whole Foods Magazine subscribers along with their regular January magazine. Heather Wainer, Whole Foods Magazine publisher, commented, "We are honored to once again be able to bring you the RidgeCrest Herbals' Almanac with the January issue of Whole Foods Magazine. We love working with all our friends at RidgeCrest and are glad that we can bring our readers such a useful, fun tool. It is obvious when you go through the pages how much work, love, and creativity went into the Almanac from every employee at RidgeCrest, in a way that reflects exactly how we feel about each issue of Whole Foods Magazine."

In addition, a copy of the Almanac is distributed to RidgeCrests' retailers throughout the country for the enjoyment of their employees and is available to the public online at RCHerbals.com. A hard copy can be mailed to individual customers by calling 800-242-4649 and are often available at RidgeCrests' booth at trade shows.
We look forward to a long term partnership with the innovative team at WaterStation Technology.

ACT Capital Advisors (ACT) is pleased to announce that is has served as the financial advisor to WaterStation Technology (WST) in its debt refinancing by KeyBank N.A. Based in Everett, Washington, WST is a provider of eco-friendly, self-serve, water vending machines. The forward-thinking technologies used in these systems produce a premium water that is more affordable than most bottled water and much better for the environment.

Founded in 2012, WSTs technology creates virtual spring water through a natural mineralization process. The companys patent-pending WST-700 takes water through a six-step process that delivers highly purified, silky smooth drinking water in one, three and five-gallon increments. WST is growing rapidly as it succeeds on its mission to provide the highest quality water to communities throughout the U.S.

WST approached ACT to assist them in securing growth capital. The company was open to equity, private debt and bank debt, individually or in combination. ACT implemented its proven process for marketing the business to a wide range of lenders. During the process, ACT was able to narrow down the best products and lenders for WST. WSTs owners chose KeyBank N.A. The primary reasons for selecting KeyBank N.A. were their willingness to lend the right amount of capital, at a competitive rate, as well as being an overall good fit for the owners. By working with KeyBank N.A., WST was able to consolidate their balance sheet, lower their borrowing costs and access additional working capital all at the same time.

Bob Hild, ACTs Chairman said, We look forward to a long-term partnership with the innovative team at WST. We believe their business is well positioned for rapid growth. ACT is excited to help them execute on their ambitious plans and become the industry leader in this vital market.

Ryan Wear, WSTs founder said, The injection of additional working capital will enhance our cash flow and enable us to reinvest in the business. Specifically, well now be in a position to capitalize on opportunities and bring new technological innovations to the market. With the addition of this new capital, we can accelerate WSTs growth and execute on our expansion strategy.

Chandler Hueckel, Sr. Business Banking Relationship Manager of Business Banking led the refinancing for KeyBank N.A. from its Tacoma office.

Trevor Hill, ACT Associate, represented WST in the recapitalization.

About KeyBank  KeyCorp's roots trace back 190 years to Albany, New York. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Key is one of the nation's largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets of approximately $136.7 billion at September 30, 2017. Key provides deposit, lending, cash management, insurance, and investment services to individuals and businesses in 15 states under the name KeyBank National Association through a network of more than 1,200 branches and more than 1,500 ATMs. Key also provides a broad range of sophisticated corporate and investment banking products, such as merger and acquisition advice, public and private debt and equity, syndications and derivatives to middle market companies in selected industries throughout the United States under the KeyBanc Capital Markets trade name. For more information, visit https://www.key.com/. KeyBank is Member FDIC.

About WaterStation  Based in Everett, WA, WaterStation Technology purifies water to the highest standard and then percolates it through a series of natural minerals. Healthy, clean water is then chilled to a perfect temperature and dispensed in to a consumer provided container. WaterStation is committed to providing eco-friendly and bottle-less products to its customers. For more information on WaterStation Technology, please visit their website at: https://www.refillandrefresh.com .

About ACT - ACT Capital Advisors, LLC is a leading Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) and Corporate Finance firm that represents lower middle-market companies ($5 million to $50 million in annual revenues) across a variety of sectors and industries, including industrial manufacturing, information technology, construction, healthcare, aerospace, consumer staple/discretionary, oil and energy, as well as outsourced services. The firm provides strategic financial advice to closely held, family-owned, as well as private equity sponsored organizations and corporate shareholders that wish to sell their company, raise growth capital, or secure commercial financing. Leveraging ACTs deep industry-wide knowledge and strategic auction process, clients appreciate ACTs approach, pairing the professional expertise of a national investment banking firm with the senior level attention and entrepreneurial creativity of a smaller enterprise.

For additional information, please contact:

Trevor Hill

ACT Capital Advisors

Mercer Island, WA

206.486.3408

thill@actcapitaladvisors.com

http://www.actcapitaladvisors.com
Alight Analytics has earned a spot on Entrepreneur magazines latest Entrepreneur360 List, a premier study of the best entrepreneurial private companies in the United States.

Alight is a full-service provider of powerful, actionable marketing analytics to advertising agencies and brands around the world. The fast-growing company is now celebrating its 10th year in business.

When we launched Alight, we were determined to solve one of the biggest problems facing marketers  measuring and proving the value of their work, said Matt Hertig, Alights CEO and co-founder. We really value the agency and brand partners who have trusted us with their marketing data and who have helped fuel our growth over the past decade.

Alight Analytics is the creator of ChannelMix, the first data aggregation solution designed for marketers by marketers. And it provides a range of consulting and training services through the Insight Analytics Group, its professional services division.

Honorees were identified based on the results from a comprehensive study of independently owned companies, using a proprietary algorithm and other advanced analytics. The algorithm was built on a balanced scorecard designed to measure four metrics reflecting major pillars of entrepreneurshipinnovation, growth, leadership and impact.

Our annual evaluation is a 360-degree analysis of top privately held companies representing and serving a variety of industries, explained Lisa Murray, chief insights officer of Entrepreneur Media Inc.

These businesses are real-world case studies for any entrepreneur who seeks to master the four pillars that can greatly impact the longevity and growth of their businesses. With the Entrepreneur 360, success is measured by achieving balance throughout the entire organization, predicated by revenue.

For additional details on the E360 List and the companies recognized, visit entrepreneur.com/360.

ABOUT ALIGHT ANALYTICS

Alight Analytics is a full-service provider of powerful, actionable marketing analytics to advertising agencies and brands around the world through its ChannelMix and Insight Analytics Group solutions.

ChannelMix, the worlds first marketing data management platform, eliminates cumbersome data gathering by combining online data, offline data, sales data and custom data sources together systematically for a single source of truth, reducing the hours marketers spend each day preparing data for reporting.

Insight Analytics Group offers expert professional services consulting and training in the field of marketing analytics. Insight Analytics Groups consultants help brands and agencies implement the same successful strategies that Alight has employed with its own clients.

Alight Analytics was named a 2017 and 2016 Inc. 5000 winner, 2017 Inc. Best Workplace, 2016 Best Place to Work by the Kansas City Business Journal, 2016 Company of the Year Stevie Award Winner and 2016 Awards For Excellence nominee by the Digital Analytics Association. Alights co-founders, Matt Hertig and Michelle Jacobs, were finalists for 2017 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year for the Central Midwest region.

Alight Analytics is a Google Analytics Certified Partner, a Google Analytics Authorized Premium Reseller, a Google Analytics Technology Partner, a Google AdWords Partner, a MarketLive Integrated Partner, an Amazon Web Services APN Consulting Partner, a Tableau Software Alliance Partner and part of the SAP HANA Startup Program.

For more information, visit http://www.alightanalytics.com.
iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- The Supreme Court sent the case of a black death row inmate who was convicted, in part, by a juror who used a racial slur to describe him, back to the lower courts Monday, after finding that prior decisions to not allow for an appeal based on the issue were in error.



Keith Tharpe was convicted of murder in 1991 and sentenced to the death penalty after allegedly raping his estranged wife and killing his sister-in-law the year prior. Attorneys for Tharpe argued that a member of the jury, Barney Gattie, was influenced by Tharpe's race and that he used the n-word in reference to Tharpe.



In the Supreme Court's per curiam decision Monday, the justices refer to "a sworn affidavit, signed by Gattie" that described his views.



"[T]here are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. N------," reads the opinion, quoting the affidavit, which continued by noting that Gattie felt Tharpe "wasnt in the good black folks category" and "should get the electric chair for what he did."



"[A]fter studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls," said Gattie in the affidavit. The juror later denied he swore to the report claimed he was intoxicated when he signed it.



The justices described the affidavit Monday as "remarkable" and note it was never retracted. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals previously decided against Tharpe's motion for relief "on the ground that it was indisputable among reasonable jurists that Gattie's service on the jury did not prejudice Tharpe," which the Supreme Court disagreed with, based "on the unusual facts of this case," and sent the court back to lower courts.



While a per curiam decision from the court is unsigned, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.



Referring first to procedural limitations and the prior failure by Tharpe to definitively prove Gattie's bias, Thomas writes that the Supreme Court's majority misread the 11th Circuit's decision and that in additional affidavit, Gattie said that race was not the deciding factor in his imposition of the death sentence.



"Gatties testimony was consistent with the testimony of the other ten jurors deposed in front of the trial court, each of whom testified that they did not consider race and that race was not discussed during their deliberations," reads the dissenting opinion.



Thomas noted that "The Court must be disturbed by the racist rhetoric in that [first] affidavit, and must want to do something about it," characterizing the per curiam decision as "ceremonial handwringing" and referring to the delay of justice for the victim of the crime, who was murdered 27 years ago.



In additional news from the court Monday, the justices allowed a ruling by a federal appeals court on a Mississippi religious freedom law to remain in place, after the appeals court judged that those who brought suit did not prove they were harmed by the law.



Future challenges to the law, which would allow for marriage licenses to be denied by clerks who voice personal religious objections, are expected.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.




Dont get me wrong, its still no picnic for women starting a business, but nowadays there are a lot more institutions and consumers who finally realize that women-owned businesses are for real and make real money for the economy. Past News Releases RSS Keen Limousine Achieves 2 Million...

Keen Limousine Named No. 1 by Kane...

The year 2018 holds two major milestones for Mary Herrell-Paul: ten years in the Fox Valley as owner of Keen Limousine, one of the first women-owned transportation businesses in the area, and thirty years overall in the transportation industry. Just dont ask me my age, joked the ever youthful Herrell-Paul.

Herrell-Paul, a retired U.S. Army veteran, took time this month to reflect on the new challenges and opportunities for women-owned small businesses. It was a lot tougher thirty years ago, noted Herrell-Paul. Dont get me wrong, its still no picnic for women starting a business, but nowadays there are a lot more institutions and consumers who finally realize that women-owned businesses are for real and make real money for the economy.

Herrell-Pauls companies, Crown Cars and Limousines and Keen Limousine, which was recently voted Best Limo Service by Kane County Chronicle Readers Choice Awards for the ninth year, will be celebrating her milestones with a series of special promotions in 2018. I think its important to say thanks to my customers. I wouldnt be here without them. Theyve trusted me with their safety and the safety of their families for years now, concluded Herrell-Paul.

About Keen Limousine

Keen Limousine offers airport, corporate, convention, special event and group transportation. Its drivers are professional and impeccably dressed, its cars are immaculate and they are always on time. Keen Limousine is the only certified green limousine company in the State of Illinois. For more information, please call 800-960-7201 toll free, 847-803-0000 local, or visit https://www.ccllimo.com/keen-limousine/.

About the NALA

The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361.
Thanx, the software-as-a-service company that helps brick-and-mortar businesses build deeper, data-driven relationships with their top customers, today announced new functionality built in partnership with leading credit card providers which provides enhanced aggregated data about customer frequency and spend at both the business and competitive businesses in the neighborhood.

With this data, Thanx presents its merchants with Comparative Insights, a dashboard that allows merchants to understand two powerful points of data that they have never been able to definitively know; how their loyalty members behavior compares to their average members behavior and how their business compares to their competitors. With these insights, merchants can take action to change customer behavior, using Thanxs automated, self-service campaign tools, which are proven to drive ROI.

Comparative Insights allows merchants to clearly understand the impact that VIPs and loyalty initiatives have on the bottom line, said Zach Goldstein, Founder and CEO of Thanx. Through our credit card partnerships, merchants will gain valuable competitive benchmarking on day one of service. This data has massive implications for the way they can use our targeted marketing tools to grow their business.

The Founder of San Francisco-based Proper Food, Howard Bloom, says, "Comparative Insights gives me data about my business that I have never had access to before. I can easily see my share of wallet and understand the shopping behavior of my most loyal customers. This is incredibly valuable data that allows me to make smarter business decisions."

Comparative Insights is available to all Thanx customers. For more information, please email info@thanx.com or visit http://info2.thanx.com/comparative-insights-thanx

About Thanx

Thanx helps merchants build deeper, data-driven relationships with their best customers that results in drastic increases in revenue and same-store sales growth. As competition for customers attention intensifies, it has never been more important for brick-and-mortar businesses to have a 360-degree view of their VIPs. Unfortunately, capturing customer spending data is hard and acting on it is even harder so most businesses are flying blind. Thanx solves this challenge by providing offline businesses with a single system of record for customer data and automated campaign tools to engage customers and drive measurable increases in sales. Founded in 2011, with offices in San Francisco and Denver, Thanx is financed by Sequoia Capital and other elite Silicon Valley investors.
Branches staff tutors a South Miami student after school. We are honored to partner with the Coral Gables Community Foundation. They are a valued partner and are truly making an incredible impact in our Greater Miami community, said Brent McLaughlin, Executive Director of Branches.

The Coral Gables Community Foundation recently donated a total of $2,500 to Branches South Miamis Grow and Climb programs as part of its commitment to positively impact our community. The Coral Gables Community Foundation has been at the forefront of the evolving needs of Coral Gables while effectively bringing together beneficiaries and benefactors to fund programs with the greatest impact and benefit to The City Beautiful.

The Branches Grow Program serves elementary students preparing them for lifelong success through enrichment of their minds, bodies and hearts. Engagement with the students begins after school with tutoring and homework help but continues with enrichment including recreational activities, social skill development, mentoring, healthy meals and snacks as well as Summer Shade Camp. The Grow program lays the foundation to make a long-term impact in the lives of children from low-income families by retaining a high percentage of students over many years. Consequently, the learning and the growth that take place in the life of a Branches student in one year becomes the foundation for further personal development and growth the next year. After just a few consistent years of engagement at Branches, students are not only in the mindset of setting goals but they are achieving goals on a regular basis.

Branches is a local non-profit organization based in Miami. By providing life-changing opportunities, Branches helps working poor families and their children break the cycle of generational poverty. Its Grow Program serves elementary students, preparing them for lifelong success. The Climb Program serves middle and high school students, focusing on the development of their individual assets in order to maximize opportunities to become better students and better people. Branches Achieve Programs target the well-being of the entire community through services fostering financial stability and long term success. Services include the ASSETS small business solutions program, the Ways to Work car loan program for working families, free VITA tax preparation and hunger relief. Branches is also proud to house and operate the United Way Center for Financial Stability (UWCFS).

We are honored to partner with the Coral Gables Community Foundation. They are a valued partner and are truly making an incredible impact in our Greater Miami community, said Brent McLaughlin, Executive Director of Branches. We are excited to bring impactful programming and services to the children, youth and families in our communities and to help them succeed in the long-term.

About Branches

For over 40 years, Branches has made a positive impact in the community by delivering on its mission to serve, educate and inspire people through student, family and financial stability services. Branches provides long-term, holistic services for motivated individuals and families. We help people grow deeper and climb higher in life by building a foundation through education so they can achieve their goals and fulfill their potential. For additional information about Branches, please call 305.442.8306 or visit http://www.branchesfl.org

About The Coral Gables Community Foundation

Led by community leaders, the Coral Gables Community Foundation provides the philanthropic conduit to connect individuals and corporations looking to positively impact the success of the community. Now in its 26th year, the Foundation has been at the forefront of the evolving needs of Coral Gables while effectively bringing together beneficiaries and benefactors to fund programs with the greatest impact and benefit to The City Beautiful. To learn more, visit http://www.gablesfoundation.org

###
OurHealth, Indianas leading provider of employer-sponsored primary care clinics, today announces a new partnership with the Indianapolis Airport Authority (IAA), which owns and operates Indianas largest airport system in the metropolitan area, including the award-winning Indianapolis International Airport.

The partnership grants IAA employees and their dependents convenient access to six primary care clinics in Indianapolis and a host of wellness programs free of charge. Clinic sites throughout the metro area include downtown Indianapolis, Greenwood, and Plainfield, as well as locations near 96th Street & Keystone Avenue, 86th Street & Zionsville Road, and Washington Square.

The addition of IAA further establishes OurHealths stronghold in the Indianapolis employer market. The nine-year-old healthcare player has traditionally focused on the professional services, municipal and education sectors and continues to bring on new employers every month.

This decision was all about our employees, said Mario Rodriguez, the IAAs Executive Director. The Indianapolis International Airport is consistently ranked as the best airport in North America, and thats due to the dedication and passion our employees have for serving our customers. Our employees and their families deserve the best, and OurHealth is the best clinic solution on the market.

The team at IAA has a high bar for excellence, and were grateful for their vote of confidence on the quality of our MyClinic solution, said Ben Evans, CEO and co-founder of OurHealth.

OurHealth is committed to working with its partners to enhance employee well-being and reduce long-term healthcare costs for employers. OurHealth customers see an average savings of 20 percent on healthcare costs, mostly in the form of reduced emergency room visits, savings on specialty referrals and reduced drug costs. Its growing roster of clients includes OneAmerica, Genesys (formerly Interactive Intelligence), Ice Miller LLP, the City of Indianapolis and the City of Charlotte.

OurHealth was founded in 2009 to solve three problems in the healthcare system: lack of access, poor outcomes and unaffordable cost escalation for employees and employers. In June 2017, the company announced a $37 million fundraising round lead by White Oak, which will be used to invest in marketing, sales and technology. Headquartered in Indianapolis, OurHealth recently expanded into North Carolina. Further market expansion is planned for 2018.

About Indianapolis Airport Authority

The Indianapolis Airport Authority owns and operates Indianas largest airport system in the Indianapolis metropolitan area. In addition to the Indianapolis International Airport (IND), its facilities include the Downtown Heliport, Eagle Creek Airpark, Hendricks County Airport-Gordon Graham Field, Indianapolis Regional Airport and Metropolitan Airport. IND serves more than 8.5 million business and leisure travelers each year, averaging 143 daily flights  seasonally and year-round  to 49 nonstop destinations. IND is consistently ranked, year after year, as the best airport in North America and the nation, based on ease of use, passenger amenities, customer service, local retail offerings and public art. The airport is home of the worlds second largest FedEx operation and the nations eighth-largest cargo facility. IND is committed to becoming the airport system of choice for both passenger and cargo service. For more information, visit http://www.IND.com.

About OurHealth

OurHealth is a provider of onsite and near-site primary care clinics and wellness programming focused on enhancing the patient experience and lowering healthcare costs for businesses of all sizes. Its MyClinic network, an industry first, significantly lowers the barrier to entry by allowing employers of all sizes to gain immediate access to a network of primary care clinics around the city. OurHealth offers a comprehensive healthcare approach to its clients and their employees, which includes primary care services, wellness services, onsite laboratory and medication dispensing services and referral guidance. OurHealth has clinics in Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. To learn more about OurHealth, visit http://www.ourhealth.org.
Our website is one of the best ways we connect with our customers and communicate our expertise as well as give a high level of service, said Brent Taylor, owner of O.C. Taylor.

O.C. Taylor, a company focused on smart exterior solutions, was recently awarded a Silver W3 Award for web design by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts. The award honors outstanding Websites, Web Marketing, Web Video and social media marketing worldwide. The organization received over 5,000 entries in this annual global award program.

Our website is one of the best ways we connect with our customers and communicate our expertise as well as give a high level of service, said Brent Taylor, owner of O.C. Taylor. To be awarded for our website is a great honor.

The website, http://www.octaylor.com, developed by Able&Co., features a complete listing of all services, informative blog entries, and frequently asked questions as well as the companys brand vision of excellence in service. We worked to capture the blend of professionalism, service and good-natured humor that Brents clients have come to enjoy in the website, said Jenny Taylor, president of Able&Co. Its been a huge success for O.C. Taylor and were happy they won this accolade.

Raleigh-based O.C. Taylor offers exterior improvement solutions for homes in the Triangle region including new siding, roofs, doors, windows and more. Owner Brent Taylor is a North Carolina licensed general contractor and has a long track record with some of the areas top builder and remodeling firms. O.C. Taylor, founded in 2015 gives Taylor the opportunity to provide an additional level of service to his clients in Wake County and the surrounding areas.

About O.C. Taylor

O.C. Taylors foundations are rooted in a rich history of trusted family businesses in North Carolina dating back to owner, Brent Taylors great grandfathers hardware store over 100 years ago. Built on the same values, O.C. Taylor continues the strong family tradition of dependable service and competitive pricing.

Media Contact

Brent Taylor

O.C. Taylor

brent(at)octaylor.com

919-714-2200
Fitscript is delighted to be able to share GlucoseZone as part of the Fitness and Health Partnership discussion at CES.

Fitscript, LLC. today announced that it will present GlucoseZone, the first ever digital exercise solution for people living with diabetes, at CES held January 9-12 in Las Vegas.

GlucoseZone is the first-ever digital exercise solution that offers exercise guidance based on users real-time glucose levels and other diabetes metrics (including data from wearable devices). The patented GlucoseZone program enables doctors to prescribe exercise to diabetics to improve A1C, achieve weight loss, and halt the progression of the disease.

Charles OConnell, Founder and CEO of Fitscript, LLC. will present at CES as part of the panel Wellness Partners: FitnessTech and Digital Health addressing the intersection between fitness and diabetes management in the changing healthcare landscape. The panel discussion will be held as follows:

Date: Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Time: 4:50 p.m. (PST)

Location: Tech West, Venetian, Level 4, Lando 4304

Fitscript is delighted to be able to share GlucoseZone as part of the Fitness and Health Partnership discussion at CES, said Charles OConnell, founder and CEO of Fitscript, LLC. Were bringing a digital exercise solution to the global diabetes community, accessed by smartphone, that has helped thousands of people control the disease, lower the cost of treatment and change lives.

More than 100 million Americans are living with or at high risk for diabetes, and nearly every one of them is advised by their physician to begin an exercise program. However, for those living with diabetes, exercise is a fundamentally different process, beginning with the need to test blood sugar. Depending on the persons blood sugar it may or may not be safe to exercise, or to perform certain types of exercise. In addition, multiple factors further complicate the requirement of exercise and diabetes including glucose levels, food consumed, medication regimen, time of day, etc.

The patented GlucoseZone platform offers content to users based on their individual and real-time diabetes metrics, providing end users with instruction from fitness and diabetes professionals from around the world to best match their individual, real time needs.

GlucoseZone is a clinically validated program proven to help patients achieve lower A1c results and weight loss, halt the pharmaceutical therapeutic progression of diabetes management, and in many cases reduce medication usage and reliance for patients living with diabetes.

For more information, please visit http://www.GlucoseZone.com.

About Fitscript, LLC:

Created in 2012, Fitscript LLC was founded to help people living with diabetes meet the exercise requirement for safely and effectively reducing, reversing and controlling their diabetes. Fitscripts patented, proprietary GlucoseZone program, now with more than 900,000 users, is the first-ever digital exercise solution for diabetics that helps improve their A1c levels and achieve weight loss based on real-time glucose levels. The all-new GlucoseZone app contains live and on demand exercise solutions, interactive workouts, diabetes discussions and much more. The app is currently available on iOS and Android.
Visit us at booth W1185!

Its tangible  a display of real products under one roof for hands-on consideration. Its personal  an opportunity to learn and discuss business practices one-on-one with key leaders in the kitchen and bath industry. Its inspirational  an introduction to new business ideas, products, and design trends. Its KBIS 2018.

MR Direct is proud to participate, once again, in this prestigious show. Numerous models from each of the MR Direct sink collections and faucet lines will be on display. Additionally, several new products will be debuted. This years show is being held in ever-friendly, Orlando, Florida; inside the beautiful and spacious Orange County Convention Center. It runs from January, 911, 2018.

Three ADA-approved, stainless steel sinks have been introduced this year by MR Direct. One is a spacious, single-bowl model in the 3/4 radius line; another is also a single-bowl design, but with traditional, wide corners; and the third is an equal, double-bowl with broad, sweeping corners. All have a depth of just over five inches, providing ease of use for those with disabilities or limited mobility.

A stunning new line of vessel sinks for the bath, known as the Artisan Ceramic collection, has recently been launched. Each design is a genuine work of art, created by hand on the potters wheel.

The ever-popular line of 3/4 radius sinks has grown in many ways. Not only have several new models been added, but almost all now come in a choice of three thickness. In addition to the standard 18 gauge, MR Direct is now offering them in 16 gauge. And, previously unheard of in the residential market, these styles are now available in 14 gauge as well.

All of the existing undermount TruGranite sinks now come in a topmount form. One new model features a low divide between its equally sized bowls. MR Direct has also developed custom-fitted cutting boards, grids, and matching strainers and flanges for each TruGranite model.

Several other new models will be on display and available soon. One such standout is a stunning, new, apron-style sink made from bamboo. Likewise, the MR Direct Home Reality AR and VR apps will be on hand to experience. Expect to be impressed. MR Direct will be exhibiting in the West Building at booth #1185. Representatives will be on site to address any concerns. A visit to the MR Direct website, http://www.MRDirectint.com, provides full details on all products offered.
Ike's Birthday Party On no, isnt that something, for goodness sakes, isnt that nice.

A Lakeland man, Isaac Newcomer  Ike, celebrated his 107th birthday on January 2nd at Meridian Senior Livings community: Lake Morton Plaza, where he is currently living. He celebrated with dozens of Lake Morton Plaza residents and Lakeland Police Department officers.

Ike was presented with gifts such as a happy birthday letter from the mayor, police challenge coins, and a framed photo. He was also given a 30 ft. birthday card with more than 600 birthday greetings extracted from Facebook comments. When Ikes daughter explained that some of the comments were from all over the world, Ike could not believe it saying, On no, isnt that something, for goodness sakes, isnt that nice.

Ike was born on January 2, 1911 in Pennsylvania. Raised on a Hershey farm, Ike was one of four boys in his family and they worked very hard. For 14 years, Ike worked in a Hershey chocolate factory and then met his wife, Helen, on a carousel at Hershey Park. Subsequent careers include brakeman on the Reading Railroad, truck driver, and constructing homes.

Ike and Helen found joy in traveling across the U.S. in their Airstream trailer. They were members of the Wally Byam Caravan Club and attending rallies in St. Louis, Bozeman and Seattle. Their travels landed them in every state except Hawaii and also most of Canada. For the holidays, Ike and Helen visited their daughter in Lakeland, FL. And in 1982, they decided to reside there to be close to family. For the next 10 years, they continued to travel with Las Vegas being their favorite travel spot. Once Ike was in his 80s he decided that the travel was not as much fun, so they changed to cruises. For their 70th anniversary, the whole family joined them for a 5-day cruise in the Bahamas, which was a wonderful memory for Ike.

Ike has been a resident of Lake Morton Plaza since December 2008 and says it has been one of the best decisions he has made. He has found friendship and happiness and looks forward to his 108th birthday. Ike is in excellent health and the Lake Morton Plaza staff says he still does his own laundry.

Lake Morton Plaza is an independent and assisted living community located in Lakeland, FL, which is about an hour from Orlando. The community is convenient to local shopping and cultural activities in town and offers engaging programs for senior citizens.
Global Traveler, the only monthly magazine for frequent business and leisure luxury travelers, announced American Airlines as the 2017 Airline of the Year and Lotte Hotels as the 2017 Hotel of the Year. Global Traveler has awarded Airline and Hotel of the Year nods for the past seven years.

Members of the Global Traveler Advisory Board, a hand-picked committee of well-traveled business advisors, selected the Airline and Hotel of the Year winners at an event Sept. 28, 2017, in Philadelphia. The winners were chosen from a list of nominees selected by GT staff. Pertinent information considered included financial data, occupancy rates, load factors, on-time figures, safety records and menus, as well as independent research and personal experience. Once an airline or hotel is selected, it is ineligible to participate for three years. The winners were honored at a gala reception in December.

Past Airline and Hotel of the Year winners include China Airlines and Melia Hotels International, 2016; Turkish Airlines and The Ritz-Carlton, 2015; United Airlines and Marriott Hotels, 2014; Etihad Airways and The Address Hotels + Resorts, 2013; South African Airways and Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts, 2012; and Asiana Airlines and Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, 2011.

In 2018, Global Traveler will add a new award to its repertoire and will name the Cruise Line of the Year. Cruise lines are invited to apply for the honor. Please email kim.krol(at)globaltravelerusa(dot)com for a copy of the application. Cruise lines must provide the required information by Feb. 28, 2018, in order to be considered. Completed applications, as well as independent research and personal experience, will factor into the final decision. Members of the Global Traveler Advisory Board will select the winner, announced in May 2018 alongside the Leisure Lifestyle Awards.

For more information about Global Traveler, visit globaltravelerusa.com.

About Global Traveler

With nearly 300,000 readers, Global Traveler connects with U.S.-based frequent, affluent, international travelers. According to MediaMark Research (MRI), GT readers have an average net worth of $2 million and 50 percent are CEOs and owners of companies. Our readers average nine domestic flights per year and 93 percent travel internationally on a regular basis, mostly in first and business class. More than 55 percent stay in 4- and 5-star hotels, at an average 60 nights per year. Four special editions  Leisure Lifestyle Edition, Global City Guidebook, Class Act Guide and The Trazee Book  complement 12 monthly issues. Each year, Global Traveler awards the GT Tested Reader Survey awards, the Leisure Lifestyle Awards and the Wines on the Wing awards.

About FXExpress Publications, Inc.

FXExpress Publications, Inc., based in Yardley, Pa., is a privately held company publishing Global Traveler, eFlyer USA, eFlyer Asia, Trazee Travel, WhereverFamily and several annuals; and also operating globaltravelerusa.com, globaltravelerusa.com/blog, trazeetravel.com and whereverfamily.com.
Dr. Christopher Knott-Craigs daughter, Cate, was different. At six years old, she routinely walked on her toes, an ailment that affected her balance and caught the cruel attention of her classmates. While this caring father could not change Cates condition, he could change her attitude.

Dr. Knott-Craig instilled in his daughter that differences are meant to be celebrated and cherished. This is a message he now looks to share with other children in The Weird Animal Club: Its OK to be Different.

The Weird Animal Club encourages young readers to embrace diversity and their own differences. Dr. Knott-Craig weaves together a diverse group of animals, each baring a unique physical appearance, but all sharing feelings of loneliness and isolation.

As the animals meet, they begin to bond with one another and grow in confidence. Soon, they each realize being different is valuable. This entertaining and informative narrative teaches readers that differences arent important when trying to make friends.

The Weird Animal Club started out as short bed time stories I would tell Cate in order to help her accept and appreciate her unique qualities, Dr. Knott-Craig said. The stories did wonders for her self-esteem and she eventually encouraged me to share my tales with other kids. Both her and I want to make sure others can face differences with confidence and compassion.

For more information, please visit chrisknottcraig.com.

The Weird Animal Club: Its OK to be Different

By Dr. Christopher Knott-Craig

ISBN: 9781480852334 (hardcover) 9781480852327 (softcover) 9781480852341 (ebook)

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Archway Publishing

About the author

Christopher Knott-Craig, MD, is an internationally-recognized pediatric cardiac surgeon. He understands that many children carry physical and emotional scars throughout life that can result in feelings of not being good enough and that theyre different from their friends. These scars can be sources of great anxiety and isolation for both children and parents. In his interactions with these families, he shares with them that their scars are physical reminders that they are special.

Review Copies & Interview Requests:

LAVIDGE  Phoenix

Jacquelyn Brazzale

480 998 2600 x 569

jbrazzale@lavidge.com

General Inquiries:

LAVIDGE  Phoenix

Satara Williams

480-998-2600 x 586

swilliams@lavidge.com
Chapel of the Flowers Announces College Scholarships for 2018 It is my hope that with this Chapel of the Flowers scholarship program, well help four deserving students offset the high cost of attending college, said Donne Kerestic, CEO of Chapel of the Flowers.

The new year is filled with hope and high expectations for the future for college students around the country. But with escalating fees for tuition, books, and housing, dreams of obtaining a degree can seem daunting at best. Todays average college graduate enters the workforce with approximately $37,000 in student debt, according to Forbes.com.

Chapel of the Flowers, famous for new beginnings as the top-rated wedding chapel in Las Vegas, today announced a scholarship program in 2018 that will help four deserving college students with their new educational beginnings and expenses. Two $1,000 scholarships will be awarded on February 14, 2018, with the additional two $1,000 scholarships to be awarded on August 15, 2018.

The application process is simple: students currently enrolled in college will need to write a 500-word personal essay about educational goals and plans following graduation, and submit the application via the Chapel of the Flowers College Scholarship web landing page, found at https://www.littlechapel.com/scholarship. To be eligible, student must be at least 18 years of age, and currently enrolled in an accredited college in the United States.

Deadlines for applications are January 31, 2018 for one of two scholarships to be awarded on February 14, 2018, and July 31, 2018 for one of two scholarships to be awarded on August 15, 2018. Scholarship recipients will be notified via email.

It is my hope that with this Chapel of the Flowers scholarship program, well help four deserving students offset the high cost of attending college, said Donne Kerestic, CEO of Chapel of the Flowers. Our scholarship program is unique in that applicants need not be working towards a major in the wedding industry, and they can be attending a community college or a four-year university. We are asking applicants currently enrolled in an accredited college to submit a 500-word essay, and tell us about their educational and career goals. Well be looking for essays that include the individuals passion, tenacity, and reason for choosing their major and career field. Our team is excited to award the scholarships and help four students with their college expenses.

About Chapel of the Flowers

Chapel of the Flowers, located at 1717 Las Vegas Boulevard South, has been celebrating love for nearly 60 years. The stunning indoor and outdoor chapels seat between 20 and 88 guests, and receive top ratings from couples around the world as well as from local residents of Las Vegas.

Founded in 1960, Chapel of the Flowers is Las Vegas' highest rated and largest full-service wedding venue, providing traditional, modern and elegant Las Vegas weddings on the world-famous Strip. An acre of cobblestone-accented grounds and vibrant backdrops are designed to capture every picture-perfect moment of a Las Vegas wedding. Professional wedding planners, part of a team of nearly 100 on-site staff members, ensure that every aspect of the wedding day is personal, easy and stress-free. Chapel of the Flowers' impeccable customer service assures the couple that all details of the wedding, including the ceremony, flowers, award-winning photography and reception venues will result in cherished memories for a lifetime. Chapel of the Flowers is honored to be one of the preferred venues in Las Vegas, the wedding capital of the world.

Media Contact

Nicole Robertson

Chapel of the Flowers - Director of Operations

Phone: 702-735- 4331, ext 806

Email: nicoler (at) littlechapel.com

Diane Ferraro

Chapel of the Flowers  Marketing and PR

Phone: 626-222-9388

Email: diane (at) thesoulfulexperience.com
Monster Tree Service I wanted to make sure the opportunity was a good fit for the market, there was a clear history of smart, sustainable growth, and it was a business that truly wanted to invest in me as a franchise partner. Monster Tree Service and Josh Skolnick covered all of those bases for me. - Marcus Roach

Monster Tree Service, the nations first and fastest growing tree service franchise, is sinking its roots deeper into the Heart of Texas. Recently featured by SUCCESS Magazine, Thrive Global, and Franchise Times, the nations first and fastest growing tree service franchise continues to build on its rapid 3-year franchise system growth.

Austin, Texas businessman Marcus Roach, has purchased the rights to five Monster Tree Service territories in central Texas. Roach will be based in the capital city and will launch his first territory in early February, 2018. According to Roach, each of his five territories possess multi-million-dollar profit potential and will extend north to Jarrell, south to Buda, east to Manor, and west to Dripping Springs.

Roach has owned and operated successful local companies, and has proven experience building, or re-vitalizing, those businesses into multi-million-dollar entities. He is excited about bringing Monster Tree Service to Central Texas, as the first truly professional tree service in the area.

Ive found people here want to feel confident in whom theyre dealing with in service industries, said Roach. Monster Tree Service isnt just about tree or limb removal. We provide a full suite of services including tree and shrub maintenance, plant healthcare, and tree planting. Plus, we are licensed and bonded, and take great pride in our professional experience, appearance, and attention to detail. We will even make sure to leave the clients property in an even more pristine condition than we found it.

Josh Skolnick, CEO and Founder of Monster Tree Service, believes Roach is a great fit as the companys newest Texas-based franchise partner.

First, Marcus is well known in the Austin area, and brings a wealth of business experience to Monster Tree Service, said Skolnick. He has been successful in every business hes been involved in, and he relates very well to people. We are excited about what he will accomplish because hes the kind of businessman who thrives as a Monster Tree Service franchise partner. Central Texas is a key growth area for Monster Tree Service as more and more people move there and search for a truly professional tree service to take care of their needs on a year-round basis.

Monster Tree Service is the only franchise tree company capitalizing on the under-served $17 Billion tree service industry. Monster Tree Service has achieved consistent, year over year, 5% growth since 2009, resulting in an $10+ Million business. Because its a high-upside opportunity, and a recession proof business, Monster Tree Service expects to achieve $100 Million in sales in 2021.

I was looking for a couple of things in a franchise business when I started my search last year, said Roach. I wanted to make sure the opportunity was a good fit for the market, there was a clear history of smart, sustainable growth, and it was a business that truly wanted to invest in me as a franchise partner. Monster Tree Service and Josh Skolnick covered all of those bases for me.

For more information about Monster Tree Service, please visit http://www.whymonster.com/.

For more information about Monster Tree Service franchise opportunities, please visit http://www.monsterfranchising.com/.

About Monster Tree Service

Founded in 2008 in Fort Washington, PA by Founder and CEO Josh Skolnick, Monster Tree Service is the first and only national franchise brand serving the $17 billion tree care industry. Over the past decade, Skolnick has aggressively built Monster Tree Service into a thriving national franchise system working day and night to build the company into a $10+ million business with 29 franchised outlets in 10 states throughout the country. Each Monster Tree Service franchised outlet offers full-scale tree pruning and removal services, including: tree pruning and trimming, tree removal, stump grinding, shrub maintenance, emergency services, plant healthcare, and various secondary services.

In stark contrast to various mom and pop style tree service companies, all Monster Tree Service franchise owners are dedicated to Making the world a more beautiful place, one tree at a time by providing homeowners with unparalleled service completed by certified professionals. Monster Tree Service is committed to educating all customers on the natural conditions, diseases and infestations that impact the health of their plants/trees and treating all issues with an environmentally friendly, Do Not Harm approach. Its all part of the Monster Tree Service vision to partner with homeowners across the country to make their trees healthy, strong, and vital.

For more information about Monster Tree Service, please visit http://www.whymonster.com/.

For more information about Monster Tree Service franchise opportunities, please visit http://www.monsterfranchising.com/.
Tim Tamura

Haute Residence is honored to announce its continued partnership with real estate broker Tim Tamura as it progresses into 2018. As a Haute Residence partner for three years, Tamura has exclusively represented the luxury real estate market in Corona del Mar, California.

In the mid-1990s, Tamura concluded a position with a Fortune 50 company to commence a career in real estate. After years of travel around the globe, he decided to settle in a place close to his heart  Corona del Mar.

Tamura founded VALIA Properties, whose Greek/Latin origin denotes there is value in truth, and, as a managing partner, works tirelessly to embody this culture and develop a long-term connection within the community.

He assembled a team of seasoned brokers, who elevate the experience of buying, selling, and investing in real estate. In addition to representing clients in the purchase and sale of residential properties, their close connection with the market has positioned VALIA as the authority for design and consulting with developers and owners alike.

Tamura and his teams professionalism has delivered record results and garnered client and peer accolades. Aggregate sales under his tenure have exceeded $2 billion, and VALIA Properties has been recognized by The Wall Street Journal in the top 100 of the Top 1000 Sales Teams in the United States for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016.

About Haute Residence:

Designed as a partnership-driven luxury real estate portal, Haute Residence connects its affluent readers with top real estate professionals, while offering the latest in real estate news, showcasing the worlds most extraordinary residences on the market and sharing expert advice from its knowledgeable and experienced real estate partners.

The invitation-only luxury real estate network, which partners with just one agent in every market, unites a distinguished collective of leading real estate agents and brokers and highlights the most extravagant properties in leading markets around the globe for affluent buyers, sellers, and real estate enthusiasts.

HauteResidence.com has grown to be the number one news source for million-dollar listings, high-end residential developments, celebrity real estate, and more.

Access all of this information and more by visiting: http://www.hauteresidence.com
MCI USA continues to enhance its comprehensive strategic events, meetings & incentives platform with the appointment of Jason Ware as Vice President, Housing Operations and Contracting. Ware will be responsible for overall housing account management and domestic hotel sourcing and contracting.

In addition to leading and mentoring an established team, Jason will also ensure MCI USA is well positioned in the US hotel industry, said Shawn Pierce, President, Strategic Events, Meetings & Incentives, MCI USA. Jason brings his extensive industry relationships and experience to MCI USA as we advance the strategic and tactical solutions we provide our corporate and association clients.

With more than twenty years of experience in the meetings and events industry, Ware was previously Director of Meetings for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) based in New York City. In this role he was responsible for strategizing and leading logistical operations of medical meetings and events, including CRFs annual citywide convention. Ware also previously served as Director of Meetings for the American Heart Association (AHA), where he oversaw the logistical planning for AHAs two largest events. Prior industry experience also includes the roles of Chapter Business Manager and Senior Manager, Membership Marketing, at Meeting Professionals International.

Its an incredible opportunity to join MCI USA at a time that it is achieving impressive growth in the meetings and incentives industry, said Ware. We have a talented team and the technological backbone to deliver on our promise to enhance the strategic and economic impact of our clients events.

Working globally while delivering locally, MCI USA partners with its clients to strategically engage and activate their target audiences, building community and boosting client performance through face-to-face, hybrid and digital experiences that support client business objectives. Find out more at http://www.MCIEvents.com.

------------------------

ABOUT MCI

MCI is the global leader in engaging and activating audiences. Our business is founded on a simple human insight: When people come together, magic happens. This magic is called community. Since 1987 we have been bringing people together through inspiring meetings, events, congresses and association management. MCI helps organizations harness the power of community by applying our strategic engagement and activation solutions to build unforgettable online and offline experiences that foster change, inspire, educate and enhance business performance. MCI is an independently owned company with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland and a global presence. Our 2,000 professionals in 60+ cities and 31 countries work with clients across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, India, the Middle East and Africa. Find out more at http://www.mci-group.com.

ABOUT MCI USA

MCI USA helps companies and associations strategically engage and activate their target audiences, building community and boosting client performance through face-to-face, hybrid and digital experiences that support client business objectives. With US headquarters in the Washington, DC area and growing offices in New York, Miami, Baltimore, and now Dallas, MCI USA is rapidly expanding its platform to deliver a robust set of services in its Association and Corporate Solutions portfolios. Find out more at http://www.mci-group.com/usa.

ABOUT MCIS MEETINGS, CONVENTIONS & INCENTIVES

MCI has engaged and activated audiences through inspiring meetings and events for almost 30 years. Today, MCI is trusted by clients across the globe to create face-to-face, hybrid and digital experiences supporting key business objectives, from building brands to reaching new markets and rewarding top performers. From the healthcare and life sciences sector to the luxury, ICT, automotive and Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sectors, MCIs industry experts create and deliver innovative, customized solutions. Coupled with MCIs insights into global mega trends and culturally relevant local learnings, our events engage, inspire and deliver return on investment (ROI). Find out more at http://www.MCIEvents.com
With some of the most experienced security experts in the nation, we enable organizations of all sizes to accurately visualize their networks with in-depth behavioral analytics to determine potential areas of network vulnerabilities that will interfere with business continuity

Cytellix (cytellix.com), the cybersecurity division of Information Management Resources, Inc. (IMRI), today announces that because of its cybersecurity expertise and proactive continuous monitoring, it can detect potential threats caused by Meltdown and Spectre, that affect most computing platforms using Intel, ARM, and AMD processors. The service can identify unusual behavior of any connected digital asset or service that may have been targeted for exfiltrating data, enabling companies to make corrections before data is extracted through the exploitation of a flaw. We provide a best of breed solution that would have seen the bad actor connections in real-time and would have alerted the abnormal activity on all devices and IPs connecting to these bad actors, said, Brian Berger, Cytellix executive vice president of commercial cybersecurity. With some of the most experienced security experts in the nation, we enable organizations of all sizes to accurately visualize their networks with in-depth behavioral analytics to determine potential areas of network vulnerabilities that will interfere with business continuity.

The Cytellix solution includes vulnerability identification and cyber real-time situational awareness monitoring of the network. The managed services includes a complete cyber assessment, network vulnerability scanning, gap analysis, system security plan, plan of action and milestones, situational awareness monitoring, remediation best practices, and security policy templates. All connected known and unknown IP addresses are identified, profiled and mapped. The system provides real-time awareness of IP behaviors, leak detection, netflow capabilities and real-time alerting of changes in behavior. Inventory and device metadata is also collected on all IPs on the network, which can identify the operating system, properties and connections to determine where an organization needs to update known vulnerabilities before a cyber event occurs.

Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and damaging, and these potentially crippling assaults are premeditated, deliberate, and coordinated. When a device manufacturer such as a network switch, firewall, or router is identified as end of life, then it either has a technological market disadvantage or a technical flaw that renders the device vulnerable in certain situations. Software patches are similar in respect, but are much more frequent and are typically called security updates or security bulletins. Many of the updates are categorized as critical, important, or moderate, and identify the issue as either part of the native vendor products or vulnerabilities in third party applications used by the native applications that can compromise the OEM publishers products. Once a flaw is known, the hacker communities also then know and start targeting their attacks to enter an organization through the identified vulnerabilities.

The issue of deployment of patches or updates by companies is the biggest concern given the public awareness of these broad based cyber/malware attacks. Recently, the attacks have been based upon the gaps in the patching of software. These organized communities develop their attacks to automatically detect and exploit unpatched software or systems that are not updated with the current software as the bases for the attack and entrance to a company.

Cytellix offers small and medium-sized businesses its best-in-class solutions and services, from comprehensive cyber gap analysis and vulnerability assessments to real-time network scanning technology that provides continuous monitoring, threat detection and remediation best practices as a turn-key subscription that is a huge value at an affordable cost.

Companies have a lot at stake and cyber attackers are looking for every opportunity to pounce. Only by being proactive with their security defenses can companies minimize their risk of being breached, added Berger.

For more information about Cytellix, visit cytellix.com or call 949.215.8889.

About Cytellix

Cytellix, the cybersecurity division of Information Management Resources, Inc. (IMRI), is a team of innovative and creative thinkers whose goal is to Help Businesses Stay in Business. The cyber leaders at Cytellix thrive on providing services to small and medium sized businesses, which are the largest targets for malicious cyber activity.

The Cytellix team of experts has created an affordable, low impact solution for defeating cyberattacks with a best-in-class, turnkey service designed to help companies take a proactive approach to securing its environment.

Cytellix works with companies in government, manufacturing, finance, banking, law, healthcare and higher education sectors, and its innovative managed service model includes assessment, gap analysis, continuous monitoring, practical plans of action, and customized best practices for remediation and implementation.

They Cytellix team is proud to have successfully secured the government network perimeters for the U.S. Army, Missile Defense Agency, and municipal organizations such as the City of Irvine, and its cyber security solution has also been deployed at leading commercial corporations as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kaiser Permanente, and The Walt Disney Company.

Cytellix and its highly-acclaimed team has been recognized with numerous honors such as the 2017 Washington Technology Innovative Company Award, the 2017 American Business Award, the 2016 Small Business Administration Person of the Year award, the 2015 Patriot Award, and the 2014 White House Champion of Change Honor; and the experts at Cytellix are frequently tapped for media interviews and keynote addresses by publications such as CNET and the Huffington Post. For more information, please visit cytellix.com.

# # #

The Cytellix logo is a registered trademark of Cytellix.

All other trademarks in this release are the property of their respective owners.
Representatives with Actaeon Consulting, an Alpharetta, Georgia-based company announced today that it is now providing customized financial analysis to businesses.

Financial statements are useful for understanding your business at a high level, but financial analytics take your business operations to the next level, John Mosher, Managing Partner for Actaeon Consulting said. Actaeon gives you the tools to dive deeper into your business, so youll know where to invest, where to cut back, which functions of your business are most profitable, and more.

Customers, according to Mosher, will have access to solutions such as product profitability and return on investment analysis, forecasting, key performance indicators, and visual analytic dashboards where all your financial data is pulled into one intuitive visual presentation.

We empower customers with insights and tools to make the wisest financial decisions for their company, therefore optimizing their competitiveness, efficiency, and profitability, Mosher stressed, before adding, At Actaeon, we customize every business solution to each clients unique situation. Get the personalized financial analyses to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition.

As to why anyone should give the companys new cloud-based solutions a try, Mosher pointed to the fact that Actaeons founders have decades of accounting, finance and IT experience at companies ranging from mid-sized private equity backed firms to Fortune 500 companies.

Our technology partners have tools to streamline and automate key functions of your back office to optimize efficiency and productivity, Mosher stressed. We can reconcile your accounts monthly, weekly, or more frequently, if necessary.

For more information, please visit: https://actaeonconsulting.com/about-us/ and https://actaeonconsulting.com/financial-analysis/.

About Actaeon Consulting

Actaeon Consulting is headquartered in Alpharetta, GA and helps businesses in the greater Atlanta area, as well as helping clients nationwide and far abroad. Cloud-based applications allow Actaeon to support a businesss accounting, bookkeeping, and analytical needs regardless of where they are located. Actaeons team carries experience from multiple industries, and will customize the right solution that makes the most sense for your business.

Contact Details:

John Mosher

Managing Partner

Actaeon Consulting

190 Bluegrass Valley Pkwy

Alpharetta, GA 30005

(770) 751-8104

(800) 670-3416

Source: Actaeon Consulting

###
Will Cummings and Tray Middlebrooks Being effective in the workers compensation system is largely dependent on having a superior understanding of each clients unique situation. Past News Releases RSS Attorney Will Cummings Earns...

Atlanta lawyers Will Cummings and Tray Middlebrooks were recently recognized as members of the states Legal Elite in business magazine, Georgia Trend. This is the 15th edition of the popular legal section, which recognizes lawyers for excellence in the practice of law. The Legal Elite honor is unique in that inclusion is based entirely on the voting of other attorneys in the state of Georgia, and the number of recipients is a very small percentage of the practicing Bar.

Cummings used announcement of the awards as an opportunity to reflect on what makes the law firm he co-founded with Middlebrooks special. In addition to a really strong commitment to personal service, our firm brings together a great mix of experience in and knowledge of the Georgia workers comp system, said Cummings. Thats a difficult combination to replicate, and it has a significant impact on our ability to achieve our clients goals.

Middlebrooks agreed with his partner and long-time friend, while adding his thoughts about how a smaller law firm can meet the needs of clients involved in the complex process. Being effective in the workers compensation system is largely dependent on having a superior understanding of each clients unique situation, including what led to their injury and their personal financial needs moving into the future, said Middlebrooks. Making a personal investment in our clients and their families is a true differentiator between our practice and the larger law firms that handle a massive number of cases.

About Cummings & Middlebrooks, LLP: The attorneys at Cummings & Middlebrooks, LLP bring over 35 years of combined experience to each clients case. Conveniently located in the heart of Atlantas Buckhead community, the firm represents clients across the state of Georgia in cases involving serious work-related injuries and wrongful death. The firm has earned Martindale-Hubbells prestigious AV Rating, and is a recognized leader in the area of injured workers rights.
What: Auberles new Family Emergency Shelter is slated to open Monday, January 8, 2018 for men and women in need and their children. Hundreds of area families struggle with a lack of permanent, stable and safe housing. Recent extreme winter weather conditions have made the crisis of homelessness even more critical for parents and their children. The Mon Valley region, in particular, lacks resources for families struggling with homelessness.

The program will be housed in Duquesne at the former site of Auberles longstanding transitional living program, Movin On, which assisted young homeless men ages 16-24 for twelve years. The emergency shelter can accommodate up to 20 individuals at one time and will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The goal of the program is to keep families safe, assist them with securing more permanent housing and link them to available resources.

Why: Auberle has been awarded a contract by the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) to spearhead an initiative that helps address the significant and substantial need for a permanent Family Emergency Shelter. Data from DHS shows that 320 families with children were served in emergency shelters in Allegheny County in 2016 and 45% of families spend less that one month in them. Oftentimes, families will seek shelters after they have experienced a traumatic event. As a result of these statistics, Auberles Family Emergency Shelter will offer a formalized housing plan for each family.

Where: Auberles Main Campus, 1101 Hartman Street, McKeesport, PA 15132

Information: To schedule an interview to learn more about Auberles New Family Emergency Shelter, please contact Deb Hilton at 412-673-5856 ext. 1315 or e-mail debh(at)auberle.org

Auberle is also seeking donations of brand new items for the children and families of the Family Emergency Shelter including diapers, diaper wipes, towels, wash cloths, and more.

About Auberle:

Since 1952, Auberle has been dedicated to community, strong families and successful youth. Auberle serves over 3,800 at-risk children and families annually in eight counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. Today, we offer 16 programs including preventative and community-based services, with about 60% of our clients served in their home, school or in their community. Auberles services include the 412 Youth Zone drop in-center for youth aging out of the foster care system and experiencing homelessness, workforce development, foster care, education, drug and alcohol and mental health programs, placement and housing services, in-home intervention. Recently, Auberle was named by the Pittsburgh Business Times as one of the most Innovative organizations in the region. The agency is also a recipient of the Wishart Award for Excellence in Non-Profit Management and was named Agency of the Year in the United States by the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, the largest network of human services organizations in the United States. To learn more about Auberle, visit http://www.auberle.org or connect with them on social media.
Russ Hickey The power of TruBlue is really that it frees up time so people can enjoy their house without it being a burden. - Russ Hickey

Russ and Alison Hickey understand the stresses of working, raising a family and caring for a house. Thats why they are excited to announce the launch of their new business, TruBlue Cincinnati East.

TruBlue offers handyman services, house cleaning services, emergency repairs, seasonal projects, yard/lawn care, a home watch program, a senior accessibility program and more. TruBlue is a great option for busy families and seniors who want the comforts of their own home without worrying about property maintenance.

My wife and I have both been business professionals for the last 20 years and we were looking for a new way to serve the community. When we learned about TruBlue and realized the positive impact the business could make on families like ours as well as seniors and others in our region, we knew this was what wed been looking for, Russ said. Im a cancer survivor and that experience put things into perspective for me. I can do a lot of home repairs on my own, but that doesnt mean I want to. We all only have so much time and I want to spend my free time with my family doing things I love  not working on the house. The power of TruBlue is really that it frees up time so people can enjoy their house without it being a burden.

TruBlue also works with homeowners, realtors and rental property owners who need to get homes move-in ready and keep them maintained and has a commercial services for business clients. TruBlue Cincinnati East serves the entire east side of Cincinnati, including Madiera, Montgomery, Loveland, Anderson, Oakley, Hyde Park and the surrounding areas.

Russ and Alison have three children and live in Anderson Township.

In addition the impact TruBlue can have on families and busy individuals, the services can also be powerful for seniors.

When people are trying to help their older parents stay in their homes, their first thought is often personal care.not the requirements of home maintenance  other than maybe cutting the grass  until something breaks or you find yourself spending every weekend on repairs. Home maintenance shouldnt be an additional stressor for families. TruBlue was created with seniors in mind - we can be a full-service property manager to make sure the home is safe, comfortable and well maintained. We are like a concierge service for home maintenance, Russ said.

As my own mom got older, it was distressing to hear about the challenges she had with contractors and companies shed hired for various house projects. I want people to have a trusted resource they feel comfortable calling for all their house projects. Thats part of what inspired me to open TruBlue, he added.

All TruBlue franchises are fully insured and bonded and all employees are background checked. To learn more about TruBlue Cincinnati East, call (513)818-3000, email RHickey(at)TruBlueHouseCare.com or visit http://www.TruBlueCincinnatiEast.com.

About TruBlue

TruBlue provides one convenient and affordable solution for all your house care needs  inside and out. TruBlues services include house cleaning, household repairs, yard work, emergency repairs and seasonal work, all handled by a personal House Care Manager. These affordable services are available year-round and customized to meet your needs and budget. TruBlue strives to provide affordable, worry-free living for seniors and hassle-free living for busy adults with the goal of eliminating the worries, hassles and headaches of home maintenance by providing full-service, trustworthy house care services to fit any budget.
A top BBC journalist has quit her role as China editor and published an explosive letter, in which she challenged the broadcaster's "secretive and illegal pay culture."

Carrie Gracie addressed the letter (available in full below) to licence fee payers, the British public who fund the BBC, and published it on her website on Sunday evening.

It follows salary disclosures at the BBC in July last year, which revealed discrepancies between how much male and female presenters are paid.

In Gracie's case, she discovered that two of her male counterparts earned "at least 50%" more than her. US editor Jon Sopel earns between 200,000 ($270,000) and 249,999, while Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen takes home between 150,000 and 199,999.

Women have been fighting for equal pay ever since, but she said little progress has been made. The BBC has adopted a "bunker mentality" and is denial over the issue, according to the presenter. She said:

"Salary disclosures the BBC was forced to make six months ago revealed not only unacceptably high pay for top presenters and managers but also an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work.

"These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff. For the first time, women saw hard evidence of what theyd long suspected, that they are not being valued equally.

"Many have since sought pay equality through internal negotiation but managers still deny there is a problem. This bunker mentality is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level."

Gracie, who has worked at the BBC for 30 years, said it must accept there is a problem, "apologise and set in place an equal, fair, and transparent pay structure."

The corporation said on Monday that "fairness in pay" is vital and an independent salary audit, carried out last year, had shown there is no "systemic discrimination."

Gracie has left her role to return to the BBC's London newsroom, where she said she expects to be paid fairly. Her open letter coincided with her guest hosting Radio 4's "Today" programme on Monday, the biggest news show in the country.

Gracie was among the main headlines, but BBC impartiality rules prevented her from giving an interview on the matter because she was presenting the programme. She did, however, say the response to her letter had been "very moving" and that there was a "depth of hunger" for fair pay.

Many have praised Gracie's bravery and tweeted their support:

Must be extremely odd to be... @ Janine Gibson

This is a huge loss to the ... @ James Cook

Brilliant letter by @BBCCar... @ Cathy Newman

A BBC spokesman said: "Fairness in pay is vital. A significant number of organisations have now published their gender pay figures showing that we are performing considerably better than many and are well below the national average.

"Alongside that, we have already conducted an independent judge-led audit of pay for rank and file staff which showed 'no systemic discrimination against women.' A separate report for on-air staff will be published in the not too distant future."

Read Carrie Gracies letter in full:

Dear BBC Audience,

My name is Carrie Gracie and I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC.

The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already  especially as someone working for a publicly funded organisation. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally.

On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability. Salary disclosures the BBC was forced to make six months ago revealed not only unacceptably high pay for top presenters and managers but also an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work. These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff. For the first time, women saw hard evidence of what theyd long suspected, that they are not being valued equally.

Many have since sought pay equality through internal negotiation but managers still deny there is a problem. This bunker mentality is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level.

Mine is just one story of inequality among many, but I hope it will help you understand why I feel obliged to speak out.

I am a China specialist, fluent in Mandarin and with nearly three decades of reporting the story. Four years ago, the BBC urged me to take the newly created post of China Editor.

I knew the job would demand sacrifices and resilience. I would have to work 5000 miles from my teenage children, and in a heavily censored one-party state I would face surveillance, police harassment and official intimidation.

I accepted the challenges while stressing to my bosses that I must be paid equally with my male peers. Like many other BBC women, I had long suspected that I was routinely paid less, and at this point in my career, I was determined not to let it happen again. Believing that I had secured pay parity with men in equivalent roles, I set off for Beijing.

In the past four years, the BBC has had four international editors - two men and two women. The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. But last July I learned that in the previous financial year, the two men earned at least 50% more than the two women.

Despite the BBCs public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women's work was worth much less than men's.

My bewilderment turned to dismay when I heard the BBC complain of being forced to make these pay disclosures. Without them, I and many other BBC women would never have learned the truth.

I told my bosses the only acceptable resolution would be for all the international editors to be paid the same amount. The right amount would be for them to decide, and I made clear I wasn't seeking a pay rise, just equal pay. Instead the BBC offered me a big pay rise which remained far short of equality. It said there were differences between roles which justified the pay gap, but it has refused to explain these differences. Since turning down an unequal pay rise, I have been subjected to a dismayingly incompetent and undermining grievance process which still has no outcome.

Enough is enough. The rise of China is one of the biggest stories of our time and one of the hardest to tell. I cannot do it justice while battling my bosses and a byzantine complaints process. Last week I left my role as China Editor and will now return to my former post in the TV newsroom where I expect to be paid equally.

For BBC women this is not just a matter of one years salary or two. Taking into account disadvantageous contracts and pension entitlements, it is a gulf that will last a lifetime. Many of the women affected are not highly paid stars but hard-working producers on modest salaries. Often women from ethnic minorities suffer wider pay gaps than the rest.

This is not the gender pay gap that the BBC admits to. It is not men earning more because they do more of the jobs which pay better. It is men earning more in the same jobs or jobs of equal value. It is pay discrimination and it is illegal.

On learning the shocking scale of inequality last July, BBC women began to come together to tackle the culture of secrecy that helps perpetuate it. We shared our pay details and asked male colleagues to do the same.

Meanwhile the BBC conducted various reviews. The outgoing Director of News said last month, We did a full equal pay audit which showed there is equal pay across the BBC. But this was not a full audit. It excluded the women with the biggest pay gaps. The BBC has now begun a talent review but the women affected have no confidence in it. Up to two hundred BBC women have made pay complaints only to be told repeatedly there is no pay discrimination at the BBC. Can we all be wrong? I no longer trust our management to give an honest answer.

In fact, the only BBC women who can be sure they do not suffer pay discrimination are senior managers whose salaries are published. For example, we have a new, female, Director of News who did not have to fight to earn the same as her male predecessor because his 340 000 salary was published and so was hers. Elsewhere, pay secrecy makes BBC women as vulnerable as they are in many other workplaces.

How to put things right?

The BBC must admit the problem, apologise and set in place an equal, fair and transparent pay structure. To avoid wasting your licence fee on an unwinnable court fight against female staff, the BBC should immediately agree to independent arbitration to settle individual cases.

Patience and good will are running out. In the six months since Julys revelations, the BBC has attempted a botched solution based on divide and rule. It has offered some women pay revisions which do not guarantee equality, while locking down other women in a protracted complaints process.

We have felt trapped. Speaking out carries the risk of disciplinary measures or even dismissal; litigation can destroy careers and be financially ruinous. What's more the BBC often settles cases out of court and demands non-disclosure agreements, a habit unworthy of an organisation committed to truth, and one which does nothing to resolve the systemic problem.

None of this is an indictment of individual managers. I am grateful for their personal support and for their editorial integrity in the face of censorship pressure in China. But for far too long, a secretive and illegal BBC pay culture has inflicted dishonourable choices on those who enforce it. This must change.

Meanwhile we are by no means the only workplace with hidden pay discrimination and the pressure for transparency is only growing. I hope rival news organisations will not use this letter as a stick with which to beat the BBC, but instead reflect on their own equality issues.

It is painful to leave my China post abruptly and to say goodbye to the team in the BBCs Beijing bureau. But most of them are brilliant young women. I dont want their generation to have to fight this battle in the future because my generation failed to win it now.

To women of any age in any workplace who are confronting pay discrimination, I wish you the solidarity of a strong sisterhood and the support of male colleagues.
A Texan woman has died after contracting a flesh-eating bacteria after eating raw oysters on a trip to the the Louisiana coast.

Jeanette LeBlanc died after a three-week battle with vibriosis, an illness typically caused by eating raw seafood, CBS reported.

After shucking and eating roughly two dozen raw oysters with her wife and a friend, LeBlanc began having respiratory distress and a rash, which she and her wife initially assumed were signs of an allergic reaction. But, when she went to the hospital, doctors said she had been infected by Vibrio bacteria.

"It's a flesh-eating bacteria," her wife, Vicki Bergquist, told local news station KLFY. "She had severe wounds on her legs from that bacteria."

The CDC estimates that vibriosis causes 80,000 illnesses each year in the US, most caused by consuming contaminated food. While most people recover from the infection, one variant  the Vibrio vulnificus infection  is often deadly. One in four infected people die, often within just a day or two of becoming ill.

Food-poisoning experts have advised exercising caution while consuming raw oysters for years.

"Oysters are filter feeders, so they pick up everything that's in the water," food-poisoning attorney Bill Marler told BottomLine. "If there's bacteria in the water it'll get into their system, and if you eat it you could have trouble."

Marler says that he has seen more foodborne illnesses linked to shellfish in the past five years than in the two previous decades.
A freedom of information (FOI) request filed by Press Association and reported by The Guardian found that there were 24,473 attempts to access pornographic websites from computers and other devices in the Houses of Parliament between June and October last year. That works out at an average of about 160 attempts a day.

The internet network in the Houses of Parliament is used by MPs, peers, and staff. It automatically blocks access to pornographic sites but that didn't stop people trying.

A parliamentary spokesman reportedly told Press Association: "All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament's computer network. The vast majority of attempts to access them are not deliberate. The data shows requests to access websites, not visits to them.

"There are 8,500 computers on the parliamentary network, which are used by MPs, peers, their staff and staff of both Houses. This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliaments guest wifi."

September was the most popular month for pornographic website requests, with 9,467 requests from both the Houses of Lords and Commons that month.
According to the Africanspotlight.com, the arrests were made in Tandahimba, northern Tanzania sanctioned by the local district commissioner.

The said girls and their parents were later released on bail and a search has been mounted for the men who impregnated them.

Earlier, some human rights activist had argued that the arrest of the girls and their parent leaving the men who impregnated them was unfair.

Tanzanian is a conservative country that frowns on immorality especially among youngsters, which president of the country, John Magufuli is bent on enforcing.
A video released by authorities of the city showed Karina Leon move out of the shop with her customers after John Bell entered and demanded her to open the cash register, according to upi.com.

The robber was so trapped that not even shooting at the door could save him. It got to a point he had to kneel down and beg people outside to help him out, sensing the danger of being apprehended by the police.

Though the incident happened in April last year, police released the video just last week, following the conviction of Bell to five years in prison.

Karina Leon told KHOU-TV, "It was in broad daylight, I was cashing out a customer and she had a baby. I think I was handing her cash, then this guy walks in with a hoodie on."

Leo added that "As soon as he went into the office I just immediately got out and got the customer out."

READ ALSO: This heavily built man had sex with prostitute until she died

But how was Leo able to get the robber trapped? She explained, "I just locked him outside because whenever you lock the door outside, from the inside you can't open it so I knew he wasn't going to be able to open it."
He reportedly died on Friday, January 5, 2018, during the operation Deep Punch offensive against Islamist sect, Boko Haram in Damoboa, Borno State.

The terror group has been put on the back foot following the renewed strength of the Nigerian army which seems to be on the ascendancy in the fight to counter the militants.

Hassan's death as well as the improved position of Nigeria's force was confirmed in a comment by a Twitter user, Ahmad Salkida.

"Captain Hassan was killed two days ago. His end is being mourned all over the theatre as he was always assigned difficult tasks to different areas to assist soldiers.

"Military sources confirm the insurgents are witnessing unprecedented pressure, with the operation Deep Punch.

"The ongoing 'Operation Deep Punch,' the NA lost some personnel amongst whom is Capt MM Hassan of the artillery corps based in Damboa.

"He was a brave, disciplined and a highly motivated Officer, that earned him the title - Sarkin Yakin Damboa by colleagues and the civil populatn.

"Nigerian Army Loses Another Outstanding Soldier in Damoboa. He is in the same league with Col. Abu Ali. Capt. MM Hassan is a soldier's soldier. His colleagues pay tribute and local residents described him as kind and humble."

The passing of the deceased war machine has become a trending subject on Twitter where sympathizers including the governor of Gombe State, Alhaji Hassan Ibrahim Dankwambo who expressed pain concerning the loss.

"Im deeply saddened over the loss of this gallant officer, Capt. MM Hassan and other patriotic officers who lost their lives while trying to keep us safe from these enemies of humanity. May God grant their families the fortitude to bear this loss," he tweeted.

Nigerian soldiers with great passion for their job

The battle to conquer the Boko Haram insurgents has seen a number of exceptional soldiers who have displayed a dedication to their jobs revealed.

Despite losing many of their colleagues to the war, some have still managed to put up a cheerful mood like an army officer who sent out a Christmas message in December 2017, in a video that went viral.

The military person began the clip with an opening chorus acknowledging support from God. He soon proceeded to stating that though he has found himself in the thick of a bush, the pride of being a Nigerian soldier stays firmly rooted in him.

"My people happy Xmas in advance," he started.

"Enjoy yourself eh. Just thank God that you guys are out there, you guys can even eat chicken. Anything you like you can just eat. But we, we are inside the bush. We feed on anything natural and we are happy. We are proud of it. That is why we are soldiers. Enjoy. (Laughing out loud)."

The rare show of commitment by a Nigerian soldier to his duty is an indication that not every security agent is corrupt and belligerent in nature.
The tragedy which occurred on Tuesday, January 2, 2018, at a location described as Rasak Okunola Avenue, Ijagemo, Ijegun, Lagos, led to the arrest of the suspect who was attached to the Kirikiri Police Division, Punch News reports.

It revealed that the deceased, 17, was buried by his father at the Apapa Cemetery after he was confirmed dead at a hospital.

Punch also reported that the deceased was expected to resume at the Olabisi Onabanjo University on Monday, January 8, 2018, having recently secured an admission.

Olusunde was arrested following a tip-off by a man living in the community where the deceased was battered by his father. The latter had reportedly tried to cover up the death.

The boy was the first of four children. His mother was not around when it happened. I think she travelled. The father said he was looking for N2,000 and said the boy took the money, which he denied.

That evening, when the man returned from work, he saw the boy outside and grabbed him by the hand. He took him inside the house and asked him to say where the money was. He started flogging the boy, who cried for help. The man flogged him until he went into a coma.

After he was confirmed dead, the policeman took the son away and buried him. He wanted people to keep quiet about it. A resident, however, called the police and he was arrested, the man told Punch in an interview.

The incident was confirmed by SP Chike Oti, a Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO).

The spokesperson who confirmed that an investigation has been launched into the matter mentioned that the deceased died after hitting his head on a septic tank.

On January 3, 2018, at about 4pm, information was received that a man killed his son and took away the corpse. We learnt that he returned to his house on Rasaq Okunola Street, Ijagemo, and locked himself inside. Detectives raced to the scene and arrested the suspect.

Upon interrogation, he said his son, Ibukun, stole his N2,000 and when he questioned him, he ran away. He said his son fell on a septic tank slab in the process and injured his head, but later died in a hospital while receiving treatment.

He said he took his corpse to the Apapa cemetery for burial. Investigation is ongoing into the case, the police rep disclosed.

Violence against children by their parents

Nigeria has seen various cases of violence against children by their parents or guardians.

In a bid to correct a bad behaviour, some adults have applied an extreme disciplinary tactic which has often led to the death of those being corrected.

A Facebook user, Alhaji Fari Muhd once took to the social media platform to describe what he considers an act of abuse against a young lady who was accused of being a witch and responsible for the deaths of family members.

The incident which occurred in Borno State, saw the victim stripped to her underpants, tied up and suspended in the air.
There was a hue and cry when news broke that expats at the ceremony were asked to pay $100,000 to sit close to the president.

The Presidency subsequently cleared the Trade Ministry of any wrongdoing in the organisation of the awards after it invited the sector Minister Alan Kyerematen to provide details on the matter.

But the Minority Chief Whip Muntaka Mubarak described as a complete cover-up, claims by the presidency that there was no wrongdoing.

The Minority in parliament called for a bipartisan committee to probe the development; a request the Speaker of Parliament Prof. Mike Oquaye granted.

But speaking on Accra based Citi FM Saturday, Mr. Cudjoe said that the conduct of the organisers was standard practice.

He, however, indicated that the Ministry could have been better with its handling of the whole process.

My personal opinion is that the Trade Ministry handled this thing quite poorly. Secondly, I have to also say that if you organize a formal programme with business people, there is actually nothing entirely wrong if they paid for tablesunless of course, those sums were indeed extorted. We have to differentiate the two, he said.
The two men whose names are not known yet were relieved of their post immediately.

They failed to enforce a bye-law which demands that all vehicles must offload goods between 6 pm and 6 am.

READ ALSO: Eastern region records 105 maternal deaths in 2017

However, the 2 who have been fired were present after 6 am when a vehicle was offloading goods at the Central Business District (CBD) of Accra.

Mr Sowah was on a tour in the same area to see how a planned decongestion exercise was going.

He chanced on the infractions and told the two, for not enforcing the law, youre fired today.

The Mayor was not ready to listen even though the officials tried to give an explanation.

READ ALSO: FDA to ban songs that encourage alcohol consumption

The Mayor, however, explained that this is a new rule and it will continue, we have not said you should not offload your goods, we are saying you should do it between 6 pm and 6 am.

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has started a major decongestion exercise to get hawkers and traders off the pavements and footbridges in the metropolis.

The AMA has earlier notified the hawkers of this exercise in the previous week.
In a Facebook post on January 7, 2018, he asked that the government update Ghanaians on the stay of the Gitmo 2 since their stay in the country has elapsed.

Time to return the Gitmo 2. Their time is up. Please update us before we use the courts, the post read.

READ ALSO: AMA begins major decongestion exercise today

In August last year, parliament ratified an agreement to allow Mahmud Umar Muhammad Bin Atef and Khalid Muhammad Salih Al-Dhuby, to stay in Ghana, following a Supreme Court order.

The Court had earlier ruled that their stay in Ghana was unconstitutional without parliamentary backing.

The then John Mahama-led government decided to welcome the two Yemeni ex-detainees from the US into the country for a period of two years.
The late Managing Editor of the Al-Hajj newspaper passed on last Friday at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital after reportedly battling with stroke.

The veteran journalist was subsequently laid to rest on Saturday, however, former president Mahama was not present at the burial service.

The former president was rather spotted at the NDCs Unity Walk held in Techiman in the Brong Ahafo region on that same day.

Mahamas absence led to speculations, with certain quarters reading all sorts of meanings to it.

However, in a press release the family of the late Alhaji Bature has warned against using the demise of their relative to score despicable political points.

They explained that the ex-president gave all the needed support before and after the death of the late Alhaji Bature, adding that Mahama was only absent as a result of circumstances beyond his control.

The family, therefore, expressed their gratitude towards John Mahama for coming to the rescue of our late brother at the time he needed them most.

Below is the full statement by the late Alhaji Batures family:

The Iddrisu family is extremely scandalized by the inexorable attempts by some political entrepreneurs to score despicable political points with the sudden death of Alhaji Bature Iddrisu by launching unwarranted scathing attacks on former President John Dramani Mahama.

While we acknowledge the inherent rights of any person or group of persons to criticize the former President, we strongly object to crafty attempts to use the death of our late brother as fertile political grounds to sow seeds of political profiteering.

The contributions of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama; his brother, Mr Ibrahim Mahama and the Mahama family in general, from the day the late Alhaji Bature Iddrisu was admitted at the hospital, to the time of his death and its aftermath, are too great a virtue for the Iddrisu family to gross over. We believe the Mahama family came to the rescue of our late brother at the time he needed them most and the best way to reciprocate is to appreciate their kind gesture.

We don't have the authority of the Mahama family to make public their contributions to Alhaji Bature prior to his death, but if there was any creature on earth who took a special interest in the upkeep of him while on admission at the hospital, it was the Mahama family.

For the records, the former President was in touch with us while in Techiman and indeed joined the Muslim community in Techiman Zongo to observe Jannaiza prayers prior to the burial of Alhaji Bature. A minute of silence was observed during the Unity Walk in Techiman in memory of the fallen Hero.

The former President sent entourage led by Alhaji Collins Dauda and other NDC stalwarts to represent him at the burial ceremony due to his absence as a result of circumstances beyond his control.

It is awfully shocking that persons who never checked up on Alhaji Bature while on his sick bed and never showed up for his burial rites or called to check up on arrangements are the ones demonizing those who singlehandedly stood by him in times of difficulty.

We are by this statement warning any person or group of persons who want to latch onto Alhaji Bature's death to settle political scores to desist from it immediately.

We have lost a national hero, and the best we can do to preserve his legacy and memory is to pray for his soul to rest in peace.

Amos Blessing Amorse
Armed with pistols, a short gun, a hammer and machetes, the suspects also took away some mobile phones and even subjected harm to the occupants of the orphanage.

READ ALSO: Robbery gang terrorise residents of Koforidua

Their luck, however, run out when they attempted to decode some of the phones they had stolen.

Two suspects were initially arrested at Kwame Nkrumah Circle after an attempt to break into one of the iPhones which led to a number being sent to the owners gmail account.Their accomplices were subsequently grabbed.
The 39-year-old was suspected to have raped his Ghanaian house help at his Airport Hills Residential home in Accra.

The court presided over by Justice Kofi Dorgu refused to hear the bail application by the accuseds lawyer, Ralph Opoku Adusei because the state prosecutor in charge was indisposed.

Lawyer for the accused pleaded with the court to consider the fact that the wife of Mr Haddad and two children have been thrown out of their house, but the Judge told the counsel to come back to the court on January 9, 2018.

The counsel for the accused prayed for bail, but the court refused on grounds that they did not have the jurisdiction to do so.

Background

The victim in this rape and assault case, who speaks only Ewe and French, said the suspect beat her after his apparent displeasure with the coffee she had prepared for him.

Four policemen from the East Legon District Police Command arrested Haddad Rabih, around 11:45 pm.

The suspect, according to reports forcibly had sex with the victim around 5 pm on Saturday in the absence of his wife and other occupants of his household after subjecting her to severe beatings for resisting his demands.

The incident happened at Airport Hills residential area.

The victim narrating her ordeal after seeking medical care, the victim (name withheld) said the suspect beat her up mercilessly after she refused to accede to his demands for the second time.

He slapped her twice on the face, finally overpowered her and dragged her to his bedroom to rape her.

According to the victim who could barely turn her neck, she had been in the employment of the suspect from the month of November but was persistently harassed by him for sex anytime his wife was not at home.

She said the event was the fourth time the suspect had raped her in a total of two separate encounters.

Narrating how it happened, she said the suspect directed her to have her bath after his wife, another house-help and his children had left home.

After her shower, the suspect allegedly directed her to his kitchen, which was close to the master bedroom to prepare him coffee.

She obliged after he refused to allow her to dress properly after bathing.

On reaching the kitchen, he locked the door but her attempt to escape was not successful.

The victim said Rabih threw her out of the room after raping her twice. She bled after the act.

Former AG steps in to serve as lawyer for the victim

Former Attorney General, Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, has stepped in to serve as the lawyer of the victim.

Mrs. Appiah-Oppong said she was keenly following the case, and expressed some satisfaction with the course of the investigations so far, and said she will ensure justice is served.

"We are fortunate to have caught this one early so that the investigation can be done properly. Very often, by the time we become aware of a situation like this, time has elapsed, evidence is lost and it becomes very difficult to follow up on it. That is why we are very keen to follow up on this one to make sure that the proper investigation and proper prosecution is also done," Mrs. Appiah-Oppong said.
According to him, the Nana Addo-led administration has gone quiet despite promising to investigate the matter when voted into power.

In his view, the NPP lied to Ghanaians concerning the DKM scandal in the lead up to the 2016 elections.

Earlier in 2017, many customers of DKM Microfinance Company were left frustrated after losing millions of cedis invested with the company.

This was after owners of the microfinance company invested in unapproved ventures and ended up losing their funds.

As a result, the Registrar Generals Department was appointed to liquidate the company in order to help refund monies to customers who lost their investments.

However, not all customers were lucky enough to receive their monies, with some getting part payment, whiles others received nothing at all.

The scandal rose to become a national issue, with the then opposition NPP accusing then president Mahama of being involved in DKMs dealings.

Now a former president, Mahama believes the ruling governments relaxed approach to dealing with the issue is enough evidence that he was innocent after all.

He, therefore, dared the Nana Addo administration to back their accusations by prosecuting him and his wife or be known as a party of lies.

When the DKM issue came up, the NPP accused my wife and I of owning that company. So they said when they come into power, they will retrieve the money from us and give it back to those it was taken from. ByGods gracetoday, theyare in now power," Mahama said during the NDCs Unity Walk held in Techiman on Saturday.

"I challenge them to investigate the ownership of DKM. If DKM is owned by my wife and me, arrest us but they are now very quiet."
Observing from what is happening in the country today, with the new phrase yetuasheda emerging during the just ended festivities, there is a high possibility, that Ghanaians will change the government, come 2020, and replace it with a new government (NDC) that will instill hope and provide solutions to the welfare issues affecting the good people of Ghana, Professor Alabi said in his statement on the 25th anniversary of the Fourth Republic.

He believed that Ghanaians should be involved in governance and applaud where we get it right and offer constructive criticism where we get it wrong.

We should be strong to change where there is the need to change.

The former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) further called on Ghanaians to renew their faith in the choice of democratic governance and put to use their God-given rights to change governments when things are not running smoothly.

He, however, stated that the kind of democracy to be embraced by all should look beyond ethnic and religious affiliations.

Let us all be active citizens by contributing towards our national development and by holding those in positions of responsibility accountable for both their actions and inactions.
Speaking on Accra-based Asempa FM, he said explained that he will be flouting the 1992 Constitution if he is seen controlling the affairs of the state broadcaster.

The Minister was reacting to the public outcry against the introduction of the TV license fee.

READ ALSO: FDA to ban songs that encourage alcohol consumption

The government has been criticised for supporting a decision to reintroduce TV License fees with some threatening to vote against the governing party in the next election.

Many Ghanaians have decided not to pay even though they risk being prosecuted. They argue that the major beneficiary GBC does not create programmes that are attractive enough for their consumption.

Mustapha Hamid believes the Director-General of the GBC must be blamed for the public reaction following news that defaulters of TV license will be prosecuted.

He explained that Dr Kwame Akuffo Anoff-Ntow single-handedly took the decision to request the setting up of courts to prosecute persons who have not paid the annual tax.

READ ALSO: GBC considers deducting TV licence fee from public workers salaries

Hamid added that there is little government can do because GBC is semi-autonomous.

The only thing government does for the state broadcaster; he noted is to pay for the salaries of staff and not to tell the Director-General what to do.
Israel has long viewed the UN agency, known as UNRWA, as biased against it, an allegation the agency strongly denies, saying it is only providing necessary services to Palestinians.

"UNRWA is an organisation that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem," Netanyahu said while also lauding Trump at the beginning of his weekly cabinet meeting.

He said that while millions of other refugees around the world were cared for by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinians have their own body which also treats "great-grandchildren of refugees -- who aren't refugees".

"This absurd situation must be ended," Netanyahu said.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said that its mandate came from the UN General Assembly "whose members give wide and strong support to the agency's humanitarian and human development mission".

"What perpetuates the refugee crisis is the failure of the parties to deal with the issue," he wrote in a statement.

"This needs to be resolved by the parties to the conflict in the context of peace talks, based on UN resolutions and international law."

In June, Netanyahu said he had raised the issue with Washington's UN envoy Nikki Haley.

On Wednesday, Trump threatened to cut aid worth more than $300 million annually to the Palestinians in a bid to force them to negotiate.

The United States has long provided the Palestinian Authority with much-needed budgetary support and security assistance, as well as an additional $304 million for UN programmes in the West Bank and Gaza.

A Friday report on Israeli Channel 10 television said the US had frozen a payment due to UNRWA, but a spokesman for the UN organisation said on Saturday that they "have not been informed directly of a formal decision either way by the US administration".

UNRWA runs hundreds of schools for Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

It also distributes aid and provides teacher training centres, health clinics and social services.

Many analysts, including Israelis, warn that closing the agency without having an effective replacement could lead to further poverty and perhaps violence.

"While UNRWA is far from perfect, the Israeli defence establishment, and the Israeli government as a whole, have over the years come to the understanding that all the alternatives are worse for Israel," Peter Lerner, a former spokesman for the Israeli military, wrote in an opinion piece in Haaretz newspaper last week.
Although their nations are separated by a heavily militarised border, North and South Korean restaurants operate side by side in Xita, the Korean neighbourhood in the city of Shenyang.

Billboards and signs in Korean script hang across the area, which boasts South Korean beer and fried chicken joints, cosmetics counters and clothing stores.

But North Korean businesses now face a Tuesday deadline to clear out as China enforces United Nations sanctions banning their presence following Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests.

After months of tensions that raised fears of nuclear warfare, North and South Korean officials will hold their first dialogue for more than two years on Tuesday.

But in this corner of China, relations between Koreans are tense and show no signs of thawing.

"We're one ethnicity, a big family, but they have a different way of thinking than us," said a North Korean waitress who works at the Pyongyang Rungrado restaurant.

She has lived in Xita for three years but has never spoken to a South Korean. She declined to give her name.

Across the street, the owner of a South Korean restaurant called Number 8 Storeroom said she has never had any contact with the owners of the two North Korean eateries near her establishment.

"I don't want to talk to them," said Jin Meihua, 43, whose restaurant serves eel and steak barbecue to a mostly Chinese clientele.

Caught in the middle

Shenyang, a city of 8.3 million, is not far from China's border with the North and houses many of China's ethnic Koreans.

In recent years it became a destination for North Koreans privileged enough to travel overseas.

North Korean eateries and small hotels popped up to feed and lodge them. South Korean boutiques became popular for shopping.

But both sides of Shenyang's Korea town have become ensnared in international disputes.

South Korean businesses took a major financial hit after China imposed punitive economic measures on Seoul over its decision to host the THAAD US anti-missile defence system, which Beijing sees as a threat to its own security.

"The whole area is in a slump," said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences in Shenyang.

"Last year there was the THAAD issue with South Korea. Then North Korea created problems with its nuclear testing. Chinese have lost interest in spending their money in Xita."

Many South Koreans packed up and went home as their businesses failed, locals say.

"Things haven't been good since then," said 27-year old Jin Zhenyou, an ethnic Korean waiter at a South Korean restaurant.

The North's own dining establishments are likely to be hard hit by dwindling visitors and a blanket order from China's commerce ministry to shut down North Korean businesses by Tuesday.

Some estimates put their number at around 100 across China.

In Xita, only one has apparently closed so far and waitresses at other establishments said they had no plans to close come Tuesday.

Socialists vs capitalists

China's ethnic Koreans could bridge the divide between the two sides, but even they say making friends with North Koreans can be difficult.

"They don't like South Koreans. They won't eat in our restaurants. There's no overlap at all," Jin said.

With the shifting geopolitical situation now hitting the North, South Koreans say they won't be sad to see them go.

South Koreans and North Koreans "don't share any special relationship", said a man surnamed Gong at the local Korea Society in Shenyang.

The citizens "don't hold any events for building friendly relations, they don't know each other and don't communicate with each other," Gong said.

In 2016 the South Korean embassy told citizens to avoid the North's restaurants for safety reasons, according to Chung Young-June, a scholar with the Institute for Sinology at Yonsei University.

The government warning filtered into North Korean eateries, further straining relations between the neighbouring restaurant owners.

"The South Korean government doesn't allow them to eat our food," said the North Korean restaurant waitress.

She had no interest in speaking with South Koreans.

"We are a socialist country, they are capitalist," she said.
3. Dogecoin, the alternative cryptocurrency inspired by a popular meme, has surged over the weekend and now has a market capitalization over $2 billion. It soared above the $1 billion milestone for the first time on Christmas Day and climbed over $2 billion on Sunday. As for its price, the coin was trading at $0.018 at the time of writing. That's up 800% from $0.002 a coin at the beginning of December.

4. U.S. oilfield service companies are gearing up for initial public offerings, according to regulatory filings and analysts, after several shelved equity sales last year during a weak period for oil prices. Oil is trading near its highest level since early 2015, fueling demand for service firms to bring new shale wells to production.

5. Oil prices firmed on Monday on the back of a slight decline in the number of U.S. rigs drilling for new production, with crude holding just below near three-year highs reached last week.U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at

6. Asian shares neared all-time peaks on Monday after Wall Street boasted its best start to a year in over a decade, with brisk economic growth and benign inflation proving a potent cocktail for risk appetite. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan

9. 'Big Four' accountancy firm KPMG has quit its role as an advisor in the Grenfell Tower inquiry after criticisms over its appointment. Campaigners said KPMG had failed to disclose a conflict of interest and called for the firm's removal from the role. In a statement, KPMG
LONDON  Deltic Group, which operates late night bars and clubs across the UK, had record sales of 2.4 million on New Year's Eve 2017, the company said on Monday.

Deltic, which operates venues such as Oceana in Southampton and Atik in Edinburgh, said sales jumped 8.2% in the four weeks to December 31 2017.

More than 76,000 people visited its 57 bars and clubs across the UK on New Year's Eve and Deltic said it sold 10,000 bottles of Champagne and prosecco across the period.

CEO Peter Marks said in a statement: "I believe that our recent performance reflects the Group's quality brands, well-invested estate, industry-leading central sales and social media campaigns and dedication to customer service, in tune with the appetite amongst consumers for great nights out, particularly on special occasions."
LONDON  New satellite imagery of two of Saudi Arabia's largest oil refineries suggests the Kingdom may have under-reported its oil stores in the first half of 2017.

Satellite images gathered by tech start up Bird.i suggest the level of crude oil held in two major refineries in Saudi Arabia, Ras Tanura and Yanbu, increased between January and June 2017. This is despite the Kingdom's official figures that show supplies declined, and a commitment to reduce supply in the face of low prices.

Bird.i collects and analyses satellite, drone and airborne images from numerous sources, some of which are captured in monochrome and some in full colour. The technology allows the fullness of oil tanks to be estimated according to the shadows cast by tanks' floating roofs: more shadow suggests the roof and oil stores are low. Factors such as the time the photos were taken, the position of the sun and the satellite's position are also taken into consideration.

Images taken of the Ras Tanura refinery, Saudi Arabia's biggest refinery with a capacity of 550,000 barrels per day, suggest stocks were relatively low in January compared to in May, when the shadows cast were much shorter  indicating a higher supply.

Images of Yanbu terminal, a major refinery on the Red Sea with a capacity of 225,000 barrels per day, suggest stocks in November 2016 were relatively low compared to those in May 2017, when the tanks look to be "almost full," according to Corentin Guillo, founder and CEO of Bird.i.

However, a third  and the most recent  image of Yanbu, taken in December 2017, shows more shadow, suggesting oil supplies fell again in the second half of the year.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world's largest oil producers and key member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In November 2016, OPEC members agreed to cut oil production in the face of an oil glut and falling prices, and in November 2017 both OPEC and non-OPEC producers agreed to extend oil output cuts until the end of 2018.

Saudi Arabia also reported falling stores throughout 2017. In official data submitted to the Joint Organisation Data Initiative (Jodi), the Kingdom reported oil stocks had declined by 5.4 million barrels between January and June 2017, and were on a downward trajectory between March and September.

"The direction of the oil price is particularly difficult to predict given the combination of global demand, technological change and politics which feed into its valuation," said Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

"It would be pretty destabilising for the oil price, and for OPEC, if Saudi Arabia was shown to be saying one thing and doing another," he said.

But Khalaf cautioned above ground storage tanks are not the full picture: satellite images are "far from conclusive evidence," he said, since reserves are also held overseas and in underground tanks.

Saudi Arabia's economy is heavily dependent on oil, a problem  in the face of a finite supply and low oil prices  the Kingdom is trying to solve. Its Vision 2030 project seeks to diversify the economy and boost the state's coffers.

As part of this project, the Kingdom plans to float state oil giant Saudi Aramco, which uses both Ras Tanura and Yanbu refineries.

"In order to comply with the normal listing rules, Saudi Aramco would have to reveal precise information about its current reserves and how they have been calculated," said Mihir Kapadia, CEO of Sun Global Investments.

"However, it is not yet clear whether the share sale would include ownership of the ground reserves, and therefore we may be uncertain about the level of transparency from the company," he said.

"The [official government] figure of 266 billion barrels [in reserves] matters because it estimates the proven value of the commodity, especially as it could appreciate after peak oil," said Kapadia.

"One of the key aspects for the [Aramco's] valuation would be the reserve total," he said.
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The $100,000-plus 2018 BMW M5 is an all-new version of one of the most impressive machines the Bavarians turn out. Now we're getting a sixth generation, and as we learned last year when the car landed at the Los Angeles Auto Show, BMW has made some major changes.
These days it's the world versus Tesla. Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, Aston Martin, and just about every other major luxury automaker with a heartbeat is working on a future rival for Tesla's Model S.

But that wasn't always the case. Back in 2012, the Tesla Model S burst onto the scene as a four-door electric sedan with the performance, range, and luxury to actually compete against conventional premium sedans. But it wasn't immediately crowned king of the hill because a rival was lurking in the wings. That rival, the stunningly beautiful Fisker Karma sedan, was the brainchild of the famed car designer Henrik Fisker. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk bet on an all-electric setup for the Model S, Fisker went with an in-car gasoline generator to relieve any potential range anxiety, or fear of running out of battery power.

The two cars vied for the hearts and wallets of the eco-friendly elite. And for a while, Fisker held its own. Leonardo DiCaprio had a Karma. In fact, the actor wasn't just the company's brand ambassador; he was an investor. "Fast and Furious" star Tyrese Gibson owned one as well. As did Justin Bieber, whose car was wrapped in chrome.

Yet a combination of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, a parking lot with several hundred flooded-out Karmas, and a defunct battery supplier doomed the budding car company. By November 2013, Fisker Automotive was bankrupt, leaving the increasingly capable Model S as the victor.

Now the Karma is back. In 2014, Wanxiang America, the Illinois-based subsidiary of China's Wanxiang Group, purchased the intellectual property and assets of the defunct Fisker Automotive for $150 million. Soon afterward, Karma Automotive was created. In 2017, the company began customer deliveries of its first model: the resurrected sedan formerly known as the Fisker Karma.

Last summer, Business Insider spent a day with a 2018 Karma Revero test car clad in an eye-catching Corona Del Sol paint job. The 2018 Revero starts at $130,000 and tops out at about $140,000.

Here it is! The 2018 Karma Revero.

It's a mildly updated, rebranded edition of the Fisker Karma that went out of production in 2012.

Unlike the Fisker, which was made by Valmet in Finland, the Revero is assembled at Karma's factory in Moreno Valley, California.

The stylish Karma is the brainchild of the famed car designer Henrik Fisker, whose other works include ...

... the Aston Martin V8 Vantage and ...

... the BMW Z8.

For better or worse, one look at the Revero and you know immediately it was designed by a true artist. The sleek hood ...

... pronounced wheel arches, and low-slung silhouette make for a truly stunning automobile.

Up front, the original Karma's distinctive front end remains virtually unchanged.

While the rear end received a couple of tweaks.

Most noticeable are the missing "Fisker Karma EV" badges that once adorned the car.

They've been replaced by a single stylized Karma badge.

There's also some trunk space!

Step inside and you'll see the biggest difference between the Karma and the Model S.

While the Model S is a roomy family sedan with room for seven, the Revero is a four-door coupe.

There is room for four, but only if the passengers are not too tall.

Unfortunately, it's one of the sacrifices you have to make for the captivating looks.

However, Revero's cabin is beautifully styled and luxuriously appointed.

Lovely details abound.

Like this attractively rendered digital instrument cluster.

The triangular push-button shifter is unique. As is the exposed battery pack visible through a clear panel.

The integrated door switch is a cool touch.

The rear-seat center console is an interesting touch. It also makes the already tight rear cabin feel more claustrophobic.

One major improvement is the new infotainment system. Unlike the unit found on the Fisker, this one seems to actually work. In fact, it didn't fail once during our time with the car.

Karma built this system in-house using BlackBerry's QNX platform as a basis.

Overall, I found the system to be responsive, intuitively organized, and attractively rendered.

The navigation system is functional.

As part of the update, Karma modified the sedan's drivetrain and power-generation systems.

This includes a reworked 20.8-kWh lithium-ion battery pack with greater reliability.

In addition, the solar roof has doubled in capacity and will now be able to help charge the main battery pack.

Unlike the Tesla, the Karma isn't a pure electric vehicle. Rather, it's a range-extended plug-in series hybrid. I know that's a lot to unpack, but here's what it means.

In most instances, the Revero runs on electric power from the battery pack. On its own, the pack delivers 50 miles of electric range. Power can be replenished by plugging it into a charger or ...

... by firing up the 2.0-liter, 235-horsepower, turbocharged Ecotec inline-four-cylinder engine sourced from General Motors. The engine doesn't actually provide direct drive to the wheels. Instead, it's used purely as a power generator.

Together with a fully charged battery pack, the Karma can deliver up to 300 miles of range.

So what is powering the Revero? How about a pair of electric motors generating an impressive 403 horsepower and a mind-blowing 981 foot-pounds of torque to rear wheels!!

According to Karma, the 5,400-pound Revero can hit 60 mph in 5.4 seconds and reach a top speed of 125 mph. It can also do the quarter mile in 14.5 seconds at 93 mph.

Here are my impressions of the Karma Revero.

The Karma Revero today is what the Fisker Karma was five years ago. It's beautiful, rich with character, not very practical, and imperfect. Behind the wheel, the Revero feels every bit of its 5,400-pound curb weight. While its 403 horsepower and 981 foot-pounds of torque should deliver head-snapping acceleration, it doesn't. The drivetrain and traction-control systems dull the power delivery. It's certainly capable of going quick, but it doesn't seem to want to. Believe it or not, there's lag in an electric car, something that I've never encountered before.

Karma characterizes the Revero as a charmingly relaxed grand tourer and not as a speed demon to rival the comparably priced Model S P100D. But I've driven enough 400-horsepower GT cars to know that it should have more pep in its step. On a positive note, the Revero's hydraulic steering is communicative and well-weighted. In addition, with fuel-economy ratings of just 19 miles a gallon and 51 miles per gallon equivalent, it doesn't really deliver on its eco-friendly image either.

The interior of the Revero, while cramped, was full of personality. It felt cozy and well-designed. Unlike the Model S and its cool technocratic aesthetic, the Karma feels like a true luxury car. Its occupants are surrounded by rich leather, unpolished wood, carefully crafted switches, and charming design details. In fact, the wood accents in the cabin come from sustainable reclaimed logs. (Our test car had the carbon-fiber accents instead of wood.) It makes you feel special the way a car for this price point should.

In spite the charming interior, the Revero is a sedan that isn't very practical and an electric vehicle that's not all that efficient. But it's a vehicle that can't really be judged by traditional criteria. The Revero has to be taken into context. For Karma Automotive, the Revero is not meant to be a moneymaker. Nor is it meant to sell in large numbers. Rather, it's a starting point for a fledgling carmaker. It's a niche product designed to help build awareness for the brand and put it in a position to release more mainstream models.
After the popular New York City home goods store Fishs Eddy began selling mugs featuring talk show host Oprah Winfrey's face and the phrase "Oprah 2020" on them this past summer, they sold well, but didn't make a splash.

But after last night's speech at the Golden Globe awards that led the famous host to begin "actively" considering a 2020 presidential run, the Oprah mugs at Fishs Eddy flew off the shelves, and the store sold out of them by Monday morning, less than a day after the Hollywood awards ceremony.

A few months ago the great ... @ Brian Stelter

People were buying it because they had the option of it, but after last night, people came and were like 'Oh there's the Oprah mug, I'm going to get it,'" the store manager of Fishs Eddy told Business Insider. "So last night's speech definitely helped sell it."

The mug is part of the store's women's empowerment collection, and was featured alongside similar mugs honoring Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other powerful women.

Winfrey's speech at the Golden Globes championed the cause of women who had spoken out through the "Me Too" campaign that highlighted sexual assault and harassment.

"I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon, and when that new day finally dawns it will be because of a lot of magnificent women  many of whom are right here in this room tonight  and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time where nobody ever has to say 'me too' again," Winfrey said on Sunday.
The Conservative Prime Minister has been shaking up her front bench, with Karen Bradley appointed Northern Ireland secretary after predecessor James Brokenshire resigned over health reasons, Matt Hancock made culture secretary, and David Gauke appointed justice secretary. But the heavy-hitters  including Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, and Greg Clark  have remained in their existing roles.

Jeremy Hunt, now the longest-serving health secretary ever, has given an expanded brief that includes social care. According to one report, he had been due to be moved to the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, but refused.

Speaking at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn accused May of "dodging the real issues" with a "pointless" reshuffle, according to a copy of his remarks shared ahead of time.

Attacking the government over the ongoing winter NHS crisis that has seen tens of thousands of operations and appointments cancelled, he said: "Its simply not good enough. You cant make up for nearly eight years of failure by changing the name of a department.

"Back in the real world, outside Westminster, our health service is on its knees: with patients dying as they wait for ambulances to arrive, ambulances stacking up outside hospitals, and corridors full with trolleys and patients."
Russian media reported on Wednesday that "radical Islamists" had destroyed six fighter aircraft and one transport plane with a mortar attack on December 31.

More than 10 Russian service members were wounded in the attack, said the report, which cited defense sources but not Russia's Ministry of Defense.

A day later, another Russian media outlet published a denial from the ministry, which said two service members had been killed but no planes destroyed.

Unverified images circulating on social media, however, seem to fit the bill of destroyed Russian aircraft at Syria's Hmeymim air base.

Joseph Dempsey, a research associate for defense analysis at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, posted the images and pointed out that the plane in them had been confirmed to be in Syria. He added that the rainy conditions captured in the photo matched the weather at the time the report said the attack happened.

@kommersant Unverified imag... @ Joseph Dempsey

Dempsey's pictures show the shredded rear horizontal stabilizer of a Su-24. But for a mortar to do such serious damage to the stabilizer, it would have to explode nearby, most likely peppering the entire plane and anything around it with bits of shrapnel.

If the images are genuine, it's safe to assume other nearby jets or assets suffered damage too.

In short, though the damage looks limited, the plane is probably wrecked. One picture shows a fuel leak and a bomb underneath the jet.

Taken together, the images depict a disaster or near-disaster where Russia bases most of its fleet in Syria.

This spells trouble for Russia

Whether the images are real or not  or whether seven or one or zero planes were destroyed  Russia has confirmed the attack and casualties.

Google Earth satellite imagery of the air base shows that the mortar attackers had ample space and cover to launch on Russia's sitting-duck Sukhoi jets.

It appears Russia most likely fell victim to a guerrilla attack or insurgency  the same kind that has for decades kept the US's superior military and air power from completing missions in the Middle East.

Charles Lister, the director of counterterrorism at the Middle East Institute, tweeted two theories about who could have attacked the base: a "localized, very small independent rebel unit active behind enemy lines," or "Ahrar al-Sham's 'special' unit operating covertly in Latakia (has a long track record)."
LONDON  Theresa May has suffered a shock resignation of a leading government ally as she reshuffled her Cabinet  but by and large, the heavy-hitters in the Prime Minister's government have remained in place.

The Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire stood down due to ill health, as the prime minister prepared to reappoint her top team, a government spokesperson confirmed on Monday morning. He has been replaced by Karen Bradley, formerly the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. (Matt Hancock has been apponted to Bradley's old role.)

Justine Greening, formerly education secretary, has quit government after being offered the Department of Work and Pensions, according to multiple reports, replaced by Damien Hinds. Instead, Esther McVey becomes Work and Pensions Secretary.

Other senior figures moved in the reshuffle included Patrick McLouglin, who was replaced as party chairman by the former immigration minister Brandon Lewis.

David Lidington was also moved from Justice Secretary to become the new Minister of State for the Cabinet office  replaced by David Gauke, previously

Lidington repalces Damian Green as May's de facto deputy, and will stand in for her at Prime Minister's Questions but without taking the title of First Secretary. Green was sacked by the prime minister last year after making a misleading claiming about pornography found on his parliamentary computer in 2008.

In a letter to the prime minister, Brokenshire said he had a small lesion on the lung which required surgery. "Clearly my long-term health and my family are my priorities," he wrote.

James Brokenshire reveals h... @ Paul Waugh

May thanked him for his service and replied that it was "absolutely right that you should put your health first."

Breaking: the reshuffle's b... @ Tom Newton Dunn

Reshuffle chaos

There was much confusion after the Conservative party announced that the Transport Secretary Chris Grayling had been moved to party chairman, replacing Patrick McLoughlin.

Why have @Conservatives jus... @ Kate Proctor

Further announcements are expected throughout the day, with more junior appointments expected tomorrow.
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LONDON  Theresa May is set to move or sack at least four senior figures in her Cabinet on Monday in the biggest reshuffle of her top ministerial team since calling the June snap general election.

The prime minister will confirm a number of changes to her Cabinet today and tomorrow, with the most high-profile changes set to be announced before lunchtime today.

The most prominent Conservative ministers reportedly under threat are Education Secretary Justine Greening, Party Chairman Patrick McLoughlin, Business Secretary Greg Clark and House of Commons leader Andrew Leadsom, who May went toe-to-toe with in the final round of the party's 2017 leadership contest.

Leadsom has today written an article for The Times outlining her plans for the year as House of Commons leader.

Though changes to the Cabinet will be wide-ranging, most of the government's big beasts are set to continue in their roles.

Boris Johnson will continue as foreign secretary despite a number of gaffes and his widely-criticised handling of the

The prime minister is likely to announce that a new ministerial position has been created to oversee preparations for the possibility of a no-deal Brexit. Steve Baker, who is currently based in the Brexit department, is set to be confirmed as the Cabinet for minister for no deal, The Telegraph reports.

Possible promotions

A major vacancy to be filled is that of first secretary of state after Damian Green was effectively sacked last month for lying about pornography found on his parliamentary computer in 2008.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been tipped as a possible replacement. However, a change in leadership within the Department for Health would be tricky with the NHS struggling with what has been dubbed a winter crisis.

Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, has also been floated as a potential successor to Green.

All eyes will be on movement at the top-end of Cabinet but Prime Minister May wants to use this latest reshuffle to promote new talent to the lower levels of government, according to numerous reports.

George Freeman, who up until recently was head of Theresa May's policy unit, has called for a "big shake-up" within the Conservative Party following the disappointment of the June election.

"Politics is changing. I think this election showed that our party structure is not fit for winning modern elections. We dont just need to repair it, I think we need to be really bold and set out what a 21st-century Conservative party looks like," he told the Today programme this morning.

Tory MPs elected in 2015 and 2017 including James Cleverly, Suella Fernandes and Bim Afolami have all been tipped for junior ministerial roles.

Brandon Lewis, the MP for Great Yarmouth and current immigration minister, is reportedly in the frame to replace McLoughlin as party chairman.
According to multiple reports, it's likely that big names will keep their jobs.

Foreign secretary Boris Johnson is expected to keep his job, despite calls for his resignation over his blunders around Brexit secretary David Davis are also thought to be safe, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

The newspaper reported that education secretary Justine Greening is fighting for her job, partly because the Conservatives want to recast themselves as the party for education.
ORLANDO  In 2016, SeaWorld announced it would end its killer-whale-breeding program after years of scrutiny about the theme-park company's treatment of animals. The decision was seen as a necessary refocusing away from SeaWorld's iconic live killer-whale show.

However, according to the CEO, the theme park has the whales necessary to continue a version of what was for decades its most famous attraction. While SeaWorld began phasing it out at some parks in 2016, its "signature killer-whale show" and animal viewings continue at others.

"We will still have the whales for 50 years," CEO Joel Manby said on Monday at the ICR Conference. "They live a long time. This is a decision that is for the immediate. But we get to keep the whales and have the experience yet have some relief from a legislative standpoint."

SeaWorld says the average life expectancy of killer whales, also called orcas, is 46 to 50 years for females and 30 to 38 years for males.

The whales' lifespan was a focus of the breeding-program backlash, which reached a fever pitch after the release of the 2013 documentary "Blackfish."

After activists petitioned for a ban on killer-whale breeding, arguing that orcas die younger in captivity, SeaWorld launched an ad campaign saying the whales live as long in its theme parks as they do in the wild. Experts told PolitiFact that SeaWorld's claim was backed by some research but that it ignored issues such as the animals' quality of life.

Manby said SeaWorld reallocated the $300 million it had before April 2016 planned to spend on expanding its pool of killer whales through breeding toward building more attractions.

The company's strategy more generally has shifted toward education and animal conservation and away from its live animal shows.

"When you thought of SeaWorld five years ago, you thought of it as Shamu the killer whale," Manby said. "When Shamu became a liability, it created somewhat of a confusion around the opportunity for us."

Manby clarified that SeaWorld was committed to its decision not to breed and that it would not restart its breeding program, at least in his "human lifetime."

The CEO says that he believes in SeaWorld's mission but that many people misunderstand the company. Backlash against SeaWorld has been driven by "lies" and people lacking in "critical thinking," he said.

"One hundred years from now, people are going to be begging for zoos and aquariums to take the animals from the wild because the extinction rate is so high," Manby said.

People are wrong to focus on SeaWorld while fishing kills numerous sharks, dolphins, and whales every year, Manby argued.
1. Intel faces at least three class action law suits over the Meltdown and Spectre chip bugs discovered by researchers last week. The suits, filed in Oregon, Indiana, and California, cite a potential performance slowdown and also Intel's response to the bug.

2. The Consumer Electronics Show, the massive annual tech tradeshow, has said it will add more women to its speaker lineup after critics pointed out there were no female lead speakers, or a code of conduct. CES said in a December it had a "limited pool" of senior female speakers to choose from.

3. Two activist Apple shareholders want the firm to study the impact of smartphone addiction on children's mental health. Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers Retirement System control around $2 billion (1.47 billion) of shares.

4. There's going to be a big battle between Google and Amazon over their smart speakers, Home and Echo respectively, as each firm races to outdo the competition. It's likely both firms will announce new partnerships and hardware at CES.

5. The first smartglasses enabled with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant will appear at CES. The glasses are being made by Vuzix, according to Bloomberg, and follows lots of third-party hardware makers integrating Alexa into their products.

6. One of Uber's biggest shareholders, Benchmark Capital, is selling almost 15% of its stake in the company to new investor Softbank for $900 million (665 million). Benchmark had hoped to sell more like a quarter of its stake.

7. Snap is hiring someone to spearhead its advertising efforts in China. The company quietly posted a job listing seeking someone to meet "ambitious revenue targets."

8. Mobile quiz game HQ Trivia has exploded in popularity, hitting 1.2 million concurrent players for the first time on Sunday night. HQ Trivia lets players win cash prizes for participating in live quizzes.

9. Samsung won a patent for a phone with screens on two sides. The futuristic device features screens on the front and back of the phone.
From the lure of tax credits to efforts to provide residences for employees, there are several reasons why Silicon Valley companies are looking to build housing and even entire cities.

Take a look at some examples below.

In 2017, the Mountain View City Council approved a Google-backed plan to construct nearly 10,000 homes.

Google recently won city approval to construct a giant campus  which will include housing, offices, shops, businesses, and a public park  in

In late 2017, a division of Google parent company Alphabet announced plans to develop a swath of Toronto's waterfront into a "smart city."

In the years following the 2008 recession, Google provided hundreds of millions of dollars in equity for several low-income housing projects in California and the Midwest.

In Menlo Park, California, Facebook plans to build a new campus with 1,500 residences.

In 2017, Facebook announced that it will construct a village that will include

In December, LinkedIn poured $10 million into a program that works toward building affordable housing in Silicon Valley.

LinkedIn recently announced that it has devoted $10 million to a project by Housing Trust Silicon Valley, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing projects in the Bay Area.

The project, called TECH Fund, gives affordable housing developers short-term loans that help them "compete more effectively with market-rate developers and purchase property faster," according to the Trust.

With LinkedIn's contribution, TECH Fund's investment totals $30 million.

Y Combinator has started research on a project to design futuristic cities.
James Damore, the engineer that Google fired in August for writing a memo suggesting women are less interested in tech because of their biology, has filed a lawsuit against Google.

Damore's lawyer is alleging that conservatives are discriminated against at Google and that Damore's firing was retribution against him for his political views. The suit was filed in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California.

Political affiliation is a protected class in many states.

But the lawsuit is seeking class action status and wants to represent more than just this one class, Damore's lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, a partner with the Dhillon Law Group in San Francisco, told Business Insider. It is seeking to represent everyone who feels Google discriminated against them for being white, or for being male, or for being conservative.

"Googles open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law. Googles management goes to extreme  and illegal  lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and

Dhillon and her law team have been out canvassing for people to join as plaintiffs against the class-action suit. So far, another Google engineer named David Gudeman, who left in December, 2016, is also a plaintiff, reports TechCrunch.

To recap: Damore's memo caused a firestorm for implying that biology was one reason for the lack of women in tech. Damore also argued that it was a lack of tolerance of diverse political viewpoints that needed to change.

After he was fired, he became a cult hero of the political right. His lawyer, Dhillon, is the former chairwoman of the Republican Party in San Francisco.

He threatened to sue, filed a complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing, and that agency investigated and issued him a "right to sue" letter. That doesn't mean he'll win the case. But it is the first step before litigation can proceed.

Google plans to fight back. A spokesperson tells us, "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."

Likewise, in 2015 Gudeman was reprimanded by Google HR after he posted comments to a document being shared internally at Google. The document was about "derailing," the lawsuit says. That involves how to deal with a conversation that goes off the rails.

Gudeman's comments expressed opinions that white men are the "victims of a racist and sexist political movement." He also compared the document to one slave owners would have written for their slaves to help them understand how to interact with their masters, the lawsuit says.
They died, visited Satans kingdom, and came back to life to tell their incredible, unbelievable stories.

Meet three people who died but came back to life from Hell.

Linda Ngaujah

In 2013, this Sierra Leonean prophetess got everyone talking about her out of this world claims. Linda said she died, visited hell, where she saw celebrities, before coming back to life.

She came back with the knowledge of denominations that would be going to hell.

In her words, all Catholics and Muslims are going to hell, adding that these so-called Christian ministers are more into money that spreading the message of God.

Her story was criticised by many pastors including William Kumuyi, the General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry.

Angelica Zambrano

This lady did not just visit hell, she also went to Heaven. She was in both places for a total of 23 hours, according to Top Tenz.

In Hell, she says she saw really famous people like Gaddafi, Whitney Houston, Pope John Paul II, and Michael Jackson.

In Heaven, she got to see Jesus Christ crying over the lost souls and His second coming of the Messiah.

Bill Wiese

This story is quite extraordinary. While others went to hell as their punishment, Bill claims God only took him so that he could testify that the place is very real.

Bill, who was a devoted Christian, went to Satans lair on November 23, 1998. He was plunged into hell by exactly 3 oclock in the morning and returned after 23 minutes at exactly 3:23 am.
The second-semester examination is scheduled to start today, Monday, January 8, 2018. However, the VC in a statement said, the ex student union president who served from May 8 to 29, 2017 before he was suspended has concluded plans with National Associaton of Nigerian Students, NANS to disturb the exams.

In the statement titled ''Attempt by NANS to disrupt the forthcoming Semester examinations beginning Monday, 8 January 2018'', Olayinka said he was surprised that anyone will still parade himself as an official of the Students Union having in mind that the union has since been suspended on May 30th, 2017.

The VC, however, declared that the union suspension remains valid and that any student of the university parading himself as its official does so at its own risk.

In part, the statement reads, Further to the Special Meeting of Senate of the University of Ibadan held on Friday, 5 January 2018 and the unanimous decision to proceed with the Semester Examinations, which has since been published, the University Management has received reliable security reports which require urgent attention.

Ojo Aderemi, a 200 Level student of the Department of History, who served as President of the Students Union from 8 to 29 May 2017 and his sympathisers under the aegis of NANS are planning to disrupt the Examinations''.

ALSO READ: Meet the 1st first class graduate of History in UI since 1948

He, therefore, declared that Security Agents have been put on alert adding that the university would not allow anarchist to disturb the relative peace on the campus.

The Security Agents have been put on alert.

Nonetheless, the generality of Students who are law-abiding and are prepared and ready for their examinations should remain calm, conclude revision of their lecture notes and go in for their examinations.

We should not allow anarchists disrupt the relative peace we have on the Campus.

100 student allegedly caught with blood soaked charm

Meanwhile, a 100 level student of the university was recentlyaccused of using blood-soaked charm and stealing iPhone has reacted to the accusation.
It is most times rare to find photos of these celebrities showing off their great bodies but when they do, it trends. We take a look at 5 hot bedroom photos from Nigerian female celebs.

1. Mercy Aigbe

Mercy Aigbe is one of the most beautiful and sexiest actresses in the Nollywood industry and there is no doubting that. From looking stunning on the red carpet to wearing amazing dresses, Mercy Aigbe has a body to die for. Mercy Aigbe's bedroom photo shows that she isn't ready to slow down rather she is getting sexier as she ages.

2. Toyin Aimakhu

Toyin Aimakhu is another beautiful celebrity who we can't stop admiring when she dresses up. Now imagine Toyin Aimakhu in a bedroom photo shoot, it is priceless and also drop dead sexy. Toyin's bedroom photoshoot definitely will get all the guys drooling and yearning for her. She doesn't do bedroom photoshoots every day but when you see Toyin in bedroom robe then be assured it's going to keep you fascinated.

ALSO READ:10 eligible beautiful celebrity bachelorettes in Nigeria

3. Chika Ike

Chika Ike is one of the hottest female celebrities in Nigeria and no one can argue about that. She has the looks and the body. If the bedroom photos of Chika Ike are used in Playboy magazines, she definitely would get a lot of people talking because she has the body to die for and reeks of sexiness.

4. Halima Abubakar

At the mention of Halima Abubakar, your guess is as good as mine, SEXINESS! Halima Abubakar is another Nollywood actor who over the years has not only excelled career wise but also is known as a very sexy lady. Halima's bedroom photos are priceless as she has the looks that can get any guy carried away.

5. Ruth Kadiri
Richard Mofe Damijo popularly known as RMD was born on the 6th of July, 1961 at Aladja community of Udu Kingdom, near Warri in Delta State.

He attended Midwest College, Warri and Anglican Grammar School and was a member of the Drama Club. He enrolled at the University of Benin to continue his education and studied Theatre Arts. In 1997 Mofe-Damijo returned to the university to study Law at the University of Lagos and graduated in 2004.

RMD took part in a television soap opera in the late 80's called Ripples. Before then, he had a stint with Concord Newspapers and Metro Magazine as a reporter. Out of Bounds was the first film for which he received a writer/producer credit. In 2005 at the maiden edition of the African Movie Academy Awards Mofe-Damijo won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

After years of acting, RMD ventured into politics as he was appointed Commissioner for Culture and Tourism in Delta state.
This is in support of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, which aim to fight sexual harassment, assault and inequality for women in all kinds of workplaces.

The likes of Dakota Johnson, Kerry Washington, Justin Timberlake, Maggot Robbie, Mariah Carey and Allison Williams already turned up for the 75th Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles in their dramatic black gowns.

The Times Up activist group was formed by some A-List actors such as Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Debra Messing, Shonda Rhimes, Emma Stone, Charlize Theron and Sarah Jessica Parker.

The Golden Globes blackout is not only a protest. It is also aimed at raising egal defense fund for victims of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Currently, the group has raised approximately $15 million, with a goal of at least $16 milion.

But Why Black?

"Today, we wear black. Why? Nearly 1/2 of men think women are well represented in leadership roles and 1/3 of women think women are well represented in leadership roles," actress Ashley Judd had posted on Instagram. "The *reality* is, only 1 in 10 senior leaders are women. #TimesUp #WhyWeWearBlack.

Judd was among the first group of women to speak publicly about the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, which kicked off the ongoing worldwide conversations about sexual harassment.

The ugly tales of Weinstein, who sexually harassed and assaulted numerous actresses, including Angelina Jolie, Cara Delevingne and Kate Beckinsale, were revealed in 2017. Harvey demanded sexual favours from these actors in exchange for a movie role.

General Acceptance of Golden Globes Blackout

Not everyone supports the blackout movemnet. Actress Rose McGowan had previously called out Meryl Streep for choosing to wear black after she happily worked for Weinsten.

Blanca Blanco also ignored the Golden Globes blackout by turning up to the event in a revealing red dress.

At the 2018 Golden Globes, stars, including Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep and Emma Watson, will be accompanied by key activists from different fields, including the founder of the #MeToo movement.
When Nigerian gangs are mentioned, the infamous campus cults first come to mind. Sadly, violent gangs have formed outside the university, in streets and close-knit communities.

Some of these groups have gone almost as swiftly as they came, while others have terrorised entire towns and cities and inspired the creation of vigilante groups to curb their excesses.

Here are 5 gangs and cults that have terrorised Nigerians

(1) Badoo:

The ritual group is perhaps the most infamous on this list. Over the last one year or so, the group has terrorised the residents of Ikorodu.

Their extremely fetish practices are most alarming. Its members break into homes or places of worship and savagely murder anyone in their sight by splitting their heads open with pestles.

According to members who have been caught, a small handkerchief is doused in the victims blood. On some occasions, body parts are severed. After a long spree of unchecked violence, security agencies have turned the heat up on the group.

ALSO READ: Herbalist who prepared juju for killer cult group captured by Police

Several members have been apprehended since the year began; a herbalist and a sponsor of the group are also in custody.

(2) Icelanders:

Nigerias south-south has an unsavoury reputation for deep-rooted cultism. The phenomenon has seeped from the universities into everyday life; campus cults in places like Benin and PortHarcourt have street cells and offshoots in residential communities where kids are recruited from a very young age.

In other circumstances, it is hardened criminals or older persons with the potential and desperation to lead a life of crime who are recruited.

The Icelanders were created in this mould. Since its inception, the Icelanders have terrorised residents of Port Harcourt and areas where oil wealth is vastly segregated.

The group engages in paid murder, kidnappings, oil bunkering and similar activities.

(3) Outlaws:

The Outlaws is another product of the South-South, and Rivers in particular. The group split from the Icelanders in the early 2000s after a power tussle between leaders in the group.

No sooner had they become a separate entity than they began to affirm their presence with waves of extreme violence. Like their parent group, the outlaws are heavily involved in kidnappings, oil bunkering, assassinations and political brigandage.

However, over a decade, the outlaws have built a reputation for clashing with the police, with heavy fatalities. Their most infamous attack happened in February 2007.

The group subdued a barrage of police officers while entering into cells and breaking out one of its leaders and over 124 suspects.

(4) One Million Boys:

One of the most saddening aspects of street violence in Nigeria is how young boys have become involved, forming armed groups.

One of such is One Million Boys, the code-name of a gang known for its notorious robbery activities around Lagos and surrounding towns.

The group was reportedly formed in Ajegunle by a group of about 20 boys who sought to represent their communities. At some point, the groups objectives moved to robbery activities, rape and maiming.

ALSO READ: 7 lies you probably believe thanks to Nollywood movies

At the groups height, it was so well-known and feared that many clamoured for them to be called to justice. A movie titled "1 Million Boyz" was released in 2014 based on their activities.

On October 9, 2012, about 130 suspected members of the group were arrested by the Lagos State Police Command during a raid around Apapa and Ajegunle. This raid signalled the beginning of the groups end.

(5) Philistines:

undefined. However, in 2015, they had to deal with a new threat.

A gang of young boys, with ages ranging from 14 to 19 years of age began to terrorise the communities. Residents believe the group formed in Angus Comprehensive High School and Somolu High School on the basis of street loyalty.

Where physical force failed them, the group moved found strength in numbers. The boys operated by parading the streets at night in groups of up to 50 at a time.

Unfortunate passers-by would be robbed, raped and waylay-ed, often with very severe injuries. After the group became a menace, the Police stepped in.
The crime lord was allegedly responsible for the New Years Day massacre in Omoku, Rivers State on January 1, 2018.

23 persons died in the massacre, including women and children.

After a long, intense manhunt, Don Wani was killed at his hideout in Enugu, alongside two members of his squad, in a joint operation by operatives of the .

Before his demise, the lean-bodied figure had cut a hard reputation as a fierce leader in the Niger Delta militancy and then as a king of boys.

Don Wani was a product of his immediate environment. Nigerias South-South has become plagued by armed militancy and gang violence. Most of it is perpetrated by young adults with slightly older men as leaders.

The Niger-Delta is a pressure cooker

A fierce fighter with a menacing presence that even in photos, gives a sense of foreboding, Don Wani, or Igwedibia Johnson was a notorious fighter who rose through the ranks to become one of those leaders.

At the height of his power, he commanded a force that was hundreds strong, made up of youths loyal to his anarchist cause and the pursuit of their goals through brute force.

Most of these people were available for the lack of a better option. The story of the Niger Delta is one that is well known.

Since oil was first discovered in commercial quantity at Oloibiri in the 1950s, the area has been violated by oil companies and the Nigerian government.

Oil pollution is perhaps Niger-Deltas biggest plague. The waters and oil, once the main source of the peoples livelihood, have been rendered useless.

In places like Port Harcourt, crippling poverty watches on as oil money drives by in entourages of expensive cars.

It is this environment that produced Don Wani.

It has produced (and is still producing) generations of angry, young men with limited options and a culture of survival that encourages hyper-masculinity and devalues life in their eyes as they chase sustenance.

Don Wanis reach and power were so wide that at the height of his power, he was one of Nigerias most feared militant leader with his hands deep in kidnapping, political violence, assassinations and just about everything that could be done with a gang and a considerable cache of weapons.

ALSO READ: Here are 5 gangs that have terrorised Nigerians

When he eventually took advantage of the government's amnesty plan for militants in 2016, there was widespread celebration.

Someone always suffers for the corruption

How did the people celebrate?

On December 20, 2016, shortly after he accepted the amnesty, the ex-militant leader was conferred with a chieftaincy title of Oyirimba I of Ogbaland.

On that eventful day, the paramount ruler of Aligwu community in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni LGA of Rivers state, King C. Nwokocha, in his palace, placed royal beads and a cap on a known murderer for the simple reason that he laid down his arms and ammunition and embraced the amnesty offer of Wikes government.

Foreign corporations may have exploited the Niger-Delta but it is its own people who have now created the perfect breeding ground for the militancy and violence that now plagues them.

The politics of power and wealth in Rivers, for instance, is well documented.

Whenever it is election season, the people brace up for waves of violence that begin with isolated assassinations and end with riots on election day.

There are claims that Don Wani worked for some of Rivers most prominent and powerful politicians during his reign.

It may be the reason why until he was declared a wanted man at the end of 2017, Don Wani enjoyed life more than most high-standing members of community.

When there are no options, people create theirs

In November 2017, members of the 6 Division of the Nigerian Army, and other security agencies raided his camp at Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni LGA.

Wani had left long before the first soldiers came knocking but at his home, they found a palatial residence. within his camp, there was a massive main mansion where he lived with his wife and young daughter, and several smaller outhouses, which on their own, were relatively large homes.

In this space, Wani housed his closest accomplices, his lieutenants, support staff and proteges.

It says much that with his ill-gotten wealth, the crime lord was able to sustain such a large force and live in splendour without attracting ire for that long.

Among other things, a number of personal shrines were also found in Wanis compound. When the soldiers went in, they found human skulls and decomposing bodies, some only weeks old.

You could call Wani a monster and you would be right, but the sad truth is that we live in a country that is producing people like this.

Life here is difficult, even for those with some form of sustenance. For those with very little, the survivalist mentality dominates their thinking such that all they can focus on is getting by for the next day, and then the day after that.

Nigeria teaches people that plans and hard work are worth very little if you are not desperate enough to dispose of others for your own good, or take advantage of the situation to your own advantage.

It is what we call our spirit of resilience, but is actually a toxic, manipulative culture of putting ourselves first.

It is a culture that has produced various forms of the same self-oriented Nigerian who will do whatever it is they need to survive, from the Yahoo boy to the oil bunker to the runs girl.
Described, at a time, as "the most impressive monument in West Africa," the Ancient Kano City Walls were defensive walls built to protect the lives inhabiting the city of Kano.

Built in the year 1095 through 1134 and completed in the middle of the 14th century, the wall, during those days, did not only serve as a fortress of protection to the people of Kano, it was also a source of pride to them.

The construction of the Ancient Kano City Walls foundation was laid by Sarki Gijimasu, the third king in the chronicle of Kano, in 1095. But it will take another three hundred years to complete the wall, during the reign of Zamnagawa.

Be that as it may, the wall would be further expanded to their present position two hundred years after its initial completion.

Now known as a tourist attraction, the Ancient Kano City Wall which was built to provide security for the then growing population of Kano is a 14km radius earth structure with gates as old as the wall itself.

It was these gates that were used to control the movement of people in and out of the city.

Each of the gates used to have a gatekeeper known as (Sarkin Kofar) and houses were provided for them and their families inside or around the gate: It is said that in those days whenever the gatekeepers saw enemies advancing towards the city, they would rush to inform the king, and he would arrange his armies to meet them.

Eight hundred and eight years after the foundation of the wall was laid, the ancient city of Kano was captured by the then General-Governor of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, Lord Fredrick Lugard, alongside his British forces.

However, the Ancient Kano City Walls which used to guard the city is no longer outside Kano city as they were in those days.

They are now inside the city and this has made it possible for people to constantly tamper with the walls, in the course of developmental activities and congestion in the area.

Even ditches that were made close to the walls in other to make it difficult for invaders to get through before mounting the walls have been turned to ponds where the walls are sited inside Kano city.

Sadly, part of the walls can be said to be largely in ruins but this does not alter the fact that the Ancient Kano City Walls and other associated sites still retain their spiritual, historical and cultural significance.

There is no telling how long the walls have left to stand. What can be said is that it is advisable for every lover of art and culture to find time and go get a view of the Ancient Kano City Walls before that which is left of it is lost to the careless hands of Westernization.
In the last couple of days, herdsmen have killed some 30 persons in Benue communities; razing homes and farmlands and sending thousands fleeing to nowhere.

Herdsmen have ended lives in Kaduna, Taraba, Nasarawa and elsewhere.

We have a pastoralist crisis on our hands and heres how we can begin to fix the mess:

1. Identifying and punishing killers

These herdsmen who slit throats and leave blood in their trail must have faces, names and acquaintances.

Its time to start arresting and dragging them before courtsfor judgment in accordance with the laws of the land. All of them.

These herdsmen mustnt be allowed to get away with murder, in order to serve as a deterrent.

And slaps on the wrist should no longer be the lots of herdsmen. The full force of the law is what's required.

2. Anti-open grazing laws

I grew up in a rural community in the Cross River plains and know what it means for cattle to trample on yam shoots, level cassava ridges, upturn rice nurseries and devour vegetable with reckless abandon.

It hurts the farmer like crazy.

Nigeria has to make laws that will make open grazing illegal.

Theres a point to be made here that the typical Fulani herdsman cherishes his nomadic, peripatetic lifestyle and wont trade that for any legislation.

But times they-are-a-changing.

The Fulani herdsman has to learn that restriction is part of the modern world and adjust accordingly.

There are no open borders anywhere. Ask Trump.

3. Invest in grazing ranches

Every State in Nigeria should dedicate parcels of land for green pasture for herdsmen and their cattle. It should be compulsory for every State to have these ranches which should be religiously maintained and tended.

Herdsmen would not need to traverse States and villages, destroying farmlands and provoking everyone in their wake.

In civilized societies, herdsmen dont trek from one end of the earth to the other. Besides, cattle restricted to ranches turn out healthier.

Its not even rocket science.

4. Educate herdsmen

Herdsmen could actually behave better if they had a little more education and sensitization to go with their trade.

What will it cost States to enrol herdsmen in informal learning centers and bring them up to speed with modern grazing and livestock techniques?

Not a lot, I tell you.

5. Disarm herdsmen

No herdsman should be carrying guns or pistols across Nigeria unless theyve been licensed to do so.

Why do we let civilians bear arms indiscriminately and helplessly watch them as they turn those arms on fellow civilians?

The internet is full of pastoralists bearing arms as they march round Nigeria.
The Acting President of the association, Prof Simon Irtwange, gave the assurance in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Monday.

He said that farmers had been mobilised to increase their production in order to make provision for the local consumption and export requirements.

Irtwange, who is also the Chairman of the Technical Committee on Nigeria Yam Export Programme, said that efforts were made to build the capacity of yam aggregators to buy exportable yams in large quantities from farmers after harvests.

He said that yam exporters, instead of going to markets to buy yams, could procure the yams from the aggregators who already knew the standards for exportable yams.

He said that the committee was partnering with the Micheal Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, for the production of seedlings of exportable yams so as to boost the production of the yams and encourage farmers.

I will not agree that export has anything to do with the local production because not every yam variety can be exported.

The ones that are exportable are the ones that meet export standards. The export requirements include 2kg. yams that are slender and smooth, while the non-export yams are purely for local consumption.

We have also encouraged yam production; this year, we would have more output than what we had in the previous year because farmers are now sensitised and they have gone into massive production. So, there will be enough yams for the local market and export.

We have already selected the yam varieties we want to promote for export but the seedlings for those varieties are the major challenge right now.

So we have gone into partnership with Micheal Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. They will produce the seedlings for us and IITA is also involved in the project.

After production, we have aggregators who will off-take the yams from the farmers and will aggregate for the exporters, he said.

Irtwange, who noted that over 20 per cent of exportable yams often rotted away because of poor preservation techniques, said that aggregators would have cooling systems for the produce.

Concerning the aggregators, what we require from them is that they will have warehouses, they will have cooling systems and they will store the yams under the correct temperature.

Through that way, we can also give assurance of the quality of what we are exporting.

The assurance is that we have done the trials, we have learnt from our mistakes and we have put in place measures to correct all the drawbacks.

The essence of the trials is to see where there are challenges, so that we can see how to solve the problems.

Now, we have known what the challenges are and we are going to face them squarely.
In a report by TheCable, the suit filed by Malami in what was understood to be an attempt to stop the decision of the senate to conduct a forensic probe of the affair, was struck out by the judge on Monday, January 8, 2018.

Justice Nyako heard Malamis application in chambers and turned it down.

In furtherance, she ordered Malami to put the national assembly on notice as there was no urgency to grant an ex parte motion.

The motion on notice will now be heard on January 15, 2018.

ALSO READ: Malami blocks Senate investigation into Maina's reinstatement scandal

National Assembly Probe into Mainagate

On October 24, 2017, the senate mandated its committees on public service, internal affairs, anti-corruption, establishment and judiciary to probe the circumstances of Mainas return to the country and the public service.

In the same vein, the house of representatives is also probing Mainas recall.

Malami's Denial

When he appeared before the panel of the lower legislative chamber in November, the Attorney general of the Federation had denied hisinvolvement in Mainas recall.

However, Malami asked the court to determine if the national assembly has the right to probe issues relating to the employment, attendance at work, disengagement, reinstatement and or promotion of a civil servant in a another suit.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the meeting was convened by the Minister of Interior, retired Lt.-Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau, at the ministers conference room.

In attendance were the Governors of Adamawa, Jibrilla Bindow; Benue, Samuel Ortom; Kaduna, Nasir El-Rufai; Nasarawa, Tanko Al-Makura, and Taraba, Darius Ishaku and Abubakar Bello of Niger.

The Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris; the Director General of the Department of State Services (DSS), Lawal Daura and the Commandant General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Abdullahi Gana, were also present.

In his opening remarks, Dambazau stated that the Federal Government would not tolerate any threat to peace and public safety in any form in the country.

He said that it was the responsibility of government at all levels to ensure the security of lives and property within their territorial boundaries.

It is against this background that the meeting is convened primarily to bring us together to share our experiences in on the security challenges.

The meeting will then agree on the necessary measures to be taken and apportion responsibilities.

We are all aware of the noble objectives, policy initiatives and huge investments of the states and federal government with regards to numerous development projects being embarked upon, notable among which is in the agricultural sector.

It is quite unfortunate that we find ourselves confronted by communal conflicts and criminal acts resulting in bloodshed and destruction of food crops, livestocks, agricultural investments, and exposing rural communities to untold hardship, the minister said.

He noted that the current situation was very dangerous in the northern parts of the country in particular and in the nation in general.

Dambazau listed the immediate repercussions of the menace to include hunger arising from acute shortage of food, diseases and deepening of animosity between ethnic and religious groups.

Bearing in mind that general elections are just approaching and considering the history of political and election violence in Nigeria, all necessary steps must be taken to ensure the recently witnessed violence is curtailed.

We must also not allow people, who are bent on sustaining instability for their political interests, to politicise matters of security, Dambazau added.

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, said that the country was currently passing through a period of anxiety with the high level of criminality going on across the country.

Nothing is more disheartening than this endless conflict between (farmers and herdsmen) and the criminality that has crept into this whole system of agricultural development.

We are very saddened by the tragedies that have taken place in these acts of violence, and it is becoming clear that there are criminals bent on causing mayhem, he said.

Ogbeh said that some of the criminals might not be herdsmen per se but people who had taken to violence as a way of life.

The minister said that while the security agencies were already dealing with the problem, the federal government was fashioning lasting solution to it.

Ogbeh said that contrary to insinuations in the public domain, the herdsmen/farmers clashes were neither ethnic nor religious in nature.

He said that the problem was as a result of years of neglect of livestock development in the country.
For Don Wani was a cultist whose methods were as unconventional as they come. He was so revered, he had the prefix 'General' attached to his name.

Unable to rein him in, the Rivers State government even offered Don Wani and his band of cultists an amnesty deal on October 5, 2016. It was a deal that broke down before the finer details could even be conveyed to the press.

'Worse than Evans'

Born Johnson Igwedibia, Don Wani often operated with military or other law enforcement fatigues. He wore mean looks even when sipping on alcohol and puffing marijuana in nondescript areas of Port Harcourt.

He operated with impunity in the full glare of law enforcement, fuelling insinuation that he was above the law.

He was worse than Evans (another kidnapper who terrorized Lagos) in the sense that his methods were crude and he operated in the open. We often thought he was above the law, one resident of Rivers told

Omoku massacre

On January 1, 2018, as worshippers returned from New Years cross over service in Omoku, Rivers State, Don Wanis gang waylaid them and ended the lives of 22.

The incident would come to be known as the Omoku massacre.

It was a massacre that shook Rivers to its foundation.

State Governor Nyesom Wike and his predecessor Rotimi Amaechitraded bitter words over the killings.

Dakuku Peterside who lost the governorship contest to Wike, also weighed in, asking the Rivers Governor to tender his resignation in the face of the killings that have turned the State into a river of blood.

Amaechi would double down as he called on State lawmakers to impeach Wike: "It never happened when I was governor. We (the security chiefs and myself) ensured that we didn't sleep at night. We stayed awake for the citizens to sleep. I think the governor needs to do much more than that or quit the office.

"I was governor of Rivers State, I did not play PDP/APC politics. Life is life, it has no symbol. Nobody has APC life or PDP life.

"The first responsibility of a governor which is what the oath of office requires, is that you swear to protect lives and property.

"When you don't protect life and property, what do you do? It is impeachment. Unfortunately, there is no House of Assembly in Rivers State.

"There is too much noise coming from Rivers State. The governor just wakes up and starts shouting, abusing people. That is all he does. Mr. Project painting roads.

N200M reward for the Don

As the war of words from both political camps intensified, Wike placed a N200M bounty on Don Wanis head.

"We have placed a N200 million bounty for relevant information that will lead to the arrest of all those involved in this unfortunate act of violence, Wike declared.

"Anybody who is connected to this crime in any way, will have his/her houses forfeited to the government. This place has been peaceful before this unfortunate mayhem.

"You cannot shed innocent blood and go free. We are working with all the security agencies to do everything possible to arrest the perpetrators. They must pay for this.

"I am pained by this unfortunate mayhem. Enough is enough."

Synergy

Sources tell that security agencies deployed to Rivers agreed to work together to root out Don Wani. It was a synergy uncommon in these parts.

On the afternoon of Sunday, January 7, 2018, Colonel Aminu Iliyasu who is Deputy Director, Army Public Relations, told Pulse that Don Wani was no more. He would follow up with a press statement detailing how the kidnappers life was brought to an end.

The authorities of 6 Division Nigerian Army Port Harcourt wish to inform the peace loving people of Omoku in ONELGA in particular, Rivers State and indeed the entire good people of Niger Delta in general that the notorious cult leader, kidnap kingpin and mass murderer Don Waney is dead. Ilayusi said.

Recall that in the early hours of Monday 20th November 2017, troops of 6 Division Nigerian Army acting on credible information from some patriotic members of the public, raided the evil Don Waney enclave in Omoku, ONELGA Rivers State where shocking discoveries of assorted weapons, dynamites, bags of suspected cannabis, full military camouflage uniforms, military boots, military communication radios, 10 human skulls and human bones were discovered.

Additionally, in continuation of the operation on Tuesday 21st November 2017, the troops also exhumed decomposing bodies of some of his victims in his shrine in the glaring eyes of the media who were invited to witness first hand.

Last straw

Iliyasu said Don Wanis mastermind of the New Year day killings was the last straw for law enforcement.

Perhaps not satisfied with the numerous lives of innocent citizens he took, Don Waney masterminded the despicable New Year day mayhem in Omoku in which he led his notorious gang of criminals to murder 22 peace loving citizens of Omoku when they were returning from cross over service at about 1:30am on Monday 1st January 2018.

Intense surveillance activities on him and his gang by the Department of State Services (DSS) Rivers State Command revealed that after committing these atrocities he relocated to a neighbourhood within Enugu Town in Enugu State where he rented an apartment and started living among unsuspecting neighbours within the community.

From the relative safety of his newly-rented apartment, Don Waney was already perfecting plans to wrought another mayhem in Omoku in which he was to attack churches, schools, Army and Police locations and the residences of the generality of the already traumatized people of Omoku. However, following his successful geo-location to his new Enugu neighbourhood hideout by the DSS Rivers State Command, a combined team of troops of 82 Division Nigerian Army Enugu and personnel of DSS Rivers State Command raided the hideout to arrest him and his other accomplices.

Incidentally on sensing that the combine team were closing in on his residence, Don Waney, his Second- in- Command (Ikechukwu Adiele) and another gang member (Lucky Ode) attempted to escape through the back exit of the apartment and were shot down by the eagle eyed troops in the process. One of them died on the spot while the other two who sustained gunshot wounds eventually died while being evacuated for medical attention.

The remains of Don Waney and his cohorts were brought back to Port Harcourt, Rivers State by the combine team and handed over to the Rivers State Police Command for further action.

To this end, the authorities of 6 Division Nigerian Army Port Harcourt wishes to use this opportunity to extend their condolences to the families of all the victims of the evil Don Waney and his gang.

We also wish to solicit your further cooperation in volunteering useful information to track down and arrest the remaining gang members so as to bring them to justice for a peaceful, prosperous and secured Omoku community, ONELGA, Rivers State and the entire Niger Delta region.

Commendation

It was a relieved Gov Wike who commended security agencies and President Muhammadu Buhari for the operation that smoked out Don Wani and put him to the sword.

According to Wike; The success recorded in the operations that ended Don Waney and his men is a victory for the law abiding people in the state.

It underscores the desirability of honest partnership and synergy between the government and security agencies as well as the public in tackling security problems in the state.

This victory gladdens our heart and we remain more committed in the fight against crimes and will continue to support the police and all security agencies in the onerous task of securing our dear Rivers State and her people.

We thank President Muhammadu Buhari for not playing politics with the Omoku massacre but gave a marching order which galvanised the efforts of the 6 Div of Nigeria Army, the DSS, police and everybody or agency who played a role to avenge the death of the innocent people killed in Omoku on 1st January, 2018.
The Public Relations Officer of the service, Alhaji Saidu Mohammed, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kano on Monday that the incident occurred while the woman was trying to use the rest room at her residence in Sharifawa in Gaya Local Government Area of the state.

He added that upon receiving the information, we quickly dispatched our rescue team and a vehicle to the scene at about 7 p.m.

He expressed joy that the woman was rescued without sustaining injuries.

He added that we rescued the woman and handed her over to the husband.
Alhaji Ahmad El-Marzuq, the Commissioner for Justice and Attorney General of the state, gave the warning in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Daura, Katsina State.

He described as unfortunate and saddening the manner in which youths used social media platforms to insult elders without remorse.

According to him, social media platforms are meant to accelerate development, now that the world has been reduced to a global village.

Marzuq, who noted that such abuses and unguarded comments could bring about disunity and misunderstanding among people, said that all religions emphasised morality and abhorred indiscipline.

He explained that the Nigerian legal system had adequately taken care of any action relating to insult or abuse be it in the social or conventional media, hence the need for those in such habit to desist from it for their own good.

The commissioner, who described the judiciary in Katsina State as highly independent, attributed achievements in the administration of justice in the state to cordial working relationship between the three arms of government.

He said the Gov. Aminu Masari-led administration would continue to operate within the four cardinal principles of equity, fairness, accountability and objectivity.
The NDLEA Commander in the state, Egwunwoke Silvia, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Minna on Monday.

She said the suspects were arrested in different parts of the state by officers and men of the command.

She said that 66 suspects were successfully convicted, while investigation was ongoing into the remaining cases.

The Commander said the agency had taken sensitive security measures to ensure the arrest and prosecution of all those involved in the sale and consumption of the prohibited drugs in the state.

We have positioned our armed security personnel in and outside the metropolis to prevent circulation of prohibited drugs in our midst, she said.

She called for more support from traditional rulers in mobilising residents to expose all those involved in the sales and consumption of drugs in the state .
The minister disclosed this while speaking to journalists at Ifitedunu, Dunukofia Local Government Area of Anambra State on Sunday, January 7, 2018.

He revealed that the committee has already commenced its deliberations on the issue and will deliver a solution that works for all relevant stakeholders.

He said, "We had our inaugural meeting on December 14 and we did a framework for our work. We will finish our job before the third quarter of this year, but we may finish earlier.

"Minimum wage is a national matter and only the Federal Government can legislate on it. Labour matters and the issue of national minimum wage are in the exclusive list.

"President Buhari is monitoring it strictly, and I am monitoring it too. I wear a double cap as minister of labour, who is the regulator and also as the deputy chairman of the committee.

"We have state governors; one from each geopolitical zone, five ministers and the Head of Service in the committee. States will key into the new minimum wage when we are done because they are part of it.

"We will fix a minimum wage, but states can pay more than that. I give you an example, today minimum wage is N18,500, but Adams Oshiomhole was paying N25,000 before he left office.

"Minimum wage is just to set the baseline, but states can pay more."

30-member committee

President Buhari inaugurated the 30-member tripartite committee responsible for the negotiation of a new national minimum wage on November 27, 2017.

The committee was inaugurated by the president in the presence of governors and senior government officials at the Council Chambers, Presidential Villa, Abuja.

While addressing the committee, the president advised them to come up with recommendations that'll be for the benefit of all.

The committee is made up of government officials and individuals from the private sector including the Nigeria Employers Consultative Association (NECA), Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce Industry Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) and Nigerian Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (NASME).

The committee is chaired by former Head of Service and Minister of Housing, Ms Ama Pepple, with Ngige serving as deputy chairman, and the chairman of National Salaries, Income and Wages Commission, Richard Egbule, as the secretary.

Members of the committee include: current Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita; Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun; Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udo Udoma; and the Permanent Secretary, General Services Office, Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Roy Ugo.

Others are: president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Ayuba Wabba, with his team: Peters Adeyemi, Kiri Mohammed, Amechi Asugwuni and Peter Ozo-Eson; president of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Bobboi Kaigama, with his team: Sunday Salako and Alade Lawa; and the president of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Igwe Achese.

Also serving as members are Director General, Nigeria Employers' Consultative Association (NECA), Olusegun Oshinowo with Timothy Olawale and Chuma Nwankwo; chairman, Kaduna East Branch, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Ahmed Gobir with Francis Oluwagbenro; the Director General, Federation of Construction Industry (FOCI), Olubunmi Adekoje; president, Kano Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA), Muheeba Dankaka; and president, Nigeria Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (NASME), Degun Agboade.

The Director General of the Nigeria Governors' Forum (NGF), Asishana Okauru, will serve as an observer with select governors from the All Progressives' Congress (APC) and the People's Democratic Party (PDP) completing the members' list.

The governors who are members of the committee are: Imo State governor, Rochas Okorocha; Osun State governor, Rauf Aregbesola; Kebbi State governor, Atiku Bagudu; Plateau State governor, Simon Lalong; Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike; and Gombe State governor, Ibrahim Dankwambo.
Wani, 34, and two of his lieutenants; Ikechukwu Adiele and Lucky Ode, were gunned down on Saturday, January 6, 2018, The Nation reports.

He was said to have masterminded the the New Year day killing of 17 worshippers after crossover service in Omoku, Rivers State.

The outgoing General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the 6 division of the Nigerian Army, Port Harcourt, Maj.-Gen. Enobong Udoh, on Sunday displayed the lifeless bodies of the alleged murderers.

The Rivers Director of DSS, Mr. Tosin Ajayi, and Rivers Commissioner of Police, Zaki Ahmed were also present at the division when the bodies were displayed.

Three AK-47 rifles and eight magazines were reported to have been recovered from Johnson, Adiele and Ode.

Wani and other militants had in 2016 laid down their arms and accepted the amnesty offer by Governor Nyesom Wike.

On December 20, 2016, shortly he accepted the amnesty, the ex-militant leader was conferred with a chieftaincy title of Oyirimba I of Ogbaland by the paramount ruler of Aligwu community in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni LGA of Rivers state, King C. Nwokocha, in his palace, for laying down his arms and ammunition, thereby embracing the amnesty offer of Wike's government.

Wani's camp, mansion and shrines in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni LGA were raided in the early hours of November 20, 2017 by troops of 6 division, with the soldiers recovering ten human skulls and various human bones, among other items, while seven suspects, including two women, were also arrested.

Addressing journalists, the GOC said "In the early hours of January 1, 2018, there was a mayhem in which 22 citizens of Omoku, Rivers State were heartlessly murdered, while returning from the crossover service.

"After that, there was a presidential directive by Mr. President (Muhammadu Buhari) that the heartless killers/perpetrators of the mayhem must be hunted down and brought to book.

"The directive was conveyed in a mandate by the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, to 6 Division, to collaborate with the DSS, police and other security agencies in Rivers State to hunt down and bring to book the perpetrators of the mayhem. "We collaborated and tracked down Don Waney and some of his gang members to Enugu. They were initially hiding in Imo State. We traced them to Enugu, where they rented an apartment. They lived with other people in the neighborhood like normal people. From there, they were already planning another mayhem in Omoku.

"We moved from here (Port Harcourt) and we collaborated with the GOC, 82 Division in Enugu and we were able to raid his (Johnsons) hideout in Enugu. In the process, he was running away and our troops set at them. These are the criminals.

"Don Waney, the leader of the criminal murderous gang, was the masterminder of the January 1, 2018 massacre in Omoku, but the operation was physically led by Ikechukwu Adiele, who is among the three persons now killed. There is another person, whom I do not want to mention, that led the operation with him (Adiele). We will not rest, until we get all of them and bring them to book."

Also, in an online statement on Sunday morning, prior to the display of the bodies, the Deputy Director, Army Public Relations of 6 division, Col. Aminu Iliyasu, said besides the strange discoveries of November 20, 2017 in Johnson's camp and shrines, troops of 6 division, on November 21, 2017, also exhumed decomposing bodies of some of his victims in his shrine.

Iliyasu revealed that Johnson, from the relative safety of his newly-rented apartment in Enugu, was already perfecting plans to wrought another mayhem in Omoku, in which he was to attack churches, schools, army and police locations and the residences of the generality of the already-traumatised people of Omoku.

The army spokesman added, "Incidentally, on sensing that the combined team was closing in on his residence, Don Waney, his Second-in-Command (Ikechukwu Adiele) and another gang member (Lucky Ode) attempted to escape through the back exit of the apartment and were shot down by the eagle-eyed troops in the process. One of them died on the spot, while the other two, who sustained gunshot wounds, eventually died, while being evacuated for medical attention.

"The remains of Don Waney and his cohorts were brought back to Port Harcourt, Rivers State by the combined team and handed over to the Rivers State Police Command, for further action."
In a statement signed by the governor's Chief Press Secretary, Terver Akase, on Monday, January 8, 2018, the mourning period will run from Tuesday, January 9, to Thursday, January 11 with flags flying at half mast.

The statement read, "The mourning period will be from Tuesday to Thursday this week and end with a church service for the victims at the IBB square in Makurdi, followed by mass burial.

"Flags will fly at half mast within the mourning period while work will close at 1 pm on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Thursday which is the day for the church service and burial of the victims will be work-free day in the state."

Benue attacks

In attacks allegedly carried out by Fulani herdsmen in Guma Local Government Area and Logo LGA of Benue between Sunday, December 31, 2017, and Tuesday, January 2, 2018, 50 people were reportedly killed.

11 other people were killed in a fresh attack on Tombu village of Logo LGA, again by suspected Fulani herdsmen, on Saturday, January 6, 2018.

Police charge 6 to court

The Benue State Police Command arraigned six Fulani herdsmen who are suspected to be connected to the massacre of over a dozen people in Guma LGA on January 2.

The suspects were allegedly involved in the killing of 19 people in Akor village and were arraigned at a Chief Magistrate Court in Makurdi before Chief Magistrate Isaac Ajim on Friday, January 5.

Alongside the six already charged to court, the state's police command also arrested two suspects in Logo LGA on Wednesday, January 3.

President Buhari blamed for attacks

Many residents of Benue took to the streets of Makurdi on Wednesday, January 3, to protest against the savage attacks and called on President Buhari to act on the terror of the herdsmen or resign from his position.

State governor, Samuel Ortom, was reportedly stoned while trying to calm protesters at Wurukum in Makurdi after the angry protesters vowed to remain on the streets until decisive action is taken against the attackers.

They had barricaded major roads leading in and out of Makurdi as soldiers drafted to quell the protest and prevent mayhem found it difficult to control the crowd.

Earlier on Tuesday, January 2, Governor Ortom, who is from Guma LGA, had blamed the Federal Government for the attacks.

Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose, also criticised President Buhari's silence over the numerous attacks carried out by herdsmen in the country over the past few years.
The soldiers had them bundled into a waiting van after handing them the beating of their lives, Oderinlo tells Pulse.

We were having a concert in Ibafo, opposite prayer city. We had fireworks and after the fireworks, I stepped out of the office with an elderly friend of the office who was coming out to pick someone. We got outside and we saw people running helter-skelter, Oderinlo begins.

We saw soldiers chasing a particular guy and they were kicking him all over the place. Because Im a staff of the company and the person being brutalised was my customer, I approached the scene and that particular soldier eventually released the guy to me.

Then one of my colleagues behind him, a female, started telling me that its not only that guy, that they had packed a lot of people who were ticketing concert goers, into the van.

Licensed fireworks

Oderinlo narrated that he was soon next in the van before he knew it.

One of the soldiers just jumped out of the van and said shey na because I nor arrest you?he was becoming increasingly aggressive and wanted to attack the girl. And I was like, Oga what is happening? Calm down ni.

The soldier just pounced on me. Two other guys joined him. They started kicking and beating me. They dragged me to the back of their van.

Oderinlo tells Pulse that the Bale of Ibafo was probably the one who alerted the soldiers to the area as fireworks from the concert blazed through the still Lagos night.

However, Oderinlo added that the soldiers should have been better informed because permission had been sought from the police for the fireworks illuminating the Ibafo skyline.

For the concert, we had a lot of security men. For the purpose of the fireworks, we registered everything. The fireworks had all the licensing and documentation that needed to be done. The bomb squad of the police from Lagos and Ogun were at the venue, we had over 60 bouncers, bodyguards, lots of mobile policemen, dog handlers. The whole place was totally secure.

ALSO READ: Making phone calls at filling stations can now land you in jail

So, I was not scared when I saw the soldiers. There was nothing illegal we had done. Soldiers werent supposed to be at the location. Thats why I approached them. Only to discover that they were unwanted guests. They were just there to scatter the whole place.

"The elderly man I came out with, started trying to calm them down. He would later talk to someone who I later found out was a lieutenant.. He was the one who led the team. There was a DSP of the mobile police unit on the scene as well. They were going to drive us away when the police fired warning shots and told the soldiers that they were on duty and that if anyone was going to arrest anyone, that person has to go through them.

The whole situation got messy. I sat down at the back of the van because I didnt want to get caught in a crossfire. Shots were being fired and stuff like that. So, I just sat down. At the end of the day, Lt Agboola came down from the van, followed the man inside the premises of the company.

Apology not accepted

The soldiers would later apologise for their actions but Oderinlo is yet to get over the beatings he received on the night.

He sustained injuries to his body and was immediately rushed to the staff clinic for first aid on the night.

Whether they came to apologise or not cannot reverse what was done before. Anything could have happened. People could have been killed. Imagine that the mobile police officers were not on ground to stop them from abducting us, anything else could have happened. They could have carried us away, shot us dead and paraded the corpses as those of terrorists or something.

It is something that I believe shouldnt be swept under the carpet. Normally, everyone keeps quiet and hands things like this over to God, but that isnt my style.

When Pulse rang a senior army officerin Lagos, he corroborated Oderinlos version of events, before adding; It was a misunderstanding, plain and simple. We did apologise and I think that should be the end of the story.
Tarkighir represents Makurdi/Guma federal constituency of Benue state at the House of Representatives.

Speaking on ChannelsTV programme, Sunrise Daily on Monday, January 8, 2018, the lawmaker expressed displeasure over President Buharis failure to name and shame Fulani herdsmen despite the attacks on Nigerians in Benue state.

He said that until the herdsmen are tagged as terrorists, the activities of security agencies in the area may not yield the desired results.

Buhari reluctant to proscribe Fulani herdsmen

He noted that the Benue state indigenes are subsistent farmers whose needs remains the protection of their lives and properties, including lands and crops.

People vote in government based on their needs, Tarkighir began.Our needs in Benue state is that we want to be protected in our land. I do not think that is politics; it is a basic need for the survival of our people. We are subsistence farmers in Benue state and we need access to our lands to farm.

"There is no reason why you will see politics in this. Our people are being killed. The United States of America has classified Fulani herdsmen as the fourth most dangerous organization in the world.

"It is the responsibility of the leadership of this country to name and shame these pastoralists. That is the only way security agencies will have the power to arrest them.

"Till today, the President has shied away from calling these people by name.

The people of Benue state are calling on the President to rise up to his oath of office which he swore to protect every Nigerian when he was elected. We believed in the President but I do not know why he is very reluctant in doing this.

Herdsmen have continued to kill our people in Benue when this president was elected till today and there has been no concrete effort from security agents to secure our lives," he noted.

Another attack

He alleged that Fulani herdsmen were massing at a village in Taraba state to attack some Benue communities.

As I speak, herdsmen are massing in Loko to attack Agatu and Gwer West in Benue state and no security agency has been deployed to those areas.

They are massing on our border in Taraba state to attack us. They attacked Logo local government last night. Nothing has been done. All we can say is that there has been collusion between the federal government and the herdsmen to deny us of access to our lands, he said.

Food insecurity imminent

The lawmaker expressed fears that with the current attacks on Benue communities, the nation may not attain its goal of becoming food sufficiency.

The federal government has been advocating for food security but how do you have food security when every time we want to harvest our produce, the Fulanis attack us?

Hundreds of trailers of rice come from Guma alone. Farmers have not fully harvested all the rice produced in Benue state but herdsmen have taken over those rice farms and burnt them down.

How do you achieve food security with that kind of situation? How can the federal government achieve rice sufficiency for the targets that it has set for itself? Tarkighir asked.

Three days mourning in Benue state

Meanwhile, Governor Samuel Ortom has declared a three-day mourning period in Benue state for victims of the Fulani herdsmen attacks.
He said those engaged in such are compounding the issues at hand, describing it as 'pouring petrol into a burning fire.'

Osinbajo also urged those affected by the killings not to retaliate.

He stated this on Sunday, January 7, 2018, at the inter-denominational church service for the 2018 armed forces remembrance day celebration held at the National Christian Center, Abuja.

He said, "The first obligation is to religiously defend the unity and territorial integrity of Nigeria by words and action.

"Rebuking firmly, and sometimes by recourse to law, those who by their word and action threaten to break the bond of nationhood paid for so dearly by the blood and sweat of our military.

"Second is to defend faithfully the freedoms and rights that form the fundament of our society in nationhood. We have seen in the past few years how these rights have been challenged by the mindless extremism of the Boko Haram in the north-east and how again our fallen military, the police and even the civilian populace have risen jointly to route these criminals combatants and restore peace in most communities in that zone.

"We have also seen even recently the killings that have resulted in attacks of herdsmen on farmers and communities and also where communities have attached herdsmen.

"The state of violence and loss of lives in Rivers State, the Badoo killings in Lagos and Ogun, the president has ordered the police and armed forces to deal decisively with these killings to ensure that the perpetrators are found and punished.

He has also through various strategic meetings task security agencies to work to find lasting solutions to these issues. But we recognised that as dangerous and deadly as heartless as these killings are, it is also the danger of allowing politics to play a part and to sometimes as they say pour petrol into an already burning fire.

"We must not permit the politicisation of this tragedy. One of the reasons why for years Boko Haram strife was because of the politicisation of the insurgency. They were those who were planning to benefit politically from the tragedy and the painted the opposition then as the perpetrator.

"Our obligation is to stop them from playing dangerous politics that could threaten our unity and stability, just as we continue to enforce the peace in the troubled area."

ALSO READ: 11 killed in fresh Fulani herdsmen raid in Benue

There have been outrage in the country over the violent killings that took place in some states in the wake of a new year.

Over 60 persons were reportedly killed by herdsmen in Benue State while 17 worshippers were also massacred at a church in Omoku, Rivers State, after a crossover service on New Year day.
Amaechi made this known on Monday, January 8, 2018, while reacting to the killings in two separate attacks in Rivers State.

Amaechi had accused Wike of failing in his responsibility to protect the people while embarking on accusing political opponents and other parties for the attacks.

The governors repugnant attempt at finger pointing, blaming oil companies, opposition politicians and everyone else apart from himself, is a clear indication that he has abdicated his primary constitutional responsibility to safeguard lives and property, he said.

Continuing, Amaechi said: The madness in Rivers state since the advent of these new men of power is rooted firmly in the witchcraft politics of those who now preside over the affairs of the state.

They lack the political will and have devilishly refused to halt the violence and killings, and restore some level of sanity in the state because of their mischievous politics and voodoo electoral calculations.

I fought cultism, gangs during my reign - Amaechi

Comparing his administration to the present administration led by Governor Wike, Amaechi said he battled and tackled insecurity while serving as the state governor.

He said: I led the fight against the cultists, gangs, thugs and criminals masquerading as militants.

We cannot continue to live like this. The Omoku massacre is the breaking point where we must all collectively rise up and raise our voices to say weve had enough, he said.

Wike should resign from office if he fails to protect people of Rivers - Minister

Amaechi reiterated the need for Governor Wike to buckle up and battle insecurity in the state or resign from office.

He said: The governor and chief security officer of the state who swore an oath to protect us must now protect us or resign from office. We will no longer tolerate his inability and/or refusal to protect defenceless citizens. Enough is enough.

ALSO READ: At least 15 dead in New Year's Day attack in Rivers

My thoughts and prayers are with all who lost loved ones in the Omoku attack, as we continue to pray for the repose of the souls of those who were murdered. I assure you that the federal government will begin to protect you.

Omoku community attacked by gangs

On Monday, January 1, 2018, at least 15 people were reportedly killed by unknown gunmen in Omoku, Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area of Rivers State

According to reports, the gunmen attacked the community while residents were celebrating during the early hours of the new year.
Macron will visit the northern city's famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of Franco-Chinese relations.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient Chinese artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

Macron is beginning the three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's colossal New Silk Road project, an ambitious initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabric, spices, and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt One Road", the plan is to see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety and France has so far been cautious on it. Observers say China is waiting for Macron to outline his views on the scheme, in his emerging role as a European leadership voice.

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord to fight climate change after the US pulled out of the deal.
"Our destinies are linked," he said in a keynote speech on the future of Sino-French relations during a visit to the northern city of Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road.

"The future needs France, Europe and China," Macron said, adding he would travel to China "at least once a year".

Macron began his three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's huge New Silk Road project, an initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabrics, spices and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt, One Road", the plan will see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety, with some in Europe seeing it as Chinese expansionism.

While France had been cautious about the plan, Macron heartily endorsed the initiative.

"It represents a real opportunity to create bridges, through exchange, between countries and civilisations, just as the ancient silk routes once did," he said in an interview with the Chinese website China.org.cn.

"I think it's very important that Europe and China strengthen their collaboration on the initiative. France is ready to play a leading role in this."

But Macron warned that it should be carried out "within the framework of a balanced partnership" -- a reference to concerns about China's trade surpluses. France has a 30-billion-euro ($36 billion) trade deficit with China.

Climate battle

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism.

In a French version of panda diplomacy, Macron will give Xi a horse as a gift: a retired Republican Guard horse that is currently in quarantine.

On climate change, Macron said he would talk to Xi about "relaunching the climate battle" by preparing an increase in their engagements to combat global warming at the COP 24 talks in Poland later this year.

He praised China, the world's top polluter, for committing to the Paris accord after US President Donald Trump notified that America would pull out of the pact.

"China kept its word," he said. "You demonstrate your immense sense of responsibility."

Cooperation will "show the world that the French and Chinese are capable of making our planet great and beautiful again", he said in Chinese.

After Xian, Macron will head to Beijing along with his delegation which includes some 60 business executives and representatives of institutions.

Macron and his wife Brigitte will meet Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan on Monday night. On Tuesday he will visit the Forbidden City, meet top Chinese officials and oversee the signing of business deals.

Human Rights Watch has urged Macron to call publicly for human rights improvements in China during his meeting with Xi, but the French president's office said the matter would be addressed privately.

Along with Brigitte, Macron visited the famous terracotta warriors in Xian, as well as a centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda -- a Buddhist site -- and the city's mosque.
The huge fire still raged around the stricken ship, which had been carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil, with thick black smoke billowing from the vessel and the surrounding sea.

Rescuers attempting to reach the crew of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis were being beaten back by toxic clouds, China's transportation ministry said.

The Panamanian-flagged 274-metre (899-foot) tanker Sanchi is "in danger of exploding or sinking", the ministry said.

State broadcaster CCTV posted a video on Twitter showing the fire seemingly under control as a second vessel sprayed it with a water cannon.

Rescuers had recovered one unidentified body as of Monday afternoon, foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said during a regular press briefing.

"Conditions... are not that favourable for search and rescue work," he said, adding that "we are also investigating how to prevent any secondary disaster."

The accident happened on Saturday evening 160 nautical miles east of Shanghai.

The tanker, operated by Iran's Glory Shipping, was heading to South Korea when it collided with a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship, the CF Crystal, carrying 64,000 tonnes of grain.

Ten government vessels and "many fishing ships" were helping with the ongoing rescue and clean up effort, the transportation ministry said, adding that a South Korean coast guard ship was also on the scene.

A US Navy aircraft participated in the search on Sunday, scouring a large area before returning to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

Environmental implications

As Chinese authorities raced to contain the ship's leaking oil, experts expressed fear that the accident was poised to create a massive environmental disaster.

Greenpeace said in a statement it was "concerned about the potential environmental damage that could be caused by the 1 million barrels of crude oil on board."

If all of the Sanchi's cargo spills, it would be the biggest oil slick in decades.

By comparison, in the sixth-worst spill since the 1960s, the Odyssey dumped 132,000 tonnes some 700 nautical miles off Canada's Nova Scotia in 1988, according to figures from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation website.

"It's very possible this will kill off marine life across a wide area," Wei Xianghua, an environmental expert at Beijing's Tsinghua University, told AFP

Even under a best case scenario, it would take a "long time" for the area to get back to normal, Wei added.

"At present, the only thing to be done is make the best effort to not allow the oil to spread to other places."

China had two vessels working to contain the spill early Monday morning, the transportation ministry said in its statement.

Iran's Petroleum Ministry said the tanker belongs to the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) and was delivering its cargo to South Korea's Hanwha Total. The ship and its cargo were insured, a statement said.

This is the second accident in less than two years involving a tanker owned by the NITC. In August 2016, an Iranian supertanker and a container ship collided in the Singapore Strait, causing damage to both vessels but no injuries or pollution.

Saturday's collision was the latest in a series of fatal maritime accidents to hit East Asia in recent years.

Last October, 13 crew on a Chinese fishing boat were killed after their vessel collided with a Hong Kong oil tanker off Japan's west coast.
"They have to stop testing. They have to be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons. Those things have to happen," she said Sunday, one day after President Donald Trump indicated he would be open to speaking directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

"This is going to be phases. This isn't going to happen overnight, as we've seen, but it's a dangerous situation," Haley said on ABC's "This Week."

Trump's latest remarks appeared to be a pivot away from his often-bellicose rhetoric on North Korea and Kim, but Haley said there was "no turnaround" in the US stance.

"What he has basically said is, yes, there could be a time where we talk to North Korea but a lot of things have to happen before that actually takes place," she said.

Trump has jumped between taking a provocative approach toward North Korea -- including trading personal insults with Kim and threatening to destroy his regime -- and calling for a peaceful resolution.

Haley said Trump's hot-and-cold approach was "very clear" in sending a message to Pyongyang that "we're not letting up on the pressure."

"I think that (Trump) always has to keep Kim on his toes. It's very important that we don't ever let him get so arrogant that he doesn't realize the reality of what would happen if he started a nuclear war."

In recent months, the North has held multiple missile launches and its sixth and most powerful nuclear test -- purportedly of a hydrogen bomb -- in violation of UN resolutions banning such activity.

North and South Korea are set to hold their first official dialogue in more than two years this week, and are expected to discuss the North's participation in next month's Winter Olympics in South Korea.
In a report by Fox News, Romney's aide disclosed that the former governor of Massachusetts was surgically treated by Dr. Thomas Ahlering at UC Irvine Hospital.

It was also gathered that the cancer treatment was successful and Romneys prognosis is good.

"Last year, Governor Mitt Romney was diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer," an aide said.

"The cancer was removed surgically and found not to have spread beyond the prostate."

The disclosure comes as Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is believed to be preparing to launch a campaign for Senate in Utah.

Romney served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.

He was nominated by the Republican Party for president in 2012, but lost to Barack Obama in the general election.

Trump had endorsed Romney during the 2012 race, but Romney became a vocal critic of Trump during the 2016 election when he vied for the ticket of the Republican party.
"Together with the EU's foreign policy chief (Federica Mogherini), we agreed to invite the Iranian foreign minister, if possible next week," Gabriel told German public broadcaster ZDF, without giving further details.

21 people have died and hundreds arrested since December 28 as protests over economic woes turned against the Iranian regime as a whole, with attacks on government buildings and police stations.

"We very quickly affirmed that we support the freedom to demonstrate and that the state should support this," Gabriel said.

At the same time, Gabriel said Berlin will not follow the lead of US President Donald Trump, who pledged to help Iranians "take back" their government.

Trump also seized on the recent unrest to again slam a multiparty nuclear deal with Iran as deeply flawed.

Germany, as well as France, has "warned against attempts at instrumentalising the domestic conflicts in Iran," said Gabriel.
Vietnam's communist government has embarked on a snowballing anti-corruption campaign, which observers say is politically driven and mirrors a graft crackdown in neighbouring China.

Scores of former officials, bankers and state executives have been arrested or jailed, including a senior banker who has been sentenced to death.

On Monday a court in Hanoi said it had started proceedings against Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former head of state-run PetroVietnam Construction, for alleged mismanagement and embezzlement.

Thanh appeared before the court together with ex-politburo member Dinh La Thang and 20 other senior officials.

They are accused of causing $5.2 million of losses for the state during an investment by PetroVietnam in the construction of a thermal power plant.

German authorities say Thanh was kidnapped from a Berlin park in July and have decried the brazen Cold War-style seizure as a "scandalous violation" of its sovereignty.

Vietnam denies the kidnap and insists the fugitive Thanh had returned home voluntarily to face the charges.

"This is a very serious case, drawing wide public attention," said an online announcement by Hanoi's People's Court, adding the accused all held key positions at major state-owned institutions.

After a two-week trial, Thang and Thanh could face 20 years in jail for mismanagement.

In addition Thanh faces an embezzlement charge, which can carry the death penalty.

The downfall of Thanh and the other men on trial has stunned a public unaccustomed to questioning the role of officialdom in an authoritarian country which routinely quashes dissent.

But the leadership is at pains to parade its anti-graft credentials, experts say, as well as remove political enemies.

In a linked case, last week Singapore deported fugitive Vietnamese intelligence officer Phan Van Anh Vu, who held a senior rank in the secret police.

Vu was trying to seek asylum in Germany, his lawyers said, arguing he may have information about Thanh's kidnapping on German soil.

In Ho Chi Minh City the trial of 46 people -- including former banking tycoons Pham Cong Danh and Tram Be -- also began on Monday.

They are accused of violating lending regulations that caused losses of around $270 million to the Vietnam Construction Bank.
"I believe it's possible to find a solution by the end of the first semester of 2018," Zaev told Greece's Alpha TV in an interview.

From the outset Greece denied its neighbour the right to use the name Macedonia, which is also the name of a northern Greek region.

Elected last year, Zaev has staked his political capital on solving the name issue with Greece as a means to gain his country's accession to the European Union and NATO.

"Our strategic orientation is conclusively (towards) the EU and NATO," Zaev said in the interview aired Sunday.

In a Saturday interview, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras also said the time had come "for decisions (in 2018) to justify Greece's role as a leading force in the Balkans".

Negotiators from both sides are to hold talks in New York later this month.

There is also anger in Athens at perceived Macedonia efforts to appropriate Alexander the Great, the ancient conqueror who is one of the country's greatest military heroes.

Greece and the EU recognise the small landlocked country by its provisional name, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), under which it was also admitted to the UN.

Skopje has long insisted that this designation was only provisional.

In Greece, there is already opposition in the north of the country to any solution including the name Macedonia, and the issue may split the Greek parliament, which will be called upon to ratify any deal.

Another possible hurdle is that Zaev has pledged to include the domestic opposition in the decision-making, and to put the issue to a referendum.

Contacts between the two neighbours have intensified in recent months.
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The 36.7km line will run north from the existing Tutuban station in Manila to Malolos, the capital of the province of Bulacan. The project involves the construction of 30km of bridges and viaducts, a depot, and 10 stations, with provision for five additional stations.

Speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony, secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOTr), Mr Arthur Tugade, said major construction contracts will be awarded by April.

The project is being financed with the aid of a $US 2bn loan from Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica), which was agreed in 2015.

DOTr says the second phase will be completed in 2022, extending the line from Malolos to Clark.
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) received six pre-proposals from firms willing to build two transload facilities in Treasure Valley and in the mid-Willamette Valley.

The Treasure Valley area project received a single proposal while the mid-Willamette Valley area project received five proposals. ODOT says the transloading sites will improve shipping connections in critical parts of the state.

The pre-proposals will be reviewed by a group comprised of ODOT planners and staff from Business Oregon following an initial check for completeness. ODOT says the review will make sure the applicants have all the key elements in place to move forward.

Well look for things like, do they have an organizational structure thats viable? Do they have experience in delivering a complex, multimodal project? said Erik Havig, planning section manager at ODOT. Most importantly, do they have local support and the support of the partner railroad?

The two transload projects were included in the Oregon legislatures 2017 transportation funding package.

The pre-proposals budget estimates range between $15.5 million and $26 million and all included letter of support from potential rail partners who expressed a willingness to explore the projects.

A summary of the proposals, including rough cost estimates:

$26 million for the Treasure Valley Reload Center by Malheur County Development Corporation with letters of support by Union Pacific and Raritan Central Railway

$18.9 million for the Brooks Hopmere Intermodal Facility by Oregon Port of Willamette with letters of support by Portland & Western Railroad and Union Pacific

$18 million for the Greenhill Multimodal Facility by Greenhill Reload, LLC with a letter of support by Coos Bay Rail Link

$16.9 million for the Lebanon Intermodal Facility by LIFTS Oregon, LLC, with letters of support by Portland & Western Railroad and Albany and Eastern Railroad

$15.5 million to $18 million for the Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Facility by Northwest Container Services with a letter of support by Portland & Western Railroad $25 million for the Mid-Willamette Valley Intermodal Facility by Linn Economic Development Group with letters of support by Portland & Western Railroad and Union Pacific

The ODOT says reviews will be complete by mid-January and recommendations will be sent to ODOT Director Matt Garrett. Recommended applicants will then be invited to submit a project plan. Those project plans will provide more detail about future timelines.
Port Clinton, Pa.-based Class II railroad Reading & Northern (R&N) set a business record in 2017, handling 31,175 carloadsa 15% increase over 2017, and a cumulative 50% increase over the past five years. Anthracite coal traffic played an important role.

This unprecedented growth came across all of the many commodity lanes handled by R&N, the railroad said. Our anthracite coal business was up more than 40%, so once again, R&N is The Road of Anthracite. This explosive growth was fueled by a late-year announcement of a major sale of Pennsylvania anthracite to the Ukraine, replacing Russian coal. Following a July announcement of the deal at the White House, R&N was told to prepare to move more than 300,000 tons of anthracite by year end. We stepped up and managed to provide all the cars needed for the business and served as many as eight different origins as the entire anthracite community pulled together to fill this huge order. We are hopeful that this business will continue in 2018.

Another significant development in the anthracite business was completion of seven years of work to connect Hazleton Hiller LLCs Hazleton Shaft and its new state-of-the art coal dryer to the R&N. That project was completed during the summer, and the process of shifting more than 100,000 tons of truck-delivered dried coal to rail began. By year end, R&N and Hazleton Hiller had shifted 40,000 tons of coal to rail for delivery to a Midwestern steel mill. To accomplish this, R&N purchased 121 hopper cars and a new conveyor to assist with the unloading at a transfer station in Indiana. We expect to convert more of this truck traffic to rail in 2018, R&N said.

There were other successes in 2017. Several ongoing industrial development projects reached fruition, adding hundreds of new cars of business. R&Ns transload facilities and warehouse attracted new customers and added more cars. The Forest Products group handled more than 10,000 carloads in 2017.

In order to handle this growth in business, R&N purchased additional freight cars and locomotives, added more employees, opened new facilities and invested in track and signal systems. At year end, we had more employees, track, locomotives, freight cars, facilities and customers than at any point in our history, said CEO/Owner Andy Muller, Jr. 2017 was the culmination of more than 25 years of investment and risk-taking. It is never my intention to rest on our success and to pocket our profits. My goal is to build the best railroad in the nation. And to do that we have to constantly invest in the railroad. Our investment decisions might not make sense to outsiders, but the proof of our strategy is apparent to anyone looking at our record of constant growth and success.

R&N has a two-pronged formula for ongoing success, said President Wayne Michel. We take care of our employees with great pay, excellent benefits and profit sharing. The result is a 98% retention rate. And R&N takes care of its customers. Our goal is to provide our customers with service superior to any railroad or trucker. We offer guaranteed on-time delivery and meet it 99% of the time. We provide special service to customers who are in need of an expedited delivery. We have one of the best customer service and marketing teams in the industry. And we keep our prices competitive.

The future looks bright for R&N as it has more than 20 active industrial development projects in various stages of development. Growth is built into the R&N DNA, said Muller. I expect our railroad to grow. Our superior service will help our customers grow and as they grow we will benefit. I expect our reputation to encourage more businesses to locate along our lines. We will always take care of our customers and our employees. That is the cornerstone of our success.

Reading & Northern, a two-time Railway Age Regional Railroad of the Year, is a privately held company serving more than 70 customers in nine eastern Pennsylvania counties (Berks, Bradford, Carbon, Columbia, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill and Wyoming). It has expanded its operations over the past 20-plus years and has grown into one of the premier railroads in Pennsylvania. R&N operates freight services and steam- and diesel-powered excursion passenger services through its Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, owns almost 1,200 freight cars, and employs more than 200.
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KEY Real Estate Holdings today announced a new equity partner in EMC Acquisitions, led by Chief Executive Officer Edgar Costa.

Mr. Costa, an entrepreneur and private equity investor, also holds the CEO position for ECOJETS, a leading provider of private aviation services in North America.

The company is pleased to welcome Mr. Edgar Costa as Vice President of KEY Real Estate Holdings, said Don Wellington, KEYs Chairman. We will benefit greatly from his broad business background. His experience makes him a great addition to our board.

The alliance brings a partnership on several New York based real estate developments, including The Time Nyack, a 133-room luxury boutique lifestyle hotel in the Hudson Valley, developed to offer travelers a carefully curated progressive and refined lodging experience. The Time Nyack offers an outdoor heated pool, over 4000 square feet of event space, and onsite dining in their signature restaurant BVs Grill. The Time Nyack is a "tech forward" hotel, engaging guests with Amazon Alexa and Echo Dot technology in every room, allowing communication with the front desk without ever picking up the phone. Catering to the modern technological culture, rooms will soon be available to book on Amazon.

KEY Real Estate Holdings and EMC Acquisitions have also partnered on the development of The Metropolitan Bronxville, a 35 unit luxury landmark property exclusively curated by famed architect David Easton, located in the heart of Westchester. The Metropolitan Bronxville reflects the highest echelon of real estate in Westchester, combining quality of construction with the passion for innovative, with units on target for completion in spring 2018.

There is tremendous opportunity in the current environment for development of properties that are unique in design and hold the highest quality in terms of construction, materials, and technology, noted Mr. Costa. There is a synergy between EMC Acquisitions and KEY Real Estate Holdings and I anticipate a strong partnership as we move forward with projects comprising these standards in excellence.

United by a common business culture, this new alliance between KEY Real Estate Holdings and EMC Acquisitions positions the company for expansion as a forerunner in the lower Westchester / Rockland County market. Key Real Estate Holdings and EMC Acquisitions are actively analyzing the acquisition of more projects in 2018.
In IT, the two-way flow of investments and intellect has been central to the growing linkage, which provides a great opportunity for both nations to improve the quality of life of their citizens, says Raman Roy.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

US President Donald Trump has signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, initiating the most sweeping overhaul of the US tax system in more than three decades.

While, as Indian IT, we appreciate the ethos behind buy American make American, we cant remain indifferent to the concerns around globalisation (globalism?) at times, seemingly threatened to be swept away in the rigmarole.

The Act in its present structure will set corporate taxes at 21 per cent (effective in 2018) instead of the current rate of 35 per cent.

Its being described as the single-biggest drop in the history of corporate tax in the US.

It is being touted to be an early Christmas present from Trump, which is expected to galvanise growth, notwithstanding the economists worry that this overhaul could trigger a fiscal deficit of anything between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade - inasmuch as the individual tax rates have been cut (though not anywhere comparable to the proposed corporate tax cuts) and the tax provisions will expire by 2025.

Just to put things in perspective, remember that the Indian economy is around $2.3 trillion.

In a nutshell, the Bill cuts corporate tax rates permanently and for individuals temporarily.

The Act would also end the individual mandate, a provision of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare in 2019.

While the mandate would technically remain in place, the penalty would fall to $0.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), repealing the measure would reduce the federal deficit by around $338 billion from 2018 to 2027, but lead to 13 million more people without insurance, which is likely to push up insurance premiums by 10 per cent. What all this means for the US economy is what Indian IT is concerned about.

Can the spurt in the fiscal deficit, accentuated by the reduction in corporate taxes, be offset by envisaged growth, including the governments reduced liability on health care, to create the right environment for international trade in the next decade?

Moreover, whether Trumps plan will trigger a global tax war is yet another justifiable concern.

Trump wants to bring back jobs to the US; he has been quite insistent in this messaging and as the immigration rules (especially the tightening the H1-B visa cap) would also indicate.

How can we turn this into an opportunity?

In recent times, a common enough adaptive response from most of our large companies has been about hiring locally, investing in skilling American workers, and opening up R&D centres, thus providing a fillip to overall growth, employment, and innovation.

Over the years, we have emphasised the shortage of science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) skills in America and international hiring has been our foremost argument.

Perhaps we can look at it differently by suggesting that Indian IT can play an instrumental role by working with academic institutions to create many more STEM professionals through various academic interventions, including investments, across levels.

This will contribute to building a healthy pipeline and perhaps a generation of young Americans who might show a strong proclivity towards Indian IT brands in the US.

Lest it be misconstrued, I am not for once suggesting that we dilute our efforts in advocacy towards a favourable immigration policy.

But, can the two initiatives work alongside towards meeting the same goal? Its not even a radical idea.

Indian IT companies - including the small- and mid-sized - are working with universities there to impart future-ready skills to locals just as all of us are doing the same thing in India.

For the last decade, India-US bilateral relations have been strong and this is an opportunity to build on them.

In IT, the two-way flow of investments and intellect has been central to the growing linkage, which provides a great opportunity for both nations to improve the quality of life of their citizens.

In a complex environment, it is best if efforts are concerted, collaborative, and cohesive, and, most importantly, conducive to the prevailing political mood.

Raman Roy is chairman, Nasscom, and managing director, Quatrro
'Bolstering India's conventional military capability against China is in America's strategic interest,' says military historian Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).



IMAGE: An anti-US protest in Peshawar, Pakistan, December 12, 2017. Photograph: Fayaz Aziz/Reuters

2018 began dramatically for the Indian subcontinent.

While some Indians were fighting over a 200-year-old battle, the American president decided to call the Pakistani bluff.

In his characteristic style Donald J Trump accused Pakistan of trading lies and being ungrateful for the $33 billion aid Washington had given Islamabad over ten years.

Trump accused Pakistan of helping the very insurgents, the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, that the Americans are fighting in Afghanistan.

The next day, the US announced a freeze on $1 billion aid that it had promised Pakistan. The Americans made it clear that the suspension applied only to military aid; presumably economic aid will continue.

A freeze in American military aid is not a new phenomenon.

In 1965, after India complained that Pakistan had used American weapons against India in Kutch, the US announced the suspension of military aid to mollify India.

At the same time the US turned a blind eye to the transfer of weapons from Germany, Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan during the 22-day war that was fought in September 1965.

US aid to Pakistan was resumed in 1966 after the Tashkent agreement between India and Pakistan.

The second suspension of US military aid occurred in July 1977 after General Zia-ul Haq staged a military coup and overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government. This freeze lasted till December 1979.

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the US not only resumed military aid, but made Pakistan a frontline State in its 'defence of democracy'.

Billions of dollars of military aid flowed into Pakistan during the 1980s, making its military one of the strongest in Asia.

In 1985 the United States Congress through the Pressler Amendment made aid contingent on Pakistan not pursuing its nuclear ambitions. But the US president and its executive branch issued false certificates that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon.

This charade ended only after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1988.

In May 1998, after India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests, the US imposed economic and military sanctions on both countries. These were removed in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The US and Pakistan again joined the American military effort in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda. It is this latest military aid package that stands 'suspended' (not cancelled).

The reason to recall this history is to make the point that US-Pakistan relations have always had this yo-yo factor.

After Turkey, the Pakistan army forms the pillar of US domination in the Middle East. Even at this time while relations have soured, Pakistan's former army chief General Raheel Sharif heads the Saudi-led military coalition primarily aimed at Iran.

Iran continues to be the focus of American hostility, therefore Pakistan, which is allied with Saudi Arabia, is vital for American interests.

The limited aim of the current pressure on Pakistan is make it give up its policy -- nay addiction -- to 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan for which the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are instruments.

Pakistan has made brave noises of standing up to the US. But if America is to follow this up by cutting off World Bank and IMF assistance, Pakistan's economy can go into a tail spin. China can mitigate the effect only partially. With low oil prices, the Arabs are also not of much help.

Military aid is not the only pressure that the US can exert on Pakistan.

A curtailment of spares for existing military hardware can easily degrade Pakistan's conventional military capability.

The Pakistan air force's frontline fighters, the F-16, need about 16,000 spare parts a year to stay airborne. Any disruption can ground the PAF's F-16 fleet.

After the Shah was ousted in 1979, Iran faced such a situation, and suffered reverses in the decade-long war against Iraq.

Pakistan is ruled by its civil and military elite. These rulers have stashed their wealth in the Gulf and sent their sons and daughters to the US. Even the votary of 'Pakistan First', General Pervez Musharraf's son lives in the US.

If the Americans were to impose travel curbs on senior Pakistan military and civilian officials, it can quickly bring them to heel.

What will be the likely impact on India?

The Americans have been careful to mention only terrorists operating in Afghanistan. Only a fleeting mention has been made of groups targeting India.

But by degrading Pakistani military capability, the US is indirectly helping India.

All these years the Indian armed forces had arms and equipment that were archaic. In 1965 Pakistan already had 155 mm guns; these became available to India only in 1985.

Pakistani small arms, radar, helicopters, guns and anti-tank weapons were always a generation ahead of India's military, thanks to the Americans. Even Pakistan-supported Kashmiri terrorists had better weapons than Indian soldiers.

It is through sheer numbers, jugaad and better military leadership that India prevailed in all the wars with Pakistan.

This situation is set to change in our favour. This is indeed a big plus from the Indian point of view.

Even if Pakistan accedes to the American request and curbs the Haqqanis, the situation is not likely to return to the earlier status quo.

Pakistan is decisively in the Chinese camp and the US needs India to balance China in Asia. Bolstering India's conventional military capability against China is in America's strategic interest.

In a sense the situation has turned topsy-turvy from the days of the Cold War. The sole American interest in India then was that we should not travel further into the Communist camp. Pakistan was already a US ally against the Soviet Union.

The situation today is exactly the opposite. This year, with American backing, India has become a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime as well as the Wassenaar Arrangement that controls dual use technology.

With technology curbs no longer in operation, India can produce high tech weapons on its own. Even with Chinese help, Pakistan cannot match this. China is not a member of these regimes and is miles behind the US in military technology.

All in all, this is a win win for India.

It is no wonder that Pakistan's foreign minister ruefully remarked that the US is talking India's language!
When Nirmala Sitharaman and Narendra Tomar arrived in Shimla, they could not have anticipated the scene that awaited them.

Aditi Phadnis reports.



IMAGE: Prem Kumar Dhumal, right, congratulates Jairam Thakur who was chosen over him as Himachal Pradesh chief minister. Photograph: PTI Photo

It was the Congress that used to face this dilemma.

In the 1970s and 1980s, an important reason for the rise of the N T Rama Rao-led Telugu Desam Party was that the Congress dispensation in New Delhi -- led at the time by Indira Gandhi -- shuffled and changed chief ministers at will with absolutely no regard for the legislators and the person they considered their leader.

NTR made this a cause celebre. Under the Congress between 1978 and 1983, Indira Gandhi appointed and sacked five individuals as chief minister -- J Vengala Rao, M Chenna Reddy, T Anjaiah, Bhavanam Venkatram Reddy and K Vijayabhaskara Reddy. It was an assault on Telugu pride.

A somewhat similar situation arose in the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the circumstances in which Jairam Thakur was appointed chief minister of Himachal Pradesh.

Consider the facts. Nine days before the poll, party chief Amit Shah announced that Prem Kumar Dhumal would be the chief minister of the state if (and not when) the party came to power.

From available accounts, Shah did not do this in good grace because Dhumal mounted a multi-pronged campaign that involved influential central ministers, his son and Member of Parliament from Hamirpur, Anurag Thakur, and others, virtually pressuring the party president to name him the party's CM candidate.

A contributory factor was that Dhumal has an excellent equation with Prime Minister Narendra D Modi -- the two go back to the days in 1997-1998 when Modi was the party in-charge of Himachal.

It was under Dhumal as CM and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as PM that Himachal added to its excellent roads infrastructure.

In his public meetings, Modi endorsed the choice and said that Dhumal, 73, would make a 'wonderful' CM though others in the party said he would be replaced midway because it was 2019 the party was looking at.

Then the unthinkable happened. Dhumal lost the election.

Actually, closer analysis shows that not only did Hamirpur show the lowest ever turnout (indicating low enthusiasm for the election), but also the Congress wrested several seats in the area earlier held by the BJP.

From the BJP's point of view, it was a bad show.

If Dhumal was out of the race, who was to become the CM? Was he out of the race?

Dhumal's supporters cited precedents: Hadn't Arun Jaitley become a minister though he had lost the Lok Sabha election from Punjab?

Two BJP leaders, Nirmala Sitharaman and Narendra Tomar, were dispatched as observers to sense the mind of the legislature party. They could not have anticipated the scene.

While Dhumal supporters shouted 'Himachal ka neta kaisa ho, Prem Kumar Dhumal jaisa ho' and 'Sara Himachal dol raha hai, Dhumal Dhumal bol raha hai', Thakur supporters countered with 'Hamara neta kaisa ho, Jai Ram Thakur jaisa ho, and 'Jairamji ko jai shri ram.'

The less original was: 'Narendra Modi zindabad, Jai Ram Thakur zindabad' bracketing Modi with Thakur.

The Sitharaman-Tomar duo went to the RSS office to consult with the senior leadership. Veterans say this has never been done before.

They held consultations with senior BJP leaders like Shanta Kumar.

They also talked to senior MLAs together and separately.

Finally, the party said the name would be announced in Delhi.

In the meantime, Shah reportedly telephoned Dhumal and asked him to issue a press release declaring he was not in the race.

What followed was a protracted negotiation over the council of ministers.

Rajeev Bindal, one of Dhumal's closest supporters, was named speaker, largely, to get him out of the way.

Then, a judicious analysis of the regions the BJP had won.

Mandi, for instance, used to go the Congress way. This time, the BJP had won Mandi.

Kangra accounts for the largest number of seats in the assembly.

The largest complement of ministers was from Kangra and Mandi.

For the first time, Hamirpur has no representation in the council of ministers.

The final list of names was finalised at 2 am.

Another minister Kishan Kapoor's name was added 15 minutes before the list went to Raj Bhavan.

Those who know Jairam Thakur say he is the perfect choice for the BJP, notwithstanding the bitterness that preceded his selection.

He is from the Sangh's student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, has humble beginnings and has been MLA five times.

Thakur has many governance challenges before him. But one thing is clear. He will be the BJP's face in Himachal for the foreseeable future.
An Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted Giuseppe Orsi, the former president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, over charges of alleged bribes paid in exchange for a Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal to sell 12 AgustaWestland helicopters to the Indian government.

Milan's third court of appeal also acquitted Bruno Spagnolini, former chief executive officer of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, who had also been handed a four-year jail term on the same charges, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Orsi was arrested in 2014 and resigned as chief executive of Finmeccanica which was later renamed as Leonardo.

He was at the helm of AgustaWestland when the deal was struck and was suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes.

Orsi had been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for false accounting and corruption.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of 12 luxury helicopters to India.

The two were accused of international corruption and false invoicing in relation to bribes exchanged for the contract with India.

Both were cleared on charges of committing international corruption at the first-instance trial in 2014 but convicted of false invoicing and sentenced to two years in prison.

In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considered definitive until the appeals process has been exhausted.

Both appealed against the conviction, while the prosecution appealed against the acquittal on the corruption charge.

In December 2016, the supreme court of cassation ordered a repeat of the appeals trial.

India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanicas British subsidiary AgustaWestland in January, 2014 for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

India's defence ministry had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after the arrest of Orsi and Spagnolini by Italian investigators in connection with the case.

In 2010, India had inked the deal to acquire 12 three-engine AW-101 helicopters from AgustaWestland for VVIP use.

In view of the corruption charges, India also barred Finmeccanica and its group companies from participating in any new programme of the defence ministry.

The CBI in September last year charge sheeted former Indian Air Force Chief S P Tyagi in a Delhi court along with nine others for bribery in the case.

They were charge sheeted for offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the Indian Penal Code in the case relating to alleged bribery of Rs 450 crore.

The CBI alleged there was an estimated loss of Euros 398.21 million (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on February 8, 2010, for the supply of VVIP choppers worth Euros 556.262 million.

Acquittal will have no bearing on case: CBI

The acquittal of Orsiand Spagnolini will have no bearing on the CBI caseas it is based on an independent investigation with strongevidence, senior central agency officials said after the verdict.

The officials said the same set of evidence had resultedin their conviction earlier.

The sources said the case in Italian courts is based onthe evidence gathered by the Italian authorities whereas theCBI carried out a completely independent investigation in thematter.

They said there is an option of appeal with Italianauthorities even after the order of the Milan court ofappeals.

"We have had a completely different probe. We have verystrong case," CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said in New Delhi.

In Italy, criminal sentences are not usually considereddefinitive until the appeals process has been exhausted.
Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling "emotional and excited" as he prepares for his "homecoming" during the four day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week.

Moshe, 11, was two when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayiba terrorists.

The attack on the Nariman House and other locations like the Taj Hotel left 166 people dead.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents' bodies, was saved in a daring move by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

"Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on January 15. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories," an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshe's grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5 in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

"I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House," Moshe had told the Indian prime minister.

Modi had responded by saying, "Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere".

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on January 14.

"Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug," Rosenberg said adding, "he is hoping to meet the Indian prime minister again during his India trip".

"He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully PM Modi 'at his home in Mumbai'," the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

"During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the site seeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment," Rosenberg noted.

Moshe's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

"It is heart warming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India haven't forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one", Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said that the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like "homecoming" for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshe's bar mitzvah in Mumbai. Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued ten year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honourary citizenship by the Israeli government.

Image: Moshe with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Israel in July 2017. Photograph: PIB
Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje on Monday announced that Sanjay Leela Bhansali's

controversial film Padmavat, earlier called Padmavati, will not release in the state on January 25.

'Honouring the sentiments of the people of the state, the film will not be released in Rajasthan,' she said in a statement in Jaipur.

Following the announcement, state Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria, the Rajasthan Bharatiya Janata Party chief and several Rajput organisations spoke out against the movie.

'The sacrifice of Rani Padmini is a matter of pride for the state and she is not just a chapter of history for us,' Raje said.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, has been cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification, which has asked its makers to change the title and suggested other modifications.

Though Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and Bhansali have not released an official statement yet, sources in the production house said the film will release on January 25, a day before Republic Day.

The period romance that features Shahid Kapoor, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone in lead roles was earlier scheduled to be released on December 1.

'Rani Padmini is our self-respect and we will not let it hurt in any case. Directions in this regard have been given to Rajasthan Home minister,' she said.

The chief minister has already written to the Centre on the issues related to the film and it will not be released in Rajasthan, Kataria told reporters.

BJP state president Ashok Parnami said that if the film has some controversial scenes, then it will not be tolerated and protests will continue.

There will be agitations if the history of Rajasthan is distorted in the movie, he said.

Outfits representing the Rajput community held a combined press conference at the Rajput Sabha Bhawan in Jaipur.

President of the Shree Rajput Sabha, Giriraj Singh Lotwara, said that it was unfortunate that the censor board wanted to favour the producers instead of considering recommendations of the panel that reviewed the movie.

The CBFC had appointed a special panel to review the film as many Rajput organisations were up in arms against the portrayal of queen Padmini in the film even though historians are divide on whether she actually existed.

"We will give a reply to the BJP in the bypolls (in the Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha seats and the Mandalgarh assembly) scheduled in the state. It will be our target to have the BJP defeated," Lotwara said at the press conference.

The BJP-led state government was trying to crush Rajputs. Changing the name of the film cannot change the facts, president of Rashtriya Rajput Karni Sena Sukhdev Singh Gogamedi said.

"We will not let the film release in the country. We have been protesting peacefully for the last one year. If the film is released on January 25, then theatres will burn," he said.

Shree Rajput Karni Sena Mahipal chief Singh Makrana said that till now, protests have been organised keeping law and order in mind.

In November, Raje wrote to the Centre, saying that the film would not be released in Rajasthan, unless the suggestions given by her to the Union Information and Broadcasting minister were considered.

She said Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria has also been directed in this regard.

Kataria also said the 'earlier orders' of Raje, prohibiting the release of the movie, will be followed.
The dreaded Islamic State is alarmingly increasing its foothold in Pakistan, a leading think tank in Islamabad has warned, negating the government's stand that the terror outfit has no presence in the country.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) on Sunday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn News reported.

The PIPS shared the findings of its security analysis titled Special Report 2017, providing an insight into security challenges of Pakistan.

Pakistan has been denying that ISIS, or IS, had an organised presence in the country, however, even though the terrorist group has claimed responsibility for several attacks in the restive Balochistan province in recent years.

'Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar and others with similar objectives perpetrated 58 per cent attacks, while 37 per cent and 5 per cent of the attacks were carried out by nationalist insurgents and violent sectarian groups respectively,' it said.

The report has also highlighted that Baloch nationalist-insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were only second to TTP as far as the their threat capability was concerned.

The report also noted the alarming increase in the footprint of ISIS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh as it carried out the deadliest attacks in those provinces.

It said that footprints of ISIS was increasing and it 'killed 153 in 6 deadliest attacks'.

It said 'down 16 per cent from the year before, 370 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan (in 2017), killing 815 and injuring 1,736 people'.

It said that Balochistan and tribal region remained critical areas with 288 and 253 terrorism-related killings, respectively, in 2017.

It also reported that Pakistan's National Security Policy is set to be released in 2018 and it will take into account especially global and regional scenarios, including the evolving Pakistan-US relations.

The report also noted that compared to 2016, a significant surge of 131 per cent was witnessed during 2017 in cross-border attacks from Pakistan's borders with Afghanistan, India and Iran.

A total of 171 cross-border attacks claimed 188 lives and injured 348 others.

Security forces and law enforcement agencies also killed 524 terrorists in 2017 -- compared to 809 in 2016 -- in 75 military/security operations as well as 68 and encounters with terrorists reported from across four provinces and FATA.

Image only for representation.
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.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Dominican Republic : Dominico Haitians

Publisher Minority Rights Group International Publication Date May 2018 Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Dominican Republic : Dominico Haitians, May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a535c9eb.html [accessed 18 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Profile

Dominicans of Haitian descent constitute a significant minority in the Dominican Republic. This community is comprised of children, grand-children and great-grand-children born in the country to Haitian migrants who arrived in the Dominican Republic from the early 1900s onwards.

While members of this minority have historically faced profound exclusion and racism, both from state institutions and from other Dominicans, their situation became markedly worse in 2013 when Constitutional Court Judgement TC/0168/13 retroactively (from 1929) stripped thousands of people of their Dominican nationality. As a result, the 2013 ruling rendered this population stateless, as set out in Article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, leaving them unable to access higher education, health care, formal employment or justice.

The judgment retroactively reviewed the nationality status of individuals born in the country to two migrant parents, disproportionately affecting Dominicans of Haitian descent. At the time it was estimated that as many as 210,000 people had been left stateless, though this figure was revised to some 133,770 Dominican-born individuals. However, this estimate only included first generation of Dominican-born individuals: that is, persons born in the country to two parents born abroad. It did not include subsequent generations of individuals of foreign descent, as there is no reliable population data available. As such it did not include all persons without nationality.

The Dominican government has made some steps to restore identity documentation to those affected with the introduction in May 2014 of Naturalisation Law No. 169-14, but the process has been slow and complicated. According to the Central Electoral Board and by the summer of 2017, only 13,495 individuals have been issued their civil documents as Dominicans, under Law No. 169-14.

History

Migration of Haitian citizens into the Dominican Republic and the nationality status of their descendants born in the country are two issues closely interlinked, though clearly distinguishable in the Dominican context. The Dominican Republic is located in the Caribbean between Cuba and Puerto Rico. It shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Migration on the island has been an on-going issue for centuries, as it was not only invaded by different countries (Spain and France) but also settled by various communities (Lebanese, Cocolos or Chinese, amongst others) on both sides of the island. The indigenous community of Taino-Arawak soon disappeared.

From the 1920s on, Haitian migrants moved to the Dominican Republic on a seasonal basis to work as sugarcane cutters for either state owned or private companies. Haitian migrants were mainly young or middle-aged men. Over time, they settled in slums next to sugar plantations called 'bateyes', bringing their Haitian families or marrying and having children in the country with Dominican women. They integrated into Dominican communities, becoming the most numerous minority group in the Dominican Republic.

The Haitian community in the Dominican Republic was an important source of cheap labour from the 1920s, but migration continued even after the Dominican sugar industry began to decline from the 1980s. Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born descendants continue to play a crucial role in Dominican economy in agriculture, tourism and construction.

In January 2010, the Haitian side of the island of Hispaniola suffered one of the worst earthquakes the world has seen. Dominican society and government showed their solidarity, opened the border to help affected people and started to invest in Haiti. However, despite many Dominicans, Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians coexisting peacefully for decades, old fears - including of a 'Haitian invasion' - have increased in the Dominican Republic. This has resulted in heightened discrimination against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Discrimination occurs based on their skin colour, Haitian sounding names, or living conditions, barring them from access to higher levels of education, health care, much formal work, international travel and justice, as well as preventing them from getting married or registering their children.

However, this discrimination is not a new phenomenon and is rooted in a long history of human rights abuses against this community: in 1937 between 15,000 and 30,000 people were killed by the regime of dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the so-called 'Parsley Massacre' by the Dajabon river. Regime officials asked migrants to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley (Perejil): those unable to pronounce the word in the same way as Spanish speakers due to their French accents were then killed.

A long-standing issue

Discrimination is a long-standing problem that Dominicans of Haitian descent have been facing for decades and over generations in the Dominican Republic. Most of the members of this community were born in Dominican territory at a time when the Dominican Constitution specifically stated that those born in its territory, unless in transit for a maximum of 10 days (Migration Law No. 95-39) or the children of diplomats, would acquire Dominican nationality.

For some years, Dominican authorities denied birth certificates to Dominican-born descendants of Haitian migrants. This led to some individuals having birth certificates while others were discriminated against and were unable to obtain such civil documentation. This problem became more visible in 2004, when the Dominican Parliament passed the new Migration Law No. 185-04. This legislation changed the concept of 'in transit' to an unlimited period and created the so-called 'Book of Foreigners'. This registry entered into force in 2007. Since then, it has segregated those born in Dominican territory of foreign parents, even though the Constitution still accepts nationality acquired by jus soli. Those registered in the 'Book of Foreigners' are not issued any identity documents and cannot enjoy their basic rights.

Restrictions to the acquisition of Dominican nationality were further imposed in 2010 when the Dominican Parliament passed a new Constitution. This text limited the jus soli acquisition of Dominican nationality. From 2010, those children born to individuals in an irregular migratory situation are no longer able to acquire the Dominican nationality through the principle of jus soli.

The de-nationalisation process of Dominicans of Haitian reached a peak with the judgment of the Dominican Constitutional Court in September 2013 (TC/0168/13). This judgment retroactively deprived hundreds of thousands of people born in the Dominican Republic between 1929 and 2010 of their nationality. This violates a fundamental right to which everyone is entitled: the right to nationality. This judgment is considered unconstitutional by local and international civil society organizations as it violates, amongst others, Article 110 on retroactive laws and Article 18.2 on nationality of the Dominican Constitution. It also run contrary to a judgement in 2005 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the issue of the nationality of Dominicans of Haitian descent. UNHCR, which has been given the mandate by the UN General Assembly to help states prevent and reduce statelessness, also expressed its deep concern at the adverse impact of the ruling on those affected.

Dominican authorities subsequently passed Naturalization Law No. 169-14 in order to address the situation created by the judgment. This Naturalization Law divided the community into two groups. However, both solutions are inadequate and fail to restore Dominican nationality to the affected population, as required by international human rights standards.

The first group, known as 'Group A', are those already registered in the Dominican Civil Registry. According to this law, their nationality documents had to be validated by the civil registry, after which they would be recognized as Dominican nationals. The Central Electoral Board has reviewed its registries and by October 2015 it had identified just over 61,000 people as part of this group. However, only 13,495 individuals had been issued nationality documents as Dominicans as of January 2017, with the large majority of those who lost their nationality in 2013 having not yet recovered it after more than four years. The transcription of registries, in itself a problem as it risks further segregating Dominicans of Haitian descent, can also lead to those registered twice having their status challenged in court. This predicament was highlighted by the case of Juliana Deguis Pierre, the subject of a high-profile court case after she challenged the refusal of authorities to issue her with identification documents because of her Haitian surname. Although the Central Electoral Board identified a large number of people, there are still many others missing from their list, with representatives from civil society organizations suggesting that a similar number may not currently be included in the list.

The second group, known as 'Group B' and created by Law No. 169-14, is made up of those born in Dominican territory but who were never registered under the Dominican Civil Registry. This group had to register as foreigners in a complex and bureaucratic procedure in order to be naturalized in two years' time after they were issued a residence permit. The criteria set for this form of registration were difficult to fulfil by those affected. Dominicans of Haitian descent had to submit numerous documents, which in some cases had to be notarized, and in other cases officials requested separate documents which were not detailed in the law as reported by local civil society organizations. This increased the costs of the whole process for a community that has little access to work and lives mainly in remote areas. Also, initially the law established a very short timeframe for registration - three months - which was then extended for another three-month period. This period proved insufficient, and the criteria too restrictive for all community members affected to be registered. This resulted in only 8,755 people being registered out of the more than 73,000 targeted according to estimations taken from the 2012 National Survey on Migrants. As a result, the overwhelming majority are still stateless and undocumented today, and in danger of expulsion from their own country.

It is important to differentiate between those people who moved to the Dominican Republic and those born in that country. Dominicans of Haitian descent continue to struggle to be recognized as Dominicans. These are children, women, men and old people who are at risk of being arbitrarily detained and even expelled from their own country, because they are stateless. This has been constantly reported by international organizations including MRG, UNHCR, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the European Network on Statelessness, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The international community has also highlighted the problem of statelessness affecting Dominicans of Haitian descent. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has published two judgments on the right to nationality, finding against the Dominican government in, for example, the case of the Girls Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic in 2005 or, most recently, the case Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v. Dominican Republic in 2014 which stated that the solution given to Group B contravened the American Convention on Human Rights. The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights has also visited the country and has organized specific hearings on this topic.

At the UN level, the Independent Expert on minority issues and the Special Rapporteur on racism concluded in 2007, at the end of their joint visit to the Dominican Republic, that there was in the country a 'profound and entrenched problem of racism and discrimination' affecting the population of Haitian descent. Their plight was one of the issues most raised at the Universal Periodic Review of the Dominican Republic in February 2014. And the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, for the first time, mentioned the Dominican Republic in the opening statement at the 30th session of the Human Rights Council. The High Commissioner urged the Dominican authorities to 'ensure that those with a valid claim to remain are allowed to do so'.

Current issues

According to the latest available data from the Central Electoral Board, 13,495 people from Group A were able to re-access their Dominican identity documents. However, local civil society groups have been unable to verify this and claim that problems persist for many members of Group A. Also, as mentioned above, the Central Electoral Board is taking some cases of nullification to the courts where authorities argue that cases of double-registration between the original and transcribed registries has occurred. In any case, taking this figure and subtracting it from the total of Group A individuals leaves over 47,000 still in need of regaining their Dominican identity documents.

In the case of Group B, those who have managed to register have had to wait two years for the naturalization process to begin. Yet local civil society groups and international organizations still do not know what this process will entail. A key concern is that authorities may require passports and birth certificates from a country of origin, documents that stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent will be unable to provide, leaving them highly vulnerable.

Another concern is that the figure given by officials of 8,755 is not clear. Out of this total, some people were from Group A and had to be removed; some are incomplete; others were registered after the deadline; and some were registered under the Book of Foreigners instead of group B. By April 2017, according to various local sources, only 2,400 people had been able to secure documents. The Socio-Cultural Movement for Haitian Workers (MOSCTHA) has proved that this figure is not higher because in at least 40 per cent of their cases when people affected go to get their documents after seeing their names in the list of documents ready to be collected, they are being told these are not ready, although officials argue it is because people do not go to collect them. MOSCTHA, together with other local civil society groups, has requested the Ministry of Interior and Police to provide a list with the people who did not complete the process in order to help authorities in speeding up the process. What remains clear is that, until these individuals acquire the Dominican nationality, they are stateless.

The rest of those who were not able to register but were subject to this registry (approximately 64,000 individuals, according to official estimates) also remain stateless and they are unable to continue with their lives. They cannot continue with their studies, access healthcare, legally work or travel within the island.

Thus, based on official figures and estimates, there are still over 110,000 people who are stateless. However, civil society groups highlight that this figure could be higher as there are still people missing from Group A and descendants of those affected should also be included, and there is no information on people registered under the Book of Foreigners.

Ways forward

The full restoration of nationality and respect of the rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic remains a major area of concern. There have been a number of demonstrations and actions against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent that have triggered a wave of racism and discrimination across the country.

The Dominican authorities have already taken some steps to resolve the problem, including the establishment of an inter-institutional board to review cases. To fully comply with national laws and follow international recommendations, the government should also take other steps, including take all necessary measures to fully restore nationality for those individuals who were arbitrarily deprived of it and rendered stateless by the 2013 ruling; fully implement the 2014 ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the issue of nationality; take all necessary action to eliminate any forms of discrimination in the civil registry; comply with international norms and standards, and fulfil all international judgements.

Updated May 2018

Copyright notice:  Minority Rights Group International. All rights reserved.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Iraq : Black Iraqis

Publisher Minority Rights Group International Publication Date November 2017 Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Iraq : Black Iraqis, November 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a53600d7.html [accessed 18 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Profile

Black Iraqis are largely the descendants of East African migrants and slaves whose presence in Iraq dates back to the ninth century. Community leaders estimate their numbers today may be as high as 1.5 to 2 million. They are located mostly in southern Iraq, with the largest community residing in Basra. The majority of black Iraqis identify as Shi'a Muslims, although the community also maintains some African traditions and spiritual practices.

Historical Context

The African presence in Iraq dates back to the ninth century, when Baghdad was the capital of the prosperous Abbasid Caliphate. It was then that a robust slave trade developed between the East Coast of Africa and the port city of Basra, which would continue in one form or another for close to a millennium. Some African migrants also came to the region as sailors or laborers. Slaves worked in agriculture, as servants in the homes of aristocratic families, and occasionally as soldiers. Many were initially given the arduous task of converting salt marshes into agricultural land through manual labour. The strenuous nature of this work contributed to the outbreak of the Zanj rebellion in Basra in 869, which lasted nearly fifteen years. The rebellion reportedly involved half a million slaves and led to the creation of a self-ruling capital, before it was violently put down by Baghdad.

Slavery formally ended in the 19th century, although blacks apparently continued to be used as domestic servants in wealthy households. Moreover, the legacy of slavery contributed to long-term patterns of marginalization and discrimination against Iraqis of African descent. The community never developed an educated class nor did black Iraqis rise to positions of power in the country, although membership in the Ba'ath party reportedly provided some with access to government jobs during the Saddam Hussein era. Many earned a living as musicians, and were sought after to perform at weddings and other festivities in southern Iraq.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, black Iraqis began to organize and develop a political consciousness for the first time. The Free Iraqi Movement, the first political association to defend the rights of black Iraqis, was founded in 2007. Spurred by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, many black Iraqis began to advocate for an end to discrimination and a greater role in Iraqi politics. Several members of the movement ran for the 2010 provincial elections in Basra, though none were elected. In 2013, in the aftermath of local council elections, the founder of the Free Iraqi Movement, Jalal Thiyab, was assassinated in central Basra. Reportedly, no official investigation was launched into the investigation and the killer was not brought to justice.

Current issues

The assassination of Jalal Thiyab was a major blow to black Iraqis' political activism, and the minority remains underrepresented in politics and other aspects of public life. Unlike other communities, black Iraqis do not have a parliamentary quota or any official recognition as a minority. There is little appetite in Baghdad to change this reality, since black Iraqis are Muslims and are not seen as being in need of positive measures.

Black Iraqis continue to face systematic discrimination and marginalization. They are continually referred to as 'abd' (slave) and their communities suffer from disproportionately high illiteracy and unemployment rates. The community has not developed a professional class and not a single black Iraqi holds a high level position in government. Many cannot find employment other than as labourers or domestic workers. Those who make a living through music and dance have had their livelihoods threatened by hardline Islamist groups who rose to prominence after 2003 and disapprove of such activities.

Neighbourhoods inhabited by black Iraqis, especially Basra's Al-Zubeir district, are characterized by extreme poverty and neglect. Many black Iraqis live in one-room mud brick houses that sometimes hold 15 residents or more. Many of their neighborhoods also lack a clean water supply and proper sewage facilities, and are prone to electricity shortages. Reportedly, some black Iraqis lack nationality documents for reasons connected to the history of slavery, and are therefore unable to access public services.

Updated November 2017

Copyright notice:  Minority Rights Group International. All rights reserved.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Iraq : Kaka'i

Publisher Minority Rights Group International Publication Date November 2017 Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Iraq : Kaka'i, November 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a5360b47.html [accessed 18 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Updated November 2017

Profile

Kaka'i, also known as Ahl-e Haqq or Yarsan, are estimated by community members to number between 110,000 and 200,000 in Iraq, mainly living south-east of Kirkuk and in the Ninewa plains near Daquq and Hamdaniya, with others also based in Diyala, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. They are generally considered to be Kurdish in ethnicity, speaking a dialect known as Macho, although there are also some Arabic-speaking communities. They are followers of a syncretic religion, which dates to the fourteenth century in western Iran and contains elements of Zoroastrianism and Shi'a Islam. Nevertheless, their distinct practices and beliefs have resulted in some persecution. As a result, Kaka'i are secretive about their faith.

Historical Context

In the Ottoman era and continuing to the monarchial period, Kaka'i held influential positions in Iraq, and were wealthy landowners in Kirkuk province.

In the context of the Ba'ath regime's conflict with the Kurds, some Kaka'i supported the Kurdish cause while others stayed neutral or even supported the government. As a result of the regime's Arabization policies, many Kak'ais were forced off their lands and displaced to Sulaymaniyah, Erbil or southern Iraq. The government also destroyed Kaka'i villages along the Iranian border in order to create a security zone. Hundreds of Kaka'i living in Kirkuk were forcibly exiled to Iran, losing their nationality in the process.

Following the rise of ISIS in 2014, the Kaka'i' religious identity made them, like other minorities, a clear target for the militant group. When ISIS began its advance in northern Iraq, most Kaka'i living in villages east of Mosul fled to Erbil. ISIS reportedly released statements threatening Kaka'i with death if they did not convert to Islam. Several villages were taken over by ISIS, and the militant group also destroyed Kaka'i shrines in al-Hamdaniya district on the Ninewa plains. In response, the Kaka'i formed their own armed forces, and one 600-member contingent was incorporated into the Kurdish Peshmerga. In September 2016, ISIS targeted a Kaka'i village in Tuz Kharmatu district with a car bomb attack, killing at least six people.

Current issues

Divisions within the Kaka'i community over whether they are a sect of Islam, or an independent religious group, have prevented the group from cementing its role in political life. The 2005 Constitution does not mention the Kaka'i religion. Without official recognition, Kaka'i cannot register their religion on their identification cards and are recorded as Muslims. However, some Kaka'i prefer this option as it protects them from discrimination. Nevertheless, the community has made some gains in recent years. In 2015, the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs recognized the Kaka'i religion for the first time, and the minority now has a reserved seat on the Halabja provincial council.

Kaka'i continue to face discrimination on the basis of their poorly understood religious identity, and have been the targets of threats, kidnappings, assassinations and boycotts of their businesses. Kaka'i men are easily distinguishable due to their characteristic prominent moustaches, thereby rendering them more exposed to harassment and discrimination.

Updated November 2017

Copyright notice:  Minority Rights Group International. All rights reserved.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Kenya : Somali and other nomads

Publisher Minority Rights Group International Publication Date December 2017 Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Kenya : Somali and other nomads, December 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a53624d7.html [accessed 18 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Updated December 2017

Profile

Although reliable pre-2009 data is not available, the size of the Somali population in Kenya appears to have steadily increased since independence to an estimated 2,385,572 according to the 2009 population census. This effectively places Somalis at 6.2 per cent of the national population, making them the sixth largest ethnic community in Kenya. These figures were controversial as previous estimates in the 1989 and 1999 census had put them at around 1 per cent of the population, leading authorities to question the 2009 census figure as inflated by recent immigration. However, other commentators have argued that previous surveys have repeatedly underestimated Kenya's Somali population due to their limited understanding of pastoralist social structures and restrictive definitions of who could be classified as 'Kenyan' that left many long-term residents of the country of Somali origin uncounted.

Kenyan Somalis have settled in most parts of the country, but they are known to predominantly occupy four counties of Mandera, Garissa, Wajir and Tana River, all of which border Somalia. There are significant numbers of Kenyan Somalis on the coast and in most urban areas of Kenya. The large majority of Kenya's Somalis are Muslim and are traditionally pastoralists who rear cattle, goats and camels. Camels are their primary asset and source of livelihood. Most Somalis living in urban areas are small-scale businessmen.

Whilst Kenya has made progress in dealing with statelessness affecting some minority communities, such as Nubians and Makonde, the situation of its Somali community -- the largest community affected by the risk of statelessness in the country -- remains very problematic. The Somali community in Kenya consists of both descendants of a cross border community originally living in the far north of Kenya and more recent migrants and refugees who have fled ongoing instability and violence in Somalia. The spread of violence from Somalia into Kenya, with numerous terrorist attacks claimed by the armed extremist group Al-Shabaab or demonstrated to involve Somalis, has led to increasingly indiscriminate targeting of the community in security crackdowns. Large refugee flows, regular violent attacks and the fact that almost all Somalis are Muslim, in contrast to Kenya's largely Christian population, have together contributed to both official and social discrimination against the Somali community. In this context, there have also been increasing efforts to limit the recognition of citizenship of those of Somali origin.

Historical Background

During the colonial period the area occupied by the Somalis was referred to as the Northern Frontier District, which served as a buffer between the British Kenyan colony and areas colonized by the Germans and Italians to the north. The Somali population of northern Kenya was well established and had been in existence for multiple generations by the time of Kenya's independence. There are thus two groups of Somalis in Kenya: those whose ancestors have lived there for many generations and others who are refugees who fled the civil war that plagued neighboring Somalia since the late 1980s.

When Somalia achieved independence in 1960, while Kenya was still under colonial rule, Somali politicians appealed to the British colonial authorities either to assign Kenya's northern area to Somalia before Kenyan independence or to allow a referendum to see if the population chose to secede from Kenya. An informal plebiscite at the time found that the overwhelming majority of the largely ethnic Somali population wished to secede. This resulted in a military push by the government of Kenya to secure the Republic of Kenya, including the previous Northern Frontier District, resulting in the period of civil strife commonly known as the shifta war. While this conflict formally ended in 1967, in practice sporadic secessionist violence and banditry persisted for several decades in the region. During this period the Somalis were heavily marginalized and victimized by the government. Evidence gathered by the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) suggests that hundreds of people were massacred during this period. The exclusion of Somalis was such that until 1983, not a single Somali ever sat in the cabinets of the Moi or Jomo Kenyatta governments.

In 1989, amidst the continued threat of secession, reprisal attacks and the displacement numerous Somalis fleeing the civil war in Somalia, the Kenyan government introduced a form of screening for Kenyan Somalis before issuing them with identity cards in accordance with section 8 of the Registration of Persons Act. It states that, '[T]he Principal Registrar requires all persons of the Somali ethnic community resident in Kenya who are eighteen (18) years and above to attend before the registration officers at the center specified in the second column of the schedule and furnish such documentary or other evidence of the truth of their registration between the 13th November, 1989 and 4th December, 1989.' Through Gazette Notice No. 5319, dated 7th November 1989, a task force referred to as the Yusuf Haji Taskforce received documentary evidence in accordance with Gazette Notice No. 5320 and issued special verification certificates to persons it considered genuine Kenyan Somalis. This was the foundation of profiling and vetting of Somalis for citizenship.

During this period there was a massive influx of Somali refugees into Kenya. Over time the refugee camps became better equipped, with basic services such as education and health care that many Kenyan Somalis in the marginalized northern areas of Kenya were unable to access. As a result, some Kenyan Somali parents enrolled their children as refugees to secure the social amenities provided to refugees. This created the complex and unusual situation of Kenyan citizens by birth being enrolled as refugees. In 1998 Kenya faced its first major terror attack, which was followed by several others in subsequent years. This acrimonious history set the backdrop for the persistent difficulties experienced by many Kenyan Somalis to have their citizenship recognized.

Current Situation

Kenyan Somalis currently hold key official positions in all branches of government. For instance, as of late 2017 there are three Somali cabinet secretaries, the leader of majority government in parliament is a Somali, and Somalis have 8 per cent representation in Parliament. One of the judges of the Supreme Court is a Somali who was the Acting Chief Justice during a period when the Chief Justice and Deputy Chief Justice were retired.

However, the systematic discrimination against ethnic Somalis is far from over. In 2014, the Somali community was subjected to extensive profiling and victimization as the government attempted a crackdown on extremist militia groups. This was accompanied by anti-Somali statements by politicians and in the media, with the conflation of Somalis with terrorists and refugees being common. In this context of mistrust and suspicion, the process of acquiring national identity cards for Somalis has become very protracted.

Although the laws on citizenship in Kenya do not require group membership along ethnic or linguistic lines, in practice citizenship is typically awarded by descent and one's ethnicity may be a crucial factor in deciding whether a person is judged eligible for identity documents. This is critical as it determines whether someone is regarded as a citizen by birth (jus sanguinis), a citizen with lesser entitlements through registration or a alternatively a non-citizen who is therefore at a risk of being stateless if citizenship is denied altogether. While it is not uncommon for communities that straddle international borders to face challenges with nationality, the barriers experienced by Kenyan Somalis in securing their citizenship are particularly high, as highlighted repeatedly in research by human rights groups in Kenya. While other communities such as Nubians and border populations have been subjected to vetting, the specific and arbitrary targeting of Somalis as an ethnic group is at a different level.

In processing an application for citizenship, for example, Somalis are frequently asked to meet unreasonable requirements such as the provision of a land title deed in an area where no subdivision has taken place or the land is owned collectively by the community. They may also be asked for documentation such as the death certificates of their grandparents to establish their lineage, even though their parents may have died at a time when the issuance of death certificates in the northern region of Kenya was not routine. Whereas some of these hurdles have been removed, government officials still require Somalis to attend with both of their parents to apply for identity documents. The parents will usually have their biometrics taken to help in the verification process. In addition they have to face a vetting committee to establish that they are Kenyan Somalis by birth. This means that while other communities can apply and acquire identity documents in school, Kenyan Somalis do not have this privilege.

The vetting has been in place since 1989 in Kenya, but it existed without the force of law until 2015 when it was introduced in law by the Security Laws Amendment Act. Section 6 of the Registration of Persons Act reads:

(1) A registration officer may require any person who has given any information in pursuance of this Act or rules made thereunder to furnish such documentary or other evidence of the truth of that information as it is within the power of that person to furnish. (1A) The Director may establish identification committees or appoint persons as identification agents to assist in the authentication of information furnished by a parent or guardian.

These processes can delay the issuance of identity cards significantly, as vetting is often periodic and conducted in a central location that may not be readily accessible. Furthermore, as most Kenyan Somalis are pastoralist, the procedures may not align with their seasonal lifestyles. Consequently, whereas unpublished research by the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) found that other Kenyans by birth ordinarily require between 8 and 28 days to acquire a national identity card, Somalis belonging to border communities -- while they ought to take at most 38 days -- typically have to wait between three and six months to get a national identity card. During any period of unrest or insecurity, or after government officials have been attacked by Al-Shabaab, the process of issuance of identity cards can be halted for a year or more. This results in late registration of persons who thereafter require another level of vetting. Even where Kenyan Somalis have acquired identity cards, they are now undergoing fresh vetting procedures when applying for Kenyan passports or replacement national identity cards. This has resulted in a very large number of ethnic Somalis resident in Kenya without valid identification documents.

Research has found that the counties inhabited by Somalis in northern Kenya face very high rates of corruption in accessing documentation. In 2016, members of parliament representing the Somali community negotiated a political settlement that allowed for the striking out of over 40,000 Kenyan Somalis who had been registered in the refugee database for economic reasons or to access opportunities, even though they were Kenyan residents.

Way Forward

There are a variety of factors, both external and internal, that continue to impede the status of the Somali community in Kenya. In particular, there needs to be a standardized system of vetting and registering nationality documents in place to ensure the process is verifiable and is not used to deny people documentation on the basis of their identity. This will also help reduce and combat corruption. Additionally, the Kenyan government needs to adopt proposed requirements that Kenyans are registered and their biometrics recorded between the ages of 12 and 17 to avoid late registration.

The Vetting Committee should also have representatives from the county governments where Kenyan Somalis reside to help devolve services and increase accountability for the provision of documentation.

Updated December 2017

Copyright notice:  Minority Rights Group International. All rights reserved.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Uganda : Maragoli

Publisher Minority Rights Group International Publication Date July 2018 Cite as Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Uganda : Maragoli, July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a5363f57.html [accessed 18 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Profile

The actual number of Maragoli in Uganda is not readily available since rather than being a named category they were considered under 'others' in the two most recent Ugandan censuses. Leaders from Kiryandongo District and the community estimate the Maragoli population to be between 25,000 and 30,000. Maragoli are found in Kiryandongo District, in Bunyoro sub-region, Midwestern Uganda. They basically occupy at least a parish comprised of two to three villages. Some are scattered within the Kigumba Town Council, the main town council for Kiryandongo District.

Maragoli have lived in Uganda for over a century and until recently had experienced few serious problems either with the communities where they had settled or with the government. Although they were absent from the national schedule in the 1995 Constitution and the amended schedule in the 2005 constitutional amendment that list the tribes of Uganda, they continued to enjoy the same rights as other Ugandan citizens. This, however, changed when the government introduced registration and issuance of identity cards as measures to identify citizens two years ago.

History

The origins of the Maragoli people in Uganda are not recorded in detail in historical sources. It is known that at some point Maragoli migrated from Ethiopia via Southern Sudan to the area through the South Sudan-Uganda border into the West Nile and Bunyoro sub-regions. There may be more Maragoli residing in Western Kenya, but others may always have been present in Bunyoro sub-region in Western Uganda, some distance from the Kenyan side. The areas they occupy are also home to other ethnic groups like Banyoro, who are the majority, as well as Acholi, Langi and Alur communities. One group is believed to have come to the place they now occupy more than a century ago (around 1901) during the construction of the Uganda Railway. Another group is known to have moved later in the 1950s.

Maragoli were resettled onto the land they now occupy by the Bunyoro Kingdom which controlled this part of Uganda. They have maintained various cultural practices such as their burial rites to date and still speak their own language, although they are also fluent in Runyoro, the language commonly used in the area where they reside.

Current Situation

The current difficulties of the Maragoli community began in 2015 when the government introduced a mass national registration of Ugandan citizens and issued each person a national identification card under a newly constituted National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA). It is at this point that the Maragoli for the first time were put at risk of statelessness due to the withholding of their identity cards.

Most Maragoli during the registration exercise were advised to register as Banyoro, the dominant ethnic group in the area, to avoid any potential difficulties around the fact that their ethnic group was missing in the national schedule of the 1995 Constitution and the 2005 amendment that recognized 65 tribes in Uganda, all members of which are entitled to Ugandan nationality. Many did so but others refused, not wanting to be overshadowed by the Banyoro and seeking their own identity as an ethnic group with an established history in the area.

Those who registered for national identity cards as belonging to other groups like Banyoro and Alur, at the advice of the district authorities, expected to be issued with their cards like other Ugandan citizens. Their cards were, in fact, produced and were released to the District at the Office of the NITO (National Information and Technology Officer). All those who went to collect their identity cards were able to collect them - with the exception of those believed to belong to the Maragoli community despite registering as other groups, whose cards were instead withheld. Other Maragoli who registered also as Banyoro or other groups outside Kiryandongo district received their cards.

Maragoli leaders took a number of steps to try to solve the problem with the NIRA, but to date their difficulties remain ongoing and the majority of cards have not been issued. They have petitioned the Speaker of Parliament, the President, the Attorney General and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but all in vain. While these efforts did result in a letter from the Ministry of Internal Affairs in which the Minister instructed the NIRA to urgently issue identity cards to Maragoli, respecting advice from the Attorney General, pending a constitutional amendment for their inclusion in the national schedule as a recognized Ugandan community. However, this seems to have been ignored or disputed at the local level as the cards have yet to be issued. The President directed the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs in Uganda to include the Maragoli in the constitutional amendment. Both directives were not adhered to and the Maragoli still have their identity documents withheld.

As a result of their lacking identity cards, Maragoli experience discrimination in many areas such as access to health services, especially when referred to hospitals, as proof of identity is routinely demanded before treatment. Indeed, almost every aspect of service provision for Ugandan citizens is dependent on the possession of valid identification: for example, employment at the district level, opening of bank accounts, loans, government income programmes such as Youth Livelihood Funds and women's funds. This was not the case before the rollout of national identity registration requirements and the resulting questions as to their status and nationality. This can leave individuals at risk of being denied a range of rights, regardless of their previous position. For instance, one Maragoli community member belonging to a school management committee was not allowed to be a signatory to the school bank account because he could not provide an identity card: he told MRG that he was thus denied a leadership position.

Recently, the country also embarked on the registration of under-16-year-olds through the NIRA, who will also be provided with children's identity cards. However, the children of Maragoli whose cards are withheld have also been discriminated against. One of the requirements to register children was to produce the identity cards of their parents for their own registration and since they could not, they too were not registered.

NIRA officials have advised Maragoli people to secure citizenship through naturalization. The community however has declined this option for several reasons: firstly, because it would represent an admission that they are foreigners, which they contest, having been born in Uganda with generations of ancestors predating the country's independence. Furthermore, naturalization does not offer the guarantee of permanent citizenship since it can be revoked by an act of parliament. They see the refusal to issue identity cards as part and parcel of a package of rising discrimination against them and consider that naturalization would further entrench their secondary status in the country.

Ways Forward

An important avenue for resolving the community's predicament is the tribunal case opened by Uganda's Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC). Maragoli must therefore be mobilized to support the case and give evidence to the EOC and other actors to ensure an effective and positive judgment. Currently, the EOC has taken it up as a case of discrimination which according to the Equal Opportunity Act 2007 they are mandated to investigate and hear. The case could result in a recommendation or an order if discrimination is found to have occurred.

A number of measures could be undertaken to support this:



Undertake a rapid assessment to establish the exact details about the Maragoli NIRA issues. This could also assist in establishing a clearer picture of why the NIRA withheld the identity cards and the reasons they continue to do so, despite letters from the various ministries and offices.

Mobilize the Maragoli community through their leaders. This should include educating them on their rights, registration processes and the potential strategies they could pursue to ensure their issues are resolved.

Organize strategic meetings between the Maragoli leadership with relevant government offices to promote dialogue. Meetings could be held seeking to clarify and progress the issue targeting points of influence: NIRA, Attorney General, Internal Affairs, Constitutional Ministry, Parliamentary Legal Committee and others. The Maragoli community, in partnership with Minority Rights Group, already has the support of the local council (LC 5) of the District which is keen to get this divisive issue for their community swiftly resolved.

Recently, with support from MRG, Maragoli lodged a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission Tribunal and the ruling, though recognizing their plight, directed the Maragoli community to naturalize while they wait to be included in the national schedule when the Constitution is amended. This position has been a concern for Maragoli who consider it to unfairly indicate that they are not Ugandans. They claim that naturalization does not grant them the same rights as citizens by birth.

Updated July 2018

Copyright notice:  Minority Rights Group International. All rights reserved.
Title Communication From the Commission to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council: Commission contribution to the EU Leaders' thematic debate on a way forward on the external and the internal dimension of migration policy

Publication Date 7 December 2017

Citation / Document Symbol COM(2017) 820 final

Cite as European Union: European Commission, Communication From the Commission to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council: Commission contribution to the EU Leaders' thematic debate on a way forward on the external and the internal dimension of migration policy, 7 December 2017, COM(2017) 820 final, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a537ab44.html [accessed 18 November 2022]
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WINSTED  The Winchester Land Trust announced Monday that it has bought the 121-acre TorWin Farm property at 243 South Road on the town line and plans to preserve it as open space.

With the addition to its holdings, the land trust has now conserved 490 acres of land in town, President Jen Perga said in a release Monday.

The farm consists of beautiful grassland and forest straddling the Winchester/Torrington border. This property is a wilderness corridor between two parts of the Paugnut State Forest and makes connections to Burr Pond State Park, Highland Lake and Platt Hill State Park, Perga said in the release. Preserving this parcel protects valuable wildlife habitat and the Burr Pond watershed, while opening the property to the public.

The purchase was funded by a loan from The Conservation Fund that bridged pledged funds from the State of Connecticuts DEEP Open Space and Watershed Land Acquisition Program and the Highlands Conservation Act Grant Program, as well as matching donations from the community, Perga said.

The property will be renamed the John and Virginia Houlihan Woods to honor the family of its previous owner, and an area on the Torrington side of the land will be established in tribute to Michael Giordano, the late husband of Lynn Giordano, Perga said.

It was sold for a bargain-sale price, Perga said  thanks to Cara and Ken Blazier, the previous owner, were included in the release.

We never could have completed this two-year project without the incredible support of our community, said board member Chuck Dmytriw as part of the release.

Perga said the property was previously used as a horse farm and airstrip by John and Virginia Houlihan  where supplies were brought in after the Flood of 1955, as well as a condensed milk farm by Gail Borden.

It is now the home to bobolinks, a species of blackbird, according to the release.

Its easy to see the incredible display of male bobolinks as they flutter their wings, hovering above the grasses in the spring and early summer  no binoculars or special equipment is needed, said board member, Louise VanAlstyne in the release.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, came to visit the TorWin farm property in October 2016, meeting with representatives of the land trust to discuss the Highlands Preservation Act, a federal program which provides matching funds for the preservation of land in a region stretching from Connecticut to Pennsylvania.

Here in Connecticut, we know its the holy grail, right? Protecting these parcels is not just the right environmental and ecological policy, its the right land use planning policy, its doubling-down on our strengths, our cultural strength, its who we are, said Murphy at the time. Its why people want to come live here  because they get to see beautiful things like this.

A portion of the purchase was funded through this program, Perga said.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection provided $307,500 in grant funding towards the purchase in November 2016.

Reach Ben Lambert at william.lambert@hearstmediact.com.
Screen grab taken from Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on January 8, 2018 shows smoke and flames coming from a Iranian oil tanker ablaze at sea off the coast of eastern China.

An Iranian oil tanker that collided with a Chinese vessel in the East China Sea is still at risk of exploding, with one body found and 32 crew still missing.

The collision between a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered freighter, occurred at around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 nautical miles east of the Yangtze estuary, state news agency Xinhua reported. Missing crew included 30 Iranian nationals and two Bangladeshi nationals, it said.

"We have sent several rescue vessels to the scene," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular news briefing in Beijing, adding that rescuers had retrieved one body at 10.30 a.m. local time on Monday.

The Iranian vessel was still burning on Monday, and was at risk of exploding and sinking, sparking concerns over environmental devastation along Chinas eastern seaboard.

But state broadcaster CCTV said the search and cleanup operation is being hampered by fierce fires and poisonous gases covering the waters around the tanker.

The Iranian-operated, Panamanian-flagged oil tanker Sanchi collided with the Hong Kong-registered CF Crystal cargo vessel with oil products equivalent to nearly a million barrels aboard.

All 21 Chinese crew members were rescued from the damaged CF Crystal, which was carrying 64,000 tons of grain from the United States to southern China, the Shanghai Maritime Bureau said in a statement on its official social media account.

The U.S. Navy sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa on Monday to join ships and craft from China and South Korea in the search and rescue mission.

Wuxi-based environmental activist Wu Lihong said that the rescue of the missing crew remains the top priority.

But he said China could soon be dealing with huge quantities of crude oil if the Sanchi began to leak.

Wu implementation of the clean-up could be problematic, as the tanker is currently in international waters.

The main effort should be focused on rescuing the missing crew, but the clean-up of large amounts of crude oil from the sea is something that also needs consideration, Wu said.

The main problem is [environmental laws] are rarely properly implemented, because nobody will supervise the clean-up, he said.

For example, several rivers in the north of the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu are disgorging untreated waste water directly into the East China Sea.

The Huaihe estuary in northern Jiangsu, for example, is an important breeding ground for killer whales, but the pollution in that area has pretty much wiped them out there, he said.

Nobody talks about pollution in the East China Sea, Wu said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang said the cause of the accident is still under investigation.

Reported by Gao Shan for RFAs Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Wu Gan, also known as 'The Butcher,' is seen behind bars at police station in Nanchang city, in eastern China's Jiangxi province, May 19, 2015.

Outspoken human rights activist Wu Gan appealed his eight-year jail term for subversion on Monday, arguing his writings and speeches on behalf of legal abuse victims fell within his civil rights.

Wu, 42, known by his online nickname "The Butcher," was detained during Chinas 2015 crackdown on lawyers and sentenced on Dec. 26 by the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court after being found guilty of "incitement to subvert state power," the court said in a statement.

Wus defense lawyers Yan Xin and Ge Yongxi on Monday filed a written appeal Tianjin Higher Peoples Court calling on the court to withdraw the verdict, pronounce Wu not guilty and set him free.

The written appeal says that although Wu had admitted in court to having thoughts of subverting state power, thoughts alone do not constitute a crime, the lawyers said.

The appeal said that Wus speeches on social media, published articles, interviews with foreign media, taped lectures, his observation of twelve cases, and his use of performance art all were protected constitutional civil rights, they said.

His speech and actions do not undermine social security, but have raised civic awareness and the awareness of civil rights among the public. This is an effective way for the public to oversee judicial performance by local governments, resulting in the redress of wrongful convictions, said the appeal.

The written appeal also argues that state power does not equal the power of a political party; and Chinese people have the right to subvert political power, especially an authoritarian system, it said.

Patrick Poon from Amnesty International told RFA Wus case underscore why it is necessary to withdraw this type of criminal charges based on subverting state power.

The Wu Gan Case is a typical case used to clamp down on dissidents with this type of charge. If this crime is not abandoned, more people will be charged with the same crime in the future.

This is a good opportunity to get rid of this problematic crime, added Poon.

When he was sentenced on Dec. 26, the indictment against Wu said he engaged in a series of actions that incited the subversion of state power and the overthrow of the socialist system, seriously harming national security and social stability." according to.

"Wu Gan began to develop subversive thoughts after growing dissatisfied with the current political system in this country," the court said. "He then used online information platforms over a long period of time to send out large volumes of posts attacking the government and the constitutional state system, disseminating his subversive ideas."

Ge Yongxi said Wu had told the court that he was honored to receive the sentence and that he would "roll up my sleeves and redouble my efforts."

Ge rejected the verdict and said the harsh sentence was likely linked to the fact that Wu had refused to confess to the charges against him during interrogation and torture at the hands of police.

In a complaint filed to the Tianjin municipal state prosecutor's office, they wrote that Wu had been interrogated "more than 300 times" since his incarceration began. He had been repeatedly and illegally held in solitary confinement, tortured, and deprived of his right to complain and to access legal advice.

Wu was initially detained by police during a performance protest he titled "Selling my Body to Raise Funds" in Nanchang city in eastern Jiangxi province.

He was trying to help finance a legal defense for Huang Zhiqiang, Fang Chunping, Cheng Fagen, and Cheng Lihe, who were jailed in Jiangxi's Leping city for robbery, rape, and dismembering a corpse.

The four received suspended death sentences in 2000 that were later commuted to jail terms, but their lawyers and rights activists say their confessions were obtained through torture, and that the men are victims of a miscarriage of justice.

Reported by Ng Yik-tong and Wen Yuqing for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated by Karen Zhang. Written in English by Paul Eckert.
Bangladesh says it is unlikely that the voluntary repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar will start in two weeks as scheduled, because the logistics are not in place.

A bilateral repatriation agreement inked Nov. 23 had called for the process to begin in 60 days  around Jan. 22  but a joint working group tasked with working out the details has not held its first meeting.

Repatriation is a complicated and huge task. This is not possible to do everything within a stipulated timeframe. So, I think it is unlikely that we can start the repatriation by Jan. 22, Mohammad Abul Kalam, Bangladeshs commissioner for refugee relief and repatriation, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, on Monday.

We need more time.

The delay was announced as Rohingya refugees continued to straggle across the border into Bangladesh and a Rohingya insurgent group said it had carried out an attack on Friday to retaliate for ongoing atrocities carried out by Myanmars military.

Several Rohingya refugees who spoke to BenarNews said they were unaware of the repatriation plans being hatched by governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh, and expressed reluctance to return to Myanmar where their safety was not guaranteed.

Jan. 15 meeting

The process of starting to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to Rakhine state, where ongoing violence has been reported in recent days, will also hinge on the first official meeting of a joint working group (JWG) to coordinate the repatriation, Bangladeshi officials said.

The 30-member JWG will meet for the first time next week, according to an official with Bangladeshs foreign ministry.

The joint working group will meet on Jan. 15 in Myanmar, Manjurul Karim Khan Chowdhury, a director general in-charge of the Southeast Asia desk at the ministry, told BenarNews, adding the meeting would be a step toward starting the repatriation process.

Since late August 2017, at least 650,000 Rohingya crossed into southeastern Bangladesh as they fled a brutal military crackdown in Rakhine that followed attacks against police and security posts carried out by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgents. In total, about 1 million Rohingya are sheltering in Bangladesh, including refugees who escaped from earlier cycles of violence in Rakhine.

Big task ahead

Myanmar officials said they have sent forms to Bangladesh that need to be completed in order for Myanmar to verify the residency in Rakhine of refugees who opt to return there.

The forms have been received in Bangladesh but not released to the press, and the procedure for completing them has not been announced.

We have yet to start collecting the data Myanmar that seeks in the repatriation form. Filling forms of 100,000 people is a big task ahead, said Kalam, the refugee commissioner, referring to the first batch of refugees that Bangladesh is targeting for repatration.

The commissioner said his department had formed a nine-member technical committee from different government departments to collect data about Rohingya refugees in the country.

But many of the offices have yet to send the names of their representatives for the technical committee. We hope that, soon, we will get the names of the representatives from all departments and we can start collecting data by this week, Kalam added.

In addition, he said, the immigration department has stored data of each refugee who had entered Bangladesh.

But the data must be organized by family. This is because the repatriation approach is family-wise. You cannot leave a family member here and repatriate others. So, we need time to rearrange the data family-wise, Kalam said.

Refugees unware of repatriation plan

Meanwhile, some Rohingya refugees appeared to be in the dark about the process that could soon begin to send members of their community back to Myanmar.

We have not heard anything about repatriation of the Rohingya. I do not think that the Moghs would allow us in, Abdu Jalil, 50, a refugee from Buthidaung township in Rakhine, told BenarNews on Monday, referring to members of Rakhines Buddhist majority.

They have been torturing us for decades to obliterate us from Arakan [Rakhine]. They would not let us live, if we return there, said Jalil, who now lives in the Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, a sub-district of Coxs Bazar district.

Lal Mia, an octogenarian who fled from his home village in Rakhines Maungdaw township, said he heard that Bangladesh and Myanmar had signed the repatriation deal.

But I will not go back. They will not let us live in Arakan. I will pass the rest of my life here, he told BenarNews.

Zahid Hossain Siddique, the administrative chief of Teknaf, said refugees continued to enter Bangladesh from Rakhine and some had reported that it was still unsafe there, saying violence was ongoing.

Meanwhile on Sunday, ARSA rebels claimed responsibility for a roadside ambush in Maungdaw that targeted a military vehicle and wounded seven people, including six soldiers, on Friday. The attack was the first since Sept. 10, 2017, when the rebels declared a one-month humanitarian ceasefire.

ARSA also accused the Myanmar military of not letting up in committing heinous crimes against Rohingya civilians, including raping and molesting women, burning down Rohingya villages and starving the Rohingya population to death.

At this juncture, ARSA has [been] left with no option but to combat Burmese state sponsored terrorism against the Rohingya population for the purpose of defending, salvaging and protecting the Rohingya community with its best capacities in line with the principles of self-defense under international law, ARSA said in a statement posted on Twitter.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
More than two months since the Communist Party Congress in Beijing, authorities in northwest Chinas Xinjiang region continue to place ethnic Uyghurs deemed extremists in political re-education camps, despite assurances the detentions would end after the sensitive annual meeting.



Since April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring extremist and politically incorrect views have been jailed or 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.



The detentions ramped up ahead of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, held Oct. 18-24 last year, with officials claiming that the campaign was part of safety measures to prevent violent incidents around the time of the event.



Some local officials in Xinjiang had told family members arrests would end and detainees be returned home when the Congress was concluded, but sources recently told RFAs Uyghur Service that authorities continue to round up residents more than two months later.



According to an official from Aqsaray townships No. 1 village, in Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefectures Qaraqash (Moyu) county, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity, police arrested dozens of Uyghurs and placed them in a re-education camp as recently as last month.



There were 85 people sent to the re-education camps in our township [on Dec. 18], and more were taken there [on Dec. 28], he said, confirming that 33 additional residents had been arrested in the second roundupbringing to 118 the total detained within a 10-day period.



An official from neighboring Kashgar (Kashi) prefectures Poskam (Zepu) county, who also asked to remain unnamed, told RFA that authorities have been instructed to make sure that everything is safe while patrolling the streets of the county, and that they had been provided with notebooks including a list of the names and pictures of individuals on record to be detained.



One suspect on the list was identified as Abdusemet Metkerim, 23, from Talbagh village, in Poskams Seyli township.



He had illegal religious video materials in his possession, the official said of Metkerim, adding that authorities had issued a warrant in the young mans name in September.



Additional names on the list were not immediately available, he said, as it was locked up in a drawer at the time of the phone call.



Overcrowded camps



Prior reporting by RFA has found that as arrests in Xinjiang have increased in recent months, the regions re-education camps have been inundated by detainees, who are forced to endure cramped and squalid conditions in the facilities.



Sources say that authorities often convert government buildings and schools into makeshift re-education camps to deal with the overcrowding, and routinely shift detainees between locationsthat include prisonswithout informing their family members.



In Bayingholin Mongol (Bayinguoleng Menggu) Autonomous Prefectures Korla citywhere sources told RFA last week that as many as 1,000 people have been admitted to the citys detention facilities over the course of a few daysa local government employee named Erkin Bawdun recently said that area re-education camps are completely full.



One of my friends overheard the camp governor shouting at police over his walkie-talkie, saying Please stop bringing people, there is no more space here in the camp for anyone, said Bawdun, who helps to oversee Lengger village, in Korlas Awat township.



Authorities regularly detain residents for allegedly extremist incidents that took place years before Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo was appointed to his post in August 2016 and began implementing several harsh policies targeting religious freedom in the region.



According to Bawdun, Awat township maintains a department for cases of special concern that had recently detained a group of 13 women who gathered and listened to religious preaching some six years ago.



Bawduns manager confirmed that in 2012, they gathered at a house and conducted religious teachings.



Four of them were arrested in July, and the remaining nine were taken away [in late December], the manager said.



None of the women had received sentences, he said, and it was unclear where they had been taken.



They wont be taken to the re-education camps because they are treated as part of a special case and will be dealt with separately, he added.



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 RFAs Uyghur Service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Restrictions on religion and security controls have intensified in northwest Chinas Xinjiang region in recent months, a congressional commission said Monday, warning that Washingtons anti-terrorism cooperation with Beijing must not come at the cost of the rights of ethnic Uyghurs.



In a statement, the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) said that the situation in Xinjiang had further deteriorated since the release of its 2017 annual report, which found that freedoms of speech and religion, the rule of law, and individual rights and freedoms had worsened under the ruling Chinese Communist Party.



Reports indicate XUAR Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo has implemented a hardline, all-encompassing security network throughout the region, by overseeing the hiring of tens of thousands of new security personnel, the convening of mass rallies, and the involuntary collection of residents DNA, fingerprints, eye scans, and blood types, said Senator Marco Rubio, CECC chairman.



Civilians are detained without cause, political education camps proliferate, and a vast surveillance apparatus invades every aspect of daily life. These rights violations are deeply troubling and risk serving as a catalyst for radicalization.



Representative Chris Smith, cochairman of the CECC, similarly expressed alarm over the state of human rights in Xinjiang.



The Chinese governments expansive surveillance and security network in Xinjiang is a gross violation of privacy and international human rights, including the right to religious freedom, as the government is turning mosques into political propaganda centers and labeling religious beliefs as extremist, he said.



These policies seem to be completely counterproductive and a recipe for instability and dissatisfaction rather than security.



Smith urged U.S. President Donald Trumps administration to avoid condoning restrictions on freedom in Xinjiang in the name of counterterrorism.



The U.S. should be calibrating our counterterrorism cooperation with China to ensure that we do not condone or advance a crackdown on peaceful domestic dissent or the freedom of religion, association, and expression, he said.



Rubio and Smith highlighted the detention and likely mistreatment of up to 30 family members of U.S.-based Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer, which the CECC said was yet another example of Chinas efforts to silence criticism of the Party or of government policies through intimidation, detention, and threats to the family members of activists living abroad.



Kadeers children, grandchildren, and other relatives are reportedly in detention, including her sons Ablikim and Alim Abdureyimboth of whom previously suffered torture and abuse during periods of detention and imprisonment.



Kadeer was a political prisoner for more than five years before being released on medical parole in 2005, and since her relocation to the U.S. that year, Chinese authorities have carried out a campaign of harassment against her family members who remained in Xinjiang.



The CECC also expressed concern over an expansion of detentions in Xinjiangs political re-education camps, where large numbers of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and others have been held for months at a time for crimes such as praying, wearing Islamic clothing, or having foreign connections.



Additionally, the commission said, Chinese authorities have ordered Uyghurs studying abroad in countries including Egypt, Turkey, France, Australia, and the U.S. to return to Xinjiang, and have subsequently detained some of them in re-education camps, about which very little is known.



Officials have also been issued quotas for the number or percentage of the population in their jurisdictions that must be sent to undergo political education, the CECC said, citing overseas reports.



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.
Authorities in Vietnam on Monday put on trial 22 defendants on charges of corruption and economic mismanagement related to millions of dollars of losses to the countrys energy and banking sectors, with former top oil executives and a recently dismissed senior Communist Party official among the defendants.



Former Politburo member Dinh La Thang, 57, faces charges of economic mismanagement, causing losses of U.S. $35 million in oil company investments in Vietnams Ocean Bank, while former PetroVietnam Construction chairman Trinh Xuan Thanh, 51, is accused of embezzlement and faces a possible sentence of death if convicted.



In August, Germany accused Vietnam of kidnapping Thanh from a Berlin park and taking him home by force to face charges.



The incident led to strained diplomatic ties between the two countries, though Vietnam said that Thanh had returned home voluntarily.



Speaking to RFAs Vietnamese Service, Petra SchlagenhaufThanhs lawyer in Germany, where he had sought asylumsaid it was clear that Thanh had been forced back, adding that a televised statement Thanh made on his return saying he had come back on his own was likely coerced.

It was no voluntary return, Schlagenhauf said. I suppose he was obliged, I dont know by which measures, to say this on Vietnamese television.



I had spoken with him many times before, and I know that he would never have gone back to Vietnam voluntarily, because he knew that he would never get a trial [defined] by the criteria used by civilized states on these kinds of issues.



Diplomatic tensions



Schlagenhauf noted that Thanhs forced return to Vietnam has led to tensions in what she called Vietnams strategic partnership with Germany, an important trading partner, with new economic agreements between the two countries now in jeopardy.



And this case of kidnapping has also caused a lot of criticism in other European states, she said.



Thanhs kidnapping in Germany by Vietnamese agents has caused very serious damage to Vietnams international image and prestige, agreed regional expert Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.



This action was unprecedented and portrays Vietnam as a quasi-police state that does not respect the rule of law, Thayer said in a Jan. 5 briefing published by the Thayer Consultancy.



Noting that Thanh is the only one of the 22 defendants now on trial to face a possible death penalty, Thayer said that if Thanh is executed, this will have a chilling effect on high-level officials who are involved in massive fraud leading to major losses for the state.



[But] in Vietnams case, massive high-level corruption can only be curbed by having autonomous investigative and audit agencies as well as a freer media that are independent from political influence, Thayer said.



Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Emily Peyman. Written in English by Richard Finney.
QUESTION: I am facing increased costs of operations and am considering downsizing. My employees are good workers. Is there another option to give raises to those that remain?

ANSWER: You should only consider downsizing if you are confident you can provide the same level of service your customers have come to expect.

If by downsizing you increase the workload of the remaining employees, you run the risk of creating a major morale problem, which may result in the further loss of valued employees.

You will then be faced with having to recruit and train new employees which, depending on their level of expertise, can be quite expensive. Statistically, it costs four to six months salary to replace an employee.

You could find that you have to pay the new hire more than the one being replaced. There also are under the radar costs that may include recruiting agency fees, advertising expenses, interview costs and signing bonuses. Dont forget about the loss of productivity while you or another employee brings the new hire up to speed.

After all is said and done, you may have spent more money than you would have had you found other ways to cut your costs of operation.

Here are a few tips to lower your labor costs:

Consider performance bonuses in lieu of salary raises. Bonuses are one-time events as opposed to raises, which are cumulative.

Consider, as an alternative to more pay, reduced hours, personal time or flex time to accommodate individual lifestyle needs

Where possible, convert salaries into commission-based compensation. Those who are commission-based essentially pay for their own salaries.

Where possible, outsource or automate nonessential tasks. Also consider part-time help if this is an option.

If you have a defined benefit pension plan, consider a SEP IRA as an alternative. Also a high-deductible health insurance plan, combined with a Health Savings Account, in lieu of one that offers first dollar coverage.

In addition to employee costs, you also should take a hard look at other major expense items like machinery and equipment. Does it make more sense to lease than to buy? Also, renegotiate contracts with your suppliers on both price and payment terms.

Remember, in the long run, it is less expensive to keep your current employees motivated and productive. They are, by far, your most valuable asset.
As a mother, Esra Conway knows parents look for high-quality childrens clothing that is affordable.

Thats why the Henrico County mother started her online childrens clothing boutique, Ayla James.

The boutique, named after her children  2-year-old Ayla and 1-year-old James  fulfilled Conways dream of starting her own business.

A former Henrico schoolteacher, Conway launched Ayla James last March. It took off quickly, she said.

The online boutique carries both girls and boys clothing, from 6 months to 6X. Everything on the site is under $20, Conway said.

The site also offers monogramming provided by a local business.

Kristen Morris is constantly getting compliments about the clothing for her children.

People are always asking me where I get the clothing from, the Henrico resident said. Ayla James clothes are adorable. They are soft and comfortable, and I love the quality.

Conway had no prior retail experience when she decided to start the online venture.

This has been something I always wanted to do, she said. I knew there had to be a way to provide clothes affordably and still have them look cute and trendy.

She began researching childrens clothing stores and manufacturers in November and December of 2016. I looked at where I wanted the company to go, she said.

She spent lots of time talking with friends and family, asking for feedback about their buying habits and what they saw as incentives when they were shopping for their childrens clothing.

I wanted to see what their driving factors were, she said. I wanted to know the reason they made a decision to purchase.

Parents repeatedly told her they purchased items based on the style and price of the item. Armed with that knowledge, she began talking to a variety of distributors about designs and quality and spent time looking through their samples.

Once I found three distributors I wanted to work with, then it was just the matter of placing the initial order and getting the products in, she said.

She stores the merchandise in a separate storage area in her house, which gives her the ability to ship items immediately.

Thats one of the things people told me. They said they dont want to wait for products, Conway said.

She always orders multiple quantities of a product in each size she sells. Products are then listed on her website.

They sell quickly because people know we dont reorder the same merchandise. I like to keep things fresh, said Conway, noting she always tries to have a selection of 40 or more items on hand at any time.

Conway funded the company with an initial investment of $4,000. Sales are up 125 percent in the three months that ended in December compared with the March-through-May period. She started the business in March.

Initially, Conways customers were local, but the company now has customers across the nation.

We have seen orders from Alaska, Hawaii and all around the U.S., she said. We just had an order from the United Kingdom.

Rachel Bryant of Henrico started ordering from Ayla James last summer.

I fell in love with it, she said of the clothing. She has unique items and a very quick turnaround time.

She likes the special touches that come with each order.

Each time you order, you get a personalized, handwritten note, she said. Esra makes sure everything is perfect. Its a great experience.

One of the reasons Conway started Ayla James was to give back to the community through philanthropy. Each month, she gives a portion of the companys total proceeds to a different nonprofit.

Last month, Hopecam, a Reston-based charity that uses technology to connect children undergoing cancer treatment with their friends at school, was the recipient of the donation.
This is the story of how the desire to do good led Steve and Kim Taylor to make something good: namely, chocolate.

Touched by the stories of the victims of human trafficking, the Taylors came up with an unconventional way to help: Steve would leave his 26-year career in manufacturing and invest the savings in his 401(k) into a new business producing beans-to-bar artisanal chocolate, and they would try to make a difference along the way by helping cacao bean farmers in Haiti and hiring survivors of human trafficking here in central Virginia.

The former is underway, the latter is in the works and chocolate is on the shelves.

Its definitely a leap of faith, said Steve Taylor, 50, president of Taylor Made Chocolate Inc., a storefront in Chester that was founded in early 2017 and started producing chocolate in November. But thats how passionate we feel about what were doing and changing the lives of people.

His wife, Kim, with a laugh, likened it more to jumping off a cliff.

I like financial security, said Kim, a certified public accountant working for Chesterfield County. This was a big change for us. But one she is glad they made. Stories of victims of slavery and human trafficking broke my heart over and over again.

I didnt want to miss the opportunity to make a difference, she said.

I stopped by for a tour of the Taylors shop on Friday, in a shopping center on East Hundred Road. Steve showed me the process  from the tubs of raw cacao beans to finished chocolate, including samples. (Yes, this is a tough gig.)

Heres the chicken-or-the-egg question: Which came first? Chocolate or the desire to do good?

Doing good, Steve said.

The seed of the idea was planted around 2012 when a couple from International Justice Mission, a global organization that serves victims of violence in the developing world, came to the Taylors church, Colonial Heights Baptist, to talk about how they were going to Asia to fight human trafficking.

Their message touched the Taylors hearts, and they began making donations to the organization, which sent newsletters about its work. The organizations success stories buoyed the Taylors spirits, but they were astonished by the scope of human trafficking around the world  even in Richmond  and they continued to ask themselves what more they could do.

They began to think providing training and jobs in the manufacturing field  which Steve knew well  for survivors of human trafficking could change lives. But manufacturing what?

They scouted food trends, since Steve had become familiar with that field working for Alfa Laval, an international company with Richmond offices that provides products used for the manufacturing of, among other things, food. He had come to know that catching a food trend at just the right time could be very profitable for you.

They settled on artisan chocolate.

The coffee scene exploded about 10 years ago, he said. The craft beer scene exploded about five years ago. We  and when I say we, I mean the artisan chocolate industry  are pretty much where the microbrewery market was five years ago and where coffee was 10 years ago.

The choice of chocolate sent the Taylors down another path of human exploitation when they discovered the vast majority of cacao beans in the world are grown using slave labor.

One way for manufacturers to combat the use of unethically grown cacao beans is to shorten the production chain and know precisely where the beans come from, and the Taylors are doing that in Haiti.

They are buying beans from companies that are fair-trade certified  meaning growers receive a higher wage for their product  and eventually want to work directly with farmers, helping to connect them with agricultural experts who can help them improve the various stages of cacao bean production: the growing, harvesting, fermentation and drying.

If youre able to work with the farmers to develop the quality, then they can get a higher price for their beans, Taylor said.

The goal of that approach from the Taylors standpoint is not only to acquire better beans but to improve their standard of living in order to keep families together  or even reunite parents with children  in a country where orphanages keep children whose parents are still alive but cannot afford to raise them.

The Taylors have contracted with Queensland University in Haiti to provide technical support to growers producing cacao beans for Taylor Made Chocolate.

University President Jean-Claude Dorsainvil said in an email that the Taylors are helping not only small farmers but also children of Haiti through the Queensland Foundation for Children, Health and Education, an organization that Dorsainvil founded that works with abandoned and disadvantaged children and youth around the country.

Dorsainvil, who visited Virginia for the opening of Taylor Made Chocolate in November, wrote that he hopes the company is successful to help small cocoa farmers in Haiti, but to help also children and youth who have no hope of living in Haiti otherwise. The only hope for a young person in Haiti is to migrate to Chile, Brazil, Canada, the United States of America or other Latin American countries.

Both Taylors are graduates of Ecole Chocolats Professional School of Chocolate Arts. Steve said Kim has a more discerning palate for fine chocolate, and he trusts her judgment as they have developed their various chocolates for market.

I call her a chocolate snob, he says. When I eat chocolate, any chocolate is good. She has more well-defined tastes.

Kim would like to join the business on a full-time basis at some point, but it generally takes a startup a few years to find its footing, so it seemed prudent for her to keep her job for now.

With three full-time employees (including Steve) and four part-timers, Taylor Made is producing four high-end chocolate bars now, starting at $7.99 apiece  two dark and two milk, the vibrant packaging labels from the artwork of Haitian students  as well as cocoa nibs (the roasted, shell-less cacao beans) that they sell at their storefront in Chester and at For the Love of Chocolate in Carytown.

Theyre launching a push this month to expand their network of retailers around Virginia and in Maryland and North Carolina.

They also plan to expand their offerings, including truffles, as the year goes on.

By summer, when they begin ramping up production for the chocolate season, as Steve calls it, which runs from Halloween through Easter, they hope to set in motion phase two of their do-good mission by bringing on board survivors of human trafficking for a world-class manufacturing experience and jobs, possibly in their own shops.

They already are making donations from company proceeds to organizations working with survivors of human trafficking and others helping Haitian cacao growers, he said.

Steves enthusiasm for the venture is palpable  and problematic. When the exterior sign for their store was delivered in September, Steve said he was super excited, so he jumped on the sign truck to make a few photographs.

In my excitement, as I was climbing down, I missed a step, he said, describing what happened next as a face-plant.

I woke up in an ambulance, he said.

Hes recovered from the concussion and facial injuries. The mission nature of the work has eased the pain.

Steve recalled a question from a class on entrepreneurship in the graduate executive leadership program he completed recently. The question: What would happen if you didnt embark on the project you were considering?

That really struck home, he said. What would happen if we didnt do this? The lives of people may not change.
Acting superintendent of public instruction named

RICHMOND  Steve Constantino took over last week as acting superintendent of public instruction, the top position for K-12 education in Virginia.

Constantino was appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe after the retirement of Steven Staples.

Staples announced his retirement, effective Jan. 1, in late October after more than three years in the role. Staples earned $206,467 in gross pay in 2015-16, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatchs state employee salary database.

Constantino served as the chief academic officer in the Division of Public Instruction for the Virginia Department of Education before being tapped to lead the division in the interim capacity.

He had previously served as the superintendent for the Williamsburg-James City County school division.

He was also the deputy superintendent in Cobb County, Georgias second-largest school district.

The family engagement expert has written four books on the subject and has also served as a professor at George Mason University and the College of William & Mary.

Constantino holds degrees from Virginia Tech, the State University of New York at Cortland, and the State University of New York at Potsdam.

The position of superintendent of public instruction is a governor-appointed role.

Teachers lounge upgraded at Robious Elementary

CHESTERFIELD  Teachers at Robious Elementary School were surprised last week with a renovated teachers lounge on the first day back from winter break.

The process began at the start of the school year with a Target registry and a Sign Up Genius registry.

The existing workroom was slowly emptied, and Home Depot donated supplies.

During winter break, volunteers, spearheaded by Fran Bolin of Assisting Families of Inmates, renovated the space into one that will provide them a place for community and self-care while also showing them just how important they are to our families and to our children, Bolin said.

The work isnt completely finished, though; Lowes is donating a new refrigerator that will come in February.

UR professor gets grant to study effects of Irma

RICHMOND  A University of Richmond professor has received money to study the impact of Hurricane Irma on marine ecosystems.

Malcolm Hill, a biology professor at UR, has been awarded a $49,234 grant from the National Science Foundation to research the effects of Irma  the Category 5 storm that hit the East Coast in early September  on sponge and other invertebrate fauna in shallow marine habitats in Florida, the school announced last week.

Request free seedlings for Arbor Day by Feb. 19

RICHMOND  The deadline for a request for free redbud tree seedlings to celebrate Arbor Day is Feb. 19.

Through Dominion Energys Project Plant It environmental education program, educators can apply to get the free seedlings to celebrate the April 27 day dedicated to planting trees.

Seedlings are given out while supplies last. Educators can register at projectplantit.com.
Henrico County police are still investigating an accident in Glen Allen that left two children who were sledding injured when they were struck by an out-of-control vehicle.

The incident unfolded Saturday evening at about 5:38 p.m. A driver in a Nissan SUV traveling in the 4800 block of Twin Hickory Lake Drive lost control, and the vehicle overturned and rolled down an embankment in an apartment complex where several children were sledding.

The SUV struck two children, injuring them seriously. They were taken to VCU Medical Center for treatment.

Police said Sunday afternoon that they had no update on the childrens medical conditions or whether the driver of the vehicle would face any charges stemming from the crash.

The accident marks the second time children out sledding have been in harms way recently.
The search for two local hunters is being made more difficult by the large amounts of ice on the James River.

Authorities were only able to have one or two boats in the water Sunday for the search because of the ice, said Lee Walker, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

The department is leading the search for the two men who took a 16-foot johnboat out Wednesday from the Jamestown Yacht Basin off the Colonial Parkway near Historic Jamestowne. They have not been found.

Brian Austin Savage, 20, of Henrico County, and Kyle Englehart, 29, of Charles City County, are the two men missing. The case is now a recovery operation rather than a rescue, given the cold temperatures that have swept the region this past week.

When those temperatures drop, the ability to survive in cold water diminishes greatly. ... Its almost instantaneous that youre going to get hypothermia, Walker said Saturday. Even with the life jacket, if you fell in the water right now, survivability is very limited.
The cold weather sweeping the Richmond region continues to affect the everyday lives of area residents.

Thousands were without power Sunday as Dominion Energy worked to restore electricity to over 16,000 homes and businesses in central Virginia. As of 7 p.m. Sunday, about 2,000 remained without power.

The cold spell has also forced area school divisions to again not have school Monday.

Goochland County Public Schools and Louisa County Public Schools were the lone divisions in the region to not close school Monday, instead opting for a two-hour delay, as of Sunday night.

The other localities  Richmond, Colonial Heights, Hopewell, Petersburg and the counties of Amelia, Caroline, Chesterfield, Dinwiddie, Hanover, Henrico, King William, New Kent, Powhatan and Prince George  canceled school again Monday with many announcements coming in early Sunday afternoon.

School was also closed across the region last Thursday and Friday, creating now a five-day weekend for area students and teachers.

The GRTC bus system will mostly operate its regular service Monday. Five routes  Routes 3/4 Robinson, Route 10 Riverview, Route 32 Ginter Park, Route 51 Church Hill and Route 53 Darbytown  will still be on snow schedule.

The Virginia Department of Transportation said Sunday that crews are still working around the clock to remove ice from routes with below-freezing temperatures.

The department said almost all roads are passable, but potential slick spots could affect travel during overnight and early morning hours until temperatures rise.

VDOT offered these tips to drivers commuting in icy conditions:

Reduce your speed and allow extra time to reach your destination.

Be aware of potentially icy areas like bridges, overpasses, hills and ramps.

Drive at least five seconds behind other cars and snow removal equipment.
DANVILLE  Flashing police lights and yellow crime-scene tape marked a stretch of Halifax Road that was closed Sunday while Virginia State Police investigated an officer-involved deadly gunfire exchange and homicide that happened shortly before 1 a.m.

Danville police responded to a 911 call from a woman claiming a man was inside a home shooting at her, state police Sgt. Rick Garletts said in a statement.

Danville police reported that responding officers knocked at the door of 1069 Halifax Road about 12:50 a.m. Sunday.

Then shots were fired from inside the house toward the officers.

Authorities reported officers took cover and tried to negotiate with Richard R. Towler, 54, but he came out of the house shooting at the officers.

One officer returned fire, killing Towler, who had lived at the home.

Inside the house, police report finding 38-year-old Crystal Lynn Averett of Danville dead.

Both bodies have been transported to the medical examiners office in Roanoke for autopsy.

No officers were wounded in the incident.

State police were called to investigate the officer-involved shooting and the homicide at the request of Danville police Lt. Col. Dean Hairston.

On a cold and cloudy Sunday afternoon, Halifax Road was still blocked off and reporters were not allowed to enter the block where the shooting and homicide took place.

State police Sgt. B.P. Long said the area was still considered an active crime scene and no reporters would be allowed to enter.

As far as talking to neighbors, you will be not allowed in there until investigators have talked to everyone, and they say it is OK, Garletts, public information officer for the state police, wrote in an email.

Assistant Fire Chief Steve Dishman, who oversees the 911 centers operations, was asked for access to the 911 calls reporting the shots fired.

I cant release them, since its an active investigation, Dishman said, adding that the state police would be handling the call records.

Garletts was also asked for access to any video and audio tapes involved in the incident or calls to 911 reporting shots fired.

All the video and audio from the officers and 911 will be included in the investigation file and most likely will not be released, Garletts wrote in an email.

The officer involved in the shooting has been placed on administrative assignment until the investigation is completed, city police reported.

In keeping with Danville police policy, city police also reported that the officers name will be released in three days.

The incident remains under investigation, Garletts wrote in a news release issued shortly after 4 p.m. Sunday.

City police Lt. Mike Wallace said he believed the most recent fatal officer-involved shooting in the city took place in 2010.

At that time, the Danville Register & Bee reported that Cpl. Samuel Bray shot a suspect fleeing from the scene of a violent confrontation between two groups of men on Chatelaine Avenue.

Police say the suspect, 21-year-old Thomas Lee Waller, pointed his gun at Bray, who shot and killed him.

The state police were also called in to investigate that incident. It was determined that Bray had not committed a criminal offense and he was not indicted.
Question: Can you threaten to kill the president with impunity, so long as you do it from the comfort of your front porch?

Obviously not.

Another question: Can a man and woman distract passing motorists by having sex, so long as they do so in their own front yard?

Again, the answer is obvious.

Here in America, the right to free speech is extensive and largely inviolate  and properly so. The same goes for the right to property. But neither free-speech rights nor property rights grant blanket immunity against any legal consequences for any type of behavior.

Thats why a judge was right not to buy Jack Eugene Turners defense. Turner got angry with some black neighbors in Franklin County, so he tied a noose and hung an effigy of a black man from a tree in his front yard. Virginia law prohibits displaying a noose in a public place to intimidate others. Turner was convicted of doing so.

He is now appealing to the Virginia Supreme Court, arguing that his right to free speech was violated  and that anyway the law doesnt apply to him because his yard is private property, not public property.

Note what he does not argue: that the noose was not meant to intimidate. He plainly meant it as a threat. And thats about all that matters here.

If Turner had displayed some other alarming symbol, such as a swastika or the flag of ISIS, he could argue that he was simply expressing his political preferences. Thats protected speech. If he tied a noose to show to students in a class he was teaching on civil rights, that also would be protected speech. But in the context of his personal dispute  not to mention a couple of centuries of stomach-turning racial violence  the noose was a clear and unambiguous threat against easily identifiable individuals. And the First Amendment doesnt protect violent threats.
Icy roads will threaten the Monday afternoon commute in Charlottesville, the Washington suburbs and the mountains of Virginia, but Richmond should be too warm to see freezing rain and sleet.

Icy sidewalks have already been reported in Charlottesville and Orange, while many weather spotters have observed a mix of sleet and freezing rain around Fairfax this afternoon.

Winter weather advisories are in effect until late this evening for the parts of Virginia north of Prince William County and west of Charlottesville, Appomattox and Danville.

The mixture of sleet and freezing rain won't add up to a lot in those areas - perhaps just a few hundredths of an inch - but it will be enough to stick to the cold ground and make untreated roads hazardous.

Probably just rain in Richmond

For the Richmond area, expect occasional light rain between sundown and midnight, possibly mixed with a few sleet pellets.

After highs in the mid 40s today, our metro area temperatures should be just warm enough this evening to keep any rain from freezing on contact.

Dry and seasonable Tuesday

Showers should end around midnight, leaving dry and clear weather for Tuesday as high pressure takes over again.

In Richmond, expect a low near freezing in the lower 30s and a slightly warmer high near 50 degrees.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
CHARLOTTESVILLE  The Virginia Festival of the Book has released its full list of featured speakers for its 24th annual event, bringing the total of authors, illustrators, publishing professionals and other guests in many genres to more than 300.

Festival organizers plan to release the complete schedule in mid-January for the upcoming event, which will take place in Charlottesville from March 21 to March 25.

The latest authors announced include Thi Bui, author of the graphic novel The Best We Could Do; S.A. Chakraborty, author of The City of Brass; Edgar Award nominee Lyndsay Faye, author of Jane Steele; and Monica Hesse, who penned American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land.

Also announced was guest Lisa Ko. She is the author of The Leavers, which is the inaugural choice for the festivals Carol Troxell Reader.

Carmen Maria Machado is author of Her Body and Other Parties: Stories. Charles Mann wrote The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrows World. David Barclay Moore wrote The Stars Beneath Our Feet.

Also announced as festival speakers were Alisha Rai, who wrote Hate to Want You: Forbidden Hearts; Justin Spring, who penned The Gourmands Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy; and David Wojahn, author of For the Scribe and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry.

In December, the festival announced two headlining programs in conjunction with national literary awards.

Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, will serve as moderator for a panel featuring authors Erica Armstrong Dunbar, David Grann and Kevin Young in a March 24 program titled In Pursuit of Truth: An Evening with the National Book Awards. Tickets for the 8 p.m. event at the Paramount Theater cost $17.50, or $10 for students.

On March 25, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recipients Peter Ho Davies, Tyehimba Jess and Margot Lee Shetterly, accompanied by Award jury member Rita Dove, will discuss their writing and insights about race and culture, particularly in light of the Aug. 12 violence in Charlottesville. The free program, titled Writing the American Story: Diverse Voices in Distinguished Books, will be held at 3 p.m. at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. There will be time after the discussion for speakers to answer questions from the audience.

The full list of speakers can be found online at vabook.org. Tickets, when applicable, can be purchased on the site, as well.

The Roanoke Times contributed to this report.
A Blacksburg developer has donated land to the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine that will allow it to expand its Virginia campus.

We do not have any immediate plans, but the property is adjacent to our campus, and that makes it excellent for us, said Thimothy Corvin, vice president for development and alumni affairs.

The 1.4 acres, which is within the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, was donated by Georgia Anne Snyder-Falkinham.

She did not want to be interviewed but said in a prepared statement that she was so impressed with how VCOM has kept its focus on the rural and primary care health needs of people living in the region. Its students and faculty truly walk the talk of the colleges mission through its numerous medical outreach programs.

Snyder-Falkinham grew up in Franklin County and said she understands the importance of providing medical care for those living in rural areas.

VCOM was founded in 2001 with the goal to develop physicians for rural areas, specifically in southern Appalachia. It has expanded to two other campuses in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Auburn, Alabama, and has graduated 2,300 new physicians. Nearly 70 percent are in residencies or primary practice in the targeted area, Corvin said.

The VCOM Blacksburg campus accepts 185 students into each class. Although there isnt a plan to expand the building, Corvin said Snyder-Falkinhams donation makes it possible.

No monetary amount has been assigned the gift, he said, noting it is priceless to VCOM because of its location.

Snyder-Falkinham founded Snyder and Associates in Blacksburg and serves on a number of boards including the Radford University Foundation and has been recognized by Tech for her philanthropy.
A feud between neighbors, spiked with an aged and weighty symbol of racism, has made its way this week from an unpaved side road off a dead-end street in Rocky Mount to the Virginia Supreme Court in Richmond.

On Wednesday, the courts seven justices will hear arguments in the case of Jack Eugene Turner, who is attempting to appeal a 2015 felony conviction he got in Franklin County after he hung a life-sized dummy from a tree branch in his yard on Lindsey Lane.

That display came in June 2015, during a period when Turner, now 54, was at odds with his next-door neighbors, who are black. Prosecutors successfully argued in circuit court that he had violated a fairly new state law, established in 2009, which prohibits presenting a noose as a means of intimidation. The only Virginian ever convicted of this offense, Turner was sentenced to six months in jail and he served that time.

But from the beginning, defense attorney Holland Perdue has argued that the hanging figure was protected as free speech under the First Amendment, and that the display existed on Turners own private property and not on a highway or other public place as the statute prohibits.

Perdue has maintained that Turners yard should not be considered a public place, and he took the case to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

In November 2016, the higher court ruled against him, finding that the evidence was sufficient to support Turners conviction, and that the dummy  a pair of coveralls stuffed with padding and topped with a black ski mask for a head  was an unprotected threat regardless of where it was.

Turner displayed a noose and a dummy in a place and manner to communicate threats to others with the intent to place members of the public in fear of violence or bodily harm, Judge Robert Humphreys wrote in a 16-page opinion.

While he acknowledged the importance of free speech, and that the First Amendment protects Turners right to be a racist and even to convey his racist beliefs to others, Humphreys wrote that a constitutional limit to that allowance has been reached when an idea becomes a threat that causes reasonable people to fear leaving their homes.

Indeed, one of Turners neighbors, John Mitchell, a husband and a father of two sons, testified at the initial trial that the effigy had accomplished exactly that.

If he can hang a noose, I dont know whats going to happen. I fear for my familys safety, Mitchell said in court in 2015.

Every morning, I walk out my door. Is somebody going to shoot me in my back? Mitchell asked.

Perdue pursued the case further and, in September, learned that the state Supreme Court would consider it.

For the 32-year-old Franklin County lawyer, the upcoming hearing represents the first time hes argued a case before the states high court, and on Friday he said he had taken to heart the appeals courts denial that Turners First Amendment rights had been violated.

I dont expect to talk a lot about free speech next week, Perdue said. Thats a juicier argument, but I think were past it now.

Whats becoming more of an issue with me now, with the Court of Appeals opinion, is that theyre saying his yard is a public place.

Thats scary in the sense of, I dont see my yard as a public place, he said.

But this distinction could prove equally thorny to argue on Wednesday, as Humphreys also examined the question of public within his ruling, citing Hackney v. Commonwealth, a 1947 case in which a man was found guilty of disorderly conduct after he hurled vile and abusive language at his mother from the front porch of his home.

[T]he use of offensive language on ones own premises does not constitute a violation of ... Penal Law unless that person communicates it to the public; for example, shouts offensive language from a window on a public street and annoys and disturbs some person or persons who are within hearing of the voice, Humphreys wrote, directly quoting the Hackney ruling.

It is without doubt that the location of the noose and dummy in Turners front yard  where it was clearly visible from the street  qualifies as a public place, the appeals court judge added.
CHRISTIANSBURG  A public intoxication charge against a former Montgomery County elementary school teacher was dismissed Monday when the sheriffs deputy who was to present the case did not appear at the hearing.

Chelsea Elizabeth Carter, 26, smiled as Judge Gino Williams made the decision, ending a very short hearing in Montgomery County General District Court. A half dozen or more witnesses who were present to testify were sent home.

After the hearing, Lt. Mark Hollandsworth wrote in an email that Deputy J. Underwood, who had charged Carter, was out sick Monday.

County Commonwealths Attorney Mary Pettitt said last year that her office would not handle Carters case because the public intoxication charge is a Class 4 misdemeanor, too minor an offense for prosecutors to take under Virginia law. Williams said Monday that he agreed that the commonwealths attorneys office could not get involved.

Carters case began Oct. 10 when school officials said she arrived drunk at Eastern Montgomery Elementary School.

At a Dec. 11 hearing, Underwood testified that she was called to the school and smelled alcohol as soon as she arrived at the school office. Carter was crying and said that she had two drinks of gin the night before but had stopped drinking around 10 p.m., Underwood testified last month.

The December hearing ended without a verdict when defense attorney Michael Barbour of Pulaski challenged a breath test that Underwood had given Carter. Barbour argued that the device that Underwood used is only certified by the state to be used as a preliminary test of sobriety, and that its results were not allowed to be used as evidence.

Williams said last month that Barbours argument could have repercussions for numerous other intoxication-related cases that involved the Alco-sensor, as the testing device is called. The judge said he needed time to study the legal issues before deciding whether to allow the results of Carters breath test to be presented.

On Monday, after court bailiffs left the courtroom to shout for Underwood and received no response, Barbour immediately moved to dismiss the case. Williams asked if Barbour wanted to wait until he ruled on the Alco-sensor question.

Barbour said that he would proceed however the court thought best. Williams grinned and dismissed the case without revealing what hed decided about the breath test.

School spokeswoman Brenda Drake confirmed Monday that Carter is no longer employed by Montgomery County Public Schools.
Carilion Clinic is conducting community health surveys in many of the localities it serves in the western region of Virginia.

Carilion conducts the surveys every three years to gather information for developing Community Health Assessments. The assessments are used to identify the greatest health needs in an area and to plan ways to overcome problems standing in the way of better public health.

To take part, go to www.surveymonkey.com/r/2018CHA or call 888-964-6620. The first question will ask where you live so that your answers will go to the correct assessment. If your community isnt on the list this time, it most likely will be in next years rotation.

Communities being surveyed are in the Roanoke Valley, New River Valley, Giles area, Rockbridge area, Henry and Franklin counties and Tazewell County.

Participants do not need to disclose their names but are asked their age, height, weight, level of education, income and ZIP code.

Questions seek to find out if medical, dental and mental health care services are available; the barriers to accessing services; the most pressing public health concerns; whether food is available and affordable; and if people feel their neighborhoods are safe.

Various community health assessment teams also have been formed to reach a cross section of people and organizations.

Previous community health assessments can be found on Carilions website, https://carilionclinic.org/community-health-assessments.
Shannon Munro was being prepped for surgery a few months ago when a Carilion Clinic nurse asked when shed last brushed her teeth.

I asked, Where did you get that question? And they said, from the VA.  The answer prompted her to smile.

As a nurse researcher at the Salem Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Munro knows better than most why patients are encouraged to brush their teeth: The simple act saves lives.

Munro is on the leading edge of national research demonstrating that if the biofilm that forms on teeth is removed twice a day, harmful bacteria will not migrate into patients lungs and cause pneumonia.

Her first test of the low-tech practice was in the VAs Community Living Center that offers long-term care to veterans on two floors of the Salem hospital. Most of the patients are elderly with complex medical problems.

Munro reviewed 10 years of records and found that the center averaged four cases of pneumonia every month. Once nurses were trained to brush patients teeth twice a day, the number dropped to zero.

Weve prevented a lot of cases  48 cases at a savings of $1.92 million in 13 months, she said. Its really amazing.

The results are so amazing and so easy to achieve that tooth-brushing regimens are spreading across the country and internationally, she said.

Munro and her fellow researchers are being feted with awards and are speaking at regional, national and international conferences.

The Centers for Disease Control and the American Hospital Association are interested in the work, she said. Munro hopes that nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which also have patients at risk of acquiring pneumonia, adopt tooth-brushing regimens.

For the last decade, hospitals have focused on ventilator-acquired pneumonia because Medicare penalizes caregivers for not preventing the infection that mostly occurs in patients in intensive care units.

But researchers are finding just as many patients  many of them younger and including new mothers  acquire pneumonia while staying on regular medical and surgical floors for all types of reasons.

Munro said there appears to be a common denominator: oral care.

Certainly being elderly, malnourished and being on a lot of medications puts them at high risk, but the one factor common in all patients was they were not receiving adequate oral care, Munro said. Thats the one thing that we as nurses can do to improve the lives of our patients.

Every patient, every shift, every day

Munro and the Salem VA became involved in the tooth-brushing research when Munro attended a conference where a friend she made while working on her doctorate at the University of Hawaii was presenting her work.

Dian Baker, a nurse researcher with the Sutter Medical Center and professor at California State University Sacramento, talked about her work in preventing infections by brushing patients teeth.

When she was done, I said, Why am I not involved in this study? I need to be involved,  Munro said. We started working on this initiative together, and it has grown.

Hospitals in every state and across the globe are adopting the practice and are documenting tooth brushing in patients records.

Tooth brushing isnt the only way to prevent hospital-acquired pneumonia, but good oral hygiene is making a difference, said Donna Bond, a pulmonary clinical nurse specialist for Carilion.

Carilion was already practicing oral hygiene on intensive care unit patients. For patients on ventilators, the pneumonia rate dropped from more than 10 per 1,000 patients in 2008 to fewer than three per 1,000 today.

Bond said she heard about Munros work, and Carilion implemented pre-surgery tooth brushing for surgery patients at Roanoke Memorial and Community hospitals. Pneumonia rates dropped from nearly 3 out of 1,000 patients in 2013 to fewer than 1 per 1,000 in 2015.

Starting the tooth-brushing regimen was not too difficult at the Salem VA. Community Living Center nurse managers Leslie Woodie and Georgine Karnide said getting the nurses buy-in was easy.

We had to change some of the way we practice. Every single caregiver provides oral care to every patient, every shift, every day, Woodie said.

They were already offering oral care, but they werent always documenting it and sometimes it was skipped.

Theres always a rush in doing morning care. Sometimes the patient has to be in physical therapy or elsewhere, Woodie said. And sometimes, nurses were swabbing mouths or wiping them with a washcloth, especially for patients with swallowing difficulties.

That practice does not remove the biofilm.

We know that nationwide, oral care is missed 70 percent of the time during a patients hospital stay, Munro said. The germs on teeth multiply five times every 24 hours. So if you quit brushing your teeth, pretty quickly a biofilm grows on the teeth.

To show how effective tooth brushing alone can be, we had the staff wake up in the morning and only use water and then see how your mouth feels, Woodie said. Then we said, see how it feels an hour later. When you rub your tongue across, the teeth feel clean.

A dentist showed the staff photos of what happens inside the mouth as the biofilm grows.

The electronic medical record was modified so that it requires nurses to document whether teeth were brushed, and whether the patient did it himself or was assisted. While an ordinary tooth brush and paste are generally used, for patients at risk of choking, nurses use a special brush with suction.

Posters were plastered all over the unit talking about how important it is to brush teeth.

Our 101-year-old would stroll down and be reading. You dont think they are paying attention, but they do, Woodie said. One day he turns around to me and says, If I dont brush my teeth Im going to get pneumonia. This a 100-year-old with dementia, and he got it.

The unit has had one patient acquire pneumonia since the program started, and he was what caregivers call noncompliant. He also continued to smoke and refused his breathing treatments.

Spreading the word internationally

At best, a case of pneumonia will set back a patients recovery at least two weeks and cost about $40,000 to treat. At worst, patients die. Munro said mortality rates are 18 percent to 19 percent.

There are a million cases among veterans annually across the VA, at a cost of $46 billion and more than 200,000 preventable deaths, she said.

Patients in the Community Living Center who acquire pneumonia are taken first to the emergency room and then cycle through the ICU, a step-down unit and the medical unit before returning to the center.

Woodie and Karnide said because the VA also offers veterans oral care, they have made it part of their units practice to have every new patients teeth and mouth evaluated, and to have problems corrected. That holds for veterans with dentures as well.

With the Community Living Centers success, the Salem VA adopted tooth brushing as a priority throughout the medical center, and Munro is helping other hospitals start up programs as well.

She has worked with a team provided by the VAs undersecretary for health to develop videos and a tool kit to train staff that tooth brushing, once thought of as a comfort measure, is actually essential care.

Munros team, in partnership with her colleagues at Sutter and Kaiser health systems, have worked with hospitals in all 50 states, six provinces in Canada, and in Australia, Brazil, Greenland and the United Kingdom.

Munro is hoping that word spreads beyond hospitals and that nursing homes and other long-term care facilities adopt the practice of routinely brushing residents teeth and documenting that the care was given.

It has to be tracked and have a feedback loop to nurses, or it will fall by the wayside, she said. One of the facilities weve been in touch with, when they got lax, the rate went up. They resumed the regimen, and cases fell.
Shannon Munro was being prepped for surgery a few months ago when a Carilion Clinic nurse asked when she'd last brushed her teeth.

I asked, Where did you get that question? And they said, from the VA. The answer prompted her to smile.

As a nurse researcher at the Salem VA Medical Center, Munro knows better than most why patients are encouraged to brush their teeth: The simple act saves lives.

Munro is on the leading edge of national research demonstrating that if the biofilm that forms on teeth is removed twice a day, harmful bacteria will not migrate into patients lungs and cause pneumonia.

Her first test of the low-tech practice was in the VAs Community Living Center, which offers long-term care to veterans on two floors of the Salem hospital. Most of the patients are elderly with complex medical problems.

Munro reviewed 10 years of records and found that the center averaged four cases of pneumonia every month. Once nurses were trained to brush patients teeth twice a day, the number dropped to zero.

Weve prevented a lot of cases  48 cases at a savings of $1.92 million in 13 months, she said. Its really amazing.

The results are so amazing and so easy to achieve that tooth-brushing regimens are spreading across the country and internationally, she said.

Munro and her fellow researchers are being feted with awards and are speaking at regional, national and international conferences. The Centers for Disease Control and the American Hospital Association are interested in the work, she said. Munro hopes that nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which also have patients at risk of acquiring pneumonia, adopt tooth-brushing regimens.

For the last decade, hospitals have focused on ventilator-acquired pneumonia because Medicare penalizes caregivers for not preventing the infection, which mostly occurs in patients in intensive care units.

But researchers are finding just as many patients  many of them younger and including new moms  acquire pneumonia while staying on regular medical and surgical floors for all types of reasons.

Munro said there appears to be a common denominator: oral care.

Certainly being elderly, malnourished and being on a lot of medications puts them at high risk, but the one factor common in all patients was they were not receiving adequate oral care, Munro said. Thats the one thing that we as nurses can do to improve the lives of our patients.

'Every patient, every shift, every day'

Munro and the Salem VA became involved in the teeth-brushing research when Munro attended a conference where a friend she made while working on her doctorate at the University of Hawaii was presenting her work.

Dian Baker, a nurse researcher with the Sutter Medical Center and professor at California State University Sacramento, talked about her work in preventing infections by brushing patients teeth.

When she was done, I said, Why am I not involved in this study? I need to be involved, Munro said. We started working on this initiative together, and it has grown.

Hospitals in every state and across the globe are adopting the practice and are documenting tooth-brushing in patients records.

Tooth brushing isnt the only way to prevent hospital-acquired pneumonia, but good oral hygiene is making a difference, said Donna Bond, a pulmonary clinical nurse specialist for Carilion.

Carilion was already practicing oral hygiene on intensive care unit patients. For patients on ventilators, the pneumonia rate dropped from more than 10 per 1,000 patients in 2008 to fewer than three per 1,000 today.

Bond said she heard about Munros work, and Carilion implemented pre-surgery tooth brushing for surgery patients at Roanoke Memorial and Community hospitals. Pneumonia rates dropped from nearly 3 out of 1,000 patients in 2013 to fewer than 1 per 1,000 in 2015.

Starting the tooth-brushing regimen was not too difficult at the Salem VA. Community Living Center nurse managers Leslie Woodie and Georgine Karnide said getting the nurses' buy-in was easy.

We had to change some of the way we practice. Every single caregiver provides oral care to every patient, every shift, every day, Woodie said.

They were already offering oral care, but they werent always documenting it and sometimes it was skipped.

Theres always a rush in doing morning care. Sometimes the patient has to be in physical therapy or elsewhere, Woodie said. And sometimes, nurses were swabbing mouths or wiping them with a washcloth, especially for patients with swallowing difficulties.

That practice does not remove the biofilm.

We know that nationwide, oral care is missed 70 percent of the time during a patients hospital stay, Munro said. The germs on teeth multiply five times every 24 hours. So if you quit brushing your teeth, pretty quickly a biofilm grows on the teeth.

To show how effective tooth brushing alone can be, we had the staff wake up in the morning and only use water and then see how your mouth feels, Woodie said. Then we said see how it feels an hour later. When you rub your tongue across, the teeth feel clean.

A dentist showed the staff photos of what happens inside the mouth as the biofilm grows.

The electronic medical record was modified so that it requires nurses to document whether teeth were brushed, and whether the patient did it himself or was assisted. While an ordinary tooth brush and paste are generally used, for patients at risk of choking, nurses use a special brush with suction.

Posters were plastered all over the unit talking about how important it is to brush teeth.

Our 101-year-old would stroll down and be reading. You dont think they are paying attention, but they do, Woodie said. One day he turns around to me and says, If I dont brush my teeth Im going to get pneumonia.' This a 100-year-old with dementia, and he got it."

The unit has had one patient acquire pneumonia since the program started, and he was what caregivers call noncompliant. He also continued to smoke and refused his breathing treatments.

Spreading the word internationally

At best, a case of pneumonia will set back a patients recovery at least two weeks and cost about $40,000 to treat. At worst, patients die. Munro said mortality rates are 18 percent to 19 percent.

There are a million cases among veterans annually across the VA, at a cost of $46 billion and more than 200,000 preventable deaths, she said.

Patients in the Community Living Center who acquire pneumonia are taken first to the emergency room and then cycle through the ICU, a step-down unit and the medical unit before returning to the center.

Woodie and Karnide said because the VA also offers veterans oral care, they have made it part of their units practice to have every new patients teeth and mouth evaluated, and to have problems corrected. That holds for veterans with dentures as well.

With the Community Living Centers success, the Salem VA adopted tooth brushing as a priority throughout the medical center, and Munro is helping other hospitals start up programs as well.

She has worked with a team provided by the VAs undersecretary for health to develop videos and a tool kit to train staff that tooth brushing, once thought of as a comfort measure, is actually essential care.

Munros team, in partnership with her colleagues at Sutter and Kaiser health systems, have worked with hospitals in all 50 states, six provinces in Canada, and in Australia, Brazil, Greenland and the United Kingdom.

Munro is hoping that word spreads beyond hospitals and that nursing homes and other long-term care facilities adopt the practice of routinely brushing residents' teeth and documenting that the care was given.

"It has to be tracked and have a feedback loop to nurses, or it will fall by the wayside," she said. "One of the facilities we've been in touch with, when they got lax, the rate went up." They resumed the regimen, and cases fell.
Forget baby showers. There's a proposal to give every newborn in the United States a "Baby Bond" account with somewhere between $500 to $50,000 in cash. Neither the kids nor their parents would be able to touch the money until the child turned 18. Then the young adult could spend the trust fund on attending college, buying a home or starting a business.

The whole point of Baby Bonds would be to dramatically lessen wealth inequality in the United States, according to the economists who came up with the idea, Darrick Hamilton of the New School and William Darity of Duke University.

"The key ingredient of how successful you will be in America is how wealthy your family is," Hamilton says. Baby Bonds are one way to change that, he argues. He presented the idea at the American Economic Association conference in Philadelphia this weekend.

Under the proposal, kids of incredibly rich parents such as Bill and Melinda Gates or Beyonce and Jay-Z would get the lowest amount, $500, while babies born into extremely poor families would get the highest amount, $50,000. There would be a sliding scale to determine how much each baby would received based on the parents' wealth. A typical middle-class baby would receive around $20,000.

While there are a number of criticisms about Baby Bonds, especially how to pay for them, presidents and prime ministers around the world are trying to figure out ways to reduce inequality. In the United States, inequality is back at the levels of the 1920s' Gilded Age. It's gotten so bad that Wall Street firms are warning their clients to pay attention to it, because inequality is driving the rise of populism. Torsten Slok, Deutsche Bank's chief international economist, says the United States and other nations are going to need creative thinking to address this. He called Baby Bonds an "intriguing" idea.

According to Deutsche Bank, nearly a third of American households now have $0 in wealth, the worst situation since the U.S. government began keeping track of that statistic (wealth outside a home) in the early 1960s.

Families of color have struggled especially hard to try to move up the socioeconomic ladder. The median net worth of white households is 10 times that of African American households.

"People like to argue if only poor black and Latino families were more responsible and made better decisions, then inequality could be dramatically reduced," Hamilton says. But years of data and real-life evidence don't support that. Hamilton points to the fact that most college-educated African Americans have less net wealth than whites who dropped out of high school.

To some, Baby Bonds sound too radical for the Unites States. But Britain tried a similar plan in which every child born between 2002 and 2010 received a modest "Child Trust Fund" of 250 to 1,000 pounds. The plan was axed during the Great Recession because of funding concerns.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton endorsed a version of Baby Bonds in her 2008 presidential run, proposing to give all babies born in the United States $5,000 to be used for college or buying a home.

"I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they will be able to access it to go to college, or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on their first home," Clinton said at the time.

Hamilton says Clinton didn't go far enough. A few thousand is barely enough to pay for a semester at some community colleges. But the higher the amount of the Baby Bond goes, the greater the cost for the federal government.

"My first instinct in thinking about Baby Bonds is: How are you going to pay for it?" says economist Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, a free-market-oriented think tank.

Hamilton estimates Baby Bonds would cost $80 billion a year, or about 2 percent of the United States' $4 trillion in annual federal government spending. If implemented, the first payments wouldn't go out for 18 years, so there could be time to build up a budget for it.

When asked where the money would come from, Hamilton points to all the incentives in the tax code, such as the mortgage interest deduction, that mainly go to wealthy families who don't need the money, although the recent debate over the Republican tax bill illustrated how hard it is to take away tax breaks for housing.

Critics also flag concerns about the formula to determine how much each baby gets and all the rules about when and how the money could be spent when a child turns 18. De Rugy doesn't like "paternalistic" proposals where the government restricts how the money can be spent. "People, even poor people, know what is best for them," she says. She says some on the right might get on board, but only if Baby Bonds replaced some other welfare programs to help low-income households. Hamilton doesn't want to do that.

"Baby Bonds are like Social Security, but for young adults," Hamilton says. "This is not meant to replace our entire social safety net."

But there's a growing belief that something needs to be done about inequality. Top business and political leaders are set to meet in Davos, Switzerland, this month. The theme for this year's meeting is "creating a shared future in a fractured world," with many of the discussion panels focused on what to do to lift the fortunes of those left behind.

Deutsche Bank put out an 80-page report last week full of charts illustrating how life for the 1 percent is great, life for the top 10 percent is pretty good and life for just about everyone else isn't much better financially than it was in the 1970s. By many measures, it's gotten worse for the bottom 90 percent.

"Inequality is likely a key source of populism in many countries," says Slok, the economist at Deutsche Bank. "Many of our clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia are asking us: What is the next populist step if these inequality trends are not reversed? What kinds of candidates are we going to see?"

It's very difficult to predict revolutions or social unrest. Slok isn't saying that will happen, but he says it's become a hot discussion topic in Wall Street circles in which many were caught off guard by Brexit and Donald Trump's election victory. Before joining the investment bank, Slok traveled the world for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Monetary Fund advising countries on how to solve problems, including inequality. He's quick to say there's no easy solution to a problem as complex as inequality.

"There is no Holy Grail. There is no easy answer to inequality," Slok says. Some say education and technology will solve the problems; others advocate raising taxes and redistributing wealth. Slok says the reality is almost every major economy is getting worse right now, so nobody seems to have the right playbook.

One of the most alarming charts in the Deutsche Bank report shows how people under 55 have far less wealth at this age than past generations did in the 1980s or early 2000s. It's another reminder how much the middle class is falling behind, even compared with their parents and grandparents.

Improving the lives and finances of the bottom 90 percent is likely to take some dramatic changes, which is why Slok was interested in hearing more about the Baby Bond idea.

Baby Bonds have a lot of similarities to universal basic income, which has generated a lot of buzz as a possible solution if robots cause mass job losses. The idea is to pay everyone $15,000 or so a year, enough to prevent anyone from starving but still low enough to incentivize people to try to work or start companies.

Universal basic income and Baby Bonds are both ways of leveling the playing field, but the key difference is Baby Bonds are cheaper, because the money goes out only once to an individual, not year after year. In the United States, a universal basic income would probably cost over $1 trillion a year, compared with an estimated $80 million a year for Baby Bonds.

"Wealth gives you choice. Wealth gives you freedom. Wealth gives you opportunity," Hamilton says. "But it takes wealth to beget more wealth."
CONCORD  Ron Davidson retired for the second time last week without planing to slow down.

The first time, in the fall of 1997, Davidson left his post as a United Methodist Church pastor after 27 years of leading congregations to start a service charity for the needy in the United States and around the world.

On Thursday, almost two decades after launching his nonprofit Gleaning for the World, Davidson stood in the Concord warehouse of the global aid organization and handed over the reins to the organizations vice president, Jeane Smiley-Mason.

The transition in leadership has been in the works for since Davidson felt a new call to finish his life of pastoring by working more directly in his community .

This started a couple of years ago working with Jeane Smiley-Mason to transition so I would at some point not be the president of Gleaning, not have to worry about the fundraising, not have to worry about the business aspect but literally get back out on the street and work with the people that are suffering, Davidson said on Thursday.

Ill still be involved with Gleaning. This is my baby and I will be involved and working in Central Virginia to meet the needs and personally be able to experience what it is like to be poor and help people know that Gods grace is sufficient for them as well as for everyone else.

After Davidson announced the leadership change and called up Smiley-Mason to speak, tears welled in her eyes as she spoke about the future of Gleaning for the World, where shes worked since 2005.

We have just put so much in place and [Davidson] is going to continue to be involved so I feel excited about our future, she said later. There are just so many opportunities to continue our work throughout the world and help struggling people so its just overwhelming.

Davidson said he plans to spend more time building personal relationships with the homeless in Central Virginia to help them out of economic hardship. Hell also consult with other area churches on starting their own ministries for helping the poor.

Some of the homeless are homeless because they choose to be, maybe 20 percent, he said. The other 80 percent are homeless just because theyve had horrible things happen in their life, but if I can go out and let them know that someone loves them and theres a God that loves them, I think we can transition them back to a normal life.

Modest beginning

Gleaning for the World began as a modest effort with a handful of volunteers and Davidson driving tractor-trailer s of supplies for long hours delivering shipments of donated items .

During the last 20 years, the nonprofit has grown to 19,000 volunteers and a large warehouse and headquarters in Concord, just over the Appomattox County line, where supplies are packed and shipped.

According to Davidson, since its founding the nonprofit has shipped more than 3,700 tractor-trailer loads of goods worth more than $700 million to the poor and those affected by disasters worldwide. Gleaning for the World has helped respond to 2017s three major Hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 200,000 .

Plenty of missionaries

When he created Gleaning for the World, Davidson focused on getting supplies to missionaries and other organizations actively helping the poor and the hungry, instead of just spreading the Christian message through preaching.

Very early on in Gleaning I decided we were not going to have missionaries all over the world because there are plenty of them out there, Davidson said. What they dont have and what I continue to hear from the missionaries is that they dont have any resources.

Initially, Gleaning for the Worlds work spread through word of mouth. After he moved his first few loads of donations, the calls arrived from companies with loads of supplies to donate.

Much of the donations could not be used in the United States due to manufacturing flaws or other issues, so Davidson worked his connections to find receptive organizations overseas .

Through networking, he built a system to connect large shipments of donations with needy people hundreds or even thousands of miles away .

Efficient operation

According to Charity Navigator.com, a website that provides information about nonprofits, Gleaning for the World had $16.7 million in revenue in fiscal year 2015. The nonprofit also has been named the most efficient charity in the United States by Forbes Magazine multiple times, according to Gleaning for the Worlds website.

Gleaning has a life of its own, Davidson said. Its like a living organism that keeps on producing and growing and developing. Wed like to think we have some type of control, but God knows what hes doing. He takes everything we mess up and uses it for good.

Almost immediately following Davidsons retirement announcement Thursday at Gleaning for the Worldswarehouse, a group of volunteers and employees immediately returned to packing boxes and sorting goods for shipment.

Phinees Robert, who works as a volunteer coordinator assistant, said he loves working for the nonprofit because of how open Davidson and Smiley-Mason are and how efficiently the organization runs.

Even when the hurricanes happened [in the fall], everything was just going smoothly because Jeane and Ron work so well together, Robert said. Jeane is going to do a great job and that allows Ron to go out and do more of the hands-on work while we continue with the mission here.

Inspired by experience

For Davidson, his drive to help those in poverty began during his time as a pastor in Eastern Virginias Gloucester County after he spent an evening handing out stew and clothes to the homeless.

This was his first intimate encounter with poverty, and after hearing the stories of the people he helped, it became his lifes focus.

I am not a normal human being, I admit it, he said. Im off the charts in compassion, but Im also off the charts in aggression and Ive been able to put those two together to be very aggressive to get the supplies and support that Gleaning needs so we can do the ministry of compassion.

Soon he began working with Walmart and collected returned merchandise items to hand out to the homeless all over Hampton Roads. Davidson met more people and the experience intensified his inspiration .

When you literally have to pray every day for something to eat, when you have to go into dumpsters and restaurants and get the leftover food to be able to eat, theres a trust [the homeless] have in God that I did not see and did not know, he said. They have taught me a different faith.

Falwell affiliation

As Gleaning for the World grew, Davidson expanded his resource network . Once Jonathan Falwell took the helm of Thomas Road Baptist Church following the death of his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., in 2007, Davidson offered the idea of the church merging with Gleaning for the World.

Although Davidsons nonprofit continued to operate independently, the connection boosted his organizations national and international reach.

When a disaster hits I can send a text to the senior leadership of Thomas Road and soon we can we have a distribution network set up almost immediately for any disaster anywhere in the United States, Davidson said. It has just been one phenomenal relationship.

Falwell echoed Davidsons evaluation, praising the mutual partnership the church and Gleaning for the World have built.

Its been a marriage made in heaven, if you will, Falwell said . Of course Ron and I have worked very closely together since then and had a great opportunity to make Gleaning stronger, and it has made Thomas Road stronger because it has given us new ways to connect with the community through service.

Go under bridges

For Davidson, one of the most important ways to combat poverty is to share the experiences of those dealing with it every day. By raising awareness of the obstacles the homeless and impoverished face, he hopes it will increase compassion and open doors for those people to find a roof to call their own.

When you drive down the road you dont know who doesnt have enough to eat, he said. You dont know who has cut their heat off in 5-degree weather because they cant afford the heat bill. They hide well.

The only way you can do that is go to the homeless shelters, go under the bridges and find out what they need and tell their stories.
Its taken 60 years and billions of dollars, but mass transit is finally coming to Dulles International Airport outside the nations capital. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is ready to open the second and final phase of its Silver Line Metrorail extension on Nov. 15. The six new stations will for the first time connect the airport and the outer suburbs of Loudoun County to the regions flagship mass transit system. But the Silver Line extension comes at a time when ridership on Metro remains at roughly half of what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Metro officials say the long-term vision of those who pushed for the line will be vindicated as riders return.
Paul Harvey, the famed and folksy radio newsman, used to say he was reporting the rest of the story.

No such claim will be made here. The reason: There is no end to the spectacularly engrossing accounts of long-ago historic doings along what is now the Interstate 81 corridor running southwest from Roanoke.

In previous reporting for this space about an old Washington County mansion called Kilmackronan, other stories inconveniently presented themselves.

These accounts were inconvenient for the reason there was no place to put them while keeping to the necessarily narrow focus of the story of the mansion and its residents.

There was no room for tantalizing details of a 16th century visit by Spanish conquistadors to the greater Chilhowie area surrounding Kilmackronan.

To at least one student of Virginia history long indoctrinated with the Anglo-centric focus on early 17th century English settlement at the mouth of the James River, accounts of Spaniards marauding decades before far to the west in what is now Virginia were bracing.

Much applause is due Blacksburg historian Jim Glanville, who over a number of years has uncovered primary documentation and synthesized previous historical and archaeological scholarship on the topic.

The result has been a substantial body of work on the once-overlooked history of the region laced by the three branches of the Holston River.

More of Glanvilles studies are found at holstonia.net.

Glanvilles work has appeared in numerous journals such as the Smithfield Review and that of the Historical Society of Western Virginia as well as being presented publicly at various conferences and other forums.

Ace Roanoke Times writer Ralph Berrier has reported on Glanvilles findings in these pages and the historian himself writes an excellent regular column for the News Messenger in Montgomery County and its sister paper in Radford.

So in case you missed any of this, heres a sliver.

Scholars have long known about the circa-1538-42 travels of Spaniard Hernando de Soto, who set out from a base in Florida to explore lands that had been claimed by King Charles I of Spain (also known as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V).

Before the Spaniards first arrived, the countryside where Kilmackronan is was part of was a late prehistoric Indian settlement with unexpected business and cultural links to the vast society of Mississipian Native American tribes down through the Tennessee Valley, and throughout greater southeastern North America south to the Gulf Coast and west to the Mississippi River drainage.

The basis for the Yuchis settlement, as the tribe was called, was the lucrative development and distribution of the salt resources that later gave the name to Saltville. The salt was mined there and distributed from the settlement near Chilhowie.

Glanville quotes scholar Raymond Evans as writing The control of large salt springs near the present Saltville, Virginia, and a knowledge of working copper gave the Yuchis in the Chisca area a tremendous economic advantage in dealing with their neighbors.

Meanwhile, traveling from Tampa Bay, the De Soto party ventured as far as present-day Texas before turning back east. De Soto, who had made his ruthless reputation  not to mention a pile of gold  in the conquest of the Incas of Peru, died on the return journey near the Mississippi River.

As long ago as 1903, when Lewis Preston Summers published History of Southwest Virginia, 1746-1786, Washington County 1777-1870 that quoted journals of De Sotos traveling companion Louis Hernandez De Biedma, that there were suggestions Spaniards had been in Virginia before the Jamestown settlement.

Summers, offering scant hard evidence, concluded beyond question that Spaniards had been in what would later become Washington County.

It was not until more than a century later that Glanville, working from previously established archaeological and archival evidence, connected the dots to firm up the startling theses.

These included with a high level of confidence that a couple of members of the De Soto detail had crossed into present day Lee County in 1540, almost 70 years before the English settled at Jamestown.

From the De Soto partys base in western North Carolina, Juan de Villalobos and Francisco de Silvera trekked north into what is now Lee County in the far southwest portion of the state in search of rumored stores of gold, silver and brass.

No treasure was found, but Glanville concluded those two were almost certainly the first Europeans to set foot in Virginia.

Over a quarter-century later, Spaniards were back in these parts. Moving from a settlement called Santa Elena at what is now the Marine Corps base at Parris Island, South Carolina, a detail under command of conquistador Capt. Juan Pardo crossed the Carolinas and into the mountains in 1567.

Near present-day Morganton, North Carolina, Pardos force established a fort it called San Juan.

Pardo later returned east, leaving a Sgt. Alferez Hernando Moyano in charge.

At some point, word of the white men reached tribesmen to the north and their chief threatened to come and eat Moyano and his dog.

The sergeant was having none of that. Under the apparent assumption that the best defense is to go on attack, Moyano and a war party of soldiers and Native American allies attacked the stockade village that a Virginia historical marker sites near Northwood High School in Saltville, put the inhabitants to the sword, and torched 50 dwellings.

Moyanos account to his superiors put the death toll at 1,000 (against two wounded Spaniards), a gruesome figure that Glanville has written he doubts, classifying it as classic Spanish exaggeration.

The figure is closer to a still-appalling 200, the historian believes.

Frankly, I am unabashedly pie-eyed at these findings.

My mothers family has roots in Washington County that go back centuries. My grandfather Charles Carson was a talented amateur historian whose papers are still kept at Virginia Military Institute, his alma mater. My prep school roommate, the late James McCombs III, was a history buff from Morganton.

They never told me any of this.

If youve been wondering about something, call Whats on Your Mind? at 777-6476 or send an email to whatsonyourmind@roanoke.com. Dont forget to provide your full name (and its proper spelling) and hometown.
February 6, 1923 January 7, 2018 Glenna Richards Weddle, 94, of Radford, passed away Sunday, January 7, 2018. She was born on February 6, 1923 in Avondale, W.Va., daughter of the late Otto and Molly Richards. In 1943 she enlisted in the United States Marines where she served proudly until 1945. Glenna loved her family, her country, her church, and the United States Marine Corps. She continued to served her country by becoming the Selective Service (Draft Board) Clerk and Board member in the 1960's and 1970's. She was preceded in death by her parents; and her husband, John W. Weddle. Glenna is survived by her sons, Michael and John W. Weddle Jr.; and grandchildren, Jeffrey Weddle, Aaron Weddle and Catherine Weddle. Glenna was a loving and caring daughter, mother, wife, Sunday school teacher, neighbor and patriot. She will be greatly missed by all with whom she came into contact. The family will receive friends from 10 until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 at the Mullins Funeral Home in Radford. Funeral services will begin at 11 a.m. with the Rev. Gregory Harrell officiating. Interment with full military honors will follow in the Southwest Virginia Veterans Cemetery in Dublin. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to either the American Cancer Society or the American Heart Association. The Weddle family is in the care of Mullins Funeral Home & Crematory in Radford. www.mullinsfuneralhome.com
By Whet Smith and Mark J. Rozell

Smith is an attorney and former Republican Party candidate for the Texas statehouse. Rozell is dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

The grand spectacle over a single disputed ballot in House of Delegates District 94 never should have happened. A winner has been chosen by random drawing and, regardless of partisan affiliation, no one would now say that the outcome was the result of a smooth operating democratic process that we should aspire to repeat.

Whatever view partisans and other observers take regarding the ruling over the disputed ballot, all can easily agree that a better process is needed. Creating one is not difficult.

The Virginia General Assembly should take steps to ensure future close elections are determined in clearer, fairer manner. To that end, and also with the intent of adding no partisan advantage and minimal additional expense and bureaucracy, we propose the following ideas for the upcoming legislative session.

First, the Commonwealth of Virginia should determine a standard of voter intent that must be demonstrated for a vote to count. We cannot simply say, as Virginia law does, that we should look at voter intent if the ballot is unclear. The law must tell us how sure the judge must be of that intent. The law needs to decide whether a probability or certainty of intent can be divined.

We believe strongly that only votes where no speculation or projection is required to determine intent should count and that voters should be expected to follow simple instructions. Thus, the ideal standard should be a showing of clear and convincing evidence of intent. The General Assembly might prefer a standard of more likely than not, or, beyond a reasonable doubt, but the main point is that the legislature needs to adopt some standard. Any standard would be an improvement over the current process of the Board of Elections trying to dream up hypotheticals before the fact.

Second, the General Assembly should make clear that only markings on the contested race should be considered. In the case of the 94th District disputed ballot controversy, examining how the voter marked other races, and considering other external factors, invited entirely too much speculation into the process. Result: whatever the outcome, it was destined to be tainted in the minds of many citizens. That undermines faith in the democratic process and causes many disgruntled citizens to question the very legitimacy of the victor holding office.

Third, any contested ballots in any race in the Commonwealth should be examined and finally determined by the Board of Elections in Richmond or a similar body, not by local elections officials. This approach should ensure that each vote in Virginia is considered equally and consistently, and will allow a body of precedent to build. Following this procedure will introduce much needed clarity into future election contests.

Finally, there is an additional needed reform that can only happen after the 2020 Census. An evenly deadlocked legislative chamber is an outcome that should be eliminated. An exact tie with no mechanism to break it adds too much uncertainty and volatility into an already short legislative session, and in todays hyper polarized political climate poses an unacceptable risk of the House being completely unable to function.

To greatly reduce the needless risk that the House cannot organize because of a tie, Virginia either should add one seat to the General Assembly, or, more realistically, reduce its size by one member. The former requires a constitutional amendment, as the Virginia Constitution sets the size of the House of Delegates at 100 (with a minimum of 90). Even if the General Assembly were to pass such an amendment, we lack confidence that a referendum for adding another politician would meet with public favor these days. Thus, when the General Assembly redistricts itself after the 2020 Census, it could reduce the size of the House membership from 100 to 99.

However it is achieved, follow the federal model: an even-numbered Senate that has a tie-breaker, and an odd-numbered lower house.

Virginia may very well have a heated legislative session upcoming, but both parties should agree on these simple fixes to make the Commonwealths elections more fair and stable.
We recently proposed that Virginia have a second governors mansion and that this second residence be in Southwest Virginia.

The point, we explained, was not to build yet another palatial estate for the governor, but to entice the chief executive to spend more time in the most distant part of the state. North Carolina has a western governors mansion outside Asheville. So could we.

Or, better yet, just require the governor to spend a certain amount of time working in this part of the state, and let him (or her) figure out the living arrangements. There is plenty of unused office space around to work out of by day. The governors probably not going to be forced to sleep under a bridge at night.

Soon after our proposal was published, we got an interesting e-mail from Roanoke lawyer  and former U.S. Attorney  John Fishwick. Heres what Fishwick wrote:

Why cant the General Assembly meet in different parts of the state every other year? It is intended to be a part-time legislature. We have great state universities with large lecture halls . . . Besides the legislature, it would be good for the lobbyists and their entourages to spend some time out here. Richmond could be the mothership and rotate to other parts of the state every other year. Students could interact with the members and the members could learn about different parts of the state first hand. And maybe citizens would have more respect for General Assembly members if they saw their work.

We think Fishwick has a good idea. Lets take a closer look.

Well start with the law. There appears to be no constitutional requirement that the General Assembly meet in Richmond. The state code, though, does specify that the legislature meet there but also provides some exceptions. Specifically:

The General Assembly shall meet in regular session on the second Wednesday in January of each year. It shall sit at the Capitol in the City of Richmond, but may adjourn to any other place.

The General Assembly may, by joint resolution, direct the holding of such session or sessions in the Restored Capitol at Williamsburg, Virginia, as to it may seem proper.

The lawyers might want to parse those sentences. When the code references the Capitol in Richmond but then says the legislature may adjourn to any other place, does it mean any other place in Richmond or any other place in the state? Wed assume the latter, except the code then goes on to give specific permission for the annual ceremonial session in Williamsburg.

Wed like to think the common-sense meaning of any other place really is any other place.

Now lets look at the logistics. There are 100 members of the House and 40 members of the Senate, so youd need two meeting rooms that could accommodate that many people  plus have enough room for the public to see the proceedings. Youd also need lots of other rooms, for various committee meetings  and offices for the legislators and their aides.

Fishwick is right: The first place to look would be state colleges  be they four-year schools or community colleges. They have auditoriums. They have gyms. They have other big meeting rooms. The legislative session  typically from January-February and sometimes into March  conflicts with the academic year, so there might be some space problems in finding enough office space. We bet something could get worked out, though. What college wouldnt want to have the entire General Assembly, with all of its powers of the purse, on campus for an extended period of time?

The real objection to a rotating legislature might not come from legislators. After all, most of them are already spending the session away from home, so does it really matter where they are?

The objections would likely come from lobbyists, whose entire corporate infrastructure is set up around Richmond. They likely wouldnt want to decamp to the hinterlands for two months. You think its hard getting something through the money committees? Just wait until you have to go up against McGuire Woods Consulting. Just saying.

Richmond wouldnt want to lose all the business that a legislative session brings, either. Theres a practical matter, too, involving the whole staff apparatus of the Division of Legislative Services, which helps legislators draft bills and perform other functions. Heck, the whole apparatus of state government, where executive branch officials are on any given day interacting with legislators.

As much as wed like to see the General Assembly hold out-of-town sessions in alternate years, thats not going to happen. Heres a more realistic fallback position, though. Every April, the General Assembly reconvenes for a veto session  to deal with bills that the governor has vetoed or amended. Typically, this is a one-day session. Why does this have to be in Richmond? Why couldnt the legislature rotate this? As we noted, most of the legislators are from out-of-town anyway. Surely lobbyists and staffers can be uprooted for a single day.

A single day may not seem like much. A veto session in Roanoke would have the economic equivalent of a one-day conference at the Hotel Roanoke, which is always nice but wont transform anybodys economy. Still, there would be some value in getting the legislature here  or anywhere in Southwest Virginia  for even a day. For one thing, a one-day session might involve a multi-day stay. Communities could create events to educate the visiting legislators. Show off our attributes. Call attention to regional issues or things we lack.

Its one thing to say we have slow broadband speeds in some areas. Let the legislature actually experience them. Well wait. And wait . . . and wait . . .

There are many ways the General Assembly could do this. It could, for instance, rotate the veto session through congressional districts. We have 11 at present, so thats a once-a-decade-plus-a-year rotation. Or maybe the decision on meeting locations is more random than that. It really doesnt matter.

The point is, if the legislature cant give us even a single day, what kind of signal does that send?
riends and family from the Amanda Butler stables got together on Saturday when they did a charity horse ride around Brinsworth to raise money for the High Hopes Riding for the Duisabled stables at Thorpe Hesley. 172185

FROZEN characters Elsa and Olaf were seen trotting through the streets with Santa and elves in tow.

The stunt was part of a charity fancy dress horse ride through Brinsworth which was the brainchild of young horse rider, Demi Wilson (9).

The Brinsworth Manor Junior School pupil got together with her horse-loving friends, who attend the same stables, to raise money for High Hopes Riding for the Disabled Group in Thorpe Hesley.

Proud mum Debbie Wilson (42) said: Demi was dressed as Elsa and her pony, Popcorn, was dressed as Olaf.

People in cars were putting money into the collection box as they drove past and we also had music playing.

The event last month helped to raise more than 500 for the charity.
The North Carolina Railroad Company (NCRR) will invest $2.5 million in design and construction of a rail spur and storage tracks for a tire manufacturer in Edgecombe County.

The investment is from the railroads economic development initiative NCRR Invests and the spur will serve Kingsboro CSX Select Site for Triangle Tyre Co Ltd., which will be locating to the site.

Companies like Triangle Tyre require significant infrastructure like rail to meet their needs and this is another example of North Carolinas competitiveness in attracting a large scale manufacturer, said Scott Saylor, NCRR president. The North Carolina Railroad is a champion of our states efforts to secure large projects and we are proud to be a part of this exciting announcement.

NCRR says the Kingsboro CSX Select Site is one of the states megasites. NCRR is committed to assisting all of the states industrial megasites with freight rail infrastructure needs should employers choose to locate in North Carolina.

As a member of the North Carolina Railroad Companys Board of Directors, we are pleased to welcome Triangle Tyre Company and the tremendous opportunities it brings to our region, said Bill Kincheloe, vice chairman of the North Carolina Railroad Company Board of Directors. Edgecombe County and the Carolinas Gateway Partnership have worked to ensure the Kingsboro site was ready to attract a significant employer, and this announcement with the North Carolina Railroad Company and other key partners, as well as the resulting construction, will have a very meaningful impact on the region.
New Jersey Transit Executive Director Steve Santoro, who has spent 18 years with the agency, submitted his resignation to New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Rick Hammer on Jan. 5. He will be leaving in April and said he is "committed to ensuring a smooth transition for the new administration" of incoming Governor Phil Murphy.

Santoros resignation comes as no surprise, as it is customary in the State of New Jersey for a new governor to appoint his or her own NJT Executive Director, particularly if the governor is of a different political party than the one who is being replaced. Phil Murphy is a Democrat. Chris Christie is a Republican.

Prior to his appointment as Executive Director, Santoro was in charge of NJTs capital programs, overseeing numerous expansion and new-build projects.

We have seen amazing projects through to completion during my career here at NJT, together working on the construction of the Hudson Bergen Light Rail, River LINE and Sandy Resiliency efforts, which will leave a lasting impression on NJT for generations to come, Santoro said in a memo to employees. Since having the honor and privilege of leading NJT as Executive Director, we have made improvements and customer enhancements across all of our business lines. We have improved rail safety with the installation of inward and outward facing cameras and begun the process of modernizing our rail fleet with additional multi-level cars and new locomotives. Weve expanded capacity by utilizing larger light rail vehicles on Newark Light Rail and Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. We are advancing environmental review for expanding HBLR into Bergen County and a new Glassboro-Camden line. Our New Jersey Transit Police Department has opened a state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center and continues to keep a vigilant watch against terrorism. Weve progressed major projects such as a new Portal Bridge and new Raritan River Bridge that will leave the transit system in better shape for our children.
A. Schulman Inc. (SHLM) is due to release its Q1 results after the bell today, with analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimating earnings of $0.44 per share and revenue of $639.1 million.

A. Schulman believes that Hurricane Harvey had minimal property damage to its three facilities in the Houston area. However, it temporarily impacted the company's raw material supply and product shipments, primarily in the first quarter of fiscal 2018. The company said it has enhanced its sales resources and improved its pricing processes to drive improving operational and financial performance in fiscal 2018 and beyond.

Year-Ago Numbers:

* GAAP Net Income - $1.1 Mln

* GAAP EPS - $0.04

* Adj. Net Income - $14.4 Mln

* Adj. EPS - $0.49

* Net Sales - $600 Mln.

FY18 Outlook:

* Projects adj. EPS in the range of $2.00 - $2.20, mid-point of EPS range represents 20% increase; Consensus - $2.09/Shr.

**

Helen of Troy Ltd. (HELE) is slated to announce its Q3 financial results before the bell today. Analysts are looking for earnings of $2.12 per share on revenue of $455.15 million for the quarter.

Year-Ago Numbers:

* GAAP Net Income - $57.6 Mln

* GAAP EPS - $2.07

* Adj. Net Income - $66.0 Mln

* Adj. EPS - $2.37

* Net Sales - $444.4 Mln.

FY18 Guidance:

* Updates 2018 GAAP EPS Outlook to $4.01 - $4.34.

* Reiterates non-GAAP Adj. EPS Outlook of $6.50 - $6.90; Consensus - $6.72/Shr.

* Updates FY18 Net Sales Outlook to $1.560 bln - $1.585 bln, Growth of 1.5% - 3.1%; Consensus - $1.58 Bln.

Dec. 21, Helen of Troy said it sold Healthy Directions LLC and subsidiaries, which make up its Nutritional Supplements segment, to Direct Digital LLC. Proceeds from the sale encompassed $46 million in cash and a supplemental payment with a target value of $25 million, payable on or before August 1, 2019.

**

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Micro Focus International plc (MCRO.L, MFGP) reported that its profit before tax for the six months ended 31 October 2017 was $145.7 million compared to $113.2 million in the prior year.

Profit after tax increased by 17.7% to $106.6 million from $90.6 million in the previous year. EPS in the period decreased by 9.1% to 34.64 cents from 38.12 cents last year. Adjusted Diluted EPS in the period increased by 16.4% to 103.87 cents from 89.20 cents in the previous year.

Adjusted profit before tax was $451.8 million compared to $276.2 million prior year.

"The board is confident that medium-term low single digit revenue growth, industry leading margins and strong cash conversion will ensure that Micro Focus can deliver on its strategy. These returns can be further enhanced by appropriate deployment of capital in value enhancing acquisitions," the company said.

Reported revenues in the six months to 31 October 2017 were $1.23 billion, 80.3% higher than the prior period reported revenues, with HPE Software contributing $569.8 million and $664.7 million coming from existing Micro Focus and SUSE Product Portfolios, a decrease of 2.9%.

The directors declared an interim dividend of 34.60 cents per share (31 October 2016: interim dividend 29.73 cents per share), which represents a payout ratio of approximately 33.3% of the Adjusted Profit after tax for the six-month period of $451.8m and a 16.4% increase on the 31 October 2016 interim dividend. The board anticipates that the weighting of the next interim dividend and the final dividend will be in line with our usual phasing of approximately 1:2, based on the 12-month period ending 31 October 2018.

The dividend will be paid on 9 February 2018 to shareholders on the register at 19 January 2018.

Our focus continues to be delivering annual returns to investors in the range of 15% to 20% per annum. We believe we have a strong operational and financial model that can continue to scale and provide excellent returns to our shareholders.

The company anticipates revenues for the Group for the twelve months ending 31 October 2018 will decline by 2% to 4% when compared to the pro-forma revenues for the 12 months ended 31 October 2017 of $4.22 billion. As a result of the change in year-end it anticipates a shift in Licence revenue towards the new year-end of 31 October which will lead to second half revenues being higher than those in the six months to 30 April. It will seek to re-balance this revenue weighting in future years.

On 1 September 2017 the Company announced the completion of the merger of its wholly owned subsidiary with Seattle SpinCo, Inc., which holds the software segment of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company ("HPE"), in accordance with the terms of the previously announced Merger Agreement. Trading results of HPE Software from completion are included in the results for the six months ended 31 October 2017.

Micro Focus International plc said that Mike Phillips, currently CFO, will be moving to the new role of Director of M&A. Micro Focus also announces the appointments of Chris Kennedy as CFO and Ian Fraser as Chief Human Resources Officer. These appointments are with immediate effect.

Mike Phillips, Chris Kennedy and Ian Fraser will report to Chris Hsu, CEO. Mike Phillips will step down from the Board on 31st January 2018.

Chris Kennedy was Chief Financial Officer of ARM Holdings plc from September 2015 to April 2017. Prior to that, Chris was Group Finance Director of easyJet plc for five years. He currently serves as a non-executive director on the board of Whitbread plc and as a trustee of the EMI Group Archive Trust and the Great Ormond Street Hospital Trust.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Croatia's foreign trade deficit declined in October from a month ago, preliminary figures from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics showed Monday.

The trade deficit fell to EUR 565.7 million in October from EUR 735.2 million in the previous month.

In the corresponding month last year, the shortfall was EUR 510.4 million.

Merchandise exports totaled EUR 1.29 billion in October, up from EUR 1.20 billion in the preceding month. At the same time, imports dropped to EUR 1.85 billion from EUR 1.94 billion.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. (MDRX), a provider of healthcare information solutions, said it has agreed to acquire privately-held Practice Fusion for $100 million in cash, subject to adjustment for working capital and net debt.

San Francisco-based Practice Fusion is a Silicon Valley pioneer in partnering with top-tier life sciences organizations to drive innovation.

This transaction is targeted to close in the first quarter of calendar 2018. Allscripts intends to fund the purchase price through its existing secured credit facilities and cash balances.

In combination with Allscripts existing payer and life sciences , the company expects to expand its big data insights and analytics, data sharing technologies, and clinical trial solutions to enable life sciences organizations to accelerate bringing life-changing therapies to market.

Allscripts noted that Practice Fusion offers an affordable certified cloud-based EHR for traditionally hard-to-reach small, independent physician practices. Practice Fusion, founded in 2005, supports 30,000 ambulatory practices and 5 million patient visits a month.

Allscripts expects the acquisition to further advance its strategy to offer the most comprehensive, high performing information technology and solutions. According to the company, Practice Fusion's EHR will complement and round out Allscripts' existing ambulatory clinical portfolio.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Henry Schein, Inc. (HSIC), a provider of care products and services, said it has acquired a 60 percent ownership investment in ABASE, a family-owned distributor of veterinary health care products with a strong presence in Brazil'sCampinas region in the state of Sao Paulo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Headquartered in Jaguariuna, ABASE sells pharmaceuticals, pet food, diagnostic equipment, and consumables primarily to the companion animal, swine, poultry, and bovine segments. ABASE had 2017 revenues of about $27 million.

Henry Schein expects the transaction to be neutral to its 2018 earnings per share and to be accretive thereafter.

"This ownership investment strengthens our position in Brazil's animal health market, which we established earlier this year in the state of Rio de Janeiro with our investment in Tecnew. It also diversifies our relationship with global suppliers and approximately doubles our volume in Brazil," said Stanley Bergman, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Henry Schein.

ABASE was founded in 1990 by Edison Baba, who will retain a minority ownership position and continue to lead the as a Managing Director. The company has approximately 90 employees, including a sales staff of more than 45 team members, and operates a centralized distribution center in Jaguariuna.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
(Agencia CMA Latam) - The Colombian government intends to extend the bilateral ceasefire with the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group, originally set to expire tomorrow, said the President Juan Manuel Santos.

"We are more than willing to extend the ceasefire with the ELN and to renegotiate the conditions of a new cessation," Santos wrote on Twitter.

The President attended over the weekend a working meeting in Cartagena involving both sides delegations. Santos also informed that on Monday, more representatives of the government would be sent to Quito to launch negotiations for a new ceasefire formally.

The ceasefire between the Colombian government and the ELN started on October 1 and is expected to end tomorrow. Both sides halted hostilities to enter peace talks.

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.
Army strongly attacks military sites, gatherings of Saudi army, its mercenaries





SANAA, Jan 8 (Saba)  The army and popular forces waged strong offensives upon military sites and gatherings of Saudi army and its mercenaries over the last 24 hours, a military official told Saba on Sunday.

In border province of Asir, the artillery and missile units of the army and popular forces hit Saudi military sites and gatherings in al-Shabakah and al-Qaidah hilltop, killing and injured dozens.



In Najran province, the army and popular forces attacks Saudi military sites, killing 11 Saudi soldiers and wounding others.



Also in Najran, al-buqa camp off al-Khadra crossing point was targeted by an artillery and missile units of the army and popular forces.



In northern province of Saada, the air defenses of the army and popular forces shot down Saudi aggression warplane, Britain-made Tornado, over the province.



In the capital, Sanaa, the air defenses of the army and popular forces fired a ground-to-air missile at a Saudi enemy warplane,F-15,over the capital.



Meanwhile, the missile units of the army and popular forces fired a ballistic missile, Zilzal 2, and Katyusha rockets on gatherings of Saudi army and its mercenaries in Saudi military of al-Mazab camp, al-Mousam,al-Kirs and Mustahdath in border province of Jizan.



Separately, in Lahj province, the army in cooperation with popular forces retook control over strategic sites in al-Qabitah district.



Moreover, in the border desert of Medi, the rocket units of the army fired Katyusha missiles upon Saudi military gatherings and their mercenaries in the north of the desert.



In Taiz province, the army and popular forces carried out two military operations against sites of Saudi-paid mercenaries in Mouza district, killing, wounding dozens and destroying a military truck.



In Mokha district in Taiz province, the army and popular forces destroyed an Emirati armored vehicle in north of Yakhtel area in the district in Taiz province, killing all its crew.



Also, in Taiz city in same province, the army and popular forces hit groups of the mercenaries in al-Tashrifat, killing and injuring a number of them.



In northeast province of Marib, several mercenaries were killed and injured when the army and popular forces hit their groups in Serwah district.



Furthermore, a number of the mercenaries were killed and wounded when the army and popular forces hit their military vehicle in Nehm district of province of Marib.



In Bayda province, the army and popular forces killed three mercenaries and wounded five others in al-Quthanfa area.



As well, two mercenaries were killed in al-Baidha hilltop in al-Maslub district of Jawf province, the official said.

Saba

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[08/January/2018]
President meets Deputy Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Yemen

SANA'A, Jan. 8 (Saba) - President of the Supreme Political Council Saleh al-Sammad on Monday met with the Deputy Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Yemen Moin Shreim, and his accompanying delegation.



The meeting discussed the situation on the national scene in light of continuing aggression and blockade against Yemen, and the efforts of the United Nations in the humanitarian aspects so as to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people



The meeting also reviewed the detainees case in light of Sana'a recent events and the operation release for many of those who participated in these events.



The President considered the meeting with the UN official is a good sign in order to brief him what are happening in Yemen as being it is regarded the most suffering and humanitarian disaster happened in the history of mankind.



He pointed out that there is a great contradiction in the international attitudes towards Yemen that dropped many masks.



Al-Sammad stressed that the meeting was an opportunity to convey the voice of the Yemeni people through the UN official to the international community.



"The position that you had heard from us in Geneva is the position you had heard in Kuwait and Muscat, is the position you will hear today,'' al-Sammad said, adding after a thousand year you will heard the same position even If we were besieged by the enemies, and even if we do not have only one meter or a district in the Republic because we have one project and case. He further said it is the same position that you had heard from us in Aden and Hadramout provinces and all over the country.



Al-Sammad said that the Yemeni people are ready with the utmost understanding for peace and extend their hands for peace.



The president talked about the strange silence of the UN envoy Esmail Ould Cheikh in light of the escalation of the aggression that kills and injures many civilians across Yemen.



He stressed that the Yemeni people are losing confidence in the credibility of the United Nations and its role in addressing and resolving the Yemeni crisis.



The president pointed out that any partial plans related to Hodeidah are wasting time and solutions.



He confirmed that good signs should be proved by lifting the siege and opening Sana'a airport International and stopping air strikes against Yemen.



The president praised the humanitarian role of the United Nations in delivering assistance to Yemen.



HA



Saba

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[09/January/2018]
Its that time of the year again. After the Festive Season, its time to prepare for back to school for many parents and families.

And to make the load lighter, Samoa Stationery and Books last week awarded twenty students with scholarships as part of their Back To School promotion.

Owner of S.S.A.B and Managing Director, Fiti Leung Wai, started the scholarship awards in 2015 when she was selected as the New Zealand Prime Ministers Fellow. It has been four years since and she is still giving away 20 scholarships annually.

Mrs. Leung Wai said her desire is to help people of Samoa fulfill their God-given potential in education.

Mrs. Leung Wai shared with the students her celebrity experience when she travelled to New Zealand to receive the N.Z. Prime Ministers Fellowship award.

Being the recipient of such a prestigious award enabled me to travel to New Zealand in early 2015 where I met Afioga Toosavili John Key and many other high profile people.

Everything was paid for by the NZ Government, my airfare, accommodation and transportation within N.Z.

A liaison officer was assigned to me and I was given my own personal chauffeur who drove me around in a very nice Government vehicle. I also stayed at the best hotels in N.Z. I also got to choose who I wanted to meet.

In fact, it was at one of my meetings that got me thinking about establishing Sei Oriana S.S.A.B. gift shop in Auckland. My Sei Oriana shop in N.Z. supports our Samoan people here because it sells handcrafts and other items that are made here in Samoa.

I must say that receiving the N.Z. Prime Minister Fellows award was a real blessing as it has inspired more to be a blessing to others, she said.

Upon her return from that trip of a lifetime, Mrs Leung Wai then established the said scholarship, in 2015, where two scholarships were given out.

The next year it increased from two to 20.

She congratulated all the students who were selected for this year as S.S.A.B. scholars.

The recipients, received $500 cash; $500 worth of School Stationery from S.S.A.B; full access to S.S.A.B. Staff childrens librarys on Saturday and for Senior Scholars, they are also entitled as members of S.S.A.B. apprenticeship programme.

Marketing Manager Anastasia Alosio Stanley and Sales Manager Dora Tuiletufuga-Malele also announced their Meka Scholarship Opportunities and their Meka Warwick discounts, such as spending $50 gains entrance into a draw that wins 15 Meka prizes.

There are also Meka Acco and Pelican discounts where if you spend $30 on these products you gain entrance to win one of the four Meka NextBooks. Here are some photos from the ceremony.
An elderly father from the village of Nuu has a reminder for Members of Parliament.

Samuelu Tinoifili wants them to remember they were voted into power by the people so they can serve their needs, not to be selfish and greedy.

Mr. Tinoifili made the comments when his opinion was sought about the cost of living and the challenges of today.

The biggest issue he sees is the low incomes for many families.

Everything is all about money nowadays, we have our childrens education and then our family on the other hand, he said.

All of these require money, but what I can see is that our people cannot afford it because we dont have money to do all of these.

I truly believe if the government is raising the cost of living, then they should also give the people a rise on their salaries so that it will balance out.

They cannot expect the people to cope with this ridiculously expensive cost of living when the people get paid $150 fortnightly that is just ridiculous.

If they cannot survive with $150 fortnightly, then how the heck do they expect the people to stretch that amount for two weeks?

Its just impossible.

Mr. Tinoifili also slams the government for supporting foreign businesses when they should be supporting the locals.

I always hear them saying the reason they have to increase the cost of living is because of the cost of freights and all these products being imported is gone up.

But my question is who told to them to bring overseas products?

Nobody, its them so they should be the one forking out money to pay for this, but not to involve the people in their mess.

We never asked for any of these, we only asked for better lives, but what do we get, nothing.

As a matter of fact we are suffering because of their wrongdoings.

We have our own local people who can produce our own local products and that will help our local markets as well.

We can even export it overseas we can do it.

But what I notice is that the government supports the overseas markets rather than our own local markets.

Its like our people dont exist and this saddens me a lot.

Lastly Mr. Tinoifili urged the government to reconsider their developments for the sake of the people.

I urge you to please fix your environment before you look elsewhere, he said.

The people are what makes a country and we voted for you to be our leaders so at least prioritize our needs and fix our own environment before you can look elsewhere.
Yesterdays front-page story titled Govt. considers law change to allow female as Head of State was certainly an interesting read.

For the uninitiated, the story quoted a Public Service Commission Newsletter which referred to Cabinet Directive (FK (17) 33 where the Ministry of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (M.P.M.C.) had been tasked to lead the preparations for the review of the Head of State Act 1965.

This review was prompted by Cabinet to reflect changes made to the Constitution regarding the Head of State post, the original newsletter reads.

Some of these changes include but are not limited to the eligibility criteria, the number of years or the duration of service and the possibility of having a female Head of State in the future.

A female Head of State?

That certainly raised eyebrows. For good reason.

Firstly, it was only last year that Samoa had welcomed a new Head of State. He is still trying to find his feet and get comfortable on that chair and here we have the government of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi already making plans for the next, according to the newsletter.

But thats not all that was rather disturbing.

The impression that Samoas Constitution prohibited a woman from holding the position seemed so ancient. It would put to shame all the governments recent efforts - including amending the Constitution to allow more in Parliament.

The good news is that the Public Service Commission, which initiated all this confusion, has owned up and taken responsibility for the error.

On the front page of the newspaper you are reading, the P.S.C. has made the necessary change and apologised for the confusion.

Ive attached our revised December edition but have included the amended article re: Constitutional changes to the Head of State Act 1965 below for ease of reference. The revised version of the newsletter has been reloaded onto the P.S.C. website also, writes Osana Liki-Ward, of the P.S.C.

Weve removed the reference on the possibility of a female Head of State as this was incorrect information that we received last year. The Act, as it stands, does not prohibit the appointment of a female Head of State. Our apologies for this.

Apologies accepted Mrs. Liki-Ward. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. Even we do and one of the best things in life is learning when to say sorry and move on.

Whats important here is that this little kerfuffle has allowed light to be shed on this issue. While weve never had a female as a Head of State, we know for a fact it might not always stay that way.

The good thing is that the law as it stands allows it. Which speaks of the vision, wisdom and foresight of our forebears who ensured this piece of vital information was included. Even before any of this gender equality and women empowerment came into the equation, our Constitution already ensured that our women would be given a fair go.

This is reaffirmed by the Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Agafili Shem Leo, on page 3 of the newspaper you are reading.

The newsletter issued makes it seem like women are not qualified, but that is not the case here, the Act is crystal clear, he said.

The Act does not say that only men are qualified. That is why this issue has never been brought up before Cabinet because there is no need.

The Act is clear and it does not pin point to only men allowed, it does not say that only men can become Head of State and that is why I was shocked to the reference used in the newsletter.

Again the proposal that came was for Parliament to review the said Act, but it does not say to include women to become Head of State.

No, I guess because only men were head of state, the late Malietoa Tanumafili II, Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi and Tuimalealiifano Sualauvi II were all men, gave the idea that women cannot become Head of State.

Also keep in mind the decision is made solely by Parliament, which is now for two terms, upon the vote of Parliament, regardless whether its a man or a woman.

Well thats great to know, isnt it? And given the way things are working out at the moment, dont be surprised when a woman occupies the role. There is nothing there to stop that from happening.

So it is not a question of whether it will happen, the real question is how soon it will happen. What do you think?

Have a great Tuesday Samoa. God bless!
Dear Editor,

Unasa Iuni Sapolu views expressed in your story where she calls for the legalization of marijuana are absurd.

I refer to the bit where she said:  Stop listening to white agendas, colonized minds, its just a plant, legalise it and reduce government indebtedness.

In my view, such an opinion is no different from those of a broken, backward, evil manipulator.

Indeed, while Unasa has the freedom to express her views publicly, I am wondering if she is high on marijuana. The fact is she is definitely contaminating my space of freedom with her obnoxious false statements.

What are white agendas?

There are racist overtones here. The fact we object to the use of marijuana in our Samoan society means we have a Samoan agenda to resist evil ways and wicked harm that this plant has done and will do to many Samoans.

Unasa Iuni Sapolus views are dangerous and these are against our beliefs.

What colonised minds are you talking about?

O amioga ma uiga le taupulea tuufau e fanau mai ile faaaogaina ole Marijuana e tagata Samoa ma iu ai i le oti, misa, fasi ole toalua, ma le faiga o uiga pei o uiga o manu vaefa ma mea ola feai.

We are colonised minds because we fight that kind of sick behaviour in our Samoan society? Come on woman, where did you get your law degree? This is delusional and a dangerous propaganda.

This is not a plant. Marijuana is a killer because of what human beings use this plant for in their daily living to get an edge over the other human being in cheating. Medicinal value? Bull***t.

Marijuana does not have the medical properties to cure any illness. It gives hallucination in the head of the druggies to think they are getting better before they are dead. The patient that craves for marijuana in their dying stages are cheats. They have been living this cheat for years and then they want the killer plant legalised so that they could continue with cheating to the grave.

Why not use Panadol?

The Pharmaceutical industry has drawbacks but its products have cured sick people. Some pharmaceutical products could be avoided but how could you replace antibiotics with marijuana?

The Samoan medicines like makalafi, lega, and hundreds other Samoan medicines could and have cured sick Samoan. Not Marijuana. This is a curse in our society firstly imported by foreigners decades ago. Remember your white agenda, Unasa?

Marijuana makes the strong sane Samoan an addict that is lazy, mad, delusional person who escapes the realities, and avoid his and her role and obligation in the village by getting high all the time.

Many of them actively undermine matai village authorities and live independent foreign lifestyles. Ask the Pulenuus? And the Faifeaus? They have the information. Where do you live Unasa? Are you a true blue Samoan?

Over 60 per cent of the Samoan population are in the young middle ages. The evil people who are planting and selling marijuana to these young people are the curse of our beloved country. These age group are susceptible to mind changing behaviour that go to the deep end winding up with organised crimes, gangs, even an open rebellion to the governments like they do in overseas countries.

Check out why the school children are having fights in public places. This kind of behaviour in the young in our country is a new development.

I have heard first hand reports of marijuana in these incidents. The government should set up a Drug Combat Squad and pass a law that model on Laws from other Democracies like the Philippines.

Finally as a matai, can I ask you Unasa if you had gone back to your village chiefs and put this to them to seek their opinion?

Im wondering if you are a matai or a an agent for legalising marijuana. I can tell you that your idea wont solve a country national debt. It multiplies a countrys national debt because of the rise in crimes, medical costs, Legal Aid, Police costs, social dislocation in villages and rebellion against Christianity in Samoa.

Pupula Malamalama

Ne Ne o Samoa
Dear Editor,

The beginning of publications for media sessions on social media for this New Year (2018) was kicked off with a political disaster. It was so disgraceful. It started off with an old disrespectful behavior of Prime Minister Tuilaepa towards members of the public like Unasa Iuni Sapolu and other members of the public that have been involved in the recent protest march for customary land.

That is the same disrespectful behavior he shows against Church Ministers in a media session last year when he was questioned by the media about his new tax law for taxing Church Ministers earnings. Unasas subject was about legalizing of marijuana but the Prime Minsters response for Unasas subject during the media session was about marijuana, protest march and customary land.

I can tell from Prime Minister Tuilaepas response, he is still not recovering from the affection of the truth that was delivered by the small protest march he was laughing at in the beginning before the protest march took place.

I believe he is not well because of his stress about the issue regarding customary land and the issue about Christian principles that involved the taxing of Church Ministers earnings.

So him being unwell is the sign of pressure about those issues especially the tax issue because it affects Gods commandments. He will never get any freedom and peace from that pressure.

Without a doubt, God is still pursuing him and God will always pursue him, his family and his generations during their life time on earth because he deceived God by repealing of the declaration about Christian principles from the Preamble of the Constitution of Samoa that the Independent State of Samoa was based upon in order to fit in his personal and political agenda; the taxing of Church Ministers earnings.

Apart from the Prime Minister, all members of Parliament including other government officials who accepted that treason to take control of the country will all face the consequences of their inappropriate actions sooner or later.

Let me expand that side a little further.

According to Prime Minister Tuilaepa when they introduced the bill in Parliament to amend the Constitution, he said, the Constitutions reference to Christianity in the Preamble was inadequate. So I thought at that time according to the word inadequate, the new amendment they have been working on for Christianity is going to be more powerful and adequate.

However, it didnt happen the way I thought according to the Prime Ministers word  inadequate because the Prime Minister was not forthcoming. He did not tell the truth regarding the inadequate of the Constitutions reference to Christianity in the Preamble.

The confirmation of the above situation is this. I found out later few months after the Parliament made some changes to the Constitution with the new Constitutional Amendment about Christianity, Prime Minister Tuilaepa and his team with in that small gap was ready with another new plan to impose tax on Church Ministers earnings.

If Prime Minister Tuilaepa was correct about inadequate then why did they repeal this important part from the Preamble of the Constitution? Whereas the Leaders of Western Samoa have declared that Western Samoa should be an Independent State based on Christian principles and Samoan customs and tradition

If the declaration as quoted above about Christianity and the foundation of Samoa was inadequate according to Prime Minister Tuilaepa, then why did they establish the new tax law to tax Church Ministers earnings but it is against Christian principles?

If it was inadequate then why repeal? If it was inadequate then why did they change the truth that was in the inadequate reference of Christian principles with un-Christian principles such as the new tax law for taxing Church Ministers earnings?

He is the first Christian leader of Samoa who serving as Prime Minister who has been able to do something impossible and wrong against God and against Christianity by misleading our country in our sacred Parliament the dignity of our government about Christianity and about the foundation of Samoa.

That is wrong and it has already been planted in the heart of our government, the sacred Parliament of Samoa. That is the basis of sources of finances for our country. Accordingly, Prime Minister Tuilaepa will never be a part of the solution because he and the H.R.P.P party are the problems.

His unprofessional response for Unasas issue confirms that he didnt want to make any good effort in order for him and the H.R.P.P party to become part of the solution for the problems that they created. So, Prime Minister Tuilaepa is still a part of the problem and not the solution.

Because of that reason, Prime Minister Tuilaepa and the H.R.P.P party will keep on working tirelessly for the defending of their reputation and their own satisfaction with their own points and arguments already provided publicly in order to prove to us and Samoa that they were innocent, honest and right.

My understanding about Unasas approach and points of view regarding legalizing of marijuana was professional. It was free from defamation and also, it has no connection at all with the recent protest march for customary land. The government indebtedness she mentioned is not an attack but it is a feeling of concern because government indebtedness is real.

She has the right and freedom of expression to express her opinions according to the Constitution. She also has the right and freedom to express her opinions on that situation because the government is owned by all the people of Samoa but not just the people who are working in the government.

Unasas approach and points of view regarding legalizing of marijuana was focus on the good sides such as medicines, economic opportunities and reduction of crimes that involved marijuana. Her focus on the good sides of legalizing of marijuana clearly identifies her position about the subject.

She is part of the solution for government indebtedness, for health care, for crime reduction, for reminding of the government about other laws of Samoa and for advising of the government about its colonized mind. She is absolutely correct about that situation because the only kinds of people who act as dictators and colonized their own people are people with colonized mind.

That is a fact and that is the reality of the government we have already seen these days. The example of those situations is the taxing of Church Ministers earnings and the legalizing of mortgages on customary land without the voice of Samoa.

That is the difference between the Prime Ministers position and Unasas. The Prime Minister should know better in terms of the position of Prime Minister that is owned by the country including private sectors.

So he should understand about the side where Unasas was coming from. Also, the Prime Minister should know better in terms of opinions and facts about the truth and the law.

So from the publics perspective, the Prime Minister has nothing to prove or defend but show his opinions with respect instead of using his opinions to attack the public.

Because the government belongs to the people of Samoa but not the Prime Minister, so it is okay for the public to be defensive in order to save their government from corruption and from dictatorship. In other words, it is not okay for the Prime Minister to be defensive in order to cover his behaviour.

Our fore-leaders during the eras of colonization and after colonization, they never acted as people with colonized minds and that is one of the reasons why they fought against colonization.

Unasa was well prepared for the subject she raised.

The most important part of her preparation is the part where she talks about the law that fits in well all her given points. She was very clear about Samoas Narcotic Act and the S.L.R.C (Samoa Law Reform Commission) to support her view. Therefore she was showing a valid point to the government that should be handling properly and professionally by the government especially the Prime Minister of Samoa.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with the Prime Minister of Samoa. Prime Minister Tuilaepa did not handle Unasas valid point in the right way. He was very rude, irresponsible and unprofessional. I thought that he is loyal to the law because he is the man of the law, who is now taking control of God and Gods law.

So it was a must for Prime Minister Tuilaepa to take on board other Acts of Samoa as suggested by Unasa even if he disagrees about Unasas subject for legalizing of marijuana. The same consideration moves he did to other Acts should also be applied to other Acts such as the ones that have been suggested by Unasa.

He is the Prime Minister and he must remember the importance of his role in creating of peace and solutions when exchange opinions publicly. So if he was sticking to the purpose of his role, it could make a difference or an improvement about public relation in order to create peace and solutions. Also, as a leader, he should understand that the right person should lead from the front as a good example of the Act of Criminal Libel law that he wanted to be reinstated is him.

Speaking of the Act of Criminal Libel law, this is a comment of Prime Minister Tuilaepa about the Act of Criminal Libel law according to a news article by Samoa Observer. Samoa observer 23/12/2017 (P.M. defends Criminal Libel law) Defamation is wrong, he said.

The law affords the opportunity to low income families who are defamed to get justice. As noticing from the news article above, Prime Minister Tuilaepa was saying very clearly in that comment that defamation is wrong. However, that was not the case with Prime Minister Tuilaepa when Prime Minister Tuilaepa responded publicly to Sapolus view about legalizing of marijuana during the media session.

This is what he said in that response. Samoa Observer 04/01/2018 (P.M. rejects call to legalise marijuana) But Tuilaepa would not budge. He says the call reflects badly on Unasa and everyone who took part during the recent Samoa Solidarity International protest march.

Thats why I feel sorry for everyone who marched during the protest, Tuilaepa said. It appeared that they had a good reason to march, which was to protect customary lands. But now this has followed, asking to legalise marijuana, its only people who are not well in the head who talk about such things.

The person who said that defamation is wrong at the reinstating of Criminal Libel law just few weeks ago, was the same person who did defamation and harm to Unasa and other people of the protest march.

That is another verification and revelation of Prime Minister Tuilaepas double-standard and hypocrisy. He told everyone that defamation is wrong and told everyone that that was the purpose of Criminal Libel law but he is not living his own life in that way according to the purpose and terms of his Criminal Libel law.

For him as the Prime Minister to say mean and offensive statements to others without any right reason to do it, it is inappropriate. That is defamation.

So what is the point of Prime Minister Tuilaepas Criminal Libel law?

Why did he want to reinstate Criminal Libel law when he is the right person who is not well? Why did he rush to reinstate Criminal Libel law when he is the root, the cause and the source of defamation and harm? The meaning of what the Prime Minister has done during the media session as explained above is defamation and insulting of Unasa and people who took part in the protest march.

He has no evidence and he has no good reason or right reason at all in order for him to say those mean and offensive statements to others. Also, he should never include other people that have been involved in the protest march in his irresponsible response for Unasa.

According to the news report by Samoa Observer, Unasa never said anything about the protest march and customary land in relation to her view about legalizing of marijuana. So why did Prime Minister Tuilaepa use the situation about the protest march and customary land to attack Unasa?

Also, why did he use that same situation he did to Unasa in order to attack other people of the protest march when those people do not have anything to do with the subject about legalizing of marijuana? What was the reason of the attack? So the real meaning of what Prime Minister Tuilaepa had done is violation of the Criminal Libel law.

He provided the media with mean and offensive information about Unasa and people of the protest march to be published with the intention of doing harm and defamation to those people. The mean and offensive information he gave to the media are not correct because Unasa never said anything regarding the protest march and customary land in the subject about legalizing of marijuana. Also, the people of the protest march; they dont have anything to do with Unasa and her subject about legalizing of marijuana.

The other serious mistake that was done by Prime Minister Tuilaepa is that he intentionally and publicly abused the legal right of people of the protest march that is protected under the Constitution of Samoa in order to ruin the legal right of those people about the protest and in order to attack the protest march and to harm the reputations of those people.

Furthermore, if the main reason for reinstating of the Criminal Libel law is because of Prime Minister Tuilaepas concern about the people of Samoa that have been affected by defamation then why didnt he show that same concern for other people of Samoa who are showing concerns about the customary land?

Why didnt he show that same concern for other people of Samoa (four Chiefs) who lodged a complaint about customary land? Why didnt he show that same concern for other people of Samoa (Church Ministers) that have been affected by the new tax law? Why didnt he show that same concern for other people of Samoa who took part in the protest march?

Why did he laugh at the plan of the protest march before the protest march takes place? Why did he attack those people again through Unasas subject about legalizing of marijuana? Only the family of Toaipuapuaga that have been affected by defamation but the number of Chiefs, Church Ministers, church members and the people of the protest march is more than thousand.

So what is the difference between the people of Samoa that have been affected by defamation and other people of Samoa such as the four Chiefs, Church Ministers, church members and people of the protest march that have been affected by lies and corruption of Prime Minister Tuilaepa and the H.R.P.P party?

If Prime Minister Tuilaepa was truly concerned about the people of Samoa then the right thing that he should have done first when they amend the Constitution of Samoa is ensuring first that the amendment they wanted to do to the Constitution of Samoa suits Samoas satisfaction according to Samoas true foundation (Christian principles) and according to Samoan customs and tradition.

The amendment must keep the truth and the context from the original. The amendment must be free from political influences.

Sadly, it appears that the current Constitution of Samoa does not keep the truth and the context that were in the original. The new amendments about the foundation of Samoa and Christianity was based on Prime Minister Tuilaepas and the H.R.P.P partys political satisfactions.

Therefore the original of the Constitution of Samoa was intentionally amended with new contents in order to cut out the power of Samoa and the voice of Samoa for its true foundation and for its possessions.

The original declaration that is already repealed shows that the voice of Samoa comes first through Christian principles and through Samoan customs and tradition. That is, the authority of the government including Parliament is under the control of Christian principles and Samoan customs and tradition.

The result from the new Constitutional Amendment about Christianity and the foundation of Samoa, is the rise of the sovereign power of the government over everything about Samoa. The first dictator of Samoa Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi was born from that sovereign power of the government.

Those situations create the reason and purpose of the protest march. In other words, the recent protest march indicates true understandings about Prime Minister Tuilaepa and the H.R.P.P party regarding customary land and regarding the Constitutional Amendment about Christianity and the foundation of Samoa that was already done to the Constitution.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Saileles own words that have been recorded and reported as news on Savali and Samoa Observer are evidences of those untruths. More details about those situations will also be discussed later on in this discussion.

Accordingly, it is a must for the Attorney General and fifty top lawyers in the office of the Attorney General to make a move about the whole situation as explained above. They should be neutral and should never be politicized anymore by the Prime Minister and H.R.P.P. They have enough information as evidence in their hands in order to give a proper advice to the Prime Minister.

They must stand up for the truth and serve nothing but the truth. They should remember that they have already done two serious mistakes to Samoa because they have been heavily politicized by Prime Minister Tuilaepa and the H.R.P.P. party. The first mistake is the taxing of Church Ministers earnings.

I am certain according to some researches I did; Prime Minister Tuilaepas misleading interpretation of the Constitution of Samoa was the cause of that serious mistake. The second mistake is legalizing of mortgage on customary land without the voice of Samoa.

Lastly, it will be very interesting to see the Police Departments position about the alleged case of defamation that I have already identified from this discussion between the Prime Minister and others; Unasa and people of the protest march. Stay tuned.

Nanai Malonuu Lealaiauloto Nofoaiga.
The Pacific Freedom Forum (P.F.F.) has come out strongly against the government for reviving the Criminal Libel law without consulting the key stakeholders.

In fact, the group of regional and international journalists believes the reintroduction of Criminal Libel is a step backwards for Samoa, especially for Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi as the Chairman of the Pacific Islands Forum.

The group joins a growing chorus of media personalities  including the Acting President of the Journalists Association of Western Samoa (J.A.W.S.), Rudy Bartley - who have expressed concerns about the governments decision.

The Criminal Libel has been re-introduced as part of a government-led hunt for online bloggers using anonymous names  such as Ole Palemia  to attack senior government officials and members of the public.

In a statement, veteran Samoan Journalist and P.F.F. Chair, Monica Miller, says there was a lack of consultation prior to the bill being introduced in Parliament and passed as law.

Lack of consultation before the bill was pushed through Parliament is good reason to consult more widely now, Miller is quoted as saying in a statement issued by P.F.F.

According to her, consultations should include a wide range of representatives from across society.

Old and new media should be represented at consultations, including bloggers and other social media users such as on Facebook, as well as newspaper, radio, television audiences, and all voices supporting freedom of expression.

Government and all media users need to sit at the same table to work out how the new laws fit with existing institutions, including the courts and the Samoa Media Council, she said.

Concerns about anonymous bloggers should not override the right of citizens to speak freely, without fear of being jailed, says Miller.

Media are right to criticise the return to a colonial-era law, from half a century ago.

But she also says media need to engage with other institutions on agreed ways to avoid potential threats to media and other freedoms, such as with the Attorney Generals office and the Samoa Law Commission.

Speaking from Papua New Guinea, P.F.F. co-Chair Alexander Rheeney says Pacific people already have the right to seek civil court action on alleged libel.

Returning libel to criminal courts means Samoa is stepping back from its regional leadership role in good governance, says Rheeney.

We have already seen examples around the region of governments using millions in tax dollars to fund civil action against news media, he says.

Samoa media users, new and old, now risk jail time and criminal fines despite constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech.

Outside of the constitution, Samoa is also a member of the United Nations, where article 19 of the 1946 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also guarantees freedom of expression, and access to information.

Speaking from Palau, fellow P.F.F. co-Chair Bernadette Carreon says government would have been better off introducing freedom of information laws, not turning journalism into a crime again.

Were stuck with it now, so consultations need to set our clear policy for criminal libel action, especially from within government, she says.

P.F.F. is calling for complainants to be encouraged to explore existing procedures, such as writing an official complaint to media outlets, or to the Samoa Media Council, before seeking arrests under criminal media laws.

Last year, the Acting President of the Journalists Association of Western Samoa (J.A.W.S.), Rudy Bartley, called on the government to find a more realistic solution to track ghost writers who use fake social media pages to attack members of the public.

As President, I believe the re-introduction of the Criminal Libel law is a serious concern and it will have a negative impact on the work of the media in Samoa, said Mr. Bartley.

Freedom of the media (to do its work) is fundamental to any democracy and laws which hinder this is not acceptable.

Earlier, the government announced that the Attorney Generals Office had been tasked to look into reintroducing the Criminal Libel law, as part of efforts to address the growing number of ghost writers who use fake social media pages to attack members of the public. One such page is known as Ole Palemia.

According to Mr. Bartley, J.A.W.S. exists to help, develop and protect the work of the media and its practitioners in Samoa.

We are also concerned about the use of social media as a platform for slander and malicious attacks, Mr. Bartley pointed out.

I assume this is the reason why the government is reintroducing this law. Those behind these attacks have tarnished the work and integrity of the media as a source of knowledge and information for our people.

He also told the Samoa Observer the government should find a more realistic - practical solution other than reintroducing this law.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has repeatedly denied suggestions that his governments decision to revive the Criminal Libel law, which had been abolished in 2013, is part of a move to restrict freedom of speech.

There have been writings that accuse me of being a dictator (in relation to the Criminal Libel). But it is not my law. They (writers) are in favor of those doing the damage. What about those who are victims of defamation? he said.

This is a Christian move to protect the victims who are being defamed. This law is designed as a refuge to people whose names and reputations have been ruined.

Tuilaepa added that Commission has been set up to help reinstate the Criminal Libel law. Tuilaepa said this law was for people who had been defamed online by faceless bloggers and social media commentators.

This law will target only those who defame individuals and tarnish their good names. This is their safe haven.

Looking back, Tuilaepa said: In the small time the said law was abolished, defamation has increased significantly here in Samoa.

Tuilaepa said this law was put in place by previous Members of Parliament.

When it was my time; maybe I was a bit too kind, he said. With confidence that those who defamed others were no longer in existence, it is why I abolished that law.

But now I know, the previous Members of Parliament knew what they were doing.
A family is a place where principles are encouraged and relationships nurtured and developed.

That was the main message behind the five day reunion for the family of the late Vaioleti Saena at Tuanai.

Ended last Sunday, Vaioleti was a mother of 15. Five generations of her family are alive today.

The youngest of the siblings, President Fafai, led the service in prayer on the first day of the reunion before heading to Brendas Beach Fales to continue on with activities organised by relatives based in Samoa.

The reunion was attended by members of the family from New Zealand, Australia and American Samoa.

There are 647 family members as of today.
Celgene Corp. agreed to buy closely held San Diego-based Impact Biomedicines for $1.1 billion upfront to gain an experimental blood cancer treatment. The price could reach as much as $7 billion over time if the drug reaches certain milestones.

Under the agreement, Celgene will add as much as $1.25 billion to the upfront payment if Impacts drug fedratinib reaches approval milestones to treat myelofibrosis, a form of bone marrow cancer, and $150 million more for other indications. Additional payments could reach as much as $4.5 billion if global annual sales rise above $5 billion, according to a statement Sunday.

The total price would make Impact one of Celgenes biggest acquisitions ever. The drugmaker is under increasing pressure to replace revenue from its top-selling cancer treatment before copycat medicines eat into Revlimid sales. Its stock lost more than a quarter of its value during a five-day stretch in October, after a highly anticipated drug for Crohns disease failed a late-stage trial and the drugmaker cut its 2020 profit target.

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The shares havent recovered all of the lost ground, and as of Friday traded 28 percent below their 2017 peak of early October, giving Celgene a market value of about $83 billion. After news of the deal broke, shares climbed as high as $106.88 in premarket trading on Monday, and were recently up less than 1 percent at $105.80.

Jefferies analyst Michael Yee said in an email that the company wisely structured the deal to base much of its value on sales milestones, and isnt overpaying for a late-stage asset.

Fedratinib is a kinase inhibitor that has shown promise as a potential treatment for a type of blood cancer called myelofibrosis, according to a statement put out by both companies.

Myelofibrosis is a disease with high unmet medical need as the number of patients who are ineligible for or become resistant to existing therapy continues to increase, said Nadim Ahmed, Celgenes president of hematology and oncology.

(Fedratinib) provides strategic options for us to build leadership in this disease.

In October, Impact Biomedicines said it had raised funds to help get the drug to market. It treats the bone marrow cancers polycythemia vera and myelofibrosis.

Impact is readying manufacturing and logistics so the drug can be available immediately once it receives FDA approval. With strong evidence the drug works against the bone marrow cancers polycythemia vera and myelofibrosis, approval is likely, said John Hood, the companys CEO, at the time of the investment from Oberland Capital.

Fedratinib was first developed by San Diego-based TargeGen, which French drugmaker Sanofi purchased in 2010 for up to $635 million on the drugs promise.

But in 2013, just as clinical trials appeared to be successfully concluding, a few patients developed a neurological disorder. The FDA put a hold on development, and Sanofi immediately dropped the drug.

Fedratinib produced durable remissions in some patients that no other drug could replicate. A number relapsed and died after the drug was no longer available, the company said.

Hood and Dr. Catriona Jamieson, a UC San Diego oncologist/researcher, have looked ever since for a way to bring back fedratinib, which led to the launch of Impact Biomedicines.

San Diegos biggest biotech deal was in 2013 when Life Technologies agreed to be purchased for $13.6 billion by scientific instrumentation company Thermo Fisher, bringing to an end the independent existence of San Diego Countys most highly valued biotech company.

Reuters, Bloomberg and U-T staff writer Bradley Fikes contributed to this report.
Celgene Corp is expected to announce Monday that it is acquiring San Diego-based Impact Biomedicines for as much as $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Sources tell the publication that the potential deal could involve an upfront payment of $1 billion for the privately held company. Subsequent components of the deal would depend on approval from the Food and Drug Administration and successful acceptance in the market, according to the publication.

Celgene and Impact Biomedicines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Celgene is biotechnology company based in Summit, New Jersey, that specializes in treatments for multiple myeloma.

Impact Biomedicines focuses on treatments for patients with related cancers that are classified as myeloproliferative neoplasms, according to the companys website.

In October Impact Biomedicines said it had raised funds to help get the drug to market. Called fedratinib, the drug treats the bone marrow cancers polycythemia vera and myleofibrosis.

Impact is readying manufacturing and logistics so the drug can be available immediately once it receives FDA approval. With strong evidence the drug works against the bone marrow cancers polycythemia vera and myleofibrosis, approval is likely, said John Hood, the companys CEO, at the time of the investment from Oberland Capital.

Fedratinib was first developed by San Diego-based TargeGen, which French drugmaker Sanofi purchased in 2010 for up to $635 million on the drugs promise.

But in 2013, just as clinical trials appeared to be successfully concluding, a few patients developed a neurological disorder. The FDA put a hold on development, and Sanofi immediately dropped the drug.

Fedratinib produced durable remissions in some patients that no other drug could replicate. A number relapsed and died after the drug was no longer available, the company said.

Hood and Dr. Catriona Jamieson, a UC San Diego oncologist/researcher, have looked ever since for a way to bring back fedratinib, launching Impact.

San Diegos biggest biotech deal was in 2013 when Life Technologies agreed to be purchased for $13.6 billion by scientific instrumentation company Thermo Fisher, bringing to an end the independent existence of San Diego Countys most highly valued biotech company.

UT reporter Bradley Fikes contributed to this report.
Im baaack and it is 2018, and to quote Bette Davis from one of my favorite movies All About Eve, Fasten your seatbelts. Its going to be a very bumpy ride.

Entrepreneurship has as one of its components the need to re-invent yourself or your product, to pivot to new opportunities and finally to offer new features. New features that you dont really want, dont need, dont want to pay more for, but they come in the basic package with built-in pricing that you never see and after all, who doesnt want new features? I dont want to be left behind in the race to give the customer more of what they never asked for, so periodically, my column this year is going to share with you some thoughts that come under the heading of  You Cant Make This Stuff Up.

And so we start with how technology companies, in an ever competitive market, are trolling for new employees. What is required to provide for the shiny, bright, newly minted computer, data, artificial intelligence, robotic, networked scientist whom you are trying to lure into your hot, venture-backed start-up? The answer  a chair.

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Yup, the thing you sit in. Bloomberg has a recent article that explains that Silicon Valleys newest it chair is what is being offered, and in fact being required, to get your next employee. Now, we all know that the chair that defined the last two decades was the Aeron. Released in 1994, it had a radical, high-tech exoskeleton, and it was fabulous. To put it in perspective, Nathan Myhrvold, then chief technologist at Microsoft, was quoted as saying that owning an Aeron chair wasnt so different from owning a private jet. If you had those in your office, it sent the message that you cared deeply about your employee. But that was then and this is now. Enter the Pacific.

Swiss furniture giant, Vitra, will start delivering these chairs this winter, and not having one is the equivalent of walking around naked on Sand Hill Road. What is unique about the chair is that it is unique. You cant just buy one. You need to customize your chair, picking from three backrests, plastic or aluminum frame, four fabrics and two dozen hues, ranging from pale pink to sandy beige, as well smooth cowhide, with either a flat grain or fine top sheen, in an additional 22 colors. The chairs soft lines and proportions are based on a Samoan adz, a tool with a curved blade. Base price is $1,200, but fully equipped with heated seats, Wi-Fi, dual carburetors and four-wheel drive, the chair tops out at $3,500. For a chair!

I get lots of deals tossed my way. And on occasion I find one that qualifies for my new category. This start-up would like to grow some organic food indoors in shipping containers, using solar arrays for micro-grid hydroponic and aquaponic vertical farming. So far, so good. Not crushingly original, but if the execution is strong, they have a chance. But here is the kicker that gets my juices flowing. The solar arrays will also be used to power computers to mine bitcoins with a zero carbon footprint. So while I am growing my kale, I can offset the cost by mining some bitcoins. How can I possibly pass on this deal?

The whole ICO (initial coin offering) racket (not ready for Eliot Ness yet, but clearly in the sights of the SEC and others) seems to have grabbed the investment community by the throat. From a recent prospectus sent to me, I share with you this quote, investors are promised a return of 1,354% over 29 days on their investment. Now if those guys would partner with the bitcoin farmers and throw in a Brooklyn Bridge, I am all over that deal.

This is a perilous time for entrepreneurs and innovation. More people are doing it (skydiving) with less certainty as to outcomes (who packed the parachute), but FOMO (fear of missing out) tends to put blinders on rational men and women, and they are saying yes with their fingers crossed and one foot out the door. Not all in, not all out, just dancing in the dark. But when it becomes clear that it is time to leave  then it will be too late, because the doorway will be jammed with dead bodies and there will be no exit.

Neil Senturia, a serial entrepreneur who invests in early-stage technology companies, writes weekly about entrepreneurship in San Diego. Please email ideas to Neil at neil@blackbirdv.com.

Rule No. 542: I have a seatbelt; its the airbag Im worried about.
On Thursday morning, a large painting was installed in the lobby of Vista City Hall. The luminous unframed canvas depicts a grieving New York City firefighter amid the rubble of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

While the painting may be new for City Hall visitors, the 3-by-4-foot canvas has taken a long road to get there. Painted by Carlsbad artist Kelly Lucas just days after the terrorist attacks in 2001, the melancholy artwork has been on a perpetual tour of North County fire stations and city buildings for the past 2  years.

Known as the Traveling 911 Memorial Painting, the painting was purchased in spring 2015 by Encinitas real estate agent Wendy Moldow. She said she realized immediately after bringing the canvas back into her art-filled home that it deserved a bigger audience.

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I hung it up and said to myself, this doesnt belong here; this needs to be seen,  Moldow said. I started thinking about that book The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and thought, why dont I start the journey of the traveling painting? 

Since Sept. 11, 2015, the painting has been displayed for one to three months at a time at fire stations and other public buildings in Encinitas, San Marcos, Rancho Santa Fe, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Escondido, Solana Beach and, now, Vista.

Its so dramatic, she said. You just look at it and it grabs you. It tugs at your heart.

Even before it came into Moldows possession, the painting had a well-traveled history, though not for the best reasons. Its original purchaser returned it to Lucas in 2002 because he found it too depressing. So for 13 years it was hidden in storage until Lucas brought it with her when she moved from Colorado to Carlsbad three years ago.

Lucas spent 10 years of her career as a professional painter in the San Francisco area and had recently moved back to her native Colorado when New York Citys landmark Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.

One of her clients, an attorney who lost several friends in the tragedy, decided to organize a charity auction to benefit the families of fallen 9/11 firefighters. His goal was to produce the event in just a few weeks to get money to the families as quickly as possible.

One of his calls went to Lucas, whom he asked to come up with a painting for the events banner and postcard. Three days later, she had two finished canvases, including the painting of the firefighter in front of a tattered American flag and the iconic twisted steel wreckage of the towers. That morning, 343 New York City firefighters and staff died when the buildings collapsed.

You just dont see our men, our heroes, our rescuers break down like that, Lucas said. I wanted to show their strength, but also how much they gave. They gave more than most anybody.

Close-up detail of a firefighter burying his face in his hands in artist Kelly Lucas Traveling 911 Memorial Painting. (Pam Kragen/San Diego U-T )

The painting was purchased at the Artists for Heroes auction for $26,000 by a Chicago restaurateur. But after he hung the canvas in his dining room he began getting complaints from staff and customers who found it too heartbreaking.

He put it in the lobby and it had a dramatic impact, Lucas said. It was too soon. People were crying, people were walking out. He didnt want his money back, but he gave it back to me and I didnt know what to do with it. I had it in my home for years.

Lucas left Colorado in 2015 because the high altitude aggravated her rare heart condition. She moved to Carlsbad to live at sea level near the surgeon who corrected her heart problem. Today she works for a company that sells cardiac screening devices to schools.

Shortly after she arrived here, Lucas decided to clear out her inventory of paintings and found a charity, Next Step Service Dogs, to be the beneficiary. At the time, she was working with Moldow at Pacific Sothebys real estate office in Encinitas, and the agency offered to host the gala auction of 15 paintings. One of them was the 9/11 memorial painting, which she sold to Moldow for just $300, with the hope that it could have a future life on public display.

Moldow said everywhere the painting has gone, it has been well received by firefighters, city officials, senior groups and the public. At many of the unveiling ceremonies, she has brought along Dr. Noemi Balinth. The Cardiff resident was the president of the New York Psychological Association when 9/11 occurred. Balinth said she saw first-hand the emotional toll the tragedy took on first responders.

On Dec. 2, the painting began its last North County exhibition in Vista. For the first month, it was displayed in a training room at Fire Station No. 1. It is scheduled to be on display in the City Hall lobby through January.

Vista Fires Deputy Chief Ned Vander Pol said the painting has had a very positive reception with city firefighters and officials.

Its striking and its a good-size painting, he said. It was very noticeable as the centerpiece of the training room, but the idea was to get it to City Hall, where more people could see it.

Moldows next goal is to find five or six fire stations in San Diego that would be interested in hosting the painting over the next year or two. Her ultimate goal is to have the canvas displayed in a firefighter museum. Fire stations that would like to host the painting can contact Moldow at (619) 339-3339 or by email at wendymoldow@me.com.

I dont care where they display the painting, whether its in the firefighters lunch room or out in public, she said. I just want them to know that people in the neighborhood know and appreciate who they are and what they do.

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com
Theres good news and bad news about Europa Galantes visit to San Diego for their Sunday evening concert at St. James-by-the-Sea.

Good news: The 13 musicians of this acclaimed early music group from Italy arrived safely this weekend in San Diego, the first stop of their American tour.

The bad news: Their checked luggage did not come with them. That included a violone, a five-stringed fretted instrument the size of a double bass.

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Thanks to their resourceful sponsors, the San Diego Early Music Society, the closest available violone was located  in Marina del Rey. A car trip up and back fetched it in time for their concert.

As if the musicians nerves were not shaken enough, the ensembles concert attire was in their missing luggage, forcing them to perform in the clothes they wore on their long flight here.

However, pluck and talent ultimately prevailed as violinist Fabio Biondi led Europa Galante in a thoughtful program of Vivaldi concertos and music by his pre-Classical contemporaries.

We tend to think of the Baroque era as winding to a close, followed by younger composers stepping up to create a new style that eventually evolved into the Viennese Classical music of Mozart and Haydn. But Vivaldi, Handel and Bach all composed through the first half of the 18th century. Their pre-Classical contemporaries developed a new style while these Baroque masters saw their music fall out of favor.

Most of the pre-Classical composers are neglected today. When was the last time you heard a piece by Georg Reutter, Ignaz Holzbauer or Baldassare Galuppi?

Galuppi is the best remembered today, if only because Robert Browning immortalized him in a poem. His vigorous overture from his opera Adriano in siria exemplified the new style, preferring less elaborate melodies and uncomplicated harmonic patterns than his Venetian colleague Vivaldi, although the Fast-Slow-Fast three-movement form was clearly influenced by Vivaldis concertos.

The same form was used by Reutter in his brief but poignant Sinfonia in D minor, but his work ends with a minuet. Both compositions point towards the four-movement symphonic form that Haydn would refine.

Holzbauer composed for the orchestra in Mannheim, Germany, well known for its discipline  able to bounce back and forth between loud and soft dynamics in lightning-fast tempos. Holzbauers Flute concerto in D major utilized those skills, admirably executed by Europa Galante. Marcello Gatti was the flutist, playing on a wooden flute with only one metal key. It was a spirited performance, although occasional intonation issues demonstrated why later flute-makers added all those keys to the instrument.

Vivaldi wrote over 200 violin concertos, but the only ones you hear modern orchestras play are the Four Seasons. Any of the three concertos that Fabio Biondi played (D major, RV 222; C major, RV 189; B-flat major, RV 371) are appealing enough to merit more performances by other violinists, with a solo part designed to dazzle with dizzying virtuosity.

Biondi was a wizard on his violin. On top of his astounding technique, he excited listeners by playing just a little bit ahead of the ensemble. He had hearty support from his musicians, all of whom sounded authoritative on their period instruments.

Lets hope that violone  still missing at press time  turns up unscathed for their upcoming Los Angeles concert.

Update: 3:30 p.m. Jan. 8: The violone and most of their baggage was recovered at noon today at the San Diego airport. Some bags remain missing. The violone is in good condition.

Hertzog is a freelance writer.
Oprah Winfrey for president was something of a running theme throughout the Golden Globes on Sunday, beginning with Seth Meyers opening monologue. He jokingly forbade Winfrey from considering the presidency.

But the trend picked up steam as the night unfolded, particularly after Winfreys impassioned acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award.

GOLDEN GLOBES 2018: Full coverage | Winners | Red carpet photos

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It didnt take long for social media, and celebs in particular, to rally Winfrey for the job, including inside the ceremony.

Its up to the people, Winfreys longtime partner, Stedman Graham, told The Times. She would absolutely do it.

Trump spokesman on Oprah 2020 run: We welcome all comers 

Gayle King, Winfreys best buddy, echoed Grahams sentiments: I thought that speech was incredible. I got goosebumps, she also told The Times.

Eva Longoria and Keith Urban shared a table at the ceremony and gushed over Winfreys remarks.

That speech! Longoria said.

It was more of an exultation, Urban replied.

Alan F. Horn, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, was equally impressed.

She knows how to deliver it too, Horn remarked. Shes really emotional.

When Oprah is speaking at the Golden Globes and your goals shift to VP... pic.twitter.com/3ghEVMmCwF  Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 8, 2018

When a Times reporter showed Dwayne The Rock Johnson the tweet above, the Fast and the Furious star laughed and asked for a link.

As for his own potential presidential run, Johnson said, The consideration is always serious. Im just trying to learn as much as I can. But I dont know a lot about politics.

Asked what he was doing to get up to speed, Johnson offered only a mischievous grin.

Of Winfrey, Johnson called her incredible and described himself as very moved by her words.

Oprah returned to her seat before the live show resumed, led by a bodyguard, but not before stopping to speak with a special guest.

Oprah Winfrey on considering a run for president: Okaay! 

#MeToo founder Tarana Burke, who accompanied actress Michelle Williams to the ceremony, was visibly moved after Winfreys speech.

Burke told The Times afterward what transpired when Winfrey spoke to her.

She thanked me and gave me a hug and said something like, Were doing it together. It meant so much to me because when I was in the early days of doing workshops with women, it was Oprah and Gabrielle Union whose stories I used.

So to hear her say #MeToo up there was such a full-circle moment, Burke added. I dont even want her for the presidency. I just want to create something new for her.

Heres a sampling of who would likely vote for Winfrey in 2020:

Switched back to the Golden Globes to watch Oprah get her award. Never let it be said that I dont respect the president of the United States.  Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 8, 2018

Oprah/Michelle 2020  Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) January 8, 2018

Oprah 2020!!!!! Best speech of the night!!  Bob Harper (@MyTrainerBob) January 8, 2018

As I sit here in tears...I have never ever seen such a speech. @Oprah, my friend. Please run for President. This world needs more of THAT. WOW.  Billy Gilman (@BillyGilman) January 8, 2018

Shes running. A new day is on the way.  Leslie Odom, Jr. (@leslieodomjr) January 8, 2018

Seth Meyers: "In 2011, I told some jokes about our current president at the WHCD... I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president. You do not have what it takes. And Hanks. Where's Hanks? You will never be vice president." #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/vQzxrHZfrt  Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 8, 2018

Shes running.  James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) January 8, 2018

Our president is giving her state of the union.  roxane gay (@rgay) January 8, 2018

Ok. Oprah's running.  Anna Holmes (@AnnaHolmes) January 8, 2018

Oprah. 2020.  Shaun King (@shaunking) January 8, 2018

The only thing that would have made that better would have been "Yes, we can. And I am. 2020." #Oprah #etalkGlobes #GoldenGlobes  Elaine L. (@LaineyGossip) January 8, 2018

Oprah shades her 2020 opponent: "It's the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice. To tyrants and victims, to secrets and lies." #GoldenGlobes  Matt Wilstein (@mattwilstein) January 8, 2018

Whether she runs or not, @oprah has already given the best campaign speech of the 2020 cycle. #GoldenGlobes  Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) January 8, 2018

Can I vote for Oprah in 2020 right now??  RosenbergTelevision (@Rosenbergradio) January 8, 2018

I, for one, am loving this first campaign speech for Oprah's 2020 run  Samhita Mukhopadhyay (@TheSamhita) January 8, 2018

Oprah isn't running for U.S. president, guys. Why in the hell would she do that to herself?*



*She's running for galaxy president.  Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) January 8, 2018

So excited that Oprah is president now  Alison Segel (@OnlineAlison) January 8, 2018

When your PASTOR is also your PRESIDENT . @Oprah . Thank you .  #TIMESUP #goldenglobes  Janelle Monae, Cindi (@JanelleMonae) January 8, 2018

2018 Golden Globes On Now Video: What can be done to help with inequality? 2:50 On Now Video: Oprah Winfrey, a look back at her career 1:14 On Now Video: Why did you wear black to the Golden Globes? 3:23 On Now Video: William H. Macy thinks the world would be a better place if women ran it 0:46 On Now Video: Lena Waithe is on a mission with 'Master of None' and 'The Chi' 0:26 On Now Video: Milo Ventimiglia says he doesn't see gay, black, white, woman, man: 'I see an artist' 1:26 On Now Video: Ann Dowd on the exposure of predators in Hollywood 0:49 On Now Video: 'The Square's' Ruben Ostlund and Terry Notary on sexual harassment in Hollywood 0:56 On Now Video: Raphael Saadiq on how to behave with women, with a little help from Dave Chappelle 1:49 On Now Video: Director Nora Twomey on wearing black at the Golden Globes 2:06

Los Angeles Times reporters Amy Kaufman and Jen Yamato contributed to this report.

libby.hill@latimes.com

@midwestspitfire

ALSO

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Catch up on the Golden Globes 7 must-see moments

UPDATES:

9:15 p.m.: This article was updated with additional tweets and comments from inside the ceremony.

This story was originally published at 7:50 p.m.
The gowns were black, but the mood was buoyant.

As the first major awards show to hit the airwaves after Hollywoods Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal swept our entire nation, Sundays 75th annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony was in a real tightrope situation. And so was Hollywood.

How do you acknowledge a raging, sea-changing controversy while still celebrating, well, yourself? How would the frothy Golden Globes take on the stuff lurking beneath the red carpet?

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By taking the high road.

As it turns out, despite the aggression and anger in the air, Hollywood did not get together in the gilded Beverly Hilton Hotel to vent about evil men and the system that allowed them to run amok.

The majority of the actresses and actors wore black to show support for the victims of sexual harassment and abuse, but the evening was not a dark downer. Instead, it was all about celebrating strong women, racial diversity and the freedom to be your own weird self.

The all-inclusive vibe was there in the awards, which honored everyone from big-dreaming Mexican boys (Coco) and fierce, fearsome women (Big Little Lies) to African-American fathers (actor Sterling K. Browns award for This Is Us) and free-thinking teens (Saoirse Ronans win for Lady Bird.)

Yes, many of the speeches were fueled by the #MeToo movement and the need to speak up for the powerless. But if you avoided watching the Golden Globes for fear of being pelted by polemics, it was your loss.

So what did you miss? You missed host Seth Meyers, doing his best to make up for being a man in a year when the Globes really needed a woman holding court.

His opening line? Good evening ladies. And remaining gentlemen.

Yes, he went there.

The crowd did not seem to appreciate his Kevin Spacey jokes. Which is unfortunate, because there were two of them. And the wisecrack about Weinstein returning in 20 years when he gets booed during the In Memoriam tribute was a little bit dead on arrival itself.

Maybe its because hes a man. More likely, its because people didnt want to laugh about the serious stuff that is on everyones minds. They wanted to talk about it.

Who stepped up to the plate, speech-wise? How much time do you have?

The Best Out of the Gate Award went to Nicole Kidman, the first winner of the evening for her subtle, heart-wrenching portrayal of a battered wife in HBOs Big Little Lies.

Kidman and co-star Reese Witherspoon were co-executive producers of the series, so if you skipped the Globes, you also missed Kidmans shout-out to the powerful Big Little Lies sisterhood.

Reese and and I did this because of our friendship and our creative union and support of each other. And I love you. This is ours to share. Wow. The power of women.

You missed Handmaids Tale acting winner Elisabeth Moss, dedicating her award to feminist and Handmaids Tale author Margaret Atwood and to the women brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice.

I hope we can elicit change through the stories we tell and the way we tell them. Lets keep the conversation alive. Lets do it.

You missed Sterling K. Brown thanking This Is Us producer Dan Fogelman for creating a role that made people see him as an actor, and that made it harder for people to dismiss him and people who look like him.

You missed presenter Natalie Portman introducing the best film director category with a pointed, And the all-male nominees are...

And you missed Cecil B. DeMille Award winner Oprah Winfrey  the right honoree at the perfect time  taking us to life school. And art church.

I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women  many of whom are right here in this room tonight  and some pretty phenomenal men are fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, Me Too again.

And near the end of the evening, Witherspoon was back to accept the award for best television limited series and to issue a promise to women that sounded like a challenge to Hollywood.

You are so brave, she said to the women who have spoken out. We see you. We hear you. And we will tell your story.

And when those stories get told, Hollywood is going to look a lot more like life, and the awards will belong to all of us.

Twitter: @karla_peterson

karla.peterson@sduniontribune.com
A bill intended to prevent temporary foreign workers from displacing Americans could reach the House floor for a vote in coming months.

The Protect and Grow American Jobs Act, sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, passed the Judiciary committee by unanimous voice vote in November, a difficult feat for legislation modifying immigration law. The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Scott Peters and Rep. Duncan Hunter, would tweak the H-1B visa program, which grants 3-year work visas to skilled workers.

Unfortunately, loopholes in the program have allowed a small handful of employers to game the system to displace American workers and crowd out others who legitimately need the limited slots available to recruit individuals with unique skill sets not available here at home, Issa said.

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Demand for H-1B visas has outnumbered the 85,000 annual cap in recent years. Many of those visas go to employees from large consulting companies with headquarters in India.

Such companies are considered H-1B dependent companies and have additional requirements when requesting new visas. Issas bill would heighten those requirements by increasing the minimum salary required for H-1B employees and requiring more extensive reporting about efforts to hire American workers.

The bill also alters the definition of an H-1B dependent company, increasing the percentage of H-1B workers for companies of 50 or more employees to 20 percent from 15 percent.

Highly skilled individuals that come to America through the H-1B visa program add tremendous value to the U.S. economy, Issa said. We have a responsibility to ensure this important program isnt being abused by employers to undercut American jobs.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, objected to a previous version of the bill in 2016 because she didnt think it went far enough to alter the program. Issa incorporated some of her suggestions to reach bipartisan agreement on the bill.

Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

Follow me on Facebook for live updates about immigration news

kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on Twitter
A broken gas line prompted a condominium complex in Chollas View to be evacuated Sunday night, a fire official said.

Someone reported smelling gas at the three-story building on Market Street near Euclid Avenue about 7:40 p.m., according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.

San Diego Gas & Electric crews found a damaged gas meter in the complexs underground parking garage, and firefighters helped evacuate the building as a precaution.

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The gas was shut off while crews made repairs. Its unclear how the meter was damaged.

Residents were allowed to return to their homes about an hour after the leak was reported.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com
San Diego police and San Diego County Crime Stoppers are asking the public for help in finding out who fatally shot a 23-year-old man in Mountain View on New Years Eve.

Crime Stoppers is offering a $1,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in the case.

Diego Armando Villa of San Diego was found lying on a sidewalk on Teak Street near South 38th Street just before midnight on Dec. 31. He had been shot in his head and arm.

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He died at a hospital the next day.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call the San Diego Police Departments Homicide Unit at (619) 531-2331 or (619) 531-2293 or the Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at (888) 580-8477.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield
For Raul Prieto Ramirez, the beauty of 103-year Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park lies in its flexibility to bring many musical styles to life.

And Ramirez showed off the sonic dexterity of the 5,017-pipe instrument Sunday during his first concert as the San Diego Civic Organist and artistic director for the nonprofit Spreckels Organ Society.

He kicked off his hour-long inaugural performance by playing one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire  Bachs Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor BVW 565  which has anchored movie scores ranging from Phantom of the Opera to vintage horror films.

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Two songs later, Ramirez dove into something more experimental  Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

The larger-than-usual crowd at the outdoor Spreckels Organ Pavilion loved it.

1 / 13 At the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, RRaul Prieto Ramirez walks onto the stage as the new organist. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 2 / 13 In between musical numbers at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez addressed the audience about his next musical number. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 3 / 13 The public enjoyed the free organ concert Sunday afternoon at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park with Raul Prieto Ramirez as the new Civic Organist. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 4 / 13 At the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez (San Diego Civic Organist) performs his first concert to a crowd of 1500. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 5 / 13 The public enjoyed the free organ concert Sunday afternoon at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park with Raul Prieto Ramirez as the new Civic Organist. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 6 / 13 Raul Prieto Ramirez the new Civic Organist rehearses before his first San Diego concert at Balboa Park. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 7 / 13 Raul Prieto Ramirez the new Civic Organist rehearses before his first San Diego concert at Balboa Park on Sunday. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 8 / 13 At the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez (San Diego Civic Organist) performs his first concert to a crowd of 1500. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 9 / 13 The public enjoyed the free organ concert Sunday afternoon at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park with Raul Prieto Ramirez as the new Civic Organist. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 10 / 13 The public enjoyed the free organ concert Sunday afternoon at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park with Raul Prieto Ramirez as the new Civic Organist. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 11 / 13 Before taking stage for his first concert at Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez changes shoes to ones designed to help with the organs foot pedals. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 12 / 13 At the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez (San Diego Civic Organist) waits back stage for his introduction to his first park concert in San Diego. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) 13 / 13 Following his Sunday afternoon concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, Raul Prieto Ramirez (San Diego Civic Organist) took a bow to a crowd of about 1500. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)

You can play pieces I used to do in my house for fun -- The Pink Panther and things like that  that I would never play in concert, said Ramirez. But here, it sounds wonderful. It is so flexible. It makes sense.

A native of Spain, Ramirez is taking over as San Diegos Civic Organist from Carol Williams, who held the post for 15 years before moving to Virginia in 2016. The Spreckels Organ Society hired Ramirez from a field of 20 candidates.

We wanted somebody who can play the heck out of the organ, and somebody with charisma and personality that will bring people in to hear this wonderful organ, said Jack Lasher, president of the Spreckels Organ Society.

Ramirez concentrates during Sundays performance in Balboa Park (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Ramirez arrived from Spain late last week. He will play at least 44 free Sunday afternoon concerts per year at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. He also will oversee the parks 10-week Summer Organ Festival, which shows off the chops of the largest outdoor organ in the Western Hemisphere.

Internationally acclaimed for his performances and recordings, Ramirez is the founder and artistic director of the Barcelona-Mataro International Organ Festival. He performed an audition concert at Spreckels Pavilion last fall that featured eclectic adaptations of songs ranging from The Pink Panther to Danse Macabre.

Ramirez brought back the Danse Macabre for Sundays performance because of the positive reception the piece received last fall.

It is a wonderful piece to showcase all the different colors and possibilities in the organ, he said in an interview. For the people who are coming for the first time, I want to show them what this can do.

Hal Schneider of Bankers Hill came to Sundays show after reading about the expected playlist in the newspaper.

We like Bach, he said. We came to hear Toccata and Fugue. And the other stuff sounds good, too.

In 1915, Adolph and John Spreckels deeded the organ to the city of San Diego at the opening of the Panama-California Exposition, and it has been played regularly ever since. The massive instrument produces dramatic notes that bring to mind big weddings, old churches and Disneys Fantasia.

Ramirez said he intends to serve up a wide range of musical styles in his weekly concerts, including popular marches to honor San Diegos Navy and Marine heritage, show tunes, classical numbers and pop favorites.

I am exploring Queen, but I am also exploring other things that I also like very much like Pink Floyd, music from the 1500s or whatever, he said. So theres no limit.

Business

mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973
San Francisco billionaire and major Democratic donor Tom Steyer said Monday hes not going to run for Senate or the governors office in California this year, ending months of speculation about his future.

Im not going to run for office in 2018  thats not where I can make the biggest difference, Steyer said at a news conference he called in Washington. My fight is not just in California, my fight is in removing Donald Trump from office and from power.

The former hedge fund manager said he will instead pour $30 million into organizing young voters in 10 states, including California, to aid Democratic efforts to retake control of the House.

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The most important task for me, the task which I feel called to do is organizing  and mobilizing Americas voters. They have got to be the most powerful force in our politics, Steyer said.

Steyer, who has repeatedly flirted with running for office in California, was weighing a challenge against Sen. Dianne Feinstein as she seeks a fifth full term in the Senate. If he had run, he would have been her second major Democratic challenger  state Senate leader Kevin de Leon announced a run in October.

In a statement, Feinstein thanked Steyer for his activism and work on environmental issues.

I look forward to his continued activism in the months ahead as we campaign to take back both chambers of Congress to protect the nation from the dangerous Trump agenda, she said.

Steyers investment is an extension of the work his nonprofit, NextGen America, has done organizing on college campuses and online since 2014. NextGen will focus on the seven Republican-held districts in California where voters backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016  Steyer specifically called out Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista)  as well as at least two dozen other House incumbents. Hell also pour money into holding vulnerable Democratic Senate seats, and electing Democratic governors.

In 10 months, God willing, the people of America are going to send a wave across the nation. This tide will wash away the stain of the Trump administration and it will not recede until America lives up to its founding creed, Steyer said.

Steyer has gained additional attention in recent months with a $20-million nationwide campaign urging Congress to impeach President Trump. He said Monday that he expects to spend at least another $20 million on the effort.

More than 4 million people have signed Steyers impeachment petition, which he called a digital army that will be mobilized to engage with members of Congress, including Democrats, who have not committed to impeaching Trump.

The ads have drawn Trumps ire, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has called the effort a distraction, telling the Los Angeles Times in October that impeachment should only be about facts and the law, not policy disagreements.

Tom Steyer can light as much of his money on fire as he wants, but doesnt change that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi view him as a distraction. If Democrats message for 2018 is a baseless impeachment threat that the majority of voters disagree with, theyre going to lose, Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens said.

Steyer brushed off that concern, but said impeachment will not be a litmus test for which candidates he and his groups will support in 2018. Steyer and his wife, Kat, donated at least $91 million to federal races in 2016, putting them among the top donors in the country.

We know this makes some of our friends and allies in this city uncomfortable, Steyer said. We know that the so-called pundits argue that we have to choose between talking about impeachment and talking about policy. But we believe this is a false choice; the fact is the two are fundamentally intertwined. This Republican Congress is willing to aid and abet a dangerous president because holding him accountable would put their agenda at risk.

sarah.wire@latimes.com

Follow @sarahdwire on Twitter

Read more about the 55 members of Californias delegation at latimes.com/politics

ALSO:

Tom Steyers campaign to impeach Trump hits nerves

California could flip the House, and these 13 races will make the difference

Updates on California politics

UPDATES:

5:14 p.m.: This article was updated with a Republican response to Steyers impeachment effort.

This article was originally published at 11:05 a.m.
Re 18 things to watch in San Diego in 2018 (Jan. 1): A top priority in San Diego should always include education. While San Diego education is generally very good, the entire system should be better.

Better means more children should have the basic skills (reading, writing, math and science) to navigate proficiently through life in an atmosphere that inspires students to contribute, achieve and strive for more.

Better means district financial commitments that create stability and efficiency yearly and a system of accountability where all parties are responsible for their performance.

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Better means a curriculum that teachers fully support and students fully understand. Quite simply, better means a more effective learning proposition. Americas Finest City should include world-class education. Instead of just the continual teacher layoffs and monitoring test scores, could we create a new standard of learning that is the model for our country?

Our education requires a new vision that includes administrators, teachers, parents and community. Outstanding should be the goal.

Bruce Reed

Scripps Ranch

Re New year, new state laws (Jan. 1): So in our elected officials collective wisdom, schools will now need to provide free lunches to every student. School buses will need new equipment probably costing thousands of dollars for each bus. Schools will have to pay for tampons for all students who need them.

So schools that are struggling financially will have to pay for all these things, and somehow we think this will make education better? Nice use of the word provide by the politicians. This way, people might think the schools will be given what is needed. In reality, schools will have to pay for all these things and thus take money out of the classrooms.

Scott Munson

Julian

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.
Two major investors in Apple  one the California teachers pension plan  sent a letter over the weekend saying the tech giant needs to do more to protect the mental health of teens and children using their products.

The California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) and Jana Partners, which collectively own approximately $2 billion in Apple stock, joined together to send the letter saying the company should offer parents more choices and tools to help them ensure that young people are using Apple products in an optimal manner.

We believe that addressing this issue now will enhance long-term value for all shareholders, by creating more choices and options for your customers today and helping to protect the next generation of leaders, innovators and customers tomorrow, the letter says.

The investors say they partnered with a doctor from Boston Childrens Hospital, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a psychologist at San Diego State University to review evidence that brought them to this conclusion. The letter cites research showing teachers say that as smartphones have become more prevalent, their students have become less focused on education and have more emotional and social challenges, and that teenagers that spend a lot of time on electronic devices and on social media are more likely to be depressed or suicidal than those who dont.

There is no good reason why you should not address this issue proactively, the investors letter reads.

The steps suggested for Apple include forming a committee of experts, funding research and educating parents.

Hows the letter going over in the tech world? Tony Fadell, who helped create the first iPhone, jumped on Twitter to say he agreed and even adding that research about adult addiction to devices is needed, too.

His 10-tweet response, which can be read here, started an interesting discussion online.

The San Diego State University professor and researcher mentioned by CalSTRS and Jana Partners wrote an essay for The Atlantic last year summing up the phenomenon concerning the investors pretty simply: Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

Union-Tribune columnist Chris Reed explored this topic in a 2017 column asserting smart phones are changing our kids, for worse.

Its definitely a topic of conversation outside tech, medicine, psychology and academics, too. Plenty of people are already talking about this on, where else, social media.

We asked our own followers on social media what their concerns are, and they raised some interesting points.

Have you noticed positive or negative impacts on the children and teens in your life? Are you a parent with an opinion on this?

Let us know your thoughts with a tweet to @sdutideas, an email to letters@sduniontribune.com or to the address below and we may publish your opinion.

Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @abbyhamblin

ALSO

First, smartphones changed our world. Now theyre changing our kids, for worse

Cell phone radiation may impact your health, California health officials say
Sales of Barbie helped Mattel Inc.'s revenue rise 8 percent during the first quarter. But higher costs for its lawsuit over the Bratz dolls and other expenses sent net income down 33 percent.

Still, results for the quarter, which is a small one for toy makers because it follows the crucial holiday quarter, were higher than analysts expected. Shares rose 5 percent to a 52-week high in morning trading.

The first quarter is a bit like spring training, and for a business like ours, what is key in the early part of the year is preparing the business for the year ahead, said CEO Bob Eckert.

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Mattel, the largest U.S. toymaker, is gearing up for a heavy movie tie-in summer, with toy lines tied into Disney/Pixars Cars 2" due out June 24 and Green Lantern, Warner Brothers new superhero franchise out June 17.

Expectations are particularly high for Cars 2" because the Cars line has been a strong seller for Mattel despite having no new movie since the original in 2006.

Cars 2" action figures and new track sets are expected to be on toy shelves in mid-May.

In the first quarter, net income fell to $16.6 million, or 5 cents per share, from $24.8 million, or 7 cents per share, last year. Analysts expected earnings of 4 cents per share, according to FactSet.

Revenue rose 8 percent to $951.9 million from $880.1 million. That beat analyst predictions of $905.1 million. Sales rose 7 percent in the U.S. and 10 percent internationally.

Barbie remained a bright spot for Mattel, with revenue up 14 percent during the quarter, the iconic dolls sixth consecutive quarter of sales growth.

Dolls in general did well, with Monster High, Disney Princesses and American Girl all gaining.

Hot Wheels rose 6 percent. Fisher-Price revenue fell 2 percent after Mattels license to make Sesame Street toys ended at the end of last year and competitor Hasbro picked it up.

Higher revenue was offset by higher expenses, however, including $18.2 million in costs related to the latest lawsuit in its six-year legal battle with Bratz maker MGA.

A jury is currently deliberating on a federal copyright infringement and trade secrets lawsuit against MGA, related to rightful ownership of the pouty-lipped Bratz dolls. MGA has countersued.

Toy makers are facing higher costs for commodities such as resin and rising fuel prices. Mattel raised its prices on April 1 in the high single-digit percentage range to offset higher costs. Eckert said retailers have been reasonable about the increase.

Separately, the El Segundo, Calif.-based company issued a quarterly dividend of 23 cents, payable on June 17 to shareholders of record as of May 25.

On Thursday, Mattels chief rival Hasbro Inc. said its first-quarter net income fell 71 percent while revenue was nearly flat at $672 million.

Shares rose $1.39, or 5.4 percent, to $27.13 in morning trading. The stock has traded between $20.14 and $26.70 during the past year.
An Egyptian court sentenced a police officer to 15 years in prison on Tuesday for torturing an ultraconservative Muslim to death, a rare lengthy prison term for a policeman convicted of abuse.

The Criminal Court in Alexandria found Osama el-Kounayassi guilty of using torture to extract confessions from el-Sayed Belal, a member of the Salafi trend in the port city whom police accused of involvement in a suicide bombing at a Coptic Christian church over two years ago.

He is the second officer in the same case to receive a 15-year sentence. El-Kounayassi had previously been convicted in absentia, but then won a retrial.

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Torture was a key grievance in the popular revolt that ousted Egypts longtime authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak. But even after the uprising, most torture cases end up with the police either being acquitted or receiving light sentences

The case of Belal, a bearded young man, was one of two extreme cases of brutality that galvanized public anger shortly before the revolution.

The first one was the death of Khaled Said, also from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by two police officers in June 2010. His name became a rallying call for the uprising. We are all Khaled Said was the name of the Facebook group that helped organize the early protests.

The brutal death of Said, a 28-year-old middle class small businessman, particularly alarmed many Egyptians who viewed torture victims as political activists or people with a criminal background. The circumstances behind his killing are not fully clear.

But rights organizations say that the Islamist groups to which Belal belonged, as well as families whom the police considered habitual criminals, often bore the brunt of abuses during the Mubarak era by police who were under pressure to produce suspects for high-profile cases.

Belal was arrested along with other suspects in the aftermath of the bombing on Jan. 1, 2011, when at least 21 worshippers were killed while leaving a New Years Eve mass in Alexandria.

Ahmed el-Mashaly, a Salafi lawyer who says he was arrested and tortured alongside Belal, said that el-Kounayassi told the suspects, You will carry this case, either dead or alive.

The detainees were known to the notorious State Security investigations department - disbanded after the revolution- as they had been arrested several times during the last decade over their links to other Salafis who joined or tried to join the insurgency in Iraq.

We were the usual suspects. We were the easiest scapegoats and if any disaster happens, eyes immediately fall on us, he said over the phone from Alexandria.

For 40 days, we were subjected to long sessions of torture. Several officers, not one, took turns in electrocuting, beating, hanging us like sheep as though we were being roasted, blindfolded and handcuffed all the time, el-Mashaly said.

One day, Belal was brought back to the cell after a full day of torture, el-Mashaly said. The moment he sat, he fell on the ground and I heard the rattle of death, he said.

El-Kounayassis lawyer, Anis al-Manawi, argued during the case that the witness accounts contradicted each other. He said his client was not guilty.

El-Mashaly said there is still a strong possibility that el-Kounayassi and his fellow officer could overturn their cases on appeal. He said accused polices colleagues and prosecutors often do a sloppy job investigating such cases, leaving many loopholes.

Karim Ennarah, a researcher on police reform at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, agreed it was likely that the verdict would be overturned on appeal. But he said it still gave a strong message that police can be held accountable for their acts.

Whatever happens next, whether the verdict will be overturned or not... the verdict can remake the relationship between the judiciary and the police and (establish) that police officers can be imprisoned, he said.

Meanwhile, a Cairo court continued its inquiry into another case involving the security forces - the discovery of shredded documents in State Securitys headquarters when it was stormed by protesters during the 2011 uprising.

Egypts Defense Minister and army chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi gave testimony in the case, according to a lawyer who provided details of the closed proceedings. El-Sissis statement did not shed light on the shredding of the documents but it was a rare case of a top army officer being summoned for an inquiry.

The lawyer spoke anonymously as he was not authorized to discuss briefings.
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The Calypso crew and I will be undertaking a series of voyages of exploration and discovery in all the seas of the world, began Jacques-Yves Cousteau, we have few rules and no uniforms, only the right cap. Cousteau was referring to the iconic red knit cap worn by himself and his crew members throughout the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. The first episode aired 50 years ago today.

Throughout the 8-year-long ABC series, the Calypso crew explored marine life using techniques and inventions pioneered by Captain Cousteau. The premiere episode, directed by Cousteaus son Philippe, sees the crew studying sharks in various spots around the Indian Ocean. Like Cousteaus Palme dOr-winning 1956 feature film, The Silent World, his television series documented ocean life in color and brought the mysteries of the deep to viewers the world over.

The Posts 1973 profile of the Renaissance man, The Wet World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, discusses the legacy of the poet, philosopher, painter, inventor, author, linguist, connoisseur of fine wines, and war hero. The author, James Stewart Gordon, visited Cousteau at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and noted, He talked about his adventures and his fear that present-day industrial wastes pouring into the oceans might destroy all future marine life.

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Amongst Jacques Cousteaus varied accolades and accomplishments was a nascent environmentalism before such a concern was common. In 1960, Cousteau led a resistance against the French governments plan to dispose of nuclear waste in the Mediterranean Sea. He worried that humankind had come to view the ocean as an infinitely vast resource instead of a delicate ecosystem that could be overwhelmed by pollution and overfishing. In 1971, Cousteau wrote an article in The New York Times called Our Oceans Are Dying, warning about the worlds diminishing coral reefs and claiming there is only one pollution because every chemical in the air or on land will end up in the ocean.

Today, Cousteaus sons, Jean-Michel Cousteau and Pierre-Yves Cousteau, are involved in marine conservation with the Ocean Futures Society and International Union for Conservation of Nature, respectively. They continue the exploratory, educational, and environmental work of their father in the oceans he called sometimes serene, sometimes savage, and always beautiful.
An analysis of so-called pukao  colossal stone hats of monumental statues (moai) on Easter Island  provides evidence contrary to the widely held belief that the ancient civilization had a warrior culture.

Pukao are large, cylindrical stones made from a volcanic rock known as red scoria.

Weighing multiple tons, they were placed on the heads of the moai during prehistoric times, consistent with the Polynesian traditions of honoring their ancestors.

Professor Carl Lipo from the State University of New York, Binghamton, and his colleagues from Pennsylvania State University, California State University, and the University of Oregon produced the first study analyzing the pukao and their significance.

The researchers created 3D images of 50 pukao that once adorned moai and compared them to 13 additional stone hats located in Puna Pau, the islands red scoria pukao quarry.

They discovered that there are far more drawings carved into pukao than was previously thought.

With the building mitigating any sense of conflict, the moai construction and pukao placement were key parts to the success of the island, Professor Lipo said.

In our analysis of the archaeological records, we see evidence that demonstrates the prehistoric communities repeatedly worked together to build monuments.

The action of cooperation had a benefit to the community by enabling sharing of information and resources.

Every time we look at the archaeological record of the island, we are surprised by what we find, he added.

There is much more to be learned from this remarkable place  important answers that shed light on the abilities of our ancestors, as well as potential ideas for contemporary society about what it takes to survive on a tiny and remote island.

The teams results are published in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.

While Easter Island is famous, the archaeological record of the island is not well-documented, Professor Lipo said.

We believe that scientists can learn a great deal from the pukao by examining this new information.

_____

Sean W. Hixon et al. Using Structure from Motion Mapping to Record and Analyze Details of the Colossal Hats (Pukao) of Monumental Statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Advances in Archaeological Practice, published online October 5, 2017; doi: 10.1017/aap.2017.28
FLORENCE, S.C.  A man faces two outstanding charges after turning himself in to the Florence Police Department.

Wesley Albert Weaver turned himself in Saturday and was charged twice with assault and battery in the second degree.

One charge stems from an allegation that Weaver grabbed a womans groin on Dec. 26 in the Magnolia Mall parking lot in Florence.

The second charge is for an incident on Tuesday where Weaver allegedly slapped a woman on the buttocks in the Walmart on Beltline Drive in Florence.

Weaver was transported to the Florence County Detention Center.
The seven-night cruise operates round-trip Portland and calls at Rockland, Eastport and Bar Harbor in Maine, and Grand Manan Island, St. Andrews and St. John in New Brunswick.

Three departures are offered in 2018: May 12, Oct. 16 and Oct. 23.

Led by Pearl Seas expert guides, Pearl Mist passengers can stroll along the charming, turn-of-the-century streets of St. Andrews' National Historic District, and visit Grand Manan Island, renowned for whale-watching and birdwatching. Some 240 species of birds make the island their home.

The cruise also visits St. John on the Bay of Fundy, where the tides force the waters to reverse their flow, creating the famous Reversing Rapids at the mouth of the Saint John River.

Along the way Pearl Mist provides enrichment programs, regionally inspired dining, opportunities to view spectacular coastal scenery and chances to visit art galleries, historic sites, museums and markets.
Fire continued to rage on the Iranian tanker that collided with the bulker CF Crystal on Saturday evening.

The body of crew member from the vessel has been found according to an Iranian official. Mohammad Rastad, head of Irans Ports and Maritime Organization, was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency that the body was sent to Shanghai for identification.

The other 31 seafarers from the tanker remain missing. The tanker had a crew of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshi nationals.

Chinese authorities meanwhile said that the still blazing tanker was at risk of exploding. The tanker was carrying a cargo of 136,000 tonnes of oil condensate at the time of the collision.

IMO secretary-general Ki-Tack Lim offer his deepest sympathies to the families of the missing seafarers.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the seafarers still missing from the oil tanker Sanchi, following a reported collision off the coast of China. I send my deepest sympathies to all their families and loved ones, Lim said.

This is an ongoing situation which we are monitoring. IMO stands ready to offer any technical assistance that may be needed. In the longer term, it is expected that there will be a full investigation into this incident and that the results and findings will be brought to IMO so that we can do whatever may be necessary to reduce the chances of such an incident happening again."

The cause of the collision is unknown.
Since Cosco acquired a majority stake in Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) and assumed management in 2016 after winning an international tender, the image of the port has been changing rapidly, a fact Greek Shipping and Island Policy Minister Panayiotis Kouroublis stressed 4 January on the occasion of the launch of new projects to upgrade Greece's largest port.

Work is well advanced as the port readies to for the arrival from China of the new large floating dock Piraeus III, at the end of February. The new works include dredging the harbour to create up to 20 m of operating depth, providing new electricity and water supply networks, and installing four mooring buoys for anchoring ships.

The new floating repair dock  240 m long, 45 m wide, 22,000 tons lifting capacity and full crane equipment  will be able to service ships with a capacity of 80,000 tons.

Kouroublis is full of praise for the Sino-Greek cooperation at Piraeus port. Speaking to Xinhua, 4 January, He said: The projects that have started at Perama and will proceed with the lifting of two wrecks off Pier II by the Shipping ministry, so that the infrastructure for the installation of PPA's large floating dock can be created, show how smoothly the cooperation of the Greek government with the investors is progressing.

They also show the Shipping ministry's policy will continue to facilitate any development activity stemming from Cosco's contractual obligations regarding bureaucracy and other obstacles. At the same time, we support workers' rights by welcoming the latest agreement between employees and the PPA to sign a Collective Labor Agreement.

The once booming Greek shiprepair industry has largely become dormant in recent years but with the arrival of the new dock the government hopes ships will no longer need to carry out repair and maintenance operations in other Mediterranean shipyards, while this move is also expected to create new jobs in the Greek market.

George Koumpenas, vp operations at Greeces Celestyal Cruises, welcomed the works as a very positive development, in particular for companies managing passenger ships operating in the region as well as for the Greek shipbuilding industry.

In recent years, due to a lack of suitable dock sizes, companies have been obliged to dock their vessels in neighbouring countries such as Malta, Turkey and Croatia. This has resulted in the loss of significant revenues for the national economy, Koumpenas told Xinhua.

Installation and operation of a large floating dock will help maintain and develop the shipbuilding industry in the wider Piraeus and Perama areas, as an important criterion for the choice of the port for seafaring companies is the ability to make repairs, said Koumpenas.
#FIFA World Cup Ghana coach 'happy' to see old pupil Son Heung-min in Qatar When South Korea and Ghana square off in their second Group H match of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar later this month, it will also set up a reunion for a coach and a former player o...
Eleven small businesses in Pontiac are the recipients of Flagstar Banks first round of business investment grants and loans, totaling $125,000 in grants and a $35,000 loan.

The Pontiac Big Idea Grant Program is committed to investing $700,000 per year into Pontiac over five years. Of the total $3.5 million overall planned investment, approximately $500,000 will be allocated in the form of grants and $250,000 in the form of business loans, with an average grant size of $10,000 and an average loan size of $5,000 to $25,000. The disbursement is being leveraged through a partnership with CEED Lending, a Small Business Administration lender.

Were pleased to see our efforts to support small businesses in Pontiac turn into real dollars to help entrepreneurs in the community, says Alessandro DiNello, president, and CEO of Flagstar Bank. This is how the program is supposed to work. We look forward to similar success with future disbursements of our $10 million commitment to the city.

Grant applications are reviewed by a ten-person community-based Advisory Council.

We have committed that the people of Pontiac will own the grant/loan program, for Pontiac. Flagstar will not make decisions on the grant/loans, says Beverly Meek, vice-president and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) director at Flagstar Bank. Therefore we have developed an Advisory Council that is comprised of smart people who live or work in Pontiac and have demonstrated leadership and consistent commitment to the people of Pontiac.

Grant awards will be provided monthly following a review from the advisory council. The criteria to receive a grant is the business must be in Pontiac and be a for-profit business.

The grant application is intended to be easy therefore there are only five questions which ask what the money is to be used for, how it will help Pontiac, how it will help the applicant and whether the idea can create jobs in Pontiac, says Meek. We have also learned through hundreds of interviews that to be successful; we need to also invest in the business ecosystem in Pontiac to ensure business owners have the support they need to develop a strong business and keep those businesses growing.

Flagstar Banks investment will also include providing grants to the City of Pontiac to help their website become a one-stop destination for prospective entrepreneurs, and will support the Main Street Pontiac program to focus on improving the downtown area and unifying businesses together toward a common goal of creating business opportunity in the city.

Willetrea Washington is one of the grant recipients, she began her business, Washington Events, seven years ago with a focus on corporate and political event planning and womens empowerment. She bills herself the corporate savior. For Washington, Pontiac is home.

Willetrea WashingtonI am a resident, and now a business owner, in the city of Pontiac. I am a graduate of Pontiac Central. Go Chiefs! she laughs. Washington will be using the grant money to hire and secure an office location in Pontiac and be a part of the nascent revitalization. The one thing that we never lost was the fact that we're still a family in Pontiac. There is the spirit in Pontiac that's awesome.

Roni Leibovich, the founder of Numbers Brothers, works on helping businesses understand their data to support better decisions. He decided to locate in Pontiac primarily for the location and recently hired his first full-time employee. With the help of his $10,000 grant, he plans to hire and secure licensing and technology for 2018.

I love the centrality of Pontiac, says Leibovich. I love the proximity of Pontiac. I live in West Bloomfield, so it's a short commute. I have clientele from downtown Detroit all along Woodward to Bloomfield Hills, and being in Pontiac allows me to stay central to my clients. Roni Leibovich

Ben Carr of AdLocal, a digital marketing agency, is using his $10,000 award to upgrade technology. That's really what the money's going towards, making sure that we have the right equipment, a couple of new computers, he says. We did a really big upgrade.

Carr and Leibovitch are also using portions of their grants to rehab a space at 7 North Saginaw, Suite 300 into a coworking space called PontiacTribe, as well as to build their businesses. PontiacTribe charges $150 per month for drop-in and $350 for a dedicated workspace.



The place needed to be upgraded, it smelled really bad, it was a dirty space, says Carr. But you go in there now, and you would never imagine what it looks like compared to what it looked like before.

Ben CarrThe business grants are part of a larger $10 million commitment by Flagstar to invest in Pontiac. Including $5 million in home ownership mortgage products with an emphasis on veterans and addressing the appraisal gap in Pontiac. The investment also includes $1 million to fund financial capacity-building programs to assist low-income households and a $1.5 million investment in the renovation of the Flagstar Strand Theater.

We want to have an impact on economic development in Pontiac; we didn't want to be sporadic with investments that did not feed into an overall strategy to help the infrastructure and support economic development in the area, says Meek. So we decided to develop what we call a comprehensive community impact program, and that requires us to be here long-term. We want to have this program spur the creation of jobs and to attract small businesses and mid-size businesses to Pontiac, and we want to create an environment where all income levels can thrive.

I think young professionals need to see that there is a real working model and a real economy and a real area for opportunity in Pontiac, to want to stay here, says Carr. I think the ingredients are ripe for growth, especially with opportunities like Flagstar infusing capital back into the entrepreneur.



The first round of grants and loans include the following:


Bernita Bradley

Brushing teeth at Starfish Early Head Start

As they saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. So what does education look like when you listen to the village to learn what it needs?Earlier this month, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and The Kresge Foundation announced their newest initiative, Hope Starts Here . The 10-year comprehensive blueprint will address the dire need for quality early education in Detroit through an initial $50 million commitment from the foundations. Kellogg announced that half of its investment, over $12 million, would be spent in the next 12 months.The initiative launched its planning phase a year ago with an important first step: finding out what parents wanted. The team recruited and trained residents to host sessions to listen to parents in their community. In total, the initiative engaged with over 18,000 parents, caregivers, teachers, and community members to create a series of six imperatives and 15 interlocking strategies.Bernita Bradley, a recruiter for Hope Starts Here, became involved in education reform after experiencing the ongoing challenges navigating the Detroit school system as a parent. Now she is the Community Development Manager at Brilliant Detroit , an organization that helps create early child and family centers in neighborhoods."This is an unheard of brainstorm to see what kids need," Bradley says. "To parents it is monumental. They think, 'Wow someone is actually listening to me, they are not putting anything into action without me.'"Bradley, whose children attended 16 different schools across nine districts, is no stranger to the difficulties parents face in the Detroit school system. She experienced classes with too many kids and unstable teachers who didn't seem to be teaching.Bradley emphasized the importance of addressing the needs of parents. "It starts with the home," she says. "If the families don't have certain resources, they won't be prepared before they go to kindergarten."At the Hope Starts Here Unveiling at the Charles Wright Museum, Rip Rapson, President and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, outlined tangible projects including upgrading educational facilities, building a new early childhood learning center, increasing wages for educators, and improving professional development. In addition, the initiative will also provide scholarships to parents who need childcare.By 2027, Hope Starts Here wants to see Detroit putting children and families first. Mark Davidoff, Chair of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, believes that efforts to bring back the city must start with the children. "We always hear 'live, work, play, Detroit.' But unless we add 'raise our children,' we will not accomplish anything."Jonetta Banks, an eastside resident, has been involved in the initiative since December of 2016. As a mother of nine children and four grandchildren, Banks wants Hope Starts Here to improve child health care and pregnancy assistance. "I'm excited to see the progress," she says.The framework focuses on the first eight years of a child's life, which "provide a critical window of opportunity to change childrens livesand our communitiesfor the better." The initiative is a holistic approach to early childhood education, beginning with comprehensive health screenings.Kids who grow up in poverty face higher risks for health and academic problems. Detroit's children face extreme disparities, even before birth. The infant mortality rate in the city is more than twice the national average. More than 60 percent of children ages 0 to 5 live in poverty. More than 86 percent of Detroit's third graders are not reading at grade level.LaJune Montgomery Tabron, President and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, stated the initiative will create opportunities for parents to become educators, recruit more men into early childhood education, and implement new neighborhood grants for early childhood education. As part of the initiative, Tabron also announced the launch of the Detroit Early Childhood Advocacy Network to inform the community with critical information.The Detroit Public School system will be involved as well, according to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. "This will not reach its true potential if it's not integrated with the school district," he says. "Often initiatives create an initial wave, but then dissipate. As a district we are going to open our doors for collaboration."Rashad Buni, an organizer for affordable and accessible family care at Michigan United , says that in order to address the root of the issue, poverty, massive policy change is needed. "We can't just be advocates, we need to empower people in the community to take control as well."Buni was interested to see how the Hope Starts Here initiative intersects with others in the city. "We must include Detroit's children and the ones disproportionately caring for them: women of color."Of course, an integral part of the village are the children themselves. The initiative has uplifted their voices as well. In a brief video at the Hope Starts Here unveiling, small children spoke about their dreams and aspirations behind a pile of blocks. "I want to be a good cop," one said.Another said, "I got a lotta persons to be."
Press Release

January 8, 2018 Transcript of Interview with Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon Drilon: Sa akin po, beyond the legislative agenda yung mga banat ni Kagalang-galang Speaker Alvarez sa senado ay unang-una, hindi po ginagawa iyan because of inter-chamber courtesies. Nasa 20 taon na ako dito sa senado, ngayon ko lang naririnig ang speaker na bumabanat sa senado. Pangalawa, sa aking tingin, beyond the criticisms - unfounded as it is - of the pace of the senate that would act on these measures, I think this is part of the effort para pababain ang tingin ng tao sa senado, para pagdating doon sa Charter change, kung ibig nilang burahin ang senado sa pamahalaan ay madali na. This attack on the senate is part of the deliberate attempt to weaken the senate as an institution of democracy. The senate is part of the check and balance system within the legislature; in the same manner that the senate may not agree with the house, the house may not agree with the senate. That is precisely part of the senate. Eh ngayon hindi naman lahat ng pwedeng ipasa eh papayag sila. That's precisely the reason why we have a check and balance in the same manner na hindi naman lahat ng ipinapasa namin sa senado ay payag sila. This is a democratic way of doing it. The attacks on the senate as an institution weaken our role as an institution which checks on the other house. For example, yung death penalty na binanggit ni Speaker Alvarez na hindi namin inaaktuhan, dahilan po sa ang karaniwang mga senador ay hindi pumapayag sa death penalty. Therefore ang position ng senado ay hindi dapat ibalik ang death penalty. Why should we be criticized for not passing that? That's part of our duty to make a judgment; that's what we are elected for - to make a judgment whether or not a particular law should be passed. The committees in the senate are controlled by the majority and therefore, the majority has not included it as part of the legislative agenda. You may be aware that we have these regular meetings with the house leadership where we agree on a legislative agenda. The death penalty is not there. The restoration of the death penalty is not part of our legislative agenda. Our records will show that 413 bills were referred to the Senate by the House in this present Congress. We have acted and approved 116 of them or about 28%, so it is not true that we are sitting on these bills. You know, this is not my role because I am the minority leader but I am citing this in fairness to the institution that is being attacked. Given all of these the more I am convinced that there is another agenda. Siguro mahina ang senado sa taumbayan at pagdating ng constitutional amendments, unicameral legislature na ang pag-uusapan at buburahin na ang senado, or kung hindi man we will be ineffective in our role to check on the bilsl passed by the house. Q: Ano ang dapat gawin ng senate ngayon? Drilon: That is not my role and I'm just pointing out what I feel about this. The leadership should respond to that question. Q: Ang sinasabi ni SP Pimentel ay sinasagot naman niya ang mga banat ni Speaker, do you think it's enough? Drilon: Sa akin po, kasi ang issue na ipinapalabas ay hindi inaaktuhan ang mga bills nila. But for me, two things. It is beyond the legsilative agenda kasi inaaktuhan naman. Nagmi-meeting kami ng regular. Bakit bumabanat ng ganyan? To me, the result is, whether intended or not, ang resulta po niyan ay sumasama ang tingin ng taumbayan sa senado. Our institution is affected. The perception of the people on the senate is affected by these attacks. Q: There should be more profound statements? Drilon: I have already made a statement and I called on the Senate President to defend the senate against these unwarranted attacks. Q: Sa death penalty lang, kahit ngayon hindi pa rin ito kasama sa priority ng senate? Drilon: I am not aware of any change in the priority list that we have agreed with the house. Q: The senate president said that it is already included in this year's legislative agenda. Drilon: The priority agenda of both houses did not include the restoration of the death penalty. Q: Ang sabi ni Senator Sotto na sa pag-uusap raw nila ni Speaker Alvarez, bicameral pa rin. Drilon: Yes, but the effect of these attacks - maybe that is not the intention and maybe unintended - but the result of such attacks on the senate as an institution affects the perception of the people on the senate. That might be the unintended consequence. Q: How can you fight back? Drilon: I'm not fighting back. I'm just defending the senate. Q: Ano po ang benefit ng unicameral? Drilon: Eh di siguro mas madaling i-railroad yung mga kailangan i-railroad? Remember that the senate is always proud of its tradition of independence. Hindi po nape-pressure ang senado ng pangulo at alam naman ng pangulo iyan that the senate is known for its independence. Q: Is there a need for the leadership to communicate it with Speaker Alvarez? Drilon: I'm just communicating an opinion; that it is the burden of the leadership to defend the institution. Q: Ano po sa tingin ninyo ang dapat na mode to amend the constitution? Drilon: Before I was deposed as chairman of the committee on constitutional amendment, precisely we had several hearings and we asked several resource persons including former CJ Hilario Davide. The records will bear me out that I invited ES Medialdea to secure the views of the OP on what mode is preferred and what are the amendments they should prefer. ES Medialdea said that on that day the President issued an executive order to create a commission to study the proposal. We were supposed to be a recipient of that study. Up to now, over a year has passed and we have not received anything. You must remember that theoretically, amendment to the constitution is the role and power of the legislature. In fact the proposed amendments to the constitution, which could be proposed by Congress as a constituent assembly, is not sent to the President for approval, not like an ordinary law. It is sent to the people in a plebiscite to approve or disapprove. Nevertheless the reality is, the congress would seek the view of the President but at the end of the day, it is congress that will decide as to what the amendments will be or what the mode of amendments will be. Q: Ano yung pros and cons of doing it via con-ass? Drilon: I don't want to preempt. The committee, now headed by Sen. Pangilinan, will have to conduct and continue the hearings where we left. Q: That is the supposed recommendation from the study group formed by the palace? Drilon: Well among those inputs will be, if any by the Palace, but it will be the committee which will submit a report to the senate in plenary. Q: Isa pa sa sinabi ni Speaker yung possibility ng no-el? Drilon: The election is provided under the constitution, so you have to amend the constitution before you say no-el and that is several steps away from where we are today. The constitutional amendments committee, which has jurisdiction over this, has first to decide if we have to amend the constitution dahil marami rin sa ating mga kababayan ang hindi payag na i-amend ang constitution. The first step is to determine whether or not we have to amend the constitution. If the senate says, yes we have to amend the constitution, the next step is how to amend it: is it through a constitutional assembly or con-con? Is it only after we have decided on which of the two modes can the proposals be submitted and debated upon and decided, including federalism. May proseso iyan at hindi po ganon na lang na bukas magsa-submit kami ng federalism proposal, hindi ganoon iyon. Q: Hindi po possible na May 2019? Drilon: I cannot say. I'm not in the leadership of the senate. Q: Given the processes? Drilon: That would have to be determined by congress kung ano dapat ang timetable. Q: Dapat walang no-el? Drilon: Sa amin, sa partido at sa minorya sa senado, hindi po kami papaya na may no-el. We are in the opposition and we do not have control over the leverages of the power. Q: Yung con-ass will really speed up things if ever? Drilon: That's one argument that the con-ass is more economical. Those in favor of the concon naman say we should not put a price tag on amending the constitution. Q: This early, some congressmen are saying that they are in favor of staying in their position in a hold-over capacity? Drilon: I'm not in favor of any holdover or no-el. The holdover is another version of no-el. Q: Mase-settle na ba yung if there is a voting process separately? Drilon: Hindi pa. Q: Do you support Makabayan's petition against the extension of martial law? Yes, we support the petition because that will allow the Supreme Court to once more pass upon the validity of the declaration of the extension. The constitution provides for that remedy and the court is obliged, under the constitution, to render a decision 30 days after it is submitted for decision. The SC has to act on it, on the merits, as distinguished from the old constitution where the SC then could consider it as political question and decline to decide. In this particular case, under our present system, the SC must decide on the validity of the extension. That is a welcome move that gives the SC an opportunity to pass upon the validity of the extension.
Press Release

January 8, 2018 Legarda Urges Public to Patronize PHL Contemporary Art Senator Loren Legarda called on the public to support Philippine art and visit the newly-launched Philippine Contemporary Art Network (PCAN) at the Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. The PCAN, which was made possible by the guidance, vision, and support of Legarda, serves as a venue for research, exhibition, curatorial exchange, public engagement and publication. Based in the state university's Vargas Museum, it was launched last December 8, 2017 with its initial project, "Place of Region in the Contemporary," that will run until January 27, 2018. "It all started with a vision to have our own permanent institute for contemporary art that will fully develop the skills of the country's talented artists and curators. With the help of Dr. Patrick Flores, this vision has finally turned into reality," said Legarda, who has been actively advocating for the development of Philippine art and is the visionary behind the return of the Philippines to the Venice Biennale in 2015 after a 51-year hiatus. Dr. Flores, director of PCAN, explains that PCAN's inaugural project was built through three nodes in a network: Knowledge Production and Circulation; Exhibition and Curatorial Analysis; Public Engagement and Artistic Formation. "The project endeavors to activate a network to coordinate a range of interventions in contemporary art in the Philippines and to cast a sharper profile for it on an inter-local and trans-regional scale. It is keen to confront the requirements of research and discourse; curate art and subject the curatorial gesture to critique; and propose modes of catalyzing the public sphere of art and in the process harness the energies of its agents." The three nodes were coordinated by Roberto G. Paulino, Renan Laru-an, and Tessa Maria Guanzon, who was a participant of the Curatorial Intensive in Manila last November 2016, a project supported by Legarda with the New York-based Independent Curators International (ICI). Legarda said she hopes that through PCAN, we can create a vibrant forum for the discussion and development of contemporary art in the Philippines. "The country has a wealth of talented artists and curators and we are now seeing a renaissance in Philippine art. With sustained government support, as well as initiatives from the private sector, we can do more and we can show that to the world. This is just the beginning of a vision to put the Filipino talent in its rightful place in the world," Legarda concluded. The PCAN's Place of Region in the Contemporary is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 9am-5pm, except declared holidays. For more information, please contact Vargas Museum at (+632) 981-8500 loc. 4024 (UP trunkline), (+632) 928-1925 (telefax) or [email protected], or visit their website at http://vargasmuseum.upd.edu.ph.
Oakland City Councilwoman Desley Brooks knockdown assault on former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown at a barbecue restaurant in Jack London Square could wind up costing the citys taxpayers a whopping $3 million  plus attorneys fees.

At issue is the citys portion of the $3.77 million verdict handed down by an Alameda County jury Dec. 21 against the East Oakland councilwoman for knocking Brown to the ground during a heated 2015 exchange. The fight was over city funding for a Brown-linked nonprofits housing and commercial development.

Brooks had pledged to kill the funding, reportedly telling Brown the project was of no benefit to black people.

The war of words ended when Brooks shoved the then-72-year-old Brown over a set of fixed chairs at Everett and Jones Barbeque, the jury found. Brown hit her head on a table and landed on the floor on her back.

She suffered bruises and a torn rotator cuff that required surgery. Brown filed a police report, but no criminal charges were brought against Brooks.

The jury in Browns civil case concluded that Brooks had been acting within her capacity as an Oakland official when she shoved the ex-Panther, and nailed the city for $2.4 million for Browns past pain and suffering and $1.375 million for future suffering.

Thats an armored carload more than the $25,000 that Browns attorney, Charles Bonner, says the city had put on the table in hopes of settling the case ahead of trial.

The judge could knock back the verdict as excessive, but Bonner doesnt expect it.

Their (the citys) own doctor told them all the injuries came from this assault, and (Brown) has permanent injuries, Bonner said. She will be in pain for the rest of her life.

He added, The award is not out of proportion with the damages. Elaines life has been totally altered.

Michael Short/Special To The Chronicle

If the judgment stands, Oakland will have to dig into its general fund to pay more than $3 million to Brown. Only $750,000 would be covered by its liability insurance.

And because the jury found that the assault was a case of elder abuse, the city may be on the hook for Browns attorneys fees as well. Bonner wouldnt say how much hell be seeking, but experts speculated that the figure could run north of $375,000.

For a city thats always scraping to pay its bills, its more than painful. The $3 million price tag, for example, is equal to all the extra funding Oakland plans to spend over the next two years to deal with its growing homeless camps.

Any verdict against a public servant is a tremendous waste of taxpayer money, said Justin Berton, spokesman for Mayor Libby Schaaf. Oaklanders would rather spend their money on affordable housing, libraries and paved roads than one individuals bad behavior.

For the city, at least, this is about as bad as this case will get. But its just starting for Brooks.

Jurors are scheduled to reconvene Monday to consider punitive damages against the 56-year-old councilwoman, who has represented East Oakland at City Hall since 2002. Those damages would come directly out of her pocket.

Alex Katz, chief of staff for City Attorney Barbara Parker, said his office would have no comment while the case is pending. But the city is likely to appeal.

In a statement after the jury returned its verdict, Brooks said, While Im disappointed in the decision, I respect the jury and the process. I assume the city will appeal the decision and I will respect that process. Neither she nor her attorney responded to our request for comment.

The Brown judgment is the latest in a series of big civil payouts for Oakland in recent years. In 2014, Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran whose skull was fractured by a police beanbag during an Occupy Oakland protest, settled with the city for $4.5 million. But in that case, the city was required to shell out only $1.8 million, with insurance picking up the rest.

The same year, a cyclist who suffered severe injuries in a crash on pothole-laden Mountain Boulevard agreed to a $3.25 million settlement. As in the Brown case, the city was on the hook for $3 million.

Although shes not responding to our questions, Brooks did send an email greeting to East Oakland residents on New Years Day. She said she looked forward to working with her constituents to build a better Oakland and a better community in 2018.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX-TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or email matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandross
More than $187,000 has been pledged to an online fundraising campaign started by a Bay Area tech company executive to help a Roy Moore accuser whose Alabama home burned down in a case of suspected arson.

The GoFundMe campaign to help Tina Johnson, one of the women who accused the failed U.S. Senate candidate of sexual harassment, started Friday and exceeded its initial $100,000 fundraising goal in less than two days.

I dont know this woman, but I do know she has risked a lot and has lost a lot, said organizer Katie Jacobs Stanton, chief marketing officer for Color Genomics, a Burlingame genomic testing company. And its important for people to support their neighbors, whether they are in California or Alabama.

Johnson is one of several women who accused Moore of past incidents of sexual misconduct. The accusations helped scuttle the Republican candidates bid for a Senate seat last month. Moore, a former judge, has denied the accusations.

The home Johnson shared with her husband and grandson in Gadsden, northeast of Birmingham, was destroyed by fire Jan. 3. Investigators in Etowah County, Ala., are investigating the blaze as an arson, but said there was no indication the fire was linked to the accusations against Moore.

Stanton is a former Google executive and Twitter vice president who served as White House director of citizen participation in the first year of the Obama administration.

Stanton said shed never before met or talked to Johnson, but was heartbroken to hear news of the fire. She had never started a GoFundMe campaign, but felt inspired by her bravery to help even in just a small way to rebuild her home. A reporter in Alabama helped Stanton connect with Johnson by text and then by phone.

Shes just a very sweet, humble woman, Stanton said. She just wants to get back on her feet with her family.

The GoFundMe page went up Friday and had taken donations from nearly 6,000 people by Tuesday , with funds coming from people in all 50 states, Stanton said.

I dont know Tina Johnson. But I believe her, Stanton wrote on the page. The initial funding target was based on the value of Johnsons home as listed on the real estate site Zillow.com, but Stanton knew she would need more to rebuild.

Whatever is left over, she wants to offer to local nonprofits, and theres one she had in mind that does support for women in need, Stanton said.

We are overwhelmed by your generosity and kindness, Stanton wrote in an update. Its a wonderful reminder that ordinary people can do extraordinary things and love trumps hate.

Johnson told the Alabama Media Group that she was grateful for the support.

I just thank everyone all across America from the bottom of my heart, Johnson told AL.com . I just cannot give them the proper words. God is good.

Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny
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Editor s note: Here are three Bay Area startups worth watching this week.

Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating app that promises to give women all the control.

Founded five years ago by three sisters, the San Francisco company has raised $11 million in funding and claims responsibility for thousands of relationships. Users can either subscribe or pay for more matches as they go.

How it works: Each day at noon, men receive a number of womens profiles  known as Bagels  that they can either like or pass on. Then, Coffee Meets Bagel selects the potential matches for women from the men who express interest.

Ladies then choose who they talk to based on the men who have indicated that they would like to chat.

CEO Arum Kang said the company could be trending on startup database Crunchbase because the holidays tend to be the apps busy season. The company also released a feature in November that allows users to record themselves answering questions like: What was your holiday meal? and What is your New Years resolution?

Online dating is heading in the direction where people want to feel like they can connect with someone on the service, Kang said. Things like video can really help people achieve that goal.

But, she said, theres one problem: Women have been slower to adopt the video feature than men. Kang said her team is trying to figure out how to make women feel more confident in front of the camera.

It continues to fascinate me how women and men behave so differently and interpret things differently, she said. Because of these discrepancies, she said, We continue to focus on our female experience.

Also trending:

DroneDeploy

What it does: A cloud-based drone mapping and analytics service that allows people to inspect large plots of land, such as construction sites and farms, from above. It generates a 3-D satellite map in real time.

What happened: This company could be trending this week because of a report by KBV Research that says the market for global drone services is expected to reach $14.1 billion by 2022.

Why it matters: 3-D maps have a variety of uses. Farmers could monitor their land and spot problems, like a rotting section of produce, before it spreads.

Headquarters: San Francisco.

Funding: $31 million, according to Crunchbase.

Employees: 51-100, according to Crunchbase.

Touch

of Modern

What it does: An e-commerce site and app that offers lifestyle products, clothing and accessories designed for men.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

What happened: The company was ranked fifth on the list of Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America by Entrepreneur magazine last week.

Why it matters: Like every online retailer, Touch of Modern faces stiff competition from Amazon. The company is attempting to set itself apart from the rest by focusing on male customers and offering carefully chosen products at a discount.

Headquarters: San Francisco.

Funding: $17 million.

Employees: 130.

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani

How we pick

the companies

Every week, The Chronicle and Crunchbase, a San Francisco firm that tracks key businesses in technology, analyze private Bay Area companies based on their financial backing, employees and activity on Crunchbase. We feature three that are moving up in the ranks. For more information on the companies: www.crunchbase.com
A prominent San Francisco donor to the Democratic Party says she is considering withdrawing support for senators who urged their colleague Al Franken to resign after he was accused of sexual misconduct.

Susie Tompkins Buell has been one of the Democratic Partys most generous supporters for decades. In particular, she has been a champion of female politicians, including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Maria Cantwell of Washington.

Last month, those senators were among the dozens who called for Franken to resign from the Senate after at least six women accused him of sexual harassment or misconduct, such as forcible kissing and groping.

Franken announced his resignation Dec. 7 before the Senate Ethics Committee had completed a review of the accusations, which he disputed.

Buell said in a text message Saturday that withdrawing support from the senators who called for his resignation was an option she was considering.

In my gut they moved too fast, she wrote, adding that Franken was never given his chance to tell his side of the story.

For me this is dangerous and wrong, she added. I am a big believer in helping more women into the political system but this has given me an opportunity to rethink of how I can best help my party.

She is a friend of Hillary Clintons and has spoken in support of Gillibrand, who led the charge in the Senate to urge Franken to leave.

In her text, Buell said she did not know Franken personally but had met him a couple of times and was impressed by his work as a senator.

As for Gillibrand, unfortunately, I believe she miscalculated and has shot herself in the foot, she added. I have supported her for many years. Will I going forward? To be determined.

Buell was a founder of the clothing brand Esprit and has spent decades fundraising and donating millions of dollars for liberal causes and candidates. Her Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation has awarded grants to organizations supporting climate change education, a free press and womens rights.

Her comments about the senators who called for Frankens resignation were reported by BuzzFeed.

Jacey Fortin is a New York Times writer.
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Last years devastating floods and fires in California combined with hurricanes and other natural disasters to wreak unprecedented financial damage on the United States, the federal government reported Monday.

The nation endured 16 weather and climate events that inflicted $1 billion or more apiece in damage in 2017, tying 2011 for the most 10-digit calamities in a year and setting an annual total-cost record of $306 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The natural disasters resulted in 362 deaths.

As federal aid for disasters is stretched and places from Puerto Rico to the Wine Country struggle to rebuild, the new report raises questions about what can be done to minimize the growing impact of bad weather  some of which is being made worse by climate change.

If were just hoping for fewer disasters, we can forget about it. Theres going to be more disaster and its going to be worse, said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia Universitys National Center for Disaster Preparedness, which helps communities evaluate and respond to climate change and other risks. I dont know where the money is going to come from, but were going to have to get it.

The cost of last years wildfires in the West, including Octobers blazes in the North Bay, hit $18 billion, three times the previous single-year record for fire damage, according to the NOAA report. Fifty-four people died in fires nationwide, 44 of them in Northern California.

California also reeled from big storms and flooding in February, contributing to the partial collapse of the spillway at Oroville Dam and a flood on San Joses Coyote Creek that forced the evacuations of 14,000 people. In addition, the San Diego area sustained heavy wind damage in January when a series of storms struck the southern tier of the United States. Each of the weather events caused slightly more than $1 billion in damage, federal officials said.

Among the 16 big-ticket disasters in 2017, hurricanes exacted the greatest toll, with $265 billion in damage, according to the report. The death count from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which smacked the Southeast and U.S. territories in the Caribbean in August and September, was 251.

Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana was the worst of the three, going down as the second most destructive U.S. storm since reliable tracking of weather and climate damage began in 1980. At $125 billion, Harveys devastation trails only Hurricane Katrinas in 2005.

NOAAs annual climate update did not attempt to assign blame for last years high disaster toll. Federal scientists merely suggested possible factors, including global warming, a La Nina weather pattern and the increased vulnerability of communities to weather events.

The report, however, highlights the stark increase in temperatures that most scientists attribute to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and blame for the uptick in extreme weather.

Last year was the nations third-warmest since record keeping began in 1895, according to NOAA. Every state except Hawaii saw an above-average annual temperature for the third year in a row. Meanwhile, the number of billion-dollar disasters has risen since 1980, when there were three, the report shows.

Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University, said theres no doubt that the warming climate is contributing to the damage totals.

We know that the fuel available for wildfires has been on the increase in the West, and global warming is responsible for that, he said. Likewise with tropical cyclones, we know that with sea level rise, due to climate change, there is greater surge flooding.

Diffenbaugh added, The more emissions of greenhouse gases that occur, the more extreme events will intensify.

Congress is deliberating one of its largest-ever disaster packages to speed recovery in areas hit hard last year. The $81 billion aid bill, which passed the House last month but stalled in the Senate, would provide infrastructure repairs, housing and other relief to communities in California, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.

The Federal Emergency Management Administration, meanwhile, has deployed more workers than in any other year but 2005, when Katrina flooded New Orleans. More than 1,800 emergency personnel have helped with hurricanes while 180 have assisted with the California wildfires, the agency said.

In Sonoma and Napa counties, the disaster workers are removing debris from burned homes and businesses, helping rebuild roads, bridges and water systems, and providing temporary housing.

But even with that mobilization, said Columbias Redlener, the need for emergency services far surpasses supply.

The long-term goal, Redlener said, is for communities to become more resilient to extreme weather by building sturdier homes and infrastructure. The problem, he added, is a lack of money and commitment from the federal government.

Were really at a crossroads here, but the Trump administration doesnt seem to get what we need to do, Redlener said, noting the presidents denial of human-caused climate change and its effects. Im just very worried.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
Ron Chapple/Getty Image

Six people died early Sunday in a crash caused by a wrong-way driver that resulted in both vehicles catching fire on a freeway near Woodland (Yolo County), authorities said.

Officers received calls about 12:30 a.m. of a Chevrolet traveling south in the northbound lanes of Interstate 5, just north of County Road 17 in the unincorporated community of Yolo, according to the California Highway Patrol.
WASHINGTON -

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has told President Trump's legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mueller raised the issue of interviewing Trump during a late December meeting with the president's lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.

The special counsel's team could interview Trump soon on some limited portion of questions - possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

"This is moving faster than anyone really realizes," the person said. Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election, the person added.

However, the president's attorneys are reluctant to let him sit for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some of the questions from Mueller's investigators, as President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller's team to demonstrate that it could not obtain the information ite seeks without interviewing the president.

The legal team's internal discussions about how to respond to a request for an interview were first reported Monday morning by NBC News.

Dowd and Sekulow declined to comment.

In a statement, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the administration's response to the Mueller investigation, said that "the White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process," referring to the special counsel's office.

"The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution," Cobb added.

Cobb had repeatedly said all interviews of White House personnel by Mueller's office were on schedule to be completed by the end of December or early this year. On Monday, he said he remains confident that any portion of the investigation related to the president or the White House will wrap up shortly.

Mueller and Trump's legal team plan to meet again soon to discuss both the possible terms and substance of the interview, as well as Mueller's timeline for the investigation, according to one person familiar with the plan.

Trump's lawyers hope to obtain from the special counsel's team a clear idea of the categories of questions that would be posed to the president.

For months, Trump's legal team has been researching the conditions under which the president would be required to submit to an interview with the special counsel, who is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

"No lawyer just volunteers their client without thinking this through," said one of the people familiar with the talks.

It has long been expected that Mueller would seek to interview Trump, in part because the special counsel is scrutinizing whether actions he took in office were attempts to blunt the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with questions posed to witnesses.

In May, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey after Comey testified on Capitol Hill that he could not comment on whether there was evidence that Russia had colluded with the Trump campaign.

The president also dictated a misleading statement later released by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., about a meeting that Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign.

Veteran prosecutors said it is unlikely that Mueller would agree to have any witness, even the president, submit a declaration or provide written answers to questions to avoid a sit-down interview.

Some experts said a presidential interview could signal that Mueller's investigation into the Trump's actions is nearing its end, but they cautioned that the special counsel might have a different strategy.

"It would certainly seem they would be close to wrapping up as it relates to the core matter they are investigating," said Solomon Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel who questioned President Bill Clinton in 1998. "You would want to know as much as possible before you go to the president. "

Asked on Saturday if he had agreed to be interviewed by Mueller, Trump said he had nothing to hide.

"Just so you understand, there's been no collusion, there's been no crime, and in theory everybody tells me I'm not under investigation. Maybe Hillary [Clinton] is, I don't know, but I'm not," Trump told reporters at Camp David. "But we have been very open. We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed, and it would have taken years. But you know, sort of like when you've done nothing wrong, let's be open and get it over with."

"Because, honestly, it's very, very bad for our country," the president added. "It's making our country look foolish. And this is a country that I don't want looking foolish. And it's not going to look foolish as long as I'm here."

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

In June, after Comey told a congressional panel that Trump had privately asked for his loyalty, the president said he would be willing to testify under oath to dispute the fired FBI director's claims.

"One hundred percent," Trump said when asked if he would give a sworn statement to Mueller.

Sitting presidents have been interviewed by prosecutors in the past, though courts have urged government investigators to seek such interviews only when they cannot obtain relevant information another way.

Clinton's attorneys repeatedly fought independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's attempts to interview their client until investigators obtained a subpoena to force his testimony. It was the first grand jury subpoena served on a sitting president. Clinton then negotiated to testify before a grand jury via video and audio link from the White House Map Room.

In the videotaped interview in August 1998, which lasted four hours and saw questions from three prosecutors, Clinton admitted to inappropriate sexual activity with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but he claimed he had been legally correct in denying that he had had sexual relations with her. He also denied having committed perjury in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

Not all presidential interviews with prosecutors have come at the end of an investigation.

In 2004, President George W. Bush sat for an in-person interview with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was investigating whether senior White House aides leaked a CIA operative's identity and broke her cover as punishment for her husband's criticism of the Iraq War. Bush volunteered for the interview, which lasted 70 minutes and was conducted in the Oval Office. Bush was far from the last one interviewed in the probe; Fitzgerald later questioned several more central witnesses.

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at the time, adding that Bush was "pleased to do his part" to aid the investigation.

Reagan testified in the Iran-contra investigation while in office and twice more after he left office. He also answered in writing some written questions presented to him by the grand jury and the independent counsel in the probe.

In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford was interviewed as part of a grand jury investigation into an assassination attempt. In a taped session in the Old Executive Office Building, Ford shared his recollections of events when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, tried to shoot Ford at close range in Sacramento in September 1975. The tape was used at her trial that year.

---

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
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The census is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. This once-a-decade count of the U.S. population is best known for determining congressional and state representation, but it also determines representation of other kinds. Officials depend on an accurate census count for everything from federal spending to public health priorities.

So the cascade of news about all the ways in which the 2020 census effort is being undermined and outright attacked by the GOP-led Congress and the Trump administration is distressing.

Alarm bells started ringing last year.

Congressional lawmakers underfunded the Census Bureau. Then reports surfaced that President Trumps pick for deputy director of the bureau was Thomas Brunell, a political science professor with little managerial experience. Hes best known for his arguments on behalf of gerrymandering.

Now the Department of Justice has filed a request to ask people about their citizenship status.

The purpose of the census is not to count U.S. citizens; its to count everyone in the country. Asking about citizenship status has nothing to do with the accuracy of the census, but in this anti-immigration climate its a surefire way to drive down response rates.

Those who cant be counted wont be represented.

Experts have predicted that asking census respondents about their immigration status would affect both red and blue states  reliably Republican Texas has nearly 5 million eligible Hispanic voters, for example.

However, because Latinos and other people of color tend to vote for Democrats, the impact of an under-counted census would fall most heavily on Democratic-leaning states and districts.

Census counts already tend to under-count people of color. The last census failed to find 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population and 2.1 percent of the African American population, for example.

There isnt much time to make changes to the 2020 census efforts.

By adding hostile and irrelevant questions that are sure to drive down census participation by these segments of the U.S. population, the Trump administration is undermining the integrity of the census process and damaging the next 10 years of democracy.

Congress needs to step in and challenge the Justice Departments request.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
A televised advertisement aimed at discouraging drivers from getting behind the wheel under the influence of marijuana was removed by California officials after critics said it promoted use of the drug.

The ad, part of the DUI Doesnt Just Mean Booze campaign by the California Office of Traffic Safety, starts with a montage of people listing reasons they use cannabis  before assuring that they never drive while intoxicated.

OK, I love it, one man says of marijuana, smiling and looking into the camera.

Rhonda Craft, director of the Office of Traffic Safety, said in a statement, We are cognizant and share the concerns expressed over certain elements of our most recent ads. As a result, we will continue to refine and improve messaging as we move forward.

The agency plans to continue using another ad that was produced for an earlier anti-DUI campaign. The points remain the same  drive high and you can get a DUI, Craft said.

The ad that was pulled began running late last year in preparation for the Jan. 1 launch of recreational cannabis sales under Proposition 64. The controversy over it underscores tension over legalization, with tax receipts from sales directed toward programs designed to combat problems associated with drug use.

The ad features several people describing the benefits of their marijuana use.

It helps my anxiety, a man says.

It helps my cramps, a woman says.

It allows me to slow my thought process, another man says.

Later, all of them say they wouldnt drive under the influence.

I never drive high, one man says.

Its still a DUI, adds a woman.

Rob Stutzman, a conservative political consultant and former spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, tweeted his disdain for the video, calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to remove it.

This CA taxpayer funded PSA spends most air time normalizing/promoting pot use before saying dont drive stoned. Imagine same extolling virtues of alcohol? This is is absurd, @JerryBrownGov should nix this, Stutzman wrote on Twitter.

Recreational marijuana sales kicked off Jan. 1 in a number of cities, including Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Sebastopol, and started over the weekend in San Francisco.

The state launched its campaign in 2016 to bring awareness to the danger of drivers using prescription drugs and marijuana, whether legally or not. Under California law, driving under the influence of cannabis is a crime.

Mohammed Abraar Ali, 22, of Hayward was charged with second-degree murder as well as driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol in a Christmas Eve crash that killed a California Highway Patrol officer in Hayward.

Ali admitted to using marijuana before the crash and had the drug in his system, CHP officials said.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani

View the ad

The advertisement against driving under the influence of marijuana that was pulled by state officials can be seen at bit.ly/2En3rcR.
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A Bay Area actor who appeared in episodes of the Netflix series "13 Reasons Why" was arrested on suspicion of stealing from and burglarizing elderly Bay Area residents, according to police.

Bryan Box, 23, of Vallejo was arrested and charged with nine felony counts of burglary, possession of stolen property and theft by a caretaker of an elder.

ALSO: Former HGTV star arrested in Los Gatos

Box was previously a caretaker at various residences in Marin County before he landed a bit part as student Jamie Garrison on the locally-filmed "13 Reasons Why." During the fall, police connected Box to a series of burglaries throughout Greenbrae, Tiburon, Novato and Mill Valley at residences where he formerly worked, police stated.

In some of the burglaries, Box allegedly stopped at the homes of these former clients, visiting with them and talking about his role on the Netflix show, the Marin Independent-Journal reported. Only later would those elderly residents realize items were missing.

Box was linked to six burglaries. Jewelry, medications, a laptop, Social Security card and checks were among the items taken from the residences. One of these burglaries added up to a total of $50,000 in items missing.

A search warrant served on Box's home in Vallejo turned up stolen property and police allegedly linked Box to a pawn shop in Oakland where other related stolen items were found. The manager of the pawn shop had apparently recalled speaking with Box and mentioned Box's "recent notoriety from the television show," according to a prosecution affidavit obtained by the Marin IJ.

Detectives with the Central Marin Police Authority, Tiburon Police Department and the Vallejo Police Department placed Box under arrest in Vallejo on Dec. 29. Bail was set at $250,000 and he was released on bail bond with an arraignment set for Jan. 16 at Marin Superior Court.
I grew up traveling to Mexico. It was an easy trip into Baja from Ventura County, California, my home. We would camp on desert points and surf for days. I always found the dusty peninsula and the country as a whole surprising, welcoming and exciting. It was not until the series of trips I took there in 2017 with Josh Partlow, our Mexico bureau chief, that I truly felt afraid. Afraid for my safety. Afraid for what Mexico had become.

The assignment started with a text from my editor, Nick Kirkpatrick, asking if I wanted to travel to a "sketchy narco zone," in Guerrero, one of Mexico's most violent states. The stories I had read about Mexican journalists being assassinated throughout the country for covering the violence and cartels were numerous. The country is second only to Syria in the number of journalists being killed on the job. But this is Mexico, a country and people I admire and respect. I knew with proper planning this was a story I wanted to photograph.
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Daniel Smith-Rowsey, a film historian and adjunct professor at St. Mary's College in Moraga, was in the midst of a Skype interview with Al Jazeera English when the live broadcast took a sudden turn. His five-year-old son, Rainier, walked in. Adorableness, as one may expect, ensued in abundance.

Host Sohail Rahman was probing Smith-Rowsey, a resident of Berkeley, about Sunday evening's Golden Globe Awards and the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, when a tiny face suddenly appeared on screen.

"Uh," says Smith-Rowsey, visibly caught off-guard. "That's my child, excuse me."

Rahman took the interruption in-stride, inviting little Rainier to participate in the broadcast. The adults continue chatting as the five-year-old completely steals the show, boasting a giant smile and a gold toy car, which he drives up and down his father's formal black shirt throughout the discussion.

The heartwarming moment harkened back to a viral March interview with professor Robert Kelly on BBC, in which his two children bust into a live Skype discussion and are dragged away by Kelly's frustrated wife.

Smith-Rowsey had a more laid-back approach to his kindergartener's interruption. He remains onscreen until the last minute, waving farewell to the camera with his tiny hand.

"Bye!" he says off-screen as the interview ends.

Speaking to SFGATE on Monday, Smith-Rowsey admitted he was "mortified" when his five-year-old walked in.

"Our office door has a broken lock, and another family member had been assigned to keep an eye on my son," he said. "But these things happen."

Smith-Rowsey said he showed Rainier, known as "Razor" among friends and family, the interview after the fact, only for the bubbly youngster to completely talk over it, unimpressed.

As for his son's nonchalant reaction to stardom, Smith-Rowsey had a fittingly academic justification: "These kids grow up seeing themselves on (homemade) videos a lot more often than you and I did as children."
Time's up, and the Golden Globes made sure everyone knows it.

The 75th annual awards show on Sunday, Jan. 7, honored the biggest names in movies and television.
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This February, the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition with presenting sponsor BevMo! celebrates its 18-year anniversary as the largest competition of American wines in the world. At the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, wine enthusiasts will enjoy sampling award winning wines from all across the country at the competitions popular Public Tasting. The San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting will take place Saturday, February 17th from 1:30 pm - 5:00 pm at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

Year after year, the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition (SFCWC) grows more competitive and more prestigious, drawing a huge number of entries from some of the finest wineries across the nation. SFCWC award-winners, especially the Sweepstakes and Best of Class winners, are widely regarded as among the best wines in America. Due to the SFCWCs size and the expertise of the judging panel, this competition is often considered the ultimate barometer for wine consumers to select and measure wine.

The public tasting event is always a highly anticipated event for wine lovers, many of whom come to the tasting with very educated palates. At the public tasting, guests come together to learn even more about wines, while gourmet food purveyors offer delectable food samples that pair perfectly with the award winning selections. The public tastingtraditionally a sellout eventalso features KGO Radio show hosts, writers from the San Francisco Chronicle and notable wine industry leaders.

The San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition is the definitive competition for American wines. To win a medal here  to stand out in a crowd of 7,000-plus submissions  is an enormous accomplishment for a winery, said Esther Mobley, the San Francisco Chronicle Wine, Beer and Spirits editor.

The San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition will kick off this year with the judging, which is set to take place from January 9-12 at the Cloverdale Citrus Fairgrounds. 67 elite wine judges from all areas of the wine industry, including media, trade, education, retail and restaurant/hospitality, will gather to participate in the blind judging. Wines are categorized by varietal and price range, evaluated, and then select winners will be invited to participate in the Public Tasting event.

Over the past decade, the number of wine entries submitted to the SFCWC has grown rapidly. In 2018, the competition had nearly 7,000 entries from 35 states, illustrating the steady demand for a variety of options among wine consumers and firmly establishing the event's prestige as an esteemed wine competition.

The SFCWC supports wine studies, enology, and viticulture programs for higher education institutions in California. Leftover wines from the competition are donated annually to Santa Rosa Junior College, Fresno State University, Sonoma State University and California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo.

Follow the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition on Twitter @Winejudging for info on the event and for special contests leading up to the public tasting.

WHAT: San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting

WHEN: Saturday, February 17, 2018

WHERE: Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco

TIME: 1:30pm  5pm

COST: $55 Early bird discount (before January 1), $70 Advance Purchase, $95 at the door (the event has sold out for the past seven years; advance ticket purchase is recommended.)

INFO: For tickets and additional information, visit www.winejudging.com

PARKING: Limited parking is available at Fort Mason Center. In addition there is public transportation and parking nearby. There is a new metered parking system on the Fort Mason Parking Lot and parking on nearby Crissy Field Parking Lot. We recommend you take advantage of public transport.

MEDIA: Contact The Larose Group, 650-548-6700 or amadsen@prmagic.com

About the SFCWC: Founded in 1983 as the modestly sized Cloverdale Citrus Fair Wine Competition, the current competition has evolved immensely over the years, expanding its eligibility to wineries throughout the United States. In 2000, the event gained sponsorship from the San Francisco Chronicle and appropriately assumed the title the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. The Cloverdale Citrus Fair, host of the SFCWC, supports wine and food education at educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. Leftover wines from the competition are often donated to wine programs at the Santa Rosa Junior College, Fresno State University, Sonoma State University, California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and other non-profit organizations.
VALE DE SALGUEIRO, Portugal  The Epiphany celebrations in the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro feature a tradition that each year causes an outcry among outsiders: Parents encouraging their children, some as young as 5, to smoke cigarettes.

Locals say the practice has been passed down for centuries as part of a celebration of life tied to the Christian Epiphany and the winter solstice  but nobody is sure what it symbolizes or exactly why parents buy the packs of cigarettes for their children and encourage them to take part.
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A group of people, scantily clad from the waist down, took over public transit in San Francisco Sunday afternoon.

As part of the annual "No Pants BART Ride," about 45 pants-less people boarded a Daly City-bound train at the Civic Center/UN Plaza Station around 1:15 p.m. They chatted, joked, and posed for pictures as the train headed south.

"Alright, so what's the occasion?" asked one bemused passenger.

Participants were instructed to act normal and deflect questions about their unconventional outfits.

Now Playing: A group of about 45 pants-less people boarded BART trains Sunday afternoon as part of the annual "No Pants BART Ride" on Jan. 7, 2018. Video: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE

"I forgot to wear my pants," responded one man wearing only underwear from the waist down.

ALSO READ: Where to get naked in the Bay Area  and not feel weird about it

But another participant spilled the beans, explaining it was part of the annual ride, which stages similar events around the world.

Besides, if the tightly-clustered and unusually friendly bunch of pants-less people didn't make it obvious something out of the ordinary was going on, the constant clicking of news cameras certainly did.

"This is not an exhibitionist thing, to be very clear," co-organizer Jay Zalowitz told SFGATE last year. "This is a spontaneous delight and meant to bring enjoyment out of people's day. We ran into some soldiers on the way back from Oakland Airport and you should have seen the smile this brought to their faces  and that alone makes something like this worth it."

The group disembarked at Balboa Park Station and posed for a group picture before returning to Civic Center. From there, they headed off to an afterparty, which yes, is also pants-less.

MORE FROM LAST YEAR: Annual 'no pants' BART ride attracts participants despite huge storm

The event was started in 2001 by New York City-based prank collective Improv Everywhere and has since spread to other metropolitan areas, including New York, Boston, Prague and Berlin.

SFGATE's Dianne de Guzman contributed to this report.

Read Alix Martichoux's latest stories and send her news tips at amartichoux@sfchronicle.com.
A federal judge in Las Vegas on Monday dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons who had been accused of leading an armed standoff against federal land managers.

Judge Gloria Navarro of U.S. District Court said the governments missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.

Navarro declared a mistrial last month in the case, stemming from the standoff at the Bundy ranch in 2014 that had arisen over land-grazing fees. She said then that prosecutors had failed to turn over important evidence to the defense, including video taken surreptitiously within the ranch during the standoff, and evidence that FBI agents were involved in the incident.

Her decision to throw out the case shattered a long government effort to portray the Bundy family members as violent extremists. It also undermined in many ways a core argument by Cliven Bundy, 71, and his sons that the federal government had become an omnipotent force of police power and that opponents to federal land policies would be crushed.

The 2014 standoff began when the Bureau of Land Management seized cattle from Bundys ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., in an attempt to force him to pay decades of fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. Bundy insisted he did not have to pay the charges because, he said, he had inherited water rights on the land. At the height of the standoff, hundreds of antigovernment activists, many of them carrying guns, rallied to the Bundys cause, until the confrontation ended with the withdrawal of federal agents.

In the years since, the family became even more firmly entrenched in the deep and bitter debate over public land policy in the West  seen either as right-wing extremists or stalwarts in standing up against federal government overreach.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five of their followers were acquitted by a federal jury in October 2016 on all charges related to their takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier that year. Last August, another federal jury, in Nevada, declined to convict four other men who were involved in the Bundy ranch standoff. And earlier this year a jury in Oregon split on charges against four men in the Malheur takeover  convicting two of conspiracy charges but acquitting two others.

After Navarros ruling in December that prosecutors had withheld evidence in the ranch standoff that might have helped the defendants, prosecutors said in their court filings that fears of violence against witnesses were part of their decision-making in what evidence to release.

Kirk Johnson is a New York Times writer.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico  Federal officials said Monday that efforts to fully restore power to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria should get a boost with more work crews and supplies in upcoming weeks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it is getting its own barge to ship items and that materials it requested several months ago have been manufactured and are finally on their way to the U.S. territory.

Were doing everything we can to increase the (power companys) ability to do this as fast as possible for the people of Puerto Rico, said Col. John Lloyd, who is helping oversee power restoration efforts for the Corps of Engineers.

Lloyd told the Associated Press that officials over the weekend also discovered some needed equipment in a previously overlooked warehouse owned by Puerto Ricos Electric Power Authority. The lack of some of those hard-to-find pieces had delayed energizing certain lines, according to the Corps of Engineers.

Puerto Ricos energy infrastructure is about 44 years old, compared with an average 18 years in the U.S. mainland, so a lot of parts damaged or destroyed by the hurricane are no longer available and have to be manufactured, Lloyd said.

More than 40 percent of Puerto Ricos power customers remain in the dark nearly four months after the Category 4 storm hit the island, causing an estimated $95 billion in damage and killing dozens of people.

Lloyd said crews are still assessing damage and that his agency is still waiting for the shipment of hundreds of thousands of poles, transformers, fuses, towers, insulators, bolts and other pieces.

Of the nearly 31,000 poles ordered, almost 12,000 have arrived. Meanwhile, of the more than 6,000 transformers ordered, only 412 have arrived, but more than 630 are expected this week.

Lloyd said most of the island should have power by end of February or early March, estimating it could be fully powered by May.

Danica Coto is an Associated Press writer.
1 Deputy killed: Authorities in Washington state appealed to the public for help Monday in tracking down a man suspected in the fatal shooting of a sheriffs deputy overnight. Pierce County deputy Daniel McCartney, a 34-year-old Navy veteran and married father of three boys, was shot during a foot chase late Sunday as he responded to a home invasion near the community of Frederickson, 15 miles southeast of Tacoma, said sheriffs spokesman Ed Troyer. One suspect was found dead at the scene, but another got away, authorities said. Police closed off roads and conducted a manhunt in an area that includes industrial sites as well as wooded areas, asking local residents to stay indoors, but did not find the man.

2 Trump Tower fire: A fire in a heating and air conditioning system at President Trumps namesake skyscraper injured three people and caused smoke to billow from the roof, the Fire Department of New York said Monday. The fire started around 7 a.m. at the Manhattan building that contains Trumps home and business offices. Two civilians and a firefighter were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, officials said. It took about an hour to extinguish the fire. The president was at the White House when fire engines clogged the streets around his Fifth Avenue luxury building during the morning rush hour.
WASHINGTON  With President Trump cheering from the sidelines, the White House on Sunday pressed its defense of the presidents fitness to govern, as fired former aide Steve Bannon reversed course and apologized for his role in a new books explosive portrait of Trump.

The presidents critics, meanwhile, said Trumps stream of taunts and insults in response to the book  Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, released last week  only emphasized the authors unsettling portrayal of Trumps presidency, depicting a leader whose own aides consider him childish, ignorant and dangerously erratic.

The most vehement defense of Trump came Sunday from senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Bannon acolyte who distanced himself from his mentor. Miller, on CNNs State of the Union, called the book grotesque and writer Michael Wolff the garbage author of a garbage book.

Wolff quoted Bannon as using the label treasonous for a Trump Tower meeting last year with Kremlin-linked figures, in which Donald Trump Jr. took part.

On Sunday, however, Bannon  who has faced withering attacks from the president since the books contents were first aired  sought to mend fences, praising Trumps son as both a patriot and a good man.

He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, Bannon said in a statement first reported by Axios, which marked a striking reversal of the stance he struck in Wolffs telling.

Also Sunday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Wolffs characterization of Trump as averse to digesting classified briefing material was ludicrous, and the ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said those around Trump love their country and respect their president.

Trump is known to closely monitor aides televised performances in putting forth his case, and he gleefully weighed in within moments of Millers televised clash with State of the Union host Jake Tapper. CNN has long been a particular target of Trumps.

Jake Tapper of Fake News just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller, the president tweeted. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!

Trumps reaction, however, seemed to bolster Tappers on-air depiction of Miller as using his appearance on the show to play to the president rather than addressing questions put to him. I get it  theres one viewer that you care about, Tapper said in exasperation after Miller turned the discussion repeatedly to negative news coverage of the president while deflecting specific queries.

Laura King is a Tribune Co. writer.
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An undocumented immigrant acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges in the 2015 death of Kate Steinle on San Franciscos Pier 14 appeared for the first time Monday in federal court to face gun charges related to the politically charged shooting that he said was an accident.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate  who during the hearing at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco said he goes by another name, Jose Juan Dominguez de la Parra  was charged by federal prosecutors with being a felon in possession of a firearm and being an undocumented immigrant in possession of a firearm.

He is also the subject of a federal warrant out of Texas alleging a probation violation. Authorities said he failed to check in with probation officers while committing a crime and possessing a weapon in San Francisco.

The federal gun charges carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and Garcia Zarate faces up to an two years in prison in the Texas case.

Garcia Zarate appeared Monday before Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James alongside his attorney, J. Tony Serra. Dressed in red clothing from the Alameda County Jail, where he was moved last week by the U.S. Marshals Service, Garcia Zarate said he understood the charges against him, but did not enter a plea. He is due back in court Feb. 13.

Now Playing: Tara Moriarty reports Video: KTVU

Serra said he plans to file two motions to have the case dismissed, arguing that the federal prosecution constitutes double jeopardy after last years trial in San Francisco Superior Court and that the charges are vindictive.

A city jury acquitted Garcia Zarate on Nov. 30 of murder and manslaughter in Steinles killing on July 1, 2015, but found him guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm. To bring the double-jeopardy motion, Serra said he must prove federal authorities and San Francisco prosecutors colluded.

Did the feds aid and abet in the state prosecution? Were they in the background directing strategy and trial tactics? Thats what we hope for here, Serra said.

The San Francisco district attorneys office declined to comment on the federal case.

The federal charges, Serra said, are vindictive because they came as result of the not-guilty verdicts in Superior Court.

Last Friday, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Samuel Feng sentenced Garcia Zarate to the maximum three-year prison term for the state gun charge. Garcia Zarate had already served his time awaiting trial, and was turned over to federal authorities, who had indicted him Dec. 5.

The case intensified a debate over immigration enforcement and sanctuary laws because Garcia Zarate was facing a sixth deportation to his home country of Mexico before Steinles death. The San Francisco Sheriffs Department, following city policy, released him instead of turning him over to immigration agents.

Steinle, 32, died after being shot in the heart as she walked along the pier with her father. San Francisco prosecutors said the shooting was purposeful, but Garcia Zarates attorneys argued he found a gun that had been stolen days earlier from a federal agents nearby car. The gun, wrapped in a cloth under a bench on the pier, went off as Garcia Zarate unwrapped it, his attorneys said.

Evidence presented during a six-week trial showed the bullet ricocheted off the pier before hitting Steinle.

Before the shooting, Garcia Zarate had been brought to San Francisco to face a decades-old marijuana charge after he was released from federal prison in the Texas case. The drug charges were dropped and Garcia Zarate was released.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

When the average person goes to the doctor, shows up at the ER, or enters the hospital, the possibility of controlling what happens next is minimal. We put ourselves in the hands of the medical machine, which in reality rests upon individual peopledoctors, nurses, physicians assistants, and so on. Human behavior involves lapses and mistakes, and these get magnified in medical care, where misreading a patients chart or failing to notice a specific symptom can be a matter of life and death. The riskiness of high-tech medicine like gene therapy and toxic cancer treatments is dramatically increased because there is a wider range of mistakes the more complex any treatment is. To be fair, doctors do their utmost to save patients who would have been left to die a generation ago, but they are successful only a percentage of the time.

Risk and mistakes go together, but the general public has limited knowledge of the disturbing facts:

 Medical errors are estimated to cause up to 440,000 deaths per year in U.S. hospitals alone. It is widely believed that this figure could be grossly inaccurate, because countless mistakes go unreporteddeath reports offer only the immediate cause, and many doctors band together to protect the reputation of their profession.

 The total direct expense of adverse events, as medical mistakes are known, is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

 Indirect expenses such as lost economic productivity from premature death and unnecessary illness exceeds $1 trillion per year.

Statistics barely touch upon the fear involved when any patient thinks about being at the wrong end of a medical mistake. What the patient is all too aware of is the doctor visit that goes by in the blink of an eye. A 2007 analysis of optimal primary-care visits found that they last 16 minutes on average. From 1 to 5 minutes is spent discussing each topic thats raised. This figure is at the high end of estimates, given that according to other studies, the actual face-to-face time spent with a doctor or other health-care provider comes down to 7 minutes on average. Doctors place the primary blame on increasing demands for them to fill out medical reports and detailed insurance claims. Patients tend to believe that doctors want to cram in as many paying customers as they can, or simply that the patient as a person doesnt matter very much.

As a result theres a new movement afoot to provide a personal advocate who stays in the doctors office with the patient. The advocate is basically someone who represents the patients best interests in any medical situation. The person might be a well-meaning relative who helps an older patient understand whats going on, or who steps in to do attendant tasks like picking up prescriptions and organizing medical bills. But more and more one sees the need for an advocate who is professionally trained to buffer the mounting risks in a health-care system in which less and less time is spent between doctor and patient.

It would be up to an advocate to find out, and needless to say, this has created hostility from some doctors. Used to ruling their domain with absolute authority, few doctors want an overseer in the room asking questions, inserting their own opinions, and potentially finding fault. At worst, the specter of a malpractice suit looms. The movement for professional advocates, which is quite young, insists that looking out for a patients best interests is benign. The medical profession has its doubts.

The upshot, for now at least, is that patients who want an advocate must play the role themselves. At the heart of the problem is passivity. When we surrender to medical care, whether at the doctors office, the ER, or the hospital, we shouldnt surrender everything. Poking and prodding is intrusive. Undergoing various tests can be stressful. The minute we walk in the door, we become largely anonymousa walking set of symptoms replaces the person. There are doctors and nurses who take these negative effects seriously and who go out of their way to offer a personal touch. They should be saluted for their humane compassion in a system that focuses more on impersonal efficiency.

You may like your doctor and feel that he cares, but this doesnt rule out being your own advocate. Quite the oppositethe inherent stress in medical treatment is what you want to counter. First comes the stress of worry and anticipation, what is commonly known as white-coat syndrome. We all remember how afraid we became as children thinking about getting a shot from the school nurse or how scary it was sitting in the dentists chair even before the drill was turned on. Studies have verified that anticipating a stressful situation can cause as great a stress response as actually undergoing the stress. In one study subjects were divided into two groups, one of which gave a public speech while the other was told that they were going to give a speech but actually didnt. Both groups became stressed out, but the researchers wanted to measure how well they recovered from the stress

Knowing that you are going to be in a stressful situation, there are a number of ways to feel more in control:



Be informed about your illness. Dont relinquish your opportunity to find out exactly what is wrong with you. This doesnt mean you should challenge your doctor. If you feel the need to inform your doctor about something you saw online, you arent being confrontational, and most doctors are now used to well-informed patients.

If the illness isnt temporary and minor, contact someone else who is going through the same diagnosis and treatment as you. This may involve a support group, of which many exist online, or simply talking to another patient in the waiting room or hospital.

If you are facing a protracted illness, become part of a support group, either locally or online.

Keep a journal of your health challenge and the progress you are making toward being healed.

Seek emotional support from a friend or confidant who is empathic and who wants to help (in other words, dont lean upon someone who is merely putting up with you).

Establish a personal bond with someone who is part of your carenurses and physicians assistants are typically more accessible and have more time than doctors. Ideally, this bond should be based on something the two of you sharefamily children, hobbies, outside interestsnot simply your illness.

Resist the temptation to suffer in silence and to go it alone. Isolation brings a false sense of control. What actually works is to maintain a normal life and social contacts as much as possible.

Following these steps will go a long way to achieving the goal of patient advocacy, which is to serve the patients best interests at all times. But there remains a difficult unknown, the possibility of a medical error.







Seeing the doctor involves personal interaction, and it's important to reduce any possible friction. Here are a few pointers:

Do

Be involved in your own care.

Inform the doctor and nurses that you like to be involved.

Ask for extra information when you need it.

Ask for a questionable event, like a pill you arent sure is the right one, to be checked with the doctor.

Tell somebody if you have gone out of your comfort zone.

Remain polite in all of the above.

Praise the doctor and nurses when its called for. A show of gratitude doesnt go amiss

Dont

Dont act hostile, suspicious, or demanding.

Dont challenge the competency of doctors and nurses.

Dont nag or whine, no matter how anxious you are. Reserve these feelings for someone in your family, a friend, or a member of a support group.

Dont pretend you know as much (or more) than the people who are treating you.

Dont, when hospitalized, repeatedly press the call button or run to the nurses station. Trust their routine. Realize that the main reason patients call a nurse is more out of anxiety than out of real need.

Dont play the part of a victim. Show your caregivers that you are maintaining a normal sense of security, control, and good cheer even under trying circumstances.

Probably the most important finding about medical mistakes is that they are frequently caused by lack of communication.



In our new book The Healing Self we delve into patient advocacy in more detail as well as covering the expanding role of self-healing, which is going to only become more important in the coming decades.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com



Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, and Super Genes. He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimers disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine's "TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World."

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Kohn LT, Corrigan J, Donaldson MS. To err is human: building a safer health system. Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2000.

Department of Health and Human Services. Adverse events in hospitals: national incidence among Medicare beneficiaries. 2010. http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00090.pdf.

A New, Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care James, John T. PhD Journal of Patient Safety: September 2013 - Volume 9 - Issue 3 - p 122128

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Makary MA, Daniel M. Medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ 2016;353:i2139. doi:10.1136/bmj.i2139

Measurement of patient safety: a systematic review of the reliability and validity of adverse event detection with record review. Mirelle Hanskamp-Sebregts, Marieke Zegers, Charles Vincent, Petra J van Gurp, Henrica C W de Vet, Hub WollersheimPublished 22 August, 2016 http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/8/e011078.full

Weismann JS, Schneider EC, Weingart SN, et al. Comparing patient-reported hospital adverse events with medical records reviews: Do patients know something that hospitals do not? Ann Intern Med. 2008; 149: 100108.

Overview of medical errors and adverse events. Maite Garrouste-Orgeas Francois Philippart, Cedric Bruel, Adeline Max, Nicolas Lau and B Misset Annals of Intensive Care 20122:2

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Ridley SA, Booth SA, Thompson CM: Prescription errors in UK critical care units. Anaesthesia 2004, 59: 11931200. 10.1111/j.1365-2044.2004.03969.x

Garrouste-Orgeas M, Timsit JF, Vesin A, Schwebel C, Arnodo P, Lefrant JY, Souweine B, Tabah A, Charpentier J, Gontier O, et al.: Selected medical errors in the intensive care unit: results of the IATROREF study: parts I and II on behalf of the Outcomerea study group. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2010, 181: 134142. 10.1164/rccm.200812-1820OC

Garrouste-Orgeas M, Soufir L, Tabah A, Schwebel C, Vesin A, Adrie C, Thuong M, Timsit JF: A multifaceted program for improving quality of care in ICUs (IATROREF STUDY) on behalf of the Outcomerea study group. Critical Care Med, in press.

Overview of medical errors and adverse events. Maite Garrouste-Orgeas, Francois Philippart, Cedric Bruel, Adeline Max, Nicolas Lau and B Misset Annals of Intensive Care20122:2

DOI: 10.1186/2110-5820-2-2 Published 16 February 2012

Kennerly DA, Kudyakov R, da Graca B, et al. Characterization of adverse events detected in a large health care delivery system using an enhanced Global Trigger Tool over a five-year interval. Health Serv Res 2014;49:140725. doi:10.1111/1475-6773.12163 Google Scholar

Rutberg H, Borgstedt Risberg M, Sjodahl R, et al. Characterisations of adverse events detected in a university hospital: a 4-year study using the Global Trigger Tool method. BMJ Open 2014;4:e004879. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-004879

Christiaans-Dingelhoff I, Smits M, Zwaan L, et al. To what extent are adverse events found in patient records reported by patients and healthcare professionals via complaints, claims and incident reports? BMC Health Serv Res 2011;11:49. doi:10.1186/1472-6963-11-49 [CrossRef][Medline]Google Scholar

Classen DC, Resar R, Griffin F, et al. Global Trigger Tool shows that adverse events in hospitals may be ten times greater than previously measured. Health Aff (Millwood) 2011;30:5819. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0190

Sari AB, Sheldon TA, Cracknell A, et al. Extent, nature and consequences of adverse events: results of a retrospective casenote review in a large NHS hospital. Qual Saf

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The economics of health care quality and medical errors. Andel C1, Davidow SL, Hollander M, Moreno DA. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23155743
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Billionaire San Francisco activist Tom Steyer has been rumored to be running for either governor or Senate in California for years, but on Monday he announced hed do neither in 2018. Instead, hes going to spend $30 million on getting other Democrats elected and another $20 million to try to impeach President Trump.

I am not going to run for office in 2018, Steyer said Monday at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Thats not where I can make the biggest difference.

Steyer, 60, would not rule out running for president in 2020. Any organizing effort he undertakes this year  and the mailing list of 4.1 million people who have signed his online impeachment campaign against Trump  would give him a solid foundation to mount a presidential run.

We are all in through Nov. 6, 2018. This is a must-win situation, Steyer said. We are not focused on anything starting Nov. 7. We dont have the ability to know whats going to happen after that.

Now Playing: He's using his own money to generate interest in a cause he believes Congress isn't paying enough attention too. Video: Time

Sean Clegg, a political strategist who is advising gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and an independent expenditure campaign supporting the re-election of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said, It is welcome news that hes going to focus on electing Democrats rather than pursuing his own political career.

Steyer is a former hedge- fund manager who spent at least $91 million on left-leaning causes and candidates in the 2016 campaign cycle. Over the past several years in California, he has funded environmentalist ballot measures and organized against oil companies, tobacco firms and corporate tax loopholes. Through the NextGen America activist group he founded in 2013, Steyer is funding campaigns to register Millennials to vote.

On Monday, he said he would spend $30 million on registering 250,000 young voters in California, Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Arizona. The effort will be aimed at electing Democrats in eight U.S. Senate races and 30 House districts in hopes of wresting Congress from Republican control, as well as on Democrats in nine gubernatorial races.

Steyer said Monday that grassroots organizing is the task I feel called to do.

Lately, Steyer has been appearing on TV ads and in Facebook news feeds, asking for signatures on a petition seeking Trumps impeachment. Hes spent more than $20 million on the TV ads and millions more on digital buys to put the 60-second spots in places Trump would see them, such as Fox News.

In one spot, Steyer, wearing an open-neck denim shirt and labeled American Citizen, calls Trump a clear and present danger who is mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons.

On Monday, Steyer said he would be redoubling his impeachment efforts, calling it the most important issue before the country.

Despite Steyers regular involvement in national campaigns, many in the California political world have wondered whether he would run for governor or Senate. One reason Steyer may have decided not to run this year: His activism has done little to raise his personal profile with California voters.

A Berkeley IGS poll taken in December showed that 77 percent of respondents had no opinion of Steyer. Fourteen percent had a positive opinion of him, and 9 percent viewed him negatively.

What that says is that its very difficult to become well known to the voting public unless youre out front with a campaign, and hes not, Berkeley IGS Poll director Mark DiCamillo said Monday.

Plus, analysts say, Steyer has a bit of a charisma challenge if he wants to make the jump from behind-the-scenes donor to candidate.

Hes not a great retail politician. Hes not a politician who can light up a room or take over a room when he enters it, said David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University.

Some have wondered whether Steyers true value to Democrats is behind the scenes. They point to NextGen Americas role in helping the partys candidates take several key races in Virginia in November.

NextGen spent $3.3 million on grassroots organizing in Virginia, none of it on TV ads starring Steyer. Instead, the organization devoted $2 million for 60 paid staffers and 1,000 volunteers to flood 26 colleges in the state in an effort to turn out young voters.

One result: Democratic gubernatorial winner Ralph Northam received twice as many votes in November among people under 30 as Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential election, exit polls showed.

Thats the test for the Steyer dollars  getting low-propensity voters to stay engaged and outraged, McCuan said.

Even though House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a fellow San Franciscan, has called Steyers impeachment drive a distraction, it is gaining some traction. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in December found that 41 percent of respondents backed impeachment hearings.

Before Steyers impeachment campaign started, only two House Democrats supported a call by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, for impeachment. Fifty-eight now do.

But Clegg, also a top adviser to Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said signing a digital petition to impeach Trump is not the same as supporting Steyer as a candidate.

If his impeachment email list is intended to be a 2020 email list, those two questions dont transfer, Clegg said. Folks are not signing that petition for Tom Steyer. Theyre signing because Tom Steyer is paying for the Facebook ads.

That bait and switch is not going to catch a lot of fish.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge Monday to Californias ban on suction-dredge mining for gold, a technique that extracts minerals from riverbeds while dumping residue that can include toxic mercury back into the environment.

The high-pressure underwater vacuums, used mostly in mountain and foothill waterways, have been prohibited by the state since 2009. Brandon Rinehart, who holds a federal mining claim in the Plumas National Forest, argued in a lawsuit that the state was effectively prohibiting gold mining in the area and that federal law forbids state interference with mining on federal lands.

A state appeals court ruled in Rineharts favor but the California Supreme Court overruled the decision in August 2016. In a unanimous decision, the court said federal law for at least 130 years has left environmental regulation of mining largely up to the states.

Although Congress allows mining on federal lands, states can place limits on effective but environmentally destructive methods, now-retired Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar said in the ruling.

Rinehart, backed by mining companies, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court but ran into opposition from the Trump administration, which has rarely sided with environmental advocates.

In a Dec. 6 filing, Justice Department lawyers urged the court to let the California ruling stand. Federal law does not ... regulate the practice of mining or its impact on the environment, government lawyers said, so the state can regulate or prohibit harmful mining practices. The filing also noted that California was considering rules that might allow some types of suction-dredge mining.

The high court denied review Monday without comment.

Attorney Jonathan Wood of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Rinehart, said he was disappointed by the decision. But he said the issue would be back before the justices soon in other cases pending in lower courts on state regulation of mining on federal lands.

In its ban on suction-dredge mining, Wood contended, California has tried to veto Congress decisions about how federal lands should be used.

Suction dredging vacuums earth and gravel from river bottoms, runs it through a sluice box that separates the heaviest substances, including gold, and discharges the rest back into the waterway. State regulators say the practice has contaminated fish with mercury and damaged the habitat of endangered coho salmon.

California started requiring permits for suction dredging in 1961, made some waterways off limits in 1975 and halted the permits in 2009 with a moratorium that later was extended indefinitely.

The case is Rinehart vs. California, 16-970.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter @egelko
A New York tourist who walked naked through a Thai airport, defecated and then threw his feces at airport staff and travelers is blaming his bizarre behavior on an overdose of Viagra, according to news reports.

Steve Cho was arrested Thursday after the turd-tossing scuffle in the departure area of Phuket International Airport, the New Zealand Herald reported. It took six security guards and other staffers to subdue the 27-year-old Cho.
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BEIRUT  Syrian government forces and allied militiamen are advancing on the largest remaining rebel-held territory in the countrys north, forcing thousands of civilians to flee toward the border with Turkey in freezing winter temperatures.

The offensive on Idlib  a large province in northwestern Syria packed with civilians and dominated by al Qaeda-linked militants  was expected after the defeat of the Islamic State group late last year. Last week, Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the main military operations against Islamic State in Syria have ended and signaled that the focus would shift to al Qaeda-linked militants.

The Idlib offensive carries significant risks. The province bordering Turkey is home to more than 2.6 million Syrians, according to the U.N., including more than 1.1 million who fled fighting elsewhere in the country. A full-blown government offensive could cause large-scale destruction and massive displacement.

Turkey, a supporter of the rebels, has deployed military observers in the province as part of a de-escalation deal with Iran and Russia, but that has not stopped the fighting on the ground or Russian air strikes against the insurgents.

It is not clear how far the current offensive aims to reach, and recapturing the entire province is expected to be a long and bloody process. Opposition activists say the main target for now appears to be the sprawling rebel-held air base of Abu Zuhour, on the southeastern edge of the province, and securing the Damascus-Aleppo road that cuts through Idlib.

On Sunday, government forces recaptured the town of Sinjar, removing a key obstacle to its march toward the air base, according to reports by the state-affiliated Al-Ikhbariya TV. The town of Sinjar is located about 12 miles south of Abu Zuhour.

And hours later, a car bombing in the city of Idlib, the provinces capital, killed 23 people and wounded dozens, according to activist groups. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Over the past two months, troops backed by Russian air strikes have captured more than 80 towns and villages in the northern parts of the nearby Hama province and breached Idlib itself for the first time since mid-2015.

The offensive gained more intensity on Christmas Day, when one of President Bashar Assads most trusted and experienced officers took command of the operation to extend the governments presence toward Idlib and boost security for the road that links the capital, Damascus, with Aleppo, Syrias largest city.

Brig. Gen. Suheil al-Hassan, also known among his troops as Tiger, has led elite forces to many victories against insurgents since the conflict began nearly seven years ago.

Bassem Mroue is an Associated Press writer.
BERLIN  German Chancellor Angela Merkel embarked Sunday on talks with the center-left Social Democrats on forming a new government, with leaders stressing the need for speed as they attempt to break an impasse more than three months after the countrys election.

Leaders aim to decide by Friday whether theres enough common ground to move on to formal coalition negotiations. Whatever the result, it will be a while yet before a new administration is in place to end what is already post-World War II Germanys longest effort to put together a new government.

Germanys Sept. 24 election produced a parliamentary majority for only two plausible coalitions: the outgoing alliance of Merkels conservative Christian Democratic Union and its Bavaria-only sister, the Christian Social Union, with the Social Democrats; or an untried combination of the conservatives, the pro-business Free Democrats and the left-leaning Greens.

The Social Democrats vowed after slumping to their worst post-war election result to go into opposition, so Merkel opened talks on the alternative coalition  which collapsed in November. The Social Democrats then reluctantly reconsidered their refusal to mull extending the grand coalition of Germanys biggest parties. Shortly before Christmas, Germany beat its previous record of 86 days for the time from an election to the swearing-in of a new government.

If the parties decide this week that theyre prepared to open formal coalition negotiations, that will require approval Jan. 21 by a congress of the Social Democrats. Party leader Martin Schulz, Merkels defeated challenger in September, may face a tough job convincing members who so far are deeply skeptical of being junior partners in another grand coalition. Those negotiations would take weeks. Further, Social Democrat leaders have promised to hold a ballot of the full party membership on any coalition deal  taking several more weeks.

Possible stumbling blocks include migration: the conservatives want to maintain a block that bans migrants granted a status short of full asylum from bringing their closest relatives to Germany, while the Social Democrats want to end it. The two sides could also clash over the Social Democrats call to reform the health insurance system and their differing ambitions for the European Union. Schulz recently advocated aiming for a federal United States of Europe by 2025, which goes too far for conservatives.

If the parties dont form a coalition, the only remaining options would be for Merkels conservatives to lead an unprecedented minority government, or a new election.

Geir Moulson is an Associated Press writer.
TEHRAN  President Hassan Rouhani lashed out at his hard-line opponents Monday, saying the protesters who have shaken Iran in recent weeks objected not just to the bad economy but also to widespread corruption and the clerical governments restrictive policies on personal conduct and freedoms.

One cannot force ones lifestyle on the future generations, Rouhani said, in remarks reported by the ISNA news agency. The problem is that we want two generations after us to live the way we like them to.

In his most extensive comments yet on the protests, Rouhani said the people who took to the streets across the country did so because they were seeking a better life.

Some imagine that the people only want money and a good economy, but will someone accept a considerable amount of money per month when for instance the cyber network would be completely blocked? he asked. Is freedom and the life of the people purchasable with money? Why do some give the wrong reasons? This is an insult to the people.

Rouhani, a moderate, has been seeking a relaxation in social controls, but he faces resistance from hard-liners in unelected power centers like the judiciary, vetting councils and the state news media. They want to keep in place the framework of Islamic laws that effectively dictate how people should live, despite enormous changes in Iranian society in the past decade alone.

Irans judiciary and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blame the countrys enemies for the protests in over 80 cities, which started Dec. 28. They said the actions were organized by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia with the aim of bringing down the Islamic government.

They call the hundreds of protesters who have been arrested rioters and want all social media to be banned. In a move seemingly unrelated to the protests, but one that gives insight into hard-liners attitudes, all English classes in elementary schools were banned Sunday to combat the spread of Western influence.

Several political supporters of Rouhani say the first protest in the city of Mashhad was actually masterminded by the hard-liners, in an attempt to discredit the government.

The Iranian president has twice run for office promising to reinvigorate the economy, but has little to show for it. To make matters worse, his recent budget enraged many by calling for cuts in fuel subsidies and cash payments to the poor, alongside sharp increases in spending for many clerical institutions.

But the protesters also have spoken of a host of other problems, including endemic corruption and the governments expensive support for the Syrian government and Shiite groups throughout the Middle East, particularly Hezbollah, the Shiite movement in Lebanon.

Seeking to blunt criticism over the economy, Rouhani stressed the breadth of the protesters demands as well as their validity. We have no infallible officials and any authority can be criticized.

Thomas Erdbrink is a New York Times writer.
TEHRAN  Irans Revolutionary Guard said Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government demonstrations that erupted last month.

In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as exiled opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
1 Refugee crisis: As many as 64 migrants, including a mother whose 3-year-old child desperately clung to her, are feared dead after a traffickers overcrowded rubber dinghy from Libya started sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said Monday. The Italian coast guard rescued 86 people from the boat hours after it started sinking Saturday due to a puncture. The dinghy had been spotted off the coast of Libya by an aircraft from a European naval mission combatting migrant trafficking. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been rescued at sea and taken to southern Italian ports in the past few years. They include refugees fleeing wars or persecution as well as economic migrants.

2 China visit: French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday he hopes to forge a partnership with China on climate, security and other issues during a visit to expand European ties with Beijing. The trip comes as Britains impending departure from the EU and the more inward-looking policies of U.S. President Trump have raised the prospect of a possible realignment of global influence. China and France have promoted themselves as leaders on global warming after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Xi welcomed Macron in unusually effusive language.
BEIRUT  Syrian government forces captured 14 villages on Monday as they advanced on the largest rebel-held enclave in the countrys north amid a wave of air strikes.

Syrian government forces and their allies have been on the offensive since late October in Hama and Idlib provinces, capturing nearly 100 villages from insurgent groups, including the al Qaeda-linked Levant Liberation Committee. The offensive intensified on Christmas Day after reinforcements were brought in from other parts of Syria.

The main aim of the troops is to reach the rebel-held Abu Zuhour air base and secure the road linking the capital, Damascus, with the northern city of Aleppo, Syrias largest. Rebels captured Abu Zuhour in 2015 after a three-year siege.

The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media said the newly captured villages, including Freija, Jahman, Dawoudiyeh and Jub al-Qasab, bring the troops closer to the air base. The SCMM and the oppositions Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that 14 villages have been captured.

Russias Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its air base and naval station in western Syria came under at least 13 attacks by drones since Saturday. The ministry said three of the armed drones landed outside the base and others detonated when they crashed, while seven drones were shot down. The ministry said there was no damage to the bases.

The Observatory said the attacks were carried out by an Islamist rebel faction that operates in rural Latakia province, southwest of Idlib.

The offensive in the southern parts of Idlib province comes amid intense air strikes and shelling that have killed 21 people since Sunday, according to the Observatory.

Clashes also erupted Monday near the Damascus suburb of Harasta, after government forces reached troops trapped for more than a week in a military base surrounded by insurgents. State media said the Syrian army broke through rebel lines Sunday to reach soldiers trapped at the Murakabat vehicle base near Harasta, in the eastern Ghouta suburbs.

Rebels surrounded the base late last month, trapping an unknown number of soldiers inside. The rebels say they have taken numerous soldiers hostage. The Observatory says 159 rebels and government soldiers have been killed in fighting over the base since Dec. 29.

In the northwestern city of Idlib, meanwhile, paramedics said the death toll from a massive car bombing Sunday night rose to at least 25. Nearly 100 people were wounded. The Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, said four children and 11 women were among those killed.
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Multinational insurance claims manager Gallagher Bassett has bought local workplace health and safety services provider TriEx Health, Safety and Wellness for an undisclosed sum.

Gallagher Bassett, which last year bought Australian insurance claims management company Stream Group's New Zealand subsidiary Symetri for up to $25 million, will take on current directors Sarah OConnell and Rob Acutt through the acquisition. O'Connell will become general manager of TriEx.

"We see this as a great opportunity," said Gallagher Bassett's New Zealand managing director Craig Furness. "GBs expertise in claim management, rehabilitation and policy administration is well known in New Zealand. TriEx is a proven and trusted provider of occupational health, safety & wellness solutions for New Zealand workers, with a great reputation for excellence."

Gallagher Bassett says it is the largest multi-disciplinary third party claims administrator in New Zealand, and manages claims on behalf of insurers, brokers, government bodies and self-insured organisations. Globally, it says it is the largest property/casualty third party claims administrator and has operations in the US, Canada, UK and Australia.

In New Zealand, it runs an accredited employer programme which reduces employers' Accident Compensation Corp levies if they take on the responsibility of managing workplace health and safety, including claims management and rehabilitation of their own employees following a work injury.

(BusinessDesk)

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The NYPD is requesting from Google the "entire digital history" of a Staten Island high school student, which according to the teen's attorney, represents an "unconstitutional violation of privacy."

The subpoena relies on the city Administrative Code, drafted by the New York City Council, rather than approval from a state or federal court, which according to the teen's attorney is both unlawful and unusual.

"Since when does NYPD have power to subpoena people?" said attorney Martin Soltar. "I've practiced as a criminal defense attorney for close to 50 years and I've never seen one of these (subpoenas) before," he said.

The NYPD contacted Google last month with the Dec. 14 subpoena for the 17-year-old's e-mails, contacts, search history and other digital information in regard to an ongoing investigation, according to the teen's Manhattan state Supreme Court filing, which seeks to block the subpoena.

Details about the investigation were redacted in a copy of the subpoena forwarded by Google to the teen, identified only as "K.Q." in the filing.

In reference to a New York Post report that suggests the NYPD requested the information as part of a child pornography probe that could be tied to an adult, Soltar said the nature of the investigation is "obvious" based on a reference he saw in court documents to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Regardless what the investigation is about, the fight in court is about tempering the power police have in obtaining a citizen's personal information, said Soltar.

"If you as a citizen tell officers, 'I decline for you to come in to my house,' and then they get a subpoena on their own...the FBI doesn't have the power to subpoena."

The NYPD requested that Google not inform anyone of the subpoena for 90 days, as not to disrupt the investigation, according to court documents.

The NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information's office referred questions to the city's Law Department, which declined to comment on the details of the investigation or teen's Supreme Court filing.

Soltar said the request is invalid because the city code it references was not meant to allow the NYPD to issue subpoenas in criminal investigations. He said it also violates the federal stored communication act, in that it isn't backed by a state or federal statute.

Once police contacted Google, the company relayed a redacted version of the subpoena to the teen, per company policy when someone signs up as a new user, the court filing says.

The company explained they would release the teen's information, unless the teen filed in court within seven days, which also is standard policy among most social media companies.

It's not the first time the NYPD has requested account data from a social media site prior to obtaining a court order.

In 2012, Twitter refused an NYPD request for account data tied to threats about a public event in the city, then, later complied under court order.

The New York Civil Liberties Union released the following statement in regard to the NYPD's request.

"We are concerned about the NYPD seeking large amounts of private information about New Yorkers without court orders," said Christopher Dunn, NYCLU assistant legal director. "When it comes to police requests for email and other internet activity, companies should not be honoring these administrative subpoenas and instead should insist on court orders."
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Brooklyn woman who used photos of a child cancer patient on Staten Island to scam donors has violated her probation and was sentenced this week to one year in jail.

A Nassau County judge on Monday revoked a probation deal for Brittney Schmidt, 31, who pleaded guilty in September to a felony charge of scheme to defraud, according to a Newsday report.

A five-year probation sentence and community service were on the condition Schmidt stay out of trouble, which she violated by allegedly skipping court and probation appointments, according to the report.

Authorities said Schmidt and co-defendant Vincent Fina, 30, solicited donations from police precincts, fire departments and businesses across the city using the story and photos of a then 5-year-old Staten Island boy who continues to undergo treatments for brain cancer.

Some of the donations were allegedly used for drugs, according to the report.

Fina, who previously took the same probation deal, has since been charged in a Dec. 12 robbery case, according to court records.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- He lost his fiancee and his unborn child two years ago due to a drug overdose.

And on Monday, Greenridge resident Frank DeGaetano, who, himself was revived in November after overdosing on heroin, lost his freedom, also because of narcotics.

DeGaetano, 29, was sentenced, under a plea agreement, to three years behind bars and two years' post-release supervision on drug-sale and drug-possession convictions.

The defendant, along with four others, was busted in January of last year in a probe dubbed "Operation Blue Angel." The investigation stemmed from the overdose death in March 2016 of DeGaetano's fiancee, Annadale resident Sharissa Turk, a.k.a. the "Blue Fairy," who was eight months pregnant.

"The court has struggled with this one for a long time," said Justice Charles Troia in imposing sentence. "Mr. DeGaetano, if anyone, should be able to see the evils of this addiction having lost your fiancee and your child. Yet, you did it again. I truly think incarceration is the only thing that might work or keep you alive for the next three years."

Moments earlier, the dark-haired defendant, garbed in a green jacket and tan pants, thanked Troia for giving him a "lenient sentence," in accordance with the plea deal.

Assistant District Attorney Travis Atkinson asked Troia to scrap the initially agreed-upon three-year sentence and hit DeGaetano with a six-year-prison term in view of his overdose while awaiting sentencing.

DeGaetano had pleaded guilty on Oct. 25 and remained free on $100,000 bond, pending sentencing, originally scheduled for Dec. 6 in state Supreme Court, St. George.

However, that proceeding was adjourned due to the defendant's overdose on Nov. 19. He was revived with two doses of Narcan after admitting he overdosed on two bags of heroin at his family home in Greenridge, a source with knowledge of the probe previously told the Advance.

Atkinson said the defendant had "failed several chances to show he deserves any leniency in this case."

He said prosecutors objected to any sentence below six years.

Defense lawyer Andrew Rendeiro told the court his client's overdose is "a symptom of the disease he has" and asked Troia to impose the promised sentence.

"It's a terrible situation," Rendeiro said outside court.

The investigation, which resulted in the arrests of DeGaetano and others, traced the supply of heroin on Staten Island to Edison Township, N.J.

Turk's death nearly two years ago had been investigated as a crime scene in an attempt to trace the drugs that killed her to the source, as part of the Overdose Response Initiative spearheaded by District Attorney Michael E. McMahon.

Turk, 25, known as the "Blue Fairy," was preparing to leave for an inpatient drug-treatment program on the day she fatally overdosed.

Turk had performed as the "Blue Fairy" in a music video about prescription drug abuse in 2013. The video went viral after Turk pleaded guilty to felony drug charges.

The probe led police, in part, to DeGaetano, who authorities named as a distributor in the takedown.

Police seized 400 glassine bags of heroin and $11,000 in cash in the bust.

Prosecutors said police documented the supply chain of heroin and fentanyl which ended in a number of neighborhoods including Rossville, Richmond, Tottenville, Great Kills and Rosebank.

A synthetic opioid, fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than the heroin it is typically mixed with and is potentially lethal, said authorities.

Also on Monday, Jessica Chaikin, who authorities said, transported heroin and fentanyl from New Jersey to Staten Island, was sentenced to four years in prison in a separate proceeding.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- If you haven't met Imam Dr. Tahir Kukiqi yet, it is a very easy thing to accomplish.

Just go to any event that is designed to bring together diverse people of all races and religions and you'll find him there.

But, he doesn't just sit on the sidelines. He actively tries, in numerous ways, to encourage people of different faiths to come together. He has helped to initiate this ever since he settled on Staten Island.

His strong dislike of "hate, lies, racism and injustice" has lead him to set his goal "to spread peace, brotherhood, justice and knowledge" in order to "improve the relationship between people wherever [he] lives and beyond."

His strong wish for peace between all neighbors, no matter how they look or pray, does not end on Staten Island, but extends deeply "beyond" -- all the way to the problems in the Middle East.

What does "imam" mean? Do you serve as a religious leader in any other venue?

Imam means "leader of community in religious affairs." It is very much like the responsibilities of a rabbi or pastor, taking care of the community in religious and social affairs. Along with that, I also do a lot of outreach to other religious communities. ... Only men can hold the title of imam. Sisters can be leaders for females in our community. I am also a member of the campus ministry at Wagner College.

Have you received any awards or recognitions?

Yes. I have been honored by the mayor's office and former Borough President Jim Molinaro, the NYPD, the Staten Island Immigrant Council, the Ilyrian Officers Society, Sen. Andrew Lanza and the NYPD Muslims, among others.

Who has been an inspiration to you?

My father, Mustafa Kukiqi, God bless his soul. My father was a very special human being. He was an example of sacrifice who did the impossible to give his 10 children all the education they needed, to the point that two of his kids are Ph.D. holders, one has a master's degree and the rest have degrees, as well. Imagine doing this in a communist regime that hates religion and the very same regime that killed our people, Albanians, for so many years.

What did he teach you that strongly influenced your life?

My father supported us and guided us in every way that we needed to succeed. He taught us to never give up when we face hardships and difficulties regardless of each condition we might be in. I learned that God is with us and will help us out and to never give up and [God] will never let us down. He taught me that hating is an illness and the cure for that is understanding and learning and to respect others, even as they are disagreeing with us.

Who else do you admire?

In the world we live in, we need more people of this category of human being who understand others, accept them, work with them and make a positive change in the community. Starting with that, the change can continue on to further distances.

You were invited as a representative of the Albanian community to a Holocaust commemoration, at the Jewish Center in Arden Heights. Tell us why the Albanians were selected for this honor?

After World War ll, there were more Jewish people in Albania than before the war. These were refugees from every country that was invaded by the Nazis. Though the Nazis put a price on the head of every Jewish person in Albania, the Muslim and Christian Albanians protected each and every one, despite the fact that they paid some consequences. One house was burnt down when it was learned that a Jew had been hidden there. Albania has a history of tolerance. Its population is steeped in beset. Would that beset spread all over the world.

Can you tell us about the 15 Years Project consisting of a yearly day of dialogue and dinner between Catholics and Muslims?

It is a full day of dialogue that has been very meaningful. It is for building bridges instead of building fences. It is very productive and has changed many lives and opinions. Instead of hate and animosity, there is respect and cooperation.

What is one thing that is necessary to bring together people with diverse beliefs?

To promote sectarian cohesion we must seek unity, not uniformity.

Get to know Dr. Tahir Kukiqi

Where he was born and were he has live: "I was born on March 5, 1955 in Kosova, formerly Yugoslavia. I came [to Staten Island from Cairo, Egypt] in 2002 to join the Miraj School and Albanian Islamic Cultural Center.

His definition of happiness: Happiness is seeing his children do well in school and when he sees that people of different faiths come together for good purposes.

Occupations he's held: "I was an announcer and editor of Radio Program at Egyptian radio and TV. Also, I was a translator for the Interior Ministry and Foreign Ministry in Egypt."

His current occupation: "I am iman/head of department of Islamic studies at Miraj Islamic School and vice president of the Albanian Islamic Culture Center."

The clubs and organizations he belongs to: "I'm a member of the steering committee for Community Day and Building Bridges, [the latter of which is] an interfaith organization where people of different religions work together, increasing the level of awareness and building bridges of collaboration between different ethnicities and religious groups, for improvement of our community."
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System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:948

/var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612eac26108)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f023cc88)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612eac26108)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f023cc88)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612f0265e90)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f023cc88)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f023cc88)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612e2499f98)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f015db00)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f015db00)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:948

/var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612efe88900)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f03a1328)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612efe88900)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f03a1328)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612efeadf40)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f03a1328)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f03a1328)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612e4d11588)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f03ec418)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f03ec418)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
If you've ever been worried about going to the movies by yourself, fear no more, why not take mans best friend?

Openair Cinemas will return to Canberra for its sixth year on Thursday and this year, organisers have made the event more dog friendly, allowing guests and anyone short of company to bring their fur-friends for a "doggy date" to any screening.

Kim and Torben Pedersen with their daughter Alexandra and dog Miles. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos

Event manager, Erin Algeo said the openair cinema was about spending as much time outdoors as possible with friends and family.

"The aim of the event is to make the most of these balmy summer nights, and what better way to do so than with food freshly cooked onsite and refreshing drinks before a movie under the stars," Ms Algeo said.
On Sunday, Australia became the hottest place on earth, stretching the east coasts energy grid as it attempted to supply the increased demand.

However, Saturday was the first real test of the National Electricity Market's reliability in 2018 after its failures in the summer of 2016-17, and whether the Australian Energy Market Operators new summer power plans are strong enough to prevent massive blackouts as the grid comes under pressure during heatwaves.

AEMO plan to introduce an additional 2000 megawatts of energy is designed to overcome increased summer demand issues. Credit:MICK TSIKAS

Late last year, AEMO announced it was adding almost 2000 megawatts of additional power for the summer ahead, which it said would more than replace the 1600 megawatts taken offline after Victoria's Hazelwood brown coal-fired power station closed in March.

These additional megawatts were called upon over the weekend as all states in the NEM saw high temperatures, with South Australia reaching an average high of 46.7 degrees Celsius, Victoria seeing up to 45.2 degrees Celsius, and NSW and Queensland hitting 46.1 and 45.4 degrees respectively, while Tasmania saw an unusual high of 35.8 degrees, increasing energy demand across the entire grid.
The day after marriage equality became law, I attended my best mate's wedding to his wife; the first in Australia where the celebrant said the words marriage is a "union of two people" excluding all others.

It was a proud moment for the groom but also for me as his groomsman, to finally hear those words. And there was applause from friends and family.

Ending social discrimination will a longer battle than eliminating legal barriers. Credit:AP

Today, January 9, is the first day that most same-sex couples can get married after declaring the requisite 30-day notice of intention to marry, following the change in our marriage law.

As we wake up, living in an Australia with marriage equality, we can expect changes. After all, the ACT voted overwhelmingly for marriage equality for a reason.
When Google stopped operating its China-based search engine in 2010 in protest against censorship, scores of young people placed wreaths at the company headquarters in Beijing as a sign of mourning.

At the time, vibrant debate and commentary on Chinese social media platforms like Sina Weibo held out some promise for the emergence of an online civil society with the power to expose corruption and effect change.

Google has announced plans to set up an artificial intelligence research centre in Beijing. Credit:Jason Lee

The Chinese Communist Party was caught in a vice  seeing the internet as an avenue for pursuing economic growth, while at the same time fretting about the political disruption it augured.

But, seemingly against all odds, Beijing has managed to strike the balance between harnessing the internet for economic growth and guarding against its threats to security  something former president Bill Clinton once called the equivalent of "nailing Jell-O to a wall".
Stephanie Edwards of Roseville thinks her "local brush turkey is on a health kick for new year  keeps chomping pieces out of my Tuscan Kale plant!"

A sharp-eyed David of Annandale has been prompted to write of some not so sharp-eyed TV police. "I've just seen a preview for the return season of Cops (US). A police officer succeeds in kicking open, at his second attempt, the front door of a house. The keys to the house are clearly in the outside of the door lock!" In a more sombre key, Ken Dundas of Banora Point asks "why do TV channels heavily promote funeral insurance during their evening bulletins? Do they think the news items are so bad that they are likely to cause premature death?"

A well and truly alive Nola Tucker of Kiama suggests a new fine for sudden impact. "If the government could fine anyone misusing or over using the dreadful word 'impact' in the media, the country would soon be out of debt."

Reading Timelines' revisiting of "1965 and the shameful era of banned books in Australia" prompted Garth Clarke of North Sydney to recall how Ulysses once reached these shores. "It was a time when many visitors to our more enlightened neighbour New Zealand returned with a banned book in their luggage. My copy of Ulysses travelled via this route."

A News Review piece on the word "thingummyjig" reminded Lorraine Nelson of Frenchs Forest of "growing up in Adelaide in the 1940s and '50s. We children would call out, 'Mum, where's the thingummybob?' She would always call back, 'Up in Annie's room behind the clock'. It goes without saying no Annie lived with us!"
Donald Trump has, once again, shown he is the master of distraction.

His performance in the wake of the allegations contained in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse has been little short of remarkable.

The raft of claims, including Mr Trump had never seriously considered he would win the 2016 US presidential election and was not prepared for his victory, combined with a brutal description of him as an obnoxious, wilfully ignorant and malevolent individual would have proved fatal for virtually any other president.

This is particularly so given the book was wholeheartedly endorsed, by former Trump insider and now bitter enemy, Steve Bannon.
My first memory of Mum's volunteering was at primary school tuck shop - once a week, pies and sausage rolls instead of home-made sandwiches. Then school fundraising, along with other mothers who became known as "auntie", with children in our classes who became our "cousins". Some of these came to the funeral 50 years on.

Oh, no! A complete re-write required in a couple hours? Too late! I'll just have to proceed with the telling of her 80-plus years of community service and wrack my brains for the bits that did harm and skip over them.

I awoke on Friday morning rehearsing the eulogy for my mother's funeral later in the afternoon, mentally making a note  thank those contributing to the service. Then I choked on my toast as the headline leapt off the page, "Volunteering often does more harm than good" ( 5 Jan, 2018).

Joining Brownies at age 8, in 1932, Mum never ceased her involvement with the Guides until she was physically no longer able and had to go into aged care. Countless girls and women gained practical skills and self confidence through the organisation either directly or indirectly from her commitment and service to the Guiding movement over 85 years.

Through Rotary she became known as "mother" to some 20 international exchange students and these also became additional "cousins" to our family around the world.

My parents were at the forefront of local fundraising for the Rotary polio eradication program which was launched in 1985. At that time there were an estimated 400,000 cases of polio diagnosed every year. Last year there were fewer than 100. This program was taken up by the World Health Organisation in 1988 and substantial additional funds have been contributed by world governments over the past 30 years, and more recently by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But these funds are still not enough without the hundreds of thousands of Rotary and other volunteers required to deliver to 2 million children a year, in India alone. A volunteer initiative that has changed the world. My mother raised funds by a sponsored bike ride.

An international project of my Rotary Club was to fund a mobile medical clinic vehicle in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where tribespeople had to walk for up to three days to get to a medical centre. The local government agreed to cover the operating costs for one year. After that trial they set up 70 more vehicles. An amazing leverage on an initiative from volunteers to demonstrate "value for money". The same can be done here. Leading by example can change government thinking and policy.

Recently I retired as a volunteer director of a community-run aged-care facility in South Melbourne. After merging two smaller organisations, a new 150-bed facility was completed in 2015. A combination of local government, community fundraising and bank loans funded the $27 million construction. Now that it's fully occupied and the debt paid off, I considered I had done myself out of a job.
On Saturday, Age readers encountered several people from Melbourne's outer western suburbs. One was John Forrester, who has lived next to the Werribee River for almost 40 years and who acts as a "river keeper". Featured in the article ("Push for tougher laws to protect rivers of west"), Forrester believes the entire corridor for both the Werribee and Maribyrnong rivers should be declared a public park.

Though unnamed, another one of the characters to which Age readers have been exposed recently also hails from the western suburbs. Having been in the media for the past couple of weeks, he was probably already familiar to readers before the publication of the article "Bail revoked for teen 'who kicked cop' ". The 17-year-old is alleged to have been involved in "a wild party" at an Airbnb house in Werribee and, in a separate incident, was charged with injuring a police officer at Highpoint shopping centre in Maribyrnong.

Despite the differences in the stories of these men, both emerge from and inhabit a region of Melbourne that is increasingly pushing back against its long-term neglect by state and federal governments  the outer western suburbs.

Where one  namely Forrester  might be viewed by some as a champion because of his campaign to protect our western waterways, for developers and politicians seeking to allow hideous developments at the edge of the Maribyrnong and Werribee rivers, he is little more than a troublemaker. People in Melbourne's west are not meant to demand a better life for themselves, let alone their rivers.
Journalists use all manner of psychological tricks to get their stories. Some cajole and threaten. Others flatter their sources and seek to convince them they are on their side.

Following Donald Trump's election victory, Michael Wolff took the latter approach to the extreme by publicly attacking what Trump calls the "fake news" media.

Rather than a threat to the nation, Wolff argued in a podcast interview that Trump was "no different from anyone else". The United States, he added, was "not in a crisis situation", simply "a new and different political moment".

He would later attack CNN host Brian Stelter for delivering a weekly "pious sermon about Trump's perfidiousness" and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for reporting on Trump as an "aberrant" President.
Prominent Liberal ministers have launched a stinging attack on one of their own - the head of the NSW Young Liberals, Harry Stutchbury - over his stance on housing affordability.

In a provocative opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, the 26-year-old Mr Stutchbury argued the Liberal Party should abolish the exemption that allows retirees to claim the pension despite owning multi-million dollar homes. The long-standing arrangement means a person's primary dwelling is not counted in the asset test for the aged pension, and presently enjoys bipartisan support in the political arena.

Mr Stutchbury said the Liberals were "terrified of taking serious steps to tackle housing affordability", having been burnt by its attempt to curb superannuation excesses before the last election.

In response, NSW Counter Terrorism Minister David Elliott blasted Mr Stutchbury on Facebook, suggesting Liberal voters in western Sydney would use the opinion piece to light their barbecues.
About 10 years ago, we spent some time living in Moorooka while our old Queenslander was renovated. There were a lot of African families living out there too. I dont know what part of the continent they came from, but chances are a fair number had arrived as refugees from the civil war in Sudan.

They were good neighbours. Quiet people, even shy.

Peter Dutton is walking down a well-trodden path. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

There was a real problem with crime in the neighbourhood, but they werent the source. It was drunken bogans tearing around the streets at high speed, and junkies turning over houses for anything they could sell for a hit. The bogans and the junkies were white. Our dog chased a few of them off. I chased a couple more.

Peter Dutton had left the Queensland Police Force by then, so we didnt need his help securing the homestead, and maybe thats a pity. Maybe if that potato-headed munter had been forced to work that beat for a while hed know what a disgusting travesty the race-baiting of the last week has been.
Princess Charlotte's first day at nursery school has been marked by the release of two pictures taken by her proud mother, the Duchess of Cambridge.

The two-year-old, who is fourth in line to the throne, was photographed at Kensington Palace before travelling to nearby Willcocks Nursery School.

Princess Charlotte is attending Willcocks Nursery School in London. Credit:The Duchess of Cambridge

Charlotte is pictured sitting down on some outside steps in the grounds of the famous palace and another standing as she holds onto a rail.

The young princess is wearing a scarf, coat and appears to have a rucksack on her back as she is photographed by her mother.
My husband 63, is working full time and has a taxable income of about $48,000 a year. I, 46, am working casually as a tutor and earn about $20,000 a year. We have accumulated nearly $300,000 superannuation in my husband's account so far. I don't have super currently because I am self-employed. As my husband's retirement is approaching we are thinking about the next move of our lifestyle. We own a one-bedroom unit  no mortgage  in Randwick, market value of $650,000 plus. Neither of us are confident about how to prepare for our retirement. An option we are thinking about is renting the unit in two years' time and buying a house in the Blue Mountains area where we can commute to the city within a reasonable time. We hope to live in a quiet rural area but quite close to the city: a three-bedroom house where I can use one room as my tuition office. To buy a new property we need to withdraw all the super money and take out a small mortgage. We are not sure if this option is a good one to choose in the future. As far as we know my husband can work part time without affecting his pension and I can do casual work in Sydney as well as at home as it's only a two-hour commute. In addition, we can hopefully expect rental income to pay off strata and mortgage payments. Do you think we are on the right track to prepare for our old age? Do you think it's sensible to use up all the super in order to buy a second property or better to keep some of the super and have a higher mortgage? Do we have a better option to choose to be better off? My husband and I would appreciate any advice you can offer. E.L.

Your husband was presumably born in 1954 and is thus eligible to apply for an age pension at age 66, in three years' time. Even though you are ineligible, the means test would count both your assets and income to determine what a married pension might be and then pay your husband half of that. You, yourself, would be eligible for an age pension at age 67, although government policy is to raise this to 70. You are currently living on about $60,000 a year net of tax.

If move to the Blue Mountains and work in Sydney, you'll have to factor in the cost of commuting. Credit:Wolter Peeters

When you apply for an age pension, Centrelink applies both an assets and an income means test and whichever provides a lower result is the pension granted. Further, once your husband reaches age pension age, then his super benefits would be counted by the means tests.

Let's say you were to rent your Sydney apartment and move to the Blue Mountains. Then the value of the newly rented flat, $650,000, and the rent received, would be counted by Centrelink's means tests. The tests would ignore your new home, and also any home mortgage you would have raised to buy it. (I imagine you would need to borrow at least $250,000 to $350,000 extra to buy even a very small home in the mountains but, frankly, you would be lucky to get a mortgage if your husband is retired and you earn a low income.)
It was the inspirational story that brought people to tears, but for David Lee, the chief executive of DWL Financial Services, it was much more than that.

After reading Daniel Hu's story, thanking his parents who worked as cleaners and lived below the poverty line to help him achieve an outstanding HSC result, Mr Lee felt compelled to reach out to Mr Hu.

Mr Hu's story resonated, as he experienced a similar struggle when he came to Australia from Malaysia as a young man many years ago.

"I grew up in a very poor Chinese Malaysian family in Malaysia and came to Australia when I was 27 speaking no English at all. I now own a successful financial planning company but, like Daniel's parents, I did anything I could to get by in the early days," Mr Lee said.
The public service commission has refused to release records of its boss John Lloyd's contacts with right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, despite questions about his links to the group.

After Mr Lloyd agreed in an October Senate estimates hearing to take on notice requests for phone records of his contacts with the IPA, the Australian Public Service Commission said it wouldn't release them to senators because it would involve an "unreasonable diversion" of its resources.

Public service commissioner John Lloyd has faced questions about his links to the Institute of Public Affairs. Credit:Jay Cronan

"In addition, it would include the release of personal information that would breach the privacy of Mr Lloyd and the people he has phone contact with," the commission said.

However the commission confirmed in a response last month he met with an IPA representative in April 2015 after sending it an email saying Labor senator Penny Wong had "taken a swipe" at two of the think tank's former directors.
The Coalition government has escaped paying nearly $350 million in wage rises to public servants at the largest agencies after they rejected workplace deal offers amid bitter rows over conditions, figures from the public service commission show.

Staff at the largest government employers went without the pay rises when they knocked back proposed deals that would have cut conditions as fraught negotiations escalated to strike action in some agencies.

The government didn't have to pay public servants at the largest agencies $350 million as they rejected pay deals. Credit:Louie Douvis

Under the government's workplace rules, public servants who agreed to new deals were denied back pay, despite waiting up to four years for wage rises amid the prolonged industrial battles that followed the Coalition's new workplace bargaining rules.

Estimates released by the Australian Public Service Commission show that $343.5 million in wage rises offered to public servants at the Tax Office, Human Services, Agriculture, Defence and the former Department of Immigration and Border Protection went unpaid during the turmoil.
A pizza shop owner ran 20 metres to punch a man who later died in hospital after seeing one of his female employees "stiff-armed" outside a NSW coastal pub, a court has heard.

George Joseph Habkouk, 49, appeared in Wyong Local Court on Monday via video link from Cessnock maximum security prison accused of punching Haydn Butcher, 30, in the head outside the Lakes Hotel at The Entrance about 1am on New Year's Day.

Mr Butcher fell to the ground after being punched, hit his head on the concrete and lost consciousness.

He was taken to Royal North Shore Hospital in a critical condition but died from his injuries the following day.
A woman stands accused of assaulting and kidnapping her mother in a "disturbing and somewhat bizarre" incident linked to the ongoing fallout of her relationship with a former high-flying stockbroker.

Royalene Pollock, 68, suffered a suspected broken rib and facial cuts after she was allegedly bashed and tied up by her daughter, Lauren Pollock, in the older woman's Cherrybrook home about 3am on Sunday.

Former BRW Rich Lister Phil Mathews. Credit:MATHEWS CAPITAL

Hornsby Local Court heard on Monday that Lauren Pollock, 37, and Afghanistan war veteran Daniel Mark Cupples, 39, are alleged to have kidnapped the elderly woman and taken her back to Pollock's home at Naremburn.

By 5am, the victim was taken to a home in Mosman where she raised the alarm to a resident, but only after allegedly being told by her daughter to go inside.
A woman charged with causing a Kings Highway crash that left five people in hospital has admitted responsibility, and said it was "about time I address my drug issues".

Katrina West, 39, from Batemans Bay, is accused of being under the influence of ice when she fell asleep at the wheel near Braidwood, while returning home after facing an ACT court on an unrelated drug-driving charge.

The car driven by Katrina West at the time of the accident. Credit:NSW Police

She appeared in Queanbeyan Local Court via video link on Monday. She is facing three charges of dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm.

Ms West's defence lawyer, Rosemary Benet, indicated her client would plead guilty to the three charges. However, the police prosecutor told the court the investigation was ongoing and the nature of the charges could change.
Police are concerned about the increasingly violent behaviour of a lone gunman who shot a 21-year-old Sydney pizza shop worker and is thought to be responsible for armed robberies at four other takeaway outlets.

Detectives investigating the five robberies in Sydney's west over a seven-week period say the method and CCTV footage has led them to conclude they're all linked.

In the first four robberies, the offender entered through a rear door, threatening employees with a gun and robbing them of cash, NSW Police say.

But in the early hours of Sunday morning, Domino's Pizza restaurant worker Anand Singh, 21, was shot twice - in the chest and hand - in Wentworthville by a man they believe to be the same offender.
Two men were arrested and several women will be given infringement notices after police broke up a protest in the Hawkesbury region on Monday.

About 100 people including federal politicians gathered at Windsor Bridge from 6am, to call for work on the bridge replacement project to halt until a government inquiry into the project is complete.

The site has historical significance, with early road paving and other artefacts discovered nearby. A salvage operation has begun to recover any artefacts in the area before construction continues.

Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon and member for Macquarie Susan Templeman were among those who linked arms at the site, where protestors held signs including "stop trashing our town" and "save our square".
2018 will be the year malicious software becomes smarter and cyber criminals increasingly chase crypto-currencies like bitcoin, according to predictions from computer security companies.

It will also be the year ransomware  software designed by hackers that locks up computer systems until a fee is paid  will become more targeted and prevalent among big business, where ransom demands are often much higher in dollar value due to businesses having more money to divulge than consumers, according to computer security firm Fortinet.

Cyber attacks are set to get a lot smarter.

Derek Manky, global security strategist at Fortinet, says that although the threat magnitude of ransomware has grown by 35 times over 2017 with "ransomworms" and other types of attacks, there is more to come.

"The next big target for ransomware is likely to be cloud service providers and other commercial services with a goal of creating revenue streams," he says, pointing to one ransom that resulted in $US1 million being paid by a web hosting company in 2017.
A man accused of raping women he met on dating app Tinder has been refused bail, after a court heard he yelled at one of his alleged victims in the street while out of custody.

Glenn Hartland, 43, is accused of raping three women he was in relationships with and sexually assaulting a fourth between 2014 and 2016, after meeting the women online.

Alleged Tinder rapist Glenn Hartland Credit:Current Affair

Mr Hartland faces multiple counts of rape, false imprisonment and assault. He has denied the allegations.

He spent most of last year out of custody until mid-December, when he yelled "there's no point hiding, you liar" at one of the women as he drove past her in Prahran, Melbourne Magistrates Court heard.
Runaway Indian driver Puneet Puneet has reportedly begged the family of the Queensland student he killed to pardon him as he continues to fight extradition to Australia to face charges over the drunken crash.

Puneet was a 19-year-old learner driver when he ran into and killed Queensland student Dean Hofstee, 19, and seriously injured Clancy Coker, 20, in Southbank, on October 1, 2008. He was drunk at the time.

Puneet was on bail and awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to culpable driving when he fled Australia using a friend's passport in 2009.

He was arrested four years later in India, on his wedding day.
Ron Tandberg, whose perfect little "pocket" cartoons have been among the most loved features of The Age for the past 45 years, has died after a short battle with cancer.

Tandberg, who turned 74 on New Year's Eve, died on Monday, surrounded by members of his family  his wife, Glen, at his side  at the St John of God Hospital in Geelong.

Tandberg joined The Age in 1972, and went on to win an extraordinary 11 Walkley Awards, including two Gold Walkleys.

He was a man who found wry humour in almost everything, including the illness he was diagnosed with on Friday the 13th of October last year.
Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is facing a fresh allegation of sexual harassment by a second Melbourne City councillor, Cathy Oke, who has told an independent investigation that he tried to kiss her while they were in his office.

Cr Oke had also told an investigation into Cr Doyle's behaviour that he clutched her thigh under a table in a separate incident.

Melbourne City councillor Cathy Oke with Greens MP Adam Bandt (right) and former Victorian Greens leader Greg Barber. Credit:Arsineh Houspian

It comes as Cr Doyle  who has denied all allegations against him  launched a public campaign to restore his reputation, hiring a public relations firm to work for him. The firm on Monday released text messages between Cr Doyle and former councillor Tessa Sullivan.

Ms Sullivan was elected to Melbourne City Council in 2016 as part of Team Doyle.
A former IT engineer from the United Kingdom, Brad Bradshaw is a long way from home as he watches over coffee beans roasting at his purpose-built shed in Western Australia's great southern region.

"Sorry, I'll just press that there," he says while fielding questions from reporters, as his roasting machine beeps, beckoning him to his computer.

Coffee beans roasting at Stash Coffee's Denmark roasting shed. Credit:Heather McNeill

Mr Bradshaw - who makes his batches with the help of tailored computer software - has taken his love for IT and engineering and transferred it into high end speciality coffee making in the seaside town of Denmark.

As he watches about 10 kilograms of coffee beans being tossed in the roasting machine on a Monday afternoon, one of his eyes is always on his nearby computer screen, which is closely monitoring the beans' reaction and temperature to help achieve that perfect batch.
Angry discussions were sparked on a community Facebook group after a picture of clothes scattered on the floor in front of the Good Sammy Mandurah drop-off bins was posted by an outraged resident.

Karla Ann Armstrong had posted the pictures on Mandurah Q and A on Sunday morning with the caption, "I am absolutely disgusted !!!!!! How can people be this lazy."

Clothes covered the floor and the top of bins at the Mandurah Good Sammy's. Credit:Karla Ann Armstrong.

Good Samaritan WA retail operations manager Paige Lynam said there was a history of clothing theft from the Mandurah bins.

"They go through the bins over the weekend," Ms Lynam said.
A Parkerville man has been fined $5000 for offences his company committed while contracting for and carrying out the fit-out of two commercial buildings in Belmont and Jandakot in 2013.

The Perth Magistrates Court found in relation to both sites the company had implied that it was a registered building contractor when it was not, and carried out a prescribed building service without the required registration.

The company was fined for carrying out unregistered work. Credit:Erin Jonasson

The court heard the company had used another builder's registration number to obtain building permits for the projects, which were valued at $133,702 and $120,402 respectively.

As the sole director of the company, which has since become insolvent, the man was taken to have committed the offences of the company.
Phnom Penh: Australian nurse Tammy Davis-Charles, who is suffering eye cancer, has had her appeal against an 18-month jail sentence on surrogacy charges rejected by a Cambodian court.

Davis-Charles sobbed after a judge ruled on Monday that under Cambodian law the court could not take into consideration her cancer.

Australian nurse Tammy Davis-Charles arrives at court in Phnom Penh on January 8, 2018. Her appeal against an 18-month jail sentence for surrogacy offences was dismissed. Credit:NARA LON

The judge found that the sentence imposed on Davis-Charles, a mother of six from Melbourne, last October was lenient.

She has been serving the sentence in Prey Sar, a notoriously harsh jail on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where medical treatment is limited.
Washington: Preliminary discussions are under way for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to potentially interview US President Donald Trump as part of the probe of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, NBC News reported on Monday.

Citing three people familiar with the situation, NBC said lawyers for Trump had met with representatives of Mueller's office in late December to talk about the logistics of any such interview.

Robert Mueller, the Justice Department's special counsel, at the Capitol in Washington. Credit:New York Times

The discussions included the possible location and length of any interview as well as legal standards and options for its format, including written responses instead of a formal sit-down, according to the news network.

Mueller, under the Department of Justice, is investigating allegations of Russian meddling in the US presidential election and possible collusion by Trump's campaign.
Radical transparency site WikiLeaks has gone after author Michael Wolff following the publication of a controversial book that puts the Trump White House in an unflattering light.

The Twitter account for the organisation published the link to the book by the New York-based media critic which has created a firestorm for US President Donald Trump over the past week.

"New Trump book 'Fire and Fury' by Michael Wolff. Full PDF:" were the only words in the tweet, followed by what appears to be a link to a Google Drive file.

The PDF file contains no page numbers, and it is not clear if it is the final version of the book.
As time and age advance, and with it ones private and professional life progresses, one might come to the conclusion that most things we do in life, in business or even in politics are just a bunch of nonsense. What is worse that we keep doing it for no good reason at all, and are continuing to create more nonsense. Some will put the blame on the boss or the government, some on the weather, others on their childhood, their mother-in-law or a recession. Great arguments that underline some of the nonsense even more. Climate change and resilience are trendy right now. It is almost like wanting to blame Nature for what Nature is and how it functions.

Ive got some news for you. Extremely old news. It may take at least 10 digits to put a number on it. There is scientific evidence that forms of life on Earth appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. One year more or less doesnt make a difference. There are people who may believe that it is what it took to create true human perfection. Just imagine that it took an evolution that long to inspire some members of the human species to decide on putting together committees to figure climate resilience out. Thats a main topic in the headlines nowadays. Just as a side remark, did you know that French soft cheese takes about 4 weeks to ripen? Anyway, to describe the mission of such committees in some straightforward wording: find out what we recently messed up and how we can quickly fix it again.

The answer is so darn simple that it almost insane: any material or process that was not created or influenced by man, and still exists, has proven to be resilient, in some cases over millions of years. The next question may be, what would have survived or flourished if it wasnt affected by human action or influence? There you will find some valid answers of what to keep, copy and protect, and what to avoid.

Some prefer looking for an easier solution, like we need more insurance and more financial assistance, or handouts to survive when catastrophes happen. The correct answer is again so senseless simple. One is provided with two features for the use: brains and hands. As for the hands, we all know that some hands are bigger than others, and that some are used to do work, and some are used to be held up and receive. As for the brain sizes and functions, lets not even get started discussing it. The answers to problems are usually quite simple and straightforward. But in order for them to be recognized and accepted, human brains and behavior have an annoying delaying effect.

In 1997, I was asked by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO to promote 1998, The International Year of The Oceans of the UN. The mission was to create awareness for the worlds oceans. At that time, climate change was already discussed. Scientists had recognized all the indications. They had computer models of the effects of rising sea levels. Why wasnt something done about it already at that time?

For one, scientists typically have to prove things first and beyond any doubt; reasonable doubt is not even good enough. One cannot prove something when it didnt actually happen. That is like wisdom from the law and order professions. Politicians will not take action unless scientists can prove something. They fear for their credibility and to be fried to a crisp if they cannot justify their decision without proper evidence. Now, after those 20 years, one can at least say that tremendous progress is made, and climate change is about to be proven. The time has now come to think about action for becoming climate resilient. And of course, on a smaller scale, like here in the Caribbean, a committee may be assembled of persons who must start thinking first, about what they actually need to be thinking about. Keep your fingers crossed for #1 seeing a plan of action and #2 enjoy experiencing the implementation.

If I would ask Mother Nature for her opinion about all this, she might respond with: You people think you are Living the life of Riley and you believe you are Hot Stuff. In my eyes you are really only lallygagging and dilldallying along through your limited time of life. From my overall perspective, you are as unimportant as a miniature ship in a bottle. Mama Nature will adapt and survive. I always did. And you? So, listen to Mama Nature and learn from Mama Nature and dont try to have things your way. Ding-dong!

Mama Nature...., I would ask with a sigh, Why such harsh words? To which she may respond with the determination of a moving bulldozer: Well, that is what it often takes to make you people halt for a moment and to forget your private interests, your shortcuts and your personal convenience and comfort before you get going.

by Cdr. Bud Slabbaert
PHILIPSBURG:--- On Saturday, January 6th, 2018, the St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church celebrated The Epiphany Festival of with the children and youths. The activities started at 3.00 pm on the Captain Hodge Square and began with an openings prayer lead by Rev. Fr. Adam Oleszczuk SVD, Pastor of St. Martin of Tours Parish.

It was a fun and spirit filled day for the children and youths. They marched in procession to the church, led by the New Generation Drum band. In church, they viewed the story of the Three Wise Men, who brought gifts for the child Jesus. The children also brought gifts for less fortunate children and had their own Christmas gift blessed. The celebration then continued at the St. Martin of Tour Parish Hall where they had group activities, received drinks and cupcakes and were entertained by the Catholic Youth Group Dancers. The highlight of the afternoon was to find baby Jesus in a cupcake. The winner was 7 year old, Harris Zephir. He received a gift and he was crowned King for the day. The activities ended at 5.00 pm.

St. Martin of Tours Parish Press Release
Tucson AZ (SPX) Jan 05, 2018





A pair of new-generation instruments to be mounted on the world's largest optical telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, located on top of Mount Graham in Arizona, will turn the telescope ... more

Granada, Spain (SPX) Jan 04, 2018





Just like the Sun is moving in our galaxy, the Milky Way, all the stars in galaxies are moving, but with very different orbits: some of the stars have strong rotations, while others may be moving ra ... more

Miami (AFP) Jan 3, 2018





It's been called the "most mysterious star in the universe," bigger than the sun and yet brightening and dimming in an odd way that suggested to some an alien megastructure might be circling it. ... more

Baton Rouge LA (SPX) Jan 04, 2018





A team of more than 100 researchers, led by LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy Assistant Professor Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the "most mysterious star i ... more

Washington (UPI) Jan 3, 2018





Early Wednesday morning, Earth passed its closest point to the sun, a portion of its orbit known as perihelion. ... more

University Park PA (SPX) Jan 03, 2018





A team of more than 200 researchers, including Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University's Tabetha Boyajian, is one s ... more

Moscow (Sputnik) Dec 29, 2017


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DER SPIEGEL: Because our liberal democracy isn't efficient?

Gabriel: Because there is a constant focus on output today. How does this or that contribute to prosperity? What does it contribute in terms of strength or technology, to political or military influence? Less and less is the question being asked as to whether developments are taking place in a democratic and free way. Europe is in a phase in which this output is no longer sufficiently visible or tangible. Youth unemployment is still far too high, we still haven't solved our currency problem and living conditions in Europe are drifting apart. That is one reason why critics say that our Europe is based on yesteryear's model. That's a major danger for us Europeans: We must demonstrate that those who have this view of us are mistaken, that we can come to agreement, that we as a community of democratic and free nations are economically successful and are gaining political influence. To do so, we must learn to project our power.

DER SPIEGEL: Is it necessary for Europe to be feared?

Gabriel: No, not feared. On the contrary. Countries that work with us should feel safer than they would if they worked with non-democratic regimes. Why isn't Europe building infrastructure in Africa instead of leaving it to the Chinese? Why haven't we succeeded in promoting the economic development of our neighbors in the Balkans, instead conceding these countries to growing Russian influence? In an uncomfortable world, we Europeans can no longer sit back and wait for the U.S.A.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you mean that democracy must be made more efficient?

Gabriel: We're a very efficient country. But this is not about efficiency -- it's about the long-term preservation of our European model of society. By the way, this claim that democracy and efficiency are contradictory is nonsense. That's evident in the history of democracy itself, because it is only democrats who were and continue to be capable of learning from mistakes. A more appropriate question is to ask whether a country like China, which has been so incredibly successful economically, is actually inefficient in light of its environmental destruction and its corruption. In China's perception, however, the democratic model is doubtlessly inferior.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you not also see Europe as being dysfunctional to a certain extent?

Gabriel: For years, we've been constantly hearing about a multi-speed Europe. It would be great if that were the case, because that would at least mean that we were all moving in the same direction, just at different speeds. The truth is that we have long had a multi-track Europe with very different objectives. The traditional differences between the north and the south in fiscal and economic policy are far less problematic than those that exist between Eastern and Western Europe. In the south and east, China is steadily gaining more influence, such that a few EU member states no longer dare to make decisions that run counter to Chinese interests. You see it everywhere: China is the only country in the world that has a real geopolitical strategy.

DER SPIEGEL: The strategy of dividing Europe?

Gabriel: No, but one of increasing China's influence.

DER SPIEGEL: Values and interests can collide. Are values destined to lose such a clash?

Gabriel: No, it doesn't have to mean that. For the time being, I am in favor of accepting this tension, of establishing it in the first place.

DER SPIEGEL: You have been accused of not being clear enough that you expect Iran to uphold values in light of the ongoing protests there. How do you view the situation? Are we currently seeing an Iranian spring?

Gabriel: That is difficult to gauge. The protests have so far been driven by very diverse groups. There is a lack of leadership figures and a joint political agenda. But it is also clear that there are reasons for discontent in Iran -- economic and political reasons. We have told the Iranian leadership repeatedly that the country's economic recovery can ultimately only succeed through greater international economic cooperation. And the precondition for that is not only that Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons, but also that Iran's role in the region become far more peaceful. We have offered to finally hold true negotiations and talks on that issue.

DER SPIEGEL: Let's get back to the conflict between values and interests, which leads us to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Gabriel: I speak of honesty and perseverence. We have reduced our economic support of Turkey because of the arrests and human rights violations there.

DER SPIEGEL: Your Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu is hoping for quick improvement in German-Turkish relations. He calls you a "personal friend" and you also invited him to visit you at your home in Goslar. Is that not a bit much given that German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel, the Turkey correspondent for the German daily Die Welt, has been held in a Turkish jail without charge since February?

Gabriel: My Turkish colleague invited me to visit him a few weeks back. Much has happened in the time since -- a number of Germans have either been released from jail through decisions made by the Turkish judiciary or have been able to leave Turkey. And now I've invited him to visit me. The situation certainly won't get any better if we don't speak with each other -- neither for our countries or for the individuals who find themselves in jail. And the Yucel case, of course, is of paramount importance. We are now awaiting the charges against Yucel so that a response can finally be given. At least he's been taken out of solitary confinement. Here, too, the Turkish justice system has reacted to our requests.

DER SPIEGEL: Why is this case so complicated?

Gabriel: It is very, very public.

DER SPIEGEL: It has been alleged that Turkey has also received military equipment from Germany.

Gabriel: Turkey is a NATO partner and a partner in the battle against IS (Islamic State). That's actually a reason not to have the kind of restrictions in place on defense exports that we have, for example, against some countries in the Middle East. Despite this, the German federal government has refrained from authorizing a significant number of defense exports. That will remain the case for as long as the Yucel matter remains unresolved. But to get back to the tension between values and interests: The focus cannot just be on how German prisoners are doing right now in Turkey. We are interested more broadly in overall developments in Turkey. That doesn't just include the debate about democracy and human rights, but also very uncomfortable questions.

DER SPIEGEL: Which ones?

Gabriel: Turkey is currently seeking to make itself more independent from Europe and is turning to the east. Is that in our interest? Does it help us bolster Western values in Turkey, or at least here at home? Or are we making ourselves weaker overall? At the same time, Turkey is violating our European moral concepts. It's a difficult conflict to endure, and it leads to necessary disputes and debates. We need these debates -- the belief that we must only retreat to values to always be on the safe side is wrong. But what we do need is an open discussion of the issue. Constantly accusing each other of betraying values neither gets anyone out of jail nor does it stengthen us.

DER SPIEGEL: The German chancellor doesn't like those kinds of debates.

Gabriel: But there's no way around it: We have to discuss the challenges facing foreign and security policy with the German population. And without reverting to canned, fully formulated answers for everything. Unfortunately, we have no experience and no real structure for strategic considerations. We don't have a think tank culture. One of the tasks of foreign policy will be to develop these intellectual capabilities in Europe and Germany.

DER SPIEGEL: That would mean having a former foreign minister switch to a foundation, a think tank, rather than going into the private sector.

Gabriel: Yes, that certainly wouldn't be a bad idea. But it wasn't my intention to apply for such a position in this interview.

DER SPIEGEL: Are Germany's partners abroad more bemused by the current stalemate in Berlin, by Germany's ongoing lack of a government? Or are they seriously concerned?

Gabriel: I'm hearing different things, but there is concern that stable Germany is no longer quite so stable.

DER SPIEGEL: What is your view?

Gabriel: I don't share this concern because, economically and politically, our country is extremely stable. There are countries with functioning governments whose institutions don't work. But here, the opposite is true right now. My only concern is about Europe. There's a risk we will run out of time. We have been blessed with a pro-European French president, but we are also approaching the next elections for the European Parliament in 2019, and it will be important for pro-European parties present a credible answer to the anti-Europeans on the left and the right.

DER SPIEGEL: Chancellor Merkel has left Emmanuel Macron waiting for months now.

Gabriel: It is better to provide a good answer rather than the wrong one given by the FDP (Free Democratic Party). Macron's idea is that of a Europe that protects its citizens. That is underpinned by defense, the fight against terrorism, but also fair social standards and the battle against tax evasion by major corporations. It's a very good plan. I hope that we will have a clear decision on working together with France in the spring.
Shaheed El-Hafed, January 8, 2018 (SPS) - The President of the Republic, Secretary-General of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, received on Saturday a reply from Mr. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in which he indicated that Polisario Front had responded positively to his intention to send a technical mission to the region.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations highlighted that, for him, all avenues for progress had not yet been exhausted and that his efforts would continue to address the outstanding issues of the 1991 Ceasefire Agreement and Military Agreement No. 1.

He stressed the need to implement independent and credible procedures to ensure full respect for human rights, adding that the United Nations was following on the issue of the natural resources of Western Sahara on the basis of the Advisory Opinion of the Hague Tribunal in 1975 and the opinion of the United Nations Legal Counsel for 2002.

He also emphasized the follow-up on the issue of respect for the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) on the criteria for the work of peacekeeping missions in the world and presenting it, if necessary, to the Security Council.

The President of the Republic had sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General in mid-December, in which he broached the status of the settlement process and the need to speed it up, the Moroccan violations in El Guerguerat region, the violations of human rights by Moroccan and the looting of natural resources Western Sahara, as well as disagreements with respect to MINURSO compliance with the standards of operation of the United Nations peacekeeping missions in the world. (SPS)

062/SPS/TRA




Seventeen heifers and one bull left from the Stabiliser Cattle Company's Givendale farm in East Yorkshire for the Grand Est region of France on 24th November 2017. Along with live exports, the initial agreement also includes extensive semen sales and embryo transfers, with a target of bringing 1,000 Stabiliser breeding females into France.

An increasing awareness by French beef producers that their native breeds are becoming too big for market while also failing to deliver to consumer demands for high quality marbled meat has led to the development of Bovinext to import UK Stabiliser genetics, says Laurent Rouyer, president of Bovinext. French beef farmers are also attracted to the Stabilisers high feed efficiency, something SCC has focused heavily on in 2017 with the launch of the Net Feed Efficiency (NFE) EBV.
A new year is upon us and, instead of sticking to such time-worn, oft-unattainable resolutions such as losing weight, the Connecticut Better Business Bureau suggests state residents resolve not to get swindled in 2018.

According to the bureau, victims often unknowingly provide personal and financial information to potential scam artists over the internet, in telephone calls and at their front door.

The keys to protecting ourselves from financial fraud and identity theft are knowing the red flags, and using a healthy dose of skepticism, said Connecticut BBB spokesman Howard Schwartz in a news release. Sidestepping scammers may appear to be a daunting task, however, it is easier than most people think. If we follow a simple few rules, we can protect ourselves from the vast majority of scams and make ourselves more educated consumers.

One of the most prominent red flags that someone is trying to bamboozle you involves any demand for payment through an untraceable method, such as a wire transfer, cashiers check or gift cards.

The BBB also said warned about impostor scams, in which swindlers pretend they are calling from your doctors office, a financial institution, government agency, the court system or police. They will typically threaten the victim with arrest unless they pay a fake fee or penalty.

Other scams involve a softer touch, in which an impostor pretends to represent a charity. Because caller ID can be spoofed, the potential victim can never be certain who is on the other end of the telephone line.

Email is another popular tool used by criminals to commit fraud. The email often has the look and feel of a legitimate institution, and encourages recipients to click on a link or open an attachment. Either of those actions can infect a computer with a virus. If you click on a link, it may redirect you to an authentic-looking web page that will ask for enough personal information to allow the scammers to commit identity theft.

Here are a few more tips from the BBB that can help make personal security a resolution we can all achieve:

Check all terms and conditions. These will help you understand any limits, exclusions or extra fees.

Avoid doing business at your front door. It is better to select a professional, business or charity yourself, rather than respond to a solicitation. In addition, if the individual claims to be with a utility company, phone company or any other type of business, they may carry false identification.

Keep an eye on your credit reports. These may give you an early indication that someone is using your personal information to open lines of credit and obtain loans. You may obtain your reports for free from the government-sanctioned website annualcreditreport.com. You will be asked to provide personal information for authentication purposes. This allows you to keep an eye on your credit reports all year long, by requesting a report from one of the three credit monitoring companies every four months.

Harden your computer security. Update and scan your computer regularly with anti-malware. Download operating system and software updates which are often designed to close security loopholes. Buy a backup drive to preserve your important files, photos and videos in case of a cyber hack or computer failure.

You dont get something for nothing. This includes cruises, fake inheritances and sweepstakes. There is always a catch.

Look for https and a padlock logo. You will find these in your browser address bar. This means the website is taking measures to protect your information.

Start with trust. Before signing a contract, putting down a deposit or donating to a charity, check them at bbb.org.
It has been 11 years since TechShop, a membership-based, do-it-yourself workspace, first welcomed customers. During that time, for an annual $11,000 fee, TechShop members were able to use the companys sewing machines, welding gear or woodworking equipment. But, recently, the company closed its doors nationwide.

Related: 4 Rules to Provide Flexibility Without Losing Accountability

While at first glance, the yearly fee might seem steep, membership dues werent enough to cover the businesss operational costs. Each of TechShops locations officially closed in November due to the company's bankruptcy. TechShop certainly drew in customers, but its business model couldn't adapt as necessary for long-term success.

And that's a shame for both TechShop and the many companies like it that sink because they lack flexibility: Anyone at the helm of a startup, after all, knows how frustrating it can be to have to justify every decision to everyone, especially those with financial pull. But warning signs can't be ignored.

Sometimes changing course is the best way to save your sinking ship.

Building a solid ship

Even as startups reach that symbolically important fifth year, open-minded leadership is critical for weathering rough patches. And business models without the capacity to change remain at risk.

A lack of flexibility -- meaning sole reliance on a specific customer or set of rules -- makes it likely a business will capsize before its first wave of revenue. Without room to change a product or service, a business might fall too far behind the competition to recover in the next fiscal year.

Customers, after all, expect businesses to be prepared to change: According to Salesforce, 51 percent of consumers it surveyed assumed that by 2020, companies would be able to predict what they want and suggest options before they, the customers, even initiated contact.

Related: Why Flexibility Is Your Key to Personal Branding Success

Similarly, if a businesss prowess at innovation is limited to one specific product, chances are that the trend that initiated that product will fade -- along with sales. Entrepreneurs must be ready to take "next steps" with their products to keep up with the competition and consumers needs.

When I originally acquired Quote.com, I wanted to drive traffic to the site by offering consumers the ability to get quotes for everything from insurance to hotel stays.

I aimed high, but I quickly realized it made no sense to invest the time and equity necessary to sustain my initial plan. I had to be patient, start with one initiative, tackle it with the right level of resources, then scale to other services as we grew. I knew we couldn't afford to get stuck, so I altered our business plan and started moving forward in a whole new direction.

If you too want to keep your ship afloat, pay attention to these important moves.

Chart a course for success.

All this means is that companies need to set aside time for their employees to think creatively and come up with new offers and solutions to customer problems. Time is the one measurable resource that cannot be renewed. If business models dont prioritize planning time,the business wont have a future. How time is spent can be a vital predictor of future success.

Even if an entrepreneur didn't focus early on, on developing an adaptable business model, it's still possible to prep business to stay afloat even in the roughest waters:

1. Be all in.

I am never offline -- seriously. To keep track of whether your company is on course or veering into uncharted waters, you need to understand every aspect of the businesses and be able to spot mishap from a mile away. There is rarely a time Im not involved in a project 100 percent to help steer us away from potential disasters.

Grant Cardone, a multimillionaire and New York Times bestselling writer, told CNBC that he pulled himself out of debt and made his fortune with his constant focus. Most people work 9-to-5, he he said. I work 95 hours [per week].

And Cardone isn't the only one. Other millionaires, like Gary Vaynerchuk, follow this same advice, working more than 12 hours a day to stay on top of any issues that might crop up for their companies.

2. Recognize when a certain kind of customer is a bad fit.

Just because an industry is doing well doesnt mean every company in that industry will follow suit. There is a reason Target and Walmart both exist and thrive. Each superstore attracts a different type of consumer. Any entrepreneur needs to clearly identify his or her ideal consumer. This will simplify the products that will then get developed, the marketing campaigns that will get deployed and the sales goals that will get set.

When Gil Sadis founded Licensario, the goal was to perfect pricing plans, boost conversions and optimize revenue streams for software-as-a-service companies. But the startup failed because, as Sadis noted, Our messaging was too broad."

He said his team feared missing out on potential customers with messaging that wasn't broad enough to reach everyone. So, know which customers of yours are the right fit, and dont be afraid to turn away those who arent.

3. Know when less is more.

No matter how amazing their equipment is, how creative their staff and how fantastic their product, startups cant risk letting their innovation and product development teams fall behind. That might mean reevaluating whether 500 employees are really needed when 250 spend half their day checking social media.

Startup Beepi, for example, began with a great mission: to provide a marketplace for customers to buy and sell previously owned and reliably vetted cars. For a while, Beepi floated along on its great customer service, but the companys business model failed to pivot.

While it had started off at a $560 million valuation, with funds from 35 investors, the company ultimately folded in February 2017 after spending about $7 million each month on its 300 employees.

Similarly, TechShop might have started with a great idea that reeled in customers, but its business model ultimately failed to yield sustainable growth. Dont join these failed companies' ranks; stay the course in the face of obstacles.

Related: Flexibility Can Actually Hurt Your Productivity

A flexible business model will allow any startup -- including yours -- to stay afloat; just follow these three steps to achieve success.

Related:

3 Steps to Take, to Avoid Sinking Your Startup

Would a Remote Tech Team Work Out for Your Startup?

3 Reasons Automation Won't Replace the CFO



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


Win McNamee | Getty Images

Hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes did a record amount of damage this past year, according to Munich Re, a German-based reinsurer.

According to Munich Res natural catastrophe review, the insurance industry was hit with a record-high $135 billion bill. Overall losses, including the uninsured, topped $330 billion. 2017 was the second most costliest year in history behind 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake in Japan caused $354 billion in todays dollars.
The chickpea (Cicer arietinum), also known as the garbanzo bean, is an annual grain legume and is a staple crop and important source of protein in central Asia, Africa, India and the Mediterranean. It also is one the eight Neolithic founder crops thought to be responsible for the origins of agriculture, and was first domesticated by early farming communities in a region of the Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent.

The eight founder crops are composed of three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley); four legumes (lentil, pea, chickpea and bitter vetch); and one oil and fiber crop (flax or linseed). Chickpea is the only one of these crops that is planted in the spring. The others follow the set pattern of fall sowing and harvesting in early summer. This cycle shift is now assumed to be due almost exclusively to a single plant disease  Ascochyta blight.

Ascochyta Blight

Asochyta blight is fungal disease caused by Didymella rabiei (formally Ascochyta rabiei) and is considered to be the most serious disease affecting chickpeas wherever they are grown. It can affect leaves, stems, and pods and under optimal environmental conditions it can spread among and throughout fields rapidly, causing substantial losses. This disease is enhanced by cool temperatures (65-70 degrees Fahrenheit) with high humidity, and/or some form of water splashing (rainfall or thunderstorms). These environmental conditions are common over the winter in the Near East, where most of the rainfall occurs between December and February.

Chickpea Domestication

The chickpea is thought to have been domesticated from the wild form C. reticulatum  a relatively rare plant native to southeastern Turkey  about 11,000 years ago. The domesticated form is now planted during spring for summer harvest. It is also well-known today that a fall-planted crop will routinely yield up to 1-1.5 tons per acre more than spring-planted crops.

Therefore, cropping over the winter should be the practice of choice, but it is not, and this has been the practice for thousands of years. Why did ancient farmers stop planting in the fall despite its obvious agronomic benefits? There must have been a good reason for changing this practice and sacrificing high yield potential for the much lower and unstable yields obtained with a system planted in spring.

Question Answered

This question was answered after experiments were conducted in the early 1960s by a group in Israel, clearly implicating the disease Ascochyta blight as the major yield-inhibiting factor. Those trials planted in the fall were destroyed by the disease in spring. Spring-sown crops were able to better avoid the disease but yielded much less (less than 1.0 tons per acre).

They additionally noted that several partially disease-tolerant lines planted in fall produced 70 percent more seed yield than the spring-planted crops, while disease-susceptible crops planted in fall yielded nothing. Therefore they concluded that the disease was the primary reason for modification of planting date for the crop.

Conclusions

Archeological records from the Fertile Crescent areas also support this concept of chickpea production being abandoned as a field crop for a period of about 3,000 years. There is evidence suggesting that chickpea production began at the end of the pre-pottery Neolithic age (9,000 to 10,000 years ago), suddenly vanished, and then reappeared in the early Bronze Age (6,000 years ago) after farming began.

The problems encountered with growing the crop over the winter due to this plant disease seemingly explain why it was not detected from the archeological records during that gap period and that the conversion of planting chickpeas to the spring must have started after the initiation of farming (Bronze Age).
In the archives at the Legacy of the Plains Museum in Gering, Director Amanda Gibbs pulls out one of her favorite photos of the Lincoln Hotel. While traveling through the area with her family in 1925, a 12-year-old girl took candid shots with her camera. The photo of the hotel is slightly crooked, but clearly depicts open windows and balconies.

The photograph is one of several artifacts at the museum that document the 100-year history of the building.

The Nebraska Hotel Company built a hotel in Lincoln and then decided to build six other hotels like it throughout the state. The goal was to bring hotels westward into smaller communities. The Lincoln Hotel was to be the premier hotel for travelers arriving in Scottsbluff.

Planning for the hotel began on Feb. 7, 1917, after the company approached the Scottsbluff Commercial Club with the idea. In March 1918, the concrete skeleton was completed. According to the National Register of Historic Places application for the hotel in August 1918, vandals wedged wooden blocks into the outlet pipes for a large water tank on the roof, causing minor interior damage but not delaying the project appreciably.

Construction concluded in October. Six weeks later, with the Lincoln essentially complete, the Commercial Club began planning a New Years Eve extravaganza to celebrate the hotels opening and the lifting of the influenza quarantine, according to the application.

The hotel saw its grand opening on Dec. 31, 1918, surrounded by fanfare. At the opening ceremonies, local celebrity Miss Bish was there to wish everyone good luck. Among the museums collection is the orange dress she wore that night, the dinner plates used in the banquet room and envelopes with their backs bragging about Scottsbluff as the largest irrigated valley in the United States and is on the shortest route to Yellowstone and other national parks.

It was definitely a big deal out here, said Olivia Garl, curator.

Hotel officials bragged to the Star-Herald that the hotel was a modern, 80-room fireproof hotel.

As is rather forcefully expressed by the management, a bonfire may be built in any room, in any hallway, in any part of the building, and it will merely burn itself out, according to the newspaper.

The Dec. 31, 1918, Star-Herald noted the building was, concrete and stone are not conductive to spectacular conflagrations.

The hotel also had its own beauty shop for women and a cigar store for men.

One photograph in Legacys archives shows the inside of the banquet hall on April 19, 1928, for the Scottsbluff High Schools junior-senior prom.

As horribly racist as it is, its Native American-themed, Gibbs said. And it wasnt even related to the Native Americans of the area.

In the photo, the dinner tables were formally dressed with all the accouterments of a fancy dinner.

One of the many humorous stories in the buildings history involves one of the first cooks, a German from Russia woman. As the story goes, in the 1920s, a married man in management tried to begin a relationship with her. She cut off his shirt with a knife and took the shirt to his wife.

The construction of the hotel even affected the building of the Methodist hospital, which originally stood at 18th and Broadway. A hotel was being constructed on 18th Street  the north hotel  and 15th Street  the south hotel  along Broadway. But there was a major influenza epidemic. According to Gibbs, a hospital was a bigger priority. The building completed first became the hospital.

Garl attributes the constant changing of hands and the hotel becoming displaced by the motels along Highway 26 as part of its decline in popularity.

It was more convenient to stay on the highway than in town, Garl said.

The Mighty like a home building has seen its ups and downs over the years, but Garl is still intrigued by its general and architectural history. Many facades were changed or ripped out completely in the 1960s, transforming its outward appearance. The original finish in the lobby was covered with wood paneling. The interior had a wood and stone trim. The original floors have been replaced with carpet.

When it was built, the hotel was sided with smooth, dressed limestone slabs, brick columns and neoclassical terra cotta entablature. It is now covered by epoxy stone panels and fixed-sash windows in a brushed aluminum frame.

Garls fascination with the hotel is how the building progressed over the past 100 years. While many buildings downtown changed over the years, architecturally, you can still tell that the hotel was meant to be grand and stick out.

I think its still kind of a landmark in town, Garl said. It does still tower over most of downtown.

The building was accepted to the National Register of Historic Places on March 5, 1998.
After skit from a West Iredell High School social studies class, there have been more questions than answers about what exactly was meant to b
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Updated at 3:30 p.m. with stock price.

Drugmaker Mallinckrodt said Monday that it planned to sell two products that control bleeding during surgery to Baxter for $185 million.

Mallinckrodt said the products, Recothrom and Preveleak, will complement Baxter's current portfolio of products used by surgeons.

Mallinckrodt fell more than 2 percent Monday, closing at $22.39 a share.

CEO Mark Trudeau said that as Mallinckrodt continues to transform itself into a specialty pharmaceutical company, products like these "are now less strategic for us."

Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter will also acquire Preveleak's manufacturing operation, which is based in the San Francisco area, according to a spokeswoman for Mallinckrodt.

Net sales for Mallinckrodt's unit that included Recothrom and Preveleak were $56.2 million during the 12 months preceding Sept. 29, 2017, according to the statement.
ARNOLD  Injured Arnold police Officer Ryan OConnor left St. Louis on a flight to a rehabilitation hospital near Denver on Monday as he continues to recover from being shot in the back of the head by a burglary suspect last month.

First responders lined his route to an airport to be flown out Monday morning, and a large number of officers and firefighters saw him off from Spirit of St. Louis Airport.

Police say Chad Klahs, 29, of Arnold, shot OConnor on Dec. 5 before fatally shooting himself, all while handcuffed in the back of OConnors police SUV.

The shooting was on the parking lot of police headquarters, just yards from the police sally port where OConnor was heading with Klahs.

OConnor underwent a five-hour surgery after the shooting and in the weeks since continued to receive medical treatment that included more surgeries and a medically induced coma.

He has been treated at St. Anthonys Medical Center and St. Louis University Hospital.

On Thursday, the Arnold Police Department posted a message on its Facebook page saying OConnor, 44, had made some small but significant improvements, including the removal of a ventilator and opening his eyes.

On Monday, the department posted an update to its Facebook page noting that OConnor will become at least the fourth St. Louis area police officer to be treated at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.

The hospital is renowned for spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation.

Ballwin Officer Michael Flamion was the first.

He was shot during a traffic stop July 8, 2016, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

Hazelwood Officer Craig Tudor joined Flamion there for about two months after he was paralyzed from the chest down during an on-duty car crash on Aug. 25, 2016.

St. Louis police Officer Gary Glasby spent several months there and another facility in Nebraska recovering from a traumatic brain injury he suffered during a car accident while on duty. He returned in December.

Flamion and Tudor were among those at the airport to see OConnor off on Monday.
WASHINGTON COUNTY, Ill.  A 93-year-old man was fatally injured Friday in a hit-and-run crash on Interstate 64, the Illinois State Police said.

The victim, Ervin H. Goeden, was a passenger in a car driven by Eugene P. Tomasello, 56. Police said another passenger, Patricia A. Goeden, 81, had major injuries. Tomasello wasn't injured. All three were from Omaha.

Police said Tomasello's eastbound vehicle ran off the road and struck a tree after it was hit by another car moving at a high speed about 5 p.m.

The car, which police said may have been a Cadillac STS with a dark window tint, didn't stop and was last seen continuing eastbound on I-64. Police said the car may have some silver paint transfer on the middle or rear passenger side.

Police said the crash occurred when the vehicle with the window tint, traveling behind Tomasello's Toyota in the right lane, moved into the passing lane, then abruptly returned to the right lane and struck the driver's side of Tomasello's car.

Police said the crash took place at milepost 47 near Nashville, Ill.

Anyone with information on the crash should call state police district 13 at 618-542-2171, extension 1202.
Parents in many states, including Missouri, can now get a state tax deduction for private school tuition, thanks to the federal tax overhaul passed last month.

A lesser-known part of the new law lets families use state-sponsored 529 college savings plans to pay for expenses such as tuition, books and tutoring for kindergarten through high school.

While Missouri families can automatically use 529 monies for K-12 expenses, state law will have to be changed for the new provision to apply to Illinois families, according to the Illinois treasurers office.

Not only can families withdraw earnings from the plans tax-free, they also can get state tax deductions for putting money into the accounts. Missouri residents can deduct from their state taxes up to $8,000 a year for contributions to 529 plans. Illinois residents would be able to deduct up to $10,000 per child each year if the law is changed to allow it.

The original idea for such savings plans was to have families invest money over a long period of time for college expenses. Using 529 funds for elementary and secondary education significantly shortens the time families would have to grow their money.

Still, using 529 plans is a no-brainer for private school parents because they can simply deposit the money they were going to spend on tuition anyway and get an automatic tax discount, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy for the American Enterprise Institute.

Youd be pretty dumb not to do it, Malkus said. Its a pretty direct transfer, led by a change in federal statute, from the Missouri treasury to private school parents.

Missouri had 110,000 private school students in the 2015-2016 school year, and Illinois had 231,300, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By Malkus estimates, if every private school family took full advantage of the 529 plan, Missouri could miss out on roughly $42 million a year in state income taxes. Illinois would miss out on roughly $90 million. That doesnt even account for the possibility that more families will enroll in private school.

Public school supporters worry that this diversion of money will hurt public schools, because less state revenue could mean less state aid for public schools.

Philosophically, we just have a problem with that when, whether its state money or federal money, is used to subsidize private schools that are not held accountable to the public in the same way public schools are, said Brent Ghan, deputy executive director of the Missouri School Boards Association.

Missouris potential tax loss to the education savings plans comes on top of other anticipated state tax revenue losses from the tax overhaul. One study predicts Missouri will lose $58 million under the new federal tax plan.

The expansion of 529 plans to include private school expenses could be considered a win for supporters of school choice. But some experts say it will mostly benefit parents who are already paying private school tuition, because the tax deduction may not be large enough to offset the cost of new tuition payments for lower-income families.

Missouri Treasurer Eric Schmitt, a father himself, touts this as a win for middle-class families. His office plans to be pretty aggressive in promoting and publicizing the new 529 option, he said.

For me, Im always supportive of anything that could provide middle-class tax relief, he said.

Private schools also say they will do all they can to inform families.

School boards, teacher associations, parent associations, well use every vehicle we have, said Sister Nathalie Meyer, interim director of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, which is the largest private school system in the St. Louis area. Anything that gives our parents some options so that they can consider Catholic schools is wonderful.

There are currently about 154,500 active 529 plans in Missouri, with a collected value of about $3 billion in assets, according to the Missouri treasurers office. There are more than 500,000 accounts in Illinois with more than $10 billion in assets, according to the Illinois treasurers office.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the 529 plan will cover home school expenses.
WASHINGTON  Sen. Claire McCaskill began 2018 with more than $9 million in her campaign coffers after raising $11.8 million in 2017, a record in Missouri for the year before a U.S. Senate election.

McCaskill raised $2.9 million in the last three months of the year, her campaign spokeswoman, Meira Bernstein, told the Post-Dispatch on Monday. McCaskill, D-Mo., had about 107,000 donors, of which about 90,000 had not given before, McCaskills campaign reported.

By contrast, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., raised about $1.25 million over the last three months of 2015, which preceded his victory over then-Secretary of State Jason Kander 11 months later.

McCaskill raised about $21 million in defeating former Rep. Todd Akin in 2012, but that amount came over multiple years. Akin spent about $6 million total in that race. McCaskill raised about $12 million in defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent in 2006.

But McCaskill enters 2018 as one of the Senates most vulnerable Democrats. She is seeking re-election in a state that voted for President Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by 19 percentage points. Trump has promised to campaign for Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley.

Hawley has not yet released his 2017 fundraising totals. He entered the race late last summer and raised about $820,000 in August and September, entering October with about $782,000 in the bank.

The other three Republicans in the Senate race  Tony Monetti, Austin Petersen, and Courtland Sykes  had not reported their year-end fundraising totals to the Federal Election Commission on Monday. Petersen said recently he was one of the pioneering federal candidates to accept donations in the crypto-currency bitcoin.

McCaskill also said she raised about $300,000 for a joint account with the Missouri Democratic Party.

McCaskill told donors at a private reception last year that she expected to raise about $30 million for her re-election, that she expected her eventual Republican opponent to come up with about the same amount, and that she expected more than $200 million to be spent on Missouris U.S. Senate race this year, including outside money spent by committees and nonprofits.

Groups supporting McCaskill and Hawley already have started running ads in the state.

The amount of money flowing into federal races has exploded since a split Supreme Court in 2010 ruled that corporations and unions could spend money independently to elect or defeat candidates. Outside groups not directly tied to campaigns now routinely outspend actual candidates themselves.

In that Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race, the winner, incumbent Republican Pat Toomey, spent just over $30 million himself. But outside groups raised and spent more than $135 million to either support or try to defeat him.

Some of the most highly contested Senate races in 2018 are in states with sparse populations and small and relatively cheap media markets, such as Montana, North Dakota, West Virginia.

That means national groups will be able to funnel more money to more expensive states with competitive races, such as Florida, Ohio, Arizona  and Missouri.
Starting this month, Missouri adoptees 18 and over are able to get access to their original birth certificates without having to get a court order.

Those records were sealed in most states decades ago to help protect the confidentiality of birth mothers, especially those who were unwed and faced the stigma of having a child out of wedlock.

But with more openness in the adoption process and pressure from adoptee rights groups, the mood has shifted in recent years. Today about half the states allow adult adoptees some type of access to their original birth certificate without going to court.

In at least nine states  Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island (for those 25 and older) and Oregon  adult adoptees have complete access to those records, according to Nina Williams-Mbengue, a program director at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The new Missouri law does not allow unfettered access. Birth parents who want to remain anonymous can fill out a form indicating that they prefer not to be contacted by the adoptee, and their names will be kept confidential and redacted from the document.

Advocates for adoptees are welcoming the new openness. Some adoptees are still in a state of disbelief. Weve been told for decades that this would never happen, said Heather Dodd, founder of the Missouri Adoptee Rights Movement. To have the law finally changed is pretty uplifting and amazing.

Adoptees who support open access say their original birth records can help them understand their backgrounds by revealing where they were born and their birth parents names and addresses.

Opponents say birth records shouldnt be opened to adoptees without the biological parents approval. They believe its a matter of privacy and want to protect parents from unwanted contact with their adult children.

Tyler McClay, general counsel for the Missouri Catholic Conference, which opposed opening the birth records to adoptees, said the group was concerned about birth mothers who may have been very young and vulnerable and believed the adoption was confidential.

We made this promise to birth mothers back in the day, and we wanted to honor that, he said.

While his group didnt succeed in blocking the legislation in Missouri, McClay said it was able to negotiate a compromise that included the birth parent opt-out provision. It also was able to delay the legislations full implementation, he said.

Then-Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, signed the Missouri Adoptee Rights Act into law in 2016, but initially it applied only to those born before 1941 because that was the year the state started sealing all original birth certificates. Adoptees born in 1941 and after had to wait until Jan. 2, 2018, to get access, under the law.

McClay said this was done at the request of the Catholic Conference, which wanted to get the word out to birth parents and give them time to decide whether they want to have their names redacted.

McClay said he thought the controversy over allowing adoptees access to their birth records would eventually fade away.

Time is moving on. Most adoptions now are open. This kind of clandestine thing is not the norm anymore, he said. People want to know who they are. I get it. Its a fair argument.

Stateline is an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts
JEFFERSON CITY  A state panel gave a green light Monday to an Illinois company to build a 110-bed assisted living facility in St. Peters.

In a unanimous vote, the Missouri Health Facilities Review Committee approved plans by Naperville, Ill.-based Ryan Companies to build Clarendale of St. Peters on an 11-acre tract at the southeast corner of Mexico Road and Dubray Drive.

The $12.5 million project, which will take an estimated 18 months to build, won support from state and local officials, despite a formula that suggests there are enough assisted-living beds in the region.

I think this meets a great need, said Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Weldon Spring.

It will have a huge economic impact on St. Charles County and our state, added Rep. Phil Christofanelli, R-St. Peters.

Once complete, the facility is expected to create 85 jobs.

St. Peters Mayor Len Pagano told the committee that the city already has given its approval to the project, which could be under construction within 30 days.

State approval was needed under a law requiring health care providers to justify the need for their facilities in order to prevent the duplication of health services in a given geographic area.

Supporters said the formula used to determine the need for additional beds in St. Peters is flawed because it included facilities in parts of St. Louis County. Many residents will not want to move into a facility that is across the Missouri River, said lobbyist Rick Watters of Des Moines-based Life Care Services, which will operate the center.

The difference between the counties is significant, Watters said.

They also said the population of seniors age 65 and older is projected to grow by 4.1 percent between 2010 and 2021.

The development also will include 22 single-story villas dedicated to independent living for seniors.
Missouri is in the company of Myanmar and Cuba on a travel guides list of places to not visit in 2018.

Fodors No List 2018 places Missouri at No. 7 among places to be avoided. Missouri is the only state on the list, which includes places where swarms of tourists have triggered a backlash (Venice, Amsterdam) or done environmental damage (the Galapagos), and destinations with health, safety and ethical issues.

Missouri seems to fit in the safety and ethics category, with the travel guide pointing to laws it deems unfair and startling headlines about the state.

A spokesperson for the Missouri Division of Tourism wasnt available for comment Monday.

Fodors explains its list this way:

Travelers must decide how and where we can concern our efforts to observe and preserve the splendor of life around us, and we do that with everything from our currency to our presence. Fodors No List is a reflection of those considerations: where should we go  or not go  that best reflects our courtesy and concern for this wonderful world. Because sometimes you have to say no to the ones you love in hopes that they can recover, reconsider, or reform.

Under a stock image of the Gateway Arch, Fodors starts off by pointing out some of the Missouris good qualities. It says Missouri is full of wonders that belong on anyones travel bucket list. It mentions positives such as limestone caves, the Budweiser Clydesdales, Kansas Citys barbecue, jazz and Silver Dollar City.

But Fodors then blasts Missouri as the place where SB 43 was passed making it more difficult to sue employers for discrimination, a state representative argued that homosexuals werent human beings, a tourist who got lost and ran out of gas was later found murdered in his jail cell without ever being put under arrest, and two men were hunted down and shot on suspicion of being Muslim on the outskirts of Kansas City. (The shooting in the Kansas City area actually took place in Kansas.)

The legislation Fodors refers to makes it harder for employees to make a case for workplace discrimination. Gov. Eric Greitens said the law brought Missouri in line with 38 other states and the federal government, and supporters of the law say it has nothing to do with travel.

The Missouri chapter of the NAACP passed a resolution for a travel advisory last July, recommending tourists to avoid Missouri. The site quotes the head of Missouris NAACP chapter as saying the state has a separate standard of laws that are only applicable to some people.

In August, the head of the regions tourism and convention agency, Explore St. Louis, said the hotel industry was being used as a weapon politically by the NAACP over the legislation and that several area hotels said they had lost meeting groups because of the advisory.

When we found out about this nearly two months ago, we were deeply saddened to hear that Fodors made this comment about our state, KittyRatcliffe, president of Explore St. Louis, said in a statement Monday. The fact is that St. Louis remains a diverse, cosmopolitan and welcoming region. Explore St. Louis fully supports nondiscrimination, equal rights, and fair and just due process for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin. Be assured that the more than 88,000 dedicated employees of the St. Louis metropolitan areas hospitality industry remain committed to serving and welcoming people from all backgrounds and experiences to our community.

The list was first released in November.

Fodors full list of places to avoid this year:

1. The Galapagos. Ecuador heavily regulates tourism in the Galapagos as part of its environmental conservation policies, but Fodors says the islands fragile ecosystems remain vulnerable.

2. The Places That Dont Want You to Visit. Too many tourists in places like Venice and Amsterdam have resulted in a local backlash against visitors. Fodors says we should just stay away.

3. The Taj Mahal. In 2018, the Taj Mahals dome will get its first thorough cleaning since the monument was built 369 years ago. A mud paste has been used to clean other parts of the monument, and Fodors says unless your dream Taj Mahal visit involves being photographed standing in front of a mud-caked and be-scaffolded dome, maybe give it until 2019 at the earliest.

4. Phang Nga Park, Thailand. Fodors says the rush to paradise has overwhelmed some of Thailands beaches with pollution and overuse. Successful recovery initiatives are in progress, but Fodors recommends taking the road less littered and enjoy a tropical vacay away from the fray.

5. Myanmar. Just a few years ago Myanmar was on every globetrotters list, having opened up to tourism after years of isolation. Now Myanmar is one of the worlds pariahs because of a violent campaign against the ethnic Rohingya minority. Fodors noted that the United Nations labeled the atrocities a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

6. Mt. Everest. Fodors says the pursuit of bragging rights from a trip up Mount Everest just isnt worth the danger (six people died climbing there in 2017) and the cost ($25,000 to $45,000).

7. Missouri. Fodors cites reports that African-Americans were more likely than whites to be stopped by law enforcement officers in the state, as well as other incidents and policies that raise questions about various types of discrimination.

8. Honduras. The murder rate in Honduras has dropped in the last several years but its still among the deadliest places on Earth. Fodors says travelers should stay safe and spend their money elsewhere.

9. Great Wall of China and Beijing. Fodors cites the deterioration of sections of the Great Wall of China and air pollution in Beijing as reasons to stay away.

10. Cuba. Americans are still permitted to visit Cuba, but new rules from the Trump administration are complicated and the mysterious illness reported among American embassy workers in Havana is worrisome. Fodors urges caution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Forecasters hope that above-freezing temperatures will limit chances of rainfall turning into ice across the St. Louis region Sunday night.

Still, a winter weather advisory is in effect until midnight.

Gary Schmocker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said rain started to move into the St. Louis region before 4 p.m., and it likely won't stop until midnight.

The heaviest rainfall is expected between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

The temperature was 37 degrees by 4 p.m., and while it will drop through Sunday evening, the weather service doesn't expect it to drop below 32 degrees.

"Certain areas like parking lots and untreated roads and sidewalks could still see some icing," Schmocker said. "Some of those grounds could still be below freezing temperatures."

Earlier in the weekend, forecasters and authorities had warned the storm could bring freezing rain, or that rain could hit cold road surfaces and turn to ice.

Schmocker expects the area to mostly just be wet through the night and into Monday morning's commute, but urges drivers to remain cautious.

The Missouri Department of Transportation's travel map of the state's highways has shown consistently clear roads across St. Louis, with some highways in northeast Missouri in rougher shape.

Anyone who hasn't taken down their holiday decorations  or just wants to get outside after weeks of cold temperatures  should aim for Thursday, when the high is expected to reach 57 degrees, Schmocker said.
At a measly 17 cents a gallon, Missouris fuel tax is woefully inadequate to fund the states growing need for transportation-infrastructure improvements. The more the system deteriorates, the worse our states business climate will become. Gov. Eric Greitens could put some muscle into his determination to attract business and generate more jobs by embracing a long-overdue fuel tax increase.

The Missouri 21st Century Transportation Task Force, created by the Legislature and approved by the governor last year, proposes to boost the tax by a dime, and by 12 cents for diesel, which is only about half of whats needed to meet annual road and bridge needs. Business leaders told the transportation task force that the states aging and dilapidated infrastructure is reducing safety and constraining economic development.

Its been 22 years since the tax was last raised. Unsafe roads can and do cost lives. What does it take to make state legislators overcome their self-imposed, irrational ban on new taxes?

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given Missouris infrastructure a grade of C-minus, and the National Safety Council gave the state an F, ranking it last in the nation in preventable accidents.

The transportation department needs a fuel-tax increase of at least 20 cents a gallon to keep up with an estimated $825 million in unmet transportation needs. The last effort to raise money that got traction was a 2014 constitutional amendment to hike state sales taxes, with the funds going to transportation. A hefty 59 percent of voters rejected it.

Its shortsighted for lawmakers to keep denying revenue for roads. Improving roads and bridges creates construction jobs. Businesses offering a variety of jobs are more likely to locate or expand in states that maintain high-quality roads. Missouri is notable for having 33,884 miles of highway, the seventh-largest road system in the country, and 10,394 bridges, the sixth most in the nation. But it ranks 47th for funding, primarily because of the low fuel tax.

Other options include toll roads and indexing highway-user fees to raise money to repair roads and bridges. But doing nothing is not an option.

Conservative lawmakers have a long-standing aversion to raising taxes, largely for fear of being targeted at re-election time. Taxpayers might not be thrilled to pay higher fuel taxes, but that is a more equitable way to pay for roads. Theres minimal evidence to suggest, however, that taxpayers would rather cope with dangerous roads than pay more in fuel taxes to upgrade them.

Fear of a voter backlash also shouldnt trouble Greitens, whose ambitions in Missouri began at the top and whose sights seem to be set on even higher national offices.

The governor could burnish his image, and improve Missouris economic development and safety, by leading a more forceful drive for a true 21st-century transportation system.
Tatuajes Black line, sometimes referred to as Pete Johnsons personal blend, has come in many shapes and sizes since a 2007 debut limited release of Corona Gordas in ceramic jars. In 2010, a Petit Lancero (6 x 38) format was introduced as a store exclusive with a run of just 5,000 cigars (later it was added as a regular release). In 2016, the line was expanded and, at the same time, the Petit Lancero packaging was updated (with boxes of 20). The Nicaraguan puro is medium-bodied with oak, cream, leather, pepper, and cinnamon spice. The cigar is well-constructed, balanced, and enjoyable, though lately Ive been finding that this blend actually is best in some of the larger ring gauge formats.
Govt. seeks investors for Colombo Hilton and Grand Hyatt View(s):

After a long wait, the Ministry of Public Enterprise on Friday invited proposals from potential investors for the Grand Hyatt Colombo, owned by Sri Lankas biggest insurance and pension funds, along with the partly refurbished Colombo Hilton.

These two entities are to be divested by their majority owner, the government and cabinet approval was received by the Ministry to put out Request For Proposals (RFPs) for the hotels. The call was published as an advertisement in national dailies. The Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation, Litro Gas and the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) have invested Rs. 19 billion in the yet-to-be-opened Hyatt. In 2011, the Government debt at Hilton was said to be over Rs. 11 billion but it was written off.

Hilton Colombos revenue for the year ended December 2016 was Rs. 2.5 billion, according to the last available accounts. F& B revenue was much higher at Rs.1.3 billion compared to Rs.1.1 billion in room revenue for the same period. Current liabilities were reported at Rs. 862,057 million compared to Rs. 678,582 million in the previous year.

The Ministry of Public Enterprise Development which is now in the process of restructuring key State owned Enterprises (SOE) was seeking Cabinet approval for some time to attract potential investors for the two state hotels, the officials said.

When the part refurbishment at Colombo Hilton was completed there were many interested parties for that property and also Hyatt. So now we thought of issuing RFPs for both Hilton and Hyatt, an official told the Business Times.
T-Bond Probe findings welcome, action urged View(s):

Respondents of a Business Times (BT) opinion poll viewed positively and with optimism the long-awaited findings of the Treasury Bond Commission but were unsure as to whether the Government would actually penalise, as promised, the named offenders.

The Commission in its report, sections of which were revealed by President Maithripala Sirisena in a nationwide television broadcast on Wednesday evening, passed several strictures on former Central Bank (CB) Governor Arjuna Mahendran, his son-in-law Arjun Aloysius and Perpetual Treasuries Ltd (PTL) CEO Kasun Pallisena and recommended stringent action. Meanwhile Mr. Mahendran who is a Singapore national and has no dual citizenship is abroad.

While former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake was not directly implicated in the bond scam which the Commission said resulted in a loss running into millions of rupees to the State, the report recommended action under the Bribery Commission Act over Mr. Karunanayakes apartment lease that was paid by Mr. Aloysius, a suspect in the bond scam.

In a quick BT survey through email conducted soon after the President revealed the findings of the Commission on Wednesday night, 82 per cent of the respondents said Yes to the question: (1) The Bond Commissions findings is a fair and independent view of corrupt deals in the disputed bond trades.

However asked whether the Government will definitely take action against the accused persons, 53 per cent responded with Undecided, 26 per cent said No and 21 per cent said Yes. Some respondents who did their own polls on a twitter account found the same result; that people are not convinced that the government would take action.

A resounding 99 per cent said Yes when asked whether strong action should be taken against those named in the report as being involved in the corrupt deals, while 90 per cent agreed that the report should be speedily released to the public.

The survey, conducted over just 10 hours, attracted a wide response from a cross-section of people including company directors, public officials, social activists and students. It reflected the publics anxiety to ascertain the findings of the Commission whose widely-publicised proceedings itself attracted a lot of attention amongst scandalous profit-making by PTL.

However many respondents who made additional comments also noted that the Government, with the same haste, should probe bond issues during the former regime and similarly take action, a process that has disappointed many supporters of this government.

The politician mentioned (in the report) will be let off. So will the head of the bank. The rest of the guys named will be punished then bailed out, said another disappointed respondent adding a sad-face emoji to his comment.

Other comments were;

 Good findings but bond issues from 2008 to 2014 should also be probed

 The Commission seems to be too lenient in its statements on the PMs role.

 Definitely action needs to be taken against the bigger players rather than the lower level miscreants, and this should be within a definite timeframe, otherwise there will be public disappointment.

 There could be some legal hurdles. Can a court of law pass judgment on the basis of the findings of a Commission? Unlikely. So the AGs Department will have to prove fresh cases against each of the accused. The government may go through the motions for appearances sake, but the chances of all parties being adequately punished are slim.

 So far they (government) only talks with no action. Whether the same practice will happen here remains to be seen.

 Given the poor track record of this Government in its action against the so-called crooks of the last regime, taking action is a debatable point.

 The President has made definitive comments on taking action and has to maintain credibility.
A shameful saga of monumental corruption View(s):

Auspicious times or not, Sri Lanka certainly rang in 2018 singularly inauspiciously as damning revelations of the monumental financial scam right in the bowels of the nations Central Bank were revealed to a badly shell-struck public even as the New Year had scarce been allowed to draw its breath.

Fairy tales on battling corruption

The contrast could not be more grotesque. On the one hand, grizzled farmers stood in the scorching sun, pitifully roaring that they were being reduced to beggars as they could not farm their paddy lands without fertilizer. On the other hand, Colombo became the epicenter of a perfect example of how millions can be plundered by slick crooks in immaculate suits and designer watches.

Even as the revelations unfolded, who could be blamed for being cynical regarding promises to recover the loot of the Rajapaksas stashed away in foreign banks? What credibility, the reform of the law couched in abstract if not esoteric terms when even existing laws on gross corruption are deliberately undermined in order to serve selfish political agendas? Who believes these fairy tales?

Those in power may bluster that they will continue to hold on to power till 2020. But they have frittered away an enormous amount of goodwill with which the Government was elected into power. As each crisis unfolds on top of another, the cumulative impact is disastrous.

Cover-up bad as the scam itself

President Maithripala Sirisenas summarizing of the final report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the issue of Treasury Bonds of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) this week illustrates one stage of an utterly disgraceful saga of events. Let us not forget that the attempted cover up of the scam was as bad as the scam itself. For that, the Government must take full responsibility, include those talking heads of the United National Party who inserted footnotes in the earlier report of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) headed by JVP parliamentarian Sunil Handunnetti on the Treasury bond matter.

At that time, unconvincing protests by these talking heads on national television were that, at best, what had occurred between the father-in-law (former Governor of Central Bank, Arjuna Mahendran) and the son-in-law (head of Perpetual Treasuries Arjun Aloysius) was a petty conflict of interest. Outrage was expressed and scandalized eyebrows were raised at the very idea that financial skullduggery had been committed.

Well, now with the findings of the Commission out in the public domain, it is clear that these excuses were a weak cover-up for what had actually transpired. Let it be said that attempts to cover-up were equally as disgraceful as the behavior of those named by the Commission for being directly implicated in the scandal.

Enormity of the fraud

The enormity of the fraud that had been committed will no doubt, take time to sink into the nations consciousness. As the statement by the President reveals, the Commissions findings were deadly. Its mandate was to inquire into the issuance of treasury bonds during 1st February 2015 to 31st March 2016, to ascertain the facts regarding allegations of corruption and mismanagement and to recommend steps to be implemented in the future.

Former Governor of Central Bank, Arjuna Mahendran was castigated for interfering into Treasury bond auctions through a process of incorrect and unconventional methods. Affirming that he was responsible for providing internal information to outsiders, allowing his son-in-law of Perpetual Treasuries to obtain undue and illegal monetary gains of an extent that is monumental, CBSL officials and some external parties were also held to be implicated.

The Commission recommended criminal and civil court action by the Criminal Investigations Department and the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption against the implicated individuals including against former Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake. This barefaced robbery of public funds was assessed as having started even earlier, from the time of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2008. It was recommended that the Central Bank of Sri Lanka conduct a forensic audit with regard to alleged fraud and corrupt practices from 2008 onwards with legal action to be taken consequentially. It is stated that it was during this time that funds of the Employment Provident Fund (EPF) had been mostly lost.

No political directions required

Meanwhile the question as to what legal consequences should follow from the Commission findings led to much scratching of confused heads, some of it engineered but some undoubtedly genuine. Should the President direct the Attorney General to take action on the report? And what meanwhile of the Prime Minister whose response was that the report of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) headed by JVP parliamentarian Sunil Handunnetti on the Treasury bond matter had been referred to the Attorney General on October 31, 2016, (compromised footnotes and all, we would presume)?

The law itself is, of course, clear. The President or the Prime Minister is not required to direct anything in terms of the law. Neither is the media required to speculate on that basis. Section 23 of the Commissions of Inquiry Amendment Act, No 16 of 2008 categorically states that it shall be lawful for the Attorney-General to institute criminal proceedings in a court of law in respect of any offence.-based on material collected in the course of an investigation or inquiry or both an investigation and inquiry, as the case may be, by a Commission of Inquiry appointed under this Act. Importantly, this is affirmed as operating notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the Code of Criminal Procedure Act, No. 15 of 197 9 or any other law.

It was precisely due to the impact of the Commission proceedings on an eventual criminal prosecution that the head of Perpetual Treasuries Arjun Aloysius was permitted by the Commission to plead the privilege against self-incrimination when an imaginative counsel advanced the same on his behalf before the Commission. Opinions may differ on whether Aloysius should have been allowed the benefit of that privilege or not as the case may be. But the fact that the law must now be activated is without a doubt.

Rascally politicians must not be allowed to escape

No doubt this is perhaps the very first Commission Report which took Sri Lanka metaphorically by its neck and forced it to see an ugly truth. But it must not end there. A hapless Attorney General must not be left to hold the blame with rascally politicians wriggling clear of the consequences.

The President cannot merely talk of corrupt politicians from both major parties and pledge that he would not hesitate to take steps to recover the loss caused to the government and take legal action against the offenders. The reservoir of good faith with which promises were believed in the past has now run dry. There is a serious crisis of public confidence in both the Presidency and the Government. That must be addressed forthwith.
British envoys lesson about truth View(s):

In ancient Greece there was this fussy old philosopher who went around the market place in broad daylight with a lantern in hand looking for an honest man. Diogenes was either a cynic or just crazy. Who would ever go to the market place in search of an honest man! It is as loony as searching for a well dry-cleaned politician, clean of mind and body.

While many in Sri Lanka would now be engrossed in discussing the Bond Commission report  if they could get their hands on it  and politicians trying to splash each other with contaminated mud, we should be pardoned for leaving the report alone until the president and his officials decide to have their final say.

Had Diogenes gone in search of an honest, truthful and principled politician he would probably be still going round in circles. After all, as the British High Commissioner James Dauris preached the other day, many things get in the way of arriving at the truth, such as numbers.

If I return to the subject of the British High Commissioner and his advice to all to refrain from argument over numbers as it only gets in the way of truth-seeking, it is because he leaves one rather puzzled. Having said that a single death is a tragedy, a large number of deaths is a statistic, Mr. Dauris reportedly went on to tell a Sunday newspaper If people allow themselves to lose sight of the tragedy of what happened, reconciliation and the guarantee of future peace will become more elusive. I think we need to be careful not to allow ourselves to get distracted by arguments about numbers, because figures can too easily get in the way of the truth. So would attempts to hide the truth, but to that later.

Perhaps it is our poor comprehension of the English language that leaves one wondering what precisely Dauris is trying to say. Well he is not the only one who has created some confusion in my mind. The English language version of the presidential statement on the Bond Commission report has also created some doubts as to who has done what and who has emerged smelling like an attar of roses.

High Commissioner Dauris says a single death is a tragedy. Not so when large numbers die. That turns into a mere statistic. But not every single death is a tragedy. As a countryman of his called Willie Shakespeare once said When beggars die there are no comets seen.

 What is confusing is Dauriss use of the word tragedy. To him a single death is a tragedy. But then he says that people should not lose sight of the tragedy of what happened.

What precisely is that tragedy? Surely this could not be a reference to another single death could it? No, he seems to be referring to the near three-decade long conflict in which several thousands died. Mainly it is the huge human loss on all sides which makes it a tragedy.

On the one hand the many thousands killed, entire families killed or missing and a generation of youth lost to the country, is what makes the conflict a tragedy. On the other hand James Dauris seems to see the human loss as a mere statistic that should not be allowed to get in the way of finding the truth. Dauris argues that if the public loses sight of the tragedy, whatever that might be in his perception, reconciliation and the guarantee of future peace will become elusive.

While the public will thank the British representative for his seeming concern for peace in this country, one wonders whether this is the real reason for his concern and for the appeal not to engage in a controversy over numbers.

To recap briefly it will be recalled that this most recent questioning of the number of civilian casualties in the last few months of the war against the separatist LTTE erupted during a House of Lords debate initiated by Lord Naseby.

During the debate Naseby contended that the figure of 40,000 or more civilian deaths claimed by some, was highly inflated. His estimate of 7,000-8,000 deaths was based on several sources including despatches from the British Defence Attache in Colombo to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London and copied to the defence establishment to which Lt. Col Anton Gash belonged.

Lord Naseby said that for three years he tried to obtain the war time despatches sent by Lt. Col Gash under the Freedom of Information Act and what he got was heavily redacted reports that hid obviously vital information which if made available to Lord Naseby would have presented a widely different scenario than the one the UK and US in particular, some British media and international NGOs have presented to the world.

What made me return to Dauris was British media comments on the release of once classified files and documents which happens regularly at the end of the year or when requests are made under the FoI law. One of the curious things that Lord Naseby discovered was that Col Gashs despatches after late April 2009 were unavailable at the FCO. It would indeed be a poor reflection and possibly a reason for recall if Gash had not filed any reports on the last few days of the LTTE and the immediate aftermath of its military defeat.

Surely a competent and conscientious military officer would not have been remiss not to report on the dying moments of the war. To think that the British Foreign Office could not find the files on the Anton Gash despatches of a couple of years earlier is a serious condemnation of the manner in which the FCO functions.

But the truth surely lies elsewhere. The Col Gash reports would have undermined the very position taken by the UK and its transatlantic ally on Sri Lankas conduct of the war and deflated the civilian casualty numbers that had been blown up to try and convince the world of atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan security forces.

What Dauris is trying to do is stop British politicians and others from digging into the past which could expose British duplicity, doubtless helped along by the separatist lobby and sections of the Tamil diaspora. The Dauris logic is rather curious. He tells us how to arrive at the truth. But how can one find the truth if all the information and facts are not first disclosed. Mr. Dauris seems to want only the part of the truth. We want more than that.

It is to hide the truth that official files go missing as inquiries by the British newspaper Guardian discovered at years end when more files were released to the public. Here are excerpts from an article by Siobhan Fenton in the Guardian newspaper.

The National Archives are home to more than 11 million documents, many of them covering the most disturbing periods of Britains colonial past. The uncomfortable truths revealed in previously classified government files have proved invaluable to those seeking to understand this countrys history or to expose past injustices.

It is deeply concerning, therefore, to discover that about 1,000 files have gone missing after being removed by civil servants. Officially, the archives describe them as misplaced while on loan to a government department.

The files, each containing dozens of pages, cover subjects such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina. It is unclear whether duplicates exist.

The loss of so many documents of such significance has understandably caused concern among historians, politicians and human rights groups. Amnesty International has called on Theresa May to order an urgent government-wide search for the documents, while Labour MP Jon Trickett has warned that the loss will only fuel accusations of a cover-up.

Also in 2014, the government was accused of a cover-up after it said it could not release information about the CIAs extraordinary rendition programmebecause the files had suffered water damage.

In 2013, meanwhile, the Guardian revealed that more than 1 million documents that should have been declassified were instead being unlawfully kept at a high-security compound in Buckinghamshire. Their existence only came to light when a group of elderly Kenyans took the government to the high court, claiming they had been tortured during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion. The Foreign Office was forced to admit it had withheld thousands of colonial-era papers.

Even if the files that have now been reported missing vanished as a result of sloppiness or incompetence rather than malice, that is in a way no less damning. Britain has long failed to acknowledge the horrors that its colonialism and imperialism have wrought on the world.

Ian Cobain writing to the Guardian said: Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the countrys National Archives and then reported them as lost.

Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Irelands troubles and the infamous letter  in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government  are all said to have been misplaced.

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall.

An entire file on the Zinoviev letter scandal is said to have been lost after Home Office civil servants took it away. The Home Office declined to say why it was taken or when or how it was lost. Nor would it say whether any copies had been made.

In other instances, papers from within files have been carefully selected and taken away.

Dauris might try to divert attention from British conduct as an argument about numbers. It is much more than fact. Such advice is an attempt to bury facts by disposing of files containing highly relevant information that exposes British conduct on many fronts.
President did not show the report to the PM and did not meet him, but telephoned to brief him on theaddress to the nation

Paradoxically, the SLFP and the UNP agree not to criticise each other during the ongoing campaign for the February 10 local polls

Questions whether Sirisena disclosed the report to boost the SLFPs chances at elections; the UNP holds 70th convention today

President Maithripala Sirisena chose to reveal highlights of the story behind the Central Bank bond scam on Wednesday  part of the findings of the Commission of Inquiry.

That it came unusually in a pre-recorded 21-minute address to the nation gave it the status of a national issue. Yet, it was one that had drawn greater public attention countrywide. Even in villages where there was less literacy and the word bond was only associated with James Bond movies, there was sufficient awareness of the alleged plunder of public funds. They were only oblivious to the nitty-gritties of bond auctions but most long believed there was something rotten in the entire episode.

The address did considerably boost Sirisenas popularity. It had taken a strongly downward slide after his efforts to reunite the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) failed miserably. How much this will impact at the local polls remains to be seen. The SLFP is now having small pocket meetings in some areas. This is ahead of major rallies which Sirisena will address in every district. The main campaign is to be launched next week.

This is one of the rare occasions when a Government in power has appointed a Commission to probe its own activities. Most others have been directed at their predecessors. Sirisena is still livid that former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa had not kept to the assurances he held out about uniting the party. He was in fact in favour of the move but remarks by Prasanna Ranatunga (UPFA  Gampaha District) at a meeting that they (the Joint Opposition) had taken Sirisena for a ride had angered him more. Earlier, Sirisena did blame Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) principal strategist Basil Rajapaksa who stoutly opposed any reunification.

And now, what is equally shocking, if not more, is the fact that he has placed his Sri Lanka Freedom Partys (SLFP) relationship with its coalition partner, the United National Party (UNP), on a razors edge. The carefully crafted delivery, the contents of which were perhaps expertly done, seemingly had an eye on the local polls on February 10. It was pregnant with many serious political nuances. That helped him regain some prestige. It was only a week earlier that he pledged to wield the sword to deal with those whom he perceived as bribe takers or the corrupt and took a few swipes. Those who were scarred, those who are yet to be when the Commissions report becomes public and the related disclosures all point in the direction of the UNP, the main coalition partner.

Firstly, Sirisena has vented his anger on the UNP, using a credible account that emanated from two Supreme Court Judges and a retired Deputy Auditor General. This naturally places the UNP in an extremely unenviable position as a coalition partner. Secondly, the political missiles Sirisena fired are sure to hurt the UNPs local polls campaign with the exception of the partys strongholds. It will also affect the UNPs slow preparations, with the help of even foreign communication experts, for the next presidential and parliamentary elections. Why does this aspect become so significant?

The story begins with the Commission of Inquiry making a request for a meeting on Sunday (December 31, 2017) to present its report. That was the last date of its twice extended mandate. However, Sirisena was going to be away from Colombo and the members were offered a meeting at 12.30 p.m. on Saturday, the 30th. A source close to the Presidency said Sirisena who received the report had a conversation with the members for some 45 minutes. On learning that the report alone ran into 1257 pages, together with some annexures, he sought to know the significant highlights, the source added.

During last week, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was on a yearend working vacation at his official residence, the Prime Ministers Lodge in Nuwara Eliya. When contacted by Parliament officials to arrange for a meeting of the Constitutional Council, he had replied that he would return to Colombo only on January 2. The news about the report reached him breaking his holiday of relaxing listening to music and talking with friends and their families. He rushed back to Colombo however on New Years Day and sought a meeting with President Sirisena. A senior UNPer said it was partly to discuss the Commission report and obtain a copy. That was to ascertain the Commissions findings and the recommendations made by it.

That copy of the report has not reached him yet. Nor was he able to have a meeting. The Presidents office had informed the Premier that he would be in Polonnaruwa on New Years eve and then in Kandy and Kataragama on New Years Day. Thereafter, Wickremesinghe sat down for a session that New Years Day evening to discuss the UNP campaign for the local polls with party Chairman Malik Samarawickrema and General Secretary Kabir Hashim. However, just hours ahead of his address to the nation on Wednesday, Sirisena telephoned Wickremesinghe and briefed him on what he was going to say. That was his first intimation of what the report contained, but still, no copy of the report was sent.

Notwithstanding what the Commission reported to him during their discussion on December 30, and the disclosures he made to Sri Lankans, President Sirisena is on the horns of a serious dilemma over this situation. A UNP Cabinet minister who spoke on grounds of anonymity since he is governed by collective responsibility was livid. The assumption, quite correctly, is that there is only one Government in Sri Lanka formed together by the SLFP and the UNP. Here is a situation where there is a publicly demonstrated assumption that there are two different Governments, one by the SLFP and another by the UNP. This may be the first time a President has not taken into confidence his own Prime Minister in sharing a document that is going to be placed before the public, through Parliament on January 23. It will thereafter be printed as a Sessional Paper of Parliament. That raises the all-important question  whether President Sirisena has lost the trust and confidence of Premier Wickremesinghe? More so, when he chose not to share a copy of the Commission report with him and brief him only on the contents of his address just hours before he delivered it.

As the December 31 deadline for the Commission neared the final days, there was public anxiety over what its findings and recommendations would be. It was the talk of the town, so to say. Yet, when the Cabinet of Ministers met for the first time in the New Year last Tuesday, there was no reference to the Commission. The previous weeks meeting was cancelled and some ministers expected copies of the report to be given to them at this meeting.

The ruling SLFP is anxious that a session of Parliament be summoned ahead of January 23. They, together with the Joint Opposition and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) have sent in separate requests to Speaker Karu Jayasuriya. A decision whether to allow such an early session rests in the hands of Premier Wickremesinghe. Speaker Jayasuriya has summoned a meeting of party leaders for 2 p.m. on Tuesday (January 9) to discuss the matter. The UNP is one of the parties that called for the tabling of the report in Parliament and it is now unlikely it would raise objections. Yet, an early debate on the Commission report is unlikely since its contents are yet to be known. An early date, however, would facilitate the tabling of the report.

A UNP Working Committee member, who also wished to remain anonymous, alluded to a letter which Sirisena wrote to his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa ahead of the parliamentary elections in August 2015. The UNP member argued there were shades of that episode in Sirisenas conduct. On July 13 of that year, Sirisena told Rajapaksa in a three-page letter that in the event of (the SLFP) gaining the support of other parties to form a Government.it is not you who should become Prime Minister but another senior member of our party. He claimed this letter one of the reasons why the Rajapaksas lost the parliamentary elections.

Mahinda Amaraweera, General Secretary of the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA), however, countered the arguments. He told the Sunday Times, We thought it is more democratic for the President to act impartially and address the nation instead of discussing the statement with other parties. If it was discussed, it could have resulted in some alterations being made to it (the statement). Those remarks from a minister regarded as a confidant of President Sirisena make it abundantly clear that withholding the report, from the Prime Minister, was a conscious move. However, Amaraweeras reason for it  that there would possibly be pressure to make amendments  is arguable for many reasons. Earlier, the appeal by three UNP ministers  Malik Samarawickrema, Kabir Hashim and Mangala Samaraweera  to Sirisena not to have Wickremesinghe summoned before the Commission of Inquiry had failed. He declared he had no role in the Commissions proceedings. Similarly, Sirisena could well have refused to make any changes if indeed they were suggested.

President Sirisena also made a reference contained in the Commission report to Premier Wickremesinghe. He said, ..The Commission report said that the Honourable Prime Ministers responsibility in the appointment of Mr. Arjuna Mahendren as the Governor to the Central Bank was proper. The Commission is of the opinion that the Prime Minister made his statement in Parliament regarding the appointment of Mr Mahendran believing in the facts presented by Mr. Mahendran and Mr.Samarasiri, especially the promises made by Mr Mahendran. The Report also says that the Prime Minister should not have done that.

The Commission stated that moreover these facts were before the COPE committee and the Prime Minister had not stated that because of that he had not taken the proper action against Mr. Mahendern

On Monday, a senior official at the Prime Ministers office showed documents to the Sunday Times. One dated November 11, 2016 sent by the Prime Ministers Secretary Saman Ekanayake, refers to the following reports:

= The Report of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) Parliament Series No. 109 tabled in Parliament on October 28, 2016.

= The Special Report on Bonds issued by the Central Bank between the period of February 2015 and May 2016 which was forwarded to the Committee on Public Enterprises.

Ekanayake said he had been advised by the Prime Minister, as Minister of National Policies, to seek the AGs opinion on the legality/validity of the bonds issued by the CBSL since 2008 and;

(a) If the procedure which had been followed is lacking in authority then the measures to be taken to rectify such defect, and

(b) Your views on the observations given in the Auditor Generals Report pertaining to Public Auction and Private Placements.

In a three-page letter, Deputy Solicitor General Milinda Gunatilleke (on behalf of the AG) in a reply on November 7, among other matters declared that in order to pursue recovery in terms of the Registered Stocks and Securities law, it would be necessary to provide a precise quantification of the loss suffered by the Government He has said it was prudent that the quantification should be carried out by the Auditor Generals Department with the assistance of an independent expert whose evidence can be relied upon in a court of law. The letter said this Department is considering whether an offence under this provision or any other law has been committed

The UNP also issued a statement on Thursday. Contrary to Minister Amaraweeras claims that discussions with other parties would have led to the Presidents message being amended, the UNP was conciliatory and supportive in its tone. Perhaps a detailed response was prevented by the non-availability of the report to the UNP. A few highlights of the UNP statement issued this week:

The President has now forwarded the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Bond Issue to the Attorney General (AG). We would like to thank the Bond Commission for its services rendered through its 10-month long inquiry.

The investigative report into the bond issue compiled by the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) under the Chairmanship of Mr Sunil Handunnetti was forwarded to the AG on the instructions of the Prime Minister in December, 2016. In December, 2016, the PM requested the AG to forward recommendations on legal action that should be taken against officers responsible for the disputed bond issue, and on regulating the bond issuance process.

Accordingly, the responsibility of taking suitable legal action regarding the bond issue was conveyed to the AGs Department by the PM in December, 2016 and by the President in January, 2018.

These assertions no doubt place on the Attorney General the responsibility of explaining why no action has been forthcoming since the Premiers request. Of course one has to bear in mind that such cases take considerable time.

The Sunday Times has learnt that the Commission of Inquiry has also raised issue on the placement of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) under the Prime Minister on grounds of the legality of that exercise. The Commission is of the view that in terms of the law, the subject should have remained with the Ministry of Finance. There was a political rationale then for the move. Ravi Karunanayake, who was the Finance Minister, had faced court action over the remittance of funds from Raj Rajaratnam, a stockbroker of Sri Lankan origin in New York and now in jail in the US for insider trading. The investigations had been initiated by the Exchange Control Department that came under the CBSL. Hence, it had then been considered prudent to bring the CBSL under the Prime Minister.

Sirisena said in his address that The Commission report refers to the allegation against former Finance Minister Mr Ravi Karunanayake regarding the payment of rent for the penthouse apartment that belongs to the Aloysius Family and their Walt and Rowe Company and stated that Mr Karunanayake was responsible for that and recommended that the Government should take necessary action against Mr. Ravi Karunanayake under the section of bribery and corruption and further legal action under the penal codes for giving false evidence at the Commission.

The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption is set to probe the former Finance Minister and later Foreign Minister. Whilst this is being described as time consuming, action under the Penal Code is to come first, according to legal sources. Whilst those testifying before a Commission of Inquiry are entitled to immunity, those giving false evidence in a judicial proceeding face a sentence of up to seven years in jail and a fine under the Penal Code. The Attorney Generals Department has opined that since two Judges of the Supreme Court, who were members of the Commission, had held that Karunanayake had given false evidence, there was already a strong case. However, Karunanayake has remained defiant. He told the Daily Mirror that he had been 25 years in politics and this was the first time his integrity was being challenged.

Appearing in a box story on this page are edited excerpts of President Sirisenas address to the nation.

Since his Wednesday address to the nation, paradoxical enough, President Sirisena chaired a meeting of SLFP and UNP ministers. It was held to discuss ways and means of avoiding criticism being levelled against each other during the ongoing polls campaign. Among others taking part: SLFP  Nimal Siripala de Silva, Anura Priyadarshana Yapa, Duminda Dissanayake and Thilanga Sumathipala. UNP  Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe, Malik Samarawickrema, Kabir Hashim and Mangala Samaraweera. Both sides refrained from making references to the report of the Commission of Inquiry. Worse enough, the UNP which has been at the receiving end of Sirisenas address did not even raise a mild protest that it would hit the partys campaign. Here is one area where the UNPs communication machinery has faltered and it has been unable to come up with periodic responses to developments linked to the bond scam.

Today, UNP leader Wickremesinghe is expected to publicly outline his partys response at the annual sessions of the party at Campbell Park in Borella. The UNP turns 70 this year. It is expected to be a reiteration of the position taken up in its statements. It is noteworthy that there is a distinct difference in the positions taken up by the SLFP and the UNP.

For the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the main constituent in the Joint Opposition, its first major session was held last Wednesday at the Sugathadasa Indoor Stadium. It was addressed by party leaders including their leader Mahinda Rajapaksa. There was, however, no reference by them to the bond issue. However, the SLPPs main strategist Basil Rajapaksa told the Sunday Times, Our position is that the entire Government including the Prime Minister should resign. They just cannot blame it on their former Finance Minister and remain silent. The JO parties discussed having maroon  or kurakkan (the colour of Mahinda Rajapaksas and Basil Rajapaksas shawl or satakaya) as their colour.

The SLFPs focus, articulated by none other than President Sirisena, is on the allegations of corrupt practices and misdeeds during the period 2015 and 2016. He said that the Commission was mandated to inquire into the period from February 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016 to find out the actual facts and to make recommendations with regard to the steps to be implemented in the future.

However, Sirisena noted that the Commission of Inquiry did not have the mandate to inquire into Treasury bond issues from 2008 to 2015. He said the Commission has recommended that there should be an investigation into that period too and added that Employees Provident Fund (EPF) money was lost mostly during that period. He pointed out that the EPF and other Government institutions had lost more than Rs 8.5 billion.

In contrast, Premier Wickremesinghe is focused on the bond issues from 2008 until 2016. The period from 2008 to 2015 was under the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa administration where similar abuses have allegedly occurred. In other words, it was to highlight that not only UNP members but also those in the SLFP who had resorted to abusing the bond auctions. The fact that Maithripala Sirisena was General Secretary of the SLFP during that period is no secret. Wickremesinghe met the Central Bank Monetary Board members on Friday to emphasise that they should probe the earlier period too. The same request was also made from the CBSL Governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy.

If the Commission of Inquiry was given a mandate lasting three months and was renewed periodically till ten long months, to come up with its findings and recommendations, it would take more than that time to bring the culprits to book.

Yet, the issue is now before the court of public opinion. How they will give their verdict will be known within weeks or after February 10. Until then, the two major coalition partners, the SLFP and the UNP, are fighting it out over many omissions and commissions. This is notwithstanding pious pronouncements that one should not criticise the other. What follows in their on-off relationship will be the most critical question this year.

President vows to recover the plundered Rs. 11.5 billion and punish the offenders Here are highlights of the edited excerpts of President Maithripala Sirisenas address to the nation delivered on Wednesday on the findings of the Commission of Inquiry that probed the Central Bank bond scandal.The Commission was headed by Justice Kankanithanthri T. Chitrasiri, Supreme Court Judge, Justice Prasanna Sujeewa Jayawardena, Supreme Court Judge and Vellupillai Kandasamy, retired Deputy Auditor General. The Commission has submitted a full report covering the period 2015 and 2016, comprising 1257 pages and it is not an interim report. The Commission has taken 10 months for this task. I have already submitted this report to the Attorney General and the Commission recommends that the criminal and civil court action must be taken through the Criminal Investigations Department and the Bribery or Corruption Commission. The Commission has clearly stated the structure of the Central Bank, the Public Debt Department, direct issuance of bonds and the pros and cons of the system of bond issues and bond auctions. The report stated that the Perpetual Treasuries Limited has made profits through illegal means with the involvement of Mr Arjuna Mahendran, Bank officials and some outside individuals. In the auction held on 27th February 2015 alone the Perpetual Treasuries Limited has made a minimum benefit of over Rs 688 million. The Commission is of the opinion that further investigations could reveal that this amount could even be more than that. As revealed during the investigations, Perpetual Treasuries Limited has made an undue profit of Rs 11,145 million in the secondary market. In this Employees Provident Fund and other government institutions had lost more than Rs 8,524 million or Rs 8.5 billion. It is stated that senior officials of the Central Bank were inactive before the former Governor of Central Bank, Arjuna Mahendran. It is believed that because they had not questioned about these and had become inactive, such incorrect decisions were made. Mr Mahendran has made interference into bond auctions through a system of incorrect and unconventional methods and he was responsible for providing internal information to outsiders. One party has used such information to obtain undue monetary profits. The Commission report said that the honourable Prime Ministers responsibility in the appointment of Mr. Arjuna Mahendren as the governor to the Central Bank was proper. The Commission is of the opinion that the Prime Minister made his statement in Parliament regarding the appointment of Mr Mahendran believing in the facts presented by Mr. Mahendran and Mr.Samarasiri, especially the promises made by Mr Mahendran. The Report also says that the Prime Minister should not have done that. The Commission stated that moreover these facts were before the COPE committee and the Prime Minister had not stated that because of that he had not taken the proper action against Mr. Mahendern. The Commission report refers to the allegation against former Finance Minister Mr Ravi Karunanayake regarding the payment of rent for the penthouse apartment belonging to the Aloysius Family and their Walt and Rowe Company and stated that Mr Karunanayake was responsible for that and recommended that the government should to take necessary action against him. Further legal action under the Penal Code for giving false evidence at the Commission has also been recommended. The Commission referred to the misuse of funds of the Employees Provident Fund and stated that it should be investigated under a forensic audit examination to find out the losses. The report has recognized that, the dishonesty of a particular party had led to this kind of malpractice on EPF funds. The people responsible for these frauds have been identified and the Commission recommends legal action against them. The report recommends that legal action against relevant persons and officials who are responsible for the fraud including Perpetual Treasuries Limited, Arjun Aloysius (son-in-law of former CBSL Governor Mahendran) and Kasun Palihena should be taken. Accordingly, the government is in consultation with legal authorities. Recommendations

Members of the Monetary Board and the Central Bank Governor must be appointed by the Constitutional Council in concurrence with the members. The regulations must be amended accordingly. There should be the highest levels of supervision over the Public Debt Department. As auditing at the Central Bank has not been conducted in a proper manner, the Commission recommends that the Audit Department must be reorganised completely. A Legal Department must be established in the Central Bank and ensure that the Legal Department functions efficiently. The Commission recommends that the dealings with the Pan Asia Bank and the conduct of the Chairman must be investigated into. It also recommends that activities of the EPF must be looked into, and in order to bring the EPF into a proper order, steps must be taken to restructure the EPF. A code of conduct for the officials of the Central Bank must be introduced. The code of conduct for Primary Dealers must be revised and updated. I would like to specifically state here that I would not hesitate to take steps to recover the loss of Rs 11,145 million to the government and take legal action against the offenders and punish them. The sum of Rs 8529million of the total losses of Rs 11,145 million was the funds of the Employees Provident Fund, Mahapola Scholarship Fund, National Savings Bank and Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. The balance was from private institutions. Hence the loss to the public sector  EPF, Mahapola, NSB and SLIC was over Rs 8.5 billion. The Perpetual Treasuries Limited has made this profit of Rs 11,145 million within a short period of 5 months. Finally, especially I would like to mention that this final report must be presented to Parliament and through this initiative the report must be open to the public. In the future, necessary as well as legal steps in this regard will be taken expeditiously according to the advice from the Attorney General. I kindly request to consider the openness of the facts of this Commission Report and I assure that any hesitation would not occur in filing cases against the offenders.
New Law and Order State Minister begins journey on wrong foot View(s):

Piyasena Gamage, the latest State Minister appointed by President Maithripala Sirisena, made news straightaway  only for the wrong reasons.

He got rebuffed by the Police when he asked for crack STF commandos for his son, and then went on to face allegations that he berated a policeman in a rural station for apprehending one of his supporters who broke the law. The State Minister was given, of all ministries that of Law and Order.

The newly appointed State Minister who was waiting in the wings since August 2015 until a court order removed the sitting MP and one-time actress Geetha Kumarasinghe, has probably still to realise he is part of a government whose motto is Yahapalanaya.

The drama was played out on New Years Day, barely days after Mr. Gamage was sworn in as the Minister of State for Law and Order and Southern Development on December 28.

Naturally, his supporters, who had remained politically dormant, became jubilant. They organised a reception for their hero at Nagoda in the Galle District. For a moment they forgot the law, perhaps in the knowledge it could now be broken and mended if the need arose, by their new boss. So all of them rode on motorcycles, escorting the State Minister without wearing protective helmets. According to traffic laws, it is a punishable offence.

An alert traffic policemen booked one of them and imposed a spot fine. He was asked to pay the amount at a post office before he returned to the Police station to collect his driving licence.

The next thing the Police officer saw was State Minister Gamage storming the station. An officer, who spoke on grounds of anonymity for fear of reprisals said, The State Minister used harsh and abusive language and demanded that the charge be withdrawn. We were shocked that he was not helping the Police to enforce law and order and encouraging his supporters to break the law. The Police stood their ground and insisted that the offender should pay the fine. With political power not producing results, he agreed to pay up to have his licence back.

Mr Gamage denied the accusation. He told the Sunday Times It is true I went to the Police station. The person involved (in committing the offence) was one of my escorts and was stopped for riding without a helmet. I asked the Police why they were acting in an inhuman way on a Poya Day (January 1). I did not use any abusive language or threaten anyone. I did make a request for the mans release.

In making those remarks, the State Minister for Law and Order confirms two important facts  that he went to the Police station and sought the release of one of his men. He also believes that laws are suspended on Poya Day.

That is not all. Just before this episode, days earlier, the newly appointed State Minister telephoned Senior DIG M.R. Latiff, Commandant of the Police Special Task Force (STF). He asked that an STF contingent provide personal security for his son, Randima Gamage, a member of the Southern Provincial Council. All this time, the son was quite safe and sound. Suddenly, he too needed protection from the police commandos.

A senior STF source said that the State Minister was politely advised by the Commandant to make his request through proper channels. That was to make a request to the Ministry of Defence after which a threat assessment could be made. If such an assessment confirmed the Provincial Councillor faced any threats, and a request was made by the Ministry to the STF, through the Law and Order Ministry, security could be provided, the source added.

One Party group enlarged to All Party group

It seems some things are foreign to some officials in the Foreign Ministry in Colombo.

This week, its website  the official portal of the Ministry  made Sri Lankans believe there was an All Party Group from Britain visiting the country. This is what it said:

A four member delegation of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Sri Lanka (APPG-SL) in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament, is currently visiting Sri Lanka at the invitation of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The visit commenced on 3rd January 2018 and will conclude on Monday 8th January.

The delegation is led by the Rt. Hon. Ranil Jayawardena, MP, Chairman of the APPG-SL and includes the Rt. Hon. Michelle Donelan, MP, the Rt. Hon. Chris Green, MP and the Rt. Hon. John Lamont, MP. The ministry release has made every British MP a Right Honourable (Rt.Hon.) It is not only that. This group of four MPs is being touted as representatives of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sri Lanka.

By Gad Sir, to use diplomatic parlance it is a terminological inexactitude or as Pukka Sahib might say, Its just balderdash, what. All four are members of the Conservative Party whereas the APPG on Sri Lanka has as Vice Chairs the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, Ulster Unionists and Democratic Unionist Party (of Northern Ireland)

So to describe this as a delegation of the APPG is surely to mislead.

SriLankan CEO plays Trump on alleged fake news

Like US President Donald Trump, SriLankan Airlines Chief Executive Officer Suren Ratwatte, has chosen to dub a number of articles in the mainstream print media as fake news. No wonder many see a similarity between the two. Accusing sections of the media of carrying inaccurate information about the airline, its performance and speculating on its future, he cites some relevant examples:

n The article in one of the daily newspapers that claimed the SLA Board and/or Management decided to close the runway at VCBI during daytime for resurfacing, when in fact we strenuously objected to a daytime closure.

n The headline in another popular English language daily, that a major international financial institution was extending a USD 200M loan to the Company. We have confirmation from the bank in question that no such credit facility has been requested or extended to the airline.

n The same daily last week stated that there is a USD 200M Bailout for the airline. Neither the management nor the Officials Committee has been informed of any such development.

The former Emirate Airlines pilots expert views on the media are contained in a message he sent to the Airline Pilots Guild of Sri Lanka (APGSL). Speaking on behalf of the management (where the resignation of five members of the Board of Directors has been accepted this week), Mr Ratwatte claims, The management is of the view that some of these articles are deliberate plants, with malicious intent to cause distress and alarm or conversely, false hope, among our staff.

An APGSL member, who did not wish to be identified, declared the whole country knows the deepening crisis faced by our national carrier. Hence, no amount of passing judgements on news reports that do not suit them would help. The ploy is too transparent.

The reason for sending out the message, the CEO points out, is to warn our team members about this worldwide trend of deliberately incorrect information (fake news) and the damage it can do. He goes on to say; Our company is about to embark on what is going to be a very challenging period of restructuring. An interim Board of Directors will be appointed soon, to drive the restructuring process expeditiously. This media feeding frenzy, which is the real fake news, has been going on for the past two and half years, he says.

Rs. 43 million for former presidents and their widows

Former Presidents and some of their spouses will have their cash allocations for 2018 renewed. About Rs 43 million has been allocated in this years budget for provision of various facilities. Those entitled are former Presidents Mahinda Rajapaksa, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and the widows of former Presidents Ranasinghe Premadasa and D.B. Wijetunge.

Around Rs 25 million from the allocated funds will go towards retirement benefits and the provision of building and vehicle facilities.

About Rs 16 million has been allocated to former President Kumaratunga as retirement benefits whilst Mrs Hema Premadasa will receive Rs 1.5 million. The funds are being disbursed from the Office of the President.
A New Year; more of the same politics View(s):

The year 2018 has begun with some fireworks alright. President Maithripala Sirisena all guns blazing, read out the findings and recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) that he had appointed to go into the Central Bank Bond scams of 2015 and 2016. It was a scam of monumental proportions which shook the political firmament and the national conscience of this country with the advent of the new Government in those years.

His address to the nation last Wednesday on the findings included a negative comment on the conduct of his own Prime Minister vis-a-vis his selection of the then Governor of the Central Bank. The recommendations went as far as calling for not only a forensic audit of what was a calculated exercise in amassing wealth by a family at the expense of state institutions, but it also called for the prosecution of a former Finance Minister of this Government.

It is a scandal unprecedented in the annals of contemporary Sri Lanka. It showed the unholy nexus between the Minister, the then Governor and their friend/son-in-law, for which the UNP is paying the price. But to the credit of the Government it is also a hitherto unprecedented fact that a public inquiry was launched into high-ranking sitting politicians and officials, and that they have been found guilty of corruption and the breach of public trust.

However, President Sirisenas motives in going public with the Commissions report unfortunately have come into debate. The timing  on the eve of crucial local elections  is purely accidental. And people have been yearning to know the details of what the COI has been deliberating on for the past 10 months, in public. It was also far superior to what transpired at the Parliamentary Select Committee COPE year before last  in camera.

The fact that the President made public the main points of the COI report without the courtesy of showing it to his Prime Minister begs the question whether he had a different game-plan in using the report as political leverage against his coalition partner in Government with the all-island local council polls next month. In his address he said that he had already sent a copy of the report to the Attorney General  why did he not give a copy to his own Prime Minister? Does he not trust him?

That he mentioned the PMs name in his public address without first telling him seems strange, if not politically incorrect, and especially so in a coalition partnership. Not that he should have omitted the reference. He shared the report given to him the previous Saturday with only his close confidants. Is his own PM now no longer one of them?

That signals the National Unity Government heading in an unhealthy direction. Only on the morning of this public address did the leaders of the two coalition partners, the UNP and the SLFP meet to discuss how not to go at each others throats in the upcoming local polls campaign. Despite the proviso from the Presidential address that this report together with the findings of the Presidential anti-corruption commission (PRECIFAC) is not aimed at witch-hunting UNPers or SLFPers, the Bond Commission report drives a dagger into the heart of the UNP  and the President knows it best.

He is also fighting an election. As Executive President he becomes a mere politician in the days ahead trying to propel his party, the SLFP, to win councils throughout the country. Split in two, the SLFP is not doing well as many with a feel for the pulse of the electorates believe. It is not just losing, but coming a poor third, even fourth, that could make him a lame duck President post February 10 for the rest of his term in office.

In his address, the President clearly portrayed himself as the only one left standing on the political battleground above the corruption and crooked ways of mere politicians  a statesman, with the countrys interests at heart, not swayed by the cacophony of parochial politics. It is, no doubt, difficult on the pedestal he sits, not to be touched himself by accusations of nepotism, political favouritism and the like. The whole country knows how he has recruited Ministers wanted on bribery and corruption charges and let investigations against them meander along  as long as they came across to his side from the rival faction baying for his blood.

That said, it is now the onerous responsibility of the Attorney General to study the voluminous COI report before him and see if further investigations are needed to file indictments. The Prime Minister is on record saying he sent the 2016 COPE report and either that report had nothing substantial to go on, or the AG is still pouring over that brief.

There is clearly a prima-facie case in the COI report and despite its heavy workload, priority has to be given by the AG to this case of daylight robbery of the Central Bank. Thanks to the Monetary Board about Rs. 10.5 billion of the offending companys money is frozen and can be used to reimburse the losses to the state institutions in this scam. There is much truth though in what the President said at the conclusion of his Wednesday address  that there is great public scepticism that Commissions of Inquiry are more to hide some wrongdoing and very little tangible comes out of them in the form of punishing culprits. The public feel, and quite rightly so, that this whole saga is still in its interim, and has miles to go to its final conclusion.

The UNP will have to face the brunt of the fallout from the findings of this COI report. The partys defence was worse than the offence. The leadership originally must have genuinely been misled to a false sense of standing-by its appointees  who in turn, had no loyalty to the party. Their loyalty was only to Mammon. The party cubs were made sacrificial goats and branded as the notorious footnote club for their gymnastics in COPE; one or two of them taking advantage of the situation for personal gain from the looks of it.

How much of it will hurt the UNP at the forthcoming elections is a matter of conjecture. Yet, UNP leaders dismiss the damage to the image of the party and believe the elections will be fought on different issues. The remaining question is how far the National Unity Government can go on like this. The undertones between the two coalition partners we witnessed in 2016 and 2017 have matured into overtones by 2018.

A vociferous and opportunistic section of President Sirisenas party is confident the party will reunite after the elections and form a formidable force with its own SLFP Government. Others feel, just the opposite will happen and defections to the rival faction of the SLFP (now known as the SLPP) under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa will be the order of the day.

If President Sirisena used the report with the idea of neutralising the UNP at the polls and with an eye on uniting the SLFP post-February 10, UNPers are going to react adversely to such a strategy. Given the increasing Chinese influence in the country, the Chinese New Year being the Year of the Dog hopefully would not witness dog eat dog in local politics in 2018.

One need not be an astrologer to predict 2018 being a year of politics; of manoeuvring and mutual mistrust at the highest levels. Whither Sri Lanka?
Quest to preserve his heritage By Kaveesha Fernando A young medical student Tuan Careem hopes that his book Persaudaraan (brotherhood) will help rekindle an interest in Malay culture among the youth of his community View(s): View(s):

When he was young, he spent many days in bed recovering from bouts of asthma. While many would cite similar experiences as a reason why they did not succeed in later life, young Tuan Careem does just the opposite. I used to get sick a lot when I was small so I would have to spend a lot of time at home. My parents took me to the library and let me borrow books to keep me occupied, but unfortunately for them I read the books at an inconveniently fast rate, grins 24-year-old Tuan.

His voracious appetite for books and reading might perhaps be the reason why he is able to successfully study Medicine and also write a book. Persaudaraan (brotherhood), his 720-page book on Malay life in Sri Lanka was launched last year. The first edition came out in 2016, all of 456 pages. This second revised edition is 254 pages longer, with many additional details included.

The book traces the history of the Malays from the time they arrived in Sri Lanka to the present day, explaining the many aspects of Malay lifestyle and culture including fashion, music and drama.

Tuan started writing at age 16, first penning articles to newspapers about ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on the Malays of Sri Lanka. After writing numerous articles about the Malays, at the suggestion of others he was prompted to write a book on Malay history. In this he was guided by his mentor Deshamanya Tissa Devendra. After the first book was published, he continued writing articles on Malay history, which he then decided to publish with the help of Dr. Peter B. R. Carey (an Oxford University professor), who instructed him on the correct procedure to follow when writing an anthropological tome. Tuan explains that he visited the National Archives, contacted local universities and obtained the help of many people in writing this book.

His grandmother instilled in him the importance of preserving culture, heritage and other values of the Malay Community, he says. It is through her that he learned to speak Malay, and he regrets that this knowledge is not being instilled in Malays of the present generation. Malays today learn Sinhala or Tamil and English so that they can communicate and study in school but no one seems interested in learning Malay. Very few Malay youngsters today know how to speak more than a few words of Malay, he remarks sadly, adding that the culture of Malays in Sri Lanka is in danger of dying out completely in the future.

The history learnt in school does not focus enough on certain aspects of our past, comments Tuan. We have historical amnesia  we learn about the Kings of Sri Lanka but do not learn about minorities and so many other aspects, he comments, adding that it is unfortunate that the history syllabus does not include much information about the endangered minorities in the country. There is a race of Tamil Veddhas who have died out completely but no-one focuses on things like that. These are also important aspects of our history, he remarks. He hopes that his book will provide important insights into one aspect of Sri Lankan history  Malay history and the role of Malays in Sri Lankan society from past to present.

Above all, Tuans main hope is that his book helps spark an interest in Malay culture among the youth of his community. Ive added so many aspects so that Malay youth can choose to read about something. If the other aspects of my book are boring, why not read about the fashion or the music? Even if they dont read my book they can still find about these things, he says. The need to educate Malay youth on their heritage is one of the main reasons why he decided to take on the arduous task of publishing a book while engaging in the rigorous work required to study medicine.

Despite being a medical student, I spend time on the weekends to preserve my culture and save it from becoming extinct, he says.

Persaudaraan  Malay Life in Sri Lanka by Tuan M. Zameer Careem has been published by S. Godage and Brothers (Pvt) Ltd and is priced at Rs. 3750.
60 years of Russia-SL diplomatic ties: SL to issue stamp 2 months after Russia View(s):

Sri Lanka is set to issue the first day cover commemorative stamp to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations between Sri Lanka and Russia, two months after Russia issued its stamp. The Foreign Ministry stated that the issuance of the commemorative stamp has been scheduled for next month, at the request of the Sri Lanka-Russia Parliamentary Friendship Association.

The Association, in October 2017, had informed the Philatelic Bureau of the Department of Posts of its intention to issue a stamp at a special event to be held in February 2018, the Ministry said. The stamp will feature a cave temple/monastery in the Russian Federation and in Sri Lanka, the statement explained Sri Lanka has already identified the Golden Cave Temple of Dambulla as the image that will be featured on the stamp. The Russian Federation is expected to share the image of a heritage site in the Russian Federation that is to be depicted on the stamp, shortly, it added.

Russia Post issued two postage stamps dedicated to the anniversary in December. The first day cover had two stamps, one depicting the Dambulu Vhiaraya and the other the Orthodox Bakhchisaray Holy Assumption Monastery. Earlier the Posts Ministry said that the Foreign Ministry had instructed them to hold back the issue of the stamp, with no reasons given.

The stamp was issued in Russia during the controversy over Sri Lankas Tea exports to Russia being suspended after Sri Lanka was set to impose a ban on asbestos imported from Russia. Sri Lanka eventually deferred the date of the implementation of the proposal and Russia too lifted the suspension on Tea imports.
Fertiliser crisis: Issue with Pakistan averted By Namini Wijedasa Mishandling of imports by Lankan Govt. and international traders caused shortage View(s): View(s):

Hot on the heels ofa spat over a tea ban by Russia, the fertiliser shortage which the Government blamed entirely on a Pakistani policy to ban exports nearly became a diplomatic issue between the two countries, with Sri Lankan diplomatic sources claiming that Pakistan wanted to clarify its position but decided against it due to political sensitivities, the Sunday Times learns.

The suspension of urea exports by Pakistan was by no means unexpected or sudden, trade sources from that country said. It is widely known that, during the final quarter of every year, there is a three-month export freeze to ensure that sufficient fertiliser is available domestically during the wheat cultivation period.

This is outlined in Pakistans national fertiliser policy and was known to the Sri Lankan industry, including Agriculture Ministry officials. The policy holds that all fertiliser exports must be completed before October 31 each year; Pakistani suppliers are not permitted to send any urea out after that date. But the freeze somehow affected several Sri Lankan private sector companies which had placed orders for 40,000 metric tonnes of urea through traders in Singapore. The orders were made at the end of August, for the supplies to arrive well before the October 31 deadlines. The sailing time from Pakistan to Sri Lanka is less than a week.

Ironically, 2017 is the first year in recent times that Sri Lanka has even ordered urea from Pakistan. Data obtained from the Department of Customs for the period from 2014 to 2017 show that imports from a host of countries including China (the largest quantities) and Australia, Hungary and the Philippines (the smallest quantities). However, the first imports from Pakistan 135,736MTarrived last year.

Industry sources said companies had turned to Pakistan because world market prices, particularly those of Chinese suppliers, had risen by US$125 a metric tonne. Pakistani suppliers were selling for US$ 100. Despite the orders being lodged in time, the shipments were affected by the freeze. One Sri Lankan company had sought 20,000MT but only 7,000MT were forthcoming. The industry is now trying to sue Singaporean traders for breach of contract. This had nothing to do with Pakistan but with the arrangement between the traders and companies.

As the crisis escalated in Sri Lanka, daily television footage of protesting farmers brought upon the Government much negative publicity. The Agriculture Ministry then tried procuring urea in the spot market, while blaming the shortage on the Pakistani ban on fertiliser exports.

The Sri Lankan Government used diplomatic avenues to request the Pakistani Government to let the urea through. It was learnt that a country-specific relaxation of the freeze was complex, though not altogether impossible if the matter was taken up at Heads of Government level.

This prompted President Maithripala Sirisena to telephone Pakistans Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. The latter convened the Economic Coordination Committeea body representing the countrys four provinces at ministerial levelbecause it had the power to lift the restriction. On the basis of friendship, a consignment of 75,000MT of fertiliser was approved. A ship with 40,000MT of fertiliser was due to arrive on Thursday.

The local industry points out that the Governments mishandling of its own urea purchases compounded the situation. In October, the Agriculture Ministry submitted a Cabinet paper for the direct procurement of 100,000 MT of prilled urea for the Yala season. The attempted spot purchase (brought on by Pakistans urea freeze) was more than double the quantity of the previous purchases for Yala.

But the product was to be bought from a first-time supplier not registered with the Ministry on DA (documents against acceptance) terms, outside of the usual letters of credit (L/C) terms. This direct purchase was blocked through industry protestshighlighting the need for open tendersto President Sirisena.

A tender was then called in November for 72,000MT of prilled urea on DA terms. Of five bids, only one was on DA terms. Again, it was from a non-prequalified, unregistered, first-time supplier JAT Holdings and higher than all the others. This was accepted but subsequently cancelled because the company could not meet the required specifications. It caused a procurement delay that added on to the situation with Pakistani urea imports.

Meanwhile, private sector companies have also now placed orders with China for the more expensive urea. These will be issued in limited quantities as they cannot meet the price ceiling of Rs 2,500 for a 50kg bag.
Navy raid uncovers Rs. 30 million worth narcotics on VVT beach View(s):

The Sri Lanka Navy yesterday recovered 90 kilograms of cannabis, four kilograms of opium and four kilograms of hashish during a raid on the Valvettithurai beach.Navy Spokesman Dinesh Bandara said the street value of the drugs seized was more than Rs. 30 million.

He said the raid was conducted by the Northern Naval Command, following a tip off. The drugs were found in packets hidden in a container.

Commander Bandara said no suspects had been arrested so far. The drug haul was handed over to the Special Task Force in Jaffna for investigations and further action.

Meanwhile, in a search operation conducted last evening, also in Valvettithurai, STF personnel recovered 17.76 kilos of Kerala Ganja hidden near the Thondamannar Bridge. Police said investigations were continuing to arrest the criminals who hid the drugs under the bridge.
Prince Edward chief guest at 70th freedom festival By Chandani Kirinde View(s): View(s):

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex and youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is expected to be the chief guest at the 70th Independence Day celebrations on February 4, a senior Home Ministry official said.

The main parade on that day will be held at the Galle Face Green, the same venue that independent Lankas first Prime Minister, D.S. Senanayake, brought down the Union Jack, and hoisted the Lion flag to mark Sri Lankas freedom from 400 years of colonial rule, some 150 years under the British.The official said the invitation to a member of the British Royal family was sent through the Foreign Ministry, and had been accepted.

Queen Elizabeth II is the Head of the Commonwealth, of which Sri Lanka has been a member since Independence in 1948.

The Sunday Times learns that the official announcement is due in the next two weeks. Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II represented the Queen at Sri Lankas 50th Independence Day celebrations in 1998.

Invitations also has been extended to members of the Royal families of Japan and Thailand. Meanwhile, the Home Affairs Ministry is making arrangements to celebrate Independence Day on a district basis on the theme One Nation.
Thilan Wijesinghe tipped to chair SriLankan interim board CCEM proposes public-private partnership for airline's restructuring View(s): View(s):

With the Government accepting the resignations of the Board of Directors of the troubled SriLankan Airlines, a new interim team was preparing to take over amidst a shake-up in the airlines top management, informed sources said.

A new team will take over soon, a source close to the officials involved in the restructuring process said, adding that Thilan Wijesinghe, Chairman of the National Agency for Public Private Partnerships and convenor of the officials committee involved in a restructure of the airline, is tipped to chair the interim SriLankan Airlines board-level panel.

This process will happen probably within days after the current directors are formally sent letters accepting their resignations.

All the directors but one  Ajith N. Dias (Chairman), Rajan Brito, Chanaka de Silva, Mahinda Haradasa, Rakhita Jayawardena (Executive Director  Compliance and Communication) and Niranjan De Silva Deva Aditya  sent in their resignations a few weeks ago. The exception was Harendra K. Balapatabendi. While there is no immediate information about Mr. Balapatabendis status, it remains to be seen whether he would be included in the new interim panel or asked to step down with the other directors.

The airlines CEO Suren Ratwatte was expected to continue during this interim period, these sources said. The airline which has barely managed to stay afloat has been struggling with accumulated losses from management issues by the previous regime, coupled with a massive compensation payment owing to a decision to cancel new Airbus orders and management issues in recent years too.

The sources said that most of the problems at the airline over the past three years were as a result of repeated clashes and disagreements between two ministers  Ravi Karunanayake (when he handled finance) and Kabir Hashim (whose Public

Enterprises Ministry is responsible for the restructure of troubled state companies).

Also being questioned is the 100 million-rupee plus assignment in mid-2016 to National Savings Bank as the lead manager appointed by the Cabinet, in finding an international investment bank to handle the restructure exercise. Concerns were raised since NSB did not have expertise in this field, and close to two years later no proper management or equity partner has been found.

Concerns have also been raised at the extent to which board members and some senior management have availed themselves of complementary airline tickets and other benefits. Minister Kabir Hashim, who has repeatedly confessed that he is not kept informed of decisions by the airline board, on Friday confirmed in a media statement that the resignations of the board of directors had been accepted.

The interim team will include members of the officials committee involved in the restructuring process. The sources said some changes in the top management at the airline are expected. The interim team of officials will continue with its restructuring mandate and supervise the management in the hands of senior management once changes are made, the source said.

Other Government sources said the interim board-level management team would remain until the airline was restructured and the new owners or managers appointed their own board of directors. The Cabinet Committee looking at restructuring of the national carrier is chaired by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and includes ministers Kabir Hashim, Mangala Samaraweera, Dr. Sarath Amunugama, Nimal Siripala de Silva and Malik Samarawickrama. The Officials Committee assisting the ministers comprises Finance Ministry Secretary H.S. Samaratunga (chairman), Public Enterprise Development Ministry Secretary Ravindra Hewawitharana, Thilan Wijesinghe (convenor), SriLankan Airlines Chairman Ajith Dias, Finance and Media Ministry Senior Advisor Mano Tittawella and Central Bank Director Dr. Roshan Perera.

Meanwhile, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Management (CCEM) has decided to complete the restructuring programme of SriLankan Airlines under a Public Private Partnership (PPP) within six months. The decision was taken this week at a CCEM meeting chaired by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Minister Hashim told the Sunday Times that a Committee comprising ministry scretaries had been appointed to workout the details of the PPP. Treasury Secretary R.H.S.Samaratunga will head the Committee which will be entrusted with the re-structuring programme and also the task of reducing the airlines losses.

The Sunday Times learns that the CCEM also decided to appoint another Committee under Dr Samaratunga to re-negotiate with the Airbus company regarding the proposed purchase of eight aircraft. The CCEM had decided to halt the purchase of four of the aircraft. With regard to the other four which are being built, the CCEM decided to find a suitable method to resell them to another company or airline or for Sri Lanka to lease them.

The decision to move for a PPP proposal came in the wake of abortive attempts to find a suitable company to take over the airline. Among the airlines Sri Lanka has negotiated with are Qatar Airways, Emirates, Japanese Airlines and AirAsia. National Agency for Public Private Partnerships Chairman Thilan Wijesinghe told the Sunday Times that SriLankan Airlines suffered an annual loss of Rs five billion.

He said the airline currently had a debt of US$ 750 million which was a burden and therefore was looking at a PPP to make it a profitable institutions. The restructuring of the airline will help to improve the value of the airline even if we have to consider the sale of the airline subsequently, he said.

Mr. Wijesinghe said the catering section and the ground handling section were profitable and the airline would be able to pay the loans from the profits gained from these sections.

He said the annual turnover of the airline was around US$ 1 billion and if they were able to improve the turnover to US$ 1.5 billion the airline could be made profitable. He said the lease agreement signed by the previous government to purchase eight aircraft had contributed to the heavy losses.
Bye bye 2017, hello 2018 View(s):

2018 arrived with a bang as most city hotels and those in Negombo and Kandy hosted lavish New Years Eve parties to bid farewell to the old and usher in the new. Here our Sunday Times photographers Indika Handuwala, Amila Gamage, Priyantha Wickramaarachchi, M.D. Nissanka and Ushan Malshika capture the scenes as young lovers, families, friends and all those party people celebrated in style.

Grand Kandyan, Kandy

Cinnamon Grand

Amaya Hills Kandy

Galadari Hotel

Kingsbury Hotel

Hilton Hotel

Jetwing Blue Negombo

Jetwing Sea Negombo
Flower power Supplying jasmine and lotus flowers is not merely a trade for those involved in it, discovers Randima Attygalle View(s): View(s):

Its roots lie in muddy waters, yet the lotus rises above the mud to bloom; untarnished by its mucky base. Lotus (nelum), with its myriad colours is religiously and culturally symbolic both in the Buddhist and the Hindu canon. Often associated with the life and teachings of Lord Buddha, the lotus which is a motif of divine beauty, purity and fertility, is revered by Hindus and associated with the gods Vishnu, Brahma, Ganesha and goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati.

For Chandana Pushpakumara from Thalawa and W.D. Wasantha from Kesbewa, the lotus is a means of living. Going into murky waters at the crack of dawn on a tyre tube, searching for these beauties is a balancing act of agility. The circumscribed space of the tube is shared by the plucker and the flower. Surprisingly 500 flowers can fit into this space, Wasantha claims. Unlike the small boats, the lightness of the tube enables one to reach out for the flowers, says Wasantha who has been in the trade for the past 15 years and his father too before him.

This business entails a sub-culture of its own. Very often the flowers are sourced from lakes which are leased out annually by farmer organisations. The highest bidder claims the lease of a lake and only the pluckers authorised by him are allowed access to the lake. The lease is renewed each year Chandana explains. The distribution channel of the enterprise, works on its own ropes. Once the flower buds (pohottu) are packed into gunny bags, they are transported to various destinations by the night train, so that they reach by morning and in full bloom, says Chandana who is a regular supplier to Aluthgama Kande Viharaya, Kalutara Viharaya and Bellanwila Temple for the past 20 years.

April is the most bountiful season for us, he says, explaining that Japan jabara or water hyacinth, an aquatic weed and heavy rains are the worst enemies of the lotus flower pluckers. Another common foe is the crocodile, says Chandana. Most of the lakes he wades through in Thalawa and Thambuthegama are also home to crocs.

K.D.D. Priyangika who has been in the flower business near Bellanvila temple, sources her supply of lotus and water lily (manel) from Thalawa, Kekirawa, Padaviya, Nagollagama and Medawachchiya. We sell about 1000 flowers a day but on poya days the demand is more, says Priyangika, adding that there is also a demand for weddings, other ceremonial functions and flower wreaths.

Watching his jasmine (pichcha) kiosk close to Wellawatta Kovil going in flames during the 1983 riots, made K. Manoharan (Mano) plant his own patch of jasmine bushes in Mawathagama, where his ancestral roots lie. His 20-perch jasmine plot of Mawathagama, off Kurunegala, envelops a visitor in a scent like none other. As Mano himself admits, the fragrance is intoxicating at times. Together with wife Nageshwari who is known more as Kumudu in a flowery spirit, Mano tends to his jasmine cultivation with reverence. Jasmine has several varieties and what we grow is pokuru pichcha often used for garlands, explains Mano who is a well- known name among flower sellers near the Kandy Dalada Maligawa and Wellawatta Kovil, as he supplies flowers to them.

A jasmine bush takes five to six months to reach maturity and a well-tended bush can have a long life span. Manos jasmine plot yields around four kilos of buds a day. Until they grow, they need to be looked after like babies, says Mano fondly, pointing at some older bushes with a chuckle: these are of course like me, gnarled now. For a bountiful crop, the bushes require basic fertilizer of nil keta every three to four months coupled with pruning. Similar to tea plucking, jasmine plucking is an art says Manos wife. The fingers have to be trained to pluck only the buds and one needs to bathe before plucking as the flowers are for holy and auspicious purposes.

Interestingly, jasmine plucking starts around 11 in the morning as sunlight enables the spotting of buds. Why we dont take the full flower is because it is frequented by butterflies that are enticed by the fragrance and when Sri Pada season approaches, they come in large numbers, says Mano. The full blooms are left for the villagers in the area for Bodhi poojas and other adornments and given free. No visitor to his plot is sent empty-handed without a jasmine plant. We live each day by the fragrance of these jasmines, Mano adds with a smile.

It takes only a few winks, for garland-makers of Wellawatte to complete several yards. Watching the nimble fingers of G.Kumara for whom 15 jasmine garlands within an hour is a cake walk, is indeed a treat. Kumara sources his jasmines largely from Badulla and Mawathagama. While the Badulla variety is thicker and can resist cold weather, what comes from Mawathagama is more delicate. At one time jasmines were imported from India, but not any more, says Kumara adding that they provide flowers in bulk for the pichcha mal pooja in Anuradhapura. Even for adornments around the stupa, many come in search of jasmine strings.

Watching Manoj Kumara deftly weave a jasmine garland makes anyone oblivious to bustling Wellawatte. Born to a Catholic family, Manoj is a third generation garland-maker with 45 years in this trade. One need not necessarily be a Hindu to offer these, reflects Manoj while lamenting that the next generation will not keep the family legacy alive.

From Thursday to Saturday, the business is thriving as these are the important days for poojas, says Manoj. Recollecting a by-gone era of his forefathers, he adds with a smile: today a parcel of jasmine will cost about 250-300 rupees while it was only five rupees those days. A yard of jasmine comes to about 30 rupees today and I still remember my father selling them for ten cents each. The kesel patta (strips from the bark of a banana tree) which held the jasmines in a garland are today replaced with artificial strings.

Generously offering us a few strings of jasmines as we take leave, Manoj says: jesu pihitai, gihin enna, (may Jesus bless you, come again) highlighting how the humble jasmines and lotuses transcend ethnic and religious boundaries.

Religious and cultural roles Flowers play a pivotal role in all aspects of our culture, be it religion, art or culture. In Buddhist canon, it is said that on Gautama Buddhas enlightenment, there were 32 auspicious episodes and a flower rain was one of them, says Senior Lecturer in Pali and Buddhist Studies, Department of Buddhist Studies, University of Colombo Dr. Wimal Hewamanage. The lotus, which symbolizes purity, occupies a significant place in Buddhist culture. Queen Mahamayas prophetic dream of a white elephant entering her womb carrying a white lotus is among the best known references. Moreover, the lotus, depicted in the moonstone is symbolic of nibbana, the final goal of Buddhists, asserts Dr. Hewamanage. He also cites Lord Buddhas comparison of a lotus to Buddhahood: as a lotus, fair and lovely, by the water is not soiled, by the world am I not soiled, therefore brahmin, am I Buddha. In Pushpa vagga of Dhammapada which alludes to flower similes, on one occasion, Lord Buddha preaches: As a bee without harming the flower, its colour or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village. While offering flowers is a kind of meditation for Buddhists, it is also a means of showing reverence to Buddha and his disciples. God Saman is also depicted holding a lotus and his vehicle, the white elephant also holds a flower with his trunk. Padmasana or the lotus position is also a very popular meditation posture in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions Shedding light upon the significance of flowers in the Hindu culture, Chancellor of Jaffna University and historian, Prof. S. Pathmanathan, says that among the earliest sources of literature which record especially jasmine or mallikai, are devotional hymns of 7th and 8th centuries, Pushpa viti, a Tamil manual dating back to the 16th century and an ancient Tamil text, Kurinchi-pattu. In Kurinchi-pattu, there is a description of garlands made out of 99 kinds of flowers, says Prof. Pathmanathan  flowers in the Hindu tradition are dedicated to deities, festivals, months and even days of the week. Flowers are considered the best of earthly products because they are symbols of serenity, purity and non-contamination, he says, citing the lotus as the symbol of the origin of the universe. Thats why there is inverted lotus as the pedestal of images including those of Lord Buddha and Hindu gods such as Lakshmi and Saraswathi. Lord Ganesha is seen holding a Lotus. White flowers according to the Hindu culture are considered supreme. The jasmine is a symbol of purity, fertility and also beauty as all features of a great flower including fragrance, texture and colour are embodied in it. It is also a flower which Hindus associate with from birth to death. Jasmine garlands are also adorned with a few orange flowers such as marigolds as orange is a symbol of wealth, Prof. Pathmanathan says.
Sealing a marriage of importance in pen and ink 80 years ago By Kumudini Hettiarachchi As Sri Lankas Medico-Legal Society marks a milestone, Dr. M.S.L. Salgado, who along with retired Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) S.B.W. de Silva was honoured for his long-standing contribution, goes back in time View(s): View(s):

An earnest plea from a single powerful voice to a distinguished gathering from a different profession, most probably during a gala event with champagne flowing and a spread of delectable food!

Link up, was the plea from none other than the highest legal luminary in the land, then Chief Justice (CJ) Sir Sidney Abrahams, of the Bracegirdl trial fame, to the Ceylon Branch of the British Medical Association. The event was the 50th anniversary of the association a few years before 1937.

Fast forward to December 9, 1937 and the plea is fulfilled with the inaugural meeting for the formation of the Medico-Legal Society (MLS) of Ceylon being held at the Law Library at Hulftsdorp, the seat of justice..fast, fast forward to December 7, 2017 and the celebrations were the 80th anniversary of the MLS of Sri Lanka headed by its President, the current CJ Priyasath Dep, PC.

The notice inviting lawyers to attend the inaugural meeting of the MLS in 1937 was put up in the Law Library, says long-time member, Senior Consultant Judicial Medical Officer (JMO) Dr. M.S.L. Salgado, seated before tomes, at the dining table in his home down Melbourne Avenue in Bambalapitiya.

The 80th anniversary celebrations are over and Dr. Salgado along with retired Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) S.B.W. de Silva have been honoured with plaques for being members of the MLS for more than half a century as well as Presidents who have contributed much towards the advancement of the society.

It is a journey into the past as Dr. Salgado literally turns back the pages of time of the Minutes Books to give us a glimpse of the early days of the MLS from the huge books that he has tenderly preserved.

From the very first meeting at the Law Library meticulous are the records, handwritten in pen and ink, legible even to this day. All in all, 80 lawyers and doctors, men of eminence, had been present by invitation, with Lalitha Rajapakse, QC (he would be knighted later) acting as pro tem (temporary) Secretary and placing his signature to the minutes of the evenings proceedings. The books list all the members present, and as time passes by and the MLS grows, the minutes and participants are scrupulously typed on paper and pasted onto the books after each meeting.

There are two phases to the life of MLS, says Dr. Salgado with its history at his fingertips.

The first phase which ended in 1940, came into being on Thursday, December 9, 1937 with Sir Sidney, in his inaugural address, not only expressing personal gratification but also paying tribute to the intellectual and academic qualities of the two professions.

Set up in the wake of a similar society in England, formed 36 years before, the CJ had pointed out its value in discussions on medical jurisprudence and in the better training of the two professions in each others science.

It is eminently desirable that medical men should know how to give evidence and it is equally necessary that counsel should have to ask questions precisely and to the point, he had said, bringing to the fore questions of insanity, the position of wounds, handwriting and fingerprints.

He had also lamented that in a country as advanced as Ceylon, proper scientific apparatus was not available to the analyst to distinguish mammalian blood from human blood.

Urging the MLS to secure different homes for those ordinarily insane and the insane who were convicted of crimes, the CJ had concluded his speech to much applause.

The business of the day followed thereafter, with Attorney General J.W.R. Illangakoon, KC proposing the formation of the MLS, seconded by the Director of Medical and Sanitary Services Dr. S.T. Gunasekera. Then Advocate C.V. Ranawake had proposed and H.V. Perera, KC had seconded a motion that a sub-committee comprising Mr. Illangakoon, handwriting expert Lawrie Muthukrishna, Dr. J.R. Blaze, Dr. N. Sinnadurai and Sir Lalitha should be appointed to draft the Constitution and the Rules of the MLS. These minutes had subsequently been confirmed on February 24, 1938, when the first General Meeting was held once again at the Law Library, with Sir Sidney being elected the first President of the newly-formed MLS.

The very first Office Bearers were powerful figures in their fields with many letters behind their names: Vice Presidents  Attorney-General Illangakoon & Medical and Sanitary Services Director Dr. Gunasekera; Secretary  Dr. E.M. Wijerama; Treasurer  Prof. Milroy Paul; Editor of Transactions  Dr. J. R. Blaze; and Council Members  Dr. A.O. Gunawardena, Advocate Ranawake, Dr. W.S. Ratnavale, Dr. N. Attygalle, Barrister-at-law H. Sri Nissanka & Mr. Muthukrishna.

With the annual subscription being set at Rs. 10, most probably a princely sum then, the objects of the MLS were set down as  The recognition of medicine and other allied sciences in the administration of justice; the promotion and dissemination of medico-legal knowledge in all its aspects; the holding of meetings, seminars and symposia at which papers may be read and discussed for the furtherance of the aforesaid objects of the society; and the enrolment of qualified members of the legal and medical professions and such other persons who may be interested in medico-legal work.

The MLS, thereafter, got into full swing with the First Council Meeting being called at the Official Residence of the Chief Justice on June 10, 1938, with Sir Sydney in the Chair and eight members present. The decisions were that the MLS would meet every quarter or on the last Friday of February, May and November at 6.30 p.m., with the meetings alternating between the Law Library at Hulftsdorp and the Colonial Medical Library on Maradana Road, Borella.

The General Meetings followed without interruption as also the pre-decided interesting lectures entailing intense discussions on wide-ranging topics which included The Evolution of Medico-Legal Science by the JMO of Ceylon Dr. N. Sinnadurai; Some Mutual Problems by the District Judge of Colombo Dr. R.F. Dias; Medical Witness and Court of Law by Senior Surgeon Dr. S.C. Paul; Expert Witness by J. E. M. Obeysekera; Criminological Aspects of Alcoholism by the Superintendent of the Mental Hospital Dr. C.O. Perera; Workmans Compensation by S.J.C. Shockman; Some Problems on Handwriting Evidence by Lawrie Muthukrishna; and Sir Bernard Spilsbury in the Witness Box by R.R. Crossette-Thambiah.

Interesting details of those early days stare at us from the Minutes Books about a decision to invite journalists from the Ceylon Daily News, the Times and the Observer as guests of MLS, a letter by Mr. Sri Nissanka on The Strange Case of Apooruwa being read and the medico-legal bearings of the case discussed, the services of a typist being secured at Rs. 5 per meeting and elaborate plans for the first Annual Dinner at the Galle Face Hotel to which Governor Sir Andrew Caldecott, Lady Caldecott and their daughter were invited as chief guests.

However, an unseen factor came into play, putting into abeyance the activities of the MLS. World War II!

Dr. Salgado says that while at the AGM on February 26, 1940, then CJ J.C. Howard was elected President, the activities ground to a halt with the last meeting of the MLS being held on November 1, the same year.

The MLS which went into hibernation was revived only 29 years later on February 8, 1966 due to the unwavering efforts of Prof. Milroy Paul, its Founder Treasurer.

The second phase, according to Dr. Salgado, took off with CJ M.C. Sansoni being elected President and 99 people attending the meeting, only two of whom are active to this day. Those two stalwarts are Dr. Salgado and Mr. de Silva who were honoured for their long service.

The MLS has also undergone much metamorphosis, with the olden tradition of the CJ being the President being done away with when Prof. Milroy Paul was elected to take up the mantle. The eligibility criteria has changed as well with an amendment to the MLS Constitution in 1969 to enable gazetted officers of the Ceylon Police Force and Staff Officers of the Government Analysts Department to be taken in, while law and medical students could become members without voting rights.

It was in 1972 that the MLS was taken to different heights, with the return of Dr. Salgado from the United Kingdom after his post-graduate studies, to assume duties as a Joint Secretary of the society.

Some significant achievements of the early 1970s included nominating six members of the MLS to the Board of Studies in Forensic Medicine, recommending the repeal and replacement of Section 311 (dealing with grievous hurt) of the Penal Code, drawing up of a new Medico-Legal Examination Form to replace the General Hospital Ticket issued by the Police and recommending the Medico-Legal Report Form and Post Mortem Report Form which have been brought into use.

Around the same time, another amendment was brought in to elect as Honorary Life Members those who had rendered special service to the MLS or distinguished themselves in law, medicine or allied sciences, with this honour being bestowed on Prof. Milroy Paul and Dr. E.M. Wijerama. President J.R. Jayewardene, a Founder-Member of MLS would later join this elite category.

With MLS growing in leaps and bounds, the Dr. W.D.L. Fernando Memorial Oration was initiated in 1981, with Prof. Chandra Amarasekera speaking On the Life and Work of Dr. Fernando and the Medico-Legal Society Oration in 1992, with judge of international fame Prof. C.G. Weeramantry speaking on Medicine, Morality and Law.

By 1986, the MSL was declared an approved charity, while also gaining recognition internationally by hosting in Sri Lanka the Second Indo-Pacific Congress on Legal Medicine and Forensic Science and inaugurating the Indo-Pacific Association of Law, Medicine and Science (INPALMS).

With the backing of the MLS membership, Dr. Salgado helped draft the Constitution of INPALMS.

The congress was inaugurated by President Jayewardene at the BMICH on August 14 and attended by 122 foreign delegates from 37 countries, says Dr. Salgado who chaired it as MLS President, adding that it was a landmark event which put Sri Lanka on the world map.

The golden jubilee of the MLS in 1987, meanwhile, saw much activity including a Medico-Legal Exhibition organized under the stewardship of its President Daya Perera PC, with the chief guest at the gala dinner once again being President Jayewardene and the Dr. W.D.L. Fernando Memorial Oration on Circumstantial Evidence being delivered by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva.

The Scientific Sessions with Justice Minister Nissanka Wijeyaratne as chief guest witnessed a galaxy of powerful orators including National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali and Health Minister Dr. Ranjith Atapattu, taking to the podium.

Since its birth 80 long years ago, the MLS has moved from strength to strength adding more milestones to its colourful history including the holding of the INPALMS Triennial Congress  2007 once again in Colombo in July to much plaudits and also electing Justice Shiranee Tilakawardane as its first woman President to steer the MLS during its 75th anniversary.

As the MLS faces the future this year with CJ Priyasath Dep, PC, at its helm, exciting horizons open up for this octogenarian society in this digital age.
Chinas soft and sharp power By Joseph S. Nye, Exclusive to the Sunday Times in Sri Lanka View(s): View(s):

CAMBRIDGE  China has invested billions of dollars to increase its soft power, but it has recently suffered a backlash in democratic countries. A new report by the National Endowment for Democracy argues that we need to re-think soft power, because the conceptual vocabulary that has been used since the Cold Wars end no longer seems adequate to the contemporary situation.

The report describes the new authoritarian influences being felt around the world as sharp power. A recent cover article in The Economist defines sharp power by its reliance on subversion, bullying and pressure, which combine to promote self-censorship. Whereas soft power harnesses the allure of culture and values to augment a countrys strength, sharp power helps authoritarian regimes compel behaviour at home and manipulate opinion abroad.

The term soft power  the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than the hard power of coercion and payment  is sometimes used to describe any exercise of power that does not involve the use of force. But that is a mistake. Power sometimes depends on whose army or economy wins, but it can also depend on whose story wins.

A strong narrative is a source of power. Chinas economic success has generated both hard and soft power, but within limits. A Chinese economic aid package under the Belt and Road Initiative may appear benign and attractive, but not if the terms turn sour, as was recently the case in a Sri Lankan port project.

Likewise, other exercises of economic hard power undercut the soft power of Chinas narrative. For example, China punished Norway for awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. It also threatened to restrict access to the Chinese market for an Australian publisher of a book critical of China.

If we use the term sharp power as shorthand for information warfare, the contrast with soft power becomes plain. Sharp power is a type of hard power. It manipulates information, which is intangible, but intangibility is not the distinguishing characteristic of soft power. Verbal threats, for example, are both intangible and coercive.

When I introduced the concept of soft power in 1990, I wrote that it is characterised by voluntarism and indirection, while hard power rests on threats and inducements. If someone aims a gun at you, demands your money, and takes your wallet, what you think and want is irrelevant. That is hard power. If he persuades you to give him your money, he has changed what you think and want. That is soft power.

Truth and openness create a dividing line between soft and sharp power in public diplomacy. When Chinas official news agency, Xinhua, broadcasts openly in other countries, it is employing soft-power techniques, and we should accept that. When China Radio International covertly backs 33 radio stations in 14 countries, the boundary of sharp power has been crossed, and we should expose the breach of voluntarism.

Of course, advertising and persuasion always involve some degree of framing, which limits voluntarism, as do structural features of the social environment. But extreme deception in framing can be viewed as coercive; though not violent, it prevents meaningful choice.

Techniques of public diplomacy that are widely viewed as propaganda cannot produce soft power. In an age of information, the scarcest resources are attention and credibility. That is why exchange programs that develop two-way communication and personal relations among students and young leaders are often far more effective generators of soft power than, say, official broadcasting.

The United States has long had programs enabling visits by young foreign leaders, and now China is successfully following suit. That is a smart exercise of soft power. But when visas are manipulated or access is limited to restrain criticism and encourage self-censorship, even such exchange programs can shade into sharp power.

As democracies respond to Chinas sharp power and information warfare, they have to be careful not to overreact. Much of the soft power democracies wield comes from civil society, which means that openness is a crucial asset. China could generate more soft power if it would relax some of its tight party control over civil society. Similarly, manipulation of media and reliance on covert channels of communication often reduces soft power. Democracies should avoid the temptation to imitate these authoritarian sharp-power tools.

Moreover, shutting down legitimate Chinese soft-power tools can be counter-productive. Soft power is often used for competitive, zero-sum purposes; but it can also have positive sum aspects.

For example, if both China and the US wish to avoid conflict, exchange programs that increase American attraction to China, and vice versa, would benefit both countries. And on transnational issues such as climate change, where both countries can benefit from cooperation, soft power can help build the trust and create the networks that make such cooperation possible.

While it would be a mistake to prohibit Chinese soft-power efforts just because they sometimes shade into sharp power, it is also important to monitor the dividing line carefully. For example, the Hanban, the government agency that manages the 500 Confucius Institutes and 1,000 Confucius classrooms that China supports in universities and schools around the world to teach Chinese language and culture, must resist the temptation to set restrictions that limit academic freedom. Crossing that line has led to the disbanding of some Confucius Institutes.

As such cases show, the best defence against Chinas use of soft-power programs as sharp-power tools is open exposure of such efforts. And this is where democracies have an advantage.

(The writer is a professor at Harvard and author of The Future of Power. )

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018. www.project-syndicate.org
Cultural heritage, peace and reconciliation By Gamini Wijesuriya View(s): View(s):

Keynote speech delivered by Gamini Wijesuriya a renowned heritage expert from Asia at the Scientific Symposium, Heritage and Democracy of the International Council of Monuments and Sites from December 8-15 in Delhi

Like the trouble you have taken, we undertook to host the 10th General Assembly of International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Sri Lanka during this time. It was held at a time when democracy was threatened in this part of the world by a chain of events of which heritage was also a victim. India lost her Prime Minister in 1991 and just four months before the General Assembly (in May 1993), Sri Lanka lost her President. Both were democratically elected leaders killed by terrorists. The incident in Sri Lanka severely affected the General Assembly and some of the members opted not to attend. While that is not my focus today there is a link, and it might help explain my apprehensions and huge sense of responsibility on being invited to talk about the concept of democracy as a conceptual framework with which to shape future heritage practices, a term and concept that has been used and abused since society began.

In 1998, the Temple of the Tooth Relic was burned by the same terrorist group the LTTE. Some of the ICOMOS senior members may remember they had the pleasure of visiting this temple, enjoying the annual procession which is Asias most stunning and spiritual cultural events. The temple is the most sacred Buddhist place in this country. Indeed this was perhaps the most, very first dramatic case of a World Heritage Site being targeted by terrorists.

Albeit the destruction was unprecedented in scale and significance for the Sri Lankan people, it also proved a benchmark for disaster for being a springboard for peace thanks to heritage being understood as a special place where peace and security can be pursued. Indeed the division and conflict between the community groups which the terrorists so desired never happened. Community engagement and the rebuilding of the temple became a defiant symbol that such targeted attacks would not achieve the objectives sought by terrorists. Moreover, it influenced heritage practice thereafter.

Since then however we have witnessed further attacks on heritage sites worldwide: Including the World Heritage List: damage to Preah Vihara in Cambodia, to the Mausoleums of Timbuktu in Mali and attacks at the Bodhgaya to name a few. Targeted and collateral damage to heritage in the Middle East continues. As much as we are concerned with these edifices being destroyed, the more vexing issues that should draw our attention is another. It is the impact on the social fabric and the community identity that we need to address.

According to the current UN Chief, We are a world in pieces. We need to be a world in peace.

It is therefore not only reasonable but imperative that the heritage sector embraces the Role of Cultural Heritage in Building Peace and Reconciliation as a theme meriting more research and capacity building to consolidate necessary knowledge areas and skills set under the wider leitmot of democracy and heritage. Needless to say this is a direction that is all the more strongly linked to politics in its more rudimentary form (who gets what, when and how) and both democracy and heritage are contested territories.

UNESCO  created at the end of the Second World War  stated in its constitution: Since war begins in the minds of men and women the edifice of peace must be constructed. Aimed at building a world at peace, UNESCO has developed many normative instruments and policies. In the recent past much emphasis has been placed on the role of heritage in building peace and reconciliation in the midst of recurring threats to heritage.

There is much progress ranging from general policy work such as the 2015 World Heritage and Sustainable Development Policy to milestone decisions such as that of the International Criminal Court regarding destruction of cultural property in Mali.

UNESCO 2015 World Heritage and Sustainable Development Policy contains a section on the use of heritage for promoting peace and reconciliation.

Other initiatives include the 2015 Strategy for reinforcement of UNESCOs action for the promotion of culture and the promotion of cultural pluralism in the event of armed conflict. This strategy covers all aspects of culture and includes in its objectives the mainstreaming of a concern for culture in humanitarian, security, peace keeping and peace building policies and operations.

The work done within the UNESCO has led to a new international awareness of the importance of culture as a humanitarian and security issue, which resulted in a series of landmark resolutions taken at the highest level, including by the UN Security Council.

The protection of cultural heritage is included within the mandate of the UN peace keeping Mission in Mali.

Some of the messages shape heritage management practice on the ground even more directly. The Post Disaster Needs Assessment methodology is a case in point. It considers not only the damage to physical assets, but also the implications in socio-economic terms and in general the larger human development impact of a disaster resulting from its effects on the cultural sector and on heritage in particular.

There are other initiatives, notably ICOMOS Norways work with the World Heritage Centre IOCOMOS, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), International Centre for the study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) known as our Common Dignity has helped to identify the diversity of rights issues experienced in the world heritage sites and the effort mobilised to start resolving them equitably. The report launched at this General Assembly points to issues involved and actions needed.

Furthermore, attempts are being made to use heritage destroyed in the past as symbols of peace and reconciliation and for healing processes, exemplified by cases such as Mostar, (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Hiroshima (Japan). Other examples include the reconstruction of the Mausoleums of Timbuktu. The Joint Technical Committee on cultural heritage established in Cyprus, a bilateral project for the rehabilitation of cultural heritage properties as a confidence building measure is another example.

Such an encouraging overview could bolster us into thinking that, collectively and institutionally, we are doing rather well on these themes. Is this true? Are such approaches sufficient? I argue that there is a major stumbling block ahead of us in the heritage sector since this new arena requires a mind-set which is alien for entire generations of heritage practitioners. Let me explain.

Peace and reconciliation are all about people but in the heritage sector we are shareholders of a discourse that has forgotten people. The idea of heritage as developed in the west in the 19th century looks at heritage from the point of view of the historian. ie. For its ability to carry information about the past and for its aesthetic qualities. I have elsewhere called this secularisation. When something is declared heritage in this approach ipso facto it is removed from ordinary life and placed on an intellectual meta-level. People themselves or their aspirations have not been seen as important. The heavy reliance on this discourse for me is the problem.

Let us take an example. Reconstruction is a very popular theme these days. After the Sector World War, people in Warsaw celebrated the towns reconstruction as expressed in this poem by Zofia Piotrowska of in 1962:

You rose from ruins and disease, Warsaw

You rose from ashes and mist

You rose through the labour of all the Nations

You rose through the will to exist

But two years after in 1964 the experts agreed on principles creating a widespread apprehension and at times hostility towards reconstruction. Yet reconstruction is part of a recovery process from shattered lives and livelihoods. It addresses the needs and aspirations of the communities affected by conflict and is the current global practice and any types of interventions are only academic.

This is just one of many cases. The key point is that disregard for traditional knowledge systems and maintenance practices embedded in community needs is another instance of distancing people from heritage and undervaluing continuity.

Overlooking the people factor has led to marginalisation, isolation and snubbing the views of the people. Ever- expanding definitions of heritage today, their power in making or breaking identities, concern for multiplicity of values, layers of history, layers of stakeholders, layers of communities have not have not been accounted for when constructing heritage narratives.

Blaming the western conservation discourse may seem all too easy. But it is not without good reason either. The words of the current president of ICOMOS, Gustavo Araoz, reminds us that this discourse was only challenged after one and a half years despite many criticisms. Referring to the impact of Nara document, Nara shattered once and for all long-held Eurocentric insistence that there were long held cultural principles for heritage identification and treatment. It took so long because, heritage practitioners assumed that they have a good understanding of heritage without rightful owners- people.

Despite, these difficulties there have been many moves to place people at the centre of heritage over the last decade and recognise that the heritage places we talk about are those created by the people, for the people and cared for by the people who are thus an integral part of heritage.

This shift, which must be called an alternative heritage discourse, promotes a different approach and does not lend its self to universal recognition since  by definition  each heritage place belongs to and is meaningful for those who created it and for those who continue to use with added values. This approach recognises the contested nature of heritage, whereby a different group within a community could have a completely different vision of what is important and why. It is this heritage debate which is important to recognise for the purpose of making peace and reconciliation.

However when placing people at the centre, we are confronted with a different set of issues to those that are familiar to heritage practitioners such as decay of materials, interventions and authenticity. The new issues are:

the political context of heritage;

the social role of heritage including livelihoods;

constructing inclusive and widely constructed heritage narratives;

rights and knowledge issues;

building community resilience through heritage;

recovery from conflict situations.

Above all, meaningful decision making at the heart of the communities is fundamental to address every one of the key issues. They all pose a set of challenges unfamiliar to heritage practitioners.

We cannot be naive and assume that people at all levels carry homogeneous views on any issues, let alone heritage. For this and many other reasons, when dealing with many issues one has to deal with conflicts. We have a huge responsibility as heritage practitioners.

It is here that the concept of democracy can be best embraced by our sector. Despite inherent deficiencies, it is widely believed that democracy can improve the quality of decision making. It is known for its ability to deal with conflicts and differences, and to promote equity and justice. Inclusiveness, rights to participate, considered judgements, informed decisions, transparency are some of the other democratic qualities.

Despite these we cannot be over optimistic. Let us take the example of Dresden Elbe Valley World Heritage site in Germany. This was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2004 as a cultural property deemed to have Outstanding Universal Value. A controversy arose when the authorities decided to build a bridge across the river which forms part of the landscape of the World Heritage site. In a referendum, the residents voted for the construction of the bridge. As a result of this, it became the first cultural site to be deleted from the List in 2009. (http:// whc.unesco.org /en/list/1156). The reason given was that the bridge was negatively impacting the outstanding universal values of the site. It is possible that, with more information on the implications of the new bridge for the historic landscape, the people of Dresden might have a different choice. But it is also possible that they would have decided to have the bridge anyway. Was the real problem a poorly-designed bridge? This paradox shows that there is no perfect solution that democracy saves, nor does it resolve our ideas of where heritage values lie. (the OUV of a site as recognised by a Committee.)

At the time of the reactive monitoring mission to Kathmandu Valley, people linked to Bouddhanath temple had already discussed, reconstructed and started the lost part of the stupa regardless of the wishes of the old international community. Such democracy  will and I say should  remain.

There is also a potential danger of trying to generalise and apply democratic principles naively. In the name of some of the democratic principles such as equity, gender balance and internationalisation of heritage, there is a tendency, for heritage professionals to question cultural practices, such as access to women and those of another religion. Where should we draw the line?

To conclude, in my opinion we are looking at a paradigm shift where the focus moves from the wellbeing of both heritage and society. This promotes people-centred approaches as a way forward and as the means to adjusting and adapting our approaches to meet the real needs of society and its heritage. This is a shift through which we can, in turn, harness the full potential in cultural heritage in building peace and reconciliation. We have to recognise with a certain honesty the pressing need to promote this shift also within the heritage community, specially those who are defiant. We must be prepared to challenge the entire conceptual edifice of heritage conservation, starting, for example, with the so called experts if we are to be successful. Indeed expert is the first word we should perhaps sacrifice in the name of democracy, peace and reconciliation.

In embracing a new approach, we may have to let go or revisit many things that have current mythological status including the concept of heritage itself. We need to open our minds and also look beyond the heritage sector in order to embrace an alternative discourse effectively. A rich variety of presentations lined up under this theme will allow us to track efforts being made globally towards this goal. Hopefully these inputs will come together as a springboard for new forms of awakening but also reconciliation within the heritage sector itself. And maybe the use of the word democracy in our sector will take on clarity that makes me very comfortable with it!
Kumar and Yehali launch a rich dessert like no other View(s):

To the sounds of Scottish bagpipes, a procession of chefs bore in their precious masterpiece in a palanquin to the front lawn of the Grand Hotel Nuwara Eliya on the morning of January 3 as a select crowd of invitees including Tourism Minister John Amaratunga looked on.

Marry Me, the US $ 25,000 dessert, crafted with dark chocolate from Madagascar, edible gold and silver and many other exotic ingredients was presented to celebrity couple Kumar and Yehali Sangakkara who fed each other spoonfuls of the exotic creation by Chef Viraj Jayaratne, who marks 25 years in the culinary industry.

Addressing the gathering, Minister Amaratunga spoke of the diversity Sri Lanka provides to visitors, and the value of the experience the destination offers.When you arrive in Sri Lanka you are part of the family, we will not only open our hearts to you, but will also open our homes to you, said Kumar Sangakkara. Marry Me can now be ordered at the Grand.
The New Zealand Transport Agency has opened the Thames Coast Road between Tararu and Manaia to escorted convoys in both directions.

Travellers are advised to expect potentially long delays waiting at either end or at traffic management points in between.

Drivers are encouraged to take an alternate route if they can, as the road is very rough in places.

Those who do take the route should pay attention to instructions from traffic management personnel, and plan for a potentially long trip.

For official updates from NZTA go to their website www.nzta.govt.nz

Thames-Coromandel District Council has received many offers for help, money and goods to support those affected by the floods.

They say they are working on getting systems in place for money and goods, and will publicise how people can contribute as soon as those systems are in place.

For those offering physical help, the council says they really appreciate it, but recommend holding off until NZTA fully reopens the road and it is safe for everyone.

The council is currently running short of skip bins so are asking residents north of Te Puru (e.g. Waioumu, Tapu) to stack any flood damaged waste in front of their properties or in a central location, which will be collected as soon as possible.

People can dispose of ood damaged household items (e.g. carpet or furniture etc) at the Thames Refuse Station free of charge. Please supply your household address, name and vehicle registration to sta at the transfer station.

The council customer services line - 07 868 0200 - is has been fielding several calls, so residents are asked to be patient.

Those who cant get through are advised to stay on hold and use the callback service.
With $10,000 in prizes up for grabs, including a trip to London, Paris, New York or Rome for the Supreme winner, organisers are expecting a last-minute rush of final entries in the Trustpower Photographic Exhibition this week.

Entries to the competition close at midnight this Friday January 12.

With many people now just coming back from holiday we want to ensure as many people as possible have the opportunity to enter, says project lead Sally Cooke.

Theres also the opportunity to be a part of the international exhibition of some of the winning entries in Japan, so its a fantastic opportunity for photographers both amateur and professional in our region to showcase their talents.

In additional to the $10,000 prize pool, this year copies of some of the winning photos will be sent to Hitachi, Japan to appear in a photographic display there to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the sister city relationship.

We have been able to arrange for this to happen in collaboration with Creative Bay of Plenty. Its a lovely add-on and means the winners will be in an international exhibition as well, so thats quite something.

This years exhibition features four categories for photographers from amateur to professional to enter before midnight Friday: Our People, Nature and Landscapes, Celebration and Digital Manipulation.

Once the judges have chosen the winners, the Trustpower Photographic Exhibition opens on The Strand, with the 20 winners on display from January 26 for an eight-week exhibition.

The exhibition is believed to be the largest outdoor exhibition of images of our region and is run as a partnership initiative with Trustpower, Downtown Tauranga, Media Works, UNO. Magazine and The Weekend Sun.

We encourage amateurs and professionals to get their best photos together and enter before this Friday. The supreme winner will once again win a trip to London, Paris, New York or Rome worth up to $3000 thanks to the generosity of House of Travel Tauranga and Downtown Tauranga, says Sally.

For more details and to enter go to www.downtowntauranga.co.nz
Cotton buds, tampons, condoms, bits of food, used oil, nappies... people throw a wide variety of things down the lavatory, but what is causing the biggest headaches for the people who look after our sewage pipes are wet wipes; originally designed to be used for babies in recent years they have commonly been used by the whole family.

There have been numerous campaigns to raise awareness of this problem, but they have had little result because many still use the lavatory as a rubbish bin without realising, or maybe not caring, that these products do not disappear by magic when the chain is pulled.

Quite the contrary, in fact: they accumulate into an enormous mass which obstructs the downpipes of blocks of apartments and, once in the outside pipes, the manholes, collectors and pumping and treatment systems as well. They cause the equipment to break down on a regular basis, and when that happens waste ends up flowing into rivers, streams or directly into the sea through the spillways. The problem is especially serious on rainy days because in most towns the rainwater and waste use the same pipes and these end up overflowing.

Laboratory tests show that the majority of wet wipes take two weeks to decompose

The problem of cotton buds and other personal hygiene products is nothing new. In fact, the sanitation companies have learned to live with them by introducing new equipment. However, what the system can't cope with, and what causes the most frequent problems, is the daily avalanche of wet wipes. It can't deal with them because they are made with textile fibres which form a skein, and this is impossible to undo; as well as blocking the pipes they also break the equipment. Wet wipes are now used in many homes, and

The damage caused by wet wipes, in figures 400tonnes of rubbish a month are removed from the pumping and treatment plants in the province, and more than 90 per cent are wet wipes. In addition to this figure, others have to be removed from apartment blocks by specialist companies, and some end up in the pipes and come out through the spillways when the pipes cannot cope with the increased flow resulting from rainfall or breakdowns. 10-18%is the extra cost of maintenance and repairs which are necessary due to the presence of wet wipes in the network, according to the Spanish Association of Water Supplies and Sanitation (AEAS). Nationally, the figure is around 200 million euros.

families are misled by manufacturers who claim they are biodegradable. Some even say on the label that they can be disposed of down the lavatory with no problem.

Slow decomposition

Technically, yes, they do decompose when they come into contact with the water but it takes about two weeks for them to do so, while ordinary toilet paper degrades in a matter of hours. This was demonstrated recently in a laboratory test carried out by the Emasa municipal water company in Malaga: it subjected wet wipes, moist toilet paper and conventional toilet paper to constant movement and compared how long it took them to decompose.

Bearing in mind that it takes up to 48 hours from the time the cistern is flushed to the arrival of the waste at the treatment plant, it is obvious that this is not long enough for the material to degrade. As a result, in the pumping and treatment stations in Malaga province an average of 400 tonnes of rubbish has to be removed every month; of this more than 90 per cent contains wet wipes.

In addition to this, some wet wipes disposed of down the toilet never reach the plant; they accumulate in the pipes and when it rains the waste becomes tangled up in the drains, collectors and spillways. Everyone knows what happens then: unpleasant smells and pools of sewage coming from the drains and flowing into the rivers, streams or directly into the sea, because the equipment just can't cope.

It doesn't matter how much we invest in technology to try to filter wet wipes, or how many awareness campaigns are carried out, while they continue to be sold as if they were biodegradable and people keep throwing them down the toilet there is nothing we can do about it, says Emasa's director of Maintenance and Treatment, Concepcion Fernandez Cotrina, resignedly.

She says wet wipes have become the most serious problem for the system, even the ones which are degradable, because when they decompose their particles are scattered about and they create microplastics which end up in the sea with no type of filter.

We're not trying to stop them being sold, we just want the people who use them to throw them into the rubbish bin, not down the lavatory, says Concepcion, as she shows us how in just 24 hours a container which can hold eight cubic metres has been filled with wet wipes removed from the Guadalhorce treatment plant.

This is a normal day. When it rains, it is much worse. One container after another, says an employee, briefly removing the mask he has to wear because of the stench from the mass of wipes mixed with waste water that have to be removed manually from the machinery.

This is a global problem, and companies from 25 countries have now set up the International Group of Water Service Operators to establish a set of conditions with which products must comply if they are to be labelled 'disposable down the lavatory'. However, the magnitude of the problem is multiplied in places like Malaga, where it rarely rains and, when it does, it is torrential, so that the wet wipes which for months have remained sedimented in the pipes are pushed to the pumping stations (which in turn push the waste water to the treatment plants), causing problems in pumps and filters.

When there is a blockage the machine stops operating, the water level rises and the drains overflow into the streets, streams or onto the beach, explains Jorge Gil, head of the collector drains department at the Acosol water company, which is part of the Mancomunidad de Municipios of the western Costa del Sol.

Apart from the environmental impact, he emphasises the appalling cost of preventive maintenance work, investment in new equipment and constant repairs, especially because on days when the flow increases no equipment could deal with it.

Extra cost

It is not easy to put a figure on this extra pressure on human and technical resources, not to mention the environmental damage caused, but the AEAS Spanish Water Supply and Sewage Association calculates that when people throw rubbish down the toilet it increases the treatment costs by between ten and 18 per cent, which is about 200 million euros a year. Although this cost is initially met by the companies, it is eventually paid for by consumers through their water bills.

Sources at Axaragua, the company which handles sewage treatment in the main coastal towns in the Axarquia region, estimate that cleaning the pumps and pipes, removing and treating the rubbish, maintaining and improving equipment and repairing breakdowns puts the cost of dealing with the wet wipes at more than 400,000 euros a year.

People don't realise the problems that are caused when they don't dispose of wet wipes properly, because when they put them down the lavatory it causes blockages in the whole network, starting with the domestic pipes and then continuing in the public ones, says Antolin de Benito, of Axaragua.

As Jorge Gil also stresses, the fact that when you throw a wet wipe down the lavatory it disappears, does not mean that the person who flushes bears no responsibility for the damage they have caused.

tonnes of rubbish a month are removed from the pumping and treatment plants in the province, and more than 90 per cent are wet wipes. In addition to this figure, others have to be removed from apartment blocks by specialist companies, and some end up in the pipes and come out through the spillways when the pipes cannot cope with the increased flow resulting from rainfall or breakdowns.

is the extra cost of maintenance and repairs which are necessary due to the presence of wet wipes in the network, according to the Spanish Association of Water Supplies and Sanitation (AEAS). Nationally, the figure is around 200 million euros.
A three-year-old boy from Marbella died on Sunday after being run over, apparently accidentally, by a car in the Casa Rusia shopping centre car park in San Pedro. Four young British men aged between 20 and 24, on holiday in Marbella, were travelling in the car that ran over the boy as it reversed out of a parking space. The driver was breathalysed and no alcohol was detected.

The tourists had parked briefly in the car park in order to retrieve a hat that had blown into the street, and the young boy was going to the shopping centre with his grandmother, who had just parked. The boy, who is French, had just got out the car as the British driver began leaving the parking space.

The emergency services were called at 2.10pm and paramedics attended to the toddler in the car park. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do to save his life and he was eventually proclaimed dead at the scene.

This accident has delivered a tough blow to the local Jewish community that the victim's family belongs to.

Given the apparent accidental nature of the incident and the results of the breathalyser test, no one has been arrested in connection with the death.
The mountain areas of Malaga province were covered in white earlier this week as snow fell on high land. Meanwhile the Costa del Sol saw heavy rain and a hail storm briefly turned a Fuengirola beach white.

PHOTOS Snow in Malaga province on Monday 8 January

On Monday morning the Spanish meteorological agency Aemet raised the yellow warning to amber in the Ronda area with yellow alerts for snow in force in the Antequera area. The warnings had been lifted by 6pm although new yellow alerts for rain were put in place for Tuesday.

Access to Sierra de las Nieves and El Torcal was still closed to traffic on Tuesday. Officials stated the heavy build-up of snow and icy patches on local roads had made the roads unsafe for vehicle access. They added that those who wish to visit should wrap up warm, take suitable footwear and a raincoat, and a bag with water, food, and a charged mobile phone.

Meteorologists say that temperatures should begin to rise again by Wednesday, but the cold could return by the week's end.

The harshest weather of this winter so far has covered the highest areas of the province in a white blanket of snow. While these idyllic settings attracted many families over the weekend, the snow has also been accompanied by a dramatic fall in the temperature to as low as -1C in Ronda and Antequera.

At the weekend it snowed across the entire mountainous strip that borders the province from the Ronda mountain range and the Sierra de las Nieves to the peaks of Tejeda, Alhama, and Almijara.

On Monday morning, the province saw further snow and rain, when temperatures in Antequera, Ronda, and Axarquia ranged from below freezing up to about 5C. In the city of Malaga temperatures ranged from 7 to 11C, in Velez from 4 to 12 C, and in Marbella between 8 and 12 C.

The forecast for the rest of the week is marked by instability. Wednesday and Thursday will be a bit drier,but showers are due to return on Friday and at the weekend.
As he stood before the Marion Town Council, Marvin Leslie flipped through the signed pages of a petition Tuesday evening, guessing that about 150 people had signed the document that asks state legislators to reject a Smyth County Board of Supervisors request that would permit elimination of librarys board of trustees. By Thursday evening when the Friends held a special called meeting, the number of signatures had doubled and was still growing.

Leslie told the Marion Town Council that the Friends of the Marion and Chilhowie libraries plan to send the petition to the General Laws committees of the General Assembly. We are imploring them to help us keep our citizen-based library board of trustees, he said.

Friends are addressing a resolution adopted by the board of supervisors Dec. 12 that asks the General Assembly to allow the county to operate the library without a board of trustees. The document asks the legislature to add the county to Section 42.1-36 of the Code of Virginia, which already exempts Chesterfield and Shenandoah counties specifically and counties that use the county manager, county executive, urban county manager, urban county executive form of government, or charter. Smyth County uses the county administrator form of government.

Margaret Linford, treasurer of the Marion Friends, noted that of the two counties exempted by the state code, Chesterfield County fully funds its library and, while Shenandoah has the exemption, it maintains a trustees board. The Smyth County library receives funding from the county, the three towns, the state and private sources.

Of 93 library systems in Virginia, she said, 68 are operated by a board of trustees. The other 25 are largely cities, Linford said.

The resolution goes on to ask that the change be effective July 1, 2018.

Folks, this is not trash collection or water and sewer. It is an important part of our education system. It deserves the participation of dedicated, volunteer citizens to ensure we have the best library system, Leslie told the town council and reiterated again Thursday evening to a crowd of about 45 people gathered at the library.

He went on to say that the countys municipalities should insist on having input for an effective, responsible and representative library board of trustees.

Noting that the towns contribute tens of thousands of dollars to financially support the library, Leslie said, At a minimum, reasonable people would agree, the municipal councils in Smyth County should be allowed, even invited, to nominate citizens [for the library board] from their respective jurisdictions to the board of supervisors.

Leslie told the council that an advisory board or library committee in lieu of a board of trustees wouldnt be an acceptable compromise for the Friends. Those entities, he said, would not be as strong as we need to protect our library.

A library board of trustees has the authority to allocate and spend money and make personnel decisions for the library as well as oversee and guide its operations. An advisory board or committee typically only recommends actions to the board of supervisors.

The Marion Town Council took no action Tuesday, but Mayor David Helms told the Friends at the Thursday meeting that he and the mayors of Chilhowie and Saltville and the three towns managers met and are drafting a resolution. He noted the resolution will call for an advisory board that is representative of all the countys magisterial districts. Breaking with tradition, the supervisors only appointed five members to the library trustees this spring when they created a new board after the regional system was dissolved and the county library established. Two of its members represent the Atkins District, and there is one each from Chilhowie, Saltville and Sugar Grove.

Helms said he expects the councils to again take up the matter at their next meetings: Saltville Tuesday evening, Chilhowie Thursday night and Marion the following Monday, Jan. 15.

The Friends plan to continue their campaign to oppose the resolution with state legislators, particularly those who make up the General Laws committees of the House of Delegates and Senate. Legislation can be defeated in committee or a committee can send a matter forward for the consideration of the full General Assembly. Legislation approved by the assembly is sent to the governor for his signature or veto.

While the Friends plan to send their petition, Jane Tate urged them to call the committee members and local legislators. Leslie concurred, saying, The more pressure we put on the legislators the better.

The 2018 legislative session begins Wednesday.
Fallout 4 is a great game, but fans always have a special love for New Vegas, a new PC mod that aims to combine both.

The latter was developed by Obsidian, the same team that developed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, which continues to have a cult-following until now. Gaming experts are aware that a remake of the fourth installment is highly unlikely since the developer is currently engaged with a different project.

Fortunately, a group of modders has taken it upon themselves to fulfill every fan's wish. They recently shared a new video that showcases the progress and quality of their project.

Starting Off

A bit of nostalgia immediately sets in as players start off outside a small settlement. The users pull up the Pip-Boy, goes through a couple of menu items, and toggles something. Next, the character enters the area of Goodsprings. The scene shifts to an encounter with an unlucky settler, whom the player guns down using a combination of regular shots while aiming down sights and the familiar V.A.T.S. system.

Once the NPC was killed, a notification comes up that immediately confirms the return of the Karma system

Ultimate Goal

Sources confirm that this is not just a demo the modders used to show off their talents. The team likewise confirms that their plan is not just to integrate New Vegas elements such as the Karma system into the latest installment. It was first announced last year followed by a couple of screenshots that flaunted a dynamic weather system.

Fans will be glad to know that their goal is to port the entire game using the Fallout 4 creation tool. Obviously, this will be a massive task for the group, given the actual size and length of their source. Therefore, it is difficult for the group to come up with an estimated release date.

Waiting For Feedback

For now, it is unknown if there would be roadblocks along the way that could hinder or altogether stop the project. Bethesda, the developer and owner of the rights to Fallout, can take legal action anytime and terminate and work the modders have done.

So far, there has been no communication from the company that indicates a request for them to abandon their venture. It could be busy working on other projects such as Fallout 4 VR or something else.

On the other hand, Obsidian appears to be amused by the New Vegas mod for Fallout 4. In fact, the developer even posted a message with a gif on Twitter.

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The Federal Communications Commission has remained firm with its decision to end net neutrality despite the controversy surrounding the public comment system before its vote for the repeal of net neutrality last December.

On a statement released Thursday night, the FCC said they did not rely on thousands of the comments before making their decision to repeal net neutrality.

The vote went through and the rule was passed despite public comments that were found to be fake. Nevertheless, the FCC has ruled over the significance of the comments.

Public Comment Period

Before the FCC voted, it opened a public comment period to get the general public's reaction on getting rid of the rule through a comment system.

A report, however, has found out that millions of comments actually came from fake e-mail addresses that spammed the public comment system.

Most of these comments were in favor of repealing net neutrality.

More than 7.75 million comments submitted to the FCC used emails from domains related to FakeMailGenerator.com, featuring almost identical wording. The FCC said that almost 23 million comments on the proposal to end the rule were filed more than 90 times each under the same name.

After the vote struck the rule down, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said it was a way to "restore internet freedom."

Questionable Comments

With the host of irregularities in the comments entered into the system, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened a probe into the matter.

"I encourage the FCC to reconsider its refusal to assist in my office's law enforcement investigation to identify and hold accountable those who illegally misused so many New Yorkers' identities to corrupt the public comment process," said Schneiderman in an open letter to the FCC.

"In an era where foreign governments have indisputably tried to use the internet and social media to influence our elections, federal and state governments should be working together to ensure that malevolent actors cannot subvert our administrative agencies' decision-making processes."

The FCC responded to Scheniderman by calling his facts "completely inaccurate." FCC spokesman Brian Hart said in an email that there had been "concerning activity" on both sides of the issue.

The Pew Research Center had found that 94 percent of the comments were submitted multiple times. FCC said in late November that it would dismiss most of the 21.7 million comments submitted to the agency during the public comment period as there were too many duplicates.

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After the repeal of net neutrality, no one was really sure how state governments or private companies would react to the changes.

Internet providers welcomed the move as it gave them more flexibility when it comes to charging consumers and fewer government rules to deal with.

The big question now is, what would the major tech companies that depend on customers internet access do to combat the repeal?

The Internet Association To Sue FCC

The major trade group that represents tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber announced on Jan. 5 that it will join the legal battle against the Federal Communications Commission for the repeal of net neutrality.

On Thursday night, the FCC released the agency's rewritten rules on what internet service providers are now allowed to do. These new rules allow ISPs to choose the speed of websites and can block them if they so choose.

"The final version of Chairman Pai's rule, as expected, dismantles popular net neutrality protections for consumers. This rule defies the will of a bipartisan majority of Americans and fails to preserve a free and open Internet," said the Internet Association in a statement. "IA intends to act as an intervenor in judicial action against this order and, along with our member companies, will continue our push to restore strong, enforceable net neutrality protections through a legislative solution."

Net Neutrality Repeal Still Not In Effect

The FCC may have already voted to get rid of net neutrality but the rule is still not in effect. To be put into effect, the rule must first be published in the Federal Register, which is still weeks away. To appeal for the rule, it needs to first be put into effect.

On Thursday, the rewritten rules outlined what the FCC hoped to accomplish by abolishing the net neutrality rules.

"We take several actions in this Order to restore Internet freedom," said the FCC in the introduction of the new rules governing the internet. "First, we end utility-style regulation of the Internet in favor of the market-based policies necessary to preserve the future of Internet freedom."

Those on the side of net neutrality argue that instead of restoring "internet freedom," these rules expose consumers. Without the protections provided by net neutrality, ISPs will be able to charge any prices and would be able to throttle service, favoring some websites over others.

On the other side, opponents of net neutrality say that the rules stifle the ISPs with overregulation, adding that the federal government is overreaching and it's not allowed to treat the companies as utilities.

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NASA shows signs that the hole in the Earth's ozone layer is shrinking, proving that humanity's plan to save the world is working.

NASA said in November last year that the ozone hole in Antarctica was at its smallest since 1988. It used satellite observations to provide the first direct proof of the ozone layer's recovery.

Ozone Layer Recovering Due To Chemicals Ban

Using measurements from NASA's Aura satellite, NASA discovered that the decline in chlorine has led to an around 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion over the Antarctic winter compared to 2005. It is the year that the satellite started measuring chlorine and ozone in every Antarctic winter.

These were also the first measurements on the ozone hole's chemical composition that showed decreased levels of ozone depletion. The study detailing the discovery was published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal on Jan. 4.

The chlorine decline was attributed to the international ban on chlorofluorocarbons, which are long-lived, man-made chemicals that greatly contribute to ozone depletion. CFCs rise to the Earth's stratosphere, where the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun breaks apart the chemical to release chlorine atoms that destroy the ozone molecules.

"We see very clearly that chlorine from CFCs is going down in the ozone hole, and that less ozone depletion is occurring because of it," said Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist from the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA and the lead author of the study on the ozone layer's recovery.

The Success Of The Montreal Protocol

The recovery of the ozone layer is crucial to the Earth's survival as ozone molecules at high altitudes absorb the Sun's harmful radiation to protect our skin and eyes.

In the early 1980s, scientists discovered that CFCs found in substances, such as refrigerants and hair sprays, were the main culprit in ozone depletion. The whole world banded together in 1987 and signed the Montreal Protocol, which banned the use of the ozone-killing chemicals.

Just over 30 years later, NASA has now provided direct proof that the Montreal Protocol is working. The ozone layer is not fully out of the woods though, as it will take decades before the hole is completely healed.

According to Strahan's colleague and a co-author of the study, Anne Douglass, the ozone hole might not be fully patched up until about 2060 to 2080. Nevertheless, the Montreal Protocol is now considered to be the most successful environmental agreement between nations in the history of mankind. Hopefully, others will follow and help make the Earth a better place for future generations.

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Our gut feelings allow us to "know" things, even if we can't explain where this information or judgment comes from.

This intuition, however, gives a sense of certainty when we make quick and sometimes important decisions such as avoiding a particular person or situation.

Human Brains Are Interconnected

Now, a leading professor from the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England has suggested of a phenomenon that can explain why people have gut feelings. Clinical Professor of Psychotherapy Digby Tantum claimed that the human brain is interconnected to others through a type of Wi-Fi that allows people to pick up information about other people.

Gut Feelings And The Interbrain

Tatum said that because of the direct connection between people's brains, people are capable of directly knowing other people's emotions and what they pay attention to. He called this phenomenon "the interbrain."

The interbrain may help explain people's gut feeling. Tatum believes that the brain subconsciously absorbs information about other people.

Why Commuters Can't Maintain Eye Contact

People can also pick up subliminal information and Tatum said that this is why commuters have a hard time maintaining eye contact on a busy train. The presence of a large number of people can overload the brain with too much subliminal information.

The interbrain may also be the reason why laughter is infectious.

Brain Communication, Language, And Smell

Tantum thinks that language plays only a part in the way humans communicate and the brain is, in fact, the one that works hard to collect small signals that communicate a person's thoughts.

The professor wrote about his idea in a new book The Interbrain published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. He thinks that brain communication may occur as an inadvertent leak that is linked to smell.

"The area of the brain that is closest to the nose is the orbitofrontal cortex. It might be there because so many of our most basic connections to other people are via smell," Tatum said.

Dangers Of Using Electronic Forms Of Communications

Amid the popularity of using the internet and electronic devices to communicate, Tatum warned that electronic forms of communication such as video calls can interrupt the interbrain process and cause harm. He explained that face-to-face visual input comes with a gesture, sound, smell of sweat, possibility of touch, and a connection. He said that internet communication could be another reason why some people have become more complicated and introvert.

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Google is doing a great job in its mission of organizing the world's information, but the multibillion-dollar company is apparently having trouble with a local problem in its Mountain View headquarters.

Gbikes, the bicycles that Google offers to its employees so that they can get around the sprawling campus, are being stolen at an alarming rate by locals living around the area.

Hundreds Of Gbikes Stolen Per Week

A report by The Wall Street Journal reveals just how bad Google's problem is regarding its Gbikes, revealing that out of the about 1,100 multicolored bicycles, around 100 to 250 go missing each week.

The Gbikes were rolled out by Google for the benefit of its employees, an initiative that has inspired similar programs across Silicon Valley. However, residents of Mountain View apparently think that the bikes are free for them to use. This is why the bikes are being brought out of the Google headquarters and then found around the city.

"It's like a friendly gesture," 68-year-old Sharon Veach told The Wall Street Journal. "They don't really want us to use it, but it's OK if you do," she added. Even Ken Rosenberg, the mayor of Mountain View, admitted that he used a Gbike to go to a movie after visiting Google's headquarters.

How Google Plans To Solve The Problem

Google has not revealed how much it spends on the Gbikes. However, the estimated price of the bicycles is about $100 to $300, which adds up to as much as $30,000 for each 100 Gbikes lost per week. Google only recovered about 70 to 190 bikes a week from July to November 2017.

The company may have billions upon billions of dollars on hand, but it apparently has had enough with the missing Gbikes problem. In late 2017, Google started to install GPS trackers to the bicycles, which revealed that they were taken as far as Mexico and Alaska. Gbikes have previously been seen in New England and at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Google has also started testing versions that Google employees can unlock with their smartphones, so that only the company's workers will be able to use them.

Most recently, Google hired a team of 30 people in five vans, with the sole task of retrieving the Gbikes. The move was necessary because Mountain View Police claimed that it does not have the manpower to ask each person riding a Gbike if they are a Google employee.

It remains to be seen if these actions will solve Google's missing Gbikes problem.

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Amid a global campaign to stop the tobacco epidemic and efforts to discourage kids from smoking, parents in a remote village in Portugal encourage their children to smoke at least once a year to observe a tradition.

The Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro features the tradition on its annual Epiphany celebrations.

Parents Give Cigarettes To Children As Young As 5 Years Old

The two-day celebration, which starts on Friday and ends Saturday with a mass, features people dancing around bonfires, a piper that plays music, and an elected "king" who distributes wines and snacks. Parents in the village also encourage their children as young as 5 years old to smoke cigarettes during the Christmas festival, a practice frowned upon by outsiders.

Locals claim that the practice has been handed down for many generations over centuries but no one is sure what this symbolizes. The legal age to buy tobacco in Portugal is 18, but there seems to be nothing that prevents the parents from giving cigarettes to their kids. Authorities neither intervene.

Those who take part cites custom as the reason why they give their children cigarettes. Thirty-five-year-old Guilhermina Mateus said that she does not see any harm in giving cigarette to her child during the Epiphany celebrations. She said that the children do not really smoke and only do this during the celebration. They also inhale and exhale immediately.

"It's only on these days, today and tomorrow," Mateus said. "They never ask for cigarettes again."

About 90 percent of adult smokers started smoking when they were kids. Interestingly, the village does not have higher incidence of adult smoking compared with other villages in Portugal, said Jose Ribeirinha, who wrote a book on the festivities.

Ribeirinha said that the geographical location of the village means it likely held on to old traditions adhering to practices that date back to pagan times. Ribeirinha said that the village is in an area known as the "forgotten one".

Tobacco Smoking

Figures from the World Health Organization show that tobacco is responsible for over 7 million deaths per year. Of these, more than 6 million are the result of direct tobacco use while the rest is linked to exposure to second-hand smoke. WHO tagged the tobacco epidemic as one of the world's biggest public health threats causing illness, impoverishment, and death.

Portugal has also taken steps to curb rates of smoking. Its efforts include partial ban on smoking indoors.

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Health officials have warned that customers of a certain 7-Eleven branch in Utah may have been exposed to hepatitis A.

Hepatitis A filled up the headlines for the wrong reasons last year, and it seems that the virus is kicking off 2018 with a possible outbreak.

Salt Lake Officials Warn Of Possible Hepatitis A Exposure

In a press release, the Salt Lake County Health Department warned that customers who visited the 7-Eleven convenience store located at 2666 West 7800 South in the city of West Jordan may have been exposed to hepatitis A.

According to the department, up to 2,000 customers who visited the 7-Eleven branch from Dec. 26, 2017 to Jan. 3 may have been infected with the virus. Of particular risk are customers who used the store's restroom or consumed some of the items for sale, including the fountain drink or other self-service beverages, fresh fruit, and any item from the hot food case that includes hot dogs, pizza, taquitos, and chicken wings.

For people who visited the 7-Eleven branch during the time period and are at risk of hepatitis A infection following the above guidelines are recommended to contact the Salt Lake County Health Department to receive an injection against the virus. Staff will screen all callers for the possible exposure risk and provide the options for the hepatitis A vaccine.

The possible exposure only affects the specific 7-Eleven branch in West Jordan, as an employee worked at the store while infected with hepatitis A. Customers who purchased and consumed only packaged food and bottled items from the store are not at risk of exposure.

"This is an important reminder to food service establishments that they should consider vaccinating their food-handling employees against hepatitis A," said Salt Lake County Health Department executive director Gary Edwards in a statement.

Hepatitis A In 2017

The Salt Lake County Health Department believes that the incident is related to the hepatitis A outbreak that started in Salt Lake County in August 2017.

Salt Lake County is not the only area that had a hepatitis A problem last year. California faced the largest person-to-person hepatitis A outbreak since vaccines became available to the public in 1995, with San Diego being the hardest-hit county in the state.

In June, frozen tuna products were also found to be positive for hepatitis A, leading to a recall in California, Texas, and Oklahoma. In May, inmates at the Oakland County Jail were also exposed to hepatitis A after one of the inmates was confirmed to be infected with the virus.

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Flu season is currently at its peak in California, causing medicine shortage, packed emergency rooms, and an alarming death toll nine times higher than the last seasonal epidemic.

This year, influenza activity started increasing throughout the state as early as October 2017 with 27 recorded deaths compared with three in October 2016. Activity climbed steadily through November and unexpectedly spiked in the last weeks of December.

Since then, the epidemic continues to spread at a rapid rate affecting all regions in California.

H3N2 Viruses Predominate In California And Other States

Influenza viruses constantly mutate, making it impossible to predict which strain will predominate in a season, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is also common for new types to spread each year.

A majority of patients are now infected with Influenza A or H3N2, a dangerous strain leading to hospitalizations and deaths because of its resistance to the flu vaccine. While a dose works only 32 percent effective against such type of virus, the CDC and health experts still recommend getting a flu shot.

"While strains can still mutate in individual cases and render the vaccine ineffective for some people, the flu vaccine can also help lessen the severity of illness in some of these cases," explains Dr. Robert Citronberg, infectious disease consultant at Advocate Health Care.

Quadrivalent recombinant and inactivated flu vaccines are now available for H3N2. Nasal sprays are discouraged by the CDC but only for this season.

Californians Face Shortage Of Emergency Services And Flu Medication

In two of California's most populous counties, Riverside and San Bernardino, hospitals are so packed with flu patients that ambulance vehicles are not able to immediately unload patients. This prevents them from responding to 911 calls, relates a spokesman for Riverside County's Department of Public Health in a report.

Moreover, flu medication is becoming a scarcity in local pharmacies. Commonly-prescribed drugs like oseltamivir, with the brand name Tamiflu, has become hard to find because of the insistent demand.

Los Angeles resident Caroline Bringenberg shares contracting the flu while in Denver to celebrate the holidays. She was prescribed to take Tamiflu, which, unfortunately, was unavailable in all CVS and independent pharmacies in her area.

"I've just sort of given up," Bringenberg says in the same report. "I think honestly it would make me feel worse to be in the car driving all over town, so I've just opted for ibuprofen and DayQuil."

CDC Gives Tips On Preventing The Spread Of Influenza

To stop the spread of flu viruses, the agency encourages people to wash their hands frequently, cover their mouths when coughing or sneezing, and stay at home when feeling sick.

Individuals suspecting to be infected with flu should get a medical evaluation within 48 hours from the onset of symptoms as the treatment works most effectively during this period.

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The Great Barrier Reef of Australia is at serious at risk of total damage if crown-of-thorns starfish will continue to eat through the coral.

Authorities have started culling procedures to prevent the spread of the coral-killing marine animals and save the reef. At least 37 sections of the Swaine Reef located at 100 kilometers to 250 kilometers, or about 328 to 820 feet off the coast between Gladstone and Rockhampton are affected by the outbreak of the coral-eating starfish.

Killer Outbreak Of Coral-Eating Marine Animals

The trigger of the recent outbreak is still unclear but authorities offer a few theories, including the presence of extra nutrients in the water.

"It may be caused by nutrient upwelling from deep ocean waters, but that's still yet to be proven," says Fred Nucifora of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority.

Starfish are known to contribute to the reef's diversity by eating faster-growing coral species, allowing slower-growing species to thrive. However, the crown-of-thorns starfish are eating way much faster than the corals can reproduce.

How Deadly Starfish Damages The Coral?

Each starfish damages the coral through spreading its stomach on the coral and releasing digestive enzymes that dissolve the coral tissues. The predator crown-of-thorns starfish eat corals about the same size of its body diameter each night. If there are thousands of starfish in the affected area, the effects are indeed damaging.

Since marine authorities started a control program to prevent the predator starfish in 2012, they have culled more than 600,000 starfish from the north and central reef areas.

This starfish outbreak has struck the Great Barrier Reef that is still reeling from two consecutive years of major coral bleaching. In 2016, the reef was damaged by the worst ever coral bleaching that killed two-thirds of a 700-kilometer stretch of reef.

When the water temperature is too warm, corals expel the algae living in their tissues causing them to become white. Corals do not die from a bleaching event but become more stressed due to rising ocean temperatures. Episodes of coral bleaching have become alarmingly frequent to a point that the reef does not have enough time to recover.

Last year, to restore the health of the coral reef, experts attempted to stimulate the growth of new corals using a technique known as "larval reseeding."

What's The Great Barrier Reef?

The Great Barrier Reef covering 348,000 kilometers is the world's largest coral reef comprising over 3,000 individual reef systems. It contains abundant marine life like sharks and rays, marine turtles, and marine mammals. It is considered as the most extensive coral reef ecosystem on the planet.

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Which came first: Complex life or high atmospheric oxygen?







Berkeley CA (SPX) Jan 04, 2018





We and all other animals wouldn't be here today if our planet didn't have a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere and oceans. But how crucial were high oxygen levels to the transition from simple, single-celled life forms to the complexity we see today? A study by University of California, Berkeley geochemists presents new evidence that high levels of oxygen were not critical to the origin of animals. The researchers found that the transition to a world with an oxygenated deep ocean occurred betwe ... read more
The Restore Louisiana program has set up meetings across south Louisiana this month to help people who could be eligible for funds to rebuild homes damaged by floods in 2016 or be reimbursed for money they've already spent.

Staff will be available to answer questions and help people work on applications for the program. The first step for residents seeking help through the program launched in April is to fill out a survey.

Approximately 45,000 people have completed that survey, said Pat Forbes, executive director of the state's Office of Community Development. Of those, more than 38,000 have been invited to apply.

Nick Speyrer, outreach manager for the Restore Louisiana program, said Friday that more than 6,000 homeowners have gotten all the way through the survey and application process.

Of those, 4,680 are eligible for the grants, which average close to $29,000 apiece, Speyrer said.

Homeowners who suffered flood damage in the March or August 2016 floods, in 51 parishes, are eligible to seek help, Forbes said.

The grants are "strictly for rehabbing a flooded home. If the work is complete, it goes as reimbursement," he said.

Residents can work with contractors associated with the program or choose their own contractors, Forbes said.

Forbes added that proposed legislation is pending before the U.S. Senate that would clear the way for residents who were awarded a Small Business Administration loan after the flood to also be eligible for grant money. Up to now, residents who received an SBA award largely have been deemed ineligible to get money, even if they didn't end up taking the loan or the full amount of the loan.

"If they get that fixed, we expect a great many more people to fill out surveys," Forbes said.

He estimates that if an SBA was no longer an obstacle, an additional 18,000 people could explore the Restore Louisiana process.

Restore Louisiana program could need more money if fixes for SBA applicants are approved, state official says Louisiana could need as much as $400 million injected into its $1.3 billion post-flood homeowner recovery program if Congress eliminates a reg

While those needing to fill out a Restore Louisiana application can also visit one of four "housing assistance centers," the community events that begin this upcoming week might be more convenient for some, Forbes said.

The Restore Louisiana meetings will be held:

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 9 at Eden Park Branch Library, 5131 Greenwell Springs Road

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 10 at Watson Branch Library, 36581 Outback Road, Denham Springs

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 11 at South Branch Library, 23477 La. 444, Livingston

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 16 at Greenwell Springs Road Regional Branch Library, 11300 Greenwell Springs Road

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 17 at Baker Branch Library, 3501 Groom Road, Baker

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 18 at Denham Springs-Walker Branch Library, 8101 U.S. 190, Denham Springs

3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Jan. 23 at Ponchatoula High School, 19452 La. 22 East, Ponchatoula

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 24 at Amite Branch Library, 204 NE Central Ave., Amite

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 25 at Fellowship Church of Prairieville, 14363 La. 73, Prairieville

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 30 at First Baptist Church Youngsville, 623 Lafayette St., Youngsville

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Jan. 31 at Abbeville Branch Library, 405 E. St. Victor St., Abbeville

2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Feb. 1 at Sterling Memorial Branch Library, 305 Keystone Road, Monroe

Construction technical advisers and damage assessment team members will be present to review homeowners program options, Louisiana Restore said.

A list of documentation that may be required to complete an application is available on the Restore Louisiana website at http://restore.la.gov.

The initial survey is still available to all flood-affected homeowners. Applicants can complete it online or by phone from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, at (866) 7352001.

The housing assistance centers in Lafayette, Hammond, Monroe and Baton Rouge are open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at: Oak Tree Building, 10000 Celtic Drive, Baton Rouge; 151 Southpark Road, Suite 500, Lafayette; 130 Robin Hood Drive, Hammond; and Old State Farm Building, 24 Accent Drive, Suite 116, Monroe.

Program representatives are available at the centers to help homeowners complete surveys and applications, connect with a case manager and provide an overview of options for repairs, reconstruction or reimbursement, according to Restore Louisiana.
Seven months after their push for a hike in the state gas tax died, road and bridge advocates are scrambling to see what, if any, other options are available for traffic relief.

"It is a quality-of-life issue in Louisiana, especially in the capital region," said House Transportation Committee Chairman Kenny Havard, R-St. Francisville.

"We don't have a choice," Havard said. "We have to fix it."

Motorist complaints are daily fare, especially in the Baton Rouge area, and report after report has criticized road and bridge conditions in Louisiana.

Transportation chief Shawn Wilson IDs main reason to expect slowdowns on Louisiana road projects The failure of efforts to boost state aid for roads and bridges means key projects statewide will be slowed, Louisiana's transportation chief 

The state is also near the bottom nationally in terms of how long it has been since its gas tax rose  nearly three decades.

But a bill to increase the gas tax by 17 cents per gallon, bringing in $510 million per year, died in the Legislature last year without a floor vote in either chamber.

Louisiana's high-profile gas tax died because of 'toxic,' leaderless House, veteran lobbyist says The push to raise the state gasoline tax died because the Louisiana House has turned into a "toxic mix" that features a "total lack of leaders

Critics said voters were simply unwilling to pay more regardless of traffic woes.

However, state Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, the sponsor of that measure, said he is not giving up.

Carter's latest plan is a constitutional amendment that would allow local voters, such as those in parishes in the Baton Rouge area, to approve a gas tax hike of their own. "That is the one thing we are going to try," he said.

Without any action on that plan, he said, "we are probably three or four years down the road" before the Legislature debates the issue again.

Legislative rules prevent tax hike debates in 2018 and 2020, and 2019 is an election year, which means major tax hikes then are highly unlikely.

Shawn Wilson, secretary of the state Department of Transportation and Development, led the push last year for a gas tax increase. He said giving voters in a region the chance to approve a tax increase is not the answer.

"The reality is you cannot solve any of the Baton Rouge megaprojects with a local option," he said.

Motorists pay 38.4 cents extra per gallon at the gas pump, including 20 cents in state charges. Each penny raises about $30 million per year.

That means if voters in a five- or six-parish region approved an increase in the gasoline tax, it would raise only a fraction of $30 million annually.

"You get no money, so you get nothing done," Wilson said.

A new bridge across the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge would cost at least $1 billion.

Wilson and others also said any such effort could undermine chances for an already uphill battle to pass a statewide gasoline tax increase. Voters who already taxed themselves to improve roads and bridges in their area would have little interest in endorsing a statewide boost.

Carter's plan, like the failed hike in the statewide gas tax, faces huge hurdles in the Legislature.

As a constitutional amendment, it would require the support of two-thirds of the Louisiana House and Senate, and a majority of voters statewide, to take effect.

Liz Smith, senior vice president of economic competitiveness for the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, said her group does not want 2018 to go to waste. "In the capital region, we cannot afford to wait," she said.

Traffic gridlock is causing twin problems, she said. One is luring firms to the area. The other is traffic obstacles to hauling goods.

However, Smith said BRAC officials, who backed last year's gas tax push, are not ready to support Carter's plan or others. "We are looking at what our options are," she said.

The dominant issue again for Gov. John Bel Edwards and the Legislature is how to fix Louisiana's looming, $1 billion-plus shortfall for state services starting July 1.

A special session on budget problems is possible in February. The regular session begins March 12.

"We recognize that the big budget crisis is going to take precedence over everything else," said Ken Perret, president of the Louisiana Good Roads and Transportation Association.

Perret said his group, which backed the 2017 push for a higher gas tax, plans to try to educate the public on state transportation needs  "try to get the public to demand some action from the Legislature," he said.

Since the gas tax push died in June, the usually optimistic Wilson has been blunt in describing the fallout.

DOTD chief says revenue problems spell motorist headaches Louisiana faces rising driver frustrations, more expensive projects and poorly-rated roads and bridges because of the death of a push to incre

In November, he told engineers that motorists face more frustrations, pricier projects because of delays getting work started and poorly rated roads and bridges.

"We have a wheelbarrow full of needs and a thimble full of money," Wilson told a legislative committee in October.

Story of Louisiana road, bridge problems: Millions in budget but billions in backlog While Louisiana road and bridge needs poured into a key legislative committee Wednesday, prospects for any sweeping changes are bleak.

Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, said public-private partnerships could offer short-term relief. "We are seeing that with Belle Chasse, and we may see it again with some other projects, possibly in the near future," he said.

Wilson's agency is trying to launch a $122 million plan to replace the Belle Chasse tunnel and nearby Perez Bridge with money from private investors and limited state dollars.

The arrangement would be the first of its kind in Louisiana.

Citing a common refrain from the 2017 debate, Havard said voter distrust in how the state uses road and bridge dollars is a huge stumbling block in winning support for higher gasoline taxes.

He noted that two of the 16 projects voters approved in 1989 along with a four-cent hike in the gas tax remain undone more than a quarter of a century later.

"I don't feel like we have done anything to address the transportation issue, just like we have done nothing to address the qualify-of-life issues in Louisiana. We are going backward," he said.
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Attorney General Jeff Landry, joined by elected officials, law enforement and fire department personnel, speaks during a press conference to announce a voucher program for distrubuting Nalaxone, a prescription drug that blocks the effects of opioids, to emergency personnel across the state Monday, May 15, 2017, at the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office Public Safety Complex in Lafayette, La.
On Jan. 7, 2018, we published an editorial urging Louisiana judges not to drag their feet in a court case involving the possible destruction o
'We're glad to have it back': Stolen Battle of New Orleans rifle returned to local museum
The first crop of legal gay weddings will take place around the country on Tuesday, a month after Australia became the 26th country to allow same-sex marriage.

While a handful of special-case ceremonies have already taken place, most couples have had to see out the statutory one month waiting period until they can actually tie the knot. The law officially changed on December 9, making Tuesday, January 9 the first day for vows to be exchanged between husband and husband, wife and wife.

Preparations were underway for weddings in Sydney's Centennial Park, on the steps of the Western Australian Parliament and at an estate on the Tweed Coast, where Commonwealth Games athlete Craig Burns will wed his fiancee and fellow sprinter Luke Sullivan at the stroke of midnight.

"It'll be a special moment to know that we're a part of that and it's an awesome step forward for Australia," Mr Burns told the Mackay Daily Mercury. A few hours later at Perth's Court Hotel, a special public event will kick off as the clock strikes 12 with the wedding of a local teacher and nurse.
Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria and Nicole Kidman just had a power pow-wow with Seacrest, talking about the powerful moment they're currently inhabiting. Witherspoon, who is one of the leading lights of the Times Up movement, told Seacrest this was about women from all industries coming together in solidarity. Longoria - who is currently pregnant - joked that she would be starring in the next Big Little Lies, such was their current level of intimacy. Kidman popped up at this point to segue into the hard work they put into the series. Is it just us, or is there some sort of healthy, feminist feelings of competition between Kidman and Witherspoon? The vibe we get is that Kidman is no longer the number one girl of Witherspoon. Has she been - gasp! - replaced by Longoria? And kidman is not about to take it lying down.

No, that can't be right. This is a moment of solidarity! Let us raise our glasses in triumph because Time's Up on the red carpet -it's time for the show!
Tandberg won a 1979 Walkley Award for this piece. Credit:Ron Tandberg Mr Baillieu said among his most prized possessions are two cartoons Tandberg drew for him just after he retired from politics. "He was very generous to me, these two cartoons he did of his own volition," he said. This cartoon won Tandberg a Walkley in 1997. "They don't mean much to anyone else, but they mean a lot to me. I was only looking at those cartoons last week and thinking how fantastic they were."

Former Age employee and friend of more than 20 years, Nigel Henham, said Mr Tandberg was the "jewel of The Age's crown". "He's an Australian institution, a giant, who will be looked at as the greatest cartoonist ever in Australia and he was quintessentially a Melbourne icon," he said. "He was a kind, gentle and thoughtful person with encyclopedic knowledge. He was never malicious, he didn't have a malicious bone in his body, but he felt strongly about issues and he had this rare and brilliant knack for cutting through... not many people have that."



Mr Henham said Mr Tandberg loved horses, owning and racing thoroughbreds, but he cared more about the welfare of his animals than he ever did about winning a race. "That was just the kind of person Ron was," he said. "He will be remembered as one of the all time greats of Australian journalism. Sometimes you don't know what you've lost until it's gone, but we have all lost something really special today. There will never be another Ron." Child and adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said Tandberg was "irreplaceable".

"So sad to hear of the great Ron Tandberg's death. He graciously illustrated 4 of my books with wit, irony and compassion." Former long-time Age cartoonist John Spooner said he had witnessed Tandberg fighting for his ideas against editors who disagreed with him. "He would get an idea for a cartoon in a matter of minutes. A lot of other cartoonists, all over the world, struggle for an idea. He was very, very quick, and he made people laugh. "People loved his succinctness. He was pithy, he was right to the point. It didn't matter what you'd think about his particular political stance on the subject, the fact was, no one ever misunderstood where Ron stood."

He said there was a "wonderful time" for more than 10 years from 1975, when Spooner, Tandberg, Peter Nicholson and Michael Leunig worked in one room, with other desks reserved for Arthur Horner and Bruce Petty when they came in. "I rang Ron two weeks ago, to say how sorry I was to hear [of his illness], and we both were reflecting on the fact that we had a wonderful time." Current Fairfax Media cartoonist Cathy Wilcox said she had followed Tandberg's work since the early 1970s when she was a child. "That simplicity of character, of face and line, and punchline, that was the thing that he could do like nobody else. "When I started to draw pocket cartoons for The Herald and The Age, his was so much of a genre, that what I would be asked to do by editors, would be to 'do a Tandberg'."

That meant "a small, pithy cartoon to go with a news article, that would encompass it". Artistic perfection was secondary to the need to get a smart idea across. "I've occasionally achieved the brevity of his, but he could always boil things down to its very essence, and remained really funny in his work until the very end." The open mouth: Jeff Kennett on the air with Neil Mitchell. Credit:Ron Tandberg Loading Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Alan Moir tweeted: "I am shocked and saddened by the news of cartooning colleague Ron Tandberg's death. He cartooned for the Melbourne Age since 1972, and I never read a cartoon that wasn't witty or pithy. One of Australia's greatest ever, he won 11 Walkley Awards. Will be greatly missed."
Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy says there is no use trying to ignore the problem of "ethnic gangs" despite African community leaders saying focusing on race is irresponsible.

"I know in the last week-and-a-half there's been a lot of commentary around ethnic gangs and there's no doubt about it, there have been problems', Mr Guy said at a press conference.

"There is no use trying to ignore that problem, it is real and it is happening."

Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy says ethnic gangs are a problem. Credit:AAP

Mr Guy said policies released by the Opposition last year, which included mandatory sentencing, strong bail and parole reform, would help deal with the problem.
An angry Mandurah mother has lashed out at the state government after being told a specialised education program at Halls Head College has been axed.

Late last year, Wannanup resident Sally Finlay said she was told her autistic son who had attended the Halls Head College Targeted Learning program, would have to find alternative education because the program would not be offered in 2018.

Mandurah mum Sally Finlay is angry at the axing of a specialist program which helped her son Shaun, who is pictured along with older brother James

The program for year one to nine students offered support for autistic children that included smaller classes and customised learning plans.

Ms Finlay said her 13-year-old son Shaun was bullied when in mainstream education and the thought of him going back to it was "horrifying".
A prison officer has been left hospitalised with facial injuries after being assaulted at the Hakea maximum security jail in Perth.

The Department of Justice confirmed the incident had occurred on Sunday afternoon.

Prisoners are sleeping on the floor because of chronic overcrowding at Hakea prison, according to the prison officers' union.

The prison officer was sent to hospital with facial injuries, primarily to the nose, and was discharged later the same day.

WA Police are investigating.
Rome: For generations of Romans, Epiphany, not Christmas, was the holiday season's main day for receiving gifts. They are dispensed overnight, according to Italian folklore, by the Befana, a broom-riding old hag with a strict naughty-or-nice ethic.

To fall on her wrong side was to wake up to a stocking full of coal.

The Befana's traditional headquarters - a kiosk-filled market in the central Piazza Navona here where vendors hawk trinkets, toys and sticky sweets  was a beloved annual pilgrimage, a kid-magnet of excitement, fun and sugar highs.

This year, Roman families turned out as usual, many with strollers in tow, on a sunny and warm Saturday. But it was evident that times had changed, and a cloud hung over the market.

Concerns about terrorism had choked off the event, and as lines formed at the entrances to the elegant Baroque square, police and carabinieri officers stood at steel barriers. Agents wielding metal detectors scanned knapsacks under the startled gaze of wide-eyed children. Earlier in the week, the square had been placed under "special surveillance."
Coming soon - The Cultural Voyager Dedicated to anyone who pursues culture as a major part of their vacation experience.
The thought of removing a pets eye can be scary, but in some cases, eye removal is necessary to improve the pets quality of life. Dr. Lucien Vallone, a clinical assistant professor in the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, explained how eye removal can be beneficial.

Veterinarians and veterinary ophthalmologists perform an eye removal when an eye has become both painful and blinded by a disease that is unresponsive to medical therapy, Vallone said. The most common cause of this in dogs and cats is from a disease called glaucoma, which creates high pressure in the eye. Eye removal is also performed when an aggressive or malignant tumor invades the eye or nearby structures.

Having just one or no eyes may seem unpleasant, but most pets that have had one or both eyes removed experience a dramatic increase in their quality of life.

Most animals are experiencing chronic pain prior to eye removal, so most will respond postoperatively by displaying more energy and playfulness, Vallone said. Every animal is different, but most dogs and cats who have had one eye removed are behaviorally indistinguishable from their two-eyed peers.

Following a surgery to remove an eye, pet owners can expect to see some bruising and swelling over the surgical site for three to five days, Vallone said.

Additionally, the pet may have some pain following surgery, which should subside within two to three days. Pets that have had one or both eyes removed will appear as if they are squinting or winking. The skin is closed permanently over the area in which the eye was removed, and fur typically grows back over the area within three to four weeks after surgery, Vallone said.

In cases where eye removal is necessary, removing a pets eye can be beneficial and even lifesaving. Even when a pet is missing one or both eyes, they can still live a normal, happy life.
October 25, 1936 - January 6, 2018

Margaret Ann Hardy-Haugland was born October 25, 1936 in Marietta, Oklahoma. Her parents were Henry Stanley Hardy and Minnie Mae Anderson Hardy. When Margaret was four years old her mother died and from that time Margaret was raised by her aunt, Miss Anna Lee Anderson and her grandmother, Mrs. Sarah E. Anderson, along with a lot of love and support from the members of the Church of Christ in Marietta.

Margaret was baptized and became a member of the Church of Christ in August, 1956. Even before that time Margaret had been actively teaching younger children and singing with a group for special occasions.

Margaret graduated from high school in Marietta and attended Harding College, in Searcy, Arkansas on a scholarship. While attending Harding, Margaret spent her summers working at Blue Haven Christian Camp in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She was one of the first counselors when this camp started. It is now one of the largest Christian youth camps in America. After graduation from college, she chose to go back to New Mexico to pursue a teaching career. It was there in church, on the first day after she arrived, that she met Gary Haugland. After a brief courtship, they were married on May 16, 1959. They were lifelong "Love at First Sight" and best friends for 59 years.

Margaret and Gary have lived in several places, Margaret let her career be wherever Gary was transferred with his jobs. She has taught at North Shore Junior High in the Houston area, then she was the first white teacher at Fannie C. Harris Elementary in Dallas before the days of integration. Next came a job teaching bilingual first grade in inner city Houston. After that she taught at Northland Christian School the second year after it started. Later when Gary's job sent him to Indianapolis, Margaret first taught in public school there and then at Indianapolis Christian School.

After Gary's retirement, Margaret and Gary traveled full-time in their R.V. going to every state in America and every province in Canada. They were members of the Sojourners, a Christian organization that helps Christian camps, children's homes and small churches. Every move and job was an adventure that she loved but, make no mistake, her three children were her top priority. They were the source of her pride. Later in life her grandchildren were equally loved and adored.

Margaret is preceded in death by her father and mother, Henry Stanley Hardy and Minnie Mae Anderson Hardy; her aunt, Miss Anna Lee Anderson; her grandmother, Mrs. Sarah E. Anderson all of Marietta, Oklahoma; and a grandson, Keith Travis Shumate.

Margaret is survived by her husband Gary Haugland, of College Station, Texas; her children, Dr. Mark Haugland and wife Jean of the Woodlands, Texas; daughter Kerri Savage and husband Jay, of Dallas, Texas; daughter Kay Shumate and husband Don, of Coppell, Texas; her grandchildren Kimberly and Jackson Savage and Kallie (Savage) Nossaman and husband Kyle; Macaully and Jake Shumate; her brother in law, Jim Haugland and wife Pauline; brother in law Dene Haugland and wife Polly..and many extended family and friends.

A memorial service is scheduled for Tuesday, January 9th at A&M Church of Christ, 2475 Earl Rudder Freeway, College Station, Texas. Visitation will be at 11 a.m. followed by a memorial service at 12:00 noon.
The increasingly bizarre dispute between President Donald Trump and his former campaign aide and White House staffer Steve Bannon continues to boggle the mind.

Yet for me as a contracts professor, one corner of the contretemps raises a simple and clear question. I refer to the letter from Trumps lawyer, Charles Harder, insisting that Bannon is in violation of a non-disparagement clause in the contract that he signed when he joined the campaign. If the facts are as claimed, I think the clause is enforceable.

Last week, my Bloomberg View colleague Noah Feldman wrote that a court probably would find that First Amendment considerations rendered the clause void, because enforcement in this instance would suppress robust public-policy debate. There is force to this argument, but the precedents point the other way. As regular readers know, I am a great believer in strong First Amendment protections, but in this case I dont think the Constitution is a bar.

Lets begin with a basic proposition: non-disparagement clauses are increasingly a part of employment contracts, and the courts routinely enforce them. Its easy to see why. If an employer and an employee are bargaining at arms length, the employers insistence on such a clause will result in higher compensation for the employee. In other words, employers will pay employees a premium to give up the right to disparage. As long as the employee understands the trade hes making when he signs the contract, why should the courts interfere? As a general rule, they dont.

We can put aside non-disparagement clauses buried in the boilerplate of consumer contracts, which companies sometimes try to use to prevent those who buy their products from posting negative reviews. Most courts have understandably held such clauses unenforceable. But when non-disparagement clauses are included in employment contracts or separation agreements, they are enforced more or less routinely. The reason isnt that judges dont understand that the clauses might be abused. The reason is that the employee who agreed to the deal is bound by his own free choice.

For example, in Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. v. Farese, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit faced an argument that a non-disparagement clause might be used to prevent a former employee from disclosing instances in which the employer broke the law.

The judges were unimpressed. In 2005, they refused to strike down the clause based on the mere possibility that an employer could use a non-disparagement clause to hide illegal activity. The court conceded that the clause might possibly be set aside should the employee seek to disclose actual crimes. But the opinion implies that the proper venue for such allegations is the relevant public authorities. Free-speech claims are routinely raised by parties who are sued for violating non-disparagement clauses. Judges generally are unpersuaded. For example, heres the response of a California appellate court in a 2010 case called Sahlolbei v. Montgomery:

Simply put, if Montgomery agreed not to disparage Sahlolbei, then a reasonable person could conclude that Montgomery waived his right to speak freely about Sahlolbei, and therefore, even if Montgomerys statements are protected, he could be found in breach of the settlement agreement.

Even when the party in violation makes a disparaging statement with an eye toward publication, the courts reject claims that the publics right to know should prevail. In Fisher v. Biozone Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a federal district judge enforced a non-disclosure agreement in 2013 when one of the parties emailed a journalist with disparaging claims about the other.

Nor have courts been impressed by claims of a public right to know. Just last fall, a federal court in Maryland rejected a First Amendment challenge to a non-disparagement clause included in the settlement of a police brutality suit.

The agreement itself was only eight pages long, the judge wrote in Overbey v. City of Baltimore, and the non-disparagement clause was not hidden in fine print. The plaintiff, had she chosen to, could have leveraged her position to demand that the non-disparagement clause be removed. She chose not to do so, wrote the court, so the clause was enforceable. If a victim of police brutality cant escape her arms-length promises, its hard to see why a presidential adviser should.

Dont get me wrong. That Trumps legal threat against Bannon might have some degree of merit doesnt mean the threat should have been made. It should be beneath presidential dignity to go after a former staffer for cooperating on an uncomplimentary book, although given the thin skin of the current incumbent, I suppose we should expect little else.

I should add that the presidents legal threat against the books publisher utterly is groundless; the publisher is not a party to Bannons campaign-employment contract. And of course the fact that Bannon is distasteful to so many Americans should have no effect on his right to speak freely; on the contrary, those who are most despised are most in need of constitutional protection.

But if, as Harders letter claims, Bannon is in violation of a signed agreement not to disparage Trump or the campaign  and if, as I have suggested, Bannon entered into the deal with his eyes wide open  then what we are left with is not a test of the First Amendment but a simple action for breach of contract. I hope the action is never filed.

Given the precedents, however, the outcome would be clear.
Making a return to our two favourite summer locations, Mount Maunganui and Nelson in early January 2023, we've got whiff of the first release lineup and me oh my, yes boy
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A Connecticut songwriter has won a Golden Globe Award for his tune featured in a film about Connecticut's greatest showman.

Westport's Justin Paul took the award Sunday for the song "This is Me," which he co-wrote with Benji Pasek for the film "The Greatest Showman." The musical, about the life of P.T. Barnum, stars Hugh Jackman as the iconic promoter and Connecticut native.

The song is the latest from Paul and Pasek to receive honors. The song-writing duo won the Tony Award for best original score written for the theatre for "Dear Evan Hansen" in June. At last year's Academy Awards, the pair took home an Oscar for "City of Stars" in "La La Land."

"This is Me" beat out songs created by stars such as Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey, who was onstage at the Globes moments before the best song award was announced.

Carey, who was nominated for her song "The Star," helped announce the winner of the best original score honor, which went to Alexandre Desplat for "The Shape of Water."
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NORWALK  The Norwalk Health Department is retooling its restaurant food-safety awards program to meet federal guidelines that go into full effect July 1.

Were going to adapt the Lighthouse ratings to the new FDA guidelines, said Thomas Closter, chief environmental officer in the citys health department. Were going to take the score out, but were certainly going to use how many risk factors were found at the time of the inspection, how many repeat risk repeaters, how many priority violations were found. Were going to move to that arena and foundation rather than looking at a score.

FDA code becomes Connecticuts

In June, the state Legislature approved aligning the Connecticut Department of Public Health food code with that of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The federal code revises risk classifications for food establishments and requires all to register with the state health department before a permit or license is issued by the local health department.

Closter described the FDA codes as science-based and not necessarily more stringent or lax than the state code. For example, deli meats and other cold foods must be refrigerated at 41 degrees or colder rather than 45 degrees or colder as previously required by the state to prevent food-borne illnesses such as Listeria. But hot foods may be kept at 135 degrees rather than 140 degrees previously allowed by the state.

The Lighthouse Certificate Award Program, established by the Norwalk Health Department in 2008, recognizes establishments that employ safe food-handling practices. Last year marked the final year the department used states restaurant inspection form, which was based on a 1-to-100 point scoring system.

The old form had 62 line items in areas ranging from food protection to equipment cleanliness, vermin control and whether a qualified food operator was present. The line items were assigned 1 to 4 points, depending upon their importance, with risk factors such as storage temperature requirements highlighted in red.

A draft of the new form, as part of compliance with the FDA code, has 56 lines items in areas ranging from good hygienic practices to food temperature control and proper use of utensils, but doesnt assign scoring points to each. At the bottom of the form, inspectors instead are asked to list the number of risk factors, repeat risk factors and good retail practice violations found at the particular restaurant.

Food establishments remain classified and inspected based upon their level of food handling. Under the old state code, Class I establishments were typically convenience stores, Class II establishments sold commercially pre-cooked foods, Class III establishments included delicatessens, and Class IV establishments were restaurants, hospitals and caterers that served food more than four hours after it was heated.

Under the new FDA code, Class IV establishment have been shifted to Class III and so forth. A new Class IV has been created for establishments serving susceptible populations such as hospitals and schools with daycare centers, Closter said.

More Lighthouse awards

When the Norwalk Health Department launched the Lighthouse program 10 years, awards went to 27 percent of the Class III and Class IV restaurants that were inspected. Awards went to 53 percent as part of the newly released 2017 awards.

Under the newly released 2017 Lighthouse awards, 222 of roughly 419 Class III and Class IV food establishments in Norwalk scored 90 points or higher under the old scoring system and had no critical violations. In addition, they had a qualified food operator on site at all times, and employed persons who exhibited safe food-handling practices.

Were pleased that the number has increased each year, Closter said. Were pleased that were gaining good compliance. People are aware of the inspection program. Theyre aware of the Lighthouse ratings. Theyre aware of food safety.

The Norwalk Health Department recognizes winners of the annual Lighthouse awards by showcasing a restaurant. The department planned to highlight Taste of Brasil on Friday afternoon but canceled the event because of the snowstorm the day before. Officials have tentatively rescheduled for Jan. 18, Closter said.

Pasquales Osteria, which was showcased by the health department in 2015, has retained the distinction and was among the 222 restaurants awarded based upon inspections done in 2017.

Every time they came out (for inspection), from the beginning, we always score a 99 to 100, said owner Pasquale Poccia. Anybody new  dishwasher or person in the kitchen  I always train them what I want: In this place you wash your hands.

Find the Norwalk Health Departments Lighthouse Restaurant Ratings at http://my.norwalkct.org/restaurantratings/.
Shuchi Sharma remembers how she once overheard a male colleague question whether a new mother at their company should have returned to work so soon.

Related: 4 Mistakes We All Make to Perpetuate Gender Bias

Sharma, now based in Washington, D.C., as the global head of gender intelligence for the software corporation SAP, knew the comment was well-intentioned. But, to her, it still carried the taint of gender bias. That mom was the major breadwinner in the family, Sharma told me in an email. And, like that male colleague, she needed to make choices for herself without worrying about her professional reputation as a new mother.

The story she tells is a perfect example of how gender stereotypes influence even well-meaning men. Despite the rush companies are making to embrace gender-equality programs, issues remain. Enter a new term to think about: gender intelligence.

The gender intelligence problem really is the fact that we are focusing on sameness, Barbara Annis, CEO and founder of the New York City-based Gender Intelligence Group, said by email. We have this egalitarian point of view, where we think men and women are the same, when actually were not.

According to gender intelligence theory, this emphasis on always being "equal" is why most gender-equality programs fail. By assuming men and women operate the same, respond the same, think the same, both sides are blind to each others skills, perceptions and experiences.

Instead, leaders should be focusing on gender intelligence to better educate men about what women bring to the table. This move may well move us toward a more accepting and collaborative workplace, where everyone is equally valued for who he or she is.

Related: You're Right, the 'System' Is Rigged Against You. Here's How to Hack It.

Still, how? Here are four steps to help men become more gender intelligent:

Step 1: Dig into differences.

In most cases, men and women have distinct ways of processing and communicating information.

For example, Annis, at the Gender Intelligence Group, pointed out that when brainstorming, women tend to be apt to make suggestions. Men, on the other hand, are more direct. As a result, a woman "suggests" an idea, then a man paraphrases it and believes hes reached the conclusion on his own. This leads to his unconsciously taking full credit for the idea.

Theres nothing wrong with that process: Two employees have collaborated together and come up with an idea. The problem is the end point, where it appears that the woman has added nothing to the idea.

This is where gender-intelligence training comes in. By teaching men -- and women -- about their differences, both become aware of what the other gender brings to the table. Men learn that when women talk, they arent rambling but rather leading to an idea. This allows everyone to better collaborate and feel equally important.

Step 2: Throw men into the issues.

Its important for women to develop their own support networks in the workplace. But when they're always excluded, men get left outside those discussions of womens issues.

G2 Crowd, a Chicago-based business software and services review site, recently began to rethink its womens groups. As a result, the site is switching from a model that works only on womens issues and prioritizing ways to get men more involved in the dialogue, too.

The more we allow for others to participate in the issues and topics, the more we see gender intelligence become core to our culture, chief customer officer Adrienne Weissman, said via email.

One easy way to do this is to bring men in on "ladies' lunches." Traditionally, these have been meetings where women in business get together and hear a female expert speak. But theres no reason men shouldnt participate in these events, too. They need to hear stories about the difficulties female colleagues are facing.

This can help them better understand, and become interested in, womens issues.

Step 3: Walk a mile in each other's shoes

When Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity, was in college, she took an internship at a bank. One of the executives was a family friend who she knew to be a good man. Yet, she was still shocked by his response when she told him where she was going to college.

When I told him, he exclaimed, I didn't know they let pretty girls into Princeton. Why, you're pretty enough to go to Ole Miss, and that is where you want to find a husband, now, isn't it?" Scott recalled in an email. He didn't realize how belittling what he was saying felt [to me].

She pointed out that for women, there's a particular issue when men lack gender intelligence: They dont know how to respond. Knowing that her boss was trying to pay her a compliment, would she have achieved anything by showing him the offense he caused?

But times have changed. Today, with more professional experience under her belt, Scott recommends improvisational training to teach people how to respond to such situations.

I recently spoke to a young woman who'd set up conversations in which men and women share scenarios of 'gender idiocy,' then brainstorm the best response, she said. This can help women know what to say when it happens next time. It can also help men know why some of the things they say are so harmful.

Step 4: Acknowledge missteps . . . even your own.

Often, awareness from male leaders can be the best way to increase gender intelligence. Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio, founder and president of leadership consultancy GreenGate Leadership in Boston, said he finds it helpful to admit when hes given in to gender bias.

On a couple of occasions, Ive had the presence of mind to back up and say something like, Im sorry, Peggy, for not paying enough attention to what you said a few minutes ago. Would you mind going back to the point you were making and telling us more?' he told me.

Related: 3 Reasons Why Gender Equality is an 'Everyone' Issue

By admitting to their mistakes, male leaders show that anyone can falter. And by making those admissions in public, they set a good example for their male employees. That kind of action points out that what a man said was wrong and teaches others a different way of behaving should a similar situation come up in the future.

Related:

Your Well-Intentioned Gender Equality Program is Missing 1 Crucial Piece

Getting to The Root of the Tech Industry's Gender Gap

#3 Ways Shepreneurs Can Inspire Entrepreneurs of the Future



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


A young man, originally from Worms, got a chance to preach recently in Palmer, something he always wanted to do.

On Dec. 31, A.J. Bader took the pulpit and preached to the members of St. Johns Lutheran Church. Everyone on hand had known him for years, so he considered it a privilege to be ministering to people who watched him grow up. He didnt always feel that comfortable, at least not at first.

Bader has also preached at Zion Lutheran in Worms twice in the past year. He said preaching at the church he grew up in, to people he has known his whole life, was intimidating at first.

I had butterflies going on, but once I opened my mouth, I was fine. He said the crowd the first time he preached at Zion was also much larger than he anticipated so that added to his nervousness.

I was expecting about 50 people, and close to 120 came, so that was a bit surprising.

Bader shared a secret he does to deal with his butterflies.

I say Psalm 19 to myself before I preach, and that always helps, he said.

Psalm 19 reads: Lord may the meditation of my heart, and words of my mouth be pleasing and acceptable in your sight.

Baders father, Shane Bader and his wife, Niki, live in rural Palmer. His mother, Steph Bader, lives in Grand Island. Growing up in rural Nebraska and being around farming, Bader said he loved it, but decided he would rather be doing ministry than farming.

I still own some cattle in St. Paul and love that, but cattle can feed a man for a day, where the holy ministry can feed a man for not only his lifetime, but for eternity.

From an early age, A.J. Bader knew he wanted to be in ministry. He said it was during confirmation class at Zion Lutheran Church in Worms that realized this dream.

I was in seventh grade, and Pastor Craig Niemeier was brand-new there. He had answers for all the biblical questions I asked him and that intrigued me, he said.

Niemeier said Bader was an eager confirmation student. He wouldve answered every question if I let him, Niemeier said.

He also said that Bader is a people person, and a caring person, other attributes important in ministry.

Niemeier recalls his first meeting with Bader.

The first time I met A.J. was the afternoon we moved to town and a lanky junior high student with a big smile confidently welcomed us to town. A.J. said, Hello! You must be Pastor Niemeier. Im A.J. Bader and we live across the street. Happy to have you here. He was a friendly young man who was at ease with people.

It was during that confirmation class that Bader began to mull over the idea of becoming a pastor.

Bader attended Zion Lutheran School from fourth to eighth grade, then went to Heartland Lutheran High School in Grand Island. It was during that time he met his future wife, Gretyl Bremer, whose father, Dan Bremer, is a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Grand Island.

Once I got associated with more area pastors, I kind of knew where I was going, he said.

It was about that time Bader got a sense of how much schooling he had to go through, but was willing to take the plunge.

Upon graduating from Heartland Lutheran in 2012, Bader attended Concordia University in Seward, where he majored in history with a minor in pre-seminary.

After graduating from Concordia, he entered Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Ind. There is also a seminary in St. Louis, but Bader said Indiana was the place for him.

I heard really good things about this school, and I am glad I went here, he said.

Now in his second year, things are not slowing down for Bader or his wife, Gretyl.

In April, I will have to fulfill my duty as vicarage somewhere I am called, so we will have to pack up and move for a year, he said.

It gets more intense for the Baders as the couple is expecting their first child in June. Bader will start his vicarage assignment in July.

Once the vicarage is over in July 2019, he will then pack up the family and move back to Fort Wayne for one more year of academic study, then he gets a call somewhere to begin his pastoral career.

Bader said with he and his wife both being from this area, they hope and plan to return to Nebraska when that time comes.

Currently Gretyl is teaching at a parochial school in Indiana, a call she took when he entered seminary school.

He said he considers God using him to do ministry as a blessing.

Besides still being in contact with both Pastor Niemeier and his father-in-law Pastor Bremer, he enjoys hunting with other men of ministry in the area.

Bader said he loves his journey but said his tallest obstacle so far has been finding the right words to say to the right situation, at any given time.

I go into a nursing home for example, and I have the residents approach me with their troubles, and I have to think quickly to say the right thing to comfort them in their time of need, he said.

Bader wanted to thank everybody for their support during his journey. Right now, he is working on some career goals, starting with the short term.

I want to get through my schooling and then settle down in a rural town in Nebraska and minister at a church here, he said. I dont want to be one of the guys who move around every three years.
HASTINGS  Adams County residents received a legislative update from State Senator Steve Halloran, and were able to voice their concerns, during a town hall Saturday evening.

The town hall, held at C3 Hotel and Convention Center, 2205 Osborne Drive East, was a private, members-only event sponsored by the Adams County Farm Bureau.

Lance Atwater, president of the Adams County Farm Bureau, said Saturday evenings town hall also allowed the organizations members to get an update from Halloran on the new legislative session. This gives our members an opportunity to be able to interact with Senator Halloran and be able to (voice) their concerns or issues they are facing, Atwater said. It allows them to get up one-on-one. It is important to us for our members to be able to have that opportunity to get to see Senator Halloran in person. That is why we try to create these opportunities.

Halloran told the roughly 20 people in attendance that last years legislative session was a longer 90-day session in which the Legislature developed its biannual budget and dealt with a $900 million shortfall. He said this session will be sort of a budget session as well, due to the state facing a $200 million shortfall.

Last session, a handful of senators who opposed the proposed budget argued the revenue projection was too high, Halloran said. It was somewhere around five percent growth in the economy in Nebraska for two years. They asked why you would want to spend X amount of dollars. So they came over, looked at the income side of it and said, Weve got to do something thats going to project the revenue to match that overspending.

Halloran added: Whether or not it is a reasonable expectation of projected revenue or not, that is what they ended up with. It turns out that it is not a revenue shortfall; it is too much spending.

Last year, Hallorans priority bill was LR 6, a resolution which called for a convention of states. Halloran said it is still in the legislature as a priority bill and can come back to the floor of the Legislature if it has 33 votes to pass.

This year, Halloran said his priority bill is the Higher Education Free Speech Accountability Act. The bill is in response to an incident that occurred on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus last fall between student Kaitlyn Mullen, a UNL English professor, and a graduate teaching assistant where Mullen was allegedly verbally abused by the latter two due to her conservative free speech.

What it does is it does not micro-manage the university. They have the right to develop their own policies, Halloran said. The legislature is responsible for making sure there is accountability. What this act does is it lays out the fundamental definitions of the first amendment and freedom speech.

It encourages the university to develop their own policies on campus and make sure those are enforced so that students and faculty have the liberty of freedom of speech.

Halloran also spoke to those in attendance about a petition drive proposed in the legislature to provide property tax relief. He said Senator Steve Erdman of Bayard has been instrumental in pushing the petition drive.

Basically, the concept in place is a 50-50 relationship between the state of Nebraska and Nebraska property owners, and public schools, Halloran said. How they are going to do that is that everything that is on your property tax statement for K-12 (education), 50 percent of that would be returned to you in the form of an income tax credit. If you do not have enough income tax liability, the balance would be a check.

During Saturdays town hall, Belva Junker of Juniata asked Halloran if he has heard anything about what is happening with the Hastings Regional Center property. The Regional Center shut its doors in 2007.

There was a $300,000 study done on it and the conclusion of the study was that it was probably more economical to demolish the building and build from scratch, Halloran said. It is a money issue right now.

Halloran added the state has a prison overpopulation problem and that Nebraska has the smallest percentage of beds available for incarcerated prisoners of all the surrounding states.

Weve got to build more prisons, Halloran said. If I had my wish, when it comes down to funding or building something for incarceration, I would rather re-establish the regional mental hospital concept.

Atwater said the Adams County Farm Bureau plans to host a coffee with the Senator event in the near future that will be open to the public.
My favorite example of chutzpah used to be the man who killed his parents and then, at his murder trial, threw himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. Hilarious in the way of black comedy, it denotes a complete lack of self-awareness.

This week, I got an even better example.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted out, The days of America looking the other way from the Iranian regimes oppression are over. America stands with the Iranian people.

In response, former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted, We stand with the Iranian people so much that we wont let them come here.

When I saw Powers tweet, I did a double take. Could this be the same woman who wrote A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide?

Why, yes, it was.

Could this also be the same woman who was our face and our voice at the United Nations during the destructive civil war in Syria, the one where Bashar al-Assad murdered his own people under the eyes of the western world after having crossed that red line President Barack Obama had drawn with eloquent, empty words?

Yup, one and the same.

And when I saw that her response to Sanders had garnered 29,000 likes and 9,000 retweets, I couldnt stop myself from tweeting back to her: Sorry, Ambassador Power, but your acts at the UN were in opposition to your moving book A Problem From Hell. As an attorney who daily handles asylum cases, I was disgusted with the Obama policy on Syria, where another Rwanda took place, and is still taking place.

What I really wanted to say was, Hey lady, youve got some nerve comparing a debatable immigration policy (with which I disagree, by the way) to your spineless abdication of responsibility and compassion for victims of genocide. You know, the ones you spent 600 pages writing about? The one that nabbed you a Pulitzer? Hello?

Of course, people never like to point out to progressive human rights activists the obvious shame of their hypocrisy.

And thats exactly what Power is being: hypocritical.

The fact that Iran was, and still is, a strategic ally of Syria cannot have been completely irrelevant to the U.S. failure to save thousands of innocent Syrian lives. Bombing Syria or otherwise acting to prevent Assad from gassing his own people clearly caused Obama a problem resolving that pesky nuclear squabble, but you would still expect the worlds preeminent expert on genocide to have opened her mouth, or resigned, when she saw that her boss was going to do absolutely nothing to save the innocent.

I think the reason Im so annoyed with Powers hypocritical tweet is that she, of all people, should know better.

The former ambassador spent a decade reporting from war zones and had visited war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She invested years studying the U.S. response to not only these horrific examples of inhumanity (where generations were lost) but other holocausts like the Cambodian killing fields, Saddam Husseins annihilation of the Kurds, the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottomans and, of course, the neutralization of Europes Jewish populations under Hitler. Add to this the fact that she was raised in Ireland at a time when Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other and her tweet becomes that much more embarrassing.

Thats because her boss did nothing to stop the murder in Syria, and it is not unreasonable to assume that it was because they wanted to seal that deal with Iran, the same country that is now cracking down on protesters with increasing brutality. Yes, Power did engage in a little have you no shame theatrics when Aleppo exploded, but it was too little, too late.

In a Wall Street Journal profile a few weeks before she left office, Power tried to excuse her diplomatic and moral malfeasance by saying, Theres lots of room, I think, for reflection on what we mightve done differently, but it is extremely difficult to believe that there was some panacea out there.

Thats a cop-out. The 2013 sarin gas attack in Damascus killed 1,500 people, more than 400 of whom were children. They didnt need a panacea, they needed the action promised by Obama, which never came. Power predicted that in her book when she wrote, We have all been bystanders to genocide.

One thing is certain.

For Samantha Power to try to shame Donald Trump for a flawed immigration policy when she herself was a bystander to genocide is chutzpah of the highest order.
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Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 07:47 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c03a58c 4 Editorial #Editorial,oil-and-gas,oil-price,#oil,#energy,energy,economic-growth,#EconomicGrowth,Jokowi,Jokowi-administration,#Jokowi Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo was highly praised nationally and internationally when in November 2014, after only one month in office, he slashed fuel subsidies by 34 percent. And again in January 2015, he drastically reformed the energy pricing policy by virtually floating domestic fuel prices using market mechanisms, thereby saving more than US$15 billion a year for more productive investment.

By just one stroke, Jokowi reduced the high fiscal sensitivity to oil prices and the exchange rate, bolstered budget flexibility and increased the scope for investment in infrastructure, one of his top priority programs.

But such bold reform was simply a piece of cake at that time because, international oil prices had plunged to around US$55/barrel in the third quarter of 2014 from over $110 in January 2014, and falling further to as low as $40 in early 2015. The relatively stable oil price below $50 during the first three years of his rule has enabled the President to accelerate infrastructure development.

But his strong commitment in stopping the hugely wasteful spending on fuel subsidies will be tested as oil prices have been steadily increasing since last year. Oil prices rose to an average of $50 last year, higher than the $45 assumed for 2017 budget calculations, thereby increasing fuel and electricity subsidies to Rp 97.6 trillion ($7.2 billion) or 9.7 percent more than the budget appropriation.

Yet oil prices will likely continue to increase this year because of robust economic growth in developed and emerging economies. Last week, oil prices rose to $60, higher than the $48 assumed for the 2018 budget estimate.

Raising fuel prices this year and next year is politically sensitive ahead of the direct elections in 171 regions in June and preparations for the presidential and legislative elections in 2019. Short-term political objectives may tempt the President to simply allow fuel subsidies to balloon in the hope that oil prices would again fall, thereby avoiding political noise and massive street protests that usually mar fuel price rises.

But such a policy stance would damage the credibility of the governments reform policy and would plant a fiscal time bomb for the next president. And judging by all political forecasts at present, Jokowi is still the strongest candidate for the next president. Moreover, we dont think Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati would agree on such a disastrous fiscal measure and may resort to resigning from the Cabinet if Jokowi stubbornly allowed fuel subsidies to explode to unmanageable levels.

The best compromise, therefore, is to cap the fuel subsidy at a fiscally-sustainable level, even to the point of having to raise subsidized fuel prices by up to 10-20 percent. But this adjustment should be backed up by a better system of targeted cash transfers to those who need them most, as the government has often done.

Doing nothing to cope with the risk of a ballooning fuel subsidy would not only would risk the President losing his most capable and credible finance minister but would also be disastrous for Jokowis political future and the longterm good of the countrys economy.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 12:43 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c043d44 4 People Veronica-Tan,basuki-tjahaja-purnama,divorce Free

A lawyer for Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama confirmed on Monday that the former Jakarta governor, who is in jail for blasphemy, had taken legal steps to divorce his wife, Veronica Tan.

The confirmation comes following a photo circulated online that apparently showed a formal divorce petition from Ahok being submitted on Sunday to the North Jakarta District Court.

We can confirm that Pak Ahok has filed for divorce from Ibu Veronica, Ahoks lawyer Josefina Agatha Syukur was quoted as saying in a kompas.com report on Monday.

Ahok has also reportedly filed for custody of their children.

Josefina said Ahok submitted the divorce petition to the North Jakarta District Court through his legal team led by Fifi Lety Indra, who is also his sister.

She declined to comment on the reason behind the divorce petition, saying that the matter was a personal one between Ahok and Veronica, and added that the divorce trial would not be open to the public.

The move has come as a shock to many, since the couple continued to display what appeared to be a warm relationship even after Ahok was sentenced to two years for blasphemy on May 9, 2017. Veronica also made headlines later that month, when she burst into tears at a press conference while reading out Ahoks letter explaining his reasons for not appealing the verdict.

Most recently, a photo of a smiling Veronica wishing her husband a happy birthday was posted last month on Ahoks official Instagram account. (dmr)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 17:02 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c04f4ad 1 Science & Tech Disney,Snow-White,Sleeping-Beauty,Sexual-assault Free

Those who dream of being awakened by true loves kiss from Prince Charming, just like in Disneys Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, might want to think twice.

According to foxnews.com, Prof. Kazue Muta of Osaka University said that princes from these fairy tales represented quasi-compulsive obscene sexual acts on an unconscious partner, or in layman's terms, had committed sexual assault on an unconscious person.

Back in early December 2017, Muta tweeted on the matter, garnering both positive and negative responses, and it was even picked up by Yahoo! JAPAN News. The gender studies and sociology professor then wrote an article for Womens Action Network to explain her stance to critics.

Read also: Thousands respond 'me too' to actress's Twitter prompt on sexual abuse

A post shared by  Pauli Pau  (@pauli._.pau) on Sep 10, 2016 at 8:39am PDT

One of the most common criticisms against Muta is that she had mixed up fiction and reality. The professor returned that fairy tales were a reflection of reality, explaining that literary criticism was often used to offer a different perspective through deep analysis of a fictional work.

The story of a princess who wakes up after being kissed by a prince, getting married to said prince and the couple living happily ever after could be viewed as a story of sexual assault if looked at from a different point of view.

Because the prince, however noble and handsome he was, kissed a stranger woman sleeping unconsciously in the forest without her consent, Muta said in the English translation of the article.

Apparently, she is not alone. According to independent.co.uk, last November a mother in Britain, Sarah Hall, urged that Sleeping Beauty be taken out from her sons elementary school curriculum, because it showed children that it was OK to kiss a sleeping woman. (wir/asw)
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Linkedin Sita W. Dewi (The Jakarta Post) Canberra  Mon, January 8, 2018 08:05 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c03b35f 4 Books leila-chudori,writer,Indonesian-writer,#writer,Laut-Bercerita,1998-tragedy,reformasi,human-rights-abuse,human-rights Free

Try to count them, I dare you, Tempo veteran journalist and author Leila S. Chudori responded in protest over an assertion that fictional stories on the 1965 coup and subsequent killings of members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were trending.

People said there were many such novels, but the truth is, out of 500 or 600 novels published in a year, only a small part focuses on the 1965 [tragedy], Leila said in Canberra recently.

Leila, who has just launched another book Laut Bercerita (The Sea Speaks His Name), recently visited Australia to discuss her latest work in sessions at the University of Melbournes Indonesia Forum and Australian National Universitys Indonesia Project. Previously, she published the award-winning novel Pulang (Homecoming), which focuses on the human impact of the 1965-1966 killings and their aftermath.

What makes them stand out is the fact that those books were well written and thus gained wide exposure, she added.

Leila gave credit to fellow authors like Laksmi Pamuntjak (Amba) and Eka Kurniawan (Beauty is a Wound) and to a more senior author, Ahmad Tohari (The Dancer), for publishing well-written books with the 1965 killings as the background. She further mentioned the influential works of filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and the digital community movement Ingat65 (Remember 65)  all of which have collectively broken the silence and ignorance on the issue in recent years.

They are all well-written and thought-provoking, she said.

But provoking discussion and shattering the status quo were not her main motive in choosing periods of political significance as the universe for her characters and stories. In Laut Bercerita, Leila follows the character of Biru Laut, a student activist who was kidnapped and eventually went missing in 1998, a few months prior to the downfall of Soeharto. The second half of the novel shifts the perspective to Asmara Jati, Lauts younger sister, who, along with other family members of kidnapped student activists, struggled to put the pieces of the puzzle together and find answers to their never-ending questions.

My forte has always been family stories. Politics, history, cuisine are all backdrops, she said, denying that she aimed to specialize on historical novels.

Despite their importance in the arts, popular works shedding light on sensitive issues like the 1965-1966 killings or forced disappearances in the late 1990s might not necessarily change things at the elite level.

Leila said some of the people, who had been involved in those tragedies, were in the government, adding that, unfortunately, the current politicians were cautious in handling the issues, although they were not connected to it in the past.

But most civilians have minimal knowledge of the issue. Furthermore, the perpetrators are still uber-sensitive [in speaking up about and acknowledging the past atrocities].

Laut Bercerita (The Sea Speaks His Name) by Leila S. Chudori (Penerbit KPG/File)

While doing research for her work, Leila encountered various kinds of characters and had to listen to their struggle in coping with the sorrow from pondering unanswered questions.

I interviewed so many people for Pulang and Laut Bercerita. The hardest thing for me was to listen to them sharing their grief: the torture they suffered, the longing of parents whose children had been kidnapped and so on. It was very difficult to listen to that, Leila recalled.

She finds the experience worthwhile.

Though fictional, Laut Bercerita was inspired by true stories of the victims, survivors and their families [...] As a journalist I can also write pieces on this issue, but still, our spaces are limited. [As an author] I want to create a totally different universe, which allows me and the readers to understand and interact with these characters, she said.

Danang Widoyoko, former student activist and former coordinator of Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), seconded the importance of fictional work inspired by historical political events in Indonesia.

A novel enlivens a story. The 1998 political event is widely understood as the year when Soeharto stepped down. But the novel tells the story of a character, of his father, his girlfriend, his life before activism and so on. It complements history textbooks.

Some social scientists argue that elite dispute was the driver of the regimes downfall, which is true, but it wouldnt have happened if it wasnt for student-led rallies. Without large-scale protests, Ginanjar wouldnt have resigned from his post, and Harmoko wouldnt have turned his back on Soeharto, Danang said, referring to former ministers Ginandjar Kartasasmita and Harmoko, who served in the last cabinet of the Soeharto regime.

He said the large rallies also didnt just happen like that  they were the culmination of small-scale rallies and prolonged student activism across the country.

In academia, elite dispute is the dependant variable. In the novel, the dependant variable is student activism, Danang added, highlighting the difference between scholarly and fictional work.

Following her latest book, Leila will push herself to the limit for her next projects.

My next work will focus on a culinary theme, she said with a chuckle. But dont think it will be a happy-go-lucky story. Its going to be a sad story, she added.

Leila also shared her excitement for her next big projects.

My long-term projects will include [writing] a prequel to Pulang and another historic novel that centers on a fictional kingdom during the Hindu period of Nusantara. I want to explore wayang and the society during that period  their lifestyle and so on, she said.
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Linkedin Luke Kawa (Bloomberg)  Mon, January 8, 2018 10:04 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c03e9bb 2 Science & Tech iPhone,smartphone,Apple,children,addiction Free

Two big shareholders of Apple Inc. are concerned that the entrancing qualities of the iPhone have fostered a public health crisis that could hurt children -- and the company as well.

In a letter to the smartphone maker dated Jan. 6, activist investor Jana Partners LLCand the California State Teachers Retirement System urged Apple to create ways for parents to restrict childrens access to their mobile phones. They also want the company to study the effects of heavy usage on mental health.

There is a growing body of evidence that, for at least some of the most frequent young users, this may be having unintentional negative consequences, according to the letter from the investors, who combined own about $2 billion in Apple shares. The growing societal unease is at some point is likely to impact even Apple.

Addressing this issue now will enhance long-term value for all shareholders, the letter said.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the letter, which was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

Read also: Should small children be banned from watching all screens?

Parental controls

Its a problem most companies would kill to have: Young people liking a product too much. But as smartphones become ubiquitous, government leaders and Silicon Valley alike have wrestled for ways to limit their inherent intrusiveness.

France, for instance, has moved to ban the use of smartphones in its primary and middle schools. Meanwhile, Android co-founder Andy Rubin is seeking to apply artificial intelligence to phones so that they perform relatively routine tasks without needing to be physically handled.

Apple already offers some parental controls, such as the Ask to Buy feature, which requires parental approval to buy goods and services. Restrictions can also be placed on access to some apps, content and data usage.

The activist pressure is the latest in a series of challenges for the tech giant. Last week, Cupertino, California-based Apple said that all of its Mac computers and iOS devices, which include both the iPhones and iPads, faced security vulnerabilities due to flawed chips made by Intel Corp. At the tail end of 2017, the company apologized to customers for software changes that resulted in older versions of its iPhones running slower than newly introduced editions.

 With assistance by Scott Deveau, and Alex Webb

Topics : iPhone smartphone Apple children addiction
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Linkedin News Desk (Japan News/Asia News Network) Tokyo  Mon, January 8, 2018 19:09 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c0541f5 2 Food Tokyo,restaurant,food,#food,Mirai-Shokudo Free

No money to pay for a meal? No problem - just work for 50 minutes.

That is the recipe to combat hunger for Ms Sekai Kobayashi, 33, a former engineer who will not turn away penniless customers at her restaurant Mirai Shokudo (translated as Future Eatery) in Tokyo.

"Instead, we offer meals in return for 50 minutes of labour at the restaurant. I use this system because I want to connect with hungry people who otherwise couldn't eat at restaurants because they don't have money."

There is no staff other than her at the eatery, which seats 12 at a counter.

Customers have the option of paying for food or earning a free meal by serving dishes, clearing tables and performing other tasks.

So far, more than 500 people, including university students, have opted to work for their meals to save money, among other reasons.

Those who contribute their labour can either dine for free or receive a free-meal coupon that can be deposited at the restaurant's entrance for anyone to use.

Ms Kobayashi opened the restaurant two years ago in the city's Jinbocho district, aiming for "a place where everyone is welcome and everyone fits in".

Read also: English restaurant looking for professional pizza taster

"Through various methods, I've also kept the business profitable," she said of her business, where the daily lunch special is priced at 900 yen (US$8).

"I dabbled in shop management as a university student. Each year at the university's annual festival, I ran a dimly lit cafe stocked with books," said Ms Kobayashi of her initial foray into the food and beverage (F&B) trade.

"The cafe won first prize in the festival popularity contest in all four years when I was a student. I even opened cafes at other school festivals," she added.

After turning 20, she worked at a bar in Shinjuku's Golden Gai - a district in Tokyo known for its cosy bars and pubs - and other places.

After graduating from university, however, she found a non-F&B job because a bar master told her that "it's not so bad to experience the outside world".

She worked as an engineer at IBM Japan, then moved to Cookpad, which runs a cooking recipe site.

The company had an in-office kitchen where everyone could prepare and eat meals.

Read also: These are the worlds 50 best restaurants

"My colleagues really liked the lunches I made for them. This led me to strongly consider opening my own restaurant," she recalled.

She enrolled for vocational training at a leading restaurant chain and other places before opening Mirai Shokudo.

But her engineering roots have not gone to waste.

"To manage my restaurant, I adopted an open-source model - a system through which software design is made available for free to the public so that everyone can improve upon it.

"I posted the restaurant's business plan and finances on its website so I can collect input from the public on how to make improvements. This information is also available for those who want to open their own restaurants.

"Sharing something with others means supporting those with ambition. That underpins my approach to work," she said.

A 56-year-old former teacher has regularly helped at the restaurant since the end of July.

"It's an exciting job because I work with a new person every time. It's interesting to develop a good rapport and work with others," said the woman, who hopes to carve out a new career in the food industry.

Topics :

This article appeared on The Japan News newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 18:55 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c053732 1 City motorcycle-ban,revocation,anies-baswedan Free

Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has welcomed a Supreme Court ruling lifting a ban on motorcycles on the city's main roads.



He said he would proceed with a plan to amend a gubernatorial decree that prohibited bikers from entering Jl. MH Thamrin from the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle to Jl. Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.



The decree, issued by former governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama, aims to make the roads, which are home to embassies and government buildings, look tidier and safer, as well as reduce traffic jams in the area.



The court has yet to submit a copy of the ruling to the city administration.

It means that we are doing something based on the principles of justice," Anies said on Monday as quoted by kompas.com.

Anies had frequently voiced his objections to the restriction, saying that it disadvantaged small and medium businesses offering goods along the road.



"We have always said that we want equal opportunities. Jakarta doesn't belong to a certain group, but to all. Thus, the ruling strengthens our idea," Anies added.



The court issued the ruling on Dec. 20 after app-based ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers Yuliansah Hamid and Diki Iskandar, who are members of the Online Drivers Communication Forum (FKPO), filed an appeal in September 2017 to review a 2014 gubernatorial decree on motorcycle restrictions.



The court said the regulation contravened the 1999 Human Rights Law because roads should be accessible to all. (fac)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 15:48 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c04cbd0 4 Business bali,hoax,competitions,Mount-Agung Free

The Bali provincial administration has accused countries that have destinations similar to Bali of spreading hoaxes about the impact of the volcanic activity at Mount Agung in trying benefit from recent disruption.

While volcanic activity at Mount Agung has been declining, they [other countries] spread [false] information, claiming that Bali is a dangerous place to visit, said the head of Bali Development Planning Agency (Bappeda) I Putu Astawa in Sanur, Bali, on Monday as reported by kompas.com.

The countries of our competitors spread [misleading information]. It has been building a bad image about Bali, said Putu.

Read also: Bali packed with tourists on Christmas day despite volcanic eruptions

Therefore, he called on the government to counter these hoaxes by spreading real information about Bali all over the globe.

He called on those involved in tourism to take part in spreading positive news about Bali.

The National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) on Jan. 4 narrowed the danger area surrounding the volcano to six kilometers from Mount Agung's crater, from the previous 10 km. However, the agency still maintains the highest alert status (Level 4) for the volcano.

We have to jointly counter false information to explain the real conditions in Bali. In fact, volcanic activity is declining, he added.

Mount Agung erupted in late November, spreading volcanic ash to nearby areas and forcing I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport and Lombok International Airports to close for several days.

BNPB said 70,610 people were being accommodated at 240 displaced person shelters, while many others have been allowed to return to their houses. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 12:43 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c043870 4 Business 200-kilometer-lrt-projct,jakarta,Budi-Karya-Sumadi,comments Free

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi has expressed support for a proposal from PT Ratu Prabu Energi to develop a 200-kilometer light rapid transit (LRT) project with a US$200 billion investment value in Jakarta.

Actually, Ratu Prabu conveyed the plan to us a year ago. Basically, the government gives privates companies the opportunity to carry out investments, Budi said during his visit to Tanjung Priok Port in North Jakarta on Sunday as reported by kompas.com.

The government welcomed any investments in the infrastructure project because the state allocated a limited amount of funds for infrastructure, he added.

However, Budi said Ratu Prabu had to submit a concrete proposal to ensure the project would be in line with the government's transportation master plan for the city.

Read also: Jakarta considering US$25 billion LRT proposal: Sandiaga

Last week, Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno said the city administration was considering Ratu Prabu's proposal.

He said the project would be a business-to-business scheme entirely without government guarantees and that it would be implemented between 2020 and 2025.

Sandiaga said the city administration would carry out a comprehensive feasibility study on the project. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 21:42 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c056e40 1 City punk,apprehension Free

Dozens of teenagers, identified as itinerant street kids aged 13 to 16 from Surabaya in East Java and Ternate in North Maluku, were reportedly apprehended on Monday for antisocial behavior on Jl. Pramuka in East Jakarta.

East Jakarta Social Agency head Benny Martha said the 13 teenagers were apprehended following a report that the group had aggressively asked for donations from residents while busking.

The men, who could not show their ID cards, came to Jakarta to meet their friends, Benny said.

"They had been searching for their friends in Jakarta for two days. After they could not find them, they busked in several spots," Benny said on Monday in a written statement.

Benny said the teenagers were now being housed at Cipayung Social House in East Jakarta and would be sent back to their respective hometowns. (fac)

Topics : punk apprehension
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) New York, United States  Mon, January 8, 2018 20:18 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c0556d6 2 World trump,fire,accident Free

The New York fire department has responded to a blaze at Trump Tower on Monday morning local time.

News footage showed a small fire broke out on the roof of Trump Tower and that firefighters could be seen on the roof of the skyscraper, at East 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The fire department was quoted by the New York Daily News as saying that the blaze broke out in the buildings heating and cooling system.

NYPD was alerted to a fire on the Trump Tower roof this morning (video via @constanandy) pic.twitter.com/vXn8Q59Sg6  UPROXX News (@UPROXXNews) January 8, 2018

It also reported that firefighters on the scene quickly knocked the fire back, but they are currently making sure it didnt spread.

The newspaper's website reported that no injuries were immediately reported, and that President Donald Trump was in Washington at the time of the fire.

Topics : trump fire accident
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 19:34 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c0551a3 1 Politics police-generals,KPU,National-Police Free

Police generals seeking candidacy in the 2018 simultaneous regional elections have been told to resign from the force once the General Elections Commission (KPU) confirms their eligibility, a spokesman for the force has said.

They have yet to resign. They will after the election commission verifies their registration on Feb. 12, National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Setyo Wasisto said on Monday as quoted by Antara news agency.

Setyo dismissed concerns that the generals would abuse their authority to win votes during the campaign period as the National Police had transferred them to nonstrategic posts. Our internal affairs division [Propam] will also look [into possible abuses of authority during the election.

Three police generals are set to run in this years regional election, namely former West Java Police chief Insp. Gen. Anton Charliyan, former National Police Mobile Brigade commander Insp. Gen. Murad Ismail and former East Kalimantan Police chief Insp. Gen. Safaruddin.

Anton is set to run as a deputy governor candidate in West Java alongside former House of Representatives lawmaker Tubagus Hasanuddin. The pair is backed by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

Meanwhile, Murad and running mate Barnabas Orno are supported by the PDI-P and two other parties, the NasDem Party and National Awakening Party (PKB), in the Maluku gubernatorial election. Safaruddin is also backed by the PDI-P as an East Kalimantan gubernatorial candidate, although his running mate has yet to be announced. (dmr)
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) London, United Kingdom  Mon, January 8, 2018 13:41 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c047273 2 World Brexit,Theresa-May,Cabinet-reshuffle Free

British Prime Minister Theresa May will begin reshuffling her cabinet Monday in a bid to reassert authority after a torrid 2017 in which she lost her working majority and several ministers to scandals.

The long-awaited shake-up arrives ahead of another year of potentially bruising battles over Brexit, as talks with the European Union enter a key new phase amid continued divisions in the Conservative party.

It also comes as the prime minister tries to reset her leadership in the face of a resurgent opposition Labour party, which exceeded expectations in the snap election May called -- and nearly lost -- last summer.

Labour has started the new year attacking her government's handling of the crisis-hit health service and railways.

The reshuffle is not expected to result in any high-profile sackings, with foreign minister and Brexit proponent Boris Johnson, pro-EU finance minister Philip Hammond and Brexit Secretary David Davis all set to keep their jobs.

May has limited political capital for bold moves and cannot afford to upset the pro- and anti-EU balance of her cabinet following the loss of her parliamentary majority in the last election and persistent internal turmoil over Brexit and her leadership.

The reboot is nonetheless predicted to be the biggest overhaul of her team since she took power in July 2016, with reports of up to a quarter of cabinet roles impacted.

Several ministers may receive promotions, while a handful of MPs are anticipated to join the cabinet.

The Daily Telegraph reported that May will name a "cabinet minister for no deal" to be based alongside Davis in the department for exiting the EU.

The new minister will provide regular updates on preparation for leaving the bloc without a trade deal and have "a significant budget", the paper said.

The role was an attempt to show Brussels that London "was serious about leaving the EU without a deal if talks fail", it added.

The need for a reshuffle grew as deputy prime minister Damian Green stepped down last month over a pornography scandal, following the autumn departures of ministers Michael Fallon and Priti Patel, who became embroiled in separate controversies.

May confirmed on Sunday that she would be making ministerial changes, but refused to disclose details.

"Damian Green's departure before Christmas means that some changes do have to be made, and I will be making some changes," she told the BBC. "It will be soon."

Last year's flurry of high-profile resignations triggered repeated calls for a reshuffle, which until now went unheeded.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 18:22 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c052147 1 City Ragunan-zoo,e-ticketing Free

Ragunan Zoo management in South Jakarta has complained about a plan to implement an e-ticketing system supported by the JakOne Card, an e-money mobile app from city-owned Bank DKI.

Ragunan head Dina Himawati has particularly objected to a point that requires the zoo to deposit Rp 20 billion (US$1.49 million) to Bank DKI for the implementation of the system.

"We have no idea how the plan works. The money is deposited to the bank, in our account. We feel like the Rp 20 billion is used for the operation of the card, including for top-up funds," Dina said at the City Council building in Central Jakarta as quoted by kompas.com.

Dina said the money was needed by the zoo, particularly in an emergency when the city administration suffered a deficit. She added that a change in regulation may be needed.



"Cooperation is meant to benefit both sides. There are many things to be evaluated," she said.



Two types of JakOne cards are offered to visitors. The first one displays Ragunan's animals and is priced at Rp 30,000, containing Rp 20,000 credit balance. The second one displays animation, and is priced at Rp 60,000 with Rp 50,000 credit balance.



The City Councils Commission C chairman, Santoso, said the agreement only benefited Bank DKI.

In October, businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, the younger brother of Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto, claimed that Governor Anies Baswedan, backed by the Gerindra in the gubernatorial election, had appointed him as the zoos supervisory boards head. (fac)
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Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, January 8, 2018 15:34 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c04b6a8 1 City Sandiaga-Uno,Rini-Soemarno,project Free

Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno discussed various infrastructure projects with State-Owned Enterprises Minister Rini Soemarno during a morning jog near the National Monument (Monas) in Central Jakarta on Monday morning.

Our priority is to develop areas with a mixed-use concept to create affordable houses for low-income Jakartans, Rini told reporters after the jog.

Rini added that they also talked about the possibility of collaboration between city-owned companies (BUMD) and state-owned companies (BUMN).

They also discussed the development of transit-oriented development (TOD) apartments at Jakarta train stations.

The construction of TOD apartments began at Tanjung Barat Station in South Jakarta and Pondok Cina Station in Depok, West Java. A third construction project at Senen Station in Central Jakarta is being carried out by state-owned housing developer PT Perumnas. (dmr)
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Linkedin Glen Carey, Vivian Nereim and Zainab Fattah (Bloomberg) Riyadh  Mon, January 8, 2018 08:34 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c03c7ee 2 Politics Saudi-Arabia,royal-crackdown,Prince Free

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans high-speed U-turn on state handouts suggests hes betting on the backing of ordinary citizens rather than traditional pillars of support as he consolidates power.

It took less than a week of Saudis grousing on social media and TV for authorities to announce theyd plow billions of riyals into peoples pockets to help offset government-initiated price increases. That sidestepped a mainstay of the princes plan to revamp the economy in part by weaning citizens off government largesse, indicating that consistency in fiscal policy isnt his top priority right now.

During his swift rise to power, the kingdoms 32-year-old de facto leader has swept aside rivals, arrested senior royals and billionaires -- including 11 princes detained on Thursday -- and defied the ultra-conservative religious establishment by letting women drive. Thats left him reliant on those Saudis eager for social change but struggling with austerity measures needed to achieve his vision of turning Saudi Arabia into a global investment hub no longer reliant on oil.

The crown prince cant afford to alienate his young constituency, said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. Its not just about economic reforms. Its also about the consolidation of the new leaderships social base and the opposition from very entrenched interests by some members of the royal family.

Grumbling

King Salman on Saturday ordered extra pay for Saudi government workers and soldiers this year after the Jan. 1 introduction of value-added taxation and a surge in fuel prices stirred grumbling among citizens. The cost to the state: more than 50 billion riyals ($13.3 billion), Saud Al-Qahtani, an adviser to the royal court, said on his Twitter account.

Saudis privately expressed mixed feelings about the about-face, with some overjoyed, and others finding it too stingy or worried about its limited duration. Some said the sudden swerve -- one of several since the prince announced his Vision 2030 blueprint for reordering the economy nearly two years ago -- made them question the governments strategy.

Patriotic hashtags including, We are all Salman, we are all Mohammed, began trending on Twitter after the orders, and local newspapers praised the kingdoms leadership.

The benchmark Tadawul All Share Index advanced 0.6 percent at the close in Riyadh, trailing markets in Kuwait and Qatar. The index was little changed in 2017, compared with a 34 percent gain for the MSCI Emerging Market Index.

Real Change

Paul Sullivan, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University in Washington, saw a potential for unrest.

The princes base seems to be a younger generation who are hoping for better lives and real change, Sullivan said. Hope is a great thing to give to people, but dashing it or giving a sense it really will not happen is a well-proven source of instability and anger.

During times of past political uncertainty, Saudi Arabias autocratic leaders lavished handouts on their citizens. When the so-called Arab Spring uprisings were toppling long-entrenched leaders across the Middle East in 2011, then King Abdullah announced more than $100 billion for housing, soldiers and religious groups to prevent unrest from spreading into the Arab worlds largest economy.

What makes things different now is that Prince Mohammed has taken steps against other royals and their supporters in ways previous monarchs never did. In November, authorities swept up dozens of Saudi Arabias richest and most influential people, including princes and government ministers, accusing them of corruption. Critics accused him of trumping up allegations to sideline critics in a quest for one-man rule.

Eleven Princes

The anti-graft drive resonated with Saudis who are bearing the brunt of low oil prices and were complaining, privately and on social media, that the kingdoms elite are allowed to act with impunity. The countrys attorney general tapped into that resentment Saturday when he warned that no one was above the law, including 11 princes arrested for protesting the states decision to stop paying their utility bills.

Pointedly, the princes were sent to the maximum-security al-Haer prison pending their trial -- and not the luxurious Ritz-Carlton Hotel that had housed many rounded up in the anti-corruption sweep.

The weekend largesse is just the latest manifestation of Prince Mohammeds struggle to implement his proposed economic overhaul while avoiding popular discontent.

In 2016, the water minister was sacked following a public outcry over a surge in water prices, which came close on the heels of the governments first round of subsidy cuts. The following year, the king reversed cuts to public sector benefits and allowances after complaints over the measures provoked calls on social media for street protests in several cities.

First Step

Saudi economist Ihsan Bu-Hulaiga said he doesnt see the new handouts as a reversal of government policy, but more of a fine-tuning. Imagine yourself doing something for the first time, he said. Its tricky. This is the first step. Well see how the economy will unfold.

The government spent much of last year designing a program supposed to cushion the impact of fiscal reforms, a so-called Citizens Account. It gave low- and middle-income families monthly cash transfers to make up for the rise in prices. Saudis complained that they needed more.

Prince Mohammed is popular and has the support of the king, but his popularity is very fragile because its built on expectations which are both significant and havent been managed, said James Dorsey, a Middle East specialist at Singapores Nanyang Technological University.

Its unlikely that he will be able to fulfill those expectations within the timeline that people expects him to. Therefore he has to manage in order to maintain popularity, Dorsey said.
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Linkedin Shaffiq Idris Alkhatib (The Straits Times/ANN) Singapore  Mon, January 8, 2018 17:42 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c050273 2 SE Asia Singapore,domestic-abuse,maid Free

A maid was subjected to a range of abuse by her employers, including physical assault and being forced to pour boiling water on her own shoulder, a Singaporean court heard on Monday.

It was alleged that one of the employers caused the maid to drink water mixed with floor cleaner and made the maid knock her own head on the floor.

Linda Seah Lei Sie, 38, is additionally accused of pulling the maid's hair and shaking her until "quite a lot" of hair fell out and hitting her with a mobile phone, causing bruising on her forehead, left eye and left hand.

Seah, who is the "boss" at her husband's Anew Me Beauty Aesthetic salon, is accused of physically abusing Myanmar national Phyu Phyu Mar multiple times.

She faces six charges in all, the court heard on Monday, the first day of the trial.

Seah's husband Lim Toon Leng, 43, faces one assault charge. He is accused of punching the maid's forehead twice.

The couple allegedly committed the offenses in their Punggol Walk flat between August and October 2016.

Former employee Lee Lee Yen told the court that she worked as a nutritionist at Anew Me between December 2015 and October 2016.

Lee, who is now an insurance agent, said Seah first brought Phyu Phyu Mar to their workplace in February 2016. The maid performed jobs like cleaning windows and dusting shelves.

"She was quite chatty. She had long hair and looked a bit chubby," Lee said.

She testified that the maid had slimmed down by September 2016 and that she complained of being hungry. Lee said she gave her some biscuits and drinks, which were consumed "at a very fast speed".

On Oct 14 , 2016, Lee noticed that the maid had a swollen left eye and a bruise around it. When asked about this, the maid showed her an injury on her left shoulder.

Lee told District Judge Olivia Low: "It was a hot-water scalding mark. It was red and the skin was starting to peel off... She told me Linda... made her pour hot water onto herself."

Lee alerted the police later that evening, the court heard.

Seah is represented by lawyer Kasturibai Manickam while Lim's lawyer is T. U. Naidu.

When cross-examined by Naidu, Lee said that Phyu Phyu Mar did not mention his client in her allegations.

The trial resumes on Monday afternoon.

Offenders convicted of maid abuse can be jailed for up to three years and fined up to $7,500.
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Linkedin News Desk (China Daily/Asia News Network) Beijing  Mon, January 8, 2018 19:37 1775 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c055342 2 News Hong-Kong,Macau,bridge,Zhuhai Free

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) will open in the second quarter this year (2018), people familiar with the matter told China Daily.

Although a precise date has not been fixed, the bridge will start services officially around May to June, according to the sources.

The final commissioning date will partially depend on the construction progress of port facilities in Zhuhai and Hong Kong, the sources said.

The Macau checkpoint is more likely to be completed earlier considering its rate of progress, according to the sources.

Meanwhile, policies for cross-border traffic have yet to be reached among the governments of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Guangdong province and the Macau SAR.

This includes the details of the cross-administration management mechanism such as customs arrangements, emergency rescue plans and cross-border car insurance arrangements.

Read also: Dutch open 'world's first 3D-printed bridge'

The central government will confirm the date later, according to the sources.

Recently, chief engineer of the HZMB Authority Su Quanke said that all work on the principal section - a 29.6km bridge-island-tunnel complex-is expected to be completed in early February and the contractors will conduct an official handover ceremony.

Except for the principal section, the bridge also consists of ports and link roads in Zhuhai and the Macau and Hong Kong SARs. Those works are conducted by the respective governments.

The 55km bridge, 20 times the length of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, connects Hong Kong in the east of the Pearl River Estuary with Macau and Zhuhai in the west.

Construction of the bridge began in 2009. Once operational, it will shorten the four-hour drive from Hong Kong to Zhuhai to less than an hour and become the first completed infrastructure project built and managed jointly by the governments of Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau.

Topics :

This article appeared on the China Daily newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
Over the weekend, State Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou joined NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer to speak out about heat outages at NYCHA complexes during last weeks cold snap. Stringer announced hes launching a new audit of the New York City Housing Authority over the issue.

In a press release on Saturday, Stringer called the situation a crisis. We cannot be a city, he said, in which those with luxury towers are living in comfort, while those across the street in NYCHA complexes are deprived of heat and hot water. Unfortunately, heating breakdowns happen year after year  and the bureaucracy continues to play whack-a-mole with short-term fixes instead of permanent solutions. We need to address this maintenance mess now, because our seniors, children, and families are struggling.

According to the comptrollers initial survey of Department of Buildings records, the rate of defective boilers in NYCHA complexes is five times the citywide average (39.5%). The new audit will be the comptrollers ninth of the hosuing authority.

Stringer said there have been complaints about a lack of heat and hot water in more than 30 complexes. Among those developments on the Lower East Side are: the Jacob Riis Houses, the La Guardia Houses and Lower East Side Rehab.

In a statement, Niou said, I have been receiving constituent reports about heat outages throughout NYCHA developments on the Lower East Side (for several weeks). There are 90-year-old seniors, new born children, and dozens of families in my district impacted by these outages, and its critical that NYCHA find long term solutions to these heating problems.

Channel 2 visited the La Guardia Houses to see how residents were coping:

With socks, robes and layers of clothing on, it was survival gear inside one tenants no-heat apartment Saturday Its cold, yeah, she said. Neighbor Yvonne DeLeon shared a photo of her 2-month-old grandson, Liam Gonzalez, and the electric space heater used to save him from injury, even death, from the cold inside the Lower East Side tower operated by NYCHA. Sometimes it just doesnt work, Linda Cherry said.

NYCHA spokesperson Jasmine Blake told Channel 4, Our staff is working 24/7 to combat this extraordinary cold spell that has battered the city. This weekend we are focused on ensuring heat is on in all NYCHA developments. NYCHA says about $2 billion is required to repair boilers in public housing complexes across the city.

Over the last few days across the five boroughs, weve seen reports from more than 30 NYCHA complexes that tenants are without heat or hot water. Its completely unacceptable. Our children, our seniors, our neighbors  they need permanent solutions, instead of band-aid fixes. pic.twitter.com/Br3eiNting  Scott M. Stringer (@NYCComptroller) January 6, 2018
I met Lucy at a Cosmopolitan event last year where I recognised her as a familiar face. As it turned out, we had already connected on LinkedIn - contacts are important kids! The speakers, Editor-in-Chief Farrah Storr and Beauty Director Ingeborg van Lotringen, then relayed an amazing anecdote about Lucy in which they explained how Lucy would work weekdays at Cosmopolitan HQ as an intern, then travel home to work at McDonald's. I remember thinking to myself, 'Now this girl is exactly who our readers want to hear about! This girl is such a boss!'So, of course in true Joanna fashion and grabbed her during the talk to learn more about her journey into the world of magazine journalism.Oh god, so much. As far as skincare goes Id say Hyaluronic Acid, its super hydrating and is a must in my day and nighttime routines. Ive noticed such a difference in my skin since using it. I like NIOD Multi-Molecular Hyaluronic Complex and Medik8 Hydr8 B5. Makeup-wise, Id say probably foundation: I know its not very exciting, but I do like putting new ones to the test and seeing how they wear. At the minute Im really liking Rimmel Lasting Finish Breathable, its medium coverage and is so easy to apply and blend. Im also a fan of Huda Beauty #FauxFilter  I initially thought itd be too much for me, and although it is full coverage, it doesnt feel too heavy on my skin. Im a big fan!You know, beauty journalism was never my first choice. Until I did my first internship I didnt even realise it was an actual, legitimate career. At one point I wanted to be a lawyer, then I did law at A-Level and realised I probably wasnt clever enough. I did English Literature and Language too  Id always enjoyed reading, but when it came to choosing a degree I decided I didnt want to be told what books to read, I didnt want the fun to be sucked out of something I liked doing  probably because Im stubborn. So then somehow I settled on journalism  I figured it was like English but different. I looked at various degree courses up and down the country and ended up settling on single honours journalism at De Montfort University in Leicester. It was NCTJ accredited (not that I ever passed the exams I needed for that qualification ) and seemed like the best option. It was very newspaper focused though and I remember in my first lecture we were asked where we saw ourselves in five years. I said, Living in London and working at a glossy magazine, and I got laughed at. At that point, I didnt know what or who I wanted to work for or write about, I just knew I didnt want to work at a newspaper. Id always had an interest in beauty, Id spend all my money in beauty halls and on expensive makeup and then, during my third year, I saw a beauty internship at Psychologies magazine advertised. I went down to London for an interview and ended up being given this four-week placement on the beauty desk and I absolutely loved it. It was in those four weeks that I realised it was a career in beauty journalism I wanted to pursue.I think getting my job at Cosmopolitan is a pretty big achievement  it took a while but I got there in the end. I remember my dad saying to me after I graduated that I couldnt wait for the dream job at Cosmo to come along  that has to be the end goal, but I was dead set on working here, I wanted nothing more and I made it happen through hard work and determination. There was definitely an element of being in the right place at the right time, but it didnt get handed to me on a plate.Be patient, work hard, make yourself indispensable, and get as much experience under your belt as you can. I know its not ideal, but it doesnt matter how many degrees or qualifications you have, you still have to work your way up and know that everybody in this industry has done unpaid work at one point. Theres absolutely no way you can go into a mid-level position in journalism without being a junior first. Use your initiative, make contacts but dont pester people. If youre on work experience then be aware that there might not always be jobs for you to do. Read the situation around you: is everyone on the team on deadline? Offer to make them tea or coffee, but dont constantly ask for things to do. The sign of a good intern is having the ability to make themselves busy and being on hand and happy to help when there is something that comes up.I think its really sad! I really do think print and digital can co-exist, it just has to be done in the right way. This explosion of influencers and digital in general has happened so quickly that nobody really knows whats happening or whats right and whats wrong. Theres no denying that people are buying fewer magazines, but with so many streams of content coming at consumers from all angles, you have to make sure you stand out. Why should people pay for content when they can get it online for free? Thats really why I love writing for Cosmo, in 2015 the whole magazine had a redesign and changed its direction. Our editor, Farrah, brought back long-form journalism we started being able to write first-person features. I think thats what people want: people dont go to magazines for bitesize bits of content and makeup tips theyve read a million times before. They want fresh, inspirational, relatable and exciting features that are actually interesting to read, that tell them something new and that really make them think. And thats where a lot of print magazines are going wrong. Theyre shooting themselves in the foot by trying to replicate whats successful online, but, sadly, thats never really going to work.I honestly dont know. Id like to think Ill still be working in beauty, probably still in London, but I have no idea doing what or where at. Hopefully, Ill be happy though, it sounds cheesy but thats ultimately whats important.

Anything else you would like to add?

Shorthand isnt the be all and end all! Ill probably get frowned upon for saying this, but I was told for three years that Id never get a job without it. It literally caused me so many sleepless nights, I hated it, I never passed the exam (I think I failed it more than once actually) and look at me now! Ive interviewed countless celebrities and never once has my dictaphone let me down

Follow Lucy on Instagram here.
from the link:



''UNRWA is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from UN member states, and in 2016, the US funded almost 30 percent of UNRWAs budget, by providing over $368 million. The total amount it has received from the US since 1994 has run up to $5 billion.''





Easy solution - a one state solution. No more refugees, no more special allocations or refugee crises.



Many right wingers are obsessed with the idea of returning refugees to the Middle East. Strangely, they share no such objection to Palestinian refugees.
The 2015 documentary is *finally* on Netflix. After the Taliban tries to kill her for speaking out on behalf of girls' education, Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai emerges as a leading advocate for children's rights and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Missed Steven Spielbergs take on the Roald Dahl classic in 2016? No worries, its headed to Netflix this January. 10-year-old Sophie makes pals with a giant, who happens to be  you guessed it!  big and friendly. Adventure inevitably ensues.

Thought Robert Pattinson peaked with Twilight? Well you were probably right, but this film is still decent. After a botched bank robbery lands his younger brother in prison, Constantine "Connie" Nikas (RPattz) embarks on a twisted odyssey through the city's underworld in an increasingly desperate - and dangerous - attempt to get brother Nick out of jail.

This 2014 film was a hit  and for a good reason. Realising that they share common foes in Margaret Thatcher, the police and the conservative press, London-based gays and lesbians lend their support to striking coal miners in 1984 Wales.

Its more of the same in the second film of the Hostel series. Beth, Lorna and Whitney decide to take a weekend excursion in Italy. Lured from their intended destination by a beautiful acquaintance, the women anticipate a stay at a luxurious spa. Instead, they become pawns in a grisly game designed to entertain wealthy deviants from around the world.
If youre 20 years old you can grab a free YO! sushi dish today  and no, theres no catch.

The offer comes as Japanese 20 year olds celebrate their national Coming of Age Day  because yes, in Japan 20 is the new 21.

Coming of Age Day is an annual holiday where the countrys youth celebrate turning 20 and becoming official adults in the eyes of the Japanese community.

20-year-old girls enjoying their Coming of Age day in Japan. Floral outfits are not compulsory for your visit.

To commemorate this centuries-old ceremony YO! is bringing the party to the UK by offering 20 year olds a FREE dish on Monday 8th January at selected restaurants nationwide.

Just hop along to your local YO!, prove that youre 20, and claim a complimentary blue plate of your choice. Favourites include Chicken Katsu Curry, California Roll and Vegetable Yakisoba.

If youre not 20, dont fear - YO! has launched the MAKE IT at YO! resolution menu that features 47 dishes all priced at just 2.80 each at selected sites until 19th January.

Perfect for a light January lunch, in our opinion.

For terms and conditions visit
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Rewind back to its origins and its birthplace: London. It started as the sound of the citys tower blocks and estates, of pirate radio, grainy videos and bedroom studios, of sweaty clashes and raves. Grime began as the sound of Londons underground. Today you wont be hard tasked to find a good grime night in London. Here are some of the top ones currently running in the city, the best venues to check out, and where to cop the latest records...588a Kingsland Rd, London, E8 4AHIf you want an idea of what to expect at a rave at Visions, check out Skeptas music video for his track Man. Joined by the likes of Lethal Bizzle, Chip, Shorty and Jammer, Skepta shot his video in this Dalston basement. Here you can catch major talent in an intimate setting. The clubs mad energy and 6am licence will have you raving until the early hours. Entry is guest list only, so make sure to send names over to their Facebook page before 8pm.91 Kingsland High St, Dalston, London E8 2PBAnother one in Dalston, this place has hosted some of the hottest (figuratively and also like literally, sweltering hot) grime nights. Look out for specialist nights, but their other events are worth checking out too. I hear they now have air con.100 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6JQWhen you hear MCs like Skepta namecheck Ace Hotel on their tracks, its the basement bar underneath the hotel theyre talking about. From the outside youd never believe it, but this intimate club has hosted some of the sickest raves in recent times.36 Stoke Newington Rd, Dalston, London N16 7XJLocated in the vibrant district of Stoke Newington, this basement club has a reputation for putting on great nights. The place gets packed quickly but the sweaty crowds, dim lighting and smoke machines only add to the vibes. The club is great for checking out new talent and regularly hosts high-profile acts like Slimzee, Wookie and Youngsta.Not your typical grime night, Boxed shifts the attention away from MCs and instead focuses on producers as electronic artists in their own right. Through their events, radio take-overs and label, Boxed have played a major role in helping establish grime as a club genre. Synonymous with experimental grime, you can expect appearances from the genre's most promising upcoming talent and some of the biggest names in the scene.If Mike Skinners involved, you know its going to be good. Not strictly a grime night, Tonga is run by Skinner and Mancunian clubbing force, Murckage Dave. Tonga keeps the crowds small but the music loud with tickets usually selling out fast. Skinner says party bass is their music policy, playing a mix of grime, rap, trap and the darker realms of house. The likes of Kano, Big Narstie and Giggs have been known to make appearances. Expect banger after banger and good vibes.Created by Wiley back in the day, Eski Dance brings together grimes biggest names and freshest talent. The scenes first event of such size, the early raves are stuff of legend. Showcasing the best of the best, you never know exactly whos going to turn up but you can guarantee therell be mad energy.Head to Farringdon for FabricLive on the last Friday of the month. The renowned venue has hosted some legendary gigs with the best talent, packed pumping rooms and the sickest sound system. Check their website to see whos performing. Theyre all about that bass so expect the hottest names in grime as well as dubstep, DnB, bassline and garage.352 Lower Addiscombe Rd, Croydon CR0 7AFDnR Vinyl specialise in UK garage, grime and dubstep. The shop in Croydon is a goldmine for those looking for reasonably-priced, second-hand records. Here you can find the classics as well as some real rarities. The staff really, really know their stuff. Theyre friendly and helpful, happy to pick out some recommendations or track down records that are harder to find.52 Eden St, Kingston upon Thames KT1 1EEYoull find a fair selection of new grime records and CDs at Banquet Records but make sure to look out for their in-store signings and performances. Theyve had grimes biggest names through those doors. Dizzee, Stormzy, Giggs, Skepta, Devlin, JME, Wretch 32 ... the list goes on and on. Well worth the trek down to Kingston.
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Home >The Revolt > Camera Destruction > New York, France, Germany, Romania: Spontaneous And Deliberate Speed Camera Destruction
The plan was always for Nick Oertwich to come back to work on the family farm near Pilger after attending the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

But following graduation, Oertwich stayed in Lincoln to work. Now, with the financial incentive that raising chickens for Costco promises, he plans to move back to the area to work on the family farm.

Nicks father, Doug, who serves on the Stanton County Planning Commission, found out about the opportunity when he was asked to serve on an advisory board for Lincoln Premium Poultry, the company that is building a large processing plant in Fremont that will provide broiler chickens for Costco. The board consists of one person from the six counties surrounding Dodge County, where the plant is located.

Lincoln Premium Poultry is managing the operations in Fremont, including recruiting farmers to sign contracts to raise poultry, overseeing construction of the processing facilities and recruiting employees for when the plant opens in about a year.

Doug Oertwich says a poultry operation adds diversification and makes his 700-acre corn and soybean farm less reliant on sagging grain markets. Although new to raising poultry, he isnt worried.

Ive worked with guys that raise hogs and cattle, and like any other animal, everything is in the details, Oertwich said.

Raising poultry will be a first for many of the 125 producers Lincoln Premium Poultry is hoping to sign to contracts. To help, the company plans on building a show house where producers and prospective producers can see how operators run the computers and equipment in poultry houses. The company also will send field technicians to help area farmers and make sure best practices are implemented and followed.

As of mid-December, Lincoln Premium Poultry was in the later stages of negotiations with 80 area farmers. The company anticipates it will be recruiting operators through the late spring and early summer.

One of the first formal applications, from a Valparaiso-area farmer, is going before the Saunders County Planning Commission on Monday.

Oertwich has traveled to Delaware, Maryland, Alabama and Georgia with other members of the advisory board to meet producers and hear about their experience raising birds.

We didnt meet anyone who said they wouldnt do it again, Oertwich said of the positive feedback he heard from producers around the country.

Despite the positive response from farmers, not everyone is eager for the poultry processing plant to open in Fremont.

John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said the organization has encouraged people to form a producers association so they will have negotiating power in the future if they need it. Hansen said the Farmers Union has not taken an official position on the processing plant since it has members that both support and oppose it.

The problem occurs when there is a disparity in level of power in a contract, Hansen said. How do you protect the smaller, less-powerful entity when the more-powerful party in the agreement is going to shape the contract for their benefit?

Hansen added that from what he knows of the contracts, they're better than most in the industry.

Its all relative, though, because the reputation of contracts in the poultry business is awful," he said. "So having a higher standard isnt in itself greater for the farmer."

Hansen cited the 15-year contract term as a positive sign, since farmers will be making $2 million to $2.5 million investments when they construct four poultry houses. Signing a longer contract mitigates risk by guaranteeing farmers 15 years of revenue.

Project manager Walt Shafer said the contracts being offered are some of the best in the country.

Nebraska farmers are making a sizable investment, and they are trusting in us to do the right thing by them, Shafer said. So we are working with Costco to put out a very, very fair contract that gives them every benefit of the doubt.

Costco recently added a square-footage incentive to producers for completing construction of poultry houses. If a farmer completes four poultry houses, he or she could receive a check for $120,000, while barns for laying hens may qualify for twice that amount.

Thats one way for the company to invest in these farmers up front," said Jessica Kolterman of Lincoln Premium Poultry. And it really helps offset costs on the front side.

This is the first vertically-integrated poultry operation Costco will be involved with, processing up to 2 million birds a week. In remarks at the groundbreaking for the project in June, Gov. Pete Ricketts said the plant is projected to have a $1.2 billion economic impact to the state, or about 1 percent of the states economy.

The processing plant will include the latest technology and advancements in automation, but the processing operation, hatchery and feed mill are estimated to have a labor force of 800 to 1,000 employees.

Kolterman is working with local career-training organizations and the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce to identify underemployed or unemployed populations to move into jobs at the poultry plant when it opens.

People come to work in these facilities from 30-60 miles away, Kolterman said.

Kolterman and Shafer said they've floated the idea of sharing transportation costs or lining up busing if there are large numbers of employees from the Lincoln or Omaha areas.
PLATTSMOUTH  A Plattsmouth woman will be required to pay more than $1,600 in restitution for stealing multiple items from a local store.

Wanda E. Bolton, 49, appeared in Cass County District Court Monday morning for a sentencing hearing. Bolton pled guilty to one Class IV felony charge of theft-unlawful taking-$1,500 to $5,000 in November. She has remained free on bond.

Bolton had been an employee at the Plattsmouth Shopko store from Dec. 1, 2015, to Oct. 20, 2016. Cass County Attorney Nathan Cox said Bolton took many items of merchandise from the business during that time period. She and other co-defendants placed many of the stolen items in plastic totes. Authorities located the totes but were unable to determine which people had taken which items.

Cox said Bolton later estimated she had taken approximately $2,000 worth of merchandise. Authorities used different types of evidence to determine a certain amount of $1,632.70.

Cox told the court Monday that the state felt probation would be appropriate for Bolton. He said probation would give her an opportunity to repay Shopko for the stolen items.

Defense attorney David Chebatoris also asked the court to issue a probation sentence. He said his client had owned a clean criminal record prior to the current case. He also said Bolton was extremely sorry for what had happened and was anxious about the possible consequences.

Shes petrified as she sits here, Chebatoris said. Shes fearful of being convicted of a felony and having that following her for the rest of her life.

Judge Michael Smith said he would not have expected Bolton to take part in the thefts because she had previously been a law-abiding citizen. He said it was a priority to have her pay back Shopko for the stolen merchandise.

Smith ordered Bolton to serve 24 months on probation and complete a victim empathy program and a Making Appropriate Decisions class. She will also be required to pay $1,632.70 in restitution. She will have to pay a minimum of $100 per month until the entire amount is settled.
Liberia faces a major political transition in 2018. The first since the end of the countrys civil war where a peaceful transfer of power from one democratically elected president, Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to another president to be determined at elections in October this year. This transfer of power will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Liberian Studies Association (LSA). These milestones present Liberia with new possibilities for development, and academics who are studying Liberia with new questions about the study and future of the country. The Liberian Studies Association (LSA), founded to promote and facilitate dialogue and exchange among scholars of Liberia has been an active part of the process of institutionalizing discussions about Liberia through various forms of academic research. Thus, this 50th anniversary offers a moment for critical reflections about the study and understanding of Liberia across the globe.

In celebration, the LSA invites proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables for its 2018 annual meeting that examine how the study and presentation of Liberia has been constructed over the last 50 years and how this study has shaped the development of the country both internally and externally of Liberia. Papers from various academic disciplines or thematic areas addressing the challenges of the current reconstruction, statebuilding and economic development, agriculture and food security, arts, and history efforts prior to, during and following the years of violence using a range of scholarly approaches including qualitative, quantitative and critical methods with datadriven conclusions are welcomed. The annual meeting will be held at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), in Rochester, NY on April 19 21, 2018. The LSA host is Dr. Danielle Taana Smith, RIT Professor of Sociology & Honors Program Director.

The proposal must include the name, title, and institutional or organizational affiliation of the presenter(s) as well as full contact details of the person or persons submitting the abstract. All proposals should not exceed 300 words, contain five key words, and sent to Dr. George Gonpu at ggonpu@gmail.com or Dr. Sam Wai Johnson at samwaijohnson@gmail.com The deadline for submission is February 1.

Conference Registration: $100 ($50 for students) by February 28. There will also be onsite registration. Presenters and other attendees are required to register. Please make checks payable to the Liberian Studies Association. For more information, contact Jackie Sayegh at jsb25@cornell.edu.

https://www.liberiastudies.com/

Venue: Rochester Institute of Technology April 19-21, 2017, Rochester, NY https://www.liberiastudies.com/

What is your take? Please post your comments below:


The All-Mighty President

Wonders shall never end!

On December 26, 2017, the change the Liberian people desired was given to them through the decisive victory of the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), headed by Senator George Manneh Weah. Now, what is required is the smooth and peaceful transfer of power in ALL democracies, especially, the Liberian Democracy. Why should this one be any different? Why turn a simple peaceful transfer of power into something so complex which involves the outgoing president and the incoming president to form a committee in which two of them serve as co-chairs? When I last checked, this process, which requires an Executive Order 91 to transfer power is first of its kind in 70 years. Why should it be different? Peaceful transfer of power is the cornerstone of a democracy. President Sirleafs Executive Order 91, is total and absolute violation of the Constitution and Statutory laws of Liberia.

Once more, President Sirleaf and her corrupt elites have violated the Constitution with Executive Order 91. According to the Constitution, Monday, January 15, 2018 is Inauguration Day, and NOT Monday, January 22, 2018. All along, President Sirleaf advocated for the run-off election to be held within the time specified by the Constitution in order to turn over to my successor. The President and her supporters got what they wanted  to the point of scheduling the run-off election the day after Christmas. Why violate the Constitution by scheduled the Inauguration a week after the legal scheduled day of Monday, January 15, 2018?

Here is what Chapter 6: Article 50 of our Constitution states:

Chapter 6: Article 50

The Executive Power of the Republic shall be vested in the President who shall be Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Liberia. The president shall be elected by universal adult suffrage of registered voters in the Republic and shall hold office for a term of six years commencing at noon on the third working Monday in January of the year immediately following the elections. No person shall serve as President for more than two terms. To continue to unlawfully arrest and hold onto power, President Sirleaf (a lime duck President), without the slightest support of the Constitution of Liberia administratively proposed and singlehandedly passed into law, Executive Order 91, lending and assigning to herself the power to establish a transitional team whose term of reference runs contrary to Article Chapter 6, Article 50 of the Constitution.

There is precedent, whether under the Constitution or Statutory laws of Liberia that lends President Sirleaf the power to enact Executive Order 91 and continue to hold onto power and the presidency of Liberia beyond Monday, January 15, 2018. Any and all other acts or actions taken by President Sirleaf and her outgoing officials of government after Monday, January 15, 2018, are irregular and unlawful. The 3rd Monday immediately following the 26 December, 2017 Runoff Election, is and remains, Monday, January 15, 2018. The Constitution of Liberia gives no power to her and/or the CDC incoming government of Liberia, to transfer power and the presidency of Liberia or receive the presidency of Liberia, Monday, January 22, 2018. Monday, January 15, is legally the 3rd Monday referenced by the Constitution of Liberia. Everything else she and her outgoing Administration do and shall do beyond Monday, January 15, 2018, are and shall be repugnant and legally void.

It is the right of an individual to establish his/her own destiny. A persons destiny does not have to be planned by others! The same is true in a political transfer of power. All that is required is for the outgoing administration to assist with the smooth and peaceful transfer of power as allowed by the Constitution; nothing more, and nothing less. So, as of January 15, 2018, the CDC will and shall become the governing party, and it does not have to drag along activities of the past government. Since lime duck president - Sirleaf and her Government has already violated Article 50 of the Constitution of Liberia, the CDC-led government of Liberia, is under no legal obligation to give credence to anything or actions taken by her outgoing Administration after 15 January 2018 since by default and constitutionally, Senator has already assumed power in Liberia, Monday, January 15, 2018. Precisely Monday, January 15, 2018, Senator George Manneh Weah becomes the President of Liberia.

Preparation for Orderly Succession

Liberias presidential transition is the transfer of the executive branch power from the incumbent President of Liberia to the president-elect; during the period of time between Election Day of Tuesday, December 26, and inauguration day on January 15 all arrangements would have been concluded. Legally, this is the 3rd Monday immediately following the holding of the 26 December, 2017 Runoff Election. After Monday, January 15, 2018, President Sirleaf becomes former president. By law the inauguration of Liberia, must be held Monday, January 15, 2018. The Constitution of Liberia gives no special room for January 22, 2018. THE CONSTITUTION MUST BE FOLLOWED! We are not stupid!

Where the Liberian Constitution was not specific on the issue of transfer of power from the outgoing administration to the incoming administration, and where the Constitution is silence on such an issue, Custom or Tradition takes precedent; meaning how succeeding administrations have handled it.

Interpretation of Custom and Tradition

Liberias Constitution is a replica of the United States Constitution. For example, the US Congress may interpret a certain clause in the Constitution as giving it the right to pass a particular law. One such example is the minimum wage that workers must be paid. However, minimum wage is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. But the Constitution gives Congress the right to control trade among the states. The goods made by workers usually travel from one state to another. On the basis of the above, Congress interpreted the Constitution to mean it can pass laws affecting working conditions, which also includes wages. While on the other hand, the US Supreme Court has the power to decide if Congress has interpreted the Constitution correctly. The Courts ruling is final like in the recent Liberty Party case.

Equally, a number of changes or practices in the U.S. government have come about as the result of custom, tradition or precedence. For example, the US Constitution did not provide for regular meetings of the leaders in the Executive Branch of the government. However, President George Washington brought these leaders together regularly to serve as his advisors, which is known today as his Cabinet. Since that time, regular meetings between the President and his Cabinet have become an acceptable part of the tradition of the US government. Up to the present, there is no written law to that effect. There are other important traditions that have since developed. These traditions are followed regularly. Yet they have seldom been written down or made into laws. For this reason, they are sometimes called unwritten constitutional laws.

The Joint Transition Team is a Fiasco

Tradition dictates that it is illegal for a lame-duck government to renew or sign new contracts, which will obligate the incoming administration to inherit and enforce. Members of the Legislature and government officials who engage in such practice will be in violation of the rules that govern the transition of one administration to another; and those who do so will have to answer to the judicial system. Also, this applies to local and international businesses.

Moreover, the government cannot continue to handover the monopoly of our economy, and atrocious tax incentives and holidays to foreigners. It must stop! Liberians cannot develop their country with such an arrangement which favors foreigners.

For example, Part V Section 46 and Section 45.1 of the 1975 PPCC Law, from which the Liberianization Policy derived, should be enforced by the CDC government. It was seriously violated with impunity by the outgoing administration.

In these scheduled transitional Committee meetings, EJSs lame-duck sessions should be discussing how funds will be made available for the incoming administration to operate, to reduce the National debt and not to increase it.

Liberia cannot remain a sweet land of bribery, where others interests take precedent over the citizens. The irony is; Liberians have become foreigners in their own country - all due to EJSs creation. The questions are: How long will our people serve as second-class citizens in their own country? Now that EJS is on her way out for good, can we work together; reclaim the control over our resources and wealth in order to free ourselves from the economic bondage of the outgoing government? The answer is, yes, we can and we should!

Wonders shall never end! This was long in the making  from Simple Majority to the Referendum that led to the amendment to the Constitution that modified the 10 Years Residency requirement and the new interpretation of the Code of Conduct (CoC) for government officials.

What the outgoing Administration should be doing is to give the President-elect operational and logistical support in the month before Inauguration. They should have assisted in things such as office space, human resources and Communications; including IT support, concessional and other outreach work.

In most democratic societies, the office of the chosen leader is supposed to serve the interest of the people, and not only the president, his/her family members, relatives, friends, those within their inner circle, and more especially, their international connections at the expense of the people they are supposed to represent.

The late African patriot, Julius Nyerere reminds us that:



Poverty is an enemy of good governance, for persistent poverty is a destabiliser, especially if such poverty is shared in a grossly unequal manner, or is widely regarded as being unfairly distributed as the few who are relatively rich indulge in conspicuous consumption Known or suspected corruption among the political leaders often makes the problem worse  and corruption throughout the society more difficult to overcome. Good wages or salaries will not stop bad people from being corrupt but miserable wages and salaries are not conducive to rectitude. Political instability, real or imagined, can be a source and is often used as an excuse, for bad governance.

Nyereres statement describes what is taking place in Liberia. If we continue to ignore the facts, Liberia will become a country run by ruling elites and a network of associates that enrich themselves using state power recklessly. Their greatest defense is to counter truth with lies and to attack the massager bearing the truth,

In order for the CDC Government to make drinking water that is essential for life as a priority; road network and electricity that facilitate development and commerce; reduce government officials high salaries and wasteful spending, there has to be a complete point of departure from the policies of EJSs government. The money saved could be used to fund some of the projects mentioned.

Conclusion

Truth needs no law to substantiate it to be Truth. It is self-evident that Truth is Truth from the time of Creation. However, it is only those throughout history make laws to enforce their opposition to it. This proclamation is a good example! It has no place during a transitional period of a government. This period should be for the inauguration of the president-elect and nothing else.

The meeting of the presidential team for at least three times before the January 22, 2018 inauguration serves no other purpose than to reward Ellens faithful servants.What tasks these so-called subsidiary groups will be meeting to do during a transition period? It doesnt look right! The intent of such planning meetings is to render President-elect Weahs government a complete failure, especially in a ludicrous or humiliating way.

According to reliable sources, the Presidential Proclamation which ordered the National Legislature of the Republic of Liberia for nine days working sessions is a fiasco. The real purpose is to reward EJSs faithful servants, many of whom are listed below with several lucrative deals:

Mr. Sylvester Grigsby, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs

Madam Marjon Kamara, Minister of Foreign Affairs

Mr. Boima S. Kamara, Minister of Finance and Development Planning

Cllr. Frederick D. Cherue, Minister of Justice

Mr. Brownie J. Samukai, Minister of Defense

Mr. Eugene Nagbe, Minister of Information, Cultural Affairs & Tourism

Mr. Milton A. Weeks, Governor, Central Bank of Liberia

Madam Mary T. Broh, Director General, GSA

Mr. Sam Gaye, Director, Executive Protection Service (EPS)

Mr. Dewitt von Ballmoos, Director General, NASSCORP

Dr. Abdoulaye W. Dukule, Office of the President

Mr. Varney A. Sirleaf, Acting Minister, Internal Affairs

Cllr. Yvette Chesson-Wureh, Angie Brooks International Center

Mr. Jordan Solunteh, Director-General of the Cabinet

I noticed Vice President Joseph Nyumah Boakai did not make the list. Did he not make the list because he is not one of the President Sirleafs Most Faithful and Reliable Servant? The conclusion most rational people reached is VP Boakai is not. Perhaps, this is the reason the she fought and opposed his candidacy for him to not succeed her. This is the conclusion most Liberians, including me, reached.

On behave of the Liberian people; we congratulate Vice President Boakai for the decency and patriotism he demonstrated throughout the entire camp God Almighty will richly bless him and his family. The Liberian people will forever remain grateful to you for the outstanding services you rendered our beloved country.

To the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Faithful Servant Award recipients, I say you are being closely watched. It is not going to be business as usual, and if you think you will continue this corrupt practice, you are juke this time around. It is illegal for the lame-duck administration to conduct business that will obligate the incoming administration to inherit is making FOOL of themselves; members of the Legislature, government officials, local and international businesses that engaged in such practice will be violating of the rules that govern the transition; and those who engage in such practice will have to answer to the law. Thats how serious and committed we are to put LIBERIA FIRST!

Our eyes are opened; the time of the people has come!

About The Author : Elder Siahyonkron Nyanseor is former Vice Chair & Chair of the ULAA Council of Eminent Persons (UCEP), Inc. Also, he is a founding member & the 11th President of the organization. He is a poet, Griot/Historian, journalist, a cultural and political activist. He is an ordained Minister of the Gospel; Chairman of the Liberian Democratic Future (LDF), publisher of theperspective.org online newsmagazine and Senior Advisor to the Voice of Liberia newsmagazine. In 2012, he Co-authored Djogbachiachuwa: The Liberian Literature Anthology; his book of poems: TIPOSAH: Message from the Palava Hut will soon be on the market. Nyanseor can be reached at: siah1947@gmail.com

Elder Nyanseor

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Dr. Murv L. Kandakai Gardiner

From his pen at the center of the Roman-African Church, St Augustine of Tunisia/Hippo, asked, When justice is taken away, what are kingdoms but a vast banditry? These words by an African Catholic Bishop even flowed through subsequent centuries to become the basic pillar in the thought of the Protestant Reformer, Jean Calvin. St Augustines concern during the formative stages of the Church has become the same concern that some well-meaning international agencies and some Liberians have. That concern points to the nihilistic threat with its accompanying decadence which is rapidly approaching due to the clamoring for power on both sides of the equation.



In this essay, as a psychologist, I invite the reader to join us in looking at some of the positive aspects as well as some of the deleterious effects of the 2017 Election challenge through the lenses of Augustines question. If governments (the people) encourage their citizens to become aberrational to the Rule of Law, what are kingdoms but a magna latrocinia? The needed change that the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC), other political parties, and the rest of the citizenry are longing for is best attainable through a just process and the exercise of jurisprudence. In this light, let us applaud the Supreme Court of Liberia for its fortitude thus far in its adherence to the Liberian Constitution.



Citing Article 20 of the Liberian Constitution, the high court under Chief Justice Francis Korkpor ordered a Writ of Prohibition because the National Election Commission (NEC) had erred in announcing a date for the runoff election without probing the Liberty Partys claim of alleged frauds and irregularities. Thus, the NEC denied the complainant due process.



But the high court, also, subsequently on December 7, 2017 lifted the Prohibition and affirmed the Runoff Election because the Liberty Party failed to prove its case. And simultaneously, it ordered the NEC to employ corrective measures. Chief Justice Korkpor, in a sense, underscored the roots of democracy, which stemmed to Pericles in antiquity. With tour de force, he provided the best explication from the Constitution on the inherency of power in the people and by the peoples authority only, free governments are instituted for their benefit and when their safety and happiness so require, they have the right to alter and reform the same. (Article 1, 1986)



Qualitative social change is attainable in Liberia through a just process and the exercise of jurisprudence, which has some historical antecedents in the parent (USA) countrys legal system that in effect originated in Englands Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought into focus a system of rule predicated on the Constitution. Through the ingenuity of the Liberian Supreme Court and President Johnson-Sirleafs beautiful, stylistic capacity for self-transcendence, which found resonance in me, justice was achieved. Hence, Chief Justice Francis Korkpor and his Associate Justices are comparable to Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States and his Associates in asserting the right of the Supreme Court to determine the meaning of the Constitution. Moreover, as it is common knowledge, Article 2 of Liberias 1986 Constitution is a replica of Hamiltons Federalist 78 appertaining to Judicial Review, which Justice John Marshall adhered to in 1803 regarding the Writ of Mandamus.



But the Korkpor Court of Liberia is dissimilar to the Rehnquist Court of America, in that the latter actively allowed the disenfranchisement of many Americans in Florida, especially some African Americans. Ironically, Justice Clarence Thomas, an African American, actively participated in the disenfranchisement of many poor and African Americans in the U.S. Presidential Election of 2000. Also, ironically, what we witnessed live on CNN and later via Michael Moores Fahrenheit 9/11, with the exception of Senator Schumer of New York, no non- African American member of the US legislature assisted the Congressional Black Caucus in their efforts to rescue Al Gore and the aforementioned Americans who were robbed of their Fifteenth Amendment rights.



In his work, The Nation, Kreitzner (2000) averred that in Bush vs. Gore, the Rehnquist Court with a 5-4 vote disingenuously invoked equal protection to abort the counting of unrecorded Gore votes. As Justice Stevens pointed out, the majority ordered the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of votes. This injustice occurred because the Republican Secretary of State in Florida deleted from the voting roll thousands of eligible voters that were illegally identified as felons. The injustice also occurred because the high court/Federal Supreme Court became antithetical to an essential tenet of the Constitution in abrogating State rights by superimposing its might and will on and over the Florida Supreme Court that had previously reordered the recounting of the votes.



Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Tennyson have all stated in variety of ways that nobody will ever be happy in the midst of war. For this reason, in his City of God (Augustine, 158) accentuated, If justice is taken away, what are kingdoms but a magna latrocinia? For Augustine, the governments/kingdoms of robberies are kept in place by enhanced impunity. ..The dark shadow of fear and the lust for blood has fallen over themIf it does not do justice, what is the government but a great criminal enterprise? (158)The change that ordinary Liberians and other social groups including some elites are longing for is rooted in the radicalism of the revolution of Liberias parent, America. As a socio-cultural and political metanoia, that change as consciousness is an ever-flowing stream (James).The U.S. Revolution brought to consciousness the plausibility of an egalitarian way of life. This radicalism gave impetus for Americans, however British they continued to be culturally and intellectually, to begin the break from absolute monarchy (divine right) to become citizens with the freedom (elutheria) to strive social-economically via hard work.



According to Gordon Wood, it was not inequality but pervasive equality that raised fear and the possibility of instabilityAnd equality did not mean that everyone was the same, but that ordinary people were closer in prosperity to those above them and felt free of aristocratic patronage and control (Wood,1986). Embedded in this radicalism, also, was Thomas Paines Common Sense  Liberty as the destiny of America, which was extrapolated from the Calvinistic tradition/longing to transform the world but not necessarily Jeffersonian/Lockean rights of man, which TJ restricted to only land-owning white males.

Still yet the major change/social justice that Liberians are longing for is rooted in the basic ideological origins of the American Revolution. Primordial to this longing is intellectual determinism. And the recent ruling of the Supreme Court of Liberia predicated on Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution, which stand commensurately with Hamiltons Federalist no. 78, echoes this intellectual determinism. Hamiltons argument is that the legislature and judiciary are comparatively smaller to the power of the people. And a pivotal function of the judiciary is to ascertain that the legislature continues to function as a servant of the Constitution and the people who gave it its breath.



Nevertheless, however brilliant our justices were, they were also challenged politically in the face of the anxiety that our international partners were experiencing. Yet they did not falter in their faithfulness to the Constitution in its emphasis on the sovereignty of Liberia (Article 3) and the raison de^tre of the Republic in ascertaining the social, economic, and political well-being of Liberians (Article 6). As our high court has brilliantly and gallantly illustrated, the true revolutionary paradigm or map to true liberation is the Constitution. Nietzsche puts it this way:



He has heart who knows fear

But vanquishes it;

Who sees the abyss but with pride.

He who with eagles talons grasps the abyss,

He has courage.

(Thus Spake Zarathustra)



In 1768 as the British stationed their troops in Boston, this brought to surface a huge intellectual meaning. (Bailyn, 1967) Britain which set the stage for freedom and continuous enlightenment in the wake of its Glorious Revolution, was now, paradoxically, encroaching on the liberty of Americans in the thirteen colonies. Liberty was at the center of the American Revolution. James Otis, John Adams, and Abigail Adams focused on liberty as they made their points at Bostons Faneuil Hall. Indeed liberty was at the center of the American Revolution. But did this mean liberty for all? It was not until Reconstruction that liberty was actualized for all via the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery, made Africans in America citizens, and gave them the right to vote respectively.



Only Hamilton and Paine were sincere about liberty. It would take several years later for John Quincy Adams to emerge as the true defender of liberty in mediating and advocating justice for some African slaves before the Federal Supreme Court. The African/Armistad slaves were taken to the Americas on the notorious Portuguese vessel the Tecora.



Hamilton, the greatest legal mind during the formation of the American Republic, facilitated plenary power for the Federal government and the creation of the First National Bank. He went on to underscore in his Federalist essay that:



The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

(The Federalist Papers)



How true Hamiltons words are as they impel us all to become introspective as we take a retrospective glance at the inception of Liberias 1980 Revolution, which became a direct antithesis of Englands Glorious Revolution of 1688 as well as the antithesis of the very slogan of many Liberian revolutionaries at the time. Right after President Tolbert was slain, and thirteen men executed horrifically as other innocent Liberians were imprisoned, words were trumpeted, In the name of the people, the struggle continues. That struggle marked the beginning of an interregnum that plunged the country into tyranny that hurt everybody on all sides.

Critically observing the importance of the Constitution, Robert Middlekauff underscores the point in his work, The Glorious Cause that neither the battle at Yorktown nor the Peace Treaty at Paris brought the American Revolution to a decisive end. For him, it was the Constitutional Convention (1787), Constitutional Ratification (1788), and the Election and Inauguration of George Washington that made the difference (132).



Yes the military efforts of the thirteen colonies led by George Washington were historically significant. However, the American Revolution as an event of historically critical change was attainable primarily because the Constitution guided the colonists from regressing into the abyss of slavery through the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other modes of oppression.



But I would go a step further than Middlekauff in asserting that it was the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the first US Constitution, which was ratified in 1781that set the legal paradigm for liberty from Great Britain. But the first Constitution did not go far enough. Therefore, Hamilton, who understood what real liberty was all about, very skillfully, along with support from Madison and John Jay, framed the new Constitution, which diminished power from an alarmingly powerful legislature and allocated equal powers to the executive and judiciary.



Hence, John Hanson the first President of the United States (1781  1782) should be applauded. But Patrick Henry of Virginia (Give me liberty or give me death), Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison (Federalist Papers), and Thomas Jefferson were pivotal to the success of the American Revolution because freedom was enshrined and guaranteed best in the second US Constitution as it accorded every citizen what was envisaged and articulated by Jefferson and invariably Abigail Adams in The Declaration of Independence as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Article 11A of the 1986 Constitution of Liberia extrapolates from this document. It is worth noting here that in view of the above, and in light of historical irony, just as major Greek writers of antiquity like Euripides, Sophocles, Homer, and Aeschylus never celebrated life without affirming death, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Americas second and third presidents died exactly on the same day during the 50th Anniversary /Jubilee Celebration of Americas Independence on July 4, 1826.



Was Aeschylus correct when he averred that we are called to tame the savageness of men and make tranquil the place of this world? It is our hope that our new president and vice president will continue to be loved and respected by all Liberians. They will need lots of support and understanding in the midst of mounting challenges. If Aeschylus is accurate, President Weah and Vice President Howard-Taylor will succeed in helping to tame the savageness of men in order to make peaceful the place of this world.



When justice is taken away, what are kingdoms but a vast banditry? We echo St. Augustines question in such a way as we bring finality to this essay because justice must be explicated and transmitted within the context of the Hebraic mishpah and tsadakah. In other words, socio-economically or assiduously, redistributive justice must flow/roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. (Amos 5:24) No matter how much civility we are able to mediate from the bottom or top of the strata of society, we must never be satisfied with the world as it is.



Because of the intellectual fervor felt in some areas like Maryland, Grand Gedeh, Nimba, Bong, Cape Mount, Bomi, Montserrado, and other parts of the country, Liberia will transform from an intellectually insouciant community to an active, thirsty, and creative community in harnessing its medical, anthropological, social, agricultural, and technological skills for the true liberation of our native land and the preservation of all of our ecosphere.

References

Augustine, Bishop. 426 AD, Hippo, The City of God Book four vol 1, ed. Marcus Dods

Edinburgh: T & T Clark

Bailyn, Bernard. 1967. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press

Hamilton, Alexander. 1787. The Federalist Papers, New York & Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Jay, John. 1787. Federalist 2 and 64 The Federalist Papers, New York and Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

Kelly, Alfred H, Harbinson, Winifred. 1955. The American Constitution: Its Origin and

Development, Berkely, California: Norton Publisher

Kreitzner, Richard. 2000. The Supreme Court Gives the Presidential Election to George W.

Bush, The Nation, New York

Madison, James. 1787. Federalist 41, The Federalist Papers, Virginia and Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

Moore, Michael. 2004. Fahrenheit 9/11 A Documentary on George W. Bush Agenda and

Election, US and Canada: Dog Eat Dog Films

Middlekauff, Robert. 1982. The Glorious Cause, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Sawyer, Amos. 1986. Constitution of the Republic of Liberia, Monrovia, Liberia

Wood, Gordon S. 1996. Radicalism of the American Revolution, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns

Hopkins University Press

Dr. Murv L. Kandakai Gardiner is Professor of Psychology and

Chairman of the Department of Social Sciences at

William V.S. Tubman University, Harper, Maryland, Liberia

He can be reached for comments at murvgardiner@gmail.com and

mgardiner@tubmanu.edu.lr

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Liberia's post-conflict democratic governance period left the people of Liberia deprived, desperate and destitute. Liberians believe that the vast resources of the country were squandered, plundered, and pillaged. As a result, they rose-up during the election to hold Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the Unity Party accountable, and overwhelmingly elected George Weah, president and Jewel Howard- Taylor, vice president. The Liberian people frantically wanted change at any cost due to their bitterness, anger and disappointment.

After 12 years of the country's best opportunity to fundamentally root transformative social change was squandered, Joseph Boakai became the fall guy for the country's collective hurt. During the presidency of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, poverty became overwhelmingly endemic, while corruption, nepotism, and patronage became the order of the day. Liberians simply could not stomach anything Ellen Johnson Sirleaf or Unity Party after 12 years of pure hell. The overwhelming majority of Liberians lost faith in the governing institutions of the country and in the elite that has hitherto controlled them; thereby, believing that the country has been on the wrong track for the past 12 years, so they rejected Joseph Boakai.

The results of the December 26 runoff election were a rebuke of kleptocracy in favor of inclusion and transformative social change. The majority of the Liberian people flatly disapproved of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf performance while in office, believing that they have nothing to lose after the country's most educated and celebrated leader failed them so miserably. The success of the CDC coalition is quite an achievement for a party that is comprised mostly of young people, many of whom were abandoned, neglected, excluded, and marginalized by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf for the past 12 years.

The 2017 elections shock the country to its core. George Weah and the CDC coalition must now seize this golden opportunity to impact the economy and the social order in a big way. The Weah victory should be nothing more than unsettling basic ideas and assumptions about development and transformative social change. Poverty needs to immediately be tackle in order to improve livelihoods, social conditions, awareness and outlook. The enormous expectations of the young people, many of whom are unskilled, unqualified and unemployed, must constructively be dealt with in a holistic manner because the vast majority of Liberians believe that their suffering will come to an end after George Weah takes office in January.

George Weah must remember that he won the presidency because his coalition was able to effectively mobilize the Liberian people to accept the hard truths that the country will be faced with over the next decade. The CDC coalition rode the wave of change generated by the miserable failure of the Unity Party lead by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Hence, they have been granted a huge opportunity by the Liberian people to make a significant difference in the lives of the youth and poverty-stricken masses. The time has now come to govern and lead the country to greatness. The Weah administration must initiate strategic policies of inclusion, and not fuel policies of marginalization and exclusion, which could have allowed the country to return to violence, bloodshed and destruction. George Weah must leverage the result of the elections to build an inclusive society where the livelihood of all Liberians can be improved.

Without delay, the state must emphatically declare as offensive and unacceptable, cronyism, corruption, nepotism, privilege, and the use of state resources for self-enrichment. As replacement, strategies must be developed to constructively engage the huge youth bulge in an inclusive manner so as to ignite transformative social change throughout the country. Reform measures must be put in place to make over the entire education, healthcare, and agricultural sectors to enhance a conducive and enabling social environment to improve life, wellbeing and progress. This is the legacy that Liberia deserve. The country and its political structures must never again be allowed to be manipulated and used for personal benefit. Incompetent, selfish and greedy people must be eliminated so as to fundamentally bring about transformative social change.

Those civil and public servants who go in to assist the CDC coalition should be prepared to not use their office as a magnet for kickbacks and enticements. Extreme poverty, hardship, unemployment, illiteracy, insecurity, and hopelessness are still the order of the day for millions of Liberians. Over 70% of our people lack education, skill-sets, opportunity and basic services to participate in and grow the economy; while, countless number of youth and women continue to experience extreme limitations in accessing opportunities and income to improve livelihood and entrepreneurial skills.



To begin this process, the George Weah administration must immediately commission a fiscal audit and comprehensive appraisal of all concession agreements of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf administration. The new government should also consider establishing mechanisms to provide robust opportunities to confiscate and repatriate stolen government funds hidden away in foreign banks. Our country's enormous natural resource endowment must translate into economic progress and better quality of life for all Liberians. It is disgusting and unacceptable to imagine the squandering of our national resource while children die throughout the country on a daily basis due to penury and curable diseases. After 12 years of corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement, Liberia deserves a government of inclusion, access, participation, equity and development. Those social cancers that plague the Sirleaf administration, should never again be allowed to manifest themselves or permeate our governance structures by becoming impediments, which obstruct our country from realizing transformative social change. Our country should never again be allowed to become a destitute pariah state as it once was. The vast resources of our country should be used to provide the foundation for enviable development and economic growth, and definitely not a curse, while over 80% of Liberians live below the poverty line.

About the Author: Send comments, observations, questions and remarks to: Francis Nyepon at fnyepon@aol.com

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How to watch and what to know about Northern Iowa at South Dakota
Senators are making another run at cracking the prison overcrowding problems in Nebraska with a stack of bills being introduced this week.

The justice system oversight committee report showed that while progress has been made in the Department of Correctional Services, more work needs to be done on significant overcrowding and understaffing, said Lincoln Sen. Kate Bolz.

By law, prisons must declare a crowding emergency if prisons overall are not at or lower than 140 percent of capacity or lower by July 1, 2020. If the emergency is declared, the Parole Board must reconsider inmates for accelerated release until the population reaches 125 percent of capacity.

The Legislature has a duty to examine the issues and do everything it can to support correctional officers, reduce overcrowding and ensure senators are doing everything they can to address problems brought forward by an ACLU overcrowding lawsuit, Bolz said.

Several Lincoln senators have waded into the problem of crowded prisons because Lincoln has four major prisons including the Diagnostic and Evaluation Center, Lincoln Correctional Center, the Nebraska State Penitentiary, and Community Corrections Center of Lincoln.

Omaha also has a couple of state prisons.

Omaha Sen. Bob Krist said the money exists in the budget to fix many of the problems, but it would need to be reinvested in certain ways. States that, like Nebraska, have had the Council of State Governments advise them on justice reinvestment are doing well and shutting down prisons.

Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus also hopes that before term limits push him out of the Legislature he can help the department in some way to get off "dead center" on overcrowding problems.

"You talk and you talk. And you study and you study year after year, and you find out you're going to study some more," he said. "Because that seems to be the universal answer when you don't have money and are unwilling to finance what you know you have to do."

One of his contributions will be to amend a bill he has in the Judiciary Committee that addresses double bunking, he said. It was "absolutely unconscionable" last year to put a young man who was in prison for a fairly minor offense into a cell with an inmate who had "nothing to lose."

Terry Berry Jr. was killed last year after he was put in a double-bunked cell at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. Department Director Scott Frakes blamed Berry's death solely on his cellmate, Patrick Schroeder, who was serving life in prison for murder.

Frakes said in October he planned to continue double-bunking inmates in solitary confinement despite Inspector General for Corrections Doug Koebernick's call for him to suspend the practice out of concern it increases dangers for inmates and staff.

The Legislature owes the men and women working in the Nebraska Department of Corrections a "deep gratitude and respect" for working in one of the toughest jobs that help keep the community safe, said Lincoln Sen. Anna Wishart.

She and her staff did major research on prison issues over the interim she said, and it is clear the Legislature must prioritize staff retention to address high turnover, increased costs of overtime and the health of employees.

Senators are also concerned that inmates are languishing in prison because of a lack of programming.

All kinds of ideas exist to help increase programming for inmates, said Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks. Think portable buildings like the schools use for classrooms, or the many volunteers in the community who are willing to help, she said.

"All of the bills we are talking about today are about preparation, planning and public safety," Pansing Brooks said. "Ninety-six to 98 percent of those inmates are coming back into our community. Do we want them safer or not?"
"They all feel its the right thing to keep doing what theyve always done as a band, make new music"
No one was injured in an apartment house fire at 750 E. Second St., on Saturday night.

Firefighters from three departments worked in the cold for two hours to get the blaze under control. They sprayed water from two aerial ladder trucks.

Capt. Tom Christensen of the Fremont Fire Department, said he suspects the older house, which was converted into five apartments, is a total loss.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Fremont firefighters were called shortly before 6 p.m.

When they arrived on scene, there were really no flames visible and it was just mainly smoke coming out of the roofline, Christensen said.

Walking around the building, they found fire coming from an apartment on the main level in the northwest area of the complex.

Firefighters made sure everyone was out of the building, while attacking the fire.

As they were trying to get that done, other crews were starting to show up at that time, so they were trying to cut vent holes in the roof with our ladder truck, Christensen said.

Seven on-duty and 10 off-duty firefighters from the Fremont Department came to the scene. The Fremont Rural and Cedar Bluffs departments provided mutual aid. The Arlington department was brought in to handle any rescue squad calls.

The blaze progressed upstairs so firefighters brought hoses to the first and second stories of the building.

Fire progressed in the attic, destabilizing the roof so firefighters were evacuated.

We went to a defensive attack, Christensen said.

Before the Cedar Bluffs department arrived with its aerial ladder truck, the Fremont aerial truck was on the southwest side of the structure  where most of the fire was.

As the roof started to fail and collapse in on the second story, they put a lot of water on it to try to get as much extinguished as they could, he said.

Firefighters were spraying water on the building from the ground as well.

Once we got the fire knocked down enough, we sent crews back inside on the second level to try to extinguish the fire, because as things collapse down it makes it harder for us to get to the fire, Christensen said.

Cedar Bluffs firefighters set up their aerial ladder.

We had a couple of hard areas to get extinguished and it was more or less where the attic windows were on the third floor. They helped us get water into difficult areas that our ladder, where it was positioned, couldnt get water onto the fire, Christensen said.

Multiple crew members pulled out ceilings and walls to get to the fire behind them.

Being an older style home, theres no firebreaks in the walls or the ceilings, Christensen said.

A firebreak is a fire-resistant barrier used to prevent the spread of a blaze for a period of time.

The fire was under control by 8 p.m. It didnt spread to other buildings.

We were very fortunate of that, Christensen said.

Firefighters faced some challenges.

Due to the older neighborhood area, the water lines were a lot smaller so we had to pick and choose how we used our water so we were flowing all that water by the ladder trucks. We couldnt run many hand lines, he said.

Cold weather presented potential hazards.

We were very fortunate that it wasnt super cold like it was the week before, but the challenges still are there. Whenever we use water, we create a lot of ice. And so we worry about firefighters slipping and falling and getting hurt, Christensen said.

When equipment gets cold and ice-covered, it has a hard time working.

It makes it a little more challenging, but we were very fortunate, Christensen said. If you take a look at the big fire in Boston, it was 18 below zero and they had ice built up on their helmetslike an inch (thick.)

Yet even when local-area firefighters try to drain hoses, their gear becomes saturated with water and freezes.

Its hard to even maneuver ourselves for walking or bending over and picking up tools, he said.

Christensen expressed appreciation for the mutual aid.

Nowadays, it takes a lot of people to do our job and not having a lot on staff we depend on our off-duty crews and our mutual aid partners, he said.

The American Red Cross assisting tenants with finding places to live, he said. The Red Cross also brought coffee and hot cocoa to the scene.


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More than a year after the Ruia-owned Essar Group announced the sale of Essar Oil and the Vadinar port, it is planning fresh investments to expand its port capacity in India and overseas.

Essar Ports has planned investment of at least $500 million over the next two-and-a-half years to increase its total cargo handling capacity to around 140-150 million tonnes (MT).

In a bid to reduce its huge debts, Essar Group sold 98 per cent stake in Essar Oil and related infrastructure including the Vadinar Port in Gujarat, to a group-led by Russian oil major Rosneft and Singapore-based commodity trader Trafigura, along with United Capital Partners, in October 2016 for around $13 billion (Rs 86,000 crore).

To make up for the lost earnings and reduced capacity post the sale of the 58 MT Vadinar port, Essar Ports is increasing investments in its other facilities.

Essar Port has completed investment of Rs 2,800 crore in its terminals in Salaya in Gujarat and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. This includes Rs 2,000 crore investment to set up Saurashtra's first deep-draft terminal facility for fully loaded vessels up to 100,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage) cargo capacity in Salaya and Rs 830 crore modernisation and expansion project at the Vizag terminal.

Post this expansion, its total cargo handling capacity will go up to 110 MT from 82 MT, spread across its facilities in Hazira, Visakhapatnam, Salaya and Paradip.

Further, it has plans to expand capacity to 140-150 MTPA in the coming years, which includes a 20 MTPA coal terminal it is setting up in Mozambique.

We had a plan that was underway (expansion at Salaya and Visakhapatnam ). That is getting completed, but it cannot be that we will not have further growth. We are looking at expansion in Hazira, we will also expand (further) in Salaya over a period of time and also overseas we are putting up a project in Mozambique. In all we are looking at $500 million investment, which will be done in these projects, said Rajiv Agarwal, CEO, Essar Ports.

The expansion plan in Salaya is in a very preliminary stage, and investment required could be in addition to the $500 million planned.

We would like to set up another dry bulk terminal there ( in Salaya) and a few LNG (liquefied natural gas) berths. This is still at an approval stage, said Agarwal.

Agarwal added that it was not just in Salaya, but the company was looking at a multi-location expansion to enhance its LNG handling capacity.

Essar Ports expects to close the current financial year ending March 31, 2018, with a revenue of around Rs 1,350 crore and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of close to Rs 900 crore.
In the Golden Globes award ceremony on Sunday, Indian-origin comedian and actor Aziz Ansari became the first Asian to win the award for best actor in a TV comedy. His globally acclaimed, and extremely binge-worthy, television show Master of None connected with the immigrant psyche like few other shows before it could. True, there were ones like Fresh Off a Boat by Eddie Huang, but Ansari's show packed that elusive, visceral punch.

"I genuinely didn't think I'd win because all the websites said I was going to lose. Also, I am glad we won this one because it would have really sucked to lose two of these in a row," Ansari said in his acceptance speech at the gala on Sunday night.

"The only reason my acting is good in that show is because everyone else holds me up," Ansari quipped.

In the show, Aziz plays the part of Dev Shah, an actor who likes to hang out with his friends, hit on pretty barmaids and even haveget thissex occasionally. The pilot episode opens with a scene where Dev gets intimate with a woman, gets spooked when the rubber breaks mid-way and rushes to a pharmacy for Plan B, the morning after-pills. No, there are no gross stereotypes of pot-bellied Indian men with a submissive wife and eight children on a leash (I am looking at you, The Simpsons). No, Dev is an actor with ambition, not a workaholic 7-eleven manager or a call centre operative. And most importantly, for once, an Indian character played the central role in a television series that addressed the immigrant experience with a rare element of nuance.

When it came to casting for the role of his parents, Aziz decided to go with the real ones. His father Shoukath and Fatima Ansari filled that role with aplomb. Best of all, the series found its footing lightning fast; the second episode named 'Parents' expertly treaded the dual minefieldsdepicting your home country, and the generation gap between the first and second generation immigrants. In the episode, Ansari and his friend take out their parentsfrom India and Taiwan respectivelyfor dinner and listen to the stories of how they managed to reach America. Some scenes, like the one where Ansari's mom says that she would not pick up the phone as she was afraid that people would not understand her accent, was intimately human. The show made, as the expats put it, television relatable like never before.

Ansari, though the most popular, is just one among the mushrooming group of assertive Asian American performers. In 2017, Indian-origin comedian Hari Kondabolu went on a tirade against the offensive Simpson's character Apu, in a hilarious documentary The Problem with Apu. The documentary brings along Indian-American celebrities from various wakes of life, even the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, all of whom reminisced about the damage that the character and his catchphrase caused in their lives. Be it Hasan Minhaj and his critically acclaimed Homecoming King, or Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick, the message is clear: we are characters not caricatures.
Music legend A.R. Rahman was made the brand ambassador of Sikkim by the state government on Monday.

Pawan Chamling, the chief minister of Sikkim, declared at a function in Gangtok that he was proud to offer the the best job in Sikkim to the great musician A.R. Rahman.

"It is a matter of pride for me and the people of Sikkim to offer this to A.R. Rahman. I am also grateful to him for agreeing to become our brand ambassador. Sikkim, under his care and patronage, will emerge as the most desired destination for the global community, said Chamling.

This is the first time that the Himalayan state has chosen someone to become the brand ambassador.

A senior cabinet minister, when asked about choosing Rahman as the brand ambassador, said, There were other Bollywood actors, and former ones who were considered. But many backed out. We wanted someone who was globally known. So we decided to offer this to Rahman, who accepted the proposal.

Rahman attended Sikkims Red panda winter carnival and Chamling introduced him as the musical maestro who has earned name and fame for our nation globally through his imposing musical talents.

Sikkim is the first organic state of India, and the only northeastern state which attracts a huge private investment. The investment is in the field of tourism, pharmacy and power sector.

Champling wants to develop horticulture and agro-based industry in the state as well, and is trying to brand Sikkim as the only organic state in the world. For that, Rahmans influence as the brand ambassador will help to a large extent.

Chamling is today the longest serving chief minister of India, and has heading the government for last 23 years. Next year, he will break the record of CPI(M) leader and former chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. Basu stayed as the chief minister for 24 years and six months.

Being brand ambassador, Rahman will promote Sikkim across the world.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has been to Karnataka twice in less than a month. Even though the Assembly elections are still five months away, the saffron-clad politician has emerged as the main draw in the southern state where the BJP is trying its best to make a comeback.

The BJP has seen Adityanath's appeal in the states that are going to polls. He had campaigned for the BJP during the Gujarat elections in order to appeal to the Hindi-speaking migrants in the western state. The Uttar Pradesh CM's visits to Karnataka are aimed at serving a similar purpose as the BJP appears to be pushing for Hindutva issues in the state to tide over the caste divisions.

After Narendra Modi, Adityanath has emerged as a most powerful Hindutva icon. He is sought after by state units of the BJP wherever elections are being held. Even in Tripura, the BJP has asked Adityanath to campaign as the state has followers of the Nath sect to which the UP CM belongs.

The Hindutva poster boy's latest visit to Karnataka gives a peek into the BJP's game plan.

During his rally as part of the 75-day Parivartan Yatra being carried out by B.S. Yeddyurappa, Adityanath questioned the Hindu credentials of Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, asking why did he allow beef consumption in the state. During his earlier rally in Hubli, in December, Adityanath had raised the same issue.

The Uttar Pradesh CM even visited Adichunchanagiri Mutt, on Sunday, where he met its seer Nirmalanandanath Swami. Both of them belong to the Nath sect.

This mutt represents the Vokkaliga community, which has been politically significant in the state.

Adityanath's visit comes after BJP chief Amit Shah had visited the mutt last year.

In Siddaramaiah, the BJP sees a strong opponent who has to be countered on many fronts. As the Congress has been tacitly supporting the Lingayat agitation, the BJP is wooing the Vokkaliga caste. Siddaramaiah has been, on his part, trying to woo different castes including the OBCs and dalits who helped his party win.

When a state votes along the caste divisions, it hurts the BJP the most as was seen in Gujarat recently. In the Uttar Pradesh elections, where the electorate did not vote along the caste lines, the BJP won an unprecedented majority.

The saffron party is adopting a similar strategy in Karnataka to minimise the caste affiliations as it is raising issues concerning the Hindus.

Adityanath's entry into the state got traction as Siddaramaiah tried to needle the former on Twitter over starvation deaths. However, Adityanath paid him back in the same coin, saying Siddaramaiah should look at the farmer suicides during his regime. The Twitter war spilled over, raising the political temperature. It is only set to go up in the coming days.
If one wants to have dinner at 2am in the night, there are several places in Bengaluru. Kalasipalyam, at the heart of the city, is one such area. In the day, this market area will be bustling with traffic, pull carts and goods vehicles. Bars in this locality operate with closed doors and a small counter cut into the shutter even after the government deadline.

On the wee hours of Monday, five employees of Kailash bar and restaurant at Kumbara Sangha complex at Kalasipalyam, who were sleeping inside the bar, were killed when a suspected electric short circuit blazed the liquor bottles and tetra packs stored inside the bar. The men suffered minimum burn injuries but asphyxiation is thought to be the cause of deaths. The deceased were identified as Manjunath (45) from Hassan, Rangaswami (23), Prasad (20), Mahesh from Tumakuru and Keerthi (24) from Mandya. Mahesh had just joined his new job at the bar on Sunday.

The incident grabbed special attention because of recent fire incident at a pub at Kamala Mills Complex in Mumbai which killed 14 party goers. M.N. Reddy, director general of police of fire and emergency services, who visited the site said his department has been alert after the Mumbai pub fire incident. He also said that this building falls below 15 metres height hence it was not necessary to get the fire safety clearance from the fire department, but in future we will urge Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to scrutinise fire safety measures of such establishments before giving trade license in the city.

A relative of one of the victims Manjunath, who comes from Channarayapatna in Hassan, said the employees were sleeping in the bar itself even though workers were given a room in the upper floor of the same building. It is said they did so because of the bed bugs menace in the room above.

It is mysterious why the victims were caught inside the small bar. Was the fire near the shutter trapping the victims inside by cutting out their escape route? Was it locked from outside? Or did the overnight sale of liquor force them to sleep inside the bar? Police have started investigating on these matters.

The incident in the working class locality seems to have opened the eyes of the authorities. Karnataka home minister, who visited the site, said he had ordered the authorities to check fire and safety implementation in the commercial buildings where large crowd gather.
The Kerala government is all set to take action against those schools under the Peace Educational Foundation that do not have mandatory affiliations. The group had courted controversy for its alleged links with Islamic extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and for having non-secular content in the syllabus.

The Kozhikode-based foundation runs 10 schools in various parts of the state. It had come under the police scanner after it was found that many Keralites who have reportedly joined Islamic State camps in Afghanistan had close connections with the foundation.

The move assumes significance as the government had recently ordered that the foundation's school in Kochi, whose syllabus encourages Islamic extremist ideologies, to be shut down after studying the reports of the collector and DPI. A departmental inquiry had found that the textbooks being used at schools were "aimed towards the propagation of ideas contradicting the secular policies of the country.''

We have already given directions to one school to shut down on the basis of various inquiries. We are looking into other schools too. But I cannot reveal more at this juncture,'' Additional Secretary, General Education, P.S. Krishnakumar said to The WEEK.

According to sources in the government, the proposed action against the Peace Educational Foundation schools was not directly connected to its alleged terror links.

The state government is determined to clean up the private education system in the state and is taking action against all such schools that are in existing violation of norms. The action against Peace Foundation Schools also should be seen in this context,'' said the official.

According to the official, the schools being run by the Peace Foundation are not affiliated to any educational boards as per the rules.

``We have found out that schools run by Peace Foundation have not been affiliated to either CBSE or state board. It does not even have the NoC from the state government, which is mandatory,'' said a senior official with the state education department who was part of the probe.

The Peace Foundation had courted controversy after it was found that its syllabus has many books that highlighted the benefits of being a Muslim. The investigation found out that it had books that said, "How we (Muslims) should never give up in any matter," and that Allah is one and unique and there can't be any comparison in this case.''

The education department had said in its report that closure of the school in Kochi was necessary to prevent Muslims from joining IS activities."

The Kochi police had earlier registered a First Information Report against the principal, administrator, and the three managing committee members of the school under Section 153(A) of the IPC on the charge of promoting enmity among different groups on the ground of religion.

The Peace Foundation, however, told THE WEEK that they are yet to receive any intimation from the government side.

We have not received any information regarding the closure,'' said the contact person at the Foundation. The school's representative accepted that the Foundation had been running the schools without any affiliation. But that is normal for many a school in the state. Most schools apply for affiliation only when the students have to write 10th Board exams. Till then, affiliation is not an issue, he said.

Meanwhile, the police is learnt to have intensified its efforts to trace M.M. Akbar, managing director of the Peace Educational Foundation, who has been absconding ever since the controversy broke out.

The police had earlier arrested three persons associated with Burooj Realisation, which created the textbooks used by the schools. The arrested persons are Burooj's secretary, content editor of the controversial texts and the persons who designed the books. During the interrogation, office bearers of the Mumbai-based publication had told the police that the syllabus of these books was prepared in consultation with the Peace Educational Foundation.

Sources in the government said that the foundation and its activities have been closely being watched ever since since its links with IS had been suspected. We could not establish the school's links with Zakir Naik. But the fact that the foundation has connections with most of the Keralites who have left to join IS is enough to suspect it, a police officer associated with the investigation said.

According to him, Merin Jacob, a Christian girl from Kochi who converted to Islam and joined the IS, had worked with the school.

Similarly, Abdul Rashid Abdullah of Thrikkarippur, Kasaragod, an engineering graduate who was the chief coordinator of the group that had fled India to join the IS, was associated with the Peace School in his district. Bihar native Yasmin Ahmed who was arrested from airport while she was about to board for Kabul had also worked as a teacher in the Peace International School.
With the Siddaramaiah government in poll-bound Karnataka openly endorsing Ahinda politics, the BJP has finally settled for a dual strategy to tame the ruling Congress in the crucial Assembly polls in April-May.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Vikas (development) agenda and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's firebrand Hindutva politics will set the campaign pitch in Karnataka, where the BJP has successfully experimented with the Hindutva movement to consolidate the fragmented Hindu votes. With the state all set to face a triangular fight with Janata Dal (Secular), too, wielding enough clout, only a polarisation of votes would benefit the BJP. It is here the traditional votebanks need constant reminders in the form of strong pro-Hindu messaging and Yogi seems to just fit the bill.

Adityanath, who addressed as many as 35 rallies in Gujarat wasted no time and landed in Karnataka (Hubli) for the Parivarthana Rally led by BJP's chief ministerial candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa on December 22. He launched an attack on Siddaramaiah government's anti-Hindu stance. Again on January 7, while addressing Parivarthana Yatra in Bengaluru, he dared Chief Minister Siddaramaiah prove his Hindu credentials by banning cow slaughter.

At Hubli, even as the BJP was drawing flak for the deadlock over the Mahadayi inter-state water sharing dispute, Yogi took a dig at Siddaramaiah government for celebrating Tipu Jayanti, and accused the chief minister of stalling Hanuman Jayanthi. A jittery Congress watched as Yogi reminded the people that Karnataka was the birth place of Hanuman and he exhorted people to vote for the BJP. Tell the Congress that in this country, Hanuman will always be revered and not Tipu Sultan," said Yogi. Siddaramaiah had responding to the barbs on twitter asking if only the BJP leaders were Hindus. Are we (Congress) not Hindus? Has BJP taken over Hinduism on lease? My name has both 'Siddha' and 'Rama'. Respecting all religions is true Hindutva, Siddaramaiah had fumed.

In Bengaluru, yogi took on Siddaramaiah over cow slaughter. Siddaramaiah cannot claim to be a Hindu, if he advocates beef eating. Why did your government repeal the law banning cow slaughter, which was enacted by the BJP government? Cow is a very sacred animal to Hindus. If Siddaramaiah is a Hindu, he shouldnt allow cow slaughter, charged Adityanath, who reminded the deeper connections of the Nath tradition being practised in both UP and Karnataka  as Gorakhnath and Bhyraveshwara (Adichunchungiri Math) respectively.

Referring to Sidadramaiah's recent interview, where he has called himself a Hindu, Yogi taunted him saying, Like Rahul Gandhi who suddenly started visiting temples during Gujarat elections, Siddaramaiah suddenly remembered he was a Hindu, he added.

Adityanath dubbed the Congress a burden on the country as it practised divisive politics. Karnataka is only an ATM for the Congress and Siddaramaiah government has dragged it five years backward. During Atal ji's tenure as PM, Bangalore got international airport and Metro rail. Modi ji gave schemes like Smartcity, and Digital India to develop the cities and empower the youths. But for any development, it is important to elect a party that shares the same vision both in the state and at the Centre, said Yogi, adding that people of Karnataka should elect the BJP to put Karnataka back on the development track, just like how Hanuman showed the path to Lord Rama to unite with Sita.

Adityanath also targeted the Congress government for the total collapse of law and order and recounted the serial killings of 22 right-wing workers in the state.

Even as Hindutva posterboy Adityanath's campaign is hoped to swing the electorate, especially the youth towards the saffron party, the ruling Congress is already seeing red. It was evident when Siddaramaiah triggered a twitter war the moment Adityanath landed in Bengaluru.

Siddaramaiah welcomed his UP counterpart on twitter and told him he had a lot to learn from the Congress-ruled state. I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us sir. When you are here, please visit an Indira canteen and a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state, tweeted Siddaramaiah (#YogiInBengaluru)

A few hours later, Adityanath responded with a Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.

The Congress Party which is worried about its growing anti-Hindu image is sure on damage control. While Modi is expected to hold his maiden election rally on January 28 in Bengaluru, AICC president Rahul Gandhi will kickstart his campaign in Karnataka on January 20 at Bellay and Belagavi, when he will address caste conventions.
Within twenty for hours of the murder of former Shiv Sena corporator Ashok Sawant, Mumbai police has made the first arrests. Sawant murder has once again highlighted the fact that even politicians are not safe in Mumbai as he faced extortion threats.

Sawant, a Shiv Sena leader and former corporator from Samata Nagar in Kandivali was murdered on Sunday night near his residence.

The police have formed teams to investigate Sawant murder and are probing whether the murder had any connection with cable TV business rivalry. Sawant, it is learnt, had also received extortion threats and had registered a police complaint.

The police have secured CCTV footage of the place where the crime took place and have prepared sketch of one of the two assailants on the basis of the footage.

A Shiv Sena functionary informed that Sawant was not much active in the party work these days. "The murder has nothing to do with politics. We learnt that some old rivalry angle is involved," said the functionary. He also said that party hasn't taken up the issue with police as there is no political angle.

The police have arrested two persons and seized an autorickshaw that is suspected to have been used in the crime.

Dr Vinay Rathod, deputy commissioner of police zone XII, told THE WEEK that police have arrested two persons in connection with the murder. " We have arrested two persons and seized the autorickshaw that was used . The investigation is on in full swing and it is too early to comment on the motive behind the murder," said Rathod.

Sawant who had received 17 serious wounds was returning home after meeting his friends. He was twice elected as a corporator and had also been deputy Vibhag Pramukh in Shiv Sena. His daughter was also elected as municipal corporator.
After the violent incidences at Bhima-Koregaon, followed by a Maharashtra bandh and media and social media warfare, it has become almost impossible to understand the truth and give an opinion on the issue, fearing retaliation from one or other group(s).

It is your history versus my history versus his history. Truth is not the issue; in fact, it is the casualty. Manipulation of truth for cultural and electoral politics is the key to understand this mess.

January 1 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of the famous Bhima-Koregaon battle, where the British defeated Peshwa Bajirao II. Soldiers from the Mahar Regiment played a major role in this. In recent years, Bhima-Koregaon has become the point of assertion for the belligerent Mahar community in their battle against the hegemony of Brahminical values.

When multiple narratives claim authenticity and legitimacy, protagonists of a narrative may treat the opposing narrative as conspiracy theory. There has been an attempt by subaltern historians to challenge the popular historical narrative of medieval Maharashtra, where Chhatrapati Shivaji is projected as Gobrahman Pratipalak i.e., protector of cows and Brahmins.

The popular and so-called mainstream narrative is Brahminical and Hindutvawadi, so the counter-narrative has to be Bahujanwadi. However, there are multiple counter-narratives and multiple claims to ownership of Chhatrapati Shivaji.

The non-Brahmin movement, led by the Maratha elites, looks at Shivaji and Sambhaji as protagonists challenging Brahminical hegemony. They look at Peshwai or the dominance of the Brahmin Peshwas in the 18th century as ascendancy of Brahmins over the Marathas. The regime beginning from Balaji Vishwanath and ending with Peshwa Bajirao II is described either as Peshwai or as Maratheshahi (Maratha confederacy) depending on ones ideological location.

Practically, even the Brahmin Peshwas considered themselves Marathas because at least then the word Maratha was not used to denote a caste, but people belonging to a region.

The defeat of Peshwa Bajirao II is celebrated as the collapse of the Brahminical regime, which suppressed the aspirations of the non-Brahmins.

Erstwhile Mahars and a section of the present neo-Buddhists claim the legacy of the Maratha regime under Shivaji and Sambhaji but detest Peshwai. A dispassionate reading of the available documents on Maratha history would tell us that none of these narratives tell us the complete truth.

Shivaji wanted to become a king and overruled the Brahmins of the Deccan when they refused to recognise him as emperor, citing religious scriptures. However, to say that Shivaji developed a counter-narrative to Brahminical hegemony and was therefore a champion of anti-Brahminism is too loose an interpretation of history.

A similar loose interpretation is to treat Shivaji as the protagonist of the Hindu cause. It is possible to point out incidences in his life that show allegiance to both.

Maharashtrians, like the rest of Indians, are bad at maintaining records. The Mughals and the British destroyed Raigad and other forts and valuable documents were lost. This leaves room for all kinds of speculation, Brahminical or otherwise. For playing contemporary politics, documents help but lack of documents helps more, because it provides more room for collective imagination and manipulation. Bhima-Koregaon is a manifestation of competitive negotiations and imagination.

It is pointless to argue that the Mahars of that time should not have fought on the side of the British.

The British wanted local soldiers who were cheaply available and who could be possibly easily trained to take on the last mighty power in India, the Marathas. The most important question is: after the defeat of Peshwa Bajirao II, did the British gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Mahars in this battle beyond building a memorial?

Looking at the minuscule minority of Brahmins in Maharashtra, it would be improper to say that the defeat of Bajiraos army is the defeat of the Brahmins. In fact, it was the non-Brahmin army led by the corrupt Brahmin elite. Peshwai like all political regimes of medieval India had its own serious problems. However, from Peshwa Bajirao I to Malharrao Holkar to Mahaji Shinde to Nana Fadnis, it had its own share of competent people; not everyone was involved and fascinated by the ideas of Ramana and Dakshina (where Brahmins were patronised and eulogised) popularised in later Peshwai.

Therefore, while celebrating the defeat of Peshwa Bajirao II, one must understand that from the time of Shahaji to Savai Madhavrao, there is a linkage in the Maratha regime and Shivaji has been revered not by the Maratha sardars but also by the Brahmin Peshwas because they understood that he was the pioneer of the empire. What is needed now is to overcome the uninformed debate from all sides and accept that multiple historical narratives are going to coexist and as long as they coexist, without baying for each others blood, it is fine in a democratic set-up.

Bhima-Koregaon has something to do with the political process evolved in Maharashtra post-1960. As the dominant caste, Marathas have controlled power for a long time.

The economically weaker sections among the Marathas have realised of late that the so-called Maratha-Kunbi caste cluster is not a monolith and the dominant groups among the Marathas are the real beneficiaries of controlling the state apparatus. This frustration of being part of the dominant caste,but still being underprivileged and unrecognised has to be factored in to understand the agitations of the Jats, Thakurs, Patidars and Marathas.

In the case of Maharashtra, when the unemployed rural Maratha youth are craving for employment, and when the system has failed to engage with them, the easiest way to divert attention is to give a history pill and discover enemies who could be responsible for everything that has gone wrong with the community. This explains the emergence of the Sambhaji Brigade, Maratha Seva Sangh and other Maratha organisations patronised by the ruling political parties in last two decades. This has contributed to the constant rewriting of history and attempts to stake exclusive ownership of Shivaji and Sambhaji for the Maratha caste.

This would explain the disproportion influence of two Bhosale rulers from Kolhapur, Satara, and the attempts by major political parties to patronise them. One may argue that this has contributed to the democratisation of the legacy of Shivaji. However, the embedded feudal component of this leadership is hard to ignore.

Ambedkar created a movement of the subaltern classes of people across India and he has a pan-Indian appeal even today,not just as a political strategist but also as one of the architects of the Constitution of India.

When he converted to Buddhism, the community that responded the most was the Mahar community to which he belonged. It is the dominant dalit community in Maharashtra. From conversion till date, Mahars and the present day neo-Buddhists have dominated the anti-caste discourse in Maharashtra.

In terms of the advantages of affirmative action, they have been the biggest beneficiaries in the state. It has brought them face to face with the middle-class Brahmins and Marathas; on the other hand, it has also antagonised other dalit castes in Maharashtra because they fear the monopolising of the anti-caste space by the neo-Buddhists.

The Congress, and its sibling NCP, have used the politics of co-option for a long time to co-opt the dalits, especially the Mahars, thereby paralysing the dalit movement.

Discourse-changing efforts like the Dalit Panthers were defeated by insecure leaders of the RPI and the megalomania of the Panther leadership. The RPI today is a multi-fractured family, with leaders having local and pocket influence claiming national status.

With the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party on the national horizon and its successful deployment of the co-option strategy, the dalit movement in Maharashtra is further marginalised, with maverick leaders like Ramdas Athawale surrendering to the NDA and rationalising the surrender.

The four comparatively relevant groups of the RPIAthawale, Prakash Ambedkar, Jogendra Kawade, and R.S. Gawaiare all at loggerheads with each other. This has resulted in jeopardising of the dalit movement. More so, the non-Mahar dalit castes who feel that they are not represented by the Mahar-led dalit movement have joined hands with the Shiv Sena or the Bharatiya Janata Party. Thus, Mangs, Chambars and Dhors have joined hands with different political parties to get their share of the cake in affirmative action and the politics of the depressed classes.

There is antagonism between educated Brahmins and Mahars because both look at each other as competitors in the bureaucratic sphere.

The Maratha-Mahar rivalry on the other hand is based on the relationship in villages and has a lot to do with control of land and local politics. More so, a section of the Marathas is unhappy with the dalit movement sharing the connect with Shivaji and his legacy because the politically frustrated unemployed Maratha youth has only one thing to emotionally cling on tothe pride in Chhatrapati Shivajis history and the exclusive connect of the Marathas with him.

Ambedkar and many others who led the anti-caste movement visualised the end of the caste system, with progressive 'decasting' of individuals. With due respect to the protagonists of the anti-caste movement, they failed to understand that electoral politics in a democracy would be a booster dose for caste politics and electoral mobilisation would contribute to caste consolidation.

Electionslocal, state and nationalare a major trigger for this mobilisation and therefore, the violence at Bhima-Koregaon and the Maharashtra bandh should also been seen in the context of the 2019 elections and political preparations leading to that.

Prakash Ambedkar, who led the Maharashtra bandh has come out of hibernation after a long time. Despite having the Ambedkar tag, he has not been able to do much of what was expected of him. The socialists and the communists, collectively called the progressives, are a marginalised lot in Maharashtra today. It is their own doing because they have followed the politics of untouchability for a long time, leading to organisational fragmentation and electoral 'peripheralisation'. The communists failed to understand and recognise the caste dynamics in India.

Both the groups are stereotypical in their criticism of the establishment, which includes the country being sold to the IMF and the World Bank and the present dispensation being fascist in nature. Although they lack organisations on the ground, they have a vocal crowd on social media and this virtual 'chatterati' class (which the Sangh Parivar also has in abundance) has contributed a lot to the incidents in Bhima-Koregaon and later in Mumbai.

The progressives, with limited or no organisation, look at Prakash and the dalit masses as their mercenary army, although it is not said in so many words. Prakash gets legitimacy from the progressives and the progressives get organisational might from the dalit masses. This way, the politics of emancipation is going to remain predictable.

I am not sure whether Prakash will be able to break this mould. As long as he is not able to do it, I dont see much future to his politics beyond prime-time news. More importantly, hiring the likes of Jignesh Mevani and Umar Khalid is not going to help beyond a point. It may in fact jeopardise the future of some dalit youth in Maharashtra. Prakash also has to take care to not align with the Naxals. Both the Hindutwawadis and the Naxals are part of the problem.

The Sangh Parivar and the Bharatiya Janata Party has very successfully capitalised on the fault lines between Brahmins and Mahars and Marathas and Mahars. Thus, Sambhaji Bhide, Milind Ekbote and the Hindutvawadi brigade, through their network of paid trolls, have been able to successfully confuse people and use it for enhancing the credibility of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his government.

I do not agree with the argument that Fadnavis is a Brahmin and therefore logically a Peshwa. There is more to Fadnavis strategy than what meets the eye. Fadnavis and his team are following Modis disruption model in the state.

On the one hand, they have imported almost every influential political leader from the Congress-NCP against whom they had campaigned from 2009. This process, aptly described on social media as Valmikikaran, has certainly affected the so-called clean image of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

We have a one-man government at the Centre, and we have a one-man government in Maharashtra.

Surprisingly even senior mediapersons do not understand the contradiction when they argue that the chief minister is good, but the system is bad. When this one-man system fails to deliver, you need Bhima-Koregaon to divert attention from core issues.

The core issues are that of employment, housing, infrastructure, quality education, health and environment. Battles for asmita (identity) reflecting through history are a challenge to this. Keeping people engaged in the battle of 1818 is an intelligent strategy of the present dispensation when 2018 is not going to be happy enough.

The mercenary army led by Bhide, Ekbote and others does its job quite well and people forget questioning why the government cut short the duration of the Winter Session, why the supplementary demands are going higher and higher and why is it that the Fadnavis cabinet is showing symptoms of policy paralysis. We will be able to see through this only when we are willing to look beyond the binaries.

This is how I think the way forward could be. Dont get ecstatic by the success of the Maharashtra bandh and dont allow yourselves to get offended every now and then because the establishment has many more Bhima-Koregaons in store and dont expect a revolution with fossilised minds and fossilised ideological set-ups.

Challenge the Hindu right but let that phobia not make you individually and collectively immobilised. Engaging with the establishment and developing a new critique is the key. The Brahmin, non-Brahmin, Peshwa-Maratha, secular-communal and fascist-progressive is the very binary division the establishment is comfortable with because they have come to power exploiting these fault lines.

If you want to really make them uncomfortable, you have to change the discourse. It is only a fresh outlook that looks beyond the false unsettling of the status quo that is going to help us evolve a new initiative, a new Maharashtra initiative if I may call. The need for such an initiative is the real lesson of Bhima-Koregaon. After the dust settles down, I hope we will move in that direction sooner than later.

Dr Deepak Pawar is a faculty member of the Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai.
Geekologie has shut down.

Thank you to everybody.

Now go be happy.
A Twitter war between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath, mocking each other on the issue of development and governance, has gone viral on the internet.

Adityanath took part in the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally organised by the BJP's Karnataka unit in Bengaluru on Sunday, as part of the party's ongoing statewide 75-day campaign to 'expose misdeeds' of the Siddaramaiah government.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018

Welcoming the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Siddaramaiah tweeted that there's a lot Adityanath can learn from Karnataka to address the reported starvation deaths in his state.

"I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here, please visit an Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru," Siddaramaiah tweeted.

Adityanath promptly responded.

Thanking Siddaramaiah for the welcome, he cited an increase in farmers' suicides and alleged ill treatment to honest government officials under the Congress dispensation.

He also pointed out that he was trying to 'undo the misery' unleashed by Congress' allies in Uttar Pradesh.

"Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers."

"As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies," Adityanath tweeted.

Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.  Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018

The 'welcome' barb between both the chief ministers has gone viral, with supporters of political parties they represent taking sides and trolling each other with hashtags "#YogiInBengaluru" and "#HogappaYogi" (go Yogi).

Addressing the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally on Sunday, Adityanath alleged that the Congress government in Karnataka was pushing the state five years back "due to corruption, divisive politics and anti-development policies."

Accusing the Congress of trying to divide the society on caste lines, keeping Assembly elections in mind, he said, "The party has become a burden... a problem for the nation."

Assembly elections are due in Karnataka early this year. This is the second visit of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to the state in less than a month to campaign for his party.

His last visit was to Hubli on December 21, 2017 to address a rally.

Adityanath has also attacked Siddaramaiah personally for endorsing eating beef.
Iraqi security forces are forcibly returning civilians from refugee camps to unsafe areas in the predominantly Sunni Anbar province, exposing them to death from booby-traps or acts of vigilantism, refugees and aid workers say.

Managing more than two million Iraqis displaced by the war against Islamic State is one of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis most daunting tasks. But critics say he is more interested in winning elections in May than alleviating the suffering of displaced Iraqis and returning them safely home.

Authorities are sending back people against their will, refugees and aid workers say, to ensure that the election takes place on time. People must be in their area of origin to vote and if they do not get home, this could delay the election.

Abadi is riding a wave of popularity after defeating Islamic State in Iraq and is anxious the election should not be held up.

His strategy is not without its hazards. Abadi risks alienating Sunni voters if displaced Sunnis are seen to be suffering from being sent home to dangerous areas.

Abadi is seeking a second term in which he plans to fight corruption and maintain national unity in the face of Kurdish separatism. He will need all the votes he can muster to face down a challenge from candidates linked to Iranian-backed Shiite militias.



Military trucks

Interviews with aid workers and dozens of displaced people at camps in the town of Amriyat al-Falluja, located in the Sunni heartland of Anbar province, 40 km (25 miles) from Baghdad, as well as with several families who were returned to other areas in the province, reveal that many were forced to go home and several suffered death or injury.

Aid workers said military trucks arrive at camps unannounced and commanders read out lists of people, who have one hour to pack their belongings and go.

The aid workers, who all spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated that between 2,400 and 5,000 people were forcibly returned between Nov. 21 and Jan. 2.

These returns are not safe, said one aid worker. Even those who dont openly resist really have no other choice. They cannot really say no to a bunch of people with guns.

They gave him a tent

An Iraqi military spokesman said the claim that the military forced displaced civilians to return against their will was an exaggeration.

Our primary concern is the safety of our citizens, our job is to protect people, Iraqi Joint Operations Command Spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told the media.

However, citizens have to go home now that Islamic State had been defeated, he said.

Some aid workers said local military commanders told them the orders came from Abadis office. The prime ministers spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

On November 25, security forces arrived at a camp in Amriyat al-Falluja and told Saleh Ahmed, 37, and his family to return to their home town of Betaya, his father, Mahdi Ahmed, said.

They refused because contacts at home told them the area was filled with booby-traps left by retreating Islamic State fighters and their houses had been destroyed.

A local commander assured them the area was safe, saying it was better to go live in a tent in your home town than live in a tent in the camp.

Saleh reluctantly took his wife and some of his children and got on the truck. Mahdi Ahmed, 72, remained at the camp with his sick wife, another son, and some of Salehs children as their names were not on the list.

They gave him a tent. He went back to our destroyed house and tried to pitch it in our yard, Mahdi Ahmed told Reuters at the camp in Amriyat al-Falluja.

An explosive went off. Salehs wife was killed instantly and his daughter sustained full body burns. Saleh lost one eye and was seriously injured in the other, according to one of his sons, who witnessed the incident.

Cannot afford to return

The Ahmeds case is not unique. Abdallah, 17, told the media his family was forced to return to the town of Jweibeh on November 26

A week later masked men arrived at the family home at 2 a.m. demanding to speak to the father. When he refused to open the door, they burst in and started shooting. Abdallahs father suffered leg injuries and his mother lost a finger.

The family do not know what the men wanted.

Its not that we dont want to return but it has to be safe, said Abdallah, who is now the family breadwinner, working at a shop in the city of Falluja.

For many it is not economically viable to leave the camps, where they can set up barber shops or fruit stands at makeshift markets, making about $50 a month.

That sum would not be possible back home where jobs, basic services, and schools are nonexistent.

I cant afford to return, said camp resident Alaa Hussein.

One man whose father suffers from kidney failure said leaving means losing access to the camps dialysis machine. His village, 450 km (280 miles) from the camp, does not have one.

I will return once there are adequate health services there, but why should I go before then? said Jassem Ali, 37.

Five camp residents told Reuters separately they were forced to leave but had to turn back because checkpoints manned by Iranian-backed Shiite militias were demanding bribes of up to $400 to let people through, a sum none could afford.

They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Reuters was unable to independently verify the claim.

Life ruined

A US diplomat in Baghdad said she had heard reports of forced returns, which the embassy had brought to the attention of the Iraqi government.

She said the government had stressed its commitment to safe and voluntary returns but also said that there is a real desire to get people home as quickly as possible.

The United Nations says more than half of displaced Iraqis have already returned. More than 3.2 million people were back home at the end of December, with 2.6 million still displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration.

For Mahdi Ahmed, the government has achieved the reverse of what it intended.

They are doing this because of the election, but if I go back and see my house destroyed, my money gone, and my life ruined, why would I vote for them? he asked.

 Reuters
The footprint of the militant Islamic State (IS) group is continuously on the rise in Pakistan as over the past year responsibility for as many as six deadliest attacks, in which 153 people were killed, was claimed by the outfit, according to a think-tank report.



The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) on January 7 stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn online reported.



"The IS claimed responsibility for just six terrorist attacks in the country, but they were the most deadliest ones. There is a need to take the matter more seriously because there is a possibility that foreign fighters would come to Pakistan in near future as things are continuously changing in the Middle East," said PIPS offical Muhammad Ismail Khan.



"What has been quite alarming is the increasing footprint of IS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh where the group claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks," Khan said.



According to the report, despite a 16 per cent decline in terrorist attacks last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its associated groups remained the most potent threats. They were followed by nationalist-insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.



It further said that concerted efforts and a revision of the National Action Plan was required to curb the terror group's activities. The report suggested a parliamentary oversight of Pakistan's counter-terror plan.



Militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups carried out 370 terrorist attacks in 64 districts of the country in 2017, the think-tank said.



These incidents, including 24 suicide and gun-and-suicide coordinated attacks, left 815 people dead. The report noted that as compared to 2016, the attacks in the country from across the Afghan, Indian and Iranian borders in 2017 witnessed a significant surge by 131 per cent.



Furthermore, security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016.



According to the report, it was quite likely that the National Internal Security Policy will take into consideration global and regional scenarios, including relations between Pakistan, China and the US.
Never let it be said diplomacy amounts to more than horse-trading.

French President Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to win the heart of the Chinese leader on the first day of his state visit on January 8, offering him a horse of the elite French Republican Guard.

Macron is on a three-day tour of China starting with a stop in Xian, an eastern departure point of the ancient Silk Road where he visited the Terracotta Army with his wife Brigitte and will talk of past and future Sino-French relations.

An adept of soft diplomacy and symbols, Macron picked an 8-year old brown gelding named Vesuvius from the presidential cavalry corps and braved stringent Chinese quarantine checks to offer it to President Xi Jinping.

The choice of the gift, an unprecedented diplomatic gesture according to the French presidency, was made after the Chinese president expressed his fascination for the 104 horsemen who escorted him during his last visit to Paris in 2014.

It is the first time France has offered one of the elite cavalry corps horses and is also a response to Chinas panda diplomacy, after Macrons wife Brigitte became the godmother of a Chinese panda lent by Beijing to a zoo near Paris.

It mattered a lot for the president, even if it was very complicated to import a horse for sanitary reasons. Its a symbol of French excellence, an Elysee official said.

Since his election last May, Frances youngest leader since Napoleon has shown his willingness to use symbols and history to win over his global counterparts.

Macron flattered Russian President Vladimir Putin in May with a meeting at the sumptuous palace of Frances former monarchy, built in Versailles by Louis XIV  the Sun King  to symbolise absolute power.

He also invited US President Donald Trump to watch a military parade on the grandest avenue of Paris on Bastille Day last July to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the US entry into World War One.

Trump later said Macron was doing a terrific job.

In Xian, Macron decided at the last minute to visit the Wild Goose Pagoda, a virtually unknown landmark in the West compared with the terracotta soldiers but well-known by Chinese people as a historic site for Buddhism.

The 40-year old French president is keen to gain more access for French companies to often protected Chinese markets and is travelling with a delegation of about 50 businessmen.



 Reuters
Before August 28, 2017, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh seemed unassailable. The chief of the Dera Sacha Sauda, had crores of followers, fabulous riches and Z Plus security that befit his life as a movie star and Messenger of God. But after a CBI special court sentenced him to 20 years imprisonment in two rape cases on that Monday, several people have come forward with more stories of illegal activities in the Dera. Many of these stories relate to sexual exploitation. Women were forced to have sexual relations with the baba, said A.S. Chawla, police commissioner of Panchkula, Haryana. Medical records have proved that the sadhus who were close to the baba and [were] guarding his family were castrated.

The CBI is investigating the mass castration case. Sources in the agency told THE WEEK that three sadhus came forward in the past one month saying they had undergone forced castration at the behest of Gurmeet. Medical examination showed they had been castrated and the CBI is preparing to submit a status report in the court in the first week of February. Dera officials, who requested anonymity, said the castration was voluntary and a way to reach God.

The trial in two murder cases against Gurmeet is also in the final stages, in the CBI special court in Panchkula. One, the murder in 2002 of a journalist, Ram Chander Chhatrapati, who had written about sexual exploitation in the Dera, and the other, the murder of a Dera follower, Ranjit Singh, the brother of one of the rape victims.

Meanwhile, a special investigation team of the Haryana Police has filed a charge-sheet on the riots that followed the verdict against Gurmeet on August 25. Thirty-six people were killed in the riots and police firing. The charge-sheet says a conspiracy was hatched by key Dera persons to destabilise the BJP governments at the Centre and in the state. Gurmeets adopted daughter, Honeypreet Insan alias Priyanka Taneja, allegedly chaired a meeting of the 45-member Dera core committee on August 17 to plan the violence.

A witness in the conspiracy case is a journalist, Sanjeev Mahajan, who told the police that he had heard Dera members Aditya Insan (spokesperson) and Surender Dhiman Insan plan the riot.

Fathers daughter: Honeypreet (centre) with her brother and family.

On the day of the verdict, Honeypreet, 26, and Gurmeet had set out for the court in a 173-vehicle procession that had a fire engine and an ambulance. The carcade had everything in it. A portable computer, generator, printers, said Chawla. The fire engine was carrying six litres of petrol, though it was a diesel vehicle [the Dera explained that it was for other vehicles]. Armed commandos from Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan police were guarding the Z Plus protectee. More than 100 live cartridges and seven weapons were recovered from these vehicles. Lakhs of Dera supporters from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan had arrived with stones, canes, weapons and black umbrellas. The umbrellas had a dual purpose: to identify Dera followers and for use as a weapon against the police.

The police said electronic evidence confirmed that some key Dera officials had asked the premis (followers) to sacrifice their lives for pitaji (Gurmeet). A sum of Rs 1.25 crore was given to Dera officials to execute the plan. The police recovered Rs 24,80,500 from the accused.

The mobile records of the key conspirators showed that they were constantly in touch with one another. After Gurmeet went to jail, Honeypreet went into hiding and was arrested 38 days later, along with an associate, from a highway near Bhatinda in Punjab. The police said she carried a suitcase that had hundreds of credit and debit cards, chequebooks, mobile phones and title deeds. Honeypreet and her associates have been charged with sedition, criminal conspiracy and waging war against the state.

Honeypreet had travelled with Gurmeet in a helicopter while he was being taken from Panchkula to a jail in Rohtak. Her ex-husband, Vishwas Gupta, has said that she is not Gurmeets adopted daughter, but his lover. He alleged that he was threatened with death after he discovered their illicit relationship.

Honeypreets family has dismissed these allegations as baseless. Her younger brother, Sahil, who runs a factory in the Dera township in Sirsa, Haryana, told THE WEEK that their family became Dera followers two decades before and that Honeypreet had sacrificed all joys of life to serve the Dera. She has two sisters who are married and settled in Faridabad and Gurugram. Her parents and brother continue to reside at the Dera headquarters.

Honey does not enjoy any powers, said Sahil. These are baseless rumours. Didi [elder sister] was helpful and friendly. She had no ego and anger. We know she is clean and we will stand by her till the end. It is a conspiracy hatched by certain people who were worried that she would become the Dera head since pitaji had declared her his adopted daughter. He said that the media had done a character assassination of Honeypreet without proof.

Sadhu Gurdas Singh Toor was once close to Gurmeet. He told THE WEEK that he was part of Gurmeets close coterie who were allowed to enter the gufa (a cave-like tunnel) where the self-styled godman lived.My family were Dera followers and when I was 18, my parents thought I could join as a sadhu, said Toor. Little did I know what I would witness. Toor said he had seen exploitation of women and forced castration. He said he was fed up with the goings-on and he ran away to escape castration.

Toor said he has given the CBI a list of 300 sadhus who had undergone castration. I want justice for all sadhus who have suffered, he said. We want to expose Ram Rahim.

Slain journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapatis son Anshul told THE WEEK that the entire state administrative machinery had surrendered to Gurmeet. Chief ministers and important ministers of several states used to visit him, he said. People had started believing that Ram Rahim can do anything and no one can touch him. But Ram Chander did not bend like them. After his murder, it was an uphill task to get the FIR registered, said Anshul. Just to include the Dera Sacha Sauda in the FIR was an impossible task. Finally, the court ordered a CBI investigation in the case.

But Anshul said he always had faith in the judiciary. When no one believed that Ram Rahim will go to jail, I was sure he will be behind bars one day, he said. I have full faith that he will be convicted of my fathers murder.
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Despite the high-minded rhetoric of state government leaders, this session of the Iowa Legislature is shaping up to be one long campaign rally.

Given the current political climate nationally and in Iowa, Democrats see the session that opens Monday as a way of energizing and mobilizing their base ahead of the November election.

Were going to be very aggressive. Were going to be very outspoken on what we think is bad policy and bad for the people of Iowa, predicted House Minority Leader Mark Smith, D-Marshalltown.

Majority Republicans, who are beset by low presidential approval ratings and the fact the presidents party nearly always loses seats in midterms, plan to stick to their game plan to move Iowa forward, to grow Iowas economy, protect Iowa taxpayers, deliver the core services that Iowans count on, but doing it in a responsible way, according to House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow, R-Windsor Heights.

In the wake of the divisive 2017 session  the first under GOP control of both legislative chambers and the governors office in two decades  the chances seem slim for the parties to find much common ground.

This session may be more about what happened in 2017 than pursuing ambitious new policies, said Chris Larimer, who teaches political science at the University of Northern Iowa.

After pushing through major parts of their agenda in 2017, Republicans will be content simply to work around the edges, Larimer predicted. Democrats likely will use the session to protest changes Republicans made last year to collective bargaining, workers compensation, family planning funding and other Democratic priorities.

Even in those areas where the parties seem to share priorities  expanding access to mental health services, for example  Larimer expects gains will be difficult if Democrats blame the problem on former Gov. Terry Branstads closure of two mental health institutions.

But election-year politics could work in favor of small victories on those shared priorities.

Republicans made good on several campaign promises last year, which could mean a somewhat less active legislative session with lawmakers this time pushing fewer measures, said Tim Hagle, who teaches political science at the University of Iowa.

State legislators who arent in safe districts might be a bit more cautious about legislation that might appear more controversial in their districts, he said.

If maintaining control of the Legislature and governors office is their priority, Republicans will walk a fine line between continuing their agenda and not doing anything too controversial, Larimer added.

Given the controversy Republicans created in 2017, it might be too late to prevent a blue wave as voters express buyers remorse in the 2018 election, according to Smith.

He is predicting that voters will put Democrats in control of the Iowa House, now controlled 58-41 by Republicans with one vacancy in a district with a 40-to-26 percent GOP-to-Democratic registration split.

Of course, its not only control of the Legislature at stake in 2018. Gov. Kim Reynolds will be seeking election to a full term, too.

Given that Iowans have been quite favorable to GOP gubernatorial candidates, Larimer thinks Reynolds is in a good spot for both the Republican primary and general election.

What you may see is Gov. Reynolds pursuing a conservative agenda that should help her fend off primary challengers Ron Corbett of Cedar Rapids and Steven Ray of Boone, but also taking positions on a few issues that create some distance between her administration and the presidents, Larimer said.

Although Iowa voters didnt share the Democratic Partys dislike for Branstad, Hagle said Reynolds needs to demonstrate her ability as a leader and not just a fill-in for Branstad.

In her favor, Iowas economy continues to grow  slowly  and unemployment is so low that employers report difficulty filling jobs. Political scientists say a good economy favors incumbents.

While Iowa hasnt been as divided along party lines as some other places, Hagle said the sharp uptick in bitter partisanship at the national level will likely affect us here as well.

House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, R-Clear Lake, doubts that nationalizing the election will work for Democrats in Iowa.

Its all local, she said, adding: To be clear, were going to hold the House.

Its not just Democrats that Upmeyer and other Republicans need to fear, according to Senate Minority Leader Janet Petersen, D-Des Moines.

I can tell you, in my tenure in Legislature, I have never seen people as energized as I have, really since the start of last session, said Petersen, who was elected to the Legislature in 2000. I hear from a lot of independent and Republicans who are frustrated as well.
DATA PAYOUTS Peers are considering changes that could force companies to pay compensation to customers when their personal data is stolen by hackers. The amendment to the Data Protection Bill would allow people to sue firms who had been careless with data.

Amendments to the Data Protection Bill would allow people to sue firms who had been careless with data

PROPERTY PAYS Buy-to-let landlords will still receive about 16.7 billion in tax relief even after a government crackdown in 2020, according to estate agent Ludlow Thompson. Stephen Ludlow, the firms chairman, added: Buy-to-let tax breaks are still very valuable, highlighting that rental property remains a highly attractive investment vehicle.

THEATRE DRAMA British billionaire Sir Cameron Mackintosh received no payout from his theatre company last year after profits tumbled. The 71-year-olds business said profits slumped 16 per cent to 23.2 million in the year to March 2017. Sales fell 9.6 per cent to 132.6 million. It came after he was paid a 35 million dividend in 2016, accounts show.

BOOMING SALES Nightclub chain Deltic Group has cheered surging sales over the festive season. The firm saw like-for-like sales rise 8.2 per cent in the four weeks ending in December 2017, largely thanks to Christmas parties, along with total sales of 2.4 million on New Years Eve.

SHOW HOMES A documentary series that will give viewers a look inside extraordinary homes has been snapped up by Apple. The series will span ten episodes and comes hot on the heels of another show starring Reese Witherspoon which the tech giant also bought.

PLUG N PLAY Tesla boss Elon Musk has promised a drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant at one of the companys new electric car charging points in Los Angeles. The billionaire inventor made the declaration on Twitter, where he has been known to respond directly to customer queries about his firms vehicles.
Shares in Carillion surged more than 20 per cent today as investors were hopeful the group will manage to secure new funding to avoid collapse later this week when it meets with lenders.

The construction firm, a major government contractor which is involved in the building of the HS2 railway, will hold crunch-talks with lenders this week.

The company is reportedly set to meet with HSBC, Santander and Barclays in a bid to cut debts and clinch new funding.

Shares in the group rose 20 per cent higher to 22.7p in afternoon trading.

High hopes: Carillion is involved in the building of the HS2 railway

Bosses are considering a rescue plan that would see it hand back loss-making contracts, revise others and potentially take financial support from the Government.

A loan from the taxpayer could be on commercial terms, or achieved via a renegotiation of contracts.

Carillion has struggled since reporting half-year losses of 1.15billion. Its share price plummeted 90 per cent after announcing its first profit warning last July.

They also fell after the companys decision to breach debt covenants along with another profit warning in November, when it said annual profits would be lower than expected.

A Carillion spokesman said: Carillion is in constructive discussions with a broad range of stakeholders regarding its options to reduce net debt and recapitalise and/or restructure the groups balance sheet.

The group is currently finalising its business plan, which it intends to present to its financial creditors and certain other stakeholders on January 10.

By David Madden market analyst at CMC Markets UK said: 'The firm has lurched from profit warning to profit warning in recent months as high debt levels and a cash flow problems.

'Now the company is seeking assistance to help it bounce back, but the problem is that its bankers dont want to over expose themselves to the company.

'Carillion does have a healthy order book of work lined up, it just needs a short-term solution to ensure its survival.'
Shares in tech company Micro Focus International plunged 15 per cent today after the company posted disappointing sales at its recently-acquired Hewlett Packard Enterprise business and trimmed down revenue forecasts.

In the first set of results since completing the 7billion acquisition, Micro Focus said revenues at HPE were at 'the bottom of the range' of its previous guidance.

The Berkshire-based firm, which helps companies with old systems update their information technology, added it now expected revenues to fall between 2 and 4 per cent in the year to the end of October 2018.

The company expects revenues to fall between 2 and 4 per cent in the year to the end of October 2018

Shares in the FTSE 100 listed firm fell 15 per cent, or 386p, to 2196p in morning trading.

That's despite reporting a 29 per cent increase in pre-tax profits to $145.7million in the first half compared to the previous year and an 80.3 per cent jump in revenue to $1.23billion. However, these numbers were a bit below some analysts' expectations.

But on a positive note, the company announced a 16 per cent increase in dividend to 34.60 cents and looked set to profit from Donald Trump's cuts to corporate tax as it now expects a rate of 25 per cent in the future, instead of over 30 per cent.

The group also announced some management's changes following its HPE acquisition.

Mike Phillips, its chief financial officer, will take on the newly created role of director of mergers and acquisitions, while Chris Kennedy, a former finance chief at ARM and easyJet, will be taking over as the new chief financial officer.

Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, said: 'Whilst H1 financials themselves failed to live up to City expectations - both MF and HPE growth undershot - there is good news in the form of a 16% dividend hike and looming US tax reform benefit.

'However, this does nothing to offset guidance being considered below par. Which is a worry when the CFO has moved to a more M&A focused role, suggesting more purchases, acquisition risk and integration of slower growth. Although at least his replacement has pedigree as ex-CFO of ARM Holdings, easyJet and EMI.'

Micro Focus and HP announced a deal last year whereby HPE would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Micro Focus in a 6.6billion 'reverse takeover', where the smaller company buys the larger.

But today's results add to previously voiced concerns that the acquisition was perhaps not a very good idea. There are fears over the health of the Hewlett Packard business, which also contains the remaining assets of another former FTSE 100 software firm - Autonomy.

Mike van Dulken added that the share plunge may have been a bit of an over-reaction to the results and said: 'Perhaps investors need more time to see that the latest monster acquisition is providing value before hearing more about incremental additions of the older product types the company likes to eke the most out.'
MBABANE  Good news is in the air for SMEs following the approval of an over E300 million loan to Swaziland Development Finance Corporation (FINCORP).



FINCORP Managing Director (MD) Dumisani Msibi has confirmed that the Board of Directors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) gave the greenlight to a Line of Credit (LOC) valued at E355 million (US$26 million) to finance key projects in key priority sectors including manufacturing, transport and logistics, forestry, agri-business, building and construction.



Explained



Msibi explained that the facility would help and scale up support to critical sectors in Swaziland and support efforts to promote private sector development.



He said it would also enhance FINCORPs liquidity and ability to provide financing on appropriate terms to projects and enterprises in key sectors including lower levels of economic activity.



The LOC will have positive development impacts including availing scarce long-term liquidity injection and promotion of private sector participation in key sectors as well as contribute to gender and social development through support to projects in rural and underserved communities, Msibi explained.



Demand



The MD said the AfDB loan comes at a time when FINCORP was faced with a huge demand for business loans which far exceeded their capacity to supply.

Msibi clarified that part of the loan amounting to E235 million was, however, subject to a government guarantee and they had since submitted their request to the ministry of finance. We are hoping that the guarantee will be issued without any delays so that we can begin to draw down on the line of credit for the benefit of the Swazi SMEs.

The biggest advantage for this facility is its tenure of 10 years which will now enable us to offer extended duration to clients, said Msibi.



On top of the loan AfDB has also offered technical assistance to the institution by way of strengthening credit appraisal and risk management. He said they would also train their staff. AfDB will also work with FINCORP in tracking development outcomes. It was also added that the financed projects and enterprises were expected to contribute to Swazilands economic development, generate employment opportunities and reduced income inequalities.



Mentioned



It should be mentioned that FINCORP realised a profit drop of 34.92 per cent, which amounts to E8.8 million in monetary terms.

The company with two shareholders in the Swazi Government and Tibiyo TakaNgwane holding 80 per cent and 20 per cent respectively reported that the group profit after tax of E16.4 million.

This is a decline from the profits of E25.2 million made the previous year. This is largely because the parent company posted a loss of E8.6 million which is largely attributable to foreign exchange valuation losses of 14.8 million, reported Tibiyo TakaNgwane in the financial year ended April 30, 2016.




MASON CITY | A Mason City woman is accused of threatening two people by pointing a handgun at them in a road rage incident Friday.

Aerial Jeanne Miller, 34, was charged with felony intimidation with a dangerous weapon after she allegedly brandished her Taurus 9mm pistol toward two people in a road rage incident about 4 p.m. Friday at South Taft and Highway 122 in Mason City.

"It was reported to MCPD that a driver of a motor vehicle had displayed a handgun at another vehicle," Police Chief Jeff Brinkley said. "Officers were able to locate the suspect and her vehicle."

According to the criminal complaint, the two who were threatened were able to describe the pistol and were afraid that Miller would execute the act.

Miller was arrested at Northside Liquor without incident, Brinkley said.

Miller was booked in the Cerro Gordo County Jail about 8 p.m. Sunday and is being held without bond. No court date has been set.

 Courtney Fiorini
DES MOINES | Ken Kline, Cerro Gordo County auditor for the past 25 years, has been named Iowa's deputy commissioner of elections.

Secretary of State Paul Pate announced the appointment Monday.

Kline said he never formally interviewed for the job.

"I received a call from the secretary of state's office informing me of the job opening and asking if I would be interested. I said, 'maybe,' Kline said.

Then later he received a call from Pate where he and Pate discussed the position and Kline's qualifications for it.

"He offered me the job and I accepted," Kline said.

Kline is a past president of the Iowa State Association of County Auditors, creator of the national award-winning Precinct Atlas electronic poll book program and served for many years as a legislative liaison for county auditors.

Pate said, Kens experience, ingenuity and dedication will be a welcome addition to the staff. He has served the people of Iowa very capably for more than a quarter of a century and is well regarded by election officials across the state and country.

Kline will begin his new role on Jan. 22. He replaces Carol Olson, who will become state director for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley.

Kline, 64, said he plans to continue to live in Mason City and commute to Des Moines but will find a place to stay in Des Moines, much like state legislators do.

He pointed out that 2018 is an election year and Pate is up for re-election. "So, who knows, this might be a one-year gig," he said with a laugh.

When Kline leaves his auditor's position, County Treasurer Pat Wright will assume the duties until a successor is named.

The Board of Supervisors can appoint a successor or call for a special election. The appointment would be through the 2018 general election. The public may override an appointment by petitioning for a special election with 2,297 signatures -- 10 percent of votes cast in the 2016 election cycle.

An appointment must be made within 40 days of the vacancy.

A special election must be held on a Tuesday at the earliest practical time between Feb. 27 and April 10.
COLONIE  Local proponents of legislation that would allow mentally competent, terminally ill adults to speed up their deaths began rallying the troops Monday, urging them to think globally and act locally.

As bill sponsors and advocates plan a press conference at the Capitol Tuesday to kick off a campaign to increase legislative endorsements for medical aid in dying, Amanda Cavanaugh of Compassion & Choices urged supporters at the William K. Sanford Town Library to approach county legislators for their backing.

Its not just about the state legislation, Cavanaugh said. We need to have everybody in on this movement to make it a positive one.

Cavanaugh was the featured speaker at the monthly meeting of Death with Dignity-Albany, which backs medical aid in dying. Modeled after a 20-year-old Oregon law, the New York proposal would give patients with a terminal diagnosis and less than six months to live the option to take a lethal dose of medication.

The practice, legal in six states and the District of Columbia, is often referred to as physician-assisted suicide. But advocates shun that terminology, as suicide often occurs when a person is mentally depressed and physically well  the opposite of a person eligible for medical aid in dying, who must have a condition with no remedy.

People are choosing how they die, Cavanaugh said of medical aid in dying, but at the end of the day, theyre dying anyway. So its different.

Proponents of medical aid in dying characterize it as an option that allows people to avoid needless pain and suffering. Opponents include the Catholic Church and some disability rights groups, which have expressed concerns that terminally ill patients may feel coerced into ending their lives too early, or will base decisions on a depressed psychological state or bad medical information.

In other states where medical aid in dying has been enacted, the passage of local resolutions has helped gain traction for legislative efforts on the state level, Cavanagh said. Yet while Compassion & Choices has a toolkit for citizens to push for the passage of such resolutions, Cavanaugh asked interested people in attendance to contact her directly, as the population and demographics in New York vary widely.

The tactic of garnering local support for the proposals will be replicated statewide, Cavanaugh said.

This is the third year that Compassion & Choices is introducing the legislation in New York. The proposal passed the Assembly Health Committee last year, but did not advance in the Senate. The advocacy group focused its efforts in 2017 on educating legislators about the bill in one-on-one sessions, Cavanaugh said, and this year will work hard to move it forward.
New York

Firefighter Brian Marts was battling a raging blaze in an apartment building, but he was also fighting the bitter cold.

Spray from his hose in an elevated bucket encased his helmet, coat and gloves in layers of glassy ice that made it tough to move. Icicles hung from ladders and power lines. Slick fire escapes and the streets below made every step treacherous for both firefighters and those fleeing the flames. With temperatures in the teens, frostbite became another real threat.

"Everyone really shows true grit. You dig deep because that's what you do," Marts recalled of the Jan. 2 blaze in the Bronx that destroyed a four-story building and injured 23 people. "The cold doesn't last forever."

But the cold snap that has plunged much of the nation into a deep freeze for weeks has also created a potentially deadly combination for firefighters: More fires caused by space heaters or unattended flames, and treacherous conditions that can slow crews down when every second counts.

Fires last month in New York City alone killed 27 people, the city's deadliest December in a decade. That included 13 killed in a Dec. 29 blaze started by a toddler playing with stove burners. Another fire in Brooklyn that killed a mother and three of her children was started by candles from a Hanukkah menorah.

Five buildings in Newark, New Jersey, were destroyed early Friday morning after firefighters battled freezing temperatures and high wind that carried the flames across the street. When firefighters were finished, the buildings were encased in ice.

Frozen hydrants, seized hoses, ice-stuck ladders and equipment failures are just some of the threats cold-weather departments prepare for months in advance, though officials acknowledge they can only do so much. Firefighters set up extra layers in their go-kits; some rub Vaseline on their faces to protect skin. Engineers who drive the trucks keep cans full of sand or salt to add traction to the slick ground. Teams rotate in and out faster to avoid hypothermia. Some departments keep steam trucks at the ready to free firefighters who get frozen to their hoses.
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Note: Congresswoman Elise Stefanik held three public, in-district events in 2017. A previous version of the story was incorrect.

SOUTH GLENS FALLS  Voters from the 21st Congressional District packed the Moreau Community Center on Sunday afternoon to listen to and get an early look at candidates hoping to unseat incumbent Elise Stefanik.

Hosted by Citizens Acting Together 21, the standing-room-only event was meant to introduce all 11 candidates, including Stefanik, to constituents.

All eight Democrats showed, and one Republican, Russell Finley, sent a statement to be read to the crowd. Republican Steven Schnibbe did not respond to the invitation. Neither did Stefanik. And that, constituents say, is one of the problems with her representation.

"I'm not particularly satisfied with Stefanik," said Bruce Caskey of Moreau who was in the audience. "I've tried to meet with her several times. She refused to show up here today. That says a lot."

Tim Schalachter of Wilton, also in the crowd, agreed. He called Stefanik  who in 2017 had three public events  unapproachable.

Stefanik's spokeman Tom Flanagin said that the forum was for Democrats and no Republicans attended. He also said that she has participated in more than 500 events since taking office.

"In 2018, Congresswoman Stefanik will continue her aggressive schedule of constituent outreach," Flanagin said.

At this point, it's too early to tell whom Stefanik will face. Bob Lippman, co-founder of CAT 21, said that this event, along with a similar event last September, was meant to give voters an idea who will be the strongest candidate heading into the November elections.

"Voters need to be able to distinguish the candidates," Lippman said. "How much did they raise, where did they raise it from, if they are intending to run as a third party. A lot of today's questions will be about process more than policy."

The eight participants  Tanya Boone of Granville, Don Boyajian of Cambridge, Tedra Cobb of Canton, Sara Idleman of Greenwich, Ronald Kim of Queensbury, Emily Martz of Saranac Lake, Patrick Nelson of Stillwater and Katie Wilson of Keene  began with opening statements describing their backgrounds, their careers and what their focus would be in Congress.

They also answered questions about fundraising. While not all candidates knew what was in their coffers, Cobb and Boyajian have raised the most so far  just above the $200,000 mark.

Nelson asked candidates to pledge not to take money from corporate SuperPACs or registered lobbyists. Boyajian, Kim and Wilson agreed. Boone said she already received funding from a union, while Idleman said that she would accept money from a PAC if the PAC worked for causes she believed in.

Finley, in his statement, vowed to beat Stefanik in a primary and said he was looking forward to facing one of the Democrats in the fall.

Afterwards, Lippman opened the floor up to a town hall-style meeting. The Saratoga Springs attorney said he hoped the questions, some submitted via Facebook before the event, would help voters "drill down on each candidate."

"There are eight candidates and limited time," Lippman said. "It's not a lot of time to answer too many specific questions."

Enid Engler, who came to hear the candidates speak, is focused on removing Stefanik from office in November. To do that, said the Hague resident, the Democrats need a strong candidate.

"We have to narrow it down to one good candidate," she said. "This will help all of us decide."

Note: Stefanik held three events in 2017 that were open to the public. An earlier version of this story had an incorrect number.
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It sounds like an urban legend: A 60-year-old man bent to pick something up outside a subway station in Stockholm.

It exploded, blowing up his hand and killing him.

But Swedish police say that's exactly what happened Sunday morning outside the Varby Gard subway station in Huddinge, a suburb to the city's south.

Witnesses say the man leaned over to pick something up from the ground. When it exploded, he was rushed to the hospital, where he died.

A woman in her mid-40s was injured in the blast. Police say she suffered minor wounds to the face and legs.

Police can't say for sure what the device was or why it exploded. Rescue official Lars-Ake Stevelind told the Swedish broadcaster SVT that "someone has used some type of explosive material" for the object. The Aftonbladet and Expressen tabloids claimed that it was a hand grenade, but police spokesman Sven-Erik Olsson dismissed that as speculation, according to the Associated Press.

Police say that they don't believe terrorism is to blame or that the victims was targeted. For now, the station is cordoned off, as officials sweep the area for any other possible explosives. They are also carefully reviewing security camera footage.

This is just the latest mysterious explosion in Sweden.

In October, bombs were detonated across the country. Explosions went off in at least two apartment buildings in Malmo. A hand grenade was tossed into a nightclub in Angelholm, which injured at least one person. A powerful blast ripped the entrance off a police station. The doorway was laced with dynamite so powerful that it blew a chunk of rubble more than 250 feet away, into the living room of someone's home. Police attributed the attack to "criminal circles."

Bomb scares and threats are becoming more common, too. In the United States, right-wing outlets such as Infowars and Breitbart have cited the explosions as evidence that President Donald Trump is right in concluding that more open immigration policies mean more crime. But local outlets say there's another explanation.

According to the Local, "Explosives are often used by organized crime rings in Sweden, especially in the south where settling of scores and intimidation are frequent among drug traffickers. Police and judges are also regularly targeted."
A Nenagh driver was involved in two separate incidents of what appeared to be racing cars on the public road, Nenagh Court was told.

Luke Grey of 5 Stone Cottage, Five Alley, Nenagh, pleaded to a number of road traffic charges, including careless driving at Knockalton, Nenagh, on November 17, 2016, and again at Lisbunny, Nenagh, on December 28, 2016.

The court was told on November 17, the Gardai observed two cars in succession passing a car and turning on to a minor road at Casey's Cross.

Both cars appeared to be racing, the court heard.

The court was told the cars took the bend at an unsafe speed.

The Gardai identified one of the drivers as Luke Grey and the driver of the second car as Adam Maxwell of 12 Yewston Estate, Nenagh.

Mr Maxwell also pleaded to careless driving on the day in question as well as having no insurance and other motoring offences.

The Gardai switched on the patrol car's blue light and followed the cars to a house where Mr Maxwell took off running.

The Gardai questioned Mr Grey who failed to produce his licence and the car had no tax or NCT certs. The fixed penalty notice for these remained unpaid.

They later stopped a car in which Mr Maxwell was a pasenger and demanded his documents but he refused to show them on the basis that he was not driving.

The court heard that Mr Grey had 27 previous convictions while Mr Maxwell had 13.

Mr Maxwell's solicitor, Elizabeth McKeever, said her client had a bad history but his parents had separated whe he was a small child and he had ADHD. He also suffered from fibromyalgia.

Ms McKeever said Mr Maxwell had recently become a father and I have seen a change in his attitude since the baby was born.

She said Mr Maxwell hoped to go back to education and his financial circumstances were not good.

Judge Flann Brennan fined Mr Maxwell 100 and disqualified him from driving for four years for no insurance.

He fined the defendant 100 for careless driving and disqualified him for two years.

Mr Maxwell was fined 50 for no licence and 50 for failing to stop.

In a second case, the court was told that Mr Grey was observed by Gardai driving side by side with another vehicle at Lisbunny on December 28, 2016.

Both vehicles were travelling at speed and appeared to be racing.

The Gardai had to take evasive action and followed the cars to a garage on Dublin Road.

The drivers were identified as Mr Grey and Jason McInerney of Tullaheady, Nenagh.

Judge Brennan was told Mr Grey became so abusive the Gardai had to call for assistance.

The court heard that when the Gardai told Mr McInerney they were seizing his car, he told one Garda: I will kick the b******s out of you.

He continued to be abusive.

Both defendants pleaded to careless driving and threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour on the date in question.

The court heard that Mr McInerney had nine previous convictions.

His barrister, Erin O'Hagan, said that Mr McInerney could offer no excuse for his behaviour.

She said he lived outside Nenagh and needed his car as his father had left the family home to live in the UK and his mother didn't drive.

Mr McInerney had a 14-year-old brother with ADHD and his family circumstances were a sad situation.

She said her client hoped to return to education and begin a trade.

Ms O'Hagan outlined that her client had a previous dangerous driving charge reduced to careless driving.

I've warned him he is in toruble but he is the author of his own misfortune, she said.

Judge Brennan fined Mr McInerney 100 for careless driving and disqualified him from driving for two years.

He fined him 50 for threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour.

Recognizance in the event of an appeal were set in Mr Mcinerney's own bond of 100.

In relation to Mr Grey, his counsel, Mr Nicholas, BL, said his client was 29 years old and the father of six children, one of whom has health problems.

He said Mr Grey's wife had mental health issues and, appealing for no disqualification, Mr Nicholas said Mr Grey needed his car to take her to appointments.

Mr Grey told the court he accepted what he did was an act of stupidity.

Judge Brennan said: You have little respect for the rules of the road. My fear is you are going to kill someone.

However, he agreed to give Mr Grey a chance, warning him that he should drive at a reasonable speed and stop at junctions.

He fined Mr Grey 50 for careless driving at Knockalton in November 17, 2016 and 100 for the offence at Lisbunny on December 28, 2016.

He fined Mr Grey 25 for threatening, abusive and insulting bahaviour at Lisbunny on December 28.

Judge Brennan fined Mr Grey a further 125 in total for having no NCT, failing to comply with the directions of a Garda and failing to stop.

It's all about respect for road users and the Gardai, said the judge.

In a contested case, Mr Grey had a charge of careless driving dismissed after he told the court he had not received any notification of the fixed penalty notice.

The court had heard that Mr Grey took a sharp turn right at Banba Square in Nenagh on February 2, 2017, narrowly missing an oncoming vehicle.

The court was told the car was stopped and the driver gave his name as Luke Grey and a penalty notice was issued.

I never received paperwork, Mr Grey told the court in evidence.

Asked by Judge Brennan if anything else went missing in the post he replied: No.

Striking out the summons, Judge Brennan described the process of serving summonses by post instead of handing the defendant a ticket as nonsense and having to strike out cases where the defendant said under oath they did not receive a summons as stupid
[January 08, 2018] California Ushers in Legal Cannabis with New Self-Service Automation

OAKLAND, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Grasshopper Kiosks ( grasshopperkiosks.com), the developers of the nation's leading fully compliant self-service systems for the storage and dispensing of cannabis products, have installed a unit in Berkeley Patients Group (BPG), the nation's longest continuously operating marijuana dispensary. The Grasshopper automated self-service sales system streamlines transaction times, tracks inventory and payments, and collects real-time data about sales trends. Grasshopper Kiosks sell products from a secure, climate-controlled, automated storage and dispensing system. Grasshopper's systems are ADA compliant and were designed to work in accordance with the complex regulations that govern California's legal cannabis industry. The system in use at BPG sells a variety of products, including pre-rolled joints, vape cartridges and edibles. "The system has been purposefully designed for cannabis dispensaries, and can be utilized to accommodate and support a variety of business needs," said Ron Christensen, Vice President of Grasshopper Kiosks. "For instance, the system can be configured to handle only medical or only adult-use products, and will keep track of those transactions separately for regulatory and taxation purposes. In this manner the Grasshopper system not only streamlines transactions for customers, but also reduces paperwork and inventory challenges for employees."



Grasshopper Kiosks can also be stocked with a dispensary's most popular items, creating a "Fastlane Checkout" for customers on the go. "We recorded over 70 transactions on the system on its first day," said Sean Luse, COO at Berkeley Patients Group. "We appreciate having a tool that not only helps customers conduct transactions quickly and easily, but also provides us with excellent data and revenue reports."

Berkeley Patients Group was one of the few dispensaries in California that was licensed to sell adult-use cannabis beginning on January 1, 2018. The dispensary opened their doors to a waiting crowd, and Berkeley Mayor, Jesse Arreguin, performed a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. Reporters and photographers from both national and Bay Area television stations, newspapers, and wire services covered the event. "We are excited to be changing the landscape of this new $7 billion legal industry with accomplished peers like the people at Berkeley Patients Group," said Martin Kaufman, CEO of Grasshopper Kiosks. "One of our top priorities is working with dispensaries to help them create a brand distinction in the market with a tool that enhances the customer experience and protects regulatory compliance." For more information on Grasshopper Kiosks, call: 877-828-3879, email: [email protected], or visit: www.grasshopperkiosks.com Connect with Grasshopper Kiosks on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/california-ushers-in-legal-cannabis-with-new-self-service-automation-300578658.html SOURCE Grasshopper Kiosks

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[January 08, 2018] Evotec and Apeiron Achieve First Milestone in Immuno-Oncology Alliance with Sanofi

Evotec AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809) and APEIRON Biologics AG, a company focused on cancer immunotherapy, announced today that the companies received the first milestone payment from Sanofi under a 3-party alliance signed in August 2015. The milestone payment of EUR 3 m will be split equally between the two biotech companies. The success payment was triggered when the partners successfully advanced an undisclosed, novel immuno-oncology small molecule into late-stage pre-clinical development. Under the alliance, the three companies work together to identify small molecule leads and targets for next-generation therapies in immuno-oncology, which may complement the pre-clinical and clinical profiles of leading checkpoint inhibitors. Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: "The Evotec and APEIRON teams are proud to have achieved our first milestone with Sanofi to discover and develop novel immuno-oncology small molecules therapies. It is a first-in-class approach with tremendous potential in combination with marketed checkpoint inhibitors but also as standalone therapy. The field of immuno-oncology will continue to evolve and at Evotec we will continue to invest in this area." Dr Hans Loibner, Chief Executive Officer of APEIRON Biologics, said: "We are delighted by the progress made in our collaboration with Evotec and Sanofi. Based on our scientific findings and the mode of action, we jointly agreed to accelerate the research and pre-clinical development of this very promising molecule. The successful achievement of this milestone further demonstrates our abilities to drive innovation in the field of immuno-oncology." ABOUT THE EVOTEC-APEIRON-SANOFI-ALLIANCE The strategic collaboration was set up in 2015 to support the long-term pipeline building for Evotec, APEIRON Biologics and Sanofi and has a potential value of over EUR 200 m in milestone payments and significant royalties. The collaboration includes major research and development efforts to advance a first-in-class orally available small molecule approach based on a novel target to treat solid and hematopoietic cancers by enhancing the anti-tumor activity of human immune cells. All three companies are making significant contributions to this collaboration in terms of scientific expertise, technological platforms and resources. The collaboration will further enhance and complement Sanofi's extensive oncology portfolio and enables Evotec to address the drug discovery area of immuno-oncology. Furthermore, the agreement will substantially support APEIRON's strategy of focusing on novel and innovative checkpoint inhibiting approaches. ABOUT APEIRON BIOLOGICS AG APEIRON is a private biotech company based in Vienna, Austria, engaged in innovative projects in immuno-oncology. Recently, the most advanced program, an immunotherapy to treat neuroblastoma, was granted marketing approval in the EU. The company is developing additional immunotherapies based either on targeted, tumour-specific approaches or on the stimulation of the immune system via novel and proprietary modes of action (unique checkpoint blockade mechanisms) to fight cancer by engaging the human body's natural defense mechanisms. For additional information please go to www.apeiron-biologics.com and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @apeironbio ABOUT EVOTEC AG Evotec is a drug discovery alliance and development partnership company focused on rapidly progressing innovative product approaches with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academics, patient advocacy groups and venture capitalists. We operate worldwide providing the highest quality stand-alone and integrated drug discovery solutions, covering all activities from target-to-clinic to meet the industry's need for innovation and efficiency in drug discovery (EVT Execute). The Company has established a unique position by assembling top-class scientific experts and integrating state-of-the-art technologies as well as substantial experience and expertise in key therapeutic areas including neuroscience, diabetes and complications of diabetes, pain and inflammation, oncology and infectious diseases. On this basis, Evotec has built a broad and deep pipeline of more than 80 partnered product opportunities at clinical, pre-clinical and discovery stages (EVT Innovate). Evotec has established multiple long-term discovery alliances with partners including Bayer, CHDI, Sanofi or UCB and development partnerships with e.g. with Sanofi in the field of diabetes, with Pfizer in the field of tissue fibrosis and Celgene in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. For additional information please go to www.evotec.com and follow us on Twitter @EvotecAG. FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS Information set forth in this press release contains forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements contained herein represent the judgement of Evotec as of the date of this press release. Such forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in these forward-looking statements. We expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.







Language: English Company: Evotec AG Manfred Eigen Campus / Essener Bogen 7 22419 Hamburg Germany Phone (News - Alert): +49 (0)40 560 81-0 Fax: +49 (0)40 560 81-222 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: www.evotec.com ISIN: DE0005664809 WKN: 566480 Indices: TecDAX Listed: Regulated Market in Frankfurt (Prime Standard); Regulated Unofficial Market in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, Munich, Stuttgart, Tradegate Exchange

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180107005139/en/

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[January 08, 2018] Air Liquide Electronics: A Record Year in Asia with New Major Contracts in 2017

PARIS, JAN. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In 2017 Air Liquide signed several new long-term contracts with major electronics manufacturers in China, as well as Japan and Singapore. Air Liquide will invest more than 150 million euros in the region to supply ultra-pure carrier gases to its customers' new fabs which manufacture integrated circuits, memory, imaging sensors and flat panel displays for consumer electronics and mobile devices. Carrier gases such as ultra-pure nitrogen are critical to the high tech semiconductor industry. These gases are used directly in the chip and display manufacturing processes as well as to maintain an ultra-clean atmosphere to protect manufacturing tools. Air Liquide will invest in new world class efficiency ultra-high purity onsite nitrogen generation systems representing a total production capacity of 170,000 Nm3/h. In addition, the demand for Air Liquide's Advanced Materials continued to grow in the Asia-Pacific region notably in China, South Korea and Japan. Advanced Materials are used in the first layers of the nano transistors at the heart of the processors and memories found in consumer eectronics and mobile devices.



Today's continuing evolution in technology from Artificial Intelligence, mobile and connected devices, Big Data, electric and autonomous vehicles are driving significant demand for semiconductor chips, sensors and high resolution displays. Air Liquide is supporting customers that manufacture cutting-edge memory devices for improved data access speeds and last generation smartphones. Michael J. Graff, Executive Vice President and member of the Air Liquide Group's Executive Committee supervising Electronics, said: "Air Liquide continues to demonstrate its leadership in Electronics in Asia. The new contracts illustrate Air Liquide's ability to supply electronics customers with products and services that meet the highest standards in the fast-growing semiconductor and flat panel industry."

Air Liquide's Electronics business Generating EUR1,618 million in revenue in 2016, the Electronics business line of Air Liquide is a world reference in molecule design, manufacturing and delivery for the electronics industry. The Electronics business line of Air Liquide is a long-term partner providing innovative solutions to the markets for semiconductors, photovoltaics and flat panel displays. 3,850 specialists worldwide are dedicated to providing the agility and reliability our customers need. www.electronics-airliquide.com

Air Liquide The world leader in gases, technologies and services for Industry and Health, Air Liquide is present in 80 countries with approximately 65,000 employees and serves more than 3 million customers and patients. Oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are essential small molecules for life, matter and energy. They embody Air Liquide's scientific territory and have been at the core of the company's activities since its creation in 1902.

Air Liquide's ambition is to lead its industry, deliver long term performance and contribute to sustainability. The company's customer-centric transformation strategy aims at profitable growth over the long term. It relies on operational excellence, selective investments, open innovation and a network organization implemented by the Group worldwide. Through the commitment and inventiveness of its people, Air Liquide leverages energy and environment transition, changes in healthcare and digitization, and delivers greater value to all its stakeholders.

Air Liquide's revenue amounted to EUR18.1 billion in 2016 and its solutions that protect life and the environment represented more than 40% of sales. Air Liquide is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange (compartment A) and belongs to the CAC 40, EURO STOXX 50 and FTSE4Good indexes. Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180108/2027089-1



SOURCE Air Liquide China

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[January 08, 2018] Continental's 3D Touch Surface Display Receives Highest Honor at CES 2018 Innovation Awards

DETROIT, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's first touchscreen, featuring a 3D surface, combines a unique visual appearance with a brand-new operating concept by Continental. The innovative 3D touch surface display can be operated instinctively, enhancing the user experience and increasing safety. The technology company was awarded the CES 2018 Best of Innovation Award in the "In-Vehicle Audio/Video" category, the highest awarded honor in its category, for its state of the art design and breakthrough technology. "Our latest display solution combines three elements: design, safety and user experience. The 3D surface not only allows for exciting design, but it also ensures that drivers can operate the various functions without having to take their eyes off the road," said Dr. Frank Rabe, head of the Instrumentation & Driver HMI business unit at Continental. "The CES Innovation Awards honor technologies for the very highest standards of design and engineering prowess, so we are absolutely delighted to have received this award." Technological creativity for innovative user concept The growing demand among users for new features and digital content means that in-vehicle touchscreens are getting bigger and bigger. While conventional screens are ideal for the flexible display of digital information, their shortcomings quickly become apparent when it comes to user-friendliness and design possibilities for vehicle manufacturers. To address this, Continental developed a 3D surface for its new touchscreen. The 3D elements allow brand-specific individualization of the high-quality plastic surface and, at the same time, finger guidance that users can actually feel. Continental's haptic technology also means that the display can provide haptic feedback when touched, allowing drivers to operate the display instinctively without having to take their eyes off the roa.



"As humanmachine interfaces become ever more complex, the combination of active, haptic feedback and passive feedback from the 3D surface ensures an outstanding user experience and significantly improves operational safety," explained Rabe. Haptic feedback and high contrast for reliable operation

Drivers can use the touch-sensitive 3D elements on the sides of the display like sliders to set frequently used functions such as volume or temperature settings without having to navigate away from the displayed menu. In the center of the display are specific, virtual buttons allowing blind operation of a range of applications, which change depending on the current menu. To prevent the driver from triggering any functions accidentally when interacting with the 3D elements, the touch force is measured (force sensing) before a command is executed. In addition, haptic feedback tells drivers when they have reached the edge of a screen element as they pass their finger over the screen, which allows them to distinguish between different virtual buttons without having to look at the screen. Haptic feedback is provided in the form of a short and highly precise mechanical pulse that is transferred to the display surface; any mechanized movement of the display is completely invisible to the naked eye. To optimize the contrast of the 3D Touch Surface Display, Continental has employed optically bonded, topographical elements that are up to ten millimeters high, homogeneously tinted and can be modified to fit any display size and shape. Continental will unveil the world's first 3D touchscreen for the first time at CES in Las Vegas. Additionally, Continental also received recognition for its CAirS and Ac2ated Sound technologies. Both were named as CES 2018 Innovation Award honorees and will also be on display. Visit Continental at CES, Tuesday, January 9 through Friday, January 12, at North Hall Booth #6106. The Continental press conference will be held at Mandalay Bay, Level 2, Ballroom A at 10 a.m. on Monday, January 8. 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 transport. In 2016, Continental generated sales of 40.5 billion and currently employs more than 233,000 people in 56 countries. Links

For the latest Continental news and information, follow us on:

Facebook www.Facebook.com/ContiPress

Twitter www.Twitter.com/ContiPressNA Online press portal: http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_en/

Online video portal: http://videoportal.continental-corporation.com/ Online media database: http://www.continental-mediacenter.com

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/continentals-3d-touch-surface-display-receives-highest-honor-at-ces-2018-innovation-awards-300578498.html SOURCE Continental

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[January 08, 2018] Eagle Harbor Solutions LLC awarded Contract to provide Network Analysis, Disaster Recovery and Cloud Migration Planning for the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians at the Department of Interior

CHANTILLY, Va., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eagle Harbor Solutions LLC (EHS), a subsidiary of Koniag Government Services, will support the Department of Interior Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians. Under this new contract EHS will review current information technology assets, network architecture and systems to develop a blueprint for moving systems to the cloud thus enabling a more robust disaster recovery and continuity of operations plan. The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Office of the Special Trustee (OST) for American Indians was created to improve the accountability and management of Indian funds held in trust by the Federal Government. As trustee, DOI has the primary fiduciary responsibility to manage both Tribal trust funds and Individual Indian Monies (IIM) accounts. "We are honored to be entrusted with the protection of the data housed in these systems to ensure OST fulfills the requirements of the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act of 1994" said Koniag Government Services CEO Ed O'Hare. About Eagle Harbor Solutions LLC

Eagle Harbor Solutions, LLC is an Alaska Native-owned, small disadvantaged business that ispart of the Koniag Government Services sector. Eagle Harbor provides Information Technologies and Professional Services through a range of consulting, engineering, and programmatic support to the Federal Government to enable them to manage their business environments and improve efficiency in delivering key business capabilities to support senior leaders and the warfighter. For more information, please visit www.eagleharborsolutions.com.



About Koniag Government Services

Koniag Government Services provides oversight, management and shared services to the companies that comprise the Koniag Government Services sector, including Eagle Harbor Solutions. Koniag Government Services (KGS) companies have supported Federal, State and Local customers for more than 20 years. Professional services include Application Development, Telecommunications, Enterprise Infrastructure Support, Cyber Security, Physical Security, Facilities Management, Cultural and Environmental Resources Support and Management Consulting Support. KGS supports clients in more than a dozen locations across the United State as well as in more than 30 worldwide sites. We have built a reputation for consistent performance and forging long term partnerships with our clients. For more information, please visit www.koniaggss.com . Media Contact:

MaryAnn Hoadley

Koniag Government Services

703-488-9303

[email protected]

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eagle-harbor-solutions-llc-awarded-contract-to-provide-network-analysis-disaster-recovery-and-cloud-migration-planning-for-the-office-of-the-special-trustee-for-american-indians-at-the-department-of-interior-300578610.html SOURCE Eagle Harbor Solutions LLC

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[January 08, 2018] Percona Announces General Availability of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.2 with MyRocks

RALEIGH, N.C., Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Percona, the company that delivers enterprise-class MySQL, MongoDB and other open source database solutions and services, today announced the general availability of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.2, a new release that includes the MyRocks storage engine, as well as a new binary log encryption feature. The powerful combination of Percona Server for MySQL and MyRocks enables database administrators to achieve more throughput for high-volume, write intensive workloads. Optimized for modern hardware, the product requires less storage space and reduces maintenance costs, providing increased ROI for on-premises and cloud-based applications.

MyRocks is a MySQL storage engine that integrates with RocksDB, a Facebook open source project. It provides improved flash storage performance through efficiencies in reading, writing and storing data. Optimized for fast, low-latency storage, its ideal for todays high-volume, write-intensive applications such as data aggregation, IoT, transaction logging, system monitoring, payment processing and billing systems. MyRocks requires less SSD storage space, provides more storage endurance, and ensures better IO capacity. Percona Server for MySQL is a free, fully compatible, enhanced, open source drop-in replacement for MySQL that provides superior performance,scalability and instrumentation. The new encryption feature demonstrates Percona's commitment to continually enhance security and meet the needs of modern enterprises. With more than 4,000,000 downloads, Percona Server for MySQL offers self-tuning algorithms and support for extremely high-performance hardware, delivering excellent performance and reliability. Percona Server for MySQL is trusted by thousands of enterprises to provide better performance and concurrency than other MySQL servers. Percona Server for MySQL also provides greater scalability and availability, enhanced backups and increased visibility.



Quotes

Peter Zaitsev, Co-founder and CEO of Percona

The combined solution of Percona Server for MySQL and MyRocks provides what nearly every company needs today  the ability to process far more data at a significantly lower cost, leading to increased scalability, improved ROI and an enhanced end user experience. MyRocks is an excellent storage engine for high-volume, write-intensive applications, and organizations can now confidently take advantage of these capabilities in conjunction with the rock-solid performance, availability and visibility of Percona Server for MySQL. Mark Callaghan, MTS, Facebook

I am thrilled to see the GA release of Percona Server for MySQL with MyRocks. The work we did with Percona makes this accessible to more users and we look forward to seeing the community benefit from the performance efficiencies provided with this release.

Company Information

Press Contact

Brigit Valencia

For Percona

(360) 597-4516

[email protected] About Percona

With more than 3,000 customers worldwide, Percona is the only company that delivers enterprise-class solutions for both MySQL and MongoDB across traditional and cloud-based platforms. The company provides Software, Support, Consulting, and Managed Services to large, well-known global brands such as Cisco Systems, Time Warner Cable, Alcatel-Lucent, Rent the Runway and the BBC, as well as smaller enterprises looking to maximize application performance while streamlining database efficiencies. Well established as thought leaders, Percona experts author content for the Percona Database Performance Blog and the Percona Live Open Source Database Conferences draw attendees and expert technical speakers from around the world. For more information, visit www.percona.com. Percona is a registered trademark of Percona LLC. All other registered and unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their respective owners.

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[January 08, 2018] Gopher Protocol Year in Review -- Transition to Revenue Generating Company Equipped with $1M cash

Atlanta, GA, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) ("Gopher"), a development-stage company which specializes in the creation of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technologies, releases a year in review for 2017. As Gopher looks ahead to new opportunities for 2018, management reflects on significant milestones in 2017 that transitioned Gopher to a revenue generating company focused on coupling its sales and marketing infrastructure with its diverse product pipeline. The review is located on the Company website: http://gopherprotocol.com/investors/

About Gopher Protocol Inc. Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) (Gopher and the "Company") (http://gopherprotocol.com/) is a development-stage company which considers itself Native IoT creator, developing Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technology. The Company has a portfolio of Intellectual Property that when commercialized will include smart microchips, mobile application software and supporting cloud software. The system contemplates the creation of a global network. The core of the system will be its advanced microchip technology that can be installed in any mobile device worldwide. Gopher envisions this system as an internal, private netwok between all enabled mobile devices providing shared processing, advanced mobile database management/sharing and enhanced mobile features.



About Guardian Pet Tracker http://www.guardianpettracker.com/

Corporate Site: http://gopherprotocol.com



Press page/ press kit - http://gopherprotocol.com/?page_id=228

Consumer and product website for Guardian Patch: http://www.guardianpatch.com/. GOPH disclosure: More info: SEC link /technology abstract: Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements". 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 as disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission located at their website (http://www.sec.gov). 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 conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release. Contact: Greg Bauer CEO Gopher Protocol Inc. VM Only 888-685-7336 Media: [email protected]

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[January 08, 2018] 2018 Kiwa Bio-Tech CEO Letter to Shareholders

Ontario, CA, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dear Shareholders, 2017 was a historic and record setting year for Kiwa Bio-Tech. Over the past 12 months, Kiwa Bio-Tech has demonstrated that our market-responsive approach, commitment to research and development and focus on extending longer-term credit to our customers achieved a positive reputation in the agricultural industry. Amidst very promising agricultural market conditions worldwide and with recently implemented governmental policy supports in China, the Company believes 2018 sales and earnings will surpass our 2017 numbers. In addition to record sales and earnings in 2017, Kiwa Bio-Tech took many important steps to build up experimental and demonstration sites in China to promote our innovative fertilizer products. We remain committed to optimizing our product portfolio and will continue to upgrade our agricultural technology to meet market demand. OUR PERFORMANCE AND STRATEGY Playing a key role in developing eco-friendly agriculture and delivering long-term value for all of our stakeholders requires strong performance in several areas. First, I am proud to say that Kiwa Bio-Tech has sold and shipped approximately $19 million of fertilizer products in this year ended December 31, compared to approximately $9.6 million during the same period in 2016, which is an increase of approximately 98%. Achieving this significant growth was due in part to the Company expanding its sales teams and distribution channels in Northwest, Eastern, and Southern China. Based on the cooperation between Kiwa Bio-Tech and China Agricultural University, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and ETS Research Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kiwa was able to finish product segmentation and apply certain new products to the national soil restoration project. Kiwa Bio-Tech has also established strategic cooperative relationships with Northwest Agricultural University, Northwestern University, and Harbin Institute of Technology, which provide cutting-edge technology for Kiwa Bio-Tech. In July 2017, Kiwa Bio-Tech made a proposal to establish Chinas harmless agriculture standard based on the cooperation with the China Agricultural Products Processing Industry Development Association. The proposal enjoys a high degree of credibility in upgrading the standard system for the harmless agricultural industry and the agricultural products market in China, which we believe provides significant market opportunitiesfor Kiwa Bio-Tech over the next 3 to 5 year term and thereafter.



POSITIONED FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS 2017 was a year that propelled the company forward, positioned Kiwa Bio-Tech to be successful in very promising market conditions and enhanced our ability to thrive as demand increases for our innovative products. Throughout the year, the Company continued to focus on positioning our company for the future:

Enhanced Marketing Plan Kiwa Bio-Tech has established a three-part initiative with respect to planting harmless crops, selling green agricultural products and soil conservation consistent with the standards of the agricultural industry. In 2017, our marketing program was implemented in Shanxi Province, Shandong Province, Hainan Province, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Due to our proactive marketing campaign, Kiwa Bio-Techs products have been used on cash crops including, apples, grapes, kiwi fruit, cantaloupe and vegetables, in green houses in approximately 82,368 planted acres. Corporation Development and Expansion Our manufacturing base in Penglai, Shandong Province, will soon commence production after the installment of facilities in 2018. When fully operational, the factory will produce approximately 200,000 tons of Kiwa fertilizer products every year. We will establish a new subsidiary company in Yangling, Shaanxi. Yangling is the only Pilot Free Trade Zones with a special focus on agricultural development that epitomizes the development of modern agricultural industry chain. As the agricultural Silicon Valley of China, Yangling could attract government incentives, high-tech agricultural companies and logistics companies. Kiwa Bio-Techs first strain fermentation manufacturing base will be developed and built in the Pilot Free Trade Zone. Meanwhile, we will also gradually establish as many as 1800 experimental and demonstration stations across China to promote our products. Increased Financial Competence and Strategic Cooperation Kiwa Bio-Tech selected new auditors in the past year that further audited our previous financial reports. We have also hired additional financial consultants to improve Kiwa Bio-Techs ongoing financial competence. Of significant importance, Kiwa Bio-Tech has signed a strategic agreement with the Beijing Jingnong Public Welfare Foundation. A major highlight of the agreement is the selection of Kiwa Bio-Tech as the technical support company to address the issue of polluted soil in Mainland China. Growing Market Kiwa Bio-Tech also announced a cooperative venture with China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where the association will apply our core technology and products to the development of the Safety Standards of Chinese Traditional Medicine Planting. In 2018, we expect the Company will significantly increase its share of the Chinese agricultural market. Kiwa Bio-Tech also looks to growth through entry into the soil restoration market. Kiwa Bio-Tech achieved tremendous success in 2017, and we believe that the Company is well positioned for 2018 and beyond. Our progress and financial success could not have happened without our employees. I offer my personal thanks for their valuable contributions to our company. As a leader in China for developing the environmentally friendly harmless agriculture industry, we believe that Kiwa Bio-Tech is uniquely positioned to build value for our shareholders and make an enduring contribution to a safer and healthier world. We plan to make 2018 a great year! Yvonne Wang Chief Executive Officer January 8, 2018 This letter contains information that constitutes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any such forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results described by the forward-looking statements. Risk factors that could contribute to such differences include those matters more fully disclosed in the Company's reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking information provided herein represents the Company's estimates as of the date of this letter and subsequent events and developments may cause the Company's estimates to change. The Company specifically disclaims any obligation to update the forward-looking information in the future. Therefore, this forward-looking information should not be relied upon as representing the Company's estimates of its future financial performance as of any date subsequent to the date of this letter. CONTACT: Kiwa Bio-Tech Products Group Corporation Molly Han [email protected]

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[January 08, 2018] Drizly Recognizes Rising Adult Beverage Influencers With Inaugural Drizly Blogger Awards

BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Drizly, the technology company behind the first and largest e-commerce alcohol app, announced the winners of its first-ever Drizly Blogger Awards. Drizly put out a call to booze-centric bloggers, from industry experts to imbibing enthusiasts, for nominations in 11 different categories to identify the blogs that consistently deliver the category's most creative, well-informed and entertaining content. The awards were judged by three bona fide experts: Jesse Brenneman, Co-Founder and Chief Alchemist of Deacon Giles Distillery, Todd Maul, Co-Founder of Cafe ArtScience, and the team at Drizly. Entries were robust and there were numerous standouts, but the cream, as in 11 winners, eventually rose to the top and are all noteworthy for making distinct contributions to furthering adult beverage enthusiasm and knowledge. 2017 Drizly Blogger Awards Winners: Best in Glass Winner: Natalie Migliarini from Beautiful Booze

Recognized as the top booze blogger in 2017  from cocktails to beer and everything in between. Booziest Brain Winner: Greg Mays from Simple Cocktails

Recognized as the go-to industry expert and all-around guru for tips on everything beer, wine and spirits. Best Drink Photography Winner: Aysegul D. Sanford from Foolproof Living

Photography can make or break the appeal of a cocktail, and these drinks are deliciously Instagram worthy. Best Cocktail Blog Winner: Natalie Jacob from Arsenic & Lace





Best Wine Blog Winner: Cindy Rynning from Grape Experiences

To honor a blog that breaks down vino for the most basic sampler to the most experienced connoisseur, and everyone in between.

Best Beer Blog Winner: Ryan Brawn from Hoppy Boston

A true lover of hops, this award honors the blogger who writes about everything from Porters to Sours and knows exactly what to crack open when. Bartender's Pick Winner: Tyler Zielinski from Bon Vivantito

Any Bartender would happily select Tyler's drink out of the crowd. Best Reinvention of a Classic Winner: Ivo Peshev and Mikey Gallop from Flair Project

Recognized for taking the initiative to make a classic drink, like a Gin & Tonic, their own. Best Use of Booze in Food Winner: Jackie Dodd from The Beeroness

For the multi-talented individual who combines booze with cooking to create tasty recipes. Craziest Concoction Winner: Leigh Ann Chatagnier from My Diary of Us

From sandwiches on top of a Bloody Mary to ice cream cone garnishes, Drizly recognizes the most creative cocktail recipes. Best Original Cocktail Winner: Kristy Gardner from She Eats

The weirder, the better. Drizly honors the most inventive and original drink yet. "Innovation is important in every industry, but at this moment in the alcohol space, it feels like innovation is booming," said Erin Schuster of Drizly. "We wanted to pay homage to the online enthusiasts with the inventiveness, know-how, curiosity and artistic talent to push adult beverage boundaries, who have worked so hard to earn their loyal, growing and fully-engaged followings." The call for the next round of submissions will be announced in November 2018. Follow Drizly on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or visit Drizly.com for additional information. About Drizly

Drizly is the world's largest alcohol marketplace and the best way to shop beer, wine, and spirits. With the speed and convenience of on-demand delivery, in-store pickup, or intrastate shipping, customers can easily browse and order their favorites from the Drizly website or mobile app. By partnering with the best retail stores in over 70 cities in North America, Drizly provides consumers a rich e-commerce experience that offers unrivaled selection, competitive pricing, and personalized content to users of legal drinking age. Drizly operates across the United States and Canada, from Austin to Boston, Calgary to Tampa, New York City to Denver (and beyond). Backed by world-class institutional investors, the company has raised $35 million to date. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/drizly-recognizes-rising-adult-beverage-influencers-with-inaugural-drizly-blogger-awards-300578350.html SOURCE Drizly

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[January 08, 2018] CARDO and OKADA Partner to Bring New Line of Motorcycle Communicators to the Japanese Market

TOKYO and TEL AVIV, Israel, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CARDO SYSTEMS, Ltd., the global market leader in wireless communication systems for motorcycle riders, and OKADA CORPORATION, the leading Japanese distributor of motorcycle accessories in Japan, announced today a partnership to bring Cardo's latest generation of motorcycle communicators to Japanese riders - starting March 1st, 2018. The two companies have signed a mutually exclusive agreement under which Okada will distribute and market Cardo's products in Japan. Okada Corp., Japan's largest wholesale distributor of aftermarket parts and accessories for the motorcycle market, serves a network of thousands of retail dealers located throughout Japan. Okada will carry the entire range of Cardo's communicators and accessories and make them available to the Japanese motorcycle community, starting in March 2018. Okada will also offer Cardo's market-leading Dynamic Mesh (DMC) communicators that provide true and uninterrupted group-communication among up to 15 riders. Powered by Cardo's unique DMC technology, and operated by natural voice, Japanese riders will - for the first time - be able to operate state-of-the-art motorcycle communicators cmpletely hands-free, without touching a single button.



Executives of both companies characterized their new alliance as an important moment for the Japanese riding community. Ken Hongyo, CEO of Okada remarked: "Best-of-class reliability, innovation and safety are what our customers expect from our product offerings and these were the main criteria that led us to select Cardo as our exclusive supplier of motorcycle communication systems." Abraham Glezerman, CEO of Cardo added: "We are excited about this cooperation with Okada, Japan's most respected distributor in the motorcycle market. Japan is among the most important markets and I am confident that this strategic partnership will bring immense benefits for Japan's motorcycle community."

About OKADA OKADA, founded in 1950 and headquartered in Tokyo, is Japan's largest wholesale distributor of a rich portfolio of quality aftermarket parts and accessories for the motorcycle market. The company is the most dominant distributor in the country, serving several thousand retail dealers in all parts of Japan. About Cardo Cardo Systems, Ltd., headquartered in Israel, has pioneered the development and introduction of Bluetooth headsets for motorcycle riders since 2005 and has been reinventing the market ever since with the introduction of game-changing innovations such as long-range intercom in 2011, Mesh communications in 2015 and Natural Voice Operation in 2017 and many more . Cardo is the industry's market leader and sells its products to avid motorcyclists in over 85 countries. PRESS CONTACT:

Kaisuke Komukai, [email protected]

Liat Sadeh-Lavan, [email protected]

SOURCE Cardo Systems

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[January 08, 2018] CES Best of Innovation Winner Intuition Robotics Launches Beta Program, as it Approaches the Commercial Launch of ElliQ, the Active Aging Companion

SAN FRANCISCO and RAMAT GAN, Israel, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Intuition Robotics, the creator of ElliQ, the Active Aging Companion, announced today the launch of its beta program, as the company approaches commercial launch in 2018. ElliQ is a proactive social robot designed to encourage an active and engaged lifestyle by helping to bridge the digital divide and keeping families closer together. In the beta program, ElliQ will be introduced into the homes of dozens of older adults in California and Florida for an in-depth multi-week user trial. Intuition Robotics has partnered with Village to Village Network, Comfort Keepers and individual families that joined the program through the company's website. In the beta, the company plans to test how ElliQ integrates into the day-to-day lives of the seniors and their families, and examine how it can improve ElliQ to fulfill the company's mission to empower older adults to keep sharp, active and engaged. ElliQ has been rigorously tested with older adults over the past year and the response has been uniformly enthusiastic. Now the company is ready for a prolonged beta to test the impact on daily life over time and ensure an exceptional user experience that will make the product successful. "Our mission with ElliQ is to harness the proactive power of cognitive computing to empower older adults to overcome the digital divide, and pursue an active lifestyle," says Dor Skuler, CEO and Founder of Intuition Robotics. "We are fortunate to have been working with many older adults to develop ElliQ's features and user experience, to meet their needs. Now, we are excited to begin the beta program as the next step on our way to a 2018 launch." Over the past year, Intuition Robotics has worke on turning its prototype, first unveiled 12 months ago, into a product. ElliQ is designed to be a proactive, emotive social robot, featuring an entirely new way to engage users with remarkable ease of use and elegant design. The beta program will use the first units coming off the company's new manufacturing line. The company is conducting the very first demonstrations of the beta version of ElliQ to a select audience at CES 2018, where it has been declared the winner of the CES Best of Innovation award in the Smart Home category.



The company is also announcing additional investment from Samsung NEXT, SPARX Group and Glory Ventures bringing its total investment to $22M. Prominent previous investors include Toyota AI Ventures, iRobot, Bloomberg Beta, and leading Israeli-based venture capital firms. Since emerging from stealth in January 2017, Intuition Robotics has garnered a stream of accolades and awards for ElliQ's innovative and thoughtful design and the robot's ability to address the specific needs of older adults, including:

- CES Best of Innovation Honoree - Smart Home category (Jan. 2018)

- Fast Company Innovation by Design Award Winner - UX category (Sept. 2017)

- AARP Innovation Champion Award - Social Well-Being category (June 2017) About Intuition Robotics

Intuition Robotics is the creator of ElliQ, the Active Aging Companion, which helps older adults stay active and engaged with a proactive social robot that overcomes the digital divide. The company's AI cognitive computing technology, award-winning design, and intuitive interaction models provide a natural way for older adults to reap the benefits of technology without the need to master the tools. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Israel with offices in California. Intuition Robotics has raised over $20M in funding and is supported by renowned industry experts. About ElliQ

ElliQ is an AI driven social robot for older adults aimed at reducing social isolation and loneliness by encouraging an active and engaged lifestyle. ElliQ seamlessly connects older adults with family and friends by making interactions with technology simple and intuitive, removing the complexity and frustration. This social companion adapts to the personalities and interests of the senior, recommending content they may enjoy such as news, music, TED talks and cognitive games. Communicating through body language, speech, sounds, light and images, ElliQ also suggests activities in the physical outside world such as taking a walk, medicine reminders or just calling family members. Intuition Robotics' media kit can be found here. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ces-best-of-innovation-winner-intuition-robotics-launches-beta-program-as-it-approaches-the-commercial-launch-of-elliq-the-active-aging-companion-300577885.html SOURCE Intuition Robotics

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or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at [email protected] 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. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006595/en/
INVESTOR ALERT: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP Reminds Investors of an Investigation Involving Possible Breaches of Delaware Law by the Board of Contango Oil & Gas Company

Levi & Korsinsky announces it has commenced an investigation of Contango Oil & Gas Company (NYSE American: MCF) concerning possible breaches of Delaware law by the board of directors of the company. To obtain additional information, go to:

http://zlkdocs.com/MCF-Info-Request-Form-5547







or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at [email protected] 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 and experience representing investors in securities litigation involving financial fraud, and have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for aggrieved shareholders. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006618/en/
[January 08, 2018] Panasonic expands TV line up with World's first OLEDs to support HDR10+ dynamic metadata technology

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Building on the numerous accolades garnered by its 2017 OLED screens for their extremely accurate pictures, Panasonic is delighted to announce its 2018 line up of OLED televisions, comprising four new models across two ranges. The phenomenally successful 77-inch EZ1000 continues from 2017 and is joined in 2018 by the FZ950 and FZ800 ranges, both available in 65-inch and 55-inch screen sizes. Featuring new OLED panels, combined with the newest generation of Panasonic's Hollywood-tuned HCX video processor, the FZ950 and FZ800 provide significant under-the-hood advancements. The four new models will be the first OLED screens available in 2018 which support HDR10+ dynamic metadata technology and able to stream several hundred hours of Amazon Prime Video HDR10+ catalogue. To deliver the very best audio quality, the FZ950 range is complemented by the addition of a 'Tuned by Technics' Dynamic Blade Speaker  a deceptively thin audio system optimized by Panasonic's acclaimed hi-fi brand to deliver a refined and powerful field of sound. Harnessing Panasonic's Hollywood and pro AV connections

Panasonic's OLED success is the result of superior image processing techniques built up over decades of TV development. This includes the company's reference-level plasma screens, aided by access to experts in film and television production, plus Panasonic's own professional Audio-Visual division. To ensure that the technical accuracy of the screens matches the director's creative intent, Panasonic intends to continue working with Hollywood giant Deluxe and its leading post-production studios Company 3, EFILM and Encore. Deluxe is a global partner to content creators and distributers enabling creative visions to come to life. Furthermore, a growing number of Hollywood film industry's post-production studios, in addition to Deluxe's, choose to use Panasonic's OLED TV screens as large-format client reference monitors as part of their creative process. With those same screens also available to consumers, Panasonic's well-established mantra bringing 'Hollywood to your Home' has never rung more true. And before shipping, Panasonic will duly seek coveted Ultra HD Premium and THX certification for all its OLED screens. Major HCX chip improvements deliver the most accurate TV pictures ever

Boasting the latest, most powerful generation of its proprietary HCX 4K video processor and latest generation HDR OLED panels, Panasonic's new models deliver the most accurate and compelling high dynamic range (HDR) TV pictures ever. The new processor's exceptional levels of control combine with incredible black levels and a color gamut of one billion shades  a result of Panasonic's ability to show almost 100 per cent of the DCI color space. Color reproduction, especially in areas that are particularly difficult to reproduce, such as dark shadows and bright highlights, is exceptionally accurate. The biggest under-the-hood change to the HCX processor is the introduction of a completely new 'Dynamic LUT' system. LUT (Look Up Table) technology is used extensively in professional post-production and broadcast circles in Hollywood and beyond to ensure color accuracy. Until now, LUTs were fixed according to the color space used by the source; with this innovation, the HCX automatically monitors the average brightness level of a scene and uses picture analysis to dynamically load an LUT appropriate to that scene. This brings significant improvements to mid-brightness scenes, making them look much more natural. To improve color accuracy in shadows, Panasonic has included additional layers of LUT data at much darker levelsthan previously. This means that while improving the transition from pure black, the colors in the shadows are even more accurate.



Finally, in response to requests from Hollywood's professional users, Panasonic has extended the range and reduced the interval between calibration steps at the darkest end of the RGB and gamma scales. This can be adjusted by the user via Panasonic's Color Management System. The FZ950 and FZ800 support Imaging Science Foundation (isf) calibration settings and new calibration points at 5 per cent and  in an industry first  just 2.5 per cent luminance, providing the greatest control to users where it is most needed, just above complete blackness in low-lit scenes. These new industry-first calibration points will also be supported by Portrait Display's CalMAN software with AutoCal functionality. Panasonic FZ950 and FZ800 are now CalMAN Ready. Raising the benchmark for black levels

All of this year's new OLED screens boast an Absolute Black Filter, which helps ensure the purest, most accurate black levels by absorbing ambient light in order to eliminate reflections  especially beneficial in brightly lit rooms.

HDR story continues

These OLEDs will support HDR10+ dynamic metadata technology which will offer considerable benefits to viewers through optimizing the viewing experience on a scene-by-scene basis. Panasonic intends to broaden support of this technology to other products yet to be announced. HDR10+ is an open, royalty-free, dynamic metadata platform for High Dynamic Range (HDR), created by 20th Century Fox, Panasonic and Samsung. Once the HDR10+ license program is open, the three founding companies will incorporate HDR10+ technologies in all future Ultra HD movie releases, selected TVs and Ultra HD Blu-ray players, and other products. To learn more about the HDR10+ license program, please contact the HDR10+ license administration office at [email protected]. Furthermore, Panasonic TVs which support HDR10+ dynamic metadata technology will be able to stream the entire Amazon Prime Video HDR library in HDR10+. The Prime Video HDR10+ catalogue includes hundreds of hours of content such as Prime Originals The Grand Tour, Golden Globe-nominated The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jean-Claude Van Johnson, The Tick and The Man in the High Castle plus hundreds of licensed titles. In addition, Panasonic's OLED screens offer support for HDR10  the standard HDR format, which is featured on the UHD Blu-ray format and across 4K HDR content from streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Also offered on all screens is HLG, the HDR format compatible with TV broadcasts, which are expected to expand in the near future. Panasonic has added a new Dynamic Scene Optimizer function, which uses picture analysis to mimic dynamic metadata when playing an HDR10 source on its new 4K TVs. Furthermore, a new Auto HDR Brightness Enhancer function allows viewers to experience the optimal viewing experience by adjusting manually or automatically how HDR content looks in a brighter room. Dynamic Blade Speaker  Tuned by Technics

To match the exceptional TV pictures of the FZ950, Panasonic has developed a beautifully elegant and sonically compelling sound system. Sporting a 'Tuned by Technics' logo, the Dynamic Blade Speaker uses audiophile grade Hi-Fi components and offers best-in-class sound for an integrated TV speaker. With no less than eight multiple speaker units (four larger woofers, four squawkers and two tweeters, plus a quad passive radiator to boost bass) and 40 per cent increased volume, the Dynamic Blade Speaker was developed in conjunction with engineers from Technics  Panasonic's acclaimed audio brand  who were involved at every stage of the process, from mechanical and electrical circuit design through to sound tuning. Meeting HDR expectations of gamers

Satisfying the demands of the most proficient of gaming enthusiasts, Panasonic's FZ950 and FZ800 screens have evolved to offer an enthralling 4K HDR gaming experience thanks to our quickest-ever response times. The screens' dedicated Game mode uses exceptionally fast image processing to deliver crisp, finely detailed images, even with fast-moving 4K and HDR games that require quick reaction times. Beautiful pictures deserve beautiful design

Elegant and with an air of refinement, Panasonic's OLED screens are designed to the highest standards using only premium materials. Designed within the umbrella of Panasonic's 'Art & Interior' ethos, the FZ950 and FZ800 have been fashioned with dark metallic finishes. Without any visible seams, they appear to float above their stands, which also elegantly hide their powerful sound systems. About Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company

Based in Newark, NJ, Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company is a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation. The company offers a wide range of consumer solutions in the U.S. including LUMIX Digital Cameras, Camcorders, Blu-ray players, Home Audio, Technics, Cordless Phones, Home Appliances, Beauty, Grooming, Wellness and Personal Care products and more. Panasonic was featured in Fortune Magazine's 2016 ranking of 50 companies that are changing the world and doing well by doing good. Specifically cited were its smart and sustainable technologies, including its contributions to smart cities and the electric vehicle revolution. Follow Press Updates for Panasonic Consumer Products:

Internet - http://us.panasonic.com/news

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/panasonicusaconsumerpress

Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/panasonicusa_consumer_press About Deluxe Deluxe is one of world's largest providers of digital services and technology solutions for content creation and delivery, and has been a trusted partner to Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers, TV networks and online content producers since 1915. Deluxe Creative companies house the world's top talent. Deluxe Delivery enables content creators and providers to get their content to the world  in any format. With headquarters in Los Angeles and New York, and operations in 25 key media markets worldwide, Deluxe relies on 8,000 of the industry's premier artists, experts, and innovators. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/panasonic-expands-tv-line-up-with-worlds-first-oleds-to-support-hdr10-dynamic-metadata-technology-300579206.html SOURCE Panasonic Corporation of North America

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Drew Angerer/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was treated for prostate cancer over the summer, an aide to Romney confirmed to ABC News.



Governor Romney was diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer. The cancer was removed surgically and found not to have spread beyond the prostate, the aide said.



Romney received treatment at UC Irvine Hospital in California by Dr. Thomas Ahlering, and his prognosis is described as good.



The news of Romney's diagnosis and treatment was first reported by CNN.



Speculation has continued to grow in recent months that Romney, who unsuccessfully ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012, will mount a bid for the U.S. Senate in Utah in 2018 following the announcement that longtime Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch is not seeking re-election.



Romney has not made an official decision on whether he will run for the U.S. Senate in 2018.



An ardent critic of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, Romney, who called Trump a phony and a fraud, was later considered for the role of secretary of state in the Trump administration.



Romney and President Trump spoke last week on the phone and discussed Hatchs retirement, and the president wished Romney luck in his future endeavors, a source familiar with the call confirmed to ABC News.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
CABORCA, Mexico, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mexus Gold US (OTCQB:MXSG)(Mexus or the Company) announced today that progress at the Santa Elena mine is moving steadily ahead. The mine staff is returning after the long Mexican holiday and is preparing for the companys first pour. The grades returning to the gold recovery pond continue to increase and, when proper returns are met, will lead to production. Mexus JV partner, MarMar Holdings, is in full control of operations. MarMar has brought in additional experts who are knowledgeable in all areas of recovery. The experts are working on the original Merrill Crowe gold recovery system which has included the addition of a clarifier and improved plumbing. This system will be the primary gold recovery system once the current plant is maximized. MarMar is doing a great job at the Santa Elena mine. In addition to what we have stated they also are looking at recovering the gold which was previously captured in activated carbon. added Mexus CEO Paul Thompson.



Mexus also announced that it is moving forward with its El Scorpio copper project. The El Scorpio concession is located 80Km from Hermosillo, Mexico. Management feels that rising copper demand and the resulting increase in copper prices make this the time to move forward on this project. Early assays on this property showed Au samples in excess of 1 g/t and Cu at 2%. The company believes that this property could host a copper porphyry system. The plan is to begin a drilling program which will be the basis for an expanded 43-101 report.

CEO Paul Thompson stated, I want our shareholders to understand that Mexus is moving forward with its plan become a major minor. The end game is to have multiple properties producing metals in the next few years. MarMar is well in control of the Santa Elena project which affords us the ability to move forward on our other projects. The coming months will be an exciting time for our shareholders as we announce new developments and plans on multiple properties.

About Mexus Gold US

Mexus Gold US is an American based mining company with holdings in Mexico. Mexus recently joint ventured its flagship property with MarMar holdings of Mexico. The fully owned Santa Elena mine is located 54km NW of Caborca, Mexico. The mine is producing gold. The company is also a partner with MarMar holdings at the San Felix mine in Northern Mexico. This 26,000 + acre property is ready for production which is planned for 2018. Mexus also owns rights to the Ures property located 80km N of Hermosillo, Mexico. This property contains 6900 acres and has both gold and copper on the property. Founded in 2009, Mexus Gold US is committed to protecting the environment, mine safety and employing members of the communities in which it operates.

For more information on Mexus Gold US, visit www.mexusgoldus.com.

Cautionary Statement

Forward looking Statement: Statements in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including the failure to complete successfully the development of new or enhanced products, the Company's future capital needs, the lack of market demand for any new or enhanced products the Company may develop, any actions by the Company's partners that may be adverse to the Company, the success of competitive products, other economic factors affecting the Company and its markets, seasonal changes, and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The actual results may differ materially from those contained in this press release. The Company disclaims any obligation to update any statements in this press release.
[January 08, 2018] Panasonic announces two new 4K camcorders and a Full-HD flagship camcorder to meet the needs of all levels of video enthusiast

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Panasonic is proud to introduce two 4K camcorders (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K) and a Full-HD camcorder (HC-V800K) which features a new sensor and new lens for significantly improved image quality. Each of the new camcorders offer exceptional optical performance such as a wide-angle 25mm* and 24x optical zoom lens, and achieve quick and accurate focusing for both 4K and Full-HD to enhance the AF function critical in video shooting. The new additions to Panasonic's extensive portfolio of high-quality camcorders continue to respond to the needs of all users ranging from video enthusiasts who pursue full-fledged 4K video quality to family users who want to record treasured moments in impressive images. Create brilliant videos even in dimly-lit places

The new large BSI MOS Sensor found in the 4K camcorders (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K) and the Full-HD camcorder (HC-V800), combined with the bright F1.8 lens, improves low-light shooting performance by approximately 70 per cent compared to previous 4K models. By suppressing noise when shooting in low light situations, such as indoor scenes and nightscapes, videographers are able to capture the perfect footage anytime, anywhere. Premium video with 4K quality

Record the best of your world with the brilliant high-definition 4K image quality available in Panasonic's new 4K camcorders (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K). The high-performance lens which has cleared Leica Camera AG's stringent standards for resolution and contrast, minimizes flare and ghost to maintain beautiful images at all times. When recorded in the 4K Photo Mode, timeless moments that cannot be captured even by the high-speed burst shooting of a single-lens reflex camera can be obtained as still images. Outstanding for shooting in proximity and taking close-ups

The newly developed Leica Dicomar lens (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K / HC-V800K) offers a remarkably powerful optical 24x zoom that ranges from a 25mm* wide angle to a 600mm telephoto zoom. The 4-Drive Lens System operates the four lens groups independently to achieve the optical 24x zoom and compact body size. The stunning wide-angle setting can fit a large group of people and background scenery into the frame, while being convenient for recording selfies with the rotatable LCD. Avoid handshake blur with the new HYBRID O.I.S.

The optical image stabilizer in the 4K camcorders (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K) and theFull-HD camcorder (HC-V800K) has evolved further from the previous 5-Axis HYBRID O.I.S. + by incorporating the Ball O.I.S. System and Adaptive O.I.S.



The Ball O.I.S. System reduces wear on the drive section, and greatly improves correction performance for small-amplitude handshake. The Adaptive O.I.S. automatically optimizes the O.I.S. effectiveness by adjusting the O.I.S. mechanical control according to shooting positions, conditions and user characteristics. The new HYBRID O.I.S. further reduces blur caused by natural handshaking particularly during zoom, which enables you to recover clear images even in high-powered 24x optical zoom. The Level Shot function automatically detects and corrects the tilting of captured images. Professional results with the electronic viewfinder and manual ring

Panasonic's highest-end 4K camcorder model (HC-WXF1K) is packed with advanced functions and features to satisfy the needs of both professionals and ambitious amateur users. The Tiltable Viewfinder lets you capture the subject accurately under any condition. The Manual Ring allows professional-standard, fast ring operation for fine tuning focus, iris and zoom.

The two separate dedicated Manual/Auto and Focus/Iris/Zoom buttons enable quick switching. The HC-WXF1K is also equipped with functions and features that are highly acclaimed in professional products, such as the Variable White Balance with an adjustable range of 2,000K to 15,000K, Focus Expand/Peaking and User Button, to respond to a diversity of user needs. 4K Cropping to preserve once-in-a-lifetime scenes with no mistakes

4K Cropping, available in both the HC-WXF1K and HC-VX1K is an original Panasonic function that lets you shoot at wide-angle in 4K, and then easily edit the shot later and save it as a Full-HD image. This kind of post-editing is also possible for zoom shots and for changing the angle of view, to save scenes that might otherwise have errors. The 4K cropping functionality features new capabilities such as Post Auto Tracking (Auto Tracking Crop) which allows you to record a fast-moving child at a wide-angle in 4K automatically tracking their face, allowing extraction of the Full-HD movie with no framing-out and the further ability to add the image stabilizing effect at the same time. A new Post Manual Tracking feature (Manual Tracking Crop) enables you to simply touch subjects that move unexpectedly, and track them intuitively with your finger to shift the angle of view. Finally, the Post Close-up (Fixed Crop) function is perfect in situations where there is little movement and a part that you don't want is included; you can shoot at wide-angle in 4K and then easily crop the part you want later. Create cinema-style videos

The Cinema Like Effect, which is featured in all 4K models (HC-WXF1K / HC-VX1K / HC-V800K*), enables shooting techniques like those used in film production, such as Slow & Quick Video, Slow Zoom, Slow Motion Video, and Dolly Zoom. These compact 4K Camcorders provide a great deal of fun for creating cinema-style videos. * HC-V800K compatible with slow motion video only. About Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company

Based in Newark, NJ, Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company is a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation. The company offers a wide range of consumer solutions in the U.S. including LUMIX Digital Cameras, Camcorders, Blu-ray players, Home Audio, Technics, Cordless Phones, Home Appliances, Beauty, Grooming, Wellness and Personal Care products and more. Panasonic was featured in Fortune Magazine's 2016 ranking of 50 companies that are changing the world and doing well by doing good. Specifically cited were its smart and sustainable technologies, including its contributions to smart cities and the electric vehicle revolution. Follow Press Updates for Panasonic Consumer Products:

Internet - http://us.panasonic.com/news

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/panasonicusaconsumerpress

Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/panasonicusa_consumer_press View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/panasonic-announces-two-new-4k-camcorders-and-a-full-hd-flagship-camcorder-to-meet-the-needs-of-all-levels-of-video-enthusiast-300579151.html SOURCE Panasonic Corporation of North America

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[January 08, 2018] 3PL Central Innovates the Third Party Logistics Industry With the Next Generation of 3PL Warehouse Manager

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- 3PL Central, the leading software provider of the first cloud-based Warehouse Management System (WMS), announced today its release of SmartView. This release is the next generation of its Warehouse Management Platform, 3PL Warehouse Manager. Created to help 3PLs better meet the needs of their customers, the SmartView experience includes a modern user interface, intelligent workflow capabilities, and a host of new features and functionalities all deployed utilizing a new REST API. Offering core WMS features and functionality is key to the success of 3PLs who operate in increasingly complex and competitive environments. In alignment with their mission to empower clients with innovative technology solutions, 3PL Central has set a rapid pace of continued software advancements for 2018. The SmartView release is the first announcement, with additional feature releases scheduled throughout the new year. "The SmartView release will help our clients take their WMS game to a whole new level," said John Watkins, co-founder and CEO. "With its clean, modern look and intuitive new capabilities, the next generation of 3PL Warehouse Manager will streamline the entire user experience, allowing our clients to get far more done, far faster than ever before. Most important of all, it will enable them to satisfy their existing customers and impress potential prospects." These changes are designed to help 3PL Central's customers meet the growing demands of their clients by providing a WMS that is accessible, scalable, easy to integrate with other systems, and can effortlessly manage day-to-day tasks. "3PL Warehouse Manager with the SmartView experience is the latest embodiment of our relentless mission to help our clients exceed their customers' expectations," continued Chief Technology Officer, Sheridan Richey. "Deployed on a cutting-edge REST API, warehouses can connect to the platforms their customers need and truly be a command center for their supply chain ecosystem. The SmartView release provides enterprise-level inventory management, connectivity, flexibility, and compliance. The result is a powerful WMS that enables complete arehouse management from one centralized data source."



In addition to its new user interface, improved navigation, and scalability, the SmartView release introduces a number of significant feature improvements to 3PL Warehouse Manager, all of which are integrated within its cloud-based warehouse management platform. Some of these updates include: Enhanced navigation to maximize usable workspace

Sophisticated data filtering with quick views

Intelligent workflows and branding capabilities to tailor system by warehouse, location, item level, and customer

Inventory hold status, giving warehouses the ability to designate items as "on-hold" to prevent them from shipping "3PL Central's SmartView release dramatically improved our efficiency handling large complex orders and receivings. Our users love working with its modern, well-engineered graphical interface," said Pete Tromblee, CIO, The Northeast Group. "I value its comprehensive REST API's, which empower us to handle unique customer requirements in-house and keep our customers happy."

To learn more about 3PL Warehouse Manager SmartView, please visit this page or schedule a demo with one of our experts at 3PL Central. About 3PL Central: 3PL Central is the leader and most popular cloud-based WMS available in the Third-Party Logistics and Warehousing industry marketplace. The company's products seamlessly integrate with a large and growing number of eCommerce enablement technologies, EDI providers, ERP platforms, accounting packages, shipping partners, and other supply chain technologies to deliver a full warehouse management platform to its customers. Since 2006, 3PL Central's software solutions have grown exponentially, providing enterprise-class WMS functionality to a range of warehouse operations who need a nimble SaaS WMS while remaining easy-to-use, flexible, and scalable. Designed to meet the unique needs of today's high-tech warehousing operations, from traditional 3PLs to Fortune 500 Distribution Centers, the company's products help their customers increase sales, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction. All while expanding overall profitability. For additional information, please visit www.3plcentral.com. Media Contact:

Lisa Zwikl

Phone: 610.442.6028

Email: [email protected] Related Images image1.png

The SmartView release for 3PL Warehouse Manager image2.png

3PL Warehouse Manager image3.png

3PL Central WMS Platform image4.png

The SmartView release for 3PL Warehouse Manager Related Links 3PL Central Website 3PL Central SmartView release View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/3pl-central-innovates-the-third-party-logistics-industry-with-the-next-generation-of-3pl-warehouse-manager-300579216.html SOURCE 3PL Central

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[January 08, 2018] New SmartDriver Program for Commercial Trucking Saves Money and Reduces Carbon Emissions

OTTAWA, Jan. 8, 2018 /CNW/ - Today's operating environment for the commercial transportation industry is marked by growing fuel costs and the need for increased environmental responsibility. By promoting initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the Government of Canada is helping industry contribute to Canada's climate commitments. Today, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Jim Carr, announced a redesigned online SmartDriver for Highway Trucking (SDHT) program to help the commercial trucking industry reduce operating costs while decreasing GHG emissions. Developed in consultation with industry, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)'s flagship training program for commercial truck drivers offers improved tools to prepare drivers for the demands of modern trucking. Flexible and convenient, the online, in-classroom and on-road training materials help drivers and instructors improve their driving efficiency. With heavy-duty vehicles accounting for 37 percent of GHG emissions from the transportation sector, fuel-efficient equipment and the driving practices featured in the SDHT program can help individual drivers reduce their fuel consumption by up to 35 percent. SDHT learning materials are available free of charge to drivers, fleets and training organizations. For more information, visit the FleetSmart website at www.FleetSmart.NRCan.gc.ca.



Quotes "This program will help meet the trucking industry's growing demand for safe, fuel-efficient drivers, while educating existing operators on improved driving techniques. The real savings come in the form of reduced greenhouse gas emissions, helping meet Canada's domestic and international climate goals."

Jim Carr

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources "Natural Resources Canada's SmartDriver for Highway Trucking program has been a key component of the Ontario Truck Training Academy (OTTA)'s entry-level commercial driver training program for over a decade. This modernized program will help OTTA continue to outline the benefits of fuel efficiency and educate drivers on the impacts of safe, energy-saving driving behaviours." Yvette Lagrois

President, Ontario Truck Training Academy Quick Facts SDHT Online makes extensive use of animation and on-location video to demonstrate techniques.

makes extensive use of animation and on-location video to demonstrate techniques. SDHT Classroom provides fleet and commercial driving schools with all the resources needed to deliver approximately three hours of high-impact training.

provides fleet and commercial driving schools with all the resources needed to deliver approximately three hours of high-impact training. The new SDHT On-Road Practicum pairs drivers and trainers for pre- and post-training drives in a cab or simulator to give drivers a chance to demonstrate and perfect the fuel-efficient driving techniques they have learned.

pairs drivers and trainers for pre- and post-training drives in a cab or simulator to give drivers a chance to demonstrate and perfect the fuel-efficient driving techniques they have learned. As a recognized leader in training for drivers of heavy-duty vehicles, NRCan signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Brazil in May 2017 to share expertise and best practices with their national trucking association, which included NRCan's SDHT fuel efficiency curriculum.

in to share expertise and best practices with their national trucking association, which included NRCan's SDHT fuel efficiency curriculum. Last October, a Canadian delegation trained the first class of Brazilian instructors in the delivery of SDHT, helping fulfil Canada's G20 commitment to support international efforts to green the freight sector. This will now serve as a model for work with other jurisdictions. Related Links Natural Resources Canada - Transportation Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan (http://twitter.com/nrcan) NRCan's news releases and backgrounders are available at www.news.gc.ca. SOURCE Natural Resources Canada

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[January 08, 2018] Blockchain Enabled Trade Via ExportPortal.com Kicks Off CES With Delegation from Taiwan

GLENDALE, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /CNW/ -- Export Portal, a blockchain-enabled e-Commerce Business to Business Platform, will be meeting with the delegation from Taiwan at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Export Portal believes that no entity should be able to dictate what business should be able to succeed on the world stage. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will depend on businesses from around the world to promote themselves in a manner that is only conducive to honest, transparent trade. No longer will the restraints of commerce be dependent on anything other than a blockchain enabled e-Commerce. Businesses that register on Export Portal.com are able to explore new markets without the fear of fraudulent companies or transactions. Export Portal is also looking forward to further discussing our ambitious 2018 plan with the Taiwan Delegation that includes: Establishing Country Brand Ambassadors in over 100 countries in 2018: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/1c41cc19fdde44fe9fc3771e4d68064d): Integrating country-specific Writers, Bloggers & Vloggers from around the world into our ecosystem: (https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/fb0b3ef48cac4677b9079f3d0442a526) Establishing Export Portal offices in key countries around South East Asia to futher expand international commerce through ExportPortal.com. Attending key trade-related events in different countries and meeting with business leaders, government representatives, and mSME groups to explore partnerships to further accelerate trade to over 120 different countries that are already represented in over 70 major industry categories on Export Portal's platform.



Ally Spinu is looking forward to an ambitious 2018 and Taiwan is a key ally in trade with the rest of the entire world. "Export Portal is able to take on companies of every size, but our key verification differentiator is meant to bring honest hard-working small and medium sized companies to a level playing field where buyers aren't at risk of buying from disreputable, unscrupulous and unidentifiable entities." Ms. Spinu continued, "The world is no longer willing to accept dishonest, unreliable trade. Every day, we hear about orders that are changed and companies that are not what they purport to be. The Fourth Industrial Revolution begins in 2018 with blockchain-enabled trade on Export Portal." The world is getting smaller and now the mouse and the cat are on an even playing field. Shows like CES allow businesses to get to know people and kick the tires on new technology. Export Portal allows the reputation of a company thrive in an online environment with a company dataset that can be utilized by anyone on our platform. A proprietary blockchain enabled International Business Identification Number (IBIN) such as Export Portal's will erase both physical as well as online borders.

While at CES, International Business Development head, John Zahaitis will be meeting with the Taiwan delegation but can also be reached @ [email protected] & +1 (818)965-9399. Join us. About Us:

Export Portal is a US-based technology company that is listening to sellers, buyers, and manufacturers the world over about #NoFakeTrade. Our proprietary verification process keeps fakes, frauds, IP bandits out and makes entering new international markets a less-stressful need to be done, easy/free to join, must-do for 2018. To learn more, go to: https://www.exportportal.com/learn_more View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blockchain-enabled-trade-via-exportportalcom-kicks-off-ces-with-delegation-from-taiwan-300579344.html SOURCE Export Portal

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[January 08, 2018] Hagens Berman: California Walmart Shoppers Sue Over Shell Egg False Advertising, Seek Refund

Walmart and one of its California egg suppliers, Cal-Maine Foods, are facing a class-action lawsuit alleging the two parties lied to consumers about the treatment and condition of hens laying Walmart store-brand Organic Marketside eggs, according to Hagens Berman. Consumers paid high prices for what they were told were eggs laid by hens "free to roam, nest and perch in a protected barn with outdoor access." However, according to the lawsuit, Walmart and Cal-Maine knew the hens were in fact confined inside industrial barns with enclosed porches, never able to touch the soil or vegetation surrounding the barns. Cal-Maine is the largest producer of shell eggs in the U.S., and Walmart the largest retailer in the world. If you bought store-brand Organic Marketside eggs from Walmart, find out more about the class-action lawsuit here. Walmart's Marketside brand eggs sell for $2.98, whereas its Organic Marketside eggs laid by hens with "outdoor access" sell for $3.97 - a third more. The suit filed Jan. 8, 2018, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeks reimbursement for consumers who paid high prices for Walmart's Organic Marketside store-brand eggs, which were sold as being laid by hens withoutdoor access. The suit also seeks an injunction from the court to force Walmart and Cal-Maine to end their deceptive marketing of Organic Marketside eggs.



"Walmart is the largest and most profitable retailer in the world, and it chose to knowingly scam those trying to do good with their purchasing power," said Elaine Byszewski, a partner of Hagens Berman. "We believe Walmart and Cal-Maine knew that despite the promise of 'outdoor access' on the cartons of eggs they sold, the hens that laid their store-brand eggs were confined inside industrial barns." Attorneys' investigations of a Cal-Maine egg farm revealed that less than 1 percent of the flock located at the massive Chase, Kansas egg farm were able to even look outside. The location has the capacity to house 400,000 hens.

"Our investigators have seen these facilities first-hand," Byszewski said. "Had consumers known the truth about what 'outdoor access' meant - stuck inside with no access to nearby pasture - they either would not have purchased them or would have paid less." "Surely this isn't what consumers have in mind when they read 'farm fresh,' 'free to roam,' and 'outdoor access,'" she added. Rather, studies show that consumers believe "outdoor access" means a majority of animals at any given time have access to open pasture and vegetation throughout the day. The class action adds that the majority of consumers (77 percent) have stated they are concerned about the welfare of animals raised for food, including laying hens. In addition, "more than two-thirds (69 percent) of consumers pay some or a lot of attention to food labels regarding how the animal was raised." The suit says Walmart and Cal-Maine knew this, and exploited consumers' concerns. Find out more about the class-action lawsuit against Walmart. About Hagens Berman Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP is a consumer-rights class-action law firm with 11 offices across the country. The firm has been named to the National Law Journal's Plaintiffs' Hot List eight times. More about the law firm and its successes can be found at https://www.hbsslaw.com. Follow the firm for updates and news at @ClassActionLaw. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006764/en/

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[January 08, 2018] California American Water Launches Personalized Water Bill Videos

California American Water has launched a new initiative to help customers navigate and better understand the components of their water bills. Starting today, all residential customers on the Monterey Peninsula that have registered an email address with their water account will receive an email notification, including a personalized video of their monthly water bill, along with conservation information. The emails will run monthly through March, unless the customer chooses to unsubscribe from the messages. The animated video will walk customers through their total current charges and total amount due, and highlight water use for the current month compared to the previous month. The video also clarifies water service and usage charges, tiered rates, and surcharges. Finally, the video reminds customers that the Monterey Peninsula faces state-ordered restrictions on its water supply, and offers conservation tips to help achieve a low level of water consumption. "With tiered rates and a number of surcharges, water bils on the Monterey Peninsula can appear complicated. These videos are an effort to improve our communication about our water charges. We hope customers will use these videos to analyze their water use and better understand their bills," said External Affairs Manager Catherine Stedman.



The videos will be sent via email soon after electronic bills are available online and about 5 days before the customer's monthly bill arrives in the mail. Exceptions for customers receiving manual meter reads and those with billing disputes or arrangements will apply. The video also contains information about services available on California American Water's website, such as paperless billing registration, links to rebate applications and other available water conservation programs. California American Water, a subsidiary of American Water (NYSE: AWK), provides high-quality and reliable water and/or wastewater services to more than 660,000 people. With a history dating back to 1886, American Water is the largest and most geographically diverse U.S. publicly-traded water and wastewater utility company. The company employs more than 6,700 dedicated professionals who provide regulated and market-based drinking water, wastewater and other related services to an estimated 15 million people in 47 states and Ontario, Canada. More information can be found by visiting www.amwater.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180108006886/en/

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VIENNA, Austria and HAMBURG, Germany, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- APEIRON Biologics AG, a company focused on cancer immunotherapy, and Evotec AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange:EVT) (TecDAX) (ISIN:DE0005664809) announced today that the companies received the first milestone payment from Sanofi under a 3-party alliance signed in August 2015. The milestone payment of  3 million will be split equally between the two biotech companies. The success payment was triggered when the partners successfully advanced an undisclosed, novel, immuno-oncology small molecule into late-stage pre-clinical development. Under the alliance, the three companies work together to identify small molecule leads and targets for next-generation therapies in immuno-oncology, which may complement the pre-clinical and clinical profiles of leading checkpoint inhibitors.



Dr Hans Loibner, Chief Executive Officer of APEIRON Biologics, said: We are delighted by the progress made in our collaboration with Evotec and Sanofi. Based on our scientific findings and the mode of action, we jointly agreed to accelerate the research and pre-clinical development of this very promising molecule. The successful achievement of this milestone further demonstrates our abilities to drive innovation in the field of immuno-oncology.

Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: The Evotec and APEIRON teams are proud to have achieved our first milestone with Sanofi to discover and develop novel immuno-oncology small molecules therapies. It is a first-in-class approach with tremendous potential in combination with marketed checkpoint inhibitors but also as standalone therapy. The field of immuno-oncology will continue to evolve and at Evotec we will continue to invest in this area.

About the APEIRON-Evotec-Sanofi-Alliance

The strategic collaboration was set up in 2015 to support the long-term pipeline building for APEIRON Biologics, Evotec, and Sanofi and has a potential value of over  200 million in milestone payments and significant royalties. The collaboration includes major research and development efforts to advance a first-in-class orally available small molecule approach based on a novel target to treat solid and hematopoietic cancers by enhancing the anti-tumor activity of human immune cells. All three companies are making significant contributions to this collaboration in terms of scientific expertise, technological platforms and resources. The collaboration will further enhance and complement Sanofi's extensive oncology portfolio and enables Evotec to address the drug discovery area of immuno-oncology. Furthermore, the agreement will substantially support APEIRONs strategy of focusing on novel and innovative checkpoint inhibiting approaches.

About APEIRON Biologics AG

Apeiron is a private biotech company based in Vienna, Austria, engaged in innovative projects in immuno-oncology. Recently, the most advanced programme, an antibody-based immunotherapy to treat neuroblastoma, was granted marketing approval in the EU. The company is developing additional immunotherapies, predominantly in clinical stage, based either on targeted, tumor-specific approaches or on the stimulation of the immune system via novel and proprietary modes of action (unique checkpoint blockade mechanisms) to fight cancer by engaging the human bodys natural defence mechanisms. For additional information please go to www.apeiron-biologics.com and follow us on Twitter @apeironbio.

About EVOTEC AG

Evotec is a drug discovery alliance and development partnership company focused on rapidly progressing innovative product approaches with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academics, patient advocacy groups and venture capitalists. We operate worldwide providing the highest quality stand-alone and integrated drug discovery solutions, covering all activities from target-to-clinic to meet the industrys need for innovation and efficiency in drug discovery (EVT Execute). The Company has established a unique position by assembling top-class scientific experts and integrating state-of-the-art technologies as well as substantial experience and expertise in key therapeutic areas including neuroscience, diabetes and complications of diabetes, pain and inflammation, oncology and infectious diseases. On this basis, Evotec has built a broad and deep pipeline of more than 80 partnered product opportunities at clinical, pre-clinical and discovery stages (EVT Innovate). Evotec has established multiple long-term discovery alliances with partners including Bayer, CHDI, Sanofi or UCB and development partnerships with e.g. with Sanofi in the field of diabetes, with Pfizer in the field of tissue fibrosis and Celgene in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. For additional information please go to www.evotec.com and follow us on Twitter @EvotecAG.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Information set forth in this press release contains forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements contained herein represent the judgement of Evotec as of the date of this press release. Such forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in these forward-looking statements. We expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

For further information please contact:

APEIRON Biologics AG Evotec AG Peter Llewellyn-Davies

CFO/CBO

Email: investors@apeiron-biologics.com

www.apeiron-biologics.com Gabriele Hansen, VP, Corporate Communications & Investor Relations

Tel.: + 49(0)4056081-255

Email: gabriele.hansen@evotec.com

www.evotec.com Investor Relations

LifeSci Advisors, LLC

Chris Maggos

T +1 646 597 6989

Email: Chris@LifeSciAdvisors.com Media Relations international

MC Services AG

Dr. Claudia Gutjahr-Loser

T: +49 89 210 228 0

Email: apeiron@mc-services.eu Media Relations Austria

PR&D - Public Relations for Research & Education

T +43 1 505 70 44

Email: contact@prd.at




KELOWNA, British Columbia, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Golden Ridge Resources Ltd. (Golden Ridge or the Company) (TSXV:GLDN). Golden Ridge is pleased to report the third and final batch of assay results from its 2017 drill program at the Hank Property (Hank or the Property) in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. Highlights include hole HNK-17-009, which returned 7.04 g/t AuEq over 21.62 meters within a broader intercept of 3.15 g/t AuEq over 58.00 meters within the newly discovered Kaip Zone. The mineralization in HNK-17-009 is hosted within and surrounding the contact of a buried altered intrusion (Figure 2). The strongest mineralization appears to be situated within the upper parts of the intrusion and targeting the Kaip zone will be a priority for the upcoming 2018 drill program.

Table 1 - Hank 2017 LAZ Drill Holes HNK-17-009  HNK-17-014: Significant Intercepts Length

(m) Hole ID From

(m) To

(m) Interval*

(m) AuEq**

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Ag

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) 291.39 HNK-17-009 15.64 72.00 56.36 0.25 0.16 1.3 0.04 0.08 AND 132.00 190.00 58.00 3.15 2.79 21.0 0.00 0.11 incl. 133.74 155.36 21.62 7.04 6.26 52.1 0.00 0.11 AND 218.60 233.48 14.88 0.27 0.19 0.8 0.00 0.09 233.78 HNK-17-010 4.77 116.00 111.23 0.52 0.34 1.8 0.03 0.20 322.17 HNK-17-011 6.95 108.00 101.05 0.32 0.20 1.0 0.02 0.13 AND 230.73 305.19 74.46 0.18 0.05 0.7 0.03 0.15 203.30 HNK-17-012 5.35 160.63 155.28 0.31 0.20 1.1 0.01 0.13 383.13 HNK-17-013 95.86 104.48 8.62 0.37 0.10 2.4 0.15 0.23 AND 188.06 209.40 21.34 0.18 0.07 0.3 0.00 0.15 AND 328.27 367.89 39.62 0.21 0.15 1.0 0.02 0.05 185.02 HNK-17-014 121.01 183.00 61.99 0.52 0.28 2.2 0.03 0.28

*The intervals reported in this table represent drill intercepts and insufficient data is available at this time to state the true thickness of the mineralized intervals and all gold values are uncut.

**Gold equivalent (AuEq) grades are calculated using 200 day moving average metal prices of: gold US$1268/oz., silver US$17.10/oz., lead US$1.04/lb and zinc US$1.28/lb. Gold equivalent grade is calculated as AuEq (g/t) = Au (g/t) + Ag (g/t) * 0.013 + Pb (%) * 0.562 + Zn (%) * 0.692. The factors for silver (0.013), lead (0.562) and zinc (0.692) will change depending on the metal price. The metal price numbers listed above were used to determine the conversion factors presented herein. Metal recoveries have not been applied in the gold equivalent calculation.

Figure1: http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b34b8075-5a09-4ec7-a7c1-a50989b852b8

Digitizing is currently underway on a large historic IP/resistivity survey which covers the entire property. Once complete, new inversions will be run on the resistivity data and used as an aid in further targeting the mineralized intrusion in the upcoming 2018 drill program.

Following the historic drilling on the Hank, a joint BCGS/MDRU research paper was completed which recognized that the Pb isotope signature of sulfides associated with gold mineralization matched that of the Bald Bluff porphyry, a large intrusive stock on the west end of the Property (Kaip, 1997). It is interpreted that the altered intrusive intersected in HNK-17-009 is related to the Bald Bluff Porphyry and likely represents one of several causative mineralizing intrusions on the Property. The 2018 drill program will further test that model with the aid of new geophysical resistivity data.

Michael Blady, CEO of Golden Ridge stated: We have been able to execute on the objectives of our 2017 program with great success which were to confirm mineralization from historic programs, test historic geologic models, test the undrilled areas of the LAZ, and to refine, update and modify our understanding of the controls on mineralization. We are well positioned for the 2018 season after closing a recent $1.5M financing and are excited to further drill the Kaip zone, utilizing the new resistivity data.

Details of the 2018 drill program are currently being revised and will be presented in an upcoming news release.

A drill plan view map, drill sections and select core photos are included in this news release and can be downloaded from Golden Ridge Resources Ltd. website at: www.goldenridgeresources.com

QA/QC Procedures:

All drill core was logged, photographed, cut and sampled by Golden Ridge personnel. Prior to shipment to ALS Globals sample preparation facility in Terrace, BC, certified reference material standards, blanks and field duplicates were inserted at a ratio of approximately 1 in every 20 drill core samples. Samples were prepared in Terrace by crushing the entire sample to 70% passing -2mm, riffle splitting off 1kilogram and pulverizing the split to better than 85% passing 75 microns. After preparation in Terrace, the prepared pulps were shipped to ALS Globals analytical laboratory in North Vancouver, BC. The gold assays are determined by Au-AA26 fire assay method which reports results in parts per million (ppm) (equivalent to grams per tonne (g/t)). Any samples with a fire assay that report gold concentrations equal to or higher than 1.0 g/t Au are analysed by screen metallic method (Au-SCR24).

Base metal assays are first determined using the ME-MS41 method, which reports results as parts per million (ppm). All analyses that reach the overlimits of ME-MS41 are reanalyzed with an Ore Grade method. The analytical results are verified with the application of industry standard Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QA-QC) procedures.

Qualified Person:

C. Mark Rebagliati, P.Eng., a consultant to the Company, is a Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release.

About Golden Ridge Resources:

Golden Ridge is a TSX-V listed exploration company engaged in acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia. Golden Ridge currently has an option to acquire a 100% interest in the 1,700-hectare Hank gold-silver-lead-zinc property located in the Golden Triangle district, approximately 140 kilometres north of Stewart, British Columbia. Golden Ridge may earn the 100% interest by performing $1.7M of exploration work by the end of 2018.

For more information please contact:

Golden Ridge Resources Ltd.

Mike Blady

Chief Executive Officer

Tel: (250) 768-1168

Website: www.goldenridgeresources.com

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed to be "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that management of the Company expects, are forward-looking statements. Although management believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements if management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements, include market prices, exploration and development successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Please see the public filings of the Company at http://www.sedar.com/ for further information.

Figure 2: http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/106e6448-c297-4e66-8847-690dbcaf7913




AS WE'RE HEARING OF DOZENS OF CRASHES THIS MORNING AND WONDER - WHEN DID KANSAS CITY FORGET HOW TO DRIVE IN THE WINTER???

Another messy morning in Kansas City is underway . . .This time around both suburbs and urban core confront dangerous conditionsBlame global climate change for the quickly shifting weather OR local governments for their inability to prepare . . . Either way, our TKC blog community advises drivers to take it slow and watch the road.Developing . . .
GLADSTONE, Mo. -- A 35-year-old Kansas City man is charged in Clay County with first-degree murder related to the shooting death of another man late Friday night. Police responded to a home near N. Troost Avenue and 74th Street in the Northland at about 10:20 p.m., Friday.
Soaring Popularity Of Grass-Fed Beef May Run Into Roadblock: Less Nutritious Grass A few years ago, Kansas City restaurateur Anton Kotar surveyed the local and national restaurant scenes and concluded his town's reputation as a steakhouse paradise had slipped. The problem, he says, is the way conventional beef is raised - bulked up with grain on feedlots, making it cheap and plentiful and changing what Americans expect to taste.

Farm to table reporting on this trend among 30k-MILLIONAIRES who ruin most decent restaurants and don't realize that waiters are insulting them when they recommend white zin - A subtle but still sweet local server snub. Checkit:
KANSAS CITY INSIDERS DIRECT OUR ATTENTION TO A COALITION OF PROGRESSIVE URBAN PLANNERS ADVOCATING BENEFITS FOR MORE LOCAL LOW-INCOME HOUSING PROJECTS DESPITE NEIGHBORHOOD RESISTANCE!!!

- Yesterday, we noted an upcoming public Library KCMO housing debate on the topic of local housing just after it was posted thanks to so many hobo readers of TKC.





- Kansas City Public TV is gathering local opinion on the topic housing as they prep to make a progressive push for more taxpayer subsidy of local projects and other housing schemes for po'folk.





- Most important of all - City Hall champions the effort for more low-income housing projects as a distraction against the vast majority of their time and resources exerted toward securing the rights of luxury developers.

Check part of the 12th & Oak social engineering effort from an upcoming ordinance sponsored by Councilman Lucas promoting the utilization of a sales tax exemption on affordable housing projects...

"The City Council recognizes that a vibrant economy is dependent, in large part, on the ability of its workforce to secure safe housing, and do so at prices that are affordable so that they are not driven to leave the City, but are able to remain and continue to contribute to the Citys economic growth . . ."

"Bottom-line - KCMO wants to turn the Northland into a slum. We're already dealing with higher crime and a lack of resources but now City Hall wants to move their problems across the river and they're using terms like "fair housing" in order to do it. The damage will be massive and communities of elderly people and families just staring out will be destroyed in the name of "income equality" or whatever buzzwords these jerks are using. Any opposition is, inevitably, going to be called racism but there is a diverse group of people who won't want more housing projects in KC - In the Northland or anywhere else. I think they will be surprised when they see the information and testimony we present in order to oppose these irresponsible plans."

2018 starts with Kansas City class-warfare on the sordid subject of fair housing.To wit . . .Confirmation and trend-spotting by our TKC Blog Community . . .To wit . . .Money line . . .Remember, a petition targeting slumlord and "renter's rights" is already on the way to the ballot.Meanwhile, our blog community offers equal time to Kansas City residents who oppose this low-income housing coalition.For years,The latest, special thanks to local leaders who are mounting opposition to this KCMO fair housing push . . .You decide . . .
Travel website Fodor's named Missouri one of the 10 places not to visit in 2018. The state, which is the only U.S. destination on the list, came in at No. 7 of 52 destinations worldwide. "The Show-Me State is full of wonders that belong on anyone's travel bucket list," the ranking said.
Fake news has become something of a hot topic in recent months. So much so that Collins dictionary even announced fake news as their word of the year for 2017.

The Western democracies can at least boast a comparatively good record when it comes to freedom of the press. Journalists can expect to do their job without fear of imprisonment or execution. Thats by no means the case everywhere.

Reporters Without Borders ranks 180 countries based on their commitment to press freedom. This list will dive to the murky depths of those rankings, taking a closer look at those countries where the government exerts control over the media and attempts to crush any alternative point of view.

10. Equatorial Guinea

The African nation of Equatorial Guinea gained its independence from Spain in 1968. Unfortunately, this just meant swapping one dictator for another, and Francisco Macias Nguema proved to be a significant downgrade from Francisco Franco. Nguema claimed to be a sorcerer, amassed a huge collection of human skulls, and took great pleasure in torturing political opponents. Its even been suggested that he may have been a cannibal. Needless to say, Macias was not a supporter of a free press; to be a journalist was in and of itself a crime punishable by death.

With a third of the population having already fled the country, Nguema was overthrown and executed by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in 1979. Equatorial Guineas soldiers were so afraid of Nguemas supposed magical powers that a firing squad had to be hired from Morocco.

The discovery of vast oil reserves in 1995 should have made the people of Equatorial Guinea very wealthy. While per capita income is now comparable to the likes of Great Britain and South Korea, the oil riches have not been shared out evenly. Some three-quarters of the population still live in grinding poverty.

The plight of the people of Equatorial Guinea is rarely reported on, not least because Mbasogos government routinely denies visas to foreign journalists. Those who are allowed to enter are closely monitored. Any misstep can be punished, and even taking photographs can result in imprisonment.

While the international community suspects Mbasogo of corruption on a massive scale, Equatorial Guineas compliant media paints a glowing picture of benevolent governance. This is not particularly surprising, since the countrys television and radio stations are run by either the state or trusted members of Mbasogos family.

9. Djibouti

The small African nation of Djibouti is quite possibly the least democratic democracy in the world. Its president, Ismail Omar Guellah, came to power in 1999. Since then he has won three elections, none of which could reasonably be described as a free and open contest.

In 2005 the opposition parties believed the process was so rigged against them that they boycotted the election altogether, leaving Guellah to romp home with 100% of the vote. Guellahs announcement that he would stand again in 2011 was met by a wave of popular protest. The police responded by arresting hundreds of protestors, including the leaders of the opposition parties. In 2016 a team of BBC journalists were kicked out of the country just days after their arrival. Guellah, to nobodys surprise, went on to win another landslide victory.

Guellahs party retains a tight grip on the media. Radio and television are owned by the state, and only 10% of the population have access to the internet. Strict libel and slander laws keep journalists in check, and few would ever dare to raise issues the government might deem controversial. More determined and vocal opponents of the government tend to find themselves treated to a lengthy stay in one of Djiboutis prison facilities.

Despite widespread evidence of Guellahs suppression of opposing political parties, he is regarded as a good friend of the West. Djiboutis relative stability, and its location at the gateway to the Suez Canal, lend it a certain strategic significance. The United States of America, France, Japan, Italy and Spain all have military bases in Djibouti, which might explain their reluctance to criticize Guellah and his apparent subversion of democracy.

8. Cuba

The particular strain of Communism pursued by Cuba is generally regarded as a softer, friendlier variety than that which infected the Soviet Union and North Korea. Fidel Castro, and to a lesser extent his brother and successor Raul Castro, are reviled in some quarters, but draw an equal amount of praise. Fidel was a dictator, but he is often remembered as a relatively benign one. Whether this is an accurate assessment is questionable at best.

Its certainly true that Cuba under the Castro brothers has achieved some quite remarkable feats. Despite US sanctions that have been in place since 1960, Cuba boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The nations health service is internationally acclaimed, and has even been studied by experts from Western democracies such as Great Britain. Life expectancy is higher than in many far wealthier nations, including the United States of America.

Cuba has done these things well, but history has shown that Communist governments rarely embrace criticism, constructive or otherwise. Unfortunately, thats very much the case in Cuba too. Freedom of speech is protected under the Cuban constitution only if it conforms to the aims of a socialist society. Essentially, Cubans are free to say whatever they like, so long as the government likes what they say. Fidel Castro made considerable use of these sweeping powers. Over the course of his rule thousands of journalists and human rights activists were imprisoned, many of them without the luxury of a trial.

7. Sudan

Sudan is Africas third largest country, and one of its most troubled. Since 1989 it has been ruled over by President Omar al-Bashir, who swept into power in a bloodless military coup. Since then he has been accused of murder, rape, genocide, and war crimes against his own people. He even shares the distinction of being one of only two current heads of state to have had charges leveled against them by the International Criminal Court; the other being Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, although the charges against him have since been dropped.

So long as al-Bashir remains in power, there seems to be little chance of him being brought to trial. His travel options are nonetheless somewhat limited if he wants to be sure of avoiding arrest. In 2015 he was forced to make a hasty retreat from South Africa when the authorities there considered enforcing the ICCs arrest warrant.

Al-Bashir maintains that he is the victim of a Western smear campaign. He can at least take some comfort in a personal fortune of at least $1 billion, and perhaps a good deal more. The average Sudanese is far less fortunate. With an income of just $960 per-annum and a life expectancy of little more than 60 years they are amongst the poorest people in the world.

6. Vietnam

The US Government went to war in Vietnam out of a fear that Communism might take over the world. The domino theory held that when one nation became infected with Communism its neighbors would soon follow, falling like dominoes. It was instead Communist governments that proved unstable and prone to collapse. Vietnam is now one of only five Communist states left standing  Laos being the only one that doesnt appear on this list.

Traditional media such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines are firmly under government control. However, more than two-thirds of the population now have access to the internet, and the authorities are struggling to maintain their monopoly on information as Vietnam enters the digital age.

Bloggers who dare to criticize the government risk harassment, intimidation, physical violence, and arrest. To take just one example amongst many, in November 2017 a blogger was sentenced to seven years in prison. His crime was to report on a toxic spill at a steel mill, which dumped cyanide and carbolic into the sea and saw 70 tons of dead fish washed up on the shore.

The strong-arm tactics employed by Vietnams one-party dictatorship have nonetheless failed to prevent bloggers from criticizing the government. Nor has the government been successful in preventing an increasing number of people from bypassing traditional media and turning to the internet for news.

5. China

China has more people online than any other nation on Earth  some 751 million of them. But they also face some of the tightest restrictions on just what they can access. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all blocked by Chinas Great Firewall. Internet users are instead encouraged to sign up to government-run equivalents, where content is tightly controlled and monitored. More enterprising individuals have worked their way around the restrictions by signing up to Virtual Private Networks, but even these are now being targeted by the authorities. In December 2017 a Chinese businessman was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for running a VPN.

If this all sounds alarmingly Orwellian, then much worse is just around the corner. In 2020 the Chinese government plans to assign each citizen a social ranking determined by a complex computer algorithm. Each individuals score will be based on a multitude of factors such as the things they buy, whether they pay their bills on time, and their performance in their job. Almost every aspect of a persons life will impact their ranking, even their friends. People who associate with high-scoring, compliant citizens will have their own ranking pulled up, but the reverse will also apply.

With each individuals social ranking score made public, those at the lower end of the scale will be impacted in their ability to obtain loans, housing, work, and even foreign travel. Details of exactly how the algorithm will work have not been released, but it has been revealed that a persons behavior will be factored into their score. Compliance will be rewarded, and its more than likely that any criticism of the government will be punished.

4. Syria

President Bashar al-Assad came to power in Syria following the death of his ruthless father in June 2000. In those early days of his rule, hopes were high that the former eye doctor would emerge as a champion of freedom and democracy. Assad promised change and democracy, granting permission for Syrias first independent newspaper to begin publishing. He even released anti-government activists and closed Syrias notorious Mezzeh Prison, where political prisoners were reportedly beaten and tortured.

Within just a year everything changed. Released prisoners were rounded up and imprisoned again, promised reforms canceled, police and security officials retained the right to torture suspects and prisoners, and Syrias brief flirtation with an independent press ended. It may have been that Assad was forced to change track by elements within his own party. Another possibility is that the so-called Damascus spring was always conceived as a plan to lure political opponents into the open.

If Assad did take office with good intentions, then things have gone rapidly downhill from there. With Syria locked in a vicious and complex civil war since 2012, the Assad regime has been accused of the torture and murder of prisoners, besieging and starving rebel-held cities, and crimes against humanity. However, it does appear that Assads brutal methods have been successful in keeping him in power.

The World Bank estimates the cost of rebuilding Syria will be in excess of $200 billion. Given his record so far, it seems unlikely that Assad will want to build a new Syria based on openness and freedom.

3. Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then its gained a reputation for being one of the most authoritarian, and downright strange, countries in the world.

Saparmurat Niyavoz, Turkmenistans president until his death in December 2006, combined eccentricity with an iron fist. Ballet, opera, and circuses were all banned. As were beards, facial hair, and gold teeth, which Niyavoz condemned as being unhygienic. Enough paintings, pictures, and statues of Niyavoz were plastered around Turkmenistan as to outnumber the countrys five-million inhabitants. He named the month of January, several cities, and even a breed of horses after himself. His mother was not forgotten, and both the month of April and, bizarrely, bread were renamed in her honor.

Niyavozs successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, reined in some of the strangeness, but his authoritarian instincts seem to be as strong as his predecessors. With complete control of the media, Berdimuhamedow has fashioned himself as the protector of the people. A recent video featuring Berdimuhamedow dressed in army fatigues as he shows off his skills with an assault rifle has been widely mocked and parodied.

2. Eritrea

Sometimes referred to as Africas Hermit Kingdom, Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1961. Since then Eritreans have had just one president, a grand total of zero elections, and years of wars and border disputes with their Ethiopian neighbor.

The Ministry of Information controls the entire media, which devotes much of its energy towards showering praise on President Isaias Afwerki. Eritreas impoverished people have the lowest proportion of internet connections in the world, and thus almost no opportunity to access alternative points of view.

While the government claims that Eritrea is an oasis of peace and tranquility, many of those who have fled the country claim they had been effectively enslaved by the state.

At the age of 18 every Eritrean becomes eligible for national service with the military. In theory this should last for 18 months, but in practice it can go on indefinitely. Until such time as they are released, conscripts have almost no control over their lives. They are not permitted to marry, could be stationed anywhere in the country, and are put to work on government infrastructure projects such as building roads. In return they receive a meager wage thats scarcely enough to fend off starvation.

Any hint of insubordination is dealt with ruthlessly. Asking for leave, complaining, and even praying can lead to arrest and detention. Thousands of Eritreans attempt to flee the country every year. The official penalty for desertion is five years imprisonment, but there are reports that a shoot to kill policy is in place.

1. North Korea

Its with good reason that North Korea is sometimes referred to as the Hermit Kingdom. Since its creation in 1948, one family has passed down power from father to son. Each member of the Kim dynasty has wielded that power in the manner of a despotic medieval monarch. There were some hopes that Kim Jong Un, who was educated in the West, might prove to be more open and conciliatory than his father and grandfather. He has instead continued in the family tradition of murdering rivals and loudly threatening South Korea and the United States of America with destruction.

North Korean media is devoted to portraying the Kim family as benevolent godlike geniuses. North Koreans are told they are the wealthiest and most fortunate people in the world. This was demonstrably false even in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the economy was outperforming that of their South Korean neighbor. Its an even harder sell now that South Korea has become one of the wealthiest nations in the world, while the North Korean economy collapsed to the point that as many as 3 million people may have died of starvation in the 1990s.

If the North Korean people ever realize the extent of the lie perpetrated on them, it might prove impossible for the government to retain its grip on power. The Kim familys solution has been to create a sealed society, with little information allowed in or out. Any North Korean found listening to a foreign radio station, watching a foreign movie, or in possession of a foreign book or newspaper risks arrest, torture, and deportation to one of North Koreas brutal prison camps.

The aggressive rhetoric and bizarre claims coming out of North Korea on a regular basis are such that a satirical Twitter account, purporting to be North Koreas official news service, has been mistaken for the real thing by several respectable media outlets.

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Qatars Public Works Authority Ashghal has completed the tunnelling works in the Western branch of the main trunk sewer of its Doha South Sewage infrastructure project.



The project site witnessed the breakthrough of the tunnel-boring machine into the wall of the tunnel shaft, in the presence of Abdulla Hamad Al Attiyah, Ashghal president assistant and Khalid Saif Al Khayareen, drainage networks projects department manager, along with a number of officials and engineers from the projects consulting and contracting companies.



This major milestone represents the completion of one of the three main branches forming the main trunk sewer of Doha South Sewage infrastructure project, which will convey the sewage flows through pumping stations to the existing Doha South Treatment Works.



Al Attiyah said that the tunnel extends five kilometres underground reaching several areas including Al Sadd, Al Maamoura, and Salwa Road, up to the Doha South Sewage Treatment Works.



He noted that the achievement shows that Ashghal is still making progress in all its roads, expressways, buildings projects as well as the infrastructure and drainage projects that are being carried out deep underground. He added that these achievements prove that the State of Qatar is able to move ahead and deliver projects with the required quality and as scheduled.



Al Khayareen said that the Western branch that was completed today is one of the three parts of the Main Trunk Sewer which will serve Al Sadd, Al Maamoura, Umm Ghuwailina, and Al Matar areas. He pointed out that the main tunnel will withdraw the drainage water in a smoother way via gravitational factors to get it to the treatment plants, which will contribute to eliminate around 20 old pumping stations.



The western branch of the main trunk sewer, which was completed on January 7, stretches from Al Thumama Area to Salwa Road through Abu Hamour Area, with a length of about 5 km, representing about 30 per cent of the total length of the main tunnel. The tunnelling works, which started in the beginning of January 2017, took a period of 12 months at an average rate of 13.7 m per day.  TradeArabia News Service
British Airways' (BA) parent company, International Airlines Group (IAG), has announced it will purchase the collapsed Austrian airline Niki for 20 million ($23.9 million) and provide additional liquidity to the company of up to 16.5 million ($19.7 million), said a report.



The sale to IAG, which was the last remaining bidder, is the final chapter in the demise of Air Berlin, the second-biggest German airline that previously owned Niki and filed for insolvency earlier this year, said a report in The National.



IAG said it will run the airline as a new subsidiary of its budget carrier Vueling, retaining about 740 former Niki staff. The assets include about 15 planes, as well as slots in airports such as Vienna, Munich and Palma.



Niki filed for insolvency earlier this month after Germany's Lufthansa backed out of a deal to buy its assets on competition concerns, grounding the fleet and stranding thousands of passengers, the report said.



The airline was founded by Niki Lauda, the Austrian ex-F1 racing champion, but was sold to Air Berlin in 2011.



Lauda made a bid to repurchase Niki, along with several others, but eventually lost out to IAG.



Air Berlin agreed to sell a large part of its airline assets to Lufthansa. It also clinched a deal with Britain's easyJet for some operations at Berlin Tegel, the report said.
Almere, The Netherlands

January 8, 2018

ASMI Share Buyback Update January 1-5, 2018

ASM International N.V. (Euronext Amsterdam: ASM) reports the following transactions, conducted under ASMI's current share buyback program.

Date Repurchased shares Average price Repurchased value January 2, 2018 37,614  56.90  2,140,395 January 3, 2018 32,498  58.15  1,889,876 January 4, 2018 32,395  58.24  1,886,711 January 5, 2018 33,312  58.60  1,952,243 Total 135,819  57.94  7,869,225

These repurchases were made as part of the 250 million share buyback program announced on September 22, 2017. Of the total program, 63.1% has been repurchased. For further details including individual transaction information please visit:

www.asm.com/investors/share-information/share-buyback.

About ASM International

ASM International NV, headquartered in Almere, the Netherlands, its subsidiaries and participations design and manufacture equipment and materials used to produce semiconductor devices. ASM International, its subsidiaries and participations provide production solutions for wafer processing (Front-end segment) as well as for assembly & packaging and surface mount technology (Back-end segment) through facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia. ASM International's common stock trades on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock Exchange (symbol ASM). For more information, visit ASMI's website at www.asm.com .

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: All matters discussed in this press release, except for any historical data, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, economic conditions and trends in the semiconductor industry generally and the timing of the industry cycles specifically, currency fluctuations, corporate transactions, financing and liquidity matters, the success of restructurings, the timing of significant orders, market acceptance of new products, competitive factors, litigation involving intellectual property, shareholders or other issues, commercial and economic disruption due to natural disasters, terrorist activity, armed conflict or political instability, epidemics and other risks indicated in the Company's reports and financial statements. The Company assumes no obligation nor intends to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future developments or circumstances.

CONTACT

Investor contact:

Victor Bareno

T: +31 88 100 8500

E: victor.bareno@asm.com

Media contact:

Ian Bickerton

T: +31 625 018 512
For immediate release



FLOW TRADERS RECEIVES LICENSE IN HONG KONG, OPENS NEW OFFICE



Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 08 January 2018 - The Hong Kong regulator (the Securities and Futures Commission) granted Flow Traders Hong Kong Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Flow Traders N.V. (Euronext: FLOW), the license required to become an Exchange Participant of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This enables Flow Traders Hong Kong to act as an official market maker in ETFs and futures.

Flow Traders will start providing liquidity in Hong Kong-listed ETFs and futures, as a regulated market maker. Flow Traders will furthermore engage in advisory panels of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to share its knowledge on trading and act as a partner in the further development of the market infrastructure in Hong Kong and the Asian ETF ecosystem.

"We are delighted to have received this license, which will enable us to provide liquidity as a regulated entity and direct exchange member in Hong Kong", commented Sjoerd Rietberg, co-CEO of Flow Traders, "We look forward to offering additional liquidity in the APAC ETF markets, both on-exchange and off-exchange to investors and other market participants."

Co-CEO Dennis Dijkstra added: "The trust expressed in Flow Traders by the Hong Kong regulator is an honor that confirms the consistent quality of our professional setup and controls and the important role electronic liquidity providers play today in the financial markets. We look forward to expand our relationship with the regulator and with Asian market participants."

Flow Traders will open its Hong Kong office without any further delay, headed by Roeland Pot and Steve Mark. The Hong Kong office will work in close cooperation with the Singapore office together representing the APAC region for Flow Traders.

ENDS

Contact

Flow Traders N.V.

Serge Enneman / Investor Relations Officer

Telephone : +31 20 7996799

Email: investor.relations@flowtraders.com

About Flow Traders

Flow Traders is a leading global technology-enabled liquidity provider specializing in exchange traded products (ETPs). We provide continuous liquidity in ETP markets, while seeking to stay market neutral at all times and without having directional opinions. Investors benefit from our activities due to increased liquidity, higher execution quality and lower overall trading costs. As such, we contribute to more efficient and transparent securities markets. We provide liquidity in over 5,500 ETP listings across the globe, tracking all underlying asset classes, including equities, fixed income, commodities and currencies with access to over 104 trading venues in 36 countries around the world. Flow Traders has been named Europe's number one ETF Market Maker at the Annual Global ETF Awards for the last ten consecutive years - 2007 until 2016, and Asia-Pacific's number one ETF Market Maker for five out of the last six years - 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016. Flow Traders is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with trading offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York and Singapore, covering all time zones. Flow Traders' shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam. For more information, please visit: www.flowtraders.com .



Important legal information

This press release is prepared by Flow Traders N.V. and is for information purposes only. It is not a recommendation to engage in investment activities and you must not rely on the content of this document when making any investment decisions. The information in this document does not constitute legal, tax, or investment advice and is not to be regarded as investor marketing or marketing of any security or financial instrument, or as an offer to buy or sell, or as a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell, securities or financial instruments.



The information and materials contained in this press release are provided 'as is' and Flow Traders N.V. or any of its affiliates ("Flow Traders") do not warrant the accuracy, adequacy or completeness of the information and materials and expressly disclaim liability for any errors or omissions. This press release is not intended to be, and shall not constitute in any way a binding or legal agreement, or impose any legal obligation on Flow Traders. All intellectual property rights, including trademarks, are those of their respective owners. All rights reserved. All proprietary rights and interest in or connected with this publication shall vest in Flow Traders. No part of it may be redistributed or reproduced without the prior written permission of Flow Traders.



By accepting this document you agree to the terms set out above. If you do not agree with the terms set out above please notify legal.amsterdam@nl.flowtraders.com immediately and delete or destroy this document.

Market Abuse Regulation

This press release contains information within the meaning of Article 7(1) of the EU Market Abuse Regulation.
Tribune News Service

Mumbai, January 8

The Maharashtra Government will showcase various infrastructure projects at the Magnetic Maharashtra Convergence  2018 investors summit to be held in Mumbai between February 18 and 20.

Among the mega projects that will be offered to investors will include the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Information Expressway, road and metro rail projects and water supply schemes across the state, according to state government sources here. The Maharashtra Government has invited CEOs of several big global corporations in addition to trade representatives of various countries, officials said.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the state government could convert more than 50% of the MoUs signed at the Make in India  2016 into actual projects on the ground. We signed 2,984 MoUs of which 1,523 projects were actually converted. Investments to the tune of Rs 4.09 lakh crore of the Rs 8 lakh crore planned have actually come in, Fadnavis said.

However, say sources, marquee investors like Foxconn which was to put up a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in the state were yet to kick-start their projects. The state government is wooing Foxconn to set up its project at SEZ near the JNPT port.
Tribune News Service

Panchkula, January 7

The special investigation team (SIT) of the Haryana Police arrested Mahinder Insan, alias Dr MP Singh, from Sirsa in connection with the Panchkula violence. He will be produced in a Panchkula court tomorrow.

As per information, Mahinder Insan had accompanied Aditya Insan, who is still at large, while coming to Panchkula on August 25. Later, violence had erupted in which 36 persons were killed and over 200 got injured on the same day.
Sushma Ramachandran

Sushma Ramachandran

THE Indian economy seems to be like the proverbial elephant being examined by several blind men. Each describes it from his own perspective. One person says it is growing very fast while the other says it is down in the dumps. The latest economic growth data released by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) shows there has been a recovery in the second quarter of the current fiscal  2017-18. The overall growth for the first half of the year is pegged at 6 per cent now. This has prompted an expectation of 6.5 per cent growth for the entire year, based on the assumption that it will be higher in the last two quarters. It is the slowest pace in the last four years. Hence, down in the dumps. At the same time, it marks a recovery from the slump of 5.7 per cent in the first quarter. Hence, it is described as robust growth.

The reality is that the overall growth in the current fiscal, despite the recovery, will be at a disappointingly low level. It may have risen from the trough of the first quarter but remains far below the level needed to bring much of Indias population above the poverty line. The country needs consistently high economic growth for at least a decade. Only then, will it be possible to reduce the huge inequities in the development matrix. An 8-10 per cent growth rate is therefore imperative. It does not help for The Economist to describe India as the worlds fastest growing economy. This is a race that this country needs to win in its own self interest, not just as an academic exercise of comparative growth rates to pat itself on the back.

The reasons for the slowdown are clear. First, the disruptive effect of demonetisation which took place in November 2016 took more than a few months to subside completely. Second, the launch of the GST, with all its bureaucratic complexities and infirmities in July this year, had a massive impact on trade and industry. Even though there was a rollback of many onerous procedures, the GST remains a hurdle for small and medium enterprises. It is a reform that needs to be fixed operationally to become entirely successful.

The question is: what are the prospects for higher growth next year and what can the government do to improve the situation? As for the external outlook, it looks bleak on one major front, that is, oil prices. These are continuing their northward journey and have touched $67 per barrel. The hardening trend may not continue after the next two months when global winter demand eases. Plus much will depend on whether Russia continues to abide by the production quota agreement reached with the OPEC cartel. High global oil prices are a worrying factor since India imports over 80 per cent of its crude oil needs. The crash in world oil prices in 2014 had eased the scenario for Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, but this year, it will become burdensome and impact fiscal deficit calculations. Even officials expect there will be a slippage in the deficit targets for 2017-18. Given the impact of higher oil prices and the subsidy on key petroleum products, there is likely to be an even greater slippage from targets for next year as well.

On the other external issue of exports, growth will be constrained due to several factors. First, the rupee has been rapidly appreciating, thereby undermining efforts to become competitive in world markets. The stronger rupee will, on the other hand, help in containing the oil import bill. Secondly, exporters are still facing problems in getting refunds under the GST. Small units especially are not able to deal with the GST and its red tape. This is significant as many major export industries like gems and jewellery, handicrafts and garments are largely in the small-scale sector. So unless the GST is reformed quickly, it could affect export initiatives.

In other sectors like agriculture and manufacturing, the CSO expects there will be a slowdown compared to the previous year. Services are the only segment that appear to be growing robustly. It thus becomes incumbent on the government to take initiatives to ensure that the two key areas of agriculture and manufacturing are given an impetus.

The need to alleviate rural distress and farmers grievances needs to be high on the agenda of the government as it prepares to formulate the Budget. It has become not just an economic, but a political priority for the current administration as the Gujarat election has shown that rural areas have opted to vote for parties other than the BJP. Credit availability to the rural sector needs to be stepped up but this needs to be combined with greater flexibility in repayment norms, given the continuing incidence of farmers suicides.

Similarly, infrastructure investment needs to be stepped up in a big way. This can give a significant boost to the economy. Private investment has not picked up to the desired extent, indicating that the economic environment is not considered favourable at this time. Issues linked to ease of doing business must be improved significantly for both foreign and domestic investors if there is to be any step up in investment.

While taking measures to revive the economy, the government will have one eye on the upcoming elections in as many as eight states. But it needs to avoid short-term populism and go ahead with durable and viable long-term reforms. This is especially urgent in the farm sector. It needs to be made a key focus area. The rural economy has to be revitalised and given sufficient support. Unless employment avenues are created in rural areas, the existing mass migration to cities will become an endless flow creating chaos in urban centres. Industrial growth, especially in manufacturing, is equally critical in order to create more jobs. No doubt, it will be a tough task, but reviving economic growth right now needs to be accorded the highest priority. Otherwise it will not be possible to achieve the aim of eliminating poverty from this country as rapidly as possible.
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 7

With the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) receiving an Intelligence input regarding a possible aerial terror attack on and around the Republic Day, the Centre has alerted the security agencies of northern states and directed them to follow strict security drill.

Sources in the MHA said a letter has been sent to the Director of General Police (DGPs) and the Police Commissioners of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

Asking them to keep a vigil on all airborne craft, a senior MHA official, in the letter, said the states had been asked to keep surveillance and positioning of special security guards at recognised field to check that no light/micro light aircraft, hand glider and helicopters is allowed to fly or even starts on and around the Republic Day.

Operations of light, micro-light aircraft, UAVs and similar long-range vehicles should be prohibited around 300 km from Delhi between 6 am and 9 pm on January 26, the letter stated. However, all state-owned aircraft, having prior security clearance, will be allowed to fly.

It has also been advised to prohibit airborne cameras and drones along sensitive locations such as Vijay Chowk, Rashtrapati Bhawan and Rajpath during the restriction period between January 26 and 29, sources said. The police have been asked to intensify highway patrolling as the aerial vehicles and light aircraft may not necessarily be operated from the airports, but from any other unprepared ground as well.

The state security agencies have also been instructed to keep a tight vigil on unused airstrips and open grounds which may allow operations of these aircraft.
THE self-certified militarily muscular government in New Delhi cut a sorry figure before a parliamentary committee recently when it failed to spell out a cogent national security policy. Worse, the government also did not appear to have a strategy to deal with Pakistan except for haranguing it for incubating terrorists; it came up short when asked to specifically spell out the strategy to deal with Pakistan in political, economic, cultural and military dimensions. India and Pakistan ties need an environment free from terror, hostility and violence to foster but as the parliamentary panel pointed out, the policy is based on a single leg: asking Pakistan to honour its publicly stated commitment not to allow any territory under its control to be used against India in any manner and take effective and credible action to put an end to cross-border terrorism.

It is a telling commentary on the security overload in the governments thought process that a parliamentary panel packed with BJP members could not help avoid picking holes in the diplomatic strategy for dealing with Pakistan. It rightly pointed out that the relationship has been blighted by recurrent periods of tensions and strains and is historically complicated. But that shouldnt stop the government from trying to hold talks with Pakistan. After all, there were tangible benefits despite the cyclical process of dialogue-terrorist attack-dialogue during the Vajpayee-Manmohan Singh eras, such as ceasefire along the LoC, improved bilateral trade and more people-to-people contacts.

Taking heed from a bipartisan committee of politicians, New Delhi needs to create conditions conducive for mature negotiations that are not held hostage to the acts of terrorism. The secret meeting between the NSAs in Bangkok may have been one such step to keep the channels of communication open, even during crises. As the frenzied Indian reaction to Hafiz Saeed sharing a platform with the Palestine envoy or to the case of former Navy officer Jadhav showed, Indias foreign policy to Pakistan does get dictated or derailed by non-state actors. Insignificant imams must not be permitted to dictate Indias foreign policy responses in the neighbourhood.
Pradeep Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 8

Power tariff has gone up in municipal areas of Haryana. With the government issuing orders today on imposition of municipal tax, urban consumers will have to shell out 2 per cent more on power bills with effect from November 23 last.

Decks were cleared for imposition of municipal tax with the Assembly passing the Haryana Municipal (Second Amendment) Act during the recent Vidhan Sabha session. Following assent by the Governor, the government issued the order today for imposition of 2 per cent municipal tax.

Officials said the higher rate of municipal tax would get more revenue for municipalities, which had been grappling with resource crunch at a time when Manohar Lal Khattar government had initiated major development projects in major cities and towns.

The municipal tax component of power bills is channelised into development projects by the state government in areas falling within municipal limits of urban areas.

Since urbanisation is growing at a rapid pace, massive investment is needed in urban areas to provide basic amenities people and upgrade infrastructure in the state.

Since 2000, power utilities had been charging municipal tax at 5 paise per unit, officials said, adding that it had now been increased to 2 per cent of the total electricity bill.

However, the tax would not be leviable on consumption of electricity by the Government of India or where it was consumed in construction, maintenance or operation of any railway by the Central government.

On July 10 last, the BJP government issued a notification asking panchayats to levy panchayat tax in villages to mop up resources for rural development in the state.

The imposition of municipal tax and panchayat tax by the BJP government in urban and rural areas was being seen as an attempt to bring in uniformity in power tariff in rural and urban areas.
Tribune News Service

Shimla, January 8

Condemning registration of an FIR by the Deputy Director of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) against Rachna Khaira, a reporter of The Tribune, in the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police for publishing news regarding the breach of secrecy of the UIDAI scheme, the Press Club, Shimla, today submitted a memorandum to Governor Acharya Devvrat.

A delegation led by Press Club president Dhananjay Sharma met the Governor at Raj Bhawan and apprised him about the incident in which the reporter had been booked under Sections 419 (punishment for cheating under impersonation), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery), 471 (using a forged document) and also under sections of the IT Act and the Aadhaar as she exposed how for a small sum of money, an agent allegedly created a gateway to access the details contained in an individuals Aadhaar card.

Mediapersons said action of the UIDAI was uncalled for and a brazen attack on the freedom of press as The Tribune had only exposed how the UIDAI could lead to breach of security.

The memorandum further said the media was with The Tribune at this juncture as it was not only an attempt to bully a newspaper, but also beginning of a new trend which, if not stopped, could pose a threat to the freedom of press and democracy.

In a report published on January 3, the reporter, using a false identity, had posed as an interested party and claimed in her report that she had an easy access to details that individuals had listed in their Aadhaar cards.

Meanwhile, president, HP Congress Committee, Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu has condemned the move and said the UIDAIs action was meant to browbeat a journalist whose investigation on the matter was of great public interest.

He said it was unfair, unjustified and a direct attack on the freedom of press. Instead of penalising the reporter, the UIDAI should have ordered an internal investigation and made its findings public. The HPCC demanded an immediate intervention of the Union Government for withdrawing the cases against the reporter, he added.
Tribune News Service

Dharamsala, January 8

Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and his Cabinet colleagues arrived here today for the four-day Winter session starting tomorrow.

Ministers of the BJP government, including Kishan Kapoor, Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, Vipin Parmar, Minister for Health, Bikram Thakur, Minister for Industries, Sarveen Chaudhary, Minister for Town and Country Planning, former CM Shanta Kumar and hundreds of party workers waited for the new CM at the Gaggal airport for about four hours. The Chief Minister was scheduled to arrive here at 2 pm. However, his arrival was delayed by about two hours.

Many BJP leaders complained that their names were not on the list of leaders who were allowed inside the airport to welcome the CM.

Some of them argued their case with airport authority officials who had to leave their office to avoid the situation.

Talking to newsmen at the airport, the Chief Minister avoided almost all controversial queries.

When asked about the second capital status to Dharamsala that was accorded by the previous Congress government, Thakur said he could not say anything regarding it. For the time being, his objective would be run the session of smoothly.

Different delegations of employees, groups of party workers and officials of various departments stood along the road to welcome the CM. The Chief Minister, who seemed exhausted attending the welcomes for the past few days, acknowledged almost every delegation.

Near Circuit House, the CM, on his first arrival to the quasi winter capital of the state, got the taste of things to come. A delegation of government workers was awaiting for him with their charter of demands. The employees were demanding the implementation of the old pension scheme in place of contributory pension scheme.

Members of the Gaddi community welcomed him in their traditional dresses. Men and women members of the community performed their traditional dance.

The Chief Minister was made to get down from his official car and walk to the Circuit House where he was according guard of honour.

In Circuit House, Thakur performed dance with Gaddi dancers and obliged many who wanted a selfie with him.

Almost all Congress and BJP MLAs arrived at Dharamsala for the session and checked in hotels booked for them by the district administration. Leader of Congress Legislative Party Mukesh Agnihotri also arrived. Former CM Virbhadra Singh also arrived here and is staying Jia Rest House, the place where former CM Prem Kumar Dhumal used to stay as the Leader of the Opposition.

A selfie moment

Members of the Gaddi community welcomed Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur in their traditional dresses. Men and women members of the community performed their traditional dance. The Chief Minister was made to get down from his official car and walk to the Circuit House, where he was according guard of honour. In Circuit House, the Chief Minister performed with Gaddi dancers and obliged many who wanted a selfie with him. The CM, who seemed exhausted attending the welcomes for the past few days, acknowledged almost every delegation.
Shahira Naim

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, January 9

Police have found no terrorist link to a Kashmiri youth arrested while travelling without ticket in a train from New Delhi to Bhopal, a high-ranking police officer said on Monday.

The youngster, Bilal Ahmad Wani, was arrested by Government Railway Police from Palwal while travelling in the New Delhi-Bhopal Shatabdi Express, and later handed over to the Anti Terrorist Squad.

Uttar Pradesh ATS Inspector General Asim Arun said that there was nothing irregular about his background.

Wani reportedly pretended to be deaf and mute when the railways Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE) asked for his ticket, raising his suspicion. The TTE reported Wani to the police, who made him alight at Mathura at 8.30 am on Sunday.

Wani continued to pretend until Sunday noon, even speaking in signs, but finally gave his name and address when officers of the ATS and local intelligence persisted in questioning him.

He said he was from Anantnag, where his family owned a medical store.

The name and address shared by him were corroborated by the Kashmir police. Till now no terrorist link has been confirmed, Arun said.

The names and addresses of two more Kashmiri youth who had been staying with him at Delhi hotel in Delhi were found to be correct. The ATS is now looking for them to bring them in for questioning.
Jerusalem, January 8

Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling emotional and excited as he prepares to visit his birthplace during the four-day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month.

Moshe, 11, was two-year-old when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based LeT terrorists.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents bodies, was saved in a daring move by his brave nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on January 15. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories, an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshes grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5 in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House, Moshe had told the Indian Prime Minister.

Modi had responded by saying, Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere.

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on January 14.

Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug, Rosenberg said, adding, He is hoping to meet the Indian Prime Minister again during his India trip.

He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully PM Modi at his home in Mumbai, the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the sightseeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment, Rosenberg noted.

Moshes parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

It is heartwarming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India havent forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one, Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like homecoming for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshes bar mitzvah in Mumbai. Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued 10-year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honourary citizenship by the Israeli government. PTI
New Delhi, January 8

Amid criticism of action by authorities over The Tribune report on Aadhaar data breach, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said the government is committed to the freedom of the press and the FIR had been filed against unknown entities.

Government is fully committed to freedom of Press as well as to maintaining security and sanctity of Aadhaar for Indias development. FIR is against unknown, Prasad said on Twitter.

Delhi Police have registered an FIR on a UIDAI officials complaint over The Tribune report on alleged data breach of Aadhaar details, naming the reporter behind the story, even as the daily said it would defend its freedom to undertake investigative journalism.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Deputy Director BM Patnaik told the police that an input was received from The Tribune that it had purchased a service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp that provided unrestricted access to details of any of the Aadhaar numbers created in India, the police had said on Sunday.

On January 5, a complaint was received from Patnaik and the FIR was registered the same day, the police said.

The Editors Guild of India sought government intervention for the withdrawal of the case and called for an impartial investigation into the matter.

Criticising the lodging of the FIR, the guild said it was deeply concerned over reports that the UIDAI deputy director had registered a complaint in which the reporter of The Tribune, Rachna Khaira, had been named.

UIDAI is committed to the freedom of Press. We're going to write to @thetribunechd & @rachnakhaira to give all assistance to investigate to nab the real culprits. We also appreciate if Tribune & its journalist have any constructive suggestion to offer. https://t.co/H3OtQSiFeJ  Aadhaar (@UIDAI) January 8, 2018

Prasad said: Ive suggested UIDAI to request Tribune & its journalist to give all assistance to police in investigating real offenders. PTI
New Delhi, January 8



An Italian court has acquitted a former president of Italian defence and aerospace major Finmeccanica and a former chief executive officer of its subsidiary AgustaWestland of corruption charges involving a multi-crore deal of VVIP helicopters with India.

The Court of Appeal of Milan on Monday cleared former president of Finmeccanica, Giuseppe Orsi, and Bruno Spagnolin, a former CEO of its subsidiary AgustaWestland of corruption charges because of insufficient proof, according to an order read out in the court.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Orsi was arrested in 2014 and resigned as chief executive of the aerospace group that was later renamed as Leonardo. He was at the helm of AugustaWestland when the deal was struck and he is suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes.

The development came more than a year after a court sentenced Orsi to 4.5 years and Spagnolini to 4 years in jail on corruption charges related to a Rs 3,600 crore contract to supply a dozen helicopters to New Delhi.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini was a result of an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of 12 luxury helicopters to India.

India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AugustaWestland in January 2014 for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

India's defence ministry had ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after Italian investigators arrested Orsi and Spagnolini in connection with the case.

In February 2010, India had inked a deal to acquire 12 three-engine AW-101 helicopters from AgustaWestland. PTI/Agencies
Washington, January 8

A group of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descents has protested outside the Pakistani embassy here against the "inhumane" treatment of the wife and mother of Indian death row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav during their recent visit to Islamabad.

Braving freezing cold, the protesters also brought along sandals to give them to the Pakistani embassy officials. The trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court, said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Baolchistan, which organised the unique event named as "Chappal-Chor Pakistan" (slipper-thief Pakistan).

Both Jadhavs wife and mother were asked to remove their sandals, mangalsutras and bindis before they were allowed to meet him, and the sandals were subsequently stolen, Mustikhan said.

The protesters said that Pakistan meted out "inhumane" treatment to Jadhav's wife and mother during their tightly- controlled interaction with the 47-year-old Indian national on December 25 in the Pakistan Foreign Office.

During the meeting, whose pictures were released by Pakistan, Jadhav was seen sitting behind a glass screen while his mother and wife sat on the other side. They spoke through intercom and the entire 40-minute proceedings appeared to have been recorded on video.

The recent episode of Pakistan makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Smt. Kulbhushan Yadav and asking them to remove even Bindi and Mangal Sutras and changing their dresses as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharata Soubhagya Nari (married Indian woman)," said Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in the US.

Carl Clemens, volunteer with several local community organisations alleged that the treatment given to the mother and wife by Pakistan foreign office typified the "petty vindictiveness and humiliation" that is the prevalent culture in Pakistan.

"They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. Because of this sort of behaviour Pakistan has found itself on a watch list. This behaviour will lead to Pakistan's own destruction," said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Pakistan on December 25 had issued a video of Jadhav in which he was purportedly seen thanking the Pakistan government for arranging a meeting with his wife and mother.

India has asserted that Jadhav appeared coerced and under considerable stress during the tightly-controlled interaction.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April, following which India moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May.

Pakistan says he was a commander rank officer in the Indian Navy. But India says Jadhav was a former naval officer.

New Delhi also says Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.

A 10-member Bench of the ICJ on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case.

It is expected to hold another hearing in March or April. PTI
New Delhi, January 8

Paving way for the Centre to make available a cheaper mode of transport for Haj pilgrims, Saudi Arabia has given its nod to India's plan to revive the option of ferrying devotees to Jeddah via sea route, 23 years after the practice was stopped.

Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi confirmed the development in a statement after he and Saudi Arabia's Haj and Umrah Minister Mohammad Saleh bin Taher Benten signed a bilateral annual agreement regarding the pilgrimage in Mecca on Monday.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Terming his meeting with Benten "very fruitful", Naqvi said officials from both the countries would discuss the technicalities involved so that the pilgrimage via sea route can be commissioned in the coming years.

"Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route... Officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years," the statement quoted Naqvi as saying.

However, it did not specify the year when the option for pilgrimage via sea route would be opened. As of now, devotees can travel to Saudi Arabia for performing Haj only by air.

The "revolutionary, pro-poor and pilgrim-friendly" decision of sending devotees through sea route will help cut down travel expenses "significantly", Naqvi said.

The government has been weighing the option of opening the sea route in the light of a 2012 Supreme Court order to abolish by 2022 the subsidy offered to Haj pilgrims who travel by air.

Ministry sources, however, said air services to Jeddah would continue to be available for those who can afford the journey. India has a Haj quota of 1.70 lakh.

It used to take nearly 12-15 days for pilgrims to reach Jeddah in Saudi Arabia from Yellow Gate in Mumbai's Mazgaon before the sea route was closed in 1995, sources said.

Naqvi said with the availability of modern and well- equipped shipswhich can ferry 4,000 to 5,000 persons at a timethe 2,300-odd nautical miles one-side distance between Mumbai and Jeddah can now be covered within just three to four days.

The minister said for the first time, Muslim women from India will go to Haj without 'Mehram' (male companion) and separate accommodation and transport have been arranged for them.

"Woman Haj assistants will be deployed for them," he said, adding more than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without 'Mehram' and of them will be exempted from lottery system and allowed to proceed for the pilgrimage.

According to the new Haj policy of India, women above 45 years of age, who wish to go for Haj but who don't have a male companion, are allowed to travel for Haj in groups of four or more.

The Haj Committee of India has received around 3,59,000 applications for Haj 2018. For the first time, we have given choice to Haj pilgrims to opt for another nearest embarkation point, Naqvi said.

This will ensure that there is no financial burden on Haj pilgrims even after removal of Haj subsidy. This decision has received overwhelming response, the statement said. PTI
New Delhi, January 8

Saudi Arabia has given its nod to Indias plan to revive the option of ferrying Haj pilgrims via sea route to Jeddah, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said in a statement on Monday.

Naqvi made the comment after the signing of the annual Haj agreement between India and Saudi Arabia in Mecca.

Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route. Officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years, Naqvi said according to the statement.

Naqvi said that sending pilgrims through ships would help cut down travel expenses significantly and added that it would be a revolutionary, pro-poor, pilgrim-friendly decision.

The practice of ferrying Haj pilgrims between Mumbai and Jeddah by waterways existed earlier too, but was stopped from 1995.

Naqvi said that for the first time Muslim women from India would go to Haj without mehram (male companion).

Separate accommodation and transport have been arranged for these women Haj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia and women Haj assistants will be deployed for their assistance, he added.

More than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without mehram. All these women will be exempted from lottery system and allowed to proceed to Haj, he added. Women above 45, who wish to go for Haj but who dont have a male companion, are allowed to travel for Haj in groups of four or more women according to the new Haj policy of India. PTI
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 8

Army Chief General Bipin Rawat today said Indian and Chinese troops had resolved an issue over the recent attempt by Chinese teams to build a road on the Indian side of the border at Tuting in Arunachal Pradesh.

Speaking to media on the sidelines of a seminar on Army technology, General Rawat said the Indian troops had stopped attempts by Chinese engineering teams to build a road near Tuting and the 'incident' had been resolved.

General Rawat said a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) between the two sides in Arunachal two days ago had resolved the issue. Chinese road building teams had entered about 1 km inside the Indian territory in Tuting, government sources said, adding that they had come for track alignment activities. The teams returned when confronted by Indian troops and left behind various road-building equipment, including excavators, they said.

According to the Army chief, there was a major reduction of Chinese troops in the Doklam area of Sikkim sector. In June, Indian soldiers crossed the Sikkim border to stop China from constructing a road in the Doklam plateau. Bhutan has no diplomatic relations with China and asked India to intervene. Delhi also stressed that it had forewarned China that the road would be seen as a serious security concern because of the access it opens up to the narrow sliver of land called the "Chicken's Neck" that links India to its north-eastern states.

Earlier, the Army Chief said: There is need for modernisation, as future wars will be fought in difficult terrain and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them.

He said he was confident of support from the industry we will walk the extra mile to ensure that we utilise the technology you give us, he promised industry leaders in New Delhi. He appreciated the progress made in the area of defence technology.

This is not the first time that the Army Chief has commented on the crucial need for equipping the armed forces with the latest that technology has to offer. In November, he had spoken about armoured vehicles in the future should have the ability to operate on both northern and western borders. "Whatever be the future armoured vehicle we are looking at, we must have the capability to operate on the western border and the northern border.

He said there was a need to reduce imports in defence technology and become self-reliant. We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defence technology)... to ensure that we fight the next war with home-made solutions," he said.

Future wars in difficult terrain

There is a need for modernisation, as future wars will be fought in difficult terrain and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them. General Bipin Rawat, Army Chief
Bengaluru, January 8

A Twitter war between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Adityanath in which they mocked each other over issues development and governance has gone viral on the internet.

Adityanath took part in the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally organised by the BJP's Karnataka unit here on Sunday as part of the party's ongoing state-wide 75-day campaign to "expose misdeeds" of the Siddaramaiah government.

Welcoming the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Siddaramaiah tweeted that there was a lot Adityanath could learn from Karnataka to address the reported starvation deaths in his state.

"I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit an Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru," Siddaramaiah tweeted.

Adityanath promptly responded.

Thanking Siddaramaiah for the welcome, he cited an increase in farmers' suicides and alleged ill treatment to honest government officials under the Congress dispensation.

He also pointed out that he was trying to "undo the misery" unleashed by Congress' allies in Uttar Pradesh.

"Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers."

"As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies," Adityanath tweeted.

The "welcome" barb between both the chief ministers has gone viral, with supporters of political parties they represent taking sides and trolling each other with hashtags "#YogiInBengaluru" and "#HogappaYogi" (go Yogi).

Addressing the 'Nava Karnataka Parivartan Yatre' rally on Sunday, Adityanath alleged that the Congress government in Karnataka was pushing the state five years back "due to corruption, divisive politics and anti-development policies".

Accusing the Congress of trying to divide the society on caste lines, keeping assembly elections in mind, he said: "The party has become a burden...a problem for the nation". Assembly elections are due in Karnataka early this year.

This is the second visit of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to the state in less than a month to campaign for his party.

His last visit was to Hubbali on December 21, 2017 to address a rally.

Adityanath has also attacked Siddaramaiah personally for endorsing eating beef. PTI
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, January 8

Union Minister for Surface Transport, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Nitin Gadkari today said his ministry would soon sort out pending clearances for the Char Dham all-weather road, which passes through the eco-sensitive zone.

The issue will be resolved at the earliest, said Gadkari while addressing mediapersons here today.

The minister also reviewed the Char Dham all-weather road and Namami Ganga projects and said these were on course. Work on the all-weather Char Dham road is likely to be completed by March 2019, he said.

The Union minister said, A stretch of 570 km will be constructed under the Bharat Mala project. Work will start within six months. Tenders for another 400-km stretch of the all-weather road will be awarded by March this year. Re-aligning of the roads is already underway.

The minister announced the construction of an express highway between New Delhi and Dehradun. We want to extend cooperation to Uttarakhand in improving its tourism infrastructure. At the same time, we want to ensure that national highways are free of encroachments,  he added.

The minister said the Central Government was committed to keeping the Ganga free of pollution. He said Auli in Chamoli would be developed as an international ski resort.

The Uttarakhand Government has also forwarded a proposal for starting a sea-plane service in the state.

Chief Minister TS Rawat was also present .
Jotirmay Thapliyal

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, January 8

A memorandum of understanding has been signed with the Central Institute of Temperature Horticulture under which Uttarakhand will be provided one lakh walnut tree saplings.

Walnut is in big demand and it is mainly the state of Jammu and Kashmir which caters to walnut fruit needs of the country. Uttarakhand has climatic conditions suitable for walnut production. The state has decided to promote it in a big way under Uttarakhand Forest Resource Management project.

An MoU has been signed between Uttarakhand Forest Resource Management Project and Srinagar Kashmir situated Central Institute of Temperature Horticulture, a Central department that comes under Indian Council of Agriculture Research.

Under the project, funded by Japanese International Cooperation Agency, the state will get over a lakh high quality walnut saplings over a period of six years. The saplings will be provided to self help groups for plantation purposes.

As per an estimate, the country has a demand of around 70 metric tonnes of walnut. However, walnut production in the country is only half of it and nearly 90 per cent of it comes from Jammu and Kashmir. Uttarakhand, at present, has minuscule walnut product which it needs to promote.

Uttarakhand Forest Resource Management Projects Chief Project Officer Anup Malik disclosed that the walnut tree saplings obtained through Central Institute of Temperature Horticulture will be distributed to farmers through Van Panchayats. As per the condition of MoU, high yielding variety that will bear fruit from the third year after being planted will be provided to the state. After six years, a full-fledged walnut tree will give a produce of 25 kg. The walnut can be source of increasing the earnings of the farmers in the hilly areas of the state.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, January 8

Uttarakhand Department of Tourism will organise International Yoga Festival in March in Rishikesh, Tourism Minister Satpal Maharaj said on Monday.

While addressing a press conference today, Maharaj said that the festival will bring together practitioners of yoga from all across the world. The annual yoga festival will be held from March 1 to March 7 that will attract national and international tourists. We will also commemorate the 50 the anniversary of Beatles arrival in Rishikesh during this period, he said. The minister said the other details regarding holding the yoga festival in Rishikesh are being worked out.
Beirut, January 8

Air strikes by regime and Russian aircraft on rebel positions in the northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, including eight children, a monitor said on Monday.

The strikes carried out on Sunday were the latest against jihadists and rebels in a week-old regime offensive on Idlib, the last province in Syria to escape government control.

The raid left at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib province, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, said.  AFP
Beijing, January 8

Carrie Gracie, the China editor for Britain's public broadcaster the BBC, has resigned from her post in Beijing due to pay disparities with her male colleagues, according to an open letter she wrote.

The BBC has come under fire recently for paying male employees more and has pledged to close the gender gap by 2020.

In July, it revealed as part of a funding settlement with the government that it paid its then top male star five times more than its best-paid female presenter, and that two-thirds of on-air employees earning at least 150,000 pounds ($203,500) were men.

In a letter published on her personal blog on Sunday, Gracie said there was a "crisis of trust" at the broadcaster, where she has worked for 30 years, and that it was "breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure".

The BBC had four international editors, two men and two women, of which she was one, she said.

When the BBC revealed top salaries as part of last year's settlement, Gracie said she learned that the two men made at least 50 percent more money than the women in those roles.

She said she had since had been offered a pay increase that remained "far short of equality" and left her post in Beijing last week, returning to her former job in the BBC TV newsroom.

"The BBC must admit the problem, apologise and set in place an equal, fair and transparent pay structure," she said, calling for an independent arbitration to settle individual cases at the broadcaster.

The BBC cited a BBC spokeswoman as saying that "fairness in pay" at the corporation is "vital", and that an audit of pay for rank and file staff led by an independent judge found there was "no systemic discrimination against women".

Reuters
Washington, January 8

No one in the White House questions the mental stability of Donald Trump, US top envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said in response to an allegation against the American President in a controversial book.

Indian-American Haley, the first-ever Cabinet-ranking official in any presidential administration, defended staffers in the Trump administration as loyal and respecting.

Haleys defence of Trump comes after the publication of the book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by journalist Michael Wolff, in which he claims to have interviewed more than 200 people familiar with the purported chaos inside the Oval Office.

In the book, Wolff writes that people around Trump regularly question his intelligence and fitness for office.

I know those people in the White House. These people love their country and respect our president...No one questions the (mental) stability of the president, Haley said on Sunday.

I cant vouch for anything like that. I dont know if it was 200 interviews with Steve Bannon, or if it was 200 interviews with him, but I can tell you, I know these people. I work with these people, she said.

Trump, 71, has repeatedly slammed the book as fake, describing it as full of lies.

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! Trump said in a tweet.

The Trump administration has been dealing with the fallout of the book since it hit the stores on Friday.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week, this is a man, he didnt become the president by accident, Haley said.

We need to be realistic at the fact that every person, regardless of race, religion, or party, who loves the country, should support this president. Its that important, she said.

Haley said she was in constant communication not only with the president but also with people around him.

Im around them all the time. I see these people put everything they have got into their jobs and into respecting and trusting the president. If they didnt, they wouldnt be there, she said.

Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart, Trump tweeted on Saturday.

Earlier, White House aide Stephen Miller described the book as a grotesque work of fiction. PTI
Manila, January 8

The Philippines vice president has joined a chorus of opposition to a possible cancellation of mid-term elections and extensions to terms in office, including that of the president, amid a renewed push for a shift to federalism.

President Rodrigo Duterte is keen to follow through on his election campaign promise to introduce federalism, saying it would be more equitable for Filipinos and would bring peace and development, especially in the countries restive south.

House Speaker and Duterte ally Pantaleon Alvarez has said it was possible May 2019 mid-term elections would be cancelled if proposed constitutional amendments, to introduce federalism, pass a plebiscite this year.

But the no-election scenario has not sat well among Dutertes critics, who also expressed concern that changing the constitution could see him prolong his stay in power beyond the end of his term in 2022. Philippine presidents are allowed to serve one term only, lasting six years.

Vice President Leni Robredo, who was not Dutertes running mate, comes from an opposition party and has clashed with him on numerous occasions, said it was self-serving if moves were made to extend terms of incumbent executives.

We are very much against this no-election proposal because holding elections sums up democracy, she said during her weekly radio programme on Sunday.

This is the only way for ordinary Filipinos to participate in the process of choosing who should lead them. Filipinos are due to elect 12 senators, about 300 congressmen and thousands of local government officials in next years elections.

Speaker Alvarez said the house planned to convene as a constituent assembly early this year to tackle constitutional amendments, including the shift to federalism.

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Duterte has no intention to prolong his stay in power and is even willing to cut short his term.

Hes willing to let go because hes not keen really on staying (longer) as president. Thats the truth, Roque told CNN Philippines on Monday.

But lawyer Christian Monsod, one of those who helped design the 1987 Constitution, questioned motives of the pro-Duterte camp in Congress.

Is it really necessary to change the constitution? he told news channel ANC.

My bet is it would be amended, revised to suit the interests of the clans and dynasties in Congress.  Reuters.
Nicosia, January 8

The ruling party of the prime minister of northern Cyprus, a statelet recognised only by Turkey, was leading parliamentary elections on Monday but will probably still need to form a coalition, partial results showed.

More than 190,500 people were registered to vote in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), established in the wake of Turkeys 1974 invasion of the island in response to an Athens-backed coup.

The vote comes ahead of presidential polls later this month in the internationally recognised Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus, with peace efforts on hold until both sets of elections are over.

The National Unity Party (UBP) of prime minister Huseyin Ozgurgun led the polls with 36 percent of the vote, ahead of the socialist Republican Turkish Party (CTP) at 21 percent, Turkish Cypriot media reports said, based on a count of 58 percent of ballot boxes.

The vote of the Democrat Party (DP)  the outgoing junior partner in the ruling coalition  however collapsed to 7 percent. The Peoples Party (HP)  a new partypolled well on 17 percent.

If confirmed, the results would probably pave the way to a UBP-CTP coalition, which could be useful for president Mustafa Akinci, as the CTP broadly supports peace talks he has led.

But the HP  which may still play a role in the coalition  has expressed scepticism over negotiations to reunify the island.

Akinci will want broad backing at home as he seeks to push once more for a federal solution to the Cyprus problem and convince his Greek Cypriot counterparts he means business.

The election in the northern third of Cyprus comes six months after efforts to reunify the island collapsed at a United Nations-hosted peace summit in Switzerland over several sticking points including the withdrawal of Turkeys 45,000 troops.

The election, originally planned for July, was brought forward after tensions in the ruling coalition of the UBP and its junior partner DP, as the opposition pressed for snap polls.  AFP.
Washington, January 8

The widespread protests in Iran was a sign of failure of the government, US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron have agreed, the White House said on Monday.

The two leaders spoke over phone on Sunday during which they also discussed the developments in the Korean Peninsula.

North and South Korea are scheduled to hold talks tomorrow.

Trump spoke to Macron to provide an update on developments on the Korean Peninsula, and to underscore American, South Korean and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearisation of North Korea, the White House said in a readout of the call.

The presidents also agreed that the widespread demonstrations in Iran were a sign of the Iranian regimes failure to serve its peoples needs by instead diverting the nations wealth to fund terrorism and militancy abroad, it said.

At least 21 people have been killed in Iran after anti-government began on December 28. PTI
Photo: Tom Berg

Environmental advocates, state attorneys general, and others are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain the Obama administrations regulation restricting the use of glider kits under the Greenhouse Gas Phase 2 rules, calling the current efforts to reverse the rule at odds with the Clean Air Act.

Last November, EPA moved ahead with its promise to repeal the glider provision found in the 2016 GHG rules. EPAs proposed repeal contended that glider kits should not be included in GHG regulations because glider vehicles are not technically new motor vehicles and glider engines are not new motor vehicle engines," and thus are not subject to the EPAs authority on environmental regulations.

In a phone conference Monday, the Environmental Defense Fund challenged this reading as intentionally misrepresentative of the CAA, saying it went against the principles upon which the legislation was founded.

For EPA to propose an interpretation of the Clean Air Act that would exclude these extremely high-polluting trucks from emissions standards is not only an unreasonable reading of the plain text of the CAA, its also at odds with and severely undermines the core purpose of the Clean Air Act, said Alice Henderson, EDF attorney.

EDF representatives also pointed out that industry stakeholders didn't challenge the EPA's authority over glider kits at the time the Phase 2 standards were being written.

In fact, some of those stakeholders late last year signed a letter supporting the original mandate. The letter, signed by executives from Volvo Group North America, Cummins, and Navistar, stated that glider kits should not be used to bypass currently certified powertrains.

In addition, a coalition of 12 attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington filed a comment strongly opposing the glider rule repeal, saying that the group was prepared to take any action to protect the emissions regulation, including legal challenges.

Repealing the glider rule is bad for our environment, for the health of our families, and for truckers and shippers who play by the rules and operate trucks with cleaner fuel-burning engines, said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to set and enforce motor-vehicle emissions standards. If EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decides to neglect this legal responsibility by doing away with the glider rule, we are prepared to take any and all action to protect the air our children breathe and the vitality and level playing field of the trucking industry, an important sector of our economy.

Fitzgerald Glider Kits Petition

In May 2017, Pruitt held a meeting with Fitzgerald Glider Kits, according to a report by The Washington Post, but the details of that meeting were not publicly discussed. Just two months later, Fitzgerald petitioned EPA for the repeal of the rule, citing EPAs lack of authority to do so as its first reason.

Fitzgerald also challenged the validity of EPAs assessment of the environmental impact that glider kits would have, saying that it was based on unsupported assumptions rather than data. This petition was directly cited in EPAs proposed repeal of the glider rule.

EDF criticized EPAs lack of transparency on the meeting with Fitzgerald Glider Kits, saying that the apparent impact of the meeting had "concerning implications" for the Pruitt-led EPA.

The advcocay group also called attention to a study conducted by Tennessee Technical University  underwritten by Fitzgerald  that appeared to show that glider kits would not have as significant an environmental impact as previously argued by the EPAs own study, as also reported by The Washington Post. The Tennessee Tech study was included in the EPAs repeal proposal instead of the agency's own report.

Theres a series of more than suspicious circumstances surrounding this particular action.  EDF's Jason Mathers

EPA itself put in the docket an extensive documentation of a test program that they had conducted at their own research facility and that was not even mentioned or cited in the proposal to roll back the provision, said Jason Mathers, EDF director for on-road vehicles. Theres a series of more than suspicious circumstances surrounding this particular action.

Public Comments

As part of the proposed repeal of the glider rule, the EPA held a public comment period for citizens and industry stakeholders to voice opinions on the rollback. More than 24,000 comments were received by EPA before the comment period closed on Jan. 5.

Daimler Trucks North America (which offers glider kits itself) and Detroit Diesel Corporation filed a comment in opposition to EPAs proposal, stating it supports the Phase 2 rules as written.

EPAs proposed revisions to the glider rules would undermine the investments that DTNA and Detroit Diesel Corporation  and all other U.S. manufacturers  made in advanced technologies and exhaust aftertreatment, while opening the vehicle and engine markets to manufacturers who find simple options to skirt EPA regulations altogether and market high-emitting engines or vehicles.

However, some small trucking businesses filed comments supporting easing the rules on gliders.

For instance, Micha Miller of MJ Miller Inc. cited its reliance on glider kits for profitable business. Being a small company, profit margins are slim. Glider kits give us the ability to do our own maintenance and repairs, which decreases our downtime. We have tried the later model trucks and the results of that ended in a fuel mileage that did not even compare to the glider kit's fuel mileage. We get an average of over a mile to the gallon better fuel mileage on the gliders. The glider kits also give us an advantage of availability of parts, due to our local part stores having the majority of older engine parts in stock. The loss of the glider kit truck would devastate our business and the way we operate.

All public comments on the rule are archived and searchable on Regulation.gov.
ALDI

A ribbon cutting ceremony for an ALDI store in the River West development area is scheduled for January 25.

ALDI is a discount supermarket chain that operates nearly 1,700 stores in the U.S. in 35 states.

For more information about ALDI, visit www.aldi.us.

Coltons Steak House and Grill

Coltons Steak House and Grill will open a location in the River West development area. The eatery is based in Arkansas with 36 restaurants in eight states. The Sand Springs locationwhat will be their 37th  is expected to open in mid-March.

For more information on Coltons, visit www.coltonssteakhouse.com.

Warren Clinic

Warren Clinics new, expanded site in Sand Springs is expected to open in the River West development area in the spring of 2018.

The new clinic will offer expanded services and extended hours. The new, larger facility will feature primary care, which covers family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics, as well as urgent care, radiology and on-site laboratory services.

The services and clinicians at the current Warren Clinic in Sand Springs in the 700 block of E. Charles Page Boulevard will relocate to the new facility once its completed.

Warren Clinic has facilities throughout the Tulsa region and has opened new clinics in Bixby, Broken Arrow and Tulsa Hills within the last two years. The clinic will have a similar design and aesthetic to its other new facilities.

Prattville QuikTrip

QuikTrip demolished its Prattville location to replace it with a new, larger building.

QuikTrip spokesperson Mike Thornbrugh said the 4,200-square-foot building at 2 W. 41st Street will be replaced by a 6,000-square-foot building. The upgraded store is expected to be open by March.

Thornbrugh said the gas pumps of the new store will be located on the side of the building as opposed to the front as in the previous design.

QuikTrip has more than 700 convenience stores in 11 states, according to the companys website. Their other location in Sand Springs is located at 200 S. State Highway 97.

For more information about QuikTrip, visit www.quiktrip.com.

Fire Station 2

Fire Chief Mike Wood previously said the new facility is expected to be complete around August of 2018.

The current facility, located at 4101 S. 113th W. Avenue, was opened in 1968 to serve citizens in the Prattville area. The new facility will be constructed just adjacent to the current one on the south side to allow it to remain functional in the meantime.

Voters approved a public safety allocation by renewing a portion of the existing Vision 2025 tax in 2016. The new facility will require approximately $1.5 million in funding.

Braums

Braums is re-building its Prattville location at 3950 State Highway 97.

For more information, visit www.braums.com.
Members of Tulsas three major Eastern Orthodox Christian churches gathered Sunday to bless the waters of the Arkansas River.

About 50 congregants from three churches  St. Antony Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and Holy Apostles (Russian) Orthodox Church in Bixby  came together to place a cross made of ice into the rivers waters.

The blessing of the waters service celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany, which commemorates the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Jeff Lamp, a member of St. Antonys and professor of New Testament at Oral Roberts University, said placing the cross in the water is an act of purification.

When Jesus came and was baptized in the water, not only did he begin his mission to save humanity, but he also, by being in the physical water, is purifying the elements of all of creation, Lamp said.

By returning (the cross) into the water, the blessed water of the cross is now diffusing throughout all the rest of the water, purifying it.

The three churches met near the amphitheater at River West Festival Park to sing, pray and bless the cross and one another with holy water. The large cross was brought to the rivers edge on a hand truck.

The rivers water level was low, so members carried the cross down to a sand bank to place it in the water.

The water was hard to come by today, but its nice to go down to a live body of water and do a blessing, said the Rev. George Gartelos of Holy Trinity.

Similar celebrations occur worldwide, according to the Rev. George Eber of St. Antony, who has been at the church for 37 years. He said he started the blessing in Tulsa more than 30 years ago.

The baptism is actually what saves us and so water, just like we have to have water now to live, the water brings us eternal life because Christ made it more powerful.
My wife and I have a running joke about the kind of architecture that suburban school systems seem to prefer these days.

Is it a school? well ask ourselves as we drive past, or a prison?

You know the kind: a collection of mostly windowless Lego blocks set at odd angles to each other with a massive parking lot in front. Theyre designed for low-cost construction, easy maintenance, efficient energy bills and a life cycle roughly equal to a bond issues pay-off date.

Schools used to be monuments of civic pride.

In early days of the Great Depression, for example, the small town of Ponca City still found the means to build a beautiful Collegiate Gothic masterpiece called Roosevelt Elementary, named after Theodore, not Franklin, who hadnt been elected yet.

With Palladian symmetry and intricate terra cotta detailing, the edifice stretches nearly a full block down a major thoroughfare with parking tucked away discreetly on the side of the building. And it was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, where it is described as an excellent local example of Progressive Era school design.

Incidentally, Barack Obamas mother attended third grade at Roosevelt while her family briefly lived in Ponca City, long before the future president was born.

But that had no bearing on the Registers decision to include the school, which was honored almost exclusively for its beautiful architecture.

You have to wonder: Will any modern school buildings be cherished by future generations? Or even still be standing?

Three other buildings from Kay County were also added recently to the Historic Register: the 101 Rodeo Arena, the Attucks Community Center and the James J. McGraw House, designed in 1910 by well-known Oklahoma architect Solomon Layton.
At Gloria Huckabys house, like at many others in Tulsa during the war, the arrival of the afternoon newspaper was not met with enthusiasm.

Really, you dreaded it, recalled Huckaby, who was Gloria Fulton at the time.

Because you knew somebody had been killed.

In reporting the latest troop deaths during World War II, the paper usually included a photo with each name.

You just never knew who you were going to see next, said Huckaby, who at various times recognized the faces of former classmates at Holy Family School.

Fortunately, Huckabys own brothers photo would never appear in that part of the paper.

Henry Dick Fulton Jr., a Navy and later Marine pilot who flew off of aircraft carriers in the Pacific, made it through the war safely.

It was the example he had set in serving, Huckaby added, that was on her mind years later when she, too, decided to don a uniform.

During the Korean War, Huckaby  the only female engineer at Tulsas Public Service Company of Oklahoma in an era when female engineers were almost unheard of  was willing to put her career on hold to go serve.

As it turned out, as a Navy reservist, she would never be called to leave the country, or her career.

But then that wasnt really the point.

I just wanted to be a part of it, she said.

The day everything changed

Huckaby, who has lived in Tulsa most of her life, just celebrated a milestone birthday, her 90th, in December. On Sunday, she joined friends and family for a party at McNellies.

For Huckaby, turning 90 has been a chance to reflect on a life that has been rich in interests and accomplishments.

Not least among them, her professional life has included both mechanical engineering and, more recently, work as a residential developer.

In fact, despite being in her 90s now, she is still involved in the latter.

In addition to her full-time work were many side pursuits. Those included the one of which she is most proud.

Huckaby served 12 years in the Navy Reserves, or WAVES (the WWII-era name by which women reservists continued to be known popularly), before retiring with the rank of lieutenant.

Like most from her generation, Huckabys idea of service was shaped by WWII.

At the time 14 and in ninth grade at Holy Family, she remembers the Pearl Harbor attack vividly, she said.

She had walked to morning church with her parents, and after returning, they heard the news.

We were glued to the radio. We didnt even know where Pearl Harbor was, Huckaby said. And I didnt really realize the importance.

Before that, life had been like a Norman Rockwell scene. But with Pearl Harbor everything changed.

But despite their new normal  of rationing and war bond drives  we didnt gripe. Nobody griped.

They were small sacrifices, they knew, compared to the ones being made by the troops.

One of those troops, Huckabys brother, who was five years her senior, enlisted not long after Pearl.

The only brother to Huckaby and her two sisters, he was our hero, she said.

I just loved him so much.

Really just a boy when he left, she said, after he came home, he preferred not to talk about the war.

She only remembers him mentioning one grim task: flying dentists into combat areas for them to help identify remains.

One of the bunch

Huckaby, meanwhile, focused on her education.

With a father and grandfather who were both engineers, and her brother studying toward it, Huckaby followed them into the same field.

At the University of Colorado, I was the only female in mechanical engineering there.

Later, as a new engineer at PSO, she was similarly outnumbered. There were other women, but all in clerical roles.

But as the only woman among the male engineers, Huckaby felt like one of the bunch, she said.

Only one thing bothered her a little.

The guys made $500 a month. I got $100 less. I was told that the men were probably supporting families, that was why the difference.

By now, another war was underway  this time in Korea.

Inspired by her brothers service years earlier, in 1951 Huckaby decided to enlist in the Navy Reserves.

I wanted to get in there in case it heated up in Korea.

My brother told me I was nuts, she added, laughing.

There was no enlistment office in Tulsa, so she and a friend went to Dallas.

Assigned for service under the Navy Bureau of Ships, Huckaby underwent training at various sites around the country and toured an aircraft carrier.

Back in Tulsa, the new Navy reservist found herself in familiar waters.

Of the local group, Huckaby was the only woman.

It didnt bother her, though. I was used to it, she said, laughing.

Navy blue

Huckabys Reserve service offered plenty of opportunity for travel, including yearly training in places such as New York, San Francisco and New Orleans.

I treasured those years, she said.

Still, Huckaby added, it would have been nice to go overseas.

I was disappointed that I was never called to go over there. I was adventurous and wanted to.

Life, though, had plenty of other adventures in store for Huckaby.

Through her career with PSO, she met her husband, Fred Huckaby, an electrical engineer there. The pair went on to adopt and raise two daughters.

After 12 years in the Reserves, Huckaby hung up her Navy dress blues. She still has the uniform, and recently had it dry-cleaned.

It sounds a little morbid, she said, but I think I want to be buried in it.

Huckaby has no plans for that to happen soon, though, she added, and she expects to continue living her life like she has to this point  actively.

It wouldnt be a surprise, in fact, if Huckaby had a couple more residential development projects up her sleeve.

Shes not working on one at the moment.

But I am looking around, she assured.
Anna Doran and Lindsay Lechman met almost eight years ago when their dogs got in a fight while they were hiking on Mount Helena.

A couple of weeks later, they ran into each other on the Downtown Walking Mall while Doran was getting ready to open a Big Dipper Ice Cream location in Helena, and Lechman asked to scoop ice cream on weekends. Three months later, Lechman quit her job with the state to manage Big Dipper. Now, Lechman is officially the new owner.

The Walking Mall has changed a lot in the eight years since Big Dipper opened its doors. When Doran went to the bank to apply for a loan, they encouraged her to look for space on North Montana Avenue.

They said: Dont do it. The Walking Mall is dead, she said.

But Doran already had a soft spot for the Walking Mall, where she would bring her two young kids in a stroller. With Taco Del Sol nearby, Doran hoped the two businesses would bring people to the Walking Mall for a meal and dessert.

Now the Walking Mall is also home to the Hawthorn Bottle Shop and Tasting Room and Ten Mile Creek Brewing. On a Facebook post announcing Doran was selling Big Dipper to Lechman, numerous people thanked Doran for helping to revitalize the Walking Mall.

Its so cool to see other people have that vision, Doran said. Its such a fun family place to be.

Big Dippers popularity in Missoula also gave Doran an advantage as a small business owner. The original shop in Missoula opened in 1995 and often has a line that wraps around the block. It also received national attention after being featured on "Good Morning America" and other media outlets. The shops in Missoula, Helena and Billings all offer the same core flavors and share recipes for specials. Lechman said Helena can be creative with its specials, which has encouraged partnerships with other local businesses like Ten Mile Creek Brewing and Firetower Coffee.

When Doran started thinking about selling the business, she knew she didnt want to put it out on the market for anyone to buy. Because Lechman had been there since day one, Doran said she knew Lechman would go above and beyond to maintain the business. When she decided she was ready to step back, she told Lechman to make an offer. Lechman ended up putting in an offer the day before her baby was born.

Lechman took over on Jan. 1 and said she doesnt expect anything to change. Doran will also be around in case Lechman needs a babysitter or someone to make ice cream.

Both Doran and Lechman said it's important for a business owner to be present, and for their employees to see them doing everything from mopping floors to making ice cream.

We do it all, Doran said. Theyre seeing how hard we work.

Because of that, employees come back each summer, and some have stayed on call for years. Doran said one employee worked at Big Dipper while she was a junior in high school. Now a nurse at St. Peters, the employee will still come back in to make ice cream when needed.

Im so happy its worked out this way, Doran said.
Benjamin Heertje, Kris Pouw, Debra Barraud and Annegien Schilling in Berlin for The Dream Diaries project.  UNHCR/Kris Pouw

GENEVA  Four young online creators have travelled more than 7,000 kilometres across Europe to meet a dozen refugee and asylum-seeking children as part of a new project, in association with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, that lets the youngsters imaginations run free.

In the course of 16 days, Humans of Amsterdam photographer Debra Barraud and her colleague Benjamin Heertje, Dutch graphic designer Annegien Schilling and film-maker Kris Pouw journeyed through five European countries to capture the dreams of children who have fled war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond. The stories make up the Dream Diaries.

Through engaging with the many children we met, they shared their dreams with us. Once we had gathered their stories and dreams, we created an image to symbolize their realization says Debra, whose Humans of Amsterdam photography project has over 400,000 Facebook followers. Through the project, we saw the strength of these children and how with the right support they can achieve anything.

I want to become a superhero so I dont have to be afraid any more."

The series, which launches over 10 days across Instagram, Facebook and the UNHCR website and social pages, visualizes the dreams of children such as Ayham, 8, who lives with his family in Vienna, Austria, after fleeing Syria in October 2015. A portrait captures him as a superhero, with lightning bolts pulsing from his fingers.

I want to become a superhero so I dont have to be afraid any more, Ayham told the Dream Diaries team. I would end the fighting in Syria and then I would go back and kiss everything, really everything, also the bananas and the watermelons.

The Dream Diaries on film (UNHCR / @krispouw / @humansofamsterdam / @fetching_tigerss)

In 2016, more than 50 per cent of refugees were children. Unaccompanied or separated children  mainly from Afghanistan and Syria  made some 75,000 asylum applications in 70 countries during that year. Approximately one-third of people seeking asylum in Germany in 2015 and 2016 were children and young people.

"At a time when we see some people and places closing their hearts and minds to refugees, its an inspiration to see four young people embark on this great journey to tell these stories of hope," says Veronique Robert, UNHCRs deputy regional representative for Western Europe. "The Dream Diaries truly exemplifies how refugees are people just like you and me, with hopes, dreams and desires. The only difference is that they have been forced to flee their homes, loved ones and leave everything behind."

"It was interesting that we created pictures that gave people hope."

The stories of the 12 children featured in UNHCRs Dream Diaries series are told from cities in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, where they have found new homes and a chance to dream again.

The general tone of pictures of people who are refugees is very sad and hopeless and almost depressing. I thought it was interesting that we created pictures that gave people hope, says Annegien, who has nearly 1 million followers on her Fetching_Tigerss Instagram account.

Audiences are being encouraged to stand #WithRefugees by signing UNHCRs global petition, which asks decision makers to grant refugees safety, education and opportunities  turning their dreams into reality. You can follow The Dream Diaries series via Humans of Amsterdam, Fetching_Tigerss and UNHCR social pages.

See more stories from The Dream Diaries
Lets just call them Generation Net. Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester had wrapped up a presentation to Billings high school students and opened the floor for questions when the subject of net neutrality shot up like an urgently raised hand.

The public generally takes note of Internet politics, but for the 25-and-younger crowd thats known only a dot-com world, any suggestion of government action adversely affecting it is a major concern.

I think its everybody, and people want the Internet the way its always been, Tester said. The best example I have is actually Billings West, when I was there meeting with one of their senior civics classes and the first three questions were on net neutrality.

Tester and his Montana Republican counterparts, Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte, are being lobbied hard by constituents worried about the Internet changing for the worse as a result of a Federal Communications Commission decision in December to end Obama-era net neutrality rules.

The rules in use since 2015 were to prevent Internet service providers from blocking websites or charging companies like Facebook, Netflix and Amazon more for delivering data-rich products like video at functional speeds. Net neutrality treats the Internet more like a regulated utility with terms for equal access.

Senate Democrats are pushing to undo the FCC action by way of a Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress, with a simple majority vote, to thwart regulation changes. Democrats announced Jan 9 that they had more than the minimum 30 lawmakers to force a CRA vote. That vote to undo the FCC's end to net neutrality would have to come within 60 days of the FCC's ruling being published in the Federal Register and also being submitted in an official report to Congress.

Tester said he supports overturning the FCC rule when the opportunity comes, probably this spring. With Alabama Democrat Sen. Doug Jones seated, Republicans have only a two-vote advantage in the Senate. Democrats assert that they can peel off two Republican votes and keep net neutrality on the books.

Theres more to the fight than congressional review. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has promised a lawsuit challenging the procedure leading up to the net neutrality repeal. Montana Attorney General Tim Fox wont decide whether to join the lawsuit until there is something to look at, said spokesman Eric Sell. Theres isnt a lawsuit to consider just yet, however, and the Montana AG is already questioning whether the FCC erred in a way that could be challenged successfully.

Daines told The Gazette the Democrats efforts to repeal the FCCs net neutrality ruling is a stunt  one that isnt likely to work. A Senate vote might be close, but a congressional review vote in the House, where Republicans hold a strong majority, is unlikely to favor a net neutrality repeal. President Donald Trump is likely to veto any CRA resolution that reaches his desk.

The Internet was doing fine before net neutrality, Daines said.

In terms of when the Internet became more broadly available, it is about 25 years old, for most of us, Daines said. For 23 of those years, the Internet had thrived. Prices have gone down, speeds have gone up. It is a tremendous testimony to innovation and the power of technology. Net neutrality did not exist for those years. The Internet thrived without it. And then President Obamas FCC and Tom Wheeler, the chairman, put in place utility-style, heavy-handed regulations. Thats what net neutrality is, and I think that is a big mistake.

Gianforte said much the same as Daines in a Wednesday email to The Gazette.

The Internet flourished for 20 years, creating good-paying jobs and leading to innovative companies like the one Susan and I started in Bozeman. But then about two years ago, the Obama administration imposed regulations on the Internet that were a solution looking for a problem that didnt exist, Gianforte said. Following adoption of these Obama Internet regulations, investment in broadband dropped for two years in a row. The FCCs recent decision restores the open, free Internet that existed two years ago and continues consumer protections out of the Federal Trade Commission.

Daines and Gianforte arent the only elected officials from Bozeman to view ditching net neutrality favorably. Public Service Commissioner Roger Koopman issued a rare statement supporting the FCC decision the day of its issue.

Koopman asserted that competition among Internet service providers was doing the work net neutrality attempted to fix. He said much the same when contacted by The Gazette this week.

Its paradoxical that the loudest voices for net neutrality are Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. All enjoyed massive growth under the light touch approach to regulating the Internet. Now that these companies have secured their market share, theyre eager to use the forceful hand of government to insulate themselves from competition, Koopman said in an email. While I respect the opinion of some that questionable trade practices may exist, adopting a uniform set of federal rules based on a law written in the monopolistic, pre-Internet days of dial telephones and Ma Bell is not the answer. Competition and freedom is.

There were pre-Obama rules on the books to assure Internet fairness. The FCC in 2005 issued a policy statement guaranteeing customers the right to access whatever lawful content they wanted. And to be able to access the Internet with whatever devices they wanted provided the devices didnt harm the network. This was the beginning of the smartphone and tablet era, as well as the explosion in applications for smart devices.

There is a need for the laws governing Internet neutrality, said Kevin Hamm of Treasure State Internet, though its hard to see large service providers throttling down the speeds of other companies products without in turn being throttled down by others in retaliation. Treasure State Internet is a small Internet service provider in Helena with some of the fastest speeds in the state. The backbone that provides Internet service across the country requires the multiple broadband companies share resources. In the sharing, theres incentive to play nice, Hamm said.

That doesnt mean throttling hasnt happened, Hamm said. Comcast and Netflix competed offline a decade ago in the DVD rental world. The cable company partnered with Blockbuster to create a competitor to the DVD movie mail service that launched Netflix. Netflix won the DVD war and transitioned into a video-streaming service that Comcast forced to pay a fee for set-top box distribution. Netflix cried foul, citing net neutrality rules.

Netflix won the battle, and Comcast earned the wrath of customers who wanted Netflix.

There will be laws governing the Internet companies in net neutralitys absence, Hamm said. Namely, corporate law favoring shareholders, not customers.

The legal requirement for corporations is to make money for their shareholders, Hamm said. They are legally obligated to find a way to make the most money.

Other Montana companies have come out in support of ending net neutrality. Missoula-based Blackfoot Telecommunications Group joined small telecoms in December to urge Congress not to repeal the FCC decision to end net neutrality. The telecoms argued the net neutrality rules were discouraging investment in broadband infrastructure.

Hamm said Internet users will have to fight to keep net neutrality in the meantime.
December 15 2017

Photography by Tom Manley

Ferguson Marine have filed a competing vision for Glasgow's Govan Graving Docks , championing re-use of the docks as a ship repair and maintenance facility as well as cultural attractions, leisure space and business accommodation.Landowner New City Vision who have already submitted their own rival application for planning in principle, currently under consideration, to build 700 flood proof homes on the site.In a media briefing note Glasgow City Council wrote: There are two development proposals now with Glasgow City Councils planners for the Graving Docks site  one from New City Vision and one from Ferguson Marine.New City Vision are the current owners of the site. They have owned the site for many years however this is the first application they have submitted for re-development proposals.The proposal of application notice begins a three-month countdown until Ferguson Marine can bring forward their own application for planning in principle.
January 8 2018

Glasgows build to rent market has sprung into life with the submission of a 105m plan to build 433 homes on the site of the former Strathclyde Police headquarters by Moda  which is acting as both developer and landlord.Following hot on the heels of a rival 200m scheme to the east Holland Park will also incorporate 31,000sq/ft of outdoor amenity space with accommodation arranged over four blocks set around a landscaped courtyard which will be open to the public during the day.Murray Henderson, director at HAUS Collective, said: The Holland Park proposals comprise a collection of forms that respond to the strong urban grid-iron plan synonymous with Glasgow. The scale of the site and its influential location within the city present a unique opportunity to deliver a high quality residential and mixed-use development that can contribute meaningfully to the locale by enhancing the townscape and local environment."As Glaswegians, we recognise the importance of an increased resident population within an evolving city centre contributing to the wider city economy. Holland Park presents a distinctive, contemporary lifestyle choice through the innovative Build-to-Rent community being created.This Pitt Street 'neighbourhood is envisaged to include co-working spaces for business startups, cafes, bars and restaurants, roof terraces and residents lounge with Woolgar Hunter serving as engineers.
UW in the News

State, national and international media frequently feature the University of Wyoming and members of its community in stories. Here is a summary of some of the recent articles:

UW economist Rob Godby was interviewed by The Casper Star-Tribune (CS-T) about Wyomings long-term economic forecast.

Wyoming Public Media interviewed Godby about factors that have influenced Wyomings energy industries.

Wyoming Business Report profiled UW instructor Mike Borowczak and some students from Computer Science 2030. Borowczak, a UW computer science professor of practice and director of the Cybersecurity Education and Research (CEDAR) center, said he tries to create assignments that students might see in the workforce.

UW Professor Gregg Cawley, interviewed in an Associated Press article, said that the case against Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities, could soon be tossed out, which would be seen by many as a victory for states rights. The New Haven Register and Oregons Bend Bulletin published the article.

High Country News also interviewed Cawley for an article about Karen Budd-Falen, a Wyoming attorney who is a candidate to lead the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

The Valley Daily Post, which bills itself as northern New Mexicos news hub, republished a story about a team of UW researchers that developed a wildfire behavior model that may help fire managers in near real time.

UW and Wyoming Department of Transportation personnel recently demonstrated new connected vehicle technology to show how vehicles and roadside units can communicate road information and alerts to travelers in near real time, reported Construction Equipment Guide.

UW students are working this semester on a project to ensure campus safety, according to The Laramie Boomerang.

Wyo4News published UWs release on the livestock judging teams eighth-place finish at the North American International Livestock Exposition. It was the teams best finish in at least 30 years.

Members of Wyoming Motorsports, a recognized student organization at UW, are building an electric formula race car to enter it in the Society of Automotive Engineers Formula Hybrid Competition later this spring in New Hampshire, K2 Radio reported.

Sheridan Media and Wyoming Business Report published UWs release on Dwight Lee Bates, a 1966 UW engineering graduate who was chosen as a Science Channel Science Superhero in December.

UW research that proves capsaicin can help curb weight gain was cited in an International Business Times article, titled Is hot sauce the answer to quick weight loss?

The Torrington Telegram published UWs release announcing that Goshen County 4-H educator Megan Brittingham recently received the Newer Employee Award from UW Extension.

Joel Dvorak, Wyoming Center for Educational Leadership director at UW, said the state high school dropout rate would be noticeably higher without alternative schools, according to The Sheridan Press.

Wyoming Public Media noted that UW researchers Michael Pierce and Hannah Jang-Condell received grants from Indiana University and NASA worth almost $1 million to study exoplanets.

UWs livestock judging team had its best season in more than 30 years last semester, according to The Fence Post, an agricultural-related publication.

The Fence Post also featured UW student Ty Shockley, of Wheatland. Shockley, who has a ranching background, served as an intern for Vice President Mike Pence last summer.

A program that helps veterans with tuition and fees would be reduced under a proposal that will be introduced in the coming legislative session. The reduction would affect veterans attending UW, according to The CS-T.
In a recent IR article where Senator Tester discussed wildfire costs, he reportedly said: "This is exactly why we've got to do something about Climate Change." Too bad he and Montana's other politicians don't take Climate Change seriously and actually DO something about it. Ironically, Tester has been made fully aware that it is technically feasible, right now, today, to safely generate vast amounts of electricity without carbon emissions; so have Bullock, Daines and Gianforte.

Canadians, in Ontario, plan to do just that by reducing carbon emissions 37 percent within the next 20 years. How? With a fleet of super-safe Small Modular Reactors (SMR) to replace aging coal-fired power plants. We could do the same, using GE-Hitachi's PRISM technology to replace the coal-fired boilers at Colstrip 1&2.

PRISM is a SMR that can be powered by so-called "spent" fuel from nuclear power plants around the country, destroying 95 percent of it in the process. The remaining 5 percent will be made far easier and less costly to dispose of than the original spent fuel. So, PRISM is truly a waste-to-clean-energy solution just waiting to be implemented.

Imagine what we could do with a nearly inexhaustible supply of emissions-free electricity. Within 50 years we could be heating and air conditioning all our homes and businesses, powering all our cars, running our factories and doing a host of other things that today involve the burning of fossil fuels. No more poor air quality days in Helena during inversions, no more smog in big cities, fewer and smaller wildfires, fewer and less costly storms and droughts; the list is endless...

So, a much cleaner and better future is possible for our children and grandchildren if our generation will take Climate Change seriously and actually do something to slow or perhaps even halt its progress. Real "leadership" from Montana's congressional delegation could begin to make this happen. Now, let's see if that leadership exists.

Bob Balhiser

Helena
During most of World War II, Denmark was first a protectorate, then an occupied territory under Germany. The decision to invade Denmark was taken in Berlin on 17 December 1939. On 9 April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark in Operation Weserubung and established a de facto protectorate over the country. On 29 August 1943 Germany placed Denmark under direct military occupation, which lasted until the Allied victory on 5 May 1945.Contrary to the situation in other countries under German occupation, most Danish institutions continued to function relatively normally until 1945. Both the Danish government and king remained in the country in an uneasy relationship between a democratic and a totalitarian system until the Danish government stepped down in a protest against the German demands to institute the death penalty for sabotage.Over 3,000 Danes died as a direct result of the occupation. An effective resistance movement developed by the end of the war, and most Danish Jews were rescued in 1943 when German authorities ordered their internment as part of the Holocaust.The occupation of Denmark ended on 5 May 1945.These rare color pictures from The National Museum that captured street scenes of Copenhagen from the days around the liberation.
Screengrab of a UK parliamentary session.

A total of 24,473 attempts were made since last June's general election from devices connected to the parliamentary network, according to data obtained by a PA Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

Prime Minister Theresa May is already reeling from a wave of sexual misconduct allegations in Westminster.

She was forced to dump minister and long-time friend Damian Green last month after he apparently misled police over claims pornography was found on computers in his Westminster office in 2008.

The parliamentary internet network is used by MPs, Lords in the upper house and their staff.

Authorities claim most attempts are not deliberate and point to a decrease in recent years.

Parliament blocked 113,208 attempts in 2016, down from 213,020 the previous year.

"All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament's computer network," a parliamentary spokesman told PA.

"The vast majority of 'attempts' to access them are not deliberate.

"This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliament's guest Wi-Fi."
Big shot Hanoi buyers are looking to spread the wealth to the provinces

A range of real estate projects have been introduced to Hanois market from Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, Danang and Nha Trang. The projects include The Charm, Sunrise City, Ocean Villas, Hyatt Regency, Olalani, Fusion Alya, Azura and Blooming Park.

Talking with VIR at a recent road show to introduce Sunrise City, located in Ho Chi Minh, in Hanoi, Novaland Joint Stock Company marketing deputy director Huynh Du An said many units were sold to Hanoians and those from northern provinces.

Meanwhile, a range of other central and southern projects have been rushing into Hanoi. Setia Becamex launched Binh Duong provinces Ecolakes My Phuoc in the capital late last week, a week before TD Group introduced the Costa Nha Trang to Hanoians. This week Singapores Guoco Lands Canary, located at the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park in Binh Duong province, will be unveiled to northern customers.

Bringing Ecolakes My Phuoc to Hanois market is one of our key marketing strategies. Hanoians are paying more attention to higher standards of living and are interested in ecological housing, said Khoo Teck Chong, general director of Setia Becamex.

VIR was told that for many projects in the central and southern parts, roughly 70 per cent of customers were from Hanoi and other northern provinces.

Matthew Koziora, sales director of VinaCapital - developer of the Azura in Danang, said the first 60 units, out of 225, were launched in Hanoi recently.

Out of the 40 units sold, 90 per cent of the buyers had come from Hanoi.

Hanoi has, according to Koziora, proven itself to be a key market for most new projects in Vietnam, given the demographics of these immediate catchments.

While condominium offerings will always be available in Hanoi due to previous pent-up demands, we can see that not all projects will enjoy a healthy sell-through, as was seen 12 months ago.

We do see, however, given the price differentials between house and land packages in Hanoi versus Ho Chi Minh City, that this market will be better received in the current marketplace and over the next six months as opposed to condominium project offerings at this time, Koziora said

Ngo Huu Truong, managing director of a real estate agency in Ho Chi Minh City, said many customers from Hanoi and Haiphong had come to Ho Chi Minh City to find out information about new projects there.

Demand is real and many projects investors have realised this trend and they are coming to Hanoi to promote their projects, Truong said.

He also said the jury was still out on how effective the promotions were.

I think that these developers [who bring their projects to Hanoi] have at least seen their target to raise their image and brand names in northern customers, Truong said.
GENCO 3's IPO will be held next month

Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue signed Decision No.2100/QD-TTg on December 27, 2017 approving the equitisation plan of GENCO 3. The company will offer 2,080,900,000 shares based on its initial charter capital of VND20,809 billion ($915 million). The offer will include:

1,061,300 thousand shares (51 per cent of the charter capital) owned by EVN Corporation;

3,424,100 shares (0.1645 per cent) will be sold to employees;

267,051,900 shares (12.8355 per cent) will be auctioned publicly at the starting price of VND24,600 ($1.08);

749,124,000 shares (36 per cent) will be sold to strategic investors after the public auction.

The criteria for selecting a strategic investor focus on finding a partner capable of providing solutions to develop the company after equitisation by transferring technology, training human resources, improving financial competitiveness and corporate governance, as well as supplying materials.

The number of strategic partners is set at a maximum of three. They should commit to develop the business sector and brand name of the company for at least three years and to keep the shares for five years.

The share price for strategic investors is not lower than the average of the successful auctions on the day of the IPO, which will be held on February 9, 2018.

IPO of heavyweight power producers electrifies market Power Generation Corporation 3 (EVNGenco 3) of Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) will put VND6.6 trillion ($290.6 million) worth of shares on sale at its initial public offering (IPO) and offer stakes for strategic investors, providing another investment opportunity for investors in the electricity sector, along with PV Powers offers.
More than 1,500 HIU graduates sang the national anthem at the assembly hall on Saturday

President of HIU, Assoc. Prof. Thai Ba Can and deput CEO of NHG Dr. Dinh Quang Nuong attended the ceremony.

I would like to thank our faculty and staff for their dedication to students up to date. Congratulations to all HIU graduates of a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and honorary students who received their awards today, Assoc. Prof. Can said to the valedictorians.

HIU, founded in 1997, is fast becoming a modern and dynamic university in Ho Chi Minh City.

HIU aims at providing international-standard education with student-centric educational practices, allowing 85 per cent of the graduating students to receive proper job offers from leading national companies, and 100 per cent of the students from the Computer Science and Graphics Design faculties to take on jobs from the third vyear. Some graduates plan to continue their studies at HIU.
illustration photo

On the HCM Stock Exchange, the benchmark VN-Index saw the first adjustment session in the New Year on Friday but still posted a weekly gain of 2.9 per cent, ending 2018s first trading week at 1,012.65 points, the highest level since the end of November 2007.

Meanwhile, the decline on Friday also cut growth of the HNX-Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange to 1.8 per cent, closing the week at 118.92 points.

The excitement of the market after conquering the 1,000 points level has temporarily subsided. However, this was reasonable as the VN-Index has rallied for nine consecutive sessions, a weekend report by Viet Dragon Securities Co said.

The benchmark VN-Index increased 7.8 per cent in the past two weeks and climbed 48 per cent in 2017.

I dont think the VN-Index is adjusting down, said Hoang Thach Lan, head of the individual investor division at Viet Dragon Securities Co.

Lan said since December, the VN-Index has been driven up by large caps, especially the 20 companies with market values of over US$1 billion (accounting for over 75 per cent of HCM Stock Exchanges total market value).

Three-forths of these companies rallied in the past one month with an average of about 13 per cent, with some seeing gains of more than 20 per cent such as PV Gas (GAS), Petrolimex (PLX), Masan Group (MSN) and Hoa Phat Group (HPG).

Only a few shares lost including brewers Sabeco (SAB) and Habeco (BHN), Mobile World Investment Group (MWG) and FLC Faros Construction (ROS).

The alternative growth of these heavyweight stocks will likely fuel the market in the short term, Lan said.

Liquidity was positive last week with an average of 285.5 million shares worth a combined VND7.1 trillion ($311.4 million) being traded in the two markets per session.

Foreign traders were also active on HCM Citys exchange, responsible for a total net buy value of nearly VND1.2 trillion. However, they were net sellers in Ha Nois market for VND221.5 billion.

Real estate stocks

Bank stocks were sold heavily in the weekend session after a long rally and analysts have reckoned some investors are channeling money into realty shares in expectations of high earnings in the last quarter of 2017.

According to Nguyen The Minh, deputy director of Saigon Securities Incs Retail Research, real estate companies are used to reporting high profits in the last quarter of the year. Now it is the start of the earnings reporting season and investors pay high attention to the companies with positive earnings prospects.

I expect the real estate stocks will pick up in the first months of 2018, especially the companies with unanticipated profits recorded from transfer of projects, Minh was quoted as saying on the tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn.

In addition, the valuation of realty stocks are now lower than the general markets value, he said.

However, Nguyen Hong Khanh, head of analysis at Sacombank Securities Co, has warned investors of the right selection as there may be a number of companies reporting losses in the last quarter.

Seeking low-priced stocks is necessary but the most important thing is to choose the right growing stocks, Khanh said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left), leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), shakes hands with Martin Schulz, leader of Germany's social democratic SPD party, as they meet in Berlin. (Bernd von Jutrczenka/DPA/AFP)

The week of meetings between Merkel's conservative alliance and the Social Democrats (SPD) will examine whether the two sides have enough common ground to begin formal coalition negotiations towards a new government by March or April.

Merkel voiced optimism about going forward with the SPD as she went into the talks at the centre-left party's headquarters, saying "I think that it can be done".

"We will work very swiftly and very intensively," the veteran leader added.

Speaking on behalf of Merkel's CDU, her Bavarian allies CSU as well as the SPD after the first day of talks, the centre-left SPD's Lars Klingbeil said: "The three party leaders made it clear in their opening statements that given the election results, we can't just go on as before."

"The global political situation, the situation in Europe, the composition of the German Bundestag, all that show that we find ourselves in a new era. And this new era needs new politics," he said, adding that "a new political style" was also required.

September's watershed elections left Merkel without a majority, while her junior coalition partner, the SPD, suffered its worst post-war score.

Meanwhile the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) captured more than 90 parliamentary seats - the best showing for a far-right party since the end of World War II.

The AfD capitalised on growing misgivings over more than a million asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany since 2015.

Questions surrounding the new arrivals could yet prove to be sticking points as Merkel seeks a new deal with the SPD.

Anxious to stem the haemorrhage to the far right, the conservative wing of her party as well as her Bavarian CSU ally are championing a tougher stance on immigration - including demands that are unpalatable to the SPD.

With an eye on a regional election in Bavaria later this year, where current polls show that the CSU could lose its absolute majority, the party wants financial handouts to asylum seekers reduced.

Following several violent crimes involving refugees of uncertain age who claimed to be minors, the CSU party also wants medical tests to determine if adult migrants are posing as under-18s.

Nevertheless, CSU chief Horst Seehofer voiced his determination to find a deal with the Social Democrats.

"We must find an agreement," he said Sunday as he entered into the exploratory talks.

'NO RED LINES'

Schulz meanwhile signalled his party's determination to extract key concessions on social welfare reforms.

"We're not drawing any red lines, but we want as many red policies in Germany implemented as possible," he said, in a reference to the SPD party's colour.

The Social Democrats had initially vowed to go into opposition, but the collapse of coalition talks between Merkel's alliance and the smaller pro-business FDP and the left-leaning Greens parties pushed the SPD to reconsider.

Any deal would still have to be put to a vote of the SPD rank-and-file, and the leadership has been at pains to stress that talking with Merkel's conservatives did not automatically mean a new grand coalition.

The talks are "open-ended," said one of the SPD's negotiators Michael Groschek, reiterating the party's stance that the discussions could also lead to tolerating a Merkel-minority government.

As the two sides square off at the negotiating table, the parties have agreed to decline media interviews, with publicity limited to joint statements.

The decision is aimed at preventing a rerun of Merkel's previous failed attempt at forging a coalition late last year, when interviews given by negotiators soured the atmosphere.

Latest opinion polls suggest however that a potential new grand coalition enjoys little favour with Germans.

A survey published by Focus magazine found that 34 per cent of Germans would prefer fresh elections, while only 30 per cent favour a return of the conservative-SPD alliance.

Another poll published by public broadcaster ARD found that only 45 per cent of Germans view a new grand coalition positively, while 52 per cent consider it a bad option.
Airplanes wait at the gates outside terminal five at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the Queens borough of New York City, as a winter storm dumps snow and creates blizzard-like conditions in many areas. (Rebecca Butala How/Getty Images/AFP)

Gushing water compounded meltdown at John F Kennedy International Airport, where furious passengers have camped out for days as a result of equipment damaged by the storm and a backlog of flights.

Water poured from the ceiling and the arrivals area was submerged by standing water, through which a few intrepid passengers picked their way gingerly, according to footage broadcast by CNN.

International flights into Terminal 4 were suspended and the water main break occurred just before 2.00pm (3.00am Singapore time Monday), said a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that runs the airport.

The west end of Terminal four lay under about eight centimetres of water, where maintenance crews were mopping up, with police and fire crews on site, the spokesman told AFP.

The cause of the break is being investigated, he added.

JFK confirmed the water main break at Terminal 4 and warned passengers via Twitter of flight delays, advising them to check with their airline before travelling to the airport.

Terminal 4 is used by more than 30 airlines, including Air India, China Airlines, Delta, Egyptair, El Al, Emirates, Etihad, KLM Royal Dutch, Singapore Airlines, Thomas Cook and Virgin Atlantic.

On Saturday the airport was forced to close Terminal 1, which serves the likes of Air France, Japan Airlines and Lufthansa, to international arrivals in an attempt to get on top of the backlog.

But tempers have flared among furious travellers, forced to sleep on the floor of terminals, with others stranded on planes for hours waiting to access a gate and massive delays in baggage claim.

"I am so angry, words cannot even express how I feel right now," one stranded female traveller told NBC television before the water leak.

"It's getting like a madhouse," traveller Steven Litvin told NBC, leaving with his wife eight hours after their plane landed - with only half their luggage.

NO SLEEP

"We're tired," he said. "We're frustrated. We didn't get any sleep and we still don't know where our bags are. Nobody knows anything."

Ninety-four flights were cancelled at JFK on Saturday and 17 diverted, as the extreme cold and storm recovery "created a cascading series of issues for the airlines and terminal operators," said the Port Authority.

"Frigid temperatures continue to cause equipment failures and slower than normal operations. Customers may experience residual delays, particularly for international flights," it said.

JFK was among parts of New York that saw record lows for Jan 7, including -15.5C.

The big freeze follows a storm on Thursday dubbed a "bomb cyclone," which has been blamed for at least 22 reported deaths in the United States.

Boston, which saw some of the heaviest snow from the storm, froze with a Sunday morning low of -19C - matching the previous Jan 7 record in 1896.

Massachusetts marked three record lows on Sunday, with Providence and Worcester frozen at minus two and minus seven respectively, breaking records last set in 1912 and 1942, the National Weather Service said.

The bitter cold is forecast to remain on the East Coast Sunday with highs below freezing as far south as parts of North Carolina.

Forecasters predicted ice accumulations from a band of freezing rain from Missouri through Ohio and Tennessee into the Mid-Atlantic, warning of hazardous road conditions before temperatures rise on Monday.

Extreme cold advisories were also lifted in parts of eastern Canada, albeit with midday temperatures still at minus four degrees in Quebec and heavy snowfall due in South Ontario, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Police officers cordon off and investigate an area outside Varby Gard metro station south of Stockholm where two people were injured in an explosion. (Henrik MONTGOMERY/TT News Agency/AFP)

STOCKHOLM: One person died and another was slightly hurt on Sunday (Jan 7) in a blast outside a metro station in a Stockholm suburb, which police said did not appear to be a terrorist attack.

A man in his 60s died in hospital after "he picked up an object off the ground which promptly exploded," police spokesman Sven-Erik Olsson told AFP.

A woman aged 45 was also hurt, suffering facial injuries, police said.

The blast occurred mid-morning at the Varby gard station in Huddinge, a southern suburb of the Swedish capital.

Police cordoned off the station and the square where the blast happened as the bomb squad moved in to investigate.

The Expressen and Aftonbladet newspapers said the device was a hand grenade.

"It is too early to say. Technicians are still working on it. Nothing indicates that the (injured) couple were targeted," said Olsson, adding there was nothing to suggest an act of terrorism.

Local resident Milorad Jencic told AFP he was shocked as witnesses and onlookers gathered around the police cordon.

"We had incidents in the 1990s and early 2000s. There were very violent gangs" at the time, he said, adding he was "surprised" by this blast because he thought those groups had since disappeared.

According to a Swedish police report published last year, Sweden is the European country where criminal gangs use the most grenades, often from stocks from the former Yugoslavia.

In August 2016, an eight-year-old boy was killed by a grenade thrown into a flat in a working-class area of Gothenburg.
Vu Duc Thuan at the hearing (Source:Vnexpress)

This was the testimony of Vu Duc Thuan, former general director of PetroVietnam Construction Corporation (PVC), at the court hearing this afternoon.

Thuan is tried on charges of intentionally violating state regulations on selecting the contractor for the EPC contract for Thai Binh 2 thermal power plant, causing serious consequences.

According to the charges, in October 2007, the Ministry of Industry and Trade assigned PetroVietnam to develop Thai Binh 2 thermal power project, a task for which PetroVietnam assigned PV Power as the investor to develop the project.

In 2010, PetroVietnam decided to change the technology of the boilers of the plant. In February 2011, Vu Huy Quang, general director of PV Power, and Vu Duc Thuan, former general director of PVC, signed EPC contract No.33. The contract was not built according to the available forms.

On May 13, 2011, PetroVietnam, PV Power, and PVC signed another contract to transfer the role of investor from PV Power to PetroVietnam. Accordingly, on October 11, 2011, PetroVietnam officially signed the contract with PVC to become the contractor of Thai Binh 2 thermal power project.

Thuan also confessed that during the implementation of the project, PVC faced financial difficulties, thus, it needed money to pay bank debts and mobilise capital for other purposes. At the time, despite the fact that the signed EPC contract was not compliant with regulations, Dinh La Thang, in the role of chairman of PetroVietnams Board of Directors, asked PetroVietnam to pay PVC more than $6.6 million and VND1.3 trillion ($59 million) in advance to implement the contract.

Thuan said that almost all of this advance payment was used to pay bank interests or was invested into PVCs member companies and other projects.

This morning, the Hanoi Peoples Court opened the first instance hearing of Dinh La Thang, Trinh Xuan Thanh, and 20 other related defendants charged with intentionally violating state regulations on economic management and causing serious consequences and asset embezzlement.
Vietnamese shares rose on Monday morning as banks and energy firms were boosted by expectations for good earnings reports.

The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange edged up 0.33 per cent to close at 1,016.04 points after having scored a total growth of 2.9 per cent last week.

The minor HNX Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange gained 0.90 per cent to end at 119.98 points. It increased by 1.8 per cent last week.

More than 183.4 million shares were traded on the two local exchanges, worth VND4.23 trillion (US$188.3 million).

The market trading condition was quite balanced, with 205 advancing stocks against 197 decliners.

Bank and energy stocks continued to drive the market upwards on Monday morning, boosted by expectations for good 2017[AC1] earnings results.

The banking sector index rose 2 per cent, while that of the energy sector added 0.8 per cent, data on vietstock.vn shows.

Gainers among the 11 listed banks included Eximbank (EIB), Bank for Investment and Development of Viet Nam (BID), MBBank (MBB), Sacombank (STB) and Asia Commercial Bank (ACB).

Meanwhile, PetroVietnam Gas (GAS), PetroVietnam Technical Services (PVS) and PetroVietnam Coating (PVB) were the ones that pushed the energy industry up.

The afternoon trade session starts at 1pm.
Hometown: Decatur

Family: I have been married 34 years to Jack. Jack is from Decatur. We have two children, Jillian Lee and Wyatt Hayden.

Work experience: I have 25 years of experience in adult education. I was specifically engaged with professional development, BRIDGE programs, career pathways and short-term vocational programs. I have spent most of my career developing programs that help individuals obtain the skills needed to become employed.

Education: I graduated from Stephen Decatur High School. I have an associates degree from Lincoln College; bachelors degree in speech communications from Eastern Illinois University; masters degree in human services from the University of Illinois.

My Id rather be  bumper sticker would read: Id rather be spending time with family and friends. I enjoy a lot of activities, but my favorite way to spend time is with my family and friends.

Hobbies/interests: Swimming, dancing and country music.

My first job: De-tasseling corn. I was 14 and was required to get a work permit. My parents told me if I started the job there would be NO quitting. No matter how hot it got, or how long of a day, or even if my friends quit. Once, I made a commitment I was required to follow it through. That lesson has stayed with me.

Why I do what I do: I have always been a cheerleader at heart. I am always pulling for the ones that need the most time and attention. I believe that if given a chance, most people want to excel and do a good job. Now, on the other hand, I am realistic. People have to WANT to go to work and they must WANT to improve. I have been fortunate to see many students/customers learn skill sets and complete programs that lead to better opportunities and a better quality of life.

Personal approaches to challenges: My personal approach is a perseverance to live each day to the best of my ability. I learned early in life that things only get better if you work hard to make them better. I understand barriers and conflicts, and try to develop pathways for people to overcome them. I've had a lot of good examples in my personal and professional life. My parents instilled a strong work ethic in my sister and I, and never let us settle for less. My professional life was always full of strong women who accepted challenges straight on. There is always a solution, and successful people work until they find the right one.

Community involvement: I have served on several boards. I served on the local Workforce board for many years, as well as the Catholic Charities board. I was active with the Illinois Association of Adult Educators, and the Illinois Advisory Board for Adult Education. My husband is an auto auctioneer and we donate our time to the community by raising money (auction style) for local charitable organizations. We work together to raise money for our community.

What is Workforce Investment Solutions? It is a federally-funded program through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). The state of Illinois, through the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, administers and allocates the funding. Macon County is the grant recipient and the chairman of the county board, Jay Dunn, is designated as the chief elected official. All funds are administered through Macon County. Workforce is comprised of dedicated professionals committed to meeting the needs of a growing workforce in Macon and DeWitt counties. It is our mission to provide businesses with qualified employees by enhancing their skills and abilities through training and education.

What are the primary challenges facing our workforce development? The primary challenges include; job seekers who lack skill-sets for available jobs and lack of knowledge of where/how to access services. Macon and DeWitt Counties are rich with resources. The main concern is the lack of awareness of what services and/or resources are available in our community.

Workforce has developed a Business Services Team, comprised of the Illinois Department of Employment Security, Illinois Division of Rehabilitation Services, Economic Development Corporation for Decatur and Macon County, the Greater Decatur Chamber of Commerce, Richland Community College and the city of Decatur. This team understands the services/resources available and is committed to addressing the needs and concerns of our local employers. We understand there is a community need for workers in health care, manufacturing and transportation and logistics. We also see a need to increase the awareness of apprenticeships and careers in the building/construction trades. The goal is to grow these occupational areas so that we can have a pool of applicants for the future needs of local employers.

What steps are being taken to address these challenges? Workforce, and the partners at the Illinois workNet Center, provide an array of services for job seekers and businesses.

Staff at the center can assist job seekers with resume development, interviewing skills, on-line applications and job search. Workforce may be able to assist the job seeker with skill upgrades such as; tuition, fees, books, transportation, child care, etc.

Workforce can assist businesses with recruitment, candidate screening and skill assessments. Workforce also has resources to offer on-the-job training incentives to employers for a hire first/train later strategy. This incentive can reimburse an employer 50 percent of the wages of a new hire for up to 6 months.

What is the Richland/Workforce Consortium? It is a partnership between Workforce Investment Solutions and Richland Community College. The Consortium is funded by an Adult Education and Family Literacy grant through the Illinois Community College Board. The Consortium will hold adult education classes downtown at the Decatur Public Library. Classes include  free High School Equivalency (HSE), GED preparation, English as a Second Language (ESL) and BRIDGE programs to provide students with basic skills before transitioning to college and/or employment.

What is the role of Workforce Investment Solutions in the Consortium? Workforce will provide BRIDGE programs in three occupational areas  health care, manufacturing and hospitality. Students will enroll in a two-week session of essential/soft skills course before moving into the occupational-specific BRIDGE program.

BRIDGE programs are designed to offer students the opportunity to increase their basic math and reading literacy while learning skills in occupational-specific sectors. Programs will begin in 2018. Workforce will also be involved with the recruitment, assessment and selection of candidates for the program. In addition, Workforce will provide students with case management, resume development, interview techniques, job search and job placement.

What is the role of Richland Community College in the consortium? Richland Community College Adult Education Department will provide GED, English as a Second Language and Certified Nursing Assistant classes. They will assist students to transition into post-secondary education by helping them through the process of registration, academic advising and financial aid. Richland will also allow us to better align a partnership with Project Read, who is already located in the Decatur Public Library. Adult education has always connected with Project Read, but it will be easier for our customers/students by being located in the same building. Its a win-win.

What is the role of city of Decatur/Decatur Public Library in the consortium? The library provides an excellent location to base the consortium and its classes. It is downtown and very easy to access.

How can job seekers get involved? We would like to invite anyone who is looking for a job or employment services to come to the Illinois workNet center and take advantage of the resources. Whether its to develop a resume, gain interview skills, look for employment or talk to a career planner, we want them to know we are here to help. They can call (217) 875-8750, ext. 231. Or just come in, we are located at 757 W. Pershing Road in Decatur.

How can employers get involved? Employers looking for assistance with hiring and/or training can contact me at (217) 875-8720. They can also contact anyone with the Business Services Team. The team wants to help in any way we can.

We'd be remiss if we didn't ask about your name. My parents were watching a movie and there was a little girl with blonde hair named Rocki. My dad told my mom that is what they are going to name their daughter. My real name is Rockanne, but Rocki has stuck with me  even before I was born.
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BLUE MOUND  A Decatur driver was arrested on preliminary charges of driving under the influence of alcohol Saturday night after a crash on Illinois 48 at Damery Road, just north of Blue Mound.

Jacob Hunt, 26, of rural Decatur, was jailed on preliminary charges of aggravated DUI and DUI, which are subject to review by the states attorney's office. The driver of the other vehicle involved, a 60-year-old Decatur man, was suffered a broken leg and other injuries, and was taken to Decatur Memorial Hospital for treatment.

Lt. Jamie Belcher with the Macon County Sheriffs Office said witness statements indicated that the crash was closer to a side-swipe, not a head-on collision.

Belcher said Hunts vehicle had been southbound at 10:40 p.m. when it crossed the center line and hit the other drivers northbound car. Both vehicles came to rest in a ditch.
DECATUR -- Like frontline troops in a vast battlefield, road crews in Central Illinois awaited Mother Natures latest weather front Sunday evening.

The crucial factor was temperature: if the mercury dipped to freezing and below, expected rain would turn to freezing rain and the crews would have to attack it with a new onslaught of salt.

But weather models earlier in the evening werent sure how sharp or prolonged any freeze would be, making planning difficult. Its more of a wait-and-see thing, said Macon County Engineer Bruce Bird late Sunday afternoon. But were definitely keeping an eye on it.

The National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory in effect until 6 a.m. today which said a worse case scenario would be an overnight mix of rain and freezing rain.

Its going to be critical as far as how just how cold it gets, said National Weather Service Meteorologist Dan Smith. Temperatures about 5,000 feet above ground level are well above freezing so the critical part here is the ground surface temperature.

Any road ice accumulations were not expected to exceed 0.1 of an inch, but that would be enough to making driving in some areas hazardous and turn bridges into slick spots.

Daniel D. Mendenall, municipal services manager for the city of Decatur, said he had eight salt truck drivers ready to deploy but didnt think the city would be hit too bad. I dont think were going to have anything in the way of an ice storm or anything like that, he added.

The Illinois Department of Transportation urged drivers to avoid any risk of running into problems and only drive Sunday night if it was a necessity. We are working hard to make our roads safe and passable, but conditions are expected to be challenging, said Illinois Transportation Secretary, Randy Blankenhorn.

Earlier Sunday, however, with the temperatures lifting for the first time in days, some people were brave enough to venture out. Chris Moss took Scully, a German Shepherd-unknown mix dog, out for a snowy run in Decaturs Fairview Park.

The bundle of energy pooch didnt mind the wet cold and Moss, 20, wasnt that bothered, either. Only if its dangerously cold, then we dont go out, said Moss. But Ive been out here in rainstorms and all kinds of stuff.

Mosss mother, Aimee Moss, sat watching while she read a book in her parked and cozy car. She likes to plan ahead when nasty stuff, like Sundays expected ice coating, is on the way. I already went to the store and got prepared and Im just going to hang out indoors, she said.

Several Central Illinois school districts have called off classes for Monday amid warnings about traveling on icy roadways.

Classes in Decatur, including Our Lady of Lourdes, St. Patrick, Holy Family, St. Teresa, Central A&M, Argenta-Oreana, Warrensburg-Latham, Mount Zion, Lutheran School Association, Sangamon Valley CUSD #9 and Tuscola schools were canceled as of 10 p.m. Sunday, according to the districts' websites and social media pages.
DECATUR  The corner of U.S. Business 51 and West Ash Avenue has beckoned developers for more than a decade. Now that one has finally laid claim, will other commercial growth follow?

City officials say they are not pushing business toward the west side of the highway, where the Decatur City Council voted 5-2 on Jan. 2 to allow a new 10,400-square-foot shopping center anchored by Chipotle Mexican Grill  but they're not ruling it out.

Businesses are feeding off of one another, almost like 1-plus-1 equals 3, City Manager Tim Gleason said Wednesday, noting Chipotle's desire to locate off the intersection. Its a great opportunity for us, and we understand why that intersection was so appealing to them.

The corner, across the highway from Walmart and other high-volume retail, is residential. Neighbors vehemently opposed the Chipotle, expressing concerns about traffic, safety, quality of life and property values. Many worry that it is the first domino to fall and more business will encroach on their quality of life.

Pam Ambeau, who has lived at her home since 1977 and will be next to Chipotle's drive-through, said it would not surprise her if commercial developments start moving further into the neighborhood now that they have their foot in the door. Such decisions would require more rezoning by the city council, but Ambeau said Tuesdays vote has her believing the city will do whats best for its bottom line.

I think whatever is going to bring Decatur some money and tax revenue, I think they will go for it, I really do, she said.

A long-desired corner

Developers have long sought the corner for its high visibility and traffic count. Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe said during Tuesday's meeting that she remembered proposals from more than a decade ago. Two years ago, she was one of three council members who voted to allow an Aldi grocery store on the site.

When that proposal was defeated, she predicted that developers would continue to seek the site. On Tuesday, she didn't rule out the possibility that more businesses would follow Chipotle's lead: "If its as successful as were hoping it is ... well just wait and see," she said.

Gleason said there is no truth to rumors that there are already plans to move forward with other developments. He acknowledged the possibility that more could occur on the west side of U.S. Business 51 from West Ash Avenue to Mound Road, but said the city would leave businesses to make their own decisions and come to agreements with the necessary landowners to buy property.

Do we believe there is a possibility for future developments in that general area? Gleason said. The answer is yes, we do believe it is. But that is going to be a discussion between the businesses and the private property owners.

The vote Tuesday came the same night Forsyth approved a tax-increment financing district across a wide section of the village. The economic development tool is meant to lure in new business, including a grocery store that village officials have long sought. The draw of businesses to Forsyth over Decatur was a reoccurring factor in the discussion about the Chipotle and strip mall.

Stephanie Brown, a former development planner for the city of Decatur, said that while neighborhoods are sometimes overtaken by commercial development, they can also coexist in relative peace.

The determining factor is what local leaders see as best use for the land.

Its really up to the city on how they want the future of that land to be used and developed, said Brown, now a planner for MSA Professional Services in Champaign. It is easier to rezone, traditionally, if there is a similar use in the area. ... Cities and counties look at whats existing, whats nearby and whether it is compatible."

Strategic planning can create a successful relationship between residential and commercial properties, she said. That means providing plenty of buffer space, attractive landscaping that fits in with existing greenery and a plan that has the interest of both sides in mind.

If done right, mixed use is always a great way to go, because you have your residents and your businesses working together, Brown said. Businesses need people to eat, shop and frequent them, and residents need places to go.

Revenue drives decision

The bustling intersection is a stark contrast to the Pershing Road corridor, just two miles south, which has struggled to keep retail. Both Hobby Lobby and TJ Maxx left storefronts along the road last year for spots in Hickory Point Mall in Forsyth, taking with them sales tax dollars that city leaders have said they desperately need.

Council members who voted for the Chipotle development pointed to Decatur's financial situation. The 2018 budget includes a $3.2 million deficit, with changes in state law and stagnant sales tax revenue among the major sources of the gap.

The developer did not request tax incentives. City officials said they have not offered any, and none were included in the measure the council approved

City officials are not pretending the shopping center will eliminate the deficit, but Gleason said it will at least be a net positive for their bottom line.

Owners of the five parcels that currently reside at the 1.6 acres, which includes four homes and one vacant lot, paid a total of $10,852.44 in property taxes last year, according to records kept by the Macon County Supervisor of Assessments.

Representatives from GMX Real Estate, LLC., the Northbrook-based developer behind the project, have estimated the site could yield $3 million to $4.5 million in annual sales, $20,000 to $30,000 in property tax revenue and create 15 to 30 full-time jobs.

GMX Co-Manager Andrew Goodman previously told the Herald & Review that the property owners had agreed to sell, though he declined to provide the price. He did not return multiple messages left at his office and cell phone seeking further comment.

Traffic worries continue

Neighbors voiced the most concern about traffic on West Ash Avenue. Deputy City Manager Billy Tyus said there have been no discussions about closing the street to through traffic or adding more roads to handle the extra vehicles coming to the new shopping center. Tyus said the highway and intersection have the capacity to handle the expected traffic.

We are completely sensitive to the questions and concerns here and we do know that there will be additional traffic but (we) want to say that this development is not a large development, comparatively speaking, that would generate the kind of traffic that might generate a need for additional roadways, etc., Tyus said in an email.

He added the city can and will adjust the timing of the traffic light at the intersection if traffic flow changes are needed.

The city conducted its own traffic study in the area, with the results matching those done by GMX. About 250 to 300 vehicles travel each direction on Ash Avenue during the peak hour each day, which is 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., Interim Public Works Director Matt Newell said. Average speeds are about 35 mph.

Entrances to the shopping center would be off of West Oak Lane and West Ash Avenue. It would only be allowed to operate from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Fourteen parking spaces on West Ash Avenue would be removed, a left turn lane into the shopping center would be added, and the bus stop would be moved. City staff said West Oak Lane would be strengthened, with curb and gutter added, to accommodate more traffic. Newell said GMX would cover the costs of infrastructure updates, with his office to supervise the work.

It is still not known when ground will break on the Chipotle-anchored shopping center. The developers, Northbrook-based GMX Real Estate LLC., have previously said they hope to finish construction by the end of the year.

The developers have also not revealed what other restaurant or retailers will join Chipotle in the center. According to the developer's filing with the city, the center could have space for restaurants, retail stores and a medical office, along with 82 parking spots.
Dear Dr. Roach: I'm a very active 79-year-old woman who had a colonoscopy three months ago and is still suffering with pain on my right side. I have had a CT scan and an ultrasound, and they say there is nothing wrong. Do you have an answer?

-- N.F.

A: There are a few complications of colonoscopy that should be considered in a person with pain after the procedure. If a polyp was removed, tenderness and fever can persist for a few days.

Perforation of the colon is uncommon: It happens in 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 colonoscopies performed for screening. Pain, fever and nausea with vomiting are the most common symptoms. These usually begin right after the colonoscopy. A rare complication is damage to the spleen (the spleen is adjacent to the colon in the left upper quadrant of the abdomen) or liver (in the right upper quadrant). The CT scan should have shown a perforation of the colon or damage to the spleen or liver.

I don't have an answer; I have what might be charitably described as a wild guess, which is that the bacteria of the colon drastically change after colonoscopy, and that after three months you may have a different set of bacteria there. (It's called the microbiome, and increasingly is recognized as important to many functions of the body.) If your pain isn't too bad, I would consider a course of probiotics (healthy bacteria) to repopulate the bowel. If the pain is moderate or severe, it's time for another visit to your doctor and possibly another evaluation.

Diabetic autonomic neuropathy

Dear Dr. Roach: I read your recent column on gastroparesis. I have both diabetes and this condition, which was referred to by my doctors as a "motility" problem, but it was explained to me that my motility problem lies in the small intestine, not in the stomach itself. My problem started after a gallbladder operation. The result was extreme nausea and, inevitably, fairly violent vomiting. I may go a number of days (even a couple of weeks) without any problem, and then I may have an almost daily occurrence for several days.

These problems start with extreme fullness. My first remedy is always a massage of my stomach area above the navel (which can be quite painful), sometimes followed by an over-the-counter gas pill; my last resort is Reglan. I am confused by some of the terminology.

-- E.K.G.

A: The same issues that affect the nerves to the stomach, causing poor contraction and motility, also can affect the small intestine. The term "diabetic autonomic neuropathy" probably is more accurate, to reflect that the problem can be at multiple levels. I don't think I have ever seen it myself where it affects the small intestine and not the stomach. This would be very difficult to diagnose -- the usual test, the gastric emptying study, looks at the stomach's ability to empty, and if the stomach is normal and the intestines are affected, the test would appear normal. I suspect that in most cases, the stomach might be less affected than the small bowel but still abnormal on testing.

Treatment with metoclopramide (Reglan) works for the stomach and the intestines, as does erythromycin.

* * *

The booklet on constipation explains this common disorder and its treatments. Readers can order a copy by writing: Dr. Roach, Book No. 504, 628 Virginia Dr., Orlando, FL 32803. Enclose a check or money order (no cash) for $4.75 with the recipient's printed name and address. Please allow four weeks for delivery.
Photo: Disney

Disneys live-action Aladdin (and hot Jafar) is still a ways off, but the drama is already starting to brew around the Guy Ritchie film. According to the Sunday Times, actors say Disney has been tanning white actors to play extras in Agrabah, the movies fictional Middle Eastern city. Actor Kaushal Odedra told the paper that he was on set working as stand-in for a lead actor during filming in September, and saw a line of 20 very fair-skinned actors waiting to be heavily tanned. When Odedra asked another man on set about the line of white actors, they both decided against complaining: I asked a Saudi cast member what he made of having these extras being tanned so heavily and he said its unfortunate, Odedra said, but this is how the industry works, and theres no point complaining about it since it isnt going to change.

Guy Ritchie declined to comment to the Times, and Disney praised the diversity on set. This is the most diverse cast ever assembled for a Disney live action production, the studio said. More than 400 of the 500 background performers were Indian, Middle Eastern, African, Mediterranean and Asian.
Dean Unglert will compete in The Bachelor Winter Games this February. Photo: Josh Vertucci/ABC

In a strange bid for network synergy and a more wholesome extension of the Bachelor brand than the lurid and painfully tone-deaf Bachelor in Paradise, ABC has a new reality series this Olympics season: The Bachelor Winter Games, premiering February 13. It features former contestants from across the franchise, including familiar faces from the American seasons and a handful of contestants from the international franchises. In four episodes, they compete in winter-themed challenges, look for potential love, and create a global celebration of unity. Plus, its a chance for the franchise to include some new people and to inject some much-needed diversity into the notoriously homogenous American series. Cute!

So lets take a quick look at the contestants, who are split into men and women from the United States and from international seasons. The USA Men category features several men from Rachel Lindsays season, including Eric (great!), Josiah (well see?), and Dean (dear Bachelor: please stop trying to make Dean happen). The USA Women category is much slimmer, but does feature the seemingly inevitably resurgence of Ashley I. In the International Women division, there are representatives from New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Japan, China, and the U.K. And then over in International Men, weve got Benoit and Kevin from Canada, Christian from Switzerland and Germany, Courtney from Australia, and Jordan from New Zealand.

Look, this is a four-episode spinoff meant to tie-in to TV Olympics hype and give Chris Harrison something to do, because if that man doesnt get to count a televised table of roses at least three times a month he starts heckling local florists. It is not going to change the world, and its total consequence even within the pool of reality television is going to be fairly minor.

But cmon, Bachelor Winter Games  youve got five international men, and theyre all white, and four of them are from English-speaking countries. Two of them are from Canada. (Okay, sure, according to his bio, Benoit from Montreal does have a sexy French accent.) There are women from Sweden and Finland and China and Japan, many of whom will surely be the subject of what the Bachelor Winter Games press release cheekily refers to as language barriers and cultural differences. Only three of the women are from the American seasons, and two of them (Clare and Ashley I.) have been frequently branded as crazy within their series. Most of the women, in other words, will likely be either desperate crazies trying to finally land a husband or exoticized beauties from far-off lands, and the mostly English-speaking men will enjoy the process of trying to, you know, talk to them.

Some of the imbalance in the contestant pool is an inevitable result of the available personalities from the international franchises  there have been far more non-American Bachelor seasons than Bachelorettes, and the most successful international Bachelorette franchise is Australian. Theres also the issue of watchability for an American audience  its hard to imagine The Bachelor franchise would be thrilled with subtitling entire episodes. But there have been Bachelorette seasons from India and Romania. Surely the category of international men couldve looked at least a little broader.

And there could be so many benefits from a more diverse contestant group! The lone international man from a non-English-speaking country, Christian, has a bio that begins, Ich bin nicht Mr Nice Guy! I want more of that.

Theres at least one other concerning phrase from the Bachelor Winter Games press announcement: In addition to the presence of Nancy Kerrigan, Trista Sutter, and what will surely be a brief, hand-waving appearance by current Bachelor Arie, the four episodes will feature some amusing issues with intimacy. Great! So fun to know that The Bachelor has decided to really lean into its happy history with amusing issues with intimacy.

My hope is that Bachelor Winter Games ends up being a mostly nothingburger of a four-episode time waster, something to let Chris Harrison try on some outerwear and spice up what could well be an otherwise pretty boring Bachelor winter. But its hard to trust the franchise with something as potentially sensitive as language barriers and cultural differences. Its frustrating that the cast looks so skewed toward English-speaking men. And its hard to imagine any version of amusing issues with intimacy thats not cringeworthy. Heres hoping well at least get some mildly funny shots of Chris Harrison being pummeled with snowballs, because I have a feeling thatll be the highlight.
Debra Messing. Photo: Kevork Djansezian/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images via Getty Images

A few weeks ago, E! News correspondent, Catt Sadler, announced she was leaving the network after a decade of work, owing to a massive pay gap between herself and her male co-host Jason Kennedy. How can I operate with integrity and stay on at E if theyre not willing to pay me the same as him? she wrote in a statement at the time. Or at least come close? Well, Debra Messing is fully apprised of Sadlers situation, and went so far as to call out the networks treatment of Sadler while on the red carpet at this years Golden Globes ceremony  while speaking with Giuliana Rancic on E!s red carpet. I was so shocked to hear that E! doesnt believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I miss Catt Sadler, and we stand with her, Messing said. And thats something that can change tomorrow. We want people to start having this conversation that women are just as valuable as men. Rancic didnt respond to the comments.

Later in the red-carpet coverage, Sarah Jessica Parker, Laura Dern, and Eva Longoria also made brief and heated comments while interviewed on E! about Catt Sadlers departure  some without mentioning her name directly. We need the powers that be and all the industries and networks and E! to help us with closing this pay gender gap, Dern told Ryan Seacrest alongside her date for the evening, activist Monica Ramirez. 50/50 by 2020. Parker, meanwhile, opined to Seacrest how she knows pay inequality has affected your network. She added: Parity, equality and safe work environments shouldnt be controversial. And its across all industries.

Longoria, appearing near the end of the networks coverage, was by far the most blunt with her opinions. We support gender equity and equal pay and we hope E! follows that lead with Catt as well. We stand with you Catt, she said, while Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman nodded approvingly.
Back row: Activist Tarana Burke, Michelle Williams, America Ferrera, Jessica Chastain, Amy Poehler, Meryl Streep, and Kerry Washington; front row: Natalie Portman, activist Ai-jen Poo, and activist Saru Jayaraman. Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Going into last nights Golden Globe Awards, there were two big stories: One was about fashion. In the wake of Hollywoods recently formed anti-harassment and abuse coalition Times Up, actresses attending the ceremony were asked to wear black as a statement, an initiative that drew no small amount of predictable and wrongheaded internet scorn. The dress code was mocked as shallow, appearance-obsessed hashtag activism, and also as weirdly misaimed: After three months of relentless and enraging headlines about men abusing women, Lets change what we wear sounded to some like victim-blaming, to others like performative emptiness.

The other story was about Donald Trump, specifically his absence. The print-ad slogan for the Globes was a photo of host Seth Meyers next to the slogan, Hollywood, we have a lot to talk about, and he didnt mean the president. In run-up interviews, Meyers made it clear that he had very little interest in revisiting the Trump commentary that pervaded last years show: If [Trump] tweets that hes disappointed we didnt bring him up, Id be thrilled, he told The Hollywood Reporter, and remarked to the New York Times that this year, it seems more fair to focus in. Especially because the industry that is celebrating itself has a lot to answer for. This seemed to set up the unsustainable idea that some kind of high wall exists between Trump and sexual-harassment scandals, that there is no intuitive connection between the women who were overridden when they said that Trump assaulted and degraded them and the Weinstein moment in Hollywood and all that has followed it. Harvey, after all, is the problem Hollywood can solve; Trump is the problem it cant. He was going to shape the collective mood inside the Beverly Hilton Hotel no matter what.

Thats a lot of political freight for an awards show that, even among awards shows, is known for being devoid of any significance whatsoever: Eighty foreign journalists handing out two dozen Ferrero Rocherlooking statuettes to every movie and TV star they can get to show up, which is, of course, all of them. In the context of the Academy Awards, in the context of honor and prestige, in the context of any possible definition of the word meaning, the Golden Globes is an empty vessel. Which, oddly, has made the show the perfect vehicle for Hollywood to let America know whats on its mind. That cant happen at the Oscars, because at the Oscars people want something. But at the Globes, people just want to say something.

For the last decade or so, the show sold itself as the party of the year  translation: The Oscars, but drunk. In the Trump era, the brand has shifted to The Oscars, but woke. Last years show, which aired two weeks before the inauguration (which was approximately 100 anxiety-years ago), was anchored by a lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech by Meryl Streep, who excoriated Trump for casual cruelty and hostility to immigrants so effectively that the president-elect was bestirred to tweet that she was overrated. That show felt like it kicked off Hollywoods version of the Resistance  some of the actresses on the telecast would be seen at pro-immigrant rallies just a few weeks later  and last nights telecast felt like the second-season premiere.

The prelude was not promising. NBCs red-carpet show may have been the first ever in which the interviewers, all desperate not to say anything meme-able, looked more nervous than the stars. (Al Roker was smiling, but his eyes said, Please dont ask me about Matt Lauer.) Their eager chatter repeatedly gestured toward the idea of having a conversation while desperately trying to prevent one from happening. Positive. Important. Important. Positive. Diversity. Empowered. Power. Powerful. Platform. Change. Meaningful. Movement. I think its powerful that a lot of women feel empowered to speak, said Sam Rockwell. This is an important conversation to have! said Carson Daly. Girl power! added Natalie Morales, beaming out subsonic waves that said, GO TO COMMERCIAL NOW.

Preshows are always awful, and this was, too  except for one element: The actresses who were the whole point. The vast majority of them were ready with thoughtful, substantive, and intelligent remarks, which, with the skill of celebrities who have had to gently power past many an obtuse questioner to make their point, they managed to deliver.

And those black dresses? As a visual corollary to what was about to happen inside, they worked perfectly. They conveyed unity while allowing for personality. They said, were all different and we all have stories to tell, but were on the same page tonight. To create an activist gesture, especially in fashion, is always to invite contempt from people who imagine that you dont understand the gap between symbolism and action, but nobody who makes these efforts thinks theyre a substitute for actual change. Gestures are about visibility, profile-raising, and strength in numbers, and in that sense, the black-clad Globes belonged to the same tradition as pink pussy hats and red ribbons. Its a way to stand up and be counted  and if you doubt that the use of clothing has deep roots in social-progress movements, go check out the Whitney Museums current exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest and see what Edward Kienholz did with military uniforms and Senga Nengudi did with panty hose.

Once the show started, the women took over. As host, Meyers was unobtrusive, moving through the requisite thrusts at Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and then getting out of the way. He was the right man for the job, given that this year no man was right for the job, and if he didnt own the evening, he deserves much credit for knowing that he wasnt supposed to. Meyers didnt seem to be around all that much after the first 15 minutes, and one reason may have been that he was confident enough to know that he didnt need to step in to give the show shape or a story line: Woman after woman, whether as presenter or winner, was doing that. Their speeches were like the black dresses: all individual, and all one. Each speaker seemed to add a panel to the quilt. Nicole Kidman (a winner for Big Little Lies) talked about her mother as an advocate for womens rights and heralded her creative partnership with Reese Witherspoon. Rachel Brosnahan (a winner for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) used her acceptance speech to push for the telling of womens stories. Elisabeth Moss (a winner for The Handmaids Tale) read a statement from Margaret Atwood. Laura Dern (another Big Little Lies winner) spoke about the culture of silence and the need for restorative justice, in an especially strong acceptance speech that was the closest thing to a Times Up mission statement made on the show. Jessica Chastain and Geena Davis both cited the salary gender gap, and a sardonic Natalie Portman and a flurried Barbra Streisand each noted the all-male lineup of directing nominees, which was especially conspicuous since non-nominee Greta Gerwigs Lady Bird walked off with Best Picture and Actress prizes. It wasnt the most suspenseful Globes, or the funniest, but  much rarer for an awards show  it felt cohesive, a glimpse not just at women, but at a community of women working in unison.

And then there was Oprah Winfrey, who got the Streep slot. As a general rule, if you make an eight-minute Golden Globes acceptance speech and the Twitter talk afterward is about whether you should run for president, you did well. Winfreys speech was steeped in her uncanny ability to assess any room and any moment. There are few American figures who can synthesize the autobiographic, the historical, the political, and the inspirational the way she can, and her stem-winder had much of the crowd up out of their chairs, first to cheer and then to keep listening, rapt as delegates on a convention floor. She began with herself, as a little girl, watching Sidney Poitier win Best Actor at the 1964 Academy Awards, a gently intersectional reminder to the audience that racial inequity must remain any part of a narrative about Hollywood, or American, abuse; then she moved into a nod to the importance of journalism (implicitly connecting her speech to Streeps last year and to The Post); then she transitioned gracefully into the responsibility of Hollywoods storytellers, and connected that responsibility to the plight of women whose stories have been too infrequently heard (in particular the late Recy Taylor) and finally to Me Too and the movement it has spawned. Their time is up! Their time is up! she incanted as the audience thundered approval. And suddenly, Donald Trump was back in the room, where Seth Meyers probably knew hed end up, despite his best efforts. Winfrey was the emotional climax of the midterm-year Globes, and given that awards shows are so often bathetic orgies of self-congratulation, its impressive that We did it, guys! never seeped into her tone. Follow-through is everything, but the crack of the starting pistol matters, and this year, the sound it made was something like: Weve had it. Were coming for you.
Viola Davis on the Golden Globes red carpet. Photo: 2018 Trae Patton/NBC

The red-carpet Golden Globe shows were the television equivalent of a stylish friend who has suddenly developed a social conscience. The pre-game programming on both E! and NBC looked pretty much the same as it always does. Lots of famous people showed up in fancy gowns and allowed Ryan Seacrest, Giuliana Rancic, Natalie Morales, and Al Roker to shove microphones in their faces. But in keeping with the spirit of the Times Up movement, an effort spearheaded by Hollywood women seeking to address sexual assault and the need for gender parity in the industry and beyond, the words coming out of their mouths were more issue-driven.

Related Stories Natalie Portman on How the Times Up Initiative Will Work

Were not asking who are you wearing, Rancic explained at the beginning of E! Live From the Red Carpet, alluding to the fact that many of the actors and actresses were dressed in black to show Times Up solidarity. Were asking why are you wearing black?

Seconds later, Rancic asked that question to Debra Messing, who responded, in part: We want equal pay. I was so shocked to hear E! doesnt believe in paying their female hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I miss Catt Sadler, so we stand with her. That last comment was a reference to the E! News co-host who left the network because of a pay disparity with her male co-host, and also an opportunity to watch someone who is live on E! tacitly acknowledge that E! is often terrible. (Later in the E! broadcast, Sarah Jessica Parker also noted during an interview with Seacrest that these issues have affected your network, while Eva Longoria made a point of saying, We stand with you Catt. Unless I missed it  which is possible due to channel-flipping  no one who appeared on the NBC preshow took the opportunity to refer to that networks issues with Matt Lauer, or the fact that his Today show replacement, Hoda Kotb, is reportedly being paid far less than he was.)

This was the #MeToo Golden Globes red carpet, right down to the presence of Tarana Burke, the creator of the #MeToo movement and senior director of Girls for Gender Equity, who came as Michelle Williamss guest. Numerous actresses  including Williams, Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, and Emma Watson  brought female activists with them to walk the celeb gauntlet and use the live-TV platform to speak about their organizations and missions. This was selfless and noble, but also made for slightly awkward TV as folks like Seacrest tried to figure out how to juggle asking Dern about her role on Big Little Lies and giving space for Monica Ramirez, her guest, to speak about sexual violence against female farm workers. As Amanda Hess of the New York Times noted in a tweet, the whole situation was both a heartening signal about extending this movement beyond Hollywood and totally slick, weird human accessorizing.

As is usually the case, E! offered more polished red-carpet coverage than NBC, which, despite the fact that they host a Golden Globes red-carpet show every year, proceeded initially as if they just got that news ten minutes before they went live. But E! was, also as per usual, more flagrantly self-promotional, using the Times Up moment to promote their upcoming show about Rose McGowan, one of the many women who has spoken out about being raped and/or assaulted by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.

The correspondents on NBC and E!, to their credit, made an obvious effort to give women the opportunity to speak first, focusing in interviews with couples like Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake as much as or more on the woman. NBCs reporters also repeatedly stressed that the Times Up movement was adding a positive energy to the proceedings, as if they could sense that too much #resistance might prompt viewers to change the channel.

It seems like it has brought a different energy here tonight, a real positive energy, Roker said to Viola Davis on the red carpet.

Well, thats what purpose does, Davis responded in that voice of hers that suggests she knows all the secrets of the universe. Thats what significance does. Its like someone says: Theres no prerequisites to worthiness. Youre born being worthy. I think thats a message that a lot of women need to hear.

Suddenly, even if you were at home snarkily livetweeting all of this, you may have been inclined to sit up a little straighter. After all, Harvey Weinstein walked this same red carpet outside the Beverly Hilton only a year ago. Twelve months later, hes gone and all these energized women in black were getting to dictate the message and focus of the coverage. That fact may not have drastically changed the way this whole flashy, glam-cam, glad-handy red-carpet operation works. But it suggested that a tiny bit of progress may have been made, and also hinted at that other P-word Davis used: purpose.
Seth Meyers. Photo: Handout/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

At Sunday nights Golden Globes, host Seth Meyers addressed the elephant in the room early on: Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen. PostHarvey Weinstein, Hollywoods sexual-harassment-and-assault reckoning has inspired the long-overdue #MeToo and Times Up movements. Many of the nights presenters and winners didnt skip an opportunity to sharpen their tongues and add their two cents: On the red carpet, actresses blasted E! for paying Catt Sadler less than her male colleagues. Inside, Weinstein and Kevin Spacey were shaded specifically, and female winners addressed broader disparities in the industry. Oprah, of course, put it best: For too long women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up. Here are all the jokes about and mentions of sexual harassment during the ceremony.

In Seth Meyerss monologue

 Its 2018, marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment isnt.

 For the male nominees in the room tonight, this is the first time in three months it wont be terrifying to hear your name read out loud.

 Meyers jokes about how they tried to get a woman to host and be judged by a bunch of people, and once they said its a hotel, she said no.

 Harvey Weinstein isnt here tonight, because, well, Ive heard rumors hes crazy and difficult to work with. Hell be back in 20 years when hes the first person ever booed in the In Memoriam.

 Meyers mentions that Netflix is moving forward with a new season of House of Cards. Is Christopher Plummer available for that, too?

 When I first heard about a film where a naive young woman falls in love with a disgusting sea monster, I thought, Oh man, not another Woody Allen movie.

 Meyers enlisted Billy Eichner for a joke about Call Me by Your Name. Call Me by Your Name is a coming-of-age story  Meyers began. Eichner finished:  said Kevin Spacey, you lost me at of age.

In acceptance speeches

 As Nicole Kidman accepted her award for Big Little Lies, she noted that her character is at the center of the conversation we are having right now, and talked about her mother, who was an advocate in the womens movement.

 Elisabeth Moss dedicated her Golden Globe to Margaret Atwood: This is for you and all of the women who came before you and after you who were brave enough to speak out against intolerance and injustice and to fight for equality and freedom in this world. She also quoted The Handmaids Tales description of women as the people who were not in the papers and said that now, We no longer live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. We no longer live in the gaps between the stories. We are the story in print and we are writing the story ourselves.

 In her acceptance speech, Laura Dern began, Many of us were told not to tattle, and encouraged society to support women who speak out and engage in restorative justice. May we also please protect and employ them, Dern said. May we tell our children that speaking out without fear of retribution is our cultures new North Star.

 Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, Oprah thanked the women who have bravely come forward across all industries to speak about sexual assault, reminding the audience of Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks, and asking men to listen to womens #MeToos. What I know for sure is speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. Im especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to share their personal stories, she said. For too long women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up.

 In her acceptance speech for Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon said she wants to thank everyone who broke their silence this year: We see you, we hear you, and we will tell your stories.

 Presenting Best Actress in a Comedy, Jessica Chastain and Chris Hemsworth joked that in response to everything going on in Hollywood, theyve decided to remove all the men from the category.

 Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon presented together and noted that Hollywood hasnt changed much at all since the release of Thelma and Louise.

 Barbra Streisand notes that she was the only woman to win a directing Golden Globe for Yentl, That was 1984! Times up, people!
David Bowie. Photo: Phil Dent/Redferns

On what wouldve been his 71st birthday, David Bowie would probably have wanted everyone to keep dancing. So, in honor of the late star, Parlophone Records has put out an unreleased demo of his 1983 single Lets Dance. He recorded the demo in Switzerland with Nile Rodgers, who said in a statement, I woke up on my first morning in Montreux with David peering over me. He had an acoustic guitar in his hands and exclaimed, Nile, darling, I think this is a HIT! As in many things, Bowie was not wrong. You can listen to the demo below and compare it with the released version here.
One of the most fervent voices to emerge from Hollywoods ongoing reckoning with sexual harassment and sexual assault, Rose McGowan is now the focus of Es upcoming five-part docuseries, Citizen Rose. Following the actresss recent activism, inspired in part by McGowans own alleged rape at the hands of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, the first trailer for the show depicts the exhausting, complicated, important pursuit of social justice. I knew others were out there, McGowan says in the clip. And I knew it was a lot of us. The limited series premieres on January 30.
Artur Khachatryan, the governor of Armenias northern Shirak Province, believes that people need to modify their expectations from the government regarding state handouts and must take a more proactive approach to solving developmental issues.

Khachatryan, who was appointed governor in June of 2017, told Hetq that despite the high levels or poverty and unemployment, Shirak has experienced positive change and that the fruits of such change will surface this year.

The governor said that the 1988 Spitak earthquake not only took thousands of lives but changed the mentality of the population, transforming citizens into mere recipients of state assistance.

Khachatryan believes that progress in Spitak can only be realized if such Soviet mentality is changed.

Its difficult when people continue to live with such Soviet mentality. The earthquake destroyed lives and homes, and manufacturing, due to which Gyumri and the province had been developing. To now expect that all that can be restored, that the state can solve all our problems, while we sit and say give, give, is no longer functional, said Khachatryan.

The governor said it was up to business leaders and local government officials to draft investment projects that will drive the economy forward.

There was a meeting with business heads two years ago. They asked how they could assist Shirak. For years, Shirak was regarded as a damaged party that needed help. Sadly, the people of Shirak carried that label around with them. Now, business leaders ask what enterprises they can launch in the province, Khachatryan said.

The governor said that his administration is working to forge an equal partnership with private business based on mutual confidence.

In 2017, fifteen investment projects were proposed, and two received state financing. 16 of the 35projects proposed by rural communities were approved by the Territorial Development Fund.

Khachatryan pointed to the benefits resulting from the Kumayri Renaissance project, tasked with restoring the historical district of Gyumri, Armenias second largest city.

The governor said that an Armenian-Czech company plans to build a sewing factory in Gyumri.

During a recent trip to Shirak, EU Ambassador to Armenia Piotr Switalski, noted that that bulk of 176 million that the EU will allocate to Armenia for 2017-2020, will go to rural communities in Shirak and to Gyumri.

A 2018 EU grant of 1million will go to developing sheep breeding in the enlarged community of Amasia.
The following was released by the Armenian Environmental Front (AEF). Hetq has not edited the text.

We became aware from an email sent to the media and larger public by Harout Bronozian, chemical and environmental engineer, that he and internationally acclaimed mining experts that have been making extensive critiques on the possible exploitation of Amulsar gold mine, have responded to the invitation of Armenias Nature Protection Minister Artsvik Minasyan dated November 15, 2017 to participate in a joint meeting together with Lydian LLC some time in January.

In their invitation letter Artsvik Minasyan mentioned that the aim of this meeting closed to media is to discuss the issue and management of acid drainage and its impact on underground waters and Vorotan-Arpa tunnel together with the specialists of Lydian.

What comes as a surprise is that before the above-mentioned invitation of the minister, media started circulating information about this meeting as if it was a jointly agreed fact already. Whereas on November 1st, 2017, Armenian Environmental Front inquired from the Ministry of Nature Protection clarification on the information disseminated by media, namely, who the participants of this meeting were and what kind of a legal authority this meeting would entail. From two inquiries back and forth, it became clear that the Ministry had leaked information as if the meeting involving international experts was finally confirmed, however the ministry was not able to give a list of participants, even the invitation sent to Harout Bronozian and international experts was issued at a later date. The responses also set out that the meeting was not going to be regulated by any legal norm, however with the agreement of the parties it would be held in a closed format (it is not clear which parties agreed on this if the ministry did not have a confirmed list of participants).

Moreover, even after our inquiries the Minister of Nature Protection and his advisor continued to mislead the media and the public presenting this meeting planned for January as a jointly confirmed event. Armenian Environmental Front evaluates this manner of work my the Ministry as media manipulation, since instead of the reality they only presented their or another partys wishes.

Nonetheless, on December 24th, 2017, Harout Bronozian, chemical and environmental engineer, Dr. Andrea Gerson and Dr. Roger Smart from Blue Minerals Consultancy, Dr. Ann Maest from Buka Environmental and Dr. Andre Sobolevsky from Clear Coast Consulting officially responded to the Ministers invitation, whereby they rejected the invitation justifying that they had up until that point not received credible answers from Lydian regarding the issues they had raised and that deep disagreements continued to persist, as well as some of the solutions to the significant environmental impact entailed political decisions and were of regulatory nature around which they were not in the position to negotiate.

The full text of the response of the international experts is presented below:

"December 24, 2017

For the attention of Mr. Artsvik Minasyan, Minister of Nature Protection of the Republic of Armenia.

Greetings,

We write this letter in response to an invitation by the Honorable Artsvik Minasyan, Minister of Nature Protection of the Republic of Armenia, to attend a meeting in Armenia regarding Lydians Amulsar Gold Project. Our group produced a series of critiques on the geochemical and water treatment aspects of this project. We subsequently received responses to our critiques from Lydian and their consultants and engaged in two rounds of arguments and counter- arguments. Despite these efforts, deep disagreements remain and our concerns that this project will have significant, long-term environmental impacts are undiminished.

Our initial review was thorough and reflected our expert evaluation of the project Environmental and Social Impact Assessment and associated documents. Subsequently, we responded to all objections from Lydian with demonstrable evidence, backed by citations from scientific publications and examples from existing mines. By contrast, we found many arguments rebutting our views to be opinions passed as facts. We heard of practices claimed by Lydian as Industry Standards that we, as authorities in the field, know not to be so. Despite these exchanges and lengthy responses, we find that Lydian has not accepted the case presented and has not offered credible responses to the issues raised. We are pessimistic about the prospects that they will ever do so.

We considered carefully the invitation by the Minister of Nature Protection to meet with ministry staff and Lydian representatives. We appreciated the benefits of explaining again the basis of our disagreement with their proposed ARD Management plan, including the scientific underpinnings of our understanding and concrete examples of existing practices that support our views. However, we are concerned that our attendance would be presented to the wider community as endorsement of the communique to be drafted at the end of the meeting, even if resolution was not achieved. Finally, we understand that some of the issues that require resolution are regulatory and political in nature, such as the development of permitted discharge limits or the requirement of reclamation bonds or other securities. As technical experts we are not the right people to negotiate these non-technical matters.

Taking these arguments into consideration, our consensus decision is to decline this invitation as we are not confident this meeting will result in improved ARD planning and management. Instead, we will provide you within a few days with documents that present our final evaluation of this project as clearly, soundly, and succinctly as possible. We hope that the Armenian government and Lydian will seriously consider our concerns and recommendations and make the needed changes before mining proceeds.

Sincerely yours,

Harry Bronozian, Chemical / Environmental Engineer

Andrea Gerson, PhD, Blue Minerals Consultancy

Ann Maest, PhD, Buka Environmental Boulder

Andre Sobolewski, PhD, Clear Coast Consulting, Inc.

Armenian Environmental Front (AEF) civil initiative




The Global Revive Organization will have a Martin Luther King Empowerment Banquet at 7 p.m. Saturday.

It will be held in the Multi Purpose Center at Rapport Academy. Tickets are $25 each and are available at the door or at Mcdowell Cafe on Dallas Street.

HOT Fair Sweethearts

The Heart O Texas Fair & Rodeo presented by H-E-B is looking to fill its 2018-19 Sweetheart roster with young women from Waco and surrounding areas with a heart to serve the community.

The selection of the Sweethearts is based on personal interviews, personality, congeniality, poise and communications skills. Eligible Sweetheart contestants can also compete for the title of Miss Heart O Texas Fair & Rodeo.

Applications can be picked up from local high school counselors, hotfair.com or in the Heart O Texas Fair & Rodeo Office at 4601 Bosque Blvd. All applications are due to the Heart O Texas Fair & Rodeo Office on or before noon on Feb. 2.

Christian Womens Job Corps

Christian Womens Job Corps of McLennan County will have a volunteer-training session from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Jan. 18 at 1101 Wooded Acres Drive, Suite 107.

This training is open to all volunteers interested in making a difference through tutoring, mentoring, serving as an encourager, serving on the snack team or teaching math concepts, language arts, computer skills or keyboarding.

For more information, call 757-0416.

Talk on higher ed cost

The Free Enterprise Forum will host Richard Vedder, a distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University and adjunct scholar at American Enterprise Institute. Vedder will give a talk titled Can Markets Improve College Education and Make it More Affordable?

The event will start at 4 p.m. Jan. 18 at Baylor Universitys Hankamer School of Business, Foster 250, 1621 S. Third St. Call 710-1694 for more information.
Time does not fly in the corner of the McLennan County radio shop at 623 Washington Ave. It snoozes in crates.

In the dark of the boxes lie two restored historical clocks that once served city and county towers, reminding downtown denizens of dentist appointments and train arrivals. The county clock and attached bell was installed in the old courthouse in 1884 and was later moved to the tower of the McLennan County Jail behind the new courthouse.

The smaller city clock was built in 1904 and was perched in the belfry of the old City Hall until a new building replaced it in 1929.

Both timepieces were in storage limbo until the 1990s, when local clock enthusiasts and county employees took on the monumental task of restoring them.

But 20 years later, these masterpieces of timekeeping are still effectively homeless.

County Judge Scott Felton wants to change that. Hes looking for community partnerships to get them back on display, perhaps in a new, functional bell tower downtown.

Ive thought for a long time that these clocks belong to the community, Felton said. To have them crated up in a box in the back of a warehouse  first, theyre taking up space, and second, theyre not being utilized. Because of the historical significance of those items, they should be used, with so much development going on.

At the same time, Felton is seeking a permanent place in the community to display the original Themis statue that has been replaced by a duplicate atop the county courthouse. He said the clock and statue do not have to go to the same place, but he would like to see both under the care of a responsible institution.

They need to be part of something substantial, whether its with the city, one of our colleges or a museum, he said. (The clocks) should be where theres a lot of pedestrian traffic.  Id like some feedback if anyone has a legitimate idea.

In the early 2000s, then county commissioner Joe Mashek and local historic preservationists pushed to build a 60-foot tower for the county clock in the parking lot of the county records building. The original vision for a $400,000 tower was scaled back to $250,000, and the Cooper Foundation and Tax Increment Financing board offered to fund $100,000 of it. But some commissioners balked at spending any county money on the project, and it died.

The clocks are currently in the custody of Wayne Canaday, director of maintenance and equipment for the county. Canaday helped restore the clocks with the Waco chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, and with that chapter disbanded, he remains the clocks biggest advocate.

He would like to see the city clock displayed somewhere and the county clock set up downtown in a tower along with the 3,500-pound bell it was created to strike.

Its just the history of Waco, he said. For the people who crafted and worked on that clock to make it, and also those who came in to do work to restore it, it would be a testimony to them.

The clocks are remarkably complete given their total neglect for decades.

The city clock, made by Seth Thomas and installed by Waco watchmaker Fred Studer in 1904, was decommissioned when the ornate 1886 City Hall was razed in 1929 to make way for the current building. It was put in storage at City Hall and forgotten until a city employee discovered it in 1995.

A couple of years later, the larger county clock was discovered at a county maintenance barn at 20th Street and Mary Avenue.

That weight-driven clock was manufactured by E. Howard of Boston and installed in the old courthouse in 1884.

In 1903, the county built a new jail next to the new courthouse, according to Wanted: Historic County Jails of Texas, by Edward A. Blackburn Jr. The clock and bell were moved to the tower of the jail, which was razed around 1952.

The clock was fitted with an electric motor in the 1930s, then disassembled and put into storage in the 1950s, Canaday said.

By the time the clock was rediscovered, the four wooden clock faces were missing. Canaday said he has heard jail trusties were ordered to chop them up with axes years before. The clock itself had been inundated several times when the adjacent Waco Creek flooded. But the brass gears were still in decent shape, and the iron parts could be sanded down and restored, he said.

A front-end loader operator discovered the heavy iron base for the clock when he was scraping the parking lot. And in 1999, an employee clearing away a collapsed mule barn at the site found that one of its beams was resting on the massive nickel-bronze bell.

The clock club set up shop at the county-owned Shriner building near Canadays shop on Washington Avenue, and after work each day he would head over to help, sometimes staying there until 10 p.m. on his own time.

The volunteers logged 2,500 hours in restoring the clocks, using steel wool to remove grime and rust, even adding a filigree of 24-karat gold leaf.

At first we used gold paint, but after we put the gold leaf on it, when the sun hit it, gosh, you could tell, Canaday said.

Canaday took a bent brass gear to a local machine shop to get it straightened out, but the proprietor was wary.

He said, If I break this, I wont be able to reproduce it. The way these angles are cut, for me to reproduce it is going to cost a lot of money.

He said a lot of this was done by hand, Canaday said. He put a little pressure on it and bent it back. I was so afraid it was going to break.

Ringing the bell

Canaday said the bell, made at a Cincinnati foundry, is also practically irreplaceable.

We took a forklift and lifted that bell a little off the ground, Canaday said. I hit it just barely, and that bell just resonated, bong! It just carried a perfect tone. Then I tapped on it a little harder and it really rang out.

He chuckled at the thought of inmates at the old jail jumping every time it rang a story above them.

Canaday said he tested the restored clock with the old electric motor, and it kept perfect time. He said the old clock machinery sat at the top of the jail tower, but it could be placed at ground level for public viewing and attached to a clock face using a long spindle.

Canaday, 65, said he would be willing to service the clock even after he retires.

The city donated its clock to the county, but Waco Deputy City Manager Wiley Stem III said he is willing to be part of the discussion in finding the clocks a new home. Stem, who will become city manager in March, said he would try to schedule a time to go look at the clocks.

I like the idea in general, he said of Feltons suggestion of displaying the clocks. It is part of our history. Its something wed have to visit with the council about. It does sound worthwhile and intriguing.
Steve Bannon went to war with Donald Trump. At least, he tried to. In recently published excerpts from Michael Wolff's new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Bannon lashed out at the administration, taking special aim at the campaign's connections with Russian operatives, which he deemed "treasonous" and "unpatriotic". Trump slapped back in a written statement, saying Bannon "has lost his mind".

Since the release of the excerpts, Bannon has mounted a strategic retreat, calling his former boss "a great man". Coincidentally, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of mega-funder Robert Mercer, and a minority shareholder in Brietbart News, distanced herself from Bannon's remarks, leading to speculation that his job at Breitbart was under threat.

While the feud was largely fuelled by Bannon's desire to stay relevant in the aftermath of his dismissal from the White House, it also came at a pivotal moment in the Trump presidency. Having styled himself an economic populist, Trump has just signed into law a tax bill that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest Americans. Nearly a year into his presidency, he has little to point to in terms of legislation that aids the working-class Americans he purports to represent.

For Bannon, it appeared the ideal moment to try to steal the populist crown from Trump.
I wasn't always a high school teacher, I started my working life in the Australian Regular Army in the mid '90s and I did a stint as a police officer in far north Queensland. Before that, I went to school in the country, came from a dysfunctional family and played a lot of sport. I might be a small woman but I can pull out a big voice when I need one. I've jumped out of a plane, I can fire weapons fairly accurately, ride a motor bike and drive a truck. I am certainly no stranger to being the only girl in the room and, in my time, I've been verbally abused, called a variety of offensive names, physically hit and, once, I had my nose broken after I was head butted. But, I've got to admit, teaching high school in the suburbs of Sydney is a tough gig.

Recently, I did some casual teaching days at an inner-city high school. In my year 11 business studies class, there was a boy banging his head deliberately and rhythmically on a desk, two others aggressively play fighting, one snapped a pencil and then tore up the worksheet I handed out, throwing the pieces towards the ceiling. A huge boy shouted at me, wanting to assure me that this group (which included the head banger, the play fighters and the paper shredder), were "the best and the smartest in the class". There was a girl drawing traditional tattoo designs, another looked like she'd been crying, and one sat silently in the front row making her own notes and ignoring everyone else.

As I asked the class to listen up, a girl yelled, "I really like your outfit", I smiled and was about to politely say thank you when she continued with, "but it would look better on my floor" and the whole class erupted in laughter. Less than five minutes in and I reminded myself that this was a class of children, albeit big and loud, and no one in the room except me had a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Remembering that, and understanding why they behave like lunatics at times, is critical to teacher survival; there is always a reason behind the behaviour. Reprimanding a child without trying to address that cause would be like continually filling up a flat tyre with air, but never repairing the puncture. Pointless

In public schools all over the country, classrooms are filled with kids who are not engaging with the curriculum and not learning. They can't focus, they can't sit still, some lash out aggressively at students and teachers, some have given up. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, Australia's level of academic achievement has been progressively slipping with the highest correlation of poor results coming from students disadvantaged through disability, indigeneity, language and low socio-economic status.
Dumped Turnbull government minster Darren Chester has denounced a lack of national leadership on curbing the road toll and regrets not being more "aggressive" on road safety during his time in the infrastructure and transport portfolio.

The Victorian Nationals MP also chastised state governments and federal bureaucrats for a "timid" approach to curbing the road carnage.

His comments follow a Fairfax Media report on Thursday in which government expert Dr John Crozier declared the national black spot program a "Band-aid" road safety solution that should be scrapped, and claimed inertia by successive federal governments was contributing to a rising number of road deaths.

Mr Chester lost the infrastructure and transport portfolio to Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce in a Turnbull government reshuffle last month, after 20 months in the job.
Labor MP Michael Danby charged taxpayers $4574 for two newspaper advertisements attacking the ABC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to documents released to blogger William Summers under freedom of information law, the sum spent by Mr Danby as part of his parliamentary communications allowance comprised $1650 for each of the half-page ads in The Australian Jewish News as well as graphic design costing $1274.

The MP for Melbourne Ports, an electorate with a large Jewish population, has long been outspoken in his defence of Israel and previously defended the advertisements criticising ABC journalist Sophie McNeill, saying he had spent a "small amount".

In its advice to Mr Danby on the first request, the Department of Finance said it complied with the rules, which required the spending be on "parliamentary or electorate purposes", but warned he might "need to publicly justify and defend the item if required".
A man has been arrested and charged after he allegedly stabbed a friend when they became lost on the way back from a crabbing trip in Perth's eastern suburbs.

WA Police say the men were driving on Brumby Avenue in Henley Brook at around 7pm when they became lost.

The men were inside a Mercedes when they began arguing. Credit:Hannah Barry

The pair argued, and the 41-year-old man is believed to have sustained serious laceration wounds during the fight.

While police were unable to confirm how he sustained the injuries, witnesses reportedly say the man stumbled from the car and yelled he had been stabbed.
New Slow Down, Move Over (SLOMO) laws designed to protect roadside workers "miss the mark" in their current form and will be almost impossible to enforce, according to the WA Police Union.

The union has raised several concerns with the soon to be introduced laws, which will come into effect from March.

WA Police Union president George Tilbury. Credit:ABC News

The laws will require drivers to reduce their speed when approaching a stationary emergency or incident response vehicle and pass at a maximum speed of 40kmh.

Drivers who fail to adhere to the new rules will cop three demerit points and a $300 fine.
Vale de Salgueiro: The Epiphany celebrations in the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro feature a tradition that each year causes an outcry among outsiders: Parents encouraging their children, some as young as five, to smoke cigarettes.

Locals say the practice has been passed down for centuries as part of a celebration of life tied to the Christian Epiphany and the winter solstice - but nobody is sure what it symbolises or exactly why parents buy the packs of cigarettes for their children and encourage them to take part.

Fernando, 6-years-old, smokes a cigarette in the village of Vale de Salgueiro, northern Portugal, during the local celebration. Credit:AP

The two-day celebrations, which start Friday and end Saturday with a Mass, include dancing around bonfires, a piper playing music and an elected "king" who distributes plentiful wine and snacks.

The legal age to purchase tobacco in Portugal is 18, but nothing prohibits parents from giving kids cigarettes, and Portuguese authorities don't intervene to stop the practice.
The president's relentlessly appalling xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism invites such comparisons to unsavory regimes. So does his proud assumption of the motto "America First," a slogan with anti-Semitic overtones and Nazi-sympathizing origins. His attacks on the media (even individual journalists) and interference with the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrate disdain not only for commonly accepted ideas of what behaviors are "presidential" but even elementary standards of democratic citizenship.

Others see a more sinister possibility: that he intends to seize on a "Reichstag fire" moment to consolidate his power in a manner reminiscent of authoritarian rulers. (Google Trends search results suggest that US interest in the term "Reichstag fire" peaked in the frenzied first few weeks of the Trump administration.)

The difficulty of finding a plausible rationale for Trump's behavior leads some to conclude that he is irrational - literally unable to control himself. A few observers have speculated that he might be mentally deficient in a clinical sense, suffering from dementia or even a variant of syphilis. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un evoked this position when he described the president as a "mentally deranged dotard." But such armchair diagnoses run far beyond the evidence - including the fact that the president does not suffer the level of impairment required to diagnose a mental disorder.

Yet other instances of the president's freewheeling style seem ill conceived. What master persuader would have recounted his election victory and bashed the media for the umpteenth time in front of a Boy Scout National Jamboree? What strategic calculus informed the president's endorsement of two losing candidates in Alabama's Senate special election? And why spread baseless conspiracy theories about charges such as massive vote fraud in the 2016 election - which he won? In fact, the biggest political "distraction" involving Trump may have been how his lightning-rod-like ability to attract scandals and alienate potential allies made it harder for congressional Republicans to enact their policy agenda.

Yet it seems unlikely that Trump intends to institute a dictatorship. One factor - far from the most important, but overlooked in many Twitter jeremiads - is that he simply seems to be too lazy to do so. Someone who can (as the New York Times reported) routinely spend four to eight hours a day marinating in cable TV news makes for an unlikely candidate to overturn a constitutional order.

Another is that he has little incentive to do so while he is secure in his position and his family is free to profit without fear of reprisal. Were either of those factors to change, the story might be different - and we would have to hope that the institutions that were weak enough to allow Trump to become president would be strong enough to thwart such ambitions.

Seeking hidden plots misses the point. There is no real distinction between the onstage and offstage Trump. He is not acting. The Donald Trump who publicly ranted during campaign rallies about Mexican immigrants and refugees is the same one who, as president, privately ranted on phone calls to the Mexican president and the Australian prime minister about those issues. Even when his staff briefly succeed in getting him to stay on message, he soon flaunts his independence by going "off-script" to reveal that his good behavior was a charade.

He has no ideology besides a half-glimpsed vision of national "greatness." He has no grand strategy, just a profound need to demonstrate that he is a winner, a dealmaker and an influence wielder. And having suffered few consequences of importance to him for his behavior so far in his short political career, he recognizes few limits to his whims. He will ignore his critics and follow the applause he receives for his reckless behavior as far as he can.

The search for meaning in Trumpism reflects the desire of both his supporters and opponents for Trump to be what he is not: profound, larger-than-life, grandiose. The self-evident pettiness of Donald J. Trump defies those aesthetic sensibilities. Recognizing that there is no greater meaning in the man himself may help us address his challenge. Reflecting on how such a small man ever came to occupy such an office may inspire us to prevent a repeat performance.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jan. 08, 2018 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 08, 2018 | 12:55 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Paducah Power Systems Christmas in the Park event generated $42,214 and 67,895 pounds of food this year.



Paducah Power Director of Community Relations and Marketing Andrea Underwood said the canned good totals were up a bit over last year, and the cash collected was the second highest in the history of the event.



The food and cash donations were gathered at the lighting displays at Noble Park, Stuff-The-Truck at local hospitals, and the School Challenge, where schools competed to determine who could collect the most food.



The School Challenge was wildly successful, the nightly traffic at the park was steady, and the visit by the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree was a great way to kick off the season, Underwood said. We feel as if all of the elements of Christmas in the Park came together in a very successful way. Underwood added that local schools collected more than half of the food collected this year.



Proceeds from Christmas in the Park will go to Paducah Cooperative Ministry, the Salvation Army, Family Service Society and St. Vincent DePaul Society.



Delivery of the food is being handled by Wagner Moving and Storage, Supply Solutions and McKeel Equipment.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 08, 2018 | 08:00 AM | GRAVES COUNTY, KY

Charlotte Goddard has tossed her hat in the ring for the May 22 Democratic primary in the Second House District.

You can count on me to be a strong voice for working people, said Goddard, who lives near Pottsville in north Graves County and teaches at Caldwell County Elementary School in Princeton.

The Second District includes Graves County and a small slice of southern McCracken County.

Goddard mailed her candidate papers to the secretary of states office in Frankfort Saturday. Incumbent Richard Heath, a Republican, has yet to file.

A member of the Kentucky Education Association and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, she pledged to partner with state and local leaders of business, organized labor and government to try to bring more industrial jobs to the Second District.

Good paying union jobs built the middle class in the Second District and across the country, she said.

Goddard also promised to champion public schools. She opposes charter schools, which she says rob public schools of much needed funds.

She also is against Gov. Matt Bevins public employee pension bill, which would cut some benefits for current personnel and retirees and force most new hires into risky 401(a) plans. "The KEA is in the fight to save our pensions," Goddard said.

"A pension is a promise, Goddard said. Do you trust the governor and the Republicans in the legislature to keep that promise? I dont.

She and her husband, Billy, have two children, Emily and Nicholas. Emily is a senior at Graves County High School, and Nicholas is in the second grade at Lowes Elementary School.

Goddard is organizing her campaign. Anyone interested in volunteering or wanting more information about her may phone or text her at (270) 970-8953. Her email address is
In 2017, Packaging Corporation of America (NYSE: PKG) found favor with investors, as a return to growth catalyzed a total return of 45% in "PKG" shares over the course of the year. It's probably not reasonable to expect quite as much appreciation again this year, but the company is certainly capable of logging another positive performance. There are several strategies that are boosting Packaging Corp of America, but does the stock's current valuation suggest that shares have become too expensive for comfort?

Implementing a plan to deal with sluggish growth

Packaging Corp of America manufactures and sells its products within two major segments: packaging, which encompasses corrugated-packaging products, and paper, in which the company manufactures uncoated free-sheet paper (i.e., reams of packaged printing paper sold in office supply stores). Between them, the two segments comprise the lion's share of company revenue: Packaging accounts for roughly 82% of revenue, and paper products contribute approximately 16% to the company's top line.

To put 2017 in context, we have to look back a few years to late 2013, when Packaging Corp entered the free-sheet paper business upon its acquisition of Boise Paper for $2 billion. This has proved to be a difficult market to thrive in, as demand for free-sheet paper has gradually deteriorated over the last several years. For example, industrywide uncoated free-sheet paper shipments dropped 3.4% in 2016, and pricing per ton declined nearly 2%, according to the company's most recent annual report.

As a result, though the Boise purchase added over $2.1 billion to the Packaging Corp's top line, the company's revenue base remained static for three years post-acquisition, with annual sales hovering around $5.8 billion in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

Acquire, convert, and fill demand

In 2016, Packaging Corp resumed acquisitions, with a focus on its traditional business of containerboard manufacturing, which outputs the corrugated material consumers think of as cardboard box packaging. New deals have been smaller, "bolt-on" additions of smaller competitors. The company bought corrugated-products producer Tim-Bar Corporation for $386 million in August 2016, and snapped up corrugated manufacturer Columbus Container for $100 million in November 2016.

Packaging Corp followed these acquisitions with the purchase of another corrugated-paper specialist, Sacramento Container Corporation, for $265 million in October 2017.

All three deals turned out to be efficient from a financial perspective. Tim-Bar, Columbus Container, and Sacramento Container were acquired at the low price-to-EBITDA multiples of 4.3, 3.3, and 5.0, respectively. Better yet, each transaction was immediately accretive to (i.e., improved) earnings.

As a result of these acquisitions on favorable terms, as well as productivity improvements, revenue increased during the first nine months of 2017 by nearly 11%, to $4.7 billion, and operating income rose 16% to $679.2 million.

The organization's resource shift toward packaging makes much sense, as global demand for corrugated products is forecast to expand at a compounded annual growth rate, or CAGR, of over 4% for the next several years. Factors driving demand include an increase in retail display packaging and, of course, the rise of e-commerce-driven package delivery.

Packaging Corp plans to sell further into this demand by converting a machine currently producing 200,000 tons of free-sheet paper per year at its Wallula, Washington, mill, into a system making 400,000 tons of 100% virgin kraft linerboard per year, by the second quarter of this year. While this conversion will benefit the integration of the Sacramento Container purchase, it will also effectively trade paper capacity for production of higher-demand corrugated products.

Fairly valued at present

Given investors' enthusiastic reaction to Packaging Corp's renewed growth and higher profits last year, does the stock's phenomenal one-year rise make it prohibitively expensive today? For an answer, we can look to two peer companies that I discussed last year as solid dividend investments within the packaging industry (alongside Packaging Corp): Avery Dennison (NYSE: AVY) and Sealed Air Corporation (NYSE: SEE). Priced at roughly 19 times forward earnings, Packaging Corp is well in line with its peers:

The company is also valued at par with the overall industrials sector of the S&P 500 index, which currently trades at an aggregate forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.5.

Thus, despite its run-up over the last 12 months, Packaging Corp still has space to climb -- and trade at a premium to the market -- if it maintains its revenue and earnings momentum. While investors shouldn't expect a repeat of last year's dizzying leap, Packaging Corp's current strategy certainly provides a sturdy foundation for further appreciation in the months ahead.

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North Korea test-fires missile with range to strike all of U.S.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 07, 2018 | 06:02 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet District 1 Snow & Ice Team is continuing to monitor a band of freezing rain that is expected to move across Southeast Missouri, Southern Illinois, and Southern Indiana during the overnight hours.

Most of the frozen precipitation is expected to remain north of the Ohio River. However, as a precaution, District 1 Superintendents in the Ohio River Counties will be checking highway conditions during the overnight hours and are prepared to call in high way crews, if required.

Again, at this time the forecast indicates temperatures in most of the western Kentucky counties are expected to remain above freezing.

Motorists who plan to travel northward into Missouri, Illinois, or Indiana should closely monitor local weather conditions.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 07, 2018 | 10:04 PM | GRAVES COUNTY, KY

Three Graves County residents were arrested over the weekend on drug and theft charges.

Graves County Sheriff Dewayne Redmon said deputies responded on Friday to a home in the 300 block of Old Dublin Road for two unwanted subjects. Upon further investigation, deputies received information that there were numerous items of stolen property inside the home.

Deputies were given consent to enter the home, where they found stolen items, methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

Deputies arrested 28-year-old Jackson Owens, of Mayfield, on charges of possession of methamphetamine, possession of marijuana, possession of controlled substance, receiving stolen property under $10,000 and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Twenty-seven-year-old Anita Martinez and Richard McGowan, both of Mayfield, were also arrested and charged with possession of meth, receiving stolen property under $10,000 and possession of drug paraphernalia.

All three were lodged in the Graves County Jail.
By The Associated Press Jan. 08, 2018 | 09:49 AM | FRANKFORT, KY

A Kentucky clerk who spent five days in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples has filed for re-election.

Kim Davis filed for re-election last week, according to documents on the Secretary of State's website. She had announced in November she planned to seek a second term.

Davis caused an international uproar when she stopped issuing marriage licenses in 2015 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning same-sex unions. Davis was jailed after she refused to obey a judge ordering her to issue the licenses. The state legislature later changed the law to remove clerks' names from the licenses.

Davis will run as a Republican. Four Democrats have filed for the seat. They include David Ermold, a gay man who was initially denied a marriage license in 2015.
Glen and Melinda Groth from Winona County finished in the Top 10 in the Achievement Award national competition at the American Farm Bureau Federations 99th annual meeting. The contest is being held during the AFBF Annual Meeting this week in Nashville, Tenn.

The Groths advanced to the AFBF Young Farmers & Ranchers (YF&R) competition after capturing top honors in the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation YF&R Achievement Award Contest in November. The Achievement Award contestants are selected on their exceptional efforts in agriculture through farm management and leadership achievements as well as effective use of capital in their farm.

Glen and Melinda grow corn soybeans and alfalfa and milk dairy cows near Ridgeway. They have two daughters.

Nearly 50 Farm Bureau members from Minnesota are among the more than 6,000 Farm Bureau members representing each state and Puerto Rico at the AFBF annual meeting. The meeting also features workshops and seminars, as well as, the national resolutions session which set policies for the upcoming year.
As lending for college through the federal government and private banks has increased rapidly, federal bankruptcy laws have tightened, making it nearly impossible for student debt to be discharged like other forms of consumer debt.
Adair Mosleys introduction to his new life in St. Charles was pretty grand.

In 1994, the 12-year-old was moving to St. Charles from West Point, Miss., to live with his mom, and it was the same time the whole town began its yearly Gladiolus Days celebration.

We came right at the beginning of the parade, and the town was gathering, Mosley recalled. I often think of that as being symbolic.

Mosley, who spent part of his junior and high school years in St. Charles before moving to Winona and graduating from Winona Senior High School, was recently named Pillsbury United Communities CEO and president after serving on an interim basis since the summer.

The Minneapolis-based non-profit develops solutions and offers assistance to underestimated populations across Minneapolis. The organization has a variety of focuses including health, education, food and employment.

Pillsbury United Communities can trace its roots back to the settlement house movement in the late 1800s. In 1905, John and Charles Pillsbury  successful flour mill owners whose legacy and lineage is tied to the popular pie crust, cookies and canister-popping crescent rolls across U.S. grocery stores  donated $40,000 toward the construction of a new settlement house in Minneapolis.

Mosleys connection to helping others and giving back through Pillsbury United Communities stems all the way back to his high school days in St. Charles and Winona.

After Mosley began his high school career in St. Charles, he felt a connection to the flower-celebrating town along Interstate 90.

(I) had a sense of community in St. Charles, said Mosley, who has an older brother, Otis Mosley, who still lives in St. Charles.

Eventually, he moved in with two St. Charles School District teachers who lived in Winona. A year and a half later, a junior in high school at this point, Mosley decided to continue his education in Winona.

But in both schools, he found support from his teachers.

I just think that they were supportive, Mosley said. They created the conditions, they told me that they believed in me, they saw promise.

One of those teachers was Tom Blahnik, the former band teacher for fifth through 12th grade at St. Charles Public Schools. Tom Blahniks wife, Jackie Blahnik, a headstart teacher in St. Charles, said Mosley has always been compassionate and dependable.

Jackie Blahnik remembers a time when The Teddy Bear Band was performing for families in the area, and a person was needed to wear a bear costume. She knew who they needed immediately.

Adair was the first person that came to mind, Jackie Blahnik said. He had a joyful side, but he also knew that would add to the experience for the young kids.

The Blahniks and Mosley have kept in touch over the years after Mosley left St. Charles, and Jackie Blahnik said they have followed his movements within Pillsbury United Communities.

As hes grown up from the sixth grader that weve known, to the young man that he is, Jackie Blahnik said through a tearful voice, Im very proud of him and his success. I think Pillsbury United Communities has made a very good decision.

After high school, Mosley went on to the University of Minnesota, studying English and introducing him to the area he still calls home.

Mosley began his career in social services, holding jobs in early education and as a guardian ad litem, representing children in court.

When the opportunity to serve at Pillsbury United Communities came up about six years ago, Mosley jumped at the chance. Then-CEO and President Chanda Smith Baker, whose position Mosley obtained upon her departure, was looking for a thought partnership, Mosley said.

Serving the organization as a chief of staff and chief innovation officer before his new position, Mosley  along with Smith Baker  helped create the North Market in North Minneapolis.

The 20,000-square-foot building began as a solution to fostering the community connections made at the grocery store, Mosley said. The market, which opened a little less than a month ago, addresses the areas need for healthy food availability while offering health, wellness and lifestyle opportunities through classes, a clinic and jobs.

The creation of the North Market also meant Mosley was connecting with and old friend from Winona.

The project was given a $2 million appropriation by the Minnesota Legislature, but to get that money, Adair presented to the Minnesota Jobs and Economic Growth Finance and Policy committee.

Sen. Jeremy Miller, who represents Winona as the District 28 senator in the Minnesota State Senate, is now the chair of the committee.

(We) have not stayed in touch as much as I wouldve hoped, but life happens, Miller said. In his role and my role, it was pretty neat to reconnect 16 years later in the state capitol in a committee hearing.

Miller said he is confident Adair is a good fit for his new CEO and president role.

Just from what I saw of him testifying on behalf of this project that he was working on, I was very impressed with the way he presented the project and from what I know about the organization, it seems to be a good fit, Miller said. Im proud of him for this significant accomplishment.

And while hes in Minneapolis, helping build the community, he still hasnt forgotten the support of his two hometowns to the south.

I think it all goes back to people; thats really the heart of it, Mosley said. I get weekly conversations with people in both communities that are still so supportive.

I just think that they were supportive. They created the conditions, they told me that they believed in me, they saw promise. Adair Mosley, on teachers at St. Charles and Winona high schools
Baraboo police on Sunday arrested an assault suspect who they say fled the scene of an incident the previous day.

At 7:37 p.m. Saturday, police officers and a Baraboo District Ambulance Service crew responded to a report of an assault on Seventh Avenue. Their investigation found a 17-year-old female was assaulted by someone she knew. The suspect had fled the scene on foot.

Police issued a news release Saturday stating they wanted to speak with Paul A. Williams, 32, of Baraboo. The Baraboo Police Department provided a detailed description of Williams and asked citizens to call 911 if they spotted him. They advised against approaching Williams.

Sunday afternoon, police announced Williams had turned himself in at the Sauk County Sheriffs Office. The investigation remains active. Charges are pending, as Baraboo police will refer the case to the Sauk County District Attorneys Office.

Anyone with information on this incident or other crimes should contact local law enforcement or Sauk County Crime Stoppers at 888-TIP-SAUK (847-7285).
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaigns Matt Rothschild hit the nail on the head with his commentary just before Christmas in which he called state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald schoolyard bullies.

That these so-called leaders are bullies is nothing new. The two Republicans  in cahoots with their slippery governor, Scott Walker, and the hyper-partisan attorney general, Brad Schimel  have spent the past several years shirking any personal responsibility for the corruption that surrounds them by unleashing smokescreens to hide their malfeasance.

Razzle dazzle em and theyll never catch wise, was shyster lawyer Billy Flynns advice to accused murderer Roxie Hart in the Broadway hit Chicago, a scene that could have been written for the fair-haired cabal that runs Wisconsin government for the benefit of those who fork over the largest campaign donations.

What prompted Rothschilds commentary was Vos and Fitzgeralds power play to attempt to force two civil service members of the states Elections and Ethics commissions to resign over their roles with the old Government Accountability Board in questioning campaign fundraising on the part of Walker that precipitated a John Doe investigation.

Vos and Fitzgerald, thanks to their control of state government and political soulmates on the state Supreme Court and in the attorney generals office, managed to cleverly muzzle the investigation. The only glitch for the cabal was that some John Doe documents found their way into the newspaper The Guardian. That prompted a fishing expedition by Schimel, who couldnt find the fish, but to save face issued a flawed report in December to condemn a couple of career civil service workers for lax security of the documents.

Hence, the frustrated schoolyard bullies pounced, needing to exact a pound of flesh from anyone who disagrees with them. Then add state Sen. Leah Vukmir, whose legislative career has long involved doing the bidding of political high rollers, to the mix and youve got a smokescreen so thick that a first-rate sorcerer would be impressed. Vukmirs been so abused by the John Doe authorities who captured some of her personal emails when they went looking for campaign finance violations that someone needs to be sent to jail. Funny, we didnt hear much from the right-wing politico when Hillary Clintons emails were snatched by the authorities, including ones in which she and daughter Chelsea discussed wedding plans.

Lets be honest here.

All this faux outrage on the part of Wisconsin GOP kingpins these past several years has been a clever way to mask the obvious: Their operatives, especially Scott Walker during the 2012 recall election, brazenly skirted the states campaign finance laws, and had the John Doe been allowed to dig deeper, several may have wound up being indicted.

If Schimel were any kind of law enforcement officer and not a pawn in the pocket of his fellow Republicans, he would have launched his own investigation into what the John Doe records revealed. For starters, how a Texas lead-paint billionaire donated $750,000 to Walker et al to get legislation passed shielding him from liability for causing brain damage in young kids.

Or the $1.2 million to the Republican governor from the mining giant Gogebic Taconite to get the states mining rules rewritten. Or the plan to shake down right-wingers like the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to funnel millions more into campaign coffers that ultimately would help Walkers election campaign.

The John Doe documents printed in The Guardian were eye-openers into how low this administration will stoop to gain an unfair advantage, regardless of the law.

So its no wonder Walker and his minions worked overtime to change the subject and now, on the cusp of an election year, they want to make villains of the very people who cared enough about Wisconsins political integrity to ask some questions. Why, for instance, did Walker feel a need to raise nearly a half-million dollars to hire Chicago defense lawyers? Just in case?

The aim ought to be the restoration of fair and honest government in Wisconsin, starting with the funding of our political campaigns.

But that would be too much to ask of schoolyard bullies.
The 747 entered commercial airline service in 1970. On Jan. 3, Delta Airlines flew its 747 to retirement in a boneyard in Arizona, north of Tuscon. The supersonic transports like the Concorde were to be the planes of the future. The 747 outlasted the Concorde and will still be on cargo hauling service for the foreseeable future due to the expansion of e-commerce. But, as of Jan. 3, there will be no 747 hauling passengers as part of the United States airline fleet. It is the end of an era.
Three people were injured Monday after a fire broke out on the roof of Trump Tower in New York City, authorities said.

The Fire Department of New York said the fire was in the building's heating, ventilation and air conditioning unit and is now under control.

The injuries were to a firefighter who was hurt when debris fell on him, an engineer who attempted to put out the fire with an extinguisher and inhaled smoke, and another civilian whose injuries were not immediately disclosed, the FDNY said.

None of the injuries were life-threatening. The two civilians were treated at the scene and refused further medical aid, the FDNY said.

Ken Reilly, a spokesman for the department, said the fire was reported shortly before 7 a.m. ET. It took about an hour to take control of the blaze, FDNY Manhattan Borough Commander Roger Sakowich said.

Sakowich said there were no smoke or fire conditions inside the building but authorities are investigating to see if there is any damage. The building wasn't evacuated during the incident, the FDNY said.

This story has been updated to reflect the latest information from the FDNY.

CNN's Sarah Jorgensen and Kristina Sgueglia contributed to this report.
For dozens of kids and adults, 2018 started at noon on Saturday in the Portage Public Library.

The first Saturday of the month at the library has long been set aside for a Family Fun Event, for children (mostly age 12 and younger) and the adults in their lives to join in intergenerational activities, with help from pre-teen and teenage volunteers.

But Saturday marked the first time that a Family Fun Event consisted of a New Years party.

As Childrens Librarian Dawn Foster led the group in counting down the last 10 seconds before noon, youngsters wearing hand-made, hand-decorated New Year crowns readied their horns and noisemakers  including the kind with the rolled-up paper tube that blows out (in the words of one boy in attendance) just like an iguanas tongue.

Instead of champagne, there was a hot chocolate bar, where one of the available additives was peppermint marshmallows.

Instead of Auld Lang Syne, there was a CD of folk songs like Oh Susanna and Oleanna.

And instead of resolutions, there was an opportunity for children of all ages to write about what they look forward to in 2018.

Its always hands-on, Foster said. And we always have a writing activity. This is very important, even for the little ones.

For the writing activity, 7-year-old Kitana Nation made a beeline for the crayons and paper.

Sledding was what she said she looked forward to, and her grandmother, Sandy Becker of Westfield, was right there to help with letter formation.

Remember, Becker said, a b has a belly.

Fifteen-month-old Vincent Poore is at the age when hes catching on that crayons are not food. With a crayon in each little fist and some help from his mom, Jamie Poore of Portage, Vincent decorated his own construction-paper New Year crown.

For Domanick Vogel, 6, of Portage, the crown looked better upside down. So thats how he wore it as he selected a handful of books to check out.

Domanick and his 4-year-old sister, Cassadi, worked together on decorating their familys memory jar. Foster said the jars are intended to be places where members of a household can deposit, throughout the year, the memories that they write down on little slips of paper.

When New Years Eve rolls around again, she said, the family members can open the jar and look back on their best memories of the old year.

On her memory jar, Sadie Nummacher affixed the initials of every member of her family.

And she already had a memory to put in the jar. Her fifth birthday was last Tuesday, and she was celebrating it at the library.

Youngsters and adults also worked together on decorating dragonflies made of flat wooden spoon-shaped sticks. Or, they played games like ring toss, beanbag toss and the classic stocking-foot game of agility, Twister.

The key idea behind Family Fun Events, Foster said, is intergenerational interaction, and an opportunity for adults  especially those who work on weekdays  to go to the library with children.

Next months event is called Dad and Donuts, and its focus will be on the significant men in childrens lives, and the stories they tell. That will happen from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Childrens Program Area.
Erin Foley says shes history.

Doug Klapper, chairman of the city of Portages Historic Preservation Commission, says hell believe it when he sees a resignation letter from Foley, who says shes been on the commission since 2008.

But if Foley follows through with her vow that last weeks meeting will be her last one, then the commission lacks a quorum, and wont be able to meet or to carry out any planned activities  including an array of events to celebrate Historic Preservation Month in May.

With just four members  Klapper, Foley, Kristin Droste and Jessica Lamb  the Historic Preservation Commission, which is supposed to have seven members, has a quorum if, and only if, all four members show up at a meeting.

The loss of just one current member, Klapper said, would mean no quorum, no meetings, and no coloring book depicting historic Portage buildings for Historic Preservation Month.

I dont know where were at now, Klapper said.

After Wednesdays meeting had adjourned, Foley said she didnt intend to return for future meetings, and Droste indicated that she, too, would like to wind down her involvement on the commission.

During the meeting, commissioners talked at some length about the challenges of participation, including the time commitment, which Droste said can be daunting for people who have day jobs and who cant always devote time to the first-Wednesday-of-the-month evening meetings, which lately have run about two hours.

But Foley said theres another issue thats bothering her: the recent proposal to appoint a 17-year-old Portage High School junior, Crystal Thom, to the commission.

A person who is not old enough to vote, Foley said, should not be allowed to be a voting member of a government body that makes decisions affecting peoples lives. And the citys ordinances do not provide for appointing non-voting members to any city board or commission.

The proposal to appoint Thom is on hold at the moment, Klapper said.

But because every decision made by the commission can be appealed to the Portage Common Council, theres no reason why a person who has not attained the age of majority cannot be part of the decision-making process, he said.

Klapper noted that a quorum of the Historic Preservation Commission is calculated based on the provision in the ordinance that it has seven members  meaning that four constitutes a quorum, no matter how many people are currently appointed to the commission.

At the commissions meeting on Wednesday, members set in motion an array of plans for Historic Preservation Month, including not only the coloring book, but also a tour of historic churches, a cemetery walk and a scavenger hunt of historic building features.

None of that will happen, Klapper said, unless the commission attains or maintains a quorum.

The principal work of the Historic Preservation Commission, Klapper said, entails determining whether a particular location within the city limits should be listed on the citys register of historic places  and, once that designation is made, deciding whether a proposed use of city-designated historic property is historically appropriate.

Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, noted that the Portage Historic Preservation Commission is far from alone in facing difficulties maintaining a quorum.

I know of other communities where there are gaps and vacancies on boards, commissions and even city councils, he said. Finding citizens with the time and interest to serve is a chronic problem, not just in this state. And one of the ways to address that problem is to be creative.

Being creative, Deschane said, could include allowing minors to serve on non-elected bodies that do not make binding decisions. Many municipal boards and commissions mainly make recommendations, on which the Common Council would have the final say. The council would, of course, have to be composed of qualified electors, which would mean someone who is not yet old enough to vote could not be on a city council or village board in Wisconsin.

Deschane said it all comes down to whats in the local ordinances.

And, since Portages ordinances doesnt specifically prohibit minors from being appointed to boards and commissions, Klapper said, theres no reason why a teen could not be on the Historic Preservation Commission.

Mayor Rick Dodd makes appointments to city boards and commissions, including those composed partly or primarily of people who are not on the Portage Common Council.

Dodd told the Historic Preservation Commission on Wednesday that hes received an inquiry from someone interested in participating in the commission.

But neither a proposed appointment, nor a letter of resignation from Foley, is included in the packet or agenda for next Thursdays semi-monthly Portage Common Council meeting.
The students raised the money by making and selling over 150 tubs of sugar cookie dough for the holidays. This donation, doubled to become $750 by another generous donor, will help to enable Positively Portage! to become a force for civic improvements in the Portage area for years to come. The students also benefited from this donation by learning how they can work together to help make a positive change in their community.
While Reedsburg has had a library for over 100 years, the Reedsburg Public Library will celebrate the 20th anniversary of what some people still call its new building on Vine Street.

Since the building opened, Library Director Sue Kucher said close to 5 million items have been circulated from the library. While Kucher said the library will keep a close eye on the numbers this month to see if they reach the 5 million mark, the library will mainly celebrate by spreading awareness of the several programs and services they offer the community.

One of the events is an open house Jan. 21. Kucher said the event is from noon to 3 p.m. on a Sunday to provide awareness the library is open Sunday afternoons.

We like to call attention to the fact we are here on Sundays, Kucher said. A lot of people dont realize we are open here on Sunday afternoons.

Kucher said food will be served at the open house and tours will be given of the library hope to bring awareness to the programs and services the library offers like audiobooks, magazines, and programs for all ages from Babygarten to Homeschooling programs and ASL Signing Sessions and Titles and Tea Book Discussions. Other events the library will host will be a book sale Jan. 25 through Jan. 28.

I think a lot of people even those who use the library regularly there are programs and service that they might not realize we have to offer, Kucher said.

Clare Cameron recently moved to Reedsburg last summer and said the library does a good job with the childrens program for her four-year-old daughter, Autumn.

It gives her a place to get her energy out, Cameron said. Theres always something for her to do and she loves it.

Kucher said ones aspect that has changed drastically since the library opened has been the technology portion of the library. Kucher said when the library was first built; it was constructed to have wired PC workstations. In 2005, wireless network was installed in the library. In addition, the library also assists those who need help using their smart phone or tablet.

A lot of people there kids have given them an iPad or a tablet of some sort or an e-reader for Christmas, Kucher said. They can bring that in and we can help them get on the way to using that independently.

When the library first opened, over 1,000 books were passed in a line of 225 volunteers what Kucher called a firemans pass from the Carnegie Library to the current building, symbolizing the library strong connection to the community. Since then, Kucher said the connection between the community and the library has only gotten stronger.

Were more and more of a community hub, were a place people can come and meet up with one another whether its for tutoring or to see friendly faces at the library, Kucher said.
Kelda Roys says emphasis on family issues, pro-choice stance set her apart from other Dems
Reedsburgs Tim Asp was in the financial industry for 36 years before he decided to retire last March. However, two financial advisors continue the tradition of building strong relationships with their clients, especially during the start of 2018.

Along with retirement, Asp called 2017 an eventful year with getting married and traveling.

It took a little getting used too, Asp said about retirement. Drinking coffee for an hour in the morning is nice. The phone doesnt ring. But theres sometimes you miss it, like the people and the business.

Asp worked for a bank before becoming an independent financial advisor through Packerland Brokerage Services in 1999 and started A.S.P Financial in Reedsburg. After his retirement, he signed a succession agreement with Bob Pulaski, a certified financial planner who has been with Packerland Brokerage since 1999 and Micah Snyder, an investment adviser representative who has been serving clients in the Spring Green/Sauk Prairie area since 2010 and joined Packerland Brokerage in 2016.

Asp said he built a strong cliental over the years he was in the industry through building trust with his clients and anyone who walks into his firm. Snyder said him and Pulaski are working on continuing to build those relationships.

Its the whole idea of really getting to know them and friendships start to develop from that, Snyder said. People really start to trust you because its their livelihood you are dealing with.

Asp said during his time at A.S.P Financial, he was known as the pizza guy, not only because he would buy dinner for potential and current clients to meet with them in their homes to talk about finances, but also because of his willingness to work with clients schedules to talk about the importance of finance. While Pulaski and Snyder havent been buying pizzas, they continue to provide the same one-on-one experience with their clients, getting to know them and their financial goals in life.

We go to the companies and we meet with every individual, Pulaski said. Its not group meetings, its one on one. So everything we do is one on one and we do whats in the best interest of that client.

Snyder said a lot of his meetings with client will take place after the work day where he will go to a clients house and talk to them about their financial goals.

You cant expect someone thats 40 years old that has two kids and a wife, and the wife and the husband both work to take a day off to meet, Snyder said. Going to them after theyve settled the kids down and ate dinner and meeting with them at their kitchen table is a lot easier for them than it is for us.

Throughout 2018, Snyder and Pulaski plan to continue to keep building relationships with the people they meet, while helping them navigate through the financial world.

Trusting someone to help you do that is where we set ourselves from other advisers, Snyder said.
Sarah Puckett was born in February and Tim Kubichek was born in March. She grew up in Virginia and he was from Colorado, which meant birthday pool parties werent an option.

Its a more moderate climate than here, but still, you cant go swimming, she said.

Shortly after this Madison couple started dating, they began visiting a Wisconsin Dells water park every year to give Puckett the birthday pool party she always wanted. This tradition has been going on for six or seven years and theyve celebrated at the Kalahari, the Wilderness and Mt. Olympus. Its like the Las Vegas of water parks, she said.

Puckett and Kubichek had to do their annual Dells trip a little earlier this year because theyre embarking on their second trip around the world starting Jan. 10. for 20 months. They said this is their honeymoon since they got married April 22, 2017.

We really thrive off of that energy that comes from new friendships, new food and new culture, Puckett said.

In January alone, theyll be going to Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Macau.

Tim and I probably plan more than the average backpacker, Puckett said. They started by selecting locations they hadnt been to on their first voyage. Then, they picked places they wanted to return to.

Next, they determined how much they were willing to spend and how much time they could take off. She used a website where you can type in the country youre going to and it lists average expenditures per day broken down into categories like food and lodging.

Its like a puzzle, Puckett said. Youre piecing together where you want to go, how much time you want to spend there and how much would it cost.

Puckett said shes very excited to explore Africa more. Morocco was the only African country they visited on their first trip. I really love wildlife and getting to observe wildlife in their natural habitats, she said. Theyre road tripping from Kenya to South Africa, visiting national parks along the way.

When you travel, youre forced outside of your comfort zone and youre confronted with ideas and cultures that are unfamiliar, she said. My capacity to love and empathize with others grew.

You can easily go to Mexico and spend all of your time at an all-inclusive resort and have no idea what Mexico actually is, Kubichek said. Or you can travel like Sarah and I do and immerse yourself with the people to learn more about the world.

The couple sold their cars, rented their places to tenants and saved as much as possible leading up to the expedition. They dont have cable or internet and wont buy new clothes unless its for the trip. They each are taking only two backpacks. You do a lot of laundry, he said.

They will be traveling to 50 countries on six continents with a two or three week break in December.

Theyll travel South America, Europe and Southeast Asia on their own and book guides in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia like India and Sri Lanka, they said.

We are taking a lesson learned from our 2014 trip, Kubichek said. They were frustrated when they visited Morocco without a guide. He said he didnt get to learn as much about the culture and Puckett said they had a lack of awareness of social norms.

They started planning this trip right when they got back from their first, which took 11 months in 2014.

After completing that one, its kind of an addiction, Kubichek said.

They visited 23 countries and all seven continents.

When she approached me and was like hey, I want to travel the world, I was a little bit hesitant, Kubichek said. He agreed to go with her for the first six months to South America and Europe but warned that he might go home while she continued on to Southeast Asia.

By the time we were three months into the trip, I knew I was committed to the whole thing, he said.

Puckett said a lot of research went into the initial trip. They looked at travel blogs and others itineraries.

Antarctica was the place Puckett wanted to go to the most after watching Frozen Planet, a British nature documentary series. Kubichek said he wasnt sold on it immediately because it would take about a third of their total budget to go to Antarctica for two weeks. But Puckett convinced him.

It ended up being our favorite place we went out of the entire year that we traveled, she said. Theres no human footprint there, aside from small science research bases.

Its like watching a nature program, but youre there, Kubichek said. They saw penguins, seals and humpback whales up close. They plan on going back for their Fifth Anniversary.

Its a blessing to be able to take off a year to travel the world, he said. The fact that our jobs support us doing this twice only three years later is ridiculous.

Theyve been consultants in the electronic medical record industry since 2015, when they got back from their initial trip. Every week, they were traveling for work, so theyre using those points and miles to help with expenses. They were able to use points to cover their flights from here to Japan. After using their hotel points, theyll stay in Airbnbs, hostels and other hotels.

To follow their journey, visit www.our21stcenturyodyssey.com.
Wits produces ready-for-work graduates

Wits graduates voted most employable in SA by directors and recruiters.

The Global Employability Survey and Ranking 2017, which measures the employability of graduates and employer satisfaction with graduates, has found that directors and talent management specialists are highly satisfied with Wits University graduates.

Polling the views of respondents from 22 countries, the survey focuses on the practical skills of ready-for-work graduates developed by universities. The respondents were asked which of their local universities produce the best graduates.

Ranked at 150, Wits is the only university in South Africa and in Africa to make it to the top 150, the cut-off line by the rankings.

The 7th annual ranking was published in the Times Higher Education, and commissioned by French HR consultancy, Emerging, with the assistance of Trendence.

Wits Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, Professor Andrew Crouch welcomed the news: The employability of our graduates and their preparedness for the workplace are the true measure of the quality of our institution. As a University, we pride ourselves on equipping our students with a range of skills that make them valuable players in the workplace from day one.

We will continue to develop graduate-ness attributes in our students by providing them with the right balance between academics, co-curricula studies, and cutting-edge programmes that are in line with the demands of the changing world.

Research output at Wits has catapulted by over 45% in the last four years, with over 85% of Wits academics publishing in quality, international journals.

This is the very core of why universities matter  we create new knowledge and the high level skills required to address the challenges that societies face today, but also equip graduates with the skills to tackle problems that may arise in the future, concludes Crouch.

This ranking complements other major global rankings focusing on the research and stature of the University:

Centre for World University Rankings

Wits University is ranked #number1 on the continent and placed in the top 0.7 percent of leading universities in world. The CWUR measures the quality of education, alumni employment, quality of academics, publications, and the number of international patents, amongst other indicators.

Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai ranking)

Wits University retained top spot in Africa in the latest Shanghai ranking. The University had three subjects ranked in the TOP 100 subject list and nine others in the TOP 500 list.

Times Higher Education

This ranking evaluates universities across their core missions, including teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. Wits placed in the Top 300.

QS World University Rankings

These rankings compare and rank the worlds top 800 tertiary institutions. Wits is placed in the Top 400.

Highly Cited Researchers

Paleoanthropologist Professor Lee Berger and microbiologist Professor Lynn Morris were featured in the Highly Cited Researchers annual list compiled by Clarivate Analytics that recognises leading researchers in the sciences and social sciences globally.
Bill Berry is a self-employed writer and editor who contributes to state and national publications. His Capital Times columns cover an array of topics, but he specializes in conservation, agriculture and sustainable land use.




China News on Women





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Steam generators in place at Hualong One unit

08 January 2018

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The third and final steam generator has been installed at the demonstration Hualong One reactor being constructed as unit 5 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in China's Fujian province. The reactor is expected to start up next year.

Installation of the third steam generator at Fuqing 5 (Image: CNNC)

The steam generator - weighing 365 tonnes and over 21 metres in length - was yesterday hoisted onto a horizontal gantry platform some 16.5 metres above the ground, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) announced. The component was subsequently moved into reactor's containment building through the main equipment transportation channel. Once there, it was lifted into the vertical position using a specially designed tool and put in place.

The first steam generator was installed at Fuqing 5 on 10 November. The second was put in place on 24 December, the same day that CNNC announced the welding of the main pipework of the unit had officially started.

Steam generators are used in pressurised water reactors (PWRs) to transfer heat from the reactor coolant into water in a secondary circuit, producing the steam used to power the electricity-generating turbines. Each steam generator contains thousands of kilometres of tubes through which hot water flows.

The ZH-65-type steam generators were independently designed by the China Nuclear Power Institute and manufactured by Dongfang Electric.

In November 2014, CNNC announced that the fifth and sixth units at Fuqing will use the domestically-developed Hualong One PWR design, marking its first deployment. The company had previously expected to use the ACP1000 design for those units, but plans were revised in line with a re-organisation of the Chinese nuclear industry. China's State Council gave final approval for construction of Fuqing units 5 and 6 in mid-April 2015.

The pouring of first concrete for Fuqing 5 began in May 2015, marking the official start of construction of the unit. Construction of unit 6 began in December 2015. The dome of unit 5 was installed on the containment building in May last year. Fuqing 5 and 6 are scheduled to be completed in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

Construction of two Hualong One units is also under way at China General Nuclear's Fangchenggang plant in Guangxi province. Those units are also expected to start up in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Chinese plant produces AP1000 reload assemblies

08 January 2018

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China's first AP1000 fuel production line has now produced 64 sets of fuel assemblies ready for the first reloading of the Sanmen AP1000 units. Both Sanmen AP1000s are scheduled to begin operating later this year.

The Chinese-made AP1000 fuel assemblies (Image: CNNC)

"The specifications of the components met the technical requirements and provide guarantee for the subsequent safe and stable operation of the Sanmen nuclear power plant," China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said today.

Westinghouse is providing the first cores and some re-loads for the four AP1000s under construction at Sanmen and Haiyang. However, China's goal of self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel supply means it wants to manufacture as much as possible in future.

In a $35 million deal announced in January 2011, Westinghouse agreed to "design, manufacture and install fuel fabrication equipment" for CNNC subsidiary China North Nuclear Fuel, with the aim of supplying subsequent fuel for the Sanmen and Haiyang units as well as the country's future fleet of AP1000s.

Construction of the AP1000 fuel line - which has the capacity to produce 400 tonnes per year - at the Baotou fuel fabrication facility in Inner Mongolia began in March 2012. Qualification of the production line was completed in October 2016. Ahead of full production, two sets of dummy fuel assemblies were made to verify the production process.

Westinghouse issued the production line with the qualification certificate on 19 January 2017 and the plant was formally put into production on 16 June. The first domestically fabricated AP1000 fuel assembly came off the production line on 14 July.

On 14 January 2017, China North Nuclear Fuel signed a refueling package procurement contract with the Sanmen plant. Under the contract, the production line will supply batches of fuel assemblies for the second, third and fourth fuel cycles of Sanmen units 1 and 2.

Sanmen 1 is expected to be the first Westinghouse AP1000 to begin operating later this year, with Sanmen 2 also set to start up in 2018.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Editor Emeritus Dave Zweifel has been with The Capital Times since he graduated from UW-Madison in 1962, serving as the paper's editor in chief from 1983 to 2008. He was president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council for 15 years, served as a Pulitzer Prize judge in 2000 and 2001, and named to the Wisconsin Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2011. A native of New Glarus, Wis., where he grew up on a farm, he serves on several non-profit boards and is a military veteran, having served on active duty as a field artillery officer in the early 1960s and for 26 years in the Wisconsin Army National Guard where he retired as a colonel in 1993.
A Chinese school official who moved to the United States for retirement was shot dead by a teenager while he was taking out trash from his home, according to police in Tennessee.

74-year-old Ruxin Wang was shot dead while taking the garbage out of his house in Nashville.

His wife of 48 years was the one who discovered his body.

Witnesses reported seeing four teens wearing hoodies running from the scene.

So far, police in Tennessee have arrested two out of the four suspects who are accused of killing Wang.

The suspects in custody were identified as 16-year-old Myeisha Brown and a 14-year-old boy.

Brown has been charged with one count of criminal homicide.

Wang moved to the United States two months before being shot after retiring from work at the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Wang moved with his wife from China to Nashville in search of a better life and to be close to his son, Wang Yun, who moved to the United States in 2000.

Yun was a devoted son and he traveled with his parents around the world.

He is devastated by the loss of his father.

aYou look at the Las Vegas shooting and you look at the Orlando shooting, and you think it is so far away from you, but itas not,a Yun said. aI couldnat imagine it could happen to our family, but it did,a he added.

People in China expressed shock and are upset over the senseless death of the beloved man.

aWhat a tragedy, this man spent his whole life educating Chinese children and teaching them morality just to move to the U.S. and get shot by American children,a one person wrote on social media.
A young man from the United States went crazy at an airport in Thailand after swallowing too many sex enhancement pills, according to police.

The Saku Police Station said that they have arrested 27-year-old Steve Cho of New York after being accused of stripping naked and throwing feces at airport staff and passengers.

Cho is facing charges of indecent exposure, criminal damage, and assault.

According to the police investigation, Cho came to Thailand for a vacation.

On Thursday, at around 11:00 p.m., Cho arrived at the Phuket International Airport in order to fly to Incheon, South Korea.

At the airport, Cho stripped naked and walked around in the terminal in front of staff and passengers.

He then defecated and threw the feces at the airport staff and passengers while screaming.

Cho was detained by six security guards.

He was taken to a lounge, where officials tried to calm him down.

When Cho continued to act out, police were called and he was arrested.

During questioning, Cho told police that he swallowed a large amount of Viagra pills and passed out.

Cho promised to pay for all the damage he caused at the airport.
A woman from the United States who visited New Zealand to attend a festival was shocked when a man approached her from behind and grabbed her breasts.

20-year-old Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller attended the Rhythm & Vines festival, which is held annually in Gisborne.

Thousands of people flock to the festival to enjoy music and wine.

Anello-Kitzmiller, who is fighting for the right of women to walk topless just like men, attended the festival and walked around without a shirt or bra.

Some body paint and glitter covered her breasts.

Suddenly, a young man approached her from behind and grabbed her breasts.

Anello-Kitzmiller became extremely angry at the man for violating her body and attacked him.

A video that was uploaded to Facebook shows Anello-Kitzmiller slapping the man and beating him over the head.

Anello-Kitzmillers friend, Kiri-Ann Hatfield, poured a drink on the head of the man.

Anello-Kitzmiller later complained that as soon as she took her shirt and bra off, people were yelling at her.

She said that people called her disgusting, and some shouted at her to put on a shirt.

Anello-Kitzmiller was even more surprised that most of the people who became angry with her walking around topless were women.

Anello-Kitzmiller, who lives in Portland, said that she stayed topless overnight because she did not want to let those angry people win.

The video of the incident went viral on the Internet.
On Friday, it emerged that the French Democratic Labor Federation (CFDT) union had approved a base contract for chemical industries letting employers pay workers less than the minimum wage. This is another application of the Socialist Party's (PS) labor law and the labor decrees of former Economy Minister and current French President Emmanuel Macron, backed by the European Union. It makes clear that their policy is to trample on basic social rights won by the working class over generations of struggle in the 20th century.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the French Managers Confederation (CFE) and Workers Force (FO) issued a statement Friday reporting that the CFDT had signed an industry-wide contract on December 21 for a 1.1 percent wage increase paid in two increments. It would set the lowest hourly salary at 9.82 on January 1 and then 9.86 on April 1. Both are less than the 2018 minimum wage (SMIC) of 9.88, set by a 1.24 percent increase approved on December 15, before the CFDT signed the chemical contract.

Using the PS labor law and the Macron decrees, the state, the oil bosses and the CFDT are concocting a pseudo-legal framework to ram through drastic cuts to workers' wages and conditions. Since 2009, the cumulative impact of EU wage and pension cuts in Greece has been to slash incomes by 40 percent. Now, similar attacks are being prepared against workers in Europe's largest economies.

According to the CGT-CFE-FO statement, the CFDT contract will integrate into the calculation of the minimum wage bonuses paid for seniority and working conditions (work at night, on Sundays and holidays, etc). Up to now, such bonuses, representing up to 35 percent of total pay, were paid on top of a base salary at least equal to the SMIC minimum wage. But with the new contract, bosses can count those bonuses as part of the sub-SMIC wage agreed to by the CFDT, paving the way for wage cuts of 35 percent or more.

This announcement came only days after reports that automaker PSA Peugeot-Citroen plans to use a provision of Macron's labor decrees to impose union-approved mass job cuts at its French plants, while it slashes thousands of jobs at its Opel-Vauxhall subsidiaries in Germany and Britain. The goal is to move PSA onto a largely temp workforce paid at the minimum wage or less.

These measures are a warning to the working class across Europe and internationally. The only way to defend wages and jobs is to reject the pseudo-legal framework erected by the EU and the ruling class, and various bought-and-paid-for union bureaucracies. As anger rises in France against the president of the rich, workers face the task of organizing independently of the trade unions for a political struggle against the illegitimate measures imposed by companies and national states.

The experience of the French labor law shows that such struggles will bring the working class into an irreconcilable conflict with the state, with revolutionary implications. The PS imposed the labor law in 2016, in the face of over 70 percent popular opposition, by using the state of emergency to mount vicious police repression of mass protests against the law. Backed by petty-bourgeois parties like the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and Unsubmissive France (LFI), the CGT capitulated in the face of PS threats to ban its protests and called off further action against the law.

Then Macronelected by default in a run-off pitting him against neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen, and whose parliamentary majority emerged from elections in which less than half of French voters participatedimposed decrees preparing a historic assault on the working class. Now, having handed over trillions of euros to the banks and the financial aristocracy since the 2008 crash, French and European authorities aim to pauperize broad sections of the working class.

Such policies have not a shred of democratic legitimacy. Since the September German elections produced a hung parliament, European officials have been promising that a Paris-Berlin axis will oversee a new dawn for Europe. Martin Schulz, the defeated candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)which worked with the PS, the Italian Democratic Party and others to formulate the French labor lawsaid last month that he was fighting for a European framework for a minimum wage.

In fact, the CFDT chemical industry contract shows how the PS and Macron, together with social democratic parties across Europe, conspired behind the backs of the people to eliminate the minimum wage with the stroke of a pen.

The French chemical contract uses two key provisions of the PS labor law and Macron decrees: first, industries and firms can obtain exceptions to the national Labor Code; second, employers can impose a contract if they can obtain the agreement of unions representing 30 percent of the workers. So, with just over 33 percent of the chemical industry workforce, the CFDT approved a contract granting an exception to Article 141 of the Labor Code. That is the article that mandates the SMIC minimum wage in France.

Similar end runs around minimum wage laws are doubtless being prepared by firms and industries across France and beyond.

Workers can place no confidence in the CGT, FO or other union bureaucracies critical of the CFDT contract to organize opposition to the chemical industry contract. The PS labor law and Macron decrees provide a juridical expression to their common evolution into organs of the state, financed by the employers, which have lost their working class base and instead serve to plan and provide pseudo-legal sanctions for attacks on their own members.

Their criticisms of the CFDT are factional maneuvers primarily designed to shield them from rising social anger in the working class, while they pursue a nationalist policy of trying to boost French competitiveness on the world market at workers' expense.

All of them are hostile to mobilizing the working class politically against the historically regressive policies of Macron and the EU. As it joins FO in criticizing the CFDT chemical contract, the CGT is provocatively denouncing a rail strike against job cuts called by FO in southern France as a populist gimmick that is counterproductive because it aims to foment hatred against the rail workers. As for FO, much of its leadership, including FO chief Jean-Claude Mailly, openly endorsed Macron's decrees last autumn.

The only way forward is the construction of independent workers' organizations and committees in workplaces and working class neighborhoods to discuss and mobilize opposition to the various attacks emerging from Macron's decrees and approved by the unions. A key element of their work would be to coordinate their struggles internationally with those of workers facing similar job and wage cuts across Europe.

This raises the the urgent necessity of building a new leadership in the working class: sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country, fighting austerity and dictatorship. The ICFI will fight to promote the growth of independent workers' organizations and link them to an international socialist movement to take state power and replace the bankrupt EU with the United Socialist States of Europe.
The recent severe cold spell in large parts of the US will be remembered most due to the frequent reports of homeless citizens freezing to death, because they could not find housing, or even emergency shelter. Half a million homeless are living on the streets of major US cities this winter, according to official counts.

Millions more face a precarious housing situation, threatened not only by a lost job or illness, events that often lead to a foreclosure or eviction, but a general decline in living standards related to widening income inequality in the US.

Precipitous increases in rent and stagnant and declining wages are creating an unsustainable squeeze on lower income households. The number of those who must spend the majority of their monthly income on rent is rising and along with that the portion of the monthly income they spend on rent is rising too.

A December report on the housing crisis that appeared in a publication of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve, called FEDS Notes, reports on the distress for families in the lowest US income quintile brought on by a squeeze in monthly income from rising rents and stagnant or falling wages.

In general, these families earn under $25,000 annually. The lowest-paid fifth of US households includes workers making more than minimum wage. In Michigan a minimum wage job for a worker employed every week for the whole year yields about $18,000. Rent increases have rapidly and relentlessly outstripped stagnant or declining annual wages for workers at the lowest income levels.

Written by researchers from the US Federal Reserve and the Brookings Institution, the December report notes that the portion of monthly income that low-income households must spend on rent has been rising through the last several business cycles. Rent burdens have increased over the past 15 years, due to both increasing rents and decreasing incomes, they say.

The squeeze is relentless. Families at the bottom end of the pay scale have not been able to get out of the squeeze in the business recovery after a recession. They note: This increase in rent burdens over the past 15 years occurred through each business cycle period including both the period prior to the financial crisis (2000-2006), the economic downturn (2006-2009) and the subsequent recovery (2009-2015). Although rent-to income ratios are greatest among low-income households, the share of income spent on rent also rose among higher income renters.

They also explain the main economic sources of the plight of low-income renters: Of the overall decline in residual income since 2000, around two-thirds came from declines in income among renters and one third resulted from rising rents.

The FEDS Notes release in late December used statistics from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey. Their report provides a window into the desperate circumstances working class families, especially those at the low end of the income scale, now face when seeking housing.

They note the deterioration of renter families ability to cope with the ever-rising rents. The median renter in the lowest income quintile pays 56 percent of monthly income on rent, exceeding HUDs standard for rent burdened, paying more than 30 percent of income on rent and severe rent burdened, paying more than half of income for rent. Though the rent burden has increased at every income level, it is especially acute at the lower end of the US income scale, they say.

Such renters have little left for paying everything else, according to the report. In the lowest income quintile in the US a family has just $476 left after housing costs for all other basic needs, noting Census bureau estimates that a family needs nearly three times this$1,400for these basic needs.

Last fall Freddie Mac Multifamily presented detail that throws light on the trend of rising rents. Researchers there noted how rapidly rents in multi-family units they finance are going up. Increases on rents on existing properties in apartments were squeezing low-income renters, following a general trend in US rental housing reported elsewhere by housing advocacy groups.

The Federal Mortgage Home Loan Corporation (FMHLC) or Freddie Mac, is one of two major US housing finance entities, along with Fannie Mae.

Some sixty to eighty percent of affordable rental apartments in privately owned multi-family apartment buildings financed by mortgage lender Freddie Mac have been eliminated in the US since 2010.

Very low income households, used in the Freddie Mac report, are defined for various US government agencies as families making half or less than the median income in a particular geographical area. This is a step above HUDs Extremely Low Income designation, and falls in the same range as the lowest quintile households covered in the FEDS Notes report.

In the Detroit metropolitan area in 2016, very low income was about $24,000 for an individual renter. By comparison, extremely low income individuals have annual incomes of about $14,000.

Along with a dearth of building in the low-income rental marketmost new apartments are built and command rents only affordable to the much better offthe report notes that housing construction costs are also a factor and have been exacerbated by the hurricane destruction in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Freddie Mac researchers compiled figures back to 2010 on lending to multi-family projects, that is apartment buildings they financed twice during that period: [W]e analyzed the affordability of the exact same units at two different, but close, points in time.

Families denoted as VLI necessarily had not moved out as rents increased year by year. Instead the same population living in the buildings ended up paying what amount to unsustainable housing costs, paying rents exceeding the HUD affordability benchmark.

The Freddie Mac researchers used two sets of data to look into affordable housing for very low income renters. The first used internal numbers on a relatively small set of data to examine how it compared with overall trends in rental housing adversely impacting lowest income renters being reported elsewhere.

In the 97,000 rental units in multi-family buildings Freddie Mac financed in 2010 and then again in 2016, the percentage of units affordable for very low income households dropped by more than half, from 11.2 percent to 4.3 percent nationwide. These were refinances of the exact same units.

Some states were hit hard. For example, in Colorado in 2010 about a third32 percent of the 5,100 rental apartments financed with Freddie Mac loans were affordable for very low income households. By 2016 the same buildings were re-financed by the agency and only 7.5 percent of the very same apartments were VLI affordable.

An expanded part of their analysis looked at all multi-family housing projects they originated from 2010 to 2016 and found an even greater decline of 78 percent between 2010 and 2016 of apartments deemed affordable to very low-income renters when Freddie Mac lent to the owners. Rent increases had wiped out affordability at tens of thousands of units by 2016.

It is remarkable that warnings usually heard from housing agencies and advocacy groupsthat is groups dedicated to advocating for the vulnerableare the subject of earnest reports advanced by financial entities at the commanding heights of the US economy. The Federal Reserve is a key player in fueling the general investment frenzy leading to the stock market rise and contributing to driving up rents.

The few solutions being offered are less than inadequate. Freddie Mac indicates in its report that one approach to addressing the problem is to look to financing manufactured homesthat is, into one of the most dangerous housing options one can find! This parallels the sclerotic federal and state efforts, often advanced by sections of the Democratic Party, to provide funding for assistance. Even existing programs, woefully underfunded, face decimation under the Trump administration to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy.
Last week Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed suit against the budget chain Motel 6 for the systematic and daily practice of employees handing over guests personal information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities.

Ferguson told reporters that there were widespread practices at multiple Motel 6 locations where employees handed over the names, birthdates, driver's license numbers, license-plate numbers and room numbers of at least 9,000 guests to immigration officials, without warrants. The lawsuit, which was filed in King County Superior Court, claims the hotel chain violated state and federal laws that protect consumers and those that guard against discrimination, as well as the state constitution.

The lawsuit follows an investigation which began last September when Antonia Farzan, a reporter for the Phoenix News Times, found a pattern of arrests of at least 20 people by ICE at Motel 6 locations in the Phoenix area, revealing that motel employees were passing along guests information following a nightly audit.

When the story broke in September, Raiza Rehkoff, a spokesperson from G6 Hospitality, the Texas-based parent company of Motel 6, announced that the practices was implemented at the local level without the knowledge of senior management... When we became aware of it  it was discontinued.

The company then issued a directive to each of their 1,400 locations nationwide, making it clear that they are prohibited from voluntarily providing daily guest lists to ICE.

Washington State contests this. Motel 6 implied this was a local problem...We have found that is not true, said Attorney General Ferguson. It was not isolated to two motels in Phoenix, not by a long shot. The companys actions were methodical. They trained their new employees on how to do this, Ferguson said.

The lawsuit states that ICE agents would visit reception desks to obtain guest lists. The attendant would print out the list and pass it to the agent along with a law enforcement acknowledgment form for the agent to sign, confirming receipt of the information. This practice would sometimes occur daily. The suit notes that the south Everett location in Washington alone gave out the personal information 228 times in a 225-day period.

A front desk clerk told the New York Times, We send a report every morning to ICEall the names of everybody that comes in. Every morning at about 5 oclock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE. ICE officials then engage in whats referred to as a knock and talk, where agents knock on doors to speak to certain guests after theyve run background checks. All of this takes place without warrants.

Additionally, Ferguson stated that Motel 6 staffers told investigators that the ICE agents circled any Latino or Latina-sounding names on the guest registry, and returned to their vehicles to run background checks.

While details are still emerging of the degree to which the motel chain engaged in a systematic practice to support ICE agents, it is of note that G6 Hospitality is owned by The Blackstone Group L.P., one of the worlds largest private equity investment firms. Its founder, chairman, and CEO is Stephen Schwarzman, who chaired President Trumps short-lived Strategic and Policy Forum (February- August 2017), a business forum created to accelerate US economic growth and job creation in the United States, according to Trump. It cannot be ruled out that one of the initiatives of this group, in line with Trumps economic nationalism, was to assist authorities with deportations.

Seattle is among the so-called sanctuary cities that limit somewhat the degree to which local agencies comply with ICE agents. The designation of a sanctuary city is usually made by Democratic city officials who face a great amount of public pressure stemming from sizable immigrant populations to offer protections for the undocumented.

Last September, the Trump administration targeted sanctuary cities such as Seattle, New York, Denver, and Los Angeles and arrested nearly 500 undocumented immigrants over one weekend to send a message that there is no sanctuary for immigrants anywhere, referring to the raids as Operation Safe City.

In line with attempts to paint immigrants as criminals and to soften the public to violation of privacy, ICE spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe told the Wall Street Journal that the agency receives viable enforcement tips from a host of sources, while also mentioning that motels were frequently exploited by criminal organizations engaged in highly dangerous illegal enterprises, including human trafficking and human smuggling.

It is important to note that ICE is not a defendant in the Washington lawsuit and its actions with Motel 6 are proceeding undisputed. The gestapo-like agency acts with complete impunity. 2017 saw a brutal attack on immigrants with the rescinding of DACA, the issuance of a new Travel Ban, and the pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The Trump administration is seeking to cultivate authoritarian sentiments within the far-right base of his support, as well as to embolden the fascistic agents and operatives within ICE itself.

Further escalating the clampdown on immigration, legislation is expected early this year that will represent some of the most reactionary anti-immigrant measures since Japanese Internment during World War II.

Cloaked in the language of a DACA Deal, the legislation will be a wolf in sheeps clothing. While the specifics of the deal are still being discussed, Democrats will agree to measures which may include increased militarization at the border, caps on the numbers of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, as well as tightened limits for family members to petition their relatives for status in the US.

The clampdown on immigrants will not occur without significant backlash by the working class, students, and youth who overwhelmingly support immigrants. Indeed, this past week, UC Berkeley pre-law student Luis Mora was arrested by ICE officials in San Diego County. Within days, a page dedicated to raising funds for his release has been shared by 1,400 people and has raised thousands of dollars.

Public outrage over the disappearances of undocumented immigrants is a healthy sentiment, but it is not enough to protect the lives of millions of immigrants. The fight against deportations requires that this outrage be given political direction. It must be elevated to the fight to abolish the nation-state system and reorganize the world economy on a socialist basis, to meet human need and ensure the rights of all workers to move about the planet as they please.
The closing months of 2017 and the beginning of this year saw a wave of redundancies in the UK, totalling in the thousands, as major corporations and banks announced job losses. The layoffs are part of long-term cost cutting to downsize workforces and close factories and high street branches of supermarket and other retail chains.

Mass redundancies have also resulted from companies being driven into bankruptcy or near administration, as larger corporations strengthen their monopoly position under conditions of declining investment and markets.

 General Electric will cut 1,100 jobs from its UK power division, which produces wind turbines for energy generation. This represents a six percent reduction of its national workforce of 18,000, with the majority of job losses in Rugby and Stafford. This is part of a global restructuring program by the US company to shed 12,000 jobs.

 Britvic, the UKs second largest manufacturer of soft drinks, has announced the closure of its Norwich factory with the loss of around 240 jobs by the end of 2019. The Carrow Row Works is co-owned with Unilever, which is conducting a review of all options, including closure of the site, which has produced the world-famous Colmans Mustard brand from 1860. This will put 113 jobs at risk.

The company aims to transfer production of its Robinsons and Fruit Shoot brands to other sites in the UK. Significant productivity and efficiency savings, executives said, would result from transferring production to its sites in Rugby, east London and Leeds.

 Sainsburys, the UKs second largest supermarket, is cutting 2,000 jobs, including 1,400 payroll and HR staff and 600 support staff. The company, which employs 119,000 full-time workers nationally, has a three-year plan to cut costs by 500 million by March 2018 and has employed McKinsey consultancy to manage head count reduction.

 Tesco, the largest UK supermarket had already announced 2,300 jobs cuts, which include one in four of its head office staff and 1,100 at its call centre in Cardiff, which is due for closure this year.

 Asda has plans to make 800 workers redundant or accept pay cuts. Already this year the supermarket chain, owned by the worlds largest retailer, Wal-Mart, has made hundreds of redundancies at 18 stores described as underperforming.

 Toys R Us UK is to close 26 of its stores, around a quarter of the total, starting in the Spring 2018, threatening at least 800 jobs. Its US parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. The UK subsidiary faced administration in December until a last-minute deal involving a bailout of its pension scheme by the state-backed Pension Protection Fund. This enabled it to win support from its creditors for the restructuring program.

 Palmer & Harvey (P&H), the grocery wholesaler, went into administration in November resulting in 2,500 redundancies. Attempts by the administrators to hive off sections of the company failed, with a further 400 jobs lost just two weeks before Christmas.

 Babcock International Group at Rosyth dockyards in Fife, Scotland has announced around 250 jobs to go as the contract to complete two Royal Navy aircraft carriers nears completion.

 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds, the UKs third and fourth largest banks, along with the countrys second largest building society Yorkshire Building Society, have announced another round of branch closures. RBS plans to close 1 in 4 of its branches, totalling 259 with 680 job losses. This is in addition to the 200 redundancies and 100 branches slated for closure earlier in the year. Lloyds Banking Group and the Yorkshire Building Society are to close 49 and 13 branches, with the loss of 99 and 250 jobs respectively.

 Around 230 jobs are scheduled to go by the summer at the Cleveland Potash mine in Boulby in northeast England. Cleveland Potash is owned by the multinational company, ICL, one of the worlds largest fertilizer companies. The job losses will go as the mine switches from mining dwindling supplies of Muriate of Potash to producing the polyhalite fertilizer, polysulphate. Currently there are around 700 jobs remaining at Boulby. 220 jobs were there lost in 2015 as potash production was cut back. The area already has high levels of unemployment. In 2015 steel production ended at nearby Redcar with the loss of over 2,000 jobs.

The official indifference to the livelihoods under threat was epitomised by Britvic. Local media sources reported that the company confirmed the closure of the factory with the workforce on the same day as the annual Christmas dinner. This followed a consultation process with the Unite and the GMB unions.

At no point have Unite, GMB, the retail workers union, USDAW, or any other, even mooted a fight in defence of a single job. At Britvic, Unite food and drink sector national officer Julia Long said, It is bad news for the wider Norfolk economy, especially as we face challenging economic times in 2018, adding only, Unite will work tirelessly with all key stakeholders to see what can be done, even at this eleventh hour.

At Babcock, Gary Cook, the Scotland chair of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, which incorporates the GMB and Unite unions, centred his plea for the redundancies to be carried out on a voluntary and nationalist basis. First and foremost, achieving these redundancies on a voluntary basis is entirely within Babcocks gift and it is the least this employer can do to recognise the massive contribution of the workforce to the delivery of the aircraft carrier programme.

Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said regarding the job losses at Lloyds Banking Group, Having returned to profitability Lloyds needs to stop ignoring its corporate social responsibilities.

Such invocations of corporate social responsibility are aimed at disarming workers and providing justification for the continuing inaction of the unions. Lloyds was one of the recipients of the Labour governments 1 trillion bailout of the banking sector following the world financial collapse of 2008. It received over 20 billion of taxpayers money and was taken into 43 percent state ownership. Last year it was transferred back into private hands and soon after posted a doubling of its pre-tax profits for the third quarter of 2017.
Just days after menacing North Korea with the huge US nuclear arsenal, US President Donald Trump suggested he would be willing to talk to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, under the right circumstances. The first official talks between the two Koreas in two years are due to take place tomorrow, after Kims offer to send a team to the Winter Olympics next month in South Korea.

Speaking to reporters at Camp David on Saturday, Trump backed tomorrows talks. I hope it works out, he said. I very much want to see it work out between the two countries. He declared that the meeting was a big start and again bragged that he was responsible for bringing it about. [If] I werent involved, they wouldnt be talking at all right now, Trump said.

Asked whether he would be prepared to talk to Kim, Trump replied: Sure, I always believe in talking... Absolutely I would do that. I dont have a problem with that at all. At the same time, he insisted his administration would maintain a very firm stance and he was not messing around. Not even a little bit.

Last week, however, Trump openly threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation. After Kim, in his New Years speech, warned the US that he had a nuclear button on his desk, Trump tweeted that his own nuclear button was a much bigger & more powerful one, and my Button works! Trump has at his disposal thousands of nuclear warheads with sophisticated delivery systems that completely dwarf North Koreas limited nuclear arsenal.

Trumps reckless tweets only inflame what is already an extremely tense situation in which the US has repeatedly threatened North Korea with military attack if it fails to abandon its nuclear and missile programs. Moreover, rather than encouraging talks, the comments undermine the possibility of a peaceful end to the present confrontation.

Senior Trump officials yesterday defended the presidents erratic comments after criticism in the media and Congress fed into the political firestorm surrounding the White House over Trumps competence to hold the top job.

Speaking on the ABCs This Week program, US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, declared that Trumps incendiary nuclear button tweet would keep [North Korean leader] Kim on his toes and remind him that in the event of nuclear war its not us thats going to be destroyed, its you.

Asked if such remarks hurt US credibility with its allies in Asia, Haley said: I know its something that makes people nervous but if we didnt do it, we would be in a more dangerous [situation]. She dismissed criticism, including from congressional Republicans such as Cory Gardner and John Cornyn, that the tweet was reckless, saying everyone is going to have their opinion.

The US ambassador played down any suggestion of a significant breakthrough at tomorrows talks between the two Koreas, saying: I think theyre going to talk about the Olympics. Its not my understanding that theyre going to talk about anything further.

Haley emphasised that talks between Washington and Pyongyang would take place only if North Korea agreed in advance to US demands to denuclearise. What he [Trump] has basically said is yes, there could be a time where we talk to North Korea but a lot of things have to happen before that actually takes place. They have to stop testing. They have to be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons. Those things have to happen.

Speaking on CBSs Face the Nation, CIA Director Mike Pompeo indicated that time was running out rapidly for a peaceful end to the standoff with North Korea. He said Pyongyang was a few months away from crossing the threshold to putting a US city at risk of nuclear attack, but refused to be more specific.

Pompeo was sceptical that the talks between North and South Korea represented a positive step. I hope thats the case, he said. But past history would indicate that this is a feint, this is not likely to lead to any true change in his [Kims] strategic outlook. That is, he will continue to maintain his nuclear capability. And that the president has said is unacceptable.

Trump himself publicly rebuked US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in October, saying his diplomatic efforts to lay the basis for talks with North Korea were a waste of time. The presidents only concession has been to agree to delay major joint US-South Korean military exercises until after next months Winter Olympics.

The US military, however, has been honing its plans for war with North Korea over the past year and has conducted a succession of major military drills with South Korea to rehearse for such a conflict. Last month the Pentagon held a large-scale joint air exercise that included the latest US stealth fighters, as well as a special forces drill, to practise for a military intervention into North Korea.

These preparations are not just for conventional, but also for nuclear war. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced a special briefing on January 16 to advise federal, state and local governments on the work to be done in the event of a nuclear attack on the US.

The notice stated: While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. Despite the fear surrounding such an event, planning and preparation can lessen deaths and illness.

Over the past week, former US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen and ex-Vice President Joe Biden both declared they believe the world is closer to a nuclear war with North Korea than ever before.
The publication of Michael Wolffs insider account of the early months of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury, has become the occasion for a media firestorm powered by allegations that Trump is mentally unfit to be president. Media pundits and Democratic politicians have cited the books portrayal of Trump to claim that the president should be declared incompetent. The result of such a maneuver, in the unlikely event it could be accomplished, would be a President Mike Pence.

In his usual fashion, Trump added fuel to the fire. First came his heavy-handed threats against the author and the publisher, seeking to suppress the book, and his imprecations against former campaign manager and White House counselor Stephen Bannon, now head of the fascistic Breitbart News, who served as the principal source for Wolff. This was followed by imbecilic tweets in which Trump celebrated his supposed intellect, describing himself a stable genius.

Wolffs Fire and Fury is typical of the gossipy fare produced by this longtime chronicler of the foibles (and fables) of the Manhattan upper class. Nothing in his account of the Trump White House comes as a shock. That the real estate con man and television reality show host is an egomaniacal blowhard with a short attention span and an aversion to reading is neither surprising nor remarkable. It does not distinguish Trump from thousands of other American CEOs.

The furor over the Wolff book is a continuation and extension of the efforts of the Democratic Party, backed by much of the media, to engineer Trumps removal through the methods of Washington intrigue and scandal-mongering. The charges of mental unfitness supplement the ongoing campaign around the investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections.

Given the political configuration in the House and Senate, Trumps Democratic opponents think it unlikely they can impeach him. They have increasingly focused on an alternate pathway, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to remove a president deemed by them to be incapable of fulfilling his duties for reasons of health, including mental health.

In an appearance Sunday on the NBC News program Meet the Press, Wolff made clear the political purpose of his book, claiming that the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was the stuff of daily discussions within the Trump White House, with top aides commenting on whether a particular statement or action by the president would put them in 25th Amendment territory.

There is not the slightest progressive or democratic content to this campaign to remove Donald Trump from the presidency on the grounds of alleged mental incapacity. It is only the latest attempt by the ruling class opponents of Trump to hijack the growing popular opposition to the right-wing policies of his administration and divert it into safe channels.

The Democrats avoid raising issues that would have popular resonance and appeal in any way to the growth of opposition to war, domestic repression and social inequality. They would like to orchestrate Trumps removal by the methods of a palace coup, without the intervention of American working people.

There is a fundamental class difference between opposition to Trump among working people and the opposition to Trump of Democratic politicians, sections of the corporate-controlled media and elements within the military-intelligence apparatus.

The ruling class opposition to Trump centers on issues of foreign policy, in particular, objections to any lessening of the ferocious anti-Russian stance adopted under Clinton and Obama. This is joined with a deeper concern that the presidents erratic and provocative conduct is undermining the world position of US imperialism and making it more difficult for him to rally public support in the event of war or a major social crisis at home.

Hence the character of the criticisms directed at Trump by the Democrats, from the anti-Russia campaign, to the allegations of sexual harassment, to the current furor over Trumps alleged mental incapacity. All are aimed at undercutting Trumps support within the state, the political establishment and Wall Street. None are aimed at winning support from working people.

The Democrats have made preparations to call demonstrations across the country in the event Trump fires Russia investigator Mueller. They made no such calls to mobilize against the passage of Trumps massively unpopular tax bonanza for the corporations and the wealthy. Nor have they made any appeal to popular opposition to his travel ban against Muslims and refugees, his persecution of immigrants, his cozying up to the fascist alt-right or his threats of nuclear war in Korea.

While Trump is portrayed as an evil interloper, his policies of militarism, tax cuts for the wealthy and austerity for workers only continue and intensify the program of the American financial aristocracy, prosecuted by Democratic and Republican presidents over the past four decades.

The deepening political crisis in the United Stateswhich has reached a level of intensity that dwarfs Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair and the Clinton impeachmenthas an objective social character. It is the product not of Trumps incapacity or the embittered feelings of the Democrats he defeated in the presidential election, but of the social contradictions within American capitalism.

Economic inequality has reached the point where three US billionaires own more wealth than the poorest 60 percent of the American population. The living standards of the great majority of working people have stagnated or declined for more than 40 years. American youth have grown up under conditions of endless imperialist wars abroad and deteriorating social conditions at home. There is mass disaffection with both capitalist parties, neither of which offers the slightest prospect of progressive change.

The frenzied character of the conflict within the ruling elite is only one of many signs of an impending social and political explosion in the United States. But the removal of Trump through the methods of scandal-mongering and conspiracy would contribute nothing to the political education and mobilization of the working class. On the contrary, the efforts of the Democrats and their media supporters are aimed at blocking any independent movement from below that would threaten not only the Trump administration, but the corporate-controlled two-party structure and the capitalist system as a whole.
The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site support conductors who are striking six private rail franchises this week in their ongoing opposition to the introduction of Driver Only Operated (DOO) train services and mass job losses.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union (RMT) at Southern, South Western Railways (SWR), Greater Anglia, Merseyrail, Northern Rail and at the Isle of Wight's Island Line will strike today, Wednesday and Friday causing major disruptions. Northern Rail alone is being forced to cancel nearly half of its scheduled services.

The rail companies are organising a well-rehearsed state-sponsored strike-breaking operation. According to evidence gathered by the RMT, this includes co-ordinated action between numerous private rail franchises to bus in managers and backroom staff with minimal training, so as to help run rail services during the stoppages.

The danger to public safety posed by DOO trains was underscored ahead of strikes last November, when a SWR passenger service train derailed in South London. This followed a derailment at Watford Junction by two London Midland trains, narrowly avoiding a head on collision. In these incidents, the collaboration of drivers and conductors was vital for passenger safety.

On December 7, a Merseyrail tunnel filled with smoke, with the RMT reporting, The guard evacuated passengers from a Northern Line service at Moorfields station after smoke began billowing into the front carriage as the train entered the single-bore tunnel after leaving Sandhills station.

As dangerous incidents begin to escalate, the rail companies and the Tory government refuse to retreat in their war against conductors jobs.

The opposition of rail workers, however, stands in sharp contrast to the RMT, which has repeatedly organised partial strikes and blocked workers demands for a national strike, while seeking to sow the illusion that the government can be persuaded to step in and oppose DOO. The RMT, the train drivers union ASLEF and other unions oppose a broader mobilisation of the working class against the Theresa May government and its programme of austerity, privatization, and other giveaways to the super-rich.

According to RMT officials it is only the dead hand of the government that is blocking it from reaching deals with the rail firms. This is despite the fact that every action by the Tory government and the Labour Party confirms that they are agents of the global transport monopolies who run the rail franchises.

The government is backing the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), made up of millionaire CEOs from all the private rail companies. It is tasked with imposing 20,000 job cuts based on recommendations in Lord McNultys 2011 reportknown as the Rail Value for Money Study. McNulty recommended DOO as the default method for train operations, with a total of 6,000 conductors jobs threatened nationally if DOO is imposed.

The RMTs opposition to mobilising the 83,000 rail workers in the union has given the government a free hand to implement its strike-breaking operation, organised from Transport Secretarys Chris Grayling office. The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) which claims to be independent but is directly accountable to governmenthas rubber-stamped the operation, just as they justified DOO expansion.

The ORRs support has been made necessary after the RMT reported a series of safety breaches during last Octobers strikes. The most serious occurred when a strike breaker opened the passenger doors on the wrong side at Ipswich station, with passengers having to climb down onto the tracks. The employers have refused RMT requests for figures on safety breaches on strike days.

The government and unions want industrial action off the agenda. While criticising the government, the RMT have jumped at every opportunity to hold talks with government officials behind the backs of rail workers. On December 12, Grayling sent an appeal to RMT General Secretary Mick Cash to end strikes on Northern, Southern, Greater Anglia, and South West Railway. He said, I am prepared to give guarantees of employment beyond the length of these franchises, if this will allow RMT to bring its disputes over DCO [Driver Control Operation] to an end. If the RMT can agree to the principle of DCO...

Significantly, Grayling did not mention Merseyrail. In a principled stand, drivers there have defied the leadership of the ASLEF rail driver union and continued to refuse to cross conductor pickets on strike days in defiance of anti-strike laws.

The talks failed as Cash knew he could not enforce such a deal, openly endorsing DOO, at this stage. This is not because the RMT is averse to agreeing such deals. Rather, it is proof that rail unions and the Tories had not counted on the determination of rail workers to resist these attacks and the scale of public support for the strikes.

In an attempt to break up the unified strikes, the RMT entered separate negotiations with SWR, which ultimately failed. In the face of reported safety breaches, strike breakers will operate 12-carriage trains on SWR during this weeks strikes, according to Londons Evening Standard.

The RMT long ago abandoned its campaign against McNultys recommendationsTory government policy since 2012after they were given a consultation role with the Rail Delivery Group. The unions justified being in talks with an organisation committed to slashing 20,000 jobs, saying it allowed them to combat attacks on terms and conditions when they are first aired.

This lie was proven at Southern, as ASLEF collaborated in imposing DOO against striking conductors and the RMT recommendationeven prior to thisthat conductors sign up to terminating the conductor grade and accept the On Board Supervisor role (a precursor to the elimination of the conductor role).

While demagogically attacking the RDG as a bosses club, the RMT is ensconced in secret negotiations with the management of its constituent parts. The RMT previously described ASLEFs support for DOO at Southern as a historical betrayal, but it is now working closely again with the train driver union to prevent more strikes breaking out of the control of the bureaucracy.

Liverpool Labour Party Mayor Joe Anderson denounced the November Merseyrail strikes, publicly supporting the removal of conductors. In response, the RMT redoubled their orientation to the Labour Partytrumpeting a statement issued by West Yorkshire Labour councils calling for the implementation of the ScotRail formulae on Northern Rail services. The RMT never opposed these councils for not blocking DOO proposals when the existing franchise was first agreed.

The ScotRail formulae, where the driver opens doors and the conductor closes them, is nothing more than a temporary staging post for the removal of conductors entirely. The RMT praised the role of the Scottish National Party government for supporting its ScotRail deal and demanded it be imposed across the UK. Only a year later, plans are underway for Glasgows underground network to be totally de-staffed after an investment of 288 million. Driverless trains will be trialled later this year on a stretch of track, with the plan to introduce them throughout the network by the end of 2020.

The Socialist Equality Party urges rail workers to form rank-and-file committees to break free from the grip of the trade union bureaucracy and mobilise the broadest support in the working class against these attacks. These committees should not only seek to unite rail workers throughout the UK, but reach out to their brothers and sisters facing similar attacks in Germany, France, Spain and across the European continent.
Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism, Saatchi Gallery, London, November 16, 2017-January 7, 2018

Actionism appeared as a reaction to the mass depersonalisation and total commercialisation of art, as a reaction to the overload of objects manipulated by curators, gallerists, and collectorsand also the laws of the market. The artist protesting against this makes a striking statement, socially significant and visually spellbinding.

These strong words from Oleg Kulik, father of post-Soviet actionist art, are quoted in the catalogue for the recent Saatchi Gallery exhibition in London, Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism.

On display at the gallery is the protest art of Kulik and other performance artists, including Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, Arsen Savadov, Damir Muratov and the Blue Noses Group. The exhibition gives an opportunity to examine how the art of Kulik and his colleagues lives up to his manifesto. How have things proceeded since Kulik first hit the headlines in the 1990s?

As Kulik says, following the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, burning issues demanded striking, significant and spellbinding answers. There was a lot for avant-garde artists to work throughthe legacy of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, its degeneration and the Stalinist counterrevolution, the catastrophic results of capitalist restoration.

But the debased social, political and intellectual climate following the liquidation of the Soviet Union conditioned their response, which varied from anarchistic individualism to pleas for a more humane capitalism and the embrace of right-wing anti-communism. The results have been generally atrocious.

The first gallery of the Art Riot exhibition exemplifies this disorientation, with its display of Kuliks artist-animal actions including images from his infamous 1994 Mad Dog performance in which he was led, naked and collared like a dog, through the streets of Moscow. Kulik engaged in more bestial acts as part of the Deep Into Russia series.

Speaking of his art in 2016, Kulik declared his contempt for any thoughtful progressive response to the Russian tragedy with the retort, All that is left is the body, which actually never belonged to you. And artists, the first actionists of the 1990s, offered the body, the naked body of a naked person, in the middle of the wild city. It is a powerful image: out of all those endless collectivist myths, endless crowds of the willing and unwilling, groups, bands, and parties a person is set apart, an individual with nothing and no one behind him. He is alone against all, but he is fighting. He simply says: I am! Here I am, I am art!

Kulik eventually stopped his performance art, fed up with (paid) requests for him to repeat the dog routine and complaining of sensationalist treatment (deliberately courted) in the press.

Gallery 2 of the Art Riot exhibition is given over to Pyotr Pavlensky who emerged into the public eye in 2012 when he sewed his mouth shut in protest against the imprisonment of members of the Pussy Riot punk band. Subsequent actions involved Pavlensky rolling naked in barbed wire and nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square in protest at the apathy, political indifference and fatalism pervading Russia.

In 2015, Pavlensky set fire to the doors of the Lubyanka building, the HQ of the Russian Security Services (FSB), eliciting the rapturous praise of Western commentators. The UK Guardian art correspondent Jonathan Jones, whose anti-communism was evident in his attack on the Royal Academy Russian Revolution exhibition last year, waxed lyrical about the action as a superbly well-aimed piece of political art that was setting Russias evil history ablaze.

To my knowledge, Jones and the others have been silent after Pavlensky, who was granted political asylum in France last May, was carted off to prison in October accused of torching a bank in Pariss Place de la Bastille. The Bastille was destroyed by a people in revolution; the people destroyed its symbol of despotism and power  The Banque de France has taken the place of the Bastille, and bankers have taken the place of monarchs, Pavlensky declared.

After years of self-imposed pain, suffering and incarceration, Pavlensky seems to have learnt nothing. He declares, The possibility of liberation, the possibility of rebellion, of a peoples uprising, has been extinguished, of course.

In the next room, large photographs of Donbass miners by Ukrainian artist Arsen Savadov are on display. Savadov declares contemptuously, My characters are personalities with a vague understanding of reality.  I am one of those artists that treat the harsh conditions of the day as myth: I make my work out of the rubble of consciousness.

In the catalogue, curator Marcel Guelman revels in Savadovs relentlessly degrading portrayals mocking the poor and the powerless, declaring how he dresses miners, those manly workers black with sootthose symbols of proletarian revolutionin white ballet tutus or simply undresses them. Funny. Or he bribes Communists on their way to a rally and places them inside a gay parade . Real old men who cant turn down the money and who pose in humiliation, without looking at one another. Scary or funny? This is horrible stuff.

Guelman twists the knife deeper, gloating, What would people do without any means of support, lost in the new capitalist reality, do for money? Marx said that a capitalist would do anything at all for profit, but it turns out that impoverished people are ready to do even more.

The cul-de-sac into which Russian artists have been driven is shown by the evolution of Pussy Riot, images of whom dominate the exhibitions fourth gallery.

The band shot to international attention in 2012 when two of its members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were imprisoned on charges of hooliganism due to religious hatred. Their performance of a brief punk prayer criticizing Vladimir Putin in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow is exhibited in a gold shrine .

The World Socialist Web Site condemned the prosecution of Pussy Riot as an attack on basic democratic rights and a sign of the Putin regimes intensifying offensive against the countrys liberal opposition and moves towards an explicitly religious basis for its rule.

We also warned that support given to the group by leading Western imperialist politicians, including US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was cynical to the coreby leaders quite prepared to ride roughshod over democratic principles when it served their reactionary policy objectives.

In the catalogue, Tolokonnikova confirms that Pussy Riot was really all about enlisting the support of such figures to put pressure on the Russian ruling elite to reform, insisting, Unlike the old Left, we cant just reject capitalism out of handwell get further by playing with it, teasing till its been perverted. Perverted, I mean, in the sense of being turned to face us, enlisted in our cause.

Tolokonnikova calls for a more enlightened Christianity, revealing her belief that former Marxist turned anticlerical Orthodox Christian-existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev is Russias greatest political philosopher.

In 1909, Lenin already had the measure of Berdyaev, writing how the set of essays including that by Berdyaev called Vekhi (Landmarks) expressed the unmistakable essence of the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), the party of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, which was pursuing a war on materialism and the materialist interpretation of positivism, restoration of mysticism and the mystical world outlook.

Berdyaev was one of around 160 intellectuals and their families exiled on philosophers ships by the new Bolshevik government in 1922, as a precaution against them acting as a rallying point for those seeking to restore autocracy or impose a fascist dictatorship. It was revealed in October that Tolokonnikovas Pussy Riot jailmate, Alyokhina, is in a relationship she deems complicated with the fascist activist Dmitry Enteo, founder of the Russian Orthodox movement Gods Will.

In the exhibitions last room, works by artists less well known in the West are displayed, including Damir Muratovs flags for a hypothetical separatist United States of Siberia. The flags have been adopted by a variety of reactionary movements calling for autonomy or secession of Siberia, backed by local business interests accusing Moscow of plundering the regions vast natural resources. Muratov has been subjected to surveillance and detention.

Also lining the last gallery walls are a series of cartoonish pictures of world leaders cavorting in their underwear, produced by the Blue Noses group (Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin) who employ puerile humour in their hooligan improvisations to subvert hallowed traditions and famous icons. Elsewhere the duo use lightboxes to show Lenin turning in his grave at the thought of what has befallen his creation.

The catalogue ends with the paragraph there are no more art-activists and actionists working productively [in Russia], who could have a significant public resonance; some have gone silent, others have emigrated, replacing their intentions of overthrowing the regime with concerns on how to survive in foreign countries. Some continue trying, without any opportunity to discuss their work anywhere.

This observation reveals what has happened to Russian protest art, but not why. In the end it proved incapable of appealing to the masses as the Soviet Union collapsedindeed the working class was often written off as a philistine mob, which had accepted or even welcomed repression and dictatorship.

Without a perspective that could raise the political consciousness of broad layers of the population, many of the protest artists inevitably became co-opted by Russian oligarchs and Western politicians or actively participated in their campaigns against the Putin regime, as it sought to re-establish Russian bourgeois interests.

The tragedy that has befallen Russia cannot be resolved on a progressive basis except through the re-emergence of the working class, armed with a revolutionary socialist and internationalist programme, inspired by the political heritage of October 1917 and utterly hostile to both Stalinism and capitalism.

One could not think of a more ignominious outcome for the products of post-Soviet protest art than to end up in the opulent surroundings of the Saatchi gallery in Londons West End.

The Saatchi brothers remain best known for the advertising campaign that backed Margaret Thatcher in the Conservatives successful general election campaign in 1979, ushering in a neo-conservative programme of privatising the welfare state, union-busting and deregulation of the City of Londona model for what was to be imposed even more brutally in post-Soviet Russia.

Equally ignominious is for the exhibitions organisation to be in the hands of Russian emigre banker Igor Tsukanov, who attempts to equate the revolutionary Bolshevik period with Putins Russia, declaring, Many of the issues that artists face in post-communist Russia are comparable to those faced in 1917.

Seeing the exhibition as a springboard for further shows of the objectsmany of which are owned by his foundationthat will see a rise in their value, Tsukanov said, We have plans to bring the exhibition to other places and it should be easy because most of the art has been commissioned by me, so it will be kept in London in storage and can be shipped to wherever there is demand for it.

As for Guelman, the exhibition is in part a cover for his own rotten role in the disaster that has engulfed the Russian working class. He was a former Kremlin spin-doctor turned art dealer, who oversaw Boris Yeltsins re-election campaign in 1996 and helped Putin secure his first presidential term in 2000. Guelman became a member of Yeltsins bogus consultative Public Chamber and did not finally end collaboration with the regime until 2012, claiming Pussy Riot made him see the error of his ways!
The South Australian state government of Labor Premier Jay Weatherill announced 750 public sector job cuts in a budget review late last month. This is part of a broader raft of austerity measures aimed at slashing government spending by $370 million over the next four years.

State Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis said the cuts would include the axing of 263 public servants and staff reductions in the state-run SA Water and Urban Renewal Authority corporations.

Homestart, a state-run corporation that provides home loans, will be forced to deliver 100 percent of its profits to the government over the next two financial years, up from the current 60 percent, supposedly in lieu of retrenchments.

The measures underscore the extent to which state-run utilities have been corporatised by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments. Koutsantonis said departmental chief executives would have maximum flexibility to deliver these savings.

In other words, the job cuts have not been specifically earmarked, so all public servants will live in fear of being victimised and sacked.

The retrenchments are a direct response to a protracted campaign by the corporate and financial elite for cutbacks to the public service. Articles and editorials in the Murdoch press, including its national flagship, the Australian, have declared that the states public sector is bloated.

The announcement follows the Labor governments abandonment of proposals for a limited bank tax, which was slated to raise $370 million over the next four years. The limited tax, which would not have affected the banks bottom line, was vociferously denounced in the financial press, and blocked in the states parliament.

The latest cuts follow a spate of redundancies in the public sector. While official figures are scanty, the number of public sector positions destroyed since the 2008 financial crisis by the states Labor governments is estimated in the thousands.

In 2014 alone, Labor eliminated 885 positions. The following year, it introduced plans to reduce the number of public servants by 4,000 over four years, including through the contracting out of government services.

Over the past five years, some 600 teachers at TAFE vocational colleges have been made redundant, as the state government has sought to wind back publicly funded education, in line with the pro-business education agenda spearheaded by the former federal Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

The union that covers public sector workers, the Public Service Association (PSA), signalled its support for cost reductions, while fraudulently claiming to oppose the sackings. Speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last month, PSA official Neville Kitchin endorsed calls for efficiency dividends that he said had been identified in recent reports.

The PSA, along with all of the major unions, backed the re-election of a state Labor government in 2014, after it had imposed major cuts, and has enforced each round of redundancies.

The South Australian cutbacks form part of a broader offensive against the jobs, conditions and wages of public sector workers, imposed by state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, with the crucial assistance of the trade unions.

Last September, in its first budget, the Western Australian (WA) Labor Party government eliminated 3,000 public sector jobs. The retrenchments, part of a four-year $1.7 billion reduction in public sector spending, are set to be completed in the 201718 financial year. The job cuts followed the amalgamation and restructuring of public sector departments reducing the number from 41 to 25, and the introduction of an effective four-year wage-freeze in May, just two months after Labors election.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), the national public sector federation, backed the pro-business measures, having campaigned for Labor in the 2017 WA state election on the bogus pretext that it would halt public sector cuts and privatisations. Backing the amalgamations, WA CPSU secretary Toni Wilkinson stated: Some of our members believe this is an opportunity to get things right in the delivery of government services.

At a national level, the CPSU has pushed through regressive enterprise agreements covering major public sector departments in the past 18 months. During a three-and-a-half year dispute, the federal Liberal-National Coalition government sought to impose a 2 percent annual pay rise cap and a raft of cuts to jobs and conditions.

Throughout the dispute, the CPSUs primary concern was that it could be side-lined by the government, depriving it of its position at the bargaining table, where it trades away the jobs, wages and conditions of the workers it falsely claims to represent.

Despite members resistance, the CPSU ultimately pushed through regressive deals at a host of federal workplaces, including the Australian Tax Office (ATO), that ratified the governments push for an effective wage freeze, and further cuts to jobs and conditions.

The perfidious role of the union continued their support for cuts to the public sector, which began in 1987 when Prime Minister Bob Hawkes Labor government introduced efficiency dividendscontinuous funding reductions.

From 2007 to 2013, the Labor governments of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd eliminated up to 14,500 public sector jobs. In 2013, the Rudd government increased the efficiency dividend from 1.25 percent to 2.25 percent, paving the way for further cuts by Coalition governments.

The assault on public service employees is one front in a wider agenda, aimed at forcing the working class to pay for the deepening crisis of the profit system. In South Australia, the shutdown of car manufacturing and other industrial production has led to deepening social distress. Real unemployment in the state is estimated at over 10 percent, and more than 200,000 people live below the official poverty line. Indices of social distress and alienation such as drug addiction are growing.

In working-class suburbs such as Elizabeth, a former hub of car production in northwestern Adelaide, unemployment is as high 33 percent. Between 1981 and 2011, the number of manufacturing jobs in the state declined from 100,000 to an estimated 74,000. The closure of GM Holden last year is expected to result in 20,000 indirect job losses, on top of the 1,400 workers directly retrenched.

Under these conditions, Labors public sector cuts are another indication that the March 17 South Australian election will be dominated by pledges from the main parties to slash spending, further eroding the conditions of the working class.

Nick Xenophon, a right-wing populist ex-senator, whose newly-created SA Best party is polling level with the Liberal-Nationals and Labor in the lead-up to the elections, criticised the public sector sackings. His attitude to austerity, however, was underscored by reports that his federal party, the Nick Xenophon Team, reached an agreement with the Coalition government to slash welfare payments and entitlements for the most oppressed sections of the working class.
Dont take this too hard: your autograph isnt worth what it once was.

American Express, Mastercard and Discover have each announced that, starting in April, they will no longer require signatures on any U.S. and Canadian credit card purchases. (Actually, American Express is making the change for all its transactions worldwide.)

Visa hasnt announced any plans to do the same. But theres speculation it may eventually do so.

That pretty much would fully evaporate what may be the most common reason U.S. consumers still bother writing signatures, which were once the most prominent symbol of our financial integrity and proof of our identity. (Its also another blow to the general use of cursive writing, for those who remember what that is.)

Signatures may be going the way of the lava lamp, said William McCracken, the president of Phoenix Synergistics, a metro Atlanta-based consumer market research company focused on the financial services.

They will not be part of Gen Z. Signatures wont be part of their stored memories.

The shift away from signatures also hints at the fantasy we all pretended to believe: that signatures actually proved something.

The industrys unspoken secret is that signatures on a credit card receipt are relatively worthless from a security standpoint, McCracken said.

Thieves only had to look at the signature on the back of a credit card, practice it a few times and come up with a fake good enough to pass.

But even that involves some quaint thinking. Because almost no one in places where we shop or dine is even glancing at signatures these days, whether you signed on paper or a glitchy electronic pad using a faulty stylus or your finger.

That would seem to explain why Ive never been flagged for using my finger to draw a line across checkout signature pads.

Signatures are still used on plenty of legal property documents, government-issued IDs, artwork, acknowledgments of medical privacy notifications, cards to grandma and anything fans can ask celebrities to scribble on.

Yet, in other ways signatures have been slipping from the economy.

Instead of putting his signature on new dollar bills earlier this year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin used a handwritten mix of upper- and lower-cased block letters that could have been thumbed out on a smartphone.

Signatures became less necessary as check writing shrank. And while credit card use continues to grow  there were more than 37 billion U.S. transactions last year totaling $3.27 trillion  most of that is going unsigned.

John Hancocks arent required on typical online purchases.

And credit card firms already scaled back signature requirements on small transactions. More than 75 percent of face-to-face Visa card transactions in North America dont require people to sign their name, according to a Visa spokesperson.

Which is just as well.

Who hasnt gone to sign for a credit card purchase using a pen that doesnt work and you just scribble anyway, said Kim Sullivan, the senior director of payments solutions for Georgia-based transactions technology giant NCR.

Dropping signature requirements should speed up lines at retailers, Sullivan said, which is exactly what store owners are looking for.

Its going to improve the experience for merchants and consumers, she said. Its all about faster and frictionless.

Sullivan estimated that eliminating signatures might save an average of three seconds on each credit card transaction. So retailers can increase the number of customers they serve and generate more money, she said.

I imagine some customers may feel a little unsettled with the idea that purchases of hundreds or even thousands of dollars could be made without signing anything.

Security is already the biggest concern people have about using credit cards, said McCracken from Synergistics.

For now, there has been no widespread rush to require use of PIN codes with credit cards transactions in the United States. And some consumers are creeped out about the idea of entrusting credit card companies with personal biometric data that could help verify their identity.

Other security measures are already in place, such as checking the cards three- or four-digit CVV number, asking consumers for their billing ZIP code, adding computer chips to more cards and monitoring for unusual purchasing activity.

But the cruelest reality of saying goodbye to our signatures is this: apparently they already have so little value there isnt a sweeping rush to replace them with something new.
VERONA  Elizabeth Folberg, a teacher of English language learners at Stoner Prairie Elementary School, had looked into obtaining her National Board Certification 15 to 20 years ago.

But she had just started working as a foreign language teacher in Ohio and had not been teaching for three years in the same role and in the same school, which was required, and then she wound up moving around some.

About 13 years ago, after Folberg started working in the Verona Area School District, she again considered obtaining the national recognition but was doing other professional development. The final push came three years ago when Folberg had earlier reached the maximum pay raise awarded for classes and credits and the Verona Area School District decided to start offering a pay increase to certified teachers.

The certification came with a 4.5 percent increase in pay and the satisfaction that she is doing more than delivering some kind of curriculum youve been handed, Folberg said. She said that is especially important because as a teacher of English language learners she is working with families who have to rely on blind faith in the educational system.

I owe it to my students and families, she said.

They learned in December she was among 12 staff members in the Verona Area School District who had passed the certification. Up until this year, the district had only eight teachers total who had gone through the process over the years. The 20 teachers still represent only about 4 percent of the districts teaching staff, according to Jason Olson, human resources director for the district. But they are part of a growing trend for teachers to seek the certification.

Madison Teachers Inc. is one of the teachers organizations that has been working with the Wisconsin Education Association Council to provide monthly training workshops for Wisconsin teachers going through the process.

By providing the support, we promote this and let them know there is support available to achieve that, said Doug Keillor, executive director of MTI.

The interest in certification also has increased since it has become more challenging for teachers to receive pay increases, Keillor said.

Madison teachers who are certified get an annual $1,500.

In addition, the state Department of Public Instruction offers a stipend during the first year of certification to reimburse teachers for the fees associated with obtaining it, said Lyman Elliott, National Board Certified Candidate Support Provider at WEAC. Then it awards $2,500 annually for the next four years the teachers are certified unless they teach at a high-needs school, in which case that stipend is doubled.

National board certification is valid for five years and teachers must renew through an abbreviated process.

The Verona Area School District, which has reimbursed teachers up to $1,800 in costs over five years for graduate work, has expanded the allowable costs to include teacher certification.

In addition, the district redesigned its salary schedule two years ago to give nationally certified teachers the top range in pay, which has meant a 4.5 percent increase.

Started about 30 years ago, National Board Certification has national standards for what teachers should know and be able to do. They must exhibit a deep understanding of their students, content knowledge, use of data and assessments and teaching practice. They must also show how they work with colleagues, parents and students and provide evidence of ongoing reflection and continual learning. Some 38 states also allow the certification to take the place of a state license requirement.

Elliott said the process, though still elaborate, was recently reworked, possibly leading to more interest.

Teachers must describe their practices through a technical writing process with a restriction in the length allowed, while video recordings the teachers make of themselves teaching are limited to a certain number of minutes.

Sarah Greenlaw, a special-education teacher in Verona, referred to the certification process as grueling but found the WEAC workshops invaluable.

About 1,253 teachers, or about 1 to 2 percent, are certified in the state of Wisconsin while the national average is closer to 3 percent, Elliott said. Districts may offer reimbursement for costs, a one-time stipend and bump in salary or nothing at all, he said.

It just seemed like the next step in my professional development  a way to grow in my teaching practice and the financial incentive made a difference, said Angie Davis, a Verona kindergarten teacher who just got certified.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - The Florida Health Care Association on Monday discussed the nursing-home group's priorities for the 2018 legislative session, covering issues such as generator requirements and increased Medicaid funding.

Following Septembers Hurricane Irma, and several deaths at a Broward County nursing home, the long-term care facilities have come under scrutiny about how they handle emergency situations.

The state and industry groups have been going back and forth in court over proposed state rules that would require nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to have generators and fuel supplies to keep buildings cool during power outages.

Florida Health Care Association chief lobbyist Bob Asztalos (Uh- stall  iss) says the cost to retrofit all nursing homes will vary significantly from location to location, depending on the size and age of a building. He says some additional state funding will likely be needed to meet the generator requirement.

Our hope is that we can work, the governor and us together, and get to a place on the rule and resolve this through the rulemaking process," said Asztalos. "If not, we will work with Democrats, Republicans, the House and Senate to try to get legislation.

During the 2018 legislative session which begins Tuesday, the Florida Health Care Association will also be asking lawmakers for more money to care for Medicaid-funded residents and protection of the Certificate of Need process which limits the overall number of nursing homes in Florida.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A former State of Florida legislative staffer will spend 10 years behind bars after being convicted for attempted enticement of a minor.

Michael Chmielewski, 38, of Tallahassee will spend 10 years in prison after being convicted in September 2017.

In February 2017, undercover investigators conducted Operation Cupids Arrow to identify people seeking to engage in sexual activity with minors.

They say Michael Chmielewski responded to a Craigslist advertisement in which an undercover officer posed as a 14-year-old girl named "Sara.

Over two days, he continued his conversation with Sara on messaging application Kik, discussed sexual activities with Sara, and traveled to meet Sara in person to have sex.

Chmielewski was arrested after arriving at a store to meet Sara.

Together with our law enforcement partners, my office will prosecute to the fullest extent any child predators who lurk in the shadows of the internet seeking to destroy the lives of innocent young children, said U.S. Attorney Christopher Canova.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A former State of Florida legislative staffer has been convicted of attempted enticement of a minor.

The verdict was handed down Friday afternoon.

In February 2017, undercover investigators conducted Operation Cupids Arrow to identify people seeking to engage in sexual activity with minors.

They say Michael Chmielewski responded to a Craigslist advertisement in which an undercover officer posed as a 14-year-old girl named "Sara.

Over two days, he continued his conversation with Sara on messaging application Kik, discussed sexual activity with Sara, and traveled to meet Sara in person to have sex.

Chmielewski was arrested after arriving at a store to meet Sara.

He faces a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison.

The sentencing hearing is scheduled for January 5, 2018, at 1:30 p.m. at the United States Courthouse in Tallahassee.
FRANKLIN COUNTY, FL (WTXL) -- In Franklin County, the Sheriff's office is kicking off an anti-drug campaign with a special focus on the younger generation.

Sheriff Smith says illegal drugs are a big problem in Franklin County. A program to raise community awareness has been discussed for months and the Sheriff's Department is looking forward to kicking it off this month.

Sheriff Smith says 90% of the people is his jail are there for drug-related crimes. He tells us the drug problem is multi generational and that's why his campaign focuses on educating children of all ages. The other area of focus is on rehabilitation for drug users, or incarceration if necessary.

Sheriff Smith says, if the community can solve the drug problem, that will help law enforcement solve other crimes in the county. He says, "I think success stories are really big because there's probably a lot of people who are involved in drugs that think there is no way out, but there is. There is help and there is hope." Sheriff Smith adds, meth and opioids are their biggest problem.

He and his deputies will visit schools across Franklin County to teach kids about the impacts drugs have on not just the user, but also their loved ones. The Fresh Start program is already mentoring inmates at Franklin County jail to help them become pro-active community members.
(WTXL) - Students and teachers at two area school districts are hoping to have warm classrooms to go back to Monday after losing heat last week.

Gadsden County Schools Superintendent roger Milton says a boiler broke down at Havana Magnet School, causing about half the school to lose heat.

They've installed a new boiler and tested it over the weekend, and heat should be fully restored Monday.

Milton says about 600-students attend Havana Magnet.

There's a similar situation at Hamilton County Schools.

Superintendent Rex Mitchell says class was cancelled Friday when an equipment failure shut down the heating system at the high school.

He says staff still came in for work, and the system was back up and running by early afternoon.

School will resume for students Monday.

MOBILE USERS: Download our WTXL news app on your Apple and Android devices for the latest from South Georgia and North Florida. Also, download our WTXL First Alert Weather app for Apple and Android devices to get the latest local weather wherever you go.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for additional local news and hourly updates.
JACKSON COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - An 8-year-old girl shot in a negligent discharge was in stable condition at a Pensacola hospital night.

The girl was shot Sunday night at a residence located off Highway 73 South near the Jackson and Calhoun County line, according to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office.

No arrests have been made in the case.

MOBILE USERS: Download our WTXL news app on your Apple and Android devices for the latest from South Georgia and North Florida. Also, download our WTXL First Alert Weather app for Apple and Android devices to get the latest local weather wherever you go.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for additional local news and hourly updates.
UPDATE:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A spokesperson from Florida A&M University says two students died in a car crash Friday.

Statement from FAMU:

"Florida A&M University (FAMU) is mourning the loss of two students, Aniya Brown, 20, of Bensenville, Illinois and 19-year-old Alfred Motlow III, of Memphis, Tennessee. The students were among three people, who were killed Friday night, during a car accident in Shelby County, Tennessee. Both students were sophomores majoring in engineering.



University officials would like to extend heartfelt condolences to their families and friends and offer support to relatives and the FAMU community through the FAMU Office of Counseling Services."

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A fraternity at Florida A&M University says one of their members died in a car crash Saturday morning.

A post on the Upsilon Psi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc. Facebook page says: "The brothers of the Mighty Melodic Bloody Up Upsilon Psi Chapter would like to send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of our beloved chapter brother Alfred Lillard Motlow III. Brother Motlow III tragically passed away this morning in a fatal car accident. We ask that you keep his family and friends in your prayers."

We've reached out to FAMU for more information & are still waiting to hear back.

Social media posts from other FAMU students indicate that two students may have died in the crash. WTXL is working to confirm this.

Stick with WTXL as we work to find out more on this developing story.
Wisconsin residents could set up long-term care funds in a manner similar to the Edvest college savings plan, under a bill with bipartisan support expected to have a public hearing soon.

Under the bill, people could make tax-exempt contributions of up to $5,500 a year  up to $8,500 a year for those older than 50  and withdraw the money tax free for qualified long-term care.

The funds would be an alternative to long-term care insurance, which can be costly and hard to get.

There needs to be an option for people, especially middle class and low-income people, to have a way to save money for this, said Ingrid Thompson, of Stoughton, former director of McFarland Senior Outreach Services.

Thompson worked on the proposal with others in the Wisconsin Aging Advocacy Network.

Rep. Dave Murphy, R-Greenville, is the lead Assembly sponsor, with Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, the Senate lead. The measure has 17 other Assembly sponsors  four Republicans and 13 Democrats  and two other sponsors, both Democrats, in the Senate.

Everybody wants to find some solutions to help elderly folks live out their final days in a better way, with respect and comfort, Murphy said.

Long-term care includes help with bathing, dressing, cooking and other daily activities when people become frail. It can be provided in private homes or in settings such as assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Medicare generally doesnt cover long-term care. Medicaid pays only after people spend or protect most of their assets.

Less than 10 percent of people who could afford and qualify for long-term care insurance have it, according to a 2016 report prepared for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Under the bill, long-term care funds would have similar tax benefits to Wisconsins Edvest funds for college expenses. Family and friends could also pay into the funds.

Account holders would have to deplete their funds before qualifying for Medicaid. But the funds would be protected assets  like burial trusts  in eligibility for other programs.

Balances remaining after death could be used for funeral expenses or outstanding medical expenses. Money left over would be transferred to beneficiaries for long-term care.

Based on data from Nebraskas tax-preferred long-term care savings plans, which ended this year, 1,311 people in Wisconsin could be expected to open such funds, reducing tax revenue by $360,000 a year, according to the state Department of Revenue.

The funds, which would be maintained by the state Department of Health Services, would save money in Medicaid, one of the largest parts of the state budget, Murphy said. However, the health department said the bill would unlikely have a noticeable impact on long-term care expenses in Medicaid because relatively few people would set up such funds.

I think people feel a little better if they have some of their own money going into this, rather than feeling like theyre just a total ward of the state, Murphy said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 00:09:12|Editor: Chengcheng

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PARIS, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- French President Emmanuel Macron left Paris Sunday afternoon for his first state visit to China, according to the Elysee Palace.

This makes Macron the first European leader to visit China since last autumn's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told media on Friday that Macron's visit to China is of great significance to bilateral ties, and the French president is scheduled to meet with Chinese leaders and attend several events during his three-day visit.

The spokesman also revealed that the French president would visit the Forbidden City in Beijing, and Xi'an, the capital city of northwest China's Shaanxi province and home to the famous Terracotta Warriors.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 00:49:18|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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by Xinhua writer Tian Dongdong

BRUSSELS, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Asked about the divide between left and right during the French presidential election last year, the then candidate Emmanuel Macron said: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice" -- a famous maxim of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

From his reply, one can gauge Macron's familiarity with Chinese philosophy as well as his deep-rooted pragmatism, which enabled him to answer the question in a manner bridging ideological and cultural differences.

With a similar pragmatism, Macron kicked off his first state visit to China on Sunday. Twenty days ahead of the 54th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic ties between China and France, the trip is set to chart the future course of and generate new impetus for the development of bilateral relations.

Highly anticipated, the trip offers a golden opportunity for both sides to further coordinate their stances on major global issues. As the red carpet will roll out amid a 21-gun salute, with even the Forbidden City opening for Macron, the trip is expected to lift China-France relations and the French leader's personal friendship with Chinese leaders to new heights.

China-France ties are currently at their peak, with Paris being Beijing's fourth largest trading partner in the European Union (EU) and Beijing ranking the first among France's Asian trading partners.

On the global level, France and China find more and more common ground on major issues such as climate change, anti-terrorism and global governance reform.

The sound development of bilateral ties in the last 54 years has laid a solid foundation for Macron's visit. Bilateral relations will be further enhanced if he remains pragmatic, which is particularly helpful amid a smear campaign against China by some Western politicians and media recently.

For one thing, pragmatism helps Macron better understand the urgency and necessity of a closer France-China cooperation on a global level.

As two permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and France play important roles in safeguarding world peace and stability. Being practical helps Macron realize the vacuum of leadership left by the "America First" policy and its resultant damage.

In addition, no country on the planet can face increasingly complicated and diversified challenges alone. The China-France relationship has become more and more strategic in the current situation. It is the two nations' shared historical responsibility to strengthen cooperation.

Furthermore, pragmatism will help Macron properly assess the full potential of France-China cooperation.

With China and France respectively being the world's second and fifth largest economies, the potential of bilateral cooperation is enormous. China's industrial production capacity and France's advanced technologies are a natural fit. If so, the pie of common interests will become even bigger. But that requires true statesmanship.

Last but not least, pragmatism could help Macron clearly see that China represents opportunity for, not a threat to France, and Europe at large.

Despite increasing mutual trust and demonstrable win-win results, certain extend of China-phobia can be felt in Brussels and other capital cities on the continent.

What is worse, some politicians exploit the fear and drum up votes by depicting China's investment as a scheme to steal EU's high technology and its Belt and Road Initiative as a conspiracy to undermine Europe's security.

In this context, it is necessary for French-Sino collaboration in building up mutual trust, respect and understanding between Europe and China. It is high time to discard bias against China.

To do that also requires practical thinking and long-term vision. The truth, in the case of the Belt and Road Initiative, is that European countries like Greece, Poland and Spain have greatly benefited from Chinese investment.

Fifty-four years ago, the French government led by Charles de Gaulle, the founding father of France's Fifth Republic, recognized the People's Republic of China. His statesmanship and pragmatism helped France win the respect and friendship of the Chinese people.

Fifty-four years later, his admirer, Macron, faces another chance to strengthen the weathered relationship. To accomplish this, he needs to practice his pragmatism, like his idol did over half a century ago.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 00:49:19|Editor: Chengcheng

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CAIRO, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq announced on Sunday to drop his bid for presidency in the upcoming elections.

"I have realized that I would not be the ideal person to run the state affairs during the coming period. Therefore, I have decided not to run in the 2018 presidential elections," Shafiq said in a statement on his Twitter account.

Shafiq, who fled Egypt after narrowly losing to the ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in the 2012 elections, announced in the United Arab Emirates in November his intention to run for president.

However, he later returned to Egypt in early December, saying he would reconsider his decision.

"Perhaps my absence for over five years prevented me from accurate follow-up of the developments and accomplishments achieved in our nation despite the difficult conditions caused by violence and terrorism," Shafiq said in his statement.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has not yet formally announced his candidacy for the 2018 elections, but he is widely expected to do so and to earn a landslide victory due to the absence of competitive challengers.

Sisi took office in mid-2014, a year after he led the ouster of his predecessor Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests against Morsi's one-year rule and his now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

Sisi said in November that the 2018 presidential elections will be held in March or April as scheduled, stressing that he will not seek to change the constitutional limit of two four-year presidential terms, thus ruling out a third presidential term for himself.

A pro-Sisi campaign said in late December that it collected over 12 million signatures of Egyptians, more than 11 percent of the population, supporting Sisi to run for a second presidential term.

Egyptian rights and opposition lawyer Khaled Ali announced in November his intention to join the 2018 presidential race.

However, Ali could be disqualified as he has received a suspended three-month jail term in September over an obscene hand gesture he reportedly made after winning a court order challenging the government.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 01:29:28|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BRUSSELS, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Less than 20 percent of Belgians said they trust and believe in social media, a figure almost twice as less compared to five years ago, according to a recent opinion poll by Whyte in Belgium.

The survey also shows that Belgians maintain a high level of trust in traditional media: in particular, the radio (69.4 percent), newspapers (55 percent) and television (55.2 percent).

This suggests that, to a lesser or greater extent, the Belgian traditional media will continue to temporarily fend off the ever-expanding universe of digital media.

In the aftermath of the devastating March 2016 terror attacks in Brussels, which killed 32 people and wounded more than 300 others, incidents of violence sparked off on social networks is raising alarm bells about the city's internal security and the increasing reliance of social media as a platform to organize illegal activity.

Indeed, social networks have played an integral part in driving some of the recent incidents in Brussels. For example, on Jan. 5, a Belgian court accused offender Jelali D. de Benlabel for inciting people to riot online through Facebook.

There was another case on Nov. 14 last year, in which fans and police clashed violently on the streets of central Brussels after a French blogger urged his fans through social network to attend an illegal shooting of a video clip.

In addition, owing to the fact that social media lacks a proper system of surveillance, some social media platforms have become a vital channel for terrorist organizations to promote extremist ideas and recruit new members.

In December 2016, for example, the Belgian police initiated a major crackdown against an extremist branch of ISIS for attempting to recruit and motivate a dozen or so Belgian minors to carry out terrorist attacks around the city.

Although social media makes news and information readily accessible at the click of a mouse, it has become increasingly difficult to discern facts from fiction, leading to the proliferation of fake rumors and disinformation.

In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Mr. Goedseels, head of White Public Relations, painted a different picture as to why Belgians lack trust in social media: he believes Belgium has three official languages with serious north-south divisions, leading to a strong critical thinking among the public.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 01:44:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DUBAI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Morocco on Sunday pledged to boost mutual cooperation and enhance the bilateral ties in various fields, the state news agency WAM reported.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, UAE's minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation, held talks Sunday with visiting Moroccan counterpart Nasser Bourita over recent regional and international development, the report said.

The UAE diplomat underlined the strong UAE-Moroccan ties and the desire of the two countries' leaders to enhance them in "various domains."

For his part, Bourita hailed the UAE's pioneering role both regionally and internationally, while stressing his country's aspiration to continue to expand cooperation with the UAE in various fields.

The UAE and Morocco are both members of a Saudi-led pan-Arab coalition which has been fighting the Shiite Houthi fighters in Yemen since March 2015.

The coalition, which supports the internationally-recognized Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, accuses the Shiite-dominant Iran of supporting the Houthis.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 03:14:47|Editor: Mengjie

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A worker from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offers a blanket to an illegal immigrant at a naval base in Tripoli, Libya, on Jan. 7, 2018. Libyan naval rescued 297 illegal immigrants on Sunday and recovered two bodies off the coast of the western city of Garrabulli, some 60 km east of the capital Tripoli. (Xinhua/Hamza Turkia)

TRIPOLI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Libyan naval rescued 297 illegal immigrants on Sunday and recovered two bodies off the coast of the western city of Garrabulli, some 60 km east of the capital Tripoli.

"A navy patrol rescued 297 illegal immigrants off the coast of the city of Garrabulli. They were on two rubber boats tens of miles north of the city," Ayob Qassem, Libyan navy spokesman, told Xinhua.

"The two bodies are women, one of them was pregnant. They were found on one of the seized boats," Qassem said.

The spokesman added the two boats were overloaded with migrants, which led to the death of the two women.

Libya has become a preferred departure point for illegal immigrants hoping to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, because of insecurity and chaos in the North African country following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 03:24:49|Editor: Chengcheng

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The subway station where an explosion happened is cordoned off in southern Stockholm, Sweden, Jan. 7, 2018. A man was killed and a woman injured when an object exploded Sunday outside a subway station in southern Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, Swedish Television reported on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wei Xuechao)

STOCKHOLM, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- A man has died after picking up what police believe was a hand grenade outside a subway station in southern Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, Swedish Television reported on Sunday.



A woman was also injured in the blast, at the Varby Gard station in the municipality of Huddinge, which is about 11 kilometers south of Stockholm.

"These two people cycled past the object and stopped to see what was on the ground. The woman who was with the man was several meters behind him," police officer Lars Alvarsjo told Swedish Television. "I don't dare imagine what would have happened if one or several children had found the hand grenade. This is totally unacceptable," Alvarsjo said.

According to Alvarsjo, hand grenades are increasingly used by criminal networks in Sweden. "It is surprising they have not detonated earlier," Alvarsjo said.

Police told news agency TT that the killed man, who was in his 60s, and the injured woman, who is in her 40s, were a couple. The report quoted police sources as saying that there was no indication that the explosion was directed against any individuals or property. The man and the woman simply "were at the wrong place and at the wrong time".

Police also said the man died at the hospital and that the woman was also taken to the hospital and had wounds on her face and both legs.

On Sunday morning, police searched the area around the station, which was cordoned off as a bomb squad was called in to carry out an investigation.

Sven-Erik Olsson of the Stockholm police at first told reporters that he could not say what kind of explosive material was used or how powerful the explosion was, only that it was "powerful enough for the couple to be taken to hospital".

The Varby Gard station was cleared on Sunday and the Stockholm subway was partially shut, with replacement buses serving part of the route on the affected line.

Police patrols will remain in the area throughout Sunday night and Monday, with the municipality offering crisis counseling to local residents. Police also called for witnesses to step forward with any information.

So far, police did not say whether the explosion was a terror-related incident.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 03:29:50|Editor: Chengcheng

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GAZA, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said Sunday that it would hold on its work under the mandate of the UN General Assembly, following Israel's call to gradually shut down the agency.

UNRWA's media advisor Adnan Abu Hasna told Xinhua that his agency was established upon a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, where the majority of members voted in favor of extending UNRWA's mandate.

"UNRWA exclusively takes its mandate from the UN General Assembly and will continue working under it until solving Palestinian refugees' issue through all parties in a just and lasting way," Abu Hasna added.

UNRWA's spokesperson Chris Gunness said that "UNRWA is mandated by the UN General Assembly, which gives it broad and strong support for its humanitarian mission."

Earlier, Netanyahu said in the weekly cabinet meeting that UNRWA agency should gradually shut down.

The Israeli prime minister said that practical steps must be taken to change the situation in which "UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem instead of resolving it."

Israeli and international reports reported the United States' intention to freeze or delay its financial fund to UNRWA and stop aid to the Palestinians until they return to the negotiations table with Israel.

In this regard, Abu Hasna said that UNRWA was not informed of any official U.S. decision to halt financial aid.

He pointed out that UNRWA is already suffering from a 49 million dollars financial deficit and any fund suspension would have a negative impact on its work.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 05:50:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KHARTOUM Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- A student was killed and three others injured as they were participating in a demonstration in El Geneina, the capital city of Sudan's West Darfur State, in protest against increasing of bread prices, Sudan Tribune reported Sunday.

West Darfur State Governor Fadl Almula Alhaja has confirmed the killing of the student and the injury of the others, saying the protests were conducted by private schools students backed by trends he did not name, according to the report.

"Investigations will be made to know the details. The protests were conducted by private schools' students, the situations are now stable," the governor was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, eyewitnesses in El Geneina said that hundreds of students demonstrated in El Geneina on Sunday in protests against the prices hike.

According to the eyewitnesses, the police forces confronted the students which resulted in injuries among the students.

Earlier on Sunday, State Minister at Sudan's Interior Ministry, Babikir Digna, said in a statement that "expression through peaceful means is allowed, but any sabotage during the protests is not allowed."

"Gatherings and public symposia require prior permission, and any sabotage during protests is not allowed," the minister added, warning that the police forces would suppress any illegal protest.

Meanwhile, Sudanese political forces and parties called on the Sudanese people to come out in peaceful protests against the recent economic decisions.

Last week, the Sudanese parliament approved the general budget for 2018, which included devaluating the Sudanese pound against the U.S. dollar, with one dollar exchanging 18 Sudanese pounds from 6.9 Sudanese pounds, besides raising the electricity tariff for the industry, agriculture and trade sectors and liberalizing the price of wheat.

Accordingly, flour manufacturers have raised the price of a 50-kilo sack of wheat flour from 167 to 450 Sudanese pounds, causing the owners of bakeries to raise the price of a piece of bread from 0.5 Sudanese pounds to 1 pound as of Friday, Jan. 5, 2018.

Sudan consumes about 2 million tons of wheat annually, while the country's production is only about 12 percent of the annual consumption.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 07:45:30|Editor: Chengcheng

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MEXICO CITY, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Mexican marines exchanged gunfire with a group of gunmen in the popular beach resort of Los Cabos, in North Mexico's Baja California Sur state, leaving seven dead, officials said on Sunday.

The state's Attorney General's Office (PGJE) said the clash took place late Saturday, as the marines headed to a neighborhood in San Jose del Cabo, one of two towns that comprise the resort, to investigate the sound of gunfire.

On the way, the marines detected armed men riding in two vehicles, both with U.S. license plates, in the road ahead of them and ordered them to stop, but they sped up in an attempt to flee while the occupants fired their guns.

As the chase continued, both vehicles eventually crashed into walls or barricades, though the four occupants of the second vehicle got out and continued to fire on the marines until they were killed.

Marines seized high-caliber weapons and vehicles in the operation.

The PGJE said it opened an investigation into the incident it said was "allegedly linked to criminal events that have taken place in the state."

In late December, authorities found bodies hanging from bridges near Los Cabos, in a sign that violent crime sparked by rival drug trafficking organizations is plaguing the state.
Madisons tech community is turning cartwheels over the news on Monday that nonstop flights to San Francisco  with nearby Silicon Valley, the top U.S. technology hub  will start in June.

United Airlines will offer daily nonstop service, once a day, from Dane County Regional Airport to San Francisco International Airport starting June 7, officials said Monday. Tickets already are available to buy.

Airport director Bradley Livingston said hes been working for many years to persuade United to offer the direct flights. This is a very significant development for Wisconsin, he said.

Entrepreneurs like Matt Howard, CEO of mobile meal-ordering app EatStreet, are thrilled.

Several of us at EatStreet regularly make trips to San Francisco to talk with investors, attend conferences and to meet with partners, such as Facebook. A nonstop flight is going to make that trip much more efficient. But more importantly, it makes it easier for Silicon Valley investors, venture capitalists and potential employees to visit Madison to get a firsthand look at tech companies they may want to be a part of, Howard said.

Employees of Epic Systems Corp., the giant electronic health records company based in Verona, will likely make good use of the new service, spokeswoman Meghan Roh said.

We are excited about Uniteds decision, Roh said. It not only brings increased opportunities for us to support our current and future Northern California customers, but also helps grow an important relationship between the Bay Area and Madisons tech community.

In fact, many Madison-area health technology companies  including cancer diagnostics company Exact Sciences and asthma management company Propeller Health  are in San Francisco this week for the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that draws 10,000 industry leaders, investors and entrepreneurs.

Zendesk, a San Francisco-based customer service software company, opened a Madison office in 2014 and now has 250 employees here.

Nonstop flights between the two cities will be a real plus, said Jillana Peterson, engagement manager in Zendesks Madison office.

Being able to meet your colleagues and customers face to face, see the local offices and explore the neighborhoods in Madison and around the world has always been important to Zendesk. Anything that makes this easier is a good thing for us and for the burgeoning tech communities that we are a part of, Peterson said.

Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce president Zach Brandon said a survey of Chamber members in early 2016 showed strong support for nonstop service to San Francisco.

Landing the flight is exciting news for our entrepreneurial ecosystem, Brandon said.

Not just tech companies, but federal laboratories and academic research centers  such as the U.S. Forest Products Lab and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center  have ties between Wisconsin and the Bay area, said Tom Still, Wisconsin Technology Council president.

The flight from Madison will depart at 3:11 p.m. daily, arriving at San Francisco at 5:45 p.m., Pacific time. The return daily flight leaves San Francisco at 8:30 a.m. and arrives in Madison at 2:35 p.m., Central time.

United will use an Embraer E-175 aircraft with three classes, first class, economy plus and economy, totaling 76 seats. Round-trip tickets start at about $375.

Madison currently has three nonstop flights to the West: one each to Salt Lake City, Denver and Las Vegas, but none to California.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 07:50:32|Editor: Chengcheng

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OSLO, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Trond Giske, a deputy leader of Norway's main opposition Labour Party, announced his resignation on Sunday following accusations that he had sexually harassed women.

Giske, 51, who had held several ministerial posts in Labour governments, has recently been accused with sexual harassment in several situations, although their details have not been made public.

"The main reason I'm doing this is that it's impossible for me and my family to continue to withstand the pressure we've been under in the last few weeks," Giske said on Facebook.

"The second reason is the consideration of the Labour Party and the important work we have ahead of us," he said.

Giske, one of two deputy leaders of the Labour Party, said he would also resign his post as the party's chief on finance policy if requested by the party.

He was expected to remain as a Member of Parliament for the 2017-2021 term.

Giske said he looked forward "to giving my version" of events tied to the sexual harassment accusations and "want to answer questions that are posed and address what I believe is incorrect."

"I apologize again for things I have done that have caused discomfort to others. I have not always been conscious enough of my own role in all situations, especially those informal or private. I'm sorry," he said.

Giske served as Minister of Education, Research and Church Affairs from 2000 to 2001, as Minister of Culture and Church Affairs from 2005 to 2009 and as Minister of Trade and Industry from 2009 to 2013.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 09:10:45|Editor: Chengcheng

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CANBERRA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government has demanded the resignation of an opposition Member of Parliament (MP) over her alleged dual citizenship.

Defence Industry Minister and Leader of the House of Representatives Christopher Pyne on Monday demanded that Australian Labor Party (ALP) seek the resignation of Queensland MP Susan Lamb.

Pyne said that if Lamb's resignation was not secure, the government would use its slim majority to refer her to the High Court, where constitutional law experts believe she would be ruled as ineligible to serve in parliament.

Under Section 44 of the Australian Constitution, anyone who is a citizen of any country other than Australia is ineligible to run for parliament.

Lamb's father was born in Scotland, granting her a British citizenship from birth by descent.

"Our first preference is for Bill Shorten to do the right thing and refer his own MPs to the High Court, including Susan Lamb who is without a doubt still a citizen of the UK," Pyne said on Monday.

"In the absence of that, the government will refer any MP with a serious case to answer."

Lamb is the latest MP to be caught up in the eligibility crisis which swept through parliament late in 2017.

In October, the High Court found that five parliamentarians were dual citizens at the time of their election and disqualified from parliament.

The saga threatened the position of the government with a number of Liberal-National Coalition MPs either disqualified by the court.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 09:10:45|Editor: Chengcheng

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- French President Emmanuel Macron will pay an official visit to China from Jan. 8 to Jan. 10 at the invitation of his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

The following is a brief introduction to the French president.

Born in Amiens, northeast France in 1977, Macron graduated from Paris Nanterre University, Paris Institute of Political Studies and National School of Administration.

Macron was appointed deputy secretary general of the Elysee in 2012. He was appointed minister of economy, industry and digital affairs in 2014. He created his own political movement "En March!" (On the Move!) in 2016 and ran for president as an independent candidate.

He was elected the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic, 11th president in the history of France on May 7, 2017 and took office on May 14.

Macron is married to Brigitte Macron.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 09:30:52|Editor: Xiang Bo

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- Brazil international striker Diego Souza has joined Sao Paulo from their Brazilian top-flight rivals Sport Recife, the six-time league champions said on Sunday.

The 32-year-old signed a two-year contract with an option of a third year after Sao Paulo agreed to a three million-euro (about 3.6 million U.S. dollars) transfer fee.

"He will arrive in Sao Paulo in the coming days to undergo a medical before being integrated into the squad," Sao Paulo said in a statement on their official website.

Souza scored 57 goals in 173 matches for Sport, whom he joined from Fluminense in 2016.

The former Benfica player has been capped seven times for Brazil's national team and holds the record for the fastest goal ever scored by a Brazilian player in an international match.

He achieved the feat against Australia last June, finding the net just 11 seconds after the opening whistle in Brazil's 4-0 victory in Melbourne.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 10:06:00|Editor: Chengcheng

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TRIPOLI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Libyan government backed by the United Nations announced on Monday the end of the military action launched a few days ago in the western region against insecurity and smuggling.

"The Presidential Council of the Government of National Accord announces the end of all military operations in and around Abu-Kammash area. Orders have been issued for the competent authorities to take over the Tunisian border," said the government in a statement.

"The government confirms that necessary security arrangements have been taken to secure the entire area and to restore a normal life. The government also confirms that efforts are made, with all possible means, to pursue criminals and those who manipulate the livelihood of citizens," the statement added.

The Libyan government on Friday launched a military operation against insecurity and smuggling networks in western Libya, where armed groups smuggle fuel and illegal immigrants.

Government forces and the municipal council of the western Libyan city of Zuwara on Saturday reached an agreement to stop all military operations in the area.

On Sunday, Abdurrahman Swehli, head of the Libyan Higher Council of State, met with mayors of western cities and called on fighting parties to calm down and refrain from military actions in civilian areas.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 10:31:04|Editor: Yang Yi

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by Mao Pengfei, Nguon Sovan

PHNOM PENH, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- China is a major partner for Cambodia in the development of infrastructure, which is a key element to boost economic growth and to reduce poverty, Cambodian officials said.

Speaking to Xinhua ahead of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's visit to the country, Minister of Public Works and Transport Sun Chanthol said that infrastructure such as roads, bridges, railways, ports, airports is really necessary for Cambodia's socio-economic development and that China has played a leading role in supporting infrastructure development in the kingdom.

"Cooperation between Cambodia and China in infrastructure sector is excellent, as most of the national roads in Cambodia have been built under concessional loans and grant aid from China," he said.

"More than 2,000 km of roads, seven large bridges, and a new container terminal of the Phnom Penh Autonomous Port have been constructed under China's aid," Chanthol said, adding that the Southeast Asian country needs around 500 million U.S. dollars a year for transport infrastructure development.

According to the minister, besides granting financial assistance, China has also provided technical assistance and helped train Cambodian transport officials.

Meanwhile, Chanthol revealed that China would invest in a new international airport project and a 190-km long expressway project from Phnom Penh to the southwestern coastal province of Preah Sihanouk.

He said the BOT (build-operate-transfer) concessional agreements for the projects would be signed soon between the Cambodian government and Chinese companies.

"The new airport is very important to deal with the rising number of tourists to the Angkor world heritage site," he said.

"For the Phnom Penh-Preah Sihanouk expressway project, it will be a very important way for economic development because it connects Phnom Penh economic pole and Preah Sihanouk economic pole," Chanthol said. "The two big economic poles must link with each other by an expressway in order to further boost economic growth."

Hei Bavy, director-general of the state-owned Phnom Penh Autonomous Port (PPAP), said that China is the largest aid provider to Cambodia for infrastructure development and that the listed PPAP has greatly benefited from China's assistance.

He said the country's largest freshwater port had built a new container terminal under the concessional loan of 28.2 million U.S. dollars from the Chinese government and the terminal was inaugurated in January 2013.

"With the China-funded terminal, the port has tripled its container loading capacity to 150,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units, or TEUs (standard-sized containers), a year," he told Xinhua.

According to Bavy, the port had received up to 180,000 cargo containers in 2017, about 20 percent higher than the expectation.

"This clearly reflects that China's financial aid to the port is very important to handle the growing flow of goods," he said.

Since 2016, the PPAP has been expanding its container terminal in the second phase to double its capacity to 300,000 TEUs, he said, adding that the 20-million-U.S. dollar project will be completed in 2018.

He added that the second phase project is being built under the port's own capital and a portion of financial contribution from the Cambodian government.

Bavy said the port has planned to seek China's aid to expand the port's capacity from 300,000 TEUs to 500,000 TEUs in the third phase from 2020 to 2022.

Commenting on the Belt and Road Initiative, which was proposed by China in 2013, he said the initiative would greatly benefit all participating countries, especially in transport infrastructure development.

"Better transport infrastructure will reduce logistic cost, so when this initiative comes to fruition, people will have goods in a cheaper price," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 10:36:06|Editor: Chengcheng

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The White House said Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron over phone Saturday about the issues of the Korean Peninsula and Iran.

Trump updated Macron on the developments of the situation on the Peninsula, underscoring the "international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearization" of the Peninsula, according to the White House.

The two presidents also talked about the demonstrations in Iran.

Iran had earlier blasted back at the U.S. stance on the demonstrations inside Iran, with its ambassador to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo slamming the U.S. government's attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Islamic Republic, Tasnim news agency reported Thursday.

Trump said Saturday that he is willing to talk with Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and that he supports the talks between the two Koreas next week.

The remarks have shelved his often-bellicose rhetoric on Kim. Since he took office last January, the Trump administration has resorted to hawkish and threatening rhetoric against the DPRK, and has sent warships and conducted joint military drills with South Korea.

Such moves, along with the DPRK's sixth nuclear test and several missile launches, have sent the situation on the peninsula to a simmering extent.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 10:41:07|Editor: Yang Yi

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A Yutong bus runs on a road in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Jan. 5, 2018. Well-equipped with high-tech and air-cons, Chinese Yutong's "smart" buses have brought a safe and comfortable riding choice to passengers in Phnom Penh. (Xinhua/Sovannara)

by Nguon Sovan, Mao Pengfei

PHNOM PENH, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Well-equipped with high-tech and air-cons, Chinese Yutong's 'smart' buses have brought a safe and comfortable riding choice to passengers in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia.

Donated by the Chinese government in July 2017, 98 buses have been used to serve passengers on five out of the eight main lines in the city, and have attracted hundreds of thousands of passengers each month.

DESIGNED BASED ON LOCAL CONDITIONS, EQUIPPED WITH SMART CONTROL SYSTEM

Yutong's sales manager for Asia & Pacific Division Jiang Lin said the buses, designed based on the actual conditions of Phnom Penh, had been equipped with intelligent management system and air-cons, and they were capable of carrying 80 passengers each, including 35 seating and 45 standing.

"Phnom Penh experiences both wet and dry seasons with a hot climate, so the buses were manufactured according to these local conditions like wet and high temperature," he told Xinhua.

Jiang said the buses were helpful for Phnom Penh to build a complete public transport system, to alleviate traffic congestion and provide the public with comfortable riding experience.

"The buses have won the praise from the Phnom Penh government and the public because of high quality, comfort and excellent-after-sale service," he said.

Through Yutong intelligent city bus system, the Phnom Penh City Bus Authority (CBA) could monitor the real-time condition of the 98 buses via a computer or a smart phone, he said, adding that the intelligent system has more than 20 functions, such as analysis report on energy saving potential, oil monitoring, multi-dimension statistics of faults, supplement record statistics, monthly maintenance schedule of vehicles, and overview of energy consumption.

"This intelligent system will help Phnom Penh to build a modern city bus transport system," he said, adding that Yutong will provide more engineers and technical support to the CBA so that it can build the "smart" bus control center in 2018.

"Undoubtedly, the China-made buses will be more and more popular among Cambodian people and help Phnom Penh transport system develop rapidly," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 10:56:09|Editor: Yang Yi

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The second Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) forum leaders's meeting will kick off in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on Wednesday, with the aim of building a community of shared future of peace and prosperity.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will attend the meeting under the theme "Our River of Peace of Sustainable Development." The river refers to the Lancang-Mekong River.

Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in southwest China, the river is called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River as it flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the sea.

More than 326 million people live along the 4,880-km-long waterway, which flows through an area of more than 795,000 square km.

Like the Lancang-Mekong River, the common mission and ideals that bind the six countries together have forged a common destiny for them.

CONSENSUS TO BUILD A COMMUNITY OF SHARED FUTURE

"Sanya Declaration determined the goal of building a community of shared future of peace and prosperity, which was reaffirmed in the joint press communique of the third LMC foreign ministers' meeting in December," said Hu Zhengyue, vice president of China Public Diplomacy Association and former Chinese assistant minister of foreign affairs.

Sanya Declaration was issued after the first LMC leaders' meeting held in Sanya City in south China's Hainan Province in March 2016.

China has proposed building a community with a shared future for mankind and the LMC cooperation mechanism can be a "good starting point" and a "demostration area" to implement the concept, Ruan Zongze, executive vice president of China Institute of International Studies, told Xinhua.

The six countries - China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam -- are closely inter-connected because they are nourished by the same river, Ruan said, adding that they have very similar development concepts and a lot in common in inter-connectivity, water resources, agriculture and technology.

The six nations have very deep traditional friendship with innate advantages, solid basis, strong willingness and great potential for cooperation, and a have common goal to build a community of shared future of peace and prosperity, said Huang Xilian, deputy director-general of the Department of Asian Affairs under the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

"This is why from the very start the Lancang-Mekong cooperation mechanism has gained great importance attached by and extensive support from the governments and peoples of the six countries," Huang said.

LANCANG-MEKONG EFFICIENCY WITH BRIGHT PROSPECTS

The LMC has achieved fruitful results since its inception in 2016. It has demonstrated a Lancang-Mekong speed and efficiency.

On mechanism construction, the LMC has formed dialogue mechanisms at different levels. It so far has held one leaders' meeting, three foreign ministers' meetings and five senior officials' meetings, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou told a recent news briefing.

On regional cooperation projects, most of the 45 early harvest projects identified at the first LMC leaders' meeting and the 13 initiatives put forward by China at the second LMC foreign ministers' meeting have been completed or made substantive progress, reads the joint press communique of the third LMC foreign ministers' meeting held in Dali City of southwest China's Yunnan Province on Dec. 15.

"The reason why the Lancang-Mekong cooperation mechanism has enjoyed rapid development is that the mechanism accords with the six nations' common willingness to enhance all-win cooperation and the trend of regional economic integration," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, "It has showed strong vitality since it was born."

In the first 10 months of 2017, trade between China and the other five countries in the Lancang-Mekong area reached 17.76 billion U.S. dollars, up 15.6 percent from the same period of the previous year, and is expected to exceed 20 billion dollars in the whole of 2017, showed the latest Chinese official statistics.

From January to October 2017, China's investment in the five countries reached 2.68 billion dollars, up 22.3 percent from the previous year.

Guo Yanjun, director of the Institute of Asian Studies of China Foreign Affairs University, is optimistic about the LMC's prospects. "The cooperation initiatives and projects have truly reflected the demands of the six countries and they should further such pragmatic cooperation in the future," he told Xinhua.

However, Guo warned that the cooperation mechanism should not be advanced with a too fast speed as there is development disparity among the countries.

The leaders at the second LMC leaders' meeting are expected to adopt several documents on the future development of the sub-regional cooperation.

"We expect that the upcoming LMC leaders' meeting will achieve fruitful results, chart the course for future development of the mechanism and inject impetus, so as to benefit the peoples in the region," said Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Xiong Bo in a recent signed article.

CHINA-CAMBODIA TIES IMPORTANT FOR LMC

On Thursday, Premier Li will also pay a visit to Cambodia. It will be his first overseas visit in 2018.

"Premier Li's choice of Cambodia as the destination of his first overseas visit in 2018 shows that China attaches great importance to China-Cambodia relations," Hu Qianwen, former Chinese ambassador to Cambodia, told Xinhua.

During his stay in Cambodia, Li will meet with Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, and hold talks with his counterpart, Hun Sen. The two sides will exchange views on bilateral ties and international and regional issues of common concern, so as to plan for future development of China-Cambodia relations.

The two sides are expected to reach consensus and sign cooperation documents on infrastructure, science, agriculture, tourism and other fields.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of China-Cambodia diplomatic relations. "China-Cambodia relationship has developed in a very steady and rapid way and is becoming better and better with very solid strategic mutual trust between the two countries," Ruan said.

"China-Cambodia cooperation is an example of international cooperation that features equality and mutual benefit between a major country and a relatively small country," he said.

Ruan said Cambodia is also very interested in the Belt and Road Initiative, which was proposed by China to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa based on ancient land and maritime trade routes.

"Cambodia has seen that cooperation with China is key to Cambodia's future development, which can help improve its economy and enhance its role in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Indo-China Peninsula," he said, "China-Cambodia relationship is in essence a community of shared future."

The relationship between China and Cambodia has its particularity, as it is also that between China and an ASEAN member, Hu Zhengyao said, "The sound development of China-Cambodia relations is conducive to China-ASEAN cooperation and the LMC."

"With a very solid foundation for future development of bilateral ties, it is expected that China and Cambodia can strengthen coordination and cooperation within the framework of ASEAN," Guo said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 11:36:19|Editor: Yamei

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PARIS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- France and China can choose to enter a "long march" towards the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, as both countries had in history "put themselves at the service of an ideal of universalism bigger than their immediate interests."

David Gosset, a senior expert on international relations and founder of the Europe-China Forum, made the remarks in a recent interview with Xinhua.

French President Emmanuel Macron left Paris Sunday afternoon for his first state visit to China, making him the first European leader to visit the country since last autumn's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

Macron's visit will reveal not only his conception of France, of the European Union (EU) and of his partner on the other side of the Atlantic, but "his global approach to our time," said Gosset.

The energy and inspiration of 40-year-old Macron, who appears as a new force, will contribute to the dynamics of the bilateral relationship, the expert said.

The French president can be a "messenger" within the Western world of the idea that a rising China is an opportunity for Europe and a decisive factor in the equation for solving major global problems, he added.

On China-France cooperation at a global level, the expert highlighted the link between qualitative growth, the post-carbon economy, and the Belt and Road Initiative, adding that the link is one of the points where Paris and Beijing can demonstrate that an "ecological civilization" must be built for the planet.

"The two countries must co-invest substantially under the framework of the Belt and Road in cooperation projects on the African continent.Wherever possible, they must act for the realization of sustainable new Silk Roads," said Gosset.

The expert also said through the joint efforts of Paris and Beijing, a mechanism needs to be established to bring together the EU, the African Union and China, which could better coordinate actions related to the African continent.

Gosset said the current international situation calls on the two ancient nations to act in new directions and to think about "the principles for the architecture of the world to come," in addition to strengthening cooperation in traditional fields like trade, education, science and arts.

"When France and China reflect together upon a changing world and try to make sense of it, the Franco-Chinese relationship is no longer the sum of what ministers, diplomats or businessmen accomplish with varying degrees of success," he said. "It puts itself at the service of a cause that transcends it but also gives it its true value."

Leaders of the two countries, in spite of their differences in age and career path, converge on two essential points, according to Gosset.

"First, in their political philosophy, they create support within their country by their ability to reconcile what, on the surface, seems to be opposed," he said. "(Second) in international politics, they converge in the idea of defending multilateralism."

Macron's three-day visit to China officially kicks off on Monday, during which he is scheduled to meet with Chinese leaders and attend a series of events in Beijing and the northwestern city of Xi'an.
For more than a decade, we have heard half-baked justifications for continuing with the failed energy policy known as the Renewable Fuel Standard, only to find constant evidence that U.S. consumers, air quality and our national security are all better off without this program.

With renewed efforts underway in Washington to limit the continued damage that comes from mandating the use of corn ethanol and other biofuels in our nations gasoline supply, the debate endures, as seen in a recent State Journal editorial on the topic, Biofuel still beneficial.

Its time for that debate, though  along with the lopsided debacle that RFS has become  to end. If we want any shot at making real clean air progress, spurring job creation and kick-starting the development of advanced biofuels, policymakers and elected leaders must take a more realistic view of how this policy failure is holding us back.

The federal governments effort for the better part of 12 years to tip the scales, providing a guaranteed market for ethanol-blended gasoline, could possibly be described as a great experiment for a few  namely, corn farmers  but absolutely terrible for most.

The 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard may have been well-intentioned, but it quickly became a failure of epic proportions, harming businesses, consumers and the environment.

The State Journal editorial calls the ethanol mandate a success and claims ethanol-blended gasoline is cleaner than pure gasoline. But the University of Michigans Energy Institute revealed in a study that greenhouse gas emissions from corn ethanol reach as much as 70 percent higher than emissions from standard petroleum gasoline. A recent study by UW-Madison also points to the RFS as a bad idea, as the State Journal editorial mentioned, noting corn ethanols major emissions.

Independent research has shown us many times over that emissions from corn ethanol are detrimental to our water and terrain  from plowing the land, to harvesting and transporting the corn and, finally, to producing ethanol.

Despite the governments meddling  picking certain well-connected special interest groups over American consumers, families and small businesses  Wisconsin voters are speaking out about this failed policy. Take, for example, Laura Timm, spokeswoman for Wauwatosa-based manufacturer Briggs & Stratton, who recently told the Journal-Sentinel that some kind of reform or repeal is necessary on ethanol.

Likewise, Dan Ariens of Brillion-based outdoor power equipment manufacturer Ariens Co., the American Motorcyclist Association, and ABATE of Wisconsin are all united in opposition to failed federal ethanol mandates.

And where the State Journal editorial board asserts that domestic corn ethanol enhances national security by reducing dependence on foreign nations for energy, we say that the revolution the United States has seen in domestic oil and natural gas production has done that much more effectively, with considerable speed. The shale revolution has not only made the RFS unnecessary, but the mandate is detrimental to our nations progress toward energy independence.

Meanwhile, thanks to the RFS, Americans paid about $83 billion for more than 92 billion gallons of ethanol to be blended into their gasoline  with the added ripple effect of lower fuel efficiency and more trips to the pump (the Institute for Energy Research calculated that a car using E10, which is 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, gets a full 3 percent to 4 percent fewer miles.)

All that aside, lets entertain the notion put forth by the State Journal that no current energy source is free of negative effects, and that there is some good about corn ethanol. If corn ethanol is truly a sustainable renewable fuel, then lets stop tipping the scales with massive government subsidies and let ethanol compete in the market.

The government should not pick winners and losers  and most certainly not when there are so few winners with ethanol. Its time for the EPA and the Trump administration to leave behind the failure that is the RFS and embrace common sense.

The RFS has never been a success. But the administration could claim a victory by putting a stop to it.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 11:51:20|Editor: Yamei

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- U.S. space firm SpaceX on Sunday launched a top secret payload into space for the U.S. government, known only by the codename Zuma.

The payload took off at 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT) on a Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Northrop Grumman, an American aerospace and defense technology company, acknowledged that it arranged the launch on the U.S. government's behalf and said the payload will be launched into a low-Earth orbit.

However, very little is known about the nature of the Zuma mission, as no U.S. government agency has claimed responsibility for it so far.

SpaceX has already launched two classified payloads for the U.S. government during the past year.

Launched in May, the NROL-76 spy satellite was for the National Reconnaissance Office. The other was an uncrewed X-37B space plane for the U.S. Air Force, which lifted off in September.

As usual, SpaceX once again landed Falcon 9's first stage back to Earth during Sunday's mission.

The company's launch webcast showed the first stage touched down at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral just eight minutes after liftoff.

Such landings are part of SpaceX's efforts to develop fully reusable rockets, which the company believes could bring down spaceflight costs.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 12:01:22|Editor: Yamei

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SYDNEY, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A remote island off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea is continuing to spew volcanic ash on Monday, causing several hundred residents to flee their homes.

Although exact details regarding the total number of local villagers that have been affected remains unclear, Samaritan Aviation, an American charity that has assisted in the evacuation, has said there are believed to be between 500 and 600 people living on Kadovar island.

Thought to be dormant, the 365-meter tall volcano began erupting on Friday and has not stopped since.

"There's been a good amount of ash emitting continuously in a plume that has traveled about 120 nautical miles so far," Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre forcaster Cheyne O'Brien told Xinhua.

"The plume of volcanic ash has reached over 2,000 meters high to the west-northwest and that's been constant with what we have observed during the last 48 hours."

At this point, there has not been any threat to aircraft in the vicinity, according to O'Brien.

"The ash at this level will not affect planes at cruising altitude and as far as we know there has been no disruption to flights," he said.

With no previous eruption ever recorded on the island, volcanologists are having a hard time predicting whether an explosive eruption, that could cause tsunamis and landslides, may follow.

Chris Firth from Macquarie University in Sydney told local media, "It's hard to predict what might happen, as there's nothing to compare it to."

The only mention of an explosive eruption in the area dates back to the 17th century, when records could be found about two "burning islands" in that area.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 12:56:33|Editor: Yamei

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HOUSTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- A 17-year-old who opened fire during a struggle was fatally shot by authorities early Sunday in North Little Rock of Arkansas, a state in south central United States, local Police Department said in a news release.

It happened shortly after 1 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) after the police pulled over a vehicle, whose 17-year-old occupant was found carrying a gun during a pat-down search. A struggle then occurred. Two other people were also in the vehicle.

"During the struggle the suspect fired at least one shot at the officers which resulted in the officers firing shots at the suspect," the police wrote, noting the teen died at the scene, whose name was later identified as Charles Smith.

The release did not indicate whether any of the officers were hurt. They have been placed on an administrative leave pending an investigation into the shooting.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 13:26:40|Editor: Chengcheng

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SEOUL, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- South Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will discuss issues of mutual concern during the upcoming high-level talks, Seoul's Unification Ministry said Monday.

Unification Ministry spokesman Baek Tae-hyun told a press briefing that the upcoming dialogue will first focus on the DPRK's participation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Issues of mutual concern to improve inter-Korean relations would be on the dialogue agenda, such as urgent issues which South Korea proposed in July last year to talk about, the spokesman said.

The Moon Jae-in government of South Korea, which was inaugurated in May last year, offered to hold military talks with the DPRK to stop any hostile act near the military demarcation line (MDL) dividing the two Koreas and humanitarian talks for the reunion of separated families.

People from the two sides have been banned from visiting and contacting each other since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war.

South Korea and the DPRK exchanged the lists of its respective five-member delegation over the weekend for the upcoming senior-level, inter-governmental talks, the first inter-Korean dialogue in about two years.

The South Korean delegation will be led by Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon, while the DPRK side will be led by Ri Son-gwon, chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fartherland.

Baek said the plenary session would kick off at 10 a.m. local time (0100 GMT) Tuesday at Peace House in the South Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 13:26:42|Editor: Chengcheng

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KABUL, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has warned that the recent Kabul deadly suicide attack may amount to a war crime, the UN mission said on Monday.

The mission released its preliminary findings into the Jan. 4 suicide attack in Kabul, where the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility a body-borne improvised explosive device, that killed at least 13 people including Afghan security forces and injured 19 others, after the arrival of anti-riot police following hours' violent disturbance between security officials and shopkeepers.

"Twelve of the 13 slain were police officials, performing legitimate law enforcement functions of helping to restore order and safety for civilians during a violent incident," said the mission.

"UNAMA reminds all parties that Afghan National Police personnel are regarded as civilians unless they are directly participating in hostilities. The officers killed in the attack were not engaged in the armed conflict. Civilians may never be the object of an attack at any time or in any place," it said, warning the indiscriminate explosive devices, almost certainly to cause immense suffering to civilians, may amount to war crimes.

More than 2,640 civilians were killed and over 5,370 others injured in conflict-related incidents in first nine months of 2017, according to UNAMA's figures.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 13:56:46|Editor: Yang Yi

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HOHHOT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Manzhouli, a major land port of entry on China's border with Russia, imported over 1,700 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) from Russia in 2017, the Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region said Monday.

Manzhouli officially began importing LPG from Russia in February of last year, and the annual imports of the gas reached 1,713 tonnes. The resource is mainly used as household fuel in the region.

Imports of LPG are expected to expand further in 2018 to meet the demand of inland users, local authorities said.

China has been adjusting its energy structure to reduce pollution in recent years. A major move has been to shift from coal to clean energy, leading to surging demand for clean fuel such as natural gas.

As a green energy, liquefied petroleum gas can make up for shortages in natural gas and is cost-effective and easy to transport. When used as an automobile fuel, it releases 90 percent less carbon monoxide and 70 percent less hydrocarbon compounds than traditional petroleum.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 14:36:55|Editor: Chengcheng

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SEOUL, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Top nuclear envoys, who represent South Korea and Japan at the six-party talks for the denuclearized Korean Peninsula, met in Seoul Monday to discuss the peninsula's nuclear issue amid growing signs of a thaw in inter-Korean relations.

Lee Do-hoon, South Korea's special representative for the Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, met with his Japanese counterpart Kenji Kanasugi, according to Seoul's foreign ministry.

The two sides agreed to strengthen diplomatic efforts to turn a peace momentum, which was recently being created on the peninsula, into a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue.

Lee and Kanasugi made an in-depth discussion on ways to encourage the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to come to the dialogue table while stably managing situations on the peninsula.

The meeting came ahead of the high-level talks between South Korea and the DPRK slated to be held Tuesday in the truce village of Panmunjom.

The inter-Korean talks would first focus on the DPRK's participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics, which South Korea will host in February in the country's eastern county of Pyeongchang.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 14:41:56|Editor: Chengcheng

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KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 militants have been killed as security forces attacked Taliban hideouts in Khan Abad district of the northern Kunduz province on Sunday night, an army spokesman, Ghulam Hazrat Karimi, said Monday.

The security forces, according to the official, have been combing up several villages in Khan Abad district to kill or capture the armed militants to ensure lasting peace in the restive district.

Without providing information on possible casualties of security personnel, the official said that the operations would last to ensure peace and stability there in Khan Abad.

Meanwhile, a villager on the condition of anonymity said that one soldier was killed and four others including two security personnel and two civilians sustained injuries.

Taliban militants haven't commented yet.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 14:51:48|Editor: Chengcheng

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People visit the Vintage Paper Fair at San Francisco County Fair Building in San Francisco, the United States, Jan. 7, 2018. For over 40 years, Vintage Paper Fair has been one of the San Francisco Bay Area's favorite antique shows. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 15:17:01|Editor: Lifang

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SEOUL, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's top nuclear envoy will visit the United States this week to discuss the Korean Peninsula's nuclear issue, Seoul's foreign ministry said Monday.

Lee Do-hoon, special representative for the Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, will visit Washington from Wednesday to Friday.

During the visit, Lee will meet with his U.S. counterpart Joseph Yun, a chief negotiator at the six-party talks for the denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

Lee will also meet with key figures of the U.S. government in charge of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) affairs, according to the ministry.

The South Korean envoy will make an in-depth discussion with U.S. officials on ways to peacefully resolve the peninsula's nuclear issue and improve inter-Korean relations.

Lee's visit to Washington would come a day after the high-level talks between South Korea and the DPRK scheduled to be held Tuesday in the truce village of Panmunjom.
President Donald Trumps first tweet of 2018, directed at Pakistan, was predictably clumsy and combative.

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, Trump huffed. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!

As is often the case, the tweet is fact-challenged  $14 billion of that money was actually post-9/11 reimbursements to Pakistan for its support of U.S. anti-terrorism initiatives and operations in Afghanistan. Nevertheless the spirit of Trumps remarks is on the mark.

For years, Pakistan has played a double game with its anti-terrorism efforts. At times, it has been helpful in ferreting out al-Qaida operatives, and has launched military offensives against its homegrown threat, the Pakistani Taliban. But Washington for years has accused Pakistan of a policy of covertly backing militant groups that target U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan  namely, the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban.

That coziness with extremist groups confounds U.S. military commanders. Haqqani and Afghan Taliban militants launch ambushes and bombings on U.S.-allied forces in Afghanistan, then slip back over the border into the badlands of northwest Pakistan, insulated from retaliation by American and Afghan forces. Pakistani leaders issue boilerplate denials that they provide militants safe haven, yet continue the tacit support.

Trumps predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as vexed. In August 2016, Obama withheld $300 million in military assistance to Pakistan because of Islamabads support for the Afghan Taliban and its ally, the Haqqani network. Last summer, the Trump administration signaled its displeasure with Islamabad by putting on hold $255 million in military aid to Pakistan. Administration officials said last week that the aid will not be sent to Pakistan.

Obama was right to withhold the money, and so is Trump.

It may not be enough of a cudgel to get Pakistan to change its ways. It certainly hasnt been in the past. But its hard to justify sending hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism aid to a country that continues to give shelter to terrorist groups. Assistance to Pakistan has always been framed as incentive for Pakistan to do more in the fight on terror. But the right way to frame the rationale is to flip it around. Aid to Pakistan should be contingent on the countrys earnest cooperation in battling terrorists, regardless of their affiliation.

The war in Afghanistan, Americas longest ever, is far from over. Afghan Taliban militants control a large chunk of the country, the most since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Last year, Trump beefed up the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They arent a combat force. Instead, they focus on counterterrorism missions and advising Afghan officers who battle Taliban militants.

Without their presence, Kabuls dysfunctional government likely wouldnt be able to reverse Taliban momentum. But just as critical to the mission in Afghanistan is Pakistans cooperation.

Pakistans long-standing under-the-table policy of drawing distinctions between terrorists to target and terrorists to coddle is bad policy for the simple reason that terrorism under any banner is wrong and lethal to innocents. In Afghanistan, terrorism equals instability on Pakistans doorstep. Thats not good for the U.S. and the rest of the West, but its also not good for Pakistan and its wrecked economy. Doling out more U.S. money to Pakistan year after year hasnt made its leaders realize that. Freezing the aid sends a stronger message....
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 15:27:03|Editor: Lifang

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KUALA LUMPUR, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia, the world's second largest palm oil producer after Indonesia, may see its palm oil exports increase after its government suspends export taxes on crude palm oil (CPO) from Monday.

Malaysian Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Mah Siew Keong announced recently the suspension of export taxes on CPO for three months from Jan 8 Monday to April 7, in a bid to boost palm oil prices and reduce high stockpiles.

The taxes removal, however, will end early if CPO stocks fall to 1.6 million tons.

According to Malaysian Palm Oil Board, Malaysia's CPO export tax for January 2018 was 5.5 percent; Malaysia's stockpile in November 2017 stood at a two-year high of 2.56 million tons.

Analysts said the export taxes suspension is expected to improve Malaysia's CPO exports competitiveness and give a short-term boost to its exports to major importers such as China and India.

"This will help boost CPO exports from Malaysia as it will be more competitive against Indonesian CPO exports, which are subject to a CPO levy of 50 U.S. dollar per ton," said CIMB Research's analyst Ng Lee Fang.

She sees it as a positive move for Malaysian planters in the near term as based on the latest export taxes, it would allow CPO exporters in Malaysia to save 144 ringgit (36.1 U.S. dollar) per ton.

"We also believe that major consumers such as India and China will take this opportunity to buy more palm oil from Malaysia," said MIDF Research's analyst Alan Lim, adding that the demand from China is supported by pre-stocking activity ahead of the Chinese New Year in mid-February.

Concurred with Lim, Public Investment Bank Research's analyst Chong Hoe Leong believed the move will give a boost to Malaysia's palm oil exports amid the upcoming Chinese New Year celebration.

"Price sensitive importers like India will likely import more while China, the second largest palm oil importer, will also lock in more orders as demand picks up ahead of Chinese New Year in February," he added.

But he also pointed out the possibilities of similar measures by other countries.

"Indonesia, the world largest palm oil producer, might also roll out some incentives to undercut the CPO prices in order to push for their palm oil exports," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 15:42:05|Editor: Zhou Xin

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MANILA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte continues to enjoy high trust and approval ratings, according to an independent poll released on Monday.

A survey by Pulse Asia Inc., conducted in Dec. 2017, showed that 80 percent of the 1,200 people aged 18 and above surveyed nationwide approved of the way Duterte runs the country. It showed that 82 percent of those surveyed said they continue to trust the leader.

Across geographic areas and socio-economic classes, the poll said, "It is only Duterte who succeeds in scoring majority approval ratings and trust figures."

Aside from Duterte, the survey also showed that Philippine Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo and Senate President Aquilino Pimentel "continue to enjoy majority approval and trust rating at the national level."

Robredo received 59 percent approval rating and 58 percent trust rating, while Pimentel, 57 percent performance rating and 53 percent trust rating, the poll showed.

Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque lauded the poll results, urging Filipinos to translate Duterte's ratings "into action by standing as one."

"This number shows that our people are aware and recognize the significant strides the president undertook in his one year and a half in office," Roque said.

"We thus call on everyone to put this appreciation into action by standing as one and helping the government as we continue to address the problem of poverty, illegal drugs, criminality, and corruption," Roque said.

Duterte, who assumed the presidency in June 2016, will end his single, six-year term in 2022.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 16:07:15|Editor: Lifang

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DUBAI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Emirates Airline, the international carrier of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), announced on Monday the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with rival airline Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi, for cooperation in aviation security.

The MoU was signed between Emirates' security division Emirates Group Security and Etihad Aviation Group by Sir Tim Clark, President Emirates Airline, and Tony Douglas, Group Chief Executive Officer of Etihad Aviation Group.

Emirates said in its statement that "the historic agreement, the first between the UAE's two world-leading aviation groups, signals the importance of closer collaboration in aviation security to effectively exploit joint synergies to enhance efficiency and security for the benefit of both groups' customers."

One of the key areas of cooperation outlined in the MoU involves the sharing of information and intelligence between Emirates, which in November added the 100th Airbus A380 Superjumco to its fleet, and Etihad, whose name means unity in Arabic, on critical aspects of aviation security.

Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, chairman and chief executive of Emirates Airline and Group said "security is one of the foremost priorities of the global aviation industry."

Through this agreement, Emirates Group Security will collaborate with Etihad Aviation Group to share know-how and extend aviation security services in order to better handle shared challenges, he added.

Vice Chairman of Etihad Aviation Group Hamad Abdulla Al-Shamsi said "by working closely together, and pooling our expertise and resources, Etihad Aviation Group and Emirates Group Security will build a stronger platform from which to share best practice and knowledge, allowing us to provide the safest travelling environment for our customers."

Earlier in October last year, Clark said the Dubai government-controlled airline was open to cooperate with local rival Etihad Airways, but stressed that a full merger between the two was "up to the owners," hence the ruling families of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Emirates recorded in the fiscal year 2016/2017, which ended on March 31, an 82-percent decline in its annual profit. Etihad lost in the full year 2016 1.87 billion dollars due to a stronger dollar.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 16:37:18|Editor: Lifang

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NEW DELHI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- India's Supreme Court Monday said that it would reconsider its 2013 order which criminalized gay sex in this country by upholding a colonial-era law.

A three-judge bench, led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, said the apex court's 2013 judgment upholding the validity of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, which considers sex between consenting adults of same gender a crime, appeared to hurt individual sexual preferences.

"Choice can't be allowed to cross the boundaries of law but the confines of law can't trample or curtail the inherent right embedded in an individual under Article 21, the right to life and liberty," the court said.

"The 2013 judgment needs to be reconsidered," the court said in the wake of a petition filed by five members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community."

The court also referred the petition to a higher bench.

In December 2013, the top court set aside a Delhi High Court order in 2009 decriminalizing homosexuality. The Delhi high court had then overturned Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, the 148-year-old colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an "unnatural offence".

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code defines homosexual acts as "carnal intercourse against the order of nature". Under the law, homosexual acts are punishable by a 10-year prison term.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 17:02:22|Editor: Lifang

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DAMASCUS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- At least 21 civilians were killed Monday by airstrikes on the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria, a monitor group reported.

Half of the killed in the airstrikes that targeted the countryside of Idlib were children and women, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, accusing Russian and Syrian warplanes of carrying out the airstrikes.

There were no official comments from the Syrian government.

The airstrikes came just hours after a deadly blast in Idlib killed 34 people, including 18 civilians, according to the Observatory.

The overnight blast targeted a position of the Agnad al-Caucaus rebel group, which is allied with the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee (LLC).

No party claimed responsibility for the bombing, but it's apparently a rebel-on-rebel operation, especially now that the LLC is accusing the Agnad group of backing down on supporting the LLC in their battles in Idlib against the government forces and other rival groups.

The Syrian army has been on a wide-scale offensive in the southern countryside of Idlib, capturing tens of towns and villages over the past two months.

The recent military victory was achieved on Sunday when the Syrian army captured the strategic town of Sinjar, which enables the government forces to advance toward capturing the key air base of Abu al-Duhur.

Idlib has emerged as the main destination of the rebel groups, which have evacuated several positions across Syria after surrendering to the Syrian army.

The area has become a home to several rebel groups from different affiliations, some of which are supported by Turkey, while others, such as the Nusra Front, are designated as terrorist groups.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 17:22:27|Editor: Zhou Xin

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by Liu Chuntao, Naim-Ul-Karim

DHAKA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Every day, hundreds of local and foreign tourists visit an archaeological site with unique architectural features which a joint team of archaeologists from Bangladesh and China have unearthed.

The site contains the remains of a Buddhist town and temple at Nateshwar, the present day location of which is in the Bikrampur area of Bangladesh's Munshiganj district, 30 km south of the capital city of Dhaka.

The archeological site is the remains of temple and city thought to be 1,000 years old.

The old ruins, still being excavated by the joint team of Bangladeshi and Chinese archaeologists, are one of the major recent archaeological discoveries in Bangladesh.

The Buddhist historical site featuring unique architectural elements has been discovered about seven meters beneath the ground. Atish Dipankar, known as a venerated Buddhist scholar and philosopher, is thought to have spent his early life here.

Deputy Chief of Mission at the Chinese embassy in Dhaka, Chen Wei, and Bangladeshi and Chinese archaeologists recently visited the excavation site.

The excavation has already unearthed several valuable artifacts from this renowned archaeological site, including a prayer hall, mortar floor, octagonal stupas, pot shreds, baked clay materials and burnt bricks.

Prof. Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, who is leading the excavation team comprised of researchers from Bangladesh and China, said carbon-14 tests on 26 unearthed relics at a Beta Laboratory in the United States had proved that the archaeological site was more than 1,100 years old.

He has sought further Chinese support to continue the excavation activities.

He expressed hope that the site, with proper conservation, will emerge as an attractive tourist site since Buddhist scholar Atisha Dipankar's ancestral house is located there.

Shahnaj Husne Jahan, a professor and director at the Center for Archaeological Studies at the leading private University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, described the site as a unique one and said it could be another world heritage site if it is conserved properly, although this may take time.

But inadequate funding and technology have hindered the excavation processes. "That's why we need more Chinese support," she said, adding that this is going to be the heart of Buddhist heritage tourism in this part of the world.

Archeological research at the site began in 2010 and a series of significant results have been achieved since then.

It is believed that this discovery will offer interesting glimpses into the early life of Atish Dipankar. During the 10th-11th Century, he was known in Bangladesh, India, China and other Asian countries as a saint-philosopher by virtue of his unique character, erudition, scholarly attributes, and spiritual eminence.

Because of his outstanding knowledge and wisdom, he was named Atish Dipankar Srigyan, which means "glorious wisdom source of light." He has been venerated for nearly 1,000 years as an outstanding personality.

He wrote more than 200 Buddhist books and was also known as a translator, popularized medical science and built reservoirs.

But the great philosopher was forgotten for centuries in a peculiar twist of history in the land of his birth, Bangladesh, as well as in the Indian sub-continent until the end of the 19th century.

After Atish Dipankar was "rediscovered" in his motherland nearly 1,000 years after he left Bangladesh for China's Tibet to introduce the Buddha's teachings and passed away there, China offered to return part of his ashes to Bangladesh.

Both Dhaka and Beijing said Atish is now a symbol of a stronger "China-Bangladesh relationship."

A mausoleum has already been built in the village of his birth with the support of China.

Chen Wei said this is the best final resting place for the venerable master.

"This is also proof that Bangladesh and China have shared very strong cultural links since long ago," Chen said.

He said that the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Hunan province is involved in the excavation and their personnel are doing a great job.

"I think it also promotes even more understanding between China and Bangladesh as well as the heart-to-heart and people-to-people contact between Chinese and Bangladeshi people."

The Chinese embassy will work together with the Bangladesh side to promote this site to become a common wealth of Bangladesh and China, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 17:37:30|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SANAA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The party of Yemeni slain former President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Sunday named a new leader to succeed Saleh who was killed last month by his onetime ally Shiite Houthi rebels, the party said in a statement.

The General People's Congress party (GPC) elected 65-year-old Sadiq Abu Ras as the new chief of the party.

The election took place at a first class hotel in downtown Sanaa, the rebel-held capital, where the GPC leadership met and named Abu Ras amid a tight security presence outside the hotel.

"The position of the party remains steadfast against the aggressors (Saudi-led military coalition) on the soil of the Yemeni people," read the party's statement.

The party welcomed any political settlement that preserves unity, security, stability and sovereignty of Yemen.

The statement did not mention Saleh's death, but demanded the release of Saleh's family members, party's leaders and journalists of Saleh-owned television channel Yemen al-Yawm from Houthi-run prisons.

The party praised the army and popular forces (Houthi fighters) in defending the country against the "aggressors."

However, senior leaders of the party rejected the party's statement and the election.

"Any party's statement that does not publicly break relations with Houthi murderers and declare war against them does not represent us and is not our party," the GPC Secretary-General Yasir al-Awadhi said in his Twitter page.

Al-Awadhi has successfully escaped from Sanaa, though Houthi media reported its fighters killed him along with Saleh during street clashes last month.

On Dec. 4, 2017, Houthi fighters killed Saleh, many of his family members and several of his party's leaders after a week of deadly clashes that erupted after Saleh switched sides of allies and declared "opening new page with the Saudi-led coalition."

Saleh, who ruled the country for 33 years and stepped down following 2011 popular protests, had waged six wars against Houthi movement that ended in 2010.

However, Saleh allied with Houthis and supported them when they advanced from their far north stronghold of Saada province and stormed the capital Sanaa in September 2014, where they overthrew Saudi-backed government and forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.

In March 2015, the Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen to restore Hadi to power and roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi-Saleh rebels.

Three years now into Yemen's civil war, over 10,000 Yemenis, mostly children, were killed, and 3 million others were displaced, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 18:07:38|Editor: Zhou Xin

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KAMPALA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan government on Monday denied reaching a deal with Israel to host thousands of African asylum seekers told to leave the Middle East country in the next three months or face imprisonment, a senior official said here.

Uganda's state minister for international affairs, Henry Oryem Okello told Xinhua that there is no agreement between the East African country and Israel for it to host over 35,000 asylum seekers, mostly Eritreans and Sudanese.

"We don't know where the story is coming from. One thing I want to state categorically that the government of Uganda doesn't have any agreement whatsoever with Israeli government in order to repatriate the refugees to Uganda," said Okello.

"We have no agreements for those seeking asylum or harbor refugees who have been rejected by Israel to be brought to Uganda," he said.

The Israeli authorities last week gave the African asylum seekers who fled war and persecution a 90-day ultimatum to leave "to their country or to a third country," or face jail sentences, without stating the third countries.

Israel's Population and Immigration Authority said those who leave the country before April will receive 3,500 U.S. dollars, airfare and other incentives for relocation.

According to reports, African migrants are given the option of going to their respective home countries, deportation to Uganda or Rwanda.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 18:47:46|Editor: Zhou Xin

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TEHRAN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A security conference on the west Asia region situation kicked off in Iran's capital Tehran on Monday.

The one-day event, held with the slogan of "Regional Security in West Asia; Emerging Challenges and Trends," is the second of its kind in less than one year organized by the Islamic republic.

More than 200 Iranian and international political figures and experts have attended the "Second Tehran Security Conference 2018."

In the opening remarks, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel are fanning the flames of regional crises through their interventionist policies, state TV reported.

Zarif also denounced what he called the U.S. "interventionist" strategies as one of the most substantive security challenges.

"The U.S. is still ignorant of objective facts across the region, and insists on pursuing its destructive and tension-creating policies through its illegitimate military presence on Syrian soil," he added.

Besides, he pointed out the continued occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel as the most critical issue facing the region.

"All issues are either directly or indirectly affected by this predicament and the oppression that has been forced upon the people of Palestine over the past 70 years," he said, dismissing Washington's recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The move by the United States is an open declaration of hostility towards Muslims and an opportunity for the spread of extremism and terrorism in the region, Zarif stressed.

He warned against the destabilizing impact of arms race in the region, saying that compared to the rest of the world, Iran's neighbors in the Persian Gulf have the highest proportion of military budget to their gross domestic product.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:12:53|Editor: Zhou Xin

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by Keren Setton

JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The latest developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict show that the sides are further away from resolving their issues.

Although a full-blown conflict seems far, a continuous trickle of fire exchanges between Israel and Gaza coupled with constant chatter on the tricky matter of Jerusalem may create a problematic combination with unwanted results.

A month ago, when U.S. President Donald Trump made the controversial announcement that his country was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, there was speculation that widespread violence would erupt.

This did not happen. Aside from demonstrations with a small number of casualties, the common reaction on the streets was indifference.

However, both the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships took it as a clear signal on how to act in the coming future.

As the Arab world condemned Trump's move, many Israelis welcomed it.

Trump made a departure from the international consensus that the fate of the disputed city would be determined through negotiations between the two sides.

Israel believes all of Jerusalem is its capital while Palestinians want the eastern side of the city as its future capital.

Over the weekend, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi announced the Arab league would push for international recognition of East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, a counter measure to the Trump move.

Just last week, picking up on the momentum of American backing, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, approved the "Jerusalem Bill" which mandates that any changes to Jerusalem's status need a supermajority of 80 of the 120 Knesset members. This would make any concessions on the city in future negotiations difficult.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement released after the passing of the bill that it was "tantamount to declaring war on the Palestinian people."

The law was another blow to the Palestinian cause.

Shuli Moalem-Refaeli, the member of parliament who initiated the bill, tweeted afterwards that it puts an end to the possibility of a "shady political settlement" with the Palestinians. It was a reflection of a growing sentiment amongst Israelis, but also Palestinians, that peace is unattainable.

Dr. Ofer Israeli, a geostrategist and an expert for international security and the Middle East from the Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, believes the current momentum on Jerusalem will eventually lead to a change in the international attitudes towards the city.

"We might see a change in the discourse on the issue of Jerusalem and this will eventually lead to a majority of countries supporting Jerusalem as Israel's capital," Dr. Israeli told Xinhua. "In this interim period, Israel can change reality and make it almost impossible to change things."

Dr. Amneh Badran, a political scientist from the Al Quds University in Jerusalem, believes the current state of affairs is "part of a systematic approach to cancel the so-called two state-solution."

"They want to start 'the deal' by taking Jerusalem out of the deal," Badran told Xinhua.

She is referring to Trump's campaign aspiration to strike "the ultimate deal" of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Slow simmering in the background of controversy surrounding Jerusalem is the conflict between Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

In recent weeks, the two sides have been exchanging rounds of fire, and rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel with the Israeli military retaliating with airstrikes. In addition, last month, the Israeli army announced it had demolished a Hamas attack tunnel that it believed was to be used in order to carry out attacks against Israelis.

The tension on the southern border rose immediately after the Trump announcement and since then, several Palestinians have been killed and dozens injured in clashes with Israeli forces, both on the Gaza border and in the West Bank.

"If one of the missiles falls in a populated area, the Israeli government will not be able to ignore it and then we will see a replay of previous events, a military operation or maybe even a war," says Dr. Israeli.

So far, there have been no Israeli casualties in the attacks so public opinion is not yet pressuring a harsher response.

In recent days, Trump tweeted that his administration would stop sending aid to the Palestinians and hold funding from UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian refugees, in response to "Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace."

According to UNRWA data from 2017, almost 2 million Palestinians receive aid from the agency in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip alone. An additional 3 million refugees and their descendants spread out in the Middle East also rely on that aid.

Media reports in Israel said the government was in a bind over the U.S. intention. A leaked internal foreign ministry report said that Israel preferred a gradual approach rather than a cold-turkey stoppage of funds. A humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories will certainly have an effect on neighboring Israel.

"UNRWA needs to cease to exist, this is an Israeli and Palestinian interest. It perpetuates their situation," Dr. Israeli tells Xinhua. "Israel will have to deal with the implications for a period of time."

Israel has long claimed that Palestinian militant organizations, Hamas included, have exploited the UN umbrella for its own activities. UNRWA has acknowledged several times that Hamas has used its buildings for stockpiling missiles in Gaza. In the fall of last year, a tunnel was found under one of UNRWA's schools in the isolated territory.

"The Palestinian leadership will not beg for American money," said Dr. Badran. "UNRWA is providing the minimum for Palestinian refugees ... there will be other sources to support UNRWA, the Americans will not stop others ... they are not interested in making the refugee issue rise to the surface."

Prospects for future negotiations are dim. The Palestinian leadership has said repeatedly that they do not believe the Americans can serve as an honest broker.

"It is not easy to re-build ... the peace process again. We are going back to the same limbo, nothing new," said Dr. Badran.

Trump's tweet that "we have taken Jerusalem ... off the table," was satisfactory for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but a severe blow to the Palestinians. Indeed, it appears American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital will be a turning point in the conflict.

"The Palestinian might choose to take a tough stance and not return to the negotiating table. They might try to enlist others, mainly the European Union, to counteract the Americans," said Dr. Israeli.

With the Israelis and the Palestinians each entrenched in polar positions, dialogue between the two rivals will probably not be the chosen method of interaction at the moment.
Everyone gripes about air travel. The complaints are universal:

Bare-it-all security checks.

Shoving matches over cabin bin space.

Economy seats increasingly reminiscent of a miniature medieval torture cell maliciously called the little ease.

Oh, for those glamorous jet-set days of yesteryear, when fliers were treated like royalty starting at airport curbside. Can modern air travel really be called an improvement?

Yes, in the starkest and most critical terms: Youll get there in one piece. Years-end reports show 2017 was the safest year for commercial travel in aviation history.

Studies by two separate safety organizations  a team of Dutch aviation consultants and the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network  reported recently that, out of a record 37 million flights, there were no passenger jet crashes in the world last year. The handful of fatal commercial accidents that did occur were limited to either cargo planes or regional carriers operating small aircraft.

This is no small achievement. Harrowing, high-fatality plane crashes, if not routine, were for decades events that took place every few years. Those who have lived in the Dallas area long enough may recall the crash of a Delta jumbo jet at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in 1985 during a summer thunderstorm. The disaster claimed 137 lives.

Experts say technology and training have steadily reduced the incidence of these tragedies over the years. The Dallas/Forth Worth crash, in fact, led directly to new standards in windshear-detection ability in both onboard and ground-based systems.

At the same time, new safety measures in aircraft construction mean that even in the event of a crash, passengers are more likely to survive. Thats due, among other factors, to better fire suppression and evacuation procedures.

Cabin safety has improved by leaps and bounds since the 1970s and 80s, said Adrian Young, a senior consultant who participated in one of the studies released recently, in an interview with The Washington Post.

Experts caution that safety challenges remain in commercial aviation, and that there is no room for complacency in the operation of our nations  and our planets  complex air transit system. Ongoing challenges include risks posed by human fatigue and the fire danger posed by batteries used in consumer electronics.

But when poker-faced aviation officials assure you that the gravest modern danger to commercial air travel is the drive to the airport, they have the statistics to back it up. Passenger flights operated by major carriers are far and away the safest means of popular transportation.

What about that presidential Twitter claim recently, during which the commander-in-chief took credit for last years air safety record?

Its not a one-year phenomenon, was the tactful response to from retired pilot and airline safety consultant John Cox. It was the work of thousands of people over decades.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:22:56|Editor: Lifang

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RAMALLAH/NABLUS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Israeli forces shut down Monday access to two West Bank villages, near Nablus city, by placing earth mounds, according to Palestinian sources.

Ghassan Daghlas, who is in charge of the documentation of the settlements activity in the north of the West Bank told Xinhua that the two villages are Osarin village, of nearly 3,500 residents and Awarta village, where nearly 7,000 Palestinians live.

The entrance of Awarta village was shut down by closing a gate located near Huwara, where Israeli soldiers are stationed in a military checkpoint disconnecting the north of the West Bank from its center.

Governor of Nablus Akram Rajoub condemned the Israeli measures. He told Xinhua that this represents "collective punishment" against Palestinians.

He added "this is unjustified and comes as part of the Israeli army's policy in backing settlers while imposing restrictions on Palestinian citizens."

Palestinian sources said that the Israeli army arrested at least 17 Palestinians in scattered pre-dawn raids into West Bank areas, including storming some houses.

Israeli army spokesperson said that those arrested were "wanted" to Israel.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:27:57|Editor: Lu Hui

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang addresses the National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Monday said that major science and technology infrastructure, data and instruments should be more accessible for the public.

Li made the remarks at the annual ceremony held in Beijing to honor distinguished scientists and research achievements.

The premier said more should be done to encourage innovative spirit and protect intellectual property rights.

He said China will pursue international cooperation in science and technology, take a more active role in the global innovation network.

Monday's ceremony honored 271 projects and nine scientists with national prizes.

Two Chinese scientists, explosives expert Wang Zeshan and virologist Hou Yunde, won China's top science awards.
Photo taken on May 8, 2015 shows Somali refugees at the Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya. Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

KAMPALA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan government on Monday denied reaching a deal with Israel to host thousands of African asylum seekers told to leave the Middle East country in the next three months or face imprisonment, a senior official said here.

Uganda's state minister for international affairs, Henry Oryem Okello told Xinhua that there is no agreement between the East African country and Israel for it to host over 35,000 asylum seekers, mostly Eritreans and Sudanese.

"We don't know where the story is coming from. One thing I want to state categorically that the government of Uganda doesn't have any agreement whatsoever with Israeli government in order to repatriate the refugees to Uganda," said Okello.

"We have no agreements for those seeking asylum or harbor refugees who have been rejected by Israel to be brought to Uganda," he said.

The Israeli authorities last week gave the African asylum seekers who fled war and persecution a 90-day ultimatum to leave "to their country or to a third country," or face jail sentences, without stating the third countries.

Israel's Population and Immigration Authority said those who leave the country before April will receive 3,500 U.S. dollars, airfare and other incentives for relocation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:32:59|Editor: Lifang

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COLOMBO, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka will implement UNESCO recommendations to preserve the status of world heritage accorded to the colonial fort in the city called Galle in southern Sri Lanka, a minister said here on Monday.

Law and Order Minister Sagala Ratnayake told reporters after an observation tour of the area.

The Galle Fort, built by the Portuguese first in 1588 and fortified by the Dutch later, risked the loss of its status as a world heritage site earlier due to the delay in implementing some UNESCO recommendations.

The minister said the UNESCO had recognized this as a world heritage site due to its ancient architectural and monumental value, and the government now had decided to implement these recommendations in an accelerated manner.

"We want to protect Galle Fort as our heritage. Unless we take steps right now, the site will deteriorate," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:48:03|Editor: Lifang

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ISLAMABAD, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The death toll of seasonal influenza cases in Pakistan's eastern city of Multan has risen to 17 on Monday, with the death of another female patient who tested positive of influenza virus, an official said.

Doctor Atta-ur-Rehman, the spokesperson of the Punjab Health Department in Multan, told Xinhua that the outbreak of seasonal influenza has claimed 17 lives so far over the last 23 days in the city.

Up till now, 104 suspected patients have been tested for influenza, said the spokesperson, adding that at least 47 cases have been confirmed for the disease.

According to local reports, at least four doctors were among the increasing number of the cases, creating fear among the administration of hospitals as the disease is rapidly spreading across the metropolis.

Medical practitioners have advised the residents to take precautionary measures and also urged them to ensure their proper checkup for timely identification of the disease.

Earlier last week, a four-member team from the World Health Organisation and National Institute of Health arrived in Multan to monitor seasonal influenza cases at the city's Nishtar Hospital, a government health facility.

Chief Minister Punjab Shehbaz Sharif took notice of the spread of influenza and issued directives that all possible measures for the prevention of influenza should be taken. He also advised the relevant authorities to organize awareness campaign regarding the illness.

Seasonal influenza, commonly known as flu, usually spreads through contact with the bacteria discharged by an infected person's coughing and sneezing. According to health experts, children, elders and pregnant women are at higher risk of contracting the disease.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:53:05|Editor: Lifang

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TOKYO, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. military attack helicopter made an emergency landing in Japan's Okinawa Prefecture on Monday, local media reported, with the incident coming on the heels of an almost identical mishap just two days earlier.

The AH-1 attack helicopter belonging to the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma made the emergency landing at a waste disposal site in the village of Yomitan in Japan's southernmost prefecture.

According to local police and the U.S. military, none of the four crew members aboard were injured in the emergency landing, which was in the vicinity of a large resort hotel, and there have been no reports of injury to persons or damage to property as a result of the latest U.S. military helicopter mishap.

The latest incident involving a U.S. military chopper follows a UH-1 heavy-lift transport helicopter on Saturday making an emergency landing on a sandy beach on Ikei Island, also in Okinawa.

The U.S. Marine Corps said the emergency landing on the small islet was due to "indications of the main rotor moving at too high a speed."

The UH-1 transport helicopter touched down just 100 meters away from a residential house, renewing concerns and anger among locals in Okinawa about the safety of U.S. military hardware owing to the increasing frequency of potentially fatal mishaps and accidents recently.

Both helicopters are based at the controversial U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is central to a protracted row between the local and central governments about its relocation from the densely populated Ginowan district, to the coastal Henoko region also on the island.

Japan's public broadcaster NHK said that according to defense ministry officials, the U.S. side explained to local police investigating the accident Monday that the emergency landing was a result of an instrument in the cockpit indicating a fault with the aircraft.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 19:58:07|Editor: Lifang

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XIAMEN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The tourism industry continued to boom in China in 2017, generating revenue of 5.4 trillion yuan (about 832 billion U.S. dollars), according to Li Jinzao, head of the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) at a tourism conference in Xiamen in east China's Fujian Province Monday.

On average, every Chinese person made 3.7 trips last year, Li said.

Over 5 billion trips were made across China last year, generating a total estimated revenue of 4.57 trillion yuan in 2017 -- a 69-percent jump from 2012 and average annual growth of 15.8 percent over the past five years. Meanwhile, 129 million overseas trips were made last year.

Tourism has created more than 80 million jobs and became an important industry to help the economy and reduce poverty, Li said.

To better regulate the domestic tourism market, CNTA downgraded three 5A tourist destinations and warned or criticized more than 400 scenic areas for poor service and substandard hygiene over the past three years, Li said.

He also introduced a three-step goal for China's tourism industry to lead China to become a strong tourism country by 2040.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 20:23:18|Editor: Lifang

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COLOMBO, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on Monday opened the sluice gates of the island's largest water reservoir, designed and constructed by PowerChina, in Moragahakanda, in the island's Central Province.

The president and prime minister were accompanied by Speaker of Parliament Karu Jayasuriya, Sri Lankan government ministers, officials from the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka and foreign dignitaries.

Sirisena praised the hard work undertaken by PowerChina, a leader in China's hydropower industry, throughout the construction process.

PowerChina's Euro-Asia Vice General- Manager Pan Dengyu told Xinhua that the Moragahakanda Project started construction in July 2012, and it will be used mainly for irrigation, water supply and electricity generation.

"The project will not only boost the agricultural production in central and northern Sri Lanka, but it will also guarantee domestic water and industrial water, as well as improving the electricity conditions for local residents," Pan said.

The water holding capacity for the Moragahakanda water reservoir is 570 million cubic meters and the reservoir will also create a favorable environment for tourism and will promote inland fishing.

The water from this reservoir will irrigate dry land in faraway Vanni in the Northern Province and Rajarata, Wayamba, Central and Eastern Provinces.

The project will also generate 25 MW in hydropower to the national grid.

Kumara Perera, 45, a local farmer from Polonnaruwa who attended the opening ceremony, said he was awaiting the opening of the Moragahakanda Project as it would ensure a continuous water supply into his village.

He said his village had been facing a drought for several months and as a result, crops had dried up.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 20:33:20|Editor: Zhou Xin

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AMMAN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- China will launch a cultural centre to promote Chinese culture in Jordan and to enhance ties between the two countries, Chinese Ambassador to Jordan Pan Weifang said Monday.

The ambassador made the remarks at a press conference with Jordanian Culture Minister Nabih Shuqum, where the two sides signed a deal for the launch of the center in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

The center, which serves to promote the Chinese cultural and boost cultural exchange between the two sides, will provide training opportunities on Chinese calligraphy, handicrafts, art, language, literature, books and movies, among other activities, the Chinese ambassador said.

"A wide array of performances, exhibitions and cultural activities will be held by the center to familiarise Jordanians with the Chinese culture and boost ties in this regard," said the ambassador, adding that the center would function as a cultural bridge between the two nations.

The Jordanian minister voiced appreciation to China for its support to Jordan, adding that the kingdom was determined on boosting cultural exchange with China.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 20:43:28|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Visiting French President Emmanuel Macron will present his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping with a horse as a national gift, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Monday.

"We express our thanks and appreciation for this friendly move," Lu told a regular news briefing, adding that Macron's visit was of "great significance."

Both sides attach great importance to this visit and pledge to further develop bilateral ties, Lu said.
Not enough white men were in the room.

Indeed, there were almost none, if we are to believe an anonymous witness who testified before the Washington, D.C., grand jury that has been handing down indictments in special counsel Robert Muellers probe into Donald Trumps campaign and administration. New York Post columnist Richard Johnson quotes this person as saying that of 20 jurors, 11 are African-American. The witness likened this to a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley.

There was only one white male in the room, the witness griped, and he was a prosecutor. He or she added, That room isnt a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.

Well.

Let us pass lightly over the ignorance of this unnamed individual (Washington is a city of 694,000 people, almost half of whom are African-American, so having 11 blacks on a 20-person jury would hardly seem remarkable).

Similarly, let us not linger overlong on that persons tone deafness (Welcome to what black America feels on a daily basis whenever they face a jury of their peers and the peers dont look anything like them, wrote Stephen A. Crockett Jr. of The Root).

The ignorance and tone deafness are prodigious, yes. But what really leaps out from this persons remarks is the haughty indignation of having found himself or herself in a room, a room of power and authority, no less, from which white men were nearly absent.

These quotes reveal more, perhaps, than the witness intended or even knew, laying bare in microcosm the fear of racial and cultural displacement that fueled the so-called Trump Train  indeed, that has undergirded more than two decades of ever more bizarre political theater. Lets hear no more, then, about economic anxiety, which was never more than an excuse, a way to absolve ourselves of facing ourselves.

It turns out the anxiety we should be talking about is that felt by Johnsons source. For most of the 242 years of our national life, one thing has always been predictable as a childrens movie and dependable as the floor beneath your feet. White men will always be represented in, and in fact, will dominate, any room where power and authority are wielded.

But the times, they are achanging. Women, people of color, religious minorities and others have slowly forced their way into those rooms. Additionally, there is the demographic fact that white preponderance  and, thus, unchallenged white prerogative  are shrinking.

If many fair-minded white Americans embrace this or at least accept it, many others regard it with a panic that can only be called apocalyptic. That, more than any other single factor, explains what happened in November of 2016.

It explains the defiantly monochromatic nature of Trumps White House that, in group photos, could easily be mistaken for Eisenhowers. And it explains the indignation of Johnsons source.

Unfortunately for that person, and notwithstanding the angry aberration of Trump, the coming demographic shift will not be gainsaid or denied. Nor will people who have made their way into those rooms quietly submit to eviction. At some point, if only for their own political survival, those who are threatened by all this will have to quit denying it. They will have to deal with it.

That includes the anonymous individual Johnson quotes, the one so affronted at being in a room of power and authority where almost no white men were present. He or she might as well get used to it.

There will be a lot of rooms like that from now on.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 20:58:34|Editor: Zhou Xin

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GUANGZHOU, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Ninety-four "zombie companies" in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, were declared bankrupt, the city's Intermediate People's Court said Monday.

Most of them, including 74 state-owned enterprises, were established in the 1980s and 1990s.

These enterprises, making great losses for years, have ceased or suspended production, and survived on government subsidies and bank loans.

Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court set up a tribunal last year to deal with "zombie" cases.

A total of 363 applications for bankrupt and compulsory liquidation have been received, and 189 cases were accepted by the court in 2017, said Wu Xiaoping, vice president of the court.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 20:58:35|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced Monday a new policy to ensure zero growth of steel capacity in 2018.

The new policy forbids plants from increasing capacity.

In environmentally sensitive areas of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, steel plants should remove at least 1.25 tonnes of outdated capacity for every 1 tonne of new capacity.

Steel profits improved amid capacity cuts in 2017.

"In the January-November period last year, combined net profits in the ferrous metal smelting and rolling sector rose 180 percent year on year to about 314 billion yuan (about 48 billion U.S. dollars)," said a MIIT statement.

The steel sector must focus on quality and profits while cutting overcapacity, it said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:03:39|Editor: Lifang

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BAGHDAD, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Twelve people were wounded Monday when mortar rounds hits an ethnically mixed city in Iraq's central province of Salahudin, a security and a lawmaker said.

During the day, several mortar rounds landed on the city of Tuz-Khurmato, some 90 km east of Salahudin's provincial capital Tikrit, leaving 12 people wounded, including three women and two children, along with damaging several houses in the city, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The mortar attack forced the city's authorities to close the doors of the schools for the day to avoid casualties among the students, the source said.

The ethnically-mixed city of Tuz-Khurmato is mostly made up of Turkoman Shiite as well as sizable Kurdish and Sunni Arab population.

Previously, the city witnessed repeated clashes between the Kurds and Shiite militias, as the city and surrounding areas are part of the disputed areas outside the Kurdistan region.

Meanwhile, the Turkoman Member of Parliament Jasim Mohammed Jaafar from the leading Shiite parliamentary bloc of National Alliance, confirmed the mortar attack on Tuz-Khurmato and accused Kurdish militants of carrying out series of mortar attacks on the city after the Iraqi federal security forces retook control of the city from the Kurdish Peshmerga.

"These mortar rounds were launched by Kurdish gangs," Jaafar said, demanding reinforcement of federal troops to be dispatched immediately to stop such attacks on civilians.

Tuz-Khurmato is part of disputed areas claimed by the Kurds and both Arabs and Turkomans. The Kurds want to incorporate the areas on the edge of their Kurdistan region, but their move is fiercely opposed by Baghdad government and non-Kurdish residents.

On Oct. 16, the Iraqi security forces fully redeployed in Tuz-Khurmato after the withdrawal of Kurdish Peshmerga forces, at the same day when the Iraqi forces redeployed on the nearby oil-rich province of Kirkuk.

The mortar barrage on the city came as tensions are running high between Baghdad government and the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan after the Kurdish region held a controversial referendum on independence of Kurdistan and disputed areas.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:08:42|Editor: Lu Hui

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Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang (Photo: www.fmprc.gov.cn)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- China said Monday that it expected that Japan could meet it "half-way" to improve bilateral ties this year.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang made the remarks at a daily press briefing, when commenting on reports that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently said that he wanted 2018 to be the year which people in Japan and China saw a "great improvement" in bilateral relations.

Lu said that China has noted the positive remarks and hoped Japan would act upon the four political documents and four-point principled consensus between China and Japan, and seize the opportunity of the 40th anniversary of the signing of the China-Japan Treaty of Peace and Friendship, to create favorable conditions for bilateral exhange and cooperation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:13:44|Editor: Lifang

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NANJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A consumer right group has brought Chinese tech firm Baidu to court accusing its two apps "snooping on consumers' personal information," according to the court source.

The Nanjing Intermediate People's Court in east China's Jiangsu Province confirmed on Monday that it has accepted a lawsuit filed by the Jiangsu provincial consumer rights protection committee.

The committee accused the Beijing Baidu Netcom Science and Technology Co. Ltd. of ignoring an instruction to remove some functionality from Baidu Mobile and Baidu Browser apps which monitor users' contacts and activity.

The committee began an investigation in July last year into "snooping" by 27 app developers. The other 26 firms all took measures to remove or optimize functions to adhere to the committee's instructions.

Such application violates consumers' rights by leaking their personal information, often directly resulting in telemarketing calls and telecom fraud, the committee said.

The committee's suit states that collection and use of consumers information must comply with laws on consumer protection and Internet security.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:28:51|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- China has made the utmost efforts in the search and rescue operations after two vessels collided off China's east coast,a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday in Beijing.

Rescuers found one body this morning at around 10: 30 am, spokesperson Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing.

The collision, between a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered freighter, occurred at around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 sea miles east of the Yangtze estuary.

Thirty-two crew members, including 30 Iranian nationals and two Bangladeshi nationals, are missing.

"We have sent several rescue vessels to the scene," Lu said, while expressing gratitude for other countries' assistance in the rescue mission.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:28:52|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SHIJIAZHUANG, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Hejian, a city in northern China famed for its donkey burgers, has vowed to punish fake meat producers following media reports.

Chinese media reported that some butchers in Hejian, in northern China's Hebei province, used mule, horse and pig meat and sold them as donkey meat, mostly to restaurants in Beijing, reports said.

Hejian government called an emergency meeting on Monday and began an investigation.

Donkey burger is a famous delicacy in northern China, dating back several hundred years.
An Israeli soldier fires tear gas near one of the entrances to Israel's Offer prison in the West Bank village of Betunia as Palestinian protesters call for the release of prominent Palestinian campaigners on December 28, 2017. (AFP Photo)

JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A total of 35 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel in 2017, compared with 15 in 2016 and 21 in 2015, according to the statistics from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) issued said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the number of "terror" attacks either in the West Bank or by "terrorists" who came from the West Bank totaled 99 in 2017, a substantial drop from 269 in 2016 and 226 in 2015, the IDF statistics reported.

The IDF said that 20 people were killed and 169 wounded in "terror" attacks in 2017, while 17 killed and 263 wounded in 2016. In 2015, in total, 28 people were killed and 360 wounded.

A total of 42 weapon workshops which were believed to have been used to manufacture firearms were uncovered or sealed, while 455 guns that were illegally owned by Palestinians were confiscated by the Israeli army, according to the IDF figures.

In retaliation to the rocket attacks, the IDF struck 59 targets in the Gaza Strip in 2017, including rocket launches and training camps, weapons production sites, observation posts and more, according to the IDF's figures.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 21:38:55|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang (C) meets with a U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang Monday expressed hope that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would continue to play a positive role in strengthening bilateral exchanges and cooperation.

Wang made the remarks when meeting with a U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation in Beijing.

"As the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States share broad common interests," Wang said, noting that cooperation was the only correct choice for both sides.

"The successful exchange of visits between the heads of state of the two countries last year has promoted the sound development of Sino-U.S. relations," Wang said.

He said he hoped that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would continue to make new contributions to the long-term stability and development of China-U.S. economic cooperation.
Iran holds Saudi, Israel and U.S. responsible for fanning flames of Mideast unrest. (AFP Photo)

TEHRAN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A security conference on the west Asia region situation kicked off in Iran's capital Tehran on Monday.

The one-day event, held with the slogan of "Regional Security in West Asia; Emerging Challenges and Trends," is the second of its kind in less than one year organized by the Islamic republic.

More than 200 Iranian and international political figures and experts have attended the "Second Tehran Security Conference 2018."

In the opening remarks, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel are fanning the flames of regional crises through their interventionist policies, state TV reported.

Zarif also denounced what he called the U.S. "interventionist" strategies as one of the most substantive security challenges.

"The U.S. is still ignorant of objective facts across the region, and insists on pursuing its destructive and tension-creating policies through its illegitimate military presence on Syrian soil," he added.

Besides, he pointed out the continued occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel as the most critical issue facing the region.

"All issues are either directly or indirectly affected by this predicament and the oppression that has been forced upon the people of Palestine over the past 70 years," he said, dismissing Washington's recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The move by the United States is an open declaration of hostility towards Muslims and an opportunity for the spread of extremism and terrorism in the region, Zarif stressed.
What would happen if Democrats were told that the Republican Tax Bill they hate was actually from Bernie Sanders? Would they support it then? Documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz took to the streets of New York's East Village to find out.
21 civilians were killed on Monday by airstrikes on the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria. (AFP Photo)

DAMASCUS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- At least 21 civilians were killed Monday by airstrikes on the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria, a monitor group reported.

Half of the killed in the airstrikes that targeted the countryside of Idlib were children and women, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, accusing Russian and Syrian warplanes of carrying out the airstrikes.

There were no official comments from the Syrian government.

The airstrikes came just hours after a deadly blast in Idlib killed 34 people, including 18 civilians, according to the Observatory.

The overnight blast targeted a position of the Agnad al-Caucaus rebel group, which is allied with the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee (LLC).

No party claimed responsibility for the bombing, but it's apparently a rebel-on-rebel operation, especially now that the LLC is accusing the Agnad group of backing down on supporting the LLC in their battles in Idlib against the government forces and other rival groups.

The Syrian army has been on a wide-scale offensive in the southern countryside of Idlib, capturing tens of towns and villages over the past two months.

The recent military victory was achieved on Sunday when the Syrian army captured the strategic town of Sinjar, which enables the government forces to advance toward capturing the key air base of Abu al-Duhur.

Idlib has emerged as the main destination of the rebel groups, which have evacuated several positions across Syria after surrendering to the Syrian army.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 22:09:03|Editor: Zhou Xin

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TAIPEI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan's exports in 2017 totaled 317.39 billion U.S. dollars, up 13.2 percent from a year earlier, and imports rose 12.6 percent year on year, both registering the highest growth rate in seven years.

Taiwan's trade surplus reached 57.88 billion dollars in 2017, up 8.13 billion dollars from 2016, the island's finance authority said Monday.

Exports in sectors such as electronic components, basic metals, machinery, communication and audio-visual devices, plastic and rubber products recorded strong growth in 2017.

The island's exports of electronic components set a record high of 107.2 billion dollars in 2017, up 15.5 percent from 2016.

Taiwan's exports in December 2017 rose 29.51 billion dollars, up 14.8 percent from a year earlier, the 15th consecutive monthly increase on the back of a strong economic recovery worldwide.

The Chinese mainland and Hong Kong remain Taiwan's largest trade partners, together importing 130.28 billion dollars from Taiwan, up 16 percent from 2016.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 22:29:06|Editor: Lifang

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SOFIA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Sofia Commodity Exchange (SCE), the largest fast liquidity exchange market in Bulgaria, here on Monday reported a fourfold increase in its turnover last year.

In 2017, the annual turnover of the SCE amounted to 266.03 million Bulgarian lev (some 162.8 million U.S. dollars) and the number of deals reached 704, Vasil Simov, its Chief Executive Director told a press conference.

In 2016, the figures stood at 66.49 million lev and 494 deals respectively, Simov said.

Simov attributed the fourfold turnover jump to the increased activity of the participants of the commodity exchange.

To a great extent, the growth was also stimulated by the revival of some industries in Bulgaria, Simov added.

According to the SCE's annual review for 2017, which was presented during the press conference, deals with fuels and oil products were worth 248.79 million lev, while the grain trade and trade in chemical products amounted to 3.54 million lev and 3.34 million lev respectively. (1 U.S. dollar=1.63 Bulgarian lev)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 22:34:08|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TIRANA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Albania has sent a second patrol vessel of its naval fleet to support the NATO-led operations the Aegean Sea, sources from defense ministry confirmed to Xinhua on Monday.

The ship ALS Butrinti departed Saturday from Pashaliman Base in southern Albania to head to the Aegean Sea and join Alliance forces.

Such operation comes in the framework of Albania's commitment to extend its first-ever maritime mission with NATO as part of the international efforts to stop illegal trafficking and migration in the Aegean Sea, sources said.

The ministry also said in a Monday press release that the mission's extension was decided following the very positive results and performance of the crew of Albanian Oriku patrol boat over the past year.

Oriku patrol boat helped in saving hundreds of people in Aegean last year, namely immigrants from Syria or other conflict zones who tried to reach Europe.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 22:49:11|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told a cabinet meeting in Athens on Monday that there was a window of opportunity for the solution in 2018 to the decades-old name dispute with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) over the Balkan state's name.

"We have a window for solution as long as the shift made by our neighbors proves to be sincere. If achieved this solution will be for the benefit of peace and cooperation in the Balkans," the Greek premier said according to an emailed press release.

Athens is going into the negotiations with FYROM on the name issue with the same position presented in 2007-2008, which calls for a compound name with a geographical qualifier for use in relations to everyone, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias said during the cabinet meeting, according to Greek national news agency AMNA citing sources.

Kotzias will receive FYROM's Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Bujar Osmani on Tuesday in Athens ahead of a new round of talks between diplomats of both sides in New York next week with UN special mediator Matthew Nimetz.

The intensified contacts between the two countries in recent months and the statements made by officials in Athens, Skopje and Nimetz have fuelled hope that the UN-mediated dialogue this time may end successful.

FYROM Prime Minister Zoran Zaev expressed optimism that a solution can be found by the end of the first semester of 2018, speaking during an interview aired on Greek Alpha television on late Sunday.

Zaev spent the New Year holidays in the northern Greece city port of Thessaloniki invited by the local Mayor.

The longstanding dispute between the two neighbors started when FYROM declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and chose the name Macedonia which is also the name of a northern Greek province.

Following last year's elections at FYROM Zaev has said that his government intends to solve the name dispute in order to open the way for the country's accession to NATO and the European Union.
File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) talks with French President Emmanuel Macron (R) during the annual Bastille Day military parade on the Concorde Square in Paris, France on July 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Jack Chan)

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The White House said Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron over phone Saturday about the issues of the Korean Peninsula and Iran.

Trump updated Macron on the developments of the situation on the Peninsula, underscoring the "international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearization" of the Peninsula, according to the White House.

The two presidents also talked about the demonstrations in Iran.

Iran had earlier blasted back at the U.S. stance on the demonstrations inside Iran, with its ambassador to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo slamming the U.S. government's attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of the Islamic Republic, Tasnim news agency reported Thursday.

Trump said Saturday that he is willing to talk with Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and that he supports the talks between the two Koreas next week.

The remarks have shelved his often-bellicose rhetoric on Kim. Since he took office last January, the Trump administration has resorted to hawkish and threatening rhetoric against the DPRK, and has sent warships and conducted joint military drills with South Korea.

Such moves, along with the DPRK's sixth nuclear test and several missile launches, have sent the situation on the peninsula to a simmering extent.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 22:59:13|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (2nd R) and his wife Peng Liyuan (1st R) pose for a group photo with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron (2nd L) and his wife Brigitte Macron at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. Xi met with Macron in Beijing on Monday. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping met with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing Monday evening.

Xi said Macron's visit to China, as his first visit to Asia at the start of year, showed that he was "paying high attention to the China-France relationship."

France was the first Western power to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.

"Chairman Mao Zedong and General Charles de Gaulle made a historic decision with remarkable political foresight to forge diplomatic ties in 1964," Xi said. "The decision not only changed the world pattern at that time, but also has effects on the world development nowadays."

"In the new era, we should follow the spirit of being responsible for history, stick to the right path so as to move toward a bright future of China-French ties," Xi said.

Stressing that there are many uncertainties in today's world, Xi said China advocated the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, while France had similar views.

"The two countries can enhance political mutual trust and fully tap the potential of cooperation transcending differences on the social system, development stage and culture," he said.

China stands ready to work closely with France to enhance cooperation including that under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi said.

He said that China attached importance to coordination with France on major international issues in the hope of promoting world stability and prosperity.

Macron said he was willing to exchange views with Xi on France-China relations and major international issues, during his first state visit to China.

He said he hoped to increase mutual trust and advance France-China relations and EU-China relations via the visit.

"France would like to take an active part in the Belt and Road Initiative," said Macron, adding that France would work with China to address common challenges of the international community such as climate change.

He said he believed that his visit to China would be a new milestone in the history of France-China relations.

Xi's wife Peng Liyuan and Macron's wife Brigitte Macron also attended the meeting.

The French president is paying a state visit to China from Monday to Wednesday. He arrived in Beijing Monday afternoon after a half-day visit to China's northwestern city Xi'an.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 23:04:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ATHENS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- An Athens court on Monday temporarily suspended the asylum status granted to one of the eight Turkish military officers seeking refuse in Greece.

"We are not afraid of the independent Greek justice. All we are asking for is our lives not to become part of a political game," the Turkish officers told Greek newspaper Vima (Tribune) through lawyers.

The Athens Administrative Court of Appeals accepted the Greek state's request to temporarily suspend the decision taken by an administrative asylum committee in late December to grant asylum to one of the eight servicemen who fled to Greece on the night of the failed coup attempt in Turkey.

The government's request was accepted on Monday for "reasons of public interest, but also in the interests of the Turkish serviceman," the court said.

The officer will remain in custody with the other seven until final verdicts on their asylum applications are issued.

In January 2017, Greece's Supreme Court ruled against the extradition of the eight men to Ankara where they are branded as traitors.

Since July 2016, the eight officers denied any involvement in the failed coup plot and expressed fear for their safety should they return to Turkey.

Their lawyers said the men intend to bring their case to the Council of State, Greece's top administrative court, if their asylum bids are rejected by appeals courts.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 23:39:22|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUSAKA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Zambian ministers on Monday pledged allegiance to President Edgar Lungu that they will stand with him.

Minister of Information and Broadcasting Services Kampamba Mulenga said contrary to social media reports that the cabinet was crumbling, the ministers have resolved to remain loyal to the Zambian leader.

Last week, Harry Kalaba resigned as foreign affairs minister citing failure to fight corruption, fueling speculation that more ministers were expected to follow suit.

Mulenga, also chief government spokesperson, told reporters after a cabinet meeting that the ministers reassured Lungu of their loyalty and faith in his administration.

"Unlike speculations on social media that cabinet is crumbling and more ministers are to resign, cabinet is not crumbling, it is not true as we are standing by his excellence," she said.

Lungu on Monday appointed Joe Malanji, a Member of Parliament for the governing party Patriotic Front (PF) and a business executive, as the new foreign minister.

He also appointed Alexander Chiteme, another ruling party lawmaker as new national development planning minister, replacing Lucky Mulusa who was fired.

The president has also challenged members of the PF who were not ready to serve under him to leave the party.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 23:44:24|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, speaks at the closing of a workshop at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. The workshop, which focused on "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" and the spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress, was attended by newly-elected members and alternate members of the CPC Central Committee, as well as provincial and ministerial-level officials. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials of the Communist Party of China (CPC) attending a workshop at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee have been urged to "resolutely defend General Secretary Xi Jinping's core status in the CPC Central Committee and the whole Party."

Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, made the remarks Monday at the closing of the workshop attended by newly-elected members and alternate members of the CPC Central Committee, as well as provincial and ministerial-level officials.

"Senior officials must uphold the authority of the Central Committee and its centralized and unified leadership, and align themselves with the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core in terms of political stance, direction, principle and path," Wang said.

The four-day workshop focused on "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" and the spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress.

Wang stressed the importance of in-depth understanding of "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" with a historical perspective.

"We should take consideration of the historic achievements and profound changes the Party and the country have witnessed, the striving history of the CPC and the history of the Chinese nation, as well as the evolution of socialism worldwide and the development of human society," he said.

The officials were also told to strengthen their consciousness of the need to think in big-picture terms and implement the goals set at the 19th CPC National Congress.

Wang asked them to fully grasp the new requirements and to use what they learned at the workshop to continue to uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.
More than 70 pro-life groups participated calling it Peace in the Womb. The idea is simple. They desire to bring the hope and joy of Christmas to one of the worlds darkest places, the abortion clinic, in the hope that familiar sounds of Christmas carols might save a life.

Does singing Christmas carols outside of abortion clinics seem like an unusual new tradition throughout the country? White it might appear so to some, during the month of December groups sang Christmas carols at abortion clinics where unborn babies had their lives terminated.

While supporters of life sang Christmas carols like Silent Night and Away in the Manager, escorts (some paid employees of the abortion clinics) stood guard outside the abortion clinics. There seem to be no other medical facilities where staff assists patients entering in case they have second thoughts.



The snuffing out of an innocent life through abortion should be of great concern to all who value life whether born or unborn. One of the most important campaign promises made by President Donald Trump was the protection of unborn life.

H.B. 490 (Heartbeat Bill) has 170 co-sponsors in U.S. House

An important pro-life bill has gained attention in the U.S. House. Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1981 by Phyllis Schlafly, has been one of the leaders at the forefront of supporting the federal Heartbeat Bill (H.B. 490), sponsored by Rep. Steve King. The organization, headed by president Ed Martin, worked alongside Janet Porter's Faith2Action and the Children First Foundation in gaining Congressional support for the Heartbeat Bill.

As of 11-01-2017, H.B. 490 had 170 co-sponsors. H.B. 490 also has more public support than any other pro-life bill. Pro-life leaders in Congress understand the importance of this bill. Simply put, the Heartbeat Bill ensures that "if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected." For to deny the child's beating heart is to deny science. To ignore it is heartless.

Another pro-life bill under consideration that likewise protects pre-born children, the Pain Capable Bill (HR 36), would only protect babies after five months, which amounts to only 1.3% of the babies facing abortion, according to CDC statistics.

According to the father of the pro-life movement, the late Dr. John Willke, the Heartbeat Bill will protect 95% of the babies who would otherwise be aborted. Simply recognizing this universal indicator of life-a heartbeat-is the most effective way to "Make America Safe Again."

As Dr. Willke stated, "When I founded the pro-life movement, it wasn't to regulate how abortions would be done, it was to bring the abortion killing to an END. We have waited too long and that wait has cost too much."

The Eighth Circuit of Appeals has declared that the heartbeat is more "consistent and certain "indicator of life than "viability," the arbitrary standard the U.S. Supreme Court currently uses to allow legal protection of children in the womb.

Join the March for Life Chicago 2018

Plan to do your part in rallying with thousands of like-minded patriots who support the life of the unborn on Sunday, January 14, 2018, at the Chicago March for Life from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm at Federal Plaza, 50 W. Adams St., Chicago, IL Participants will come together from across Chicago and the Midwest to defend, protect and celebrate LIFE. You will march in peace through the streets of Chicago with people from diverse ethnic, social and religious backgrounds, but all dedicated to defending and protecting all human life. For as Dr. Mildred Jefferson, Pro-Life Activist and Heroine said:

The fight for the right to life is not the cause of a special few, but the cause of every man, woman and child who cares not only about his or her own family, but the whole family of man."

Keynote speaker will be Ramona Trevino, former Planned Parenthood Director, author of Redeemed by Grace. Sheila Liaugminus, host of Relevant Radio talk show, "A Closer Look" will serve as Master of Ceremonies. Among the speakers will be His Eminence Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago.







Rauner's Taxpayer Abortions the Last Straw

Foremost on the minds of those who will gather in Chicago on Sunday, January 14, 2018 is a bill known as H.B. 40 that Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law on Thursday, September 28, 2017, to expand taxpayer-subsidized abortions, angering many Republicans (especially conservatives) who accused Rauner of breaking his promise to veto the bill. Conservative Republicans immediately called Rauner an incompetent, failed governor destined to serve only one term.

H.B. 40 expands taxpayer-subsidized abortions for women covered by Medicaid and state employee insurance. The state already covers abortions in cases of rape, incest and when there is a threat to the health and life of the mother. The law expands the Medicaid coverage beyond those limited cases. Illinois Right to Life, which opposed the bill, projected that the measure could mean 12,000 additional abortions per year. Another group, however, put the figure at 3,800 a year.

The expansion of public funding for abortions is opposed by those who say it violates a longstanding principle that taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for a procedure that they might oppose on moral or religious grounds. But supporters of the legislation say the limits on abortions for women who are covered by Medicaid or state employee insurance create unfair burdens and hurdles.

While Rauner could have expected criticism on the abortion issue, conservative Republicans went beyond simply accusing him of breaking his veto pledge. Conservatives groups and individuals throughout the state Illinois wasted no time in pledging that they could not support Governor Rauner's re-election, whereupon the recruitment of Jeanne Ives followed.

Pro-life Jeanne Ives challenges pro-abortion Governor Bruce Rauner

For those who are not familiar with Jeanne Ives, the following article appearing in Illinois Review on Wednesday, December 27th is worth your time to read, Rauner challenger says she's not heartless, she's got a heart for state's taxpayers. In the article Ives said her main priority as a candidate is to let voters from one end of Illinois to the other know that how public policy affects their bank accounts matters.

As a West Point graduate of the Class of 1987 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics, Jeanne Ives went on to serve in the U.S. Army. Her assignments included platoon leader and headquarters detachment commander for transportation units in Germany and ROTC instructor at Wheaton College. Ives resigned from the Army in 1993 to raise her children, while working as a tax advisor and bookkeeper for small businesses and individuals.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 23:59:28|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) poses for a photo with explosives expert Wang Zeshan (R) and virologist Hou Yunde, winners of China's top science award, at the National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 8, 2018. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese scientists, explosives expert Wang Zeshan and virologist Hou Yunde, won China's top science award Monday for their outstanding contributions to scientific and technological innovation.

President Xi Jinping presented award certificates to them at an annual ceremony held in Beijing to honor distinguished scientists and research achievements.

He shook hands with them and offered congratulations.

Other leaders, including Li Keqiang, Zhang Gaoli and Wang Huning, were also present.

Monday's ceremony honored 271 projects and nine scientists with national prizes.

Seven foreign scientists won the International Science and Technology Cooperation Awards.

On behalf of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, Premier Li Keqiang extended congratulations to the prize winners and thanked foreign experts for their support to China's science and technology development.

While addressing the ceremony, Li called for more scientific and technological research in major disease prevention and control to improve people's well-being.

He said that more efforts should be made in food safety and pollution control to enable people to live a better life.

Li called for building China's strength in science and technology and urged increasing basic scientific research, diversifying investment in research and development, boosting integration of basic and applied sciences and enhancing innovative ability.

The Premier said China would pursue international cooperation in science and technology and take a more active role in the global innovation network.

"We welcome all kinds of talented people to join China's innovation and entrepreneurship campaign and share the development opportunities and achievements of innovation," he said.

Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli presided over the ceremony, which was attended by about 3,300 people.

Before the ceremony, Xi and other leaders met with representatives of the winners.

Also on Monday, Vice Premier Liu Yandong met with the seven scientists from the United States, Britain, Uzbekistan and Sweden who have won the International Science and Technology Cooperation Awards, and presented the medals to them.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-08 23:59:28|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TEHRAN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Iran's nuclear chief said Monday that Iran might reconsider its cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) if the United States fails to respect its commitments under 2015 nuclear deal, Iran Daily reported.

"If the United States does not meet its commitment in the JCPOA, nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic of Iran would take decisions that might affect its current cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency," Ali Akbar Salehi told IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano in a telephone conversation.

Besides, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Monday that Washington tried to destroy the nuclear deal last year and may destroy it in the coming days.

"It has been more than a year since the U.S. president sought to destroy the JCPOA with all his efforts," said Araqchi, adding that "In Iran, we are prepared for any scenario."

If the U.S. administration decides to breach the nuclear deal, "the international community and our region will be the biggest loser, since a successful experience in the international arena will be lost," he said.

"Our region will not become a safer region without the JCPOA," he stressed.

On Oct. 13, Trump announced that he had decided to decertify Iran's compliance with the Iran nuclear deal reached in 2015, a move that did not pull the United States out of the deal but triggered a 60-day window for Congress to decide whether to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, even it means violating the deal on the U.S. side.

In the past two months, the U.S. Congress did not come up with any resolution to reimpose sanctions.

With no action from Congress, the ball was passed back to Trump, who should decide in mid-January if he would like to waive energy sanctions on Iran.

The nuclear deal was reached between Iran and the six world powers of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany in July 2015.

So far, the deal has helped defuse the Iran nuclear crisis and bolstered the international non-proliferation regime.

The IAEA, tasked to monitor Iran's nuclear activities, has certified eight times Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:04:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Rescuers Monday found a body in waters near a collision between two vessels off China's east coast Saturday evening, according to the Ministry of Transport.

The body is believed to be one of the 32 crew members from oil tanker SANCHI, which belongs to an Iranian shipping company and was carrying 136,000 tonnes of condensate oil at the time of the collision, according to the ministry.

"Later, identity check and body transfer will be carried out according to procedures," the ministry said.

The ministry has made all-out efforts to search for the missing and expanded the circle of the search, it said.

As of Monday afternoon, 13 rescue vessels were searching an area of 900 square nautical miles, amid rain and strong wind.

SANCHI caught fire in the collision and was still burning Monday afternoon, the ministry said.

The collision between the Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter occurred around 8 p.m. Saturday in waters about 160 nautical miles east of the Yangtze River estuary.

The 32 SANCHI missing crew members comprise 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis.

All 21 crew members on the bulk freighter -- all Chinese nationals -- were rescued, according to the ministry.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:09:33|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUANDA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Angolan president Joao Lourenco on Monday described international terrorism as a main threat, while prescribing austerity as a cure to the struggling economy.

The president, who was speaking during an interview by journalists in state palace, said Angola is working to prevent the country from being affected by international terrorism.

Lourenco's interview has mainly focused on his 100 days of governance marked by economic reforms and the dismissal of Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, as head of the state-run oil company.

Lourenco considered austerity as a way to reverse the country's current economic and financial crisis and to boost diversification of the national economy.

Lourenco also underlined that the country intends to privatize all the non-lucrative public enterprises.

Lourenco is the third president of Angola since independence in 1975. He was elected in the general elections of August 23, 2017.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:14:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ROME, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Center-right parties in Italy agreed to forge a coalition ahead of general elections scheduled on March 4, according to political sources and media on Monday.

The electoral bloc would comprise Forza Italia (FI) party of former premier and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, anti-immigration Northern League, and minor right-wing Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) party, Ansa news agency reported.

The deal was announced by FI in a statement late on Sunday, after the leaders of the forces involved held talks at Berlusconi's residence in Arcore near Milan.

The center-right coalition is currently leading in opinion polls, and would be worth about 35 percent of the vote.

Under a new electoral law approved last year -- favoring coalitions instead of single parties -- about 40 percent of votes would be necessary to govern, although no majority premium was due to be allocated to the winning side.

Berlusconi, 81, is barred from public office after a definite conviction for tax fraud in 2013. Yet, he would nonetheless play a crucial role for center-right forces in the campaign, and, within the alliance, his FI party was expected to gain the largest share of seats in parliament.

None of the biggest parties are seen as strong enough to govern alone in Italy. Opinion polls led by SWG Institute and Index Research in mid-December showed anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) was the most popular single party with about 26 percent.

Center-left Democratic Party (PD) -- which ruled the cabinets in the latest legislature -- followed with about 25 percent of the votes, while Forza Italia (FI) gathered about 15 percent.
CAPE TOWN, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The South African government on Monday celebrated 20 years of diplomatic relations with China, pledging to explore more opportunities for win-win cooperation.

President Jacob Zuma took the opportunity to express his hope to further reinforce the well-established relations.

More opportunities remain to be tapped to create win-win cooperation for both countries, the president said.

"The government and the people of the Republic of South Africa join me in conveying to the government and people of the People's Republic of China our warmest greetings," Zuma said.

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) also issued a statement to mark the occasion.

"Over the past 20 years, the two countries achieved a significant number of bilateral cooperation agreements in areas including trade, investment, economic and people-to-people relations," DIRCO spokesperson Clayson Monyela said in the statement.

South Africa and China established diplomatic ties on January 1, 1998.

In the previous two decades, the two countries have assumed increased strategic significance, starting with a Partnership in 2000, to a Strategic Partnership in 2004 and ultimately to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP) in 2010 when the two sides signed the Beijing Declaration, Monyela said.

He said the year of 2017 saw South Africa and China strengthening friendship through the inaugural of South Africa-China High-Level People-to-People Exchange Mechanism which took place in Pretoria, South Africa in April.

Also last year, South Africa advanced the China-Africa partnership by continuing to co-chair the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and working towards the implementation of the outcomes of the 2015 FOCAC Johannesburg Summit, while China successfully hosted the 9th BRICS Summit in Xiamen, said Monyela.

South Africa is scheduled to host the 10th BRICS Summit in 2018.

With bilateral trade continuing to grow, China has been South Africa's biggest trade partner for eight years running.

According to the latest official figures provided by the Chinese Embassy in South Africa, bilateral trade volume stood at 35.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2016, with China exporting goods worth 12.8 billion dollars, and importing goods worth 22.5 billion dollars.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:19:37|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TAIPEI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- A rail service in Taipei was suspended Monday evening as protesters against an amendment to the labor rule laid on the tracks, with more than 10,000 travelers affected.

Braving rain and low temperature, hundreds of people led by the "May 1 Action Coalition" -- an alliance of trade unions and labor-rights advocacy groups -- gathered outside the legislative body building in Taipei Monday to protest against the amendment.

The Democratic Progressive Party administration's amendment to the labor rule has triggered huge controversy in Taiwan. The protesters said the amendment would leave workers more vulnerable to overtime abuse, and none of the proposed revisions would benefit workers.

The amendment will allow employers to force their employees to work longer, and reduce the rest time between shifts from 11 hours to eight, the protesters said.

Sporadic clashes broke out between protesters and the police.

A total of 19 trains were affected in the evening, as more than 10 protesters laid on the tracks in Taipei Main Station at around 6:30 p.m. The protesters were carried away by police at 8 p.m.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:19:40|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The armed wing of Hamas movement, known as al-Qassam Brigades, on Monday sent a letter in Hebrew via Twitter to the mother of an Israeli soldier, who has been missing in Gaza since 2014.

The group said in a letter written in Hebrew on its Twitter account "The residents of Gaza, mothers, fathers and children don't accept abducting bodies because it's inhuman."

Every mother wants to visit her son's grave, said the letter, which addressed the mother of the missing Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin.

"Leah Goldin, if you want to see your son go to your government because it hides the fact," it said.

Golden was apparently killed during a large-scale Israeli air and ground military offensive waged on the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014, which left more than 2,000 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis killed, and thousands injured.

During the war, Hamas armed wing announced that it holds two Israeli soldiers, without saying if they are dead or alive. Hamas said it only can give information on the Israeli soldiers through a prisoners' swap deal between the two sides.

Hamas wants to exchange the two Israeli soldiers and another two Israeli civilians are captive in its grip for Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails.

In October 2011, Egypt brokered a prisoners' swap deal between Hamas and Israel, where more than 1,000 Palestinians, imprisoned in Israel were freed for the release of an Israeli soldier was abducted in Gaza in 2006.

Hamas leaders in Gaza had repeatedly announced that until now nothing is new in relation to reaching another prisoners' swap deal with Israel to release the four Israelis for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem on January 7, 2018. (AFP Photo)

GAZA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The armed wing of Hamas movement, known as al-Qassam Brigades, on Monday sent a letter in Hebrew via Twitter to the mother of an Israeli soldier, who has been missing in Gaza since 2014.

The group said in a letter written in Hebrew on its Twitter account "The residents of Gaza, mothers, fathers and children don't accept abducting bodies because it's inhuman."

Every mother wants to visit her son's grave, said the letter, which addressed the mother of the missing Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin.

"Leah Goldin, if you want to see your son go to your government because it hides the fact," it said.

Golden was apparently killed during a large-scale Israeli air and ground military offensive waged on the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014, which left more than 2,000 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis killed, and thousands injured.

During the war, Hamas armed wing announced that it holds two Israeli soldiers, without saying if they are dead or alive. Hamas said it only can give information on the Israeli soldiers through a prisoners' swap deal between the two sides.

Hamas wants to exchange the two Israeli soldiers and another two Israeli civilians are captive in its grip for Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails.

In October 2011, Egypt brokered a prisoners' swap deal between Hamas and Israel, where more than 1,000 Palestinians, imprisoned in Israel were freed for the release of an Israeli soldier was abducted in Gaza in 2006.

Hamas leaders in Gaza had repeatedly announced that until now nothing is new in relation to reaching another prisoners' swap deal with Israel to release the four Israelis for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:29:41|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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ISLAMABAD, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Afghanistan has pressed Pakistan to grant up to one-year extension of the stay of over 1 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Afghan diplomats said Monday.

The demand came days after Pakistani cabinet decided to grant only one month extension to the stay of nearly 1.4 million registered refugees in Pakistan.

The Pakistani cabinet in its Jan. 3 meeting granted the extension in the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards that allow registered refugees to stay legally in Pakistan.

The PoR cards expired on Dec. 31, 2017 and under the cabinet's new decision registered Afghan refugees can legally stay in Pakistan until Jan. 31.

The cabinet had also decided that the issue of early repatriation of Afghan refugees should be raised with the UN refugee agency and with the international community.

Afghanistan deputy ambassador to Pakistan Zardasht Shams said over 1 million refugees cannot be sent back home in one month time.

Shams told Xinhua late Monday that the Afghan government is in contact with the Pakistani officials to extend the stay of the registered refugees by one year or at least six months.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has already suspended voluntary repatriation of the refugees from Pakistan for winter break until March, he said.

The cabinet has taken the decision at a time when the documentation of the hundreds of thousands of un-registered refugees is underway in Pakistan.

The Afghan deputy ambassador said about 700,000 unregistered refugees had been documented until Jan. 5. The documentation process, which is going on in 21 centers across Pakistan, is scheduled to conclude on Jan. 31.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 00:49:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ROME, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Italian museums registered a high number of visitors in the first Sunday of 2018, confirming a record upward trend in 2017, Italy's Culture Ministry announced on Monday.

Over 123,000 people visited museums, archaeological and historical sites across the country on Jan. 7, which was the first free-entry Sunday of the new year, official data showed.

Since July 2014, Italy's state-owned museums and heritage places offer free admission to all visitors every first Sunday of each month.

Visitors exceeded the record number of 50 million visitors in all of 2017, bringing some 193.6 million euros (231.8 million U.S. dollars) to state coffers, Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism Dario Franceschini said.

The number of foreign tourists visiting Italian museums also increased by 7.8 percent in number, and 7 percent in terms of spending last year.

"The 2017 will be recalled as a record year for one of our economy's most crucial sectors, which is our duty to support in its growth," Franceschini said.

The minister also stressed the "key role" played by Italy's southern regions within such national trend in 2017. "The Campania region (surrounding Naples) is firmly in the second place in the national ranking, for example," Franceschini said.

"One driving factor has been the regeneration of Pompeii, but a positive performance also marked the management of the Royal Palace of Caserta, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, and (museums of) Capodimonte and Paestum," he added.

Overall, Italian museums and heritage sites have witnessed an upward trend in latest years, from 38.42 million visitors in 2013 to 43.28 million in 2015 and 45.38 million in 2016, according to official statistics.

The most visited places in 2017 were Rome's Colosseum with over 7 million visitors (10 percent annual increase), Pompeii's Archaeological Park with 3.38 million visitors (7.6 percent increase) and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence with 2.2 millions (10.4 percent).
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:04:49|Editor: Xiang Bo

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Egyptian National Election Authority (NEA) Chief Lashin Ibrahim (C) speaks during a press conference in Cairo, Egypt, on Jan. 8, 2018. Egypt will hold its 2018 presidential elections from March 26-28, National Election Authority announced on Monday. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa)

CAIRO, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Egypt will hold its 2018 presidential elections from March 26-28, National Election Authority (NEA) announced on Monday.

"Elections of Egyptian expatriates will be held on March 16-18," NEA Chief Lashin Ibrahim said in a press conference.

Ibrahim said that candidate registration will start on Jan. 20 and close on Jan. 29, noting that electoral campaigns will kick off on Feb. 22.

Results of the first round will be announced on April 2, Ibrahim said.

In case of runoff, he added, polls will be held from April 19-21 for expatriates and on April 24-26 in Egypt.

"Final results will be announced on May 1," he said.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi took office in mid-2014, a year after he led the ouster of his Islamist predecessor Mohammed Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests against Morsi's one-year rule and his now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

Sisi said in November that the 2018 presidential elections would be held in March or April as scheduled, stressing that he will not seek to change the constitutional limit of two four-year presidential terms, thus ruling out a third presidential term for himself.

Although he has yet to formally announce his candidacy for the 2018 election, Sisi is widely expected to do so and to earn a landslide victory due to the absence of competitive challengers in the presidential bid.

A pro-Sisi campaign said in late December that it collected over 12 million signatures of Egyptians, more than 11 percent of the population, supporting Sisi to run for a second presidential term.

Egyptian rights and opposition lawyer Khaled Ali announced in November his intention to join the 2018 presidential race.

However, there is a possibility for Ali's disqualification as he had received a suspended three-month jail term in September over an obscene hand gesture he reportedly made after winning a court order challenging the government.

Former Air Force Commander and ex-Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, who fled Egypt after narrowly losing to Morsi in the 2012 elections, announced from the United Arab Emirates his intention to run for president.

However, he announced on Sunday his final decision not to run for the presidential elections.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:19:57|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Federation ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zaspekin said Monday that his government has donated 500,000 U.S. dollars to help Lebanese and Syrian children through the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF).

According to a statement by Prime Minister Saad Hariri's media office, Zaspekin met with Hariri in the Serail with Hariri's adviser in Russian affairs George Chaaban to discuss the latest developments and the ways to strengthen the bilateral relations between the two countries in 2018.

"We touched on the joint state committee for economic and cultural cooperation conference to be held in Beirut in spring, as well as more cooperation in the military-technical field," Zaspekin said after the meeting.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:30:01|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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TRIPOLI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Libya's UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj stressed Monday his support for the action plan proposed by the Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya, Ghassan Salame.

Serraj made his remarks during a meeting with Salame in the capital Tripoli, where the two officials discussed the latest political developments in the country.

"The prime minister reiterated his support for the mission of the UN envoy and the steps taken to complete the current transitional phase, leading up to the elections and beginning of building a stable Libya," the prime minister's media office said in a statement.

Salame proposed an action plan last September to end the political crisis in Libya. The plan includes amendment of the current UN-sponsored political agreement and holding presidential and parliamentary elections before the end of 2018.

The meeting also discussed the return of internally displaced people of Tawergha city, where Serraj revealed that a mechanism had been developed for their return in February.

"The prime minister said that there is a mechanism to implement the reconciliation agreement between Misurata and Tawergha cities, and that the return of the people of Tawergha will start on Feb. 1. He expressed hope that the event will be the beginning of a new phase of civil peace," the statement added.

During the 2011 uprising, some residents of Tawergha allied with the forces of the former regime of Gaddafi to fight the rebels of the nearby city of Misurata.

After Gaddafi's regime was toppled, those residents, accused by Misurata of actively participating in the fighting against them, fled their homes to others cities in Libya. Since then, they have been internally displaced.

In August 2016, representatives of Tawergha and Misurata cities signed a UN-sponsored draft reconciliation agreement to allow Tawerghan refugees to return home.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:35:03|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TIRANA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Albanian government on Monday announced its decision to dismiss the general director of state police Haki Cako, who held the post for three years.

Announcing the news, Albanian Minister of Interior Fatmir Xhafaj said vice director of state police Rebani Jaupi would replace Cako until a new director was appointed.

Xhafaj said another leading figure with fresh energy was needed for the upcoming challenges ahead.

"Although many targets and objectives have been delivered in the domain of public order, the challenges awaiting State Police require a faster dynamic. For this reason, there's a need for a new leadership with fresh energies to motivate and push the work of the State Police forward," the minister said.

According to local media, Cako was a close aide of former minister of interior Sajmir Tahiri, who is now under investigation over allegations connecting him with criminal gangs and drug trafficking.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:35:03|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RABAT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Morocco has remained Spain's main supplier of fruits and vegetables in 2017, Morocco's official MAP news agency said on Monday.

Morocco's exports amounted to 553.66 million U.S. dollars during the first 10 months of 2017, an increase of 36 percent year-on-year, said the report citing the Spanish Federation of Associations of Producers and Exporters of Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers and Live Plants (FEPEX).

In terms of volume, Morocco's exports totaled 314,112 tonnes in 2017 compared with 246,349 tonnes in 2016, the same source said.

The North African country was followed by France, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium in the report.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:35:03|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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CAIRO, Jan 8 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said Monday that he would not allow the state to be hit by a water shortage crisis, official Ahram Online reported.

Sisi made the comments as he announced the construction of Egypt's biggest water treatment and desalination project, at a cost of almost 70 billion pounds (3.96 billion U.S. dollars).

"We won't allow a water-shortage crisis to occur in Egypt. We have not only to keep our share of the Nile, but also to use our share to the maximum," he said.

Egypt is currently carrying out the biggest water treatment and desalination project, just in case of any circumstances concerning the sharing of water, Sisi added.

"This is not for luxury but to resolve a possible situation," he said, adding that he did not want to elaborate more.

Egypt has expressed concerns over Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project, saying it will affect Egypt's share of Nile River water, a claim rejected by Ethiopia.

Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have been involved in talks for the past three years concerning the dam and its effect on the downstream countries.

The Nile River is the main source of fresh water in Egypt.

Sisi said that the government started implementing the water treatment and desalination project three months ago.

"This is our country, and water for agriculture and drinking must be secured for citizens from Aswan to Alexandria, so that no problem will occur later and we say that we are not ready for it," he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:35:03|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BAQUBA, Iraq, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Monday launched an operation to hunt down remnants of Islamic State (IS) militants at a rural area in Iraq eastern province of Diyala, killing at least four IS militants, an army commander said.

A joint force from the Iraqi army and police carried out an operation in Maytah area, some 120 km northeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, leaving four IS militants killed and destroying eight IS hideouts, Lt. Gen. Mezhir al-Azzawi, commander of the security forces responsible for military operations in Diyala province, told Xinhua.

The troops also discovered two caches of ammunition and explosives, along with carrying out under control detonation to eight roadside bombs and a booby-trapped car, Azzawi said.

Maytah is part of the volatile al-Udhaim area in the northwestern part of Diyala province that extends to the rugged areas in the neighboring province of Salahudin.

Despite repeated military operations in the provinces of Diyala and Salahudin, remnants of IS militants are still hiding in rugged areas near the border with Iran in eastern Diyala province, as well as the sprawling areas between Diyala and Salahudin.

Dozens of IS militants fled their former bases in Salahudin province and Hawijah area in west of Kirkuk after the Iraqi forces cleared these areas from the extremist militants during anti-IS offensives in the past few months.

On December 9, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared full liberation of Iraq from IS militants after Iraqi forces recaptured all the areas once seized by the extremist group.

However, small groups of IS militants resorted to deserts and rugged areas looking for safe havens but the security forces are hunting them down from time to time.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:40:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Lebanon Christophe Martin said Monday that the majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon want to return home.

According to a statement by the presidential media office, Martin made the remarks during his meeting with Lebanese President Michel Aoun over the standards of ICRC to ensure the refugees' safe and dignified return.

Martin pointed that the ICRC's vision for how it would support refugees in their eventual return to Syria would be discussed with senior Lebanese officials as well as relevant international bodies and nations.

He told the president that 80 percent of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon want to go back to Syria once the security situation there improves.

The return of Syrian refugees would also benefit the Syrian people and would prove the importance of reaching a peaceful solution for the Syrian crisis, said Aoun.

"Lebanon is not responsible for the Syrian war, but suffers its consequences. The responsibility of the war falls on the countries that caused, facilitated or participated in it without anyone being held accountable for what they've done," added the president.

The United Nations Higher Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) announced last month that the number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon had dropped to below 1 million for the first time since 2014.

The UN agency said that the number of Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon as of the end of last November was 997,905.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 01:55:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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OSLO, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Norway exported 2.6 million tonnes of seafood worth 94.5 billion Norwegian kroner (11.7 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017, a record high both in value and volume, the Norwegian Seafood Council said on Monday.

This is an increase in value of 3 percent, or 3 billion kroner, and an increase in volume of 7 percent from the record year of 2016, the council said in a statement.

"2017 was yet another fantastic year for Norwegian seafood exports," Renate Larsen, managing director of the Norwegian Seafood Council, was quoted as saying.

"We see a growth in value and volume for overseas markets in Asia and the United States. Simultaneously, exports to the European Union (EU) were unchanged from 2016," she said.

Of the total value of Norway's seafood exports in 2017, 72 percent came from aquaculture and 28 percent from fishing. Measured in volume, the distribution was 40 percent from aquaculture and 60 percent from fishing.

Salmon is the most important species for Norwegian seafood exports, with over 68 percent of the total export value and 38 percent of the volume, according to the council.

Norway exported 1.6 million tonnes of seafood to the EU worth 61 billion kroner in 2017. This is an increase in volume of 2 percent, while the value is at the same level as 2016.

Norway exported 539,000 tonnes of seafood worth 18.7 billion kroner to Asia in 2017. This is an increase in value of 1.3 billion kroner, or 8 percent, and an increase in volume of 12 percent, or 59,000 tonnes, from 2016.

The largest growth market in 2017 was the United States, with a full 1 billion kroner in growth or 23 percent, for a total export value of 5.7 billion kroner. This makes the United States the fourth largest market in 2017, following Poland, Denmark and France. (1 U.S. dollar = 8.0834 Norwegian kroner)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 02:10:11|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KUWAIT CITY, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait unswervingly supports Iraqi reconstruction to ensure security in the region, said Kuwaiti Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Al-Jarallah on Monday.

He made the remarks at a press conference held on Monday to promulgate the details of the "Kuwait International Conference for Reconstruction of Iraq."

The senior diplomat said that Kuwait's unwavering support for Iraq stems from the fact that stability in its Gulf neighbor is key to ensure security in the region.

He congratulated the Iraqi military on its decisive victory over the Islamic State (IS), saying that it was both a humanitarian and a moral obligation to stand by the Iraqi people.

Pointing out that the conference will come under close scrutiny by the international community, he said that the private sector would join efforts to rebuild the nation battered by war.

The Chief of Staff in the Iraqi Prime Minister's office Mahdi Alalak at the press conference said that the forthcoming conference will provide lucrative investment opportunities, which will be announced in due course.

Alalak added that his war-torn country is in need of no less than 100 billion U.S. dollars to revive the its residential sector, which bore the brunt of the war.

The "Kuwait International Conference for Reconstruction of Iraq" will be held on Feb. 12-14 in Kuwait.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 02:35:16|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NICOSIA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Nationalist and center-right parties bagged most of the votes and seats in Sunday's vote of the Turkish Cypriot community, causing consternation among Greek Cypriot politicians over the prospects of ending the over 40 years of partition of Cyprus.

Final results published on Monday showed that the nationalist and center-right parties won 35 seats in the 50-member strong legislative chamber of the breakaway entity in the northern part of Cyprus, which is recognized only by Turkey.

Despite their sweeping victory, an administration by center-right parties will have a feeble majority, after Gudret Ozersay, a former negotiator on behalf of Turkish Cypriots and now the leader of the new People's Party, with 9 seats, said he will not take part in any coalition administration.

This will leave a coalition by the National Unity, Democratic and Rebirth parties with 26 votes, barely a reliable majority to stay in power for a long time.

The vote result was seen by Greek Cypriot politicians, who currently engaged in an electoral campaign for a presidential vote on Jan. 28, as a distancing of Turkish Cypriots from negotiations to end the partition of Cyprus.

Turkish Cypriot live in seclusion for over 40 years, after Turkish troops occupied the northern part of Cyprus in 1974, reacting to a coup organized by the rulers of Greece at the time.

Analysts said the turn of voters towards parties following a nationalist policy was caused by disappointment after the failure of the latest round of reunification negotiations in July.

"It was a possibility to be expected that the disillusionment over the failure of the negotiations would push the majority of Turkish Cypriot voters towards parties favoring a closer association with Turkey or even a separate state," Nicos Moudouros, an expert on Turkish and Turkish Cypriot affairs told state radio.

He explained that this happened in past elections when Turkish Cypriot voters saw their expectations for an end to the partition to come to nothing.

Yet, despite the gloomy atmosphere, a psychology professor at the University of Cyprus told state radio that a large majority of Turkish Cypriots support a federal solution.

Haris Psaltis told state radio that according to data of a survey currently being evaluated, about 75 percent of Turkish Cypriots either support or consider a federal state as the most acceptable arrangement.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 02:35:17|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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HAVANA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Chile's President Michelle Bachelet on Monday vowed to strengthen economic and commercial ties with Cuba and urged her nation's businessmen to participate in the island's reform process as Havana has set favorable conditions for foreign investment.

Bachelet inaugurated a bilateral business forum as part of her official visit to the Caribbean nation, calling on both public and private companies to increase bilateral commercial links which reached 52 million U.S. dollars last year.

The South American president highlighted several joint projects in the health sector as well as the first iron exploration in Cuba's history between the island's Commercial Caribbean Nickel S.A. and Chile's RM Asesorias.

She also said several bilateral agreements have been signed in the past three years to deepen trade with favorable tax conditions and aiming at benefiting small- and medium- Chilean companies.

"These agreements as well as a new Cuban law which favors foreign investment generates favorable conditions to bolster economic relations. We foresee new opportunities to continue developing our links that benefit both sides," she said.

The Chilean leader said Cuba's flagship project to attract foreign investment at the Mariel Special Economic Zone is a unique opportunity for her nation's businesses to invest in the island and the rest of the Caribbean.

"Bilateral trade continues to be deficient taking into consideration our friendship and social cooperation. We must work to increase Cuba's exports to Chile as well as our country's presence in this nation's economic development," she added.

She highlighted the increase in Chilean tourists to Cuba which rose from 17,000 in 2010 to more than 49,000 in 2015, the last year this number was registered by Santiago's authorities.

Cuba's Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment Rodrigo Malmierca, who also participated in the forum's opening, said there are currently various Chilean investment projects under negotiation which could be finalized this year in areas like tourism, agriculture and professional services.

"Our average bilateral trade in the last few years has been around 50 million U.S. dollars. Although it has had a favorable evolution we're not satisfied with these numbers and we consider there are possibilities to expand trade in both directions and improve Cuba's exports to Chile," he said.

Bachelet is on an official two-day visit to Havana which she started on Sunday by meeting with local artists and intellectuals and witnessing the signing of a cultural cooperation agreement between both countries.

Later Monday, she will meet with President Raul Castro and also lay a flower wreath to Cuba's national hero Jose Marti at the capital's Revolution Square.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 02:50:19|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADEN, Yemen, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- At least ten Houthi rebels were killed when artillery shelling targeted their locations near the government-controlled province of Lahj on Monday, a military official told Xinhua.

The pro-government army units supported by the Saudi-led coalition carried out a heavy artillery shelling on Houthi-held locations near the mountains of Kahboob in southern Lahj province, the military official said on condition of anonymity.

He said that the artillery shelling precisely destroyed the hideouts of Houthis and killed at least ten rebels and injured several others at the scene.

Two Houthi vehicles which arrived later in the area and tried to rescue the injured rebels were also targeted during the artillery shelling, the source added.

The Saudi-backed Yemeni army aborted several attempts by Houthi rebels who repeatedly attempt to make overnight infiltration into the government-controlled provinces in the country's southern part.

Despite the continuing aerial bombardment by the Saudi-led warplanes, Houthis are still positioned in mountainous areas close to Lahj province, where a key air base of the coalition is located.

The Sudanese troops and other forces of the Saudi-led coalition are using military bases in Lahj for training hundreds of newly-recruited Yemeni soldiers to fight Houthis and confront terrorist groups.

Yemen's internationally-backed government, allied with the Saudi-led Arab military coalition, has for about three years been battling Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels over control of the country.

The coalition began a military air campaign in March 2015 to roll back Houthi gains and reinstate exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government to the power.

The coalition also imposed air and sea blockade to prevent weapons from reaching Houthis, who had invaded the capital Sanaa militarily and seized most of the northern Yemeni provinces.

UN statistics show more than 10,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed since the coalition intervened in the Yemeni civil war that also displaced around three million.

The impoverished Arab country is also suffering the world's largest cholera epidemic since April, with about 5,000 cases reported every day.
Photo shows the historic torching of ivory and rhino horns at Nairobi National Park in Nairobi, Kenya, April 30, 2016. (Xinhua/Allan Mutiso)

NAIROBI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) on Monday welcomed the plan by the British government to shut ivory markets, saying the move will help end illegal trade of ivory.

KWS said in a statement that the existence of legal ivory markets and exports within Britain and Europe provide opportunities for laundering illegal ivory.

"KWS and Kenya welcome the plan by UK to close its ivory markets as this will obliterate any chances for opportunists, who may have in the past used the existing market in antique ivory as a cover for trade in illegal ivory," KWS said.

The statement comes after Michael Gove, Britain's Environment Secretary, announced that London will impose a ban on ivory sales to help end the poaching of elephants.

"The decline in the elephant population fuelled by poaching for ivory shames our generation. The need for radical and robust action to protect one of the world's most iconic and treasured species is beyond dispute," Gove said last week.

The move came after China honored its commitment to ending commercial processing and sales of ivory by the end of 2017.

The closure of ivory market in China is expected to drastically reduce slaughter of African elephants whose population declined by about 110,000 over the past decade based on statistics from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It is understood that the legal trade of ivory, raw or worked, in Britain and other European countries' auction houses and shops have fueled demand for ivory and contribute to poaching.

KWS said the plan to ban ivory sales in Britain and towards implementing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) recommendation to close domestic ivory markets is a welcome shot in the arm for Kenya and other elephant range states' conservation efforts, as the demand for ivory is bound to plummet.

Over the last two decades, poaching and illegal wildlife trade in and around protected areas in Africa have been on the rise.

According to conservationists, as profits rise, illegal wildlife trade has become a transnational organized enterprise, estimated by the CITES to be worth up to 20 billion U.S. dollars a year, making it the fourth biggest illicit activity after trade in guns and drugs, and human trafficking.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses servicemen as he visits the Hmeymim air base in Latakia Province, Syria December 11, 2017. (Sputnik Photo)

MOSCOW, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Terrorists attempted last week to attack Russia's Hmeymim and Tartus military bases in Syria with drones, which were captured or destroyed by Russian servicemen, local media reported Monday, citing a defense ministry statement.

Seven combat drones were destroyed by surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artilleries, while another six were brought to ground by radio-electronic warfare equipment with three of them exploding after hitting the ground, the statement said.

The Hmeymim airbase and Tartus naval base are operating normally after the drone attacks, it said.

Moscow began military operations against terrorist groups in Syria at the request of Damascus since September 2015.

With the support of the Russian bombing, the Syrian government has retaken most of its territories controlled by the Islamic State group in the past two years.

Given the victory on the ground, the Russian army began a partial withdrawal of its troops in Syria early last month under the order of President Vladimir Putin.

Russia said it will keep the Hmeymim and Tartus bases in case of the reemergence of terrorists.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 03:55:31|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The United Nation's humanitarian affairs chief, Undersecretary-General Mark Lowcock, is about to make his first visit to Syria where he is expected to meet with government representatives and "see for himself the impact of Syria's conflict," a UN official said on Monday.

Lowcock, also the world organization's emergency relief coordinator, leaves Tuesday to assess the civil war's impact on civilians, the humanitarian response and discuss how to improve access and delivery with key stakeholders, said Stephane Dujarric, chief UN spokesman.

"With the seventh winter of the conflict under way, more than 13 million people need basic aid and protection," he said. "They face daily deprivation and brutality. Some 69 percent of the population is estimated to be living in extreme poverty and millions are in need of protection in addition to food, clean water, shelter and other emergency aid."

"While some parts of Syria are witnessing a welcome reprieve from hostilities, many others face intensified military operations and conflict," the spokesman said.

During his visit to the capital of Damascus, Lowcock is expected to meet government officials, representatives of humanitarian agencies and partners and other key stakeholders, Dujarric said.

While Lowcock is expected to spend most of his time in Damascus during his four-day visit, he is expected to visit Homs to meet with people who have suffered first-hand from the effects of the crisis, and who need life-saving assistance, the spokesman said.

Homs is Syria's third-largest city and was a rebel bastion before government forces recaptured the city.

The former undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Stephen O'Brien last visited Syria in December 2015.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 04:40:42|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RABAT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Egypt will be the guest of honor of the upcoming Casablanca International Book Fair, the Moroccan Ministry of Culture and Communication announced Monday.

The Morocco's flagship book fair, which will be held on Feb. 8-18, will shed light on the Moroccan-Egyptian cultural relations, the ministry said in a statement.

It will also show the literature legacy of the Egyptian writer, Jamal El Ghitani, it said.

El Ghitani, who died at the age of 70 in 2015, is considered one of Egypt's most acclaimed novelists.

Several Egyptian writers, novelists and researchers are expected to take part in this fair.

The annual Casablanca International Book Fair brings together hundreds of publishers from all over the world and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 04:40:44|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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KHARTOUM, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Sudan on Monday renewed a complaint to the United Nations Security Council demanding Egypt hand over control of the border region of Halayeb.

"Sudan has renewed its complaint regarding Halayeb Triangle," Sudan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Cairo and Khartoum has a long-standing territorial dispute over Halayeb, which is currently under Egyptian control.

Since 1958, Sudan has been annually renewing complaints at the United Nations Security Council over Halayeb, which it wants to settle through either dialogue with Egypt or international arbitration.

In 2016, Egypt rejected a request from Khartoum to enter negotiations or to seek international arbitration.

Last Thursday, Sudan recalled its ambassador from Egypt to Khartoum for consultations.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 04:50:46|Editor: Xiang Bo

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Vehicles of Fire Department of New York (FDNY) gather at the site where a fire broke out in Manhattan, New York, the United States, on Jan. 8, 2018. Fourteen people were injured in a fire at an apartment building in Manhattan in New York City on Monday afternoon, according to the New York Fire Department. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

NEW YORK, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Fourteen people were injured in a fire at an apartment building in Manhattan in New York City on Monday afternoon, according to the New York Fire Department.

Fire officials said on Twitter that none of those injuries were life-threatening in the blaze on the second floor of the apartment building in upper Manhattan.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 05:25:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council on Monday hailed the peaceful conduct of the Dec. 26 presidential runoff election in Liberia.

"The members of the Security Council congratulated the Liberian people and government, as well as political leaders, civil society organizations, and the media for the peaceful conduct of the Dec. 26 presidential runoff election. They congratulated the two candidates for the responsible conduct of their campaigns," said the Security Council in a press statement.

They council members noted the significance of the first peaceful transfer of power between democratically elected leaders in Liberia in over 70 years. They further noted the importance of the upcoming political transition and commended active engagement between the outgoing and incoming administrations leading up to the inauguration of President-elect George Weah, it said.

They commended Liberia's National Elections Commission, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the government of Liberia for their preparation and execution of the presidential runoff and for their efforts to address the issues from the Oct. 10 legislative and presidential election, said the statement.

They further expressed appreciation to the Economic Community of West African States, the African Union, and all international, regional, and domestic election observation missions for their contributions to the transparency of the electoral process and timely assessments.

The members of the Security Council encouraged the continued engagement of the international community and donors to assist Liberia's continued efforts to achieve sustainable peace.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 05:30:54|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TRIPOLI, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Libyan Navy on Monday announced that 135 illegal immigrants were rescued off the coast of the western city of Garrabulli.

The immigrants, including 54 women and three children, were found on a rubber boat off Garrabulli coast, some 60 km east of the capital Tripoli, Libyan Navy said in a statement.

The immigrants, who are of African and Asian nationalities, were taken to Tripoli naval base to be transferred to a reception center, it said.

Earlier on Sunday, Navy spokesman Ayob Qassem told Xinhua that 297 illegal immigrants on two rubber boats were rescued and two bodies were recovered off Garrabulli coast.

Meanwhile, Libya's Anti-illegal Immigration Department said Monday that 252 immigrants from Nigeria were repatriated voluntarily to their home country, with the assistance of the International Organization for Migration.

The voluntary repatriation program is organized by the organization for stranded immigrants in Libya.

The organization recently announced that 19,000 immigrants were repatriated voluntarily from Libya to their countries of origins in 2017.

Due to insecurity and chaos following the 2011 uprising that toppled former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya has become a preferred point of departure for the immigrants, mostly Africans, who hope to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 05:40:56|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RABAT, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Morocco and Malawi agreed on Monday to strengthen cooperation in the field of agriculture.

The two countries have finalized two deals on enhancing agricultural cooperation, Hamou Ouhelli, Morocco's secretary of state for rural development, water and forests, told reporters after meeting with Malawian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Emmanuel Fabiano.

The first deal relates to the means to be taken to aid Malawi's farmers, particularly through the installation of drip irrigation systems on agricultural lands in Malawi, Ouhelli said.

The second deal offers training for Malawi's farmers in order to strengthen the organizational capacity of professionals in cooperatives and associations, Ouhelli said.

He hailed the talks as an opportunity for the two countries to examine ways to promote bilateral cooperation in the field of agriculture.

For his part, Fabiano said that Malawi aims to boost agricultural cooperation with Morocco, which has made achievements in this area, especially in irrigation.

He noted that Malawi is seeking to develop its irrigation systems, particularly the drip irrigation technology.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 06:01:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DAMASCUS, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- An array of rebel groups unleashed an offensive Monday to reimpose a siege on a key military base in the eastern countryside of the capital Damascus, a monitor group reported.

The Levant Liberation Committee (LLC), previously known as the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, and allied militant groups waged intense battles to close the breach made by the Syrian army in the siege imposed on the Vehicle Management base in Harasta city in the Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The monitor group said if the rebels' offensive continued in the same momentum, the siege could be restored on that key base in Harasta.

The UK-based watchdog group said the battles in Harasta are coupled with intense airstrikes on areas in Eastern Ghouta, killing at 23 civilians and wounding tens of others on Monday.

Meanwhile, pro-government Sham FM radio cited military sources as saying that the army foiled the attack on the base on Monday.

It added that around 20 wounded soldiers were evacuated from the base to a military hospital in Damascus after the army broke the siege on Sunday night.

The ultra-radical rebels unleashed their offensive on the base late last month, succeeding to lay a siege on that big facility. The attack triggered a counter-offensive by the Syrian army, which was capped by breaking the siege.

The base is the largest military facility in the Eastern Ghouta region, stretching from Harasta to Arbeen area.

It hosts a large number of soldiers, including Republican Guards, as well as big weapon depots.

During the war, the base has become a major operation center and supply facility for the Syrian forces inside the Eastern Ghouta region, which has many towns and neighborhoods.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-09 06:01:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GENEVA, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- The trial of 13 financiers accused of funneling more than 15 million Swiss francs (15.3 million U.S. dollars) to the Sri Lankan rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) started at the Swiss Federal Criminal Court on Monday.

The accused are from Switzerland, Germany and Sri Lanka, the Swiss news agency SDA reported, and they were caught in a sting operation in 2011.

Between 1999 and 2009, they allegedly created a complex fundraising structure which involved coaxing members of the Tamil diaspora to obtain loans from banks.

The 13 people on trial face charges of fraud, false documentation, money laundering and extortion.

The LTTE has never been declared a terror organization in Switzerland, so they will not face charges of funding a terror group.

"The Attorney General strongly suspects the LTTE fraction under investigation of having collected the money in question by means of threats and by creating a regime of fear to induce them to make the payments," a court document says.

The Swiss funds were transported in cash by couriers to Singapore and Dubai, eventually reaching the LTTE in Sri Lanka who allegedly used the money to purchase arms. This funding system collapsed in 2009.
YAKIMA, Wash. -- While authorities reiterated Sunday that no one can predict exactly when the Rattlesnake Ridge landslide will occur, theyve pushed the estimated date to late January or early February.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jay Inslee, who toured the site Sunday, said an independent geologist will join the team already monitoring the progress of the roughly 20-acre, 200-foot-deep mass of basalt that continues to slide down the south side of the ridge at about 1.5 feet a week.

This is a significant risk that we have significant concerns about, Inslee said. We are continuing to determine whether there should be additional monitoring or additional analysis ... and in the next several days we will probably be engaging a third-party independent consultant that would work for the state of Washington for the multiple agencies involved.

He hopes to fill that role within a week.

I dont sense a gap in our analytical ability. We have multiple geologists looking at this ... every day, he said. But we want to give the public more confidence that there is someone who is outside state agencies who is also not hired by the quarry owner so that we know that theyre totally independent.

During his visit, Inslee joined about 40 officials with local and state agencies and the Yakama Nation who heard from Dave Norman, state geologist for the Department of Natural Resources, in a closed briefing held at the Yakima Air Terminal.

Authorities, who had previously estimated a slide could potentially occur in mid-January, extended the estimate to later in the month or early February.

After the nearly hour-and-a-half briefing, Inslee and others took Interstate 82 to drive by the south side of the ridge before stopping along Lateral A Road near its intersection with U.S. Highway 97.

Though thick morning fog had thinned somewhat, the top of the ridge was still enveloped as Jeff Emmons, emergency management director for the Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management, pointed toward the Anderson Quarry  shuttered since October  and the harder to see growing fissure above it.

The hillside has been sliding since at least October when authorities began monitoring cracks that had opened atop the western slope of Rattlesnake Ridge. At that time, the landslide was moving at less than an inch per day. As of Friday, that had increased to 2.5 inches.

Authorities have spoken with 67 residents potentially affected by the landslide, said Horace Ward, senior emergency manager with the Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management.

That number has been fluid because some residents are on vacation and others were difficult to reach due to unusual work hours, Ward said Sunday. But its believed everyone potentially affected has now been contacted, he added.

Those residents, who lived in a small community on Thorp Road, are under an evacuation order as an estimated 4 million cubic yards of rocks and dirt continues to slide south.

Theyre being offered storage units for free for the next three months, said Ward, adding all agreed to take free, five-week paid hotel stays.

Other agencies are working on longer-term options, he noted, adding that the shelter offered to those evacuating has closed.

No significant movement occurred overnight, authorities said Sunday morning.

To my knowledge, nothing of large scale has happened overnight ... theres been no significant movement, Ward said.

And though Inslee was interested in a closer look near the now-closed Thorp Road and concrete-filled shipping containers placed along it to stop falling rocks, he stressed safety was more important.

I did not go to the scene because were encouraging people to please avoid this area, Inslee said. Theres a lot of work going on in this area. ... Dont bother folks who are doing geological work up there.

Norman, the state geologist, noted that while one or two rocks have rolled down the hill so far, There is rockfall occurring in the quarry itself on a daily basis.

Asked about the possibility of the slide reaching the Yakima River, Inslee repeated what members of the emergency management team have been saying.

Q&A: What lies ahead as fissures continue to widen on Union Gap ridge? The gap between Rattlesnake and Ahtanum ridges is narrow  less than 2,000 feet at its thinnest  and crowded.

The geologists have indicated that that is a very low probability with the information we have, Inslee said, but we have to make sure we monitor this on an hourly basis because if something changes, we want to be able to respond on a minute-by-minute response plan.

Flooding is a worst-case scenario, Inslee said.

There is an evaluation of potential flooding risk. ... It is not predicted for this to happen, but if there was a flooding event in Union Gap, there are already emergency preparations to deal with any flooding event, he said.

We talked to the Union Gap Police Department and emergency response folks; they already have a plan for that.

Officials are monitoring the landslide around the clock in person and using an array of monitoring devices that include GPS monitoring stations, seismometers, total station receivers and terrestrial LIDAR  Light Detection and Ranging. Thats a remote sensing method that uses lasers to measure distances, according to the National Ocean Service, a part of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Norman said rainfall isnt driving the landslide but a large snowfall followed by a quick melt could speed it up and plans are all being developed around worst-case scenarios.

As this event unfolds, we get more evidence and more information and were able to get better ideas of whats going to happen, he added.

Plans include two potential detours should the landslide close I-82. One detour to route traffic to U.S. Highway 97, a second would send traffic from the Tri-Cities past Mattawa to Interstate 90 near Vantage.

Some residents have suggested using controlled blasting to trigger the landslide, but Inslee said that is not an option.

Explosives have been considered but really not seen as a viable option. The state does not have enough confidence that that wouldnt create a larger problem, he said.

In the case of the Rattlesnake Ridge landslide, caution is paramount, Inslee stressed.

We are treating this slide with extreme caution, with extreme sensitivity and the nth degree of evaluation, he said. And weve got to do that because human life is an issue here. We have to take this with extreme caution.
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Cum arata noul brad de Craciun din centrul Sucevei

Noul brad de Craciun din centrul municipiului Suceava montat in aceasta saptamana a capatat instalatie noua. Firma din Cluj care se ocupa de ornarea bradului a finalizat astazi lucrarile si a facut proba. Ce a iesit vedeti in aceasta fotografie preluata de pe pagina de socializare a primarului Ion [citeste mai departe]
Stiri pe aceeasi tema

- Transgaz reported a net profit of 273.559 million RON January through September this year, 144pct higher against the same period last year, in the context in which the entire group's consolidated net profit amounted to 266.160 million RON, up by 152pct, according to the company's Quarterly Report

- Romania's national electricity consumption over January - September was 5.7 percent down year-over-year, with household consumption dropping 8.1 percent from the year-ago period, shows data released on Monday by the National Institute of Statistics (INS). Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

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- Senate acting president Alina Gorghiu declared on Monday that the National Liberal Party (PNL) wants the three ruling coalition parties to continue their governing cooperation "under terms of respect and mutual loyalty", noting that one should not forget that the Liberals have increased the pensions

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- Turnul de Control al traficului aerian din Delhi a contactat pilotul pentru a-i oferi ajutor, insa acesta a refuzat sa aterizeze in India.Potrivit Indian Express , apelul a fost primit la ora 9:30 (ora locala), cu privire la un zbor Mahan Air, pe ruta Teheran-Gangzhou.Turnul de control din Delhi a

- The total volume of construction works, in unadjusted terms, increased by 4.7% January through July this year compared to the similar period last year, and by 2.7% as workday and seasonally adjusted series, according to data issued by the National Institute of Statistics sent to AGERPRES on Monday.
VILLANOVA, Pa.Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput announced the recipients of the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, the Benemerenti Medal, and the Order of St. Gregory the Greatamong the highest honors the Holy Father can confer on laypeople, deacons and religious. Villanova University professors Thomas W. Smith, PhD, and Kevin L. Hughes, PhD, were among those recognized by Pope Francis to receive the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, lauded for their sustained and exceptional service to the Church and Catholic higher education.

Pontifical honors will be awarded at a special Vespers service at the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia on Sunday, January 21 at 4 p.m.

The Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice is bestowed for distinguished service to the Church by lay people and clergy. It is the highest honor that can be awarded to laity by the Pope. The Diocesan Bishop petitions the Holy See with the names and biographical information of those whom he wishes to receive the award.

I am extremely proud to have not one, but two, Villanova faculty members recognized by His Holiness for their contributions to Catholic higher education, said the Rev. Peter M. Donohue, OSA, PhD, Villanova University President. Dr. Smith and Dr. Hughes are deserving of this special honor, as they were instrumental in the development of Villanovas Humanities program. This program has enriched the intellectual life of our entire community and has helped us to more fully live out our Augustinian and Catholic mission.

Drs. Smith and Hughes were integral in establishing and expanding the Department of Humanities at Villanova. Dr. Smith was the founding chair of the Department of Humanities at Villanova. In that role, he oversaw the creation of a distinctive new curriculum that serves as a model for Catholic intellectual life, as well as the establishment of a new major.

Humanities was created in 2004 and is one of the ways Villanova has advanced Augustinian and Catholic intellectual life across disciplines over the last two decades, said Dr. Smith. I am honored and humbled by this award. Villanova has provided me with some unique opportunities to serve our community and the award is a testament to the encouragement and help Ive received. Im grateful to Villanova and especially the Augustinian community here, who have been such a great support and source of growth over my 25 years at the University.

Dr. Hughes served as Chair of Humanities from 2008-2016, during which time he continued to grow and expand the Departments offerings and influence on the Villanova academic experience. Under his leadership, the Humanities Department expanded its presence in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and developed an international reputation with Catholic institutions around the world, including the establishment of the Catherine Barr Windels Scholarship for study at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford.

The Humanities department was founded on the powerful idea that a deep and focused understanding of the human person, of God, of the world, and of society, informed by and rooted in Catholic theology and philosophy, can open a new horizon to interdisciplinary study and a true liberal education, noted Dr. Hughes. It is this education that sets us free to serve God and our neighbor in whatever vocation we discern. I am deeply humbled to receive this honor from Pope Francis and I gratefully accept it on behalf of the community of scholars and students that I have had the opportunity to serve.

Dr. Thomas W. Smith is currently the Anne Quinn Welsh Endowed Chair and Director of the Honors Program at Villanova University. He previously served as Founding Chair of the Humanities Department and Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Smiths teaching and scholarship focuses on the history of political thought, higher education, and the intersection of faith and public life. His scholarly work has appeared in such journals as The American Political Science Review, The Review of Politics, Communio, Logos, Religion and Literature, The Journal of Politics, and Polity. He is currently working on a book about Catholic higher education.

Dr. Kevin Hughes is an associate professor of Theology and Religious Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Villanova University. He served as Chair of the Humanities Department from 2008-2016. His specialties include Medieval and Early Modern Theology and Culture and Historical Theology. Dr. Hughes is the author of Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the Development of Doctrine in the Early Middle Ages and Church History: Faith Handed On, along with articles appearing in journals such as Modern Theology, Theological Studies, Franciscan Studies, and the Heythrop Journal. He is currently working on a book on Saint Bonaventures Collationes in Hexaemeron.

About Villanova University: Since 1842, Villanova Universitys Augustinian Catholic intellectual tradition has been the cornerstone of an academic community in which students learn to think critically, act compassionately and succeed while serving others. There are more than 10,000 undergraduate, graduate and law students in the University's six collegesthe College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Villanova School of Business, the College of Engineering, the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing, the College of Professional Studies and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Ranked among the nations top universities, Villanova supports its students intellectual growth and prepares them to become ethical leaders who create positive change everywhere life takes them. For more, visit www.villanova.edu.
NEW DELHI: As the Supreme Court decides to reconsider the Constitutional validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which criminalises homosexuality, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy has a few words for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community.

As long as they don't celebrate it, don't flaunt it, don't create gay bars to select partners it's not a problem, said Swamy.

But he has a problem with gay people flaunting their love.

In their privacy what they do, nobody can invade. But if you flaunt it, it has to be punished and therefore there has to be Section 377 of the IPC, added Swamy.

Swamy has been vocal about his views on homosexuality.

In 2015, the BJP leader took to Twitter, expressing his stand on the subject:

Legitimizing homosexuality leads to commercial profit since Gay Bars will be opened in all cities on FDI. It is a genetic flaw celebrated  Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) November 29, 2015

The statement had generated quite a furor back then.

On Monday, a top court bench  Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justices AM Khanwilkar, and DY Chandrachud  claimed that the issue arising out of Section 377 needs to be debated upon by a larger bench.

The court has also issued a notice to the Central government seeking its response on a writ petition filed by five members of the LGBT community, who stated that they live in fear of police because of their natural sexual preferences.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Monday questioned the state government over the delay in the initiation of the admission process of the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) at nursery level.

The court further pointed out that the admission process of the general category in nearly 1,700 private schools has begun on December 27.

The last date of submission of the application forms is January 17 while the process will end on March 31, 2018.

The admission process will be conducted to fill 75 percent of the total seats available in the city, the remaining 25 per cent will be reserved for those belonging to the economically weaker section/disadvantaged (EWS/DG) category. Admission to these seats will be conducted by the Delhi government centrally.

The application forms had been made available on the websites of these schools from December 27. The first list will be released on February 1.

Every year, nearly four times of children apply than the available number of seats which are around 1.25 lakh across the city. The admission is conducted through a point system for which schools set their criteria. After a screening process, the schools issues lists of selected candidates.

The schedule and rules apply to all private schools in the city, including the 298 schools built on government land. Last year, the government had issued separate criteria for them making neighbourhood the sole criteria for admission. The schools moved court against the move, and the matter is currently sub judice.
NEW DELHI: When Max hospital Shalimar Bagh gave back the bodies of the twins to the parents, they did not even record the time of death of the infants in its register, police found while probing a case of medical negligence against the hospital. Max hospital declared a stillborn child dead and handed over the twins to the parents in plastic bags.



The records of the hospital show that the only the time of birth of the twin babies was mentioned and not their time of death despite the babies having being handed over in two separate packages.

The final report in connection with the cause of death will be submitted after getting the final opinion from the histopathology department of Safadarjung Hospital.

The Delhi Medical Council had earlier issued notices to nine doctors and two nurses of the hospital in connection with the medical negligence case.

The license of the 250-bedded hospital had also been cancelled by the Delhi government citing negligence on the part of the doctors.

On November 30, a newborn premature baby was declared as dead even though he was alive. When the baby was being taken for burial, he showed physical movements. He was then admitted to north Delhi's Agarwal Nursing Home but died on December 6.
New Delhi: Eager to win over middle class, finance minister Arun Jaitley on 1 February is expected to present a common man friendly budget by either raising tax slabs or hiking investment limit in savings instruments, as per a news paper report.

As per a report in the Times of India, a section in the government wants to ensure the vocal segment is rewarded although the fiscal costs will be weighed.

Besides giving sops to the individual tax payers, Jaitley is also expected to unveil initiatives to give additional benefits for health insurance.

The FM may also look to raise interest in bank fixed deposits that have become less attractive following the recent rally in stock markets.

Another option before the finance minister may also be to offer sops for investment in mutual funds, the report said.

Quoting sources, the newspaper further said that a section within the government is backing the re-introduction of long term capital gains tax on stock market transactions. However it will apply to new transactions above a certain value, say Rs 5 lakh.

Technically this would be Arun Jaitleys last full-fledged budget as the next one will be a vote-on-account (where Parliament approves routine expenditure such that the government continues to run till a new regime is in place).

The next budget would come just months before the scheduled date of the 17th general election.

The Budget session of Parliament will commence from January 29 and the Union Budget will be presented on 1 February one.

President Ramnath Kovind will address the joint sitting of the two Houses on January 29 and the Economic Survey for 2017-18 will be tabled on the same day.
New Delhi: In its next meeting, GST Councilthe apex decision making body of the new indirect tax systemmay relax tax slabs on digital camera, irrigation equipments and bio-diesel vehicles, Zee Media sources have said.

Currently digital camera and bio-diesel vehicles attract 28 percent GST rates while irrigation equipments come at 18 percent GST.

Sources have further said that the finance minstry has identified 6 irrigation equipments including pump set and pump pipes.

The GST Council will meet on January 18 in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi who heads the Group of Ministers (GoM) on GST Network, has asked the finance ministry to roll out glitch-free e-way bill mechanism.

The all-powerful GST Council had on December 16 decided to implement the e-way bill mechanism throughout the country

The e-way bill for inter-state movements will be implemented from February 1 and for intra-state movement from June 1. The official said states have been given the option of choosing when they want to implement the intra-state e-way bill between February 1 and June 1.

Government data has revealed that the revenue collected under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in October was Rs 95,131 crore and average revenue shortfall of states has come down to 17.6 percent

The government had collected Rs 93,141 crore revenue under the GST in September.

The average revenue shortfall of all states for August was 28.4 percent and it has come down to 17.6 percent in October.
BENGALURU: The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore today announced the launch of Women Start-up Programme (WSP)  India's first customised online and classroom initiative for aspiring female entrepreneurs.

The programme launched by the institute's NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) is being jointly funded by finance company Goldman Sachs and Centre's Department of Science & Technology (DST).

Meant for women entrepreneurs-in-the-making across the country, the programme will offer in-depth training to foster managerial and entrepreneurial skills through mentoring, incubation, and financial support.

Here's how the programme will work:

1. In the first stage, the WSP is expected to provide training to nearly 12,000 aspiring women entrepreneurs through its five-week Do Your Venture Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

2. Thereafter, 300 women entrepreneurs-to-be shortlisted for a boot camp to be held at partner campuses in the towns nearest to them, where they will receive classroom instructions on communications and customer interaction.

3. From the 300 ventures, a select 100 women entrepreneurs will then travel to IIM Bangalore campus for a second boot camp, where they will receive classroom instructions on developing a business plan, understanding costing and pricing, sales and marketing, and negotiation skills. At this stage, the candidates will also receive networking opportunities with successful women entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, institute students, and Goldman Sachs professionals.

4. After the completion of the boot camp, the women entrepreneurs will have their business ideas incubated for a year at a partner institution of their choice where each women will also receive INR 30,000 per month for financial support and funding from a small prototype fund to run their ventures.

The partner institutions for WSP includes CIIEs Innocity, Ahmedabad, IIM Indore, IIM Nagpur, IIM Udaipur, IIM Visakhapatnam, and Presidency University, Kolkata.



The WSP builds off from a successful pilot programme launched in November 2016 by the NSRCEL which drew more than 1,700 aspiring female entrepreneurs from across the country. The pilot programme selected 50 women entrepreneurs to attend a three-week boot camp at IIMB which enabled participants to develop customized methodology to test and comprehend the success and sustainability of their ventures. From there 15 of the top ideas were selected to be incubated. Ventures included matching volunteers to social causes, specialized healthcare systems, and customized social networks, said IIM Bangalore in a release.
NEW DELHI: Changing its stance of playing the National Anthem before the start of a movie, the Centre on Monday told the Supreme Court that it may not be necessary to play National Anthem in cinema halls anymore.

Requesting the Supreme Court to modify its order that makes National Anthem mandatory in cinema halls across the country, the government asked SC to restore status quo ante.

The government further told the court that an Inter-Ministerial Committee has been set-up to frame new guidelines on the issue.

In an affidavit, the Centre told the top court that the final action will be based on the committee's recommendations. It also said that the entire exercise will need six months, said reports.

The court will hear the matter again on Tuesday.

On October 23, 2017, the SC asked earlier asked if should be compulsory for the national anthem to be played in theatres, asking the government to come up with a response by January 2018.

The top court had further said that standing for National Anthem in movie theatre not a measure of patriotism.

The Supreme Court on November 30, 2016, had made it mandatory for movie halls to play the National Anthem before the screening of movies. It had later clarified that movie watchers would not be obliged to stand for the anthem if it is part of the film that is being screened.
NEW DELHI: After Mumbai, the Delhi Police on Monday denied permission to a public meeting that was scheduled to be addressed by newly-elected Gujarat MLA and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani on Tuesday.

The police denied the permission to the meet under Section 144 and claimed that the decision was taken to maintain law and order in the national capital ahead of the Republic Day.

Jignesh was likely to raise issues like land, dignity and education in his public meet today.

One day to #YuvaRally



Hear youth leaders Jignesh Mevani from Gujarat, Akhil Gogoi from Assam, Manoj Manzil from Bihar, Pooja Shukla from Lucknow - all incarcerated for raising issues of land, dignity, education - tomorrow at Parliament street 12 noon onwards#FreeChandrashekhar pic.twitter.com/xMycJjxYTs  Shehla Rashid (@Shehla_Rashid) January 8, 2018

Earlier on January 4, the Mumbai Police had denied permission to a summit that was to be addressed by Mevani and JNU student Umar Khalid. Several students were detained who had gathered outside a hall for the event and protested against the police for not giving permission for the programme.

Had booked Bhaidas Hall for All India National Students' Summit here today, but now we are being denied entry. Reason police is citing is the news doing the rounds about Umar Khalid and Jignesh Mewani for the past few days: Sagar Bhalerao (Chhatra Bharati,VP), Organiser #Mumbai pic.twitter.com/4Fg3mSP6wq January 4, 2018

The authorities also detained the organisers of the event - Sachin Bansode, president of Chhatra Bharati, his deputy Sagar Bhalerao and an MLC Kapil.

The Pune Police had earlier said that they had received a complaint against Mevani and Khalid for their 'provocative' speeches at an event in Pune on December 31.

Mevani and Khalid had attended the 'Elgar Parishad', an event organised to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima-Koregaon, at Shaniwar Wada in Pune.

Violence erupted in Pune district when Dalit groups were celebrating the bicentenary of the Bhima-Koregaon battle in which the forces of the British East India Company defeated the Peshwas Army.

Several towns and cities in Maharashtra were on edge on Tuesday as Dalit protests against Monday's deadly violence in Pune spilled over to capital Mumbai, with agitators damaging scores of buses, and disrupting road and rail traffic.

Over 160 buses were damaged in Mumbai by rampaging protesters, of which 100 were detained.
Milan: An Italian court today acquitted Giuseppe Orsi, the former president of defence and aerospace giant Finmeccanica, of charges related to alleged bribes paid in exchange for a Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal to sell 12 AugustaWestland helicopters to India.

Orsi was arrested in 2014 and resigned as chief executive of the aerospace group which was later renamed as Leonardo.

Orsi was at the helm of AugustaWestland when the deal was struck and he is suspected of involvement in the payment of bribes.

He had been sentenced to four-a-half-years years in jail for false accounting and corruption.

Bruno Spagnolini, former CEO of the company's helicopters subsidiary AgustaWestland, who had also been handed a four-year jail term on the same charges, was also cleared, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

The case against Orsi and Spagnolini resulted from an investigation launched in 2012 into the sale of 12 luxury helicopters to India.

India had scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AugustaWestland in January 2014 for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force over an alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of kickbacks paid by the firm for securing the deal.

India's defence ministry had ordered a CBI probe into the allegations of kickbacks to the tune of Rs 362 crore after the arrest of Orsi and Spagnolini by Italian investigators in connection with the case.

In February 2010, India had inked the deal to acquire 12 three-engine AW-101 helicopters from AgustaWestland for VVIP use.
New Delhi: Army chief General Bipin Rawat has underlined the need for modernization of armed forces in view of changing and challenging dynamics of military operations. He also said dependence on imported military equipment should be minimised.

Speaking at an Army Technology Seminar on Monday, General Rawat said that armed forces which are technologically advanced would play a key role in operations in the times to come. "There is a huge requirement of modernization of our armed forces, in every field," he said. "Future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances & we have to be prepared for them. "We would like to gradually move away from imports (in defense technology) because for a nation like ours, the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with home-made solution."

General Rawat also added that the Indian Army is on the right track towards using technology and that support from relevant industries would be crucial. "A good headway has been made in lightweight bullet-proof material and fuel cell technology. The journey has begun and this must continue," he said. "We are confident that if we get support from industry, we will walk the extra mile to ensure that we utilize the technology you give us."



This is not the first time that the Army Chief has commented on equipping armed forces with the latest that technology has to offer. In November, he had spoken about armoured vehicles in the future should have the ability to operate on both northern and western borders. "Whatever be the future armoured vehicle we are looking at, we must have the capability to operate on the western border and the northern border. Whatever equipment we are going to introduce must be capable of inter-operability on both fronts," he had previously said.



The Indian Army last year also finalised plans to replace ageing weapons and has plans of acquiring 7 lakh rifles, 44,000 light machine guns (LMGs) and nearly 44,600 carbines.
NEW DELHI: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, two-day sea sortie, on Monday visited Goa to oversee various naval operations. These operations included Practice Missile Firings, warships submarine and aircraft interaction exercises, flying operations from aircraft carrier and fly-past.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited #Goa Naval Area. She will oversee various naval operations including Practice Missile Firings, warships submarine and aircraft interaction exercises, flying operations from aircraft carrier and fly-past during the two day sea sortie. pic.twitter.com/EiNz61mLX9  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Sitharaman went to overview Indian Navy's showcase of operational might and maritime prowess at sea.

In the event, held along the western coast of the country, the Navy showcased more than ten ships, including aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, a submarine and various Naval aircrafts.

The event that started today exhibited Navy's combat capabilities and battle readiness along the Western coast of India.
Congress President Rahul Gandhi arrived in Bahrain on Monday where he will address the Non-Resident Indian community. He was received by members of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) at the airport.

Looking to woo the NRI community across the world soon after taking on the reigns of India's oldest political party, Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter a day earlier to hail their contribution.

"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe," he had tweeted. "Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow."

This is his first visit abroad as the party president and comes ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the region.

He is expected to meet Bahrain Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa and other local leaders. He will also meet members of the local business community.
NEW DELHI: Congress President Rahul Gandhi, who is currently on a visit to Bahrain to address the Indian diaspora, will begin his address at 8:30 pm. NRIs from 65 countries are expected to attend the meeting.

The Congress President, earlier in the day, had arrived in the Gulf country and was received by members of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) at the airport.

Praising the Indian diaspora across the world, he had on Sunday called the NRIs the true representatives of the country's soft power and the brand ambassadors of the nation across the globe.

"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow, tweets Congress President Rahul Gandhi," he had tweeted.

This is his first visit abroad as the party president and comes ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the region.

He is expected to meet Bahrain Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa and other local leaders. He will also meet members of the local business community.
Bahrain: Taking a veiled dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday said that India doesn't need silence.

People are killed in India because of religious issues, judges die mysteriously, journalists are killed, and the PM has nothing to say," said Gandhi while addressing a large gathering of the Indian diaspora in Bahrain on Monday.

We will defeat them (BJP) in 2019, said the Gandhi scion while responding to questions.

Watch: When Rahul Gandhi got a rousing welcome in Bahrain

He further claimed that job creation is at an 8-year low in India and that instead of accepting that we are lacking in job creation, the government is not doing anything.

What China does in two days, India takes one year to do the same, he added.

Rahul Gandhi, who landed in Bahrain earlier today, was speaking at the convention of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin. This is his first visit abroad as the party president.

The visit comes days ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's scheduled tour in the region.

Non-Resident Indians from more than 65 countries attended the meet.

Calling Indian politics a strange experience, the Congress President said, I am here to tell you that there is a serious problem back home, and to tell you that you can do a lot about it.

Praising the Indian diaspora, Gandhi said, You send almost 3.5% of India's GDP, you are responsible for adding to the wealth of the world.

Your patriotism is what India needs today... India can bridge any gap put before it.

Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, H.R.H. Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain. @BahrainCPnews pic.twitter.com/BxHm9AttmG  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 8, 2018

The Congress President earlier met with Crown Prince of Bahrain H.R.H. Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and his delegation. Congress leader Shashi Tharoor also accompanied the Congress chief.
In this episode of Democratic Newsroom, watch as India Today's news anchors share their views on the gruesome murder of Shradha Walkar by her live-in partner Aaftab Amin Poonawala, politics over the murder and the way the incident has been covered.
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday said that it will reconsider and examine the Constitutional validity of section 377 which criminalises homosexuality. The apex court has referred the plea seeking decriminalisation of sex between two consenting adults to a larger bench.

Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justices AM Khanwilkar, and DY Chandrachud stated that the issue arising out of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) needs to be debated upon by a larger bench.

The court has also issued a notice to the Central government seeking its response on a writ petition filed by five members of the LGBT community, who stated that they live in fear of police because of their natural sexual preferences.

The bench was hearing a plea filed by Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare Section 377 as unconstitutional. Referring to a recent nine-judge bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight that right to choose a sexual partner is a fundamental right, Johar's counsel emphasised that "you can't put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex."

In 2013, a two-judge bench of the SC had ruled that under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, homosexuality will continue to be treated as an offence irrespective of their age and consent. The court had then out the ball in parliament's court, stating that the government was free to annul the law through a legislation.

Defending its order, the court had then said that "a miniscule fraction of the countrys population constitute lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders and in last more than 150 years, less than 200 persons have been prosecuted for committing offence under Section 377."

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says that "whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine."
In his first visit to a foreign country after becoming Congress president, Rahul Gandhi is in Bahrain. The Gandhi scion received a positive reception, which the Congress termed as euphoric.

The Congress tweeted a video of Rahul Gandhis arrival in the Kingdom of Bahrain, wherein large number of people thronged him to click his photographs. Posters welcoming him were also seen at the airport.

Euphoric reception for Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain. This is CPs first foreign visit after his takeover. pic.twitter.com/zsGOaXnwCv  Congress (@INCIndia) January 7, 2018

A day after his arrival in the kingdom, the Congress president on Monday met Crown Prince of Bahrain, HRH Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa.

The Gandhi scion tweeted that the crown prince and he discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain.

Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, H.R.H. Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain. @BahrainCPnews pic.twitter.com/BxHm9AttmG January 8, 2018

Rahul Gandhi was also slated to address the Indian diaspora on Monday and the event was expected to be attended by NRIs from 65 countries.

The Congress president was received by members of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) at the airport.

Praising the Indian diaspora across the world, he had on Sunday called the NRIs the true representatives of the country's soft power and the brand ambassadors of the nation across the globe.

"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow, tweets Congress President Rahul Gandhi," he had tweeted.
Happy Birthday Aaron Finch: Check his TOP records and know about GORGEOUS wife Amy Griffiths
New Delhi: Philip Morris International (PMI), the makers of Marlboro cigarettes, has announced that it will stop manufacturing cigarettes and replace them with alternatives such as e-cigarettes.

Weve built the worlds most successful cigarette company, with the worlds most popular and iconic brands, Philip Morris website said.

We will be far more than a leading cigarette company. Were building PMIs future on smoke-free products that are a much better choice than cigarette smoking. Indeed, our vision  for all of us at PMI  is that these products will one day replace cigarettes, it wrote.

The company had placed advertisements in major newspapers in UK last week with a New Years resolution: Were trying to give up cigarettes.

The newspaper advertisement also said,"No cigarette company has done anything like this before. You might wonder if we really mean it."

PMI has also launched a new website, smokefreefuture.co.uk encouraging its UK customers to quit smoking.

The global tobacco major in October had said it will fund proposals under its $100 million global initiative to support third-party projects dedicated to the fight against illegal trade.

The company established its PMI Impact initiative to support projects dedicated to fighting illegal trade and related crimes, such as corruption, organised crime and money laundering.

Private, public or non-governmental organisations have been invited to submit applications to avail funding under the second round of PMI Impact, the company said in a statement.

PMI has pledged $100 million across three funding rounds of PMI Impact.

In the first funding round of the initiative, 32 projects were selected from 200 proposals.
Chattarpur: A 12-year-old girl from Madhya Pradesh was allegedly raped by her own father for more than five years. What's even more shocking is that the minor's mother, who was aware of the entire case, aided the father with the crime.

The victim and her family live on Orchha Road in Madhya Pradesh's Chhatarpur city.

The man has been raping his minor daughter for at least five years. The mother did nothing to put a stop to the sexual assault. The victim's brother, who came to know about the assault last year, raised his voice but was threatened by the father and forced to stay quiet.

The incident came to light when the girl managed to escape home and landed at her uncle's place, where she narrated her ordeal.

The relative immediately took the girl to the police and reported the matter.

Both the father and mother have now been arrested by police. An investigation is underway

Speaking to Zee News, the victim said the both her father and mother should be sentenced to death for such a heinous crime.
MUMBAI: Unidentified assailants stabbed Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant to death outside his residence in Kandivli in Mumbai on late Sunday.

Sawant, who was also an ex-corporator in Mumbai, was attacked at around 10:45pm while he was returning home after meeting a friend. He was barely 200 metres away from his residence when he was stabbed by the attackers.

As per reports, two men, who had been waiting in a vehicle outside his house in Sur building in Samta Nagar, approached him aggressively and attacked him with choppers before fleeing from the scene.

A police team rushed the 62-year-old Shiv Sena leader to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead by the doctors.

His body has been sent for a post-mortem at city's Shatabdi hospital.

As per police, Sawant suffered at least 17 wounds and reportedly succumbed outside his residence in Samata Nagar.

The police have filed a case under IPC section 302 and an investigation is underway. The police examined footage from CCTV cameras installed in the locality has reportedly identified one of the accused.

The preliminary motive behind the crime appeared to be extortion.

As per another report, the deceased had entered a cable business and had been receiving extortion calls for the last few days.

They also said that he had brought the matter to their notice. Media reports said the murder was probably connected to these extortion threats.

Sawant is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.

Parts of Kandivali east observed a spontaneous shutdown in memory of the slain two-time municipal corporator, who was currently a deputy Vibhag Pramukh.

His funeral has been slated later on Monday evening following the autopsy.
New Delhi: The benchmark BSE Sensex rallied 178 points or or 0.52 percent, to trade at an all-time high of 34,331.85 and the NSE Nifty breached the 10,600 for the first time in opening trade on Monday.

Last week, Benchmarks rallied to record highs to end the first week of 2018 with gains as investors cranked up fresh purchases in tandem with bullish global cues.

The BSE Sensex surged over 184 points to close at its lifetime high of 34,153.85, while the broader NSE Nifty ended at record 10,558.85. Sentiment got a leg-up after the Lok Sabha yesterday gave its approval for Rs 80,000 crore recapitalisation bonds for strengthening public sector banks (PSBs).

Meanwhile, the rupee strengthened by 11 paise to trade at 63.26 against the US dollar in opening session today on selling of the greenback by exporters and banks amid gains in stocks which scaled record levels.



Currency dealers said continued foreign fund inflows and weakness in the greenback against other currencies overseas supported the rupee.

Most Asian markets rose today following yet more records on Wall Street but Hong Kong turned lower after nine days of gains.

Traders in New York pushed all three main indexes ever higher on Friday, unperturbed by a well-below-forecast jobs reading with analysts saying the results indicated the employment market was tightening.
MUMBAI: A fire broke out on the third floor of the Mumbai Session Court building in Karamveer Bhaurao Marg on Monday morning, reported news agency ANI.

At least five fire engines were rushed to the spot and the flame was brought under the control. No casualties have been reported.

#Visuals from Mumbai: Fire doused at Mumbai Sessions Court premises located at Karamveer Bhaurao Marg, no casualties reported pic.twitter.com/CpqAurOohI  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

The fire brigade got a call at 7.14 am about the blaze in the court building, located near the campus of the Mumbai University in South Mumbai, the official of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's disaster management unit said.

The cause of fire was not yet known, he said, adding that an investigation will be carried out into the incident.

This is the fifth major fire incident in the city over the past two weeks.

The incident comes days after a fire broke out on the first floor of Shiv Shakti building at Lower Parel on Sunday. However, no injuries were reported here and the flame was brought under the control in a short time.

On January 6, a technician was killed in the massive fire that broke out at Cinevista studio in east central Mumbai. The audio assistant's charred body was found with 100 percent burn injuries during a search the next morning.

In another fire incident, at least four of a family were charred to death while nine were left with burn injuries in at the Maimoon Manzil building on late January 3.

On December 28, another major fire at Kamala Mills compound in Lower Parel left 14 persons dead, most of them in their 20s and early 30s. Several others were also injured in the huge fire that started from a restaurant and spread rapidly to nearby restaurants and offices as well.

On December 18, 12 people were killed when a massive fire broke out at a snack shop in Saki Naka-Kurla area here.
Mumbai: He is born to veteran screenwriter Salim Khan and has superstar Salman Khan as his big brother, but Arbaaz says the stardom of his kin has not overshadowed his career.

The 50-year-old actor-director said getting recognised as Salman's brother does not bother him and it only acts as an advantage.

"I don't think (it has bothered me) ever. There are only advantages of being Salim Khan's son, Salman Khan's brother and coming from a known family," Arbaaz told PTI.

The actor said the fact that "I could never make it to the level that I should have was because I was under pressure or under the shadow of my father or brother. I think those are just excuses."

Arbaaz said he is aware that there is a certain baggage of expectations when a person comes a famous family but he has taken it in his stride.

"There is a pressure. People look at you differently. But you've got to move on. I look at all that has happened to me because of my family as an advantage rather than disadvantage. It has more pros than cons."

After an acting career of more than a decade, Arbaaz ventured into film production between 2009 and 2014. He took a sabbatical from acting as he produced films like Dabangg, Dabangg 2 - which he also directed - and Dolly Ki Doli.

He, however, said acting is something he enjoys the most.

"For me, acting is something I am passionate about. I am someone who wants to be known for who I am. If I wanted to just make money, I would've chosen some other profession.

"I know there are insecurities in being an actor. There are certain compromises you need to make, but they are all worth it. The perks of being recognised are something else," he said.

Arbaaz is currently awaiting the release of his next Nirdosh, in which he plays a cop investigating a murder.

The thriller, directed by Pradeep Rangwani and Subroto Paul, also features Manjari Fadnis, Ashmit Patel, Maheck Chahal and Mukul Dev.

Nirdosh is scheduled to be released on January 19.
Mumbai: Actor Shrivallabh Vyas, who had played the role of Ishwar kaka in Aamir Khan starrer Lagaan, breathed his last Sunday morning after prolonged illness on January 7. He was 60.

His last rites took place in Jaipur last evening. According to a report in hindustantimes.com, Vyas suffered a brain stroke while shooting for a film in Gujarat in 2008. He reportedly fell in the toilet and was found lying in a pool of blood next morning. He underwent a surgery but since then he was paralysed.

The actors wife  Shobha had reportedly approached the Cine and TV Artists Association (CINTAA) for financial assistance but was disappointed with the amount that was offered to her. Vyass co-actors Irrfan Khan, Manoj Bajpayee and Aamir Khan came forward to help his family, the report added.

Vyas had played character roles in a number of films and the list includes  Sarfarosh, Shool, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero, Abhay etc.
By PTI: (Eds: Incorporating CM announcing financial assistance)

Firozabad (UP), Jan 7 (PTI) In a freak accident, at least 11 people were today killed after a speeding truck hit a three-wheeler and took a tumble, crushing a car and some passers-by here, the police said.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has expressed grief over the loss of lives in the accident and has announced a financial assistance of Rs 2 lakh to the kin of each of the deceased, an official statement said.

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According to Firozabad District Magistrate Neha Sharma, those who have lost their lives include, two women, a youth, six men and two children.

The incident took place around 4 pm when the truck, on its way to Kanpur from Agra, lost balance while taking a sharp turn on a busy national highway and hit a three-wheeler, Superintendent of Police Manoj Kumar told PTI.

It then took a tumble, crushing a car and some passers- by, the police official said.

According to the police, a JCB machine was used to remove the debris and pull out the bodies.

"As many as 10 people died on the spot, while a critically injured man succumbed to his injuries on way to Agra," Sharma said.

"Of the deceased, identity of four have been ascertained so far. They are Manoj (35), a resident of Mainpuri, his 12- year-old son Himanshu and nine-year-old son Pranshu. The person who was critically injured and later died, has been identified as Pankaj, also a resident of Mainpuri," the district magistrate said.

The bodies have been sent for post-mortem. The truck driver is absconding and further investigation into the incident is underway, the police said.

In the statement issued by the office of the chief minister in Lucknow, Adityanath expressed his condolence to the bereaved families. PTI CORR NAV ANB

--- ENDS ---
Mumbai: Speculations were rife that Ranveer Singh would get engaged to Deepika Padukone on her birthday (January 5) in Sri Lanka. But it seems the couple will take some more time to make it official. Nonetheless, the two, who have been together for over 4 years now, keep giving us relationship goals.

Ranveer and Deepika were seen at the citys International airport. The two walked out of the airport after spending some quality time in Maldives, reports suggest.

A fan club of the power couple took to Twitter to share images of the two superstars as they stepped out of the airport recently.

Last week, a strong buzz suggested that the couple was in Sri Lanka for New Year celebrations. Ranveers presence at an airport in Sri Lanka had almost confirmed the news. But the couple apparently ringed in the new year at a private repost in Maldives.

Deepika, who turned 32 on January 5, has been dating Ranveer since Goliyon Ki Raasleela  Ram Leela days. The two had set the silverscreen ablaze with their sizzling hot chemistry in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial. They spun the same magic as Bajirao Mastani in SLBs next! They even played man and wife in Homi Adajanias Finding Fanny (read: Ranveer made a cameo appearance which lasted just for a few seconds).

And now the rumoured couple is awaiting the release of their upcoming film  Padmavat  another Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial which has been in the eye of storm since the inception.

Interestingly, Ranveer and Deepika dont share screen space in the film. The dimpled beauty, who plays Rani Padmavati has been paired opposite Shahid Kapoor who essays Maharawal Ratan Singh while Ranveer portrays the character of Alauddin Khilji.
JAIPUR: Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje on Monday said that Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmavat will not be allowed to release in the state.

"Padmavat will not be released in the state, keeping in view the sentiments of the people. Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria has been instructed for the same," she said.

Her statement comes even after the CBFC has given a go-ahead to the magnum opus Padmavati-turned-Padmavat.

The politics over the release of the Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh starrer seems to fail to die down.

Speaking to mediapersons, Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria, earlier in the day, had said, "Following the earlier orders of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, movie Padmavat will not be released in the state.

This came just hours after reports said that the release date of the film was finalised for January 25. The movie was initially slated for release on December 1, 2017.

Before the censor board gave a go-ahead to Padmavat, which was earlier named Padmavati, several states, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra had declared that they would not allow the release of the film alleging distortion of historical facts.

The censor board had to constitute a special panel for the purpose of certifying the film. The panel comprised historians as well as members of royal families from Rajasthan. The board suggested no cuts but only five modifications for the release.

Among the modifications, the body has suggested "to change the disclaimer clearly to one that does not claim historical accuracy" and to further add a point that the film in no manner subscribes to the practice of Sati or seeks to glorify it.

Secondly, the title of the movie was asked to be changed from Padmavati to Padmavat, given the filmmakers have attributed their material/creative source to the fictional poem Padmavat and not history.

The song `Ghoomar` was also asked to be modified so as to make the depiction befitting the character being portrayed. The film was given UA certificate.

However, the move failed to end the protest over the movie with the Rajput Karni Sena threatening to vandalise all cinema halls that would show the movie.

The magnum opus stars Deepika Padukone (as Rani Padmavati), Shahid Kapoor (as Maharawal Ratan Singh) and Ranveer Singh (as Alauddin Khilji).
New Delhi: When the Chinese space agency launched its space lab Tiangong-1 in 2011, little did they expect it to come 'crashing' back to Earth six years later.

The Asian country's first space station that was hailed as a potent political symbol of Chinas growing power, is expected to crash land sometime this year.

In September 2016, scientists at China's CNSA space agency admitted to having lost control of the lab, saying that it would be crash-landing on Earth. That put an end to months of speculation, as experts watching the path of the station suggested that it had been behaving strangely.

The news also raised immediate concerns of how the falling space debris will put the people on Earth at risk.

The Chinese space station is accelerating its fall towards us and will reach the ground in the coming months, Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell had told the Guardian in October 2017. It is decaying quickly and he expects "expect it will come down a few months from now  late 2017 or early 2018", he had said.

However, a top Chinese spaceflight engineer has now refuted the reports saying that the space lab is not out of control and does not pose a safety threat.

The Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace 1, Chinas first space lab, was launched into orbit in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments as part of Chinas ambitious space program, which aims to place a permanent station in orbit by 2023.

Tiangong-1 was originally planned to be decommissioned in 2013 but China has repeatedly extended the length of its mission. The delay of re-entry into the earths atmosphere, which China said would happen in late 2017, had led some experts to suggest the space laboratory may be out of control.

Zhu Congpeng, a top engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the state-backed Science and Technology Daily newspaper that the space station was not crashing and did not pose a safety or environmental threat.

We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to allow it to fall within the first half of this year, Zhu told the newspaper.

It will burn up on entering the atmosphere and the remaining wreckage will fall into a designated area of the sea, without endangering the surface, he said.

Re-entry was delayed in September 2017 in order to ensure that the wreckage would fall into an area of the South Pacific ocean where debris from Russian and U.S. space stations had previously landed, the paper said.

The California-based Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit group that works for the US government, said the Tiangong-1s re-entry was unlikely to be controlled but was highly unlikely to hit people or damage property, according to a post on its website last updated on Jan 3.

Although not declared officially, it is suspected that control of Tiangong-1 was lost and will not be regained before re-entry, it said. There may be hazardous material on board that could survive re-entry, it said.

Advancing Chinas space program is a priority for President Xi Jinping, who has called for China to become a global space power with both advanced civilian space flight and capabilities that strengthen national security.

Beijing insists that its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has said Chinas program could be aimed at blocking adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.

(With inputs from Reuters)
Kolkata: The International Society for Krishna Consciousness is planning to promote spiritual tourism at the Sagar Islands in West Bengal and would take up several projects in the area for which West Bengal has promised help.

As part of the ISKCON plan a Vedic Centre for Culture and Education, a world-class park, community hall, light and sound exhibition to attract the visitors to Sagar Islands, which attracts lakhs of pilgrims during holy 'Makarsankranti' on January 14-15 every year, an ISKCON statement said.

The West Bengal government has promised all help to the project, it said.

An NRI has also expressed the wish to contribute to the projects at Gangasagar, it added.

ISKCON has set up a large camp at the Ganga Sagar fair ground which will be operational from January 11 to 16 to house pilgrims from the country and abroad.

During the Mela ISKCON's Sewa camp aims to distribute one lakh plates of 'prasadam' to the pilgrims, Sundar Govind Das, the in charge of Food for Life programme run by ISKCON, Mayapur, said.

It will also provide free medical aid by doctors of a private super-speciality hospital and distribute blankets among the pilgrims, he added.
ALIGARH: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on Monday expelled a student following reports of his alleged involvement in "highly objectionable activities, which can hamper the peaceful academic atmosphere and create disharmony".

Mannan Bashir Wani is a PhD student from the Department of Geology. The university authority has also sealed his room, said the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of AMU.

Earlier in the day, the Uttar Pradesh Police had conducted raids at the university in search of Wani, who went missing a few days back.

Wani, who hails from Jammu and Kashmir, had recently appeared in a photograph posted on social media holding an AK-47 rifle, with a message claiming that he has joined militancy.

"Mannan Wani, son of Bashir Ahmad Wani, joined Hizbul Mujahideen on January 5," read the message that appeared on WhatsApp and Facebook along with his photograph.

However, the Kupwara police had expressed caution to the viral photo and had said there is no confirmation yet on whether Mannan has joined militancy or not. IG of Kashmir had suspected that Mannan's photograph may have been photoshopped by some miscreants and that they are trying to locate him. He was last seen in Delhi.

Aligarh SSP Rajesh Pandey too asserted that while there are reports of Mannan joining Hizbul Mujahideen, there has been no confirmation on the same.

Soon after the photograph went viral on the social media, the AMU administration had suspended the PhD scholar from the college.

Wani's brother, Mubashir Ahmad, reportedly said that he and his family have no idea whether he has joined militancy or not. As per Mubashir, they lost contact with Wani on January 4 after his phone appeared to be switched off.

Ater failing to contact Munnan, his family registered a missing report with police on Saturday.

As per another report, Mannan had left AMU a few days ago and was supposed to reach his home in Kupwara on January 3.

Wani had enrolled in AMU after successfully completing Bachelors in Geology and Earth Sciences from the University of Kashmir. He had also completed his Master's and MPhil in Geology from AMU.

The official website of the university says that the 26-year-old Wani was pursuing a PhD on 'Structural and Geo-Morphological Study of Lolab Valley, Kashmir'. He had also won an award for the best paper presentation at an International Conference in 2016.

Wani's father is a lecturer while his brother Mubashir is an engineer.
ALIGARH: The Uttar Pradesh Police on Monday conducted raids at the Aligarh Muslim University here in search of PhD student Mannan Wani, who went missing a few days back.

Mannan, who hails from Jammu and Kashmir, recently appeared in a photograph posted on social media holding an AK-47 rifle, with a message claiming that he has joined militancy.

"Mannan Wani, son of Bashir Ahmad Wani, joined Hizbul Mujahideen on January 5," read the message that appeared on WhatsApp and Facebook along with his photograph.

However, the Kupwara police expressed caution to the viral photo and said there is no confirmation yet on whether Mannan has joined militancy or not. IG of Kashmir suspected that Mannan's photograph may have been photoshopped by some miscreants and that they are trying to locate him. He was last seen in Delhi.

Aligarh SSP Rajesh Pandey too asserted that while there are reports of Mannan joining Hizbul Mujahideen, there has been no confirmation on the same.

Soon after the photograph went viral on the social media, the AMU administration suspended the PhD scholar from the college, said a news agency ANI report.

Mannan Wani, a research scholar at AMU, suspended from college after a video of him with weapon went viral on social media, #Aligarh SSP Rajesh Pandey says 'there are reports of him joining Hizbul Mujahideen, can't reveal anything before verification' pic.twitter.com/LjEK636DBz January 8, 2018

Mannan's brother, Mubashir Ahmad, reportedly said that he and his family have no idea whether he has joined militancy or not. As per Mubashir, they lost contact with Munnan on January 4 after his phone appeared to be switched off.

Ater failing to contact Munnan, his family registered a missing report with police on Saturday.

As per another report, Mannan had left AMU a few days ago and was supposed to reach his home in Kupwara on January 3.

Mannan had enrolled in AMU after successfully completing Bachelors in Geology and Earth Sciences from the University of Kashmir. He had also completed his Master's and MPhil in Geology from AMU.

The official website of the university says that the 26-year-old Mannan was pursuing a PhD on 'Structural and Geo-Morphological Study of Lolab Valley, Kashmir'. He had also won an award for the best paper presentation at an International Conference in 2016.

Wani's father is a lecturer while his brother Mubashir is an engineer.
DAMASCUS: At least 18 people were killed on Sunday by a blast that targeted a rebels` position in Idlib, Syria, a monitor group said.

Civilians were among those killed and wounded by the car bomb that targeted a position of Agnad al-Caucaus rebel group, Xinhua reported.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast was heavy, stopping short of giving details on the number of civilians among the killed militants.

The Syrian army has been on a wide-scale offensive in the southern countryside of Idlib, capturing tens of towns and villages over the past two months.

The recent military victory was achieved on Sunday when the Syrian army captured the strategic town of Sinjar, which enables the government forces to advance toward capturing the key airbase of Abu al-Duhur.

Idlib has emerged as the main destination of the rebel groups, which have evacuated several positions across Syria after surrendering to the Syrian army.

The area has become a home to several rebel groups from different affiliations, some of which are supported by Turkey, while others, such as the Nusra Front, are designated as terrorist groups.
Acapulco: Violent clashes involving gunmen, a community police force and state police killed 11 people in the troubled southern state of Guerrero, while a separate series of shootouts the previous night left seven dead in the northern Mexico beach resort of San Jose del Cabo.

Guerrero state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said eight people were initially killed when gunmen ambushed community police before dawn in the town of La Concepcion, near the resort city of Acapulco. Two of the dead were from the community force.

Later in the morning, state police arrived to disarm the local agents, and another shootout erupted in which three people were killed. Alvarez said he did not know how they died, but local media said they were community police.

State Attorney General Xavier Olea Pelaez said 30 members of the community police were detained on suspicion of crimes including homicide and illegal weapons and drug possession.

Among those arrested was Marco Antonio Suastegui, the founder of the community force and the leader of a social movement that for over a decade has fought against a hydroelectric project in the region.

Photojournalist Bernandino Hernandez said that while covering the violence he was beaten, kicked and dragged by state police and forcibly relieved of his camera's memory cards. He also witnessed several other journalists being treated roughly.

Hernandez said he had photographed police using force against locals who tried to prevent the arrest of the community agents: "Some people were dragged by the hair to take them away."

Hernandez is a regular contributor of photographs to The Associated Press but was not on assignment for AP at the time.

Guerrero has been one of Mexico's most violent states in recent years, home to marijuana and opium poppy fields as well as warring organized crime gangs.

It's also where 43 teachers college students disappeared in 2014 after being taken by police from the city of Iguala who allegedly handed them over to a drug cartel. They remain missing.

In the northern state of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said in a statement that marines responding Saturday night to reports of gunfire in San Jose del Cabo came upon heavily armed men wearing tactical vests and riding in two vehicles with license plates from the U.S. State of California.
KANO: At least a dozen people were killed over the weekend in apparent tit-for-tat clashes between farmers and cattle herders in central Nigeria, police and community sources said on Monday.

The violence between Christian Bachama farmers and Muslim Fulani herders happened in the Lau district of Taraba state on Friday and Saturday.

Police spokesman David Misal said 12 people were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked Fulani settlements on Friday. A reprisal attack followed on Saturday, he added.

"We recorded four deaths in the Fulani settlements and eight in the Bachama village," he told AFP.

Residents of the affected villages put the death toll at 40. It was not possible to verify either figure independently.

The attacks are the latest in a bloody, long-running dispute over land, exacerbated by religious and ethnic tensions that have killed thousands in recent decades.

The International Crisis Group warned last September the conflict was becoming "as potentially dangerous as the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast".

Herdsman Abdullahi Hamma said suspected Bachama tribesmen launched a dawn attack on his village of Donadda and two others, Babagasa and Katibu.

"We buried 15 bodies of people killed in the attacks on our communities," he added.

On Saturday, Fulani herders stormed Bachama-populated Robi village on motorcycles and opened fire on residents.

"We lost 25 people to an unprovoked attack by Fulani gunmen on our village," said Robi youth leader Felix Uban-Doma.

"Several people were injured."Police spokesman Misal said the killings were a "spill over" of similar violence last month in neighbouring Adamawa state. Lau district lies near the state border.

Then, at least 30 Fulani herders were killed by Bachama militia in an attack on four Fulani villages in the Numan district of the state.

The killings led to reprisal attacks by Fulani herders on nearby Bachama villages where several people were killed, leading to an exodus of residents from the area.

"It was those aggrieved by the attack on their kinsmen in Numan that attacked the Fulani communities in Lau, which shares border with Adamawa, and led to the reprisals," Misal said.

Police were deployed in the affected area to contain the violence, said Misal, adding the police arrested three suspects in connection with the violence.

Dozens more people are believed to have been killed in a week of violence between Fulani herders and ethnic Tiv farmers in the Guma and Logo areas of central Benue state.

Benue police spokesman Moses Joel Yamu said it was not yet established how many had died.

"Our primary responsibility is to ensure that lives are protected," he told AFP, adding that reinforcements had been sent to the affected areas.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of the Benue state capital, Makurdi, over attacks on farming communities.

The mainly Muslim nomadic cattle rearers have been clashing with largely Christian farmers over grazing rights in Nigeria for decades.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari -- a Hausa-speaking Fulani from northern Nigeria -- has condemned the deadly clashes as "wicked and callous".

But he has been criticised for not doing more to prevent the attacks.
Beijing: China on Monday said it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking it with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of cracking down on terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's support for its all-weather ally came as the US stepped up its efforts to pressure Pakistan to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

The US last week suspended approximately USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we don't agree to place the responsibility of anti terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House official's remarks that China could play helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump increased rhetoric against Islamabad providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Year's Day tweet accused the country of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trump's efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a military base at Jiwani located close to Iran's Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan. Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China.

While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts.

"First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.
By PTI: Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) Around 1,300 women from India will go on Haj without a "Mehram" and will be exempted from the lottery system this year for the annual pilgrimage, Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi reiterated today.

Till now, women Haj pilgrims were required to be accompanied by their husbands or a "Mehram" during the annual pilgrimage.

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"Saudi Arabia has relaxed the norms and allowed a group of at least four women to go on Haj without a male companion," Naqvi said during an interaction with PTI journalists here.

The term "Mehram" refers to a male, whom a woman cannot marry (i.e. father, brother, son etc.).

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Mann Ki Baat radio programme, had said that the women who have applied to go on Haj without a Mehram would be exempted from the lottery system and allowed to go on the annual pilgrimage," the minority affairs minister said.

The Centre had decided to allow the women pilgrims over the age of 45 years to undertake the pilgrimage in groups of at least four, sans a "Mehram", he added.

Meanwhile, referring to the impasse in the Rajya Sabha between the ruling party and Opposition, due to which the "triple talaq" bill could not be passed during the just- concluded Winter session of Parliament, Naqvi said it was not a setback for the government.

"We have made the practice of triple talaq illegal and unconstitutional. Hence, there is a provision of imprisonment (for the offenders)," the minister said.

Pointing to the response of the Muslim community to the triple talaq decision, Naqvi said there was "not a single protest", unlike the protests on the Shah Bano issue during late Rajiv Gandhis tenure as prime minister.

"The Congress missed an opportunity to make a statement about our bill in the Lok Sabha. It did not even suggest an amendment. Now, it is stalling the bill in the Rajya Sabha," he added.

Asked if the Muslims were going away from the BJP, Naqvi said, "For the first time, the BJP got around 17 per cent votes from the Muslim community in Gujarat. We realised this when we analysed the results booth-wise."

This is the first time the saffron party had received so many votes from the Muslim community, the minister said, adding, "The figure used to be around 8-9 per cent."

In last months Gujarat polls, with 99 MLAs, the BJP secured a simple majority in the 182-member Assembly, 16 less than its 2012 tally of 115.

The opposition Congress, which had won 61 seats in 2012, managed to increase its tally to 77. PTI ND NRB VT RC

--- ENDS ---
Dubai: An Indian man in the UAE has hit a jackpot by winning a whopping dirham 12 million (USD 3.2 million) in the biggest-ever raffle prize money in Abu Dhabi.

Harikrishnan V Nair, 42, who works as a business development manager for a firm in Dubai and has been living in the UAE with his family since 2002, won the huge amount yesterday in 'Big Ticket' raffle draw.

"I still cannot believe it. Is it me? Is it really me?" an excited Nair, who is from Kerala, told Khaleej Times.

He said he had bought the tickets twice before, but had never won.

Nair said he had always wanted to travel the world with his family and the time for it has come.

"I think 2018 is the year for that. I will plan a world tour soon," said Nair, father of a seven-year old son.

"I would like to plan for my son's education and buy another house in India. I want to take good care of my mother and my wife's mother too, who are in India," he said.

Charity is also on top of Nair's agenda.

"I have always wanted to help people in need, and by God's grace I can do it now. That is something I will really do," he said.

His wife, a logistics support staff, said she could not believe the news.

"I was dump-founded when I got the call from my husband. First I thought he was playing the same prank I had planned on him," she said.

"Now that he has won the jackpot, I will let him figure out what he wants to do with it. He is after all a business development manager and would know better how to manage his funds," she said.

Eight Indians were among 10 people who had won dhirham 1 million (USD 2.7 lakh) each in a mega raffle draw in Abu Dhabi in October last year.

In August, an Indian man had won dhirham 5 million (USD 1.3 million) in the draw in the UAE.


Infuriated by the manner in which Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife were treated when they met him in Islamabad last month, a group of NRIs and Baloch activists staged a protest outside Pakistani embassy in Washington on Sunday.

Carrying placards which read '#ChappalchorPakistan' and displaying footwear in protest against Jadhav's wife being made to remove her footwear before she met him, the protestors questioned Pakistan for violating basic norms of humanity. "Pakistan's narrow-mindedness was exposed with how they treated Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife, what policymakers and people here need to understand is that Pak as a whole is also being run with the same narrow-minded mentality," said one of the protestors.

When they stole the chappal of a woman (#KulbhushanJadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they use these also. I want to say one thing- Pakistan ka matlab kya? Amreeka (America) se dollar la, Hindustan ke joote kha!: Protester at #ChappalChorPakistan protest in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/nky7TrsRoD  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

War or words ensued between India and Pakistan on the conditions under which Jadhav - a former Indian Naval officer unlawfully arrested by Pakistan on charges of spying - met his mother and wife. The women were made to take off their sindoor, mangalsutra, bangles while Pakistan even said a recording device was found in the footwear of one of the women. India has not just strongly refuted the charges but also slammed Pakistan for violating mutually-agreed conditions under which the women would meet Jadhav.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in a speech in Parliament, termed Pakistan's conduct as 'absurdity beyond measure.'

"A mother met her son, wife met her husband after 22 months but it was used as a propaganda weapon by Pakistan," she said. "We had asked that Pakistani media not be allowed near the family but they were permitted to come in close proximity from where they humiliated them, accused them."

"Jadhav's wife was forced to take off her shoes, they said it had a camera. Then they said it had a recorder. What I want to know is that she took two flights - one Air India and then Emirates - and even if we assume that Air India allowed her safe passage, was recorder, chip not noticed during checking at Dubai Airport?" she asked.



While Swaraj's verbal attack sought to blunt Pakistan's charges, there have been numerous protests elsewhere in India and even abroad. Many have expressed their dismay at the treatment meted out to Jadhav's family even as Pakistan continues to refuse India's repeated requests of consular access.
A Pakistani Urdu newspaper Khabrain has sparked a row with its new year calendar. The calendar has become a talking point as it carries a photograph of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief and 2008 Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

A photograph of the calendar featuring Saeed was shared by Pakistan-based journalist Omar R Quraishi on Twitter.

Pakistani Urdu newspaper 'Khabrain' issues its annual 2018 calendar with JUD chief Hafiz Saeed on it pic.twitter.com/6LiyHnOxA8  omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) January 8, 2018

This came even as Pakistan blacklisted Saeeds JuD after US blocked $255 million military aid to the country.

However, Hafiz Saeed has already opened the first political office of Milli Muslim League (MML) in Lahore, snubbing warnings from the Pakistan government. The MML is a party formed by Saeed to contest the 2018 general elections in Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistans financial regulatory body  Security and Exchange Commission of Pakistan  banned Saeeds group from collecting any donation.

In January 2017, the Pakistan government had launched a crackdown against JuD, placing Saeed under house arrest.

However, Saeed was released in November after the Lahore High Court refused to extend the period of his confinement.
Pakistan has reportedly warned the United States against mounting a strong offensive against Taliban in Afghanistan, stating that anything that less than complete success would lead to the terrorist outfit making strongholds in the mountainous regions along the border with Pakistan.

Quoting diplomatic sources in the country, Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that the Islamabad fears failure to strike a deadly blow to Taliban would lead to a complete crumbling of any chances of talks. Urging that the first line of action should be talks rather than attack, authorities here have learned to have told their counterparts in Washington to strongly re-think a proposed plan of two-pronged military offensive.

The US in recent months has accused Pakistan of not acting against home-grown terror outfits. The two countries previously have been allies in the war on terror in the region but the Donald Trump administration has charged Pakistan for its 'lies and deceit.'

Relations between the two nations have soured with the Americans warning that if Pakistan does not act, the US will do so unilaterally - prompting Pakistani officials to issue terse statements.

Pakistan is also jittery about the US asking India to play a more active role in Afghanistan although New Delhi has made it clear its work here would not involve its armed forces. Nonetheless, Pakistan sees no merit in any Indian role in Afghanistan at all. "We don't foresee any political or military role for India in Afghanistan," Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had said recently. "I think it will just complicate the situation and it will not resolve anything. So if they want to do economic assistance, that's their prerogative, but we don't accept or see any role politically or militarily for India in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, it is Pakistan that continues to play the victim card and has repeatedly said the fight against terrorism has taken a toll on its people and forces.
Richard Pugh discusses changes in the court system and the use of bail under the recently passed state constitutional amendment.

Public Defenders have the very difficult job of representing people accused of crimes who cannot afford independent counsel. On Monday, January 8, Richard Pugh the District Defender for the Second Judicial District in Bernalillo County will speak to Albuquerque Press Women and Friends at 11:30 a.m. at the Golden Corral (5207 San Mateo NE).

For the last four years Pugh has been the District Defender in Bernalillo County. He will discuss current changes in the court system and the use of bail under the recently passed state constitutional amendment.

Previously Pugh worked in the Roswell office, Albuquerque felony division, and as a public defender contractor. Pugh has tried more than 60 felony cases throughout several judicial districts and is on the Board of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Attorneys and the National Association of Public Defenders Workload Committee.

Everyone is welcome and individuals are responsible for their own meals. No reservations are needed. Non-members will be charged an additional $5.
SkyBridge Arizona, which will be the nations first international air cargo hub to house both Mexican and United States customs, will operate out of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.



Arizona is becoming home of the nations first international air cargo hub to house both U.S. and Mexico customs, according to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

Dubbed SkyBridge Arizona, the hub will operate out of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport and will enable trade in Mexico and throughout Latin America more efficiently without having to go through the international customs center in Mexico City, the governor said.

The customs portion of the project  Unified Cargo Processing (UCP) Program  will be jointly operated by both U.S. and Mexico customs officers. The UCP program began as a pilot program last year in Nogales, Ariz. and has been approved for airfreight to SkyBridge Arizona.

A similar program in partnership with Mexicos Servicio de Administracion Tributaria (SAT) began conducting joint cargo inspections at Customs Otay Mesa Cargo Facility in October.

Under the UCP pilot program, Customs and SAT will eliminate separate inspections at the Otay Mesa Cargo Facility, located south of San Diego on the U.S.-Mexico border, thereby reducing wait times, the governor said.

All required documents, inspections, tracking and other services will occur on-site at the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. The Customs Processing status will follow cargo electronically to its final destination to any city in Mexico, and eventually further into Central and South America. Furthermore, the UCP Program will be operational at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in the coming months.

The SkyBridge Arizona project is expected to create 17,000 direct and indirect jobs and increase cargo flights out of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport by 2,000 a year, eventually reaching 10,000 by 2036. The project involves $230 million in investments for 360 acres of commercial development, 2 million square feet of warehouse space, 900,000 square feet of light industrial and flex space, 800,000 square feet of air cargo operations, and a 15-year build out plan for infrastructure improvements around the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, including water, sewer and power expansions as well as water retention basins.

The arrival of SkyBridge Arizona once again proves that our state is a national leader in advancing innovative new ideas, Governor Ducey said. Arizona has forged an incredible relationship with our friends and neighbors in Mexico, and were very proud of this latest collaboration to enhance international trade and create more jobs for Arizonans.

SkyBridge Arizona was initiated due to the airfreight growth rate of 30 percent per year in Arizona, or 180 percent from 2011 to 2015. Airfreight trade between Arizona and Mexico currently totals $390 million per year and is expected to surge to $650 million by 2025.

The state also outpaces all of its Southwest neighbors of California, New Mexico, Nevada and Texas, whose air freight traffic grew by just 10 percent during the same period, the governor said.

SkyBridge will truly change the way we conduct cross-border business, slashing delivery times for companies and ensuring safe transit, SkyBridge CEO Ariel Picker said. This is true international cooperation and something we can all be proud of.


YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. Simple yet sophisticated, affordable fast food and a gourmet special at the same time, local favorite and international trademark  there are many ways to describe the famous beef noodles of Lanzhou, but as they say: Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. Well in this case it should be to taste instead of to see.

This city, home to roughly 3,5 million people, is located in the very center of mainland China, and has historically served as a major link on the Silk Road. The city is located on the banks of the Yellow River  the third longest river in Asia, the basin of which was the birthplace of the ancient Chinese civilization.

And presently, as Chinas President Xi Jinping signaled the One Belt One Road initiative, Lanzhou  being a key transportation hub, enhances and develops infrastructure to boost international cargo shipments via its modern railway systems. The Dongchuan Logistics Center, located in the International Land Port of the city, serves as a major international trade distribution center, and according to estimates the annual handling capacity of the railway will reach 30 million tons as the system is being rapidly enhanced.

Lanzhou, the capital and largest city of Chinas Gansu province, takes pride in what its best known for  the Beef Noodles.

Lanzhou Beef Noodles were first introduced in the end of the Qing Dynasty, and ever since have become the most popular dish. This dish, which is the trademark of Lanzhou, requires culinary craftsmanship at its best, as all types of the noodles , be it thick or needle thin, are hand-pulled.

This dish is one of the top consumed foods in the city, and locals enjoy a bowl of beef noodles both as a breakfast and lunch. Over the years it has grown into a unique cultural significance, and the name of the city is instantly associated with the beef noodle soup. This popularity has quickly taken hold of not only throughout China, but also all over the world, with the beef noodle industry playing a major role for the citys tourism.

With over 1200 Beef Noodle restaurants, the business generates 9% of the citys industrial output and has a significant role for the local economy, according to Zhang Haiming - head of the Business Service Department of Lanzhou Commerce Bureau. Investors can easily find projects, the local government is supporting the industry.

One can easily notice the high demand this sphere has, as the city runs its very own specialized training facility for future chefs  the Gansu Xinglong Beef Noodle Vocational Training School. Executives of the facility say people willing to learn this craftsmanship are required to complete a three-year course in order to become certified beef noodle chefs. There are even people who come from abroad to study in this esteemed center.

The city also has its very own Lanzhou Beef Noodle Industry Association, with Zhao Xiaolong serving as Secretary General. The Association regulates and organizes this business.

Lanzhou restaurateurs are very eager to enhance and expand their operations globally, with many Beef Noodle restaurant franchises presently open in more than 40 countries. According to restaurant executives from the MaZi Lu Beef Noodle, these restaurants operating in foreign countries use beef, vegetables and noodles from Lanzhou to keep everything authentic.

Stepan Kocharian

Administration of Oriental Palace Beef Noodle restaurant show off the craftsmanship of their chefs with a handmade noodle thin enough to go through a needle hole

Evening in downtown Lanzhou

Future chefs at the specialized beef noodle training center

Lanzhou skyline and the famous Zhongshan Bridge

Local beef noodle restaurants are always stacked

Mother of the Yellow River Statue

Senior master chef Ma Wenbin, one of the most famous beef noodle chefs of China, displays the preparation process

The Oriental Palace Beef Noodle restaurant boasts the biggest table in town

The Yellow River as seen from Lanzhou Old Town
STEPANAKERT, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. On January 7, at 13:20, Defense Army soldier Vache N. Chilingaryan, born in 1998, was fatally wounded by the Azerbaijani shooting in one of the military units located in the north-eastern direction of the Artsakh Defense Army, the Artsakh defense ministry told Armenpress.

Investigation has been launched to clarify the details of the incident.

Artsakhs defense ministry shares the grief of the loss and extends condolences to the family, relatives and co-servicemen of the killed soldier.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. Official Stepanakert is labeling the Azerbaijani actions to be terrorist.

Artsakh Presidential spokesman Davit Babayan commented on the recent death of a soldier caused by Azerbaijani gunfire in an interview with ARMENPRESS.

We are dealing with a terrorist state in the person of Azerbaijan. We are dealing with a low adversary. The violation of ceasefire during New Year days, which doesnt whatsoever impact the military political balance, doesnt change the situation in Azerbaijans favor. This is simply low, terrorism, inhumane conduct. This is the abnormal adversary we are dealing with, he said.

Davit Babayan reminded that the official Stepanakert, had proposed 10 years ago to refrain from ceasefire violations especially during international, national, religious holidays as means of stability and peace.

Taking such a step during holidays is a low [thing to do], it doesnt fit into any reasoning. This is an irreversible loss for us, the memory of the fallen soldier will always stay bright in the hearts of all, Babayan said.

On January 7, an Artsakhi soldier was shot dead by Azerbaijan.
The FIR in the Aadhaar leak matter earlier this week is the second such case in less than a year against journalists for exposing vulnerability of biometric data security.

Case has been registered against journalist for exposing vulnerability of Aadhaar data security: Picture for representation. (Photo: PTI)

By Tanseem Haider: Acting on a complaint by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the Delhi police have filed a case against journalist Rachna Khaira for purchasing Aadhaar data. But, this is not the first time that the UIDAI has tried to shoot the messenger.

The UIDAI had filed another case against a journalist in March last year on the charges of attempting to access Aadhaar data without having been authorised. The journalist had got two Aadhaar IDs on same biometric information: one original and another fake.

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It was done to expose how some people were taking advantage of the loopholes in the system. The UIDAI responded by getting an FIR registered against the journalist instead of fixing the flaw.

The FIR still stands and the journalist continues to be questioned by the crime branch. Meanwhile, the UIDAI blocked his original Aadhaar card.

In the present case, the journalist tried to expose the loopholes and show that security breach in Aadhaar biometric system was possible. The UIDAI has treated this as an act of cheating, forgery, use of fraudulent means and an offence under the IT Act.

The complaint said that the journalist used a false identity to procure Aadhaar data and made payment through an online app. It further stated that the journalist and other accused are in possession of large data and thus case needed to be registered.

FIR lodged in Aadhaar leak story. FIR lodged in Aadhaar leak story.

The police today said that the FIR was lodged against unknown suspects and not against the journalist. Police also said that the FIR is "open ended".

Meanwhile, the Confederation of Newspaper and News Agency Employees' Organisations today demanded that the FIR should be withdrawn.

But, sources in Delhi police said that it would not be easy to cancel or quash the FIR. Delhi police can now cancel the FIR only after securing permission from the Delhi High Court, the source said.

ALSO WATCH | UIDAI condemned by Editors Guild for booking journalist over data breach story

--- ENDS ---
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Iran and three members of the European Union plan to hold a consultative meeting over the Iranian nuclear agreement, IRNA reports.

Minister Zarif said the meeting will focus on the US destructive policy regarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The meeting place and date are not released.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. The government of Tajikistan has tasked relevant ministries and agencies to take measures to establish direct air communication with Armenia, news.tj reports.

The governments of Armenia and Tajikistan signed an agreement on air communication on June 14, 2017.

By governments decree the Ministry of Transport together with other relevant ministries and agencies is ordered to take necessary measures to ensure the implementation of a government-to-government agreement between Tajikistan and Armenia on launching direct air communication.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan has been tasked to inform the Armenian side that Tajikistans respective internal procedures necessary for the agreements entry into force have been completed.

During the official visit of the President of Tajikistan to Armenia, the two Presidents agreed to consider the opportunity to launch direct flights.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said they are ready to provide privileges to Tajik partners within the frames of the open sky policy run by Armenia in the aviation field.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Movses Hakobyan presented details of the Azerbaijani shooting of a soldier in Artsakh.

During a press conference, Hakobyan said the soldier was shot dead by a sniper, and stressed that the soldier did not do any violations.

It is definitely a fact that the serviceman was shot by a sniper. The commander, who rushed to assist the serviceman, was also wounded. The vehicle of the tactical group which was dispatched to the scene also came under fire. One of the soldiers in the vehicle was also wounded, Hakobyan said.

Movses Hakobyan also said the two servicemen were slightly wounded. I would like to specially emphasize the heroism of the officer who didnt hesitate and went to save the life of his soldier, but was wounded. While our soldier didnt do any kind of violation, the adversary is simply looking for means to shoot our servicemen, he said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. The situation in Iran in general is calm at the moment, ethnic Armenian lawmaker of the Iranian Parliament Karen Khanlarian told ARMENPRESS.

The activeness of protests has calmed down, there are almost no rallies, protests, the situation is calm and under control. You know that these issues emerged in connection with the socio-economic problems. And this was also supplemented by the political vector which is a result of influence of foreign powers, he said.

According to the lawmaker, the complaint among the people has its reason, the country really faces a socio-economic problem. This also emerged by applying economic sanctions against Iran.

In the recent years there have always been protests in Iran. I have witnessed different groups in streets, squares near the parliament voicing their complaints over economic, social issues. This time the protests were supplemented by a little political character which was exclusive. Now everyone is concerned, tries to find solutions to the existing issues in order to prevent such incidents, Karen Khanlarian said.

As for the Armenian community, the lawmaker said everyone freely expresses his/her opinion. The economic issues concern all citizens of Iran, including Armenians. He added that as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Iran the small and medium businesses of many Iranian citizens, including Armenians were greatly affected.

The talks on nuclear deal inspired hope that the sanctions will be lifted, the economic situation will improve, but we see that the US not only doesnt want to eliminate the sanctions, but tries to increase them, the lawmaker added.

Anti-governmental protests launched in Iran on December 28. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 8, ARMENPRESS. 65% of the Armenian Army is comprised of contractual servicemen, and only 35% are conscripted soldiers, Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Movses Hakobyan told a press conference.

He reassured that the manning level in the army is on the highest level, both in on-duty units and reserve bases, which are called permanent readiness bases.

We have a decrease of conscription for 12 years consecutively. This is the last year that we have a decrease. And during these years we knew that this will happen, and thats why we simultaneously manned the army with contractual servicemen. This hasnt impacted the combat readiness of the army. We carry out the planning in a way that the decrease of conscription doesnt impact the readiness, he said.
LOS ANGELESProducers in the burgeoning virtual reality (VR) segment of the porn industry create more than half of all VR content in the current market, and VR porn is projected the become a billion-dollar business within the next decade, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times last week. But VR porn creators say they are running into a major obstacle: the giant corporations that manufacture the headsets required to watch VR video, the Times reported.

Makers of VR viewing devices include some of the worlds largest technology companies, such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, HTC and Facebook through its Oculus VR division. But the big tech firms have blocked access to apps created by VR porn companiesapps that make downloading and viewing adult content in virtual reality easy and convenient.

Fans can still watch VR porn on the headsets, but that often requires awkward and complicated workarounds. Even so, according to experts cited by the Times, VR porn has already become a major driver of VR hardware purchases, despite the official resistance from the big tech firms.

The official line is that they dont talk about it, VRPorn.com boss Daniel Peterson told the paper. But everyone knows its a major factor driving VR.

It's this very strange situation where if you talk privately to people who work at major VR companies and you say, Hey, what do you think about VR porn? And they say, Oh, I love VR porn! said Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey who, according the Times, no longer works for the company. But then they go to a public panel at a game development conference, and they'll get asked, What do you think about VR porn? They say, What is VR porn? I don't know anything about that.

Porn creators have long been early adopters of new technology, as they seek new methods to deliver adult content to an audience constantly in search of new experiences. The first known erotic film, the 1896 French short Le Coucher de la Mariee (aka Bedtime for the Bride), appeared about a year after the invention of the motion picture.

About six decades later, the still-underground porn film business helped drive the explosion in Super-8 film and cameras which, in the era before home video, first made movies relatively cheap and simple for anyone to create and view. Fast-forward to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and porn creators then adopted the VHS videotape format as the most cost-effective and convenient medium to put adult video content into the hands of eager consumers.

Around the same time, erotic programming led to a sharp rise in cable TV subscriptions. And of course, porn has pushed the progress of internet technology, starting in the early 1990s when Penthouse gave readers what were then lightning-fast 2400-baud modems for free, to let fans view the online Penthouse content without prohibitively long download speeds.

Porn has also driven innovation in video streaming, online payment systems and other groundbreaking internet technologies.

With porn now on the cutting edge of VR tech, VR porn producers, whose industry took in $93 million last year and could top $1 billion by 2025, according to The Times, say they want to help hardware makers innovate their technology as well.

For example, Naughty America exec Ian Paul says that his company has offered to invest in age verification technology that would allow big tech firms to grant access to VR porn apps while shielding the adult content from minors.

I don't want to paint the picture that it's us versus the manufacturers, because it's not, Paul said.

Naughty America is one of the few adult companies exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show, currently taking place in Las Vegas.
Leading figures from businesses including Greggs, SSP, Caffe Nero and Itsu will be speaking at the 2018 MCA Food-to-go Conference.

This years event, taking place at the Ham Yard Hotel, London, on 7 February, will analyse changing consumer behaviour and its implications for industry stakeholders.

Operators will talk about their growth plans, as well as the operational, marketing and supply challenges and opportunities set to define the future of the sector.

The conference is described by organiser MCA  which is owned by British Baker publisher William Reed Business Media  as an unmissable event for fast-food outlets, cafes, supermarkets, convenience stores and their suppliers.

This years speakers include:

Julian Metcalfe, founder of Itsu, on why 2018 will be a big year for his Asian-inspired concept, including how it has become a 100m-turnover business and its plans for further growth and its launch in the US.

Gerry Ford, founder and group chief executive of Caffe Nero, on the continuing international growth of this business across eight countries.

Hannah Squirrell, customer director at Greggs, will take a look behind the success of Greggs Rewards loyalty app, and how it contributes to the company placing the customer at the heart of its business.

Simon Burdess, the first director of foodservice at Waitrose, on how the retailer is evolving its food and beverage offer and increasing its in-store foodservice options to meet consumer needs.

Jonathan Robinson, business development director at SSP, will discuss how the company selects its food and beverage partners, and the challenges and opportunities it faces working in high footfall locations.

For further information visit www.foodtogoconference.co.uk

For delegate enquiries or event sponsorship opportunities contact michael.blakesley@mca-insight.com, or phone 01293 610334.
Ingredients supplier Macphie has named Mark Duncan, currently head of operations at the companys Glenbervie site, as its new technical director.

Duncan joined the business in 1995 as Glenbervie quality assurance manager. He moved on to be head of quality and regulatory affairs at the Glenbervie and Tannochside sites, before becoming operations head at Glenbervie.

In his new role as technical director, he will take the lead on research & development, quality and safety, health and environmental matters.

A graduate of Nottingham Trent University, Duncan worked for Daylay Foods, Kellogg Company in Australia and Scotch Premier Meats before joining the ingredients supplier.

Macphie managing director Andy Underwood said the company had been reviewing the opportunities and challenges the business has faced recently and would face in the future as it looked to continue its growth.

As a result of this review, we have decided to strengthen the board with the appointment of a technical director. Mark has a wealth of technical and operational knowledge across the business, as well as a broader appreciation of our entire supply chain, which will be invaluable as we move forward.

Macphie  which was named Bakery Manufacturer of the Year at the 2017 Baking Industry Awards in September  recently announced a 13.2% increase in turnover to 53.9m. Sales increased across most UK channels, with out-of-home the key growth area, the company stated, adding that the Middle East offered further growth opportunities.
The Democrat leadership has made constant, profound and incredible pronouncements that one's supportive vote for Republicans is tantamount to surrendering Democracy forever. Understanding their sincere thinking in their extreme position: How will you still vote on this election day?

Democrat; because the continuance of this Democracy from the existential threat of extreme Republicans is paramount.

Republican; the process of having a choice is the democratic method within what so called "Democracy" does exists.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) Adani Group has been named in the top 15 global utility solar power developers that includes likes of First Solar, Total, SunEdison and Engie.

Adani, ranked 12th, is the only Indian company on the list put out by Greentech Media, a Wood Mackenzie business.

"We have only included companies that are active in developing projects in more than one country," it said in a report. "There are a number of developers active in single markets (predominantly China, India and the US) that have developed more capacity than some of the companies covered in this report."

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Top of the list is First Solar with an operational capacity of 4,619 MW and in-development capacity of 4,802 MW. Adani has 788 MW of operational capacity and another 1,270 MW under development.

"Adani is moving into the Australia solar market with the development of the 140 MW Whyalla and 170 MW Rugby Run plants," GTM Research said.

It "could potentially look to acquisitions to grow outside of India ? the company had been rumoured to be interested in the acquisition of Equis Energy," the report said.

Adani Renewables is targeting 10 GW of installed renewable power by 2022. The company currently has 12 MW of operational wind assets, as well as 788 MW of solar PV.

"The top 15 companies have an additional 33.5 GW of announced projects in the pipeline," it said.

First Solar, Canadian Solar and Total have the largest project pipelines. SunEdison has the fifth-largest portfolio, though the company is in the process of divesting much of its portfolio to other developers after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2016.

The report said the top 15 developers are globally diversified and 13 companies are active in developing projects in at least three regions around the world.

"Most of the largest developers are actively looking to develop projects outside of the well-established markets such as Europe and Japan that have provided much of the early growth in their portfolios. Very large-scale projects are now more achievable in emerging markets, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America," it said.

Also, several companies are moving toward a "build, sell and operate" model rather than keeping projects on their own books.

"This points toward an increasingly active secondary market for large-scale solar PV (photovoltaic) assets and an easy entry to the solar market for companies with money to spend," the report said.

Each of the top 15 global developers is actively participating in tenders for large-scale capacity around the world. PTI ANZ BAL

--- ENDS ---
Todays announcement notes that all of Smithfields company-owned farms now house pregnant sows in groups, rather than letting them linger for essentially their entire lives in gestation crates. Photo by iStockphoto

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Today, the worlds largest pig producer, Smithfield Foods, announced more progress in its movement away from confining mother pigs in tiny gestation crates, further acknowledging that animals built to move ought to be allowed to move.

As a matter of historical import, our quest to rid the industry of these inhumane contraptions got an enormous lift in 2007 when Smithfield Foods originally made its anti-gestation-crate pledge. The crates or cages are barely larger than the sows bodies and prevent them even from turning around. With the company having invested significant capital in these confinement systems, it would be no small feat to fulfill the promise. Since the 1960s, all the other big producers in the pork industry have relied on the same production techniques, and Smithfield was the first big player to make a commitment to stop the use of these crates.

The commitment came just months after The HSUS prevailed in a hotly contested ballot measure in Arizona to ban gestation crates and helped set the stage for legislative and corporate policy advances in subsequent years. Five years after the Smithfield commitment, we worked with many of the biggest names in American food retail to pledge to eliminate their procurement of pork from factory farms that use gestation crates in their supply chain. McDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Safeway, and Krogerall companies that pay real heed to price points  made those commitments. Dozens of other companies followed in their wake, with many of them committing to the 100 percent gestation-crate-free mark by 2022.

Smithfields competitors in the production sphere  including two of the biggest names, Tyson Foods and Seaboard  have not announced any concrete plans to even reduce their use of gestation crates, whereas Smithfields substantial reduction is measurable.

Todays announcement notes that all of Smithfields company-owned farms now house pregnant sows in groups, rather than letting them linger for essentially their entire lives in gestation crates. There is still a long way to go for its contractors, but theres been some movement there, too.

While we laud the companys progress, we also dont want to overstate it. As an image pulled from a December 2016 Smithfield Foods corporate presentation illustrates, the company still uses gestation crates at its facilities. Heres how it works: Smithfield inseminates each breeding pig and confines her in a gestation crate for the first five to six weeks of her gestation period. During that time, shes unable to turn around or engage in other important behaviors. Then, shes moved into a more open group housing system, where she lives for about 10 weeks. After another month in a different crate (called a farrowing crate), shes re-impregnated and the process starts again for her. So if a breeding pig goes through seven of these cycles of gestation, birth, and farrowing over the course of her lifetime, it would mean that all told, even under Smithfields new system, each sow will experience a total of 42 weeks confined in gestation crates (meaning that she would be out of the crates for roughly 70 weeks).

This is far from perfect, but it represents a dramatic reduction in Smithfields use of gestation crates. Again, its progress we applaud. Its our intention to hold its officials to the original company pledge. Thats especially important considering that major companies like McDonalds have made it clear their own commitments are to end or eliminate gestation crates (not reduce their usage) from their supply chains.

Its time for Smithfields competitors to stop lagging, too, especially as so many major customers in food retail have pledged no-gestation-crate policies. Whats more, California voters are considering an HSUS-backed ballot measure this year to ban the sale of pork in all of California if it comes from factory farms using gestation crates  locking off a market of 38 million consumers to companies that keep relying on crates.

We look forward to working with Smithfield in the months and years to come as it goes down a path the company rightfully calls continuous improvement. Smithfield has made major strides strides that weve publicly supported all along its journey. As we enter a new year, Im pleased to report this progress, and look forward to more. Its time now for the entire nation  all producers, all food retailers, and all consumers  to get fully on board too.

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Good news everyone: Scott DesJarlais, a strident anti-choice congressman and beloved Tea Party hero from Tennessee, says God has forgiven for having sex with his patients when he was a doctor and then pressuring them to get abortions.

From The Daily Mail:

A Republican congressman slept with patients when he was a doctor, had sex with his subordinates and despite a pro-life voting record, pressured women in his life to have abortions.

Scott DesJarlais, who represents Tennessee's 4th district, has so far largely escaped mounting scrutiny of legislators' conduct that has forced four to quit and two more to say they will not seek re-election.

But public records show that he had a lengthy record of dubious behavior before being elected as part of the Tea Party wave to represent the largely rural south-east Tennessee district, which stretches from just outside Chattanooga to close to the suburbs of Nashville.

DesJarlais, 53, doesn't dispute the facts. He even paid a fine levied by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners in 2013 for having sex with his patients.
Missouri, an overwhelmingly poor, GOP-dominated state, where a new "right-to-work" bill will face a referendum on the 2018 ballot, is at the heart of the battle over the nation's surging trade union movement.



Despite the stacked deck against unions in Missouri, the employees of a Auxvasse, Missouri Dollar General store were able to unionize, defeating the company's written commitment to being "union-free."





Dollar General is one of many businesses that "promotes" workers to manager in order to force them to work unpaid overtime. Margeorie Nation was one such manager, of a Dollar General in Glasgow, MO, and she asked other store managers what they knew about the unionization drive in Auxvasse. Shortly thereafter, she was fired, despite never having been reprimanded and having led her store to win an award from Dollar General head office for sales and customer satisfaction.





Dollar General advised its investors that the company's fortunes were looking good thanks to rising inequality in the US and the expansion of a poor underclass who can't afford regular retailers. Nation has retained counsel to sue the company for wrongful dismissal. But of course, if she'd been unionized, they'd have protected her  a fact that can't have escaped the notice of her erstwhile work colleagues.

Dollar General stands to benefit from rising inequality in America, as CEO Todd Vasos noted at a Goldman Sachs retailing conference in September. "As middle class continues to go away, unfortunately, to the lower end of the economic scale versus the higher end," he said, the economy will create more of the chain's "core customer." "I think there's going to be more and more opportunities for us to get in and build more stores," Vasos added.



In an early December earnings call, Vasos was asked about how the company's core customer would be impacted by minimum wage increases in some states. "We feel good about where the consumer is right now," he said. "But as I always say, we work under the premise that she is always tight because her expenses continue to rise on the other side of expense  excuse me, of her income rising."

A Missouri Dollar General Voted to Unionize  Then a Manager at Another Store Asked About It and Was Fired [Zaid Jilani/The Intercept]

(Image: Artaxerxes, CC-BY-SA)
It's a shame Logan Paul wasn't jailed for the many stupid petty crimes he committed while he was in Japan. He makes millions of dollars a year behaving this way in videos for 9-year-olds to watch. I feel sorry for him  you can sense his desperation as he joylessly performs these unpleasant stunts on unappreciative victims.

Here's a video of people in Japan who think Logan Paul is icky:

See also: Youtuber Logan Paul is really sorry for showing body in Japan's "suicide forest"


When a German neo-Nazi politician tweeted that German police were trying to "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men," her account was briefly suspended  but when the satirical magazine Titanic put up its own tweet mocking the Nazi, their account was suspended, too.



Now, both the Nazi and the people who were making fun of her have to prove that they weren't engaged in hate-speech.





Germany's hate-speech law was only three days old when Titanic lost its account. The law provides for up to 50m in fines for businesses that don't expeditiously remove hate speech, and 5m in personal fines directed at individual employees who fail to remove hate speech within 24 hours.

These fines are as high as they are on the theory that it has to cost a company less to comply with the law than to ignore it. 50m buys a lot of human staff to monitor your service, or a lot of programmers to write hate-speech detection bots. But with the stakes this high, it's a given that businesses will develop hair-triggers and kill anything that might bring them under enforcement action, guaranteeing that the Nazi tuna-net is going to catch a hell of a lot of antifa dolphins.





Prior to the law's passage, free speech advocates warned that this would happen, and Angela Merkel personally promised it wouldn't. It only took three days for the first case to come to light.

The magazine's writers are shocked at this turn of events. They likely didn't expect an American social media company to be making judgment calls on speech ahead of German censors. Prosecutors are "examining" the politician's comments for possible illegality, but no one seems too eager to explain why Twitter nuked a satirical account as well. The Titanic's publishers say Chancellor Merkel herself promised writers the law wouldn't have this effect. But here we are, observing this exact effect in motion  one completely expected by everyone asking their representatives for a better, more narrowly-crafted law.

It Took Only Three Days For Germany's New Hate Speech Law To Cause Collateral Damage [Tim Cushing/Techdirt]
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

A media scholar and political analyst Pedzisai Ruhanya has warned the first lady Auxillia Mnangagwa that her love of the media will end up in monumental scandals and tears.The warning come in the work of the ZBC news crew always trailing her around as she tours the nation visiting orphanages and hospitals."What is this about these First Ladies of Zimbabwe? Every day, hour and on main ZBC-TV news she is doing something with the public broadcaster in hot pursuit, including filming her buying tomatoes by the road side as news," Ruhanya said."Actually she appears on news more than the hub President. Sally Mugabe remains class among this disgraced lot. At this speed of light, she will be Prof Auxillia shortly!"
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Unconfirmed report say Zanu PF firebrand Magura Charumbira who led the group that booed Grace Mugabe during the ninth interface rally in Bulawayo on November 4 has died in a car accident this morning.Charumbira was also known for causing commotion at the Bulawayo Zanu PF offices during the squabbles between the Lacoste and G40 factions last year. He is also alleged to have also gone around the city forcing vendors to attend a party meeting at the offices and allegedly collecting money from them as a protection fee from the council security."The Zanu Pf family has been plunged into mourning following the death this morning in a road traffic accident of firebrand Youth member Cde Magura Charumbira," reads a post on social media."Cde Charumbira was a controversial character who clashed with the law and party rules on many a times. He is mostly remembered for booing the former First Lady Grace Ntombizodwa Mugabe during the 9th Presidential Youth Interface held at White City Stadium in Bulawayo."It is alleged that the crash occurred when he tried to overtake another vehicle some where in Norton outside Harare.More follows....
News / Press Release

by Morgan Tsvangirai

Monday, 08 January 2018

Fellow Zimbabweans, our schools are opening tomorrow and our industry or what is left of it is due to open starting end of this week. We begin this watershed year amid a lot of promise and mammoth national expectations for bright and positive prospects for this great country that we all love.Last November we all united, for a patriotic cause, to orchestrate a huge fall of an intractable political edifice that had for decades stood between the people and their collective hope.We all saw and reveled at the fall of a strong man who had ruled this country with an iron fist and bludgeoned the people for selfish political ends.In came a new administration on the back of a military-backed effort that still raises very valid and genuine questions about the constitutionality of allowing soldiers to dabble in civilian political affairs.However, despite the palpable and justifiable national relief at the fall of Mugabe, huge challenges remain for the new administration.Firstly, the new administration has to articulate a clear and comprehensive roadmap to legitimacy that includes implementation of the much-needed reforms to ensure free, fair and credible elections in a few months time. It is disheartening to note that we are already behind schedule and last week, I raised these concerns to President Mnangagwa when he made an impromptu but welcome gesture to check on me following my public disclosure that I had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon.This new administration has to earn its legitimacy through a proper election. It must seek the people's mandate. The new government has to break away from the past and genuinely chart a new trajectory to a dispensation of clean politics that truly puts the country and its people first. It has to respect diversity and to appreciate that despite our different political formations, we are all patriotic Zimbabweans who yearn for the best for our country.For me, that visit to my residence by the new President was significant not only in terms of the content of what we discussed but in the import of its overall relevance.The visit signaled what must be the bane of the new politics of our time that an opposition party, especially one represented in our national Parliament, does not in any way constitute an enemy of the State. The opposition is just as patriotic and aspires and wishes for the best for our people.Indeed, my engagement with President Mnangagwa must herald a new page in our politics----a page in which the opposition is considered a partner and not an enemy of the State. The visit can be built upon by truly well-meaning Zimbabweans to herald a new politics of engagement in our country.Political difference must be celebrated and the people must be allowed to express themselves. That is why I was shocked by the new regime's iron-fist response two weeks ago to Zimbabweans in Bulawayo who sought to alert the government of the deep-seated wounds that are still festering since the Gukurahundi atrocities of the 1980s.That response was wanton, unjustified and shows that the Mnangagwa administration still has a lot of work to do to earn our faith and trust.Fellow Zimbabweans, we begin the New Year mired in deep economic problems from which we need urgent extrication. The cash crisis, price increases, the liquidity crunch, the huge budget deficit and the lack of faith and trust in the sincerity of government and all its institutions remain a somewhat permanent cancer in our body politic.The onus is on the new administration to inspire hope and confidence in the nation.True, there appears to have been some effort in tackling corruption but one hopes that the fight against graft and avarice truly becomes wholesome and ceases to be part of a retributive agenda against the ousted faction in Zanu PF. One hopes that the crusade against sleaze and corruption becomes a genuine crusade being fought in the national interest and not to punish a few selected individuals.Fellow Zimbabweans, we are on the verge of what could be an exciting year especially as we reflect on the great potential we have as a country and as a people.At a personal level, I feel an air of satisfaction as I reflect on the great journey we have travelled together even as I seriously ponder about the future.You, the people have travelled with me a journey that had its own tribulations. Yet it was also a journey in which we worked hard and achieved so much together. I am in the process of writing a book that is set to be a collective national treasure on the great things we have achieved together over the years in our journey of service and sacrifice.It was a journey that began at the ZCTU Congress in Gweru in 1988 when, with a few hours before the elective congress; a delegation knocked on my hotel room in the middle of the night and persuaded me to run for the post of secretary-general of the country's national labour federation.I was to win that election and the first task that we achieved together was to extricate the ZCTU from the clutches of government by making it a genuinely autonomous labour body that represented the interests of the country's workers.We fought that battle together and achieved that true independence and autonomy of the ZCTU.When the government introduced a toxic IMF-foisted economic structural adjustment programme that was not in the interest of the workers, we fought together and the government began to take the voice of the workers seriously.In 1998, together, we turned the workers' voice into a sonorous national chorus that could shout for a national shut down to articulate the genuine concerns of the country's workers. Together, we galvanized the workers into a formidable force that could blow out the smoke from our productive industries to clamour for national attention.The government began to take us seriously.We achieved that together.In 1999, through the national working people's convention, together with the workers of this country, you clamoured for a workers-driven political party.The country could never be the same again.That working people's convention gave birth to the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999. Since then, the party has become a perennial people's voice in Parliament. It became a formidable political force that administered the country's major cities and towns and Zanu PF---- to this day----remain visitors and strangers in the country's cities, towns and other rural enclaves where the gospel of change has made a huge imprint.We have achieved that together.In 2008, we defeated Robert Mugabe and we showed--through an inclusive government---that it is possible for government to be an arena that can bring positive and palpable change in the lives of the people.We achieved that together.In that government we turned around the economy, stabilized prices and gave a battered nation the reason to hope again.We achieved that together.Above all else, we wrote and affirmed in a referendum a new Constitution for the country; a Constitution that determined the way we want our affairs managed and our country governed. At the heart of this supreme law is a comprehensive Bill of rights almost second to none in Southern Africa and beyond.The challenge for the new administration is to give life to that governance charter that we made ourselves.That new Constitution was no mean task and we achieved it together.Beyond what we have achieved together, we ought to leave a lasting legacy where the baton can be changed peacefully, in a tranquil and cordial atmosphere of unity and togetherness.At a personal level, I am using this New Year not only to reflect on the onerous journey that we have travelled together but also to peer with renewed hope into a bright future.I am looking at the imminent prospects of us as the older generation leaving the levers of leadership to allow the younger generation to take forward this huge task that we started together so many years ago with our full blessing and support.It was therefore not by accident but by design that when I disclosed to you my health status, I also took a bold step to appoint an additional two Vice Presidents to assist me. As I have said before, while politicians only think about the next election, true statesmen think about the next generation, for current leaders are only but caretakers for future generations. We do not have any entitlement to lead but we have a duty to serve.We must recognize the imperative that new hands, with the full blessing of the people, must take this struggle and this country forward with the destination remaining the same - a society that prides itself for not leaving anyone behind in their pursuit of freedom, prosperity and happiness. That is the only lasting legacy and precedence that we must leave to future generations.As we move towards the upcoming elections, we must not lose sight and misinterpret what happened in November 2017. The departure of Mugabe resulted in a change of guard at the helm of our state but #ChangeIsNotEnough . This country requires transformation of both our governance culture and the way we do business.Our war war cry therefore for the upcoming elections is simple "Munhu Wese Kubasa"  "Umuntu wonke emsebenzini" - "Everyone to Work". Whether you are an investor, a commercial farmer, an industrialist, a teacher, a banker a worker or a peasant farmer, lets all go back to work in order to prosper. We need to produce in order to grow our economy and create new jobs.For that to happen, we need both domestic and international investment capital which must be guaranteed a safe, predictable, secure and corruption free environment underpinned by the rule of law, constitutionalism, respect for property and human rights and freedoms. The starting point for this envisaged take off for our great nation is a return to legitimacy through a free, fair, credible internationally supervised and monitored election whose outcome is not contested.Anything short of this will spell doom for our great nation. I therefore call upon the interim leaders of our country not to miss this opportunity by dipping their heads in the sand and wish away our crisis by not implementing the necessary reforms required before elections------for history will judge you harshly.Lastly, I would like to urge those who have not registered to vote to take advantage of the extended registration exercise to register so that you can participate in shaping your new destiny.God bless Zimbabwe.Morgan TsvangiraiPresident MDC-T/MDC Alliance
IT Trends

3 Starters for Digital Leadership in Higher Ed

A higher education technology leader offers his take on three transformative themes that will dominate in colleges and universities for 2018.

United States higher education is struggling to move into the 21st century digital era, according to Dr. Samuel Conn, president and chief executive officer for nonprofit technology consortium NJEdge. Holding back the segment, he said, are legacy processes and "last-century" thinking, which can no longer meet the demands of students who are more digitally savvy than their instructors  not to mention the growing competition coming from global institutions that are attracting those same students.

What institutional leaders need, Conn noted, is "re-energizing." Only then will they have the spark and inspiration needed to undertake the change they wish to see in their organizations. Enterprise transformation is the major theme of this year's NJEdge Annual Conference, taking place Jan. 11-12 in Whippany, NJ. Although the organization and its event are situated in New Jersey, its products and services have stretched far beyond state borders, and even outside of higher ed.

NJEdge was founded in 2000 to deliver access through EdgeNet, a high-performance optical fiber network spanning the state's colleges and universities. Since then, the organization has added additional solutions: EdgeCloud (for co-location and platform-as-a-service), EdgeMarket (for consortium buying), EdgeSecure (for security coverage), EdgePro (for professional services), EdgeMedia (for digital asset management and cloud-based videoconferencing) and EdgeEvents (for professional development activities).

Along the way, new kinds of members have joined, including K-12 districts, local government agencies and healthcare providers. And that EdgeMedia media management system, Illumira, which Conn calls "a YouTube on steroids," has been adopted by schools outside of the state, including higher ed customers in Michigan, Maryland, New York, Virginia and Connecticut.

NJEdgeCon 2018 takes place Jan. 11-12. Learn more on the NJEdge website.

The annual conference reflects that diversity. Although there's a heavy emphasis on the subjects higher ed will care about, since that's the major type of member NJEdge has, the two-day event will also offer coverage of topics of interest for leaders seeking to remake their organizations to reflect current trends in digitalization.

In a recent interview, Conn offered his take on three themes colleges and universities can expect to pay more attention to in the coming year as starters for kicking their transformation efforts into high gear.

1) Big Data and Analytics

Predictive modeling using business intelligence applications should be a big deal to schools, said Conn. Forget about the buildings, faculty and other aspects that campuses have "historically prided themselves on," he asserted. "Institutions are really starting to understand that data is one of their primary assets, that the data is what's telling the story."

Conn

NJEdge isn't new to the data realm. The company is part of New Jersey's Big Data Alliance, an initiative formed by legislative action and run from Rutgers University, with a membership that includes academia, industry, nonprofits and government. NJEdge provides the transport mechanism for big data initiatives and, in particular, for research. "The composition of research environments is all about three things," Conn said: "Networks that can transport data at very high speeds, storage and high-performance computing." Those same components are being picked up to power other kinds of data analysis as well.
The suspected militant, and two of his accomplices, were staying at a guest house located near old Delhi's Jama Masjid. The plan to attack the Akshardham temple was revealed on interrogation.

By India Today Web Desk: The Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) revealed that terrorists were planning an attack on Delhi's iconic Akshardham temple this Republic Day.

A suspected militant, on Monday, revealed that they were planning to attack the Akshardham temple in Delhi and disrupt the Republic Day parade on January 26, 2018.

Bilal Ahmad Wani, the main suspect, was taken into custody by Uttar Pradesh ATS and was interrogated for hours. Wani admitted the terror-attack plan. ATS said, "Wani disclosed that he, along with two of his companions, were planning to attack the Akshardham temple and disrupt the January 26 parade."

advertisement

They moved to Al Rashid guest house, located near Jama Masjid in old Delhi, on January 2, 2018. Uttar Pradesh ATS and Delhi Police tried to nab Mudsir Ahmed Wah and Mohammed Ashraf, Bilal Ahmad Wani's friends but they vacated the guest house on January 6, 2018.

A high alert has been sent in search of the alleged absconding terrorists. Ahead of the Republic Day celebrations, security has also been beefed up in Delhi-NCR.

Bilal Ahmad Wani, 32, is a resident of Dialgam, Anantnag, South Kashmir. Wani was detained by Government Railway Police (GRP) for traveling without a ticket in Shatabdi Express and was handed over to ATS yesterday. A few Aadhaar cards and documents have been recovered from Wani's possession as well.

With inputs from ANI

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When it comes to Connecticut Shade cigars, many companies will try to make their blend stand out by saying this is a different type of Connecticut Shadethe Aerial Robusto not only fits the bill, it also delivers an excellent all-around smoking experience.

Wrapper: Ecuadorian Connecticut Shade

Binder: United States

Filler: Nicaraguan

Country of Origin: Nicaragua (La Zona)

Robusto: 5 x 50

Price: $9.25

Review: Cornelius & Anthony Aerial Robusto (10/10/17)

Appearances on Countdown (By Year/Brand): 1 (2017)

Coming in at #12 is the Cornelius & Anthony Aerial Robusto. The Aerial is a cigar that was officially launched at the 2017 IPCPR Trade Show and added the first Ecuadorian Connecticut Shade release into the Cornelius & Anthony portfolio.

Cornelius & Anthony is the premium cigar division of Virginia-based tobacco company, S & M Brands. S & M Brands is owned by Steven Bailey. The Bailey family has been growing tobacco for over 150 years. The Cornelius & Anthony name is derived from Cornelius Bailey, Steven Baileys great-great-grandfather and the first member of the Bailey family to farm tobacco. It is also derived from Steven Baileys middle name which is Anthony.

In addition to the Ecuadorian Connecticut Shade wrapper, the Aerial features a binder from the United States and an all-Nicaraguan filler. Details of the U.S. binder have not been disclosed. The Aerial is one of five of the companys lines that is currently produced out of the La Zona factory in Esteli, Nicaragua. The Robusto size that lands on this years Countdown measures 5 x 52.

Aerial gives Cornelius & Anthony its first-ever spot on a Cigar Coop Countdown  becoming the sixth company to have a first-time appearance on the Countdown. Aerial is the second cigar from La Zona to make the Countown. It is also the second Connecticut Shade cigar to make the list with both of those cigars coming out of La Zona.

The Cornelius & Anthony Aerial Robusto delivered notes of natural tobacco, citrus, earth, cedar, cream, and a touch of black pepper. Over the past few years, there has been a trend of making robustos bolder and pushing the envelope to medium or higher in terms of strength and body. The Aerial Robusto does this. This is a cigar that started out medium-bodied and progressed to medium to full by the last third. Simultaneously, this cigar delivered medium strength.

Overall, I found the Aerial to be a complex and unique cigar  both key qualities for landing on a Cigar Coop Countdown.





For details of the 2017 Cigar of the Year Countdown, see our 2017 criteria.

Photo Credit: Cigar Coop, except where noted
MONDAY, Jan. 8, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Women who pull the night shift regularly might be at greater risk for a number of cancers, new research suggests.

"Our study indicates that night-shift work serves as a risk factor for common cancers in women," said study author Xuelei Ma. He is an oncologist in the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy and Cancer Center at West China Medical Center of Sichuan University, China.

"These results might help establish and implement effective measures to protect female night-shifters. Long-term night-shift workers should have regular physical examinations and cancer screenings," Ma said in a news release from the American Association for Cancer Research.

For the new study, the researchers conducted a review of 61 studies involving almost 4 million people from North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, to look for an association between long-term night-shift work and the risk of 11 types of cancer.

The investigators found that working during the wee hours over the long term was associated with a 19 percent greater risk of cancer among women.

Looking at specific types of cancer, Ma and colleagues found the risk of skin cancer jumped 41 percent, the risk of breast cancer increased 32 percent and the odds of developing gastrointestinal cancer was 18 percent higher among women who were long-term night-shift workers. But the study did not prove that night-shift work caused the risk of these cancers to rise.

When the researchers took into account for location, they found that only the night-shift workers from North America and Europe had a greater risk for breast cancer.

"We were surprised to see the association between night-shift work and breast cancer risk only among women in North America and Europe," Ma said. "It is possible that women in these locations have higher sex hormone levels, which have been positively associated with hormone-related cancers such as breast cancer."

The researchers then focused on female nurses who work night shifts and the risk for six different forms of cancer. The findings showed these nurses had a 58 percent higher risk of breast cancer -- a greater increase than any other job included in the study.

In addition, the night-shift nurses had a 35 percent greater risk of gastrointestinal cancer and a 28 percent higher risk of lung cancer than the people who didn't work nights.

"Nurses that worked the night shift were of a medical background and may have been more likely to undergo screening examinations," Ma said. "Another possible explanation for the increased cancer risk in this population may relate to the job requirements of night-shift nursing, such as more intensive shifts."

The researchers also noted that the longer women worked night shifts, the greater their risk of breast cancer. The risk for the disease increased 3.3 percent for every five years of this type of work.

"By systematically integrating a multitude of previous data, we found that night-shift work was positively associated with several common cancers in women," Ma said. "The results of this research suggest the need for health protection programs for long-term female night-shift workers."

The study was published Jan. 8 in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about shift-work health risks.
MONDAY, Jan. 8, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- The United States has had the smallest decline in child death rates among wealthy nations over the past 50 years, despite spending more on health care per child than the other countries, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed child death rates from 1961 to 2010 in the United States and 19 other economically similar countries, including Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

All of the countries registered a reduction in the death rate among children. But the rate in the United States has been slowest to decline and has been higher than in the other 19 countries since the 1980s, the findings showed.

Over the 50-year study period, the slower reduction in the U.S. child death rate has resulted in more than 600,000 excess deaths, according to the study.

In all of the countries, about 90 percent of child deaths occurred among infants and older teens (aged 15 to 19). In the most recent decade studied (2001-2010), U.S. infants were 76 percent more likely to die and children aged 1 to 19 were 57 percent more likely to die than their counterparts in other wealthy nations.

Leading causes of infant death during the most recent decade were premature births and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Compared with babies in other countries in the study, U.S. children were three times more likely to die because of premature birth and more than twice as likely to die from SIDS, the study found.

In the United States, the two leading causes of death for teens aged 15 to 19 were motor vehicle crashes and gun violence. Compared with teens in the other wealthy nations, American teens were twice as likely to die from motor vehicle crashes and 82 times more likely to die from gun violence.

"Overall child mortality in wealthy countries, including the U.S., is improving, but the progress our country has made is considerably slower than progress elsewhere," said the study's lead author, Dr. Ashish Thakrar. He is an internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

"Now is not the time to defund the programs that support our children's health," Thakrar added in a news release from Johns Hopkins Medicine.

While the United States spends more per child on health care than other wealthy nations, it has poorer outcomes than many, Thakrar noted. It ranked 25th among 29 developed countries for overall child health and safety on a list put out by the United Nations Children's Fund.

Dr. Christopher Forrest, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the study's senior author, said, "The findings [of the new study] show that, in terms of protecting child health, we're very far behind where we could be."

Forrest added, "We hope that policymakers can use these findings to make strategic public health decisions for all U.S. children to ensure that we don't fall further behind peer nations."

The researchers concluded that U.S. politicians need to fully fund the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides health insurance to millions of disadvantaged children, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food stamps.

In addition, public health research and programs can help reduce the death toll from gun violence and car crashes among U.S. children, the study authors said.

The report was published in the Jan. 8 issue of Health Affairs.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on child health and safety.
MONDAY, Jan. 8, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Severely obese teens who undergo bariatric surgery to lose weight end up lowering their heart disease risk down the road, new research indicates.

For the study, researchers tracked 242 adolescents for three years after they had weight-loss surgery.

"This is the first large-scale analysis of predictors of change in cardiovascular disease risk factors among adolescents following bariatric surgery," said the study's lead author, Dr. Marc Michalsky. He is surgical director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

"The study demonstrated early improvement and reduction of cardio-metabolic risk factors, offering compelling support for bariatric surgery in adolescents," he explained in a news release from the hospital.

Before surgery, 33 percent of the teens had three or more factors that boost the risk for heart disease. Risk factors included high blood pressure, high blood-fat levels, problematic blood sugar levels and systemic inflammation.

However, three years after the surgery, that number had dropped to just 5 percent, the findings showed.

People who were younger at the time of their surgery tended to do better in terms of eliminating heart disease risk factors, "suggesting there may be advantages to undergoing bariatric surgery earlier, even among adolescents," Michalsky said.

Patients who had a lower body mass index (a measurement based on height and weight) before surgery also did better on reducing heart disease risk. And, girls did better than boys, the investigators found.

The study was published online Jan. 8 in Pediatrics. The research was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and was conducted at five clinical centers across the United States.

More information

The American Heart Association has more on obesity and heart disease risk.
New Delhi

The Centre is considering a number of proposals including one to re-introduce long term capital gains tax on stock market transactions in this year's budget. "It will impact 5,000 investors but will benefit 5 crore families," said a source, who did not wish to be identified.

In November, during a meeting with the finance ministry brass, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) had suggested the introduction of long term capital gains tax, arguing it will end friction in the market and also tackle the problem of manipulation in penny stocks.

Sources, however, said that BSE had made this suggestion in the past too. Some market players believe that Securities Transaction Tax (STT) has also lost its utility and long-term capital gains tax makes sense now. "The debate on whether the capital gains exemption on listed shares should be removed comes up before every budget as it's one of the options available with the government to mobilise revenues. To some extent, with the amendments to the tax treaties (such as Mauritius and Singapore) in 2017, it is now only the long term capital gains that are exempt and more so with the changes and limitations introduced in the Budget 2017, much of the misuse of this exemption has been plugged. Looked at from a perspective of incentivising investment and creation of capital, both private and listed shares should be treated alike. There is a large amount of domestic savings as well as private and international capital going into the creation of capital through private companies and it will augur well if a calibrated approach of providing some relief to such shares is also considered," said Abhishek Goenka, Direct Tax Partner at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Sources said that the "tax package" will be a political call that will be taken by PM Modi after detailed deliberations with Jaitley. If the government finally moves ahead, an increase in the exemption limit will be calibrated in a way that it does not leave the government short of resources for flagship programmes or to bolster public investment. Currently, there is no tax up to 2.5 lakh with investments of up to 1.5 lakh in public provident funds or bank deposits of five years or more enjoying benefits under section 80C of the Income Tax Act.

While health insurance premium is outside the ambit, a 25,000 benefit is seen to be too low given the surge in costs over the last two-three years.

Sidhartha K, The Times of India, Delhi/NCR
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Lome, January 8, 2018Nigerian authorities should immediately release Timothy Elombah, editor of the news website Elombah, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Security forces arrested the journalist at his home in Nnewi, a city in Anambra state, on January 1, 2018, according to his lawyer, Obunike Ohaegbu, and media reports.

Timothy Elombahs brother, Daniel, and Ohaegbu told CPJ that police raided the family home in the early hours, and arrested the journalist, Daniel, and four other men. Police questioned the group separately for several hours and then released everyone except for Timothy Elombah, according to his brother. Daniel Elombah added that police told them the inspector general ordered their arrest because of what he called a defamatory article published on a news website called Opinion Nigeria. The December 22 article was critical of Nigerias Inspector-General of Police, according to the Premium Times.

Elombah covers Boko Haram and has reported critically on President Buharis son. Daniel Elombah, who is the websites chief executive, denied that Elombah had anything to do with the article that police said was the basis for their arrest. He added that police have charged him and Timothy Elombah with cybercrime.

Daniel Elombah, who is based in London, said that police have banned him from travel, which means that he and his family cannot return to their home in the U.K.

Jeff Okoroafor, the founder and publisher of Opinion Nigeria told CPJ that police requested the article be removed, but that he refused. He said no further action was taken. Ebiowei Dickson, who wrote the article, did not immediately respond to CPJs email.

Nigerian authorities should immediately release Timothy Elombah, drop legal proceedings, and allow his brother Daniel to return home, said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney, in New York. Police have no business raiding a journalists home and locking him up just because an officer does not like something written in the press. Its not even clear that the man they have detained had anything to do with the article they deem defamatory.

When CPJ called the Nnewi police station, the person who answered the phone said that they were not permitted to comment on the case and hung up. CPJ contacted the Nigeria police Public Complaint Rapid Response Unit for comment but was directed to call the Abuja police. CPJs repeated calls to the police headquarters in Abuja went unanswered.
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New York, January 8, 2017Sudanese authorities should stop seizing critical newspapers and allow journalists to report freely on matters of public interest without fear of reprisal, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Agents from Sudans National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) yesterday confiscated all copies of six newspapers: the privately owned Al-Tayar, Al-Moustagilla, al-Qarar, Al-Saiha; the socialist partys paper al-Midan; and the leftist opposition National Congress Partys Akhbar al-Watan, according to news reports.

Akhbar al-Watans editor, Hanady al-Siddiq, told journalists in a written statement that the confiscations are likely related to the newspapers coverage of rising food prices in the country.

Sudanese authorities should halt their desperate attempts to silence critical coverage of widely reported events, CPJs Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said from Washington D.C. We call on authorities to allow the media to do its job informing the public without any fear of reprisal.

NISS did not issue a statement explaining the confiscations and did not respond to CPJs emailed request for comment.

The Sudanese governments decision to devaluate the local currency and rising bread prices sparked protests across the country yesterday, which resulted in police killing at least one protester and arresting another, according to news reports.

In mid-November, the Sudanese cabinet approved a draft of an amended version of the Press and Publications Law that, if approved by the parliament, would extend the states powers to censor journalists and publications, according to media reports. The new law would allow the states National Press Council to order the confiscation of critical newspapers for up to 15 days instead of three days under the current law, according to news reports. CPJ has documented how the security service, in recent years, has confiscated entire print runs when a paper publishes content of which it disapproves, as a way to censor the news and force publications to incur significant financial losses.
Chef Chris Trapani is starting his India tour with New Delhi this week.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Texas-based chef Chris Trapani, a transgender, will take on a five-city tour in India, starting with New Delhi on Wednesday.

The globally celebrated authority in Tex-Mex food will also travel to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Chandigarh.

For his visit here, Trapani along with The Lalit Food Truck Company chefs will conduct a skill development workshop for the members of the transgender community.

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Also Read: Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson is in Mumbai, and she's eating every delicacy the city has to offer

The aim of this workshop is to share anecdotes on how to set up and run a successful food truck and catering business and follow the passion for food. The workshop will conclude with a live cook off session by the participants.

"My move to Texas changed my life over a decade ago. Today, I am hoping to touch and inspire some lives in India. I have heard a lot about the country and can't wait for the journey to begin," Trapani said in a statement.

Also Read: Sanjeev Kapoor, the only chef in Forbes 100, ranks higher than ever before

Keshav Suri, Executive Director of The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group, expressed his enthusiasm on the prospect of introducing India to Trapani's talent. "I am immensely pleased with Chef Chris' visit and joining us in this initiative to continuously support the marginalised communities."

--- ENDS ---
The U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, has sanctioned two individuals in response to North Koreas ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, in continued violation of United Nations Security Council Resolutions.

The sanctions, announced on December 26th, target key leaders of North Koreas unlawful weapons programs as highlighted in the recently adopted UN Security Resolution 2397. As a result of these actions, any property or interests in property of those designated by OFAC within U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and transactions by U.S. persons involving the designated persons are generally prohibited.

OFAC sanctioned two individuals pursuant to Executive Order 13687, which targets, among others, officials of the Government of North Korea and the Workers Party of Korea, known as the WPK.

OFAC sanctioned two senior officials of the UN- and U.S.-designated WPK Munitions Industry Department, Kim Jong Sik and Ri Pyong Chol, who were listed in UNSCR 2397.

The Munitions Industry Department is responsible for overseeing North Koreas ballistic missile programs and was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of State in 2010 pursuant to Executive Order 13382. Kim Jong Sik reportedly is a key figure in North Koreas ballistic missile development, in particular efforts to switch from liquid to solid fueled systems, and Ri Pyong Chol is reported to be a key official involved in North Koreas intercontinental ballistic missile development.

Treasury is targeting leaders of North Koreas ballistic missile programs, as part of our maximum pressure campaign to isolate the DPRK and achieve a fully denuclearized Korean Peninsula, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. These actions follow United Nations Security Council Resolution [2397], which imposed strong new sanctions on North Korea, further shutting down its ability to raise illicit funds.
Vicente no longer fits into his wedding suit. Although he was always short, as a young man he was stocky. Now, at 78 years of age, he has a pronounced belly like a mountain without a peak. It is a personal statement: eating, after the war and dictatorship, was a revolutionary act for families, an act that compensated for years of hunger.

Vicente married Severina when he was 22 years old  just months after losing his brother, and his mother wanted Vicente to wear a black corduroy suit at the ceremony as a sign of mourning. Severina said to her future mother-in-law: I will not marry your son like this. Vicente traveled to Portugal three nights in a row to get some duros (one duro is slang for five pesetas) by smuggling. With this money he bought a good quality suit. Made from good material, adds Severina.

They sacrificed themselves so they could feed their families Town Hall official Maite Barroso

In the border between Portugal and Spain, known as la Raya (the Line), poor families supplemented their income by smuggling, a practice that had been around in the area since the 15th century.

From age 15, Vicente balanced his day job in an olive field with smuggling at night. He would travel four times a week to Foios, the first town across the border into Portugal from Eljas. Crossing the mountains, it was 8km on foot. My boss gave me 15 duros. To buy the suit, I took over double the load and he gave me 20 per night, recounts Vicente.

A blanket wrapped around you and a bag over your shoulder  that was the typical outfit for smugglers. Thats how they describe it in the Spanish towns Eljas, Oliva de la Frontera (Badajoz) and El Granado (Huelva). Here they did not make offerings to the Virgin Mary but to smugglers. In 1995, Eljas and Foios became sister towns. What brought us together? Smuggling, explains Antonio Bellanco, the mayor of Eljas, who also trafficked goods at the end of the 70s. We would walk to Foios to pick up coffee. To get tobacco we would go to Aranhas, which was further so we had to go on horseback.

In El Granado, smugglers crossed the Guadiana river to get to Santana de Cambas where they would pick up coffee. Maite Barroso, from the Santana de Cambas town hall, points out that the towns monument, erected in 2011, is a tribute not to illicit activity but rather to the tough conditions that many families had to live through. They sacrificed themselves so they could feed their families, he adds.

In 1995, Eljas and Foios became sister towns. What brought us together? Smuggling Mayor of Eljas Antonio Bellanco

Rafael Caballero, from Oliva de la Frontera, is one of the promoters of the hiking club Los Mochileros (The Backpackers), named in homage to the backpacks carried by smugglers. Not only does the town have a monument, there are also organized hiking tours that follow the smugglers routes. We show people where they hid, how they oriented themselves, and the field they crossed when it got dark, says Caballero. He explains that after the war, flour and cigarette lighters began to be smuggled. Followed by coffee. Returning from the Portugal towns of Barrancos and La Marilleja: They would carry 40 kilos on their back, five in their hands. If they had to run from the Civil Guard, they would ditch the 40 kilos and keep the five. This was what was called their lifesaver.

Between Galicia and Andalusia there are 1,200 km. The towns which fall in the middle are geographically and politically isolated. The border is as a kind of apartment block where the Portuguese are literally neighbors who you could go to to ask for a bit of salt or sugar. Smuggling, which was once so widespread that under the dictator Francisco Franco even priests and mayors took part in it, is today a cultural product.

English version by Melissa Kitson.
Snow caused chaos on the AP-6. Hernan Rodriguez

The Spanish government is investigating Iberpistas, the operator of the AP-6 tollway northwest of Madrid, after thousands of vehicles were trapped for up to 18 hours in the snow over the weekend. Many drivers complained about a lack of information about the situation

Public Works Minister Inigo de la Serna told EL PAIS that the aim of the investigation was to gather information and make an assessment on whether to take the matter further and impose sanctions against the road operator.

The minister said that while the government owned the infrastructure in question, Iberpistas had management responsibility when it came to the snowy conditions and that the company was in charge of  many of the decisions, including when to close access to the toll route. The road operator was also required to have the necessary means to deal with such situations, the minister said.

The head of Spains General Directorate of Traffic, Gregorio Serrano, says I have not considered resigning. He said chaos on the AP-6 had many causes but did not concede there had been errors in the governments handling of the situation.

For its part, Iberpistas said in a media release issued on Sunday that it had rolled out an operational plan for winter road conditions at 9pm on January 5, under the supervision of the Public Works ministry and Spains General Directorate of Traffic (DGT). It added that it had been in constant cooperation with emergency services and with Spains military emergency unit (UME), which worked non-stop on Sunday to clear stranded vehicles from the road.

However, De la Serna said the government had only been informed of the situation after the fact, and would now see if the road operator had failed to comply with protocols.

An Iberpistas spokesperson told EL PAIS that it was standard procedure for the government to open an investigation in these cases.

But the public works minister noted that on state-operated roads like A1, the traffic situation in the same snowy conditions had been resolved without the kind of problems that affected the AP-6. De la Serna attributed the trouble to the heavy snowfall that was recorded after Iberpistas had already closed off the road to traffic, then reopened it after clearing blocked lanes. The problem arose with the intense snowfall, he said.

In response to criticism about the lack of information, the minister said the DGT had been providing weather updates for several days. The DGT also said on Sunday that it had been warning drivers for several days about the expected snowfall with roadside information boards.

Alerts for minimum temperatures active on Monday.

Drivers trapped on the AP-6 either did not find out about these warnings, or did not take the necessary precautions given that many cars were traveling without tire chains, a fact also noted by Iberpistas.

Things happen when there are extreme, adverse conditions, said government spokesperson Inigo Mendez de Vigo after supporting the executive over its handling of the situation.

But the leader of the Socialist Party, Pedro Sanchez, said the Public Works ministry and the DGT must provide explanations for the absolute lack of planning after the chaos on Spanish roads, which saw families trapped overnight in the cars.

Inigo Errejon, a deputy with the anti-austerity party Podemos, also highlighted the lack of planning and the poor management of the [ruling] Popular Party.

On Monday, DGT boss Gregorio Serrano admitted he had been in the southern city of Seville during the weekend traffic crisis but defended his actions. I have not thought about resigning because I have no reason to do so, he told radio station Cadena SER, noting that internal management of the privately-operated AP-6 tollway was not a DGT responsibility.

English version by George Mills.
Journalist Susana Ye. EL PAIS

Quan Zhou would like to say she has never received racist abuse, but this Spaniard, born to Chinese parents, still remembers what she went through as a child. They looked at me strangely, they followed me down the street, they called me Chinese but in an offensive way, she says at the Madrid bookshop where she is signing her second graphic novel, Andaluchinas por el mundo (Andalusian-Chinese around the world). Through stories and humor, the 28-year-old illustrator recounts what it was like growing up in Spain with her Chinese origins. Born in the Andalusian city of Algeciras, she refers to herself as Andaluchina. Its a term she prefers over chinoles, which was coined by the children of Chinese migrants who were born in Spain to define a generation that straddles Asian and European culture.

They hassled me for having almond eyes and very straight hair, or for not being able to pronounce the letter r

Yi Yi Zhang

Yi Yi Zhang, a 22-year-old waiter, confesses to feeling more Spanish than Chinese, although no one else thinks of him this way. From when I was very young, they hassled me for having almond eyes and very straight hair, or for not being able to pronounce the letter r, he says. He remembers they often yelled at him, Chinese piece of shit, go back to your country. But he says he was always clear about where his home was: Madrid. When I travel to China, it takes just a few days before I want to go back to Spain, he says.

The Chinese community is the fourth-largest foreign community in Spain, with 207,593 registered citizens, according to 2017 figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In first place are Moroccans, followed by Romanians and the British. The first generation of Chinese migrants did they best they could, explains journalist Susana Ye, born in Alicante to Chinese parents. They didnt integrate well because they had to take care of their basic needs and work incredibly hard to provide a future for us, she says.

The young journalist has tried to challenge the image of Asian people as a gigantic, strange, homogeneous group in a documentary that explores the daily life of children of migrants who arrived from China to Spain in the 80s and 90s. The documentary Chinoles y bananas (Chinoles and bananas) defines the duality of being yellow on the outside and white on the inside, says Ye. This is a dual identity which, in many cases, causes conflict both within the children themselves and with their family and society. When I looked at myself in the mirror as a girl, I saw what the rest of the world saw, explains Ye.

The Chinese community is the fourth-largest foreign community in Spain, with 207,593 registered citizens

Being the first meant we had to lead the way and normalize the fact that we didnt have Spanish faces, says David Wu Xu, who was born in Valencia to Chinese parents. The 32-year-old brand manager remembers wearily the infinite number of times he was asked if he ate cats, if he understood Spanish or if Chinese people are dirty. The media and film industry have constantly made fun of the image of Chinese people and this doesnt help, says Xu. He points to, among others, the role of Yibing in the television program El Hormiguero (The Anthill) as an example of this. In this show, the young Chinese woman Yibing answers prejudiced questions from the host and audience. The media presents a very simplistic vision of the Asian community, adds journalist Susana Ye.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Chinese community is that they work longer than standard working hours and dont pay taxes. To put an end to these rumors, the association Andalucia Acoge launched a campaign in 2014 that put paid to these popular false beliefs. They have pigeonholed us: it seems we cant do anything other than open a restaurant or a bazaar, says Yi Yi Zhang. Its true we work a lot but it is because we have a very clear objective and I think we could all learn from this, adds David Xu.

Another one of the stereotypes of the Asian community is that Chinese women are submissive. They continue to think that we are sweet and submissive, says Susana Ye. In my case, this is not true because I have a strong character. The illustrator Quan Zhou is also surprised by this conception of Chinese women: The women in my family are all very strong, she says.

The media presents a very simplistic vision of the Asian community Susana Ye, journalist

With Chinas economic growth and the rise of the middle class with greater buying power, the European perception of Chinese people is changing. I have noticed the change a lot: Now we are treated well in shops where before they would have eyeballed us, says Quan. Susana Ye argues the change in perception is due to economic interest in China. People study Chinese, they are interested in learning how to set up a business in Beijing, she explains.

But despite this progress, Yi Yi believes racism will persist. There are always going to be people who simply dont accept us for who we are. One has to get used to the insults: It makes no difference to me if they call me Chinese piece of shit, I dont let it affect me.

The illustrator Quan is more optimistic: We are not that different. It doesnt matter where you are from, if you are a good person, what matters and whats good is there. Susana Ye adds: Now is the time for them to stop seeing us as a uniform mass and starting seeing us as individuals.

English version by Melissa Kitson.
Ines Arrimadas of Ciudadanos in Jerez de la Frontera. Juan Carlos Toro (EL PAIS)

Ines Arrimadas, 36, is enjoying her last days of rest in her home town of Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz) in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. The more than 1,000 kilometers separating her from Barcelona provide the kind of perspective that she needs to resist the pressure coming in from all sides: after her pro-unity Ciudadanos became the most-voted party at the Catalan election of December 21, many voices are demanding that she take the initiative and try to form a government.

Arrimadas defends Ciudadanos strategy against the separatist parties  whose combined 70 seats are enough for a parliamentary majority, if they reach such a deal  and asks people to remain calm and trust in her party.

Question. After becoming the most voted party in Catalonia, a historical achievement in itself, why would you give up on taking the initiative?

Answer. In reality, we have already taken the initiative with regard to the first step, which is constituting the parliaments Mesa (permanent board of officers). I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding here. There are people asking us to make a bid for the premiership when the new parliament hasnt even been summoned yet. You cant do that. Plus, at a time like this, the Mesa is going to be a key body, just as it was during the previous political term. The follies that were committed back then were made possible by the fact that the Mesa was at the service of the separatists. We are the most-voted political force and we have already demanded the speakers position in the Catalan parliament. We began talks in that direction on December 27.

I understand people want to deal with 35 years of nationalism in five days, but unfortunately thats not going to happen

Q. But there is a sense of resignation  that you have allowed the separatists to make the first move.

A. That debate was opened up by the Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE) with the clear aim of concealing their own poor results in Catalonia. What can you expect from a party that secured four seats [as the PP did]? They have to say something about Ciudadanos so people dont talk about them instead. The PPs and PSOEs strategies have been nefarious for constitutionalism (the pro-unity with Spain movement) in Catalonia. The only party with a correct strategy, the only won able to win the elections, was Ciudadanos. So lets keep calm, because we are doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. Its not clear to me at all that separatists are going to reach a deal, with some of them fleeing from justice, others in Brussels, others in prison....we know what were doing.

Q. Its not just the PP and PSOE though. The Catalan business association Fomento del Trabajo has also asked you to try to put forward a proposal for a government.

A. Fomento del Trabajo needs the uncertainty to pass as soon as possible, and to hear assurances about whats going to happen next. I wish the number of seats we obtained was more in line with the number of votes that were cast in our favor, because that in itself would have conveyed the message that Fomento wants to hear. But were going to handle this in the best possible way. We know what were doing. () I understand that people want to deal with 35 years of nationalism in five days, but unfortunately thats not going to happen.

Protestors defend the unity of Spain in Barcelona on October 8. M. Minocri / ATLAS

Q.

Q. If you finally do attempt to form a government, will you seek support from Mayor Ada Colaus party (the unaligned Catalunya en Comu-Podem)?

We would clearly have to talk with the Commons: I have never refused to talk to them

A. We would clearly have to talk with the Commons. I have never refused to talk to them, I have never vetoed them. Any party that can help stop the madness currently gripping Catalonia  corporate flight, a fractured society, lower investment levels  is clearly welcome. If you ask me whether theyd be welcome to join a government, that would be very complicated. But of course we could hold talks to unblock the situation and at least get them to abstain (at the investiture vote)...So what will the Commons do? They have said through every possible channel that they will vote against me, but well see...well see when there are five days left before a second election has to be called, and if just by abstaining they could facilitate the appointment of a new premier; well see if they keep voting no.

Q. So your strategy will be forcing them to avoid a new election?

A. I dont think of it so much as a strategy as a reality. It could happen. Reality is what it is. I would have liked a different reality, a different majority of seats. A fair electoral law would have given us the chance to form a government. But because this has not happened, I know what the separatist parties are going to do, I know their weak points  I know them, I know their rhetoric, I know their candidates, I know their party discrepancies...and so I know that the most intelligent strategy for constitutionalists right now is the one we are following.

Q. So youre waiting for them to fail?

A. Theyre the ones who decided to include individuals with extremely serious crimes and accusations on their tickets. Theyre the ones to decided to include people who are in prison, to say that Puigdemont is the president, a hologram president that is....it wasnt us. They have pushed for things that are unthinkable. If they are unable (to form a government)  and chances are high that they will be unable to  we will then be under the obligation to propose an alternative of our own. But not now, which is what Mr Puigdemont would like to see. Mr Puigdemont would like for me to make a bid on January 18th, to watch me fail.

Q. You once talked about bringing in independents into a future government of Catalonia. Do you believe there is still a part of the pro-independence movement that is recoverable?

I think there are 7.5 million ways to be Catalan

A. What I do believe is that there are individuals, beyond parties or movements. There are independent people who do not carry party cards and who could contribute to a cross-party government in Catalonia with the kind of project that it needs right now. I have talked to a lot of people, and we have done a lot of groundwork in recent years.

Q. Given the election outcome, when do you feel that the PP and PSOE began to go wrong in Catalonia?

A. A great many years ago. By failing to reform Spain, by failing to change election legislation. By cutting deals with the nationalists in exchange for looking the other way, by creating three-party coalitions with the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) in which the Socialists gave them control over the media and even over education! And then we go complain about it. They were thinking more about their parties than about their country. Nationalism does not grow in countries where things are going well: in countries that provide hope and which are proud of their own symbols and successes.

Q. You are especially tough on the Catalan Socialists...

A. The Catalan Socialists have completely taken on the nationalist rhetoric. We saw that during the last campaign, when (party leader Miquel) Iceta said things that did not reflect the majority views of his voters, but rather nationalist logic, such as speaking about Catalonia and Spain as though they were two separate entities, or speaking about privileges and about government pardons. People could not understand why he insisted that he would not negotiate with us, yet he was already preparing a pardon for (jailed ERC leader Oriol) Junqueras. Nobody got that. His voters did not get it.

Q. Has the pro-independence camp learned anything from such a traumatic outcome?

A. When we talk about the pro-independence camp, I really like to draw a distinction between pro-independence parties and leaders on one hand, and the social reality that supports independence on the other.

Nationalism does not grow in countries where things are going well

I think that the real lack of responsibility lies with the leaders of pro-independence parties who knew that everything they were saying was a lie, yet kept right on saying it. During this campaign, Puigdemont, the ERC, everyone has kept on lying. They said that if they won the elections he (Puigdemont) would become the premier, and that they would get people out of prison, and that they would be able to continue with their separatist roadmap, and that they would be accepted by Europe.

Their great promise is a lie. Have they learned? I dont know whether privately they have learned anything, but certainly the message that we have sent the world at this election is that the top force in Catalonia is an openly constitutional force that clearly defends the unity of Catalonia with the rest of Spain and the rest of Europe. And that is a great step. They had won the rhetoric battle all these years, but now we are beginning to win that battle. But for that, you need a clear communication strategy. You need to be able to defeat them at elections. You need to be able to speak out in an uninhibited manner. You need to be able to go to Europe and Brussels, as we have done, to refute what they have been saying in Europe and Brussels.

Q. It is striking that after this entire crisis, the most talked-about issue is an initiative like Tabarnia (an imaginary state resulting from two provinces seceding from the rest of an independent Catalonia).

A. Let me be very clear about the fact that we are not supporting a breakaway Tabarnia. We are not secessionists, either within Spain or within Catalonia. But as a joke, it really debunks the secessionists logic, because suddenly you are seeing secessionists using unionist arguments to fight Tabarnias own arguments. The whole thing has underscored the fragility of secessionists logic. Tabarnia is a fantastic joke that places secessionists before a mirror. I think that, in time, we will view what is happening in Catalonia with a bit more perspective. At times it may seem like were a little frustrated because we didnt manage a majority of seats and it looks like our efforts have been useless. But that is not the case: we are achieving many things that had been out of reach in recent years. People have marched in large numbers. Do you know what its like to get one million constitutionalists out on the streets? That used to be unthinkable. There are now neighborhoods in Catalonia filled with Spanish flags. A total 1,100,000 people voted for Ciudadanos. We won the most seats and we won the most votes. That was unthinkable,too.

Q. What does it mean to you to be Catalan?

Mr Puigdemont would like for me to make a bid [for the premiership] on January 18th, to watch me fail

A. I think there are 7.5 million ways to be Catalan. I dont think there is a label you have to wear to be a Catalan. There are many ways to feel Catalan, and think that those who dont support independence are just as Catalan as those who do. I dont believe in this ideological identity that posits that if you are pro-independence, you are more Catalan.

Q. Do you have ambitions at the national level?

A. Right now I have an enormous political responsibility in Catalonia. I am not considering a jump to national politics right now, because our responsibility lies in Catalonia. I would love to be able to lead the government in Catalonia. Not because I want to be the premier, but because there is a great need for another governing style, to turn the situation around, to return to the fold of the law, to stop more businesses from leaving and get others to start returning. If things stay like this three, even two more years, theyre going to sink Catalonia completely.

People believe that Catalonia is always going to be what it is now, no matter what we do. But it isnt. If we ruin Catalonia, if we undermine its stability, if we undertake mad actions from government, as they have been doing, we may well regret this dark period in Catalan history for the rest of our lives. And all for nothing, because they are not going to achieve independence.

English version by Susana Urra.
President Hassan Rouhani has rejected a report by the Islamic Republics Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) concerning the details of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjanis death, his youngest son, Yasser Hashemi Rafsanjani has disclosed.

In an interview with a local news agency, Pana, Monday, January 8, Rafsanjanis son has revealed that SNSC consequently sent a letter to President Rouhani demanding to shelve the case concerning his father's death.

President Rouhani has rejected the demand, ordering SNSC to re-investigate the whole case and as a result it should be reviewed from scratch, according to Rafsanjani Jr.

The real cause of Rafsanjanis death, which occurred a year ago, has been the subject of intense controversies. Many, including some members of his family hint at foul play.

Meanwhile, the youngest son of the late influential ayatollah has admitted that the family has not yet seen SSCIs report, although his other brother, Mohsen was supposed to have the permission to study the report compiled on his fathers death.

Earlier on Saturday, December 16, 2017, the outspoken younger daughter of the deceased ex-president and former Tehran MP, Faezeh Hashemi had said that the body of her father had contained radioactive elements 10 times more than the allowed level.

In her interview with Etemed News Website, Faezeh Hashemi also added that her family had been informed about the issue of radioactivity during a meeting with several members of the Supreme National Security Council of the Islamic Republic. She did not mention when the meeting was held and who were the officials who attended it.

Hashemi's daughter also disclosed in her interview that her sister, Fatemeh and her mother were tested for radiation. Her mother had three times the normal level and her sister had twice. She did not say when the tests took place, but most probably, it was after they learned about high levels of radiation in her father's body.

The members of national security council told the family that they did not know about the source of the radiation, however they had concluded that it was not the reason for the death of Ex-President Rafsanjani and therefore, the case had been closed, Faezeh Hashemi told Etemad.

More than a month later, the SNSCs authorities have yet to react to Ms. Hashemi Rafsanjanis remarks.

There have been many contradictory reports concerning the mysterious death of the ex-president believed to be the second strongest man in post Islamic Revolution in Iran, after ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the founder of the Islamic Republic.

An outspoken dissident and son of an influential ayatollah, Mehdi Khazali, claimed at the time that Hashemi Rafsanjani had been killed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). An accusation that IRGC has so far kept mum about it.

The body of the 82-year old ayatollah was found on Sunday, January 8, 2017, in a pool in his house that he frequently used. The cause of the death was officially declared as heart failure, a term used in Iran to describe a death caused by unknown factors.

Rafsanjanis children said that at the time their father was very healthy and did not have any history of heart problems.

Immediately after the death of the former president, Irans minister of health criticized the medical team for shortcomings in addressing the heart attack, and rumors circulated that Rafsanjani was in fact drowned in a pool. He died while taking his routine swimming exercise.

Ayatollah Hashemi who was widely believed to be the mastermind behind ayatollah Ali Khameneis rise to power as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, separated his way from the leaders over controversial reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Though, Khamenei never openly attacked his old friend but implicitly criticized him on many occasions.

Rafsanjani's relations with Khamenei gradually worsened and his son, Mehdi and daughter Faezeh Hashemi were both arrested on various charges and placed behind bars.

Currently, Mehdi is serving his term, while Faezeh is facing new charges.

After separating ways with his friend of more than half a century, ayatollah Khamenei has tacitly accused him and his proteges, the current president, Hassan Rouhani and the so-called reformist former president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) of attempting to reach a rapprochement with the U.S.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

Trend:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set to hold talks with top Russian military commanders later this month, the first such high-level meeting in years, BuzzFeed News reported on Sunday.

The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti will meet with the chief of general staff for Russia's Armed Forces Gen. Valery Gerasimov in Baku, Azerbaijan later in January, according to the news outlet.
Reports had emerged of the possibility of the 25-year-old PhD student having joined the terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen.

Mannan Wani, the AMU scholar believed to have joined the Hizbul Mujahideen

By India Today Web Desk: Aligarh Muslim University has expelled Mannan Bashir Wani, a research scholar who had earlier been suspended following reports that he may have taken up arms and joined the Hizbul Mujahideen.

The university's Public Relations Officer (PRO) made the announcement, ANI reported. The PRO was quoted as saying Wani's room had been sealed following reports of his alleged involvement in "highly objectionable activities, which can hamper the peaceful academic atmosphere and create disharmony."

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The university's move to suspend Wani came hours after reports emerged of the possibility of the 25-year-old PhD student having joined the terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen.

Since Mannan Bashir Wani has breached the A??AMU StudentsA?? Conduct and Discipline Rules, 1985A??, the matter was placed before the AMU Vice Chancellor, Professor Tariq Mansoor: Professor M Mohsin Khan, Proctor, AMU- ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 8, 2018

Photos showing Wani holding a gun appeared on social media soon after his family in Kashmir lodged a missing persons complaint with the Jammu and Kashmir Police.

Wani was to return home last week, but wasn't heard from since January 3. His last known location was New Delhi.

Photos on social media showed Mannan Wani holding an AK-47 assault rifle

Earlier, the Inspector General of Jammu and Kashmir Police had said the force could not confirm whether Wani had indeed joined the Hizbul Mujahideen and had expressed caution, saying the photos in question could be photoshopped.

Mannan is a resident of the Takipora village in Kashmir's Kupwara and was pursuing a PhD in geology from AMU.

WATCH | AMU PhD scholar from J-K's Kupwara joins Hizbul Mujahideen

--- ENDS ---
Details added (first version posted on 14:37)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

Trend:

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has received credentials of incoming ambassadors of a number of countries.

President Aliyev has received credentials of newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Mongolia Bold Ravda.

Ambassador Bold Ravda reviewed a guard of honor.

Bold Ravda presented his credentials to President Aliyev.

President Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador.

The president expressed his hope that the friendly Azerbaijan-Mongolia relations will continue successfully developing. He underlined Azerbaijan's keenness to cooperate with Mongolia in the areas of mutual interest, including in political, economic and cultural ones in the years ahead.

President Aliyev recalled his recent phone conversation with the Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga. The president noted that during the conversation they discussed the issues of mutual interest and expressed their regret over the absence of active contacts between the two countries at the level of heads of state and government so far.

President Aliyev noted the importance of establishing bilateral relations between different authorities of the two countries, including the parliaments, ministries, business groups, as well as in the political area, and hailed the good opportunities for expanding bilateral cooperation.

The ambassador thanked President Aliyev for the warm words, and extended Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga's greetings to President Aliyev. He noted that the Mongolian president also recalls his phone conversation with the Azerbaijani president.

Pointing at the unsatisfactory level of bilateral relations, the Mongolian ambassador said that he will spare no efforts to contribute to expanding the bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

They also discussed the issues of cooperation in a number of fields, including in import and export, defense industry, investment, education, and agriculture.

President Aliyev thanked for President Battulga's greetings and asked the ambassador to extend his greetings to the Mongolian president.

President Aliyev has also accepted credentials of newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Nigeria Hamzat Ibrahim.

Ambassador Hamzat Ibrahim reviewed a guard of honor.

Hamzat Ibrahim presented his credentials to President Aliyev.

President Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador.

Noting that Nigeria is a brotherly country for Azerbaijan, the president stressed the importance of the two countries' mutual support on the international level and within the UN and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Emphasizing the contribution of Azerbaijan to the cause of Islamic solidarity, President Aliyev said that a number of important events were held in the country in this regard.

The Azerbaijani president noted the significance of declaring 2017 as a Year of Islamic Solidarity in Azerbaijan and holding the Islamic Solidarity Games in Baku.

Hailing the political ties between the two countries, the head of state also stressed the importance of increasing mutual trade, investment making, defining cooperation opportunities in business sphere, and underlined the necessity of reciprocal visits of the two countries' delegations at different levels.

Ambassador Hamzat Ibrahim extended greetings of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to President Aliyev. Saying that the two countries enjoy strong political relations, Hamzat Ibrahim noted that the economic cooperation does not conform to this level.

He said that during his meetings with Azerbaijani officials in Baku the ways of developing economic ties will be determined. Stressing that measures are being implemented to develop the non-oil sector in the two countries, the ambassador added that there are good opportunities for cooperation in tourism, education, trade and other fields.

They noted the significance of developing the bilateral cooperation in economic, investment making, trade, defense industry and other spheres, and stressed the appropriateness of establishing a joint intergovernmental commission for expanding the bilateral ties on this front.

President Aliyev thanked for the greetings of President Muhammadu Buhari and asked Hamzat Ibrahim to extend his greetings to the president of Nigeria.

President Aliyev has also accepted credentials of newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Equatorial Guinea Jose Esono Micha Akeng.

Ambassador Jose Esono Micha Akeng reviewed a guard of honor.

Jose Esono Micha Akeng presented his credentials to President Aliyev.

President Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador.

Emphasizing the importance of Jose Esono Micha Akengs visit in terms of strengthening bilateral relations between Equatorial Guinea and Azerbaijan, the head of state said he hoped the ambassadors meetings with heads of relevant authorities in Baku will help define areas of cooperation between the two countries.

Pointing to the fact that both Equatorial Guinea and Azerbaijan are oil producing countries, the newly appointed ambassador underlined that he will spare no efforts to develop the bilateral cooperation.

They underlined the importance of restoring relations, which had previously existed between the two countries, and stressed the significance of developing cooperation in various fields, particularly in energy, education, investment, import and export, and others.

President Aliyev has also received credentials of newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Sadovic.

Ambassador Bakir Sadovic reviewed a guard of honor.

Bakir Sadovic presented his credentials to President Aliyev.

President Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador.

They noted the importance of high-level meetings between the two countries, hailed a very good level of bilateral relations, and stressed the importance of strengthening the friendly ties even further.

The ambassador said Bosnia and Herzegovina highly appreciates Azerbaijans investments in its agrarian industry and supporting social and humanitarian projects.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend:

Kazakhstan has introduced a ban on the export of unprocessed cattle hide from the country for a period of six months.

The corresponding order was signed by Minister for Investments and Development of Kazakhstan Zhenis Kasymbek.

In Kazakhstan, most of the unprocessed hides are exported abroad, while domestic plants and factories fail to operate in full capacity due to a lack of material.

Entrepreneurs repeatedly appealed to the government to resolve the current situation.

To prevent the shortage of cattle hide in the domestic market, by the order of the Minister for Investments and Development of Kazakhstan, a temporary ban was introduced on Aug. 15, 2016 for a period from Nov. 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017.

But, following expiration of the ban, the market again faced a deficit.

To date, the tannery industry in Kazakhstan is represented by three large and 10 small enterprises whose production capacity allows processing about 2.4 million hides of cattle a year, which is almost the entire amount of tanning raw material obtained from slaughtered cattle. In fact, tanneries in Kazakhstan process about 400,000 cattle hides a year or 17 percent of their total volume. The cattle hides are exported to China, Kazakh MPs noted earlier in an address to Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Bakytzhan Sagintayev.

The budget receives about 22.5 million euros from the export of unprocessed hides a year, and 150 million euros from the sale of finished leather. If the skin processed in the country is used for sewing shoes, haberdashery and other products, the amount may rise to 1.875 billion euros, or by 83 times.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Jan. 8

By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested 256 million euros in the economy of Turkmenistan, paying special attention to supporting private entrepreneurship in the country, the EBRD said in a message Jan. 8.

In November last year, the EBRD forecast the Turkmen economy to grow 5.7 percent in 2017 and 5.1 percent in 2018.

Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world in terms of the volume of natural gas and has opportunities to export it to China and Iran.

Ashgabat chose a course to diversify the local economy. The textile industry, as well as the area of petroleum products, advanced. The oil, gas and chemical industry and the production of building materials are being actively developed.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Nigar Guliyeva -Trend:

A production of lanolin - a greasy, yellow substance that is extracted from wool and then purified to be used as a base for creams, lotions and ointments- will be launched at the Uzbek free economic zone "Boysun-Pharm".

This substance is produced in a few countries of the world. The Baysun district has enough raw material for the production of high-quality, cheap lanolin substance, Uzbek media reported citing the FEZ leadership.

The hypodermic glands of sheep release not only fats, but also lanolin substance. With the help of a special technology, lanolin is separated from washed wool and re-processed for removing odor.

Uzbek businessmen, who studied this process abroad, expressed their desire for using modern technology in the Baysun district. Since the first days of the new year, implementation of the corresponding business project has begun. This will be a non-waste technology, the FEZ leadership said.

Lanolin, which rapidly absorbs into the human skin, is considered an important raw material for pharmaceutical and perfume industry. It is widely used in pharmaceutics as a binder in manufacturing medicinal candles and ointments.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Nigar Guliyeva  Trend:

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has urged the citizens who keep money abroad to transfer their funds to Uzbekistan.

He was speaking at an extraordinary session of the Council of MPs of the Tashkent region.

Bank accounts of those who keep money in banks of Uzbekistan will not be checked, he added.

"I will not allow checking the accounts of people who keep their money in Uzbekistan. Bring your money, build factories, create clusters, earn as much as you want, "Mirziyoyev said.

Currently, there are 28 commercial banks in Uzbekistan, including three non-governmental, 12 joint stock commercial banks, eight private banks and five banks with participation of foreign capital.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkey will purchase meat from French producers in 2018 in accordance with the agreements reached during the visit of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to France, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock of Turkey told Trend Jan. 8.

It is expected to import 5,700 tons of meat from France in 2018, according to the ministry.

In 2017, Turkey imported 3,000 tons of meat from France.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

Trend:

CEOs of compulsorily liquidated or bankrupt companies will not be able to head credit bureaus in Azerbaijan, according to the Procedure for Regulation and Supervision of Activity of Credit Bureaus approved by the Financial Market Supervisory Authority of Azerbaijan.

The ban is valid for two years after the compulsory liquidation or bankruptcy of a legal entity, according to the document.

The Supervisory Authority assesses activity of the credit bureau, effectiveness of its work, oversees the exchange of information in the bureau and ensuring the inviolability of personal data.

The credit bureau should submit reports to the Supervisory Authority, which, in turn, monitors the bureaus activity. Comprehensive inspections should be conducted at least once every three years.

Thematic inspections take place in case of frequent personnel reshuffles in the management of the credit bureau, a large number of complaints from consumers of services and in other cases.

The authorized capital of credit bureaus should not be less than 2 million manats.

In December last year, Azerbaijans banking market participants decided to create Azerbaijan Credit Bureau LLC. Chairman of the Board of the International Bank of Azerbaijan Khalid Ahadov was elected Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Azerbaijan Credit Bureau.

The International Bank of Azerbaijan, Bank Respublika, Xalq Bank, Kapital Bank, PASHA Bank, Rabitabank, Unibank and Ziraat Bank Azerbaijan became the founders of the Azerbaijan Credit Bureau LLC.

The private credit bureau will contain more information than the Centralized Credit Registry and cover a bigger number of borrowers. The bureau will receive information not only from banks, but also from insurance and leasing companies, mobile communication operators, etc.

(1.7001 manats = 1 USD on Jan. 8)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Iran exported 1891 passenger cars during the first nine months of the current fiscal year (started March 20, 2017), according to the date released by Iran's Customs administration.

Iraq, Lebanon and Armenia were among the main destinations of Irans car exports. Tehran also exported cars to Italy, Germany, China, France, Romania, South Korea, Spain, Tunis, Czech Republic, the UAE, Guinea and Azerbaijan were other car importers from Iran.

Meanwhile the Islamic Republics car imports in the 9-month period reached 57,000 units, according to the report.

Iranian automakers exported 10,000 cars (worth over $10 million) the last fiscal year (ended March 20, 2017), which was 59 percent less compared to the 24,500 cars in the preceding year.

The huge fall in Irans car exports occurs despite the fact that the countrys car industry has experienced output increase in recent months, following lifting of international sanctions.

According to the latest report of the countrys Industry, Mine and Trade Ministry, Irans passenger car (including sedans and SUVs) output registered a rise by 17 percent during the first nine months of the current fiscal year (March 20-Dec. 22) to stand at 1.034 million units.

Irans car export registered a record high in fiscal year to March 2011 and stood at 81,596, however the figure sharply fell in next year (fiscal year to March 2012) and accounted to 38,258 due to intensified international sanctions which targeted the countrys auto manufacturing industry.

The export even decreased to 10,000 in the fiscal year to March 2014, but revived again following the removal of the international sanctions against Irans car industry.

Iranian automakers exported 27,000 cars in the fiscal year to March 2015, but they failed to revive the exports to the pre-sanction period.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Nigar Guliyeva  Trend:

Uzbek banks have increased the limit on withdrawing cash through ATMs installed in public places, podrobno.uz reported.

The limit has been increased from 100,000 to 200,000 soums. Those wishing to receive a bigger amount can apply to the cashier's offices of the bank that issued the card.

Reportedly, for the operation to cash out money one will have to pay a commission of 1 percent. cashing operations are not made through cash desks, but only through ATMs.

However, call center at "Ipoteka-bank" noted that the limit in ATMs of this bank has not changed and remained within 100,000 soums. The terms have not changed either - the commission is not charged.

Representative of "Uzpromstroybank" reported on the increase of the limit for ATMs to 200,000 soums, and its complete absence in the banks' offices. Cardholders of this bank do not need to pay commission for the operation, and cardholders from other banks will have to pay it.

Representative of the Central Bank noted that commercial banks have the right to independently determine limits, both for ATMs, and the size of the commission for the operation.

National Bank, People's Bank, Uzpromstroybank, Qishloq Qurilish Bank, Ipoteka Bank and Microcreditbank are among those which installed ATMs in bazaars and large shopping centers.

Earlier, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank Timur Ishmetov informed about the plans of commercial banks to increase the number of ATMs to 200 units by early 2018.

Currently, there are 28 commercial banks in Uzbekistan, including three non-governmental, 12 joint stock commercial banks, eight private banks and five banks with participation of foreign capital.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Anvar Mammadov  Trend:

Azerbaijan intends to supply hazelnuts to the markets of Africa and Arab countries in 2018, Ismayil Orujov, chairman of Azerbaijans Association of Hazelnut Producers and Exporters, told Trend.

In total, Azerbaijan intends to export hazelnuts to 30 countries in 2018, which is much more than the figures in the previous years.

Hazelnuts were supplied from Azerbaijan to 25 countries in 2016 and to 27 countries in 2017.

"We exported over 8,000 tons of hazelnut in January-November 2017," Orujov said. Most of Azerbaijans hazelnuts are exported to Italy, Russia and Germany."

He added that several hazelnut producing and processing enterprises are being built in the countrys Khachmaz and Zagatala districts to expand the export of hazelnuts. The enterprises must be constructed by the end of 2018.

To date, the biggest hazelnut producer in the world is Turkey with a 75 percent share in the global market. Azerbaijan's share in the global hazelnut market is 4 percent. However, according to the foreign media, the country has a great potential for further growth in this field.
By PTI: Chennai, Jan 8 (PTI) Assam Chief Minster Sarbananda Sonowal today invited industrialists from Tamil Nadu to invest in the state, saying his government has announced key initiatives to boost trade, including the "Act East Policy".

Sonowal addressed a conference organised here as part of the states first ever Global Investors Summit scheduled to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi next month in Guwahati.

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He said Modi had termed the north-east region as the new engine of Indias growth.

The chief minister said his government has succeeded in bringing in investments worth about Rs 7,000 crore to the state since his government came to power.

"That is only in the last 1.5 years. New policies, reforms, establishing new units by famous brands (in Guwahati) has given a new vibrancy to the industrial scene of the state," he said.

The government has announced very attractive tax incentive for the industry.

"A new startup policy supporting young entrepreneurs has been put in place. We have also announced a very attractive IT enabled services policy and a bio-technology policy," Sonowal said.

Detailing other initiatives taken up by the government, he said steps have been taken up to upgrade Guwahati airport as an international airport, mainly connecting the South-East Asian countries.

Work for the construction of new terminal and expansion of the airport has already begun, he added.

Noting that the government has taken steps to give Guwahati a new global identity, the chief minister said, "We are planning to develop Guwahati as a new city with modern facilities to boost economic and commercial ties between India and ASEAN countries".

He said Bangladesh has set up an office of Assistant High Commissioner, while Bhutan recently opened a consulate in Guwahati.

"We are working to get consulates of more neighbouring countries and ASEAN nations in Guwahati", Sonowal added.

Additional Chief Secretary of Assam, Ravi Capoor told reporters that the state was in the advanced stage of rolling out the North East Investment Policy.

"I think may be next month or in this month, we would be seeing a new investment policy. It is in the very advanced stage of discussion and finalisation," he said. PTI VIJ RC BAL

--- ENDS ---
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan.8

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Europe wants to have diversification of gas supply, new sources and new routes, said European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic.

What we have highlighted from the beginning is, that from an energy security perspective we want to have diversification of supply, we want to have new sources, new routes and new suppliers, Sefcovic told the Energy Post.

Talking about the Russian-initiated Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, the EU commissioner noted that this project raised political issues  including energy security, respect for EU law and for Europes energy strategies  to the highest level.

We have such a lot of political concerns on this project, I believe that the best way to try and resolve it is through negotiation, he added.

This is while Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. Southern Gas Corridor projects were again included in the third list of the Projects of Common Interest (PCI), released by the European Commission in November 2017.

The South Caucasus Pipeline Future Expansion (SCPFX), Trans Anatolia Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which constitute the Southern Gas Corridor, are in the third list of PCIs.

Southern Gas Corridor envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.



At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.



As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans Adriatic Pipeline.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend:

Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov will pay a working visit to Dushanbe city on Jan. 10-11, Tajik media reported quoting a source in the country's government.

During the visit,Aripov will hold meetings with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Prime Minister Kokhir Rasulzoda.

During the meetings in Dushanbe, the issues of preparation for the official visit of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Dushanbe, which is expected in early spring, will be discussed.

In addition, issues of building up trade and economic cooperation between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as accelerating demarcation and delimitation of disputed sections of the state border of the two countries will be discussed.

The trade turnover between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan increased significantly in the past two years. In 2016, the trade turnover between the two countries hit $70 million, which is almost 6 times more than in 2015. Out of the total volume about $ 36 million is accounted for the export of Tajik goods to Uzbekistan and almost $ 34 million for Tajikistan's import of Uzbek products.

In January-December 2017, the trade turnover between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan jumped up by 85 percent, exceeding $110 million.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 6

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Iran, which holds the largest conventional gas reserves in the world, sees Georgia as a potential market for its gas exports.

While the country has increased its gas output significantly and targets an output of 1 bcm/d by the end of the current fiscal year (March 20, 2018), Turkey and Iraq remain the only destinations for the countrys gas export.

Tehran exports 30 million cubic meters of gas to Turkey and 14 million cubic meters to Iraq per day at the moment.

Irans deputy oil minister, Hamid Reza Araqi, told the ministrys official news agency on Jan. 6 that Tehran has the capacity to export gas to various countries, including Georgia, thanks to its geographical position.

Araqi, who heads the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC), said that gas export to Georgia is still on the agenda and the private sector would take part in the issue once agreements are finalized.

Iran needs to obtain Armenias agreement as well, because the gas will pass through that countrys territory, he said.

Araqi added that the private sector will buy gas from Iran and will transfer it to Georgia after paying swap costs.

The official further said that previously a private company took part in the issue, but no gas was exported.

Earlier in April 2017, Georgias Deputy Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Mariam Valishvili told Trend that delivery of gas from Iran to Georgia is theoretically possible, and there is necessary infrastructure for this, but such contracts were not concluded between state companies.

She also noted that Georgia prefers Azerbaijani gas, since it is the most optimal supplier of gas to Georgian market.

Azerbaijan has been the main exporter of gas to Georgia for many years. Moreover, in previous years, Georgia received from Russia 10 percent of Russian gas supply to Armenia as a payment for its transit. In April 2017, Georgia decided to abandon Russian gas and fully switch to purchasing Azerbaijani gas.

Valishvili said that it is theoretically possible to supply Iranian gas to Georgia through Azerbaijan  there are pipelines from Iran to Azerbaijan and from Azerbaijan to Georgia.

In July 2016, Managing Director of National Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC) Alireza Kameli said that Iran signed an agreement with the Georgian private company, Georgian International Energy Corporation, to pump 40 million cubic meters of gas to Georgia.

Meanwhile, Valishvili noted that Georgias pipeline system is in possession of the state, and private companies must present such contracts to the government in order to obtain services for transportation of purchased gas through the country.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 6

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Iran imported 2.023 billion cigarettes during the first nine months of current fiscal year (March 20-Dec. 22, 2017), Ali Asghar Ramzi, head of Irans Center for Tobacco Planning and Supervision, said.

The figure indicates a fall by 39 percent year on year, Ramzi said, the official website of Irans industry ministry reported.

Irans 12 cigarette producing plants produced 35.02 billion cigarettes in the 9-month period, 10 percent more compared to the same months of the preceding year, the official added.

He further said that over 3.1 billion cigarettes were smuggled into Iran during the same time span based on estimates, adding that the illegal cigarette import has witnessed a 39-percent fall year-on-year.

About 55 billion cigarettes is smoked in the country annually.

Ramzi noted that over 90 percent of the cigarette smoked in the country will be supplied by domestic producers during the current fiscal year (to be ended March 2018).

The Iranian administration seriously follows a plan to domestically produce foreign cigarette brands, in order to cut down the imports.

In recent months, Iranian officials have repeatedly underscored that the administration increased domestic output of cigarettes, decreasing the dependency on imports. Meanwhile over 80 percent of the tobacco, used in Irans cigarette factories is supplied through imports.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

The upcoming talks expected to be held between Iran and the EU this week will only focus on nuclear issue, Bahram Qassemi, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said.

Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is invited by EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini to hold talks on implementation of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action),  Qassemi said at a press conference in Tehran Jan. 8, Iranian media outlets reported.

Besides Zarif and Mogherini three European foreign ministers will take part in the meeting, the spokesman added.

Earlier Germany's Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that the European Union will invite Iran's foreign minister for talks about the recent anti-government protests that have hit the country.

"Together with the EU's foreign policy chief (Federica Mogherini), we agreed to invite the Iranian foreign minister, if possible next week," Gabriel told German public broadcaster ZDF on Jan. 7.

"We very quickly affirmed that we support the freedom to demonstrate and that the state should support this," Gabriel added.

At the same time, Gabriel said Berlin will not follow the lead of US President Donald Trump, who pledged to help Iranians "take back" their government.

At least 21 people have been killed and hundreds arrested during the protests in Iran, which began December 28 as protests against economic hardship and corruption grew into political rallies.

Qassemi further touched upon the Friday meeting of UN Security Council on Iran protests, saying the session was another failure for US president Donald Trump.

The US on Friday took the Iran protests to the UN Security Council, where deep divisions emerged over the issue, with Russia arguing the demonstrations posed no threat to international peace and security.

Qassemi also commented on the upcoming Iran sanctions waiver and Trump's report to the Congress on the JCPOA, saying that possible withdrawal of the US from the nuclear deal or any unreasonable decision by Washington will be resulted with Irans proportional and heavy reaction.

He added that any grave mistake by the US will lead to Washington's regret.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Irans deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi has said that the global community must prepare itself for possible withdrawal of the US from nuclear deal reached between Tehran and the six world powers in 2015.

It is not clear what will the US President Donald Trump's decision be January 12, when he must decide again whether to certify the Islamic Republic's compliance with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka nuclear deal), as he is required to do every three months.

Araqchi said at the 2nd Tehran Security Conference, which kicked off on Jan. 8, that Trump spares no effort for more than one year to destroy the JCPOA, Irans ISNA news agency reported.

There are some speculations that the US president will refuse to suspend sanctions against Tehran in coming days, which is required under the JCPOA, Araqchi said, adding that the global community must be prepared to that possibility.

In October 2017, Trump declined to certify Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal, saying sanctions relief was disproportionate to Iran's concessions, adding the agreement goes against US interests.

However, he waived the sanctions for another three months and left the decision on staying in or quitting the deal for later, while urging Congress to change the US law concerning the certification.

Araqchi said the Islamic Republic is prepared for any scenario.

The cancellation of the nuclear deal, which is a sample of successful international agreement, will inflict greater damages to the global community and the Middle East region, the top Iranian diplomat said.

Our region will not become safer in lack of the JCPOA, he added.

Earlier today, Bahram Qassemi, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said that possible withdrawal of the US from the nuclear deal or any unreasonable decision by Washington will result in Irans proportional and heavy reaction.

He added that any grave mistake by the US will lead to Washington's regret.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan.8

Trend:

The Military Committee, NATOs highest Military Authority, will meet in Chiefs of Defence (CHODs) Session on Jan. 16-17, at the NATO Headquarters, Brussels.

The session will consider a number of issues, while meetings with partners from Georgia will focus defence reform progress and the way ahead, the NATO press service reported.

"The session with Georgia will focus on continued defence reform progress and the way ahead for the Substantial NATO-Georgia Package," the report reads.

The Substantial NATO-Georgia Package (SNGP) is a set of initiatives endorsed at the September 2014 Wales Summit, aimed at strengthening Georgias defence capabilities and developing closer security cooperation and interoperability with NATO Members.

As of February 2016, some 20 NATO Allies and partner states have provided support to the implementation of the package in the form of expertise and resources.

The SNGP comprises support at the strategic, tactical and operational levels across 13 areas: Acquisition; Strategic Operational Planning; Special Operations Forces; Military Police; Cyber Defence; Maritime Security; Strategic Communications; a Joint Training and Evaluation Centre; Logistic Capability; Intelligence and Communications; a Defence Institution Building School; Aviation and Air Defence and NATO-Georgia Exercises in Georgia open to partners.
The Emergency Management Service of Georgia has announced a series of systemic reforms, Agenda reports.

Head of the agency Giorgi Mgebrishvili held the first working meeting with officials of the service and discussed details of the reforms today.

He said that following the planned changes and "significantly increased funding, Georgian fire-fighters will get their social packages and technical equipment improved this year.

"The Government of Georgia pays special attention to emergency management and mobilises as many resources as possible to solve problems in this field. We have the ambition to create a service of Western standards that each and every citizen of Georgia and the countrys guests will count on, Mgebrishvili said.

He said that changes will take place in the staff of the service as well. He presented Aleksandre Khvadagiani as new head of the Emergency Management Agency.

Under the recent legislative changes that came into force on January 1, the Emergency Management Agency of the Interior Ministry and the State Security and Crisis Management Council were merged to become a new Emergency Management Service. Head of this newly established agency became Giorgi Mgebrishvili, who previously was the minister of internal affairs.
U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on Saturday, the White House said on Sunday, and Trump provided Macron with an update on developments on the Korean Peninsula and the two discussed demonstrations in Iran, Reuters reported.

The White House said the conversation was intended to underscore U.S., South Korean and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea.

The Presidents also agreed that the widespread demonstrations in Iran were a sign of the Iranian regimes failure to serve its peoples needs by instead diverting the nations wealth to fund terrorism and militancy abroad, the White House said in a statement.
The Syrian government forces have unblocked an armored vehicles military base in the Syrian city of Harasta, that was surrounded by militants, a source told Sputnik on Monday.

"The Syrian army has unblocked the transport department in Damascus' suburbs. Having broken through the encirclement, the infantry and tanks have entered the department's territory," the source said.

According to the source, the government forces have also managed to regain control of flour mills, situated close to the military base.

Earlier, the Syrian government forces have ceased their offensive operation southwest of Damascus after al-Nusra Front terrorists asked to start negotiations on their unhindered exit from the territory after the Syrian army and the militias surrounded their stronghold.
Assam police has arrested an IAS officer Kumud Kalita in connection with Rs 2250 crore scam in Social Welfare department of the state.

By Manogya Loiwal : Assam police has arrested an IAS officer Kumud Kalita in connection with Rs 2250 crore scam in Social Welfare department of the state.

Earlier, Assam police announced a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh to anyone who can provide information leading to missing IAS officer Kumud Kalita. Kumud Kalita had served as the director of the department.

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The IAS officer was suspended on charges of corruption.

Following the directive of Assam CM, the Vigilance and Anti Corruption had registered a case in connection with the multi-crore rupees scam.

On July 28 last, the investigation agency had arrested another IAS officer Dilip Borthakur (former Director of Social Welfare department) in connection with the scam.

The vigilance and anti corruption had already accused 11 persons in the case.

During the investigation it was revealed that an amount of Rs 150 crore was siphoned off every year from the social welfare department of the state for the past 15 years during previous Congress regime.

The investigation also detected nine lakh fake entries of ghost children in the ICDS list.

The IAS officer was chargesheeted in the largescale corruption case, was absconding since February 2017.

This is being seen as a big success by the state police and a feather in the cap of BJP government in a bid to fight against corruption.

ALSO WATCH | Lucknow: Senior IAS officer found dead near Hazratganj

--- ENDS ---
Israels central bank said on Monday it would not recognise virtual currencies such as bitcoin as actual currency and that it was difficult to devise regulations to monitor the risks of such activity to the countrys banks and their clients, Reuters reports.

Deputy Governor Nadine Baudot-Trajtenberg said there had been public complaints Israeli banks were making it difficult for some customers to transfer money from their accounts to buy bitcoin. But this was something the central bank would not be able to address. Other central banks faced the same problem.

The Bank of Israels position is that they should be viewed as a financial asset, Baudot-Trajtenberg told a meeting of Israels parliamentary finance committee, noting that there was no government responsibility for investors in bitcoin.

The central bank, Baudot-Trajtenberg said, was studying the issue of virtual currency but not much could be learned from what exists globally since no regulator anywhere in the world had issued guidelines to the banking system on how to act in relation to customers activity in virtual currencies.

There is a real difficulty in issuing sweeping guidelines to the system regarding the proper way to estimate, manage, and monitor the risks inherent in such activity, she said. Beyond the risks to the customer there are also compliance risks to the bank.

The value of a bitcoin, the biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, surged in mid-December to nearly $20,000, then dropped to less than $12,000 at the end of the month. It was trading on Monday around $15,370.

Bitcoin is a publicly available ledger of a finite number of digital coins, which backers say can be used as a currency without the support of any countrys central bank. It is mined by computers, which are awarded new coins for working out complex mathematical formulas.

Several other cryptocurrencies have been launched that work on similar principles.

Committee members during the meeting on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies urged Israels regulators to quickly come up with regulations.

There seems to be a greater possibility that they will become central to our financial lives, said Moshe Gafni, the chairman of the panel.

He called on regulators to submit to the committee within a month how they tend to deal with bitcoin and the like.

Still, Israels regulators are generally opposed to giving credence to virtual currencies since they are based on private initiatives and they do not have the same level of investor confidence as regular currencies.

The anonymous nature of virtual currencies leads to the possibility that they may be used to launder money, finance crime, and so forth, Baudot-Trajenberg said.

Shlomit Wagman, head of Israels anti-money-laundering authority said a thorough investigation was needed since terrorist organisations use virtual currency platforms.

Last week, Israels markets regulator proposed regulations that would ban from trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange companies whose main business revolves around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
More than 300 people stormed the heavily fortified border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave Melilla in what authorities on Sunday called a mass violent crossing.

Some 209 migrants succeeded in reaching Spain in Saturdays incident.

Spains two North African enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, are a common target for entry into the European Union by migrants who try to climb the border fences or enter the territories by sea.

One Civil Guard police officer was injured in an attack by a migrant, the Spanish government said.

Four of the migrants who reached Spain received treatment for injuries sustained during the crossing.
At least 56 people went missing after a shipwreck near the Italian island of Sicily, the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) non-governmental organization said on Monday, according to Sputnik.

"According to our medical teams in the port of #Catania #Sicily, at least 56 #people are missing after the first terrible shipwreck of 2018. Among them there were many children who are believed to have drowned at sea," the MSF said on its Twitter page.

The organization added that its psychologists had talked to 14 people, who survived the shipwreck.

"Our psychologists in #Sicily have talked with 14 people who have lost at least 1 family member or a friend to the sea. Among the survivors, was a 3 year old child who has lost her mother and arrived alone and a family of 11 now a family of 3," the MSF added.

The Mediterranean Sea remains a key transition route for migrants and refugees fleeing war and poverty in North African and Middle East countries. In 2017, about 120,000 people arrived in Italy through the Mediterranean route while 2,832 migrants died during the journey, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) figures.
Airbus is set to boost production of narrowbody jets in China as it nears a new multi-billion-dollar deal to supply the worlds fastest-growing aviation market during a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron, industry sources said, Reuters reported.

The deal is expected to be unveiled together with a package of agreements coinciding with the French leaders visit, and could include orders for around 100 jetliners, they added.

The final number of jets to be sold has not been determined. China is also said to be shopping for larger jets like the A330.

Airbus declined comment on Monday.

Airbus and its US rival Boeing (BA.N) compete for large-scale orders in China and such package deals are typically rolled out during major diplomatic events, but not without last-minute negotiations on the quantity and price of jets.

Boeing announced a deal for 300 aircraft during a visit to China by President Donald Trump in November.

About one in every four planes that Airbus produces is delivered to China, but fewer than 8 percent are assembled at its Tianjin facility outside Beijing - one of four A320 assembly plants including two in Europe and one in the United States.

Airbus is likely as part of any new airplane order to agree to lift the number of aircraft assembled in Tianjin from the current level of around 50 a year, the sources said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

The Istanbul police confiscated 500 kilograms of drugs, the police said in a message Jan. 8.

Heroin accounted for 150 kilograms of the total confiscated drugs, according to the message.

Three drug traffickers were also detained in a special operation.

The minimum age of Turkish citizens who start using drugs is 13, the average age is 36, and the highest age is 65. Thus, 2.9 percent of the country's population account for drug addicts aged 15-24, 2.8 percent - drug addicts aged 25-44, 2.3 percent - drug addicts aged 45-64.

Some 18 percent of the people arrested in the country in 2016 were for drug dealers.

More than 300,000 people have been detained in Istanbul for using and selling drugs over the past four years.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 8

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

State of emergency will be extended for three more months in Turkey, the Turkish media quoted Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying Jan. 8.

Bozdag added that the decision, made by the Turkish government, will come into force soon.

On July 15, 2016, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country. Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them. However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.

The death toll as a result of the coup attempt stood at 250 people, and more than 2,000 people were wounded.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Police have rounded up at least seven people in anti-narcotics raids across Turkey, officials said Monday, Anadolu reported.

A total of 49 kilograms of heroin was seized in eastern Hakkari province during arrests held across the province between Jan. 1-8, the provinces governorship said in a statement on Monday.

One suspect was remanded in custody, the statement added.

In northwestern Sakarya province, anti-narcotics teams seized 13 kilograms of heroin and around seven grams of marijuana in a car, police sources said.

In another bust in southern Mersin province police held two suspects, Mersin Gendarme command said.

The arrest came after security teams raided a house in Mersin's Erdemli district after a tip-off.

One kilogram of powdered marijuana was seized in the raid and the suspects were remanded in custody, the statement added.

In western Afyonkarahisar province, gendarme forces seized nearly 300 pills in a vehicle arresting two suspects.
TipRanks

2022 has undoubtedly been a rough one for investors. Even accounting for the recent gains, all the major indexes are still down for the year and the backdrop of economic uncertainty still hovers menacingly. Such an environment makes it difficult to find the stocks which are primed to charge ahead, but one way to sort the wheat from the chaff is to follow in the footsteps of legendary stock pickers. And few are as well-versed in the investing game as billionaire Steve Cohen. Famous for his high-r
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) The commerce and industry ministry is awaiting a concrete proposal from iPhone maker Apple to set up manufacturing unit in India, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu said today.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from Apple...Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu told reporters here.

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During a recent meeting with Apple officials, the minister has asked them for a proposal.

Nick Amman, Director, Government Affairs and Priya Balasubramaniam, Global Vice President, Operations, Apple Inc met the minister last Friday.

The Cupertino-based iPad manufacturer Apple has asked for certain concessions for setting up manufacturing unit in the country.

The government had sought investment and job creation details from the iPhone maker to facilitate setting up its manufacturing facility in India.

In March, the then Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had informed the Rajya Sabha that the government has not accepted most of the demands of the company.

Apple India had sought concessions, including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for smartphone manufacturing and service/repair for a period of 15 years.

The company also wants relaxation in the mandated 30 per cent local sourcing of components, besides reduction in customs duties on completely-knocked-down and semi-knocked- down units of devices that are to be assembled in the country.

Apple does not manufacture devices on its own but gets the job done through contract manufacturers. It sells its products through company-owned retail stores in countries like China, Germany, the US, the UK and France, among others.

It has no wholly-owned store in India and sells its products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro. PTI RR BAL

--- ENDS ---
As we stepped into 2018, all our attention shifted to what are likely to be hot investments this year. Investors must be searching for best picks in every asset class. This is especially true given that 2017 has been piping hot for stocks thanks to Trump trade and a pickup in the economy. So, a fear for overvaluation is understandable.

Against this backdrop, we evaluate the pros and cons and highlight what could be the best sector ETFs for this year (read: 8 ETF Predictions for 2018).

Biotech

An analyst, examining bull markets over the past 50 years, concluded that technology outperforms in the late stages of a bull market. However, with the technology sector riding high in the last one year (up 33.8% in the last one year), the sector boasts overvaluation (read: Value Biotech ETFs to Buy Now).

As a result, investors can take a look at biotech stocks and ETFs for 2018. Ebbing tensions over the price gouging issue, hopes of easing regulation, positive clinical trials, FDA approvals of drugs and success in the immune-oncology field should spur a rally.

Investors can take a look at SPDR S&P Biotech ETF XBI which has a Zacks ETF Rank #2 (Buy) with a High-risk outlook and a P/E of 17.76x. The P/E of XBI is lower than the P/E (19.92x) of SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY.

Energy

According to the analyst referred to above, the Energy sector also outperforms in the late stages of a bull market. Now, oil prices have made a sharp comeback to close out the year 2017, though the whole year was not so smooth. West Texas Intermediate futures jumped over $60 a barrel in late December for the first time since 2015. United States Oil USO and United States Brent Oil Fund BNO gained about 8.8% and 21.6% in the last one year (as of Jan 5, 2018).

The constant oil price volatility hurt energy ETFs like VanEck Vectors Oil Services ETF OIH in the last one year. However, the funds can gain strength ahead. As per Goldman Sachs analyst, thanks to the shale oil revolution, producers outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries can easily ramp up production when prices are $60 to $65.

Story continues

Added to this, the Interior Department announced last week that it wants to permit drilling in about all U.S. waters, the single largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever planned by the federal government. All these moves and possibilities better position funds like OIH in 2018. The fund gained about 7% in the last five days (as of Jan 5, 2018) while it lost about 19.4% in the last one year (read: 3 ETF Losers of 2017 That Can Rebound in Q1).

Materials

U.S. tax cuts, upbeat global growth and the resultant strong international demand plus the likely beefing-up of infrastructure spending by the government should lead to higher demand related to industrial production, which in turn feeds into seasonal strength in the material sector. Higher activity is in the offing the United States this year as the economy took momentum. This makes Materials Select Sector SPDR ETF XLB our pick for 2018 (read: ETFs to Buy as U.S. Manufacturing Hits 13-Year High).

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* Australia gov't sees iron ore price drop

* Cites shrinking China stee sector

* LNG exports on the rise (Adds iron ore price milestone, UBS, Citi forecasts)

By James Regan

SYDNEY, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Australia on Monday said it expects iron ore prices to average $51.50 a tonne this year, down 20 percent from 2017, because of rising global supply and moderating demand from top importer China as its steel sector shrinks.

The government projection is out of step with some private forecasts, with UBS and Citi calling for iron ore prices to average around $64 a tonne in 2018 - flat on 2017's $64.30 - with the market proving suprisingly resilient.

Spot iron ore, currently around $75 a tonne , last traded below $52 in June 2017, but Department of Industry, Innovation and Science resource and energy analyst David Thurtell pointed to an expected contraction in China's steel industry.

"We're still comfortable with where our forecast sits," he said.

The world's top three mining companies, BHP and Vale rely heavily on iron ore sales for the bulk of their revenue despite efforts to diversify more into other industrial raw materials, such as copper, aluminium and coal.

Brazil-based Vale is planning to lift iron ore exports 7 percent in 2018 to 390 million tonnes. In Australia, Rio Tinto and BHP, along with Fortescue Metals Group aim to add about 170 million tonnes of new capacity over the next several years.

The forecast price decline will continue into 2019, when the steelmaking raw material will average only $49 a tonne, the department said in its latest commodities outlook paper.

"The iron ore price is expected to experience some ongoing volatility in early 2018, as the market responds to uncertainty regarding the impact of winter production restrictions on iron ore demand," it warned.

The lower prices will reflect growing supply from low-cost producers and moderating demand from China, it said.

China is in the process of closing ageing, high-polluting steel mills and induction furnaces to curb overcapacity in the sector.

Story continues

China's President Xi Jinping said in October that fighting pollution was one of the country's key tasks through 2020.

Australia's liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports are forecast to climb to 76.5 million tonnes in the year to end-June 2019, from 63 million tonnes forecast for the 2017/18 fiscal year and 52 million tonnes last year.

Between 2016/17 and 2018/19, LNG should add A$14 billion ($11 billion) to Australia's export earnings, while iron ore is forecast to subtract A$10 billion, according to the department.

The shift follows the construction of $180 billion of new gas projects. The rise in LNG earnings will be underpinned as three remaining projects under construction hit their stride, it said. These are Chevron Corp's Wheatstone project, Inpex Corp's Ichthys and Royal Dutch Shell's Prelude.

Prices for coking coal, another key steel-making ingredient, are forecast by the department to drift lower over the next eighteen months from last quarter's benchmark price of $192 a tonne as rising supply more than offsets demand.

It also expects thermal coal prices to ease through 2018 and early 2019, with the Newcastle spot price forecast to drop 12 percent to an average $77 a tonne in 2018, and by a further 6 percent to $70 in 2019. ($1 = 1.2719 Australian dollars) (Reporting by James Regan; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Richard Pullin)
From Tyler Durden: In retrospect, the launch of bitcoin futures one month ago has proven to be a modestly disappointing event.

While it helped send the price of bitcoin soaring as traders braced for the institutionalization of bitcoin, the worlds most popular cryptocurrency has stagnated since the beginning of December when first the Cboe then CME started trading bitcoin futures, trading in a range between $12,000 and $17,000.

And while bitcoin futures markets volumes have been lower than most had expected, the past 4 weeks have provided enough data to observe how volumes and open interest have evolved.

We discussed previously that Bitcoin futures were off to a slow start in the first week of trading, with volumes of CBOE Bitcoin futures averaging just around $40MM per day, despite intense media hype helping fuel heavy trading when both contracts launched, at least in the first hours of trading.

Since then, volumes spike briefly in the following week coinciding with the launch of the CME futures, with volumes of on both exchanges at relatively similar levels.

Then, as JPMs Nikolaos Panagirtzoglou shows, after a spike in volumes to around $200mn on 22 December, which saw sharp swings in underlying Bitcoin prices, volumes have averaged around $50mn and $60mn per day on the CBOE and CME futures, respectively.

sdf

One month after their launch, futures trading volumes remain very modest compared to average Bitcoin trading volumes of around $15bn per day since futures contracts were launched according to coinmarketcap.com data. While open interest in both the CBOE and CME contracts has risen steadily, it too remains rather modest at around $60mn and $70mn, respectively.

Putting futures volumes in context, on Friday, the combined size of the bitcoin-futures markets at the two exchanges was roughly $150 million, measured in terms of the value of outstanding contracts, while the total value of all bitcoins in existence was around $290 billion.

Story continues

asd

Another factor behind the slow volume growth may be the reluctance of many Wall Street banks to touch bitcoin futures. Firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch havent offered their clients access to bitcoin futures.

Another notable observation: with both volumes and open interest between the two sets of futures contracts converging, it suggests that a large degree of arbitraging of price differentials has taken place between the contracts which initially showed significant divergence. As JPM further notes, when trading in the CBOE futures initially started, a striking feature was the wide basis between the futures contract and the underlying bitcoin prices, which intraday exceeded $2000 or more than 12% of the underlying price at the time. While traders provided numerous explanation for the spread, since then the difference between futures prices on both the CBOE and CME contracts and underlying bitcoin prices has narrowed significantly (chart below), and even turned negative briefly last week.

asd

That covers bitcoin futures volumes, but what about positioning? Well, as many traders expected, it appears that institutions are using the futures product to slowly but surely build a short position in bitcoin. According to the CFTC Commitment of Traders report (available CBOE futures), non-commercial traders held a net short position of around $30mn as of Tuesday Dec 26, or around half of the total open interest.

Separately, the Traders in Financial Futures breakdown provided by the CFTC show that the leveraged funds category that consists largely of hedge funds and various money managers had a short of around $14mn, or around a quarter of the total open interest.

In other words, spec investors have used the futures contracts to establish Bitcoin shorts.

How does this compare with other asset classes typically used as a store of wealth such as gold and silver? As JPMorgan explains, for gold futures, non-commercial investors held as of Dec 26 a net long position of around 30% of open interest, of which the managed money category held around 80%, while in silver futures both the non-commercial and managed money categories were close to zero.

asd

* * *

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal confirms that while hedge funds and other large traders are betting that bitcoin will fall, small investors remain convinced that bitcoin prices will keep on rising.

As the WSJ reports, for traders who hold fewer than 25 of Cboes bitcoin futures contractsa category that likely encompasses many retail investorsbullish bets are 3.6 times more common than bearish ones, according to the latest Commodity Futures Trading Commission data that cover trading through Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the big CBOE players in bitcoin futures tend to be short. For instance, among other reportableslarge trading firms that dont necessarily manage money for outside investorsshort bets outweighed bullish long bets by a factor of 2.6 last week.

asd

The historical data will probably not come as a big surprise: many skeptics on Wall Street have called bitcoin a bubble and would be more apt to bet on its decline. In a sign of how more conservative firms are keeping their distance, the CFTC data show near-zero trading in Cboes bitcoin futures by banks and asset managers.

There is probably more optimism in the retail segment than there is in the institutional segment, said Steven Sanders, an executive vice president at Interactive Brokers Group Inc., an electronic brokerage firm that offers its customers access to bitcoin futures.

And sure enough, presenting JPMs data in a slightly different context, COT data shows that hedge funds and other money managers had placed almost 40% more short bets than long bets last week.

Curiously, it is worth noting that that represented a less bearish outlook than they had in late December, when such funds had more than four times as many short bets as long bets.

To be sure, shorting bitcoin futures doesnt necessarily mean a trader expects bitcoin to crash. In a natural hedge, a cryptocurrency trading firm with significant holdings of bitcoin might go short to hedge those inventories against a price fall. That would make the firm indifferent as to whether bitcoin goes up or down.

As the WSJ further notes, shorting futs could also be part of certain sophisticated trading strategies, such as betting that rival cryptocurrencies will outperform bitcoin. One such rival, Ethereum, rose above $1,000 for the first time last week, more than double its value from the beginning of December.

With the CFTC data, youre not seeing the full picture, said James Koutoulas, chief executive of hedge-fund firm Typhon Capital Management, which trades futures in bitcoin as well as commodities. Typhon has swung back and forth, being long and short bitcoin futures at various times, Mr. Koutoulas said.

Of course, its not just bitcoin.

As JPM writes, any given cryptocurrency faces competition from other cryptocurrencies, posing risks to their individual valuations. Indeed, the market capitalisation of Bitcoin has risen by around $100bn to around $270bn since late November, while other cryptocurrencies have seen a significant increase in market cap from around $130bn to nearly $500bn currently.

sdf

Other cryptocurrencies  mostly ethereum and ripple  have benefited from the increased interest in Bitcoin amid the listing of exchange traded futures, as well as the sharp rise in Bitcoin average transaction costs from around $6 per transaction in early December to nearly $60 per transaction on Dec 22, before settling in a $25-$30 range in recent days.

sdf

By contrast, average transaction fees in Ethereum reached a high of $1.50 in early December and were around $1 on Jan 4, while average transaction fees in Ripple measure a few cents according to bitinfocharts.com. The one-third share of Bitcoin of the total cryptocurrency market cap of around $770bn represents a new low. In contrast, the market of $770bn for the total cryptocurrency market represents a new high.

* * *

And while we await futures contracts to be announced on other cryptos, most likely ethereum and ripple next, events which we believe will be catalysts for substantial price upside in both cryptocurrencies, the question for bitcoin is who will be right: institutions, who are short, or retail investors (especially those in Japan and South Korea) who remain fervently long. If the past 7 years  in which retail has consistently trounced smart money returns are any indication, bitcoin is about to soar as yet another major short squeeze develops in the coming weeks and months.

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FRANKFURT, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Cerberus Chief Executive Stephen Feinberg has told the German government that he is not interested in a merger of Deutsche Bank and smaller rival Commerzbank, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Monday, citing several people familiar with the matter.

Cerberus holds 3 percent of shares in Deutsche Bank and 5 percent in Commerzbank, which has fuelled speculation that the U.S. buyout fund could push for a merger of the two banks.

But according to Handelsblatt, Feinberg said in meetings in mid-December with senior representatives at Germany's chancellery, the Finance Ministry and regulators that Germany's economy had room for two big private banks.

He also said that he saw much potential for Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank to improve their efficiency and productivity and reduce complexities, according to the newspaper.

Cerberus was not immediately available to comment.

Deutsche Bank on Friday said it would report its third consecutive annual loss for 2017, defying its chief executive's expectations of a swing to profit and highlighting the difficulty of overhauling Germany's largest lender.

Shares in Deutsche Bank were down 1.2 percent at 15.30 euros by 0823 GMT, while Commerzbank was 0.7 percent lower at 12.57 euros, putting the two banks among the biggest decliners in Germany's blue-chip DAX index in early trade. (Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Additional reporting by Arno Schuetze. Editing by Jane Merriman)
Shares of several trendy cryptocurrency proxy stocks--including Riot Blockchain (RIOT), LongFin (LFIN), and the Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC)--dropped sharply on Monday morning, despite gains throughout the broader technology market.

Shares of several trendy cryptocurrency proxy stocksincluding Riot Blockchain RIOT, LongFin, and the Bitcoin Investment Trust GBTCdropped sharply on Monday morning, despite gains throughout the broader technology market.

Todays slump in crypto stocks comes alongside noteworthy declines in several on the worlds most popular cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has dropped more than 12% over the last 24 hours, while Litecoin has tumbled more than 13% and Dash has plummeted nearly 17%.

Ripple, a rapidly growing crypto that is controlled by a San Francisco-based startup, has lost more than 15% of its value within the past day (also read: What Investors Need to Know About Ripple, Bitcoin's Cryptocurrency Rival).

Mondays volatility is nothing new for these booming cryptocurrencies, which frequently witness sudden gains and drops. Not all of these moves can be traced back to specific news, but recent concerns about regulation and demand in Asia do seem to be dragging cryptos down today.

According to several reports, China is planning to limit power use by some bitcoin miners, and South Korean is gearing up to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges and possibly institute a capital gains tax on crypto trading.

The fuss about regulators tightening screws in South Korea is pushing the price of bitcoin, Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at TF Global Markets in London, told Bloomberg. This and the Chinese news is going to bring a blip in the price.

For trendy stocks like Riot, Longfin, and GBTC, volatility in the crypto market causes volatility in their own valuations. Shares of Riot were down more than 5% on Monday morning, Longfin dropped more than 7%, and GBTC fell about 8%.

These stocks are still up significantly over the past three months, but their unprecedented runs have now been replaced by massive day-to-day price swings. GBTC, which operates as a bitcoin holding fund and once regularly traded at a 100% premium to its bitcoin-per-share value, has now dropped nearly 40% from the highs it reached in mid-December.

Story continues

Elsewhere, both Riot and Longfin are prime example of small-cap companies that have benefitted from adding blockchain technology to their business models. Just a few months ago, Riot was a dying biotech diagnostics equipment firm, while Longfin exploded after acquiring Ziddu.com, a blockchain research company working on decentralized solutions for lending and financing.

This trend has left many investors scratching their heads, but for those focused on the short-term trading of cryptocurrencies and related stocks, Mondays movement is all in a days work.

Want more stock market analysis from this author? Make sure to follow @Ryan_McQueeney on Twitter!

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Andrew Cuomo

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo gives his 2018 State of the State address. Photo Credit: The Associate Press/Hans Pennink[/caption] Gov. Andrew Cuomos plan to sue the federal government over the recently enacted tax bill on grounds that it violates constitutional principles would face significant challenges, legal experts say. Last week, Cuomo, a Democrat, laid out a litigious agenda for the year arguing that the federal government was punishing blue states, such as New York, with its recently passed tax overhaul legislation. During his annual address to the state Legislature, Cuomo said his administration believed that the GOP tax plan signed by President Donald Trump in December was illegal and that the state would challenge it in court as unconstitutional. Law experts queried by the New York Law Journal doubted the likelihood of success of such a legal challenge, but on Monday the Cuomo administration's top counsel said the governor's office is considering "a variety of legal claims" against the federal government in connection with the tax bill. Darien Shanske, a University of California, Davis tax law professor, said Cuomos plan to sue the federal government over the tax overhaul is not particularly likely to succeed in court, especially since the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, allows Congress to collect taxes on incomes. For the federalism claim, because the definition of income is broad and its up to Congress to define it ... Congress can make rational distinctions if it wants to, Shanske said. The tax plan Trump signed in December caps a deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000the deduction was previously unlimitedwhich will increase the federal tax liability for many homeowners in high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey. The tax plan is violative of states rights and the principle of equal protection, the Democratic governor alleged last week. But if Congress wants to take away the deductibility of state and local taxes, its entitled to, because the arguments for doing so certainly survive the rational basis review, Shanske said in an interview. Thomas Brennan, a tax professor at Harvard Law School, said Cuomos plan to sue the federal government over the tax plan would be difficult. My own thought is it would be a challenging thing to challenge this law on constitutionality, at least the SALT (state and local taxes) restriction, Brennan said of the proposed Cuomo administration lawsuit. I imagine the strategy would be to argue about an infringement on states' rights of some sort. Similar to Shanskes argument, Brennan also noted that deductions are considered to be a matter of legislative grace by Congress, and Congress is entitled to collect taxes on income under the 16th Amendment. But on Monday, the Governors top counsel, Alphonso David, said in a statement to the New York Law Journal that the administration is exploring several avenues to pursue a lawsuit . New York is exploring a variety of legal claims in response to the divisive federal SALT law. The elimination of the state and local tax deduction targets certain states and impinges on the ability of those states to provide the government chosen by their own citizens. The practical and intended impact of this law is to impose a disadvantage on blue states, which are governed by Democratic governors, notwithstanding any purported legitimate justification. Courts have historically conducted a searching and careful inquiry and rejected government action in the past that inappropriately targets a class of people and this should be no different, David said. The office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said it is working with the Cuomo administration on a legal response. In response to the federal tax bill, Cuomo signed an executive order late last month allowing New Yorkers to prepay their property taxes before Jan. 1, 2018. But the federal IRS issued an advisory on Dec. 28 that a "prepayment of anticipated real property taxes that have not been assessed prior to 2018 are not deductible in 2017, " and that "state or local law determines whether and when a property tax is assessed, which is generally when the taxpayer becomes liable for the property tax imposed." The IRS ruling limits the number of taxpayers who could take advantage of prepaying 2018 taxes, a one-off fix in any case. The Democratic governor also said last week that he would soon announce a major shift in the state tax code that could restructure the current income and payroll tax system." Details on his tax plan are slated to be released later this month. A proposed plan to impose a payroll tax on employers, which is still legally deductible on federal taxes, appears to have the approval of members of his own party. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who leads the Democratic-dominated Assembly, said last week that converting the states income tax into a payroll tax makes a lot of sense. Were very encouraged by the payroll tax idea because then that would restore what Washington has taken from us, said Heastie, D-Bronx. But talking to reporters Monday, Heastie tempered his remarks saying hes in favor of investigating the payroll tax. I know its going to have challenges, the Bronx Democrat said. Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan, a Republican from Long Island, said he didnt know the details of Cuomos plan. My initial reaction is, we dont want to talk about anything that relates to raising taxes, Flanagan said last week. While suing the federal government over the tax bill seems feasible, Cuomos plan to change the tax structure is much more promising, Shanske said. The state of New York is entitled to raise revenue, within constitutional bounds, the way it wants to, as long as it does not violate the federal Constitution, Shanske said. This story has been updated with comment from Gov. Cuomo's office and Assembly Speaker Heastie received Monday afternoon.
Not only Noida, there are several places that politicians avoid visiting. Each one has its own jinx that creates fear of loss among powerful politicians.

By Prabhash K Dutta: Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has given a new currency to superstition attached with Noida.

Commenting on recent Noida visit by UP CM Yogi Adityanath and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Akhilesh Yadav said, "We are to witness the outcome of visiting Noida. And, this time that both of them have been to Noida. We will see the outcome."

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The jinx developed roots after Vir Bahadur Singh and ND Tiwari lost their chief ministership within months of visiting Noida in the late 1980s. Rajnath Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav never visited Noida as UP chief minister. Mayawati tried to break the jinx but lost the 2012 Assembly election.

As UP CM, Akhilesh Yadav never acknowledged that he believed in the Noida jinx but yesterday the same superstitious belief rekindled his hope of political revival in Uttar Pradesh. Such superstitions are not only attached with Noida rather there are many places where powerful politicians don't even dare to go.

ASHOKNAGAR IN MADHYA PRADESH

On December 25 when Yogi and Modi visited Noida for the inauguration of the Magenta Line of the Delhi Metro, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that he would soon visit Ashoknagar district headquarters.

Ashoknagar district headquarters carries the same jinx as Noida. Myth has it that if a Madhya Pradesh chief minister visits this ancient town - that draws its name from Maurya emperor Ashoka - under Guna Lok Sabha constituency, then he loses the chair.

The myth took ground in the 1970s after Prakash Chand Sethi was removed as chief minister in 1975 and Shyama Charan Shukla in 1977 soon after visiting Ashoknagar district headquarters. The pattern followed thereafter when Arjun Singh lost his chair in 1984, Sundarlal Patwa in 1993 and Digvijaya Singh in 2003.

ICHHAWAR IN MP

Ichhawar is another place in Madhya Pradesh,which Chief Minister Chouhan has not visited during his 12-year tenure. Interestingly, Ichhawar is located in his home district Sehore.

Recently Congress MLA Shailendra Patel raised this issue in MP Assembly saying that CM Chouhan did not visit Ichhawar due to his superstitious belief of losing power.

But there is a history. Kailash Nath Katju lost his CM chair in 1962 after visiting Ichhawar followed by Dwarka Prasad Mishra in 1967, Kailash Joshi in 1977, Virendra Kumar Saklecha in 1979 and Digvijaya Singh in 2003.

Irony is that Digvijaya Singh toured Ichhawar in November 2003 and said that he visited the place in order to break the myth. But, he soon lost power and the jinx continued.

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UJJAIN HAS ITS OWN

Temple town Ujjain is famous for its Mahakaleshwar temple but it is equally feared by the chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and members of erstwhile princely family of Scindia.

Madhya Pradesh chief ministers and the royal family members don't spend the night in Ujjain. Even Shivraj Singh Chouhan has maintained the practice. He has visited the temple town and offered prayers but returned to Bhopal before night falls.

The belief is that Mahakal or Lord Shiva is the king of Ujjain and another ruler (CM or members of royal family) can't stay during the night in the city. If they do so, something bad will happen to them, goes the myth.

Similar myth prevails in the Kadamgiri Hill in Madhya Pradesh. Politicians avoid flying over the Kadamgiri Hill fearing divine wrath. It is believed that during his exile, Lord Rama stayed here for some time and if someone flies over it in a helicopter, it will meet an unfortunate fate.

BRIHADESHWAR TEMPLE OF TAMIL NADU

Brihadeshwar temple of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu is also not a favourite with politicians. It is believed that if a VIP enters the temple through the main entrance, called Keralanthan Gate, he would lose power, fall ill or even meet a fatal accident.

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The superstition gained currency in 1984 when the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the then Tamil Nadu CM MG Ramachandran suffered a major stroke. Both had recently entered the temple through main gate.

No VIP politician has entered the temple from the main gate since then. Even self-proclaimed rationalist M Karunanidhi entered the temple through side entrance as Tamil Nadu chief minister in 1997, when 45 people were killed in a fire in the temple premises.

ALSO WATCH | Modi with Adityanath in Noida for Delhi Metro's Magenta line's inauguration

--- ENDS ---
The Trump administration faces a deadline Monday to decide whether to renew a program granting temporary immigration status to over 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador.

The Department of Homeland Security is expected to end the relief program, which granted temporary immigration status to people who came to the United States after earthquakes devastated El Salvador in 2001. The administration already ended similar relief programs for immigrants from Haiti and Nicaragua.

Vicki Rosenthal and others protest in front of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Broward county to urge the Department of Homeland Security to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants on May 21, 2017 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

We have thousands of residents from El Salvador who have lived here legally for years  residents who contribute to our economy, attend our schools and universities, and help us build safer, stronger neighborhoods, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser wrote in a letter to Trump advocating for the renewal of the program, which affects 30,000 immigrants in D.C. Ending TPS for El Salvador will have devastating impacts by tearing families apart.

Ending TPS for El Salvador will have devastating impacts by tearing families apart. These petitions reaffirm our #DCValues, and we will continue fighting for our neighbors. See my full statement: https://t.co/lK43LaIqcb #SaveTPS pic.twitter.com/AXZO1aExMH  Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) January 8, 2018

Meanwhile, Rep. Jimmy Panetta of D.C. took to Twitter to talk about a press conference he held on Friday to urge Trump to #SaveTPS, saying without the 200,000 refugees to whom it grants legal status, the U.S. would lose billions from its GDP.

.@realDonaldTrump, tomorrow is the deadline to extend #TPS for 200k Salvadorans. They own businesses & homes and pay taxes. W/o them, US would lose billions from GDP, Social Sec & Medicare, and employers would pay millions in turnover costs. We are all relying on you to #SaveTPS  Rep. Jimmy Panetta (@RepJimmyPanetta) January 8, 2018

Many of the Salvadorans affected by the decision have been in the United States since 2001 or earlier. The 2001 earthquakes killed more than 1,000 people, and El Salvador continues to struggle with lingering effects.

The Obama administration renewed Salvadorans protected status in September 2016, but the program can only be renewed in 18-month increments.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said she objects to short-term extensions.

Getting them to a permanent solution is a much better plan than having them live six months, to 12 months to 18 months, she told the Associated Press.

The Trump administration in 2017 ended the protected status for 60,000 Haitian immigrants who came to the United States after Haitis 2010 earthquake and 2,500 Nicaraguan immigrants given protection after a 1998 hurricane. The decision on Salvadorans status affects the largest group of TPS-holders so far.

The deadline arrives while the White House is negotiating with Congress over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

This is my family. they are part of the 200,000+ Salvadorans who will be affected by the decision to end TPS, if its executed, one Twitter user said. Without my family, I dont know how me and my siblings and cousins would survive.
(Adds quote, details, background)

AMSTERDAM, Jan 8 (Reuters) - The Dutch minister for the economy said on Monday that output at the large Groningen gas field should be reduced "by as much as possible" during the current government term through 2021.

Eric Wiebes made the comment following a magnitude 3.4 tremor earlier on Monday that was the largest in recent years.

Dozens of earthquakes every year, resulting from decades of gas extraction, have caused damage to thousands of buildings and homes and prompted a dramatic shift in government policy now aimed at capping output.

The new coalition government under Prime Minister Mark Rutte has already agreed to reduce output to around 20 billion cubic metres (bcm) from a current 21.6 bcm, Wiebes was quoted by the ANP news agency as saying in a reaction to Monday's quake.

"I will try to reduce by as much as possible," he said. "Whatever it takes, we have to bring down gas production. The Netherlands has to stop using natural gas."

Amid an ongoing legal battle, the government had proposed last year capping production at the Groningen gas field at 21.6 bcm per year for five years, after a 2015 report found production was risking lives.

That reduction, the justification for which is currently under a legal review, would be down from 24 bcm in the production year just ended and 39.4 bcm in 2015-16.

The NAM joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil operates the Groningen field. (Reporting by Anthony Deutsch, editing by David Evans)
James Damore

YouTube/Joe Rogan Experience

The Google engineer who was fired last summer for posting a manifesto about women being less interested in tech because of biology is suing Google.

The engineer alleges that he was the subject of discrimination for his political viewpoints as well as his race and gender.

His lawyer is seeking class-action status and wants to represent anyone who believes Google discriminated against them for being white or male or conservative.

Another white, male engineer is also part of the lawsuit. He was fired for making public comments that resulted in his coworkers reporting him to HR.



James Damore, the engineer that Google fired in August for writing a memo suggesting women are less interested in tech because of their biology, has filed a lawsuit against Google.

Damore's lawyer is alleging that conservatives are discriminated against at Google and that Damore's firing was retribution against him for his political views. The suit was filed in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California.

Political affiliation is a protected class in many states.

But the lawsuit is seeking class action status and wants to represent more than just this one class, Damore's lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, a partner with the Dhillon Law Group in San Francisco, told Business Insider. It is seeking to represent everyone who feels Google discriminated against them for being white, or for being male, or for being conservative.

"Googles open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law. Googles management goes to extreme  and illegal  lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google," the lawsuit alleges.

Story continues

Dhillon and her law team have been out canvassing for people to join as plaintiffs against the class-action suit. So far, another Google engineer named David Gudeman, who left in December, 2016, is also a plaintiff, reports TechCrunch.

To recap: Damore's memo caused a firestorm for implying that biology was one reason for the lack of women in tech. Damore also argued that it was a lack of tolerance of diverse political viewpoints that needed to change.

After he was fired, he became a cult hero of the political right. His lawyer, Dhillon, is the former chairwoman of the Republican Party in San Francisco.

He threatened to sue, filed a complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing, and that agency investigated and issued him a "right to sue" letter. That doesn't mean he'll win the case. But it is the first step before litigation can proceed.

Google plans to fight back. A spokesperson tells us, "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."

Likewise, in 2015 Gudeman was reprimanded by Google HR after he posted comments to a document being shared internally at Google. The document was about "derailing," the lawsuit says. That involves how to deal with a conversation that goes off the rails.

Gudeman's comments expressed opinions that white men are the "victims of a racist and sexist political movement." He also compared the document to one slave owners would have written for their slaves to help them understand how to interact with their masters, the lawsuit says.

He was fired in 2016 after he posted comments questioning a Muslim co-worker's recent travel and another employee reported him to HR alleging he was creating "conspiracy theories" about the coworker.

NOW WATCH: The best phones of 2017 that you can buy right now

See Also:

SEE ALSO:
European markets closed higher on Monday afternoon, following a firm lead by U.S. stocks in the previous session and as Germany looks closer to forming a new government. The pan-European Stoxx 600 (STOXX:.STOXX) closed 0.27 percent higher after hitting its highest level since August 2015 in the morning. But of the major European bourses, the U.K. FTSE ended the day in the red, down 0.36 percent as U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May reshuffled her cabinet. Basic resources stocks led the gains, rallying over 1.5 percent by the end of Monday's trade. This follows news of trade deals between France and China. Airbus is trying to reach new deals with Beijing on the A380 as it works to get new customers. Efforts are part of a trade mission by President Emmanuel Macron during his first state visit to the Middle Kingdom. Meanwhile, autos closed 0.89 percent higher having hovered around the 1 percent figure throughout the day as investors grew confident on the prospects of the sector in 2018. Technology was the poorest performing sector, ending Monday's trade down 0.23 percent. Looking at individual stocks, Galapagos (Euronext Amsterdam: GLPG-NL) rose to near the top of European benchmark, up by about 4.5 percent after news of positive preliminary tests in an osteoarthritis study. Dialog Semiconductor (XETRA:DLG-DE) shares swung to the downside in afternoon trade, closing 0.8 percent lower despite having recovered some losses. In fact, the chipmaker had begun the day in positive territory after preliminary fourth-quarter sales numbers came in above expectations. Dialog's fortunes are dependent on the custom of technology giant Apple (AAPL), its largest client, who may be developing its own chips. On the other hand, Micro Focus (London Stock Exchange: MCRO-GB) was the worst performing stock on the index, trading nearly 17 percent lower after saying its pretax profit for the first half of its fiscal year was boosted by the acquisition of Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Meanwhile, shares of Mothercare (London Stock Exchange: MTC-GB) fell over 27 percent after the retailer issued a profit warning. More broadly, positive global sentiment continues to drive European stocks. On Friday, the Dow set a new record for the best start to a year since 2006. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sounded optimistic about reaching a deal with the Social Democrats and thus avoiding fresh elections. In the corporate world, Hershey (HRCR) and Ferrero are racing to buy Nestle (Swiss Exchange: NESN-CH)'s U.S. candy business. Across the pond, U.S. stocks fell as investors took a breather from the rally that kicked off in 2018. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped by 38 points, while the S&P 500 withdrew by 0.1 percent.



More From CNBC


The Google app logo is seen on a smartphone in this picture illustration taken September 15, 2017. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

By David Ingram

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A former Google engineer fired after he asserted in a memo that biological causes were behind tech industry gender inequality sued his former employer on Monday, saying he was discriminated against as a white man with conservative political views.

James Damore last year caused an uproar in Silicon Valley and beyond when he wrote the internal memo, which later became public. Google said he had perpetuated gender stereotypes and fired him in August.

In the months since, his firing has become a popular cause among right-leaning U.S. bloggers, and Damore hired a Republican Party official as his attorney.

Damore and another white male former Google engineer, David Gudeman, filed the lawsuit as a proposed class action in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California. The lawsuit alleges workplace discrimination and retaliation.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) based in Mountain View, California, said in a statement: "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."

According to the lawsuit, the company has failed to protect employees, especially white men, from workplace harassment related to their support of U.S. President Donald Trump or conservative political views.

"Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also accused Google of maintaining a secret blacklist of conservative media personalities who are not allowed inside the company's offices.

The lawsuit requested an injunction barring Google from discriminating against individuals with conservative political views, as well as for unspecified compensation.

Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said when Damore was fired that portions of his memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace."

Story continues

Gudeman was fired in December 2016 after a confrontation with a Muslim coworker on an internal Google forum, according to the lawsuit.

The coworker said on the forum that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had targeted him for being a Muslim, and he expressed worry about his personal safety, the lawsuit said. Gudeman responded with skepticism, saying the coworker had provided "zero evidence" for the claim and suggesting the FBI may have had justification.

A human resources employee later told Gudeman he had accused his coworker of terrorism based on religion, and that he was being fired as a result, the lawsuit said.

(Reporting by David Ingram; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Tom Brown)
You can absolutely expect a slew of new TVs at CES 2018.

More than 170,000 people are headed to Las Vegas, woefully unable to deal with the traffic theyll inflict, where theyll spend most of a week in a gadget-addled, marketing-soaked haze. Why? CES.

The convention formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show (anybody calling it the CES show is welcome to leave this article) functions as the gadget universes annual meeting. Exhibitors both brag about what theyve done over the past year and show off their hardware, apps and services that they plan to bring to market over the next year.

Heres what this years show is likely to bring.

TVs again  of course

The television business has spent the past several years trying to fix the problem it created by popularizing HDTV after its CES 1998 debut: How do you sell a new TV to somebody when high-def looks pretty great already?

3-D TV was not the answer, but UHD (Ultra High Definition, also called 4K for its nearly 4,000 pixels of horizontal resolution) has become HDs successor despite a continued relative lack of content. The past two years have seen UHD make a better case for itself by adding HDR, short for high dynamic range color and brightness.

So now what? Expect more boasting over whose HDR-enhanced colors are brighter, a continued battle for screen supremacy between LED-backlit LCDs and ultra-thin but expensive OLED sets, more integration of streaming-media services, and maybe hardware integrating over-the-air ATSC 3.0 tuners that can receive UHD broadcasts (and more-reliable HD broadcasts) over that just-finalized standard.

Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri walk into a bar

The big surprise of last years CES was how successful Amazon (AMZN) has been in getting random smart-home gadgets to operate with its Alexa personal-assistant app. Alexa and the lineup of Echo smart speakers that host her/it have become the default interface to the (sorry, buzzword) Internet of Things.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) has since done sufficiently well with its Google Home smart speakers  it announced Friday that its sold more than one of these devices each second since October  so we should see many bilingual IoT gadgets that can be controlled through either personal assistant.

Story continues

An LG robot at CES 2017. Well likely see more AI-powered devices form the likes of Google and Amazon at this years big show.

That leaves Apple (AAPL) somewhat behind, with its own HomePod Siri smart speaker delayed past the holidays. How threatened does Apple feel? Friday afternoon, a company rep sent an unsolicited pitch to check out the HomeKit-compatible gear on display at CES, something that Apple PR almost never does.

You wont, however, see Apple itself on the show floor. The company makes a point of not exhibiting at events it doesnt run.

Smarter, greener transportation

CES might not seem like the ideal place to hide an auto show, considering that the North American International Auto Show happens in Detroit the week after. But over the past decade, an increasing number of carmakers have set up shop in Las Vegas to tout their more tech-intensive vehicles. Think connected cars, self-driving cars, electric cars, or combinations of the above.

For example, Lyft will be offering rides in autonomous vehicles during the show. Spoiler alert: Between the line to get a seat in one of these vehicles and the usually-horrible CES traffic, it will probably be faster to walk or bike  especially if you can use one of the increasing variety of electrically-assisted e-bikes set to debut at the show.

A stage for tech policy

Because this show is put on by a trade group across the Potomac River from Washington, the Consumer Technology Association, CES always brings a large contingent of politicians who sometimes make news. Three years ago, at the show, then Federal Communications Commission Tom Wheeler announced in an onstage interview that he would support strong net-neutrality rules.

Im not sure what this is, but chances are there will be more at CES 2018.

Wheelers successor Ajit Pai was supposed to make his own appearance at CES 2018 but backed out last minute. Recodes Tony Romm reported that the FCC chairman had received enough death threats to be persuaded to cancel; an FCC spokesman declined to comment on security issues.

CES 2018 will still, however, feature plenty of policy banter on such issues as the rules of the road for self-driving cars, protecting privacy and smart cities.

People still buy computers

The last several years of CES have featured an increasing amount of exhibit space devoted to wearable gadgets of one sort or another  from activity-tracking smartwatches to the face-borne computers that are virtual-reality headsets  but the show remains the one big get-together for the non-Apple computer industry in the U.S.

Between Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 10 and Googles Chrome OS, manufacturers now have two good, touch-capable operating systems to craft machines around. The resulting crop of touchscreen, two-in-one devices that function as standard laptops or fold up for use as a tablet has no parallel in the Mac universe.

A CES constant: #fail

Because so much of the stuff on display at CES has yet to survive customer interactions, there are very good odds that a lot of it wont work. Some will fail during flashy/tacky onstage demos, others will never make it to market, and still more will hit stores and fail to find any buyers.

This show is supposed to send the message that tech companies know the products of the future and will soon have them on sale, but flops offer a more useful reminder: Sometimes, theyre just as confused as we are.

More from Rob:

Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
By India Today Web Desk: Bandgi Kalra is a household name today, thanks to her stint in the popular reality show, Bigg Boss 11. And it looks like Bollywood is ready to cash in on her newfound popularity. After taking the small screen by storm, Bandgi will soon make her big screen debut, if a report in Pinkvilla is to be believed.

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Apparently, she has been approached to play a pivotal role in a big film. "She will be playing a part in a film starring an A-lister. She plays a critical character in the movie," a source told the publication.

Rumour has it that Bandgi will play a radio jockey in the film, which is still in the pre-production stage. The film is expected to go on floors soon.

Bandgi was evicted from Bigg Boss 11 last month. During her stay, she made headlines for her closeness with fellow contestant Puneesh Sharma. In fact, their growing proximity drove a wedge between her and her boyfriend, Dennis Nagpal, who announced their break-up on Instagram. However, Bandgi maintained that her relationship with Dennis had ended before she entered the Bigg Boss house and called him a publicity seeker.

Talking about her life after Bigg Boss, Bandgi exclusively told IndiaToday.in that "every bit of it has changed, for better". She revealed that she gets mobbed but added, "You cannot say no to them, because they have supported you. But I like it."

ALSO WATCH: Puneesh Sharma and Bandgi Kalra's bathroom romance on Bigg Boss 11

--- ENDS ---
Pfizer announced it would no longer fund research into Alzheimer's and was closing labs in Andover and Cambridge - REUTERS

The search for a cure for Alzheimers disease suffered a heavy blow after Pfizer, the worlds largest drugs company, announced it was halting research efforts into finding new treatments.

The US based company is expected to cut 300 jobs globally.

It follows years of failed drugs trials for Alzheimers treatments which have cost the company dearly.

Dr James Pickett, Head of Research at the Alzheimers Society, said: Its disappointing to hear that Pfizer, one of the worlds leading pharmaceutical companies, will be terminating their research efforts in neuroscience, including Alzheimers disease drug discovery.

This will come as a heavy blow to the estimated 46.8 million people currently living with the condition across the globe.

However charities said there were still reasons to be hopeful that new treatments will found.

David Cameron committed Britain to finding a disease modifying treatment by 2025.

Pfizer will also stop looking for new treatments for Parkinsons disease however the company said the restructuring would not affect research into drugs for rare neurological diseases.

This was an exercise to reallocate spending across our portfolio, to focus on those areas where our pipeline, and our scientific expertise, is strongest, said a spokesman for the company.

Other big drugmakers, including AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly are still pushing ahead with Alzheimers treatments, although have also suffered expensive setbacks in recent years.

Charities have called on other drugs companies to continue funding research Credit: Pete Byrne PA

Dr Matthew Norton, Director of Policy at Alzheimers Research UK, said it was crucial for companies to continue to invest in new treatments.

We must continue to encourage companies to invest in research in dementia and neuroscience.

The UK is now a world leader in dementia research, and we hope that pharmaceutical companies will look at the long-term potential when deciding whether to participate in this effort.

It is vital that all of us  charities, government and industry alike  make long-term commitments to dementia research if we are to bring an end to the fear, harm and heartbreak of dementia.
Jan 8 (Reuters) - Magellan Midstream Partners LP said on Monday an estimated 300 barrels of gasoline leaked from its pipeline system that hauls fuel from Rosemount, Minnesota to Minneapolis

* The leak occurred in Eagan, Minnesota and was caused by third-party excavation equipment, the company said.

* Magellan said emergency responders are on site and a few business operations in the immediate area have been evacuated.

* Several roads have been temporarily closed. (Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
etihad plane

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Flight EY474 from Abu Dhabi to Jakarta diverted for a medical emergency.

Cleaners later found a dead newborn hidden in a drawer.

A 37-year-old woman, who was returning home after four years of domestic work in Abu Dhabi, was arrested upon returning to Indonesia.



A newborn child was found dead on an airplane over the weekend, wrapped in a plastic bag.

Cleaners made the gruesome discovery in a drawer inside a bathroom of an Etihad plane on Saturday night after it landed at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, Agence France-Presse reported.

The police have arrested a 37-year-old Indonesian woman, identified only as Hani, who they think secretly gave birth on the flight, EY474.

Hani had worked as a domestic helper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, for the past four years and has a husband and children in Cianjur, Indonesia.

According to Indonesian newspaper The Jakarta Post, Hani said the child was a result of a relationship with her employer in Abu Dhabi.

The woman began bleeding halfway through the flight, according to AFP, and the Airbus A330 she was traveling on had to divert at Bangkok so a medical team could evacuate her.

etihad abu dhabi jakarta diversion

Google Maps/Business Insider

A passenger, Francesco Calore, told AFP: "The woman was in economy class but then [the airline] laid on a business-class seat with an oxygen mask. The captain then announced we should divert to Bangkok."

It wasn't clear whether anybody on board the plane thought Hani was pregnant or had given birth.

Etihad's guidelines say expectant mothers need a medical certificate to fly in the last 10 weeks of their pregnancy and should not fly at all in the final four.

Hani returned to Indonesia early Sunday morning, the day after her original flight had arrived. She was arrested at Jakarta Airport.

Ahmad Yusef, Jakarta's police chief, told AFP the migrant worker "didn't look healthy."

The cause of the infant's death remains unknown.

Story continues

NOW WATCH: The 5 issues to consider before trading bitcoin futures

See Also:
The pharma and biotech industry will send billions of dollars back to the United States as a result of President Donald Trumps tax overhaul, Alexandria Real Estate (NYSE:ARE) Chairman Joel Marcus said on Monday.

In our particular niche, since we are in a very unique niche which has a high barrier to entries in these irreplaceable markets  The pharma and biotech industry will repatriate, thanks to the congressional approval, the presidents tax bill, over $150 billion of cash, Marcus told Maria Bartiromo on Mornings with Maria.

Congress passed the tax bill in December, creating the a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax systemthe largest in three decades. The legislation aims to create a more attractive environment for business by shifting to a territorial system and reducing the federal tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Marcus expects the cash surplus will go toward creating more jobs, commercial real estate expansion and continued mergers and acquisition (M&A) growth in the sector.

Youll see more M&A and a real continued growth, he said, while pointing out that only 5% of the 10,000 known diseases have been medically addressed. So thats why we were comfortable in giving the street a five-year outlook on our performance.

With a market cap of $16.1 billion and an asset base in North America of 28.6 million square feet, Marcus said the company expects to double its revenues between 2018 and 2022.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. is an urban office REIT focused on collaborative life sciences and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations.

Related Articles
Commoner Luv Tyagi is the latest to get evicted after getting the least number of votes.

By India Today Web Desk: Commoner Luv Tyagi has been finally eliminated from the show after surviving for 14 weeks in the house. Luv was nominated along with three celebrity contestants--Shilpa Shinde, Hina Khan and Vikas Gupta. For the first time in the history of Bigg Boss, the eviction took place through LIVE voting in a Mumbai mall, and that might have proved to be detrimental for Luv who's not from the city.

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Host Salman Khan announced the eviction in the Weekend Ka Vaar episode tonight. Luv got 393 votes which was less than Vikas, Hina and Shilpa. Shilpa got the maximum votes in the mall task.

Luv's journey in the house has been full of ups and downs. The commoner who started out in the padosi house took some time before finding a ground in the main house, but the wait was worth it. For the contestants who were more popular than Luv in the beginning couldn't match up to his ever-swelling fan base--be it Hiten Tejwani, Priyank Sharma or Arshi Khan .

There were a lot of people who were seeing him as a finalist, yet things changed courtesy the unique elimination process that happened in a Mumbai mall in front of the LIVE audiences.

With Luv's elimination, the show has got its top 5 contestants--Shilpa Shinde, Hina Khan, Vikas Gupta, Puneesh Sharma and Akash Dadlani.

The grand finale of the show will air on January 14. WATCH | All the goss from Bigg Boss 11: Unexpected twists and turns raise the heat ahead of grand finale

--- ENDS ---
Jan 8 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

- Intel Corp and its chief executive, Brian Krzanich, are in the hot seat over Meltdown and Spectre, two chip security issues that were disclosed last week. The company said it has quietly marshaled a coalition of software, hardware and cloud services to develop and deploy programming tweaks that are designed to close most of the security gaps. http://nyti.ms/2AFwohG

- Jared Kushner's family real estate company received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer that is one of Israel's largest financial institutions, according to a Menora executive. The deal, which was not made public, took place shortly before Jared Kushner accompanied U.S. President Trump, on the pair's first diplomatic trip to Israel. http://nyti.ms/2ADGP5u

- Carrie Gracie, a senior editor for BBC News accused the network in an open letter on Sunday of operating a "secretive and illegal" salary system that pays men more than women in similar positions. http://nyti.ms/2CT6gGk (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom)
Steve Bannon said Sunday he "regrets" his comments made to author Michael Wolff in his explosive book "Fire and Fury" that has shaken the Trump White House. "My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda," Bannon said in a statement, first reported by Axios , the political news website. NBC News later confirmed the statement. Axios tweet 1 Bannon said he also regrets not speaking out sooner about "inaccurate reporting" about President Donald Trump's son Donald Jr.Axios tweet 2 In Wolff's book, which went on sale Friday, Bannon said the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between the president's eldest son and a Russian lawyer was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."Wolff also quoted Bannon as saying: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.'"In his statement, Bannon said: "Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."He said his comments were not aimed at Trump Jr. "My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort , a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate," Bannon said. "He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends." Manafort, Trump's campaign manager from June to August 2016, was indicted in October in special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation of Russian collusion with the president's campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Bannon's comments to Wolff, which were first reported Wednesday by The Guardian, provoked Trump to say that Bannon had "lost his mind." Bannon, who headed the Trump presidential campaign, left his job as White House political advisor in August by mutual consent with the administration. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind, " Trump said Wednesday in a statement. The Guardian obtained a copy of the book nearly a week before it had been scheduled to go on sale. The publisher, Henry Holt & Co., moved up the sale date to Friday after attorneys for Trump threatened to seek a cease and desist order to stop the sales . Wolff's book describes Trump's behavior as childlike, and it questions his mental fitness. That apparently prompted an extraordinary statement on Saturday by Trump defending his own mental health."Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," Trump tweeted."I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star ... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!"Trump tweet In lambasting the book a day earlier, Trump derided Bannon as "Sloppy Steve.""Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book," Trump said. "He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!"Trump tweet Sloppy SteveRead Axios' full story here. Steve Bannon said Sunday he "regrets" his comments made to author Michael Wolff in his explosive book "Fire and Fury" that has shaken the Trump White House. "My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda," Bannon said in a statement, first reported by Axios , the political news website. NBC News later confirmed the statement. Axios tweet 1 Bannon said he also regrets not speaking out sooner about "inaccurate reporting" about President Donald Trump's son Donald Jr. Axios tweet 2 In Wolff's book, which went on sale Friday, Bannon said the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between the president's eldest son and a Russian lawyer was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." Wolff also quoted Bannon as saying: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.'" In his statement, Bannon said: "Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around." He said his comments were not aimed at Trump Jr. "My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort , a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate," Bannon said. "He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends." Manafort, Trump's campaign manager from June to August 2016, was indicted in October in special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation of Russian collusion with the president's campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Bannon's comments to Wolff, which were first reported Wednesday by The Guardian, provoked Trump to say that Bannon had "lost his mind." Bannon, who headed the Trump presidential campaign, left his job as White House political advisor in August by mutual consent with the administration. "When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind, " Trump said Wednesday in a statement. The Guardian obtained a copy of the book nearly a week before it had been scheduled to go on sale. The publisher, Henry Holt & Co., moved up the sale date to Friday after attorneys for Trump threatened to seek a cease and desist order to stop the sales . Wolff's book describes Trump's behavior as childlike, and it questions his mental fitness. That apparently prompted an extraordinary statement on Saturday by Trump defending his own mental health. "Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," Trump tweeted. "I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star ... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!" Trump tweet In lambasting the book a day earlier, Trump derided Bannon as "Sloppy Steve." "Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book," Trump said. "He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!" Trump tweet Sloppy Steve Read Axios' full story here.



More From CNBC


The AT&T logo is pictured during the Forbes Forum 2017 in Mexico City, Mexico, September 18, 2017. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

(Reuters) - AT&T Inc (T.N), the No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier, has backed off from a deal to sell smartphones made by Chinese Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL], the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Neither company has ever confirmed that they were in talks. But the Journal reported that Huawei, the world's No. 3 smartphone maker by shipments last year, was expected to announce that it had struck an agreement with AT&T at a Las Vegas trade show on Tuesday.(http://on.wsj.com/2CSgV32)

AT&T declined to comment. In a statement, Huawei spokesman Charles Zinkowski said the company would announce new products for the U.S. market on Tuesday "including availability" but did not give further details. Huawei phones are available for purchase in the United States but have never been distributed by a major carrier.

Over the past five years Huawei has proven itself by delivering premium devices with integrity globally and in the U.S. market," Zinkowski said in a statement.

(Reporting by Sonam Rai in Bengaluru; Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Anjali Athavaley in New York; Editing by Maju Samuel and Lisa Shumaker)
A Bitcoin logo is seen on a cryptocurrency ATM in Santa Monica, California, U.S., January 4, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

By Trevor Hunnicutt

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. fund managers are ramping up efforts to tap into the fever surrounding digital assets, and the latest planned bitcoin products could deliver some head-turning and stomach-churning price movements if they come to market.

The new idea is to build "leveraged" and "inverse" funds that would rise - or fall - twice as fast as the price of bitcoin on a given day.

Direxion Asset Management LLC plans to list such products on Intercontinental Exchange Inc's NYSE Arca exchange if U.S. securities regulators give the nod, according to a filing by the exchange this week.

In the filing, the exchange said the listing "will enhance competition among market participants, to the benefit of investors and the marketplace."

Bitcoin is a virtual asset that can be used to move money around the world quickly and with relative anonymity, without the need for a central authority, such as a bank or government.

Bitcoin is one of the wildest trades in the market today, delivering sharp gains and losses that defy explanation. Trading has been expensive and difficult, with brokerages offering limited access and specialist websites like Coinbase reporting regular outages. Top voices on markets from economist Robert Shiller to JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon have warned people off buying bitcoin.

Yet asset managers have been racing to design more than 10 proposals for bitcoin funds that are currently before U.S. regulators.

New ETFs could make access to bitcoin easier and, in the case of the Direxion product, mean bigger stakes for investors, with a 25 percent gain or loss on one day doubled to 50 percent.

So far the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has declined or put on hold all the proposals.

A spokesman representing Direxion declined to comment on the latest filing as did a representative from NYSE.

Bitcoin gained nearly 12 percent on Friday to $16,928 on the Bitstamp exchange.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Leslie Adler)
From selling firewood to eggs, these Nigerians are exchanging whatever is available to survive.

By India Today Web Desk: Boko Haram is a Jihadist militant organisation based in northeastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon, Chad and Niger. It is responsible for various terror attacks in Nigeria and has displaced over 2 million people since the insurgency began in 2009.

Boko Haram was ranked as one of the most deadly terror groups by GTI (Group Terrorism Index) in 2015. The United Nations even called the insurgency the 'worst humanitarian crisis'.

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This extremist group has been responsible for attacks in Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria and has been 'using' children as 'bombs'. Boko Haram has been appointing young girls for carrying out the attacks.

According to the Human rights watch, the group is said to have appointed thousands of children for their attacks. It was found in 2002 but, it took over as a deadly group (led by Abubakar Shekau) in 2009 after a sudden mass radicalisation.

The locals are struggling to survive in the refugee camps located in Nigeria. They don't have funds to buy products and as a result, they have been resorting to barter system.

Below, you can see how 21,000 people living in Bakasi camp are struggling to survive for things that many of us don't even have to think about.

From selling firewood to eggs, these people are selling whatever they can to survive. Cash isn't allowed and available to members of the Bakasi camp but they can surely exchange goods.

Bakasi camp is located on the outskirts of the city of Maiduguri in Borno and is also known as the spiritual home of the Islamist Boko Haram movement.

Here's what happens inside the camp:

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Aisha Umaru (L) holds a basin of milk as Umaru Usman Kaski holds up firewood at the Bakasi IDP camp, Maiduguri, Nigeria. "We don't get money, that's why we do this," said Umaru Usman Kaski, hoping to trade a small bundle of firewood worth about 50 naira ($0.16) to support his family of eight.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Abachi Mohammed holds six packets of chicken instant noodles.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Insua Damladi holds up a sachet of salt.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Nasiru Buba (R) was trading packets of laundry detergent for a tray of groundnuts. He had bought the detergent after working as a porter in the city, pushing a cart loaded with people's belongings, and wanted to trade them for groundnuts.

"My wife has just delivered a baby and the breast is not coming out with milk," Buba told Reuters. "I needed to get groundnuts for her to eat so she will produce sufficient breast milk, and I don't have any money. When I got the detergent I was not in need of anything, but that changed."

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Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Aisha Alhajji Audu holds four small red onions in her hand.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Falmata Ahmadu, swaps her bowl of maize for Musa Ali Wala's Amaranth vegetables. In Bakasi, the displaced frequently swap the little they have for their preferred goods, whether it's herbs and spices to make soup, groundnut to help a breastfeeding mother produce milk or laundry detergent for a family's clothes.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Aisha Umaru Gaye holds up a pumpkin. Cash cannot be king for the people of Bakasi camp. Instead, a small bundle of firewood can be traded for some milk. An unwanted bowl of baby fish is good in exchange for cooking oil. Peanuts are always in high demand.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Mohammed Ali holds up two tomatoes and some dried vegetable leaves.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Famta Musa Tamaha holds a crate of eggs.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Zainab Umar gives parboiled soya bean paste to Aisha Jaule in exchange for spaghetti.

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Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Jibril Adamu holds okra seeds and sugared groundnuts, ready for exchange.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Abdulwahal Abdulla, a 50-year-old living in Bakasi for three years, hoped to trade this bowl of dried young tilapia fish worth roughly 150 naira for cooking oil. Abdulla, no fan of the fish, had bought them because products were scarce and it was the only thing he could buy at the time, he said.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Falmata Madu exchanges her plate of uncooked rice for Hadisa Adamu's ground maize.

Photo: Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde

Isa Zakariya Audu (L) holds pieces of firewood while Kakaye Ahmadu Maikifi holds up a plate of okra.

--- ENDS ---
In this article, Im going to take a look at Vimal Oil & Foods Limiteds (NSEI:VIMALOIL) latest ownership structure, a non-fundamental factor which is important, but remains a less discussed subject among investors. Ownership structure has been found to have an impact on shareholder returns in both short- and long-term. Since the effect of an active institutional investor with a similar ownership as a passive pension-fund can be vastly different on a companys corporate governance and accountability of shareholders, investors should take a closer look at VIMALOILs shareholder registry. All data provided is as of the most recent financial year end.

Check out our latest analysis for Vimal Oil & Foods

NSEI:VIMALOIL Ownership_summary Jan 8th 18

Insider Ownership

I find insiders are another important group of stakeholders, who are directly involved in making key decisions related to the use of capital. In essence, insider ownership is more about the alignment of shareholders interests with the management. 74.78% ownership of VIMALOIL insiders is large enough to make an impact on shareholder returns. In general, this level of insider ownership has negatively affected underperforming (consistently low PE ratio) companies and positively affected the companies that outperform (consistently high PE ratio). It may be interesting to take a look at what company insiders have been doing with their holdings lately. Insiders buying company shares can be a positive indicator of future performance, but a selling decision can simply be driven by personal financial needs.

General Public Ownership

The general public holds a substantial 22.21% stake in VIMALOIL, making it a highly popular stock among retail investors. With this size of ownership, retail investors can collectively play a role in major company policies that affect shareholders returns, including executive remuneration and the appointment of directors. They can also exercise the power to decline an acquisition or merger that may not improve profitability.

Story continues

Private Company Ownership

Another group of owners that a potential investor in VIMALOIL should consider are private companies, with a stake of 3.01%. While they invest more often due to strategic interests, an investment can also be driven by capital gains through share price appreciation. However, an ownership of this size may be relatively insignificant, meaning that these shareholders may not have the potential to influence VIMALOILs business strategy. Thus, investors not need worry too much about the consequences of these holdings.

What this means for you:

A relatively significant holding of company insiders could mean high alignment with shareholders. But at the same time, investors should be aware of the level of influence executives could have on governance decisions. However, ownership structure should not be the only focus of your research when constructing an investment thesis around VIMALOIL. Rather, you should be examining fundamental factors such as Vimal Oil & Foodss past track record and financial health. I urge you to complete your research by taking a look at the following:

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.



The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.
Asbury Automotive (ABG) shares have started gaining and might continue moving higher in the near term, as indicated by solid earnings estimate revisions.

For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  January 08, 2018  Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include Verizon Communications Inc. VZ, AT&T Inc. T, T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS, Sprint Corp. S and United States Cellular Corp. USM.

Here are highlights from Fridays Analyst Blog:

5G Wireless Network Race Set to Begin This Year

Forget 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution); the stage is set for 5G wireless race in the U.S. telecom space. With the U.S. telecom industry continuously evolving, companies in the league are fighting it out to stay abreast of competition. Among them, two behemoths, Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. are leading the race.

Verizon, which was the first to deploy 4G LTE network nationwide six years ago, plans to launch next-generation 5G wireless residential broadband services in three to five U.S. markets in 2018. The company announced a contract with Samsung to start commercial 5G fixed-wireless services. Samsung will provide Verizon with commercial 5G home routers, 5G radio access units comprising a compact radio base station and virtualized RAN elements, as well as 5G radio frequency planning services.

Also, AT&T is planning to offer standard-based mobile 5G services to consumers in various U.S. markets by late 2018. AT&Ts standard will be based on implementable 5G New radio (NR) specification of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This basically supports a non-standalone 5G standard that uses LTE to control 5G data connections. Since AT&T supports non-standalone and standalone options for the 5G standard, the new timeline will accelerate availability of hardware.

However, a full phased 5G wireless network will be offered only in 2020. By that time, other national telecom operators, such as T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. may join the 5G race. Additionally, United States Cellular Corp. is also preparing to deploy 5G wireless network.

Story continues

AT&T carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). However, Verizon, T-Mobile US, Sprint and United States Cellular carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) each. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Large carriers are focusing on building a fiber and wireless infrastructure in a bid to deliver mobile video efficiently. Accumulation of dark fiber will bolster their cell network density consequently giving a boost to its mobile backhaul network. The densification of cell network will help the company install and build its upcoming 5G network.

Advantage of 5G

Latency period of 5G data delivery will be in single milliseconds. Further, 5G technology is designed to be more power efficient than any other standard wireless network available these days. Therefore, 5G-enabled mobile devices are likely to last a lot longer than their 3G or 4G counterparts.

According to a study commissioned by Qualcomm, 5G wireless technology could result in real global economic growth by $3 trillion cumulatively between 2020 and 2035. Per a report by Strategy Analytics, global 5G smartphone shipments are set to rise from 2 million units in 2019 to 1.5 billion in 2025, reflecting an average annual growth rate of 250%.The 5G category will be the fastest-growing sector of the global smartphone industry for the next decade, said the report.

Additionally, superfast 5G mobile networks will be of utmost necessity in managing the exponential growth of internet-connected devices, popularly known as Internet of Things (IoT). The U.S. telecom industry has lately emerged as an intensely contested space where success thrives largely on technical superiority, quality of services and scalability. Thus, in order to stay ahead of competitors, existing players need to be constantly on their toes to introduce innovative products.

According to a recent report by research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), worldwide spending on IoT is slated to grow 14.6% year over year to $772.5 billion in 2018. Moreover, the IoT space will witness a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4% to reach nearly $1.1 trillion in 2021.

Bottom Line

In 2018, we expect 5G wireless network to be a game changer in the telecom space with a full-fledged deployment in 2020.

Zacks Editor-in-Chief Goes "All In" on This Stock

Full disclosure, Kevin Matras now has more of his own money in one particular stock than in any other. He believes in its short-term profit potential and also in its prospects to more than double by 2019. Today he reveals and explains his surprising move in a new Special Report.

Download it free >>

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performancefor information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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Pakistans beleaguered southwestern province of Balochistan is in the midst of a political crisis as its provincial government faces ouster through a no-confidence vote.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) is trying hard to rescue its coalition provincial administration in Balochistan, where many of the partys parliamentary deputies have revolted against their leader, Nawab Sanaullah Zehri.

As the chief minister or most senior elected official in the province, Zehri is facing the most difficult challenge after being sworn into office in December 2015. His election was part of a power-sharing agreement between the PML-N and two smaller Pashtun and Baluch ethno-nationalist political parties in a region reeling from decades of separatist violence, government crackdowns, and sectarian and terrorist attacks.

In what appears to be a desperate final attempt to salvage Zehris administration, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi visited the provincial capital, Quetta, late on January 8.

His mission, however, seemed in jeopardy as dissident members of the ruling coalition refused to meet with him ahead of the January 9 vote on the no-confidence motion.

Maulana Abdul Wasey, the opposition leader in Balochistans provincial legislature, says he is optimistic that their no-confidence vote will secure a majority in the 65-member provincial assembly.

We opposed this government from day one and always pointed out its weaknesses, he told journalists on January 8. These so-called nationalists in the provincial government always claimed to get the rights and due share of Balochistan, but they have achieved nothing since assuming office more than four years ago [in 2013].

Ironically, Waseys Jamiat Ulema-e Islam Fazal (JUI-F) group is a close ally of the PML-N in Pakistans federal government. His statement indicates that efforts by PML-N central leadership to save Zehris administration are increasingly proving difficult.

Shahzada Zulfiqar, a journalist in Quetta, says Zehris administration appears to be in danger after the defection of three key loyalists. On January 7, lawmakers Mir Asim Kurd Gello, Sheikh Jaffar Khan Mandokhail, and Tahir Mehmood declared their intention to back the no-confidence motion.

Things are now becoming clearer. The opposition to Zehri now appears to have the requisite 33 members to bring him down, Zulfiqar told Pakistans Bol Television, adding that Zehri apparently now has the backing of 30 members.

As the largest parliamentary party in Balochistan, the PML-N has 21 lawmakers, at least half of whom have now appeared to rebel. They are followed by the Pashtun nationalist Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Partys 14 members. National Party, a Baluch nationalist faction, has 11 members. With eight lawmakers Waseys JUI-F joined other smaller parliamentary parties to form the opposition in Balochistan.

Politics in Balochistan, Pakistans largest but least populated province, have been dominated by hereditary tribal chiefs and clerics whose loyalties are mostly fluid as they frequently join and abandon political parties and coalitions. The province, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, has a long coastline along the Arabian Sea, where the port of Gwadar is turning into a key hub of Chinese efforts to project influence and develop a trade corridor through Pakistan.

Lawmaker Abdul Quddus Bizenjo is confident they now have the majority backing in the provincial assembly.

I believe we are going to win because only 14 members had initially signed the no-confidence move [on January 2], he said. Since then, lawmakers have joined our cause in droves, with many even resigning from their posts. There is no going back; we have burned our boats.

Observers and PML-N leaders are convinced the political turmoil in Balochistan is part of a larger struggle between their leader and ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the countrys powerful military establishment. Sharif has repeatedly criticized the military since Pakistans Supreme Court removed him from office in July for undeclared assets.

Last week, Sharif publicly called on the military establishment -- Pakistani euphemism for top army generals -- to abandon self-deception.

I have repeatedly urged putting our house in order and have urged to reflect on why the world holds negative opinions about us, he said in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trumps accusation that Pakistan provides safe haven to terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.

Anwar Sajdi, a senior journalist in Balochistan, says the machinations in Balochistan are basically aimed at depriving the PML-N from becoming the majority party in the Senate or upper house of the Pakistani Parliament.

In March, the provincial assemblies are slotted to elect [nearly half or 52] members of the Senate, which prompts many people here to speculate that the current [political] turmoil in Balochistan is aimed at preventing the PML-N from tightening its hold over the central government, he told the BBCs Urdu service. You must also know that Balochistan is a remote-controlled province. It is always controlled by the powers controlling the central government.

Sardar Yaqoob Nasar, a senior PML-N leader from Balochistan, points at the timing of the no-confidence vote to reinforce the claim that its goal is to deprive his party of power. He questioned what prompted the turncoats in his party after they had been part of the provincial coalition government for more than four years.

The move is aimed to influence the results of the Senate elections, he noted. If they had any complaints, they should have taken it to the electorate in the general election [scheduled for later this year].

If the PML-N loses the January 9 no-confidence vote in Balochistan, its struggling administration will likely face more pressure in Islamabad and its key power base in the countrys most populated and prosperous eastern province of Punjab.

Political turmoil in Balochistan will add to its instability. For nearly 15 years, the region has reeled from a Baluch separatist insurgency and Islamabads efforts to suppress it through coercion. Hard-line sectarian and terrorist groups frequently attack members of religious minorities and minority Muslim sects, officials, and politicians. Criminality has mushroomed amid the chaos in Balochistan.

Radio Mashaal correspondent Ayub Tareen contributed reporting from Quetta, Balochistan.
Fresh Kakula resource estimate being prepared based on drilling completed to the end of December 2017

KOLWEZI, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ivanhoe Mines (TSX:IVN) (OTCQX:IVPAF) Executive Chairman Robert Friedland and Chief Executive Officer Lars-Eric Johansson announced today that ongoing upgrading work at the Mwadingusha hydropower plant in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has almost tripled the plants interim power output from 11 to 32 megawatts (MW).

This represents 45% of the plants designed capacity. Three of Mwadingushas six generators now have been modernized; the remaining three generators are due to be upgraded and fully operational by the end of 2019  restoring the plant to its installed output capacity of approximately 71 MW of power.

The work at Mwadingusha, part of a program to eventually overhaul and boost output from three hydropower plants, is being conducted by engineering firm Stucky, of Lausanne, Switzerland, under the direction of Ivanhoe Mines and its joint-venture partner, Zijin Mining Group, in conjunction with the DRCs state-owned power company, La Societe Nationale dElectricite (SNEL). Once fully reconditioned, the three plants will have installed capacity of approximately 200 MW of electricity for the national grid, which is expected to be more than sufficient for the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project.

Mr. Friedland said a long-term, sustainable supply of electricity is essential to Ivanhoes vision to develop Kamoa-Kakula in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.

The upgrading program underway at Mwadingusha is a significant private-public partnership venture between SNEL, Ivanhoe and Zijin, which is vital to secure sustainable, clean electricity for the Congolese people and for the development of a Tier One copper mine at Kamoa-Kakula, Mr. Friedland added.

Hydropower, with its virtues of being clean and renewable, is the best energy solution to support our development priorities as we continue to look for ways to reduce our impact on the environment and produce the copper the world requires.

Mwadingusha hydroelectric power plant and distribution substation.

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9b5ac2fc-786d-42ec-9772-b453000f47d1

Mwadingusha is the first of three hydropower plants that Ivanhoe and Zijin plan to upgrade.

Upgrading of the other two existing hydroelectric power plants  Koni and Nzilo 1  is expected to begin once Mwadingushas upgrading is completed.

The Mwadingusha and Koni plants are in cascade, with Koni directly downstream from Mwadingusha on the Lufira River at the mouth of Lake Tshangalele, north of Likasi and approximately 250 kilometres northeast of the Kamoa Mine development site.

The Nzilo 1 plant is on the Lualaba River, downstream of Nzilo Lake and north of the city of Kolwezi, approximately 40 kilometres from Kamoa.

Interior of the Mwadingusha power plant, with one of the upgraded alternators.

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f61b5e91-4842-4897-a944-87cb4c711f77

Mwadingusha dam, upstream from power plant.

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/df2f78e9-8d41-412a-8317-3c8514e41318

Kakula Mine development site now connected to national grid power

Mr. Johansson said that the Kakula Mine development site, approximately 10 kilometres south of Kamoas initial Kansoko Mine site, began receiving power from the national grid last month.

Kakulas development is being fast-tracked, with a pre-feasibility study in progress. The Kakula box cut was successfully completed in October 2017 and the first blast for the twin declines at Kakula took place in November 2017.

The Kakula Copper Deposit is a gently-dipping blanket of thick, chalcocite-rich copper mineralization. Initial mine development is planned to begin in the flat, near-surface zone, which at a 3% cut-off is between 7.1 metres and 11.7 metres thick, with copper grades of between 8.24% and 10.35% along the deposits axis.

Based on the results from an independent National Instrument 43-101 preliminary economic assessment (PEA) released in November 2017, Kakulas ultra-high copper grade is expected to average 6.4% over the first 10 years of production.

Portals to declines being built to access the Kakula Deposit, showing ventilation installed in the services decline.

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b0fbe411-3d38-4a16-9c1a-9915704e41a2

Jumbo drill operating in the Kakula services decline.

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3eabde67-ba5e-46f4-8a28-2ecc000976af

New Kakula Mineral Resource estimate underway

An updated Mineral Resource estimate for Kakula, being prepared based on drilling completed to the end of December 2017, is expected to result in a significant upgrade and expansion of the Kakula Mineral Resources.

Results from drill holes completed to the end of December 2017 will form the basis of the new estimate that will encompass the entire strike length of the Kakula Discovery, which now extends beyond 12 kilometres. This represents an increase of approximately 60% in the strike length that will be used to calculate the new resource estimate, compared to the 7.7-kilometre strike length covered by Kakulas current resource estimate.

The new resource estimate will enable Ivanhoe and Zijin to assess early and expanded production scenarios by incorporating resources from Kakula West and Kansoko to support the main Kakula development plan that was detailed in the November 2017 Kakula preliminary economic assessment.

About the Kamoa-Kakula Project

The Kamoa-Kakula Project is a very large, stratiform copper deposit with adjacent prospective exploration areas within the Central African Copperbelt, located approximately 25 kilometres west of the town of Kolwezi and about 270 kilometres west of Lubumbashi. The Kamoa Copper Deposit was discovered by Ivanhoe Mines (then named Ivanhoe Nickel & Platinum) in 2008, followed by the discovery of the Kakula Deposit in early 2016.

In August 2012, the DRC government granted mining licences to Ivanhoe Mines for the Kamoa-Kakula Project that cover a total of 397 square kilometres. The licences are valid for 30 years and can be renewed at 15-year intervals.

The current Mineral Resource estimate for the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Deposit has an effective date of November 27, 2017, and was prepared by George Gilchrist, Ivanhoe Mines Mineral Resources Manager, under the direction of Dr. Harry Parker and Gordon Seibel, of Amec Foster Wheeler. The combined Kamoa-Kakula Indicated Resources total approximately 1.1 billion tonnes grading 2.78% copper, containing 67.9 billion pounds of copper, plus another 261 million tonnes of Inferred Resources at 1.94% copper, containing 11.2 billion pounds of copper, at a 1.0% copper cut-off grade. Details of the current Mineral Resource estimate are contained in Ivanhoe Mines November 28, 2017, news release.

Ivanhoe Mines and Zijin Mining each hold an indirect 39.6% interest in the Kamoa-Kakula Project, Crystal River Global Limited holds an indirect 0.8% interest and the DRC government holds a direct 20% interest.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information in this release has been reviewed and approved by Stephen Torr, P.Geo., Ivanhoe Mines Vice President, Project Geology and Evaluation, and a Qualified Person under the terms of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Torr, who is not independent of Ivanhoe Mines, has verified the technical data disclosed in this news release.

For detailed information about assay methods and data verification measures used to support the scientific and technical information, please refer to the Kakula 2017 Resource Update, June 2017 technical report available on the SEDAR profile of Ivanhoe Mines at www.sedar.com or under technical reports on the Ivanhoe Mines website at www.ivanhoemines.com. A new technical report is being prepared and will be filed within 45 days of the November 28, 2017 news release that announced the results of an expanded, independent PEA for the development of the Kakula Discovery at the Kamoa- Kakula Project.

About Ivanhoe Mines

Ivanhoe Mines is advancing its three principal projects in Southern Africa: 1) Mine development at the Platreef platinum-palladium-gold-nickel-copper discovery on the Northern Limb of South Africas Bushveld Complex; 2) mine development and exploration at the Tier One Kamoa-Kakula copper discovery on the Central African Copperbelt in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and 3) upgrading at the historic, high- grade Kipushi zinc-copper-silver-germanium mine, also on the DRCs Copperbelt. For details, visit www.ivanhoemines.com.

Cautionary statement on forward-looking information

Certain statements in this release constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including without limitation: (1) statements regarding the remaining three generators at the Mwadingusha hydropower plant are scheduled to be fully upgraded and operational by the end of 2019; (2) statements regarding the upgrading program is expected to restore Mwadingusha to its installed output capacity of approximately 71 MW of power; (3) statements regarding the upgrading of the other two existing hydroelectric power plants  Koni and Nzilo 1  is expected to begin once upgrading work at Mwadingusha is completed; (4) statements regarding the three plants, once fully reconditioned, will have installed capacity of approximately 200 MW of long-term, electricity for the grid, which is expected to be more than sufficient for the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project; (5) statements regarding Kakulas ultra-high copper grade is expected to average 6.4% over the first 10 years of production; (6) statements regarding a new Mineral Resource estimate is expected to result in a significant upgrade and expansion of the Kakula Mineral Resources; and (7) statements regarding the new resource estimate will allow Ivanhoe and Zijin to assess early and expanded production scenarios by incorporating resources from Kakula West and Kansoko to support the main Kakula development plan that was laid out in the November 2017 Kakula PEA.

All such forward-looking information and statements are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by Ivanhoe Mines management in light of their experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors management believe are appropriate in the circumstances. These statements, however, are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information or statements including, but not limited to, unexpected changes in laws, rules or regulations, or their enforcement by applicable authorities; the failure of parties to contracts to perform as agreed; social or labour unrest; changes in commodity prices; unexpected failure or inadequacy of infrastructure, or delays in the development of infrastructure, and the failure of exploration programs or other studies to deliver anticipated results or results that would justify and support continued studies, development or operations. Other important factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements also include those described under the heading Risk Factors in the companys most recently filed MD&A as well as in the most recent Annual Information Form filed by Ivanhoe Mines. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward- looking information or statements. The factors and assumptions used to develop the forward-looking information and statements, and the risks that could cause the actual results to differ materially are set forth in the Risk Factors section and elsewhere in the companys most recent Managements Discussion and Analysis report and Annual Information Form, available at www.sedar.com.

This news release also contains references to estimates of Mineral Resources. The estimation of Mineral Resources is inherently uncertain and involves subjective judgments about many relevant factors. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The accuracy of any such estimates is a function of the quantity and quality of available data, and of the assumptions made and judgments used in engineering and geological interpretation, which may prove to be unreliable and depend, to a certain extent, upon the analysis of drilling results and statistical inferences that may ultimately prove to be inaccurate. Mineral Resource estimates may have to be re-estimated based on, among other things: (1) fluctuations in copper or other mineral prices; (2) results of drilling; (3) results of metallurgical testing and other studies; (4) changes to proposed mining operations, including dilution; (5) the evaluation of mine plans subsequent to the date of any estimates; and (6) the possible failure to receive required permits, approvals and licences.

Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the company believes are reasonable assumptions, the company cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Subject to applicable securities laws, the company does not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this news release.
Guilford, CT, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GUILFORD, CT  January 8, 2018  Pearl Seas Cruises is pleased to announce a brand new cruise itinerary that sails up the Maine coast to the Bay of Fundy, one of the 7 natural wonders of North America, located in the Canadian Maritimes. Round-trip from Portland, Maine, the 7-night, 8-day Maine & Bay of Fundy cruise visits Rockland, ME; Eastport, ME; St. Andrews, NB; St. John, NB; Grand Manan Island; and Bar Harbor, ME. Currently there are three 2018 dates for this spectacular new cruise, May 12th, October 16th, and October 23rd.

Led by Pearl Seas expert guides, guests will stroll along the charming turn-of-the-century streets of St. Andrews, recognized as a National Historic District, and visit Grand Manan Island renowned for best whale-watching in the Canadian Maritimes as well as great birdwatching (240 species of birds make the island their home). This majestic cruise visits St. John the oldest incorporated city in Canada and the only city on the Bay of Fundy, where the tides force the waters to reverse their flow creating the famous Reversing Rapids at the mouth of the St. Johns River.

All along the way, Pearl Seas offers award-winning enrichment programs, guided shore excursions and delectable, regionally inspired cuisine. View the most stunning coastal scenery in North America, visit art galleries, historic sites, museums, and markets all while relaxing aboard the small and beautiful ship, Pearl Mist.

https://www.pearlseascruises.com/cruises/canada/maine-and-bay-of-fundy

About Pearl Seas Cruises:

Pearl Seas Cruises operates all over North America aboard the new 210-passenger Pearl Mist. The line focuses on providing an intimate experience and personalized service in the most unique places. Popular itineraries include the Canadian Maritimes, St. Lawrence Seaway, Great Lakes, New England, and Cuba cruises. To learn more about Pearl Seas, please visit www.pearlseascruises.com or call 800-983-7462.

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4be6082f-3e20-4efe-8901-0b82dc6c3390

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/76463624-529e-4e69-bb69-674446968079

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e3ec1662-9095-4b91-a3b6-06534cf5c930
Brad Pitt offered to pay 120,000 dollars to watch an episode of Game of Thrones with Emilia Clarke, but he was outbid.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Actor-producer Brad Pitt offered to pay $120,000 to watch an episode of Game of Thrones with Emilia Clarke, but he was outbid.

Pitt bid six figures on Saturday night during a silent auction at Sean Penn's annual gala for Haiti, held at Milk Studios in Los Angeles, reports variety.com.

During the charity gala, the auctioneer announced the opportunity to watch an episode with Clarke, who was in attendance at the event, along with her Game of Thrones co-star Kit Harington.

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The auction to watch the episode with Clarke started at $20,000. Pitt bid $80,000. Then he outbid himself to $90,000. Later, Pitt raised his own bid to $120,000.

In the end, Pitt was outbid by a gala-goer who ended the auction at $160,000.

Also in attendance were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Segel and Leonardo DiCaprio, who was honoured for his work in combating climate change.

Later during the auction, DiCaprio bid $80,000 on a painting by artist Josh Smith, but was outbid by Clarke for $90,000. There was a second Smith painting available, so in the end, both DiCaprio and Clarke ended up walking away with artwork.

--- ENDS ---
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C., Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smithfield Foods, Inc. has joined forces with Food Lion to support North Carolina military members and their loved ones. The global food company donated 1,000 ham coupons to soldiers and families at Fort Bragg, a military installation of the United States Army. Food Lion also donated 1,000 coupons for families to use towards purchases at their local store.



"At Food Lion, we are committed to serving our communities," said Kris Thornton, Food Lion Director of Operations over the Fayetteville area. We're so grateful for the sacrifices our service members and their families make every day. By partnering with Smithfield, we hope to provide a little joy for so many of our military families.

Smithfields contribution aligns with its charitable giving and philanthropic efforts, which includes supporting those who have served in our nations military, education and hunger relief efforts. This donation also supports Food Lions commitment to nourish local communities through associate volunteerism, food donations, and in-store promotions.

"At Smithfield, we are honored to thank our nations military for their service, said Kenneth M. Sullivan, president and chief executive officer for Smithfield Foods. Through this donation, and with support from Food Lion, we are proud to bring military families together to enjoy a wholesome meal.

Located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Fort Bragg is the largest military installation in the world. The donation from Smithfield and Food Lion, valued at $25,000, will honor and give back to the men, women and families stationed at Fort Bragg.

Smithfield has a long history of supporting military causes through volunteerism, food and charitable donations and partnerships. In the past five years, Smithfield has donated more than $3 million to Operation Homefront through its Eckrich brand. Last year, Smithfield introduced two new veterans initiatives  Smithfield Salutes and Operation 4000!. Smithfield Salutes is a Veterans Employee Resource Group that aims to make the transition from military to civilian life a seamless one. Through Operation 4000!, Smithfield is working to employ 4,000 veterans10 percent of its U.S. workforceby 2020.

To learn more about Smithfields support of veterans, visit smithfieldfoods.com/veterans.

About Smithfield Foods

Smithfield Foods is a $15 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathan's Famous, Farmland, Armour, Farmer John, Kretschmar, John Morrell, Cook's, Gwaltney, Carando, Margherita, Curly's, Healthy Ones, Morliny, Krakus and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com.



About Food Lion

Food Lion, based in Salisbury, N.C., since 1957, has more than 1,100 stores in 10 Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states and employs more than 65,000 associates. By leveraging its longstanding heritage of low prices and convenient locations, Food Lion is working to own the easiest full shop grocery experience in the Southeast, anchored by a strong commitment to affordability, freshness and the communities it serves. Through Food Lion Feeds, the company has committed to provide 500 million meals to individuals and families in need by the end of 2020. Food Lion is a company of Delhaize America, a U.S. division of Amsterdam-based Royal Ahold Delhaize Group (OTC:ADRNY). For more information, visit www.foodlion.com.

Contact:

Diana Souder

Smithfield Foods, Inc.

(757) 357-1675

dsouder@smithfield.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/173a24c3-2bcc-4a82-96a7-d7a0260a43a6
Re: Although the Broadway musical known as "Hair" contained nudity, strong [ #permalink

10 Kudos 4 Bookmarks
Fri, 11/18 (10:30am ET): How to Write the Best M7 MBA Essays
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New Delhi, Jan 8 (IBNS): The long standoff between India and China reached a peaceful solution on Monday as the latter agreed to stop road-construction activity across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Tuting area of Arunachal Pradesh.



The Indian side has also offered an olive branch by returning the two earth excavators and other equipment seized from Chinese workers in the region last month, media reports said.

Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday told media that: "The Tuting incident has been resolved. A border personnel meeting (BPM) was held two days ago."

The past few months witnessed military standoff at the Bhutan-India-China tri-junction in Doklam, a disputed territory claimed by both Bhutan and China, where the Indian Army personnel had earlier reached to stop China from building a road.

China had accused India of trespassing into its territory and demanded withdrawal of troops leading to a prolonged standoff.

While India and Bhutan had claimed that the land belongs to the tiny Himalayan kingdom and that the Indian troops are there at the request of Bhutan, China earlier warned that it will not accept any dialogue till Indian soldiers pull out from Doklam.
Toronto, Jan 8 (IBNS): Environment Canada has issued a statement for Greater Toronto Areas that it will remain under snow on Monday, media reports said.

Though the snow cover will be less in Toronto but the daily commuters in the city will be affected.

Commuters have been warned of slippery roads.

The weather service said the total snow cover will be 10 centimetres.

Snowfalls will be maximum in the north east of the Great Lakes, report said.

Snowfalls warnings have been issued in east and north east of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay where snowfall is expected to occur around 15 centimeters.



(Reporting by Suman Das)
Two more militants have been killed in an encounter at Chadoora area of central Kashmir's Budgam district, taking the death toll of militants to three.

By India Today Web Desk: Two more militants have been killed in an encounter at Chadoora area of central Kashmir's Budgam district on Monday, taking the death toll of militants to three.

A senior police officer told India Today that the operation has been concluded with the killing of two more militants.

"Among the slain militants, two are said to be foreigners (Pakistanis). One among them is a local from neighbouring Pulwama district namely Firdous Ahmad Mir," the officer said.

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The officer added that the identity of the remaining two are being ascertained.

Earlier, a joint team of army, SOG and CRPF following a specific information had launched a cordon-and-search operation in the area.

As the joint team of forces intensified the searches, the hiding militants opened fire triggering off an encounter.

Soon after the news about the encounter spread, the people, mostly the youth, took to streets at Chadoora and its adjoining areas and started pelting stones on security forces.

The forces resorted to teargas shelling and used some aerial shots to disperse the protesting people.

In the meantime, the busy market at Chadoora shut down spontaneously.

Meanwhile, in wake of the encounter, the authorities have blocked internet services in Budgam and Pulwama districts to maintain law and order.

ALSO WATCH | Chidambaram calls Kashmir issue a long-pending dispute concerning accession

--- ENDS ---
Bangkok, Thailand, is known for having some of the best street food in the world. Now, one street seller is being officially recognized for her tasty creations.

The roadside restaurant Jay Fai in Bangkok was recently awarded a star in the highly respected Michelin Guide to restaurants around the world. Officials from the guide visit restaurants and then give them a rating of 1 to 3 stars, based on overall quality.

Jay Fai is like many other street eateries across Bangkok. It serves a variety of Thai dishes in simple surroundings.

The owner and main cook is 72-year-old Fai Junsuta. She prepares the food in an open-air kitchen. She does all of the cooking in a couple of large pans called woks, and wears special glasses to protect her eyes from an endless stream of smoke.

The Michelin Guide describes her restaurant as a place that both taxi drivers and foodies wax lyrical about. It says that some of the restaurants most popular food items are crab omelets, crab curries and dried congee.

Many restaurants wait years to receive Michelin stars. But Fai Junsuta says was not aware of the honor before being chosen.

"Before, I knew the Michelin name but I did not know it had to do with cooking," she told Agence France-Presse. "I am very proud."

But she added that she would quickly be returning to the kitchen after attending an awards ceremony. "We do not have a lot of staff because I'm a bit difficult and crazy," she said.

Jay Fai was one of 17 restaurants chosen for the first-ever Michelin Guide for Bangkok.

Three of the citys restaurants  serving Indian, French and European food - received two stars. The others  seven of which are Thai restaurants - received one star. Many other eateries, including 28 street food places, are also included in the guide, but they did not receive any stars.

In announcing the selections, Michelin said Bangkok has learned how to successfully offer many kinds of international cooking styles without giving up its own food heritage.

Thailands Tourism Authority signed a partnership with Michelin to create the Bangkok guide.

The partnership followed an announcement last year that Thai officials planned to ban street food sellers in Bangkok in an effort to clean up the city.

The government later backed away from its plans to completely remove all street food vendors. But officials did tighten some rules to prevent sellers from blocking traffic and people.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from Reuters, Agence France-Presse and other sources. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

Where have you eaten the best street food? Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

wok  n. large, bowl-shaped pan used for cooking

wax lyrical  phrase. talk about something in a very enthusiastic way

staff  n. people who work at an organization

heritage  n. the traditions, achievements, beliefs, etc., that are part of the history of a group or nation

vendor  n. person who sells something outside


The president of Iran says recent anti-government protests were not only about the economy but also the countrys political leadership and issues of individual freedoms.

President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday that he thought the Iranian people had economic, political and social demands.

Rouhani suggested that protestors disapproved of Iranian officials who opposed greater individual freedoms at home and closer ties with the West.

The president said people should be permitted to criticize all officials without exception.

No one is innocent, and people are allowed to criticize everyone, he said.

Protest issues expanded from economics to politics

Rouhani, a clergyman, defeated anti-Western candidates to win a second term as president last year.

On Monday, he called for lifting restrictions on social media. Critics of Irans government used social media during the recent protests. They were the largest demonstrations in Iran since 2009.

Rouhani also dismissed calls by some clergymen to permanently block social media and messaging apps.

As the protests have weakened, the government has lifted restrictions on the social media app Instagram. But a more widely used messaging app, Telegram, was still blocked. The government said the restrictions would be temporary.

Peoples access to social media should not permanently be restricted, Rouhani said. He added, We cannot be indifferent to peoples life and business.

Irans Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday that security forces had put an end to the week of demonstrations. The group blamed foreign enemies for the unrest.

The protests began with young people and working-class Iranians angry over a lack of jobs and poor economic conditions. The protests spread to more than 80 cities and towns. Iranian officials say the unrest resulted in 22 deaths. More than 1,000 people were reported arrested.

Irans deputy head of the judiciary Hamid Shahriari said all of the leaders of the protests had been identified and arrested. He said they would be firmly punished, with some possibly facing death sentences.

An Iranian lawmaker reportedly said on Monday that one of those detained had died. Iranian media reported that a 22-year-old young man had hanged himself in jail.

Irans foreign policy also a source of anger

Many protestors expressed anger over Irans foreign policy. Iran has been involved in conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It competes with Saudi Arabia for influence in the Middle East.

Iranians are also displeased with the countrys financial support for Palestinians and the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

They demand that the government deal with problems facing Iranians at home instead.

Last year, Rouhani won re-election by promising more jobs for Irans young people through foreign investment. He promised increased individual freedoms, political tolerance, and social justice.

Im Mario Ritter.

Mario Ritter adapted a report from the Reuters news agency for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

social media n. forms of electronic communication through the internet

apps n. (applications) a computer program designed to do a specific job or group of jobs

tolerance n. the willingness to accept the activities or beliefs of others that are different from your own

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A new book tries to show what life in Africa is really like after one removes misinformation and some stereotypes found in western media.

The book, called Everyday Africa, presents the major and minor events in life through the images of 30 photographers. It is now available in bookstores across Europe and the United States.

The book started as a feed on the social media photo-sharing app Instagram. It was a project of two Americans, Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill. Now it belongs to a community of Africans across the continent.

Showing an Africa most do not see

DiCampo says the project dates back to 2012, when he and Merrill traveled to Ivory Coast to report on the end of its civil war. While speaking with refugees and soldiers about how the country was recovering, the Americans found that daily life was fairly normal for most people. However, they felt this information was not coming through in the story they were preparing.

"We were seeing all these other moments that were much sort of truer to our daily life experience in that part of the world.

To capture those events, Merrill said they started using cellphones to take pictures of what they saw around them.

You know, pictures of people going to work, or eating breakfast, or hanging out with their friends; things that were just more normal everyday scenes and we felt like there was really something to that, and that might be the most important thing we had to tell about that place, at that moment, instead of the crisis story."

DiCampo said he feels it is difficult to have an understanding of the world when all you see are extreme stories. The Everyday Africa Instagram feed was a way of seeing what daily life looks like in Africa from many different perspectives.

The project is popular, and still growing. The Instagram account has over 360-thousand followers and an active community of photographers sharing pictures of the continent.

We've had lots of African photographers join, non-African photographers join, but we've also got some skilled amateurs. In Cape Town Barry Christianson is a computer programmer. Mahmoud Katub in Caro just finished medical school. I think that there's something about that mix of people that strengthens the community and that makes the work better.

Training students for better media understanding

With the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, DiCampo and Merrill are using the Everyday Africa name to help educate students. They visit middle school classrooms in the United States to train students on how to document their lives and recognize stereotypes.

In their visits with students, DiCampo says, they use the story of Everyday Africas creation to discuss how media representation affects them and their communities. They also show the students how to improve their own photography, with the goal of helping them create their own school or community everyday project.

DiCampo and Merrill say their dream is for Instagram communities to be formed all over the world, documenting their everyday life. They hope that the book will give them the chance to reach more people and to show an underrepresented side of African life to the world.

Im Phil Dierking.

Zoe Leoudaki wrote this story for the VOANews.com. Phil Dierking adapted her story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

Do you think your country is misrepresented in the news? In what way? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

__________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

amateur - n. a person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job

app - n. a computer program that performs a special function

perspective - n. a way of thinking about and understanding something

moment - n. a precise point in time

stereotype - n. an often unfair and untrue belief that many people have about all people or things with a particular characteristic
Fishermen on the northeastern coast of the United States are voicing concerns about the development of offshore wind power.

Some of the fishermen are based in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The town was once a major center for whale-hunting ships. The city was made famous in Herman Melvilles book about whaling, Moby Dick. New Bedford also has been one of the nations most profitable fishing ports for 17 years.

But fishermen there now fear the possibility of having to pilot their boats through many wind turbines to reach their fishing grounds.

The state of Massachusetts wants to build hundreds of the large wind turbines off the coast near New Bedford. The electricity produced would be enough to power more than 1 million homes.

Eric Hansen harvests scallops from his boat in New Bedford. His family has been in this business for generations. The 56-year old spoke to the Associated Press about his concerns. You ever see a radar picture of a wind farm? he asked. Hansen added, Transit through it will be next to impossible, especially in heavy wind and fog.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is the government agency responsible for dealing with energy issues in federally-owned waters. An organization representing East Coast scallop fishermen has taken legal action against the agency. They are trying to stop a proposal for a wind farm of nearly 200 wind turbines off the coast of New Yorks Long Island.

Commercial fishermen in Marylands Ocean City and North Carolinas Outer Banks have also raised concerns about being unable to reach fishing grounds.

But supporters of the offshore wind power industry say they have learned from Europes experience with the technology. They also point to the opening of Americas only offshore wind farm near Rhode Island. They say it provides evidence that wind farms will not hurt U.S. fishermen.

Deepwater Wind is a company based in Rhode Island that opened the five-turbine wind farm near the states Block Island.

The company is proposing larger wind farms in other places along the East Coast.

Matthew Morrissey is a vice president of Deepwater. He told the Associated Press, We want to do this the right way, and I believe we have a path to do that.

However, fishermen are concerned that offshore wind farms will only lead to more restrictions.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management representative Stephen Boutwell said the agency has taken steps to deal with the concerns of the fishermen. These include banning wind farm development in some areas off Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York that are valuable to the fishing industry.

The agency also has carried out studies on issues fishermen have raised. This includes questions about the effects of wind farm construction and electromagnetic fields on fish behavior.

Deepwater Wind said early findings from studies of its Block Island wind farm show little harm to the environment. The company suggests that fish and lobster populations are just as strong as they were before the wind farm.

The company says it has paid several fishermen who were temporarily unable to reach their fishing grounds during construction.

There have not been reports of fishing boats striking the turbines. But several boats have reported their fishing equipment getting damaged by undersea structures connected to the turbines.

Richard Fuka is the president of the Rhode Island Fishermens Alliance. He said problems with wind turbines have cost fishermen tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and lost fishing time.

Also, U.S. fishermen are not pleased with the comparison to European fishermen. In Europe, 10 different countries have placed restrictions on fishing around the more than 3,500 turbines off their shores.

U.S. officials and developers however say similar bans are not being considered, except during construction.

Studies have been done on the North Sea of Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. They suggest the turbines actually support the growth of sea life.

Yet, Merlin Jackson of the Thanet Fishermens Association said in Britain transit through wind farms remains difficult in bad weather.

He said there have been at least two cases of fishing boats hitting turbines. Fishermen largely depend on the lights on turbines as guides, but they are not always taken care of well.

Jackson added that Americas slower, more complex approval process for turbine construction has forced more questions to be asked.

East Coast fishermen seem more united than those in Europe when wind farms are being developed.

If fishermen can be organized and be allowed to have input into the earliest parts of the planning process, then there should be a way forward, Jackson said.

Im Pete Musto. And Im Lucija Milonig.

Philip Marcelo reported this for the Associated Pres. Pete Musto adapted it for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

How can the fishing and wind power industries work together? What will the future be like for both? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Quiz

Now, test your understanding by taking this short quiz.

Quiz - US Fishermen Fear the Growth of Wind Power Industry Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz



_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

whale  n. an often very large animal that lives in the ocean and that is a mammal rather than a fish

turbine(s)  n. a tall structure that has large blades attached to an engine and that is used to produce electricity

scallop(s)  n. a type of shellfish that has a flat, round shell with two parts and that is often eaten as food

transit  n. the act of moving people or things from one place to another

commercial  adj. related to or used in the buying and selling of goods and services

electromagnetic  adj. describing a magnetic field that is produced by a current of electricity

lobster  n. an ocean animal that has a long body, a hard shell, and a pair of large claws and that is caught for food

allow(ed)  v. to permit someone to have or do something

input  n. advice or opinions that help someone make a decision


Vietnam is trying 22 business leaders on corruption charges, including a former top Communist Party official.

The trial is part of the campaign against corruption by Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.

Most of the business leaders on trial are current or former officials of the state-owned PetroVietnam oil company.

Dinh La Thang was a former chairman of PetroVietnam and a former member of Vietnams powerful Politburo.

The Politburo is the top political committee in a communist form of government.

Thang is accused of wrongdoing for his part in providing a contract to another company without a required bidding process. He also is accused of involvement in a deal that resulted in a $5.5 million loss to the state.

Thang is the first former Politburo member to face charges in many years. He could receive up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.

Trinh Xuan Thanh is another former chairman of PetroVietnam. He is accused of several charges including taking $186,000 for himself. The crime of embezzlement can be punished with a death sentence in Vietnam.

Last August, Germany said the Vietnamese intelligence service kidnapped Thanh from a park in Berlin. Vietnam denied the accusation. Officials said Thanh turned himself in voluntarily. However, the incident caused Germany to expel two Vietnamese diplomats.

Le Hong Hiep is an expert at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He said, the trial sends out a stern warning that there will be no no-go zones in this campaign, and corrupt officials, no matter who they are and what position they hold, will be brought to justice.

Hiep added that, in the past, political power was divided in Vietnam. The division weakened the countrys efforts against corruption. Now the general party secretary has increased powers.

Ngo Quang Hung is a retiree who was among the crowd gathered outside the courthouse. He said, Im happy that the government is getting tough on corruption.

Foreign media, however, are not permitted to attend the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.

Speaking in Berlin, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Rainer Breul said embassy representatives were inside the courtroom.

We will observe it very closely and then evaluate what this means for our policy, Breul said.

Germany is Europes largest economy.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on AP news reports. Mario Ritter was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

contract n. an official business agreement to provide goods or services

bidding n. a process in which different companies or individuals compete by offering a lower price for a good or service

embezzlement n. to steal money you have been trusted with

stern adj. very serious

zones n. areas or places that are different than others for some reason

evaluate v. to judge something giving it careful thought
China on Friday tightened limits on critically important energy supplies to North Korea and stepped up other trade restrictions under intensified U.N. nuclear sanctions.

Beijing said it will limit exports of crude oil and refined petroleum to the North. Previous curbs didnt apply to crude oil, which makes up the bulk of Chinas energy exports to the North.

China accounts for nearly all of Pyongyangs energy supplies and trade, making its enforcement key to sanctions aimed at discouraging leader Kim Jong Un from pursuing nuclear and missile technology.

The Security Council tightened sanctions on the North following its ballistic missile test on Nov. 29.

Beijing was long Pyongyangs diplomatic protector but has supported the U.N. sanctions out of frustration with what Chinese leaders see as their neighbors increasingly reckless behavior.

Despite the loss of almost all trade, the impoverished North has pressed ahead with weapons development that Kims regime sees as necessary for its survival in the face of U.S. pressure.

China has steadily increased economic pressure on Pyongyang while calling for dialogue to defuse the increasingly acrimonious dispute with U.S. President Donald Trumps government.

On Friday, a foreign ministry spokesman applauded news of possible talks between the North and South Koreas government.

We welcome the recent positive turn of events in the peninsular situation, said spokesman Geng Shuang at a regular briefing held before the latest trade curbs were announced.

Geng expressed hope all relevant parties would take advantage of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to bring the issue back to the correct track of peaceful settlement through dialogue and consultation.

In the same briefing, Geng said Chinas government would deal seriously with violators of U.N. sanctions on North Korea after a South Korean newspaper said Chinese-owned ships registered abroad regularly traded oil to the North.

Analysts see North Koreas need for Chinese oil as the most powerful economic leverage against Pyongyang. But Chinese leaders have warned against taking drastic measures that might destabilize Kims government or send a wave of refugees fleeing into China.

Chinese leaders have resisted previous U.S. demands for an outright oil embargo but went along with the latest limits.

Under the new restrictions, Chinese companies will be allowed to export no more than 4 million barrels of oil and 500,000 barrels of refined petroleum products per year. They are barred from supplying the Norths military or weapons programs.

The new measures also ban sales of steel, industrial machinery and vehicles. The Commerce Ministry said imports of North Korean food, machinery and some other goods will be banned.

In September, North Korean businesses in China were ordered to close by this month, cutting off an important supply of foreign currency. Most North Koreans who work in factories and other Chinese businesses have been sent home.

Chinese officials complain their country bears the cost of enforcement, which they say has hurt businesses in its northeast.

Previous sanctions banned sales of natural gas to North Korea and purchases of the Norths textile exports, another key revenue source. China also has banned imports of North Korean coal, iron and lead ore and seafood since early September. Joe McDonald, AP

Koreas will meet for talks this week



The rival Koreas will sit down for their first formal talks in more than two years this week to find ways to cooperate on the Winter Olympics in the South [see more on page 19] and to improve their abysmal ties, Seoul officials said Friday. While a positive sign after last years threats of nuclear war, the Koreas have a long history of failing to move past their deep animosity. The announcement came hours after the United States said it will delay annual military exercises with South Korea until after the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month.
Two residents were rushed to hospital after a New Era bus and a private vehicle collided on Saturday at 1:32 p.m. Police authorities said the car driver lost control of his vehicle on a flyover next to Lisboa and subsequently crashed into New Eras 28BX route in the opposite lane. Another accident occurred next to the reservoir when a truck crashed into road railings. According to reports, one passenger managed to leave the vehicle on his own, while the driver and another passenger were trapped inside the truck and were rescued later on. The drivers involved in both incidents passed breathalyzer tests.

Suspect of attempted rape in preventive custody

An individual suspected of attempting to rape an underage student has been presented to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP), where a judge decided on preventive custody after the first judicial hearing. Considering the serious matter of the case, the Investigation Judge of the Criminal Court [has] accepted the suggestion of the Prosecutor in charge of the Investigation [and] decided for the application of the mentioned coercive measure, a statement from the MP says. The statement added that the case will return to the Public Prosecutor to continue the investigation procedures.
The government has claimed that it is gaining support for its proposal for real names to be used when registering for prepaid SIM cards.

The Office of the Secretary for Security Wong Sio Chak said in a statement that the proposal  included in a bill that aims to establish a Cybersecurity Law in Macau  was well received at the first public consultation.

The consultation is a means for the government to hear the views of the general public, as well as the companies and entities directly involved with the related procedures and services.

During Friday evenings session at the Judiciary Police (PJ) headquarters, some of the 19 people that expressed their views on the document said they supported the government on the measure, noting that the measure can help police in the investigation and fight against cybercrime, according to the statement.

A total of 90 citizens attended the session, where the governments representatives presented the proposal on the Cybersecurity Law in detail and exchanged ideas with participants.

The majority of the stakeholders agree with the need to establish this Law, the statement concluded.

The management of public services and entities cybersecurity was also discussed. It was eventually decided that internal guidelines should be given to all public services, and that the Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau would be in charge of creating a data center to provide technical support to the public services.

Participants expressed the opinion that the authorities should establish standardized cybersecurity criteria. They also shared their views on the protection of personal data, the effectiveness of the law, the enforcement and scope of penalties, awareness-raising campaigns, regional cooperation, and the professionalism of the future permanent committee.
Hong Kongs justice chief is leaving his job earlier than expected amid rising turmoil over the semiautonomous Chinese citys judiciary.

The government said Friday that Rimsky Yuen is stepping down as the citys top law enforcement officer.

Yuen, who was reappointed for a second five-year term in July, will be replaced by Teresa Cheng, a lawyer and arbitration expert, after her nomination was approved by Beijing.

Yuens tenure was marked by a number of controversies over rule of law.

Activists criticized Yuen, 53, for using the law to clamp down on growing dissent through heavy-handed prosecutions of pro-democracy leaders involved in 2014s massive Umbrella Movement and other protests, many of whom were sent to prison.

He led government efforts to disqualify a group of newly elected opposition lawmakers from office over irregularities in their oaths of office.

Yuen also played a key role in pushing through plans for a cross-border express rail terminal in a downtown district that involves stationing mainland Chinese immigration agents in the city. The plans raised concerns about mainland authorities enforcing the law on Hong Kong soil, which pro-democracy lawmakers and activists say is a breach of Beijings agreement to let the city keep wide autonomy and a separate legal system following its 1997 handover from Britain.

Yuen said at a news conference that at different stages of life, one should do different things, without elaborating.

Cheng, 59, said that her prime mission would be to uphold the rule of law. AP
The Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT) expects construction of the gastronomy center at its Taipa campus to be completed within four to five years.

The school intends to launch its first masters degree program in the next two years, with a strong focus on hotel management, IFT president Fanny Vong told the press on the sidelines of the institutes Open Day yesterday.

The Open Day featured a series of activities, each led by different departments, to address visiting students enquiries.

IFT also plans to introduce a new culinary management course, in response to increased demand.

The school already offers several popular culinary-related courses, of which there were more than 170 in 2016/2017.

Vong said that once the school has enough resources, it will expand the scope of its courses to focus more on research and training in various areas of local gastronomy.

Antonio Chu, head of the Technical and Academic Support Division, told the Times that it aims to recruit some 420 new students for the 2018/2019 intake.

The maximum quota is 457 students. Eighty percent of this will be our target to local students. Of course, this includes students in both daytime programs and evening programs, Chu explained.

The division head also added that IFT aims to admit 90 students from the mainland and accept more students from Hong Kong and Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, noting that the institute has been conducting promotional activities across the region.

Returning to the topic of IFTs culinary degree  which will cater to around 20 students per class due to limited equipment  Chu continued, This [was] a competitive program last year and now the application period has started we [have] noticed that this program remains attractive to local students.

Although Chu recognized a slight decrease in the number of graduating high school students, he expressed hopes that IFT could reach its admission targets for the upcoming intake.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) Postponing disinvestment of Air India by five years will further erode its value, says aviation think tank CAPA in response to a draft report by a Parliamentary panel recommending the government review its decision on the airlines stake sale.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture in its draft report has said the government should look at alternative to disinvestment as it would not be appropriate to disinvest in the airline at a time when it has shown operational profits.

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The draft report suggested the government should revisit its decision to privatise the national carrier at the end of the 10-year turnaround plan in 2022.

"Parliamentary panel recommending divestment of Air India be postponed by 5 years will further erode its value. CAPA estimates that the government would need to inject additional USD 2.5-3bn funding, and these may be conservative estimates," said Kapil Kaul, Chief Executive, Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA).

Privatisation of the Air India should in fact be "fast- tracked" to maximise investor interest and value for the government, CAPA added.

The Union Cabinet last year gave its in-principle approval for the disinvestment of Air India and formed an inter-ministerial group to work on the strategy for the airlines stake sale.

The Air India has a debt of Rs 51,890 crore.

As part of a turnaround plan approved by the previous UPA dispensation, the airline was to receive a bailout package of up to Rs 30,231 crore for a period of 10 years, starting in 2012.

In 2016-17, the airline had a net loss of Rs 3,643 crore, while the operating profit rose to Rs 215 crore, as per the provisional figures.

The thinktank has also made suggestions for the Air Indias disinvestment process and said the government must sell airline operations alone as part of the core disinvestment along with aircraft-related debt and reasonable working capital loans.

Air Indias subsidiaries, CAPA says, should be sold off separately to raise capital that can be used to retire debt and that real estate and non-core assets should be placed in a separate Special Purpose Vehicle.

It also proposes that the government should exit from Air India completely and that foreign airlines should be allowed to participate in the bidding process by investing upto 49 per cent as per the FDI norms for the sector.

"No major Indian corporation from outside of aviation will invest in such a complex project without an experienced strategic partner. Allowing foreign airlines to participate will increase the number of interested bidders and the valuation," the CAPA said in a press statement.

It also suggested that the Air Indias domestic and international operations should be offered together. PTI JC TIR

--- ENDS ---
Police said four officers were killed Saturday when rebels fighting against Indian rule in disputed Kashmir detonated a bomb on a street the officers were patrolling.

Streets were deserted and shops and businesses closed for a strike when the massive blast struck the northwestern town of Sopore, hitting the police patrol. The town, famous for apple orchards, is observing a shutdown on the 25th anniversary of a massacre in which government forces killed at least 47 people after a paramilitary soldier died in a rebel attack.

The strike was called by separatist leaders who challenge Indias sovereignty over Kashmir. The town was already on high alert with hundreds of police and paramilitary soldiers patrolling the area in anticipation of anti-India protests and clashes.

Police said at least half a dozen shuttered shops suffered extensive damage in the blast, which was remotely detonated.

The Jash-e-Mohammed militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the English-language Greater Kashmir newspaper.

Reinforcements of police and paramilitary soldiers rushed to seal off the area.

Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan each administer part of Kashmir, but both claim the Himalayan territory in its entirety. Rebel groups demand that Kashmir be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country. India accuses Pakistan of arming and training the rebels, which Pakistan denies.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in the region, and most people support the rebels cause against Indian rule while also participating in civilian street protests against Indian control.

Nearly 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian military crackdown since 1989. AP
The attorneys for a former Hong Kong government official charged in the United States with using bribes to secure business deals asked a judge on Friday to release their client on bail.

The lawyers representing Dr. Chi Ping Patrick Ho said in a letter to Judge Katherine Forrest that Ho is neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk.

Ho has been jailed since November, when he was charged with paying bribes on behalf of a Chinese energy conglomerate to the president of Chad and the Ugandan foreign minister.

Ho, 68, of Hong Kong, and Cheikh Gadio, 61, of Senegal, were charged in Manhattan federal court with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, international money laundering and conspiracy.

Prosecutors allege that Ho hatched the scheme at the United Nations when the Ugandan foreign minister was president of the U.N. General Assembly. Beginning in October 2014, the pair arranged bribes to secure business advantages for a Shanghai-headquartered multibillion-dollar conglomerate that operates internationally in the energy and financial sectors, court papers say.

Ho was denied bail on Dec. 1 when U.S. Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman said she agreed with prosecutors argument that he was a flight risk

The lawyers said they are now asking that Ho be released on USD10 million bond secured by $2 million in cash. They are proposing home detention in Manhattan with electronic monitoring.

Lawyers Edward Y. Kim, Paul M. Krieger and Jonathan F. Bolz told Forrest, who will preside at Hos arraignment today, that Ho has every incentive to defend this case and clear his name. AP
Toys and other gifts from parents and aid workers brightened the Epiphany holiday Saturday for children living in dozens of makeshift tent camps more than three months after a deadly earthquake.

The Jan. 6 holiday is commonly known as Day of the Magi in Latin America, and its when children in Mexico traditionally receive gifts rather than on Christmas Day.

Uriel Martinez, an 8-year-old whose family lost their home in the Sept. 19 quake, woke up early Saturday to find a toy gun had been left for him overnight. That made him happy because he wants to be a soldier when he grows up.

I heard the kings come, but then I went back to sleep, Martinez said.

The camp where the family is sleeping in a southern neighborhood of Mexico City is a motley assortment of tents pitched on boards with tarps strung overhead to keep out the overnight chill.

Nearby is the quake-damaged building at 18 Independencia Street where they used to live, and which they now enter only to use the bathroom for fear it could collapse. Authorities plan to demolish it.

But this weekend there was plenty of holiday cheer.

Kids devoured a rosca de reyes, the kings cake associated with the day. A girl walked hand-in-hand with a doll around a Christmas tree strung with streamers and ornaments, and a young boy pedaled a tricycle underneath laundry airing on a clothesline. One toy car was so big it barely fit through the door of a tent.

Luz Maria Alvarez, who is also living in the camp with her husband, children and grandchildren, said the adults and teens are stressed because they still dont know what will happen.

But for the younger kids, living like this is still a kind of adventure and even more so on a day like today when we are all together, Alvarez said.

The nonprofit Ayudame hoy, Spanish for help me today, said it distributed some 3,000 gifts in quake camps in Mexico City and elsewhere. Some people are also still homeless in the south of Mexico after another powerful quake hit there earlier in September. AP
Six Myanmar soldiers were wounded in an insurgent attack in northern Rakhine state, where government troops have been accused of ethnic cleansing that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to flee into Bangladesh, officials said.

The military said in a statement on the commander in chiefs Facebook page that the attackers were from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the militant group blamed for attacks on police posts in August that prompted the crackdown that left thousands of Rohingya dead and more than 650,000 displaced.

On Friday, more than 20 insurgents used homemade bombs to attack a truck transporting troops from Taungpyo township in northern Rakhine, the government said in a separate statement on its Facebook page.

Six soldiers were taken to a military hospital, border guard police official Sann Oo said by phone Saturday.

In the past, the military has retaliated against Rohingya villages following such attacks.

The United Nations top human rights official in September described the Myanmar armys crackdown against the Rohingya Muslim minority as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

The United States also declared the violence against Rohingya Muslims to be ethnic cleansing and President Donald Trumps administration announced on Dec. 21 that it sanctioned the countrys Maj. Gen. Maung Maung Soe, who until recently was in charge of security operations in Rakhine.

Myanmars military released a report in November saying an internal investigation had absolved its forces of wrongdoing including allegations of rape and killings. AP
Lawmaker Sulu Sou and political activist Scott Chiang announced yesterday that Portuguese lawyer Jorge Menezes has agreed to act as their lawyer, but that he is requesting the Court of First Instance wpostpone tomorrows scheduled start date to allow for the necessary translation of court documents.

In order to have the necessary time to acquaint himself with the court file, obtain translation of the relevant documents and prepare the defense, our lawyer [Menezes] has filed an urgent request [] to postpone the trial date, which is pending approval, said a statement jointly signed by Sou and Chiang.

The two former leaders of democrat group New Macau Association, face charges of aggravated disobedience from a 2016 demonstration against the Macao Foundations RMB100 million donation to the mainlands Jinan University.

Last month, lawmakers in the Legislative Assembly voted 28-4 in favor of suspending Sou, thereby lifting his prosecutorial immunity and allowing for him to be tried in a court of law.

The unprecedented vote carries ramifications for future cases against Macau lawmakers, especially given the minor nature of the alleged crime.

According to the judicial procedure, we believe the judicial system is able to make a fair judgment for this case, Sou told the Times late last week when asked about the upcoming case.

We appreciate the public interest attached to this court action and the relevance that many understand it may have for Macaus political and legal systems, yesterdays statement added.

However, it has been our firm intention to respect the independence of the courts, which is a fundamental tenet of the rule of law. Facing the current, critical judicial procedure [] we do not intend to make [any] further comments.

The Times contacted Menezes for a statement, but the lawyer would not comment on the case at this time.

In the joint statement, Sou and Chiang also expressed gratitude to two court-

appointed attorneys, Che Hoi Tong and Kuan Weng I, for their continuous support.

The trial was initially scheduled to begin on November 28, but was postponed while lawmakers deliberated over whether to suspend the young democrats mandate.

The trial will begin tomorrow if the request for postponement is denied. DB
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen warned for the second time in a week that Chinas escalating efforts to assert its authority over the island risked destabilizing the broader region.

In a tweet Friday, Tsai cited Beijings approval of commercial flights near the rivals de facto border over the Taiwan Strait and increased military patrols around the island. Cross-strait stability is impt to regional stability, she said. Recent unilateral actions by #China  including M503 flight route & increased military exercises  are destabilizing & should be avoided.

Tsai leveled similar criticism at a year-end news conference, in which she pledged to increase defense spending amid Chinas growing military activity. While the democratically run Taiwan has been ruled separately since the end of the Chinese Civil War almost seven decades ago, Beijing continues to consider the island a province to be reunited with the mainland.

Tensions have been building since Tsai  whos Democratic Progressive Party supports independence  ousted a more China-friendly government in the islands elections two years ago. On Thursday, Taiwan protested Chinas reckless decision to approve four new flight routes over the strait, which it sees as the latest in a series of Chinese moves to undermine its sovereignty.

Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for the Beijing-

based Taiwan Affairs Office, said Thursday that the routes were intended to relieve air congestion and urged Tsais government to take a correct attitude, not make a fuss or hurt cross-strait ties, according to the China Times.

Taiwan has also complained about increased Chinese military activities, including encirclement patrols around the island. The PLA released a video on Dec. 18 showing Chinese fighter jets, bombers and surveillance aircraft conducting routine patrols near the island. Such flights are the new normal, PLA Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said last month.

The U.S. provides military support to the island under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, and Congress in September authorized naval visits with Taiwan as part of a defense spending measure. Last month, a senior Chinese diplomat in Washington said that China would unify Taiwan with military force if a U.S. warship visited.

Meanwhile, the Taipei-

based Mainland Affairs Council on Thursday blocked Chinas state-owned China Central Television from playing a propaganda ad on large television screens in Ximending, one of Taipeis busiest commercial districts, on ground that it violated regulations. The clip ends with Believe in China in 2018. Ting Shi, Bloomberg
Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

In response to the increasing informal sharing of human milk, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (ABM) has published guidelines to minimize the risk of this practice while enhancing the health benefits. The position statement is published in Breastfeeding Medicine, the official journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine.

"Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine's 2017 Position Statement on Informal Breast Milk Sharing for the Term Healthy Infant" discusses strategies to maximize the safety of community-based breast milk sharing, including 1) medical screening of the donor and 2) safe milk handling practices. Donors should have no medical illness where breastfeeding is contraindicated nor on any medication that is incompatible with breastfeeding. Mothers can further reduce the risk of infections by performing home pasteurization of donated milk prior to giving it to her infant; however, pasteurization can decrease some of the beneficial components of human milk. ABM also emphasizes that while informal milk sharing has potential health benefit, "internet-based milk sharing is not recommended under any circumstances."

"Informal breast milk sharing is becoming increasingly common for healthy term infants as 21st century families desire to feed their infants human milk," says Dr. Timothy Tobolic, president of ABM. "Physicians and other health care providers can help mothers and families evaluate the risks and benefits of informal milk sharing."

More information: Natasha K. Sriraman et al, Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine's 2017 Position Statement on Informal Breast Milk Sharing for the Term Healthy Infant, Breastfeeding Medicine (2018). Natasha K. Sriraman et al, Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine's 2017 Position Statement on Informal Breast Milk Sharing for the Term Healthy Infant,(2018). DOI: 10.1089/bfm.2017.29064.nks
(HealthDay)Obesity rates among poor kids may be declining, U.S. health officials report.

The number of severely obese 2- to 4-year-olds enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) increased to slightly more than 2 percent of all kids from 2000 to 2004, but it then decreased over the next decade to slightly less than 2 percent.

Though a small drop, the trend was seen among all ethnic and racial groups living throughout the nation, the researchers noted.

"Our findings indicate recent progress in reducing the prevalence of severe obesity among young U.S. children enrolled in WIC," said lead researcher Dr. Liping Pan, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"However, severe obesity in early childhood remains a serious public health concern," Pan added.

Obesity rates in children remain high, and those with obesity and severe obesity face significant health and social challenges, such as asthma, sleep apnea, bone and joint problems, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, she said.

"These lifelong health risks associated with severe obesity during early childhood indicate the importance of preventing and identifying severe obesity as early as possible," Pan said.

Differences in genetic, behavioral and environmental factors across years may have contributed to the increases and decreases in the prevalence of severe obesity, Pan said.

In addition, changes in WIC benefits might also have influenced the recent declines in obesity and severe obesity.

"The WIC food packages were revised in 2009 to promote fruits, vegetables and whole-wheat products, include more variety of healthy food options, support breast-feeding and provide state agencies with greater flexibility in prescribing foods to accommodate cultural food preferences," she said.

Recommendations and activities from the CDC and strategies from the U.S. Institute of Medicine to prevent and manage childhood obesity also may have contributed to the modest declines in severe obesity, Pan said.

The report was published online Jan. 8 in JAMA Pediatrics.

"The last time we got news about severe obesity among young children in the U.S., that news was all bad," said Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. "But no one should mistake this reassuring update for good news."

Except for the rare endocrine or genetic conditions, childhood obesity is entirely preventable. "That nearly two out of every 100 children in WIC are subject to the adversities of severe obesity is a national disgrace," Katz said.

For instance, he said that Americans are too willing to overlook the perils of a food supply that he described as willfully engineered to be addictive. They're also willing to recognize junk food as a food group and to mortgage the future health of children for the sake of corporate profits, he said.

"We may be thankful for a slight improvement in these trends," Katz said. "But that there are trends in severe childhood obesity worth tracking in the first place is testimony to a societal failure for which we should all hold ourselves accountable."

For the study, the researchersfrom the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Servicecollected data on nearly 23 million 2- to 4-year-olds from all the states who were enrolled in WIC from 2000 to 2014. Specifically, the researchers looked for the prevalence of severe obesity among these children.

They found that the prevalence of severe obesity decreased from 2.12 percent to 1.96 percent from 2000 to 2014.

The findings refer only to children in the WIC program and may not be representative of all low-income children because only about half of young children eligible for WIC are enrolled in the program, Pan said.

Nutritionist Samantha Heller said that "the nutrition education, improved access to fruits and vegetables and support provided by programs like WIC go a long way in helping families make healthier choices."

That's especially true, she said, "in a world where we are bombarded with highly effective marketing campaigns targeting kids for fast and junk foods, sweets and other unhealthy foods." Heller is a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Medical Center in New York City.

Parents need to take charge of their kitchens and not be swayed by the popularity of highly processed foods, she said.

They can save time and money and create healthier meals by planning ahead, cooking more at home, shunning fast and junk foods, ditching sugar-sweetened beverages and getting themselves and their children to be physically active, Heller said.

More information: Liping Pan, M.D., M.P.H., epidemiologist, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, Derby, Conn., and president, American College of Lifestyle Medicine; Samantha Heller, M.S., R.D., senior clinical nutritionist, New York University Medical Center, New York City; Jan. 8, 2018, JAMA Pediatrics, online. Liping Pan, M.D., M.P.H., epidemiologist, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, Derby, Conn., and president, American College of Lifestyle Medicine; Samantha Heller, M.S., R.D., senior clinical nutritionist, New York University Medical Center, New York City; Jan. 8, 2018,, online. The Obesity Society has more on childhood obesity. Journal information: JAMA Pediatrics

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
In a major development, an Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted the former chiefs of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland in a bribery case related to a helicopter contract with the Indian government.

By Munish Chandra Pandey: An Italian court may have acquitted the former chiefs of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland in a bribery case, but the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) remains confident that its case, which it investigated independently, is strong.

"Both Giuseppe Orsi and Bruno Spagnolini have been concocted by the lower court and the Italian authorities can appeal against the decision of acquittal before the Supreme Court of Italy. We have investigated our case independently and our case against both the accused is strong," said a CBI spokesperson.

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In a major development, an Italian appeals court on Monday acquitted Orsi and Spagnolini in a bribery case related to a helicopter contract with the Indian government. Both men were cleared of corruption charges due to insufficient evidence.

Earlier, Italy's Supreme Court had ordered the their retrial. They had been convicted in 2016 by a lower court, for paying bribes worth Rs 423 crore to Indian government officials to bag the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland helicopter deal in 2010.

In 2016, the court had sentenced Orsi to 4.5 years in jail for false accounting and corruption in the deal for 12 VVIP choppers, while Spagnolini was handed a four-year sentence. The CBI filed a chargesheet against Spagnolini and Orsi in September last year in the AgustaWestland chopper scam.

Along with Orsi and Spagnolini, retired Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi, former Air Marshal JS Gujral, Tyagi's cousin Sanjeev Tyagi, lawyer Gautam Khaitan, Carlo Gerosa and Guido Haschke, and alleged middleman Christian Michel have been named as accused by the CBI.

WATCH | Full interview of AgustaWestland middleman Christian Michel with India Today

--- ENDS ---
(HealthDay)Parents aren't the only ones worried about their kids' smartphone habits. Some big Apple investors want the iPhone developer to make it easier for Mom and Dad to manage their children's phone time.

Apple also needs to explore potential mental health effects of smartphone overuse, says a letter sent to the technology giant this weekend by Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers' Retirement System (Calstrs).

Jana, a leading activist investor, and the pension fund control about $2 billion of Apple shares, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The letter states that "Apple can play a defining role in signaling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do," the Journal reported.

In the letter, the investors cite a "growing body of evidence" of "unintentional negative side effects" from excessive smartphone use by the so-called "iGen."

Some worry that as screen time replaces face-to-face socializing, rates of depression and suicide are rising as well. The authors cited worrisome research by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and others, plus observations from teachers, according to the news report.

The investors want Apple out front in attempting to learn what is optimal usage and in simplifying parental controls. The company shouldn't wait for consumers or regulators to demand action, the investors contend.

"There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility," the shareholders wrote.

They have drawn big names to an advisory board, including rock musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, and Sister Patricia Dalythe nun who took on Exxon Mobil Corp. over environmental concerns, the news report noted.

Media expert Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, likened the movement to other public-health science campaigns.

"How can we apply the same kind of public-health science to this that we do to, say, nutrition?" Rich told the Journal. "We aren't going to tell you never go to Mickey D's, but we are going to tell you what a Big Mac will do and what broccoli will do."

More information: Common Sense Media has tips for parents for Common Sense Media has tips for parents for managing kids' cellphone use

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Learning how to manage anxiety takes time and practice, so its not helpful to wait until stress levels are at a peak before seeking help. Credit: shutterstock

Roughly one in five students drop out of university in Australia in their first year. Students with prior emotional difficulties, who are doing their degrees part-time, mature age at entry, or from a lower socioeconomic status background are most likely to be in this category.

Not all of these factors can be changed. But there are ways parents and students can prepare for the transition to university.

Students who have previously struggled with emotional difficulties or mental health problems are particularly at risk. But the earlier the strategies to support these students are put in place, the more likely they are to succeed.

How much stress or anxiety is normal?

Starting university is a common cause of heightened stress. There are many new challenges to overcome, such as adjusting to a new learning environment that has less personalised assistance and greater emphasis on independent learning. It's also challenging to be in a course with hundreds of other students you don't know.

Most students adjust to these challenges, and the stress they experience should be temporary. But those who find change difficult, who worry excessively about their performance, are overly perfectionistic, or are fearful of public speaking or exams are likely to find transitioning to university particularly challenging.

Students who find these things difficult on an ongoing basis are likely suffering from an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders tend to run in families, and often start early in life. They have very negative impacts on someone's functioning and well-being.

If your child is skipping lectures or tutorials, avoiding class presentations or exams, failing regularly, not handing in assignments, losing sleep, constantly worrying about their performance or thinking they're not good enough, it's time to intervene.

What can parents do to help?

Fortunately, anxiety can be treated. Cognitive behavioural therapy is the treatment of choice for anxiety-related problems.

Cognitive behavioural therapy teaches people to change unhelpful thinking, and to face fears over eight to 12 weeks.

Learning how to manage anxiety takes time and practice, so it's not helpful to wait until stress levels are at a peak before seeking help. If a student has anxiety related to these circumstances, it's advisable to get assistance before they start university, or as soon as the problems arise.

Those students who find exams particularly stressful are likely to find the transition to university difficult. Credit: shutterstock

Parents can assist students to make appointments and possibly assist with gap payments for professional services such as for a private clinical psychologist or specialist anxiety clinics with expertise in cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety disorders. Assistance can also be sought from local headspace services for free.

Self-help resources that teach cognitive behavioural therapy skills are available online, including internet-based therapy programs.

Most universities also offer student support services. These services can get very busy around exam time. So, it's best to tackle issues as soon as they arise  preferably before a student heads to university.

Here are some tips on how to deal with Exam Anxiety using CBT techniques.

Managing expectations

In addition to playing a role in facilitating early intervention, parents can also assist students by setting realistic expectations. These would be related to performance at university, and the time taken to learn new and often complex skills and theories.

Parents can also encourage students not to avoid classes or assessments they find difficult, but to enrol in support courses or workshops to enhance learning in particular tasks they're struggling with, such as an essay writing course.

But while parents are an important support network for university students, as young adults, parents have to balance support with encouraging independence.

Important support for students will come from other students in the same course. They will be able to provide information on how to approach an assignment or to discuss what a particular theoretical concept means.

When most students begin university they often don't know anyone else in the same course, or at least not in their tutorial group. Parents can play an important role in encouraging students to start up conversations with others in their course, encouraging them to get involved in university social clubs and mentoring programs.

Parental pressure plays an important role in academic stress in high school students. And although it has not been specifically examined in university settings, it's likely to be a source of stress.

Parents need to prepare for the transition to university by managing their own expectations about what marks the student should be getting or what courses they should be studying. They should step back and encourage and facilitate their child to make their own decisions and to get external assistance if needed.

Transitions to university are difficult for most, but stress should be temporary. If your child has anxiety or had difficulties coping with year 12, it's important to seek help to prepare them for the challenges of university before they begin.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
So many people have fallen sick with influenza in California that pharmacies have run out of flu medicines, emergency rooms are packed and the death toll is rising higher than in previous years.

Health officials said Friday that 27 people younger than 65 have died of the flu in California since October, compared with three at the same time last year. Nationwide and in California, flu activity spiked sharply in late December and continues to grow.

The emergency room at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica typically treats about 140 patients a day, but at least one day this week had more than 200 patientsmostly because of the flu, said the ER's medical director, Dr. Wally Ghurabi.

"The Northridge earthquake was the last time we saw over 200 patients," Ghurabi said.

Experts say it's possible that this year's flu season is outpacing the last simply because it's peaking earlier.

The flu season is typically worst around February, but can reach its height anytime from October to April. Though influenza had only killed three Californians at this time last year, it had taken 68 lives by the end of February, according to state data.

Many California doctors, however, contend that the recent surge has been unusually severe.

"Rates of influenza are even exceeding last year, and last year was one of the worst flu seasons in the last decade," said Dr. Randy Bergen, clinical lead of the flu vaccine program for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.

State health officials said Friday that there was no region of the state where people were being spared from the flu.

In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, ambulance services have been severely strained because of the number of flu calls coming in, local health officials said.

Plus, emergency rooms are so crowded that ambulances arriving at hospitals can't immediately unload their patients, so they're unable to leave for incoming 911 calls, said Jose Arballo Jr., spokesman for the Riverside County Department of Public Health.

"The ambulances have to wait ... and if they're waiting there, they can't be out on calls," Arballo said.

Most people in California and nationwide are catching a strain of influenza known as H3N2, which the flu vaccine typically doesn't work as well against. National health officials predict the vaccine might only be about 32 percent effective this year, which could be contributing to the high number of people falling ill.

H3N2 is also a particularly dangerous strain of the flu, experts say.

"It tends to cause more deaths and more hospitalizations than the other strains," said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, L.A. County's interim health officer.

Of extra concern this year are large numbers of older patients who are showing up at hospitals with the flu and pneumonia, a potentially fatal combination.

"You have no choice but to admit them and hydrate them on IV antibiotics to preventGod forbida bad outcome," Ghurabi said.

Each year, the number of flu deaths reported by the state includes only people younger than 65 and therefore underestimates the real toll of the flu, since elderly people are most likely to succumb to the illness, experts say. In Los Angeles County, 33 people have died of the flu this season and only a handful were under 65, Gunzenhauser said.

Dr. Matthew Mullarky, an emergency physician at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, said that half of the patients he saw on a recent ER shift were so sick that he had to keep them in the hospital. Most of them were older than 85, with the flu and pneumonia.

"It's incredibly scary," he said.

Doctors often prescribe the flu medication oseltamivir, known by the brand name Tamiflu, to patients with the flu. But doctors and patients said this week that the drug was hard to find.

Caroline Bringenberg, who lives in Silver Lake, fell ill when she was visiting her family in Denver for the holidays. She had headache, fever and weakness.

"I don't remember the last time I was this sick," said Bringenberg, 25.

When her doctor prescribed her Tamiflu on Wednesday, Bringenberg learned that a CVS pharmacy in Glassell Park was out of the medicine. All the CVS pharmacies in the area had run out, the pharmacists there told her.

Bringenberg then called a nearby independent pharmacy, but it also had exhausted its supply.

"I've just sort of given up," Bringenberg said. "I think honestly it would make me feel worse to be in the car driving all over town, so I've just opted for ibuprofen and DayQuil."

CVS spokeswoman Amy Lanctot said increased demand for Tamiflu in California may have led to some stores being temporarily out of stock. Other pharmacies reported that they were running low on the medicine or were out completely.

"They're all on back order right now," said Talia Dimaio, a pharmacy clerk at Rancho Park Compounding Pharmacy in West L.A. "We can't get it."

Bob Purcell, spokesman for the San Francisco-based pharmaceutical company Genentech, which makes Tamiflu, said there isn't a national shortage of the medicine, suggesting that pharmacists' shelves were emptied this week by a sudden surge in demand.

Doctors say Tamiflu doesn't eliminate the flu but lessens the severity of symptoms and how long they last. It works best if taken within 48 hours of when patients start to feel sick.

Nihar Mandavia, a pharmacist who owns the Druggist Pharmacy in Laguna Niguel, said he's been ordering as much Tamiflu as possible from wholesalers and filling 25 prescriptions a day, compared with a typical one a day. He said out-of-stock pharmacies are referring patients to him.

"It's been crazy," he said. "And there's still morewe're getting calls right now."

On Friday morning, Mandavia had enough left for only four more patients, he said. And some of his wholesalers had run out too.

Though flu season is underway, health officials say it's not too late to get the flu shot. The vaccine is recommended for everyone older than 6 months.

"Even if you're healthy, the downside of getting the flu vaccine is so lowit's relatively inexpensive. At the worst you'll have a sore arm," Gunzenhauser said.

The vaccine can also mean not getting sick and then infecting someone who might not recover so easily. Nationwide, 13 children have died of influenza this flu season.

Dr. Greg Hendey, UCLA's chair of emergency medicine, said people usually develop flu symptoms two to three days after they're exposed to the virus, but are most contagious the day before symptoms develop. "So before you even know you're sick you're already spreading the virus," he said.

He recommended that people wash their hands often and avoid close contact with anyone coughing or sneezing.

Hendey said they've been trying to adjust staffing levels at the ER to keep up with the crowds, but there's been an added challenge lately. "Sometimes we don't have our full complement of nurses because, they're people too, they get sick."

2018 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Scientists are looking to see if they could add positive thoughts to bad memories. Credit: CC0

Reducing the trauma associated with bad memories while someone is asleep sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it could become a reality in 10 years thanks to a greater understanding of how the brain encodes memories during sleep.

A good snooze is known to be important for forming memories but it is only recently that scientists are starting to understand the details, and the work could lead to better treatments for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or age-related forgetfulness.

In 2015, Dr. Karim Benchenane from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France, and his colleagues demonstrated for the first time that false memories could be created in mice while they were sleeping. The team targeted nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain that fire when the animal is, or thinks of being, in a specific locationthe so-called 'place cells' that provide both rodents and people with an internal map.

'When mice sleep after exploring an environment, you see that the same neurons are reactivated in the same order,' said Dr. Benchenane. 'Replaying that information in the brain while sleeping is just like repetition in learning. This repetition improves memory consolidation.'

Using electrodes, the team recorded the activity of place cells when mice explored their environment and later when they slept. They then stimulated the brain areas associated with reward when particular place cells fired  each of which is associated with a specific location. When they awoke, the mice had a new memory and headed straight to that reward-associated location.

'When you stimulate parts of the brain associated with reward during sleep, it's just like the animal gets a huge reward in the physical world. We can make the animal believe that it gets a reward in a particular location in the environment,' explained Dr. Benchenane. 'This means when place cells fire in sleep, they still convey spatial information.'

Traumatic

Now Dr. Benchenane hopes to build on this work by using a similar technique to alter negative memories associated with traumatic events in mice, as part of a project called MNEMOSYNE, funded by the EU's European Research Council (ERC).

'We want to use reactivation during sleep to treat pathologies associated with fear or anxiety, such as post-traumatic stress disorder,' said Dr. Benchenane.

The idea is to add positive thoughts to bad memories. 'We have managed to modify the emotional imbalance of a memory during sleep by stimulating the reward areas in the brain, meaning we can take a memory that is neutrala location in the physical world for instanceand make it positive. Now we have to understand how positive and negative memories compete in the brain, and see if a positive memory can suppress a negative one, or even make it neutral,' he said.

Dr. Benchenane and his colleagues plan to give an electrical shock to mice when they are in a specific location, to associate this location with a bad memory. Then, while the mice are asleep, they will stimulate the reward areas in the brain when the place cells fire in this specific location, to change the negative memory into a positive one.

'During wakefulness, the rodent will learn to avoid this location because it's frightening,' he explained. 'But after waking up, we'll see if the reward we gave during sleep will be able to suppress the aversion memory we gave during wakefulness.'

If their results in rodents are promising, the technique could be developed for people.

'The application in humans might not be that far awaywe're talking about 10 years which is quite soon when we're talking about science,' said Dr. Benchenane. 'But first we need to understand how positive and negative valence (whether someone feels good or bad about something) compete in the brain. We don't want to make people like what they are scared of.'

While some people might benefit from having memories reduced, others would like to see them strengthened  a key function of a normal night's sleep.

As we doze, our brains replay our day. Like this, some memories are consolidated or strengthened whereas unimportant memories are selected and forgotten.

'The brain has time to work on strengthening and selecting memories with less disturbance during sleep,' said Professor Anders Martin Fjell from the University of Oslo in Norway. 'Selective forgetting is as important as memory per se, since we do not have the capacity to remember all that we experience, and sleep seems to help us with this too.'

Older

But as we grow older, our ability to form new memories for specific events in our lives worsens. It not only takes longer to learn new information, but it is also harder to recall that information.

Prof. Fjell is looking at how age affects the way memories are unconsciously strengthened in the brain during sleep and its impact on memory loss in the elderly, as part of the ERC-funded project AgeConsolidate.

'Since a large proportion of cognitively healthy older adults report to be worried about their own memory function, finding the causes of reduced memory in ageing is important,' said Prof. Fjell. 'This will also allow us to develop strategies for reducing memory problems in ageing.'

Although we know age affects our ability to encode (or learn) and retrieve information, studies on how memories are strengthened  or consolidated  in the ageing brain have largely been ignored until now, says Prof. Fjell.

He hopes to strengthen selected memories without the participants consciously retrieving or activating themas these will otherwise be encoded a second time.

To do this, Prof. Fjell and his team will use a technique called targeted memory reactivation (TMR) by using sound to stimulate people's brains while they sleep in a scanner. The idea is to boost the memory-strengthening processes that happen during deep sleep in order to get a better understanding of the neural mechanisms responsible for increasing memory consolidation.

The scans will be carried out across participants with above- and below-average memory function at two-year intervals to look at changes in their brains and specific memories over time.

'As many people experience changes in sleeping patternsand sometimes qualitywith age, it is important to know whether sleep contributes to the reduced memory in ageing,' said Prof. Fjell.
Data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System shows a 129 percent increase in the number of children removed from their homes due to parental neglect, tied to illicit opioid abuse. Credit: Troy Quast, PhD, University of South Florida College of Public Health

The opioid epidemic has become so severe it's considered a national public health emergency. Addiction to prescription painkillers, such as oxycodone and morphine, has contributed to a dramatic rise in overdose deaths and health care costs. What many don't realize, it's also associated with an alarming number of children placed into foster care.

In a study published in this month's issue of Health Affairs, researchers analyzed the association between the rate of opioid prescriptions in Florida and the number of children removed from their homes due to parental neglect.

"Through my experience as a foster parent, I've seen first-hand how the foster system has been overwhelmed by children removed from homes where the parents are opioid-dependent," said lead author Troy Quast, PhD, of the University of South Florida College of Public Health. "My goal in this study was to gain insight into the factors behind this surge."

Quast and his colleagues reviewed 2012-2015 data on Florida's 67 counties submitted to the federal government's Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. They found that in 2015, roughly two out of every 1000 kids and teens were removed from their homes due to parental neglect, reflecting a staggering 129 percent increase since 2012.

According to the Florida Drug-Related Outcomes Surveillance and Tracking System, the number of opioids prescribed during this same time period rose 9 percent. In 2012, doctors prescribed 72.33 prescriptions for every 100 residents. The rate grew to 81.34 by 2015, averaging 74.1 prescriptions during the 2012-2015 time frame. It's important to note the rate dropped 2.5 percent in 2013, following the implementation of several new state policies regarding pain clinics and a prescription drug monitoring program.

The range of Florida's opioid prescription rate was dramatic. Some counties averaged about one prescription a year for every three people, while other counties had as many as 1  opioid prescriptions per person each year. The highest rates were found in predominantly white counties.

The analysis by Dr. Quast and his colleagues showed that on average, for every additional 6.7 opioid prescriptions per 100 people, the removal rate for parental neglect increased by 32 percent. This estimated increase corresponds to roughly 2000 additional children removed, resulting in an annual state fiscal cost of $40 million. Previous studies have shown children removed from their homes due to parental neglect have a greater likelihood of juvenile delinquency, teen motherhood, mental and physical health problems and adult criminality.

"While the reported drop in opioid prescription rates over the last two years is encouraging, unfortunately it appears illicit opioid use has more than offset the decrease," said Dr. Quast. "We need to keep affected children in the forefront of our minds when tackling this crisis."
Credit: University of South Australia

An Australian review of palliative care services has revealed the impact of opioid medication errors on patients in the final weeks of their lives.

In a paper published in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care today (Monday 8 January), researchers from NSW and the University of South Australia reveal that errors involving opioids are almost three times higher than previously reported in other healthcare settings.

Researchers looked at opioid errors in three inpatient palliative care services in metropolitan NSW over a two-year period, from 2013-2015. More than half of the errors (57 per cent) involved patients receiving a lower dose of pain relief than ordered, requiring clinical intervention in a third of cases. The majority of patients had cancer and were aged in their 70s.

Professor Debra Rowett, from UniSA's School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, says the study highlights the importance of understanding why opioid errors occurparticularly lower dosingwhich may contribute to patients' pain.

"Palliative care clinicians have identified that safe use of opioids is a patient safety priority and this study is an important first step in quantifying and identifying opioid errors," Professor Rowett says.

"The high rate of errors in palliative care environments compared to other healthcare services most likely reflects the higher volume of opioids such as morphine being used for patients to manage their pain in the last stages of their lives."

Of 55 opioid errors identified, most involved morphine dosages (35 per cent) and two thirds related to administration errors. Researchers say better understanding the factors that contribute to or mitigate opioid errors is a priority in this clinical setting.

Medication errors pose one of the greatest risk to patient safety, researchers say, particularly those involving opioids, which are high-risk medicines. The risk is amplified in patients who are older, have multiple health issues and are taking numerous medications.
(HealthDay)A common respiratory virus that circulates in winter can pose a serious threat to children, an expert warns.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) "is the most important respiratory virus of infants and young children," said Dr. Pedro Piedra, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston.

RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants younger than 1 and each year is linked to 60,000 to 200,000 deaths worldwide of children younger than 5.

"Nearly all infants and young children will have been infected at least once by the time they reach 2 years of age, and individuals will be reinfected throughout life," Piedra said in a Baylor news release.

The virus also affects older adults and causes nearly as many deaths in that age group as the flu, he said.

"RSV during the wintertime is all around us and is rampant right now," Piedra said. "A lot of times, people confuse RSV and the flu. There are several respiratory viruses that are co-circulating right now, and many of these viruses mimic each other."

"Don't assume that it's a breakthrough infection of the flu if you have been vaccinated," he warned.

In young children, RSV can cause symptoms of respiratory distress such as rapid breathing, coughing, not eating well and throwing up when coughing, especially when trying to eat.

In adults, RSV is hard to distinguish from the flu.

There is no specific antiviral treatment for RSV, but doctors can treat symptoms in children and adults, Piedra said.

More information: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on RSV

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Similar in size to an A4 page, the cold plasma dressing is intended to accelerate healing and kill bacteria in wounds. Credit: COLDPLASMATECH

A relatively inexpensive egg-based formula and a Star Trek-like plasma patch can accelerate healing of serious and chronic wounds, which affect millions of Europeans every year.

According to trade association MedTech Europe, around 4 million people in the EU develop non-healing wounds each year. These are most commonly bedsores or diabetic ulcers, and the problem is likely to become worse as lower birth rates and higher life expectancy means the European population is getting older.

Dr. Carsten Mahrenholz from German company COLDPLASMATECH says that physicians tend to just re-dress chronic wounds as they are very hard to heal. But he warns that the current issues we are experiencing with multidrug-resistant bacteria means that we are on the brink of a return to the Middle Ages in terms of our susceptibility to infection.

Inspired in part by Star Trek, his favourite show, Dr. Mahrenholz is bringing the sci-fi use of plasma closer to reality by developing an active plasma dressing for treating chronic wounds.

Plasma is known as the fourth state of matter, after solids, liquids and gases. It is similar to a gas but carries a charge (it's ionised) which gives it unique properties  such as the ability to carry electrical currents and generate magnetic fields.

To date, clinical applications of plasma technology show potential for use as a disinfectant to sterilise medical equipment in the age of virulent hospital-borne infections such as MRSA, but the power of plasma is now also being explored in direct biomedical applications.

"It's called cold plasma, which is the same plasma you have on the sun's surface or in lightning," said Dr. Mahrenholz. "However, it's tissue tolerable, so it's cold and we can use its bioactivity."

He has developed a patch that uses the properties of plasma to help kill drug-resistant bacteria and trigger healing in persistent wounds, in order to save time, money and effort for those who experience them.

"This bioactive gas (in plasma) influences two areas," he said, "One is bacteria and the other is cells. During the process, bacteria cells, including multidrug-resistant bacteria, are killed within seconds of being exposed to the cold plasma."

Cells then start basic recovery, cell migration and other biological processes. "Wound-healing is triggered," said Dr. Mahrenholz. "And this is very important for chronic wounds that don't heal themselves."

Burns

One of COLDPLASMATECH's early successes occurred when a young woman was brought into hospital with severe burns. Although the prototype patch was not yet up and running, the team worked overnight to prepare a special plasma treatment which quickly killed the bacteria in the wounds and ultimately saved her life.

The company has been supported by EIT Health, part of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), which supports innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe. The technology has now progressed to the point where it is readily available and automated.

"We have a wound dressing which is put on the wound and then there's a button pressed and that's it. In two minutes (it's done)," said Dr. Mahrenholz. "When you take it off you have the full killing of all bacteria or fungi that are in the wound. And after a couple of repeated treatments you will start wound healing."

Yet, what if there was an even simpler way to treat wounds? Inspired by ancient healing techniques, the common chicken egg could provide another solution.

Eggs are consumed in massive amounts across Europe every day and European hens lay more than 7 million tonnes of eggs a year, but a lot of shells are going to waste. One company is using this eggshell waste and transforming it into a novel wound-healing technology.

Biovotec is collecting and processing the membranes from discarded eggshells, which have similar healing properties to a human placenta, to manufacture a material to use as a wound dressing. The advantage is that the volume of egg membranes available means that dressings can be produced at scale.

Egg membranes have been used for healing throughout history, including in traditional Chinese medicine. The membrane was applied directly as a dressing for wounds such as burns because its properties can help accelerate the healing process.

Describing the effects of the membrane, Dr. Henri-Pierre Suso, co-founder of Norway-based Biovotec said: "It reduces inflammation and induces cell migration to reconstruct new tissues."

Magnet

As part of the EU-funded BIOCURE project, they have developed a dissolvable film which attracts healthy cells like a magnet. Once applied it turns into a gel and enters the wound, enabling the injury to heal.

The project has recently completed successful safety tests in animals and intends to begin human trials this summer, Dr. Suso hopes that their product can shorten the treatment time for full wound closure significantly, as well as providing hospitals and at-home nurses with treatments that are more affordable than today's options.

The aim is that it will be suitable for a variety of wounds, including bed or pressure sores, and diabetes-related wounds like foot ulcers, which are estimated to affect 25 % of people with diabetes. But currently their focus is the chronic open sore of venous leg ulcers.

"We have had very positive results which have driven our motivation so far," said Dr. Suso. "It seems to be an exceptional cost-effective product for chronic wounds."
Cancer patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs are less likely to receive excessive end-of-life interventions than those treated through Medicare, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

The study will be published online Jan. 8 in Health Affairs.

"The findings are not just important for veterans and VA policy, but for anybody who needs medical care at the end of life, which is a majority of us," said Risha Gidwani-Marszowski, DrPH, a consulting assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. "We as a society need to ensure we are setting up the organization of health care and its financial incentives to ensure that the services patients receive are the ones that are in their best interests at the end of life."

Gidwani-Marszowski, the lead author, is also a health economist at the VA Health Economics Resource Center. The senior author is Steven Asch, MD, professor of medicine at Stanford.

Many Americans say they would prefer to die at home and forgo intensive medical care at the end of their lives. Yet in the last month of life, many studies have shown that the use and cost of health care accelerates. Approximately 4 percent of the entire federal budget is spent on care for Medicare patients in their last year of life, according to some estimates.

In addition, changes are afoot at the VA. Several efforts, including the proposed Veterans Empowerment Act, would change the VA so that it mostly funds medical services, along the lines of Medicare, rather than providing all the care itself.

Those changes could expose veterans to any effects a Medicare-like funding approach has on end-of-life care, Gidwani-Marszowski said.

Testing a funding model

The researchers tested whether the way that care is organized affects the provision of end-of-life services for veterans dying of cancer. The study looked at 87,251 veterans older than 66 who had solid tumors and died between October 2009 and September 2014.

The researchers based the analysis of care quality on guidelines developed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Quality Forum, as well as on research that has shown patients consider some services undesirable or burdensome at the end of life. Specific criteria included whether patients received chemotherapy; whether they had two or more emergency department visits; whether they were admitted to the hospital and, if so, how many days they spent there; whether they died in the hospital; and whether they were admitted to intensive care. In the study, higher numbers of veterans receiving these services indicates lower quality of care.

The researchers then compared the use of these services by veterans with cancer who used VA health care with veterans with cancer who received their care through Medicare. More than 90 percent of older veterans are enrolled in Medicare as well as the VA, so the population that is eligible for both programs is ideal for evaluating differences in care due to health care system factors, Gidwani-Marszowski said. Researchers accounted for several characteristics that could affect which system veterans choose for care, including the distance they live from medical facilities, Gidwani-Marszowski said.

The study showed that Medicare patients were more likely to receive unduly intensive care at the end of life including chemotherapy, hospitalization, admission to the intensive care unit, longer stays in the hospital and death in the hospital than those who received care through the VA.

Gidwani-Marszowski said the study's findings that Medicare patients receive lower-quality, higher-intensity end-of-life care make sense given the different financial incentives of the two systems. VA physicians are salaried, while Medicare-funded physicians bill according to the services provided, which is known as fee for service. Therefore, additional services provided through Medicare generate funds for physicians and health care organizations.

Emergency department use differs

The researchers also found that the VA patients were more likely than the Medicare patients to have two or more emergency department visits. One possible explanation, Gidwani-Marszowski said, is that extended hours or access to appointments are not available at all VA facilities and that veterans may instead need to go to the emergency department for their care. Another is that Medicare patients may be hospitalized for care that VA patients get in the emergency department.

"The VA has long been a leader in providing patient-centered care at the end of life," Asch said. "Our study showed that veterans can expect appropriately lower-intensity care as they face late-stage cancer at VA facilities. If they choose instead to use their Medicare benefits outside the VA, they are at greater risk of getting chemotherapy, hospitalization and other services that will likely not help them in their last days."

The work is an example of Stanford Medicine's focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill.
Credit: University of Leeds

Fewer women who suffer a heart attack each year in the UK would die if they were simply given the same treatments as men, according to new research.

Scientists at the University of Leeds and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden used data from Sweden's extensive online cardiac registry, SWEDEHEART, to analyse the outcomes of 180,368 patients who suffered a heart attack over a 10 year period to December 2013.

After accounting for the expected number of deaths seen in the average population, the researchers found that women had an excess mortality up to three times higher than men's in the year after having a heart attack

While the analysis uses Swedish data, the researchers believe that the situation for women in the UK is likely to be worse than in Sweden, which has one of the lowest mortality rates from heart attacks anywhere in the world.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, was co-funded by the British Heart Foundation.

Professor Chris Gale, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Leeds, who co-authored the study, said: "We need to work harder to shift the perception that heart attacks only affect a certain type of person.

"Typically, when we think of a heart attack patient, we see a middle-aged man who is overweight, has diabetes and smokes. This is not always the case: heart attacks affect the wider spectrum of the population, including women.

"Sweden is a leader in healthcare, with one of the lowest mortality rates from heart attacks, yet we still see this disparity in treatment and outcomes between men and women.

"In all likelihood, the situation for women in the UK may be worse."

Analysis of the Swedish data found that women who had a heart attack resulting from a blockage in the coronary artery were 34 per cent less likely than men to receive procedures which clear blocked arteries and restore blood flow to the heart, including bypass surgery and stents.

The paper reported that women were also 24 per cent less likely to be prescribed statins, which help to prevent a second heart attack, and 16 per cent less likely to be given aspirin, which helps to prevent blood clots.

Critically, when women received all of the treatments recommended for patients who have suffered a heart attack, the gap in excess mortality between the sexes decreased dramatically.

Professor Gale, from the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine, added: "The findings from this study suggest that there are clear and simple ways to improve the outcomes for women who have a heart attack  we must ensure equal provision of evidence-based treatments for women."

Previous British Heart Foundation research has shown that women are 50 per cent more likely than men to receive the wrong initial diagnosis and are less likely to get a pre-hospital Electrocardiogram (ECG) which is essential for swift diagnosis and treatment.

Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Heart attacks are often seen as a male health issue, but more women die from coronary heart disease than breast cancer in the UK. The findings from this research are concerning  women are dying because they are not receiving proven treatments to save lives after a heart attack."

More information: Oras A Alabas et al. Sex Differences in Treatments, Relative Survival, and Excess Mortality Following Acute Myocardial Infarction: National Cohort Study Using the SWEDEHEART Registry, Journal of the American Heart Association (2017). Journal information: Journal of the American Heart Association Oras A Alabas et al. Sex Differences in Treatments, Relative Survival, and Excess Mortality Following Acute Myocardial Infarction: National Cohort Study Using the SWEDEHEART Registry,(2017). DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.117.007123
It was announced at the All India Whips Conference in Udaipur.

By Rohit Parihar: Centre has made a provision of Rs 750 crores to make all Legislative assemblies and legislative councils digital and paperless.

This was disclosed by Anant Kumar, union minister for Parliamentary Affairs while addressing 18 the All India Whips Conference at Udaipur on Monday.

He said this was a five-year project named E-Vidhan and centre will bear the cost.

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Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje in her address talked about the importance of health debate and ensuring that bills that were meant for public interest were not held up due to the ruckus.

She remembered Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and Meenu Masani for setting best examples in parliamentary debates.

"We can learn a lot from the parliamentary values that they had set," she said.

Raje remembered Shekhawat for encouraging young members of the house to participate in debates.

Anant Kumar lauded Raje for her efforts that have resulted in an increase in average working hours of the house.

Vijay Goyal, union minister of state for Parliamentary Affairs called upon the simplification of rules of the procedure and changes.

Dignitaries also released a coffee table book "New India-We Resolve to Make" on the occasion.

--- ENDS ---
Zika virus particles (red) shown in African green monkey kidney cells. Credit: NIAID

Two years ago, the world was gripped in Zika panic as the mosquito-borne virus infected millions and spread across 80 countries. Officials declared a global health emergency and tourists canceled their tropical vacations. Thousands of babies were born with devastating birth defects after their mothers were infected in pregnancy.

Today, public health priorities have shifted as the virus fades. In hard-hit Brazil, where some athletes skipped the 2016 Summer Olympics out of Zika fears, confirmed cases dropped from 206,000 that year to fewer than 14,000 in 2017, all before April.

Cases of the virus in the U.S. dropped from 5,102 in 2016 to 385 last yearall but three acquired while traveling to tropical areas.

Last month, the Missouri health department said it will stop testing most pregnant women who have traveled to Zika-affected areas. Clinical trials of a Zika vaccine at St. Louis University will not move into a second phase of testing after a drugmaker pulled funding.

Intensive mosquito control probably had an effect on Zika's presence. Travel warnings and personal precautions such as bug spray also helped. Most likely, a high enough percentage of people were infected across central and South America that a "herd immunity" developed, making it hard for the virus to continue its spread.

Still, "we are not finished with Zika," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"Even though when you look at the number of infections, it's dramatically down, it doesn't mean they're going to stay down," Fauci said. "You've got to be careful when dealing with vector-borne diseases. They have a tendency to cycle in and out. It very well could come back."

Fauci said the federal government remains committed to getting its Zika vaccine to market, with testing in Puerto Rico and South America. He pointed to the record four months it took between sequencing the virus's DNA to testing vaccines as proof of the urgency.

At St. Louis University, 90 people entered a trial for another Zika vaccine. Early results released last month showed the vaccine had no significant safety concerns, and produced a favorable immune response in nearly all the volunteers.

But that trial has stalled, with no plans for a second phase of testing in Zika-affected areas after drugmaker Sanofi pulled funding, citing a combination of reduced virus activity and government budget cuts.

Dr. Sarah George, associate professor of infectious diseases, allergy, and immunology at St. Louis University, said the initial research will be useful because a vaccine can be ready for further testing if an outbreak occurs.

"That will happen. We just don't know when or where," she said.

It happened in summer 2016 in Miami, where federal health officials issued their first-ever medical travel warning in the U.S. The Zika outbreak in Florida infected nearly 300 people in 2016. Just two people were infected in Florida in 2017. Last week, state health officials closed their Zika information hotline.

The World Health Organization counted 12 outbreaks worldwide in 2015, 22 in 2016 and just one in early 2017three cases in India. The health agency hasn't issued a Zika situation report since March 2017.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently deactivated its emergency response system for Zika that was launched in January 2016.

Mosquito-borne viruses are notoriously tricky to predict, and experts say it's premature to dismiss the threat entirely. There is still much to be learned about Zika, which seems to be the only virus of its type to cross the placental barrier and stunt the brain development of the fetus. It is also unusual because it can be spread through sexual contact.

Even if Zika never returns at the same levels, thousands of children face lifelong disabilities. A study of Brazilian babies diagnosed with Zika at birth in 2015 and 2016 shows that most experience seizures, can't sit up or walk and have hearing and vision problems.

The future of Zika could look like the pattern of mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which hit highs 9,862 cases in the U.S. in 2003 and hasn't reached those numbers since. Or it could be more like dengue virus, with four subtypes that reliably infect more than 1 million people each year in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are some other clues about Zika's path based on its emergence in the South Pacific. About 75 to 80 percent of people were estimated to have been infected in 2013 and 2014 on some islands in French Polynesia, where the virus has since been virtually eradicated. Once people are infected, they are thought to be immune for life. If a large enough percentage of the population has immunity, the virus can't take hold.

"After a wave of infection comes through, there are very few susceptible people left to infect in subsequent years," said Dr. Steven Lawrence, infectious disease specialist at Washington University. "It may be once you weather the initial storm of the first year or two, then it becomes a less prominent problem in future years."

Although mosquito-borne viruses are not known to mutate readily, much about Zika remains a mystery. It could make the leap from tropical mosquito species to others that are more common in the U.S., Lawrence said.

The Missouri State Public Health Laboratory still recommends and provides Zika testing for anyone who may have been exposed to the virus and went on to develop symptoms, which include fever, rash and joint pain. Pregnant women are still advised to avoid travel to tropical areas.

"We can't totally write it off yet," Lawrence said. "It's still a potential problem for people traveling. There is always the potential for changes in the virus. I don't think the story is over."

2018 St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Tehran denies Washington's statement about supplying explosives to Yemen

Kamala Harris says US is committed to Asia for the long term

Iranian authorities impose sanctions on French carmakers

Artsakh MFA replies to Baku: Any discussions will be acceptable only if the principle of equality is maintained

Macron hopes for resumption of talks between Ukraine and Russia

Armenian and Georgian heads of parliamentary committees sign memorandum on cooperation

Prime Minister of India: Cryptocurrencies are used to finance and recruit terrorists

Macron: China plays an important role in the context of pressure on Russia

Garibashvili: If 'Ukrainian government allies' were in power in Georgia, they would 'turn country into training ground'

Jerusalem Post: Azerbaijan is the first state with a Shiite majority to open an embassy in Israel

Participation of GeoProMining in state subvention projects in Armenia reaches 1 billion 700 million drams

Azerbaijan to open embassy in Tel Aviv and office in Ramallah

Russia and China switch to settlements in national currencies for energy supplies

'Gazprom' begins supplying gas to Azerbaijan under new contract with SOCAR

CNN: US is running out of weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine

Kyiv residents are recommended to stock up on water and food

Sweden: Explosions that damaged Nord Stream pipelines were caused by 'gross sabotage'

Macron calls US, China 'big elephants'

Azerbaijan carries out tactical maneuvers

Azerbaijani Armed Forces shell villager working in fields of Artsakh village of Hatsi

Erdogan and Putin discuss grain deal

Politico: Viktor Orban has taken the EU hostage

Kremlin confirms Putin's visit to Yerevan

Expert: Armenia becomes one of the main auto exporters to Russia

Turkish court arrests 17 suspects in connection with Istanbul street bombing

Mishustin and Aliyev meet in Baku

Nikol Pashinyan is questioned as witness

CSTO Collective Security Council to discuss joint assistance measures for Armenia

Republican congressmen introduce resolution calling for audit of funds sent to Ukraine

Biden caught using 'cheat sheet' with instructions on where to sit and when to speak

Armenia to receive loan of 100 million and $100 million to finance budget: Agreements are signed

Azerbaijan plans to open embassy in Israel

Cavusoglu accuses U.S. and EU of pressure and threats against members of TDT

Hungary: EU wants new sanctions to somehow justify its flawed decisions

RBC TV channel does not publish interview with Ruben Vardanyan because of Azeri threats

Armenian Central Election Commission representatives to monitor presidential election in Kazakhstan

Newspaper: Deputies from ruling party go on another 'voyage'

Cavusoglu calls incident in Poland 'accident'

Biden administration says Saudi prince has immunity in lawsuit over Khashoggi murder

Marukyan reminds Aliyev: The UN, OSCE and EU do not deal with the 'internal matter'

Azerbaijani MP demands 'serious conversation with adherents of Iranian influence in Azerbaijan'

Inflation in Japan accelerates to 40-year high

Seoul and Riyadh sign $30 billion investment agreements

North Korea launches intercontinental ballistic missile that lands near Japan

FBI: U.S. concerned about China 'setting up' unauthorized 'police stations' in U.S. cities

Prime Minister of Finland: Europe is now too reliant on Chinese technology

Turkey to require insurance from oil tankers when passing through its waters

EU to provide Ukraine with generators and kits to repair power grids

Turkey sentences sect founder to 8,658 years in prison

Xi Jinping urges world to abandon any Cold War mentality

Aliyev rules out talks with Artsakh State Minister

FP: Ukraine's appetite for weapons depletes Western stocks

Putin and Aliyev discuss energy cooperation

Armenian financial technologies to enter international market: VISA and Idram sign memorandum in Yerevan

Incident in Poland causes disagreement between Kyiv and West

Mark Milley urges Kyiv and Moscow to find political solution: Chances of military victory are unlikely

New NATO Secretary General to be announced at Vilnius summit in 2023

Finnish Defense Ministry announces largest batch of military aid to Ukraine

Pashinyan receives Ukrainian businessmen of Armenian origin

Armenian soldier wounded in Azerbaijani shooting

Erdogan: Turkey-Israel relations entered a new phase of development

Mishustin: Cooperation between Moscow and Baku has become truly strategic and allied

Igor Khovaev to visit Baku

Mishustin arrives in Baku

Russian Foreign Ministry: South Caucasus is a strategic transport hub for Eurasia

U.S. general lays flowers at eternal flame at Armenian Genocide memorial

Republicans stand for same-sex marriage rights

Pallone says US State Department should not hesitate to speak about Azerbaijani aggression

Aliyev refuses to discuss Nagorno-Karabakh and threatens Armenia with new aggression

Greek minister doesn't get off plane to meet head of Libya's presidential council

Sergey Lavrov to visit Yerevan

Lebanese parliament fails to elect president of country

Kremlin on Zelenskyy's proposal to hold 'public' talks

National Assembly Speaker: Armenia is extremely interested in establishing strategic relations with Georgia

Canada provides additional military aid to Ukraine

Representatives of defense agencies of CSTO countries discuss crisis response issues

Armenian Defense Minister and American General discuss defense cooperation

Tehran accuses Israel and West of trying to organize civil war in Iran

Oppositionist: No guarantees that war with Azerbaijan can be avoided

Issue of biometric passports to Armenian citizens is temporarily suspended

Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement to be signed till end of year? Pashinyan's associate voices conditions

Erdogan says Russia and US agreed to refrain from using nuclear weapons

Azerbaijani oppositionist complains of torture by police

Kyaram Sloyan and Andranik Zohrabyan posthumously bestowed 'Hero of Artsakh' title

UN Secretary General Guterres welcomes parties' agreement on renewal of food deal

Eurasian Development Bank: Armenia is the leader among EEU countries in terms of economic growth

Greece promises to continue military support to Ukraine

Number of appeals from Azerbaijan to ECHR is growing

Pashinyan: The wheel of processes related to confiscation of illegal property is spinning

Fire hits Baghdad airport

North Korea fires ballistic missile towards Sea of Japan

Istanbul agrees to extend 'grain initiative' for another 120 days

'Hayastan' Fund to build 6 residential houses in Nerkin Khndzoresk village

Vocal as Russophobic propaganda: Azerbaijani singer sings about 'disgusting peacekeepers'

Biden congratulates Republicans on winning majority in House of Representatives

14 freight cars derailed in Kazakhstan, train traffic suspended

Newspaper: Ruben Vardanyan does not hurry to make changes in composition of Karabakh government

Russia attacks Ukraine with missiles in morning: Explosions heard in Dnieper, air defense works in Kyiv region

U.S. National Security Council: It is clear that the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia

Gold prices decline
The dead body of a newborn was found on board a plane that landed at the international airport of Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia.

Police have detained the 37-year-old mother of this baby, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

According to police, the woman was taken to hospital.

She had given birth on board an Abu Dhabi-Jakarta flight.

Around four hours after takeoff she began bleeding, and therefore the plane made an emergency landing at an airport in Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand, where she was provided with medical assistance.

But when the plane arrived in Jakarta without this woman, the newborns dead body was found in the toilet of this aircraft.

The cause of the childs death has not been determined yet.

The said woman arrived in Jakarta on board the next flight.

Even though she was detained, she has not been questioned yet because she is unable to testify.
The Chandigarh Press Club members organised a protest march against the UIDAI authorities for registering an FIR against English daily The Tribune and its reporter Rachna Khera.

By Manjeet Sehgal: The Chandigarh Press Club members on Monday organised a protest march against the UIDAI authorities for registering an FIR against English daily The Tribune and its reporter Rachna Khera.

The media persons also criticised the UIDAI authorities for targeting the newspaper and its reporter.

The Tribune news editor Nanki Hans told India Today that the UIDAI instead of investigating the case and taking action against the accused selling Aadhaar data for a few hundred rupees targeted the English daily and Khera.

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The move by UIDAI authorities comes off like shooting the messenger, Hans added.

Earlier, while addressing the media persons, the president of Chandigarh Press Club Jaswant Rana slammed the UIDAI authorities for making the journalists a soft target.

He said that this was an attack on the freedom of press which shall not be tolerated.

Dr. Joginder Singh, senior news editor of Dainik Tribune, told India Today that The Tribune group is consulting the Legal Eagles to fight the case.

"The group stands by its story and believes in investigative journalism," Dr. Joginder Singh said.

Chandigarh Press Club members also formed a human chain during the protest march and shouted slogans against UIADI authorities.

They also demanded the withdrawal of the FIR registered in New Delhi against the English daily and its reporter.

ALSO WATCH | Aadhaar card helps deaf and mute woman reunite with family

--- ENDS ---
Representatives of Iran and the three EU countries intend to hold a consultative meeting on the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program. This was stated by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, IRNA news agency reports.

According to Zarif, the meeting will be devoted to the destructive U.S. policy towards the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The possible date and venue of the meeting are not specified.

On July 14, 2015, Iran and the six international mediators (Russia, the United States, Great Britain, China, France and Germany) reached a historic agreement on the settlement of the long-standing problem of Iran's atom: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, implementation of which frees Iran from previous economic and financial sanctions from the UN Security Council, the United States and the European Union.

The current U.S. administration severely criticizes the agreement and threatens to withdraw from it, calling the document the worst deal for the United States.
YEREVAN.  Unless they have obtained citizenship of another country by no later than November 28, 1995, former Armenian SSR citizen ethnic Armenians who live in other countries shall from now on be considered Republic of Armenia (RA) citizens according to their application, and not by the force of law, after receiving an RA citizenship passport. In this case, they will be considered RA citizens as of November 28, 1995.

Mnatsakan Bichakhchyan, Head of the Passport and Visa Department of the Police of Armenia, informed about the abovementioned on his Facebook page.

He added that the respective amendments to the law on RA citizenship have come into force on January 6.
China today made it clear that it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking its all-weather ally with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of combating terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

By PTI, Press Trust of India: China today made it clear that it is opposed to the US "finger pointing" at Pakistan and linking its all-weather ally with terrorism, insisting that the responsibility of combating terror outfits cannot be placed on a particular country.

China's backing for Pakistan came as the US stepped up pressure on Islamabad to eliminate terror safe havens on its soil.

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The Trump administration last week suspended nearly USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan for its failure to take decisive action against terror groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

"China always opposed linking terrorism with any certain country and we don't agree to place the responsibility of anti terrorism on a certain country," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing.

He was responding to a question on a White House officials remarks that China could play helpful role in convincing Pakistan that it was in its national interest to crackdown on terror safe havens.

"We have stressed many times that Pakistan has made important sacrifices and contributions to the global anti terrorism cause," Lu said.

"Countries should strengthen anti-terrorism cooperation on the basis of mutual respect instead of finger pointing at each other. This is not conducive to the global terrorism efforts," he said.

China has been vocal in extending support to Pakistan since US President Donald Trump stepped up criticism against Islamabad for providing safe havens for terrorists.

Trump in a New Years Day tweet accused Pakistan of giving nothing to the US but "lies and deceit" and providing "safe haven" to terrorists in return for USD 33 billion aid over the last 15 years.

Chinese media has been speculating that Trumps efforts to step up pressure on Pakistan may move it closer to Islamabad as Beijing is involved in a number of projects in the country under the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The Chinese official media is highlighting reports that Pakistan may allow China to build a a military base at Jiwani located close to Iran's Chabahar port, which is being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan.

Jiwani is also close to the strategic Gwadar port in Balochistan which is being developed by China. While defending Pakistan, Lu said China at the same time backed international counter terrorism efforts.

"First and foremost, I would like to say that terrorism is the common enemy of the international community. Cracking down of terrorism calls for the joint efforts from the international community," he said.

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"Actually, China is defending countries that have been making anti-terrorism efforts in a just and fair way. China also welcomes all the global joint efforts in terms of counter terrorism on the basis of mutual trust and mutual respect," he said.

ALSO WATCH | China's U-turn after BRICS summit: Beijing defends Pakistan on terror

--- ENDS ---
YEREVAN.  The ceasefire agreement in Nagorno-Karabakh will continue to operate, despite temporary escalations, the director for the Center of Military Forecasting at the Moscow Institute of Political and Military Analysis Anatoly Tsyganok told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

One of the factors contributing to the strict adherence to the ceasefire regime is a sharp reduction in Azerbaijani financial resources, noted the expert.

Azerbaijan used to buy weapons without any problems, now it is a big problem for Azerbaijan, Tsyganok explained, adding that the provocation that Baku staged in April 2016 will not repeat in the near future.

According to the expert, Turkey is also not interested in the new aggravation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Ankara supports Baku, and Moscow, in its turn, supports Yerevan. Russia and Turkey formed an alliance, which will prevent a new war in Nagorno-Karabakh, as they do not want to spoil relations with each other.

This time Turkey will not allow Azerbaijan to start a new war in the region,said Anatoly Tsyganok.
Shabaab Claims IED Strike on U.S.-Trained Alpha Group in Somalia, Attacks in Kenya's Mandera and Wajir Counties
It was on December 26, 2017 India discovered that China was trying to build an operational track along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in upper Siang district.

By Sudhi Ranjan Sen: China has agreed to stop road construction activity at Bhising area in upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh.

Chief of Army Staff, General Bipin Rawat, while speaking to media persons in New Delhi today confirmed the same. "The Tutting incident has been resolved after a border personal meeting," Rawat said.

It has been sorted out & we have had our Border Personnel Meeting after that: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on face-off with China in Arunchal Pradesh pic.twitter.com/KCGRfQ4Kfn&; ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

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It was on December 26, 2017 India discovered that China was trying to construct an operational track - an unpaved road for movement of men and material - along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Chinese labour retracted after Indian troops objected to the road building, while leaving behind earth excavators and water bowsers.

The Indian and Chinese troops had a meeting on January 6 over the issue.

"The Chinese reacted very maturely. They accepted that differing perception of the border led to crossing the Line of Actual Control," a senior officer aware of the developments told India Today.

"China has assured us that it won't be using the road now," he added.

Following the Border Personnel Meeting, India returned the excavators and water bowsers to China.

Chinese efforts to construct a road in upper Siang had sparked considerable concern in New Delhi. The fresh road building activity began a few months after the 73-day stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops at the Doklam plateau in Bhutan.

The stand-off between both the troops near the India-China-Bhutan tri-junction started on June 16, when a People's Liberation Army (PLA) construction party entered the Doklam area and attempted to construct a road on land that is claimed by Bhutan.

The face-off ended on August 28.

ALSO WATCH | Chinese building equipment found in Arunachal Pradesh village

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Kathmandu, Jan 8 (PTI) Intense cold weather in Nepal has claimed seven more lives, taking to 24 the death toll due to severe winter conditions over the past week in southern part of the country, according to a media report.

More than half of the them, 14, were reported from Saptari district while five each in Rautahat and Siraha districts in the Tarai region, it said.

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Seven people, including a 7-month-old child, lost their lives due to excessive cold in various municipalities of Saptari district last night, the Himalayan Times quoted senior police officials as saying.

The locals of Saptari have sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, demanding relief materials for those vulnerable to cold.

In Rautahat, two people died due to freezing cold last night, Superintendent of Police Yagya Binod Pokhrel said.

Rautahat District Administration Office said warm clothes and blankets were being distributed to the poor and in Dalit settlements of the district.

In Siraha, a five-year-old child died due to excessive cold, taking the number of deaths due to cold wave in the district to five, according to the report. PTI KIS AKJ KIS

--- ENDS ---
In a shocking case of corporal punishment, a warden of government run hostel, beat up two minor students over a petty issue.

By Ashish Pandey: In a shocking case of corporal punishment, two minor students of a government run hostel were brutally thrashed by a warden in Sangareddy district of Telangana.

The incident came to light when a video showing the brutality went viral. Following the popularity of the video, several child right activists demanded strict action against the accused warden.

According to the report, Yadaiah, the warden of SC hostel Zaheerabad beat up two minor tribal students after they were found fighting over a petty issue.

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The furious warden took them out into the campus and asked them to go upside down near a wall and thrashed them with a plastic pipe.

While the accused warden was hitting the students, few others captured the incident in their mobile phones and circulated it on WhatsApp.

A probe has been ordered in the alleged incident of corporal punishment. Bala Hakkula Sangam, a child rights organisation has also approached the state human rights commission demanding strict action.

Moreover, several parents and guardians have demanded action against the warden for venting out harsh punishment to students.

The government has clearly ordered that no student must be punished physically at any circumstance. Despite that, several such cases have emerged in the recent past, where students faced brutal behaviour of teachers or other staff at school and colleges in Telangana.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: (Eds: With fresh details)

Gurgaon, Jan 8 (PTI) A sessions court today rejected the bail plea of a 16-year-old student, accused of killing 7-year- old Pradhuman Thakur at the Ryan International School here.

Additional Sessions Judge Jasbir Singh Kundu declined relief to the accused and imposed a cost of Rs 21,000 for "wasting courts time" in baseless litigation and directed the father of the accused to deposit the amount.

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"The conduct of the appellant (accused) indicates that he is taking court proceedings for a joy ride. He has indulged in wasting precious court time in baseless litigation on account of which seven court hearings have gone down the drain.

"This court finds no irregularities, illegalities or impropriety in the impunged order dated December 15, 2017 passed by JJB, dismissing default bail application," the court said.

The court said the accuseds ulterior motive in filing the present application was aimed to divert the track of the ongoing investigation or delay the probe and then "grab" the default bail.

It also directed in-chamber proceeding in the matter and ordered the media not to use the juveniles name in any of the reports.

Talking to PTI, Barun Thakur, father of the seven-year old-boy Pradhuman Thakur who was found killed, welcomed the order and said he was satisfied with the verdict and the progress of the investigation so far.

The court had earlier reserved the order after hearing arguments of the counsel for the accused, the CBI and the complainant.

The defence counsel had claimed that the charge sheet in the matter was not filed within one month, as prescribed in the Juvenile Justice Act, and he was not given the required documents.

Opposing the contention, the CBI had said the mandatory period for filing a charge sheet was 90 days under CrPC provisions as the accused had been declared an adult by the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB).

Pradhuman was found with his throat slit in the schools washroom on September 8 last year.

The Gurgaon Police had claimed the crime was committed by a school bus conductor, which was later refuted by the CBI.

The probe agency had claimed the teenager had killed Pradhuman in a bid to get the school closed so that a parent- teacher meeting and an examination could be deferred.

The court was hearing an appeal filed by the accused against an order of the JJB denying him bail.

The JJB had on December 20 held that the teenager would be tried as an adult and directed that he be produced before the Gurgaon sessions court.

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The JJB had noted that the accused was mature enough to recognise the consequences of his actions.

If convicted, the accused will stay in a correctional home till he is 21 years old after which the court can shift him to a jail or grant him bail, it had said.

The board had earlier rejected the bail plea of the Class 11 Ryan International School student.

It had set up a committee which included a psychologist from the PGI, Rohtak, for an expert opinion on the accused who was taken into custody by the CBI in November 2017.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 lowers the age of juveniles from 18 years to 16 years for heinous crimes such as rape, murder and dacoity-cum- murder, which warrant at least seven years of imprisonment.

However, the JJB first decides whether the crime was "child-like" or was it committed in an "adult frame of mind", following which it orders the accused to be tried as a juvenile or an adult. PTI UK PKS RRT ARC

--- ENDS ---
The gang was involved in transporting marijuana from remote parts of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh border to Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR).

The arrested drug peddlers with the vehicle and marijuana seized from their possession.

By Tanseem Haider: Delhi Police's special staff team today busted an inter-state narcotics supply racket and arrested four of its key members. The team recovered over 123 kg of ganja worth Rs 50 lakh from their possession.

The gang was involved in transporting marijuana from remote parts of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh border to Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR). They have been using private vehicles to transport ganja from Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

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In the past few weeks, the Delhi Police received tip-off about notorious drug peddlers supplying huge quantity of marijuana from West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh to Delhi-NCR. The information was developed by the special staff team of south-east district after which they sprung into action.

The rear seat of the car was especially designed and a chamber was built under it.

The team acted based on specific inputs about two marijuana suppliers Jagbandhu and Rajgir arriving in Faridabad to deliver a consignment on January 4.According to the information the team received, the suppliers were supposed to reach Madanpur Khadar in a private vehicle- Tata Indigo Manza around 9 am on January 4.

The team laid a trap near the Sarita Vihar metro station and a special vehicle checking picket was set up. True to the inputs received, a Tata Indigo Manza car (BR-1BB-0360) arrived from Badarpur at the said time.

On conducting a search of the car, 88 kg ganja was recovered. The arrested have been identified as Jagbandhu Patra, resident of Odisha, and Rajgir Kumar, who hails from Bihar. The vehicle was found to have been modified for the purpose of smuggling narcotics. The rear seat of the car was especially designed and a chamber was built under it.

Arrested drug peddlers Arrested drug peddlers

Similarly, the car's boot space had a secret deep space. Both these modifications were done to safely transport consignments from Odisha to Delhi by evading detection.During the interrogation, the two accused disclosed that they came in contact of a peddler from Bihar - Halender. The peddler, who was residing as tenant in Odisha's Balasore, allured them to join the illegal business of supplying ganja.

Halender, kingpin of the narcotics supply chain, had lured unemployed youth to join his gang in lieu of handsome money. Based on the revelations made by the arrested accused, two local drug peddlers have been arrested.

--- ENDS ---
Both DMK and TTV Dhinakaran have been demanding a floor test ever since the disqualified MLAs met then Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao in September last year.

By Press Trust of India: Day One of the Tamil Nadu Assembly session began on a stormy note, with Opposition leader MK Stalin's DMK staging a walkout.

As Governor Banwarilal Purohit began his address, Stalin waved his hand in protest and walked. "The governor has ignore(d) the Opposition('s) request for a floor test. Also, this governor has been conducting review meetings of state officials. This is against democracy," he told reporters.

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But what gave the Edappadi Palaniswami government even more jitters was the entry of TTV Dhinakaran, the new MLA from Chennai's RK Nagar - J Jayalalithaa's former constituency. He entered Fort St George - the administrative centre of the Tamil Nadu capital - accompanied by the 18 MLAs recently disqualified by the Speaker.

Thangatamizhselvan, a member of the TTV Dhinakaran camp, said all those lawmakers would soon re-enter the assembly.

Both the DMK and TTV Dhinakaran have been demanding a floor test ever since the disqualified MLAs met the then Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao in September last year, and told him that they had lost confidence in Chief Minister Palaniswami.

Today, MK Stalin and Dhinakaran, an independent MLA, reiterated their claim that Palaniswami lacked the numbers to head the government, apparently referring to the revolt of the 18 MLAs.

Stalin claimed it was "clear" that the government had the support of only 111 MLAs in a 235-strong House.

A confident Dhinakaran said there were still many "sleeper cells" in the Assembly. "Many AIADMK MLAs inside the assembly wanted to wish me but obviously they were scared. This government will fall soon," he said.

(Inputs from PTI)

ALSO WATCH | Here is Rajinikanth announcing his political debut

--- ENDS ---
here for all of op's posts on these trash men

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mte

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yep

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Lol yep!

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so much yes!

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doing the good work

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The OP and milfordacademy are the heroes 2018 deserves and needs, and joint GREATEST ONTDer of the year by a long country mile already and it's only 8th January.

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This dude has some fucking nerve.

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So did everyone just forget the interview where he defended Mel Gibson and dropped the n word like it was nothing?



Because that also happened.



Anyway, go suck a railroad spike, Gary.

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"Replaced?" As if they don't have a new host basically every year?

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I remember that. it was sickening.

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ot but icon love

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also insisted that there's no one on earth who hasn't said the n word or "fucking jew". as someone who has never said either of those things out loud, in my entire life, it's VERY TELLING that this man has said them not only once, but many times.

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"It illustrates that words and actions can change the world and boy oh boy does it need some changing."



He said this in his speech and lmfao yeah, it does need changing so pieces of shit like you don't get nominated at all.

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He has some nerve.

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Oldman's longtime manager, Douglas Urbanski, defended Oldman in a statement to CNN.

"I have looked at the Playboy interview a few times now -- in fact I was in the room during the entire 8 or 9 hours. I am unaware -- as I have seen reported -- of Gary Oldman defending any anti-Semitic remarks in the interview, or, for that matter, anyplace!" said Urbanski.

"He would not do so, and in fact he finds any kind of bigotry, homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism or sexism unacceptable and disgraceful. Period. If you read the Playboy piece correctly and entirely, and in context, it is the hypocrisy of political correctness that Gary is addressing, nothing else."



This is from after he made the anti-semetic remarks

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OMG seriously.



Also for people who don't remember here are some quotes:



"He got drunk and said a few things, but weve all said those things. Were all f-----g hypocrites. Thats what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the word n----- or that f-----g Jew? Im being brutally honest here. Its the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.



"Mel Gibson is in a town thats run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because hes actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him. But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasnt turned and said, 'That f-----g kraut' or 'F--- those Germans,' whatever it is?"







He's a fucking anti-semitic, woman-beating piece of shit. But congrats on giving him a Golden Globe HFPA. Good job hiring hime Joe Wright and Focus Features!

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I am glad HBC murdered him in Order of the Phoenix

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holy shit, i didn't realize the quotes were that anti-semitic. he can fucking choke.

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WTF?!! My only point of reference for him is the HP films.

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wooooowwww at his equating "fucking kraut" with anti-Semitic hate speech. Woooooow

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Holy shit I need to vomit.



Also, this is the 2nd time Ive heard about interviews lasting 7-8 hours. Sounds physically painful to talk to a stranger for that long.

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Who is Sasha Stone?

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a misogynist film critic.

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Omfg are you serious?

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She wouldn't care anyway, she just keeps going on about how people don't want Gary to win because he's a terrible person, even though he "deserves it."

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That is absolutely sickening and I wish I hadnt read it

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i can't believe we are just going to repeat last year w/ casey affleck again this year with gary oldman rme

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Also so no one forgets, best of his infamous playboy interview:



"He got drunk and said a few things, but weve all said those things. Were all f-----g hypocrites. Thats what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the word n----- or that f-----g Jew? Im being brutally honest here. Its the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.



"Mel Gibson is in a town thats run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because hes actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him. But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasnt turned and said, 'That f-----g kraut' or 'F--- those Germans,' whatever it is?"



"Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while hes pissed off coming out of his building because they wont leave him alone? I dont blame him."



"If I called Nancy Pelosi a c---  and Ill go one better, a fucking useless c---  I cant really say that. But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobodys going to stop them from working because of it."







He also name dropped the Golden Globes in his speech:







"Its a meaningless event. Theres nothing going on at all. Its 90 nobodies having a w--k."



"It certainly doesnt mean anything to win a Golden Globe."





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"Its a meaningless event. Theres nothing going on at all. Its 90 nobodies having a w--k."

"It certainly doesnt mean anything to win a Golden Globe.

SO GIVE IT BACK

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I can't with him casually saying that we're all hypocrites like he's self aware and above criticism, STFU

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omg ew i hate that excuse from people for everything from being innocuously lazy to a straight up racist. like. just. no.

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Hollywood should have never forgiven him for this. Wish his career died there and then but thats what happens when youre privileged.

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he's such a disappointment >:(

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We need to start putting "abusive" /"pedophile" /"assaulter" /"racist" in front of all these actors names every time we refer to them tbh. It needs to be common knowledge so their fans can't shy away from the truth

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i like this idea. i'm sick of deliberate vagueness & misleading bullshit like "officer-involved shooting"

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I don't need to "shy away from the truth". I know he's not a great person. Doesn't take away from his acting ability.

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Hit dogs will holler 

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Cool. Good thing my comment wasnt directed at you

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Abusers love to keep the focus on someone else.

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that description is rlly sad and horrible.

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he's going to win, I'm resigned to that. To Hollywood he's a good actor whose long been ignored in recognition. And yeah, he is a good actor. Most of the time. But he's also a terrible fucking person, and I'm tired of terrible fucking men being rewarded for being terrible fucking men who happen to be talented.

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Bio-indican can be used as an effective, reductant-free cotton textile dye. (a) Top row, Pure indican with no -glucosidase (BGL); pure indican with -glucosidase; bio-indican with -glucosidase. Bottom row, Indigo, nonreduced; indigo, reduced with sodium dithionite. All swatches are dyed on white cotton denim. Scale bar, 1 cm. (b) Scarf (100% white cotton gauze fabric) dyed with indican. All samples were photographed after numerous, vigorous water washes. Scale bar, 5 cm. Credit: Nature Chemical Biology, doi:10.1038/nchembio.2552

They can be tight, flared, ripped at the knee. Jeans come in all styles and colours these days, but one hue will always be synonymous with the world's favourite garment: indigo blue.

To satisfy the world's seemingly insatiable demand for blue denim, more than 45,000 tonnes of indigo dye are produced every year, with much of the waste making its way into rivers and streams, conservationists say.

On Monday, scientists announced they had developed a greener method to produce the coveted tintusing lab-grown bacteria.

While not yet commercially viable, the technique holds promise for a "much-needed update to the historic, but unsustainable, indigo dyeing process," researchers wrote in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

"Demand for the dye is higher than ever before, making its ecological consequences unsustainable," they warned.

Originally extracted from plants, indigo is one of the oldest dyes, with evidence of its use in textile colouring going back some 6,000 years.

It is prized for being vibrant and long-lasting, and was an important cash crop until humans started making synthetic indigo in the early 1900s.

Indigo crystals cling easily to the cotton fibres used in jeans and are resistant to laundry detergents, yet flake off slightly with wear-and-tear to yield the sought-after worn-in look.

Some four billion denim garments are produced every year, the vast majority indigo-tinted, said the study authors, and warned of "a serious sustainability problem".

The first danger: producing indigo dye requires the use of toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.

Furthermore, synthesised indigo is insoluble in water, meaning chemicals are needed to make it suitable for dyeing.

'Not currently feasible'

One such chemical is sodium dithionite, which decomposes into sulfate and sulfite which can corrode equipment and pipes in dye mills and wastewater treatment plants.

"Many dye mills avoid the additional cost of wastewater treatment by dumping the spent dye materials into rivers, where they have negative ecological impacts," said the research team.

The new method mimics the workings of the Japanese plant Persicaria tinctoria.

Instead of a plant, "we engineered a common lab strain of Escherichia coli, a bacteria found in our gut, to be a chemical factory for the production of indigo dye," study co-author John Dueber of the University of California's bioengineering department told AFP.

Like the plant, the bacteria produces a compound called indoxyl, which is insoluble and cannot be used as a dye. By adding a sugar molecule, the indoxyl is turned into indicana precursor of indigo.

Indican can be stored and transformed into indigo direcly on the cloth when dyeing, by adding an enzyme to the mix.

The lab is working to make the process commercially feasible, Dueber said.

For now, producing five grammes of indigo to colour one pair of jeans would require "several litres of bacteria," he said, and would be more expensive.

More information: Employing a biochemical protecting group for a sustainable indigo dyeing strategy, Nature Chemical Biology, DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2552 Journal information: Nature Chemical Biology

 2018 AFP
There are two things working against the Trump administration's proposal to open up California coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling: state regulators and simple economics.

California has powerful legal tools to head off new offshore development, and the price of oil offers little incentive to the energy industry to pursue expensive drilling projects next to a hostile state.

"I don't think there's any reasonable chance that there will be any leasing or drilling along the coast," said Ralph Faust, former general counsel for the California Coastal Commission. "This just seems like grandstanding" by the Trump administration.

The Interior Department on Thursday released plans to open vast areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to new oil and gas exploration and drilling through a five-year leasing program that would begin in 2019.

But there are myriad obstacles opponents can throw in front of the proposal, not to mention questions about whether the oil industry has much of an interest in California's offshore reserves at a time when domestic oil production is at its highest level in decades.

Under the plan, the federal government would offer 47 leases in U.S. waters on the outer continental shelf, including two each off the Northern, Central and Southern California coasts and one off Washington and Oregon.

The governors of all three states issued a joint statement Thursday saying they would do whatever it takes to block new leasing off their shores, which include some of the nation's most pristine coastlines.

The first hurdle for the Trump plan is a period of public comment and an extensive environmental review under federal law, which opponents can use to challenge the proposal as ecologically harmful.

In California, the state coastal commission also has the authority to review activities in federal waters to ensure they are consistent with the state's coastal management plans.

"The commission has extremely broad and very powerful authority to say 'no' to federal actions that would harm the coast of California and harm coastal waters," said Steve Mashuda, an attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.

The commission is ready to use it.

"Nothing galvanizes bipartisan resistance in California like the threat of more offshore oil drilling," coastal commission Chairwoman Dayna Bochco said in a statement. "We've fought similar efforts before, and we will fight them again."

While the U.S. secretary of commerce could override a commission finding that new oil drilling violated the state's management plan, federal courts have tended to side with states in such contests.

And California has another weapon: State Lands Commission jurisdiction over tidelands and waters that extend roughly three miles offshore.

That gives the commission the ability to stop the construction of pipelines that are the most economical way of transporting oil and gas from offshore rigs to land.

"In some ways that is an even more formidable tool that the state of California and like-minded local governments can utilize to deny approval of things like oil terminals and pipelines crossing state sovereign tidelands," said Richard Frank, director of the California Environmental Law & Policy Center at the University of California, Davis.

There are 23 oil platforms in federal waters off California and four in state watersnear Santa Barbara County, Huntington Beach and Seal Beach.

There are also four artificial islands used as drilling platforms off Long Beach and one off Rincon Beach in Ventura County.

But images of oil-drenched seabirds and fouled beaches during the massive 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill soured the state on offshore oil development. There have been no new federal leases off California since 1984.

Moreover, uncertainty over prices makes costly new drilling projects in California's deep offshore waters difficult to justify financially compared with cheaper hydraulic fracturing operations on land.

Oil is trading at about $60 a barrelroughly the price that would make an offshore project profitable, said Peter Maniloff, an economist at Colorado School of Mines who studies the oil and gas industry.

But "you want to be confident that prices will remain that high before undertaking a very large investment to drill an offshore well," Maniloff said. "And it's hard to be confident of that because fracking has driven prices down.

"This announcement is not a game-changer for the oil industry or for California," he added. "I would not expect substantial drilling or production off California."

Michael Livermore, an environmental law professor at the University of Virginia, said that "based entirely on the Department of Interior's own analysis, drilling off the coast of California is a terrible idea."

He cited a section of the leasing proposal that found waters off Central California did not meet the government threshold for benefits exceeding the costs of oil drilling. "Waiting in the region could provide greater value to society than leasing in the 2019-2024 Program," according to the report.

Livermore also questioned whether any company would be willing to risk the public backlash were there to be a spill in such closely watched waters.

David Hackett, an oil industry expert and president of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine-based transportation energy consulting firm, supports more oil development off the California's coast.

But given fierce state and local opposition, he doubts new oil rigs will start popping up in the Pacific.

"Even if California was supportive, it would take a decade for production to begin," he said.

2018 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Rhinoceros. Credit: Cindy Harper, D.V.M.Veterinary Genetics LaboratoryUniversity of Pretoria

In murder investigations, DNA evidence often helps to link a perpetrator to a crime scene and put him or her behind bars. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 8 show that DNA evidence is also successfully being used to link rhinoceros horns seized from poachers and traffickers in various countries directly to the specific crime scenes where rhinoceros carcasses were left behind.

Their Rhino DNA Index System (RhODIS) includes a chain-of-custody-compliant biosampling kit and sampling methodology. It has already been used in more than 5,800 forensic cases with links made between recovered horns, blood-stained evidence items, and specific rhinoceros carcasses in more than120 cases.

"Unlike similar work in which genetic databases provide an indication of geographic provenance, RhODIS provides individual matches that, similar to human DNA profiling, is used as direct evidence in criminal court cases," says Cindy Harper of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Black and white rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis and Ceratotherium simum) are listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered and near threatened, respectively. The new report comes at a time when poaching incidents have seen an uptick after decades of progress. In South Africa, rhinoceros poaching incidents increased from 13 in 2007 to 1,215 in 2014. Rhinos are killed for their horns, which are sought after for medicinal purposes and, increasingly, as cultural status symbols. In the last 10 years, more than 7,000 African rhinoceros have been hunted and killed illegally.

To calculate the probability of a match between confiscated DNA evidence and a crime scene, the researchers relied on allele frequencies calculated from a collection of 3,085 white rhinoceros and 883 black rhinoceros. Their analyses show that it's possible to reliably match the unique DNA profile of an individual animal obtained from any tissue, including horns or curios and powders made from the horns, with a panel including 23 short tandem repeat (STR) loci.

The report highlights nine cases in which DNA matches were made and that evidence was used for the prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of perpetrators of rhinoceros crimes. One case involving three horns and tissues from two carcasses led to a sentence of 29 years.

The RhODIS dataset also offers insight into rhino populations. For instance, the data support the species classification of white and black rhinoceros and three subspecies of black rhinoceros. As a result, Harper says the genetic panels include loci that can also be used to identify horns as originating from white or black rhinoceros. Information on the population structure can also help investigators narrow their search for specific carcasses linked to seized horns.

Because rhinoceros horns often move extremely rapidly from the crime scenes to the consumer countries, the researchers note that the investigation, sampling, and analysis of forensic evidence must be expedited and internationally coordinated. Fortunately, Harper says they've found extensive support for the program from within South Africa, from provincial wildlife and enforcement authorities, the national government, police services, national parks, and the majority of states where rhinoceros live.

"Thanks to this support, we've seen rapid growth of the database into a representative source of rhinoceros genetic data for both forensic and management applications from its inception," Harper says. "The unprecedented cooperation and support for the program from these authorities has been surprising and encouraging."

These cases now show that forensic data resources for wildlife species that are under severe threat from illegal hunting and trafficking can be applied successfully across borders to assist in the investigation and ultimate conviction of wildlife criminals. The hope is that the increasing risk of conviction and stiff sentencing will play an important role in decreasing incentives to deal in illegal wildlife products.

The researchers say the RhODIS database continues to grow as new samples are added. With funding support and the use of genetic data to better manage remaining rhinoceros populations, "this effort will further ensure that the survivors remain healthy while efforts to curb wildlife trafficking and educate consumers continue," Harper says.
A blue crab in a tank in a research lab at Georgia Tech. In the tank behind it, small mud crabs are hiding in plastic tubes. Credit: Georgia Tech / Alex Draper

Psssst, mud crabs, time to hide because blue crabs are coming to eat you! That's the warning the prey get from the predators' urine when it spikes with high concentrations of two chemicals, which researchers have identified in a new study.

Beyond decoding crab-eat-crab alarm triggers, pinpointing these compounds for the first time opens new doors to understanding how chemicals invisibly regulate marine wildlife. Insights from the study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology could someday contribute to better management of crab and oyster fisheries, and help specify which pollutants upset them.

In coastal marshes, these urinary alarm chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, help to regulate the ecological balance of who eats how many of whomand not just crabs.

Blue crabs, which are about hand-sized and are tough and strong, eat the mud crabs, which are about the size of a silver dollar, and thin-shelled. Blue crabs also eat a few oysters, but mud crabs eat a lot more oysters than they do. When blue crabs are going after mud crabs, the mud crabs hide and stay still, so far fewer oysters get eaten than usual.

Humans are part of the food chain, too, eating oysters as well as blue crabs that boil up a bright orange. The blue refers to the color of markings on their appendages before they're cooked. Thus, the blue crab urinary chemicals influence seafood availability for people, as well.

Predator pee-pee secrets

The fact that blue crab urine scares mud crabs was already known. Mud crabs duck and cover when exposed to samples taken in the field and in the lab, even if the mud crabs can't see the blue crabs yet. Digestive products, or metabolites, in blue crab urine trigger the mud crabs' reaction, which also makes them stop foraging for food themselves.

"Mud crabs react most strongly when blue crabs have already eaten other mud crabs," said Julia Kubanek, who co-led the study with fellow Georgia Tech professor Marc Weissburg. "A change in the chemical balance in blue crab urine tells mud crabs that blue crabs just ate their cousins," Kubanek said.

Figuring out the two specific chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, that set off the alarm system, out of myriad candidate molecules, is new and has been a challenging research achievement.

Principal investigator Julia Kubanek loads a sample into a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy device. Credit: Georgia Tech / Christopher Moore

"My guess is that there are many hundreds of chemicals in the animal's urine," said Kubanek, who is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences, in its School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and who is also Associate Dean for Research in Georgia Tech's College of Sciences.

The researchers applied technology and methodology from metabolomics, a relatively new field used principally in medical research to identify small biomolecules produced in metabolism that might serve as early warning signs of disease. Kubanek, Weissburg, and first author Remington Poulin published their results the week of January 8, 2017, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Peedle in a haystack

Trigonelline has been studied, albeit loosely, in some diseases, and is known as one of the ingredients in coffee beans that, upon roasting, breaks down into other compounds that give coffee its aroma. Homarine is very similar to trigonelline, and, though apparently less studied, it's also common.

"These chemicals are found in many places," Kubanek said. But picking them out of all those chemicals in blue crab urine for the first time was like finding two needles in a haystack.

Often, in the past, researchers trying to narrow down such chemicals have started out by separating them out in arduous laboratory procedures then testing them one at a time to see if any of them worked. There was a good chance of turning up nothing.

The Georgia Tech researchers went after all the chemicals at one time, the whole haystack, using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

"We screened the entire chemical composition of each sample at once," Kubanek said. "We analyzed lots and lots of samples to fish out chemical candidates."

Mud crabs hiding in reaction to chemicals taken from blue crab urine and introduced into their tanks in a lab at Georgia Tech. Credit: Georgia Tech / Alex Draper

Crabs are 'walking noses'

The researchers discovered spikes in about a dozen metabolites after blue crabs ate mud crabs. They tested out those pee chemicals that spiked on the mud crabs, and trigonelline and homarine distinctly made them crouch.

"Trigonelline scares the mud crabs a little bit more," Kubanek said.

More specifically, high concentrations of either of the two did the trick. "It's clear that there was a dose-dependent response," said Weissburg, who is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences. "Mud crabs have evolved to hone in on that elevated dose."

"Most crustaceans are walking noses," Weissburg said. "They detect chemicals with sensors on their claws, antennae and even the walking legs. The compounds we isolated are pretty simple, which suggests they might be easily detectable in a variety of places on a crab. This redundancy is good because it increases the likelihood that the mud crabs get the message and not get eaten."

Ecological and fishery effects

Evolution preserved the mud crabs with the duck-and-cover reaction to the two chemicals, which also influenced the ecological balance, in part by pushing blue crabs to look for more of their food elsewhere. But it influenced other animal populations as well.

"These chemicals are staggeringly important," Weissburg said. "The scent from a blue crab potentially affects a large number of mud crabs, all of which stop eating oysters, and that helps preserve the oyster populations."

All of that also impacts food sources for marine birds and mammals: Just by the effects of two chemicals, and there are so many more chemical signals around. "It's hard for us to appreciate the richness of this chemical landscape," Weissburg said.

Marc Weissburg talking about marine chemicals and population regulation. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

As scientists learn more, influencing these systems could become useful to ecologists and the fishing industry.

"We might even be able to use these chemicals to control oyster consumption by predators to help preserve these habitats, which are critical, or to help oyster farmers. That's becoming important in Georgia fisheries," Weissburg said.

Pollutants in pesticides and herbicides are known to interfere with estuaries' ecologies. "It will be a lot easier to test how strong this is by knowing specific ecological chemicals," Weissburg said.

Fear-o-mone small molecules

By the way, trigonelline and homarine are not pheromones.

"Pheromones are signaling molecules that have a function within the same species, like to attract mates," Kubanek said. "And blue crabs and mud crabs are not the same species."

"In this case, the mud crabs have evolved to chemically eavesdrop on the blue crabs' pee. You might call trigonelline and homarine fear-inducing cues."

Identifying such metabolites, also called small molecules, and their effects is the latest chapter in constructing the catalog of life molecules. "Everyone knows about the human genome project, identifying genomes; then came transcriptomes (molecules that transcribe genes)," Kubanek said. "Now we're pretty far along with proteomics (identifying proteins), but we're just now figuring out metabolomes."

More information: Remington X. Poulin el al., "Chemical encoding of risk perception and predator detection among estuarine invertebrates," PNAS (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713901115 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Dickinsonia costata, one of the most common species of the Ediacaran period, moved and fed on seafloor microbe mats. This specimen and its silly putty cast are about 6 centimeters across and from the Nilpena Station of South Australia. Credit: Mary Droser

Microbial mats that existed on sea floors prior to the Cambrian explosion provided the foundation for early animal life to arise, new research looking at trace fossils of that early life has found.

When Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species and for decades thereafter, scientists ascribed the beginning of animal life to the Cambrian, eventually pinned to about 540 million years ago when trilobites and other multicellular organisms emerged in a relatively short timeframe.

In recent years, however, astonishing complexity has been discovered in the period right before the advent of the Cambrian explosion, revising the scientific view of the origins of the most complex, multicellular life on Earth.

"By the time we get to the Cambrian  which has much more familiar organisms  a lot of the evolution had already happened on Earth," says paleobiologist Mary Droser at the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of California, Riverside.

Droser is the lead author of a recently published paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences describing the conditions that led to the rise of the earliest animals in the late Ediacaran period (an era that lasted from 635 to 540 million years ago) of the Precambrian, and the stages of evolution that led to their domination. Classification has proven difficult for soft-bodied Ediacara biota, as their remains are encased in some of the oldest rocks on the planet. However, uniting attributes like multicellularity, bilateral body shapes and movement to find food have surfaced in recent years. Droser said it was time to compile and synthesize the published research on the topic.

Although scientists have widely credited the Ediacaran for harboring early animal life, researchers mainly focused on fossil impressions of individual specimens. Droser and her colleagues, James Gehling and Lidya Tarhan, took a different approach by examining microbial textures, evidence of mobility and species associations among fossil beds to gather clues about their ecology and evolution.

By studying how and why early animals settled or moved, scientists can get a glimpse into the lives of these long-gone animals and the adaptions they used to survive, including what kinds of surfaces they colonized and how they traveled and ate.

An artist interpretation of an excavated Ediacaran fossil bed measuring 50 centimeters by 100 centimeters depicts the once-common Dickinsonia and sea frond-like organisms. Credit: Michelle Kroll

"One of the things that we look at is evidence of mobility, as opposed to the organism itself," Droser said.

A trove of mobile information can be found about the Ediacaran in trace fossils, in the form of "footprints" left behind by the animals when they moved and interacted with the surrounding environment rather than their actual body parts.

"We're not just looking at the beautiful fossils but everything that's there," Droser says. "It's looking at the weird and unusual things that actually provide a lot of the insight."

Root-like anchors that attached sea fan-like organisms to the substrate, scraping marks left by mollusk-like algae eaters, and mining burrows left by worm-like animals are all examples of the traces these extinct creatures left behind.

Before the ubiquity of predators, sediment mixers and decomposers, what accumulated on the seafloor was not only organic material that fell to the seafloor but also mucus-like layers of microbes coating the sandy bottom called microbial mats. "Think pond scum," says Droser.

The range and diversity of microbial mats that served as the foothold for Ediacara biota would prove even more pivotal to the ecology of these ancient habitats. The mats offered an alternative path from the free-floating lifestyle of microscopic algae and bacteria as something for the new and enterprising species to attach to or feed from on a shifting seafloor. The stability and environmental complexity provided by the sticky mats made the extensive seafloor habitable.

The appearance, diversification, and evolution of Ediacara biota are inextricably linked to these mats. Researchers have found that with the rise of complex animals comes advancements in the microbial mats themselves, revealing the ecological interplay between the species, Droser says.

Sprigginia fossils are some of the most complex fossils found in the Ediacaran period. Vaguely resembling soft-bodied trilobites, Sprigginia has a head-like region and repeat-ing segments running the length of its body. Credit: Mary Droser

The advent of mobile taxa played the critical role of colonizing other mats after big disturbances, such as large storms, thereby preventing total community wipe outs. Mobile and immobile animals exploited the textural qualities of the mats representing different microbe brews, from microbial bunching of sediment to bumpy structures that resemble "elephant skin" or "bubble trains".

Microbial textures are a proxy to understanding how sediment, microorganisms and macroorganisms interacted to produce consorts of animals, or assemblages, found in regular association across fossil beds. The Ediacaran stratigraphic record shows three distinct groups of animals that emerged successively  the Avalon, White Sea and Nama assemblages  each with their own strategies to exploit their changing environment, spreading and then waning before many met evolutionary dead ends.

The Ediacaran, replete with explosive diversity, saw the first emergence of successful bilaterial animals that would later give rise to Earth's first vertebrates, mobility, early mollusks, skeletons, plant-like reproduction and population struggles such as competition over resources and space, which are all vital components of modern animal ecosystems today.

"We would argue that the beginning of animal life as we know it begins in the Precambrian," says Droser. "By the time that you get to the Cambrian, all of the major groups are established."

Droser said studying the ecology and evolution before the Cambrian explosion offers key insights into how the early stages of the evolution of complex life may play out on other planets.

"It's much cheaper and easier to go back in time on our own planet and ask," Droser says, "'How did the atmosphere and ocean chemistry interact with the nature of prokaryote, eukaryote and multicellular evolution to produce a planet with this complex green scum around it?"

More information: Mary L. Droser et al. The Rise of Animals in a Changing Environment: Global Ecological Innovation in the Late Ediacaran, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1146/annurev-earth-063016-015645

This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at www.astrobio.net .
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) Concerned about the deterioratingA call drop situation, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will meet service providers on January 10 to discuss the burning issue as also the new service quality norms that have been implemented in the sector.

"We want to convey to the operators, the governments concerns on state of call drops. Service providers have to get their act together,"ATelecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters here today.

advertisement

She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference to mark the completion of the first phaseAof Bharat Net project.

The meeting with telecom industry CEOs will be chaired by the DoT Secretary.

The meeting is also slated to discuss the new stringent call drop norms that were enforced by telecom regulator TRAI in October last year.

On the same day, DoT will also hold aAseparate meeting with the telecom regulator on the call drop issue.

The Telecom Commission, meanwhile, will meet tomorrow to discuss multiple issues including some recommendations by Interministerial Group (IMG) on relief measures for the stressed industry, importantly, the raising of spectrum caps. PTI MBI ANU

--- ENDS ---
Neutrons produced when a spin-aligned (polarized) proton collides with another proton come out with a slight rightward-skew preference. But when the polarized proton collides with a much larger gold nucleus, the neutrons' directional preference becomes larger and switches to the left. These surprising results imply that the mechanisms producing particles along the beam direction may be very different in these two types of collisions. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Imagine playing a game of billiards, putting a bit of counter-clockwise spin on the cue ball and watching it deflect to the right as it strikes its target ball. With luck, or skill, the target ball sinks into the corner pocket while the rightward-deflected cue ball narrowly misses a side-pocket scratch. Now imagine your counter-clockwise spinning cue ball striking a bowling ball instead, and deflecting even more stronglybut to the leftwhen it strikes the larger mass.

That's similar to the shocking situation scientists found themselves in when analyzing results of spinning protons striking different sized atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Neutrons produced when a spinning proton collides with another proton come out with a slight rightward-skew preference. But when the spinning proton collides with a much larger gold nucleus, the neutrons' directional preference becomes larger and switches to the left.

"What we observed was totally amazing," said Brookhaven physicist Alexander Bazilevsky, a deputy spokesperson for the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC, which is reporting these results in a new paper just published in Physical Review Letters. "Our findings may mean that the mechanisms producing particles along the direction in which the spinning proton is traveling may be very different in proton-proton collisions compared with proton-nucleus collisions."

Understanding different particle production mechanisms could have big implications for interpreting other high-energy particle collisions, including the interactions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with particles in the Earth's atmosphere, Bazilevsky said.

Detecting particles' directional preferences

Spin physicists first observed the tendency of more neutrons to emerge slightly to the right in proton-proton interactions in 2001-2002, during RHIC's first polarized proton experiments. RHIC, which has been operating since 2000, is the only collider in the world with the ability to precisely control the polarization, or spin direction, of colliding protons, so this was new territory at the time. It took some time for theoretical physicists to explain the result. But the theory they developed, published in 2011, gave scientists no reason to expect such a strong directional preference when protons were colliding with larger nuclei, let alone a complete flip in the direction of that preference.

"We anticipated something similar to the proton-proton effect, because we couldn't think of any reasons why the asymmetry could be different," said Itaru Nakagawa, a physicist from Japan's RIKEN laboratory, who served as PHENIX's deputy run coordinator for spin measurements in 2015. "Can you imagine why a bowling ball would scatter a cue ball in the opposite direction compared with a target billiard ball?"

Brookhaven Lab physicist Alexander Bazilevsky and RIKEN physicist Itaru Nakagawa use billiards and a bowling ball to demonstrate surprising results observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider's PHENIX detector when small particles collided with larger ones. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

2015 was the year RHIC first collided polarized protons with gold nuclei at high energy, the first such collisions anywhere in the world. Minjung Kima graduate student at Seoul National University and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center at Brookhaven Labfirst noticed the surprisingly dramatic skew of the neutronsand the fact that the directional preference was opposite to that seen in proton-proton collisions. Bazilevsky worked with her on data analysis and detector simulations to confirm the effect and make sure it was not an artifact from the detector or something to do with the adjustment of the beams. Then, Nakagawa worked closely with the accelerator physicists on a series of experiments to repeat the measurements under even more precisely controlled conditions.

"This was truly a collaborative effort between experimentalists and accelerator physicists who could tune such a huge and complicated accelerator facility on the fly to meet our experimental needs," Bazilevsky said, expressing gratitude for those efforts and admiration for the versatility and flexibility of RHIC.

The new measurements, which also included results from collisions of protons with intermediate-sized aluminum ions, showed the effect was real and that it changed with the size of the nucleus.

"So we have three sets of datacolliding polarized protons with protons, aluminum, and gold," Bazilevsky said. "The asymmetry gradually increases from negative in proton-protonwith more neutrons scattering to the rightto nearly zero asymmetry in proton-aluminum, to a large positive asymmetry in proton-gold collisionswith many more scatterings to the left."

Particle production mechanisms

To understand the findings, the scientists had to look more closely at the processes and forces affecting the scattering particles.

"In the particle world, things are much more complicated than the simple case of (spinning) billiard balls colliding," Bazilevsky said. "There are a number of different processes involved in particle scattering, and these processes themselves can interact or interfere with one another."

Alexander Bazilevsky discusses surprising particle spin results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"The measured asymmetry is the sum of these interactions or interferences of different processes," said Kim.

Nakagawa, who led the theoretical interpretation of the experimental data, elaborated on the different mechanisms.

The basic idea is that, in the case of large nuclei such as gold, which have a very large positive electric charge, electromagnetic interactions play a much more important role in particle production than they do in the case when two small, equally charged protons collide.

"In the collisions of protons with protons, the effect of electric charge is negligibly small," Nakagawa said. In that case, the asymmetry is driven by interactions governed by the strong nuclear forceas the theory developed back in 2011 correctly described. But as the size, and therefore charge, of the nucleus increases, the electromagnetic force takes on a larger role and, at a certain point, flips the directional preference for neutron production.

The scientists will continue to analyze the 2015 data in different ways to see how the effect depends on other variables, such as the momentum of the particles in various directions. They'll also look at how preferences of particles other than neutrons are affected, and work with theorists to better understand their results.

Another idea would be to execute a new series of experiments colliding polarized protons with other kinds of nuclei not yet measured.

"If we observe exactly the asymmetry we predict based on the electromagnetic interaction, then this becomes very strong evidence to support our hypothesis," Nakagawa said.

In addition to providing a unique way to understand different particle production mechanisms, this new result adds to the puzzling story of what causes the transverse spin asymmetry in the first placean open question for physicists since the 1970s. These and other results from RHIC's polarized proton collisions will eventually contribute to solving this question.
Author Tom Iliffe leads scientists on a cave dive. Credit: Jill Heinerth , CC BY-ND

Maybe when you picture a university professor doing research it involves test tubes and beakers, or perhaps poring over musty manuscripts in a dimly lit library, or maybe going out into the field to examine new crop-growing techniques or animal-breeding methods. All of it's good, solid research and I commend them all.

Then there is what I do  cave diving. To study the biology and ecology of coastal, saltwater caves and the marine fauna that inhabit them, my cave diving partners and I head underground and underwater to explore these unique and challenging ecosystems. Often we go to places no other human has been. While the peaks of the tallest mountains can be viewed from an airplane or the depths of the sea mapped with sonar, caves can only be explored firsthand.

Around the globe, from Australia to the Mediterranean, from Hawaii to the Bahamas and throughout the Caribbean, I have explored more than 1,500 such underwater caves over the last 40 years. The experience can be breathtaking. When you are down 60 to 100 feet in a cave that has zero light and is 20 miles long, you never know what you are about to see as you turn the next corner.

My primary focus is searching for new forms of life  mostly white, eyeless crustaceans  that are specifically adapted to this totally dark, food-poor environment. Cave diving is an essential tool in our investigations since the caves I'm interested are filled with water: typically a layer of fresh or brackish water on the surface and then saltwater at depths of 10 to 20 meters or more.

There's no other way to access these unexplored areas than to strap on your scuba tanks and jump in.

The remipede Cryptocorynetes elmorei from Eleuthera, Bahamas. Remipedes are only found in deeper saltwater layers from caves on opposite sides of the Atlantic and from the Indian Ocean coast of Western Australia. Credit: Tom Iliffe, CC BY-ND

Scientific research as extreme sport

The list of what can go wrong in a cave dive could fill your event planner.

Equipment or light failure, leaking scuba tanks, broken guide lines, getting lost, cave collapse, stirred up silt resulting in zero visibility, poisonous gas mixtures  you get the idea.

It's fieldwork that can be a matter of life or death. I have had some close calls over the years, and sadly, have lost several good friends and researchers in cave accidents.

To put it mildly, underwater caves can be very hostile and unforgiving. One such cave  the Devil's system in north-central Florida  has claimed at least 14 lives in the last 30 years, and there are other examples elsewhere in Florida and in Mexico.

Tom Iliffe preparing for a side mount dive at Cliff Pool, Bermuda. Rather than carrying tanks on his back as in conventional scuba, a tank is clipped off under each arm, allowing him to pass through low sections in a cave where it would otherwise be impossible to go. Credit: Gil Nolan, CC BY-ND

Most of the time, human error is to blame, when divers don't follow the rules they should or lack essential training and experience in cave diving.

My family has gotten used to the idea that what I do is not always a walk in the park. They know that since I'm 69, I stress safety, being physically and mentally prepared, and that I religiously abide by the cardinal rule of cave diving  that you never ever dive alone. My colleagues and I usually go into a cave with teams of two to three divers and constantly look after each other to see if there is anything going wrong during our dives, which usually last about 90 minutes, but can be as long as three hours or more.

Death-defying dives pay off in discoveries

It's not just new species we are discovering, but also higher groups of animals including a new class, orders, families and genera, previously unknown from any other habitat on the planet. Some of our newfound animals have close relatives living in similar caves on opposite margins of the Atlantic Ocean or even the far side of the Earth (such as the Bahamas versus Western Australia).

While most of these caves are formed in limestone, they can also include seawater-flooded lava tubes created by volcanic eruptions. Amazingly, similar types of animals inhabit both.

Tom Iliffe diving with his Megalodon closed-circuit rebreather in a lava tube cave in the Canary Islands. Credit: Jill Heinerth, CC BY-ND

In the deserts of West Texas, our team discovered and explored the deepest underwater cave in the U.S., reaching a depth of 462 feet.

The graduate students in my lab work on a diverse group of questions. They're uncovering the nature of chemosynthetic processes in caves  how microorganisms use energy from chemical bonds, rather than light energy as in photosynthesis, to produce organic matter  and their significance to the cave food web.

Other students are examining records of Ice Age sea level history held in cave sediments, as well as the presence of tree roots penetrating into underwater caves and their importance to the overlying tropical forest. We're finding evidence that sister species of cave animals on opposite shores of the Atlantic separated from one another about 110 million years ago as tectonic plate movements initiated the opening of the Atlantic, as well as determining how environmental and ecological factors affect the abundance and diversity of animals in saltwater caves.

Our research has significant implications, especially concerning endangered species and environmental protection. Since many cave animals occur only in a single cave and nowhere else on Earth, pollution or destruction of caves can result in species extinctions. Unfortunately, the creation of many protected areas and nature reserves failed to take cave species into account.

Some discoveries can be completely unanticipated. For example, when we sequenced DNA from a variety of arthropods, including crustaceans and insects, the data strongly support a sister group relationship between hexapods (the insects) and remipedes, a small and enigmatic group of marine crustaceans exclusively found in underwater caves. This places the remipedes in a pivotal position to understanding the evolution of crustaceans and insects.

The remipede Godzillius robustus from Abaco, Bahamas. Note the darker shaded venom-injecting fangs on the first pair of appendages. Credit: Tom Iliffe, CC BY-ND

Even at this stage of my life, to me the risks attendant to my cave diving research are worth it. It's like the Star Trek mantra come true  to boldly go where no man has gone before. The chance to discover new forms of marine life, to view never-before-seen underwater formations, vast chambers, endless tunnels and deep chasms, to swim in some of the bluest and purest water on Earth  I will take that sort of research and its challenges any day.

Yes, it can give new meaning to the old line about "publish or perish" in academia. But I love it, and I will tell you with all honesty, I can't wait until my next trip.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
A digital elevation model of Gale Crater shows the pattern of mid-latitude Martian craters with interior sedimentary mounds. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas

By seeing which way the wind blows, a University of Texas at Dallas fluid dynamics expert has helped propose a solution to a Martian mountain mystery.

Dr. William Anderson, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, co-authored a paper published in the journal Physical Review E that explains the common Martian phenomenon of a mountain positioned downwind from the center of an ancient meteorite impact zone.

Anderson's co-author, Dr. Mackenzie Day, worked on the project as part of her doctoral research at The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her Ph.D. in geology in May 2017. Day is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Gale Crater was formed by meteorite impact early in the history of Mars, and it was subsequently filled with sediments transported by flowing water. This filling preceded massive climate change on the planet, which introduced the arid, dusty conditions that have been prevalent for the past 3.5 billion years. This chronology indicates wind must have played a role in sculpting the mountain.

"On Mars, wind has been the only driver of landscape change for over 3 billion years," Anderson said. "This makes Mars an ideal planetary laboratory for aeolian morphodynamicswind-driven movement of sediment and dust. We're studying how Mars' swirling atmosphere sculpted its surface."

Wind vortices blowing across the crater slowly formed a radial moat in the sediment, eventually leaving only the off-center Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high peak similar in height to the rim of the crater. The mountain was skewed to one side of the crater because the wind excavated one side faster than the other, the research suggests.

Day and Anderson first advanced the concept in an initial publication on the topic in Geophysical Research Letters. Now, they have shown via computer simulation that, given more than a billion years, Martian winds were capable of digging up tens of thousands of cubic kilometers of sediment from the craterlargely thanks to turbulence, the swirling motion within the wind stream.

"The role of turbulence cannot be overstated," Anderson said. "Since sediment movement increases non-linearly with drag imposed by the aloft winds, turbulent gusts literally amplify sediment erosion and transport."

The locationand mid-latitude Martian craters in generalbecame of interest as NASA's Curiosity rover landed in Gale Crater in 2012, where it has gathered data since then.

"The rover is digging and cataloging data housed within Mount Sharp," Anderson said. "The basic science question of what causes these mounds has long existed, and the mechanism we simulated has been hypothesized. It was through high-fidelity simulations and careful assessment of the swirling eddies that we could demonstrate efficacy of this model."

The theory Anderson and Day tested via computer simulations involves counter-rotating vorticespicture in your mind horizontal dust devilsspiraling around the crater to dig up sediment that had filled the crater in a warmer era, when water flowed on Mars.

"These helical spirals are driven by winds in the crater, and, we think, were foremost in churning away at the dry Martian landscape and gradually scooping sediment from within the craters, leaving behind these off-center mounds," Anderson said.

That simulations have demonstrated that wind erosion could explain these geographical features offers insight into Mars' distant past, as well as context for the samples collected by Curiosity.

"It's further indication that turbulent winds in the atmosphere could have excavated sediment from the craters," Anderson said. "The results also provide guidance on how long different surface samples have been exposed to Mars' thin, dry atmosphere."

This understanding of the long-term power of wind can be applied to Earth as well, although there are more variables on our home planet than Mars, Anderson said.

"Swirling, gusty winds in Earth's atmosphere affect problems at the nexus of landscape degradation, food security and epidemiological factors affecting human health," Anderson said. "On Earth, however, landscape changes are also driven by water and plate tectonics, which are now absent on Mars. These drivers of landscape change generally dwarf the influence of air on Earth."
In this 1992 photo from the Galileo spacecraft, the surface of the moon is marked with craters from impacts, but isnt weathered. Many particles on the moons surface can last billions of years undisturbed. Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS

Hidden in the particles of moon dirt brought back by astronauts more than fifty years ago, secrets of ancient Earth lie in wait.

A team of scientists are examining crushed rocks brought back from the moon by Apollo astronauts for evidence of minerals that might have been formed in the presence of water to better understand the early formation of Earth. They presented the preliminary results of their work last month at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Planetary scientist Sarah Crites and instrumentationalist Casey Honniball are part of a team of researchers from the Hawaii Institute for Geophysics and Planetology and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who are exploring lunar regolith. Lunar regolith is the layer of dust, dirt, and broken rock scattered across the surface of the moon; the researchers are examining millions of individual particles of material, searching for fragments that might have long ago been blasted off Earth's surface and preserved in the pristinely still environment of the moon.

"It's a record of Earth's surface geology that could go back billions of years," said Marc Fries, a Raman spectroscopist who now works as Astromaterials curator at NASA's Johnson Space Center who was not involved with the research.

Scientists know little about the surface of Earth billions of years ago. Crites, Honniball, and the team are relying on ancient collisionsasteroids and other space debris plummeting to the planet's surface and blasting rock all the way to the moonto provide raw material like clay from Earth's surface among the more common basalt and olivine formed on the moon itself. They also rely on the moon's surface, which experiences very little weathering, volcanic activity, and movement.

"If you drop a rock on the moon, it's just going to stay there for the most part," Crites said. "We still have rocks on the lunar surface from when the moon was formed."

By the end of the Apollo missions, astronauts had brought a total of 842 pounds of lunar rock, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the moon's surface to Earth. The researchers are using the material to try to detect particles of ancient Earth, asteroids, and anything else that might have landed on the moon over the last several billion years.

Carefully tapping sieved lunar samples into a thin layer, the researchers have been scanning the particles beneath three different hyperspectral imagers. These devices reflect wavelengths of light off of each captured pixel of the scanned material, giving the researchers a precise chart of wavelengths of light reflected or absorbed by minerals and other particles, Honniball said. While the receptors in human eyes can only see three colors, the hyperspectral equipment samples hundreds of different wavelengths.

The plots of reflection and absorption for each pixel of their images reveal something about the chemical makeup of lunar dirt. Crites is specifically looking for water, or the evidence of its presence when the particles were formed, making those particles "hydrated minerals."

Basalt, pyroxene and olivine are all igneous rocks and were probably formed on the moon itself, but clay and mica, among others, can only form near water. The researchers' procedure for sorting the moon rocks should pinpoint hydrated minerals that couldn't have developed on the dry surface of the moon, Honniball said.

So far, four particles have stood out as likely candidates. On their next scan, the team plans to remove those pieces of material and analyze them further, looking for chemical composition and structure that might confirm their origin and even their age.

This story is republished courtesy of AGU Blogs (http://blogs.agu.org), a community of Earth and space science blogs, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Read the original story here.
The plankton nets were dragged slowly just below the sea surface to capture floating plastics. Credit: 2017 Cecilia Martin

The Red Sea has relatively low amounts of floating plastic debris in its surface waters due to fewer sources or faster removal.

Researchers are mapping global patterns of marine plastic pollution as alarm grows over floating rubbish. A team led by marine scientist Carlos Duarte from KAUST shows that the level of plastic debris in the Red Sea is relatively low.

Samples of floating plastic rubbish were collected by the team from 120 sites along 1500km of shoreline on the eastern margin of the Red Sea during voyages in 2016-2017. The debris was captured in plankton nets dragged slowly just below the sea surface and the fragments were then painstakingly sorted into material type and size.

Three-quarters of the collected rubbish was rigid fragments of broken objects. Plastic film, such as bags or wrapping, made up 17% percent, but there were only small amounts of fishing lines or nets (6%) and foam (4%).

The relatively low levels of floating plastic in the Red Sea may either be due to there being fewer sources of rubbish or its faster removal, explains doctoral student, Cecilia Martin. Not much plastic comes from the land because this coastline has few of the usual polluting contributors.

A raw sample before sorting, showing one piece of blue plastic. Credit: 2017 Cecilia Martin

"Usually the main source of plastic in the sea tends to be litter and mismanaged waste," says Martin. "But on this coastline, the only large human settlement is Jeddah, with a population of 2.8 million people, and little tourism, so there are few people with the opportunity to litter." Similarly, rivers globally provide 10-50% of discarded oceanic plastic, but because the Red Sea catchment has no permanent rivers, their contribution is negligible..

"Instead, the winds and a few storms are most probably the main sources of plastic," says Martin. "This is reflected in our findings of proportionally higher amounts of plastic films compared to global trends."

There is a concern, however, says Martin, about the "missing" plastic. The low levels of debris can be partially attributed to its "'removal" by the extensive mangrove and coral reef systems of the area. Capture of plastics is problematic for these ecosystems.

"Mangroves are perfect traps for macrolitter," says Martin. "At high tide, floating items reach the forest and then, as the tide drops, get stuck in seedlings and mangrove aerial roots (pneumatophores) which act as a mesh to trap them."

Samples were carefully sorted into size and type of plastics. Credit: Cecilia Martin

Coral ecosystems can also consume plastic. "The small size of microplastic items makes it available to a wide range of organisms and many marine groups, such as corals, mollusks, crabs and plankton are found to ingest plastic.."

Duarte says the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean reflects our consumer habits and the solution is to reduce plastic use in our daily lives.

More information: Elisa Marti et al. Low Abundance of Plastic Fragments in the Surface Waters of the Red Sea, Frontiers in Marine Science (2017). DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00333
Social media is serving as a powerful tool in which users are urging men to condemn violence against women, a new Michigan State University study finds. Credit: Unsplash.com

The social media backlash against sexual assault not only gives victims a collective outlet for disclosure, but also serves as a powerful tool to urge boys and men to condemn violence against women, finds a first-of-its-kind study by Michigan State University scholars.

#NotOkay, a Twitter campaign against Donald Trump's statements about grabbing women's genitals, included a surprisingly large number of tweets by both women and men calling on men to shut down "locker room talk" that is degrading to women.

"Boys being boys?" said one Twitter user. "Don't insult me. I've been a boy all my life and I've never did or said things like that before."

#NotOkay was followed by the influential #MeToo campaign, which Oprah Winfrey referenced in a powerful Golden Globes speech on Jan. 7, specifically noting the role of men. "I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon!" Winfrey said. "And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women ... and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me Too' again."

MSU's Megan Maas, who led the study examining thousands of #NotOkay tweets, said people in the social media campaign were identifying on Twitter as a way to make the issue more visible, but were also asking for change in specific ways such as engaging boys and men.

"I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people calling boys and men into action," said Maas, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. "This is where our field is at. For the last 20 years it's been about how not to get raped - how to avoid being sexually harassed - but now we're moving toward bystander intervention. Its about getting boys and men to step in when it looks like their friend is about to say something derogatory or potentially do something predatory toward women."

Author Kelly Oxford started the #NotOkay campaign in October 2016 after the public release of then-presidential candidate Trump's vulgar comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. "Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything," said Trump, who later defended his comments as "locker room banter."

More recently, the #MeToo Twitter campaign rose to prominence following high-profile sexual assault accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Time Magazine called the people behind that movement "The Silence Breakers" and named them Time's Person of the Year for 2017.

Maas and colleagues were the first researchers to capture and analyze tweets related to sexual behavior. Aside from the harrowing disclosures of sexual violence, there were myriad tweets that commented more generally on Trump and sexual assault. Overall, three themes emerged:

An acknowledgement and condemnation of "rape culture."

That Trump is a salient symbol of the national state of sexual assault.

That engaging boys and men is an important step for ending violence against women.

"We urge everyone, but particularly men and boys, who are in a position like Billy Bush to resist engaging in or to actively shut down conversations that are degrading to women," Maas said. "Research shows that doing so makes an impact on changing social norms that are permissive of violence against women. In turn, sexual assault and harassment is prevented."
A fast-moving winter storm hit the eastern United States during the first week of 2018. Heres the view from a NASA Earth observing satellite. Credit: NASA

The "eye in the sky" has become a major part of research for segments of the scientific community. But how should it be trained?

Over the past two years, University of Virginia environmental scientist Scott Doney served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel that on Friday released a report making recommendations for what satellite Earth observations should be made during the next decade by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geological Survey.

Doney, a chaired professor, came to UVA last fall from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research spans oceanography, climate and biogeochemistry, with an emphasis on computer models, remote sensing and data analysis. He is interested in how the global carbon cycle and ocean ecology respond to natural and human-driven climate change signals, such as ocean warming, sea-ice loss and acidification of the ocean that results from the burning of fossil fuels.

He answers here a few questions about the National Academy report for UVA Today.

Q. What are some of the things we've learned about the Earth and atmosphere by observations from space?

A. Over the past several decades, satellite observations have opened up a whole new window on our changing planet. In part, this is because satellites provide an invaluable global perspective.

I'm an oceanographer, and we are often limited because research ships only move at about the speed of a bicycle. Satellite data, in contrast, allows us to map planet-wide patterns in storms, ocean currents, sea-ice and plankton. Space-based observations also have been used to quantify and understand the causes for the changing global water cycle: rising sea-levels, shifting droughts and floods, depleting groundwater and melting glaciers and ice sheets.

Similar advances have occurred across Earth science, from improving weather forecasting to tracking evolving ecosystems, air quality and natural hazards.

Q. What is the gist of the panel's report?

A. Our task as a panel was to help NASA, NOAA and USGS shape science priorities and guide agency investments in satellite Earth observations into the next decade.

Working from input from the scientific community, public and expert panels, we came up with a set of about a dozen priorities for new observations that complement existing and planned satellite missions. The observations were chosen to address both pressing science questions, such as climate change, and the growing utility of satellite data in our daily lives. Key recommendations include new observations on clouds and precipitation; atmospheric aerosols or small particles that influence air quality and climate; planet-scale reorganizations of water between the ocean, snow and land-ice and groundwater; vegetation and algal biomass that fuel ecosystems; and deformations of the Earth surface associated with natural hazards like earthquakes and landslides.

Q. If implemented, in what ways would Earth observations be altered over the next decade from current methods?

A. In the past, scientists were often forced, by necessity, to concentrate on somewhat narrow aspects of the planet because of limited data. New satellite observations and modeling tools now allow us to take a more comprehensive perspective  for example, linking together measurements of rainfall and soil moisture to water supply, crop harvests and forest health. Studying the Earth as a dynamic system of intertwined parts is essential for answering the most challenging scientific questions.

Q. What more do you think we will learn in the coming decade?

A. Satellite data has become ubiquitous in the functioning of modern society, so commonplace that we don't often appreciate how Earth observations contribute to our economy, national security, public safety and quality of life. An important task moving forward is to speed and ease the translation of satellite observations into new applications that support humanity's ability to thrive.

Q. How did you get selected to serve on this panel?

A. The panel members were chosen by the national academies from nominations from the scientific community. The panel contained scientists and engineers with expertise spanning the Earth sciences and satellite technologies.
By PTI: (Eds: Adding more info and management quotes)

Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) Ports arm of the embattled Essar Group today said it will invest USD 500 million over the next 30 months to expand capacities at its two existing domestic projects and also build a new coal terminal in Mozambique.

"Well be investing USD 500 million to increase our capacity at Hazira and Salaya, and also build a new coal handling terminal in Mozambique," Essar Ports chief executive and managing director Rajiv Agarwal told reporters here.

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He said the investment will be completed over the next two-and-a-half years and will take its cargo capacity to around 150 million tonne per annum (mtpa) 110 mtpa that it will be ending FY18 with.

For coal exports, Mozambique has built a rail network of 550 km till an existing port, where Essar Ports will be building the new terminal, he said, adding this will be its only facility outside the country.

The port currently operates four assets-at Hazira and Salaya on the West Coast, and Vishakhapatnam and Paradip on the East Coast.

The company is aiming to close FY18 with a net profit Rs 320 crore on an income of Rs 1,350 crore, he said.

Agarwal said the balance sheet of the company will he healthy with a net debt of Rs 2,600 crore by the year to March, but will increase to Rs 4,000 crore by FY19, which will be 2.5 times the targeted pretax profit of Rs 1,300 crore.

It is also negotiating with the Gujarat Maritime Board for adding a large capacity addition at the Salaya Port, which may entail investments of over Rs 10,000 crore to raise the dry bulk potential and a few berths for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquid cargo handling, he said.

Agarwal reiterated that the company is looking at a multi-location LNG handling capacity and named Hazira as one of the other locations where it can have it.

The company will close FY18 with a cargo handling of 42 mtpa and aims to increase to 60 mtpa in FY19.

At present, 22 per cent of revenue come from third- parties, which will go up to 40 per cent by GY19, he said.

It can be noted that the diversified Essar Group had sold its cash-cow oil assets in a USD 13 billion to the Russian government-controlled energy giant Rosneft last November primarily to pay off lenders and had since then retired over Rs 75,000 crore of debt.

The groups steel business, which as over Rs 44,000 crore debt, is also facing the spectre of a change in ownership as banks have initiated insolvency proceedings against it.

Essar Ports said it will be completing a six-year-old capex programme of investing Rs 2,800 crore in its Salaya and Vizag facilities soon. PTI AA BEN BEN

--- ENDS ---
" " People gather around the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on June 4, 2020, amid continued protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody. RYAN M. KELLY/AFP via Getty Images

In Richmond, Virginia, in June 2020, during protests against police brutality and racism, demonstrators spray-painted the base of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee with epithets and slogans like "Black Lives Matter", "Blood On Your Hands" and "Stop White Supremacy." These were sparked by the May 2020, death of George Floyd while in police custody. The city's mayor agreed to take down this and other Confederate monuments by July 1, 2020, saying "Richmond is no longer the capital of the Confederacy. It is filled with diversity and love for all, and we need to demonstrate that," according to The Guardian.

The movement to pull down public Confederate monuments, which began in 2017, has been picking up steam. In the spring and summer of 2017, construction crews hired by the cities of Baltimore, Maryland and New Orleans wrapped heavy straps around the bronze chests of towering sculptures of confederate icons Lee, Confederate States President Jefferson Davis, Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.

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Working under the cover of darkness to avoid crowds of protesters (there were death threats), the crews used cranes to lift the monuments from their pedestals and load them onto flatbed trucks. The statues were shipped off to warehouses, where they would remain out of sight until the cities could find appropriate places  if any  to resettle them.

Taking down public monuments like these is no small decision. In these cases, the removal of the Confederate monuments was sparked by the June 2015 murder of nine black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by an avowed white supremacist claiming allegiance to the Confederate battle flag.

Immediately following the Charleston attack, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the city council to convene a task force on the removal of the city's Confederate monuments [source: Wendland]. The same thing happened in Baltimore, where former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake assembled a panel of historians and activists to decide the fate of its monuments [source: Campbell].

In both cases, the city councils voted to remove the Confederate statues, ruling that they were offensive to the two cities' majority African-American residents and flashpoints for violence.

But many monuments to the Confederacy still stand in American cities. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 1,700 statues, flags, plaques, city and county names, street names, holidays and even military bases named for Confederate generals, or otherwise dedicated to honoring and celebrating the Confederate cause. Some 780 of these are monuments. Only 114 Confederate symbols have been removed since the Charleston attack.

Supporters of these Confederate monuments argue that removing them is akin to erasing or rewriting history, and wonder which other historical figures will fall victim to modern readings of morality. Founding Father and third POTUS Thomas Jefferson kept slaves at Monticello. Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas led to savage oppression of the New World's native inhabitants.

The decision of whether or not to remove a public monument is really a question of what public monuments represent. Are they bygone products of a distant time and place, or timeless reminders of our core values and beliefs? When our values change, should our public monuments change with them? Are monuments an important way of chronicling a nation's history, both the good and the regrettable? Or do they chiefly serve to chronicle only the history that a small group of people  typically the wealthy and powerful  want to preserve?

Before we dive into the history and controversies surrounding the removal of public monuments, let's take a swing at that first question  what do public monuments really represent?
Florida Schools Receive Threatening Extortion Email

Last Tuesday, college and university presidents across Florida received a 1,250-word extortion email threatening violence.

Last Tuesday, college and university presidents across Florida received a 1,250-word extortion email threatening violence. The email promised a deluge of false bombing and mass shooting threats unless the sender received a payment of 1.2 Bitcoin  about $18,000 at the current rate  by noon Wednesday.

The sender wrote that the repeated false threats of violence would disrupt campuses, and they would follow through with one of them at random.

"One of these threats will be legitimate. Which one will be a surprise," the email read. "You will be forced to evacuate the campus."

The email is written without referencing a specific campus. Its not clear how many campuses received it, but it was sent to a wide variety, including Hillsborough Community College, the University of Florida and University of West Florida.

UF and other recipients alerted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

"After they conferred, they basically determined that this is a scam," UF spokeswoman Janine Sikes said. "It does allow us to use it as a reminder that if people see something, they should say something."

Betsy Bowers, interim vice president of UWF's finance and administration department said student safety is her campuss top priority.

"We have protocols in place that our faculty and staff are trained to do, Bowers said. Sheltering in place to make sure nobody is going across campus or giving access to people that could be of suspicion that would threaten or harm anyone on our campus space."

The FBI and other authorities continue to investigate the incident.
Evaluating biases in Sea Surface Temperature records using coastal weather stations Posted on 8 January 2018 by Kevin C Science is hard. Some easy problems you can solve by hard work, if you are in the right place at the right time and have the right skills. Hard problems take the combined effort of multiple groups looking at the problem, publishing results and finding fault with eachother's work, until hopefully no-one can find any more problems. When problems are hard, you may have to publish something that even you don't think is right, but that might advance the discussion. The calculation of an unbiased sea surface temperature record is a hard problem. Historical sea surface temperature observations come from a variety of sources, with early records being measured using wooden, canvas or rubber buckets (figure 1), later readings being taken from engine room intakes or hull sensors, and the most recent data coming from drifting buoys and from satellites.

Figure 1: Three types of buckets used in early sea surface temperature observations. From Folland (1995). Figure 1: Three types of buckets used in early sea surface temperature observations. From Folland (1995). These different measurement methods give slightly different readings, with the transition from bucket to engine room observations during the second world war being particularly large: this represents the single largest correction to the historical temperature record, and reduces the estimated warming since the mid 19th century by 0.2-0.3 C compared to the uncorrected data (figure 2).

Figure 2: Difference between the historical temperature record using only raw observations, and using observations corrected for the effects of different measurement methods. The corrected data show less warming on a centenial timescale. From Zeke Hausfather. Figure 2: Difference between the historical temperature record using only raw observations, and using observations corrected for the effects of different measurement methods. The corrected data show less warming on a centenial timescale. From Zeke Hausfather. Different approaches have been used to address the problem of combining different kinds of sea surface temperature observations. Records from the UK Met Office and from Japan use information about how the temperature was measured to correct for the type of instrument. The record from the US agency NOAA takes a different approach, using air temperature observations from ships to correct the water temperature readings. If both methods gave the same result, this would increase our confidence in the resulting record. But unfortunately the two approaches give rather different answers (figure 3).

Figure 3: Existing sea surface temperature records from the UK Met Office (HadSST3), from the US agency NOAA (ERSST), and from Japan (COBE-SST2). The lower panel shows the difference between the other records and the UK record. Figure 3: Existing sea surface temperature records from the UK Met Office (HadSST3), from the US agency NOAA (ERSST), and from Japan (COBE-SST2). The lower panel shows the difference between the other records and the UK record. We wanted to determine which approach was right, so we looked for another source of data which could be used to work out how to combine different types of sea surface temperature observations. Coastal weather stations provide air temperature observations covering the whole of the sea surface temperature record, and can be compared against sea surface temperature observations from ships passing close to the coast (Jones 1991). We assembled a dataset of about 2000 coastal weather stations, of which about 400 were located on small islands or peninsulas (figure 4).

Figure 4: Coastal weather stations used to detect the effect of different observation types in the sea surface temperature data. Figure 4: Coastal weather stations used to detect the effect of different observation types in the sea surface temperature data. Coastal air temperatures warm faster than sea surface temperatures, so first we had to scale the weather stations to preserve the sea surface temperature trend for recent decades. Then we used the coastal weather stations to determine the correction required to combine the sea surface temperature observations for each month in the record. This allowed us to create a new sea surface temperature record (figure 5).

Figure 5: Our new sea surface temperature record (the Hybrid SST) is compared to existing records from the UK Met Office (HadSST3), and the US agency NOAA (ERSST). For a comparison of the bucket correction to Jones (1991) see Figure 5: Our new sea surface temperature record (the Hybrid SST) is compared to existing records from the UK Met Office (HadSST3), and the US agency NOAA (ERSST). For a comparison of the bucket correction to Jones (1991) see this figure Unfortunately the resulting record does not agree with either the UK or US sea surface temperature records. It does rule out an unexplained and contentious warm spike in the US record during World War 2. It also tends to reject an unexplained cool feature around 1910 which is present in all existing records. When our new record is compared with the average of many climate model simulations, the differences between the models and the observations are rather different than for existing records, and tend to be slightly reduced (figure 6).

Figure 6: Comparison of global temperature records based on either the UK Met Office sea surface temperature record (HadSST3), or our coastal hybrid record. The smoothed records are compared to the average of climate model simulations from the CMIP5 project. The lower panel shows the differences between each set of observations and the models Figure 6: Comparison of global temperature records based on either the UK Met Office sea surface temperature record (HadSST3), or our coastal hybrid record. The smoothed records are compared to the average of climate model simulations from the CMIP5 project. The lower panel shows the differences between each set of observations and the models If the new record were correct, then it would suggest that climate models have been doing a better job than we thought, and there is little evidence of any difference between the models and observations in the total amount of warming. However we do not necessarily trust our new record, because of the assumptions we had to make in constructing it. The most important result of our work may therefore be to identify places where extra attention should be given to addressing problems in the existing sea surface temperature records. A secondary result is that caution is required when trying to draw conclusions about any differences between the models and the observations, whether it be to identify internal cycles of the climate system or problems in the models, because the differences that we do see are mostly within the range of uncertainty of the observations. Some other relevant papers on this issue include: Estimating sea surface temperature measurement methods using characteristic differences in the diurnal cycle.

Indian Ocean corals reveal crucial role of World War II bias for twentieth century warming estimates 0 0 Printable Version | Link to this page
Some prisons in New Jersey have, as official policy, banned the book The New Jim Crow, which deals with the systemic discrimination leading to mass incarceration of black men, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a letter sent Monday to the New Jersey Department of Corrections calling on the ban to be lifted, New Jersey ACLU attorney Tess Borden wrote that the it could not be justified as a practical matter of prison safety and that it violated the prisoners First Amendment rights.

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New Jersey has had the worst racial disparity in prisons of any state in recent years, although that disparity is expected to shrink as it leads the country in reducing prison population overall. For the state burdened with this systemic injustice to prohibit prisoners from reading a book about race and mass incarceration is ironic, misguided, and harmful, Borden said in a statement on the ACLU website.

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In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that a discriminatory criminal justice system traps millions of black men in a cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement by imprisoning them for minor crimes and later denying them rights and opportunities. This system of mass incarceration, she argues, legitimizes discrimination as the new form of Jim Crow laws. The book became a best-seller after its publication in 2010 and won several awards, including ones given by the NAACP and the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

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According to the Guardian, The New Jim Crow was one of several banned books, including the autobiography of the rapper Prodigy, a book about the hunt for the drug lord El Chapo, and several true crime books. The Guardian also reported that New Jersey prisons blocked magazines related to hip-hop.

Prisons in the state are allowed to ban books that could be dangerous in the hands of inmates. These could include those covering topics such as lock-picking and bomb-making, for example.

The ACLU letter pointed out that the ban on The New Jim Crow stood out as a particularly egregious choice considering it is actually promoted as prison reading material in Texas, a state with 10,000 banned books. (The ACLU did point out this list was also problematic. According to the New York Times, Texas banned Memoirs of a Geisha, The Color Purple, and a MapQuest Road Atlas, but not Mein Kampf or books by the white nationalist David Duke. The Guardian also reported that several books grappling with forms of racism were also banned for racial content.)

The letter ended by calling for a response from the Department of Corrections: In its worst light, it looks like an attempt to keep impacted people uninformed about the history of the very injustice that defines their daily lives.
I loved Oprahs Golden Globes speech on Sunday. It was mesmerizing, pitch perfect, and gave voice to many lifetimes of frustration and vindication with eloquence and a full authority she has earned. But I found the strange Facebook response of Oprah 2020 weirdly discordant and disorienting. Oprahs speechin my hearingwasnt about why she needs to run for office. It was about why the rest of us need to do so, immediately.

The dominant theme I heard was about giving voice to invisible people. It was the arc of the entire speech. Its also what the very best journalism is about, and its worth remembering thats how Oprah began her career. The speech began with her goosebump-y tale of first seeing Sidney Poitier win an Academy Award in 1964 and how much of a revelation it was at the time to see a black man celebrated in America. Then it ran through to her chilling invocation of Recy Taylor, a young black woman who was raped in Alabama in 1944 by six white men who were never brought to justice. She deftly linked Taylor to Rosa Parks, who investigated the rape for the NAACP and then 11 years later refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery with Taylor somewhere in her heart. This was a speech about how seeing someone else model the fight against racism, sexism, and injustice activates us to fight alongside.

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It was a testament to the greatest gifts she has as a journalist, actor, and media personality: the ability to shed light on the faceless and speak of justice and morality in ways that are urgent and original. Thats why the speech honored not just the women in sleek black dresses who were on their feet cheering her. The true message was about someone else:

Women whose names well never know. They are domestic workers and farmworkers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and theyre in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. Theyre part of the world of tech and politics and business. Theyre our athletes in the Olympics and theyre our soldiers in the military.

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What I heard in her speech wasnt a bid to save us all, but rather a powerful charge to the young girls watching at home to tell their own stories, to fight for their own values, and to battle injustices with the certainty that they will be seen and heard.

In a sense, this speech sounded in the key of Obamas famously elusive spur toas Gandhi urgedbe the change you want to see in the world.

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In so many ways, this was a maddening proposition when it was being pushed by a moderate Democrat such as Obama. And it was more maddening still when the president told leaders on the left that he needed them to pressure him further into their corner; that he couldnt make that move on his own. This language of citizen empowerment and responsibility is also so painfully foreign at the moment with a sitting president for whom the greatest obligation of the citizenry is to adore and thank him (and spend money on his brand). We are being trained to believe that President Trump alone creates safer skies and restores coal-mining jobs; that passively accepting his leadership is the holy grail of change.

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But what Winfrey and Obama talk about is the limits of top-down power. It is one of the great sins of this celebrity age that we continue to misread this message as a call to turn anyone who tries to deliver it into our savior. When someone tells you I alone can fix it, you should run screaming for the emergency exits. When someone tells you to get off your ass and fix it yourself, you should think first about running for office yourself.

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Since the 2016 election, the cry one hears constantly from the left is who will lead us? But Democrats should have learned more than they have from Novembers stunning electoral successes in Virginia. The lesson should have been that extraordinary and unknown candidates, including inspired and inspiring first-timers, could win elections without fame or fanfare.

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When someone tells you I alone can fix it, you should run screaming for the emergency exits.

I have no idea whether Winfrey plans to run for the Oval Office in 2020. According to reports, she is actively considering it. But I heard the force and dignity of her speech as a mirror held up to the country about our own responsibilities, accompanied by a very prominent shoutout to journalists for helping to tell those stories. This was a tribute to nameless women who have faced their own #MeToo moments without receiving attention or justice, and for todays young black girls on linoleum floors who couldnt previously imagine themselves winning a lifetime achievement award and woke up Monday thinking they just might.

Its easy to devalue those words as cheese-puff throwaway lines. But for women who went to law school because they saw Sandra Day OConnor on the high court (I was one) or Anita Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, this moment isnt made of cheese. I will never in my life forget the lines of teenage Latina women snaked around the Senate to watch Sonia Sotomayors confirmation hearings. That was about more than just young people looking for a savior. We become what we see modeled and that is where #MeToo will intersect with 2018. On Sunday night, I heard Winfrey urging invisible people to speak up, become engaged, transform policy, and find their own power. It was a speech about moving from passivity and acceptance to furious, mobilized participation and a call for allies in that fight.

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There is an interesting side debate about whether Winfrey should run for office raging on social media. But that should be ancillary to what she actually told us to do. It took a stable media genius to attempt to peel off the narcissism and solipsism of the celebrity culture in which we all seem to be permanently lodged. Maybe its destined that nobody will ever again be elected president who doesnt have a billion-dollar media brand behind them. But the speech I heard last night was about using a billion-dollar media brand to remind young women of color that they, too, have the power to save us all.
By PTI: (Eds: Adding more info and management quotes)

Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) Ports arm of the embattled Essar Group today said it will invest USD 500 million over the next 30 months to expand capacities at its two existing domestic projects and also build a new coal terminal in Mozambique.

"Well be investing USD 500 million to increase our capacity at Hazira and Salaya, and also build a new coal handling terminal in Mozambique," Essar Ports chief executive and managing director Rajiv Agarwal told reporters here.

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He said the investment will be completed over the next two-and-a-half years and will take its cargo capacity to around 150 million tonne per annum (mtpa) 110 mtpa that it will be ending FY18 with.

For coal exports, Mozambique has built a rail network of 550 km till an existing port, where Essar Ports will be building the new terminal, he said, adding this will be its only facility outside the country.

The port currently operates four assets-at Hazira and Salaya on the West Coast, and Vishakhapatnam and Paradip on the East Coast.

The company is aiming to close FY18 with a net profit Rs 320 crore on an income of Rs 1,350 crore, he said.

Agarwal said the balance sheet of the company will he healthy with a net debt of Rs 2,600 crore by the year to March, but will increase to Rs 4,000 crore by FY19, which will be 2.5 times the targeted pretax profit of Rs 1,300 crore.

It is also negotiating with the Gujarat Maritime Board for adding a large capacity addition at the Salaya Port, which may entail investments of over Rs 10,000 crore to raise the dry bulk potential and a few berths for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquid cargo handling, he said.

Agarwal reiterated that the company is looking at a multi-location LNG handling capacity and named Hazira as one of the other locations where it can have it.

The company will close FY18 with a cargo handling of 42 mtpa and aims to increase to 60 mtpa in FY19.

At present, 22 per cent of revenue come from third- parties, which will go up to 40 per cent by GY19, he said.

It can be noted that the diversified Essar Group had sold its cash-cow oil assets in a USD 13 billion to the Russian government-controlled energy giant Rosneft last November primarily to pay off lenders and had since then retired over Rs 75,000 crore of debt.

The groups steel business, which as over Rs 44,000 crore debt, is also facing the spectre of a change in ownership as banks have initiated insolvency proceedings against it.

Essar Ports said it will be completing a six-year-old capex programme of investing Rs 2,800 crore in its Salaya and Vizag facilities soon. PTI AA BEN BEN BAS

--- ENDS ---
Barney Gattie served on the jury in Georgia that sentenced Keith Tharpe to death for the murder of Jaquelin Freeman. Gattie is white; Tharpe is black, and so was Freeman. Seven years after the trial, Gattie stated in a sworn affidavit that he believed there are two types of black peopleblack folks and niggers. He declared that Tharpe was a nigger while the Freemans were nice black folks. Gattie added that after studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls. In light of this affidavit, Tharpe argued that his constitutional right to an impartial jury had been violated. A state court disagreed, as did a federal district court. In September, a federal appeals court also ruled against Tharpe, clearing the way for his executionwhich the Supreme Court blocked in September, over the dissents of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

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On Monday morning, the Supreme Court gave Tharpe a second chance, vacating the appeals courts decision that Gatties racism did not affect the jurys sentence and sending the case back down for further consideration. Once again, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented. This time, the trio explained their objections in an inflammatory dissent by Thomas that accused the majority of attempting to prove its concern for racial justice. The dissenters excoriated their colleagues for allegedly twisting the law in Tharpes favor to meet an ideological end. But their underlying argument isnt just that the majority distorts the law. Its that the law shouldnt protect people like Tharpe.

Tharpe was sentenced to death in 1991. His attorneys, Diana Holt and Laura-Hill Patton, did not uncover Gatties flagrant racism until they interviewed him at his house in 1998. That year, Patton testified that Gattie told them:

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If the victim in Mr. Tharpes case had just been one of the niggers, he would not have cared about her death. But as it was, the victim was a woman from what Mr. Gattie considered to be one of the good black families in [the community].  Mr. Gattie stated that that sort of thing really made a difference to him when he was deciding whether to vote for a death sentence.

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Holt confirmed this account in an affidavit and added:

Mr. Gattie said that he was congratulated for a good job as a juror on this case by some folks in the community. He said that one of the victims family members had even told him, Thanks for sending that nigger to the chair.

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Shortly after this conversation, Patton and Holt returned with a draft affidavit for Gattie to sign. This draft included Gatties discussion of niggers, skepticism that black people have souls, and opposition to interracial marriage. (For example, look at O.J. Simpson. That white woman wouldnt have been killed if she hadnt have married that black man.) And it stated that some of the other jurors wanted blacks to know they werent going to get away with killing each other. As Holt explained:

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I read the statement from beginning to end to him, including the preface declaring that Mr. Gattie was swearing to the following information. After each point, I looked at him and asked him if the statement was right. He nodded or said, yes after each point, except for one point [conflating interracial marriage with integration]. I corrected the statement on that point to reflect Mr. Gatties actual words. He confirmed the accuracy of every word of the rest of the statement.

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This affidavit did not persuade a state court that Gatties vote to impose the death penalty rested on Tharpes race. Tharpe took his fight to the federal judiciary, but a district court ruled that no clear and convincing evidence contradicted the state courts decision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed that ruling. It asserted that jurists of reason could not dispute the district courts decision, because Tharpe failed to demonstrate that Gatties racism had substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jurys verdict.

The Supreme Court held otherwise. Gatties remarkable affidavit, the court explained on Monday, presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpes race affected Gatties vote for a death verdict. On the unusual facts of this case, the majority wrote, the 11th Circuit should not have found that it was indisputable among reasonable jurists that Gatties service on the jury did not prejudice Tharpe.

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Is Thomas really so gullible that he believes this prosecutorial damage control?

This decision will not necessarily spare Tharpe from execution. Its a procedural ruling that will merely give Tharpe another chance to make a substantial showing that he was denied a constitutional right. But the narrow nature of Mondays decision is part of what so angered Thomas. Because the ruling will not guarantee Tharpe a victory in the 11th Circuit, Thomas dismissed it as ceremonial handwringing that will lead to a useless do-over. He also criticized the majority for insufficiently deferring to the lower courts conclusions.

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Thomas primary objection, howeverone apparently shared by Alito and Gorsuchis more fundamental. The justice derided his colleagues palpable horror at Gatties racist comments, as well as their respect for Tharpes rights under the law in light of the murder he commited. Thomas downplayed Gatties racism. He pointed out that, by Gatties own admission, he had consumed [m]aybe a 12 pack, [and] a few drinks of whiskey when he signed his affidavitas if intoxication excuses racial animus. Moreover, Thomas wrote that prosecutors later obtained a second affidavit from Gattie; in this statement, Gattie said he definitely wasnt racist but was drunk when he signed the first affidavit. The justice failed to mention that Gattie never actually retracted his initial affidavit.

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Is Thomas really so gullible that he believes this prosecutorial damage control? Of course not. Theres something else going on here: Thomas wants to shame his colleagues for what he views as their naive and facile political correctness. To that end, Thomas described Tharpes crime in gratuitously graphic detail, accusing the majority of callously delay[ing] justice for Freeman. He then charged his colleagues with bending the rules for a black capital inmate to show a contrived concern for racial justice. Finally, he noted that Freeman was also black, but was ignored by the majority, which only wished to disclaim the racist rhetoric in that affidavit. The courts decision, Thomas scoffed, is no profile in moral courage.

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There are three disturbing aspects of Thomas dissent. The first is the fact that Gorsuch joined it in full, providing further evidence of his shallow commitment to racial equality. The second is that Thomas felt compelled to level a searingly personal attack at his colleagues over a fairly minor legal dispute. As he has in the past, the justice appeared more focused on swift punishment than dispassionate application of the law, eagerly anticipating Tharpes inevitable execution.

Third, and most importantly, Thomas dissent confirms that he simply does not care when racism infects the criminal justice system. In the past few years, the Supreme Court has granted relief to a black man whose prosecutors dismissed all potential black jurors; a black man whose expert witness said black people were unusually dangerous; and a Mexican man whose jury was tainted by anti-Latino animus. Only Thomas dissented from all three decisions. The justice has given up on equal rights under the law. At this point, he just wants retribution.
President Donald Trumps work days are starting a lot later these days than they did when he first moved in to the White House, according to Axios Jonathan Swan. The president is demanding more Executive Time on his schedule, which almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence.

The White House is apparently doctoring the presidents official schedules and Swan got a look at documents that are different than the sanitized ones released to the media and public.Although the schedule technically says Trumps Executive Time is from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Oval Office, the truth is he is usually at the residence talking on the phone, tweeting, and watching television. Trump then arrives at the Oval Office for his first meeting at 11 a.m., which is usually an intelligence briefing. Then hes back at the residence at 6 p.m.

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That schedule is quite different from his predecessors. George W. Bush was a notoriously early riser and got to the Oval Office at 6:45 a.m. while Barack Obama liked to work out before starting his day and usually got to the Oval Office between 9 and 10 a.m.

The White House responded to the Axios report by saying Trump is a really hard worker. The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. The president is one of the hardest workers Ive ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long.
Robert Gilpin, R.I.P. - The Washington Post : His greatest book was written in 1981, but the main theory in it is perhaps more trenchant now...
While Slovakia is witnessing a rise in liquidity and transparency, it is still lagging behind its CEE neighbours concerning total commercial investment volume.

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In 2017, the commercial real estate market in Central and Eastern Europe has achieved some of its best results in the post-crisis period. The first half of the year fell just short of the highest first half-year regional investment volume achieved in 2007.

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This positive development is pushing the region into a situation of lacking attractive opportunities, with higher rates and lower yields. Nevertheless, the Slovak market remains attractive for both local and institutional investors, according to real estate consultants.

The only current drawback is the smaller size of the market, says Rudolf Nemec, senior investment analyst in JLL Slovakia consulting company.

Investors therefore automatically assume only few investment opportunities and little market liquidity, Nemec told The Slovak Spectator. The greatest potential is still in the industrial property sector, mainly in the less concentrated localities of central and eastern Slovakia, said Lubor Prochazka, director of commerce at CBRE Slovensko.

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Read also: FAQ: Buying and selling a property in Slovakia Read more

The Slovak commercial real estate market consists of office, retail, industrial, logistic and hotel buildings. Other types of investment property, such as hospitals, infrastructure and residential dwellings are not among buildings sold for profit in Slovakia.

While the country is witnessing a rise in liquidity and transparency, it is still lagging behind its CEE neighbours concerning total commercial investment volume. The whole CEE market recorded a total of 5.6 billion in investments flowing into the CEE in the first half of 2017, but only 154 million, or 3 percent of CEE, came to Slovakia, the JLLs CEE Investment Market Pulse report stated.

(Source: Colliers International)

Logistics is preferred

For now, the industrial and logistics market remains favourable for developers, according to analysts at Colliers International. The high degree of competition is pushing rents down despite the low rate fluctuating around 2.2 percent; the lowest in the last nine years.

While western Slovakia remains home to most of the industrial premises mainly thanks to its good highway connections, speculative projects are popping up in the regions of Senec, Nove Mesto nad Vahom and Zilina. The biggest industrial investors in Slovakia are Prologis, P3 Logistic Parks, CTP, Goodman, VGP, Immorent and Karimpol.
Vice-president of the European Commission discusses presidential run, Brexit, and the new gas pipeline Nord Stream 2.

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In the interview, vice-president of the European Commission, Maros Sefcovic, reveals whether he will run for Slovak president in 2019,

- how he feels about Slovakia's failed bid for the European Medicines Agency (EMA),

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- and whether he will stop the project of new gas pipeline Nord Stream 2.

Sme: Prime Minister Robert Fico can imagine you as a candidate for president. Can you imagine this?

Maros Sefcovic (MS): If your name, or the name of any other person gets into such a debate, you have to appreciate it. But for me, it was a huge surprise -a completely new idea, as I have not talked about it with anybody.

Instead, I envisioned increasing the turnout for the European parliamentary elections as my role. You know, if the turnout was similar or lower than in the past election, either extremist, strongly anti-EU, or anti-establishment parties could make it to the political foreground.
Providers of services via digital platforms are now obliged to pay taxes in Slovakia and Finance Minister Peter Kazimir also wants to tax cryptocurrencies.

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Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Booking.com are required to pay taxes in Slovakia on their income arising from services on the countrys territory, the Finance Ministry ensured through an amendment to the Income Tax Act.

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These companies will now have to register as a permanent operation in Slovakia if they provide their services repeatedly in the form of mediation of transport and accommodation, said Finance Minister Peter Kazimir, as quoted by the Dennik N daily.

If the provider of such services does not register its permanent operation, withholding tax will be applied. From the fee that a businessman pays to a foreign company for the use of its platform, a 19-percent to 35-percent withholding tax will be imposed depending on the seat of the actual beneficiary. The obligation to pay this tax will belong to a particular driver in the case of transport services and in the case of accommodation services, to a specific accommodation facility using the services of unregistered foreign portals, the TASR newswire wrote.

All these measures have been taken to prevent the outflow of profits outside Slovakia, and it should be said that Slovakia is one of the first countries that has decided to deal with the taxation of this modern business form, Kazimir said, as quoted by TASR.

According to the ministry, these measures are also designed to ensure a fair business environment so that digital platforms which are properly registered and pay taxes in Slovakia are not at a disadvantage compared to those that move their profits into tax havens.

Taxation of cryptocurrencies planned, faces obstacles

The revenues stemming from cryptocurrenices, including the best-known bitcoin, should be taxed, too, according to Kazimir, who wants to prepare a draft proposal this year and believes that this measure could be effective as of next year.

We perceive virtual currencies as having two roles now: one as a means of exchange and the other, as an investment asset, Kazimir said, as cited by Dennik N. We are really interested in solving the issues related to taxation of the income stemming from its exchange for goods, as well as of the income stemming from trading such a cryptocurrency.

The ministry has the intention to tax the revenues from cryptocurrencies in the moment they are made, be it exchange, or sale, he added. The Finance Ministry will analyse possibilities on how to implement this.

Kazimir added that he is not a big fan of this phenomenon and perceives cryptocurrencies as something not widely known and, thus, quite dangerous.

Unregulated and anonymous, the trade with cryptocurrencies involves risk of terrorism and organised crime, the minister opined, while also saying that this sphere has to be regulated globally, although he does not plan to regulate it in Slovakia for now.

Experts see difficulties

On the other hand, experts say that it would be difficult to supervise such an activity.

The most important issue that will influence the development of virtual currencies this year will be their regulation, with regard to the huge success of and great deal of attention paid to these currencies, Across Private Investments analyst Jakub Rosa said, as quoted by TASR. We hear more and more about this from governments and central banks.

The taxation of virtual currencies would require the introduction of special rules for both entrepreneurs and private individuals, according to the Slovak Chamber of Tax Advisors (SKDP). It is also important to define cryptocurrencies, i.e. whether these are currencies, financial assets (investments) or goods, which will, in turn, determine their taxation. SKDP said that in line with a ruling of the European Court of Justice, trading with cryptocurrencies should be considered a financial transaction that is exempt from VAT.

One of the main problems regarding the taxation of private individuals transactions in cryptocurrencies lies in distinguishing whether an isolated transaction or repeated trading is in the frame, when a taxable income arises, and of what amount, stated Martin Tuzinsky of SKDP, as quoted by TASR.

In addition, the obligations imposed by legislation on mediators, banks or brokers who accept cryptocurrency can not be enacted outside of Slovakia, said Tuzinsky.

In my opinion, supervision over whether the rules regarding the taxation of transactions in cryptocurrencies are being observed would be complicated and practically impossible to regulate beyond the borders of individual countries, he said.

Despite the ongoing discussion concerning taxation of this type of currency, an obligation to tax these yields already exists

There is an obligation to tax yields from cryptocurrencies even today, Tuzinsky stressed. Taxpayers are obliged to pay tax.
New Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis visited Bratislava and was welcomed home by his Slovak counterpart.

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Welcome home, if I can say so, said Prime Minister Robert Fico as he welcomed his Czech counterpart (of Slovak origin) Andrej Babis, who visited Bratislava on his first foreign visit after he came into office. The Czech PM came to Slovakia on January 5, the SITA newswire wrote.

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The prime ministers discussed not only the anniversaries linked with the year 2018, such as the 25th anniversary of independence of both countries or the 100th anniversary of the first Czechoslovak state, but also focused on European issues, the Visegrad Group and the euro area. Both prime ministers appreciated the quality of mutual Czech-Slovak relations, which they both see as above-standard.

I like to use the term mutual trust loans, Fico said, as quoted by SITA. We are trusted partners who will never lie to each other and always support each other.

They also both believe that in 2018, they will further boost their relations and remind not only Czechs and Slovaks, but also the entire European Union of the success story of both countries.

Cooperation in international groupings

The Visegrad Group (V4  Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) was on the agenda.

We spoke a lot about our neighbours and I want to emphasise on behalf of the Slovak government that I care very much about V4 continuing to operate in the EU as a credible, reliable, and constructive partner who actively contributes to finding compromises, Fico said, as quoted by SITA.

Both PMs declared interest to coordinate their steps within the European Union. Fico stressed the potential to find a joint stance also in the topics such as migration and the reform of the asylum system. Babis added, as quoted by the Pravda daily on January 8, that migrant redistribution quotas do not work.

When asked about the Czech Republics ambitions to join the eurozone, Babis said that he sees more negatives than positives for the country in this regard.

We are happy with the Czech crown, Babis stated, as quoted by Pravda.

Slovak Defence Minister Peter Gajdos and his Czech counterpart Karla Slechtova met as part of the official visit, too.
A five-year-old child from Upper Hron (Horehronie) recovered from meningococcus while a small baby from the very south of central Slovakia died.

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The Regional Public Health Office in Velky Krtis announced at the beginning of January the death of a baby with meningitis, aged two months, who lived with parents in the Czech Republic but arrived to Slovakia with her family for Christmas holidays.

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The baby was crying with a temperature of almost 39 degrees Celsius, the office spokesperson, Maria Tolnayova, informed the My Banska Bystrica regional newspaper. The mother gave her medicine and in the morning she ate milk but during the day, she lost her appetite. The mother tried to reduce the fever but in the afternoon, she noticed a red spot on the baby's forehead and side.

The baby was brought to the emergency room but showed no signs of life. Unfortunately, resuscitation failed.

The autopsy confirmed Neiseria meningitis of the C type, Tolnayova told the newspaper.

The second case involves a suspected  not yet confirmed  invasive meningococcus infection in a child from the Horehronie (Upper Hron) region of central Slovakia, aged five, who suddenly got sick on January 4. The child is stabilised, while the laboratory has not sent final results yet.
Manager Peter Petras Sr. attracts hundreds of visitors to Rainer chalet with his snowy replica of Bethlehem.

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More information about travelling in Slovakia

Please see our Please see our Spectacular Slovakia travel guide

The sunny weather on January 6, the state holiday of Epiphany, attracted around 500 people to Rainer chalet in the High Tatras where the Epiphany Noon took place for the 19th time. Visitors came to see the huge replica of Bethlehem made of snow by manager of the mountain chalet, mountain bearer and teacher, Peter Petras Senior.

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The whole Polana was full as we had exceptionally nice weather, Petras said for the SITA newswire. This is a big difference from last year when there was a freezing temperature of -25 Celsius, and now, it is +10C.

This was not so good for building Bethlehem (i.e. nativity scene) but they did their best to repair it, he added.

Part of the Epiphany Noon is celebrated with a cultural programme that includes traditional goral (mountain folks) music. People also tend to pray near the nativity scene on Epiphany but no official masses are held.

This time round, the Bethlehem replica is four metres tall and 4.5 metres wide, while Virgin Mary, Baby Jesus and St Joseph are carved into the centre.

I have been building the body of the sculpting group with my son and his friend for four weeks, Petras Sr described for SITA. Gathering the snow and forming the skeleton was very hard work as the basic height was 2.5 metres. Later, the roof was made. The carving itself took three days and was a creative work.

When they began the project, it helped that there was enough snow close to the Rainer chalet so they did not have to bring it from as far as Poland. Later, however, thawing began and it was more difficult to carve the figures for the scene.

The temperatures are still quite high, and so visitors who would like to see the nativity scene at the Starolesnianska Polana as a whole, before it starts melting in the unusually warm weather, should hurry.

We have to warn tourists and hikers about slippery paths, however, Petras noted, as quoted by SITA. If someone decides to come here, they should have at least ski poles, or pointed, anti-skid shoe covers.

Petras will begin working on a snow sculpture of the mountain bearer on January 8 as the snow is soft and malleable. Later, the skeleton of the Easter egg will be made.

The oldest chalet in the High Tatras was built in 1863 by Jan Juraj Rainer. After the Kamzik (Chamois) chalet was established in 1884, it ceased to exist and was only renewed in 1998. Currently, Peter Petras Jr. is its manager. This year, they commemorate the 20th anniversary of its re-opening with official celebrations taking place in mid-August.
By India Today Web Desk: China agrees to stop construction in Arunachal Pradesh

It was on December 26, 2017 India discovered that China was trying to build an operational track along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in upper Siang district.

ISIS increasing presence in Pakistan, warns leading think-tank

Though Pakistan government has denied the presence of the Islamic State (IS) on its soil, a leading think-tank here has warned that the dreaded terror outfit is alarmingly increasing its presence, posing a major threat to the country.

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Padmavat: Won't tolerate objectionable content, says BJP; Raje-sthan ban stay

While Padmavati is officially releasing on January 25 this year, renamed as Padmavat, the Rajasthan government has said that the Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed film will not release in the state.

India in South Africa: I don't play for personal glory, says Hardik Pandya

South Africa vs India, Cape Town Test: Hardik Pandya has enjoyed a sensational Test match so far, scoring 93 and picking wickets in both innings. Can he do more to win India the New Year Test?

--- ENDS ---
Thief takes luxurious watches worth 0.5 million from jeweller's shop.

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An unidentified perpetrator rammed the entrance door of a jewellers shop in downtown Bratislava on Monday morning.

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Read also: Police hunt for Bratislava ram-raiders (video included) Read more

Based on our information so-far, an unknown culprit crashed a motor vehicle into a jewellers shop at Panska Street in Bratislava shortly after 5:00, the police informed on their Facebook site. Afterwards he stole several cases with watches worth more than 500,000 and fled.

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Law enforcement authorities cannot provide further information at this time, the police announced. They are requesting that potential witnesses call 158.
Apart from snowdrops and pansies, pheasants eye is also beginning to blossom.

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Warm weather is waking up nature in Slovakia. On the sunny western slopes of the Devinska Kobyla hill above Bratislava, pheasants eyes have started to blossom. This protected yellow flower is a typical spring species.

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The occurrence of these flowers is unusual under ordinary winter conditions, but with the current warm temperatures it is possible, said botanist Darina Valkova from the administration of the Small Carpatian protected area to which the Devinska Kobyla hill belongs.

The pheasants eye, adonis vernalis in Latin, usually begins to blossom in March. The sunny slopes of Devinska Kobyla are an excellent place for this endangered species as they provide a dry environment with plenty of sunshine which is preferred by this species.

Pheasants eye is not the only spring flower species that has started to blossom. Snowdrops and pansies are begining to flower too.

Whole-day temperatures above zero should remain in southern Slovakia to the end of this week. Then the weather should become a bit colder, based on the weather forecast by the Slovak Hydro-Meteorological Office (SHMU).
Slovakia and the United States share several anniversaries in 2018.

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January 8th is a special day in the history of US-Slovak relations. On this very day in 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson first announced his 14 Points, a statement for peace, in a speech to the US Congress.

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In that speech, he called for, among other things, freedom and self-determination for the various nations living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, US Ambassador to Slovakia, Adam Sterling, told the press.

On the occasion of the anniversary, the US Embassy unveiled a banner situated on its building on Hviezdoslavovo Namestie, beginning the celebrations of 100 years of US-Slovak relations.

Its main motto is: The United States and Slovakia: The Courage to Be Free.

Events to remember

Slovakia remembers two important anniversaries this year: 100 years since the first Czechoslovak Republic was established and 25 years since becoming an independent state.

The history of the mutual relationship between the United States and Slovakia started much earlier than 1918, though. It goes back to the 19th century when the migration of hundreds of thousands of Slovaks to America started.

Besides President Wilson's 14 Points, other important milestones include the 1918 Pittsburgh Agreement, as well as US aid to help Slovakia build its civil society and democratic institutions throughout the 1990s and early 2000s including support for its entry into NATO in 2004.

America has assisted Slovakia on its path to stability, security, and prosperity, the US ambassador said.

Road show and bicycle tour

The embassy will trace the history of this mutual relationship with various events.

During the year, well tell the stories of Slovaks and Americans who have done extraordinary things for our countries, Sterling added, referring to people like Milan Rastislav Stefanik, Woodrow Wilson, Edward Baranski and Michal Strank (Slovak-Americans who fought to liberate Europe and the Pacific from the Axis powers during World War II).

The embassy will also feature contemporary Slovaks and Americans who continue to shape the ties between our countries today, Sterling said.

Other activities include a road show to 32 cities, towns and villages across Slovakia, a Woodrow Wilson Award ceremony recognising people for their significant contributions to US-Slovak relations, a bicycle tour, performances by the U.S. Air Force in European musical groups around Slovakia, a video competition as well as films screenings and a book launch.

A part of the activities will also be branding.

When we were working to develop this branding, we focused on the qualities that unite our people  a love of freedom and a shared history of struggle for self-determination and sovereignty, Sterling said. Our branding reflects these qualities and neatly sums up the values that our countries share.
Ladislav Miko is replacing Dusan Chrenek.

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Ladislav Miko officially began his tenure as the head of the European Commissions Representation to Slovakia on Monday, January 8th. He has replaced Dusan Chrenek.

Im glad that after 25 years as the Europan Commissions representative, Im able to return to my home country, said Miko, as cited by the TASR newswire. During my tenure, Id like in particular to focus on communicating the benefits that the European Union has been bringing to the everyday lives of common people for decades.

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Born in Kosice, Czech citizen Ladislav Miko has spent more than 10 years in senior European Commission posts and almost 20 years in the Czech and Slovak public administrations.

Im glad that Im taking up the office in a year of significant anniversaries, said Miko. One I hold especially dear to my heart: we are commemorating the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic this year. Personally, I call both countries home. Even though Im a citizen of the Czech Republic, I was born in Slovakia. Now I represent the EU, which again merged both of my homes into a single entity 14 years ago.
Online Schools

New Mexico Won't Renew Largest Virtual School Charter

According to reporting by the Associated Press, New Mexico won't be renewing the charter for its largest online charter school due to "lagging academic performance," which could lead to its shuttering. State education representatives have voted down the renewal of the charter for New Mexico Connections Academy, which reported delivering online lessons to 1,538 students during the 2016-2017 school year from across the state and in grades 4-12.

The decision was made based on the school's performance report card, which reported high failure rates for student achievement in all grades for two years running. For example, in grade 4 the latest "not proficient" rate in reading was 88 percent; for math it was 90 percent. Every grade saw "not proficient" scores between 82 and 94 percent for math. In reading, the only grade that did better than that was grade 11, which had a "not proficient" score of 72 percent.

The graduation rate across the state of New Mexico was 71 percent for 2016; the graduation rate for that same period at the academy was 48 percent.

Education Commissioner Tim Crone told AP that "particular attention" was given to the school's inability to raise performance among students "who struggle the most academically." "We pay special attention to the lowest quartile," he said, "and Connections was not doing very well in that area." As one example, among English language learners, the state's "not proficient" rate overall was 80 percent; at the academy, it was greater than 95 percent.

The school's website refers to it as a "tight-knit school community, offering all the online services and resources needed to create a well-rounded student experience." It claimed "dozens" of clubs and activities, "dedicated and highly qualified teachers" and a STEM academy for delivering advanced coursework.

A survey conducted last January found agreement among parents regarding the "high quality" of the curriculum (96 percent agreed), teacher helpfulness (96 percent), and the ability of the school's technology tools to improve their child's learning experience (94 percent).

However, the website reported no information regarding academic outcomes for its students.

According to the AP reporting, the school has the right to appeal the Public Education Commission's decision. It could also reorganize under the oversight of a local school district. Otherwise, the virtual charter will 'be forced to close."
A fire swept a restaurant and bar in Bengaluru killing five sleeping employees. The blaze appeared to have been sparked by a short-circuit, a police officer said.

The fire broke out at around 2:30 am, killing five employees who were sleeping inside Kailash Bar and Restaurant

By Nolan Pinto: At least five people died after a fire accident in Bengaluru today. The fire broke out in Bengaluru's Kalasipalyam area early morning and was brought under control by the time dawn broke.

All the five people killed in the fire were employees of Kailash Bar and Restaurant, a restro-bar in the Kumbaara Sangha building.

The fire broke out at the restaurant at around 2.30 am when all the five employees who died in the blaze were sleeping inside the premises.

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Locals of the area first noticed smoke and fire emanating from the bar's premises following which two fire tenders and one other rescue vehicle were pressed into service.

The fire was brought under control around dawn and the initial cause of the blaze is believed to be a short-circuit.

The five killed in today's fire in Benglauru were identified as 23-year-old Swami, 20-year-old Prasad, 45-year-old Manjunath, 24-year-old Keerthi , and 35-year-old Mahesh.

A compensation of Rs 5 lakh each was announced for the families of those killed in the fire at the bar, which was licensed in the name of one RV Dayashankar.

Confirming the deaths, Bengaluru's Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) M.N. Anucheth told news agency IANS that a short circuit may have caused the blaze. "Though the cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated, a short circuit appears to have set the blaze."

#SpotVisuals from Bengaluru: 5 employees, who were sleeping inside, charred to death after fire broke out at a restro-bar in Kumbaara Sangha building at 2.30 am, last night, pic.twitter.com/LsvvZauc0F- ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

"The victims were charred to death in the fire at Kailash Bar & Restaurant in the K.R. Market area between 2.30-3 a.m., while they were asleep on the ground floor of the building," Anucheth said, adding, "We have registered a negligent case against bar owner (RV Dayashankar)."

The fire comes days after fire and emergency services in Bengaluru launched a safety audit of restaurant, bars and pubs. The fire-safety audit was launched in the wake of the deadly restaurant fire at Mumbai's Kamala Mills.

Kailash Bar and Restaurant, where the fire broke out, is licensed in the name of one RV Dayashankar (Photo: Twitter/Nagarjun Dwarakanath)

That fire killed 14 people and the high number of causalities were believed to have been a result of fire-safety violations at the restaurant where the blaze broke out.

(With inputs from IANS)

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An ex-chairman of a Vietnamese joint stock commercial bank and a former executive of local lender Sacombank, along with 44 other defendants, appeared in court on Monday for their roles in causing losses of more than US$264 million for the commerical bank.

The trial in Ho Chi Minh City is expected to last for a month, with more than 70 lawyers representing 46 defendants, and over 200 individuals summoned to court.

The hearing is the second phase of a high-profile court case centered around Pham Cong Danh, the former chairman of the erstwhile Vietnam Construction Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VNCB), who is now standing his second trial after being convicted last year.

In September 2016, Danh was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on charges of violating the lending regulations of credit institutions and acting deliberately against state regulations on economic management, with serious consequences, for his role in a separate loss of more than VND9 trillion ($401.79 million) at VNCB.

During the trial just beginning in Ho Chi Minh City, the 53-year-old ex-chairman is being tried on charges of deliberately acting against state regulations on economic management, with serious consequences for causing a further VND6 trillion (US$264.32 million) loss for VNCB.

Pham Cong Danh, former chairman of the erstwhile Vietnam Construction Joint Stock Commercial Bank, is seen at a court in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

VNCB was founded following the acquisition of the loss-making TrustBank in May 2013.

According to court documents, as chairman of the board of directors of VNCB, Pham Cong Danh made no move to revive the institution, but instead focused on finding ways to take money from the bank for his personal gain.

Following the Pham Cong Danh scandal, VNCB was acquired by the State Bank of Vietnam for a symbolic zero dong price tag. The state bank later tasked top lender Vietcombank with helping to manage VNCB.

The VNCB is now known as the Construction Bank (CB), which is guided by the State Bank of Vietnam and managed and operated by Vietcombank, according to its website.

Multiple tycoons involved

Among the 200 people summoned to court are heavyweights of the banking and business sectors including Tram Be, a former deputy chairman of Sacombank, and Tran Bac Ha, an ex-banker at local lender BIDV.

Tram Be was arrested in August 2017 on criminal charges for his role in the VND6 trillion loss scandal at VNCB.

Be is believed to have been an active accomplice for Danh in the loss of VND1.8 trillion ($79.3 million) to VNCB.

Tram Be, a former deputy chairman of Sacombank, is seen at a court in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Ha is accused of signing the 12 documents approving a total of VND4.7 trillion ($207.05 million) in loans from BIDV to 12 bogus companies owned by Danh.

Following the disbursement of those loans, Danh withdrew all the money for his personal use. VNCB eventually suffered losses of VND2.5 trillion ($110.13 million) after Danh defaulted on the debts, borrowed using deposits at BIDV as collateral.

Employing the same trick, Danh managed to borrow more than VND1.6 trillion ($70.48 million) from TPBank through 11 of his companies, which eventually created losses of VND1.7 trillion ($74.89 million).
You need a plan for Vietnams extended holiday season! If you dont well, look forward to boredom, frustration, delays and other debacles.

Long term expats and savvy locals know exactly what Im talking about. The next eight to twelve weeks has unexpected twists and obstacles that we often forget from last year  or simply are not aware of. So in the Christmas spirit of giving something good to everyone, here are a few tips. The list is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive  Ill bet someone in the pub will say, AhStivi forgot to mention about Probably, but then again Im more accurate than Donald Trumps tweets.

There are lots of tell-tale signs that the holidays will affect you. It starts off innocently enough when your English students or company staff begrudgingly admit that they didnt do the homework or turn up for work on time because of a __________ (name of holiday) party, accompanied by some very insincere groveling and unconvincing apologies. Saying sorry while youre grinning from ear to ear doesnt cut it with the teacher or boss, kids.

Other signs including your housekeeper, best friend or partner disappearing at all times of the day, usually to help out the family raise money for Tet (Vietnams Lunar New Year holiday  the 16th to the 20th of February, 2018) or cover another family members job while they do the holiday shopping. This slowly translates into an economic slow-down that starts cutting into your life  and your sanity  as no one really warns you in advance; a Western idea that has no meaning here.

So its up to you to think ahead. Make a plan, get it done early and youll be able to weather the chaos like a seasoned pro, like me. Im the Stephen Hawking of this kind of stuff.

Travel: Book early! Even with the period between Christmas and New Year  flights can be difficult to get for the right day and time youre after. This is doubly true for Tet (see dates above) when millions will be returning to their hometowns to celebrate with family and friends.

Avoid the budget carriers as they are often overbooked and offer more travel times than actually occur. If you have the money, avoid the buses  accidents are frequent over the holiday periods (check your travel insurance!)  and fly. If you have to go by bus  book through an agency as the main bus terminals dont do announcements in English. The trains are ok, if youre willing to bunk together with strange Vietnamese who have no idea of social politeness.

Bus stations will be much more crowded than this ahead of Tet. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Banks: Open over the Chrissy period. Most banks will have their opening times listed on the front doors. The big problem will be Tet when the ATMs are less frequently topped with cash and its quite common for many to be empty within the first days of Tet. Overseas transfers into Vietnamese accounts can take a few days so top up the account well before the 15th.

Home safety: Foreigners are often targets during the holidays and thieves will roam around noting locations. Organize someone to check the house, put on the lights at night, or better yet, someone to house-sit for a while. Dogs should stay with people you trust, along with any tech gear you value and a backed-up hard drive. If your landlord is reliable, let them know early your travel plans and contact them during your time away to remind them.

Stocking up: The local shops are open throughout most of the holidays, however you might find many of your favorite bars or cafes shut or on limited trading hours. Bakeries particularly can be a pain. Medicine can be tricky to get too, depending on your location. Power cuts still occur too, so extra candles, cooking gas and backing up your work should also be considered.

Getting a job: Plenty of part-time teaching work around to cover for teachers taking their holidays however you will find a lot of schools (academies and learning centers are private -- schools are official and by law must also offer the Vietnamese curriculum) advertising jobs but in reality they are collecting resumes (CVs). By February, government offices will start to slow down before Tet so doing paperwork for working visas and permits becomes a small nightmare. If you are offered full-time work check that you are working over the school summer holidays; June, July and August.

Underestimating chaos: Christmas Eve, New Years Eve and Tet are traffic chaos in the big cities so you have been warned! Airports are madhouses so add an extra hour to get through security and ticket lines. Buying presents for Vietnamese friends should be done early as the best gift baskets are snapped up fast! Be careful with cash, phones and cameras in large crowds. If you have local travel insurance, check which hospitals accept your insurance card and obviously, give out emergency numbers.

Nowyoure not dumband yes, you do this but a checklist of sorts is good to be thinking about early. Checking with your social networks for things you havent thought about yet is handy too.

And remember, The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry does apply, so be adaptable, dont get angry and deal with problems quickly instead of wasting time.

My plan? Im staying home!
One Ho Chi Minh City resident has spent the last decade making a name for his Vietnam-made ceramic products in a domestic market dominated by Japan and China.

Hoang Viet Hai, 30, has spent ten years turning his company, Yen Lam, into a household name in Ho Chi Minh City.

Over 100 restaurants, many of which are famous in the southern city, and a number of local residents use Yen Lam products.

The companys path to success was not an easy one, however.

Cups and a teapot produced by Yen Lam, Hai's brand name. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Periods of intense competition often forced Hai to draw on his creative prowess to keep the business alive.

Hais first failure occurred after he opened a shop specializing in traditional Vietnamese ceramics on a street in District 5, an area where Chinese ceramics have already replaced Vietnamese pottery.

The entrepreneur was undeterred by competition and created a line of aroma lamps, then unavailable in the local market, which garnered numerous orders from essential oil producers and put his company on the map.

However the appearance of Chinese-made lamps that sold at half the price sent his business in a downward spiral.

Hai's pottery. Photo: Tuoi Tre

About five years ago, his business suffered another blow when Japanese pottery became a hot item in Vietnam.

Resignedly facing the reality, Hai became more inventive in his approach to the pottery business, introducing novel designs for a variety of ceramic products, each with its own distinctive signature beauty.

Now, with a catalogue of bowls, jars, plates, flower vases, tea pots, decorative items, and telephone rests, Yen Lams reputation is at an all-time high.

But success, in his view, is ultimately not for the sake of wealth. Self-enrichment was never the intent of Hais pottery aspirations.

The only reason I set up the business is for the Vietnamese and for Vietnamese-made pottery, Hai said.

A large Yen Lam enamel vase with a lotus pattern. Photo: Tuoi Tre

He defines rich as relating, first and foremost, to his role in preserving the beauty of Vietnamese pottery, followed by the ability to do what one likes and help their employees.

Traditional ceramics and their philosophy have always fascinated him, with the former appealing to him from an early age.

Recognizing the esthetic advantage of Vietnams unique style of ceramics, he notes that it is characterized by natural but not very bright colors that help convey the fashioner's care and ingenuity, while Chinese counterparts tend to present elaborate patterns and colors and Japanese pottery shows drawings not quite familiar to the Vietnamese.

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About a hundred elementary and middle school students of Ho Chi Minh City and neighboring provinces gathered the General Sciences Library in District 1 for an art competition celebrating the friendship between Vietnam and Singapore on Sunday morning.

The contest was held by the Consulate General of the Republic of Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City, the Ho Chi Minh City Union of Friendship Organizations and the General Sciences Library to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the countries diplomatic ties.

Among the items chosen by the students for their paintings were Singapores iconic Merlion, Ben Thanh Market in Ho Chi Minh City and national flags of the two nations.

Two first prizes, four second prizes and six third prizes were handed out to the children who were excited to see their works being displayed onstage.

We want to involve the students of Vietnam because I think children represent the future generation, they symbolize the future that we have," Consul General Leow Siu Lin told Tuoi Tre News at the event.

They can bring the bilateral relationship to a higher level.

We also felt that an art competition would be very good since it allows them to express how they feel about Singapore as well as how they feel about Vietnam.

Consul General Leow also explained that there were many ways to maintain the diplomatic friendship.

By promoting cultural exchange through the painting competition, the organizers hoped to create more memories to strengthen the relationship between the two countries, she added.

The diplomat said that there have been plans for a food festival showcasing Vietnamese and Singaporean foods, also in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore.

Vietnam and Singapore established diplomatic relations in 1973 and have tightened cooperation as they became strategic partners in 2013.

Children participate in the art competition to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tran Phuong/Tuoi Tre News

Children participate in the art competition to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tran Phuong/Tuoi Tre News

Children participate in the art competition to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tran Phuong/Tuoi Tre News

Organizers award gifts and certificates to winners at the art competition to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Dong Nguyen/Tuoi Tre News

The painting by Tran Huynh Que Minh won the first prize at the art competition to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City on January 8, 2018. Photo: Dong Nguyen/Tuoi Tre News
Doan Ngoc Hai, deputy chairman of Ho Chi Minh Citys District 1, has handed in his letter of resignation from all positions, keeping his promise that he would resign if he could not bring order to the districts sidewalks and saying officials backed the intest groups benefiting from footpath occupation.

An official from the Peoples Committee of District 1 has confirmed Hais resignation on Monday.

In his letter which he submitted before a meeting among District 1 leaders, Hai said the reason for his resignation was because he had failed to deliver on his promises to the people," seeing the sidewalks of downtown Ho Chi Minh City once again being occupied and encroached by parked vehicles and street vendors.

Between January and October 2017, my efforts to restore order to the streets of District 1 had generated a positive impact on a national scale, being held in high regard by the prime minister, Hai wrote in the letter.

However, my actions had interfered with the interests of the many parking lots, hotels, restaurants, and households that reaped huge profits  of thousands of billions of Vietnamese dong [multimillion dollars]  from the districts sidewalks, as well as those of a significant number of officials who have a symbiotic relationship with those violators, Hai continued.

Hai wrote that he felt he had not fulfilled his promise or lived up to the expectations of retired officials who supported his 'sidewalk-clearing' campaign.

Therefore, resignation is an adequate option, he wrote.

Doan Ngoc Hai gestures during a sidewalk crackdown in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The campaign

The sidewalk reclamation efforts began on January 16, 2017, when Hai led a team of district officials and police officers to fine those who occupied the sidewalks on multiple streets in the downtown area.

The fight against sidewalk encroachment was stiffened in February when Hai set out to demolish even parts of state-owned buildings and to tow away cars that were parked on the footpaths.

District 1 will carry out this campaign thoroughly, and violations by public agencies will be the first to be penalized to set an example for the people to follow, Hai stressed.

I will resign if I fail to deliver on my promises. These are not empty words, he said the famous words.

The deputy chairman, who by then had been dubbed by local media the man with the sword of power to restore order on the citys sidewalks, even had concrete steps and ornamental tree boxes of five-star New World Saigon Hotel and a next door Starbucks outlet in District 1 destroyed for blocking the sidewalk.

Even the Ho Chi Minh City branch of the State Bank of Vietnam was not spared from Hais justice as he ordered the removal of a chain barrier and several police-approved security booths that occupied the sidewalk outside the building.

Doan Ngoc Hai during a sidewalk crackdown in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Hai even booked vehicles bearing diplomatic number plates when he found them to be illegally parked on the sidewalk. Many then said he broke diplomatic rules, but Hai insisted that he did not, as he only fined drivers of vehicles that did not qualify for diplomatic immunity.

His campaign inspired other districts in Ho Chi Minh City to take up similar measures and gave rise to a nationwide movement to reclaim sidewalks for pedestrians.

The campaign was not without its ups and downs, as a brief spell of inaction from Hai between late March and August last year turned out to be due to two directives from District 1s Party Committee and administration requesting that he stop leading the initiative.

Hai made a surprise comeback on August 7, 2017, instructing police officers to slap fines on multiple vehicles illegally parked on sidewalks and having properties of violators confiscated.

But the renewed hope was short-lived as only two months later, in October, an administrative decision signed into effect by District 1 chairman Tran The Thuan forced Hai to seek permission from the chairman before leading any future campaign, effectively reining back Hais sidewalk crackdown.

Since then, disorder has returned to haunt the citys sidewalks, with street vendors once again running their businesses in broad daylight and drivers using the footpaths as their parking space without fearing that they might run into their worst nightmare  Doan Ngoc Hai.

Doan Ngoc Hai has resigned from the following offices and positions: deputy chairman of District 1, member of the Standing Committee of District 1s Party Committee, member of the executive board of District 1s Party organization, and member of District 1s decision-making Peoples Council. Hai wrote at the end of his resignation letter that he looked to, as a regular citizen, spend his free time contemplating on more "comprehensive solutions" to the problem of sidewalk encroachment.

Doan Ngoc Hai makes a phone call during a sidewalk crackdown in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

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An unmanned handicraft stand has appeared in the hall of the University of Economics and Finance, Ho Chi Minh City, as part the students' effort to raise funds for disadvantaged children this month.

The stand starts off another phase of the public-spirited Art for Kid 3 project, launched by the students at the end of last year.

Diverse colorful handmade items are on sale, displayed with prices in front of them and a project introduction board hung above.

Visitors can freely select a product and leave their cash in the collection box nearby.

A number of teachers, students and international volunteers to the project visited the handicraft stand to make a purchase as a way to support the cause.

The sale proceeds are expected to support the construction of a playground out of eco-friendly, recycled materials for an illiteracy-eliminating class of primary school-age children in a suburban district of Ho Chi Minh City.

International participants join Art for Kid 3, adding luster to it. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The children, whose parents are immigrants to the city, grow with a difficult family background that proves detrimental to their opportunity to enjoy a happy childhood.

The help extended to the poor children on this occasion is antedated by two other charity activities by Art for Kid 3 in Tay Ninh and Binh Duong  Ho Chi Minh Citys neighbors.

The project is designed to provide the participants with valuable lessons in working in teams, gaining sponsorship, building up funds and organizing events, according to Vu Xuan Thanh, deputy director of the university's student affairs office.

During the course of carrying out the program, each student will be mature in their thinking and behavior, he said.

It is deemed a commonplace that Vietnamese university and college students organize themselves variously to create financial support for part of the community, but setting an unattended stand modeled upon a Japanese sale practice for that purpose seems to be unheard of.

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A traffic police officer in Vietnam has been held in custody for allegedly shooting a man dead in a tenanted house on the weekend.

The Department of Police in Dong Nai Province has apprehended Lieutenant Nguyen Tan Phuoc, 40, who works for the provinces traffic police division, for the alleged murder of Bui Viet Hai, a source close to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper confirmed on Sunday.

According to police records, Hai, 30, from the northern city of Hai Phong, was in his tenanted house on Tran Cong An Street in Bien Hoa City, Dong Nai Province on Saturday evening when he was approached by a strange man.

The man asked if the victim was Hai, before shooting him in the head after he said yes.

The shooter then drove away on his motorcycle.

Hai was admitted to the hospital for emergency treatment but succumbed to his head wound.

Doctors said that the patient had taken a bullet to his left temple.

Following an investigation, authorities identified Lt. Phuoc as their prime suspect.

The traffic officer previously worked as a driver for a former leader of the Dong Nai police department.

He assumed his current position after the official resigned.

Initial information revealed that Hai had been in a romantic relationship with a local girl named Nhu, which was disapproved of by Nhus mother.

The mother relayed the situation to Lt. Phuoc, who acted as her friend, before the police officer came to Hais place to confront him.

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The trial of Dinh La Thang, former Politburo member and ex-chairman of state-run oil and gas group PetroVietnam (PVN), began in Hanoi on Monday and is scheduled to conclude this month.

The municipal Peoples Court has opened the trial of Thang, along with Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former chairman of PetroVietnam Construction Corporation (PVC), a subsidiary of PVN, and that of 20 other defendants.

The suspects are alleged to have been involved in financial misconduct that led to losses of VND119 billion ($5.24 million).

As the former chairman of PVNs management board, Thang is charged with deliberately violating state regulations on economic management, with serious consequences.

Thang, 57, was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam from January 27, 2016 to May 7, 2017, and secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee from February 5, 2016 to May 10, 2017.

Three attorneys will defend him during the trial.

Eleven other suspects have been charged with similar offenses, while eight defendants will be prosecuted for embezzlement of property.

Thanh and Vu Duc Thuan, the ex-general director of PVC, are charged with both.

Dinh La Thang speaks before the court in Hanoi on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

According to court documents, PVN opened the Thai Binh 2 thermal power project, located in the namesake province, in 2010.

Under Thangs directions, PVC was chosen in June 2010 as the EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contractor for the project.

PVN then made an advance transfer of $6.6 million and over VND1.3 trillion ($57.2 million) to PVC to aid its construction.

However, Thanh, and other suspects at PVC, are alleged to have spent the money fraudulently, resulting in losses of VND119 billion for PVN.

The defendants are also alleged to have used the advance payment to legalize several documents relating to the building of several facilities in order to withdraw VND13 billion ($572,584), which was divided between the individuals.

Among them, Thanh pocketed VND4 billion ($176,220), while Thuan took VND800 million ($35,244).

Their trial will close on January 21.

Trinh Xuan Thanh is escorted to the court in Hanoi on January 8, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Upcoming trials

Thang is facing a separate trial in the near future regarding his role in losses of approximately VND800 billion ($35.2 million) worth of PVNs investment in OceanBank.

Thang and six other accomplices are accused of deliberately violating state regulations on economic management, with serious consequences.

OceanBank was a private lender acquired for zero dong by the State Bank of Vietnam, the countrys central bank, in 2015 because of its poor financial results.

Additionally, Thanh is expected to stand trial for his involvement in the embezzlement of VND14 billion ($616,770) from the PetroVietnam Power Land Joint-Stock Company (PVP Land).

Seven of his accessories, including Dinh Manh Thang, Dinh La Thangs younger brother, will also be present at the trial.

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By PTI: (EDs: Updating with fresh inputs, background) Gorakhpur (UP), Jan 8 (PTI) A major fire today gutted the principals office and an adjacent record room of the state-run BRD Hospital here, the fire department said.

No loss of life has been reported in the blaze in the hospital, which was in the news last year after scores of infants died at the facility.

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"Prima facie, it seems that the fire was caused by a short circuit," SP (North) Ganesh Saha said.

A committee has been constituted to probe the reasons behind the fire, Chief Fire Service Officer T K Singh said.

Six fire tenders took nearly an hour to control the flames which destroyed important documents in the record room.

The Baba Raghav Das Medical College had hit the headlines in August last year when 63 children, including infants, died within a span of four days when the supply of oxygen was allegedly disrupted due to non-payment of dues to the vendor.

The state government has, however, vehemently denied that shortage of oxygen led to the deaths.

An FIR against nine accused, including ex-principal Dr Rajiv Misra, his wife Dr Purnima Shukla and nodal officer Dr Kafeel Khan, was filed by director general medical education (DGME), K K Gupta in Hazratganj police station in Lucknow and police have filed a charge sheet against them. All the nine accused have been arrested. PTI COR SMI DV

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West Africa-focused oil and gas outfit Lekoil on Thursday said its joint venture with Green Energy International had signed a contract with Sinopec Changjiang Engineering Services Limited to acquire 197 sq km of 3D seismic data at the Otakikpo Marginal Field in the Niger Delta.

The seismic acquisition over Otakikpo is expected to commence in the first quarter of 2018 to kick-off phase two development of Otakikpo, Lekoil said in a statement.

As the Otakikpo field nears its first phase target production of 10,000 bopd, the joint venture is now focused on the second stage of its development Plan which aims to increase steady state production up to approximately 20,000 bopd.

Lekoil chief executive Lekan Akinyanmi said: "With significant milestones already achieved in 2017 as he Otakikpo Technical and Financial Partner, today's announcement demonstrates Lekoil's progress into the next phase of delivery and growth.

The Company expects the phase two development to be fully funded by industry players, which the company is already in discussions with."
Volkswagen and Uber will introduce NVIDIA tech in their vehicles to create artificially intelligent self-driving cars and trucks.

Volkswagen plan to introduce NVIDIA DRIVE IX platform in their vehicles to achieve an intelligent car with new cockpit experiences and an improvement in safety.

The technology would allow facial recognition to automatically unlock the vehicle, surround perception to warn the driver of potential dangers, gesture recognition for user controls, language understanding for a flawless voice control and gaze tracking to avoid driver distractions.

At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang discussed those innovations on stage.

They revealed their plans to bring back the iconic VW MicroBus run with electricity and infused with artificial intelligence technology for the cockpit and self-driving.

Diess said: "Autonomous driving, zero-emission mobility and digital networking are virtually impossible without advances in AI and deep learning. Combining the imagination of Volkswagen with NVIDIA, the leader in AI technology, enables us to take a big step into the future."

For his part, Huang chipped in saying: "In just a few years, every new vehicle will be expected to have AI assistants for voice, gesture and facial recognition as well as augmented reality, Volkswagens work with NVIDIA DRIVE IX technology will make that a reality.

"Together, we are building a new generation of cars that are safer, more enjoyable to ride in than anything that has come before, and accessible to everyone."

Rival Uber had also selected NVIDIAs technology for its fleet of self-driving vehicles. At the same edition of the CES, Huang said that Uber Advanced Technologies Groups fleets of self-driving cars and trucks running with artificial intelligence count used NVIDIA tech.

"The future of transportation will be transformed by mobility services. Convenient, affordable mobility-as-a-service will reshape cities and society, and help support the billion-person increase in the worlds population over the next decade," Huang said.

"Autonomous vehicles are the critical technology to making mobility services pervasive. Were thrilled to be working with Uber to realize this vision," he added.

Uber had been working on driver-less technologies for years, launching its first city trials in 2015, in Pittsburgh. The self-driving Ubers have already completed more than 50,000 passenger trials, racking up more than 2m autonomous miles in the process.

Eric Meyhofer, the head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group said: "Developing safe, reliable autonomous vehicles requires sophisticated AI software and a high-performance GPU computing engine in the vehicle. NVIDIA is a key technology provider to Uber as we bring scalable self-driving cars and trucks to market."
President Donald Trump has hit back at people questioning his mental health by boasting about his intelligence on Twitter.

After the release of Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury on Friday, in which he painted a picture of a chaotic administration with a childlike man at the helm, Trumps mental stability is being questioned by some.

In response, the US President has taken to Twitter to defend himself against those attacks and to call Michael Wolff a fraud.

"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames.

"I went from VERY successful businessman, to top TV Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius [...] and a very stable genius at that!"

In a press conference at Camp David he also said: "I went to the best colleges or college. I went to  I had a situation where I was a very excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars, became one of the top business people."

During the same conference, he denied knowing Wolff and claimed that he was never interviewed by him, going on to label him a fraud and his book as a "work of fiction".

He also called for stricter anti-libel laws in the US in retaliation.

Triggering Trump's tweets, Wolff had told the BBC: "I think one of the interesting effects of the book so far is a very clear 'emperor has no clothes' effect.

"Suddenly everywhere people are going: 'Oh my God, it's true, he has no clothes.' Thats the background to the perception and the understanding that will finally end [] this presidency."

Indeed, in a highly unusual development, fifty-seven House Democrats had sponsored a bill questioning whether the president is mentally and physically fit to be in office.

Under the 25th amendment, which was implemented at the height of the Cold War, legislators could formally question the Commander-in-Chief's aptitude to be charged, among other things, with the keys to the new and vast destructive power that only nuclear weapons could unleash.

Trump recently tweeted a taunting message to Kim Jong Un in North Korea saying he had a "bigger (nuclear) button" that was more powerful and "actually worked".

The increasingly public debate came as the President was to undergo his annual medical exam, the results of which would be released into the public domain.
Stocks are holding on to their early advance, following bumper gains during the prior week and amid an ongoing debate among analysts regarding the outlook for shares in 2018.

As of 1202 GMT, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was edging higher by 0.26% or 1.03 points to 398.37, alongside gains of 0.32% to 13,362.26 on the German Dax and a rise of 0.32% to 5,488.33 for the Cac-40.

Over in FX markets, euro/dollar was down by 0.35% to 1.1986.

On the more cautious side of the spectrum of analysts' opinions, Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, pointed out to clients how the German Dax was still shy of the record highs posted several months ago, despite which it notched up gains of 3.5% over the previous week.

Hewson added: "Having got off to such a positive start in 2018 and with economic data continuing to look reasonably resilient despite a fairly average US jobs report, investors continue to appear to be happy to push this bull market even higher, despite some misgivings that, particularly in the case of US markets valuations remain stretched."

Weighing in with a more constructive view, Mike van Dulken at Accendo Markets said: "Equities are off their best levels but maintain a northerly bearing, buoyed by German coalition talks and fresh highs on Wall St, despite mixed Eurozone macro data and commodities off their best levels.

"A stronger USD helps, pushing GBP and EUR lower, especially the latter to ensure the German DAX outperforms the UK FTSE. US futures point to another positive opening this afternoon."

Acting as a backdrop, over the weekend Germany's CDU/CSU and the SPD began 'exploratory' talks, with an expected end date of 11 January, on the possibility of forming a coalition, with the SPD set to vote at a special party conference on 21 January on whether to enter formal negotiations with that same aim.

On the economic front, Germany's Ministry of Finance said factory orders declined by 0.4% on the month in November (consensus: 0.0%).

That 'miss', according to Tomasz Wieladek at Barclays Research, was the first sign of an economic impact from Germany's uncertain political landscape.

Nevertheless, Wieladek believed the SPD might agree to a coalition treaty by mid-February, with political uncertainty possibly being resolved shortly after then.

To take note of as well, Romania's central bank surprised most analysts on Monday, with rate-setters in Bucharest opting to hike their main policy rate by 25 basis points to 2.0%.

In parallel, the European Commission reported that its consumer confidence index for the single currency bloc in December printed at 0.5, unchanged from a preliminary estimate.

Meanwhile, earlier during the session Sentix's barometre of Eurozone investor sentiment advanced from a reading of 31.1 for December to 32.9 in January (consensus: 31.3).

German sportswear-maker Adidas was on track to quadruple its digital sales by 2020 to 4.0bn, the company's chief Kasper Rosted told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom shares were making headway despite a report in Wirtschaftswoche, citing consultants at FAS AG, according to whom the introduction of IFRS 16 accounting rules might force the operator to add at least 14.4bn of leasing liabilities to its estimated debt pile.

Elsewhere, Airbus chief Tom Enders inked a non-binding agreement with Turkish Airlines for the potential shipment of 25 A350-900 jets.

At the weekend, various reports surfaced in Italian media dismissing rumours of possible M&A involving Fiat Chrysler.

Other reports in that same country indicated Telecom Italia may be planning to cut as many as 10,000 positions over the next three years.
London stocks nudged lower in early trade on Monday as a profit warning from Mothercare kept investors on edge ahead of a big week for retailers.

At 0830 GMT, the FTSE 100 was down 0.1% to 7,713.86, while the pound was flat against the euro at 1.1282 and 0.2% weaker versus the greenback at 1.3538.

Lee Wild, head of equity strategy at Interactive Investor, said: A rush of corporate updates will keep traders glued to their screens this week. Modest valuations and market-leading dividend yields have already attracted buyers to the housebuilding sector, but latest numbers will need to soothe concerns about falling house prices in London and a slowdown elsewhere.

The jury is still out on the high street retailers after last weeks mixed bag from Next and Debenhams. After so many failures, M&S is under pressure to provide evidence that a five-year turnaround plan is working. Sales growth is key here and, if the current high-profile executive team cant achieve success, there seems little hope. At least the share price is currently underpinned by a generous dividend.

Overnight Visa/IHS data shows a significant slowdown in spending in December which meant 2017 saw a fall in spending for the first time in five years. On an annualised basis, retail sales in the key trading month in the UK were said to be down by 1%.

In corporate news, software group Micro Focus tumbled as its first-half results failed to impress.

Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell said: Micro Focus actually posted some attention-grabbing numbers, namely a 28.7% surge in revenue to $145.7m and an 80.3% jump in revenue to $1.23bn. Yet the fact that revenue dropped 2.9% year-on-year to $664.7m when the effects of its HPE Software merger were stripped out, alongside its group results coming in at the bottom end of expectations, soured investors on the tech firm, who sent the stock to a four-month low.

TP Icap edged down as it acquired US-based energy and commodities broker SCS Commodities based for an undisclosed cash sum and further performance-related amounts over five years.

Babcock gained after saying it will lead a bespoke team of industry partners in a bid for the UK Ministry of Defence's new 1.25bn Type 31e general purpose light frigate programme.

Standard Life got a leg up from an upgrade to buy from Jefferies, while Thomas Cook was boosted by an upgrade to overweight by Morgan Stanley, and BBA Aviation was up after an upgrade to buy at Citi.

Ladbrokes Coral and Paddy Power were hit by downgrades from Morgan Stanley.

Outside of the FTSE 350, in a week that will see updates from the likes of Morrisons, Sainsburys, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, and Boohoo, retailer Mothercare tumbled after it warned over profits and said sales fell over the Christmas period.

Market Movers

FTSE 100 (UKX) 7,713.86 -0.13%

FTSE 250 (MCX) 20,952.95 0.10%

techMARK (TASX) 3,569.86 -0.31%

FTSE 100 - Risers

Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA) 432.10p 1.03%

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) 1,375.00p 1.03%

G4S (GFS) 277.70p 0.91%

Experian (EXPN) 1,662.50p 0.82%

BHP Billiton (BLT) 1,573.60p 0.77%

Worldpay Group (WPG) 438.10p 0.71%

Scottish Mortgage Inv Trust (SMT) 464.87p 0.62%

Glencore (GLEN) 391.00p 0.62%

Rio Tinto (RIO) 3,982.50p 0.58%

Centrica (CNA) 146.85p 0.48%

FTSE 100 - Fallers

Micro Focus International (MCRO) 2,344.00p -9.22%

Paddy Power Betfair (PPB) 8,730.00p -1.58%

Hargreaves Lansdown (HL.) 1,805.00p -1.04%

ITV (ITV) 169.53p -0.80%

Randgold Resources Ltd. (RRS) 7,212.00p -0.77%

Just Eat (JE.) 804.80p -0.76%

International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (CDI) (IAG) 659.40p -0.69%

Reckitt Benckiser Group (RB.) 6,800.50p -0.59%

Persimmon (PSN) 2,762.00p -0.58%

Whitbread (WTB) 3,971.00p -0.58%

FTSE 250 - Risers

Thomas Cook Group (TCG) 130.80p 4.64%

Euromoney Institutional Investor (ERM) 1,290.00p 2.38%

Ascential (ASCL) 400.20p 2.35%

Victrex plc (VCT) 2,736.00p 2.01%

Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group (JLT) 1,432.00p 1.99%

BBA Aviation (BBA) 350.20p 1.74%

Syncona Limited NPV (SYNC) 214.00p 1.66%

Diploma (DPLM) 1,259.00p 1.61%

Sophos Group (SOPH) 623.49p 1.55%

Kaz Minerals (KAZ) 898.20p 1.26%

FTSE 250 - Fallers

TI Fluid Systems (TIFS) 243.60p -4.84%

GCP Infrastructure Investments Ltd (GCP) 124.52p -1.95%

Coats Group (COA) 88.79p -1.35%

Ladbrokes Coral Group (LCL) 185.50p -1.33%

Softcat (SCT) 528.96p -1.31%

Ultra Electronics Holdings (ULE) 1,280.00p -1.08%

Barr (A.G.) (BAG) 663.25p -1.01%

RDI Reit (RDI) 37.10p -0.93%

Jupiter Fund Management (JUP) 625.80p -0.89%

LondonMetric Property (LMP) 186.50p -0.80%
First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon has made clear that a Brexit without a deal is unthinkable and has said that Theresa should stop appeasing hard-line Brexiteers and think about what is best for the country.

Sturgeon said that a second referendum could become "irresistible", especially in the case of a no-deal scenario.

She told BBC Radio Scotland: ""It seems to give the impression that the UK Government think this is some kind of game, that Theresa May is more concerned with appeasing the hardline Tory Brexiteers than she is about acting in the best interests of the country.

"No deal is unthinkable, let me be absolutely clear, no Brexit is preferable to no deal."

She also added that it seemed that the UK Government at times was trying to pursue the hardest Brexit possible: "My focus, has to be to make sure that we do everything possible to protect Scotlands best interests.

"If Brexit is going to happen then in my view the priority is that we remain within the European single market and customs union because that is the least damaging outcome in terms of jobs and the economy," she added.

She also said that Scotland would publish a series of reports analysing every possible outcome of Brexit and its impact on the economy.

Sturgeon explained that in 2016 nobody knew the relationship that the UK and Europe would have once Brexit occurs, but that a year and a half later the people are still in the dark. She said that no deal would be harmful for the economy and society and that no Brexit would be preferable.

"So if we did get into a position for example where there was no deal then Im very clear and I think a lot of people, certainly in Scotland but I suspect across the UK as a whole, would think that in those circumstances no Brexit was absolutely preferable to a no deal situation."

She also spoke about a potential Scottish independence referendum, adding that she would wait until the current stage of negotiations with Brussels is over to make a proper assessment and judgement.
Reorganisation turns chaotic as Hammond, Davis, Johnson stay put

Greening quits Education after refusing Work & Pensions job

Prime Minister Theresa May's attempt on Monday to "refresh" her ministerial team ended smelling like a pub before the smoking ban took force, as several refused to go and one resigned rather than move.

In a chaotic reshuffle that had clearly not gone according to plan, Education Secretary Justine Greening quit rather than be moved to Work and Pensions, while Business Secretary Greg Clark refused to make way for the seemingly unsackable Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

The well-regarded Greening was replaced by Damian Hinds, while former television presenter Esther McVey was named Work and Pensions Secretary, taking over from David Gauke who moved to the Justice Ministry - becoming the sixth person to do the job in less than eight years.

Chancellor Philip Hammond, a staunch pro-European, remained in post, despite calls from hard-right Brexiteers for him to be fired over his insistence on a so-called "soft" Brexit.

The need to maintain a balance between 'leavers' and 'remainers' in her Cabinet effectively hobbled May from making any major changes. With her parliamentary majority effectively shot, she could not afford to risk backbench rebellions as crucial Brexit legislation passes through parliament.

The confusion that has characterised May's tenure after the Conservatives disastrous showing at the last General Election was highlighted after a statement on social media welcomed the hard-right Brexiteer Chris Grayling as party chairman was issued then deleted.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd stayed in post, while Brexit Secretary David Davis keept his job, despite coming within a whisker of being held in contempt of parliament over claims his department had completed studies on the impact of Brexit on various sections of the economy, then telling a select committee none actually existed.

Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary and man who desperately wants May's job, became a remainer of a different sort. Seemingly coated in teflon, he once again survived a series of high profile gaffes, including one which actually extended the detention of a British national in an Iranian jail, which would have sunk anyone else.

His Brexit partner-in-crime, Michael Gove, was retained at the Department for the Environment as was Liam Fox at International Trade.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire resigned unexpectedly after revealing he needed lung surgery. He was replaced by Karen Bradley, who left Culture, Media & Sport. Matt Hancock stepped into Bradley's role.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, another senior cabinet member thought to be at risk given the current winter crisis in hospitals and criticisms of underfunding of the National Health Service, was another refusnik, not only clinging on to his job, but given responsibility for social care.

Transport Secretary and hard Brexit cheerleader Chris Grayling, whom many tipped to get the sack over his failure to settle crippling rail strikes across the country and disappearing on a trip to Qatar on the day train fare rises of 3.6% came into force, escaped the chop.

Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, had housing added to his portfolio, while Gavin Williamson, recently promoted to Defence Secretary, stays in post.

Brandon Lewis was appointed Conservative party chairman, and a minister without portfolio. Previously he was immigration minister. He replaced Sir Patrick McLoughlin, who resigned.

David Lidington was appointed Cabinet Office minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, replacing Damian Green, who was forced to resign after making "inaccurate and misleading" statements over what he knew about claims pornography was found on his office computer in 2008.

There were also raft of junior ministerial departures to the hinterland positions of Conservative vice-chairman. It was unclear whether they were sacked or jumped.
Magnolia Petroleum , the AIM-quoted US focused oil and gas exploration and production company, said three extra increased density oil wells would be drilled near the Gilchrist well in Oklahoma.

The company said project operator SandRidge Energy would conduct the drilling after excellent initial production rates... significantly exceeded projections.

Together with Western Energy Development, Magnolia has a combined working interest of 1.57% in the spacing unit on which Gilchrist is located and where the additional increased density wells are to be drilled.

Magnolia chief executive Rita Whittington said: Thanks to Gilchrists better than expected IP rates, these three new wells have been materially de-risked, specifically in terms of geological risk.

They therefore have the potential to significantly add to the $0.2m of value generated for Magnolia by the successful $0.5m pilot programme with WED. We are focused on replicating this success many times over and with this in mind, we are currently investing the first $0.5m tranche of capital received under the $18.5m WED agreement.
While the spring semester didn't officially start until Jan. 8 at the University of North Georgia (UNG), nearly 300 cadet leaders, incoming freshmen recruits and new cadet officers returned to UNGs Dahlonega Campus a week early for training.

Before the beginning of fall and spring semesters, UNG's Corps of Cadets holds a Non-commissioned Officers Academy (NCOA) for sophomore cadets entering leadership positions within the corps and Freshman Recruit Orientation Group (FROG) training for incoming students. Due to the compressed schedule for the spring semester, FROG Week and NCOA were held simultaneously.

For the recruits, the week of training traditionally called FROG Week stresses the importance that UNG's Corps of Cadets places on leadership development. The purpose of FROG Week is to teach Corps rules and standards, and university customs and traditions. As with orientation events held for all students, recruits learn about academics, class locations and student resources.

Among the 69 recruits this semester is Hannah Yancey, a freshman from Loganville, Georgia, who entered UNG in fall 2017. Yancey said after seeing members of the Corps of Cadets on campus and learning more about the program, she was interested in joining.

"I thought about it a lot, and I felt like if I didn't do it, it would bug me. So I did it, and here I am. It's intense, and I'm just trying to learn everything," Yancey said. "I want to be a physical therapist in the Army, and I think the Corps of Cadets would give me an advantage."

The severe cold the first week of January  with overnight temperatures in the teens  caused some changes to the training schedule, including the cancellation of rappelling at the Army Ranger training facility at nearby Camp Frank D. Merrill. That activity was moved on campus, said retired Maj. Richard Neikirk, the assistant commandant of cadets at UNG. Also, the Crown Mountain run traditionally held the morning of FROG graduation will be held at a later date.

"For safety factors, we did not want our freshmen to rappel off of a frozen, iced cliff," Neikirk said. "During the cold weather and always, safety is No. 1 whenever our cadets are training. The recruits conducted physical training indoors in the mornings, and we waited until later in the day when the weather warmed up to do other outdoor training. And no one goes outside without cold weather gear to include hats and gloves.

It's not just the weather that makes FROG Week in spring semester different from fall. In recent years the training week was added before spring semester as the number of cadets enrolling in spring has steadily grown each year. Many freshman cadets at UNG choose to start their college career in spring after attending Basic Training or Advanced Individual Training as members of the U.S. Army Reserve or Georgia National Guard. This year, 42 incoming freshmen are members of the Georgia National Guard, and 24 of those are attending on the UNG Military Scholarship, a full-tuition scholarship worth $70,000 over four years.

This semester's NCOA of 89 cadets featured a first  two cadets from the General Tadeusz Kosciuszko Military Academy of Land Forces (MALF) in Poland. It's the first visit to the U.S. for the two cadet sergeants, who are in their junior year.

After a lengthy trip, during which they only slept a couple of hours in two days, Tomas Trzak and Mateusz (Matthew) Wolski hope to gain insight on leadership from their semester at UNG.

"The most important thing for me is to get experience in leadership here," said Trzak, who will go into the Polish army armored vehicle division upon graduation. "Everything about the military that is important for me I will have in my academy, but your academy is very proud of having expertise in leadership and the skills connected with commanding, so I think spending time here will give me the ability to increase those skills."

Wolski, who will go into air defense when he completes his studies, concurred.

"For me, it is also very significant to understand your management and your leadership because I want to be a leader in the future, so it's very important to me to learn another style with my friends from the United States," Wolski said.
By PTI: (Eds: Updating with SP district chief seeks probe)

Gorakhpur (UP), Jan 8 (PTI) A major fire today gutted the principals office and an adjacent record room of the state- run BRD Hospital here, the fire department said.

No loss of life has been reported, but the fire destroyed important documents in the record room of Baba Raghav Das Medical College, which was in the news last year after scores of infants died at the facility.

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While the police said it seems that short circuit may be the cause of the fire, a local Samajwadi Party leader described the blaze as mysterious and sought a probe into why "only vital files were destroyed".

"Prima facie, it seems that the fire was caused by a short circuit," SP (North) Ganesh Saha said.

Chief Fire Service Officer T K Singh said a committee has been constituted to probe the reasons behind the fire. Six fire tenders took nearly an hour to bring the blaze under control.

Describing the fire as mysterious, SP district chief Prahlad Yadav suspected that it was an act of sabotage to destroy vital documents related to provision of oxygen to the hospital and files pertaining to its shortage in supply that led to deaths of so many children last year.

He alleged that officials reached the spot late though their attention was drawn to the blaze as soon as flames were noticed by the people there.

"It should be probed as to how and why only important files were reduced to ashes," Yadav said.

The BRD Medical College had hit the headlines in August last year when 63 children, including infants, died within a span of four days when the supply of oxygen was allegedly disrupted due to non-payment of dues to the vendor.

The state government had, however, vehemently denied that shortage of oxygen led to the deaths.

An FIR against nine accused, including ex-principal Dr Rajiv Misra, his wife Dr Purnima Shukla and nodal officer Dr Kafeel Khan, was filed by director general medical education (DGME), K K Gupta in Hazratganj police station in Lucknow and police have filed a charge sheet against them. All the nine accused were arrested. PTI COOR SMI NSD

--- ENDS ---
Gehlot also claimed that it seems the Rajasthan government did not apprise him deliberately of the facts to land him in an embarrassing situation.

By Dev Ankur Wadhawan: Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has written a stinging letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking him not to 're-lay' the foundation stone of Barmer refinery.

PM Modi is scheduled to visit Rajasthan's Barmer district on January 16 to inaugurate the project.

In his letter, Gehlot also stated that the foundation stone of the refinery was laid by former Congress President Sonia Gandhi in September 2013.

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Here's a verbatim of the letter:

"This is to remind you about my earlier letter No. PS/Ex-CM/2017 dated 12 August 2017 (copy enclosed), in which I had brought to your notice the facts about the 9 MMT capacity refinery with Petrochemical complex at Pachpadra in the Barmer district of Rajasthan.

It was launched by the UPA government in the Centre and the Congress government in Rajasthan in the year 2013. It has been reported in the newspapers that you are going to re-lay the foundation stone of on 16 January 2018, whereas it had already been laid by the former UPA chairperson Smt Gandhi on 22 September 2013."

Gehlot, in his letter, has claimed that due to obstacles created by the current Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, the project has not made any progress.

"One could appreciate inviting you on completion of the project. But unfortunately due to obstacles created by the present Chief Minister the project did not move an inch," the letter states.

Gehlot also claimed that it seems the Rajasthan government did not apprise him deliberately of the facts to land him in an embarrassing situation.

"You are aware that holy mantras are chanted and pooja is performed at the time of foundation stone laying ceremony and inauguration. To chant the same mantras and perform the same pooja all over again for the very same project is against the religious sanctity. Moreover, the public does not view it in a positive manner. Re-laying of foundation stone is, indeed, not a healthy tradition in a democratic setup where governments keep changing."

"It seems to me that the state government has deliberately not apprised you to these facts to create an embarrassing situation for the PM. Hope you will re-think about your decision to re-lay the foundation," the letter concludes.

ALSO WATCH | Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavati: A look at the entire controversy

--- ENDS ---
Former Democratic Party Chairman Brian Colon jumped into the race for state auditor on Sunday, challenging state Rep. Bill McCamley for the Democratic nomination.

Colon, an Albuquerque lawyer who has run previously for lieutenant governor and mayor, said his background in finance and law would be an asset in the state office that examines whether government agencies are complying with legal and financial requirements.

Im passionate about holding the powerful in New Mexico accountable for the tax dollars they get the privilege of using, Colon said in an interview.

He joins three-term state Rep. McCamley of Las Cruces in the auditors race. The primary election is June 5.

Democrats have traditionally dominated the office, but its now held by Republican Wayne Johnson, who was appointed by Gov. Susana Martinez to take over in December. He succeeded Democrat Tim Keller, who stepped down as auditor after winning the race for Albuquerque mayor.

Johnson became the first Republican to hold the office since 1970. Colon and Johnson each ran for mayor last year, too, but neither made it into the November runoff election with the top two candidates.

Colon finished third in the initial round of voting, with 16 percent in an eight-person race, while Johnson finished fourth with about 10 percent.

He was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2010, when the Republican ticket, headed by Martinez, won the governors office.

Colon, whos 47, served as chairman of the state Democratic Party from 2007-09.

He has proven to be a successful fundraiser, not only in his political races but also for nonprofit groups. He grew up in Valencia County, later moved to Las Cruces and now lives in Albuquerque.

Johnson, the incumbent auditor, has said he is strongly considering a run to keep the office, though he hasnt made an announcement yet. He is a Bernalillo County commissioner and owns a media production company.
Wilson & Co., an Albuquerque-based engineering and architectural firm known for taking on big infrastructure jobs across the West, celebrated a big milestone of its own recently: moving to new corporate headquarters in Journal Center II.

According to Dan Aguirre, a senior vice president for the company, Wilson relocated 150 of its Albuquerque workforce to the Thompson Reuters Building at 4401 Masthead NE. Move-in day followed an intense three months of tenant improvements to the 30,000 square feet of space the firm now occupies on two floors. Aguirre said Wilson hired Tanglewood Construction for the $1.2 million project.

Its a nice fresh start to the new year for our staff, said Aguirre, referring to the engineers, architects, planners, surveyors, mappers, right-of-way agents and construction managers working at the corporate HQ.

Things are looking brighter in the new digs. Theres much more natural light, said Aguirre.

Aguirre is expecting a busy year for the company, which has 450 professionals working from offices in nine western states. Wilson provides services to a diverse client base including federal and municipal governments, public transportation agencies, railroad companies, secondary education and health care clients.

Ex-Rosemont exec joins CBRE

Jason Lott has been hired as CBRE Albuquerques new vice president with the advisory and transaction services group, where he will specialize in office properties.

In his new role, Lott, formerly with Gemini Rosemont, will focus on office leasing and landlord representation. Jasons extensive office leasing and development experience will enhance our office property team, and we are happy and excited to welcome him, said Jim Chynoweth, managing director for CBRE Albuquerque.

Over his 20-year career, Lott has worked in multiple markets, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C., before settling with his family in New Mexico in 2006.

In his most recent position, he was responsible for new leasing and renewals for all of the office and multi-use assets for New Mexicos largest owner of commercial buildings. In New Mexico alone, Lott has been involved with over 3 million square feet of office space being leased and developed, including transactions ranging from 47 square feet (a small server room) to 216,000 square feet.

Apartments purchased

Austin, Texas-based CHF Investment Partners has purchased Diamond Mesa apartments, a 456-unit multifamily community at 2300 Diamond Mesa Trail SW in Albuquerque. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Built in 2015 and located near Downtown and Interstate 40, the property is close to several large, emerging employers, including one of six Facebook data centers currently under construction south of Albuquerque near Los Lunas.

We are excited to add another high-quality property to the portfolio, said Benoit Rochard, vice president at CFH Investment Partners. Diamond Mesa presented the opportunity to acquire an attractively located long-term holding near major employment drivers. Our extensive operational experience will allow us to efficiently operate this property while improving the resident experience, he said.

David Eagle, senior vice president of CBRE, represented the unnamed seller in the off-market transaction. Tony Stein, vice president of CBRE, was the mortgage broker for the deal.

Steve Sinovic is the Journals real estate reporter. He can be reached at ssinovic@abqjournal.com or by calling 505-823-3919.
Virgin Galactics passenger rocket ship is gearing up for powered flights that could eventually carry paying tourists into space from southern New Mexico.

Its the next critical step for SpaceShipTwo, which is moving from a series of glider flights that started in December 2016 to rocket-powered ones this year at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Southern California, said Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides.

Were about done with the glide-flight phase, Whitesides told the Journal last week. The next step is powered flights through an incremental process to test performance. Powered flight will push the vehicle into supersonic flight, and eventually to multiple times the speed of sound.

That puts the company nearly back to where it was in October 2014, when its first SpaceShipTwo broke apart in a powered flight over the Mojave Desert. That accident set back the launch of commercial flights from New Mexicos Spaceport America by years. Human error caused that incident after the copilot prematurely engaged the rockets braking system, tearing the vehicle apart in midair in an accident that killed the copilot and injured the pilot.

The new SpaceShipTwo is equipped with an automated lock mechanism to prevent such things in the future. And since 2016, it has flown nearly a dozen times, about half of them captive carry flights where the vehicle remains attached to the mother ship, WhiteNightTwo. The other half were glider flights, where the rocket detaches from WhiteNightTwo while in the air to descend on its own to the ground.

The glider flights have allowed Virgin Galactic to fully assess vehicle performance as it returns to earth. That includes testing the rockets feathered braking system, through which the ships wing booms are turned into position for re-entry from suborbit to permit the vehicle to gently glide down to earth.

Virgin Galactic teams have also tested vehicle handling at slow speeds with more weight on board, including shifts in the ships center of gravity for landing.

At least one more glide flight is planned for the coming weeks before moving onto powered ones. Once that happens, it thrusts SpaceShipTwo into a final-frontier phase where the rocket will shoot incrementally higher in successive tests until eventually entering space.

Under Virgin Galactics system, the rocket is carried on the underbelly of WhiteNightTwo to 50,000 feet. It then detaches, and pilots ignite the rocket propulsion to push the ship into suborbit at 327,000 feet, or 62 miles up, which is considered the edge of space.

Well test all parameters of the vehicle in powered flights, Whitesides said. Well compare all metrics and performance with our analytical models to make sure that what we see in the real test-flight data is what we predicted in our forecasts.

Its not clear how long powered-flight testing will take, much less how soon the company could actually move to commercial operations at Spaceport America. But Virgin Galactic is now actively preparing for operational activity. It will move many of its Mojave-based employees and their families to New Mexico in the next few months, growing its local workforce from about 30 now to more than 100 this year.

We will start to post positions and work with contracted suppliers for jobs that support commercial operations such as hospitality, facilities management, and operations, said Virgin Galactic spokeswoman Christine Choi in an email to the Journal.

Virgin Galactic is also building more models of SpaceShipTwo, with two more rockets now under construction. The company envisions a fleet of five rockets and two mother ships, although that depends on flight demand from paying passengers.

Were hard at work on the next two space ships, Whitesides said. Theres still a lot more work to do, but those vehicles are coming together, foreshadowing our vision of having a fleet of ships.

All the progress is generating excitement among Spaceport America enthusiasts.

A lots going on, Richard Holcomb, spaceport ambassador, told the Albuquerque Economic Forum in December. Its coming, its very imminent, and its going to happen.

Holcomb, along with Dale Dekker of the architecture firm Dekker/Perich Sabatini and other supporters, created the nonprofit Ambassadors for Spaceport America to promote New Mexicos commercial space industry.

Its a booster club to step up and help make this happen, Dekker told the Economic Forum. We believe New Mexico will become a global center for space commercialization and innovation.

Spaceport America is actively recruiting more companies. Apart from Virgin Galactic, its signed up four more permanent tenants, including SpaceX, UP Aerospace, Exos Aerospace, and Energetic Pipeline2Space.

Some are getting ready to move dirt and build hangers, said Spaceport America CEO Dan Hicks.

Others, such as The Boeing Co., are testing new technologies at the spaceport, and more suborbital providers are also considering operations there, Hicks said.
Everyone: Time is running short.

I know, the year just started. But you probably already have big plans for your organization in 2018, and if you want to hit those lofty goals, youll need a healthy workforce.

Heres how youll know whether youre in good shape: New Mexicos Top Workplaces.

The Albuquerque Journals Business Outlook is once again sponsoring the survey in partnership with Energage (previously known as WorkplaceDynamics). Taking part gives you a chance to find out what youre doing right when it comes to motivating your employees and where you need to improve. If youre really good, youll earn some bragging rights, too.

The Top Workplaces team already is reaching out to companies and organizations around New Mexico to compile a comprehensive list of New Mexicos Top Workplaces for 2018. The results will be published in the Journal this spring, and an analysis of the results will be provided to the employers who take part.

To join the survey, an employee, employer or customer needs to nominate the company by Jan. 19 at ABQJournal.com/nominate or by calling 505-288-3443.

The organization will receive a call from Energage a few weeks later to explain the survey process.

Employees will be surveyed about the companys direction, execution and engagement of employees. Energage determines who makes the list based on those surveys.

The survey has strict protocols. There is no internet voting, no click as many times as you can, and participating companies must grant individual access to either all employees or a vast majority for larger businesses.

Among the benefits of making the Top Workplaces list are improving employee morale and collecting important employee feedback.

What you need to know about Top Workplaces

 Any organization with 35 or more employees in New Mexico is eligible to participate (can be public, private, nonprofit, government).

 Workplaces are evaluated by their employees using a 24-question survey. Companies will be surveyed through February. Deadline to apply: Jan. 19
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

Albuquerque city councilors this past November approved an ordinance that severely restricts panhandling, but you wouldnt know the law has been in effect for a month given the number of people still asking for a handout at intersections throughout the city.

The ordinance prohibits panhandlers  and anyone else  from soliciting motorists or occupants of a vehicle at busy medians and even on sidewalks. It also makes it illegal for drivers and passengers to physically interact with them.

A spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department said earlier this week that APD is concerned about the cost of budget constraints in enforcing the new measure, though he added that the bigger issue is making sure that everyone is educated about the new law.

This was an ordinance adopted by City Council and passed by the previous administration, Gilbert Gallegos, APDs director of communications and community outreach, told the Journal in an emailed statement.

APD is currently working to educate officers, as well as the public, about the new ordinance. This includes access to shelters, health care and housing solutions.

APD is facing a manpower shortage, with about 135 fewer officers than are authorized and roughly 335 fewer officers than Mayor Tim Keller and others have said are needed. Albuquerque is also in the midst of a crime wave with a record number of murders last year and a spike in property crime.

Neither APD nor Kellers administration would discuss whether the manpower shortage is impacting the police departments ability to enforce the ordinance, nor would either say whether enforcing the ordinance is a priority for the Keller administration.

But Councilor Trudy Jones, the sponsor of the measure, said she has been assured by Keller that the ordinance will be enforced. She said the city is in a ramp-up period on enforcement, adding that she expects APD will begin enforcement in about two weeks.

It will be enforced, Jones said. The administration has agreed to enforce it, but there are a couple of steps that need to be taken.

Violating the ordinance is a petty misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $500, or not more than 90 days in jail, or both.

Jones said APD is working on standard operating procedures, and the city has put together a flier to hand to pedestrians and drivers violating the ordinance.

The flier, Jones said, outlines the new ordinance, explains the public safety reasons behind the ordinance, and has information about social service agencies that help people down on their luck.

Thats what its about. Its not to punish people, she said, referring to the new city law.

Jones said the flier needs to be reviewed by the citys legal department.

She acknowledged that enforcement of the ordinance will not be APDs top priority, but she said the mayor told me, Yes, we will stand behind this. We will enforce this. 

Councilors voted 8-0 to adopt the ordinance Nov. 6. Councilor Klarissa Pena was absent and did not vote on the measure.

Former Mayor Richard Berry neither signed nor vetoed the ordinance within 10 days, which, under the City Charter, means that the ordinance became city law at that point.

Acting City Clerk Trina Gurule told the Journal that the ordinance was published Dec. 1 and became effective Dec. 6.

The pedestrian safety ordinance doesnt apply just to panhandlers. It also prohibits such things as boot brigades that firefighters sometimes engage in to raise money from motorists, an individual handing out fliers to motorists or any other activity when drivers  or occupants of their vehicles  are being asked to physically interact with a pedestrian.

The ban doesnt apply in instances in which a motorist can safely pull over into street-side parking.

Under the new ordinance, a driver and vehicle occupants can be cited for physically engaging with panhandlers or others while in a travel lane.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico has raised concerns about the constitutionality of the measure, arguing that people have a right to stand in public spaces like sidewalks and street corners to solicit.
WASHINGTON  President Donald Trumps U.N. ambassador said Sunday the administration isnt changing its conditions regarding talks with North Korea amid growing tensions over the Norths nuclear and missile programs.

Nikki Haley made clear that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would first need to stop weapons testing for a significant amount of time.

Trump had said on Saturday that he was open to talking to Kim. It appeared to be a softening of rhetoric, given that Trump lectured Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last year that it would be a waste of time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man, Trumps nickname for Kim.

But Haley insisted that Trump was reiterating his past position in his comments from Camp David over the weekend.

There is no turnaround, she said. What he has basically said is yes, there could be a time where we talk to North Korea, but a lot of things have to happen before that actually takes place. They have to stop testing. They have to be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons.

Its a dangerous situation, Haley added.

Trumps comments came as the first formal talks between North and South in more than two years are set to take place in a border town Tuesday; the rivals are trying to find ways to cooperate on the Winter Olympics that begin next month in the South. Tensions are high because of the Norths nuclear and missile programs.

Haley said it was her understanding that the two sides were limiting their talks to the Olympics, but you know, those two countries have to get along.

Thats good for the United States that they can at least start getting back into talks, she said.

The Trump administration has agreed to delay joint military exercises with South Korea until after the Olympics. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted the move was a practical necessity to accommodate the Olympics and was not a political gesture.

In recent weeks, Trump and Kim have traded barbs about their arsenals and the nuclear button on their desks, raising fears the two countries could be drawing closer to war.

On Sunday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo stressed his view that an attack from North Korea was not imminent, though the North appeared to be a few months away from reaching the capability of putting a U.S. city at risk of a nuclear attack. Pompeo defended Trumps tweets as appropriate and consistent with U.S. goals of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

The president has made very clear that were going to do everything we can to do that in a way that doesnt involve military action, Pompeo said, but has equally made clear that were not going to stand for allowing Kim Jong Un to hold Los Angeles, or Denver, or New York at risk.

Expressing skepticism that North Korea was sincere in trying to improve relations, Pompeo added: Well just have to wait and see how the conversations go Tuesday.

Haley spoke on ABCs This Week and Pompeo was on Fox News Sunday and CBS Face the Nation.
State police have identified a 40-year-old from Los Lunas as the man fatally shot by Valencia County deputies on Saturday.

New Mexico State Police Lt. Elizabeth Armijo said in a news release Sunday night that at least one deputy opened fire after an altercation broke out during an investigating into a stolen vehicle on San Rafael Drive in Los Lunas around 10 a.m. Saturday.

At some point, shots were fired by at least one deputy, killing 40-year-old John Bailon.

Bailon died at the scene, though deputies attempted life-saving measures, Armijo said.

The shooting remains under investigation. The names of deputies involved will be released after interviews are conducted, Armijo said.
Our families depend on clean water, air and soil to live well and raise healthy children. Businesses need a safe environment to build customers and create jobs, and even New Mexicos tourism industry depends on clean air and water.

But in the next couple of weeks, decisions will be made in Washington, D.C., that could move New Mexicos environment, public health and fragile economy backward for years to come. The Trump administration and many members of Congress are working to weaken the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and cut its budget to its lowest level since the 1970s.

Hollowing out the EPA would be a disaster for New Mexicos health and economy. We face increased risk of exposure to dangerous pollution in the air we breathe and the water we drink. In 2015 Albuquerque had 113 days of elevated smog pollution and Farmington and Las Cruces had more than 100. Most American cities have only one such day each year. Between 2012-2016 New Mexico received more than $12 million from the EPA to help monitor air quality. The result of these cuts could be more Code Red unsafe air days where children are kept indoors, more asthma attacks and more worker sick days.

The Trump administration would also like to eliminate EPA grants that help control pollutants carried by rainfall runoff into our drinking water and rivers like the Rio Grande. And it would eliminate millions of dollars to support efforts to deal with the backlog of more than 830 leaking underground storage tanks in New Mexico that leak harmful chemicals like oil, gas, benzene and toluene into our drinking water and soil.

Remarkably, the administration and its allies are also seeking deep cuts in money to clean up hazardous Superfund sites, including a deep cut to emergency response funds that help clean up the most urgent threats. New Mexico has 20 hazardous waste sites on the EPAs Superfund Priorities List and received nearly $11 million from 2012-2016 for cleanup of these sites. With the proposed cuts, these hazardous waste cleanup costs could be shifted from polluters to taxpayers by creating a 37 percent cut in enforcement funds.

Also cut deeply would be Brownfields grants that help counties and communities clean up polluted properties, thereby boosting economic development and real estate values. For example, in the 1980s the Santa Fe Railyard was blighted with lead, other metals and petroleum. EPA Brownfields support for cleanup leveraged more than $125 million from public and private sources to create todays vibrant gathering space of museums, farmers market, movie theater, public events and a hub for the Rail Runner commuter train.

The stakes could not be higher for New Mexico or the nation: for millions of us who depend on a safe and healthy environment to live a safe and healthy life and support good jobs, undermining EPAs work would move us backward to a dirtier and more dangerous era. We cant let the EPAs budget be bargained away in back room. Our childrens health and the health of our beautiful New Mexico landscape depend on it.
WASHINGTON  The White House is being used to stage some kind of dark, dystopian comedy in which all the humor is of the gallows variety. Somebody tell me how we survive another three years of this oppressive, exhausting show.

The revelations about the Trump administration from journalist Michael Wolff are, if true, stunning, jaw-dropping, gob-smacking  but also pretty much what many in Washington expected. The craziness and dysfunction were obvious from the beginning. Wolff simply documents what others say privately about an administration that is dangerously erratic and incompetent.

The central problem, according to Wolffs forthcoming book Fire and Fury, is President Trump himself. Voters elected to the nations highest office a man who is unfit to do the job, who has proved unworthy of the public trust and who seems, to be blunt, increasingly unbalanced.

It is of some comfort, I suppose, that there are people around Trump who are aware of his flaws. We have to hope that family members, staff members, political allies and longtime friends can serve as guardrails to keep Trump from driving us all off some cliff.

Weve made it safely through a year, but at some point our luck is going to run out.

As Wolff tells the story, after the election he proposed to Trump that he be allowed to write a fly-on-the-wall account of the administrations early days. Trump seemed to say that would be OK, so Wolff began a routine of coming to the White House, installing himself on one of the couches in the West Wing lobby and latching on to senior staff members as they walked by.

No competent White House communications shop would have given such access to any journalist, let alone one known in New York media circles as a shark among sharks. Day after day, Wolff feasted.

Clearly Wolffs principal source was Stephen K. Bannon, Trumps political guru who served as a high-ranking White House adviser before being ousted in a palace coup. Bannon is quoted as describing the meeting Donald Trump Jr. convened with a Kremlin-tied Russian lawyer as treasonous and painting extremely unflattering portraits of Trumps daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Perhaps it was this material about Trumps family that sent the president into such a rage Wednesday, issuing a series of statements blasting Bannon  one said that when Bannon was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. The White House has loudly disputed the books veracity and, on Thursday, a Trump attorney sent a cease-and-desist notice to Wolff and his publisher seeking to stop the books publication on Friday and threatening possible charges, including libel.

When the president calms down, someone should point out to him that the legal threat unwittingly gives credence to Bannons version of events.

An excerpt of Wolffs book published by New York magazine opens on the day of the election, with senior officials of the Trump campaign  including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway  preparing for what looked like certain defeat. Around 8 p.m. Eastern, however, it became clear that Trump might actually win. Wolff writes that Donald Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost.

About the president, Wolff writes: There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannons not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

But he is not capable. This whole administration is based on a desperate delusion.

On Tuesday, the president of the United States taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has a nuclear arsenal: Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

You can decide whether to laugh or cry. Or perhaps scream.
By PTI: Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) A former Shiv Sena corporator was killed by unidentified assailants here last night, a police official said today.

Ashok Sawant, 62, a two-term corporator from Samata Nagar in suburban Kandivli, was attacked with choppers while he was returning home after meeting a friend around 11 pm, he said.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital in Kandivli but was declared dead on arrival, the official said.

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Sawant had entered the cable television business a few years ago, he said. PTI VT GK

--- ENDS ---
Donald Trump is given to lurid rhetoric and, in the MS-13 gang, he has finally met a subject beyond his ability to exaggerate.

He calls members of the largely Salvadoran gang animals. He charges them with spreading gruesome bloodshed. He says they kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob, they prey on children. And, finally, he insists that they shouldnt be here.

Hes right on every count. If there is any aspect of the Trump immigration agenda that should command universal support, it is his crackdown on an immigrant gang whose motto is murder, rape and control, and whose signature weapon is the machete.

Yet the Trump administrations focus on MS-13 has occasioned criticism from the usual quarters, for the usual reasons.

A piece in The Boston Globe objected to the administration blaming crime on highly organized gangs of immigrants.

Well, what if a highly organized gang of immigrants is indeed responsible for its own crime wave?

Philip Bump of The Washington Post objected to Trump at an Ohio rally speaking of the brutal stabbing death of a teenage girl at the hands of MS-13. It was a graphic depiction of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, Bump wrote, as violent, bloodthirsty animals.

As it happens, MS-13 are, indeed, bloodthirsty, and they are Hispanic immigrants.

Jamelle Bouie of Slate accused the president of undertaking a political plan to demagogue Hispanic immigrants as imminent threats to white Americans, and white women in particular.

This has it backward. The chances of a white person getting extorted, assaulted or killed by MS-13 is vanishingly small compared with the poor Hispanic immigrants who live and work in the communities blighted by the gang.

As Jessica Vaughan and Jon Feere noted in a report for the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, a surge of more than 2 million immigrants came to the United States from Central America during the 1980s and 1990s, most settling in Los Angeles, most illegal immigrants. Nurtured on violence in the guerrilla wars of Central America, members of the incipient MS-13 were well-prepared to fight it out in the worst gang-ridden neighborhoods in the city.

Law enforcement substantially disrupted the gang in the United States during the 2000s, but it has made a comeback. The gangs leaders in El Salvador professionalized its U.S. operations. And the flow of so-called unaccompanied children from Central America across the southern border has replenished the gangs ranks; MS-13 members have been among the migrants, and the influx of non-English-speaking young males with no connections to the U.S. provides a ready base of recruitment.

This has led to horrifying headlines in places across the U.S. with large Central American populations, from Long Island to Houston to the Washington, D.C., area.

In a lengthy report on Langley Park, Md., The Washington Post detailed the depredations of MS-13 seven miles from the White House. According to the Post, It took Abigail Bautista less than a month of living in Langley Park to learn that her new neighborhood in Maryland had its own set of laws, written not in statutes but in gang graffiti and blood.

Needless to say, Bautista is not a white woman. Shes an illegal immigrant and mother of five, whose street-vending business made her a prime target for extortion by the gang. The tragedy of immigrants in places like Langley Park is that they encounter in the U.S. exactly the breakdown in civil society and lack of rule of law that they thought they were escaping in Central America.

It will stop only if we continue the newly invigorated campaign against MS-13 members and get a better handle on migrants coming here from Central America. The commentators tsk-tsking Trumps focus on MS-13 surely dont, by and large, live in neighborhoods dominated by savage gangs. Why should anyone else?

Rich Lowry can be reached via email: comments.lowry @national-review.com.  2017 by King Features Syndicate.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administrations decision to end special protections for about 200,0000 Salvadoran immigrants filled many Salvadoran families with dread Monday, raising the possibility that they will be forced to abandon their roots in the U.S. and return to a violent homeland they have not known for years, even decades.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen gave Salvadorans with temporary protected status until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or face deportation. El Salvador becomes the fourth country since President Donald Trump took office to lose protection under the program, which provides humanitarian relief for people whose countries are hit with natural disasters or other strife.

The decision, while not surprising, was a severe blow to Salvadorans in New York, Houston, San Francisco and other major cities that have welcomed them since at least the 1980s.

Guillermo Mendoza, who came to the United States in 2000 when he was 19 years old, was anguished about what to do with his wife and two children who are U.S. citizens.

What do I do? Do I leave the country and leave them here? That is a tough decision, said Mendoza, a safety manager at Shapiro & Duncan, a mechanical contractor company in Rockville, Maryland, near Washington.

Orlando Zepeda, who came to the U.S. in 1984 fleeing civil war in El Salvador, said the lack of surprise does not ease the sting for the 51-year-old Los Angeles-area man who works in building maintenance and has two American-born children.

Its sad, because its the same story of family separation from that time, and now history repeats itself with my children, Zepeda said in Spanish.

Many immigrants hope Congress can deliver a long-term reprieve by September 2019. If that fails, they face a grim choice: return to El Salvador voluntarily or live in the U.S. illegally under an administration that has dramatically increased deportation arrests.

Cristian Chavez Guevara, a 37-year-old Salvadoran immigrant in Houston who is raising two American stepchildren and a young cousin, said the decision would tear apart his family. He was unsure what to do.

I have been building dreams for the future and raising hope for a better future not just for me but for my family, he said. All of that came to a halt.

The action presents a serious challenge for El Salvador, a country of 6.2 million people whose economy counts on money sent by wage earners in the U.S. Over the past decade, growing numbers of Salvadorans  many coming as families or unaccompanied children  have entered the United States illegally through Mexico, fleeing violence and poverty.

In September 2016, the Obama administration extended protections for 18 months, saying El Salvador was still suffering the lingering effects of earthquakes in 2001 that killed more than 1,000 people. The administration said the country was temporarily unable to absorb such a large number of returning people.

Nielsen, who faced a Monday deadline on another extension, concluded that El Salvador has received significant international aid to recover from the earthquake, and homes, schools and hospitals there have been rebuilt.

The substantial disruption of living conditions caused by the earthquake no longer exists, the department said in a statement.

El Salvador President Salvador Sanchez Ceren spoke by phone Friday with Nielsen to renew his plea to extend status for 190,000 Salvadorans and allow more time for Congress to deliver a long-term fix for them to stay in the U.S. The countrys top diplomat, Foreign Minister Hugo Martinez, said Mondays decision underscored a need for Congress to act.

The 18-month delay was small comfort for Teresa Salmeron, a Salvadoran woman who has relatives working in the United States.

What are they going to do here? There is no work here, she said. I live on the money they send home.

Democratic leaders and immigrant advocacy groups criticized the move. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called it a heartbreaking blow to nearly a quarter of a million hard-working Salvadorans who are American in every way. Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said it was just the latest in a string of heartless, xenophobic actions from the Trump administration.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called it heartbreaking and said many families will be devastated.

However, groups advocating immigration restrictions called it an important step for the humanitarian programs credibility.

The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the temporary protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration, said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA.

The decision comes amid intensifying talks between the White House and Congress on an immigration package that may include protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the country as children and were temporarily shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program. Trump said in September that he was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, but gave Congress until March to act.

The U.S. created temporary protected status in 1990 to provide safe havens for people from countries affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war and other disasters. It currently shields people from 10 countries, more than half from El Salvador.

The benefit, which includes work authorization, can be renewed up to 18 months at a time by the Homeland Security secretary.

In November, Nielsens predecessor, acting Secretary Elaine Duke, ended the protection for Haitians, requiring them to leave or adjust their legal status by July 22, 2019, and for Nicaraguans, giving them until Jan. 5, 2019. She delayed a decision affecting Hondurans, leaving that decision to Nielsen.

Last year, the Trump administration extended status for South Sudan and ended it for Sudan. Other countries covered are Nepal, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

___

Associated Press writers Amy Taxin in Los Angeles and Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report. Spagat reported from San Diego.
GALVESTON, Texas  A mother, father and their two young sons were shot to death early Monday at a Southeast Texas beachfront hotel in what police are investigating as a possible triple killing followed by a suicide in which the woman was the shooter.

Galveston police Capt. Josh Schirard said the four victims were a 37-year-old woman, a 39-year-old man and two boys ages 10 and 5. He said the family from Baytown about 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of Galveston checked in Sunday evening at the San Luis Resort.

Police were summoned to the upscale 250-room hotel on the Gulf of Mexico after a guest in a nearby room on the eighth floor called police about 4:30 a.m. and reported popping sounds. Officers entered the locked room and found the man and two boys in bed with apparent gunshot wounds and the woman on the floor, also with a gunshot wound.

The woman and one of the children were unresponsive but still appeared to be alive and were taken to a hospital where they both died, Schirard said, adding that neither was ever able to speak.

A motive is unknown at this time, but forensic data collected at the scene indicated the female is believed to be the shooter at this time before apparently taking her own life with a 9 mm handgun found adjacent to her body, Schirard said. Theres no indication or evidence that there are any other persons involved or that there are any other suspects still at large.

Authorities said no issues were apparent before the family checked in, and nothing about the condition of the room indicated there was a struggle.

My heart goes out to the rest of their family, their extended family, their community and our community, the ones that dont have the training to deal with this and have to be exposed to an event like this, Schirard said.

Psychologists and others who have studied cases of mothers accused of killing their children have said its not as uncommon as people might believe. But media coverage often focuses on dramatic cases, such as Andrea Yates who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 2001 drowning deaths of her five children in Houston.
DENVER  Colorado regulators are considering proposed new rules for thousands of oil and gas pipelines after a fatal explosion last year blamed on leaking gas.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission opened two days of hearings Monday on regulations for installing, testing and shutting down flow lines, which carry oil and gas from wells to nearby equipment.

The rules for thousands of oil and gas pipelines are in response to an April 17 explosion in the town of Firestone that killed two people, injured a third and destroyed a house. Investigators said the explosion was caused by odorless, unrefined natural gas leaking from a severed flow line.

Investigators said the line was believed to be abandoned but was still connected to an operating well with the valve turned to the open position.

The flow line was severed about 10 feet (3 meters) from the house, and gas seeped into the homes basement, investigators said. The well and pipeline were in place several years before the house was built.

The proposed rules are a significant expansion of existing ones. A final version will be drawn up after this weeks hearings. No date has been set for the commissions seven voting members to approve or disapprove of the rules.

Colorado has nearly 129,000 flow lines within about 1,000 feet (300 meters) of occupied buildings, according to energy company reports submitted to the state last year.

The presence of homes and schools near oil and gas operations is a contentious issue in Colorado, especially in the booming Front Range urban corridor  including Firestone  which overlaps with an oil and gas field.

A 22-page draft of the new regulations says flow lines that are permanently taken out of service must be disconnected, drained and sealed at both ends and any above-ground portion must be removed. The rules also allow energy companies to simply remove the lines.

The proposal also would require energy companies to provide information on the location of flow lines to the Call 811 program, which marks the site of underground utilities at a property owners request. Thats meant to help homeowners and construction companies avoid inadvertently severing a line.

The proposed rules revise or add requirements for designing, installing, testing and documenting flow lines.

Shortly after the explosion, some state officials argued that Colorado should compile a map of all flow lines in the state and make it available online. But Gov. John Hickenlooper decided against that in August, citing concerns about security and theft.

Instead, he said the state would require energy companies to participate in the Call 811 program, saying that would make location information available to anyone who needs it.

The new rules also are intended to close some gaps in pipeline regulation.

Commission staffers noted last week that one federal agency, three state agencies and some local governments have at least some say in pipelines, but a few types of pipelines and activities dont fall within any agencys jurisdiction.

___

Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/dan%20elliott .
The man arrested after an hours-long SWAT standoff at his southwest Albuquerque home Saturday had been armed with an airsoft rifle made to look like an assault rifle, according to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court.

Around 1 p.m. Saturday police were called to the 900 block of Pacific SW, south of the Albuquerque BioPark, after neighbors reported a man was intoxicated and waving what looked like an AK47 style weapon around.

When officers arrived they found the man, later identified as Benjamin Cano, 31, walking back and forth between his own home on Pacific and his neighbors home on 9th street SW, according to the complaint.

The two residences have connecting yards that have access through a gate, a detective wrote in the complaint. Officers were unable to position themselves to stop the subject.

The Albuquerque Police Department SWAT team was called to arrest Cano, and the New Mexico State Police and Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office also responded to the scene to assist.

Around 10 p.m. SWAT officers took Cano into custody. When they executed the search warrant on the house they found an airsoft rifle with the orange tip on the barrel painted black so it would resemble a real assault rifle, according to the complaint.

Cano is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center. He was still in custody Monday.
FORT COLLINS, Colo.  Authorities say a man who pleaded guilty to a hate crime for vandalizing a Colorado mosque has killed himself.

The Coloradoan reported Monday that 36-year-old Joseph Giaquinto took his own life Saturday. His death came two days after he was sentenced to three years in wellness court and six months of work release for throwing rocks and a Bible through the windows of the Islamic Center of Fort Collins.

Prosecutors said the former Army medics actions escalated to a hate crime because they were deliberate.

The defense argued he was suffering from post-traumatic stress and alcohol abuse disorders.

His lawyer Heather Siegel said the act was a crime of location since he lived near the mosque. She said he was drunk and was later horrified to learn what he had done.

___

Information from: Fort Collins Coloradoan, http://www.coloradoan.com
SANTA FE  Santa Fe Brewing Co. is seeking city approval to open a taproom downtown, its first within the boundaries of its namesake city, with hopes to open by February.

The taproom in an old, brick house at 510 Galisteo St., former home of the Santa Fe Cigar Co. a block west of the state Capitol, would be Santa Fe Brewings fourth serving location, adding to the brewerys home site south of town on N.M. 14, an El Dorado taproom east of Santa Fe on Caliente Road and a taproom in Albuquerque.

Our brand is very well established, and weve gotten a lot of requests from the locals to have something downtown, somewhere close where they can try some of our beers, said owner and President Brian Lock. He said the new location would give Santa Feans and tourists staying downtown a chance to try Santa Fe Brewings specialty taproom beers  varieties that arent mass distributed  without going to the brewery itself. The specialty brews include seasonal offerings like the 12 Beers of Christmas, rotating IPAs or small batches that the company is testing for customer feedback.

The Galisteo Street building, about with about 1,600 square feet of space, would have a central bar as well as other seating locations, including a shaded outdoor patio.

It almost reminds me of a speakeasy kind of place; very small, very quaint, very cozy, said Lock. Santa Fe Brewing plans to lease the building from Carlos Muller. Muller recently bought the space and offered it to Lock for a taproom.

The site also has the bonus of being across the street from the Roundhouse parking garage, which offers free public parking, Lock noted.

In addition to a small brewer license, Santa Fe Brewing needs a special waiver from City Council to sell alcohol within 300 feet of the Santa Fe Jewish Center Chabad on Manhattan Avenue. The companys application includes a letter of support from center Rabbi Berel Levertov. The taproom proposal goes before the City Council Wednesday.
The Albuquerque area is about to have one less Bed Bath & Beyond with the closing of the chains Paseo del Norte location.

The New Jersey-based retailer, which sells everything from kitchen gadgets to shower curtains, will shutter the Northeast Heights location in late February, said a store manager, who referred all other questions related to the closure to the companys media relations department, which did not return calls for comment.

A sign at the 8850 Holly Avenue NE location this week says a storewide clearance event is underway and suggested that customers visit the San Mateo, Cottonwood Commons and Rio Rancho stores, which still are in business.

Last summer, Bed Bath & Beyonds CEO told analysts that as leases come up, the company would renegotiate terms with landlords but that it contemplated closures of some 80 to 100 stores in the next few years, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha, a content service for financial markets.

U.S. retailing, an industry that employs one in 10 American workers, is experiencing a profound disruption, thanks to combination of technological change, massive overbuilding and a seismic shift in how consumers shop. In 2017 alone, 2,800 stores went under, taking 55,000 jobs with them, and retail bankruptcies are up 31 percent. Big names like Sears, J.C. Penney and Macys are struggling.

The 28,000-square-foot Bed Bath & Beyond store going out of business is located in the Ventura Place shopping center, which includes Trader Joes, Jinja, Ulta Beauty, Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union and Pharmaca.

No word yet on what might replace Bed Bath & Beyond. Representatives from Base 5 Retail, a commercial real estate firm that is seeking to lease the space, could not be reached for comment.
STROUDSBURG, Pa.  Four New York City men were given jail sentences Monday in the death of a 19-year-old fraternity pledge during a 2013 hazing ritual in Pennsylvania, with a judge saying she believes they succumbed to brainwashing and indoctrination that is rampant at fraternities around the nation.

Baruch College freshman Chun Michael Deng was blindfolded, forced to wear a heavy backpack and then repeatedly tackled as part of the fraternitys Crossing Over initiation ceremony. He was knocked unconscious and later died at a hospital.

Police charged 37 people with crimes ranging from aggravated assault to hazing to third-degree murder.

Not one person out of 37 picked up a telephone and called an ambulance. I cannot wrap my head around it, Monroe County President Judge Margherita Patti-Worthington said. So theres something greater going on here, and I think its probably really prevalent. We see across the country these issues in fraternities.

The four defendants sentenced Monday, Kenny Kwan, Charles Lai, Raymond Lam and Sheldon Wong, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, hindering apprehension and other charges.

Kwan got 12 to 24 months in county jail. Lam and Wong were sentenced to 10 to 24 months each. Lai, who spent 342 days in jail after he was unable to make bail, was sentenced to time served.

All four defendants apologized, a few of them tearfully.

Lam was the most emotional, saying he has been consumed by guilt. He said he has attempted to kill himself.

The guilt will never go away, and I think about Mr. Deng every day, he said.

In a statement to the court, Dengs mother wrote about the anguish of losing her only son and demanded a sentence that would send a message about hazing.

This punishment should forever remind them of the pain and grief we will carry for the rest of our lives as the result of their misconduct, Deng wrote. It is also our hope that the punishment may also save lives by sending a clear message to other fraternities and their members that the outrageous tradition of hazing will no longer be tolerated and must be ended once and for all.

Earlier Monday, the Pi Delta Psi fraternity was banned from Pennsylvania for 10 years and was ordered to pay a fine of more than $110,000 for its role in Dengs death.

The judge and a prosecutor slammed Pi Delta Psi for calling itself a victim of rogue fraternity members, saying the fraternity tolerated and even encouraged hazing for years.

Its the epitome of a lack of acceptance of responsibility. Its their rituals and functions that led us here today, Monroe County Assistant District Attorney Kim Metzger said in court.

Pi Delta Psi has 25 chapters in 11 states, including one at Penn State University that will now have to be disbanded.

In a written statement, Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American cultural fraternity founded in 1994, said its now-disbanded Baruch College chapter brought shame and dishonor to the national fraternity.

Pi Delta Psis attorney, Wes Niemoczynski, argued that Pi Delta Psi had developed a no excuses hazing policy before Dengs death but said the policy worked on the honor system and proved to be inadequate.

The fraternitys initiation rituals involved some physicality, but they certainly did not involve the level of physicality, the level of inhumanity and the depravity of the individuals who are also coming before the court, he said.

The defendants sentenced Monday faced the most serious charges. Dozens of other defendants have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to probation.
The 75th Golden Globe Awards saw some nasty digs being taken at US President Donald Trump and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

By India Today Web Desk: Comedian Seth Meyers opened his stint as host of the 75th Golden Globe Awards with a political undertone and jokes around US President Donald Trump and sexual harassment scandals in Hollywood.

He opened his monologue saying, "Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen," adding that it would be the first time in months that men won't be terrified to hear their names read out loud.

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The host, dressed in black, took a dig at Hollywood names Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, who have been alleged for using their position to sexually harass people. The award show was held in Los Angeles on January 7 (January 8 IST).

"A lot of people thought it would be more appropriate for a woman to host tonight's show, and they might be right, but if it makes you feel any better, I have absolutely no power in Hollywood," Meyers said, as the camera panned to actor Seth Rogen in the audience.

"Remember when he was the one causing trouble with North Korea?" Meyers questioned, referring to Trump's tweets calling out on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

There was mention of Harvey Weinstein in his monologue.

"Don't worry, he'll be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person to be booed at the annual In Memoriam," said Meyers, which was followed by groans from the audience.

"It will sound like that," he added.

Meyers, who was hosting the Golden Globe Awards for the first time, took a jibe at disgraced actor Kevin Spacey too.

He said, "Despite everything that happened this year, the show goes on. For example, I was happy to hear they were going to do another season of House of Cards. Is Christopher Plummer available for that too? I hope he can do a Southern accent because Kevin Spacey sure couldn't."

The joke was in reference to Plummer replacing Spacey in the film All The Money In The World.

Sexual misconduct and gender equality were the highlights of the monologue, but there were undertones of politics too.

"We're all here at the courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. A string of three words that could not have been better designed to infuriate our president. The only name that would make him angrier would be the 'Hillary Mexico Salad Associated'."

The comedian wrapped up his monologue on a serious note, saying, "People in this room worked really hard to get here, but it's clearer now than ever before, the women had to work harder. So thank you for all that you do. I look forward to seeing you lead us into whatever some next."

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The Golden Globe Awards 2018 honoured the best in Film and Television this year. The night saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, picking up four Golden Globes, including that for the Best Picture - Drama. Gary Oldman was adjudged the Best Actor - Drama and Frances McDormand the Best Actress - Drama.

James Franco and Saoirse Ronan took home the trophies for Best Actor and Actress - Musical or Comedy respectively. Lady Bird was named the Best Picture - Musical or Comedy at the 75th Golden Globe Awards.

(With inputs from IANS) ALSO SEE: 75th Golden Globe Awards Full Winners List

ALSO WATCH: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and The Revenant win top honours at Golden Globes 2016

--- ENDS ---
The Rachna Khaira-Aadhaar data breach report case has one again brought to the fore the issue of freedom of media and freedom of speech in India. Khaira, a journalist working with The Tribune, broke the story about Aadhaar data leaks involving details of over one billion Aadhaar cards.

Following the publication of the report, the Delhi Police has filed an FIR based on a complaint reportedly from a deputy director of the Unique Identification Authority of India, the government body responsible for the entire Aadhaar exercise.

Khaira, meanwhile, has received the support of the media fraternity, who have called it a case of shooting the messenger. The Broadcast Editors Association has condemned the FIR and called it an attack on freedom of speech.

In a statement issued, the BEA demanded immediate withdrawal of the police case against Khaira, who has been charged under various sections of the IPC, including forgery and cheating. The reporter has been booked under IPC sections 419 (punishment for cheating under impersonation), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery), 471 (using a forged document) and also under sections of the IT Act and the Aadhaar Act.

Such FIRs against journalists exposing systemic flaws is a spiteful kick in the teeth of Indian democracy and the right to free speech and expression.

The BEA further stated, The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is rather expected to take media investigations into data leaks positively. With the Supreme Court declaring privacy fundamental right, measures must be strengthened to protect Aadhaar data. Shooting the messenger is no solution. Its a toxic trend, which must stop forthwith.

Earlier, the Editors Guild of India, too, came out in Khairas support. Filing of the FIR is unfair, unjustified and a direct attack on the freedom of the press, the Guild said, further adding, it is clearly meant to browbeat a journalist whose investigation on the matter was of great public interest.

The Guild demanded that the concerned Union Ministry intervened and had the cases against the reporter withdrawn, apart from conducting an impartial investigation into the matter.
McCann Worldgroup India put up yet another strong show at the Effie Awards 2018. Not only did the agency take home 5 Gold, 16 Silvers and12 Bronze awards, McCann also walked away with the Effie India Agency of the Year award.

Leading the team at the awards show was Prasoon Joshi, CEO and CCO, McCann Worldgroup India and Chairman McCann Worldgroup Asia Pacific. Adgully caught up with Joshi at the awards evening on January 5, 2018, where he spoke about McCanns good show at every awards platform, befriending technology and bracing for change, among others. Excerpts:

On winning awards, ideas and having a great team...

We won every possible international creative award in 2017. We won everywhere. After that if the year comes a complete circle, this shows the effectiveness of our work. What more can you want for your agency? What makes me happy is that the work we did also impacted our clients business hugely and contributed to building brands.

You can have huge mottos, credos, etc., but the core motive is that if you are not benefitting your clients and their brands, then these awards sound hollow and empty. In my opinion, McCann has been consistently doing that. Whether it was a few years back when we were here for relaunching Maggi, Coca-Cola, and our work for Nestle. Today I can proudly say that all the work has come from across categories and geographic locations for us. We also have a great global team  CEO Harris Diamond, Creative Head Rob Reilly and Strategy Head, Suzzane Powers, who has built the culture of great strategic thinking at the agency.

McCann India has truly reflected with what McCann Global is trying to do. That syncing and alignment with the global management is benefiting. Also, we are hugely rooted and we know how to ply to our local market because all our people are handpicked. Our India Strategy Head, Jitendra Dabas, is hugely responsible for what we saw at the awards. What he has been successfully able to do is break the silos between creative and strategic planning; he has been able to get them to work together. NCD Prateek Bhardwaj and Creative Director Kapil Batra, who is responsible for the work done for Paytm. All these people have been able to work together without a planning team. Partha Sinha has been a great help, too. He is one of the finest strategic minds in the advertising industry. We have great business minds like Alok Lal, who heads our North Operations, and Suraja Kishor, GM of our Mumbai operations.

If you have a keen eye for business, you can contribute to the business. I was a creative guy and was made CEO of the business. Harshit Jain, Head of Healthcare comes up with great business ideas, too. Ideas can come from anywhere. McCann today understands that the solution is not to work in silos, but work together. Thinking can come from anywhere as long as you are aligned in thought. Last but not the least, we take huge pride in our relationship with our clients. We are together in this journey. It is not like we get a one-page brief one day and we start to think on it. We think for the brand together and this is manifested in the results. A lot of the ideas do not come with the briefs, but with our relationship with the brands.

On technology, creativity and Paytm campaign...

The work on Paytm reflects how technology affects the creative aspect of ad making  you either get overwhelmed by it or you accept it and become a part of it. Paytm karo! is a reflection of the fact that we did not get overwhelmed by the technology. We wanted to understand it and this is manifested in the campaign where we have showed how people will understand the technology and how it will impact their lives. So, a simple thing like a bua (aunt) giving shagun (gift) to her bhateeja (nephew) is a glimpse of the fact we are not overwhelmed by the technology, but have understood it well. McCann has always been quick in understanding data and we have always used that for our clients benefit. So, technology is not something we are intimidated by, we befriend technology.

On ad content and rewarding viewers...

Content has changed hugely over the years. But when has it not? Ive never seen ads as ads, but as short stories. I only think of it as something that reaches out to people and has something to say, doesnt matter if it is for a brand or for a short story. As long as you understand that you have to reward the viewer for what he/she watches, you will never mistake an ad for an ad and if you do, you will only get caught in the formulas. So, be rewarding for the audience. This has always worked for McCann. This year, I would say that there are more people who have manifested that, more brands who have understood that. We have always been performing well at the awards, be it Cannes or Effies and other accolades for the country.

On befriending change in 2018...

Two kinds of brands will be seen  the ones that will befriend change and contribute positively towards it, and the ones that will get intimidated by change. The former will be the brands that will do well as we are in times of change and empowerment. The change is reaching deeper into our society, where the purchasing power is getting deeper, be it through Aadhaar or Jan DhanYojna. The point is that common man is getting more money and so, more people are empowered to spend more.

During such times, will you be a brand that looks confused or a brand that consumers look at and say I can rely on this brand? The companies that are unsettled by the change are not going to do well, while the ones that have the clarity and are confident with the change will be the ones that consumers will rely on.

Read More:

https://www.adgully.com/mccann-worldgroup-india-and-o-m-win-big-at-the-effie-awards-india-2018-75686.html

https://www.adgully.com/effie-awards-2018-announces-shortlisted-case-studies-75641.html
UpGrad, founded by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Ravi Chug and Prabhav Phalgun, has acknowledged interest from investors groups to raise $40 Million for a 10 per cent stake. The funds would be allocated across building a global tech platform, investment in courses, content facilities and studios, marketing  both offline and online, international expansion and the creation of 50 offline UpGrad Xchange Centres for engagement and networking. This announcement comes close to the heels of Screwvalas plans to expand UpGrad into the UAE and SE Asian markets.

The company had ventured into the EdTech category in 2016 with an aim to disrupt the sector and provide working professionals who are in constant need to upgrade and upskill an opportunity to access quality online education. Today, UpGrad has become the largest player in the category, targeting a revenue rate of Rs 20 crore a month in March 2018, leading to an annual run rate of Rs 250 crore and run rate of students of over 8,000 by March 2018.

Ronnie Screwvala commented, Both Mayank and I are of the strong belief that opportunity with EdTech is unbounded. With the speed at which our working professionals in India need the Upgrading and Upskilling, there is no choice but to look at things exponentially. Keeping this in mind, we have decided to open the company to a 10 per cent dilution and capital raise for us to take all our initiatives. Personally, I do believe that equity is the most valuable asset at this juncture of UpGrad and hence, we are taking a cautious step towards this dilution.

The online education platform claims to have a 95 per cent completion rate and till now has reached over a quarter of a million young professionals through courses in Data Science, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Software Development, Digital Marketing & Communications, Big Data Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Product Management.

In a short span of 2 years since its launch, the online education major has also formed alliances with reputed institutes like IIIT Bangalore, BITS Pilani, IMT Ghaziabad, SPJIMR, MICA Ahmedabad, and Cambridge UK, among many others. UpGrad is also the official education partner for Government of Indias Start Up India learning programme for which the EdTech company has built the largest enrolment program online program in the country.

Commenting on the size and potential of the EdTech market, Screwvala said, The Higher Ed Universe is a massive 150 million students and the core of approx 60 million, who are working professionals presently, will look to UpGrade in the very near future. As 10 per cent of them look to online learning, this will create a $6 billion revenue opportunity in the next 5 years and the lead player and early mover, which UpGrad plans to be, could have a one-third share, leading to a potential of $2 billion revenue. In the very immediate future, there is a job creation and specific opportunity for at least 1 million jobs each across Data, Management and Software Development and Coding. Thats 3 million jobs! With an average cost of Rs 2 lakh for online courses, the opportunity is a whopping 75,000 crore and we firmly believe that this is just the start and the category remains massively underserved.
James Franco and Saoirse Ronan win big in Best Actor and Actress in a Comedy or Musical category.

By India Today Web Desk: James Franco was yet another actor who went home with an award. The 39-year-old won award for best actor in a musical or comedy at Golden Globes 2018 for The Disaster Artist.

Franco had promised to bring Tommy Wiseau to the Golden Globes after being nominated for The Disaster Artist, and that's what he did at the awards night. In fact, he went a step ahead and got Wiseau on the stage during his acceptance speech.

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This is James first win at the Golden Globes.

On the other hand, Saoirse Ronan, has won the best actress in a musical or comedy award for Lady Bird.

Ronan has another reason to rejoice as her film Lady Bird has won the Best Film in a Musical or Comedy.

ALSO WATCH: The worst dressed celebs at Golden Globes: What were you thinking?

--- ENDS ---
January 8, 2018

The last day of 2017 turned out to be one of the gloomiest for the Russian military in Syria. First, one of its helicopters crashed north of Hama due to a technical failure, killing two servicemen. Then, rumors spread that on Dec. 31 militants had shelled the Russian Khmeimim air base, which President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had visited about three weeks beforehand.

News of the attack wasn't reported until Jan. 3, when the authoritative Kommersant newspaper published a story saying two political diplomatic sources confirmed the air base had suffered one of its worst attacks during Russia's entire military campaign in Syria. According to the report, Islamist militants shelled the air base, allegedly destroying at least four Su-24 attack aircraft, two Su-35S multirole fighter aircraft and one An-72 transport aircraft, as well as an ammunition depot that detonated after it was hit by a missile. The report said that more than 10 servicemen were injured.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Jan. 4 denied that seven planes were destroyed, calling that part of the report fake, but acknowledged that two military personnel were killed in the attack.

During the four days it took Moscow to comment on the incident, numerous journalists found sources with differing stories, multiplying the number of theories about what happened at the key Russian military facility and sowing doubt about the accuracy of the official narrative. Moreover, subsequent days saw more reports of attacks or attempted attacks on Khmeimim air base: On Jan. 4, Russian anti-air defense systems downed two handmade drones over Latakia. That same day, an Il-76 heavy transport plane flying from Russia to Syria couldnt land at the air base for undisclosed reasons and had to go back. On Jan. 6, the Russian air base reportedly was attacked yet again by small armed drones.

The official version from the Russian Defense Ministry reads, On December 31, at nightfall, the [Khmeimim] airfield came under a sudden mortar fire from a mobile militant subversive group. Two military servicemen were killed in the shelling." However, the ministry added, "Russias air group in Syria is combat ready and continues to accomplish all its missions in full."

Franz Klintsevich, the deputy head of the Defense and Security Committee of the Russian Senate, argued that foreign intelligence was behind the Khmeimim attacks.

Some Russian military experts suggested the mobile militant subversive group mentioned by the Defense Ministry approached the base by car, coming as close as 2 miles carrying mobile 82 mm mortars. If that were the case, the attack should have lasted no more than a few minutes and the air defense systems wouldnt have detected the mortar rockets due to their size (3.2 inches), which is smaller than that of unguided rockets. Others argued the attackers used 2B9 Vasilek (Cornflower)  an automatic 82 mm gun mortar. This type of weapon is easy to move as it fits into a van, can be loaded with cassettes for four shots each and used on repeat fire.

The Syrian army and different loyal militias provide security to the base. However, the base is difficult to secure because of the absence of a clear-cut front line, difficult terrain features, alleged corruption and the relative weakness of Syrian intelligence services. Besides, the attacks might not have been carried out by jihadis. As Syrian government forces, with the support of the Russian air power, continue their offensive against the opposition in de-escalation zones, it is possible that any rebel faction could be behind the incidents.

In most cases, journalists theories do not actually contradict the official narrative but rather complement it or interpret it differently.

According to Russian business news outlet RBC, militants shelled the base using mortars and multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS). RBC cites its own source in the Defense Ministry as saying, "Defense of the base was duly organized: Rockets were downed by respective air defense systems, yet mortars are almost impossible to tackle. The source mentioned the fire came from the zone under control of the Syrians and said one helicopter and a Su-24 aircraft were damaged.

You arent always ready when they shoot you in the back, he added.

Hypothetically, the extended coverage range of the BM-21 Grad MLRS is able to reach Khmeimim from such settlements as Nahr al-Bared (about 22 miles away) and Qalaat al-Madiq (25 miles away) in Hama province.

Roman Saponkov, a Russian military correspondent, posted images allegedly showing the damage at Khmeimim, suggesting six Su-24 aircraft were hit as well as one Su-35S, one An-72, one An-30 spy plane and one Mi-8 helicopter. According to him, the Russian military didnt know the militants had achieved a new technological level and could reach the base, thus insinuating the attackers had foreign backup."

Alternative theories propelled by liberal media insinuate the base was not attacked Dec. 31 and that the ammunition depot might have been accidentally detonated by New Year's celebrations in Latakia. This could in part explain why no group has yet claimed responsibility for the Khmeimim attacks. Opposition media outlets report the Latakia province saw some shooting on that night resulting in a number of civilian injuries and one death, yet local residents did not confirm any serious blasts.

On specialized online forums, some commenters  allegedly retired Russian military personnel  speculate that only two aircraft were damaged as a result of the night attack by mortar fire and homemade drones. The tail unit of one jet, according to them, was damaged not by a mortar, but by a crash with a car that happened during the confusion of the shelling.

Proponents of all theories seem to share a view that the government might have leaked some initial details of the story as Moscow wanted it presented, and chose Kommersant specifically because the paper is known for its quality and reliability, so the account would not be questioned. But once Kommersant fleshed out more details, and so many contradictions surfaced, the Defense Ministry might have turned to Sputnik to say some of the Kommersant story was fake. The ministry's "alternative facts," however, didn't strike many as being terribly credible.

It's also possible the government simply doesn't know what happened, so multiple sources shared various theories.

Some pro-government Russian experts insist that no opposition group claimed responsibility for the attack because they fear the Russian military will take revenge. Yet previously, the opposition hasn't been afraid to "sign" the missiles they launched toward Syrian government forces in Latakia, saying in reference to peace talks in Russia and Kazakhstan, Neither Astana nor Sochi, we are for Hama," and "Sochi is yours, Hama is ours."

The experts also deny the attacks might have been a provocation by pro-Assad forces, though the Syrian opposition suggests that might have been the case. Ayman al-Asami, a member of the delegation of the Syrian Revolutionary Forces to the Astana peace talks, said the Khmeimim base was shelled from the Bustan al-Basha settlement in Latakia by the pro-Iranian group Imam al-Murtada to block Moscow-led initiatives on the political settlement of the Syrian conflict. Another opposition media outlet shared a document  allegedly issued by Syrian intelligence  that orders an investigation of the attacks delivered from Bustan al-Basha, which is under the control of the pro-government militia the National Defense Forces.

Moscow declared that from now on the base will be better guarded. But the Russian military long ago should have taken measures such as spreading its aircraft across the base and mounting reinforced-concrete shelters that could protect the aircraft, ammunition and fuel from mortar shelling and missile and bombing raids. Most importantly, however, instead of just increasing the fighting in de-escalation zones, Russia should take the appropriate political steps to support the cease-fire and increase pressure on its allies in Damascus and Tehran.
January 8, 2018

So far, 2018 has been a negative year for Egyptian-Sudanese relations. On Jan. 4, Sudan recalled its ambassador from Egypt. Without providing further details, Sudans Foreign Ministry stated that Ambassador Kamal al-Din Hassan Ali was recalled for consultations. Egypts Foreign Ministry is weighing how to take appropriate action. This diplomatic spat has unfolded in a complicated context in which numerous issues have fueled tensions in bilateral relations for years.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project has contributed to friction in Cairo-Khartoum relations. Egypt sees the project as a major threat to its water interests, while Sudan views it as a valuable opportunity. In November 2017, Cairo officially declared that technical negotiations with Sudan and Ethiopia had failed. Then, at the beginning of January, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reportedly sent Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn a proposal to continue talks between Cairo and Addis Ababa over the megaproject, excluding Khartoum. Egypt denies that Sisi sent this proposal to Ethiopias leadership. Nonetheless, the Nile's water supply remains a source of much disagreement between Cairo and Khartoum.

According to Sudanese state-owned media, the Egyptian military has since deployed its forces to waters off the coast of the disputed Halayeb triangle border area, where Cairo has also sent warplanes. Although not a new conflict, Egypt and Sudans territorial dispute at the border area has recently escalated.

In April 2017, Khartoum saw itself in a stronger position due to more support from Arab Gulf monarchies and a new administration in Washington that may have appeared far more open to a Sudan-US rapprochement than any of US President Donald Trumps three predecessors. This prompted Sudanese officials to ask Egypt to relinquish control of the area; Cairos refusal led to harsh words in the Egyptian and Sudanese media. Then friction intensified once Khartoum re-established a requirement that Egyptians must possess a visa to enter Sudan. The following month, Sudan banned the importation of Egypt-sourced agricultural products, and President Omar al-Bashir accused Cairo of arming rebels in Darfur, which Egypt denied. Egypt fired back, pointing to the residence of several Muslim Brotherhood members in Sudan.

In the grander regional picture, Egypt and Sudan find themselves on opposite sides of an increasingly polarized Sunni Arab world, underscored by the Qatar crisis. Egypt  along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates  has sought to convince African states to back the Saudi/UAE-led bloc against Doha based on the narrative that Qatar is a rogue actor and a sponsor of terrorism. Yet Sudan has refused to join this anti-Qatar campaign. Khartoums neutral response to the Gulf dispute has been an outcome of Sudan  in complete contrast to Egypt  not viewing Doha as a menace and Sudans understanding that close ties with all six Gulf Cooperation Council states, including Qatar, best serves Khartoums interests. Illustrative of Egypts inability to bring Sudan behind the campaign against Doha was Qatari Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Ghanim Bin Shaheen al-Ghanims visit to Khartoum at the end of last month, when he held discussions with his Sudanese and Russian counterparts about Red Sea security issues.

Since the eruption of Libyas civil war in mid-2014, Egypt and Sudan have been opposing stakeholders in that conflict, with Khartoum aligning with Ankara and Doha instead of with Egypt and the UAE. Also, by November 2017, Egypt began inserting itself as an influential diplomatic actor in South Sudans internal environment for numerous reasons, namely to secure greater leverage over Sudan. Recent reports claim that Egyptian, Emirati and Eritrean military and political officials are coordinating, from Eritrea, with elements of Sudans opposition.

Egypt and Sudan have had an overall negative relationship since the aftermath of Hosni Mubaraks visit to Addis Ababa in 1995, when gunmen tried and failed to assassinate him. Egyptian officials accused their Sudanese counterparts of plotting the assassination attempt. By October 2016, there was renewed optimism regarding a rapprochement after Bashir accepted Sisis invitation to Cairo, where he received Egypts highest military medal as a gesture from the Egyptian leadership. The two countries further signed a strategic partnership agreement and 15 memorandums of understanding.

Such hope was short-lived, as the various issues that heightened friction in Egypt-Sudan relations throughout 2017 prevented Bashirs 2016 trip to Cairo from establishing more of a solid foundation for better relations. Ultimately, the emergence (or re-emergence) of new and old sources of contention between Egypt and Sudan has left the two countries with conflicting interests and clashing agendas in Africa and the Middle East.

Yet what recently brought the tension in Cairo-Khartoum relations to an entirely new level was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans visit to Sudan last month. Erdogans trip resulted in Sudan agreeing to temporarily give Turkey control of Suakin Island. This news alarmed many in Cairo and other Arab capitals who interpreted Bashirs decision as essentially giving Turkey license to establish its second military base on the African continent. This also raised questions about Qatar or Iran being able to access a Turkish military installation within close proximity to Saudi Arabia and Yemens Red Sea coasts.

The Egyptian media lashed out at Sudan for embracing Erdogan and looking to Turkey for deeper military and economic ties. Cairos concern is that Sudan will use greater military might and diplomatic leverage from Ankara to step up pressure on Sisi with respect to both the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project and the Halayeb triangle border area. Beyond such strategic factors, which leave Egypt concerned about Turkeys new foothold in the Red Sea, officials in Cairo see Sudan as facilitating Erdogans "neo-Ottoman" and pro-Muslim Brotherhood foreign policy ambitions, which do not sit well with Egypt and other Arab states.

Among the numerous lingering tensions between Cairo and Khartoum, the future of the relationship between these two Nile countries  once close allies  will largely depend on water issues. Failure to mend fences will ultimately make it increasingly difficult for the two to address major regional challenges facing both of them, such as extremism, fast population growth, climate change and transformation of industries. Yet if Cairo and Khartoum can pursue a diplomatic course of action, such cooperation could exemplify the ability of governments worldwide to overcome political tensions in pursuit of peace and good neighborly ties. The gloomy alternative is a future in which fast-paced demographic and environmental changes exacerbate food security and other vital interests of nation-states, leading to more "water wars."
January 8, 2018

On Jan. 2, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman met with new Zionist Camp leader Avi Gabbay. It was a friendly meeting to give the two men a chance to get to know each other. There were no major revelations and just a single comic pause, when Gabbay asked about the fate of the American peace plan. The ambassador's response was unequivocal: The United States has not abandoned the idea of reaching an arrangement. One might wonder when the Americans would realize that the peace plan idea has abandoned them.

Meanwhile, there isnt a single member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet who has any expectations about US President Donald Trump's peace initiative. Instead, they share a rare consensus: It's all about nothing, and it will never amount to anything. The same sentiment prevails in Ramallah: Trumps "ultimate deal" is dead and buried. Please avoid any condolence calls.

In Ramallah, a 10-minute drive from Jerusalem, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is all holed up on top of a tall tree. People close to him say that he's done with the United States. Matters have reached a point that his office has issued unambiguous instructions to Palestinians in any official capacity whatsoever to cut off all ties with the US Consulate in East Jerusalem. Abbas doesn't want to hear from Trump. He has finally been convinced that the president is little more than a Zionist agent who is working with Netanyahu to decimate the Palestinian people and incite the entire Middle East against them. The much-discussed book "Fire and Fury" only infuriated the Palestinians even more: "We read in it that Trump sent [White House senior adviser Jared] Kushner to consult with [Jewish-American billionaire] Sheldon Adelson before putting together his peace plan," one senior Palestinian official said disparagingly on condition of anonymity. "And then he pretends to be an honest broker.

The sense of euphoria among the Israeli right has reached record highs over the past few weeks. A tidal wave of new initiatives and legislation intended to bury the two-state solution is flooding the Knesset. There is the United Jerusalem law, which would require a special majority of 80 Knesset members to enact any changes to Jerusalem's municipal boundaries (in case of a diplomatic agreement), the decision by the Likud party's Central Committee to support the immediate annexation of the settlements in the West Bank, and a whole slew of similar initiatives and ideas. The purpose behind these initiatives and legislation is to establish facts on the ground by taking advantage of the Trump momentum. The prime minister is not blocking these initiatives as he did in the past. On the contrary, he is promoting them in what can only be called a free-for-all.

Meanwhile, some of the ideas that the American team looked into are starting to leak out, explaining why Abbas beat such a hasty exit from the scene. Although they have no formal confirmation, reports about them have started to appear on Al Jazeera's English-language website and various other places. These reports refer mainly to an old plan, already raised a decade ago. Now it seems as if most of the main players in the region, including the US team, are giving this plan another look. This would involve an exchange of territories by three or more parties (perhaps even four or five). What makes it different from prior efforts is that this time, the Egyptians and Saudis are in on it.

At the core of the idea is the creation of a major Sunni-Israel alliance, which would serve as a counterbalance to the victorious Shiite axis, which poses a threat in the north. The basic idea includes an extensive territorial exchange, in which Egypt would cede a piece of the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip. With this, Gaza's territory would extend southward along the seashore, making it three or four times larger than it currently is. This would make it possible to relieve some of the pressure in Gaza, but it would also shift the balance of power between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

According to this plan, the center of power in the future Palestinian state would be in Gaza, expanded toward the north of Sinai, rather than the West Bank. In exchange for the expanded territories that they would receive in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians would give up territories in the West Bank, allowing Israel to annex the settlement blocs along with a generous amount of land around them, thereby maintaining some degree of territorial integrity between the various blocs. At the same time, Israel would give Egypt a narrow strip of territory along the lengthy southern border between the two countries. There is also the possibility that Saudi Arabia and Jordan would also participate in these territorial exchanges, with various ideas proposed.

As noted, a similar plan was already proposed in Israel in the first decade of the 21st century. It was developed by Israeli geography professor Yehoshua Ben Aryeh and adopted by head of the Israeli National Security Council Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent a representative to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to see if the plan was even feasible. The Egyptians responded by tossing it into the dustbin of history. They refused to give up a single grain of sand from their territory in Sinai. The situation today is entirely different. Sinai constitutes a serious economic and security drain on Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's regime. He'd be happy to have someone relieve him of this problem, for the right price, of course. Sisi has already transferred two Egyptian islands to Saudi Arabia and survived.

Hints that this major plan is being formulated together with the Egyptians and Saudis could be discerned in a series of leaks over the past few weeks concerning both those countries' real position concerning Trump's Dec. 6 Jerusalem declaration. Despite all the official denials, Ramallah is convinced that Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have betrayed them by giving a discreet nod to the Trump declaration.

In one of his tweets, Trump hinted that Israel would also be expected to pay a "political price" for his declaration (tweeting that We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more.) Still, nothing came of it once the Palestinians blew up the talks. Diplomatic sources believe that Israel's anticipated concession revolved around a plan proposed by Likud Knesset member Anat Berko under which certain Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem would be transferred to the Palestinian Authority. That plan, which was described by Al-Monitor in an earlier article, is constantly being discussed and refined in secret discussions, with Netanyahu fully aware of it.

As of now, the whole idea has been put on ice, and not because of the cold wave hitting North America either. Abbas immediately recognized the risk and took advantage of the Trump declaration to escape as fast as he could. "That's what happens when people make plans that have no basis in reality," one senior Palestinian official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. "Abbas would rather die with nothing than live with such a plan."
January 8, 2018

Wind turbines are an efficient, nonpolluting energy solution, but even they have ecological disadvantages. In November 2017, the Regional Committee for Planning and Construction in northern Israel rejected a program for establishing a wind turbine farm in Ramot Menashe. The program was rejected due to anticipated damage to the nesting region of red falcons. This region is also where falcons born in captivity are released to nature. Red falcons are in danger of extinction around the world.

The Red Book of Birds in Israel, a report by the Society for the Protection of Nature (SPN), was recently updated for the first time in 15 years and submitted to the committee. The report paints an especially worrisome picture of the condition of wild birds in Israel. The report stated that 65 species of birds are in extreme danger of extinction. This is in contrast to only 38 species that received this designation in 2002  an increase of 71%. The following are some of the species in extreme danger of extinction: the Griffon vulture, Egyptian vulture, golden eagle, Bonelli's eagle, Lanner falcon, short-eared owl, yellow wagtail, Lichtenstein's sandgrouse and Nubian nightjar.

Dan Alon, the director of the Israel Ornithological Center of the SPN in Israel, told Al-Monitor that the main reason for the worsening of the situation is the fact that living and nesting territories for birds in Israel have shrunken considerably. This is because Israel has developed the areas surrounding cities. Another severe problem is the contamination of water and food sources. Sometimes farmers use poison against wolves, and this severely harms birds of prey and carcass-eating animals. This year, only 30 eagles were counted in the Golan Heights, in contrast to 180 eagles 10 years ago.

Another danger that threatens eagles is when they cross the Israel-Syria border. A minority of them are hunted down, and others are purposely caught by the Syrians, who fear that the GPS devices attached to these birds are really military espionage devices. An eagle like this was caught in Syria this past September by a rebel force against Bashar al-Assads regime. It was returned to Israel after secret negotiations. Some say the rebels returned the eagle to show their appreciation to Israel for the medical treatment given to wounded Syrians in Israeli hospitals.

Bird protectors are now focusing on averting the establishment of a turbine farm in the Tel Fares area in the Golan Heights. According to the Israel Ornithological Center, these turbines will likely wipe out the entire eagle population. Alon said that only a public struggle can prevent the erection of the turbines and that hundreds of Israelis have already sent letters in which they expressed their reservations and outright opposition to the turbines. The letters were sent to the Regional Committee for Planning and Construction, which is supposed to discuss the plan.

Noam Lider, the director of SPNs Ecology Center, told Al-Monitor that the update of the Red Book was just the first stage in the strategic plan needed to preserve Israels rich biological diversity. Lider said, The Red Book is an instrument that deliberately focuses on nature-preserving activities needed to prevent the extinction of the species in the book. The condition of some of the bird species has worsened significantly in comparison to the past. Therefore, renewed, system-wide deep thinking is needed as well as the development of new conservation tools.

Alon added that the report is a cautionary cry to decision-makers, who they hope will adopt actions that will decrease environmental damage.

The SPN also works with various parties to minimize damage from construction and development. For example, there was a joint project in 2008 with the Israel Electric Corporation to prevent the electrocution of birds of prey sitting on electrical pillars and cables by protecting exposed electric pillars. Yet the SPN is also fighting with the Electric Corporation to forgo ultra-high-power lines, which endanger the birds. In fact, this struggle led to the cancellation of the 2016 plan to string high-voltage electrical lines in the Jezreel Valley. During the migration season, this area is in the path of the flight of millions of birds from Europe to Africa. The Jezreel Valley is also home to many Israeli wild birds.

According to the updated Red Book, the condition of 15 species has improved and their extinction danger has decreased. Four species have returned to nest in Israel after they had become extinct in Israel in the past. This is by virtue of assorted nature conservation activities, such as enforcing the prohibition against duck hunting in reservoirs. Alon also said that the court forced the SPN to retract the permits it had given in the past to hunt quails. This is another bird that has deteriorated greatly in recent years.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) work closely with the SPN. For example, the IDFs training programs in the Mount Hermon area were recently adapted to the nesting seasons of the wild birds in the area and in the training areas. Similar activity is now being carried out in training areas of the Negev to prevent harm from coming to birds in danger, including the houbara bustard.

Of course, the birds do not understand diplomatic borders or political disputes. Thus, to safeguard them, Israel must cooperate with neighboring countries and mainly with the Palestinian Authority (PA). This cooperation is not simple and encounters many obstacles. However, sometimes it does succeed, such as in the case of the red falcon. The red falcon was under a severe threat of extinction at the beginning of the millennium. Yet after hard work with activists from the Palestine Wildlife Society, the condition of the red falcons has improved.

According to Alon, cooperative work with the Palestinians in the recent year involved a project of renovating bird habitats in the Modiin region, on the Green Line. Next year, nature-preservation bodies from Israel, Jordan and the PA will conduct a joint survey of bird species on the border.

In spite of all the projects and cooperative work, the bottom line is pessimistic: The condition of wild birds in Israel, and in the entire region, is worsening over the years.
By PTI: Manama (Bahrain), Jan 8 (PTI) In his first address to NRIs outside India after taking over as Congress president, Rahul Gandhi today accused the government of dividing people on the basis of caste and religion, alleging it was converting the anger of jobless youth into hatred among communities.

Gandhi also assured the NRI community here that he would give a "new shining Congress party" in the next six months, hinting that there will be dramatic changes in the organisation, in which the people will believe in and trust.

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Noting that there was a "serious problem" in the country, he urged NRIs help solve the problem and be a part of this restructuring.

He also exuded confidence that the Congress will defeat the BJP in 2019 as it had the strength and capability to do so, while noting that the saffron party merely scraped through in recent elections in Gujarat, which is their fortress.

Addressing NRIs at the meeting of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) here tonight, the Congress president gave his vision for the country saying his top three priorities would be to create jobs, good health infrastructure and an education system.

"India today is free, but once again it is under threat. There are two clear threats that face our country today. Our government has failed to create jobs for the people.

"Instead of uniting people of all religions together, the government is busy creating the anger due to lack of jobs into hatred between communities," he said.

"There is a serious problem in the country and you can solve this problem. I have come here to build that bridge," he told the gathering, while seeking their support in helping change India.

Gandhi claimed that the governments failure to create jobs is resulting in "tremendous unrest" in India and this anger is visible in the streets and is rising with each passing day.

"Instead of removing poverty and creating jobs, what we see instead is a rise in the forces of hate and division", he said.

The Congress chief, who received applause from NRIs who had come from various parts of the Middle East as well as other countries, said he has not come to tell them anything but, "Ive come here to ask for your help. We need you to fight these forces of anger and hatred."

Noting that Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar were also NRIs, he said "Our ancestors needed you in 1947 to protect the idea of India and I have come to seek your help to transform India now."

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Gandhi is here as a state guest of Bahrain.

He said that Indian politics is "quite a strange experience" and noted that signalling by politicians in the country is "wrong" that leads to incidents of hate and violence against people.

He said when such hate incidents take place, the government is silent on them and that should not happen.

"Today the problem is that the signalling is wrong. There is violence against somebody, there is silence. There should not be silence. The government of India should make its position clear. We cannot imagine an India that does not belong to all of us," he said. PTI SKC NAB KUN

--- ENDS ---
January 5, 2018

KIRKUK, Iraq  In a Jan. 4 meeting with a delegation representing Kurdistans opposition parties, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said that an agreement has been reached to calm the situation in Kirkuk province and in the district of Tuz Khormato.

The retaking of Kirkuk by the Iraqi army in October has changed the balance of power in the oil-rich town that had been under full control of the Kurds since 2014. The operation was part of Baghdads retaliatory measures after the Kurds held an independence referendum that has since been declared illegal.

In Kirkuk, some signs of the three years of Kurdish control have already been erased. Some pictures of Kurds who fell in the battle against the Islamic State (IS) have been replaced by images of other Iraqis who were killed, and the 20-meter-tall (65-foot) statue of a Kurdish peshmerga fighter on the motorway into the city now has an Iraqi flag.

In his office in the Kirkuk provincial councils compound in downtown Kirkuk, with the bodyguards of Turkmen and Arab colleagues hanging around in the corridor, independent Kurdish council member Awad Amin said, All the balances have changed. Some feel that now is the time to readjust all the wrong decisions made by the Kurds.

Kirkuk is a mixed city shared by Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and Christians. Politically, the Kurds were a majority and held the governors post, but the deadlock over new elections, power sharing and the status of the disputed city has remained impossible to break. Since the Iraqi takeover, the departures of the governor and a number of Kurdish politicians have changed the political balance of power.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein confiscated hundreds of acres of agricultural land from the Kurds and gave the land to Arabs in order to Arabize the area. Some of the Arabs were expelled from the city while the Kurds controlled it.

The new Iraqi Constitution introduced after Saddams removal in 2003 includes clauses related to settling the fate of the city and its residents. But the process has been difficult and slow.

Only a few of the 6,000 cases have ever been resolved, Amin said. Now we see Arabs coming back. The Kurds feel hopeless.

Most recently, the Iraqi police were involved in threatening Kurds in the village of Palkana in Kirkuk province. They reportedly ordered them to leave their homes within 72 hours, as members of an Arab tribe were waiting to take them over. After urgent complaints, the authorities in Baghdad prevented this from happening.

The Kurds lost their own security forces when the Iraqi army took over Oct. 16.

According to Rawla Hamid al-Obeidi, a member of the Arab Committee on the provincial council, the Kurdish forces cannot return. They caused many problems here. They were tied to the Kurdish parties and working to further their interests. We are against those kinds of forces.

Obeidi said that since the situation is now stable and safe, all Kurds are welcome to return. It is just a rumor that those who voted in favor of Kurdish independence are not welcome, she said. Still, the fact that the Kurds imposed both their referendum and the Kurdish flag on the people of Kirkuk is a big problem for us. The Kurdish flag should only fly in those places where the Kurds rule.

The Kurds saw the flying of their flag to be within their rights, as they had taken control of the city after chasing IS away. But Obeidi brands it as imposing their vision on the city. They used their domination to push things through, which is bullying. We are supposed to pass laws by agreement.

While the Kurds complain about Arabization, the Arabs accuse the Kurds of Kurdification. Now that Kurdish rule has ended, Obeidi is working on taking the peshmerga to court over the destruction of Arab villages in the battle against IS. Human rights organizations have confirmed that dozens of villages in Kirkuk province were razed and flattened and its inhabitants expelled. While the peshmerga branded them IS villages, the operation was seen as a move by the Kurds to take over disputed areas.

Some 82 villages were destroyed, said Obeidi, and over 22,000 people were displaced and made homeless. The peshmerga trespassed on the rights of the Arab people living there, she added. Obeidi wants to bring the matter to the international courts so those responsible will be punished, and she mounted a campaign to help the villagers go back home.

Both Arab and Turkmen members of the provincial council say the situation is better than before, but that opinion is not shared outside the council compound. You do not know whom to trust, said freelance Turkmen journalist Omar Hilali. Before, people feared the Kurds. Now anyone can pick you up.

Hilali was himself picked up and forced by Iraqi security forces to sign a document stating that he had no links to the Kurdish media. But many of my friends are Kurdish journalists. Now I dare not even pick up the phone when they call me. The same thing has happened to nongovernmental organization workers, he said.

The first weeks after the takeover saw many revenge attacks. Following the looting and destruction of thousands of Kurdish homes after their owners fled the nearby Turkmen-Kurdish town of Tuz Khormato, a Kurdish resistance group was formed to fight the Shiite militias controlling the area.

Hilali fears for the fragile relations between the different groups in Kirkuk. Before, we thought the ties between the different components were strong. Now we know they could break under the slightest pressure.

Amin agrees that the problems between the groups have been aggravated. The different groups are moving further and further apart.

Normalization can only happen after Erbil and Baghdad have entered into direct negotiations. Our problems can only be solved at the highest level, Amin said.
January 8, 2018

Some 150,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem neighborhoods on the eastern side of the Israeli-built wall snaking in and out of Jerusalem and the West Bank continue to live in a legal and administrative limbo. The political orphans of East Jerusalem are not allowed to be connected to their Palestinian leadership but are also not part of the Israeli political system even though the latter decides, unilaterally, what happens to them. This was recently reiterated by the Israeli Knesset.

While much of the attention was given to a law passed Jan. 2 requiring 80 out 120 Knesset members to agree to any changes to the boundaries of Jerusalem, another part of the original bill was of much more direct interest to the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. The New York Times reported Jan. 2 that right-wing Knesset member Naftali Bennett, leader of HaBayit HaYehudi, had unexpectedly decided at the last moment to remove a clause that would have made it easier to redraw the map of East Jerusalem.

The Times reported, The surprise move came around 3 a.m., when members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus governing coalition stripped from a bill they were about to enact language that would have made it easier to exclude Palestinians from the map of Jerusalem. The move left the status of Kufr Aqab, Shuafat and other Palestinian neighborhoods in the city unchanged.

The decision appears to have been made for tactical reasons. According to the Times, right-wing Israeli officials, fearing that a left-wing government might one day take power, did not want to make it easier for such a government to create a separate Palestinian municipality to be called al-Quds by using administrative powers rather than the Knesset's legislative process.

Whether changes in the status of Palestinian communities beyond the wall will be made easier or harder has not much affected the outlook of Palestinians contacted by Al-Monitor.

Khader Dibs, a Jerusalem activist, told Al-Monitor, We are working hard to defend our national rights in Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Palestine, and to work against their efforts to impose apartheid rule on our communities, he said.

Dibs called the decision by the Knesset the latest proof that the Israelis negotiate among themselves about the future of Palestinians, but not with the Palestinians themselves. He stated, They act unilaterally as if the Knesset is the only party that is involved in this conflict. They refuse to negotiate with us or with the Quartet or any other reliable mediator. They simply negotiate among themselves about our future.

In terms of events on the ground, Dibs said that the Knesset decision not to impose changes on the status of Palestinian communities will hopefully allow for some slight improvements to the deteriorating situation.

In recent times, they had withdrawn the services of the Jerusalem municipality, but now they have decided to keep us within the municipality, he said. And there are talks now that they will be establishing a post office and offices of the Interior Ministry at the Shuafat checkpoint to provide services, while at the same time preventing, as much as possible, Palestinians from entering Jerusalem.

While Jerusalem's municipal boundary zigzags between the homes of the Shuafat refugee camp (part of the West Bank) and the neighborhood of Shuafat (part of Israel), and between areas under Israeli control and areas that are under the Palestinian government, the situation in Kufr Aqab to the north is an even bigger humanitarian issue. Munir Saghair, head of the Kufr Aqab local council in areas under Palestinian administrative control, told the Israeli daily Haaretz in October that some 64,000 Palestinians live in crowded and unregulated areas.

According to Saghair, since 2001, the Israeli municipality has refused to issue a single housing permit, leaving some 25,000 Palestinians living in unlicensed homes. Israel issued orders in October to demolish five high-rise buildings housing 138 families in Kufr Aqab. The unlicensed, rented buildings also include offices belonging to various Israeli health and social services offices in these supposed illegal structures, Saghair told Haaretz when the demolition orders were issued and then approved by Israeli courts.

In its weekly meeting, the Palestinian government blamed the deteriorating situation on one factor in particular. The decision by US President Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has whetted the appetite of Israeli extremists to demolish the peace process, it said in a statement after meeting Jan. 3.

Meanwhile, the status of some 150,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites continues to be in flux. The time has come, however, to pay closer attention to the political and humanitarian rights of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, in the Old City and outside its walls and on both sides of the Israeli-imposed security wall.
January 8, 2018

The Arabi21 news website revealed Dec. 20 that Iraqi President Fuad Masum had approved Law No. 76 of 2017, which stripped Palestinian refugees living in Iraq of their rights and classified them as foreigners. The law came into effect after being published in the Iraqi Gazette.

The new law replaced Law No. 202 of 2001, issued by former President Saddam Hussein, forcing the Iraqi state to treat Palestinians as equals to Iraqis, with all privileges and citizenship rights, such as tax exemption, opportunities to work in government departments, and access to education and health care services.

Mohammed Mshenesh, a Palestinian researcher on refugee affairs, told Al-Monitor, The most important issue with the new law is that it replaces the previous one that stipulated treating Palestinians as Iraqis. This is why Palestinians are worried about the future of those in Iraq who were already marginalized regardless of the law protecting them, which has now been quashed.

Mshenesh added, The new law will deprive Palestinian engineers, doctors and teachers the ability to become members of Iraqi trade unions," thus preventing them from practicing these professions, "and whoever wants to start a commercial project will have to comply with the foreigners law, which requires the presence of an Iraqi sponsor and the approval of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the Ministry of Interior. This will increase the Palestinians suffering and push the few left to leave Iraq.

Until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, roughly 43,000 Palestinians resided in Iraq since they arrived as refugees in 1948; their numbers decreased as they were targeted, killed and hundreds were arrested by US forces. Thousands suffered from organized killings, expulsion and displacement at the hands of armed Shiite militias. There are no precise figures on the number of Palestinians residing in Iraq today, yet some estimate less than 4,000 remain, some of whom live among Iraqis while others reside in refugee camps.

The legal status of Palestinian refugees in Iraq is not clear. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior does not adopt specific instructions in this regard; it sometimes gives Palestinians a one-month residency, at other times a permit for two or three months.

Ihsan Adel, a legal adviser to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, told Al-Monitor, This new Iraqi law has a political background and it should have been the subject of discussion between the concerned authorities such as the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations. Palestinians have been in Iraq for decades, and their legal situation has been altered in virtue of policies adopted by successive governments.

Adel noted, However, they have suffered a setback since the ousting of Saddam in 2003. Iraqi governments have treated them as undesirable guests, claiming that Palestinians supported Saddam. The new law will have a harsh impact on them. They do not have Iraqi passports, but rather refugee travel documents that does not make it easy for them to travel.

On Dec. 21, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed quoted a senior source in the Iraqi presidency's office on condition of anonymity as saying that the new law is inhumane to the Palestinians.

Palestinian Ambassador to Iraq Ahmad Akel told Al-Monitor, We are confident that the Iraqi government will not change the situation of the Palestinian refugees, but we fear that the ministries will start treating them differently. On Jan. 2, I met with Iraqi parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri to clarify the situation.

According to Akel, Jabouri had promised him to reach a legal arrangement so Palestinian refugees and Iraqis can be treated as equals in terms of rights and duties.

The Palestinian factions denounced the Iraqi law. On Dec. 27, Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas political bureau, denounced the new Iraqi law, as it deprives the Palestinians of their acquired rights, contradicts the characteristics of the Iraqi people as well as coincides with Israeli attempts to wipe out the refugee issue, all the while the Palestinians continue to be targeted until this day.

On Dec. 25, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine expressed its deepest regret that the law would deprive the Palestinians in Iraq of their human rights, especially of permanent residency, and wished Iraq would reconsider its repeal of Law No. 202 in order to spare Palestinians further harm.

Taysir Khaled, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, called Dec. 23 on the Iraqi parliament and government to withdraw their approval of the law because it represents a serious violation of the rights granted by the Iraqi government to Palestinians in Iraq 70 years ago. He also found it baffling for such a law to be issued in parallel with US and Israeli pressure to dissolve the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and to settle the refugee issue once and for all.

The legal status of Palestinian refugees in Iraq progressed between 1961 and 2001, when dozens of resolutions and laws dealing with their affairs were issued.

Issam Adwan, the head of Hamas Division of Refugee Affairs, told Al-Monitor, The new law falls in line with the repressive circumstances suffered by the Palestinians in Iraq, because some Iraqi government parties have always accused them of supporting Saddam. In addition, they are marginalized because of their sect; those parties are against Sunni Muslims, especially since Iraq is known for its Shiite majority.

Adwan added, This law would have never seen the light if the PLO showed a strict stance in defense of the Palestinians rights. However, the PLO is not paying much attention to them, which could prompt us to resort to Iran since it has great influence in Iraq and could put an end to the new law.

If the law were to be applied in early 2018, the number of Palestinians in Iraq would decrease even more; they would leave in search of safety, especially since they would be prevented from investing and deprived of employment in the private sector. The law would also prevent them from owning property or joining trade unions, and it would force them to pay full college tuition.

Thamer Mashineesh, the president of the Iraqi Palestinians Association, told Al-Monitor, The Iraqi law ends the permanent residency of Palestinians in Iraq, so they are now required to renew their residency through consulting the official agencies. They could risk being expelled from Iraq if they were to commit any violation. This could threaten their rights to compulsory and university education, which evidently affects their education and gradually turns them into an ignorant community. In addition, all health care services would decline and they would be unable to pay for expensive surgeries, increasing their daily suffering.

Majed al-Zeer, the head of the Palestinian Return Center in London, told Al-Monitor, The new Iraqi law is a step backward in how Palestinians in Iraq are treated. He said that he wants to meet with Iraqi Ambassador to the United Kingdom Salih Husain Ali to discuss the law, its effects and its impact on the situation of Palestinians in Iraq.
January 8, 2018

Saudi Arabia is following the unrest in Iran with intense interest, hoping it will force its regional rival to turn inward. The Saudis have little capacity to influence Iranian domestic developments, however, and share many of the same problems as Tehran. The Iranian question is unlikely to help resolve Riyadhs biggest foreign policy challenge: the expensive quagmire in Yemen that is only getting worse.

Since the start of the protests Dec. 28 in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest and holies city, the state-controlled media in Saudi Arabia has followed the protests closely. The protesters' call for Iran to spend more money at home and less on foreign adventures in Syria, the Gaza Strip, Iraq and Yemen especially has gotten much attention in Saudi media outlets. The Saudis have been fighting to combat Iranian advances in all these states for years with little success, so they hope that domestic unrest will constrain Iran, especially the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Saudi media has expressed concern about the sustainability of the unrest. Media articles in the country featured CIA Director Mike Pompeos public estimate that the unrest is likely to continue because of the weakness of the Iranian economy. At least one Saudi commentator has expressed concern that the unrest not produce another failed state in the region, which would create too much turmoil. Better to have enough disruption to keep the Iranians focused internally.

The Saudi government has been more quiet when it comes to on-the-record statements. It can scarcely endorse the protests' calls for democracy and freedom of expression and protest. The kingdom is an absolute monarchy married to a theocracy. Opposition to the royal family, even within the family itself, is ruthlessly repressed; 11 princes were arrested on Jan. 4 for protests at the royal palace in Riyadh. The government said they were protesting utility bills but Saudi dissident sites reported the princes were protesting the demotion and house arrest of former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

The kingdom also shares with Iran the same fundamental economic problem: low oil prices have flatlined growth. King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud announced new measures to cushion the impact of ricing prices recently as the government strives to both implement Saudi Vision 2030, which seeks to reduce dependence on oil, and avoid austerity measures that would spark domestic unrest in the kingdom. Its a daunting challenge.

Saudi Arabia has been reaching out to Iranian opposition groups in the last year, including Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. Arab and Baluchi dissidents have also been approached but there are few details about the contacts; these are fringe elements in Iran, not threats to regime survival.

Most Iranians despise the Saudis. Thats why the Tehran authorities are eager to blame the Saudi government for allegedly paying for the protests. The most effective way to discredit the protesters is to paint them as puppets of the Wahhabi and Saudi system. The king's intensely sectarian policies at home and abroad have only reinforced Shiite Persian distaste for Saudi Arabia. His son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is portrayed in the Iranian media as an upstart who has huge ambitions.

The kingdoms biggest national security challenge is the war in Yemen that started almost three years ago. The Saudi government blames Iran for the war, but Riyadh spends far more than Iran does as each backs their allies in the civil war. Indeed, Irans expenses in backing the Houthis are a pittance of the wars cost to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis also get almost all of the international blame for the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen because of its blockade. Mark Lowcock, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, last week said Yemen is approaching the apocalypse due to famine and disease caused by the blockade. He warned Yemen soon will be the worlds worst humanitarian crisis in 50 years if the war continues.
January 8, 2018

A Turkish military convoy came under fire in Idlib today as Russian-backed regime forces pressed on with their offensive to rout al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups from the eastern half of the northwestern Syrian province. Idlib is one of the few areas to remain under Sunni opposition control since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011.

According to Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency, a rocket landed just 20-30 meters (66-98 feet) from the convoy in the Darat Izza district and no injuries have been reported. Anadolu did not name the attackers and there have been no claims of responsibility so far.

In separate news, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which monitors the conflict, reported that the death toll from Sundays car bomb attack on the Idlib headquarters of a Chechen jihadi group had risen to 34, of which 18 were civilians.

Turkish troops moved into Idlib in October, ostensibly to establish observation points to monitor a cease-fire between the regime and the opposition and to ease the flow of humanitarian supplies, among other things, for millions of internally displaced Syrian sheltering in the province.

Through its military presence, Turkey was also expected to pressure the al-Qaeda-linked militia known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to disarm and disband, or at the very least move to the western part of Idlib under the informal terms of the Astana talks Turkey co-sponsors with Russia and Iran.

Turkey has instead eased into a modus vivendi with HTS, and raised many eyebrows when its troops were escorted by the jihadis as they first moved in. Turkey has used its presence mainly to hem in Afrin, the Syrian Kurdish-controlled enclave Ankara has repeatedly threatened to invade.

The looming question is whether Russia will lean on Turkey for having failed to keep its side of the deal to move its troops out of the approximately 2,000 square kilometers (1,200 miles) of territory it controls in the so-called Euphrates Shield zone covering Jarablus, al-Bab, Dabiq and Azaz.

A commander with the Syrian Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which are partnering with the US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS), said in a telephone interview with Al-Monitor, After Idlib, Jarablus and Azaz will be next. He insisted, Turkey and the [opposition] Free Syrian Army gangs have no place in Syrias future. And now that Iran is facing internal strife at home its power to influence events in Syria has receded, the commander said. Therefore the notion that Turkey serves Russia as a counterbalance to Iran in Syria no longer holds.

Gonul Tol is the executive director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute. She concurred in an interview with Al-Monitor that Turkey can only stay in Syria for as long as the Russians agree. And having failed to do anything to counter HTS, Turkey has outlived its use. Moreover, its activities in Idlib are opaque to say the least. Tol noted that if Russia is calling for the United States to withdraw its forces from Syria it will need to demand the same of Turkey, if only for the sake of consistency. Unlike Russia, which is in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government, Turkish and US forces are not.

Either way, the status quo is now being upended as Syrian government forces and allied militias are advancing on eastern Idlib, forcing thousands of civilians to flee toward Turkey. With 3 million Syrian refugees already, Turkey is keen to avoid a further influx and is setting up field hospitals and erecting tents along its border to keep them on the opposite side.

The main target of the current offensive appears to be the rebel-held air base of Abu al-Duhour on the southeastern edge of Idlib and securing the road linking Damascus to Aleppo.

Regime forces have reportedly captured nearly 100 villages from the insurgents in Hama and Idlib since late October. SOHR confirmed that 14 villages were wrested from them today alone and regime forces were now some 11 kilometers (7 miles) away from the rebel-held air base. Turkish authorities have blocked access to the website, ostensibly because of its reporting on Turkey, including a recent report that several senior leaders of IS had managed to find sanctuary there.
CH Powell Company, a logistics provider headquartered in Massachusetts, has acquired The Irwin Brown Company, a New Orleans-based licensed customs brokerage and international freight forwarding firm.



Massachusetts-based logistics provider CH Powell Company has acquired The Irwin Brown Company, a licensed customs brokerage and international freight forwarding firm headquartered in New Orleans, with offices along the Gulf Coast, CH Powell confirmed Friday.

This acquisition allows CH Powell Company to expand its import brokerage services in this important region, the firm explained in a prepared statement. With growing trade in Central and South America and the continual growth of imports from Asia to the Gulf, CH Powell and the Irwin Brown team are well positioned to expand its national and international footprint.

CH Powell, which has declined to reveal the purchase price and terms of the acquisition, was founded in 1919 and has 18 offices throughout the U.S., plus subsidiaries throughout Asia and the Netherlands known as Tandem Global Logistics.

Irwin Brown, which was founded in New Orleans in 1968, has offices in Louisiana and Mississippi, offering end-to-end logistics. The firm works with clients throughout the U.S., coordinating their custom clearance, export forwarding and transportation needs.

Irwin Brown has been an industry leader in customs clearance in New Orleans and the Gulf for 50 years. Their reputation and knowledge in this industry are stellar, CH Powell Vice President Robert Powell said. We are excited that the IBC team is joining our company and look for our mutual synergies to grow our business.
French startup 3dRudder is getting ready to show off a brand new update to its foot-maneuvered VR controller lineup at CES 2018 in Las Vegas. For those who may not already be aware, the companys previous controller  the 3dRudder Wireless  actually launched at last years CES. The foot controllers were designed as a way to enable a more realistic VR experience for players who dont necessarily have enough space to set up a full room-scale VR system. While that controller made plenty of headway in that regard, the company is now back with an even better version, which it has dubbed the 3dRudder Blackhawk.

The company started improvements by adding foot straps to Blackhawks disc-shaped platform, ensuring that players feet dont accidentally slip off and ruin whatever VR experience they are interacting with. The company as also added what it calls an Active Dead Zone. As the name of the new feature implies, it effectively provides players with a means to prevent awkward or erratic movements, while remaining responsive to the snappier movements often required by more intense VR titles. Beyond that, the new controller features a new, more refined aesthetic, with blue accents around the edges and LED lighting at the center. Since players will be wearing a headset while playing, its hard to say what purpose those lights will serve, if any. But theyll certainly look nice and the lights may even be enough to save some owners from tripping over the controller in a dark or dimly lit room. For those who happen to own one of the companys previous Wireless controllers, 3dRudder has gone a step further and announced a new update kit which will include foot straps and more.

Meanwhile, 3dRudder will be reportedly be accepting yet another of the upcoming events coveted CES 2018 Innovation Awards. That will actually represent the companys third such award in as many years and is presumably, at least partially, a result of its newly announced Blackhawk controller. So it certainly makes a lot of sense that theyd want to show off their latest innovation at the tech gathering. Unfortunately, as of this writing, no pricing or availability information has been provided for the new controller but that should be available sooner rather than later, with CES 2018 set to start on January 9.
Ahead of the start of CES 2018 a new blog post has gone live on behalf of Google detailing some of the Android TV developments being discussed at this years event. While on the face of it there are no major Android TV announcements coming through from Google during CES, the posting notes how Android TV is taking center stage and largely thanks to a number of new third-party devices being announced that are powered by the platform.

The Medium post is penned by Rachel Berk, a business development manager for Google Play, and generally speaking is more aimed towards developers as it focuses on the benefits of developers opting to bring their offerings to the Android TV platform. In particular, the article looks to detail the latest benefits on offer with Android TVs upgrade to Android 8.0 (Oreo)  an upgrade that is slowly in the process of rolling out to devices. The posting specifically explains how the changes on offer with Oreo will look to improve retention, engagement and re-engagement on Android TV. Like for example, the new channel-layout which is designed with a content-first approach in mind. Providing users an easier and quicker way to see a wide variety of content they may be interested in, from the specific channels (apps) they are most interested in. While this in itself is likely to increase engagement the post further elaborates on how this is also as beneficial to developers who now have the ability to target people with the content you know theyll want to binge. Other aspects that are picked up on as ways to further increase levels of engagement include the use of Video Previews (clips that automatically play when hovered over), and an improved setup procedure  allowing users to download their favorite apps more quickly and easily.

What may be of interest to existing Android TV users is the blog posting provides some insight into Android TV in general as well as its consumption by users  data that is not often provided. For example, the post notes how 87-percent of Android TV users are active every day and on average there are 15 apps installed on an Android TV device. According to the posting, TV apps are seeing (on average) 1.8 to 3 times the amount of minutes watched each month compared to the level of consumption through the same apps on mobile. Highlighting that the TV form factor is helping to further drive TV-related app engagement. At the device level, the posting explains that at present twenty operators in fourteen different countries offer Android TV while 8 out of the top 10 set top box OEMs build for Android TV. Below are images representing some of the changes coming with Oreo and further highlighting the key benefit to developer points.
Moens presence at the Consumer Electronics Show has been relatively strong for several years now, and the latest iteration of the Las Vegas, Nevada-based fair is no exception, with the company using it as an opportunity to unveil the latest addition to its 2017 smart shower lineup  support for Amazons artificial intelligence assistant Alexa. The cutting-edge shower still features a digital control panel that acts as a valve and allows you to control its output volume, water temperature, spray patterns, and a number of other performance aspects. With the arrival of support for Amazons digital companion, users will also be able to simply tell Alexa to turn the shower on or off and recite more specific instructions to the device. In practice, interacting with the Alexa-enabled U lineup is as simple as telling your assistant youre about to take a shower at a defined temperature and not worrying about anything else, which is as futuristic of a feeling as you can currently get in a bathroom.

The shower is relatively quick to reach your desired temperature and maintain it while also not being wasteful; while your initial request for a shower at a specific temperature will result in a burst of water, the shower will stop gushing it out as soon as it reaches its target and will just maintain it while idling, making fiddling with valves while looking for the perfect temperature a thing of the past. Consumers who like the idea of a connected home but would prefer not speaking to AI assistants will still being able to control Moens smart shower via the Alexa mobile app that can be downloaded to Android devices from the Google Play Store and Amazon App Store, though doing so largely defeats the purpose of owning a smart shower.

Besides reciting complex configurations every time you want to take a shower, youll also be able to save presets for Moen, which adds yet another level of convenience to the affair. The implementation showcased in Las Vegas relies on a third-party Alexa skill developed by Moen but a more deeply integrated solution is understood to be coming soon and should additionally facilitate the process of controlling your shower by speaking to the AI assistant. The setup developed by the Ohio-based company allows for four showers to be connected to Alexa simultaneously, whereas manually taking over the digital valve doesnt require any extra steps. The two biggest limitations of the current solution are the fact that some commands can still be rather lengthy due to the nature of Alexa skills and that you wont be able to ask for particularly cold or hot showers due to safety reasons, though youd still be able to manually turn the heat up or down. The demo unit brought to CES was limited to a range between 60 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit (15 to 48 degrees Celsius) but the finalized version of the service may introduce a slightly different array of supported temperatures.

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Besides Alexa, Moen said the U Smart Shower lineup will also receive support for Apples Siri, though that particular functionality is set to be introduced later this year. While Siri is arguably the least capable mainstream AI assistant, it should work with Moens offering just as well as Alexa seeing how the devices integration with digital helpers is said to be identical across all services. Given the companys recent product practices, it wouldnt be surprising if Moens U series also receives support for the Google Assistant in early 2019.
Insteon, a company which releases IoT devices, has announced that its gadgets are compatible with Google Assistant. This announcement occurred at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and this will let you control Insteons lighting system devices, including wall switches, outlets, plugs, and so on, using your voice, as is the case with every other IoT device that is compatible with Google Assistant.

Now, if youd like to get started, youll need to link your account from within the Google Home application or the Google Assistant on your phone to the Insteon Hub. Once the pairing is complete, you can start using your voice to control Insteons products which are connected to the companys Hub, its that simple. If you need some examples as in how this all works, all you have to do is say OK Google or Hey Google, and once the Google Assistant-enabled device starts listening, you can simply say turn on the outside lights or turn off the downstairs lights in order to make the magic happen, presuming everything is set up correctly in order for Google Assistant to differentiate your lighting setup, of course. It seems like all of the companys products can now be controlled using the Google Assistant, as everything runs through the Insteon Hub, which got support for Google Assistant, so no worries there.

Insteon is a company which focuses on lighting IoT products, and products which are in line with that, electrical control gadgets. The company is using its patented dual-mesh network in order to make its devices work properly, this technology lets Insteons devices communicate simultaneously via wireless radio waves and the homes existing wiring. The company also mentioned that its products integrate with hundreds of products and systems out there, including HVAC units, timers, lighting, locks, cameras, music, humidity, garage doors, and so on. That is more or less, it, the company did not announce any new gadgets at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES), at least not yet, but who knows, maybe they will at a later date, theres still plenty of time for them to do so.
Opposition party Indian National Lok Dal questioned the purchase of 10 copies of the holy book for a whopping Rs 3.8 lakh.

By Anand Patel: The Haryana government's spending during the International Gita Festival held last year raised many a eyebrows. In the latest development, information obtained through Right to Information into the spending during the event, held between November 25 and December 5, has revealed shocking details of how public money was spent.

Opposition party Indian National Lok Dal questioned the purchase of 10 copies of the holy book for a whopping Rs 3.8 lakh. As per the RTI, each copy came at a price of Rs 38,000. These were gifted to VVIPs during the event.

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Dushyant Chautala, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) leader and Lok Sabha MP from Hisar, told India Today, "Bhagwad Gita is available at a much lower price both online and at the Gita press. The Manohar Khattar government should explain the purchase of 10 copies of the book at such an exorbitant price."

RTI details reveal that two BJP MPs were also paid to perform during the event- while Hema Malini was paid Rs 20 lakh, Manoj Tiwari was paid Rs 10 lakh.

"PM Modi says his government has zero tolerance towards corruption, but his MPs are being paid handsome money, that too for religious functions," alleged Chautala.

He said that the cost of the annual event has shot up to several crores, which during the Chautala and Hooda government was few lakhs only.

"If the Haryana government doesn't conduct inquiry then I will write to the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to investigate misappropriation of public money," the Indian National Lok Dal leader said.

As the RTI details, Rs 1 crore was spent on repair of Brahm Sarovar, but in 2016 Rs 38 lakh was spent for the same purpose.

INLD also alleged that certain contracts were awarded to near and dear ones of several BJP leaders.

Meanwhile, the Haryana government denied these allegations. Senior minister Anil Vij told media persons that the Gita Mahotsav was an international event of great repute.

"We will order a probe and if any official is found guilty, strict action will be taken against them," Anil Vij said.

--- ENDS ---
LG Electronics on Monday detailed its 2018 lineup of futuristic smart television sets that are planned to be released in the United States over the course of this year, having also confirmed that the models will be showcased from tomorrow until Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. The new TVs have several major selling points, with one of them being the  (Alpha) lineup of custom chips specifically designed for heavy workloads and artificial intelligence applications. The core experience of the LG ThinQ ecosystem that spans all kinds of devices will also be ennobled by the addition of support for the Google Assistant to select webOS-powered TV models from the South Korean company, marking the first occasion on which the AI service has been integrated into a television platform that isnt Android TV.

LG is quick to boast about its Full-Array Local Dimming (FALD) backlighting solution that it claims will bring ones home cinema experience to the next level in an energy-efficient manner. In total, the Seoul-based firm introduced nine 4K OLED models and seven 4K SUPED UHD ones, with both categories being classified as smart. The OLED lineup includes devices with screens spanning from 55 to 77 inches, whereas the SUPER UHD series encompasses equally compact models but stops at 75-inch display panels. The ThinQ AI platform behind the new offerings comes with support for hundreds of voice commands, all of which are issued via the Magic Remote which also serves as a relay for conveying queries and orders to the Google Assistant. In essence, compatible TVs will now be able to double as Internet of Things hubs akin to Googles Home series, with the solution itself being capable of differentiating between commands meant for the TV and the AI service itself. In other words, telling Google to pause a movie will never result in a mistaken Internet search and if you ask for a takeout from Dominos, the assistant wont attempt to interact with the TV.

In terms of audiovisual quality, combined support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision should have you covered on all fronts, with LGs offerings being capable of displaying arguably the best HDR standard currently available on a consumer level. Handling HDR10 and HLG content is also an option, as is taking advantage of a wide variety of third-party apps developed for webOS. No pricing and availability details have yet been provided by LG, though first products from the companys portfolio should start hitting the market in the coming months.
NVIDIA has confirmed that Uber has selected the company to power its self-driving vehicle fleet. NVIDIA has been pushing into new fields as of lately, with the company most recently looking toward the growing self-driving vehicle market as its next big investment. This push has attracted a number of customers, with the companys CEO Jensen Huang confirming a new set of partnerships at CES 2018, including that with Uber.

The ride-hailing company has made no secret of its plans to introduce its own fleet of self-driving vehicles in the future. In fact, Uber initially started work on its self-driving technology back in 2015. Since then, the development has been relatively successful, with tests taking place in both Pittsburgh and Phoenix and logging over two million miles between them over the course of 50,000 trips as of last month. As part of the companys partnership with NVIDIA, Uber will take advantage of the firms powerful chips in order to run AI algorithms and have the computing power needed to ensure a high level of passenger safety. After all, the vehicles need to be capable of perceiving the world and calculating distances with high accuracy, while also detecting people and other vehicles, and working out the best possible route to the final destination. Ubers original self-driving fleet used NVIDIA GPUs but has recently introduced NVIDIA-mad processors alongside them, a change that has rapidly accelerated development, with Ubers vehicles driving one million miles in just 100 days. Uber isnt the only customer that NVIDIA has added to its list at CES, with Volkswagen also signing a new agreement with the company and Baidu following suit.

In the case of Volkswagen, the German company will utilize the Drive IX platform in a number of upcoming vehicles in order to introduce features such as facial recognition, gesture control, and many others. In terms of Baidu, the Chinese tech giant is working with NVIDIA in order to develop an autonomous vehicle platform designed specifically for China. Lastly, Aurora Innovation has confirmed that it will make use of the new Xavier SoC from NVIDIA. Xavier is a chip that puts a large focus on artificial intelligence and has been designed specifically with autonomous vehicles in mind, being set to power Auroras future solutions.
It seems like Pisen is planning to announce a new series of mobile phone charging products at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, along with some other products that well talk about later on. We have seen plenty of announcements at CES already, even though the show officially starts on January 9. In any case, Pisen has been in the mobile accessories game for quite some time now, it has released its first power bank 13 years ago, and these new, upcoming chargers will offer Quick Charging 3.0 technology, at least some of them, read on.

Pisen also said that its upcoming chargers will be compatible with USB Power Delivery (USB-PD). In addition to all that, the companys CEO, Mr. Zhao, said that 99 percent of all power banks are made in China, and that the company is looking to innovate every step of the way. Now, in addition to portable chargers, the company will also announce a wireless charging pad, which will offer fast charging with 5V/1.5A input and 5V/1A output. This charger will weigh only 72.5 grams, says the company, as it will be around 7mm thin. The companys wireless charger will also sport LED indicator lights, which will indicate charging status, as expected. New Pisen-branded power strips are also coming, along with 10,000mAh power banks and cables. On top of all that, the company is planning to announce both wireless and wired headsets at this years CES, so theres plenty to look forward to it seems.

Now, it seems like Pisen has some serious plans regarding global expansion, as the company is planning to bring its products to all mainstream e-commerce platforms in 2018. The company is already selling its products on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, and Wish, that all started last year, and further expansion plans seem to be in place. That is more or less all the info that the company shared thus far, along with the featured image that is included above this article, which presumably shows off the companys both existing and upcoming devices. More details regarding Pisens upcoming products will follow in the coming days, so stay tuned for that.
Samsung is expected to have a big presence at this weeks CES 2018 but has reportedly decided to kick things off early, taking the wraps off a brand new 2018 edition of its Family Hub smart refrigerator. Although previous iterations of the Family Hub undoubtedly pushed the humble fridge into the modern era, Samsung has made some substantial changes for the new year. Family Hub (2018) will, of course, hold onto key features introduced in earlier smart refrigerators. For example, the internal cameras and screen which allow a homeowner to check whats in the fridge without opening it or via a mobile device from the grocery store are still present. Bixby makes a return, as well, but with several improvements.

However, Samsung obviously wanted to drag its smart refrigerator much further into the IoT and smart home categories. For starters, the newly included Bixby features nearly the full range of Bixby interactions and can even individually recognize household members to personalize responses. Meanwhile, the new Family Hub ships with SmartThings integration so it can connect and interact with compatible smart home accessories and products such as speakers, lights, thermostats, and cameras. Samsung has also included a range of new applications which can be accessed via the screen  including an intelligent Meal Planner that factors food preferences or restrictions into the recipes it provides and a location-based deal finder application called Deals. Taking things yet another step forward, the new Samsung Family Hub also incorporates AKG-branded speakers just below the screen, so users can play media through built-in apps or stream it from their connected devices. Presumably, that means that video content can be streamed, in addition to sound, either at launch or through a future update. The speakers themselves are described as being capable of putting out both deep bass and rich mid-range audio.

As to when the newest member of Samsungs Family Hub series of refrigerators will be available to purchase, the company has only provided a spring timeline. In the meantime, no price point has been revealed yet, either. However, with consideration for the number of features to be included, it probably isnt unreasonable to assume that the 2018 edition of Family Hub will sell near or just beyond the upper reaches of the refrigerator spectrum.
Sony has today announced updates to its Xperia XA line ahead of the start of CES 2018. The Xperia XA range of smartphones was first announced in March of 2017 (during MWC) with the launch of the Xperia XA1 and the XA1 Ultra. Following which, both of these models are now receiving an upgrade and arriving as the Xperia XA2 and XA2 Ultra. With these being Sony smartphones, both the XA2 and XA2 Ultra place some of their emphasis on their camera capabilities. With Sony confirming both models will employ a 23-megapixel rear camera, along with an 8-megapixel front-facing option  equipped with a 120-degree super-wide-angle lens. Both new phones also come powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC, feature a microSD card slot for expanding the storage (up to 256GB), a USB Type-C port, and come running on Android 8.0 (Oreo) at launch.

Although the two phones do share a number of common specs and features, they also do differ quite significantly as well, with the most obvious difference being the size. As while the standard Xperia XA2 features a 5.2-inch display, the XA2 Ultra features a larger 6-inch display. On both smartphones, however, these are considered to be borderless displays due to the screen extending as much as possible to the left and right sides. Both displays also support a 1920 x 1080 resolution.

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Another clear differential is to do with the front-facing camera. While both XA2 models come with the all-new 8-megapixel front-facing camera, the Xperia XA2 Ultra (shown above) is actually a dual front camera setup-boasting smartphone, as it also comes loaded with an additional 16-megapixel camera along with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). A third major difference between the two is in the battery department with the XA2 sporting a 3,300 mAh battery, and the Xperia XA2 Ultra a 3,580 mAh battery. Although both phones do support Qnovo Adaptive Charging, as well as a number of other software tweaks designed to improve battery life in general. There is also a slight difference in the primary specs of the two phones with the Xperia XA2 packing 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, compared to the Xperia XA2 Ultra which features an upgrade in RAM to 4GB, as well as the choice of either 32 or 64GB storage.

As is typically the case with Sony smartphones, both of the new Xperia XA2 models will be available in a variety of colors, although the color selection for each phone will differ in one respect. While both the XA2 and XA2 Plus will be available with the choice of either a Black, Blue, or Silver color, the Xperia XA2 will also be available in a fourth color, Pink, while the XA2 Ultras fourth color option will be Gold. Though, there is no guarantee all color options will be available in all regions where they are released. Speaking of their release, Sony has opted to forgo confirming pricing information and firm details on availability today. Instead, explaining these details will be made known on a regional basis and closer to when the two devices become available  which at present is set to begin in early February.

Sony Xperia XA2

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Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra
Unsolicited surveys from Google are now reportedly showing up for users in Android Messages, in addition to the surveys that began showing up for some Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL owners just last week. While those prior questionnaires were only reported to be affecting Pixel users, the new survey is being reported across a broader range of devices. Like those prior inquiries from the company, the new survey appears first as a banner-style message along the bottom of a users screen within the app, which asks the user to Help improve Android Messages. Users can, of course, choose not to participate by selecting the appropriate option or can tap the other option to see the questions.

Googles efforts here appear to be genuinely in the interest of making the companys applications better via relatively random responses from users, though the method by which they are obtaining feedback will almost certainly bother at least a few users. For starters, there are a number of arguably better ways the company could be garnering customer responses. Not least of all, the questions could be asked through the search giants very own Google Rewards application  which is optionally downloadable and survey-specific. However, conducting a questionnaire by other methods wouldnt necessarily give a clear oversight for how an application is performing on a specific handset and it may just be that Google is looking for answers as they relate to specific manufacturers or models.

Having said that, its at least as likely to be the case that Google is conducting its survey by this particular method in order to get its information from as random a sample of devices and users as possible or that they have some other reason for choosing to use in-app messages to get responses. Without some sort of official information from the company, it would be nearly impossible to tell for sure. Whatever the case turns out to be, it also isnt immediately clear which handsets can expect to see a survey or even which Google applications one might appear in. The company may end up continuing throughout its entire suite of software or it could be looking for information about a select few apps.
Harvard University / World Bank / TCI NetworkOnly a few months ago, the Government of Catalonia paid homage to Antoni Subira when it celebrated the 25th anniversary of the cluster policies he pioneered. Now he has sadly passed away and it is time to reflect on the importance of his leadership and the impact it has had in Catalonia and beyond. Minister Subira was one of the pioneers in applying cluster-based economic development policies, a new approach pioneered in Professor Michael Porters book The Competitive Advantage of Nations in 1990. When Subira was appointed minister of Industry, he received a manuscript of the book from IESE Business School colleague Professor Eduard Ballarin, Subira became immediately interested; and began deploying the ideas even as the book was being published. Catalonias work in clusters was soon highlighted as an example in the book On Competition (1998), and case studies on Catalonia were taught at Harvard Business School. Twenty years later Catalonias policies had been recognized worldwide, and Catalonia became a center of global cluster institutions, like the TCI Network and the European Foundation for Cluster Excellence, both chaired and nurtured by Subira.

A cluster policy that worked

Most importantly, the model worked. When the French government launched its cluster policy, Subiras approach was credited as having doubled the Catalan GDP per capita in 10 years. Subira never talked too much about clusters during his tenure, concerned that if he drew attention to the cluster initiatives in process, they would become an object of political desire and calls for subsidy by other companies. Instead, Subira talked about larger goals like the internationalization of the Catalan firms or raising quality levels to participate in global value chains. He implemented cluster policy in his usual down-to-earth fashion, working closely with the regions entrepreneurs, micro-cluster by micro-cluster, until covering all of Catalonias economy.

Minister Subiras origins in the textile industry in Mataro gave him a deep understanding of the reality of local companies and what was needed to move them to the next level. He was never attracted to the industrial policy fad of picking winning sectors. Instead he supported all the sectors present in Catalonia. When few saw a future for the textile or jewelry industry in its traditional form, he helped stimulate innovations that led to some of Catalonias most important companies like Mango, Desigual and Tous. In the leather tanning cluster in Igualada, which in a Harvard case study of 1995 was called the ugly duckling of industries due to its environmental impact, Subira helped transform the sector, in two decades, to an environmental leader which supplies the most sophisticated luxury brands.

Antoni Subira didnt have EU subsidies or tax incentives to offer, but helped build anchor assets in the region such as: technology centers, testing facilities and shared services. Building the quality of the cluster environment and not giving subsidies or a tax breaks. These assets have created lower costs and great resilience to crises versus competition from other regions.

Sharing his experience

Antoni Subiras contribution did not stop when he stepped down as Minister in 2003. He returned to his professorship at IESE Business School, and became an international thought leader. His open character and genuine interest in every entrepreneur and region he encountered, ranged from working with Finlands former Prime Minister, Esko Aho, on European cluster policies, to assisting the local authorities in Cauca (Colombia) on how to develop local artisanal industries in displaced indigenous communities. Whether it was the CEO of a large German car manufacturer or a small leather tanner, Subira had a gift in establishing dialog with entrepreneurs on opportunities, not only on problems, and distancing economic development from politics. His legacy will live on the impact he has had on his native Catalonia, the ideas he has institutionalized and in the many people that he has inspired.
Randy Porter Plays Cole Porter, special guest Nancy King (Heavywood)

If Randy Porter played more widely outside the US Pacific Northwest, he would likely be lauded as one of the leading contemporary jazz pianists. This new album of songs composed by his namesake Cole Porter could go a long way toward bringing about wide recognition of an artist with a record of achievement going back more than three decades. Porter has toured extensively in Europe and Asia, traveling with saxophonist Charles McPherson and bassist David Friesen, among others. He is known on the west coast well beyond his home base in the Portland, Oregon, area.

Six of the nine tracks find Nancy King, at 77, as musicianly as everindividualistic and expressive, one of the few vocalists capable of improvising with harmonic wisdom equal to that of experienced instrumentalists. Her coordination with Porter, bassist John Wiitala and drummer Todd Strait is evident in this Cole Porter classic captured on video at the recording session.

Spurred by its 2018 Grammy nomination, the Porter-Porter album seems bound to further spread Randy Porters growing reputation,.
What Are Blue Balls? Understanding Epidydimal Hypertension & How to Get Rid of It

Yes, Blue Balls Are a Thing, So Here Are the Best Ways to Beat It

You might not know what "blue balls" are (they don't usually cover them in health class!), but chances are you've experienced them. Described as epidydimal hypertension in medical terminology, they're that unfamiliar pain you get in your testicles when you're extremely aroused for a prolonged period of time, but unable to achieve the relief of orgasm.

RELATED: Keeping Your Balls Dry

Masturbation or sex might be your immediate thought as an obvious cure, but is there anything else you can do in order to achieve some relief? Also, what's actually going on down there when blue balls occur? Do they ever really turn blue? Do women ever experience the equivalent?

To answer all of these questions and more, we spoke with Eric M. Garrison, clinical sexologist, best-selling author and professor of masculinity studies at William & Mary. Read on for what he had to say about everything you need to know about blue balls, including answers to frequently asked questions.

1. What Is Blue Balls?

When men are sexually aroused, their organs start to swell with blood necessary for penile erection. That blood is not released until either after a short period of time, or very close to orgasm. When you become aroused sans release, you're stuck with too much blood in your male member  that's where the 'blue' part of this situation comes into play.

"If there's too much oxygenated blood in the penis, this will make the testicles look blue," says Garrison. "Which is how the phenomenon gets its name."

2. What Causes Blue Balls?

You got all hot and bothered but stopped short for whatever reason, and never actually finished the job. As Garrison explains, the occurrence of blue balls is all a matter of blood flow.

"Blue balls, or 'involuntary testicular vasocongestion,' happens when the male sex organs aren't able to release the blood that swells during the arousal process," he explains.

3. Blue Ball Symptoms

The more easily you're aroused, the more likely you'll suffer the wrath of blue balls. This is especially true for anyone young enough (or vigorous enough) to receive frequent, random erections.

"Young teenage men might have it worse," says Garrison, "because young men are more easily stimulated. For a teenager experiencing those constant erections, plus probably a lot of outercourse and heavy petting, there may not be that release. Plus, they may not be familiar with the process, or know that masturbation can get rid of it."

4. Can Girls Get Blue Balls?

The short answer? They sure can. When women become aroused, blood rushes to the clitoris in the same way it does for men when they get an erection. "Women get erections," explains Garrison, "but we only see a small portion, since the clitoral legs go back and down into the female anatomy."

"Blue lips" mimics the same feeling men get when things get stopped short, and though it's common, it's less recognized.

"I've never heard a single person describe it as blue lips, but it can be described as that," says Garrison. "I hear more cases of that vasocongestion in the labia than I do the scrotum."

5. How to Get Rid of Blue Balls

Of course, the obvious, quickest fix is to rub one out (or become unaroused).

"If a person is experiencing that vasocongestion, the only thing that will alleviate it is if they walk away from feeling aroused," says Garrison. "Eventually everything goes back to normal. Or if if that's not the case, they can have an orgasm, which will allow everything to pack up and go home."

But if getting yourself off isn't in the cards, and you're impatient about this whole "waiting to become unaroused" thing, there's something that may bring you relief faster.

According to Garrison, anything that'll immediately take you out of the fantasy or situation that's turning you on will help get rid of blue balls faster.

"If you were right in the middle of sex and you heard someone behind you start a chainsaw, or if lightning struck, any of those things would cause an immediate drop in sex drive," he states. "Any immediate response like that will cause vasocongestion to go away faster."

6. How to Talk to Your Partner About Blue Balls

If the person you're with is constantly giving you blue balls, you should probably talk to them about it. However, you don't want to bring it up in a way that makes it seem like you're pressuring them to do something that they're not comfortable with yet. How can you approach the subject, you ask?

According to dating and relationship expert James Anderson, the way you frame it is important.

"When you are talking to a woman about blue balls, you have to realize that many of them will not understand what it is, what causes it or what it feels like," he says. "Broach the subject by saying that you know that both of you want your sex life to be as amazing as possible and that honest communication is critical for that. Just as you would want her to talk to you about anything causing discomfort in your sex life you want her to be aware of what blue balls is so you can prevent it together. You are not accusing her of anything here."

Just make sure you're not coming off as a complainer.

"A confident guy doesn't need to whine or complain when it comes to blue balls," adds Anderson. "Your best bet is to lay out the facts and approach it as an opportunity for the two of your to prevent this from happening in the future together. If you whine or complain at this point she is much more likely to think you are just using this as an excuse for more sex."

Truth be told, blue balls has a stigma that comes with it that you're going to be up against if brought up. To combat this, certified counselor and relationship expert David Bennett suggests taking your partner what it feels like for you.

"Many women simply don't understand that blue balls is an issue that many men experience when they are highly aroused, which causes intense testicular pain and pressure," he says. "It's not simply a way of saying a man is sexually frustrated or desires sex, nor is it some sort of thing guys make up just to get sex. A guy should explain the pain that he feels at the moment and how it's treated via sexual release/ejaculation. However, he needs to explain it in a way that doesn't imply a woman should feel pressured into having sex with him simply because he has blue balls. A woman shouldn't feel pressured into doing something against her values over this."

And if the two of you aren't there yet in terms of going all the way, sex expert Louisa Knight suggests exploring other ways of getting off together that you're more comfortable with in order to prevent blue balls.

"Reframe your understanding of sex to include a variety of sexual activities, including mutual masturbation," she says. "This generally means that masturbation can be both a solitary and partnered activity, and a good way to connect sexually without full sex."

If you're not on the same page sexually, Knight suggests addressing that as well in order to avoid blue balls.

"Talk to your partner about why your sex drives are currently out of line, and be sensitive to that," she says. "Consider the times of day when you and partner typically have sex  are you defaulting to sex just before bed when you're both tired? Trying to find alternative times to have sex might more mutually rewarding and help you both feel more satisfied. Don't pressure a partner for sex even when you're horny, as nothing kills ardor faster than a sense of pressure and expectation."

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A marriage function ended in a tragedy in Hyderabad after a youth dancing in the baaraat was hit fatally by his own sword.

Junaid was killed by his sword while dancing.

By Ashish Pandey: A marriage function ended in a tragedy after a youth dancing in the baraat to celebrate the wedding was stabbed fatally by a sword on Friday.

The youth, identified as Hameed, died in the hospital in Hyderabad where he was admitted after the injury.

Hameed, a student of 9th standard, was performing a sword and dagger dance when he managed to stab himself with his own sharp-edged weapon.

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However, no one amongst his friends or family informed the police about the incident and shifted him to a local hospital for treatment where he succumbed to injuries on Saturday.

Later, the police filed a case and arrested a person, Junaid, who is also a relative of the deceased.

The incident has shocked the city of Hyderabad where the Arabic-style marriage performance with sword dance is a socially and culturally accepted ritual.

ALSO WATCH | Daylight robbery caught on cam, men with knives snatch bike

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Trump's tweets came in the wake of a new book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, and his "nuclear button" comment on North Korea this week, following which political opponents raised questions over his mental stability and fitness.

By PTI, Press Trust of India: Unfazed by fierce criticism and fears over his "mental" health, US President Donald Trump described himself as being a "genius".

"Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence," Trump tweeted.

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Identifying "mental stability" and being "really smart" as his two greatest assets, Trump in a series of tweets said that winning the presidential election on his first attempt qualifies him as a "genius".

"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames," he said.

"I went from VERY successful businessman, to top TV Star to President of the United States (on my first try)," he said.

"I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius and a very stable genius at that!" he tweeted.

Trump's tweets came in the wake of a new book titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, and his "nuclear button" comment on North Korea this week, following which political opponents raised questions over his mental stability and fitness.

"Ive never questioned his mental fitness. I have no reason to question his mental fitness," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said yesterday when asked about Trump's mental fitness.

According to multiple media reports, about a dozen lawmakers from the House and Senate received a briefing from Yale psychiatrist Bandy X Lee on Capitol Hill about Trump's fitness to be President.

Twitter had a field day reacting to Trump's tweets. Here are some of the funniest reactions received on Twitter:

....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

I'm starting to think you have a crush on Hillary.- Sam Zimmerman is yer favrit (@Reverend_Freako) January 6, 2018

You is smart, you is special, you is important. pic.twitter.com/1LCjMENKpX- Ricardo del Villar (@radelvillar) January 6, 2018

You truly are, like, really delusion.- Gene Dalbec (@SkarlokApophas) January 6, 2018

pic.twitter.com/4kQkhVNwuV- Its True - All of it (@1977Towerburn) January 6, 2018

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An American intellectual property-specialist firm has become the first foreign law firm to open its doors in Chinas Silicon Valley.Brinks Gilson & Lione an office in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in China last month after getting approval from the government in August. The office is also the Chicago, Illinois-headquartered firms first office outside of the US.We very much look forward to offering advice and guidance to Chinese-domiciled entities on the intellectual property laws of the US, and to helping them protect their IP, said Gustavo Siller, Brinks president. We know we will serve a key role protecting the innovations of Chinese companies and defending them against assertions of infringement in the United States.Xilin Jiang, who heads Shenzhens Bureau of Justice, attended the opening ceremony. Brinks attorney, their colleagues, clients, and members of the Shenzhen technology community also attended.Guangdong Province offers remarkable opportunities, and we are very pleased to be the pioneering US law firm in this truly impressive city," said Brinks shareholder Harold Johnson. This is a great day for our firm, not only formally opening our first office outside the US, but being the very first US law firm to open an office in Shenzhen. Brinks advises Chinese clients that export to the US about US intellectual property laws, helping them protect their innovations and defending against allegations of infringement.Johnson lives in the city and is the offices managing shareholder. The office will also be staffed by Fei Hu, a Chinese native who studied in the US and was most recently senior legal counsel to chip giant ARM. He was also a lawyer for Huawei and Tencent.Brinks attorneys Siller, Yuezong Feng, and Lyle Vander Schaaf, who all represent Chinese clients, will join the office on a rotating Basis. The firm is also on the lookout for local Chinese technical and administrative talent.Founded in 1917, Brinks has more than 130 intellectual property lawyer working out of seven offices across the US.
SUV

EV

However, before diving deeper into this high-riding matter, allow us to remind you that the rumor mill talks about thereceiving a new name en route to the showroom.The Goodwood-based automaker introduced this nameplate, which comes from the South African-discovered diamond on the Queen's scepter, back in 2015, but it seems we're looking at an internal name rather than a commercial one.Underneath the imposing styling cues of the SUV, we'll find a modified version of the all-aluminum platform that made its debut on the new Phantom The mix between the now-proven architecture and the body shape of the upcoming model means that occupants will get to enjoy amazing cabin room.Oh, and you shouldn't take the ample body roll showcased in the Nurburgring testing video at the bottom of the page all the seriously. Rolls-Royce machines are famous for matching supreme ride comfort with respectable handling assets, so we're expecting the production model to be more prepared for winding roads.The luxury sedan will also borrow its heart to the crossover. As such, the newcomer will be animated by a 6.75-liter twin-turbo V12 engine, which will deliver the low-end torque traditionally associated with the British marque. And while RR customers have determined the company to put anyprojects on hold, the V12 we're talking about can be nearly as silent as an electric motor.We expect to see the Rolls-Royce SUV bowing in the second half of the current year, which means we have plenty of time to get our hands on fresh details.
For one thing, we're not sure whether the go-fast machine will be offered under the Toyota banner, as the thing could come as a Gazoo vehicle (we're talking about the automotive producer's Gazoo Racing division). Heck, not even the Supra nameplate is certain - as we found out last year, Toyota is also considering other names.Nevertheless, we know that the Japanese newcomer shares its tech side with the 2019 BMW Z4 - while the Toyota model will come in coupe form, the Bimmer will cater to the needs of those who seek roadster driving pleasures. Both sportscars will be brought to life by the Magna Steyr plant in Graz, Austria.The engine lineup for the Mk V Supra will be comprised of turbocharged 2.0-liter (four-cylinder) and 3.0-liter (six-pot) turbocharged engines. As for the gearbox, it's unclear whether the newcomer will be offered in both manual and automatic trim.Forum chat also mentions a hybrid range-topper and with both BMW and Toyota model ranges featuring plenty of gas-electric machines, these rumors appear to make sense. However, if this version turns out to be true, you can expect the hybrid model to debut later on in the vehicle's lifecycle.Following the introduction of the FT-1 concepts, the teasers and tons of spy material, the fifth-generation Supra is scheduled to land this year and this is enough of a reason to keep us awake at night. Meanwhile, the piece of spy footage below shows the 2019 Toyota Supra doing its thing on the Nurburgring.
You see, the Ukrainian-born 24-year-old decided to replace gasoline with... bleach. In the process, he tormented the V6 hear of an Infiniti and you can now check out the result.Fortunately, the vlogger did add some motor oil before driving the car in b-mode - without this, the expected lubrication issues would've probably caused the powerplant to stall rather quickly.Of this shenanigan seems familiar, it's probably because the said vlogger isn't at his first attempt of putting the wrong liquid into the gas tank.It all started when he emptied a two-liter Coca-Cola bottle into the tank of an E46-generation BMW 3 Series Touring (think: wagon). Despite the tank being around 40 percent full, the engine quickly stalled, with the car requiring expensive repairs in order to be brought back to life.With the resulting video proving popular, the young man went on to try and destroy another Bimmer. To be more precise, he put liquid nitrogen into the tank of a Z3. However, with the said tank being at least half full, the car passed the test without showing too many signs of stress.Well, as it turns out, the YT guy paid attention to the tons of comments urging him to leave Bavarian machines alone. And while we're not expecting him to give up these stunts altogether (there are so many liquids that await), we can only wonder what brand he'll aim for next. Until we get our answer, you can check out the Chlorox ordeal of the said Infiniti in the piece of footage below.P.S.: Yes, we too can almost smell the bleach after checking out this clip.
We flew a group of customers from North Carolina to Canada for a factory visit. This was a part 91 corporate trip, in a King Air 200.When we returned several days later, our Canadian airport had turned into the ice planet of Hoth: not just snow but ice everywhere. We got clearance to taxi from ground and I was barely moving trying to steer with just differential thrust. An airport vehicle called for clearance to move and he was told to hold for the King Air taxing out. The following exchange took place.

Airport vehicle: What King Air?

Tower: I dont see him. Oh wait, there he is. He is BARELY moving

Me, in my obviously Southern drawl: Hey, we are doing the best we can!

Tower: Dont you have spikes on your tires?

Me, in an even deeper Southern drawl: Well we bought some chains, but nobody onboard knows how to put them on!

Tower: Sounds of multiple people laughing.
Three arrested members of an armed opposition group that seized a police station in Yerevan in 2016 are continuing a hunger strike which they began last month in protest against their prison conditions.

One of them, Armen Bilian, was the first to start refusing food at Yerevans Nubarashen prison in mid-December. He was joined by another gunman kept there, Smbat Barseghian, shortly afterwards. Both men are demanding their transfer to another, more modern and less crowded prison located near Armavir, a town 40 kilometers west of the Armenian capital.

Bilian and Barseghian stand accused of murdering three police officers during the armed groups July 2016 standoff with Armenian security forces. The gunmen demanded that President Serzh Sarkisian free the jailed leader of their Founding Parliament movement, Zhirayr Sefilian, and step down. They laid down their weapons two weeks after storming a police compound in the citys Erebuni district.

The third prisoner, Arayik Khandoyan, went on hunger strike on December 29 in what he called a show of solidarity with his two comrades. Khandoyan began the protest after being taken to a penalty isolation ward at Nubarashen. The prison administration claimed to have found two mobile phones and bootleg alcohol in his regular cell.

Khandoyans lawyer, Ara Gharagyozian, on Monday dismissed the alcohol claim as absurd. But he admitted that his client kept the phones in breach of Armenian prison rules.

There are cellphones in all prison cells, Gharagyozian told RFE/RLs Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). Theyve just confiscated a cellphone from another client of mine and but have not transferred him to an isolation ward.

Gharagyozian insisted that Khandoyan, who remained in solitary confinement as of Monday afternoon, was punished for his defiant behavior at one of the three ongoing trials stemming from the Erebuni standoff. He accused the prison administration of keeping Khandoyan in inhuman conditions.

The isolation ward is freezing, the lawyer claimed, adding that his client complained of health problems when he visited the latter earlier in the day.

Representatives of Armenias human rights ombudsman, Arman Tatoyan, also visited and spoke to Khandoyan on Monday.
8 January 2018 15:16 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The deplorable state of the Armenian economy has many reasons, and the terrible corruption is one of the root causes for that. The countrys government pretends to fight against corruption, but the situation is not changing in a positive direction.

The Armenian president must leave the state power, and then necessary conditions may appear for Armenia to solve a problem of corruption, Manvel Sargsyan, director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies, said in his recent interview with Tert.am.

The expert noted that the U.S. and Europe are tired of reiterating that corruption must be combated in Armenia, because, basically, corruption harms the state. He said that a number of high-ranking EU officials were calling for an expanded and serious fight against corruption in Armenia.

We saw the RPAs [the ruling Republican Party of Armenia] violent reaction to all this, because at first they said that such statements are aimed at interference in Armenias internal affairs, but anyway everyone realized that corruption is the main problem in the country, Manvel Sargsyan said.

Corruption was called as the key problem of the Armenia-EU agreement, as it stands at the heart of the framework agreement between Armenia and the European Union and other agreements, demanding from Armenia to fight corruption and build a judicial system.

Armenia signed the agreement, but the question is what will happen in the future, the expert said.

Commenting on the fact that Armenia will be accountable for fulfilling its obligations given considerable amounts allocated to that end, Manvel Sargsyan noted that the ruling authorities will only pretend to fight against corruption.

What will the RPA representatives be busy with? These people will try once again to derail the process. How can a person fight himself or with his essence? he exclaimed.

Today, many in Armenia are aware that the actions of the Armenian government against corruption are fake  the authorities have to imitate efforts in this direction due to their obligations before international organizations and partner countries. However, the allocated amounts themselves get stolen because the government is itself mired in corruption.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
8 January 2018 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 125 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said on January 8.

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.

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By PTI: Balrampur (UP), Jan 8 (PTI) India and Nepal have reached an agreement to resolve differences on reconstructing damaged pillars along the mutual border and clearing the encroachment on the "No Mans Land", an Indian official said here today.

The agreement was reached during a meeting of Indian and Nepalese officials at the SSB Group centre here, Balrampur District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Misra said.

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Six Nepalese officials and officials from five districts of Uttar Pradesh took part in the meeting, he said.

India and Nepal will soon start reconstructing the damaged pillars and clear the "No Mans Land" of encroachers, said Misra, the nodal officer for the Indian side.

A team to survey the border areas for the purpose has arrived in Balrampur, Misra said, adding that the work to be carried out on the border has been divided into three parts.

They include identifying the damaged pillars, reconstructing them and clearing the No Mans Land.

Misra said the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the Public Works Department, Revenue Department, and the Nepali Police will contribute to the process.

He hoped the resolution of differences will help in strengthening ties between the people of the two countries.

Hariprasad Mailani, the nodal officer of the Nepalese side, said no one will be allowed to misbehave with the Indian people and jawans in Nepal.

The SSB, which works under the the Union Home Ministry, is tasked with guarding the 1,751-km India-Nepal border.

Uttar Pradesh shares a 599.3-km open border with Nepal touching seven districts - Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Sravasti, Balrampur, Sidhharthnagar and Maharajganj. PTI COR SAB ABH

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8 January 2018 11:35 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

Increase in customs duties on car imports since the beginning of this year will affect current prices in the car market.

Director of the Expert Property Center Ramil Osmanli told local media that new rules will lead to a rise in car prices by 20 percent, adding that increase in customs duties will reduce imports.

This is a factor that directly leads to a narrowing of the offer and a rise in prices, while at the same time the duty will be calculated at 1.5 manats ($0.88) for each cubic centimeter of the engine, which is quite a high figure leading to an increase in prices for cars by at least 15-20 percent, the expert stated.

Marketing manager of Sirena Motors (official representative of Chinese automobile brands) Eyyub Aliyev said that increase in customs duties will affect only cars that will be imported since February.

Negotiations with the plants are currently underway. We are trying to get discounts on cars in order to avoid high premiums in addition to new duties. If earlier we bought a car for 18,000 manats ($10,500) and sold for 21,000 manats ($12,300), now we are trying to buy for 17,000 manats ($9,900) to sell at least for 21,500 manats ($12,600), Aliyev noted.

In accordance with the Nomenclature of Foreign Economic Activity of Azerbaijan, Import Rates of Customs Duties and Export Customs Duties approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan on November 17, 2017, since January 1, the customs duty for imported cars has increased by 70 percent on average.

Azerbaijan, currently working to develop its car manufacturing industry and encouraging interior purchases within the country, now is operating with different courtiers to develop its own automobile manufacturing market.

Currently, the country plans to produce cars jointly with Iran and will soon launch manufacture of cars in the Neftchala Industrial District. The plant will operate on the basis of joint project of AzEuroCar LLC and Irans largest car manufacturer Iran Khodro. The plant was due to open in June, but because of the cold winter there were delays in the plant's construction. The opening is rescheduled for August.

The plant with a capacity of about 10,000 cars per year initially will produce four Iranian car brands  Dena, Runna, Soren and Samand.

Production of some spare parts is planned in local factories. For this, proposals will be made to the plants and if the plants receive positive feedback from the Iranian company, then the production of spare parts will launch.

The plant intends to cooperate with the Sumgayit Industrial Park and SOCARs new plant. Some 20 percent of the vehicles will be exported to CIS and Central Asian countries.

Speaking about how the plant will get a share in the local market, Azeurocars representative said the plant will produce the cheapest cars.

The price of new cars will be 10,000-12,000 manats ($5,800-7,000). The cars produced at the plant will meet Euro 5 standard.

First cars of Azerbaijan-Iran joint car plant are planned to be manufactured beginning from 2018.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
8 January 2018 11:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Estonia can join to the international transport route North-South, Estonia's charge d'affaires ad interim in Azerbaijan Indrek Kiverik said, Estonian media reported.

For Azerbaijan, Estonia is a jump ramp into the Scandinavian market. On the other hand, Azerbaijan is a possible ramp for our businessmen towards the market of Iran, Near East and India. We are pleased with the fact that Azerbaijan is building both a political and a railway contact with Iran. If this route works, for our investors and entrepreneurs will be very easy to reach the mentioned markets right through Azerbaijan, he said.

Kiverik noted that the volume of Azerbaijani export to Estonia is increasing and economic cooperation is progressing well.

The turnover is small, even slight I would say. As far as Azerbaijans investments into Estonia are concerned, they are growing. It happens because the number of Azerbaijani entrepreneurs opening offices in Estonia is getting higher. They are engaged in logistics, consulting services, IT, wholesale distribution and restaurant business, Kiverik said.

The International North-South Transport Corridor is meant to connect Northern Europe with Southeast Asia. It will serve as a link connecting the railways of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia. At the initial stage, it is planned to transport 5 million tons of cargo per year through the corridor and more than 10 million tons of cargo in the future.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
8 January 2018 12:25 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The cooperation between the High-Tech Park of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) and the China-Russia Innovation Tech Park, which was established last year, is going to reach a new level. Azerbaijans High-Tech Park will create a portal that will become a platform for establishing business relations between Chinese and Azerbaijani entrepreneurs.

Employees of Azerbaijans High-Tech Park will visit the China-Russia Innovation Tech Park located in Yantai, China in January 2018 to thoroughly study the format of cooperation, the High-Tech Park told Trend on December 28.

Earlier, the management of the China-Russia Innovation Tech Park visited Azerbaijans High Tech Park, where the sides discussed prospects of cooperation between the two high-tech parks and signed a memorandum of cooperation.

According to the memorandum, the sides jointly implement scientific and technical programs and innovative projects. Moreover, joint laboratories, scientific, technical and innovation centers are planned to be established, as well as mutual visits are expected to be organized.

The China-Russia Innovation Tech Park has rich experience of cooperation with post-Soviet countries and offers residents joint innovation development in China. It has 350 residents, which work on the creation of new materials, biopharmaceuticals, integration of electronic and mechanical systems as well as highly efficient agriculture.

Cooperation between Azerbaijani and Chinese entrepreneurs was also discussed during the opening of a technology transfer center at the High-Tech Park in November. The sides discussed the deployment of LED lamp and lithium-ion battery production in Azerbaijan. National entrepreneurs were invited to China to review the production capacities.

The High-Tech Park of the ANAS was established in 2016. The Park provides the necessary infrastructure and material and technical basis for carrying out scientific researches and experimental design works and their application in industrial, service and other spheres.

In general, Azerbaijan is one of the leading countries implementing high technology in the region. Investment in the development of the ICT sector in Azerbaijan is expected to rise to $4 billion by 2020. Today, the country constructs high tech parks in the capital and in regions.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
8 January 2018 19:17 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

A meeting with the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Tajikistan to Azerbaijan Rustam Soli was held at the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company CJSC on January 8.

The company reported that chairman of the organization Rauf Valiyev informed the guest about the work carried out in the field of sea transport in Azerbaijan, achievements in the modernization of the fleet, contribution to the development of transport corridors of the republic.

Soli closely acquainted with the transit capabilities of the Shipping Company. He noted that Tajikistan is interested in transporting goods to international markets through the Caspian Sea.

The sides exchanged views on the prospects for bilateral cooperation.

Diplomatic relations between the countries were established on 21 October, 1992.

The Azerbaijani Embassy in Dushanbe was opened on September 22, 2007. The Embassy of Tajikistan in Baku has been functioning since March 23, 2008.

The main areas of economic cooperation are the agro-industrial complex, non-ferrous metallurgy, light industry, transport, etc. A significant part of the volume of goods turnover is produced by the Tajik Aluminium Company (TALCO).

In the framework of the agreement between the Defense Ministries of the two countries, students from Tajikistan annually study in higher educational institutions of the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry. Currently, more than 20 Tajik students receive education in the leading universities of Azerbaijan.

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8 January 2018 18:16 (UTC+04:00)

By Aygul Salmanova

The number of patients suffering from the advanced stage of tuberculosis and its widespread form has decreased twice since 2010, from 7.6 percent to 3.4 percent in Azerbaijan.

Tuberculosis, second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest killer worldwide from a single infectious agent, is one of the most common infectious diseases, causing significant damage to the economy due to high levels of temporary and permanent patient disability, and mortality.

In recent years, there have been positive changes in the dynamics of the disease of tuberculosis, the press service of the Azerbaijan Health Ministry told Trend.

If in 2010 there were 53 cases registered for every 100,000 of the population, this figure has now dropped to 39. The number of primary cases of tuberculosis detected in Azerbaijan decreased by 21 percent.

As a result of intensive treatment and provision of patients with drugs, the number of deaths from this disease is decreasing. In 2010, the death rate per 100,000 population was 7.9, whereas in 2016 this figure had decreased to 4.6.

It was possible to achieve positive results in the fight against tuberculosis, resistant to drugs. If in 2007 the rate of primary patients in Azerbaijan, suffering from this form of the disease, was the highest among European countries, now this figure has almost halved among primary and re-converted patients.

The Azerbaijani government provides special attention to people who are suffering from tuberculosis and makes every effort to treat them.

The country started to combat tuberculosis in 1995, while implementing a strategy in the countrys prisons, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The law On Combating Tuberculosis was adopted in Azerbaijan in 2000.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has also approved a plan of action on anti-tuberculosis measures for 2016-2020. The program aims to prevent the spread of the disease and to reduce the number of tuberculosis-related deaths, as well as to strengthen logistics of tuberculosis treatment centers, to improve the supply of patients with medications, and to raise public awareness of the disease.

The treatment of tuberculosis patients is being carried out at the states expense, regardless of the stage of the disease.

Azerbaijans Scientific Research Institute of Lung Diseases fulfills all the requirements and recommendations of the WHO.

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8 January 2018 10:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The first protest meeting in 2018 in Bishkek was the protest of employees of the Center for Family Medicine No. 1 in Bishkek in front of the building of the Ministry of Health. The protesters demand to dismiss their director from office, Kabar reports.

According to the press service of the Ministry of Health, some 15 people gathered to express their protest. The leadership of the Ministry of Health is ready to hold a dialogue and take measures to resolve this situation as soon as possible, the report said.

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8 January 2018 11:22 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dowlatabadi has said that 70 suspect rioters have been released on bail after interrogation over the past 48 hours, Mizan news agency reported.

Media reports suggest that security officials have detained at least 1000 rioters during the last weeks unrests in Iran.

Iran saw turmoil and political unrests in several cities across the country which eventually took the lives of at least 21, including the law enforcement forces.

The unrests began after some groups joined demonstrations to protest against high prices but the economic protests soon turned into anti-government demonstrations.

Jafari-Dowlatabadi further blamed the US for plotting the riots which were planned to overthrow the countrys political establishment within 40 days.

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8 January 2018 10:21 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Iran has banned the teaching of English in primary schools, a senior education official said, after the countrys Supreme Leader said early learning of the language opened the way to a Western cultural invasion, Reuters reported.

Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations, Mehdi Navid-Adham, head of the state-run High Education Council, told state television late on Saturday.

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8 January 2018 15:29 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) plans to open its office in Tashkent, the organizations regional director on the CIS countries Manish Mohan said, Jahon news reported.

The fact that the Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev proposed to declare 2018 as the Year of Support of Active Business, Innovative Ideas and Technologies in Uzbekistan was of particular interest, according to the director.

We are ready to actively cooperate with Uzbek partners in this direction. In order to deepen cooperation with the country, the CII intends to open its office in Tashkent, he said.

CII, being India's leading economic organization, brings together over 8,000 members from the private and public sectors, including small and medium-sized businesses, as well as transnational corporations.

The priority tasks set by the Uzbek leader in the economic sphere, in particular, the creation of an effective system for attracting foreign investments and credits, the introduction of an innovative development program, and the stimulation of entrepreneurial activity reflect the firm focus of President Mirziyoyev on achieving real and sustainable results, the representative of one of the largest business associations in India noted.

Today Uzbekistan is rapidly changing, especially in the economic sphere as the country is entering a new reality, according to Birendra Madhukar, Secretary General of the BRICS Chamber of Commerce.

The issue of creating the most favorable conditions for entrepreneurial and investment activity acquires a high priority. At the same time, the country's economic system is becoming more transparent, which plays an important role in attracting investment and ensuring fair competition for economic development, he said.

In 2016 the trade turnover increased by 15 percent and reached $366 million. However, this indicator is far below the potential of the two countries, as Uzbekistan and India are able to increase the volumes and diversify the structure of the mutual trade.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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8 January 2018 18:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Housing prices in Kazakhstan have not changed much during the two last months of 2017 although the increase in prices is obvious when compared to 2016.

The average cost of 1 square meter of new housing in Kazakhstan amounted to 253,242 tenge in December and has not changed compared to the previous month, according to the Committee on Statistics under the Kazakh National Economy Ministry.

The price has risen by 1.3 percent compared to December 2016.

The average resale price of 1 square meter of well-maintained housing in December stood at the level of 185,666 tenge, thus remaining unchanged from the previous month and 1.6 percent less than in December last year.

The resale price of 1 square meter of ill-equipped housing averaged to 114,496 tenge that is 0.8 percent lower than in December 2016.

The average rental price of 1 square meter of well-maintained housing in Kazakhstan last month amounted to 1,329 tenge that is 1.1 percent higher than in the previous month and 3.8 percent higher than in late 2016.

Previously, Kazakhstan has experienced a sharp decline of the real estate market due to adverse external conditions. Devaluation of the national currency, along with a decrease in real wages and purchasing power affected the demand side, while slight overinvestment and high exposure to currency risks shocked the supply.

In January-May 2017, the cost of new housing as compared to the same period of 2016 has decreased by 3.2 percent. Over the year the resale prices have fallen by 3.1 percent for well-maintained housing. However, the resale cost of ill-equipped housing has not changed much. In this regard, the number of deals for apartment purchase and sale in Kazakhstan has grown by 30 percent this year.

In the same period, about 63,000 deals for purchase of apartments have been made in Kazakhstan (14,400 more than a year before).

The Kazakh government is committed to resolving current issues on the real estate market with massive programs, which aim to provide affordable housing, including rental, refinancing foreign currency mortgages and stimulating construction of infrastructure for individual housing construction.

Cost of living in Kazakhstan is 4.24 percent higher than in Azerbaijan while rent is 2.43 percent higher than in Azerbaijan.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
By PTI: By Sajjad Hussain

Islamabad, Jan 8 (PTI) The Islamic State (IS) militant group poses a major threat to Pakistan and is alarmingly increasing its presence in the country, according to a think- tank report.

Pakistan has been denying that ISIS had an organised presence in the country, however, even though the terrorist group has claimed responsibility for several other attacks in Baluchistan in recent years.

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The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) yesterday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn News reported.

The PIPS shared the findings of its security analysis titled Special Report 2017, providing an insight into security challenges of Pakistan.

"Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar and others with similar objectives perpetrated 58 per cent attacks, while 37 per cent and 5 per cent of the attacks were carried out by nationalist insurgents and violent sectarian groups respectively," it said.

The report has also highlighted that Baloch nationalist- insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were only second to TTP as far as the their threat capability was concerned.

The report also noted the alarming increase in the footprint of ISIS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh as it carried out the deadliest attacks in those provinces. It said that footprints of ISIS was increasing and it "killed 153 in 6 deadliest attacks".

It said "down 16 per cent from the year before, 370 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan (in 2017), killing 815 and injuring 1,736 people."

It said that Balochistan and tribal region remained critical areas with 288 and 253 terrorism-related killings, respectively, in 2017.

The report said that security forces and law enforcement agencies killed 524 militants in military/security operations as well as armed clashes and encounters.

It also reported that Pakistans National Security Policy is set to be released in 2018 and it will take into account especially global and regional scenarios, including the evolving Pakistan-US relations. PTI SH AMS

--- ENDS ---
8 January 2018 12:50 (UTC+04:00)

By Aygul Salmanova

How is the beauty of a city defined? Probably by its nature, art, architecture, people, etc. Some cities are famous for their remarkable architecture, some for picturesque nature, others for their admirable art samples. Whatever form of beauty speaks to you, there is no doubt that you will enjoy your time in Sheki.

Nasib Imamaliyev, head of the Sheki Tourism Information Center, said that factors attracting foreign tourists in Sheki included the majority of historical monuments, the citys ancient history, ancient art samples, urban flora and fauna, geographical location, cuisine (mainly sweets), hospitality, cheerfulness and sense of humor of Sheki people.

Imamaliyev noted that in recent years there has been an increase in the number of tourists coming to the city. Until the end of the Soviet era, the number of tourists had been increasing dramatically. Over the next 8-10 years it rose much more frequently and had still been growing, he said.

The number of tourists visiting Sheki in 2017 was much higher compared with previous years, he mentioned: This number is expected to increase in the coming years.

Imamaliyev noted that Sheki had been a transit zone from the Georgian border to Baku throughout the long history. He said that Sheki was a region, which tourists used as a place to stay for a couple of days and then continue their trip to or from Georgia, Baku and other regions.

The main reason for the development of the tourism sector and the increase of the number of tourists visiting Sheki is the fact that the region is stable. Tourists do not travel to places where there is no stability. In addition, the development and rising interest of foreigners in Azerbaijan, advertisements, increasing popularity of Azerbaijan in the world also contribute to this trend, he noted.

The inclusion of the city to UNESCO Creative Cities Network will lead to its further recognition and popularity around the world, Imamaliyev added.

Earlier in November 2017 Sheki became a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, an association supporting the formation of a network with the aim of promoting international cooperation between cities.

He noted that tourists from all over the world - Europe, Asia, and America - visit Sheki. Recently, however, there is an increase in the number of Arab tourists. In general, tourists from 40 to 50 countries visit Sheki every year.

The most visited places in Sheki are Sheki Khan's Palace (Yuxari Bash Reserve), museums, Alban Temple in the village Kish, Shakikhanovs House Museum, and Bazar, he said.

Touching upon the interesting places to visit in Sheki, Imamaliyev said that there was a Labyrinth or the so-called Eternal Silence World (bdi Sukut Dunyas), a very ancient underground museum, which attracted the attention of foreign tourists. Those who like horses can visit the center of horseback riding in Sheki, he added.

The head of the center noted that the most elite dish in Sheki is Piti. It is almost a brand. I remember a time when I met a German tourist in the airport in Baku. He told me that he wanted to eat Piti in Sheki, he said.

Imamaliyev said that the city was also famous for its sweets. We always serve our tourists tea and Sheki halvasi or with rose water after the lunch or dinner, he noted.

He also said that there were still many unexplored places in the city: There are many historical monuments in Sheki. For instance, there are ancient Albanian temples in the villages. There are many breathtaking and interesting places to go in the mountains. Great Albanian temples exist in the villages Orta Zayzid and Dashbulaq.

Imamaliyev also touched upon the ancient history of Sheki.

It is believed that Sheki has a 3,000 years history. However, the city traces its origins back to more ancient times. Researches carried out also show that the city has a very old history. It had its own state, and coins. About 3,700 years old samovar (heated metal container traditionally used to heat and boil water), a jug-like vessel with a funnel in the middle, was found in Sheki, which shows that the city is older than assumed.

Sheki, located on the picturesque hillsides of the Caucasus Mountains, in the background of snowy peaks is one of the country's main tourist destinations, hosting more than 100,000 tourists every year.

The city is a real natural wonder with its beautiful landscapes, mineral water springs, forests and rivers.

Beautiful Sheki can also be called the architectural reserve of the country, since the city has 84 historical and cultural monuments. Archaeological findings suggest that the city might be one of the oldest settlements in the Caucasus.

Modern Sheki was actually rebuilt in 1772 after the city was destroyed by mud streams - River Kish. Annually, Sheki becomes a place for international and local festivals which attract many people.

--

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8 January 2018 15:27 (UTC+04:00)

By Aygul Salmanova

Air Arabia, the Middle East and North Africas first and largest low-cost carrier, will launch a new route to Azerbaijan, flying to the popular touristic city of Gabala from June 27, the Arab media reported on January 8.

The flights will be operated three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, departing Sharjah International Airport at 13:00 (GMT +4) and arriving at Gabala International Airport at 16:10 (GMT +4). The return flight will depart Gabala at 17:15 landing in Sharjah at 19:50.

Adel Al Ali, group chief executive officer of Air Arabia, said that Gabala is a sought-after destination and is highly appealing to people in the Gulf region.

Our flights to Gabala increase the offering of affordable travel to passengers in the Gulf and Azerbaijan, and boost our network in the Caucasus region, he said.

Air Arabia currently operates flights on 133 routes across the globe from five hubs located in the Middle East and North Africa. The airway currently serves Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, with daily flights.

Speaking of tourists visiting Azerbaijan, it is impossible to avoid the growing number of tourists coming from Muslim countries. And due to the influx of Muslim guests, the country now is considering to develop halal tourism, a sub-category of tourism that is aligned with the laws and traditions of Islam.

The Culture and Tourism Ministry previously reported that the number of visitors to Azerbaijan amounted to about 2.5 million people during 11 months of 2017. Of these, 87,215 were citizens of the United Arab Emirates.

It should be particularly mentioned that Azerbaijan has lately became the most favorite place for travel of many Arab tourists. The majority of them are from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Iraq.

Short distance between Azerbaijan and their countries is one of the reasons of such a great tourist growth. In the 2016 survey of GMTI covering 130 tourist destinations, Azerbaijan, has ranked 20th among the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Additionally, there is a visa-free regime for persons with diplomatic and service passports, and since 2015, the UAE citizens has been visiting Azerbaijan on the basis of a simplified visa system. They can obtain an entry visa, valid for 30 days stay, at any international airport in Azerbaijan.

Furthermore, the cause of massive growth of Arab tourists is due to the country's security and safety, as well as in multicultural values.

Another reason for the launch of this new route connecting Gabala with the Gulf region is the fact that the city is one of the most popular tourist destinations of Azerbaijan. Gabala, with its beautiful waterfalls, streams and emerald green forests, has turned into one of the most-visited tourist attractions in the region. The abundance of attractions, natural paradise and well developed infrastructure attract thousands of tourists.

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The American Association of Nurse Anesthetists awarded the late Arthur Zwerling, DNP, DAAPM, MSN, MS, CRNA, its highest honor, The Agatha Hodgins Award for Outstanding Accomplishment.

Here's what you should know:

1. The family of Mr. Zwerling will accept the award at the AANA Nurse Anesthesia Annual Congress in Seattle, Sept. 8 to Sept. 12.

2. Former AANA President Terry Wicks, CRNA, said in a release, "Though Arts sphere of influence extended to nearly every corner of the nurse anesthesia community, he will most vividly be remembered for his work in the recovering community, and for promoting wellness in the nurse anesthesia profession."

3. Mr. Zwerling served for 16 years on AANA's peer assistance advisory committee. He was the committee's chair for four years.

4. He volunteered more than 1,400 hours to save people suffering from substance abuse disorders.

5. Mr. Zwerling established and moderated an online forum dedicated to anesthetists in recovery and he developed a group for the partners of the addicts.

6. He ran a successful campaign to have curriculum modules on wellness added to AANA's online learning system.
Tampa, Fla.-based Physician Partners of America will open its eleventh pain clinic in Wellington, Fla., Jan. 15.

Here's what you should know:

1. Physician Partners specializes in using alternatives to narcotic pain relievers through the use of interventional pain management.

2. Alejandro Tapia, MD, will supervise the new clinic, while continuing to see patients at PPOA's Boynton Beach, Fla.-based location.

3. Company President and COO Tracie Lawson said, "Interventional pain management is the least talked-about option for pain relief, but one of the most effective. It can prevent addiction to narcotic pain medication in the first place."

4. In addition to the group's Florida locations, PPOA provides pain services at several Texas-based clinics.



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The University of New Mexico and its medical school recently settled a lawsuit filed in 2011 over the university's alleged mishandling of a reported rape. The anesthesiology department's chair said the settlement caused department faculty to forgo their year-end bonuses, according to NM Political Report.

The plaintiff, a former UNM anesthesiology resident, sued the medical school in 2011 for violating the New Mexico Human Rights Act and the New Mexico Whistleblower Protection Act when the university dismissed her from its anesthesiology residency program.

The plaintiff said the university fired her after she reported a fellow resident raped her. UNM claimed they fired the plaintiff for a prescription drug problem and poor work performance, not for reporting a rape.

Here are five things to know about the settlement and its resulting repercussions on faculty compensation.

1. UNM settled the lawsuit in November for an undisclosed amount. Shortly after, Hugh Martin, MD, anesthesiology chair at the UNM Health Sciences Center, informed department faculty that the cost of the settlement effectively negated their bonuses. "I regret to inform the faculty that due to the recent legal settlement with the former dismissed problem resident, [the plaintiff], the Department had to reallocate the monies I had planned to use for a retention bonus to pay the settlement legal costs to" the plaintiff and her attorney, Dr. Martin wrote in an email to the department. He referred to the plaintiff by name.

2. The retention bonuses Dr. Martin referred to in the email are part of the medical school's incentive pay program, where faculty receive bonuses based on performance, UNM Health Sciences Center spokeswoman Alex Sanchez told NM Political Report. A portion of a faculty member's pay is held at risk and only given if they meet specific performance-based metrics, which include research, clinical and instructional activities. Each department manages its incentive compensation program differently, according to a statement. The UNM Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine lists 46 faculty members, but it is not clear how many faculty members have lost their bonuses.

3. The settlement used funds from the anesthesiology department rather than impacting a risk fund or insurance policy, according to Ms. Sanchez. The university did not release specific dollar amounts or details due to the confidentiality of the settlement, according to a statement.

4. UNM's policy on paying for legal settlements does not indicate where the money comes from. However, it is not unheard of for an individual department to cover the costs of settlements, Ms. Sanchez said.

5. Although the anesthesiology department was responsible for paying a portion of the settlement, the department does not appear to be responsible for the university's legal fees in litigating the case.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:16 p.m. CST Jan. 8.
Illinois' Cook County laid off more than 300 employees Friday, including five drug and alcohol counselors at Chicago-based John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, according to ABC 7.

The five counselor layoffs come amid the county's plans to cut 34 workers at Cook County Health and Hospitals System, of which Stroger Hospital is a part.

County officials revealed the layoff plans in November following budget cuts.

"When the Board unanimously approved the 2018 budget, it required more than $200 million in spending cuts to make up for repealed revenue [from the sweetened beverage tax] and to meet the county's obligation of balancing its budget annually," Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said in a statement Friday, according to ABC 7. "Because approximately 80 percent of the county's spending is related to personnel costs, losing revenue and balancing the budget unfortunately meant that some County employees would be subject to layoffs this fiscal year."

The 34 total health system layoffs primarily affect licensed practical nurses.

A hospital spokesperson said individuals affected by the layoffs have had the opportunity to fill an open position they qualify for. Additionally, "the responsibilities of the roles eliminated will be absorbed elsewhere in the health system to ensure continuity in delivery of care," the spokesperson told Becker's via email.

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As you get ready for a busy week, here are five articles you must read to catch up on all the latest healthcare news.

1. 10 latest healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements

From a North Carolina hospital's former finance director allegedly stealing more than $3 million to pharmacies accused of failing to report accurate drug prices to government payers, here are the latest healthcare industry lawsuits and settlements making headlines.

2. Public perception of the opioid crisis: 6 key findings from 7 national polls



To assess the public's perception of the nation's ongoing opioid overdose and addiction crisis, two public health researchers with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston analyzed findings from seven national polls conducted in 2013, 2016 and 2017.

3. 6 things to know about potential Medicaid work requirement rules

Rules for Medicaid work requirements are forthcoming, according to The Hill.

4. Digital health startups raised $11.5B in 2017, a new record high: 6 things to know

With midterm elections on the horizon and healthcare politics in the headlines, physicians should consider their role in discussing politics with patients.

5. CVS Health, Aetna in discussions with other potential partners during merger talks: 4 takeaways

CVS Health and Aetna were talking with other potential parties amid early discussions of their $69 billion deal, inked Dec. 3, Bloomberg reports.
Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of New York City-based NYC Health + Hospitals, said the public healthcare network must focus on improving its primary care initiatives to combat shrinking federal and state funds and declining patient populations, among other challenges.

Dr. Katz, who began his dual appointment as president and CEO Monday, spoke to The New York Times about his goals for the system and how his past experience at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services will inform his decision making at NYC Health + Hospitals.

Here are four takeaways from The New York Times report.

1. Dr. Katz highlighted the importance of maintaining public institutions such as NYC Health + Hospitals, a system comprising 11 hospitals, five nursing facilities, 70-plus community-based healthcare centers and clinics and approximately 40,000 employees.

"I'm all about trying to strengthen public hospitals," Dr. Katz told The New York Times. "Public hospitals are incredibly precious. If you don't look out for them, they'll disappear."

2. Dr. Katz said NYC Health + Hospitals faces a number of similar challenges he encountered while serving as director of the LACDHS, such as declining reimbursements and patient populations. NYC Health + Hospitals is one of the state's largest providers of healthcare to uninsured patients. Thirty-seven percent of the estimated 1.1 million patients who visited the system during the 2017 fiscal year were uninsured, according to a management report released by the New York City mayor's office and cited by The New York Times.

3. Dr. Katz said he inherited a $250 million budget when he started as head of the LACDHS in 2011, but left the agency with a $560 million surplus. The key to his success, he claims, was shifting the agency's focus toward outpatient services.

"It's all about providing primary care," he said. "When you take care of people over time your own involvement with them is healing, and you don't have to do as many tests to get to the answer because you know the person."

4. Dr. Katz said he also plans to expand the system's use of eConsult, an electronic health management system, to streamline care and reduce wait times for specialty appointments. He said he will also evaluate staff allocation and may consider decreasing administrative services to increase savings and revenue, the report states.

To access the full New York Times report, click here.
Though Pakistan government has denied the presence of the Islamic State (IS) on its soil, a leading think-tank here has warned that the dreaded terror outfit is alarmingly increasing its presence, posing a major threat to the country.

By Press Trust of India: Though Pakistan government has denied the presence of the Islamic State (IS) on its soil, a leading think-tank here has warned that the dreaded terror outfit is alarmingly increasing its presence, posing a major threat to the country.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) yesterday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn News reported.

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The PIPS shared the findings of its security analysis titled Special Report 2017, providing an insight into security challenges of Pakistan.

Pakistan has been denying that ISIS had an organised presence in the country, however, even though the terrorist group has claimed responsibility for several other attacks in Balochistan in recent years.

"Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar and others with similar objectives perpetrated 58 per cent attacks, while 37 per cent and 5 per cent of the attacks were carried out by nationalist insurgents and violent sectarian groups respectively," it said.

The report has also highlighted that Baloch nationalist- insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were only second to TTP as far as the their threat capability was concerned.

The report also noted the alarming increase in the footprint of ISIS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh as it carried out the deadliest attacks in those provinces. It said that footprints of ISIS was increasing and it "killed 153 in 6 deadliest attacks".

It said "down 16 per cent from the year before, 370 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan (in 2017), killing 815 and injuring 1,736 people."

It said that Balochistan and tribal region remained critical areas with 288 and 253 terrorism-related killings, respectively, in 2017.

It also reported that Pakistan's National Security Policy is set to be released in 2018 and it will take into account especially global and regional scenarios, including the evolving Pakistan-US relations.

The report also noted that compared to 2016, a significant surge of 131 per cent was witnessed during 2017 in cross-border attacks from Pakistan's borders with Afghanistan, India and Iran.

A total of 171 cross-border attacks claimed 188 lives and injured 348 others.

Furthermore, security forces and law enforcement agencies killed a total of 524 militants in 2017, compared to 809 in 2016, in 75 military/security operations as well as 68 armed clashes and encounters with militants reported from across four provinces and FATA.

ALSO WATCH | India Today goes inside ISIS recruitment room

--- ENDS ---
Sunshine Bodey claims her son was denied a life-saving heart transplant at their local Oregon hospital because of his autism, and he would have died if she and her family had not been able to find a hospital in California willing to operate on him, according to an op-ed in The Oregonian.

Ms. Bodey writes the hospital told her no facility would ever agree to operate on her son, who is unable to communicate verbally and has sensory and motor difficulties. However, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Lucile Packard Children's Hospital said they would accept him as a patient though it was unclear if he would be able to survive the flight from Oregon to California. After multiple open heart surgeries, he eventually underwent a heart transplant and recovered successfully.

Ms. Bodey argues that although her son's case had a happy ending, it is indicative of problems that many autistic and other developmentally disabled patients face when they are in need of organ transplants.

"Transplant programs are given wide latitude in deciding whether to take a patient's disability into account. A 2008 study by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics found that 43 percent of the 50 pediatric heart, liver and kidney transplant programs surveyed always or usually considered neurodevelopmental delays, while 39 percent rarely or never did," Ms. Bodey wrote in The Oregonian.

While the American with Disabilities Act created rules outlawing discrimination, Ms. Bodey said states must focus more on enforcing these rules.
The following healthcare mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and general transactions took place or were announced during the past week.

1. Tenet to divest Missouri hospital

Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare entered into a definitive agreement Jan. 5 to sell St. Louis-based Des Peres Hospital and other Tenet-owned physician practices and hospital-affiliated operations in the area to St. Luke's Hospital, a 493-bed facility in Chesterfield, Mo.

2. UnityPoint Health-Des Moines affiliates with Grinnell Regional: 3 things to know

UnityPoint Health-Des Moines (Iowa) and Grinnell (Iowa) Regional Medical Center, in partnership with the Iowa City-based University of Iowa Health Care, announced their finalized affiliation Jan. 3.

3. Tenet, Baylor Scott & White restructure joint venture: 4 things to know

Tenet Healthcare and Baylor Scott & White Health have signed a definitive agreement to dissolve a joint venture the two Dallas-based health systems finalized two years ago.

4. Illinois OKs BJC HealthCare's 2-hospital takeover plan

The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board approved St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare's petition to gain control of two Illinois hospitals Dec. 29.

5. SSM Health completes sponsorship transfer of 2 Wisconsin health facilities

St. Louis-based SSM Health and the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes completed the sponsorship transfer of two Wisconsin-based health organizations Jan. 4.

6. UNC Health Care finalizes purchase, rebrands bankrupt North Carolina hospital

Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health Care completed its purchase of bankrupt Eden, N.C.-based Morehead Memorial Hospital Jan. 1.

7. Bozeman Health buys private practice at Big Sky Resort

Bozeman (Mont.) Health finalized its acquisition of The Medical Clinics of Big Sky (Mont.) Jan. 1.

8. Real estate investment trust sells 20 Genesis facilities for $103M

Sabra Health Care REIT on Dec. 22 completed the sale of 20 skilled nursing facilities leased to Kennett Square, Pa.-based Genesis HealthCare.

9. CoxHealth completes acquisition of 6th hospital

Springfield, Mo.-based CoxHealth finalized the acquisition of its sixth hospital  Lamar, Mo.-based Barton County Memorial Hospital  Jan. 1.

10. MetroHealth seeks strategic partnership after 'extraordinary year'

Cleveland-based MetroHealth will seek out a third-party adviser to assist in the search for a strategic partner during the course of the next year.

11. St. Luke's University Health Network, Blue Mountain Health finalize merger

Blue Mountain Health System, a two-hospital system in Lehighton, Pa., finalized its merger with St. Luke's University Health Network, a seven-hospital system in Bethlehem, Pa., Dec. 31.

12. Hackensack Meridian Health to combine with JFK Health, become largest health system in NJ

Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health revealed plans to combine operations with Edison-based JFK Health Jan. 3. The merger will make Hackensack Meridian the largest health system in New Jersey.

13. ProMedica finalizes acquisition of Michigan hospital

Toledo, Ohio-based ProMedica completed its acquisition of Coldwater, Mich.-based Community Health Center of Branch County Jan. 1.
Methodist Dallas Medical Center is diverting nonemergency patients to other local hospitals due to an influx of flu cases, according to NBC DFW.

The hospital diverted nonemergency patients to prioritize care for patients experiencing trauma, stroke and other emergencies.Hospital officials are urging patients with flu-like symptoms to visit urgent care locations or their primary care physician.

"Consistent with federal and state laws, Methodist Dallas Medical Center is currently re-routing nonemergency patients due to high volumes of patients with flu-like symptoms," the hospital said in a statement, according to NBC DFW. "This measure is so we can still take care of emergency patients such as trauma, stroke, and those transferred by ambulance. We take this very seriously because we want to be able to treat anyone in need anytime."

On Jan 10, Methodist sent an updated statement to Becker's Hospital Review emphasizing patients were not turned away from the hospital.

"Methodist Dallas Medical Center [is] no longer at critical capacity and resumed receiving all patients coming in by ambulance in need of medical treatment ... At no point did Methodist Dallas turn away patients."

Editor's Note: This article was updated at 3:47 p.m. January 10, 2018 to include an updated statement from Methodist Dallas Medical Center and to emphasize no patients were turned away.
Minneapolis-based Hennepin County Medical Center  a Level I Trauma Center across the street from the U.S. Bank Stadium, where Super Bowl LII will be held Feb. 4  is developing an emergency plan to ensure access to the hospital as roads close and people rush into the city for game day, reports CBS Minnesota.

In the days leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, the hospital will increase staff levels in preparation for an uptick in patients. In addition, the hospital's plan asks for on-call staff to be housed at the hospital.

Normally, ambulances start at HCMC and are dispatched to emergency situations accordingly. However, ambulances will be located at different locations throughout the city on Super Bowl Sunday. Helicopters will still be able to land and take off from the medical center.

"There's been a tremendous amount of time and hours and commitment to that planning," Mark Lappe, Emergency Manager at HCMC, told CBS Minnesota. "Being ready means that we have the resources and the personnel and supplies to be able to surge up in case we have a large number of patients that are suddenly showing up at our door whether it's a mass-casualty incident of some sort  or a shooting."
American children in more than 3,000 neighborhoods nationwide have experienced lead poisoning at rates double those recorded during the peak of Flint, Michigan's water contamination crisis, according to Reuters.

Here are five things to know.

1. To assess the burden of lead poisoning among U.S. children, Reuters investigators examined previously undisclosed neighborhood-level blood testing results compiled by the CDC and state health departments. Most of the data span a five- to 10-year period through 2015.

2. In 2014, the city of Flint changed its water source to the Flint River without taking proper precautions to protect against the corrosion of the city's aging lead pipe systems. The switch resulted in elevated levels of lead in the city's water supply. In 2015, 5 percent of children screened in Flint displayed high blood lead levels. The Reuters analysis identified 1,100 communities across the U.S. where children displayed high levels of lead in their blood at four times the rate of Flint children in 2015.

3. The investigation also revealed county maps previously created by states to assess the burden of lead poisoning among children were misleading.

"We found that those countywide maps not only didn't really show the problem areas, but they actually could provide a false sense of security," Michael Pell, a member of the Reuters investigative team, told Public Radio International. "[I]f you look at the entire county, [you might see] a small percentage of kids with high lead levels, but if you break that down by neighborhood level, what you could see is that there are some neighborhoods where a lot of kids are still testing very high for lead."

4. Like Flint, many communities identified in the analysis had an aging water infrastructure, in addition to crumbling lead paint in homes and residual industrial waste. In portions of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, lead poisoning has been an issue for generations. In the last decade, 40 to 50 percent of children in these communities have experienced lead poisoning.

5. Any child displaying elevated levels of lead merits a public health response, as even a minor elevation can cause developmental issues, according to the CDC. Lead poisoning can result in damage to the brain and nervous, behavioral issues, problems with speech and hearing issues.

To read the full Reuters report, click here.

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Smoking can increase the risk of lower back pain that requires spinal surgery, according to a study published in The Spine Journal.

Researchers looked at cases of lumbar spinal stenosis  a common cause of lower back pain that develops when the spinal canal narrows, putting pressure on the spinal cord and nerves. Although the condition can develop as people age, nicotine can contribute to the process by constricting blood flow and increasing inflammation.

The study team gathered data on 331,941 construction workers who were on a nationwide occupational health registry in Sweden. The study followed workers for more than three decades on average, beginning when workers were usually in their 30s. In the study, 1,623 participants eventually had surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis.

Here are five findings from the study.

1. In all, 44 percent of participants were non-smokers. Another 16 percent were former smokers, while 26 percent were moderate smokers and 14 percent were heavy smokers.

2. Heavy smokers who smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day were 46 percent more likely to have surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis when compared to participants who never smoked. The connection between smoking and spinal surgery persisted after researchers accounted for aging and obesity.

3. The increased risk for lumbar spinal stenosis surgery was 31 percent for moderate smokers who had up to 14 cigarettes a day. Ex-smokers saw a 13 percent increased chance for surgery.

4. Although previous research has linked smoking to worse outcomes from spinal surgery, this study offers additional evidence that smoking can also increase the chances that back pain will require surgery, said Arkan Sayed-Noor, MD, PhD, senior study author.

5. The authors noted the study was limited by a lack of data on exercise habits and that most of the construction workers in the study were men. The results may have differed for women.
The California Department of Public Health on Dec. 28 collectively issued $549,555 in fines to nine hospitals for licensing compliance issues that either caused or were likely to cause serious harm or death to patients.

The penalized incidents occurred between 2014 and 2017. Here is a breakdown of the penalties.

1. The health department issued California Pacific Medical Center  Davies Campus Hospital in San Francisco two fines for incidents that occurred in 2015 and 2016. The 2015 incident yielded a fine of $47,452.50 and was related to a medication error. The hospital received a $66,000 fine for failing to take appropriate actions to prevent a patient fall in 2016. The health department associated the fall with the patient's subsequent death.

2. Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs incurred an $82,500 fine for issues related to a 2014 patient blood transfusion that resulted in a prolonged hospitalization.

3. Doctors Medical Center in Modesto incurred a $47,250 fine for circumstances related to an interpatient sexual assault in 2016.

4. The health department fined Methodist Hospital of Sacramento $47,452 for a medication error that occurred in 2015.

5. Palmdale Regional Medical Center incurred a $49,500 fine after an emergency department patient stabbed himself in 2016.

6. Health officials fined Regional Medical Center of San Jose $33,300 for a 2017 event involving a medication error.

7. Riverside Community Hospital incurred a $31,500 fine for a 2014 event involving a medication error.

8. The health department fined Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital $100,000 for circumstances surrounding a 2015 patient suicide.

9. UC San Diego Health-Hillcrest incurred a $44,000 fine for issues related to the death of a cardiac patient who was not connected to the telemetry monitor.

To learn more about the fines, click here.

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Physicians are a significant economic driver for their communities, according to a new report released Monday by the American Medical Association.

The report, titled "The National Economic Impact of Physicians," examines the economic contributions of 736,873 patient care physicians nationwide. All physicians were practicing as of December 2015.

Here are five findings at the national level.

1. Physicians generated $2.3 trillion in economic output (i.e., sales revenues) in 2015, with each physician, on average, generating $3.2 million in output, according to the report.

2. Physicians supported 12.6 million jobs in 2015, with each physician, on average, supporting 17.1 jobs.

3. Physicians contributed $1 trillion in total wages and benefits paid to workers in 2015, with each physician, on average, supporting $1.4 million in workers' wages and benefits, the AMA said.

4. Physicians supported $92.9 billion in state and local tax revenues in 2015, with each physician, on average, supporting $126,129 in these revenues.

5. Overall, the study found physicians' national-level economic output, supported jobs and contributed wages and benefits exceed that of professionals in higher education, nursing/community care facilities, legal services and home health.

Read the full report, including a state-by-state breakdown of physicians' economic effects, here.

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Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff is teaming up with a number of other firms to bid for the lucrative construction of the UK government's 1.25bn plan to build five new frigates.

The Government wants to build five new ships, each worth 250m.

In September, the Belfast Telegraph reported that Titanic-builder Harland & Wolff, which once employed 35,000 workers at its peak back in the 1920s, but now is down to a workforce of 115, said it hoped to be in the running for work on the ships.

Now, according to the Financial Times, it is teaming up with companies, including weapons firm Thales  which employs more than 500 people in Belfast  to bid for constructon of the ships.

Last year, David McVeigh, head of sales and marketing at Harland and Wolff Heavy Industries, said:

"H&W have supported the development of the National Shipbuilding Strategy and look forward to engaging further with the Ministry of Defence and industry partners in an effort to secure work on the T31e programme and create shipbuilding jobs."

Harland & Wolff's Jonathan Guest said at the time that "we'd very much like to hope that Harland and Wolff would be one of those" selected for work on the ships.

The frigates are due to be in service by 2023 and shipyards would be encouraged to ensure the vessel was competitive on the global market by working with "global partners".

Harland & Wolff hasn't produced a ship in around 14 years. The last to leave Queen's Island was the 40m Anvil Point at the start of 2003.

The 22,000-tonne ferry was the second of two vessels built for the Ministry of Defence.
Newry firm MJM Group has landed a major new deal which will see it refit a major cruise vessel at Harland & Wolff in Belfast.

The move is part of a recent multi-million pound contract between cruise liners Royal Caribbean and Azamara Club and the specialist high-end fitout company, MJM Group. It also marks the first time a cruise ship firm has awarded complete project management responsibility to an individual organisation.

MJM Group will project manage the docking, berthing and refit of the Azamara Pursuit in Belfast this April and the ship will make its maiden voyage in August.

Gary Annett, chief executive of MJM Group, said the deal is a milestone opportunity for the company.

"The success of this project has the potential to be a game-changer for the UK maritime industry. By securing this multi-million pound contract we are putting Northern Ireland, and the UKs marine industry in a strong position to compete for future drydock and refit works," he said.

There are currently 335 ocean going ships which dry-dock on average every two and a half years for refit work that represents a spend of $3bn. These projects usually take place at shipyards in the Caribbean, Europe, USA, Canada and Asia.

MJM Group, which was set up in 1983 by Brian McConville, can list all of the worlds top cruise liners as clients, including Star Cruises, with which it signed a seven-figure contract last year for work in China.

But Mr Annett said the Royal Caribbean and Azamara Club deal allowed it realise a goal to bring a major refit to a UK port.

... we have always had the ambition to revive the rich shipbuilding industry history right here in Northern Ireland. We looked at many other facilities globally but we worked hard to put together a case for Northern Ireland.

"To secure the Azamara project we had to demonstrate that we had the ability to provide complete project management, outfitting, berthing and ship yard services. With Harland & Wolff on our doorstep and our experience in the industry we were able to do this. This truly is a historic day for this industry in Northern Ireland, for MJM Group and indeed our customers, he said.

Jonathan Guest, director of business development and improvement at Harland & Wolff said the deal has the potential to revive this industry in Northern Ireland.
The 25-year-old geology scholar was supposed to return home around January 3 but failed to turn up.

The photo that went viral on social media. | Photo credit: Ashraf Wani

By India Today Web Desk: News about AMU scholar Mannan Wani joining Hizbul Mujahideen is circulating after a photo of him holding an AK-47 rifle was posted on social media.

Mannan is a resident of Takipora village in Lolab, Kupwara and was pursuing a PhD in geology from AMU.

According to sources, Mannan Wani's photo went viral on social media showing him holding an AK-47 a day after he was reported missing.

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The 25-year-old geology scholar was supposed to return home around January 3 but failed to turn up. After Mannan did not reach home and the photo started circulating his family contacted the police and filed a missing complaint.

Jammu and Kashmir police say that there is no confirmation that Wani has joined the militant forces. IG Kashmir said that the there's a possibility that the images could have been photoshopped.

The police said that they are trying to locate Mannan and his last known location was Delhi.

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Jessica Chastain and Chris Hemsworth speak onstage during the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards (Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

Irish actress Saoirse Ronan looks set to once again bring fear to the stars of Hollywood this awards season, as they continue to struggle with the pronunciation of her name.

The Co Carlow star is currently gaining huge acclaim for her role in the Oscar tipped Lady Bird, which saw her win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical on Sunday.

Great news for Saoirse, not so much for Jessica Chastain who was charged with announcing her as the winner alongside actor Chris Hemsworth.

In fairness to Jessica, she did look to Chris for help only to be met with a look that said: "There's no way I'm attempting that", resulting in her announcing that 'Sher-sa' had won the award.

This is all despite actor Ryan Gosling famously clarifying the pronunciation back in 2016 as "Ser-sha, like inertia".

Saoirse also addressed the issue herself last month while making her Saturday Night Live hosting debut. She provided a public service announcement on how to pronounce her name.

She joked: 'I am very Irish, and I have an extremely Irish name. Some would say too Irish. Its Saoirse. It means freedom. But Ive got a little problem; it's spelled wrong. Its a full typo.'

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As expected, Twitter found Jessica's pronunciation of Saoirse hilarious.

"We are all the panic on Jessica Chastains face when she saw she had to pronounce Saoirse Ronan #goldenglobes," one user wrote.

Another added: "Omg Im dead at Chris Hemsworth not wanting to pronounce Saoirse Ronans name when Jessica Chastain held out the envelope to read together."

"Jessica Chastain clearly didn't see Saoirse Ronan's SNL appearance, or Ryan Gosling's explanation, for pointers on her name..." said one user.

Hollywood has a long history of mispronouncing Saoirse's name, with Dennis Quaid famously announcing "Sheesa" Ronan was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2016.

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The 35-year-old faces charges of causing grievous bodily harm with intent and possessing cocaine.

A woman allegedly stabbed her boyfriend three times at a weekend party in east Belfast, a court has heard.

Police said the man was rushed to hospital for treatment to shoulder wounds inflicted at a flat in the Newtownards Road area early on Sunday morning.

Sonya Johnston, 35, faces charges of causing grievous bodily harm with intent and possessing cocaine.

Johnston, with an address at University Street in the city, was granted bail but banned from contacting the alleged victim.

Appearing before Belfast Magistrates' Court, she spoke only to confirm that she understood the charges.

Police opposed her application to be released from custody, claiming there were risks of further offences and interference with witnesses.

Outling details of the alleged attack, a PSNI constable said: "The injured party called police at approximate 1.50am on January 7 to report his girlfriend, the defendant, had stabbed him in the shoulder. It was at a party."

A doctor who treated the man identified three stab wounds, the court heard.

Johnston's lawyer revealed that the couple are no longer together.

"The relationship has come to an end," he said.

Despite police objections, District Judge Fiona Bagnall ruled that Johnston could be released on bail.

"This seems to be a specific alleged offence, a row with her partner," she pointed out.

Mrs Bagnall also excluded the accused from parts of the city and imposed an alcohol prohibition.

Johnston is due back in court in six weeks time.
A legal bid to sue Northern Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions for failing to bring charges against suspects in a double loyalist murder 26 years ago is unsustainable, the High Court has ruled.

A judge held that the potentially landmark claim brought over the killings of Kevin and Jack McKearney at their Co Tyrone butchers shop was both defective and frivolous.

Lawyers representing Kevin McKearney's widow, Bernadette, are now set to appeal the decision to strike out a writ against the prosecuting authority.

An Ulster Volunteer Force gunman shot the two men at the family shop in Moy in January 1992.

Kevin McKearney, 32, was killed instantly, while his uncle Jack, 70, died later in hospital.

The murders were investigated by the police's Historical Enquiries Team amid relatives' claims that a death threat received by the family days before the shooting was not properly investigated by the RUC.

In 2012 the HET concluded that police had not done enough to prevent the killings, but found no evidence of collusion with the terrorists.

Mrs McKearney is already suing the Chief Constable and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), alleging negligence, misfeasance in public office and a human rights breach over events surrounding the shooting.

Her legal team wanted to join the Director of Public Prosecutions to the lawsuit, claiming staff within the department had failed to pursue all possible leads to establish circumstances and wrongdoing.

Criticism centred on the non-prosecution of three people, including UVF man Laurence George Maguire.

In 1994 Maguire reportedly received five life sentences, together with a total of 480 years in jail, when he admitted 41 terror-related offences including murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and blackmail.

He was the first person to be charged with directing terrorism.

The court heard he was also considered for the offences of murdering Kevin and Jack McKearney, but it was ultimately decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Counsel for Mrs McKearney argued that he should have faced a criminal charge in relation to their deaths, based on a pattern of him buying cars subsequently used in killings.

But a barrister representing the Director sought to have the case against him struck out.

He argued that it was not legally possible to make the prosecution decision Mrs McKearney wanted.

The Director has neither an investigatory role nor any responsibility for pursuing all possible leads, the court heard.

Setting out reasons today for agreeing to strike out the action against the prosecuting authority, Master Bell held it had no function to pursue all possible leads in the murder.

"I conclude for the reasons set out above that the statement of claim in this case is defective," he said.

"Even if I had not reached this conclusion... I would have struck out the litigation against the Director on the basis that it was frivolous or vexatious, that is to say obviously unsustainable.

"I consider that, on the basis of the evidence submitted to the Director, in respect of Mr McKearney's murder, the Director's decisions were entirely appropriate."

Master Bell added: "Nothing of course in this decision affects the plaintiff's litigation against the Chief Constable, the Ministry of Defence and the Secretary of State for Defence which now continues."
The inside of the church before it was destroyed

The work being carried out on Straid Congregational Church

A Co Antrim community is in turmoil after a church congregation began tearing the pews out of their landmark 200-year-old church late on Friday night.

While members of Straid Congregational Church are keen to build a new place of worship "fit for the 21st century", others in the village are horrified that the building will be razed.

Officials from the Historic Environment Division (HED), which has been considering the building for listed status, visited the site last week and were in the process of completing their records when the attempted demolition took place.

Tom Gilbert (64), who has lived near the church for almost three decades, was asleep in bed when he was alerted to the fact that church members were ripping the building apart from the inside.

"I was horrified," he said last night.

"Then I found out they were preparing to tear the building down the next day."

Mr Gilbert was one of dozens of protesters who managed to save the historic structure from being completely demolished on Saturday when they obstructed a bulldozer in a desperate bid to buy time until an emergency preservation order was issued by Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council.

Protesters were successful in peacefully delaying the demolition until a council employee arrived with a stop notice.

The preservation notice means the church will effectively be given temporary listed status for six months.

However, campaigners are hoping it could be permanently listed within weeks.

The Belfast Telegraph understands that the local authority has issued a letter to councillors advising that they are in receipt of a letter from HED which will be discussed with the planning committee in "due course". Plans to knock down and rebuild the church have caused a deep rift in the congregation, with the pastor Paul Bradley supporting demolition.

He was present during the protest along with a small number of his supporters.

UUP MLA Steve Aiken, former Alliance Party leader David Ford and DUP MP Paul Girvan all attended the protest.

Mr Gilbert, who is not himself a church member, claims many of the congregation have been left upset by the row.

"Some of them were crying and begging for the demolition to stop," he said.

Just over a year ago, in a video celebration of the church's 200th anniversary, Pastor Bradley described the "beautiful building" as having a lot of "history and sentimental value".

"You would be surprised and delighted to see the original internal structure," he said.

But on Friday night that historic interior was reduced to matchwood.

Ballyclare Ulster Unionist councillor Jim Bingham, who also took part in the protest, said many residents had been left furious after the inside of the church was wrecked.

"No one would object to a new church, but this building has been part of this community for centuries and they didn't consult with anyone," he said.

"They thought they could do what they wanted, but it didn't work out that way and if they continue they will be in breach of the law.

"I know people who have left the church over the head of it and they say they won't be stepping foot inside it again."

Chair of the Green Party of Mid, East and South Antrim, Dawn Patterson, branded the church's "destructive step" as disappointing.

"Our churches across Northern Ireland are a key part of our architectural treasure trove and once gone, they are gone forever," she warned.

Last night the old church was in darkness as the congregation gathered for a Sunday evening service in the neighbouring church hall.

Pastor Bradley declined to be interviewed about the redevelopment.

Worshippers arriving for the service all supported the pastor's plans for the church but none would give their names.

"The plans are brilliant. We're all for it," one female worshipper said.

Another member of Straid Congregational Church said she had seen a presentation about the development on Friday, and thought it was the right thing to do.

In the church car park, a worshipper in his 30s said: "The vast majority of the congregation are in support of the redevelopment.

"It's not just a one-man band, as has been reported."
An MP regarded as the most prolific Commons contributor has described himself as a "workaholic" who wants to support his colleagues.

Jim Shannon, who is well known among Westminster watchers for his frequent interventions, contributed to 213 debates and question sessions in the House of Commons and Westminster Hall between the start of the current Parliament in June and Christmas, official figures show.

In the last six months, the Democratic Unionist MP has spoken at all hours in the parliamentary day in debates ranging from school funding in North Northumberland and Cornwall's dark sky status, to job losses in Cardiff.

Mr Shannon said his interest in such diverse, regional matters stems from issues raised by his Northern Irish constituents, and he wanted to support his colleagues when they bring up similar matters.

The MP for Strangford told the Press Association: "You build up relationships with MPs.

"I try to be friendly with everyone - it's just my nature to be like that - so if I have an MP who I would be supportive of, and some of the things that they're bringing forward, I will go and support them."

Mr Shannon is widely regarded as the MP who contributes the most in Parliament, making around double the number of interventions compared with other talkative politicians.

Analysis of Hansard records by the Press Association detailing the number of spoken contributions by MPs since June 13 - when the House returned after the election - until it rose for Christmas, showed Tory Kevin Foster (Torbay) was recorded as having spoken or seeking to speak in 92 sessions in the two chambers.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May has spoken in 26 sessions since she was re-elected - with Prime Minister's Questions plus lengthy Brexit statements among the main reasons for her appearances.

"I've a busy nature and probably, in all honesty - and it's not meant as a boast - a workaholic," Mr Shannon explained.

Asked about MPs who do not contribute regularly in Parliament - notably his party's rivals Sinn Fein who do not take their seats in Westminster, he said: "That's really not for me to say - people do things differently. I'm a workaholic, not everybody is.

"I want to represent the people vocally and verbally where the occasion gives me the opportunity. Other people do it a different way and that's entirely up to them.

"Every MP here is inherently a good person who wants to do his best for his constituents, and because we're all different characters and different personalities we'll all do it in different ways."

A backbench colleague from the SNP described Mr Shannon as "well respected" and acknowledged his "hard work", adding: " It wouldn't be possible for everyone to do what he does but everyone knows to expect an intervention from Jim Shannon when they've got an adjournment debate.

"He's a personable guy and he gets on with a lot of folk on a cross-party basis, and he's very supportive of a lot of the all-party groups and so on."
The cottage near Glenties where Denis Donaldson was shot dead

A republican councillor in Londonderry has been arrested in Donegal in connection with the shooting dead of Denis Donaldson, the senior MI5 spy who operated at the heart of the IRA and Sinn Fein.

Gary Donnelly, an independent councillor on Derry City and Strabane District Council, was yesterday arrested on suspicion of unlawful possession of a firearm at the home of Mr Donaldson on the day of his murder.

Mr Donaldson (56) - who had been a close associate of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams - was gunned down as he answered the door of his remote rural cottage at Doochary, near Glenties, on April 4, 2006, after it emerged he was a British agent.

The Real IRA claimed responsibility for his murder.

Mr Donnelly was arrested by Garda shortly after 2pm yesterday afternoon as he returned from a republican commemoration in Dungloe.

The 46-year-old was one of the main speakers at the 100th anniversary of the Min Beannaid train ambush, commemorating the first action in the Irish War of Independence.

The vehicle Mr Donnelly was returning home to Derry in was stopped by officers at Crolly, Co Donegal.

He was arrested and taken to Letterkenny Garda station for questioning.

Mr Donnelly is being detained under Section 30 of the Offences against the State Act and can be detained for up to 72 hours.

Mr Donaldson was a prominent member of Sinn Fein before being expelled from the party after admitting being a British spy for 20 years.

During his time as an informer he was head of the party's administrative team at Stormont and was at one stage also in charge of international relations, spending time in the Middle East improving the party's presence there.

The inquest into the Belfast man's murder has been delayed 20 times.

It is believed that the delays are partly connected to sensitive material in the Garda's possession, namely a journal.

It is understood that the diary contains information about Donaldson's British handlers and political figures in Northern Ireland.

The Donaldson family have taken a legal challenge against the authorities over the delays.

The family, who claim that members of the PSNI played a role in exposing him, have also asked Police Ombudsman Dr Michael Maguire to help them recover his journal from the Republic.

An Garda Siochana was contacted for comment on the matter but had not responded to this newspaper's request at time of going to print.
The crowd assembled at the service of remembrance for the victims held at the Town Hall in Bessbrook yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the atrocity

Sisters Cathy Michale, Colleen McKenna and Eileen Reavey unveil the monument to commemorate their brothers in Whitecross, Armagh

Karen Armstrong holds a photograph of her brother John McConville, who was killed in the Kingsmill attack

Alan Black:Survivor of the Kingsmill, Armagh, Massacre/Shooting, when he was shot with his 10 workmates in an ambushon their way home from work by gunmen. Pictured at the Kingsmill Memorial monument. 4/1/1981

Alan Black in hospital after the IRA shot him and killed 10 of his colleagues at Kingsmills

The funeral service for five victims of the Kingsmills massacre at the Presbyterian church grounds in Bessbrook

The victims of the Kingsmill massacre (clockwise from top left): Robert Chambers; John Bryans; Joseph Lemmon; James McWhirter; Robert Freeburn; Robert Walker; Reginald Chapman; Kenneth Worton; John McConville and Walter Chapman

Families of murdered workmen attend an evening service in 1976 as six coffins of IRA victims are brought to church in Bessbrook the night before the funerals of those killed in the Provisional IRA's infamous sectarian Whitecross (Kingsmill) Massacre. The IRA lined up the occupants of a workers minibus carrying 11 protestants and one catholic, before releasing the catholic man and mowing down the 10 protestant workmen, leaving the critically injured Mr Alan Black for dead. Alan Lewis Photopress

The sole survivor of the Kingsmill massacre has said if Barry McElduff was a man of principle he would quit his public role.

Alan Black was speaking after the West Tyrone MP was handed a three-month suspension from Sinn Fein for a video in which he put a loaf of Kingsmill bread on his head, posting it on the anniversary of the 1976 atrocity.

Republican paramilitary gunmen stopped a van carrying textile workers in the south Armagh village of Kingsmill on their way home, identified the Protestant occupants, lined them up at the side of the road and shot them. They allowed one man, Richard Hughes, a Catholic, to walk free.

Alan Black survived the attack despite being shot 18 times. He said the three-month suspension was not sufficient.

"I watched all my friends being murdered, my 19-year-old apprentice crying for his mother, and then to watch on Friday a man standing and mocking their deaths, if he was a man of principle he would walk," he said.

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After 35 hours Barry McElduff removed the offending post from social media and apologised saying it was never his intention to hurt the families and he did not realise the link to the anniversary of the sectarian killings.

After meeting with Sinn Fein senior membership on Monday he was suspended with full pay.

Mr Black accused Sinn Fein of "circling the wagons" around Mr McElduff.

"If he didn't know the fifth of January was the Kingsmill massacre, it's beyond me," he told UTV.

Read More

Bea Worton, whose son Kenneth was murdered, told the broadcaster Mr McElduff should have been "put out" of Sinn Fein.

"Mrs O'Neill wants equality, and that's the equality we get?," she said.

"We get no equality."

Son Colin said he had been initially heartened to hear Declan Kearney's strong condemnation on Monday morning saying the video was "indefensible".

"And then they came out and gave Barry McElduff three months suspended sentence," he told the BBC.

"They have saw a fire and instead of putting it out they have poured petrol over it and made it worse."

Read More

His sister Raquel Brush said she was disgusted and seething over the discipline handed out by the republican party in response: "Words can't describe it - it's laughable.

"You would give a child more for less."

Sinn Fein MLA Mairtin O Muilleoir retweeted the video. He later apologised but has so far escaped sanction from his party.

Former UUP MLA Danny Kennedy who has campaigned with the families for justice, said the anniversary of the sectarian killings was marred by the actions of Sinn Fein and others over past days.

He said the stress and distress caused by the video had been compounded by the "laughable sanction" handed down by Sinn Fein "and only to Mr McElduff" suggesting action should also be taken against the South Belfast MLA.

"He got a tame yellow card, when he deserved a straight red," he said in a statement.

"Sinn Fein still stand exposed for their treatment of innocent victims. Their calls for respect and equality ring hollow. I will continue to stand with the sole survivor and the families of Kingsmills in their dignified campaign.

"If you are not standing with the Kingsmills families, then you are not standing in the right place."
Belfast Crown Court heard that during the burglary, Michael Leo McMillan "stopped to engage" in inhaling aerosol from an air freshener.

A 24-year old man caught by police burgling a flat in north Belfast whilst wearing socks on his hands was sentenced on Monday for the break-in.

Belfast Crown Court heard that during the burglary, Michael Leo McMillan "stopped to engage" in inhaling aerosol from an air freshener.

McMillan - who appeared in court with 70 previous convictions and whose address was given as HMP Maghaberry - was handed a sentence of two years and five months for burgling and ransacking an apartment in the Duncairn area of the city last May.

Saying McMillan's addiction to drink and drugs was the "root cause" of his offending, Judge Patricia Smyth told him he will serve half the sentence in prison, with the remainder on supervised licence.

The court heard McMillan was so noisy during the break-in that he alerted the occupant of the flat below, who contacted police just before midnight on May 22, 2017.

When police arrived at the scene, they caught McMillan in the property and wearing socks on his hands. He was searched and had several items belonging to the householder, which were later returned.

Prosecuting barrister Simon Jenkins revealed McMillan used a fire extinguisher to smash the front door of the flat. Once inside, he caused further damage, and also left his iPhone in a bedroom.

When arrested, McMillan confirmed the phone was his, but refused to answer any further questions. He later admitted a charge of burglary.

Defence barrister Martin Morgan said McMillan had experienced trauma in his childhood - including witnessing the death of his brother - which in turn led to drug and alcohol misuse.

Telling the court it was Probation's view that McMillan had "unresolved grief issues", Mr Morgan said: "The nemesis in his background is the addiction issue."

Regarding the offence, Mr Morgan spoke of a complete lack of sophistication, and also revealed McMillan knew no-one was in at the time, meaning there was no confrontation with the occupant.

Sending McMillan to prison, he was told by Judge Smyth that he had paid no respect to the occupant whose home he damaged, or their privacy. The Judge said she also accepted the break-in was "unsophisticated and "didn't have the normal trappings of a professional burglary."
Owen Smith says more needs to be done by Theresa May to end logjam

This year is the 20th anniversary of one of the most important political achievements in modern British and Irish history.

The Belfast Agreement, signed on Good Friday in 1998, marked the end of the so-called Troubles, that sweet euphemism for a bloody civil war which killed 3,500 and injured 50,000 more.

For younger generations it may seem extraordinary, unimaginable even, that a 30-year conflict was so recently fought on these islands.

Or that the Good Friday Agreement, when it came, brought an end not just to that chapter of bloodshed, but a hope that political compromise might staunch, forever, the centuries of blood that had flowed in Ireland's name.

But in this anniversary year we have to remind ourselves, all of us who are citizens of Britain or Ireland, or both, that the Troubles were very real and that the progress - political, economic and social, which came with their ending - is real too.

What is far less certain today is that such progress can be maintained, or that violence cannot restate its claim on the lives of current generations.

Because next week marks another, less auspicious anniversary: the first since the collapse of the latest Northern Ireland Executive born out of the 1998 settlement.

And though 12 months may seem short in the long context of Irish politics - short even when compared to similar breakdowns over the last two decades - there are growing reasons to fear that this current erosion of trust between parties may be undermining the very foundations of the Good Friday Agreement.

Of course, Sinn Fein and the DUP, the largest nationalist and unionist blocs, claim they are each ready to re-engage.

The DUP immediately, it says, Sinn Fein after "past agreements" on various issues, the treatment of the Irish language in particular, are resolved.

Many experienced observers of Northern Ireland politics, however, see strong strategic reasons why neither side will be quick to compromise and collaborate once more.

For the DUP, the pain of being out of office in Stormont is salved by the power it now exercises at Westminster.

It can argue that it has served Northern Ireland well, with 1.5bn extracted for its constituencies, albeit at the expense of the rest of the Union it supports.

And it can bend the Government to its hard-nosed will on Brexit, albeit at the expense of the Remain-voting province it represents.

While for Sinn Fein, the current impasse provides shelter from the austerity decisions it rejects for Northern Ireland and allows space to fight the forthcoming election in the Republic.

And Brexit, of course, has a silver lining for the party, though it would never admit as much.

Taking Northern Ireland out of the EU along with the rest of the UK, irrespective of the nature of the border, will be seized upon as sufficient reason to call a poll on the issue that remains its raison d'etre, the unity of Ireland.

Now, perhaps such cynicism is unwarranted and a deal can quickly be reached when another round of talks begins, as it surely will, in the coming weeks.

But if there is any truth in the idea that the political parties each see more risk than benefit in re-entering power-sharing, then the Governments of the UK and Ireland, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, have to do more than they have to date to keep its dream alive.

They have to do more to put pressure on the parties to show their commitment to the Agreement. Because both the DUP, which though it was never party to its inception, carries great responsibility

For it, as unionism's principal representatives, nor Sinn Fein, are honouring the terms of the Agreement in their refusal to share power. And if either party is now prepared to, in effect, breach the terms of their contract under the Agreement, then the feasibility of the Good Friday Agreement may be at risk.

That is not an outcome that we in the Labour Party, so proud about the role we played in helping forge the Agreement, are prepared to countenance.

And it is why we are calling on the current guardians of the Agreement in London and Dublin to do much more to safeguard its future.

They could begin, in London, by engaging the Prime Minister.

Mrs May currently shares with her predecessor the dubious honour of being the British Prime Minster least involved in the affairs of Northern Ireland in living memory.

Our Prime Minister has barely set foot in Ireland and has made no significant intervention or personal investment in the current process. That has to change.

The Prime Minster should use her first days back in Parliament to announce a substantive relaunch of the political talks, beginning with a summit of all of the political parties, chaired by herself and representative of the Irish Government.

Secondly, an independent chair, respected by all sides, must be appointed to take the subsequent talks forward to fruition.

And, third, a road-map and clear timeline, of a few short months, should be agreed and spelled out by the two Governments, including how and when direct rule will be implemented and political accountability reinstated.

The current Secretary of State has set and seen broken innumerable deadlines since the collapse a year ago.

That cycle of failure has to change.

And the consequences of a further, final failure must be made clear.

Returning to direct rule from Westminster will be a hugely retrograde step for Northern Ireland.

And in Labour we know, from bitter experience, that it is far easier to implement direct rule than to restore devolution thereafter.

But its threat may be necessary to focus minds, and its consequence may be to bring forward important economic and social reforms, such as modernising local taxation or introducing equal marriage legislation.

Though such an active period of direct rule would be controversial and contested, social reforms would be welcomed by many in Northern Ireland, and economic modernisation would significantly increase pressure on the political parties to retake their places at Stormont.

In any event, there is a final lesson that the peace process we oversaw in Labour, and the subsequent stasis we've seen under the Tories, should teach us: in Northern Ireland, as with the proverbial bicycle, you have to keep moving forward or fall over.

Now is the moment for Theresa May and her ministers to show that they can get things back on track and moving forward, or concede another reason why it's time for them to move aside.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) has decided to go ahead with its plan to not mark their attendance as the administration insisted on introducing a mandatory attendance rule.

During a meeting with the JNU vice chancellor this morning, JNUSU president Geeta Kumari said, "we explained to the administration how such a surveillance is going to curtail academic freedom and destroy JNU culture".

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"We explained how students of the campus attend lectures not just at classrooms, but also at dhabas and hostel mess. Learning is a 24X7 process for us. The VC, however, insisted on the adoption of compulsory attendance model of IITs," Kumari said, after submitting a memorandum with around 2,500 signatures.

JNUSU joint secretary Shubhanshu Singh said that they have started campaign on the move in some classes.

"Some professors are also taking part in the campaign," Singh said.

However, JNU Teachers Association president Ayesha Kidwai said that the teachers body would decide its course of action at its General Body Meeting which is scheduled for January 10.

The JNUSU had yesterday announced for boycott of attendance. PTI CPB SMN

--- ENDS ---
Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire has resigned and will be leaving the government due to ill health.

The Northern Ireland Office confirmed on Monday he had left office.

It comes as Prime Minister Theresa May is to give her Government a New Year revamp in the most extensive reshuffle of her top team since she appointed her first Cabinet on entering Downing Street in 2016.

Mr Brokenshire has resigned from the Cabinet as the 50-year-old outgoing Northern Ireland Secretary requires surgery for a lung condition.

The Old Bexley and Sidcup MP is a close ally of Mrs May, having served under her for five years at the Home Office, and he was not among ministers who were predicted to go in the Prime Minister's first major reshuffle since she took office.

Mr Brokenshire took the role in 2016 replacing Theresa Villiers.

In his resignation letter to the Prime Minister Mr Brokenshire addressed his health and said he has a "small lesion in my right lung which needs to be removed".

Really appreciate all of the kind messages. Standing down will allow me to focus completely on my family, my health and recovering from surgery speedily so that I can get back to frontline politics as early as I can. Not quite how I thought Id mark my 50th birthday! pic.twitter.com/EDMGBR56y6  James Brokenshire (@JBrokenshire) January 8, 2018

He said it had been a "huge privilege" to serve in Mrs May's government and "to serve the people of Northern Ireland as Secretary of State".

He said: "I have very much enjoyed the role and been moved by the spirit, determination and kindness of so many people.

"Despite the challenges and the huge frustrations felt as a result of the lack of devolved government Northern Ireland has so much potential and we can be positive as to what can be achieved in the years ahead.

Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close James Brokenshire's letter to Theresa May James Brokenshire's letter to Theresa May Theresa May's letter to James Brokenshire / Facebook

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Whatsapp James Brokenshire's letter to Theresa May

"The parties in Northern Ireland should grab hold of this and get on with delivering this shared future benefiting the whole community.

"Rather than looking for reasons not to restore the Executive the parties should focus on why this matter now more than ever".

"My earnest wish is that we see devolved government restored as quickly as possible.

"The parties have got over much bigger issues in the past and at this important time they have a duty to do so now."

Mrs May said Mr Brokenshire had demonstrated that the role in the Northern Ireland Office was vital work which will demand long hours, hard effort and complete focus and it was absolutely right that you should put your health first.

She told him he had performed with great diligence, determination and good humour in his government roles and I know that you will approach your forthcoming operation in the same way.

She added: I very much look forward to working alongside you again when you are back to full health.

Mrs May sent her best wishes to Mr Brokenshire, his wife Cathy and their three children.

While it is typical of you that your first thought was not for yourself, but for your duties as a Cabinet Minister and public servant, it is absolutely right that you should put your health first, for your sake and that of your family, she said.

Northern Ireland's political parties have been reacting to the news.

DUP Leader Arlene Foster MLA said: This is clearly a difficult time for not only James but for Cathy, his wife and his children. I send my best wishes to him and the entire Brokenshire family. I trust James will have the surgery he needs and will make a full recovery.

"Since becoming Secretary of State in 2016, Mr Brokenshire had immersed himself fully in the role by dedicating long hours to trying to make progress.

"James leaves the role with a very intimate knowledge of Northern Ireland and I look forward to working with him again in the future.

DUP deputy Leader Nigel Dodds said: "Sorry to hear Secretary of State is standing down. Best wishes to James and his family for the time ahead."

UUP Leader Robin Swann said: "It is with sincere regret that I have learned of James Brokenshires resignation. I respected his honesty and how be played with a straight bat. I wish him well for the future both with his health and in his political career

"I hope that we will see a new SoS appointed soon. Given the state of politics in Northern Ireland it is important that the future Minister is able to hit the ground running and I hope that the incoming SoS will reconvene talks as a matter of urgency."

Shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland Owen Smith said: "Very sorry to hear that @JBrokenshire is unwell and has left the Cabinet. I, and Im sure all in Northern Ireland, thank James for his diligent service and wish him a speedy recovery."

SDLP Leader Colum Eastwood wishes Mr Brokenshire well and said he always had a "good working relationship with him".

He said: "In the course of negotiations, the SDLP has often disagreed with the position of his government but I have always found Mr Brokenshire to be personable, reasonable and, so far as possible, helpful.

Our thoughts are with him and his family as he takes time to concentrate on his health.

Its clear now that any new talks process aimed at restoring power sharing must be chaired by an independent arbiter. We cannot undergo the same discussions with a new Secretary of State only to arrive at the same barriers.

The new office holder should move quickly to appoint an independent chairperson and bring the parties together to resolve the challenges that remain. Our hospitals, schools and other public services are on the brink. It is critical that we get to work to seek a resolution now.

Green Party Leader Steven Agnew said he wishes Mr Brokenshire all the best in his recovery.

The North Down MLA said: Mr Brokenshire took on the mantle of Secretary of State during a particularly difficult time in Northern Ireland politics and faced an uphill task in trying to forge a consensus between negotiating parties that seemed unable to move any closer to an agreement.

Our thoughts are with him in his illness and we wish him all the best in his recovery.

Alliance leader Naomi Long said: We often disagreed, sometimes robustly, but the role of Secretary of State is mostly a thankless task and I appreciate, particularly in the current political circumstances, it is not an easy role to fulfil. On behalf of my colleagues and I, I wish James well for the future and I hope and trust he will soon return to full health.

Obviously, this resignation, coming at a time when parties expected to be moving into a more intensive phase of negotiations about restoration, creates a break in continuity in the Northern Ireland Office.

However, whilst any new Secretary of State will need some time to develop relationships and an understanding of the current state of play, it is important planned talks proceed as quickly as possible.

We have been without government for too long already and must ensure this impasse is speedily resolved. Alliance stands ready to work with whomever is appointed as his successor to ensure fresh momentum and direction is injected into the search for an accommodation.

More to follow
The PSNI have been called on to investigate damning claims by a former IRA member about his role in an attack on RUC officers.

Michael Ryan, who took part in the IRA's border campaign between 1956 and 1962, makes shocking revelations in a book set to be published this week.

The 81-year-old reveals his central role in detonating a landmine which seriously injured two RUC officers in a vehicle.

The Sunday Business Post reported that Ryan's memoir details his time in the IRA and the ill-fated border campaign.

"The jeep was hit all right, because I could see some parts of it fly into the air and land a few yards away," Ryan wrote.

"We were showered with clay and debris. The three of us immediately opened fire on the jeep."

Ryan, who lives in Dundalk, could face legal action over the claims in his book 'My Life in the IRA' about the 1959 attack in Ballsmill, outside Newry.

Two RUC officers - Constable William Johnston (28) and Special Constable Trevor Boyle (21), who was in the reserve police force known as the 'B' Specials - suffered serious injuries.

Ryan also wrote that after escaping across the border, he was disappointed that the operation had not been as successful as he had hoped.

The book's revelations have prompted calls for a police investigation. DUP MLA William Irwin said Ryan should be brought before the courts.

The Newry MLA said: "This was clearly attempted murder and anyone responsible for that needs to be brought before the courts.

"I think it's important that those responsible for acts are held accountable.

"He seems to suggest that he's sorry someone wasn't killed. I think it's an indictment of this man and I believe he needs to be arrested and questioned about these offences.

"He's admitting to crimes that are very serious and admitting to the fact that he's sorry it didn't have a different outcome and he wasn't successful with his murder bid.

"Those officers suffered serious injuries which they had to live with for the rest of their lives.

"If this particular man can boast about this in a book, then it's vital he's questioned and I would call on the PSNI to investigate these remarks."

The book is the first account by an IRA member who was active during the border campaign.

Ryan was interned for a year in the Curragh camp in Kildare in 1958 and was also jailed for three months in 1961.

He further claimed that he was told a consignment of bazookas and rockets were being sent by Irish supporters in the USA. But when they arrived, they were duds.

"Of the many low points in the campaign thus far, this was the lowest," he said.

Ryan later worked as an insurance salesman with New Ireland Assurance and sided with the Official IRA when it spilt with the Provisional wing in 1969.

The book, edited by former Irish Times journalist Padraig Yeates, will be launched by Mercier Press in Dublin on Thursday.

In a statement, Assistant Chief Constable Barbara Gray said: "As the book is yet to be published, it is not possible for us to make a comment at this time.

"However, the PSNI will consider a response once we have had the opportunity to consider the book's contents."
The Azamara Pursuit will be berthed at Harland and Wolff from April (MJM Group/PA)

A major new cruise ship is being fitted out in Belfast this spring.

The Azamara Pursuit will be berthed at Harland and Wolff from April.

Larry Pimentel, president and chief executive of Azamara Club Cruises, said it will be the first time any company within Royal Caribbean Cruises has used a UK shipyard for works of this scale.

"We are delighted to come to Northern Ireland with Azamara Pursuit.

"It will be a truly magnificent sight to see our ship beneath the historic Harland and Wolff cranes which are so synonymous with Belfast's proud maritime history, and we thank MJM Group for helping us make this happen.

"Additionally, Azamara Pursuit will make her maiden voyage from Southampton which will be another momentous occasion for us.

"With the refit in Belfast and her maiden voyage from Southampton, we are showing our commitment to the UK marketplace."

Azamara Pursuit will make her maiden voyage from Southampton in August.

Gary Annett, chief executive of MJM Group which is carrying out the work, said: "MJM Group is delighted to have been awarded the refit contract for Azamara Pursuit in what is a milestone opportunity for our business, and indeed for the marine industry in the UK.

"The success of this project has the potential to be a game-changer for the UK maritime industry.

"By securing this multimillion-pound contract we are putting Northern Ireland, and the UK's marine industry, in a strong position to compete for future drydock and refit works."
Karen Bradley arrives at 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister Theresa May reshuffles her cabinet on January 8, 2018 in London, England. The former Culture Secretary was named Northern Ireland Secretary.

Karen Bradley said being named new Northern Ireland Secretary of State was a "great honour" and her top priority was the restoration of government at Stormont.

Mrs Bradley, MP for Staffordshire Moorlands, was formerly in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and is considered a close ally of Prime Minister Theresa May.

She was appointed to the position after James Brokenshire stood down for health reasons during Monday's Cabinet reshuffle and said he top priority was to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Read More

"I believe a devolved government in Belfast is best placed to address these issues and take the key decisions which affect peoples day to day lives - whether these relate to the economy, public services or issues of policing and justice," she said noting a year had past since the Executive last met.

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"It is a great honour to be asked to serve as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, particularly at such a decisive moment for Northern Ireland and the whole United Kingdom," she added.

"I would like to pay the warmest tribute to my predecessor and friend, James Brokenshire, who did such an outstanding job. I wish him all the very best for his medical treatment and for a speedy recovery."

Read More

Mrs Bradly grew up in Buxton with her parents who ran a hotel and pub, the Queen's Head Hotel. She attended Buxton Girls' School before gaining a BSc in Maths from Imperial College London.

She worked with the Conservatives from 2005 in the party's policy unit specialising in tax matters before contesting unsuccessful for election in 2005. A former Home Office minister she was first elected to parliament in 2010. Mrs Bradley lives in Leek with her husband and two children.

"Northern Ireland is a very special part of our United Kingdom and has huge potential," continued Mrs Bradley.

"A key part of my role will be to help build a Northern Ireland that is fit for the future and works for everyone. In seeking to achieve that I want to work closely with all parties, the Irish government as appropriate, and with all sections of the community. Be assured the UK Government remains fully committed to the Belfast Agreement, its principles and institutions."

She continued: "We must also continue the work to deliver a Brexit that recognises Northern Irelands unique circumstances and avoids a hard border on the island of Ireland while maintaining the economic and constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom.

The UK Government remains fully committed to the Belfast Agreement, its principles and institutions.

"Alongside these issues, I am conscious of the need to establish a stronger economy and a shared society, to address the legacy of the past and to keep people safe and secure.

"In the coming days, I look forward to meeting many different people, parties and other groups as I take on this hugely important and exciting role in the Prime Minister's Government."

Business representatives welcomed her appointment saying her priority should be the restoration of Stormont's devolved institutions.

An immediate priority will of course be the re-establishment of an inclusive devolved government for this region," Angela McGowan director of the CBI in Northern Ireland said.

"In addition, Minister Bradley will have to grapple with the swift development of a new Northern Ireland budget which will restore NIs public finances to a more sustainable footing.

The new Secretary of State must also be a strong advocate for the regions economic interests  ensuring Northern Irelands unique vulnerability to a no deal Brexit is fully understood across the corridors of Whitehall. Local firms are adamant that any proposed EU/UK deal must guarantee seamless, frictionless trade both east/west and north/south to both uphold the principles of the Good Friday Agreement and safeguard peace and prosperity.

Glyn Roberts, chief Executive of Retail NI which represents small and independent business, added: "Karen Bradley must hit the ground running in an renewed effort to restore devolution and avoid direct rule. Her appointment will hopefully give new momentum to an intensive talks process which leads to the Executive being re-established.

Our members are beyond frustration at the continuing political deadlock and lack of a Government. We will never be able to fully move our economy forward while we have this level of political instability.

Karen Bradley has a incredibly tough role over the next few months and wish her well in her efforts. We look forward to working her."
Politicians who stand in the way of zero tolerance to drink-driving are endangering lives, the mother of a road crash victim has claimed.

Gillian Treacy, who has been appointed to the board of the Road Safety Authority (RSA), warned that dangerous drivers and those who drive under the influence of alcohol need to be put off the roads.

Ms Treacy, whose four-year-old son Ciaran was killed by a drunk driver in Co Laois in 2014, was given the role by Transport Minister Shane Ross, along with another prominent campaigner Donna Price.

Ms Price's 18-year-old son Darren was killed in a car crash in March 2006. She founded the Irish Victims' Association six years later.

The new RSA members vowed to bring a human perspective to their job, including the minister's attempts to legislate for automatic three-month bans for driving under the influence.

Ms Treacy said: "Any TD that's holding us back, as Minister Ross said, is putting other people's lives at danger.

"We need to eradicate these drunk drivers, dangerous drivers off the roads.

"Anyone who goes against this bill is an insult to my little son Ciaran and any other family that has lost a loved one through actions of a drink-driver or a dangerous driver."

Ms Price said she simply cannot understand people not backing a zero tolerance to drink-driving.

"To lose a child to an incurable disease is one thing but to lose a child to something preventable is soul-destroying. We're now compelled (to do something)," she said.

A review of the Government's Road Traffic Strategy 2013-2020 was published alongside the announcement of the new RSA board members.

It warned that road deaths would increase without enforcement of what it described as the main killer behaviours of speeding, drink-driving and non-seat belt wearing.

The review called for disqualified drivers to be named and shamed and funding to be secured to improve dangerous roads.

Mr Ross praised the campaigners appointed to the RSA.

"Their bravery in the face of personal tragedy has already inspired others and made many aware of the significant dangers on our roads.

"Their passion and their personal experience will drive the board to take further measures in pursuit of saving lives," he said.

"Whilst we had a reduction in road deaths last year, 158 is 158 too many".

RSA chairman Liz O'Donnell called for more gardai in road traffic enforcement.

"Road fatalities are down for 2017 and that has to be welcomed but we've a long way to go to get to our target," she said.

"The gardai are our key collaborators in reducing fatalities on our roads and we have been very concerned that the numbers of the Garda Siochana have been diminished."

"Before the recession we had roads policing, exclusively, we had 1,200, we now have 681.

"We need more gardai, we need high-profile gardai, to make people change their behaviour through fear of being prosecuted and being caught."
Two men have been arrested over the murder of IRA informer Denis Donaldson

An independent councillor arrested as part of investigations into the murder of MI5 agent Denis Donaldson has been released without charge.

Donaldson, a 55-year-old senior Sinn Fein official and close colleague of Gerry Adams, was shot dead at a remote cottage near Glenties, Co Donegal, in 2006 after being exposed as a British spy.

Gary Donnelly, a hardline republican and independent councillor in Derry and Strabane, was detained on Sunday.

A Garda spokesman said a second man , in his 30s and also arrested on Sunday, remained in custody under section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act.

"The investigation is ongoing," the Garda press office said.

"Gardai are continuing to appeal to anyone with information in relation to this murder to contact them."

It is the second time Mr Donnelly has been arrested and released without charge during investigations into Mr Donaldson's murder.

Dissident republican group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the killing in 2009.

Ciaran Shiels, solicitor for the Donaldson family, from law firm Madden and Finucane, said: "The family have no comment in relation to either arrest at this stage.

"However, we don't believe either individual to be 'Lenny', Denis Donaldson's PSNI and RUC handler.

"The family believe he is the person with the most serious questions to answer in this matter and we would urge, yet again, that the authorities speak to him under caution and as a suspect in this case."

Mr Donnelly was arrested after speaking at a centenary commemoration of the Meenbanad ambush in Co Donegal, where two republicans were freed from a British Army escort in what is considered one of the first acts in Ireland's War of Independence.

Micheal Cholm Mac Giolla Easpaig, an independent councillor in Donegal who organised the event, said: "We believe Gary Donnelly's arrest to be politically motivated.

"It was a staged arrest, politically motivated and it was to undermine the work of independent councillors like ourselves."

Mr Mac Giolla Easpaig said the arrest warrant was issued on November 22 and Mr Donnelly was a frequent visitor to Donegal and could have been arrested on a number of occasions in the last two months.
The advocates have demanded constitution of a commission of inquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to investigate the events and circumstances surrounding the late Judge's death.

By Vidya : A public interest litigation (PIL) has been filed in the Bombay high court seeking constitution of a commission of inquiry headed by retired Supreme Court judge to investigate the events and circumstances surrounding the death of late Judge BH Loya.

The petition has been filed by Bombay Lawyers' Association, which is a body of advocates registered under the provisions of the Society Registration Act, 1860.

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Justice Loya was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter killing case in 2005, at the time of his death.

A magazine had in November raised questions about Judge Loya's death after speaking to his family members in Maharashtra.

The petition reads: News had "sent shock waves in the entire country, particularly, in the legal fraternity including advocates and judges as well. In spite of that therein is pernicious silence from all authorities on this issue which has created serious doubt in the mind of the public at large about safety and security of judges ensuring independence of judiciary."

According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation, in 2005 Sohrabuddin was allegedly killed in a fake encounter by Rajasthan and Gujarat police. The gangster's wife Kausar Bi was also allegedly killed in the encounter.

A year later, Sohrabuddin's associate and a witness Tulsiram Prajapati was also allegedly killed. When the chargesheet was filed by the CBI in 2010, it was against the then Home Minister of Gujarat and present BJP president Amit shah, Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria and others.

The trial in the case had not yet started till 2014 and the then judge JT Utpat was transferred. Utpat was replaced by Judge BL Loya and within months of taking over, he was found dead.

Family members of Judge Loya had claimed of mysterious circumstances under which his body was handed over to them for the last rites. While postmortem reports claimed that Judge Loya died of heart attack, the family found blood stains on his clothes raising their suspicion.

The magazine had also claimed Judge Loya's family members had told them that he had been under tremendous pressure to discharge Amit Shah from the case. In fact, Loya was even offered money for the same.

Months after Judge Loya's death, Amit Shah, Kataria and many others were discharged from the case due to lack of evidence.

The petition points out that not just the magazine but other media also reported about how the family lives in fear and that many popular faces including a former judge of the Bombay high court wrote seeking a proper probe in the case.

The lawyers' asssociation petition states, "if independence and integrity of the judiciary is to be preserved, then the death of Judge Loya and the circumstances surrounding the same should be thoroughly investigated by a Commission of Inquiry."

--- ENDS ---
Positive momentum in the Irish economy is set to outweigh any negative impacts of the looming Brexit through 2018, a leading business body has predicted.

Ibec, the group that represents Irish business, said the country's economy had moved on from its post-financial crash "recovery phase" and was now on a path of "strong and sustainable" growth.

Ibec's quarterly economic outlook has forecast 4.2% economic growth in 2018, having estimated the growth rate in 2017 at 6%.

It said the expansion was being underpinned by business investment and strong consumer spending.

The group said the likely impact of Brexit impact on growth this year would be "outweighed by positive domestic and global momentum".

Gerard Brady, Ibec's head of tax and fiscal policy, said the economy could look forward with confidence despite external threats.

"Since the crisis we have seen a recovery in the Irish economy which has been exceptional," he said.

"This was driven by the strength of the Irish business model with record FDI (foreign direct investment) and an increasingly global footprint from our indigenous industries.

"Because of this growth in our business substance, the economic recovery phase is now over, with 2017 seeing Ireland surpass many of the most important pre-crisis milestones.

"As we enter 2018 the State's accounts are effectively balanced, employment has returned to 2006 levels, and we are seeing the quickest real wage growth in Europe at 1.8%.

"Irish households are clearly benefiting with real disposable incomes growing at over four times the eurozone average and per-capita income in working households now likely to have passed out its pre-crisis peak.

"This phase is now more sustainable than the 'boom' period."

Mr Brady said a "major question" facing the economy in the future would be the ability of the economy to meet the needs of a growing population.

"Major challenges are already clear in the housing sector," he said.

Mr Brady added: "Delivering on the promise of growth with stretched capacity and a tight labour market, whilst also maintaining competitiveness, will be a key challenge ahead for both business and the Government."
Justine Greening has quit the Government after refusing to take the work and pensions post after being moved from the education portfolio, Downing Street sources said.

The move is the biggest upset of a reshuffle which saw Prime Minister Theresa May keep all the political big beasts in her Cabinet in place.

No 10 sources said Mrs May is disappointed but respects Ms Greenings decision to leave the Government.

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Ms Greening was succeeded as Education Secretary by Damian Hinds, who was promoted from being a junior work and pensions minister.

The way Ms Greening left the Government could cause a headache for the PM when the Putney MP, who backed Remain in the referendum campaign, returns to the back benches.

Ms Greening had made it clear she wanted to stay in the education post in the run-up to the reshuffle amid a raft of reports that the PM was determined to move her.

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In an embarrassing twist to a reshuffle beset with social media mistakes, Jeremy Hunt, who was kept on as Health Secretary with an extended social care role in the shake-up, was forced to explain why he had liked a tweet stating that Ms Greening had left the Government.

Mr Hunt tweeted: Like button pressed by accident. Justine was an excellent minister and will be a great loss to govt.

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The post of Work and Pensions Secretary which Ms Greening turned down was given to former minister Esther McVey.

Former justice secretary David Lidington was appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office, but was not awarded the title of First Secretary of State enjoyed by his predecessor Damian Green.

It was Mr Greens resignation after he admitted lying over pornography on his office computer that prompted the reshuffle.

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But Mr Lidington will fill in for Mrs May at Prime Ministers Questions and take on some of the responsibilities for chairing influential Cabinet committees, including some relating to Brexit.

Downing Street confirmed Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Brexit Secretary David Davis are all keeping their current jobs.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire resigned from the Cabinet on grounds of ill health, weeks before major surgery for a lesion on his right lung.

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Mr Lidington was also named Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, replacing Sir Patrick McLoughlin, who was sacked as Conservative chairman following criticism of his role in the partys poor performance in last years snap election.

Brandon Lewis has been named the new party chairman, amid farcical scenes which saw the Tories official Twitter account incorrectly announce that the job had gone to Chris Grayling.

Transport Secretary Mr Grayling was kept on at his department despite widespread reports that he faced the axe.

Greg Clark also retained his position as Business Secretary amid speculation he could be sacked, and Downing Street announced Claire Perry would also attend Cabinet as minister of state at the business department.

Sajid Javid has had his responsibility for housing added to his existing Cabinet title in a sign of the issues increasing political importance. He is now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

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Gavin Williamson retains his role as Defence Secretary, which he has held for just over two months.

Former work and pensions secretary David Gauke has taken over the roles of Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary vacated by Mr Lidington.

Ex-culture secretary Karen Bradley has been moved to the politically sensitive Northern Ireland role vacated by Mr Brokenshire.

Digital minister Matt Hancock takes over from his old boss as Culture Secretary.

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Environment Secretary Michael Gove, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox all remain in the same jobs.

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park stays on as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords.

David Mundell remains Secretary of State for Scotland, and Alun Cairns stays on as Secretary of State for Wales.

Jeremy Corbyn told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party that the reshuffle was a pointless and lacklustre PR stunt.

He said: In 2018, the impact of Tory austerity is hitting home with the public, most tragically with the most serious NHS winter crisis yet.

And yet the Governments big plan for the new year is to dodge the real issues and reshuffle the pack in a pointless and lacklustre PR exercise.

Its simply not good enough. You cant make up for nearly eight years of failure by changing the name of a department.

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Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson tweeted: Sorry to see @JustineGreening leave government  she brought her non-nonsense, northern accountants eye to every brief and is a real role model for LGBT+ Conservatives.

Former chancellor George Osborne tweeted: Glad to see many of the old Treasury team thriving (and surviving) in this unusual reshuffle  well done @DavidGauke @DamianHinds @sajidjavid @GregClarkMP and my former chief of staff @MattHancock. All competent, creative, hardworking and good to work with.

Andrea Leadsom remains Leader of the House of Commons, despite widespread speculation that Mrs May could demote her.

And Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss also stays in post.
Munir Mohammed on a trip to his local Asda where he bought the wrong type of nail varnish remover to make explosives (Counter Terrorism Policing North/PA)

A couple who met on a lonely hearts website have been found guilty of plotting devastating carnage over Christmas with an Islamic State-inspired bomb or ricin attack.

Sudanese asylum seeker Munir Mohammed volunteered for a lone wolf UK mission as he chatted on Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander.

He enlisted the help of pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan, drawing on her knowledge of chemicals needed to make a bomb after seeking her out on SingleMuslim.com.

At the time of his arrest in December 2016, Mohammed had two of the three components for TATP explosives as well as manuals on how to make explosives, mobile phone detonators, and deadly ricin poison.

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Mohammed, 36, of Leopold Street, Derby, and El-Hassan, 33, of Willesden Lane, north-west London, denied preparing terrorist acts between November 2015 and December 2016.

But following an Old Bailey trial, a jury found the pair guilty of the plot.

Judge Michael Topolski QC remanded the pair in custody and warned them they faced jail when they are sentenced on February 22.

Following the verdicts, he said: Munir Mohammed, you have been convicted of planning a potentially devastating terrorist attack by creating an explosive device and deploying it somewhere in the UK targeting those you regarded as enemies of the Islamic State.

Rowaida El-Hassan, you share the extremist mindset with Munir Mohammed and you were ideologically motivated to provide him with support, motivation and assistance.

You knew he was engaging and planning an attack. You knew he was planning an explosion to kill and maim innocent people in the cause of Islamic State.

Mohammed was unanimously convicted and his co-accused by a majority of 10 to one jurors.

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Mohammed arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and claimed asylum in February 2014, the court heard.

After being left hanging for more than two years, he appealed to Derby MP Margaret Beckett for help with his immigration problems.

The long-serving Labour MP was informed by authorities that his case was not straightforward and had been referred to a specialist unit for consideration.

Meanwhile, Mohammed was working at a Kerry Foods in Derby making sauces for supermarket ready meals and wooing a potential British bride he met online.

The prosecution claimed he was drawn to University College London graduate El-Hassan because she referred to having a Masters degree in pharmacy in her dating profile.

She wrote that she was looking for a simple, very simple, honest and straightforward man who fears Allah who she could vibe with on a spiritual and intellectual level.

Jurors were told the pair had a rapidly formed emotional attachment and a shared ideology and by the spring of 2016 were in regular contact on WhatsApp and had met more than once in a London park near El-Hassans home.

As well as arguments, jokes and everyday concerns, they also shared extremist views and videos.

Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC said Mohammed resolved upon a lone wolf attack and El-Hassan was well aware of his plan.

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In August 2016, Mohammed was put in touch via Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander, known as Abubakr Kurdi.

He pledged allegiance to Kurdi and offered to participate in a new job in the UK, said to mean an act of terrorism, jurors heard.

In September 2016, Mohammed complained he had not received his instructions, saying in coded language: If possible send how we make dough (explosives) for Syrian bread (a bomb) and other types of food.

Mother-of-two El-Hassan advised fellow divorcee Mohammed on what chemicals to buy for a bomb, jurors were told.

In November 2016, Mohammed got hold of a video containing information on how to manufacture ricin, the court heard.

In the days before his arrest, Mohammed was captured on in-store CCTV buying acetone free nail polish from Asda, in the mistaken belief it was a chemical component of TATP.

He also looked at pressure cookers at Ace Discounts, which the prosecution said could be used to contain the explosives.

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When police raided his home on December 12 2016, they found hydrogen peroxide in a wardrobe and hydrochloric acid in the freezer.

Mohammed denied the chemicals were for a bomb, claiming the hydrochloric acid was to clean the alloys on his car and the peroxide was to treat a burn.

He told jurors he sent El-Hassan extremist videos mainly for the news and claimed his intention was to marry her.

However, the court also heard he had an arranged marriage in Sudan with a woman he had never met called Fatima who he was hoping to bring to England on a student visa.

El-Hassan, who came to Britain from Sudan at the age of three, told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat.

Asked if she had feelings for Mohammed, she said: It was mixed feelings at the time. Yes, there was emotional attachment.

There were feelings developing and we were getting to know each other. I was grateful for things he helped me with. And he was grateful for things I helped him with. I liked the attention he was giving me.

Sue Hemming, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: Munir Mohammed and Rowaida El-Hassan were clearly attracted to each other through their support for Daeshs violent ideology and its intolerance of those who do not subscribe to its views.

They planned to kill and injure innocent people in the UK and had the mindset, the methodology and almost all the material needed for Mohammed to carry out an attack.

Both will be in prison, where they cannot plot together and will no longer be a danger to the public.
HMS Westminster, a Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate, was scrambled to intercept two Russian warships (Ministry of Defence)

A Royal Navy warship has been tasked with escorting four Russian vessels through the English Channel, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has confirmed.

HMS Westminster, a Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate, was scrambled to intercept two of Vladimir Putins warships and two supporting vessels as they passed close to UK waters.

The latest incident comes amid what the MoD called an upsurge in Russian units transiting UK waters during the festive season.

HMS St Albans spent Christmas Day escorting another Russian warship, the Admiral Gorshkov, through the North Sea.

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Commanding officer of HMS Westminster, Commander Simon Kelly, said the ships role as the Royal Navys Fleet Ready Escort is to be at very high readiness to respond to anything.

While today most people are returning to work for the first time in the new year, HMS Westminsters ships company has been at sea and at readiness as part of the Royal Navys commitment to keep Britain safe at all times, he said.

The English Channel is an absolute lifeline for the UK, and it is very important HMS Westminster and the Royal Navy maintains a watchful eye on this key strategic link.

After being dispatched on Friday, HMS Westminster remained at sea before meeting up with the Russian ships.

The MoD said the ship had been keeping track of their activities in areas of Britains national interest, before escorting them through the English Channel on Monday.

It is believed the four Russian ships are returning to the Baltic after operations in the Middle East.

The UK warship will remain with the two Steregushchiy-class frigates Soobrazitelny and Boiky and support vessels Paradoks and Kola as they head north.

On Christmas Eve, HMS Tyne was called to escort a Russian intelligence-gathering ship through the North Sea and the English Channel.

A Wildcat helicopter from 815 Naval Air Squadron, based at RNAS Yeovilton, was then dispatched to monitor two further Russian vessels.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said in response to the Christmas scrambling of HMS St Albans that he would not hesitate in defending our waters or tolerate any form of aggression.
Motorists and businesses are set to make major savings as the Government reduces the charges to cross the Severn bridges.

From Monday all vehicles will be exempt from VAT, meaning car drivers will pocket an extra 1.10 as the charge for individual crossings reduces from 6.70 to 5.60.

This change will also lift an administrative burden for business users, who will no longer need to claim back VAT.

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The move is expected to save regular motorists around 1,400 per year, making it far cheaper to travel to Cardiff, Newport or Bristol.

Businesses across the area will also benefit by not paying over 16 for lorries to cross the Severn.

A Welsh Government study previously estimated that the abolition of VAT on toll charges would boost the Welsh economy by over 100 million a year.

The reduction comes as the crossings return to public ownership, with Highways England, a UK-Government owned body, taking over responsibility for the bridges operation and management from Severn River Crossing PLC.

Drivers are set to benefit further when the UK Government abolishes the charges completely by the end of 2018.

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Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns said: In less than a year we will see the biggest economic stimulus for south Wales and the valleys.

This important move taken by the Prime Minister and the UK Government in regard to the Severn Crossings represents a clear symbol of breaking down the economic and historic barriers which have hindered Wales prosperity, whilst supporting the union of the United Kingdom.

My number one priority as Secretary of State was to remove the tolls, which will not only make journeys cheaper for commuters and tourists, but will also create exciting opportunities for businesses and investors looking to make their mark in Wales.

This will boost Welsh employment and establish lasting relationships between the economies and communities of South Wales and South West England, creating the most natural growth corridor spanning from Cardiff through Newport to Bristol.

It is time to make politics fit business, not business fit politics in Wales.

The first Severn Bridge was opened in September 1966, providing a direct link from the M4 motorway into Wales, with a toll in place for use of the bridge to pay for the cost of construction. In 1996 the second crossing opened to the public.
A two-time corporator from Samta Nagar, Ashok Sawant was attacked about 200 metres from his Kandivali residence on Sunday as he was returning after meeting a friend.

Ashok Sawant was rushed to hospital but was declared dead on arrival.

By India Today Web Desk: Two suspects have been arrested in connection with the killing of Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant in Kandivali, a suburb of Mumbai.

A zonal District Commissioner Police announced the arrests, ANI reported. A vehicle that was used in the crime was seized, he said.

A two-time corporator from Samta Nagar, Ashok Sawant was attacked about 200 metres from his residence on Sunday as he was returning after meeting a friend.

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He was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead on arrival.

Media reports said Sawant had entered a cable business, and had been receiving extortion calls for the last few days, and that the Kandivali murder was probably connected to these threats.

--- ENDS ---
CCTV cameras on the side of a building in central London (Clive Gee/PA)

Britains growing CCTV network could be a target for hacking attacks, a watchdog has warned.

Surveillance camera commissioner Tony Porter flagged up the possible risk of intrusion on the public by individual and state actors.

He pointed to a major cyber incident in Washington DC in January last year where more than 100 cameras were infected with ransomware.

Mr Porter said: The risk potential for intrusion on citizens has significantly increased both by lawful operators of surveillance camera systems and those individual or state actors who seek to hack into systems.

Cyber security has moved to the top of the security agenda.

Publishing his annual report for 2016/17, Mr Porter said surveillance cameras are not always recognised as potential hacking targets.

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He told the Press Association: As we move from analogue to digital surveillance, most cameras are plugged into corporate IT networks.

If your camera is not suitably protected you are potentially opening up a back door for organisations that choose to hack.

What we are saying is that cameras are potentially your vulnerable point. You must ensure that you apply the same level of IT security to your cameras as you do to your mainframe.

There is a whole host of areas where data could be accessed through insecure surveillance networks.

Britain is seen as having one of the most extensive CCTV networks in the world, and the commissioners report indicates that it continues to grow.

Research in 2013 estimated the number of cameras in the UK at up to six million.

Mr Porter said: I believe the figure may now be much higher than this estimate, given the proliferation of cameras being adopted by such a wide range of organisations and the increasingly intrusive nature of new and emerging technologies.

I am concerned at the incrementally intrusive development of surveillance cameras in the everyday lives of citizens.

The assessment also called for the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system to be placed on a statutory footing.

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ANPR is one of the largest non-military databases in the UK, with around 9,000 cameras nationally that capture between 25 million and 40 million pieces of data per day, while up to 20 billion read records are held.

Mr Porter described this activity as formidable, saying: The nature of its capabilities to intrude on privacy by building patterns of travel and the provision of imagery should not be underestimated.

I firmly believe that this system needs legislative oversight and that the Government should place this system on a statutory footing.

The watchdog noted that arguments have been advanced that the number of manufacturers of number plates should be limited.

But he suggested a system of stricter controls may be needed, similar to the production of driving licences and passports.

Mr Porter also said he understood there are issues with inaccurate location of ANPR cameras or cameras failing to report their correct location, adding: I think this might have a negative impact on future prosecutions.

A Home Office spokesman said: Automatic number plate recognition gives police vital evidence to protect the public.

There are strict rules in place for how the ANPR database can be used and who can access it.

The Surveillance Camera Code of Practice sets out clear rules to be followed to guard against unauthorised access and use of surveillance cameras.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: The UK is already the most surveilled country of any Western democracy  and the surveillance state appears to be dangerously expanding.

This growing, intrusive tracking of the UKs population is unacceptable.
A hastily deleted tweet which saw the wrong Conservative MP named as the partys new chairman has been mocked on social media.

For a few minutes it looked as though Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was to become the partys chairman in Theresa Mays January reshuffle.

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But the actual new chairman has been confirmed as Brandon Lewis, the MP for Great Yarmouth, who has moved from a ministerial position in the Home Office. He has also been made minister without portfolio.

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The gaffe proved an amusing sideshow as the media was watching and waiting for answers on who was in and out in the reshuffle.

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Graylings Wikipedia entry was updated to say he served in the chairman role for between 10 and 37 seconds, although the edit was later removed as vandalism.

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In spite of its brevity, people spoke longingly of Graylings chairmanship.

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Among those getting in on the joke was MP Ed Vaizey, the Conservative member for Didcot and Wantage, who recalled a mix-up between him and Liberal Democrat Ed Davey.

Sharing a tweet by Guardian journalist Gaby Hinsliff about a reshuffle which went wrong during the Blair years, he said: That happened with me and Ed Davey. I was trade minister for 30 minutes.

Even Lewiss official announcement, on the Number 10 Twitter account, was marred by a spelling error although it was swiftly adjusted.

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The original tweet named Lewis as the minister without porfolio.

Hold on, there arent missing letters again are there?
Donald Trump's former chief strategist has reaffirmed his support for the commander in chief and praised Mr Trump's eldest son as "both a patriot and a good man", as he faced a growing backlash.

Steve Bannon infuriated the US president with comments to author Michael Wolff describing a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York between Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign aides and a Russian lawyer as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic".

But Mr Bannon said Sunday his description was aimed at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who also attended the meeting, and not Mr Trump's son.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency," Mr Bannon said in the statement, first obtained by the news site Axios.

He said his support for Mr Trump and his agenda was "unwavering".

Hours before the statement came out, administration officials used appearances on the Sunday news shows to rally behind Mr Trump and try to undermine Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which portrays the 45th president as a leader who does not understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides.

Chief policy adviser Stephen Miller, in a combative appearance on CNN, described the book as "nothing but a pile of trash through and through".

He also criticised Mr Bannon, who is quoted at length by Wolff, saying it was "tragic and unfortunate" that Mr Bannon "would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive".

CIA director Mike Pompeo said Mr Trump was "completely fit" to lead the country, pausing before answering because, he said on Fox News Sunday, it was such "a ludicrous question".

"These are from people who just have not accepted the fact that President Trump is the United States' president and I'm sorry for them in that," said Mr Pompeo, who gives Mr Trump his regular intelligence briefings.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was at the White House once a week, and "no one questions the stability of the president".

"I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to, to lie for money and for power. This is like taking it to a whole new low," she told ABC's This Week.

Stephen Miller said "the portrayal of the president in the book is so contrary to reality, to the experience of those who work with him".

Mr Miller's interview on CNN's State of the Union quickly grew heated, with Mr Miller criticising CNN's coverage and moderator Jake Tapper pressing him to answer his questions and accusing him of speaking to only one viewer: Mr Trump.

Mr Tapper abruptly ended the interview, saying: "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time."

Soon after, Mr Trump tweeted: "Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"

Mr Trump used Twitter on Saturday to defend his fitness for office, insisting he was "like, really smart" and, indeed, a "very stable genius".

He pressed the case again on Sunday as he prepared to depart Camp David for the White House.

"I've had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author," he tweeted.

Mr Wolff's book draws a derogatory portrait of Mr Trump as an undisciplined man-child who did not actually want to win the White House and who spends his evenings eating cheeseburgers in bed, watching television and talking on the telephone to old friends.

The book also quotes Mr Bannon and other prominent advisers as questioning the president's competence.

Mr Trump and some aides have attacked Mr Wolff's credibility, pointing to the fact that the book includes a number of factual errors and denying that the author had as much access as he claimed.

AP
Photo taken with permission from the twitter feed of @SusanSball4 of smoke coming from Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, USA. Susan D. Ball/PA Wire

Three people were injured after a fire broke out in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system, New York City fire chiefs have said.

The blaze started at around 7am (noon GMT), causing smoke to billow from the roof at the Manhattan building which contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Two civilians and a firefighter were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, the New York fire department said.

It took about an hour to put out the fire.

The president was at the White House when fire engines clogged the streets around his Fifth Avenue building during the morning rush hour.

Mr Trump's son Eric later wrote on Twitter: "There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower.

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

The Republican president announced his candidacy in 2015 at Trump Tower, his home for more than 30 years.
Iran's foreign minister has warned neighbouring countries against fomenting unrest after anti-government protests rocked the country over the past two weeks.

The remarks by Mohammad Javad Zarif at a security conference in Tehran echoed previous allegations by Iranian officials, who have blamed the violence that accompanied some of the protests on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

"Some countries tried to misuse the recent incidents," Mr Zarif said, without naming them.

"No country can create a secure environment for itself at the expense of creating insecurity among its neighbours."

"Such efforts" will only backfire, the official Irna news agency quoted Mr Zarif as saying.

The anti-government demonstrations first broke out in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city, on December 28 and later spread to several other cities and towns.

The protests were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election.

They were sparked by a hike in food prices amid soaring unemployment but some demonstrators later called for the government's overthrow and chanted against the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At least 21 people were killed and hundreds arrested.

Large pro-government rallies were held in response.

In the past few days, Iranian authorities have said the protests are waning, and on Sunday, Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed the nation and its security forces had ended the unrest.

The Guard blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Mr Zarif also mentioned an emergency session of the UN Security Council on Friday.

The United States had called the meeting, portraying Iranian protests as a human rights issue that could spill over into an international problem.

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the session had put Iran on notice that "the world will be watching" its actions, but envoys from several other countries expressed reservations about whether the council was the right forum for the issue.

Mr Zarif depicted the session as a fiasco, saying the Trump administration is "isolated at the international level".

The world "witnessed that (all other) members of the UN security council spoke about preventing the meddling in Iran's internal affairs," he said.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani meanwhile said that despite the exploitation of the protests by outsiders, authorities should listen to the demonstrators' economic grievances.

"People rightfully say: 'See us, listen to our words'," Mr Rouhani said.

Mr Rouhani, a relative moderate, also argued against the permanent suspension of social media applications that authorities had taken offline at the height of the protests, including the popular messaging app Telegram, which is used by an estimated 40 million Iranians, half the population.

"You had a good sleep while 40 million people were in trouble," Mr Rouhani said.

"Some 100,000 people have lost their jobs over this past week" because of the suspension of the apps, he said, referring to their widespread use in online commerce.

AP
Following the cruel and cowardly attempt on the life of a social worker in Portlaoise, I and the members of the Northern Ireland Association of Social Workers (NIASW) stand in solidarity with our colleagues in the Republic of Ireland.

Social workers across the island of Ireland are working day in, day out to support, safeguard and empower some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

It is a job our members love, because they see the positive change they make in the lives of others.

The hateful act carried out against our colleague could not stand in starker contrast to the constructive work she was undertaking.

NIASW condemns the perpetrators in the strongest terms.

Throughout the Troubles many social workers across the north worked in an environment rife with intimidation.

Only recently our colleagues in the Probation Board for Northern Ireland received threats from dissident republicans. NIASW is currently working in partnership with academics at Queen's University Belfast to document the experiences of social workers during the Troubles.

It is of the greatest importance that the tragic violence of this period is not repeated anywhere, in any form.

COLIN REID

Northern Ireland Association of Social Workers
Martin McGuinness could be funny but he wasn't a clown. It's hard to imagine him prancing in front of a camera with a loaf on his head. That more sober approach would have spared him the disgrace that Barry McElduff's antics have landed him in.

And McGuinness managed a relationship with unionists for a time, even though they well knew that he stood by the IRA and its works. Before the first running of d'Hondt to select an executive in December 1999, an Ulster Unionist MLA briefed me that the party had been assured that Sinn Fein would not embarrass them by nominating to a ministerial position someone with a known IRA past.

This was when the SDLP was the majority party within nationalism and the deputy First Minister was going to be Seamus Mallon. Only two seats of the 10 would go to Sinn Fein anyway.

So there were genuine gasps of surprise when Gerry Adams stood up and nominated Martin McGuinness as Minister of Education.

The next day there were protest walkouts by pupils in some protestant schools.

McGuinness had been a hate figure for unionists for many years.

He was known to have been an IRA leader. Police officers who had stopped his car in Derry talked of his steely gaze. Once when the RUC had been delivering a road safety presentation in his child's school, McGuinness walked into the room and withdrew his child.

The police nickname for him was Art Garfunkel, countering his fearsome manner with mockery of his hair.

Martin McGuinness had been thought of in the IRA as a hardliner, one of those who swore after the calamitous 1975 ceasefire that there would be no future ceasefires without clear assurances in advance.

Through the early stages of the peace process there was media speculation that Adams would have problems getting McGuinness on side.

Much of this was based on a simple misreading. McGuinness proved to be a pushover. He loved the peace process. He frankly compared Adams to Mandela.

This has appalled some old diehards so much that they reason that he must have been working for the British all along.

When McGuinness took his seat at his office desk for his new job as Education Minister he smiled like a child opening his Christmas presents.

And that showed us that there was a soft side to this man, a very soft and sentimental side.

A year or so later, I was talking to some unionists about the latest crisis in devolution and it was clear that they did have a hate figure but it wasn't McGuinness; it was Bairbre de Brun. She as Health Minister annoyed them with her insistence on saying everything twice, first in Irish then in English, effectively halving the time they could question her on anything.

McGuinness was now 'Martin'. They weren't going to hug him or be matey with him in front of a camera but they didn't hate him any more. They did hate Gerry Adams and, as I suggested in my recent book about Adams, one of his contributions to the party might have been to act as a lightning rod for unionist contempt.

Every time Adams said he had never been in the IRA the rage flowed towards him, bypassing Martin McGuinness, Jennifer McCann, Caral ni Chuilin, Conor Murphy, Gerry Kelly and a host of other MLAs who were in no position to make such a denial.

But the eager, childlike peacemaker blossomed as never before when the system harnessed him to Rev Ian Paisley, in the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister.First Minister Paisley could jokingly refer to his sidekick as 'deputy', emphasising his junior status, and McGuinness plainly enjoyed that.

As Education Minister he had bequeathed a massive problem to the schools system, abolishing academic selection without devising an alternative, leaving the schools to effectively privatise selection and damning children to going through two systems instead of one.

Jennifer McCann was pulled back into place by the party when she said that McGuinness should have, in effect, found the solution before creating the problem.

Journalists who covered the McGuinness/Paisley years say that McGuinness was often protective of Paisley, that he would actually intercept tricky questions thrown at the DUP leader.

And later we learned that they prayed together and that the Paisley family cherished the friendship between the two men, trusting that they were bound together by faith in God.

The years as deputy to Peter Robinson were not as amicable but they weren't as difficult as either man might have made them. They didn't joke much together in public.

But McGuinness showed a willingness to respect symbols and occasions of importance to unionists, and even shook hands with the Queen.

These were times when the DUP also felt that it could gain credit through conciliatory gestures.

But this was the period in which the flags protest arose, loyalism took to the streets and the DUP felt compelled to assuage the rage.

And when Arlene Foster took over as First Minister she was more distant from him, carrying the hurt from her father having been shot, herself having been on a school bus that the IRA bombed.

McGuinness, among other republicans, was clear that he was not apologising for the IRA campaign. His wanted to be accepted as a soldier who had put down his gun, but he was never going to concede that he had had no right to take it up in the first place.

Yet, after the 2016 election to the Assembly, with the smaller parties going into opposition, the DUP and Sinn Fein were seen as having almost merged. The leadership was jokingly called Marlene.

This was on the very eve of that relationship falling apart.

McGuinness had thought he could address Arlene Foster like a wise old uncle, urging her to stand aside for a short time to allow for an investigation into the renewable heating scheme that overran its costs, the 'cash for ash' scheme.

And Arlene wasn't going to be patronised, even for her own good, by a man who honoured those who had shot her father and bombed her.

At the same time, republicans muttered that McGuinness had got little in return for his efforts; he was debasing core principles by honouring the Queen.

So the tension just increased.

And we may speculate on whether it might have worked out differently if McGuinness had not then been weakened by illness, and been just weeks away from death.

We wouldn't be where we are if Arlene Foster had trusted his advice to step aside for a while.

Now, almost every major speech by Adams and other republicans, expressing determination to hold fast to current demands, starts by referring to Martin McGuinness's words when he brought down the executive, saying that there would be no return to the status quo.

They say they honour Martin's memory by holding out for equality. And the man who wanted to be a reconciler is now a standard for obstruction.

But his project included assuaging unionist anxiety about the IRA. We can't know how he would have dealt with Barry McElduff. I suspect he would have kicked him out of the party.
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The hospital has denied any ill-treatment. The Superintendent of KR Hospital told Bangalore Mirror that the patients were not kept in the store room.

By Nolan Pinto: In an incident that has been reported from Mysuru, two mentally disabled patients have been locked away in the store room of a hospital.

Sources said nurses or doctors were not attending to the patients.

The two patients were admitted to the hospital three years ago. The hospital received complaints about the patients from staff and fellow patients and decided to lock them up in a store room.

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No food was provided to these patients.

This inhumane treatment has brought the prestigious hospital under scanner. The staff is accused of ill-treating mentally disabled patients.

The hospital though has denied any ill-treatment. The Superintendent of KR Hospital told Bangalore Mirror that the patients were not kept in a store room.

"The patients were not kept in the store room. Actually, ward cleaning was going on and we made these patients sit outside the ward. Some miscreants in the hospital took a video and some photographs of these patients, and circulated them on WhatsApp," the superintendent told Bangalore Mirror.

He reassured that the patients were not treated badly and said that a special ward will be provided for them.

--- ENDS ---
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We live in a time when there is great fascination about life after death. Why this fascination with the world beyond the grave? Is it not because death is so final? Whatever one thinks about the reports of near-death visions, death when it finally comes is irreversible. When you finally cross the line, there is no coming back from the other side. Death wins the battle every time. After the doctors have tried the latest wonder drug, after the best minds have pooled their wisdom, after the philosophers have done their best to explain that death is only a natural part of life, we come face to face with the ugly reality that someday we will all die. And that deathwhether planned or accidental, whether comfortable or painfulwill be the end of life as we have known it.

Questions about Life after Death

In answering questions about life after death, we are left with only two sources to consult. Either we turn to human experience or we turn to the Word of God. If we turn to human experience, we find many guesses, many ideas, many theoriesbut no sure answers. Thats because, in the nature of the case, no human has a sure answer. The only people who have the answer are dead! That leaves us with the Word of God. In Gods Word we find ample, abundant answers. God who knows the future knows what happens when we die, and he hasnt left us to wonder about it. The Bible is filled with information on this subject, so much in fact that we can offer only a brief survey in this chapter.

If you want the answer in one sentence here it is: What happens after you die depends on what happens before you die. Consider what the Bible says in Hebrews 9:27, It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment (NKJV). This is an appointment no one will miss. As someone has noted, the statistics on death are appalling. One hundred out of one hundred people will eventually die. We are all terminally ill with a disease called death; we just dont know when the end will come.

Before we go further, lets stop and think about some important questions that people often ask about death and dying.

Is There a Second Chance after Death?

This is the popular view of many people who hope that those who did not accept Christ in this life will somehow have a second chance after deatheither in the afterlife or perhaps through reincarnation. The answer is quite simple: There is no biblical support whatsoever for the notion of a second chance. Hebrews 9:27 declares that we die once and after that comes the judgment of God. Let no one be mistaken on this point. The only opportunity you will ever have to get right with God is the opportunity God affords you right now. If you dream of coming to God after you die, you are nursing a vain hope.

What about Near-Death Experiences?

Such experiences are very popular today. Ive already mentioned the pioneering work of Raymond Moody. Other books in recent years have purported to tell of people who died, went to heaven, and then were given a second chance to return to the earth. Some of those books have been extremely popular, and a few have been embraced by Christians. However, a close inspection shows that most of those books embrace unbiblical heresy, either the notion that we are saved by doing good works or the idea that everyone is going to heaven in the end.

In thinking about this question, we need biblical balance. On one hand its undeniably true that some Bible characters did see the Lord before they died. Stephen saw Jesus just before he died in Acts 7. Paul was evidently given a vision of heavenperhaps during his stoning at Lystra in Acts 14. He alludes to the event in 2 Corinthians 12. However, its important to say that such revelations did not happen often even in Bible times. Not every believer had or will have a revelation of heaven. Could such a thing happen today? Yes, but we shouldnt expect it or base our hope of heaven upon a last-second experience.

Lets also remember that Satan is the great deceiver. He can create scenes that seem to be scenes of heaven but are actually creations born in hell. Some near-death experiences are demonic in nature. You should never base your hope of heavenor the hope of seeing a loved one in heavenon a supposed vision or revelation. The only reliable ground given to us is the eternal, unchanging Word of God.

What Happens to Children Who Die?

This is obviously a very tender subject to many people. Parents want to know: Will I see my child again? The place to begin in answering this question is with the observation that the Bible doesnt specifically address this question. However, we do know two things are true. First, children are not born innocent, but sinful. If children who die do go to heavenand I believe they doit is not because they are morally innocent in the sight of God. All of us are born with an inclination to sin that leads us away from God. Ephesians 2:1 says that we are spiritually dead by nature. That applies as much to young children as it does to adults. Second, we know that Gods grace is always greater than human sin. Romans 5:20 reminds us that where sin abounded, grace superabounded. Gods grace always goes far beyond sins disgrace.

I believe that Gods grace credits children with the merits of Jesus blood and righteousness so that children who die before they are old enough to believe are covered by His blood, and their entrance into heaven is made sure and certain. Thus they are saved by grace exactly as we are.

Can We Contact the Dead after They Are Gone?

The answer is no. Any attempt to dabble in spirit contact is strictly forbidden in the Bible. It is sometimes called necromancy or sorcery or dealing with familiar spirits. Remember, demons can masquerade as the dead. They can even mimic the voices of our loved ones and give information that only the dead person would have known (for more on this subject, see Leviticus 19:26-28, Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:9-14; Galatians 5:20). In case this isnt clear, let me make it plain. Do not attempt to contact the dead through any means at allseances, parlor games, crystal balls, psychic readers, channelers, or mediums. You are involving yourself in that which God forbids. Leave the dead alone.

What Do You Say to Someone Who Has Lost a Loved One?

Over the years I have discovered that it really doesnt matter what you say in terms of the precise words. Those who are grieving will not remember the words you say, but they will never forget that you cared enough to be there when they needed you. If you go with Gods love in your heart, he will give you any words you need to say. That means we dont need to answer questions only God can answer. If we dont know the spiritual state of the deceased, we shouldnt speculate, either to offer false hope or lay a heavier burden on those who are left behind. God is both just and merciful, and in every case He will do what is right.

What Happens at the Moment of Death

Now we come to the central question: What happens at the very moment of death? I have already given the general answer: What happens when you die depends on what happens before you die. The Bible classifies the whole human race into two broad categoriesthe saved and the lost. The saved are those who have trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The lost are those who havent. What happens to the saved is radically different from what happens to the lost.

. . . For the Saved

The Bible is abundantly clear on this point. When the saved die, they go directly into the presence of the Lord. At this point we remember the words of Jesus to the thief on the cross, I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43, emphasis added). This appears to be a straightforward promise that at the moment of death the repentant thief would pass from his life of crime and his agonizing death into the realm called paradise. This would seem to contradict the teaching called soul-sleep, which implies that at death a believer sleeps in a kind of suspended animation until the day of the resurrection. How could the thief be that very day in paradise if his soul went to sleep when he died? At the moment of death the believer passes immediately into the personal presence of Jesus Christ. This is our hope and comfort as we stand at the graveside of a loved one.

Paul said he had a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far (Philippians 1:23, emphasis added). He also said, We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body (that is, separated from the body by death) and at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8, emphasis added). These are the words of a man who believed that heaven would begin at the moment of his death. Was Paul looking forward to an unconscious slumber after his death? No! He was looking forward to the personal presence of Jesus Christ.

But thats not the whole story. The soul goes to be with the Lord in heaven, and the body is buried until the day of resurrection when Jesus returns to the earth. 1 Thessalonians 4:14 says, We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. Here you have both sides of the truth. Christians who die are said to be with Jesus (thats the soul in the conscious presence of the Lord) and have fallen asleep in him (thats the body which sleeps in the grave). Listen to Pauls description of that great reunion of body and soul: For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first (1 Thessalonians 4:16, emphasis added). Here is a clear promise of future bodily resurrection for the believer.

1 Corinthians 15:51-55 adds the crucial fact that our bodies will be raised imperishable"that is, with a body that is perfect in every way, free from the vestiges of death and decay In this life our bodies wear out, like a clock continually running down, but when we are raised, it will be with bodies that can never decay, never wear out, never suffer injury, never grow old, never get sick, and thank God, never die.

Many Christians have a wrong view of death. We think were going from the land of living to the land of dying. But the opposite is true. If you know Jesus, you are going from the land of dying to the land of the living. Here are some of the images the Bible uses for the death of a Christian: going to sleep and waking up in heaven . . . moving from a tent to a mansion . . . walking from the darkness into a well-lit room . . . coming home to see your family and friends . . . being set free from prison . . . taking a long journey to a new land . . . riding a chariot to the New Jerusalem . . . moving into a brand-new home . . . opening a gate to a brand-new world.

Christians have always faced death with confidence. The very word cemetery comes from a Greek word meaning sleeping-place, which refers to their confidence in the promise of the resurrection. Many pagans cremated their dead because they saw no further use for the human body. But Christians buried their dead as a statement of faith in the coming resurrection of the body. I have been asked more than once how God can raise the dead if the body has been burned or lost or vaporized in some terrible explosion. I dont think thats a difficult question at all. If you can raise the dead, you can raise the dead. Resurrection is Gods problem, not ours. We dont need to know the how of the resurrection as long as we know the who.

As he lay dying, D. L. Moody proclaimed, Earth recedes, heaven opens before me. Catherine Booth, wife of the founder of the Salvation Army, cried out, The waters are rising, but I am not sinking. And George MacDonald, the English novelist, said, I came from God, and Im going back to God, and I wont have any gaps of death in the middle of my life. John Wesley summed up the faith of the early Methodists with four simple words: Our people die well.

When Benjamin Franklin was twenty-three years old, he wrote the following epitaph. His words catch the essence of the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection:

The body of Benjamin Franklin

Printer;

Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents torn out,

And stripped of its lettering and gilding,

Lies here, food for worms.

But the work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believed, appear once more,

In a new and more elegant edition,

Revised and corrected

By the Author.

Once our bodies are raised, we will be with the Lord forever. Wherever he is, there we will be, rejoicing, praising, singing, and celebrating throughout the ages of eternity. 1 Thessalonians 4:17 says, We will be with the Lord forever. Speaking of his own return, Jesus said, In my Fathers house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am" (John 14:2-3, emphasis added).

What is ahead for us when we die?

Our soul goes into the conscious presence of the Lord.

Our body is buried until the day of resurrection.

When Christ returns, we will be raised bodily from the grave.

Body and soul reunited, we will be with the Lord forever.

As Tony Evans says, Have a good time at my funeral, because Im not going to be there.

... For the Lost

Now we turn to briefly consider the fate of those who die without Jesus Christ. The lost fear death and with good reason. Job 18:14 calls death the king of terrors. Hebrews 2:14 reminds us that the devil holds people in bondage through the fear of death. And 1 Corinthians 15:26 calls death the last enemy.

Before saying any more, we should note one similarity between the fate of the saved and the lost. At the moment of death, the body is buried in the grave while the soul enters a new realm. For the believer, the moment of death brings him into the personal presence of Christ. For the unbeliever, death begins an experience of unending conscious punishment.

We can summarize the fate of the lost in four short statements:

1. At the moment of death the soul of the lost is sent to hell where it is in conscious torment. In Luke 16:19-31 Jesus told of a rich man who upon his death went to hell and suffered in the flames of torment. It does not matter whether you think this passage is literal or figurative. If you say it is literal, then it must be a terrible punishment. If it is figurative, the figure itself is so awful to consider that the reality must be much worse.

2. That punishment is eternal. Though this is debated in some circles today, Christians have united across the centuries in their belief that the Bible teaches an eternal punishment for those who do not know our Lord. Mark 9:43-48 speaks of the fire that is not quenched and the worm that does not diea reference to the continuing existence of human personality in hell.

3. The body is raised at the Great White Throne judgment. Revelation 20:11-15 describes the awesome scene as the unsaved dead are raised to stand before God and receive their final sentence of doom.

4. The unsaved are then cast into the lake of fire where they will reside forever, eternally separated from the presence of Almighty God. If this is unbearable to think about, if we shrink from such a thought, then let us by all means do whatever is necessary to make sure that such a fate does not befall us or the ones we love the most.

This is the final destiny of those who do not know Jesus Christ. To make it more personal, it is the final destiny of your friends and neighbors, your loved ones, your parents, your brothers, your sisters, your children, if they die without Jesus Christ. And it is your destiny if you die without Jesus Christ. Let that thought linger in your mind. The reality of hell is more than just a theoretical doctrine. There is a place reserved for you in the lake of fire unless you by a conscious choice put your complete trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Shadow of Death

Only one question remains. How can you personally face your own death with confidence? Dr. Donald Grey Barnhousebeloved Bible teacher of another generationtold the following story. While he was still a young man in the ministry, his first wife died. As he was returning from the funeral with his heartbroken children, their car came to a stoplight just as a massive truck pulled up next to them, blocking the light of the sun. Seeing the immense shadow that had overtaken them, Dr. Barnhouse asked his children if they would rather be run over by the truck or by the shadow of the truck. By the shadow, the children instantly replied, knowing that a shadow could not hurt them. Thats what has happened to your mother, he told them. Death cannot hurt her because the Lord Jesus Christ took her to heaven. It is only the shadow of death that took her from us.

If you know Jesus, you have nothing to fear when death knocks at your door. Death comes to all of usit will come for you one of these days. Do you know Jesus? If so, then you need not live in fear. Death may be quick or slow, painful or painless, but when the moment comes, you will find yourself ushered into heaven where you will see Jesus face to face.

Some people wonder if they will have enough faith when they die. They worry about losing their faith and wonder if that will cause God to turn them away. When she was a young child in Holland Corrie ten Boom worried about her own death and whether or not she would have enough courage when the moment finally came. Her fatherPapa ten Boomknew of her fears and calmed her heart with these words: Corrie, when I am going to take you on the train, when do I give you the ticket? Just before we get on board. Thats right. Dying is like taking a trip to see the Lord Jesus. He will give you whatever you need just when you need it. If you dont have the courage now, its because you dont need it now. When you need it, the Lord will give it to you, and you wont be afraid.

In another generation, believers talked about dying grace. They meant the special enablement God gives to his children as death draws near. Countless Christians who worried about their last moments on earth have exited this life full of faith because the Lord gave them grace just when they needed it most.

Jesus Has the Keys

Here are the words of Jesus in Revelation 1:18: I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. Keys are a sign of authority. If you have the keys to my house, you can open it and go in anytime you want. It is often said that the devil owns the gates of hellthat is, he has the power of death. But thats okay. The devil has the gates, but Jesus has the keys. We have nothing to fear in the moment of death for when the time comes, Jesus will personally unlock the gate and usher us into his presence.

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? (John 11:25). If you believe in Jesus, you will never die. What an amazing promise. But believers die every day. Yes, but for the believer, death is merely the passing from this life with all its sorrows into life eternal in the presence of our Lord. The question is not: What happens when we die? But rather: What will happen when you die?

Death is not the end of the road, it is only a bend in the road. For the believer, death is the doorway to heaven. For the unbeliever, it is a passageway into unimaginable suffering. These things are true even if we do not fully understand them. They are true even if we dont believe them.

What happens when you die depends on what happens before you die. Here is my final word to you: Make sure youre ready to die so that when the time comes, you wont be surprised by what happens next.

A Truth to Remember:

What happens when you die depends on what happens before you die.

Take a moment to calculate the number of days you have lived so far. Now take a guess as to how many more days you expect to live. What is the most eternally profitable way you can spend your remaining days?

Have you ever had a near-death experience, or do you know anyone who has? Why is it crucial that such experiences always be evaluated by the standard of Gods Word? Why does the Bible contain such strong warnings against trying to contact the spirits of the dead? What happens when those warnings are ignored? Picture the moment of your own death. How do you expect it will happen? Do you fear that moment? Describe what will happen to you the first five minutes after your death. Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead? Why is this doctrine essential to the Christian faith? Name at least five Christians now dead who will be raised when Christ returns. Read 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 and Revelation 20:11-15. What does the first passage teach about the resurrection of the saved? What does the second passage teach about the resurrection of the lost? Do you believe in a place called hell where unbelievers are punished for eternity? Why or why not? Why is this doctrine sometimes denied today?

[Taken from FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About The Christian Life by Keep Believing Ministries. Used by permission.]

Image courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: September 11, 2015, Updated: November 2, 2017
Is AMR Modern-day FRANKENSTEINS MONSTER?

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) continues to pose a significant public health problem in terms of mortality and economic loss. The rising AMR is a matter of huge concern that needs to be tactfully handled and health authorities of several countries, including India, have formulated action plans for its containment. Significant efforts by the government, an active involvement of startups and diagnostic players is a good start. The question remains, whether this will be enough.

For Feedback, please email us at: communications@mmactiv.com
Aries: The full Moon in the beginning of the month will be very auspicious for you at the professional front. Increase in respect is seen along with increase in power and responsibilities. Make sure to keep your family and close friends closer to you, as it is also a good time for positive changes to occur in your domestic field. On January 11th, Mercury will enter Capricorn, which will let you put your entire focus on your career.



There will be a planetary alignment happening on January 15th - Jupiter in Scorpio and Pluto in Capricorn - that will create a bond, which will let you reach great heights in your career. Venus will move into Aquarius on January 17th, and you will tend to do a lot of things on the social front. On January 31th, the total lunar eclipse will tend to increase your creativity at work. This eclipse will also affect your love life, as you will meet someone new and interesting.

Taurus: This month will be very interesting for you, as the full moon at the start of the month will compel you to travel abroad. All your plans will finally see the light of the day when Mercury moves into Capricorn on January 11th. During the great planetary alignment on January 15th, with Jupiter moving into Scorpio and Pluto moving into Capricorn, you may enter into business partnerships. You are also predicted to pursue a new romantic relation during your travel to abroad. For people already in a relationship, this planetary alignment will just make your bond stronger. You are advised to plan an outing with your partner too. Planet Venus will shift in to Aquarius on January 17th. This is a great time for you on the professional front, as you may receive a promotion. Unemployed people too will receive employment. zodiac-signs 2018: 3 Zodiac Signs That Will Undergo A Major Change

Gemini: For Gemini, the full moon at the start of the month signifies growth in terms of wealth. You are advised to take a hard look at your finances and try to pay off any impending debts. Movement of Mercury into Capricorn on January 11th, will help you settle your finances and plan for the future. The planetary positions on January 15th is good for you to make some changes in your daily routine. Signing up for a new class or simply getting involved in religious activities will help. During the second half of January, out-of-country travel is foreseen.

The total lunar eclipse on January 31th will activate your communication area, where it will be easier for you to keep your point across.



You are advised to pay a close attention to the body language of people, as it may provide you with information that may not be vocally revealed by the speaker.

Cancer: This is a very good year for Cancerians, as the month has started with a full moon. This will help you reveal the secrets your friends or a close partner is holding. This full moon will also help you let out negative energy and reach your full potential. The planetary alignments on January 15th predict a long-term partnership. This phase is very good for your love life, as you are about to meet someone new.



Venus will move into Aquarius, which will drive your emotions high. The lunar eclipse at the month end is a good time to retrospect your activities and deeds.

Leo: The full moon at the start of the year will help you tune up your instincts. You will be guided by your sixth sense at this time. You will also be on an emotional over-ride. The planetary positions of January 15th will let you concentrate on your domestic issues. You are required to give importance to your domestic life and also create a perfect work-home balance. You are also predicted to succeed in your artistic endeavours. Venus will move in to Aquarius on January 17th, which will let all singles find themselves romantically involved with someone. People already in a relationship may get serious with their partners. The total lunar eclipse at the end of the month will make you retrospect your life and learn from your past mistakes. It is also a good time to release the negative energy in you and unleash the fiery Leo that you are.

Virgo: The month started off with a full moon in Cancer. This planetary alignment means that you will find yourself in many new friendships and partnerships. You are also predicted to innovate in the field of technology due to the planetary alignment of January 11th. On January 15th though, people in the artistic or writer's field, who were suffering from a road block, will shine. You may also receive recognition for your artistic work. The dates of January 17th and 18th will be very good for you health wise. You will be at the pink of health. It is also an excellent time for new romances. The total lunar eclipse on January 31th will improve your sixth sense and intuition. zodiac-signs What Are Your Intimacy Issues According To Your Zodiac Sign?

Libra: The new moon in the start of the year will bring in good news for you at the professional front. You are required to chart out your professional goals carefully and plan accordingly. The mid-month will let you see a growth in your monetary and domestic issues. You are advised to make investments on January 15th, as that time is very auspicious and you will gain immense benefits. Also, buying and selling property is foreseen. On January 17th, individuals of this sign will embroil themselves in a new relationship. The total lunar eclipse at the end of the month will make you socially active. You may also be on the lookout for a new friends' circle. Business partnerships are also foreseen around this time.

Scorpio: This month will be full of travel and adventure for fellow Scorpions. A long journey is predicted for you this month, which will be full of adventure. The mid-month planetary alignments will activate your communication area, where you will express yourself freely. You are advised not to mince words and be direct in your approach. This will help you fulfil your wishes. On January 17th, the focus will shift on to your domestic life. You are predicted to make a few changes in your domestic space too. The lunar eclipse on January 31st will see you getting into newer roles and responsibilities at the career front.

Sagittarius: The new moon will be very different to Sagittarians, as your sign will be illuminated by the moon and you will see things more clearly now. You will also uncover some hidden secrets. On January 15th, the focus will be move on your wealth. You are advised to pursue any religious work too around this time, which will benefit you immensely.



Your communication skills will improve, mostly by January 17th or 18th. It is a great time to get together with friends and take part in fun activities.



At the end of the month, doing something new will interest you, at both personal and professional fronts. You will enter into a new venture or take up a hobby, which will excite you.

Capricorn: The full moon of the New Year will unveil some facts about your relationship, which you were completely unaware of. You are advised not to take hasty decisions, as there may be more to the story. The mid-month is a good time for you to start a new business venture or a project. You are also predicted to go on a journey with friends. Your personal finances will get a bit better after January 17th. Keeping a close eye on your income and expenditure will ensure a smooth year ahead, financially. It will also be better to keep your finances as separate from your spouse as possible. life Discover What Your Birth Month Reveals About Your Personality Traits

Aquarius: The full moon will see you breaking your normal routine at the start of the year and engage yourself in a new activity. The mid-month is a very good time professionally, as you plan to start a new business in the area of your interest. Let your gut feeling tell you what is right or wrong, as it will never let you go ashtray. You will suddenly find yourself to be the centre of attention after the mid month. Your words will be taken seriously and your ideas will highly be appreciated. The lunar eclipse at the end of the month will bring in some important changes in your life. This is also the time you will reach your highest potential. You are advised not to enter into partnerships though.
By PTI: Vasco, Jan 8 (PTI) Ivory Coast striker Mechac Koffi saved Churchill Brothers from defeat as they came from behind to hold East Bengal to a 1-1 draw in the Hero I-League here today.

The match was hotly contested with East Bengal taking the lead in the 26th minute through Jobby Justin. But Churchill Brothers rode on Koffis brilliance to restore parity in the 75th minute.

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After todays draw, East Bengal remained at the top with 18 points from nine matches.

Jovel Martins and Wayne Vaz, who have been loaned from FC Pune City, made therir debut along with Ivory Coast striker Koffi as Churchill brothers tried to change their fortunes in the new year after five losses last year.

They showed lot of promise probing into the rival goal often and had scoring chances in early part of the match but Uttam Rai, Peter Omodmamuke along with Nicholas Fernandes failed to score.

With Churchill Brothers doing most of the attacking it was East Bengal who took the lead in the 26th minute.

Yusa Katsumi from the middle initiated the move and relayed the ball to Laldanmawia Ralte who from the right who send a low cross into the box for Justin who found the net with a diving header.

The goal saw East Bengal step up the ante as they grew in more confident and Al Amna could have double the lead two minutes later when he made his way inside the box between two rival defenders but shot out from close.

Churchill lacked motivation in the second half which they displayed in the early part of the first half.

Both the teams fielded fresh pair of legs in search of the winner but could not find it. PTI MCS BS BS

--- ENDS ---
Protestors rally outside Pakistan embassy in Washington, DC against its authorities misbehaviour reported with Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife and mother during their Islamabad visit.

By India Today Web Desk, Geeta Mohan: In renewed protests over Pakistan authorities misbehaving with captyred Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav 's mother and wife, a group of Indian-Americans rallied against chappal chor (shoe thief) Pakistan outside its embassy in Washington, DC.

Holding placards with news cutouts of how Jadhav's family was humiliated to the extent of taking away his wife Chetankul's shoes - suspecting a foreign object hidden to spy- the protestors also offered their shoes.

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"When they stole the chappal [shoe] of a woman [Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife] who was in distress, I hope they use these also," said a protestor showing the pile of shoes they were donating to the Pakistan officials.

Shoes kept outside Pakistan embassy in Washington DC.

He further added, "What does Pakistan do? Take dollars from America and shoes from India."

Among the demonstrators, were also few supporters of Baloch freedom, who highlighted the similar kind of "vindictiveness" that ordinary residents of Balochistan experience on a daily basis.

Ahmar Mustikhan, a senior Balochistan journalist and founder of American Friends of Balochistan in Washington, DC, said, "The trial of Kulbushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court."

Krishna Guidipati, a local Hindu community leader in the US and Director of Organisational Affairs, American Friends of Balochistan, said, "The recent episode makes a mockery of humanity. By not returning the slippers of Chetankul Jadhav and asking them to remove even bindi and mangalsutras, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done..."

When they stole the chappal of a woman (#KulbhushanJadhav's wife) who was in distress, I hope they use these also. I want to say one thing- Pakistan ka matlab kya? Amreeka (America) se dollar la, Hindustan ke joote kha!: Protester at #ChappalChorPakistan protest in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/nky7TrsRoD- ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

This comes two weeks after Jadhav's family was flown to Islamabad to meet him for over 20 minutes. The meeting soon caused a furore over the mistreatment meted out to Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife by both the media and officials .

(Note: The demonstrators are using the hashtag ChappalChorPakistan in the protest. )

Watch: Jadhav family made to change clothes, remove mangalsutra, bangles, bindi before meeting

--- ENDS ---
Domino's Pizza workers appear set to be paid default award rates, at least temporarily, after the workplace tribunal delayed their vote on a new pay offer.

Domino's employees were due to start voting on the new enterprise agreement negotiated with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA) from Tuesday.

The vote has been delayed for one week.

But on Monday the Fair Work Commission ordered that the ballot be delayed by at least one week because the company it had failed to negotiate in good faith with the rival Retail and Fast Food Workers Union.

Domino's will have to meet with the RAFFWU this week to discuss the union's outstanding concerns about the wage deal.
The consumer watchdog has reported a surge in the number of Australians complaining about being fobbed off by businesses that sold them faulty products.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says 29,000 people contacted it in 2017 to complain about issues with consumer guarantees - a 39 per cent jump from 2016.

There was a surge in complaints about car dealerships. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

Acting ACCC chairman Michael Schaper said he was concerned by the dramatic rise in complaints, which had been driven by a spike in complaints about automotive dealers.

Automotive dealers were the biggest single focus of complaints, responsible for a quarter of all issues lodged with the ACCC, followed by electronics and whitegoods, which were responsible for another quarter.
The government has forecast the end of the mining boom, with 2018 marking the tipping point for when producers will see export earnings heading south.

In fiscal 2017, the resources and energy sector is tipped to see record high exports earnings. But this is expected to be short-lived.

Data from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science released on Monday suggests a bleaker outlook for 2018 with billions less in earnings.
Our politicians are still in holiday mode, apart from the occasional Turnbullian thought-bubble about another postal survey, this time on the republic. At this rate, the greatest achievement of his prime ministership will be saving Australia Post.

But our American cousins are back into the fray for 2018, courtesy of the juicy excerpts from Michael Wolff's new book, Fire and Fury  a title that could equally describe the response so far to Wolff's revelations from deep inside a White House apparently riven by infighting and dysfunction.

Illustration: Reg Lynch

He claims that Trump wanted to lose, and Melania cried when he won, while Ivanka's dead keen to be president. We also learned why POTUS is so fond of Big Macs  he thinks that constantly eating Macca's protects him from being poisoned, except via the slow, inexorable march of heart disease.

The Twitter insult comic-in-chief, whose skin is as thin as it is tangerine, has been apoplectic. He's tried to sue both the publishers and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who's suing right back  I've ordered the book on my Kindle so I can read it before the lawyers get to it.
A fire that broke out at the sessions court complex in Mumbai was brought under control early morning.

The fire was brought under control by 8:30 am (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

By India Today Web Desk: A level-2 fire broke out at the Mumbai Sessions Court complex early morning in what was the five recent instance of a blaze in the Maximum City.

Eight tenders of the Mumbai Fire Brigade were rushed to the court complex in south Mumbai's fort area. The fire was successfully brought under control by 8.30 am and no causalities were reported.

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According to the BMC Disaster Control, the fire was noticed on the third floor around 7 am, and eight fire-tenders have rushed to the spot to douse the blase.

The sessions court fire came a day after a blaze at the Cinevista Studio in the city's Kanjurmarg. The level-3 fire, which began on the sets of the TV serial Bepanah, was brought under control only after two hours.

The Cinevista fire followed a January 4 blaze that killed four people, including two children, after an upper floor of a residential building in suburban Marol caught fire.

Both these fires came a week after a major tragedy at Mumbai's Kamala Mills, where 14 people were killed after in a midnight blaze at a popular pub. That fire had raised serious questions over the fire-safety norms followed by buildings in Mumbai.

A week before before the Kamala Mills blaze, twelve people were killed when a massive fire broke out at a snack shop in Saki Naka-Kurla area on December 18.

(With inputs from IANS)

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Efforts to squeeze more out of Sydney's rail fleet as a part of an overhaul of timetables has resulted in "smaller windows" of time available to maintain trains and tracks, putting more pressure on staff to carry out night-time work.

While extra weekly services will help the network cope with surging demand, a Sydney Trains document obtained by the Herald lists, among the challenges for carrying out train repairs, "reduced fleet maintenance windows" and an "increased demand on maintenance as [a result of the] fleet doing more kilometres".

Decades-old S-set trains are also being pressed into service more often in order for Sydney Trains to put on the 1500 extra weekly services rolled out as part of the timetable changes. It leaves passengers to face uncomfortable rides this summer because the S-sets are not airconditioned.

The leaked document, written before the timetable overhaul on November 26, also warned of "shorter maintenance windows" for the repair of rail tracks. Trains are running more regularly during off-peak periods of the day, and later at night, thereby reducing the "midnight to dawn windows" when work can be carried out.
A man has handed himself in and been charged after allegedly attacking two families on the Gold Coast in separate incidents during a three-week period.

Police will allege he assaulted a female driver, who was travelling with children in her car, last week, after also abusing a family at a boat ramp in December.

It will be alleged the man tried to grab the arm of a female driver during an incident at Robina last Wednesday.

It will further be alleged the man broke the woman's car keys off in the ignition, before throwing them into the bush about 1.25pm on Scottsdale Drive.

Police will also allege the man verbally abused another family at Currumbin Creek boat ramp on December 14.
A man remains in a serious condition in hospital on Monday night after he was shot at a Gold Coast residence.

Emergency services were called to Plateau Crescent in Carrara just after 4pm following reports of a shooting.

Emergency services quickly cordoned off the area as detectives examined the crime scene. Credit:Nine News Queensland - Twitter

Police said the man was confronted by three men and a woman, one of the men was armed with a gun and the woman with a metal pole.

The 44-year-old man was then shot and suffered injuries to his left arm and chest, while his attackers fled the scene in a car.
Malcolm Turnbull knew or ought to have known that the claims he made about Labor's housing policy during the election were likely to be wrong.

The Treasury pointed it out in the lead-up to the campaign.

Ramping up his rhetoric in order to win the election, Turnbull said Labor's plan would "devalue every home, every property, in Australia".

It would "smash up home values", "pull the rug out from under the property sector".
Bangkok: Malaysia's 92-year-old former prime minster Mahathir Mohamad will lead an opposition coalition into one of his country's most bitterly fought elections since independence, challenging the ruling party he led for 22 years.

In a stunning turnaround, Mahathir has agreed to seek a royal pardon for jailed former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and to allow him to replace him as prime minister if he topples the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) which has formed every government since 1957.

Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad speaks in 2016 when issuing a declaration signed by 58 public figures urging Prime Minister Najib Razak to resign over corruption allegations. Credit:AP

A feud between Mahathir and Anwar shaped Malaysia's political landscape for almost two decades.

But the pair are now seen as the biggest threat for Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is engulfed in a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal.
I spent months crying over the US election results. Yes, I'm sure you have a million reasons in your evidence to show me that Donald Trump is great for America. You may even have been in that group of drunken 20-year-old white boys at a Group of Eight university, in the bar cheering and shouting "lock her up" at the result because you're not yet far enough along in your education to understand that politics is about more than slogans.

And maybe you'd like to drone on for months about why Hillary Clinton is a bad person and why she would have been the death of America. Anyhow, she lost and I'm nearly used to the idea, although occasionally I feel terrible pangs.

But, intermittently, those bleak feelings of loss, despair and fear bubble up.

It may be the terrible provocation of North Korea, or Trump's unilateral decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It may be hearing from those women; the women, in his own parlance, whose pussies he grabbed, whom he harassed long before #MeToo. Perhaps it was his rousing support for Doug Moore, himself accused of shocking sex offences.
US President Donald Trump Sunday night misquoted in a tweet a flattering column in the New York Post as lauding his "enormously consensual presidency". He then corrected it to reflect the real word: "consequential".

In the New York Post column, Michael Goodwin spoke highly of Trump's year in office, writing that it "is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency". He also wrote that "despite my own frustration over his missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president."

US President Donald Trump misquoted in a tweet a flattering column, lauding his "enormously consensual presidency". Credit:CHRIS KLEPONIS

In a late-night string of tweets, Trump directed his millions of followers to the column but misquoted it, replacing the word "consequential" with "consensual". He also left out the author's references to the President's "missteps". Instead of linking to the article, Trump tweeted out an email address for Goodwin.

Trump or someone acting on his behalf deleted the tweet shortly after posting it, replacing it with a new tweet correctly quoting the article and linking to it.
Government initiatives of financial assistance to restart life is proving a boon as ultra-Left extremists return home.

Gas cylinders were distributed and houses built for the surrendered Maoists using government funds.

By Divyesh Singh: "We realised that the life we were leading wasn't resulting in any change and through our relatives we decided to surrender." - Ramji Munshi Mattami, 32.

"There was no development of tribals. Nothing helping the cause we were fighting for and eventually in 2008 I decided to surrender." - Dalsay Chamru Korcha, 35.

Mattami and Korcha are just two of the hundreds of Maoists for whom the Red dream had faded. The call for revolution, heard way back in the 1960s and echoing across large swathes of India ever since, is fast losing its allure.

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A large part of the kudos to bring the boys back home lies with the government - Central and various state ones. There was also a paradigm shift in the government's Maoist strategy.

CHANGING THE STRATEGY

Maharashtra took a leaf out of the rebel's handbook: go on a propaganda blitzkrieg instead of just engaging in combat. Maoist guerrillas are famous for using various types of propaganda to recruit fresh blood in their ranks.

Senior Maoists cadres were lured with the help of their relatives; the promise of all previous cases being buried and the carrot of economic help to start afresh were big draws for Maoists who wanted to surrender.

Government posters, messages and announcements were peppered across Maoist-dominant tribal areas.

"Our job was to conduct propaganda for the Maoists. We would approach various villages and carry out their message amongst people against the government. Now I have got a plot from the government and am working in the Gadchiroli district. Life is much better now and I am leading a normal life," says Ramji Munshi Mattami.

Mattami, resident of Javeli Khurd village in Etapalli taluka of Gadchiroli, joined the Maoists in 2002 and surrendered in 2016. Working under a pseudonym Sunil, Mattami was a divisional committee leader of Kasansur area.

The government's policy on bringing back the Maoists into mainstream was enhanced by the strategy of area domination. This resulted in a major success as the presence of C 60 anti-Maoist commandoes and district police increased. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was also a participant in the exercise.

Confidence-building exercises brought the forces and the villagers together. From building small bridges over nullahs and rivulets to arranging bazaars for the tribal population helped.

Medical camps were organised and those suffering from serious illnesses were taken to cities.

Medical camps were organised and those suffering from serious illnesses were taken to cities.

DANGLING THE CARROT

For the surrendered Maoists, police arranged for their weddings, gas cylinders were distributed and houses built for them using government funds in the affected areas of the district.

Then there are other things that the police do to stop surrendered Maoists from going back into the jungles: cash assistance, housing assistance along with plots and construction aid, jobs in local civic body or in the government; recruitment as special police officers.

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Dalsay Chamru Korcha, alias Raju, works with the solid waste management department of Gadchiroli municipal council. He stays with his wife in a house allotted by the council while his children study in Chhattisgarh with his elder brother's family.

Police arranged for weddings for the surrendered Maoists.

Korcha was dalam deputy commander for the Khobramenda dalam. Khobramenda dalam was one the most dreaded and one of the most powerful dalams operating in Gadchiroli district."I had joined Maoists in early 2002 and since then worked against the government. I then took my wife also along with me. After some time I realised that the life we were leading was not good and we kept running through the jungles all the time," Korcha told India Today.

Now thanks to his decision to surrender, he says he's happy and hopes that his children will get government jobs.

Even high-ranking Maoists cadres, who've worked with the central committee members, have also decided to handover their guns to the government.

Houses were built for the surrendered Maoists using government funds.

Raoji Maniram Naitam, 21, alias Vicky, was a bodyguard of Venugopal Rao alias Bhupathi. Brother of top Maoist leader Kishenji, Bhupathi was a top commander of the outfit.Vicky, who joined in 2007, worked as his bodyguard and surrendered in 2016. He now works as a home guard and lives in Gadchiroli.

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THE MOVES ARE PAYING OFF

"Besides other assistance we also provide surrendered Maoists with security for the first few weeks," said Kishor Kumar Khade, sub-inspector, surrender cell of Gadchiroli police.

The Maharashtra government recently launched a Gharkul residence scheme for surrendered Maoists in the district headquarters of Gadchiroli. Every surrendered Maoist has been allotted a 1,500-square-foot plot where they can construct their homes for which economical assistance would also be provided. According to the police the government's initiatives have delivered with the number of Maoists surrendering going up over the years.

A total number of 583 Maoist cadres have surrendered in Gadchiroli till date. In December itself five senior dalam members have surrendered taking the total number to 21 in 2017.

The government policy of giving them a clean slate and economical assistance seems to be working well in this part of the red corridor. The surrendered Maoists are leading a good life and have gelled well with the mainstream.

-With inputs from Vyankatesh Dudhamwar

ALSO WATCH | Court gives life sentence to Delhi University Professor GN Saibaba for Maoist links

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His dog days are over!

A paralyzed pooch rescuers found left for dead in a garbage bag inside a Cypress Hills park is back on his paws thanks to the efforts of some Marine Park and Park Slope vets, who released the mutt on the mend into the care of his new foster dad on Friday, according to one of his saviors.

Were just happy that he is going to be shown the love he deserves, said Carla Mohan, who works with rescue service New York Bully Crew, which came to the pups aid after he was discovered abandoned.

Passersby called 911 after spotting a garbage bag moving and moaning inside Highland Park near the Jackie Robinson Parkway last month, and cops found the 1012-year-old German shepherd mix inside it with his mouth duct-taped shut.

Officers handed the dying dog off to Bully Crews rescuers, who rushed him into emergency care at Marine Parks Verg South, where vets stabilized the mutt and dubbed him Saint Vincent.

But Vinnys ordeal wasnt over. Doctors soon discovered the aging pup couldnt move his back legs, prompting them to send him to Verg North in Park Slope, where specialists administered an MRI to test for spinal injuries.

The procedure showed that the four-legged saint wasnt suffering from any one condition, but a panoply of illnesses common in older dogs that years of abuse made worse, according to one of his physicians.

He had these chronic problems common in older dogs, compounded by the neglect and abuse of a person, Dr. Brett Levitzke said.

But vets could treat the poochs many ailments without any surgeries, Levitzke said, and soon he was up and walking, at which point doctors handed Vinny over to Bully Crews founder, Craig Fields, who will shelter him at his Long Island house until the furball can find a forever home.

Our job now is to ensure a continuous safe environment for Saint Vincent to flourish, and to find the perfect home for him to finally settle into and receive unconditional love and nurturing, the foster dad said.

Vinny is an older guy, and though the worst of his medical conditions are behind him, anyone looking to adopt the mutt should anticipate his favorite hobby  relaxing.

He just wants to hang out, watch a good movie, and relax, said Mahon.

Police are still looking for the fiend who abandoned the pooch, according to authorities, who said no arrests have been made.

Anyone with a forever home for Saint Vincent should visit New York Bully Crews website at www.nybullycrew.org.

Reach reporter Colin Mixson at cmixs on@cn gloca l.com or by calling (718) 260-4505.
Distributed-power projects are expected to be immediately successful in areas like Beijing and Zhejiang province, where electricity prices are higher than the national average. Photo: Visual China

Chinas central government has pushed back the deadline for regional governments to submit their respective plans for Beijings pilot distributed-power trading program after months of slow progress.

The National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration issued a joint statement last week that called on provincial-level areas to submit their plans for the pilot program, which is aimed at increasing the use of solar and wind power, by March 31  three months later than the previous submission deadline.

The two central government agencies had announced in October a pilot program in which companies would generate electricity for their own use through small-scale generators and then sell the excess to the grid or to nearby users. The pilots original planned start date was Feb. 1, but that has been extended to July 1, according to last weeks statement.

Last weeks document was a response to the slow pace at which the governments have started work on the project, Tsinghua University photovoltaic industry researcher He Jijiang told Caixin. Many provincial-level areas had no idea how to concretely implement the plan and faced many uncertainties, including which areas within their respective regions should be included in the pilot project, and whether the power generated by participating companies would be compatible with the grid, He said.

The most recent central government statement on the pilot program also recommended that provincial-level governments choose power generators directly selling excess electricity to users as the main model for their distributed generation projects. The other alternatives are electricity grid companies selling on behalf of generators, and the grid companies directly purchasing electricity.

Additionally, the document said that participating wind and solar power generators would not be limited by industrywide capacity quotas if they were to voluntarily give up the subsidies China provides to renewable energy companies. The country has been trying over the past year to wean renewable energy firms off subsidies.

Distributed-power projects are expected to be immediately successful in areas like Beijing and East Chinas Zhejiang province, where electricity prices are higher than the national average. Surplus power from smaller energy generators would cost less than the current commercial price to produce and connect to the grid, He told Caixin.

If this kind of trading model can be smoothly implemented, businesses will no longer be dependent on government subsidies to develop, and the governments role will simply be to maintain order on the market. For the solar power industry, this would be an ideal state of development, He said.

Contact reporter Teng Jing Xuan (jingxuanteng@caixin.com)
KBP BioSciences Co. Ltd. has chosen the Philadelphia area as the site of its new headquarters, according to a company statement. Photo: Visual China

A Chinese biopharma developer has decided to move its global headquarters to the U.S. in a bid to take advantage of the countrys extensive talent pool and enormous pharmaceutical market.

KBP BioSciences Co. Ltd. has chosen the Philadelphia area as the site of its new headquarters, according to a company statement.

The clinical-stage biotechnology company has attracted some big names in its latest $76 million fundraising round, including the venture capital firm under the government-backed State Development & Investment Corp. and a venture fund under Ping An Insurance.

The move to the eastern U.S. gives KBP BioSciences access to the exceptional talent base in the region which uniquely includes scientific and business graduates from top universities, experienced biotech entrepreneurs and leading experts, it said.

Among the talent that the company secured is its new CEO, Brian McVeigh, a 25-year veteran of GlaxoSmithKline PLC who managed the U.K. pharmaceutical giants worldwide business development.

McVeigh said that the new funding will allow the company to grow from its roots as a China-based preclinical development organization into a truly global enterprise.

KBP BioSciences has several promising drugs in its pipeline. Its best prospect is a drug for cardiovascular disease that has entered the second phase of clinical trials in the U.S.

As the worlds largest market for biopharmaceuticals, the U.S. offers drugmakers huge academic and commercial potential. U.S. firms conduct over half the worlds research and development (R&D) in pharmaceuticals. The biopharmaceutical industry accounts for 17% of all domestic R&D funded by U.S. businesses, according to SelectUSA, a U.S. government program that seeks to attract investment to the country.

Although it is a relatively small player in the biopharmaceutical industry, China is aiming to catch up with the U.S. In a 2017 plan, the National Development and Reform Commission vowed to send some competitive companies abroad through mergers and acquisitions, setting up R&D centers and establishing sales networks.

Contact reporter Coco Feng (renkefeng@caixin.com)
This year, China's banking regulator will continue its campaign of targeting misconduct to try to wring out risks in the system, sources told Caixin. Photo: Visual China

Chinas top banking regulator launched a torrent of investigations and regulations in 2017 to try to tame the worlds biggest banking system  and the storm appears far from over.

Under its new chairman, the China Banking Regulatory Commission targeted excessive leverage, off-balance sheet banking activities, and market wrongdoing. The CBRC acted as concerns mounted over financial risks building up in the system.

Since March, the regulator has uncovered 59,700 instances of wrongdoing involving 17.7 trillion yuan ($2.72 trillion), it announced Monday.

Fines totaling 2.9 billion yuan were imposed last year on 1,877 banking institutions, according to figures released by the CBRC on Sunday. The biggest penalty  722 million yuan (more than $100 million)  was slapped on China Guangfa Bank for fabricating guarantee documents.

It also punished 1,547 industry employees  including banning 270 from the industry for years or up to a lifetime  and issued a flurry of regulations to try to wring out risks.

The CBRC is determined to make "those who try to take advantage from regulatory loopholes unable to profit from such practices and strictly punish those who violate the rules," said one person close to the commission.

The commission will extend the regulatory campaign this year, targeting misconduct in interbank transactions, mostly bills and short-term loans;

wealth-management products, which are the major funding source for the shadow banking system by raising money from retail investors; and bankers acceptances, a short-term debt instrument issued by the company, sources close to the CBRC told Caixin.

Last year, the main violations involved institutions trying to skirt capital adequacy and credit rules, and providing excessive loans in the property sector, as well as local governments and wobbly industrial sectors, a CBRC official said.

Some banks have seen risks from a serious mismatch of assets and liability as they invested funds raised from short-term wealth management products to long-term projects or risky borrowers.

Of the near-60,000 cases of wrongdoing that the regulator says it found, 11,534 centered on industry rules and law, 4,060 on arbitrage that capitalized on uncoordinated regulations, 12,800 on improper business innovation and practices, and 31,300 on flaws in corporate governance, such as violations in ownership structure and investment activities, according to the CBRC.

In October, CBRC Chairman Guo Shuqing sent a warning to expect the crackdown to continue. The trend of financial supervision is increasingly strict oversight and stringent enforcement of the law and regulations, he said.

Cleaning up disorder

Guo took the helm in February of last year, pledging to tackle the various phenomena of disorder in the banking sector.

The effort got underway by late March and has focused on interbank and wealth management businesses that have thrived over recent years with little regulatory oversight. The regulator is concerned these businesses have steered capital away from the real economy  the part concerned with actual production of goods and services instead of investment in the financial markets  to risky and highly leveraged investments, posing risks to the system.

The CBRC has issued a slew of regulations to rein in risks from the loosely regulated shadow lending, wealth management products and interbank-market businesses, while stepping up inspections of suspected market wrongdoing.

On Jan. 5, the CBRC announced a set of new rules on off-balance sheet entrusted loans, in which a bank acts as an agent to facilitate a loan between two businesses, stepping up scrutiny of one of the main segments of the countrys shadow-banking industry.

In November, the CBRC along with the central bank and other regulatory bodies released proposals to calm countrys $15 trillion asset management industry and untangle the complex web of investments that exist outside the formal banking system.

Amid stricter oversight, commercial banks interbank assets and liabilities were reduced by 2.8 trillion yuan and 830 billion yuan, respectively, by the end of November from the beginning of the year, indicating shrinking off-balance sheet business, said a CBRC official.

Wealth-management products sold on the interbank market dropped by 3 trillion yuan between the end of 2016 and the end of November. The proportion of entrusted loans, which are blamed for helping banks skirt lending rules, in the countrys broadest measure of credit had dropped to 8% by the end of November from 8.5% at the end of 2016.

Over the past year, the CBRC has removed some hidden risks in the banking sector while encouraging banks to offer greater support to the real economy, the CBRC official said.

From January through November, new loans issued by Chinese banks totaled 13.3 trillion yuan. Growth of lending to manufacturing sector rose 1.7 percentage points from the same period last year.

Chinas banking sector has seen its total assets reach 240 trillion yuan, growing 80% from 2012. Assets of major state-owned banks totaled 86.5 trillion yuan by the end of November, up 7% from the previous year. State banks liability totaled 79.4 trillion yuan by the end of November, according to CBRC.

Total assets of joint-stock commercial banks and smaller city commercial banks stood at 44 trillion yuan and 31.4 trillion yuan by the end of November, respectively. The CBRC said interbank and wealth management businesses are the major sources of risks for joint-stock banks, while city commercial banks are seeing more violations in ownership structure and internal governance.

Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com)
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Here's how the Queen reacted to the gift Meghan Markle got her for Christmas.

By India Today Web Desk: Spending a few days with your prospective in-laws can be as daunting as meeting them for the first time is. And that's probably how Meghan Markle felt before spending her first Christmas with her fiance, Prince Harry's family at Sandringham. After all, her in-laws include Queen Elizabeth II herself!

A key part of Christmas celebrations is the exchange of gifts that people across the world indulge in. The British Royal Family also follows this tradition, but because of their German heritage, they exchange gifts on Christmas Eve.

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Also Read: The Queen has officially let Meghan Markle into the family, with her Christmas speech

Meghan, as a part of the celebrations this year, also got gifts for her new family. But was her present for the Queen a hit or a miss?

Kate Middleton, Prince William, Meghan Markle, and Prince Harry, seen at the Sandringham Estate. Photo: Reuters

Meghan got a singing toy hamster for the Queen, and it turned out to be a big hit. What's more, the Queen laughed quite a lot when her pet corgis tried to snatch it away from her, the Daily Star reports. She was quite amused, and even said that the toy "could keep my dogs company"!

The same report also described that since the British Royals are quite wealthy, and have everything that they could ever need, they usually go for funny gifts on Christmas. This was probably why Meghan's gift, which is cheaply available at toy stores, was just a hit with the Queen.

Queen Elizabeth II, giving her Christmas speech. Photo: Reuters Queen Elizabeth II, giving her Christmas speech. Photo: Reuters

Also Read: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry just flew in Economy to France, and we are impressed

But that's not all the fun that Meghan poked with her Christmas gifts. She gave Prince William a Tom O Shanter hat, which comes with an attached wig, to joke about his thinning hairline.

Her sense of humour is precisely what helped Meghan fit in with her future in-laws so well.

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The timetable for Class 10 & Class 12 has been released by Jharkhand Academic Council,(JAC) Ranchi. Candidates can view the timetable from the official website. The exams will be conducted from March 8, 2018, to March 27, 2018.

Students can visit the official website of JAC to download the JAC Class 10 & Class 12 TimeTable 2018.

JAC SSC (Class 10) timetable:

Exam Dates Music March 08, 2018 Hindi (Course A & Course B) March 09, 2018 Commerce / Home Science March 10, 2018 IIT/ITS/HEL/MAE/SEC/RET/BAW/TAT March 10, 2018 Mathematics March 12, 2018 Urdu / Bengali / Oriya March 13, 2018 Science March 14, 2018 Arabic / Persian / Ho / Mundari / Santhali / Oraon March 15, 2018 English March 16, 2018 Kharia / Khortha / Kurmali / Nagpuri / Panch Pargania March 17, 2018 Social Science March 19, 2018 Sanskrit March 21, 2018

Jharkhand HSSC (Class 12) timetable:

Exam Dates Geology - I.Sc. March 08, 2018 Music - I.A. March 08, 2018 Vocational - I.A., I.Sc. & I.Com. March 09, 2018 Hindi A, Hindi B + Matribhasha & English A (Compulsory Core Language) - I.A. March 10, 2018 Hindi A, Hindi B + Matribhasha & English A (Compulsory Core Language) - I.Sc. & I.Com. March 12, 2018 History - I.A. March 13, 2018 Economics - I.Sc. & I.Com. March 14, 2018 Philosohy - I.A. March 14, 2018 Biology (Botany+Zoology) - I.Sc. March 15, 2018 Geography - I.A. March 15, 2018 Business Mathematics - I.Com. March 15, 2018 Economics - I.A. March 16, 2018 Physics - I.Sc. March 17, 2018 Accountancy - I.Com. March 17, 2018 Business Studies - I.Com. March 19, 2018 Sociology - I.A. March 19, 2018

Chemistry - I.Sc. March 21, 2018 Home Science - I.A. March 21, 2018

Psychology - I.A. March 22, 2018 Entrepreneurship - I.Com. March 22, 2018 Political Science - I.A. March 23, 2018 Elective Language (Compulsory) - I.A. March 24, 2018 Additional Language - I.Sc. & I.Com. March 24, 2018 Mathematics / Statistics - I.A., I.Sc. & I.Com. March 26, 2018 Computer Science - I.Sc. & I.Com. March 27, 2018 Anthropology - I.A. March 27, 2018

Click here, for more information about Class 10 & Class 12 timetable.

About Jharkhand Board:

The state of Jharkhand came into existence on the 15th of November, 2000. An Act to establish the Jharkhand Academic Council was enacted by the Jharkhand State Legislature and assented to by the Governor, which was known as Jharkhand Academic Council Act. As per the official website, the Jharkhand Academic Council was established for holding and conducting examinations at the end of Intermediate, Education, Secondary Education, Sanskrit Education and Madrasa Education and for prescribing courses of studies for such examinations and for recommending for recognition of Intermediate Educational Institutions, High Schools, Sanskrit Schools and Madrasas to the State Government and for carrying out such other or duties assigned to the council by the state government from time to time. With the establishment of the Jharkhand Academic Council, the Bihar Intermediate Education Council Act, 1992, the Bihar School Examination Board Act, 1952 (adapted as Jharkhand Secondary Examination Board Act, 2000) Bihar Sanskrit Education Board Act, 1981 And Bihar Board of Madrasa Education Board Acts, 1981 were repealed.

Jharkhand Postal Circle GDS Result 2017 Released: Check Now!
Riyad Capital: Outlook for Saudi Arabia in 2018

Published 08 January 2018

Riyad Capital will present its outlook for the Saudi Arabian cement industry in 2018 at Cemtech Middle East & Africa held between 17-20 February 2018 at the JW Marriott Marquis, Dubai, UAE. Santhosh Balakrishnan, assistant vice president of research, explains to ICR what to expect in the year ahead.



ICR: What impact will the Saudi Vision 2030 initiative have on the cement industry? Will we see the effects of this plan by 2018, or will it come to fruition later?



Santhosh Balakrishnan (SB): In our view, the impact will be positive, but its difficult to quantify at this point for a period that is 12 years from now. The government is adopting plans to be less dependent on oil, which suggests that domestic spending could elevate and raise cement demand.



ICR: Some clinker lines have stopped in Saudi Arabia recently due to high inventory and lower demand. Are you expecting to see further temporary stoppages of clinker lines throughout 2018 and what financial impact could this have?



SB: Most of the producers which have taken the brunt of low demand have already resorted to stopping clinker production lines. We expect another 5-10 per cent cut in clinker production, which is the base case in our view. However, companies cannot go beyond the threshold level, at which point cheap fuel access would not be recompensated by Aramco.



The 2016-17 numbers suggest that a 10 per cent cut in production resulted in a 200-300bps drop in operating margins.



ICR: Arabian Cement Co (3.8Mta) and Al Safwa (2.2Mta) were discussing a potential merger and have signed an exclusivity deal. Will this deal happen, and are there sufficient incentives in Saudi Arabia to encourage future mergers?



SB: A consolidation move is welcome at this point in time, but both Arabian Cement and Al Safwa have called off the deal. We expect this to re-emerge as valuations for smaller players have hit bottom and are below greenfield project valuations, meaning it has become very attractive.



Unless the companies in the same market consolidate, we do not expect big synergies. While promoter shareholders are common in a few companies, a strategy to consolidate helps for accounting synergies and not operational synergies.



ICR: Could the surplus cement be exported to resolve the demand and supply mismatch that is highlighted in Riyad Capitals recent report? How much of an issue is the high export tax?



SB: The government recently reduced the export fee by 50 per cent from SAR85-133/t (USS21-35/t), which is a welcome move. However, the target export markets do not support the prevailing export price level, after adding taxes and transportation costs, which is in the range of SAR320-340/t (USS85-91/t) in neighbouring countries. Additionally, the pace of reconstruction could be delayed in areas where the geopolitical risk is high, which may undermine any growth in export demand.



ICR: Saudi Arabia is looking to shift its focus away from the oil industry. How will this affect the cement industry in 2018?



SB: The economy is now focussed on diversification. The 2018 budget has put an emphasis on capex spending in infrastructure. This is a relief which should reach the cement sector in the coming months.



There are several other reasons for the positive outlook for the industry in 2018, such as the announcement of Neom, a new planned city, which will border the Red Sea coastline, and signs of easing tension in neighbouring markets.

In summary, the end of curtailed spending seen between 2014-17 has had investor sentiments high since the third quarter, but the timing and execution of spending is awaited.

All these factors are positive signals for the upcoming year, not ignoring the impact of VAT, utility hikes, transportation costs and a higher expat levy. There is no immediate demand push expected, but consumption could stabilise at 46-47Mt in 2018.



ICR: How does your outlook for 2018 differ from the outlook of previous years?



SB: Since 2014, when the oil bear market started, cement demand has been rapidly decreasing and the industry suffered from opacity in government spending. As we discussed at Cemtech MEA 2017, there were no green shoots to be seen, which therefore resulted in our neutral outlook for the period. However, our outlook for the year ahead is more upbeat, moving from neutral to positive.

Financially speaking, the overall sector saw a 26 per cent fall in 2017 in market capitalisation, taking 2014-17 returns to -52 per cent. While the fundamental signs for a further rally are not seen at present, the worst of the downturn is ending in our view.

Santhosh Balakrishnan, Riyad Capital (Saudi Arabia) is a speaker at Cemtech MEA 2018, which takes place in Dubai on 17-20 February, 2018. For more information click here
Cemex Colombia to pay SIC fine, object via litigation

ICR Newsroom By 08 January 2018

Cemex Colombia announced that it proceeds to pay the value of the fine imposed by the country's Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC) in September 2013, amounting to the sum of US$25.3m.



The investigation is in line with Resolution 81391 of 11 December 2017 which saw the SIC fine Cemex Colombia, along with Cementos Argos and Holcim Colombia) and to six individuals for price fixing of grey cement in the national market.



The company decided not to file an appeal for reversal against the SIC decision and said the payment is made in the appropriate time and manner.



The reason for this decision is that, throughout the investigation, as well as in the observations on the Motivated Report, the company presented a solid legal and economic argument that distorts the charges made by the SIC, according to a report in El Economista. However, to date these have not been taken into account by the entity, which is why it will go directly to the contentious administrative jurisdiction to file an action for nullity and reinstatement of the right against the decision, explains the entity in its report. In addition, the company added that it has the legal and economic arguments that demonstrate its correct action in the Colombian market, which is why the producer expects the Contentious Administrative Tribunal to evaluate and accept them, proceed to annul the charges formulated by the SIC and order the restitution of the sanction paid today with the adjustments provided by the Law.

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New projects to take total Ugandan output to 6.8Mta

ICR Newsroom By 08 January 2018

A number of projects in Uganda are expected to commence operation this year, taking total cement production to 6.8Mta from 3.6Mta, reports Ugandan newspaper The Independent. Hima Cements new 1Mta facility in Tororo is expected to open in 1Q18 and will take the companys overall capacity to 1.8Mta.



Meanwhile, Tororo Cement is awaiting a capacity increase to 3Mta from 1.9Mta through a plant expansion. National Cement is also investing US$185m on a 1Mta plant in the same region, which is expected to begin operations later this year.



Despite a significantly-increased capacity, Ugandas demand remains at 2.4Mta. However, growth in the construction industry is expected as the government confirms a number of new infrastructure projects.



Looking at the projection, we are going to have a construction boom once investments in the oil industry start and the subsequent oil flows. Towns are going to sprout up and more structures will be constructed, said, Allan Ssemakula, the chief commercial director at Hima Cement.



The increase in capacity has led to competition in the market with cement prices falling to a current price of UGX28,000 (US$7.65) per 50kg bag, down from UGX33,000 recorded in 2016.



Elsewhere, cheap imports from producers in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia threaten to further weaken the market in Uganda.

Published under
What the Aftermath of a Nuclear War With North Korea Would Actually Look Like

Though it appears North Korea is moving closer toward peace than war, it wasnt long ago that Kim Jong Un recently in his annual New Years Day address that the entire area of the U.S. mainland is within our nuclear strike range, and that a nuclear button is always on my desk. Kim meant this idle threat as an effort to deter the U.S. from ever attacking North Korea.

However, that made us wonder what would actually happen if the U.S. and North Korea went to nuclear war with one another. What would the aftermath be like? How long would it take to have those places go back to normal? As it turns out, a few researchers actually modeled the effects of what 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs would have on the planet. Those answers will terrify you.

Week 1: 100 nuclear warheads are detonated

Embed from Getty Images

There would be 5 megatons of black carbon launched into the air in the immediate fallout of a nuclear war with the detonation of 100 nuclear bombs. That black carbon is from everything burning in the combined blast areas. The upper atmosphere of the entire planet will be filled with black carbon by the end of the first week.

Next: The effects are almost immediately felt across the globe.

Week 2: Blackout

By week two, there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that sunlight can no longer reach the Earth. The Earth begins a rapid spiral of cooling that wont stop for months. This also starts a chemical reaction inside the Earths ozone layer that will effectively eat the ozone layer away.

Next: Enter the deep freeze.

2 months: Nuclear winter

Embed from Getty Images

After a two month spiral of cooling, the average temperature of the Earth has fallen well below freezing. The amount of rainfall the planet receives also plummets because of the falling temperatures.

With so much radiation from the initial blasts, plants were adversely affected. By two months plants stop growing and their DNA begins to stabilize. Without crops producing any new food supplies, starvation soon sets in planet-wide.

Next: It will be some time before we see any significant changes from the abyss were in.

2 years: A huge portion of the population may be dead or dying

Roughly 2 billion people may have died at this point from starvation alone. With barely any crops being able to produce enough food, stability in any region is tedious at best. On top of that, most areas in the world are frozen wastelands and some are completely unlivable.

Next: The latent effects of nuclear war on humans.

5 years: Latent cancer pandemic

Embed from Getty Images

By year five, the ozone has been depleted by about 20-25% since the bombs first dropped. This is when UV light is at its peak intensity. Couple that with significant levels of radiation and you have a wave of latent cancer deaths killing off about 16-18% of the population that survived the blasts. This will trigger the second major die off after the 2 billion that previously died of starvation.

Next: At this point, we will start to see our first signs of improvement.

10 years: The first signs of hope

Ten years after the blasts, the ozone layer will be the first to see significant improvement. The ozone will still be damaged by the black carbon in the atmosphere, but will only be about 8% thinner than it was before the bombs dropped.

Next: Another milestone is reached in our atmosphere

20 years: Gaining warmth, but there is still a long way to go

Embed from Getty Images

At this point, the Earths temperature is beginning to stabilize. Although, the average temperature of the Earth is still well below modern day. This still affects crops and their growing seasons and they have not returned to levels before the blast.

Next: It will take a lot longer to get relatively comfortable again.

30-50 years: A relatively stabilized planet

Plant growth begins to stabilize but is still pretty slow. Plants also eventually start taking over unpopulated areas, much like Pripyat next to Chernobyl.

Radiation levels are still pretty significant in some areas which make them unlivable and will remain that way for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

This entire model is based on the assumption that 100 nuclear weapons were detonated at the same time. The current stockpile of nuclear weapons is estimated around 15,000 warheads. If the tipping point comes for the U.S. and North Korea, we could see something similar or far worse than this model suggests.

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2017 ended up being a bumpy ride for health care policy in America. Though outright Obamacare repeal never happened, the GOP tax law did kill the ACA individual mandate. This change to federal law will have an impact on millions of Americans in the coming years, especially those 50 to 64. Beginning in 2019, anyone in that group will see an average jump of $1,500 in health insurance premiums, an AARP study found.

Meanwhile, changes to state Medicaid policies continued in 2017. With the approval of several waivers by the Trump administration, state governors and legislatures may now change the way many Americans access health care programs. Looking ahead to 2018, Medicaid recipients across the country could find new income requirements and even drug screening on the table.

Since Medicaid covers disabled Americans and seniors in addition to the poor, the impact would be felt throughout America. Yet Medicaid is not the only federal program facing changes in the coming year. New tax policy will also have an impact on Medicare. Heres how the changes to both Medicaid and Medicare could affect you in 2018.

1. Some Medicaid coverage eliminated in Iowa

The end of retroactive coverage leaves Iowans on the hook for emergencies.

Theres a feature in Medicaid that saves people from massive debts to health care providers: retroactive coverage. The way it works is simple. Once someone signs up for Medicaid, they receive three months of retroactive coverage. This safeguard allows the poorest Americans coverage for past hospital visits and treatment that would qualify for Medicaid.

Unfortunately for new Medicaid recipients in Iowa, the Trump administration approved the states request to end retroactive coverage. According to Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), the waiver will affect low-income parents, children over 1, ACA expansion adults, seniors, and people with disabilities. In 2018, if a stroke or other emergency forced someone onto Medicaid, they would not be covered beyond the first of that calendar month.

2. Caps on physical therapy covered by Medicare

As of January 1 2018, Medicare Part B patients face therapy caps while they recover.

Congress occupied itself with tax reform in December, so the GOP-controlled body had no time to see to Medicare safeguards. Specifically, caps for Medicare Part B patients undergoing physical therapy did not get extended into 2018. That means seniors who suffered a stroke and need crucial therapy have limits on how much rehab they can receive.

Senior and health care advocates petitioned Congress to extend the cap exceptions into the new year, to no avail. According to McKnights, it is unlikely a cap extension could pass until February at the earliest. If Medicare Part B patients hit their threshold of therapy in the meantime, there will be huge problems.

3. Indiana rolling back retroactive Medicaid

New Medicaid enrollees wont see retroactive benefits in Indiana.

While Iowas Medicaid changes affect more people, Indiana will begin some rollbacks of its own in 2018. After the Trump administrations approval of a state waiver request, many new Medicaid enrollees will not get retroactive benefits. The list includes low-income parents, people moving off welfare, and 19- and 20-year-olds new to the program, Kaiser Family Foundation reported. If you believe you may qualify for Medicaid, dont hesitate to apply.

4. Medicaid work requirements

Seven states made requests to add work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries.

In addition to ending retroactive coverage, many states hope to begin work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. At the end of 2017, seven states had requests for some type of work requirement pending with the Trump administration. Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, and New Hampshire will tie it to the ACA Medicaid expansion. Maine, Utah, and Wisconsin seek work requirements for most adults applying for benefits.

5. Penalties for negligent nursing homes get lighter

The Trump administration will reduce penalties for homes abusing Medicare patients.

President Trump promised to cut regulation, and his administration applied that concept to nursing home care. In a January 2018 announcement, the Trump administration said it would scale back penalties for homes that abused or neglected Medicare patients. According to CNN, 40% of the 6,500 nursing homes received fines for a serious violation since 2013.

In 2018 and beyond, these guidelines could discourage regulators from fining nursing homes even when a patient dies. For families with relatives in a home, this change could spell bad news. An example CNN cited involved a nursing home being fined $282,000 following neglect that led to the death of a patient. (A judge called the penalty modest.) Under the new guidelines, the home would pay about $21,000 in fines following a death.

6. Medicaid drug screening in Wisconsin

Governor Scott Walker said he expected Trump to approve the request for drug screening.

In June 2017, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker requested approval to require drug testing for Medicaid applicants. Childless adults would face the tests if the Trump administration approves. Though these ideas increase bureaucracy and cost the state big in administrative fees, Walker hopes Wisconsin becomes the first state in the nation to start drug testing for Medicaid.

7. Automatic Medicare cuts

Since the tax cuts increase the deficit, automatic Medicare cuts would follow.

Anyone concerned about the national deficit should be concerned about GOP tax reform tacking on $1.4 trillion. Future generations will have to reckon with burden, but immediate cuts also come with the new law. For example, an automatic $25 billion cut to Medicare triggers in 2018 unless Congress does something about it. After therapy caps and CHIP both expired in 2017, we dont feel confident Congress will find that solution in time.

8. Asset and property tests in Maine

While Maine voters approved Medicaid expansion, the state hopes to limit enrollees.

According to Governing, a trade publication for public officials, Maine requested the most far-reaching Medicaid requirements. Governor Paul LePage hopes to impose asset tests on Medicaid applicants. In addition to other terms, LePages request would ask for savings account information and property values. These waiver requests came from a state where voters approved a referendum on Medicaid expansion in 2017.

9. Medical expense deductions

In 2018, anyone with high medical expenses can deduct amounts over 7.5% of income.

Many people feared the GOP tax plan would eliminate medical expense deductions. (In 2017, taxpayers could deduct amounts exceeding 10% of their income.) For the coming tax year, the threshold lowers to 7.5% of income. So this point went from a scary proposition to a relief for anyone with high medical bills. The amount will remain 7.5% until 2020, when it should go back to 10%.

10. Voter referendums on Medicaid

At least three states look headed for a Medicaid referendum in 2018.

Following the win for Medicaid expansion in Maine, several other states could vote on similar referendums in 2018. These programs would bridge the gap between those who earn too much for Medicaid but cannot afford ACA plans. Organizers in Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska launched efforts with this goal in mind, Forbes reported. As in Maine, these efforts are being made in spite of the party in control of the state governments.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) The Delhi Police today said that Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevanis request for holding a rally here tomorrow on Parliament Street has not been granted yet.

The police had earlier said that Mevanis request was "under consideration".

"No permission granted so far by Delhi Police to hold proposed protest at Parliament Street in view of NGT orders. Organisers have been constantly advised to go to alternate site, which they are reluctant to accept," the office of Deputy Commissioner of Police, New Delhi, tweeted tonight.

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However, the organisers have confirmed to PTI that they would be going ahead with their plan.

The Social Justice rally or Yuva Hunkaar Rally is planned to be addressed by Mevani along with Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi.

The NGT on October 5 last year had ordered officials to "immediately stop all activities of dharna, protest, agitations, assembling of people, public speeches and using of loud speakers among others at the Jantar Mantar Road."

One of the organisers and former JNU Students Union president Mohit Kumar Pandey said, "There has been a lot of attempts to stop this event and even some media houses are spreading wrong information that the permission for the rally has been denied."

Ever since the rally was announced on January 2, "a lot of money has been spent on posters calling Mevani a deshdrohi (traitor) and urban naxal," Pandey told PTI, adding the event will be held as per schedule.

Mevani could not be reached for his comments.

In a statement, the organisers have urged the prospective participants to "assemble on the Parliament Street at 12 pm on tomorrow".

The rally seeks to raise the demand for the release of Dalit outfit Bhim Armys founder Chandrashekhar Azad and emphasise on issues like educational rights, employment, livelihood and gender justice.

A large section of students from universities and colleges in Delhi, womens groups, teachers associations and activists associated with Mevani from across the country are expected to attend the rally.

Azad, 30, was arrested in June last year from Himachal Pradesh as he was the main accused in the Thakur-Dalit clash in Uttar Pradeshs Saharanpur district. PTI CPB/SLB ANB

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The document obtained by Nirupam shows that BMC officials twisted rules and gave permission to go-karting track.

By Mayuresh Ganapatye: After exposing Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' connection with Vidarbha Infotech, and how the company received towing contract in Mumbai by flouting rules, Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam today exposed another Nagpur connection.

This time it's with Mojo's Bistro restuarant.

Nirupam alleged, "Mojo's Bistro which signed the contract in 2016 to run the restaurant in Kamala Mills, has owners which has Nagpur connection. And, one BJP MLA from Nagpur setup the meeting of owners with CM Fadnavis."

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Nirupam pointed out, "After the tragic incident at Kamla Mills, BMC started demolishing the illegal portions of all the restaurants in city. However, it stopped all of a sudden. So far, only one person has been arrested and other owners of Mojo's Bistro are roaming scot free. This will not happened unless there is some Nagpur connection to it."

In a press conference Nirupam produced documents and alleged that 'Smassh', a recreational center in Kamala Mills has got a 'Go-carting' track which is illegally constructed under DCR (Development Control Rule).

According to the document obtained by Nirupam, shows that BMC officials twisted rules and gave permission to go-karting track.

Recently, while speaking to media, Nirupam asked Ajoy Mehta to reveal the name of a politician who is pressuring him in the investigation. He also questioned his decision of suspending the 5 officials.

"Documents clearly shows the nexus between BMC babus and hotel owners. As babus twisted rules for them. And BMC chief Mehta signed on the illegal proposals. Mehta should resign taking moral responsibility of this and if he doesn't, then the CM should suspend him or else we will hit the road." concluded Nirupam.

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'Crown' seasons 3 & 4 cast news: Helena Bonham Carter in talks to join seasons 3 & 4

Reports say Helena Bonham Carter is joining the upcoming seasons of Netflix series "The Crown."

The world-famous Bellatrix Lestrange from the "Harry Potter" franchise is said to be all but confirmed to play the older version of the Queen's sister Margaret in the most expensive series ever made.

Season 2 of "The Crown" premiered on Netflix last Dec. 8 to a huge success, just like its sequel did before it. The second installment explored the years 1956 to 1964, with a focus on Queen Elizabeth's (Claire Foy) struggles as a new head monarch.

It was a tough time, which came at the same period the British public was questioning the need for a monarch. Add to that the infamous love life of her husband Prince Philip (Matt Smith), who was reportedly hooking up with various women in his commonwealth tour.

For Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), it was the start of the "great party," after she was forced to break off her wedding with divorcee Peter Townsend (Ben Miles). Instead, she weds photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones.

In season 3, reports say there will be a huge jump in the timeline, which means there would be a need to change the major casts.

It was earlier reported that for seasons 3 and 4, Olivia Colman is taking the crown from Foy, who has won a Golden Globe award and a Screen Actors Guild award for her work in the series. She has also been nominated as best actress in the Emmy.

Series creator Peter Morgan has always been honest about his intent to change the casts to better portray the characters as they age. No news yet on who will replace Smith as Prince Philip.

Reports say production for "The Crown" seasons 3 and 4 is already well under way, despite the lack of go signal from Netflix. "The Crown" season 3 is slated to premiere in 2019.

Meantime, Bonham Carter is starring as one of the thieves in the upcoming "Ocean's 8," which premieres on June 22.
John Worboys and God: How the Church works in Britain's prisons

'God has forgiven me!', the serial rapist John Worboys claims. That is according to the Star on Sunday's front page which, it has to be said, is not generally known for religious affairs exclusives.

But, as was pointed out on Sunday, this is not as unlikely a story as it might seem.

Through an interwoven network of chaplains, inter-faith groups, prayer initiatives and evangelistic efforts, churches have boasted a steady drip feed of stories claiming that hardened inmates are experiencing radical conversions.

Shane Taylor, once considered one of the most dangerous prisoners in Britain, is one of hundreds to have dramatically converted while in prison. He described praying while at the maximum security HMP Long Lartin, Worcestershire: 'Suddenly a bubbly energy seemed to start within me. It rose up from deep within my belly, moved up my body and through my chest. My emotions opened up and I found myself crying,' he said.

'As I cried I felt as though tons of invisible bricks were falling away from me and I was shedding the weight of them, leaving me feeling lighter and more able to see things clearly. At that moment I knew God had touched me, he'd heard my prayers and with sure certainty he was real.

'All the hate, anger and resentment seeped away as I cried, leaving me feeling lifted.'

While stories like Taylor's are rare, religion's presence in UK prisons is not new. In fact each prison is required by law to have a chaplain and prison chaplains are the only clergy to have statutory duties they must carry out. Under the 1952 Prisons Act prison chaplains must visit new prisoners within 24 hours of their arrival, they must visit all prisoners under segregation or in the prison hospital and they must take religious services.

Their role is pastoral, not proselytising. 'The chaplains of today are not here to judge or convert anyone, or anything like that, they are just here to talk to and give prisoners support,' one prison governor told a study on prison chaplaincy by Cardiff University.

However the makeup of prison chaplains has changed drastically in more than six decades since the legislation was passed. Whereas the Act assumes chaplains are male, Christian and more specifically Anglican, now both male and female chaplains cover a whole range of faiths with 15 per cent of the prison population now Muslim, two per cent Buddhist and one per cent Sikh.

But despite the changes in wider society and the decline in organised religion from 1952, the Church of England retains its established presence in prisons: the 'chief chaplain' to the prison service, the Chaplain-General, is still traditionally an Anglican; one of the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords is given the title of Bishop for Prisons; and the majority of chaplains employed by the government are still Anglicans.

Aside than the formal, statutory, links between the Church and Her Majesty's Prisons, there is a more informal network of religious charities who work in prisons.

Unlike prison chaplains, these are not merely pastoral and have freedom to run evangelistic courses.

One such group is the Prison Fellowship, an initiative founded in the US and now running in the UK, which writes letters to prisoners, buys presents for inmates to give to their children at Christmas and works with victims of crimes to help their perpetrates see the impact on people's lives.

But perhaps the most prominent is Alpha; an eight-week evangelistic course to emerge from the charismatic Anglican church in Kensington, Holy Trinity Brompton. Boasting alumni including Bear Grylls, Geri Halliwell and the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Alpha is based on a series of short talks followed by a discussion group. It is designed to give a whistle-stop tour through the Christian faith and more than 24 million people in over 100 countries across 112 languages have taken the course.

Alpha was registered in 64 prisons in the UK at the end of 2016 and runs in more than 800 prisons, in 55 countries, around the world. In the UK 2,560 people, including volunteers, are estimated to have taken part in Alpha in prisons in 2016 and 67 per cent said they 'experienced personal transformation'.

Steve Page, development manager for Alpha UK in prisons, told Christian Today Alpha offers a place to discuss.

'It is voluntary. They can disagree. They can ask questions. If they think Jesus is an alien from another time and space they can think that. We are not there to correct their theology.'

Evangelistic courses for offenders such as Worboys may jar as either preying on the vulnerable or offering the depraved an excuse to pretend they have changed.

But Page said it was neither. 'They don't have to go. It is optional and quite often it's run at the same time when they can have their one shower a week and many of these guys chose to go to Alpha,' he told Christian Today.

'We find Alpha in whatever context is held when people have questions about life. These people have got a lot of time to be thinking about these questions.

'It is there to be the place where they can ask those questions and we are there to wade through them with them.'

Shane Taylor's dramatic conversion followed an Alpha course. He was released a year later, six-and-a-half years through his eight year, nine month sentence and is now a regular ambassador for the course. Page said the main reason Alpha is allowed is because it reduces re-offending.

'We're hoping they don't come back,' he said. 'We hope that there is spiritual awakening so they don't re-offend.'

There's no suggestion Worboys took part in an Alpha course. But there are plenty of other opportunities for a prisoner to find faith if they are seeking it. Whether his alleged conversion is genuine is another question  and whether his conversion should have any influence on whether he's released is another question still. Christianity should not act as a get-out-of-jail-free card and the law must still take its course.
Megachurch rallies around pastor after he admits sexually assaulting 17-year-old girl 20 years ago

The leadership of a megachurch in Memphis, Tennessee has rallied around its pastor Andy Savage after he publicly admitted to sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl while serving as a youth minister at a previous church in Texas 20 years ago.

Savage received a standing ovation at church yesterday after making the admission and appealing for forgiveness.

Chris Conlee, the lead pastor of Highpoint Church, said in a statement after Savage admitted the incident which was outlined in a detailed blog post from the victim: 'This information is not new to me or to our leadership...On behalf of the elders, pastors, staff, and Trustees of Highpoint, I want to affirm that we are 100 per cent committed to Andy...and his continued ministry at Highpoint Church.'

The statement came after The Wartburg Watch on Friday published the account of a woman, named as Jules Woodson, who had accused Savage of abusing her in the late 1990s.

She recalls an evening in Spring 1998 when Savage offered her a lift home after a meeting at the Woodlands Parkway Baptist Church. According to the account, he drove past the turn-off for her house and instead carried on down a dirt road with a promise of a 'surprise'.

After arriving in a deserted area of woodland, she writes that he asked her to engage in sexual activity with him, which she reluctantly did. Then, after around five minutes, she said Savage suddenly jumped out of the vehicle and ran over to her, falling to his knees with his hands on his head and begging her not to tell anyone what had happened. 'You can't tell anyone Jules, please. You have to take this to the grave with you,' she quotes him as saying.

The victim then states that she approached the church's associate pastor to inform him of the incident and that the first thing the man said in response was: 'So you're telling me you participated?'

She writes: 'Not only did I suddenly feel this immense guilt for doing what Andy had asked me to do but I also started to feel that this was my fault somehow because I didn't stop him.'

She writes that the church sought to cover up the incident until she gained the courage to tell more people about it, and Savage subsequently left the church due to a 'poor decision' he had made, with no details being provided to the church's congregation.

'No one could imagine Andy doing anything bad or immoral, much less illegal, and so, it somehow became my fault that Andy was leaving,' the victim writes.

In his statement admitting to the incident, which he read out in church on Sunday, Savage said: 'As a college student on staff at a church in Texas more than 20 years ago, I regretfully had a sexual incident with a female high school senior in the church. I apologized and sought forgiveness from her, her parents, her discipleship group, the church staff, and the church leadership, who informed the congregation. In agreement with wise counsel, I took every step to respond in a biblical way.

'I resigned from ministry and moved back home to Memphis. I accepted full responsibility for my actions. I was and remain very remorseful for the incident and deeply regret the pain I caused her and her family, as well as the pain I caused the church and God's Kingdom.

'There has never been another situation remotely similar in my life before or after that occurrence. The incident happened before Amanda and I were engaged and I shared every aspect of this situation with her before I asked her to marry me. I further disclosed this incident to Chris Conlee before coming on staff at Highpoint and have shared with key leaders throughout my tenure.

'This incident was dealt with in Texas 20 years ago, but in the last few days has been presented to a wider audience. I was wrong and I accepted responsibility for my actions. I was sorry then and remain so today. Again, I sincerely ask for forgiveness from her and pray for God's continued healing for everyone involved.'

In his statement, Conlee said: 'This information is not new to me or to our leadership. As one of my closest friends and partners in ministry, I can assure you that I have total confidence in the redemptive process Andy went through under his leadership in Texas. In addition, for more than 16 years, I have watched Andy strive to live a godly life and proactively share what he has learned to help others.

'On behalf of the elders, pastors, staff, and Trustees of Highpoint, I want to affirm that we are 100 per cent committed to Andy, Amanda, and their family and his continued ministry at Highpoint Church. We ask for your prayers and support for all involved.'

Yesterday, in extraordinary scenes at Highpoint recorded by the website Makechurchsafe.com, Savage received a standing ovation after reading out his statement alongside Conlee, adding: 'Since then I have tried to live my life in keeping with that original act of repentance. For any painful memories or fresh memories this has created for anyone, I am sorry, and I humbly ask for your forgiveness. I love you all very much.'

Conlee, with his arm around Savage, said to the congregation: 'We are so grateful for your support. I know when you support Andy in that way, you are also supporting Ms Woodson. You are supporting her healing. You are supporting, and you are praying for her, and we are willing as individuals and as a church to do whatever we can within the scope of what it means to offer spiritual healing, to do that for Ms Woodson.'

Woodson said she had decided to send an email to Savage on December 1 with the subject line 'Do you remember?' after being inspired to act by victims of abuse coming forward in Hollywood and elsewhere.

In the email which she says went unanswered, Woodson wrote to Savage:

'Do you remember that night that you were supposed to drive me home from church and instead drove me to a deserted back road and sexually assaulted me?

'Do you remember how you acted like you loved me and cared about me in order for me to cooperate in such acts, only to run out of the vehicle later and fall to your knees begging for forgiveness and for me not to tell anyone what had just happened?

'Well, I REMEMBER.

'#me-too.'

In her blog, she adds: 'To anyone who has suffered from sexual abuse in the church and the subsequent cover up and pressure to remain silent, I want you to know that it is not your fault. Most importantly, I want you to know that you are not alone.'

On Saturday, Woodson told WMC News that Savage's apology was insufficient.

'His apology isn't enough because number one, he's lying about how he handled it. He never came to me, the church told him he couldn't talk to me and they told me I couldn't talk to him,' she said.

Woodson said that it had taken her two decades to come forward because she'd felt 'pressured by the church to be silent'. She added: 'It's very hard to tell your story. It's very hard to speak up.'
Pope Francis locks horns with Trump over Korea, nuclear weapons and Jerusalem in speech to diplomats

Pope Francis today called for dialogue over Korea, a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons and the retention of the 'status quo' in Jerusalem in his annual speech to diplomats known as his 'state of the world' address.

The Pope also addressed climate change, calling for countries to remain committed to the 2015 Paris accord on reducing carbon emissions. Donald Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from the agreement.

'It is of paramount importance to support every effort at dialogue on the Korean peninsula, in order to find new ways of overcoming the current disputes, increasing mutual trust and ensuring a peaceful future for the Korean people and the entire world,' Francis said.

Francis addressed diplomats a day before North Korea and South Korea are due to hold talks expected to address North Korea's participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

Earlier this month, after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un asserted that he had a nuclear button at the ready, Trump tweeted that the US button at his disposal was bigger and more powerful.

'Nuclear weapons must be banned,' Francis said, quoting a document issued by Pope John XXIII at the height of the Cold War and adding that there is 'no denying that the conflagration could be started by some chance and unforeseen circumstance'.

The Pope noted that the Holy See was among 122 states that last year agreed to a United Nations treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The US, Britain, France and others boycotted the talks that led to the treaty, instead pledging commitment to a decades-old Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Pope's comments on Jerusalem came after Trump unilaterally announced in December that the US was controversially recognising the city as the capital of Israel. At the time, Pope Francis said 'I cannot keep silent my deep concern' over the issue.

Additional reporting by Reuters.
Royal wedding news 2018: Meghan Markle's half brother blames engagement for New Year brawl

Meghan Markle's half brother, Thomas Markle, Jr., is blaming the royal engagement for a drunken fight that ensued with his fiance on New Year.

The Daily Mail earlier reported that Tom's fiance, Darlene Blount, was sent to jail after the couple had an intense fight at their Oregon home. According to his earlier statement to the media outlet, Blount started "pummelling me in the face with her fists." But he later changed his tune, saying his injuries were self-inflicted.

Tom blames the altercation to all the media attention they have been receiving since Meghan's engagement.

"It hasn't been easy. Meghan's relationship with Prince Harry has shone a spotlight on our family," Tom told the Daily Mail. "It doesn't help when you have issues and your sister is engaged to Royalty. It adds a whole new level of scrutiny."

He added that they have been under a lot of stress because of all the attention. "At some point you find yourself drinking too much to escape the pressure."

Meghan and Prince Harry reportedly welcomed the New Year "partying like tycoons" in Monaco with the independent city-state's Prince Albert and his wife, Princess Charlene.

While that was happening, Meghan's 51-year-old half-brother was having a huge row at a bar with his fiance. Blount reportedly left the bar in rage. Tom then also went back to their bungalow, where he continued his drinking.

Later, when Blount arrived home as well, Tom said she immediately downed a bottle of bourbon. An argument then ensued.

It was Blount who called the police, but she ended up being arrested instead. "I might have said Darlene beat me up," Tom explained. "It was a big confusion."

Later, it was also Tom who bailed Blount out by paying $1,000. He has since vowed to "seek help" following the altercation.

This was not the first time the couple was engaged in a huge fight. In January 2017, Tom was also arrested for reportedly pointing a gun at Blount's head, also during a drunken row.
'The Real Housewives of New Jersey' news: Joe and Teresa's restaurant closes down; upcoming RHONJ episode a roller-coaster ride

The year 2018 is not off to a good start for "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" stars Joe Gorga and Teresa Giudice. Siblings Gorga and Giudice decided to close down their pizza joint in New Jersey.

Gorga and Giudice opened the restaurant in May 2017, and the grand opening was featured in the Bravo reality television show. According to a US Weekly source, Giudice had a falling-out with his brother. The issue between the two then triggered to Gorga's exit. The source said, "Joe is done with Gorga's Homemade Pasta & Pizza. The actual owner of the restaurant and Joe worked out this deal where Joe would get money... if he lent his name and image to the restaurant. But the owner never made good on his end of the deal so Joe is done with the restaurant."

Gorga also had a slight disagreement with his own wife Melissa. In the first episode of RHONJ for 2018, Joe was not happy with Melissa's decision to go to Milan to acquire a unique product. The handbag she secured in Milan finally arrived at her home in New Jersey. There are still no words from the show's producer if Joe and Melissa will work things out in the upcoming episodes.

Elsewhere, fans of the show are looking forward to the next episode with Teresa set to visit her husband Joe Guidice in prison. According to the episode's summary description, Danielle Staub's boyfriend Marty Caffrey will take their relationship to a new level. Dolores Catania will also receive relationship advices from her ex-husband Frank Catania. Also, Margaret Josephs will be having a blast with her birthday on the next episode. Siggy Flicker, on the other hand, will do something that somehow diminishes her honesty among the group.

"The Real Housewives of New Jersey" episode 13 of season 8, titled "Prisons, Proposals, and Parties," will air on Jan. 10 at 9 p.m. EST on Bravo.
Thousands of people are converting to Jediisim, politician worried about 'spiritual void'

"Star Wars" is a work of fiction, and Jedis do not really exist in real life. But a lot of people really admire their philosophy and way of living, so much so that they started a religion called "Jediism."

This has gotten Michael Snyder, a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho's First Congressional District, really worried. After seeing a documentary called "American Jedi," Snyder researched more about the phenomenon and discovered a website for "the Temple of the Jedi Order."

Even though their faith is based on make-believe characters, Snyder was surprised to find out that the IRS granted them tax-exempt status in 2015.

"I was seven years old when 'Star Wars' first came out, and it definitely had a major impact on me," he wrote for Charisma News. "But even as a child, I understood that it was just a movie. Unfortunately, there are some people out there that are so drawn to 'the Jedi Order' that they actually want to make it a religious faith."

One such person is Opie Macleod. While he was practicing within the Jedi community, he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his friend, Miles Robinson, who is a practicing Sith. "My student, who I had said was a Jedi Knight, not only tossed the Jedi path away, to follow and explore the Sith path," Macleod told the Huffington Post, "but also slept with a Sith."

Because of the betrayal, Macleod veered away from the Jedi community. But after a few years, he came back and even took on another student - former marine Perris Cartwright who claims to have suffered from multiple rapes while in the marine corps before finding peace in Jediism, the more she got over past wounds.

Filmmaker Laurent Malaquais, who created the documentary, said she even learned something from Opie.

"Opie Macleod taught me a valuable lesson. Whenever you are confronted with a difficult situation in life, the very first thing you must do is fully accept it," he said. "I do believe Jediism is very much a religion. Simply because it's inspired by ancient religious practices and it definitely takes the place of religion in the lives of Jedi."

Malaquais might have been impressed by Jediism, but Snyder definitely isn't. He said that countless Americans are "groping for answers to the most fundamental questions in life," which have left them feeling disillusioned. Because of this "spiritual void," Snyder stressed that the need for new spiritual awakening has never been greater.

"It is one thing to dress up like Luke Skywalker and wave a fake lightsaber around, but it is another thing entirely to make 'Jediism' your religion. I guess it just shows how spiritually empty a lot of people are feeling these days," he said.
Treasure-seekers target French church linked to conspiracy theories in Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code'

An ancient French church, whose former priest's name was used for a character by the bestselling author Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, has been targeted by seekers of a mythical treasure trove mentioned in several other books.

Not for the first time, a hole has appeared by the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Chateau, a village with a population of only 70. This is because a story that a priest buried a trove of gold coins and gems there at the end of the 19th century has spread across France.

The Telegraph reported that the village, near Carcassonne, 55 miles southeast of the southern city of Toulouse, became a magnet for treasure-hunters after books recounted various versions of the myth.

The mayor there was forced to ban unauthorised digging as far back as 1960 after complaints that Rennes-le-Chateau was beginning to look 'like a Swiss cheese'.

The priest, Francois-Berenger Sauniere, is credited with a role in the conspiracy theories behind The Da Vinci Code, a novel based on the fictional idea that Jesus had children and a relationship with Mary Magdalene. One of the novel's main characters, Jacques Sauniere, is named after the priest.

The Telegraph reported that fewer treasure-hunters have been sighted in the village in recent years, but the new hole has raised fears that it is being targeted again.

A local deputy mayor, Marcel Captier, said: 'We don't want to find ourselves with swarms of treasure-hunters again.'

But Helene Calmedero, who runs the local bookshop, 'Au Rendez-Vous des Chercheurs' (The Seekers' Rendez-Vous), said she would welcome the treasure-seekers back.

'I miss those days. The treasure-hunters were all like big children, excited about their searches. They carried on day and night, following up the vaguest hunch with metal detectors,' she said.

According to one version of the myth, Sauniere discovered treasure buried by the Bishop of Alet as he fled to Spain during the French Revolution.

Sauniere renovated the church, which dates from the 10th or 11th century, with some believing that the priest himself buried what was left in the church grounds or graveyard.

But most historians have concluded that the treasure never existed and the priest raised money by stealing donations and charging for church services.

According to the Telegraph, he is also said to have had an affair with his housekeeper, with villagers recounting a story circulated after his death in 1917 that he was punished by being transformed into the stone figure of a horned devil supporting a basin in the church.

Last year, a young woman wearing a Venetian mask damaged the sculpture by attacking it with an axe. She was given a suspended prison sentence for vandalism.

'That awakened bad memories,' Captier said. 'It's all very traumatic.'
In yet another fire incident in Mumbai, three people have been badly injured while three others have sustained minor injuries while repair for a gas leak.

By Mayuresh Ganapatye: In yet another fire incident in Mumbai, three people have been badly injured while three others have sustained minor injuries while repair for a gas leak.

The explosion occurred when the gas company employees were attending a gas leak complaint.

The incident took place in Oshiwara area of Andheri West.

A family's house had the gas leakage problem. They called the gas company mechanic for repair. Two mechanics from the gas company came to the house to repair. At that time only housewife was present.

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As the mechanics were repairing the gas leakage, blast happened. The two mechanics and housewife got badly injured in the incident.

The blast radius was minimal and was spread to 2 other houses in the densely populated area.

Local resident Aslam Sheikh said, "At 11am the incident took place. There was problem in the gas cylinder as there was leakage. Two mechanics came to repair when the blast happened. Over six people got injured in the incident. This is third such incident in our area. The gas company should check the cylinders before sending it to public use."

Another neighbour Noorjahan Khatoon Siddique said, "My child was playing outside their house when the incident took place. My son has received burn injuries. A neighbour woman too has received injuries."

A police official said that there is mistake from the gas company and mechanics that came for repair. After our investigations we will take proper actions. Currently, the mechanics are badly injured in the incident.

ALSO WATCH | Major fire guts iconic RK Studio in Mumbai

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Vicar found guilty of spiritually abusing teenage boy

A vicar in Oxfordshire has been convicted by the Church of England of spiritually abusing a teenage boy, in what is thought to be the first judgment of its kind, the Church Times reported.

The victim was put under 'unacceptable pressure' during one-to-one Bible study sessions in his bedroom over an 18- month period, according to the judgment which was published online by the Church.

The priest, Timothy Davis, of Christ Church, Abingdon, was found guilty under the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) 2003 of 'conduct unbecoming or inappropriate to the office and work of a clerk in holy orders through the abuse of spiritual power and authority' by a five-strong Bishop's Disciplinary Tribunal for the Oxford diocese, chaired by the Revd Mark Bishop. A penalty has yet to be set.

The CDM tribunal is reportedly the first of its kind that has found a case to answer over allegations of the abuse of spiritual power and authority.

The complaint was brought by the Archdeacon of Dorchester, Judy French, in 2013, and referred to a period of 18 months from January 2012, during which Davis held private mentoring sessions with a 16-year-old schoolboy, whose family were part of his congregation, as part of a youth scheme set up by the youth pastor of Christ Church, Matt Luscombe.

The case was heard in November last year by a panel which was chaired by Judge Bishop and included the Rev Edward Bowes-Smith, Canon Ann Philp, Prebendary Sue Lloyd, and Dr Stephen Longden.

Those who gave evidence to the panel included the Bishop of Dorchester, Colin Fletcher, the victim (who cannot be named for legal reasons) and victim's mother, and the former assistant curate at Christ Church, Jitesh Patel.

The 20-page judgment found that Davis had engaged in 'mentoring so intense' that the victim had been 'deprived of his freedom of choice as to whether to continue' with it.

At one point. Davis moved in with the family, who reportedly wanted to help him during a period of loneliness and illness. He later holidayed with them in Crete, which led to concerns from the congregation as to the 'intensity of the contact' between mentor and mentee, and the involvement of the Bishop of Reading, Andrew Proud.

In January 2015 Davis took a sabbatical, after which the Bishop was alerted by the curate, Patel, who had been told by Davis of the nightly, hour-long, private meetings he had conducted with the victim. Patel gave evidence of Davis's 'anger and the fear that his curate felt as a result'.

Davis was later asked to move out of the family home by Bishop Fletcher, who conducted a meeting with Davis about safeguarding concerns, before asking Archdeacon French to investigate and decide whether a formal complaint should be pursued.

Judge Bishop determined that Davis was 'in breach of the safeguarding requirements' by being alone with the boy in his house, in the vicarage, or other places, 'and on occasions deliberately touching him albeit not in a sexual manner'.

Davis was also judged to have, 'under the guise of his authority, sought to control by the use of admonition, scripture, prayer and revealed prophecy, the life' of the victim and his relationship with his girlfriend, and 'throughout the said period failed to have any regard to the propriety of the said conduct' and its effect on others, in particular the victim.

The victim was reported to have found these meetings 'too intense', but 'found it impossible' to tell Davis that he wanted to reduce their contact. He also gave evidence saying that Davis 'became angry' if he did not ring him or respond to his texts, and 'he would say that this is not what friends did'.

The victim's mother also reported that Davis became angry regarding contact with her son on numerous occasions. 'He would be angry if [her son] did not come to an evening service because of being with his girlfriend,' the judgment reads. 'She told us that [Davis] would say that he was God's anointed, and a person had died because he did not do something that [Davis] wanted.'

She further gave evidence of how Davis had 'invested the will of God in the relationship he had with the family in broad terms, and her fear of what would happen if she crossed [him] and thereby, in her understanding at the time, crossed the will of God'.

The parish-mentoring-scheme documents included stipulations that the mentors abide by church safeguarding policy; that 'an adult should not be left alone with a child/young person where there is little or no opportunity of the activity being observed by others'; and that counselling via text, email, instant messaging, or phone should be avoided.

Davis was formally suspended by the diocese of Oxford on 25 July 2016, a spokesperson confirmed.

Davis had been diagnosed with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] in September 2016, according to a psychiatrist who is quoted in the report.

The panel considered Davis's mental health in mitigation, but concluded: 'Rather than getting diagnosed and treated he proceeded with this risky mentoring programme where we believe he was placing his own emotional needs first.'

Davis disputed many elements in the account given by the boy and his mother in his statement to the tribunal. But the panel found the boy and his mother 'credible and reliable witnesses', and was satisfied with their account.

A spokesperson for the diocese of Oxford said in a statement: 'Abuse of spiritual authority and power falls far short of the obligations and duties of those in holy orders. Clergy are in a privileged position of trust in their congregations and communities. The professional guidelines to which they are bound make clear that this is a trust that they must not abuse.

'The findings of the tribunal show that, sadly, Tim Davis betrayed the trust of everyone involved in a youth-mentoring programme at Christ Church, Abingdon  none more so than the young man and his family, who offered their home and hospitality to him.

'The behaviour and actions of Tim Davis during this period are in no way reflective of acceptable church practice. We fully support the findings of the tribunal and now await their decision as to the penalty to be imposed.'

A date for a hearing at which a penalty will be issued has yet to be set.
A former youth minister at a church in The Woodlands has admitted to a 'sexual incident' with a teen in his youth group in 1998.

Andy Savage, currently a teaching pastor at Highpoint Church in Memphis, was responding to blog post. In it, Jules Woodson described an incident that took place when she was a 17-year-old youth member at Savage's former employer, The Woodlands Parkway Baptist Church, now known as Stonebridge Church.

HIGHEST RATE: Texas universities with the most sexual assaults in 2017

In an open letter published on the blog Watch Keep, Woodson shared her story. The post quickly went viral and reached authorities in Montgomery County.

On Wednesday, the Montgomery County Pct. 3 Constable's Office announced that because the 1998 statute of limitations has passed and no charges were filed, they will not be investigating the incident, despite a case being opened and a complaint filed.

"Using the current statute we would have some possible options, but we are limited to the law as it was at the time of the offense in 1998. As a result, we are unable to investigate and seek justice to the full extent of what would we normally would in such a case," Capt. Dan Zientek wrote in the press release on Wednesday.

According to Woodman's open letter, the incident occurred while Savage was giving her a ride back to her mom's house following a meeting at the church.

"As he was driving me towards my home, he passed the turn he should have made to go to my house. I asked him where he was going. I don't remember his exact response, but it was something along the lines of 'you'll see' or 'it's a surprise,'" Woodson writes in her letter. She admits she thought the surprise was going to be going to get ice cream.

They turned down a dark, dirt road where Savage allegedly parked the truck and turned off the vehicle's headlights.

"Suddenly, Andy unzipped his jeans and pulled out his penis," Woodson writes. "He asked me to suck it. I was scared and embarrassed, but I did it. I remember feeling that this must mean that Andy loved me. He then asked me to unbutton my shirt. I did. He started touching me over my bra and then lifted my bra up and began touching my breasts."

CONFIRMED: Texas constable sergeant under investigation for sexual assault

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Woodson writes that the incident lasted all of about five minutes before Savage allegedly got out of the truck to run over to the passenger side to plead for Woodson's forgiveness.

"Now I was terrified and ashamed," Woodson writes. "I remember him pleading, while he was on his knees with his hands up on his head, 'Oh my god, oh my god. What have I done? Oh my god, I'm so sorry. You can't tell anyone, Jules, please. You have to take this to the grave with you.'"

Woodson writes that she didn't stay silent and tried to report the incident to the lead pastors of the church, Larry Cotton and Steve Bradley, but was not aware of any immediate discipline, according to Woodson. So she turned to her all-female discipleship group and told them about the incident.

"Rumors were starting to spread that something had happened between myself and Andy," Woodson writes. "People thought/assumed that we had exchanged an 'innocent' kiss. The church, however, never came out with an official statement addressing what had happened and/or what was being done about it. Instead, they held a going away reception for Andy at the church in which he was allowed to simply say that he had made a poor decision and that it was time for him to move on from our church."

VIDEO: Celebrities react to sexual assault allegations flooding Hollywood today

Read Woodson's entire letter here.

Following the release of Woodson's story, Savage released a statement on Highpoint Church's website saying:

As a college student on staff at a church in Texas more than 20 years ago, I regretfully had a sexual incident with a female high school senior in the church. I apologized and sought forgiveness from her, her parents, her discipleship group, the church staff, and the church leadership, who informed the congregation. In agreement with wise counsel, I took every step to respond in a biblical way.

I resigned from ministry and moved back home to Memphis. I accepted full responsibility for my actions. I was and remain very remorseful for the incident and deeply regret the pain I caused her and her family, as well as the pain I caused the church and God's Kingdom.

There has never been another situation remotely similar in my life before or after that occurrence. The incident happened before Amanda and I were engaged and I shared every aspect of this situation with her before I asked her to marry me. I further disclosed this incident to Chris Conlee before coming on staff at Highpoint and have shared with key leaders throughout my tenure.

This incident was dealt with in Texas 20 years ago, but in the last few days has been presented to a wider audience. I was wrong and I accepted responsibility for my actions. I was sorry then and remain so today. Again, I sincerely ask for forgiveness from her and pray for God's continued healing for everyone involved.

Following Savage's statement, the lead pastor of the megachurch, Chris Conlee, also wrote a brief statement.

"This information is not new to me or to our leadership," lead pastor Chris Conlee wrote in an online statement. "On behalf of the elders, pastors, staff, and Trustees of Highpoint, I want to affirm that we are 100% committed to Andy, Amanda, and their family and his continued ministry at Highpoint Church. We ask for your prayers and support for all involved."

The senior pastor of Stonebridge Church, Steve Bradley, mentioned in Woodson's story above, is still the senior pastor at Stonebridge and released this statement, according to KPRC: "This happened twenty years ago and to suggest that I or anyone else on the staff at Stonebridge Church participated in a conspiracy to cover-up this sexual misconduct is simply not accurate."

This incident is among the dozens of other reports of sexual assault that have been released as a part of the #MeToo movement that raises awareness of sexual assault incidents in the workplace and in society today. To see the other high-profile cases of the movement, go through the photos in the gallery above.

Heather Leighton is a digital reporter at Chron.com. She considers herself as a Jack(ie) of all trades and covers various topics from entertainment to politics. You can read more of her stories here and follow her on Twitter at @loveheathernoel.
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DALLAS  Facing a crowded Democratic primary election in just over eight weeks, former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez on Sunday kicked off her long-shot campaign to unseat Republican incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott.

And she quickly acknowledged she will have to work to win.

"A lot of people don't recognize me when I'm out of uniform," she told a crowd of around 100 cheering supporters, wearing a black suit with white blouse instead of her familiar blue outfit.

Indeed, in her first bid for statewide office, the 70-year-old daughter of migrant farm workers  born in San Antonio as the youngest of eight children  has challenges ahead. After announcing her candidacy a month ago, she is still building her campaign team and is operating the race out of her home.

Fundraising is just beginning. Her kickoff rally on Sunday at a converted wax paper factory, announced on Facebook days ago, was devoid of big-name Democrats who usually attend events for a candidate widely viewed as the party's likely standard-bearer should she win the primary.

She will have to convince Democrats, especially the Hispanic population, to turn out and vote in large numbers for the first time in a state where Republicans have won every statewide elective office for two decades.

If she can win the primary  over a field of candidates that seems destined to split enough votes to force a costly runoff  she will have to best a better-financed Republican incumbent whose campaign war chest holds a reported $50 million.

Valdez made it clear she thinks her message of inclusiveness in Texas, not the divisiveness she insists Abbott and other Republican leaders have sowed, will make her the first Latina to occupy the Governor's Mansion in Austin.

"Enough with the hate and vitriol," she said, citing the GOP-passed ban on sanctuary cities, the bathroom bill and a local law that allows local police to demand immigration papers, all championed by Abbott.

"We should be lending a hand up, not tearing them down. We must be the type of state that helps people get a fair shot."

Opportunity in the Lone Star State "should be as big as a Texas sky," she said in a speech that toggled between English and Spanish and was repeatedly interrupted in cheering and applause.

"I want to be the change-maker," she told the crowd. "I want to be the people's candidate and bring common sense to government."

Campaign manager Keifer Odell said Valdez's grassroots campaign will start with a candidate forum in San Angelo on Monday and stops next week in San Antonio and South Texas. Before the primary, she plans to visit dozens of Texas cities and towns.

"We're going to be reaching out to voters," he said.

The primary elections are March 6.

While political scientists say Democrats' chances of defeating Abbott are slim, the primary will be a first test in a race where most candidates have little name ID outside of their hometowns. Four years ago, state Sen. Wendy Davis  who was much better funded than Valdez is now  lost to Abbott by 20 percentage points.

So far, only Houston entrepreneur Andrew White, son of the late Gov. Mark White, appears to have the resources and organization to compete on a statewide basis  though his credentials as a conservative Democrat already have not pleased progressive and liberal party members, they said.

Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "The Future is Latina" at Sunday's rally, Dallas political activist Soraya Colli, 44, said she supports Valdez because she thinks it is time to stop the Hispanic-targeting policies of Republicans in Austin and Washington. After the "show me your papers" bill was enacted in Austin last spring, Colli said she started carrying her passport with her at all times "to prove I'm a citizen if I get stopped."

"I was born in Texas and never had to think about the fact I was Mexican until then," said Colli, a daughter of immigrants. "Most people come to this country, there's no idea of rocking the boat.You work. You raise your family. You live your life. But with everything that is happening, this is the time when our voice must be heard."

Simone Contreras, 47, a Dallas businesswoman, shared that view.

Valdez "represents hope  hope that the politics of oppression will end, that progressive politics can return Texas to the days of Ann Richards," she said, noting that her parents entered the country illegally. "I hope this is where the blue wave starts. That's why I came out."

Richards, elected in 1990, was Texas' last Democratic governor.

Many of the supporters who came out Sunday said they accept that Texas is mostly Republican.

But they said they hope to make 2018 the year when Democrats turn the tide to make the state leaders more representative of Texas' growing diversity.

They said Valdez's resume highlights that diversity: A U.S. Army veteran, she has worked in law enforcement for 40 years, from a jailer to a prison guard to federal agent to sheriff, since 2005.

"Lupe Valdez is that: She's a Latina, comes from 40 years in law enforcement, not politics, and is an openly gay woman," said Mark Dinnell, 28, who said he attended even though he supports rival Democratic candidate Jeffrey Payne, a gay Dallas businessman.

"The fact that Texas has two gay candidates for governor, a record number of LGBT candidates for all offices and with a record number of women and Latinas says volumes about where this state is and who we to represent us," he said. "This is the year to change the course of our future."
Mergers feel like a taboo subject inside many charity boards. As one trustee said recently, Well, it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas. Too often mergers are only considered as a last resort when the charity is in such financial straits that it is at risk of closing. It may be bad luck, a changing funding environment, or poor forward planning. Or because the board has confused protecting the charitys mission with preserving the organisation.

Mergers should be a strategic question. The most frustrating question I hear regularly is: Arent there too many charities?
Very few charity mergers take place because staff and trustees in danger of losing their positions choose to block them, senior individuals in the sector have told Governance & Leadership magazine.

This months G&L carries a series of articles about charity mergers, which include several charity leaders saying that beneficiary needs are being overridden by the self-interest of staff and trustees who fear a merger could jeopardise their positions.

It is usual, when two charities of equal size merge, that one chief executive and half the trustees lose their positions. For this reason, G&L found, most charity mergers take place when one chief executive is ready for a new job, or for retirement, or by the financial distress of one or more parties.

Several of those interviewed said that for boards and senior directors to back a merger would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

As a result only 70 mergers involving 142 charities took place in the year to March 2017, out of 167,000 registered charities, according to Eastside Primetimers, a consultancy specialising in mergers.

Two mergers which never happened

David Fielding, managing partner of recruitment firm Attenti, told G&L he had been involved in two potential mergers which had not gone ahead because of the individual personal desires of those involved.

Its absolutely depressing, he said.

In one case, he said, he was hired to look at the skills of two chief executives involved in a potential merger. But when one began to fear he was not the preferred candidate, he began to smear his counterpart and persuaded his board to abandon the merger.

The redundancy terms were not very good and he was not convinced that he would easily land another job, Fielding said.

In another case, a group of paid trustees lobbied heavily against a merger because they feared to lose their incomes.

Confidential dating service needed

Julian Stanley, chief executive of the Education Support Partnership, also says many mergers are also blocked by self-interest, self-preservation and sometimes over-identification with the original founding cause.

But he also said that another major barrier was the lack of any mechanism for charities to discuss the idea in confidence. He said a confidential dating service for charities is needed to allow charities to express an interest without weakening their own position.

To read more about the subject of merger, read Governance & Leadership magazine, the only title specifically catering for charity trustees. For more information, or to subscribe, click here
Christian international development charity Tearfund has recorded its highest-ever income of 72.8m, according to recently filed documents.

Tearfunds accounts, which run to 31 March 2017, show the charitys income rose slightly from the previous years record level of 72.2m.

The charitys income from donations increased by 1.6m, which it said was due to a particular large increase in legacies left to Tearfund during the year.

Its income from voluntary donations meanwhile dropped slightly from 7.4m to 7.3m.

Tearfunds income from contractual services, however, fell by a half year-on-year from 3.8m to 1.9m.

Its accounts say this is due to Tearfunds contract in the Democratic Republic of Congo to deliver water, health and sanitation improvements being completed in 2015/16 with only monitoring of outcomes continuing into 2016/17.

Tearfunds expenditure rose from 68.0m to 70.9m, including a more than 1m increase in cost of generating income and an almost 1m rise in spend on charitable activities.

The charitys number of full-time equivalent staff dropped from 1,228 to 996, despite the UK-based number increasing slightly.

Tearfunds number of full-time equivalent staff based overseas on local contracts dropped significantly from 757 to 497.

The charitys chief executive received 90,000 in 2016/17. The senior executives of the organisation earned a combined 519,000, up from 494,000 the previous year.

Tearfund Canada

World Relief Canada has announced that it is joining Tearfunds global family and will rebrand as Tearfund Canada.

The two previously separate organisations had partnered on numerous projects for many years.

Wayne Johnson, president of what is now Tearfund Canada, said: For over 30 years, we have partnered with Tearfund on many projects around the world, often with the same local partners.

This is a natural and fitting progression to that relationship and for our relationship with the individuals and communities we serve around the world.

Nigel Harris, chief executive at Tearfund, said: We are thrilled to welcome Tearfund Canada into the worldwide Tearfund family.

We look forward to working closely together as we continue to go where the need is greatest and help communities around the world escape the very worst effects of poverty and disaster.
Our weekly summary of the latest movers in the charity sector.

Chief executive

Age UK has appointed Steph Harland as its chief executive has been acting chief executive at Age UK since September, and before that was deputy chief executive. Her appointment follows a competitive process at the end of last year. Full story here.

Christian Aid has announced that Amanda Khozi Mukwashi will be its next chief executive. She will join the charity in mid April. She takes over from Loretta Minghella who joined the Church Commissioners in November 2017. Full story here.

International charity, Unicef has appointed Henrietta H. Fore as its seventh executive director, taking over from Anthony Lake. She started the role on 1 January and is based in Unicefs head office in the United States. Full story here.

Hilary McGrady will become the next director general at the National Trust in March when Dame Helen Ghosh departs. Full story here.

Action on Hearing Loss Cymru has appointed Rebecca Woolley as new director. She had a brief period as interim director and joined Action on Hearing Loss as head of external engagement in 2011 following previous service management roles in the NHS, and then became head of services in 2013.

Kate Collins has been made interim chief executive of Teenage Cancer Trust as Siobhan Dunn steps down from the role. Collins had been acting chief executive since October, when prior to that she was director of fundraising and marketing at the charity.

Fundraising

Epilepsy Society has appointed a new director of fundraising and marketing, Claire Glazebrook. She joins the charity from Bletchley Park Trust where she has been director of development for more than five years.

Policy

Claire Ainsley has been appointed executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with immediate effect. The newly-created role means she will be responsible leading the policy, research, analysis, communications and external affairs functions within JRF.

As part of a restructure the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) has promoted Keiran Goddard to director of external affairs, leading the policy, communications and influencing function of the organisation. In addition, Emma Hutchins will take on the role of senior policy and communications officer. It also seeking to appoint a new head of policy and a policy and communications intern.

Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity has appointed Kiki Syrad as director of grants and impact. She was previously head of research, strategy and funding at Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Non-executives

Sir Brian Pomeroy will become chair of Age UK in February when its current chair Dianne Jeffrey, completes here term after ten years in the role.

Eye research charity, Fight for Sight, the UKs leading eye research charity, has welcomed two new trustees. Alina Kessel is a global executive at WPP, the world leader in marketing communications. She has over 25 years of experience building brands, growing client businesses and running advertising agencies. Steve Blackman is the Commercial Director of digital agency group Draw, and brings 25 years of experience of leading commercial and communications activities.

Morag MacDonald, Gerard O Sullivan, Janet Swadling, and Helen Wollaston have been appointed as new non-executive directors at Zero Waste Scotland. MacDonald is a creative, successful business leader and chartered accountant. O Sullivan most recently worked as director of corporate operations with Stirling Council. Swadling was, until very recently, the deputy principal and chief executive of Scotland's Rural College (SRUC). Wollaston is chief executive of WISE, a campaign for gender balance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.




Toward the end of a long workday, one last email dropped into Jawar Mohammeds inbox. It looked like a news tip, forwarded from an Ethiopian radio station. Mohammed, head of an independent broadcaster based in Minnesota and a leading figure in the Ethiopian opposition movement, wasnt fooled. He didnt click the link.

Instead, Mohammed forwarded the message to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, who confirmed his suspicions. Clicking the link would have turned his phone or computer into the ultimate spying tool: recording sound, video, calls, texts, and passwordspossibly putting Mohammeds contacts in serious danger. Luckily, Mohammed didnt need an army of paid hackers to defend against this threat. His own sense for digital security was enough.

ICYMI: Merriam-Webster reveals its word of the year

Others have not been so fortunate. The New York Times said that operators based in China probably used the same type of email deception to break into their systems in 2012. In Mexico, journalists have been systematically targeted with sophisticated commercial spyware purchased by the Mexican government in an ongoing spying scandal. And these instances of probable state-sponsored spying represent only one type of digital threat against journalists today.

Once considered the exclusive concern of national security reporters, basic digital security competence is now essential for all journalists. Online mobs try to silence writersespecially women and people of colorby finding and leaking their personal information online; criminals lock down publishers systems and try to extort ransoms; metadata can leave breadcrumbs back to vulnerable sources; and one misguided click or weak password could let intruders into a whole news organizations system. These days, bad security habits could betray your sources, or the sources of the reporter sitting next to you.

The majority of journalism schools surveyed devote less than two hours to digital security training.

Yet, new data collected by the Citizen Lab suggests that most journalism schools do not do enough to prepare the next generation of reporters to protect themselves, their sources, and their colleagues online. (You can read the full survey methodology at the bottom of the page.) Only half of the 32 schools across the US and Canada that responded to the survey offer digital security training, and less than a quarter make that training mandatory. Among programs that have training, the majority devote less than two hours to the subject; previous research has found that even after six, three-hour workshops only half the participants passed a test about the material they covered.

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The good news is that, among schools that said they offer training, most are moving in the right direction by integrating digital security into their courses, rather than offering standalone sessions. Unfortunately, almost all of these schools still devote less than two hours to the subject, which we know is not enough. And another large fraction of schools arent offering any training at all.

Of course, its not easy for journalism schools to turn on a dime in response to changing trends, but digital threats to journalists are getting worse. And experienced educators say that giving students the basic knowledge they need to work safely in the digital world might be easier than schools assume.

A short one-off session has been the go-to approach to digital security training for many institutions, from government to the private sector. About a third of the schools that responded to the Citizen Labs survey cover digital security in a short session. Most often this was a 12 hour lecture or 35 hour workshopsome were mandatory, others optional. This approach can easily go wrong.

RELATED: Why DDoS attacks matter for journalists

In her eight years of experience leading security trainings for a range of organizations, Carol Waters often confronts absurd requests from clients who want her to jam too much material into a quick session. Waters understands that time constraints and the difficulty of finding instructors can make these one-off sessions the easiest option for institutions that want to do something about digital security. But shes adamantly against trying to cover too much material in too little time. Its magical thinking, she says. It doesnt work.

Waters has also seen how well-intentioned but misguided training can even be counterproductive. In 2014, as a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, Waters and fellow trainer Chris Walker piloted an in-depth course in digital security spanning a whole semester. In the process, they found that students whod previously been through one-off trainings usually retained almost no knowledge, and sometimes developed defeatist attitude about their ability to learn good security habits. Short trainings also left some students with half-installed tools on their devices, which often malfunction. Waters and Walker concluded that these two-hour trainees often end up more frustrated and no better informed.

ICYMI: A bombshell scoop that started with an 11-word, late-night text

Fortunately, our results show that the majority of the eighteen schools that said they offer training are taking a more constructive approach by integrating digital security into their existing courses. Susan McGregor, a professor at Columbia and expert on digital security issues affecting journalist, says that this is the ideal way to teach the topic. For example: a basic reporting class might touch on the need to store notes and contacts securely in case your devices are searched; a photojournalism class would mention that metadata in photo files can reveal the location where they were taken; a social media class would teach students how to lock down their accounts and cope with online threats; and an investigative techniques class would highlight the hidden ways in which documents can be traced. Our survey doesnt show what material is currently being covered, but we do know that many schools are taking the right teaching approach.

The advantage, according to McGregor, is that security is integrated into journalistic practice. That way, security becomes a habitlike checking the spelling of names before publication or organizing photos at the end of the each shootrather than a cumbersome add-on. Its also easier for schools to tweak current syllabi than to add new classes in tightly scheduled programs. This integrated approach does, however, require faculty to teach what is, for many, an unfamiliar subject.

If security is integrated into journalistic practice, it becomes a habit.

Whereas in other safety and security scenarios we have a lifetime of lived experience, said McGregor, the digital equivalent of checking both ways before you cross the street is not nearly so intuitive. Still, McGregor is guardedly optimistic. Journalists are smart, she says. They learn new stuff all the time. If you can use a CMS, youre going to be fine.

And journalism instructors dont necessarily need to grapple with PGP encryption or learn the ins-and-outs of every new security app. Experienced educators say that teaching these tools is secondary to helping student think through questions like: What information do I need to protect? Who might be trying to attack me? When am I at greater risk? And how can I protect myself?

Steve Doig, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter and professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, said his digital security class isnt a how to session. He just wants his students to be able to assess risks. Hes also conscious that security tools change so quickly that practical training swiftly goes out of date.

Doigs approach mirrors the way journalism schools often teach students about the law, which is required under US accreditation standards. Journalists dont need to be legal experts, but they are taught to follow simple best practices (like preserving your notes) because you never know when a reporter or source may stumble into legal jeopardy. Similarly, Doig wouldnt want one of his students to end up in a situation where they should be using specialized digital tools but arent even aware of the risks.

Someday they may find themselves in a situation where, to get the story, they need to promise confidentiality, says Doig, They need to keep that promise. Its in those situations that Doig hopes students will remember his class, and seek out the technical knowledge and expert support they need to protect their professional practicemuch like a journalist might call in a lawyer when legal issues arise.

Doig is self-taught in digital security, and has now trained countless students, which goes to show: educating educators has exponential benefits. Kenneth Werbin, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, said that completing our survey made him reconsider his own programs digital security offerings. After researching the topic and taking a training course with a press freedom group, hes planning to spend more time in his next class talking about the digital security risks his students may face in their careers and what they can do about them.

ICYMI: Civil says the future of media is blockchains and cryptocurrencies

This article is a collaboration between CJR and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Labs study was financially supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Ronald J. Deibert, Principal Investigator). Thanks to all the survey participants and to the research team, especially Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Christopher Parsons, Lokman Tsui, Dawn Walker, and Ronald J. Deibert.

Survey methods: These findings are based on a survey sent to 124 university degree programs in journalism in the US and Canada by the Citizen Lab. For American schools, our research team began with the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) list of accredited programs. We manually excluded programs that were exclusively focused on communications, public relations, and other non-journalism fields. For Canadian schools, we began with the Universities Canadas list of member institutions and conducted manual searches to determine if each institution had a journalism program.

The survey was distributed by email to the official who appeared (from the schools website) to be responsible for academic programs, or to the head of the program/school. The initial request was followed by two reminders and a last call. Responses were collected through Google Forms. The survey questions are available here.

In total, 32 institutions responded. Although we asked respondents to complete one survey for each program at their institution only two followed this instruction. We have therefore reported the results by institution. The response rate was 26% (32 out of 124). Twenty-one respondents were from American institutions. Thirteen were Canadian. Given that there are many more American schools, the response rate was considerably higher for Canadians than for Americans. Twenty-four responses were for Bachelors degrees. Seven were for Masters degrees. One response was recorded for a PhD program.

Since this was a surveynot a pollthe results are not necessarily representative. They do, however, offer a unique insight into how journalism schools are teaching digital security.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Joshua Oliver is a research assistant at the Citizen Lab, and a freelance journalist. He can be reached at josh@citizenlab.ca.
On December 28, a fire tore through '1 Above', a rooftop bar in the redeveloped Kamala Mills compound in Lower Parel, south-central Mumbai, killing 14 people, 11 of them women. One of the women was celebrating her 29th birthday with friends. Police found no fire extinguishers; many of the bodies were found piled up near a restroom, caught in the panicked rush to escape a burning bar with few obvious exits.

Police said many of the bars and restaurants in the complex flouted safety rules, begging the question why so little has been done to enforce these rules.

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Two managers on duty at '1 Above' on the night were arrested, but the owners are absconding. The bar's management addressed a self-serving letter to various authorities, including the president and the prime minister, claiming that a bistro next door was to blame. Will our lax authorities now take it upon themselves to force restaurants and bars in cities across the country to wake up to their responsibility to keep customers safe?

--- ENDS ---
Words of the year pronouncements seem to gain traction every year, even as the number of contests themselves seem to be increasing. Like the Time magazine person of the year, they are more exercises in highlighting current societal trends than they are momentous awards.

Some words of the year are determined by popularity, meaning they spiked in online lookups. By definition, then, they are related to happenings in the world.

ICYMI: Notable changes in AP style

Thats the case with Merriam-Websters word of the year, feminism. As explained on the Words at Play blog, lookups of feminism spiked several times in 2017after the womens marches in January; with the arrival of movies featuring strong female characters, like Wonder Woman and The Handmaids Tale; and with the tsunami of sexual harassment accusations against powerful men.

Like many of the organizations offering words of the year, M-W lists more than one. Following close on the heels of feminism were complicit, recuse, empathy, dotard, syzygy, gyro (thank you, Jimmy Fallon), federalism, hurricane, and gaffe. If you need to know what these words mean, please look them up. Especially syzygy, one of our favorites. Better still, listen to M-Ws editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, explain how they decide.

Dictionary.com also shows how popular culture is tied in. Lookups for its word of the year, complicit, spiked when Saturday Night Live ran a parody advertising a new Ivanka Trump perfume called Complicit in March. Complicit lookups spiked again almost a month later, when, in a television interview, Ivanka Trump said, If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then Im complicit. As dictionary.com said, being complicit is decidedly negative, as it means that a person is involved with someone or something thats wrong. Whatever your politics, this meaning is not up for debate. (What is up for debate is dictionary.coms claim that When the meaning of words is called into question, people turn to Dictionary.com as a source of truth. As weve noted, when people need definitions, they turn to dictionaries, regardless of their URLs.)

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Both of those word of the year decisions are based on visits to individual websites. For a broader view, a corpus, a massive database of how words are used in context, can be analyzed. There are many kinds of corpora, and Brigham Young University offers access to many of them. One, called News on the Web, or NOW, is used to determine its word of the year. For 2017, it was fake news. (Yes, thats two words, but the database includes multiword expressions.) As its site explains, we looked at the actual frequency of words in 2017 and we compared this to the frequency in 2016. The NOW corpus contains nearly 1.7 billion words in 3.5 million articles in newspapers and magazines from 2017 (as well as 3.8 billion words for previous years).

ICYMI: A bombshell scoop that started with an 11-word, late-night text

The American Dialect Society is far less scientific, having its members nominate and vote for the word of the year. Nonetheless, it came up with the same word of the year, fake news. It was a contender last year, it says, but at the time its meaning was restricted to fictional or embellished stories presented as authentic news, disseminated for financial gain or for propagandistic purposes. This year, it said, President Trump often used it as a rhetorical bludgeon to disparage any news report that he happened to disagree with, giving fake news not just new meaning but much broader exposure. (ADS has different categories of words of the year, including digital WOTY, slang WOTY, emoji of the year) Collins Dictionary also chose fake news.

Now, to a couple of outliers. Oxford Dictionaries named as its word of the year youthquake. Its not surprising if you havent heard of it, since Oxford is a British institution, and admits that it has yet to land firmly on American soil. Its defined as a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people. Its usage, Oxford says, has traveled throughout the Empire, to New Zealand and Australia, but its origin is actually American, coined by the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland in the 1960s, when youth around the world were rebelling and gaining their political balances.

And the Oxford University Press named as its childrens word of the year trump. Note the lowercase. It was picked because of its significant increase in use (a total rise of 839 per cent on 2016) by entrants writing in this years competition and the sophisticated way in which children used it to convey humour and satire, and evoke powerful descriptive imagery.

Out of the mouths of babes

ICYMI: What we learned from CNNs bizarre interview

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times, where she worked for twenty-five years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.
An Indiana board has approved proposals from two local governments to require carbon monoxide detectors in residential properties after blocking those efforts over the past few months.

The state Fire Prevention and Building Safety Commission voted Wednesday to let the ordinances from Chesterton and Porter County in northwestern Indiana take effect. The board dominated by construction industry representatives turned down the Chesterton ordinance in October and has postponed action on others, The (Northwest Indiana) Times reported .

State law requires cities and counties trying to pass ordinances that differ from state building code and fire safety laws to seek permission from the 11-member commission, which is appointed by the governor.

Chesterton Fire Chief John Jarka said he was grateful to finally get approval for the citys ordinance on detectors for the odorless, poisonous gas produced by malfunctioning fuel-burning appliances. Indiana is among a dozen states without such a requirement.

I would just hope that the state would adopt it in the code, Jarka said.

The Indiana Apartment Association, which represents apartment building owners, has opposed the local ordinances, arguing that it is best to have statewide safety codes.

Jonathan Whitham, general counsel for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, said the agency will encourage local officials to submit proposed ordinances for review that they dont conflict with state building regulations.

We dont want them wasting their time, we dont want their local councils or commissions wasting their time, adopting an ordinance that has defects that we could identify ahead of time, Whitham said.

Thats not quite the template ordinance that Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb told The Times last month that he wanted the commission to prepare  especially for communities interested in adopting carbon monoxide detector ordinances.

Whitham said local ordinances that have won commission approval will be posted online, alongside the commissions review and approval guidelines, for local officials to use.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
An Iowa farmer-turned-reality television star is fighting to avoid prison after driving his pickup into the back of a tractor and killing a neighbor.

Chris Soules, who became known as Prince Farming during his 2015 appearance on The Bachelor and also appeared on The Bachelorette and Dancing With The Stars, lost a legal battle Friday in the felony case against him.

A judge dismissed his constitutional challenge to an Iowa law requiring the surviving driver in a fatal accident to remain at the scene until police arrive.

Soules rear-ended a farm tractor driven by Kenneth Mosher on a rural northern Iowa road just after sunset on April 24. Mosher died soon after at a hospital.

The accident sent the tractor Mosher was driving and Soules pickup into ditches on opposite sides of the road. Soules called 911 and identified himself, administered CPR to Mosher and remained at the scene until emergency personnel arrived. But before law enforcement could arrive, Soules was driven home.

One of Soules attorneys, Brandon Brown, said in a statement Soules did everything he could to assist Mosher. Brown said the Iowa Supreme Court has never considered whether the actions he took could rightfully be punished as a hit and run.

Mr. Soules and his attorneys vigorously disagree with the judges ruling and plan to appeal to give the Iowa Supreme Court the opportunity to review this important issue, Brown said.

Soules was arrested at 1:16 the next morning at his home near Arlington, 12 miles northeast of the accident scene. Sheriffs reports indicate he declined to let officers into his house until after they obtained a search warrant.

He was charged with failure to remain at the scene of a fatal accident, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. He faces trial on Jan. 18.

His attorneys claim Iowas law violates the constitutional rights of citizens to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and to avoid self-incrimination.

The law in question says, in part, a surviving driver shall promptly report the accident to law enforcement authorities, and shall immediately return to the scene of the accident or inform the law enforcement authorities where the surviving driver can be located.

Most states consider it a felony to leave the scene of an accident in which someone is injured or dies, but Iowas law differs in that it has been interpreted to require the surviving driver to be present when law officers arrive.

No other state has a comparable requirement, Soules attorneys said in court documents.

A driver forced to meet face-to-face with police is exposed to interrogation and observation by officers and risk self-incrimination, his attorneys argued.

State prosecutors contend the purpose of the law is to prevent drivers from evading liability for driving recklessly, driving while drunk or driving with a suspended or revoked license.

The state submits the legislature foresaw that drunk drivers could flee the scene of a fatal crash precisely because they wanted to escape and sober up before confronting law enforcement officers who may detect telltale signs of intoxication, prosecutors said in court documents.

Initial court documents Buchanan County Attorney Shawn Harden filed in May said Soules was seen purchasing alcohol at a convenience store shortly before the accident. They allege he attempted to obfuscate the immediate facts and circumstances surrounding the accident, including a determination of his level of intoxication and an explanation of the empty and partially consumed open alcoholic beverages located in and around his vehicle 

Had Soules been tested at the scene or soon after and found to have been legally drunk, a much more serious charge such as vehicular homicide could have been brought. It carries a prison sentence of as much as 25 years.

Soules, 36, pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 2005 and was sentenced to one year of probation and a 60-day suspended jail sentence. In 2001, when he was 19, he twice pleaded guilty to underage possession of alcohol and also was fined for having an open container in a car.

The ruling Friday by Judge Andrea Dryer says Iowas requirement to remain at the scene is not a seizure under the state or federal constitutions and it does not require the driver to divulge anything to police that would violate rights against self-incrimination.

Soules became a television reality show celebrity after appearing on the ABC networks The Bachelorette in 2014 and played the starring role in the networks The Bachelor in 2015. He also was chosen to be one of 12 celebrity competitors on Dancing With The Stars in that year but was eliminated during week eight of the competition, finishing fifth.

Brown said in court documents that Soules may claim as a possible defense diminished capacity based upon his then-existing medical condition due to injuries sustained.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Recent headlines have been teeming with money laundering stories, as journalists and hackers reveal ever more sophisticated money laundering schemes, and law enforcement officials issue high-profile arrest warrants and criminal indictments. Meanwhile, over the past half century, the definition of a financial institution subject to money laundering regulations has expanded to include not just banks, but also a wide variety of companies, including insurance companies, casinos, broker/dealers and diamond merchants. And woe be unto those financial institutions that fall short in performing their anti-money laundering duties. Regulators have not been bashful about extracting eye-watering penalties from financial institutions that fail to maintain adequate anti-money laundering (AML) programs, or worse, those that actually facilitate criminal activity.

But fundamentally, what is money laundering  and what is not? How did money laundering enforcement regulations evolve, and why were certain sectors, including the insurance sector, brought under enforcement requirements? In many ways, the history of money laundering laws is a fascinating reflection of governments efforts to respond to our collective fears, from crimes associated with organized crime and drug trafficking, to terrorism and massive financial fraud.

Definition of Money Laundering

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN:

Money laundering is the process of making illegally-gained proceeds (i.e. dirty money) appear legal (i.e. clean). Typically, it involves three steps: placement, layering and integration. First, the illegitimate funds are furtively introduced into the legitimate financial system. Then, the money is moved around to create confusion, sometimes by wiring or transferring through numerous accounts. Finally, it is integrated into the financial system through additional transactions until the dirty money appears clean. Money laundering can facilitate crimes such as drug trafficking and terrorism, and can adversely impact the global economy.

Note the importance of the origins of the money. If a customer arrives at a bank with a pillowcase containing dozens of bundled $100 bills, the bank would be required to submit a record documenting the transaction, but the customer has not committed a crime if the cash was obtained legally. The Banks money laundering reporting requirements are in place to help law enforcement develop cases against criminals, not to prevent law-abiding citizens from using legitimate cash. In other words, money laundering is a crime that must be linked to another crime, such as trafficking in illegal substances, corruption, embezzlement, or tax evasion. It is not a crime to move legally obtained money through shell companies located in tropical paradises, or to wire money to sketchy jurisdictions, as long as the money involved is not connected to any criminal activity.

A Brief History of Anti-Money Laundering Laws and Enforcement

The first law that can be described as anti-money laundering, was the Bank Secrecy Act, commonly known as the BSA. Passed in 1970 in response to the fact that criminals frequently deposited large volumes of currency into their bank accounts, the BSA essentially deputized banks, requiring them to record and report the movement of currency and other monetary instruments. Its purpose was to help law enforcement officials build criminal cases by requiring the reporting of cash transactions exceeding $10,000, either when deposited or transported across international borders.

The target of the BSA were banks, not the criminals. The focus of the law was to create a system of recordkeeping and reporting requirements. But several years after President Reagan declared a war on drugs, law enforcement sought additional tools to combat drug trafficking, and Congress passed the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. This was the law that established money laundering itself as a federal crime and began requiring financial institutions to develop procedures to monitor for compliance with the BSAs requirements.

Through the end of the Twentieth Century, Congress and FinCEN passed a flurry of AML laws and regulations, and the international community began working together to combat cross-border money laundering through the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF. While many of the laws and regulations implemented during this period were designed to reduce paperwork and streamline reporting requirements, others expanded the definition of financial institutions subject to cash reporting requirements to include non-bank entities that deal in cash and luxury goods, such as casinos and car dealerships.

Following the September 11 terror attacks, Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, better known as the USA PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act dramatically expanded FinCENs reach, requiring more kinds of companies to monitor for, and report, suspicious activity. Soon check cashers and currency exchanges, along with registered broker/dealers and traders of precious metals, stones, and jewels were required to comply with FinCENs reporting requirements.

When FATF released its study of Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing Typologies in June of 2005, the report included a lengthy study of the vulnerability of the insurance sector to money laundering. The study, which included ten case examples, noted that the range of predicate crimes underlying the cases was relatively narrow, as most were related to drug trafficking and financial frauds such as tax fraud and embezzlement. The report concluded that while the insurance sector was rapidly expanding and developing more sophisticated products, the primary risk for money laundering came with the life insurance portion of the industry, which provides the flexibility and substantial rates of return sought by money launderers.

Shortly after FATF released its report, FinCEN began to require insurance companies to develop AML compliance programs, though limiting them to insurance products that present a high degree of risk for money laundering or the financing of terrorism or other illicit activity, including products with cash value or investment features. Still, insurance companies do not account for a significant portion of the suspicious activity reported to FinCEN. Of the nearly 17 million SARs filed between 2014 and 2016, less than 17,000 of them, or about 0.1 percent of the total, were filed by insurance companies.

The post-9/11 world accompanied a revolution in data storage and analytic capacity, which augmented the ability to identify suspicious activity using sophisticated algorithms. Regulators increased their expectations that financial institutions would know their customers sufficiently well to be able to flag virtually any type of abnormal activity. They also began raising the stakes for financial institutions that failed to comply with their responsibilities under the governments AML guidelines, punishing financial institutions with record fines for lapses in their AML controls.

In the past two years, following press reports that high-priced real estate was being used to launder criminal cash, FinCEN began requiring title insurance companies to file reports identifying the natural persons behind companies used in large all cash (that is, non-bank financed) real estate purchases. The test program required reporting of transactions exceeding certain threshold amounts in Manhattan and Miami-Dade County ($3 million and $1 million, respectively). So successful was the program at identifying illicit activity that FinCEN expanded the geographic reach to include luxury purchases in all the New York boroughs, Broward and Palm Beach Counties in Florida, Los Angeles County, San Diego County, the three counties that form the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and Bexar County, which contains the city of San Antonio, Texas.

Whats Next?

It is, of course, impossible to predict with any degree of certainty where regulators will focus their attention next, or what threat will emerge that may demand a new set of priorities. Yet three recent cases provide a glimpse into the future: the $8.9 billion penalty assessed against BNP Paribas, the $1.7 billion civil forfeiture actions involved in the 1MDB scandal, and the arrest of Alexander Vinnik for crimes related to his digital currency exchange, BTC-e.

BNP Paribas

In 2014, BNP Paribas was assessed an $8.9 billion penalty after admitting that it willfully and knowingly structured, conducted, and concealed U.S. dollar transactions using the U.S. financial system on behalf of banks and other entities located in or controlled by Sudan, Iran, and Cuba. Part of the reason for the severity of the punishment was the fact that, to mask the identities of sanctioned individuals and entities, the Bank deliberately falsified transaction data by stripping information from wire transfers so they would pass through the U.S. financial system undetected. The Bank was sentenced to a five-year term of probation, suspended from its U.S. dollar clearing operations for one year, and required to terminate the employment of thirteen individuals, including several senior executives. It was the first time a financial institution and been convicted and sentenced for violations of U.S. economic sanctions, and the penalty was the largest ever imposed in a criminal case.

1MDB

1 Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, was a fund created to promote economic development in Malaysia. Between June 2016 and July 2017, the U.S. Justice Department filed three civil forfeiture actions against entities associated with 1MDB, alleging that more than $4.5 billion was stolen from the fund by high level officials of 1MDB and their associates, at least some of whom had close ties to the Malaysian Prime Minister. Proceeds from 1MDB were used to purchase artwork, expensive jewelry, a luxury yacht, real estate properties in the U.S. and overseas, as well as to fund the production of major Hollywood films, including Daddys Home, Dumb and Dumber To, and The Wolf of Wall Street. The forfeiture actions seek to recover more than $1.7 billion of these assets and to return them to the people of Malaysia.

Alexander Vinnik and BTC-e

While vacationing in Greece last summer, Alexander Vinnik was arrested at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. He stands accused of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money services business known as BTC-e, a digital currency exchange. The indictment alleges Mr. Vinnik worked on behalf of cybercriminals, laundering the proceeds of their crimes, including computer hacking and ransomware, fraud, identity theft, tax refund fraud schemes, public corruption, and drug trafficking. He is also accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars from the hack of Mt. Gox, another digital currency exchange, and of laundering the proceeds through yet another digital currency. Mr. Vinnik is currently in Greece, fighting his extradition to the U.S., where he faces decades of prison.

The story of money laundering enforcement follows the governments response to our collective fears of the past fifty years: of crime and drug wars, of terrorism and fears of financial instability, of borderless cybercrime and perhaps even of democracy plagued by endemic corruption. Meanwhile, in their public statements, law enforcement officials continue to send a simple message: they will not allow the U.S. financial system to be used to pursue illegal activity and will aggressive punish financial institutions caught facilitating illegal activity.
Louisiana has paid at least $1.3 million to settle more than two dozen sexual harassment claims since mid-2009, including allegations made against college professors, judges, health care workers and one former state lawmaker, according to records released Friday.

The money was paid through Louisianas self-insurance program, the Office of Risk Management, and covers claims made across all three branches of state government. Data involving the 27 payments was provided to The Associated Press and other news outlets in response to public records requests.

Payments range from $5,500 for a sexual harassment claim involving a professor at Grambling State University to $205,000 for two claims against a New Orleans civil court judge. A former commissioner of the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control was the subject of two payments totaling $150,000.

Dollars were paid involving claims against a custodian supervisor at a state-owned safety-net hospital, the director of a state juvenile prison facility, a probation and parole supervisor, and a state park manager.

A $50,000 payment was made in 2012 to settle a claim against then-state Rep. Clif Richardson, a Republican lawmaker from the Baton Rouge area who resigned in 2013 citing health problems related to a cancer diagnosis. Richardson did not respond to a telephone message left by the AP on Friday. But the ex-legislator told The Advocate that he had repeated a joke of a sexual nature to an aide who took offense and he didnt feel up to fighting the allegations because of cancer treatment.

The list of payments provided by the Office of Risk Management doesnt include details of the conduct alleged, the person making the allegations, or what if anything was proved. It wasnt immediately clear if any of those accused of sexual harassment still worked in the positions or elsewhere in government.

In the past few months, sexual misconduct accusations have unseated people in positions of power in Hollywood, the media and government. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards deputy chief of staff, Johnny Anderson, stepped down in November after sexual misconduct claims were made against him. The governors office hasnt said what the allegations were and has hired an attorney, in case the woman who accused Anderson of harassment files a lawsuit.

Anderson had previously been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women in 2006 when he worked for then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco and was chairman of the Southern University System Board of Supervisors.

Anderson has denied wrongdoing.

Andersons resignation  and the broader national conversation about sexual misconduct  spurred multiple reviews of Louisianas policies for handling claims. Edwards has created a seven-member study group to make recommendations by March 1. Louisianas legislative auditor is conducting his own review.

Release of the data came the same day the Southern University System announced it has put one of its administrators on leave because of sexual misconduct allegations.

The higher education system said associate vice president for human resources Lester Pourciau was placed on administrative leave Thursday. Southern said it received a complaint filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from a former employee with accusations that were sexual in nature. An investigation is ongoing. Pourciau did not respond immediately to a telephone message seeking comment.

Every employee and student has the right to a safe, positive working and learning environment, Southern System President Ray Belton said in a statement. We will do everything in our power to ensure such.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Long-term and systemic failures by California dam managers and regulators to recognize inherent construction and design flaws at the tallest U.S. dam caused last years near-disaster there, an independent panel of dam safety experts said Friday, calling it a wake-up call for dam operators around the country.

Members of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials and the U.S. Society on Dams carried out an independent investigation into the human and technical problems that caused the crisis at Californias Oroville Dam. The experts issued their report Friday.

Both spillways at the half-century-old Oroville Dam gave way in February 2017, forcing 200,000 people downstream to be evacuated. The feared uncontrolled release of massive amounts of water over the top did not happen, and residents were allowed to return home days later.

The independent panel of safety experts said the dam was badly built from the start in the 1960s. The principal designer of the spillway told the dam-safety team that he had just completed post-graduate work at the time he worked on the Oroville project decades ago, had had no previous engineering employment beyond two summer stints, and had never designed a spillway before.

The crisis started when massive chunks of the dams main concrete spillway suddenly began washing away.

The report faulted Californias Department of Water Resources, which owns and operates the dam, an anchor of Californias water system, and dam regulators for allegedly failing to recognize and address problems in the 770-foot (230 meter) structure over decades of inspections and reviews.

There were many opportunities to intervene and prevent the incident, the experts concluded.

The state has said repairs to the structure will cost more than $500 million. Residents and businesses downstream, including in the 19,000-resident town of Oroville at the foot of the dam, have filed more than $1 billion in damage claims.

Repairing a dam is great  but whats happened to the view of Oroville as a safe place to live? asked David Steindorf of American Whitewater, one of the environmental groups that had long complained that the state ignored concerns about the dams construction flaws. Theres a lot of long-term impacts that need to be addressed.

The experts said the Oroville crisis made clear that it was essential for dam managers and inspectors to review original dam construction in light of modern engineering practices.

Like many other large dam owners, DWR has been somewhat overconfident and complacent regarding the integrity of its civil infrastructure, the experts said.

In a statement, Joel Ledesma, a deputy director at the water agency, said state officials had supported the independent review so we can learn from the past and continue to improve now and into the future.

We will carefully assess this report, share it with the entire dam-safety community and incorporate the lessons learned going forward, Grant Davis, the agencys director, said in the statement.

The water agency said it would assess its organizational structure as a result of Fridays findings and already was assessing its dam-safety program.

Dam experts said the Oroville crisis is a warning for operators around the world.

The fact that this incident happened to the owner of the tallest dam in the United States, under regulation of a federal agency, with repeated evaluation by reputable outside consultants, in a state with a leading dam safety regulatory program, is a wake-up call for everyone involved in dam safety, the experts report said.

The average age of the more than 90,000 dams in the U.S. is 56 years, making thorough inspections and maintenance increasingly important for the safety of people downstream, dam experts said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By PTI: Gaya (Bihar), Jan 7 (PTI) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today called on Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama at Bodh Gaya near here and also released a book with him.

The Dalai Lama, who has been at Bodh Gaya since January 2, received the Chief Minister at the Kalachakra Maidan and presented him with a picture of the Buddha and an "Angavastram" (traditional mens attire) as tokens of blessing.

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Later, they jointly released "Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics" - the first part of a multi-volume edition which explores scientific observations about the material world and the mind found in classical Buddhist treatise.

Speaking on the occasion, Nitish lauded the spiritual leader for "introducing Indian youth to the Buddhas scientific thoughts" and said it is a matter of pride for every resident of Bihar that they belong to the land where the Buddha, whose thought has inspired people across the world, had attained enlightenment.

Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya more than 2,000 years ago.

"I feel delighted whenever the Dalai Lama visits Bodh Gaya. His discourses have inspired and transformed countless number of people. I am hopeful that this new book, which has been compiled under his supervision, will serve as an inspiration for promoting peace in the world," Nitish said.

The Bihar chief minister also said his governments motto of "nyay ke saath vikas" (progress with justice) was a development model in which equal attention was paid to the needs of humans as well as the ecosystem.

Later, Kumar visited the Maha Bodhi temple, built at the very spot where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, and inaugurated a newly-constructed boundary wall of the complex.

Nitish also prayed at the temple and the Bodhi tree, where Buddha is said to have meditated.

He also asked the district administration and the Maha Bodhi Temple Management Committee to take steps for beautification of the surrounding area. PTI NAC JM

--- ENDS ---
One of the benefits of China shifting its economy away from traditional manufacturing is that the country's economic growth will be less reliant on borrowing, an economist said on Monday.

"[China is] trying to boost growth of the new economy, as the new economy is less credit intensive. That's also helping deleveraging efforts in China," said Robin Xing, Morgan Stanley's chief China economist.

Speaking to CNBC on the sidelines of the Morgan Stanley China Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference in Beijing, Xing spoke against the backdrop of longstanding concerns about the sustainability of three decades of breakneck debt-fueled growth in the world's second-largest economy.

Morgan Stanley's GDP forecast for China is 6.5 percent this year. China's official 2017 growth target had been around 6.5 percent, and that's likely to remain unchanged this year, Reuters reported last Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

In 2016, China's growth was 6.7 percent, which was the slowest in almost three decades.
Beijing's push to transition its economy has led to the country moving on from simply being known as the world's factory, according to a top executive at Swiss bank UBS.

"A lot of things are being created now in China, rather than [it just] being a manufacturing hub," Kathryn Shih, president of UBS Asia Pacific, told CNBC on the sidelines of the UBS Greater China Conference in Shanghai.

"China is at the forefront of a lot of changes in financial technology. So we see a lot of financial firms using China technology now, whether it's local firms or even international firms," she said.

Changes have also come to the manufacturing front as China moves into more high-tech sectors, with Shih pointing to developments in the Chinese electric car industry.

"We see the advent of ... electric cars here and I think that's going to be great in creating Chinese brands in the future," Shih said. She added that many UBS investors were looking to invest in up-and-coming names in the space  in which China is currently angling to become a leading player.

The broader shift comes as China continues with its years-long plan to transition from a factory-led model of growth to one driven by services and innovation.

And while the country has drawn criticism over the business environment for foreign firms  the EU Chamber of Commerce in China last year called the country's "Made in China 2025" manufacturing strategy an import-substitution plan  Shih had a sanguine take on UBS' prospects when compared to domestic asset managers.

"I think the main advantage of being local here is distribution channels and that happens everywhere. But China has actually been creating a more and more open field," she said, highlighting Beijing's announcement last year to lift the foreign equity ownership limit in certain financial sector joint ventures.

"There's been a lot of opening up in recent few months that is great for foreign firms like us," Shih added.
A Supreme Court-appointed lawyer has submitted that there is no evidence to prove the involvement of a mysterious second person in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination.

By India Today Web Desk: There is no evidence to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi was killed by anybody other than Nathuram Godse, senior advocate Amrendra Sharan told the Supreme Court today.

Sharan was appointed by the apex court to assist it in ruling on a Public Interest Litigation that sought a re-investigation into Gandhi's death.

The petition, filed by a Mumbai-based researcher and trustee of Abhinav Bharat, Dr Pankaj Phadnis, had called the probe into Gandhi's assassination one of the biggest cover-ups in history.

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Phadnis, in his PIL claimed that more than two people were involved in the assassination of the Mahatma. In response, the Supreme Court appointed Sharan as an amicus curiae and asked him to assist in the matter.

Now, Sharan has told the apex court that there is no evidence to prove that a 'mysterious' second person was also involved in the successful bid to assassinate Mahatma.

Sharan also told the Supreme Court there is no evidence to prove the four-bullet theory advanced by Padnis' PIL. According to the theory, Mahatma Gandhi was hit by four bullets on the fateful day of January 30, 1948.

It was the fourth bullet, fired by a 'mysterious' second person, that claimed the Mahatma's life, Phadnis' PIL had claimed.

During a hearing on the PIL last year, the Supreme Court posed a few searching questions with the two-judge bench of Justices SA Bobde and L Nageswara Rao wondering if new evidence in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination had surfaced.

The court had also initially expressed skepticism over whether the investigation in the Mahatma's murder could be reopened, with the judges observing during an October 6 hearing that "nothing can be done in law" in a case that was decided years ago.

However, after appointing Sharan as an amicus curiae, the court told him its initial observations on the PIL were not binding on him and asked him to independently asses the matter.

Gandhi was shot dead at point blank range in New Delhi on January 30, 1948 by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a right-wing advocate of Hindu nationalism.

(With inputs from Anusha Soni in New Delhi)

WATCH | Mahatma Gandhi's assassination: Was there more than one assassin?

--- ENDS ---
Whirlpool has said Apple Watch wearers will soon be able to remotely control their home appliances.

It would mean smart watch owners could change temperature settings on ovens, delay cycles on washers or check how long is left to run on a dryer.

The manufacturer announced the development at the CES tech show in Las Vegas Monday and said it's the first time that an appliance maker has connected its products with the Apple Watch.

Compatibility with Apple Watch will begin with a roll out to more than 20 of Whirlpool's connected appliances this year.

The new technology heralds another stage in the rapid development of connected white-ware. Last week Amazon announced that you would soon be able to control your microwave oven from its smart assistant, Alexa.

Whirlpool said Monday that will be a reality this year, stating that families will be able to control its 2018 range of appliances with voice commands to both Amazon's Alexa and Google's home assistant.
AT&T won't sell smartphones from Huawei, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Huawei was rumored to be in talks to sell its Mate 10 smartphone through AT&T by February. It would have been the first time the Chinese company, which is currently the world's third largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, partnered with a major U.S. carrier. The deal was expected to be announced at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

However, the breakdown in the deal means Huawei's foray in the American market will be delayed.

AT&T and Huawei did not immediately respond to CNBC requests for comment.

- Additional reporting by Todd Haselton.
Big banks might not be jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon just yet, but other institutional investors are likely to warm up to cryptocurrencies this year.

"I think there is caution, but it depends on which sort of institutions you're talking about," Michael Casey, senior advisor at the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab, told CNBC.

More aggressive institutional investors, such as hedge funds, are likely to find the the volatility associated with cryptocurrencies "inherently attractive," Casey said on the sidelines of the UBS Greater China Conference in Shanghai.

"That's a different story than saying you're going to get invested in a technology and everything else underlying it. There's a play that people have on the volatility," he added.

Big banks, however, are likely to approach the space more cautiously, Casey indicated.

Once a niche asset associated with the dark web, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have become increasingly regarded as a mainstream play on the back of growing investor interest.

Last year saw the launch of bitcoin futures by the CME and Cboe , some of the world's most prominent exchanges, which lent greater legitimacy to the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin rose more than 1,200 percent in 2017.

That increase has led to a corresponding uptick in regulatory concern globally as governments attempt to keep up.

"There's a necessary caution that regulators are taking on: Not wanting to kill the technology, but on the other hand, trying to protect the financial system, protect people from this," Casey said.

"What I worry about is that things get too out of hand, we come through a collapse and people sort of ignore the fact that something very real underneath this is being built," he added, comparing the crypto craze with the dotcom bubble, which Casey said ultimately "fed and built the infrastructure for the big next wave of the internet."
Philanthropist Tom Steyer stands in front of one of the billboards he has funded in Times Square calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump on November 20, 2017 in New York City.

Billionaire activist Tom Steyer will push $30 million into an effort to boost millennial voter turnout in this year's midterm elections to help Democrats take over the House.

The former hedge fund manager, who made the announcement Monday, will not run for office in California this year. Rumors had swirled around whether he would challenge Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her seat later this year.

"I'm not going to run for office in 2018. That's not where I can make the biggest difference," Steyer said at a news conference in Washington.

Steyer raised his profile by launching national advertising campaigns in October calling for President Donald Trump's impeachment. He reportedly spent about $20 million on his Need to Impeach campaign and pressured Democrats to remove Trump from office if they win the House majority in the 2018 elections.

His voter turnout campaign, called NextGen Rising, said it will target more than 30 seats. It said it aims to "register more than 250,000 young voters."

"I'm putting $30 million behind NextGen America's youth organizing program to unleash the full political power of young voters ... They are horrified by what's happening in Washington D.C.," Steyer said on Monday.

The campaign will be active in 10 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, Steyer said.

His campaign will go after notable Republicans such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in the Nov. 6 midterms.

The Washington Post first reported on Steyer's plans.

In a statement, Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens said "Tom Steyer can light as much of his money on fire as he wants," but it "doesn't change that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi view him as a distraction."

"If Democrats' message for 2018 is a baseless impeachment threat that the majority of voters disagree with, they're going to lose," he said.

Steyer, who retired from his hedge fund Farallon Capital in 2012, has pushed millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes in recent years. He started NextGen America, a political organization that supports liberal positions on climate change, immigration and health care, among other issues.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose to around 2.48 percent at 2:57 p.m. ET, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was down at 2.812 percent. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

U.S. government debt yields ticked upward Monday, as investors turned their attention to the U.S. central bank space, where three officials are set to speak.

The state of the U.S. economy will be front and center Monday as leading members of the Federal Reserve speak at separate events.

In Georgia, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said that the central bank may only need to raise rates twice in 2018 without significant pressure on prices.

Both San Francisco Fed President John Williams and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren will be delivering separate remarks at Brookings Institution in Washington.

Bostic and Williams are both 2018 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, whereas Rosengren is not.

As markets kick off the second trading week of 2018, investors will likely be mulling over the latest figures from the Labor Department. On Friday, markets rose sharply despite nonfarm payroll data coming in below market expectations.

In December, the U.S. economy added 148,000 jobs, compared to market estimates of 190,000, according to a Reuters poll.
To be aggressively optimistic on this stock market now is to bet that it can challenge the greatest bull market of all-time  the 13-year run that ended in early 2000 .

In terms of its cumulative gains, persistence, valuation and the public's exposure to stocks, only the final years of the 1990s advance sit at higher elevations.

This might sound scary, given how singular that bubbly period now seems  and given the brutal wealth destruction that followed. And it should be sobering, in terms of what it means for longer-term expected equity returns.

But here's the good news, for now. First, this market is hinting that it's accelerating in that direction. There's also a good deal of room overhead in terms of price gains between where we are and the late-'90s extremes. And, finally, in the areas where today's backdrop differs from the 1987-2000 version, the current one looks better in terms of corporate fundamentals and capital-markets behavior.

In two months, the climb from the depths of the financial crisis market low is set to reach nine years. The overall gain is now 306 percent, not including dividends. That's better than any other except the 1987-2000 glory run  which was a stunning 582 percent.

The annualized gain since March 2009 is nearly 16 percent. That's well above the long-term average, but then again, when major bull markets have ended, the trailing 10-year annualized gain has often topped 20 percent.

(There is no absolute definition of bull markets. Some quibble that the recovery from the 2009 low didn't turn into a wholly new bull market until it hit a fresh record high in early 2013. Others say the 1990 setback or the tumble in late-2015 into early 2016 was effectively a mini-bear market that reset the clock. Fair enough  that's what makes market debates.)

Valuation  whether based on the past year's reported earnings, forecast earnings for the coming year or the fun-spoiling Shiller-CAPE measure using 10 years of average profits  all show U.S. stocks more richly valued than any period except the late-'90s.

The trailing 12-month price/earnings multiple for the S&P 500 is now approaching 23. Once again, the tech bubble was so extreme that there remains plenty of room between here and that peak.

As Bespoke Investment Group says, the P/E "didn't once get above this level during the 2002-2007 bull market, but it was consistently above 23 during the final three years of the bull market that ended in early 2000. From 1998 to 2000, the S&P's P/E expanded from 23 up to 30+."

Source: Bespoke Investment Group

Leuthold Group notes that last week's strong start to the year took the S&P's price-to-sales ratio above where it was at the year-2000 market peak. This speaks to today's high profit margins  boosted in part by madly profitable winner-take-most tech giants.

High hopes are also implicit in investors' elevated equity holdings. There remains a stubborn narrative that the little guy has boycotted this bull market, but it likely relies too much on traditional mutual-fund flow stats and doesn't recognize that individuals have let stock allocations stretch higher with share prices.

The monthly asset-allocation survey of American Association of Individual Investors shows stocks at 72 percent of member portfolios, highest since 2000, when they peaked at 77 percent. The Fed's measure of household equity holdings shows a similar trend. And cash reserves in Charles Schwab client accounts recently hit an all-time low.

Source: J. Lyons Funds Management

Michael Hartnett, strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has been calling for a crescendo of investor confidence for some time and believes this "Icarus trade" is still rising but isn't yet high enough to melt the market's wings. He's waiting for stock holdings of BAML retail clients to exceed 63 percent (now 60.8) and institutional-client cash levels to drop below 4 percent (now 4.7).

This has become a popular stance: Conceding the market is expensive and the mood is getting giddy but expecting an even more intense public-participation phase to carry equities higher before there's any reckoning. Value investor Jeremy Grantham of GMO last week effectively called for a manic "bubble phase" soon for stocks.

It's all pretty neat and tidy, with the added virtue of being plausible  and supported by the market's behavior itself. Market breadth is healthy. Only three of Citigroup's 18 indicators of a coming bear market are flashing red. Last week's 2.6-percent S&P 500 gain in four days would have made it the best week of 2017, a sign of expanding risk-taking appetites and more eagerness among buyers.

For sure, in the very short term, tactical sentiment signals are flashing a yellow light. The Daily Sentiment Index of professional traders for stocks hit 95 percent bulls late last week. Citi's Panic-Euphoria Index edged into "euphoria" in recent days for only the second time during this bull market.

And we're pushing 400-straight trading days without even a 5 percent market dip, rivaling the longest ever streak. The way the three prior ones eventually ended? With a decline of "more than 7 percent over 30-40 days," says Jason Goepfert of SentimenTrader.com  but none marked the end of a bull market.

If this market run is ultimately to end in overconfidence and silly economic distortions, we're not there yet. Stock-sector weightings remain right in line with their earnings contribution, unlike in 2000. There's no rush of wild initial public offerings  or even many at all, which keeps alive the idea of lots of cash chasing scarce assets.

We've scaled the wall of worry, and everyone likes the view. Tech giants coining money in a deflationary innovation boom are thriving alongside cyclical "reflation" sectors feeding a global production surge.

Gobs of "house money" winnings have accrued in investment accounts, boosting risk appetites and likely buffering the downside on the first gut check. The corporate tax cut has arrived just in time to furnish a new bullish story line and provide an alibi for stretched valuations.

So what could possibly go wrong?
China's online education industry has flourished following the government's relaxation of the One-child policy, with English language providers enjoying robust demand.

One of the companies benefiting from that boom is Alo7, a Shanghai-based platform that offers its proprietary curriculum to language institutes across China.

"We're a business-to-business player," Executive Vice President Andrew Shewbart told CNBC on the sidelines of the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Beijing.

There are 50,000 English training institutes in China, the majority of which are regional players and Alo7 customers, he explained. "I offer online classes to my regional customers in order for them to compete with business-to-consumer offerings."

And while those regional players are good at teaching, they often lack a large tech department, he noted: "That's what we do ... we leverage AI for computerized adaptive assessment testing."

It generally takes four to five years to learn English based on Alo7's program depending on the desired level of confidence, Shewbart said. Beyond that program, the company is looking at developing Mandarin content for Chinese students both in the country and overseas, he added.
President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping leave after an opera performance at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, November 8, 2017.

President Donald Trump will unveil plans for an aggressive trade crackdown over the coming weeks, according to a report by Politico.

The White House is likely to introduce new tariffs designed to combat China's alleged unfair trade practices, the report said, citing administration sources that could not be verified by CNBC. Trump's administration could reportedly begin finalizing decisions on trade fights ranging from steel imports to policies regarding intellectual property as soon as this week.

Senior officials have marked Trump's State of the Union address at the end of January as a provisional deadline to announce America's trade measures, the report said.

Speaking in Beijing in November, Trump said the current relationship between the world's leading economies had been a "very one-sided and unfair one," before adding "it is just not sustainable." The U.S. leader has frequently identified apparent trade imbalances as a problem he wants to resolve.

By turning to trade policy, Trump is set to refocus on one of a handful of major policy areas on which the president can act without having to rely on Congress. A spokesperson for the White House was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Read the full Politico report here.
Major technology trends will have knock-on benefits in the Chinese economy, a hedge fund executive predicted on Monday.

Cloud computing and artificial intelligence, for instance, "are tremendous trends in which we expect technology breakthroughs to happen. And that will benefit the entire supply chain all the way down to semiconductors, to NAND memory [flash memory] producers," said Brandon Lin, SPQ Asia Capital's president and chief investment officer.

The Hong Kong-based hedge fund oversees $7 billion assets under management.

Speaking to CNBC on the sidelines of the Morgan Stanley China Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference in Beijing, Lin named Chinese e-commerce solutions provider Baozun and data center services provider 21Vianet as a few of his picks.

SPQ Asia Capital also invests in Chinese real estate and is still optimistic about the sector despite talk of a property tax as its expected implementation in 2020 is still "a bit far off," Lin said, adding that the sector is still "trading at very attractive levels" with price-to-equity ratio at 7 to 9 percent.

"China's fiscal system is very unique. It's hard to see how property tax is going to fill the entire gap of the the local government finances. I think land sales will continue to be a large, if not the major portion of the finances," he said.
An employee works on an Airbus A380 plane inside the Air France KLM maintenance hangar at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Roissy, near Paris, France, May 31, 2016.

Hugely popular with passengers but less so with airlines, after just 10 years in the sky, the A380 superjumbo is struggling to find buyers.

The France-based manufacturer is reportedly offering China an industrial partnership with the company if Beijing places orders for its largest passenger jet. Airbus Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier is in China to hold talks after traveling to the country as part of French President Emmanuel Macron's trade mission.

Rami Myerson, an analyst at Investec, said Monday that there had been speculation for some time that Beijing will invest in the struggling superjumbo.

"There is a view that aircraft and airspace are becoming more and more congested and given the strong growth in China that could be an attractive plane for the country," he said.

Airbus currently has fewer than 100 Airbus A380s on its production line and it is expected that some of these orders will be canceled.

It had hoped to announce a fresh deal for at least 30 more A380s with top customer Emirates at the Dubai Airshow in November, but that never happened and negotiations appear to have stalled.

Emirates has expressed concern that, with few other customers, Airbus may not be able to fulfill its delivery promise.
"I am not running away. I was at my home in Pune until January 2. I started receiving threatening calls soon after. I informed the police and decided to stay away," said Hindu right wing activist Milind Ekbote in an exclusive interview with India Today.

By Pankaj P. Khelkar: Hindu right wing activist Milind Ekbote of Samast Hindu Aghadi, who is in the spotlight for allegedly "orchestrating" the violence at the anniversary celebrations of the battle fought 200 years ago in Bhima-Koregaon spoke exclusively to India Today.

An FIR has been registered by the Pimpri police against the 61-year-old Ekbote and others for allegedly inciting the Bhima-Koregaon violence.

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"I am not running away. I was at my home in Pune until January 2. I started receiving threatening calls soon after. I informed the police and decided to stay away," Ekbote said

India Today had been tracking the Hindu rights activist since the riots happened. "I'm not afraid of anyone. I'm a fearless person since I know I'm innocent," he said.

India Today asked about Ekbote's hate speeches striking a chord among the Vadhu youths who took out morcha on January 1, leading to the violent clashes.

He refuted the charges and said, "Since the last 25 years I have been visiting Vadhu to worship at Chhatrapati's samadhi and also for the upkeep of the place which was in very bad state as mentioned by Former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee during his visit to Pune in 1987."

"I would say that I have no connection with that post, the language of that post itself reflects that the person who has posted this post is trying to misguide everyone against him," Ekbote said on a hate filled social media post.

Milind Ekbote said he had opposed Yelgar Parishad in front of Shaniwar Wada."I did oppose it because Shaniwar Wada is meant for only cultural programs and this was political program. Also, I opposed Yelgar Parishad in front of Shaniwar Wada because MLA Jignesh Mewani and Umar Khalid are known to give hate speeches."

His organisation is said to have opposed the celebration of "British victory" in the battle of Bhima- Koregaon. Regarding this allegation Ekbote said, "British policy was to divide and rule. The same thing is happening in the current times. People are indulging in this, by dividing the society all for the Dalit and Maratha vote bank."

Ekbote also mentioned that he has records that Dr BR Ambedakar after visiting the Bhima-Koregaon Victory Memorial had said that Indian fighting against Indians in this battle is not something to feel proud of. He also said that why did such condition occur that Mahar had to fight against their own people. It should be introspected.

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"I'm being targeted but the real target is Hindutva and to malign PM Modi and CM Fadnavis's image. All of the allegations of riots are baseless, false and truth will prevail. It will come out clean," he concluded.

ALSO WATCH | Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani questions Prime Minister Modi's silence on Bhima Koregaon violence

--- ENDS ---
A cryptocurrency backed by oil would be a big first. A cryptocurrency backed by a sovereign government would be even bigger.

But while Venezuela claims it is going to do both very soon with the petro, experts are doubtful the country has the capabilities or the characteristics to achieve its goal.

The petro will be dogged by a major question, "Is it redeemable, in other words, can you take physical delivery?" notes finance professor Stephen McKeon of the University of Oregon.

The strength of any currency backed by a commodity, regardless of whether it is physical or digital, is that holders must believe they can exchange it for the actual commodity. When the U.S. was on the gold standard, individuals could bring their dollars to a bank and exchange them for physical gold.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says each petro will be worth the equivalent of one barrel of oil, and he has specifically designated the oil from field one of the Ayacucho block in the Orinoco region of Venezuela, which contains more than 5 billion barrels.

But McKeon says Venezuela carries a lot of "counterparty risk" because it has little rule of law and falling oil production. If Venezuela fails to deliver the oil, he asks, what is the legal recourse for holders?

Joshua Satten, blockchain partner at Wipro, also questions whether Venezuela is a "sound enough government" to instill confidence in would-be miners and holders of the petro.
President Donald Trump will undergo a formal health check on Friday as he attempts to dispel any doubts about his fitness for office, according to The Telegraph.

Trump will be examined by the same doctor as predecessor Barack Obama, the report said, and a summary of the results is expected to be made public. The routine physical was first announced by the White House late last year.

The customary examination will reportedly last around two hours and is set to include blood and urine tests, heart checks and questions about Trump's sleeping habits and sex life. Nonetheless, Trump has the power to hold back any details he wishes.

The formal medical check will be Trump's first since entering the White House and comes at a time of intense speculation about his mental and physical suitability for the presidency. Last week, an explosive book by journalist Michael Wolff alleged Trump would frequently fail to recognize old friends and often repeated stories "word for word." The president described the book as "fiction" and claimed he was a "very stable genius."

Read The Telegraph's full article here.
European markets closed higher on Monday afternoon, following a firm lead by U.S. stocks in the previous session and as Germany looks closer to forming a new government.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 closed 0.27 percent higher after hitting its highest level since August 2015 in the morning.

But of the major European bourses, the U.K. FTSE ended the day in the red, down 0.36 percent as U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May reshuffled her cabinet.

Basic resources stocks led the gains, rallying over 1.5 percent by the end of Monday's trade. This follows news of trade deals between France and China. Airbus is trying to reach new deals with Beijing on the A380 as it works to get new customers. Efforts are part of a trade mission by President Emmanuel Macron during his first state visit to the Middle Kingdom.

Meanwhile, autos closed 0.89 percent higher having hovered around the 1 percent figure throughout the day as investors grew confident on the prospects of the sector in 2018.

Technology was the poorest performing sector, ending Monday's trade down 0.23 percent.

Looking at individual stocks, Galapagos rose to near the top of European benchmark, up by about 4.5 percent after news of positive preliminary tests in an osteoarthritis study.

Dialog Semiconductor shares swung to the downside in afternoon trade, closing 0.8 percent lower despite having recovered some losses. In fact, the chipmaker had begun the day in positive territory after preliminary fourth-quarter sales numbers came in above expectations. Dialog's fortunes are dependent on the custom of technology giant Apple , its largest client, who may be developing its own chips.

On the other hand, Micro Focus was the worst performing stock on the index, trading nearly 17 percent lower after saying its pretax profit for the first half of its fiscal year was boosted by the acquisition of Hewlett Packard Enterprises.

Meanwhile, shares of Mothercare fell over 27 percent after the retailer issued a profit warning.
Australia on Monday said it expects iron ore prices to average $51.50 a tonne this year, down 20 percent from 2017, because of rising global supply and moderating demand from top importer China as its steel sector shrinks.

The world's top three mining companies, BHP and Vale rely heavily on iron ore sales for the bulk of their revenue despite efforts to diversify more into other industrial raw materials, such as copper, aluminium and coal.

Brazil-based Vale is planning to lift iron ore exports 7 percent in 2018 to 390 million tonnes. In Australia, Rio Tinto and BHP, along with

Fortescue Metals Group aim to add about 170 million tonnes of new capacity over the next several years.

The forecast price decline  from an average of $64.30 a tonne in 2017  continues into 2019, when the steelmaking raw material will average only $49 a tonne, according to the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science.

"The iron ore price is expected to experience some ongoing volatility in early 2018, as the market responds to uncertainty regarding the impact of winter production restrictions on iron ore demand," the department warned in its latest commodities outlook paper.

Iron ore currently sells for about $75 a tonne.

The lower prices will reflect growing supply from low-cost producers and moderating demand from China as the steel industry there contracts, the department said.

China is in the process of closing ageing, high-polluting steel mills and induction furnaces to curb overcapacity in the sector.

China's President Xi Jinping said in October that fighting pollution was one of the country's key tasks through 2020.

Australia's liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports are forecast to climb to 76.5 million tonnes in the year to end-June 2019, from 63 million tonnes forecast for the 2017/18 fiscal year and 52 million tonnes last year.

Between 2016/17 and 2018/19, LNG should add A$14 billion ($11 billion) to Australia's export earnings, while iron ore is forecast to subtract A$10 billion, according to the department.

The shift follows the construction of $180 billion of new gas projects. The rise in LNG earnings will be underpinned as three remaining projects under construction hit their stride, it said. These are Chevron's Wheatstone project, Inpex's Ichthys and Royal Dutch Shell's Prelude.

Prices for coking coal, another key steel-making ingredient, are forecast by the department to drift lower over the next eighteen months from last quarter's benchmark price of $192 a tonne as rising supply more than offsets demand.

It also expects thermal coal prices to ease through 2018 and early 2019, with the Newcastle spot price forecast to drop 12 percent to an average $77 a tonne in 2018, and by a further 6 percent to $70 in 2019.
Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has taken a positive view of U.S President Donald Trump's tweets on North Korea.

Speaking to CNBC on Monday on the sidelines of the UBS China Conference in Shanghai, Ban downplayed concerns about what many have called Trump's reckless rhetoric in response to President Kim Jong Un's ballistic missile tests.

Trump's tweets, in which he mocked the North Korean leader and called him "rocket man," among other things, have caused significant controversy and sparked fears of escalation.

"There is a tendency to see President Trump's remarks as very provocative rhetoric. But I would like to interpret that in another way  these are strong words and (a) message of (the) international community given to North Korea," Ban said.

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Ban's comments came ahead of what is set to be a momentous meeting between North and South Korean leaders in the border town of Panmunjom on Tuesday  more than two years since the last government-level talks were held. The proposal for talks originally came from South Korean President Moon Jae-In, who took office in May 2017 on the promise of opening dialogue with the North.

The upcoming talks represent an important effort to quell hostile activities near the countries' shared border; they take on a sense of urgency following the unprecedented pace of North Korean missile development in recent months. Ban, who is South Korean, described the current climate on the peninsula as possibly at its most tense since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
French President Emmanuel Macron (centre L) and his wife Brigitte Macron (centre R-red coat) are given a tour during a visit to the Great Mosque of Xian in the northern Chinese city of Xian on January 8, 2018. Macron on January 8 launched a state visit to China in Xian -- the starting point of the ancient Silk Road -- in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route. LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images

French President Emmanuel Macron was in China on Monday for a three-day state visit designed to bolster economic and political ties between Beijing and the euro zone's second-largest economy. Improving trade and business relations is top of the agenda, with Macron leading a delegation of around 50 top business representatives to China. Like other nations making overtures to Beijing, such as the U.S. and U.K., France is keen to increase its access to China's lucrative markets and consumers. Toulouse-based Airbus is reportedly offering China an industrial partnership if it places orders for the aircraft manufacturer's largest passenger jet, the A380. Airbus Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier, who is part of Macron's trade mission, is due to hold talks in China on Monday. Recent reports have suggested that Airbus was ready to phase out production of the A380 due to slow sales, so a deal could be crucial for the company. The visit comes hot on the heels of trade agreements signed between China and France in December that pledged "reciprocal" treatment in terms of commercial relations. China has long been accused of a protectionist approach to its economy, but has said [when?] it will open more markets to foreign investment. Speaking in the city of Xi'an on Monday, Macron endorsed China's Belt and Road initiative, saying China and Europe should collaborate so that a new Silk Road isn't a one-way street. He also referenced concerns about China's trade surpluses. The French president is due to meet his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, later Monday.

Gift horse

Like other global leaders visiting China and hoping to woo the country's leadership, France has been keen to make a good impression with Macron reportedly presenting President Xi Jinping the unusual gift of a horse ahead of his state visit. The horse is an eight-year old gelding called Vesuvius, according to Reuters, and belonged to France's elite Republican Guard. The gift was reportedly made after Xi expressed an interest in the presidential cavalry corps during a visit to Paris in 2014. France's horses are not the only thing to have caught China's attention, with the country's cheeses, wines and meats gaining favor in the country's increasing consumer market. There were concerns in the cheese-producing nation last year when China put a block on soft cheese imports over fears of the bacteria used in their production. French cheese-makers breathed a sigh of relief when China lifted the restrictions in October, allowing Brie, Camembert and Roquefort to enter the country again.

Building trust

David Baverez, private investor and author of "Beijing Express  How to Understand New China," told CNBC on Monday that Macron should push to cement France's  and Europe's  relationship with China, as U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump looks precarious. "Really, President Macron should be speaking not as the president of France, but he should be speaking as someone who wants to rebuild Europe. And you cannot rebuild Europe without redefining what should be the relationship with the second largest economic power which, at some part of the 21st century, will be the first (economic power in the world). That's really the challenge for Macron," he said.

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Merkel sounded optimistic ahead of the talks, commenting on Sunday that she believed an agreement "can be done," but the SPD's Schulz has vowed to extract concessions from the CDU/CSU on many of its key policies.

The SPD had previously refused to enter into another coalition government given that its voters punished it in the last election for its previous alliance. But after coalition talks between Merkel and two other parties failed to find an agreement , the SPD has changed its stance.

Merkel, the head of a conservative alliance made up of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister-party the Christian Social Union (CSU), will meet with Martin Schulz, the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), for preliminary talks this week. They are set to discuss whether they can renew a governing coalition that has been in operation in recent years.

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has entered talks with a rival party in a last-ditch effort to form a coalition government after months of political uncertainty and deadlock in the euro zone's largest economy.

The talks run until Thursday and are expected to encounter some stumbling blocks, particularly with Merkel's conservative union at odds with the center-left SPD over a number of issues, including social welfare reforms and the asylum status of refugees, many of whom entered Germany in 2015 at the height of Europe's migration crisis.

If the parties find enough common ground this week to proceed, the SPD must then get backing for the deal from its members at the party's congress later in January. If that succeeds, then the parties will proceed to full-blown coalition talks.

At best, a government could be sworn in late March or early April, according to Oxford Economics.

"The government formation in Germany is unlikely to be completed before the end of the first quarter even in an optimistic scenario," Oliver Rakau, chief German economist at Oxford Economics, said in a note last week.

"The main stumbling blocks are the final vote of the SPD party congress. The latter is extremely skeptical of a new cooperation with the CDU," he added.

If the talks fail to produce a deal, another election is likely. This would be a blow for Germany but more so for the wider euro zone that looks to its largest economy for political and economic stability. Germany accounts for 28 percent of the euro zone's gross domestic product (GDP), according to the International Monetary Fund.

Germany's economy is expected to have achieved 2.6 percent GDP growth in 2017, the country's Bundesbank said in December, and similar momentum is expected in 2018. But political uncertainty would be a distraction for business and worrying for voters.

Pepijn Bergsen, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC Monday that the talks would not have much impact on the German economy in the short term, however.

"For the German economy I don't think it'll make much difference (if talks fail), the economy is running very well  2.5 percent last year and probably above 2 percent this year so there's no need in the short term to reform in Germany. Over the medium to long term Germany still definitely needs to do quite a lot and for that, you'd want a stable government over the coming years.

"The real risk is more within Europe, there's an ambitious reform agenda for the next half a year and for that you need a German government in place," he said.
Since taking office, the Trump Administration has taken deliberate actions to systematically sabotage and dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) piece by piece, while the Republicans in Congress, with Trump cheer leading all the way, have worked hard to repeal the law. This has thrown American families and health care markets into a frenzywho would be covered? What would it cost? What's the future of America's health care?

These are some of the many questions for Alex Azar to answer as the person who hopes to succeed Tom Price as the leader of the Health and Human Services agency (HHS) when he appears before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday.

While Price distinguished himself as a zealous opponent of the ACA, Azar has the opportunity to enact a proactive agenda to improve America's health care. But first he has to decide whether he's going to be an agent for the future or a captive of his past as an executive for a top U.S. drug company.

Azar can revive HHS's mission to "enhance the health and well-being of Americans," or follow the profit-driven path he plowed at Eli Lilly which jacked up the price of insulin by 225 percent since 2011. Given how much we still don't know about Azar even after his first confirmation hearing, we have some questions we hope he finally will answer during the remainder of the Senate confirmation process.

What will you do to strengthen the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and expand access to affordable, quality care?



Instead of working to expand enrollment in the marketplaces and working to stabilize insurance markets to ensure consumers have a wide choice of insurers, Republicans in Congress and the administration has taken several steps in the opposite direction.



From the repeal of the individual responsibility provision of the law to the administration's proposed rule allowing insurers to offer bare-bones insurance without consumer protections, these moves only serve to increase costs and weaken Americans' health care.



Instead of taking every step possible to undermine the law, we need an HHS secretary who will work to create more stable markets, strengthen the law, and expand access to affordable care. Will you work with the ACA instead of against it, Mr. Azar? The health care of millions depends on your answer.

Will you commit to protect and invest in Medicaid and Medicare, so no one will lose coverage?



Both programs provide care for working families, children, seniors and people with disabilities and have come under threat since Trump took office. Each health care repeal bill would have made dramatic cuts to these programs and end Medicaid as we know it, as would the GOP's tax and budget plans.



Azar is on the record favoring what Republicans often refer to as "state flexibility" on Medicaid and block grants, but those are just cuts in disguise. We cannot afford a leader of HHS who favors cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and supports efforts to undermine these programs. Which side will you be on, Mr. Azar?

How do you plan to lower drug prices?



When President Trump announced the nomination, he said Azar would lower drug prices. But he's nominated a drug profiteer to the post. Azar was most recently president of U.S. operations for Eli Lilly & Co., a company now under investigation for possible price fixing under his leadership and that paid the lowest U.S. tax rate among other leading American pharmaceutical companies.



Drug companies cannot be allowed to exploit the need for life-saving prescription medicine. Even though Azar does not seem open to checks on the cost of drugs, we hope he will use his experience to help stop drug company price-gouging. What will you do, Mr. Azar  work for the people or the drug companies?

Since taking office, President Trump has made it clear that Americans' health care will never be safe in his hands. The last thing we need at HHS is a leader who is hostage to both his boss and his drug industry past.

Americans are tired of waking up every day and wondering if their health care will be taken away or become too expensive. Every attempt by the House and Senate to repeal the ACA has been met with resounding opposition from the public.

For Azar, the central question is whether he will work for pharmaceutical corporations and Republican campaign contributors or the American people. Where do you stand, Mr. Azar? Who will you represent? Americans deserve to know.

Commentary by Margarida Jorge and Ethan Rome, co-directors of Health Care for America Now, a national grassroots coalition that led the effort to pass, protect and promote the Affordable Care Act. It has come back together to fight against efforts to repeal and undermine the law.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
"Judging by the intense scrutiny that comes for a candidate and his or her entire family would any fully sane person ever run for President of the United States?"

Indeed, President Trump's public behavior is totally out of sync with what we've seen from every president before him. He's frequently tweeted angrily against members of his own cabinet and Republican Party. Even in live speeches, he's slung around racial slurs, like calling Senator Elizabeth Warren "Pocahantas."

And there was his disastrous comment that there were some "fine people" marching among white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Beyond his unusual comments and tweets, we also have the massive turnover inside his administration with a record number of positions shuffled through for a first year.

But let's take a reality check for a moment. Only a professional psychiatrist who has actually examined a patient can medically deem whether he or she is mentally fit for any job or office.

Yes, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the vice president and the cabinet to jointly transfer the powers of the presidency to the vice president, (if the president objects, such a move would also require a two-thirds vote by Congress). But there seems to be no chance of that happening any time soon.

No matter how many "Fire and Fury" copies are sold and how many news media panels filled with amateur mental health pundits focus on the book's accusations, this is simply another futile path for those obsessed with not accepting the 2016 election results.

But as long as the issue of presidential sanity is front-and-center right now, it's not a bad idea to look at what really should serve as the criteria for judging the chief executive's fitness for office. That is, presidential policies.

If we look at some of what our past presidents have actually done, the question of presidential sanity should come up often. For example:

Was it sane for President Obama to release tens of billions of dollars of Iranian money frozen by sanctions back to Iran in return for a promise to not develop nuclear weapons for a decade?

Was it sane for President George W. Bush to pursue and execute a long war with Iraq instead of conducting a more focused and effective war on radical Islamic terror?

Was it sane for President George H.W. Bush to support the Kurds in the first Iraq war and then abandon them?

Was it sane for President Clinton to have a sexual affair with a 22-year old intern right in the White House?

Was it sane for President Kennedy to support a ragtag bunch of revolutionaries to invade Cuba and then abandon them?

Was it sane for Presidents Johnson and Nixon to prolong what they knew was an unwinnable war in Vietnam with massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnam and Cambodia?

Finally, judging by the intense scrutiny that comes for a candidate and his or her entire family would any fully sane person ever run for President of the United States?

We can't expect to come to any national agreement on most of the above examples. But at least they would be more productive than debating or pontificating on disputed quotes, leaks, and innuendo about any president's personal behavior.

It's bad enough that the coverage of every presidential campaign has become dominated by a focus on personality, poll numbers, and all things non-policy related. That's been a major complaint about the presidential election process ever since television played such a big role in John F. Kennedy's 1960 election victory.

But now we're seeing coverage of an actual presidency that's focusing mainly on the president's personality. That's dangerous.

This is true for both sides of the partisan aisle. For example, the GOP tax bill and its de facto repeal of Obamacare just passed and became law thanks greatly to the Democrats being distracted with non-policy matters like the Russia probe.

Meanwhile, Republicans who support President Trump's policies are constantly forced to answer questions and criticisms based on his personal behavior. But all this amounts to is an enormous head fake.

That's because the hard fact is that President Trump's policies, executive orders, and the bills he's supported are no less sane than any of his predecessors' actual body of work. No matter how unprecedented and salacious the quotes in "Fire and Fury" are, they don't count as presidential policy. Presidential policy is not only objectively verifiable; it's the only presidential report card that matters.

Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
James Damore, the engineer after his internal memo criticizing the company's diversity efforts went viral, has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the company.



Damore's original memo, which , criticized Google's culture as "left leaning" and argued that women in engineering were paid less than men because of their biological differences, not because of hiring practices, among other topics. It sparked a discussion about rampant sexism in Silicon Valley, and Google said that portions of the memo were contrary to the company's "basic values" and Code of Conduct.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Santa Clara Superior Court on Monday, alleges that Google "discriminated against employees for their perceived conservative political views," as well as due to their "male gender" and "Caucasian race" and then "systematically punished" them.

David Gudeman  another former Google employee, who was fired in December 2016  is also listed as a plaintiff. The suit alleges that he was fired for his comments on a coworker's thread about being targeted by the FBI for his religion.

The lawsuit seeks to represent all Google employees who have been discriminated against for being male, Caucasian or conservative and seeks monetary, non-monetary and punitive damages.

"Google employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google's employment policies and its business, such as 'diversity' hiring policies, 'bias sensitivity,' or 'social justice' were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights," the lawsuit states.

The suit also alleges that Google has "open hostility for conservative thought," that Damore and others were "ostracized, belittled and punished" for their views, that the company is an "ideological echo chamber" that uses "illegal hiring quotas" at the expense of white males.

The lawsuit comes after Damore has spent the several months since his firing talking to press about discrimination and how Google "betrayed" him, including one conversation where he compared being a conservative at Google to "being gay in the 1950s."

During a press conference, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the lawyer representing the case, said Google isn't the only company guilty of this kind of prejudice and that she hopes the lawsuit will act as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley, where the "only acceptable form of discrimination" is against "conservatives and white men."

A Google spokesperson said the company "looks forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."

Meanwhile, Google is also facing a class-action lawsuit for gender pay discrimination.

Read the full document, on Scribd, here.
Raje said she'd asked her Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, to take steps to prevent the release of Padmavat in Rajasthan.

By Rohit Parihar: Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has said Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 'Padmavat' won't be released in her state.

In a media release, Raje said Rani Padmini's martyrdom and sacrifice were an honour for everyone.

She said Padmini was more than just history, and that she'd asked her Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, to take steps to prevent the release of Padmavat in Rajasthan.

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Sanjay Leela Bhansali's much-awaited movie is all set to open in theatres across India on January 25, after the filmmakers agreed to amendments suggested by the Censor Board.

The Censor Board may have cleared Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film with a few changes, but the storm surrounding it refuses to die down.

Padmavat - earlier "Padmavati" - had been slated for a December 1 release, but got stuck after the Karni Sena claimed it distorted historical facts related to the Rajput community.

The new release date coincides with that of R Balki's Padman, starring Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor and Radhika Apte. A big box-office clash is inevitable, as the makers of Padman have maintained that they won't shift the release of their film, come what may.

ALSO WATCH | Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavati: A look at the entire controversy

--- ENDS ---
"The federal government should not be interfering when states' economic growth comes from a substance that is only legal for adults, and poses very little danger to one's health compared to other legal substances like alcohol."

That's why, for constitutional conservatives who believe in limited government, Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recent move to override the states and reassert the federal government's prohibition on cannabis is a dangerous step backward, putting more unconstitutional power in the hands of the federal government.

States across the country have legalized cannabis, both for medicinal and adult use purposes. Within these states, different laws and regulations are put into place to fit with the state's needs.

In Maine, where we legalized medical cannabis in 1999 and adult use cannabis in 2016, individual municipalities are given the opportunity to put moratoriums on cannabis businesses into place if they wish. We are still working on fine-tuning the laws governing adult use cannabis, and the Health and Human Services committee still regularly works on policy proposals to make changes to the medical cannabis law.

That is the way it should be. When individual states - and municipalities - are given the opportunity to shape laws, they can better meet the needs of the people affected by the law.

States that have fully implemented legalization have experienced economic benefits. Colorado has seen $600 million in tax revenue in the years since its adult use cannabis law has gone into effect. They have used the money to fund rural school improvement and addiction treatment programs for the truly dangerous drugs. In just one month, Nevada saw nearly $4 million in tax revenue from cannabis sales. Revenue in Nevada is put toward education and the state's rainy day fund.

The federal government should not be interfering when states' economic growth comes from a substance that is only legal for adults, and poses very little danger to one's health compared to other legal substances like alcohol.

Selling cannabis legally and legitimately is benefitting the people of Colorado and Nevada - and the cartels and drug dealers who sold it on the black market are losing out.

Should Colorado, Nevada or any other state start to see negative effects from a marijuana law and have broad support for a repeal of legalization, they can undertake that effort through the democratic process. It should not be in the hands of the federal government to strike down a successful legalization effort that has broad support in a state.

According to a 2017 Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans support legalizing cannabis for adult use, including a majority of Republicans. And a poll conducted by Marist indicates that 83 percent of Americans support legalizing cannabis for medical purposes.

When Mr. Sessions announced his decision to rescind the non-interference policy on cannabis, Republicans and Democrats alike expressed their disappointment. Not because all of them are staunch supporters of cannabis use, but because this decision is a clear unconstitutional overreach by the federal government.

Our founders would reject in the boldest terms Mr. Sessions' unconstitutional agenda. We the people should as well.

We should be giving decision-making power back to the states and back to the people. The United States was not created to give power to a bloated, bureaucratic federal government that has supreme power over states and individuals. America deserves better.

Commentary by Eric Brakey, a candidate for U.S. Senate in the State of Maine. He currently represents Maine's 20th Senate District in Maine State Senate, where he serves as the Senate Chairman for the Committee on Health and Human Services. When Eric Brakey was first elected to the Maine Senate in 2014 at the age of 26, he was the youngest State Senator in the nation. Folllow him on Twitter @SenatorBrakey.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
Ahead of the talks, CNBC takes a look at some of the most memorable quotes from Kim Jong Un over the past 12 months

While Kim Jong Un has ignored recent peace overtures with Seoul, officials from both countries are expected to initiate a formal dialogue on Tuesday

North Korea's leader is thought to have turned 35, although the state does not publicly recognize his birthday and there is no mention of the date on the regime calendar

This undated picture released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 12, 2017 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (C) attending a photo session with teachers who volunteered to work at branch schools on islands and schools in forefront line and mountainous areas, in Pyongyang. STR | AFP | Getty Images

North Korea's Kim Jong Un was widely believed to be celebrating his birthday on Monday, a day before Pyongyang is set to hold talks with its southern neighbor for the first time in more than two years. The leader is thought to have turned 35, although the North Korean state does not publicly recognize his birthday and there is no mention of the date on the regime calendar. While Kim Jong Un has ignored recent peace overtures with Seoul, officials from both countries are expected to initiate a formal dialogue on Tuesday. Ahead of the talks, CNBC takes a look at some of the most memorable quotes from Kim Jong Un over the past 12 months.

North Korea has 'achieved' nuclear status

In his 2017 New Year's address, North Korea's leader claimed the country had "achieved the status" of a nuclear power, before adding economic rivals would no longer dare to provoke a "military giant in the East." In response to Kim Jong Un's claim his country had the capacity to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S., President Donald Trump tweeted: "It won't happen."

'Up to you whether the US exists on this planet'

In a state-produced video released last March, images showed a computer-animated nuclear attack on Washington. Subtitles to the video warned that the U.S. would be punished if it continued to provoke Pyongyang, before adding: "The United States must choose! It's up to you whether the nation called the United States exists on this planet or not."

North Korean soldiers attend a mass rally to celebrate the North's declaration on November 29 it had achieved full nuclear statehood, on Kim Il-Sung Square in Pyongyang on December 1, 2017. KIM WON-JIN | AFP | Getty Images

The United Nations (UN) had imposed sanctions on North Korea earlier that month, after the country tested a nuclear device and a long-range rocket.

'Bereft of reason'

In August, amid escalating tensions between North Korea and the U.S. regarding Pyongyang's nuclear missile tests, North Korea's military warned "only absolute force can work" when communicating with the U.S. leader. "Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason," Kim Jong Un said in a statement published on Korea's state run news agency.

'Mentally deranged US dotard'

Trump issued a harsh warning at the UN General Assembly to nuclear-armed North Korea in September. In his first address, Trump threated to "totally destroy" Pyongyang if the U.S. was prompted to defend itself or its allies.

President Donald Trump. Kena Betancur | AFP | Getty Images

"Whatever Trump might have expected, he will face results beyond his expectation. I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire," Kim Jong Un said in a statement circulated on state news agency KCNA. Translated from Korean to English, the word "dotard" generally means an imbecile.

'Nuclear button on my desk'
After her stirring speech at the Golden Globes award ceremony Sunday night, the idea of Oprah Winfrey running for president in 2020 is once again gaining steam.

There are now even reports that she is seriously considering the idea.

The outpouring of support for Oprah in the hours since her speech is a testament to just how popular and powerful she is as a celebrity and a spokesperson for any given cause.

Now, the hashtag #Oprah2020 is out there, pushing her to take on President Donald Trump in the next election.

Could she win?

There is no denying Oprah could be a formidable opponent. She scores the highest possible marks for name recognition, financial backing (from her own large fortune), and she has a dedicated base of support. People have been speculating about the possibility of her running since last year.

But we still have no examples of Oprah speaking for herself as a candidate or attacking a political opponent, which flex different muscles than pushing causes, businesses or movies. It's a key difference between her and President Donald Trump, who had spent years promoting himself and launching attacks on his political opponents long before he became an official candidate.

That's the key difference that Winfrey and the Democrats should focus on if they want to take full advantage of her powerful and proven assets. The better key to victory for the Democratic Party in 2020 isn't in Oprah the candidate, but Oprah the promoter.

Oprah can make a book a best-seller in an instant. She can make a reviled celebrity likable with just one special interview. Most importantly, she can help a relative newcomer to national politics overtake a prohibitive favorite to win a presidential nomination.

We know that last part because that's what Oprah did for then-Sen. Barack Obama in the years between his big 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and his eventually successful 2008 primary run against Hillary Clinton. In September 2006, Oprah went public with her support for Obama for president for the first time. A month later, she featured him and his book "The Audacity of Hope" on her show. For the record, this was all five months before he officially announced his candidacy.

A detailed study of Oprah's involvement in Obama's campaign concluded that her support was worth 1 million primary votes and made the difference in his winning the nomination in 2008.

In short, what we really know about Oprah Winfrey and politics is that she is a powerful kingmaker. Or, to use a term than may be more accurate for 2020, she's a very likely "queenmaker." In that capacity, Oprah can be a real savior for a Democratic Party that still lacks a list of any serious contenders for president in 2020.

Does anyone seriously doubt that Oprah could make people like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris household names in an instant? Does anyone doubt that she could make someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren seem more likable and human? Does anyone doubt that she could still boost a male candidate like Sen. Cory Booker's chances? If anyone does doubt it, they really shouldn't.

With that in mind, if you're looking to identify the most ambitious and smart Democrats in America today, look for the ones who make a point of meeting with Oprah and publicly asking for her support. Whomever the Democrats choose to run in 2020 will still have to be more persuasive than Trump to win. But getting Oprah's support as early as possible is a great way to prove anyone's persuasive chops.

The alternative is that Oprah and the Democrats go out on much thinner ice and bet on her directly. That's a bet that threatens her brand and also would basically confirm that the Democratic Party is basically irrelevant. After all, if a party demands no actual political experience or dues-paying to gain its highest level of support, what's the point of a political party in the first place?

The good news for the Democrats is that the longer Oprah's name gets bandied around as a possible presidential candidate, the more valuable her endorsement will be in a year or so when the serious running begins.

Oprah the candidate is iffy both for her personally and the Democrats as a party. But Oprah the powerful and influential party placeholder is almost a sure winner for both.

Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
A doctor uses a laptop computer to enter information about her patient in Miami Beach, Florida.

Practice Fusion, a start-up in the crowded electronic medical records market, was acquired on Monday for $100 million, two years after bankers were expecting to take the company public at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Allscripts announced the cash deal in a press release and said the price is "subject to adjustment for working capital and net debt."

Fueled by funding from powerful venture capital firms like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Practice Fusion raised more than $157 million on the promise of developing medical records software that smaller practices could use for free. But the market has continued to consolidate in the hands of giant vendors like Epic Systems and Cerner , leaving little business for start-ups.

"Oh my goodness, how disappointing," said Bob Kocher, a health and technology investor at Venture firm Venrock, which did not invest in Practice Fusion. "A company with so much promise has fallen so far."

Practice Fusion last raised a big venture round in 2013 at a $700 million valuation. In January 2016, The New York Times reported that the company had hired JPMorgan to explore an IPO that could value Practice Fusion at $1.5 billion, on the basis that it could reach $181 million in revenue by 2018.
President Donald Trump's legal team is in negotiations with the FBI on how to handle a possible interview between the president and special counsel Robert Mueller, NBC News reported Monday.

Trump's lawyers have been involved in ongoing discussions with FBI investigators as part of the agency's probe into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election, according to NBC.

Citing "a source close to the president," the Washington Post later reported that the special counsel's office could interview the president "possibly within the next several weeks."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The president's team is deliberating ways to avoid a sit-down interview between Trump and Mueller's team, sources familiar with the matter told NBC.

Some of the options being considered include submitting written responses to questions instead of a sit-down interview or filing an affidavit signed by the president asserting his innocence, according to the report.

Discussions about the alternatives began shortly after former campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted by the FBI in late October for charges that include money laundering.

Trump's legal team met with investigators in mid-December, the first correspondence between the two sides since the special counsel completed interviews with White House staff, CNN reported at the time.

Trump has consistently called the investigation a politically motivated "hoax" and has been reluctant to acknowledge multiple U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusions that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in Trump's favor.

Read the full report on NBC News.
He added, "$200 billion from the federal government, when combined with other capital from states, local governments, private sector, could create $1 trillion of infrastructure funding, create 10 million jobs, rebuild our country."

"To really do infrastructure the right way we need an investment from the federal government," he said in an interview Monday with CNBC's " Power Lunch ."

That would provide a $200 billion investment, which is needed to create a "transformative infrastructure plan," said Rep. John Delaney, D-Md.

As President Donald Trump turns his attention to an infrastructure plan, one Democratic congressman has a suggestion on how to partially fund it: raise the corporate tax rate from the just lowered 21 percent to 23 percent.

Sergio Hernandez works on the median just east of the new I-25 interchange in Castle Rock, Colorado.

Now that the Republican tax package has been signed into law, Trump is planning to move forward with a massive infrastructure program. The details could be released before the president's State of the Union address, White House officials said last month.

Delaney insists his proposal is an honest attempt at a bipartisan compromise, even though Republicans just passed a 21 percent corporate tax rate as a part of their tax reform package.

"I think every Democrat would support it and I think a lot of Republicans would support it," he said.

His reasoning focuses on the fact that business groups have lobbied for years to lower the corporate rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.

"If you brought it to 23 percent you would still be way ahead of where the business community wanted it," Delaney contended.

However, he's open to other ways of coming up with the $200 billion in funding. Another possibility is ending the so-called carried interest loophole that benefits managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, which is kept in the GOP law, he said.

Delaney has been pushing an infrastructure plan in Congress, first introducing a bill in 2013. He reintroduced the Partnership to Build America Act in the last two congresses, most recently in March 2017.
The company said it will increase its 401(k) contribution to 10 percent of base salary. In other words, an employee who earns $100,000 a year can set aside $5,000 and the company will contribute $10,000. Visa's longstanding policy has been to contribute $2 for every $1 an employee contributes. Employees can now contribute up to 5 percent of base pay, up from 3 percent.

"Tax reform in the United States will strengthen Visa's competitive position globally and create new opportunities for Visa to invest in our business," the company said in a statement. "With the additional 401(k) match, Visa's U.S. employees will enjoy a sustained benefit, consistent with the role they will play in building our business."

Global payment network company Visa said Monday it will strengthen contributions to employees' 401(k) savings plans, as a result of the recently passed Republican tax law.

Visa is just the latest in a host of companies, including Boeing , AT&T , Fifth Third Bancorp and Wells Fargo , to share proceeds from the GOP corporate tax cut with employees.

In all, there was $5.3 trillion in 401(k) plans as of Sept. 30, 2017, according to the Investment Company Institute. The median balance in a 401(k) account was $24,713, according to Vanguard.

Unlike bonuses, which employees could either save up or blow on shopping, an increase to a retirement plan match is useful for workers' long-term financial planning, said Gregg Levinson, senior retirement consultant at Willis Towers Watson.

Whether more employers will boost their 401(k) match in response to the tax law remains to be seen.

"The downside is that if the economy or the tax rules change, they've made a promise to employees that is going to be hard to scale back," said Levinson.

Smaller firms, which have fewer resources, may raise wages or give a one-time bonus, as opposed to raising their 401(k) plan matches.

"It's a one-time benefit," Levinson said. "You get the good will, but you're not on the hook."

 CNBC's Darla Mercado contributed to this report.

(Correction. An earlier version had an incorrect amount for the company contribution.)

WATCH: Big money lines up to sell GOP tax plan
Reports were doing the rounds that Padmavati would hit the theatres on January 26. However, it has now been confirmed that it will release on January 25, after being renamed Padmavat.

By India Today Web Desk: The wait is finally over. After several delays and uncertainties, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavat (formerly Padmavati) will finally release on January 25. The period drama will now be named after Malik Muhammad Jayasi's 16th Century epic poem of the same name on which it is purportedly based.

Trade analyst Taran Adarsh took to Twitter to announce the film's new release date.

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Incidentally, this is the same date on which R Balki's Padman, starring Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor and Radhika Apte, is set to hit the screens. A big box-office clash is inevitable, as the makers of Padman have maintained that they will not shift the release of their film, come what may.

On ticket-booking websites, the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film says release on January 25, 2018, and that it is now named Padmavat.

Padmavat, which stars Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmini, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh and Ranveer Singh as Alauddin Khilji, was recently given a green signal by the Central Board of Film Certification, subject to five modifications including a change in the title from Padmavati to Padmavat.

However, the Shri Rajput Karni Sena, which spearheaded the agitation against Padmavat, is not pacified and is demanding a total ban on the film.

ALSO SEE: Makers of Akshay's Padman unfazed about clash with Padmavati

ALSO SEE | Absurdity of epic proportions: Are people aware of the content in Jayasi's Padmavat?

ALSO WATCH: 'Padmavat' likely to hit screens on Republic Day

--- ENDS ---
Self-made billionaire Oprah Winfrey has sparked speculation she could consider a presidential run in 2020 following her widely shared Golden Globes speech on Sunday evening. The 63-year-old media mogul became the first black woman to win the Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. In her acceptance speech, Winfrey reflected on her own life and career and addressed changes she says need to be made in the media industry. "What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I'm especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories," Winfrey said, referring to Hollywood's ongoing conversation against sexual harassment. The inspirational speech led many to believe Winfrey could run for president: Golden Globes host Seth Meyers joked about the possibility while Meryl Streep and civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. chimed in with their own endorsements.

Winfrey's media empire made her a billionaire in 2003 at age 49, but she began life at the other extreme. Born in rural Mississippi to an unmarried teen mother, she grew up in poverty and endured years of sexual abuse. She was shuffled between family members until a more permanent living situation surfaced: Her dad's place in Nashville, Tennessee, where she went to live at age 14. The move changed the course of Winfrey's life. She thrived in high school, earning honors and a full ride to Tennessee State University. Winfrey took a risk when she dropped out of college to pursue a career in media. But the gamble paid off.

Oprah Winfrey, 1978 Afro American Newspapers | Gado | Getty Images
Although Winfrey has denied any plans for a presidential bid, Bloomberg reports , Graham told the Los Angeles Times that it's truly the public's decision.

Further speculation over Winfrey's potential presidential bid spread immediately after her acceptance speech for the 2018 Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.

"In 2011, I told some jokes about our current president at the White House correspondents' dinner, jokes about how he was unqualified to be president," the NBC late-night host said. "And some have said that night convinced him to run. And if that's true, I would just like to say Oprah you will never be president."

Award show host Seth Meyers first planted the seed for speculation during his opening monologue when he teased how reverse psychology could get Winfrey to run for president.

After Oprah Winfrey 's powerful acceptance speech at the Golden Globes on Sunday, celebrities are calling for the self-made billionaire to run for U.S. president in 2020. Those supporters include civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr ., Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman and Winfrey's longtime partner Stedman Graham.

"It's up to the people," he told the newspaper on Sunday when asked about a presidential run. "She would absolutely do it."

Meryl Streep, the acclaimed actress and last year's winner of the Globes' award told the Washington Post that Winfrey "launched a rocket" Sunday evening.

"I want her to run for president," Streep said. "I don't think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesn't have a choice."

Streep went on to call Winfrey's speech "a barnburner."

"She runs a major company. She could lead the country. Instead of leading the country down," Streep added.

Winfrey began the speech by reflecting on her own life and career, discussed the importance of being the first black woman to win the prestigious award and closed it by addressing the progress the media industry still needs to make.

"I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon," Winfrey said, referring to Hollywood's ongoing conversation against sexual harassment. "And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, 'Me too' again."

Here are some of the celebrities calling for Winfrey to run for U.S. president in 2020:

Civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr.:

Rev Jesse Jackson tweet

Television host Joy-Ann Reid:

Joy Reid tweet

Country singer Billy Gilman:

Billy Gilman tweet

Singer, actress and model Janelle Monae:

Janelle Monae

Bestselling author Roxane Gay:

Roxane Gay tweet

Comedian and night-show host Larry Wilmore:

Larry Wilmore tweet

Actress and comedian Sarah Silverman:

Sarah Silverman tweet

Actor and producer John Stamos:

John Stamos tweet

Actor and singer Leslie Odom Jr.:

Leslie Odom jr tweet

Film exec Franklin Leonard:

Franklin Leonard tweet

In October last year, Winfrey said she had never considered the possibility of running for president. On "CBS This Morning," she shut down her longtime friend Gayle King's question about a potential vice president shortlist.

Tweet

"There will be no running for office of any kind for me," Winfrey told King. Still, CNN reported on Monday that Winfrey is "actively thinking" about running for president, according to two close friends of hers.



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President Donald Trump will likely get a polite reception from farmers and agribusiness leaders when he addresses the American Farm Bureau Federation's convention Monday in Nashville, but there's still challenges and uncertainties facing the industry whether on trade, labor or the farm bill.

Farmers want assurances that trade disputes such as NAFTA won't close markets that are a major source of revenue. They also want to be heard in the immigration debate since agriculture is struggling with a farm labor problem and relies on seasonal, foreign workers.

At the same time, farm incomes have come under pressure due to low prices for crops such as corn. And some fear federal budget cuts may impact the farm bill.

Debate over the next farm bill is heating up and comes after Congress has held numerous hearings on the issue. Critics want to see cuts in subsidies and changes to crop insurance programs, and dairy and cotton farmers could see some of the biggest changes. The current farm bill is set to expire in September 2018.

Trump is the first sitting president to address the U.S. farm group in 26 years, and he is scheduled to speak at 4 p.m. ET. The AFBF is the nation's largest agricultural group with around 1.5 million member families.

Meantime, the sixth round of negotiations involving the North American Free Trade Agreement is set to begin Jan. 23 in Montreal. The U.S. has clashed with Canada on access to dairy and Mexico has been accused of abuses, such as "dumping" of certain specialty crops such as tomatoes.

Trump has previously threatened to withdraw the United States from the 24-year-old trade pact with Canada and Mexico. But scrapping NAFTA without a replacement could be devastating to U.S. agriculture and end up costing American consumers more for their food, including Mexican-grown avocados used to make guacamole.

"The food chains of the three countries are very integrated, so without NAFTA it would have a massive displacement," said John Beghin, a professor of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University. "Walmart or the other big retailers or food processors have spent time integrating across borders, so any change in trade policy will create headaches."

Overall, Mexico and Canada represent nearly one-third of total U.S. agricultural exports. Corn, soybeans, fresh fruits and vegetables as well as livestock and dairy are major U.S. exports to those countries.

U.S. agricultural exports in fiscal 2017 totaled $140.5 billion, up nearly $11 billion from the prior year. Canada was the second-largest ag export customer last year after China, with Mexico in third place, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For the Trump administration, though, concerns about NAFTA go well beyond agriculture to other industries such as auto manufacturing.

Another hot-button issue that may come up is immigration.

The ag industry claims they can't find enough American workers willing to harvest crops in fields and perform other farm work. Some farmers also say the immigration crackdown by the administration hasn't helped the situation and they worry that cutting off foreign-born workers will only worsen the farm labor shortage.

"Part of it is there is plenty of work, even for people in this country, but it's really difficult for citizens to see themselves working in a field," said Jim Durst, an organic farmer who grows squash, melons and other specialty crops in Yolo County in Northern California.

Durst added that the continued pressure by the Trump administration on immigrants coming into the United States "has exacerbated the problem by creating an atmosphere of fear." He also faults Congress for its failure to help on the issue.

Growers from California and other parts of the country have relied on a so-called H-2A visa program that allows agricultural guest workers to perform seasonal work. But agricultural employers say it's essentially created a "mini-bureaucracy" and added other burdens rather than eased the farm labor shortage.

Still, one of the themes the president is likely to tout is progress his administration has made on the regulatory front to help ranchers and farmers.

For one, the Trump administration rolled back the so-called Waters of the United States rule, which was drafted during the Obama administration and broadened the definition of such things as "tributary" and also toughened controls over "adjacent waters."

Ag groups claimed the new rules forced ranchers and feedlot operators to get permits or risk excessive penalties despite being miles away from any navigable water. Also, some ranchers said it restricted their ability to erect important structures including fences to keep in livestock.

Trump also is likely to tout the new tax bill as it could lower rates for family farms structured as small businesses. Also, there are provisions that help farmers with expenses.

Finally, the president may discuss how rural America is facing challenges with the opioid epidemic but how his administration declared it a "health emergency" and is tackling the issue.
Among the industries affected by this deregulation are agricultural biotech and forestry, Trump will say.

Trump will go on to say he is "proud to report that within our first 11 months, my administration has canceled or delayed over 1,500 planned regulatory actions  more than any president in history." The president will tout a figure of 22 regulations cut "for every one new regulation."

"For years, many of you have endured burdensome fines, inspections, paperwork and relentless intrusion from an army of regulators at the EPA, the FDA and countless other federal agencies," Trump will tell the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau in Nashville Tennessee, according to excerpts released Monday by the White House.

President Donald Trump will tell farmers on Monday his administration has cut their taxes and slashed regulations on agriculture and food processing that amounted to a "regulatory assault on your way of life."

"We are streamlining regulations that have blocked cutting edge biotechnology setting free our farmers to innovate, thrive and grow. We are removing harmful restrictions on forestry so you can log more timber, plant more trees and export more renewable resources to other countries," the president will say to the convention attendees.

Trump also plans to take a victory lap following the passage late last year of massive Republican tax cuts for businesses, and more modest tax cuts for individuals.

The president will highlight recent announcements by a number of corporations that they plan to give out $1,000 bonuses to certain workers. Trump will claim that "more than 1 million workers have already received a tax cut bonus," a figure that is impossible to verify.

The conservative group Americans for Tax Reform recently published a list of companies that have announced plans to give out such bonuses to some of their workers. The total number of employees that ATR predicted will get bonuses was 1,003,547.

The speech is the president's first major road trip address of 2018, and it is part of a broader effort to shore up voters and demographic groups that will be critical for Republicans to win over if they intend to keep their majorities in the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.

In 2016, Trump won rural voters by a nearly 2-to-1 margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Sixty-two percent of rural voters cast their ballots for Trump, while only 34 percent pulled the lever for Clinton.

Rural voters in such traditionally Democratic "blue wall" states as Michigan and Wisconsin were especially instrumental in helping Trump win the election.
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Celgene's acquisition of Impact Biomedicines could be just the start of a flurry of deals in the pharmaceuticals world. Activity was down in the biopharma sector last year, with only 34 transactions totaling $38 billion, according to JMP Securities, compared with 60 deals worth $133 billion in 2016, and 74 deals worth $174 billion in 2015. Improving clinical success rates and advancements in science among small and midsize companies will likely attract large companies looking to bolster their innovation pipelines, JMP Securities wrote in a December research note. Plus, many big companies will have more money to spend. Pharmaceutical companies have some of the largest stockpiles of overseas cash. The tax law President Donald Trump signed last month makes it cheaper for multinational companies to repatriate foreign cash, and they could use that money to fund transactions. The windfall may not cause companies to completely reverse their corporate strategies, but it could nonetheless make it easier to justify pursuing any mergers or acquisitions. Of course, no one completely knows exactly who will pursue what until it's announced. The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which starts Monday, is a hotbed for deals. Here are some companies to keep an eye on.

Johnson & Johnson

The sprawling health-care company dropped $30 billion on its acquisition of Swiss company Actelion last year, so a major deal may not be on the horizon just yet. Still, J&J could use some of the tax law windfall to bulk up its portfolio. In the third quarter of 2017, Johnson & Johnson held $14 billion overseas, an estimated 90 percent of its total cash, according to Credit Suisse. The company hasn't shared its plan for the money yet, though it expects to do so before it announces earnings on Jan. 23, a company spokesman told CNBC. J&J has pointed to acquisitions as an important part of its growth strategy. "I think the most important thing is all of the actions we've taken to invest in the platforms that we believe have significant growth, and we've been doing this both in terms of acquisitions, strategic partnerships and investing in R&D," the company's group worldwide chair, Sandra Peterson, said on an earnings call with analysts in October. J&J's focus areas for acquisitions are immunology, oncology, cardiovascular and metabolic, infectious diseases and vaccines, and neuroscience, Credit Suisse analyst Vamil Divan wrote in a note published last month. Investing in single assets at earlier stages of development have been the most value creative moves recently, he added. So J&J may not be hunting for a blockbuster this year, but it could continue scooping up smaller ones.

Pfizer

The drugmaker has said the tax law won't change its approach to capital allocation, which prioritizes dividends, buybacks, investing in the business and M&A. Just before the tax law passed, Pfizer said it would spend $10 billion on share buybacks and raise its dividend. That leaves deals as a possibility this year. "Our priorities for capital allocation don't change," Chief Financial Officer Frank D'Amelio said on an earnings call with analysts in October. "They are dividends, share buybacks, investing in the business and M&A. Those will continue to be our capital allocation priorities going forward. Pfizer has tried and failed to make two $100 billion-plus inversion attempts in the past few years. The deals with AstraZeneca in 2014 and Allergan in 2016 both unraveled, but they show Pfizer's willing to try and execute large transactions. Pfizer held $13 billion overseas in the third quarter of 2017, representing 90 percent of its total cash, Credit Suisse estimates. The drugmaker would likely focus on inflammation and immunology, cardiovascular and metabolic, oncology, vaccines, neuroscience and pain, and rare diseases, Credit Suisse said. Investors have focused on Pfizer doing a larger deal, analyst Divan wrote, but the company would rather see midsized deals to bring multiple growth drivers into the innovative business. Pfizer declined to comment.

Eli Lilly

The Indianapolis-based company has typically favored small deals, but that could change this year under new management. Eli Lilly 's largest acquisition was its $6.5 billion purchase of ImClone in 2008. Multiple new members are joining the executive team this year, and Credit Suisse said it's possible Lilly may look to do something bigger. Lilly held $11 billion overseas in the third quarter of 2017, or 85 percent of its total cash, Credit Suisse estimates. Lilly's target areas for acquisitions include diabetes, immunology, oncology, neuroscience and pain, Credit Suisse's Divan wrote. Lilly has not provided specific plans for the repatriated cash, a spokesman said in an email. "The majority of the repatriated cash will be used to fund our existing capital allocation priorities, including current products and pipeline opportunities, investing in business development, and returning cash to shareholders via the dividend and share buybacks," he said. "A smaller portion of repatriated cash will be used to reduce our debt."

Merck

Merck has said it views deals as ways to boost its pipeline. The tax law could help it pay for a spending spree. In the third quarter of 2017, $20 billion, or 85 percent, of Merck's cash was overseas, according to Credit Suisse. Divan strongly favors Merck using that money to boost its mid-late stage pipeline and add more growth drivers to the company's story. Merck CEO Ken Frazier has said the company's looking for transactions that enhance its ability to innovate. "We're not looking at things purely for synergies or consolidation purposes," Frazier said on an earnings call with analysts in October. "And so I would think that our view continues to be that we're going to look for those things, particularly bolt-ons, that will help us as we go further with our innovation strategy." When searching for candidates, Merck will likely focus on oncology, vaccines, anti-infectives and acute care, Credit Suisse said. In a statement to CNBC, Merck praised the tax law. "This is critical given our innovation model relies on long-term, sustained investment in R&D to discover vaccines and medicines for unmet medical needs," a spokesperson said.

Potential targets
The U.K. now looks to be seriously contemplating the idea that it could leave the EU without a fully-formed trade agreement with the rest of the bloc.

Reports early Monday from The Telegraph newspaper said that U.K. leader Theresa May will appoint a "cabinet minister for no deal Brexit" this week. This is seen an attempt by the prime minister to demonstrate to the EU that the country is serious about leaving even if it fails to reach a trade deal. Such a minister would work alongside Brexit Secretary David Davis and deliver constant updates on preparations for the eventuality of a no trade deal scenario.

Joan Hoey, regional director of Europe at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC via email there is "some logic" to such appointment. "No deal is not the government's objective, but it is the fall-back position in the event of an unsatisfactory deal. If the government is serious about walking away if the EU fails to offer an acceptable deal, it needs to prepare seriously for such an eventuality, and that requires a senior minister within the department for exiting the EU," she said.

The U.K.'s Department for Exit of the European Union did not confirm the specific appointment of a minister for a no deal scenario when contacted by CNBC. A spokesperson said that the new appointments will be handled by the prime minister "in the usual way."

This comes as May is set to give a broader reshuffle of her cabinet this week. So far on Monday, Brandon Lewis has replaced Patrick McLoughlin as Conservative Party chairman. Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire has resigned for health reasons. More announcements are due to follow Monday.
To perfect your interviewing skills, you're going to have to do your homework. Brandon Santulli took this to heart, and it helped him ace an interview with the CEO of his dream company, in an industry where he had no experience. In 2015, Santulli graduated with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics but he quickly realized he wanted an entirely different career. "A couple years after graduating, I knew I wanted to enter the world of tech  despite my non-tech major," he says. "Once I found out I landed an Executive Assistant interview with WayUp's CEO, I knew I'd have to get creative in order to get my foot in the door."

Brandon Santulli Courtesy of WayUp

Santulli was determined to make a great impression on Liz Wessel, the CEO of job search platform WayUp. "I wasn't about to take 30 minutes with Liz for granted, so to stand out and prove I was serious about this opportunity, I decided to learn as much as possible about her," he says. Indeed, Santulli scoured the internet and read every interview Wessel had ever conducted. "During my daily runs the week before the interview, I listened to every podcast Liz was featured on, taking mental notes of peculiar facts," he says. After reading dozens of articles and nine separate podcasts, he walked away with two seemingly innocuous facts that would turn out to be his secret weapons for landing the job: her socks never match, and she studied Japanese.

On the day of the interview, Santulli was prepared for anything. After answering the typical interview questions he asked Wessel, "I was just wondering, do you still wear mismatched socks every day?" Wessel was taken aback and said, "I do. Great research." "Well, after hearing you talk about it on a podcast, I thought I'd give it a try today," said Santulli before showing off his own mismatched pair of socks. After the interview, Santulli sent a follow-up email and signed off with "Arigatou Gozaimasu," which means "thank you" in Japanese.
For international travelers, the chaos at JFK was intense: Long-haul flights arrived in the airport only to sit on taxiways for hours due to a lack of available gates. Ground equipment malfunctioned in the bone-chilling cold, while high winds and ice on the ground after the storm hampered cleanup efforts.

More than 7,000 flights were canceled because of the storm, a costly headache for airlines that were dealt a string of hurricanes in 2017 as well as for passengers who were stranded abroad after their flights to the U.S. were canceled. The storm struck when many travelers were making their way home from end-of-year holidays and 2018 business travel was getting going.

The airport receives more international passenger traffic  more than 31 million people in 2016  than any other U.S. airport. The air travel disruptions in the wake of a powerful winter storm that struck the East Coast last week only snowballed thanks to a blast of cold temperatures and confusion on whether the airport was up and running.

When New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport goes down, the implications are felt around the world.

A passenger and his luggage are seen during the weather-related cancellation at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, United States on January 08, 2017.

But passengers and airlines alike were confused by whether the airport and the carriers who operate there could even cater to them, which led to more chaos. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the airport, decided to close JFK during the storm on Thursday, forcing JFK-bound flights to divert to other airports.

Even after the airport reopened, diversions continued, because there weren't enough gates to handle the previous days' delayed flights plus new arriving flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday suspended arrivals of some flights. That day an Aeroflot plane from Moscow turned back halfway through the trip to JFK. Dozens of other JFK-bound flights landed at other airports in the region and elsewhere, such as Detroit. More than 230 flights have been diverted since Thursday because of the storm, 124 of them international flights to JFK, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware.

Passengers at JFK complained on social media that they were not able to retrieve their luggage as bags piled up at claims areas.

The airport appeared to be slowly getting back to normal on Monday, but more than 100 flights were canceled in or out of JFK. Snow and sleet were in the forecast for the New York area during the rush-hour period, which could throw things even more off track.

So what complicated the cleanup from a one-day storm? For one, while the Port Authority oversees operations at the airport and makes the call on whether to close the airport, separate terminals are leased by different parties: airlines and other consortiums.

For airlines, the advantage of this arrangement is they have dedicated gates and facilities for their operations. JetBlue , for example, operates Terminal 5. American Airlines has Terminal 8.

It is difficult for a plane to get a gate at a terminal where they don't normally fly into. For one, gates are often allotted to scheduled flights. Some planes are so big, such as the Airbus A380, that a terminal may lack gates or jetways tall enough to accommodate the aircraft.

Further complicating the recovery, on Sunday, a pipe burst in Terminal 4, the main international terminal, home to airlines including El Al, China Southern, Air India, Copa and Swiss Air, just to name a few. Passengers were evacuated from the terminal after a portion of it flooded, and although it reopened later that day, operations were snarled again. The Port Authority said it would investigate the incident and other relationships within the airport.

"The Port Authority intends to aggressively review with its partners, the terminal operators and airlines, the process to assure that planes and passengers get to their gates during the surge of rescheduled flights that follow a severe weather event," it said.

While wintry weather was expected and airlines and airport officials knew about the problem days in advance, it was no consolation to passengers who waited for hours, and even days, to board flights. Many complained about a lack of communication from airlines about whether flights would take off. The storm left some flights without crews, which have strict limits on their working hours to ensure adequate rest.

"This past weekend's events at New York's John F. Kennedy airport demonstrated in stunning detail the consequences of inadequate contingency planning and passenger communication at major international airports," said Greeley Koch, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

Koch called out another infrastructure problem that recently snarled air travel: the nearly half-day power outage last month at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world and the home of Delta Air Lines .

"The airlines don't help themselves when they are not providing accurate information and customers are spending a lot of their own money [to get to the airport]," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel consultant and founder of Atmosphere Research Group.

How airlines "recover will determine whether passengers book with them again," he said. "It's not about how you operate when it's sunny and 72 [degrees]."
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the biggest week of the year for investors in the biotechnology sector, hadn't even officially started when word of a multibillion-dollar acquisition broke: Celgene is spending at least $1.1 billion, and potentially almost $6 billion more, to buy Impact Biomedicines.

That's business as usual for the summit, which draws thousands of investors, executives and analysts to San Francisco each January. More than 450 companies are scheduled to present at the conference, setting the stage for the year ahead.

On everyone's minds this week: Will the U.S. tax overhaul spur acquisitions? And will the president once again attack the industry for its pricing practices?

Sunday afternoon came news of the former: Celgene's acquisition of Impact Biomedicines, a private biotechnology company with an experimental medicine for the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis. Celgene is paying $1.1 billion in cash, with almost $6 billion more if Impact meets certain regulatory and sales goals.

A deal to kick off the conference follows suit with previous years: in 2015, the weekend before the conference brought news of Shire's $5.2 billion acquisition of NPS Pharma; in 2016, Shire's $32 billion acquisition of Baxalta. And last year, the news held at least until the official start to the conference Monday morning: Takeda's $5.2 billion purchase of Ariad.

M&A isn't the only topic of discussion this week. The summit is also a key time for companies to report results and provide forecasts for the year ahead; already the weekend brought news from Exact Sciences , Alnylam and Sanofi . Analysts are also expecting updates early in the week from Regeneron , Vertex and Acorda , just a few among the onslaught that begins Monday morning.

Finally, investors are hoping the week remains quieter on at least one front: that of President Donald Trump. It was on the third day of the J.P. Morgan conference last year that Trump said in a speech that the pharmaceutical industry is "getting away with murder" when it comes to the prices of medicines, driving the IBB biotech ETF down almost 3 percent.

Despite Trump's rhetoric, and investor fears, 2017 brought little in the way of government action on drug prices, and biotech stocks, despite a rocky second half, ended the year up about 20 percent.
Expanding its Digital India and 'Go Green' initiative, the centre is planning to propose a shift to a paperless parliament and state legislatures.

By India Today Web Desk: As a part of its 'Go Green initiative', the government is proposing a shift of the hallowed portals to a paperless and digitised version, in the Parliament and State Assemblies.

The Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar is expected to put the 'paper free' plan forward at All India Chief Whips Conference in Udaipur.

The two day conference will witness a meeting of the Whips of Parliament and Legislature and the Ministers of Parliamentary Affairs (MoPA) of various states.

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The MoPA aims for a digitised Parliament and state legislatures. The step is being seen as transparent, responsive, and accountable to people. Moreover, it will be in line with the Digital India plans of the government.

Over the past few years, the Union government has worked to cut down on its paper consumption. It has reduced printing of hard copies of documents and reports, to a great extent.

In 2016, the government almost halved the number of printed Budget copies from its previous year figure of 5100, said a report in The Hindu.

In 2017, only Members of Parliament got hard copies of the Budget while the Finance Ministry uploaded the Budget speech and proposals on its website.

Lawmakers on the other hand, believe that even though the idea is theoretically good, it is tough to implement. "It sounds very nice when we say paperless, but it's like saying cashless after demonetisation. By the next decade, if we get halfway there, we could consider ourselves lucky," said Derek O'Brien, Leader of the Trinamool Congress in the Rajya Sabha.

The 18th Whips conference in Udaipur will be inaugurated by Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Ananth Kumar.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia will be the chief guest of the inaugural session.

According to a report of DNA, the conference will take place from today and will see the rollout of e-Sansad and e-Vidhan.

--- ENDS ---
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Getty Images

Bypass the SALT

Two switcheroos

Two main strategies to bypass this constraint are taking shape. First, New York is considering a proposal to shift some of its revenue-raising from personal income taxes to payroll taxes. The reason it would want to do that is because payroll taxes charged to employers  unlike personal income taxes  remain fully deductible under the new federal tax law. Second, California and New Jersey, as well as New York, are considering plans to grant tax credits to taxpayers who donate to state-affiliated institutions, such as public schools, hospitals and parks. These donations would be voluntary, and the resulting credits could be used to offset state and local income and property tax liabilities. This is feasible because the tax overhaul left the charitable contribution deduction intact and the IRS has already indicated that donations to state charitable credit programs should be treated for federal tax purposes as charitable contributions rather than state and local tax payments. Anyone who hits the $10,000 SALT cap could benefit from programs of this sort. Those taxpayers could replace some or all of their nondeductible state tax payments with deductible charitable contributions. Not only would these initiatives alleviate the added federal burden for some taxpayers, they could make it easier for state and local governments to raise revenue in the future because residents could pay for public schools and other services with tax-deductible dollars. Herb Jackson tweet

Payroll please

Here's how the payroll tax change, which New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo mentioned his State of the State speech, would work. Let's say your employer pays you $100,000 a year and you pay $5,000 in state personal income taxes, leaving $95,000 before federal taxes and other charges. What if instead your employer paid you $95,000 in wages and also paid a $5,000 payroll tax to the state? Your employer would be no worse off, with its out-of-pocket cost still totaling $100,000, and the new tax law preserves an employer's ability to deduct payroll taxes from their own tax bills. And you generally would be no worse off either, as you would still have $95,000 before dealing with your federal tax bill. Indeed, you would most likely fare better financially once federal taxes are factored in. The federal government would tax you on $95,000, whereas you would be taxed on the full $100,000 if the state did not adopt the payroll tax workaround and if you could not claim a SALT deduction. That would be the case if you claim the standard deduction  as at least nine-tenths of taxpayers will  or if you hit the $10,000 SALT cap based on property taxes alone. Depending on your federal tax bracket, the savings could increase your after-tax income by anywhere from 0.6 percent to 3.1 percent. States adopting this approach do not need to repeal their personal income taxes entirely. Their income taxes still would apply to earnings from sources other than wages, such as investment or self-employment income. But they would not tax workers on wages that already have been subject to an employer-side payroll tax. Implementing this change would be relatively straightforward in states like Illinois, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, which have flat personal income tax rates. It would be somewhat more complicated to pull this off in states such as New York and California, which have highly progressive rate structures. But this can almost certainly be done through a system of refundable credits, and the potential savings for state residents would be dramatic. In New York, for example, an average household might save around $1,200 per year on its federal taxes.

Charity begins at home

And here's how the charitable credit idea would work: Say your state offers you a 90-cent credit against state taxes for every dollar you give to an in-state university or local community college. The IRS determined in a memo in 2011 addressing a similar program in Missouri that the full $1 donation would be a deductible charitable contribution, notwithstanding the state tax credit you get in return. For someone in the 37 percent federal income tax bracket, this means their $1 donation would generate 90 cents in state tax benefits and 37 cents in federal tax benefits. That's a $1.27 after-tax return on a $1 investment. More than a dozen states already have implemented tax credit programs like this to finance private school vouchers. Nothing would stop them from extending these programs to finance state universities, community colleges, K-12 public schools, hospitals, parks and more. Indeed, California Senate President Kevin de Leon already has introduced a bill along these lines. New York's Gov. Cuomo has expressed interest in the idea too, as has New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy.

Lingering questions

The payroll tax idea would work best for the majority of workers who earn wage income and who will claim the standard deduction under the new federal tax law. The charitable contribution credit, in contrast, would be more likely to benefit higher-income households who continue to itemize deductions for federal purposes. States can adopt both because the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Theoretically, the IRS could challenge either approach. But a well-designed state plan should hold up in court. With respect to the payroll tax workaround, Congress has explicitly said that taxes paid by employers should remain deductible, and nothing requires states to tax the wage income of their residents. Seven states already have no state income tax, and two more have income taxes that exclude wages. There is no legal obstacle preventing additional states from reducing their reliance on income tax revenue and shifting toward employer-side payroll taxes. The IRS of course could revoke its 2011 memo that blessed the charitable arrangements already out there. But decades of judicial precedent, which the agency on its own can't undo, supported that memo. Moreover, with similar tax credit programs that finance private school vouchers popular among the Republican Party's base, GOP lawmakers may resist moves to end such credit arrangements. How many states will ultimately adopt proposals along these lines? It's too soon to say, but for now, it looks like states that choose to fight back against the SALT rollback will have the upper hand.
Shaken up by the advent of digital tech, education is changing. There's no getting away from it: learning no longer takes place solely within four walls, for a designated period of time. Against this backdrop, Total is working with students and faculty from universities the world over to find solutions to future energy challenges, with them and for them. Inspiring and listening are two key virtues for doing so.

In 2012, David Puttnam, Ireland's then Digital Champion, wrote in Views of the Future, Dangers and Opportunities that: "Learning is no longer something that needs to happen within particular hours, in a particular place, or even with a particular group of people."

He was definitely onto something. For although from the outside looking in, all of the world's universities seem safely ensconced on their campuses, a revolution is happening outside the classroom. As you've no doubt guessed, it's a digital revolution that calls into question the very principles of education, prompting Peter J. Wells, chief of higher education at UNESCO, to remark that: "Industry employers contend that half of what students learn in the first two years of a four-year technology degree will be out of date by the time they graduate."

Classroom work now shares the stage with MOOCs (massive open online course), virtual courses, recorded university lectures on YouTube and real-time university discussion groups on Facebook. Courses are getting increasingly collaborative and ever more open to the wider world, in real time.

As a result, most of today's sought-after professions didn't exist just a decade ago! Director of ethical hacking, team building genius, data visualization expert, cognitive computing architect, organizational catalyst, digital prophet, chief happiness manager: who would even have been able to come up with such job titles in the early 2000s?

Surfing the digital-tech wave, education is evolving. It's more open and more plugged into the way the world is changing. It's also more innovative and more uncertain. Should students keep acquiring hard skills or give priority to soft skills such as dealing with uncertainty, performing under pressure, critical thinking, communicating and getting along with others, to name a few? Those are the new skills and talents the business world is looking for, putting an end to job descriptions as we've known them for decades.

For that matter, what is learning? UNESCO's Incheon Declaration in 2015 makes a down payment on the answer by articulating an aspiration: "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and  lifelong learning opportunities for all" by 2030.
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
Word has always been the workhorse app of the Microsoft Office suite. Nearly everyone who uses Office ends up using Word at some point, whether it be for writing memos, typing up agendas, creating reports, crafting business correspondence or any of a thousand other uses.

Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the perpetual version of the suite), or they can purchase an Office 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.

When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite  say, Office 2016 or Office 2019  its applications will never get new features, whereas Office 365 apps are continually updated with new features. (For more details, see What are the differences between Microsoft Office 2019 and Office 365?)

This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that were introduced in Word 2016 and Word 2019, the perpetual-license versions of Word included with Office 2016 and Office 2019, respectively. In Office 365, Word has all those features, plus several more. If you or your organization has an Office 365 subscription, see our separate Word for Office 365 cheat sheet for coverage of all the latest features.

Most of the tips in this article apply to both Word 2016 and Word 2019 for Windows. Near the end is a section for Word 2019 only.

Share this story: IT pros, we hope youll pass this guide on to your users to help them learn to get the most from Word 2016 and 2019.

Use the Ribbon

The Ribbon interface in Word 2016 and 2019 hasnt changed much compared to earlier versions. The Ribbon has been included in Office suite applications since Office 2007, so youre probably familiar with how it works. But if you need a refresher, see our Word 2010 cheat sheet.

Just as in Word 2013, the Ribbon in Word 2016 and 2019 is flatter-looking, cleaner and less cluttered than the one in Word 2010 and 2007. The 2016 and 2019 Ribbon is smaller than in Word 2013, the title bar is now solid blue rather than the previous white, and the menu text (File, Home, Insert and so on) is now a mix of upper- and lowercase rather than all caps. There are other minor changes as well  for instance, the old Page Layout tab is now called just Layout  but the Ribbon still works in the same way and you'll find most of the commands in the same locations as in Word 2013.

IDG The Ribbon in Word 2016 hasnt changed much from Word 2013. (Click image to enlarge it.)

To find out which commands live on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our Word 2016 and 2019 Ribbon quick reference. Also see the nifty new Tell Me feature described below.

Just as in earlier versions of Word, to make the commands underneath the tabs on the Ribbon go away, press Ctrl-F1. To make the commands appear again, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the Ribbon tabs  File, Home, Insert and so on  stay visible.)

IDG Here are the Ribbon display options.

Youve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon at the top right of the screen, just to the left of the icons for minimizing and maximizing Word. A drop-down menu appears with these three options:

Auto-hide Ribbon: This hides the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of Word.

This hides the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of Word. Show Tabs: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. Its the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when theyre hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display icon and select Show Tabs and Commands.

This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. Its the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when theyre hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display icon and select Show Tabs and Commands. Show Tabs and Commands: Selecting this shows both the tabs and commands.

And if for some reason that blue on the title bar is too much color for you, you can turn it white or gray. (In Word 2019, theres also a black option.) To do it, select File > Options > General. In the "Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office" section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme and select Dark Gray or White (or Black) from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar blue again, choose the Colorful option from the drop-down list. Just above the Office Theme menu is an Office Background drop-down menu  here you can choose to display a pattern such as a circuit board or circles and stripes in the title bar.

Theres a useful change in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you've connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You'll be able to see at a glance which is which.

IDG Select Add a Place to add a new cloud storage service for Word.

Collaborate live

The biggest feature launched with Word 2016 is live collaboration that lets people work on documents together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, a feature that Google Docs has long had. There are only two requirements for collaboration in Word 2016: You must be logged into your Microsoft or Office 365 account, and the document must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

However, while Office 365 subscribers or anyone using Word 2019 or Word Online can see the changes that other users of those versions make to a shared document in real time as they happen, Word 2016 users have to save their documents periodically to see and share changes. So while it is live collaboration, its not real-time visibility into that collaboration. Still, it does allow you to work with others on the same document at the same time.

To collaborate on a document, first open it, then click the Share icon in the upper-right part of the screen. If you havent yet saved your file in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online, youll be prompted to do so.

Clicking the Share button opens the Share pane on the right-hand side of the screen  this is command central for collaboration. At the top of the pane, type in the email addresses of the people with whom you want to collaborate on the document, separated by commas. As you type, Word looks through your address book and displays the matches it finds; click the person you want to invite. If youre on a corporate network, you can click the address book on the right to search through your corporate email address book. If a person isnt in your address book  just type in their complete email address.

IDG Selecting people with whom to collaborate via the Share pane. (Click image to enlarge it.)

After you enter the addresses, select either "Can edit" or "Can view" in the drop-down to allow collaborators full editing or read-only privileges. (If you want to assign different rights to different users, you can send two separate emails, or you can change any collaborators permissions later by right-clicking their name in the Share pane.) Type a message in the text box if you want. When youre done, click Share. An email gets sent out to everyone with whom youve shared the file, showing a View in OneDrive button that they can click to open the document.

IDG Your collaborators get an email message like this when you share a document. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Theres another way to share a file stored in a personal OneDrive for collaboration: At the bottom of the Share pane, click Get a sharing link, and from the screen that appears, choose Create an edit link if you want to create a link to the file that will allow people to edit the file, or Create a view-only link if you want to create a link that will allow them to view the file only. Then copy the link, paste it into an email using any email program, and send it.

When your recipients receive the email from you, they click a button or link to open the document, which opens in Word Online in a web browser rather than in the Word desktop client. At this point, they can view the document but not edit it. Users who arent signed into a Microsoft account will see an Edit in Browser button; once they click that, they can start editing in their browser window. Logged in users will see an Edit Document menu, from which they can choose Edit in Word to open the file in the client version of Word, or Edit in Browser to work in the free web version.

The web version isnt as fully featured as the client version  for instance, there arent as many formatting options and you cant insert shapes, take screenshots, use mail merge, or use several other features. But for basic editing, it works fine.

When a collaborator starts working in a shared document, youll get a notification that someone else is editing the document. What you see next depends on whether youre working in Word 2016 or 2019.

If youre using Word 2016, whenever a collaborator makes a change, a small Updates Available icon appears along the bottom of your Word window. As mentioned above, though, youll have to save your document (or click the Updates Available icon) to see their changes or have them see yours. After you save or click Updates Available, your collaborators additions appear in your document with a pale green overlay.

IDG When collaborating in Word 2016, you must save the document to see changes made by others (highlighted in green) and to share your changes with them. (Click image to enlarge it.)

When you're working on a document in Word 2019 with other people in real time, each person gets a cursor with their own unique color. You can see what they do as they do it, including deleting, editing and adding text. They see what you do as well.

IDG In Word 2019 you can see other collaborators edits in real time, with a different colored cursor for each collaborator. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Be aware that how well real-time collaboration works depends on the strength of your internet connection. On slow or flaky connections, you wont immediately see edits that other people make and they wont see yours immediately  there will be a lag. So its always best, when possible, to have the strongest connection possible when collaborating.

In addition to seeing each others changes to the document, you can communicate with your collaborators in other ways. The Share pane shows a list of people who have access to the document, with a note underneath their name indicating if they are currently editing the document, and if not, whether they have editing or viewing access.

Right-click the icon of anyone currently working on the document and click Open Contact Card; a screen pops out with the various ways you can contact them, including chat, phone and video via Skype (if they have Skype) and email. That lets you talk or text with them while you're working on the document together, making collaboration that much more effective.

IDG Click the icon of someone working with you on a document to see other ways you can contact them. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Tackle tasks with Tell Me

Although live collaboration is the biggest addition to Word 2016, there are several other new features as well. A very useful one is Tell Me, which is extremely helpful when you want to do a task that you havent done before or have forgotten how to do.

Its a text box just to the right of the Ribbon tab labels at the top of the screen with the words Tell me what you want to do in it. Type in a task, and youll get a list of possible matches. Click the task you want to get instructions on how to do it.

For example, I typed address an envelope and chose the Envelope result, and the screen you use for addressing envelopes appeared. When I typed in the more general query write an essay, it popped up a link to Words Researcher feature that lets you do research from right within Word, add sources from the research you find, and then cite the sources in the document properly. If you type in a query and hover your mouse over a result instead of clicking it, youll see a screen describing what you can do if you click the results.

IDG Tell Me gives advice on addressing an envelope (or any other task). (Click image to enlarge it.)

Its a big time-saver, because you dont have to hunt through the Ribbon to find the command you want. And it remembers the features you've previously selected in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you've searched for. That way, tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) South American country Peru generated its highest export sales to India during January- October 2017 with shipments totalling USD 1.57 billion, as compared to other Asian economies like China, South Korea, Japan and the UAE.

According to the countrys Exports and Tourism Promotion Board, Peruvian sales to Asian markets went from USD 10.53 billion (January-October 2016) to USD 15.59 billion in the same period last year.

advertisement

The target markets included China, South Korea, India, Japan, the UAE, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

"In particular, Perus sales to India registered the highest growth rate by totalling USD 1.57 billion between January-October 2017, a 126.78 per cent increase over the same term in 2016 (USD 694.16 million)," a statement said.

Also, Indian importers have shown a growing interest in Peruvian avocados, leading to a steady increase in its consumption since 2016, it said.

In 2015, Peru became the second largest exporter of table grapes- Red Globe variety- to India, a position it holds even today. These grapes are typically available in Indian supermarkets between December and April every year.

Perus exports to India also include gold, silver, copper, Sacha Inchi, Quinoa, Camu Camu, among others.

"With the India-Peru trade agreement discussions, India will be able to move ahead of the stereotype of seeing Latin America through the Brazilian lens.

Open trade barriers between the two countries provide Peru with a new and significant trade partner, because of which the economy is enjoying a surge," said the statement issued by the Commercial Office of the Embassy of Peru. PTI RSN ANU

--- ENDS ---
Microsofts hasty Meltdown/Spectre patches, released late on Jan. 4, have started baring their fangs. Complaints about Win10 Fall Creators Update cumulative update KB 4056892 and Win7 Monthly Rollup KB 4056894 resulting in blue screens  particularly on AMD Athlon, Sempron, Opteron and Turion processors  started appearing shortly after the patches were released.

With no notice or warning, Microsoft moved the Win7 patch, KB 4056894, from version 1 to version 2 on Jan. 5. As of early Monday morning, Jan. 8, version 2 is the only version available on the Microsoft Update Catalog. The Win10 1709 patch, KB 4056892, is still at version 1.

According to @abbodi86 on AskWoody, the jump from version 1 to version 2 was a metadata change  generally, a change in the way the patch is installed. The KB 4056894 patch itself didn't change. Microsoft hasnt said anything.

I now see blue screen complaints on the AskWoody Lounge, the Microsoft Answers forum, Microsofts TechNet forum, on Reddit, on MyDigitalLife, on OverclockersUK, and in many non-English forums.

Many of the reports dont include details about the processor type or Windows version, but its clear that AMD processors  which arent even affected by the Meltdown vulnerability  are getting hurt the worst. That said, there are sporadic reports of other kinds of processors taking it in the shorts.

[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]

Oddly, all of the Win7 blue screen reports I've seen are associated with the 2018-01 Monthly Rollup. The manual-download Security Only update hasn't had as many problems. Or, at least, as many reported problems.

How to fix the blue screen problem

Proposed fixes run a dime a dozen, but the most reliable seem to be these:

For Win7, boot to a recovery CD (if you have one) and roll back to the last Restore Point (if you have one).

Failing that, on Win7, try the dism approach posted by zip369 on Reddit.

For Win10, reset your PC and save personal data.

That said, theres at least one frustrated admin on Reddit whos tried everything and cant seem to get any of the suggestions to work.

If you get your machine back and working, make sure you follow the general steps for blocking updates until Microsoft cleans up its mess. (Win10 Pro 1703 or 1709 customers have an easier job.) In Win7 or 8.1, simply turn off Automatic Update.

What I find most distressing: All of this angst is for nothing. Yes, you need to install the Meltdown/Spectre fixes at some point, but as of this moment there are no known exploits in the wild. None.

No matter what the gurus on TV or in the mainstream media say, theres no reason to get these patches installed before Microsoft works out the bugs. None.

Chalk this up as yet another example of why you need to wait a while after Windows patches get pushed out the automatic update chute. In spite of the scare tactics.

Well keep you up to date on the latest repair techniques on the AskWoody Lounge.
Nick de Bois is the former MP for Enfield North and an Advisory Board Member for the youth charity Kids Count.

In a thoughtful piece for the Evening Standard recently, Kit Malthouse, the former London Deputy Mayor for Policing and now MP for North West Hampshire, set out the impact that political leadership can make on the shocking number of incidents of knife crime and knife crime fatalities. He rightly contrasted this with the woeful lack of leadership from the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, under whom we have seen a return to peak level of fatalities in the capital  not seen since 2008.

Then, the number of teenagers killed reached a staggering 29. In one month six people were stabbed to death  in one week. When Malthouse left office in 2012 the total had fallen to eight, and as he rightly concedes that was eight too many, but based on the 2008 trend it could have been 50.

It is nevertheless plainly wrong to blame any Mayor for the actions of murderers, but when Kit Malthouse and Boris Johnson assumed personal responsibility for tackling this appalling state of affairs, they demonstrated that politicians can change things for the better, and in this case, save lives.

Now, five years later, the number is back up to 26. The four killings on New Years Eve have once again put unease and some fear back into communities, and with it has come a justifiable sense of outrage from the media to which the current political response is utterly inadequate  and in the case of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, both complacent and to me, shameful.

So far from Mayor Khan we have seen excuses. He blames cuts to police, he blames closure of youth centres, continuing a theme he has maintained since being elected in 2016 namely, its not me guv, its the governments fault. This is lazy at best and downright deceitful at worse. More so because we are dealing with the loss of lives, young lives in particular.

Only last week on LBC when interviewed by James OBrien he took the government to task for cuts to funding that meant some youth centres had closed  resulting in the rise of knife crime. He regularly blames the government for cuts to police funding as another reason for the rise. In both cases he overlooks facts in an attempt to pass blame rather than recognise the complexity of the causes of knife crime and offer tangible solutions. He cannot explain for example why in 2008 when knife crime last peaked at 29 deaths in London, there were no cuts to funding and the closed youth centres he now points to as a reason for the rise in knife crime were then presumably open.

He points to cuts to policing funding in 2017 as another cause for the rise in knife crime but fails to point out that in the Metropolitan Police force in 2008 there were 31,460 full time equivalents police officers and in 2017 there were 31,517.

There was in fact fewer police officers in some of the intervening years when we were facing far fewer deaths from knife crime (with the exception of the Olympic year when police numbers reached over 32,000). Hardly seismic evidence that the cuts are a major factor in the spiralling deaths. Whats more, it is worth noting that the Met Police have the highest ratio of police officers per 100,000 head of population in the country at 382. The real difference between now and 2008 is the political leadership of Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan.

Khans obsession with offering flawed excuses leaves a huge political vacuum in leadership to help bring the rise in knife crime under control and reduce both attacks and deaths. This is a vacuum that needs to be filled by national government. The solutions are complex and should be centred around early intervention programmes, family intervention, such as we have seen successfully in Strathclyde where gangs have been broken up  and of course a review of stop and search policies with the input from BAME community leaders. Likewise, the criminal justice system still fails some victims, victims families, and those offenders who can be rehabilitated. Much more can be done.

With a national leadership program showing the political will to tackle this problem we can bring together the best practice that is sporadically seen across the UK, and champion the solutions that are evidenced-based and work. We should not be afraid of new thinking, embracing former offenders and gang members who can reach vulnerable youngsters enticed into gangs and knife culture. Too often I hear from third sector organisations how bureaucracy stops offenders working with young people. And finally, money.

For every pound invested in early intervention programmes the payback to community, economy, savings from the justice system and the personal impact of changing lives is a powerful argument for more investment. Presently such funding is at the mercy of local priorities. And as we have seen, mayors that lack the political leadership and will to take on these problems are unlikely to invest what is needed.

A national programme can drive the priorities as well as ensuring the right organisations get the right support. That is not by any means always the case now as overly bureaucratic procurement programs of local government shut out many smaller, but credible and effective third sector organisations who are trying to stop this horrible cycle of gangs, knife crime and wasted lives.

Knife crime is not just a police problem, or simply a schools problem, a sentencing problem, a family problem or a gang problem. It is all of these and more. A government chief tasked with leading the fight-back against the rising culture of knife crime could bring the resources and the advocacy to change things for the better.
Five years ago, the TaxPayers Alliance reported that in the last year, five times more Labour people were appointed to public bodies than Tories.

Since then, the figures have varied, and some Conservative members or supporters have been selected to fill important posts.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that, since it took office in 2010, our Party has punched beneath its weight when it comes to public appointments. One of the reasons seems to be that Tories simply dont apply in the same number as Labour supporters.

To help remedy this, every fortnight we put up links to some of the main public appointments vacancies, so that qualified Conservatives might be aware of the opportunities presented.

         

Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services  Inspector of Fire and Rescue Authorities in England

Inspect a number of the 43 police forces in England and Wales, and a number of 45 fire & rescue authorities in England, as determined by the Chief Inspector. This will include: monitoring inspected organisations performance; forming a professional assessment of inspected organisations performance; identifying problems and challenging inspected organisations and their governing bodies so that the public are not exposed to avoidable risk or harm and can be assured that policing and fire and rescue services are effective and efficient; preparing inspection reports to high corporate standards and presenting findings to the public; and promoting good practice.

Time: Full-time, fixed-term for five years.

Remuneration: 133,983 minimum.

Closes: 14 January

         

Social Work England  Chief Executive Officer

High quality social work can transform lives. Social workers play an absolutely critical role in society, delivering a range of vital services to vulnerable children, families and adults. Social Work England will be a new specialist regulator for social workers that has an absolute focus on protecting the health and wellbeing of those individuals who need social work support. The credibility of the regulator will depend on its ability to deliver its core regulatory functions effectively and efficiently, supporting and protecting the public from the outset.

Time: Full-time.

Remuneration: A highly attractive total reward package, including pension and a basic salary of up to 142,500 per annum.

Closes: 18 January

         

Construction Industry Training Board  Chair

The Chair and the Board will hold the Executive Team to account for the delivery of the organisations offer to the construction industry, provide inclusive and dynamic leadership to the Board of Trustees, ensuring that each trustee fulfils their duties and responsibilities for the effective governance of the organisation. The Chair will also support and, where appropriate, challenge the Chief Executive and ensure that the Board functions as a unit and works closely with the entire Executive of the organisation to achieve agreed objectives.

Time: Avg. one day per week.

Remuneration: 22,500 per annum plus expenses.

Closes: 19 January

         

Committee on Radioactive Waste Management  Chair

The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) provides independent scrutiny and advice to UK Government and Devolved Administration Ministers on the long-term management of radioactive waste, including storage and disposal. The Committees primary task is to provide independent scrutiny on the UK Governments and Radioactive Waste Management Ltds (RWMs) high profile programme to deliver geological disposal, together with interim storage, for higher activity wastes The role of the CoRWM Chair is high profile and the Chair may be required to appear before Parliamentary Select Committees. The Chair is also the Committees main point of contact with stakeholders and will represent the Committees views to both broadcasting and written media (where required).

Time: Up to 78 days per year.

Remuneration: 450 per diem plus travel and subsistence.

Closes: 19 January

         

Intellectual Property Office  Non-Executive Director

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is an international organisation which is responsible for setting the agenda and contributing to the wider economy with intellectual property rights including patents, designs, trademarks and copyright. It has a clear delivery function to operate and maintain a clear intellectual property system in the UK, encouraging innovation and helping the economy and society to benefit from knowledge and ideas. The organisation also helps people get the right type of protection for their creation or invention.

Time: Around 18 days per annum.

Remuneration: 6000 per annum plus expenses.

Closes: 31 January

         

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council  Executive Chair

We are seeking an inspirational individual with international standing and a proven track record to lead the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as its Executive Chair, once it becomes one of the nine Councils of UK Research and Innovation in April 2018. As part of UK Research and Innovations Executive Committee, the Executive Chair will have a critical role within UK Research and Innovation and in championing and increasing the impact of engineering and physical sciences. This includes chemistry, engineering, information and communication technologies, advanced materials, mathematical sciences and physics.

Time: See listing.

Remuneration: To be discussed with individual candidates.

Closes: 02 February
Nadhim Zahawi is a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and is the MP for Stratford On Avon.

On December 28th, protests apparently initially about the cost of living in Iran started in the city of Mashhad, and quickly spread around the country. This began days of protests on an ever-widening set of issues which united the various groups in Iran who have been let down by their Government. The protests have ranged in size, location and aim, but in total they have been the greatest threat to the Iranian regime since the 2009 election.

Typically, the Labour Party have equivocated on the subject. Jeremy Corbyn has been silent while he reportedly takes a long holiday in Mexico. In the meantime, his shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry said that the party didnt want to leap to judgement. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on which I sit, Tom Tugendhat, has rightly led a wave of criticism and pointed out how extraordinary it is for Labour to refuse to say the regime should change in response to the legitimate concerns of its people.

Perhaps the Shadow Foreign Secretary is just toeing the line of her leader, who has taken 20,000 from a TV channel that is the mouthpiece of the Iranian government, but it should not be hard to reach a firm and reasonable judgement on these protests. It would be wrong for any western government or political party to urge on a violent and destabilising revolution, especially if you are unwilling to help militarily. Its perfectly fine to urge a peaceful solution. However, Labours line does not reflect what is actually occurring on the ground. Indeed, for Labour and their supporters to equivocate in this way only adds fuel to the regimes accusations that these ordinary protestors are American puppets seeking a bloody overthrow of the regime, rather than people with dreams of a better future for their children. There is absolutely no evidence that this is some kind of evil US operation; this exists only in the brains of anti-Western fantasists. Many of whom now find themselves in positions of power in the Labour Party.

We should remind ourselves of what the Iranian regime is, and think about exactly who Labour are refusing to condemn. Iran pays lip service to democracy, but this is only a facade in practice, with the whole system run according to what the Ayatollahs are willing to allow. Religious police roam the streets, and fine or imprison women who are not covering their hair. Millions are spent by the Iranian Government, not on supporting its own people but on funding terrorist groups across the Middle East. And protestors are killed when asking for their Government to change. In the face of all this, it is truly shameful for Labour to have remained silent for so long, and even worse for them to muddy the waters when they do find something to say.

Iran is a theocracy that spends vast amounts of its wealth on a battle for regional control rather than for the benefit of its own people. That is why demonstrators are asking for reform, and that is why we should openly support those goals. This is not about destroying the Iranian state, but about encouraging change and creating the environment for this to happen.

Moving from autocracy or theocracy to democracy is not simple. Britain took 713 years to get from Magna Carta in 1215 to the achievement of full voting rights to women in 1928. Democratic institutions are one thing, but complicated networks of civil society institutions are even harder to nurture, and cannot be transplanted from one country to another. However, there are lessons, assistance and advice that can be passed on that would make Irans change faster than our own.

There are two competing visions for government in the Middle East. The first is one of reform, and separating mosque and state, which is being attempted by the UAE and Egypt. The other is the way of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ayatollahs theocracy. The second is not conducive to good governance, but still holds a great sway in the region. We should do what we can encourage reform. Dictators hollow out opposition, political thought and the infrastructure of civil society. When one is removed, it creates a vacuum that is often filled by military or religious extremists. It is in our interests to encourage reforms that enhance stability and increase the chances of steady transition to resilient democracy. Because no people will accept autocracy for ever.

The inevitability of the worldwide march towards democracy has been dented and doubted in recent years. But we mustnt give up on the democratic ambitions of the people of the Middle East. The region is full of ordinary people who have no less desire for stability, security and prosperity for their families than you or me. They have no less tolerance for corruption and iniquity than the peoples of democratic nations. They want the same things that we want, and they will eventually achieve these ambitions. We must never stop advocating their right to achieve these goals through a peaceful process and reasonable reforms, and we must not be shy about doing so. We must also make clear why change is in the benefit of the regime as well. The alternatives, whether the status quo, or a populace reaching breaking point, are unacceptable.
Petitioner Kalyani Sen Menon's affidavit - filed on Friday - lists a series of violations by the Aadhaar authority. Her plea is likely to come up for hearing on January 17.

By Meetu Jain: The government may have shot the messenger where the Aadhaar data breach is concerned, but there is enough dirt that the UIDAI has tried to brush under the carpet, as per a PIL in the Supreme Court.

Petitioner Kalyani Sen Menon's affidavit - filed on Friday - lists a series of violations by the Aadhaar authority. Her plea is likely to come up for hearing on January 17.

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For instance, I-T minister Ravi Shankar Prasad admitted in Parliament in April last year that 34,000 Aadhaar operators had been blacklisted or cancelled since the inception of the Aadhaar project.

One such operator is accused of selling secure Aadhaar data to a Tribune news paper journalist.

Since April 2017, the number of such rogue operators, enlisted with capturing the biometrics of 1.3 billion Indians, has shot up to 49,000 as per latest reports, the petitioner states.

There have been other breaches of data privacy, the government has admitted in Parliament. The IT ministry, in response to a Parliament question provided a list of 210 government websites that have displayed data, including a list of beneficiaries and their personal details.

And how serious is the government about the security infrastructure of the scheme has also come in for serious question. The Rajat Moona Committee set up for this actually gave a report in exactly 17 days.

WHAT THE PETITION SAYS

The petition points out that, "The committee was formed on 21.08.2017, the first meeting took place on 28.08.2017 and then a final meeting took place on September 14, 2017, culminating in a report that recorded the claims made by the UIDAI through its officials."

"Further, the report discloses no details of any attempted or actual breaches and the exact standards of security that have been implemented at various stages of the scheme. It is manifestly clear that the same has not been prepared with due application of mind."

The government has been insisting that no data has been breached as the bio-metrics are safe. But the truth is that the government can actually reveal this data, including biometrics. All that it requires is either a court order or a "national security" issue.

The affidavit points out that "the provision fails to lay down any meaningful safeguards for the exercise of this power and the phrase 'national security' has been left undefined. It also does not provide the affected individual with a right to notice or an opportunity of being heard before this information is shared."

Whether there has been a data breach in the past is also not known, because Aadhaar data was collected without legislative backing, without the Aadhaar Act coming into force.

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"The Counter Affidavit filed by the Respondents is silent on the bio-metric information already compromised and retained by a host of several public and private entities alike", the affidavit points out.

The affidavit also debunks several claims made by the UIDAI. For instance, it helps reduce corruption.

Citing the case of Orissa, the affidavit says, "It was found that Aadhaar itself is responsible for deleting only 27,000 out of 6.6 lakh ineligible ration cards. The total number of PDS cards in Orissa in 2014 was 85.39 lakh."

"Therefore, Aadhaar's fraud detection rate was only about 0.32 per cent. It may help weed out duplicate PAN cards. The total number of duplicate PAN cards in the country is not more than 0.4 per cent," the affidavit points out.

ALSO WATCH | Operation Aadhaar leaks: How safe is your Aadhaar card?

--- ENDS ---
CORNWALL, Ontario  The first weekend in January brought some of the coldest days that Cornwall and the Counties have seen in a long time.

Saturday saw a high temperature in the minus 20s, but it felt more like -30 with the wind chill. At some points the outside temperature felt as cold as nearly -40. Environment Canada warned the public that being outside for any extended period of time could result in frostbite.

One good Samaritan decided to do what she could to help keep members of the community out of the cold.

Tammy Marion decided to use part of her weekend to give people rides so they could get around without getting frozen.

I couldnt imagine my family or friends having to walk in this weather, she said in an interview with Seaway News. So I posted on Facebook if anyone needed a ride to call me. My cousin Joel sent me a message and asked for a ride to the gym. Once I dropped him off I decided to drive around and look for people.

Marion stopped and spoke with six people and wound up giving a ride to three people in total and she shared her journey on social media with selfies with her riders. She said that the strangers were surprised, but were appreciative.

Marion said that she was happy to offer help to those who needed it and would absolutely do it again.
CORNWALL, Ontario  At 106, Stella Deneault is still as sharp as they come.

I feel pretty good, said Denault from her room at Woodland Villa in Long Sault. The only thing is my eyes and my ears.

Denault is hard of hearing and blind, but her memory does not fail her and neither does her spirit.

The secret is that you dont know so I always took it one day at a time, she said. When you live, you dont know what will happen tomorrow.

Deneault has lived in the Cornwall area since she was 10-years-old when she moved into the city with her mother from Coteau Station.

She has seen a lot of changes in the region since then. She has seen business come and go and has seen social norms change. Deneault remembers a time when married women were not allowed to work.

At the age of 21, Stella Deneault was working at the Courtaulds textile factory in the reel room. She was also planning to get married, which she did at St. Columbans Church in Cornwall on the night of Dec. 26, 1932.

Deneault said that she chose to get married during the Christmas break because she would not have to take time off work. Denault did not want her employer to know she was married because she did not want to lose her job. A fellow employee however let it slip to her supervisor that she had married over the holidays and she was let go.

I liked it because I was making $12 a week, she said. Its not like today where you make that in an hour, that was a lot of money back then.

Deneault has done some traveling in her time to Paris, France and Las Vegas, which she says she had been to quite a bit.

Stella Deneault has 12 children, 38 grandchildren, 71 great grandchildren, 39 great great grandchildren, 12 great great great grandchildren and 2 great great great great grandchildren.

Deneault will be celebrating her 106 birthday with some members of her large family, as well as some of her friends at Woodland Villa in Long Sault on Sunday, Jan. 21 from 1 p.m. If you are stopping by to visit Stella and to wish her a happy birthday, please just bring your best wishes and a smile.
CORNWALL, Ontario  Alain Boudrias, 41, and Chantal Leger, 39, both of Cornwall were arrested on Jan. 7, 2018 and charged with theft under $5, 000.

Boudrias was also charged with breach of recognizance for being outside his residence while Leger was charged with breach of undertaking for failing to keep the peace. It is alleged on Jan. 7, 2018 the two removed property from a Cumberland St. residence without permission and police were contacted to investigate. Both were taken into custody during the investigation, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing.

BREACH, POSSESSION

CORNWALL, Ontario  A 25-year-old Cornwall woman and a 29-year-old South Dundas man were arrested on Jan. 5, 2018. The woman was charged with breach of undertaking for communicating with her ex-boyfriend, being within 100 meters of him and for failing to keep the peace. She was also charged with possession of marijuana. The man was charged with breach of recognizance for failing to reside at a specific address, failing to notify a change of address and communicating with his ex-girlfriend. It is alleged during a traffic stop on Jan. 5, 2018 they were found to be in breach of their conditions and taken into custody. The woman was also found to be possession of a quantity of marijuana. Both were charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. Their names were not released as the conditions stem from domestic incidents and would identify the victims in the matter.

WARRANT

CORNWALL, Ontario  Calsy Bigtree-Thompson, 26, of Hogansburg was arrested on Jan. 6, 2018 on the strength of a warrant. It is alleged the woman breached her probation order and a warrant was issued for her arrest. On Jan. 6, 2018 the woman was stopped at the Port of Entry and police were contacted. She was taken into custody on the strength of the warrant and released to appear in court on Feb. 13, 2018.

There were 113 calls for service in the City of Cornwall in over the weekend (8am Friday to 8am Monday morning). To see whats happening in your neighbourhood visit our Crime Plot Map @ http://www.cornwallpolice.ca/ . CCPS reserves the right to not post all calls for service in order to protect the identity of the victims.
MORRISBURG, Ontario  Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi condemned the shooting of an Iranian national at the OPP office in Morrisburg.

Babak Saidi was shot and killed by a Morrisburg OPP officer on Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017. Saidi had schizophrenia and was required to check-in at the detachment once a week after a 2014 conviction for assault and battery.

Saidi was 43 and had been living in Iroquois with family members.

A member from the Morrisburg Detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) was involved in an altercation with an adult male outside of the Morrisburg OPP Detachment, read the OPPs statement on the incident. During the altercation the adult male sustained fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene. The officer is being treated for undetermined injuries.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry released a statement on the shooting on Dec. 27.

Unfortunately, weve learned that an Iranian citizen named Babak Saeedi (sic), who lived in Canada and who was ill, was gunned down by the [Canadian] police, said spokesman Bahram Qassemi in a statement. We are reviewing the details of the issue and will call on official and relevant bodies to look into the issue to shed light on its dimensions and will demand an explanation from the Canadian government, he said.

Qassemi said that Iranians in Canada often have issues reaching consular services.

Over the past two years, extensive efforts have been made to create more favourable conditions to offer consular services to Iranian expats living in Canada, but the desirable result has not been achieved yet, he said.

In 2012, the Canadian government under then Prime Minister Stephen Harper severed diplomatic relations with Iran. Current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stated that he is considering re-opening diplomatic ties.
STORY LINK GBP to AUD Exchange Rate Climbs on Analyst Forecasts for Iron Ore and ?Aussie?

GBP Advances Despite Domestic Political Uncertainties

Sterling has been dominated by Brexit-related headlines and the fact there is a bit of a constructive tone from both parties in recent weeks has removed some of the volatility premium from Sterling,

AUD Sold on Expectations for Iron Ore Price Fall and Flat Aussie in 2018

GBP/AUD Forecast: Could Pound Continue to Advance?

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Despite UK political uncertainty and a lack of strong UK ecostats in recent sessions, the British Pound to Australian Dollar exchange rate advanced on Monday, regaining most of last weeks losses due to market concerns that the Australian Dollar may be in for a relatively flat 2018.After opening last week at the level of 1.7280, GBP/AUD fluctuated and then closed the week at around 1.7234. On Monday afternoon however, the pair trended in the region of 1.7300, quickly rising above last weeks opening levels.Despite some speculation that the UK government could be getting a minister for a no deal Brexit, the Pound clawed back some gains against a weaker Australian Dollar on Monday.As UK Parliament reconvened following the winter recess, UK Prime Minister Theresa May took the New Year as an opportunity to reshuffle her government cabinet in an effort to reassert authority following a messy 2017 for the Conservative Party.The Pound saw fluctuations earlier in the day but generally had little trouble advancing against the Aussie as investors became more comfortable that the reshuffle hadnt considerably changed anything that would affect the current Brexit outlook.On top of this, Sterling became more appealing due to news that the Pound volatility index had fallen to its lowest levels in over three years.The market gauge which measures Sterling volatility against the US Dollar (USD) was trading around 6.6%, its lowest levels since November 2014, due to market expectations that the Pound would not see as many big shifts in the coming months.According to Alessio de Longis, portfolio manager from Oppenheimer Funds;Mondays UK data, Halifaxs December house price report, was disappointing and fell short of expectations. Overall though the data had little notable impact on Pound trade.The Australian Dollar tumbled against most major rivals like the Pound and the US Dollar (USD) during Monday trade, as investors digested some dovish forecasts that could affect Aussie trade throughout 2018.Monday saw Australias government forecast that prices of iron ore, Australias most lucrative commodity, would fall around 20% this year overall as demand from China eases.As China is Australias biggest trade partner and one of the largest consumers of Australian iron ore, expectations for Chinas steel sector to shrink as the nations growth slows and it fights pollution issues could lead to weaker demand for the commodity overall in the future.On top of this, the Australian Dollar was pressured by a Reuters poll suggesting that analysts predicted the AUD/USD exchange rate would be close to where it currently is at the end of 2018.Predictions that the Aussie could see relatively flat trade throughout 2018 weighed on the currencys appeal on Monday and made it easier for GBP/AUD to advance.Despite a lack of notable UK ecostats due for publication until Wednesday, the Pound could hold its Monday gains against the Australian Dollar unless Brexit concerns worsen again.If UK Prime Minister Theresa Mays cabinet reshuffle ends up being poorly received or cause concerns about the Brexit process, this could cause some bearish Pound reaction throughout the week.Pound investors will of course remain on the lookout for any news about the potential tone that the second phase of Brexit negotiations will take when they begin in March.The Australian Dollar is unlikely to quickly recover its Monday losses, due to a lack of highly notable Australian ecostats due on Tuesday. Australian building permits data could influence the Aussie slightly however.The GBP/AUD exchange rate is more likely to be influenced by political news and risk-sentiment until Wednesday, when Australias NAB business confidence data will come in as well as Britains trade and production reports from November.Australian retail data is due on Thursday. If this weeks Australian data all impresses investors it could bolster hopes of a more hawkish Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) which could make the Aussie more appealing again.

International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements.

TAGS: Pound Australian Dollar Forecasts
Russia's Experimental Hybrid War With Ukraine

Since 2014 Russia has used Ukraine as a testing ground for its hybrid warfare doctrine, underscoring what some security experts say is a case study for the new kinds of security threats the US and its Western allies can anticipate from Moscow.

The threats Ukraine faces are harbingers of things to come for the US and its other allies, said Junaid Islam, chief technology officer and president of Vidder , a California-based cybersecurity firm that does work in Ukraine. It is in the national strategic interests of both the United States and Ukraine to cooperate deeply in cybersecurity because Ukraine is a canary in the cyberspace coal mine, Islam said

A top Ukrainian security official recently disclosed a cyber warfare tactic honed by Russia in Ukraine, which could be a bellwether for Russias next act of political warfare against the US.

The Ukrainian government recently has been attacked by undetectable computer viruses that target particular individuals, in particular departments, and theyre constructed based on the social understanding of social media by particular people, Dmytro Shymkiv , deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on Administrative, Social and Economic Reform, explained recently at the 2017 Future in Review conference. Russia recruits psychiatrists, scientists, and neurologists, who construct these things to target particular individuals, Shymkiv said.

According to Ukrainian security officials, Russian agents build a psychological profile of their mark through his or her social media footprint. Then, using that information, the Russians can make personalised computer viruses, or run a social media influence operation specifically crafted with that one particular person in mind. People say, Well, thats a science fiction. Its not, Shymkiv said. When the annexation of Crimea took place, [Russia] shut down the internet to Ukraine, and they used social media to influence peoples behavior. And you can influence peoples behavior. You do it in a nice way, posting things to their friends, et cetera. Theres a whole factory in Russia doing this.

This is known in the cybersecurity world as social engineering, a form of cyberattack in which people are psychologically manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. According to some security experts, the best defense against this kind of threat is education. Man is the weakest link in the chain of information technology, said Mykhailo Vasyanovich, head of the Public Council for the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine. With such cyberattacks, which are now taking place in Ukraine, it is necessary to raise the level of information technology literacy of users by conducting educational work on cybersecurity among employees of private and state enterprises, Vasyanovich said.

Some experts worry this reliance on the security savvy of Internet users to fend off Russian cyberattacks might be a vulnerability for the US. What may especially worry the US is that Russia targets influential individuals, such as journalists or political analysts, especially those of rather skeptical approach toward Moscow, Daniel Szeligowski, senior research fellow on Ukraine for the Polish Institute of International Affairs, told The Daily Signal. Unlike institutions or infrastructure, they dont have state protection and are thus vulnerable to intimidation and blackmailing, Szeligowski added. And given the rising popularity of social media, such a threat is even more widespread.

Hybrid War

Russias hybrid attacks against Ukraine have included, but are not limited to:

 Using social media to shape public opinion among an adversarys population.

 Turning commercially available computer software into a tool for espionage and cyberwarfare.

 Exploiting smartphones to spy on and wage psychological warfare against an adversarys military forces.

 Using cyberattacks to undermine an adversarys electoral process.

 Using pseudo-news reports to push a propaganda line that sows division within an adversarys national culture.

All of these tactics have also been used by Russia against the U.S. since Russo-American relations took a nosedive in the fallout over Russias military aggression against Ukraine in early 2014. Ukraine is a perfect testing ground for hybrid warfare, Szeligowski said. Thus, it is no wonder that Russia has already seized the opportunity, and in Ukraine it has made a dry run of all sorts of its offensive techniques.

Russian hybrid warfare is not covert warfare. Rather, its the combined use of conventional military force with other means such as cyberattacks and propaganda to sow chaos and confusion, both on the battlefield and deep behind the front lines.

Hybrid warfare is an evolving threat spanning every combat domain. Particularly, hybrid warfare weaponises many pieces of everyday life, including smartphones, social media networks, commercially available computer software, and journalism.

Russia is testing in Ukraine both procedures and concepts, which later on are being applied in the West, such as during the US and French elections, a Polish security spoke incognito, asking not to be named due to professional restrictions on speaking to the media.

In short, Ukraine remains for Russia a crucial hybrid warfare battleground and testbed, the security official said. The Russian hybrid warfare model is being further developed, perfected, and tested as we speak. Russias ability to escalate rapidly across the whole spectrum of conflict makes the West prone to the surprise effect.

Russias use of social media and cyberattacks as weapons of war might be innovative, but, at its core, its a modern revamp of a Cold War-era idea. Hybrid warfare is the Kremlins contemporary take on a Soviet military doctrine called deep battle, in which front-line combat operations are supported with operations to spread chaos and confusion deep within the enemys country. Hybrid warfare also draws on the Soviet Unions well-documented history of influence operations against the US and other Western allies.

In effect, Russias overall strategy to undermine the West hasnt changed all that much from the Soviet Unions playbook. But the world in which those Soviet theories are now put into practice is a radically different one than during the Cold War.

The advent of the internet, and social media in particular, has given the Kremlin direct access to the populations of its adversaries, bypassing the gatekeeper role Americas media institutions used to play. Everything today is digitised, including phone and mail services, and everything runs on the same network, Kenneth Geers, ambassador of NATOs cybersecurity center and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The Daily Signal. There is only one Internet, and one cyberspace, inhabited by all of the worlds citizens, soldiers, spies, and statesmen.

Meanwhile, Americans distrust in their media institutions has reached historic levels. Russia has stealthily taken advantage of Americans crisis of confidence in the media to permeate the US news cycle with misinformation spread by propaganda mouthpieces cloaked as alternative news sources, such as RT and Sputnik.

Lessons Learned

Some commercial cybersecurity firms have stepped in both to harden Ukraines cyber-defenses and use lessons learned from Ukraine to craft better defenses for the US to counter Russia. With the world increasingly digital and connected, Ukraine is of strategic, vital interest to the West, said Greg Ness, a cybersecurity specialist and vice president of marketing at Vidder . What happens in Ukraine doesnt stay in Ukraine. California-based Vidder has put together a team of cybersecurity experts to comprise the core of a proposed US-Ukraine cybersecurity center with offices in Kyiv, Washington, and Silicon Valley.

By ensuring that Ukraine adopts leading cybersecurity solutions and best practices, we will not only provide Ukraine with the best protection from cyberattacks, but it also helps US experts develop new and more effective technologies and strategies in the future, Islam, Vidders president, said. It will also help establish Ukraine as a secure, stable, prosperous, and reliable ally in Eastern Europe.

The war in Ukraine has shaped how NATO forces are training for the next military conflict. NATO and Ukraine already cooperate in a joint center to counter hybrid warfare. The center is part of the Comprehensive Assistance Package that NATO pledged to Ukraine during the alliances summit in Warsaw last year.

According to NATO, the joint center will be a platform for identifying lessons learned from hybrid war in Ukraine.

For its part, the US military has reportedly been studying the war in Ukraine to shape its own military doctrine. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Trump administrations national security adviser, recently directed a study to analyse Russias hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine in order to craft recommendations for the US Army.

Not all of Russias hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine would be effective against the US. There is a yawning gap between Ukrainian and American cyber capabilities, not to mention cultural and linguistic differences between Russians and Americans, Szeligowski said. But it goes beyond any doubt that, at least at some point, Russia already used hybrid warfare instruments against the US, and did it effectively.

Hybrid Way of Life

The effects of Russias proxy war against Ukraine are limited to a 250-mile-long static front line in southeastern Ukraines Donbas region. The war is moderated in intensity and is geographically frozen according to the rules of the February 2015 cease-fire deal, known as Minsk II. More than 10,100 Ukrainians have died so far in the war. The conflict has displaced about 1.7 million people. Yet, the physical consequences of the war are quarantined from most of the country. Outside the range of the artillery, mortars, rockets, and tank shots, youd hardly know there was war going on.

On a physical battlefield, a war extends as far as the range of the weapons used. In hybrid warfare, however, the battlefield knows no limit.

Consequently, theres hardly any part of Ukrainian life that hasnt been affected by Russias ongoing hybrid war.

Russian cyberattacks have hit Ukraines power grid, water supply systems, the countrys banking system (shutting down ATMs), its largest international airport, and the electoral process.

In December 2016, a cyberattack, which Ukrainian officials attributed to Russia, took down one-fifth of Kyivs electrical grid . Since 2014, Ukrainian security services have thwarted numerous cyberattacks in which malware from abroad was used in attempts to steal classified information from Ukrainian government networks. In the eyes of Ukrainian security officials, the internet has become as much of a battlefield as the trenches in the Donbas region. The main goal of Russias information warfare, according to Ukrainian security officials, is to incite civil unrest throughout all of Ukraine and to undermine the governments credibility.

Since 2014, Ukraine has established a Situation Center for Cybersecurity , and Ukrainian officials have fostered closer ties to Western intelligence agencies to bolster their cyber-defenses.

Security State

Russias purchase of $100,000 worth of Facebook advertisements in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election sparked a media frenzy in America and an outcry from lawmakers for social media sites to provide better transparency about the identity of those who purchase advertisements on their sites.

In Ukraine, Russia has been exploiting social media as a weapon of war for years.

In a sweeping ban announced in May, Ukrainian officials banned Russian internet search engines, including Yandex, as well as popular Russian social media sites such as VKontakte, which millions of Ukrainians used. The ban prompted some pushback from Ukrainians, who used these sites for many daily tasks and for social reasons. But Ukrainian officials insisted the sites posed a national security threat, which warranted the free speech trade-off.

Also in May, Ukraine banned commercially available Russian software, including anti-virus software from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, the same company US officials now say was used as a Trojan horse for Russian intelligence agencies to steal classified information from the US government. The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalise on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates US national security, the Department of Homeland Security said in a Sept. 13 statement posted to its website.

US intelligence officials said Russian intelligence services had modified anti-virus software from Kaspersky Lab to clandestinely search computers around the world for classified US government documents and top-secret information.

Possessing a worldwide deployment of sensors may be too great a temptation for any countrys intelligence service to ignore, and Kaspersky may have been forced into a quiet business partnership with the Russian government, Geers, the NATO cybersecurity specialist, said.

Similarly, news reports recently detailed how Russian military forces have been targeting the smartphones of NATO troops to gather intelligence. Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern war zone have long been advised by their leaders not to turn on their smartphones while in the war zone. Russian forces reportedly have used the cell signals emitting from Ukrainian soldiers phones to target its artillery. For years, Ukrainian soldiers have reported receiving death threats and demands for their surrender from their enemies over cellphone text messages.

New Weapons

Journalism has been one of Russias most lethal weapons against Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have banned a slew of Russian TV stations from broadcasting in Ukraine, and foreign journalists accused of spreading Russian propaganda have been booted out of the country. Anti-propaganda outlets in Ukraine such as StopFake.org also monitor media reports for Russian disinformation and are dedicated to setting the record straight.

To counter Russian propaganda in the war zone, Ukraines government has rebuilt its TV and radio broadcast network in the east, which Russia and its separatist proxies destroyed in the opening days of the war.

For years, Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine could access only Russian TV channels for their news. Now, Ukraine has taken back control of the airwaves. While not as evident or as spectacular as the artillery bombardments and the tank battles, the battle for broadcast dominance in eastern Ukraine is a key piece of the overall war effort for Kyiv. After all, many Ukrainian citizens in eastern Ukraine cant tell whether the artillery they are living under is fired from Ukrainian or Russian forces. And so long as they had access only to Russian television networks, which exclusively painted Ukrainian forces as the aggressor and, consequently, responsible for all civilian casualties, public opinion toward Ukraines central government was under an endless stress test as the war dragged on.

Now, with Ukraine able to defend itself on the airwaves, Russia has lost a potent weapon to turn the citizens of eastern Ukraine against their own government. Similarly, US lawmakers have debated how to defend the US population against Kremlin-backed news outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik, which US officials have called out as Russian propaganda mouthpieces.

The FBI reportedly has turned to a US law intended to prevent the spread of Nazi propaganda to determine whether the two Russian media outlets should register as foreign agents.

In America, as has been the case in Ukraine, manipulation of the media by a foreign power increasingly is regarded as a hostile act warranting retaliation. America has experienced a sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our countrys division, former President George W. Bush said in alast year. Russia has made a project of turning Americans against each other, Bush said, adding, Foreign aggressions, including cyberattacks, disinformation, and financial influence, should never be downplayed or tolerated.

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I went on a tour of North Korea in July 1989, when I was in Kerala. We couldnt travel directly to its capital Pyongyang. We got off at Beijing in China, took help from our embassy, and boarded a train to Pyongyang.

I was already sick of the huge advertisements appearing in The Hindu, praising Kim as a great leader. I was hosted at a five-star hotel. It was five-star only in name; the food and amenities were ordinary. Like in the Moscow of Stalins time, huge palaces loomed everywhere. You bought daily use products at these palaces. At one such palace, beneath a glittering chandelier, I saw people queueing up for bread. Like all countries in Europe, Russia dreamed of building an empire like Rome, and was not able to build a socialist society finding comfort and happiness in its everyday ordinariness. It was evident in Pyongyang that a similar ambition  to become a great nation  had turned North Korea into a disturbed nation. Anxious that the world was not recognising it, the country was advertising aggressively.

The paradox is that North Korea does not need all this anymore. After it made it known to the world that it could produce a nuclear bomb, it is featured regularly on CNN and BBC. The country has achieved its objective; it has found an identity. All nations that depend on nuclear power to establish their greatness keep their citizens hungry and impoverished. Even Stalin, who embalmed and preserved Lenins body, destroyed Lenins ideals, and did something similar. The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight: it had grown into a dinosaur nation.

India has now caught the attention of the world with its nuclear capability. It is dreaming of joining the great nations of the world. As it dreams, farmers unable to deal with their debt are committing suicide. Capitalism and communism, both developed by the West, are ultimately anti-people. In their technological naivete, they are anti-life.

Suragi, by UR Ananthamurthy; Translated from Kannada by SR Ramakrishna; Oxford University Press

I ate bland, tasteless Korean food at the hotel, and saw everything I was expected to see to understand the might of Korea. I travelled with two interpreters. Kim Sangs face was everywhere, at every elevation. His new name Kim means the sun. We saw his village and his humble home. After the Second World War, when America and the Soviet Union were trying to polarise the nations of the world, Kim was on the Soviet side. This hero had fought against Japan in the Red Army and became a leader in North Korea. He was thirty-three in 1945. The consensus seemed to be that he was a true peoples leader. He had taken part in a guerrilla war against the Japanese who had occupied Korea. There was no comparable leader in South Korea. I didnt see a single person in North Korea who wasnt wearing a badge with his picture. They say a ruler must be loved and feared by his people. Even if he is not loved, he must be feared.

People forced to live in fear may deceive themselves into believing they love what they fear. All evil people who want to build nations know this. Ashoka was perhaps the only exception.

My interpreter friends said Kim was a greater thinker than Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Going against the belief that Mao had added a new dimension to communism, they believed Kim had taken a bigger stride. Not only had he added a new dimension but he had also fathered a son who could continue his work. Kim, in power now, used to be called the Dear Leader. He is still called that.

Another unforgettable memory is from my trip to a peak in North Korea. It goes by the name of Summit Myohyangsan, meaning "mysterious fragrant mountain". Photo: Juche Travels

Initially, in terms of its economy, North Korea was ahead of South Korea. Although North Korea had taken help from the Soviet Union and China, Kims followers went about saying he was no flunkey. They used a word to describe this: juche. It means self-reliance. In this idea of self-reliance, the Soviet Union and China had played a significant role. When those two countries were in conflict, Kim was inclined in favour of China, and that had affected the North Korean economy. I saw many impressive schools, factories, and military units. No truth can be gleaned from such a tour. These are meant to impress visitors. I will not write about them but will record two unusual experiences.

A girl from South Korea, called Rim, had come to North Korea to take part in a tournament. She had defied her government and arrived in North Korea without her countrys permission. The day after I landed there, she had turned into a hero in North Korea. With her as the focus a movement began to unify the two Koreas. Several Palestinians, besides a Gandhian from America, took part in this movement. I was one of those who believed the two countries should come together, and joined the demonstration. Being a foreigner supporting the cause, I made news. I marched in the procession, and made a speech. My interpreters were delighted. I used to ask every day, "Take me to a restaurant where common Koreans eat."

They finally gathered the courage to heed my request. When they tried to usher me in as a VIP, I objected. I stood in a queue, waited like the others, and ate authentic Korean fare. Each of those I saw there wore a Kim badge. Many people identified me as a participant in the movement, and shook hands.

As I write, I recall something from the past. When the two Koreas were at war  that is, when America and the Soviet Union were at war  Aurobindo, one of the great seers of our country, took a stand. He broke his silence and said we should side with the Americans in this war. I regard him highly for his scholarship, and I am still perplexed by his position. Why just Aurobindo, even Karanth, Adiga, and Shah, the editor of Quest magazine, were in favour of America. Their rivals, such as Bhisham Sahni, had seen the cruelty of the Soviet Union, but closed their eyes to it. The great nations conspired to stop these two nations from uniting, a desire in the hearts of all Koreans. The origins of all problems in todays world can be traced to the sins of these two nations.

Does Korea love its culture? Is it searching for an identity? A South Korean writer told me, "Few read what we write in Korean. All American books, even the awful ones, get translated instantly into Korean, writer Saul Bellow included. Translation is a curse." In Washington, once, I met an adventurous businessman from Udupi. He knew Shivarama Karanth, and had a rich inner life. He used to frequent South Korea for business. He once wished to see historical places there. His friends and fellow businessmen there told him, "We dont want our past. We are trying to erase it completely, and become new. We have never been to these historical places." North Koreans, who have gained independence from their Japanese colonisers, think of themselves as the true Koreans. I asked my companions, "Is there an ancient Buddhist temple I can see?" They said they had banned all faiths but those who wished to retain their shrines had been allowed to do so. They took me to a Buddhist temple that had survived this way.

They say a ruler must be loved and feared by his people. Even if he is not loved, he must be feared. Photo: Reuters

I saw an emaciated monk. His upper garment didnt have a badge of Kim, the countrys supreme leader. Perhaps we could say he was free to that extent. He showed me the old books in the shrine. He got little by way of honorarium from the villages around, as he might have in an earlier age. A couple of elderly people were walking in and out for their prayers. He answered my questions in a manner that would please my companions. I asked them, "Isnt Buddhism important to you?" What they said in reply was not too different from what the South Koreans had told me. "We live in a new age. Our great leader Kim is creating his age. He has gone beyond Buddha, Marx, and Lenin, and presented his ideas." I didnt let them go at that. "Isnt Buddha important in your cultural history for any reason?" One of my companions pondered. He stopped me, and gave me an astonishing answer. "Buddha is important from the perspective of printing technology. His disciples were the first to print books." I was stupefied by his reply.

I must add another observation here. I started thinking about the life of the emaciated, pathetic monk and his ancestors. People in the villages were probably sharecroppers. These monks must have had the power to punish those who didnt hand them their shares. As one who had come from a religious order, I knew how, as part of the daily ritual of worship, property was routinely confiscated. Yet I need all of them  Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Shankara, Madhwa, Ramanuja, Ramana, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. I need them without their materialist critics, and without their fake acolytes. I need them as themselves. I need them as people of their time, and also as people relevant to our times.

Another unforgettable memory is from my trip to a peak in North Korea. It goes by the name of Summit Myohyangsan, meaning "mysterious fragrant mountain". At 57, forgetting my diabetic problems, I climbed it with my companions. Hundreds of others were also climbing it. They were strong. Some were Korean soldiers. We stopped when we felt tired. I climbed on in anticipation of reaching the summit. Suddenly my blood sugar plummeted, and I started shivering. I felt giddy, and blacked out for a moment. I slumped to the ground. I didnt have any candy in my pocket. My companions, who loved American chocolate, didnt have any sweet on them either. I saw soldiers marching on, carrying food on their shoulders. I pointed at the packets. A soldier came to me and opened his packet. It had some stale rice, cooked long ago. He lovingly gave me what he would have eaten for lunch. He told me, in humility and in a language I couldnt follow, to eat it. I devoured it as if at a feast, and recovered. I felt the energy slowly returning to my body, and enjoyed the experience.

A woman was taking a child to the peak. I had been in the news in Korea, and she identified me. She carried some toffee for her child. She offered me some. Disgusted with Kim and his intoxicated self-praise, I was suddenly struck by the goodness of the people and forgot all my political thoughts. I felt better, and climbed all the way to the summit. A palace stands there. It is grand beyond description. It is meant to proclaim the splendour of their supreme leader Kim. It is filled with aircraft and cars  gifted to him by Stalin and the Chinese premier  and stunning statuettes and plaques made of gold and silver, gifted by other countries. They ushered me in to look at the books. It had books on Kim, written by writers from across the world. Surprisingly, I found hundreds of books written by Indians. I could not recognise even one of those authors. They were slim books but produced lavishly and bound in leather.

We came down the mountain and reached a pond. I was so exhausted I flopped down on a bench. My two companions took off their suits. They stripped me down to my underwear and began to massage my body. Their fingers had a miraculous power. They had a mischievous twinkle in their eyes that helped me overcome my inhibitions. My body was gradually rejuvenated. They fetched tea from somewhere, made me sip it, and escorted me to the car.

My companions, who had been so loving, began to trouble me from the next day. "Our great leader Kim is getting old. You must write a book on him," one of them said. They wanted me, as vice-chancellor of a university, to get him a DLitt. "Please, please..." I assumed they were trying to get promotions, and said regretfully, "I have no authority to grant a DLitt to a political leader. But a book?" "I dont write such books," I said. They offered to fund the writing. I declined. My companions thought I was just being modest, and continued to take good care of me for the rest of my stay in their capital.

After I reached Kerala they got people to call me from the Korean embassy, and continued to pressure me. All that is past now. North Korea has armed itself with nuclear weapons, and is on the path of self-destruction, like many other countries.

They no longer need writers like me. While talking to an official about Korean agriculture, I had told him about ragi, the millet we grow with little rainfall. He asked me to send him some seeds. I didnt write a book or give Kim a doctorate. But I did send the official some ragi.
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By India Today Web Desk: Who would not want to catch a glimpse of where and how the President of India lives?

The larger-than-life grandeur of the presidential house would undoubtedly attract one and all and that is what makes the Rastrapati Bhavan a major tourist attraction, apart from being the official seat of the President.

Even President Ram Nath Kovind has now invited all Indians to visit the presidential house or what he has called the ''embodiment of the Indian Republic.''

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The official social-media page of the President of India recently shared a video that takes you on a virtual tour of the 340-room presidential mansion.

''I welcome you to visit Rashtrapati Bhavan, the embodiment of the Indian Republic. It belongs to all Indians. Do come and see it,'' the post was captioned.

I welcome you to visit Rashtrapati Bhavan, the embodiment of the Indian Republic. It belongs to all Indians. Do come and see it #PresidentKovind pic.twitter.com/xH6SXFZNLX- President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) January 7, 2018

The 43-second video gives you a sneak-peek into various corners of the mansion, including Durbar Hall (where India's first independent government was sworn in), a wonderfully decorated Ashoka Hall (where introductions for visiting foreign delegations by the Heads of Missions of foreign countries are held), the library, the state dining room, the south drawing room, thus leaving you awestruck with its sheer magnificence.

Photo: Twitter/IncredibleBhumi Photo: Twitter/IncredibleBhumi

Also Read:Rashtrapati Bhavan to open up areas never seen before by tourists

President Kovind had earlier extended a similar invitation to people, two months ago.

This isn't the first time that the Rashtrapati Bhavan has been opened to tourists. What made the difference this time was President Kovind's personal touch to the invitation.

Besides, the website, where people have to fix an appointment before visiting, has also been refurbished. A nominal registration charge of Rs 50 will have to be paid by visitors above the age of eight. Now, one can also purchase souvenirs from the government's online store, reported NDTV.

Rashtrapati Bhavan is open to visitors four days in a week, which are Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, as mentioned in the video.

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GSK plc, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the creation, discovery, development, manufacture, and marketing of pharmaceutical products, vaccines, over-the-counter medicines, and health-related consumer products in the United Kingdom, the United States, and internationally. It operates through four segments: Pharmaceuticals, Pharmaceuticals R&D, Vaccines, and Consumer Healthcare. The company offers pharmaceutical products comprising medicines in the therapeutic areas, such as respiratory, HIV, immuno-inflammation, oncology, anti-viral, central nervous system, cardiovascular and urogenital, metabolic, anti-bacterial, and dermatology. It also provides consumer healthcare products in wellness, oral health, nutrition, and skin health categories. The company offers its consumer healthcare products in the form of nasal sprays, tablets, syrups, lozenges, gum and trans-dermal patches, caplets, infant syrup drops, liquid filled suspension, wipes, gels, effervescents, toothpastes, toothbrushes, mouthwashes, denture adhesives and cleansers, topical creams and non-medicated patches, lip balm, gummies, and soft chews. It has collaboration agreements with 23andMe; Lyell Immunopharma, Inc.; Novartis; Sanofi SA; Surface Oncology; Progentec Diagnostics, Inc.; Alector, Inc.; and CureVac AG., as well as strategic partnership with IDEAYA Biosciences, Inc. and Vir Biotechnology, Inc. The company was formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline plc and changed its name to GSK plc in May 2022. GSK plc was founded in 1715 and is headquartered in Brentford, the United Kingdom.
Few of the important trains that are stuck due to the strike are Rajdhani 12423, Sariagat Express 12346, Shatabdi Express, and Darjeeling Mail.

By Manogya Loiwal : A 12-hour strike called by Jharkhand Disom Party protesting against the Religious Freedom Act and the Land Tenancy Act passed by the Supreme court has massively affected daily life in West Bengal.

The protestors in order to demonstrate their anger and disapproval against the Act, blocked many railway lines and disrupted the daily schedule of the passengers.

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A passenger travelling via Rajdhani said, "The problem should be solved as we are suffering for no reason here. We have been standing here for over 4 hours and no one is paying any heed. The locals and the station master said that the train won't move until Mamata Banerjee comes here."

Few of the important trains that are stuck due to the strike are Rajdhani 12423, Sariagat Express 12346, Shatabdi Express, and Darjeeling Mail.

Also, 4 DMU trains have returned and many passenger trains have been cancelled.

Upon asking for the reason Durga Hembrom, the General Secretary of Uttar Dinajpur Jharkhand Disham Party said, "We called for 12 hours of Bharat Bandh with the claim of abolishing Jharkhand Land Tenancy Bill and Jharkhand Religious Freedom Bill which were passed in 2017. Earlier, the tribal lands were not sold to other tribes, but with the passage of this Bill, it allows the selling and the registry of land to other tribes. These bill are making lives of the tribal people miserable. Therefore, we want immediate abolition of these bills."

Tribals have gathered in front of the railway lines with almost 500 to 600 supporters along with their traditional weapons.

On account of the strike, Bramhaputra Mail, Tevaga Express, Padatik Express, several goods train and a huge number of vehicles got stuck. Places which are affected because of this strike are Cooch Behar, Bardhaman, Bakura and Malda.

Trains in the entire north Bengal en route Assam are now delayed by more than 12 hours and many are yet to reach their destination.

(With inputs from Bhabananda Singha, Anil Giri and Kayes Ansari)

WATCH | India Today Conclave East 2017: Mamata Banerjee lashes out at PM Modi, calls him Tughlaq

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BorgWarner Inc. provides solutions for combustion, hybrid, and electric vehicles worldwide. The company operates through four segments: Air Management, E-Propulsion & Drivetrain, Fuel Injection, and Aftermarket. The Air Management segment offers turbochargers, eBoosters, eTurbos, timing systems, emissions systems, thermal systems, gasoline ignition technology, smart remote actuators, powertrain sensors, canisters, cabin heaters, battery modules and systems, battery packs, battery heaters, and battery charging. The E-Propulsion & Drivetrain segment provides rotating electrical components, power electronics, control modules, software, friction, and mechanical products for automatic transmissions and torque-management products. The Fuel Injection segment develops and manufactures gasoline and diesel fuel injection components and systems. The Aftermarket segment sells products and services to independent aftermarket customers and original equipment service customers. This segment provides a range of solutions, including fuel injection, electronics and engine management, maintenance, and test equipment and vehicle diagnostics. The company sells its products to original equipment manufacturers of light vehicles, which comprise passenger cars, sport-utility vehicles, vans, and light trucks; commercial vehicles, including medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks, and buses; and off-highway vehicles, such as agricultural and construction machinery, and marine applications, as well as to tier one vehicle systems suppliers and the aftermarket for light, commercial, and off-highway vehicles. The company was formerly known as Borg-Warner Automotive, Inc. BorgWarner Inc. was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company discovers, develops, licenses, manufactures, and markets biopharmaceutical products worldwide. It offers products for hematology, oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, fibrotic, neuroscience, and covid-19 diseases. The company's products include Revlimid, an oral immunomodulatory drug for the treatment of multiple myeloma; Eliquis, an oral inhibitor for reduction in risk of stroke/systemic embolism in NVAF, and for the treatment of DVT/PE; Opdivo for anti-cancer indications; Pomalyst/Imnovid indicated for patients with multiple myeloma; and Orencia for adult patients with active RA and psoriatic arthritis. It also provides Sprycel for the treatment of Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia; Yervoy for the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma; Abraxane, a protein-bound chemotherapy product; Reblozyl for the treatment of anemia in adult patients with beta thalassemia; and Empliciti for the treatment of multiple myeloma. In addition, the company offers Zeposia to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis; Breyanzi, a CD19-directed genetically modified autologous T cell immunotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma; Inrebic, an oral kinase inhibitor indicated for the treatment of adult patients with myelofibrosis; and Onureg for the treatment of adult patients with AML. It sells products to wholesalers, distributors, pharmacies, retailers, hospitals, clinics, and government agencies. The company was formerly known as Bristol-Myers Company. The company was founded in 1887 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
Chevron Corporation, through a network of subsidiaries, engages in integrated energy and chemicals operations worldwide. The company is the 7th largest integrated oil company worldwide, the 2nd largest in the US, and has been in operation since 1879. Chevron was part of the original Standard Oil Company and is one of the 34 successor companies that were formed when it was broken up. Today, the company brings in roughly $160 billion in annual revenues and is the last remaining oil and gas component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Originally called Standard Oil Of California the company grew quickly via mergers and acquisitions. It was hailed as one of the Seven Sisters to dominate the US and global production throughout the mid-20th century and became even bigger in 1985 when it merged with Gulf Oil. The merger with Gulf Oil resulted in the rebranding from Standard Oil Of California to Chevron (a brand used by the company outside its California jurisdiction) and then ChevronTexaco Corporation in 2005 when that merger took place. The company rebranded again in 2005 to what we know today as Chevron Corporation.

Chevron Corporation is now based in San Ramone, California, and has operations in 180 countries. The company employs more than 42,500 people who operate 5 refineries and 8,000+ Texaco, Chevron, and Standard Oil service stations in the US alone. The company's Exploration and Drilling operations produced a record 3.1 million barrels per day and its US refineries process more than 1 million barrels per day. At the end of 2021, the company has more than 11.3 billion barrels of proven oil and liquid-equivalent reserves and boasted a 112% reserve replacement rate.

The company operates in two segments, Upstream and Downstream. The Upstream segment explores new reserves, develops known reserves, produces petroleum and gas products as needed, transports, processes, pipes, stores, and markets petroleum worldwide. The Downstream segment refines and markets the full line of petroleum-based products including but not limited to fuels such as gas, diesel, and aviation fuel, as well as lubricants, petrochemicals, and plastics. The company transports products via pipeline, rail, marine vessels, and truck.

Chevron recognizes the need to lower the worlds carbon output and is working toward that end. The companys strategy is two-pronged and includes reducing its own carbon output while investing in green and lower-carbon technologies. The companys goal is to invest $10 billion or more into lower carbon energy sources and technologies by 2028.

Chevron is a Dividend Aristocrat. The company has been paying a dividend since 1989 and it has raised it every year since its inception.






Rahul Gandhi will address political heads and the business community of Indian origin in Bahrain and discuss the state of Indian economy.

By India Today Web Desk: Congress President Rahul Gandhi is in Bahrain on a one-day trip. This will be Rahul Gandhi's first international trip as Congress President.

Rahul received a warm welcome in Bahrain. The Congress' twitter handle tweeted a video showing the grand reception Rahul Gandhi received in Bahrain.

Euphoric reception for Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain. This is CP's first foreign visit after his takeover. pic.twitter.com/zsGOaXnwCv- Congress (@INCIndia) January 7, 2018

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The newly elected Congress President will be addressing the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin. Before leaving for the gulf country, Rahul Gandhi had called out to the NRIs in a tweet reiterating that NRIs are the brand ambassadors of a nation.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow.- Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 7, 2018

Rahul Gandhi will address political heads and the business community of Indian origin in Bahrain and discuss the state of Indian economy. According to former Congress MP Madhu Goud Yashki, who is travelling with Rahul Gandhi, the NRIs are worried about the "slowdown in the Indian economy".

Rahul will also meet Prince Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa of Bahrain.

Here are some photos of Rahul Gandhi's arrival in Bahrain:

Image credit: Twitter/@INCIndia

Image credit: Twitter/@INCIndia

Image credit: Twitter/@INCIndia

Image credit: Twitter/@INCIndia

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Pfizer Inc. discovers, develops, manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells biopharmaceutical products worldwide. It offers medicines and vaccines in various therapeutic areas, including cardiovascular metabolic and women's health under the Premarin family and Eliquis brands; biologics, small molecules, immunotherapies, and biosimilars under the Ibrance, Xtandi, Sutent, Inlyta, Retacrit, Lorbrena, and Braftovi brands; and sterile injectable and anti-infective medicines, and oral COVID-19 treatment under the Sulperazon, Medrol, Zavicefta, Zithromax, Vfend, Panzyga, and Paxlovid brands. The company also provides medicines and vaccines in various therapeutic areas, such as pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, tick-borne encephalitis, and COVID-19 under the Comirnaty/BNT162b2, Nimenrix, FSME/IMMUN-TicoVac, Trumenba, and the Prevnar family brands; biosimilars for chronic immune and inflammatory diseases under the Xeljanz, Enbrel, Inflectra, Eucrisa/Staquis, and Cibinqo brands; and amyloidosis, hemophilia, and endocrine diseases under the Vyndaqel/Vyndamax, BeneFIX, and Genotropin brands. In addition, the company is involved in the contract manufacturing business. It serves wholesalers, retailers, hospitals, clinics, government agencies, pharmacies, and individual provider offices, as well as disease control and prevention centers. The company has collaboration agreements with Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Astellas Pharma US, Inc.; Myovant Sciences Ltd.; Akcea Therapeutics, Inc; Merck KGaA; Valneva SE; BioNTech SE; and Arvinas, Inc. Pfizer Inc. was founded in 1849 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
In Bahrain, Rahul Gandhi appealed for NRIs' help to protect the basic principles of non-violence and brotherhood.

By Supriya Bhardwaj: Congress President Rahul Gandhi told an gathering of Indians from 50 countries that they were part of a solution to India's "serious" problem, and assured them they were indispensable to a global vision for the country.

Recently appointed the leader of India's oldest party, Rahul was speaking at the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin in Manama. He told his audience he was there to "build a bridge" between wherever they were, and "home."

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Rahul tore into the Modi administration in his speech, saying job creation and bank credit growth were the lowest they had been in several years (in the second case, decades).

I am here to tell you what you mean to our country, that youA??re important, to tell you there is a serious problem at home, to tell you that youA??re part of the solution and that I am here to build a bridge between wherever you are in the world and home. pic.twitter.com/Ki2cQsRSZs- Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 8, 2018

He lamented the "rise in forces of hate and division." Instead of accepting that India is struggling to create jobs, and uniting people of all religions and communities to face that challenge, the Modi government is busy converting the fear felt by jobless youth into hatred between communities, Rahul said.

The Congress chief recalled the BJP's narrow win the Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state. "Gujarat is (the) BJP's bastion and it has just narrowly escaped," he said.

He appealed for the NRIs' help to protect the basic principles of non-violence and brotherhood, saying their "talent, skills, tolerance, patriotism" were what India needed.

"All of you in this room are proof that India can bridge any gap that is put before it. No global vision for India can be built without you," he explained.

WATCH | People of Gujarat reject Modi's hollow development model, Rahul speaks after defeat

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Wells Fargo & Company, a diversified financial services company, provides banking, investment, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance products and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through four segments: Consumer Banking and Lending; Commercial Banking; Corporate and Investment Banking; and Wealth and Investment Management. The Consumer Banking and Lending segment offers diversified financial products and services for consumers and small businesses. Its financial products and services include checking and savings accounts, and credit and debit cards, as well as home, auto, personal, and small business lending services. The Commercial Banking segment provides financial solutions to private, family owned, and certain public companies. Its products and services include banking and credit products across various industry sectors and municipalities, secured lending and lease products, and treasury management services. The Corporate and Investment Banking segment offers a suite of capital markets, banking, and financial products and services to corporate, commercial real estate, government, and institutional clients. Its products and services comprise corporate banking, investment banking, treasury management, commercial real estate lending and servicing, equity, and fixed income solutions, as well as sales, trading, and research capabilities services. The Wealth and Investment Management segment provides personalized wealth management, brokerage, financial planning, lending, private banking, and trust and fiduciary products and services to affluent, high-net worth, and ultra-high-net worth clients. It also operates through financial advisors. Wells Fargo & Company was founded in 1852 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
The Williams Companies, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as an energy infrastructure company primarily in the United States. It operates through Transmission & Gulf of Mexico, Northeast G&P, West, and Gas & NGL Marketing Services segments. The Transmission & Gulf of Mexico segment comprises Transco and Northwest natural gas pipelines; and natural gas gathering and processing, and crude oil production handling and transportation assets in the Gulf Coast region, as well as various petrochemical and feedstock pipelines. The Northeast G&P segment engages in the midstream gathering, processing, and fractionation activities in the Marcellus Shale region primarily in Pennsylvania and New York, and the Utica Shale region of eastern Ohio. The West segment comprises 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; and operates natural gas liquid (NGL) fractionation and storage facilities in central Kansas near Conway. The Gas & NGL Marketing Services segment provides wholesale marketing, trading, storage, and transportation of natural gas for natural gas utilities, municipalities, power generators, and producers; risk and asset management; and NGL marketing services. The company owns and operates 30,000 miles of pipelines, 29 processing facilities, 7 fractionation facilities, and approximately 23 million barrels of NGL storage capacity. The Williams Companies, Inc. was founded in 1908 and is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
By PTI: Manama, Jan 8 (PTI) Rahul Gandhi today met with Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa here and discussed a variety of bilateral issues of interest during his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief.

Gandhi, who is here as a state guest of Bahrain, is also expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa.

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He will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf countrys Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

"Had a good meeting with Crown Prince of Bahrain, HRH Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. We discussed a variety of issues of interest to India and Bahrain," Gandhi said in a tweet.

The Congress president also met with foreign minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Gulf Daily News reported.

According to a statement issued by the Congress yesterday, Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) today.

Delegates of 50 countries are participating in the function, the statement said.

He will also have an interactive session with business leaders of the Indian-origin tomorrow.

"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow," Gandhi tweeted ahead of his trip yesterday.

Gandhi is expected to return to India on January 9. PTI CPS AKJ CPS

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Congress president Rahul Gandhi and other senior party leaders will review the ground situation in poll-bound Karnataka at the meeting in New Delhi.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi's visit to Bahrain is seen by many as an effort to reach out to the large Indian population in the Gulf. Photo: Twitter/@INCIndia

By Supriya Bhardwaj: Congress president Rahul Gandhi along with the who's who of the Karnataka Congress will meet on January 13 in Delhi to chart out the strategy for the poll-bound state.

According to sources, proposals related to outreach programmes that can be rolled out in Karnataka will be discussed at length. Rahul Gandhi along with other senior party leaders will also review the ground situation at this crucial meeting.

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"PCC [Pradesh Congress Committee] has been asked to give a detailed 360-degree plan. Besides reviewing ground situation, outreach proposals will be discussed at length," said a senior Karnataka leader.

The Congress' Karnataka unit has already requested the party's newly elected chief, Rahul Gandhi, to start campaigning in the southern state.

Congress general secretary in-charge of Karnataka K C Venugopal said, "We have already put in a request to Rahul ji to start campaigning in Karnataka. He has also agreed [to it]. Most likely, he will hit the campaign trail after January 20."

As part of the election strategy, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has visited 120 constituencies while other top Congress leaders are touring the remaining constituencies. A total of 224 Assembly constituencies in Karnataka will go to polls this year.

AICC secretary in-charge of Karnataka Madhu Goud Yaskhi said, "To build up the party's momentum in Karnataka, we want our party president Rahul Gandhi to lead from the front during the election campaign. Other senior Congress leaders from the national level will also join the campaign after January 20."

Yaskhi, a former MP, is also coordinating party chief Rahul Gandhi's Bahrain tour. The Gulf has a sizeable population from the southern Indian states and 47-year-old Rahul Gandhi's visit is being seen as an effort to reach out to NRIs from Karnataka.

Euphoric reception for Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain. This is CPA??s first foreign visit after his takeover. pic.twitter.com/zsGOaXnwCv- Congress (@INCIndia) January 7, 2018

WATCH: Sholay in Congress: Gabbar Sonia grills 4 aadmi - Rahul, Hardik, Alpesh, Jignesh

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) Drones will now monitor railway projects, aid in crowd management and oversee maintenance work across its zones, railway officials said today.

Cameras (UAV/NETRA) will be used for various railway activities especially project monitoring and maintenance of tracks and other railway infrastructure, the national transporter said in a statement.

"Directions have been given to Zonal Railways to procure such cameras. This is in-line with Railways? desire to use technology to enhance safety and efficiency in train operations", it said.

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Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones shall be deployed to undertake monitoring activities of relief and rescue operation, project monitoring, progress of important works, conditions of track and inspection related activities, the statement said.

It shall also be used to assess preparedness of non- interlocking (NI) works, crowd management during fairs, to identify scrap and also for aerial survey of station yards. It is going to be instrumental in providing real time inputs related to safety and maintenance of tracks and other railway infrastructure.

A drone is essentially a flying robot which can be remotely handled through software-controlled flight plans embedded in its systems working in conjunction with GPS. PTI ASG DV

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: route: Naqvi

(Eds: With more info, adding quotes)

New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) Paving way for the Centre to make available a cheaper mode of transport for Haj pilgrims, Saudi Arabia has given its nod to Indias plan to revive the option of ferrying devotees to Jeddah via sea route, 23 years after the practice was stopped.

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Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi confirmed the development in a statement after he and Saudi Arabias Haj and Umrah Minister Mohammad Saleh bin Taher Benten signed a bilateral annual agreement regarding the pilgrimage in Mecca yesterday.

Terming his meeting with Benten "very fruitful", Naqvi said officials from both the countries will discuss the technicalities involved so that the pilgrimage via sea route can be commissioned in the coming years.

"Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route... Officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years," the statement quoted Naqvi as saying.

However, it did not specify the year when the option for pilgrimage via sea route would be opened. As of now, devotees can travel to Saudi Arabia for performing Haj only by air.

The "revolutionary, pro-poor and pilgrim-friendly" decision of sending devotees through sea route will help cut down travel expenses "significantly", Naqvi said.

The government has been weighing the option of opening the sea route in the light of a 2012 Supreme Court order to abolish by 2022 the subsidy offered to Haj pilgrims who travel by air.

Ministry sources, however, said air services to Jeddah would continue to be available for those who can afford the journey. India has a Haj quota of 1.70 lakh.

It used to take nearly 12-15 days for pilgrims to reach Jeddah in Saudi Arabia from Yellow Gate in Mumbais Mazgaon before the sea route was closed in 1995, sources said.

Naqvi said with the availability of modern and well- equipped ships -- which can ferry 4,000 to 5,000 persons at a time -- the 2,300-odd nautical miles one-side distance between Mumbai and Jeddah can now be covered within just three to four days.

The minister said for the first time, Muslim women from India will go to Haj without Mehram (male companion) and separate accommodation and transport have been arranged for them.

"Woman Haj assistants will be deployed for them," he said, adding more than 1,300 women have applied to go for Haj without Mehram and of them will be exempted from lottery system and allowed to proceed for the pilgrimage.

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According to the new Haj policy of India, women above 45 years of age, who wish to go for Haj but who dont have a male companion, are allowed to travel for Haj in groups of four or more.

The Haj Committee of India has received around 3,59,000 applications for Haj 2018. For the first time, we have given choice to Haj pilgrims to opt for another nearest embarkation point, Naqvi said.

This will ensure that there is no financial burden on Haj pilgrims even after removal of Haj subsidy. This decision has received overwhelming response, the statement said. PTI ENM NSD

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: (Eds: Updating with reax, more quotes)

New Delhi, Jan 8 (PTI) The Supreme Court today agreed to reconsider its 2013 verdict criminalising gay sex and referred to a larger bench the plea challenging the penal provision, observing the societal morality "changes from age to age."

Giving a ray of hope to the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities which are pushing for scrapping Section 377 of the IPC that criminalises homosexuality, the court decision moved a step towards a final judicial call on the controversial provision that has been described as "archaic."

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Noting that the curative petition against its 2013 judgement is pending before a five-judge Constitution bench, the apex court said the present petition will also be heard by the same larger bench and that a finality could be attained whether gay sex between two consenting adults can be decriminalised.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud gave the order, observing that the judgement, upholding the constitutional validity of Section 377 of the IPC needed to be debated upon.

As many as 26 nations -- Australia, Malta, Germany, Finland, Colombia, Ireland, United States, Greenland, Scotland, Luxembourg, England and Wales, Brazil, France, New Zealand, Uruguay, Denmark, Argentina, Portugal, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands -- have decriminalised gay sex.

The apex court, in its 2013 judgement, had said "minuscule fraction of the countrys population constitutes LGBT is not a sustainable basis to deny the right to privacy. The purpose of elevating certain rights to the stature of guaranteed fundamental rights is to insulate their exercise from the disdain of majorities, whether legislative or popular...". It had overturned the Delhi High Court verdict decriminalising gay sex among consenting adults.

Legal experts like Rajiv Dhawan, Colin Gonsalves, Anand Grover, Dushyant Dave and Kamini Jaiswal welcomed the order.

They said the matter is of utmost social and legal significance and a positive move has been initiated by the apex court for a re-look into the earlier judgement which, according to them, required reconsideration.

"Its quite refreshing to see a positive stand in the matter. The judgement of the apex court declaring 377 to be intra vires really requires a serious reconsideration. This provision itself on the face of it is archaic and it is wholly unconstitutional. Nobody can support it under any circumstances," Dave said.

Section 377 of the IPC refers to unnatural offences and says whoever voluntarily has carnal interAcourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

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"Section 377 uses phraseology carnal intercourse against the order of the nature. The determination of order of the nature is not a Constitutional phenomenon and societal morality also changes from age to age," the bench said while referring the petition filed by celebrities including chef Ritu Dalmia, hotelier Aman Nath and dancer N S Johar to a larger bench.

It, however, made a distinction that the penal provision, which also deals with such carnal sex involving animals and children will not be dealt by the larger bench.

"The consent of two adults has to be the primary consideration and otherwise children will become the prey. The protection of children in all sphere has to be guarded," the bench said, adding that the CJI, in his administrative side, will decide on setting up of the larger bench.

The bench also directed that the copy of the petition filed by members of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, be served on the Union Ministry of Law and Justice to ensure proper representation.

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During the hearing, the court considered the submission os senior advocates Arvind Datar and Kapil Sibal and said that it appeared that the penal provision hurt sexual preferences of individuals.

Datar said that the provision is unconstitutional as it provided prosecution and sentencing of consenting adults who are indulging in such sex.

"You cant put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex," he said while referring to a recent nine-judge bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight the point that the right to choose a sexual partner was part of fundamental right.

The bench, in its order, also referred to the privacy judgement and terms like social and constitutional morality, individual choices of sexual preferences and said that the law must have the sanction of the Constitution.

Datar submitted that though curative petitions against the 2013 Suresh Kumar Koushal verdict are pending before the Supreme Court, the challenge in those will be possible only on two narrow grounds.

"Civilisation has moved on. As far as the Delhi High Court judgement is concerned, it has held that there is no question of carnal intercourse being against the order of nature. the Supreme Court overturned this on the ground that only a minuscule population is affected. The apex court has to decide whether the Right to choose a partner is limited to partner of the opposite sex," Datar said.

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The bench said that the challenge was only to the extent of penalising consenting sex between adults and not with respect to sex with animals or minors.

Datar also referred to the 2009 Delhi High Court judgement delivered on a plea of NGO Naz Foundation in which the provision was held unconstitutional.

Naz Foundation had filed a petition in December 2001 in the High Court, which had on July 2, 2009, decriminalised Section 377.

After refusing twice to entertain the pleas against Section 377, the SC on February 2, 2016 referred the issue to a five-judge bench.

The apex court had earlier dismissed a batch of review petitions filed by the Centre and gay rights activists against its December 2013 verdict declaring gay sex an offence punishable up to life imprisonment.

It had revived the penal provision making gay sex an offence punishable with life term.

While setting aside the July 2, 2009 verdict of Delhi High Court, the apex court had held that Section 377 of IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality and that the declaration made by high court was legally unsustainable. PTI SJK ABA MNL RKS GSN

--- ENDS ---
The Central government has issued showcause notices to eight Chinese pharmaceutical firms for supplying poor quality raw material to Indian drug makers.

Hyderabad: The Central government has issued showcause notices to eight Chinese pharmaceutical firms for supplying poor quality raw material to Indian drug makers, said a news agency, adding that these companies may be blacklisted.

The allegations against the companies are of providing poor quality products and the action against them will soon be decided by the government. This will be harsh as we dont want the quality of drugs in India compromised, said IANS quoting a senior DCGI officer. The notices were issued after a special inspection team of the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) inspected the eight companies in China, it said.

Most Indian pharma firms are of late depending on active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) or raw material for medicine from Chinese companies, raising concern in the Indian government.

According to a pharma industry body, Indian pharma companies secure 70-75 percent of APIs from China. India typically imported around `12,000 crore worth APIs every year from China. However, this figure had risen to `18,372.54 crore in FY17.

The Indian drug makers have shifted to Chinese APIs as they were about four times cheaper than those produced in India. The Chinese companies manufacture in large scale and have cheaper power, helping them to cut down on the cost.

Calling it a bold decision by the government, Dr Appaji, former director-general of Pharmexil, said, Though it sends a signal to importers that we are vigilant about the quality of drugs, the government should be extremely careful and cautious to ensure that it does not lead to supply disruption.

He said the Centre should also take care of the Indian pharma industrys needs by promoting domestic APIs, which are cost-effective. Last year, the government had proposed to give preference to formulations produced from indigenous API and its intermediates in government procurements.
Crop sector inclusive of foodgrains, oilseeds, commercial crops and horticulture account for more than 60 per cent in the weight of the economic activity.

New Delhi: Following the release of the advance estimate of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross Value Added (GVA) for the country's economy in 2017-18, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare (MoAFW) on Sunday said that the agriculture sector is expected to register a much higher GVA for the aforementioned time period, which will be reflected in the final estimate figures.

As per data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) earlier in the week, the GVA of 'Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing' index for the year 2017-18 was estimated at 2.1 per cent, compared to 4.9 per cent in the preceding year.

To this, the ministry, who had a quick deliberation on the growth rate for this sector, said the lower coverage of the area by August 2017 on account of the delayed onset of monsoons caused a poor reflection compared to the actual positive field situation by December. The estimate also indicated that despite a lower share of crop sector in the GVA computation of agriculture, based on August 2017 status the growth rate still worked out to 2.1 per cent.

"This is a manifestation of higher growth rates in livestock and fishery sectors, the other two components. As seen thus, even by August 2017 the estimated production of livestock and fishery was very positive and by December, crop the dominant sector has bounced back. If this amended and actual field situation is taken into account in the computation of the GVA for Agriculture sector as a whole, its growth rate can be estimated to be much higher than the Advance Estimate of 2.1 per cent", the ministry noted.

With regards to Kharif crops, the ministry noted that the area coverage under different crops in Kharif as of August, 2017 was below that of the previous year on account of delay in onset of monsoons in some parts of the country. However, good rainfall thereafter helped the Ministry in increasing the area coverage in accordance with Kharif targets.

"Despite the delay in onset of monsoons and relatively poorer rainfall compared to the previous year, the area coverage under Kharif finally rose to 106.55 million against the five-year average of 105.86 million", the ministry noted.

In case of horticulture, which also forms a part of the crop sector, a similar positive trend was seen in respect of both area coverage and production as of December 2017. The area coverage as per first advance estimate under fruits and vegetables stood at 24.92 million, as against the previous year final of 24.85 million. Concomitantly, the horticulture output as per first advance estimate was 305.4 million tonnes compared to 300.6 million tonnes in the previous year (2016-17).

Since crop sector inclusive of foodgrains, oilseeds, commercial crops and horticulture account for more than 60 per cent in the weight of the economic activity, namely, 'Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing', the value in respect of crops is bound to influence overall GVA estimate for the sector, either positively or negatively. It is, hence logical, that the computation based on area coverage under crops as in August 2017 had a negative impact on the advance estimate for the overall agriculture sector, the ministry noted.

"The GVA estimate is bound to get corrected upwards, if increased area coverage by December 2017 and concomitant production estimate in case of foodgrains, oilseeds and commercial crops, in particular, are taken into account. These three accounts for the higher percentage of the share than horticulture in the GVA computation. And horticulture is showing a higher productivity estimate", it said.

In terms of Rabi, the ministry said it was optimistic about achieving a high growth rate due to improvement in the performance of Rabi sector, in addition to good Kharif.

"As on January 5, 2018, the area coverage under Rabi is 58.6 million, which is a very good progress. Considering that the Rabi sowing continues up to the first week of February, the total area under crops and resultant production will be very good", the ministry claimed.

Further, the ministry expects to consolidate the record production achieved during the year 2016-17, by focusing on realising higher productivity. The credit made available for the year 2017-18 is as high as Rs 10 lakh crore, compared to Rs 9 lakh crore in the year 2016-17. Also, state governments have been pursued to enhance the availability of credit to the farmers, which is a critical input for achieving higher productivity.

"Considering that crop segment constitutes a dominant component of the GVA computation, its performance is very critical. However, with inelasticity of land where there exists little scope for increase in the average coverage, productivity enhancement assumes importance. Crops in particular and agriculture, in general, are highly dependent on monsoons and the overall status of weather. Even small variations in weather tend to influence agriculture adversely, as seen for example, in the area coverage by August 2017. The ministry has, therefore, been focusing on achieving higher productivity in all the segments including crops".
Mumbai: Shrivallabh Vyas, an alumini of National School Drama and Television and Bollywood actor, died at the age of 60 in Jaipur on January 7, 2018. He breathed his last at 9.30 am and the last rites took place in the evening, claim sources to Hindustan Times.

Vyas was a part of 60 films and a number of television shows, but his most noted works include the role of Ishwar in Ashutosh Gowarikers Lagaan (2001) and Jinaah in Sardar (1993), apart from Sarfarosh (1999), Shool (1999) and Dil Bole Hadippa (2009) and other movies.

In 2008, the actor reportedly suffered a brain stroke followed by a paralytic attack while shooting for a film in Gujarat. He fell in the middle of the night, only to be found profusely bleeding the next morning. The actor was later operated on and he had become bed-ridden. His family, his only wife, couldnt afford his treatment, which is why they relocated from Mumbai to Jaisalmer and later Jaipur for the treatment.

But this did not happen without any difficulties coming their way. Already facing financial crunches, the actors wife Shobha approached the Cine and TV Artists Association (CINTAA) for financial help, as the association has a trust for the actors, but she was up for disappointment. The only support the family had was in Vyass co-actors Irrfan Khan, Manoj Bajpayee and Aamir Khan.

Aamir not only helped the family financially, but also made it a point to visit the family in February while shooting in Jaipur for PK. Shobha once said, Its because of him we can afford a three BHK flat, medical expenses, fees for my daughters and other expenses.

Shrivallabh Vyas is survived by his wife Shobha Vyas and two daughters.
Bengaluru: In a tragic incident, five workers died after a fire broke out at a bar and restaurant at Kalasipalya Market in the early hours of Monday.

The deceased have been identified as Rangaswamy, 22, Jai Prasad, 20, and Mahesh, 35, all from Tumakuru, and Manjunath, 45, from Hassan, and Keerthi, 19, from Mandya. They were working as waiters and cleaners at Kailash Bar and Restaurant, situated on the ground floor of Kumbara Sangha building.

The fire broke out around 2.30 am when all the five were sleeping inside. Passersby noticed the fire and informed the Fire and Emergency Service personnel and Kalasipalya police, who rushed to the spot and doused the fire by 3.30 am. When they broke open the shutter and went inside looking for survivors, they found the five dead.

A senior police officer investigating the case said, Inside the gutted bar, we found one person dead near the toilet and the others inside the toilet. We assume that they had run into the toilet to escape the fire. All the liquor bottles, cookery items, cash box and showcases have been destroyed in the fire.

He said, Preliminary investigations indicated that cause of the fire could be a short-circuit. But nothing can be ascertained till the reports arrive. There was a gas cylinder inside which was intact, but the inverter power supply unit was completely burnt. The bar was closed around 1.30 am and the workers had locked themselves inside the bar and gone to sleep when the fire broke out.

Two of the deceased have sustained burns, while others do not have any injuries, indicating that they might have died due to asphyxiation. But nothing can be confirmed till the postmortem reports arrive, the police officer said.

City Police Commissioner T. Suneel Kumar, who visited the spot, said, A detailed inquiry has been ordered and we cannot say anything about the cause of the fire till we get the reports. It is a small place with a single entry and exit point. No fire safety equipment were found inside the bar. Strict action will be taken against the owner for negligence. A team of five members has been formed to trace the accused, who are absconding.

DCP (West) Anucheth told Deccan Chronicle, A case under Section 304 IPC (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) has been registered against V.R. Dayashankar, licence holder, his brother V.R. Prakash, who ran the bar, Somashekar, manager of the bar, and the management of Kumbara Sanga. We have already arrested Prakash, Somashekar and the others will be caught soon.

Single entry, exit for bar

Bengaluru: Kailash Bar and Restaurant, where five employees died after a major fire early on Monday morning, is situated on the ground floor of Kumbara Sangha building, which is a 50-year-old structure.



Bengaluru Development Minister K.J. George on Monday said that the building did not have emergency exit and entry points. The bar just had a single entry and exit. If there was another exit, some of them could have survived, he said.

A top police officer said that the ground floor has been given out on rent to several shops, while the other floors have rooms to accommodate people coming to Kumbara Sangha from other parts of the state. The building also houses a small hostel for college-going students. Fortunately, the fire stopped at the bar. If it had spread to the other floors, the causalities would have been much higher, a police officer said.

Small hole in the shutter: When Deccan Chronicle spoke to a few local residents, they pointed to a rectangular hole in the shutter which was used to supply liquor after the stipulated time.

They closed the bar at 1 am, but continued to sell liquor through that hole. The workers had been given a room on one of the floors, but they slept at the bar because the room was infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. They used to sleep inside the bar as it helped them to get up early in the morning as the bar opened at 6 am, the police officer said.

Labour law violation: Mayor Sampath Raj blamed the bar owner for the death of his employee. He said it is a violation of labour law as no one is allowed to sleep inside their workplace.



The owner should have made necessary arrangements for the workers to stay and this also amounts to worker exploitation. The labour department should check across the city for such violations and we are sure that there will be plenty of them, he said.
Hyderabad: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to seek the support of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in getting the triple talaq Bill passed in Parliament in its present form.

Naidu has said he is okay with the triple talaq Bill but is opposed to criminalising the action. Sources in the Chief Ministers Office (CMO) said that Naidu has asked for an appointment with the PM on January 12 or 17 to discuss several issues. CMO sources said January 12 is the most likely date for the meeting.

Since the Centre wants the triple talaq Bill to be passed without the changes demanded by Opposition parties, Mr Modi may seek the support of his Telugu Desam ally in the Rajya Sabha in getting the Bill passed in its present form.

After the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, Naidu had said that the TD would support the Bill but there should be no criminal action over and above the regular court administered process of divorce.

Mr Naidu had pointed out that if triple talaq becomes invalid, the normal process of divorce has to be followed and no criminal charges should be framed against the man as it will aggravate the problem.

He also said that according to the feedback he had received, 68 per cent of Muslims and 82 per cent of Hindus agreed that the Bill was essential to prevent exploitation of Muslim women.

If the Centre agrees to send the triple talaq Bill to a select committee as demanded by members of the Rajya Sabha, a TD member will be appointed on the committee according to TD sources, and the Prime Minister may ask Mr Naidu to ensure that the TD member and the party supports the BJP stand.
A Gurugram Police officer was run over and killed by an SUV in Palam Vihar after he tried to stop the vehicle during a nakabandi.

SPO Mukesh Kumar was hit and run over by an SUV.

By Munish Pandey, Munish Chandra Pandey: A Gurugram Police officer was allegedly killed by an SUV in Palam Vihar after the officer tried to stop the vehicle during a nakabandi on the intervening night of Sunday and Monday.

Police said the Mahindra Xylo has been identified with number plate PB11 U1312 and efforts are on to trace the driver and arrest him.

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According to police, the senior police officer Mukesh Kumar attached to Palam Vihar Police Station had set up a nakabandi after an input was received about dreaded criminals in a Punjab number plate SUV.

"As SPO Mukesh Kumar tried to stop the suspected SUV, the driver intentionally turned his vehicle towards him and ran the SUV over Kumar," said Ravindra Kumar, Spokesperson of Gurugram Police.

Assuming that the driver would slow down, Mukesh signalled the SUV to stop before the nakabandi.

However, the SUV driver picked up speed, hit him and drove away.

Mukesh Kumar was taken to a local hospital where he was declared brought dead.

Kumar hails from village Sirsa Khera. Born in 1982, Kumar started his career with Haryana State Industrial Security Force (HSISF) in 2004.

In August 2017, Kumar joined the Gurugram Police force as a Senior Police Officer.

The police has booked the SUV driver under section 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty), 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder) of Indian Penal Code.

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Bengaluru: Three men, who were hired by the residents of a posh apartment at Bandepalya in HSR Layout to manually clean the clogged Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) tank, suffocated to death in the 12 ft deep tank on Sunday.

The deceased have been identified as Narayanaswamy (35), in charge of the STP at ND Sepal Apartment in Somasundarapalya, Srinivas (56), a painter, and Madegowda, (42), an electrician at a garments factory. Apartment residents had contracted Narayanaswamy to look after STP tank and other civic works of the apartment. He called up Srinivas and Madegowda to clean the STP tank, promising them a good pay. The two had earlier too worked at the apartment as Narayanaswamy regularly gave them work on Sundays, the police said.

While Narayanaswamy and Srinivas died in the STP tank, Madegowda succumbed while being shifted to Columbia Asia Hospital.

The incident occurred around 11 am, when all the three set out to clean the STP tank at the basement of the apartment. One of them, it is not clear who, entered the STP tank, but he suffocated to death because of toxic gases inside. When he failed to respond, the other worker went in, he collapsed as there was no oxygen inside the tank. An alarmed Madegowda entered last, but he too collapsed. The apartment security guard, who was worried about the long absence of the three workers, went to check near the STP tank and did not get any response when he called out for them.

He immediately alerted the apartment association members, who called up the fire and emergency department, the police said.

Fire brigade personnel along with the Bandepalya police rushed to the spot, pulled the three out of the STP tank and administered CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). The three were rushed to St. John's Hospital, where they were declared brought dead.

A senior fire and emergency official said that the workers had no safety equipment before entering the STP. Additional Commissioner of Police (East) Seemanth Kumar Singh told Deccan Chronicle that a case of death due to negligence has been taken up at the jurisdictional Bandepalya police station.

"According to the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, manual scavenging is prohibited and employing people for manual scavenging is a punishable offence. The police are finding out those responsible for employing the workers and action will be taken against them. The apartment dwellers claim that Narayanaswamy was in-charge of the STP tank and he had hired the two others for manual scavenging. But there was no written agreement between the apartment dwellers and Narayanaswamy," Mr Singh said.

As the news spread, relative and family members of the deceased gathered at the spot and protested against the apartment residents association. Bengaluru Development Minister K.J. George and Mayor R. Sampath Raj visited the spot.
Thiruvananthapuram: RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat will again hoist the Tricolour at a school near Palakkad in connection with a camp that begins there on Republic Day. But this time it is a school run by Bharatheeya Vidya Niketan  Vyasa Vidya Peetom  administered by RSS fellow travellers at Kallekkadu on the outskirts of Palakkad town. A three-day camp of mandal-level Sangh functionaries will be held there.

It may be recalled that Mr Bhagwat had created a controversy by hoisting the flag at the government-aided Kanakiamman Higher Secondary School, Palakkad, on Independence Day last year.

The Kerala Education Rules do not apply to the CBSE school and hence the state government cannot intervene in the function. RSS state secretary and Prantha Karyavahak P. Gopalankutty Master told this newspaper that the camp would be attended by over 7,000 mandal-level functionaries.

The programme was decided over one year ago. Celebrating the national days is part of the RSS culture, he said.

The event was shifted to Palakkad from the earlier scheduled venue of Angamaly as the auditorium there had sought a huge rent of Rs 3 crore.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had asked the general education department to take action against the school where Mr Bhagwat hoisted the flag on Independence Day. Vande Mataram was sung at the function instead of the National Anthem violating the code.

The DPI office had issued a notice to the headmaster and manager seeking an explanation on the issue. Action will be taken based on the report from the deputy director of education, said sources.
Kochi: The land deal row in the Syro-Malabar Church has entered a new phase with the probe report of the Catholic Congress finding only technical lapses in the deal which resulted in financial losses. According to the report, the Church leadership had no vested interests or financial motives in the land transaction. A three-member internal probe team of the Catholic Congress prepared the report which will be submitted to the national working committee.

Archdiocese vicar-general Sebastian Vadakku-mpadath had entrusted Mr Saju Varghese, a real estate broker, to sell more than three acres of land at a rate of Rs 9.05 lakh per cent to clear the liabilities of the Church. He prepared the title deed and got it signed by Cardinal Mar George Alencherry promising that he would be able to pay the amount only after six months citing currency ban and financial crisis.

Instead of giving the balance amount of Rs 18 crore, he bought 25 acres of land at Kottappady near Kothamangalam and 17 acres at Devikulam for the archdiocese. The vicar-general and procurator visited these sites and realised that the properties are worth Rs 18 crore.

The cardinal agreed to purchase the land after he was convinced of the land value. Hence, it is certain that the financial loss was caused not because of any deliberate attempts by the Church leadership, the report said.

The Catholic Congress feels that an attempt is being made to indict Cardinal Alencherry and demanded strict action against the real estate dealer who misguided and cheated the Church. The report also doubted a conspiracy by a section of clergymen in dragging the deal in the public domain.

Meanwhile, the first half-yearly session of the 26th synod of Syro-Malabar Church that began on Monday in Kochi has reportedly favoured the Cardinal.
A small bulldozer clears a road at the entrance of Villacastin, Segovia province, after the winters first heavy snowfall

Madrid: Spain deployed 250 soldiers on Sunday to help rescue hundreds of drivers who were trapped overnight in vehicles as heavy snowfall cut off several roads.

The armys emergency unit UME said it had sent two companies of specialist soldiers and 95 vehicles to free hundreds of cars stranded on the AP6 highway linking Madrid and the northwestern Segovia.

Soldiers and firefighters used snowplows to try to clear the snow, and distributed blankets and hot drinks to motorists. The rough weather comes as many Spaniards are travelling home after the Christmas holidays.
Moshe, 11, was two when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. (Photo: File | PTI)

Jerusalem: Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who as a toddler survived the 2008 terror attack at a Jewish centre in Mumbai, is feeling "emotional and excited" as he prepares for his "homecoming" during the four day visit to India by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week.

Moshe, 11, was two when his parents were killed in the Mumbai attacks at Nariman House (also known as Chabad House) by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists.

The attack on the Nariman House and other locations like the Taj Hotel left 166 people dead.

The boy, standing and crying between his dead parents' bodies, was saved in a daring move by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuels, who was hiding in a room downstairs when the attack happened.

"Moshe is very excited and at the same time emotional as he gets ready to leave for Mumbai on January 15. He is returning to his birthplace and is waiting to see many things connected to his late parents that he has heard about from us and his nanny. There are lots of memories," an overwhelmed Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Moshe's grandfather, told PTI.

In an emotional meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5 in Jerusalem, the young boy had expressed his wish to visit Mumbai.

"I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House," Moshe had told the Indian Prime Minister.

Modi had responded by saying, "Come and stay in India and Mumbai. You are most welcome. You and your all family members will get long-term visas. So you can come anytime and go anywhere".

Netanyahu then promptly asked Moshe to join him when he travels to India, a promise he did not forget and has invited the family to join him in Mumbai during his forthcoming visit to India starting on January 14.

"Moshe says that he was touched by the warm embrace he received from Prime Minister Modi when he met him in Jeursalem during his July visit to Israel. He says that he felt like it was one of his own people giving him a warm hug," Rosenberg said adding, "he is hoping to meet the Indian Prime Minister again during his India trip".

"He is waiting to host Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife Sara, and hopefully PM Modi 'at his home in Mumbai'," the grandfather said.

The young boy will be accompanied by his grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, nanny Sandra and a psychologist during his trip to Mumbai.

"During a meeting with the psychologist, who has been mentally preparing him for the visit, Moshe gave him an account of places in Mumbai he would like to visit. He has done his homework and knows about not only the site seeing places but also other places where his parents carried out works related to their assignment," Rosenberg noted.

Moshe's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were serving as Directors at the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place also came under attack by Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

"It is heart warming to see that the Indian leadership and the people of India haven't forgotten us and share our pain. It gives us strength and makes us feel one," Rosenberg said.

In a brief telephonic call, Sandra, who was in Afula in the north of Israel where Moshe and his family lives, said that the boy is excited and told her before leaving for school on Sunday that it is like "homecoming" for him.

The family also plans to celebrate Moshe's bar mitzvah in Mumbai. Bar mitzvah is a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which some Israeli scholars compare with upnayana, or the thread ceremony.

India issued ten year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents to ease their travel to the country in August. Prime Minister Modi is said to have personally followed up on the matter as promised to Moshe during their meeting.

Sandra also now lives in Israel and has been felicitated with an honourary citizenship by the Israeli government.
Sankalp Malaysia to act as a gateway for business expansion in Southeast Asia

Sunnyvale, California Jan 8th, 2018 - Sankalp Semiconductor, a design service company offering comprehensive digital & mixed signal SoC services and solutions, today announced establishing a fully owned subsidiary in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The company has a strong presence in India, USA and Europe markets. The Malaysia office will enable the company address the growing need of semiconductor design services from large semiconductor and system design companies. The growth of the Hi-Tech Southeast Asia market is attributed to the rapid expansion and robust growth in mobile, automotive, medical and IoT sectors.

Malaysia is a strategic location to multiple of our customers. Our office in Malaysia will allow us to maintain close proximity with our existing local customers and offer ease of operation for the new customers in the hi-tech semiconductor digital and analog semiconductor space. said Uday Ramachandran Vice President - Business Development (India & APAC), Sankalp Semiconductor.

Sankalp Semiconductor was founded in 2005 with a focus to serve the semiconductor companies primarily offering analog & mixed signal design services. Today, Sankalp with a team of 700+ engineering professionals has design centers in Hubli, Bengaluru, Kolkata in India and Ottawa, Canada. The company provides unique advantage to its semiconductor customers by enabling them at any point of semiconductor services life cycle with the ability to provide end-to-end solutions.

About Sankalp Semiconductor

Sankalp Semiconductor offers an integrated portfolio of services and solutions to its customers in key semiconductor domains including analog, digital, high-speed physical interface IP, Embedded Memory Compiler and EDA modelling. Sankalp Semiconductor is a preferred semiconductor design service partners to multiple Fortune 500 companies in the Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Industrial IoT and Medical electronics space. The company enables its customers to achieve their time-to-market window by delivering first pass silicon designs and engage with product engineering teams across the globe to design System-on-Chip. Sankalp Semiconductor is based in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in USA, India, Canada and Germany. www.sankalpsemi.com






Moortecs expansion continues to gain pace with the opening of a brand new European Design Centre in Gdansk, Poland.

Plymouth, UK -- January 8, 2018 -- The brand new facility will be headed up by Moortec Design Centre Manager, Szymon Gerka, with support from Moortec CTO, Oliver King.

Moortec provides compelling embedded IP subsystem solutions for Process, Voltage & Temperature (PVT) monitoring, targeting advanced node CMOS technologies from 40nm down to 7nm.

The exciting new Design Centre in Gdansk will allow Moortec to accelerate its engineering efforts in terms of its advanced node roadmap and help cement its position both in Europe and Globally as the number one provider of embedded PVT sensing technology. - Oliver King, CTO Moortec Semiconductor. We also recognise the valuable, highly professional and talented engineering resource that Poland has to offer.

The recent rapid growth of Moortec means the company is seeking talented engineering staff to grow its team in Poland. Moortec wishes to recruit designers to help ensure the company continues to provide cutting edge embedded monitoring IP for the advanced node semiconductor industry.

We are looking forward to growing the team and continuing to provide highly accurate, highly featured monitoring IP to optimise the performance and reliability of todays modern SoCs whether that be for consumer, telecommunications, datacentre and enterprise applications or for emerging markets such as automotive, IoT and AI. - Ramsay Allen, VP of Marketing Moortec Semiconductor.

Moortecs PVT monitoring subsystem IP is designed to optimise performance in todays cutting-edge technologies, solving the problems that come about through scaling of devices. The new design centre will strengthen Moortecs engineering team and allow the company to add even more new silicon-proven designs to their already impressive IP portfolio.

About Moortec Semiconductor

Established in 2005 Moortec provides compelling embedded sub-system IP solutions for Process, Voltage & Temperature (PVT) monitoring, targeting advanced node CMOS technologies from 40nm down to 7nm. Moortecs in-chip sensing solutions support the semiconductor design communitys demands for increased device reliability and enhanced performance optimization, enabling schemes such as DVFS, AVS and power management control systems. Moortec also provides excellent support for IP application, integration and device test during production.

For more information please contact Ramsay Allen ramsay.allen@moortec.com, +44 1752 875133, visit www.moortec.com






In the crowd of Gunda and Jaani Dushman-s of the world, Pyaar Impossible has its own place in the so-bad-that-it-is-good classics. The movie directed by Jugal Hansraj was a project that probably required the actors to come to set and make a complete fool of themselves. To be honest, the only redeeming quality of the film was its hummable music composed by Salim Suleiman, the rest was a nightmare for YashRaj Films and Priyanka Chopra who would like to forget it for ever. As far as Uday Chopra is concerned, the movie was a true reflection of his fate in Bollywood. It was impossible. On the 8th anniversary of the masterpiece we recall why the movie deserves a solid presence in Bollywoods Hall Of Fame of the Worst Movies Ever Made.





Jugal Hansraj on the Directors Chair





After a respect worthy attempt in Roadside Romeo that won a National Award and managed to get screened in the Cairo Film Festival, Jugal Hansraj thought it would be a good idea to continue his mohabbatein with Uday Chopra and YashRaj banner. Though the script did not leave much in his hands, but the masoom director did absolutely nothing to salvage the disaster. In fact the film looks like that the only brief from the director was to look annoying and stupid in every frame.

Stereotypes Galore





Pretty popular girl, nerdy besotted guy, rescuing from river, unruly child of divorce, unscrupulous businessmen, this movie gets full point for not discriminating against any stereotypes. It packs all of them in abundance. The script, if it can be called so, had as much meat as a stale veggie burger. It also deserves a special mention for re-instating the fact that unattractive people are nerdy losers and pretty people are shallow and scheming. Keeping the legacy intact, it also mistakes serious criminal stalking for romantic determination. Slow Claps.

Uday Chopra Was A Lead



Source: yash raj films Source: yash raj films

Yup, the movie is that old. When Bollywood (read his home production), was still harbouring the dream of Uday Chopra having a career in Bollywood. The whole movie is a futile exercise to figure out if he is more annoying or clueless as an actor. In absolute absence of a script, it looks like a contest to see how bad his acting can get, and this is perhaps the only aspect in which Uday Chopra emerges as an undisputed winner.

Dino Morea Was There In It





Again, this is a reminder of how old we have become. This was still an era where Dino Morea had a job, that too in a mainstream movie. It would be unfair to analyse his acting performance in a movie where everyone competed with each other in a bid to see who can look more stupid. However, even then, our Dino boy did not disappoint. He manages to deliver a performance that is completely sync with the clueless spirit of the movie. Not that we ever expected anything else from him.

Priyanka Chopras Amazing Decision Making





The moment you see the first 10 minutes of the film, you are sure that Priyanka Chopra is not in the movie because she believed in the script. It would probably forever be a mystery as to why our dearest Pee Cee decided to board this ship that had shipwreck written all over it. But then she also thought Whats Your Rashee, Love Story 2050 and Drona were good ideas. It is probably safe to assume that along with many other things, her selection process of choosing scripts have developed over the years. We forgive you Pee Cee.

The Child Artist





Tanya, played by an adorable Advika Yadav is one of the most annoying child characters ever. Dont get us wrong, there is nothing wrong with the kid itself, but the character she was given was a complete pain in the you-know-where. She was rude and unruly and not in a good way. Even if we overlook that, there is no way a kid of that age understands complexities of adult relationship. And if she does then it is not really palatable.

Tech Savvy



Source: yash raj films Source: yash raj films

What is with Bollywood and technology? In a country where every second person is a software engineer or a tech nerd, how difficult is it to write accurately about technology. In the film Uday Chopra, a tech nerd, develops a software that integrates all operating systems. Even if we let that pass as a leap of creativity, the question why the whole thing looks like a futuristic rocket launching mechanism is beyond us to figure out.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead on arrival. Police filed a case under IPC section 302 and were investigating the matter.

Ashok Sawant was rushed to hospital but was declared dead on arrival.

By India Today Web Desk, Mayuresh Ganapatye: Ashok Sawant, a Shiv Sena leader and ex-corporator in Mumbai was stabbed to death on Sunday at around 10:45 pm near his house by two unknown assailants.

A two-time corporator from Samta Nagar, Sawant was attacked about 200 metres from his residence as he was returning after meeting a friend.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead on arrival. As soon as they were informed, police arrived at the scene of the crime and samples were collected for forensic examination.

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Samta Nagar Police were also trying to determine if there was a CCTV near the scene of the crime. A case under IPC section 302 was filed and the matter was being investigated.

Vinay Rathod, DSP, Zone 12, said that a case of murder has been registered against unknown persons. The body has been sent to Shatabdi Hospital for postmortem.

Media reports said that the deceased had entered a cable business and had been receiving extortion calls for the last few days. A hunt has been launched to nab the perpetrators of the crime.

Media reports also said that the murder was probably connected to these extortion threats.

Sawant is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.

(With inputs from ANI)

--- ENDS ---
Argentinean regulator Enacom has given the green light to proposals allowing firms to deliver multi-play services including mobile, fixed, internet and pay-TV.

The regulators decision had been widely anticipated for the start of 2018 following its January 2017 publications of guidelines that would allow operators to expand their offerings. The move is aimed at bringing about greater competition in the market.

Following the announcement, Enacom has issued mobile provider Claro and Telefonica with licences enabling them to provide radio and pay-TV services in certain cities. The regulator has also provided cable TV provider Supercanal Sociedad Anonima with an MVNO licence, allowing it to offer mobile services.

Enacom president Miguel De Godoy claimed that multi-play services would enable more offers for users and better quality communication. In 2016, the government of Argentina confirmed its expectation its reform proposals would bring in $20 billion in investment within four years.

In July 2017, Telecom Argentina merged with cable TV firm Cablevision in a bid to compete more effectively against America Movils dominant Claro unit. The regulator approved the merger in December that year with the condition that the combined entity gave up some of its spectrum to remain below the government cap.
HTC has teased the launch of a new headset on social media with the tagline, New Years Resolution, suggesting a bump in resolution

HTC has started teasing a new version of its Vive VR headset. The company posted a teaser for the headset on social media with the tagline, New Years Resolution, suggesting that the new headset will offer an improved resolution. The teaser also suggests that we might see HTC unveil the new headset on January 8, which is a day ahead of CES 2018. While details about the headset are not yet known, it is possible that we may get to see a Vive headset that offers 4K resolution.

The current HTC Vive offers two AMOLED displays that are 3.6-inches in size. Both offer a resolution of 1080 x 1200 pixels each, for a total resolution of 2160 x 1200 pixels. It has a refresh rate of 90Hz and a field of view of 110 degrees. The system also offers room scaling, that lets you walk around in a set area. The Vive was launched in India back in April last year at Rs 92,990. However, since then, the system has gotten a price cut and is currently available for Rs 76,990.

It should be noted that to run the system, users need to have an adequately equipped PC. Those interested need to have at least an Intel Core i5-4590 or an AMD FX 8350 processor with 4GB RAM or more. On the graphics front, they need a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or an AMD Radeon RX 480 at the least. As far as games go, users can play Fallout 4 VR, Doom VFR, LA Noire: The VR Case Files and more.

You can check out our first impressions of thye HTC Vive here.

Catch The Latest From CES 2018 Here
Babcock on Monday said it would lead a bespoke team of industry partners in a bid for the UK Ministry of Defence's new 1.25bn Type 31e general purpose light frigate programme.

Babcock had teamed up with fellow defence contractor Thales, along with BMT, Harland & Wolff and Ferguson Marine to form 'Team 31'.

It said the consortium would pitch to the UK's Ministry of Defence that it could deliver "world-class ships that will drive economic benefits throughout the UK".

Babcock said it would act as the overall programme lead, whilst Thales will have overall responsibility for the development of the mission system solution.
At least 20 retailers will reveal how they performed over the festive period this week, with Tesco expected to be one of the Christmas winners but Marks & Spencer continuing to struggle. Others due to update investors include Sainsburys, Morrisons, John Lewis, House of Fraser and fast-growing discounter B&M. With little sales growth to be found, it is not expected to be a vintage year for any company as consumer confidence and spending power remains weak.  Guardian

Commuters are facing a week of disruption as workers in five rail companies prepare for strike action over the role of train guards. Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) will walk out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the first full week back at work following the festive break after last-ditch talks collapsed.  Guardian

Confidence among Britains businesses appears brittle as fears about trade and economic growth have escalated in a trio of surveys. Brexit has been identified as the biggest concern among those in control of company finances and is likely to lead to more subdued spending by businesses, according to a Deloitte survey.  Telegraph

Public houses look to have cashed in on the nations Christmas spirit thanks to insatiable demand for premium drinks and longer opening hours to help elongate the festivities. Privately owned pub groups have reported buoyant Christmas trading and analysts are expecting upbeat data from some of their larger publicly traded rivals, particularly those with a skew towards drink sales.  Telegraph

Ministers have been asked to come up with plans to secure the future of the Vauxhall car plant at Ellesmere Port and to promote it as a factory in the vanguard of the electric vehicle revolution. The future of the Cheshire factory, home of the Vauxhall Astra, has been in doubt since it, along with the rest of the Opel Vauxhall assets in Europe owned by General Motors, was sold to Groupe PSA, the Peugeot and Citroen carmaker. Ellesmere Ports prospects worsened in the autumn when PSA cut a shift and laid off 400 workers, about a quarter of the labour force.  The Times

The 49 billion BT pension scheme is set to pull its administration back in-house after terminating a contract with Accenture three years into an eight-year deal. The pension scheme, which has 300,000 members, is one of the largest in the private sector. The decision comes amid intense discussions over the future of the scheme, which has a 13.9 billion deficit.  The Times
A long-simmering dispute between Google and Amazon this week escalated into a front-burner feud, following Googles decision to block its YouTube video service from Amazons Echo Show, effective immediately, and from its Fire TV, effective Jan. 1.

Google apparently decided to cut off YouTube as retaliation for Amazons refusal to carry its products, including Chromecast and Google Home, on its website. Further, Amazon has not made its Prime Video service available to Google Cast users. Amazon also recently stopped selling some smart home products from Nest, another subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet.

Echo Wars

The tiff marks the latest in an evolving series of disputes related to ecosystem building. Companies with their own hardware and content ecosystems constantly must choose between interoperability and competition, suggested Tim Mulligan, senior analyst at Midia Research.

Hardware/ecosystem proxy wars are an inevitable consequence of an integrated tech and media company looking to replicate Apples success with building a closed ecosystem around their devices, he told TechNewsWorld.

Amazon and Google have competing video ecosystems and voice-activated devices, so each must take steps to protect its respective business interests.

Google may wind up being the party that takes the biggest hit, as keeping YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show could hit it directly in the wallet.

This is one of those instances where Googles young executive staff showcases as a serious problem, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

What they are doing is stupid, he told TechNewsWorld.

YouTube depends on advertising revenue to make a profit, Enderle pointed out, and cutting off access is going to hurt Google more than Amazon.

More Than It Can Chew?

On the other hand, it could be Amazons ambitions that have kept it from reaching a deal with Google, observed Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

The problem apparently began with a disagreement over Amazons implementation of YouTube on its Echo Show devices but has escalated from there, with Google restricting access to its content and Amazon pulling Google products from its site, he told TechNewsWorld.

You could call it a commonplace pissing match between online behemoths, but if so, its one where the companys customers are the ones who are most likely to get splashed, King quipped.

The conflict could escalate further if Net neutrality is voted out at the next meeting of the FCC, Tirias Research Principal Analyst Paul Teich told TechNewsWorld. That might be a way for the competitors to charge customers obscene amounts of money to have the convenience of cross-platform access.
The Interior Department has reached a deal with a remote Alaskan village to construct a controversial road through a national wildlife refuge.

Local officials from King Cove in the Aleutian Islands said last week that the Interior Department has approved a land swap that would allow the village to build a 12-mile gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge that will connect the village to the nearby town of Cold Bay.

The proposed road, which would cut through key habitat for grizzly bear, caribou and other species, has been a political flash point for decades. Interior Sec. Ryan Zinkes move to allow the road will overturn a 2013 decision by then-Interior Sec. Sally Jewell to block the roads construction.

As reported by the Washington Post:

Randi Spivak, who directs the public lands program for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an email that the advocacy group was prepared to challenge the agreement in federal court if it is finalized. The proposed project, she argued, would probably run afoul of the Wilderness Act, the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

Bulldozing a road through the heart of the refuge violates federal laws designed to protect Alaskas pristine wild places, Spivak said. Zinkes backroom deal is an end run around Congress and will destroy world-class wetlands critical to millions of migrating birds, bears and other wildlife. Once its destroyed, well never get it back.'

In a press release, Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark said, We will not stand by while some of the worlds most vital wildlife habitat is ripped from public ownership to satisfy commercial interests. We will challenge this illegal scam in federal court.

For a deeper dive:

Washington Post, New York Times, KTOO, KUCB, KTUU

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
Extreme weather is blasting opposite ends of the globe.

As the

northeastern U.S. faces freezing winds and record snowfall, a catastrophic heat wave in Australia has prompted warnings of dangerous bushfire and has literally melted part of a busy highway.

According to the

New York Times, triple-digit temperatures reached life-threatening levels over the weekend in many parts of the continent:

Penrith, a suburb of Sydney, reached 47.3 degrees Celsius on Sunday, or just over 117 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the hottest day on record in Penrith, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, New South Wales, and the hottest anywhere in the Sydney area since 1939, when a temperature of 47.8 degrees118 degrees Fahrenheitset a record that still stands.

At 40.1 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, Melbourne, 550 miles southwest, was comfortable only by comparison.

On Friday in the Australian state of Victoria, with temperatures hitting 104 degrees Fahrenheit, traffic slowed to a crawl due to melting tar on a six-mile stretch of the Hume Highway in Broadford.

The heat caused the asphalt to become soft and sticky and the roads surface to bleed, a spokeswoman for VicRoads, which manages the states road systems, explained to

Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Traffic at a stand still on the Hume outside Broadfoard due to melting tar @7NewsMelbourne @Y7News pic.twitter.com/mUocn6vzmN  Steph Harris (@StephHarris26) January 5, 2018

This heat is a killer, Victoria ambulance commander Paul Holman

warned, adding that the heat was like a blast furnace and residents should stay indoors.

Similarly, last year, a devastating heat wave in New Delhi also

melted roads after temperatures neared 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat in Australiaas well as the

bomb cyclone in the U.S.comes as 2017 earned the dubious distinction of Earths second-hottest year on record. Signs of climate change include devastating wildfires to diminishing Arctic ice, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union monitoring center, noted. This follows 2016, when Earths surface temperatures were officially the hottest since record-keeping began in 1880.

Its striking that 16 of the 17 warmest years have all been this century, Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of Copernicus, told

Reuters, noting the scientific consensus that man-made emissions has exacerbated climate change.

Experts say that unusually cold weather does not disprove global warming. Climate scientist

Katharine Hayhoe pointed out that the record snowfall in the lakefront city of Erie, Pa. late last month could be explained by warmer temperatures increasing the risk of lake-effect snow.

But President Donald Trump, who famously asserted that climate change was created by the Chinese to hurt U.S manufacturing, tweeted recently that the bitter cold East Coast could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Years Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against, Trump tweeted while vacationing in Palm Beach, Florida. Bundle up!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/statuses/946531657229701120
The Netherlands, aka Windmill Country, is now operating 100 percent of its electric trains with wind energy.

As of Jan. 1, 600,000 daily train passengers have been traveling completely carbon neutral, according to an announcement from the Netherlands principal passenger railway operator, NS.

Netherlands take e-mobility to next level: 100% of countrys trains are powered by #wind: https://t.co/U1oDry30ll pic.twitter.com/c0vrXxrDZl  UN Climate Change (@UNFCCC) January 10, 2017

Dutch electric trains are running on 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of wind energy supplied by sustainable energy supplier, Eneco. As Brightvibes noted, a decreasing and relatively small number of Dutch trains are still running on diesel.

NS and Eneco first announced their plan of a wind-powered railway in 2015 in order to drastically slash train ride emissions. Their original goal was to transition the trains to 100 percent renewable energy by 2018, but that target was moved up after reaching 75 percent in 2016. Impressively, this means their initial goal was met one whole year ahead of schedule.

According to Eneco, the power used by the carriers comes from newly built wind farms in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Belgium. By tapping into both domestic and foreign sources of wind power, it [ensures] that there is always sufficient green power available on the grid for rail companies, even if the wind is not blowing, the company explained.

As Enecos account manager Michel Kerkhof pointed out, the key objective is to avoid procuring energy from the limited existing number of sustainable energy projects in the Netherlands, thus promoting renewable growth both domestically and Europe-wide.

This partnership ensures that new investments can be made in even newer wind farms, which will increase the share of renewable energy, Kerkhof continued. In this way, the Dutch railways aim to reduce the greatest negative environmental impact caused by CO2 in such a way that its demand actually contributes to the sustainable power generation in the Netherlands and Europe.

Railway Gazette reports that NS records about 1.2 million passenger-journeys per day, with an annual energy requirement for 1.2 billion kWh. The company aims to further reduce consumption by 2 percent a year with an energy efficiency program, with total consumption already reduced by 30 percent since 2005. The company is also looking for a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

In this video, NS CEO Roger van Boxtel is humorously strapped to a windmill blade as he touts his companys latest renewable energy achievement. The clip is in Dutch so set the captions to translate if you do not speak the language.

Wind farmsboth onshore and offshoreare regarded as a key component in renewable energy policy and an important tool in mitigating the risks of climate change.

The Netherlands currently has a total of 2,200 wind turbines across the country, according to DutchNews.nl. The turbines supply enough energy to power 2.4 million households.

The Dutch government is looking to ramp up the nations share of renewable energy from 4 percent in 2014 to 16 percent in 2023. This year the country is due to start operating a 600-megawatt offshore wind farm, called Gemini.
By PTI: Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) Strongly opposing the proposed blanket safeguard duty on imported solar panels and cells, the All-India Solar Industries Association today said this levy will badly impact manufacturers operating from the special economic zones.

"SEZ units are treated on par with foreign manufacturers and hence any safeguard duty will be detrimental to the domestic solar industry as a whole," associations general secretary Gyanesh Chaudhary said in a statement.

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On December 26, government ordered a safeguard duty probe on surging solar cell imports with a view to protect domestic manufacturers after the domestic industry approached the Directorate General of Safeguards.

Solar cells, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, are imported primarily from China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.

The country is targeting 100-gw (gigawatt) solar capacity by 2022 against the current installed capacity of 15 gw and has planned to auction 20 gw capacities by March, and 30 gw each in next two fiscals.

The association further said the specific anti-dumping duty on imports from China, which is flooding the domestic market with its cheap solar modules, is making domestic industry unviable.

According to him, currently the country has 3,100 mw of installed solar capacity of which 2,000 mw, which is more than 60 per cent, are in SEZs. Further, of the 8,300-mw of solar module manufacturing facilities, 3,800-mw are in SEZs.

"Hence, the indigenous manufactures situated in SEZ will come under the ambit of any blanket duty that will be imposed on solar cells and modules which will make them uncompetitive," he said.

In FY17, estimated demand of solar modules was around 6000 mw, which is expected to go up to 10,000 mw this fiscal.

"The purpose of duty should be to protect the domestic industry from dumping. Levying duty on domestic manufacturers can also lead to an increase in the cost of power that will discourage the domestic industry," he added.

He further said there is a need to revaluate the duty structures to ensure survival and growth of domestic industry.

Interestingly the call for import duty has comes from by the Indian Solar Manufacturers Association on behalf of five domestic producers-- Mundra Solar PV, Indosolar, Jupiter Solar Power, Websol Energy Systems and Helios Photo Voltaic.

These companies want safeguard duty on solar cells whether or not assembled in modules or panels immediately for four years.

Imports of solar cell increased from 1,275 mw in FY15 to 9,331 mw by FY17 while the domestic production was 246 mw in FY15 and is likely to increase to 1,164 mw in FY18.

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Domestic players had a market share of 13 per cent in FY15, which is estimated to decline to 7 per cent in FY18.

The domestic industry also asked DGS for a provisional safeguard duty in view of the steep deterioration in the performance of the local players as a result of increased imports of the solar cells.

Safeguard duty is a WTO-compatible temporary measure that is brought in for a certain time-frame to avert any damage to a domestic industry from cheap imports. PTI PSK BEN BEN

--- ENDS ---
The

oil tanker that set fire after colliding with a freight ship off the east coast of China may explode and sink, possibly putting the environment and human health at risk, experts warned.

The Iranian tanker was carrying 150,000 tons, or nearly 1 million barrels, of condensate crude oil when it collided with the CF Crystal on Saturday. Condensate is an ultra-light hydrocarbon that is highly toxic and much more explosive than regular crude oil.

The size of the oil spill from the ship and the extent of the environmental harm are currently unknown but the disaster has the potential to be the worst since the ABT Summer spill off the Angolan coast in 1991, Reuters noted.

Chinese authorities have since dispatched three cleaning boats to the site. Search and rescue are also underway for the 32 crew members that have gone missing after the collision in the mouth of the Yangtze River Delta.

First and foremost, Greenpeace hopes that the search and rescue operations of the Chinese coast guard go smoothly and the 32 missing crew will be found, said Greenpeace East Asia campaigner Rashid Kang.

But the environmental organization is also concerned about the potential environmental damage that could be caused by the release of the oil on board.

We are worried about the potential environmental impact that could be caused by leakage from the vessel that was holding almost 42 million gallons of crude oil. A clean up procedure is already underway and we will be monitoring its progress, Kang said.

As the BBC reported, condensate is both color- and odor-less, making it hard to detect, contain and clean up compared to heavy crudes.

Additionally, condensate is not like crude, which does break down under natural microbial action; this stuff actually kills the microbes that break the oil down, Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, explained to the news service.

Boxall said the best hope was to put out the fire and stop the ship from sinking.

If she sinks with a lot of cargo intact, then you have a time bomb on the sea bed which will slowly release the condensate, he said.

There could be a long-term exclusion of fishing for many hundreds of kilometers in this area, Boxall added.

Babatunde Anifowose, a senior lecturer in petroleum and environmental technology at the University of Coventry told CNN that if the tanker explodes and sinks, cleanup will be made much more difficult due to the oil seeping beneath the surface of the water.

Anifowose also noted that the toxic fumes released by condensate could could be picked up by winds and carried onto nearby onshore populations.

The fumes could aggravate existing health conditions or lead to coughing or asthma, Anifowose said.

But Mu Jianxin, a senior engineer at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, told the Global Times that the oil is soluble in water, making it easier to handle.

Pollution caused by the leak is certain, but compared to the wide watershed of the Yangtze River estuary, the 136,000 tons of oil should not cause too serious a problem, Mu said.

Some physical methods can be used to dissolve or neutralize the oily pollutant.
By Erika Spanger-Siegfried

On Thursday in Massachusetts we were asking ourselves questions that have rarely, if ever, needed asking.

What happens when half-frozen seawater suddenly floods onto roadways? Can something the consistency of a milkshake and 3 feet deep be plowed? Theres a large dumpster floating down the street  What depth of water is sufficient to do that? What happens if some of this water freezes in place before it retreats (as I write this, the temps have plummeted to 12 degrees F and dropping)? Will those cars now filled with seawater in the snow-emergency parking lot run again? What if the water freezes inside them over the weekendcan that punch out doors?

The stories are countless. In Salem, MA, my mother watched out her window as fire and rescue workers hauled someone to safety on a raft through at times waist-deep water.

My colleagues and I think about coastal flooding a lot, but the footage from Thursday had our brains buzzing with new unknowns and threats never considered.

Ive been keeping an eye on social media, the news, and hearing from friends and family, and these three questions emerged for me as needing to be asked and answered.

1. Why was this flooding so much worse than forecast?

In the lead up to Thursdays storm, dubbed Grayson by the Weather Channel, the coastal flooding forecasts shifted from minor to moderate, from moderate to major. Coastal residents monitoring this would have been concerned but not nearly enough. Even as the storm was getting underway, the flooding forecasts greatly understated what actually played out on the ground.

In the end, severe flooding struck multiple areas of the coast of Massachusetts from the North Shore to the Cape, with chest-high water in some locations, emergency boat rescues, and damage that were just beginning to take stock of. People were caught off guard, greatly increasing the risk to public safety and the damage to property. For example, below is a shot of the Gloucester High School parking lot where residents are instructed to park their cars in a snow emergency. Ouch.

Look closely! These are cars submerged in record coastal flooding in #Gloucester Massachusetts! People were asked to get their cars off the streets and park at the local high school. Then the football field turned into a lake! @fox5dc pic.twitter.com/e6d8mdoSwe  Sue Palka FOX 5 DC (@suepalkafox5dc) January 5, 2018

2. Why didnt we see this coming?



The reasons given by local meteorologists for the surprising severity are the astronomical high tide (Monday was a full moon) that coincided with the storms path, and strong onshore winds creating significant storm surge and damaging waves. The tide itself is no mystery and our ability to forecast storm surge is pretty good. The wind speeds and snowfall totals were mostly as forecast. So where was the gap between our forecasting methods and tools and this storms true coastal flood potential? And how do we close it?

3. Was this flooding made worse by climate change?

Bostons Mayor Marty Walsh declared If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are. Some of those zones did not flood 30 years ago. And he did so while the storm was still lashing the city. The days of tiptoeing around this question are clearly over.

So, what can and cant be said here on sound scientific footing? Like any storm, there were a lot of factors responsible for Thursdays: wind speed and direction, and the resulting storm surge and wave height. And there are two ways that climate change plays a role in the impact of storms like this.

On the one hand, it can influence a storm itselfcausing it to form faster, become stronger, etc., so that when it strikes, it has greater potential for doing damage. Tracing this to climate change is harder to do, but the science is catching up. As climate scientist and colleague Rachel Licker pointed out this week. According to the American Meteorological Societys new report, science is now not only able to detect a climate change signal in individual extreme events, science is now able to determine whether climate change caused by humans was essential in the development of an extreme event. In other words, science is now at the point where it is able to tell us whether certain extreme events would or would not have happened without climate change.

We dont know the day after, however. Such research takes time. But I expect well hear more about the detection of climate change fingerprints on this storm in the months to come. See my colleague Brenda Ekwurzels blog for more on this specific topic.

The other way climate change plays a role in the impact of storms is clear and can be discussed more definitively today: todays storms have higher water levels to work with due to sea level rise. In Boston, water levels have risen ~5 inches just since the blizzard of 78. (This upward trend is also responsible for the increased tidal flooding along Bostons waterfront.) So ANY storm that hits our coasts today is working with water that is higher and closer to our cities, buildings, homes and infrastructure, than when we first put them there.

It was interesting to note that the tide height associated with this storm topped the Blizzard of 78 by hundredths of an inch. In its defense, the Blizzard of 78 was working with an ocean that was 5 inches shorter. If that exact storm happened today, the flooding would be worse than it was in 1978 given this additional water. And importantly, the damages would likely be worse as well, given the additional people, property and stuff weve put along our coasts since that time.

But speaking of comparisons. We released an analysis in 2017 that identified areas along the entire U.S. coast that would flood on a chronic basis, just with normal tidal fluctuations. By 2060, the general area of Boston that flooded Thursday would flood at least 26 times per year, irrespective of storms or rainfall, with a high rate of sea level rise. (Add storms and rainfall and the frequency rises.) Thats about 45 years from now, well within the lifetime of the buildings and infrastructure weve built and continue to build in these areas. With a more moderate rate of sea level increase, it would flood chronically a couple of decades later.



Bostons storm-flooded area becomes its tidally-flooded area later this century.

This sunny-day floodingthe kind seen today at places like Long Wharf during extreme high tideswouldnt have the destructive waves of Thursdays storm. It would, however, put large areas under inches and potentially feet of sea water, it would be unaffected by the construction of major harbor storm barrier, and it would preclude business-as-usual along some of the busiest and highest-value parts of Bostons waterfront. Go to this link to view your own coastal community.

Importantly, our analysis also shows that a lower rate of sea level rise, associated with adherence to the Paris agreement, could greatly reduce this flooding.

4. What are some responsible takeaways?

Well be taking stock of this storm for some time to come.

Boston, a city with a strong and growing commitment to coastal climate preparedness and resilience, an unsurpassed local expert community, and uniquely engaged business and philanthropic sectors, can emerge as an even stronger national leader in the wake of this storm.

Massachusetts, with its growing if patchy commitment to the same, can recognize its mounting exposure to coastal flooding and get much more serious on this front. Republican Governor Charlie Bakers executive order on state government adaptation efforts shows that sensible, bipartisan action is possible. Passage of the bill to establish a comprehensive adaptation management action plan (CAMP) would codify this order and represent a serious commitment toward tackling our climate risks.

The important takeaway for Boston, Gloucester, Scituate, Barnstable, Salem and on down the lineas well as for places in other states that dodged this bullet, this timeis not simply how do we prepare for storms like this. Its how do we prepare for a futureand to a certain extent, a presentwhere storms have the potential to be more destructive, and where no storm is needed for transformative flooding to occur. In Massachusetts, we can do that, and the sooner we start, the less costly and disruptive it will be.

Erika Spanger-Siegfried is a senior analyst in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
By Steve Horn

The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) has sued Wisconsin State Superintendent Tony Evers for what it alleges was a state education agencys violation of an anti-regulatory lawlong pushed by the petrochemical billionaire Koch brothersknown as the REINS Act.

Wisconsins version of REINS, or Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, is a piece of legislation heavily lobbied and advocated in favor of for over half a decade by Americans for Prosperity, a policy and electioneering advocacy front group founded and funded by the Koch Family Foundations and Koch Industries.

The bill, which has a federal equivalent in Congress, has long been seen as the crown jewel of the Koch network. It essentially gives legislative bodies full veto power over regulations, including proposed environmental safeguards, which have been proposed by executive agencieseven when those regulations are mandated by laws legislatures have passed.

WILLs November 20 lawsuit, if successful, would be the first time the REINS Act is used to halt a proposed regulation. WILL is funded almost entirely by the conservative Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation, which has offices located next door. Wisconsins Republican Governor Scott Walker, who is up for re-election in 2018, became the first state chief executive to sign the state equivalent of REINS into law.

Walker has long maintained close ties with the Koch network and has received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the juggernaut.

The federal version of the REINS Act, first introduced early in Barack Obamas presidency, was again proposed during the 2017 congressional session. The bill passed early in the year in the House, but not in the Senate, where it currently has 38 co-sponsors.

Rep. Steve Haugaard, a Republican in the South Dakota legislature, recently told the Heartland Institute that he too is in the process of bringing a version of the REINS Act to his state. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group which brings lobbyists and generally Republican Party state legislators together to vote on model bills at its annual meetings, has a resolution in support of the REINS Act as one of its pieces of model legislation.

Wisconsin Supreme Court, WILL Tie

WILL has brought the lawsuit directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It argues that Evers, a Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate, has promulgated proposed regulations without sending a detailed scoping statement to the states Department of Administration. That office functions, in essence, as an extension of the governors office.

Such a statement would have laid out the costs for stakeholders to comply with the proposed rules. The lack of this statement was discovered via an open records request filed by WILL, according to the complaint and exhibits from the case. The Wisconsin version of REINS requires that this type of scoping document be published, mandating that if the costs of regulatory compliance rise above $10 million, the bill or regulation either be rewritten or discarded.

State Superintendent Evers is blatantly violating newly enacted state law, Rick Esenberg, WILL president and general counsel, said in a press release. The legislature passed the REINS Act to make all agencies, including the Department of Public Instruction, more accountable to the elected-state legislature and open to the people of Wisconsin. No one, including Superintendent Evers, is above the rule of law in Wisconsin.

As the Associated Press noted, Gov. Walker recently appointed Dan Kelly, who formerly sat on WILLs litigation advisory board, to the Supreme Court in July 2016. Upon the appointment, WILL issued a statement in support of Kelly.

Ive known Dan a long time and enjoyed our personal and professional relationship. He is a very bright, capable attorney who believes in a judiciary that interprets the law objectively, fairly, and follows where the law might lead, WILLs Esenberg said in a press release. His experience unquestioningly qualifies him for the Supreme Court where reason and sophisticated legal analysis guides public policy affecting nearly six million Wisconsinites.

The Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commercethe Wisconsin state-level equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commercehas inserted itself into the case by filing an amicus, or friend of the court, brief in support of WILLs lawsuit.

Legal Representation Issues

Beyond the lawsuit itself, Evers is actually having problems related to legal representation for the nascent case because he does not want to be represented by counsel from the office of Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel. Schimel has come out in agreement with REINS and its implementation.

Pointing to this set of circumstances, Evers wrote a letter on Nov. 28 and then held a subsequent press conference on Nov. 29 laying out why he would like to use his own team of lawyers, including Department of Public Instruction in-house counsel, for the case.

I believe that your office is neither willing nor ethically able to provide representation in this matter, wrote Evers. [Wisconsin Supreme Courts Rules of Professional Conduct] require all attorneys, including those at the Department of Justice, to advocate for their clients, abide by a clients decisions concerning the objectives of representation, and avoid conflicts of interest.

Evers and the rest of the Walker-run bureaucracy are at odds to begin with because, in Wisconsin, the state superintendent of public instruction, an office Evers also holds, is an elected post. Further complicating things: Evers, if he wins the Democratic Party gubernatorial primary in August, would be Walkers opponent in the general election.

In perhaps the most outrageous Republican attempt to consolidate all political power in the hands of Gov. Scott Walker, Attorney General Brad Schimel, echoing French king Louis XIV, has effectively declared that he is the state (letat, cest moi), wrote Wisconsin attorney Lester Pines of the development. Schimels expression of absolute authority arose in the latest effort by Walker to gain control of the only other executive officer created by the Wisconsin Constitution who has vested executive power, the superintendent of public instruction.

Dairy State Crucible

As previously reported by DeSmog, Schimel was also a co-plaintiff for the lawsuits spearheaded by then-Oklahoma Attorney General and current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt against the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan would have regulated carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitta climate change denier, as is President Donald Trumphas repealed the Clean Power Plan and now mulls its required replacement.

A spokesperson for Schimels office, Johnny Koremenos, told WisPolitics.com that the Office of the Attorney General is his legal counsel whether Evers likes it or not.

Whether Superintendent Evers likes it or not, the State of Wisconsin is the actual defendant in this lawsuit, and his personal opinions as to what the law is or should be will have no bearing on the attorney generals power or ethical duty to represent the state, said Koremenos.

Beyond the legal representation quagmire, Evers Department of Public Instruction has also called for the lawsuit to be dismissed on its face. Agency spokesperson Tom McCarthy told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, The case has no merit, period. The only people that dont understand this is WILL.

What happens in the days and months ahead with the WILL lawsuit, though, will likely have big implications for environmental regulations not only in Wisconsin but likely far beyond, with the Dairy State once again serving as a test case and battleground for the implementation of the Koch agenda.

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.
Public education in America needs reformand badly. There is an abundance of data showing the underperformance of our nations public schools. For example, the results of a major cross-national test, the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment, placed American students 30th in math and 19th in science out of all 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of the largest advanced economies. And the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress administered by the U.S. Department of Education found that a mere 40 percent of 4th graders, 33 percent of 8th graders, and 25 percent of 12th graders were proficient or advanced in math.

Thats not to say that all public schools are badquite the contrary. However, ineffective education tends to center in large, urban areas. When was the last time you heard someone say they wished they could move to Detroit to send their kids to that citys public schools? Its a pointed questionbut the answer would be just the same if you said Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia. This is not a single state or a single schools problemit is a systematic problem for the entire country.

Consider this sad reality: Our nation produces technology so advanced that I could use the phone in my pocketwhich is already three generations oldto take a video of you and email it to someone in London, but at the same time we cant seem to teach a 4th grader to read in Detroit. Does this make sense? Why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?

Ultimately, the reason for this huge disparity is not that we dont spend enough money on our urban schools: The Detroit public school district, for example, spends roughly $15,000 per pupil per year. It is that we produce cellphones through the market process, and we produce public education through a system that is basically one of central planning. The government tells you what school you can attend, who is to be hired in the schools, and what is to be taught in the school.

We must make the transition from central planning to a market economy for the sake of our children."

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once compared our nations education system to an island of socialism in a free-market sea. Similarly, nearly 30 years ago, the then-president of the American Federation for Teachers Albert Shanker wrote, Its time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybodys role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. Its no surprise that our school system doesnt improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.

We must make the transition from central planning to a market economy for the sake of our children, and especially for the children of low-income families. The current system does not incentivize teachers and administrators to teach children to read or do math, but rather to lobby for more state and federal revenue. This is not to say that we do not have wonderful public school teachers and administrators. But as Adam Smith once wrote, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. He never said you wouldnt find a benevolent baker, but systematic improvement will require using market incentives rather than relying on that uncertain benevolence.

How we make the transition is open to debate, but to me, it seems as though the best, most efficient path to success is through charter schools. I was on the board of education in Michigan and supported the development of charter schools in the state. I worked with the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and her husband Dick in attempting to expand school choice both while I was on the state board of education and afterwards. Charter schools introduce market forces so that the revenue follows the child, and students can attend the school of their choice no matter where they live. This way, if schools fail to provide what students need and parents want, the school loses students and revenue. And gradually, as parents increasingly choose charter schools, the idea of competition in the production of education will gain a foothold in the public square and allow the political transition to purely private schools.

Whats more, introducing charter schools will allow us to reclaim the true purpose of education in a democratic society. Private schooling is consistent with a belief that government should provide education. It is the government production of education that is not only inefficient, but a threat to true democracy. As Friedrich A. Hayek, another Nobel laureate, pointed out, democracy only makes sense if you can form an opinion independent of your government. Government education for all certainly hampers a citizens ability to think originally and freely.

In light of all this, we should wish Betsy DeVos the best in her efforts to improve the education of the poorest among us by expanding the ability of parents to trust their own judgment and choose the schools that serves their child best.
Man fined 4500 for animal offences



Two dogs were found stained with urine and underweight at a Douglas property in 2016

The Isle of Man Constabulary says it takes animal cruelty and neglect very seriously after a man was fined 4500 for cruelty to dogs and illegally possessing two birds of prey.

The Douglas man was also banned from keeping any animal for 10 years after being found guilty at trial at Douglas courthouse.

The police and the MSPCA recovered the animals from an address in Douglas in August 2016.

Officers were looking for the birds following reports they were being kept in poor conditions without a licence, but also found dogs being kept in appalling conditions.

Both dogs were underweight with prominent back bones and being kept in a single downstairs toilet on a urine-soaked piece of foam with no food or water available.

Two hawks have been rehomed to a sanctuary in the UK while the dogs remain at the MSPCA with a view to being rehomed in the near future.

It's hoped the fine will send out a clear message that crimes against animals are taken seriously by Manx police.

Officers intend to continue to work with the MSPCA to ensure offenders like this are brought before the courts.

Photos
BEER-SHEVA, Israel...January 8, 2018 - Women who conceive while using an intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) have a greater risk of preterm delivery, low birth weight babies, bacterial infections, or losing a fetus, according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the Soroka University Medical Center. The research will be presented at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's 38th Annual Pregnancy Meeting in Dallas, Texas on January 29 to February 3..

"We believe this is the first report tracking children born to mothers using an IUD over a long timeframe," says Dr. Gali Pariente, a faculty member of the BGU Division of Obstetrics and Gynecology, BGU Faculty of Health Sciences and a clinical instructor at Soroka. "Working with a large sample over 23 years allowed us to investigate obstetric parameters that hadn't been examined previously in large groups."

IUDs are the most popular form of reversible contraception worldwide. Nearly as effective as sterilization, yet not as permanent, they are the preferred birth control method for 23 percent of female contraceptive users, according to a 2015 United Nations report on world contraceptive use.

An IUD is recognized as a foreign body by the uterus, which produces an inflammatory reaction that impairs sperm implantation. Adding copper or progesterone enhances this response and stimulates further barriers that inhibit sperm from binding with an egg. The risk of IUD failure is highest within the first year of insertion.

In this new study, researchers compared the outcomes of 221,800 deliveries from 1991 to 2014.

During that time, nearly one percent (203) of the women who delivered babies had an IUD which was removed early in the pregnancy, and six percent (149) retained their IUD throughout gestation.

Women who conceived with an IUD were more likely to have one or more adverse outcomes including:

Preterm delivery - 14.3 percent who removed their IUD and 14.1 percent who retained their IUD had preterm deliveries vs. 6.8 percent without an IUD

Bacterial infection (chorioamnionitis) - Nearly five percent who removed their IUD and 2.7 percent who retained their IUD developed a bacterial infection vs. 0.6 percent without an IUD

Low birth weight - 11.3 percent who removed their IUD and 12.1 percent who retained their IUD delivered babies under five pounds vs. 6.6 percent without an IUD

Perinatal mortality - Two percent who removed their IUD and 1.3 percent who retained their IUD lost the fetus vs. 0.5 percent without an IUD

The study, Perinatal Outcomes of Pregnancies in Women Who Conceived While Using an IUD, will be presented at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual conference in Dallas, Texas, January 29 to February 3 by Dr. Gali Pariente, Dr. Tamar Wainstock of BGU's School of Public Health, and Prof. Eyal Sheiner, M.D., Ph.D., vice dean for student affairs of the BGU Faculty of Health Sciences, member of the Division of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and head of the obstetrics unit at Soroka.

"Because of the elevated risks of severe, adverse short-term perinatal complications, we recommend careful monitoring of any women who conceive while using an IUD," says Dr. Pariente.

###

About American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU) plays a vital role in sustaining David Ben-Gurion's vision: creating a world-class institution of education and research in the Israeli desert, nurturing the Negev community and sharing the University's expertise locally and around the globe. As Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) looks ahead to turning 50 in 2020, AABGU imagines a future that goes beyond the walls of academia. It is a future where BGU invents a new world and inspires a vision for a stronger Israel and its next generation of leaders. Together with supporters, AABGU will help the University foster excellence in teaching, research and outreach to the communities of the Negev for the next 50 years and beyond. Visit vision.aabgu.org to learn more.

AABGU, which is headquartered in Manhattan, has nine regional offices throughout the United States. For more information, visit http://www.aabgu.org
A three-judge SC bench today said that it would review Section 377 that criminalises gay sex between two consenting adults.

By India Today Web Desk: In a big relief to the LGBT community, a three-judge bench of Supreme Court today said it would revisit Section 377- that criminalises gay sex between consenting adults.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said the issue arising out of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) required to be debated upon by a larger bench.

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The Supreme Court bench also observed that the earlier judgement on Section 377 has hurt sentiments of various people.

The bench further said, "Societal morality changes with time, law walks with life. A section of people can't live in fear of their individual choice."

The apex court has also issued notice to the Centre seeking response on a writ petition filed by five members of the LGBT community, who say they live in fear of police because of their natural sexual preferences.

WHAT IS SECTION 377?

Section 377 of the IPC refers to 'unnatural offences' and says whoever voluntarily has intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to pay a fine.

'CAN'T PUT CONSENTING ADULTS IN JAIL'

The bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by one Navtej Singh Johar seeking to declare Section 377 as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex .

Senior advocate Arvind Datar, appearing for Johar, said the penal provision was unconstitutional as it also provided prosecution and sentencing of consenting adults who are indulging in such sex.

"You can't put in jail two adults who are involved in consenting unnatural sex," Datar said and referred to a recent nine-judge bench judgement in the privacy matter to highlight the point that the right to choose a sexual partner was part of fundamental right .

RAVI SHANKAR SAYS NEED CONSENSUS

This comes close to Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's call for a "consensus" required to take any decision regarding Section 377 , while replying to a debate on two Bills passed by the Lok Sabha on December 19.

The debate was to repeal obsolete laws and a demand by BJD MP Pinaki Misra to strike down Section 377.

"The 2012 judgement, by which the Delhi High Court in a very bold move struck down [IPC section] 377, was set aside by the Supreme Court in the 2013 judgement on the grounds that it is the job of the legislature to do away with it, and it is not the job of the court to legislate," Misra added.

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Last year, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor brought the Indian Penal Code (Amendment) Bill seeking changes in Section 377 of IPC (unnatural offence) but it was defeated in the Lok Sabha.

With inputs from Anusha Soni, Sanjay Sharma and PTI

Watch: Fresh plea on gay rights: Will Sec 377 be scrapped?

--- ENDS ---
In murder investigations, DNA evidence often helps to link a perpetrator to a crime scene and put him or her behind bars. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 8 show that DNA evidence is also successfully being used to link rhinoceros horns seized from poachers and traffickers in various countries directly to the specific crime scenes where rhinoceros carcasses were left behind.

Their Rhino DNA Index System (RhODIS) includes a chain-of-custody-compliant biosampling kit and sampling methodology. It has already been used in more than 5,800 forensic cases with links made between recovered horns, blood-stained evidence items, and specific rhinoceros carcasses in more than120 cases.

"Unlike similar work in which genetic databases provide an indication of geographic provenance, RhODIS provides individual matches that, similar to human DNA profiling, is used as direct evidence in criminal court cases," says Cindy Harper of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Black and white rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis and Ceratotherium simum) are listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered and near threatened, respectively. The new report comes at a time when poaching incidents have seen an uptick after decades of progress. In South Africa, rhinoceros poaching incidents increased from 13 in 2007 to 1,215 in 2014. Rhinos are killed for their horns, which are sought after for medicinal purposes and, increasingly, as cultural status symbols. In the last 10 years, more than 7,000 African rhinoceros have been hunted and killed illegally.

To calculate the probability of a match between confiscated DNA evidence and a crime scene, the researchers relied on allele frequencies calculated from a collection of 3,085 white rhinoceros and 883 black rhinoceros. Their analyses show that it's possible to reliably match the unique DNA profile of an individual animal obtained from any tissue, including horns or curios and powders made from the horns, with a panel including 23 short tandem repeat (STR) loci.

The report highlights nine cases in which DNA matches were made and that evidence was used for the prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of perpetrators of rhinoceros crimes. One case involving three horns and tissues from two carcasses led to a sentence of 29 years.

The RhODIS dataset also offers insight into rhino populations. For instance, the data support the species classification of white and black rhinoceros and three subspecies of black rhinoceros. As a result, Harper says the genetic panels include loci that can also be used to identify horns as originating from white or black rhinoceros. Information on the population structure can also help investigators narrow their search for specific carcasses linked to seized horns.

Because rhinoceros horns often move extremely rapidly from the crime scenes to the consumer countries, the researchers note that the investigation, sampling, and analysis of forensic evidence must be expedited and internationally coordinated. Fortunately, Harper says they've found extensive support for the program from within South Africa, from provincial wildlife and enforcement authorities, the national government, police services, national parks, and the majority of states where rhinoceros live.

"Thanks to this support, we've seen rapid growth of the database into a representative source of rhinoceros genetic data for both forensic and management applications from its inception," Harper says. "The unprecedented cooperation and support for the program from these authorities has been surprising and encouraging."

These cases now show that forensic data resources for wildlife species that are under severe threat from illegal hunting and trafficking can be applied successfully across borders to assist in the investigation and ultimate conviction of wildlife criminals. The hope is that the increasing risk of conviction and stiff sentencing will play an important role in decreasing incentives to deal in illegal wildlife products.

The researchers say the RhODIS database continues to grow as new samples are added. With funding support and the use of genetic data to better manage remaining rhinoceros populations, "this effort will further ensure that the survivors remain healthy while efforts to curb wildlife trafficking and educate consumers continue," Harper says.

###

This research was supported, in part, by the Russian Science Foundation and by St. Petersburg State University.

Current Biology, Harper et al.: "Robust forensic matching of confiscated horns to individual poached African rhinoceros" http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31450-1

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
A cellular traffic jam appears to affect neurons in most forms of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), researchers at Emory University School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville have shown.

The results are scheduled for publication in Nature Neuroscience.

ALS research had already identified nuclear transport problems in the most common inherited form of the neurodegenerative disease, caused by mutations in the gene C9orf72. Just a minority of ALS cases can be blamed on inherited mutations; most are sporadic, thought to come from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. The findings suggest that a drug strategy aimed at easing the traffic jam may be generalizable to sporadic and at least some familial types of ALS.

The project began with an investigation of a protein called TDP-43, a "bad actor" in both ALS and FTD (frontotemporal dementia), says senior author Wilfried Rossoll, PhD, previously at Emory and now assistant professor of neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.

TDP-43 was considered a "victim" of transport defects in the C9orf72 form of ALS, Rossoll says. TDP-43 is normally found in the nucleus. In ALS-affected neurons, truncated forms of TDP-43 aggregate into clumps that are found in the cytoplasm.

"We show that TDP-43 is also a 'perpetrator', in that it can cause transport defects on its own in most ALS cases, and potentially other neurodegenerative diseases with TDP-43 pathology, such as frontotemporal dementia," he says.

Rossoll and his team wanted to figure out how TDP-43 aggregates inflict damage upon neurons. However, these aggregates are difficult to analyze since they are insoluble. The scientists used a technique akin to the way banks attempt to foil robbers by loading dye packs, ready to burst, into stacks of cash.

Yi Zhang, an exchange student at Emory from China, grafted an enzyme onto TDP-43 that slaps a tag onto everything nearby in live cells. Working with Nick Seyfried, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and neurology and director of the Emory Integrated Proteomics Core, Zhang was able to isolate and identify the tagged proteins.

In neurons in which the TDP-43 fragment was aggregating and making them sick, the enzyme tagged several gatekeeper proteins, components of the nuclear pore, which are critical for moving traffic in and out of the nucleus. When TDP-43 clumps together, so do the nuclear pore proteins.

Ching-Chieh (Ian) Chou, PhD, a former Emory graduate student and now a postdoc at Stanford, is the lead author on this study. He found that the clumping alters the shape of the nuclear membrane and the nuclear pores, and thus disrupts the import of proteins into the nucleus and export of RNA out of it. The Emory/Mayo team found alterations in nuclear structure in skin cells obtained from ALS patients by Chad Hales, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology - both C9orf72 forms and others. They saw similar problems in neurons generated from patients' induced stem cells..

In post-mortem brain tissue from ALS patients, the researchers could also see clumps of nuclear pore proteins. Significantly, these were visible in sporadic ALS cases as well as those driven by mutations in C9orf72 or TDP-43. This research was conducted with Jonathan Glass, MD, professor of neurology and director of Emory ALS Center.

"TDP43 pathology is seen in about 98 percent of ALS cases and about 50 percent of FTD cases, and our work supports the now accepted conclusion that nucleopore abnormalities are not restricted to C9orf72 expansion mutations," Glass says. "Confirming the in vitro data in human brain tissue was very important, making the findings that much more relevant."

He adds that there is still a chicken-or-egg question surrounding TDP-43 aggregation and the nuclear pore abnormalities.

Forcing cultured neurons to produce aggregation-prone TDP-43 fragments is toxic. But the Emory/Mayo team showed that a drug that clamps down on some nuclear transport routes can blunt the toxic effects in culture. The drug, called KPT-335 or verdinexor and made by Karyopharm Therapeutics, inhibits nuclear export. KPT-335 may compensate for disrupted protein import, and also may prevent too much TDP-43 from accumulating outside the nucleus, Rossoll says. Drugs similar to KPT-335 have shown beneficial effects in animal models of the C9orf72 form of ALS, and this class of drugs is headed for clinical studies.

###

This work was supported by grants from Emory's Catalyst Funding Program, the ALS Association (17-IIP-353), and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS091749).
The January issue of Health Affairs includes a study by Ashish Thakrar of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System and coauthors. The United States has poorer child health outcomes than other industrialized nations despite greater per capita spending. The authors compare child mortality rates in the US and the nineteen other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) during 1961-2010, looking at data for children up to the age of 19. They found that over the fifty-year period, childhood mortality progressively declined in all the OECD countries. However, by the first decade of the 21st century, US infants had a 76 percent increased risk of death, and children ages 1-19 were 57 percent more likely to die before adulthood (see exhibit below). According to the authors, perinatal conditions and injuries account for much of the elevated death rates in the US--conditions that they note can best be addressed through multi-sector approaches that reach beyond a country's health care system.

###

Health Affairs is the leading peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Published monthly by Project HOPE, the journal is available in print, online, and on mobile phones. Additional and late-breaking content is found at http://www.healthaffairs.org. To update your subscription preferences, please visit the Alerts page on our website.
Researchers have discovered mutations in a gene related to obesity, offering new treatment possibilities in the fight against the global epidemic.

Research into the genetic causes of obesity, and related conditions, could be incredibly valuable in finding ways to treat them. Currently, there are some drugs available or being tested, but knowing what specific mutations cause obesity allows scientists to create drugs that target them specifically.

The new study, led by Imperial College London and published today in Nature Genetics, focussed on children suffering from obesity in Pakistan, where genetic links to obesity had been previously identified by the team in about 30% of cases.

This link of genes to obesity is due to recessive mutations that are more likely to be inherited and passed on to children in a region like Pakistan because of the high level of consanguinity (inter-family relationships) in its population. This is because parents who are closely related are more likely to be carrying the same mutation, so a child may inherit from both sides, causing the mutation to take effect.

This new study used genome sequencing and found mutations in one specific gene related to obesity: adenylate cyclase 3 (ADCY3). When mutations occur in ADCY3, the protein it codes for forms abnormally and doesn't function properly. This leads to abnormalities relating to appetite control, diabetes, and even sense of smell.

Professor Philippe Froguel, chair of Genomic Medicine at Imperial, said: "Early studies into ADCY3 tested mice that were bred to lack that gene, found that these animals were obese and also lacked the ability to smell, known as anosmia. When we tested our patients, we found that they also had anosmia, again showing a link to mutations in ADCY3."

ADCY3 is thought to impact a system that links the hypothalamus (part of the brain) to the production of hormones that regulate a wide variety of biological functions, including appetite.

After identifying the mutations in the Pakistani patients, the researchers entered their results into GeneMatcher, described by Professor Froguel as a "dating agency for genetics". This led to another group of scientists in the Netherlands contacting the team with their own ADCY3 findings in one of their patients with obesity.

This new European patient inherited different mutations on the same ADCY3 gene from both parents (as they were not closely related, as in Pakistan) so the ADCY3 gene of the offspring was not functioning properly, leading to obesity.

Further connections were made with a group of Danish scientists, studying the Inuit population of Greenland. Whilst not traditionally consanguineous (as in close family marriages), this population is small, so inbreeding is likely to have occurred.

This research also found a link between ADCY3 mutations and obesity, and is published alongside the Imperial research in Nature Genetics. Professor Froguel noted how positive this kind of collaboration is, particularly in terms of showing that the research and findings are reproducible.

Professor Froguel added: "Obesity is not always gluttony, as is often suggested, and I think we should have a positive outlook considering the new treatments that are becoming possible. Such attempts to understand obesity and look for a cure are a real strength of the Imperial Faculty and Department of Medicine."

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When we think of bacteria, images of nasty infections like pneumonia, meningitis or food poisoning come to mind, but bacteria can themselves be infected - by viruses, also called bacteriophages. Interestingly, just like not all bacteria are harmful to humans, not all viruses are harmful to bacteria and some can even benefit them. Can bacteria tell good and bad viruses apart? An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) studied how infections with potentially beneficial viruses play out in bacteria that carry a certain type of anti-viral immune mechanism called restriction-modification (RM). They show that population-level interactions between viruses and bacteria make the infection proceed in a way that compensates for the inherent disadvantage of individual cells and allows immune bacteria to acquire many more beneficial viruses in the long-term. This is the finding of a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study was carried out by Maros Pleska, a PhD student and Moritz Lang a postdoc in the group of C?lin Guet at IST Austria, as well as collaborators Dominik Refardt at Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Bruce Levin at Emory University.

Some infections can bring new genes to bacteria

Many viruses simply replicate inside bacteria and such infections, which usually result in the death of the infected bacterium, are called lytic. However, some viruses, called temperate viruses, can take a gentler approach: During lysogenic infections, the genetic information of a temperate virus integrates into the genetic information of the infected bacterium and thus enhances the bacterial gene repertoire. Examples of genes, which are spread among bacteria by temperate viruses, include dangerous toxins, such as shiga toxin, cholera toxin, or botulinum toxin. However, there is a catch for the bacteria as temperate viruses can both kill or integrate into their hosts, and the decision on which way the infection will proceed is made in a seemingly random manner.

It is well known that many bacteria protect themselves from lethal lytic infections by carrying mechanisms of immunity, such as Restriction-Modification (RM) systems that cut viral DNA. What is not known is how these primitive immune systems affect the ability of bacteria to acquire potentially beneficial viruses in the process of lysogeny. Can RM systems distinguish between lytic and lysogenic infections, or do they act more generally and, in protecting bacteria from death, also prevent them from acquisition of beneficial viruses? Pleska, Lang and their colleagues combined experiments and theory to investigate this question.

Individual vs population - a counterintuitive finding

As a first step, the researchers looked at what happens to individual bacteria carrying RM systems when infected with temperate viruses. They found that the RM system always sought to prevent infection, regardless of whether the infection was heading towards lysis or lysogeny. From this, the conclusion would be that, as an inadvertent cost of preventing bacteria from lysis, RM system are also a barrier to acquisition of viral genes.

However, a very different result emerged when the researchers investigated what happens at the level of the bacterial population. Simply speaking, they mixed a large number of bacteria with a large number of bacteriophages, and looked at how many bacteria acquired viral genes in the long-term. Based on the previous result, the scientists expected that viruses will integrate much less often in bacteria with RM systems, as compared to bacteria without this mechanism of immunity. However, the opposite happened: more viruses had integrated into bacteria that were expected to be immune.

Restriction-modification systems offer temporary respite

What is the explanation of this counterintuitive result? The researchers found that instead of preventing infections completely, RM systems merely postpone the infection, giving the bacterial population time to grow until viruses break through the barrier and infection fully hits. While lysis is more frequent in small bacterial populations and many bacteria get killed if the population is infected early on, lysogeny becomes more prevalent in large bacterial populations, making bacteria that get infected later more likely to acquire the virus instead of getting killed by it. RM systems therefore offer a temporary respite, protecting bacterial populations only from the most dangerous phase of infection, without limiting the potential benefits.

The importance of population-level interactions

Is a new unknown molecular mechanism responsible for this switch in behaviour? No, says first author Maros Pleska: "The most intriguing finding is that we actually did not have to find any new mechanism at all. What we observe is all a simple consequence of the population dynamics of interactions between bacteria and viruses." This result is a rebuff to those seeking to predict the longer-term behaviour of populations from the biology of individual molecular components, explains Pleska: "The basic biology of all the elements in our system was known as the RM systems and viruses we looked at are some of the best understood molecular systems we know. Nevertheless, this study illustrates how hopeless we are when it comes to using this molecular-level knowledge to predict the dynamics that occur after we put individual pieces together. In fact, our observations ran completely opposite to what anyone would expect. Thus, ecological and evolutionary interactions between even the simplest biological elements can be very complex and we need new ways of looking at them, if we ever want to understand their role in nature."

###

Researcher biographies

Maros Pleska joined the lab of Calin Guet as a PhD student in 2012. He successfully defended his PhD thesis in December 2017 and will move to Rockefeller University, New York, for his postdoctoral research on microbial ecology, starting in January 2018. Moritz Lang joined IST Austria as an IST Fellow in 2015. The work was funded by an HFSP Young Investigators' grant awarded to Guet. Pleska is a recipient of a DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Science at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

IST Austria

The Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria) is a PhD granting research institution located in Klosterneuburg, 18 km from the center of Vienna, Austria. Inaugurated in 2009, the Institute is dedicated to basic research in the natural and mathematical sciences. IST Austria employs professors on a tenure-track system, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students. While dedicated to the principle of curiosity-driven research, the Institute owns the rights to all scientific discoveries and is committed to promote their use. The first president of IST Austria is Thomas A. Henzinger, a leading computer scientist and former professor at the University of California in Berkeley, USA, and the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The graduate school of IST Austria offers fully-funded PhD positions to highly qualified candidates with a bachelor's or master's degree in biology, neuroscience, mathematics, computer science, physics, and related areas. See http://www.ist.ac.at
Until now it had been assumed that, once a flow of a fluid has become turbulent, turbulence would persist. Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) including Professor Bjorn Hof and co-first authors Jakob Kuhnen and Baofang Song have now shown that this is not the case. In their experiments, which they published in Nature Physics, they managed to destabilize turbulence in a pipe so that the flow turned to a laminar (non-turbulent) state, and they observed that the flow remained laminar thereafter. Eliminating turbulence can save as much as 95% of the energy required to pump a fluid through a pipe.

From water to oil and to natural gas an enormous amount of fluids is transported across the globe through pipes. The amount of energy used to pump these fluids is considerable and corresponds to approximately 10% of the global electricity consumption. It therefore does not come as a surprise that researchers worldwide are working intensely on finding ways to reduce these costs. The major part of these energy losses is caused by turbulence, a phenomenon that leads to a drastic increase of frictional drag and hence much more energy is required to pump the fluid. Previous approaches have aimed to locally reduce turbulence levels. Now the research group of Bjorn Hof at IST Austria has taken an entirely new approach, tackling the problem from a different side: rather than temporarily weakening turbulence, they managed to destabilize existing turbulence so that the flow automatically becomes laminar.

In a so-called laminar flow, a fluid flows in parallel layers which do not mix. The opposite of this is a turbulent flow which is characterized by vortices and chaotic changes in pressure and velocity within the fluid. Most flows that we can observe in nature and in engineering are turbulent, from the smoke of an extinguished candle to the flow of blood in the left ventricle of our heart. In pipes, both laminar and turbulent flows can in principle exist and be stable, but already a small disturbance can make a laminar flow turbulent. Turbulence in pipes was until now assumed to be stable, and efforts to save energy costs therefore only focused on reducing its magnitude but not to completely extinguish it. In their proof of principle, Bjorn Hof and his group have now shown that this assumption was wrong, and that a turbulent flow can indeed be transformed to a laminar one. The flow thereafter remains laminar unless it is disturbed again.

"Nobody knew that it was possible to get rid of turbulence in practice. We have now proven that it can be done. This opens up new possibilities to develop applications for pipelines," explains Jakob Kuhnen.

The secret lies in the velocity profile, i.e., in the variation of the flow velocity when looking at different positions in the pipe's cross section. The flow is fastest in the middle of the pipe while it is much slower near the walls. By placing rotors in the flow that reduced the difference between the fluid in the center and that close to the wall, the researchers managed to obtain a "flatter" profile. For such flow profiles the processes that sustain and create turbulent eddies fail and the fluid gradually returns to smooth laminar motion and it remained laminar until it reached the end of the pipe. Another way to obtain the flat velocity profile was to inject liquid from the wall. Yet another implementation of the idea of a flat velocity profile was a moving part of the pipe: by moving the walls quickly over a stretch of the pipe, they also obtained the same flat profile that restored the laminar flow.

The group has already registered two patents for their discovery. However, turning this proof of concept experiment into a system that can be used in actual oil or water pipelines all over the world will require some more efforts in development. So far, the concept was proven for relatively small velocities, but for use in pipelines, an application working at larger velocity will be necessary. In computer simulations, however, the flat velocity profile always led to a successful elimination of turbulence, which is very promising for future developments.

"In computer simulations, we have tested the impact of the flat velocity profile for Reynolds numbers up to 100.000, and it has worked absolutely everywhere. The next step is now to make it work also for high speeds in the experiments," says Bjorn Hof.

###

IST Austria

The Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria) is a PhD granting research institution located in Klosterneuburg, 18 km from the center of Vienna, Austria. Inaugurated in 2009, the Institute is dedicated to basic research in the natural and mathematical sciences. IST Austria employs professors on a tenure-track system, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students. While dedicated to the principle of curiosity-driven research, the Institute owns the rights to all scientific discoveries and is committed to promote their use. The first president of IST Austria is Thomas A. Henzinger, a leading computer scientist and former professor at the University of California in Berkeley, USA, and the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The graduate school of IST Austria offers fully-funded PhD positions to highly qualified candidates with a bachelor's or master's degree in biology, neuroscience, mathematics, computer science, physics, and related areas. See http://www.ist.ac.at
Johns Hopkins scientists have used a form of artificial intelligence to create a map that compares types of cellular receptors, the chemical "antennas" on the surface of immune system T-cells. Their experiments with lab-grown mouse and human T-cells suggest that people with cancer who have a greater variety of such receptors may respond better to immunotherapy drugs and vaccines.

A report on how the scientists created and tested what they call "ImmunoMap" appeared Dec. 20 in Cancer Immunology Research.

"ImmunoMap gives scientists a picture of the wide diversity of the immune system's responses to cellular antigens," says Jonathan Schneck, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology, medicine and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

Receptors on T-cells recognize antigens, or pieces of other cells that trigger an immune response, particularly antibodies. If the antigens are foreign, T-cells raise the alarm within the immune system, which can distribute an "all-points bulletin" to be on the lookout for the unfamiliar antigens.

Because diseases such as cancer tend to evade detection by T-cells' receptors, allowing a tumor to grow unchecked, scientists have long sought "intel" on this process as a means of developing therapies that target malignant cells, but leave healthy cells alone.

"Much of immunotherapy today is built on the premise that we know these antigens," says Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering M.D./Ph.D. student John-William Sidhom. "But we actually don't know as much as we need to about them and the T-cells that recognize them."

To address that need, Sidhom used high-powered computing to create a mathematical model--essentially a digital map--of genomic sequence data of receptors from human T-cells that were exposed to a virus in the laboratory. "Our goal was to cluster T-cell receptors that are similar and may target the same antigen," says Sidhom.

Using an unsupervised learning algorithm, the team was able to convert the T-cell receptor sequencing data into numeric distances based on similarities in the receptor sequences and cluster them by functional specificity. For example, if two receptor sequences were similar, the computer assigned a short distance rank between the two sequences. If the sequences were different, they received a longer distance rank.

Once the thousands of sequences were converted into these "distance" metrics, the computer system's artificial intelligence algorithms looked for patterns among the receptors.

"That's how we got ImmunoMap, by characterizing receptor sequences as they relate to each other," says Schneck. "T-cell receptors that are very similar, with slight differences in their sequences, may be recognizing the same antigen."

The Johns Hopkins team tested ImmunoMap's ability to correlate immune responses on receptor sequencing data from T-cells in the tumors of 34 patients with cancer enrolled in a nationwide clinical trial of the immunotherapy drug nivolumab.

Of the 34, three patients with melanoma responded to nivolumab, and the rest did not respond. In the responders, the scientists found more--an average of 15--different T-cell receptor clusters compared with eight to nine in the non-responders.

The scientists also found that the diversity of T-cell receptors decreased among the responders by 10-15 percent four weeks after nivolumab treatment.

"Those patients had a broad array of receptor weaponry before their treatment, which may have allowed the right receptor to kill their cancer cells," says Schneck. "Once their immune system found the correct receptor, T-cells expressing those receptors multiplied, leading to an overall reduction in the structural diversity of their T-cell receptors."

Schneck says some scientists have emphasized that response to immunotherapy is largely dependent on whether T-cells are infiltrating the tumor site, but his research suggests that while, "infiltration is important, it's not enough to explain patients' variable responses to immunotherapy drugs."

The team also created an ImmunoMap of the diversity of T-cell receptors specific for tumor antigens in mice with and without tumors. Their analysis showed that the diversity of T-cell receptors decreased among samples of T-cells taken closer to the tumor, compared with farther away. The data may help scientists determine how tumors evade detection by the immune system.

Schneck says the research group also needs to amass more ImmunoMap data to reliably predict which patients may or may not respond to immunotherapy. "At this point, ImmunoMap can't match T-cell receptors to specific antigens, or determine whether those antigens are important for immunotherapy response in any individual patient," he notes.

But the hope, he says, is that ImmunoMap may one day be helpful in designing vaccines and engineered T-cells for cancer treatment.

###

Other scientists who contributed to this research include Catherine A. Bessell and Alyssa Kosmides of Johns Hopkins and Jonathan J. Havel and Timothy A. Chan of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Funding for the research was provided by the Johns Hopkins University-Coulter Translational Partnership, the TEDCO Maryland Innovation Initiative, the Troper Wojcicki Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (R01- AI44129, CA108835 and U01 - AI113315), Bristol Myers-Squibb, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance, the PaineWebber Chair, Stand Up 2 Cancer and the Starr Cancer Consortium.

COI: Under a licensing agreement between NexImmune and The Johns Hopkins University, Jonathan Schneck is entitled to a share of royalties received by the university on sales of products described in this article. He was a founder of NexImmune and currently serves as a member of NexImmune's scientific advisory board and has equity in NexImmune. This arrangement has been reviewed and approved by The Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict of interest policies. Timothy A. Chan is the cofounder of Gritstone Oncology. Jonathan Havel's wife is a full-time employee of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Adolescents with severe obesity who had bariatric surgery showed significant improvements in cardiovascular disease risk factors, according to the most recent "Teen Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery" (Teen-LABS) study, published online today by Pediatrics. Prior to bariatric surgery, 33 percent of the study participants had three or more defined cardiovascular disease risk factors. However, three years post-surgery only 5 percent of study participants had three or more risk factors; representing significant reduction in the overall likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease later in life.

Teen-LABS is a multi-center clinical study funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that is examining the safety and health effects of surgical weight loss procedures in the adolescent population. This on-going study is being conducted at five clinical centers in the U.S., including Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Texas Children's Hospital, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The study's Chair, Thomas H. Inge, MD, PhD, is located at Children's Hospital Colorado, Denver, CO.

Marc P. Michalsky, MD, surgical director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children's, is the lead author of the latest Teen-LABS publication. The study demonstrated bariatric surgery performed during adolescence may provide unique benefits later in life by altering the probability of the future development of adverse cardiovascular events, including the development and progression of impaired glucose metabolism, atherosclerosis, heart failure and stroke.

"This is the first large-scale analysis of predictors of change in cardiovascular disease risk factors among adolescents following bariatric surgery," said Dr. Michalsky, also a professor of Clinical Surgery and Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine." The study demonstrated early improvement and reduction of cardio-metabolic risk factors, offering compelling support for bariatric surgery in adolescents."

This most recent publication from the Teen-LABS research study extends previous findings describing the baseline prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors within the cohort of 242 adolescents. Predictors of change in prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors measured included blood pressure, lipids, glucose homeostasis and inflammation.

Three years post-surgery, the study showed a reduction in cardiovascular disease risk factors is associated not only with weight loss, but also with age at the time of surgery, pre-operative body mass index (BMI), sex and race. Specifically, increased weight loss, female sex and younger age at time of surgery serve to predict a higher probability of risk factor resolution. Younger participants were more likely to resolve dyslipidemia compared to older patients, while females were more likely than males to demonstrate improvements in elevated blood pressure.

"Although relationships between change in cardiovascular disease risk factors and postoperative weight reduction were not unexpected, we learned younger patients at time of surgery were more likely to experience dyslipidemia remission and normalization of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), suggesting there may be advantages to undergoing bariatric surgery earlier, even among adolescents," said Dr. Michalsky. Furthermore, Dr. Michalsky noted that "the results of the current study from Teen-LABS gain further significance when considering newly published data by investigators at Yale University which highlights the long-term impact of significantly elevated cardiovascular disease risk factors observed among a large sample of severely obese youth (Class III and Class IV Obesity) compared to less obese study participants.

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FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. - Call it CSI meets conservation.

Stephen O'Brien, Ph.D., a research scientist at Nova Southeastern University's (NSU) Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography, has worked with colleagues across the globe to create a DNA database of rhinoceros that will be used to help with the criminal prosecution of poachers.

"What we've done is create a powerful tool - a genetic database - that enforcement officials can use when they are building cases against those accused of poaching," Dr. O'Brien said. "These magnificent animals are facing increased dangers, so we need to bring every resource we can to the efforts to save them for generations to come."

The research team included experts from the University of Pretoria's Veterinary Genetics Laboratory, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University and African wildlife enforcement units.

A new report addresses the illegal taking of African rhinoceros - an important conservation icon - by organized crime syndicates trafficking rhino horns to southeast Asia markets. Rhino poaching is uncontrolled and increasing, from a few incidents a decade ago to more than 1,000 per year today. The profits are enormous, and so far the risks rather modest.

This study changes that.

The study, published today in Current Biology titled "Robust forensic matching of confiscated horns to individual poached African rhinoceros", describes a comprehensive effort to create a large database of individual rhinos' composite short-term repeat-STR (also called microsatellite) genotypes so they could match confiscated tissue-DNA to real time crime scenes for prosecution.

The team developed an extensive database of rhinoceros DNA profiles and demographic information named RhODIS (Rhino DNA Index System), modeled after CODIS, which is the U.S. FBI's criminal DNA database. The RhODIS forensic system involved African wildlife ranger training and certification, a chain of custody compliant sampling methodology used for live and dead rhinoceros and rhinoceros horns, an eRhODIS field data collection "app" and state-of-the-art DNA genetic individualization. To date, more than 20,000 individual rhinoceros specimens and genotypes have been added to the RhODIS database.

These data include more than 5,800 forensic case samples where links were made between recovered horns, blood stained evidence items and specific rhinoceros carcasses. In the most recent cases listed in the report, this forensic genetic individualization allowed heavy punishments upon conviction, establishing international legal precedents for prosecuting and convicting smugglers of rhino horns suitable for other endangered species traffic. The applications highlight the legal precedent of utilizing the RhODIS system for rhinoceros crimes and provide a benchmark for implementation of similar systems for global wildlife trafficking investigations of other species.

African black and white rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis and Ceratotherium simum) are classified on as critically endangered and near threatened, respectively. Their continued survival is jeopardized by habitat loss and a surge in illegal hunting for their horns that are considered of both medicinal value and as a cultural status symbol in Asian countries, mainly Vietnam and China. More than 7,000 rhinoceros have been killed through poaching in the past decade across Africa with South Africa suffering the highest losses.

"We've seen a huge surge in the number of rhinos poached over the past couple of years simply because the financial reward far outweighed the risk," Dr. O'Brien said. "Now that we can genetically tie someone to a specific cases of poaching, the chances of successful prosecution will go up - hopefully the risk will now not be worth it."

The RhODIS system also provides a comprehensive genetic resource that can be utilized to assist in the management of rhinoceros populations under increasing pressure due to the escalating and non-selective poaching across the African continent. As numbers decline and genetic variability is reduced in the remaining animals, the RhODIS data is providing a tool to inform genetic management of selected populations to avoid inbreeding while maintaining reproductive potential of the survivors.

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About Nova Southeastern University (NSU): Located in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida, NSU is ranked among US News & World Report's Top 200 National Research Universities and is a dynamic, private research university providing high-quality educational and research programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional degree levels. Established in 1964, NSU now includes 16 colleges, the 215,000-square-foot Center for Collaborative Research, a private JK-12 grade school, the Mailman Segal Center for Human Development with specialists in Autism, the world-class NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and the Alvin Sherman Library, Research and Information Technology Center, which is Florida's largest public library. NSU has campuses in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Miramar, Orlando, Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico, while maintaining a presence online globally. Classified as a research university with "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, NSU is one of only 50 universities nationwide to also be awarded Carnegie's Community Engagement Classification, and is also the largest private institution in the United States that meets the U.S. Department of Education's criteria as a Hispanic-serving Institution. Please visit http://www.nova.edu for more information about NSU and realizingpotential.nova.edu for more information on the largest fundraising campaign in NSU history.
By chipping away at a viral protein, Rice University scientists have discovered a path toward virus-like, nanoscale devices that may be able to deliver drugs to cells.

The protein is one of three that make up the protective shell, called the capsid, of natural adeno-associated viruses (AAV). By making progressively smaller versions of the protein, the researchers made capsids with unique abilities and learned a great deal about AAV's mechanisms.

The research appears in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Rice bioengineer Junghae Suh studies the manipulation of nondisease-causing AAVs to deliver helpful cargoes like chemotherapy drugs. Her research has led to the development of viruses that can be triggered by light or by extracellular proteases associated with certain diseases.

AAVs are small -- about 25 nanometers -- and contain a single strand of DNA inside tough capsids that consist of a mosaic of proteins known as VP1, VP2 and VP3. AAVs have been used to deliver gene-therapy payloads, but nobody has figured out how AAV capsids physically reconfigure themselves when triggered by external stimuli, Suh said. That was the starting point for her lab.

"This virus has intrinsic peptide (small protein) domains hidden inside the capsid," she said. "When the virus infects a cell, it senses the low pH and other endosomal factors, and these peptide domains pop out onto the surface of the virus capsid.

"This conformational change, which we termed an 'activatable peptide display,' is important for the virus because the externalized domains break down the endosomal membrane and allow the virus to escape into the cytoplasm," Suh said. "In addition, nuclear localization sequences in those domains allow the virus to transit into the nucleus. We believed we could replace that functionality with something else."

Suh and lead author and Rice graduate student Nicole Thadani think their mutant AAVs can become "biocomputing nanoparticles" that detect and process environmental inputs and produce controllable outputs. Modifying the capsid is the first step.

Of the three natural capsid proteins, only VP1 and VP2 can be triggered to expose their functional peptides, but neither can make a capsid on its own. Shorter VP3s can form capsids by themselves, but do not display peptides. In natural AAVs, VP3 proteins outnumber each of their compadres 10-to-1.

That limits the number of peptides that can be exposed, so Suh, Thadani and their co-authors set out to change the ratio. That led them to truncate VP2 and synthesize mosaic capsids with VP3, resulting in successful alteration of the number of exposed peptides. Based on previous research, they inserted a common hexahistidine tag that made it easy to monitor the surface display of the peptide region.

"We wanted to boost the protein's activable property beyond what occurs in the native virus capsid," Thadani said. "Rather than displaying just five copies of the peptide per capsid, now we may be able to display 20 or 30 and get more of the bioactivity that we want."

They then made a truncated VP2 able to form a capsid on its own. "The results were quite surprising, and not obvious to us," Suh said. "We chopped down that VP2 component enough to form what we call a homomeric capsid, where the entire capsid is made up of just that mutant subunit. That gave us viruses that appear to have peptide 'brushes' that are always on the surface.

"A viral structure like that has never been seen in nature," she said. "We got a particle with this peptide brush, with loose ends everywhere. Now we want to know if we can use these loose ends to attach other things or carry out other functions."

Homomeric AAVs display as many as 60 peptides, while mosaic AAVs could be programmed to respond to stimuli specific to particular cells or tissues and display a smaller desired number of peptides, the researchers said.

"Viruses have evolved to invade cells very effectively," Suh said. "We want to use our virus as a nanoparticle platform to deliver protein- or peptide-based therapeutics more efficiently into cells. We want to harness what nature has already created, tweak it a little bit and use it for our purposes."

###

Co-authors are Rice Ph.D. graduate Christopher Dempsey and alumna Julia Zhao and former lab manager Sonya Vasquez. Suh is an associate professor of bioengineering.

The research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Thadani and a National Institutes of Health Nanobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Training Program grant to Dempsey.

Read the abstract at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.7b07804

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2018/01/08/kindest-cut-makes-virus-programmable/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

Related materials:

Reprogramming virus nanoparticles to bind metal ions upon activation with heat: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm200225x

Synthetic Virology Lab (Suh Lab): https://sites.google.com/site/suhsynvirol/

Department of Bioengineering: http://bioe.rice.edu

George R. Brown School of Engineering: https://engineering.rice.edu

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,879 undergraduates and 2,861 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.
By PTI: Hyderabad, Jan 8 (PTI) Telangana IT and Industries minister K T Rama Rao today laid the foundation stone for construction of an IT tower at Karimnagar.

According to an official release, the construction will be completed within one year and provide plug and play facilities for IT companies.

The state government signed MoUs with six IT firms which showed interest for setting up their shops in IT towers.

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"In the first phase, 1,000 direct employment opportunities will be created for the youngsters. To ensure youngsters from the state get employed, the government is attracting investments into IT and several allied sectors," it said.

KTR said the government will also set up the regional center of TASK ((Telangana Academy of Skill and Knowledge) for job seekers and T-Hub for job startups in Karimnagar.

Focusing on tier 2 cities, the state government is aggressively promoting Warangal, Khammam, Karimnagar, Mahabubnagar, and Nizamabad as IT hubs, the release said. PTI GDK NRB

--- ENDS ---
There are more than 8 million species of living things on Earth, but none of them -- from 100-foot blue whales to microscopic bacteria -- has an advantage over the others in the universal struggle for existence.

In a paper published Jan. 8 in the prestigious journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, a trio of scientists from universities in the United States and the United Kingdom describe the dynamic that began with the origin of life on Earth 4 billion years ago. They report that regardless of vastly different body size, location and life history, most plant, animal and microbial species are equally "fit" in the struggle for existence. This is because each transmits approximately the same amount of energy over its lifetime to produce the next generation of its species.

"This means that each elephant or blue whale contributes no more energy per gram of parent to the next generation than a trout or even a bacterium," said co-author Charles A.S. Hall, a systems ecologist with the College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York. "We found, rather astonishingly, by examining the production rate and the generation time of thousands of plants, animals and microbes that each would pass on, on average, the same amount of energy to the next generation per gram of parent, regardless of size. A single-celled aquatic alga recreates its own body mass in one day, but lives for only a day. A large female elephant takes years to produce her first baby, and lives much longer than the alga. For all plants and animals of all sizes these two factors - rate of biomass production and generation time - exactly balance each other, so each contributes the same energy per gram of parent to the next generation in their lifetime."

The bottom line, Hall said, is that all organisms are, on average, equally fit for survival.

Hall's co-author, James H. Brown, a physiological ecologist at the University of New Mexico, said, "The fact that all organisms are nearly equally fit has profound implications for the evolution and persistence of life on Earth."

The third author on the paper, which was published online, is mathematical biologist Richard M. Sibly of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

The scientists tackled an intriguing question about life on the planet, beginning with some common knowledge. On one hand, they noted, microscopic, unicellular bacteria, algae and protists that weigh only a few micrograms live fast, generate much new biomass per day or even per minute, and die young, often within hours. On the other hand, mammals such as a 100-foot blue whale can live up to 100 years but generate new biomass, including babies, much more slowly.

The authors ask a sweeping question: How can such enormous variation in reproduction and survival allow persistence and coexistence of so many species? Their answer: Because there is a universal tradeoff in how organisms acquire, transform and expend energy for survival and production within constraints imposed by physics and biology.

In their research, the authors built a model of energy allocation, based on data involving rates of energy investment in growth and reproduction, generation times (commonly considered 22 to 32 years for humans) and body sizes of hundreds of species ranging from microbes to mammals and trees. They found an exactly equal but opposite relationship between growth rate and generation time among all these organisms.

The net result is what the authors call the "equal fitness paradigm." Species are nearly equally fit for survival because they all devote the same quantity of energy per unit of body weight to produce offspring in the next generation; the higher activity and shorter life of small organisms is exactly compensated for by the slower activity and greater longevity of large organisms.

Hall said the tradeoff between rate of living and generation time is one reason for the great diversity of life on Earth: No one size or life form has a built-in advantage over another. The apparent benefits of being larger (for example, bigger males are more likely to win in competition for mates) are compensated for by the fact that larger animals are typically less productive over time.

"There is no single way of living and using energy that is best," Hall and Brown said. "Given the array of environmental conditions on the planet, one kind of organism might gain a temporary advantage, but such gains will soon be countered by other, competing organisms. The result is what evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen called the 'Red Queen phenomenon,' based on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: All species must keep running to keep up with others and stay in the evolutionary race."

###
Cancer patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs are less likely to receive excessive end-of-life interventions than those treated through Medicare, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

The study will be published online Jan. 8 in Health Affairs.

"The findings are not just important for veterans and VA policy, but for anybody who needs medical care at the end of life, which is a majority of us," said Risha Gidwani-Marszowski, DrPH, a consulting assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. "We as a society need to ensure we are setting up the organization of health care and its financial incentives to ensure that the services patients receive are the ones that are in their best interests at the end of life."

Gidwani-Marszowski, the lead author, is also a health economist at the VA Health Economics Resource Center. The senior author is Steven Asch, MD, professor of medicine at Stanford.

Many Americans say they would prefer to die at home and forgo intensive medical care at the end of their lives. Yet in the last month of life, many studies have shown that the use and cost of health care accelerates. Approximately 4 percent of the entire federal budget is spent on care for Medicare patients in their last year of life, according to some estimates.

In addition, changes are afoot at the VA. Several efforts, including the proposed Veterans Empowerment Act, would change the VA so that it mostly funds medical services, along the lines of Medicare, rather than providing all the care itself.

Those changes could expose veterans to any effects a Medicare-like funding approach has on end-of-life care, Gidwani-Marszowski said.

Testing a funding model

The researchers tested whether the way that care is organized affects the provision of end-of-life services for veterans dying of cancer. The study looked at 87,251 veterans older than 66 who had solid tumors and died between October 2009 and September 2014.

The researchers based the analysis of care quality on guidelines developed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Quality Forum, as well as on research that has shown patients consider some services undesirable or burdensome at the end of life. Specific criteria included whether patients received chemotherapy; whether they had two or more emergency department visits; whether they were admitted to the hospital and, if so, how many days they spent there; whether they died in the hospital; and whether they were admitted to intensive care. In the study, higher numbers of veterans receiving these services indicates lower quality of care.

The researchers then compared the use of these services by veterans with cancer who used VA health care with veterans with cancer who received their care through Medicare. More than 90 percent of older veterans are enrolled in Medicare as well as the VA, so the population that is eligible for both programs is ideal for evaluating differences in care due to health care system factors, Gidwani-Marszowski said. Researchers accounted for several characteristics that could affect which system veterans choose for care, including the distance they live from medical facilities, Gidwani-Marszowski said.

The study showed that Medicare patients were more likely to receive unduly intensive care at the end of life including chemotherapy, hospitalization, admission to the intensive care unit, longer stays in the hospital and death in the hospital than those who received care through the VA.

Gidwani-Marszowski said the study's findings that Medicare patients receive lower-quality, higher-intensity end-of-life care make sense given the different financial incentives of the two systems. VA physicians are salaried, while Medicare-funded physicians bill according to the services provided, which is known as fee for service. Therefore, additional services provided through Medicare generate funds for physicians and health care organizations.

Emergency department use differs

The researchers also found that the VA patients were more likely than the Medicare patients to have two or more emergency department visits. One possible explanation, Gidwani-Marszowski said, is that extended hours or access to appointments are not available at all VA facilities and that veterans may instead need to go to the emergency department for their care. Another is that Medicare patients may be hospitalized for care that VA patients get in the emergency department.

"The VA has long been a leader in providing patient-centered care at the end of life," Asch said. "Our study showed that veterans can expect appropriately lower-intensity care as they face late-stage cancer at VA facilities. If they choose instead to use their Medicare benefits outside the VA, they are at greater risk of getting chemotherapy, hospitalization and other services that will likely not help them in their last days."

The work is an example of Stanford Medicine's focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill.

###

The study's other Stanford authors are Todd Wagner, PhD, associate professor of surgery and director of the Health Economics Research Center at the VA Palo Alto; Karl Lorenz, MD, professor of medicine and section chief of the VA Palo Alto-Stanford Palliative Care Program; Manali Patel, MD, assistant professor of medicine; Kavitha Ramchandran, MD, clinical assistant professor of medicine; Derek Boothroyd, PhD, senior biostatistician; Gary Hsin, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine and director of the Hospice and Palliative Care Center at the VA Palo Alto; Samantha Murrell, research associate at the VA Palo Alto and Stanford surgical affiliate; and Vilija Joyce, research associate at VA Palo Alto.

Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles and Brown University also contributed to the study.

The research was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Program; and the VA Health Services Research and Development Service, VA Information Resource Center.

Stanford Health Policy and Stanford's Department of Medicine also supported the work.

The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://med.stanford.edu/school.html. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children's Health. For information about all three, please visit http://med.stanford.edu.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Replacing the popular contraceptive shot known as DMPA with alternative methods of contraception could help protect women in sub-Saharan Africa and other high-risk regions from becoming infected with HIV, according to a comprehensive review of available evidence published in the journal Endocrine Reviews.

"Human studies suggest DMPA use may raise the risk of HIV infection in exposed women by about 40 percent," said Zdenek Hel, Ph.D., professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Pathology, UAB School of Medicine, and a co-author of the study. "Importantly, we know that some other forms of contraceptive methods do not show the same deleterious effect on the immune function in cell culture, small animals or human studies

As of 2016, 36.7 million people worldwide were living with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. More than half of those people live in eastern or southern Africa. AIDS is the most advanced stage of the HIV viral infection.

DMPA -- or depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate -- is the predominant contraceptive in sub-Saharan Africa, administered as a birth control shot every three months. It is estimated to be used by more than 50 million women worldwide. "It is also used at a relatively high frequency in Alabama and other Southern states in the United States," Hel said.

In the research review, first author Janet P. Hapgood, Ph.D., University of Cape Town, South Africa; Hel; and Charu Kaushic, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, examined the underlying biological mechanisms that could contribute to increased risk of HIV infection for certain hormonal contraceptives but not others.

"To protect individual and public health, it is important to ensure women in areas with high rates of HIV infection have access to affordable contraceptive options," Hapgood said. "Increasing availability of contraceptives that use a form of the female hormone progestin different from the one found in DMPA could help reduce the risk of HIV transmission."

In addition to these clinical studies, the authors examined animal, cell and biochemical research on the form of progestin used in DMPA -- medroxyprogesterone acetate, or MPA. The analysis revealed MPA acts differently from other forms of progestin used in contraceptives. In the cells of the genital tract that can come in contact with HIV, MPA behaves like the stress hormone cortisol.

"The increased rate of HIV infection among women using DMPA contraceptive shots is likely due to multiple reasons, including decreases in immune function and the protective barrier function of the female genital tract," Hapgood said. "Studying the biology of MPA helps us understand what may be driving the increased rate of HIV infection seen in human research. These findings suggest other forms of birth control should rapidly replace DMPA shots."

"Access to safe, effective and affordable contraception is critical for women's health worldwide," Hel said. "Up to 50 percent of unintended pregnancies in Africa end in abortion, often performed in an unsafe manner. We have to do everything in our power to rapidly replace DMPA with a safer alternative. The word 'replace' is critical; DMPA cannot just be taken off the shelves as many women would be left with no available option. Ideally, women should have access to a full range of contraceptive choices and should be informed regarding the benefits and potential dangers associated with each option."

The study, "Hormonal Contraception and HIV-1 Acquisition: Biological Mechanism," was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Endocrine Reviews is a publication of the Endocrine Society, the world's oldest and largest organization of scientists devoted to hormone research and physicians who care for people with hormone-related conditions.

To offset the immunosuppressive effect of DMPA, a new formulation called Sayana Press has recently been developed that administers 31 percent less hormone via a subcutaneous administration. In a manuscript released this week, Chelsea Polis, Ph.D., Guttmacher Institute, and Sharon Achilles, M.D., Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, together with Hapgood and Hel, address the potential effect of reducing the dose of DMPA. The authors conclude that, while the lower dose is likely to result in a partial reduction of the systemic concentration of the hormone shortly after delivery, it is not likely to ameliorate the overall negative impact of MPA on biological responses.

"Unfortunately, simply reducing the dose of DMPA is not a solution," Hel said. "We need a qualitatively new approach. However, I am an optimist. I believe a solution is already in our hands. The real effort now lies in the implementation of the knowledge accumulated over the last six years into clinical practice and public health policy."

###

The study, titled "Is a lower-dose, subcutaneous contraceptive injectable containing depot medroxyprogesterone acetate likely to impact women's risk of HIV?" was published by the journal Contraception and was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Guttmacher Institute.
Jan. 8, 2018 - Birds exposed to constant noise from oil and gas operations show physiological signs of chronic stress and--in some cases--have chicks whose growth is stunted, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research.

The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), also found that western bluebirds - which tend to gravitate toward noisy environments - lay fewer eggs that hatch when they nest there.

"In what we consider to be the most integrated study of the effects of noise pollution on birds to date, we found that it can significantly impact both their stress hormones and their fitness," said lead author Nathan Kleist, who conducted the research while at CU Boulder and graduated with a PhD in evolutionary biology in May. "Surprisingly, we also found that the species we assumed to be most tolerant to noise had the most negative effects."

The authors, which include researchers from California Polytechnic State University and the Florida Museum of Natural History, say the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting noise pollution from human activity is harmful to wildlife.

They also shed light on how stress from chronic noise exposure may impact humans.

For the study, the researchers followed three species of cavity nesting birds, including western and mountain bluebirds and ash-throated flycatchers, which breed near oil and gas operations on Bureau of Land Management property in New Mexico. Kleist and his team erected 240 nest boxes on 12 pairs of sites. For three breeding seasons, the team took blood samples from adult females and their offspring and assessed hatching success, nestling body size and feather length. Across all species and life stages, the birds nesting in areas with more noise had lower baseline levels of a key stress hormone called corticosterone.

"You might assume this means they are not stressed. But what we are learning from both human and rodent research is that with inescapable stressors, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in humans, stress hormones are often chronically low," said co-author Christopher Lowry, a stress physiologist in the department of integrative physiology at CU Boulder.

He notes that when the fight-or-flight response is constantly revved, the body sometimes adapts to save energy and can become sensitized. Such "hypocorticism," has been linked to inflammation and reduced weight gain in rodents.

In the current study, Kleist also found that nestlings in noisy areas had a hair-trigger response to the acute stress of being held for 10 minutes, producing more stress hormones than those bred in quiet nests.

"Whether stress hormone levels are high or low, any kind of dysregulation can be bad for a species," said senior author Clinton Francis, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Cal Poly. "In this study, we were able to demonstrate that dysregulation due to noise has reproductive consequences."

Chicks in both the quietest and loudest areas had reduced feather growth and body size. The researchers hypothesize that adults in the quietest areas are exposed to more predators, so have less time to forage for young.

Meanwhile, in the loudest areas, the machinery noise masks calls from other birds - a signal of whether predators are present - stressing moms and nestlings.

"If you were trying to talk to your friends and your children and you were always at a loud party you would get worn out," said Kleist, who likens the sound of an oil and gas compressor to the drone of a highway.

Previous research has shown that some bird species opt to leave noisy areas. But the new study shows what happens to those which remain.

For the western bluebird, previously suspected to be resilient to noise, the reduced hatching rates are concerning, said Francis.

"This is an example of an 'ecological trap': when an organism develops a preference for something that is actually bad for them."

None of the species studied are endangered. But the researchers suspect that if other species experience similar effects in noisy areas, avian populations could decline as human-caused noise increases.

One recent study found that anthropogenic noise already doubled background sound levels in 63 percent of protected areas tested.

"There is starting to be more evidence that noise pollution should be included, in addition to all the other drivers of habitat degradation, when crafting plans to protect areas for wildlife," said Kleist, now a visiting professor at State University of New York.

"Our study adds weight to that argument."

###

Alexander Cruz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU Boulder, and Robert Guralnick, associate curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History also contribute to the study.

The study was funded by National Geographic, the National Science Foundation, and the North American Bluebird Society.
The three got 'Certificate of Election' confirming their election to the Upper House by Returning Officer Nidhi Srivastava.

By India Today Web Desk: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidates Sanjay Singh, Sushil Gupta and ND Gupta, whose names were decided to be sent to the Rajya Sabha on January 3, have been elected unopposed to the Upper House from Delhi.

The three got 'Certificate of Election' confirming their election to the Rajya Sabha by Returning Officer Nidhi Srivastava.

AAP's decision to send senior party leader Sanjay Singh, businessman Sushil Gupta and chartered accountant ND Gupta to the Rajya Sabha was announced following the party's Political Affairs Committee (PAC) meeting on January 3. The meeting, which was held at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence, was attended by 56 party MLAs.

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"Sushil Gupta has made big contributions in the education and health sectors in Delhi and Haryana. He provides free education to 15,000 children. Narayan Das Gupta is the former president of the ICAI(Institute of Chartered Accountant of India)," AAP leader Manish Sisodia said soon after the announcement.

Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken had on Saturday sought rejection of the nomination of ND Gupta for allegedly holding an office of profit, even as the latter rejected the charges.

In his objection filed with the returning officer, Maken claimed that Gupta is "currently holding the office of a trustee of the National Pension System Trust. He was appointed on March 30".

In his response to the returning officer's notice on Maken's objections, Gupta said he was appointed as a trustee of the NPS on March 30 last year but he resigned from the trust on December 29, way before the filing of his nomination.

-With IANS inputs

--- ENDS ---
Monday, January 8, 2018

Holographic messages from loved ones who have died are no longer the what if stuff of Star Wars. Artistry In Motion Holographics (AIM) recently introduced a new service to the funeral industry: life-sized 3D moving images of pre-recorded messages from the yet-to-be deceased.

In this video below, AIM CEO Carl Minado looks like Col. Sanders, but it was October 31 at the 2017 National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) convention, so he dressed to play the part. He jokingly referred to himself as a 3D version of the original. But he was serious about the potential impact their technology could make in funeral service.

Someone could plan ahead while theyre in their 60s or 70s, and create a beautiful lasting legacy of themselves that would be shown at their celebration when they have passed, Minardo explained. It would enable you to do your legacy your way, and not burden family members or a clergy person who doesnt know you.

AIM Holographics employs a patented system of visual creation that results in a life-sized full color 3D moving image or animation. Theyve used the technology in varied sectors such as business, medical, and not-for-profit. This was their first introduction to the funeral industry.

The AIM technology allows parents or grandparents to record messages that live on and provide timeless inspiration to the generations to come.

Mindardo said, You wouldnt want it to be, If you see me now, Im dead, but more like, Hi, Im so glad youre all here. I want to talk to you about what really made me happy in my life, and how important all of you were being a part of that. Its up-lifting. You can leave everybody with a sense of, Wow, wasnt that great? I know Id want to do that.

How about you? Learn more at their website, www.AIMHolographics.com.

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NEW CASTLE, Pa.  The Lawrence County Conservation District hosted its annual awards luncheon Jan. 4 at the First United Methodist Church in New Castle.

Cliff Wallace, the chairman of the board, recognized volunteers and landowners who have done exceptional work conserving the land of Lawrence County.

Wallace, joined the board of directors to finish the term of Robert Jackson, who passed away this year. He is a former agriculture instructor at Mohawk High School.

In addition to Wallace, the board added two new associate directors, Blaine Sturgeon of Perry Township and Layne Kind of Plain Grove Township.

Award winners

Four farms were honored for their conservation efforts.

Dennis and Betsy Musser, and Cassie and Nate Rassau of Den-Be Farms worked with the district to install a six-month liquid manure storage facility.

The storage will help the farm manage manure and reduce the potential for agricultural source pollution to reach waterways. The total cost of the project was $215,579. The Mussers did some of the work themselves and used a private engineer.

The district also recognized Bob Trotter of Trotacre Farms, who worked with the district on four projects this year. He put in an end wall for a bunk silo, built a heavy use area protection, installed an animal walkway and completed a stormwater management plan.

He plans to finish the project in the spring by installing rain gutters. The total cost of the projects was $96,375.

Charlotte Chapman of Burdock Hill Farms has been working on two projects with the district, the installation of an access road to a cement animal concentration area and a rain gutter system for all the outbuildings. The gutter system then pipes the water underground, discharging it away from the buildings.

Lastly, Doug and Karen Beatty, Beatty Dairy, were recognized for their work on installing storm water diversion and a new animal walkway, heavy use area protection and a milk house waste transfer system.

Volunteer Tim Sturgeon was also honored for his of service to the district, and Hickory Township was recognized for its work in installing a water mattress to eliminate flooding on a country road.

FFA demonstrations. In preparation for competing at Pennsylvania Farm Show, three FFA chapters practiced their demonstrations after the luncheon.

Laurel FFA demonstrated how to wire a light bulb to a switch; Mohawk FFA demonstrated how to make a tile table; and Wilmington FFA demonstrated how to make a deer feeder.

All three chapters will compete at the Pennsylvania Farm Show this week.

Lawrence County Conservation District Karen Beatty and Lindsey Henry accepted the conservation award for Beatty Dairy. They were recognized for their work on installing storm water diversion and a new animal walkway, heavy use area protection and a milk house waste transfer system. (Katy Mumaw photo) < > < > 1 View Lawrence County Conservation District Karen Beatty and Lindsey Henry accepted the conservation award for Beatty Dairy. They were recognized for their work on installing storm water diversion and a new animal walkway, heavy use area protection and a milk house waste transfer system. (Katy Mumaw photo) 2 View Lawrence County Conservation District Charlotte Chapman of Burdock Hill Farms was honored for her work on two projects with the district, the installation of an access road to a cement animal concentration area and a rain gutter system for all the outbuildings. (Katy Mumaw photo) 3 View Lawrence County Conservation District Hickory Township was recognized for its work in installing a water mattress to eliminate flooding on a country road. Pictured are Kathy Abranovich and Bill Dean accepting the award given by Cliff Wallace. (Katy Mumaw photo) 4 View Lawrence County Conservation District Lawrence County Conservation District honored Dennis and Betsy Musser, and Cassie and Nate Rassau of Den-Be Farms who worked with the district to install a six-month liquid manure storage facility. (Katy Mumaw photo) 5 View Lawrence County Conservation District Volunteer Tim Sturgeon was also honored by Cliff Wallace, the district's chairman, for his many years of service. (Katy Mumaw photo) 6 View Lawrence County Conservation District Bob Trotter of Trotacre Farms, was honored for his conservation work. He put in an end wall for a bunk silo, built a heavy use area protection, installed an animal walkway and completed a stormwater management plan. Also pictured is Cliff Wallace, chairman of the conservation board. (Katy Mumaw photo) 7 View FFA Demo Laurel FFA demonstrated how to wire a light bulb to a switch. 8 View FFA Demo Mohawk FFA demonstrated how to make a tile table. 9 View FFA Demo Wilmington FFA demonstrated how to make a deer feeder.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.  President Donald Trump became the first president in a quarter century to address the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Trump spoke to nearly 7,400 members and guests at the AFBF convention late Monday afternoon, Jan. 8, focusing on economic development in rural communities.

The president hailed the recent tax overhaul efforts, saying tax cuts and the doubling of the threshold for the estate tax will help farmers.

Trump said most family farms will be spared now from the deeply unfair estate tax, adding that the GOP law will help farmers keep your farms in the family.

But the president largely skirted the two areas where his administration and the Farm Bureau differ  trade and immigration.

He briefly mentioned the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying its under negotiation as we speak, but added we want to make it fair for you people again.

We are reviewing all of our trade agreements to make sure they are fair and reciprocal.

Trade matters

The farm group is hoping the president will change his mind on free trade agreements, and not throw out trade agreements altogether.

We sell about half of what we produce to foreign markets around the world, said AFBF President Zippy Duvall during his convention address the day before President Trump spoke. If we lose those markets, where is that agricultural production going to go?

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. agricultural exports totaled $140.5 billion in fiscal year 2017, climbing nearly $10.9 billion from the previous year to the third-highest level on record.

As it has done for over 50 years, the U.S. agricultural sector again posted an annual trade surplus, which reached $21.3 billion, up almost 30 percent from last years $16.6 billion.

Immigration

Duvall added that immigration is a key issue for farmers, one that has been overtaken by politics.

Everywhere I go, no matter which region or state, farmers tell me this is the number one problem they face  not enough ag workers to get their crops out of the field, the farm organization leader said.

Rural prosperity

President Trump also highlighted the Agriculture and Rural Prosperity Task Force report, released Monday, promising better broadband internet coverage (according to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans  23 million people  lack sufficient broadband access), and rural infrastructure improvements.

Trump also emphasized the importance of addressing the opioid crisis, which has disproportionately impacted rural communities.

While just under half of rural Americans say they have been directly impacted by opioid abuse, 74 percent of farmers and farm workers say they have, according to a poll conducted in a joint effort by the AFBF and the National Farmers Union.

Earlier in January, the groups launched a new website, FarmTownStrong.org, to provide opioid abuse information and resources that can help struggling farm families and rural communities.

Trump tipped his hat to the 4-H and FFA youth development programs, saying its the future of our country. Their devotion to our nation inspires us all.

The president also played homage to the ag community in general: We know that our farmers are our future.

Farm approval

Other than the rhetoric of dismantling free trade agreements, the American Farm Bureau has been pleased with the Trump administration so far, according to AFBF President Zippy Duvall.

We have had a seat at the table with the Trump administration, Duvall said during his convention speech. Folks, I can tell you that it has been a breath of fresh air to be able to advocate for getting things done, instead of having to constantly defend agriculture against a steady stream of challenges from our own government.

He lauded the administrations decision to reconsider the controversial interpretation Waters of the United States rule within the Clean Water Act, which greatly expanded the list of bodies of water subject to federal regulation.

We are urging the agency to propose a new rule, one that draws clear lines that protect waters without regulating farm fields.

In a speech to the AFBF crowd Jan. 8, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said USDA has been rolling back excessive regulations following a directive from President Trump.

Perdue said USDA has targeted 27 final rules for elimination that will save $56.15 million annually, and asked farmers to bring any onerous regulations to USDAs attention by visiting the agencys website.
The rural economy is set to receive a huge boost as plans have been announced to create a new Northern Forest that will comprise over 50 million trees.

The Woodland Trust and the Community Forest Trust will plant 50 million trees over 25 years.

The forest will stretch from Liverpool across to Hull with the M62 as its spine, and the plan has now received Government backing.

The project will embrace the cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Chester and Hull as well as major towns across the north.

The rural economy is also set to receive a huge boost, thanks to sustainable timber production and rural tourism.

It is hoped the plan will help deliver environmental, social and economic benefits through the creation of new woodland and sustainable management of existing woods.

The plans will help improve air quality, mitigate flood risk in key catchments and connect people with nature.

With a population in excess of 13m that is expected to rise by 9% over the next 20 years and with woodland cover at just 7.6%, below the UK average of 13%, and far below the EU average of 44%.

'A haven'

Farmers and landowners could also be incentivised through grants to help plant new woodland.

Environment Minister Therese Coffey said planting trees is one of the best ways farmers and landowners can invest in the British environment for future generations.

"They provide a haven for wildlife, reduce flood risk and improve water quality  making them some of our most cherished assets," Ms Coffey said.

However, tree planting rates are dramatically low, with planting in 2016 being only 700 hectares against the governments target of 5000 hectares a year.

Austin Brady, director of conservation, Woodland Trust said: England is losing tree cover. We need to make sure we are protecting our most important habitats such as ancient woodland as well as investing in new major woodland creation schemes.

Existing approaches to increasing woodland cover are stalling and existing delivery mechanisms, such as Community Forests are under threat.

The new forest will help the government deliver its planned 'green Brexit', which includes replacing the EU's CAP with a series of support payments that further enhance "public goods."
A fourth generation farmer has retold his farm fire experience as new figures show 4.6m worth of farm fire insurance claims were made in 2016 in the south west alone.

One April evening last year, East Devon dairy farmer Henry Gent went to bed as normal, only to be woken by one of his farm hands at 5am informing him that his dairy parlour was on fire.

An electrical fault had caused the blaze which destroyed the electrics leading into the milking parlour at Mosshayne Farm, West Clyst, near Exeter, meaning Henry was faced with 300 cows which needed milking, with no means of milking them.

Three fire engines and six fire fighters attended the farm to deal with the fires aftermath.

The ensuing hours were crucial to what was transpired to be a relatively smooth recovery: ruling out the possibility of being able to track down an alternative available parlour and locate some 15 lorries to transport the cows there, locally based electricians acted fast, sourcing a generator so that five hours later, milking could get underway, potentially saving the lives of the cows, who were thankfully out in the fields at the time.

Henry, whose great grandparents first ran the farm, subsequently made a successful 38,000 claim from NFU Mutual.

'Greatest hazard'

The 59-year-olds claim contributed to the total 4.6m worth of farm fire insurance claims made in the south west in 2016; the fourth highest amount in the UK.

According to NFU Mutual, this figure is down 14 per cent from 5.4m in 2015, but despite the decline, the farm insurance specialists are keen to warn farmers that fire remains one of the greatest hazards to their livelihoods.

In 2016, the most common cause of farm fires was electrical faults, which were responsible for almost half of fire claims.

Arson was the next most common cause. In 2014 the company set up the Farm Safety Foundation to support farmers to work safely and continues to raise awareness about keeping farm fire safe.

'Terrified'

Henry said: It was a shock but it could have been far worse. I remember feeling terrified when an electrician said that we would not be able to milk at the farm that day and probably not for week, because the mains electric supply would not be restored quickly, and all cables leading to the motors were destroyed.

It would have been a disaster to leave the cows unmilked because the freshly calved cows would have been in pain and leaking milk, leading to the risk of infection from open teat ducts.

Infection would lead to mastitis and the risk of permanent damage to the udders, illness, loss of yield, treatment costs, even mortality.

So, it was crucial to get them milked, and we had to act fast to get electricians working on supplying the machines from an emergency generator.

Regular checks

Henry said his electrics were around 20 years old, and is therefore encouraging other farmers to get their electrics checked out more regularly.

In addition to the electrics being ruined, the parlour was partially destroyed and consequential loss included 7,000 litres of milk going to waste during the wait for electricity to the refrigerators to be reinstalled.

It took around four months for farm operations to return to normal.

Ten years prior, on November 5, Henrys farm suffered another fire; a fire which started amid straw in his Dutch barn spread to the silage clamp it was housing, and the tyres laid on top caught on fire. Around 15,000 damage was caused.

Unfortunately, Henry had opted not to insure the silage clamp due to its perceived low risk, so bore the brunt of the costs himself.
By PTI: Kolkata, Jan 8 (PTI) West Bengals ruling Trinamool Congress today advised BJP leader Mukul Roy to focus on party organisation rather than resorting to gimmicks after former TMC MLA Manju Basu turned down the saffron partys offer to contest the upcoming Noapara assembly bypoll.

The TMC also refuted allegations by BJP that Basu was intimidated and forced to change her stance and express her loyalty towards TMC.

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"You cannot ask someone to express her loyalty towards Mamata Banerjee by threatening her. Rather than resorting to such gimmicks, the man from Kanchrapara (Mukul Roy) should focus on building organisation of his party," TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee.

Another senior TMC leader Jyotipriyo Mullick, said, Roy was trying to misled the BJP as Basu has never willing to join BJP.

The BJP central leadership had announced Basus name as the partys candidate for the byelection yesterday evening. Hours later, Basu told reporters that she is still with the TMC.

The two-time TMC MLA from Noapara assembly seat, however, chose to speak little on the matter and said it was her personal decision to decline the BJPs offer.

"You can have offers from various political parties. But whether you will accept it or not is a personal decision."

Basu, known to be a close associate of Mukul Roy during his stint with the TMC, was seen holding regular talks with the BJP in the past few days after being denied a ticket from the seat by the Mamata Banerjee-led party.

A senior BJP leader claimed that Roy, who had joined the saffron party in November last year, had pitched for Basu even as a section of state BJP leadership was not very keen on giving her the ticket.

"She was willing to contest on BJP ticket. But TMC threatened her to change her stance. This instance proves that there is place for democracy in Bengal," said Roy.

The TMC has announced the name of Sunil Singh as its candidate from Noapara.

The Noapara assembly seat fell vacant following the death of Congress MLA Madhusudan Ghose a few months ago.

The bypoll has been scheduled for January 29 and counting of votes will take place on February 1. PTI PNT RG

--- ENDS ---
A gang which raided farms across the south west has been ordered to pay back almost 120,000 or face longer prison sentences.

61-year-old Daniel Small and his two sons targeted isolated farms around South and West Devon, and sometimes Cornwall.

They often stole farm machinery and cars. According to The Kingsbridge & Salcombe Gazette, they carried out 31 raids and stole 281,470 worth of machinery, tools and vehicles.

Mr Small was jailed for four years at a trial at Exeter Crown Court in March 2017.

The trial heard how the thefts, which were normally conducted overnight, targeted farmers and a rural economy in which many businesses are struggling to survive.

It was only until a tracking device on a stolen quad bike led police to a yard ran by the gang in January 2016.

'Soft target'

The National Farmers' Union (NFU) has previously warned that farmers should not be seen as a 'soft target' for criminals.

A survey by NFU Mutual showed 56% of respondents have been a victim of rural crime in the past 12 months.

And in December, farmers were encouraged to take part in the governments Commercial Victimisation Survey and record the nature, extent and costs of any crime.

Agriculture has been reintroduced as part of the survey, after successful efforts from the National Farmers' Union.

It is seen as opportunity to make the government and the Home Office aware of the extent rural crime affects farm businesses.

The results are used to monitor crime trends, identify what actions need to be taken to reduce crime and find out what support would be most helpful to farm businesses.

'Increasing fear'

NFU land management adviser Rupert Weaver said the survey is a "perfect opportunity" for farmers to make Government aware of the serious impacts rural crime poses to farm businesses.

As the NFU has already highlighted in its Rural Crime Report, rural crime affects a huge number of farmers, affecting their business and family life, Mr Weaver said.

There is increasing fear in rural areas due to increasing crime, resulting in significantly lower than average satisfaction levels with the police.

There is a lack of official statistics relating to rural crime, partly due to underreporting, and a significant response from the farming community could provide the relevant authorities with the data they need to act on this problem. The NFU would encourage all farmers who receive the survey to participate.
Laser beam technology is being trialled in Scotland as a method to deter sea eagles from kidnapping lambs.

The lasers will be shone onto hillsides in Argyll to scare the white-tailed sea eagles, which have caused misery for local farmers.

Conservation agency Scottish Natural Heritage said the trials would be "carefully monitored.

Photographs of a sea eagle carrying a new born lamb taken in 2017 reignited the bitter feud between farmers and conservationists over the reintroduction of Britains biggest bird of prey.

The white-tailed sea eagle went extinct in the UK during the early 20th century, due to illegal killing, and the present population has been reintroduced.

But crofters and farmers in the Highlands and Islands have frequently complained that the large birds of prey pose a risk to young livestock.

Hill lambs are an easy target for the bird, and there have been reports of adult sheep and ewe hoggs being attacked.

If the laser trial is successful, it could be rolled out under licence to other areas where the birds are causing issues for farmers.

Other techniques which could be implemented include audio bird scaring device and cutting down trees to stop the birds nesting in them.
A man has appeared in court charged with selling mislabelled meat which falsely advertised the produce as British.

Simon Drust, a butcher and owner of The Meat Shack in Studley, Warwickshire, placed adverts in the Redditch Standard and on Facebook.

It said: "Buy British-All Beef pork, Lamb and Chicken." However, the newspaper reported that the meat was not actually British.

Mr Drust appeared in Warwick Magistrates Court on December 19. He faces a number of charges relating to fraud and misleading customers.

The charges included the sale of non-British meat under banners stating "Best British Beef, Best British Pork, Best British Chicken and Poultry and Best British Lamb".

Other charges include misleading customers about the country of origin of meat sold in the shop, the breed from which beef was derived, whether pork was free range, and whether meats and poultry were fresh or had been frozen.

Mr Drust is now set to appear at Warwick Crown Court on January 22.

It follows news of the UK preparing to develop its own 'gold-standard metric' for British food and farming quality.

The food labelling system, announced by Defra Secretary Michael Gove, will showcase Britain's animal welfare standards coupled with a detailed country of origin label, and could be rolled out across supermarkets after Brexit.

He explained future profits in food production lie in "distinctive quality produce".
The UK should follow the Netherlands as an example of increasing public access to the countryside, according to a new report.

Encouraging the public to access the countryside was one of Michael Goves commitments in his New Year keynote speech.

He stated that support payments should move away from encouraging "production inefficiencies" and instead public money should be redirected for public good.

According to the report, the UK should follow the Netherlands as an example, who use voluntary agreements to provide flexible access.

This is according to Andrew Gillett, legal adviser for rural organisation the CLA. He recommends a new approach to public access to the countryside, but warns that changes should be voluntary and done in collaboration with farmers.

Change of attitude

As far as access is concerned throughout England and Wales we first need to change our attitude, inflexibility and legislative framework to public rights of way in order to create a workable system, Mr Gillett states.

Having recently completed a Nuffield Farming Scholarship, his report titled A comparison of public access provisions and methods of mitigating impacts of public access on agriculture details the need for collaboration from Government, user groups and landowners.

During my Nuffield Farming Scholarship, I travelled to Scotland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and the USA to look at their approaches to public access.

Following my visits, it struck me that our inflexible and expensive approach to public access is stifling our ability to offer permissive rights of way, which could enhance both landowners, and the general publics, experience of the countryside.

Collaborative approach

Using the Netherlands as a case study, Mr Gillett details how their voluntary agreements to provide flexible access resulted in a successful collaborative approach.

The Netherlands have a payment mechanism in place for providing public goods in the form of permissive rights of way, he explains.

Under voluntary agreements landowners receive a payment per meter of access and local Government grants them an indemnity against any potential claims.

He adds that these routes could be adapted with ease to suit the farms cropping or livestock commitments, a process that is nearly impossible under current English and Welsh laws.

The process I witnessed in the Netherlands was inexpensive and amicable and if we could emulate the system in England and Wales including payments and an indemnity I strongly believe there is a case for innovation.

Mr Gillett says he acknowledges that the current public access system is unnecessarily complex and calls on the Government to look at other countries that have solved the problems presented by the current laws and liability challenges.
Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif starrer Zero is undoubtedly one of the most awaited films of this year. The film that is being directed by filmmaker Aanand L Rai will have Shah Rukh Khan playing the role of a dwarf for the first time in his career span of 25 years. All this while, Anushka was busy with her prior commitments and her wedding celebrations. After cheering for Virat in South Africa, the actress is back in Mumbai and on the sets of Zero.Anushka took to her Instagram handle today to share a picture of her from the sets of the film. Sitting in her gorgeous floral van, Anushka mentioned how happy she is to be back at work. She captioned the picture saying, They say - Back to one! In this case Ill say - Back to Zero!! Happy to be back on the film and back to work with my lovely co actors and crew!! Thank you for the beautifully decorated floral van Commenting on why the film is titled Zero, Aanand L Rai earlier told a leading daily, Like the way we say that perfect is boring, imperfection is much interesting Our film is also celebrating the same. The story of the film is celebrating a perfect love story of two imperfect people. Though the protagonist of the film is a dwarf but more than the physical disability of an individual, the story talks about the space of emotional incompleteness of our life.
Radhika Drops A Bomb

When Neha asked Radhika who she thought was the most overrated in Bollywood, the latter hesitated for a moment and then shot back, "Sushant Singh Rajput!"

Sushant Singh Rajput Won't Be Pleased!

We wonder if Radhika's answer will go down well with the 'Drive' actor! Will he ignore the comment or give it back to her?

She Didn't Spare Sooraj Pancholi Either

When quizzed about one actor who needs acting classes rather than gym sessions, Radhika took Sooraj Pancholi's name.

On The Other Hand,

Rajkummar Rao, her co-star on the show chose the diplomatic route and refused to invite the controversy.

He Chose To Stay Mum

Rather than upsetting the film fraternity, Rajkummar chose to down shots of chilli as 'punishment'. The actor is reportedly sensitive to spicy food and the chillies were killing him. But he refused to make any controversial statements.

In Other News,

Radhika recently revealed in an interview with Mumbai Mirror that she has signed a film opposite 'Slumdog Millionaire' fame actor Dev Patel. She was quoted as saying, "Yes, I'm doing a film with Dev which I will announce soon."
Manoj Bajpayee

The super talented man has time and again treated the audience with his acting prowess and his amazing body of work. Manoj has earlier played a role of army man and is now all set to essay it yet again in Neeraj Pandey's Aiyaary. We just can't wait, folks!

Sidharth Malhotra

The 'Student Of The Year' has finally graduated to play an army officer for the very first time in Aiyaary. It would be quite interesting to watch Sid in this new space. Going by the promos of the film, the grey shades to his character makes things more intriguing.

Akshay Kumar

He played a street-smart army guy in A.R Murugadoss' Holiday and watching him take down the bad guys was a pure treat! Not to forget, the high octane action sequences!

Shahrukh Khan

It won't be wrong to see that he was born Fauji. Shahrukh Khan's uniforms are always a cut above whether it was the Air Force pilot blues in Veer Zaara or the uber-cool army guy in Yash Chopra's final directorial 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan'.

John Abraham

The handsome hunk inarguably delivered the best performance of his career in Shoojit Sircar's 'Madras Cafe' as an army man. Gear up to watch him back in action in Parmanu!

Ajay Devgn And Saif Ali Khan

In the sea of military fatigues in LOC Kargil, these two men stood out. Ajay Devgn as Major Manoj Pandey and Saif Ali Khan as Captain Anuj Nayar.

Sunny Deol

If there is one Bollywood actor who will be eternally synonymous with the Indian army, then it has to be Sunny paaji! He is still reminisced fondly for his knockout act in J.P. Dutta's cult film, 'Border'.

Hrithik Roshan

While most of us couldn't stop drooling over Hrithik Roshan's got-no-bones dance in 'Main Aisa Kyun Main', it was Hrithik's coming-of-age act in Farhan Akhtar's Lakshya.
Lagaan actor Shrivallabh Vyas passed away on Sunday (7th Dec) morning in Jaipur. He breathed his last at 9.30 am.

Shrivallabh Vyas had appeared in over 60 Hindi films. His noted films includes Lagaan, Sarfarosh, Shool and Dil Bole Hadippa among others.



As per Indian Express, He had to take a break from acting in 2008 after he collapsed in his hotel room in Gujarat. The actor had suffered a brain stroke followed by a paralytic attack.

Film and television actor Daya Shankar Pandey, who is a close family friend of Shrivallabh Vyas, confirmed the news and told the daily, "Vyas was a great actor and we will miss him immensely. He died on Sunday morning around 9.30 am and his last rites will take place in the evening today. He has two daughters and his wife struggled a lot while taking care of Vyas."

"He was a very well-read man and an immensely talented actor, but he didn't get his dues. But his work has always spoken for him. He was also into singing and had started writing too, but life was cruel to him," added Daya Shankar.

Shrivallabh Vyas is survived by his wife Shobha Vyas and two daughters.

May his soul rest in peace.
Aww, That's So Sweet!

That's Anushka Sharma's Instagram story as she starts shooting for Zero. The actress thanked Shahrukh Khan & the Zero team for the floral welcome.

P.S. We're totally loving the photos of Virat & Anushka behind the bouquets.

Meanwhile, Aanand L Rai Can't Stop Gushing About SRK's Guts To Do Zero

The duo have collaborated for the first time on the upcoming film, Zero and the director said Shahrukh still has a lot to offer as an actor.

"I think he is a very gutsy actor from day one, he has always taken up challenges. And that is the reason I am with him."

We Do Agree With Mr Rai

He further added, "As a director, you should be prepared to take him on a journey and explore such a superstar. He says yes to subjects that are extraordinary and puts himself in a space that is new, yet different."

When Rai Made SRK Romance Despite Taking Away His Two Feet

Rai says, "This is a blessing that I got to work on a film like this with him. I am happy. He is an intelligent person to play this role."

"Who else can do this and get into the skin of a character like this? It is tough to take away those two feet, flamboyance, grace and still say 'let's romance'.

Does JHMS's Failure Make Rai Worried About Zero?

Speaking about the same, Rai said, "In a decade's time, he will do so much as an actor but as a visionary he will take the Indian cinema ahead. He doesn't think like just as an actor. Do expect a lot of newer things as an actor. He has got great plans."

Zero Is India Biggest VFX Film

"And with this man, if I feel stressed, (it is) not done. There is nervousness and I enjoy that. This is India's biggest VFX film but you will hardly feel that. It will look like any other normal film and yet new, so that is what the VFX is all about."

Zero Will Have The Cameos Of Many Superstars

Bollywood's big names such as Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Juhi Chawla, Sridevi, Rani Mukerji, Kajol, Karisma Kapoor, among others have cameo appearances in the film. But according to Rai, the actors are not placed in the movie deliberately.
Shanthi Krishna

Yesteryear actress Shanthi Krishna, made a memorable return to Malayalam films with Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela. She fetched a lot of praises for her powerful performance in this super hit movie. It was after a break of 19 years that the much loved actress of Mollywood marked a comeback to Mollywood.

Amala Akkineni

Amala Akkineni did appear in two Malayalam films of the 90s and she made a lasting impact in the minds of the Malayalam film audiences with those movies. In 2017, she returned to Mollywood with the C/O Saira Banu, which featured Manju Warrier in the lead role.

Raadhika Sarathkumar

Through the Dileep starrer Ramaleela, which was one of the biggest blockbusters of the year 2017, popular South Indian actress Raadhika Sarathkumar marked her return to Mollywood after 24 years. She portrayed the role of Saghavu Ragini, the mother of Ramanunni, the character played by Dileep in the movie.

Gautami

Popular South Indian actress Gautami, who has acted in a good number of Malayalam movies of the 90s, did make a comeback to Malayalam cinema in the year 2017. She played one of the lead roles in the horror movie E, directed by Kukku Surendran. She made a comeback to Mollywood after a gap of 14 years.

Jomol

Jomol did carve a place for her own in the Malayalam film industry with movies like Ennu Swantham Janakikutty, Niram and many others. The popular actress of Mollywood, who quit films after marriage, made a comeback with this year's release Careful.
By PTI: (Eds: Adds more details)

Suri (WB), Jan 8 (PTI) A senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader organised a "Brahmin convention" in Bolpur town of Birbhum district today, a move described by the BJP as the Mamata Banerjee-led partys tactical shift towards "soft Hindutva".

The day-long "Brahmin and Purohit Sammelan" was held by the TMCs Birbhum district president, Anubrata Mondal, who is a strong critic of the BJP and its policies.

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Mondal said the convention was organised to highlight the "misinterpretations" of Hinduism by the BJP and discuss what the Hindu religion stood for.

"Hinduism is being misinterpreted by the BJP. We will discuss the real meaning of Hinduism," he told reporters.

A source in the ruling party in the state said thousands of Hindu priests attended the meet, adding that each one of them was felicitated with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a shawl and pictures of Sarada Maa and Ramakrishna.

The saffron party has accused the TMC leadership of practising "soft Hindutva" in a bid to stop the Hindu voters of the state from tilting towards the BJP.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees recent visit to the Sagar island to take stock of the arrangements for the January 14 Makar Sankranti festival also came under attack from the saffron party.

"The so-called secular leaders are practising Hindutva, because they are well aware that the Hindus are uniting under the BJP. They have realised that they will no longer be able to win elections by appeasing Muslims," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said.

Mondal refuted the "soft Hindutva" allegation and said the TMC would also organise a conference of Muslim clerics this month.

Addressing the meet, he stressed the need to make a new generation of Hindu priests as a "society cannot exist without Hindu priests".

He also described the priests as the "teachers of the society".

The conference began with the chanting of vedic mantras.

The conference was organised months ahead of the crucial panchayat polls in the state. The BJP has been making steady inroads in Birbhum district, considered to be a TMC stronghold. PTI CORR PNT SNS RC

--- ENDS ---
Sara Underwood

Sara Underwood is a model and actress hailing from the United States of America.

Too Hot

Her pictures are smouldering hot and she can set the temperature soaring at any given point.

Underboob

She is capable of breaking anyone in cold sweat. Also, her underboob picture is so cool, right?

Scarf Into A Top

She turned a scarf into a top! Well, kudos to her talent, folks!

Black Bra

Doesn't she look so hot in her uber cool black bra?

Christmas Gift

Sara Underwood would make the perfect Christmas present! Won't she?

But First, Selfie!

No matter where you go, it's always important to take a selfie!

Horsing Around

Sara Underwood is seen horsing around and doing the 'Hand Bra' pose!

Oh Damn!

Sara gets the feel of the ocean on top of a cliff while doing the hand bra pose.

Hot Woman

She is indeed one superhot woman, isn't she?

Sunny Sara

The sun, sky and Sara makes this image picture perfect!

Back In The Day

Even back in the day, she was as hot as she is now!

Twitter Followers

Sara Underwood has a huge following on Twitter which is more than half a Million.

Instagram Queen

She has the highest followers on Instagram which is 8.7 Million! That's huge, right?

Facebook Likes

One Facebook, Sara Underwood is inching closer to 5 Million followers.

They Go Crazy

Her followers go crazy whenever she posts a picture on her social media handle.

Follow Her Now

You're really missing out on a lot of you're not following Sara on all the social media platforms.

Hand Bra

Sara Underwood started the 'Hand Bra' trend way back in the early 2000's as well.

Blood, Sweat & Tears

She has worked really hard at the gym to attain this body that she's enjoying now.

India Visit?

We hope Sara Underwood will visit India sooner or later!

In Love

We're sure she'll end up falling in love with India if at al lshe comes here!

2018 Calendar

Sara Underwood has released her hot 2018 calendar as well and is available for $30 along with her autograph on it.

Showering Sara

Sara Underwood taking a shower is what we'll leave you with, folks!

Follow Her On Instagram

Do follow Sara Underwood on Instagram below!
Did Siddharth Get Paid Fans To The Mall?

A tweet from @RochelleFanClub alleged Siddharth offered money to 25-25 students to cheer for Vikas at the mall, and requested Colors and Bigg Boss team to take action.

@RochelleFanClub Tweets

With a note, @RochelleFanClub tweeted, "I request @ColorsTV @BiggBoss team to look into this matter n take necessary action.Kindly contact me I have all the proofs against the "paid fans"of @lostboy54 This is shameful.Such influential n rich people can buy "paid fans" and votes anytime. @rajcheerfull @EndemolShineIND."

Fans Have Cooked Up A Story!

But, Siddharth denied the claim. He was quoted by News18 as saying, "There are some fans who cooked up this story. The funny thing is that they are saying that I went with two AC buses and gave 5K per head to students and it's really funny because I'm in Dubai."

Siddharth Says

"And the way they have portrayed the story that strict action should be taken against us, it sounds so genuine. That's why I reacted to it as I felt it was a little way too much."

Siddharth Has Not Paid Money To Any PR

"I have not paid a single penny to any PR. There's no online PR for Vikas. People have approached me but I didn't see the point because first of all he was not getting nominated only."

After Shilpa & Hinas Fans, Vikas Fans Trend On Twitter

We had also reported about Shilpa and Hina's trends on social media. Shilpa's fans had created a record with 1 Million tweets. This was followed by Hina and yesterday, Vikas fans also started trending.

#VikasDeservesTheWin Trends On Twitter

Many celebrities too supported the trend. Very soon, the tweets (#VikasDeservesTheWin) crossed 1M. It was said that the tweets were so fast and it could only be because of paid PR tends.

@iBeingJaySingh Tweets

But one of the fans (@iBeingJaySingh) clarified by tweeting "Some are saying Paid trends, Paid PR trends can't be trend in multiple countries. Dear haters,VIKAS DESERVES THE WIN is trending in multiple countries i.e. Rome, Pakistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus and many more. Jali hai...Aur Jalegi..."

Vikas Brother Clarifies

Vikas' brother, Siddharth retweeted the fans' tweet and wrote, "Exactly use your brains people! It's genuine love of the people! VIKAS DESERVES THE WIN."
It wasn't that long ago that an investment in oil and gas felt like throwing cash into a burning pit. Lower oil prices wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in market value in a matter of 18 months. Several one-trick ponies in the industry, among them offshore rig owners and independent oil and gas producers, collapsed under the weight of their debt loads. Even the titans of the industry -- the integrated majors -- got walloped.

Today, the industry is looking to be in much better shape. Companies have found ways to cut costs and turn a profit with oil prices at much lower levels than they were three to four years ago. It also helps that oil prices are still creeping upward.

For investors looking for an opportunity in this still beaten-up sector, Big Oil is an excellent place to turn. These giants not only withstood the blow of low prices but also reoriented their businesses to be much more profitable entities. Despite what some might think, not all Big Oil companies are created equal. So let's dive into this sector to see which of these companies is the best stock to buy in 2018.

Whom are we talking about, anyway?

Most of the integrated oil and gas companies are incredibly recognizable brands in the U.S. -- ExxonMobil (XOM -1.76%), Chevron (CVX -1.52%), Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) (RDS.B), BP (BP -1.72%). Others, including Total (TTE -1.76%) and Statoil (EQNR -3.44%), are much more recognizable in Europe.

To look at these companies holistically, you need to look at the typical metrics -- margin, cash flow, returns, valuation, and so on -- but also their investment plans, because the energy landscape is changing under our feet. So here's a look at all of these things and how the stocks compare with each other as a potential investment.

What's eating margin and returns?

Company Gross Margin (Current) Gross Margin (10-Year Avg.) EBITDA Margin (Current) EBITDA Margin (10-Year Avg.) Net Income Margin (Current) Net Income Margin (10-Year Avg.) BP 15.2% 15.9% 10.5% 9.5% 0.26% 2.6% Chevron 33.3% 32.1% 19.1% 20.7% 4.2% 7.3% ExxonMobil 28.9% 31.5% 14.8% 17.4% 5.3% 7.3% Royal Dutch Shell 17.2% 17.8% 14.8% 13.5% 2.1% 4.2% Statoil 40.3% 45.7% 31.1% 35.6% 9.5% 4.1% Total 32.1% 34.7% 18.7% 22.2% 5.9% 5.6%

Two things pop out when looking at these results. On one hand, gross margin for each company is in line with 10-year historical averages despite lower prices lately. This development is due to two significant changes in how these companies operate:

The price at which they can produce oil and gas has come down significantly during this weak commodity price environment.

Downstream operations such as refining and chemical manufacturing, which have historically been treated like the middle child of the business, have been optimized.

On the other hand, those margins start to deteriorate the further we go down the income statement. During the downturn, these companies either did some restructuring or took some writedowns to adjust their businesses and used debt to bridge the funding gap between operating cash flow and spending. Those charges and higher interest payments have taken a toll. BP was hit particularly hard because it ponied up a lot of cash for the Deepwater Horizon spill. Management did note that these costs will be much lower in the coming years.

The two companies that have bucked this trend are Statoil and Total. Statoil has been able to do so thanks to exceptional results in Norway, and Total has benefited immensely from a downstream revitalization plan and a cost-cutting program.

Company Return on Equity (Current) Return on Equity (10-Year Avg.) Return on Invested Capital (Current) Return on Invested Capital (10-Year Avg.) BP 3.9% 9.1% 2.3% 6.7% Chevron 4% 15.6% 3% 14.1% ExxonMobil 6.7% 21.6% 5.2% 19.1% Royal Dutch Shell 4.2% 12.4% 2.8% 10.1% Statoil (1.9%) 14.7% (1%) 9.8% Total 7.3% 15.9% 4.6% 9.8%

Looking at rates of return, all of these results appear similar to what the net income margin results showed us. The one exception here is Statoil, because it took some big writedowns in prior quarters that are adversely affecting results for the year.

Here's how the companies rank in this category:

1. Total

2. ExxonMobil

3. Statoil

4. Royal Dutch Shell

5. Chevron

6. BP

The return of cash flow

As nice as earnings look on paper, they can occasionally mask some problems in an industry that's so capital intensive. Cash flow is arguably more important than earnings in this business. The ability to generate enough cash to cover massive spending budgets, pay generous dividends, and fund other opportunities such as acquisitions or share repurchases is an incredibly important metric for the health of this business.

As the price of oil started to dip, so did cash from operations. However, we're starting to see cash flow results trend upward again as oil and gas prices rise slightly and each company lowers its breakeven price.

At the same time, capital spending budgets have declined from the delay of some projects and from wringing out additional costs. That has helped to boost the most important number for these companies: free cash flow.

Looking at these charts, it would appear that ExxonMobil and Shell are head and shoulders above the rest. That isn't necessarily the case, though, because Exxon and Shell are much larger companies. A better way to look at these companies' cash-generating ability is to measure free cash flow to assets, which accounts for the size of the company.

Company Free Cash Flow to Assets (Current) Free Cash Flow to Assets (10-Year Avg.) BP (1.56%) 1.09% Chevron 1.34% 2.18% ExxonMobil 4.29% 6.66% Royal Dutch Shell 4.23% 1.62% Statoil 4.03% 1.45% Total 2.27% 1.42%

Also, here's a look at the companies' operational cash flow as a percentage of capital spending. This metric is a helpful gauge of the changes in incoming cash and spending habits in recent years.

Company Last 12 Months FY 2016 FY 2015 FY 2014 BP 74% 64% 103% 145% Chevron 124% 71% 66% 89% ExxonMobil 209% 137% 114% 137% Royal Dutch Shell 183% 93% 114% 142% Statoil 139% 74% 88% 104% Total 133% 91% 79% 97%

These results yield a different conclusion than the charts. In this case, Shell, Statoil, and Total are all outperforming their historical averages, which is an incredible feat when you consider where are oil prices are.

Stepping back, these results make some sense. Ten years ago, we were at the height of "peak oil" fears, and some oil executives were saying we could expect oil above $250 a barrel. As a result, these companies took on some costly development projects. So capital budgets from 2010 to 2014 were abnormally high. Now that companies are learning to get a lot more out of their development portfolio with less capital, cash flow to assets is on the upswing.

The company that has taken this change to heart is Shell. Historically, Shell was known as the "engineers' oil company" that would take on challenging projects. As oil prices started to crash, though, CEO Ben Van Beurden made the company focus more on the value of its products rather than the volume it produced. As a result, the company has made drastic improvements to its free cash flow.

Here's how the companies rank in this category:

1. Royal Dutch Shell

2. ExxonMobil

3. Statoil

4. Total

5. Chevron

6. BP

An eye on outlook

Now that we have a handle on what each company can do with oil prices where they are today, let's start looking at where each company goes from here. Here's a rundown of what the management teams have said during their investor and analyst day meetings.

1. BP

Perhaps one of the reasons BP's cash flow metrics are so lousy is that the company is in the midst of an ambitious growth phase. In 2017 alone, the company expects to bring seven major capital projects online, and year-over-year production is up 9.5%.

It appears that, based on the company's most recent strategic outlook presentation, this is the beginning of something big. Between now and 2021, BP plans to add 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day to its current production. That production increase -- plus its equity stake in Russian oil company Rosneft -- could make BP the largest producer in 2021.

One thing that we learned, though, is that growing production for growth's sake is a recipe for disaster. BP learned this the hard way during the Deepwater Horizon spill. According to the company's projections, it expects upstream free cash flow to grow to $13 billion to $14 billion based on an average price of Brent crude (the international benchmark) of $55 per barrel. That oil price is a touch higher than today, but it's a reasonable assumption and represents a significant increase in cash flow, so we can assume its cash breakeven is significantly lower.

On top of its upstream plans, the company intends to boost its downstream results significantly. That plan stands on three core pillars: improved refining performance, better sales of lubricants, and a more significant retail presence.

The refining and lubricant business is probably its most uncertain bet. BP doesn't have plans to build new refineries. Instead, it wants to upgrade its existing facilities to produce higher-margin products and lower costs. It has done a commendable job of improving its refinery operations recently, but there's one thing that makes this strategy look a little fishy. BP's refining assets in the U.S. have been designed to process lots of heavy Canadian crude, and the company's projections assume that Western Canadian Select (the Canadian benchmark oil) will sell at a $15-per-barrel discount to West Texas Intermediate (the U.S. benchmark price).

The price difference between these two crudes has been converging for the past five years. Shale oil has become much less expensive to produce, and the price differential between these two crudes has not been $15 or more for some time. It doesn't look as if this trend is going to reverse anytime soon, either. U.S. shale production continues to rise, and there seems to be a consensus that nobody will be investing in a new oil sands facility for a long, long time.

If this is indeed the case, there's a good chance that BP's downstream business might not live up to management expectations. Based on its upstream production plans, though, it may not matter that much.

2. Chevron

Integrated oil companies have all followed a similar blueprint to improve their financial performance:

Cut capital spending and operating expenses.

Sell assets to "right-size" the business.

Take on debt to bridge funding gaps in the interim.

Spend on on new, lower-cost projects.

The difference for each company has been the pace at which they can execute this plan plans.

Chevron has been one of the slowest companies to enact these changes, and its Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects are to blame. These two projects have taken years and billions to develop. Since capital was already committed to these two LNG export facilities, the company couldn't simply stop construction. As a result, it was harder for the company to lower overall spending rates and react to the changing dynamics of the market. Now that Gorgon is complete and Wheatstone almost finished, the company is at the "right size" phase.

Chevron is much more focused on upstream production than its peers are. What's interesting about Chevron is that it seems to be doubling down on this position by divesting several billion in downstream assets, including its refineries in Hawaii, British Columbia, and South Africa.

One would assume that it would then plow that money into growing profitable production, but the company's growth plans look rather modest. Between now and 2020, management doesn't expect production to exceed 3 million barrels per day after adjusting for asset sales. With production at 2.72 million barrels per day, that isn't a whole lot of growth. The most prominent contributor to the company's earnings growth will be continued reductions in cost to boost upstream margin.

Chevron is more or less holding serve over the next few years as it looks to lower its breakeven production costs and generate more cash per barrel produced. The one fear here is that the company is being left behind.

3. ExxonMobil

There was a time when "integrated" meant a company would carry the same molecule of oil or gas from the well all the way to the end market. As these corporations diversified globally and picked the highest-return projects, those value chains became less and less "integrated" and eventually became a collection of assets along the value chain. Exxon was a shining example, as its sources of production didn't necessarily connect with its refining and petrochemical manufacturing hubs.

Looking at Exxon's spending plans over the next few years, though, that is going to change. Much of ExxonMobil's capital spending is going into two key assets: Its shale assets in North America and its refining, chemical manufacturing, and export capacity near the Gulf Coast. The theory is to leverage its production to supply its massive refining and petrochemical production facilities with cheap domestic feedstocks, and to generate better returns from each molecule.

The upstream component is centered on Exxon's massive Permian Basin holdings. Exxon believes there are about 60 billion barrels of oil in place in its holdings there. Based on the expected returns at current oil prices, management intends to grow its Permian and Bakken shale production by 20% annually between now and 2025 to around 800,000 barrels per day. Even more striking is that management expects more than half of its upstream capital spending will go to short cycle production like the Permian and Bakken.

There is, of course, a trade-off for these investments: a slower development pace for its international operations. Except for its offshore project in Guyana, the company's spending on major capital projects look much more timid than what we've seen in the past. That's why investors should only expect production growth of 200,000 to 600,000 barrels per day between now and 2020.

A benefit of ExxonMobil's approach is that it doesn't have to do much "right-sizing" of the business in the interim. Unlike most of its peers, management doesn't have plans for significant asset sales, and it doesn't have to do as much to get its balance sheet back into fighting shape. The thing that will determine the success of this strategy is how soon it can get back to buying back stock as it has in the past.

Overall, this is par for the course for ExxonMobil. It didn't overreact when the crash hit, and it isn't overreacting as oil prices recover. This formula is the one the company has used for decades. It's hard to imagine it will change course anytime soon.

4. Royal Dutch Shell

Shell's decision to buy BG Group for $70 billion in 2015 was like going all-in before seeing all the cards in a game of poker. It was an audacious bet when no one had any idea how long and how severe the downturn would become. It looks as if that bet is going to pay out.

Perhaps the most important part of Shell's transformation wasn't the purchase of BG, but what management decided to do with all of those assets afterward. Shell took BG's assets, looked at the new combined entity, and ditched several assets that didn't have much overlap or cost synergies. So far, the company has unloaded more than $20 billion in assets, with plans to shed another $10 billion.

What's left is a company that has a concentration in two segments: LNG and offshore drilling. Shell is already the biggest LNG player, with more than 45 million tons per year of liquefaction capacity. The company also has another nine liquefaction terminals under consideration.

On the deepwater side of things, the company has an immense concentration in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and the pre-salt formation off the coast of Brazil. The company has a stake in 14 different production platforms there that should produce 1.7 million barrels per day in the next few years -- Shell has to share that production with its equity partners, though.

Overall, the company expects production to grow 800,000 barrels per day between now and 2020. Almost all of that will come from its LNG and offshore investments. What's more important is that the company expects to generate $10 billion annually from just its upstream segment in 2018. That estimate is based on having the price of Brent oil hover around $60 a barrel.

Shell has some investments in shale, but they are still very much in the early stages. Management doesn't anticipate that it will be able to monetize its shale acreage until 2020, when it has adequate infrastructure in place.

On the downstream side of the business, Shell is investing heavily in chemicals and lubricants. The company expects to spend about $3 billion to $4 billion annually on projects including a 1.6 million-ton-per-year polyethylene facility in Pennsylvania, a 1.2 million-ton-per-year ethylene facility in China, and an additional 425,000 tons of olefins production at its Geismar facility in the U.S. Gulf Coast. High-margin chemical products like these have transformed Shell's chemical segment, which today has average returns on capital employed in excess of 20%.

Shell's BG acquisition may have looked like a high-risk bet, but it has paid off well. Now, the company has a much better business upon which it can build.

5. Statoil

Statoil is the outlier of this group. Its investments are heavily weighted toward its home country. Norway is the largest producer of oil and gas in Europe and is one of the only non-Russian suppliers of natural gas that can be shipped by pipeline. Statoil has an immense geographic advantage and a captive customer base in mainland Europe. Europe has to import much of its natural gas, and much of that is LNG. Therefore, the price for gas is much higher than in other parts of the world. Fortunately for Statoil, its Norwegian gas doesn't have to go through the expensive process of liquefaction, ship transport, and regasification, resulting in much higher realized prices and margins.

It appears that, based on the company's plans, it intends to leverage these advantages and focus on value creation more than anything else.

One of the most telling things in Statoil's investor presentations is the company's focus on its breakeven costs. Almost all of Norway's oil and gas deposits are offshore and in harsh environments such as the North Sea and the Arctic, which are typically higher-cost sources. While it has the benefit of higher gas prices and lower transportation costs, Statoil's expenses have historically been higher than those of its peers.

Recently, the company has ruthlessly cut costs for its Norway production. It has gone from a breakeven cost of $90 a barrel of oil equivalent back in 2013 to $27 per barrel of oil equivalent today. At that low of a price, the company can reasonably assume that it will generate a decent per-barrel profit margin no matter what happens with the price of oil or gas over the next several years.

Statoil also has some equity investments outside Norway, the largest of which are in the U.S. -- both offshore and shale -- and Brazil. Overall, though, these are non-operator stakes that will rely more on the efficiency of its partners than on its operations. There is indeed some room for upside, but it's relatively minor.

In exchange for incredibly low breakeven costs, Statoil has a much more modest growth plan. Between now and 2020, the company only expects to grow organic production by 3% annually. Also, Statoil doesn't have significant capital plans for downstream assets.

6. Total

Total's high rates of return over the past few years were a result of serendipity. Right as oil prices started to crater in 2014 and 2015, the company was completing several of its major capital projects. In 2015 alone, the company increased production by 9%, which is incredible. The additional benefit of bringing all these new assets online is that it reduced capital spending obligations.

One thing you can give management credit for is using this serendipitous time to cut costs and maintain a low breakeven price. All of management's investment decisions and projections for free cash flow are based on having a barrel of oil stay at $50 to 2020. With international crude prices in the $60-$65 range already, this looks like a conservative estimate that could produce better-than-expected returns.

Total's growth is pinned on three core ideas:

Add oil production if it has a low breakeven price.

Expand presence in LNG.

Grow chemical production and marketing segments.

This strategy explains several moves, such as taking on contracts to operate oil and gas fields for Middle Eastern countries and buying Maersk's oil and gas assets. These assets are more mature fields with a lot of oil left in them and low breakeven prices. They may not provide the massive potential of a new reservoir, but they ensure a reliable rate of return for years.

Total estimates its production will grow 5% annually until 202, most of which will come from LNG. It has LNG export facilities under construction in Russia and Australia and an equity stake in a prospective terminal in the U.S., and it's also mulling plans for a terminal in Papua New Guinea. By 2022, total wants to double its LNG trading portfolio and own 5% of the global LNG trade.

To generate better returns from chemical manufacturing and retail business, Total is investing heavily in the U.S. Gulf Coast, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, where it either has access to cheap feedstocks or a captive market. On the retail side, Total is investing heavily in Africa, where its goal is to own 20% of the retail market. By 2020, it expects its free cash flow contribution from downstream to increase 37% to $5.5 billion.

An assessment

For a group of companies that are typically bundled together as the same thing, these are diverse investment plans. Chevron and Statoil look as if they want to stay in a holding pattern, in terms of production, to capture better margin. That's not a terrible plan, but investors can get higher margin from every company mentioned. BP's plans are ambitious and could potentially have the most upside of the bunch, but if its assumptions for its downstream strategy don't pan out, it could be a detriment.

ExxonMobil's plans are safe. The company has opportunity for upside with its Permian and Guyana assets without committing too much capital. Also, its investments in downstream could be incredibly lucrative. The one knock is the modest production increases, but that could change.

Total and Shell look like the complete package: production growth with reasonable breakeven prices and a focus on lucrative markets such as LNG and petrochemicals. Total might look like the better bet with that $50-per-barrel price assumption, but Shell is already generating gobs of free cash flow. We can probably expect that to continue even if prices remain where they are today.

Here's how the companies rank in this category:

1. Royal Dutch Shell

2. Total

3. ExxonMobil

4. BP

5. Statoil

6. Chevron

Beyond oil and gas investments

Let's address the 900-pound gorilla in the room for oil and gas investments: climate change and the rise of renewables. For years, oil and gas companies have dismissed climate change as a risk to their business. Some of these companies previously flirted with investments in renewable energy; most abandoned them after the Great Recession because of poor rates of return and the need to raise cash.

The tide is starting to change, though. Every year, solar energy and wind energy have become less expensive, and they're now the lowest-cost sources of electricity. Furthermore, battery technology is also advancing by leaps and bounds. While batteries and electric vehicles may not be wholly cost-competitive with internal combustion engines now, they're catching up fast.

If you look at the investment plans for these oil companies, you can see that renewables are influencing their decisions. They will probably chalk up low production growth numbers to improving balance sheets, but there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that oil demand growth is waning. Moving to natural gas and petrochemicals is the move a company would make to adjust to a world where oil is used less for fuel.

For investors looking to buy these stocks for the long haul, it's time to consider each company's plan to handle these changes. Here's a look at each.

1. BP

Big Oil companies' investment strategies for alternative energy seems to fall into three categories: Deep research with small annual capital commitments, sizable capital commitments without expectation for returns, or capital commitments with expectations for returns. BP lands in the middle of this cycle. The company is committing $200 million to its non-fossil-fuel portfolio, which has 1.4 gigawatts of wind-power generation, 10 million tons per year of biofuel production, and several other longer-shot investments in new research.

According to management, these businesses generate positive operating cash flow, but there is no mention of an expected rate of return. Perhaps in the near future, we will start to see plans that add expectations to that spending.

2. Chevron

In all of Chevron's investor presentations over the past year, there has been no mention of any alternative investments or future commitments to anything other than fossil fuels. Perhaps this is a product of still "right-sizing" the business. However, it would be encouraging if the company could come up with a plan sooner rather than later.

3. ExxonMobil

Exxon's approach has a "have your cake and eat it, too" feel about it. The company says it has invested $7 billion to reduce the carbon emissions of its current operations and that it spends $1 billion a year on research and development into several low- or no-carbon technologies. If you look at some of the options it's proposing, though, it doesn't change the dynamic of the company that much.

The two big ideas Exxon is working on are carbon sequestration and second-generation biofuels. Admittedly, these ideas are somewhat novel and could be exciting options if they can become commercially viable. On the carbon sequestration front, the company is working with FuelCell Energy to develop a fuel cell that can turn CO2 emissions into additional power and condensed CO2 gas that is then injected into underground storage. It would enable power generation from fossil fuels, notably natural gas, to be emissions-free.

The other idea is a new method for manufacturing biofuels. Current biofuels such as ethanol compete with food crops for valuable items like arable land, water, and fertilizer. Also, current biofuels aren't chemically identical to petroleum products and can cause engine trouble. ExxonMobil and its partner Synthetic Genomics are is looking to develop a biofuel from algae that would not only be chemically identical to gasoline but would also not require the same valuable inputs.

4. Shell

Shell is somewhere between spending a lot of money without expectations and spending money with return expectations. At its most recent management day presentation, the company announced it would spend $1 billion to $2 billion on what it calls its new energies segment. This business segment is doing work on a plethora of projects from biofuels, hydrogen as a fuel, and power generation. While the company doesn't have any expectations as of yet for its existing investments, it does specify that any investment in power generation would have to have a rate of return in the 8%-12% range.

Shell has been proposing hydrogen as a potential alternative fuel for a long time, mostly because it plays well into its existing business structure. Hydrogen fuel cells themselves don't produce any carbon emissions, but the only economical way to produce hydrogen gas in commercial quantities is a process known as gas reformation, which requires natural gas. So it's in the company's interest to make hydrogen a viable option.

5. Statoil

Statoil seems to have found a great way to merge its current competencies and the alternative energy world with offshore wind. If there's one thing that oil and gas companies have learned to do over the years, it's how to build multibillion-dollar facilities in the open ocean that can handle harsh conditions. Statoil has 5.8 gigawatts of offshore wind facilities either in operation or under construction, with more likely to be on the way, as it has been able to reduce installation costs by as much as 40% over the past five years.

Statoil appears to be all-in and expects a rate of return on these investments. Today, the company expects a 9%-11% return on its wind investments and plans to spend between $500 million and $750 million on non-fossil fuels from 2017 to 2020. Management estimates that by 2030, 15%-20% of annual capital spending will go toward non-fossil-fuel energy.

6. Total

While perhaps not quite as ambitious as Statoil's plans, Total is further down the investment path with renewable energy than most of its peers are. This past year, management announced that it will spend $500 million annually on renewable energy.

The company already has a majority stake in U.S. solar-power company SunPower, which makes it a major player in the U.S. market. It also spent $1.1 billion last year to buy specialty-battery company Saft, which it believes will help put itself on the map for energy storage combined with power-generating assets.

The company's expectations for returns today aren't great, but down the road, it expects a lot from these alternative-energy investments. By 2022, Total wants to own more than 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity and generate $500 million in free cash flow annually from its gas, renewables, and power segment -- which doesn't include natural gas production, just gas trading.

An assessment

Statoil is the furthest along with its non-fossil-fuel developments. It has found a niche in which it has a competitive advantage, it is dedicating large sums of money today, and it has expectations for decent rates of return. If it does get to an investment level of 15%-20% of total capital spending, then we're talking about a lot of money for offshore wind.

Total is solidly in second place. Its investments in solar are much further along than those of its competitors are, and it seems to have a pretty clear strategy of how it wants to tackle renewable power. Shell is spending a lot of money, but it's more like throwing out a bunch of different ideas and seeing what sticks at this point. BP and ExxonMobil are next, because they don't seem to have a coherent strategy yet. Some of the ideas are intriguing, but neither has a true path to profitability.

Then there's Chevron, which for now is punting on the whole renewable-energy idea.

Here's how the companies rank in this category:

1. Statoil

2. Total

3. Royal Dutch Shell

4. BP/ExxonMobil (tie)

6. Chevron

Valuation

Now that we have an idea of what we're investing in, it's time to see what kind of value we're getting if we buy shares. Since this is a cyclical industry, valuation matters, so keep in mind that the valuation and where we are in the cycle are both critical.

I think it's reasonable to say the industry is on the upswing. That suggests we should expect higher-than-average valuations. Here's how they all stack up.

Company Total Enterprise Value/Sales Total Enterprise Value/EBITDA Price to Earnings Price to Book Value BP 0.8 7.5 36.2 1.43 Chevron 2.0 10.2 37.5 1.66 ExxonMobil 1.6 10.3 28.2 2.01 Royal Dutch Shell 1.2 8.0 26.9 1.48 Statoil 1.5 4.6 -- 1.93 Total 1.1 5.9 17.8 1.29

One single valuation multiple by itself can be rather misleading. If we look at price to earnings alone, all of these stocks look rather expensive. Keep in mind, though, that all of these companies have had asset writedowns or impairments recently that have negatively skewed earnings. By comparison, these stocks look rather cheap on the basis of both total enterprise value (EV, or market cap plus debt) to sales and enterprise value to EBITDA. For comparison's sake, let's look at the 10-year historical averages.

Company Total Enterprise Value/Sales Total Enterprise Value/EBITDA Price to Earnings Price to Book Value BP 0.60 8.2 16.6 1.41 Chevron 1.16 6.1 27.6 1.64 ExxonMobil 1.2 7.1 17.1 2.63 Royal Dutch Shell 0.69 5.2 22.6 1.32 Statoil 0.98 2.9 12.4 1.73 Total 0.79 4.3 15.0 1.56

Comparatively, these stocks aren't as much of a deal as they initially appear. All of them trade at a premium on at least one metric. Keep in mind, though, that if we are indeed in a market upswing, we should expect valuations to be slightly higher.

An assessment

I'm fond of price to book value because it gives a valuation of the underlying business that generates earnings rater than the earnings themselves. That can help to smooth out some of the cyclical nature of the business.

The ones that stand out are Total and ExxonMobil. Both are trading at decent discounts compared to their historical book values. I'm giving Total a slight advantage here because its price-to-earnings ratio today is much more in line with the 10-year average than Exxon's. BP is next because it's more or less in line with its historical book value and trades at a discount on an EV/EBITDA basis. After the writedowns and payments for the Deepwater Horizon spill start to come off the books, perhaps that price-to-earnings valuation will fall back in line.

Here's how the companies rank in this category:

1. Total

2. ExxonMobil

3. BP

4. Royal Dutch Shell

5. Chevron

6. Statoil

Putting it all together, here are the rankings we get.

Company Margin and Returns Cash Flow Outlook and Plans Beyond Oil and Gas Valuation BP 6 6 4 4 3 Chevron 5 5 6 6 5 ExxonMobil 2 2 3 4 2 Royal Dutch Shell 4 1 1 3 4 Statoil 3 3 5 1 6 Total 1 4 2 2 1

What a Fool believes

Following Big Oil stocks over the past few years has been fascinating. When oil prices crashed from 2014 to 2016, the market rightfully gave management teams a spanking for pursuing too many projects at once and being a little too cavalier with their spending. Surprisingly, almost all of them were able to cut costs and capital spending significantly without cutting production or sacrificing too much short- to medium-term growth.

While no one can say with any certainty that we're in a new normal for oil prices, it's getting harder and harder to envision a scenario where oil prices collapse much below $50 a barrel. According to Chevron, the next 13 million barrels per day slated to come online between now and 2025 -- these are the barrels that will replace existing production and meet demand growth -- have an average breakeven price of $50 a barrel. Now that companies realize what kind of damage a couple of years of undisciplined capital spending can bring, they're much less likely to pursue aggressive production growth.

As it stands today, the price of Brent crude is in the $65-per-barrel range. That's well above the breakeven prices each company has used as its price projection. If this price holds, then we could see some significant share-price gains in 2018.

Looking at these numbers, we see an extremely tight race among Total, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell for the top spot. It all depends on how much you value plans for when fossil fuels are less dominant and current valuation metrics. Even though Shell isn't quite up to snuff on the margin and returns and is slightly more expensive than the others, I think that's going to change in 2018. The company took a lot of non-cash charges that affected earnings last year and will roll off the books. As this happens, its returns should be more in line with its incredible cash-generating abilities. This is an astonishing turnaround for the company, considering it was an also-ran for the past few years.

Exxon may be slightly less expensive, but its long-term plans don't look quite as ambitious as Shell's on paper. Shell also gets the nod over Total because Total's free cash flow-generating abilities are still less certain. As Shell has shown, though, these situations can change quickly.
What happened

Shares of mining darling Northern Dynasty Minerals (NAK -1.92%) lost a little over 10% in December to end what had begun as a wild year with a thud. The single event that caused the monthly slide was actually one that investors had been awaiting the entire year: repartnering the Pebble Project. The term refers to finding a deep-pocketed partner to help develop the company's prized asset in Alaska after previous partners bailed years ago in the face of regulatory uncertainty.

Management delivered by announcing a framework agreement had been reached with the $12 billion copper-mining titan First Quantum Minerals. That's good news, considering Pebble's most profitable resource could very well be its copper deposits. But Wall Street was left unsatisfied after reading the remaining details of the outlined agreement.

The stock finished its 2017 campaign down 14.5%.

So what

On the surface, Northern Dynasty Minerals appeared to have crossed the all-important "repartner Pebble Project" task from its to-do list. Dig a little deeper, though, and there are multiple details that may create more questions than answers.

First and foremost, a partnership with First Quantum Minerals hasn't been finalized. The keyword is "framework" agreement. While the copper mining leader provided Northern Dynasty Minerals with $37.5 million upfront, the deep-pocketed partner is still conducting due diligence on its potential role in Pebble. That means the deal could fall through or have the initially outlined terms amended to de-risk the potential partner's stake.

Second, the initially outlined terms don't appear to be to Wall Street's liking. The framework agreement calls for Northern Dynasty Minerals to give up 50% of the Pebble Project for only $1.5 billion, which likely isn't enough to develop half of the project. That total includes the $37.5 million upfront payment, which itself is part of $150 million in early funding that could be provided in the early stages to kick-start permitting activities.

Now what

Northern Dynasty Minerals may have missed its self-imposed deadline of announcing progress on the repartnering process by the end of the third quarter of 2017, but you have to admit that First Quantum Minerals is an ideal candidate to develop the copper-loaded Pebble Project. And hey, a couple of months late is close enough in the grand scheme of things, especially when the asset isn't expected to be in production until 2024.

But the delay and the terms outlined in the framework agreement serve as a reminder that there's a significant amount of room for error between now and production. Little delays could add up. Northern Dynasty Minerals may have to give up more -- and end up funding more of development -- than it wants in order to meet its deadlines. Investors will need to be on the lookout for further clarification on repartnering and progress on the permitting process in 2018.
By PTI: (Eds: Adding fresh inputs)

Chennai, Jan 8 (PTI) Amid a boycott by opposition parties led by the DMK, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today made his maiden address to the state assembly, urging the Centre to sanction Rs 4,854 crore towards Cyclone Ochki rehabilitation work.

Soon after he arrived in the House, Purohit greeted all members with a Vanakkam and began his address. Even as he began his speech, Leader of the Opposition MK Stalin was on his feet trying to raise some issues. The governor paused for a moment and told Stalin please utkkarunga (please take your seat) in Tamil but to no avail. Stalin was supported by his party MLAs, who raised slogans demanding that their leader be allowed to speak. A little later, the DMK Working President led his party members and staged a walkout.

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Congress members and the lone IUML legislator also followed suit. Amid noisy scenes, sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, who made his debut in the assembly after having won the December 21 RK Nagar bypoll by a thumping margin of 40,000 votes against E Madhusudhanan of AIADMK, was seated calmly.

Later, Purohit resumed his address which was peppered with praise to late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaas vision and expression of thanks to the Centre for fund-releases towards instances including an "on-account" release of Rs 133 crore for cyclone Ockhi rehabilitation work.

"I urge the Central government to...sanction the due release of Rs 401 crore for temporary restoration and Rs 4,854 crore for permanent restoration towards damages caused by Cyclone Ockhi." Thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for visiting cyclone-hit Kanyakumari, he said the Centre should ask its team which visited Tamil Nadu to assess storm damages to expeditiously submit its report.

Recalling the financial assistance provided by the State government to the bereaved families vis-a-vis the storm, he said Tamil Nadu was committed to continuing rescue efforts till the last fisherman was rescued.

Lauding the State for achieving a smooth transition to the GST regime, he said Tamil Nadus fiscal position has been "resilient" and continues to be so despite unexpected setbacks in revenues. "Though there is a concern about increasing revenue deficit due to slow growth in revenue receipts, the State is firmly on the path of containing the fiscal deficit and Debt to GSDP ratio within the norms." Referring to his State-wide tours, Purohit complimented Tamil Nadu for "active participation," in "Swachh Bharat Mission," which was being pursued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a "missionary zeal."

"During my tours, I witnessed commendable work by the State in implementing this mission..16 districts have achieved Open Defecation Free status under the mission." It may be recalled that Purohit toured a number of districts in which he undertook cleanliness drives and held meetings with officials. It evoked strong protest from Opposition parties primarily the DMK which alleged that it amounted to interference in the rights of the state. Outlining the policies and programmes of the AIADMK regime, he reiterated the government position that Katchatheevu islet should be retrieved from Sri Lanka which will restore the traditional fishing rights of Indian fishermen. "Efforts taken by the central government has substantially reduced the incidents of unprovoked attacks by the Sri Lankan Navy on our fishermen." Seeking release of Tamil Nadu fishermen from Sri Lanka, he thanked the Union government for supporting Tamil Nadu in its efforts to promote deep sea fishing by sanctioning Rs 200 crore for replacing existing fishing vessels with tuna longliners. On the contentious Cauvery issue, the Governor said, "The Government continues to urge the Centre to expedite the constitution of the Cauvery Management Board and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee to fulfil the long-standing legitimate demand of the State." He said Jayalalithaa enabled the State to become "power surplus," and Tamil Nadu will pursue its goal of adding 13,000 MW thermal power to its generating capacity. Despite its "immense fiscal stress," the government has already implemented pay revision on the basis of the recommendations of the pay panel 2017 at an additional cost of Rs 14,719 crore per annum, he said. "Many representations are being received from various quarters about the pay revision.. This government will constitute a committee to examine these." The governor also urged the Centre to accord early approval for Phase-II of the Chennai Metro Rail Project. Hailing Tamil Nadus Universal Public Distribution System which has ensured a "functional food safety net," Purohit said all rice card holders were being provided with Pongal gift hampers consisting of one kilogram each of raw rice, sugar besides other items this year as well. PTI VGN SA ROH DV

--- ENDS ---
The UKs largest independently owned dairy group, Meadow Foods, has dropped its standard milk price by 0.75p/litre.

The cut means Meadows 650 producers will receive 29p/litre for milk with a constituent content of 4% butterfat and 3.3% protein from the start of February.

The processor sighted the recent downturn in the milk market and increased national production volumes as the driving force behind the price drop.

See also: Muller commits to 29p/litre until March

Other February milk price changes (4% butterfat, 3.3% protein) Yew Tree reduces price by 1p/litre to 30p/litre

South Caenarfon Creameries reduces price by 1.2p/litre to 28.81p/litre

Belton Farm reduces price by 1p/litre to 29p/litre

Provisional AHDB Dairy milk production statistics for November 2017 show volumes 8% ahead of where they were a year ago at 1,164m litres, but in line with the same month in 2015 and the three-year average.

We regret that we have reduced our price to reflect the volatile market conditions, said Mark Chantler, Meadow Foods chief executive.

We are working hard to reduce some of the effects of market volatility by further developing our sales through an extended product range and reach as well as working with our producers to help mitigate the impact.

He added: We hope the market stabilises in the near term, but will continue to monitor the situation very closely.

The UK levy board anticipated continued pressure on milk prices through the spring as production hits its peak and fat markets roll back from their meteoric highs in the middle of last year.
A man has appeared in court charged with manslaughter over the death of 20-year-old Lauren Scott.

Neil Carpenter, 44, of Firbank Road, Dawlish, Devon, did not enter a plea during the hearing at Newton Abbot Magistrates Court on Wednesday, 3 January. He spoke only to confirm his name, age and address.

Lauren Scott, from Kenton, near Exeter, died in an incident involving a milling machine while working at Springfield Farm near Dawlish on 4 March 2017. Miss Scott was taken by ambulance to hospital, but she could not be saved.

See also: Tougher penalties for farm health and safety breaches

Mr Carpenter was also charged with failing to comply with health and safety regulations.

The case was sent to Exeter Crown Court to be heard on 2 February. Mr Carpenter was remanded on unconditional bail.

Miss Scott was a former student at Bicton College and she previously attended Coombeshead Academy in Newton Abbot. She also had a passion for horses and she worked at Newton Abbot Racecourse, where she was very popular.

Lauren Scotts family paid tribute to their beloved sister and daughter and called her death a catastrophic loss. They added: Lauren  the sun may set upon your time with us, but your memory will live on.
In a recent Q&A session, Ubisoft mentioned that with the high demand from the player community, they are considering to release a New Game Plus mode for Assassins Creed Origins.

They said: We know that a large number of community members have requested a New Game+ feature. We are currently investigating the possibility of implementing this option in a future title update,

The New Game Plus mode will if released will enable the players to Playthrough the storyline again with some constraints and limitations, after they complete the story for the first time. The players will be able to pass on the character progress from the first playthrough along with the weapons, making the Plus mode a little bit less challenging.

New Game + Mode has become a new norm and I think all action-adventure open world game must have it. What is your opinion? Share it with us in the comment section below.
Do More with Google Chrome; 10-Hour Battery Life and Strong, Quiet Performance

The Acer Chromebook 11 provides easy access to the Google ecosystem including Google Drive, Gmail, and a variety of useful Chrome apps and extensions. Also, the Acer Chromebook 11 will fully support Google Play at launch, so customers will have access to millions of Android apps on Google Play to let them have more fun, be entertained, stay connected and remain productive. Plus, customers won't have to take their power adapter on the go, as the new Acer Chromebook 11 provides up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge.

Customers can also enjoy multiple apps and tabs at the same time on the Acer Chromebook 11 since it delivers strong performance with the latest Intel Celeron processors. The Acer Chromebook 11 comes with 4GB of memory and 16GB or 32GB of eMMC storage. The device's fanless design allows it to run quietly, making it great for shared spaces such as in a family room, library or coffee shop.

Stay Connected to Peripherals, Wirelessly

The new Acer Chromebook 11 device includes two USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 1 ports, which can be used to charge the device as well as other products, transfer data quickly and connect to an HD display. Plus, customers can use the MicroSD card reader to access and transfer content. The Acer Chromebook 11 also includes two USB 3.0 ports and Bluetooth 4.2. Customers can stay connected to their network with fast and reliable 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless connectivity.

Display Options in a Portable Design

The Acer Chromebook 11 has an 11.6-inch IPS display available in either touch (CB311-8HT) or non-touch (CB311-8H) models with a 1366x768 resolution to provide sharp and legible text as well as vivid, clear videos and photos. The high-dynamic range (HDR) camera produces clear and brighter photos as well as a video for Google Hangouts and webchats. The dual stereo speakers and integrated microphone enhance the webcam experience with high-quality audio.

The slim and portable form factor makes the Acer Chromebook 11 ideal for use anywhere; it measures only 0.71 inches (18.15mm) thin and weighs only 2.43 pounds (1.1kg).

Acer Chromebook 11 Simplifies Security and Collaboration

Chromebooks are easy to use and ideal for sharing by multiple users. Customers simply log into their own Google account to access their Gmail, Google Docs, apps, extensions, bookmarks, and other information. Chrome OS provides additional security since it's automatically updated to guard against ever-changing online threats. Many Chromebook customers store their files on Google Drive which protects files, documents, and photos safely in the cloud, and ensures that the most current version of the file or document is always available and safe, even if the Chromebook is lost or stolen.

Pricing and Availability

Several models in the Acer Chromebook 11 line (CB311-8HT/ CB311-8H) will be available in North America in April with prices starting at $249, and in EMEA in March with prices starting at 249. Exact specifications, prices, and availability will vary by region. To find out about availability, product specifications and prices in specific markets, consumers can contact their nearest Acer office or retailer or visit the Acer website.
Nokia 6 (2018) receives Android Oreo update and Google Play support News oi -Abhinaya Prabhu

Nokia 6 (2018) was unveiled a couple of days back and is all set to go on sale in China soon. While it comes with notable improvements in comparison to its predecessor, the one disappointing aspect of this device is that it runs Android Nougat instead of Android Oreo.

According to a recent NokiaPowerUser report, Nokia 6 (2018) receives an update the first time it is booted and the update rolls out Android Oreo to the smartphone. Wondering why the Nokia 6 (2018) did not ship with the latest iteration of Android out of the box? There is no possible explanation from HMD Global regarding this but it could be because the Oreo build was not ready before the smartphone was shipped to the distributors and resellers in China.

Well, that's not all! The report also claims that the variant of the Nokia 6 (2018) that is official now will not arrive with Google services pre-installed as it is the Chinese variant. However, it has the optional support that lets users install Google Play Store APK file on the device. Having said that, users can be free from the stress of unlocking the bootloader to install Google services.

Notably, the first generation Nokia 6 that was launched early in 2017 did not arrive with the above feature but received the ability as a part of the July security patch. However, this advantage is for those who are living outside of China who use the international variant of the Nokia 6.

The Nokia 6 (2018) brings a slew of new features and improvements in comparison to its predecessor. The device boasts of a 5.5-inch FHD 1080p display and a completely revamped design language. But the device does not feature the full-screen design with 18:9 aspect ratio screen as seen in the recent launches.

Nokia Phones Symbian to Android - GIZBOT

While the 16MP main camera, the 8MP selfie camera and the 3000mAh battery remain the same, the latest launch from HMD Global features a more powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC. Also, the smartphone comes with many new features such as Nokia OZO Audio and the Bothie feature those were launched with the Nokia 8 flagship smartphone.

Best Mobiles in India

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Sold more than one Google Home device every second : Google News oi -Priyanka With Google Home Mini and Google Home Max in addition to original Google Home, we brought you even more ways to use the Assistant in your home.

Search giant Google recently said that it sold more than one Google Home device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October.

With Google Home Mini and Google Home Max in addition to original Google Home, we brought you even more ways to use the Assistant in your home. So it's no wonder we've sold tens of millions of all our Google devices for the home over this last year, Google stated this news in a blog post.

The Google further said, the Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices, including speakers like Google Home, Android phones, and tablets, iPhones, headphones, TVs, watches and more.

"We brought the Google Assistant to a dozen countries, from France to Japan, offering help in 8 languages around the globe," Google said.

"As we've added more features-like Voice Match, Broadcast and Hands-Free Calling-the Google Assistant have become even more helpful. Your Assistant now gives you the power to voice control more than 1,500 compatible smart home devices from over 225 brands," the search engine added.

With all these choices, you've connected millions of new smart home devices to Google Home every month. All told, Google Home usage increased 9X this holiday season over last year's, as you controlled more smart devices, asked more questions, listened to more music, and tried out all the new things you can do with your Assistant on Google Home.

The Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices, including speakers like Google Home, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, headphones, TVs, watches and more.

"We brought the Google Assistant to a dozen countries, from France to Japan, offering help in 8 languages around the globe," Google said.

Furthermore Google pointed out that they would be revealing more features and future of Google Assistant in 2018 at the CES 2018. We're expecting the company to introduce more features for the US market. In India though, we get limited features, and it's also disappointing that the company is yet to announce a Google Home product in the Indian market.

Best Mobiles in India

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By PTI: By Lalit K Jha

Washington, Jan 8 (PTI) US President Donald Trump today postponed his much-talked about Fake News Awards to the mainstream media for "dishonesty and bad reporting" to January 17.

The awards ceremony was supposed to be held today.

Trump upon his return from the presidential retreat of Camp David yesterday tweeted about the new date of the "one- of-its-kind" awards to various media houses.

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"The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday," he tweeted.

"The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!" he said.

Trump had, on January 2, announced that he would give away awards to media houses for "dishonesty and bad reporting".

"I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 oclock. This would be one of its kind media award by the US president. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!" he had tweeted.

Trump had coined the term Fake News during his presidential campaign, targeting media houses for "biased" news.

He very often identifies CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post as "fake media".

In November, he tweeted about a competition among news networks for the Fake News Trophy, excluding the Fox News.

"We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!," he wrote on the micro-blogging site on November 27.

In an email to supporters of the president on December 28, the Trump campaign had sought nomination for the King of Fake News trophy.

"At President Trumps request, we are holding a contest to name the 2017 KING of Fake News. And we want to hear from you," it said.

"The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people. Some journalists and liberal pundits think that Americans are too stupid to see through their amateur efforts to manipulate public opinion, but THEYRE WRONG," it wrote the supporters.

Noting that Americans were "sick and tired of being lied to, insulted, and treated with outright condescension", the Trump Campaign said, "Thats why President Trump is crowning the 2017 KING OF FAKE NEWS before the end of the year. Theres no point in pretending that some journalists are anything more than peddlers of falsehoods and liberal propaganda".

advertisement

As per the Trump Campaign list, the competition for King of Fame news is between three news organisations.

"ABC News "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election," it said.

"CNN "MISTAKENLY" reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks,? it wrote.

"TIME "MISTAKENLY" reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office," the Trump Campaign said, asking the participants to "let the President know if there is another story you think should be crowned as the 2017 KING of Fake News". PTI LKJ AQS AQS

--- ENDS ---
CIA Director Believes DPRK Could Threaten US Cities in a Few Months

Sputnik News

21:42 07.01.2018(updated 23:16 07.01.2018)

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Mike Pompeo speaking at the Face the Nation show on the CBS television network on Sunday expressed his views on perils originating from Pyongyang, Russia's alleged attempts to meddle in 2018 US elections and protests in Iran.

On North Korea

Pompeo confirmed he still believed that Pyongyang was just a few months away from crossing the threshold to putting a US city at risk of nuclear attack.

When asked, was that a three- or four-month period, Pompeo said he was unable to give "that kind of certainty."

However, he refuted the allegations that underestimation of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities was a failure of US intelligence.

"Look, I've been one who's been candid where the intelligence community has made mistakes, where we have missed things. This is not that," Pompeo stressed.

On the contrary, he added, in recent months, US intelligence has managed to better understand what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his inner circle were doing.

"We have what we think is a very good assessment of their military capability. That is, how ready those enormous forces are," Pompeo said, recalling that in addition to nuclear weapons, North Korea has enormous conventional capacity.

Tensions between Pyongyang and Washington have escalated in the wake of repeated ballistic missile launches and a nuclear test by Pyongyang followed by the sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council on North Korea. Most notably, in August, North Korea said it was considering a strategy to strike the US pacific territory of Guam. US President Donald Trump said, in turn, that the United States would respond to North Korea's threats with "fire and fury."

On Russian Meddling

Pompeo responded affirmatively when asked whether Moscow was trying to undermine the 2018 elections.

"Yes, sir. Have been for decades. So, yes, I  I continue- continue to be concerned not only about the Russians but about others' efforts as well. We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy. So there's this  this Washington-based focus on Russian interference. I want to make sure we broaden the conversation," Pompeo told the broadcaster.

In November 2018, the United States will hold midterm elections with voters choosing one third of the US Senate, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and governors of 36 states and three territories.

The US Congress is currently investigating Russia's alleged meddling in 2016 US presidential election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been carrying out a similar investigation. A number of hearings regarding the issue have been held in the Congress, but intelligence service officials have yet to provide any evidence, as they claim the information is confidential.

Russia has repeatedly refuted allegations that it meddled in the US election, calling the accusations "absolutely groundless" and noting that Moscow never had contacts with the campaign team of now US President Donald Trump.

On Iran

Mike Pompeo said that the recent wave of protests in Iran was determined by the government's failure to fulfill its promises regarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and internal economic and social issues.

"They're [Iranians] protesting because they've seen the failed promises of President [Hassan] Rouhani and [Iranian Foreign Minister Javad] Zarif, that they haven't been able to deliver the economic outcomes that they said. They said they'd get the JCPOA and food would be plentiful, that commerce would reign, and that jobs would arise. And that simply hasn't happened," Pompeo told the CBS broadcaster.

Several major cities in Iran, including Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Rasht, have been engulfed in anti-government protests since December 28, 2017. The people have taken to the streets to protest against unemployment, poverty, and the rising cost of living, as well as policies of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. At least 20 people have reportedly been killed in the unrest.

In July 2015, the European Union, Iran and the P5+1 group of nations comprising the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom plus Germany signed the nuclear deal that stipulated a gradual lifting of sanctions imposed on Tehran in exchange for guarantees of peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to halt the Iran nuclear deal, while the US lawmakers were working on amendments to the accord.

 Sputnik

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Yemen's GPC names new head to replace slain Saleh

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 06:25PM

Yemen's General People's Congress (GPC) has picked a new leader to replace long-time chief Ali Abdullah Saleh who was killed last month.

In an announcement on Sunday, the GPC named Sadeq Amin Abou Rass as Saleh's replacement.

The former agriculture minister is now expected to lead a fragile partnership between tribes who have been traditionally loyal to Saleh but are now split on how to deal with the ruling Houthi Ansarullah movement, a group that has led a two-year resistance campaign against a brutal war by Yemen's northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia.

The GPC announcement said the party would keep resisting the Saudi "aggression", but it did not mention the Ansarullah. Also missing from the statement was the name of Ahmed Ali Saleh, the exiled son of the former president who had vowed to lead a campaign against the Houthis after his father was killed in a roadside attack by fighters loyal to the Ansarullah.

"What happened (Saleh's killing) will not prompt us to make peace with the aggressors against the sovereignty, the dignity and the freedom of our great Yemeni people," said the statement, adding that the GPC remained open to national reconciliation and talks with all Yemeni factions.

The party also called for the release of its prisoners, including Saleh's family members and staffers of the pro-Saleh TV channel Yemen al-Yawm.

Saudi Arabia launched its devastating campaign against the impoverished Yemen in March 2015 in an alleged bill to restore power to a resigned president. Saleh initially took sides with the Ansarullah and opposed the Saudi air campaign which has since killed more than 13,600 people. However, he switched sides apparently under pressure from Riyadh in what the Ansarullah's described as a clear form of treason.



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Yemeni forces target Saudi-led Tornado fighter jet over Sa'ada: Report

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 03:47PM

Yemeni air defense forces have reportedly intercepted and shot down a twin-engine and multirole Panavia Tornado combat aircraft belonging to the Saudi-led military alliance involved in the aerial bombardment campaign against Yemen.

A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the fighter jet was targeted on Sunday evening as it was flying in the skies over Kitaf wa al-Boqe'e district in the country's northwestern mountainous province of Sa'ada, Yemen's Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.

The source added that the aircraft was struck with a surface-to-air missile fired by Yemeni forces.

The jet had purportedly taken part in airstrikes against residential neighborhoods in Yemen. The development was also reflected on the official Twitter page of al-Masirah.

Earlier in the day, Yemeni army soldiers and allied fighters from Popular Committees had destroyed an Emirati armored vehicle north of Yakhtul coastal fishing village in Yemen's southwestern province of Ta'izz.

On December 30, 2017, Yemeni army forces and their allies managed to shoot down a Saudi unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as it was on a reconnaissance mission in Yemen's northwestern province of Hajjah.

In late October, Yemeni air defense forces and Popular Committees' fighters targeted a Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet belonging to the Royal Saudi Air Force.

Yemen's air defense unit told the country's Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that the aircraft had been targeted with a surface-to-air missile as it was flying in the skies over Nihm district east of the Yemeni capital city of Sana'a.

In June, Yemeni air defense forces also intercepted and shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet in the skies over Sana'a.

According to Yemeni military officials, the invading aircraft had taken part in deadly airstrikes against residential neighborhoods in the Arab country.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Yemen in 2015. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The Saudi-led war has also triggered deadly epidemics of infectious diseases, especially diphtheria and cholera, across Yemen.

According to the World Health Organization's latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April and is suspected to have infected 841,906.

WHO has also warned that at least 471 people in Yemen have contracted diphtheria, a bacterial disease that has been killing one in 10 Yemenis since the outbreak started in the war-torn country in mid-August last year.

The UN agency's spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic, made the disturbing announcement last Thursday, adding that the west-central province of Ibb and the western province of Hudaydah were the hardest hit by diphtheria, which is easily spread between people through direct physical contact or the air.

On November 26, the United Nations children's agency (UNICEF) said that more than 11 million children in Yemen were in acute need of aid, stressing that it was estimated that every 10 minutes a child died of a preventable disease there.

Additionally, the UN has described the current level of hunger in Yemen as "unprecedented," emphasizing that 17 million people are now food insecure in the country.

It added that 6.8 million, meaning almost one in four people, do not have enough food and rely entirely on external assistance.





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Yemenis firing own missiles at Saudi Arabia: Iran's IRGC

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 01:52PM

The chief commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has dismissed the allegations leveled by the US and its allies about the Islamic Republic's provision of missiles to Yemeni forces.

"Missiles fired at Saudi Arabia belong to Yemen which have been overhauled and their range have been increased," Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Sunday.

He added that there is no possibility at all that the Islamic Republic could transfer missiles to Yemen.

He said the US and its puppets have so far spread many lies and leveled many allegations against Iran.

"How is it possible to send weapons, specially missiles, to a country which is fully under siege and there is even no possibility to send medical aid and foodstuff?" the IRGC commander asked.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on December 14 appeared in a staged show in front of a large and charred tube that she claimed was "concrete evidence" that Iran was providing missiles to Yemeni forces fighting against Saudi Arabia's war of aggression on their country.

Responding to Haley's allegation, Iran's UN mission categorically dismissed as "unfounded" her claim that a missile fired at Saudi Arabia from Yemen was supplied by the Islamic Republic.

In a statement released following Haley's allegations, the mission said, "These accusations seek also to cover up for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen, with the US complicity, and divert international and regional attention from the stalemate war of aggression against the Yemenis that has so far killed more than 10,000 civilians, displaced three million, crippled Yemen's infrastructure and health system and pushed the country to the brink of the largest famine the world has seen for decades, as the UN has warned."

Iran's defense minister also announced that the Islamic Republic would file a complaint with the United Nations over Haley's claim that missile debris allegedly retrieved in Saudi Arabia was of Iranian origin.

Brigadier General Amir Hatami added that Iranian military technicians were investigating the US administration's allegations and were preparing a complaint to be filed with the UN.

"The enemies of the Islamic Republic can make whatever claim, but once the [Iranian] complaint is filed, a part of the missiles [presented] will have to be handed over to Iran so we can present a final conclusion after inspections," Hatami noted.

On December 16, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed as "baseless" the US allegation that Tehran supplies missiles to Yemen, saying it was an attempt by Washington to whitewash its war crimes in the Middle East.

Zarif said such claims aimed to deflect attention from US complicity in the crimes committed in the Middle East, particularly in Yemen, and from US President Donald Trump's "very dangerous move" to recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel's "capital."

On December 14, Abdel-Malek al-Ejri, a senior official of Yemen's Houthi Ansarullah movement, said that Yemen had been firing missiles at Saudi Arabia during the course of the kingdom's military aggression against Yemen since it began in 2015.

"After three years of war, America suddenly finds evidence that Iran supports the Houthis," he wrote in a message on his Twitter account.

"America did not find any evidence in all the missiles fired from Yemen until now. The story is clear. They want to give Arabs a story to divert their attention from Jerusalem al-Quds. Instead of being angry at Israel, they wave the Iranian bogey," the official added, referring to Washington's push to move its diplomatic mission in Israel from Tel Aviv to the occupied city of Jerusalem al-Quds.

Even the United Nations refuted US missile claims against Iran with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres saying in a confidential report obtained by AFP that the world body's team, which visited Riyadh to scrutinize the alleged evidence, had not yet established a link between them and the Islamic Republic.

A Saudi Arabian-led coalition launched a war against Yemen in 2015 and has ever since been indiscriminately hitting targets in the country. Yemeni Houthi fighters have been firing missiles in retaliatory attacks against Saudi targets every now and then.

On November 4, a missile fired from Yemen targeted King Khalid International Airport near Riyadh, reaching the Saudi capital for the first time.

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Israel PM wants UNRWA closed amid US aid cut threat

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 02:50PM

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the closure of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees after US President Donald Trump cut the funding for the organization.

Netanyahu said at the beginning of his weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem al-Quds on Sunday that the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) needed to pass away from the world.

"I completely agree with President Trump's sharp criticism of UNRWA. UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem, and perpetuates also the narrative of the so-called right of return, whose goal is the elimination of Israel. For these reasons, UNRWA should be shut down," the Israeli prime minister said.

"This is a body established separately 70 years ago, just for Palestinian refugees, while the UNHCR exists for all other refugees in the world," Netanyahu said, referring to the UN refugee agency that is also known as the UNHCR. "This has led to the situation where the great-grandchildren of refugees, who are not themselves refugees, are cared for by UNRWA, and in 70 more years there will be great-grandchildren of those great-grandchildren, and so this absurdity has to end."

UNRWA runs hundreds of schools for Palestinian refugees in the besieged Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

It also distributes aid and provides teacher training centers, health clinics and social services.

Washington has cut off $125 million in funding for UNRWA.

On January 2, Trump, in a number of messages posted on Twitter, threatened to cut Washington's aid to Palestinians, currently worth more than $300 million a year, alleging that the Palestinian Authority was no longer willing to engage in the so-called peace talks with Israel.

Tensions between the United States and Palestinians started escalating after Trump announced last month that Washington would recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as the "capital" of Israel and would relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied city.

On December 21, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that calls on the United States to withdraw its controversial decision regarding al-Quds.

Jerusalem al-Quds remains at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinians hoping that the eastern part of the city would eventually serve as the capital of a future independent Palestinian state.

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Gunmen kill 13 in Senegal's south

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 09:39AM

Gunmen have killed at least 13 people in an attack in Senegal's volatile south, military sources say.

Security officials in the West African country said the massacre took place outside the town of Ziguinchor in the Casamance region late Saturday.

The victims were reportedly collecting firewood in the region "when they were attacked by an armed band of 15 people," with hospital sources saying that some of the victims had been shot and others decapitated.

Army spokesman Colonel Abdoul Ndiaye confirmed the number of fatalities and said seven others had been wounded in the deadly attack, adding that the military had stepped up its presence in the area.

The Casamance region in southern Senegal has been ravaged by a long-running armed conflict between government forces and separatist groups.

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the killings, suspicion has fell on members of a separatist group known as the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), which has been seeking independence in Senegal's south for more than three decades.

The deadly assault came hours after the release of two prisoners belonging to the rebel outfit. It sparked fears of renewed unrest in the area as Casamance had been relatively calm since 2012 despite the presence of separatists.

The armed wing of the MFDC group agreed to a ceasefire in 2014, and the last major attack blamed on the group was in 2013, when rebels took hostage a dozen employees of a South African bomb disposal firm. The victims, all Senegalese citizens, were eventually released.

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Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Reveals Real Source of Yemeni Missiles

Sputnik News

22:09 07.01.2018(updated 22:25 07.01.2018)

Responding to claims that Yemeni militia missile attacks against the Saudi coalition "prove" that Iran has been supplying the Houthis with advanced weaponry, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, slammed the allegations, and explained why it was impossible for Iran to send weapons to the country.

Earlier this week, Saudi media alleged that the latest Houthi missile attack into southern Saudi Arabia proved that "the Iranian regime remains implicated in supporting the armed Houthis." The allegations follow on similar claims by US UN Ambassador Nikki Haley last month, who presented what she said was "undeniable" proof of Iran's involvement in the conflict in Yemen while standing in front of the remnants of what she said was an Iranian ballistic missile in a hanger outside Washington.

Responding to the collection of claims on Sunday, IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said that it was ridiculous to suggest that Iran could send any weapons, and particularly advanced ones such as missiles, to a country that's been subjected to a Saudi coalition blockade for nearly three years.

"How is it possible to send weapons, especially missiles, to a country which is fully under siege and there is even no possibility to send medical aid and foodstuff?" Jafari asked.

As for the real source of the weapons, the senior officer said that Yemen has a sufficient stockpile of its own missiles, which the Houthi rebels have successfully "overhauled."

"Missiles fired at Saudi Arabia belong to Yemen which have been overhauled and their range has been increased," Jafari said.

The IRGC chief's remarks expanded Iranian officials' earlier response to the allegations made by Nikki Haley in December. At that time, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami said

that "such unreasonable claims" made by the US envoy "prove the collapse of US policy in the region and the world" and were "a ridiculous and unworthy performance." Iran's own UN mission issued a statement saying that US claims against Tehran were an attempt to cover up the Saudi-led coalition's crimes in Yemen, to which Washington was complicit.

The Houthi militia has reportedly had a number of startling successes against Saudi coalition forces in the last week. On Sunday, the Houthis claimed that their air defenses shot down a coalition warplane. Saudi media blamed the crash on a technical malfunction, and said that the plane's pilots were safely evacuated. Earlier this week, the militia released a video showing Houthi navy divers seizing a US Navy underwater drone somewhere off Yemen's coast. On December 30, the Houthis reported downing a Saudi surveillance drone.

Yemen has been engulfed in a brutal civil and foreign-backed conflict since early 2015, when Houthi rebels ousted President Mansur Hadi's government from the country's capital. Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition has been conducting a military campaign in an effort to restore the Hadi government.

 Sputnik

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Social media users tweeted clips and photographs of the fire, which a US news channel said broke out early on Monday morning.

A minor fire broke out at Trump Tower in New York (Photo: ANI/Twitter)

By India Today Web Desk: A minor fire broke out on the roof of Trump Tower, the New York headquarters of US President Donald Trump's business empire, the news agency ANI reported citing US media.

New York's fire department said the fire broke out before 7 am (local time) and that it had been brought under control within around an hour., the US news channel CBS reported.

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CBS' report also said a firefighter and an engineer had been injured.

A small fire broke out on the roof of Trump Tower in New York City. No injuries reported. President Trump keeps a residence at Trump Tower. The president is currently in Washington, D.C. : US media pic.twitter.com/Sb5omAtiFh- ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

Trump was in Washington, where he has lived since he was elected president.

Social media users tweeted clips and photographs of the fire.

Trump Tower is on fire pic.twitter.com/qwUTAuBsEW- NYCBMD (@NycBmd) January 8, 2018

Trump tower on fire! pic.twitter.com/lUnpkc219J- Susan D. Ball (@SusanSball4) January 8, 2018

--- ENDS ---
Yemeni General People's Congress Picks New Party Leader After Saleh's Death

Sputnik News

18:34 07.01.2018(updated 18:35 07.01.2018)

SANAA (Sputnik) - The General People's Congress, the political party of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was killed in December 2017, chose his ally and party's deputy head Sadiq Amin Abu Ras as its new leader, a Sputnik correspondent reported Sunday.

The party's General Council elected Abu Ras head of the party unanimously. Voting on the party's secretary general will take place later, for the time being, several party leaders jointly have taken up this post.

Abu Ras held various positions in the government of Yemen during the reign of Saleh. In 2011, he was injured during the missile attack on the presidential residence in Sanaa during the so-called Arab Spring protests. The unrest eventually led to the resignation of Saleh and then-Vice President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2012.

Since 2015, Yemen has been torn by a conflict between the government, headed by Hadi and the Houthi movement backed by army units loyal to former President Saleh. The Saudi-led coalition of mostly Persian Gulf countries has been carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis at Hadi's request.

The civil conflict in Yemen between the Houthis and the authorities, led by President Abd Rabb Mansour Hadi, continues from 2014 onwards.

 Sputnik

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Taliban Looking for New Means to Support Insurgency in Southern Afghanistan

By Khalil Noorzai, Habibzada Mohammad January 07, 2018

Airstrikes on narcotics processing labs may be forcing the Taliban to seek new ways to finance their insurgency in southern Afghanistan.

Taliban officials say they have established a new customs house in the Delaram district of southern Nimruz province in the southwestern part of Afghanistan. The new effort to collect revenue follows joint Afghan-Coalition airstrikes on Taliban narcotics processing labs in the Helmand province last November. U.S-led coalition says such attacks will continue.

A Taliban statement says it will begin collecting a transit tax in the southern Nimruz and southwestern Farah provinces on Jan. 13.

Desperate to finance their insurgency, the Taliban has been using many illegal ways of making money, including kidnapping and extortion, and smuggling drugs, minerals and precious stones, according to Afghan officials.

Local security officials tell Voice of America that the militant group is using the money to purchase weapons and strengthen itself against Afghan security forces.

"They tax the transiting commercial vehicles and finance their insurgency in the southern Helmand and Farah provinces through this money," said Gul Bahar Mujahid, police chief of Farah province.

Officials in neighboring Nimruz province also confirmed to VOA that the Taliban is collecting money from transiting commercial vehicles.

"[The Taliban] has repeatedly engaged in extortion and looting in the route of the Delaram and Khashrwod districts, and we are using military force to prevent their vicious actions," said Khwaja Jelani Abu Bakr, police chief of Nimruz.

However, local travelers told VOA that the Taliban has established their own checkposts on the main highways connecting Farah and Nimruz to other neighboring provinces.

"There is a Taliban checkpost after every Afghan security checkpost, you can see their white-color flag raised over the checkposts. ... They tax commercial cars and trucks according to the sizes of the vehicle," said a local traveler identified only as "Ahmad."

A customs tariff by so-called Afghanistan Islamic Emirates shared on social mediashows a charge of 50,000 Afghanis ($717) to an oil tanker.The Taliban has also provided a local phone number the drivers can call in case of an emergency.

Local residents fear if the government fails to cut the Taliban's financial sources, the militants will expand their insurgency to relatively calmer provinces.

The Taliban in the Nimruz and Farah provinces has threatened to close the transit routes in those provinces if the customs revenue is denied.

Targeting Taliban's revenue streams

Afghan and U.S officials believe that close to 60 percent of the Taliban's financial revenue comes from narcotics smuggling.

Resolute Support Mission Commander Gen. John Nicholson said last November that a new massive campaign by joint Afghan-U.S forces will continuously target the Taliban's financial streams.

"We're hitting the Taliban where it hurts, which is their finances," said Nicholson.

The RSMC commander added that the Taliban has between 400 to 500 drug processing labs in Afghanistan, which he promised to hit.

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Trump Says No to Immigration Protection Bill Unless it Includes Border Wall Funds

By VOA News January 07, 2018

U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated Saturday that he would not support legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation unless it included funding for a border wall and eliminates the visa lottery program and extended-family-based immigration.

"We all want DACA to happen, but we also want great security for our country," Trump said of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which expires in March.

The administration has a 10-year, $18 billion plan to build a wall, something deeply unpopular with Democrats, especially when tied to DACA.

"We hope that we're going to be able to work out an arrangement with the Democrats," he said said Saturday. "It's something, certainly, that I'd like to see happen."

Trump spoke as he met with Republican lawmakers and members of his Cabinet to establish the administration's 2018 legislative priorities and to devise a strategy for midterm elections in November. They were gathered at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

"We went into DACA and how we're going to do it, and we hope that we're going be able to work out an arrangement with the Democrats. I think it's something that they'd like to see happen," Trump told reporters.

In September, Trump rescinded DACA, which was instituted by former President Barack Obama. It protected nearly 800,000 immigrants from deportation, allowing them to legally live and work in the United States.

Trump gave Congress until March 5 to agree on legislation that would allow equivalent protections to those offered under DACA, provided the measure included funding for a wall along the border with Mexico, ended the visa lottery program, and ended extended-family-based immigration, in which immigrants from a particular area follow others from that area to specific U.S. cities or neighborhoods.

Trump also said the drug crisis in America had reached unprecedented levels and vowed his administration would make a "big dent" in resolving the problem this year.

"One of the things we are discussing very powerfully is drugs pouring into this country and how to stop it, because it's at a point over the last number of years ... it's never been like this," he said.

Trump said the drug problem is less difficult to deal with in countries that "take it very seriously, and they're very harsh"  an apparent signal the U.S. is preparing to take a much tougher approach.

"We are going to be working on that very, very hard this year, and I think we're going make a big dent into the drug problem," he said.

Trump said the Republican leaders also discussed the nation's infrastructure needs and a variety of military issues.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was among those in attendance, did not elaborate on priorities for the the new year. But he told reporters 2017 would be "a tough year to top" and added, "If you are like those of us here at the podium, you'd like to see America be a right-of-center country."

House Speaker Paul Ryan said rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and bolstering the military would be priorities this year, as well as ensuring "that everyone enjoys the economic growth that's to come."

Republican legislative priorities also will include the budget, welfare reform and the midterm elections.

Trump appeared Saturday to back away from efforts to overhaul the welfare system. McConnell had argued that welfare reform was a no-go given Democratic opposition. And Trump appeared to have come around.

Additionally, Republicans have been eager to cut benefit programs like welfare and food stamps.

Congress must work quickly, however, to approve a funding plan by January 19 to avoid a government shutdown.

Republican priorities could be stopped in their tracks if the Democrats are successful during the midterm elections.

Trump has been facing increasing criticism about his presidential style. He begins the new year with the release of a bombshell book, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, that describes the president as being like a child and in need of psychiatric help.

It remains to be seen how the book and other accounts of Trump's mental status will affect the upcoming elections.

All 435 members of the House and one-third of the 100 members of the Senate will be up for re-election in 2018.

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China set to build navy base near Pakistan's Gwadar Port

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 12:09AM

China is set to build a naval base in Pakistan as tensions are rising between Islamabad and Washington over the US cutting aid funds.

According to the South China Morning Post on Saturday, the naval base will be built in Gwadar Port, in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, as military vessels require "specific services" which cannot be provided by the present commercial facility.

"Gwadar port can't provide specific services for warships Public order there is in a mess. It is not a good place to carry out military logistical support," said one of the sources.

A China-based military analyst, Zhou Chenming, told the newspaper that China needs to build a base in Gwadar for its warships as the port has turned into a civilian facility.

On Friday, Pakistan denounced as "counterproductive" Washington's decision to suspend millions of dollars in security aid to Islamabad.

The statement came a day after US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said at least $900 million in security assistance to Pakistan would be suspended until the government in Islamabad addressed the issue of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network militant groups. She declined to put a figure on exactly how much aid would be suspended.

Last week, US President Donald Trump threatened to cut off foreign aid to Pakistan, accusing Islamabad of harboring violent extremists.

The United States has long accused Islamabad of allowing the Haqqani network, which is an affiliate of the Taliban militant group, to operate relatively freely in Pakistan's porous border regions to carry out operations in Afghanistan. Islamabad denies the accusation, saying Washington is overlooking Pakistan's sacrifices in its fight against terrorism.

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Trump Says Willing To Talk To North Korean Leader, With Conditions

January 07, 2018

U.S. President Donald Trump has said he would be willing to speak by phone with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a step back from his often-bellicose comments about communist state

"I always believe in talking," Trump told reporters at January 6 at the Camp David presidential retreat when asked if he would be willing to speak to the man he has described as "Little Rocket Man."

"Absolutely I would do that -- I wouldn't have a problem with that at all," he said, adding that there would be some unspecified conditions before any talks could take place.

The comments come after North and South Korea have agreed to hold their first official talks in more than two years, mainly to discuss Pyongyang's possible participation in the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea on February 9-25.

A North Korean Olympic official on January 6 said his country's participation was "likely."

Trump said: "I would love to see them take it beyond the Olympics. And at the appropriate time, we'll get involved."

The United States and North Korea have been in a war of words that has intensified each time Pyongyang has tested its ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in violation of United Nations resolutions.

Based on reporting by AFP and AP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/north-korea- trump-willing-talk-jong-un/28961324.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.

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'No Problem With That': Trump Ready for Talks With DPRK - Reports

Sputnik News

03:36 07.01.2018(updated 03:48 07.01.2018)

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - On Saturday, US President Donald Trump Trump was asked during a press conference if he was willing to engage in a telephone conversation with the North Korean leader. Trump has said that he was ready for negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, adding that, nevertheless, certain preconditions for such talks exist.

"I always believe in talking. Our stance, you know what it is. We're very firm But I would be  absolutely, I would do that. No problem with that, at all," Trump told reporters as quoted by the CBS News.

At the same time, Trump noted that the United States was not ready to engage in talks without any prerequisites.

In December, US State Secretary Rex Tillerson stated that Washington was willing to engage in negotiations with North Korea, provided Pyongyang halted its nuclear and missile tests.

The tensions on the Korean peninsula have been high recently due to the repeated nuclear and weapons tests carried out by Pyongyang in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions. The dialogue between South Korea and the North has resumed this week on the issue of the North Korean athletes' participation in the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in South Korea.

 Sputnik

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US Ambassador Haley: N. Korea's Nuclear Threat Remains 'Very Dangerous'

By Ken Bredemeier January 07, 2018

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, says it is "good for the United States" that North and South Korea are set to engage in high-level talks, but warned Pyongyang's nuclear weapons ambitions still pose a serious threat to the world.

"This is a very dangerous situation," Haley told ABC News on Sunday.

She said the United States is "not letting up on the pressure" to end North Korea's nuclear weapons development and warned, "We can destroy them, too." She said that if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, "It is not going to be us [The United States] that is destroyed."

She defended U.S. President Donald Trump's response to Kim after the North Korean leader said in a New Year's address that he had a "nuclear button" on his desk and that "the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike.''

Trump, in a Twitter comment, retorted, "Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!''

Numerous U.S. political figures say Trump's response unnecessarily inflamed tensions with North Korea, but Haley said, "You always have to keep Kim on his toes."

She said before the United States would engage in serious talks with North Korea, Pyongyang would have to end its missile tests "for a significant amount of time" and be willing to discuss ending its use of nuclear weapons.

High-level officials from the two Koreas are slated to talk Tuesday about North Korea's possible participation in the Winter Olympics next month in South Korea, but it's uncertain whether longer-term relations between the two countries will be discussed.

Trump said Saturday he hopes the newly arranged discussions between North and South Korea will go "beyond the Olympics" and promised the United States will take part "at the appropriate time."

Trump gave an unusual news conference from the Camp David presidential retreat, where he met with Republican lawmakers. Of the upcoming talks between Seoul and Pyongyang, Trump said, "I hope it works out."

"I would love to see them take it beyond the Olympics," he said.

Trump said "if something can happen and something can come out of those talks that would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world.''

The president also said he had spoken with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, who "thanks me very much for my tough stance.''

"You have to have a certain attitude and you have to be prepared to do certain things and I'm totally prepared to do that,'' Trump said, suggesting that his tough language has helped persuade the North to sit down with the South.

Tuesday's talks are scheduled to take place at the truce village of Panmunjom in the heavily fortified demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas.

On Sunday, North Korea announced a list of five officials who will represent Pyongyang, a day after South Korea confirmed its representatives.

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Trump on Korea Talks: "If Something can Come out" of Those "That Would be a Great Thing for all of Humanity"

By VOA News January 07, 2018

U.S. President Donald Trump says he hopes the newly arranged talks between North and South Korea will go "beyond the Olympics" and promised the United States will take part "at the appropriate time."

Trump gave an unusual news conference Saturday from the Camp David presidential retreat, where he met with Republican lawmakers. Of the upcoming talks between Seoul and Pyongyang, Trump said "I hope it works out."

"I would love to see them take it beyond the Olympics," he said. "And at the appropriate time," he added, "we'll get involved."

On Sunday, the White House released a statement saying the president spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday and discussed the latest "developments on the Korean Peninsula, and to underscore American, South Korean, and international resolve to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea."

Assessing the upcoming discussions between the two Koreas on January 9, Trump said "if something can happen and something can come out of those talks that would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world.''

The president also said that he had spoken with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, who "thanks me very much for my tough stance.''

"You have to have a certain attitude and you have to be prepared to do certain things and I'm totally prepared to do that,'' Trump said, suggesting that his tough language has helped persuade the North to sit down with the South.

Recently, Trump and Kim have traded barbs about their nuclear arsenals.

In a New Year's address, Kim said he had a "nuclear button'' on his office desk and threatened that "the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike.''

Soon after, Trump tweeted: "Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!''

North Korea on Friday accepted South Korea's offer of high-level talks on the upcoming Olympic Games to take place Tuesday (January 9) at the truce village of Panmunjom in the heavily fortified demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas.

On Sunday, North Korea announced a list of five officials who will represent Pyongyang, a day after South Korea confirmed its representatives.

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IRGC hails foiling enemy plots in Iran unrests

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, Jan 7, IRNA -- Iran's Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) in a statement on Sunday praised the 'epic made by the Iranian people' to foil the new plot by the country's enemies during the recent unrests.

The national epic made by the Iranian people just uncovered the new plot developed by the United States, Britain, the Zionist regime, Saudi rulers, Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorist organization and monarchists,' the IRGC statement said.

'The big epic once again revealed eternal grandeur of the Iranian people and pointed to the high aspiration of a nation overpowering its enemies and preventing them from achieving their satanic ends,' it said.

Tehran and some Iranian major cities in recent days witnessed people taken to streets to protest bad economic conditions.

The demonstrations, originally staged for economic reasons, soon turned violent with innocent people even killed in some cities during the riots.

2044**2050

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Foreign hands obvious in recent Iran unrests: Majlis briefing

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, Jan 7, IRNA -- Foreign elements have played a role in fanning the fire of recent riots in Iran, it was revealed in a briefing session in Iran's Majlis (parliament) on Sunday.

'Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli briefed the lawmakers on the recent unrests in the country while Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi gave reports on the roots and causes behind them,' Jalal Mirzaei, a member of Iranian parliament told the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

'It was emphasized that foreign elements and in particular the United States played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrests,' Mirzaei said.

Another participant in today's briefing session was Iran Police Chief Brigadier General Hossein Ashtari who also briefed the lawmakers on the conditions of those detained during the unrests, as well as their ages, and education.

2044**1771

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By PTI: Mumbai, Jan 8 (PTI) Two persons were today arrested in connection with the murder of former Shiv Sena corporator Ashok Sawant in suburban Kandivali.

Sawant was stabbed to death yesterday night near his residence in Thakur Complex while he was returning home with a friend.

Narrating the sequence of events, police said that Sawant was riding home with a friend, Vinod Sonwane, when an autorickshaw came along and one of its occupants kicked the motorcycle they were on.

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Both Sawant and Sonwane fell and while the latter ran after the person who kicked their two-wheeler, a man got out of the autorickshaw and stabbed Sawant several times, police said.

Police added that by the time Sonwane returned, Sawant had been stabbed over 20 times and he succumbed to his injuries in a local hospital around midnight.

Police, on scouring the CCTV footage of the area, managed to zero in on the autorickshaws driver, Ganesh Jogdand, who then was arrested from Dahisar.

Police said Jogdands interrogation led them to his accomplice Sohail Dodhia who police said was not at the scene of crime but had given the contract of killing Sawant to Jogdand on behest of the main accused.

A case had been registered against the two arrested persons and a hunt was on for the main accused, an official said.

The motive for the crime was being investigated with police adding that Sawant had received a threat call from the main accused some time ago.

Sawant, a two time corporator from Kandivali, had entered the cable television business a couple of years ago, police added.

His son Abhijit said his family did not know about any business dispute involving Sawant adding that they found out today that Sawant had filed a police complaint a year ago about a threat call he had received. PTI AVI BNM

--- ENDS ---
Iran Navy's 49th strike group berths in Bandar Abbas

ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency

Sun / 7 January 2018 / 16:50

Tehran (ISNA)  The 49th strike group of Iranian Navy has returned to Iran on Sunday after 67 days of sailing in international waters.

The 49th strike group of Iranian Navy has returned home after travelling 7820 nautical miles and berthed on Sunday in one of the Iranian Navy's regions in the port city of Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf.

The commander of the 49th strike group of Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral Reza Qorbani said, "This fleet consists of the Sabalan destroyer and military supporting ship Bandar Abbas with 284 crew. During the period, this fleet sailed in the North of Indian Ocean and Bay of Bangal".

"During the period, the fleet participated in a maritime rescue drill in Bangladesh for three days," he added.

The 49th strike group also escorted 41 Iranian ships during its mission in international waters.

End Item

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IRGC Says Iran's Antigovernment Protests 'Defeated'

RFE/RL's Radio Farda January 07, 2018

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) says antigovernment protests that it blames on foreign instigators have been "defeated."

In a January 7 statement, the IRGC said "Iran's revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces, police and the Intelligence Ministry have broken down the chain [of unrest] created...by the United States, Britain," Israel, Saudi Arabia, militants, and monarchists.

The IRGC statement was issued after Iran's parliament held a closed-door session on January 7 to discuss the antigovernment protests that have rocked the country for more than a week.

The parliamentary session was called by a reformist faction of lawmakers who questioned security and intelligence officials about the causes of the unrest -- which Iran's government has also blamed on foreigners.

Internet Controls

The parliament's ICANA website reported that lawmakers questioned Interior Minister Abdolrahmani Rahmani Fazli, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi, and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani.

It said some lawmakers voiced concerns about Internet controls put in place in the midst of the unrest, including a ban on Iran's most popular messaging app, Telegram, which officials said had been used to incite violence.

The government has reportedly lifted restrictions that it imposed on the Instagram social media tool.

But access to Telegram remained blocked on January 7, despite claims from Iran's FARS news agency that the restrictions on Telegram had been "fully lifted."

"The parliament is not in favour of keeping Telegram filtering in place, but it must pledge that it will not be used as a tool by the enemies of the Iranian people," Behrouz Nemati, spokesman for the parliament's presiding board, said.

Almost a third of Iran's 80 million people use the Telegram app as their main source of news and a way of bypassing the highly restrictive state media.

The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protesters, but deny allegations of fomenting them.

Meanwhile, state media on January 7 broadcast live footage of a fifth day of pro-government rallies organized by authorities.

State media has stopped reporting on antigovernment protests.

Credible Reports Of Further Protests

But RFE/RL has received credible reports that protests continued in at least nine cities across Iran on January 6, including Tehran, where social media footage showed gatherings despite a large police presence.

RFE/RL's Radio Farda also obtained credible reports on January 6 from sources in Iran about overnight demonstrations against Iran's clerical rulers in Takestan, Arak, Masjed Soleiman, Mashhad, Qazvin, Rasht, Lahijan, and Khomein, the birthplace of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic.

More than a week of unrest has seen 22 people die and more than 1,700 arrested.

Various Iranian officials said on January 6 that hundreds of detainees had been released, some after agreeing to sign a pledge not to "re-offend," the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.

They include around 90 university students, lawmaker Mahmud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by ISNA.

Later on January 7, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters had been released on bail during the previous 48 hours.

Dolatabadi also said that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots.

In a rebuke to Iranian government claims that the widespread demonstrations had been organized and/or instigated by foreigners, a group of 16 prominent reformist figures living in Iran issued a statement rejecting that claim.

In the January 6 statement, the signatories said, "Despite the fact the enemies of the country always try to take advantage of such events, we should know that any kind of foreign interference would not be possible without the existence of internal conditions."

They added that in addition to the government claim of foreign involvement being "an insult" to Iranians, it leads to "negligence toward the real causes of the protests."

The reformist letter also went on to condemn "American interference," especially of President Donald Trump, in the "internal affairs of Iran."

Most of the signatories to the statement are former officials or parliamentarians from the time of President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005).

Iranian emigres also staged numerous antigovernment demonstrations in front of Iranian embassies around the world during the weekend -- including The Hague, Berlin and Hamburg, Stockholm, London, and Paris.

With reporting by RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari, Reuters, AFP, AP, dpa, and Press TV

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-antigovernment- protests-defeated-irgc/28961235.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.

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We Broke Down Unrest 'Created by US, UK, Israel' - Iran's Revolutionary Guard

Sputnik News

11:33 07.01.2018(updated 15:01 07.01.2018)

Iran's authorities announced that the foreign-fueled unrest in the country has been thwarted, adding that the alleged orchestrators of the protests were detained.

The Iranian authorities have detained the leading protest organizers, who are being held in different cities throughout the country. Authorities first started detaining protesters in late December, and most of the participants have already been released, Press TV reported, citing a police spokesman.

"The people and protesters who had rightful demands were separated in the minimum time possible from the organizers and those directing [the riots] and the violators were identified and arrested," said police spokesman Said Montazer-al-Mahdi. According to him, the judicial authorities released most of the ordinary participants, leaving only "the main culprits" and "saboteurs" in custody.

IRGC said in a statement on the Guard's Sepahnews website "revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces, police and the Intelligence Ministry have broken down the chain [of unrest] created by the United States, Britain, the Zionist regime [Israel], Saudi Arabia, the hypocrites and monarchists."

On December 28, anti-government protests against rising food prices began in Iran. During the protests, more than 45 people were killed.

According to the newspaper Al-Akhbar, Iran's Attorney General Mohammad Jaafar Montazery, speaking in Kum, has accused the US of setting up two centers for the promotion of rioting in Iran  in Erbil, Iraq and in Herat, Afghanistan.

Iranian authorities claim that more than 450 people have been arrested for participating in the riots, and that all of them will be brought to justice in the near future.

Protests erupted in more than 80 cities and rural towns.

Speaking at a rally in Tehran, Akhmed Khatami, a member of the government's Council of Experts, said that "the Iranian people will muffle the voices of foreign agents speaking on behalf of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

The European authorities expressed their concern over the demonstrations, called for the civil rights of the protesters to be observed and for demonstrators and police alike to refrain from violence. The US called the riots in Iran a popular uprising and promised to support the participants in the mass demonstrations.

Pro-Government Rallies

Thousands of government supporters staged demonstrations for a fifth day in a backlash against anti-government protests. According to state television, hundreds of demonstrators gathered despite heavy snowfall.

"Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to Britain! Death to seditionists!" the demonstrators chanted.

 Sputnik

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Iran's Revolutionary Guard: People, Security Forces 'Have Broken the Chain' of Unrest

By VOA News January 07, 2018

Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) said in a statement Sunday that the Iranian people and the country's security forces played a role in ending the recent wave of unrest that the IRGC says was fomented by foreign enemies.

The group said in a statement, "The new epic of the proud, conscious, pious, and revolutionary Iranian people, along with the distinguished presence of tens of thousands of loyal Basij volunteer forces in calming the riots and the sincere endeavors of the brethren of the Law Enforcement Force and the Intelligence Ministry have broken the chain woven by America, Britain, the Zionist regime [Israel], the Saudi royal family, the Hypocrites [the banned Mojahedin-e-Karl Organization] and monarchists and eliminated the witchery of a new sedition."

Iran's parliament holds a special session Sunday to discuss the anti-government protests that began December 28 and continued into the following week.

Iran's ISNA news agency reported that Iran's interior minister, head of intelligence and security council chief are all expected to attend. On the agenda are discussions of the root cause of the protests, as well as legal help for protesters jailed during the demonstrations.

The session was called by a group of reformist lawmakers, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In a letter, those lawmakers called for legal assistance for the detained and condemned any outside "interference" in the protests, calling out the United States in particular.

U.S. President Donald Trump is set to soon decide whether to continue waiving sanctions on Iran that were suspended under the 2015 international deal on Iran's nuclear program. The waiver must be renewed every 120 days, according to U.S. law. Trump could decide not to renew, putting U.S. trade sanctions back into effect.

In Europe, supporters of the anti-government protesters in Iran have been gathering to show their support in The Hague, Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm, London and Paris.

At least 22 people have died in the protests and more than 1,000 have been arrested. Hard-line cleric Ahmad Khatami told worshipers in a sermon Friday that those arrested should be treated as enemies of Islam, particularly those who have burned the flag. "There should be no mercy for them," he said.

Government official Mansour Gholami has told reporters that about a quarter of those arrested have been released, but he did not provide exact numbers.

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday at the urging of the United States.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called the protests "a powerful exhibition of brave people who have become so fed up with their oppressive government that they are willing to risk their lives in protests." She also addressed the Iranian government, saying, "the U.S. is watching what you do."

In response, the Iranian ambassador, Gholamali Khoshroo, said it is a "discredit" to the Security Council to hold such a meeting on Iran in the face of the conflicts taking place in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. He, along with a number of Security Council members, said the United States is meddling in Iran's domestic affairs.

After the meeting, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, "The UNSC rebuffed the U.S.'snaked attempt to hijack its mandate ... Another FP [foreign policy] blunder for the Trump administration."

Still, U.S. intelligence officials warn Tehran is at a crossroads, noting the protests are the biggest outpouring of public discontent since Iranians took to the streets in 2009 following a disputed presidential election.

"The protests are symptomatic of long-standing grievances that have been left to fester," an intelligence official told VOA on condition of anonymity. "Will it address the legitimate concerns of its people or suppress the voices of its own populace?"

"What is clear is that these concerns are not going away," the official said.

Critics of Iranian President Nassan Rouhani say he has abandoned the poor, pointing to rising prices for key commodities like fuel, bread and eggs.

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Six PKK militants killed as Turkish jets pound northern Iraq

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 02:48PM

Six members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have been killed when Turkish military aircraft carried out a string of aerial attacks against the militants' positions in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

The Turkish General Staff announced in a statement on Sunday that the terrorists were killed when Turkish fighter jets struck their positions in Kani Rash town of the region.

The slain terrorists were reportedly planning an attack on Turkish military posts and bases.

The Turkish jets safely returned to their bases following the operations, the military statement added.

The Turkish military stated on December 27, 2017 that nine PKK terrorists were killed when Turkish warplanes bombarded their hideouts in the Hakurk, Zap, Avasin Basyan, and Metina districts in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

The militants were purportedly planning attacks on Turkish military bases along the border.

The statement further noted that considerable amounts of munitions belonging to PKK terrorists were destroyed in the aerial attacks.

Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the PKK in its southern border region. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq.

The operations began in the wake of a deadly bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc in July 2015. More than 30 people died in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.

After the bombing, the PKK militants, who accused the government in Ankara of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of attacks against Turkish police and security forces, prompting the Turkish military operations.

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Car bombing leaves over 20 people dead in Syria's Idlib

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 06:52PM

Nearly two dozen people have been killed and scores of others injured when a powerful explosion ripped through a residential area in Syria's northwestern city of Idlib, where Syrian army forces, supported by allied fighters from popular defense groups, continue to gain ground against foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorists.

Lebanon-based Arabic-language al-Mayadeen news network, citing local source, reported that an explosive-laden car went off in front of al-Miri supermarket in the 30th Street of the city, located roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) north of the capital, Damascus, on Sunday evening, leaving more than 20 people dead and many others injured.

The sources added that the explosion targeted a building housing militants from the Caucasian Front, blaming members of the Takfiri Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist alliance for the act of terror.

The Caucasian Front militants are heavily present in Idlib. Most of them live with their facilities in buildings on the 30th Street.

The development came on the same day that Syrian government troops and their allies could liberate the town of Sinjar in the Maarrat al-Nu'man district of Idlib province after HTS terrorists were defeated.

The source added that Syrian army soldiers and their allies could also retake the towns of Mutawasita, Khiara, and Kafrya al-Ma'ara.

Sinjar would serve as a key launching pad for further military operations in Idlib province.

The town is only 14 kilometers from the key Abu al-Duhur Air Base, whose recapture would enable the Syrian army to regain the upper hand in carrying out airstrikes against militant positions in Idlib.

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Jordan agrees to aid drop for stranded Syrians

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 06:10PM

Jordan has agreed to a request by the United Nations to deliver humanitarian aid to thousands of displaced Syrians stranded in harsh conditions near a border crossing between Jordan and Syria.

Jordanian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Kayed said in the capital Amman on Sunday that the aid would be lifted across the border using special equipment.

It will be a "one-off" operation to send "humanitarian aid across the Rukban border crossing" toward a desert area where the Syrians are stuck, Kayed said.

The spokesman did not elaborate on the kind of humanitarian aid that would be sent to the Syrians nor did he say how many Syrians were stranded in the desert.

In October last year, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi insisted that aid to those stranded near Rukban should come from Syria itself.

Jordan alleges that Rukban border camp has been infiltrated by the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group and that cross-border traffic endangers the kingdom.

Daesh killed seven Jordanian troops in a bombing near Rukban in 2016, forcing the closure of the common border and triggering the Jordanian army to declare the country's desert areas, which border Syria and Iraq, "closed military zones."

The closure ended the UN's regular aid shipments from Jordan to displaced Syrians struggling for survival in a remote stretch of the desert. Conditions are worsening for them as winter grips the region.

According to the UN's estimates, between 45,000 and 50,000 Syrians have been stuck for months on the Syrian side of the frontier near Rukban.

Aid agencies have been struggling to reach those in need in the area since the onset of the emergency situation along the border.

The Syrian army has managed to advance to the border with Jordan and liberate a 30-kilometer-long stretch of land along the frontier. The liberation has blocked the loopholes across the border, which would previously allow arms transfers from Jordan to militants based in Syria.

The UN refugee agency says it has registered more than 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan since March 2011, when crisis erupted in Syria.

Jordan shares a desert border of more than 370 kilometers with Syria and says it is hosting 1.3 million Syrian refugees.

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Syrian army, allies recapture key militant stronghold in Idlib

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 7, 2018 01:05PM

Syrian army forces, supported by allied fighters from popular defense groups, have managed to regain control over a key stronghold of foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorists in the country's northwestern province of Idlib as they are engaged in a major military offensive to break the siege on a strategic air base in the province.

A military source, requesting anonymity, said government troops and their allies could liberate the town of Sinjar in the Maarrat al-Nu'man district of the province, located roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) north of the capital, Damascus, on Sunday after members of the Takfiri Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist alliance were defeated.

The source added that Syrian army soldiers and their allies could also retake the towns of Mutawasita, Khiara, and Kafrya al-Ma'ara.

Sinjar would serve as a key launching pad for further military operations in Idlib province.

The town is only 14 kilometers from the key Abu al-Duhur Air Base, whose recapture would enable the Syrian army to regain the upper hand in carrying out airstrikes against militant positions in Idlib.

The developments came only a day after the media bureau of Syria's Operations Command announced in a statement that government forces and their allies had managed to establish complete control over the villages of Khwein al-Kabir, Rasm Sham al-Hawa, Niha and Qaliat al-Tawibiyah in addition to Zarzur town following fierce clashes with terrorists from the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham Takfiri group, formerly known as al-Nusra Front, in the southern part of Idlib province.

Meanwhile, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Sunday the army had taken more than 95 villages in Idlib and Hama provinces since October 22.

"Battles have shifted now to the northwest of Sinjar after the Syrian army and its allies controlled the town," the Britain-based monitor said.

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Car Bombs Rip Through Syria's Idlib, Killing Dozens

Sputnik News

22:38 07.01.2018(updated 23:32 07.01.2018)

Dozens of people were killed and injured after terrorists had set off two car bombs in the Syrian province.

Two car bomb explosions have taken lives of dozens in Syrian Idlib province, local media reported. First car bomb, fitted with several tonnes of explosives, exploded near a supermarket in the city of Idlib and killed and injured more than 30 people, according to Al Mayadeen TV channel.

Another bomb has been set off by the terrorists near the headquarters of one of the local fringe groups, killing at least 20 people.

Syrian Idlib province, which is bordering Turkey, is part of the de-escalation agreements brokered by Moscow, Ankara and Tehran. Earlier, according to the deal covering the Idlib province, Turkey deployed observation points in the area.

The province is mainly controlled by the Free Syrian Army, other opposition forces and terrorist groups, such as Jabhat Fatah al Sham terrorist group (formerly known as Nusra Front) which are fighting against government troops. Clashes between the militants' amid successful offensives of the Syrian army sometimes result in civilians casualties. The province is covered by one of the four de-escalation zones, established during the September round of Astana talks.

 Sputnik

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Syrian Army Liberates Strategic Settlement of Sinjar in Idlib Province - Source

Sputnik News

15:37 07.01.2018(updated 15:40 07.01.2018)

BEIRUT (Sputnik) - Syrian troops supported by allied forces liberated the settlement of Sinjar southeast of the Idlib province from the militants of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly known as Nusra Front) terrorist group, outlawed in Russia, a well-informed source told Sputnik on Sunday.

"The Syrian army has taken control of the strategically important settlement of Sinjar," the source said.

According to the source, in addition to Sinjar, terrorists were knocked out of four villages located nearby.

The settlement of Sinjar is considered strategically important since there was one of the important strongholds of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and it is located only 15 kilometers (9 miles) from Abu al-Duhur Military Airbase.

The Syrian civil war has been since 2011, with government forces fighting against both Syrian opposition groups, who strive to overthrow President Bashar Assad, and numerous extremist and terrorist groups such as Daesh and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.

 Sputnik

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jan 7 (PTI) Cab-hailing major Uber is re- launching its AUTO service in India, almost two years after shutting down the offering in March 2016, starting with Bengaluru and Pune.

The US-based company, which is locked in an intense battle with homegrown player Ola, will allow customers to book autorickshaw rides through AUTO option on its platform later this month in these two cities.

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Ola, which also allows booking autorickshaw rides under Auto service, had launched the offering in Bengaluru and Chennai in 2014. Ola Auto is currently operational across 73 cities with over 1.2 lakh autos associated with the company.

An Uber spokesperson said the company had "paused" the service "to see how that side of Indias transport ecosystem evolves".

"Auto rickshaws are ubiquitous to mobility options in many Indian cities. To expand transportation choices for our riders, we are excited to launch AUTO in Bengaluru and Pune," the spokesperson told PTI.

In its previous attempt, Ubers AUTO offering was available in New Delhi, Coimbatore, Indore and Bhubaneshwar.

"We are re-launching AUTO starting with two cities. Gradual geographical expansion like this is common to how we operate in cities around the world and it is something that we are looking at very closely," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that AUTO will include all safety features available for Uber cab rides and riders will be able to pay via cash, Paytm and debit/credit cards.

Uber will only on-board licensed, existing auto-drivers who have been screened and accredited by the authorities and every driver partner on AUTO will be required to submit valid government documents before they are given access to the Uber app, the spokesperson said.

For Uber, India is one of its largest markets where it has seen strong growth.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which is also an investor in Ola, has recently committed investing over USD 1 billion in the US-based ride-sharing platform. PTI SR SBT

--- ENDS ---
Taiwan calls for talks with China on aviation issues

ROC Central News Agency

2018/01/07 18:43:02

Taipei, Jan. 7 (CNA) Taiwan is calling for discussions with China on issues related to aviation management in the Taiwan Strait, in the wake of China's recent unilateral activation of four aviation routes close to the median line of the strait.

Last week, China reneged on a 2015 cross-strait agreement with Taiwan and unilaterally activated four new aviation routes in the Taiwan Strait -- a northbound path on the M503 route and three east-west extension routes called W121, W122 and W123.

The M503 at its nearest point is only 7.8 km from the centerline of the strait and close to the Taipei Flight Information Region, while the W122 and W123 are close to Taiwan's offshore islands of Matsu and Kinmen, respectively.

China's move to open the four flight routes without prior negotiation with Taiwan has sparked concerns in Taipei about potential intrusions into domestic flight routes to and from Matsu and Kinmen.

Detailing such concerns, Lin Kuo-shian (), director-general of Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA), said Xiang'an International Airport, under construction on China's southeast coast, is just 10 kilometers from Kinmen.

The Xiang'an airport in Xiamen, which is being built to ease congestion at Gaoqi International Airport in the same city in Fujian Province, is scheduled to be completed in 2020, he noted.

If the new airport begins operations without prior cross-strait negotiations, it will have a huge impact of air traffic in and out of Shang Yi Airport in Kinmen, as it is even closer than the Gaoqi airport, Lin said.

Expressing similar views, another CAA official Shiue Shao-yi () said it is essential for civil aviation authorities in China and Taiwan hold discussions on flight route controls and other relevant issues before the Xiang'an airport opens.

He declined, however, to comment on aviation experts'speculations that when the new airport opens, a new flight route will be launched from Xiang'an to link with Taiwan's domestic routes to and from Kinmen.

It is not yet clear what routes Xiang'an airport will use, Shiue said.

(By Wang Shu-fen and Evelyn Kao)

Enditem/pc

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Bannon said he still supported Trump, whose public break with his one-time strategist and use of a derisive nickname for him, "Sloppy Steve," reflected the depth of the president's anger.

By Reuters: President Donald Trump's former strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday backed away from derogatory comments ascribed to him about Trump's son in a new book that sparked White House outrage and could threaten Bannon's influence as a would-be conservative power broker.

Bannon, ousted from the White House in August, was quoted in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," by journalist Michael Wolff, as saying a June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians attended by Donald Trump Jr. and his father's top campaign officials was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."

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The president responded by saying Bannon had lost his mind, and the White House suggested the hard-right news site Breitbart News part ways with Bannon as its executive chairman.

Bannon said in a statement released on Sunday that his comments were directed at Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, and not aimed at the president's son.

"Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around," the statement said.

"I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency," Bannon said.

Uproar over the book has dominated news coverage for days, putting the White House on the defensive just as Trump and his advisers sought to plan and bring attention to their policy goals for 2018 ahead of a November congressional election.

The former strategist's statement could be aimed at trying to secure his job at Breitbart, a platform he has used while backing anti-establishment candidates for election to Congress.

The book portrays Trump, a former reality TV star who took office nearly a year ago, as mentally unstable and unfit for the demands of his job.

'SLOPPY STEVE'

Trump said last week that Bannon had nothing to do with him or his presidency. That scathing response left Bannon alienated among the more conservative factions of Trump's Republican Party.

Bannon said he still supported Trump, whose public break with his one-time strategist and use of a derisive nickname for him, "Sloppy Steve," reflected the depth of the president's anger.

"My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda," Bannon said in Sunday's statement. "I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism, and I remain ready to stand in the breech for this president's efforts to make America great again."

In the book, Bannon voiced astonishment over the meeting that Trump Jr., the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Manafort attended at Trump Tower in New York with a Russian lawyer, who was said to be offering damaging information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate.

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Bannon was quoted as saying he was certain Trump Jr. would have taken the Russians who took part in the meeting to meet his father.

Bannon did not specifically dispute the quotes, but said his criticism was meant for Manafort, who is being prosecuted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of a probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends," Bannon said.

On CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday a senior aide to Trump, Stephen Miller, assailed the book, released on Friday, and launched an attack on news coverage before his TV host, Jake Tapper, urged him to calm down and cut off their interview.

Miller, a senior policy adviser, said the book was a "grotesque work of fiction" and said it was "tragic and unfortunate" that Bannon made the comments in the book that he did.

ALSO WATCH | Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, removed from role

--- ENDS ---
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Late last week, a leaked stable Oreo ROM for Samsung Galaxy S8 revealed Dolby Atmos support. However, the South Korean company clarified that there are no plans to add such a feature. The comment was made by a member of Samsung's UK Beta Team.

Last week's leak even included a screenshots of the feature, so Samsung denial comes as a bit of surprise. It's possible the feature will eventually arrive, just that the first stable Oreo build won't have it.

Thanks for the tip, Pranjal!!!
Trump administration believes that policies followed by successive US administrations vis-a-vis Pakistan post 9/11 have not worked.

By PTI: The Trump administration believes that it is time to try something new other than maintaining strategic patience and offering inducements to Pakistan, PTI reported.

A senior Trump official who spoke to a group of reporters on condition of anonymity said that the policies, such as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill which gave billions of dollars to Pakistan, followed by the successive US administrations vis-a-vis Pakistan post 9/11 have not worked.

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"These sanctuaries really threaten stability in the region and they continue to fuel the overall terrorism problem that we are facing," he said.

The US is committed to not allowing either Pakistan or Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists from where they can attack the US and its allies, the official added.

Terrorists continue to operate freely inside Pakistan and there is a relationship between terrorist organisations and the establishment, he said.

The official added that the president has been clear about his commitment to stabilising Afghanistan.

Last week, the Trump administration suspended approximately $2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan, resulting in an outrage from Islamabad.

The Pakistan Foreign Minister, in an interview to The Wall Street Journal, had said that America was no longer an ally of Pakistan.

About President Donald Trump's comprehensive South Asia strategy for regional diplomacy announced in August last year, the official said, "It looked at India-Pakistan relations, encouraging better ties between the two countries and reducing tensions between them".

The policy is not about looking at Pakistan through the lens of Afghanistan, but it is about looking at the region and the future of the US, he said.

"We have invested a lot of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. We are committed to not allowing the Taliban to dominate Afghanistan," the official said.

Former Speaker of the US House of Representative, Newt Gingrich, in an interview to AM970 in New York said that Trump has "shocked the elites" by freezing US aid to Pakistan.

"It has so thoroughly shocked the elites that we actually are going to protect America, and defend America, and that were actually going to render judgement," he said.

"If you kick us in the shin, were not going to pay you," Gingrich said.

(With inputs from PTI)

ALSO WATCH | Donald Trump hails US Senator's bill to stop aid to Pakistan

--- ENDS ---
Published on 2018/01/07

Get the best K-beauty advice from some of the country's top YouTubers, browse the most popular stories of last year from the hard-hitting Korea Expose, Quartz looks at the power political memes in Korea, and avoid committing these cultural faux pas.

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"Top 10 Korean beauty YouTubers of 2017"

Along with the country's films, dramas, food and music, South Korean cosmetics have become a very lucrative export industry. Pair the rise of 'K-beauty' with Korea's incredible ability to self-promote, as well as their digital sophistication, and we find a growing number of highly successful YouTubers, online stars who act as "ambassadors to the complex world of ever-expanding K-beauty products". In this post on the Korea Herald you'll find a list of the top ten Korean YouTubers who are waiting to give the best K-beauty advice around.

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"Korea Expose's Top 10 Korea Stories in 2017"

Korea Expose is a hard-hitting online news and commentary site that prides itself on being critical, independent, and unbound. The website started as a small blog three years ago, but in just a few years the site has become bigger and more diverse as they continue their aim of becoming the "go-to English-language source" for Korea-related stories. In this post, Korea Expose looks back at 2017 and reveals some of their most popular stories of the year.

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"The memes that took over Korea's internet in 2017 show people are done with elites and corruption"

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his popular science book "The Selfish" as a potential mechanism for how ideas circulate in society. Since then, however, the internet has run away with the idea; now, most are familiar with the term "meme" as, say, a single image that gets circulated, usually with a comedic or political bent. In this post on Quartz, Hailey Jo and Isabella Seger have compiled an interesting list of some of the memes that emerged in Korea as a result of the tense political climate that characterised 2017.

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"What are Some Cultural Faux Pas in South Korea?"

If you're visiting South Korea for the first time you'll most likely be unaware of all of the social norms at play. Fear not, however, because Korea Expose has you covered. "Koreans will often overlook any minor faux pas you make", the article begins, but, "there are nevertheless some actions that you'll need to avoid". If you're looking to make a good impression in The Land of the Morning Calm, or you're just curious about other culture's norms, this post will be of great interest. Do you know of any useful dos and don'ts? Share them with us and others in the comment section below.

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Ask Matt ... why Walmart has so many buggies?

Walmart leads retailers in shopping carts. [MATT MATTESON/Hendersonville Lightning]

Q. Why are there so many shopping carts at Walmart? Target and Sams Club only have a fraction of those.

I caught up with a shopping cart jockey at the Walmart in the Highlands Square Shopping Center. He said they have 1,800 carts and he would know more than anyone. Some carts are stored outdoors or inside the covered area of the store, some are in use, and the rest are in the parking lot stalls or otherwise left unattended. My guy also said that on Black Friday just before Christmas, they used all the carts that were serviceable. That may be hard to believe, but it should answer your question about why so many. Now for those who like a visual comparison, if you lined up all of Walmarts buggies end to end, they would stretch from the Historic Courthouse on Main Street all the way to Hendersonville High School.

Q. On a recent visit to the Outer Banks I noticed that many license plates on the islands had an OBX prefix. Why so many and can we get one for HVL out here?

I was able to solve this puzzling question with the help of Marsha Harris of the state DMVs Special License Plate Unit. North Carolina law sets the cost, appearance and distribution of all license plates issued within the state  except the Outer Banks plates. The exception was made in 1999 at the request of the Dare County Board of Directors. The OBX license plate is not considered a specialty plate by DMV and may only be issued by the Manteo License Plate Agency in Dare County. Each plate begins with OBX followed by sequential numbers.

A specialty plate carries a logo of ones favorite group such as Duke, NASCAR, Ducks Unlimited or Retired Army. There are about 200 such choices. Specialty plates initially cost $30, half of which is returned to the organization featured on the plate. One form of specialty plate is the personalized plate also known as a vanity plate which typically displays the owners name or initials or some cryptic reference to the owners lifestyle.

It does not surprise me that the OBX exception was made during Sen. Marc Basnights tenure in the state legislature. Basnight, from Manteo, was president pro tempore of the state senate and held sway in the statehouse for many years. It is unlikely that a license plate exception could be made for Hendersonville or even Western North Carolina for that matter. One thing about having OBX on your license plate is that with so many seasonal visitors, it helps identify the locals. Whether thats good or bad is another question.

* * * * *



Send questions to askmattm@gmail.com.
Gardai at the door of the flat in Little OCurry Street

Gardai are treating the death of a 45-year-old man in Limerick as suspicious after he was discovered with a number of injuries.

The man was found inside a flat on Little O'Curry Street in Limerick city centre at around 6pm yesterday.

Last night a garda forensic team were called to the scene.

The flat was sealed off by investigators last night, along with a section of the street where it is located.

Pathologist

"Gardai in Henry Street are investigating all the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body of a male in his 40s at a flat on Little O'Curry Street shortly before 6pm this evening," a spokesman said.

"The scene has been preserved and the offices of the State Pathologist have been notified. The services of the Garda Technical Bureau have also been requested."

Local representative Elenora Hogan said her thoughts were with the family of the man, though she said she was not yet aware of his identity.

"It's very tragic, whoever the unfortunate man is," Ms Hogan said. "Anything like this is very sad, particularly at this time of year when we're all just getting over the buzz of Christmas and New Year's."

It is believed that State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy will perform a post-mortem examination today at University Hospital Limerick.

They are appealing for witnesses or to anyone who may have seen anything unusual or suspicious in or around Little O'Curry Street to contact Henry Street garda station, the garda confidential telephone line or any garda station.

Gardai are awaiting the report by the State Pathologist to determine the course of their investigation.

In a separate incident, a Kildare father-of-two died in a crash after his car hit a wall in the early hours of yesterday.

Children

The man, in his late 40s, was fatally injured when the car he was driving left the road and struck a wall at around 2.15am on the N4 inbound at Lucan in west Dublin.

The victim was pronounced dead at the scene and his body was removed to Blanchardtown Hospital.

The man, who was named locally as Darren Hedley, was the sole occupant of the car.

Mr Hedley is understood to have had two children, a boy and a girl.
Gardai have still not been contacted by St Patrick's Mental Health Services over alleged inappropriate behaviour by comedian Al Porter.

The former Blind Date host is alleged to have sexually assaulted a young patient when he visited the South Dublin psychiatric hospital in 2015.

On November 20, the hospital received a complaint from the patient - a student in his 20s - about the alleged incident.

However, more than three months on, gardai have still not been contacted by the James Street hospital.

"Neither Kilmainham Garda Station, which covers James Street, nor the district HQ, have been contacted by the hospital about this matter," said a senior gardai source.

Complete

"If it had been reported to gardai elsewhere, officers in Kilmainham would be aware of it."

A spokesperson for St Patrick's Mental Health Services did not respond yesterday when the Herald asked why the alleged incident had not been reported to gardai.

In a statement in November, the hospital said it was investigating the allegation.

It said it would not be commenting further until the investigation was complete.

HSE guidelines state that, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that a criminal act has been committed, the matter must be reported to gardai.

Health care agencies are also obliged to carry out their own investigations into such allegations.

In a separate case, Pearse Street Garda Station is investigating an allegation that a man had been groped by Mr Porter.

The man made the allegation in November and a full investigation has been launched into all aspects of the case.

Al Porter has not yet been interviewed by gardai and no arrests have been made.

Mr Porter was forced to resign from a number of jobs after he was hit with a wave of allegations of inappropriate behaviour in November.

The comedian responded by saying that at no time did he intend his "flamboyant and outrageous public persona" to upset anyone.

A bishop has subsequently appealed for people to be more understanding towards the comedian following his fall from grace.

Dublin's auxiliary bishop, Eamonn Walsh, said in his annual Christmas homily that he would like to see less judgment of the former Today FM and TV3 presenter.

Expanding on what he said in Mass, he told the Herald how there was always two sides to every story.

"Let's not jump to judgment without the facts," he said.

"Furthermore, we have to be aware that there may be judicial proceedings down the line, so I wouldn't want to say anything that would interfere with that."

Cheery

The comedian went out partying on New Year's Eve in a bid to end his "annus horribilis" on a high and begin 2018 on a cheery note.

The Tallaght man rang in the New Year in the trendy Pygmalion bar on South William Street in Dublin's city centre.

"He was with a group of friends and looked like he was enjoying himself," said an insider.

"He went upstairs after a while and a couple of people went over to him and wished him well."

This was the first public appearance by the popular Irish comedian since last year's allegations.
Both men had earlier been given prison terms for international corruption and fake invoicing. They were named in an chargesheet filed by the CBI last year.

By Ankit Kumar: An Italian court acquitted former AgustaWestland head Bruno Spagnolini and former Finmeccanica (now Leornado) chief executive Giuseppe Orsi, of charges related to alleged bribes paid in exchange for a multi-million-euro contract to sell 12 helicopters to the Indian government.

The operative part of the Milan Court of Appeal's judgement reads: "There isn't sufficient proof."

In December 2016, the Italian Supreme Court had ordered a re-trial of this case, after these two former executives were found guilty on corruption charges related to the contract. Both the accused had moved the Milan Court of Appeal.

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The Indian government had also moved the Italian court as a civil party, claiming damages due to alleged corruption by top executives of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland. According to Italian prosecutors, kickbacks were given by the then -management of the Italian defence firm through three middlemen : Guido Ralph Haschke, Christian James Michel and Carlo Valentine Gerosa.

The case came to light following the arrest of a former Finmeccanica executive back in 2012. This executive informed Italian police that kickbacks had been given to India in order to secure the VVIP Chopper deal.

This information lead to extensive surveillance of Finmeccanica's top management and Italian middlemen Carlo Gerosa and Guido Haschke.

UPROAR

In early 2013, Guido Haschke was arrested in Switzerland, and later turned into a witness.

A massive uproar broke out back in India, once the news of corruption spread. Indian agencies swung into action.

Central Bureau of Investigation has already filed a separate chargesheet in a Delhi court, where former Air Chief SP Tyagi is among others facing corruption charges.

'NO EFFECT ON TRIAL IN INDIA'

After today's verdict, CBI sources told India Today, "In Milan, India was only a civil party and not the prosecutor...this verdict of Milan Court will not have any effect on the trial back in India because CBI has enough evidence."

Speaking to India Today on the phone from Abu Dhabi, Christian Michel, one of the middlemen in this case, said "I have been saying this from beginning that no political corruption took place as it was being alleged and reported. Now that (the) Milan court has vindicated, it's time for Indian government to clear this huge mess".

After today's verdict, all three middlemen - including Michel and Haschke - are free from any charges in Italy. However, both of them remain wanted for prosecution back in India.

Last year, Haschke used his Italian case status to get rid of an Interpol Red Corner Notice against him. It's also expected that the other accused, including former Air Chief SP Tyagi, can use this verdict in their defense back in India.

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What's more, the Congress will have another reason to be aggressive against the ruling BJP, as this is the second instance after the 2G verdict in which a UPA-era scam has been nullified by a court.

Italian prosecutors have the right to appeal against the Milan court's order, but there is no official word from their side yet.

WATCH | Full interview of AgustaWestland middleman Christian Michel with India Today

--- ENDS ---
Boonsboro cheerleaders make Washington County history

The Warriors became the first county champions in cheerleading, and then the first county cheerleaders to advance to both regions and states
Rahman, who recently joined BJP after quitting TMC, was produced in Midnapur court today from where he was sent to three-day police custody.

By Manogya Loiwal : Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Anisur Rahman, who was arrested on allegations of rape, conspiracy and eve teasing, has been sent to three-day police custody.

According to police, the victim was mentally harassed by Rahman for a long time.

She even tried to commit suicide while undergoing treatment at a private nursing home in Midnapur town. Rahman had reportedly visited the nursing home on Sunday evening.

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He was taken for interrogation by the West Bengal police from the nursing home after which he was arrested.

"We have learnt about it, but it is a big conspiracy against Anisur Rahman. Police is taking necessary steps. Anisur recently joined our party. We don't know much about the incident yet," Sammit Das, BJP district president, said.

Anisur had recently joined BJP after quitting Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Sammit Das said that the TMC men had physically harrassed Anisur in front of the police even though he hasn't been proved guilty.

Both the victim and the accused were produced in Midnapur court today.

-With inputs from Sheikh Shah Jahan Ali

--- ENDS ---
With West Bengal districts witnessing sub-zero temperatures, water bodies in several parts across the state have frozen.

By Manogya Loiwal : Water bodies in several parts across West Bengal have frozen with the state witnesses sub-zero temperatures in a number of districts.

Sandhakpur area in Darjeeling district of West Bengal saw icicles on the trees and grass covered with snow as the entire water in the area froze on Monday.

The entire Rimbik and Dhotara area of the district is also experiencing the chill with temperature around minus 2 degree Celsius.

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The vegetation on the entire stretch in those regions is covered with snow.

In the capital city of Kolkata, mercury has dipped to as low as 8 degree Celsius with an expectation of more drop in the coming days.

In the neighbouring Sikkim, parts like Lachung, Yumthang are also experiencing snow fall.

Parts of Odisha too have registered a fall in the temperatures and have gone below 3 degree Celsius in some parts of the state.

According to weather experts, temperature will dip further in the next 48 hours in the North-Eastern states of India.

Trains are running late by several hours across the region.

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Norberg assumed her position with Loews Hotels & Co after serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer of RLH Corporation, where she was responsible the strategy and execution, to ensure achievement of the companys growth strategy and transformative human capital initiatives. Prior to this, Norberg worked with Northwell Health, the largest private employer in the state of New York, joining as Vice President, Human Resources of Long Island Jewish Medical Center and departing as Chief of Human Resources Operations for Northwell Health. Norbergs other positions were also in the hotel industry where she served as Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources with Dolce Hotels & Resorts, and at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. where she held leadership roles at the local, regional and corporate levels in Human Resources and Leaning & Development, departing as Vice President of Learning & Development for North America. She became interested in the hospitality field after her start at Hall & Evans, LLC, a law firm in Denver. Born and raised in Colorado, Norberg earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Colorado State University, Global Campus. Based at the Loews Hotels corporate office in New York City, she resides in Newtown, Connecticut with her husband and two sons.
Boca Raton, Florida  January 3, 2018  Cendyn, the leading provider of hotel CRM and hotel sales platforms in the hospitality industry, announced today that Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Tim Sullivan has been honored with the Top 25 Extraordinary Minds accolade by the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International.

The HSMAI Top 25 Minds award recognizes leaders in sales, marketing and revenue optimization within the travel and hospitality industry who stand out through their creativity and innovation, cutting-edge campaigns, triumphs in challenging situations and efforts that resulted in dramatic gains.

"Tim has been instrumental to our success at Cendyn," said Charles Deyo, President and CEO at Cendyn. "Cendyn has grown revenue by over 30 percent in the last 24 months, shepherding in a fresh and exciting era of acceleration. We are grateful for his accomplishments and proud to see him recognized with this prestigious award."

As the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Cendyn, Tim Sullivan oversees global sales, business development, marketing, and client success. Previously President of Cendyn/ONE, where he brought an integrated hotel CRM and digital marketing platform to market, he is now responsible for Cendyn's global expansion and strategy for the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud.

During his eight years with the company, Tim played a key role in helping transform Cendyn into a cloud-based software and services company that is revolutionizing the hospitality industry. Throughout 2017, Tim helped bring in a vast number of integrations and partners, establishing the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud as the most integrated and connected in the industry.

He is an HSMAI member, former HSMAI digital advisory council member and Cendyn board member.

Tim will be honored with the Top 25 Extraordinary Minds award at a reception and gala during the HSMAI Adrian Awards in February 2018 at the New York Marriott Marquis.

Michael Bennett

SVP, Global Marketing

[email protected]

561-419-2286

About Cendyn

Cendyn is a catalyst for digital transformation in the hospitality industry. We help hotels around the globe drive profitability and guest loyalty through an integrated technology platform that aligns revenue, eCommerce, distribution, marketing, and sales teams with centralized data, applications, and analytics, so they can capture more demand and accelerate growth. With operations across the globe, in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Singapore, Bangkok, and India, Cendyn serves tens of thousands of customers across 143 countries. To find out more, visit www.cendyn.com

Casey Munck

Senior Marketing & Communications Manager
St. Regis Hotel Coming to Hong Kong Early 2019

St. Regis Hotels & Resorts today announced a collaboration with China Resources Property which is slated to bring the St. Regis brand to Hong Kong by early 2019. Marriott International has nine properties in Hong Kong, but this will be the first property for the St. Regis brand in the city.

"Hong Kong is a bustling center of commerce with an incredible mix of glamour, culture, history and tradition. This vibrancy makes it an ideal destination for St. Regis," said Lisa Holladay, Vice President and Global Brand Leader, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts. "With its excellent location, impeccable service, and refined elegance, we look forward to offering guests an exquisite experience in one of the world's most exciting cities."

Located in the heart of historic Wan Chai, with its skyscrapers, high-end shopping and commercial buildings, the new St. Regis Hong Kong will be within walking distance to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, as well as and Victoria Harbor.

With interiors created by acclaimed Hong Kong-based designer, Andre Fu, the 25-story St. Regis Hong Kong will offer 129 guest suites, many of which will feature stunning views across Victoria Harbor and Kowloon Bay. Guests will enjoy the brand's legendary St. Regis Butler Service, signature Chinese and French restaurants, a 320-seat banquet hall and a heated swimming pool, among other luxurious amenities. An open-air terrace next to a grand Lobby Lounge will provide the ideal venue for al fresco gatherings, and a St. Regis Bar will serve up the hotel's rendition of the brand's signature cocktail, the Bloody Mary.

The glamorous, fast-paced city of Hong Kong has long been considered a place where 'East Meets West', due to the fusion of its deep Chinese roots and its recent history as a British colony. Beneath its ultramodern, 21st-century facade of glittering skyscrapers and world-class infrastructure, old traditions remain and ancient concepts such as feng shui are still deeply respected throughout the city. Truly a cosmopolitan city and a hub for international finance and trade, Hong Kong still boasts age-old Cantonese cuisine found in small noodle shops next to chic designer boutiques.

"St. Regis constantly seeks to reinterpret and reimagine time-honored traditions, bringing exciting new options and modern conveniences to luxury travelers," said Paul Foskey, Chief Development Officer, Asia Pacific, Marriott International. "We are glad to be working with China Resources Property, a subsidiary of China Resources Holding, to bring the legendary St. Regis name to Hong Kong."

"We are proud to be bringing this iconic brand to Hong Kong," said Frankie Y.F. Bao, Managing Director, China Resources Property. "All St. Regis Hotels & Resorts represent the ultimate in timeless, tasteful luxury, which the discerning and sophisticated traveler appreciates. We are also happy to note that the presence of the outstanding new St Regis in Wan Chai district will add a new level of prestige and appeal to this vibrant quarter of our city."

St. Regis Hotels & Resorts is one of the world's fastest growing luxury brands, more than doubling its footprint in recent years. There are currently more than 40 St. Regis branded hotels open worldwide, with nine properties in the Greater China region.
Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group Signs Radisson Zhengzhou, China

Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group today announces the signing of a management agreement for Radisson Zhengzhou with Henan Longzhu Hotel Management Co., Ltd. Scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2022, the 210-key property is located at Zhengdong New District, Zhengzhou city in China.

A capital city of Henan province, Zhengzhou is an emerging tier-one city that serves as a hub for the nation's railroad, aviation, highway, electric power, post and telecommunications. "Zhengzhou is an important economic epicenter in central China. Zhengdong New District has transformed itself into a thriving global metropolitan, an upcoming financial and business hub demonstrating its dynamic drive and vitality in the region," said Katerina Giannouka, president, Asia Pacific, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group. "Carlson Rezidor is confident in the future growth of Zhengzhou and we are honored to partner Henan Longzhu Hotel Management Co., Ltd. in the development of the city."

Radisson Zhengzhou is strategically located between two core areas, Dragon Lake Financial Center and Ruyi Lake Central Business District (CBD). The hotel is a mere 5 kilometers' drive away from the city center and Zhengzhou High Speed Railway Station, and 32 kilometers to Zhengzhou International Airport. Its accessible location also connects the hotel to the Henan provincial government's various offices, Zhengzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone, as well as the Zhengzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center.

Radisson Zhengzhou features an all-day dining restaurant that serves international delights, a Chinese restaurant and a lounge bar. The hotel also offers a business center, ballroom and meeting room.

"We are thrilled to collaborate with Carlson Rezidor to offer Zhengdong New District the service of Radisson as an international hotel brand," said Mr. Li Guoxuan, chairman and general manager, Henan Longzhu Hotel Management Co., Ltd. "As the new Central Business District of Zhengzhou, the capacity of Zhengdong New District is an urban frontier that is fast accelerating with the diversified development of cultures and businesses in the region. We believe business travelers will benefit from the delightful guest experience provided by Radisson Zhengzhou."

Radisson has become one of the best-recognized hotel brands, offering an upscale hotel experience for business and leisure guests. The World of Radisson features solutions that are empathetic to the challenges of modern travel, including the 100% Guest Satisfaction Guarantee. Radisson has more than 160 hotels located in major urban and suburban settings, leisure destinations, airports, and business districts throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific and the Caribbean. Every staff member has a passion for Yes I Can!SM hospitality, the signature service philosophy of Radisson, which ensures the total wellbeing and satisfaction of each guest.

Carlson Rezidor's Asia Pacific portfolio has 118 hotels in operation across the region, including 22 Radisson hotels.
By PTI: Mumbai, Jan 9 (PTI) Relatives of a 56-year-old woman who died after surgery at a city hospital have approached the Maharashtra Medical Council, claiming she died due to "gross negligence" of the hospital.

They said the hospital convinced them that the patient needed to undergo a new and expensive heart valve procedure, claiming it was "200 per cent safe".

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"My mother-in-law Manju Bafna died a fortnight ago after being discharged from the hospital while still in coma," said Sanjay Bharkatia.

The family then lodged a complaint with the Council as the "unprofessional attitude and gross medical negligence" on part of hospital cost her life, he said.

Doctors at the hospital had assured the family members that it would be "200 per cent safe" for the patient to undergo the newly-introduced the Transcatheter aortic valve implantation procedure, he said.

"They told me that my mother-in-law would be able to go home within five-six days after the surgery which was performed on October 25. She was forced to leave on December 19 while still in a comatose condition," he said.

She died on December 19 immediately after she was discharged from the hospital, he said.

Bafna, whose heart valve had been replaced earlier, was hospitalised after she developed breathlessness, he said.

The hospital asked the family to pay the bill of Rs 44 lakh, he said, adding the hospital returned Rs 11 lakh after the family pointed "lapses" in her treatment.

Action should be taken against the hospital doctors and staff for ethical and professional misconduct, he said.

The hospital hasnt come out with a statement yet. PTI APM NSK VT VT

--- ENDS ---
Kevin Gates will soon be out of prison and, by the looks of things, hes focused on more than just reloading his music career.

According to TMZ, the talented rapper is set to become a free man this week and his plans to improve the lives of those around him go far beyond just taking care of his friends and family: he wants the youth of today to learn from his mistakes so they can become more well-rounded adults in the future.

Gates lawyer told the gossip outlet that the rapper plans on pursuing this community-minded venture soon after hes released from the Illinois penitentiary hes currently occupying on Wednesday. Hell supposedly donate considerable time and resources talking to troubled teens and sharing anecdotes from his own life in hopes theyll avoid the same pitfalls.

Apparently, Gates also plans on getting involved with various organizations, among them the Boys & Girls Club, to share stories about his regrettable decisions and how they can be avoided. To be sure, his wife and kids are still his first priority, with his music coming a close second, but setting kids straight in his own way isnt far behind either of those.

Gates was originally jailed for physically assaulting a woman. He was about to taste freedom back in March of last year, but an outstanding weapons charge kept him behind bars for a while longer. He has served 9 months out of a 30-month sentence and will be released on parole. No doubt it will be a positive day not only for Gates and his loved ones, but also those in the rap community who respect the rappers artistry and lyrical prowess.

Kevin Gates
Grime icon Skepta and Tennessees Xavier Wulf have a history of mutual appreciation, and now, theyve officially joined forces on wax. In 2015, Skepta tweeted out Xavier Wulf in the stereo on the motorway. Very empowering, a big co-sign from one of the U.K.s biggest hip-hop acts. Later, Wulf ended up actually meeting Skepta, and today theyve come through with a brief but nevertheless dope remix of Wulfs Check It Out. It picks up where the original left off, employing the same instrumental from Squat Beats and Go Grizzley, only this time, Skepta brings a dose of his overseas swagger.

Told my girl drive the car, yeah Im pussy whipped, raps Skepta, the world is mine, time is money Im forever rich / I found my wave, I was surfin I remember it, Xa told me keep your eyes on the jellyfish. Check out the remix now (complete with a Sleem Luciii directed video) and sound off below.

Quotable Lyrics

Told my girl drive the car, yeah Im pussy whipped

The world is mine, time is money Im forever rich

I found my wave, I was surfin I remember it

Xa told me keep your eyes on the jellyfish
Nearly a quarter, or 24%, of workers in the region are stressed or emotional because of work. Most stressed are those in the telecom sector (44), while least stressed are those in manufacturing (19%).

Forty-five percent of Asia-Pacific workers look forward to going to work, with New Zealand workers the most driven (54%) while those from Hong Kong the least (34%). Those in utilities (56%) look forward to going to work the most while those in the public sector and in retail (both 28%) the least.

Again, work-life balance is a factor in looking forward to going to work, followed by a manager that helps with tasks, the ability to try out new things on the job, and having a manager who helps resolve work-related issues.

king for a company that supports work-life balance, having managers who acknowledge good work and getting the right training to work effectively are the three top reasons for employee engagement, the Qualtrics Employee Pulse Study found.Fifty-three percent of workers in Asia-Pacific are engaged, broken down into 57% for New Zealand, 56% for Australia, 51% for Malaysia, 45% for Singapore and 40% for Hong Kong.Employees in both healthcare and travel & leisure are 60% engaged. Least engaged are those in media & advertising and in public relations, where just 40% of workers are engaged.Given these, some 15% of workers in the Asia-Pacific are looking to leave their current jobs in the next two years. The number is highest in Hong Kong, with 21% looking to leave. Per industry, retail workers are also most likely to look for a new job (21%) followed by media & advertising (20%) and finance (18%).On the other hand, 70% of healthcare workers are likely to stay on.Those intending to stay cite their employers support for work-life balance, the right level of training, and the trust they have for their colleagues.Work-life balance is not a 50-50 split, said Steve Bennetts of Qualtrics Employee Experience. Its about understanding all these experiences where the workplace and personal life intersect with each other.Other findings:Information from 4,505 workers in various industries around the world was used for the Qualtrics Employee Pulse Survey.
ustry, government and education sector should accelerate action to address the growing shortage in digital skills driven by the speed and scale in demand, according to New Zealand Digital Skills forum chair Victoria MacLennan.The growing skills shortage in New Zealand's IT industry and broader economy is very real," she said, as reported by the New Zealand Herald.The report commissioned by the forum found an 11% annual increase in demand for software programmer jobs.In 2016, more than 120,000 people were employed in the tech sector and about 14,000 new jobs were created. But only 5,090 tech students graduated the previous year and 5,500 tech visas were granted.The numbers clearly show a shortfall, and that the supply of people with advanced digital skills did not meet demand and the gap was growing.Aside from the deficit, there were also There was also a diversity challenge. In 2016, 36% of tech students were female and only 8% were Maori.MacLennan added that if industry, government and education fail to act, the future prosperity of New Zealand will suffer greatly."We need to nurture and develop local talent, and at the same time make sure that we fill any gaps from the best talent we can find worldwide. If we do this, well then we have the opportunity to make New Zealand a technology powerhouse on the world stage.The Digital Skills Forum already brings together leading teach industry and government agencies to address the shortage.But more must be done. The report, she said, presents a great opportunity as technology is an important part of day-to-day life of New Zealanders.Just about everyone has a stake in our success, she added.This year the school education sector had been reformed to include digital education. The median salary for technology roles was $82,000 - nearly twice the average median salary, MacLennan said."Together, we need to remove barriers for our graduates finding their first job, make it easier for those seeking a career change, and improve the gender and cultural diversity in digital roles. None of us can do this on our own."The New Zealand Digital Skills Forum includes NZRise, NZTech,and IT Professionals NZ from the tech sector, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Ministry of Education, the Department of Internal Affairs and the Tertiary Education Commission from government.
We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector
In the war of words between Siddaramaiah and Yogi Adityanath, the Karnataka Chief Minister today called his Uttar Pradesh counterpart a "supporter of Nathuram Godse".

By India Today Web Desk: The war of words between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath refuses to end.

The Karnataka Chief Minister today sharpened his attack on Yogi Adityanath and called him a "supporter of Nathuram Godse".

Slamming the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah said, "I don't need to learn Hindutva from Yogi". "Yogi has jungle raj in Uttar Pradesh," he added.

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A twitter war broke out between the two chief ministers yesterday (Sunday). Siddaramaiah took a swipe at Yogi's visit to poll-bound Karnataka and said "there is a lot you can learn from us, Sir".

"When you are here please visit an Indira canteen and a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state," the Karnataka Chief Minister tweeted.

I welcome UP CM Shri @myogiadityanath to our state. There is a lot you can learn from us Sir. When you are here please visit a Indira Canteen & a ration shop. It will help you address the starvation deaths sometimes reported from your state. #YogiInBengaluru https://t.co/lj0m4fMphC- Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) January 7, 2018

Hitting back at Siddaramaiah, Yogi Adityanath said, "I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers".

Yogi said that "as UP CM, I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies" before thanking his counterpart in Karnataka for the "welcome".

Thank you for the welcome @siddaramaiah ji. I heard number of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka was highest in your regime, not to mention the numerous deaths and transfer of honest officers. As UP CM I am working to undo the misery and lawlessness unleashed by your allies.- Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) January 7, 2018

A total of 224 Assembly constituencies in Karnataka, currently ruled by the Congress government, will go to polls this year.

(Inputs from Nolan Pinto in Bengaluru)

Yogi Adityanath a Nathuram Godse supporter, don't need his Hindutva lessons: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah

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Watch: Dog Clears Way for Herd of Cattle in Snow Storm, Internet Can't Contain Emotions
She is Ireland's woman of the moment - even being hailed the country's very own Meryl Streep.

Saoirse Ronan's Golden Globes success has catapulted her among Hollywood royalty.

Irish stand-up comedian and actress Deirdre O'Kane was one of the first to congratulate her fellow countrywoman on her gong.

"Over the moon about Saoirse Ronan's golden globe... she is our Meryl Streep, a HUGE talent and a beautiful human being, that's all.." she Tweeted.

Ireland's Culture Minister Josepha Madigan said she was delighted for the 23-year-old Carlow woman.

The Fine Gael TD also praised Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh on his Golden Globe win.

"Saoirse Ronan and Martin McDonagh are both wonderfully charismatic people and their success in winning Golden Globes, which are such significant international awards, are indicative of their immense talent and versatility as artists.

"I would like to send my best wishes to both on their success and I am sure their personal achievements last night will be welcomed by all in the Irish film industry," the minister said.

The small national school in the village of Ardattin in Co Carlow, where Saoirse studied as a young girl, suddenly became the focus of the media on Monday.

Principal Laura Vance was inundated with calls about the school's most famous ex-pupil.

It was here at the rural school that a young Saoirse juggled her studies with her television and film work.

Her mother and father Monica and Paul Ronan, both from Dublin, had returned to live in the area when Saoirse was three, after 11 years living in New York.

Her first acting job was on RTE's The Clinic, which also starred her father, when she was just nine years old.

A part in the TV series Proof followed, before she was cast in the Michelle Pfeiffer movie I Could Never Be Your Woman.

By the age of 13 she was nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actress category for her role in the film Atonement.

She then played a child assassin in Hanna and a pastry chef who helps break a man out of prison in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

She earned her second Oscar nomination for her role as an Irish immigrant who makes her way to 1950s New York in Brooklyn.

The 23-year-old finally won her gong on Sunday night for her role in the coming-of-age comedy-drama Lady Bird, leading to floods of tributes to "Ireland's leading lady".

Tourism Ireland Tweeted: "Congrats to Ireland's leading lady, Saoirse Ronan, on her #GoldenGlobe win for her role in the movie Lady Bird! Martin McDonagh's film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, won a whopping four awards, including Best Motion Picture - Drama!"

The Irish Embassy in the US also Tweeted: "Many congrats to Saoirse Ronan for #GoldenGlobes award for best actress for #LadyBird!"
Laser beams could be shone on to Highland hillsides in a bid to protect flocks of sheep from Britains biggest bird of prey.

The technology is to be trialled in Argyll in an area where crofters and farmers have repeatedly complained that Scotlands white-tailed sea eagles are taking their livestock.

The unusual move will be tried along with other measures, including cutting down trees close to one lambing area in a bid to stop the huge raptors nesting in them and preying on lambs.

The conservation agency Scottish Natural Heritage said the trials would be "carefully monitored, with lasers being shone on to the hills and not directly at birds.

David Colthart, a farmer and member of the Argyll and Lochaber Sea Eagle Stakeholder Group, said not all sea eagles were a problem but some did prey on lambs.

He added that if the laser trial was successful it could be rolled out under licence to other areas where the birds were causing problems.

Farmers and crofters in areas including the Isle of Skye and the Gairloch peninsula have complained of the birds killing lambs and larger ewe hoggs (sheep up to 18 months old).

Last May, a photograph emerged of a sea eagle carrying a new born lamb in its talons as it flew over the village of North Connel in Argyll.

The rare raptors are have been the subject since 1975 of a successful, but controversial, reintroduction programme in different parts of Scotland, most recently on the east coast.

Ross Lilley, SNH's sea eagle project manager, said the "serious concerns" of some farmers and crofters about the impact of sea eagles on livestock had been acknowledged.

He added: "At this point, no trials on laser-scaring deterrents for sea eagles have been undertaken.

"They are under consideration along with other options. A carefully monitored trial will be critical to make sure lasers are a safe and effective method before we proceed any further."

A report in 2016 predicted the number of sea eagles was likely to reach around 220 pairs by 2025, with potential for a much larger population by 2040. Sea eagles became extinct in the UK in 1916, largely due to persecution.
Heather Humphreys has said she won't rush into a decision to relax the work-permits regime to let in low-skilled workers from outside Europe.

The Business, Enterprise and Innovation Minister said that while her department is carrying out a review of the employment permits system as the economy booms and unemployment falls, she does not want to "displace Irish workers".

Her department claims to be coming under pressure to open up the permits system to allow "lower-skilled workers" in certain sectors.

"We're carrying out a review of the employment permits system. We've got to be cognisant of the fact that there's 6pc unemployment in the country still, so there are 244,000 people unemployed in this country and 18.5 million unemployed right across Europe," Ms Humphreys told the Irish Independent.

"But having said that, I recognise that if there are skill shortages, we do need to look at that and that will form part of the review."

Asked if she was minded to loosen the rules, the minister added: "I do need to carry out the review first and I want to look at it carefully."

"I don't want to rush into making decisions because the one thing that I don't want to do is displace Irish workers and we do want to press down the unemployment figures."
Conde Nast has named Irish woman Samantha Barry as the new editor-in-chief of Glamour.

One of the biggest fashion and beauty media brands in the world, Glamour attracts more than 15 million consumers across social, 10 million in print, and 7 million digital each month.

Barry, from Cork, is the eight editor to assume the role which will see her oversee all content development, production and consumer experiences for Glamour's digital, social, video and print platforms.

She previously served as executive producer for social and emerging media at CNN Worldwide, where she led the social teams across all CNN bureaus and developed strategy for editorial teams working across publishing, news-gathering, digital and TV.

Sam is Glamours first digital-native editor which is to say she arrives from the future rather than the past, said Anna Wintour, artistic director of Conde Nast.

As an editor she has led all manner of news coverage from the 2016 Presidential election and the horrific Las Vegas mass shooting to the love story voicemails and the 2018 New Years Eve festivities. Sam understands social media as a tool for storytelling and reporting; a way to support social conversation and the ever changing contours of whats cool.

"Sam is fearless like so many leaders of the moment and has both a reverence for Glamours history and a crystal clear view of its future in the digital environment.

Read More

Speaking about her new role, Barry added, I am as humbled by Glamours past as I am excited about Glamours future.

I could not be more proud to take the reigns of an iconic womens brand at this pivotal moment for all womens voices. For me, Glamour is the home of strong storytellers, insightful journalism, beauty and fashion. I look forward to building on the brands success, and sharing Glamour with audiences everywhere.

While at CNN, Barry spearheaded CNN's 2016 Election coverage across social platforms, which received the first ever Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in social media and a Webby Award recognizing the same 2016 campaign work.

Barry kick started her career, after a degree in English and a Masters in Journalism from DCU, as a reporter with a late-night internship at 2Fm followed by roles as a reporter and producer on RTE Radio 1's Morning Ireland.

She also reported on breaking news with Newstalk before spending 18 months in Papau New Guinea with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

After joining BBC World News, Barry then travelled and worked in many different countries as a social media producer and a journalist  using platforms as a tool for news gathering and audience building.

She has also worked as a social media and technology trainer for the U.S. State Department, the United States Institute of Peace and Internews and she is a 2016 fellow of Columbia University School's prestigious Sulzberger executive program and is a guest lecturer at Yale.

Her new role begins on January 15.
A trend where families declare themselves as homeless post-Christmas is set to bring a spike in the number of people seeking accommodation and support this month.

Charities and organisations working in the homeless sector predict a sharp rise in the number of new families declaring as homeless in the coming days and weeks, putting a strain on resources and increasing demand for temporary and permanent accommodation. They say the trend has been prevalent since the housing crisis began.

It comes as figures compiled by Fianna Fail show the Government has repeatedly missed targets to address the housing crisis.

The figures show the Government has failed to deliver on targets to complete rapidbuild schemes, add social housing units to the national stock and missed goals to acquire, repair and lease properties to relieve the housing crisis.

Under the Rebuilding Ireland initiative, the Government aims to provide 50,000 social housing direct-build units by 2021. This target included completing 3,200 units in 2017, but fewer than a quarter of these (773) were finished before Christmas.

A repair and lease initiative rolled out by Tanaiste Simon Coveney last February aimed to deliver up to 800 units in 2017 but failed to provide any new homes. A separate rapid-build programme was to provide 800 new units but only 76 were completed.

Added to this are the 4,200 properties identified by Nama as potentially available for social housing that were rejected by local authorities or sold to other buyers.

These missed targets will put further pressure on the housing market as charities and local authorities prepare for a January spike in the number of families becoming homeless.

Many families wait until after the Christmas holidays to seek support so their children can get through the festive period as comfortably as possible. Many stay with friends or family during December under the condition they seek support early in the new year.

Landlords are also reluctant to evict tenants in the run-up to Christmas and are more likely to issue a notice to quit in January.

Focus Ireland director of advocacy Mike Allen said January was a challenging time for homeless charities to respond to the demand for their services.

"With families presenting as homeless there is a very distinct pattern," he said. "Usually there is a fall-off in newly presenting families in December and then a spike in January. That has been the pattern since this crisis started. The highest January spike was in 2016 when 125 presented themselves as homeless. The month before, only 41 families had presented as homeless. There is absolutely no reason to believe that [trend] will be any different this time around.

"It puts extra difficulty in finding emergency accommodation for those families."

Dublin Region Homeless Executive reports show a further 87 families declared themselves homeless last January, and charities expect another spike this month. In its two most recent reports on the reasons for family homelessness, the executive has cited a growing trend of families deferring the decision to access homeless supports until after the festive period.

Peter McVerry Trust CEO Pat Doyle said families were doing this to protect younger members of their families. He also hit out at Housing Agency chairman Conor Skehan, who last week claimed families were "gaming the system" by declaring themselves homeless to move up the housing waiting list.

"You often hear about a rise in January or a spike in July," said Mr Doyle.

"That is not a sudden spike. That is families planning it, telling relatives they can stay until the holidays, or until the kids finish their exams.

"That is not gaming the system. It is people putting off what is a very difficult decision.

"It would be far more productive if he [Mr Skehan] was to put down his five strategies for solving the housing crisis instead of making claims that are not backed up with hard evidence."

In the year to last July, 850 new families moved to emergency accommodation in Dublin. Of these, 380 (44.7pc) said they became homeless because they were unable to secure private rental accommodation and 341 were served with a notice to quit by their landlord.

Relationships breaking down contributed to 44.6pc of cases of family homelessness during this period. This includes 112 cases where families became homeless after the breakdown of a relationship with a parent, almost double the number who were homeless after leaving their partner (57).

Mr Doyle said these figures show the causes of homelessness are complicated.

"We have a dysfunctional private rental market. You have professionals who are living in that sector now because they can't get mortgages with the Central Bank's lending rules. They are paying exorbitant rents that a single parent could never afford, so there is nothing for him or her to fall back on."

He added that a surge in homelessness in the coming months would be very difficult for government and agencies to address.

"What worries me even more [than a January increase] is February and March," he said. "If we see a number in January and that is repeated in February and March, then that means something has gone amiss and it is getting worse."
A complete overhaul of property tax has moved significantly closer after a dramatic intervention by the Minister for Housing, who says bills should no longer be solely based on the value of homes and the annual charge needs reform.

Minister Eoghan Murphy said the current property tax system is unfair on homeowners and needs to be significantly changed in the coming months.

"I would like to see a more fundamental change to how the local property tax is calculated, to one that isn't linked exclusively to the perceived market value of a home," he told the Sunday Independent.

At the same time, Minister for Transport Shane Ross also weighed into the debate by calling for waivers to be introduced for older people who live in expensive homes but could have a fixed source of income and may be "pension poor".

Property tax will move centre stage this week, when Mr Murphy holds his first meeting with Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe to review the controversial charge, which is seen as deeply unfair on Dublin homeowners.

Property tax bills are four times higher in parts of Dublin than in more rural parts of the country.

One in every three euro in property tax raised last year was paid to the four Dublin local authorities.

It is understood one of the new models being actively considered is the introduction of a nationwide property tax "banding" system, whereby factors such as location and local authority services would be taken into account when calculating how much homeowners should pay, rather than just the market price of property in the area.

Read More

Mr Murphy said he "would not make any assumptions" about property tax and insisted a number of proposals will be considered before a final decision is reached.

"I think solely having a tax that is linked to a perceived market value of a home isn't going to be fair on the homeowner in terms of their ability to pay, but neither will it necessarily meet the needs of the local authority in terms of its funding.

"So we are looking at new ways of potentially funding the local authorities using the property tax," the minister said.

Mr Ross is understood to have sought property tax waivers for pensioners in last year's budget negotiations but his proposal was shot down by Minister Donohoe.

However, waivers are expected to be considered as part of the forthcoming review.

The Minister for Transport told the Sunday Independent he considered the property tax a form of "double taxation" as in most cases homeowners had already paid stamp duty on their property.

"I think it is a tax which is very unfair in its implementation and very unfair to people living in Dublin," Minister Ross told the Sunday Independent.

This coming Wednesday is the deadline for homeowners to notify the Revenue Commissioner of their intention to pay the charge by credit card, debit card or cheque.

This is the last year of property tax payments before the freeze on rates expires in 2019.

Mr Murphy and Mr Donohoe's meeting this week will focus on establishing a cross-departmental review group, whose task will be reform of the property tax system.

TDs and senators, along with interest groups, will be invited to make submissions ahead of the final report.

A senior Fianna Fail source said the party would use its influence to prevent "massive increases" in property tax bills and seek to ensure charges are "as near as possible" to the current rates.

The source said property tax will be a "big issue" for the local elections in 2019, once the freeze on charges has expired.

"The main principle of property taxes - to allow for reinvestment into local services - is our policy, so once the tax is not exorbitant there will be room to manoeuvre," the source added.

Read More

There is great concern among homeowners whose properties have rocketed in value since the crash, who will face massive property tax bills once the freeze ends in 2019.

The Government is also anxious to break the link between property tax and house prices - not least because of concerns that if the property market crashed again, the revenue raised by the tax would plummet.

The property tax review is also set to spark another rural-vs-urban debate, as the vast majority of the 477m raised by the charge is received from Dublin householders.

Revenue Commission figures released last week show a third of the entire property tax raised last year was paid to the four Dublin local authorities. Homeowners in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown pay an average of 524, while the average in Donegal was 160 and in Leitrim only 130.

Government sources said the current system is unfair because it means the owner of a small apartment in Dublin will pay significantly more property tax than the owner of a large house in rural Ireland.

The current property tax system also sees revenue raised by Dublin local authorities redistributed to rural councils in which less money is raised.
The technology industry's premier annual gathering kicks off this week with no women leading the keynote sessions and no code of conduct that might prevent incidents of sexual harassment, despite efforts by organizers to cast the show as a more inclusive event.

CES, the showcase for the latest consumer electronics from televisions to self-driving cars, is known for mostly male attendees and female models known as 'booth babes' showing off the new technology.

It has attracted criticism for not making itself more welcoming for women or toning down its sexualized atmosphere even as the issue of harassment and assault has grabbed headlines in the last six months and propelled the #MeToo movement into life.

"The fact that this large global gathering of tech leaders is totally ignoring this issue makes them completely tone deaf and irresponsible," said Liliana Aide Monge, chief executive of California coding school Sabio, who is skipping CES for the second year in a row because of the lack of women and minority speakers.

The organizers of CES, which opens its doors to nearly 200,000 attendees in Las Vegas on Tuesday, drew criticism last month from executives at Twitter and other tech companies for a keynote list dominated by white men.

CES made a concerted push to diversify its entire speaker lineup, but ultimately failed to find a high-ranking female executive for an individual keynote address.

"To keynote at CES, the speaker must head (president/CEO level) a large entity who has name recognition in the industry," said Karen Chupka, who oversees the event as senior vice president at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), in a blog post a month ago.

"As upsetting as it is, there is a limited pool when it comes to women in these positions. We feel your pain. It bothers us, too. The tech industry and every industry must do better."

On top of that, CES also will go forward without creating a code of conduct, a mechanism several conferences in technology and other industries have adopted in recent years to set rules for behavior for attendees, from guidelines on using inclusive language in presentations to requirements that attendees wear name tags at all events, even after hours, to deter misconduct.

"Its sad that CES doesnt have a code of conduct," said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity-focused consulting firm. "They have a lot of influence. If theyre choosing not to leverage that to promote diversity and inclusion at large, that communicates to the rest of the industry that maybe it isnt as necessary as we keep saying that it is."

High Stakes

Evidence of the effect on shows safety and tone is mostly anecdotal, but several conferences with these codes, including hacker convention DEF CON, CoreOS Fest and Cloud Foundry Summit, say they have removed attendees after reports of harassment.

The stakes are high for the technology industry, rocked in the past year by a sexual harassment scandal at Uber and misconduct by some prominent Silicon Valley investors.

The organizers of CES say they expect attendees to heed their own companies standards of business conduct and will kick out anyone who behaves poorly, but will not introduce a set of guidelines.

"We dont necessarily have specific rules because we assume everyone will be held accountable to the standards of being in an office, said Chupka.

"Unacceptable" behavior would be addressed by the executive team and legal counsel as necessary, the CTA said. "We have the right at any time to revoke a show badge and/or trespass an individual." CES notes that it has received no reports of sexual harassment at the event in recent years.

Women subjected to uncomfortable situations at or near past CES gatherings told Reuters that they did not report incidents because they were too used to it or did not recognize there was a way to do so.

To change that thinking, the show is debuting a security app that lets attendees report issues from crimes to broken elevators. While there will be no effort to promote the app specifically as a way to report sexual harassment, attendees may do so, and CES said its lawyers will be ready to act.

Slush Code

The need for a code of conduct became apparent at Finland's Slush tech startup event in 2016 when multiple women spoke up about being inappropriately touched and receiving unwanted propositions for sex by male attendees as well as being ignored by investors who were only interested in working with male entrepreneurs.

The following year, it doubled security, trained staff on how to handle reports of harassment and instituted a code of conduct, including a requirement to wear name badges at all times as a way to make it easier for attendees to identify a harasser.

A similar approach has been adopted by some in the US tech industry. Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event, second only to CES in attendee numbers, added a code of conduct in 2014, while film, tech and music conference South by Southwest added one in 2016. Meanwhile, large conferences run by Oracle and RSA Security have not adopted such a code.

It remains to be seen if CES's lack of a code of conduct will prove costly.

Las Vegas' reputation for excess is part of the problem, said Liz Lopez, a tech marketing professional who has attended several industry conferences in the city.
Opponents of the euro are rearing their heads again, this time in Italy. Matteo Salvini, leader of the country's anti-immigration Northern League party, has reiterated his opposition to the single currency.

Growing Italian discontent with the European Union could help to make the issue a vote-winner in elections planned for March 4. Despite a widespread economic revival, monetary union remains a political target, rather than a European reality.

Investors thought they had put the threat of a euro break-up to bed after opponents of the currency bloc were trounced in French, Dutch and German elections last year. But they are springing up elsewhere.

The Northern League's Mr Salvini, who has an outside chance of becoming Italy's next prime minister, this week told newspaper 'La Repubblica' that he remained convinced the euro was a mistake and vowed to rectify the error.

In his manifesto, Mr Salvini pledges to renegotiate EU treaties in order to regain political and monetary sovereignty. He has also spoken of a parallel currency.

The tactic is probably designed to steal votes from the 5-Star Movement, which is currently projected to become Italy's largest single party with 28pc of votes.

The anti-establishment group had previously promised a referendum on leaving the single currency. But in a bid to appease moderate voters, leader Luigi Di Maio last year declared that the plan would be a last resort. Relative political calm and resurgent growth in the eurozone's third-largest economy helped propel Milan's FTSE MIB Index to a two-year high in November, making it among Europe's best-performing indices.

Yet bashing Brussels could yield political gains. Once staunchly pro-EU, Italians have become more sceptical.

According to a Eurobarometer poll published in November, only 34pc of Italian respondents said they tended to trust the EU - the lowest level in the bloc outside Greece, Britain and France.

Anti-euro rhetoric can backfire, though. Marine Le Pen's vague plan to pull out of the single currency cost her votes in last year's French presidential election.

If the threat of a return to the lira becomes too real, savers could get cold feet.

Even so, Italy's election is shaping up to be another political test for the euro. (Reuters Breakingviews)
She is Irelands woman of the moment  even being hailed the countrys very own Meryl Streep.

Saoirse Ronans Golden Globes success has catapulted her among Hollywood royalty.

Irish stand-up comedian and actress Deirdre OKane was one of the first to congratulate her fellow countrywoman on her gong.

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Over the moon about Saoirse Ronans golden globe she is our Meryl Streep, a HUGE talent and a beautiful human being, thats all.. she tweeted.

Irelands Culture Minister Josepha Madigan said she was delighted for the 23-year-old Carlow woman.

The Fine Gael TD also praised Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh on his Golden Globe win.

Saoirse Ronan and Martin McDonagh are both wonderfully charismatic people and their success in winning Golden Globes, which are such significant international awards, are indicative of their immense talent and versatility as artists.

I would like to send my best wishes to both on their success and I am sure their personal achievements last night will be welcomed by all in the Irish film industry, the minister said.

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The small national school in the village of Ardattin in Co Carlow, where Ronan studied as a young girl, suddenly became the focus of the media on Monday.

Principal Laura Vance was inundated with calls about the schools most famous ex-pupil.

Video of the Day

It was here at the rural school that a young Ronan juggled her studies with her television and film work.

Her mother and father, Monica and Paul Ronan, both from Dublin, had returned to live in the area when Ronan was three, after 11 years living in New York.

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Her first acting job was on RTEs The Clinic, which also starred her father, when she was just nine.

A part in the TV series Proof followed, before she was cast in the Michelle Pfeiffer movie I Could Never Be Your Woman.

By the age of 13 she was nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actress category for her role in the film Atonement.

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She then played a child assassin in Hanna and a pastry chef who helps break a man out of prison in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

She earned her second Oscar nomination for her role as an Irish immigrant who makes her way to 1950s New York in Brooklyn.

The 23-year-old finally won her gong on Sunday night for her role in the coming-of-age comedy-drama Lady Bird, leading to floods of tributes to Irelands leading lady.

Tourism Ireland Tweeted: Congrats to Irelands leading lady, Saoirse Ronan, on her #GoldenGlobe win for her role in the movie Lady Bird! Martin McDonaghs film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, won a whopping four awards, including Best Motion Picture  Drama!

The Irish Embassy in the US also Tweeted: Many congrats to Saoirse Ronan for #GoldenGlobes award for best actress for #LadyBird!
RTEs Marty Morrissey and Ksenia Zsikhotska during the opening show of RTEs Dancing with the Stars. kobpix

We've survived the first episode and for the next 11 weeks RTEs shiny floor juggernaut show Dancing with The Stars will be completely unavoidable.

Youll try to ignore it, but eventually the DWTS team will wear you down  with their spangled costumes and iron-fist PR push.

And before you know it youre waiting with baited breath for Marty Morrissey to do the Salsa to Despacio.

RTE has promised that this year will be bigger, better and glitzier than ever.

But here are some things we can be certain will happen.

l Marty Morrissey will win. There is no way he will not win. Even if Fred Astaire rose from the dead and participated on the show, Marty would win.

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l For the next 12 weeks, The Late Late Show/ Ray DArcy Show guest list will rotate between the contestants of DWTS, the cast of Striking Out, the judges of DWTS, the cast of Striking Out, the dancers on DWTS, and John Creedon. On Saturday night we already had judges Loraine Barry and Brian Redmond 'sharing their thoughts with Ray about the show this season'.

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l Amanda and Nicky will have more terrible, terrible scripted banter. Theyre no Tess and Claudia, thats for sure.

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l Norah Casey will dance to the theme tune of 1973 Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon, or Sisqos Unleash the Dragon.

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l Thalia Heffernan and Ryan McShane will remind us once again that they are DWTS true loves dream.

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l All of the contestants will complain about how time consuming the show is.

l All of them will lose weight.

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l Jake Carter will wear inappropriately tight trousers.

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l His brother Nathan will perform.

l RTE will realise the benefits of asking the siblings of famous people to be on reality shows.

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l Louis Walsh will continue to point out the lack of celebrities in the line up. They are not even celebrities in their own homes, he said last year. Louis opinions are unbiased and definitely have nothing to do with the fact that he has a rival show Irelands Got Talent airing on TV3.

l There will be a movie-themed night and Marty Morrissey will go as a Porg from Star Wars.

l Erin McGregors time on the show will be short but eventful. She will leave early because she is from Dublin and Dubliners dont vote.

l Before she leaves Conor McGregor and his baby CJ will arrive at Ardmore flanked by security and wearing matching shiny Spanish trousers.

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l Dancing Dessie will return for one night only.

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l Anna Geary will work a camogie into a dance routine. In much the same way that Teresa Mannion was swanning about with an umbrella.

l All of the contestants will talk far too earnestly about the journey they have all been part of. And how much they love their fellow contestants.

l The following Irish celebrities will casually mention to the press that they would be more than willing to take part in the 2019 show; Rory Cowan, Lorraine Keane, and any Irish influencer you can think of.

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l There will be a sequin-related injury. A Roundel will end up in someones eye, mark my words.

l Nicky will be asked once again if a Westlife reunion is on the cards.

l RTE and Shinawil will act like they themselves devised the format, instead of nicking it off the Beeb.
Three boys aged 14 and 15 have been charged over a series thefts around the country.

They appeared before Judge Gerry Jones at Dublin Childrens Court on multiple charges for thefts in Laois, Galway, Dublin, Kildare, Westmeath and Offaly. They were ordered to appear again later this month.

Court Garda Fionnuala Monaghan told the judge the charges related to incidents around the country. It was a very complex file and anticipated that it would take some time for it to be prepared, she said. She was addressing the court on behalf of the numerous investigating gardai.

Gda Monaghan applied for an adjournment to allow those officers to be in a position to explain themselves to the court.

Barrister Damian McKeone acting for the trio asked the court to note one of them was aged only 14 and he asked that there would be a certain amount of expediting in getting directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Judge Jones said the charges related to offences around the country and it was not a straightforward case.

The teens, who were accompanied to court by family members, were remanded on continuing bail to appear again in three weeks. They did not address the court and have not yet indicated how they will plead.

Two of 15-year-old boys are charged with: stealing a charity box containing approximately 60 from a garage shop in Portarlington, Co. Laois on November 16 last; stealing a 700 phone from an Eir shop on Dublins Henry Street between June 1 and June 14 last year; theft of another 700 phone from an Eir shop in Blanchardstown and stealing a phone worth 900 at Liffey Valley shopping centre in Dublin between November 1 and November 14 last; theft of another phone worth 880 from a Three shop on Pearse St, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath on October 28 last; theft of a phone valued at 699 at DID in the Tullamore retail park and another phone worth 479 from Expert electrical Cloncollig industrial estate in the same Co. Offaly town on November 11 last.

One of the 15-year-old boys also has an additional charge for stealing a 699 phone from Currys at Headford Road, Galway on April 12 last year.

The 14-year-old co-defendant is accused of theft of 51 of petrol at a service station in Leixlip, Co. Kildare on December 1 last; 52 worth of petrol from a garage in Kilcock, Co. Kildare on November 30 last and 40 worth of petrol three days earlier at a service station in Clonsilla, Co. Dublin.

Two reside in Co. Dublin while one lives in Co. Kildare.

The three teens and their families are originally from eastern Europe and Judge Jones agreed to order that interpreters would be present to translate at the next hearing.
An investigation is underway after a bus driver was arrested for testing positive for alcohol at a garda checkpoint.

Gardai carried out a Mandatory Intoxicant Checkpoint on the M1 motorway between Swords and Balbriggan on Saturday morning.

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The driver of a bus was arrested after he failed the roadside test.

It's believed that up to 17 passengers were on the bus at the time and were left stranded for up to two hours until a replacement bus arrived.

During the checkpoint, 246 motorists were randomly tested for Alcohol and 4 for Drugs.

Speaking at the conclusion of the checkpoint Chief Superintendent Aidan Reid said:

"I would like to thank everyone traveling on the route during this mornings MIT checkpoint for their co-operation and commend the very high compliance rates among motorists."

Chief Reid went on to thank Transport Infrastructure Ireland for their assistance and the team of over 40 gardai from across the Dublin Region involved in the operation.
A Dublin pharmaceutical firm is facing prosecution for breaking medicinal regulations over the sale of cancer treatment drugs.

The case against Taj Accura Pharmaceutical Ltd had its first listing at Dublin District Court on Monday. The firm and three named directors are being prosecuted by the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA), the agency which regulates medicines in Ireland.

The firm with an address at Trinity Street, Dublin 2, faces charges relating to the sale of suspected falsified products and breaching medicinal product regulations.

It is alleged that from November 16 until December 22, 2015 they sold by wholesale a medicinal product name Fluourouracil 50 injections containing the prescription only substance Fluourouracil in circumstances where there was sufficient grounds to suspect it was a falsified medicinal product.

The prosecuting agency also allege that on March 5, 2016, the defendants imported into the State a product named Afhlan (Melphalan injections USP 50mg) knowing it to be a falsified product. It is also alleged they exported it, sold it by wholesale and placed the product, which contained a prescription only substance, in circulation.

The HPRA allege that between August 11, 2015 and Jan. 29, 2016 they brokered and sold by wholesale the product BICNU containing the prescription only substance Carmustine and sold the product.

It is also alleged they sold by wholesale Melphalan injections which contained a prescription only product between March 23, 2016 and April 5, 2016.

Directors James Madden, of Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2, Emma Madden of the Waterfront, Hanover Quay, Dublin 2 and Orna Madden of Hanover Dock, Hanover Quay, Dublin 2 were co-defendants with the company.

Solicitor Ronan ONeill, for the HPRA, asked Judge John Brennan to adjourn the case for six weeks to allow time for disclosure of evidence to the defence. Judge Brennan agreed and adjourned the case until Feb. 19 next when the case will be listed for mention.

Their solicitor said it was a technical matter and the judge agreed to excuse the defendants, who have not yet indicated how they will plead, from having to attend the next hearing.
Hundreds of people are waiting for a bed in Irish hospitals today according to two key sets of data.

The Irish Nurses and Midwives (INMO) daily trolley watch figures - which include people waiting on trolleys on wards - shows that 555 people are waiting on a bed in hospitals around the country.

Cork University Hospital is the worst affected hospital in the country according to both sources - with the INMO reporting 45 people waiting on a bed.

This is despite the hospital taking a range of measures to tackle overcrowding including moving people to other hospitals in the city, including to a private hospital.

The Medical Clinical Director of CUH Mike O'Connor told RTE's Morning Ireland 11 patients were transferred to the Mater Private.

Additional staff and resources were also brought on stream over the weekend.

This was the second year in a row that CUH was forced to send patients to the Mater Private he said.

A number of other patients were transferred to other public hospitals in the area.

Meanwhile, the TrolleyGar figures, which looks at patients on a bed at 8am, show that there are 10pc more people waiting on trolleys compared to this day last year, with 427 waiting. This figure includes eight children.

This morning in Temple Street Children's Hospital there are five children on trolleys, while in Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin there are three children without a bed. Four of those have spent more than nine hours on the trolley.

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Of those adults waiting 230 have endured a wait of more than nine hours according to the HSE.

Letterkenny General Hospital has 40 people on trolleys, while in the Midlands Regional Hospital in Mullingar there are 32 patients waiting on trolley crisis.

The latest figures comes amid fears the end of the school holidays could lead to a surge in flu cases.

The reopening of schools today after the holidays is expected to cause a big increase in flu cases in the coming days and weeks.

Health Minister Simon Harris previously urged parents to keep their children home from school if they showed signs of being unwell.
Another hectic week looms for health services and emergency department patients caught in the overcrowding crisis, amid fears the end of the school holidays could lead to a surge in flu cases.

A jump in patient numbers, worsened by rapidly rising numbers of people hit by influenza, continued unabated over the weekend with very high numbers of patients on trolleys desperately waiting for beds to become available.

The reopening of schools today after the holidays is expected to cause a big increase in flu cases in the coming days and weeks.

The HSE reported 330 patients were on trolleys in emergency departments yesterday morning, including four children who were waiting more than nine hours for a bed.

But the overall number of patients on trolleys was significantly higher because those on trolleys in wards were not counted, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO).

A top emergency medicine consultant also warned that the Irish hospital system was not able to cope with big surges in patient numbers.

Dr Emily O'Conor, president of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine, said: "What we don't have in the Irish health care system is any surge capacity.

"I was criticised by some of my colleagues for saying that emergency departments are working at 100pc capacity because we are actually working at 200pc and 300pc capacity all year round.

"But when any surge occurs, be it influenza, there is no ability for the system to open up extra capacity.

"We can't cope with any surge in the system. A surge is happening at the moment with flu," said Dr O'Conor, an emergency medicine consultant at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, Dublin.

Speaking about a further increase in people getting the flu with the reopening of schools today, she said: "The concerns of my paediatric emergency medicine colleagues would be that influenza doesn't really hit our paediatric population until the schools go back.

"It's been a very challenging week. And this coming week there are always going to be peaks in attendances on Mondays and Tuesdays.

"Even though most scheduled activity has been cancelled, and that's not good for patient care, we recognise it's very frustrating for patients on waiting lists, but we are facing into another challenging week now."

She welcomed Health Minister Simon Harris's comments on providing more beds.

"In the short term, we need acute beds brought into the system in the next year. In the longer term, we as a country are going to have to invest in large numbers of acute beds," she said.

On the shortage of life-support and critical care beds, she said: "As the winter goes on and respiratory distress affects more and more people, difficult decisions have to be made in emergency departments all around the country about who is prioritised for those beds."

INMO president Phil Ni Sheaghdha warned that if children have flu and they go to school, they pass it on.

"When those children go home, adults are likely to get it as well," she said.

"It's good advice that, if there are symptoms, don't send your children to school."

Ms Sheaghdha said that nurses were crying with stress in emergency wards and that there were still 3,000 fewer nurses in the system compared to a decade ago.

Fianna Fail education spokesman Thomas Byrne called for the flu vaccine to be provided free of charge to teachers and school staff.
National guidelines are needed to help planners decide if large-scale solar farms are acceptable.

The chair of An Bord Pleanala, Dr Mary Kelly, also said it would be a "good thing" if data centres were allowed to utilise fast-track planning as is already enjoyed by major projects, such as large wind farms and electricity projects.

This, she said, would allow schemes to be dealt with in a "holistic" way.

Dr Kelly said the board did not have any policy-making role, but did advise the Department of Housing of issues in relation to legislation.

It had told the Government that data centres should be designated as strategic infrastructure and that solar projects should be subject to guidelines similar to those in place for wind farms.

"We would often say parts of the legislation aren't working, that things are cumbersome. We did suggest that the data centres would be strategic infrastructure," Dr Kelly said.

She said the board was dealing with some 40 solar farm applications and that it would be "preferable" if guidelines were in place.

Around seven applications for wind farms were also being processed, along with "six or seven" data centres.

Among the issues in relation to data centres were not just the physical infrastructure, but the electricity needed to power them.

Dr Kelly said: "They use a lot of energy and they need to be situated near power. Sub-stations can be part of the transmission system, so they are strategic infrastructure, but the warehouse is not.

"With Apple (data centre in Athenry, Co Galway), we had the data warehouse, which went to the planning authority, and we got the appeal.

"The sub-station had to come into us separately.

"A strategic infrastructure designation would be a good thing."
09/01/18 pictured tonight outside Dundalk Courthouse where a candlelit vigil was held for murder victim Yosuke Sasaki (24) who died in a knife attack on Avenue Road, Dundalk last week. Picture Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

A candlelit vigil has been held in honour of Yosuke Sasaki. Pic: Ciara Wilkinson

Yosuke Sasaki a 24-year-old Japanese man was stabbed to death, and two other men wounded, during a mercifully brief spree of violence

Over 1,000 people took part in a candlelight vigil in Dundalk tonight for Yosuke Sasaki (24) who was killed last week as he walked home from work.

Among those in attendance was Her Excellency Mrs Mari Miyoshi, the Japanese Ambassador to Ireland.

In a statement the Sasaki family said we are truly saddened by what has happened, but we hope that this incident will not give Japanese people a bad impression of Ireland.

They said their son came to Ireland initially as a language student and only intended a short stay. However, he was touched by the kindness of the Irish people and he decided to work here.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the kindness the people of Ireland have shown.

The statement was read by Cllr John McGahon, chair of the Dundalk Municipal District which supported and organised the vigil on a cross party basis.

The family said that, When he was alive our son spoke about the warmth of the people of this town and his love of Dundalk.

The family, who are in contact with a garda liason officer, said we hope that a tragic event like this one will never happen in this country again.

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Cllr McGahon said the vigil is to show our unity with Yosuke, his family, his friend and the people of Japan. Dundalk has a vibrant and thriving multicultural community that we are proud of.

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Whatsapp 09/01/18 pictured tonight outside Dundalk Courthouse where a candlelit vigil was held for murder victim Yosuke Sasaki (24) who died in a knife attack on Avenue Road, Dundalk last week. Picture Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

Words were said by Fr Mark OHagan the administrator of St Patricks Parish, by Iman Nooh, Dundalk Islamic Community and by Rev Captain Geoffrey Walmsley, Church of Ireland.

Fr OHagan said, as we stand here this evening shoulder to shoulder, of many faiths and no faith, we gather as a community, as a family devastated, shocked at the terrible incident that happened here in our town last week.

Iman Nooh said, On behalf of Dundalk Muslim Community I am here sending our condolences to the people of Japan and most especially the family of Yosuke, his workmates.

Rev Walmsley said people gathered were of all different classes, colours, creeds of people in human commonality together, we gather as a community sharing in our shock, our hurt and our grief in Yosukes passing.

Many of his work colleagues from National Pen were at the vigil.

One man said, it is important that the people of Dundalk show their solidarity. It is one in a trillion what happened, a guy came over to work with us, his colleagues still work with us and it is nice we can show our respects.

A fund toward the repatriation costs of Mr Sasaki was due to close at midnight last night but will instead remain open until this (Tuesday) afternoon according to Mr Oliver Morgan.

He set up the GoFundMe page last week and by the time the vigil began, it had raised nearly 18,000 excluding a 5,000 donation from a local company.
The Press Ombudsman has rejected a complaint made by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams against the Irish Independent.

The complaint was in relation to a front page story published on September 1 last which was headlined Dont jail IRA murderers of innocent farmer - Adams.

The story carried extracts of an interview Mr Adams had given to local radio station LMFM after gardai discovered a number of new lines of inquiry in relation to the murder of Co Louth farmer Tom Oliver by the IRA in 1991.

The report stated that Mr Adams had said he did not think that jailing Mr Olivers killers would assist the wider process. He was also reported as saying that jailing the killers would be totally and absolutely counterproductive.

The front page story ended with information that the full story was available inside the paper on page six.

Solicitors for Mr Adams wrote to the Editor of the Irish Independent, Fionnan Sheahan, stating that their client denies your grossly inaccurate assertion that he had said Mr Olivers killers should not be jailed.

Legal representatives for the Irish Independent responded by saying the article was fair and accurate and by no means false and misleading and included transcripts of the LMFM interview to support the headline.

Mr Adams then made a complaint to the Office of the Press Ombudsman.

In his submission to the Ombudsman, Mr Sheahan said that what the paper had reported was a truthful and accurate representation of the interview and that a quote referred to by Mr Adams was incomplete.

Solicitors for Mr Adams responded by saying that the headline and whole tenet of the article was inaccurate as Mr Adams had stated in the interview that Thomas Olivers family deserved the truth and also that Sinn Fein continued to facilitate attempts to put in place an independent international body to obtain information for Thomas Olivers family and other families.

In his determination, Ombudsman Peter Feeney said that while the front page story did not mention that Mr Adams had said he supported the rights of families of people killed by the IRA to see investigations and prosecutions, this information was carried in the fuller story on page six.

He pointed out that the fuller story also included Mr Adams qualification that there were two conflicting imperatives - the rights of the family of Mr Oliver to see his murderers prosecuted and the wider process that we are all engaged in.

Mr Feeney said he did not believe the failure of the front page article to refer to this rendered it untruthful or inaccurate. This information was carried in the inside report.

Newspapers are entitled to concentrate on particular parts of interviews which they regard as newsworthy.

The view that Deputy Adams regarded the sending to jail, if convicted, the murderers of Mr Oliver as counterproductive was newsworthy.

The reference to the counterproductive outcome of jailing Mr Olivers murderers was a specific statement, the right of families to the truth was something that had been stated before by Sinn Fein representatives and was, therefore, less newsworthy.

The complaint is not upheld.
A member of the small family syndicate from Dublin that won a 38.9m EuroMillions jackpot has described how the group have been 'laughing and crying' since they found out about their windfall.

The group, who have chosen to remain anonymous, collected their cheque at National Lottery HQ today for the massive prize which they won on the final EuroMillions draw of 2017, on December 29.

The ticket was sold in The Village Shop in Malahide on the day of the draw.

A spokesperson for the group, described as a small family syndicate, said that when he checked the ticket and found out they had won the jackpot he felt 'dizzy'.

I play EuroMillions regularly and I checked my ticket as normal in a shop the morning after the draw," he said. "A message came up to contact the National Lottery. I knew then we had won. I was dizzy.

The man then went home to tell his family the news.

We stayed in all day," he revealed. "There were lots of emotions. We kept looking at each other laughing and crying. You always hope that someday you would win a jackpot, but never really believe it will happen. For us our dreams have come true. We had a friend staying and we broke the news to him on Sunday. He said he could not believe he was sleeping under the same roof as people who had won almost 39 million!

We watched the TV coverage from the winning shop in Malahide on Thursday and some of the media videos taken in the shop. And we kept saying: This is us!

The group say that they hope to continue living life as normally as possible.

"We havent had much sleep in the last week," he said. "We will take our time before we make any big changes. We would like to start our own business and maybe look at buying a new house later this year. We will take a sun holiday in May or June, possibly the Bahamas or the Maldives we will see! What is great is that we can look after family and help make their lives easier also. That will give us great pleasure.
Mohamed Morei (18) outside Dundalk District Court yesterday evening where he was charged with the murder of a Yosuke Sasaki. Photo: Gerry Mooney

Yosuke Sasaki a 24-year-old Japanese man was stabbed to death, and two other men wounded, during a mercifully brief spree of violence

A friend of the Japanese man stabbed to death in an attack in Dundalk has said he was a calm and gentle man who really liked living in Ireland.

Yosuke Sasaki (24), died after being stabbed in the back as he made his way home from work on Avenue Road at around 9am on Wednesday. Two other men were attacked in the town shortly after Yosuke was stabbed.

Mohammed Morei (18), has been charged with Yosukes murder.

Family and friends of Yosuke are struggling to come to terms with his death.

His pal Ken Sasaki, who is from Japan but became friends with Yosuke while they were both living in Ireland, said he is shocked and devastated.

He was so friendly and talkative. He was a very kind person. He was always calm and gentle to every single person hed meet. If I was to describe him in one word it would be great, Ken said.

He explained how Yosuke ended up in Ireland.

He wanted to improve his English. Thats why he came to Ireland.

Yosuke was making his way home from his work in the National Pen company in Dundalk when he was stabbed.

He was wearing headphones and was attacked from behind, so is unlikely to have seen his attacker coming.

He worked in telesales, dealing with Japanese speaking customers. According to friends, he was going to go the post office after his shift before heading home so was walking a different route to the one he would normally take.

He was originally from Ebina City in Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan, but had been living in Ireland for more than a year.

He had been there around one-and-a-half years, said Ken. He really liked the atmosphere and the Irish.

He added that Yosuke had no plans to leave Ireland any time soon.

He wanted to stay longer.

He said that friends of Yosuke cant understand why he would have been targeted.

They cant understand why a Japanese person was targeted in Dundalk. They cannot believe something like this has happened in Ireland. We believed Ireland is such a peaceful country.

Friends of Yosuke cant understand why he was chosen and why he was killed. Why did this have to happen to my friend?

A candlelight vigil is to be held in memory of Mr Sasaki at the Maid of Eireann statue outside Dundalk courthouse this evening between 7pm and 8pm.

Councillor John McGahon, chairman of Dundalk Municipal District, confirmed that a representative from the Japanese Embassy will be in attendance and will speak.

"This is a joint event that has been organised by all members of the district to show our unity with Yosuke and his family," he said.

Books of condolence will also be open at the offices of the council in Dundalk, Drogheda and Ardee this morning.

Morei appeared in court charged with the murder of Mr Sasaki at a special sitting of Dundalk District Court on Thursday evening.

Defence solicitor Barry Callan asked that his client receive "appropriate medical treatment while in custody".

The judge directed that all appropriate psychological and medical treatment be provided to Mr Morei.

The judge remanded Mr Morei in custody until next Thursday at 10am at Cloverhill District Court.

There was no application for bail.
Fine Gael has amassed a 1m election "war chest" and is well advanced in candidate selection and other preparations, party chairman Martin Heydon has warned.

Mr Heydon stressed that the party wants to "continue providing good government" and does not want an election in the coming 12 months.

But he says the brinkmanship of late November, which forced the resignation of tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald, gave everybody a reminder that the Fine Gael-led Coalition could collapse at any time.

"We definitely do not want an election in 2018. But should it happen we will be ready. In mid-December we had our super draw, our largest fundraiser of the year, and it raised 960,000 - that is money which can be spent on an election," the Kildare South TD said.

The Fine Gael chairman said candidates have been chosen in half the country's constituencies, and the party is on target to achieve the mandatory ratio of 30pc women candidates. Special attention has been paid to Tipperary and Longford, constituencies without a Fine Gael TD, and other areas where the party had problems in the February 2016 general election.

In Tipperary, now a unitary five-seater, a total of five hustings have been held with prominent potential candidates arguing their case to packed houses. The selection process is likely to be dealt with in late February or early March.

In Longford, part of four-seat Longford- Westmeath, the party has identified a potential candidate in Cllr Micheal Carrigy, of Ballinalee. Party sources say it is likely that Athlone-based senator Gabrielle McFadden, and sitting TD Peter Burke, of Mullingar, will also contest here.

Mr Heydon, first elected to the Dail in 2011 and a poll-topper last time out, said he believes that, on balance, the current Government is set to continue in office through 2018 and deliver its third scheduled budget next October. "When it was first put together few people believed it could last. But we're now working very well with our colleagues in the Independent Alliance and with the other Independents," he said.

"That was why we got such a surprise in November. It reminded us that the destiny of this Government is not entirely in our hands."

The Kildare South TD said that Brexit is the key economic issue for Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the Government, and all the parties in 2018. He argued that Fine Gael is still ideally placed to lead on this issue as it has important links through its membership of the EPP Christian Democrat party.

"It is the EU's biggest grouping, with nine of the 27 prime ministers, and all the key Brexit people in Brussels are linked to the EPP," he said in reference to chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and the presidents of the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament.

"The economic importance of Brexit is appreciated by every single voter across the country and I find a very keen interest in the issue in Kildare South."
Minister of State for Flood Relief Kevin Moran has called for a full Cabinet position to be created to focus on flood defences.

Mr Moran insisted the next government should have a senior minister for flooding who would be specifically asked to address the challenges posed by adverse weather.

He also said the Government needs to allocate more than 1bn to aid businesses and homes affected by flooding.

"I think the message is getting through finally, that public policy must shift towards a greater investment in flood defences over the next decade," Mr Moran told the Sunday Independent.

"The next Government must recognise this by appointing a senior minister in this area.

"A place at Cabinet is essential so the funding is maintained as a priority for flood relief measures," he added.

Mr Moran campaigned on flooding before being elected to the Dail and has made it the main focus of his time in office.

He insisted he is not seeking a full cabinet position to address flooding "out of self interest".

"My only interest is to see that the suffering experienced by people in floods is ended as quickly as possible," he said.

"That can only be done through greater investment in flood defence measures, through funding and other resources such as engineering staff, together with a general raising of public awareness in this whole area. A voice at Cabinet would be essential in this regard."

The minister said previous governments gave full ministries to areas of policy that required specific attention, such as the fisheries and forestry, gaeltacht, labour, and economic planning and development.

"The present Government has laid particular stress on children and youth affairs, and rural and community development, where policy objectives reflect the seriousness with which deficits have to be addressed for the betterment of the general public," he said

The minister's demand come after Storm Eleanor wreaked havoc across the country.

At the peak of the storm more than 130,000 homes, most in the west of Ireland, were left without electricity.

Business owners are also facing substantial bills to repair damage caused to their properties and goods by the floods.

The adverse weather followed Hurricane Ophelia in October, which itself is expected to result in more than 110m in insurance claims.

The Government announced last week that it has given 7m to local authorities for flood repairs. Since last June there has been major flooding damage to homes and businesses in Donegal, Portlaoise and Galway. Business owners and families have struggled to get insurance policies to protect their properties in these communities and other areas of the country.

Mr Moran said the Government's commitment to spend 430m on flood defences by 2021 is not enough - and the figure should be increased to 1bn.

"The Office of Public Works (OPW) knows what flood defence will cost the country over the next decade - somewhere in the region of 1bn.

"We must ensure that this funding is there, so that we can build on the 40 major flood relief schemes already in place across the country that are protecting 8,500 properties.

"We have just completed flood-risk mapping for the entire country, with which we are now aiming to protect a further 11,500 properties," he said.

A risk assessment report by the OPW also confirmed the Government would need to spend 1bn to address the problems caused by flooding.

The Catchment Flood Risk Assessment and Management Study also cleared the way for a 260m flood protection scheme that will benefit around 8,000 properties across the country.
Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy is looking at the tax Picture by Fergal Phillips

Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy has signalled he is ready to change the way property taxes are calculated.

Mr Murphy, who will meet Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe later this week to discuss the future of the controversial charge, has said he wants to see less emphasis on the value of the property.

That could be good news for Dublin homeowners who face higher charges than people in comparable houses outside big urban centres.

Mr Murphy told the 'Sunday Independent' that he would be "making no assumptions" on the matter before a Government review. But one in every three euro raised by the tax last year came from the four Dublin council areas.

With property taxes in Dublin up to four times higher than many rural areas, all TDs are very conscious of the political sensitivities around the capital. Most elections are won or lost for bigger parties in and around Dublin, which has over 40 TDs out of the current 158 total.

At the same time, Transport Minister Shane Ross, who like Mr Murphy represents a constituency in Dublin South, has said he would like to see more waivers for people on low incomes.

Mr Ross has said that some people with high-value homes are getting by on low pensions.

It is understood that one of the options under consideration is "a rated banding system".

This would take into account a range of factors such as location and local authority service levels, and not just depend on a property valuation.

The Government is preparing a major review of the controversial tax. Politicians and various interest groups and individuals will be invited to make submissions.

It is understood that Fianna Fail will approach the issue by trying to keep property tax rates as low as possible and especially avoid sharp rises.
Former Fine Gael TD Paddy Harte has been remembered for the "incredible work" he did to build bridges during the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Mr Harte, who served as a TD in Donegal North East for 36 years, has passed away today aged 86.

Government chief whip Joe McHugh has expressed his sympathy to Mr Harte's family and paid tribute to his late party colleague.

Mr McHugh said Mr Harte had left a lasting peace process legacy through his cross-community and cross-border work.

"I went into politics after Paddy but was acutely aware when I entered Dail Eireann of his work before me for the people of County Donegal," said Mr McHugh.

"He also did incredible work to build bridges on this island during many dark days for our people.

His lasting legacy will be the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Flanders, Belgium, which was officially opened by President McAleese in 1998.

Mr Harte co-founded the park along with Glen Barr, a former loyalist paramilitary commander who passed away last year.

Mr Harte was a TD between 1961 and 1997 and served as junior minister for Posts and Telegraths in the 1980s.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said At very difficult and divisive times during the Troubles, Paddy was a steadfast opponent of violence and he consistently sought to reconcile the communities from both traditions on this island.

Mr Varadkar said Mr Hartes work developing the Peace Park helped to lay the foundation stones of tolerance and respect which are the hallmark of the States approach to the Decade of Centenaries. He expressed his condolences to Mr Hartes family.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin also offered his sympathies to Mr Harte's family.

Paddy Harte has left a lasting mark on Irish politics, not only through his work as a TD representing the people of Donegal North East, but also as a builder of bridges," Mr Martin said.

Mr Martin said the late TD engaged meaningfully with all sides involved in the conflict and also paid tribute to him for dedicating much of his life to public service pointing to his almost four decades in the Dail.

The Fianna Fail leader noted Mr Harte's work to acknowledge the sacrifice Irish soliders made in World War 1.

This work saw him awarded numerous accolades including an Honorary OBE and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the National University of Ireland, as well as being named European of the Year in 1998," Mr Martin said.

I want to extend my condolences to Paddys wife Rosaleen and his nine children," he added.
Kelly (left) wears a yellow ochre herringbone tweed coat and textured scarf by Avoca; Thalia (centre) wears a multicoloured mosaic knit sweater by Mary Callan; Eve wears a lime tailored wool coat over tweed trouser suit, by Celtic Tweeds Photos: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

Showcase - Ireland's International Creative Expo - will be held at the RDS in Dublin from January 21 to 24.

The annual trade fair enables 450 of Ireland's top designers and manufacturers to present their latest work to more than 5,000 retail buyers from 21 countries.

Last year's show generated sales of more than 21m.

Showcase is a launch pad for Irish designers, manufacturers and craftspeople who unveil their new season collections across fashion, jewellery, home and giftware.

Expand Close Thalia wears a rust sweater with khaki and rust knit pencil skirt by Ros Duke for a preview of some of the Irish fashion and textile designs at Showcase 2018, at the RDS. Photos: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland / Facebook

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Whatsapp Thalia wears a rust sweater with khaki and rust knit pencil skirt by Ros Duke for a preview of some of the Irish fashion and textile designs at Showcase 2018, at the RDS. Photos: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

For 2018, Showcase introduces MADE/Slow, a presentation of quality products designed and made in Ireland, providing sustainable rural employment through the combination of technology and traditional production methods.

Design Ireland will feature 80 leading contemporary Irish brands chosen by an independent jury for their creativity, innovation and craftsmanship.

Karen Hennessy, chief executive of the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland, said: "Inspiring and supporting client companies to scale and successfully compete both at home and abroad is central to our strategy in growing the international reputation and commercial potential of Irish design and craft."
Cyclists make their way through the frosty Sally Gap, Co Wicklow Picture Frank Mc Grath

Plummeting temperatures of as low as -7C will lead to a blanket of frost on roads and paths across the country today - and the cold snap is set to carry on for the rest of the week.

Road users, cyclists and pedestrians have all been warned by forecasters to take their time on their travels today and wrap up well.

A Status Orange low-temperature warning was in place nationwide until 10am. However, the frosty conditions are not anticipated to lift until the early afternoon.

Met Eireann said the temperatures are the worst of the winter season so far and are not set to improve until Thursday.

Meteorologist Siobhan Ryan said the ground frost would have begun to hit most of the country as soon as it got dark last night.

"Road users, cyclists and people on foot should take extra care today - wrap up warm," Ms Ryan said.

"There will be no upward trend with regards to temperatures. "Temperatures might only get up to -2C in parts of the country (during today)."

The forecaster said the Midlands, west and most of Leinster would be the worst affected areas by the frosty conditions.

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It's expected that Wednesday night will also see bitterly cold conditions sweep the country.

AA Roadwatch has urged drivers to take care and to allow more time to reach your destination.

In Cork, the AA reports, black ice has been reported on the Midelton/Dungourney Road (R627) at Ballinacole Cross. There are very icy conditions between the Michael Collins monument in Beal na Blath and Beal na Blath village, with Gardai advising extreme care.

Also in Cork route 248 has been cancelled due to ice on roads.

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There are reports of icy conditions on the Toonsbridge/Ballylickey Road (R584) between Ballingeary and Gougane Barra.

In Limerick secondary routes in the Askeaton and Adare areas are particularly icy.

Carrick-on-Shannon and Roscommon town and it's surrounds are the worst affected raods in Connacht.

While in Ulster secondary routes in the Cavan town area are particularly icy.

Gardai have reported icy conditions on roads around Kildare Town, especially in the Kildangan area in Co Kildare.

Gardai have also noted icy conditions on secondary and local routes around Portlaoise.

Icy conditions are also set to hit commuters in the Mullingar area, with the Lynn Rd (R400) being particularly bad.

Meanwhile, Dublin Fore Brigade has warned commuters of horses on the loose on the Rathoath Road in Finglas.

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The Red Line Luas is running 13 minutes behind at points on the line.

Yesterday, the freezing conditions caused havoc - early- season GAA tournaments with matches in Mayo and Monaghan were among those cancelled at the last minute.

It is understood that many of the fans for Mayo's clash with Donegal were in the Castlebar stadium when the decision was made to postpone the match following a pitch inspection.

Meanwhile, with the cold snap due to last until Thursday, Age Action Ireland has raised concerns for elderly people, who can fare poorly when the weather takes a turn for the worse.

Justin Moran, of the advocacy group, urged communities to play their part to ensure that their older neighbours remain safe and well in their homes during the cold snap.

"Cold weather can kill and does kill in Ireland, making the winter a particularly challenging period for older people," he said.

"If there is an older person living in your neighbourhood we would encourage you to visit or phone them to check if they need supplies and that they are OK - don't depend on others to do it."
A restaurant in Dublins Temple Bar has called one of its dissatisfied customers the rudest person ever in a public post on TripAdvisor.

Klaw The Seafood Cafe on Fownes Street in Dublin 2 made the comments when responding to a womans review three weeks ago.

The anonymous diner gave Niall Sabongis seafood restaurant a one-star review in terms of value, service and food on TripAdvisor.

She claimed that the lobster she ordered made for just three bites of meat.

But Niall Sabongi decided to respond to the diner's complaint, saying that she was "disgracefully rude to the staff".

You were the rudest person any of the team have ever encountered! the restaurant responded on TripAdvisor.

Even the lady with you had to apologise for you being so disgracefully rude to the staff and for no reason!

In her review, the customer said while the quality of the lobster was excellent in terms of flavour and taste, she was dissatisfied.

After several questions regarding the size and price of the portion of lobster served, specifically would the portion be enough to 'feed' us for dinner. We were assured it would and was more than ample.

Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case. We received our lobsters which turned out to contain literally three bites of meat. The price was 18 euro. This was accompanied by a small bowl of chips - 4 euro.

While both were excellent in taste and flavour, neither represented value for money. So we complained. To be frank, we were brushed off, being told that it was explained that this was the price per portion.

We were not satisfied with this response as we have specifically enquired if the portion was enough to feed us for dinner. It was not and we felt mislead. We complained again. This time the person dealing with the complaint became argumentative.

The restaurant hit back, by outlining its side of the story.

Youre giving out because of the price of Lobster in December, so lets break it down: Local live Irish Lobster caught off the Dublin Coast  1. The lobster is clearly marked on the Menu @10 per 100g; 2. You were shown the lobster; 3. You were given the weight; 4. You were given the price.

You proceeded to order it but being clearly out of your budget you decided to share a lobster and have 1/2 each.

You then go on to complain that it's not enough to fill you! Youre a grown woman, If you don't know how much you need to eat to fill yourself how in gods name do you expect us to know what it takes to 'FILL' you.

The post continued: In this industry, you hear the legend of the nastiest person of the year and I'm delighted to let you know that for 2017 you're the winner. Award by us and vouched for by your own company on the night!

Nobody has the right to be rude and nasty but karma will play its roll in all this.

Speaking to Independent.ie, owner Niall said that while people are perfectly entitled to review restaurants on TripAdvisor, they should be mindful that a restaurant is a livelihood for the owners and staff.

[The response I made] is not something that Id normally do. But I did it more so for the sake of the staff... to show solidarity with them.
Premium

Eoghan Harris Opinion Misery media fails to give due credit to the Taoiseach

Taoiseach Micheal Martin must drive his advisers mad. Unlike Leo Varadkar or Donald Trump, he never bigs up success stories such as the effect of Level 3 Plus on Covid or his visionary Shared Island project. Last Friday, Tony Holohan and RTE cheerleaders seemed to imply Level 5 was responsible for the improved Covid situation. Not so.
Not for nothing was Barbara Bush known as 'The Enforcer'

Barbara Bush, tougher than her husband and known to her family as 'The Enforcer', is probably the most popular of all ex-US first ladies of recent times. Jackie Kennedy is remembered across the globe for elegance and tragedy, but she was not loved. Rosalynn Carter worked hard and was a noted campaigner on issues of mental health, but she has suffered in retrospect because of her bitterness at his defeat by Ronald Reagan, who is widely perceived to have been as great a success as Carter was a failure. The brittle Nancy Reagan was an essential support to her husband, but was thought to care little for anyone else. Hillary Clinton was loathed by those who thought her a careerist. The likeable Laura Bush did a lot of useful work but lacked her mother-in-law's commanding personality. And although Michelle Obama had rock-star status, that has diminished as she and her husband embrace luxury and celebrity. Betty Ford is probably the closest rival, having been far more effective and formidable than her husband Gerald, the 38th president, and still having a posthumous reputation for her prowess as a campaigner on addiction, not least because so many of the famous troop to the Betty Ford Clinic.
'There was one particularly traumatic incident, when a person was out on a boat. They had an accident with a propeller and their limbs were severed."

Phil Ni Sheaghdha, the newly-appointed head of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), is recalling one of the many harrowing incidents she tended to while working as a nurse in intensive care.

Her words jar with the warm glow of the fairy lights, still twinkling around her, as she settles into a chair in the canteen and her first week in her new role.

"You focus immediately on stabilising the patient, giving them the care required, making sure the bleeding stops and fluids are replaced - working as a team," she says.

And when do your own emotions kick in? "When you finish your shift and you are driving home and you are wondering 'God, did we do everything we could?'"

Originally from the small rural village of Ventry, near Dingle, Ms Ni Sheaghdha developed a love for nursing while still a leaving cert student, working at a local care centre for the elderly. There she would play cards with patients and found joy in the simple moments of their interactions. A daughter of emigrant parents, it was these skills of building a nurse-patient rapport that stood her in good stead while working with end-of-life care patients at a cancer centre in New York, often tending to terminally ill children.

Expand Close Sharp end: Phil Ni Sheaghdha, the INMOs new director of industrial relations. Photo: David Conachy / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sharp end: Phil Ni Sheaghdha, the INMOs new director of industrial relations. Photo: David Conachy

There, she says, "emotions were on a different scale". When the patients' families would say to her in an nonchalant tone: "Oh, you are on night duty tonight. That's great!" it made it worth the while. "It meant that trust was there. They knew they could relax a bit and go off and have a few hours sleep and you would call if needed."

In the midst of trolley figures and headlines about the health crisis, it is easy to forget the real stories behind the nurses who are now seeking better pay.

The INMO recently made a submission to the Public Sector Pay Commission citing that - in comparison to nurses in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - Irish nurses must have the same entry requirements but are paid 12-17pc less.

Ms Ni Sheaghdha says public policy in this country "absolutely encourages nurses to emigrate", with 70pc citing 'resignation' as their reason for leaving.

She cites how the UK treats our newly-trained nurses in comparison to bosses in Ireland. When Irish nurses qualify they are asked two simple questions: "What date can you notify us that you have passed your exams?' and "When you are coming and what do you specialise in?" In comparison, Irish healthcare bosses call nurses in for a rigorous full-scale interview, then wait six to eight weeks to inform them whether or not they have been accepted. Even then, they won't be informed which hospital they will be placed at.

All of this, and Ms Ni Sheaghdha says Irish nurses must then go on to endure "the lowest pay and the longest hours, while working under very difficult conditions in overcrowded hospitals".

The trade union boss says the Irish government needs to wake up and make Ireland an employer of choice that gives nurses an incentive to stay rather than hoping they'll have a gra for home. "We can't just rely on this idea that 'ah sure they'll be home for Christmas and Mammy might ask them to stay'."

She cites Brexit as a future factor that is going to have a detrimental effect on Irish hospitals if something isn't done to stop the drain of nurses. "The competition we have from the UK will get intensive. It will mean the nurses who are training here will be given very attractive packages to go to the UK."

Controversial choices and hard bargaining down the line for the INMO

Another issue coming down the tracks is the possibility that abortion on demand will be introduced in 2018.

Ms Ni Sheaghdha says the INMO doesn't take political positions, but she says: "I presume it will be debated at our conference in May."

Asked if nurses should be allowed to opt out of a termination procedure if it is against their personal beliefs, she said: "I think that is a matter that will be debated and determined."

It is possible, she says, that if the legislation is passed, nurses could ask the INMO for a 'conscientious objection clause' to be negotiated into their contract.

"They haven't said that yet because it isn't a feature, but if it were the case and if that was the mandate they gave us, that is what we would have to seek."

On her own opinion on abortion she says: "I don't have an opinion one way or another. I think that if women in Ireland require care - regardless of what it is, and if the law [is laid down] and the citizens vote to have the procedure here or not - then the care of the person is what we would be most concerned with. I don't have a position one way or another. My job has been the care of the patient."

In the meantime, Irish nurses have much more pressing demands to deal with, she says. If the INMO follows procedure and makes demands for better pay to the public service pay commission, and the commission finds in its favour but the Department of Finance still doesn't meet those demands then, she says: "You are going to have a big problem."
My girlfriend's husband died very tragically four years ago. One year later in her mid-20s, she had a liaison with her then boss, resulting in her becoming pregnant. She terminated the pregnancy after 15 weeks because of religious and cultural differences. She said it was the correct decision and has absolutely no regrets.

She moved from a rural location to Dublin for personal security reasons and also because of complex problems regarding her late husband's estate and trouble with her parish because of the termination.

We met as we were working in the same company and over time, we became very friendly. We officially became boyfriend/girlfriend about 15 months ago and we care about each other deeply.

I brought her home to meet my mother and siblings. My mother is a devout Catholic and would disown me if she knew my girlfriend had had a termination.

Our work situations have now changed - nothing to do with our relationship - and we realise that we will not be able to meet as regularly as we do now. My girlfriend feels insecure and lacking in confidence. She has suggested that we live together from next February. She also said she would like to start a family and have children over the next 10 years and then we will get married.

This came as a bit of a shock to me, but I understand where she is coming from because of the traumatic experiences she has had over the last four years. However, I cannot leave my apartment as I share it with other mature students who, like me, are working full-time by day. We have an environment of study in the apartment and I have a few years before my studies are completed so 2020 is the earliest that I can seriously contemplate cohabiting with her.

I will do anything I can to help her. But I am concerned about our future relationship.

Mary replies: I have shortened your very detailed letter considerably for reasons of anonymity. It seems to me that you are battling with two problems. Firstly, what to do if your mother ever found out that your girlfriend had a termination, and secondly, you don't want to move in with your girlfriend for another two years.

Parents pass on to their children their moral and religious beliefs and hope that they will be guided by them. It would be very wrong of any mother to expect a future daughter-in-law to share her beliefs and it would also be wrong of her to judge her if she did not do so.

It should be of no concern to your mother what your girlfriend did before meeting you. Instead, she should be hoping your girlfriend will make you happy in the future. So if it doesn't bother you that she terminated a pregnancy, then stop thinking about it and get on with enjoying each other's company.

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Which brings me to your second problem. I don't get any sense of lightness or fun in the relationship from your email other than your assurance that you care deeply for each other.

If you can't live together until 2020, so be it, but there is nothing to stop you enjoying each other's company on an ongoing basis until that time.

There will still be plenty of time for your girlfriend to have babies and who knows, she may have lost some of her aversion to being married by that time.

Tell her your plan for study and work advancement and explain how you see her place in all of this. Because of her insecurities, be sure to tell her how much you care.

Nobody should be pressured into moving in together before they feel that the time is right. You will find that compromise plays a big part in any couple's story.

But you can't be studying all the time, particularly at weekends, and so it should be possible for both of you to enjoy time together as well.

You can contact Mary OConor anonymously by visiting www.dearmary.ie or email her at dearmary@independent.ie or write c/o 27-32 Talbot Street, Dublin 1. All correspondence will be treated in confidence. Mary OConor regrets that she is unable to answer any questions privately.
A hastily deleted tweet which saw the wrong Conservative MP named as the partys new chairman has been mocked on social media.

For a few minutes it looked as though Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was to become the partys chairman in Theresa Mays January reshuffle.

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But the actual new chairman has been confirmed as Brandon Lewis, the MP for Great Yarmouth, who has moved from a ministerial position in the Home Office. He has also been made minister without portfolio.

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The gaffe proved an amusing sideshow as the media was watching and waiting for answers on who was in and out in the reshuffle.

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Graylings Wikipedia entry was updated to say he served in the chairman role for between 10 and 37 seconds, although the edit was later removed as vandalism.

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In spite of its brevity, people spoke longingly of Graylings chairmanship.

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Among those getting in on the joke was MP Ed Vaizey, the Conservative member for Didcot and Wantage, who recalled a mix-up between him and Liberal Democrat Ed Davey.

Sharing a tweet by Guardian journalist Gaby Hinsliff about a reshuffle which went wrong during the Blair years, he said: That happened with me and Ed Davey. I was trade minister for 30 minutes.

Even Lewiss official announcement, on the Number 10 Twitter account, was marred by a spelling error although it was swiftly adjusted.

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The original tweet named Lewis as the minister without porfolio.

Hold on, there arent missing letters again are there?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted she was optimistic her conservatives and the Social Democrats (SPD) could cut a deal as they began five days of make-or-break talks about reviving the 'grand coalition' that has governed Germany since 2013.

Persuading the centre-left SPD to team up with her is Ms Merkel's best bet for forming a stable government and extending her 12 years in office, after she failed in November to form an alliance with two smaller parties.

Arriving at SPD headquarters for talks more than three months after a national election, Ms Merkel (inset) said the parties had much work to get through but intended to tackle it quickly, adding: "I think it can succeed."

The SPD, which had said it would go into opposition after its worst election showing since 1933, reconsidered when Germany's president intervened.

But the party, among whose membership opposition to a grand coalition re-run remains strong, has been playing hard-to-get.

A group called "NoGroKo", meaning "no grand coalition", has formed within its ranks to campaign against working with Ms Merkel again, saying that would cost the SPD votes and make the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the leading opposition party.

SPD leader Martin Schulz said that, while the outcome of the talks was unclear, his party would enter them constructively.

"We won't draw any red lines - rather we want to push through as much red politics as possible," Mr Schulz said, referring to the party's colour.

He said five days should suffice to find out whether the parties had enough common ground to launch full-blown coalition talks. The SPD leadership is due to recommend on Friday whether or not to start those talks, and it will then be up to an SPD party congress on January 21 to make a decision.

A coalition between Ms Merkel's CDU/CSU alliance - which lost ground to the AfD in September's ballot - and the SPD has run Europe's largest economy for eight of the last 12 years.

But it has tended to be viewed as a last resort by both politicians and voters as it leaves the opposition weak.

A poll for broadcaster ARD showed more than half of the electorate - 52pc - are sceptical about reviving it, while 45pc are in favour.

Not natural allies, the two camps are likely to clash on immigration, tax, healthcare and Europe - and expectations among other top figures in the parties were mixed as the preliminary talks got under way.

Norbert Roemer, SPD head in the regional assembly of North Rhine-Westphalia, said none of his colleagues favoured a grand coalition because they no longer trusted Ms Merkel. The SPD in the eastern state of Thuringia is also sceptical about such a tie-up.
The Epiphany celebrations in the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro feature a tradition that each year causes an outcry among outsiders: parents encourage children as young as five to smoke cigarettes.

Locals say the practice has been passed down for centuries as part of a celebration of life tied to the Christian Epiphany and the winter solstice - but nobody is sure what it symbolises, or exactly why parents buy the packets of cigarettes for their children and encourage them to take part.

The two-day celebrations include dancing around bonfires, a piper playing music and an elected "king" who distributes plentiful wine and snacks.

The legal age to buy tobacco in Portugal is 18, but nothing prohibits parents from giving children cigarettes, and Portuguese authorities don't intervene to stop the practice.

Guilhermina Mateus, a 35-year-old coffee shop owner, cites custom as the reason why she gives her daughter cigarettes.

"I can't explain why. I don't see any harm in that because they don't really smoke, they inhale and immediately exhale, of course," she said.
Photo taken with permission from the twitter feed of @SusanSball4 of smoke coming from Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, USA

Three people were injured after a fire broke out in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system, New York City fire chiefs have said.

The blaze started at around 7am (noon GMT), causing smoke to billow from the roof at the Manhattan building which contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Two civilians and a firefighter were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, the New York fire department said.

It took about an hour to put out the fire.

The president was at the White House when fire engines clogged the streets around his Fifth Avenue building during the morning rush hour.

Mr Trump's son Eric later wrote on Twitter: "There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower.

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

The Republican president announced his candidacy in 2015 at Trump Tower, his home for more than 30 years.
The Trump administration has ended special protections for Salvadoran immigrants.

The decision could force nearly 200,000 to leave the US by September 2019 or face deportation.

El Salvador is the fourth country whose citizens have lost temporary protected status under President Donald Trump.

Salvadorans have been, by far, the largest beneficiaries of the programme, which provides humanitarian relief for foreigners whose countries are hit with natural disasters or other strife.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's decision, while not surprising, will send shivers through parts of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and other metropolitan areas that are home to large numbers of Salvadorans.

They have enjoyed special protection since earthquakes struck the Central American country in 2001, and many have established deep roots in the US, starting families and businesses.

The action also produces a serious challenge for El Salvador, a country of 6.2 million people whose economy counts on money sent by wage earners in the US.

Over the past decade, growing numbers of Salvadorans, many coming as families or unaccompanied children, have entered the United States illegally through Mexico, fleeing violence and poverty.

In September 2016, the Obama administration extended protections for 18 months, saying El Salvador suffered lingering harm from the 2001 earthquakes that killed more than 1,000 people and was temporarily unable to absorb such a large number of returning people.

Ms Nielsen, who faced a Monday deadline on another extension, determined El Salvador has received significant international aid to recover from the earthquake and that homes, schools and hospitals there have been rebuilt.

Salvadorans will have until September 9 2019, to leave the country or adjust their legal status.

"The substantial disruption of living conditions caused by the earthquake" no longer exists, the department said in a statement.

Homeland Security also said more than 39,000 Salvadorans have returned home from the US in two years, demonstrating El Salvador's capacity to absorb people.

It said the 18-month delay would give Congress time to develop a legislative change if it chooses, while also giving Salvadorans and their government time to prepare.

Democratic leaders and immigrant advocacy groups greeted the decision with resounding dismay, saying well-established families, many with US-born children, will be separated and people will be forced to return to heavy violence in El Salvador.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called it "a heartbreaking blow to nearly a quarter of a million hard-working Salvadorans who are American in every way".

Representative Bennie Thompson, ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said it was "just the latest in a string of heartless, xenophobic actions from the Trump administration".

However, NumbersUSA, a group advocating immigration restrictions, called it an important step for the humanitarian program's credibility.

"The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the 'temporary' protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration," said Roy Beck, the group's president.

El Salvador president Salvador Sanchez Ceren spoke by phone on Friday with Ms Nielsen to renew his plea to extend status for 190,000 Salvadorans and allow more time for Congress to deliver a long-term fix for them to stay in the US.

The country's top diplomat, foreign minister Hugo Martinez, said Monday's decision underscored a need for Congress to act before September 2019.

"We are convinced we can get legislation in the US Congress before that date," he said.

The decision comes amid intensifying talks between the White House and Congress on an immigration package that may include protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the country as children and were temporarily shielded from deportation under an Obama-era programme.

"Mr Trump said in September that he was ending deferred action for childhood arrivals, or Daca, but gave Congress until March to act.

The US created temporary protected status in 1990 to provide safe havens for people from countries affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war and other disasters, and it currently shields nearly 320,000 people from 10 countries.

The benefit, which includes work authorisation, can be renewed up to 18 months at a time by the Homeland Security secretary.

Critics say it has proved anything but temporary, with many beneficiaries staying years after the initial justification.

Ms Nielsen said last week that short-term extensions are not the answer.

"Getting them to a permanent solution is a much better plan than having them live six months to 12 months to 18 months," she said.

In November, Ms Nielsen's predecessor, acting Secretary Elaine Duke, ended the protection for Haitians, requiring about 50,000 to leave or adjust their legal status by July 22 2019, and for Nicaraguans, giving about 2,500 until January 5 2019.

She delayed a decision affecting more than 50,000 Hondurans, leaving that decision to Ms Nielsen.

Last year, the Trump administration extended status for South Sudan and ended it for Sudan.

Other countries covered are Nepal, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Salvadoran immigrant Orlando Zepeda, who came to the US in 1984 to flee civil war, said he was not surprised by Monday's decision given the administration's position on other countries.

Still, that does not make it any easier for the 51-year-old Los Angeles-area man who works in building maintenance and has two American-born children.

"It's sad, because it's the same story of family separation from that time, and now history repeats itself with my children," Mr Zepeda said in Spanish.

AP
A US judge has dismissed criminal charges against a Nevada rancher and his sons accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities in 2014.

Chief US District Judge Gloria Navarro signalled when she declared a mistrial last month that she might dismiss the case outright against 71-year-old Cliven Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Montana militia leader Ryan Payne.

The judge, sitting in Las Vegas, severely criticised prosecutors for wilfully violating the due process rights of the defendants, including failing to properly turn over evidence to their lawyer.

But she gave the government a chance to submit written documents opposing dismissal of all charges.

The decision will reverberate among rights advocates in western states, where the federal government controls vast areas of land that some people want to protect and others want to use for grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling.

A tense armed stand-off outside Bunkerville, about 80 miles north east of Las Vegas, stopped a federal Bureau of Land Management round-up of Bundy cattle from public land including what is now Gold Butte National Monument.

About three dozen heavily armed federal agents guarding corrals in a dry riverbed faced hundreds of flag-waving men, women and children calling for the release of 400 cows.

The cattle had been rounded up under court orders issued over Mr Bundy letting his herd graze for 20 years without paying government fees.

No shots were fired before the outnumbered and outgunned federal agents withdrew.

Several gunmen among the protesters who had assault-style rifles were acquitted of criminal charges in two trials last year.

Ryan and Ammon Bundy were acquitted of federal criminal charges in Oregon after leading an armed occupation of a national wildlife refuge in early 2016 to demand the government turn over public land to local control.

Payne awaits sentencing in that case but is trying to withdraw his guilty plea to a felony conspiracy charge, which is expected to bring a sentence of more than three years in prison.

In Las Vegas, the judge declared a mistrial on December 20, leaving Cliven Bundy as the only defendant still jailed after refusing an offer to be released under house arrest.

AP
The group's half-year revenues slipped 2.9% to $664.7 million (491.3 million) once its tie-up with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software was set aside (Brian Lawless/PA)

Shares in Micro Focus International have plunged after the software groups half-year results missed expectations and it forecast future revenues to fall.

The group was down more than 13% in morning trading on the London Stock Exchange, with half-year revenues slipping 2.9% to $664.7 million (491.3 million) once its tie-up with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Software was set aside.

Taking into account the $8.8 billion (6.5 billion) reverse takeover of HPE Software, revenues surged 80% to $1.2 billion (886.9 million) over the six-month period to the end of October.

Pre-tax profits also soared following the deal, climbing 29% to $145.7 million (107.7 million) over the period.

However, it said group revenues would fall between 2% to 4% for the year to October 2018.

The half-year update came as the FTSE 100 firm announced a boardroom shake-up, with ex ARM Holdings and easyJet executive Chris Kennedy joining as chief financial officer.

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Mike Phillips, the companys current CFO, has been shifted to director of mergers and acquisitions, while Ian Fraser has been recruited as chief human resources officer.

In his first set of results since being appointed in September, chief executive Chris Hsu said: The period from announcement to completion of the HPE Software transaction is the longest of any of the Micro Focus mergers and acquisitions.

This was a period of uncertainty for customers, partners, investors and employees which came to an end as we brought the two companies together at the beginning of November.

We have achieved a great deal over the last 12 months and enter the new financial year with stronger foundations than a year ago.

Adjusted earnings, the firms preferred measure of performance, rose 66% to $530.1 million (391.8 million) for the half year.

Dividend per share also lifted 16% to 34.6 cents over the period.

Focusing on the shake-up, executive chairman Kevin Loosemore said the new position for Mr Phillips came in response to conversations with shareholders about how it can scale its approach to M&A.

He added: Both Chris and Ian bring recent relevant experience in functional terms and also in dealing with listed businesses of scale in the UK and the US, and we welcome them to the team.

On the share price fall, Graham Spooner, investment research analyst at The Share Centre, said: Its likely that investors are also reacting negatively to the group now forecasting a decline in revenue of 2% to 4% for the year at its core business as a result of the declines in the existing Micro Focus Product Portfolio.

This has been a recent concern for the market as it focused on the longer-term growth picture, which in turn has seen a bumpier ride for investors and the share price over the last year.
No details are set for any potential interview with Donald Trump

No details are set for any potential interview with Donald Trump (AP)

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team of investigators has expressed interest in speaking with Donald Trump as part of a probe into possible co-ordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, a source has said.

The issue of an interview with the president has come up in recent discussions between Mr Mueller's team and Trump lawyers, but no details have been worked out, including the scope of questions the president would agree to answer if a meeting were to take place, according to the source.

Mr Mueller has for months led a team of prosecutors and agents investigating whether Russia and Mr Trump's Republican campaign co-ordinated to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and whether he worked to obstruct an FBI investigation into his aides.

Mr Mueller's team recently concluded a series of interviews with many current and former White House aides, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus.

A spokesman for Mr Mueller declined to comment, as did Trump lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow.

A White House spokesman pointed to a statement from White House lawyer Ty Cobb saying the White House does not publicly discuss its conversations with Mr Mueller.

AP
Fire crews are seen at base of Trump Tower, in New York, U.S., January 8, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. Twitter/@oinonio/via REUTERS

A smoke coming out of Trump Tower as seen from building next to it, in New York City, U.S., January 8, 2018 in this still image obtained from social media video. INSTAGRAM/@SLIMADOS/via REUTERS

A smoke is seen rising from the roof of Trump Tower, in New York, U.S., January 8, 2018 in this still image obtained from social media video. TWITTER/@NYCBMD/via REUTERS

Three people were injured after a fire broke out in Trump Tower's heating and air conditioning system, New York City fire chiefs have said.

The blaze started at around 7am (noon GMT), causing smoke to billow from the roof at the Manhattan building which contains President Donald Trump's home and business offices.

Two civilians and a firefighter were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, the New York fire department said.

It took about an hour to put out the fire.

Expand Close A smoke coming out of Trump Tower as seen from building next to it, in New York City, U.S., January 8, 2018 in this still image obtained from social media video. INSTAGRAM/@SLIMADOS/via REUTERS / Facebook

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Whatsapp A smoke coming out of Trump Tower as seen from building next to it, in New York City, U.S., January 8, 2018 in this still image obtained from social media video. INSTAGRAM/@SLIMADOS/via REUTERS

The president was at the White House when fire engines clogged the streets around his Fifth Avenue building during the morning rush hour.

Mr Trump's son Eric later wrote on Twitter: "There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower.

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

The Republican president announced his candidacy in 2015 at Trump Tower, his home for more than 30 years.
The Panama-registered tanker "Sanchi" is seen ablaze after a collision with a Hong Kong-registered freighter off China's eastern coast (Korea Coast Guard via AP)

An Iranian oil tanker that caught fire after colliding with a freighter off China's east coast is at risk of exploding and sinking, Chinese state media have said.

The news came as three countries struggled to find its 32 missing crew members and contain oil spewing from the blazing wreck.

State broadcaster China Central Television, citing Chinese officials, said none of the 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis who have been missing since the collision late on Saturday have been found as of 8am on Monday.

Meanwhile, search and cleanup efforts have been hampered by fierce fires and poisonous gases that have completely consumed the tanker and surrounding waters, CCTV reported.

The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided late on Saturday with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in the East China Sea, 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai, China's Ministry of Transport said.

China, South Korea and the US have sent ships and planes to search for Sanchi's crew, all of whom remain missing. The US Navy, which sent a P-8A aircraft from Okinawa, Japan, to aid the search, said late on Sunday that none of the missing crew had been found.

All 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the United States to China, were rescued, the Chinese ministry said. The Crystal's crew members were all Chinese nationals.

It was not immediately clear what caused the collision.

State-run China Central Television reported the tanker was still floating and burning, and that oil was visible in the water. Photos distributed by the South Korean government showed the tanker on fire and shrouded in thick black smoke.

Chinese authorities dispatched three ships to clean the oil spill. It was not clear, however, whether the tanker was still spilling oil as of Monday and the size of the oil slick caused by the accident also was not known.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 metric tons of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.

The Sanchi has operated under five different names since it was built in 2008, according the UN-run International Maritime Organisation.

The IMO listed its registered owner as Hong Kong-based Bright Shipping Ltd., on behalf of the National Iranian Tanker Co., a publicly traded company based in Tehran.

The National Iranian Tanker Co. describes itself as operating the largest tanker fleet in the Middle East.

An official in Iran's Oil Ministry said 30 of the tanker's 32 crew members were Iranians.

"We have no information on their fate," he said on Sunday. "We cannot say all of them have died, because rescue teams are there and providing services."

The official said the tanker was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Co. and had been rented by a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Co. He said the tanker was on its way to South Korea.

Hanwa Total is a 50-50 partnership between the Seoul-based Hanwha Group and the French oil giant Total. Total did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is the second collision for a ship from the National Iranian Tanker Co. in less than a year and a half. In August 2016, one of its tankers collided with a Swiss container ship in the Singapore Strait, damaging both ships but causing no injuries or oil spill.

AP
Senior South Korean officials are heading to the Demilitarised Zone for rare talks with their North Korean counterparts.

The officials departed Seoul early on Tuesday for the border.

The agenda includes co-operation at next month's Winter Olympics in South Korea and improving long-strained ties.

The rivals' first formal meeting in about two years comes after months of tension over North Korea's expanding nuclear and missile programmes.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said in his New Year's Day address that he was willing to send a delegation to the Olympics.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in welcomed Mr Kim's overture and proposed talks.

Critics say Mr Kim may be trying to divide Seoul and Washington in a bid to weaken international pressure and sanctions over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests.
The Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets tackle a fire following a bombing that targeted the office of the militant group Ajnad al-Koukaz (AP)

Syrian government forces have captured 14 villages as they advanced on the largest rebel-held enclave in the country's north following a wave of air strikes.

The Syrian troops and their allies have been on the offensive since late October in Hama and Idlib provinces, capturing nearly 100 villages from insurgent groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee.

The offensive intensified on Christmas Day after reinforcements were brought in from other parts of Syria.

The main aim of the troops is to reach the rebel-held Abu Zuhour air base and secure the road linking the capital, Damascus, with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest.

Rebels captured Abu Zuhour in 2015 after a three-year siege.

The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media (SCMM) said the newly captured villages, include Freija, Jahman, Dawoudiyeh and Jub al-Qasab, bring the troops closer to the air base.

The SCMM and the opposition's UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that 14 villages have been captured over the past hours.

Russia's defence m inistry said its air base and naval station in western Syria came under at least 13 attempted attacks by drones since Saturday.

The ministry said three of the armed drones landed outside the base and others detonated when they crashed, while seven drones were shot down. The ministry said there was no damage to the bases.

The Observatory said the attacks were carried out by an Islamist rebel faction that operates in rural Latakia province, southwest of Idlib, and which had targeted the air base a number of times since December 31.

The offensive in the southern parts of Idlib province comes amid intense air strikes and shelling that have killed 21 people since Sunday, according to the Observatory.

Clashes also erupted on Monday near the Damascus suburb of Harasta, after government forces reached troops trapped for more than a week in a military base surrounded by insurgents.

State media said the Syrian army broke through rebel lines on Sunday to reach soldiers trapped at the Murakabat vehicle base near Harasta, in the eastern Ghouta suburbs.

Rebels surrounded the base late last month, trapping an unknown number of soldiers inside.

The rebels said they have taken numerous soldiers hostage.

The Observatory says 159 rebels and government soldiers have been killed in fighting over the base since December 29.

In the north-western city of Idlib, meanwhile, paramedics said the death toll from a massive car bombing the previous evening has risen to at least 25.

Nearly 100 people were wounded. The Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, said four children and 11 women were among those killed.

The Observatory said 27 civilians were killed in the attack, including 14 children, adding that the attack also killed at least 15 insurgents.

The Sunday night bombing targeted the office of Ajnad al-Koukaz, a militant group consisting of foreign fighters mostly from the Caucuses and Russia, activists said.

Idlib is the capital of a province by the same name that is controlled by insurgent factions, including an al-Qaida-linked group.

AP
Washington, Jan 8 (IBNS): Measurements show that the decline in chlorine, resulting from an international ban on chlorine-containing manmade chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), has resulted in about 20 percent less ozone depletion during the Antarctic winter than there was in 2005  the first year that measurements of chlorine and ozone during the Antarctic winter were made by NASAs Aura satellite.

We see very clearly that chlorine from CFCs is going down in the ozone hole, and that less ozone depletion is occurring because of it, said lead author Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

CFCs are long-lived chemical compounds that eventually rise into the stratosphere, where they are broken apart by the Suns ultraviolet radiation, releasing chlorine atoms that go on to destroy ozone molecules. Stratospheric ozone protects life on the planet by absorbing potentially harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancer and cataracts, suppress immune systems and damage plant life.

Two years after the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, nations of the world signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which regulated ozone-depleting compounds. Later amendments to the Montreal Protocol completely phased out production of CFCs.

Past studies have used statistical analyses of changes in the ozone holes size to argue that ozone depletion is decreasing. This study is the first to use measurements of the chemical composition inside the ozone hole to confirm that not only is ozone depletion decreasing, but that the decrease is caused by the decline in CFCs.

The study was published Jan. 4 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Antarctic ozone hole forms during September in the Southern Hemispheres winter as the returning suns rays catalyze ozone destruction cycles involving chlorine and bromine that come primarily from CFCs. To determine how ozone and other chemicals have changed year to year, scientists used data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) aboard the Aura satellite, which has been making measurements continuously around the globe since mid-2004. While many satellite instruments require sunlight to measure atmospheric trace gases, MLS measures microwave emissions and, as a result, can measure trace gases over Antarctica during the key time of year: the dark southern winter, when the stratospheric weather is quiet and temperatures are low and stable.

The change in ozone levels above Antarctica from the beginning to the end of southern winter  early July to mid-September  was computed daily from MLS measurements every year from 2005 to 2016. During this period, Antarctic temperatures are always very low, so the rate of ozone destruction depends mostly on how much chlorine there is, Strahan said. This is when we want to measure ozone loss.

They found that ozone loss is decreasing, but they needed to know whether a decrease in CFCs was responsible. When ozone destruction is ongoing, chlorine is found in many molecular forms, most of which are not measured. But after chlorine has destroyed nearly all the available ozone, it reacts instead with methane to form hydrochloric acid, a gas measured by MLS. By around mid-October, all the chlorine compounds are conveniently converted into one gas, so by measuring hydrochloric acid we have a good measurement of the total chlorine, Strahan said.

Nitrous oxide is a long-lived gas that behaves just like CFCs in much of the stratosphere. The CFCs are declining at the surface but nitrous oxide is not. If CFCs in the stratosphere are decreasing, then over time, less chlorine should be measured for a given value of nitrous oxide. By comparing MLS measurements of hydrochloric acid and nitrous oxide each year, they determined that the total chlorine levels were declining on average by about 0.8 percent annually.

The 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016 as determined from MLS ozone measurements was expected. This is very close to what our model predicts we should see for this amount of chlorine decline, Strahan said. This gives us confidence that the decrease in ozone depletion through mid-September shown by MLS data is due to declining levels of chlorine coming from CFCs. But were not yet seeing a clear decrease in the size of the ozone hole because thats controlled mainly by temperature after mid-September, which varies a lot from year to year.

Looking forward, the Antarctic ozone hole should continue to recover gradually as CFCs leave the atmosphere, but complete recovery will take decades. CFCs have lifetimes from 50 to 100 years, so they linger in the atmosphere for a very long time, said Anne Douglass, a fellow atmospheric scientist at Goddard and the studys co-author. As far as the ozone hole being gone, were looking at 2060 or 2080. And even then there might still be a small hole.

Image Credits: NASA
In keeping with the Government's policy to release more security forces-held lands to the civilians, the Sri Lanka Army released another 133.34 acres on December 28, 2017, in the Keppapilavu area of Mullaitivu District to the civilian Tamil owners. As of December 1, 2017, the Army had released a total of 55,510.58 acres of land in Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Vavuniya Districts in the Northern Province, in addition to the 133.34 acres released on December 28 in Keppapilavu. As on March 1, 2016, the Army was occupying 67,427 acres of land belonging to Tamil civilians in the Northern Province. The Army commenced the gradual release of private property used by the armed forces after the conclusion of the Eelam War on May 17, 2009.

Earlier, Sri Lanka had transformed the Menik Farm Displacement Camp in Mullaitivu District into Menik Farm village, an apparel village with garment factories, as part of a new US$ 1.8 million national apparel initiative at village levels. The Displacement Camp was at one time considered the world's largest refugee camp, sheltering close to 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). It was closed at the end of 2012, as all IDPs had been resettled. The national apparel village project aims at setting up 150 Mini Apparel Factories across the country. 73 of the 150 factories are dedicated to conflict affected areas, including 38 in the Northern Province and 35 in the Eastern Province. On November 14, 2017, Minister of Industry and Commerce Rishad Bathiudeen addressing the opening ceremony of the first factory in the Menik Farm village, declaring, "We want these 150 factories to form their own apparel companies or cooperatives one day and share their profits among them. Reconciliation would be a distant dream without provision of livelihood to war affected families."

Meanwhile, furthering the constitution-making process, the Constitutional Assembly (CA), which was formed on March 9, 2016, to draft a new Constitution for the island nation, replacing the current Constitution adopted in 1978, had 10 meetings, so far. At the 6th to 10th meetings of the CA held on October 30, October 31, November 1, November 2 and November 8, 2017, an Interim Report of the Steering Committee set up under the CA was debated. The Interim Report was submitted to the CA by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as Chairman of the Steering Committee on September 21, 2017, and stressed that Sri Lanka should remain one undivided and indivisible country, where maximum devolution should be granted. It argued explicitly for the inclusion of specific provisions in the Constitution to prevent secession (division of the country). The report proposed that provincial councils would be the primary unit of devolution, while local bodies had been named as the implementing agency of both the central Government and the provincial councils.

Issuing a statement following the submission of the Interim Report, R. Sampanthan, Leader of the Opposition and of the main Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), stated, on September 21, 2017, "The successful conclusion of this Constitution-making process on the basis of an acceptable, reasonable and substantial national consensus would bring about a firm finality to this issue. Sri Lanka would perpetually be a united undivided and indivisible country in keeping with the basic and Supreme Law of the country, and on the basis of the free will and consent of its entire people." Further, on January 3, 2018, Sampanthan added, "I have not the slightest doubt that we made the correct decision in backing Mr. Sirisena. We were sick of the Rajapaksa government which had been particularly unjust and unfair to the Tamil civilians. I have no regrets about the decision we made, though the Tamil people, and consequently those of us who represent them, expected greater performance from the government." In the keenly contested Presidential Election held on January 8, 2015, TNA supported common opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena, leader of the New Democratic Front (NDF), which emerged victorious, securing 6,217,162 votes (51.28 per cent) against 5,768,090 votes (47.58 per cent) polled by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent President and candidate of the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA).

Significantly, in another step forward in Sri Lanka's path to sustained peace, and paving the way to set up the Office for Missing Persons (OMP) to trace around 20,000 people still missing eight years after the end of the nearly three-decade-long civil war, the Constitutional Council (CC) submitted the names of seven nominees for the OMP to President Maithripala Sirisena, on December 8, 2017. There were more than 100 applicants seeking to be members of the OMP, among whom the seven were selected, and their names had been sent to the President for approval. The Bill to establish the OMP was introduced on May 22, 2016, and on June 21, 2017, was passed unanimously in Parliament. On July 20, 2017, President Sirisena signed the OMP Act.

Notably, to launch a television channel to promote reconciliation, on December 20, 2017, the Cabinet approved the establishing of a "Channel of Reconciliation", a television studio complex in the Northern Province. It was decided to obtain a land plot of 100 perches (3,025 square yards) for this purpose from the Meesalei Weerasingham Central College premises in Jaffna. Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation has been entrusted with this project according to a Cabinet paper submitted by Finance and Mass Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera. Further, underlining the Government's commitment to resolve the ethnic issue, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, while addressing a ceremony to distribute title deeds under the theme 'Our house in our land,' at Hatton Dunbar Grounds in Nuwara Eliya District noted, "The war is over, and the people elected Maithripala Sirisena as the President in January 2015 with a mandate to rebuild the country. But there is no development without peace. We as Sri Lankans have to unite as one. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has come forward for peace building for the first time. They wanted a political solution for their demands."

Similarly, President Sirisena, addressing the Religious Coexistence Convention held at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH) in Colombo on December 12, 2017, observed, "Today, we are gathered here because deep down we know that we have a problem in this country. The ethnic and religious conflicts in this country resulted in a 30-year war. The war was ended through a military solution. Our Forces were able to defeat a separatist terrorist organization but we have not managed to defeat the beliefs that led to it. We all know that ideas and beliefs cannot be defeated with arms. It can only be replaced with a better, more positive belief. I strongly believe that our local temples and religious institutions do not preach conflict. The religious leaders always try to direct the people in the right direction. All philosophies, be it Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, strive try to correct society."

Nevertheless, the assault of international organizations against the Sri Lanka Government continues. Human Rights Watch (HRW) Geneva Director John Fisher on November 15, 2017, urged the United Nations (UN) members to insist that Sri Lanka adopt an action plan and timeline to implement Geneva proposals as promised to theUnited Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Resolution adopted in October 2015, and argued, "The Sirisena government made key pledges at the United Nations Human Rights Council in October 2015 to ensure justice, accountability, and security sector reform. The failure of the government to fulfill most of these promises has brought its commitment to reform into question and dashed hopes of victims and affected communities. Sri Lanka is in danger of not just standing still on rights, but backtracking on essential reforms. UN members need to look beyond the increasingly hollow promises of reform, and insist that the government present an action plan and timeline for honoring its commitments." Similarly, the three-member United Nations (UN) Working Group on Arbitrary Detention comprising Jose Antonio Guevara Bermudez, Leigh Toomey and Elina Steinerte who visited Sri Lanka from December 4-15, 2017, to assess the country' situation regarding the deprivation of liberty, on December 15, 2017, urged the Government to introduce urgent reforms to the 'outdated' legal framework to end arbitrary detention in the country. The delegation identified significant challenges to the enjoyment of the right to personal liberty in Sri Lanka, resulting in arbitrary detention across the country.

Meanwhile, on June 20, 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers approved Prime Minister Wickremesinghe's proposal to appoint a Committee of Ministers chaired by him and a Committee of Officials to assist and to coordinate the UNHRC recommendations made in the consensus resolution adopted in October 2015. Further, on November 1, 2017, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe launched the five-year National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights at a ceremony held at the Parliament Complex. Speaking at the event, the Prime Minister declared the time had come to reaffirm human rights in the country. The National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights 2017-2021 documents goal-oriented activities in the Human Rights arena, aimed to strengthen national processes and mechanisms for the protection and promotion of human rights through substantial constitutional, legislative, policy and administrative frameworks.

Through 2017, the National Unity Government (NUG) has made remarkable efforts to press forward the reconciliation process by reaching out to the Tamils and initiating constitutional and legal reforms. It has furthered the much-awaited Constitution-making process by debating the Interim Report of the CA Steering Committee in Parliament. It has also passed enabling legislation to establish the OMP to help find the missing persons of the war era. Colombo's record on these parameters compares favorably with almost any other post-conflict society in the world, and certainly improves on the conduct of Western expeditionary forces in various theatres of strife across the world. But unrealistic expectations and criteria that are not applied to a multiplicity of conflicts - both current and past - are being imposed on Sri Lanka by elements within the international community. These are contaminating the discourse within the country, deepening polarization between the communities, and obstructing the process of reconciliation, rather than contributing in any constructive measure to a peaceful resolution.
Chennai, Jan 8 (IBNS): Sidelined AIADMK leader and newly elected RK Nagar MLA, TTV Dinakaran, made his debut in the Tamil Nadu Assembly as its session began on Monday, media reports said.

Dinakaran, who fought as an independent from RK Nagar constituency, defeated his own party AIADMK's and opposition DMK's candidates.

RK Nagar constituency had fallen vacant after the demise of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa.

The first day of the Assembly witnessed an uproar as DMK leader M K Stalin protested against former Governor C Vidyasagar Rao's role in forming of the government by the AIADMK despite losing supports of 18 MLAs.

Though Chief Minister E Palaniswamy formed the government, 18 AIADMK MLAs had supported the Sasikala camp, the former interim AIADMK General Secretary, who is now serving a jail term in a disproportionate assets case.

Sasikala, before being convicted, had expressed her ambition to become the CM of the state. She was the confidante of Jayalalithaa.

The DMK along with Congress even walked out of the Assembly protesting against the former Tamil Nadu Governor, NDTV reported.
Gurugram, Jan 8 (IBNS): Gurugram High Court has denied bail to the 16-year old accused in connection with the murder of class 2 student of Ryan International School, Pradyuman Thakur, media reports said.

The accused is also a student of Ryan International. Being a juvenile, his name has not been disclosed.

Pradyuman was found in a pool of blood inside the washroom of the school with his throat slit open in early September.

The teenager allegedly wanted to impede the approaching exams and parent teacher meeting and hence killed the boy.

A civic court also granted bail to bus conductor Ashoke, who was arrested earlier for allegedly murdering the class 2 student, on Nov. 21.

Though Ashoke had earlier confessed that he was the one who killed Pradyuman, a CBI probe found that he did not commit the crime.

The CBI has revealed that Gurgaon police had planted the murder weapon, a knife, that was used to kill seven-year old Pradyuman Thakur in Ryan International School, on bus conductor Ashok Kumar.
Mumbai, Jan 8 (IBNS) : Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant was stabbed to death on Sunday night near his residence in Mumbai's Kandivali east by two unknown assailants, media reports said.

A former corporator of Mumbai, Sawant was attacked when he was returning home in Samta nagar after meeting a friend.

Reports said he was declared dead after being taken to a hospital.

Poice rushed to the spot of the incident and started an investigation.

Police were also trying to determine if there was a CCTV near the scene of the crime. postmortem.

Media reports said that Sawant had been in a cable business. .

Sawant is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.

Image: youtube
New Delhi, Jan 8 (IBNS): There is no evidence that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by an unknown person and not Nathuram Godse, submitted senior advocate Amrendra Sharan to the Supreme Court on Monday, according to media reports.

Sharan was instructed by the apex court to go through all documents pertaining to the assassination to check if the alleged claim of an unknown person firing the fourth bullet that killed Gandhi had any basis.

The SC order was based on a plea by a 'self-confessed' Veer Savarkar devotee and founder of 'Abhinav Bharat' Pankaj Phadnis, who insisted that four shots were fired at Mahatma Gandhi and it was the fourth bullet fired by a mysterious person that took his life.

Times of India quoted Sharan as saying, "The bullets which pierced Mahatma Gandhi's body, the pistol from which it was fired, the assailant who fired the said bullets, the conspiracy which led to the assassination and the ideology which led to the said assassination have all been duly identified. No substantive material has come to light to throw any doubt on any of the above requiring either a re-investigation of the Mahatma Gandhi murder case or, to constitute a fresh fact finding commission with respect to the same."

Sharan and his assitants, advocates Sanchit Guru and Samarth Khanna, examined nearly 4,000 pages of trial court records and the Jeevan Lal Kapur Inquiry Commission report, to arrive at their conclusion.

The Father of the Nation was assassinated on January 30, 1948, in the compound of Birla House, a large mansion in central New Delhi.
New Delhi, Jan 8 (IBNS) Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday attacked Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal over recent deaths due to cold in the nation capital.

Kejriwal said the Lieutenant Governor did not consult the government before CEO of Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) was appointed.

The DUSIB looks after the issue of night-shelters for the homeless in New Delhi.

"Media reporting 44 deaths of homeless due to cold. Am issuing show cause notice to CEO, DUSIB. Negligible deaths last year. This year, LG appointed a useless officer. LG refuses to consult us before appointing officers. How do we run govt like this?," Kejriwal tweeted.
New Delhi, Jan 8 (IBNS): Amid an outrage over complaint against a journalist regarding Aadhaar leakage, the Supreme Court on Monday told politicians to allow the freedom of press, media reports said.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had filed an FIR against a journalist who exposed a racket that gave people an unauthorised access to Aadhaar card in return of money.

The Tribune had reported that it had received an offer to access an Aadhaar card for Rs. 500.

The Delhi police on Sunday said they will try to track down who sold the password, NDTV reported.

Indian newspaper The Tribune has said it is ready to explore all legal options open to 'defend' freedom to undertake serious investigative journalism after the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has filed a case against it and journalist Rachna Khaira over a news report that revealed how people could illegally access demographic data of individuals from UIDAI.

In its statement, the newspaper said: "My colleagues and I are grateful for expressions of support and solidarity from media organisations and journalists."

"We at The Tribune believe that our stories were in the nature of a legitimate journalistic exercise," it said.

The Tribune said its performs its reporting by following 'traditions of responsible journalism'.

"Our story was in response to a very genuine concern among the citizens on a matter of great public interest," the news paper said in the statement.

"We regret very much that the authorities have misconceived an honest journalistic enterprise and have proceeded to institute criminal proceedings against the whistleblower. We shall explore all legal options open to us to defend our freedom to undertake serious investigative journalism," it said.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has filed a case against newspaper The Tribune and journalist Rachna Khaira over a news report that revealed how people could illegally access demographic data of individuals from UIDAI, media reports said.

The Tribune confirmed on Sunday that the case was filed by a Deputy Director of the UIDAI on Saturday.

Joint Commissioner of Police Alok Kumar (Crime Branch), while confirming the development to The Tribune on Sunday, said it was against the paper and the reporter.

The FIR has been registered by the UIDAI. Soon an investigation will be initiated," he told the newspaper.

According to the newspaper report, the FIR has been filed against The Tribune newspaper, reporter Rachna Khaira, and three names.

"The sections under which the UIDAI complaint has been registered are 419, 420, and 468 of the IPC, and Section 66 of the IT Act, 2000. Besides, Sections 36 and 37 of the Aadhaar Act have also been invoked," The Tribune reported.
Guwahati, Jan 8 (IBNS): The sleuths of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption of Assam Police on Monday arrested another IAS officer in connection with the Rs 2250 crore scam of Social Welfare department.

The arrested IAS officer, who served as the director of the Assam government department, was absconding since February 2017 last.

According to the reports, following a tip-off, the sleuths of V&AC arrested IAS officer Kumud Kalita from Guwahati.

The Assam government suspended the IAS officer after revealing his involvement in the multi-crore rupees scam.

Earlier, the Assam police announced a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh to anyone who can provide information leading to absconding IAS officer Kumud Kalita.

V&AC had registered a case into the multi-crore rupees scam following directive by Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal.

On July 28 last, the investigating agency had arrested another IAS officer Dilip Borthakur (former director of the Social Welfare department) in connection with the scam.

A top official of V&AC said that, the investigating agency had already submitted a charge sheet of the scam before the court.

11 persons including both the arrested IAS officers' names were included as accused in the charge sheet, the top official said.

Earlier, the V&AC had arrested six officials of social welfare department on February 27 last year in connection with the scam.

The arrested officials are District officer of Goalpara Hemi Borah, District officer of Kamrup Kishori Dutta, Accounts officer RS Bhattacharya, UD assistant Debasish Dey, LD assistant Sajid Hussain and Programme officer Kulen Saikia.

In connection with the multi-crore rupees scam, the V&AC team had also grilled three former Congress ministers including Akon Bora, Gautam Roy and Ajanta Neog.

The vigilance team had grilled at least 32 officials including three IAS officials into the scam.

In 2016, Assam CM had directed to probe the multi crore scam during the previous Congress regime.

During the investigation it was revealed that an amount of Rs 150 crore was siphoned off every year from the social welfare department of the state for the past 15 years.

The investigation also detected nine lakh fake entries of ghost children in the ICDS list.

The top official of V&AC said that 390 fake Anganwadi centres have been identified, which were fraudulently entered for siphoning off the money.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
INC India Twitter Handle

Manama, Jan 8 (IBNS): Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday addressed a gathering of PIOs in Bahrain where he slammed India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government for creating hatred and division among people.

Addressing the gathering, Rahul said: "The tragedy is that instead of focusing the attention of our people on what is critical - the removal of poverty, job creation and the building of a world-class education system - we see instead a rise in the forces of hatred and division."

He said, "Together, we must steer India back to its original strengths, we need to make India the centrepiece of ahimsa, of non-violence, of compassion."

Rahul alleged that job creation in India today is at an 8 year low.

"New investments are the lowest they have been in 13 years, bank credit growth has sunk to a 63 year low," said he.

"We need to bring our conversation back from violence and hatred to one of progress, jobs and love between our people. And we cannot do that at home without our largest skill base on the planet  all you people in this room," said the Congress President.

Promising to rebuild the party, Rahul said the Congress's vision is one that builds bridges and is compassionate - it is a tried and tested vision that has fought for India in its toughest moments.

"Ours, more than any other vision, because of the struggle and because of our victory in India's liberation, is a vision that has strong roots in the NRI community," said he.
A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) trooper, Ashish Patra (29), was killed during an exchange of fire between Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres and Security Force (SF) personnel in the Chakarbandha Hills near Balthar village under Barachatti Tehsil (revenue unit) in Gaya District on January 2, 2018. According to sources, on January 1, after receiving specific intelligence regarding Maoists' movement in the area, a search operation was launched by the SFs. On the next day (January 2), at around 3.30pm, an exchange of fire took place between the two sides in which the CRPF trooper sustained injuries and died later.

It was the first fatality recorded in this category (SFs) in the State, after a gap of almost one year and three months. The last SF fatality was registered on October 3, 2016, when three motorcycle-borne suspected CPI-Maoist cadres shot dead Quuam Ansari, the Officer-in-Charge (OIC) of Kotchi Police Station, in Gaya District. The OIC was on a morning walk when the assailants attacked, killing him on the spot.

Remarkably, in 2017, SFs had achieved their best ever kill ratio against the Maoists, on year on year basis, since the formation of CPI-Maoist in 2004. They had killed nine Maoists without suffering a single loss in 2017. By contrast, in 2016, they had lost 15 of their own personnel, killing just nine Maoists.

Further, SFs arrested 98 Left Wing Extremists (LWEs) through 2017. The arrested cadres included three 'area commanders', one 'zonal commander', and one 'secretary' of the North Bihar Zonal Committee (NBZC) of the CPI-Maoist. Most recently, on December 14, 2017, Police arrested Manoj Sada, a CPI-Maoist 'area commander', active in Farakiya diara (riverine area) under Morkahi Police Station area in Khagaria District, was arrested from his hideout at Jhamakia Musahari by the Police. A pistol and some live cartridges were recovered from his possession. SFs arrested 104 Maoists in 2016.

Mounting SF pressure also led to the surrender of 17 LWEs in 2017, in addition to 24 surrenders in 2016. The cadres who surrendered in 2017 included Maheshi Yadav, a Maoist 'zonal commander' of the Morhar Nilanjan sub-zone. Yadav carried a reward of INR 50,000 on his head.

At least 25 incidents of recovery of arms and ammunition by SF personnel were reported in 2017. In a recent incident of recovery, on December 26, 2017, the Police seized an AK-47 rifle, a semi-automatic rifle, five country-made pistols, four revolvers and over 700 live cartridges during a raid at Tikarampur under the Mufassil Police Station in Monghyr District. There were 32 such instances of recovery in 2016.

Not surprisingly, the trend of declining fatalities in LWE)-linked violence established since 2011, with two exceptions in 2012 and 2016, was re-established in 2017. According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least 24 persons, including 15 civilians and nine Maoists, were killed in the State in 2017, as against 32 persons, including eight civilians, 15 SF personnel and nine Maoists, killed in 2016. Significantly, 2015 had witnessed the lowest number of such fatalities, nine (four civilians, three SF personnel and two Maoists) recorded in the State since the formation of CPI-Maoist in September 2004. A lone fatality (SF, January 2) has been reported in the current year so far (data till January 7, 2018).

Unsurprisingly, on July 26, 2017, Rajiv Rai Bhatnagar, the Director General (DG) of the CRPF, claimed that the area controlled by CPI-Maoist had "shrunk in three States in the last two and a half years. There is substantial decline in areas controlled by Naxals[Left Wing Extremists (LWEs)] in Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. Disturbances in these areas are very less."

However, other parameters of violence suggest that the Maoists still retain a significant presence and operational capabilities. Fatalities among civilians are witnessing an increase in recent years. After, touching an all time low of four fatalities in this category in 2015, the lowest recorded in the State since the formation of CPI-Maoist in September 2004, it doubled to eight in 2016, and almost doubled further in 2017, reaching 15. Most recently, on December 18, 2017, CPI-Maoist cadres abducted and hacked to death two security guards of a private Construction Company in Jamui District.

In addition, the Maoists carried out three blasts in 2017, in addition to four in 2016. They attacked railway properties on at least three occasions each, in both these years. Also, they were found involved in 11 incidents of arson in 2017, and 10 in 2016. At least eight incidents of abduction (in which 18 persons were abducted) by Maoists were reported in 2017 as against just two incidents (in which six persons were abducted) in 2016.

The Maoists also issued six bandh (shut down strike) calls on different issues in 2017, in comparison to four such calls in 2016. The December 18-20, 2017, bandh witnessed the most violence, when an armed squad of about 15 CPI-Maoist cadres, including some women, carried out an attack at the Masudan Railway Station in the Jamalpur area of Monghyr District in the night of December 19, 2017, at around 11 pm. The Maoists set ablaze station property, including the signaling panel, hampering rail services, and abducted two railway employees present at the station - Assistant Station Master [ASM] Mukesh Paswan and porter Narendra Mandal. After the State Police and CRPF launched a joint search operation, the Maoists released the two men in a hilly area at Jamalpur. According to the SATP database, Bihar has accounted for at least 62 Maoist-linked attacks on the Railways since September 21, 2004 (data till January 7, 2018). These attacks have resulted in 25 deaths (nine civilians and 16 SF personnel) and 32 persons injured.

Meanwhile, according to CRPF sources, three pockets - the Jamui/Nawada/Giridih triangular section, the Gaya Aurangabad section, and the Lakhisarai/ Monghyr/ Banka/ Jamui section - still record significant CPI-Maoist influence. For instance, a report dated December 25, 2017, noted that three groups, each comprising of 20-25 CPI-Maoist cadres, were seen in the border areas of Banka District.

Disturbingly, splinter groups of the CPI-Maoist, such as the People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI) and the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC), mainly based in Jharkhand, also continues to made their presence felt in Bihar as well. On October 16, 2017, PLFI cadres shot dead a contractor after he refused to comply with extortion demands at Diha village under the Guraru Police Station area in Gaya District. Police said contractor Ramadhar Singh was allegedly shot dead by armed squad of the PLFI, after he refused to pay the "levy" demanded by them. On April 9, 2017, suspected cadres of the TPC, raided the construction site of Gas India Limited (GAIL), the agency engaged in laying gas pipeline passing through Gurua Police Station area of Gaya District of Bihar, and 'ordered' stoppage of work for the company's failure to pay the 'levy' demanded by the outfit. On March 1, 2017, the TPC 'zonal commander' Anil Kushwahaaka Rakesh Mishra and 10 cadres killed one Jitendra Kharwar (18) over delay in serving them food in Rohtas District.

Meanwhile, according to a December 13, 2017, report, the Centre and the State Government have devised a strategy to combat the Maoist menace in Bihar. Under the new strategy, named 'Mission 100', hundred people will be identified and brought to book for their involvement in organised crime and Maoist activities. Under the 'mission', the central agencies would strike at the source of income (read extortion) of the Maoists and also confiscate the ill-gotten property of their strategists. The report stated further that in November 2017, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) initiated the process of attaching the property of two senior Maoists - Pradyuman Sharma aka Kundan, head of the Bihar-Jharkhand Special Area Committee (BJSAC)'s Magadh zone, and Sandeep Yadav aka Badka Bhaiya, in charge of the BJSAC's Madhya zone. Yadav carries an INR 500,000 reward on his head in Bihar and INR 2.5 million in Jharkhand. Similarly, the Bihar Government has announced INR 50,000 on Sharma while he carries a reward of INR 500,000 in Jharkhand. Bihar's Special Task Force (STF) disclosed that Sandeep and his family have accumulated assets worth INR 15.2 million, and Pradyuman and his family members have property worth more than INR 12.8 million. Inspector General of Police (Operations) Kundan Krishnan disclosed, "Sandeep's wife Rajwanti Devi, who is enrolled as a contract teacher at a Banke Bazar (Gaya) primary school, has withdrawn salary of Rs 675,424 over the years but she does not go to the school. Such is Sandeep's terror that no one has lodged a complaint on it so far. Rajwanti's bank balance is Rs 749,546, which is disproportionate to her known sources of income." The report also says Rajwanti owns a .66 acres plot in Gaya, valued at approximately INR 5 million, and a flat in Ranchi worth INR 3 million. Sandeep's brother Dhan is also a Maoist. Meanwhile, Pradyuman and wife Shanti Devi have millions deposited in his bank, while their children study in expensive private institutions. His brother Pramod, resident of Hulasganj in Jehanabad District, reportedly owns 38 small- and medium-sized plots, mostly of agricultural land, said to be worth INR 5 million in all.

Further, the State has deployed 10 battalions of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) to fight LWEs. These include seven battalions of CRPF (five regular and two Commando Battalion for Resolute Action, CoBRA, battalions) and three battalions of Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB). Further, four helicopters have been stationed in the Ranchi District of neighboring Jharkhand for anti-Maoist operations in Bihar.

The fight still lacks critical muscle, as the Bihar Police continues to lag in terms of capacities to deal with the challenge. According to the latest Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) data, as on January 1, 2017, Bihar has 74.76 Police personnel per 100,000 population, the lowest in the country and far below the national average of 150.75. Bihar, however, fares better than the national average on Police/Area Ratio (number of policemen per 100 square kilometers) at 83.05, as against the national average of 60.83. In both these categories, the sanctioned strength for Bihar is much higher, at 107.73 and 119.67 respectively. Moreover, there are 42 vacancies of IPS officers in the State against the sanctioned strength of 231. An unnamed senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the State disclosed on December 30, 2017, that among the 189 serving IPS officers in the Bihar cadre, 36 were on central deputation.

The Maoist rebels are persistent in their efforts to restore their sway in the State. The Administration, consequently needs to gear up and strengthen its responses - particularly in terms of State Police capacities - to neutralize the enduring Maoist challenge.
Karachi, Jan 8 (IBNS): Two robbers, who were caught during an armed robbery attempt in Pakistan's Karachi city, have died, media reports said.

Citizens beat one of the robbers after he was caught and he later passed away in a hospital.

The other robber died in a shoot-out, media reports said.

He died during exchange of fire with security personnel.

"The robbers had killed a shopkeeper earlier over resistance during the robbery. The two were running away after stealing from one of the shops in the mobile market," Geo News reported.


Kabul, Jan 8 (IBNS): At least 15 ISIS militants have been killed in Afghanistan's Kunar province on Sunday, local Tolo News reported.

In addition, 20 militants were injured.

The incident took place in the evening after the militants attacked a police check post in Chawki district of the province.

At least three policemen were killed and 13 others were injured during the clash, officials confirmed.
Dhaka, Jan 8 (IBNS): With severe cold wave gripping several parts of Bangladesh, the country recorded its lowest ever temperature in history at 2.6 degrees in Tetulia, Panchagarh .

Bangladesh Meteorological Departments Tetulia branch Assistant Met Officer Md Raidul Islam told The Daily Star the lowest ever temperature was recorded at 8:38am this morning.



As per met office, Rajshahi, Pabna, Dinajpur and Kushtia regions are experiencing cold wave situation.

As per met department website, minimum temperature in Dhaka on Monday was 9.5 degrees Celsius.

The maximum temperature recorded was 18 degrees Celsius.
Washington, Jan 8 (IBNS): US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has reacted to Donald Trump's "nuclear button" tweet and said the US President's comment warned North Korean leader Kim Jong-un about America's nuclear capabilities and kept him "on his toes", media reports said.

Haley told ABC: "We're not letting up on the pressure. We're not going to let them go and dramatize the fact that they have a button right on their desk and they can destroy America. We want to always remind them we can destroy you too, so be very cautious and careful with your words and what you do.

The president "always has to keep Kim on his toes, Haley said.

She said: It's very important that we don't ever let him get so arrogant that he doesn't realize the reality of what would happen if he started a nuclear war."

Escalating further possibilities of a nuclear war, US President Donald Trump recently warned North Korea that he commands a much bigger and more powerful arsenal of devastating weapons than the Asian nation.

"North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the 'Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.' Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!," Trump tweeted as he warned the Asian nation.

2017 witnessed US President Donald Trump slamming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as the Asian nation continued to conduct several of its missile tests, teasing world peace and tranquillity and often threatening to trigger a war.

Situation became far tensed when North Korea tested an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) that the nation said was capable of striking US mainland.

The United Nations Security Council imposed strong new sanctions against the Asian nation after its Nov 29 launch of a nuclear-capable weapon.



Image: twitter.com/nikkihaley
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7 Acts of Native Resistance They Dont Teach in School

It is irresponsible to teach the tragedies without also teaching the resistance movements that oppose colonial violence.By Halee KirkwoodYES! Magazine

The history of people indigenous to the North American continent is often glossed over in education. We are badgered with the legend of Native benevolence to the pilgrims who landed on the East Coast on Thanksgiving.

If indigenous history is covered , students are likely to hear a tragic but vague narrative of massacre, disease, and death, a narrative devoid of the specific political and tribal context that is vital to understanding the colonial and imperial relationship between Native communities and the U.S. This renders indigenous bodies invisible. This also contributes to the concealment of contemporary indigenous rights movements, some of which are happening right now.

It is essential that we acknowledge the physical, economic, and psychological trauma that U.S. colonialism has inflicted on indigenous communities. It is also essential that we acknowledge historic and momentous moments of resistance led by indigenous people. Here are seven moments in indigenous history that we should have been taught in school. (For further reading after this article, please check out Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizs book An Indigenous Peoples History Of The United States , which was a vital resource in the creation of this article.)

1. Divide and conquer: the Dawes Act of 1887

An extremely complicated facet of history, The Dawes Act (otherwise known as the General Allotment Act or the Indian Homestead Act) intended and succeeded in dividing reservations already established by previously set treaties, though this effort was met with resistance.

Through the Dawes Act, tribally owned land decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934. This amount of land lost is comparable to the size of the state of Minnesota. The Dawes Act gave the president of the United States the right to dissolve any reservation created for Indian use  if it is his opinion that it would be advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes. Native families were allocated small plots of landunder the stipulation that they pay a land tax. Any indigenous people allocated land who relinquished tribal life were gifted with United States citizenship. Surplus land left after allocation was sold by the United States to settlers.

This act played a humongous role in westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, and in indigenous assimilation efforts. It is an essential component to U.S. history that absolutely must be taught in schools.

2. The massacre at Wounded Knee and the AIM occupation The massacre at Wounded Knee, which resulted in the bloody murders of 250 to 300 Lakota men, women, elders, and children , was a part of a pattern in United States war tactics to quash anti-colonial movements and people. Dunbar-Ortiz says that this pattern would continue from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for U.S. American identity. How can students fully comprehend a history of the United States without first studying this event, which is exemplary of the horrific war tactics employed by the U.S. to eradicate this lands first people?

Troops were deployed to Wounded Knee in order to arrest Chief Spotted Elk and scatter his followers. Spotted Elk had led a group of Lakota people to Wounded Knee to dance the Ghost Dance, a traditional dance that a Paiute elder had prophesied would bring about the end of Euro-American imperialism. We cannot teach that the United States was founded under the freedom of religion principle when such violent acts are perpetrated against people practicing their religion. It is also important to teach that just 14 days earlier, Lakota leader Chief Sitting Bull was issued a warrant for arrest at Standing Rock reservation, where he would be eventually killed by police.

Important to teach alongside the massacre, however, is the 1973 siege and occupation of Wounded Knee . It is irresponsible to teach moments of tragedy without also teaching the resistance movements which oppose colonial violence. The occupation lasted 71 days and aimed to challenge the substandard living conditions created on reservations by the U.S. government. The choice of placement here was critical; to advocate for social change on the land that had born witness to tragedy is power.

This movement was part of a larger string of protests and occupations known as the Trail of Broken Treaties , which included a 20-point position paper to address the injustices against indigenous people on behalf of the U.S. government.

3. Boarding schools and extreme assimilation efforts

More than 100,000 Natives were placed into boarding schools, and the end results included, mostly, irreparable psychological and emotional damage. By forcing cultural imperialism and genocide upon children, the U.S. government made its priorities clear: If Native people could not be massacred out of existence, then the next facet of life to attack was culture, language, and the soul itself.

But indigenous culture is beautiful, brilliant, resilient, and proud. Teaching the traumatic legacy of boarding schools is imperative to taking responsibility for the great harm colonialism has caused. Other ways to ensure that indigenous culture does not disappear is by investing in the success of traditional Native language and buying from inspired Natives rather than from culturally appropriative Native-inspired fashions.

4. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956

This was a Bureau of Indian Affairs-funded project that focused on relocating indigenous people to major urban industrial areas, most prominently to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver, and Cleveland.

Indigenous people were drawn away from tribal communities and funneled into urban areas with the promise of BIA benefits, housing, and job training programs. It is important to note that at this time, the U.S. government had already terminated over 100 indigenous nations , making relocation another act of assimilation, another act of trying to make Native people disappear. By further distancing Natives from tribal life and identity, the easier it would be to attack and destroy treaties and legislation upholding tribal sovereignty. The struggles of Natives relocated to large cities are diverse and include poverty, violence, alcoholism, and a loss of tribal identity

What the U.S. did not expect was for marginalized communities to inspire one another. As Native populations were scattered into poor communities and into existing communities of color, the proximity of Natives relocated to these communities in the thick of the civil rights movement led to the formation of indigenous advocacy groups, such as the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement

(For more information about the Indian Relocation Act, watch the film Exiled NDNZ by Navajo filmmaker Pamela J. Peters.)

5. The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island

From November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971 , a group of inter-tribal activists under the name Indians of All Tribes occupied the island after Alcatraz Federal Prison shut down operations on the island, citing the 1886 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed the return of out-of-use federal lands to Native peoples. After a period of removals, the occupation gained traction and 79 Native activists held the space down, despite a Coast Guard brigade. The Alcatraz Proclamation , a sharp and bitingly pointed document, issued a direct statement of intent to the U.S. government: that since the infrastructure of government-created reservations became increasingly unstable and unlivable, it was only the natural course of things for indigenous people to discover new lands to populate.

Unfortunately, white hippies from San Francisco became attracted to the occupation and brought along with them drugs and alcohol, an action of total disrespect to indigenous people and intentional actions. A decree had to be issued that all of those who were not indigenous were to leave the island at night. However, this is a good moment in history to look to and draw example from when explaining to white activists why they must treat tribal land with respect, like at Standing Rock

(Watch the documentary We Hold The Rock for more information on this moment of indigenous resistance.)

6. The Walleye Wars

The Walleye Wars was a bitter, violent political confrontation between the Wisconsin state government, non-Native sport fishermen, and tribal Lac Courte Orielles and Lac Du Flambeau fishermen who spearfished, a traditional Ojibwe fishing method. Non-native sport fisherman, who are not allowed to spearfish due to state gaming regulations, became increasingly violent and threw rocks, blockaded, and shouted vile racial slurs at the fishermen on the lake. There was even a bomb threat at a local community hall where there was to be a feast for those stepping up for Ojibwe treaty rights. This was over an alleged (and baseless) fear by the non-Native fisherman, who thought that spearfishing would deplete the walleye and musky populations; however, data at the time and data to come out subsequently would prove otherwise.

But the tribe held their ground and advocated for their treaty-given rights. An injunction to the group Stop Treaty Abuse was issued to halt harassing the traditional fishermen. Groups such as the Midwest Treaty Network formed to strengthen tribal communities through treaty education and direct action. The Walleye Wars should be taught in history class because it is a contemporary example of indigenous people standing up forand retainingtheir rights.

(Watch the film Lighting the 7th Fire for a more in-depth look at the issue.)

7. The history of nuclear proliferation on reservations

Seventy-five percent of the 15,000 uranium mines in the United States exist on Native reservations , most predominantly on Navajo land. This has caused major health hazards, trauma, and death among indigenous people. Many of these plants have since been abandoned and have yet to be cleaned up, leaving heaps of exposed uranium scattered throughout Navajo Nation , spreading into the air and into the water supply. The EPA has only just announced its plan for clean-up in September of last year. This has affected the Navajo water supply to the point where it is nearly undrinkable. Indigenous women are on the forefront of ensuring that families receive the water they need to live.

The proliferation of uranium for nuclear weaponry on tribal land is a special kind of cruelty. In doing this, the U.S. government perpetuates violent colonialism and imperialism by extracting resources from the land it has already colonized. The history of uranium mining on Navajo land must be taught as a part of a continuing pattern of corporate interest extracting resources from indigenous land at the expense of the health of indigenous people and the health of the Earth.

(Read Winona LaDukes The Militarization of Indian Country to further your understanding of how U.S. military interests harm indigenous communities.)

This article was originally published by thebodyisnotanapology.com . It has been edited for YES! Magazine

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Bollywood lost a lot of gems in 2017 including Vinod Khanna and Shashi Kapoor, but looks like the grief continues in 2018. The year has just begun and we have already lost a great actor.

Shrivallabh Vyas, who played the role of Ishwar (wicket-keeper) in Ashutosh Gowarikers Lagaan, has passed away. The 60-year-old actor who has acted in more than 60 films, including Sarfarosh, Abhay, Aan: Men at Work, Shool, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero and Sankat City was suffering from prolonged illness, according to reports.

Vyas was a great actor and we will miss him immensely. He died on Sunday morning around 9:30 am and his last rites will take place in the evening. He has two daughters and his wife struggled a lot while taking care of Vyas... He was a very well-read man and an immensely talented actor, but he didnt get his dues. But his work has always spoken for him. He was also into singing and had started writing too, but life was cruel to him, his friend and actor Daya Shankar Pandey was quoted as saying by Indian Express.

The alumnus of National School of Drama in Delhi, Vyas took a break from his acting career in 2008 after he had collapsed in his hotel room in Gujarat. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Twitter

It has also been reported that his family was facing financial crisis as they were struggling to pay for his treatment. Aamir Khan, Akshay Kumar and Irrfan Khan were helping the family with the expenses.

Barring few, most ignored us. Even producers who worked with Vyas refused to bear his medical expenses... Aamir Khan has been supporting us. Its because of him we can afford a three BHK flat, medical expenses, fees for my daughters and other expenses, his wife Shobha told TOI.

(Also Read: Reema Lagoo To Chester Bennington, 11 Talented Artists Who Passed Away In 2017)
Draped in rainbow colours, hundreds of people on Sunday marched in the heart of the national capital for the 9th Queer Pride Parade to show solidarity with the LGBTQ community in making a united call for equality of gender and sexuality and seeking "a life without fear".

Organised by the Delhi Queer Pride Committee, the march kicked off from the corner of Barakhamba Road and Tolstoy Marg and saw members of the community as well as their friends and family members turn out with placards, masks and costumes.

"Pride is an inter-mingling of many movements -- feminism, anti-caste movements, for free speech, so this march is important as it is a united call for a prejudice-free India," one of the participants said, requesting anonymity.

Another participant, Delhi University student Esha, said unlike earlier occasions, it is important for queer people this year to shout back equally louder to combat "noise from homophobic groups and an unfriendly government".

"I'm not out yet so I tend to keep a low profile at LGBTQ events, but this year pride is important as a show of strength more than ever because noise from homophobic groups and an unfriendly government seems to have become louder. It is important that we as queer people should shout back equally louder," Esha said.

One of the organisers, Rituparna Borah, said this year's parade saw a greater participation than the last year, with around 800-1,000 people turning out.

"People from all walks of life, identifying with different sexual orientations and genders took part in the parade, that culminated at Jantar Mantar," another organiser said.

While the focus of the 'pride' has been the repeal of Section 377 that criminalises same-sex unions and the demand for dignity for people who do not conform to society's ideas of sexual orientation or gender, different movements joined the parade this year in solidarity with the LGBTQ community.

This year's march was also in support of Dalits, Muslims, women, disabled, Kashmiris, people in the North-East, Adivasis, academics, filmmakers and students, according to an earlier statement on the Facebook page created for the event.

The march saw demands being voiced by a wide section of society -- from the demand to live free of fear to calls to break down patriarchal mindsets.

"Hence, more than ever, we assert that our pride is inextricably tied to a broader demand for freedom and dignity for all," a statement said.

A participant, who works with a private company here, said, "We want to live without fear of any kind ofrepercussion from our family and from the workplace because of the gender we identify with. It is important to live a life without fear."

The parade is a yearly festival, held on the last Sunday of November, to honour and celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and many gender and sexual non-conforming people, and their supporters.
Most of us - men and women - have been attacked by someone we know or a random stranger on the internet in one way or the other, validating that cyberbullying is just not the monster under your bed, it is way bigger than that.

Also read: Security Supervisor Turns Sexual Predator, Harasses The Woman He Was Supposed To Protect

youtube

With so many social media channels at one's disposal, there is no dearth of creeps slowly trying to crawl into your life and invade your privacy. And these people, who reach out to innocent individuals are not in minority, to say the least.

So, how big is this business anyway?

Surprisingly, India stands on the third spot in cyberbullying, The Global Youth Online Behaviour Survey conducted by Microsoft revealed. To add to that, here is another case.

A Chennai based blogger, Namya Baid, was recently attacked by someone who claimed to offer a job with Air France. The guy called ( +91 73566 88358) Namya and asked a couple of disparaging questions. He asked her the size of her breast and the size of her waist. He even lied to her, said someone else will call the organization whereas he was the only one talking to her.

Also read: Andhra University Sanskrit Professor Sexually Harasses Girls, Get Thrashed By Students

Namya

A couple of calls later, he qualified Namya for a third round and asked her to be alone in the room. On this call, he asked her to show her tattoos, show her stomach and take her innerwear off while wearing the shirt.

Namya did not do any of this, she disconnected the call.

Read the full post here:

The good thing about this ordeal was that Namya recorded every bit of it: the calls, chat and video. She now has evidence to validate that she was harassed and targeted and can sue this guy.

What's more important that we keep our cool and report the issue. Even if as a victim you have shared details that you probably should not have, it does not give anyone the right to harass or harm you.

Never succumb to these scumbags. It takes a lot of courage, but it is worth standing up to them. More power to you, Namya!
In a landmark legal move, the Supreme Court today agreed to reconsider its 2013 decision criminalising homosexual acts. A constitutional bench will now review Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalises gay sex.

The Supreme Court also issued a notice to the Centre seeking its response to a writ petition filed by five members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community, who said they live in fear of police because of their natural sexual orientation and preferences.

The move has given a new ray of hope to countless homosexual Indians who have been fighting for their rights in the society. The constitution of the bench by the apex court is an opportunity for it to rectify the mistake of recriminalising homosexuality in the country.

BCCL

Homosexuality is considered a taboo in a largely conservative Indian society which seemingly is undivided on the controversial issue.

The Law

Section 377 of IPC (modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533) -- which came into effect in 1862 -- defines unnatural offences. The colonial-era provision introduced by the ruling British criminalises consensual acts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) adults in private.

Delhi High Court decriminalises homosexual acts in private

The Delhi High Court in July 2009 had decriminalised consensual homosexual acts in private by asserting as unconstitutional a part of Section 377 of IPC that criminalises unnatural sex, saying the section denies a gay person a right to full personhood

Supreme Court recriminalises homosexuality

In December 2013, the Supreme Court chose to reverse the verdict by the Delhi High Court. Perpetuating the constitutional validity of Section 377 IPC, an SC bench headed by Justice GS Singhvi (since retired), put the ball in the Parliaments court, saying it was for the legislature to take a call on the desirability of the contentious provision.

The fight against Section 377 received a massive boost when a nine-judge, Bench of the Supreme Court, upheld the right to privacy as the fundamental right intrinsic to life and liberty. The apex court ripped apart a 2014 judgment dismissing the case against Section 377.

The nine-judge Bench on August 28, 2017 observed that the chilling effect of Section 377 poses a grave danger to the unhindered fulfillment of ones sexual orientation, as an element of privacy and dignity.

AP

In distinct judgments, the Constitution Bench led by then Chief Justice of India J.S Khehar resolved that the 2014 verdict by a two-judge Bench of the apex court pandered to a majoritarian view to turn down the LGBT community their intrinsic fundamental rights of life, personal liberty, equality and gender discrimination.

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud observed that the 2014 judgments view that a minuscule fraction of the countrys population constitutes lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders was not a sustainable basis to deny the right to privacy.

Implications for heterosexuals

Section 377 IPC is not restricted to sexuality and sexual acts by homosexuals alone. The case has implications for heterosexuals, or straight as well. Consensual acts of adults such as oral and anal sex in private are currently treated as unnatural and punishable under the Section.

Will homosexuality be decriminalised?

Thanks to the right to privacy being deemed as a fundamental right, the fight for LGBT rights has taken a different and a more powerful course.

BCCL

We need to welcome it. We still have hope from the Indian judiciary. We are living in 21st century. All politicians and political parties must break silence and support individuals sexuality, LGBT activist, Akkai told ANI.

Congress welcomes Supreme Court's decision. Everybody has equal right to live life the way they want: All India Mahila Congress President Sushmita Dev on SC bench to reconsider constitutional validity of section 377

(file pic) pic.twitter.com/wb91vPH9uQ  ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2018

"Law walks with life" says the SC.

It took a while for the courts to agree to revisit their ruling on #Section377. Fingers crossed for a progressive judgement this time around. #Sec377 #strikedown377 https://t.co/3Kp73E6j2e  Shruti Mahajan (@shrutimahajan21) January 8, 2018

#Section377 SC should strike down this damn law. Its a symbol of feudal and imperialist mindset !! Human rights is LGBTQ rights, LQBTQ rights is human rights... All support for those suffering from #Section377 !!   (@SubhaB79) January 8, 2018

#Section377 What happens between two consenting adults behind the closed doors is none of our business  Honest critic (@honestcritic1) January 8, 2018

The Supreme Court observed that confines of law cant trample or curtail the inherent right of an individual and that natural order is not a constant, hinting that the New India need new laws that do not contain individual freedom.

The right to privacy and the protection of sexual orientation lie at the core of the fundamental rights, and the move will propel India into the ranks of the progressive societies that ensure rights to their citizens.
BCCL

In a landmark legal move, the Supreme Court today agreed to reconsider its 2013 decision criminalising homosexual acts. A constitutional bench will now review Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalises gay sex. Read more

Here's more top news of the day:

1) Uttar Pradesh Begins Crackdown On Noise Pollution, To Remove Loudspeakers Installed Without Permission

Baltimoresun/Representational Image

With just a few weeks left to respond to the high court query on loudspeakers leading to noise pollution, UP government has started a survey of all loudspeakers installed at public places across the state. Read more

2) Delhi's Khan Market Is Next. NDMC Might Seal 30 Restaurants For Violating Fire Safety Norms

BCCL/Representational Image

About 30 leading restaurants and several other shops located on the first floor and floors above it in Khan Market could be sealed today. The Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee is learned to have ordered New Delhi Municipal Council to execute the order for alleged violation of provisions of the 2021 master plan. Read more

3) UK Ministers Are Addicted To Porn, Make 160 Attempts Daily To Access Online Porn In Parliament

Representational Image

UK politicians are addicted to porn and make all possible attempts to gain access to pornography websites within the Houses of Parliament. Around 160 requests per day were made in late 2017 to access online porn, Britain's Press Association (PA) reported Monday. Read more

4) Irans Bans English In Primary Schools After Leaders Say It Leads To Western Cultural Invasion

AFP

Iran has banned the teaching of English in primary schools, a senior education official said, after Islamic leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a Western "cultural invasion" and adversely influences young minds. Read more

5) BJP Candidate Welcomed With A Royal Garland Of Shoes For Failing To Keep His Promises

In what looks like an act of serious condemnation, a man in Madhya Pradesh's Dhar district greeted a BJP candidate with garlands of shoes while he was campaigning. Dinesh Sharma, the BJP candidate for Dhamnod Civic election, was going from door-to-door seeking people's support for the election. Read more
Have you ever won a lottery in your life? If yes, then maybe you will relate to this story, if no, maybe you will relate to the rest of us mere mortals.

Also read: Bengaluru Couple Falls For Nigerian Lottery Scam, Spends Rs 1.3 Crore To Get Rs 5 Crore Prize

We reckon, most of us are quite unlucky when it comes to taking a chance and actually having something good come out of it. We never get the last seat on the bus, we never find old currency notes in our pockets and neither do we land a jackpot.

But not this woman.

46-year-old Oksana Zaharov was recently handed a lottery ticket - one she did not choose, and she ended up winning a lottery of $5 million!

nylottery

The woman wasn't supposed to win this, okay? This American wonder lady was handed out a different ticket at the shopping store in Manhattan. She picked up $1 lottery ticket but the clerk at the supermarket gave her a $10 'Set For Life' lottery ticket. She decided to pay for it anyway.

Also read: Indian Doctor Wins Rs 17.5 Crore In Lottery In UAE!

"When the clerk handed me the wrong ticket I felt bad so I decided to just go ahead and buy it," Ms Zaharov told New York Lottery.

"I actually used the ticket as a bookmark for a couple weeks before I decided to scratch it," she said.

Well, that's one expensive bookmark, we must say!





chicagobusiness

Upon scratching, she found out that she had won a lottery and obviously, she could not believe it. You aren't supposed to win a lottery just like that! She then took the ticket to the office and it was only then she accepted that she had won it.

"I never win anything. I was sure the ticket was fake. It wasn't until I brought it into the office that I knew it was for real," she said,

She now wants to spend the money on a trip to the Bahamas and maybe the rest of it on educating her kids. She will get the entire amount in about 19 annual installments.

Also read: School Dropout Gets Lucky On His First Lottery, Wins Rs 1.5 Crore New Year Bumper Prize

Oh, so while we are stuck in a 9-5 repertoire, people around the world are winning lotteries and making plans to travel to the Bahamas - Nice! Hurts like a beach, but nice!
A number of Americans of Indian, Afghan and Baloch descent carrying placards with #ChappalChorPakistan scribbled in bold protested outside the Pakistani embassy in Washington over the mistreatment of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife and mother when they visited Islamabad last month to meet him.

Jadhav's wife Chetankul and mother Avanti were asked to remove theirmangalsutra, bindi, bangles and forced to change their clothes before their 40-minute meeting, across a glass screen and through intercom, began. Pakistan then "confiscated" Ms Chetankul's footwear claiming "there was something metallic in it".

ANI

Pakistan's conduct with Mr Jadhav's wife and mother during their tightly-controlled interaction on December 25 is condemnable, said protesters. They also brought a carton full of shoes to be donated to the Pakistani embassy.

"The trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav violated all norms of international law as it was conducted by a military court," said Ahmar Mustikhan, founder of the American Friends of Balochistan, which organised the event "Chappal Chor Pakistan".

ANI

"Pakistan has made a mockery of humanity. By not returning Mr Jadhav's wife's slippers and asking them to remove their bindi and mangalsutra and changing their clothes as well, it is just another sleazy activity Pakistan has done to a Bharatiya saubhagya nari (married Indian woman)," Krishna Gudipati, local Hindu community leader in USA, was quoted as saying by news agency Press Trust of India.

ANI

"They have humiliated the religious and faith symbols of Hindu womanhood. This behaviour will lead to Pakistan's own destruction," said the protester Dhananjay Shevilkar.

Mr Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for alleged espionage, an accusation that India has dismissed as concocted. New Delhi says Mr Jadhav was kidnapped in Iran, where he had legitimate business interests, and brought to Pakistan.
Technology should always strive to make our lives better than what they were before its introduction. And authorities in China are doing just that with facial recognition as a marriage registration tool.

representative image

The Marriage, Adoption Registration Management Center of the city of Chongqing launched the facial recognition system earlier this month in January, where not only local citizens register their marriages, but registration between Chinese citizens and foreigners can also use the facial recognition system.

There are multiple reasons why China's adopted facial recognition as an important step to register marriages.

Chinese law traditionally requires marriage registrars to check a persons ID and household registration certificates before awarding them a marriage certificate. The facial recognition technology can not only shorten this examination time, but also improve its accuracy, claims report coming out of Chongqing.

The facial recognition system can snap a photo of the marriage applicant and compare it with information from other documents, including public databases. The quickest time to complete an examination is just 0.3 second, whereas without the facial recognition system the same would take around 10 minutes to check peoples documents. So it's a huge time saver!

representative image

The new facial recognition system can also deal with cases where applicants have had plastic surgery or for twins who can be differentiated via fingerprints, cases which were difficult for the previous artificial recognition systems to deal with effectively.

Chinese authorities also argue that the facial recognition system be an efficient way to crack down on crimes where suspects steal identities by producing fake marriage certificates.
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NASS to Gift CoF after the Close Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 7:24AM CST Front month feeder cattle futures finished the day with $0.95 to $1.17 gains. Cash trade picked up on Thursday; the USDA confirmed $148 to $156 sales on Thursday, citing $152 as the bulk of business in... LEZ22 : 152.725 (-0.02%) LEG23 : 155.475 (+0.05%) LEJ23 : 158.950 (+0.03%) GFF23 : 179.625 (-0.19%) GFH23 : 182.025 (-0.26%)

Friday Hogs Look to Cap-Off the Week Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 7:24AM CST The lean hog market continued to work higher through the Thursday session, save for the Dec contract which gave back 60 cents. The other nearbys added 5 to 12 cents to the move. The USDA National Average... HEZ22 : 84.225 (-0.88%) HEJ23 : 95.200 (-0.83%) KMZ22 : 95.500s (-0.42%)

Morning Gains in Wheat Market Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 7:24AM CST Overnight wheat markets stayed within a 10 cent range of mostly upward action in Dec SRW. Futures are currently fractionally to 6 cents higher into the last trade day of week. Domestic wheat prices ended... ZWZ22 : 808-0 (+0.15%) ZWH23 : 826-0 (+0.12%) ZWPAES.CM : 7.4223 (+0.15%) KEZ22 : 938-0 (unch) KEPAWS.CM : 8.9632 (-1.92%) MWZ22 : 954-2 (unch)

Soy Futures Rallying for Friday Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 7:24AM CST Preliminary OI data confirmed yesterdays soybean weakness was net new selling, rising 5,433 contracts. Futures are currently back up by 4 to 8 cents into Fridays AM session. Meal prices are $1.90... ZSF23 : 1423-6 (+0.48%) ZSPAUS.CM : 13.9857 (+0.48%) ZSH23 : 1429-2 (+0.49%) ZSK23 : 1435-0 (+0.46%)
AUB Group on the hunt for acquisitions
The range and nature of risks is ever growing and evolving worldwide. Individuals, businesses and communities are having to deal with issues like globalisation, rapid urbanisation, technological evolution, population growth and climate change.This changing risk landscape is throwing new challenges at the insurance industry, which is having to develop new ways to mitigate risk and address the insurance protection gap that exists in the developed and developing world. One method growing in popularity is the use of parametric insurance.Global law firm Clyde & Co has launched a report called Building a resilient world: How parametric insurance can help close the protection gap, which looks at the growth of parametric insurance and considers the important role it has to play in building resilience to natural catastrophes.Parametric insurance products are developing rapidly at local, regional and national level as they provide an elegant solution for risk-transfer concerns, often for populations that were previously uninsured and for whom the protection gap has traditionally been widest, said Nigel Brook, partner, Clyde & Co. That is why they are gaining so much attention, particularly following a year where the threat from natural disasters has been writ so large.The insurance protection gap means that in middle or low-income countries the uninsured proportion of catastrophic losses often exceeds 90%. Meanwhile, the Bank of International Settlements calculates that, especially in developing markets, the worst natural catastrophes can in some cases permanently reduce a countrys GDP by almost 2%.In 2017, economic losses caused by natural catastrophes looked set to top US$300 billion (according to Swiss Re data) compared to an average of US$178 billion for the previous 10 years. Parametric insurance can play a key part in closing the protection gap and mitigating some of those losses, according to Brook.The Clyde & Co report explores the benefits of parametric insurance  which centre on speed, certainty and the ability to plan ahead  and how such products have been used so far. It looks at some of the legal and regulatory challenges that have already or may be faced in the future, and how these have been and can be mitigated. It also explores the question of basis risk; the concept of insurable interest; and the indemnity principle, which means that, in theory, in certain jurisdictions, losses must be valued or assessed before claims can be paid.The report contends that the way parametric products are treated in the law and by regulators will evolve and become clearer as case law and precedent develops. But it suggests that with the level of support currently being given by governments around the world, together with demand from buyers and the proven success of parametric insurance products to date, regulators and law makers are expected to support and encourage the responsible roll-out of parametric insurance rather than attempt to hold it back.With continued support and increased understanding, parametric insurance can fulfil its vast potential and, alongside traditional insurance and other novel forms of risk transfer, play a key part in closing the protection gap, Brook added.
One of Australias premier platforms for legislative updates and business case studies in the area of workers compensation will be returning for its 19th instalment this February, with Gallagher Bassett as a major sponsor.The 2018 National Workers Compensation Summit will be held on February 20-21 in InterContinental Sydney, and will bring together executives and practitioners from a range of backgrounds including insurance, government, health and medical services, and finance.With perspectives from federal and state governments, the annual event will analyse the impact of regulatory and legislative changes; implementation of successful RTW and injury management frameworks; the use of technology; best-practice methods for injury prevention and creating safer working environments; and creating a fairer and more efficient system.GBs Darrin Wright, executive director for personal injury, will talk about the evolution of leadership in personal injury; while Ben Sheat, general manager of self-insurance, will present a claims perspective on improving self-insurance liabilities through service and support.Other notable speakers include Clare Amies, chief executive of WorkSafe Victoria; Carmel Donnelly, chief executive of SIRA; Christina Carras, chief customer officer at WorkCover Queensland; Jennifer Taylor CEO for Comcare; Jim Kelly, director for health and return-to-work at SafeWork NSW; and Kim Garling, workers compensation independent review officer at Workers Compensation Independent Review Office (WIRO).For more information about the event, visit the summit homepage . Gallagher Bassett clients are entitled to a 15% discount on all registrations to the event.
Paul Girard, national underwriting manager and director at SURA Professional Risks, has died, it has been announced.Girard was one of the most valued and respected underwriters in Australia and battled several illnesses throughout 2017.Paul Robinson, managing director of SURA Professional Risks, praised Girards work in the industry throughout his long career.Pauls passion in life and business was admired by all, Robinson said.Over the course of his successful career Paul built strong and lengthy relationships and was greatly admired and respected by his colleagues.Paul will be sorely missed by myself and I am sure all who had the pleasure of knowing him. And, our close-knit team will rally around his family as we grieve this loss together.Angie Zissis, SURA managing director, announced that Girard died last week.Paul was an absolute gentleman and all-round terrific person. He was a friend to most, and a mentor to many, Zissis said. He will be greatly missed.Girard spent more than four decades in the insurance industry, with the last five spent at SURA Professional Risks as a director as well as national underwriting manager and a shareholder within the business.Before his time with SURA, Girard worked as national underwriting manager for Mint Plus and as a senior underwriter at Vero , amongst other roles.The funeral will be held at 10:00am on Tuesday 9th January, 2018 at the Ann Wilson Chapel, cnr Barrenjoey Road & Darley Street, Mona Vale.Cortege will then proceed to Mona Vale Cemetery.For any further details on these funeral arrangements, contact SURA Professional Risks staff.
Californias insurance commissioner has warned that more and more insurers operating in the state are refusing to issue homeowners policies in areas most prone to wildfires.Sharing the results of his offices most recent report, Commissioner Dave Jones said that insurers refused to renew over 10,000 policies in the 24 counties most vulnerable to wildfires in 2016  the number is up 15% from the prior year.Supervisor Tom Wheeler added that homeowners in the Madera County mountain communities have also been refused policy renewals.Although many of the affected customers can still get coverage from other insurers, Jones noted that there has also been an increase in homeowners signing up for Californias insurer of last resort of fire; the FAIR Plan.Jones said that the problem will only get worse as insurers label more homes as wildfire risks following the most recent series of wildfires that hit the state.We have a major problem here in California, and if last years fires didnt teach us that weve got to do something about it, shame on us, the commissioner remarked.The state of California has 1.3 million housing units deemed to be at high or very high risk of fire by insurers. These include more than half the units in 12 counties  those areas in sporadically populated and forested regions of Northern California and the Sierra Nevada.Some experts think Jones may have hastily assumed the worst.Mark Sektnan, vice president of state government relations for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America told The Associated Press that the insurance industry is reviewing the insurance commissioners report.Its too soon to tell what kind of impact the current fires are going to have on the insurance market, so Im not sure we can necessarily say there is an availability crisis, Sektnan said. Some companies may decide not to write (policies), but other companies...are actually moving into the market.
A former California insurance agent has been sentenced to a year in prison for stealing more than $100,000 in insurance premiums and investment funds from 10 victims.Frederick Donald Rollins, 42, pleaded guilty to one count of grand theft, two counts of securities fraud and an aggravated white-collar crime enhancement, according to the California Department of Insurance. In addition to his prison term, Rollins must pay $100,363 in restitution to his victims.The California Department of Insurance launched an investigation into Rollins after receiving multiple complaints  including one from an insurance carrier after a company attempted to file a claim for an injured employee under a non-existent policy. A business owner also complained after discovering they had no actual workers compensation or liability coverage.The investigation revealed that Rollins collected premium payments from several clients but didnt actually place coverage with any carrier. Even after leaving the insurance agency where hed worked, Rollins continued to sell phony policies under a corporation he registered in Nevada but failed to license in California.The investigation found that more than $20,000 in premium payments Rollins collected from his victims, made payable either directly to him or to his company, were spent on his own personal expenses. He issued fake certificates of insurance in order to cover his tracks.Rollins also allegedly presented himself as a registered stockbroker and accepted money from several victims who thought they were making investments. He collected almost $80,000 from various victims under the guise of investing their money in stocks, the California Department of Insurance said.Many people make the mistake of thinking insurance fraud is a victimless white-collar crime, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said. This agent left his clients at great financial risk when he failed to secure their policies, leaving them without the coverage they paid for.
Another landmark in the development of our business, was how chief executive officer Darren Doherty described the decision to move Pioneer Underwriting into Latin America.



The London-based underwriter has already spread its wings into the USA and now it has announced it will be opening up a regional hub in Latin America, based in Mexico City. Its a move the company says is consistent with its strategy to access local business placed in local markets.



Leading the new business will be Graeme Rayner, Pioneers group director of underwriting. His team will focus on property and casualty business and will include Rogelio Diaz, who has 22 years of experience in the Latin American market, and was previously at Odyssey Re; Gabriel Buzo, who has 12 years of experience in the region and was formerly head of financial lines and liability at Odyssey Re; and Paolo Benitez who has 15 years experience and is the former Latin American head of general casualty and financial lines at Reasinter.



Pioneers unique operating model and innovative culture provides a great platform from which to trade going forward, said Diaz. We are excited to be part of this growing and dynamic organisation.



Completing the team is Salvador Hernandez, who is a former Latin American territorial leader at Gen Re.



The team will add to our existing capabilities in the region and bring Pioneers capabilities closer to clients and local brokers, commented Doherty. The Latin American teams credentials speak for themselves and Im delighted to welcome them to Pioneer.






Three insurance agents in California have been sentenced to prison for their part in a fraudulent life insurance scheme.US Attorney Brian Stretch announced that Behnam Halali, of San Jose, was sentenced Friday to five years, Ernesto Magat, of Hayward, was sentenced to four years, and Karen Gagarin, of San Jose, was sentenced to three years.The San Francisco Chronicle reported that aside from serving prison time, the three were also ordered to pay $2.8 million in recompense to American Income Life Insurance (AIL), the insurer that employed them. Judge Susan Illston of the US District Court Northern District of California also ordered each defendant to serve 140 hours of community service and three years of supervised release.All three were found guilty of wire fraud and identity theft last March by a jury following a four-week trial.A release from the US Attorneys Office Northern District of California said that while working at AIL, the defendants participated in a conspiracy involving the submission of hundreds of applications for life insurance policies on behalf of people at least some of whom did not know that a policy was applied for or issued in their name and/or did not want a life insurance policy. The defendants then shared the commissions and bonuses issued by their employer related to their fraudulent operation.The fraud scheme concocted by Halali, Magat, and Gagarin was sophisticated, the US Attorneys Office observed. The defendants paid recruiters to find people willing to undergo medical exams for about $100. The personal information gleaned from these tests would then be used by the defendants to submit applications for life insurance under the unwitting victims names, usually without their knowledge.The defendants and their co-conspirators also paid individuals to participate in a fictitious survey of a medical exam company. The medical and personal information obtained from these false tests were then also used to file fraudulent life insurance applications.Evidence also demonstrated that the three agents and their co-conspirators also created false drivers licenses. This allowed the co-conspirators to take the medical exams while claiming to be the applicants.
A hospital in Wellsville, NY was brought to its knees after a cyberattack disabled its information systems.Jones Memorial Hospital, a rural 70-bed acute care facility, said in a statement that it is in the final stages of bringing its systems back online, expecting to resume standard operations in the days to come.Health Data Management reported that the hospital has yet to specify the exact nature of the outage of its systems.Work on the impacted systems is nearly complete, and Jones clinicians are working with our IT team to conduct system checks prior to resuming full operational status, the hospital said in an announcement. We have also worked with Meditech, our vendor for patient electronic medical record systems. The leadership of Jones appreciates their dedication and hard work in helping to restore our systems.While its systems were down, the hospital had implemented standard computer downtime procedures, which included the practice of manually entering information into patient medical charts while some of our systems are offline.We continue to believe that no patient financial or medical information has been compromised, and have been in contact with law enforcement and the New York State Department of Health since the downtime began, the healthcare facility assured in its statement. This issue is isolated to Jones Memorial Hospitals computer systems.
In the public market, exceptional CEO talent is hard to fi nd, and the competition is fierce. As in any economic model, CEO compensation is driven by supply and demand. Many industries CEOs are grossly overpaid. Its not insurance; its the public company model and competitive market forces at work.The real issue is the disparity of compensation from top to bottom, which affects morale. Its hard to justify the earnings gap between a CEO paid $20 million, line underwriters making $70,000 or a product line manager making $150,000, based only on performance. Bottom line: The public company compensation model is broken.The compensation structure within insurance companies has been criticized for paying unusually large bonuses to CEOs whose companies fi nancial performance had been a failure. This criticism stems from boards not playing an active role in compensation policy. The appointment by the board of so-called compensation experts to provide paid-for competitive compensation surveys to justify the CEOs outrageous compensation continues.The gap between an underwriters annual salary and the chief executives $3.5 million annual salary will continue to widen. Without a revolt by concerned company shareholders, dont expect to see any changes in the future.The answer depends on what you measure, how you measure it and what you compare. Insurance company CEOs were awarded pay  cash and non-cash remuneration  last year ranging from $21.3 to $24 million. That looks like a tight range. Broaden the study to include CEOs at fi nancial services companies generally, and the range widens to $19.5 to $124 million.But were these CEOs worth their pay? When their pay is evaluated relative to their companies three-year operating performance, the insurance CEOs ranked poorly  at or near the bottom. Thats true even when you include the other financial services CEOs.
Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the Florida state-run insurer of last resort, is anticipating its policyholder count will increase in 2018 for the first time since its efforts to shed policies through depopulation began several years ago.

As it moves on from a tumultuous 2017 that included a major hurricane and ongoing assignment of benefits (AOB) abuse, Citizens executives said at its Board of Governors meeting last month that it anticipates more than 60,000 policyholders from private insurance companies will return to the state-run insurer of last resort.

Citizens President, CEO and Executive Director Barry Gilway told the board at the Dec. 13 meeting that the Florida domestic insurance markets combined ratio and surplus have declined, and the majority of Florida insurers experienced a negative net income for the first time in five years.

The active 2017 storm season is one factor contributing to deteriorating insurer results, but the biggest factor is increasing costs from nonweather-related losses and AOB abuse fueled by attorneys and unscrupulous contractors, which has led to a cumulative negative impact on insurers bottom lines. The industry has started taking steps to limit their losses from AOB, including not writing in certain areas of the state where it is the most rampant.

Citizens, which is statutorily obligated to offer coverage when the private market will not, will have to pick up these policies. Gilway said he expects Citizens will see significantly less depopulation next year.

When the market is healthy, and companies are making money, depopulation soars; when it becomes negative, depopulation drops. We are not expecting a lot of depopulation next year, Gilway said.

Instead, Gilway said, Citizens is expecting its overall policy count of 442,000  the lowest it has been since the company was formed in 2002  to climb back up to around 500,000. Citizens policy count reached a high of 1.4 million before the depopulation program began in 2012.

Gilway said the insurers personal lines accounts (PLA) where AOB is having the biggest impact will grow by about 66,000 policies. The company expects its commercial lines policy count to continue to decline because the commercial market is so competitive.

Gilway said Citizens overall premium will likely grow by about $100 million primarily because of the growth in PLA, but added, the unfortunate thing is we are growing in unprofitable lines and losing business in profitable lines. Its the nature of the beast. Gilway said that brings more pressure to focus on finding solutions for the personal lines account segment.

Citizens took several steps in 2017 to mitigate nonweather-related losses and AOB abuse, in addition to an unsuccessful push for legislative reform. Over the summer, Florida regulators approved Citizens request for a $10,000 sublimit on nonweather-related water claims for policyholders who opt not to use the new Citizens managed repair and preferred vendor program. Citizens will also require that contractors and other third parties adhere to the same disclosure responsibilities as policyholders when they accept an assignment of benefit.

The policy changes go into effect for new and renewal policies on May 1, 2018, to coincide with the implementation of Citizens 2018 rates.

Gilway said Citizens other efforts to curb AOB abuse have been successful at stabilizing the overall cost of water damage claims, but added nonweather-related water claims remain double the cost of a non-litigated water damage claim in the Tri-County region of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward.

The last couple years, at least we are maintaining the same level of severity, he said.

Still, Citizens percentage of operating expenses relative to claims and litigation are increasing. The company expects AOB and litigation costs will account for about 23 percent of its 2018 operating expenses, up from 16 percent in 2017  an increase of $17 million.

The scam  and thats what it is  continues. And until legislative changes are made, it will continue, Gilway said.

Christine Ashburn, chief Communications, Legislative & External Affairs officer, told the board that the bill the industry supported last year to address AOB abuse and reform the one-way attorney statute blamed for the abuse was reintroduced by Florida Sen. Dorothy Hukill for the upcoming 2018 Florida Legislative session, but she is not optimistic it will be passed next session. The same bill passed by the Florida House in 2017 was also filed again.

Our legislative priority remains unchanged from 2017 with our primary focus being meaningful assignment of benefits reform, she said.

Hurricane Irma Response, New Claims System

As of the beginning of December, Citizens had closed nearly 80 percent of its 63,600 Hurricane Irma claims, and the company said it is continuing to work with policyholders whose claims remain open or whose closed claims need to be adjusted further. It reported about 1,476 of its total claims filed had an AOB attached, and 6,312 claims had representation. The total number of claims in the tri-county region was 58.4 percent.

Despite a projected $1.1 billion in Irma losses, Chris Gardner, chairman of Citizens Board of Governors, said the company maintains a $6.4 billion surplus and substantial reinsurance coverage following the payout of Irma claims.

Gilway told the board that Citizens is making improvements to its claims processing in the aftermath of Irma to help with efficiency and communication with its policyholders.

There are lessons learned with every event, and what we learned very quickly with Irma is that we did not have an online claims capability, he said.

Gilway said Citizens was not prepared for the magnitude of calls that came in for Irma and the subsequent follow-up calls from customers requesting status updates on their claims. To meet this need after future events, Citizens is upgrading its claims system and implementing a customer portal. The new system will allow insureds and claimants to view the progress of their claims and, once fully implemented, report them online.

From a consumer standpoint, it clearly will be a huge benefit, he said.

Citizens will also upgrade its existing Guidewire software and storage platform, the first update since the system was implemented five years ago.

Topics Carriers Trends Florida Claims
A top Mississippi official said in December that the state will stop suspending peoples drivers licenses purely because they havent paid court fines and fees, meaning tens of thousands of people who lost driving privileges could get them back in coming months.

Department of Public Safety Commissioner Marshall Fisher made the joint announcement with lawyers from the MacArthur Justice Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, after advocates complained that it was another way the state was criminalizing poverty. It parallels a court rules change enacted in July that requires a judge to determine whether a person can afford to pay a fine before jailing anyone for nonpayment.

These changes are consistent with those new rules and a recognition across the state that a person couldnt be punished just for their poverty, said Micah West, a lawyer for the Alabama-based SPLC.

More than 100,000 people have had their Mississippi licenses automatically suspended at the request of a court clerk. MacArthur Center lawyer Cliff Johnson said its hard to tell how many will get their licenses back, although he estimated it would be in the tens of thousands.

Both legal groups have also sued cities and counties in Mississippi for jailing poor people who cant afford to pay bail or fines. This time, it didnt take a lawsuit, although Johnson said we discussed the potential for litigation challenging their license suspension policy. West said talks had been ongoing since January.

The state will begin reinstating licenses starting in January. Mississippi will waive its $100 reinstatement fee, sending letters to anyone who benefits. Officials say people should await written notification before driving again. People whose licenses were suspended for additional reasons, such as reckless driving or driving under the influence wont get them back. Licenses will continue to be suspended for people who dont respond to a citation or if a judge holds someone in contempt for failing to pay fines.

We will continue to suspend licenses for other reasons allowed under Mississippi law, and we certainly take it seriously when people drive with suspended licenses, Fisher said in a statement. The reinstatement of these licenses will not relieve the drivers of the legal obligation to pay the fines, fees or assessments.

Mississippi becomes the fifth state to require a consideration of ability to pay before suspending a license. Others include Louisiana, which enacted the change as part of a package of criminal justice changes last year. Mississippi lawmakers had been mulling the change as well  it was originally proposed last year in a bill meant to make it easier for people to re-enter society after being convicted of criminal offenses. The drivers license provision was dropped, and Gov. Phil Bryant ultimately vetoed the bill because it allowed some repeat offenders to be paroled after serving only a quarter of their sentence.

Johnson said suspended licenses were also driving people deeper into trouble because, lacking other options, they kept driving, incurring citations up to $500 for driving without a license and up to $250 for driving without auto insurance each time theyre caught.

Were making it illegal for people to drive a car in a state where we dont have any public transportation, Johnson said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Personal Auto Mississippi
New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has signed Assembly Bill No. 1620 into law, requiring insurance companies to notify employers in advance of some workers compensation insurance premium increases.

The law was written by Big I New York, the states oldest insurance producer trade association, to protect New Yorks businesses. It applies to all policies issued or renewed on and after April 17, 2018.

Assembly Bill 1620 requires insurers to give businesses written notice of when their workers comp policy premiums will rise by more than ten percent upon renewal by an affiliated insurer. They must send the notice at least 30 days before the existing policies expire. The requirement applies only to premium components within the insurers control. Insurers will not have to send a notice when the increase results from changes in factors related to the risk, such as an increase in the business payroll, or surcharges or discounts based on the business loss history.

A 1986 law requires insurers to notify businesses in advance when premiums increase more than ten percent. However, it exempts workers comp insurance.

As a result, businesses would often learn of large workers comp premium increases days before their policies were to renew, according to Big I New York in a press release announcing the bills signing.

The new lawwill give businesses fair warning of premium increases within the insurance companys control, said Big I New York Chair of the Board Richard E. MacDonald in the release. They will have time to respond that they did not have before.

In his signing message, Cuomo called on the State Legislature to make technical amendments to the law in the upcoming session.

We intend to work closely with lawmakers on a bill to make the governors requested changes, MacDonald added in the release.

Topics Carriers Legislation Workers' Compensation New York Pricing Trends
A subsidiary of European steel giant ArcelorMittal has agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations its western Pennsylvania coke plant violated emissions requirements over soot and other pollutants almost daily, according to a proposed agreement filed in Pittsburghs federal court.

The environmental advocacy group that sued, Philadelphia-based PennEnvironment, said it believes the penalty is the largest secured by a citizen lawsuit in Pennsylvania history under the federal Clean Air Act.

Federal and state officials, as well as representatives of ArcelorMittal and PennEnvironment, signed the 108-page proposed agreement.

As part of the agreement, ArcelorMittal agreed to implement air pollution controls the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated would cost $2 million. The proposed agreement is subject to a 30-day public comment period and must receive a judges approval.

In a statement, the company said restarting the coke plant was challenging, and its environmental performance during that period was unacceptable. It said it has been working to improve the facilitys performance and is committed to achieving full compliance with its environmental requirements.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Pollution Pennsylvania
The fight to reinstate criminal charges against the engineer in a deadly 2015 Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia will carry over into 2018.

A judge told prosecutors she will review Brandon Bostians case, and she set a hearing for February where prosecutors may have the chance to argue that the engineer should be held criminally accountable for the derailment.

A different judge in September of 2017 threw out involuntary manslaughter and other charges after finding evidence pointed to an accident.

Eight people died and more than 200 people were injured when the train rounded a curve at more than twice the speed limit and derailed.

Like in the December 2017 fatal crash involving a speeding Amtrak train in Washington state, the track where the Philadelphia crash occurred did not have the technology that can automatically slow or stop a speeding train.

Federal safety investigators determined that Bostian lost track of where he was on the route after hearing on the radio that a commuter train had been struck with a rock. Thinking he was on a long straightaway, Bostian accelerated the train, they concluded. The train was actually approaching a sharp curve.

Bostian has been on unpaid administrative leave from Amtrak since the crash and is suing the government-owned railroad, alleging he was left disoriented or unconscious when something struck his train before it derailed. Federal investigators believe nothing struck Bostians locomotive.

Amtrak has taken responsibility for the crash and agreed to pay $265 million to settle claims filed by victims and their families. It has also installed speed controls on all its track from Boston to Washington.

Bostians lawyer said after the hearing that Bostian wants to put the case behind him. A spokesman for the attorney generals office said he is pleased with the courts decision.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Pennsylvania
An Edina, Minnesota, chiropractor and his recruiters have been found guilty of auto insurance fraud, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced in late December 2017.

Federal prosecutors reported that Adam John Burke, a chiropractor, and patient recruiters Abdirahin Khalif Ibrahim and Dana Enoch Kidd were convicted for their roles in a multi-million-dollar insurance fraud conspiracy.

Burke, Ibrahim and Kidd were initially indicted in December 2016. They were recently convicted on charges of conspiracy and mail fraud by a federal jury before Senior Judge Michael J. Davis in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, Minn.

Prosecutors said trial documents show that beginning in at least 2012, Burke ran a scheme to defraud automobile insurance companies by hiring patient recruiters, or runners, to solicit automobile accident victims for treatments at Burkes clinic, Burke Chiropractic Center P.A. (Burke Chiropractic). Runners, including Ibrahim and Kidd, typically were paid $1,000 to $2,000 for each patient they brought to Burke Chiropractic.

Burke would write checks to the runners with false descriptions in the memo lines such as marketing, consulting fee, or pt transportation. To further disguise the nature of the payments, he required runners to form corporate entities, such as limited liability companies, with names that sounded like legitimate businesses that performed marketing or transportation services. He wrote more than 280 checks to the runners, totaling more than $590,000.

The scheme was structured in order to maximize Burke Chiropractics billings to the insurance companies, according to prosecutors. Burke typically withheld kickback payments to runners until after the patients had attended a certain number of treatment sessions. To make sure that the patients attended the minimum number of treatment sessions, the runners frequently paid a portion of the kickback payments to the patients.

Additionally, Burke often referred patients to personal injury attorneys and instructed runners to advise patients that following through on all treatment sessions would result in a bigger insurance settlement.

This case was investigated by the Minnesota Commerce Fraud Bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the Minneapolis Police Department, Saint Paul Police Department, Minnesota State Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations. It was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys David M. Maria and John E. Kokkinen.

Topics Auto Fraud Minnesota
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has ruled that two former board members and investors in a limited liability company are not liable for failing to pay the LLCs former president, in a case that the SJC called quite unusual and removed from the core concerns of the Wage Act.

The case, Andrew Segal vs. Genitrix, LLC, & others, was brought by plaintiff Andrew Segal, former president of Genitrix LLC, against defendants H. Fisk Johnson III and Stephen Rose, two former Genitrix board members and investors.

The Massachusetts SJC concluded in the case that the defendants are not liable for failing to pay wages owed to Segal because they were company officers who had limited agency authority. Segal was the only officer having the management of the company and chose not to pay himself for a period of time as a result of the companys financial difficulty.

The Massachusetts Wage Act

In Massachusetts, The Wage Act requires employers to compensate their employees for earned wages. An employer who violates the Act may be sued by the affected employees.

Section 148 of the Act defines employer as a person having employees in his [or her] service. For corporations, these include the president and treasurer of [the] corporation and any officers or agents having the management of such corporation, in addition to the corporation itself. The statute does not include board directors or investors in its definition of employer.

The provision also indicates two requirements: the defendant must both be an agent and have the management of the company, according to the SJC document.

Not all officers or agents are included the SJC document said. Some management responsibility is not the same as the management of the corporation.

With this in mind, the court concluded that personal liability for Wage Act violations can be imposed on the president and treasurer of a corporation and other officers or agents who may not hold these titles, but have assumed management responsibilities over the corporation similar to those performed by a corporate president or treasurer, particularly in regard to the control of finances or payment of wages.

Although an employee may always sue the president and treasurer of a company for unpaid wages, the Massachusetts SJC stated, the plaintiff in this case is the president and sole officer of the corporation and the only person identified as responsible for Wage Act violations.

Genitrix Background

The case comes after representatives for Johnson initially contacted Segal about investing in his cancer research in 1997, and Segal and Johnson agreed to form a biotechnology startup company.

Genitrix was then established as a Delaware limited liability company headquartered in Boston, Mass., with Segal serving as president and CEO and Johnson providing initial funding.

Stephen Rose was a representative for Johnson and spoke to Segal on Johnsons behalf during their negotiations over the formation of the company.

Segal transferred his intellectual property rights to the company in exchange for a substantial equity interest. Johnson also received a substantial equity interest in return for his initial investment in the company.

Johnson served on the board for the companys first year. Rose was appointed as one of Johnsons board representatives in 1999 and remained a Johnson board member until the companys dissolution. Johnson indicated to Segal to contact Rose about any financing issues, stating that Rose speaks for Johnson, the SJC document said.

As a condition of Johnsons investment in the company, he required Segal to sign an employment agreement with Genitrix. The agreement stated Segal would serve as the president and CEO of the company, responsible for conducting the companys business, research and development and managing its finances and other administrative matters, subject to board authority.

The agreement also specified Segals salary for the first two years of his employment. Afterward, his salary was to be determined by a 75 percent vote of the board. The employment agreement identified Johnson as a third-party beneficiary and authorized him to enforce the companys rights under the terms of the agreement.

In 2003, Johnson began funding Genitrix through Fisk Ventures LLC (Fisk), an entity owned by Johnson and Rose. Fisk became the largest shareholder of Genitrix.

Genitrix never employed more than five full-time employees. As the president and sole officer, Segal was responsible for all day-to-day operations. He supervised the laboratory, directly managed human resources, was in charge of fundraising and generating new capital and handled the companys payroll. As the only person at the company with authority to sign checks on the Genitrix bank accounts, he wrote checks for employee wages.

When Genitrix began using a company called Paychex to handle its payroll, Segal still had to order each payroll individually, including for himself. However, he needed board approval for several actions, including material personnel practices or policies, hiring and firing employees earning $45,000 or more, setting compensation for officers and employees other than himself and acquiring debt or equity in the company, the SJC document said.

Financial Difficulties

On March 23, 2006, Segal informed the board that the company was running out of funds to pay its employees. He told the board it would need to lay off at-will employees the company could not afford to pay in order to avoid liability under the Wage Act.

At the start of 2007, Genitrix was still short on money and struggling to make payroll. Because of this, Segal stopped taking his salary in January 2007. He testified that he did this to help the company afford to pay Elihu Young, its last remaining employee other than Segal.

Segal explained that he was put in a position where he felt it was necessary not to pay himself, the SJC document said. When pressed about who made that decision, Segal testified, Given the box I was in, I did, the court document added, stating that Segal later suggested to the board he was no longer paying himself.

When asked at trial who instructed the payroll company, Paychex, to stop paying him, Segal testified, Well, I didnt tell them not to pay me. I just didnt tell them to pay me.

On May 17, 2017, Johnsons board members agreed to lay off Young. When Young left, he closed the companys laboratory.

Months after he left Genitrix, Young threatened to bring a Wage Act claim against the company for outstanding unpaid wages. In March 2008, after Rose directed Fisk to invest enough money in Genitrix to compensate Young for his unpaid wages, Young signed an agreement releasing Genitrix, its board members and its agents from liability. Rose did not, however, direct Fisk to invest money in Genitrix toward Segals salary.

At this point, the company was out of money and apparently deadlocked on even how to conduct board business, the SJC document said.

Dissolution of the Company

As a result of the companys financial condition, Rose filed a petition for the judicial dissolution of Genitrix on behalf of Fisk in June 2007. The petition was filed in Delaware, where Genitrix was incorporated. Segal was a named party to the Delaware dissolution proceeding because he was still the president of the company.

For the next two years, Segal opposed the dissolution. In July 2007, he brought counterclaims in that proceeding against the defendants for breach of the LLC agreement, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, breach of fiduciary duties and tortious interference with his employment agreement. Segal did not bring a Massachusetts Wage Act claim in those particular proceedings.

As the dissolution proceedings continued, Segal did other work as president, including paying patent annuity fees and protecting the work associated with those patents, securing directors and officers insurance and making necessary tax filings, the SJC document said.

Segal testified that he continued to work for the company during this time despite no longer taking a salary because he thought he would eventually get paid. He believed when the company sold its patents, that money would be used to pay him, at least in part, the SJC document said.

Segal Files Suit

In early 2009, Segal filed suit against Rose and Johnson in Massachusetts under the Wage Act for unpaid wages from 2007 to 2009. Around the same time, the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered Genitrixs dissolution and appointed a liquidator. As part of the dissolution, the liquidator auctioned off Genitrixs intellectual property.

Segal submitted a proof of claim to the liquidator for back pay in June 2009, but that claim was denied. Segal appealed from the denial to the chancellor, who dismissed the claim in October 2010 because the company did not have enough money to satisfy Segals claims.

The defendants moved for summary judgment in the Massachusetts Wage Act suit, and a Massachusetts Superior Court judge granted the motion in 2013 after finding the defendants did not have the management of the company under the Wage Act.

The Appeals Court in Massachusetts then reversed and remanded the grant of summary judgment on the Wage Act claim, with the jury finding both defendants individually liable under the Wage Act. On appeal, the defendants argued there was insufficient evidence to find Wage Act liability.

The defendants moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and a new trial. Both motions were denied, and the defendants appealed.

Supreme Judicial Court Decision

While Segal had significant officer and agency authority, the defendants had limited express agency authority, all of which related to the power to terminate Segal, the Massachusetts SJC document stated.

Additionally, Segal was given responsibility to manage the finances and the payroll function in his employment agreement and made the decision not to pay himself, the document added.

Because of this, the Massachusetts SJC concluded that the agency authority in this case was insufficient to make the defendants individually or collectively liable under the Wage Act.

With this in mind, the SJC reversed the denial of the defendants motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and remanded to the Superior Court for entry of judgment for the defendants.

Topics Agencies Massachusetts
To support continued growth within the Connecticut market, workers compensation specialist The MEMIC Group has announced the promotion of Ian Torrey to the position of production underwriter.

Torrey, a native of Hartford, Conn., joined The MEMIC Group in 2015 as an account analyst and was promoted to associate underwriter in 2016.

The MEMIC Group includes MEMIC Indemnity Company, MEMIC Casualty Company, and parent company Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company. As a super-regional workers compensation specialty insurer, The MEMIC Group holds licenses to write workers compensation across the country. The group maintains offices in Manchester, N.H.; Glastonbury, Conn.; Albany, N.Y.; Weehawken, N.J.; West Conshohocken, Penn.; Tysons Corner, Va.; and Tampa, Fla.; in addition to its headquarters in Portland, Maine.

Source: The MEMIC Group

Topics Workers' Compensation Underwriting Connecticut
Four multi-family homes have been damaged and six residents and two firefighters injured following in an early morning fire in Providence, R.I.

Fire officials say the blaze was reported at around 3 a.m. Saturday in the citys Olneyville neighborhood. Firefighters arrived to find at least two three-story residential buildings on fire.

The Providence Journal reports the six residents were treated for smoke inhalation at Rhode Island Hospital.

Fire Battalion Chief Stephen Capracotta told the newspaper that neither firefighters injuries were considered life-threatening, though one of them had to be rescued when a roof collapsed.

Three of the structures have been totally destroyed while another suffered minor damage. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Numbers Homeowners
MS Amlin, the London-based specialist re/insurer, announced that a Bermuda-domiciled special purpose reinsurer, Viribus Re Ltd., has been created to provide collateralized capacity support for MS Amlin Syndicate 2001s global reinsurance portfolio in 2018.

Viribus Re Ltd has entered into a quota share agreement with MS Amlin, incepting January 1, 2018, under which it will reinsure a share of MS Amlins worldwide property catastrophe excess-of-loss portfolio.

The vehicle has secured commitments of more than $60 million, said MS Amlin, noting that capital has been committed by a number of third party investors, including MS Amlin, which has provided $5 million. The combination of new investors in Viribus Re, alongside existing capital structures and partners, strengthens MS Amlins position as a leading global re/insurer, the company said in a statement.

This is an important long-term strategic initiative for MS Amlin as we continue to seek ways to build capacity and relationships with capital market partners, whilst providing us with greater scope and flexibility to support the evolving needs of our clients, said James Few, global managing director of Reinsurance at MS Amlin. We are delighted to have secured funding for Viribus Re Ltd. from a range of new partners whom we look forward to working with closely in the future.

Aon Securities acted as sole structuring and placement agent on the transaction. Willkie Farr & Gallagher UK (LLP) acted as deal legal counsel for the transaction.

Source: MS Amlin

Topics Reinsurance Mississippi
Lockton Benefit Group (LBG) has added Mike Mascolo as chief operating officer (COO). He is based in Kansas City, Missouri.

In his new role, Mascolo will focus on coordination and collaboration across the benefits group as well as play an essential role in working with insurers and other business partners.

Mascolo is highly regarded in the benefits industry for his client consulting and management skills. He has been in the healthcare and insurance business for more than 20 years, spending the last decade with Wells Fargo Insurance.

In his most recent role as the employee benefits national practice resource leader for Wells Fargo Insurance, Mascolo guided his client consulting teams in their thought leadership and resource development activities. Under his direction, the Employee Benefits Practice implemented a data-driven performance and execution model to deliver outstanding client solutions through an innovative alignment of resources and enhanced priority action planning.

Source: Lockton
Using a drone to spy on neighbors, drop drugs into prisons or harass cows could lead to criminal charges under a new bill Nebraska lawmakers will consider later this year.

The measure would impose new safety and privacy rules on the remote-control flying machines that are now used for dozens of jobs throughout the state.

Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue said she introduced the bill to protect the public without overregulating drones, the kind of technology she said is critical to the states economic growth. The Federal Aviation Administration already oversees drones, but Blood said the agency hasnt addressed all of the public safety concerns.

We want to make sure we have laws that tell people what our expectations are when they use technology, she said.

If the measure passes, Nebraska would join 40 other states with laws regulating drones, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The laws often address how law enforcement agencies and the general public can use the devices.

The Nebraska bill would create a variety of new restrictions for drone users. Pilots who use drones to peep inside homes without permission could face a misdemeanor charge, and so could sex offenders who use drones to violate a protection order.

Drone users who fly lower than 300 feet over private property after receiving a trespass notice could also be charged, as could pilots who fly too close to a prison or cordoned-off crime scene. The bill would prohibit pilots from strapping weapons to their drones or harassing livestock.

The legislation also would shield police officers and firefighters from lawsuits if they damage a drone while performing their official duties and believed it was interfering with their work. Law enforcement agencies could use information from drones with a warrant or in certain emergencies and situations.

A Nebraska Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman said the agency has had no confirmed drone sightings over a state prison but was aware of incidents in other states where pilots used them to deliver contraband.

Blood stressed that the bill wouldnt apply to drone pilots who have a property owners permission. She said she has spent the past year researching the issue and working with drone pilots, law enforcement, city officials and others to reach a compromise that wouldnt infringe on anyones rights.

People are worried about being overregulated, she said. I keep assuring them that if theyre responsible, this wont affect them in any way.

Even so, the bill will likely generate debate among drone users and their supporters. David Silchman, who owns an Omaha-based flight school, said he hadnt seen the proposal but questioned whether state laws are necessary given the current federal licensing and registration requirements.

Silchman said drones have become increasingly important in a variety of fields, such as agriculture and real estate. Railroad and utility companies frequently use them to inspect their infrastructure.

Every day, people find more and more uses for them, he said.

Drones have also proven invaluable to some Nebraska law enforcement agencies, despite past efforts to curtail their use. In 2013, lawmakers considered legislation to ban law enforcement agencies from using drones, but the bill never advanced out of committee.

La Vista Police Chief Bob Lausten said drones have helped his department photograph crime scenes without a helicopter and scout homes before serving high-risk search warrants. Officers recently relied on a drone to locate children who had run away from home, he said. In October, they used it to reconstruct a crash involving a cement mixer that overturned and killed two Omaha men.

There are a lot of different uses, he said. We want to be able to utilize the technology, but do it without infringing on anyones civil rights.

Many ranchers see drones as a helpful tool to check wells and fences and search for lost cattle amid the states workforce shortage, said Jessie Herrmann, the Nebraska Cattlemen Associations director of legal and regulatory affairs.

But Herrmann said her groups members are also concerned that animal rights groups will fly drones over their property without permission. Earlier this year, she said one animal rights group flew a drone over the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center near Clay Center, Nebraska, and may also have photographed a feedlot.

Theres going to be a lot of interest in the bill, Herrmann said. Its a pretty big issue that a lot of people are concerned about.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Fraud Law Enforcement Agribusiness Nebraska
Chances that a fix to a major microchip security flaw may slow down or crash some computer systems are leading some businesses to hold off installing software patches, fearing the cure may be worse than the original problem.

Researchers this week revealed security problems with chips from Intel Corp. and many of its rivals, sending businesses, governments and consumers scrambling to understand the extent of the threat and the cost of fixes.

Rather than rushing to put on patches, a costly and time-intensive endeavor for major systems, some businesses are testing the fix, leaving their machines vulnerable.

If you start applying patches across your whole fleet without doing proper testing, you could cause systems to crash, essentially putting all of your employees out of work, said Ben Johnson, co-founder of cyber-security startup Obsidian.

Banks and other financial institutions spent much of the week studying the vulnerabilities, said Greg Temm, chief information risk officer with the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group that shares data on emerging cyber threats.

The flaws affect virtually all computers and mobile devices, but are not considered critical because there is no evidence that hackers have figured out how to exploit them, said Temm, whose group works with many of the worlds largest banks.

Its like getting a diagnosis of high blood pressure, but not having a cardiac arrest, Temm said. Were taking it seriously, but its not something that is killing us.

Banks are testing the patches to see if they slow operations and, if so, what changes need to be made, Temm said. For instance, computers could be added to networks to make up for the lack of processor speed in individual machines, he added.

Some popular antivirus software programs are incompatible with the software updates, causing desktop and laptop computers to freeze up and show a blue screen of death, researcher Johnson said.

Antivirus software makers responded by rolling out fixes to make their products compatible with the updated operating systems, he said. In a blog posting on Friday, Microsoft Corp. said it would only offer security patches to Windows customers whose antivirus software suppliers had confirmed with Microsoft that the patch would not crash the customers machine.

If you have not been offered the security update, you may be running incompatible antivirus software, and you should consult the software vendor, Microsoft advised in the blog post.

Government agencies also are watching. The Ohio Attorney Generals office is monitoring the situation, a spokesman said by email.

Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time, the worlds No. 1 chipmaker said on Thursday in a release.

It cited Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.s and Microsoft as saying that most users had seen no significant impact on performance after installing the patches.

The cloud vendors are among a group of firms that quickly patched their technology to mitigate against the threat from one of those vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown, which only affects machines running Intel chips.

Major software makers have not issued patches to protect against the second vulnerability, dubbed Spectre, which affects nearly all computer chips made in the last decade, including those from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and ARM-architecture manufacturers, including Qualcomm Inc.

However, Google, Firefox and Microsoft have implemented measures in most web browsers to stop hackers from launching remote attacks using Spectre.

Governments and security experts say they have seen no cyber attacks seeking to exploit either vulnerability, though they expect attempts by hackers as they digest technical data about the security flaws.

One key risk is that hackers will develop code that can infect the personal computers of people visiting malicious websites, said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of cyber security firm Veracode.

He advised PC owners to install the patches to protect against such potential attacks. Computer servers at large enterprises are less at risk, he said, because those systems are not used to surf the web and can only be infected in a Meltdown attack if a hacker has already breached that network.

Microsoft has issued a patch for its Windows operating system, and Apple desktop users with the most recent operating system are protected. Google has said most of its Chromebook laptops are already protected and that the rest would be soon.

Apple said it planned to release a patch to its Safari web browser within coming days to protect Mac and iOS users from Spectre.

While third-party browsers from Google and others can protect Mac users from Spectre, all major web browsers for Apples iOS devices depend on receiving a patch from Apple. Until then, hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users will be exposed to potential Spectre attacks while browsing the Web.

(Editing by Richard Chang)

Topics Cyber Google
Texas Department of Insurance fraud investigations in 2017 resulted in 135 suspects referred for prosecution, 113 indictments, and $2.3 million in court-ordered restitution for victims.

TDI described some of the most significant cases resolved last year as:

Gainesville, Texas, clinic owner Mark Allen Cox pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and was ordered to repay $1 million after an investigation by the Texas Department of Insurance found that he billed for chiropractic services without having a licensed chiropractor on staff.

In Dallas County, Reginald Cofer recruited 12 other people to participate in a scheme involving arson of residences. Cofer owned a restoration business and used the fires to generate work. He pleaded guilty to engaging in organized criminal activity and was sentenced to six years in prison.

James Halsell, a licensed insurance agent, operated a commission scheme in Bexar County where he used Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses to create fictitious people as applicants for life insurance policies. He would collect commissions for the policy sales and then allow the policies to cancel. He also used a similar method where he stole actual identities and took out policies without permission to collect commissions. Halsell was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $52,364 in restitution.

In Bexar County, insurance agent Paula Villareal defrauded her victims into rolling their retirements into IRAs and then depositing the funds for the IRAs into her personal account. She was sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and return $55,373 to her victims. As part of the sentence, she permanently surrendered her insurance license.

Ariel Ratcliff operated an internet business selling fake insurance certificates and other documents. The victims were unaware that they were uninsured and that their premiums were being deposited directly into Ratliffs bank account. Ratliff was sentenced to two years in prison.

Cornell Tanner filed fraudulent claims with multiple insurance companies for three separate accidents using fake medical bills. Tanner claimed more than $53,000 in fabricated medical treatment and received $25,269 in payments. Tanner was sentenced to two years in prison and repaid all restitution to the insurance companies.

In Tarrant County, Mary Burress fabricated medical bills and submitted claims for injuries that never happened. She pleaded guilty to third-degree felony insurance fraud and was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $53,735 in restitution.

Damon Carter reported an accident in which he claimed a phantom driver had swerved into his lane and caused him to go off the road and into a tree. Carter staged the accident by ramming his vehicle repeatedly into the tree. Carter and three other people made claims for injuries. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $9,000 in restitution.

Jason Halstead, a licensed insurance agent, used life insurance proceeds belonging to a niece with a disability to buy an annuity without her consent. Halstead then withdrew a large portion of the principal, incurring a penalty, to make a down payment on his house and used the annuity payments for personal expenses. He was sentenced to six years probation and ordered to pay $41,000 in restitution.

Tiffany Sibley, a billing agent for a hospital, submitted fake insurance claims over two years. Each of her claims was supported by fabricated hospital bills allegedly from the hospital where she worked. Sibley received more than $14,000 in payments from her scam. Sibley was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and restitution of $14,408.

TDI investigators are certified peace officers and work closely with law enforcement authorities around the state when investigating fraud cases.

Source: TDI

Topics Texas Claims Fraud
The Commissioner of Insurance for North Carolina says a recent rate increase of 18.7 percent proposed by North Carolina insurers is unwarranted and has set a hearing date for later this year to resolve the matter.

We are not in agreement with the [North Carolina] Rate Bureaus proposed increases filed Nov. 17, 2017. The next step, according to statute, is to set a hearing date, said North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey in a statement. After hearing and reading the more than 9,000 comments from residents across the state and studying the figures in the filing, it is now necessary to hold a hearing to reach a resolution that will make the most financial sense for our residents and insurance companies.

The NCRB filed the average 18.7 homeowners increase Nov. 17, 2017. The filing covers insurance for residential property, tenants, and condominiums at varying rates around the state. Under the NCRB proposal, the biggest increases would be felt along the coast. The NCRB has requested certain areas of western North Carolina receive small rate decreases. These areas include Haywood, Cherokee, Mitchell rand Avery counties. Anson, Montgomery, and Richmond counties would also see small rate decreases.

Causey said the hearing would be held July 23, 2018 for the North Carolina Rate Bureaus proposed homeowners rate increase.

The hearing will be held unless the N.C. Department of Insurance and N.C. Rate Bureau are unable to negotiate a settlement before that date. State law gives the insurance commissioner 45 days to issue an order once the hearing concludes. This means the order could be issued in October 2018. Once the order is issued, the NCRB has the right to appeal the decision before the N.C. Court of Appeals. A Court of Appeals order could then be appealed to the N.C. Supreme Court.

The NCRB and NCDOI can settle the proposed rate increase at any time during litigation.

The NCRB represents insurers that write the states homeowners policies. It is a non-profit unincorporated rating bureau separate from the Department of Insurance. The NCRB also represents auto and workers compensation insurance companies.

The NCDOI held a public comment forum regarding the NCRB rate filing Dec. 12, 2017. Six people attended the forum, including Rep. Bob Muller, R-Brunswick, and Sen. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort. The department also received comments via email and U.S. mail through Dec. 29, 2017.

The last NCRB homeowners rate increase filing was in 2014 that resulted in an order of no change from then Commissioner of Insurance Wayne Goodwin. In 2012, the NCRB requested a 17.7 percent increase, which was settled for an increase of 7 percent that took effect in 2013.

The hearing will begin at 10 a.m. in the Second Floor Hearing Room in the Albemarle Building, 325 N. Salisbury St., Raleigh.

Topics Trends Pricing Trends Homeowners North Carolina
The company in a deadly November 2016 school bus crash in Tennessee has settled a lawsuit for $323,000 on behalf of a 9-year-old boy injured in the wreck.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Durham School Services will pay $250,000, plus $73,000 in medical expenses, to the boy who suffered a concussion, a broken arm, cuts to his liver and permanent scarring on his arms.

The case is the fifth that the bus company has settled in Hamilton County Circuit Court over the crash. About 30 lawsuits connected to the crash remain pending.

Authorities say Johnthony Walker was speeding in November 2016 when he wrecked the bus on a curvy Chattanooga road while carrying 37 children. The 25-year-old faces 34 charges, including six counts of vehicular homicide.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Education Tennessee
This blog generally follows traditional journalistic standards. It's not about opinions, though you may read one here occasionally. It's about facts that we think will be useful to rural journalists, non-rural journalists who do rural stories, and others interested in rural issues. We don't try to be provocative, so we don't generate as many comments as most blogs with the level of traffic we have, but we certainly invite comments -- and contributions, to

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REPUBLICATION
The GEO Group Inc., operator of the Central Arizona Correctional Facility and Arizona State Prison-Florence West Facility in Florence, will pay $550,000 and furnish other relief to settle lawsuits for sexual harassment and retaliation filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Arizona Civil Rights Division of the Attorney Generals Office.

The EEOCs and ACRDs allegations involved many other forms of sexual harassment and retaliation occurring between 2006 and 2012. The EEOC and ACRD charged that the harassment included sexual assault, a male manager grabbing and pinching the breasts and crotch of a female correctional officer, and a male employee forcing a female employee onto a desk, shoving her legs apart and kissing her.

The EEOC and ACRD also alleged a wide variety of verbal harassment, including male officers asking female officers for sex, a male officer calling a female officer degrading names daily, and supervisors and officers making sexually explicit comments to female officers.

The EEOC and ACRD also charged that GEO retaliated against female employees when they complained of the harassment. The EEOC and ACRD charged that when women complained or sought help from GEO, the company would discipline the women, force them to quit, fire them, or place them in unsafe conditions in the prison.

The EEOC filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in September 2010, after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process. ACRD filed a similar suit, and the two lawsuits were consolidated. After the district court dismissed claims on behalf of a class of women identified during the litigation and held that some of the allegations did not rise to the level of actionable harassment, the EEOC and ACRD appealed the district courts decision to the Ninth Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court and remanded for further proceedings in a published opinion on March 14, 2016. The Ninth Circuit first held that the EEOC and ACRD had properly sought relief for women identified during litigation.

The Ninth Circuit held that the EEOC and ACRD must be allowed to discover additional aggrieved individuals during litigation when they conciliate on behalf of a class. With regards to the dismissed harassment claim, the Ninth Circuit reversed because the cumulative effects such misconduct has on a woman were enough to go to trial.

The consent decree resolving this case provides $550,000 for 16 women who had been dismissed from this case in 2012. GEO also must send letters of regret to the women and provide employment references for them. In addition, GEO will review its equal employment opportunity policies, ensure that all complaints of sexual harassment and retaliation are immediately and thoroughly investigated by a neutral employee, and ensure that the complainant is informed of the results of the investigation. GEO is also required to designate certain alleged harassers as ineligible for rehire, post notices of the consent decree in its Florence facilities, conduct anti-discrimination training, and include EEO compliance when evaluating its managers.

The EEOCs Phoenix District Office has jurisdiction for Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and part of New Mexico.

Topics Lawsuits Arizona
Burma Anti-Corruption Commission Encourages Public to File Complaints

Spokesperson of Myanmars Anti-Corruption Commission U Han Nyunt. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

NAYPYITAW  Members of the public can complain, but with clear evidence, about civil servants who are wealthier than their pay scale would warrant, said Anti-Corruption Commission spokesperson U Han Nyunt.

The spokesperson urged the public to file complaints, but reminded them that adequate evidence was needed for action to be taken against corrupt officials and also to protect plaintiffs from a countersuit.

If directors-general and directors take bribes, concerned ministers can take action against them. If ministers are corrupt, the president can directly take action, U Han Nyunt told reporters during the commissions press conference in Naypyitaw last week.

If a director-general has become extremely rich, the minister must take action. If the minister doesnt take action, a complaint can be filed. But the complaint cant be sent anonymously, he added.

Under the current Anti-Corruption Law, the commission tasked with fighting graft is not authorized to take action against corrupt officials unless someone files a complaint. The commission will propose that Parliament amend the law so that it can use its discretion to punish corrupt officials.

U Aung Kyi, the ex-general and information minister in U Thein Seins administration, is taking charge of the anti-corruption commission, which was reconstituted in November by the National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government.

The Orchid Hotel in Yangon filed a complaint with the former commission led by U Mya Win against a department head of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism for demanding 10 million kyats (US$7,500) grease money from the hotel, but to no avail, said hotel owner U Htay Aung.

We were told that our evidence was not adequate and the investigation has been delayed. And we are being troubled by that official. So, we plan to file a complaint again, U Htay Aung told The Irrawaddy.

Director-general of the Anti-Corruption Commission U Htin Kyaw said that dozens of corrupt directors-general, rectors, directors and police officers were punished under the 2013 Anti-Corruption Law since the commission was formed in 2014.

He also admitted that the commission failed to properly inform the public regarding punishment of corrupt officials.

Ranks below permanent secretaries in ministries including directors-general are not required by law to disclose their possessions, but ministers, deputy ministers and similar ranks have to disclose their possessions to the Presidents Office, said U Han Nyunt.

I had to disclose my possessions after I became a member of the Anti-Corruption Commission. Even the [former president] had to disclose his possessions to parliamentary speakers in a sealed letter, he said.

Former lawmaker U Ye Htun stressed the importance of providing compelling evidence in filing complaints as plaintiffs can be counter-accused of defamation if evidence is inadequate.

The commission currently has 392 complaints to handle including complaints against judges, said U Han Nyunt. Complaints primarily involve corruption and land disputes.

We have also tried to take action against corrupt judges. But there are many cases in which they fled just before we investigated them, he said.

As its first step to root out bribery and corruption in the country, the commission will cooperate with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to organize a paper reading session on fighting corruption in Yangon from Jan. 22-23.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma ARSA Claims Recent Attack in Northern Rakhine

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army appeals for international assistance in the ongoing situation in Rakhine State in a video posted online. / Rohingya Network / Screengrab

YANGON  The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a Muslim militant group behind a series of attacks on government security outposts in northern Rakhine State in August, claimed responsibility for an ambush that injured six government troops last week in the restive area.

In the latest attack since a unilateral ceasefire in October, a civilian vehicle carrying six soldiers and an army officer were blasted by what was thought to be a remote-controlled landmine in northern Maungdaw Township on Friday morning.

The explosion was reportedly followed by an ambush carried out by gunmen apparently positioned on a nearby hill. The attack injured six soldiers and a civilian driver.

On Sunday, ARSA released a statement on Twitter, saying it was behind the attack.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) hereby declares that we carried out an ambush against the Burmese terrorist army in Turaing Village, San Kar Pin Yin Village Tract, Northern Maungdaw Township, Arakan State at around 10:00 AM on 05 January 2018, said the statement.

After the attacks in August, the Myanmar government denounced the militant group as a terrorist organization. The government army then launched clearance operations in the area, leading to the exodus of more than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to nearby Bangladesh.

Internationally, the army was accused of ethnic cleansing and arbitrary killings, rape and arson. Myanmar Military Chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing denied these allegations.

In the Sunday tweet, ARSA said the Burmese terrorist government and the Burmese terrorist army have never stopped committing acts of Terrorism, War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes against Humanity against innocent Rohingya Indigenous native ethnic community of Arakan State.

The Rohingya are not listed in Myanmars 135 official ethnic groups, and the majority of the country believes they are Bengali, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Calling the clearance operations state-sponsored terrorism, ARSA said it is left with no choice but to fight back to defend the Rohingya.

Last but not least, it is extremely pertinent to note that Rohingya people must be consulted in all decision-making that affects their humanitarian needs and political future.

U Maung Maung Soe, a Yangon-based political analyst, told The Irrawaddy that ARSA seemed to derail the repatriation process between Myanmar and Bangladesh that was scheduled for later this month.

Its likely that the attack may pose an intimidation for those who want to come back, he said.

ARSA previously said that it was open to a ceasefire. This was dismissed by both the government and the army.

Government spokesperson Zaw Htay previously stated: We have no policy to negotiate with terrorists while defense minister Lt-Gen Sein Win said, No government negotiates with terrorist groups. We dismiss them [ARSA].

U Zaw Htay told The Irrawaddy on Monday that the government has found out that the attack was aimed to jeopardize the repatriation process, and terrorists will be responded to as they are.

We have ordered that they be responded to in line with the law. If they launch further attacks, they will face what they deserve, he said.

He also urged the international community to see ARSA as a terrorist organization and to neither support it politically nor financially.

The government is trying to solve the problem out there. If you support ARSA, our effort there will be hindered, he said.
Burma Head of New Crisis Panel Urges Access to Rakhine State

Rohingya refugees wait for a rice delivery during a foggy morning at the Nayapara refugee camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh December 25, 2017. / Reuters

BANGKOKHumanitarian workers and journalists should be given free access to Rakhine State, where violence has prompted some 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh, the head of a new international advisory panel on the crisis said.

Surakiart Sathirathai, a former Thai foreign minister, also expressed concern at the arrest of two Reuters reporters last month and said he hoped the case did not lead to broader restrictions on the international media.

I think press and humanitarian access to Rakhine are important issues as well as free access to other stakeholders, said Surakiart in an interview in Bangkok. Legitimate press coverage is something that should be enhanced.

Myanmar has severely curtailed access to Rakhine, where an army operation in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents has been condemned by the United Nations as ethnic cleansingan accusation rejected by the Buddhist majority country.

Surakiart, 59, was chosen last year by State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to head a 10-member board that will advise on how to implement the recommendations of an earlier commission headed by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Allowing free media coverage was one of the specific recommendations in the 63-page report from Annans commission, which was appointed by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 2016 to investigate how to solve Rakhines long-standing ethnic and religious tensions.

Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who had worked on coverage of the crisis, were arrested in Yangon on Dec. 12 on suspicion of violating the Official Secrets Act.

Surakiart said he had raised concerns about their case with Daw Aung San Suu Kyis national security adviser Thaung Tun. He said he had asked for the case to be dealt with transparently and been assured that proper legal procedures would be followed.

I hope that this would not snowball in adverse directions for both the international press and the Myanmar government, Surakiart added. I hope the case will not lead to the Myanmar government not welcoming the international press. I want this to be a specific case and hope for a quick resolution to it.

Bridging the Gap

The Annan-led panel delivered its recommendationswhich also included a review of a law that links citizenship and ethnicity and leaves most Rohingya statelessjust before insurgent attacks on security posts on Aug. 25 triggered the latest crisis.

Surakiart said there were concerns over the repatriation of those who had since fled to Bangladesh and that the advisory board would need to find an approach to ensure people could return without fear, even if they were not recognized by existing law as Myanmar citizens.

The State Counselor has faced international criticism for perceived inaction over the crisis in Rakhine, but Surakiart said she was constrained by domestic politics.

Buddhist nationalism has surged in Myanmar in recent years, and the army campaign has wide support.

Aung San Suu Kyi tried to address the issue by trying to build consensus from within rather than finger-pointing, said Surakiart.

There is a big gap between domestic and international interpretations of the situation in Rakhine. If we cant bridge this gap then it will be an obstacle for all of us who want to improve the situation.

The former Thai foreign minister also said his advisory board would seek to engage with all groups in Rakhine, including the military.

The advisory board is not a mouthpiece to anyone, Surakiart said. We are not a spokesperson for Myanmar or the international community.

The board, which is made up of five members from Myanmar and five international appointees including veteran former US politician and diplomat Bill Richardson, will meet the Myanmar government on Jan. 22 in the capital Naypyitaw before making its first trip to Rakhine on Jan. 24.

I do not want the advisory board to be just a talking shop, Surakiart said. We want to help bring about tangible progress.
Burma Netizen Sued After Criticizing Mon State Chief Minister on Facebook

Mon State Chief Minister Dr. Aye Zan. / Chan Son / The Irrawaddy

THATON, Mon State  A netizen was sued by a member of the Mon State ethnic affairs committee on Saturday after posting several posts critical of the Mon State chief minister.

U Aung Ko Ko Lwin, a Thaton local who uses the Facebook account Aung Ko Ko Lwin, posted a video clip of Mon State Chief Minister Dr. Aye Zaws controversial remark last week urging the residents of Thaton Township to eat only a dish of curry at mealtime in order to bring down food prices.

I dont know exactly what I was sued for, the video or other posts, U Aung Ko Ko Lwin told The Irrawaddy.

His other posts claimed that the chief minister turned a deaf ear to his demands during the Mon State authorities meeting with Thaton residents last week as he asked the chief minister to install a transformer for the towns central market and LED signals at a railway crossing on the Yangon-Mawlamyine motor road where traffic accidents frequently occur.

He didnt bother to reply. He was not dutiful, U Aung Ko Ko Lwin wrote.

He was sued by U Saw Kyaw Moe under Article 8(f) of a law protecting the privacy and personal security of citizens, new legislation that was enacted late last year.

No one shall unlawfully interfere with a citizens personal or family matters or act in any way to slander or harm their reputation, states Article 8(f).

Violation of the law is punishable by up to three years imprisonment plus a maximum fine of 1,500,000 kyats (US$1,100).

U Saw Kyaw Moe said he filed the complaint as a community elder of the town but not on behalf of the state government.

They can talk freely on Facebook. We have always engaged in democratic causes. But his post is the negative use of freedom of expression. And other youths from our town have followed his footsteps and written similar posts, said U Saw Kyaw Moe.

His negative criticism spoils the image of the town, he added.

In another post, U Aung Ko Ko Lwin complained about the irregular electricity supply to Thaton Market along with a photo of the Mon State chief minister and lawmakers having meals at a donation ceremony.

You may be able to walk with your head held high during this term in Thaton, but if you go against the wishes of people, how can you greet them after this term expires? he wrote.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma RCSS Postpones Shan National-level Political Dialogue

RCSS/SSA soldiers march in a parade to mark Shan National Day at Loi Tai Leng, the headquarters of the SSA-S, in February 2016. / Nyein Nyein / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  The Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), a signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), on Monday postponed the Shan national-level political dialogue, which had been scheduled for Jan. 12-14 in Langkho (Lin Khay/Langkhur).

In a statement, the RCSS said, The prior public consultation meetings that had been held had been faced with various persecutions by the Tatmadaw [Myanmars military], making it impossible for the people to freely and democratically express their will and fully discuss their opinions.

Public consultations were held in 14 of 55 townships in Shan State on Dec. 17-25, led by the Committee for Shan State Unity (CSSU), which is chaired by the RCSS. However, the meeting in Panglong on Dec. 17 was prevented from going ahead by the Tatmadaw, as was a later meeting in Tachileik Township. The Tatmadaw issued a letter prohibiting any meetings from being held on Dec. 19. Three days later, on Dec. 22, the Shan State Government revoked the instructions it had issued to district authorities to permit public consultation meetings. Consultations were canceled in Taunggyi, Kali, Kyaukme in Shan State and Mandalay.

In Panglong, according to the RCSS, as the people were preparing to hold the public consultation, the Tatmadaw came in and blocked the meeting, fully armed with war weapons as if to seize an enemy stronghold  an incident that has left a permanent black mark in the history of the Union.

As a result of the Tatmadaws actions, which included blocking the last prior public consultation meeting at Taunggyi on Jan 7-9, the RCSS/SSA-S (Shan State Army-South) has decided to temporarily postpone the proposed National Political Dialogue of Shan Nationalities said, Lt-Col Sai Oo, a spokesman for the RCSS.

Not holding the Shan national-level dialogue in Langkho means the group wont be able to raise its recommendations at the upcoming Union Peace Conference  21stCentury Panglong (UPC), the spokesman told The Irrawaddy.

As we have been unable to hear all of the publics views, we will not compile recommendations for the UPC, he said, adding that the group would hold further internal discussion on whether to join the UPC.

The RCSS claimed consultations both inside and outside of Shan State were held with the approval of the Government and in line with the Union-level Bilateral Agreement, which it signed on Jan. 2012.

In accordance with the implementation process of the national level political dialogue, it is necessary to hold prior public consultation meetings with all the Shan communities living in various parts of the Union, the RCSS said.

The holding of the public consultation meeting, prior to the National Political Dialogue of Shan Nationalities, at Taunggyi, which is the capital of Shan State, is very important in terms of the historical traditions of the entire Shan nation; in terms of political dignity, national equality, legitimacy of national political dialogues and trust building, it said.

Despite being an NCA signatory, the RCSS has been involved in at least 25 armed clashes with the Tatmadaw since signing the agreement on Oct. 2015.

Military tensions have also been high in Shan States RCSS-controlled territories since our preparations began for the ND [national level dialogue]. Fighting has been frequent from last month through Monday, said the spokesman, though the clashes have been in remote areas. Two clashes were reported on Saturday morning in Mai Buu Gyi village in Mongpyin, near Keng Tung.

In the first week of January, RCSS troops were attacked by Tatmadaw soldiers in Loi Len and Mong Pyin townships in southeastern Shan State, said Lt-Col Sai Oo. He said about 80 troops from two Tatmadaw battalions attacked four RCSS soldiers in Naung Lai village tract in Loi Len on Jan.3.

Clashes over territory in Mongpyin were reported in May 2017, and there were interventions from the Joint-Ceasefire Monitoring Committee last year.
Guest Column What is the NLD Doing for Political Prisoners?

The main gate of Yangon's Insein Prison. / The Irrawaddy

It was Jan. 4, 2018. As it was also the 70th anniversary of Myanmars independence, I could not help thinking about my days in prison. Independence Day is one of the special occasions each and every prisoner looks forward to with high hopes.

That is because of a custom of granting amnesty to prisoners and reducing jail sentences on every anniversary.

Everyone who has had to spend part of his or her life in prison knows how it feels. Prisoners cannot help feeling grateful to the government when they see some of their fellow inmates walk out of prison on such occasions, even if they themselves are not released. It is a fine practice among prisoners, despite being anti-government activists, to praise and thank the government for granting them amnesty.

Such days give hope to all types of prisoners. It is also a common practice among prisoners as these days approach to ask prison authorities for any unusual news from the outside.

All inmates look forward to these days because death sentences can be commuted, long sentences can be reduced and those about to complete their terms may be released.

I had not heard of anyone being released from prison under a general amnesty as I was writing this piece on Jan. 5. When I asked the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) about it, they said they had not heard of any releases either.

I could not help but empathize with the political prisoners in jails across Myanmar. They were surely extremely disappointed as their hopes were dashed. They have pinned all their hopes on such occasions.

When I saw that the government was organizing a grand New Years alms-offering ceremony and Dhamma talks attracting more than 100,000 devotees, I was confident there would be something for prisoners. I later came to learn that I had been completely wrong.

Back when the governments ranks had no ex-political prisoners, amnesties and commuted sentences came every year. Former political prisoners were even allowed to form a committee to identify current political prisoners with the aim of getting them released.

A lot of political prisoners were freed this way. It has also become the norm for other inmates to be released alongside the political prisoners.

That is why I was confident that a government led by a party of former political prisoners would release the political prisoners left.

My expectations have proven to be wrong. It has been a long time since I last heard anything about political prisoners being identified. There are still about 100 political prisoners left in Myanmar, according to organizations of former political prisoners such as the AAPP.

The AAPP has even gone to the trouble of tracking down the original dossiers of the accused to identify people as political prisoners before adding them to its list. It found many cases in which what happened had nothing to do with the laws under which the victims were charged. The charges were fabricated intentionally to put the dissidents in prison, making it impossible to know if they are guilty or innocent based on the charges. The AAPP has carried out a thorough investigation to come up with a detailed list.

It was also revealed that there are about 120 lawmakers in the Union Parliament who were once political prisoners. There is no doubt that former political prisoners can empathize with their peers still behind bars. However, the question is why the representatives have not been able to help them. Why have they not tried to help them?

When I attended a ceremony to mark Independence Day at the headquarters of the NLD about 10 years ago, I was offered a badge with the name of a political prisoner on the back. When I asked about this, the party said it had chosen by lot a political prisoner for me to help.

The back of my badge said Ma Khin Htar in Dawei Prison. I was not able to help her because I myself soon became a political prisoner.

However, about two years after I was sent to prison a lady approached my family offering to help me because I had been chosen by lot for her. After consulting with my family, she sent me books to read in prison.

Such help can be of great benefit to a person in prison. It can give an inmate hope and strength. I later learned that the lady, Daw Sabel, had taught my son and daughter-in-law, and she has felt like a member of the family ever since.

I am deeply sad that the help and assistance the NLD offered when it was an opposition party disappeared after it came to power. I am just sad because I have not been able to find out why that has been so.

I believe the government has complete authority to release political prisoners. I am confident that no one can prevent it from, and interfere with it in, exercising that authority. It would be very ugly to write a history that says that about 120 former political prisoners were not able to come to the rescue of about 100 political prisoners behind bars.

What has been happening? Could you please help me find the answer?

Sai Nyunt Lwin is the secretary general of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy.
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Monday, Jan 8th, 2018 (2:22 am) - Score 2,219

The most recent independent data for Q4 reveals that the United Kingdom ended 2017 with fixed line superfast broadband (24Mbps+) networks having covered 94.7% of premises (94.3% if you define superfast as 30Mbps+), which suggests that the Government has hit their 95% target.

The estimate, which was produced by Thinkbroadband, wisely tends to be a bit more pessimistic than official figures (i.e. officially the Government will probably claim victory on their 95% target). The focus will now switch towards tracking the Governments next expectation for superfast broadband to reach 98% by around 2020 (here), as well as the growth of ultrafast (100Mbps+) connectivity (e.g. FTTP/H/B, G.fast and Cable DOCSIS).

However we should point out that later Broadband Delivery UK contracts have adopted the EU and Ofcoms higher download speed target of 30Mbps+ for superfast connectivity, which tends to trail around 0.3-0.6% points behind the 24Mbps+ figure (depending on location). Meanwhile those in the final 2% are expected to be catered for via the Governments 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO).

Its worth remembering that the first c.75% of coverage was largely achieved by commercial roll-outs from Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media (plus some altnet ISPs), while most of the final 25-30% has benefited from around 1.6bn+ of public investment via the BDUK programme. More recently another 600m has separately been earmarked to support future full fibre (FTTP/H) deployments (here and here).

Below you can see the latest data to the end of December 2017 (Q4) and as usual weve stripped out some of the more confusing aspects in order to make it easier to understand. Weve also left in the 10Mbps figure as this will be a useful gauge for understanding the ever shrinking scale of the proposed USO for broadband, which could be introduced by 2020 (details).

NOTE: The term fibre based below includes fibre optic and hybrid fibre solutions, such as FTTP, FTTC / VDSL2 / G.fast and Cable (DOCSIS), albeit without any definition of speed (e.g. some FTTC lines deliver speeds below 24Mbps). Elsewhere nearly all of the below ultrafast (100Mbps+) coverage is coming from Virgin Medias cable network, although Openreach, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, Cityfibre, TrueSpeed and others all have big full fibre (FTTP/H) expansion ambitions for related services (here, here, here, here and here) and the rapid 330Mbps G.fast roll-out to 10 million premises by 2020 should also help.

Area % Fibre based % Superfast 24Mbps+ % Superfast 30Mbps+ % Ultrafast 100Mbps+ % Under 10Mbps USO London 97.70% 96.8% 96.60% 71.5% 2.60% England 97.50% 95.2% 94.90% 56.2% 3.40% United Kingdom 97.40% 94.7% 94.30% 53.2% 3.80% Rest Of Scotland 97% 94.3% 94% 47.5% 4.60% Wales 97% 93.7% 93.20% 32.6% 4.50% Scotland 96.60% 93.1% 92.70% 43.2% 5.80% Northern Ireland 98.50% 85.4% 84.40% 30.6% 9.50% Highlands and Islands (Scotland) 89.70% 77.9% 76.50% 0.3% 16.90%

Take note that each devolved region has its own policy and targets, which all feed into the central UK target. For example, Wales has proposed a new aspiration to reach every property with 30Mbps+ broadband by 2020 (here) and Scotland hope to do the same by 2021 (here). The Highlands and Islands and Rest of Scotland areas above represent the two halves of Scotlands overall roll-out programme.

Elsewhere Northern Ireland, which has good fibre based coverage, remains one of the weaker entries and theyre clearly struggling to deliver speeds of 24Mbps+ to those within its reach. However the recent deal between the DUP and UK Government, which gifted 150 million to help N.I provide ultra-fast broadband to its population (here), may help to resolve that.

As stated earlier, this data is only an estimate and should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because it wont always reflect the real-world (this is particularly true where issues like faulty lines, poor home wiring, slow WiFi and other problems can result in much slower speeds than expected). However its still one of the best gauges that we have for checking against official Government claims (theyre also based on an estimate).

NOTE: Its very important to remember that Government / political targets like 95% or 98% reflect a national average, which can of course be better or worse for some specific areas (e.g. a few may achieve universal coverage, while others could be well below that level).
Microsoft appears to be working on a Surface Phone, if a post to a Chinese forum by an engineer working for the Microsoft Asia Research Institute is any indication.

The Chinese tech news website ITHome was the first to spot the post which claimed that the Surface Phone was on its way and that it would work much better with Cortana, the Microsoft digital assistant, than Android phones do.

The post was made on the Chinese social site Zhihu. It said that the Institute "look forward to the perfect performance of the Surface Phone.

As an explanation, it added that some Cortana features on Android were limited because of restrictions in Google's mobile operating system.

After Windows Phone fans reacted enthusiastically over the post, the Microsoft employee, in what appeared to be damage control, edited it to add, "we dont know a Surface Phone will exist.

Another tech news site, Windows Latest, published a rough translation of the post which ran thus:

First of all, Siri and Bixby, two intelligent assistants installed in the smartphones, and Cortana is a third-party application, permissions support may be embarrassing.

"Windows Phone users may know that Cortana in Windows Phone was better than the Cortana app, Windows Phone Cortana was a lot easier to use. Microsoft Cortana (Xiao Na) is a cross-platform smart assistant, available across all devices including PCs and smartphone, trying to do more like WeChat Noda.

"For the smart assistant, permissions is a good thing, looking forward to the perfect performance of the Surface Phone (although Hana do not know will not be a surface phone).

"Of course, as a smart assistant, the pace of development is still relatively slow, but Cortana team will be working hard to make the assistant better.

"Last year in 3rd-anniversary celebration, Cortana saw all new features and support, three years is not a long time, but the move on this road Hana never forget, Microsoft Cortana team must live up to expectations.
Trumbull, CT- January 8, 2018TMC today announced RTCWeb, Observables, nCore Communications have joined the start up pavilion at ITEXPO to be held February 13-16 at the Greater Fort Lauderdale/ Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale. ITEXPO is the communications and business transformation event where influential buyers gather to make their purchase decisions. The enterprise mid-market, resellers and service providers attend for 3 full days of content, 6 collocated events, training opportunities, powerful keynotes, an interactive exhibit floor and hours of dedicated networking time.

We are excited to welcome RTCWeb, Observables, nCore Communications to the startup pavilion at ITEXPO and look forward to seeing their unique solutions on the exhibit floor, said Rich Tehrani, TMC CEO and conference chairman.

Pavilion participants include:

nCore Communications is a technology solution provider with headquarter in southern California. By developing new SW solutions, based on exiting established technologies, nCores technology and products have opened new market opportunities for private and public operators and service providers in wide areas such as Mobile, Enterprise, Industrial IoT and Cloud communications. nCores technology is leveraging well established technologies such as LTE, Ethernet, WiFi, Satellite, mmWave Radio, in novel and exciting new ways, to solve long-standing problems such as secure connectivity, mobility and service guarantees, at the same time as providing a scalable platform for supporting application and services.

is a technology solution provider with headquarter in southern California. By developing new SW solutions, based on exiting established technologies, nCores technology and products have opened new market opportunities for private and public operators and service providers in wide areas such as Mobile, Enterprise, Industrial IoT and Cloud communications. nCores technology is leveraging well established technologies such as LTE, Ethernet, WiFi, Satellite, mmWave Radio, in novel and exciting new ways, to solve long-standing problems such as secure connectivity, mobility and service guarantees, at the same time as providing a scalable platform for supporting application and services. Observables Inc. provides cloud-based connected services that empower security, AV, IT, and smart-home dealers in delivering solutions to their customers. The AlwaysON Cloud Portal and Multi-Service IOBOT Signal Router integrate physical, logical, and cyber elements that provide robust connectivity, simplified deployment, remote monitoring, central station reporting, real time control, and self-healing solutions. Observables is privately held in Santa Barbara, California.

provides cloud-based connected services that empower security, AV, IT, and smart-home dealers in delivering solutions to their customers. The AlwaysON Cloud Portal and Multi-Service IOBOT Signal Router integrate physical, logical, and cyber elements that provide robust connectivity, simplified deployment, remote monitoring, central station reporting, real time control, and self-healing solutions. Observables is privately held in Santa Barbara, California. RTCWeb is a startup and the brainchild of Galaxy Weblinks; your WebRTC technology partner. RTCWeb develops customized Real-time Communication solutions with flexible deployment across all devices & platforms. Connect anywhere, anytime on any device.

ITEXPO is supported by Diamond Sponsors, Digium, Inc., Platinum sponsors, 888VoIP, Fiber Mountain, Grandstream, Sangoma, Sansay, Telnyx, Windstream, Yealink, Gold sponsors, ABP Tech, Snom/ Vtech, Speech Mobility, Verizon, Vitelity and vXchnge

For more information or to register for ITEXPO, contact [email protected]. For media inquiries, contact Jessica Seabrook. Companies interested in exhibiting, sponsorship or advertising packages for ITEXPO should contact TMC's Joe Fabiano at 203-852-6800 x132 or Maureen Gambino at 203-852-6800 x109.

For the latest ITEXPO news, updates and information follow the event on Twitter at @ITEXPO.

About TMC

Global buyers rely on TMCs content-driven marketplaces to make purchase decisions and navigate markets. This presents branding, thought leadership and lead generation opportunities for vendors/sellers.

TMCs Marketplaces:

Unique, turnkey Online Communities boost search results, establish market validation, elevate brands and thought leadership, while minimizing ad-blocking.

Custom Lead Programs uncover sales opportunities and build databases.

In-Person and Online Events boost brands, enhance thought leadership and generate leads.

Publications, Display Advertising and Newsletters bolster brand reputations.

Custom Content provides expertly ghost-crafted blogs, press releases, articles and marketing collateral to help with SEO, branding, and

overall marketing efforts.

overall marketing efforts. Comprehensive Event and Road Show Management Services help companies meet potential clients and generate leads face-to-face.

For more information about TMC and to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals, please visit www.tmcnet.com.

Media and Analyst Contact:

Jessica Seabrook

Marketing Director

TMC

203-852-6800 x 170

[email protected]

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Edited by Mandi Nowitz
Fraudsters used scam emails to steal millions of dollars from Queensland law firms in December, according to security firm MailGuard.

The company says it was noteable that the fraudsters didnt attack the law firms by hacking into their networks or infecting their computers with a virus  they just sent them an email.

It was textbook social engineering. The lawyers who fell for this scam were targeted with phone calls from people who said they were seeking legal representation. The phone calls seemed legitimate; after explaining their problems the callers promised to email the lawyers with important documents related to their cases, said MailGuards Emmanuel Marshall in a blog on the security firms website.

When the lawyers received the emails they found links to a file-sharing site. They clicked on the links and were required to enter their email account passwords to gain access. This whole process was a trick designed to collect the lawyers email login passwords.

Lawyers are smart people, right? Not the sort who easily fall for scams. But the criminals who executed this fraud gained their trust by speaking to them on the phone so that when the scam email arrived, the victims were primed and waiting to click on the malicious link it contained."

Marshall said that once the scammers gained access to the lawyer's email accounts, they moved to phase two of the scam, monitoring the firm's email traffic for invoices requesting payment.

When they saw a suitably large invoice arrive in the firms inbox they sent a bogus message with false bank account details so that the payment went into the bank account of the scammers instead of the law firm.

Speaking to the Brisbane Times  which originally broke the story about the law firm scam  Christine Smythe, president of The Queensland Law Society, said, They are quite cunning... They are people who speak good English, answer in a convincing away and come with a backstory... The precise method of attack varies, but the essence is that the criminals obtain access to the firms email accounts and use this to misdirect funds.

People are not machines. We make a lot of decisions based on emotional responses and social cues. We havent got the mental bandwidth to parse every communication and verify its authenticity. Like the lawyers who fell for the email scam in Queensland, were all prone to making errors of judgement and thats the security gap cyber criminals can most easily exploit, says MailGuards Marshall.

Social engineering is a booming crime category because cyber criminals understand that its easier to deceive a person than a machine. TechBeacons 2016 Cyber Security Trend Report reveals that 65% of professionals identify social engineering as the most serious security threat to their business.

Human beings are still the gatekeepers of valuable data. Bank accounts, file storage, credit card details; they are all protected by passwords and those passwords can be obtained with trickery because they are stored in human brains.

Hacking into a company using social engineering techniques is as simple as sending a cleverly worded email to people who work there. If criminals can trick one person into clicking on a malicious link or logging into a compromised website, they can use that person as an access point to the companys most valuable data.
Brisbane-based enterprise software-as-a-service company TechnologyOne (ASX:TNE) has expanded the reach of its charity foundation for 2018 - with a pledge to help 500,000 children and their families in India free themselves from poverty  through a new partnership with Opportunity International Australia.

TechnologyOne executive chairman Adrian Di Marco says the companys ambitious new goal to save 500,000 children from poverty spans a 15-year period, with Opportunity taking an innovative, entrepreneurial approach to charitable giving, called microfinance.

He says the partnership will provide small loans to enable families in India to grow businesses, earn regular incomes and create safety nets for the future.

Di Marco also said the TechnologyOne Foundation was one of his proudest initiatives in the companys 30-year history.

We established the TechnologyOne Foundation as a way to pay it forward, and institutionalise giving for our company.

The foundation really defines who we are as a company. It defines our values, culture and who we aspire to be, and demonstrates the values we are looking for in future employees.

Opportunity International helps families in poverty free themselves with hope, dignity and purpose, said Robert Dunn, global executive director of Opportunity International.

The changes that we see in poor communities is only possible because of great partners who come alongside us, like TechnologyOne. Through our partnership together, Opportunity International and TechnologyOne have set an ambitious target to lift more than 500,000 children out of poverty.

TechnologyOne has also committed to a three-year partnership with The Fred Hollows Foundation to support the Vietnam Child Eye Care programme, which aims to eradicate avoidable blindness in all school-aged children.

These new initiatives underpin its existing 1% Pledge commitment, with the company pledging to donate 1% of its time, 1% of its profits and 1% of its product.

People are inspired by the 1% Programme. When they hear about 1% of profits, product and time, thats an inspiring story, thats a real commitment. And thats pretty unusual  you dont see that in many companies, Opportunitys Dunn said.

Its an amazing, heroic, world-changing thing; its rare, but its terrific.

Di Marco said the company had made these commitments through the TechnologyOne Foundation because it is the right thing to do.

As a large, successful company we have the capability and capacity to make a difference.

The foundation has enabled us to make a greater impact in our communities and really empowers our employees to get involved in our philanthropic endeavours and make a difference. It is exciting to think about the increasing impact we will have moving forward.

Other initiatives by TechnologyOne in 2017 included contributing to The School of St Judes e-learning and technical programmes; continuing to support 20 ongoing disadvantaged youth programmes through The Salvation Army and Mission Australia across Australia, New Zealand and the UK; and assisting World Visions work with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice.
Samsung unveiled its take on the collaborative digital whiteboard at CES today, launching its Flip display.

Digital whiteboards are getting a lot of attention from a number of large vendors, including Google, Microsoft and Cisco. All aim to replace traditional flip charts and whiteboards with touchscreen-enabled hardware designed to ease collaboration during meetings and brainstorming sessions.

Up to four different participants can interact with a Flip whiteboard at the same time, using either their fingers or a stylus to create or annotate content. Designed for use in meeting rooms, the 55-in. 4K display can switch from portrait to landscape orientation depending on company needs. It includes USB ports to enable connection to PCs and mobile devices, as well as wireless connectivity.

An integrated screen-sharing capability allows Flip content to be viewed directly from PCs and mobile devices, which would be useful for remote workers, in particular. Flip runs the Tizen operating system used in a variety of Samsung products, including its smart TVs, and contains 8GB of internal storage.

Samsung set the retail price for the Flip at $2,699; rival digital whiteboards are more expensive. Google's Jamboard for G Suite, released last year, retailed for $4,999 at launch, while Microsofts SurfaceHub costs $8,999 for the 55-in. version.

However, those devices offer integration with each companys respective business software suite, providing them with an advantage over Samsungs Flip. Meanwhile, Ciscos Spark Board integrates with its Spark collaboration software and supports video conferencing.

[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]

The meeting room has become the new battleground for business communications and collaboration, said 451 Research senior analyst Raul Castanon-Martinez. Samsung Flip will face tough competition from Google and Microsoft. These players have an advantage with their business and productivity suites, which they integrate into their respective whiteboard products.

He noted that Google and Microsoft are strong contenders as software providers while Samsung is already present in meeting spaces, thanks to its PBX phone systems and smartphones.

Competing with other feature-rich products is just one hurdle for those offering digital whiteboards, said Larry Cannell, research director at Gartner. Digital whiteboards have been around in some form for years and vendors have yet to convince substantial numbers of users to swap tried-and-trusted tools for digital alternatives.

The challenge with these products isnt necessarily integration with back-end software, said Cannell. Rather, they are still competing with in-room physical whiteboards and large sticky flipcharts.

From my experience, most digital whiteboards have ended up being most used as fancy digital projectors, he said.

Despite the launch of new hardware by some major vendors in the past year, customer demand is still building momentum, Castanon-Martinez said. That is likely to change over the next year or two as hardware becomes increasingly integrated with collaboration and productivity software.

Digital whiteboards are at the intersection of productivity and collaboration, unified communications and telephony, and audio and video conferencing, he said. All of these are in transition with new technologies emerging.

I expect that, as adoption for products like Microsoft Teams, Google G Suite and Cisco Spark grows, we will see increased demand for digital whiteboards.
Local OB/GYN physician Beth Cook's 500th minimally-invasive robotic gynecological procedure was cause for celebration at the Summerville Medical Center last week, as colleagues gathered to praise the MD's commitment to help women get through their ailments and carry on with their everyday lives. Read moreSummerville Medical Center OB/GYN performs 500th robotic gynecology procedure
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

Senior policy advisor for the Trump White House and notorious white supremacist Stephen Miller appeared on Jake Tappers Sunday show to defend Trump from the allegations in Michael Wolffs Fire and Fury.

Miller declined to leave after the train wreck of an interview, in which he accused Tapper of gloating over the revelations in the Wolff book and attempted to portray Tapper as an out of touch East Coast elite journalist unable to understand the discontents of the US working class.

CNN building security allegedly had to come and physically remove Miller from the studio. (Ive done a lot of television, and the issue here is that if the guest doesnt leave the desk after the segment ends, hell be in the next shot as well, and still will have the microphone).

=================

CNN: Tapper cuts off Trump adviser interview: Ive wasted enough of my viewers time

=================

Miller serves an administration staffed by billionaires who just stole $1.5 trillion from the working and middle classes and gave it to the . . . billionaires, attempting to kick 26 million workers off of health insurance.

Miller insisted on delivering a set of long speeches praising Trumps political genius instead of answering any specific questions, and attempted to erase his mentor Steve Bannon from the history of the first Trump administration. Tapper characterized the performance as filibustering.

Tapper pointed out that Miller has his job on Bannons recommendation, and Miller denied it, attaching himself retrospectively to Corey Lewandowski. Both Bannon and Lewandowsky were fired (the latter by Paul Manafort, who was then fired) likely pointing to Millers future fate, which he seems to be attempting to avoid by becoming the universes premier brown-noser.*

Millers attempt to ventriloquize the working class is sad, given that he is serving the wealthiest administration in American history, and one especially sadistic toward the working and middle classes. Two-thirds of Trump voters make over $50,000 a year. WaPo reported that white non-Hispanic voters without college degrees making below the median household income made up only 25 percent of Trump voters. A third of Trump voters, in contrast, make over $100,000 a year. Trumps base is wealthy, which is why his policies are rewarding the wealthy. It is true that 70% of Trump voters dont have a college degree, but 70% of Republicans dont have a college degree, and a lot of those people are very well off.

Most working class people dont vote at all, and the majority of them reliably vote Democratic when they do go to the polls. Pro-Trump white factory workers exist, but they are a minority of their social class and trying to portray Trump as a champion of the working class is just propaganda. It is true that members of the white working class mainly driven by financial distress voted for Hillary Clinton, while the minority of that class who voted for Trump tend to dislike foreigners.

Miller again blamed immigrants for taking jobs from working class whites, which is a false argument. Immigrants most often dont have the skills to compete in the same market with the working class, and tend to do menial jobs or jobs locals decline to do, as with picking strawberries. Their labor brings down prices for working class consumers. There are also high-income immigrants in e.g. the tech world, who often make discoveries and form companies that expand the economy and create working class jobs.

Miller used his appearance not to answer questions about the goings-on in the White House or even effectively to refute Wolffs book (a denial and character attack is not an argument), but to broadcast his racist poison to millions of people. Corporate news really shouldnt be giving him a platform, since he uses it to normalize Neo-Nazism. His epithet on social media is Baby Goebbels, referring to the National Socialist propagandist.

*
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - FIORE GOLD LTD. (TSXV: F) (OTCQB: FIOGF) (Fiore or the Company) is pleased to provide an operational update on its Pan Mine in White Pine County, Nevada. Mine production in November totaled 436,290 tons of ore and 484,771 tons of waste, with the mine now consistently mining in excess of 14,000 tons per day (tpd) of ore. Gold production for November was 2,760 ounces, a significant increase over the 1,809 ounces produced in October.

The new Phase II leach pad is now in operation, with the first ore placed on the pad in late December [image 1, image 2]. As the existing Phase I leach pad approaches its final design height, operating space on the pad has become constrained which reduced the leach cycle times. As a result, December gold production is expected to come in below forecast, however, with the new Phase II pad now in operation, production will improve as ore is placed on the new pad. Fiore is projecting gold production of 35-40,000 ounces in fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through September 2018), with gold production weighted towards the second half of FY2018 as higher-grade ore is mined.

Tim Warman, Chief Executive Officer of Fiore, commented: November was our best month yet for gold production, and were looking forward to continued strong performance over the remainder of the fiscal year. With the new Phase II leach pad now operational, we can begin loading the test cells that will confirm the viability of adding a crushing and agglomeration circuit to the mine later in 2018. The successful completion and permitting of the new leach pad is a testament to the highly skilled operating and development team weve built at Fiore Gold, and the first-rate work done by our contractors.

Exploration work aimed at increasing the resource and reserve base at Pan is also ongoing, with a number of drill targets identified proximal to the existing operations. Drilling is expected to commence in early 2018.

At our nearby Gold Rock project, the Nevada State Office of the Bureau of Land Management has completed its review of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and advanced it to the Washington DC office for final review and publication. The process to publish the FEIS is anticipated to be completed in the first quarter of 2018, with the Record of Decision (ROD) to follow within 45 days of publication. We believe actions by the US government to expedite this review process provides optimism that the process to issue the ROD will proceed in a timely manner.

Corporate Strategy

Our corporate strategy is to grow Fiore Gold into a 150,000 ounce per year gold producer. To achieve this, we intend to:

grow gold production at the Pan Mine from a planned 35-40,000 ounces in fiscal 2018 to between 40-50,000 ounces per year by fiscal 2019

advance exploration and development of the nearby Gold Rock project, with a resource update planned for late 2018

acquire additional production or near-production assets in Nevada and surrounding states

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information relating to Fiore Golds properties contained in this press release was approved by Ken Brunk (MMSA) Fiore Golds Technical Advisor and a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101.
MATTOON (JG-TC) -- The school district made a statement Sunday assuring local residents that a school gun threat made recently was not addressed toward the Mattoon High School.

A Sunday night social media post that pictured a several guns with a statement: "Don't go to school tomorrow @MHS. Students. Loaded up bout to head out" circulated.

Mattoon Superintendent Larry Lilly said the post had circulated among people locally and a screenshot of the post was sent to Rich Stuart, MHS principal, who then filled in other school administration and police.

Soon after, it was discovered that the post was addressed to Monticello High School students in Virginia and not those at the Mattoon school, Lilly said.

According to Albemarle County, Va., police who investigated the social media post, it was a hoax allegedly made by a juvenile. They stated on their Facebook page that the juvenile was detained with charges pending.
Highlights:

3.0 g/t Au over 83.1 metres starting at 7.4 metres depth, including 10.8 g/t Au over 11.4 metres, main Dyke extended 300 metres south of the former Beliveau Mine

4.6 g/t Au over 6.5 metres intersected in near-surface expansion drilling southwest of the New Beliveau Deposit

Additional drilling in the North Zone returned strong mineralization grading up to 3.2 g/t Au over 12.4 metres near surface

Drilling 150 metres to 200 metres east of the South Zone discovery hole returned significant intercepts grading up to 8.1 g/t Au over 3.5 metres near surface

85,000-metre drill program planned for 2018, five drills currently on site

TORONTO, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Probe Metals Inc. (TSX-V:PRB) (OTCQB:PROBF) (Probe or the Company) is pleased to provide new results from the 2017 drill program at its 100% owned Val-dOr East project (the Project) located near Val-dOr, Quebec. In 2017, the Company drilled 83,076 metres in 194 holes at Val-dOr East. The drill program was focusing on expansion and exploration drilling in and around the New Beliveau gold deposit and on other gold zones along a 2.5 kilometre strike length within the Pascalis Gold Trend. An updated resource estimate, incorporating new drill results from the 2016 and 2017 program, is planned for Q1-2018. Owing to the success of the 2017 exploration program, the Company has commenced an 85,000-metre drill program that will continue the resource expansion along the Pascalis Gold Trend as well as testing high-priority gold targets in new areas within its 327-square kilometre land package during 2018.

Results from thirty-eight (38) holes (PC-17-198 to PC-17-235) totaling 16,104 metres drilled along the Pascalis Gold Trend continue to demonstrate strong potential for expansion and new discoveries surrounding the former Beliveau mine (see Figure 1). Expansion drilling in the Main dyke 300 metres to the south has returned significant results with intercepts grading 3 g/t Au over 83.1 metres starting at 7 metres depth, including 5.3 g/t Au over 13.6 metres, 5.9 g/t Au over 5.5 metres and 10.8 g/t Au over 11.4 metres in Hole PC-17-207. Expansion drilling to the north of the New Beliveau deposit intersected 6.1 g/t Au over 6 metres at a vertical depth of approximately 300 metres in hole PC-17-224 along the eastern extension of the high-grade structure (1122 g/t Au over 0.7 metres, DDH PC-17-100), while expansion drilling to the Southwest of the New Beliveau deposit intersected 4.6 g/t Au over 6.5 metres at vertical depth of approximately 70 metres. Drilling to test the extension of the North Zone, approximately 60 metres west of high-grade hole PC-17-168, intersected significant mineralization grading 3.2 g/t Au over 12.4 metres between 10.8 metres and 23.2 metres depth, while continued testing of the eastern extension of the South Zone, 150 to 200 metres east of the discovery hole PC-17-143, intersected new mineralization grading up to 8.1 g/t Au over 3.5 metres between 77 metres and 80.5 metres depth.

Drill results from thirty-one (31) holes (PC-17-236 to PC-17-267) that will be included in the updated resource estimate are still pending at the lab and will be released as soon as they are received.

David Palmer, President and CEO of Probe, states: It is encouraging to see such strong drilling results from New Beliveau as we finish 2017 and start the 2018 drill program. The success of the drilling at New Beliveau to-date bodes well for continued expansion in the drilling ahead. In addition to the achievements at New Beliveau, 2017 also saw an expansive regional exploration program that has generated a significant number of priority drill targets, all in areas that have seen very little historic exploration. 2018 will be another pivotal year for the Val-dOr East project from the perspectives of resource expansion and potential new discoveries from the regional program. As we increase our efforts in advancing on Val-dOr East project in 2018 we would like to thank investors for their past and continued support.

Mineralization intersected in all the gold zones are similar to that observed in the Beliveau Deposit, and are characterized mainly by sulphide-bearing quartz-tourmaline veins typically associated with mineralized diorite dykes.

Assay results from selected drill holes are reported in the following table:

Selected drill results from the Val-dOr East drilling program1,2

Hole Number From (m) To (m) Length (m) Au (g/t) Area/Host Rock PC-17-138ext 676.4 679.8 3.4 4.7 NB/Dyke PC-17-198 478.0 485.0 7.0 2.9 HW/Volcanics PC-17-200 152.4 153.4 1.0 14.6 NB/Volcanics-Dyke PC-17-201 313.8 315.9 2.1 5.5 NB/Volcanics-Dyke PC-17-202 101.4 105.1 3.7 2.8 NB/Volcanics PC-17-203 227.5 230.0 2.5 5.3 NB/Dyke PC-17-204 21.1 32.2 11.1 1.3 NZ/Dyke 70.3 84.0 13.7 2.4 NZ/Volcanics-Dyke PC-17-205 164.9 169.8 4.9 2.1 NB/Volcanics 231.0 233.0 2.0 10.2 NB/Volcanics PC-17-206 97.8 99.3 1.5 8.5 NZ/Volcanics 231.6 235.1 3.5 3.9 NZ/Volcanics PC-17-207 7.4 90.5 83.1 3.0 NB/Dyke Including 16.7 30.3 13.6 5.3 NB/Dyke Including 44.2 49.7 5.5 5.9 NB/Dyke Including 61.5 72.9 11.4 10.8 NB/Dyke PC-17-214 96.4 102.9 6.5 4.6 NB/Volcanics PC-17-215 123.5 127.1 3.6 5.7 SZ/Volcanics-Dyke PC-17-218 313.7 318.1 4.4 2.4 SZ/Dyke PC-17-224 318.9 328.0 9.1 4.2 NB/Volcanics Including 322.0 328.0 6.0 6.1 NB/Volcanics PC-17-230 30.1 34.1 4.0 2.8 SZ/Volcanics PC-17-231 10.8 23.2 12.4 3.2 NZ/Volcanics 54.0 57.0 3.0 5.3 NZ/Volcanics PC-17-232 341.0 342.5 1.5 8.8 NB/Volcanics PC-17-233 77.0 80.5 3.5 8.1 SZ/Volcanics PC-17-235 236.5 239.0 2.5 6.9 NZ/Volcanics 477.5 479.5 2.0 5.7 NZ/Dyke

(1) All the new analytical results reported in this release and in this table, are presented in core length and uncut. Additional drilling is planned for the immediate area which will enable the true width determination.

(2) Definitions: NB =New Beliveau, SZ = South Zone, NZ = North Zone, HW = Highway Zone

Figure 1: Surface Map  Pascalis Gold Trend Area





2018 Exploration Program at Val-dOr East

Following a successful 2017 exploration program on its Val-dOr East project, the Company is planning 85,000 metres of drilling for 2018. The proposed $12 million exploration program will focus on expanding the Projects current gold resources as well as delineate potential new gold deposits within its regional land holdings. There are presently five drills operating at the Project.

Approximately 50,000 metres of drilling will be focused on the potential expansion of the New Beliveau Gold Deposit to the north, west, east and south of its current limits as well as other gold zones on the property.

Approximately 35,000 metres of drilling will be focused on testing numerous high priority gold targets generated during the 2017 regional exploration program.

The New Beliveau Gold Deposit

The New Beliveau deposit consists predominantly of a series of parallel, east-west trending, moderately dipping, mineralized zones hosting gold-bearing quartz-pyrite-tourmaline veins. Gold mineralization occurs in the veins but also in their immediate wall rocks. The sulphide content is generally 1% to 5%, but may reach up to 10% in the higher-grade sections. The extent of the alteration zone, which consists of a mixture of quartz, tourmaline, dolomite, albite, and euhedral pyrite is commonly twice the thickness of the vein itself. The north-south trending diorite dykes also contain significant gold with gold grades typically increasing in areas where the dykes are intersected by the east-west quartz-tourmaline veins. Wall rocks for both systems consist of intermediate volcanics rock.

Together with the Highway and North Zones, the New Beliveau Deposit host a NI 43-101 inferred resources of 770,000 ounces at 2.6 g/t gold calculated at a 1.0 g/t cut-off above 350 metres depth and 1.5 g/t cut-off below 350 metres depth (see NI 43-101 technical report: Mineral Resource Val-dOr East Property - January 4, 2013).

Qualified Persons

The scientific and technical content of this press release has been reviewed, prepared and approved by Mr. Marco Gagnon, P.Geo, Executive Vice President, who is a "Qualified Person" as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101").

Quality Control

During the last drilling program, assay samples were taken from the NQ core and sawed in half, with one-half sent to a certified commercial laboratory and the other half retained for future reference. A strict QA/QC program was applied to all samples; which includes insertion of mineralized standards and blank samples for each batch of 20 samples. The gold analyses were completed by fire-assayed with an atomic absorption finish on 50 grams of materials. Repeats were carried out by fire-assay followed by gravimetric testing on each sample containing 5.0 g/t gold or more. Total gold analyses (Metallic Sieve) were carried out on the samples which presented a great variation of their gold contents or the presence of visible gold.

About Probe Metals:

Probe Metals Inc. is a leading Canadian gold exploration company focused on the acquisition, exploration and development of highly prospective gold properties. The Company is committed to discovering and developing high-quality gold projects, including its key asset the Val-dOr East Gold Project, Quebec. The Company is well-funded and controls a strategic land package of approx. 1,000-square-kilometres of exploration ground within some of the most prolific gold belts. The Company was formed as a result of the sale of Probe Mines Limited to Goldcorp in March 2015. Goldcorp currently owns approx. 13.7 % stake in the Company.
TORONTO, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Continental Gold Inc. (TSX:CNL) (OTCQX:CGOOF) ("Continental" or the "Company") is pleased to announce positive gold reconciliation results from approximately 600 tonnes of recently extracted trial mining test ore that the Company batch-processed through its 30-tonne per day Yaragua mill located at the Buritica project, Antioquia, Colombia. Two vertically-stacked stopes located along the HW vein in the Yaragua system, at a midpoint elevation of 1,525 RL measuring 20 metres along strike by 35 metres vertically by 2.60 metres wide, were mined using the mechanized long-hole method. All ore extracted from the stopes was systematically and thoroughly muck sampled and assayed, with final results significantly better than the current mineral resource block model estimate on grade, tonnes and ounces (see December 18, 2017 Company news release).

Table 1: Estimated Stope Production vs. Actual Results*

Tonnes Gold

(g/t) Silver

(g/t) Contained

Gold

Ounces Contained

Silver

Ounces Combined Stope Design 3,649 7.34 14 862 1,652 Actual Results 4,627 8.60 18 1,285 2,678 Increase from Mineral Resource

Block Model Estimation +27% +17% +26% +49% +62%

* From December 18, 2017 Company news release

A total of 594 tonnes of ore, recovered from the western portion of both the upper and lower stopes, was initially muck sampled and then batch processed through the Companys 30-tonne per day Yaragua mill. The mill results have been reconciled with both the mineral resource estimate block model and subsequent muck sampling results. Final results are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Reconciliation of Batch Processed Ore from Western Portion of Upper and Lower Trial Mining Stopes

Tonnes Gold

(g/t) Silver

(g/t) Contained

Gold

Ounces Contained

Silver

Ounces Mineral Resource Block Model(1) 622 5.4 12.3 109 246 Muck Sample Results 616 8.4 16.2 167 320 Actual Results from Processing 594 9.1 13.3 173 254 Difference between Muck Sampling Results

and Mineral Resource Block Model -1% +56% +32% +53% +30% Difference between Actual Results from

Processing and Mineral Resource Block Model -5% +69% +8% +59% +3%

(1) Estimated using final stope design.

Both gold grades and ounces produced continue to consistently reconcile better than estimates for the Buritica project and we are hopeful that it is a harbinger of what to expect from commercial production once it commences in 2020, commented Ari Sussman, CEO. Project construction continues to make positive gains and timelines remain on schedule.

Technical Information

The technical information contained in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Donald Gray, Chief Operating Officer of the Company, who is a qualified person within the meaning of NI 43101.

Underground development along the veins was sampled by trained crews under the direct supervision of mine geologists. The sampling consisted of channel samples that were taken by hammer and chisel across the full width of the back every 3 metres along strike. Distinct geological zones were sampled separately (vein separate from wall rock), with minimum-maximum horizontal sample widths of 0.1 to 1.0 metres. The widths of the channels were adjusted so that each sample weighed approximately 3 kilograms. Sample locations were measured from a surveyed control point. Channel samples were also taken from advancing faces in the SG9521W sublevel along the Hanging Wall vein for comparison with back and drill hole sampling. Duplicate channel samples were collected with a frequency of one every 25 samples. Bar code tags were inserted into the individual sample bags by the geologist, including duplicates which were numbered in sequence with the primary samples. The bags were then secured with a cable tie and transported out of the mine by the sampling crew to a secure staging area on surface. Sample shipments were prepared by the sampling crew and approved by the Mine Geologist and Chief Geologist. All channel samples were transported from the gated mine compound in Company vehicles to a sample preparation lab operated by ALS Colombia Limited (ALS) in Medellin, Colombia. Samples were then shipped for analysis to ALS Perus ISO 9001 accredited assay laboratory in Lima, Peru.

Muck samples, equivalent to 16 tonnes of broken material, were taken during stope extraction at a frequency of one sample from every four scoop buckets. Sampling was performed by the geology assistant, extracting four separate channels vertically across the face of the scoop bucket into large pails for the purpose of approximating as close as possible a representative sample of both coarse and fine rock fragments present in the muck. Each sample weighed approximately 40 kilograms. The large sample was reduced by cone-and-quartering on a canvas to two 5kilogram sample splits, which were placed in separate sample bags. One of these was the primary split and the second was a quality control duplicate. Sample bags were numbered in sequence with a numbered tag inserted by the Mine Geologist, who then secured the individual bags with cable ties. The sampling assistant and geologists transported the bags out of the mine to a secure staging area where sample shipments were prepared. In all, 342 primary muck samples were collected, totaling 1.7 tonnes of stope material. Sampling was done by the same three teams over the entire program for consistency. The Mine Geologists performed regular audits of the sampling and sample reduction technique. Custody of the samples was transferred at the mine site to Actlabs, which transported the samples to Actlabs Colombia SAS, Medellin, Colombia, an ISO-9001 accredited facility. Channel samples taken from the development backs were analyzed by a 50-gram gold fire assay with atomic absorption finish, or a gravimetric finish for samples initially reporting over 100 g/t gold. Muck samples were analyzed by a 50-gram gold fire assay with a gravimetric finish. All silver values were determined by aqua regia digestion and atomic absorption method.

Besides rigorous chain-of-custody procedures, the Company utilized a comprehensive quality control/quality assurance program for the channel and muck samples, including routine insertion of blind certified commercial standards, blanks, field duplicates, check assays and analysis of results using industry-accepted best practices. For the test stope program, all quality control anomalies were addressed and/or corrected as necessary to assure reliable assay results; no material quality control issues were encountered in the course of the program.

For the core drilling in the test stope area, the Company applied its standard protocols for sampling and assay. HQ and NQ core are sawn or split with one-half shipped to a sample preparation lab in Medellin operated by ALS in Colombia, whereas BQ core samples are full core. Samples are then shipped for analysis to ALS Perus ISO 9001 accredited assay laboratory in Lima, Peru. The remainder of the core is stored in a secured storage facility for future assay verification. Blanks, duplicates and purchased certified reference standards are inserted into the sample stream to monitor laboratory performance. A portion of the samples are periodically check-assayed at SGS Colombia S.A., an ISO 9001 accredited assay laboratory in Medellin, Colombia.

For information on the Buritica project, please refer to the technical report, prepared in accordance with NI 43101, entitled Buritica Project NI 43101 Technical Report Feasibility Study, Antioquia, Colombia and dated March 29, 2016 with an effective date of February 24, 2016, led by independent consultants JDS Energy & Mining Inc. The technical report is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, on the OTCQX at www.otcmarkets.com and on the Company website at www.continentalgold.com.

About Continental Gold

Continental Gold Inc. is an advanced-stage exploration and development company with an extensive portfolio of 100%-owned gold projects in Colombia. Formed in April 2007, the Company  led by an international management team with a successful track record of discovering and developing large high-grade gold deposits in Latin America  is focused on advancing its fully-permitted high-grade Buritica gold project to production with first gold pour on track for early 2020. Additional details on Continental Golds suite of gold exploration properties are also available at www.continentalgold.com.
Rep. Song Young-gil, chairman of the Presidential Committee on Northern Economic Cooperation, speaks at his office in the National Assembly during an interview with The Korea Times, Jan. 4. / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



By Choi Ha-young



Stronger economic ties with China and Russia will help North Korea open up to the outside world, said Song Young-gil, the head of the Presidential Committee on Northern Economic Cooperation.



"In resolving the North Korea nuclear issue, South Korea's economic cooperation with Russia and China can ease military tension and promote economic partnership between the two Koreas," Song said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.



"We need to strengthen ties with these countries to make North Korea open its doors. That is what the committee is for. We will promote North Korea's economic reform and make it adopt an open-market policy."



Song, a four-term lawmaker of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, insisted that Seoul must bolster multilateral economic ties in an effort to promote peace in Northeast Asia.



The committee is tasked with making a blueprint for economic cooperation with countries north of Seoul  China, Mongolia and Eurasian Economic Union countries, potentially including North Korea. After being launched in December, the pan-governmental committee is setting up the New Northern Policy declared by President Moon Jae-in.



The policy, coupled with the New Southern Policy, aims at diversifying the country's economic partnerships with northern and southern countries other than the two superpowers  the United States and China. At the same time, the government is eyeing synergy with China's "One Belt One Road Initiative" and Russia's bid to develop its Far East.



"Currently, South Korea's economy is leaning too heavily on its two largest trade partners. The committee's goal is to discover new growth engines and attract Pyongyang to the economic community in Northeast Asia," Song said.



Basically, the committee is meant to work as a facilitator for local companies to expand to the northern countries. "Trade with Russia accounts for a scant 1.2 percent. This shows there's a great potential in the New Northern Policy," he noted.





Nine-bridge strategy



The liberal President came up with a more concrete plan named the Nine-bridge Strategy in a speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Russia, in September last year. The initiative seeks Korea-Russia cooperation in the nine industrial sectors of shipbuilding, harbors, developing arctic shipping, gas, railroad, electricity, industrial complexes, agriculture and fisheries.



Bilateral cooperation in shipbuilding is already achieving results. On Jan. 3, President Moon visited a shipyard of Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering in Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province.



"I proposed Moon to visit there as a symbolic move to encourage the industry which has been sluggish for years," he said. "By cooperating with Russia, I hope the industry will see new demand."



The company has exported 15 ice-breaking tankers to transport liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Russia. The project is part of Moscow's Yamal LNG project to export the energy through the Arctic.



"The Arctic shipping route is the shortest, shortening the 7,000 kilometers distance from Asia to Europe. As the commercial value of the Arctic route increases, the government will back up the resources, shipping and shipbuilding industries to make use of it," he said.



Song acknowledged that Moon's five-year term might not be enough to complete the nine-bridge strategy. "The committee will not set unrealistic goals," he said. "Building a gas line to connect Russia and South Korea, via the North, could be difficult in the near future."



The energy project was floated by ex-Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, but proved fruitless.



Song believes that past governments' bids to cooperate with northern countries failed because the projects were tied to North Korea's denuclearization. Based on this reason for failure, the committee put cooperation with other countries before any with Pyongyang.



"Instead, the committee is seeking to increase LNG imports from Russia," Song said. Currently, most of the nation's LNG is coming from Qatar and Oman, which could be unstable due to regional political insecurities."



For this, he said he will visit the Yamal Peninsula in Russia at the end of this month.



Being connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway to reach out to the European market is another goal that overlaps with former President Park's Eurasia Initiative.



"I will push for the railroad project gradually. Firstly, I am trying to facilitate Korean products' delivery from a Vladivostok port. The second goal is making use of the Russian port of Khassan and North Korea's Rajin port. Eventually, the committee will make efforts to connect railroads to the southern city of Busan."





North Korea factor



Needless to say, the committee needs North Korea's participation to flourish. However, Song said the committee will "do what it can do first."



"The Eurasia Initiative was no more than a slogan that lacked action," he said. "International society cannot recognize the North's nuclear ambition but we cannot waste time under this pretext."



The lawmaker recently drew up a revision bill in preparation for the North's involvement in the nine-bridge strategy if international sanctions against the regime are lifted.



"Currently, there's no legal basis to support inter-Korean projects held in a third country such as China or Russia," he said. "North Korea's cheap labor force could be our comparative advantage. In the face of China's enormous economic power, a better relationship with the North could be the South's leverage in diplomacy."



Song reiterated that the U.S. holds the key to the North Korean nuclear issue. "The normalization of the Washington-Pyongyang relationship is the only possible way to make the North abandon its nuclear weapons."



"China's suggestion of simultaneously halting joint military drills between Seoul and Washington on the condition of a nuclear freeze by Pyongyang deserves consideration," he said. "At the same time, the U.S. should send out a reliable signal that it will guarantee North Korea's security if it abandons nuclear weapons. How can the North trust the U.S. government, which easily undermined the Iran nuclear deal?"



He criticized some conservatives' "dichotomous thinking" which calls on the nation to pick only one option between Washington and Beijing. "Even Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is reportedly pursuing cooperation in China's One Belt, One Road project, while trying to counter China's growing maritime influence," he said.



"Conservatives are concerned that President Moon's cooperation in China's infrastructure project may irritate the U.S., but such a confrontational view doesn't work in global dynamics. Rather, Korea needs to adopt flexible thinking. For example, better Korea-China ties could be an effective tool in preventing Pyongyang's military provocations."



During the presidential election in May last year, Song was a leading campaigner for Moon. Right after the inauguration, Song was appointed as a special envoy to Russia and met Russian President Vladimir Putin.



"As a former key campaigner, I am obliged to support the President to achieve his declaration in Berlin  building a permanent system to uphold peace and dissolve the Cold War on the Korean peninsula," Song said.


By Kang Aa-young, Park Si-soo







Unable to get a job because of hair loss? It sounds bizarre and ridiculous, but it happened at a South Korean company.







Thankfully, the state human rights watchdog put a stop to this appalling practice. But the incident revealed how basic human rights can be ignored for nonsensical reasons.







According to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRC), a man applied for a job with a building management company in August 2015. He passed all the recruiting procedures and received final notice of his employment.







But days after, he was told his employment had been cancelled because, he claimed, he was bald.







The company said the cancellation was due to "critical flaws" found after he received confirmation he had been hired. But the man found hard and circumstantial evidence suggesting his baldness was the sole reason.







He filed a petition with the commission, demanding the company withdraw the cancellation. The human rights advocate verified his claim to be true through a fact-finding investigation and demanded that the company hire the man although it was not legally required to comply.







"Being bald . . . is a natural consequence that can't be reversed by human control. So putting someone at a disadvantage in employment for one's baldness is a discrimination that can't be accepted under any circumstances," said a NHRC official.


A New York developer plans to close on the sale of the Lincoln Journal Star's office building by April 30, according to a redevelopment agreement with the city.

The agreement for Ninth and P streets, which was introduced at the City Council on Monday, involves the largest private investment in a single building in the city's history, officials have said.

Newman Development Group of Vestal, New York, announced plans last year to purchase the Journal Star building, demolish it and redevelop the site into a nine-story mixed-use building.

Newman is not buying the newspaper operations, and the Journal Star plans to move its newsroom and business offices to a new location. The Journal Star's production building at Ninth and Q streets is not part of the sale.

According to the redevelopment agreement, the new building will have 35,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor, 88,000 square feet of office space on the second and third floors and 238 apartments on floors four through nine.

The building also will have a partial 10th floor with amenities for apartment residents, including a pool and fitness center.

The new building will have underground parking for approximately 100 vehicles, and the agreement gives developers the right to lease up to 340 stalls in the Market Place garage at 10th and Q streets.

Newman is expected to spend $85 million on construction of the building, with the city kicking in $15 million in tax-increment financing, according to the agreement. The $15 million in proposed TIF is based on an estimated valuation of the new building of approximately $68 million.

The redevelopment agreement lists the purchase price of the property at 926 P St. as $6.25 million.

Tax-increment financing allows developers to pay for parts of a redevelopment project using the additional property taxes generated by it. The money is collateralized into bonds and then paid off over a 15-year period.

According to the agreement, more than half of the TIF would go to site acquisition and preparation costs, with most of the rest of it going to facade enhancements, energy-efficiency improvements, interest costs on the bonds and streetscape improvements.

Officials from Newman Development could not be reached for comment.

The agreement does not have a set requirement for when demolition or construction must begin; however, it does say that Newman "shall use its best efforts to substantially complete all levels comprising the new building on or before December 31, 2020."

The Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the redevelopment agreement Jan. 22 and vote on it Jan. 29.
On 3 January, US President Donald Trump phoned Chiles president-elect Sebastian Pinera, of the centre-right Chile Vamos coalition, to congratulate him on his win in Chiles December 2017 presidential election. Trump said he looked forward to working closely with Pinera on matters of mutual interest, read a statement on the White Houses website. The two presidents also discussed the political crisis in Venezuela and their desire to see democracy restored. Pinera, who already served as Chile president between 2014 and 2014, will replace the current president, Michelle Bachelet of the centre-left Nueva Mayoria coalition, on 11 March.

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Apr 30, 2021, 3 AM

Meetings between the two men featured in the county seal more than 200 years ago laid the groundwork for the countys official start.

By Molly Goad

The Union County Historical and Genealogy Society in Jonesboro, Ill., is commemorating the countys bicentennial with a special postmark featuring the county seal.

The year 2018 is a big one for the area, marking the 200th birthday for the state of Illinois, Jonesboro and Union County. Jonesboro is one of the few towns celebrating its 200th birthday with the state.

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Established in 1800 and incorporated in 1818, Jonesboro is the county seat for Union County. It is also one of the sites for the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen Douglas in 1858.

The county seal depicts two preachers shaking hands. According to History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois by William Henry Perrin (published 1883), the preachers were the first people in the county; their historical meetings that gave the county its name likely occurred around 1816 or 1817.

To obtain the postmark, address your request to:

UNION COUNTY, IL Station, Postmaster, 103 W. Broad St., Jonesboro, IL 62952-9998, Jan. 2.
Stephen Hawking, the physicist who rewound the universe and skimmed boosted particles from the hot boundary regions of black holes, turns 76 today (Jan. 8).

In addition to being a world-renowned cosmologist, Hawking has become something of a pop culture icon. He's a striking figure: a genius curled up in a body largely immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. He's supported by an advanced wheelchair, and communicates to the world through a rare and specialized system that converts the movements of a single muscle in his cheek into speech. In that mode, he appeared on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "The Simpsons" and "The Big Bang Theory."

But Hawking's most lasting legacy will be as the most important physicist of the second half of the 20th century  a researcher who took the earlier works of figures like Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg and knitted them together into something approaching a coherent explanation for the behavior of the cosmos. [8 Shocking Things We Learned from Stephen Hawking's Book]

"There is a singularity in our past"

No good genius story starts with anything less than a bang, so it's appropriate that Hawking's first great achievement was also his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge.

Hawking's thesis, approved in 1966, made a dramatic argument: that the entire universe began as a single point, infinitely small and dense and curled up upon itself  a point at the beginning of everything. Or, as he would later write, succinctly: "There is a singularity in our past."

It was the first description of the Big Bang as it's commonly understood today: an infinitely small point at the far reaches of time that burst into our modern, ever-expanding cosmos.

As Hawking described in his 2005 lecture "The Origin of the Universe," his thesis arrived at a moment when scientists had seen that the vast empty reaches of space, the chasms between galaxies, were expanding. But they weren't sure why. Some physicists proposed weaker versions of the Big Bang concept, minus the singularity. But another theory, called the Steady State Universe, was dominant.

"As galaxies moved apart," Hawking said of the Steady State Universe, "the idea was that new galaxies would form from matter that was supposed to be continually being created throughout space. The universe would have existed forever and would have looked the same at all times."

In other words, many scientists thought that the universe was expanding, but in a way that gave it no beginning and no end.

As biographer Kitty Ferguson wrote in her book "Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind" (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012), Hawking struggled with depression in the months after his 1963 ALS diagnosis at age 21, and had that mental illness persisted, he might never have arrived at his thesis. But his depression subsided as it became clear that he was outliving expectations and when he was granted an exception from Cambridge rules governing graduate students, allowing him to marry his first wife, Jane Wilde, according to Ferguson.

During that period before he arrived at the subject of his doctoral thesis, Hawking reported feeling frustrated with the way researchers busied themselves with work he considered ultimately trivial.

"People were so pleased to find any solution to [Einstein's] field equations; they didn't ask what physical significance, if any, it had," he later said in his 2002 birthday lecture.

That frustration led him to his first brush with notoriety. As Ferguson recounted, Hawking traveled in June 1964 to hear a lecture from Fred Hoyle, a famous astronomer and advocate of the Steady State Universe theory. During the lecture, Hawking became so frustrated that he hauled himself to his feet, leaning on his cane, to challenge one of Hoyle's results. [Portrait of Genius: Stephen Hawking Exhibit Photos]

"An astonished Hoyle asked Hawking how he could possibly judge whether the result was right or wrong," Ferguson wrote. "Hawking replied that he had 'worked it out.'"

The audience was impressed, and Hoyle was "infuriated," by this unknown graduate student who had appeared to tear apart the professor's research in his head at the lecture, Ferguson wrote. (In fact, Hawking had befriended one of Hoyle's students and begun to attack the idea long before the lecture.)

Soon afterward, Ferguson wrote, Hawking learned about a cosmological theory developed by mathematician Roger Penrose: that singularities, the points of infinite density and space-time curvature theorized in general relativity, might actually appear when sufficiently large stars collapse on themselves. [8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life]

"Hawking took off from there," Ferguson wrote, "reversed the direction of time, and considered what would happen if a point of inifinite density and infinite curvature of space-time  a singularity  exploded outwards and expanded. Suppose the universe began like that. Suppose space-time, curled up tight in a tiny, dimensionless point, exploded in what we call the Big Bang and expanded until it looks the way it does today. Might it have happened like that? Must it have happened like that?"

Hawking got to work, backing up his train of speculation with robust supporting calculations. His doctorate thesis, based on those calculations, was approved in 1966. Those calculations, along with follow-up research conducted in partnership with Penrose over the decade that followed, formed the foundation for scientists' modern understanding of the Big Bang.

Around the same time, certain key predictions of the Steady State Universe theory began to fail experimental tests, cementing Hawking's status as discoverer of the true history of the early universe.

Black-hole explosions?

If Hawking's only achievement in his career were discovering the historical shape of the universe, he would still be a giant  the kind of person mentioned alongside Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the double-helix shape of DNA, or Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the heliocentric model of the solar system. But that was just the first of Hawking's two defining achievements.

The second, Hawking radiation, requires a bit of understanding of two things: black holes and the quantum mechanics of empty space.

First, about black holes: A black hole is a star that has collapsed on itself and become so gravitationally intense that not even light can escape a region around its center. Beyond that point, called the event horizon, space-time is so curved that everything that falls behind the shroud is lost forever. A black hole, according to this understanding in the early 1970s, never emits light, never shrinks, never loses mass; it only gains mass and draws more of space into its shrouded territory.

Second, on quantum mechanics: By the time of Hawking's career, scientists had long known that Heisenberg's uncertainty pricinple implied that empty space isn't really empty. Instead, it roils with "virtual" particles  matter-antimatter pairs that appear together, separate and then crash into each other and annihilate in a span of time too short to measure. (Scientists argue to this day whether those virtual particles really exist or turn up only in quantum equations due to their weird, probabilistic nature.)

In the late summer of 1973, Stephen and Jane Hawking attended a lecture series in Warsaw, Poland, celebrating Copernicus' 500th birthday, Ferguson wrote. There, Hawking encountered two Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and his student Alexei Alexandrovich Starobinsky, who had shown that the energy of spinning black holes would create particles just outside their event horizons. Those particles would careen away into space, Zel'dovich and Starobinsky said in their lecture, sapping some of the spin of the black hole as they went. Eventually, Zel'dovich and Starobinsky said, the black holes would stop spinning.

The idea stuck in Hawking's head, Ferguson wrote, and he returned to Cambridge to repeat and refine Zel'dovich and Starobinksy's calculations. But when he took his first stabs at their results, something new unfolded.

"I found, to my surprise and annoyance, that even nonrotating black holes should apparently create and emit particles at a steady rate," he later wrote in his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time." [The Best Science Books]

Here's why, as he explained in that book:

If black holes exist in space and have defined event horizons, and if space roils constantly with virtual" pairs of self-annihilating particles, then sometimes those particles must pop into existence right at the edges of black holes' event horizons. In fact, some of those particle pairs must appear perfectly positioned with one negative-mass antimatter particle separated onto one side of the event horizon and the other positive-mass matter particle separated onto the other side.

That strange circumstance would effectively "boost" the particles from their virtual semiexistence into full reality, Hawking realized, as they would have separated enough not to annihilate. That meant that particles of energy and mass would appear to stream from the surface of black holes' event horizons. And that stream of energy, radiating outward from what physicists had previously believed were eternally dark bodies, took the name Hawking radiation, after he described it in a 1974 paper (opens in new tab) in Nature titled "Black Hole Explosions?"

Hawking radiation profoundly changed the way physicists understood the universe. Before Hawking's realization, scientists believed that any matter or energy lost to a black hole was gone from the wider universe forever, such that black holes' event horizons would act as walls from beyond which some of the universe's stuff would never return.

But Hawking's discovery showed that black holes would decay faster and faster over time. For each positive particle that streamed from the surface of an event horizon out into the wider universe, a negative particle with negative energy and mass would fall back into the space beyond the event horizon, reducing the total mass and energy locked away there. Over time, that process would cause black holes to shrink. And as they shrank, they would become more active with Hawking radiation and shrink faster.

Hawking predicted that the universe must contain "primordial black holes" that emerged not from collapsing stars but from the extreme pressures of the early universe. These black holes, he reasoned, would have shrunk considerably over the intervening billions of years and their small event horizons would churn out powerful rays of Hawking radiation.

"Such holes hardly deserved [to be called] black: they are really white hot," he wrote in "A Brief History of Time."

Eventually, Hawking decided, they would explode.

As Hawking began to share this idea, Ferguson wrote in "An Unfettered Mind," his peers received it as either brilliant or heretical. When Penrose heard whispers of it, he called Hawking just as the physicist was sitting down to his 1974 birthday dinner and congratulated him for so long that his dinner got cold. But months later, the moderator at the symposium where Hawking presented his proposal rose to declare it "utter rubbish."

Today, it's considered a basic scientific fact.

Beyond black holes

In the four and a half decades since "Black Hole Explosions?" Hawking has continued to publish research that picks away at the underpinnings of the universe  including ideas that attack his own earlier contributions. (See, for example, the startling 2014 headline (opens in new tab) in Nature, "Stephen Hawking: There Are No Black Holes'".)

Hawking has become most famous in his later career as a science communicator. He has followed up his 1988 classic "A Brief History of Time" with 10 more works of popular science and a memoir, titled "My Brief History" (Random House, 2013).

It's impossible to talk about Hawking's enormous contributions to the human understanding of the universe without acknowledging the context of his long-declining health. Hawking's two seminal contributions to physics came during the same period in which he transformed from a young person who was able to walk on his own to a man who was confined to a wheelchair, slurred his speech and was reliant on his wife to transcribe his thoughts.

ALS paralyzes the body, but  at least in Hawking's case  it doesn't damage the mind. And for that, Ferguson wrote, Hawking has long counted himself "supremely lucky."

"It was true in 1964, and it is today," Ferguson wrote, "that as far as Hawking is concerned, the less made of his physical problems, the better. I recognized in 1989, during interviews for my first book about him, that if I were to write about his scientific work and fail entirely to mention that doing such work possibly represented more of an achievement for him than it would for most people, that would have suited him fine."

Hawking has appeared most comfortable discussing disability in the context of his activism, which has been significant. In 1999, he joined a group of 12 prominent figures, including South African activist Desmond Tutu, in signing a charter calling on the world's governments to transform their relationships with their disabled populations and expand services that improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Hawking has also been a prominent defender of universal health care and the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), going so far as to attack Conservative Party Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt in an August 2017 speech for insufficiently funding and supporting the program.

"I wouldn't be here without the NHS," Hawking said.

Hawking tends to get the most attention for his ideas on humanity's future when he comments on artificial intelligence or aliens. But the bulk of his pronouncements on the subject have been more down-to-earth: opposing wars, worrying that U.S. President Donald Trump's dismissal of climate change could damage the planet, and joining the global academic boycott of Israel.

Live Science wishes Hawking a very happy birthday and many more.

Originally published on Live Science.
Multicolored, sugary sprinkles are a popular topping for ice cream cones and sundaes, but a swimming pool filled with fake sprinkles at a Florida pop-up museum recently landed the institution in hot water.

The Museum of Ice Cream celebrates the dairy treat through frozen-dessert-themed interactive experiences and design elements that offer numerous photo opportunities for sharing on social media. But Miami Beach city officials recently fined the museum for creating an environmental hazard with their fake sprinkles, which filled a so-called "Sprinkle Pool" that visitors could frolic in, burying themselves in the tiny bits of brightly colored plastic, Miami's Local10 News reported.

Candy-like particles were escaping the exhibit  likely hitchhiking to freedom on enthusiastic sprinkle divers  and had been detected in nearby storm drains, raising concerns that they could disperse into local waterways, according to Local10 News. [Photos: Trash Litters Deep Seafloor]

The temporary museum opened to the public in Miami on Dec. 13, 2017, and closes Jan. 22. This is the Museum of Ice Cream's fourth location since its New York City debut in July 2016, and the museum promised "physical, digital and experiential dialogues" in a statement released prior to its Miami opening.

But the contents of the museum's immersive Sprinkle Pool proved to be problematic to contain. Concerns about wayward sprinkles prompted officials to slap the museum with a $1,000 fine, and to initiate inspections to make sure that the sprinkles stayed in their designated area, Local10 News reported.

Plastic pollution poses a threat to many types of sea life, which mistake the indigestible bits for food. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels and do not biodegrade, and humans have produced a staggering amount  approximately 9 billion tons, half of which was made in the past 13 years, researchers reported in a global analysis conducted last year. About 440 million tons (400 million metric tons) of plastic are generated each year, of which about 1 to 2 percent ends up in the ocean, the researchers wrote in the study.

The world's oceans are thought to hold approximately 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, about 92 percent of which is microplastics  fragments measuring under 0.19 inches (5 millimeters) in length.

Plastic has even penetrated the deepest reaches of the ocean, with creatures living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench  about 36,000 feet (10,970 meters) below the surface  containing microplastics in their guts, scientists found in November 2017.

The Ice Cream Museum is currently taking steps to contain "sprinkle residue" in the surrounding area, representatives said in a statement issued to the Miami New Times on Jan. 3. Their efforts include hiring "multiple cleaners" to sweep areas near the museum building, installing blowers at the Sprinkle Pool exits, and layering drains with felt to catch wayward sprinkles. The museum is also investigating a biodegradable sprinkle formula for future use, according to the statement.

Original article on Live Science.
Local News, Business & Finance, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: January 08 2018

PSC Taking Steps to Ensure Utility Customers, Not Utility Shareholders, Receive the Financial Benefits of Federal Corporate Income Tax Cuts.

Albany, NY - January 8, 2017 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that the New York State Public Service Commission is taking steps to ensure that any financial windfall that might be received by New York's utilities as a result of the federal government's decision to cut corporate federal income taxes is returned to the more than 10 million utility customers in New York who indirectly pay the taxes.

"While the federal government slashes corporate income taxes at the expense of middle- and working-class men and women, the PSC will ensure that any resulting financial gains earned by our utilities go to benefit consumers and not company owners," Governor Cuomo said. "We will do everything in our power to keep this windfall from lining the pockets of the top 1 percent, and deliver savings directly to hardworking New Yorkers."

The federal tax cut dramatically slashes the taxes collected on corporate profits at the expense of the middle-class. With its passage, PSC accounting and finance experts estimate utilities in New York stand to receive a financial windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars. However, since utility customers indirectly pay the companies' federal income taxes when they pay their monthly utility bills, it is only fair that the benefits received pass to the customer, not to the corporation.

Public Service Commission Chair John B. Rhodes said, "While some utilities have provisions that will automatically capture the net benefits for consumers, some do not, and shareholders could receive the windfall. To prevent a windfall, we will conduct a thorough accounting of the benefits the utilities realize from the tax reduction plan, and we will ensure it's the customers who receive the benefits, not company shareholders."

While a portion of the potential financial benefits would be captured in future rate cases, others could be lost absent immediate PSC action. Rather than allow the utilities to keep those financial savings for their shareholders, the PSC's plan will capture those tax savings for the benefit of customers.

The PSC's regulatory jurisdiction extends over New York's investor-owned utilities, including six major electric/gas utilities, five major gas utilities, three major water companies, nearly 40 small telephone companies, and hundreds of small water companies. In 2016, these utilities served a total of 10.1 million customers and had total annual operating revenues of about $24.5 billion.
Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: January 08 2018

An unknown male subject entered Spirits Wine and Liquor store, displayed a knife and demanded money, cops say.

NCPD are seeking a suspect in a Hicksville Robbery that took place on on Saturday, January 6.

Hicksville, NY - January 8, 2017 - The Second Squad reports the details of a Robbery that occurred on Saturday, January 6, 2018 at 7:49 p.m. in The Second Squad reports the details of a Robbery that occurred on Saturday, January 6, 2018 at 7:49 p.m. in Hicksville

According to detectives, an unknown male subject entered Spirits Wine and Liquor store, 69 East Old Country Road, displayed a knife and demanding money from the employee behind the counter. The victim, 53, handed an undetermined amount of US currency to the subject who then exited the store and fled on foot southbound on Broadway. No injuries were reported.

The subject is described as a male white, 510 tall, approximately 160-180 pounds, wearing a black mask, black jacket, blue jeans, and black shoes.

Detectives believe this subject is the same subject that displayed a knife in a Robbery that occurred on Wednesday, December 20, 2017 in Hicksville at the Citgo Gas Station located at 400 South Broadway.
The Legislature on Monday avoided another time-burning battle over its filibuster rule by adopting its current governing rules for this year without any changes.

That decision put to rest the possibility that senators would engage once again in a long brawl over the rule that requires votes of at least 33 senators in the 49-member body to break the grip of a filibuster and allow trapped legislation to move forward.

A battle mounted last year by senators who would like to reduce minority power to hold legislation hostage raged for nearly 30 legislative days, limiting floor action for about one-third of the legislative session.

Monday, the only proposal to change the rules came in a motion from Sen. Lydia Brasch of Bancroft, who wanted to make an argument for open-voting selection of legislative committee leadership positions that now are filled by secret ballot.

After arguing that "it is important to be clearly transparent" and sparking a brief discussion, Brasch withdrew her motion.

Several senators said open selection of legislative leadership positions is in the public interest.

Sen. Adam Morfeld of Lincoln argued that the current system that allows senators to make their choices by closed ballot "allows us to be nonpartisan and be able to choose the right person while ignoring party politics."

Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha jokingly told his colleagues he was "profoundly disrespected" by Monday's brief debate.

This was a rare moment, he said, when no one offered "a rule to stifle me."
School & Education, Local News

By Long Island News & PR Published: January 08 2018

Nicholas Raftis spelled frontispiece correctly to win the schools fourth annual spelling bee.

Spelling bee winner Nicholas Raftis (center) with Rachel Somers (left) and Kayla Watson (right) are pictured with the judges Roy Lee, Bea Foster and Keith Houghtaling, as well as Linda Czarnomski, Principal Carolyn Schick and former WFMS PTO President Theresa Caputo.

Moriches, NY - January 8, 2017 - It took 13 rounds and 108 words before William Floyd Middle School eighth grader Nicholas Raftis spelled frontispiece correctly to win the schools fourth annual spelling bee sponsored by the William Floyd Middle School PTO. For his efforts, Nicholas will travel to Hofstra University for the Long Island Regional Scripps Spelling Bee on February 4, 2018, to compete against the top spellers in all of Suffolk and Nassau counties for an opportunity to represent Long Island at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., held in the spring.

Coming in second place and serving as Nicholass alternate for the Long Island Regional Bee is eighth grader Rachel Somers; and serving as the second alternate with a third-place finish is seventh grader, Kayla Watson.
by Fern Siegel , January 8, 2018

Some years in history are so monumental, they deserve intense study.

Thats the case for 1968, which put the country through seismic political and cultural shifts. In that tumultuous year, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; LBJ signed a Civil Rights Act, Yale admitted women, Richard Nixon was elected president and humans orbited the moon.

On the pop-culture front, 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered, while rock band Led Zeppelin gave its first live performance.

Now, 50 years later, The Atlantic is producing a year-long series, led by staff writer Conor Friedersdorf, to chronicle the momentous moments that made up a defining year in U.S. history  and helped shape modern America.

Friedersdorf told Radio Atlantic that often forgotten history is worth revisiting. Seminal events, the black power salute at the Olympics, the My Lai massacre that turned the public against the Vietnam War, various technological changes defined and shaped us in ways  that inform how we behave today.

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He added: Today, people are losing faith in the American experience, were in an authoritarian moment, and 1968 resonates with the last two years. You see in both a loss of faith in political leadership. It frightened voters. It caused them to embrace Richard Nixon in one case and Donald Trump in another.

A second charge of the series is to put the culture in perspective.

The Atlantic hopes to present the past in a truthful, contextual way without present-day bias. Writers will utilize archival material, experts, TV and movies and remembrances from those willing to share personal recollections.

On Radio Atlantic, Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, added: The [Martin Luther] King assassination is one of the most important events of post-World War II America -- and we could use that as a locus to say: Where have we gone, where have we not gone, where did we think we were going, and what happened along the way?
by Larissa Faw , January 8, 2018

While much of day-after chatter regarding the 2018 Golden Globes is about the shows focus on sexual harassment and all-black dress code, one advertiser  LOreal Paris  was a big winner in the Jan. 7 show, according to marketing technology company Amobee.

L'Oreal Paris aired an ad starring new brand ambassador Winona Ryder. It featured a tagline aligning Winona Ryder's acting comeback  in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things  with the potential for damaged hair to make a comeback, too.

"Everyone loves a comeback, the proclaimed. Damaged hair deserves one, too."

According to Amobee, the ad has attracted nearly 300% more digital content engagement around L'Oreal Paris since it aired in the Sunday Globes telecast on NBC.

advertisement advertisement

This interest is likely because people are happy for Ryder's "Stranger Things" comeback and because of the unusual comparison between Winona's career and damaged hair, says an Amobee spokesperson. The ad has also sparked positive interest from traditional news publishers, including US Weekly, Huffington Post and the Daily Mail.

Among the various awareness hashtags affiliated with the show, #TimesUp is the most popular. On Jan. 7, there were 175,600 tweets around the hashtag #TimesUp; 59,200 tweets around the hashtag #WhyWeWearBlack, and 43,600 tweets around the hashtag #MeToo.

All three tweets are related to gender and harassment.
by Larissa Faw , January 8, 2018

Viacom is acquiring influencer marketing shop Whosay to further bolster Viacom's influencer reach, omnichannel distribution and advanced advertising tools. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Whosay is a creative-marketing agency that develops and produces branded content particularly for mobile devices. Founded in 2010 by CEO Steve Ellis and CAA, the New York-based agency has a network of celebrity talent under its umbrella, spanning YouTube up-and-comers to A-Listers.

Under the deal, the 70-person Whosay team and services will remain the same with Ellis continuing to run the agency.

This acquisition turbocharges our commitment to using ideas and creativity to create brand-safe solutions that drive measurable outcomes, stated Ellis. As a Viacom company, we'll be able to continue to do much more of that and to do it bigger and better.

This acquisition follows a two-year partnership during which Whosay executed more than 50 campaigns for MTV, BET and other Viacom brands. It seems Viacom was pleased with the results.

Whosay has swiftly notched up brand partnerships across all categories after originally starting from a single #WakeUpWithMe celebrity selfie story for Crest.
Scientists working with adults who fixate on negative thoughts have noted a link between this distressing compulsion and poorer-quality sleep, as well as shorter sleep duration. Share on Pinterest Worriers of the world, is your repetitive negative thinking caused by lack of sleep? Repetitive negative thinking occurs when a person compulsively lingers on thoughts and stimuli that are distressing and unhelpful, which often leads to a decreased quality of life and the emergence of mental health problems, tied to depression and anxiety, in particular. Prof. Meredith E. Coles and Jacob A. Nota, both of whom are from the State University of New York at Binghamton, conducted a study that focused on the link between repetitive thoughts of moderate and high intensity  also referred to as worry and rumination, respectively  and an individuals nightly sleep duration and habits. Their findings have been reported in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

Poor sleep and elevated negative thinking The researchers recruited 52 participants aged between 18 and 65, all of whom had scored highly on the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire , which is a test that aims to measure an individuals level of repetitive negative thinking. For the purpose of this study, the participants were shown various pairs of images  both neutral and emotionally evocative  and their degree of attention was tested by following their eye movements. The team also collected information about the participants sleep cycles, recording data about how long they tended to sleep every night and around what time they normally fell asleep. Prof. Coles and Nota observed that the participants who reported frequent sleep disturbances also found it more difficult to stop focusing on any negative stimuli they were exposed to, suggesting a link between poor sleep and the preponderance of intrusive thoughts. We found, explains Prof. Coles, that people in this study have some tendencies to have thoughts get stuck in their heads, and their elevated negative thinking makes it difficult for them to disengage with the negative stimuli that we exposed them to. While other people may be able to receive negative information and move on, the participants had trouble ignoring it, she adds.
Here are five news stories and events to start your week from the editors at Military.com:

Downed C-2A Greyhound Located in Philippine Sea

The U.S. Navy has located the C-2A Greyhound cargo plane that crashed Nov. 22 into the Philippine Sea en route to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Three sailors were killed in the accident and eight crew members were rescued. A team of deep water salvage experts located the plane at a depth of about 18,500 feet, "making the salvage phase of this operation the deepest recovery attempt of an aircraft to date," according to a statement released late Friday by 7th Fleet. The team in coming weeks will return to the site with specialized equipment, including a side-scan-sonar and remotely operated vehicle, "to map the debris field and attach heavy lines for lifting the aircraft to the surface," the release states.

Veterans' Group Calls on Troops to Own the 'Me Too' Movement

Via Hope Hodge Seck at Military.com: "On Monday, the Service Women's Action Network plans to hold a demonstration outside the Pentagon that aims to bring the "#MeToo" sexual assault awareness movement home to the military. It's unclear whether any active-duty service members will be in attendance. Since October, when the #MeToo hashtag gained viral intensity on Twitter and Harvey Weinstein became the first of a herd of powerful men to lose positions and prestige over sexual assault accusations, a new wave of awareness has swept the country. But the military, which has been addressing the realities of sexual assault in the ranks for years, has been largely absent from the movement."

Surface Navy Association National Symposium Kicks Off

The 30th annual National Symposium of the Surface Navy Association will take place this week outside Washington, D.C. The event, scheduled to run Tuesday through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, will draw a number of the Navy's top brass, including Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden, commander of Naval Surface Forces. Watch for leaders to discuss a number of issues facing the surface fleet, including the sea service's response to last summer's deadly destroyer collisions in the Pacific. The agenda can be found here.

Mattis Doesn't Plan to Read Book on Alleged White House Feuds

Via Richard Sisk at Military.com: "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sidestepped the furor Friday over the new tell-all book on White House infighting that depicts a feud between since-ousted aide Steve Bannon and Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser. Mattis said he had been told that his name pops up several times in the book 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,' by journalist Michael Wolff. But when asked whether he would read it, he said, 'No, I'm a little busy these days.' At an informal session with Pentagon reporters, Mattis joked that he would leave the reading of the book to the "more literate" members of the press corps."

Former USMC Drill Instructor Pleads Guilty to Hazing, Will Be Separated

Via Hope Hodge Seck at Military.com: "A former Marine Corps drill instructor implicated in a 2015 incident in which a Muslim recruit was thrown in an industrial dryer and interrogated like a terrorist will serve 45 days' restriction and be administratively separated from the military, Marine officials announced Friday. Sgt. Michael K. Eldridge pleaded guilty at a summary court-martial aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, to maltreatment; failure to obey a lawful general order; and disorderly conduct, officials with Marine Corps Training and Education Command said Friday. In addition to restriction, he will be demoted to corporal, according to the announcement."

-- Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Brendan_McGarry.
Officials say the device was known as an "unexploded ordnance," or an explosive weapon that did not explode and still posed a...
The U.S. has "no beef" with the Iranian people who have shown in recent street protests that they "aren't buying" the policies of the regime in Tehran, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.

Matts also told Pentagon reporters that Iran has thus far failed in the grand scheme to establish a "land bridge" across Syria as part of an overall effort to create a "Shiite crescent" in the Mideast running from Tehran to Beirut.

"I don't think there's a land bridge right now" in Syria, he said, despite Iran's continued support of Hezbollah in Lebanon which has sent fighters to the civil war against Russian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In Tehran on Sunday, the Iran's Revolutionary Guards claimed victory over the protests in which at least 22 have been killed and 1,000 arrested in widespread demonstrations that have posed the boldest challenge to the clerical establishment since the so-called "Green" movement of 2009.

The latest protests by mainly youthful and working-class demonstrators spread to more than 80 cities and rural towns in an outburst of anger at corruption, unemployment and a deepening gap between rich and poor.

In a statement Sunday on their Sepahnews website, the Revolutionary Guards said that Iran's "revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij [Revolutionary Guards] forces, police and the Intelligence Ministry have broken down the chain" of unrest.

The Guards said the protests had been fomented by "the United States, Britain, the Zionist regime [Israel], Saudi Arabia, the hypocrites, and monarchists." Iran's official Fars news agency also said that counter-demonstrators had risen up "to condemn the foreign-backed riots in few towns."

At the Pentagon, Mattis joined with President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo and others in the administration in voicing support for the protesters.

"I think it's very important that we stand up and say that we understand the Iranian people. Our beef, if we have one, is not with the Iranian people. It is specifically the same regime that the Iranian people, clearly, are fed up with as well," Mattis said.

"So the most important thing, I think, is it's up to the Iranian people what form of government they have, and to say we believe that they should have the kind of government they want," Mattis said.

"And, right now, the regime senses that they've got a lot of people who aren't buying this revolutionary regime's act," he said.

"And my intent is to show that, to the world, clearly the Iranian people aren't buying this revolution or export of their terrorism, or whatever the revolutionary regime people want to call it. They're not buying it there at home. We're not buying it internationally," Mattis said.

On Syria, Mattis said there was still too much fighting going on by a variety of forces with differing agendas in the civil war for an Iranian "land bridge" to take effect -- "rough terrain, rough enemy units that haven't been cleaned up, and all the usual cleanup going on."

He said again, "I don't think there's a land bridge right now."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has spent more than 40 years in the study and practice of war, but his extensive thoughts and writings on the subject have often been selectively reduced to chesty one-liners.

There's the admonition to the troops: "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

And another: "There's some a------s in the world that just need to be shot."

Other examples of bumper sticker bravado could be cited that tend to drown out the context and Mattis' consistent underlying message in a career as Marine legend and four-star general -- that being prepared for war is the best way to prevent it.

Mattis in the past week has been attempting to provide more context in three informal sessions with Pentagon reporters that he acknowledges undertaking at the suggestion of The Associated Press' senior defense correspondent, Bob Burns.

It's just him in the middle of a reporters' huddle. His aides stand aside but within earshot. He is unfailingly polite and direct in his responses to any topic that comes up, with the exception of those that he feels would give a clue to future operations.

Only once has he snapped at a question. Mattis took a question on civilian casualties in Yemen as suggesting that the U.S. didn't care about the casualties. "Don't screw with me," he said.

At the session with reporters last Friday, Mattis took questions on Pakistan, Syria, Korea, Iran, Russia, transgender recruits and the budget and, in the process, made a statement that could be added to his lexicon of one-liners.

"What counts most in war is [the] most difficult to count," he said in expanding on his thoughts about civil war in Syria in response to a question about whether progress could be gauged by the number of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters killed.

Another reporter interjected that Mattis had recently said in Tel Aviv, "I've got better things to do than counting while the fight's still going on."

Mattis went on to say: "Yes, we're not going to get into that sort of thing. You'll know probably the most challenging part in assessing in combat -- to include specifically your question -- is that what counts most in war is most difficult to count, to quantify, OK?"

The most difficult thing to quantify is the enemy's morale, Mattis said, but there are "lagging indicators" that would show that constant pressure is having an effect.

"Morale, eventually, you'll see a lagging indicator," he said. "You'll see that not as many people want to be recruited into a force that's getting annihilated -- witness Syria.

"You won't see as many foreigners coming to join witness this. So you can kind of look at what's happened in Syria and say, 'Wait a minute. They're not putting out squads to go blow off bombs in Brussels anymore.' They can't. You know, this sort of thing," Mattis said.

The problem is that "not always can you quantify where you're at, at any one moment," he said, but in the case of ISIS "we'll fight them" until the threat is eliminated.

Mattis also spoke on tyranny and revolution in commenting on the recent street protests in Iran against the Islamic regime.

"You know, it's interesting. You know, I enjoy reading history, just because I learn a lot from it. And, if you watch, when people confront tyranny -- and this goes back 1,000-2,000 years -- people, eventually, they get fed up with it," he said.

"And whether it be physical tyranny or mental tyranny or spiritual tyranny, they revolt against it," Mattis said.

"So we may come from different directions," he said of Iranian and American judgments on the regime in Tehran, "but ultimately, it's the same kind of tyranny.

"In their case, it's about their internal government, what it does to them. In our case, it's that, plus it's what that government has done to espouse or support terrorism, destabilizing activities, export of ballistic missiles, disruption of commerce. All these kinds of things," he said.

Mattis declined to speculate on what may come next, and what the U.S. response would be.

"There's a reason I have four-stars out in the field," he said of the combatant commanders.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Veterans groups demonstrated in bitter cold Monday outside the Pentagon to turn some of the focus of the "#MeToo" movement toward sexual harassment and assault in the ranks.

"It is time that there is a safe way to report sexual assault in the military so that men and women serving our country have the freedom to say 'Me Too' instead of silence," said Nichole Bowen-Crawford, a former Army E-4 who said she was sexually assaulted in Iraq.

Bowen-Crawford was among about 30 to 40 demonstrators who said they were inspired by the "#MeToo" movement that has gone viral amid continuing revelations of predatory behavior, harassment and assault by men in positions of power in Hollywood, the media and Congress.

The demonstration organized by the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN) and joined by representatives of other veterans groups was sanctioned by the Defense Department.

However, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, told Military.com that the DoD had not itself conducted any events or initiatives stemming from the "#MeToo" movement.

"We already have a very proactive position in this regard," he said. "We are already very active in regards to training and internal awareness campaigns to train our internal audience to understand what is unacceptable."

DoD officials said currently serving military personnel could participate in the demonstration, so long as they were not in uniform.

Several of the demonstrators carried signs in support of the Military Justice Improvement Act, sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, which would change the way sex crimes are reported and prosecuted in the military.

According to Gillibrand's website, the proposed legislation would move "the decision over whether to prosecute serious [sex] crimes to independent, trained, professional military prosecutors, while leaving uniquely military crimes within the chain of command."

At the demonstration, Monica Medina, a former Army captain who later served as a special assistant to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, said the Pentagon's own surveys show that about 80 percent of women in the military say they've been sexually harassed during the course of their careers.

"That's twice the number in the private sector," Medina said. "We've got to encourage more women to come forward. Time is up."

Former Coast Guard Judge Advocate General's officer Denise Krepp, who later became chief counsel to the U.S. Maritime Administration, said the fear of retaliation preventing many women from coming forward "existed 20 years ago and it hasn't changed. We still have these problems with sexual assault."

"People have not been fired," Krepp said, "and it's not just the senior officers, it's the political appointees" who have been preying upon women in the ranks.

In the current military culture, "you're more likely than not to be retaliated against" for reporting a sex crime, said Lydia Watts, SWAN chief executive officer. "Where is the decisive action against our assailants?"

Bowen-Crawford said she was assaulted in 2003 in Iraq by a sergeant while working the night shift.

"I didn't report it," she said, after being told by friends that it would be pointless and would probably ruin her career. The sergeant was later promoted, she added.

The problem for many female victims of sexual assault in the military often is that "you have to report the sexual assault to the perpetrator or their friends," Bowen-Crawford said.

She said the #MeToo" movement is bringing new awareness to the persistence of sexual assault in other fields and now "the military is next."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
After you've Made America Great Again, what's left to prove for the World's Most Famous Man? If Donald Trump (who will be 74 in 2020) decides to move on, we'll need a new president.

Oprah Winfrey has suddenly become a factor in 2020 after her barn-burner of a speech at the 2018 Golden Globes.

Oprah Winfrey has a huge following as a TV host, 60 Minutes correspondent, cable network CEO, movie producer and even (sometimes) an actress, starring in Disney's upcoming movie of the children's classic book "A Wrinkle in Time."

The core of her speech was aimed at the changes sought after recent Hollywood sexual abuse scandals, but it's pretty clear from her speech that she has some wider targets in mind as well.

If President Trump does retire, what about the Secretary of Defense as his successor? He's got his own incredibly viral video.

Plus he has, you know, actual executive branch governing experience. Oh yeah, plus he's a Marine Corps LEGEND who served as head of Central Command from 2011-2013 after combat success in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mattis has yet to share his own views on the kind of social and economic issues important to many voters, but he's already proven himself a man of integrity with an impeccable record of leadership.

Oprah vs. Mattis: who you got? Sound off!
Ghanaian musician Opako has signalled a strong warning to comedian and actor, Kalybos to desist from copying his brand.

In an interview with SeancityGh, Opako seems not being happy with how the Amakye and Dede's actor is directly copying his brand.

According to him, Kalybos has copied his style of dressing which makes him (Opako) distinct from all others.

Opako is a fantastic musician under Bisa K'dei's label, BLMC.

He has featured music gurus like Bisa K'dei Floking Stone, Guru, Kojo Cue, Kesse, Sista Afia, among others
08.01.2018 LISTEN

Highlife Musician, Lucky Mensah has lamented over the songs being churned out by most Ghanaian artistes.

The Nkratuo hit maker said in an interview on Storm FMs Mid Morning Show that the new crops of Ghanaian artistes are not making sense with their songsand they cannot be compared to the old musicians.

The new crop of artistes thrives on rhythm. They do not make any sense in the songs that they do. All Ghanaians know that most of these new musicians are not making sense. It is only a few of them that are making sensible songs, he said.

Lucky Mensah who released his first album in 1993 disclosed the people he looked up to.

People heard about me in the early 2000 but my first album was released in 1993. I started in the era of Charles Elliot, Sibo Brothers, Kaakyire Kwame Appiah and others. I listened to Oheneba Kissi, Lumba, Kojo Antwi, Amakye Dede, Aboagye Dacosta and others.

Their songs made a lot of sense. 

Obrafour, Okyeame Kwame, Lord Kenya, Akatakyie and other artistes learned from us and they did a great work. You cannot compare our days to what they are doing now, he stated.

He added that making music in the early days was not easyand a lot of due process has to be followed before one can release a song.

It wasnt easy at that time; you have to be behind the scene for about four-five years before you can come out with a song. Studios were not common at that time. It is not like today that almost everybody has a studio in their rooms.

People gather at cassette shops to listen to new songs when they are released. They bought many cassette at that timesome even argue about songs that makes a lot of sense, songs that advise or motivate peopleand that influence them to buy the cassettes, Lucky Mensah

revealed.

It appears all hope is not lost, he has this to say about Michael Owusu Addo popularly known as Sarkodie: I listen to Sarkodie and you will hear that he does talk sense in his tracks.

He noted with concern that organizers of the various music award schemes, are not helping because they give out awards to these people who are not writing sensible songs.

They think they know a lot but they do not know anything. Their verses do not match their choruses but people patronize it because of the danceable rhythm. Most these musicians do not listen to advice. If you do not have the talent, then forget about making music. DJs should

also play the sensible songs on the airwaves, Lucky Mensah concluded.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

Actor Prince David Osei says a woman should not be allowed to take the responsibility of a man by bearing the costs of a wedding.

He believes it robs the man of his dignity.

The actor, alongside writer Aphua Larbi-Mensah and Yasmine Wuruche were guests on the Super Morning Show where they discussed whether or not it was high time women took the initiative in proposing to men they like.

Prince David Osei, just like the other guests, thought that it was not unheard of.

According to him, some men for the fear of commitment stall in popping the big question and must sometimes be awakened by the woman taking matters into her own hands.

L-R: Aphua Larbi-Mensah, Prince David Osei, Yasmine Wuruche and Kojo Yankson

According to him, the man is the one taking someone from her parents' home and bringing to your house, so you should be responsible, you should be ready.

He suggested that even though the woman may meet the man half way with expenses, allowing her take charge, sometimes it takes your dignity away as a man.

Writer and film critic Aphua Larbi in her submission admitted that though there was nothing wrong with a woman popping the big question, she had to be sure her partner felt the same way about her.

In a relationship, you have to be sure youre both on the same page, because if they are, why not? You can go ahead and propose.

Miss Wuruche in agreement said, I think if you want to propose to a man, sure go ahead, but like she said you have to be on the same page, just like if a man was going to propose to a woman.
Ghana National Herbal Awards 2018 was held on Saturday, January 6, 2018 at the Golden Tulip (Kumasi), in the Asanti Region.

The Awards was aimed for the production of unique products and efficient services delivery. It also seeks to place emphasis on these individuals impeccable results through commitment to business growth, professional excellence and community service.

There were exciting performances by Kakyire Kwame Appiah, Kofi Nti, Mary Agyemang, Ernest Opoku jnr, Frank Mensah Pozo and many more.

Founder Of Ghana National Herbal Awards  Cecilia Gyase Konmah

Founder Of Ghana National Herbal Awards  Cecilia Gyase Konmah

See the full list of winners below:

HONORARY AWARDS

Power Herbal Specialists  Best herbal clinic

Dr Edu Herbal Center  Best stroke hospital

Gaftram  Main pillar of the herbal fraternity

Dr Anastasia first female directorate

Department of herbal medicine KNUST was honored as first institution to run a degree programmed in herbal medicine

Category Winners

Taabea Mixture  Best malaria herbal medicine, Best herbal sales of the year, best herbal medicine of the year, charity award.

Givers Capsules  Best man capsules, Best capsules of the year, Best herbal package capsules, Best koo capsules

Kenoga Company Limited  Best distributor, Best herbal advertiser, charity award

Gifas Mixture  Best stds herbal medicine, Best herbal advert of the year

G.p.c Mixture  Best herbal waist pains

Dank Natural Health Care Complex  Best body pains

Suzzy Herbal Centre  Best promising herbal star

Adonko Bitters  Best alcoholic sales of the year, Best alcoholic advert of the year

Bie Gya Bitters  Discovery alcoholic beverage

Joy Industries  Best herbal cream, Best alcoholic beverage, Best alcoholic package, Charity award

Adutwumwaa Herbal Best herbal blood tonic

Fine Fine Herbal Soap  Best herbal soap

Antec Herbal Center  Spanish Garlic, Best herbal medicine for blood pressure, Best garlic bitters

Dependable Herbal Home  Best koo mixture, Best menstrual herbal medicine, Best herbal medicine with more products, Best lady care

Solak biochemist Limited  Best ulcer herbal medicine

Kakyire Kwame Appiah



Kofi Nti



Ernest Opoku jnr



Frank Mensah Pozo



Emilia Brobbey



MC of the show Naana Hayford and Salinco

Source: Dan Kwasi Prince// www.dailyviewgh.com / Ghana

Writers email [email protected]
Controversial Ghanaian counsellor, George Lutterodt is in the news again for stating that Ghanaian and Nigerian women are dream killers according to a research he conducted in 2017. The counselor who made an appearance on the late night satirical show, Tonight starring Andrew Tandoh Adote on Joy Prime also insisted that the Nigerian and Ghanaian women are the most cause of the death of sexual death in the life of men.

He stated: This year I was trying to do a global research and that is when we found out that Ghanaian women, Nigerian women are dream killers and they are the most cause of the death of sexual death in the life of men in Ghana. If you meet a Ghanaian woman, a Nigerian woman, you will easily die in bed. But if you meet anybody from East African coast, you will ask God, Why did you create me here in this country, they dont stress men, they distress men. Ghanaian women stress men. And even when you are enjoying the act, they will ask you, will you marry me.

Counselor Lutterodt who is not new to controversy also maintained that every wife must produce stress in the life of her husband, for the survival of the union.

Mistresses are not supposed to be married. Because they miss stress, they miss your stress. Wives give stress and every wife must produce stress in the life of a husband. If your wife is not producing stress your marriage will die. Because if you are not producing stress, how will the mistresses get job to do. You have to create job for the boys, he stated.

Check out the full interview below:


Son of the late Managing Editor of Al-Hajj newspaper Alhaji Bature, Mubarak Bature, has revealed that his father died as a result of high blood pressure (Hypertension).

Immediately, the death of the veteran journalist was announced, a publication that circulated within the media fraternity indicated that, he died of stroke.

The reports indicated further that,Alhaji Bature collapsed at his bathroom prior to the Christmas festivities and was rushed to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital where he was on admission receiving treatment before his sudden demise.

The spokesman for the family ,Amos Blessing Amorse,had debunked that the media reports about the late Managing Editor Of Al-Hajj newspaper are untrue and thus the public should disregard it.

But speaking in an exclusive interview with Razzonline.com in line with what killed his Father,the first son of the late veteran Journalist Mubarak Bature who is based in the United States revealed candidly that:

First of all, what I know is my father died of bphe was admitted at the surgical ward of the Korle Bu teaching hospital for two weeks ...thats what I know,Mubarak told Razzonline.com

Mubarak explained extensively that, though the post mortem is not yet out, the doctors actually told him his late dad died of BP

The late Alhaji Bature Iddrisu,was laid to rest around 3pm on Saturday,January 6, 2017,after Jannaiza Prayers was observed at his family house at Nima,Gorillas;adjacent UNIBANK in accordance with the Islamic faith.

He was an outspoken political commentator on Adom TVs morning show,Badwam, and a member of the National Democratic Congress.
07.01.2018 LISTEN

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crownd, Crooked eclipses gainst his glory fight, And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beautys brow, Feeds on the rarities of natures truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow: And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand, Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand."

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore (Sonnet 60) William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616. On Saturday, 6th January, 2018, thousands of mourners from across Ghana's political world's entire spectrum attended the funeral and burial of Alhaji Bature Iddrisu, the managing editor of the Al Hajj newspaper, who died aged 60 at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, in Accra, on Friday, January 5, 2018. The huge crowd at his funeral illustrated perfectly how extremely well-connected Alhaji Bature - as he was popularly known - actually was whiles alive.

Witty, humorous and full of life, Alhaji Bature had an outgoing nature and was very empathetic - always ready to help people who approached him for help in resolving their personal problems. The story of his life epitomised the boundless energy and creativity of the cultural melting-pot that is Nima - and the dynamism of its ethnically-diverse population of many religious faiths.

Though he was not born into great wealth - but rather started life from very humble beginnings - he used his fertile imagination to propel himself into the upper reaches of Ghanaian society, and had a personal network, which included many prominent people from the top strata of Ghanaian society. He was someone whose company many - including myself - enjoyed tremendously.

I will miss his infectious laughter and will always remember him for the high regard he held President Nkrumah in: which is the reason why I allowed him to publish articles of mine from time to time in the Al Hajj newspaper. Above all, Alhaji Bature never forgot those who helped him. I recall his telling me with much feeling of gratitude, once upon a time, about how Ibrahim Mahama surprised him by giving him the new Toyota Landcruiser Prado 4x4 that he drove.

And if the matter has still not been settled, one hopes that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that he devoted so much of his energies and time serving, will ensure that the renewal of the lease on the land that he built his Nima McBonalds Hotel and published the Al Hajj newspaper from, is handled in win-win fashion to the satisfaction of both the landowners and Bature's surviving family.

Ditto the completion of the new hotel and house he was putting up - if both properties hadn't been completed before his demise, that is. Like all of us, Alhaji Bature was not a saint - but unlike most did not pretend to be one: and even once acknowledged openly - during an Adom TV morning programme that he and Hon. Kennedy Adjapong were regular guests on - that he wouldn't dispute anyone who accused him of being corrupt, although to him there was a world of difference between everyday petty corruption and high-level corruption amongst ministers and other upper echelon government appointees. Farewell, Alhaji Bature Iddrisu. On a purely human level, some of us will never forget you.

Rest in peace dear friend.

And May Allah bless your soul.
President Akufo-Addo has reiterated his government's commitment towards industrializing the country's economy to enable it to compete on the global stage.

According to him, the country will only become prosperous if it invests in industries to add value to the raw materials it produces.

While addressing the gathering at the commemoration of 25 years since the start of the country's 4th Republic, President Akufo-Addo said Ghana aims at joining the list of prosperous nations in the world with its focus on industrialization, which he said is premised on modernized agriculture.

We've begun to take a deep look at the structure of our economy and transform it from a raw material producing and exporting one to a value-added industrialized economy with a modernized agriculture to serve better our needs. The era of Ghana's industrialization has dawned so that we can trade in the global marketplace, not on the basis of raw materials, but on the basis of the things we make inspired by our sense of enterprise, creativity, and innovation, he said.

It is the most effective way we can generate jobs and wealth for the masses of our people and join the ranks of the developed prosperous nations of the world, he added.

President Akufo-Addo stressed that the country had been endowed with enormous wealth and human potential that can guarantee its growth and development.

While commending Ghanaians for their active role in ensuring peace and stability in the country over the past 25 years, Akufo-Addo said the best days of mother Ghana lie ahead of us. We are laying the platform for the evolution of a Ghanaian civilization to give true meaning to the foundational values of freedom and justice, from which our nation was conceived.

Ghanas democratic journey

Ghana's 25-year-long democracy journey has seen the country being led by five different presidents including the incumbent, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The first regime of the Fourth Republic was led by Former President Jerry John Rawlings, whose leadership transitioned from a military government under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) to constitutional rule under the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in 1992.

After serving two terms in office making him ineligible to run against as president, Rawlings endorsed his vice-president at the time, Prof. John Evans Atta Mills as the NDC's presidential candidate in 2000.

Atta-Mills, however, lost the elections to the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) John Agyekum Kufuor in the 2000 elections.

Kufuor led the country for two terms; from 2000 to 2004 and then to 2008.

Prof. Atta-Mills won the 2008 elections against the NPP's Nana Akufo-Addo and served until 2012 when he died, 6 months before the end of his first term.

His position was taken by the then Vice President, John Mahama, who was in accordance with the constitution sworn-in hours after the news of Prof. Atta-Mills' death.

John Mahama completed Atta-Mills' tenure and went on to win the 2012 presidential elections, again, against Nana Akufo-Addo.

Mahama's attempt to seek re-election a second term in office was unsuccessful as Nana Akufo-Addo, on his third presidential attempt, secured a resounding election victory of acquiring 53.85% of the total valid votes cast against Mahama's 44.40%.

The 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana that came into effect on January 7, 1993, after it was approved on April 28, 1992 through a national referendum after 92% support.

The constitution declared Ghana to be a unitary republic with sovereignty residing in the Ghanaian people.
The residents of Kpane in the Sagnarigu district of the Northern region have threatened to block the only road that links the district capital (Sagnarigu) to the assemble for neglecting them.

The several kilometer-road links the district capital (Sagnarigu) through Kukuo to Kpane and to Kasalgu and back to the main business city (Tamale)

Portions of the road especially the part linking to the community and several others are in bad shape due to the potholes that look like homes for elephants and Lions on it that causes vehicles

including motorbikes to fall when using it.

But the assembly constructed the road from Sagnarigu up to the District Assembly, cutting off Kpane and many other communities.

This has made using the road just about a hand's length from the district assembly to the community a hectic one as cars and Tricycles continue to fall on it every day.

But the district assembly according to the residents have paid a death year to their several plead to put the road in good shape so that they can also have access to the main business town (Tamale)

"This is not the first time a car is falling here, this is the fourth one in the past 4 months" a resident complained

But always government will promise that it be done soon, when? Until someone or many people die before? he asked

The annoying factor according to the residents is that the district assembly is situated on the land of the community and yet nothing good comes to them.

"The Sagnarigu district capital is on the land of kpane, we own that land, but we don't get anything. Our roads are not good, we have problems in terms of water and many others " he added

The residents who spoke with heavy hearts to Northernnewsgh said they are fed up with the several unfulfilled promises made to them by both present and past governments to get the road constructed.

They claimed the road has been awarded the contract during the NDC era but is yet to be fully constructed.

"The DCE herself was here some weeks ago, and the chief questioned her about the delays in getting the road constructed, but she said she was surprised to hear that. According to her, the road on papers has been fully constructed and tiled" one of them said.

"If on papers the road is being constructed but in reality, it is not, what are you doing as a DCE? he questioned

They said every year, the contractor comes with excavators to level the road with the hope of finishing it but runs away until another year.

The residents, therefore, threatened to block the road at the Sagnarigu end of the road to the assembly, so that nobody can use it till their demands are met.

They said if the district assembly does not respond to their pleads, they will come out to demonstrate against the government especially, the DCE Hon Mariam Mohammed.
A citizen, not a spectator, is the generic portfolio H.E. President Akufo Addo accorded all Ghanaians on 7th January, 2017 with no V8 Landcruiser or fat salary, but a pleasant benefit of freedom to express our opinions.

By virtue of the above portfolio, I have every right to open my wide bucal cavity to communicate my opinion on issues that drives my income tax above social security controbution.

Planting for food and Jobs, a very wise agenda that could end up a mere political gimmick due to gross failure or absence of proper supply chain initiatives. Post-harvests loss for food is rampant within supply chain, and this often falls in the domain of warehouse, warehousing standards and product integrity as part of inventory management.

A collage of pictorial evidence of a planting for food and jobs warehouse I sighted on facebook has ignited my doubts on the seriousness of the stakeholders and custodians of the program. Beautifully mounted billboard which adds absolutely zero value, but with a questionable warehouse and warehousing standard with a tendency to make the warehouse a 5star Callosobruchus maculatus (beetle) "Kempiski".

The collage serves as my better and further particulars. Cereals like every food product have conditions with regards to temperature and humidity under which it should be stored. Yes, Coleoptera like the

Callosobruchus maculatus is a foe to cereal storage, and the antidotes to battle their infestation are good housekeeping, and compliance to temperature and humidity standards as well as regular fumigation among others.

The warehouse in the collage, if truth certifies as one of the warehouses for the planting for food and jobs, then, I am sorry, it fails the test for standards. A brief excogitation and fair perusal of the collage in question, reveals poor ventilation, zero extractor fans, zero beetle traps, zero hygrometer, poor housekeeping, and poorly arrange stocks. If care is not taken, we would plant, harvest, and during storage, everything would come to zero.

Yes, citizen, not a spectator, I have expressed my opinion without an iota of gasconading attitude. I, therefore, expect no schizophrenic paranoid comments or response from the "hero worshipers" of government.

If I deviated in your opinion, do remember, opinions are like noses, but I would gladly welcome a debate on the subject.

I am waiting for the forensic audit report for then Central Medical Stores.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

Students of the University of Ghana have been asked to pay fees for the 2016/2017 academic year as the valid fees for the 2017/2018 academic year several months after Parliament failed to approve new fees it had set for the 2017/2018 academic year.

In a statement dated 6th January, 2018 and signed by the SRC President and Secretary, Mr Daniel Otting Awuah and Janet Maame Serwaa Arkoful Awotwe respectively, the SRC stated:

Students are by this notice informed that the fees paid in the 2016/2017 academic year remain the valid fees for the 2017/2018 academic yearthis is as a result of the stalled deliberations by Parliament on providing a consensus with regards the fee schedule. The University Council in a unanimous decision has therefore ruled that the fees that were paid in the 2016/2017 academic year be maintained for the 2017/2018 academic year.

It further urged students to note that the deficits that may appear on the MIS web are as a result of structural measures by the University to avoid conflictual figures, in the event different resolutions are passed by Parliament.

Brief Background

In July last year, students in tertiary institutions protested against hikes in the fees for the 2017/2018 academic year, culminating in a petition to parliament to review the fees. Parliament directed that there be no increases pending its approval of the new fees. The institutions complied with the directive and students were made to pay fees for the previous year ( the 2016/2017academic year) so that reopening for the 2017/2018 academic year could go on as planned. But Parliament has since not approved the fees of the 2017/2018 academic year even as the second semester is about to begin.

It is worthy of note that the 2016/2017 fees were not approved by Parliament.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

I have followed the Johnson Asiamah episode, off and on, for quite some time now. It is neither unique nor remarkable. We witnessed a similar case at the Ridge Hospital, in Accra, in the wake of the Akufo-Addo election victory and resumption of office. There is a clear pattern with regard to purely political appointments. This is what Dr. Johnson Asiamah, the Second-Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, who recently resigned, and his lawyer, Mr. KwadjogaAdawudu, are not telling the media and the general public. The irony here is that the media is more than replete with well-educated operatives who are capable of telling us the reality of the issue at stake here (See I Was Forced to Resign  Former Bog Second-Deputy Governor Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/6/18).

Like the Ridge Hospital case, in which a Kufuor-appointed Hospital Administrator was summarily fired to make way for a Mahama appointee who had been brought in from Tamale, Mr. Mahamas home region, it is very likely that an NPP appointee had been bumped to make way for Dr. Asiamah. This brutally partisan state of affairs does not make for a good narrative, unless Dr. Asiamah were disingenuously made to seem like a veritable victim of political vendetta. But, in fact, his alleged removal is standard practice. But, of course, having fooled themselves with an obdurate sense of entitlement, this NDC appointee has deviously chosen to portray himself to the media and the general public as a regular civil servant who has risen through the traditionally established promotional rungs, only to be unconscionably savaged by New Patriotic Party operatives.

In the case of the Ridge Hospital Administrator, the latter made the situation seem as if he was being dismissed or terminated. But in reality, the Mahama appointee was merely being transferred back to Tamale, from where he had been brought in to replace a New Patriotic Party appointee who had actually been fired! The fired employee who had held the post prior to the democratic change of government, was simply being returned to his former post at which, we were reliably informed, he had performed creditably. You see, the NDC operatives have falsely and foolishly convinced themselves that they are some superhuman Ghanaian citizens who are well above the laws of the land, and that it is only Ghanaians affiliated with the now-ruling New Patriotic Party for whom the laws were made to exclusively control.

One cannot blame these NDC apparatchiks, since it is very clear that the countrys 1992 Republican Constitution was specially tailored to cater to the whims and caprices, as it were, of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and predatory cronies and associates like former President John Dramani Mahama. Has anybody wondered why Dr. Asiamah has Ms. BawaMotgari, the Mahama cousin and spokeswoman, vigorously flailing about the media and pretending as if Dr. Asiamah were the best government appointee ever to work at the Bank of Ghana? Displaying the credentials of the recently resigned Second-Deputy Bank of Ghanas Governor can only fool people with little or no knowledge about academic and professional credentials. They do not tell us much, besides the fact of the holders having having studied a certain course package at a named institution and being certified for doing the same.

Real achievement happens in ones field of study or discipline of practice and acknowledgment by ones peers. We saw Dr. Kwabena Donkor, the NDCs Member of Parliament for Pru-East, in the Brong-Ahafo Region, a man with a doctorate from a globally renowned and reputable flagship academy sign an energy contract for the entire country, as our Energy Minister, without reading a single line or sentence of what the contract actually meant, in terms of both its short- and long-term financial implications for the country. Dr. Donkor says that he did not read the AMERI-Deal contract because in the words of the fired former Energy Minister, I thought our creditors had already done the necessary due diligence.

Well, Mr. Kwabena Donkor has a doctorate in Business Management and Public Administration. So much for sheepskins.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
The issue of motor riders and their pillion passengers riding without helmet is of serious concern which needs to be addressed amicably to eschew carnage on our roads that claim cardinal lives.

Day in and day out, we hear of accidents that claim lives as a result of riders and their pillions riding without the needed safety gadgets.

What aches my heart is how some of motor riders ride with their babies, sometimes just holding them and at other times sitting behind without any safety gadget safeguarding them.

This is extremely dangerous in every sense because an accident, should it occur will certainly be fatal or the passengers could be maimed for life.

Now, you the reader tell me. Why is it that parents are not recognizing this danger and are putting themselves and their children at risk?

However, am appealing to the police to prevent people from putting their own lives and that of children in jeopardy. On the more serious note, sometimes I also see policemen riding without helmets too. Something needs to be urgently done to save precious lives.

We cannot go on like this. Ghanaians voted for change. This change should not only be about a change in government but reflect in our attitude and behavior for the betterment of this nation and to us all.
Today, January 7 2018, marks the 25th anniversary of Ghanas Fourth Republic. The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) CDD-Ghana joins fellow Ghanaians in marking this historic milestone. We applaud successive administrations and political actors, including the various political parties, and indeed, the entire Ghanaian citizenry for keeping faith with the 1992 Constitution, which ushered in the 4th Republic and has undergirded our democratic governance system and practices in the last quarter of a century.

CDD-Ghana notes with great pride and overall satisfaction the successful conclusion of seven multi-party

presidential and parliamentary elections, producing three electoral turnovers in this Republic. We are also happy

with the prevalence of peace and unity in the country as well as the growing levels of economic and social

development, broadly speaking.

The Center continues to note with dismay, however, that governmental accountability and responsiveness have

remained highly insufficient (despite delivery of considerable voice to citizenry under the 4th Republic); public

corruption remains pervasive; progress of the constitutionally-mandated political, administrative and fiscal

decentralization has stalled; the economy remains characterized by jobless growth; income and spatial inequality

are on the rise in spite of poverty reduction; and the nations two main political parties which have alternated in

power in the 4th Republic have increasingly taken on the features of rival cults (whose primary purpose seemingly

is to win elections, achieve state capture and practice winner-takes-all politics).

We are particularly concerned about the failure on the part of successive governments and majority parties to

address the well-known gaps and deficiencies in the 1992 Constitution such as overconcentration of legal and

constitutional power in hands of the executive branch in general (especially the presidency), and indirectly, the

governing political party.

While we deservingly celebrate our longest running constitutional order since independence, we must also pause

to reflect on the things we must do to consolidate and deepen the gains made possible by the 4th Republican

Constitution. The list is long, but we can start by passing the 17-year old Right to Information Bill and reforming the

public office-holder asset disclosure regime to promote governmental transparency and accountability as well as

curb corruption in the public sector. In the medium to long term, we must amend the law and constitution to

strengthen Parliaments ability to oversight the executive (in order to promote effective checks and balances); inject

meritocratic selection and fiduciary accountability into the governance of the state corporate sector; and allow for

popular election of district mayors to promote local government decentralization and effectiveness. These types of reforms are some of the changes needed for the country to achieve this administrations grand goal of a Ghana

Beyond Aid.

Long Live the 4th Republic

Long Live Ghana!

God bless Ghana!
Reverend Father Benjamin Nii Darko Robertson, the Parish Priest of St. Augustine Anglican Church, Dansoman, has called on Christians to demonstrate Christ-like behaviour in the discharge of their duties to accelerate national progress.

When peace, truthfulness, unity, integrity, discipline, hard work and respect for the rule of law are reflected in the behaviour of Christians, as extolled by Christ in His teachings, Ghana would be a successful nation for other developing countries to emulate, he said.

Rev.Fr. Robertson gave the advice in an interview with the Ghana News Agency during the Church's first Sunday Service of the year.

He condemned poor time management and other negative work practices among public and civil servants and urged them to turn a new leaf.

Rev Fr. Robertson said if Christians acknowledged their doctrine as followers of Jesus Christ, then they must be ready to live just like Him, by showing some positive attributes including respect, peace, obedience, law-abiding, love, humility and sacrifice.

He, therefore, urged Christians to let the lessons of the past year be a guide as they went about their various endeavours in the New Year.

With prayers, songs of praise and dancing, the congregation demonstrated gratitude to God for His divine protection and guidance that had brought them thus far.

They also prayed for the sick, needy, the country and the leadership.
The Great Commission Church International (GCCI) at the end of its 27th General Council Meeting, has elected a new set of leadership to steer its affairs for the next five years.

The officials, who were elected for the various portfolios on the GCCI Ghana National Council, include Reverend Godson Gbloe, Second Vice Chairman in-charge of Finance and Administration; Rev Ben Larry Nayo, Director of Finance; Rev. Charles Akasreku, Director of Ministries; Rev Alexander Obeng Oguamenah, Director of Personnel and Rev Samuel Arthur, Director of Evangelism.

However, the Director for the Church Life slot was keenly contested by Rev. Alex Boakye-Yiadom and Rev. Isaac Nyarko, at the end of which Rev. Boakye-Yiadom won with 106 votes as against 29 for his opponent. The election was supervised by Elder Samuel Doku.

Rev. Nyarko, who conceded defeat, congratulated Rev Boakye-Yiadom and wished him well in all his endeavours.

It must be noted that at the end of nominations, no one had filed for the portfolio of First Vice Chairman in-charge of Missions, hence it would be by appointment.

Following the promulgation of GCCI's new Constitution on 29th July, 2017, Apostle Professor Samuel Asuming-Brempong, the Chairman of GCCI National Council Ghana, had his mandate automatically extended by five years.

Furthermore, under the new Constitution, Apostle Joseph Felix Kwesi Mensah, former Chairman of the ex-while Apostolic Council of GCCI, is now the Chairman of GCCI Executive Council and leader of the Church globally.

The new officers would be inducted into office on Sunday, July 22.

The four-day General Council Meeting, which took place at the Shai Hills in the Dangbeme West District of the Greater Accra Region, on the theme: 'Imitating Christ,' was attended by more than 160 pastors and their spouses and presiding elders of the Church across Ghana.

Apostle Asuming-Brempong in his annual report to the Council, said since the establishment of GCCI in 1991, its five-fold ministry gifts - apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers - had always been encouraged.

'However, from this year (2018) the leadership of the Church is laying more emphasis on how we fully operate these gifts together with other charismatic and operational gifts from the local congregation to our Church programmes and activities at the national level,' he said.

He charged the pastors and congregation of the GCCI to work harder to develop and operate in the five-fold ministry areas.

'This way, we can support and promote the work of the ministry as we advance the Great Commission,' he added.

Apostle Mensah, in his homily, urged Christians to fear God and to hold the teachings of the Bible in high esteem.

He cautioned Christians against criticising the Church because it belongs to Jesus, which he referred to as the 'wife of Jesus.'

He explained that just as no man would accept his wife being unnecessarily criticised, Jesus would not be happy with people who criticised the Church.

He again warned that on judgement day, every deed of mankind would be brought to light and that men would be made to account for every idle word they had ever spoken.

Apostle Mensah tasked the Church to ensure that the Great Commission of Jesus Christ was propagated to all four corners of the globe.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Sunday re-echoed government's commitment to resolving Ghana's democratic and structural challenges to put the country on the path of sustained progress and prosperity.

He said government remained resolute in its goal at fulfilling the hopes and aspirations of Ghanaians, who yearned for improvements in their living standards, security and solidarity.

President Akufo-Addo said this at the Interfaith National Thanksgiving Service at the Independence Square in Accra to mark the Silver Jubilee of the Fourth Republic.

The Anniversary was commemorated on the theme: "25 Years of the Fourth Republic - Celebrating the Goodness of The Lord".

The historic event, held under an atmosphere of unity, brought together the former Presidents of the Fourth Republic; Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, John Agyekum Kufuor, and John Dramani Mahama, as well as Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, the Speaker of Parliament Prof. Mike Ocquaye and Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo.

It also drew members of the Legislature, Judiciary, the Clergy (Christian and Moslem), security services, political parties, identifiable groups, as well as government officials, traditional rulers, and people from all walks of life.

President Akufo-Addo expressed optimism that with a spirit of reconciliation, fairness, integrity and hard work permeating the workings of the country, "the best days of Mother Ghana lie ahead of us."

'We can hope for a brighter future, because we are blessed with enormous wealth and human potential.

"Together, we are laying the platform for the evolution of a new Ghanaian civilisation, which will give true meaning to the foundational values of freedom and justice on which our nation was conceived," he said.

The President said his government had begun to take a deep look at the structure of the Ghanaian economy to transform it from a raw material producing and exporting one to a value added industrialised economy with a modernised agriculture to serve the needs of the country.

'The era of Ghana's industrialisation has dawned, so that we can trade in the global market place, not on the basis of raw materials, but on the basis of things we make, inspired by our sense of enterprise, creativity and innovation.

"It is the most effective way we can generate jobs and wealth for the masses of our people, and join the ranks of the developed and prosperous nations of the world,' he noted.

With Ghana experiencing the longest, uninterrupted period of stable, constitutional governance in its history, President Akufo-Addo said the period "had banished the spectre of instability that disfigured the early years of Ghana's existence, and the benefits are showing."

He said Ghana had witnessed sustained growths in the size of the economy; rising levels of per capita real incomes; systematic expansion of the private sector; and taken strong measures to try to protect her lands, water bodies and environment from the menace of environmental degradation.

However, there was much more to do to get the country on the pedestal it deserves, and his administration would not relent in ensuring that the rule of law, probity and accountability, respect for individual liberties, human rights, and the principles of democratic accountability and social justice were deepened, he said.

President Akufo-Addo commended previous administrations, the Legislature, the Judiciary, government and governance institutions, the security services and the entirety of the Ghanaian people for their role in the success of the Fourth Republic.

Prayers were said for peace, progress and stability of the nation.

GNA
President Nana Akufo-Addo says the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the 4th Republic is to the great credit of the Ghanaians.

He said 25 years ago, Ghanaians resolved to build under God, a united nation, grounded in democratic values and the rule of law, and, largely, have gone a long way towards realising it.

A cross-section of some ministers in the Akufo-Addo government

The President said this on Sunday at the Independence Square, at an interfaith Thanksgiving service held to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the establishment of the 4th Republic.

Leaders of some political parties

The overwhelming vote was 3,408,119 representing 92.59%, in favour, with 272,855 votes against, which is 7.41%.

The 4th Republic was, therefore, declared with an immense popular backing which saw Jerry John Rawlings sworn into office as the 1st President of the 4th Republic. On January 7, 1993.

Former President Kufuor, former First Lady, Nana Konadu and husband, J. J. Rawlings

For this reason, the President Akufo-Addo commended the erstwhile Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), the 1991 Consultative Assembly, the Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ), the pro-democracy organisations, civil society and religious bodies, whose collective efforts and agitations led to the birth of the 4th Republic.

He also paid tribute to Parliament, under the leadership of successive Speakers  Justice D.F. Annan, Peter Ala Adjetey, Ebenezer Sekyi Hughes, Justice Joyce Bamford-Addo, Edward Doe Adjaho, and, currently, Prof. Aaron Mike Oquaye.

He lauded them for growing stronger in stature, and in its contribution to good governance.

A seat for former Presidents

In ensuring that the commitment made 25 years ago to embark on the journey of multiparty democracy resounds strongly, one of the most important actors in the preservation of this has been the Judiciary, he said.

The President continued, today, I pay tribute to their Lordships Philip Archer, I.K. Abban, E.K. Wiredu, George Acquah, Georgina Wood, and, the incumbent, Sophia Akuffo, the Chief Justices of the 4th Republic, who have ensured, and are still ensuring that the Judiciary plays its role as the defender of the rights and liberties of the people, and as an independent arbiter, which aims to inspire confidence in the citizenry.

Acting National Chairman of the NPP, Freddie Blay and former President Mahama

President Akufo-Addo also remembered with gratitude the contribution of the Council of State, under its various leaders, in helping to steer the ship of state to its current state.

He also commended past and current officials in the public service, and to the active and retired members of the security services who have played their part in helping to preserve the security and the stability of Ghana.

This survey cannot be complete without mention of the Electoral Commission (EC), National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), political parties, trades unions, civil society organisations, traditional authorities and religious bodies in the success of the 4th Republic, he added.
The family of the late Managing Editor of the Al-Hajj newspaper, Alhaji Bature Iddrisu, has cautioned against using the demise of their relative to score a cheap political point.

In a press statement after the burial of the popular political commentator, the family through its spokesperson, Amos Blessing Amorse, further condemned people using the situation to launch "unwarranted scathing attacks on former President John Dramani Mahama."

The family were grateful for the contributions of the former President, his brother, Ibrahim Mahama as well as the Mahama family in general from the day the late Alhaji Bature was admitted to the hospital, to the time of his death and its aftermath.

"We believe the Mahama family came to the rescue of our late brother at the time he needed them most and the best way to reciprocate is to appreciate their kind gesture," the statement added.

In direct reaction to those who said Mr Mahama went ahead with a political event when a soldier who has served the party has fallen, the family said, "for the records, the former President was in touch with us while in Techiman, and indeed joined the Muslim community in Techiman Zongo to observe Jannaiza prayers prior to the burial of Alhaji Bature."

Photo: Ibrahim Mahama and Alhassan Suhuyini, at the funeral of late Alhaji Bature.

Below is the full statement

The Iddrisu family is extremely scandalized by the inexorable attempts by some political entrepreneurs to score despicable political points with the sudden death of Alhaji Bature Iddrisu by launching unwarranted scathing attacks on former President John Dramani Mahama.

While we acknowledge the inherent rights of any person or group of persons to criticize the former President, we strongly object to crafty attempts to use the death of our late brother as fertile political grounds to sow seeds of political profiteering.

The contributions of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama; his brother, Mr Ibrahim Mahama and the Mahama family in general, from the day the late Alhaji Bature Iddrisu was admitted at the hospital, to the time of his death and its aftermath, are too great a virtue for the Iddrisu family to gross over. We believe the Mahama family came to the rescue of our late brother at the time he needed them most and the best way to reciprocate is to appreciate their kind gesture.

We don't have the authority of the Mahama family to make public their contributions to Alhaji Bature prior to his death, but if there was any creature on earth who took a special interest in the upkeep of him while on admission at the hospital, it was the Mahama family.

For the records, the former President was in touch with us while in Techiman and indeed joined the Muslim community in Techiman Zongo to observe Jannaiza prayers prior to the burial of Alhaji Bature. A minute of silence was observed during the Unity Walk in Techiman in memory of the fallen Hero.

The former President sent entourage led by Alhaji Collins Dauda and other NDC stalwarts to represent him at the burial ceremony due to his absence as a result of circumstances beyond his control.

It is awfully shocking that persons who never checked up on Alhaji Bature while on his sick bed and never showed up for his burial rites or called to check up on arrangements are the ones demonizing those who singlehandedly stood by him in times of difficulty.

We are by this statement warning any person or group of persons who want to latch onto Alhaji Bature's death to settle political scores to desist from it immediately.

We have lost a national hero, and the best we can do to preserve his legacy and memory is to pray for his soul to rest in peace.

Amos Blessing Amorse

News Editor The aL-hAJJ/Spokesperson for the Iddrisu family
08.01.2018 LISTEN

According to Lolly Daskal(2006), " Nobody likes being criticized. But how you handle it makes all the difference. If you lock up and become defensive, you're likely to waste a lot of time feeling bad--and repeating the same behavior that was a problem to begin with.

But if you can learn to take it in stride, with some genuine reflection on how you can use it as a basis for improvement, you can come to realize that criticism can actually be a gift."

The above should be a lesson to all public and political office holders who think they must defend everything even when the issue is staggeringly ugly to defend. The recent brouhaha surrounding the payment of TV license fees is a classical example where leaders think they alone can think right without any input from subjects.

For sometime now, the Ghana Broad Casting Corporation has been trying to impose this fee/mandatory levy on the ordinary Ghanaian. That has been the agenda of GBC for the past four years or so. GBC might think that it has now achieved its long dream of garnishing mountainous financial muscle through a sort of legal dictatorship or should I call it communist inferior tactics. All the explanation being given as justification for this tax appears to me as "nonsensical"

That approach of using the court to compel the ordinary citizen to pay this license fee without any understanding of the need to pay, is a lazy approach adopted by a lazy state institution that always wants to be spoonfed by the ordinary Ghanaian who is already burdened with almost daily increases in commodity price. In the advent of technological advancement, an important corporation like GBC should be able to find other pragmatic ways of standing the test of time.

If GBC is too lazy to compete with the many media houses that are springing up, the pocket of the ordinary Ghanaian cannot be a realistic salvation. There are many private media houses who do not have the benefit of enjoying government subventions or any form of largesse from central government but are doing extremely well. I can state without any modicum of doubt that the content of GTV for instance is always boring and unattractive. It does not break news, even very important events we consider national events are not always aired live. For these reasons and others, most people do not watch that channel. It is simply uncompetitive.

We are told that there are hundreds of workers in GBC yet its "glaring incompetence." If it is very difficult to break even, they should kindly reduce the number of workers there.

Any better management of the corporation would have been thinking of institutional restructuring as well as redefinition of content so as to stand competently in the competitive global environment. It amazes me that managers of the institution do not really appreciate their own impediments or is it the case that they are being clueless and pretentious?

The reality is that without any institutional reforms, no amount of unjustified imposition of tax/fee can salvage the situation GBC finds itself in. That is the bitter truth.

Also, the imposition of the license fee was not well thought. The explanation being given lacks coherence and consistency. As we speak, GBC is not able to explain to us whether we are paying for the content given to us or just for owning a television set. They are also unable to define what a TV is either than relying on some "outmoded" definition. We now watch television on our smart phones, computers, projectors etc.

The question of what is TV and who owns it remains unanswered yet we are being asked to pay without questions. That is very ridiculous. We won't pay!!!

Let the court sentence all of us because we won't pay without understanding the issues being raised. You can't democratise autocracy in a civilized fully democratic nation, a climate that has given you powers to operate within your mandate as a broadcasting corporation.

We are not unaware that GBC always allow itself to be used as a propaganda machine by government. This situation has always left them in debt but we are not also unaware of the many subventions it has been enjoying. If management is not firm only to allow political bootlicking to ruin the institution into insolvency, it is not the ordinary citizen that will resuscitate it. Let's have competent leadership that can be firm to act within the core mandate of GBC so that it is not used as a propaganda tool by ruling governments.

Until such steps are taken to redeem GBC to be competitive to stand the test of time, we can't pay that obnoxious fee!!

If you force us to pay this ridiculous fee in the face of a government who promised to remove such nuisance taxes, only posterity awaits us.

Denis Andaban

[email protected]
08.01.2018 LISTEN

Konkonbas and Mamprusis have lived in peace and harmony for only God knows how long. There is that mutual respect and understanding between these two tribes which has shaped the relationship between them. Konkonbas are peace-loving, hardworking and intelligent people, traits that even their worse critics will admit to. In Mamprugu for instance, the Nayiri who is the overlord of the kingdom has openly spoken many times of his admiration of Konkonbas, their industry and truthfulness. There are some Mamprusi settlements like Yunyoo where it is impossible to find individuals without Konkonba blood in them because of the inter-ethnic marriages between the Mamprusis and the Konkonbas dwelling in the area.

This explain why many Mamprusis will even refer to people of Yunyoo and other Mamprusi settlements in the Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo district as Konkonbas. In reality, it is the peaceful coexistence and inter-tribal marriages that has broken the Berlin Wall between these two tribes and narrowed their balkanization. A lot of Mamprusis speak the Konkonba dialect and the vice-versa is also true. A Konkonba funeral is never complete without delegations from Mamprusis and the reverse is equally a truism.

Recently, there have been attempts to defile this enviable bond existing between Konkonbas and Mamprusis for personal interest trumpeted in the name of the collective, group or tribal interest. At the forefront championing this sacrilege is Mr. Emmanuel Gulari, who until today was the president of the Konkonba Students Union (Konsu). Mr. Gulari in the course of his tenure as president fanned tribal sentiments and fed untruths to unsuspecting Konkonbas about being neglected and cheated by their nephews-the Mamprusis. That I have the piece of mind to still type this is owed largely to the sagely admonitions of Konkonba chiefs against his quest for blood to be spilled for the capital of the Yunyoo-Nasuan district to be sited in Namongo, the hometown of his benefactors.

This gentleman has used unprintable words on the Vice-President and the Minister of Local Government for failing to manipulate (courtesy Mr. Emmanuel Gularis interview granted to Diamond FM in Tamale) documents to make Namongo the district capital of the newly created Yunyoo-Nasuan district assembly. There are more than enough audio recordings of him calling the Second Gentleman of the Republic and the honorable minister of Local Government and Rural Development names, and disrespecting the offices they occupy; their crime being that they are Mamprusis and coincidentally, Yunyoo, which is currently a sub-district of the Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo assembly has been carved out of the old district to become the Yunyoo-Nasuan district assembly, with Yunyoo as capital. Mr. Gulari, who I believe is enlightened, or at least understands the criteria for the creation of districts knows very well that tribal considerations do not count as a factor but played on it and issued threats of violence and unspeakable mayhem if he wasnt listened to, and Namongo made the capital of the new district. In fact, there were insidious moves to carry out these threats.

Majority of Konkonbas were however not on his side and therefore kicked against violence. During that period, there were gunshots, burning of houses belonging to Mamprusis and interception of a cache of arms allegedly bound for Namongo, the likes of which triggers memories of the notorious Pablo Escobar and all the atrocities he committed. In the interregnum, the people of Yunyoo turned to refugees and slept in the bush for fear of being attacked by Gulari and his people.

Thanks to God, he failed on this score because as stated earlier, Konkonbas are peace-loving and intelligent people. They read between the lines and realized that they could not sacrifice the peace and unity existing between Mamprusis and Konkonbas to fight a proxy war for Gulari who by now they realized was a lackey. The new district assembly, unlike Mr. Gulari want us to believe, is created as part of governments efforts to deepen decentralisation and bring development to the doorsteps of all affected communities and not just the district capital. There was no manipulation at all by anyone to favor any community. What the MLGRD did was in line with the law, standard practices and conventions.

Be it known that this same gentleman nearly kindled a bloody war between his village and their neighbors not long ago in the District Assembly elections. He lost an assembly election and tried to twist the results in his favor after realizing his faith. The margin of his defeat was so huge that it was unfathomable to people of his electoral area why he should declare himself the winner of the elections with frivolous excuses that irregularities had taken place in the polling station of his main contender. But for the timely intervention of a combined army and police team, Gulari would have succeeded in causing a serious war between his village and their neighbors.

He who does not learn from history repeats the mistakes of yesteryears. Today, Mr. Gulari has been unseated as the president of Konsu and he is roping in innocent people and levelling bogus allegations against them. How on earth will anyone with his senses intact accuse the Hon. Hajia Alima Mahama of interfering in elections she has no knowledge of or interest in? She is not a Konkonba and neither is she a student. The only interest she has in Konkonbas is to bring development to those of them in her constituency and by extension the generality of Ghanaians. This explains why it was in her time as MP that the Kanchina bridge was constructed, several schools built in Konkonba communities like Gbangdaa and Gbintiri etc.

The Gbintiri market, one of the biggest markets in the northern region was built out of her initiative and funding. Currently, she has lobbied for the construction of the Nalerigu-Gbintiri road to ease transportation of goods and services in the Konkonba communities which has found expression in the 2018 budget. She is currently concluding modalities to empower the Konkonba youth and women groups in the Nalerigu-Gambaga constituency. Already, some key appointments have been given to Konkonbas since she got elected as MP and subsequently appointed as minister. All these is because of her genuine love for Konkonba people and her keen interest in their development. Per our understanding of Konsu, it is not a political grouping, and honestly, Mr. Gulari is having an exaggerated importance of himself. Hon. Hajia Alima Mahama does not remember his name or ever having an interaction with him. She does not also know any of the other aspirants who contested with, and subsequently defeated him in the elections. This whole thing about the honourable minister bringing Bimobas to vote in Konsu elections in order to unseat him defies elementary logic.

Why Bimobas? Which Bimoba in his or her senses will risk his/her life to do such a thing in a Konkonba town very remote from any Bimoba community, knowing the fragile relationship that exist between Konkonbas and Bimobas? Is Konsu, which under normal circumstances should be the intellectual bank of Konkonbas so bereft of ideas that will put security measures in place to prevent non-Konsu members from voting? How did Hajia Alima suddenly acquire membership for these so-called Bimobas who voted against Mr. Gulari at a time he, Mr Gulari was the president of the union? Could anyone just walk in and vote? If Hajia was interested in using a DCE to interfere in the elections, why didnt she use the East Mamprusi DCE? After all, the congress was held in the East Mamprusi district and not Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo district. Mr Gulari claimed that Hon. Hajia Alima Mahama and Hon. Oscar Liwal brought thousands of people to the congress in cargo trucks (sic), did they bring them in person or the people that came informed him (Gulari) that they (Hon. Alima and Hon. Oscar) brought them?

We are quite convinced that there is a grand plot to rope the Hon. Minister of Local Government and Rural Development into every misfortune that befalls you or that your intentionally create, even if that include getting kicked out from the position that gave you prominence and made you a toast of the media for the bad news you sell to them, which sells faster. The good Lord has been merciful and protective of Hon. Hajia Alima Mahama. Try as you may, her integrity and resolve remain unshaken and intact. She will continue to discharge her constitutional duties without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. That is not however to encourage you to continue in that tangent. You must learn to respect other peoples rights in expression yours. Your agenda to give Hon. Hajia Alima Mahama bad publicity has not worked and will not work for Allah is ever defensive of the innocent.

My friendly advice to Mr. Gulari is that speaking to the media and levelling baseless and unsubstantiated allegations do not make you an intellectual and neither do fanning bigotry make you a patriot. There are big men out there always preying on the vulnerabilities of young men and women like us to front their interest. The value of our education is being able to decipher the ones that are noble and conscionable from the repugnant, divisive and self-centered ones. Your ability to stand up to these leeches and reject their tempting offers is what makes you truly enlightened, patriotic and God-fearing. Our conscience is always the best judge, it will judge all of us sooner or later.

It is a new year, flip a new page Mr. Emmanuel Gulari!!!

Simon Suayam
BURLINGTON  Burlington High School sophomore Grace Geyso has placed second in the state Voice of Democracy Audio-Essay Contest. Geyso had received first place at the district level earlier in the school year.

BHS students enrolled in honors speech participated in the local contest, which is sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The theme was American History: Our Hope for the Future.

Of the 85 Burlington High School applicants, six advanced to the district level. Geyso received first place at the district level and was one of 10 competitors at the state level.

Veteran Michael Egner, a representative from local Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2823, presented an award to Geyso and other awardees at Burlington High School Dec. 20. Ranked winners in the district contest included Geyso, Rosemary Pinter (second), Ryan Follis (third) with Dalton Damon, Gwen Kosirog, and Katherine Schopp receiving honorable mention. Participants also received a certificate.

Egner encouraged students to write and record a three- to five-minute essay that addresses the two facets of the theme history and hope. I encouraged students to personally answer What is my hope for the future? in their essay, he said.

In her essay, Geyso portrays America as a person with an individual history. Then she shared her hope, which is that while America has many divisions today, she wants America to become united as one body not only in crisis, but in all endeavors.

This contest is an important program to VFW, said Egner, who works with a judging team that values quality applicants. This is Egners sixth year judging Voice of Democracy entries for the post and his fourth year working with Matt Nie, the honors speech teacher at Burlington High School.

It has been an invaluable experience for students to not just do an assignment confined to the four walls of a classroom, but make a connection with the VFW and the amazing sacrifice that these veterans have and continue to make for our country, said Nie.

Established in 1947, the Voice of Democracy audio-essay program provides high school students with the opportunity to express themselves through a democratic and patriotic-themed recorded essay. Each year, nearly 40,000 high school students from across the country enter to win the educational scholarships and incentives awarded through the program.
This article is to commemorate the 18th Anniversary of the formation of the Tertiary Students Confederacy of the New Patriotic Party (TESCON). It also coincides with the 25th Anniversary of the birth of the Fourth Republic.

From its humble beginnings as a tertiary students wing of the NPP, TESCON has steadily evolved into a powerful political machinery, occupying an important place within the structure of the NPP. Since its inauguration on January 8, 2000 by the venerable John Agyekum Kufuor, the distinguished former president of the Republic, TESCON has been at the forefront of student and political activism, and grass root mobilisation. It has produced a wealth of talented individuals, whose skills and drive have been aptly utilised by the NPP to build capacity and enhance its stock as a demonstrable political guild, not only in Ghana, but Africa. I must take this opportunity, yet again, to commend the founding members who gave birth to the Confederacy and the Patriots whose Herculean sacrifices, over the years, have nurtured it into the formidable political force it is today.

The 2016 elections, like that of year 2000, was a defining moment, not only for TESCON and the NPP, but Ghanaians at large. Eight years of economic mismanagement, flagrant abuse of power, unbridled corruption and incompetent stewardship was threatening to bring Ghana yet again to the brink of economic and social degradation. Indeed, we were at the abyss and only an undiluted resolve of the citizenry could savage this precipitous decline.

While the task ahead remained enormous, it did not seem to daunt hardworking party members or sympathisers who were disillusioned by the poor level of governance the NDC had bequeathed Ghanaians. Lacing boots and girding up their loins, the presidential candidate of the NPP and his running mate travelled extensively across country, rallying the base and bringing the message of hope. We were to discover on those worthwhile journeys the true state of the country. Despite the song and dance about transforming Ghana, which the NDC claimed was unprecedented, we witnessed unfathomable hardship of many who were wallowing in abject poverty and social exclusion. We also saw at first hand, the deplorable state of our road infrastructure. It seemed the die was cast, win to competently steer the affairs of State or perish into political oblivion. It was a stark reality that confronted us as a party and we were determined to rise to the occasion.

Ghana Beyond Aid

TESCON was to play a critical role in complementing the efforts of the presidential candidate and his campaign team. With determination and incomparable vigilance, from polling stations to collation centres, TESCON members joined fellow patriots to deliver a crushing blow to the faint hopes of an incumbent which had resolved to conduct a divisive and tribalistic campaign, devoid of substance that addressed the legitimate needs and concerns of the Ghanaian people. The resounding electoral victory of the NPP, unprecedented in the history of Ghana, was a clear rejection of the myopic policies of the NDC but more importantly, a decision by the people of Ghana to embrace the new vision that the NPP was seeking the mandate to implement. This vision has been reiterated by President Nana Akufo-Addo on many occasions, but none more fortuitous than during the visit of the President of France to Ghana: A Ghana Beyond Aid!

The battle for electoral victory having been comprehensively won, the newly sworn in government on January 7, 2017, has set about to reverse the decline of our economic competitiveness and swiftly laid an impermeable foundation for the new industrialisation agenda to take off. The challenges have been many and the tasks arduous, but this government would be unrelenting in its pursuit of building a more just, equitable and progressive society, where all have equal opportunities to realise their dreams and fulfil their potentials, irrespective of social status.

Pledges

The implementation of our flagship campaign pledge, the Free Senior High School remains a radical but necessary step toward the socio economic transformation of Ghana. The One District One Factory programme has begun in earnest and gathering steam. Restoration of nurses and teachers allowance, payment of accrued arrears to road contractors and other government suppliers have been done with minimal fiscal implications to the economy. Revamping of the National Health Insurance Scheme and the School Feeding Programme are but a few of the social interventions that government is committed to as part of efforts to broaden the social safety net.

Without a doubt, job creation remains a key priority for the NPP government. Commendable efforts have been made, through the dynamism of the Vice-President, to create a formal and digital economy, evidenced by the National Digital Address System, E-registration of businesses at the Registrar General office and the Paperless Ports Project. While enhancing efficiency and reducing cost of business, the digital economy will undoubtedly create opportunities for new businesses to mushroom, not least e-commerce. It will also help government raise the needed revenue to meet its obligations to the people.

Aside the digital economy, government continues to adequately resource the Youth Employment Authority to perform its duty of developing feasible policies to engage the the youth.

As eloquently stated by the President, it is people who build nations. It is not gold, cocoa, diamonds, timber or oil that is going to build nations. It is Ghanaians, especially the youth of today, who are going to build Ghana. Maximising the demographic dividend requires a new mindset coupled with the creation of an ecosystem that stimulates new thinking, fosters innovation, creativity and unleashes the entrepreneurial spirit of the youth. Government has set up the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP), a flagship initiative, aimed at stimulating investment and providing timely support and advise to budding entrepreneurs.

Contribution from TESCON

TESCON, as a youth platform with dynamic minds can contribute meaningfully to the realisation of this ecosystem. The seeds for growth and jobs have already been sowed. Now is the time for it to be watered by honing skill sets to take advantage of the opportunities that a buoyant economy will present. We must inject the same levels of energy, drive and zeal that characterised our collective efforts in winning the elections into discovering new pathways for success and prosperity. Not everyone would welcome our success as a government and party nor seek the collective interest of Ghanaians with genuine intention. To such, the response must be to strengthen our resolve to deliver on the promises made and to build the capacity of the youth to navigate this brave new world driven by technology and innovation.

As we mark a year into office and also celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fourth Republic, my appeal to TESCON is to remain united, resolute, focused and diligent in helping government implement its laudable initiatives. The accelerated development of Ghana is a shared responsibility of both a purposeful government and a dutiful citizenry. The flame of hope has been lit and all productive forces, including TESCON, must put their shoulders to the wheel in driving the transformation agenda forward.

Being Ghanaian must mean something. It must mean living a life of dignity, self respect, discipline and personal responsibility. It must mean a dedication to our cherished values of fearless honesty, commitment to service and a desire to see each other strive for excellence. Ghana will rise again as the Lord continues to bless us with good leadership and patriotic citizens.

Happy New Year 2018!

The Author, Francis Asenso-Boakye is the founding president of TESCON, and currently Deputy Chief of Staff and Political Assistant to the President.
The Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, will this week meet managers of Happy Sunshine Company over the latters failure to comply with regulations guiding its operations.

This follows a directive from the sector Minister, Professor Frimpong Boateng asking the company to cease operations.

Residents close to the factory have complained of the health implications posed by the activities of the company, and have strongly advocated for its relocation.

The Head of Public Relations at the Ministry of Environment, Nasir Ahmed Yartey, told Citi News that the meeting is expected to yield concrete results that would bring finality to the matter.

The Happy Sunshine Tomato factory, which belongs to some Chinese expatriates, has been at the forefront of major public criticism after series of protest by residents of Korleman City, an estate at Kuntunse in the Ga West Municipality over the negative effect of the companys operations in the area including noise, air, and environmental pollution.

The company was fined GHC15,000 by the EPA in August 2017, for operating illegally, whilst it was also ordered to halt any form of production.

However, the management of the tomato factory violated the order and resumed full production in November.

The residents, who held a meeting with the MCE in a bid to get him to ensure the company's closure and subsequent relocation, accused him of rather shielding the company at the expense of their health.

The EPA on the other hand, appeared adamant after their initial orders were disrespected with the tacit support of the Ga West Municipal Assembly intervened.

This forced the Minister of Environment, Science and Technology, Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, has ordered the closure of a Chinese Tomato paste factory operating unlawfully in the Ga West Municipality of the Greater Accra Region.
THE MARINE, Railways & Ports Headquarters of the Tema Regional Police Command are holding two suspects for allegedly stealing a 20-footer container filled with 666 boxes of alcoholic beverages at Tema.

Kwame Oteng alias Ortega, a 35-year-old driver and Issah Munkaila, 40 years of age, were said to have diverted the consignment meant for a warehouse in Accra, and sold some boxes of the alcoholic beverages to one Hajia Fati, who is currently at large.

Briefing DAILY GUIDE, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Joseph Benefo Darkwah, Tema regional police spokesperson, indicated that on December 11, 2017, Oteng, driver of a truck with registration number GR 1851 Y, and two others were engaged to deliver alcoholic beverages which had been cleared from the Tema Port, to a warehouse at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle in Accra.

According to him, the two other people delivered their consignments at the said destination but Oteng diverted his consignment to a yard being guarded by Issah Munkalia at Community 9, Tema.

ASP Benefo Darkwah continued that the suspects sold some of the stolen goods to one Hajia Fati, adding that Otega went into hiding after selling the goods.

However, on December 31, 2017, the police spokesman said that Oteng was apprehended at his hideout at Techiman in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

He claimed that Oteng led the police to his accomplice  Issah Munkaila  who had kept 25 boxes of the alcoholic beverages in his yard at Community 9.

Four days later, 296 boxes of the stolen items were retrieved from a house at Valco Flats, a suburb of Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region.

ASP Darkwah added that the police later recovered additional 345 boxes from a hideout at Tema Community 2.

Both Oteng and Munkaila had admitted the offence, according to the police spokesman, and they will be processed before court when investigations are completed.
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has apparently been gripped with fear and panic since President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo gave presidential assent to the bill that establishes the Office of the Special Prosecutor.

Anti-corruption bodies have lauded the signing of the bill into law as they believe that it can go a long way to reducing or uprooting corruption in the public sector.

Members of the NDC fear that the alleged corrupt acts of some of them would not be ignored by the special prosecutor.

When it is established, the Office of the Special Prosecutor will be one of the fulfillments of major promises of Nana Akufo-Addo in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

Mahama's Apprehension

Former President John Dramani Mahama, whose administration many alleged corruption scandals rocked, has tasked members of the party to stand behind his former appointees who might be summoned for any corruption trial.

When speaking at the 36th anniversary celebration of the 31st December, 1981 'revolution' in Ho, the Volta Region, Mr. Mahama said, Recently, President Akufo-Addo was threatening members of our administration with prosecution when he visited the Eastern Region and I said yes, we are prepared to accept the probity of our tenure in office.

Having been the disciples of probity and accountability, we must not run away from probity and accountability; we must be prepared to face any prosecution that this government throws to us, but we must do this with commitment and solidarity.

Mr. Mahama expressed further, They will have their day in court and until they have that day in court, it is our duty to solidarize with them to make sure they have the best legal representation to be able to put their case in order; and it is my wish that things will turn out well for them.

The former president charged President Akufo-Addo to also pursue corrupt officials in the current administration saying, Let me point out that the easiest part in the fight against corruption is prosecuting your political opponent. It does not take courage; it does not take bravery to prosecute one's political opponent.

The true test in the fight against corruption is holding your own people accountable when they go wrong We must not pursue post-regime accountability; we must pursue accountability while your regime exists.

Mr Mahama urged members of the opposition party not to let the Office of the Special Prosecutor scare them, despite the threats by some political commentators that the office would jail his appointees.

Addressing a gathering of NDC activists at Techiman in the Brong-Ahafo Region on Saturday as part of his supposed campaign strategy to lead the party again in 2020 dubbed, 'Unity Walk,' Mr Dramani Mahama hinted, We the members of NDC are not scared  whether Special Prosecutor, Attorney General or state attorney, we are not scared.

Anyidoho's Warning

However, Deputy General Secretary of the opposition party, Koku Anyidoho, in reaction to Mr. Mahama's call for solidarity, warned the supporters of the party not to storm the courtrooms to support any officials of the Mahama administration who might be facing prosecution for alleged corruption.

According to him, the relatives and friends of those officials could do that but not the entire party and its supporters. Why should I wake up in the morning and say a particular individual has been sent to court so I must follow him to court? he quizzed.

Of course, such persons have families, friends and loved ones who are free to follow them to court, and, of course, who may want to follow them to court, and nothing stops them, but to mass up as party executives, stop our jobs and follow them to court, no, he added.

U Turn

Mr. Anyidoho, speaking with Accra-based Kasapa FM, said he didn't know any past government appointee under former President Mahama to be corrupt hence, the assertion attributed to him could not be accurate.

He said the party is ready to solidarize with its members in court when the NPP starts witch-hunting them. We as a party will solidarize with our people; we'll not buy into the propaganda of the NPP. The NPP will not use the courts to divert our attention from our reorganization exercise, he averred.

Asiedu Nketia

The General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, indicated that appointees of the Akufo-Addo government must rather be frightened by the coming of the special prosecutor and not members of the NDC.

He said, If there is a group of people who should fear the coming of the special prosecutor, it should be the NPP and not the NDC. Killing ones enemy is not difficult, but having to kill one's relative is. All this while, governments come into power and hound members of the previous administration, but this time around there's going to be a paradigm shift.

It Won't Be Independent

Even though the name of the special prosecutor has not been mentioned yet, members of the NDC have argued that the office could not be independent since the prosecutor would certainly be someone aligned to the NPP.

Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia argued, I want to remind them that if they are going to appoint another NPP lawyer as the independent prosecutor, then you would have wasted the nation's time and resources in making that law.

NPP's Stand

However, Acting Chairman of the governing New Patriotic Party, Freddie Blay, has explained that the Office of the Special Prosecutor would be free from any interference, adding that not even the president would be able to meddle in the affairs of the office.

It will not be subject to any control by anybody  not even the president's office  and that is what the president has decided will happen, he pointed out.

Speaking on the 'Ekosii Sen' programme on Asempa FM in Accra, the acting National Chairman of the party said the government would do everything possible to make the office independent.

Mr. Blay hinted, When the person is appointed, the appointment is supposed to be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny; parliament will agree to it by overwhelming majoritywe want to make it independent just like in other countries. We all have to work towards that to make sure it succeeds.

Bawumia's Confidence

Meanwhile, Vice President Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia has said he is optimistic that the Special Prosecutor Act will be an active instrument in fighting corruption and ensuring the prudent use of state resources.

He noted, The signing of the Special Prosecutor Bill into law is a significant step in the president's determination to fight corruption in the public life of our dear nation. Both past and present public officers will be under the microscope to account for their actions and inactions.
The sages couldnt state it better: You dont throw stones if you live in a glass house. And you dont cut the hand that feeds the mouth. Why would someone do that one may ask. Ironically, not everyone gets it. In fact that wise saying sounds nonsense and gibberish to the ears of a folly.

See, the folly fools around without recourse. Hes like a rogue thats no mercy for his neighbour and even when trouble gawks him in the face he sees nothing until hes hammered by trouble. Unfortunately, when that happens, guess who bears the brunt. Its the innocent and law-abiding citizens that suffer for his reckless act.

This is why someone is ringing the alarm bell. Supposedly, this is what responsible and good citizens must do to stem mayhem and troubles. You dont wait for them to grow horns or escalate.

A concerned Nigerian resident in Accra Ghana has made a passionate appeal via social media to the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) to do something about the influx of Nigerians to Ghana, especially those coming through the Aflao border from neighbouring Togo. The eastern corridor has become a hotbed for nocturnal activities.

I think Ghana Immigration should sit up. Ghana Immigration should get to Aflao and tighten the border. cried the concerned Nigerian. He also alleges that Nigeria women in Ghana are into sex trade and child trafficking. These minors, he claims are used as sex workers in Ghana by their pimps.

Is this guy just snitching his fellow Nigerians?

Or hes giving the Ghanaian authorities a heads up for a potential danger?

On the morning of Friday January 5 2018 the man said he received a-three-minute 48 seconds audio from a brother that purported that trouble was brewing at Ofankor a suburb of Accra in the Greater Accra region. The incident involved two guys --a Ghanaian and Nigerian. According to him the two were arguing over a woman and it appeared the incident ended tragically, as the Ghanaian was stabbed in the process by the Nigerian.

He stabbed the Ghanaian with a bottle or knife and I dont know whether he died or not, he narrated.

There was also an accompanied image of a battered female black-eyed. Shed had her pretty face either knifed razored. But the narrator didnt make any reference to it. She must be the lady at the centre of the furor.

Distraught by the horror he spurt his anger at his fellow Nigerians and described their action as irresponsible. According to him hes invested in Ghana and hes in the country with his family to stay. Therefore he wasnt going to sit aloof for some idiots to invite trouble for innocent and law-abiding Nigerians who are working hard to make life worth living.

And he was very uncharitable with /about his words for his kinsmen.

Im so disgusted and Im tired of this nonsense. Must you be in Ghana? he quizzed. Im a Nigerian... Ive invested hereIve a family, I came here to live. If youre an idiot, if youre cursed then go back to Nigeria and die there. Your country is being held by a political thread.we dont even know whats going to happen. And youre here in Ghana you wont comport yourselves and behave yourself properly like a human being. You come to another mans country youre stabbing him and drugging his woman. Youre breaking bottle. Are you mad?

Does anybody remember the underwear bomber?

On Christmas Day 2009 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (a Nigerian) popularly known as underwear bomber was on a suicide mission courtesy of AL Qaeda and its affiliates. Hed planned to detonate a bomb on a civilian airliner carrying 289 passengers en-route to the United States. Umars father a successful banker I learned had warned the US Embassy in Nigeria that his son was sup to no good and shouldnt be given a visa to travel. However, the embassy ignored the warning and the African brat kid set forth until some Dutch brave men onboard the airplane managed to foil his wicked plot.

Are Nigerians resident in Ghana pushing their host to the wall?

Maybe Ghanaians themselves havent realised that. Maybe they still have enough of their well-known patience and tolerance saved at the bank. Maybe the cases of abuse, harassment and knifing arent widespread. Or maybe just maybe the host nation wants Nigerians themselves to tell their own story so that when the untoward erupts tomorrow (God forbid) the blame would go squarely to them.

Regardless, this isnt an issue that must be swept under the rugs. Proactive measures must be rolled out immediately. I know The BNI is on top of that but they say a stitch in time saves nine. The director of immigration and his able top-ranking officers and men/women should treat this as an issue of significance.

I think the concerned Nigerian has said it eloquently, this wanton attacks by Nigerians, if not controlled has the potential to cause or spark xenophobic attacks across Ghana. Lets not push Ghanaians to the wall. Fellow Nigerians were pushing Ghanaians too much to the wall. I hope we can handle it when it bounces on us, he warned.

Whats ECOWAS role in this?

ECOWAS is a huge and fascinating region in the African continent. Its made up of 15 countries of which Ghana has been a member since its formation in May 28 1975 in Lagos Nigeria. From its ancient coastal cities to prehistoric monuments, sights and sounds in some of its landlocked countries, theres always so much to see and do while on a visit to any part in the community.

Therefore in recognition of the utmost importance of movement of people both within and outside the region, the community signed a Protocol on Free Movement, Right of Residence and Establishment which has recorded some significant achievements as ECOWAS citizens continue to travel without visas within the region.

There are travel documents that are issued by the 15-member states immigration and consular government departments. However, there are some bottlenecks despite the legal framework that was put in place over 30 years ago

Per the current status the ECOWAS Commission revised and developed comprehensive and strategic provisions as inputs into the revision of the protocol on free movement. That specifically looked into the development of columns for the monitoring report by member states, provision for refugees and asylum seekers, establishment of a committee of eminent persons on free movement and redefinition of the concept of the ECOWAS citizen.

And I think thats where we find ourselves now whos coming in and going where? Border patrols must be keen and rapid since we may not have full proof records of ECOWAS citizens visiting from sister nations. I think member states must be privy one's criminal record .who is travelling as what -- a tourist, an entrepreneur or businessman, a student etc..?

That said I now understand why ECOWAS citizens have some limitations to their right as enshrined in the free movement of Protocol. That perhaps suggests that the Community doesnt have the teeth or resources to police its permeable borders. May I play the Devils Advocate here: Does ECOWAS have the resources to deal with its internal problems and can it respond rapidly if theres regional problem?
Of course, to persistently write and highlight the injustices in the country, which some observers would bizarrely perceive as a trivial issue, is to be regarded as a political extremist, who is seeking to cause disaffection, but we must be true to the faith, uphold and defend the good name of our beloved Ghana.

In fact, I had a glint of suspicion on my mind after listening to Ex-President Mahamas speech at the NDCs unity health walk at Techiman, where he broached vehemently that he and Lordina are not owners of DKM, and that any attempt to investigate them will hit the wall.

Former President Mahama stated: thankfully, they are now in power and I will want them to prosecute me and the first lady if it is true the DKM company belonged to us (yen.com.gh).

It would appear that the Mahamas are voluntarily putting themselves forward for interrogation by the Special Prosecutor. In any case, I am pretty sure Mrs Mahama is not immune from possible prosecution, unlike Mr Mahama, who per Ghanas 1992 Constitution is covered by the irrational indemnity clause.

All the same, let Mr Mahama be rest assured that his wish will definitely come to pass. Surely, every suspect will have his/her day at the Special Prosecutors quarters.

Well, if not for the insertion of the unconscionable indemnity clause in Ghanas 1992 Constitution, I, for one, would have preferred Ex-President Mahama to face the Special Prosecutor and answer questions about the STX housing deal, Brazilian aircrafts and the Armajaro scandal.

If we take a stroll down memory lane, somewhere in October 2010, the British media brought up sensational reports about how the then Vice President John Dramani Mahama, was lobbied by a British Cabinet Minister to get a reprieve for the ban imposed on Armajaro Holdings, one of the cocoa buying companies who were found guilty for smuggling the commodity out of Ghana.

Armajaro Company was banned together with a few other companies, when the award winning investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas exposed the smuggling of uncountable bags of cocoa into neighbouring Cote dIvoire.

Shockingly, however, the British media reported that subsequent to the meeting between the then Vice President John Dramani Mahama and the British Cabinet Minister, Armajaro Company was given a needless reprieve and then started its operations.

Besides, I would have demanded answers from Ex-President Mahamas dreadful handling of the STX Housing deal which was supposed to provide affordable housing to the security agencies.

But in spite of the fact that the deal did not materialise, the then Vice President Mahama, is alleged to have given us a bill in excess of $200 million.

Last but not least, I would have lodged complaint with the Special Prosecutor to look into the Brazilian aircraft deal if not the ridiculous indemnity clause.

It would be recalled that during his State of the Nation Address on 19th February 2009, the late President Mills informed the Parliament that his government was looking into the decision to acquire two executive Presidential jets.

However, the late President Mills was somehow ambivalent over the acquisition of the aircrafts and thus observed: "Ghana simply cannot afford the expenditure at this time and we certainly do not need two Presidential Jets" (thestatesmanonline.com, 16/06/2016).

Astonishingly, however, whilst the late Mills was joyfully delivering his euphonious state of the nation address in the parliament, the Vice President John Mahama, who also happened to be the chairman of the Armed Forces Council, was blissfully entertaining delegations from Brazil and busily negotiating the acquisition of five jets, including the most expensive hangar without the knowledge of the late President Mills.

Unsurprisingly, the late President Mills became suspicious of the whole deal and decided to put a committee together to review the deal, according to Mr Martin Amidu, the former Attorney General under President Mills.

In the wisdom of the framers of Ghanas 1992 Constitution, the insertion of the controversial indemnity clause was to let the sleeping dogs lie and move on with our lives.

But despite the utter public outcry over the indemnity clause, Professor Albert K. Fiadjoe, the Chairman of the Constitution Review Commission (CRC) insisted that the removal of the controversial clause from the 1992 Constitution would lead to anarchy in the country.

It means that all governments since 1966 are illegal, that we must immediately handover the reigns of government to the Convention Peoples Party, we will criminalize all those who have participated in governments since the overthrow of the first republic and would also bring unnecessary interruptions in national affairs.

The removal of the indemnities could adversely affect the democratic dispensation because it would give the negative impression that the country is reneging on a settlement that it has previously accepted.

This could seriously undermine stability in the country (Source: graphic.com.gh, 2012).

In as much as the CRCs reasons for the retention of the indemnity clause may be valid, there is no justification for corrupt public officials to keep all the alleged stolen monies.

In contrast to CRCs disposition, it will, however, remain unfair, unconscionable and incommodious not to amend the unpopular indemnity clause to allow us to retrieve any possible stolen funds.

To me, Ghanas constitution has to be reviewed further and the irrational clauses such as the indemnity clause are either amended or expunged accordingly.

How on earth can individuals commit unpardonable crimes (gargantuan corruptions) against the state and get away with their misdeeds?

And more so the traditional exemption of heads of state from prosecution despite the evidence of a case to answer is wrong.

How serious are we as a nation when we can only descend heavily on goat, cassava and plantain thieves and let go hard criminals who persistently dip their hands into the national coffers as if there is no tomorrow?

Elsewhere, though, both past and incumbent heads of state may face the laws without any recourse to their status.

Take, for example, in recent times, the controversial South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, found herself in a wide-ranging corruption and cronyism scandal, which culminated in her removal from office in March 2017.

And more recently, former Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, who has been cited as the most famous president in Brazils contemporary history, has been sentenced to nine years and six months in jail after being found guilty on corruption and money-laundering charges (Source: guardian.co.uk, 12/07/2017).

Surely, we could do better. So let us do so. Let us amend or expunge the irrational laws and replace them with innovative and expedient laws.

Well, I must confess I do not for a minute, envy the incoming Special Prosecutor, whose desk is already occupied with a tall list of alleged bribery and corruption cases.

Verily, whoever secures that prestigious job may have to work assiduously and assertively so as to circumscribe the almost insurmountable battle against the cancerous sleazes and corruption that have slackened our development so far.

K. Badu, UK.
(Accra)  Ghanaians who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) suffer widespread discrimination and abuse both in public and in family settings, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. While some Ghanaian officials have publicly called for an end to violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the government has yet to repeal a colonial-era law that criminalizes same-sex activity.

The 72-page report, No Choice but to Deny Who I Am: Violence and Discrimination against LGBT People in Ghana, shows how retention of section 104(1)(b) of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 prohibiting and punishing unnatural carnal knowledge, and failure to actively address violence and discrimination, relegate LGBT Ghanaians to effective second-class citizenship. Police officials and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) have taken some steps to protect LGBT people. But they are still frequent victims of physical violence and psychological abuse, extortion, and discrimination in many aspects of their daily life.



Having a law on the books that criminalizes adult consensual same-sex conduct contributes to a climate in which LGBT people are frequently victims of violence and discrimination, said Wendy Isaack, LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. Homophobic statements by local and national government officials, traditional elders, and senior religious leaders foment discrimination and in some cases, incite violence.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 114 LGBT people in Accra, Tamale, Kumasi, and Cape Coast in December 2016 and February 2017. Human Rights Watch also interviewed three representatives of human rights organizations based in Ghana, a CHRAJ complaints officer, the assistant police commissioner, and three diplomats in Accra.

Many of those interviewed said that the law contributes to a climate in which violence and discrimination against LGBT people is common. The provision is rarely, if ever, used to prosecute people, and unlike several of its neighbors, Ghana has not taken steps in recent years to stiffen penalties against consensual same-sex conduct or to expressly criminalize sexual relations between women.

The government should recognize that we are human beings, with dignity, not treat us as outcasts in our own society, said a 40-year old lesbian from Cape Coast. We want to be free, so we can stand tall in public and not deal with obstacles and harassment daily  this will make it easier for us to get an education, learn a trade, get jobs and be useful and productive Ghanaians.

The Ghana Police Service has at times responded appropriately to abuses against LGBT people, for example in cases of false accusation and blackmail of gay men in Tamale. CHRAJ has an online system to register allegations of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and has processed 36 cases.

But in February 2017, Mike Ocquaye, the parliament speaker, referred to homosexuality as an abomination and called for stricter laws against same-sex conduct. In July, during a public discussion about prospects for abolishing the death penalty, he equated homosexuality with bestiality. His comments have heightened tensions for LGBT people and contributed to an increase in calls by some opinion leaders, including other members of parliament, to further criminalize same-sex activity.

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, President Nana Akufo-Addo made rather conciliatory remarks. When asked why the law remained on the books, he said he did not believe a sufficiently strong coalition has emerged which is having that impact on public opinion that will say change it  lets then have new paradigm in Ghana.

Dozens of LGBT people have been attacked by mobs or by members of their own families, Human Rights Watch found. In August 2015, in Nima, a town in the Accra region, members of Safety Empire, a vigilante group, brutally assaulted a young man they suspected was gay. In May 2016, in a village outside Kumasi in the Ashanti region, the mother of a young woman organized a mob to beat up her daughter and another woman because she suspected they were lesbians and in a same-sex relationship. The two young women were forced to flee the village.

A young lesbian woman at an LGBT community center in Accra, Ghana.  2017 Human Rights Watch

Lesbians, bisexual women and transgender men are frequently victims of family violence, Human Rights Watch found. Lesbians described being threatened, beaten, and driven from their homes after family members learned of their sexual orientation. One woman said that when her family heard that she was associating with LGBT people, they chased her out of the house with a machete. She has not been able to go back home to visit her 2-year old daughter. LGBT peoples fear that the law could be used against them, combined with social stigma, serves as a barrier to seeking justice, Human Rights Watch found.

The law is inconsistent with basic tenets of the Ghanaian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law, respect for human dignity and the right to privacy. The law also violates several human rights treaties that Ghana has ratified. In April 2014, the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights adopted its groundbreaking resolution 275, calling on African governments to prevent and punish all forms of violence targeting people on the basis of their real and imputed sexual orientation or gender identity.

The government of Ghana should repeal the specific provision in the Criminal Offences Act that criminalizes unnatural carnal knowledge and act swiftly to protect LGBT people from all forms of discrimination, intimidation and violence based on their real or imputed sexual orientation and gender identity.

Ghanaian authorities should also engage in a constructive dialogue with the LGBT population to better understand its needs  with a particular focus on addressing the intersecting forms of discrimination that affect lesbian and bisexual women  and ensure that the necessary legislative and policy measures are taken to ensure their safety, dignity, and equality.

LGBT Ghanaians should have the same protection from the government as everyone else, Isaack said. And the government should work to address the stigma that subjects people to violence in their own homes, the place where they should feel safest.

No Choice but to Deny Who I Am: Violence and Discrimination against LGBT People in Ghana https://www.hrw.org/node/312882

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Ghana, please visit: https://www.hrw.org/africa/ghana
Five armed robbers were arrested yesterday, 7th January 2018 by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana police at the Upper East regional capital, Bolgatanga.

Information reaching ahotoronline.com indicates that these robbers had three foreign pistols, one short gun and ammunitions were retrieved from them. They are to be transferred to the Prampram police station for further investigation.

History

On 20th November 2017, at 1:00 am, 5 armed robbers stormed an Orphanage home at the New Ningo and succeeded in taking away an unspecified amount of foreign and local currencies, six mobile phones and succeeded in brutalizing them.

A report was made to Prampram Police and thorough investigations started. These robbers were said to be at Bolgatanga and the regional CID was notified.

Below are pictures of the robbers
The Tesano Police have apprehended a 42 year old Nigerien for attempting to defraud a businessman of GH40,000 under the pretext of selling him oil cement.

Suspect Seidu Maiga was arrested at Santa Maria when he was in the process of collecting the money.

ASP Efia Tenge, the Accra Regional Police Public Relations Officer, said the victim who had been defrauded before and the matter pending in court, received a call from four unidentified persons that they have oil cements for sale.

They told the victim that if he could part with GH40,000 they would give him ten sachets of the said oil cement products which he can also retail.

The victim became suspicious and feigned interest in the deal.

He later reported the matter to the police and went further to arrange to meet the suspects.

On January 4, 2018, suspects agreed to meet victim at Santa Maria with the items and to collect the money.

The police also went there to lay ambush at the said location when suspect Maiga arrived with the items.

In an attempt to collect the money from the victim, the police accosted him.

When the items were opened in his presence, it contained sand mixed with cement.

The items which were parked in a carton were brought to the station together with the suspect.

The police believed the suspect and his cohorts may have used the same modus operandi to defraud other unsuspecting victims and is therefore calling on such persons to report at the station.

She said suspect is yet to mention the names of his accomplices.

The matter is still under investigation.
Wife of the Lebanese national accused of raping his 19-year-Old "house help" broke down in tears at an Accra High Court after a hearing was adjourned with her husband still on remand.

The court was unable to hear bail application of Hadad Rabih due to the absence of State Attorneys handling the case.

The suspect, Hadad Rabih, has since December been in the custody of the police with his lawyers attempting to make an application for bail.

The court was forced to adjourn after former Attorney General Marietta Brew Appiah Oppong who is watching brief for the House Help, told the court she had been informed the Attorney handling the case was unwell.

This did not sit well with the visibly unhappy wife of the accused who started shedding tears in open court and could be heard saying

"So if she is unwell tomorrow too, the same thing will happen ", revealing her displeasure at the extended remand time for her husband.

Lead Counsel for the Lebanese Ralph Opoku Adusei registered his displeasure at the turn of events.

He argued his client under the law was entitled to bail and that the application could be heard with or without the presence of the state attorney.

He added that presence of the former A-G was enough representation to enable the case to proceed.

Lawyer Adusei stated "they have been evicted from their home and thrown to the street, the one who needs to provide for them is being kept in custody. This is case where the charge doesn't even support the facts yet they are keeping him in custody ".

Justice Justin Kofi Dorgu adjourned hearing to January 9 for the application for bail to be moved. The suspect is in the custody by an Accra Central District Court.

A 39-year-old Lebanese, arrested on December 3, 2017 after a complaint had been lodged at the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service and the Airport Police.

The alleged sexual assault happened at his Airport Hills residence in Accra, while his wife was away.

He is said to have consistently harassed the house help (name withheld) and insisted on having sex with her.

He, however, purportedly managed to forcibly have sex with her on November 30, 2017. The victim reportedly confided in her co-worker, but both initially kept the matter to themselves for fear of that they might lose their jobs.

Rabih Haddad was dragged before the court for rape contrary to Section 97 of the Criminal Offences Act 29/60. His plea of not guilty was not taken.
RACINE  Racine-area employers are viewing the incoming Foxconn Technology Groups manufacturing campus as an opportunity for their own worker needs.

The Taiwanese electronics company plans to build a liquid crystal display panel plant in the Village of Mount Pleasant, where 13,000 new jobs will net the company $1.5 billion in tax credits. The deal has raised concerns around the state about who will fill those positions, given the workforce shortage in Wisconsin. But representatives of Racine businesses say even though Foxconn could create competition for employees, it views the development as positive for the area.

InSinkErator President Chad Severson said that one of the hiring hurdles in manufacturing in the U.S. is the lack of awareness of opportunities in the field.

Sometimes the skilled trades dont occur as an option right away for folks, he said. Its a real educational issue that we have as a country, and I think the Racine area is no different in that regard.

As of Sunday, InSinkErator had 25 open positions on its website at its Racine location, 4700 21st St., many of which require advanced manufacturing skills. Severson said Foxconn may be a valuable partner in drawing more qualified applicants to the area for those jobs.

Im optimistic that well get the word out that southeast Wisconsin is a great place for a career, and I think we can get that word out together, he said. As the demand for skilled trades increases, theres great careers and incomes to be earned and getting that message out is what we need to do.

Brian French, CNH Industrials vice president for human resources in the NAFTA region, said he thinks the region will benefit from Foxconn as an employer, because it could be a magnet for future employees whom his company could hire. Foxconn employees may also move to the area with spouses and other family members who could become CNHs employees.

CNH has operations in Racine and Mount Pleasant.

I think it will be good for the employers, especially those that react well and make sure they provide a compelling reason for potential employees to come to you, he said.

At Modine, Human Resources Vice President Brian Agen said he sees Foxconns plans as a boon for the community. The new development will help the community thrive, he said, which gives his company something to hype to potential hires.

Still, Agen said, he expects Foxconn to disrupt the labor market. He said Modine has not historically had a high turnover rate, but Foxconn may add competition for new employees.

Its going to be disruptive, no doubt, he said. Its going to push companies to do the best they can to attract and retain good people. Thats a good thing for the marketplace.

Modine, headquartered at 1500 DeKoven Ave., will continue its focus on offering a company culture employees enjoy, he said, and it may expand its searches for new employees further than Wisconsin and the Midwest.

The tactic is similar to the one Gov. Scott Walker announced in November to bring young workers to Wisconsin. He asked the Legislature for $6.8 million for a campaign to market Wisconsin outside the state to address workforce needs.

In a statement to The Journal Times, Department of Workforce Development Secretary Ray Allen said the state needs institutions to work together with employers to address workforce needs.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has unprecedented alignment between workforce, economic development and educational systems, and a wealth of potential sources to ensure a robust talent pipeline into the future, he stated.

What keeps you here

Mayor Cory Mason told The Journal Times Editorial Board in a December interview that he doesnt expect all of the jobs that open because of Foxconn to go to people who live in the city or county of Racine. The community needs to market itself so that those out-of-towners want to relocate to the area.

The question becomes how do you make Racine an attractive place for people to want to come and live? he said. Its not what brings you here. Its what keeps you here.

Mason said, however, he expects some of Foxconns employees to be people who work at existing businesses in the Racine area. The community needs to prepare for that possibility, he said, to ensure those businesses can maintain a workforce.

The idea is that its a growing pie for everybody, he said. We dont want to hurt incumbent businesses that have been here for decades, in some cases more than a century, by this opportunity.

Thats a concern for employers such as Torben Christensen, the president and chief executive officer of Caledonia-based Wiscon Products. Christensen said he is personally excited about the impact he expects Foxconn to have on the area, but has concerns about what it will mean for staffing his business.

Racine County is in the process of implementing a new revolving loan fund through Racine County Economic Development Corporation for businesses that will be affected by Foxconn coming to the county, for better or for worse.

One of the applicable uses of the loan funds would be to offset the cost of raising wages or providing additional training to current employees. But Kate Walker, Gateway Technical Colleges director of operations for business and workforce solutions, said that a big driver behind the formation of the loan was businesses wanting to invest in automation.

Everyone is thinking about how do they develop plans for automation, she said. Its going to be a way for companies to increase their capacity, productivity and, ultimately, their modernization will make them more competitive.

Christensen said his company is emphasizing automation. Wiscon Products also wants to make leaving for a Foxonn job less attractive, which will include training and and growth opportunities.

At the end of the day, this is a good thing, he said. Its not going to be easy, certainly, not for business owners  we have to embrace it. This is a huge benefit to our area, and it could be a big boom to our business if we do it correctly.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

The payment of TV (Television) Licence is a worldwide form of taxation, nations charge on their citizens, to sustain a national broadcaster. This TV Licence is actually a charge on all citizens for the provision and control of information in the national interest. It aim at allowing the national broadcaster to play a critical role in national development and security.

The TV license therefore aim at removing the direct control of the national information from the politicians, to an independent broadcaster, so the best interest of the nation will be first before none. By relieving the national Broadcaster of petty political interest and interference, at the expense of national goal, the independence of the national information provider put the interest of the citizens first. The approach ensures objective reporting, forwarding looking agenda and nationalistic vision in its orientation. As the mission of all national broadcaster state to; educate, entertain and inform, the Ghana national broadcaster is not an exception.

In achieving these noble ideals, the best approach then became making the ultimate beneficiary of the best result out of decent broadcasting, to pay for the services of thr national broadcaster which became the citizen, through direct taxation. This then make the broadcaster to be financially independent and accountable to the citizen by its service provisions. In fact, the national Broadcaster is not expected to raise revenue from any other sources than from the citizens' TV licence fee. This citizen is in turn, expected to pay by the quality of his development and sense of security.

It's sad no one like paying for TV licence anywhere in the world but, the challenge of generating revenue from TV licence fee, is worse in underdeveloped countries than the developed ones. In fact the development of those in the developed countries explains why they pay TV licence fee, as the service provision is evidenced by the people's level of security and development. This as well, explain why those of the underdeveloped countries, to whom development has been a myth than reality, find it difficult to pay TV licence fee. Why pay for security in an underdeveloped society where death stire at one every seconds?

Ghanaians in their millions are defying the call on them to pay TV licence to the national Broadcaster, as demanded by law. The law on the payment of TV licence fee is not new to Ghanaians. The law has been in place for some time, as it does in almost every one of the 15 member states of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States).

Since the payment of TV licence fee is a form of tax by the state to levy specified amount on citizens for owning and using TV set, the payment of the tax has nothing to do with whether a citizen who own the set, watches the state TV programs or not. It's purely about taxing the citizens to pay for the national information service because of the critical role of information control to national security and development. One is then force to ask for why citizens of Ghanaians have problem with paying for the national security and development which is part of a citizen patriotic duty?

The answer then become very clear when one carefully listen to the reasons for why the Ghanaian is questioning the payment of service the national Broadcaster is providing. The Ghanaian is actually questioning the benefit of the national Broadcaster's service, in the payees life. I fact, the Ghanaian is questioning the law itself, by questioning the manner by which the employees of the law are playing their roles and using the law as a cash cow. In a democratic environment, this dictatorial exploitation, is a legitimate concern.

Prior to the introduction of VAT (Value Add d Tax) in the taxation system of Ghana, personal income tax and export of national resources, form the main budget of Ghana. The domestic industrial base was so small and formal employment was not tat high. Thus, the national Broadcaster is catered for from the national annual budget with the hope that its role will evolve the Ghanaian into a more productive being. The introduction of VAT was necessitated by the need to make up for the shortages in national revenue, to meet up with all national commitments, when demand on state expenditure was gaining mumentuim over revenue. So as salaries and cost of running the state grew, the budget become over stretched, calling for other sources of revenue, as our national income fall short of expenditure.

The national Broadcasting service then become a challenge as budget allocation to it shrink. The broadcaster then started to struggle with its meagre in meeting up with its critical responsibilities of national security and development. This challenge even became worse with political instability, as cronyism, nepotism and ethnocentrism became rife in the affairs of the national broadcaster. The transition from our state national broadcaster's era of monopoly, to an era of deregulation of bradcasting in Ghana, also came with its own challenge. The big fish is no more alone in the pond.

These changes in Ghana, coupled with the increasing cost and competition in the media, gave the national Broadcaster no any other choice than to resort to the 1960s law on revenue. The TV licence law was activated, to keep up with its mandate and national responsibilities.

In fact the docile national broadcaster did strive to redeem its years of damaged image to no avail, in wooing back the Ghanaian populace. What the national Broadcaster did not realise is, its own long misplaced priorities has failed the Ghanaian, enough to make the ordinary person have any confidence in the broadcaster. The citizen has lost total confidence in the GBC as an active partner in national security and development. There was no doubt the national Broadcaster lost the clearer understanding of its role in the life of the Ghanaian.

What has been happening is, the national broadcaster is pretending to be serving the devil, without falling on the Ghanaian for any TV licence fee, while the Ghanaian who is happy not to be the one directly paying for the pretence of the national broadcaster, seem to play the unconcerned observer. Like a child in a public school classroom whose teacher is not doing his work, the Ghanaian enjoy being left alone to face his pathetic fate.

Informations we said, is the most critical factor in the development of a citizen. Thus, the kind of information citizen consume define the focus of what they invest their energies on. Information defines a people's culture. Information shed clearer light on a people's sense of their history, explain the state's laws to its people, uncover the genuine politicians, strengthen the institutions and the define the traditions that best serve the national interest. Information. clear all ambiguities around the five core elements of a people's culture. It shape how a people must understand their challenge and how to solve it. So the poorer the information a people gets on a challenge, the worse the end up trying to solve it.

The heap of unresolve challenges facing the Ghanaian today, says a lot about the kind of national broadcaster we have. If today, we have millions of Ghanaians poorly inform and therefore still undeveloped enough to be capable of producing their basic modern manufactured needs, then the work the national Broadcaster has done over the years, is unhelpful.

The average Ghanaian today is misinform by the national broadcaster into understanding his crude indigenous past as the most important thing in his life, when actually the broadcaster itself need modern imported items for broadcasting information, the poorly educated Ghanaians are incapable of producing. How consistent is this? The national broadcaster disguising under misunderstood version of culture and tradition, engaged the minds of Ghanaians on information about irrelevant items that have no bearing on the modern day needs of the Ghanaian.

The worse is, the Ghanaian national Broadcaster has degenetated to a state of inviting fake witch doctors, quark religious related practioners and what have you, in the name of tradition to mislead Ghanaians. Our national broadcaster removed itself from the responsibility of ensuring genuine information content, and left the vulnerable citizens to fish out the right and wrong content.

Our national Broadcaster become a medium of marketing fake medications, with all sorts of questionable claims, to mislead Ghanaians into believing and consuming dangerious items. One even question whether GBC is now own by religious and ethnotribal bodies, when the state of Ghana is suppose to be more of a secular state, as possible.

Hardly anyone in Ghana, who is not a lier, thanks to our GBC. Children in Ghana grow watching GBC feeding the entire population with all sorts of lies, in all forms imaginable. Our national broadcaster has has reach the peak of throwing trust to the dogs, as anarchy reigns amidst free for all lies. GBC even invite public sector worker, including highly place state security personnel and politicians, to misinform Ghanaians. Again this is done, without the authority playing the role of ensuring right thought provoking questions in safeguard the concerns of the TV licence fee, are fully exhausted.

In fact millions of Ghanaians like my humble self, rather have their families to watch 1960 Sesmi Street, than waste time watching or listening to the programs of our national broadcaster.

So instead of being a blessing that develop the Ghanaian in every field of life, the national Broadcaster is ridden with all forms of infectious bureaucracy to confuse and underdevelop the Ghanaian. The national Broadcaster is sadly unaware of how much damage it has done to the Ghanaian and here we are being ask to pay for our psychological nemies?

Yes, we have no doubt we need a national Broadcaster, regardless to the number of private broadcasters that now exist in our country. The question is, must the Ghanaian continue paying for a national Broadcaster that is confusing and underdeveloping the Ghanaian? Of course, No! Then how do we move from here, as Ghanaians are not seeing the positives of the national broadcaster in their lives?

In proceeding from here, it's important to point out that the rebellious stance of the Ghanaian is not just to the national Broadcaster but to all our state services by law, whose role are not reflective of the quality of life of the Ghanaian. All the citizens are saying is, they are tired of paying public sector workers for doing nothing. We are tired for paying people to develop us into those capable of living as masters of our destiny, and all we get for paying is, daily increase in our sense of insecurity.

We are now between the devil and the deep sea. We cannot afford to exist without our national Broadcaster, as a critical part of our national development and security. We are however too poor to be paying fraudulent cash cow who are pretending to be empowering us into productive people.

We are therefore at a cross road of either paying for business as usual, or standing up to device a mechanism fit for progressive people.

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) was once right in the same soup we are today, but has now moved on. It will therefore be helpful to get the honest brains to study the BBC approach, to wriggle us out of this embraglow. It is only by this effort that the frustrated Ghanaians can recandle his trust in the National Broadcaster.

Kofi Ali Abdul-Yekin

Chairman ECRA

(ECOWAS Citizens Right Advocates)

[email protected], 07737224787
The National Secretariat of the Graduate Students Association of Ghana (GRASAG) wishes to express its dissatisfaction on the turn of events at the Scholarships Secretariat in relation to the Graduate Thesis and Bursary Grant for the 2016/2017 academic year.

We are reliably informed by the Secretariat that all beneficiary institutions should collate bank account details of recommended applicants to the Secretariat for direct payment of the Thesis and Bursary Grants to be effected. Though the new mode of payment is ideal, we strongly believe it will only further delay the monies already in arrears. This is not the right time for this to and fro movement of the 2016/2017 bursary and thesis grant.

We want to put it on record that we, GRASAG, as a major stakeholder was not consulted before the sudden change in mode of payment; which we believe is not congenial to the graduate student, at this material moment.

The National Executive Committee (NEC) on several occasions met with the Registrar and the entire management team of the Scholarships Secretariat and this mode of payment never came up in our discussions, we therefore dont agree.

As responsible students, and law abiding citizens of the Republic of Ghana, we will still cooperate with the Scholarships Secretariat. That notwithstanding, we have run out of patience and cannot wait any further and will resort to other means of communication since we have exhausted all dialogue procedures.

We are by this release giving the government and the secretariat up to Monday, 15th of January, 2018 to pay all recommended applicants. Graduate students have not been treated fairly and need to be treated with utmost respect.

We appreciate the cooperation of the Scholarship Secretariat so far and wish them well in their endeavor.

Long Live GRASAG

Long Live Mother Ghana

........Signed.......

*Kwame Bonah Osafo- Ampomah*

PRESIDENT

(0244778983)

*Jacob Apibilla Ayembilla*

GENERAL SECRETARY

(0247553468)
The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), wants President Nana Akufo-Addo to fast-track the process of getting the Special Prosecutors Office running to clamp down on corruption in the country.

The Union has described as unsatisfactory, efforts at aimed at addressing corruption in the first year of the New Patriotic Party administration.

The ICU, however granted the administration a favorable 80 percent rating.

Speaking to Citi News, the General Secretary of the ICU, Solomon Kotei, said eliminating corruption will be crucial in meeting growth targets.

He explained that the 80 percent rating was because of the few issues of corruption that came up, and the way they were dealt with. We thought they could have been more professionally handled. We look at the A-plus matter and we also look at the issue that took place at BOST.

Charity begins at home

Looking into the future, Mr. Kotei said the country would have taken a step forward if citizens also saw persons within the NPP government being prosecuted and not only persons from the past National Democratic Congress [NDC] government.

If the special prosecutor really is going to rise up, we think that charity begins at home. We want to see that those that fingers are pointed at within the NPP must also be put before this special prosecutor so that we would have a fair balance because corruption is not only in previous governments. It is all over as we have seen, he said.

President Akufo-Addo assented to the Office of the Special Prosecutor Bill last week to mark the fulfillment of a major campaign promise in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

The Bill defined the modalities for the appointment and operations of the Special Prosecutor, which will have the mandate to investigate and prosecute cases of alleged corruption under the Public Procurement Act 203 Act 63, and other corruption-related offenses implicating public officers, political office holders and their accomplices in the public sector.

The NPP has sent out signals to the effect that it will go after corrupt officials within the past NDC government.

But Former President, John Mahama, has said his party members are resolute and unperturbed by the Office of the Special Prosecutor.

He also challenged President Akufo-Addo to show true commitment to the fight against corruption by prosecuting corrupt members of his own government.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has lauded president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for some good attempts in his first year but scored him low on governance.

NDC General Secretary Johnson Asiedu Nketia said the presidents poor handling of attacks by vigilante groups and allegations of corruption in his government has taken the shine off his works.

Assessing the first year of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) on the AM Show on the JOYNEWS channel on MultiTV Monday, he said the response of the government on corruption claims has been pure cover-up.

Sunday marked the first year president Akufo-Addo took over from the then president John Dramani Mahama after he defeated him in the 2016 general elections.

Security expert Kwesi Aning told Emefa Apawu on Joy FMs Midday News while the government is committed to the security of this country in words, it is lacking in action.

The inability of the Ghana Police Service to act in cases of impunity creates a precedence [but] in terms of security there is a lot to be done, he said.

For Mr Nketia the presidents dismissive approach to corruption allegations in his government smacks of a cover-up.

He cited the alleged payment of money at the presidency as a requirement to see the president and the cash-for seat scandal which rocked the Trades Ministry as examples of the cover-up.
Some drivers believed to have been prosecuted and convicted for using Defective Vehicle (DV) and Direct from Port (DP) plates could have their punishment waved, the Police Administration has intimated.

This followed an internal memo by Inspector General of Police (IGP), David Asante-Apeatu, directing officers to stop restricting movements of vehicles with DV and DP after 6 p.m.

IGP Asante Apeatu.

Prior to the directive, motorists using the DV and DP plates were barred from moving between 6 pm and 6 am. The police imposed the directive in 2007, to address security concerns related to the use of such vehicles.

ACP Eklu

He acknowledged the LI 2180 supersedes any other internal directives given to police officers, an internal order, he said, needed to be backed by law.

Even though ACP Eklu was uncertain of prosecution of users of such vehicles on the grounds that they flouted the directive, he said the Motor Transport Traffic Department [MTTD] has been instructed to furnish the Police Administration with information on that.

We have written to the Director-General of MTTD to find out if anybody has been prosecuted so that if there are any remedies to be done it will be done, he told the host of the Show, Kojo Yankson.

Despite the new directive, ACP Eklu said DV/DP plated vehicle users could still be stopped by the police if they commit any infractions that flout the law.

These may include not having a log book, making false entry into the log books as well as using DV/DP vehicles for social functions such as weddings and funerals.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Jerry Tsatro Mordy | Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jerrymordy
The Prampram Divisional Police Command in the Greater Accra Region, has in collaboration with the Upper East Regional Police Command, arrested nine persons in Bolgatanga in connection with a robbery incident at Prampram.

The suspects include Rufai Umoru, a Nigerian national aged 36; Mutaka Mohammed, aged 29 and his wife; Stephen Botey, aged 29, Laryea Nevis aged 27 and Adongbire Asampana, aged 24.

Speaking to Citi News, the Upper East Regional Police Commander, DCOP Vincent Redeemer, said the suspects went into hiding after a robbery in Prampram on November 20, 2017.

They were arrested on Saturday, January 6, 2018, at Gambligo, a suburb of Bolgatanga, at about 10:00 pm.

Muntaka Mohammed, during police interrogations, confessed that the three Nigerians were his accomplices in the robbery.

He later led police to Kings and Queens hotel at Bukere, a suburb of Bolgatanga, where four members of his gang, namely; Israel Edoh, aged 43; Mike Osuji aged 48; Daniel Adosi, aged 52 and Musah Issah were also arrested.

He added that four handguns were found on the gang leader, Mutaka Mohammed, three Nokia phones, one Samsung Galaxy S7, Samsung Galaxy Duos, Infinix Note, Techno tablet, Techno T349 and an HP Laptop.

All the items, except the guns, were stolen from victims during the robbery at Prampram, according to police.

Mutaka Mohammed again told police that his three gangmembers asked him to bring weapons to enable them rob a gold businessman at the Gbani mining site in the Talensi District of the Upper East Region.

Ashaiman robbery arrest

In another development, a wanted armed robber, Aduku Wahabu Awinitit, involved in series of robberies in Ashaiman and its environs, was also nabbed in a hotel at Binaba in the Bawku West District.

DCOP Vincent Redeemer said the suspect is currently assisting police investigations and will be transferred to Prampram and Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region for prosecution.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

The Brong Ahafo Regional Youth Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kwame Baffoe Agyei known in political circles as Abronye DC has described the unity walk being organized by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) across the country as a metro mass unity walk.

The description, he said, is as a result of the fact that the party led by former President John Dramani Mahama has been transporting people from one point to the other to partake in the walk which has become a mini campaign for the ex-President.

The NDC has been transporting people in Metro Mass Buses (MMT) to partake in their unity walks, they did that in 2016 and are still doing it now, he said on Adom FMs Morning Show, Dwaso Nsem on Monday.

The NDC over the weekend embarked on a unity walk in the Brong Ahafo Regional town of Techiman.

Media reports indicate that a teeming crowd of NDC members attended the partys 5th Unity Walk session.

Several party functionaries led by ex-President John Mahama attended the event which has been touted as one of the most successful gatherings of the NDC in recent times.

But Abronye believes the walk was a success because the NDC transported people to the venue.

According to him, the NDC transported people in MMT Buses from Kumasi and Tamale to the venue.

Ask them why Techiman was the venue that they choseit is because it easier to get to Techiman from Kumasi and Tamale than any other town in the region. 15 buses full of people came to Techiman from Kumasi for the walk. And 10 buses were brought from Tamale too, he said.

This, he said, has been the tactics of the NDC and hence he is not shocked at all.

They bused people in 2016 and still lost. They can continually be busing people here and there but who cares, the figures from the 2020 elections would expose them, he added.

Source: www.adomonline.com
Ghana's controversial agreement with the United States of America for the hosting of two former Guantanamo Bay detainees effectively ended on January 6, 2018.

The two detainees, Mahmud Umar Muhammad Bin Atef and Khalid Muhammad Salih Al-Dhuby, who were in detention for 14 years after being linked with terrorist group Al-Qaeda, were brought to Ghana in 2016, for a period of two years.

They were released as part of efforts to close down the US-operated Guantanamo Bay prison, which is known to have had a questionable human rights record over the years.

The move was criticized by many observers including the then-in-opposition New Patriotic Party, who described the two as a security threat despite assurances to the contrary by the US.

Two citizens; Margaret Bamful and Henry Nana Boakye, further sued the former Attorney General and the Minister of Interior contending that the two were being hosted illegally.

The two were justified by the Supreme Court, which declared as unconstitutional the agreement between the Mahama government and the United States.

The apex court ordered the government to send the agreement to Parliament for ratification or have the two detainees sent back to the US.

According to the judgment, the Mahama government needed the approval of Parliament before entering into any international agreement, just as in the case of the two detainees.

When the matter came up for discussion in Parliament, the House was informed that the agreement that was reached under a note verbale and Memorandum of Understanding.

A note verbale is a piece of diplomatic correspondence prepared in the third person and unsigned.

Indications are that the two governments opted for a less formal mode of communication and agreement because of security considerations .

The President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, who was briefed ahead of Ghana's decision to host two former Guantanamo Bay detainees said he felt the processes leading up to the move were necessary, despite their hosting being declared illegal .

A former Member of Parliament George Loh, who during his time Parliament, was privy to sensitive information on the matter, noted that due diligence, security-wise, was done on the matter and key stakeholders were briefed ahead of the transfer of the two Yemen nationals.

Mr. Loh continued to explain on a Citi News platform that, some of the things are so security sensitive that you cannot come and run your mouth in the public domain. A lot of the things are done at a security level. American security will not put anything in writing and send formally for somebody to intercept and put out there.

Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, Foreign Affairs Minsiter

When the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, indicated in Parliament that Akufo-Addo administration had not altered the formal agreement between Ghana and the United States over the two, she had essentially confirmed that, the January 6, 2018, expiry date remained.

Mr. Speaker, we have not changed anything. In the note verbale that were exchanged between the two countries. Indeed there was no agreement. The whole transaction was done through what we call a note verbale from both sides. What we have done is to attach all those documents.

Possible stay after expiry

Per the statement released at the time from the then-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hanna Tetteh, on January 6, 2015, the government did not explicitly state that the former detainees would necessarily have to leave the country after the agreement expired.

The statement said the two may leave the country after the two year period, suggesting the decision was in their hands.

Hanna Tetteh

At the request of the US Government, we have also agreed to accept two detainees of Yemeni origin who were detained in Guantanamo but who have been cleared of any involvement in any terrorist activities and are being released. They are unable to return to Yemen at the moment and we have indicated our readiness to accept them for a period of two years after which they may leave the country, the statement said.

During their two year stay under the agreement, the US are said to have provided about $300,000 for the two Yemenis upkeep, which comes to about GHc 1,362,000.

In 2017, it emerged that Bin Atef had gotten married during his short stay in the country. Bin Atef's wife, Haia, is a Yemeni national, and they are believed to have gotten married sometime in March 2017, according to his lawyer.
The Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly [KMA], on Monday embarked on a decongestion exercise in the Central Business District.

It said the exercise was to ensure the free flow of traffic, which has over the long period of time been impeded by the activities of traders along major roads.

In the last quarter of 2017, the Assembly conducted a similar exercise which forced traders to move from the area to available spaces at the Racecourse. However, they returned to the streets during the Christmas period with the excuse that they could only make sales there.

But the Public Relations Officer of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly [KMA], Goodwin Okumah Nyame, said with the Christmas season over, traders will not be permitted to carry out their activities on the streets.

Mr. Nyame threatened that traders who flout the regulations will be dealt with accordingly.

When Citi News visited the central business district, most of the traders had vacated the area, with some still packing their wares.

Some tables belonging to traders were destroyed by the KMA task-force members.

Some traders have however vowed not to move from the Central Business District until the Assembly provides them with a better alternative to ply their trade.

In Accra, the Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly , Mohammed Adjei Sowah, led a team of officers from the Assembly including metro guards and police officers to clear hawkers off pavements in the metropolis.

The exercise, which commenced in the early hours of the day saw the MCE and his team visit the Central Business District, Kwame Nkrumah interchange, Tip-toe lane, Kokomlemle among other areas where they destroyed illegal structures and ejected hawkers.

In the New Juaben Municipality of the Eastern Region, the Metropolitan Chief Executive, Comfort Asante, has cautioned traders to desist from plying their trade on the pavements and along the streets following the expiry of the yuletide grace period she gave them in December.
The Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly , [AMA], Mohammed Adjei Sowah, on Monday led a team of officers from the Assembly including metro guards and police officers to engage in the usual clearing hawkers off pavements in the metropolis.

The exercise, which commenced in the early hours of the day saw, the MCE and his team visit the Central Business District, Kwame Nkrumah interchange, Tip-toe lane, Kokomlemle among other areas, where they destroyed illegal structures and ejected hawkers.

The action was in a bid to ensure sanity within the metropolis as the activities of the hawkers and the traders on the shoulders of the road and pavements impede human and vehicular movement, as well as result in the creation of huge waste along the streets.

While confiscating some wares and materials belonging to traders, the team locked up some businesses that were operating illegally and those that had been sited at unapproved places.

Some business owners were also arrested.

Mr. Adjei Sowah told Citi News that his outfit will not relent in its efforts to ensure that the exercise succeeds.

A similar exercise was also carried out today in the Kumasi metropolis despite resistance from some traders whose activities along the street had become a nuisance to motorists.

In the New Juaben Municipality of the Eastern Region, the Metropolitan Chief Executive, Comfort Asante, has warned traders to desist from plying their trade on the pavements and along the streets following the expiry of the yuletide grace period she gave them in December.

AMA boss, Adjei Sowah



She lamented that the traders had vacated a newly constructed market to sell on the streets.

The various assemblies across the country are part of efforts to sanitize space in the country and ensure sanity as pledged by President Akufo-Addo in various public addresses.
Hundreds of Sudanese students from the University of Khartoum threw stones at anti-riot police Monday on a third day of protests against soaring bread prices, an AFP correspondent reported.

Bread prices more than doubled last week as flour manufacturers raised prices on dwindling wheat supplies after the government decided to stop importing grain and allowed private companies to do so.

Sporadic anti-government protests have been held since Saturday in some parts of the country following the price rise.

They were staged again on Monday in the area around Khartoum university, triggering clashes between students and anti-riot police.

"No, no to high food prices," students shouted as they attempted to leave the university campus but were quickly pushed back by dozens of anti-riot police who fired tear gas at them, the AFP correspondent reported.

The protesters then threw stones at the police who closed the main road to the university as thick plume of black smoke billowed over the campus.

Dozens of police in plain clothes were deployed around the university, as the authorities warned of a crackdown.

"Police will crush any protest that results in destruction of property," Minister of State for the Interior Babikir Digna said, according to the official SUNA news agency.

In another protest at Kosti in the state of White Nile, several school children staged a demonstration but it was swiftly broken up by baton-carrying police, witnesses said.

On Sunday, a student was killed during protests in the town of Geneina in war-torn Darfur. It was still unclear how he was killed.

Leading opposition groups have called for anti-government protests after the cost of flour jumped to 450 Sudanese pounds ($25) for a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack from 167 pounds.

Similar protests were held in late 2016 after the government cut fuel subsidies.

The authorities had cracked down on those protests to prevent a repeat of deadly unrest that followed an earlier round of subsidy cuts in 2013.

Dozens of people were killed in 2013 when security forces crushed large street demonstrations, drawing international condemnation.
08.01.2018 LISTEN

The Akyem Tafo Youth Movement (ATYM) has asked the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) to fulfil its promise of ensuring that killers of J.B. Danquah Adu are duly prosecuted and convicted.

The group in a statement Monday said it believes there is a deliberate ploy to perpetuate injustice in this matter due to the lackadaisical attitude of the state apparatus, the players and handlers of this case.

The pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the former legislator, Dr Lawrence Edusei told an Accra Central District Court last Thursday the autopsy report is missing.

He explained this happened after his house was burgled in September 2017 and the computer which contained the autopsy report and thousands of other autopsy reports, was stolen by the thieves.

But Deputy Public Relations Officer of ATYM, Kwabena Sarpong, has catalogued a series of incidents that have occurred since the trial of the case started in February 2017, claiming they form part of an attempt to dismiss the case.

Daniel Asiedu (2nd right) and Vincent Bosso (left), being escorted from the court premises.

It, therefore, rejected the fairy tale explanation offered by the Pathologist, describing it as intriguing and very disturbing.

We must say without any equivocation that the explanation given by the pathologist will not be accepted today, tomorrow and even in eternity, the statement cautioned.
Management of Our Charity Foundation (OCF), a charitable organisation based in Kumasi, Ghana, in collaboration with one Ms. Hilda Owusu, a Ghanaian based in the USA have donated items worth thousands of Ghana cedis to the All Nations Charity Home at Ayigya, a suburb of Kumasi in the Ashanti region over the weekend. The items donated include boxes of bottled water, assorted drinks, clothings,biscuits, boxes of chocolate and shoes.

Donating the items to the charity home, the President of Our Charity Foundation, Mr. Godwin Alex Wirekoh,the founder and President of the foundation indicated that his organisation has always been very sensitive to the plight of the vulnerable and underprivileged in society especially women and children. Mr. Wirekoh said his organization and Ms Hilda Owusu therefore decided to support the charity home on humanitarian grounds and to demonstrate their commitment to supporting and protecting the most disadvantaged groups and individuals such as orphans in our society.

Mr. Wirekoh disclosed that, he developed the passion of giving back to humanity some ten years and has since not looked back. "Our coming here today is to fulfil the very obligation that we have committed ourselves to over the years,thus, to donate the very little we are able to afford to the less privileged ones such as these our lovely kids with the hope that it would be beneficial to them and this very charity home as a whole", he said.

He Indicated that, this is not the first time that his outfit is reaching out to the needy. He said the NGO has supported a number of orphanages on annual basis with assorted items as well as undertaken series of charitable projects within the region since its establishment some ten years ago. He sited King Jesus Charity Home at Boadi, Missionaries of Charity Home at Ashanti New Town, and many others as beneficiaries of his organization's philanthropic gestures.

He pointed out that his organization also made donations to over 120 needy and destitute on the streets of Kumasi in December 2015.

The president, expressed his profound gratitude to all and individuals who have supported the needy through his NGO both financially and materially especially Ms. Hilda Owusu.

On his part ,the Public Relations Officer (PRO) for the NGO, Frederick Acquah used the occasion to advise the young ones to submit themselves to parental control, shun social immorality and disengage themselves from acts that are likely to result in early childhood birth in order to reduce the number of children on our streets. "I would admonish my young brothers and sisters here to heed to instructions and advise from their parents and elders in our society so that they can grow to become responsible parents and guardians in the future. I'm sure that most of the children in this home and other orphanage homes are by no faults of theirs but rather as a result of their parents' early indulgence in act that they were not matured enough to indulge in", Acquah lamented.

The Executive Director of the All Nations Charity Home, Rev Philip Kwasi Nyamekye who received the items on behalf of his management thanked Our Charity Foundation and its partner, Ms. Hilda Owusu for their kind gesture. "We are most grateful to have received these items on this day. We pray that the good Lord replenish the pockets which made money available for these items," the minister acknowledged and prayed. Rev. Nyamekye urged other individuals and organisations to emulate what Our Charity foundation and Ms Hilda Owusu have done and contribute the little that they can afford to the various institutions which need assistance. He also used the occasion to appeal to meaningful individuals and charitable organisations to assist the charity home in the construction of a major drainage close to the facility which has been breeding alot of mosquitoes.
A New Patriotic Party (NPP) National Youth Organizer hopeful, Bright Essilfie-Kumi, has proposed the establishment of NPP Communication Institute to train its communicators across the country.

Mr. Essilfie-Kumi said in every region and constituencies, the communicators appear on television and radio stations to defend and explain the policies of the government, so if they are not properly trained, defending the government will be difficult.

The NPP National Youth Organizer hopeful made the proposal in relation to Information Minister, Mr. Mustapha Abdul-Hamids comments that government would expand its communication frontiers.

The Information Minister in a media encounter in Accra said the expansion would help the media to reach government officials for timely information.

According to the Information Minister, government had decided to appoint spokespersons for each of the five Cabinet Sub-committees including the Legal and Governance, Economy and Finance and Infrastructure, as well as Security and Social Services.

Mr. Essilfie-Kumi, who is a staunch member of the party (Ghana and USA) and President of Movers for Change (MOCHA), remarked: why cant we train and equip the old communicators of our party who know their stuff, polish their skills and maintain them.

We can then start paying them to be consistent with their work. We cannot afford to use them in opposition, dump and employ the so called professionals while in power, Mr. Essilfie-Kumi cautioned.

The Youth Organizer hopeful explained that this is why I propose the establishment of the NPP Communications Institute to admit, train, certify and produce communicators, then grant them the permit to speak on our behalf. Remember, communication covers wider spectrum of areas that require content, written and spoken materials with a bit psychology to adjust and pause where necessary. Training is the way to go.

He explained that the NPP Communications Institute, which is one of my policies is that, you and I know that in every region in every constituency, we have communicators who actually go on radio stations, TV stations trying to defend the policies of the party. Now, one thing is very obvious, defending a party policy or manifesto or whatever it is while in opposition is entirely different ball game from when you are in power and my agenda is very simple.

The President of MOCHA noted that the problem we have as I speak to you now is that, when we throw every policy out there, everybody goes out there and they try to dissect the mind of the policy makers, the media then carries them in different ways making the understanding difficult. These bits and pieces dont come together because everybody speaks their mind from a different perspective but if we are able to train people on how these programs and policies intends to achieve, it will help all of us speak in a very centralized way.

Mr. Essilfie-Kumi noted that currently what is happening in the party is that, somebody may be in Kumasi or other towns and cities, talking about same programme the government has initiated and whatever he is saying is different from the guy in Accra, but when we train them, we build them, their speaking skills, build their content to communicate on behalf of the party on any medium being radio or TV.
The Upper East Regional Police Command has arrested some five wanted suspected criminals from their hideout in the Bolgatanga Municipality in the Upper East Region.

The five suspects, including Rufai Umoru, 36, Otu Laryea Devis, Stephen Botey, 29, Adonbire Asampana, 24 and Muntaka Mohammed. Muntaka Mohammed is believed to be the Gang Leader and Adonbire Asampana, believed to be his wife.

They were arrested in Bolgatanga where they had come to cool off after they had allegedly attacked an Orphanage at New Ningo in the Ningo-Prampram District in the Greater Accra Region, and bolted with an unspecified amount in foreign and local currencies. They also took away mobile phones.

The suspected criminals were armed with Pistols, a Short Gun, a Hammer and Machetes at the time of the attack of the Orphanage and so succeeded in molesting the inmates and staff without any resistence before robbing them.

An initial report was made at the Prampam Police Station and with the help of technology, the Police there tried to trace the one who had tried to decode one of the iphones that were stolen from the Orphanage. After a thorough investigations it was revealed that, the person who had tried to decode the iphone had run to Bolgatanga.

The Upper East Regional Criminal Investigation Department of the Ghana Police in Bolgatanga, with support from other Police Officers from Prampram, apprehended all the five suspects on January 7, 2018 at about 11:00 pm. A search conducted on them, revealed 3 foreign Pistols, one short gun and ammunitions, and were all retrieved from them.

The Gang Leader, Muntaka Mohammed during interrogation also mentioned other suspects; Israel Valentine Edoh, Nana Yaw also known as Pastor and Mike Osuji, as the persons who invited him to bring weapons to assist them to rob a Gold Dealer at Gbani, a mining community in the Talensi District in the Upper East Region.

Israel Valentine Edoh was arrested at the Kings and Queens Guest House, from where he led the Police to Musah Issahs hide out.

According Israel Valentine Edoh, Musah Issah was the one who told him about the Gold Dealer, and the fact that, he had some Gold and huge sum of money in his possession.

Musah Issah on the other hand, mentioned Daniel Adosi also known as Pastor Dan as the one who introduced Israel Valentine Edo to him.

Another suspect who was also arrested by the Police in Bolgatanga in a different operation, is Aduku Wahabu Awinititi, alias Bullet (a Rasta man). He has been on the Police wanted list for a number of crimes he has committed at Ashaiman and its environs.

The suspects according to the Regional Police Commander will be handed to the Tema and Ashaiman Police respectively, for onward prosecution.

Meanwhile Upper East Regional Police Commander, DCOP Vincent Redeemer Dedjeo has issued a stern warning to criminals within and outside the Upper East Region, never to consider the region as a place to hide, stressing that, the region is not a safe place for criminals.

He was addressing the Media in Bolgatanga to announce the arrest of the suspected criminals.
Some residents of Gbulahagu, a suburb of Tamale, on Sunday, 7 January 2018, attacked officers of the Ghana Police Service for attempting to rescue a woman who had been accused of witchcraft.

Narrating the incident to Class News' Northern Regional Correspondent, Mohammed Gaddafi, the Regional Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Yussif Tanko, said the police got information that a 35-year-old woman identified as Memunatu Neindoow was under attack over allegations that she was a witch. Police officers were dispatched to visit the village and rescue the victim.

He stated that on arrival, the police met the victim in a burnt thatch house with bruises on her body and surrounded by her assailants.

ASP Tanko indicated that as soon as the team attempted to rescue her, there was a sudden blackout, followed by firing of AK47 rifles amidst throwing of stones.

He said the team quickly made their way to their vehicle to leave the community but on their way, the road was blocked with logs and stones. He added that when the officers tried to remove the hurdles, the residents accosted them with stones and fired AK47 rifles at their vehicle.

He said the police team escaped with broken windscreens, broken rear windshield and broken side glasses.

When they left the community, they realised that in the heat, one of their men had been left in the community, so they quickly mobilised and sent men there and he was rescued and brought back he added.

ASP Tanko noted that the case is under investigations and the officers will do everything possible to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to book.

-ClassFMonline.com
The 4th REPUBLIC is 25 And this constitution has been our most enduring.

As usual, we have celebrated to excess. While the passing should be marked, it should be a sad reminder of what might have been.

In the preamble to this constitution, we pledged to "secure for ourselves and posterity the blessings of liberty, equality of opportunity and prosperity" and pledged commitment to "Freedom, Justice, Probity and Accountability". Unfortunately, even as the constitution was being launched, the commitment to accountability was gutted. The traitors of 31st December, in flagrant disregard for accountability, inserted immunity clauses to protect themselves. We have never recovered from that betrayal.

The celebration of this 25th anniversary conveniently grossed over many of those whose struggles and sacrifices made the 4th REPUBLIC possible-- like the Professional bodies led by men like Sam Okudzeto, the students of Ghana, religious bodies like the Catholic Bishops and the Methodist Conference, led by leaders, including Bishop Sarpong and Reverend Essamuah, politicians like Akufo-Addo, Tarzan and the late John Bilson and Obeng Manu and media practitioners, including Kweku Baako, Haruna Attah, Ben Ephson and the late Tommy Thompson. The unfortunate impression was left that Jerry Rawlings, who was dragged kicking and screaming to the 4th REPUBLIC, was its founder. That was tragic. It would be the equivalent of crediting British General Cornwallis with the founding of the American republic.

The 4th republic's undoubted achievement has been that it has survived. Otherwise, it has failed to deliver on any of its major promises included in our constitution .

It pledged, under article 25 " progressive introduction of free education" at all levels. That has not happened.

It pledged that no one shall be deprived of his/her life without due process but this has happened repeatedly with the involvement or indifference of the state-- as in the Kumbungu 4, the Ya Na et al, Agbogbloshie, the Kume Preko 5, Mobila and others.

It pledged under article 35 (7) , that "As far as possible, a government shall continue and execute projects and programs commenced by the previous goverment." This provision has largely been honoured in the breach.

It pledged, under 35 (8), that "The state shall take steps to eradicate corrupt practices and abuse of power". Corruption and abuse of power are ascendant under this Republic.

We pledged to promote political tolerance but that has not happened. Indeed, intolerance has grown, not just between parties but within parties.

In terms of development, Nkrumah delivered more for this country in his 15 years without oil than all the Presidents of the 4th Republic combined have done to date, with oil!

We have been given bigger government instead of better government.

Unemployment marches on while our leaders talk. The number of applicants for the recent GIS jobs bear testament to our dire unemployment state.

State institutions serve powerful interest rather than the public interest.

Our increased freedom of expression, in the public square, leads to increased noise instead of sense, heat rather than light.

Many have called for changes to the 4th Republic. Some, like Adam Bodomo, and former President Rawlings want a new Republic. Indeed, during his 31st December address in Ho, Rawlings called for a new revolution! When a convicted rapist starts admiring the shape of your daughter's breast, you would be foolish to ignore the implied threat. Adam Bodomo and other Nkrumahist desire peaceful change.

Others want the 4th REPUBLIC to work better. We must work to make the 4th REPUBLIC deliver more than just elections to the people.

We must reform our constitution.

This must begin with the report of the committee established by former President Mills. In the end our amended constitution must ensure:

1: Election of District, Municipal and Metropolitan Chief executives by the public.

2: End the discrimination against diasporans in the pursuit of elective or appointive office at all levels. The only President who delivered on development was the diasporan, Nkrumah.

3: Assure that members of the EC are approved by Parliament after nomination by the President.

4: Make the Council of State an Elected Upper body of the Legislature.

5: Cap the number of MPs and end the requirement for Ministers to be nominated from Parliament.

In the end though, our problems are not all due to the constitution. No constitution can solve corruption or create jobs or improve our educational system. Only good governments and policies can.

We must fight corruption as the constitution requires. The Independent Prosecutor would, despite public enthusiasm, have little effect. He/She will punish some who are corrupt--- mainly from opposition ranks. But we need to Prevent corruption, not punish it. In corruption as in medicine, prevention is better than cure. Woyome was not an aberration, it was the tip of the ice-berg. While there are honest people in our government, in many areas, government functionaries have become accomplices to those who want to fleece our state. It is the equivalent of Dracula in charge of the blood bank. No effort against corruption that does not reform the police, the judicial service and the accountant general's department, the ports and the tax authorities will have any impact. And for the avoidance of doubt, honest Presidents can preside over corrupt governments. It is not enough for a President to wish corruption away. It must be fought actively.

We must create good jobs that deliver value for money to the public. The police, sanitation and healthcare are good areas where government can create jobs. And it does not make sense to spend our scarce resources in producing graduates who are unemployable. We should produce graduates we need.

Finally, as citizens, let us put country above party and ethnic group and insists on good governance.

May our 4th REPUBLIC grow and deliver on its promise. God bless Ghana.

Arthur K
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) has blamed the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 for the abuses and discrimination against homosexuals in Ghana.

Speaking to Emefa Apawu on Joy FMs Newsnite Monday, the HRW for Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Programme Director, Graeme Reid said the law contributes to a climate of human rights abuses in the country.

The Criminal Offences Act also makes it difficult for LGBT people to report cases of discrimination and abuses to the police making them second-class Ghanaians, he added.

HRW LGBT Rights Programme Director, Graeme Reid

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo

Although some legal experts claimed the practice of same-sex relationship has not been defined as a criminal act, they said the Criminal Offences Act has dealt with one homosexual act which is the unnatural carnal knowledge.

Section 104(1)(b) of the Act states: Whoever has an unnatural carnal knowledge of any person of sixteen years or over with his consent is guilty of a misdemeanor.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo told Qatar-based Aljazeera last year Ghana could change its laws banning homosexuality if there is enough public pressure.

Making a case for the repeal of the law, Graeme Reid said the wording carnal knowledge is a colonial legacy that has no place in modern Ghana.

What we are saying is that the people need to feel safe [but] the law makes them feel that they are criminals [so] it will be good for the law to go, he said.

Watch the full video below:


Fulani nomads at Agogo in the Asante Akim district of the Ashanti Region have allegedly shot five soldiers, Starrfmonline.com has gathered.

The incident occurred Monday afternoon when the military men stormed an area where the nomads were feeding their cattle.

It comes as a deadline for the nomads to evacuate their cattle expires.

Briefing journalist on the incident the Asante Akim DCE Andrew Appiah Kubi said all the fulanis and their herdsmen must leave our lands. They have no right to any parcel of lands in Agogo area and they cannot forcibly also enter on our lands and expect us to remain quiet for them to destroy farm lands and produce.

He said the nomads have been given a weeks moratorium to evacuate from the Agogo lands.

The community insisted on three-day moratorium but magnanimously the Paramount Chief has extended it to one week. So we expect these people [Fulani nomads] to leave our lands within one week, he stated in his briefing.

Speaking to Starr News, Derick Amoah, the chairman of Justice and Security Committee in Agogo told Atiewin Mbilla-Lawson that the situation in Agogo following the shooting is that fear and panic.

The situation is deteriorating, he added.
On the 6th January,2018, modernGhana.com published an Article with caption" *Rev. Prof Afful Broni's greed misled Hon Alex Afenyo Markin*. The said article was attributed to one faceless Eric Appiah who failed to give readers the benefit of knowing his real identity. Pseudo has indeed given cowards an opportunity to put out things that defines the magnitude of their senses and i am not surprised that ,the immediate past uew Utag president( Samuel Ofori Bekoe who is a surrogate of the embattled VC and the finance officer has decided to stoop soo low to the extent that, he cannot put his real name under those articles published by ModernGhana but will use " Eric Appiah" as a name.

Common sense should have even reminded Eric Appiah that, Hon Alex Afenyo Markin was not a plaintiff but a counsel who represented the assemblyman in court and for that matter, it will be senseless to aver that, he at a point in time admitted that, if he had known the facts concerning the case,he wouldnt have gone to court for the first place but because he was misled by the acting VC to go to court when in actual fact, he was only representing a client in court as a lawyer. As a PhD holder in the academia, he failed to give credence to the ethics of the legal profession which serves as a guide to every professional lawyer in respect of dealing with clients. He failed to understand that, lawyers go to court based on the instruction or directive of clients and the fact that a lawyer is representing a client in court doesnt mean that, the said lawyer automatically becomes a client .

The said person also failed to know that, the title of the suit was Kofi Supi Kwayera V Uew and not Hon. Alex Afenyo Markin V Uew. Indeed common sense is far more better than a useless Phd like the one which has been conferred on Dr Samuel Ofori Bekoe who is using" Eric Appiah" as a pseudo to put out trash just because his surrogates have been asked to step aside on matters of criminality. Why didnt they accuse Afenyo Markin of being behind the EOCO investigation of Kumasi Campus in 2015 for embezzling student funds meant for the building of a lecture theatre? Where was Dr Samuel Ofori Bekoe( Eric Appiah) when some of us dragged uew to the BNI for investigation into allegation of thievery and extortion by management when they decided to charge interest on partly paid fees ? Which aspect of the university handbook or Act 672 gave the university the legal backing to charge those interest? I wasnt surprised when the embattled VC issued a rejoinder to the said publication in the chronicle news paper as a decision that was taken by a non existing university council. The idea to charge interest on school fees partly paid was only under Prof Mawutor Avorke's regime. As a professor of special education,he never knew that, the university wasn't a financial institution for interest to be charged just on fees partly paid.

Let me use this opportunity to remind the surrogate of the interdicted personalities that, the water he seeks to muddy will be given to his paymasters to drink Insha Allah when the time is due. It will be in the interest of my friend who is the current Kumasi campus college principal in whose name i have decided to let matters of the criminal investigation by Eoco rest just because of the image of the university to try as much as possible to advise those behind the muddying of the clean waters before some of us strike again like a thunder. A word to the wise is enough.

Dawda Eric( Equity)

Citizen for vigilance

8th January,2018
A rebel movement in Senegal's restive southern region of Casamance on Monday blamed the massacre of 13 men at the weekend on a feud in the illegal teak logging industry.

The Casamance Movement of Democratic Forces (MFDC) said it "firmly condemns" the killings, which it claimed sought to wreck efforts to restore peace to the troubled Casamance region.

The movement "will not let itself be distracted or disorientated by the gravediggers of peace", said the group, which has been campaigning for the region's independence since 1982.

The west African nation began two days of mourning on Monday as flags flew at half mast in Ziguinchor, the region's biggest city.

"They sold firewood... for 200 francs (CFA, some 30 cents)," said Mamadou Diallo, whose father was killed in the violence.

Due to lack of work in the city, he said his father was "forced to go into the bush" even if it was dangerous.

The MFDC called on the authorities to "focus their inquiries" on local military and governmental officials "who are at the head of a vast network of illegal logging and selling of teak".

Teak is a high-value tropical hardwood whose resilience makes it prized for use in boat decking and outdoor furniture.

'Definite peace'

The killing is linked to a feud between sawmill operators, "whose fierce competition has instilled animosity between workers," the MFDC claimed.

The 13 were murdered on Saturday in an execution-style killing deep in Borofaye forest in the commune of Boutoupa-Camaracounda, according to a survivor.

The government said 10 were shot dead, two were stabbed to death and one was burned. Half a dozen more were wounded.

Casamance, separated from the rest of Senegal by The Gambia, has been the target of an independence campaign for more than 35 years.

Violence has left thousands of civilians and military personnel dead and forced many to flee. The economy, heavily dependent on agriculture and tourism, has been badly hurt.

However, the region has been calm in recent years after President Macky Sall came to office.

In October 2016, France, the former colonial power, removed Casamance from its list of danger zones for tourists visiting the area.

Last October, the government and a rebel faction met in Rome to revive a peace process under the Catholic organisation Sant'Egidio.

In a New Year's message, Sall had appealed to the rebels to continue talks to create a "definite peace".

The MFDC said the attack "seeks nothing more than to break the dynamic of peace in order to live more profitably from conflict."

A local rebel leader, Oumar Ampaye Bodian, also condemned the attack, saying in an interview on the private radio station Sud FM that the "evil attack" had occurred while "the president is reaching out" on the Casamance issue.
Nollywood actress, Georgina Onuoha, is seriously ready this New Year when it comes to fashion as she has begun stocking her wardrobe with some latest Nigerian designs.

She gave sneak peak on what to expect from her when it comes to fashion as she and her two girls stepped out in so pretty in Agbada outfit.

It is not only those in Nigeria that will keep slaying as she and her girls also slayed while they stepped out Sunday worship at Divine Mercy Catholic Church in US.
Young Imo State cultural ambassadors and reigning AdaImo, Queen Judith Orisaekeziem, has revealed that people of Cross Rivers State and other tourists that attended the 2017 Calabar Carnival gave her a feel of what she has been missing as a beauty queen.

Having led the line alongside the Opara Imo at the Carnival she revealed that she couldnt count the number of times people ran into the line to take selfies with her and it was one feeling that makes you say, yeah Im truly a beauty queen

Walking 12.5km along the streets of Calabar on the first day and then having a wonderful procession at the International Carnival on the second day, Queen Judith Orisaekeziem described it as an amazing experience and one she would not be forgetting in a hurry.

Taking to her face book page to write; Leading #TeamImoState at the #CalabarCarnival #2017. So much fun and I am proud to have walked 12.5km for my state. Glory to God, its a huge success. #AdaImo, she then described the experience as amazing, adding that she would be looking forward to Imo Carnival by Easter.

TeamImo was awesome and Imolites and Igbos out there also showed us much love as we walked the streets. Calabar people were awesome too and it will always be different when you are in the line

The attention we were getting was out of this world and it actually kept us going on the 12.5km. We even wanted more of the distance because theres someone in front cheering you and theres another kid begging the mum to help her take pictures with you. There someone showing you love and it was just like a family of unknown faces. Its same with Nigerians and foreigners and it was just an amazing feeling that brings smiles to your face

Im glad we went there and our coordinators were also amazing because they succeeding in putting up the largest band in Calabar and I would also say the most amazing band of many colours as well she said.
The founder and senior pastor of Champions Royal Assembly, Abuja, Bro. Joshua Iginla has prophetically advised Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, to steer clear of any temptation of seeking re-election in 2019.

He also told the president to beware of those he called Judases around him, saying they will abandon him after leading him to danger.

In his words, In my vision, I saw His Excellency, President Muhammadu Buhari in a big boat, surrounded by men and they were sailing with him and when they got to the middle of the sea, there was a great tempest and the whole ship was shaking and I saw the people who were supposed to stand around him putting life vest, jumping out to swim away and they left him.

The revered man of God whose prophesies have always come to pass also has more words for the president who came to power in 2015. Mr. President, God said I should tell you, there are many Judases around you, so many snakes who just want you to fail. They are already planning for you to sink."

Mr. President, if you will ask for the mind of God, please leave 2019 for another person. God has used you to do wonderful things in this nation, you have fulfilled your agenda by fighting corruption the way no one else has been able to do. But, the Judases around you cannot make you to fulfill your other mandates. They will thwart it.
Dotz Nano Ltd [ASX:DTZ] shares are up 24% in early trade today. The upswing comes after the company announced it had agreed to a distribution deal in China.

What happened to Dotz Nano share price?

Dotz Nano specialises in making graphene quantum dots (GQDs). These are minute layers of graphene with semiconductor properties. In fact, GQDs are so tiny that theyre referred to as artificial atoms.

Theyre used in a range of technologies, perhaps most noticeably in modern TVs. But thats just the beginning. GQDs applications could be much farther-reaching, but only time will tell. Nonetheless, todays deal is a step towards innovation.

Dotz Nano has agreed to provide China Israel Science Technology Innovation Center Ltd (CisticPoly) with these GQDs, which the company will then sell locally in China. The exclusive deal has been valued at US$15 million for Dotz Nano over three years. And thats just the minimum, so the deal could be worth even more.

Whats next for Dotz Nano?

The deal effectively started on 19 December 2017. Dotz Nano is just waiting on product approval before it expects purchase orders to begin.

However, if the product doesnt get approval, Dotz Nano will receive nothing. CisticPoly wont have to buy the GQDs if they cant get approval in China. However, both companies are confident it wont be an issue.

In fact, the pair may create their own manufacturing site in China if demand is strong enough  an option that will be explored in 24 months if GQDs prove popular.

Theres no doubt that its an exciting time for the technology and Dotz Nano shareholders.

Regards,

Ryan Clarkson-Ledward

Junior Analyst, Money Morning

PS: If youre looking for other small-cap stocks like Dotz Nano, weve got you covered here at Money Morning. In our latest report well show you three of the most promising small-caps on the ASX right now. Check them out in our latest report for free right here.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is set to extend a deadline under a fair housing rule issued by the Obama administration in 2015.Under the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) final rule published by the HUD in July 2015, program participants would conduct an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH). Regulations provided for a staggered submission deadline for these assessments.The HUDs Office of the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is set to issue a notice that it is extending the deadline for submission of the assessments to the next submission date that falls after Oct. 31, 2020.According to the notice, a review of initial assessment has led the HUD to believe program participants require more time and technical assistance to comply with the process and complete submissions that will be accepted by HUD.HUD's decision is informed by the review of AFH submissions received, the HUD said in the notice. Based on the first 49 AFH initial submissions that received a determination of accept, non-accept, or deemed accepted from HUD, the department found that many program participants are striving to meet the requirements of the AFFH rule. In 2017, the department conducted an evaluation of these submissions and found that more than a third (35%) were initially non-accepted.Julian Castro, the former HUD secretary who oversaw the AFFHs introduction in 2015, criticized the move.In a tweet sharing an article about the notice, Castro said the HUD has effectively crippled the AFFH. It will be up to the next Administration to get this back on track, he said.We need to maximize opportunity for all Americans, regardless of their background, not look the other way when communities limit their opportunity, Castro said in a later tweet.
Economic hardship not the outcome of ...
President Donald Trump View Photos

President Trump held a press conference at Camp David on Sunday and was Mondays KVML Newsmaker of the Day.

Here is the unedited script:

Thank you very much. Its great to have you at Camp David  a very special place. We started, as you know, yesterday afternoon. We had a couple of incredible meetings. Its a feeling here that you dont have in very many places. There was a bonding. There was a  we got a lot of work done, a lot of great work for the people.

Security discussed, infrastructure discussed, military and all types of military situations and applications discussed. General Mattis is here, General Kelly  a lot of good military input. Very important. Discussed funding for the military, which is so important.

We also, obviously, went into budget. So we went into DACA and how were going to do. And we hope that were going to be able to work out an arrangement with the Democrats. I think its something that theyd like to see happen. Its something, certainly, that Id like to see happen.

So we are very well prepared for the coming year. We finished very strong. One of the things we are discussing and discussing very powerfully is drugs pouring into this country and how to stop it. Because its at a point  over the last number of years, its never been like this. Weve never had a problem with drugs like we do, whether its opioid or drugs in the traditional sense. Its never been like it is.

And we are going to do everything we can. Its a very difficult situation, difficult for many countries. Not so difficult for some, believe it or not. They take it very seriously and theyre very harsh. And those are the ones that have much less difficulty. But we are going to be working on that very, very hard this year. And I think were going to make a big dent into the drug problem.

With that, I think what Ill do is ask Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to say a few words. Then, Ill have Paul Ryan. And well  perhaps youll have some questions for some of the folks. We have a great group of talent. And I will tell you, the meetings, again, were really, perhaps, transformative in certain ways. Were doing things and we have things planned for next year.

One of the things Mitch said  and he said it very well  was its going to be tough to beat the year we just left because what we had last year was something very special, especially to cap it off with the tremendous tax cuts and tax reform. And dont forget ANWR. And dont forget the fact that the individual mandate  such a horrible thing for so many people  was terminated. So its very, very tough.

But Id like to ask Mitch  come up, say a few words, please.

LEADER MCCONNELL: Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. As you suggest, last year would be a tough year to top.

If you are like those of us here at the podium, youd like to see America be a right-of-center country. From a right-of-center point of view, 2017 was the most consequential year in the many years that Ive been here in Congress. The Presidents spectacular nominee for the Supreme Court; 12 circuit judges, the most in the first year of any President since the circuit court system was set up in 1891; not to mention deregulation; and then topping it off with the most consequential boost to our economy through this tax reform bill  was an astonishing year.

But its time to look forward. Mr. President, I want to thank you for inviting us all up. We had a great planning session for 2018. We hope that 2018 will be a year of more bipartisan cooperation. And the Presidents agenda, much of which he just referred to, are things that we believe there would be a significant number of Democrats interested in helping us accomplish.

And so, Mr. President, thanks for the opportunity to be here. Were excited about the new year, and ready to get to work. Thank you.

SPEAKER RYAN: Well, I, too, Mr. President  I want to thank you for inviting us here to Camp David. Im particularly pleased with the fact that we had an extremely productive conversation with the President and his team yesterday about how we go forward in 2018.

We have big things to do for the American people. Were excited about getting to work on that, and as both the President and the Leader said, we had historic achievement in 2017 that we want to build on  historic achievements that we believe will get our economy growing much faster.

And what we want to work on in 2018 is making sure that everyone enjoys the economic growth that is to come. We have people who are sidelined in society that need to get out of poverty and into the workforce. So we want to focus on making sure that we can close that skills gap, that opportunity gap, so that everyone can get the kind of life and the career that they can get in this country  tap their potential.

Wevegot issues such as infrastructure that we want to attend to. We want to make sure that Secretary Mattis and our military have the tools and the resources that they need to keep us safe.

So we have a very bold agenda for 2018. We think this agenda is one that will appeal to everyone in-between  between Democrats and Republicans, independents. And so were excited about the progress that has already been made, and were very excited about what we have in store for us for 2018. Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Paul.

Mike.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr. President. 2017 was a year of extraordinary accomplishment. And the congressional leaders who are gathered here were incredible partners with this President and our entire administration in advancing the interests of the American people  rebuilding our military, supporting law enforcement, historic regulatory reform, appointments to our courts to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution from the Supreme Court to courts at every level, and of course historic tax reform, repealing the Obamacare mandate, and opening up American energy from Alaska to around the globe.

The Presidents policies have been achieving extraordinary results. Nearly 2 million new jobs created. Unemployment at a 17-year low. Our economy is already growing at a pace that most economists didnt predict would happen for years  3 percent. And were looking to exciting predictions for 2018.

But as the President said at the close of 2017, were just getting started. The President convened the congressional leadership gathered here with members of our Cabinet to outline the Presidents priorities for the coming year. Those include a budget agreement; investment in our military to truly rebuild and make the strongest military in the world even stronger still; immigration reform and enforcement; the construction of a wall and border security; as well as dealing, as the President just said, with the issue of DACA.

We truly do believe that there are opportunities after our discussions this weekend for bipartisan work on a broad range of issues from infrastructure to workforce to vocational education. And I can say, Im even more confident, after this weekends discussion, that, with the Presidents leadership and with the strong leadership in the Congress, were going to keep delivering for the American people in 2018 and were going to create a stronger and more prosperous America.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Mike.

Any questions for the group?

Q Mr. President, I didnt hear any mention here of welfare reform. Is that something that is still on the agenda for 2018?

THE PRESIDENT: We are looking at it. Were looking at aspects of it. Its a subject thats very dear to our heart. Well try and do something in a bipartisan way, otherwise well be holding it for a little bit later. But well be looking to do that very much in a bipartisan way, if we can.

Yes.

Q Mr. President, you were talking about the policy issues that you all were focusing on the last few days here at Camp David, but this morning you were tweeting about your mental state. Why did you feel the need to tweet about that this morning?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, only because I went to the best colleges for college. I went to a  I had a situation where I was a very excellent student. Came out and made billions and billions of dollars. Became one of the top businesspeople. Went to television and, for ten years, was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard. Ran for President one time and won.

And then I hear this guy that does not know me, doesnt know me at all. By the way, did not interview me for three  he said he interviewed me for three hours in the White House. It didnt exist, okay? Its in his imagination.

And what I was heartened by  because I talk about fake news and the fake news media  was I  really, was the fact that so many of the people that I talk about, in terms of fake news, actually came to the defense of this great administration and even myself because they know the author and they know hes a fraud.

And when I saw some of the people say  and you look at some of his past books. He did a book on Rupert Murdoch. It was a terrible expose and it was false. So much of it was false. I consider it a work of fiction and I think its a disgrace that somebody is able to have something, do something like that. The libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were strong, it would be very helpful. You wouldnt have things like that happen where you can say whatever comes to your head.

But just so you know, I never interviewed with him in the White House at all. He was never in the Oval Office. We didnt have an interview. And I did a quick interview with him a long time ago having to do with an article, but I dont know this man. I guess sloppy Steve brought him into the White House quite a bit, and it was one of those things. Thats why sloppy Steve is now looking for a job.

Okay, who else do you have? Yes.

Q Mr. President, the meetings now between South Korea and North Korea  the discussions 

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. Hope it works out.

Q I was going ask, are you comfortable that this will remain just about the Olympics? Are you 

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think so. I spoke with the President, as you know  with President Moon of South Korea. He thanked me very much for my tough stance. And you know, for 25 years, they havent been using a tough stance. Theyve been giving everything.

When you look at what Bill Clinton did  and youve seen the famous clip where Bill Clinton wants to give them everything, and where I said, years ago, with Russert on Meet the Press  many years ago, I talked to  I dont think anything has changed. You have to have a certain attitude and you have to be prepared to do certain things. And Im totally prepared to do that.

But President Moon called me, and we had a great discussion a couple of days ago, and he thanked me very much. And I hope it works out. I very much want to see it work out between the two countries. Id like to see them getting involved in the Olympics and maybe things go from there. So Im behind that 100 percent.

He actually thanked me. He said  and a lot of people have said, a lot of people have written  that without my rhetoric and without my tough stance  and its not just a stance  I mean, this is  this is what has to be done, if it has to be done  that they wouldnt be talking about Olympics, that they wouldnt be talking right now.

Q Are you comfortable that theyre not also taking the conversation beyond the Olympics while he continues to 

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I hope they do. I hope they do. I would love to see them take it beyond the Olympics. We have a very good relationship with South Korea. I would love to see it go far beyond the Olympics, absolutely.

And at the appropriate time, well get involved. But I like the idea of their dealing on the Olympics. That should be between those two countries.

Yes.

Q Mr. President, did you ask the White House Counsel to ask Attorney General Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation?

THE PRESIDENT: Everything Ive done is 100 percent proper. The story, by the way, in the Times was way off, or at least off. But everything that Ive done is 100 percent proper. Thats what I do is I do things proper.

And you know, I guess the collusion now is dead because everyone found that, after a year of study, theres been absolutely no collusion. There has been no collusion between us and the Russians.

Now there has been collusion between Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Russians. Unfortunately, you people dont cover that very much. But the only collusion is between Hillary and the Russians, and the DNC and the Russians, and one of those things.

Okay, any other questions?

Q In what way was the New York Times story off?

THE PRESIDENT: Youll find out. But the story was off.

Q Do you stand by Jeff Sessions as your Attorney General?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do.

Q And will Gary Cohn continue to remain in position?

THE PRESIDENT: I hope so. Wheres Gary? Is he here? He was here. Gary, come here. (Laughter.) Did you hear the question, Gary, in this beautiful hangar thats freezing?

MR. COHN: I did not, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: They said, will Gary Cohn continue or remain in the administration? I said, I hope so.

Now, if he leaves, Im going to say, Im very happy that he left, okay? (Laughter.) All right. Come here, Gary. Come here. Are you happy, Gary? Hes just passed a very big bill. I think hes pretty happy.

MR. COHN: Yes, Im happy. Hows that? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Gary, hopefully, will be staying for a long time.

Yes, maam.

Q Just to follow up on the conversations between North Korea and South Korea, are you willing to engage in phone talks with Kim Jong-un right now?

THE PRESIDENT: Sure. I always believe in talking.

Q Do you think that that would be helpful?

THE PRESIDENT: But we have a very firm stance. Look, our stance  you know what it is. Were very firm. But I would be  absolutely I would do that. No problem with that at all.

Q So no prerequisites for coming to the table and talking with him?

SPEAKER RYAN: Thats not what he said.

THE PRESIDENT: We  thats not what I said, at all. Look, right now, theyre talking Olympics. Its a start. Its a big start. If I werent involved, they wouldnt be talking about Olympics right now. Theyd be doing no talking or it would be much more serious.

He knows Im not messing around. Im not messing around  not even a little bit, not even 1 percent. He understands that. At the same time, if we can come up with a very peaceful and very good solution  were working on it with Rex and were working on it with a lot of people  if something can happen and something can come out of those talks, that would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world. Very important, okay?

Yes, sir.

Q Do you plan on involving yourself in Republican primaries in this midterm year?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Ill be very much involved. In fact, thats one of the reasons  hard to believe, my polls numbers have gone way up. Youll have to explain that to me someday. But I will tell you, they  actually, theyve been explaining it to me, but they want me to be involved, and were going to be very involved. In fact, not only with the Senate, also with the House.

Q And protecting incumbents? Will you 

THE PRESIDENT: Protecting incumbents and whoever I have to protect. But we need more Republicans. We have to have more Republicans.

With that being said, I think were going to go bipartisan. I think were going to have some really great bipartisan bills. But we need more Republicans so that we can really get the rest of the Make America Great Again agenda passed.

And so I will be actually working for incumbents and anybody else that has my kind of thinking. And I think its going to happen. Were going to make a lot of trips. Well be very involved. I think you folks are going to be very happy because youre going to be doing a lot of travel.

Q Does that include some challengers to incumbents too?

THE PRESIDENT: I dont see it  I dont see that happening. I dont see that happening at this moment, no. I think theyve sort of scattered.

You had somebody that lost us the state of Alabama. And I think, as far as Im concerned, that was a shame that that was lost. That should never have been lost.

And you have to  look, with it all being said, we have the right policy, we have the right everything. You still need a good candidate. You dont have a good candidate, youre just not going to win. So we should have never lost Alabama. It shouldnt have happened.

Okay, any other questions? Yes, maam.

Q Mr. President, can you lay out  I know that you guys released a very long list of requirements  things that you wanted to see on immigration tied to a DACA fix.

THE PRESIDENT: I do.

Q But can you explain to us right now the exact points 

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I can just say some of the basics.

Q What exactly do you need to sign it?

THE PRESIDENT: I can say some of the basics. We want the wall. The wall is going to happen or were not going to have DACA. You know, we want to get rid of chain migration. Very important. And we want to get rid of the lottery system.

In addition to that, we want some money for funding. We need some additional border security. These are great people and we need some border security. We need ICE. But we want to make sure that, in terms of what we want  and we want DACA to happen. We all  everybody, I think I can speak for everybody  we want John Cornyn from Texas. We all want DACA to happen. But we also want great security for our country. So important. We want to stop the drugs from flowing in. Very important.

So we have to get rid of the visa lottery. You know, the lottery is a disaster. They give you people  in fact, as you know, the person on the West Side Highway that killed eight people and so badly injured  legs and arms  so badly injured many more, they came in through the lottery system.

And remember this, the lottery  its just common sense  theyre not sending us their finest, okay. When somebody gets picked in the lottery, were not getting their best people. So we have to get rid of the lottery system, we have to get rid of chain migration, and we have to have a wall.

Q Do you want the lottery and the chain migration aspects in that same piece of legislation?

THE PRESIDENT: I think it should be in the same legislation, yes. And I think, frankly, that the Democrats feel strongly about it too. I mean, Chuck Schumer is New York. He saw somebody that came in through the lottery system. He saw this man kill eight people on the West Side Highway that he knows very well and he loves like I do. I think hes okay with it. I really think well have a lot of Democrat support. I hope so.

Yes, sir.

Q Mr. President, have there been any more efforts to get Mexico to pay for the wall?

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I believe that Mexico will pay for the wall. I have a very good relationship with Mexico. As you know, were negotiating NAFTA. Well see how that goes.

Yes, but Mexico will pay. In some form, Mexico will pay for the wall.

MS. SANDERS: Probably got time for one more question.

THE PRESIDENT: One more question.

Q Mr. President, if Robert Mueller asks you to come and speak with his committee personally, are you committed, still, to doing that? Do you believe thats appropriate for a President?

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. Just so you understand  just so you understand, theres been no collusion; theres been no crime. And in theory, everybody tells me Im not under investigation. Maybe Hillary is, I dont know, but Im not.

But theres been no collusion. Theres been no crime. But we have been very open. We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed and it would have taken years. But you know, its sort of like, when youve done nothing wrong, lets be open and get it over with.

Because, honestly, its very, very bad for our country. Its making our country look foolish, and this is a country that I dont want looking foolish. And its not going to look foolish as long as Im here. So weve been very open and we just want to get that over with.

Okay, anybody else? I think were set. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
More Information

Quick facts about Garcia

What's your morning routine: The alarm goes off at six. Get up, wake up my daughter, cook breakfast, and then it's off to school. After I drop her off depending on my day, I come into the office or somewhere in South Texas.

What book are you reading right now? I just finished "Above the Line" by Urban Meyer. I really like reading sports books that go over the team concept that applies to the workplace. But when I don't find myself reading something I want, I usually find myself reading my daughter's third-grade reading list. "Sarah, Plain and Tall" was the last one I read. "Bunnicula" was the one before.

What's your favorite restaurant: Two of my favorite foods are steaks and shrimp. So if it's steaks, Bohanan's in San Antonio, and if it's shrimp, it's Catfish Charlie's in Corpus.

What was your first job? Believe it or not I was a baker at Sirloin Stockade. I was responsible for baking all the dinner rolls and all the baked goods.

What is your passion or hobby outside of work: With kids and a busy schedule, I still enjoy going hunting and fishing when I can, but honestly my weekends are spent with the family and going to their extracurricular activities, whether it's going to a softball game, a soccer game or whatever activity they may have on the weekend.

If you had to choose a totally different career in a different field, what would it be: Without a doubt I would love to have been an attorney. I think it would have been a challenge to present to a jury.... that would have been an interesting job to have.
Yves here. This post provides another confirmation of the cool and getting cooler official stance of the US towards China. China maven Scott Kennedy, in South China Morning Post, stated in The US is preparing for a trade war with China  dont be fooled by the noise:

My sense is that we are on the cusp of a new American strategy in which Washington replaces dialogue and multilateralism with extended unilateral pressurethe Trump administration has been moving systematically to put the regulatory pieces in place so that it can credibly threaten China with limits on its exports, investment and other elements of the relationship.

The tepid US reaction to a Chinese overture seems consistent with this strategy. Another interpretation might be that the US side does not think the Chinese measures mean anywhere near as much as they appear to on the surface, that the official liberalization will be significantly curtailed via numerous informal impediments.

By Alicia Garcia Herrero, non-resident research fellow at Real Instituto El Cano. She is also the Chief Economist for the Asia Pacific at NATIXIS. Alicia Garcia Herrero is currently adjunct professor at City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and visiting faculty at China-Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Originally published at Bruegel

Now that the dust has settled, one thing is clear: President Donald Trumps visit to Asia in November served as a milestone in the increasingly rapid transfer of power from the U.S. to China. President Xi Jinpings enthronement during the 19th Party Congress as Chinas leader for the foreseeable future did most of the work, but Mr. Trump helped by failing to advance a clear agenda articulating the U.S.s key national interests regarding China.

The transfer of economic power to China has only accelerated since Mr. Xi came to power. It will accelerate further if and when China institutes real economic reform. But when China announced reforms to open up its financial sectorjust hours after Mr. Trump concluded his visit to Beijingthe reaction from the Trump administration was muted at best, as the administration remains focused on Chinas too-benign attitude toward North Korea and its nuclear missile program.

Reaction from investors, too, was muted. The only significant announcement came from UBS for a securities investment that was approved months before the announcement. Recall that China has been promising to open its financial markets since entering the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Beyond the lack of progress so far, the announcement does not fully cast away doubts about the speed and depth of the opening going forward.

For example, the foreign ownership cap of domestic securities firms will increase from 49 percent to 51 percent and then to 100 percent in the coming three years. However, there was no hint about lifting the current restriction on listed securities companies (ranging from 20 percent to 25 percent based on various conditions). Until further clarification, this probably means foreign investors can only gain control of non-listed securities firms, which are, of course, much smaller.

Theres even less clarity regarding the banking and insurance sectors. We already know that reforms are delayed for another three years. However, Chinas vice finance minister, Zhu Guangyao, told The New York Times that China would raise the investment in insurance companies to 51 percent in three years and 100 percent in five years. In addition, China also plans to end its current 25 percent limit of foreign ownership in banks, according to what Mr. Zhu told the Times.

China clearly has a strong self-interest in opening up its securities market. After the massive growth of bank balance sheets and the piling up of non-performing loans, Chinese regulators hope that the market (with Chinese characteristics) will do the cleaning up.

The massive securitization occurring in China over the last couple of years would clearly benefit from foreign expertise. Even better would be if foreign players brought along foreign investors to share in the potential losses. Within this context, one should not be too surprised at the general lack of interest in the opening of Chinas financial sector.

Certainly the move does not seem to have softened the U.S. administrations stance toward China. The U.S. has officially declared its opposition to Chinas obtaining market economy status from the WTO. Of course, this decision might be more closely related to Chinas perceived lack of cooperation on North Korea. But it also suggests that obtaining a couple of licenses to operate in Chinas financial market will not calm down Mr. Trump.

Clearly, Mr. Xi is frustrated with Mr. Trumps reaction to his kind gesture. All in all, it would be hard to expect an auspicious 2018 for the Trump-Xi coupleprobably the most important one on earth.
Yves here. Perhaps I am too much of a cynic, but so rarely do groups manage to overcome high-school level social dynamics that I despair of ideas like collective intelligence in human affairs.

By David S. Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Nss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is Does Altruism Exist?Twitter: @David_S_Wilson. Originally published at This View of Life; cross posted from Evonomics

David Sloan Wilson interviews Geoff Mulgan

Say the word mind and most people immediately think about the workings of an individual brain. The idea that something larger than an individual might have a mind seems like science fictionbut modern evolutionary theory says otherwise.

It is now widely accepted that eusocial insect coloniesants, bees, wasps, and termiteshave collective minds, with members of the colony acting more like neurons than decision-making units in their own right. For example, a critical stage in the life of a honeybee colony is when it fissions and the swarm that leaves must find a new nest cavity. Exquisite research by Thomas Seeley and his associates shows that the swarm behaves like a discerning human house hunter, scouting the available options and evaluating them according to multiple criteria. Yet, most scouts visit only one cavity and have no basis for comparison. Instead, the comparison is made by a social process that takes place on the surface of the swarm, which is remarkably similar to the interactions among neurons that take place when we make decisions. After all, what is a multi-cellular organism but an elaborately organized society of cells?

The reason that multi-cellular organisms and eusocial insect colonies both have minds is because they are both units of selection. Lower-level interactions that result in collective survival and reproduction are retained, while lower-level interactions that result in dysfunctional outcomes pass out of existence. What we call mind focuses on the lower-level interactions that result in the gathering and processing of information, leading to adaptive collective action.

As soon as we associate mind with unit of selection, then the possibility of human group minds leaps into view. It is becoming widely accepted that our distant ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive self-serving behaviors within their groups, so that cooperating as a group became the primary evolutionary force. Cooperation takes familiar physical forms such as hunting, gathering, childcare, predator defense, an offense and defense against other human groups. Cooperation also takes mental forms, such as perception, memory, maintaining an inventory of symbols with shared meaning, and transmitting large amounts of learned information across generations. In fact, most cognitive abilities that are distinctively human are forms of mental cooperation that frequently take place beneath conscious awareness. It is not an exaggeration to say that small human groups are the primate equivalent of eusocial insect colonies, complete with their own group minds. As the great 19th century social theorist Alexis dToqueville observed, The village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that, wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to constitute itself.

The adjective small is needed because all human groups were small prior to ten thousand years ago, although a tribal scale of social organization needs to be recognized as important in addition to the fission-fusion bands within each tribe where most of the social interactions occurred. In addition, cultural evolution is a multi-level process, no less than genetic evolution. As Peter Turchin shows in his book Ultrasociety, the societies that replaced other societies during the last 10,000 years did so in part because of their ability to gather and process information, leading to effective collective action at ever larger scales, such as the nations of France and America which were the main objects of Toquevilles attention. Some elements of culturally evolved group minds are consciously designed, but many others are the result of unplanned cultural evolution, taking place beneath conscious awareness. They work without anyone knowing how they work.

Not only do units of selection tell us where group minds are likely to exist, but also where they are unlikely to exist. In many animal societies, within-group selection is the primary evolutionary force, leading to behaviors that would be regarded as selfish and despotic in human terms. If these societies have group minds at all, they are highly impaired, unlike eusocial insect colonies. By the same token, despotic human societies have group minds that are highly impaired, unlike more cooperatively organized human societies.

Knowing all of this has tremendous potential for recognizing collective intelligence in human life where it currently exists and socially constructing it where it is needed. However, most of what I have recounted is new, emerging only within the last two or three decades, and is often not reflected in the thinking of otherwise smart people on the subject of collective intelligence. In particular, there is a tendency to naively assume that collective intelligence emerges spontaneously from complex interactions, without requiring a process of selection at the level of the collective unit.

It was therefore with trepidation that I began reading Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World, by Geoff Mulganfounder of the think tank Demos, director of the UK Prime Ministers Strategy Unit and head of policy under Tony Blair, and current chief executive of Nesta, the UKs National Endowment for Science. That made him smartbut was he smart about collective intelligence from a modern evolutionary perspective?

To my delight, I found him very well informed, clearly recognizing that collective intelligence only exists under very special conditions, which makes it both present andabsent in human life. In addition to his conceptual understanding, his book is filled with examples from his extensive policy experience that were previously unknown to me, along with practical advice about how to enhance collective intelligence where it does not already exist. I therefore lost no time inviting him to have an email conversation, which he generously accepted. An excerpt of his book is featured on the online magazine Evonomics.com.

DSW: Welcome, Geoff, to TVOL and congratulations on your superb book. In our correspondence leading up to this conversation, you called my attention to a 1996 issue of Demos Quarterly devoted to evolutionary thinking. Tell us about your background and how you came to appreciate the relevance of evolutionary theory in relation to human affairs. Bear in mind that while you are already well known in some quarters, you will be new to many of our readers.

GM: My intellectual background is a combination of economics, philosophy, social science and telecommunications, the subject of my PhD. By the time I started becoming interested in public policy there was already widespread dissatisfaction with the overly mechanistic, equilibrium models of economics which failed adequately to explain patterns of change: how technologies arise and spread; how economies grow. Many of us looked to evolutionary thinking as a useful tool. It could provide metaphorical frames  understanding social change in terms of the generation of new possibilities, selection and then replication (which has subsequently helped feed a very dynamic field of social innovation); it gave some new insights into how we were formed as human beings, and new psychological insights into policy. The Demos Quarterly you mentioned was a good showcase of the state of the field at the time. But it had little immediate influence.

One interesting spin-off was what is now called behavioural economics, which adapted many insights from evolutionary biology into the language of economics. The next issue of Demos Quarterly in 1996 focused on that, and I later commissioned quite a bit of work in the UK government (including a big 2002 study on the implications of behavioural psychology for public policy). A few years later Nudge was published by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler and introduced these ideas to the mainstream, helping the creation of a behavioural insights team in the Prime Ministers office in the UK.

Another result, which I write about quite a bit in the book, is to see large scale cognition, like evolution more generally, in terms of trade-offs. I call it cognitive economics: what selection or survival advantages are provided by certain kinds of cognition, and at what cost. A great deal of work has been done on this at the individual organism level in terms of the advantages of a larger, but very energy hungry, brain. Im interested in the parallels for groups of organisations: if they spend scarce resources on abilities to observe, analyse, create or remember does that confer advantages? Can they overshoot  like the clan that spends so much time remembering its ancestors that it fails to protect itself from threats; or a company that spends so much time trying to create the new that it fails to attend to the present. My hunch is that a new discipline is possible that draws on evolutionary thinking to analyse these kinds of trade-offs in more precise ways.

DSW: Thats very helpful background. I dont want to assume that we agree upon everything, so please comment on my rather lengthy introduction. Is there anything that you would like to add or amend, to set the conceptual stage broadly for our conversation?

GM: Your introduction makes a great deal of sense to me, and coming from a social science background its obvious that the group is a unit of selection. The question that animated me was a version of this: why do some nations, cities, organisations manage to thrive and adapt while others dont, even though they appear to be endowed with superior intellectual resources or technologies? Why did some of the organizations that had invested the most in intelligence of all kinds  from firms like Lehmann Brothers to the USSR in the 1980s  fail to spot big facts in the world around them and so stumble? I was looking for a theory that could explain some of these patterns and understand how and when some groups are able to optimize for a particular environment and then adapt to a rapidly changing one.

DSW: Indeed! Now Id like to focus on two conventional wisdoms that obscure clear thinking about collective intelligence. The first is the conventional wisdom that axiomatically takes the individual as the unit of analysis, including methodological individualism in the social sciences and the rational actor model in economics as a type of methodological individualism. This axiomatic view makes it difficult to conceive of the concept of mind above the level of an individual. What are your views about methodological individualism?

GM: Western intellectual life is dominated by traditions that reject any notion that a collective mind could be more than the sum of its parts. There were some good reasons to be suspicious of vague and mystical invocations of community, god, or national spirit. But I think its wrong to conclude that collective intelligence is nothing more than the aggregation of individual intelligences. We recognize that in any serious account of history, and to an extent in the law which can be guilty of crimes. There is little doubt in my mind that groups can think, and can have true or false beliefs. But the ways groups do these things are not precisely analogous to the ways individuals work. I try to provide a way of thinking about the degrees of we-ness of groups, that relates this to the extent of integration of cognition in a group. Here I extend recent work on individual consciousness which relates it to the degree of integration of the brain while awake. This, I hope, more nuanced position sees individuals as shaped by groups, and groups as made up of individuals and is helped by the ways in which psychology and neuroscience have revealed that the individual mind is better understood not as a monolithic hierarchy, with a single will, but rather as a network of semiautonomous cells that sometimes collaborate and sometimes compete. If you accept that view, then it becomes more reasonable to see groups in a similar way, even if you differentiate the highly integrated individual mind from the less integrated group mind (in other words, not altogether integrated individual minds not altogether integrated into larger groups).

DSW: Thanks. The second conventional wisdom regards collective intelligence as an emergent property of complex interactions, without paying careful attention to the special conditions that are required. Here is how you put it on p 5 of your book: To get at the right answers, well have to reject appealing conventional wisdoms. One is the idea that a more networked world automatically becomes more intelligent through processes of organic self-organization. Although this view contains important grains of truth, it has been deeply misleading. Please say more about this view, which in my experience is held by some people who are otherwise very smart, such as complex systems theorists who dont have a strong background in evolutionary science.

GM: I offer several different challenges to the glib, but very common, view that the universe has some inner dynamic towards benign self-organisation. The first recognizes organization as costly, the lens of cognitive economics. When we study self-organisation more closely in any real situation  from markets to online collaborations like Wikipedia  they turn out to rely on a great deal of labour, provided by some people who choose to devote scarce time and money to the work of making things happen, rather than just having fun or sitting on the couch. Where there are insufficient motivations, incentives or habits for doing this self-organisation tends to disappoint. The second lens recognizes conflict, and a constant struggle between forces for cooperation and forces that aim to disrupt or misinform. Contemporary social media are an obvious example. The third more sociological lens recognizes that most real complex human societies combine multiple cultures, some hierarchical, some individualistic, and some more egalitarian and cooperative. These complement each other in all sorts of ways. Purely flat, self-organising egalitarian structures tend to fall apart, as do structures which are only hierarchical or only individualistic. I believe this is a fundamental insight of some modern social science (which I attribute particularly to the anthropologist Mary Douglas) which helps make sense of everything from grappling climate change to the everyday life of business. But many well-informed people are unaware of it.

DSW: I agree! Now that we have cleared the deck of misleading conventional wisdoms, could you please provide one of the best examples of human collective intelligence? Then we can discuss how it works mechanistically and how it came into existence historically.

GM: The global science system is probably the best single example, and nicely illustrates how real, living intelligence depends on each of the organizing principles described above. It has hierarchy within disciplines and within universities; strong individualist incentives; and a strong egalitarianism (the sociologist Robert Merton spoke of the communism of science, the assumption that knowledge is there to be shared). It depends on some common infrastructures; it orchestrates millions of minds and millions of machines; and it has to fight constant battles against its own internal and external enemies. The internal ones include the strong incentives for fraud or burying uncomfortable evidence (just last week a newly appointed professor of computational biology described being told by a superior that one should repeat experiments as many times as necessary to get the right result!).

Seen from afar the science system looks like a wonderful emergent system; seen up close it depends on many individuals devoting their lives to the hard work of building up a community, and establishing its norms, and persuading others to give it money, status and other resources.

DSW: This is indeed an excellent example to single out. Mechanistically, we can show that scientific inquiry requires a complex social physiology with regulatory processes enforced by norms. Historically, we can rely on books such as Steven Shapins Social History of Truth and Robert McCauleys Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not. As the title of McCauleys book implies, we can consult our deep genetic evolutionary past to show why we are not natural born truth seekers and require a socially constructed process to create a body of objective knowledge. We can also see how scientific and scholarly cultures have been torn apart in the past and should not be taken for granted in the present.

To continue, Id like to focus on an example of collective intelligence that is a work in progressthe smart cities movement. To say that cities need to be made smart implies that they do not become smart on their own, affirming the point we have already made that collective intelligence does not spontaneously emerge. Yet, efforts to make cities smart often fail to reach their goals. What is your opinion of the smart cities movement?

GM: The smart city movement is simultaneously exciting and maddening. Its promise is that many of the everyday processes of city life can become more intelligent. Data flows can greatly improve the efficiency of energy management and transport flows. Central command centres like the one in Rio can spot emergencies and respond quickly. Sensors on lampposts can assess air quality, and families like mine can control heating in our home remotely, or check on our security. Thats the promise. Unfortunately far too much of what has been labelled as smart cities is either facile or irrelevant, often meeting needs that dont exist (like refrigerators that tell you when you need to buy more milk). Too many plans failed to attend to the human element, or focused only on smart hardware not on helping people to be smart. These are just some of the reasons why so much investment in smart city technology has been wasted, why most of the prominent examples essentially failed  from Dongtan in China that was never built to Masdar in Abu Dhabi, or left us with rather soulless places like New Songdo in Korea. Few attended to the most pressing needs of cities  for health or jobs. And few learned basic lessons from evolution. The best cities have been given the space to evolve, to learn from experience and to reconfigure themselves. The smart city plans tend to be conceived as blueprints that simply need to be implemented with little engagement from the people who live in the city.

DSW: I like your point about the need for smart cities to be a collaboration with the residents. One of my former PhD students, Dan OBrien, is involved in the smart cities movement in Boston. His research on 311 illustrates an important distinction between designing social systems and participating in the social systems that we design. As you know, 311 is a three-digit number that can be called to report problems such as a fallen tree or a pothole. It originated as a cultural mutation in Baltimore to handle calls that were inappropriately being made to 911, which is for emergency situations. Then people began to realize that 311 could serve as the eyes and ears of a city by having residents provide information about problems that the city could process and address. Today it is being used in hundreds of cities. With such a system in place, a city begins to resemble a single organism with a nervous system that receives and processes information in a way that leads to effective action. A lot of work is required to design and implement the system, but once it is in place, using it is as simple as punching three numbers into your smart phone when you see a problem. It seems to me that this distinction between designing social systems and participating in the social systems that we design is very general. Do you agree and can you provide some other examples?

GM: Yes I do. I was quite closely involved in variants of this in the 1990s when 111 services were designed, and then more recently when Nesta supported various tools that could show in real time the topics being called about, providing a real time map of the citys concerns and problems. All of these examples have worked best with some space for iteration and learning. The UK introduced something very similar in the health service in the 1990s  called NHS Direct  to deal with more everyday issues and reduce pressures on hospitals. But this technically strong idea ran into challenges: resistance from some doctors who didnt like diagnoses to be done by nurses helped by algorithms; concerns from lawyers about the risks of error, which together meant that too often the service recommended going to a doctor or hospital anyway; and the challenges of serving a large population without good English. In the same way my mentor Michael Young created a precursor in the 1980s, a call centre service of doctors and nurses for people with sensitive or embarrassing health conditions who didnt want to interact face to face with a doctor; in this case he co-designed it with patients themselves. All of these are at their best examples of co-evolution  systems learn best by trying, fixing and following leads rather than abstract design.

DSW: Again, your emphasis on the need for policymaking to be iterative is important. In addition, any systems engineer will tell you that a complex system cannot be optimized by separately optimizing the parts. The parts and their interactions must be organized with the performance of the whole system in mind. If so, then collective intelligence at the global scale requires policies that are formulated with the welfare of the whole earth in mind. Nothing else will do and the concept that each nation can pursue a my nation first policy is collective idiocy. Do you agree with this assessment?

GM: The insight that optimization of parts can be suboptimal for the whole is one of the great contributions of systems engineering, and one that is often forgotten both in business and government, where the relentless pursuit of narrow targets can often have disastrous consequences. This is in part a technical challenge. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a good example of a first attempt to create something more like a global collective intelligence that can inform policies formulated with the welfare of the whole earth in mind, as you put it. But its only a first stab. The huge number of variables involved in something like climate change, let alone its interaction with economies or social life, makes it next to impossible to model. The task is so far beyond the capability of either our brains or computers that we have to rely on rough and ready heuristics.

So to complement our imperfect tools we also need to cultivate a parallel ethical stance. In my work on public leadership I developed the idea that leaders should think of three concentric circles of accountability. The first is to the immediate task, or organization. The second is to the wider community they are part of. The third is accountability to humanity and the planet. Ideally we want leaders who can align all three. But if they try to sacrifice the first to the third then they are not likely to survive very long. Conversely the world would be disastrous if everyone focused only on interests of their immediate organization. We have to learn to strike a balance. To be compassionate only to those close at hand is narrow and mean. But to be compassionate only for the world as a whole and to ignore those closest to you can be just as bad.

DSW: I agree entirely. The parts must be organized in relation to the whole but the whole must sustain the parts. There is a lot to be pessimistic about, but can you leave our readers with some things to be optimistic about?

GM: We are in an odd phase of history which is simultaneously bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and unusually foolish or malign leaderships. Seen in the long view I tend to confident. There is some evidence of the Flynn effect, a long-term rise in individual intelligence; many of our institutions are becoming more capable, certainly if seen at a global level; we have greatly more awareness of global public goods, and greatly enhanced capacities to observe, analyse and predict; and we are in a period when millions more are becoming makers and shapers of technologies and of their world. Of course its not at certain that our capacity to think and act is advancing sufficiently fast. But I see strong reasons to err on the side of hope. One comes from family history. My cousin, John Mulgan, who was a New Zealand novelist and soldier, killed himself in 1945 because he was so depressed at what he saw happening in the world (amongst other things the British were reinstalling the Greek King in the country where he had been fighting for several years). He thought the outlook was hopeless. Yet in retrospect 1945 was one of the great years of new opportunity for the world, a reminder of how hard it is for us to judge our times accurately.

We shouldnt rely on hope however, or fall into the trap of believing that there grand historical forces will either make things turn out for good or for bad. Systems  markets, humanity, science  dont automatically generate solutions. History tells us that again and again and the space for agency  sparked by both imagination and fear  is where the most important work is done. Im lucky to spend much of my time with practical innovators in the social innovation movement worldwide, in business, science and government; if you do so, you are inevitably infected by optimism.

They point to a final insight: over the years Ive learned that the more detached people are from practical work the more they risk of slipping into negativity and fatalism. Action breeds hope not the other way around. Goethe said that in the beginning was the deed, not the word, and engagement with practice is probably the best way for us to keep hopeful and useful, and to make our contribution to the next stage of human evolution.

DSW: Thats great and describes my own experience as an activist. Im also optimistic. The problems are wicked, but we are beginning to develop the tools for becoming wise managers of evolutionary processes.
How antidepressants are ending up in Great Lakes fish Detroit Free Press

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History Nicholas Kristoff, NYT (GF).

Top charts of 2017 Economic Policy Institute (Furzy Mouse). There seemed to be a real dearth of end-of-year wrap-ups for 2017.

Can secular stagnation morph into secular expansion? Gavyn Davies, FT

Where modern macroeconomics went wrong Joseph Stiglitz, Oxford Review of Economic Policy

How to make economists fight like ferrets in a sack The Spectator

Zuckerbergs Dilemma: When Facebooks Success Is Bad for Society WSJ. I think the very last thing we want is Zuckerberg encourag[ing] meaningful social interactions, because I dont think we want a squillionaire at the head of ginormous monopoly defining, operationally, what is meaningful, social, or an interaction. And I cant believe we wouldnt find Zuckerbergs methods of encouragement anything other than degrading.

Facebook loses steam, Vice gets sold: Bold calls for 2018 Digiday

Benchmark is selling $900 million of its holdings in Uber Recode

Nvidia Expands Its Drive For Robocar Tech Supremacy With VW, Uber Alliances Forbes

Black Mirror Reveals Our Fear of Robots and Algorithms We Cant Control The Intercept

These psychedelic stickers blow AI minds TechCrunch (original). Our attack works in the real world, and can be disguised as an innocuous sticker.

Puerto Rico

Hospitals Wrestle With Shortage of IV Bags, Linked to Hurricane WSJ. The manufacturer, Baxter International, is located in Puerto Rico, and still has intermittent power. This in the midst of a flu epidemic: It might as well be a Third World country, said Erin Fox, senior director of drug information services at the University of Utah, which tracks nationwide drug shortages. Hospitals, she said, are now administering medications using syringes instead of IV bags because of the shortage. Baxter Says Saline Shipments Disrupted in Hurricane-Wracked Puerto Rico (Sept. 27, 2017) Those methods have more side effects, Ms. Fox said. Its happening every day, she said. And it will have more of an effect as hospitals get into delaying electives or clinical trials. Might as well be?

Syraqistan

North Korea

The aircraft carrier: The weapon that refuses to go under Asia Times (Re Silc).

China?

Japan succession crisis could rip links out of auto supply chain Nikkei Asian Review

Vietnam seeks to purge corrupt Communist leaders FT

New Cold War

RTs editor-in-chief on election meddling, being labeled Russian propaganda CBS. This is interesting. Simonyan is the RT editor: Back then, she says she was a big fan of the United States, especially when she was an exchange student in Bristol, New Hampshire. Margarita Simonyan: New Hampshire is absolutely beautiful. Lesley Stahl: Did you watch American television? Margarita Simonyan: Mostly MTV. Lesley Stahl: MTV. Margarita Simonyan: I was 15. Lesley Stahl: I get the impression though that your views of the United States have kinda curdled. Margarita Simonyan: It didnt just happen to me. It happened to more or less all of Russians in 1999 when you bombed Yugoslavia. The U.S. called that NATO operation a humanitarian intervention to prevent ethnic cleansing. But to Russia, it was a sign of U.S. aggression too close to home. Margarita Simonyan: We found that absolutely unfair, outrageous illegal because it wasnt approved of by the United Nations. It was a shock. America had Russia wrapped around it little little pinky through the whole 90s. We did everything you told us. And we were eager to do more and more. The whole nation Russian nation was like, Tell us what else we can do to please you. We want to be like you. We love you. And then in 1999 bam. You bomb Yugoslavia. And that was the end of it. In a minute, in one day. And thats when you lost us unfortunately.

Banking union is not enough to save the eurozone FT

Under pressure, Merkel warms to coalition talks Handelsblatt

Italy, at sea without a paddle Politico

Trump Transition

Democrats in Disarray

Imperial Collapse Watch

Guillotine Watch

But How Will We Pay for It?: Modern Monetary Theory and Democratic Socialism Truthout (JZ).

Class Warfare

Inside the Amish town that builds U2, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swifts live shows Wired UK. Fun!

Quantum spooky action at a distance becoming practical Phys.org

Dont pirate or well mess with your Nest, warns East Coast ISP Engadget (DK). Once again, any product marketed using the word smart you should run a mile from.

iPhones and Children Are a Toxic Pair, Say Two Big Apple Investors WSJ

Antidote du jour:

Dundee, the sweetest collie whoever lived

Sept 1 2004, Jan 7, 2018

And a bonus antidote:

Duck landing on ice ? pic.twitter.com/bYjKEYzhSp  Nature is Amazing ? (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 6, 2018

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Yves here. Be sure to read to the later part of the article about the stunning conflict of interest at the Minerals Management Service, which among other things, oversees offshore drilling.

By Donald Boesch., Professor of Marine Science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Originally published at The Conversation; cross posted from DeSmogBlog

The Trump administration is proposing to ease regulations that were adopted to make offshore oil and gas drilling operations safer after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. This event was the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Eleven workers died in the explosion and sinking of the oil rig, and more than 4 million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists have estimated that the spill caused more than US$17 billion in damages to natural resources.

I served on the bipartisan National Commission that investigated the causes of this epic blowout. We spent six months assessing what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon and the effectiveness of the spill response, conducting our own investigations and hearing testimony from dozens of expert witnesses.

Our panel concluded that the immediate cause of the blowout was a series of identifiable mistakes by BP, the company drilling the well; Halliburton, which cemented the well; and Transocean, the drill ship operator. We wrote that these mistakes revealed such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry. The root causes for these mistakes included regulatory failures.

Now, however, the Trump administration wants to increase domestic production by reducing the regulatory burden on industry. In my view, such a shift will put workers and the environment at risk, and ignores the painful lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The administration has just proposed opening virtually all U.S. waters to offshore drilling, which makes it all the more urgent to assess whether it is prepared to regulate this industry effectively.

Donald Boesch

Separating Regulation and Promotion

During our commissions review of the BP spill, I visited the Gulf office of the Minerals Management Service in September 2010. This Interior Department agency was responsible for expeditious and orderly development of offshore resources, including protection of human safety and the environment.

The most prominent feature in the windowless conference room was a large chart that showed revenue growth from oil and gas leasing and production in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a point of pride for MMS officials that their agency was the nations second-largest generator of revenue, exceeded only by the Internal Revenue Service.

We ultimately concluded that an inherent conflict existed within MMS between pressures to increase production and maximize revenues on one hand, and the agencys safety and environmental protection functions on the other. In our report, we observed that MMS regulations were inadequate to address the risks of deepwater drilling, and that the agency had ceded control over many crucial aspects of drilling operations to industry.

In response, we recommended creating a new independent agency with enforcement authority within Interior to oversee all aspects of offshore drilling safety, and the structural and operational integrity of all offshore energy production facilities. Then-Secretary Ken Salazar completed the separation of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcementfrom MMS in October 2011.

Officials at this new agency reviewed multiple investigations and studies of the BP spill and offshore drilling safety issues, including several by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. They also consulted extensively with the industry to develop a revised a Safety and Environmental Management System and other regulations.

In April 2016, BSEE issued a new well control rule that required standards for design operation and testing of blowout preventers, real-time monitoring and safe drilling pressure margins. Prior to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the oil industry had effectively blocked adoption of such regulations for years.

About-face Under Trump

President Trumps March 28, 2017 executive order instructing agencies to reduce undue burdens on domestic energy production signaled a change of course. The American Petroleum Institute and other industry organizations have lobbied hard to rescind or modify the new offshore drilling regulations, calling them impractical and burdensome.

In April 2017, Trumps Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, appointed Louisiana politician Scott Angelle to lead BSEE. Unlike his predecessors  two retired Coast Guard admirals  Angelle lacks any experience in maritime safety. In July 2010 as interim Lieutenant Governor, Angelle organized a rally in Lafayette, Louisiana, against the Obama administrations moratorium on deepwater drilling operations after the BP spill, leading chants of Lift the ban!

Even now, Angelle asserts there was no evidence of systemic problems in offshore drilling regulation at the time of the spill. This view contradicts not only our commissions findings, but also reviews by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board and a joint investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department.

Fewer Inspections and Looser Oversight

On December 28, 2017, BSEE formally proposed changes in production safety systems. As evidenced by multiple references within these proposed rules, they generally rely on standards developed by the American Petroleum Institute rather than government requirements.

One change would eliminate BSEE certification of third-party inspectors for critical equipment, such as blowout preventers. The Chemical Safety Boards investigation of the BP spill found that the Deepwater Horizons blowout preventer had not been tested and was miswired. It recommended that BSEE should certify third-party inspectors for such critical equipment.

Another proposal would relax requirements for onshore remote monitoring of drilling. While serving on the presidential commission in 2010, I visited Shells operation in New Orleans that remotely monitored the companys offshore drilling activities. This site operated on a 24-7 basis, ever ready to provide assistance, but not all companies met this standard. BPs counterpart operation in Houston was used only for daily meetings prior to the Deepwater Horizon spill. Consequently, its drillers offshore urgently struggled to get assistance prior to the blowout via cellphones.

On December 7, 2017 BSEE ordered the National Academies to stop work on a study that the agency had commissioned on improving its inspection program. This was the most recent in a series of studies, and was to include recommendations on the appropriate role of independent third parties and remote monitoring.

Minor Savings, Major Risk

BSEE estimates that its proposals to change production safety rules could save the industry at least $228 million in compliance costs over 10 years. This is a modest sum considering that offshore oil production has averaged more than 500 million barrels yearly over the past decade. Even with oil prices around $60 per barrel, this means oil companies are earning more than $30 billion annually. Industry decisions about offshore production are driven by fluctuations in the price of crude oil and booming production of onshore shale oil, not by the costs of safety regulations.

BSEEs projected savings are also trivial compared to the $60 billion in costs that BP has incurred because of its role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Since then explosions, deaths, injuries and leaks in the oil industry have continued to occurmainly from production facilities. On-the-job fatalities are higher in oil and gas extraction than any other U.S. industry.

Some aspects of the Trump administrations proposed regulatory changes might achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency in safety procedures. But it is not at all clear that what Angelle describes as a paradigm shift will maintain a high bar for safety and environmental sustainability, as he claims. Instead, it looks more like a shift back to the old days of over-relying on industry practices and preferences.
On Tuesday 9 January 2018, the NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will meet the President of the Republic of Slovenia, H.E. Mr. Borut Pahor, at NATO Headquarters.

Media Advisory

13:45: Secretary General joint press point with the President  Main entrance

The press point will be streamed live on the NATO website in English, French and Russian.

Still and video images of the event will be available on the NATO website after the event.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)
(Natural News) Has Sharia law found its way into the United States, replacing American democracy? If you live in California and criticize Islam on Facebook, your words could be interpreted as harassment and you could be charged with serious misdemeanor crimes.

Thats what happened to one man from California who ranted on a pro-Islam Facebook page. In 2016, 41 year old Mark Feigin posted five messages criticizing Muslims on the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC) Facebook page. He wrote things like, Islam is dangerous and called out their ties to terror.

Instead of deleting the post, blocking Feigin, and moving on, the Islamic Center of Southern California felt deeply offended, saved the Facebook rant, and used it as evidence that would ultimately be used to charge Feigin with misdemeanors.

ICSC Communications Coordinator Kristin Stangas contacted authorities and shared Feigins messages. The messages include:

THE MORE MUSLIMS WE ALLOW INTO AMERICA THE MORE TERROR WE WILL SEE.

PRACTICING ISLAM CAN SLOW OR EVEN REVERSE THE PROCESS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION.

Islam is dangerous  fact: the more muslim savages we allow into america  the more terror we will see -this is a fact which is undeniable.

The Los Angeles Police Department took the Facebook matter seriously, arrested Feigin, and charged him under Cal. Penal Code  653m(b), which states: every person who, with intent to annoy or harass, makes repeated telephone calls or makes repeated contact by means of an electronic communication device  to another person is  guilty of a misdemeanor. Nothing in this subdivision shall apply to telephone calls or electronic contacts made in good faith or during the ordinary course and scope of business.

Its easy to type how you really feel and send it over the internet. You think youre safe, letting out your anger, as you sit behind a screen anonymously. But it doesnt matter how free you think you are. Powerful groups can find ways to manipulate the interpretation of the law to use your words against you in court. Ultimately the California Attorney General says the Facebook posts violated the law by making, repeated contact by means of an electronic communication device with the intent to annoy or harass. The Facebook posts were from 2016 and the trial began on January 2, 2018.

Feigin never committed any real crime and never threatened anybody. He was charged because the organization felt offended and complained to authorities that they were being harassed. If hurt feelings caused by online text can be used to charge someone, then practically anyone could be charged for anything they post on Facebook. Its easy to dwell on typewritten words and feel deeply offended. This happens all the time on Facebook. This is why former Facebook employees admit that Facebook is ripping society apart.

But what happens when an offended religious group uses the power of the law to charge people with crimes? Everyday people freely express their opinions about President Trump, calling him dangerous and other more explicit terms. Are Islamic groups a protected class of citizens? Threats are constantly blurted out online toward the President of the United States, but authorities arent trekking through neighborhoods, hunting down these people and charging them with misdemeanor crimes.

The question now is: If any organization feels annoyed by online ranting, could they use the law to charge that person with harassment?

Some of the most radical beliefs of Islam seek to destroy American democracy and culture and replace it with oppressive Sharia law. Is this case in California an open door for Islamic groups to assert dominion over American democracy and speech? Will Islamic groups begin to use American laws as weapons to silence opposing views online? Are other religious groups protected in this manner? Muslims should stand up to their religions most oppressive ideas of conquest and control, or risk losing their credibility as a peaceful religion altogether.

Sources include:

DailyCaller.com

NaturalNews.com
21 gas bottlers apply for NS certification

Twenty-one liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) bottlers have applied for Nepal Standard (NS) certification after the Nepal Bureau of Standards and Metrology began tightening the screws on plants delaying fulfilling safety requirements.
(Natural News) Cyber attacks on private schools significantly increased over the recent months, according to the chief executive of the Independent Schools Bursars Association. The authorities noted that hackers continue to breach vulnerable computer systems and access the personal information of parents whose data are stored on cloud-based apps. The hacked systems were then used to trick parents into paying for fake school fees, leeching them of thousands of pounds.

In one case, one parent was swindled by as much as $94,000 after being lured into a 10 percent early bird discount. Cybersecurity experts stated that schools were rendered vulnerable to cyber attacks after transitioning to Google for Education, a version of the cloud-based app suite Google Docs.

Ive had six cases recently from schools and three more from parents. Typically a schools admissions team is targeted with a phishing message, to which they fall victim. This could be purportedly from an organization such as an agent of the school. They use a [false]email of a person known to the school to send a shared documentwhich asks you to enter your username and password to view. Once they have that they can log into Google for Education as the school and access the administrators email, Neil Hare-Brown, a director at the digital investigations company Storm Guidance, said in a Brinkwire article.

The Metropolitan Police to the Independent Schools Council cautioned that the cyber attacks start with an email sent to the parents. The email indicates the latest payment details for school fees, the council said. According to the authorities, the email appears official and at times may be sent from the schools hacked email system. This, in turn, enables hackers to take hold of the new bank details and divert the school fees into their bank accounts. (Related: Security alert: Voice impersonators can trick voice recognition systems, according to research.)

All parents need to be cautious if you receive emails stating a change of payment detail or containing unexpected attachments. You should telephone the school on the usual number, not one contained within the email, and double check the validity of all information before making any payment, the council advised.

Heres how you can boost your online operations security

An article posted on the Daily Mail website listed five key tips for more secure online transactions. These pointers include:

Activating two-factor authentication  According to the article, most major online services support this practice.

This authentication process requires a login and password per usual, but also sends a unique numeric code to another device through various media including text message, email or a specialized app. Log in is refused if access to the other device was denied

This authentication process requires a login and password per usual, but also sends a unique numeric code to another device through various media including text message, email or a specialized app. Log in is refused if access to the other device was denied Encrypting the internet traffic  Subscribing to a virtual private network (VPN) service to encrypt digital communications may deter hackers as the practice makes it more challenging for them to intercept the encrypted data.

Increasing password strength  Long, strong and unique passwords are surefire repellent for hackers. Subscribing to a reputable password manager may help users identify strong passwords and have the data encrypted on their computers.

Keep tabs on the devices activity  According to the article, many computer programs and mobile apps continue running even when they are not in use. The entry added that most computers, phones, and tablets have a built-in activity monitor that enables users to keep track of devices memory use and network traffic in real time. This feature allows users to identify which apps are sending and receiving internet data, and close programs that shouldnt be running in the first place, the article concluded.

Avoiding suspicious hyperlinks, attachments  It is important to keep an eye out for suspicious hyperlinks or attachments in an email. The entry advised exercising caution in opening these attachments even when they appear to come from familiar sources, as users may never know if the sources email address had been compromised.

Sources include:
Katie Bond has joined the firm Amin Talati Upadhye as a partner in the Washington, D.C. office.

Focused on the industries of food and beverages, nutritional supplements, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, Amin Talati Upadhye provides full legal services for the lifecycle of products aimed at improving the populations health and wellness.

We are thrilled by the initial success of our Washington, D.C. office led by Ivan Wasserman, said Ashish Talati, a founding partner, and we plan to build on that success by strategically adding industry-leading professionals with the right skills and experience to support our clients and the industries we serve. We can think of no one that fits that description better than Katie Bond. With years of experience gained at leading law firms, she has become the go-to attorney for many of worlds most innovative food, nutritional supplement, drug, and cosmetic companies.

Recognized by Super Lawyers as a Washington, D.C. Rising Star and recommended in the US Legal 500 for her work in the Marketing & Advertising area, Katie not only regularly advises companies of all sizes on developing effective and compliant marketing campaigns, she also has considerable experience responding to FTC and state attorney general investigations, defending consumer class actions, and initiating and responding to self-regulatory challenges before the National Advertising Division (NAD) and the Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program (ERSP).

Amin Talatis broad client base in the food and drug space, and its sophisticated regulatory and intellectual property practices, make it an ideal platform for me and my clients, said Ms. Bond. I am honored to be joining this group of diverse and dedicated professionals, and in particular to helping Ivan continue to develop the office into a leader in Washington, D.C.s legal community."

For more information, visit our website at AminTalati.com.
The Philippines Coast-Guards selected OCEA for the supply of 5 boats at civil standards, with the associated logistic support services: 4 fast-patrol boats of 24 m Type OCEA FPB 72 MKII, 1 offshore patrol vessel of 84 m type OCEA OPV 270, cCrew and maintenance teams training, the maintenance of the vessels in operational conditions.

The Philippines Coast-Guards selected OCEA for the supply of 5 boats at civil standards, with the associated logistic support services: 4 fast-patrol boats of 24 m Type OCEA FPB 72 MKII, 1 offshore patrol vessel of 84 m type OCEA OPV 270, cCrew and maintenance teams training, the maintenance of the vessels in operational conditions.

OCEA FPB 72 MKII

This choice is the result of an international competition that highlighted the solutions developed by OCEA; that allow very strong reduction of the operational costs and of the CO2 emissions.

OCEA fast patrol boat FPB 72MKII (24 m) is a well-known model within the shipyard, who already delivered such units to Nigeria in 2012, to Suriname in 2013, and again to Nigeria in 2017.

OCEA OPV 270 MKII

OCEA OPV 270 offshore patrol vessel (84 m) is the outcome of 30 years of experience and permanent innovation in the field of aluminum design and shipbuilding. OCEA confirms its presence in the offshore patrol vessels (OPV) segment, initiated during the 2014 EURONAVAL exhibition by the presentation of its OPV range. OCEA has already delivered 60 m units to the Indonesian Navy in 2015 and to the Senegalese Navy in 2016.

These units will be built in the new facilities of OCEA shipyard in Les Sables dOlonne.

The transition to this new size of vessels represents a great performance for OCEA, who substantially invested in its production facilities and design capabilities in 2015.

The customer selected OCEA for the performances and operational capabilities of the vessels, fully adapted to Philippines coastguard requirements, thanks to its design department and its expertise in building aluminum vessels with demanding operational profiles.

Beyond these technical considerations, the advantages of OCEA solution were its competitive acquisition price as well as the operational cost of the vessel designed by OCEA, significantly lower than a steel vessel.

A less common selection criterion, but taking a significant turn: the Philippines, who signed the Paris Agreements, were seduced by the reduced environmental impact of OCEA solution.

The OCEA OPV 270, over 20 years of operation, will allow for a CO2 emission reduction of 20 400 tons, equivalent to approximately 40% reduction by comparison to a similar size steel vessel, for equal performance.

After the delivery of two 60 m oceanographic vessels to the Indonesian Navy, this new contract with the Philippines government sets firmly OCEA sales activities in Asia.

OCEA points out that this achievement was made possible thanks to the support of the French State, in particular BPI France, the committed French Administration (especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance), and also thanks to the strong involvement of BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole-LCL banks.

The vessels are scheduled for delivery in 2018 for the 4 FPB 72 and in 2019 for the OPV 270.
Border Patrol is closing the door on a program that allows loved ones living on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to reunite for three minutes by opening the barrier that separates them.

The head of Border Angels, an immigration advocacy group that works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to put on the annual event, announced the decision earlier this week.

"Opening the Door of Hope" has been held for the last six years at Friendship Park, an area between two border fences at Border Field State Park near south San Diego. During the event, Border Patrol opens a gate that seperates pre-selected loved ones living in separate countries and allows them to embrace, kiss and speak face-to-face. Last year 12 families were selected.

Director of Border Angels Enrique Morones said he met with Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott earlier this week to discuss several events the agency and the group coordinate on, including Opening the Door of Hope.

Morones said that Scott will not allow Opening the Door of Hope this year, but the organizations have coordinated on several other events planned for 2018.

The cross-border event came under scrutiny last month after it was discovered that one of men selected to participate in the cross border event  a U.S. citizen who used his three minutes to wed his international girfriend  had been charged with drug smuggling.

Brian Houston married Evelia Reyes, a Mexican national, in November.

At the time, Houston declined to explain why he was unable to go to Tijuana, but said the couple's attorney was trying to obtain a green card for Reyes to join him in the U.S.

A month after the wedding, a federal complaint shows Houston was unable to cross into Mexico because he surrendered his passport in March when he was released on bail after he was caught smuggling more than 120-pounds of heroin, meth and cocaine across the border. He pleaded guilty to three felony charges of importing a controlled substance.

The incident angered Border Patrol, but it is not clear if it had any influence on the cancellation of Opening the Doors of Hope.

CBP still allows families to see each other through a fortified fence at Friendship Park while remaining firmly in their countries. Morones said that events at Friendship Park like Immigration First Sundays, a day for immigrants to meet with a lawyer for consultations on various issues, and a Valentine's Celebration with music and flowers, will continue.
Southern California residents looking to go to Disneyland can once again do so at a discounted price.

The theme park on Monday once again began selling two-day and three-day tickets for Southern California residents, allowing them to save some dough when visiting Disneyland, Disney California Adventure or both.

From Monday through May 24, SoCal residents will be able to purchase multi-day tickets at the following discounted rates:

Two-Day Tickets

One park per day: $159

Park hopper ticket: $204

Three-Day Tickets

One park per day ticket: $199

Park hopper ticket: $244

Keep in mind that if you buy these tickets, you will have to show proof of residency, like a California ID, to get in. So go forth, purchase your tickets and have fun, you thrifty SoCal Mouseketeers.
The flu has hit California so hard this season, pharmacies have run out of medicine to treat it, emergency rooms are packed and the death toll is rising.

State health officials say that 27 people younger than 65 have died of the flu in California since October. That's compared to three the same time last year, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Health officials say there's no region of the state where people were being spared from the flu.

At UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, the emergency room saw more than 200 patients on at least one day, mostly because of the flu.

"The Northridge earthquake was the last time we saw over 200 patients," Ghurabi said, citing the 1994 disaster that killed dozens and injured thousands.

In San Bernardino and Riverside Counties east of Los Angeles, emergency rooms are so crowded that ambulances aren't immediately able to unload their patients, preventing them to respond to incoming 911 calls, said Jose Arballo Jr., spokesman for the Riverside County Department of Public Health.

And some hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area are limiting visitors under the age of 16 as a precaution, since young people can be more vulnerable to effects of the flu.

Medical experts say this year's flu season may be outpacing last year's because it's peaking earlier. The flu season is typically worst around February.

Though the flu killed three Californians by this time last year, 68 people had died from it by the end of February, according to state data.

Still, many doctors say the recent surge in flu cases have been unusually severe.

National health officials predict the flu vaccine may only be about 32 percent effective this year. But most people in California and the rest of the country are catching a particularly dangerous strain of influenza that the vaccine typically doesn't work well against.

"It tends to cause more deaths and more hospitalizations than the other strains," said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, Los Angeles County's interim health officer.

Meanwhile the preferred drug to treat the flu, known as Tamiflu, has been hard to find at many California pharmacies.

CVS spokeswoman Amy Lanctot said increased demand for Tamiflu in California may have led to some stores being temporarily out of stock. Other pharmacies reported that they were running low on the medicine or were out completely.

There isn't a national shortage of Tamiflu, suggesting that pharmacists' shelves were emptied this week by a sudden surge in demand, said Bob Purcell, spokesman for the San Francisco-based pharmaceutical company Genentech, which makes the drug.

Caroline Bringenberg was prescribed Tamiflu on Wednesday but the 25-year-old Los Angeles resident said her local CVS had run out of it, and her pharmacist told her all of the drugstores' supplies in the area had been depleted.

Bringenberg tried a nearby independent pharmacy but it also had run out.

"I've just sort of given up," Bringenberg said through sniffles. "I think honestly it would make me feel worse to be in the car driving all over town, so I've just opted for ibuprofen and DayQuil."

While Tamiflu doesn't eliminate influenza, it can lessen the severity of symptoms and how long they last. It works best when taken within two days of when patients start to feel sick.

For those who haven't gotten the flu, health officials recommend getting the vaccine, washing their hands often and avoiding close contact with anyone coughing or sneezing.
An actor who appeared in the popular Netflix series "13 Reasons Why" has been arrested for burglarizing North Bay residences where he previously worked as an elderly caregiver, according to police.

Bryan Box, 23, was taken into custody without incident on Dec. 29 at his residence in Vallejo, police said. He was booked into the Marin County Jail for burglary, theft by a caretaker of an elder and possession of stolen property.

Multiple North Bay police jurisdictions in October launched an investigation into burglaries that occurred at residences in Mill Valley, Tiburon and Greenbrae, according to police. It was later discovered that Box previously worked at those residences where he took care of the elderly.

A search warrant was executed on Nov. 7 at Box's Vallejo residence, and officials found property stolen during the burglaries, according to police. Box was arrested in December after an arrest warrant was served at his home.

Box's bail has been set at $250,000, according to police.
The fight over the body and possessions of apocalyptic cult leader Charles Manson has fragmented into at least three camps competing over an estate that could cash in on songs he wrote that were used by The Beach Boys and Guns N' Roses.

Manson, 83, died in November nearly a half-century after he orchestrated the 1969 killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and eight other people.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Monday said more information is needed to sort out at least two conflicting wills and claims by a purported son, grandson and pen pal who all seek control of an estate that includes commercial rights to his name, image and mementos that can fetch thousands of dollars from "murderabilia" collectors. Judge David Cowan scheduled a hearing on both issues for later this month.

"We think Manson's worth more than anyone realizes," said Mike Smith, a music agent for a man who claims Manson fathered him during an orgy. "There's a lot of money there."

The Jan. 26 hearing will seek to name an attorney to administer Manson's estate on behalf of purported grandson Jason Freeman, who claims to be the rightful next of kin. Court documents show Freeman is the son of the late Charles Manson Jr. and the grandson of Charles Manson and his first wife, Rosalie Willis.

That lineage is disputed by Matt Lentz, a Los Angeles-area musician who goes by the name Matthew Roberts. Lentz was adopted by an Illinois couple as a newborn.

Lentz plans to file a will Monday that Manson purportedly signed in January 2017 and gave to friend and memorabilia collector Ben Gurecki. It names Gurecki as executor and Lentz as beneficiary.

If valid, it could supersede a 2002 will filed in Kern County by longtime Manson pen pal Michael Channels that disinherits Manson's natural born children and names him as executor and heir. After this morning's hearing, Channels said he has a copy of Manson's will and that the cult leader left no property of any significant value. Channels said he has no financial motives in getting involved in the probate case and that he is not looking for attention. He said he only wants to see Manson buried in a place where spectators won't vandalize the gravesite.

"It's not about money," Channels said. "What I'm trying to do is put the man to rest."

Channels, who is representing himself, said he has tried to hire an attorney to help him in the probate proceedings, but no one has accepted the job.

"Half of them hang up on me," Channels said.

Attorney Alan Davis, who represents the Freeman bid, said he expected no final decision Monday in part because Judge Clifford Klein would first have to consolidate competing claims.

Lentz wants a DNA test of Manson's remains, which are still being held by the Kern County sheriff-coroner, to prove he is kin and Freeman is not.

JoAnne Lentz is among those who think her adopted son looks like Manson and has other similarities.

"Matthew's got long dark hair and he's a musician," she said. "Have you seen a picture of my Matthew? They look alike, but as far as any DNA (test), I don't know."

Matthew Lentz himself questions whether the will he possesses is valid.

"It looks pretty generic, like they got it off the internet or something," he said. "It didn't have the three witnesses that California requires, it only had one."

Manson also had a reputed son with Mary Brunner, an early member of his cult. Michael Brunner had no connection with Manson growing up and has severed ties and made no apparent claim to the estate. He did not return messages seeking comment.

The will filed by Channels purportedly disinherits both Brunner and Charles Manson Jr., who killed himself in 1993 after siring Jason Freeman.

Smith said he fears that Freeman only seeks to profit from his position and could put Manson's remains on display.

Celebrity probate attorney Adam Streisand, who is not involved in the case, said any royalties might instead go to relatives of Manson's victims, though their claims may have lapsed over the years.

Royalties from Guns N' Roses 1993 recording of a Manson song, "Look at Your Game, Girl," went to the son of one of his victims under a court order, Streisand said. Manson was also an acquaintance of Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in 1968, and the band recorded a variation of a Manson song under the title "Never Learn Not To Love."

Whomever controls the estate would be able the use Manson's image and have the power to authorize biographies or documentaries.

Freeman refused to say what he would do if he wins the court fight, other than to have the body cremated. He's saving further details for a documentary he's been filming since last year.

His bid is backed by Manson associate John Michael Jones, who said Manson refused to leave a will. Jones dismissed other claims to Manson's body or possessions as frauds.

"They're just looking for 15 minutes of fame," he said.

Freeman said he's waiting for a judge to sort it all out.

"I'm a former professional fighter," Freeman said. "I look at this like we're going into the 7th round of a 12-round fight. We're looking for the knockout punch."
A California Highway Patrol helicopter was struck several times by a green laser Sunday evening in Richmond, according to the CHP Oakland division.

At about 6:20 p.m., the helicopter was on patrol over the city of Richmond when the laser strikes occurred. Lasers are dangerous and harmful, and the person responsible could face federal and state charges, the CHP said.

The Federal Aviation Administration also could impose a fine of up to $11,000 per strike, the CHP said.

The laser strikes Sunday rerpresent the second such incident directed at CHP helicopters in the East Bay in less than a month.

The incident is under investigation.
NOTE: Watch the forum live here.

NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago have partnered with the Union League Club of Chicago and the Chicago Urban League to host the first televised 2018 Illinois Democratic Gubernatorial Forum.



The hour-long forum, broadcast from NBC Tower, begins at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 23, and will be moderated by NBC 5 Political Editor Carol Marin.



NBC 5 reporter Mary Ann Ahern and Telemundo Chicago reporter Karla Leal will take questions from the audience in the roundtable-conversation format.

"We are pleased to host the Illinois Democratic Candidates for Governor in this forum," said Frank Whittaker, NBC 5 station manager and vice president of news. "Our commitment to political coverage is unmatched in Chicago. We look forward to giving voters a look at where each candidate stands on important issues facing our state.

"Our main priority is to keep our Spanish-speaking viewers informed about news that affects their lives, said Diana Maldonado, Telemundo Chicago vice president of news. "The broadcast of this gubernatorial forum is certainly part of our commitment to the community we serve."

The forum can be seen live on NBC 5, on NBCChicago.com and the NBC Chicago app. It will be subtitled live in Spanish on Telemundo Chicago, TelemundoChicago.com and on the Telemundo Chicago app.



In 2015, NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago hosted the award-winning Chicago Mayoral Debate, and in 2014 both stations hosted The Republican Illinois Governor Candidate Forum.
3 die, 2 hurt in fires while keeping warm

Three people lost their lives and two others sustained injuries after being burnt while sitting around fire in Bardiya, Surkhet and Dhanusha districts in the past few days.
A doctor in Torrington hit some turbulence with American Airlines when one of his employees quit unexpectedly before an overseas charity mission.

For 17 years, the optometrist, Dr. Matthew Blondin and his wife, Audrey, have headed up a charity eye care mission to Nicaragua as part of the Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity (VOSH, CT).

"This is an opportunity for doctors to really go in and make a difference on people's lives," Blondin said.

But this year's trip hit a snag when Blondin bought an American Airlines ticket costing $1272.39 for a staff member who unexpectedly quit.

Blondin said he tried to get a refund but it was "impossible."

He said when the contacted American Airlines for a refund or transfer, they said, "Sorry, we dont credit money. We dont issue another ticket. Its only good for that particular person."

"It would be one thing if we were maybe on vacation, but this is part of a charity mission," Bronin said.

Frustrated with American Airlines, Blondin reached out to NBC Connecticut Responds.

A representative from the airline told NBC Connecticut that Blondins reservation was canceled and said they would also authorize a refund to his credit card, but it could take up to five days.

According to American Airlines, a non-refundable fare for a ticket can be changed, but the customer would have to pay the change fee. Regardless, American does not allow a name change from passenger to passenger.

In Blondins case, the airlines said they refunded the ticket amount as a gesture of goodwill.
California billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer announced Monday he will spend $30 million to get young voters to the polls to help Democrats in this year's midterm elections.

Steyer is a former hedge fund manager who has invested some of his wealth in an array of political causes, most notably fighting climate change. Forbes estimates his wealth at $1.6 billion.

Steyer has advocated for President Donald Trump's impeachment. He said he knows that the effort is making "some of our friends and allies in this city uncomfortable." But Steyer said that effort will continue.

He said his organization will deliver the book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" to all members of Congress this week. The book portrays the 45th president as a leader who doesn't understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides.

By my count, Donald Trump has committed at least eight impeachable offenses, Steyer said Monday. He said more than 4 million people have signed the online petition.

When asked if he would support Oprah, Steyer said his focus is on the midterms.

Steyer said he will also focus his financial clout on helping Democrats running for the House and Senate. He said Republicans won't cross a president who controls their base regardless of what he says or does.

"We now know that this partisan fight has becomes a fierce battle for the soul of America," Steyer said. "And we, the people, have to win this battle, and we don't just have to win, we have to run the table."

Steyer considered running for office, but says that's not where he can make the biggest difference. He is the founder of NextGen America, a liberal advocacy group. He is the main source of cash for a super PAC called the NextGen Climate Action Committee, which spent more than $90 million in the last election cycle.

Steyer said NextGen America helped register more than 20,000 voters in last year's Virginia elections. He credited the effort for helping Ralph Northam win election as governor, and he said the effort will expand to 10 states this year, including California, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. The organization is looking to register more than 250,000 voters this year.

Steyer has also spent $20 million on a campaign to impeach Trump. He was coy about how much more he would spend on that front. He said it would depend upon political events, but was confident of a greater investment.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California has called impeachment efforts a distraction and warned they could backfire against Democrats.

Michael Ahrens, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said, "Tom Steyer can light as much of his money on fire as he wants, but doesn't change that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi view him as a distraction. If Democrats' message for 2018 is a baseless impeachment threat that the majority of voters disagree with, they're going to lose."
A man is dead and a woman seriously injured after they stopped to help a driver whose vehicle was disabled in a hit-and-run crash Sunday night in Dallas, police said.

The two good Samaritans, a man identified as 38-year-old Michael Donnelly and 26-year-old Lyndsee Longoria, stopped their vehicles along southbound U.S. Highway 67 at Interstate 35E at about 11 p.m. to help the driver of a Ford Explorer move his vehicle off the road.



As the pair were helping move the Explorer, they were struck by a 19-year-old driving a Honda sedan who swerved to avoid hitting the unlit SUV.

Both victims were transported to the hospital, where Donnelly was pronounced dead. Longoria, officials said, was in stable condition.



Rich Donnelly, Michael's father, told NBC 5 Monday that while his son's death is tragic he was proud to learn that his son died a hero trying to help someone in distress.

Rich added that Michael joins three of his seven siblings who lived their lives as heroes.

One of Michael's sisters inspired many others when she fought a fatal brain tumor during her senior year at Arlington High School. More recently, two of his other sisters were at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire on the crowd from the Mandalay Bay hotel, injuring more than 500. Michael's sisters, according to their father, laid on top of two victims, protecting them with their own bodies, until help arrived.

"Wow. I'm so humbled. We have eight kids. I'm so humbled by what my four kids have done. They make me so proud. They make me so humble. It's unbelievable to think they did all this for someone else," said Rich Donnelly.

The driver of the Honda sedan who stopped at the crash is not expected to face any charges. Investigators said they have little to go on in the initial hit-and-run that led to the fatal crash and that no description of that driver or vehicle is available.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story identified Lyndsee Longoria as the girlfriend of Michael Donnelly. Longoria confirmed Tuesday morning that she was not Donnelly's girlfiend and did not know him, though she credits Donnelly with saving her life.



NBC 5's Allie Spillyards and Eline de Bruijn contributed to this report.


Update: Methodist Dallas Medical Center says they are no longer at "critical capacity" and has resumed receiving all patients in need of treatment. Below is the original article.



Methodist Dallas Medical Center says they at "critical capacity" and that all non-emergency patients are being re-routed to urgent care facilities or other hospitals so that they can continue to handle emergencies.



The increase in patient load is largely due to an influx of patients with the flu, the hospital said. Methodist Dallas Medical Center said they are still accepting trauma patients and that anyone who arrives at the hospital needing emergency treatment will receive treatment.

Methodist Dallas Medical Center released the following statement:

Consistent with federal and state laws, Methodist Dallas Medical Center is currently re-routing non-emergency patients due to high volumes of patients with flu-like symptoms. This measure is so we can still take care of emergency patients such as trauma, stroke, and those transferred by ambulance. We take this very seriously because we want to be able to treat anyone in need anytime.

During the period while Methodist Dallas is re-routing patients, we encourage anyone having non-emergent symptoms to seek care at an urgent care facility or through their primary care physician.

NBC 5 called several North Texas urgent care clinics Monday morning where wait times ranged from 30 minutes to four hours. People are urged to call ahead or schedule an appointment before going to their clinic of choice.



Eleven people in Dallas County have already died from the flu this season. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said flu season nationwide is far worse than what they saw last year at this time.

Left: Reported Flu Activity for the Week of Dec. 31, 2016 (Week 52); Right: Reported Flu Activity for the Week of Dec. 30, 2017 (Week 52)

Data: CDC

Last year, 12 states had widespread cases, but this year there are 46.



More than 400 people have died from the flu around the country.

While the flu shot isn't always effective, doctors said if you catch the flu and have had the shot the symptoms may be less severe.

Influenza Surveillance Report (Week Ending Jan. 27, 2018)

Click on each state for more information.

Data: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Nina Lin/NBC

Methodist Dallas Medical Center announced Sunday night that all non-emergency patients were currently being diverted to other hospitals due to an influx of patients with the flu.
Dallas police are investigating a shooting early Sunday morning that left a man dead.

Police responded at about 4 a.m. Sunday to a shooting in the 4300 block of Malcolm X Blvd. When they arrived, a man who had been shot multiple times was being transported to the hospital. The victim later died from his injuries.

Investigators believe the shooting was the result of a fight with another man. The suspect has not been identified.
Oprah Winfrey's acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the 75th Annual Golden Globes on Sunday resulted in a rallying cry for her to run for president.

But NBC sparked a backlash after a message posted on the network's Twitter account referred to Winfrey as "OUR president." The network deleted the tweet Monday morning, saying the message was posted by a "third party," had been in reference to a joke from host Seth Meyers' monologue and was "not meant to be a political statement."

Winfrey's Cecil B. DeMille Award acceptance speech was a full-throated tribute to the women and men who support the #MeToo Movement.

"It will be because of a lot of magnificent women... and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when no body ever has to say 'me too' again," Winfrey said.

She expressed homage to Recy Taylor, a black woman from Alabama who was kidnapped and raped by six white men in the 1940s. Taylor never saw justice and died just 10 days ago. Rosa Parks served as her appointed caseworker.

Winfrey said in honor of all women and men who've experienced abuse that "speaking your truth is the most powerful tool you all have."

Reese Witherspoon, Winfrey's co-star in "A Wrinkle In Time," introduced Winfrey and said her hugs could end all wars.

Calls for Winfrey to run for president echoed on social media. And Winfrey's partner, Stedman Graham, told The Los Angeles Times that a potential presidential run would be "up to the people."

"She would absolutely do it," he was quoted as saying.

Oprah Winfrey is giving her State of the Union address at the Golden Globes. #GoldenGlobes #Oprah  Serema W. (@SeremaW) January 8, 2018

Well before Winfrey's speech, NBC had tweeted this during Sunday's broadcast: "Nothing but respect for OUR future president. #GoldenGlobes"

https://twitter.com/nbc/status/950172700625915904

The tweet on the network's account came in the wake of jokes by Meyers about the possibility of Winfrey running for office.

"Oprah Winfrey is receiving the Cecil. B. DeMille award tonight. What a tremendous honor for Cecil B. DeMille," he said. "And Oprah, while I have you, in 2011, I told some jokes about our current president at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Jokes about how he was unqualified to be president. And some have said that night convinced him to run. So if thats true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president. You do not have what it takes.

Pointing at actor Tom Hanks, Meyers said, "you will never be vice president. You are too mean and unrelatable."

NBC's tweet drew criticism from some prominent conservatives, including Donald Trump Jr., who called it another example of media bias against his father, President Donald Trump.

In case anyone had any doubts about where the media stands this should take care of it. The bias against @realDonaldTrump is now so obvious they have simply given up hiding it.



Can you trust anything they say at this point?



Americans see the truth in job #s & in their wallets! https://t.co/uu4KbW82UO  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 8, 2018

In deleting the tweet on Monday, NBC said in a pair of messages that it was "not meant to be a political statement."
The Trump Administration has presented its most detailed request for the president's border wall proposal  asking Congress for nearly $18 billion for a wall expansion over 10 years.

The funds would be used to create a total of 970 miles of barrier between the United States and Mexico by September 2027, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the matter.

Another $15 billion has been requested for technology, personnel and roads. It amounts to an additional $33 billion in spending for security along the southern U.S. border.

One local U.S. Customs and Border Patrol union leader backs the plan.

From the perspective of a border patrol agent, a wall and other physical barriers are very helpful for us doing our jobs, said Joshua Wilson, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council Local 1613.

Most of the people that will tell you a border wall doesnt work, have zero border security experience, Wilson added.

The new funding proposal would add 5,000 new border patrol agents and 3,500 border inspectors and other personnel, the U.S. official said.

Immigrant rights advocates argue there is already an excessive security presence in San Diego.

Its just an outlandish amount of money that is being spent on policies to enforce the border, which have failed, said Pedro Rios, Director of American Friends Services Committee in San Diego.

The President and the Administration need to hear what the border communities have to say about this, Rios added.

The financial plan for a border wall comes as lawmakers debate protections for undocumented young people known as Dreamers. Any attempt at a compromise on immigration reform in the coming year will likely come with a requirement that more money be spent on border security.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has asked to meet with the four U.S. Attorneys who prosecute federal law in the state to gauge whether or not they plan on enforcing federal marijuana laws.

"I've reached out to all four to sit down with them... because we'd like to know how each of the four will intend to move forward with this new policy from US DOJ."

Becerra was referring to a memo released last week from US Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicating his office would "enforce the law" when it comes to marijuana. Sessions rescinded an Obama-era policy of not enforcing federal marijuana laws in states where voters had made it legal to consume, either for medical or recreational use.

California's chief law enforcement officer says the state would take legal action if needed to protect the will of the voters following passage of a 2016 ballot measure legalizing marijuana.

"I would encourage everyone in the state of California including the 400 people who have now gotten a license and registered to partake in our new industry to do it the right way... We are moving forward."

Becerra made the comments on NBC4 Sunday morning.

The state has filed several dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration over various regulatory disputes, marijuana being just one that reignited last week.

Becerra said that opening up of federal land offshore for oil drilling is a "non-starter" and was dismissive of a condemnation over California's new "sanctuary state" law by the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE Director Thomas Homan said the state was going to see "a lot more" customs and border patrol officers. "If the politicians don't want to protect their communities then ICE will," he told Fox News.

"We can't stop the federal government from doing what the constitution gives them the right to do," Becerra said on the program. "We believe it is better to unite families rather than separate them."
What to Know Jan. 8 and 9, 2018

Participating California Pizza Kitchens around California

Dine in or take out, mention the fundraiser to your server, and 20% will go to the foundation

Giving heartfelt support to an organization that works to "...support those on the front lines and aid communities throughout California before, during, and after the alarm" is as straightforward and simple to do as visiting the California Fire Foundation site and making a donation.

There are also appreciation nights at Dodger Stadium, too, and other regional events that help the foundation in its mission to give "...emotional and financial assistance to families of fallen firefighters, firefighters, and the communities they protect."

And an event that's incredibly timely and helpful to many Golden State communities, communities that weathered the devastating fires in the fall and early winter of 2017, is happening as the second week of January begins. It's a California Fire Foundation fundraiser at participating California Pizza Kitchens throughout California, and it is happening all day long on both Monday, Jan. 8 and Tuesday, Jan. 9.

How to join in? Go to your local CPK (if they're participating; a quick call will confirm), order your favorite pizza or salad or any other menu item, and then tell your server that you'd like to play a part in the fundraiser.

What happens then? Twenty percent of your bill will go to supporting the foundation.

This is good for take out, too, and delivery, if you have your food delivered through CPK (and not a third party, do note). Just be sure to mention the foundation fundraiser when you order.

Beverages are included, too, in the ultimate donation amount on your bill. Just keep in mind that CPK airport locations aren't on the participant list, nor are those eateries located at universities.

How to help and show your dedication to this great organization ASAP? You can give at the California Fire Foundation site right now, or find other meaningful ways to get involved with an organization that bravely serves us all.
Holiday Ice Rinks to Bow Out: Have you taken a turn or twenty around the cold, flat surface at Pershing Square or ICE at Santa Monica? They're both in their final days for the 2017-2018 pop-up, under-the-stars skating season. Others have already closed, from LA Live to Irvine Spectrum, so get to 5th and Arizona in Santa Monica or the downtown hub, tie on those blades, and give the wintry pursuit some love. They're keeping weekday hours, too, so visit on a Tuesday, or a Thursday, if you like, but do go before Jan. 15 (the last day for both).

California Pizza Kitchen Fundraiser: Dine at a CPK on Monday, Jan. 8 or Tuesday, Jan. 9 and mention to your server that you'd like 20% of your check to go to helping the California Fire Foundation. This is good for take-out, too, and it is happening around the state, at participating locations. Thinking of doing dinner out on one of those days? There's a way to get your big salad or comfort-food-y apps and lend some love to our neighbors around California, too.

Canter's Deli 70th Anniversary: A certain Fairfax institution is marking seven amazing decades of piled-high sandwiches and perfectly pleasing pies and some of the best black and white cookies around. How? By offering a pastrami or veggie reuben for 70 cents (yes, as in seven dimes) on Tuesday, Jan. 9. There's a limit of one per customer, and you'll want to dine-in for this one. Will it be a popular, bustling day at this avenue icon? Is a pastrami sandwich filling?

Disney's 'Aladdin' Opens: Is "A Whole New World" your favorite song ever from an animated feature? You wouldn't be alone, for that tune remains high in the pantheon of great Disney ditties. Now imagine seeing it performed live on stage, at the Pantages in Hollywood, along with all of the other songs and great moments from the tale. It's a production that's been getting buzz all over, and now it flies, like a carpet, into Tinseltown beginning on Wednesday, Jan. 10.

An Evening with... Rian Johnson: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art welcomes the director of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" for a roving chat at the museum's Bing Theatre on Thursday evening, Jan. 11. "American Graffiti" will screen, a movie that "... had a formative impact" on Mr. Johnson, so count on the discussion to spotlight the work of George Lucas before he made "Star Wars." Tickets are $25 each for the general public; details here.
Demonstrations, strikes go on

Demonstrations and strikes continued in the districts of Parsa, Dhankuta and Doti, where locals are up in arms demanding that their areas should be declared the capitals of their respective provinces.
Rain spread across Southern California Monday as the region's first major storm of winter prompted evacuations.

Storm Photos: Send Us Your Weather Images

Morning showers made for a wet drive and the first rainfall in months for a region locked in a dry spell and still recovering from December wildfires, including the largest on record in California. Evacuations have been ordered for communities below hillsides charred by the Thomas fire due to the increased risk of mudslides and flooding. The fire, which is 92 percent contained, has scorched nearly 282,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Residents of Montecito, Summerland and Carpinteria who were evacuated because of flames in December were ordered to leave again because rains could wash dirt and debris down into neighborhoods.

By early afternoon, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced mandatory evacuations for the Kagel Canyon, Lopez Canyon and Little Tujunga Canyon areas due to their susceptibility to mudslides because of the recent wildfires.

Showers were scattered throughout the areas early Monday. Wet conditions are possible through Tuesday night.

"We're seeing those pre-frontal showers," said NBC4 forecaster Shanna Mendiola. "Rain is expected to really pick up as we go into tonight."

The wet and windy system moving ashore Monday will bring 2 to 4 inches to coast and valley areas. Up to 6 inches of are possible in Los Angeles County hillside areas.

Snow could make for treacherous driving conditions in mountain areas early Tuesday. Expect 12 to 18 inches at the 8,000-foot level, 3 to 6 inches at 6,000 feet. Blizzard conditions are possible on the 5 Freeway Grapevine stretch north of Los Angeles.

The storms come after a 10-month dry spell in Southern California following torrential rains in January and February of last year. In 2017, downtown Los Angeles experienced its driest March 1 through Dec. 31 since 1878, with only .69 of an inch of rainfall.

In Northern California, a flash flood watch has been issued and rainfall the next two days could trigger mudslides in areas devastated by wildfires in October. A storm moved in to the San Francisco Bay Area early Monday, snarling traffic during the morning commute and causing several accidents. No major injuries have been reported.

The flash flood watch is in effect from noon Monday to 6 a.m. Tuesday and officials in Santa Rosa, one of the areas hardest hit by last year's wildfires, said crews are standing by in case they are needed.

A winter weather advisory was issued for portions of the Sierra Nevada Mountains because higher than usual snow levels are expected Tuesday. Travelers should be wary of slippery roads, gusty winds and low visibility.
A 17-year-old is dead following a shooting in Homestead.

According to Miami-Dade Police, they responded to a call about a shooting shortly after 5 p.m.

The victim, Jatavious Williams, 17, was at a park located at 600 Southwest 14th Avenue, when three unknown men approached him and shot and killed him.

Williams was pronounced dead on the scene.

An officer sustained minor unrelated injuries during the incident.

Superintendent of Miami-Dade Public Schools Alberto Carvalho took to social media to express his disdain for the ongoing gun violence occurring in South Florida.

Winter Break began with the murder of a teen and is now ending with the same kind of tragedy - just one day after another teen was shot to death in his neighborhood. This is beyond unacceptable, it threatens the very decency that holds our community together. #Enough  Alberto M. Carvalho (@MiamiSup) January 8, 2018

Police are still investigating this crime.
The Trump administration said Monday it is ending special protections for Salvadoran immigrants, an action that could force nearly 200,000 to leave the U.S. by September 2019 or face deportation.

El Salvador is the fourth country whose citizens have lost Temporary Protected Status under President Donald Trump. They have by far been the largest beneficiaries of the program, which provides humanitarian relief for foreigners whose countries are hit with natural disasters or other strife.

Salvadorans will have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States or, if eligible, file the necessary paperwork to remain in the U.S. legally, a senior administration official told reporters on a call previewing the announcement. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen faced a Monday deadline whether to grant an extension.

Nielsen, who is tasked with making the decision, told The Associated Press last week that short-term extensions are not the answer.

"Getting them to a permanent solution is a much better plan than having them live six months, to 12 months to 18 months," she said in an interview, referring to the uncertainty of short-term extensions.

A decision to force the Salvadorans back to their native country would send shivers through parts of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and other metropolitan areas that are home to large numbers of Salvadorans, who have enjoyed special protection since earthquakes struck the Central American country in 2001. Many have established deep roots in the U.S., starting families and businesses over decades.

Furthermore, TPS does not provide beneficiaries with a path to lawful permanent residence or citizenship. However, a U.S. citizen can petition for a family member who is a TPS recipient to become a lawful permanent resident. According to the USCIS, a husband or wife can petition for their spouse, parents can petition for their children and children over the age of 21 may petition for parents or siblings. TPS recipients may also be eligible to apply for a Green Card as an immigrant worker sponsored by an employer or as a Special Immigrant, such as a member of a religious denomination coming to the U.S. to work for a nonprofit religious organization, among other paths.

Ending the protections would also represent a serious challenge for El Salvador, a country of 6.2 million people whose economy depends on remittances from wage-earners in the U.S.

Over the last decade, growing numbers of Salvadorans - many coming as families or unaccompanied children - have entered the United States illegally through Mexico, fleeing violence and poverty.

In September 2016, the Obama administration extended protections for 18 months, saying El Salvador suffered lingering harm from the 2001 earthquakes that killed more than 1,000 people and would be unable to absorb such a large wave of people returning.

Immigration advocates have argued that the conditions in El Salvador are still too violent and impoverished for those on temporary protected status to return.

A senior administration official said the Trump administration did not consider the gang-related violence in El Salvador when deciding to end the protected status, only that the country has recovered from the 2001 earthquakes.

Nielsen said Monday that damage inflicted by a 2001 earthquake in the Central American country didn't justify another temporary extension. She says that El Salvador has received significant international aid and that much of the country's infrastructure is rebuilt.

Homeland Security also said more than 39,000 Salvadorans have returned home from the U.S. in two years, demonstrating El Salvador's capacity to absorb people. It said the 18-month delay would give Congress time to develop a legislative change if it chooses, while also giving Salvadorans and their government time to prepare.



El Salvador's President Salvador Sanchez Ceren spoke at length by phone with Nielsen Friday to renew his request to extend the status to allow more time for Congress to deliver a long-term fix for those covered to stay in the U.S.

The decision comes amid intensifying talks between the White House and Congress on an immigration package that may include protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the country as children and were temporarily shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program. Trump said in September that he was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals but gave Congress until March to act.

President Donald Trump is expected to host a bipartisan group of senators at the White House this week to try to hash out a deal.

The U.S. created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to provide a haven from countries affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war and other disasters. It currently shields nearly 320,000 people from 10 countries. There are nearly 440,000 beneficiaries from the 10 countries, including 263,000 from El Salvador  but many of those people have obtained legal status in other ways.

The benefit, which includes work authorization, can be renewed up to 18 months at a time by the Homeland Security secretary. Critics say it has proven anything but temporary  with many beneficiaries staying years after the initial justification applies.

In November, Nielsen's predecessor, acting Secretary Elaine Duke, ended protections for Haitians, requiring about 50,000 to leave or adjust their legal status by July 22, 2019, and for Nicaraguans, giving about 2,500 until Jan. 5, 2019. She delayed a decision affecting more than 50,000 Hondurans, forcing a decision on Nielsen.

Last year, the Trump administration extended status for South Sudan and ended it for Sudan. Other countries covered are Nepal, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
What to Know Pi Delta Psi was banned from the state of Pennsylvania for 10 years and ordered to pay a $110,000 fine in the death of Chun "Michael" Deng

Deng, a freshman at Manhattan's Baruch College, died in 2013 during a hazing ritual in the Poconos

Four men will also be sentenced Monday in the death of the 19-year-old

A national fraternity was banned from Pennsylvania for 10 years and ordered to pay a fine of more than $110,000 as it was sentenced Monday for its role in the death of a 19-year-old pledge during a 2013 hazing ritual.

The judge and a prosecutor slammed Pi Delta Psi for calling itself a victim of rogue fraternity members, saying the organization tolerated and even encouraged hazing for years leading up to the death of Baruch College freshman Chun "Michael" Deng.

"It's the epitome of a lack of acceptance of responsibility. It's their rituals and functions that led us here today," said Monroe County Assistant District Attorney Kim Metzger said in court.

Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American cultural fraternity founded in 1994, has 25 chapters in 11 states, including one at Penn State University that will now have to be disbanded.

Four defendants who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and other charges will be sentenced later Monday.

A grand jury said fraternity members at Baruch, a campus of the City University of New York, physically abused Deng, and then tried to cover it up as the 19-year-old lay dying in their rented house in the Pocono Mountains. Police charged 37 people with crimes ranging from aggravated assault to hazing to third-degree murder.

His mother wrote in a statement delivered at Monday's sentencing hearing that "I feel like there's a cat clawing and scratching at my heart, hurting me persistently and relentlessly. I wake up and I pray for deliverance."



His mother wrote in a statement delivered at Monday's sentencing hearing that "I feel like there's a cat clawing and scratching at my heart, hurting me persistently and relentlessly. I wake up and I pray for deliverance."

Pi Delta Psi was convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a trial. In a written statement, Pi Delta Psi said its now-disbanded Baruch chapter had brought "shame and dishonor" to the national fraternity.

The fraternity also called itself "in part a victim," which brought a rebuke from Monroe County President Judge Margherita Patti-Worthington.

"I would never label the national fraternity as a 'victim,'" said the judge, who faulted the fraternity's board for allowing the hazing rituals to persist.

Pi Delta Psi's attorney, Wes Niemoczynski, argued that the organization had developed a "no excuses" hazing policy before Deng's death, but he said the policy worked on an honor system and proved to be inadequate.

The fraternity's "Crossing Over" initiation rituals "involved some physicality, but they certainly did not involve the level of physicality, the level of inhumanity, and the depravity of the individuals who are also coming before the court," he said.
What to Know Someone stole a police SUV outside Hoboken Terminal in New Jersey and drove it into the terminal doors

Law enforcement officials said they're investigating whether the man, who was seen checking car doors, was intoxicated at the time

No one was injured, but the terminal's entryway sustained significant damage

A man has been arrested after he allegedly stole an NJ Transit Police Department vehicle and crashed into a waiting area lobby at Hoboken Terminal on Monday morning.

Law enforcement officials told News 4 they're looking into whether the suspect who stole and repeatedly smashed the K-9 unit SUV into the waiting hall near the terminal's ferry slip about 8 a.m. was intoxicated at the time of the theft.

The suspect, identified as 46-year-old Santiago Brito-Avalos, a Mexican national, arrived at Hoboken Terminal from Suffern at about 8 a.m., officials said. He was spotted on surveillance footage checking car doors until he found one that was unlocked. He found a spare set of keys in that unlocked K-9 vehicle, and he drove towards the ferry slip and crashed.

He tried to drive away, but two NJ Transit police officers approached and tried to open the door. When he locked it, the officers broke through the window on the passenger side and apprehended him, officials said.

The police dog assigned to the SUV wasn't in the vehicle at the time, officials said.

Photos posted to social media show the SUV crashed into the doors of the waiting hall with a door ajar. Several officers could be seen around the vehicle, and the area was cordoned off with police tape.

"Couldn't enter Hoboken terminal waiting room and was a little confused because it looked fine, then got around to the ferry terminal and saw this," said one Twitter user.

No one was hurt in the crash on a heavily traveled pedestrian walkway amid the morning rush.

"There was a huge bang noise, but then we heard it again," said Evelyn Soto, a New York Waterway employee at the terminal at the time of the crash.

New York Waterway boat captain Craig Hygus said it was a miracle no one was hurt.

"The place was packed with people from the PATH system and the traffic was very, very heavy," he said.

Brito-Avalos was taken into custody by NJ Transit police at the scene and was to be remanded at Hudson County Jail in Kearny. He's facing charges of causing or risking widespread injury, theft of moveable property, burglary, auto burglary and impersonating an officer.

Authorities say it appears to have been a crime of opportunity. There's no evidence Brito-Avalos was trying to harm anyone, and authorities are investigating a history of mental illness, an NJ Transit spokeswoman says.

Ferry service was not affected by the situation. But it came on a morning where NJ Transit and PATH, which both also run service in and out of the terminal, both experienced significant delays and service suspensions.

NJ Transit spokeswoman Nancy Snyder said the station's ticket windows were closed and that a train on track 8 was being used as a temporary waiting room and restroom. The entryway to the waiting room sustained significant damage in the crash, she said.
What to Know The Port Authority warned of possible fresh delays at JFK Airport on Monday after a nightmare weekend of delays

A water pipe break, a plane collision and a man allegedly carrying a loaded gun created a "meltdown" after a blizzard caused pileup delays

58 flights coming to or leaving from the airport were already delayed or cancelled as of early Monday morning

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said Monday it will investigate the water pipe break that added to the weather-related delays that caused a nightmare weekend at Kennedy Airport and will "hold all responsible parties accountable" -- just as passengers struggle to hunt down unclaimed baggage.

The agency said there were still some delays on Monday, the day after a water pipe that feeds a sprinkler system in the privately operated Terminal 4 broke, causing water to flood the terminal and significantly disrupt operations.

Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton said investigators want to determine "why an internal pipe was not weather protected and whether any other failures contributed to this disruption."

"We intend to identify what went wrong, why it went wrong, where there were failures of communication and coordination, and we intend to fix it," said Cotton.

The pipe break sent about three inches of water gushing onto the floor of the terminal. Video shows streams cascading from a ceiling and people slogging through pools of water.

Power to the affected areas was temporarily shut off for safety reasons and additional staffing and busing operations were deployed to assist travelers, the Port Authority said.

The situation added to the misery piled on travelers after a winter storm blasted New York on Thursday. Passengers were kept on planes and waited hours to retrieve luggage as flights were delayed and canceled, and a backup to get to terminal gates built up.

Cotton said Monday, "Gates were not made available to inbound international flights in a timely way, and the question on the table is why."

We are sharing a gate with another airline, and they have just cancelled there flight, causing the disturbance and the police being called. Our flight is operating and our teams are now moving our customers through the gate so they can board our aircraft. ^RM  Virgin Atlantic (@VirginAtlantic) January 7, 2018

Others reported waiting for hours for luggage, only to see their flight numbers disappear from baggage claim boards. At least one NBC employee who arrived at the airport early Sunday said that an employee handed out pieces of paper for passengers to file a report and were told to leave a message on a voicemail inbox that was already full.

Another traveler, Rosemary Owuo, told News 4 she was told to leave her luggage at the terminal after Sunday's chaos, and airport employees told her she'd have to wait two weeks to get them back.

"I couldn't wait two weeks," she said. "There are important things in the bags."

Cotton said Monday the Port Authority has directed the airlines and terminal operators to "immediately expedite return luggage to passengers," and that customers of domestic airlines -- Delta in particular -- will have all baggage on way to customers by the end of the day.

Also looking like power has been lost in the terminal too. Some Delta flights are diverting away from #JFK due to the water main break pic.twitter.com/058IPY7ZZd  Alex (@Airline_Alex) January 7, 2018

Wow! Total meltdown at #JFK after a power main break led to a power outage and no luggage for anyone #welcometonewyork @Delta pic.twitter.com/oHUAq0TULu  bubbly&bella (@bubblyandbella) January 7, 2018

International airlines have committed to have baggage reunited by passengers in New York City by Tuesday morning, said Cotton.

In a statement released before the water pipe break, the Port Authority said Saturday's cold "created a cascading series of issues for the airlines and terminal operators."

"These included frozen equipment breakdowns, difficulties in baggage handling, staff shortages and heavier than typical passenger loads," the statement said.

Also among the issues: two planes collided on the tarmac and a man was arrested with a loaded, stolen gun while going through security.
Sen. Charles Schumer is urging President Donald Trump to sign legislation that would allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection to buy portable screening equipment to detect the powerful opioid fentanyl before it enters the United States.

Schumer said Sunday that the bill that passed both houses of Congress last year will help ensure that illicit narcotics "can be quickly detected, identified and seized on the spot."

The New York Democrat says he wants Kennedy Airport to be among the first locations to get the new high-tech drug scanners because it is a major port of entry.

Fentanyl is a deadly synthetic opioid that can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. The primary source of fentanyl is outside of the United States, in Mexico or China.
President Donald Trump's legal team is in discussions with FBI investigators over what a possible interview with special counsel Robert Mueller's team might look like, three people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

One option for the interview being discussed is written responses to questions instead of a formal sit-down, sources said. One person with direct knowledge of the discussions described them as preliminary and ongoing.

Two of Trump's lawyers and a spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment to NBC News.

Justice Department veterans suggested that Mueller would want to interview the president directly, with former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Chuck Rosenberg saying that prosecutors "want answers directly from witnesses, not from their lawyers. The odds of prosecutors agreeing to written responses are somewhere between infinitesimally small and zero."
One of three men who forced their way into a Virginia apartment accidentally shot himself, according to the Alexandria Police Department.

Investigators said the men forced their way into an apartment in the 3800 block of Executive Avenue around 1 a.m. Monday morning. They said the men were armed with knives and a firearm.

After demanding and receiving valuables, one of the men unintentionally shot in the lower body, and all three men fled the scene.

Police said the victims were not injured, and they are still investigating the case.
A Prince George's County, Maryland, man with dementia who has been missing from the Beltsville area for nearly a week amid freezing weather may have been picked up on Route 1 and dropped off in a town in Anne Arundel County, police say.

Daniel DeHaven -- a 65-year-old man who is nonverbal -- was last seen at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at a Costco store on the 10900 block of Baltimore Avenue in Beltsville.

Prince George's County police said on Sunday that a driver may have picked up DeHaven while he was walking on Route 1 and dropped him off in the 800 block of Annapolis Road in Gambrills. Police are telling people to lookout for DeHaven in that area.

A group of 200 volunteers who organized online searched neighborhoods in the area on Saturday and headed back out on Sunday. They asked anyone with outdoor surveillance cameras to check the footage to see if anyone with DeHaven's description appears.

To get involved in the search, visit the Help Us Find Danny Francis DeHaven Facebook page or email finddannyfrancisdehaven@gmail.com.

DeHaven's family hopes he found someplace warm to rest and has been there.

"We're just trying to stay focused on keeping hope going, and focusing on the search," DeHaven's son, Kevin, said.

"We're not going to stop, because he wouldn't stop," Kevin DeHaven said. "If it were any of us, he wouldn't stop."

Police and volunteers have been searching for Daniel DeHaven around the clock despite blustery temperatures.

"The snow that's coming and the dipping temperatures are not on our side," Prince George's County Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Donelan said Wednesday.

Police in Greenbelt, Laurel and Montgomery County, as well as federal officials, are helping search for Daniel DeHaven.

Daniel DeHaven, who goes by Danny, did not have identification with him when he disappeared.

"He's a kind man. He's approachable. If you see him, he's not able to communicate, necessarily, but if you call out 'Danny,' he'll know his name and most likely, you'll be greeted by a smile," his son said.

Police received a tip that a man meeting Daniel DeHaven's description was seen in downtown Silver Spring, but they were unable to find him.

Daniel DeHaven is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 175 pounds. He has brown eyes and partially gray hair, police said.

He was last seen wearing a gray hat, black coat and blue jeans.

Anyone with information on Daniel DeHaven's whereabouts is asked to call police immediately at 301-699-2601.
Dr KC begins 14th hunger strike

Dr Govinda KC, a senior orthopedic surgeon at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH), has begun his 14th hunger strike from 4pm on Monday demanding the resignation of Chief Justice Gopal Parajuli.
An 18-year-old woman seeking to avenge the killing of her boyfriend pleaded guilty to stabbing the 15-year-old girl she believed was responsible 13 times in a brutal killing that was recorded on cellphone video and shown in court.

Some kids are prodigies at the violin and some kids are prodigies at violence, Fairfax County Commonwealths Attorney Ray Morrogh said. This is a prodigy at violence.



Venus Romero Iraheta's guilty plea came on the one-year anniversary of Damaris Alexandra Reyes Rivas' death. Iraheta is one of 10 young people charged in Reyes Rivas' death.

She tortured her and then she told her, I'll see you in hell, and made sure the victim understood what her full name was, Morrogh said. That's just a level of cruelty even I'm not used to after almost 35 years in this business.

Iraheta told investigators she stabbed the girl 13 times and sliced off a tattoo, according to testimony.

"Just pure evil," Morrogh said. "To torture to death a 15-year-old girl, it staggers the imagination."



Reyes Rivas left her home in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Dec. 10, 2016. She had told her mother she was being threatened by gang members at school.

The night of Jan. 8, 2017, Iraheta and nine other young people allegedly took Reyes Rivas to an area near Lake Accotink Park.

They then assaulted and interrogated her about the recent murder of Christian Sosa Rivas, whose body was found Jan. 12 along the Potomac River in Dumfries, Virginia, police said. Sosa Rivas was Iraheta's boyfriend.

The deadly attack on Reyes Rivas was recorded, and the video included footage of her being tortured and stabbed. The video was shown Monday during Iraheta's hearing, as the victim's family wiped away tears.

They recorded the video to send to MS-13 leaders in El Salvador with hopes of being promoted in the gang, Morrogh said.

"It's kind of like a trophy they take," he said. "They show it off to the other gang members."



Investigators portrayed Iraheta as bent on revenge and wanting to inflict some of the fatal wounds herself.

The FBI special agent who questioned Iraheta after her arrest testified that Iraheta blamed Reyes Rivas for luring her boyfriend to his death. The night they took Reyes Rivas, the group forced her to stand in the snow with no shirt or shoes so she would "feel as much pain as Christian."

Iraheta faces a maximum of life in prison plus 20 years when she's sentenced May 25. Morrogh plans to seek a lengthy sentence.

Seven of the 10 people charged in the case have been convicted or pleaded in guilty, including three other suspects who pleaded guilty in October. Cindy Blanco Hernandez, 19, pleaded guilty to two counts of abduction by force and the abduction of another juvenile female in early January. Aldair Miranda Carcamo, 18, pleaded guilty to gang participation and two counts of abduction by force. Emerson Fugon Lopez, 17, pleaded guilty to abduction in connection with Alexandra's death and gang participation.

They are set to be sentenced May 5.

Morrogh hopes these prosecutions help halt the surge in MS-13 violence.

Hard working people come here for the American dream, and this gang is ruining it for them, he said. They are terrorizing people who are here working two or three jobs and we've got to stamp them out.
When Nancy Vasquez first flew to the United States from El Salvador in 1999, after she and her husband got visas, she packed only one suitcase stuffed with precious photographs, a few dresses and two pairs of shoes. She couldnt speak a word of English but she moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, with her husband, Fernando, because they were lucky enough to be granted visas. They planned to never return home.

Before Vasquezs visa was set to expire in 2001, she discovered she could receive a form of humanitarian, provisional residency known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) because an earthquake devastated her home country that year. In the years that followed, Vasquez had a daughter named Rebecca, she divorced her husband and she traded the rented room she once shared with him for her own home in Damascus, Maryland.

Vasquez is one of an estimated 267,000 TPS holders in limbo after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told them their legal residency will end.

DHS announced Monday that it will end special protections for U.S. residents from El Salvador, forcing nearly 200,000 people to leave the country, find another way to achieve legal residency or face deportation.

The Washington, D.C. area has the largest number of TPS holders from El Salvador, at more than 32,000, according to an April 2017 report from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an advocacy group.

Vasquez said before the decision was announced that she has started to work on plan B. If her TPS status ended, Vasquez, 48, said she planned to move back to El Salvador and let her daughter live with the child's uncle and his husband in D.C. She said she dreaded this possibility.

She needs me because shes only 12 years old, Vasquez said, her voice rising. She needs more of her mom. Her uncle is her uncle. Hes not her mom. Im her mom. Yo soy su mama.

For people from other countries, the Trump administration said Nov. 20 that it would end TPS for about 46,000 people from Haiti on July 22, 2019, and for about 2,550 people from Nicaragua on Jan. 5, 2019. DHS is set to determine the fate of people in the U.S. from Honduras by July 5.

TPS holders received the status because the secretary of DHS determined conditions in their home country  like a continuous armed conflict, an environment disaster or an epidemic  barred them from returning or barred the country from receiving them. People with TPS status are protected from deportation, can work and can apply for travel authorization.

Now theyre worrying about what to do if theyre forced to leave.

Pennsylvania resident Karla Alvarado was 9 years old when she left San Salvador, El Salvador in 1997, with her aunt and 4-year-old brother. They went to meet her mother, who arrived in the U.S. a year earlier to escape Alvarados abusive father. Her mother sold everything she had to leave El Salvador, Alvarado said.

It took two weeks for Alvarado, her aunt and her brother to make their way from El Salvador to the U.S., traveling through Guatemala and Mexico. They entered the U.S. illegally and got TPS status in 2001. It came with a sense of security, Alvarado said.

I knew before [that] we were illegals, she said.

TPS gave her a a sense to say Im here legally. I dont have to worry about anything, she continued.

As an adult, Alvarado lives what she called her American dream. She went to nursing school, works as a nursing supervisor in home care and bought a house with her husband. Now 29, she helps supports her mother and younger siblings.

Before the decision was issued, she said the thought that her TPS status could end filled her with anxiety.

The uncertainty of not knowing whats going to happen makes me very anxious. I have a mortgage. I have a car payment. I have my bills to pay. I have my husband, she said. Im head of household. I have to help my mother and my siblings.

Youre taking that away from me and I dont understand why, Alvarado added.

Her husband is a citizen, so Alvarado is looking into whether his status would help her case for permanent residency. Shes worried her mother and brother could be deported.

Weve been here, my brother and I, since we were little, Alvarado said. We dont really know what its like to live in El Salvador anymore. This is our home.

The decision to end TPS for Nicaragua and Haiti came after a review of the current conditions of the two countries. Elaine Duke, then acting secretary for DHS, determined the conditions that led to those designations didnt exist anymore, statements from the department say. People from Nicaragua got TPS status after Hurricane Mitch in 1999. In Haiti, the designation came after the major earthquake in 2010.

The Nicaraguan government made no request to extend its current designation, and Duke decided the conditions caused by Hurricane Mitch no longer existed, according to a statement issued Nov. 6. For Haiti, DHS said the country has shown "a commitment to adequately prepare for when the countrys TPS designation is terminated," according to a statement issued Nov. 20.

"Significant steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens, and Haiti is able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens," the statement said.

Nicole Svajlenka  a senior policy analyst for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank  said she believes some TPS-designated countries, such as Haiti, likely are not that well-equipped to receive such a large number of people at once, back from the United States.

The infrastructure that takes decades to rebuild after something that would cause countries to be designated complicates this, she said. Through no fault of their own, people have lived here for a very long time. The U.S. really hasnt made this temporary in any means.

Svajlenka said ending U.S. residents TPS status would lead many people to become undocumented immigrants and create more mixed-status families.

Svajlenka co-wrote a report published in October on how TPS holders influence the U.S. economy and society. If TPS were to be eliminated, the report found, the U.S. citizen children of recipients would have two main options: being separated from their families or moving to a country they dont know.

Those families are faced with a choice that is just absolutely heartbreaking to imagine. Do you stay in the U.S. without authorization, or do you return to a country that received this designation for important reasons? In many cases, things that they havent recovered from yet, Svajlenka said.

Laura Munoz Lopez, a special assistant for immigration policy and colleague of Svajlenka said violence and political unrest make it difficult for countries such as El Salvador and Honduras to take in people who have made lives in the United States.

Its called Temporary Protected Status for a reason. But at the same time, that is under the assumption that the country that has TPS is working on a way to getting out of the chaos or civil unrest that its in, Munoz Lopez said. Its not like we want Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti to never get better. We would love for those countries to be in a place where they can be welcoming back to the people that call that country home. But unfortunately, that isnt the case.

The removal of TPS holders from the workforce would be catastrophic, not only for the states but for the country as a whole, Munoz Lopez said.

According to a report from the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, TPS holders from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti  the three countries with the largest TPS populations  have a labor force participation rate that ranges from 81 to 88 percent, which is above the 63 percent rate for the total U.S. population. TPS holders from those three countries primarily work in construction, restaurants, landscaping, child care and supermarkets, the same report said.

TPS holders are fulfilling jobs that would be otherwise untaken, unfilled, said Zuzana Jerabek, a policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum, which supports bipartisan efforts for immigration reform.

They are enhancing our economy. They are making our culture more diverse. They are bringing different ideas into our society, she said. Thats what we believe makes America great.

Ending TPS status for thousands of U.S. residents would give them three possibilities, Jerabek said: they could leave the country, migrate to another country or go into the shadows in the U.S.

Instead of doing what the administration is saying it wants to do -- it wants to get rid of unauthorized populations -- they would create more of these undocumented people, Jerabek said.

Immigration lawyer Corie ORourke said she has told TPS holders to start searching for other immigration options so they can get something in place before their TPS ends or not have too long of a gap after their TPS ends. She works for Ayuda, a D.C. nonprofit that provides legal and social services to immigrants.

Many TPS holders dont have other opportunities for protection, even though their entire lives are here, she said.

Theyre having to face, Do I leave all that and go back to a country that I left for a reason? These countries are not places that a lot of people want to go back to, ORourke said. Or Do I stay here and have to go under the radar and hide from the government? I wouldnt wish it on anyone to face that decision.

Vasquez, the Salvadoran who has lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, said shes worried about being forced to choose what to do. She said even an extension of her TPS status would not be enough; she wants a path to legal permanent residence.

Im American because Im from El Salvador, and El Salvador is Central America, Vasquez said. I consider this country to be my country. This is my land because Im American also. Thats it.
A Virginia man arranged to pick up 9 pounds of marijuana delivered to an address in Washington, D.C., but it had already been handed over to police, according to a police report.



A FedEx box of eight vacuum-sealed packages of marijuana arrived at a community art space in southwest D.C. Friday, according to the police report. It was addressed to a community farm that operates out of the location, but no one there was expecting the marijuana, so it was handed over to police.

A man who said his name was "Jay Green" then called the main number at the art establishment Friday evening asking about the package. He was told they didn't know if it had been delivered but would check the next day.

"Jay Green" called back Saturday and was told he could go to the address and pick up the package, police said. Police called his cellphone to arrange the pickup.

When 25-year-old Jacob Greenbaum, of Leesburg, Virginia, went to the building to get the package, he was met by an undercover officer with a decoy package, police said. After exchanging greetings with Greenbaum, the officer went to his car to get the decoy.

After Greenbaum put the decoy in the back of his car and started to leave, police stopped and arrested him, police said. Greenbaum had more than $700, and a crumpled vacuum bag similar to those in the FedEx package with a green leafy substance in it was found in Greenbaum's car.

Greenbaum is charged with felony possession with intent to distribute marijuana.

The Metropolitan Police Department announced the confiscation of the drugs with a tweet saying, Anyone misplace 9 lbs of weed over the weekend? Feel free to stop by #DCPolice headquarters...we'd be happy to chat.
Students are returning to a Massachusetts high school on Monday after heating issues shut down the building last week.

School officials shut down Lowell High School to allow maintenance workers time to fix ongoing heating issues in the building.

According to the Lowell Sun, a voice message to families and staff was left by Head of School Marianne Busteed on Sunday saying that officials had been closely monitoring the ongoing heating problems and that contractors were in the building daily.

"Although all the necessary repairs are not complete, we feel enough progress has been made to bring students and staff back tomorrow," Busteed said in the message.

Pictures of the cold conditions at the school had been shared on social media. One mother showed NBC Boston a video of a pipe bursting inside the school's gym.

Senior Matt Draper said he was so cold in class that his hands were turning purple.

"Nobody was able to pay attention because everyone was focused on how cold they were and trying to stay warm any way they could," Draper said.

The Lowell city manager's office said issues with the heating system have been going on for more than a month.

According to the high school's Twitter account, the school semester will be extended a week due to the missed days.
The top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts offered no guarantees on Monday that he would take a hands-off approach to legalized pot, injecting a new layer of uncertainty and confusion into the commercial marijuana industry as it looked to gain a foothold in the state.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a statement that while he understood the desire for guidance on the federal approach to the state's voter-approved recreational marijuana law, he "cannot provide assurances that certain categories of participants in the state-level marijuana trade will be immune from federal prosecution."

Such determinations would be made on a "case-by-case basis," he added.

"I'm not sure what type of message that sends or what type of security that gives you," said Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo. "Or lack of security, I should say."



"They could go after anyone because it's all against federal law," said Jonathan Napoli, a cannabis consultant who also owns The Boston Gardener, which supplies individual growers and dispensaries with soil, lamps and other paraphernalia.



The Yes on 4 Coalition, which spearheaded the 2016 ballot campaign, had publicly called for Lelling to provide "clear, unambiguous answers" to several questions, including whether his office would prosecute businesses that are granted licenses by state cannabis regulators to grow, produce, test or sell marijuana legally in Massachusetts.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions moved last week to rescind the so-called Cole Memorandum, an Obama-era Justice Department policy that, in general, called for non-interference with legal marijuana operations in states. Eight states, including Massachusetts, have legalized adult use of recreational pot.

Lelling took office in December after being nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His comments on Monday expanded on an earlier statement last week that promised enforcement of serious federal crimes but did not directly address the recreational marijuana issue.

"This is a straightforward rule of law issue," said Lelling. "Congress has unambiguously made it a federal crime to cultivate, distribute and/or possess marijuana."

"A compliant dispensary, I'd be shocked if he went after that," said Napoli. "But there's no guarantees."



Jim Borghesani, a Massachusetts spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, called the prosecutor's comments "ominous." Pro-marijuana groups fear the change in tone from the Justice Department and federal prosecutors will send a chill through the nascent cannabis industry, discouraging those looking to start or invest in those businesses.

"I don't think any business would ever want to open its door and have fears on the first day that the FBI is going to be standing on their doorsteps," said Borghesani.

Democratic legislative leaders echoed those concerns Monday, with acting Senate President Harriette Chandler saying that would-be marijuana entrepreneurs now faced "a great deal of uncertainty."

The Cannabis Control Commission, a five-member panel created to regulate marijuana in Massachusetts, has pledged to move forward with a process that foresees the first commercial pot shops opening in July.

Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, who said last week that rescinding the Cole Memorandum was the "wrong decision," continued to support the commission's work and would provide adequate funding for it, a spokeswoman said Monday.
A body has been found in one of three triple-deckers that burned in a massive fire in Providence, Rhode Island, over the weekend.

The body was found Monday, two days after the Saturday fire in the city's Olneyville section. Authorities have not yet released the person's identity, but have said previously that a woman was missing after the blaze.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

WJAR-TV reports that the city was in the process of condemning the house. An inspector wrote just last week that the "house is a mess" and had no heat or running water. The station reports that the inspector said "occupants were running space heaters" and "numerous propane torches."
The Mitre Benefice is to stage the premiere of Edenbridge, a musical Christmas production for all the family.

The Mitre Benefice is to stage the premiere of Edenbridge, a musical Christmas production for all the family.

Join free on line Norfolk food aid workshop A free online workshop will be held next week to give guidance and share experiences for groups working to help those struggling with food insecurity. Read more

Sprowston Methodist Church needs a cleaner Sprowston Methodist Church, near Norwich, is seeking to appoint a part-time Church Cleaner for 16 hours per week. Read more

Norwich choir puts on Christmas concert for children's hospices The Phoenix Male Voice Choir will be performing their Christmas concert at Mile Cross Methodist Church in aid of East Anglia's Children's Hospices. Read more

Rebrand as Norwich church changes its name A Norwich church has changed its name for the fourth time in its 170-year history transforming from Surrey Chapel into CityGates Church Norwich. Read more

Blues concert fundraiser for Stalham Baptists There will be a free concert at Stalham Baptist Church next Saturday to raise funds towards the refurbishment of premises at the church. Read more

Norwich church moves to wrestling ring A Norwich church has temporarily relocated to a boxing ring where self professed 'hard men' will tell their stories of finding faith. The first Tough Talk event is set for November 20. Read more

How can we help feed those in need? Andrew Frere-Smith reminds us of the importance of meals, and offers us some food for thought as the rising cost of living impacts our communities. Read more

Latest Norfolk Christian community events Events of interest to the Norwich and Norfolk Christian community happening over the next few weeks are listed. Read more

John leads Norwich churches trip to Holy Land Experienced Holy Land traveller and former CEO of YMCA Norfolk, John Drake, is leading an inter-church tour from Norwich to Israel and Palestine in March 2023, with a few places still available. Read more

Christmas rhyming play by North Norfolk teacher Matthew Pickhaver, who lives in North Norfolk, has just published the third of his series of play scripts on the theme of Christmas, which is now available to buy. Read more

Advent and Christmas events at Norwich Cathedral From an Advent Open Evening to Carols in the Cloister and an array of special services and concerts with Norwich Cathedral Choir, there is lots to look forward to at Norwich Cathedral this festive season. Read more

Norwich church to hold Sunday healing service Witard Road Baptist Church is hosting a healing service on November 27 led by Rev Ray and Ruth Scorey from Norfolk Healing Rooms. Read more

Sheringham youth attend forbidden church The youth group at Lighthouse Community Church in Sheringham were forced to meet at a secret location earlier this month when the Lighthouse building had, supposedly, been shut down by the authorities. Read more

Christmas pud workshop at Norwich church Not made your Christmas pudding yet? Don't know where to start? Come along to a Christmas pudding workshop at Norwich Central Baptist Church on November 21 with MasterChef contestant Jane Wyndham. Read more

Norwich Foodbank provides over 4,700 food parcels Norwich Foodbank gave out 4,793 emergency food parcels to people across Norwich in the last year  with 1,790 of these going to children. Read more

Poppies cascading in Sheringham church A fall of poppies cascades from the pulpit in St Andrews Methodist Church in Sheringham, and anyone is welcome to come and see them. Read more

Bishop Graham's prayers for COP27 climate conference Bishop Graham is publishing daily prayers on social media for the current COP27 climate conference, and is asking all to join. Read more
Licensed medical personnel on military operations abroad adapt easily to the military organization but experience dual loyalties between the organization and their medical ethics. This emerges in a new dissertation by Kristina Lundberg, doctoral student at the University of Boras and Jonkoping University, Sweden.

As a former battalion chaplain in Kosovo and Afghanistan, Kristina Lundberg has experience of licensed medical personnel's ethical dilemmas of working in a military intervention area and has seen the importance of proper training before working in a combat zone.

"Swedish licensed medical personnel should follow laws as well as professional and medical ethical codes when working in an intervention area. My thesis addresses ethical problems among licensed medical personnel on military operations abroad as well as tactical officers' challenge of leading medical staff in combat zones", Kristina Lundberg says.

The results from her thesis show that licensed medical personnel easily adapt to the military structure. However, they do not only undertake care duties but also military duties, resulting in a dual loyalty - in other words that they weigh between their medical ethics and adapting to the military organization.

Undertaking military duties

"One example is that licensed medical personnel gather information that they call 'intelligence', which is a task normally carried out by trained military staff. When undertaking this specific military duty, they give different arguments to justify it, for example that it feels hard seeing the soldiers work hard when they have nothing to do at the moment", Kristina Lundberg says.

Her results also suggest that tactical officers experience a challenge leading licensed medical personnel. Since they are often recruited outside the military organization and come to the area on own rotation, the medical personnel are not co-trained with the other staff, which might have a negative impact on the operation.

The results of the thesis could be used to train licensed medical personnel before going to an intervention area as well as educate managers in leading licensed medical personnel.

"There is not much previous research in this field, which has had an impact on the preparations before licensed medical personnel go to an area where they actually risk their lives on a daily basis. My thesis could help improve these preparations. I could also imagine that the results could be used in prehospital care, which in many ways is an environment that sometimes resembles a combat zone", Kristina Lundberg explains.

Kristina Lundberg defended her thesis "Conflicting values - everyday ethical and leadership challenges related to care in combat zones within a military organization" at Jonkoping University, December 15, 2017.
Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc. and Pfizer Inc. today announced a collaboration for the development of a potential gene therapy using zinc finger protein transcription factors (ZFP-TFs) to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) linked to mutations of the C9ORF72 gene.

ALS and FTLD are part of a spectrum of neurodegenerative disorders caused by mutations in the C9ORF72 gene that involves hundreds of additional repetitions of a six base pair sequence of DNA. This ultimately leads to the deterioration of motor neurons, in the case of ALS, or neurons in the frontal and temporal lobes, in the case of FTLD. Currently, there are no cures to halt or reverse the progression of ALS or FTLD. The C9ORF72 mutation is linked to approximately one-third of cases of familial ALS.

"We are excited to continue our collaborative relationship with Pfizer with this new program using Sangamo's zinc finger protein technology to develop a potential gene therapy for patients with certain forms of ALS and FTLD, devastating diseases with very limited treatment options," said Dr. Sandy Macrae, Chief Executive Officer of Sangamo. "The precision and flexibility of zinc finger proteins enables targeting of virtually any genetic mutation. Collaboration with the right partner for a given therapeutic application is a key component of our corporate strategy and enables us to pursue the vast opportunity set of our platform."

"We look forward to working with Sangamo on potential treatments for devastating diseases related to genetic mutations of the C9ORF72 gene," said Greg LaRosa, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, Pfizer Rare Disease. "Pfizer is proud of the progress we have made in the area of gene therapy, which offers tremendous promise to patients and their families."

Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

Gene therapies are a potentially transformational technology for patients, focused on highly specialized, one-time treatments that address the root cause of diseases caused by genetic mutation. Sangamo's ZFP-TF technology involves introducing an engineered zinc finger protein (ZFP) which is designed to identify and bind to a precise sequence of DNA. Once bound to the target sequence of DNA, a transcriptional repressor domain attached to the ZFP suppresses expression of the gene. Under this collaboration, Sangamo and Pfizer will investigate allele-specific ZFP-TFs with the potential to differentiate the mutant C9ORF72 allele from the wild type allele and to specifically down-regulate expression of the mutant form of the gene.

Under the terms of the collaboration agreement, Sangamo will receive a $12 million upfront payment from Pfizer. Sangamo will be responsible for the development of ZFP-TF candidates. Pfizer will be operationally and financially responsible for subsequent research, development, manufacturing and commercialization for the C9ORF72 ZFP-TF program and any resulting products. Sangamo is eligible to receive potential development and commercial milestone payments of up to $150 million, as well as tiered royalties on net sales.

In May 2017, Sangamo and Pfizer entered into an exclusive, global collaboration and license agreement for the development and commercialization of potential gene therapy products for Hemophilia A, including SB-525, which entered the clinic in August 2017.
The first nurses in England to complete self-funded studies celebrate as they approach graduation from the University of Bolton. The non-commissioned pre-registration course was developed in addition to Health Education Englands commissioned students and ensures local talent stays local, supporting nearby healthcare initiatives.

Prof. George E Holmes DL and Karen Partington, Chief Executive Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with nursing students

Eleven student nurses, who this week are approaching the end of their three-year self-funded studies, are celebrating their achievements at the University of Bolton before graduating and taking their places in hospitals across the North West later this year.

The occasion marks the first cohort of nurses to conclude their training since the government-funded bursary scheme for undergraduate nurses was withdrawn in 2017. The students all applied for a standard degree loan and started their courses in February 2015. Undertaking their practical training at Preston & Chorley (Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust), the nurses will formally graduate in summer 2018 and all go directly into employment in the North West.

The University of Bolton has pioneered the self-funded degree training course and provided the first non-commissioned nursing program in England, with subsequent intakes of undergraduate nurses now studying at teaching hospitals in Manchester, Bolton and shortly, Wigan. The University has a further target intake of 290 nursing undergraduates in 2018, starting in January, May and September.

We are incredibly proud of our first group of nurses as they conclude their training. said Professor George E Holmes DL, President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Bolton. Their hard work and the commitment of both University staff and local teaching hospitals has resulted in nursing students recruited and trained locally, who will go into work at local hospitals, supporting Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust along with Greater Manchesters 2021 vision for healthcare.

Nursing student Sanna Hussain commented:

The support, knowledge and skills I have gained during my time at the University of Bolton will help me enormously throughout my career. By running this program, the University has enabled me to fulfil my dream of becoming a nurse, something that a few years ago, I was not sure would be possible.

The University of Bolton ranked number one in England for teaching quality across its nursing courses in The Times & The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2018, and the University was rated first in Greater Manchester for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey 2017.
FinMin recommends EPCF modality for Nijgadh airport

The Finance Ministry has advised the Tourism Ministry to use the engineering, procurement, construction and finance (EPCF) modality to build a new international airport in Nijgadh, situated 175 km from Kathmandu.
Women are more likely than men to die during the year following a heart attack because they are less likely to be offered recommended treatments, according to a study of Swedish patients.

Credit: Peerayot/Shutterstock

Experts warn that Sweden has one of the best healthcare systems in the world and that in Britain, the disparity could be even worse.

Researchers from the University of Leeds and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden analysed outcomes for 180,368 Swedish heart attack sufferers over a ten-year period (between 2003 and 2013) using data from Swedens online cardiac registry.

They found that women were twice as likely to die during the year following a heart attack and that, on average, they were less likely to receive the recommended treatments after a heart attack such as bypass surgery, stents and statins.

For one type of heart attack, women were 34% less likely to receive bypass surgery or stents to clear blocked arteries, 24% less likely to be prescribed statins to protect against a further attack and 16% less likely to be prescribed aspirin for blood clot prevention. This is despite guidelines recommending these treatments for both men and women.

Co-author of the study Chris Gale (University of Leeds) says there is a misconception amongst the public and healthcare professionals about what heart attack patients are like:

Typically, when we think of a heart attack patient, we see a middle-aged man who is overweight, has diabetes and smokes. This is not always the case; heart attacks affect the wider spectrum of the population - including women.

Gale says that from their very first point of contact with a healthcare professional, women are less likely to receive the same diagnostic tests as men, thereby increasing their risk of being misdiagnosed from the start. That, in turn, dictates the rest of their care, with women being more likely to miss the next point of contact. This all adds up cumulatively and leads to a greater mortality," he explains.

The study, which is published in The Journal of the American Heart Association, also found that when women did receive the recommended treatment, the gender gap in mortality rate decreased in almost all circumstances.
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China has an exaflop supercomputer budget of $150 million to $300 million. The exaflop supercomputer could be built as early as 2019.

It is to be built in Shandong province coast as soon as 2019 to support ocean research in the South China Sea and boost Chinas maritime expansion.

Six leading US technology companies received $258 million in funding from the Department of Energys Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as part of its new PathForward program. This money is to accelerate the research necessary to deploy the nations first exascale supercomputers in about 2021.

Oak Ridge National Lab will have the 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer come online in mid-2018. It will use 15 megawatts of power.

Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titans 18,688 nodes, using only approximately 4,600 nodes when it arrives in 2018. Like Titan, Summit will have a hybrid architecture, and each node will contain multiple IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs all connected together with NVIDIAs high-speed NVLink. Each node will have over half a terabyte of coherent memory (high bandwidth memory + DDR4) addressable by all CPUs and GPUs plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM that can be used as a burst buffer or as extended memory. To provide a high rate of I/O throughput, the nodes will be connected to a non-blocking fat-tree using a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect.

Upon completion, Summit will allow researchers in all fields of science unprecedented access to solving some of the worlds most pressing challenges.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will have the 120 petaflop Sierra supercomputer in 2018.

Argonne National Laboratory plans to construct the Aurora exaflop supercomputer in 2021.
Hugh White makes the case that Americas influence is decreasing in Asia and China is on the eventual but inevitable path to dominating Asia.

Others make the case that the USA still has strategic options.

Nextbigfuture believes the ultimate Future of Asia and the world is about AI, other advanced technology and economics.

The US would definitely benefit by engaging more with allies like Japan, India, South Korea, ASEAN and Australia.

Now to 2029

China is currently at 120% of the US economy on a PPP basis and 66% of the US economy on an exchange rated basis now. China will edge closer on an exchange rated basis and then sometime in the mid to late 2020s China should pass the US economy on an exchange rated basis.

China will still be spending less on its military and Chinas military will still be inferior to the USA. However, already Chinas military is such that while the US can defeat China, the cost of the war is more than the US is willing to commit.

The US can and will be providing F35s to Japan and South Korea. This will enable Japan and South Korea to upgrade their helicopter carriers to aircraft carriers with 9 to 20 fighter jets.

The US will be more concerned with North Korea and the continuing problems with the middle east and terrorism than with what happens in the South China Sea or with Taiwan.

The Southeast Asian countries are accepting that China will get most of the South China Sea and Taiwan has a closer economic relationship and dependence on China than Canada does with the USA.

India and ASEAN countries will get economically stronger.

2030-2050  ultimately it is about the advanced technology and economy

India and ASEAN will become economically competitive with China. Europe will continue to shrink its share of the world economy.

A stronger factor is how well each country or region is managing its advanced technology.

How good are the Artificial Intelligence and robotics capabilities?

How good is the molecular nanotechnology and biotech and antiaging?

How good is the space capabilities?

Right now and for the next few decades the US has a continuing big and growing advantage with space because of SpaceX.

The US has problems because of the military-industrial corruption and waste which causes military equipment to be over-priced by two to ten times.
NEW HAVEN  Education officials in the city have long agreed that school choice  which allows families to select from schools in their neighborhoods, magnet schools with specialized curricular themes and charter schools, often through a lottery process  is an advantage of the district.

According to data provided by district officials, city enrollment in local charter schools has grown to be nearly equal to suburban enrollment in the districts magnet schools.

From October 2014 to October 2017, city enrollment in charter schools grew from 1,957 students to 2,682. In that same time period, suburban enrollment has fluctuated between a low of 2,812 students and a high  in 2014  of 2,912 students.

We are one of the few districts in the state that is growing, said New Haven Public Schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark in an emailed statement. Post Oct. 1 count (which was up) another 170+ have been added from hurricane areas, primarily Puerto Rico.

Enrollment is important for public school districts, as it is tied to state and federal funding, which keeps them operational. Additionally, keeping classrooms full helps to keep after-school programs running and creates a need for more jobs within the district.

Although charter advocates argue they are underfunded, having been flat-funded by the state at $11,000 per student for years, public school districts are financially responsible for ancillary costs like transportation.

Magnet schools were conceived in part as school integration tools, competitive schools that feature attractive curricular options for suburban families, creating schools that are more racially and economically diverse than traditional neighborhood schools. The state funds magnet schools on a per-pupil basis, creating an additional financial incentive for cities like New Haven.

Clark said he believes the growth in charter enrollment has to do with the creation of more charter schools  such as Booker T. Washington Academy, which opened its doors in 2014 and has added a grade every year since. Sherri Davis-Googe, district director of choice and enrollment, reported to members of the school board in April that about 2,000 suburban families applied to a new magnet school for the 2017-18 school year.

As an organization, we are certainly encouraged and pleased to see so many parents are choosing this option for our kids, said Kerisha Harris, spokeswoman for the Northeast Charter Schools Network. Our strong belief is charter growth in general should be fueled by demand.

Harris reported that preliminary data for the 2017-18 school year is that names on the wait list for New Haven-area charter schools exceeded 2,100, a number reportedly similar to that of suburban families seeking to enter New Haven magnet schools.

Harris said much of the growth can likely be attributed to the addition of grade levels in some of New Havens charter schools in recent years, but other charter schools, such as Common Ground High School, stand to grow more.

They have a beautiful, brand new building, a working farm and top honors. They would love to open up and have more students and offer this educational option to more kids, but they cant grow past the current amount of students they have. They have the space for it and the room, Harris said.

Charter advocates have argued that the flat-funding of $11,000 per-pupil means expanding is not a possibility. Officials at Common Ground say the overhead for the building Harris mentioned is $7.5 million. Teachers at Common Ground work for 85 percent of the pay scale of teachers in the traditional schools.

Clark said that although the situation of students enrolling in charter schools represents funding going away from the district, officials can pursue multiple avenues.

The dilution of major funding streams from the state and federal government is a challenge for all schools districts and any diminution of our funding or other re-purposing toward Charters would only heighten those concerns. Clark said. We continue to be aggressive in seeking out grants and revenue in order to have diverse streams of funding to support and sustain our programming and growth.

In the last four years of data, preschool-enrolled charter students rose from four to 87, but district schools still teach more suburban preschool students: 243 in 2017. There was a drop, however, to 153 suburban kindergarten students in New Haven magnet schools that year.

What I always find interesting in the magnet numbers is the perception of a big bump at pre-K and K and then a drop off. While that is certainly true of Pre-K, that largely is a creature of lack of pre-K in and around New Haven more than anything else, Clark said.

According to NHPS data, suburban magnet enrollment in the district does fall after preschool, but there is an observable bump around sixth or seventh grade  from 187 sixth-graders to 240 seventh-graders in 2017  as families prepare to send their students to magnet high schools.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com
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NEW HAVEN  The city Police Department is closer to replacing an 18-year-old command vehicle with a new and larger one they will share with Yale University police.

New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell said the vehicle will be similar in size to a tour bus and increase the number of personnel that can be transported. The vehicle would be used as a mobile command post for extreme situations that are often prolonged, such as when there is a barricaded subject or an active shooter situation.

It is a location where not just officers (are), but its a place where we strategize, where a SWAT or emergency unit could meet, Campbell said.

The new vehicle hasnt been completely built yet, according to New Haven police spokesman Officer David Hartman. He said it will be outfitted to meet the departments specifications. Once it arrives in New Haven, it will require additional retrofitting.

At least $300,000 is being allocated to pay for the vehicle and its additional equipment.

Campbell said the vehicle will be outfitted with portable radios and other communication devices. The new command vehicle would come with significant technological improvements over its current counterpart.

Hartman said the current vehicle doesnt have any computers, but it does have VHS units. He added that the current vehicle serves little purpose other than a shelter place to work out of.

The new vehicle will be able to dispatch and communicate to officers directly from within the unit; Hartman said officers currently use radios when on-board the command vehicle.

Its way (too) small. You might be able to get three to four people (in it), Campbell said of the current vehicle. The new vehicle will be used for major snowstorms, hurricanes... its multipurpose.

Yale University is contributing $100,000 for the new vehicle. University spokeswoman Karen Peart said the two police units are collaborating on the purchase of a shared asset, to which both departments will have access.

Additional funds being used to pay for the finished and equipped vehicle include $125,000 from the city and a $75,000 federal JAG grant, Hartman said,

Campbell, a Yale alumnus, said the relationship New Haven police with the university is the best its ever been. The two departments worked closely last year on numerous occasions, especially during demonstrations and rallies.

Its good to see that our relationships are working well. We want to keep moving forward, Campbell said.

Campbell said hes been eyeing a new command vehicle since he served as an assistant chief. After conducting an audit on the departments fleet, he felt the vehicle was due for replacement. Campbell said the department doesnt want to invest more money on the used vehicle.

The current vehicle was used last September during a police standoff with an armed man who allegedly shot his wife and two police officers. Campbell said the incident magnified the reality of the need for the vehicle.

These are the kinds of things the public wont see on a regular basis, Campbell said. But in the instances that we do need it ... its better to be proactive.

Reach Esteban L. Hernandez at 203-680-9901
Five succumb to cold in Rautahat

Two more people have died in Rautahat on Monday as severe winter cold continue to grip this Tarai district.
You are clearly a super-user of NUVO.net. Thats a good thing. It means you depend on independent and local news sources to keep you informed. You are a smart person.



Coincidentally, independent and local news sources depend on you too. Youve read 25 articles this month and now, wed like you to be join our mission and become a NUVO Supporter. For as little as $4 a month, you can keep us alive and fighting -- and can have unlimited access to the independent news that cant be found anywhere else.
Govt announces relief to 22 cold-hit Tarai districts

The government has announced a relief package of Rs 22.2 million to 22 cold-hit Tarai districts.
Pedestrian knocked down to death in Capital

A pedestrian was killed after being knocked by a passenger bus at Bafal in Kathmandu on Sunday night.
Dr KC arrested

A team of Kathmandu Police Range on Monday arrested Dr Govinda KC from Maharajgunj-based Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, Kathmandu.
Saptari chill death toll climbs to 15

Six deaths, including that of a seven-month-old, within the past 24 hours in Saptari are blamed on cold weather. With the latest incidents, the toll from the cold wave has reached 15 in a week in the district.
SC ruling on IoM dean splits legal experts

The Institute of Medicine (IoM) will have two deans for the next four days after the Supreme Court on Sunday ordered the Tribhuvan University to reinstate Dr Shasi Sharma as its dean.
Sumargi files defamation case against Kantipur Publications

Controversial businessman Ajeya Raj Sumargi has filed a defamation case at the Kathmandu District Court against Kantipur Publications stating that news reports carried by various outlets of the media firm on his financial dealings have defamed him.
Most of us can barely wait to open our Christmas presents every year, but one Canadian man has managed to keep one unopened for the past 47 years.

Adrian Pearce of Edmonton received the gift in 1970 when he was a 17-year-old student at George S. Henry Secondary School in suburban Toronto. It was from Vicki, his first serious girlfriend, who gave him the gift and then immediately ended their relationship. He was so angry and upset about the breakup that opening the present was the last thing on his mind. He simply threw it under the Christmas tree and when it remained the only unopened present on Christmas day, he told his family that he was never going to open it. Believe it or not, he managed to keep that promise.

Photo: Adrian Pearce/Facebook

She gave me a present at the same time, and I took the present home. I had a long walk home, and I was all upset and angry, and all the things you feel when somebody breaks up with you, Pearce told CBC News. And so I fired the present under the Christmas tree. After my family opened their gifts at Christmas, there was still one Christmas gift left, and its the gift this girl Vicki had given me. I told my family Im never going to open that present.

True to his word, he never did open the gift.

Pearce told reporters that Vickis sister contacted him several years after the breakup and gave him a contact number. He said that he met up with her a couple of times after that, but they both realized that they had moved on and werent interested in dating each other again. Soon after that, they lost touch.

Despite that, Pearce continued to put the present under his tree year after year. Eventually, he married someone else and had children, but the unopened present always found its way under their Christmas tree. His children asked many times if they could open it, but Pearce said no. His wife eventually got fed up and told him the gift wasnt to be put under the tree anymore. Since then he just takes the present out of storage every year to look at the shiny blue paper for a while before storing it away again. This year he decided to take another step however and called the last number he had for Vicki.

Photo: Adrian Pearce/Facebook

I was almost shaking I was so nervous, he said. The Toronto area didnt use ten-digit dialing at the time, so Pearce tried the three current area codes but had no luck. He also attempted an internet search and called a woman with the same name in Kelowna, B.C., but she turned out to be 91 years old and had never even lived in Ontario.

Pearce didnt know what he would even say if he managed to reach Vicki, and he isnt even sure why he kept the present all these years anyway.

I kept it initially because I guess I had hopes that we would get back together and open it together. Now its just become a habit after 47 years of looking at it and having the pleasure of not opening it, Pearce said. Maybe I dont want to know whats inside it. Its more exciting right now not opening the thing.

Pearce claims that his wife doesnt mind, and also enjoys the mystery of the unopened gift as well. He is considering opening it on the 50th anniversary of receiving it, and maybe even having a contest to guess whats under the wrapping. There would be a fee to enter, and all proceeds would go to charity. Thats a pretty good idea, especially with his story going viral online.

Photo: Adrian Pearce/Facebook

Perhaps she can be found and share in the celebration, Pearce added.
A Taiwanese dentist was recently ordered to pay $1 million to his mother in order to honor a contract that he had signed growing up, in which he agrees to pay 60 percent of his net profits until he can cover the cost of his upbringing and education.

The mother, known only as Luo, had to raise her two boys by herself, after divorcing her husband. At one point she became worried that despite all her sacrifices, her children would fail to look after her in her old age, so she decided to get some insurance. In 1997, when her sons were studying to become dentists, she asked them to sign a contract which clearly stipulated that they agreed to pay her part of their earnings until they covered the sum of roughly $1.7 million, as compensation for the money she had spent on their studies and upbringing. They both did, but one of them failed to honor the deal, so the mother took him to court.

Photo: Psychonaught/Wikimedia Commons

Ms. Luos two children became dentists in 2003, and originally agreed to honor their contracts, paying their mother 60% of their earnings. To be fair, they were working in her dental clinic, which she had opened with financial help from her family. But, after a while, they apparently decided that they had paid her enough and refused to hand over the largest part of their monthly profits to their mother. While the older son decided to renegotiate the terms of the contact and convinced his mother to lower his debt, the younger one refused to pay anything. The mother sued him and theyve been fighting in court for eight years.

The polarizing case reached Taiwans highest courts, which again heard both parties arguments before making a final decision. Ms. Luo maintained that the contracts she signed with her two sons were legally-binding and that she only wanted them to be honored, while the son claimed that he was only 20-years-old when he signed and didnt fully understand the implications. Furthermore, he had already paid his mother $1 million, which he felt was enough.

The dentist added that the contract violated good customs, as raising a child should not be measured in financial terms.

Photo: Sterilgutassistentin/Wikimedia Commons

After hearing both parties, a judge ruled that, the dentist, referred to by Taiwanese media as Mr. Chu, signed the contract as an adult, without being forced or tricked into it, so he should honor its terms. The man was ordered to pay the remaining $754,000 of the agreed upbringing fee with additional interest raising the debt to his mother to $967,000.

The unusual case has gotten a lot of attention in Taiwan, a country where adults are required by law to take care of their elderly parents. Not all of them do, and parents hardly ever sue their children like this, so this was pretty much a first in a society where filial piety and good parenting are regarded as important virtues.

Some people agreed with the mother and accused the sons of not wanting to take care of her. Unfilial people are beneath pigs and dogs, one Facebook user wrote.

Photo: Bruce Yerman/Panoramio

I believe everyone should want to repay their parents for raising them once theyve grown old, so I support the judges decision, Wu Chih-hang, a young Taipei dentist, told the New York Times.

However, others said that the woman was getting much more money than she had actually spent on her sons upbringing and education.

The old woman got some serious cash  she got $1.7 million to raise a kid, a Jason Chen commented on Taiwanese broadcaster EBCs website. Im not even sure if I cost $170,000 to raise.
Greek eco-terrorists claim to have started injecting hydrochloric acid, a highly corrosive substance, into supermarket foods and drinks. The anarchist group even posted photos of themselves injecting soda, milk, and meat with acid, on social media.

Several Greek supermarkets were forced to withdraw specific products from their shelves after the threats of contamination. Authorities urged citizens in Athens and Thessaloniki not to buy or consume Coca-Cola, a local milk brand, and packaged meat for fear of them being contaminated with the dangerous substance. The two cities have a combined total of about 1 million residents affected by these precautionary measures.

Photo: IndyMedia

I would categorize this as terror activity, Mary Bossis, an associate professor of International Relations at the University of Piraeus and an expert on left-wing militancy, told VICE Munchies. They are not political activists; they are criminals.

The anarchists, who go by the name Blackgreen Arsonists, released a manifesto declaring:

These days, thousands and thousands of Christians will leave their couch to make the necessary shopping for their Christmas tables, to fill their empty lives with consumable rubbish covered in beautiful, glittering wrapping. The victims of this feast are the millions of living creatures that are slaughtered to arrive at the tables of the living, drained to the last drop of blood to satisfy their palates.

Photo: IndyMedia

For some reason, the group even mentioned which specific items would be contaminated, citing practical reasons: 1.5-liter bottles of Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Light, a lunch meat called Yfantis (350- and 500-gram packages) and Delta whole milk. The group claims to have collected these items in the month leading up to Christmas, and proceeded to clandestinely return the products to shop shelves from December 20th to the 24th.

Hydrochloric acid is a colorless, odorless solution of hydrogen chloride in water used in research and industry. The acid is considered a toxic substance by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and it is highly corrosive, causing immediate damage when ingested, inducing severe throat pain, shock, bloody vomiting, and even death.

Similar threats have emerged several times in the past, including last Christmas, but no cases of hydrochloric acid poisoning were ever actually recorded. In this case, however, the group included photos as part of their online threat. Authorities currently have no information on the identities of the terrorists, and they do not appear to have a cohesive political message or aim.

Photo: IndyMedia

They only think within their own category of thinking., Bossis said. Its a group of people that believes [] they are hurting multinational corporations, which is not true. This terror activity [] alienates them and puts them in the category of criminals and not political activists. This targets predominately young people, as they are the main consumers of these products.

So far, no cases of hydrochloric acid poisoning have been reported.
An Illinois man who has been offering shelter to homeless people in his Chicago neighborhood has been ordered by city officials to cease and desist or risk having his home condemned.

Greg Schiller, of Elgin, Illinois, began opening his home to a group of homeless people last month when the temperatures dropped dangerously low. He filled his unfinished basement with cots and blankets and started organizing slumber parties for homeless people with no place to go. He would offer them food and warm beverages and even put on movies for them to watch until the morning. Unfortunately, his kindhearted effort didnt sit well with local authorities who are now threatening to condemn his home if he doesnt stop his so-called parties.

Photo: Greg Schiller

Im trying to help these people get out of the cold, he told NBC 5. Theres not a lot of help for them as far as places to lay their heads. He added that he only opened the shelter when local licensed shelters werent open, and noted that several local shelters require a stringent set of criteria before allowing homeless people in, and only open when temperatures reach a certain level.

Schiller had initially set up a shelter in 2016 in his garage, but EMTs who were called to attend to a man with a heart condition alerted city officials who cited him for breaking city code.

The good Samaritan examined the code then and found a loophole that allowed for Slumber Parties, so he moved the shelter to his basement and introduced all the activities necessary for it to be considered a slumber party. City officials, however, claim that the loophole exists for childrens parties and that the gatherings Schiller host several times a week make his home a rooming house, which is prohibited by city code. There are also sleeping regulations for basements, which Schillers basement does not meet.

While we appreciate those who volunteer to provide additional resources in the community, Mr. Schillers house does not comply with codes and regulations that guard against potential dangers such as carbon monoxide poisoning, inadequate light and ventilation, and insufficient exits in the event of a fire, city spokesperson Molly Center said in a statement.

Schiller was given 24 hours to comply with code, and an emailed statement from Center read, If not, the City will take additional enforcement action to compel the removal of the unlawful basement sleeping area.

Photo: Franco Folini/Flickr

City officials came to his home with a warrant and went into the basement where they found the ceiling height too low, the windows too high and small for escape, and unsafe conditions regarding fire safety.

From the neighborhood services perspective, it is a concern  the safety of the occupants and for emergency services to get in if there is a problem. If they are sleeping down there and have propane heaters  that is not safe to have. If it is knocked over at the base of the stair, there would be no way to get out, said Coby Basham, Elgins department of neighborhood services director. Basham had been alerted to the situation by an anonymous neighbor, who reported that 10 to 15 people were sleeping in the basement each night.

They shut me down and said I have 24 hours to return my basement to storage and take down  I have several cots with sleeping bags for everybody  or theyll condemn the house, Schiller told NBC Chicago. Schillers girlfriend Teresa Quarles, who owns the property in question, told NBC that the citys actions were reprehensible.

We are talking about peoples lives, she added.

City officials had previously cited other violations at the house including a broken window, a fold-up trailer on the property and a portable toilet that had set up for the group to use. The citation gave the owners seven days to remove the port-a-potty, and 30 days to repair the window and remove the trailer before the city would levy fines.

Schiller had previously co-founded a homeless shelter with the organization Matthew 25:40 at First Methodist Church of Elgin, but had left after a falling out with another individual on the board. When he established the shelter, it was with an agreement that it would not open unless overnight temperatures fell below 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2017 that number was raised to 15 degrees.

Its cold enough to freeze to death, Schiller said to NBC Chicago.

While Schiller has agreed to stop hosting slumber parties, he is working to find other options to help the local homeless people that he has come to know so well.
Thailands fascination with skin whitening treatments is well known, but while most people opt to have the most visible parts of their bodies whitened, an increasing number of men are undergoing special laser procedures on the dark parts of their groin region.

News of the penis whitening craze in Thailand reached the Western world a couple of days ago, after photos of men undergoing the unusual procedure at the Lelux aesthetic hospital outside of Bangkok went viral on social media. They showed a number of men lying down on a medical chair while hospital staff operated the Pikachu laser on their groin region. If that name sounds a bit strange, you should know that the popular Pokemon is slang for penis in Thailand.

Photo: Lelux Hospital

The Lelux Hospital, famous for its body whitening procedures, launched the penis whitening service in July of last year, and is currently struggling to keep up with demand for it from Thai men. According to Tech Times, the Bankok hospital now has around 100 clients a month, or up to 4 clients a day, willing to pay $650 for the five-session treatment.

It is so fast, thanks to social media. Now, people need to book the treatment a week in advance, Popol Tansakul, Leluxs marketing manager, told DPA. We are simply responding to our clients needs. Many of them have asked for treatments of specific areas.

The penis whitening procedure was apparently inspired by a similar laser treatment offered exclusively to women. Pioneered around the same time, the service also attracted the attention of men, who started asking for it, so Lelux decided to give men the option to have their private parts whitened as well.

According to representatives of the Thai hospital, the treatment involve the same pigmentation laser equipment used in other skin whitening procedures, and is certified by Thailands Ministry of Public Health. It is supposed to decrease the level of melanin in the skin considerably, leaving the affected area looking lighter and pinkish.

Despite its unexpected popularity, the penis whitening procedure poses some health risks, according to Thai health experts.



The skin of the private parts is sensitive. Such laser services may cause irritation, allergies and inflammation, Health Service Support Department deputy director-general Dr Thongchai Keeratihuttayakorn told reporters. What if your skin becomes spotted?

Dr. Mingkwan Wichaidit, director of Thailands Department of Medical Services, recently told Morning News that the treatment has just a temporary whitening effect. He claims that our bodies will still build melanin and reverse the effects of the procedure. Mingkwan adds that there is no research to support that laser treatment on the sensitive skin of the penis is completely safe and warns that it could cause infection and scarring.

The Lelux Hospital maintains that all of the clients it has treated so far have been happy with the result.
Flat-earthers, people who believe that the Earth is flat, have been catching a lot of flack for their ridiculous claims, but theirs is not the craziest theory regarding our planets shape and structure. Some people actually believe the Earth is hollow and that a race of superior humans live inside it.

The hollow Earth theory was first proposed in the 17th century by some of the leading scientists of the time. Unlike their predecessors, however, the modern hollow Earth theorists also believe that a race of superior humans, Vikings, and Nazis live in paradise at the center. These residents of the core frequently send UFOs, via holes in the North and South poles, to spy on us surface dwellers in an attempt to prevent a nuclear war.

Photo: 2012.com.au

Spearheading the modern Hollow Earth movement is Rodney Cluff, author of a book called World Top Secret: Our Earth IS Hollow. In 2007 Cluff organized a voyage to the core, with plans to sail from Russia on an icebreaker ship seeking the supposed opening at the North Pole. He had to cancel the 15,000-per-head expedition, but he claims that this hasnt dampened his enthusiasm for the theory, and told The Sun Online that the movement is only growing in popularity.

More and more people are coming to terms with the fact that the Earth is hollow. I get emails from people learning about it every day, Cluff said. Its definitely growing in popularity  certainly not in the millions but maybe in the thousands.

So how does the theory hold up against modern science? Right now, the scientific consensus is that the Earth is made up of a series of unbroken layers and crusts surrounding a solid ball composed mainly of an iron-nickel alloy. Surrounding that solid core is a layer of liquid that is about 2,260 kilometers thick. Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann deduced the presence of the core in 1936 while studying seismograms from earthquakes in New Zealand. Her findings have been backed up many times in the decades since.

Photo: YouTube screengrab

These mainstream theories are considered part of the conspiracy to cover up the truth, by Hollow Earth believers, who subscribe instead to the 17th century science. Edmund Halley, of Halleys Comet fame, first proposed the theory of a hollow Earth in 1692 as a way of explaining unusual compass readings. Halleys theory suggested that the planet is a series of spherical shells stacked like a Russian nesting doll, all spinning in different directions around a central core. This model could account for the inaccuracies in his compass readings. He postulated that the space between each shell might contain a luminous atmosphere capable of supporting life.

Halleys bizarre theory was expanded upon over the centuries by various proponents, and in 1818, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. published his Circular No. 1, stating to the world that the Earth is hollow. He posited that unlike Halleys multi-layered model, the planet was a giant cavern that housed a miniature sun. Symmes also claimed that there were massive holes at the North and South poles allowing for access to the world inside. This aspect of his theory became known as Symmes Holes.

The 19th-century public and scientific community met Symmes theory with derision, but he continued giving lectures and publishing letters about the Hollow Earth. He aimed for an expedition to the North Pole, even getting Congress to vote in 1822 on funding it, but his vision never came to fruition. He never let up campaigning for the expedition until his death in 1849.



Symmes son and other loyal followers kept the Hollow Earth theory alive into the 20th century when it began to take on a more supernatural air. Works of fiction that used Halley and Symmes visions as starting points have profoundly influenced modern believers of the theory. Author Jules Verne published A Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864, which proposed a lush world inside the planet. The novel inspired an entire sub-genre of science fiction about prehistoric jungles and highly advanced and enlightened races of humans living beneath us.

Some modern hollow earthers believe Nazis who escaped from World War Two, as well as the lost Viking colonies of Greenland and the lost tribes of Israel all live in the center of the Earth. Others think that it is home to around 100 subterranean cities full of superior humans, known as the Agartha network.

They have flying saucer technology. They live lives of perfect health for hundreds of years. Their science is much more advanced because they live much longer lives, Rodney Cluff told Atlas Obscura. It has a perfect temperature. God made the inner sun so that it provides heat, during the night, and a little bit less at night. Trees grow up to a thousand feet tall. Humans even grow up to 15 feet tall.



Cluff claims that the only reason we on the surface havent had any verifiable contact with those in the core is that a vaguely defined international banking conspiracy has worked to cover up the Hollow Earth and hide any evidence of Symmes holes. Hes not the only one. YouTube conspiracy theorists secureteam10 told The Sun: Every single satellite image that we have of the North Pole shows a massive hole or a blackout hole put there to hide whatevers underneath.
Despite being a hub for technological advancement, Californias bay area is also notorious for absurd anti-science health trends such as the movement opposing vaccinations which, in 2014, lead to the most significant measles outbreak the state had seen in decades. Joining the absurdity of the anti-vaxxers is a new and equally ridiculous trend  raw water. Thats actually unfiltered, untreated, raw spring water, which, even when from the seemingly cleanest of sources, can spread diseases like cholera, E. coli, Hepatitis A or Giardia.

To add insult to potential injury, this unsterilized water, bottled and marketed by startups like Live Water, is priced at $36.99 per 2.5-gallon containers and $14.99 per refill at the co-op Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. The water is often out of stock and typically sees a price hike with every restock.

Photo: Live Water/Facebook

It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouthfeel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile, Kevin Freeman, a manager at Rainbow Grocery, told the New York Times. Bottled waters controversial. Weve curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm.

Live Water was founded by Mukhande Singh (formerly Christopher Sandborn), three years ago in Culver, Oregon, but has since moved to Los Angeles. Although pure water is obtainable via a reverse osmosis filter, Singh claims that pristine water is not the goal. Youre going to get 99 percent of the bad stuff out, he said. But now you have dead water.

Singh added that real water expires after a few months. It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery, he said. If it sits around too long, itll turn green. People dont even realize that because all their waters dead, so they never see it turn green.



As for public water, Singh believes that it is poisonous. Tap water? Youre drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them, he said. Chloramine, and on top of that, theyre putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but its a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.

Of course, there are plenty of studies that show how fluoride is beneficial to dental health, but this evidence means nothing to people like Singh. He is hardly alone in his delusions, however, as the crusade against adding fluoride to municipal water began in 1950s and has been growing ever since. The once fringe movement has unfortunately gained a great deal of traction recently, much to the dismay of health professionals.

Without water treatment, theres acute and then chronic risks, Dr. Hensrud, the director of the Healthy Living Program at the Mayo Clinic said. Some of these risks include E. coli bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can be present in untreated water. Theres evidence all over the world of this, and the reason we dont have those conditions is because of our very efficient water treatment.



Hensrud compared the raw water movement to the anti-vaccination movement for its rejection of established modern science and its risk to public health. The rejection of vaccines has lead to a resurgence of diseases once thought eradicated, and raw water could do the same. Water treatment in the US eliminated diseases such as cholera, which once killed many Americans, and still kills up to 143,000 people globally every year.

The idea that tap water is dangerous could potentially undermine support for public municipal water systems, and lead to citizens making poor health choices for themselves and their children. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan was a direct result of public funding shortfalls, a decision that has lead to long-term health consequences for residents. If the concept of raw water gains too much traction, Hensrud fears that there could be similar issues arising all across the country.

The World Health Organization estimates that contaminated water kills over 3.4 million people globally every year, making it the leading cause of death worldwide. 844 million people, according to WHO, lack access to clean water. This raw water trend among some of the wealthiest elite on the planet is an insult to those millions of people suffering from lack of access to treated water.
Jonathan Hirshon, a public relations professional, has managed the rather astonishing feat of staying completely anonymous online for the past 25 years. Although he is a pro at building publicity for his clients, he is dead-set against images of himself appearing online.

This is no small feat in a world of social media where major tech companies are pushing facial recognition technologies, and people are always photographing the world around them on their phones. It is easy to pop up in the background of a photo taken in a public place, but Hirshon is vigilant. He has been successful in his efforts as a google search of his name doesnt turn up a single picture of his face. So far, he has been successful in his quest to remain anonymous, as a google search of his name doesnt turn up a single picture of his face.

Photo: Jonathan Hirshon/Facebook

Hirshon is by no means a hermit, however, as he is very active on social media. He has over 3000 Facebook friends and frequently updates his status and profile with personal information from dinner plans to the state of his health.

I choose to share virtually everything about myself on social media, but my face is the essence of me individually, and this is about refusing to give up the last piece of identifiable information that I can control, Hirshon told the BBC.

When the [web] started, I decided to play a game with myself: How long could I keep my picture off the Internet, Hirshon told Daniel Terdiamn of Fast Company. Its turned into a 20-year trek.Theres only been two instances where pictures were taken of me [and posted] without my permission, and they both took them down.

Hirshons anonymity is increasingly becoming an anomaly in a data-driven world. Facebook began using facial recognition technology in 2010 to identify and tag users whenever a photo of them is uploaded, by any user, to the site. The service helps users manage when and where their picture shows up online. Credit card companies are considering the use of selfies to allow customers to pay for things, and many schools are also looking into using the technology to check attendance. Law Enforcement agencies already use it to track down offenders.

Photo: Jonathan Hirshon/Facebook

The latest Apple phone, the iPhone X, uses facial recognition to identify the owner, an idea that Hirshon is open to, telling the BBC, I trust Apple with my data. Many of the points of facial recognition are kept locally on the phone. Apple doesnt get that information.

Hirshon regularly speaks at conferences around the world, which has proven to be the biggest challenge in the quest to keep his face offline. His first slide, regardless of the topic at hand, is always of a camera with a red slash through it. He also asks the organizers of the event to remind the audience that no one is allowed to photograph him.

He regularly searches the internet for pictures that may have slipped through, but in 25 years he has only ever found two. The incidents occurred after events in Serbia and Croatia, and the pictures popped up on Twitter.

I raced to find bilingual friends in both instances to send an urgent tweet respectfully asking on my behalf to take the picture down, he told the BBC. Both were happy to do so and apologized profusely for the error. Nothing done out of malice, just language issues.

Photo: Jonathan Hirshon/Facebook

Hirshon is realistic, however, about maintaining anonymity and is aware that it could end soon. He has put into place a small hack that he hopes will extend it though, based on the 1960 film Spartacus. The slaves identity was protected in the famous scene when many of his fellow slaves stood up and declared: Im Spartacus. Hirshon has adapted the concept to the modern era by asking his friends to tag him in random photos of people and animals.

If youre so inclined, he wrote in a private Facebook post, take a moment and tag me in some random picture or image. A leaf on the wind, a howler monkey, geometry equations, George Clooney, a large steaming pile of excrementselect an image that you think best suits me or [is] based solely on your whim.

The collection of images under the tag Jonathan Hirshon could confuse Facebook and Googles algorithms and potentially bury any real photos of Hirshon that might eventually turn up. As to why he is so intent on keeping his anonymity secure, Hirshon told Fast Company, Youve probably noticed that I have a fairly decent grasp of facial recognition technology. I have worked for a number of companies in the (information and security) space. You can leave it at that, and let people draw their own conclusions.



When people ask me why I do it, I give them four options. One: I am shy. Two: I used to work as a spy. Three: I am on the witness protection programme. Four: all of the above. I refuse to confirm or deny which one is the truth.
Throwing down the gauntlet

New Indian foreign secretarys appointment will reinforce view that India is willing to deal with the Chinese on their own terms
1,300 women from India to undertake Haj without male guardian: Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi

India

pti-PTI

Mumbai, Jan 8: Around 1,300 women from India will go on Haj without a "Mehram" and will be exempted from the lottery system this year for the annual pilgrimage, Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi reiterated.

Till now, women Haj pilgrims were required to be accompanied by their husbands or a "Mehram" during the annual pilgrimage. "Saudi Arabia has relaxed the norms and allowed a group of at least four women to go on Haj without a male companion," Naqvi said during an interaction with PTI journalists here.

The term "Mehram" refers to a male, whom a woman cannot marry (i.e. father, brother, son etc.). "Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his 'Mann Ki Baat' radio programme, had said that the women who have applied to go on Haj without a 'Mehram' would be exempted from the lottery system and allowed to go on the annual pilgrimage," the minority affairs minister said.

The Centre had decided to allow the women pilgrims over the age of 45 years to undertake the pilgrimage in groups of at least four, sans a "Mehram", he added. Meanwhile, referring to the impasse in the Rajya Sabha between the ruling party and Opposition, due to which the "triple talaq" bill could not be passed during the just- concluded Winter session of Parliament, Naqvi said it was not a setback for the government.

"We have made the practice of triple talaq illegal and unconstitutional. Hence, there is a provision of imprisonment (for the offenders)," the minister said. Pointing to the response of the Muslim community to the triple talaq decision, Naqvi said there was "not a single protest", unlike the protests on the Shah Bano issue during late Rajiv Gandhi's tenure as prime minister. "The Congress missed an opportunity to make a statement about our bill in the Lok Sabha. It did not even suggest an amendment. Now, it is stalling the bill in the Rajya Sabha," he added.

Asked if the Muslims were going away from the BJP, Naqvi said, "For the first time, the BJP got around 17 per cent votes from the Muslim community in Gujarat. We realised this when we analysed the results booth-wise." This is the first time the saffron party had received so many votes from the Muslim community, the minister said, adding, "The figure used to be around 8-9 per cent."

In last month's Gujarat polls, with 99 MLAs, the BJP secured a simple majority in the 182-member Assembly, 16 less than its 2012 tally of 115. The opposition Congress, which had won 61 seats in 2012, managed to increase its tally to 77.

PTI
Army Chief stresses on indigenous defence technology

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Asserting that there is huge requirement to modernise the armed forces, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday called for self-reliance in terms of defence equipment manufacturing. Speaking at the Army Technology Seminar in Delhi, General Rawat said: " the time has come to ensure that we fight the next war with homemade solutions."

"There is a huge requirement of modernization of our armed forces, in every field. The future wars will be fought in difficult terrains and circumstances and we have to be prepared for them," he said.

He also lauded the progress made in the direction of indigenous development of defence technology and called on the industry to strive towards it.

"Good headway has been made in lightweight bullet-proof material and fuel cell technology. The journey has begun and this must continue, we are confident that if we get support from the industry we will walk the extra mile to ensure that we utilize the technology you give us," he added.

India has been pushing for 'Make in India' initiative in defence manufacturing industry. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had in December said that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has a great role in realising the 'Make in India' vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The defence ministry had last week issued a Rs 10,000-crore tender for acquiring 61 advanced air defence gun systems from local manufacturers under the Make in India programme. The tender was issued by the acquisition wing of the defence ministry and the 61 Close-in Weapon Systems (CIWS) air defence systems would be used to replace the Russian-origin systems, including the L-70 and Zu-23 air defence guns.

OneIndia News
Assocham warns government against "knee jerk" reaction over GST

India

pti-PTI

Hyderabad, Jan 8: Cautioning the government against resorting to "knee-jerk" reaction to deal with slippage in GST collections, industry body Assocham has said the revenues would pick up once the glitches in the system are addressed.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections slipped for the second straight month to Rs 80,808 crore in November, down from over Rs 83,000 crore in the previous month. Asscoham president Sandeep Jajodia said there is a need for an increased vigil on the implementation of the GST and related problems.

"No knee-jerk reaction should be resorted to in the wake of fall in tax revenue; after all, the collections should pick up once the glitches are addressed," Jajodia told PTI.

On the last full-fledged budget of the present government to be presented on February 1, he said from India Inc's point of view, the most important 'Must Dos' would include problems of banks in terms of their NPAs which have also become a part of the 'twin balance sheet' issue.

"It is only when banks are able to lend adequately again that the demand generation in the economy would be seen," Jajodia said.

The other priority, he said, should be to take steps which revive the private investment that has been on the back burner for the last few years now. "Besides reducing the cost of finance, the private sector should be actively engaged in sectors like the railways which are dominated by the government, he said. A lot more needs to be done in terms of infrastructure boost that should translate into opportunities for the private sector", Jajodia stressed.

"The rural distress is bound to be a focus area for the government and here again, the private sector should be taken as partners, in areas such as financial inclusion, fertiliser, seeds, farm implements, marketing and processing of agri produce," he added.

PTI
Apple launches iPhone 13 series, to be available in India from Sep 24: See price, specs, features and more

Awaiting concrete proposal from iPhone maker Apple: Prabhu

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Jan 8: Union Minister Suresh Prabhu on Monday said the commerce and industry ministry is awaiting a concrete proposal from iPhone maker Apple to set up a manufacturing unit in India.

"We are waiting for a good proposal from Apple...Please give us a concrete proposal. If the proposal comes, we will examine it. We are always open for that," Prabhu told reporters here. During a recent meeting with Apple officials, the minister has asked them for a proposal.

Nick Amman, Director, Government Affairs and Priya Balasubramaniam, Global Vice President, Operations, Apple Inc met the minister last Friday. The Cupertino-based iPad manufacturer Apple has asked for certain concessions for setting up a manufacturing unit in the country.

The government had sought investment and job creation details from the iPhone maker to facilitate setting up its manufacturing facility in India. In March, the then Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had informed the Rajya Sabha that the government has not accepted most of the demands of the company.

Apple India had sought concessions, including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for smartphone manufacturing and service/repair for a period of 15 years.

The company also wants relaxation in the mandated 30 per cent local sourcing of components, besides reduction in customs duties on completely-knocked-down and semi-knocked- down units of devices that are to be assembled in the country.

Apple does not manufacture devices on its own but gets the job done through contract manufacturers. It sells its products through company-owned retail stores in countries like China, Germany, the US, the UK and France, among others.

It has no wholly-owned store in India and sells its products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro.

PTI
'Kantara' box office: Even as Bollywood's Akshays and Ajays struggle, this one hits Rs 75-crore mark

Bengaluru fire tragedy: Bar owner still at large

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Karnataka Minister KJ George has announced Rs. 5 lakh compensation for the kin of those who lost their lives in a fire at KR Market's resto-bar in Bengaluru. At least five persons have died in after a fire broke out at the Kailash bar. The first was noticed at 2.30 am on Monday and the fire services were immediately pressed into service.

RV Dayashankar, the owner of Kailash bar restaurant in Kumbaara Sangha building, absconding after a call from the Bengaluru police, reported ANI. The victims were identified as Swami (23), Prasad (20), Mahesh, all natives of Tumakaru, Manjunath (45) from Hassan and Keerthi (24) from Mandya.

Police Commissioner T Suneel Kumar said at the site that a case has been registered against the owner of the resto-bar under section 304 of the IPC which pertains to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

BBMP Mayor inspects the building BBMP Mayor Sampat Raj comes out after inspecting the spot after a fire broke out at a bar-cum-restaurant, in Bengaluru on Monday. The fire resulted in five casualties. PTI Photo Police officers at the site Two police officers inspect the site after a fire broke out at a bar-cum-restaurant, in Bengaluru on Monday. The fire resulted in five casualties. PTI Photo Police stand guard Police officers stand guard at the site after a fire broke out at a bar-cum-restaurant, in Bengaluru on Monday. The fire resulted in five casualties. PTI Photo Passer-bys Bengaluru Passer-bys look on at the fire site where a fire broke out at a bar-cum-restaurant, in Bengaluru on Monday. The fire resulted in five casualties. PTI Photo OneIndia News
Chicken sales dip in Bengaluru amid bird flu scare, mutton sale up

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

With bird flu or H5N1 influenza confirmed in Bengaluru last week, the sale of chicken meat has dipped in the city.

Bengaluru's civic agency officials had ordered for the culling of chickens after a confirmed case of bird flu, came to light on January 1.

"The sale of mutton has gone up. Sale of chicken has gone down by at least 25 percent," news agency ANI quoted a meat-seller, Aslam, as saying.

The National Institute of High-Security Animal diseases (NIHSAD) in Bhopal confirmed the outbreak in Dasarahalli area. An official release said birds in some poultry farms in the area started dying in December last year, triggering panic of avian bird flu, following which the area was quarantined and culling of birds was carried out.

[Bird Flu scare in Bengaluru: Health department officials order culling of chicken]

BBMP officials are also scrutinising stalls in wholesale meat markets across the city. Officials are now in the process of tracing where the chickens were bought from. The government, meanwhile, has issued a notification declaring an area of one-kilometre radius from the chicken centre at Bhuvaneshwari Nagar in Dasarahalli as an infected zone and an area of 10 km radius as surveillance zone. Bengaluru last reported cases of bird flu in October 2012.

OneIndia News
Did this brilliant AMU research scholar from Kashmir join the Hizbul Mujahideen?

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Recommended Video

Kashmiri scholar from AMU joins terror outfit, images with gun goes viral | Oneindia News

He had won accolades for his paper on flood risk assessment in his hometown of North Kashmir using remote sensing and GIS techniques. This is research scholar from Aligarh Muslim University Mannan Wani who took a break to go to his hometown.

However, now images of him holding an assault rifle have sent shock waves. It is now said that he has joined the Hizbul Mujahideen in South Kashmir. Wani was studying at the AMU's Department of Geology for around 4 years. He had chosen to specialise in Applied Geology.

In his mid-twenties, he enrolled in the university's PhD programme. His decision has come as a shock to friends and family. One of his friends said that he always expected Wani to make it to the civil services. Another spoke about a paper that had won him the first prize at an international conference at Bhopal two years back.

It is said that he had left AMU a couple of days back and reached Delhi. He was on his way to Kupwara where his family lives. However, with no sign of him for three days and images of him holding an assault rifle surfacing, his family has filed a missing complaint.

OneIndia News
Fanatics hound, push Karnataka woman to suicide for saying "I love Muslims"

India

oi-Anusha

Constant harassment and threats by pro-Hindu activists pushed a 20-year-old woman in Karnataka to kill herself for declaring that she "loved Muslims". Dhanyashree was found hanging at her residence a day after a group of five pro-Hindu group workers threatened her and her mother for "being friendly with Muslims". A BJP youth leader from Chikmagalur has been arrested in connection with the case.

Dhanyashree, in a private chat with her friend, had spoken about communal incidents and how hatred in the name of caste and religion was futile, In response to a question posed by her friend, identified as Santosh, the woman had replied that she "loved Muslims". Her friend warned her against being friends with people from other communities and invoked Love Jihad. Screenshots of the conversations were shared widely by Santosh who also sent it to the local Bajrang Dal leaders, the police said.

A gang of five men led by a local BJP youth wing leader, Anilraj, barged into the girl's house on Friday and threatened her for being "friendly with Muslims". The gang warned the family to stay away from people of other religions. Meanwhile, a photograph of the girl with a man from another community was deliberately shared to tarnish her image, the police added.

"The girl was found hanging at her residence and a suicide note recovered from her house reveals that she was harassed and threatened by this gang. Her pictures were made viral causing mental trauma pushing her to kill herself. Anyone involved in the case will be brought to the books," said Annamalai, SP, Chikmagalur.

The Mudigere police registered a case against five people under IPC section 306 for abetment to suicide. Two special teams have been formed to identify all those involved in harassing the girl, sharing screenshots of her messages and pictures.

OneIndia News
Gag on loudspeakers in UP: Muslim clerics hail govt decision

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Yogi Adityanath led Uttar Pradesh government's decision to not let the use of loudspeakers in religious places without permission has been welcomed by Muslim clerics. The UP government's decision comes in compliance with the directive of the Allahabad High Court.

"The Allahabad High Court's order should be welcomed by everyone as it is in the interest of the nation. But if the government has to act it should first check on the loudspeakers used in private functions such as marriages and political rallies. The use of loudspeakers at religious places is done for a very limited period of time," a News 18 report quoted Sufiyan Nizami, a cleric, as saying.

The Principal Secretary Home Arvind Kumar issued a circular in this regard to district magistrates and district police chiefs to ensure compliance with the High Court order. The circular directs the officials to ensure that prior permission for the use of loudspeakers is taken and sound should not be more than 10 decibels at public places and 5 decibels at private.

[No use of loudspeakers in UP without permission]

The Allahabad High Court had last year passed an order directing the government to take action on the use of loudspeakers. It had asked the government as to who had given permission for the use of loudspeakers on religious and public places and what steps the state government has taken to ensure compliance of the Noise Pollution ( Regulation and Control) Act, 2000. The order had rapped the state government for its failure to control growing noise pollution.

OneIndia News
India to buy 240 KAB-1500s from Russia: What can these bombs do

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

India has emerged as one of largest buyers of defence equipment in recent years. The defence ministry last week announced that it would purchase 240 precision-guided bombs at a cost of Rs 1,254 crore from Russia's Rosoboron export. The smart KAB-1500 laser-guided bombs will be procured for Sukhoi-30MKI fighter jets.

This procurement will address the deficiency of Precision Guided Munitions in the IAF arsenal, besides enhancing the offensive capabilities of the IAF.

Defence Ministry has also confirmed that it would buy 131 Barak Missiles and associated equipment from Israel's Rafael Advanced Defence Systems at a cost of Rs. 460 crore

All about KAB-1500 bombs:

These bombs are going to be fitted to IAF's Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter jets. It is designed to destroy ground targets such as railway lines, ammunition depots, bridges, military facilities and ships. The bomb's warhead weighs 1,100 kilograms. The bomb has folding fins that allow it to manoeuvre while being guided to the target.

Unlike conventional bombs, these bombs can be guided after being dropped so that it can find the target precisely. Even when dropped from high altitude, guided bombs can deviate from the vertical path to the target by as much as 5 miles (8 km), allowing the aircraft to operate at a distance from the enemy and avoid the risk of direct contact.

[BrahMos successfully test fired from Sukhoi; cruise missile triad achieved]

It has a feathered semi-active laser homing head and an HE warhead. The KAB-1500 is comparable to America's Paveway II and Paveway III series and has been used by the Russian Air Force during its intervention in Syria. Some foreign analysts have estimated that certain versions of the KAB-1500 have a Circular Error Probable (CEP) of four to seven meters, meaning that 50 percent of the bombs would fall within that distance from their target. It is unclear which exact variant Moscow is selling to India.

OneIndia News
UML, Maoist Centre agree to kickstart merger process

A much awaited meeting between two top leaders of the left alliance has paved the way for unification of the CPN-UML and the CPN (Maoist Centre) within a few days, leaders said.
Jignesh Mevani's event at Parliament street cancelled

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

An event, scheduled to be held at Delhi's Parliament Street on Tuesday, where Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani was to take part, has been cancelled as of now. This is the second to be cancelled by the authorities this month.

The event was supposed to attended by Jignesh Mevani from Gujarat, Akhil Gogoi from Assam, Manoj Manzil from Bihar, Pooja Shukla from Lucknow at Parliament street 12 noon onwards

One day to #YuvaRally



Hear youth leaders Jignesh Mevani from Gujarat, Akhil Gogoi from Assam, Manoj Manzil from Bihar, Pooja Shukla from Lucknow - all incarcerated for raising issues of land, dignity, education - tomorrow at Parliament street 12 noon onwards#FreeChandrashekhar pic.twitter.com/xMycJjxYTs  Shehla Rashid (@Shehla_Rashid) January 8, 2018

The event titled, 'Yuva Hoonkar rally and Jansabha' aims to question PM Narendra Modi's government over unemployment and rise in attacks on Dalits.

Last week, the All India Student's Summit 2018, where JNU student leader Umar Khalid and Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani were supposed to speak, was cancelled in Mumbai. Police forcibly removed students gathered for Chhatra Bharati event outside Bhaidas Hall and imposed Section 149 of IPC to prevent 'unlawful assembly'. Members of Chhatra Bharti staged a protest outside Juhu Police Station after some members were detained by Police.

OneIndia News
Cong has ability to defeat BJP in 2019 polls: Rahul to Indians in Bahrain

International

oi-Madhuri

Recommended Video

Rahul Gandhi hits out at Modi Government for spreading communal hatred, Watch | Oneindia News

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Monday while addressing at convention of Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin in Bahrain said that Congress is capable of defeating BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

In his first address to NRIs outside India after taking over as Congress president, Gandhi, Gandhi said,''I am here to tell you what you mean to your country, you are important, to tell you that there is a serious problem at home, and to tell you are part of the solution.''

Slamming the government for allegedly dividing people on the basis of caste and religion and converting the anger of jobless youth into hatred among communities, Gandhi said,''Job creation is at an eight year low. Instead of focusing on removal of poverty, job creating and world class education system, we see instead rise in forces of hate and division. Instead of accepting that we are struggling to create jobs, instead of uniting people of all religions and communities together to face the challenge, the govt is busy converting the fear being generated in jobless youth into hatred between communities.''

The Congress also said,''Your talent, skills, tolerance, patriotism is what India needs today. You have shown us how you have built the countries you have journeyed to.''

Gandhi claimed that the government's failure to create jobs is resulting in "tremendous unrest" in India and this anger is visible in the streets and is rising with each passing day.

He said the Congress has the strength to fight the BJP and claimed it will defeat the ruling party in 2019. "Congress party knows how to fight. It defeated the British. It changed India and helped the country stand on its feet with the help of people. "This party has so much power that it will defeat the BJP in 2019," he said on the party's plans for 2019 polls.

On his vision for the party, Gandhi said he admits his mistakes as well as those of the Congress. "We will have to present a new Congress, a new vision that is something you trust. You will see a dramatic change in the Congress party, you would believe you can trust," he said.

Noting that Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar were also NRIs, he said "Our ancestors needed you in 1947 to protect the idea of India and I have come to seek your help to transform India now".

Drawing comparisons with China, which he said was galloping ahead in job creation, he said "what China does in two days, takes India one year to do" while claiming that job creation in India is at an eight-year low and new investments are lowest in 13 years, with bank credit growth also nosediving.

OneIndia News (with PTI inputs)
Forcible conversion: 19 year old Nidhi pushed to death by Mohammad Sufiyan in UP

To boost connectivity in North-East, PM Modi to inaugurate first greenfield airport in Arunachal Pradesh

UP: Massive fire erupts at BRD hospital in Gorakhpur

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

A fire broke out at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur early on Monday morning. The fire gutted the principal's office situated at the hospital premises. However, no casualties were reported.

Three fire tenders were pressed into service to control the blaze that caused extensive damage to the principal's office and the adjacent record room situated in the hospital premises. The cause of the fire is yet unknown.

The hospital was in news in August last year when 63 children, including infants, died within a span of four days when the supply of oxygen was disrupted due to non-payment of dues to the vendor.

The incident has brought to light shocking negligence at the Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College and Hospital.

OneIndia News
Modi reviews security, policing at meet of DGPs, IGPs

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting in Madhya Pradesh with top police officers of all states. The meeting focused on specific areas of policing and security.

Modi also reviewed the status of the decisions taken in the last three years. The PM addressed the annual conference of DGPs and IGPs at the BSF Academy in Gwalior's Tekanpur and spoke on key security issues. "At the conference of DGPs and IGPs in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh, there were insightful presentations and fruitful discussions on aspects relating to our security apparatus. There was also a presentation on the implementation status of decisions taken during the last three years," Modi tweeted.

PM Modi was received at a military air base by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Gwalior Mayor Vivek Narayan Shejwalkar and other officials. After his arrival, Modi inaugurated five new buildings at the BSF Academy. "Had focussed discussions with groups of officers on specific areas of policing and security. I also inaugurated five new buildings at the BSF Academy," the PM also tweeted.

OneIndia News
No use of loudspeakers in UP without permission

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Recommended Video

Yogi Adityanath government makes use of loudspeakers without permission illegal | Oneindia News

The Yogi Adityanath led Uttar Pradesh government has decided not to let the use of loudspeakers in Mosques, Temples, Churches and other public places without permission. The order comes in compliance with the directive of the Allahabad High Court.

The Principal Secretary Home Arvind Kumar has issued a circular in this regard to district magistrates and district police chiefs to ensure compliance with the High Court order. The circular directs the officials to ensure that prior permission for the use of loudspeakers is taken and sound should not be more than 10 decibels at public places and 5 decibels at private.

The Allahabad High Court had last year passed an order directing the government to take action on the use of loudspeakers. It had asked the government as to who had given permission for the use of loudspeakers on religious and public places and what steps the state government has taken to ensure compliance of the Noise Pollution ( Regulation and Control) Act, 2000. The order had rapped the state government for its failure to control growing noise pollution.

The state government has to submit a compliance report to the High Court on February 1. Following the High Court order, the ADG Law and Order Anand Kumar, who is also Acting DGP, issued orders to all SSPs and SPs to conduct a survey on religious places and identify those using loudspeakers without permission. They would be asked to take permission from the concerned authorities or else they would not be allowed to use loudspeakers on temple and mosque after January 15. "We have issued directions for the compliance of the honourable High Court order. No one would be allowed to use loudspeakers without permission and in accordance with the law," said the Acting DGP.

OneIndia News
Padmaavat protest: Goons who attacked school bus ought to be booked for 'attempt to murder'

Would it be accepted if Gandhiji is shown doing bhangra ': Giriraj Singh on Padmaavat row

46 people have been arrested so far in connection with 'Padmaavat violence': Gurgaon Police

Padmavati to release on Jan 25: Rajasthan govt says won't allow it

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

The storm surrounding Padmavati, now Padmavat has refused to die down even after the announcement of its release date.The Rajasthan government on Monday said that it will not allow the Deepika Padukone starrer for release in the state though the name had been changed from 'Padmavati'.

Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria said that the state govt will not allow the release of Padmavat in the state.

The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in power in Rajasthan, does not want to be seen as going against the prevailing sentiment, i.e., against the release of the film. Several crucial by-elections, including that of Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha constituencies, are to be held shortly in Rajasthan.

After facing several roadblocks, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's controversial film has been retitled to "Padmavat", seems set for a January 25 release, sources in Viacom18 Motion Pictures said on Monday.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, has been given the go-ahead by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which has asked the makers to change the title and suggested some other modifications. The film was earlier scheduled to be released on December

Though Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and Sanjay Leela Bhansali have not released an official statement yet, sources in the production house confirmed that the film will release on January 25, a day before Republic Day.

"The film is releasing on January 25. There is no clarity when the official statement will be out regarding this," sources in the Viacom18 Motion Pictures told PTI.

OneIndia News
Rajinikanths hand symbol has this Mumbai start up worried, here is why

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

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The hand symbol made popular by Rajinikanth has a startup in Mumbai worried. The hand position that the actor-and-would-be politician is known for is often likened to "Apana mudra", a yoga finger and palm posture.

And now, Mumbai's Voxweb, an 18-month-old social networking app, says that it is similar to its logo.

"If another company or brand has a similar logo, it will not matter much. But social media and political parties have quite a few similar traits - they have mass adoption, they are really close to their user base and so on. This creates a conflict," Voxweb founder Yash Mishra said.

The mudra is seen by Rajinikanth's legion of followers as his trademark gesture, ever since he raised two fingers and folded two in his 2002 film 'Baba'. The actor holds the two middle fingers down with his thumb and raises the little and index fingers in a broad vee.

The symbol figured prominently on the stage at a series of meetings addressed by the megastar recently. Fans also carried placards with the hand symbol.

Voxweb, Mishra said, has a similar brand logo, but with the thumb left free.

"Social media platforms are being accused of favouring political parties during elections and using their algorithms to promote that kind of content. People are already asking us if we are favouring Rajnikanth's outfit or if we have any common investors," Mishra told PTI.

The startup has written to the actor over the issue but is yet to hear from him. There was no response to messages sent by PTI to the star's publicity team.

Asked what measures he planned to take to save his logo from the Rajini juggernaut, Mishra said his moves would depend on the new political outfit's reactions.

"We are open to suggestions and would ask them to make some alterations. All that we have to say is there is absolutely no relationship between the company and the party or its ideology," he said.

Rajinikanth had said last month that he would soon launch a political party in Tamil Nadu.

OneIndia News
What will happen to armed forces as homosexuality a punishable offense under their laws?

Supreme Court to review Constitutional validity of section 377, seeks reply from Centre

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

The Supreme Court decided to reconsider whether Gay sex between consenting adults will be a criminal offence or not. After the apex court banned instant triple talaq, the LGBT activists urged the apex court to also take steps to decriminalise homosexuality. The issue of Section 377 of the IPC, which criminalises homosexuality, is pending before the top court.

Supreme Court said, 'Suresh Kumar Koushal needs to be considered afresh, in a fresh petition filed by Gay persons. Matter referred to larger Bench.'

A three-judge bench of CJI Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said the SC's 2-judge bench judgment upholding the validity of Section 377 appears to hurt the sexual preferences of individuals.

Also, the Bench issued a notice to the Centre seeking a response on a writ petition filed by five members of LGBT community, who say they live in fear of Police because of their natural sexual preferences.

India's gay prince Manvendra Singh opens his palace to LGBT people

In 2013, Suresh Kumar Koushal and another v/s NAZ Foundation and others case, the Supreme Court of India which overturned the Delhi High Court case Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

On 11 December 2013, the SC set aside the 2009 judgement given by the Delhi High Court stating that judicial intervention was not required in this issue. This in effect recriminalized sexual intercourse "against the order of nature". In its judgment the Supreme court bench of justices G. S. Singhvi and S. J. Mukhopadhaya stated -

"In view of the above discussion, we hold that Section 377 IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality and the declaration made by the Division Bench of the High court is legally unsustainable."

Subsequently, the then central government had filed a review petition on 21 December 2013. In its review petition, the Centre said: "The judgment suffers from errors apparent on the face of the record, and is contrary to well-established principles of law laid down by the apex Court enunciating the width and ambit of Fundamental Rights under Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution."

OneIndia News
Measles in Mumbai: Toddler dies, 126 children infected in 2022 so far

Aamir Khan announces break from acting, wants to spend time with family

Former Shiv Sena corporator stabbed to death in Mumbai, 2 arrested

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Two suspects have been arrested in connection with the murder of former Shiv Sena corporator Ashok Sawant outside his house in Kandivali, also, the vehicle used in the crime has been seized. The police investigation is underway.

Shiv Sena leader Ashok Sawant was stabbed to death by unknown assailants outside his house at around 11 pm, on Sunday night. Reason for the murder is not yet known.

He was rushed to a nearby hospital in Kandivli but was declared dead on arrival, a police official told PTI. Sawant had entered the cable television business a few years ago, he said.

Ashok Sawant from Kandivali was a two-time corporator from Samata Nagar. The Times of India reported that two men attacked the 62-year-old leader with choppers before fleeing the spot.

An FIR has been filed under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code at the Samata Nagar police station, reported India Today.

OneIndia News
This mystery West Bengal woman is facilitating the journey of ISIS recruits into Afghanistan

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Shazia is married with two children. She is based in West Bengal and her name has surfaced yet again following a thorough investigation which has revealed a plot to send ISIS recruits from Bangladesh to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

She is highly radicalised and was in contact with several ISIS recruits. She forms part of the top rung of this racket and it is in the final stages that she comes in contact with the radicalised youth.

Her name has cropped up twice in the past. Agencies probing cases relating to the ISIS in both Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh learnt about this lady who is said to be highly radicalised.

In all the probes in the past, it has been found that the ISIS is making a desperate push in India to recruit for its wing in Afghanistan. The 21 youth from Kerala who went missing were also found to be in ISIS territory in Afghanistan.

Once the Kerala case was busted the normal routes taken by Indian ISIS recruits to reach Afghanistan was busted. All the operatives would take flights into Iran and from there move towards Afghanistan. However, with this route coming under the scanner of the agencies, it has become increasingly impossible for operatives to take that route.

"The Indian recruits have now changed their route and found another way of reaching Afghanistan", investigators say. All recruits across the country are moved into West Bengal. Out there, Shazia along with her accomplice Atiq would make arrangements to illegally move them into Bangladesh.

Once in Bangladesh, another module would take over and push them directly into Afghanistan. In some cases, they have been told to take the Pakistan route from where they would be moved into Afghanistan, investigations have also found.

Shazia has a team of people working for her. The job of those under her would be to identify, radicalise and recruit. Shazia would come into the picture only once the entire process was completed.

OneIndia News
Use of harmful pesticides massive in country

The No Pesticide Use Week, which concluded on Sunday, might have encouraged some to avoid use of harmful pesticides, but the country seems to be obsessed with pesticides as the country continues to import thousands of tons of harmful chemicals every year.
Vande Mataram row in Meerut yet again, this time scuffle between BJP, BSP councillors

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Recommended Video

Uttar Pradesh : Clashes break out between BJP and BSP councillors over Vande Mataram | Oneindia News

A scuffle is said to have broken out between the BJP and the BSP councillors in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, on Monday after a few BSP councillors refused to stand and sing Vande Mataram.

Even in December 2017, a controversy erupted over Vande Mataram in Meerut after newly-elected Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) mayor Sunita Verma was sitting while Vande Mataram was being recited at the swearing-in ceremony.

According to reports, some persons said to be Muslims, refused to stand up while the Vande Mataram was being played at a Nagar Panchayat meeting in Muzaffarnagar on January 7. Bajrang Dal members, who were also present at the event, then forced the Muslims leaders to stand up for Vande Mataram and also sing. The Muslims agreed to stand up for the song but refused to sing it.

It has been a while we have been witnessing several 'political' controversies over the national song, Vande Mataram. While right-wing groups and political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), want Vande Mataram to be accorded the same position and respect as the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, others, especially the Muslim organisations, feel that the song goes against the tenets of Islam.

Last year in March, the Meerut Municipal Corporation has declared that it would not let councillors unwilling to sing the patriotic song 'Vande Mataram' to attend its meetings. This led to a protest by seven corporators who cited a Supreme Court order that says singing of Vande Mataram is not mandatory.

OneIndia News
'Victims, perpetrators of communal clashes are Dalits, OBCs,' points out Siddaramaiah

India

oi-Anusha

Chief Minister of Karnataka Siddaramaiah on Monday pointed out that victims as well as accused in communal clashes are always Dalits or those from backward classes. Addressing a gathering during his statewide tour in Udupi, Siddaramaiah said that communal incidents will stop only when people realise this irony.

The Congress strongman took to his personal twitter account to express his concerns over victims of communal clashes in Karnataka. Two lives have been lost in mindless violence in the last one week in Suratkal alone.

"Those who die as well as kill in communal incidents are innocent children from backward classes and Dalits. Children of those putting a knife into their hands are becoming doctors and engineers. Our children are going to jail. Communalism will end only when people realise this," said a tweet from Siddaramaiah on Monday evening.

As part of his Karnataka Navanirmana Yatra- a month-long statewide tour to promote his government- Siddaramaiah visited Udupi on Monday. On Sunday evening, Siddaramaiah visited the family of Deepak Rao and Ahmed Basheer- both residents of Suratkal who were hacked to death. The government apart from announcing a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to both families has also offered a job to Deepak Rao's differently-abled brother.

Siddaramaiah's balancing act continued on Monday when he visited a temple as well as a mosque in Udupi. The promise of a fresh recommendation to the centre to include castes of Ganga, Besta, Moogaveera and Kharvi fishermen communities under Scheduled Tribes category, interest-free loans to fishermen in the upcoming budget are a few assurances that Siddaramaiah gave during his yatra on Monday.

While Sunday saw Siddaramaiah and his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath's volley of words on Twitter, the Karnataka Chief Minister continued his tirade against the saffron icon on Monday taking him on the issue of beef and food choices.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, January 8, 2018, 23:13 [IST]
Indian-Americans stage #ChappalChorPakistan protest in Washington

International

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Recommended Video

Indians in USA hold Chaapal Chor Pakistan protest in Washington, Watch Video | Oneindia News

The outrage against Pakistan over the treatment meted out to Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife and mother when they visited Islamabad on December 25 to meet him is not limited just to India. A group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest outside Pakistan embassy in Washington over the misbehaviour.

The protestors carried placards with '#ChappalChorPakistan' and 'in solidarity Kulbhushan's family' written on them. They also carried pictures of Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife and mother meeting him in Ismalabad last month with a glass partition in between.

The protestors seemed to be sending a message to the US administration to sever ties with Pakistan. One must note that US -Pakistan ties are at an all-time low, with President Donald Trump repeatedly dropping hints that he would stop all aid to Islamabad.

"Pakistan's narrow-mindedness was exposed with how they treated Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife, what policymakers and people here need to understand is that Pakistan as a whole is also being run with same narrow-minded mentality," one of the protestors told news agency ANI.

Protest outside Pakistan embassy in Washington Kulbhushan Jadhav has been in the Pakistani jail since April 2016 over allegations of being an Indian spy. On what Pakistan claimed was a humanitarian gesture, Jadhav's mother and wife were issued visas and allowed to meet him on December 25. #ChappalChorPakistan on placards The meeting did not turn out to be the way Jadhav's family may have expected. There was a glass partition between Jadhav and his family, and his wife and the mother were asked to remove mangalsutra, bangles and bindi, besides been asked to change the attire, citing it as a security measure. Pakistani officials also confiscated Jadhav's wife's shoes and did not return it. Protest to express solidarity with Jadhav's family "When they stole the chappal of a woman who was in distress, I hope they use these also. I want to say one thing- Pakistan ka matlab kya? Amreeka se dollar la, Hindustan ke joote kha! (What does Pakistan mean, take dollars from US and shoes from India)," said another protestor in Washington. Shoes kept to embarrass Pakistan External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on December 28 tore into Pakistan for confiscating the shoes of Kulbhushan Jadhav's wife when she visited Islamabad to meet him. Swaraj asked if something really suspicious was there in the footwear then why nothing was detected by the security check of Emirates Airline, which she took from Dubai to Islamabad.

(Images credit - ANI/Twitter)

The minister told the House that Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother was not allowed to speak in Marathi, their mother tongue and that Pakistani officials switched-off the intercom when she spoke in Marathi.

[How Kulbhushan Jadhav was abducted in Iran and sold to ISI]

OneIndia had in July 2017, carried a story confirming that Jadhav was captured in Iran by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Khorasan and then sold to the ISI in Pakistan. This revelation was made Baloch activist, Mehrab Sarjov.

OneIndia News
Leading think tank warns Pakistan of IS, says it is increasing foothold in country

International

pti-PTI

Islamabad, Jan 8: Negating the Pakistan government's stand that the Islamic State has no presence in the country, a leading think-tank has warned that the dreaded terror group is alarmingly increasing its foothold in Pakistan.

The security report by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) yesterday stated that the IS, especially active in northern Sindh and Balochistan, was also behind the abduction and killing of two Chinese nationals last year, Dawn News reported.

The PIPS shared the findings of its security analysis titled Special Report 2017, providing an insight into security challenges of Pakistan. Pakistan has been denying that ISIS had an organised presence in the country, however, even though the terrorist group has claimed responsibility for several attacks in the restive Balochistan province in recent years.

"Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jamaatul Ahrar and others with similar objectives perpetrated 58 per cent attacks, while 37 per cent and 5 per cent of the attacks were carried out by nationalist insurgents and violent sectarian groups respectively," it said.

The report has also highlighted that Baloch nationalist- insurgent groups, especially Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were only second to TTP as far as the their threat capability was concerned. The report also noted the alarming increase in the footprint of ISIS, especially in Balochistan and northern Sindh as it carried out the deadliest attacks in those provinces. It said that footprints of ISIS was increasing and it "killed 153 in 6 deadliest attacks".

It said "down 16 per cent from the year before, 370 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan (in 2017), killing 815 and injuring 1,736 people." It said that Balochistan and tribal region remained critical areas with 288 and 253 terrorism-related killings, respectively, in 2017. It also reported that Pakistan's National Security Policy is set to be released in 2018 and it will take into account especially global and regional scenarios, including the evolving Pakistan-US relations.

The report also noted that compared to 2016, a significant surge of 131 per cent was witnessed during 2017 in cross-border attacks from Pakistan's borders with Afghanistan, India and Iran. A total of 171 cross-border attacks claimed 188 lives and injured 348 others. Security forces and law enforcement agencies also killed 524 militants in 2017  compared to 809 in 2016  in 75 military/security operations as well as 68 and encounters with militants reported from across four provinces and FATA.

PTI
Bharat Jodo Yatra will proceed to Srinagar, come what may, says Rahul Gandhi as march enters Maharashtra

If Cong is elected in HP, decision on 1 lakh govt jobs, pension scheme in 1st cabinet meet: Rahul

Rahul Gandhi arrives in Bahrain on first foreign visit as Congress president

International

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Congress President Rahul Gandhi is in Bahrain on a one-day trip. This will be his first foreign trip after becoming the Congress chief, where he will address a convention of NRIs and meet the Gulf country's Prime Minister Prince Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa.

The Congress' took to twitter and posted a video showing the grand reception Rahul Gandhi received in Bahrain.

Euphoric reception for Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his arrival at Kingdom of Bahrain. This is CPs first foreign visit after his takeover. pic.twitter.com/zsGOaXnwCv  Congress (@INCIndia) January 7, 2018

Gandhi will be the chief guest at valedictory session of a function organised by Global Organisation of People of India Origin (GOPIO) there on Tuesday.

Rahul will be speaking to Indian diaspora living in Bahrain and is expected to come back to India in the evening of January 8.

Gandhi will be meeting the Indian community group, INCAS (Indian Cultural and Arts Society) in the UAE, which is politically aligned to Indian National Congress. Rahul will also be meeting the Gulf country's Prime Minister Salman bin Hamas Al-Khalifa and is further expected to meet King Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa. Rahul will be visiting as the state guest of Bahrain.

Delegates from 50 countries will also be participating in the function.

Ahead of his first foreign trip after becoming the President of the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi tweeted that NRIs are the brand ambassadors of India across the globe. His tweet read,"NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow.

NRIs are the true representatives of our soft power and the brand ambassadors of our nation across the globe. Looking forward to meeting and addressing fellow countrymen in Bahrain tomorrow.  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) January 7, 2018

Rahul took over as the party president on 16 December 2017 after taking charge from mother Sonia, who ruled the party for 19 years.

OneIndia News
Saudi Arabia allows India's plan to ferry Haj pilgrims via sea route: Naqvi

International

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Saudi Arabia has approved India's plan to revive the option of ferrying Haj pilgrims via sea route to Jeddah, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Monday.

Naqvi made the announcement after the signing of annual Haj agreement between India and Saudi Arabia in Mecca.

"Saudi Arabia has given its nod to revive the option of sending pilgrims by sea route...Officials from both the countries will discuss all the necessary formalities and technicalities so that Haj pilgrimage through sea route can be started in the coming years," Naqvi said.

For the first time, Muslim women from India will go to Haj without Mehram (male companion). Separate accommodation & transport has been arranged for these women Haj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia and women Haj Assistant will be deployed for their assistance. pic.twitter.com/FswUoPdl7D  Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi (@naqvimukhtar) January 8, 2018

Naqvi said that sending pilgrims through ships would help cut down travel expenses significantly and added that it would be a "revolutionary, pro-poor, pilgrim-friendly decision".

The practice of ferrying Haj pilgrims between Mumbai and Jeddah by waterways existed earlier too but was stopped in 1995.

Muslim women can now perform Haj without male guardian

Naqvi also said that for the first time Muslim women from India will go to Haj without 'Mehram' (male companion).

The term Mehram refers to a male, a woman cannot marry in her life (i.e. father, brother or son etc). Till now, women pilgrims would be required to be accompanied by their husbands or 'Mehrams' during the annual pilgrimage.

According to the ministry of minority affairs, Muslim women aged above 45 will now be allowed to go for the pilgrimage without 'mahram' in a group of at least four.

According to the sources, about 1,300 Muslim women have applied to perform Hajj without 'mahram' and women from different parts of the country from Kerala to north India, have expressed their wish to go for the Hajj pilgrimage.

Exemption from Lucky draw

Muslim women who have applied to go for Hajj without a 'mehram' (husband or a male first blood relation as guardian) this year have been exempted from the lucky draw system that the Hajj Committee operates, the government said on Sunday.

This means that all the 1,300-odd women who have applied for Hajj will be able to travel with no quota restrictions.

OneIndia News (with PTI inputs)
UK parliament : Daily 160 attempts to access online porn in 2017

International

pti-PTI

London, Jan 8: Britain's Press Association (PA) reported that around 160 requests a day were made in late 2017 to access pornography websites from computers within the Houses of Parliament.

A total of 24,473 attempts were made since last June's general election from devices connected to the parliamentary network, according to data obtained by a PA Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

Prime Minister Theresa May is already reeling from a wave of sexual misconduct allegations in Westminster. She was forced to dump minister and long-time friend Damian Green last month after he apparently misled police over claims pornography was found on computers in his Westminster office in 2008.

The parliamentary internet network is used by MPs, Lords in the upper house and their staff. Authorities claim most attempts are not deliberate and point to a decrease in recent years.

Parliament blocked 113,208 attempts in 2016, down from 213,020 the previous year. "All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament's computer network," a parliamentary spokesman told PA.

"The vast majority of 'attempts' to access them are not deliberate. "This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliament's guest Wi-Fi."

PTI
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Pakistan's alliance with the United States seems to be coming toward an end following the US decision to suspend security aid, Pakistan Minister of Foreign Affairs Khawaja Asif told the Wall Street Journal on Friday (January 5).

Asif said he believes the US-Pakistan relations are now at risk, especially after the tensions heightened and moods turned sour when President Donald Trump warned Islamabad to "do more" against terrorists, to whom, he alleged, the country provides safe havens.

"We do not have any alliance [with the US], this is not how allies behave," the minister told WSJ.

On New Year's Day, US President Donald Trump tweeted that the US had "foolishly" given Pakistan over $33 billion in aid over the past 15 years, adding that Islamabad gives "safe havens to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help.

"No more!" Trump added.

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal said the foreign minister's statement further ratcheted up an increasingly tense exchange in the past week between the two countries, which have maintained a rocky anti-terror collaboration since the September 11, 2001, attacks: "Those ties have frayed but not broken despite differences over Afghanistan, India, and the 2011 U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, which was undertaken without Islamabad's prior knowledge."

In that fraught context, the two countries' relations appeared likely to continue in a grudging, distrustful way, given that Washington and Islamabad haven't taken more drastic steps or moved to actually dissolve the bulk of their complex ties, WSJ added.

For Washington, jettisoning support for a longtime nuclear-armed ally in a strategic location isn't easy. For its part, Pakistan fears a full break could lead the U.S. to apply its leverage in international forums to hurt the country's economy, according to WSJ.

A long-festering dispute lies at the heart of the conflict between the two countries: The U.S. accuses Pakistan of harboring jihadists who kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, while Islamabad says Washington doesn't adequately acknowledge Pakistan's role in decimating al Qaeda or its sacrifice of thousands of lives after joining America's war on terror, the WSJ report said, adding:

"Islamabad also sees the U.S. growing ever closer to its archenemy India, with the Trump administration even inviting New Delhi to take a bigger role in Afghanistan--a move experts say all but guaranteed Pakistan's pullback from cooperating with the U.S. The cleavage could push Pakistan further into the arms of China and complicate America's effort to end the Afghanistan war, its longest-running conflict. BMI Research, an economic-analysis firm based in London, said in a report Friday that the U.S. suspension of aid "will likely accelerate Pakistan's geopolitical drift towards China."

New York Times: Dealing with Pakistan is both vital and difficult

Afghan officials have pleaded with three American presidents to reconsider their support for Pakistan, which was both receiving billions of dollars in American aid and harboring the leaders of a Taliban insurgency that the United States has struggled to defeat, the New York Times said, adding:

"But when President Trump suspended nearly all American security aid to Pakistan on Thursday for what he called the country's 'lies and deceit,' any jubilation in the halls of power in Afghanistan -- and there was some -- was leavened with worry over how the move might affect a complex war that has pushed the Afghan government to the brink.

"If there is one consensus among Afghan leaders and their American counterparts, it is that dealing with Pakistan is both vital and difficult. The question on the table after the cutoff of military aid to Pakistan is who will come under the most pressure: the Pakistanis, or the coalition fighting the Taliban."

Muhammed Umer Daudzai, a former Afghan interior minister and ambassador to Pakistan, was quoted as saying: "The pressure on Pakistan had come too late, with the country having developed regional allies who would help it weather the financial toll. The financial sanctions may not bite Pakistan because they have developed alternatives."

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This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

From Truthdig



Donald Trump

(Image by pixabay.com) Details DMCA



Dec. 18 was a day like any other in the Donbas region, the flashpoint of a grinding civil war between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. That afternoon, a girl was badly wounded by a shell fired by Ukrainians into the separatist-held Golmovsky. A few hours later, a hail of Grad rockets fired by pro-Russian forces poured down on the Ukrainian-controlled town of Novoluhanske, killing eight civilians in the middle of a community celebration and damaging over 100 buildings. The shelling continued into the night, killing three in the pro-Russian town of Stakhanov, including a 94-year-old woman.

Artillery exchanges like this have become a tragic routine in Donbas. Though the killing has slowed since the heaviest fighting, which occurred in 2015, over 10,000 have fallen in the conflict, and at least 1.4 million have been turned into refugees. With the war entering its fourth year, a decision by the Trump administration virtually ensured that the news from Donbas will grow dramatically worse. Last month, the State Department approved the transfer of $50 million worth of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military. Along with a shipment of M107A1 Barrett sniper rifles, the United States will be delivering 35 FGM Javelin anti-tank launching systems and 210 missiles.

Though the Javelin has scarcely been tested against the latest models of Russian tanks, advocates of the arms transfer have insisted that the missiles will save lives by deterring the Russians. After a meeting last June with House Majority Leader Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, Andriy Parubiy, who is the speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament (and a veteran Nazi activist), presented the Javelins as a game changer. "If we'd burned several hundred Russian tanks [in 2015], it would have been an important step toward restoring peace in our country's east," Parubiy declared.

But others who have witnessed the grueling war of attrition from the front lines dread the prospect of new arms on the battlefield. Brian Milakovsky, a Fulbright scholar who is working with an aid organization on the Ukrainian side of Donbas, told me the Javelins would provoke Russia to escalate its military involvement and dramatically deepen suffering on both sides.

Click Here to Read Whole Article
From Paul Craig Roberts Website

Russiagate originated in a conspiracy between the military/security complex, the Clinton-controlled Democratic National Committee, and the liberal/progressive/left. The goal of the military/security complex is to protect its out-sized budget and power by preventing President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. Hillary and the DNC want to explain away their election loss by blaming a Trump/Putin conspiracy to steal the election. The liberal/progressive/left want Trump driven from office.

As the presstitutes are aligned with the military/security complex, Hillary and the DNC, and the liberal/progressive/left, the Russiagate orchestration is a powerful conspiracy against the president of the United States and the "deplorables" who elected him. Nevertheless, the Russiagate Conspiracy has fallen apart and has now been turned against its originators.

Despite the determination of the CIA and FBI to get Trump, these powerful and unaccountable police state agencies have been unable to present any evidence of the Trump/Putin conspiracy against Hillary. As William Binney, the former high level National Security Agency official who devised the spy program has stated, if there was any evidence of a Trump/Putin conspiracy to steal the US presidential election, the NSA would most certainly have it.

So where is the evidence? Why after one year and a half and a special prosecutor whose assignment is to get Trump has no evidence whatsoever been found of the Trump/Putin conspiracy? The obvious answer is that no such conspiracy ever existed. The only conspiracy is the one against Trump.

This has now become completely apparent. Russiagate originated in a fake "Trump dossier" invented by Christopher Steele, a former British MI6 intelligence officer. It is not yet clear whether it was the DNC, the CIA, or the FBI who paid Steele for the fake dossier. Perhaps he sold it to all three.

What we do know is that the FBI used what it knew to be a fake dossier to go to the FISA court for a warrant to spy on Trump.

As a consequence both Comey and the FBI, special prosecutor Mueller, and Christopher Steele are in hot water. The Chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley, has instructed the US Attorney General to launch a criminal investigation of Steele for false statements to FBI counterintelligence officials.

You can see where this leads as former FBI director Comey is a participant in the Russiagate attack on President Trump. To protect himself Steele will have to rat on who put him up to it. If President Trump had any sense, he would put Steele under protective custody, as his life is clearly in danger. If the CIA and the FBI don't get him, the Clintons surely will.

Trump's easy election shook the Republican Establishment as well as it upset the Democrats and the military/security complex. The Republican Establishment hates losing control. Initially the Republican Establishment aligned with Trump's enemies, but now understands that Trump's demise means their demise.

Consequently, all of a sudden in Washington facts count. Not all facts, just those relating to the Steele dossier. Be sure you listen closely and carefully to these two videos of US Representative Jim Jordan's destruction of US Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein for sitting on his ass while a totally corrupt FBI attempted to destroy the elected president of the United States. Keep in mind that Rosenstein is a member of the Trump administration. Why does the President of the United States employ people out to destroy him?

For videos, see here and here.

Here are 18 questions asked by US Rep. Jim Jordan:

1) Did the FBI pay Christopher Steele, author of the dossier?



2) Was the dossier the basis for securing FISA warrants to spy on Americans? And why won't the FBI show Congress the FISA application?



3) When did the FBI get the complete dossier and who gave it to them? Dossier author Christopher Steele? Fusion GPS? Clinton campaign/DNC? Sen. McCain's staffer?





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From Truthout

Donald Trump's veiled threat to use nuclear weapons against North Korea is not only horrifying, but also illegal. It warrants his removal from office.

On New Year's Day, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un asserted, "The entire area of the US mainland is within our nuclear strike range. The United States can never start a war against me and our country," adding, "The United States should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table." Kim clarified that he would not use those weapons except in response to aggression.

Not to be outdone by Kim, Trump tweeted in response, "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

The president's cavalier threat to start a nuclear holocaust cannot be dismissed as the rant of an immature bully. Trump controls a powerful nuclear arsenal. In fact, a few days after Trump's nuclear button tweet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared it would sponsor a public meeting to cover "planning and preparation efforts" in the event of a nuclear attack.

Trump's tweet violates several laws. Threatening to use nuclear weapons runs afoul of the United Nations Charter, which forbids the use of or threat to use military force except in self-defense or when approved by the Security Council. North Korea has not mounted an armed attack on the United States nor is such an attack imminent. And the UN Security Council has not given the US its blessing to attack North Korea. Trump's tweet also constitutes a threat to commit genocide and a crime against humanity.

The ominous tweet follows Trump's promise last summer that North Korean threats would be "met with fire and fury," a phrase that found its way into the title of Michael Wolff's explosive new book. Trump also told the UN General Assembly he would "totally destroy North Korea."

"Nuclear war is not a game," said Derek Johnson, executive director of Global Zero, the international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, in a statement. "We are flirting with unacceptably high risks that carry catastrophic consequences for the country and the world. No one can afford to not take Trump's threats seriously -- least of all the North Koreans, who could be provoked into striking first in order to preempt what they perceive as an imminent attack."

Lawmakers are echoing the concerns of advocates like Johnson.

"A nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula would be a catastrophe, leading to the deaths of potentially millions of people, including American service members and families stationed there," Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) stated.

Indeed, "even a conventional war between the US and [North Korea] could kill more than 1 million people; a nuclear exchange, therefore might result in tens of millions of casualties," The Intercept reported.

Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in nuclear policy at Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told HuffPost that after a nuclear strike, "there would be survivors for days trying to make their way out of the rubble and back home, dying of radiation poisoning."

Markey said that Trump's tweet "borders on presidential malpractice," adding, "We cannot let this war of words result in an actual war."

Eliot A. Cohen, assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the George W. Bush administration, was alarmed by Trump's nuclear button tweet.

Some of those surrounding Trump are indeed laughing: Consider the disturbing comments of Michael Flynn Jr., son of Trump's former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Flynn Jr. thought Trump's tweet was "just awesome." Flynn Jr. tweeted, "This is why Trump was elected. A no bulls#t leader not afraid to stand up for his country." Cohen tweeted, "Spoken like a petulant ten year old," adding, "But one with nuclear weapons -- for real -- at his disposal. How responsible people around him, or supporting him, can dismiss this or laugh it off is beyond me."

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From The Nation



President Trump on-screen appearance at the White House press briefing to praise the recently passed tax bill.

(Image by YouTube, Channel: CBS News) Details DMCA



The most jarring development of a startling week in American politics was not the publication Friday of Michael Wolff's tell-all book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which ably confirms everything we knew, or should have known, about Donald Trump's presidency.

The most jarring development was the authorization by the president of the United States of a move by his lawyers to block the publication of the book that details his dangerous duplicity and scorching incompetence. After an initial excerpt from the book was published, and additional excerpts began to circulate in Washington, Trump's legal team moved on Thursday to block its publication.

"(He's) helping me prove the point of the book," Wolff said of the president's legal threat. "This is extraordinary that a President of the United States would try to stop the publication of a book. This doesn't happen -- has not happened from other presidents, would not even happen from a CEO of a mid-size company."

Wolff is right. This is not what presidents do. But this is what Trump did.

In an 11-page letter to Wolff and the president of publisher Henry Holt & Co. -- and cc'd to the president -- a lawyer with the firm that serves as litigation counsel for Trump wrote: "Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book, the article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the book and article that lack competent evidentiary support."

Wolff stands by his book, telling NBC, "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than perhaps anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point."

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From Share Blue

The latest, chilling authoritarian move from Republicans is to threaten legal action against a key player who assembled damaging information on Trump.

Five days into 2018 "and the "bombshell keeping falling," CNN's Brooke Baldwin announced Friday afternoon as she detailed the latest revelations about a Trump White House that seems to be careening out of control.

Between the new tell-all book where Trump aides depict the president as a childish fool completely incapable of fulfilling his duties, to stunning revelations about how Trump tried to force the United States attorney general to protect him from prosecutors, the Republican Party appears to be in panic mode.

And one way that complete panic manifests itself is the extraordinary efforts Republicans are taking in hopes of derailing ongoing Trump investigations, or creating news diversions by demanding probes into Trump's foes.

Friday brought another shocking, authoritarian move: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) urged the Department of Justice to investigate British spy Christopher Steele to see if he lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the so-called Russian dossier.

Steele was hired in 2016, first by Republicans and then by Democrats, to assemble the widely confirmed intelligence document that detailed Trump's many shocking connections with Russian business operatives over the years, as well as the Kremlin's attempt to get him elected president.

In other words, Republicans are now actively going after a key player who tried to expose the wrongdoing of Russian collusion in the first place. Indeed, Republicans are waging an all-out war against those connected to the truth-telling dossier.

The latest GOP turn would basically be like if Republican senators in 1973 had demanded the FBI investigate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they uncovered the Watergate scandal.

As for Friday's criminal referral, which Democrats were not notified beforehand, the whole thing seems like a publicity stunt, albeit one designed to send a chilling message to people with uncompromising information about Trump.

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From Sputnik

There seems little doubt that the surge in New Year protests across Iran was, at least in part, following a regime-change agenda set by the United States.

Public statements issued by US President Donald Trump and his senior officials all made strident calls in support of protesters while denigrating the Iranian government as a "brutal oppressor." Arguably, that amounts to audacious incitement of sedition in a foreign state, and such American misconduct should be legally sanctioned.

What's remarkable too is just how close the recent turmoil in Iran seemed to follow a well-worn US formula for regime change, including political statements of condemnation; biased media coverage to undermine the legitimacy of the target government; and the apparent hijacking of peaceful protests by violent provocateurs.

Such a formula has been used by Washington and its allies in dozens of countries over the decades, including more recently in Syria during the 2011 unrest that led to an all-out war.

What is acutely resonant is the historical background. Iran was probably the first nation to have been subjected to American regime-change operations in the post-Second World War period, with the CIA-led coup carried out in 1953.

But first, let's look at the flagrant attempts by the US to destabilize the Iranian government through highly pejorative and misleading public statements.

Last week, the American ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley even claimed that "the Iranian people are crying out for freedom against their dictators." A senior official in the US State Department also admitted that his government was communicating via social media with demonstrators in Iran.

Washington's top diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, openly said in a media interview this weekend that his government is seeking "political transition" in Iran -- or, in other words, regime change.

Also this weekend, the US called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in an attempt to censure the Iranian government for the dozens of deaths incurred during the week-long protests. Haley declared: "The world is watching what Iran does."

Iran, Russia, and China have berated the US for violating Iranian sovereignty by interfering in the country's internal affairs. The brazen attempt by the US to fuel protests in Iran is indeed a serious breach of the UN Charter forbidding interference in any nation's political matters. US regime-change policy is arguably criminal conduct.

It remains to be seen just how actively involved on the ground US agencies were in stoking the recent protests in Iran. The initial demonstrations that first broke out on December 28 in the city of Mashhad quickly spread to dozens of other urban centers. Iranian authorities have blamed the US and other foreign enemies for being behind the disturbances.

A legitimate part of the rallies was motivated by genuine economic grievances among the population. But at the same time, the rapid escalation of violence and armed attacks on police stations suggest that a subversive plot was being orchestrated.

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Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"Rob explores the difference between a natural, organic, bottom-up connection consciousness and our corporately imposed top-down hierarchical collective consciousness. What Rob is speaking about is the difference between an artificial and ultimately stagnate way of organizing the world and a natural, organic growth, which starts with a seed, sends downs roots and sends up shoots which blossom. By returning to a Nature-based theory of connection, the Bottom-Up revolution brings us back into alignment with Earths laws, returning humanity to its place in creation. Like a good gardener, Rob works into the soil of his thesis different voices that exemplify how this Bottom-Up revolution is expanding in politics, business, religion, personal self-awareness and story. And he places technology where it belongsas a tool to further our connection consciousness, not an end in itself. The bottom-up revolution is about democracy finally living up to its original ideals, where we the people decide what we need from our society."



Cathy Pagano, author of Wisdoms Daughters: How Women Can Change the World
ATPLUG CONTROL: the plug-in and self-reclosing protector against surges and undervoltages

Surge and undervoltage protector

One of the latest product launches from Aplicaciones Tecnologicas is the ATPLUG CONTROL, a protector for permanent and transient overvoltages and undervoltages that is plug-in, single-phase and self-reclosing.This protector, when detecting a permanent overvoltage or an undervoltage, acts by disconnecting the power supply from the outlet, then reconnecting the power supply to the load again when it comes to a halt.When detecting a transient overvoltage, the ATPLUG CONTROL driving the current to earth and reducing the voltage to a level that does not damage the connected equipment.The main advantage of this device aside form automatic reconnection, is that it does not require installation, it is simply inserted in the plug to which the equipment to be protected is connected. Fast and easy. This surge protector is tested and certified according to UNE-EN 50550 and UNE-EN 61643-11 standards.In APLICACIONES TECNOLOGICAS, S.A we are experts in lightning protection systems and lightning rods. We have at your disposal all the existing technology and innovate every day, giving suitable solutions to each particular case. We manufacture our products according to maximum quality standards. Research, innovation and safety are the key factor underlining our leadership and presence the world over.Aplicaciones Tecnologicas SAParque Tecnologico de Valencia C/Nicolas Copernico, 446980 PaternaValencia ESPANA
Electromyographs - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2022

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Global Electromyographs IndustryLatest Report on Electromyographs Market Global Analysis & 2022 Forecast Research StudyGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Electromyographs in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Electromyographs market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingAmbuANA-MEDBioresearchBTS BioengineeringClarity MedicalCompumedicsContec Medical SystemsDeymed DiagnosticDr. Grossegger & Drbal alpha trace medical systemsDr. Langer MedicalDragerEbneuroElectrical GeodesicsEMS BiomedicalGymnaUniphyMega ElectronicsNatus Medical IncorporatedNeurosignNihon Kohden EuropeNORAXONRecorders & Medicare SystemsShanghai NCC MedicalShenzhen XFT ElectronicsShimmer SensingSIGMA Medizin-Technik GmbHThe Prometheus GroupThought TechnologyTry Sample Report @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into2-channel4-channel16-channelOtherOn 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, includingHospitalClinicSome points from table of content:Global Electromyographs Market Research Report 20171 Electromyographs Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Electromyographs1.2 Electromyographs Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Electromyographs Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Electromyographs Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 2-channel1.2.4 4-channel1.2.5 16-channel1.2.6 Other1.3 Global Electromyographs Segment by Application1.3.1 Electromyographs Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Hospital1.3.3 Clinic1.4 Global Electromyographs Market by Region (2012-2022)1.4.1 Global Electromyographs Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2012-2022)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Electromyographs (2012-2022)1.5.1 Global Electromyographs Revenue Status and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5.2 Global Electromyographs Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2012-2022)2 Global Electromyographs Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Electromyographs Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.1 Global Electromyographs Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Electromyographs Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Electromyographs Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.3 Global Electromyographs Average Price by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.4 Manufacturers Electromyographs Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Electromyographs Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Electromyographs Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Electromyographs Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionFor Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @3 Global Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)3.1 Global Electromyographs Capacity and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.2 Global Electromyographs Production and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.3 Global Electromyographs Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.4 Global Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.5 North America Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.6 Europe Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.7 China Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.8 Japan Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.9 Southeast Asia Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.10 India Electromyographs Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)4 Global Electromyographs Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)4.1 Global Electromyographs Consumption by Region (2012-2017)4.2 North America Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.3 Europe Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.4 China Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.5 Japan Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.6 Southeast Asia Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.7 India Electromyographs Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)5 Global Electromyographs Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Electromyographs Production and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.2 Global Electromyographs Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.3 Global Electromyographs Price by Type (2012-2017)5.4 Global Electromyographs Production Growth by Type (2012-2017)Continued.For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comAbout UsWise 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 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.Contact Us:Norah Trent+1 646 845 9349 / +44 208 133 9349Follow on LinkedIn: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 LtdPune  411028Maharashtra,Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Auger Drilling Market - Detailed Analysis and Forecast 2017-2025

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Global Auger Drilling Market: SnapshotAuger drilling involves the task of drilling through massive depths that are enough for mining companies to search for minerals seated well below the ground level. One of the distinct features of auger drilling is that it engages three blades attached to a hollow tube that hold the potential to cut through the earths surface. The hollow tube of an auger drill is capable of separating the samples under evaluation from the materials that are loosened because of the drilling activity.Auger drilling is considered as an exploratory standard drilling technique which can help to easily analyze samples without causing them damage. Other drilling techniques such as percussion rotary air blast (RAB) drilling pose a great risk of damage to samples during their extraction. When it comes to soft soil and rock formations, auger drilling could be the best technique to apply for achieving the desired result. Auger drilling also cancels the risk of contamination as samples are directly blown into its hollow tube. Also regarded as an open front drilling method, auger drilling helps in the trenchless installation of pipelines.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Auger drilling is expected to prove itself quite advantageous for mining companies as it usually yields larger pieces of samples which are easier to analyze and acquire accurate representation of those below the surface. Besides facilitating miners to reach to enormous depths, auger drilling does not necessitate the casing of holes created during the drilling process. Auger drilling machines could be easily and quickly moved between different locations when required.Global Auger Drilling Market: OverviewAugur drilling is used for drilling holes into the surface with the help of a chiseled tip. It exhibits a rotational penetration technique to drill holes. The technique comes handy especially for environmental purposes and is also carried out during geotechnical sampling. However, it is due its rising use in construction and mining activities that the global augur drilling market is gaining pace.The report presents a holistic study, covering the various aspects of the market, vis-a-vis, manufacturing cost structure, supply chain analysis, investment feasibility, vendor landscape, segmentation based on various criteria, and factors influencing its trajectory. It is compiled to help stakeholders analyze the prevailing dynamics of the market better. The report also encompasses exhaustive information intended to provide readers a granular analysis of the global augur drilling market and opportunities prevalent therein.Request TOC of the Report @Global Auger Drilling Market: Trends and OpportunitiesAugur drilling is an advanced technology that offers faster rate of penetration and has a low operational cost. These are the chief drivers of the global auger drilling market. Furthermore, these drills are easy to maintain and operate, which aids their demand. However, due to their nature, augur drills are used only for drilling soft materials, which could be looked upon as a restraint. Furthermore, augur drilling is slow when compared to more automated drilling techniques. It also involved handling heavy equipment. These are a few structural challenges, which limit the scope for the markets expansion to an extent.Nevertheless, the market is forecast to gain from the increasing construction activities in developing nations. While, the time required for performing auger drilling could hamper its growth, the market will witness accelerated pace of gains as the demand for minerals and metals derived from the earths crust increase.Global Auger Drilling Market: Key SegmentsThe global augur drilling market can be segmented based on type of augurs used for drilling. Broadly, the market can be bifurcated into bucket augur and flight augur. Of these, flight augur is the most commonly used machine. In this type of drilling, cuttings are produced and brought to the surface using the helical edges of drill bit. Another type to have gained significant demand in the market is the bucket augur. In this method, the cuttings are first collected in a bucket from the surface. They are hinged at the bottom of the bucket, which is why extensions are required based on the depth of borehole. The method is mostly used for drilling in construction projects and mine shafts.Get Discount @Besides this, augurs are also available on various sizes. Small size augurs for instance are installed on trucks and are used in smaller projects, whereas the ones larger in size are used for building bridge foundations. The report provides in-depth analysis of the various factors supporting the markets growth as well as those restraining its trajectory across the aforementioned segments.Global Auger Drilling Market: Vendor LandscapeTo study the competition prevailing in the market, the report profiles some of the leading vendors operating therein. It determines the strengths and weaknesses of these companies based on results obtained from the SWOT analysis. The study also identifies the opportunities and threats that these companies are likely to witness through the course of the forecast period.Currently, enterprises such as American Drilling Rigs, Total Drilling Supply LLC, Beijing Cortech Drilling Equipment Co. Ltd., Jewett Construction Inc., Shanghai Yizhe Industry Co. Ltd., Zhengzhou Hanfa Imp & Exp Trading Co. Ltd., Triumph Rig, Drilling Structures International Inc., and Fabrication among others. Innovative strategies adopted by these companies to gain competitiveness have profound impact on the global augur drilling market.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Industrial Wire Line Networking Market - Regional Outlook of Industry & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Global Industrial Wire Line Networking Market: OverviewThe rising need for information technology for every industrial vertical in order to ensure effective functioning and growth is one of the major factors projected to augment the growth of the global industrial wire line networking market over the next few years. With networking, industries are expected to experience effective management and integrated security, which is likely to help them in effective functioning. The growing awareness regarding the benefits of industrial wire line networking is estimated to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the coming years.Among the key product types, namely wire line networking and wireless networking, the latter is considered as comparatively expensive, owing to which the global industrial wire line networking market is estimated to witness strong growth in the near future. A substantial rise in the number of broadband service providers and advancements in technology are the key factors that are likely to enhance the overall development of the market in the coming years. Furthermore, with the adoption of industrial wire line networking, the cost of managing the network is reduced significantly, which is likely to act as a major factor escalating the growth of the market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The presence of a large number of players in developed economies such as Europe and North America is estimated to witness high growth in the near future. In addition, the availability of advanced IT infrastructure and the increasing level of competition among the leading players are projected to stimulate the growth of the global market in the next few years.Global Industrial Wire Line Networking Market: SnapshotInformation technology is essential for nearly every industry for their proper functioning and prosperity. Industrial wire line networking refers to IT networks designed to handle heavy loads of inter-connectivity across enterprises and industrial equipment. Basically of two type, wireless and wire line, these networks enable better manageability and integrated security and are able to handle huge volume of data, although they cannot function without a support of reliable and robust wire line network. Since wire line networking are fairly easier to implement as opposed to wireless networking and also meet the industrial networking demands in an efficient way, the global market for the same is projected for a robust growth rate during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.This report on global industrial wire line networking market is a comprehensive study of the current scenario and offers a figurative estimations of the opportunities based on several factors that are expected to influence the demand in near future. This market can be segmented into interconnect products, network management software, and networking components. The interconnect products can be further sub-segmented into connectors, testing devices, printed circuit test points, battery contacts, and jumpers, while networking components can be divided into electrical networks, optical networks, and combined networks. The market can also be segmented on the basis of end-user industries, which includes food and beverage, automotive, oil and gas, refining and wastewater, and petrochemical.Request TOC of the Report @Global Industrial Wire Line Networking Market: Trends and ProspectsOwing to fact that installation of fiber optic cables is considerably less expensive in comparison to copper cables, and rapid increment in broadband service providers, the demand in global industrial wire line networking has escalated. These interconnections assists decision makers in providing real time data and information for taking strategic decisions, thereby contributing to the growth of this market. Another factor favoring the growth rate is the reduced cost of managing the networks while it connects different systems, machinery, equipment, and devices within the industrial operations. The rising use of Ethernet which enhances interoperability among the industrial systems at lowered costs is also contributing to the growth of this market. Rapid innovations in the field of wire line networks to expand their use and accommodate increasing traffic are also driving the growth of global industrial networking market. However, compatibility with the existing systems in an organization and the ongoing costs incurred to accommodate increasing traffic are some of the major barriers affecting the growth of industrial wire line networking market.Global Industrial Wire Line Networking Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the report segments the global market into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world. Currently, North America serves the maximum demand due to the robust budget of the organizations. However, several emerging economies in Asia Pacific, such as China, India, Japan, and Malaysia, are aggressively investing in improving their IT infrastructure and several multi-national companies have set up their organizations in these countries. This will lead to increased demand coming from Asia Pacific during the forecast period.Get Discount @Some of the major players in this line of business include Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Cisco Systems, Inc., Ericsson, Juniper Networks Inc., Nortel Networks Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, and ZTE Corporation.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) Market - Segment Analysis & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) Market: OverviewInternet protocol television is considered as an effective technology that offers several television services through a packet-switched network although remaining within a large number of internet protocol suites. With the tremendous rise in the online traffic, the need for internet protocol television is expected to rise substantially, thus encouraging the overall development of the market. Moreover, the growth in the internet video advertising is expected to accelerate the growth of the global internet protocol television market over the next few years.Furthermore, the emergence of new technology and advanced products are estimated to generate promising growth opportunities for the leading players operating in the internet protocol television market in the near future. The lack of verification of effective locations for servers and the lack of proper accounting are estimated to curtail the growth of the market in the coming years. In addition, the rising need to meet the customer preference is considered to act as a major barrier for the development of the market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Nonetheless, the growing need of consumers for high-quality and reliable online experience is likely to offer growth opportunities in the near future. Moreover, the rise in the use of internet and the advent of mobile CDN is estimated to accelerate the markets growth in the near future. The developed economies across the globe are expected to offer lucrative benefits for the market players, whereas the rising population in developing economies is likely to fuel the development of the global internet protocol television market over the next few years.Global IPTV Market: SnapshotIPTV stands for Internet protocol television, a technology that delivers television services over a packet-switched network while remaining within the Internet protocol suites. With IPTV, smaller batches of media can now be streamed directly on customers devices in smaller batches. As per the International Telecommunication Union, IPTV functions over an IP-based network that enable high level of security, quality of service, reliability, and interactivity. With the widespread outreach of the Internet and direct to home (DTH) services, and technological advancements in interactive television, the global market for IPTV is projected for a robust growth rate during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.Request TOC of the Report @Broadly, there are three types of services offered by IPTV: live television, time-shifted television, and video on-demand (VOD). Live television is streaming of current events broadcast on television while time shifted services allows used to replay the content after delays. VOD refers to services wherein customers select a video of choice from a catalog of videos offered by the service providers. Major components involved to deliver IPTV services include TV head-end, interactive portal, VOD platform, home gateway, delivery network, and set-top box. The two basic types of architectures used for delivering IPTV are distributed architecture and centralized architecture. IPTV is implemented using several protocols such as H.263 for video compression, modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) for audio compression, and Real-time Protocol (RTP) for live streaming and VOD.Global IPTV Market: Trends and ProspectsDTH services have gain immense popularity in the recent past, which is clearly reflecting on increased demand for VOD services. Additionally, IPTV offer value added services such as e-mail, voicemail and others, which is further fueling the market. Moreover, several telecommunication services have entered the IPTV market recently, including Verizon, Vodafone, and British Telecom. These new entrants with strong financial background are expected to escalate the level of competition, which will eventually lead to reduced cost to the consumers and thereby increase the demand in the global IPTV market. However, for the proper functioning of IPTV, minimum bandwidth required is around 10 mbps of high speed Internet connectivity, which is not available all across the globe. This is the solitary restraint over the growth rate of the global IPTV market, although the effect of this factor is expected to reduce over the duration of forecast period as several next-generation spectrums are being launched by several governments.Get Discount @Global IPTV Market: Segment AnalysisIPTV market can be segmented on the basis of end-users and geography. Corporate consumers and individual consumers comprise end-users. Currently, corporate consumers serve the maximum demand but, with improving network infrastructure, the segment of individual consumers will also escalate significantly during the forecast period. Geographically, the report studies the lucrativeness of the regional markets of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world. Though the developed countries in North America and Europe are currently serving the maximum demand, vast population base in Asia Pacific is expected to surge ahead in terms of demand towards the end of the forecast period.AT&T, Cablevision, China Telecom, Comcast, Bharti Airtel Limited, Reliance Communications Limited, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Etisalat, France Telecom, Telecom Malaysia, NTT DOCOMO, Telenor, Verizon, and Vodafone are some of the key players currently operational in global IPTV market.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Smart Grid Cyber Security Market - Drivers ,Inhibitors & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Global Smart Grid Cyber Security Market: SnapshotSmart grids, considered next-generation power system, combine sophisticated computing and communication technologies to better efficiency and reliability of power systems. Emergence of renewable energy in response to rising demand for electricity, has particularly stoked their uptake. On account of their salient features which consists of millions of interconnected electronic devices across power facilities heavily reliant on communication networks, cyber security emerges to be a critical issue for smart grids.This has spawned the market for smart grid cybersecurity, which tackles both deliberate attacks from terrorists, business enemies, and disgruntled employees and inadvertent ones resulting from equipment failures, errors by users, and natural disasters. The primary benefit of smart grid security is its ability to counter any contingency brought about by power failure of any crucial component of the power system by facilitating a reliable and stable power system. A challenge facing the market currently is the lack of standard reference architecture for the smart grid and the dearth of release mechanisms.Request Sample Copy of the Report @From a geographical standpoint, North America and Europe generate maximum demand in the global market for smart grids cybersecurity. On account of a slew of guidelines and policies pertaining to data security and privacy in countries of Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K., the market in Europe is slated to see good growth in the upcoming years. Asia Pacific, powered by China, will also likely emerge as a key market in the next couple of years.Siemens AG, VeriSign, Lockheed Martin Corp., ViaSat Inc., Industrial Defender Inc., IOActive Inc., and IBM Corp are some of the main providers of smart grid cybersecurity.Global Smart Grid Cyber Security Market: Inclusive InsightCyber security comprises checking damage, illegal usage, and misuse of communication systems, electronic information, and the information contained therein to ensure availability, integrity and confidentiality. It also includes restoration of electronic information and communication systems in case of natural disaster or deliberate attack. The components within smart grid that are prone to cyber-attacks include operational technologies, IT systems, and end access points. The operational technologies which are exposed to cyber threats are power line communication devices, supervisory control, intelligent electronic devices, and data acquisition (SCADA) and energy management systems.Request TOC of the Report @This industry research report is a brief review of the growth trail in terms of existing, past, and future scenarios of the global smart grid cyber security market. It deals with the evaluation of the aspects that are expected to influence the development of the market and the primary trends have also been specified in the research study. The research study also offers a broad lookout on the vendor landscape of the market through Porters five forces analysis. The research report offers references of the research and development activities, mergers and acquisitions, and specifics on licensing and collaborations. The report probes into the strategies related to publicity, shares, and product range of the key participants in the global smart grid cyber security market.Global Smart Grid Cyber Security Market: Drivers and InhibitorsThe growing demand for power along with growing global mandate for smart grid technologies is expected to bolster the progress of the global smart grid cyber security market. A smart grid provides a network of electricity for consumers and suppliers to regulate the demand for energy and flow of information through the high-end devices. The communication layer is the backbone of the smart grid and is susceptible to cyber-attacks. The smart grid is envisioned to decrease the vulnerability of the electricity systems and improve emergency response. Smart grid security is an important parameter to maintain reliable and stable power system during the contingency situation due to power failure of any critical power system component.Get Discount @The chief driver of growth of the global smart grid cyber security market is the increasing occurrence of cyber threats owing to rising interconnection and integration. Furthermore, the new two way communication systems and growing risk to operations are expected to boost the demand for smart grid cyber security technologies globally. Nevertheless, the dearth of standard reference architecture for the smart grid and the lack of release mechanisms is expected to hamper the growth of the market.Global Smart Grid Cyber Security Market: Regional OutlookCurrently, North America and Europe account for the peak demand of cyber security. In European nations such as the UK, German and the Netherlands, there are several of guidelines and policies for data security and privacy. The market for smart grid cyber security in Europe is estimated to rise progressively in the near future. In Asia Pacific, China is expected to drive the growth of the smart grid cyber security market mostly driven by methods to reinforce the smart grid systems.Global Smart Grid Cyber Security Market: Competitive LandscapeThe key market players operating in the market are VeriSign, ViaSat Inc., Siemens AG, Industrial Defender Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., IOActive Inc., IBM Corp, and BAE Systems PLC among others.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Robotic Total Station Market Set for Rapid Growth and Trend by 2022 Hexagon, Topcon, Trimble

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MarketStudyReport.com Add New Report Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Robotic Total Station Market 2017 Forecast to 2022 to its research database. The report presents a deep study of the market growth factors and drivers. The report spread across 123 pages with table and figures in it.Global Robotic Total Station Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 provides Market information about Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application. This Industry report also states Company Profile, sales, Robotic Total Station Market revenue and price, market share, market growth and gross margin by regions.Measuring robot, also known as robotic total station, is the measurement platform with automatic target recognition, automatic calibration, automatic angle measurement and distance measurement, automatic target tracking, automatic recording function. The primary use of robotic total stations is in surveying, which is critical and demands high precision. Robotic total stations are advanced, easy to install, reliable, and fast, due to which surveying applications contributed the largest share of over 44% in 2016.Request a Free sample PDF of this research to evaluate more:Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Global Robotic Total Station market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers Hexagon, Topcon, TrimbleMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, covers 0.5'' Accuracy, 1'' Accuracy, 2'' and Other AccuracyMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into Surveying, Engineering and Construction, ExcavationRequest Discount for Global Robotic Total Station Market Research Report @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Robotic Total Station market.Chapter 1, to describe Robotic Total Station Market Size Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Robotic Total Station Market Size, with sales, revenue, and price of Robotic Total Station, 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 Robotic Total Station, for each region, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the Robotic Total Station Market Size by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 12, Robotic Total Station market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Robotic Total Station sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceFor More Info on Market Research @Related Reports: -World Telepresence Robots Market Research Report 2022 (covering USA, Europe, China, Japan, India, South East Asia and etc)Telepresence Robots market research report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability.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:
Third Party Banking Software Market - Region-Wise Outlook & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Global Third Party Banking Software Market: SnapshotBanking has undergone a paradigm shift over the years on account the gigantic strides made in technology. From credit cards and ATMs to the latest chatbots, they are known to have leaned on technology heavily to improve operations, better serve customers, and thereby increase their profit margins. An emergent trend in that direction is leveraging third party banking software.A third party banking software helps them to reduce operational costs and hence enhance profits. It also helps them to better understand a customers changing demands and facilitate flexible operations. Commercial banks go for installation of third party software solutions to connect to a desired interbank network as well as to other modular software. Trading banks and retail banks, for example, use it to streamline their operations.Request Sample Copy of the Report @A third party banking software can serve as a core banking software, multi-channel banking software, business intelligence software solution, and private wealth management software. Increasing demand for standardized activities by the banking sector is the primary growth driver of the market for third party banking software worldwide. This is because of the rising complexity of even the basic banking activities. Besides, demand for sophisticated software solutions to manage various financial stuff using a very flexible process is also resulting in increased uptake of the software.From a geographical standpoint, Europe and North America are dominant regions in the global market for third party banking software. This is because of the amount of demand they generate and also because of being home to a copious number of important players.Global Third Party Banking Software Market: OverviewThird party banking software finds a massive scope of use for the automated and manual managing of nearly all bank functions to enhance the throughput and cut down on service time for its customers. The intention of implementing third party banking software solutions is to allow generally the commercial banks to connect to a desired interbank network as well as to other modular software. Based on functions, the global third party banking software market can be segmented into core banking software, business intelligence software solution, multi-channel banking software, and private wealth management software. Third party banking software is commonly used by trading banks and retail banks to streamline their operation.Request TOC of the Report @Global Third Party Banking Software Market: Top Trends and ProspectsThe global third party banking software market is currently being driven by factors such as the growing demand for standardized activities in the banking sector. There has been a sea of change in banking operations over the recent years and the growing complexity even basic banking activities has necessitated for efficient and competent banking software solutions. Banks today want advanced solutions in software which can help them handle all their financial needs through a highly flexible process. The economic crisis of the past decade has made a lot of large banking firms reevaluate their business and expansion strategies. A lot of them are progressing with the intention of adopting advanced risk management and information management systems, as long as they fall within the limitations set by the concerned national regulatory framework.However, the global third party banking software market is currently being stifled by the reluctance of several key banks due to the high costs of moving from legacy systems to the new automated systems. The task of upgrading existing systems is also a very crucial activity that involves the creation of complex system networks, therefore requiring a lot of skilled labor which is unfortunately in short supply currently.Recent trends in the global third party banking software market show an increase in the implementation of online banking and mobile banking by customers. The users are showing a high level of inclination towards accessing their account details and perform financial actions and make transactions by using their smartphones, laptops, tablets and other handheld devices. this presents a vast scope of new opportunities for players in the global third party banking software market, especially in developing economies where the above trends have only just started to pick up pace.Get Discount @Global Third Party Banking Software Market: Region-wise OutlookNorth America and Europe have so far been the leaders of the global third party banking software market in terms of both demand volume and prominence of players. Both regions are expected to witness very high growth rates over the coming years. The growth rate of both regions is owed to a growth in the use of banking software solutions in various business activities as well as the large presence of globally leading financial institutes here. Asia Pacific, on the other hand, with its rapidly growing banking sectors and flourishing economies, is a promising market and is expected to show a substantial growth in this market.Global Third Party Banking Software Market: Key Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the leading players operating in the global third party banking software market include Sungard Ambit., Sopra Banking Software, Polaris Financial Technology, Path Solutions, Nucleus Software, Misys Plc., Jack Henry & Associates, Infosys Ltd., Fiserv Inc., FIS Group, Diasoft Software Solutions, Datapro Inc., Temenos Group AG., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., SAP AG, and Oracle Corp.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Composite Structural Repairs 2018 Global Industry Key Players - Hexcel , Gurit, The 3M Company, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA , Sherwin-Williams Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025

Global Composite Structural Repairs Market

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Global Composite Structural Repairs MarketThis report studies the global Composite Structural Repairs market, analyzes and researches the Composite Structural Repairs development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeHexcel (U.S.)Gurit (Switzerland)The 3M Company (U.S.)Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany)Sherwin-Williams (U.S.)Heatcon Composite Systems(U.S.)WichiTech Industries Inc. (U.S.)Request a Sample Report @Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoHand Lay-upVacuum InfusionAutoclaveOthersMarket segment by Application, Composite Structural Repairs can be split intoAerospace & DefenseWind EnergyAutomotive & TransportationMarineConstructionPipe & TankOthersTo enquire about this report visit @Table of Contents-Key Points CoveredGlobal Composite Structural Repairs Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Composite Structural Repairs1.1 Composite Structural Repairs Market Overview1.1.1 Composite Structural Repairs Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Composite Structural Repairs 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 Composite Structural Repairs Market by Type1.3.1 Hand Lay-up1.3.2 Vacuum Infusion1.3.3 Autoclave1.3.4 Others1.4 Composite Structural Repairs Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Aerospace & Defense1.4.2 Wind Energy1.4.3 Automotive & Transportation1.4.4 Marine1.4.5 Construction1.4.6 Pipe & Tank1.4.7 Others2 Global Composite Structural Repairs Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Composite Structural Repairs 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 Hexcel (U.S.)3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Gurit (Switzerland)3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 The 3M Company (U.S.)3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany)3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Sherwin-Williams (U.S.)3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Heatcon Composite Systems(U.S.)3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 WichiTech Industries Inc. (U.S.)3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Composite Structural Repairs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent DevelopmentsContinued.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
Colocation Market - Future Growth with Current Trends Analysis 2017-2025

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Global Colocation Market: SnapshotJust about every business sector and geographical region is envisaged to be advantaged by better data management solutions such as colocation. Players operating in the global colocation market are not only advised to tap into newer geographies but also untapped industries. In the foreseeable future, the global colocation market could gain a large impetus on the back of a perpetual growth triggered by a diverse range of industries, including IT, power, energy, government agency, and healthcare. It is not just North America that is envisioned to bring in lucrative opportunities for players, Europe could also step into the action and draw a heavy demand on account of the rising growth in cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, and London.In terms of type of service, vendors of wholesale services could clinch some profit-making business deals in the global colocation market while riding on economical rates and lower space and power consumer requirements. As a result, wholesale services are prophesied to be highly adopted among business enterprises.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Interxion had partnered with Microsoft in May 2015 for deploying the Microsoft cloud at its colocation data center with the help of Azure ExpressRoute solutions. Colocation facilities are not just online, physical structures located close to vital power hubs could function to maintain data centers. One of the reasons for physical colocation facilities to be placed near power hubs is prognosticated to hold a strong relation with accessible connectivity. Colocation centers could also help consumers with bandwidth, cooling, and power security.Global Colocation Market: OverviewWith the growing data production, companies across the world are increasingly searching for creative and cost effective data center services. Colocation solutions are being increasingly acknowledged as an effective way of managing files across small, mid-sized, and even large organizations. These solutions aid in enhancing business potential by cutting down in house IT maintenance and operational expenditures and maximizing the ability to focus on the core business. The major end-user verticals of the market are banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), telecomm and IT, government, utilities, and healthcare and life sciences.The research report serves as a reliable source of analysis and information regarding various vital parameters of the global colocation market including its dynamics, geographical segmentation, and vendor landscape. It profiles prominent companies operating in the market along with their latest developments, business strategies, and contact information.Request TOC of the Report @Global Colocation Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe non-availability of strategic location for the data centers is translating into the greater adoption of cloud computing. The increasing implementation of cloud technologies is leading to the introduction of the concept of hybrid platform, which is an amalgamation of traditional and cloud colocation that eases the storage and management of data. This, in turn, is augmenting the market. Moreover, the increasing emphasis on improving business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities is creating a staggering volume of demand for colocation services. However, the high cost of initial start-up and the growing skepticism regarding the loss of direct control over the servers is limiting the global colocation market from realizing its utmost potential.Global Colocation Market: Geographical SegmentationThe regions methodically examined in the report are North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Rest of the World. North America is expected to account for a substantial share in the colocation market throughout the forecast period. The early adoption of cloud computing provides the region an edge over other regions. Rapid technological advancements and robust IT infrastructure are contributing to the growth of the region.Get Discount @Asia Pacific is expected to progress at a brisk pace during the same period. The paradigm shift towards cloud technologies along with the overall increase in data production is providing a fillip to the growth of the region. Furthermore, the emergence of the region as a dynamic hub for e-trading is attracting global players to invest in the region. Countries such as Japan, India, China, and Taiwan will be the major contributors in the Asia Pacific market.Global Colocation Market: Vendor LandscapePlayers in the global colocation market are focusing towards offering products with unique scalability, data security, and cost-effectiveness in order to stay relevant. Key companies are investing large amounts in the research and development of new ways of securing and controlling data to stay ahead in the market. Some of the key players in the global colocation market are AT&T, Colt, Coresite, Digital Realty Trust, Dupont Fabros Technology, Equinix, IBM, Internap, Navisite, Verizon Terremark, and NTT Communications.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market - New Era Of Industry & Forecast 2017-2025

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Global Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market: SnapshotThe global combustion controls equipment and systems market is prognosticated to be positively influenced by the highly competitive nature of its vendor landscape. Several participants are expected to adopt different strategies to create a lasting impression in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market.General Electric, for instance, could take to the manufacture of novel technologies that explore deep underground and sea floor sites of oil and gas reserves. On the other hand, Alfa Laval is prophesied to make its clients more competitive in their individual industries by helping them curb their consumption of energy with the introduction of energy-efficient processes. Another reason for the competitive characteristic of the global combustion controls equipment and systems market could be the large presence of leading participants.Request Sample Copy of the Report @According to type of product, the global combustion controls equipment and systems market is envisioned to witness the contributions of control instruments, systems and monitoring, and boilers. Out of these, control instruments could take the lead in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market, owing to advantages such as avoidance of accidents at workplaces and potential exposure to hazardous materials. Besides this, control instruments are anticipated to find application in an extensive ambit of sectors such as chemicals and oil and gas.Aerospace and marine could be key applications in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market because of their high demand for energy-efficient equipment and systems. However, energy and power, cement, refining and petrochemicals, metallurgy, and process sectors are foretold to be other crucial applications in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market.Global Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market: OverviewThe ever-rising demand for electricity and robust growth of the industrial sector are creating a pressing need for greater number of power generation facilities across the globe. This is working in favor of the growth of the global combustion controls equipment and systems market. Combustion controls equipment and systems offer solutions that contribute towards a cleaner environment by adapting effective pollution control methods and standards for excellence. Their demand is higher in developing regions as they are undergoing industrial expansion at a greater pace. These equipment and systems are used across a large number of industries including metallurgy, refining and petrochemicals, process industries, energy and power, cement industry, and aerospace and marine.Request TOC of the Report @The primary objective of the report is to provide a 360-degree view of the global combustion controls equipment and systems market. It does so by methodically examining various critical parameters of the market including its dynamics, trends, geographical segmentation, and competitive landscape. The information regarding the market is gathered from various paid and unpaid sources such as press releases, journals, presentations, and white papers. The report profiles key players in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market along with their business strategies, latest development, market shares, and revenue structures. It presents the SWOT analysis that helps in calculating the growth trajectory of each key player in the market.Global Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe global market combustion controls equipment and systems market is gaining tremendous traction with the rising resistance against nuclear power. Countries such as Switzerland and Germany have decided to slow down their nuclear power generation due to the large amount of radioactive wastage generated by nuclear reactors, which is hazardous to human health and can cause diseases such as cancer. In addition, the growing concerns regarding hazardous air pollution (HAP) and volatile organic compound (VOC) are providing a significant boost to the growth of the market.On the other hand, the availability of substitutes along with their competitive prices is hampering the growth of the global combustion controls equipment and systems market. However, the rapid growth of the shale gas industry is likely to augur well for the growth of the market in a long run.Get Discount @Global Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market: Geographical SegmentationThe regional markets meticulously covered in the report are Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific will be a prominent market for combustion controls equipment and systems throughout the forecast period, with China and India being the site of high growth rates. Governments in these countries are pouring sizeable funds into the expansion of power generation facilities. Moreover, rapid technological advancements are providing a significant momentum to the market in the region.Global Combustion Controls Equipment and Systems Market: Competitive LandscapeDeveloping technologies and products with low energy consumption and high cost-effectiveness are becoming the norm for players in the global combustion controls equipment and systems market, as clients are lining up to patronize the vendors who can offer novel and innovative features. Some of the prominent players in the market are ABB, Alstom, Dongfang Boiler Group, Doosan, General Electric, Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Siemens AG, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Toshiba.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Ferroelectric RAM Market - In-Depth Analysis & Forecast 2017-2025

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Global Ferroelectric RAM Market: SnapshotAlthough the ferroelectric RAM technology has not yet been proliferated in a myriad of applications owing to its emerging state, the market is predicted to expand securely during the forecast period 20172025. Nevertheless, the rising implementation of ferroelectric RAM-based smart meters is expected to be a key trend that could help the global ferroelectric RAM market gain a significant traction in the next few years.Smart meter manufacturers are envisioned to adopt ferroelectric RAM technology due to its less power consumption for the purpose of including RAM as an economical memory hardware in their offerings. Smart meter vendors could also increasingly adopt ferroelectric RAM technology as it holds the potential to enhance the efficiency and improve the lifespan of their products. Besides offering low power consumption, ferroelectric RAM technology is capable of providing a high write speed. Other usages such as automatic system update in wireless applications are predicted to augur well for the global ferroelectric RAM market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The global ferroelectric RAM market is anticipated to exhibit the presence of a very low count of leading players operating in the industry. However, the competition in the global ferroelectric RAM market could be intense on account of a telling demand for the technology offering overpowering advantages compared to non-volatile memories engaged these days. Players could look to expand their share in the global ferroelectric RAM market with the introduction of high potency products. For instance, the 64-Kbit serial bus-enabled FeRAM by ROHM Semiconductor that finds application in healthcare equipment, car navigation systems, and smart meters necessitating recurrent log data acquisition.Global Ferroelectric RAM Market: Inclusive InsightFerroelectric RAM, also known as FRAM, is a type of random access memory that amalgamates the characteristics of a dynamic RAM with ROM and flash memory. Ferroelectric RAM enables quick write and read access coupled with the capability to retain data and information even after power loss. As against dynamic RAM, FRAM employs a ferroelectric layers for the purpose of fabrication in place of a dielectric layer. The ferroelectric RAM requires power during reading or writing a cell and thus requires no power in the idle state. Furthermore, unlike flash memories, ferroelectric RAM does not need regular refreshing and thus capable of finishing a writing process in less time.Request TOC of the Report @This market study is an assessment of the growth scenarios and chronological tract of the global ferroelectric RAM market. It deals with the valuation of the facets that have been projected to influence the expansion of the market both destructively and positively. Further, the significant trends have also been indicated in the publication. The market study further presents an extensive outlook on the seller background of the market referring to Porters five forces analysis. The research report also deals with the R&D accomplishments, mergers, acquisitions, and essentials on certifications and partnerships. The report analyses the tactics related to shares, profile-raising, and product series of the key companies in the global ferroelectric RAM market.Global Ferroelectric RAM Market: Key TrendsThe growing concerns over energy conservation supports the development of new energy efficient devices. FRAM is one of the non- volatile random-access memory technology which offers operations similar to that of a flash memory. The application areas of FRAM are extensively increasing owing to the growth in investment in R&D projects. Moreover, FRAM is used in applications such as wireless device and battery-powered wireless sensors because of higher power efficiency. The market is expected to witness a double digit growth in next few years. Improved investment in FRAM development is anticipated to enhance the performance and offer substantial growth opportunity and wider area for its application. Low power consumption of FRAM is a chief factor contributing to the market growth. Additionally, FRAM offers higher write performance as compared with flash memory. One of the key challenge faced by the global FRAM market is high efforts requirement for sales and market development of FRAM. This is because of FRAM being a new technology.Get Discount @Global Ferroelectric RAM Market: Regional OutlookThe market is segmented by geography which include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the world. North America is expected to emerge as a leading market in terms of consumption of FRAM over the next couple of years. The various benefits of FRAM are likely to play a significant role in the development of the market in these regions.Global Ferroelectric RAM Market: Companies Mentioned in the ReportKey players in the market include Infineon Technologies AG, Toshiba Corp., LAPIS Semiconductor Co. Ltd., Ramtron International Corporation, Fujitsu Ltd., and Texas Instruments among others.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Hybrid Power Systems Market Valuation US$703.55 mn by 2024: New product development and innovation

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The technology-driven hybrid power systems market is characterized by high initial investments and low switching costs.The global hybrid power systems is composed of a handful of major players who have already established a strong foothold in the market thanks to their increased focus on innovation and technology. Fueled by the combined efforts of these companies, the hybrid power systems market is expected to develop at a CAGR of 6.1% between 2016 and 2024, with its valuation increasing from US$411.79 mn in 2015 to US$703.55 mn by 2024.The research study is designed to analyze the global hybrid power systems market. The market is calculated in terms of revenue (US$ Mn) based on the annual sales of hybrid power systems. The market for hybrid power systems has been segmented on the basis of type, end-use, and country/region. The global hybrid power systems market, based on type, has been segmented into wind-solar-diesel-hybrid, PV-diesel-hybrid, and others. On the basis of end-use, the hybrid power systems market has been segmented into residential, rural facility electrification, and others.Request to get the sample copy of report:The regional segments included in this study are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South and Central America (SCA). These regional segments are further divided into country-wise segments. The report provides a detailed growth forecast for the 20162024 period, considering 2015 as the baseline year. Projections have been provided for revenue (US$ Mn) through the annual sales of hybrid power systems.The report includes the key market dynamics affecting the demand for hybrid power systems. As a part of our market dynamics analysis, we have analyzed the market drivers, market restraints, and market opportunities. A comprehensive competitive landscape, which includes company market share analysis and market attractiveness analysis, has also been provided in this report. The report also provides a detailed industry analysis of the global hybrid power systems market with the help of Porters Five Forces model. The Porters Five Forces analysis aids in understanding the five major forces that affect the industry structure and profitability of the global hybrid power systems market. The forces analyzed are the bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, and degree of competition.Request to send an enquiry here :The study also includes the value chain of the global hybrid power systems market which provides a glimpse of key suppliers, manufacturers, and distribution channel as well as interaction of suppliers and buyers with end-users. The company market share analysis has been done considering the revenue and global penetration of key market players in the hybrid power systems industry. The market attractiveness involves benchmarking and ranking each technology and region on the basis of numerous parameters. The parameters selected are likely to have a pronounced effect on the demand for each technology in the current scenario as well as in the near future.Key participants in the global hybrid power systems market include Bergey WindPower Co., BORG Inc., Guangzhou HY Energy Technology Limited Corp., Kestrel Renewable Energy, KYOCERA Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Schneider Electric SE, Sharp Electronics, Siemens AG, and Suzlon Group. This report provides an overview of these companies, followed by their financial revenues, business strategies, technical information, and recent developments.Browse full report :Global Hybrid Power Systems Market: Type AnalysisWind-Solar-Diesel-HybridPV-Diesel-HybridOthersGlobal Hybrid Power Systems Market: End-Use AnalysisResidentialRural Facility ElectrificationOthersGlobal Hybrid Power Systems Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.CanadaMexicoEuropeTurkeyKazakhstanRussiaRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaJapanAustraliaIndonesiaRest of Asia PacificMiddle East and Africa (MEA)South AfricaTanzaniaEgyptUAERest of MEASouth and Central America (SCA)BrazilChileRest of SCAMRRbiz supports your business intelligence needs with over 700,000 market research reports, company profiles, data books, and regional market data sheets in its repository. Our document database is updated by the hour, which means that you always have access to fresh data spanning over 300 industries and their sub-segments.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948(USA-Canada)Tel: +1-518-621-2074E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
At a CAGR of 9.80%, Global Deception Technology Market to grow over Forecast period 2017-2021

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Deception technology was introduced as an advanced security feature to track and avoid targeted attacks. Deceptions are achieved through the use of purposeful obfuscations, deceitful responses, feints, misdirections, and other falsehoods. Deception in this context is used as a technique for defensive or disruptive purposes, and is not offensive in nature.The global Deception Technology market to grow at a CAGR of 9.80% during the period 2017-2021. The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global deception technology market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of deception technology solutions that include software suites and services provided to government organizations, large enterprises, and SMEs. On-premise deployment model and cloud-based infrastructure are included in the report.Click to get Sample PDF:The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEATechnavio's report, Global Deception Technology 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.View Complete TOC with Tables and Figures at:Key vendors- Attivo Networks- Cymmetria- GuardiCore- Illusive Networks- TrapX SecurityOther prominent vendors- Acalvio Technologies- Allure Security Technology- CyberTrap- ForeScout- Hexis Cyber Solutions- LogRhythm- Percipient Networks- Rapid7- Sandvine- Shape Security- Smokescreen Technologies- TopSpin Security- vArmour SolutionsKey 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:
Produced Water Treatment Systems Market to exhibit a 6.1% CAGR from 2014 through 2020

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TMR forecasts that the global produced water treatment systems market is on pace to exhibit a 6.1% CAGR from 2014 through 2020, by which year the markets valuation will be US$6.2 bnAcross the world, it is now common practice to reinject produced water given the stringent government regulations at play and the overall scarcity of water. This trend is creating hitherto unexplored opportunities for companies in the produced water treatment systems market. In 2014, while 68% of the 201.4 bn barrels of produced water generated worldwide from oil and gas wells was disposed of, the rest was treated and injected back into oilfields at onshore and offshore locations.This trend is expected led to a sizeable increase in produced water volume worldwide, reaching 340 bn barrels by 2020. At 23% from 2014 through 2020, offshore reinjection is expected to exhibit the fastest CAGR and will be followed by onshore reinjection.Besides this high-impact driver, factors such as the rising ratio of oil-to-produced water and an inclination toward unconventional oil exploration are driving investments in produced water treatment systems, observes TMR.Request for sample copy of report :Produced water is a blend of organic and inorganic compounds that are produced during the extraction of oil and gas. Produced water is usually generated in large quantities. Currently, there is no separation between oil management and produced water in terms of administrative divisions. There are, however, multiple stages within oil management that cater to the management of produced water.The primary aim of any oil management body is to minimize the amount of water produced in order to reduce the volume of water that is lifted and pumped and consequently reduce the volume of water being treated and disposed. Most conventional oil production scenarios witness an exponential proportion between the amount of oil extracted and the volume of water produced. Unconventional oil production methods show an inverse proportion between oil and water.This research report on the global produced water treatment market provides descriptive analysis of all the features that drive it as well as the obstacles that it faces currently. The report derives relevant and valuable data from a curated archive and presents it to the user in a format that applies to the current and future trends in the global produced water treatment market. The research is conducted in a segmented manner based on the various types of treatment, including membrane, physical, and others.Request to send an enquiry here :The report provides a holistic study of the trends in the global produced water treatment market through the eyes of its top players, regions, and other categories. The report incorporates all the recent developments that have occurred in the global produced water treatment market, along with conclusive applications of top rated research methodologies such as Porters five force analysis and SWOT analysis.Overview of the Global Produced Water Treatment MarketThe global produced water treatment market is currently expected to grow at a steady rate. One of the major drivers of the global produced water treatment market is the increase in the rate of exploration of on-shore and off-shore oil and gas resources. Extraction procedures have scaled up in terms of number of installations as well as production volume, further propelled by a growing demand for oil and gas on a global level. The global produced water treatment market also benefits from the growing prevalence of fracking, or land gas drilling through the use of hydraulic fracturing. As the production rates of the oil industry increase, so will the demand from the global produced water treatment market.The market is also propelled by the constantly reducing supply of usable water in developing countries such as India and China, thereby increasing the demand for better water treatment solutions.Browse full report here :The market is, however, restrained by the high installation costs and operation costs. Most top players in the oil and gas industry are concerned about the scaling of water treatment processes with their growing production of oil. They have also expressed concern regarding the high maintenance costs of operating large-scale water treatment equipment.Regional analysis of the global produced water treatment market reveals North America to have led in the recent past, owing to an increase in oil exploration and tightening government regulations over the release of treated and polluted water in larger water bodies.Companies Mentioned in the Research ReportThe key players in the global produced water treatment market are Siemens, Veolia, Cetco Energy Services, Baker Hughes Inc., Schlumberger, FMC Technologies, Ovivo, Halliburton, GE Water, and Enviro-Tech Systems.MRRbiz supports your business intelligence needs with over 700,000 market research reports, company profiles, data books, and regional market data sheets in its repository. Our document database is updated by the hour, which means that you always have access to fresh data spanning over 300 industries and their sub-segments.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948(USA-Canada)Tel: +1-518-621-2074E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Market Key Trends, Challenges and Opportunities 2022

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Tire Pressure Control Systems to its huge collection of research reports.This report on the global Tire Pressure Control Systems market has been developed by a selected group of professional market research analysts, with a solitary goal to present the current scenario of the market for Tire Pressure Control Systems and throw light on its growth prospects. The report targets audiences such as manufacturers of Tire Pressure Control Systems, government agencies, and other research consultancy services. The report presents comprehensive assessment of the major factors that may impact the demand in the global Tire Pressure Control Systems market, analyzes the challenges or pitfalls, and catches the latest trends, which the existing vendors must take a note of in order to stay ahead of the competition.For more info, get the sample report for FREE here:This report on the global Tire Pressure Control Systems market provides estimations regarding the market size in terms of value (USD million). It includes both top-down and bottom-up views in order to estimate and validate the size of the Tire Pressure Control Systems market and of several other related submarkets in the overall global market. The opportunities open in the market for Tire Pressure Control Systems by manufacturing countries type and application, and presents forecast for the duration of 2017-2022 has also been discussed extensively in this research report.As this report targets the stockholders of the global Tire Pressure Control Systems market, it was only wise that some of the leading companies currently in this market are profiled in order to represent their market share, product portfolio, and recent strategic decisions. This chapter is also aimed at understanding the potential of the entrance of new players. Leading players in the global Tire Pressure Control Systems market have been detected via secondary research, and their dominance in respective regions have been evaluated through rigorous primary as well as secondary research.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringPSIDana LimitedHendrickson USANexter GroupSTEMCO (EnPro Industries)Tire Pressure Control InternationalAperia TechnologiesPressure Guard (Servitech Industries)PTG Reifendruckregelsysteme GmbH (ti.systems GmbH)TlflowRead Complete Table of Content of the Report at:Table of ContentsGlobal Tire Pressure Control Systems Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.1 Definition and Specifications of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.1.1 Definition of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.1.2 Specifications of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.2 Classification of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.2.1 Tractors1.2.2 Trucks1.2.3 Trailers1.2.4 Others1.3 Applications of Tire Pressure Control Systems1.3.1 Military1.3.2 Commercial1.3.3 Agriculture1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 India2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Tire Pressure Control Systems2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Tire Pressure Control Systems2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Tire Pressure Control Systems2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Tire Pressure Control Systems3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Tire Pressure Control Systems3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Major Manufacturers in 2016To check available discount on this report, visit at:4 Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 Tire Pressure Control Systems Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2012-2017E Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2016 Tire Pressure Control Systems Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2012-2017E Global Tire Pressure Control Systems Sales Price4.4.2 2016 Tire Pressure Control Systems Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment)...About QYResearchReports.comQyresearchreports.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:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
New Research Report Explore Insulin Delivery Pens Market Expected to Represent a Value of US$ 9,100 Mn by 2027

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This research report offers a comprehensive analysis of the Insulin Delivery Pens Market: Reusable Insulin Pens to Remain Dominant Product Type throughout the Forecast Period: Global Industry Analysis (2012 - 2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017 - 2027) The main objective of this report is to deliver insightful information and clear-cut facts pertaining to the growth trajectories of the market.Request to view Sample Report @Introduction of new products in the global insulin delivery pens marketWith the advancements in technology, many new products are being introduced in the global insulin delivery pens market. The types of products currently available include reusable insulin pens, disposable insulin pens and smart insulin pen caps. Reusable insulin pens include different types of pens that can be used over and over again. Types within the reusable insulin pens category include refillable insulin pens, Bluetooth connected smart insulin pens and USB connected smart insulin pens. Disposable insulin pens contain a prefilled cartridge and the entire pen is disposed or thrown away when the cartridge is empty, allowing a one-time dose adjustment. Smart insulin pen caps record dosage data and helps patients with diabetes to manage their condition more effectively.Reusable insulin pens is the largest segment by product type in the global insulin delivery pens market, which is estimated to represent over US$ 3,400 Mn, or 64.6% share of the total market in 2017 and is projected to reach over US$ 9,100 Mn by the end of 2027, expanding at a robust CAGR of 10.2% over the forecast period 20172027. The second place in the global insulin delivery pens market is taken by the disposable insulin pens segment, which is behind the reusable insulin pens segment in terms of revenue, but is expected to grow at a higher CAGR of 11.0%.Advanced features of Bluetooth connected smart insulin pens make it the most popular product typeThe new slew of insulin pens with Bluetooth and cloud based technology has transformed the whole diabetes management system across the global healthcare industry. Bluetooth connected smart insulin pens have the ability to track insulin dosage and critical dose data, such as time, date and amount of insulin administered to a patient. This results in an accurate dosing allowing more efficient diabetes management. It enables automatic transfer of patient data via Bluetooth technology to the patients smartphone. This data can then be transferred to a cloud-based platform, making it accessible to healthcare providers. Bluetooth connected smart insulin pens enable target type 1 and type 2 diabetic patients to have mobile access to their insulin dosage data along with a more accurate record of therapy. The Bluetooth connected smart insulin pens sub-segment is expected to grow at a strong CAGR of 10.9% during the forecast period. However, refillable insulin pens will still lead the market with the highest market value throughout the forecast period. Disposable insulin pens hold a significant share in the global insulin delivery pens market with the second highest market value of over US$ 5,300 Mn estimated by the end of the forecast period in 2027. The smart insulin pen caps segment is expected to grow at a high CAGR of 11.2% during 2017-2027.Browse Full Report with TOC @Rise in needle stick injuries in North America boosting regional demand for smart insulin pensNorth America represents the most lucrative market for insulin pen products, followed by Western Europe and APEJ. North America and Caribbean accounted for more than half of the healthcare expenditure spent on diabetes treatment with the USA accounting for US$ 320 Bn in 2015. High incidence rate of needle stick injuries and associated serious consequences persuade health care professionals to use injection pens in North America. Also, in North America there has been strong presence of industry players who are applying for new product indication. The North America insulin delivery pens market is expected to witness a market value of just under US$ 2,000 Mn in 2017 and this is estimated to increase to over US$ 5,500 Mn by the end of the forecast period in 2027.Enquire about this Report @Market 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.State Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:
Image Recognition Market to Register Unwavering Growth During 2020

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Image recognition is a technique for acquiring, processing, scrutinize, and sympathizing images. It gathers high-dimensional data from the real world in order to generate numerical or symbolic information. Image recognition uses disentangling of representational information from image data using replica created with the help of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.Image recognition (biometric-based recognition) technique has emerged as the most promising alternative of card based recognition for identifying individuals in recent past. Image recognition is used for verification (one to one matching) and identification (one to many matching) of individuals.Request Report for TOC @Image recognition technologies include identification based on physiological distinctiveness of the people such as facial patterns recognition, fingerprints recognition, hand geometry recognition, hand veins pattern recognition, finger geometry recognition, palm recognition, iris recognition, retina recognition, and voice recognition. Image recognition also identify the behavioral uniqueness of the individuals such as gait, signature and keystroke dynamicsThe recognition based on passwords and PINs are trailing in popularity mainly due to the fact that they are hard to remember and cannot be stolen, duplicated by the intruders. Moreover the risk associated with misplacing of cards, tokens, keys and the like is also lend a hand in wide acceptance of image recognition as an alternative of traditional access control systems.Request to Sample of Report @On the basis of technology the global image recognition market can be broadly categories in five different market variants namely, optical character recognition (Ocr), pattern and gradient matching, object recognition, barcode/Qr code recognition and facial recognition.On the basis of the different component use in the image recognition equipment the overall market can be broadly categorized in three segments namely, hardware, software, and services.Based on the end user application the image recognition market can be further categories in eight different classes namely, government and defense, banking, financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing or industrial, consumer goods and retail, information technology and telecommunications, transport and logistics and others.The growing use of face recognition technology in smart phones, tablets and personal computer owing to the advancement in size and accuracy is propelling the market for face recognition technology. Moreover increasing governmental budget towards homeland security and defense is further driving the market in developing countries such as India, China, and Russia. Increasing use of facial recognition access system over card based access system in industries and residence is providing new market opportunities for the facial recognition technology.North America is the largest market for facial recognition in the world. It is then followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The U.S. is the largest market for facial recognition in the North America. Chinese and Japanese are the major user of image recognition technology in Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is one of the rapid growing markets of image recognition where the market is growing in double digit. High threat prospective from terrorist attack couples with trend towards e-governance is contributing to the high growth rate in this region.Pre Book Full Report @Some of the major companies operating in global image recognition market include, Catchoom, Honeywell, LTU Technologies, Panasonic Corporation, Toshiba, Hitachi Ltd, Itraff Technology, NEC Corporation, Qualcomm Technologies, and Wikitude GmbhAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Adjustable Capacitors Market 2018 - Qorvo, WiSpry, AVX, Tusonix

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The statistical surveying information incorporated into the Adjustable Capacitors report is the aftereffect of significant essential and optional research exercises. The report fragments the global market for Adjustable Capacitors based on makers, item compose, applications, and districts. In this report, each fragment is contemplated completely and measurements are introduced in detail. The report offers an exact outline of the global Adjustable Capacitors advertise covering key factors, for example, drivers and restrictions affecting the development.Get the sample report :Top manufacturers of Adjustable Capacitors Market Report :AVXVoltronics (Knowles)Murata ManufacturingSTMicroelectronicsWiSpryPanasonicVishay IntertechnologySprague Goodman ElectronicsCavendish KineticsTusonix (CTS Electronic Components)QorvoIXYS ISSThe global Adjustable Capacitors advertise report is the result of the intensive investigation of the market, which will help showcase players to manage and develop exponentially in the gigantically aggressive market.Enquire before buying Adjustable Capacitors Market report :The Adjustable Capacitors report is set up after essential and auxiliary levels of research exercises. Essential research speaks to the heft of research endeavors, supplemented by a broad optional research. Auxiliary research incorporates investigation of late exchange, web sources, and factual information from government associations, exchange affiliations and offices. This has ended up being the most dependable, powerful and fruitful approach for getting exact Adjustable Capacitors advertise information, catching industry member's bits of knowledge and perceiving business openings. The write about the global Adjustable Capacitors showcase likewise talks about a portion of the main players display in the market, winning rivalry, key procedures received and their current advancements.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 -
Smart Camera Market Projected to be Resilient During 2020

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Smart camera, also known as intelligent camera, is an image processing system designed with a motive to automate decision in an industrial capacity. Smart camera is viewed as hybrid of smartphone and digital camera on the basis of its usage and applications it supports. In addition to picture capturing property smart camera is capable of extracting application specific information from the number of picture captured. Smart camera is a standalone vision system with inbuilt image sensor within the video camera. Smart camera may consists all or some of these components such as image sensor, Image memory, Image digitization circuitry, processor, communication interface (Ethernet), lens holder or inbuilt lens, illumination device (mostly LED) and video output.Request Report for TOC @Communication interface property of smart camera helps in transferring the pictures wirelessly using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC (near-field communication). Smart cameras also have the capacity of interacting with smartphone and PC application. With the help of smart camera people can directly upload pictures and videos on various social media platforms and other photo-sharing portals.Smart camera is still considered as niche market owing to less number of players operating in the global smart camera market. Smart camera is used for various purposes including automated inspection for quality assurance, part sorting and identification, code reading and verification (barcode, data matrix and alphanumeric data), visual sensor networks and detection of intruders, fire or smoke detection. Also, used for web inspection (inspection of continuous flow of material such as coils, tubes, wires and extruded plastics).Request to Sample of Report @North America has the largest market share for smart camera, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. The U.S. is the largest market for smart camera globally owing to its wide area of application. Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness double digit growth in the forecasted period owing to the increasing domestic demand in the emerging markets of India and China.Advancement in technology paired with varied application of smart camera is driving the global smart phone market. Additionally, consumer desire to have digital camera combined with features resembling smartphone is expected to increase demand of smart camera to some extent. However, smartphone with better camera quality can hinder the growth of smart camera.Pre Book Full Report @Consumer demanding more of smartphone resembling camera is prompting various software companies to invest in the smart camera manufacturing. Some of the major companies operating in the global smart camera market are Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus and Polaroid.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:
The Happening

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Opening exhibition 2018 of Galerie Art Pool Vienna presenting the following artists: Daisy Gold, Momo Hoflinger, Elisabeth Rass, Herwig Maria Stark, Manfredo Weihs.In this exhibition we dont travel back to the 1960s and no objects are thrown, but the Galerie Art Pool Vienna opens the exhibition year 2018 with an exhibition of works by Daisy Gold, Momo Hoflinger, Elisabeth Rass, Herwig Maria Stark and Manfredo Weihs.THE HAPPENINGOpening: January 30, 2018, 7 p.m.  10 p.m.Galerie Art Pool ViennaMarkgraf-Rudiger-Strasse 131150 Vienna, AustriaDuration of the exhibition: till February 10, 2018Opening hours: WED  FRI 2 p.m.  7 p.m., SAT 11 a.m.  4 p.m.Short information about the artists:DAISY GOLD, graphic designer, illustrator and painter from Munich. She studied at the Graphic Academy in Munich and works for many years as an illustrator and graphic designer. Since 2011 she is working as a visual artist in the field of oil painting. Her picture cycles are versatile, fantastic and changeable. (daisygold.at)MOMO HOFLINGER, photographer and painter from Vienna. Intensive employment and experimental examination of the two art forms painting and photography since the earliest youth. Her focus is put on the visualization of the inconspicuous things. (momo-hoeflinger-art.at)ELISABETH RASS, photo artist from Vienna. For her, photography is a way to show states, grievances, beauty, everyday occurrences and extraordinary in a different light or perspective. Her works are represented in public collections in Italy, South Korea, USA and Austria. (elisabethrass.com)HERWIG MARIA STARK, artist and fashion designer from Salzburg. He studied fashion design in Vienna and Florence and was awarded with the Austrian State Prize for the best Design in 1996. As a visual artist he puts his focus on the essential "behind the surface". His works have been awarded several times internationally and are represented in international collections. (herwigmariastark.com)MANFREDO WEIHS, Austria. Photography is his life and he learned it from scratch. During many years working as a press photographer, he also used the camera as an experimental tool. His experimental work shows a great technical know-how and a lot of attention to details. (ateliercoolpool.at)The exhibition is a project of Galerie Art Pool Vienna (member gallery of BIENNALE AUSTRIA) presenting artists of BIENNALE AUSTRIA association.BIENNALE AUSTRIA association was founded in 2005 in Vienna with the focus on supporting visual artists on the fields of communication, marketing, networking and public relations. The association is funded by membership fees, organization fees for exhibitions and voluntary service.BIENNALE AUSTRIA association is operating internationally and is partner of various artist-, art-, and curators associations.BIENNALE AUSTRIA - Verein zur Forderung zeitgenossischer KunstlerSchottenfeldgasse 19/81070 Wienoffice@biennaleaustria.orgElisabeth Rass
Middle East Automotive Parts Aluminium & Magnesium Die Casting

http://www.strategymrc.com/report/middle-east-automotive-parts-aluminium-magnesium-die-casting-market-outlook

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The Middle East Automotive Parts Aluminium & Magnesium Die-Casting report provides an in-depth analysis of the various market segments and its sub-segments.Product types Covered: Pressure die casting Semi-solid die casting Squeeze die casting Vacuum die castingApplications Covered: Body assemblies Engine Parts Transmission parts OthersThe report focuses on current and upcoming market trends such as Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, and Challenges, technological advancements, Porters Five Forces analysis to assess the intensity of competition in the market. The market values are presented in the form of tables and graphs for better interpretation.For More, Please Visit:Market Size EstimationsThe market assessment is made by the core industry experts using our 360 research approach. The data is derived from the most reliable, authenticated data sources and is validated by the industry experts (Primary Research). Both top down and bottom up analysis are implemented to enhance the accuracy of the market figures. The market projections are calculated for the next 8 years using the actual market numbers of previous year as the base year.Company ProfilingThis section provides the overview of the key players that are leading in the industry, covering their business operations, financials, list of products & services, SWOT analysis, major developments such as mergers & acquisitions, agreements, partnerships, joint ventures, new product launch, expansions etc.Report Highlights:- Market share assessments for all the mentioned market segments and sub-segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 8 years for all the given segments- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping, mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsFor More, Please Visit:We offer wide spectrum of research and consulting services with in-depth knowledge of different industries. We are known for customized research services, consulting services and Full Time Equivalent (FTE) services in the research world. We explore the market trends and draw our insights with valid assessments and analytical views. We use advanced techniques and tools among the quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify the market trends. Our research reports and publications are routed to help our clients to design their business models and enhance their business growth in the competitive market scenario. We have a strong team with hand-picked consultants including project managers, implementers, industry experts, researchers, research evaluators and analysts with years of experience in delivering the complex projects.STRATISTICS MRC17049 King James Way, Gaithersburg,MD, 20877, USA
Animal Healthcare Market Analysis by Product, Animal Type, Geography and Growth Factors Forecast to 2022

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The global animal healthcare market is expected to grow from $29,537.4 million, at a CAGR of 7.0% during 2017-2022.Request for a free sample of this research report:Among the various products,the pharmaceuticals segment including,ectoparasiticides, endoparasiticides, anti-inflammatories and others accounted for largest share in the global animal healthcare market.The increasing population of production animals and companion animals is supporting the growth of the animal healthcare market. The production animals are nurtured by the consumers for milk and meat related products; whereas,companion animals are adopted for office or house guards and companionship. The increasing transfer of diseases from animals to humans, through companionship and consumption of products sourced from them,are driving the demand of the global animal healthcare market.The growing population, increasing per-capita income level, and changing lifestyle of the consumers are some of the factors leading to increased meat consumption globally. Due to the growing health concern of animals and their increasing number, the healthcare expenses in farms are surging globally. Animal farms are increasing globally, due to growing demand for protein rich foods, such as milk, eggs, and meat.Explore report at:PEDV resulted in about 3 million pig deaths in the U.S. from May 2013, to January 2014. State animal health officials,the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA),the National Pork Board and the American Association of Swine Veterinarians are actively involved in introducing preventive measures to stop percolation of this disease, which is expected to drive the animal healthcare market in the country.Make enquiry before buying the report:Some of the major companies operating in the global animal healthcare market include Zoetis, Merck, Merial, Bayer, Virbac, Ceva Sante Animal S.A., Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Elanco, and Vetoquinol.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide market research reports, industry reports, business intelligence and research based consulting services across a range of industries.With the help of our professional corporate relations with various companies, our market research offers the most accurate market forecasting. Our analysts and consultants interact with leading companies of the concerned domain to substantiate every single data presented in our publication. Our research assists our client in identifying new and different windows of opportunity and frame informed and customized strategies for expansion in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:
Cloud Services Global Market Research Report 2017

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GET SAMPLE REPORT @Where is the largest and fastest growing market for cloud services? How does the market relate to the overall economy, demography and other similar markets? What forces will shape the market going forward? The cloud services global market 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 information technology 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 cloud services market section of the report gives context. It compares the cloud services market with other segments of the information technology services market by size and growth, historic and forecast. It analyses Expenditure Per Capita, Expenditure Per Household, Cloud Services Indicators Comparison, Internet Penetration, Internet Hosts, Number Of Registered Domains, Average Internet Speed (Mbps), Number Of Registered Businesses across selected countries.ACCESS REPORT @Table of ContentsCloud Services Market CharacteristicsCloud Services Market Size and Growth2.1 Historic Market Growth2.1.1 Drivers of the Market2.1.2 Restraints on the Market2.2 Forecast Market Growth2.2.1 Drivers of the Market2.2.2 Restraints on the Market3. Porters Five Force Model3.1 Bargaining Power Of Buyer3.2 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers3.3 Threat Of New Entrants3.4 Threat Of Substitutes3.5 Industry Competition4. PESTLE Analysis4.1 Political4.2 Economic4.3 Social4.4 Technological4.5 Legal4.6 Environmental5. Cloud Services Market Segmentation5.1 Global Segmentation5.1.1 Software as a Service (SaaS)5.1.2 Market Characteristics5.1.3 Market Trends And Strategies5.2 Platform as a service (PaaS)5.2.1 Market Characteristics5.2.2 Market Trends And Strategies5.3 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)5.3.1 Market Characteristics5.3.2 Market Trends And Strategies. CONTINUEDMore Details-Contact Us:The Business Research Company,1st Floor, Anshu Colors Building,Road Number 1, Park View Enclave,Jubilee Hills,Hyderabad (India),500033.+91 8897263534The Business Research Company excels in company, market and consumer research. It has offices in the UK, the US and India and a network of trained researchers in 15 countries globally.The Business Research Company,1st Floor, Anshu Colors Building,Road Number 1, Park View Enclave,Jubilee Hills,Hyderabad (India),500033.+91 8897263534
Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market Estimated to Flourish by 2017  2025

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Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: SnapshotThe significant rise in the prevalent of chronic diseases across the world, including the increasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases, which need early detection, is influencing the global market for venipuncture procedure analysis significantly. The continual increase in the geriatric population is also boosting this market substantially across the world. With the technological advancement in devices utilized for collecting blood, especially vacuum venipuncture equipment, the accuracy of the result gained by the analysis of the sample is likely to add to the polarity of venipuncture procedure analysis solutions in the years to come, reflecting greatly to the global market. However, the dearth of essential skills among medical professionals for handling venipuncture procedure accurately may affect the growth of the market adversely over the next few years.In a number of cases, when clinicians were proficient in this procedure, accuracy of the results have been compromised. However, the rising focus of healthcare providers over various pre-analytical activities, regarding the collection of blood samples and its handling, is likely to improve the efficacy of the process in the near future, leading to immense growth of this market. North America, thanks to the advent of the U.S. as the key domestic market for venipuncture procedure analysis, is likely to acquire the leading position among all the regional markets over the forthcoming years.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: OverviewVenipuncture is the medical procedure of drawing blood from veins in humans and animals, mainly for diagnostic purposes such as blood sampling of the blood components. Venipuncture procedures are also used to administer intravenous therapies. The procedure is performed by various clinicians including medical practitioners, medical laboratory scientists, paramedics, dialysis technicians, phlebotomists, and nursing staff. Venipuncture procedures are majorly performed with the help of evacuated or vacuum tubes that mainly includes needles and syringes.The venipuncture procedure has emerged as a vital tool in the hands of clinicians that help in the invasive diagnosis of various diseases. In the recent years, the procedure has gained popularity in the healthcare industry driven by several diagnostic purposes: monitoring levels of blood components, administering therapeutic treatments, chemotherapy, or nutrition; and removing some portion of blood to get rid of excess RBC.Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: TrendsThe global venipuncture procedure analysis market is majorly driven by increasing incidence of various chronic diseases, prevalence of cardiovascular diseases that require early diagnosis, and rising geriatric population. Technological advancement in the devices used for collecting blood, such as vacuum venipuncture equipment, has led to the accuracy of the sample analysis. However, lack of essential skills of medical professionals using the venipuncture process has largely affected the growth of the market. In many cases, the instances of the clinicians not being proficient in the process, has impeded the accuracy of the results.Request TOC of the Report @However, increasing focus of healthcare providers regarding various pre-analytical activities, pertaining to blood sample collection and its handling, has increased the efficacy of the process, boosting the uptake.Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: Market PotentialRecently, CorVascular, a Minneapolis-based leading supplier of advanced peripheral vascular diagnostic solutions, recently announced that it has entered into an agreement with Novarix Inc., a medical device company that develops innovative solutions in Intravenous (IV) therapy. Under the terms of the distribution agreement, CorVascular, will be the exclusive marketer of IV-eye, which is developed and manufactured by the medical device company in the UK. The device is a near infrared (NIR) vein imaging device that will assist clinicians in finding effective peripheral veins for performing venipuncture. Under the agreement, CorVascular has the task of making the device available to all resellers present across various healthcare segments in the U.S. The agreement is significant as this will increase the access of cost-effective imaging device for identifying the correct veins for the process of cannulation and venipuncture.Repeated failed attempts by medical practitioners to gain IV access in a large number of patients has resulted in prolonging the treatment and even can lead to significant delayto the tune of 16 to 30 minutes, estimates healthcare expertsin the administration of therapies, including medications. This has also contributed to poor patient experience with venipuncture, greatly impeding the uptake of the procedure. Furthermore, technological advancements and the measures taken by doctors to increase the safety of the procedure is expected to expand the market potential.Request Discount of the Report @Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the U.S. is a prominent market for venipuncture procedures and is expected to register impressive growth along the forecast period. The growth in the regional market is attributed to constant technological advancements leading to innovative products. These solutions have significantly increased the safety and efficacy of the procedure. In addition, the efforts taken by healthcare providers to train clinicians performing the procedure are expected to fuel the regional market in the coming years.The U.K. is another market showcasing lucrative avenues for the manufacturers of venipuncture equipment. A substantial demand is expected to be stimulated by advancement in evacuated tube systems which are extensively used in the venipuncture procedure. The market has witnessed significant demand for venipuncture procedure analysis in Germany and several Nordic countries.Global Venipuncture Procedure Analysis Market: Competitive AnalysisLeading players are making innovative product launches and consolidating their distribution networks to strengthen their market shares in various regions. Companies eyeing a sustained share in the venipuncture procedure analysis market include Translite LLC., Adam,Rouilly Limited, Kyoto Kagaku, Smiths Medical, and Sunphoria Co., Ltd, and CorVascular Diagnostics, LLC.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
Waterborne Ink Market Size will Observe Substantial Growth by 2024

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The global waterborne ink market is highly diverse with the presence of a large number of players in all sizes. Among the larger names, the global waterborne ink market was dominated by Sun Chemical Corporation, Flint Group, and Siegwerk Druckfarben AG & Co. KGaA, who collectively took up 27.8% of its total value at the time. The success of companies such as Sun Chemical Corporation is attributed to a consistent rate of development and innovation, coupled with aggressing market area expansion in terms of distribution of high-quality products.According to a research report published by Transparency Market Research, the global waterborne ink market is expected to hold a uniquely intensive competitive scenario. A lot of the older and prominent players in the market base their trade dynamics in long-term contracts and goodwill. This allows them a safe playing field to engage in further expansionistic strategies.View Report Preview:At the same time, the availability of raw materials is made very easy to their low costs and abundance in all regions. This attracts several newcomers to the global waterborne ink market despite the overall fluctuating nature of pricing in it. The global waterborne ink market was valued at US$2.3 bn in 2015 and is expected to reach US$2.49 bn by the end of 2016. After expanding at a CAGR of 6.5% between 2016 and 2024, the markets revenue is projected to reach US$ 4.1 bn in 2024.Pro-environment Regulations Swell up Demand for Waterborne InksPrinting inks are widely considered harmful to the environment, in terms of manufacturing waste disposal as well as product disposal into the environment. As a result, the markets related to printing inks have come under close scrutiny by government bodies as well as environment-conscious consumers. Acts such as the TSCA and the CAA have been instrumental in curbing the overall emission levels of VOC by bringing it under federal control within the U.S. Similar processes are being followed in a lot of the developed economies of the world, and this is severely cutting down the demand for conventional printing inks. Consequently, the visibility and preference of waterborne inks has shot up over the recent past due to its eco-friendly nature in terms of low VOC content. This is currently the leading driver of the global waterborne ink market, states a TMR analyst.Further Restriction of VOC Content could Restrict Global Waterborne Ink MarketGovernment regulations do come as a double-edged sword for the global waterborne ink market, as a lot of nations are going one step further to try and completely eradicate VOC content in industrial emissions. Despite its low VOC content, waterborne inks have a solid contender rising up in prominence  the burgeoning market for UV-cured inks. These inks are known for being completely VOC-free as well as quicker to dry due to the incorporation of UV drying methods. The risk of losing market demand to UV-cured inks is expected to increase in severity over the coming years.Request to view Sample Report:A lot of the more prominent players in the global waterborne ink market from developed economies are looking to the emergent ones for better demand and an expansion in market shares. The nations of Asia Pacific and Latin America will be key for the proliferation of several players who are sensing greater opportunities there, adds the analyst.The information presented in this review is based on a Transparency Market Research report, titled, Waterborne Ink Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market Global Outlook 2018: General Electric, Siemens, IBM Corpo, Microsoft, Oracle

Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market Global Outlook 2018

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The report entitled Global Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market 2018 delivers the comprehensive and in-depth research analysis of the key regional industry standing of the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market on a global level. This report especially focuses on the core regions such as North & South America, Europe, Africa, South & Middle East Asia and Australia and also the key countries like (USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Russia, India, China, South Korea and Japan).Get Sample Copy of Report Here:This Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market report state and future prospects of the segment have jointly been examined. Additionally, key methods within the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market that features partnerships, product developments, link-ups, and acquisitions, etc., mentioned. Besides, Upstream raw materials, equipment, and downstream consumers analysis is equally carried out. This extensive research encompasses of market profit, sales, Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market revenue, potentials, and challenges also project the growth rate. Producers Analysis and Prime Sellers of world Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market 2018:1. General Electric2. PTC3. Siemens4. Dassault Systemes5. IBM Corporation6. ANSYS7. Microsoft Corporation8. Oracle CorporationInquiry for Buying, Visit Here: Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market (Type Analysis):- Parts Type, System Type Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market (Application Analysis):- Aerospace & Defense, Automotive & Transportation, Machine Manufacturing, Energy & Utilities, OthersIn the first segment, The Internet of Things (IoT) Twin report covers the marketing research and forecast of Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market on a regional also the world level. The Internet of Things (IoT) Twin report is generically divided into six components and each half aims at the summary of the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin past, present and future conditions of the market, the feasibility of the investment on many methods and policies. Excluding the classification and definition, the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market report conjointly discusses the analysis crucial and export and explain a comparison of the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market that is targeted at the trends and development. Key Emphasizes the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market:1. Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market evolution for the regional as well as country level segments.2. Depth Analysis of global market forecasts and outlook for 2022, and forecasting of CAGRs through an expected period.3. In-depth analysis of Types/product and applications.4. Competitive mapping the prevailing key trends.5. Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market estimations.6. Analyze the crucial market trends and new evolution technologically in the Internet of Things (IoT) Twin Market.After that, This Internet of Things (IoT) Twin report deals with the precise info on the selling Channels and novel project investments. So the modern professionals and the mainstream industry rival get the direction of these markets trends as well as regional analysis. This report also supports the new entrants, readers, investors and the established players to set up their plans and decide which segment or sub-segment to invest on so as to reap maximum profits.Finally, In Internet of Things (IoT) Twin report key details, methods, and variables are examined and also whole helpful data are combined together for the learning and understanding the key facts related the worldwide Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market. The Internet of Things (IoT) Twin market share and production price with the SWOT analysis everything is integrated into this report.About Us:Business Worldwide is a trusted brand in the research industry with a capability of commissioning complex projects within a short span of time with high level of accuracy. At Business Worldwide, we believe in building long-term relations with our clients. Our services cover a broad spectrum of industries including Energy, Chemicals and Materials, Automotive, Software and Aerospace.Contact Us:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Global Development on Fashion Retailing Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2016-2020)

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"Global Fashion Retailing Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2016-2020)" The Report covers current Industries Trends, Worldwide Analysis, Global Forecast, Review, Share, Size, Growth, Effect.. .Description-' ' Fashion can be described as any style (or styles) of apparel, footwear, bags and accessories preferred to be worn at any given time by groups of people. The styles and trends may vary depending upon whether it is designed for a high-street users or mass-market users/street-style fashion users. The fashion industry involves the design, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and retailing of all types of apparel (mens, womens, and childrens) from the most exclusive and luxurious couture and designer fashions to ordinary everyday clothing.. .Get Sample Report @' ' Fashion retailing involves the sale of fashion products or merchandise for individual consumption, either from a fixed location such as a specialty store, department store or stall, or through a wide-ranging online network, also known as e-commerce portals. Fashion retailing in the present world scenario operates in two types of retailing namely On-site retailing and Off-site retailing. On the basis of fashion line, fashion retailing can be segmented into Haute-couture, RTW designer, Fast fashion and Mass-market fashion. The key factors which are anticipated to drive this market include growing global retail Ecommerce sector, rising online fashion penetration rate, increasing middle-class consumption expenditure and rising young population. Some of the noteworthy trends of this industry include upswing in fast-fashion retail, rising online spending in emerging markets and globally converging fashion due to increasing travel. However, the growth of respective industry is challenged by high cost of labor, exchange rate volatility and swiftly changing fashion styles. The report provides an extensive study of global fashion retail market and also some of its major regional markets. Furthermore, market dynamics such as key trends and development; and challenges are analyzed in depth. The global fashion retail market is highly competitive consisting of several large enterprises including the Inditex, H&M, Gap Inc, and Fast Retailing. The competitive landscape of the respective market, along with the company profiles of the leading players are also discussed in detail.Table of Content1. Market Overview1.1 Fashion1.1.1 Segmentation by Functions1.1.2 Segmentation by Product Type1.2 Fashion Retailing1.2.1 Segmentation by Fashion Line2. Global Fashion Market2.1 Global Fashion Market Revenue  Actuals2.2 Global Fashion Market Revenue  Forecast2.3 Global Fashion Market by Product Type2.4 Global Fashion Market by Segments2.4.1 Global In-Store Fashion Market Revenue Forecast2.4.2 Global Online Fashion Market Revenue  Forecast2.5 Global Clothing Market2.5.1 Global Clothing Market Revenue  Forecast2.5.2 Global Clothing Export by Value  Actuals2.5.3 Global Clothing Export by Value  Forecast3. Global Fashion Retail Market3.1 Global Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Actuals3.2 Global Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Forecast3.3 Global Fashion Retail Market by Region3.4 Global Fashion Retail Market by End User4. Regional Fashion Retail Market4.1 Europe4.1.1 Europe Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.1.2 The UK Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.1.3 Germany Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.2 Asia-Pacific4.2.1 Asia-Pacific Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.2.2 China Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.2.3 India Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.2.4 Japan Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.3 The US4.3.1 The US Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Actuals4.3.2 The US Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.3.3 The US Clothing Retail Market Revenue  Forecast4.3.4 The US Fast Fashion Retail Market Revenue  Forecast5. Market Dynamics5.1 Growth Drivers5.1.1 Growing Global Retail Ecommerce Sector5.1.2 Rising Online Fashion Penetration Rate5.1.3 Increasing Middle-Class Consumption Expenditure5.1.4 Rising Young Population5.2 Key Trends5.2.1 Upswing in Fast-Fashion Retail5.2.2 Rising Online Spending in Emerging Markets5.2.3 Globally Converging Fashion due to Increased Travel5.3 Challenges5.3.1 High Cost of Labor5.3.2 Exchange Rate Volatility5.3.3 Swiftly Changing Fashion Styles6. Competitive Landscape6.1 Competition by Revenue6.2 Competition by Market Capitalization6.3 Competition by Store Count7. Company Profiles7.1 Inditex7.1.1 Business Overview7.1.2 Financial Overview7.1.3 Business Strategies7.2 H&M7.2.1 Business Overview7.2.2 Financial Overview7.2.3 Business Strategies7.3 GAP Inc.7.3.1 Business Overview7.3.2 Financial Overview7.3.3 Business Strategies7.4 Fast Retailing7.4.1 Business Overview7.4.2 Financial Overview7.4.3 Business StrategiesList of TableNAList of Chart?Fashion Market Segments by FunctionsFashion Market Segmentation by Product TypeGlobal Fashion Market Revenue  Actuals (2011-2015)Global Fashion Market Revenue  Forecast (2016-2020)Global Fashion Market by Product Type (2015)Global Fashion Market by Segments (2015)Global In-Store Fashion Market Revenue  Forecast (2015-2020)Global Online Fashion Market Revenue  Forecast (2015-2020)Global Clothing Market Revenue  Forecast (2015-2020). .More Clear Details get Table of Contents @ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Researchmoz Global Pvt. Ltd.90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United States,Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free),Tel: +1-518-621-2074
Biomarkers Market : New Research, Future Opportunities, Treads, Analysis, Forecast 2025

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Global Biomarkers Market: SnapshotThe global biomarkers market is witnessing a tremendous rise in its valuation, thanks to the increase in diagnostic applications of biomarkers. The augmenting investments for research and development activities in the pharma and biotech companies, rising number of CROs, and the low cost associated with the clinical trials in emerging economies are also boosting this market.Going forward, the high prevalence rate of cancer and novel initiatives for biomarker research are likely to propel this market in the years to come. On the flip side, heightened need for capital investments and the low cost-benefit ratio, various technical issues associated with collecting samples and their storage, and the poorly suited regulatory and reimbursement systems are likely to act as restraining factors to the growth of this market over the next few years.Hitherto, North America, with massive share, has been leading the global market for biomarkers. With technological advancements and the increasing focus on research and development activities, this regional market is likely to remain on the top over the forthcoming years. Asia Pacific, among other regional markets, is expected to witness high growth in the years to come, thanks to the presence of ample raw materials.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Biomarkers Market: OverviewA biomarker is considered as a biological gene or molecule which is being used extensively across the globe in order to evaluate accurate pharmacologic responses, biological procedures, and pathogenic procedures. In addition, biomarkers are used to check bodys response to a specific treatment for a condition or disease. This helps the medical professionals in making effective clinical decisions, which will further assist in diagnosing the health of patients. According to the research study, the global biomarkers market is predicted to register a progressive growth rate throughout the forecast period.Global Biomarkers Market: Key TrendsIn the last few years, there has been a significant research on biomarkers, owing to which the application areas are likely to expand. This is estimated to benefit the global biomarkers market in the coming years. The use of biomarkers for effective therapeutics for cancer is likely to generate potential growth opportunities. In addition, the key players in the market are emphasizing on developing economies across the globe in order to create a niche and expand their presence in the next few years.Request TOC of the Report @Global Biomarkers Market: Market PotentialThe approval for the use of biomarkers by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a surrogate end-points in the treatment development process is one of the major factors is projected to fuel the growth of the global biomarkers market in the next few years. In addition, the key players are focusing on new product development is anticipated generate potential opportunities for key players operating in the global biomarkers market in the next few years. On the other hand, the high cost of sample collection, tests, and storage is one of the key challenges being faced by the leading players in the global biomarkers market. This is expected to hamper the growth of the market in the next few years.Global Biomarkers Market: Regional OutlookAmong the key regional segments, in 2016, the North America market for biomarkers led the global market with a massive share. As per the research study, this segment is estimated to remain in the leading position throughout the forecast period. The robust growth of this region can be attributed to technological developments and the rising focus on research and development activities. The rising demand for biomarkers from diverse industrial sectors is estimated to accelerate the growth of the North America market in the next few years.On the other hand, Asia Pacific is projected to exhibit a progressive growth rate throughout the forecast period. The growing use of biomarkers for several diagnostic purposes, the rising incidence of chronic diseases, and the rising rate of outsourcing of pharmaceutical research and development activities are projected to supplement the growth of the Asia Pacific biomarkers market in the next few years.Request Discount of the Report @Global Biomarkers Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the prominent players operating in the biomarkers market across the globe are Qiagen N.V., Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC., EKF Diagnostics Holdings, Inc., Enzo Biochem, Inc., Merck Millipore, Biosims Technologies Sas, Cisbio Bioassays, Signosis, Inc., and Perkinelmer, Inc. A significant rise in the number of players projected to enter the market is estimated to strengthen the competitive landscape of the global biomarkers market in the next few years.Furthermore, the growing focus of key players on innovations and technological developments is likely to encourage the growth of the global biomarkers market in the next few years. In addition, the expansion of the product portfolio is estimated to accelerate the growth of the market and benefit the prominent players operating in the global market.About TMR ResearchTMR 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
1. Yes. The ordinance goes against state law and is not in the best interest of the cities.

2. Yes. At the very least, it should be amended to give police officers some discretion.

3. No. Voters approved the ordinance by large majorities; the councils cant ignore that fact.

4. No. The petition process has to be given a chance to work. Leave the ordinance alone.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say how the cities should move forward regarding the ordinance.

Vote

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Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Denmark, Market Outlook to 2030, Update 2017-Capacity, Generation, Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), Investment Trends, Regulations and Company Profiles

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ReportsWeb.com published Solar Photovoltaic Market from its database. 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."Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Denmark, Market Outlook to 2030, Update 2017-Capacity, Generation, Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), Investment Trends, Regulations and Company Profiles", is the latest report from Publisher, the industry analysis specialists that offer comprehensive information and understanding of the Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market in Denmark.The report provides in depth analysis on global renewable power market and global Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market with forecasts up to 2030. The report analyzes the power market scenario in Denmark (includes conventional thermal, nuclear, large hydro and renewable energy sources) and provides future outlook with forecasts up to 2030. The research details renewable power market outlook in the country (includes hydro, small hydro, biopower and Solar Photovoltaic (PV)) and provides forecasts up to 2030. The report highlights installed capacity and power generation trends from 2006 to 2030 in Denmark Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market. A detailed coverage of renewable energy policy framework governing the market with specific policies pertaining to Solar Photovoltaic (PV) is provided in the report. The research also provides company snapshots of some of the major market participants.Request a Sample Report@The report is built using data and information sourced from proprietary databases, secondary research and in-house analysis by Publisher's team of industry experts.Report Scope:The report analyses global renewable power market, global Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market, Denmark power market, Denmark renewable power market and Denmark Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market. The scope of the research includes--A brief introduction on global carbon emissions and global primary energy consumption.-An overview on global renewable power market, highlighting installed capacity trends, generation trends and installed capacity split by various renewable power sources. The information is covered for the historical period 2006-2016 (unless specified) and forecast period 2017-2030.-Renewable power sources include wind (both onshore and offshore), Solar Photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), small hydro power (SHP), biomass, biogas and geothermal.-Detailed overview of the global Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market with installed capacity and generation trends, installed capacity split by major Solar Photovoltaic (PV) power countries in 2016 and key owners information of various regions.-Power market scenario in Denmark and provides detailed market overview, installed capacity and power generation trends by various fuel types (includes thermal conventional, nuclear, large hydro and renewable energy sources) with forecasts up to 2030.-An overview on Denmark renewable power market, highlighting installed capacity trends (2006-2030), generation trends(2006-2030) and installed capacity split by various renewable power sources in 2016.-Detailed overview of Denmark Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market with installed capacity and generation trends and major active and upcoming Solar Photovoltaic (PV) projects.-Deal analysis of Denmark Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market. Deals are analyzed on the basis of mergers, acquisitions, partnership, asset finance, debt offering, equity offering, private equity (PE) and venture capitalists (VC).-Key policies and regulatory framework supporting the development of renewable power sources in general and Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in particular.-Company snapshots of some of the major market participants in the country.Inquire before Buying@Reasons to buy:-The report will enhance your decision making capability in a more rapid and time sensitive manner.-Identify key growth and investment opportunities in Denmark Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market.-Facilitate decision-making based on strong historic and forecast data for Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market.-Position yourself to gain the maximum advantage of the industry's growth potential.-Develop strategies based on the latest regulatory events.-Identify key partners and business development avenues.-Understand and respond to your competitors' business structure, strategy and prospects.Companies Mentioned:European Energy A/SDanfoss A/SFor more information about this report@About 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.Contact Us:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Electronic Security Market by Commercial Sector, Analysis and Outlook to 2020

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Physical security refers to security measures that help to monitor and control access of an entity to premises, or equipment, or resources. These measures protect individuals and property from theft or attacks. Physical security involves the use of multiple layers of security products, such as surveillance systems, locks, and access control systems. It is mainly divided into two: electronic physical security and mechanical physical security. Electronic physical security is a system that is developed by integrating numerous entities as per end-users' requirements. This security system is a combination of various security equipment or solutions.Publisher's analysts forecast the global electronic security market to grow at a CAGR of 14.4% during the period 2016-2020.For more information atCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global electronic security market for 2016-2020. This report provides a list of vendors that provide electronic security solutions across the globe. Vendors are identified based on their product features, geographical presence, customer base, and product portfolio.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEAPublisher's report, Global Electronic Security 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- Axis Communications- Bosch Security Systems- Honeywell Security- Tyco Security ProductsRequest Sample Copy:Other prominent vendors- ADT Security Services (acquired by Apollo Global Management in June 2016)- A2 Systems- ALL-TAG Security Americas- Anixter- ASSA ABLOY- AxxonSoft- Checkpoint Systems- Delphi- FLIR Systems- Gallagher- Genetec- Hikvision Digital- Intergraph- Ketec- Lenel Systems- Nedap- NetVersant- Nortek Security (acquired by Melrose Industries and Nevada Corp in July 2016)- Panasonic- S2 Security Corporation- Salient Systems- Samsung Techwin (named changed to Hanwha Techwin)- Siemens- videoNEXTMarket driver- Decline in prices of security products- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge- Replacing analog cameras with new IP cameras- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend- Rising adoption of electronic security products by SMEs- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMake an enquiry:Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Fireproof Ceramics Global Market is Anticipated to Grow at a Moderate Pace, with a CAGR of 10.1%, to garner over $6.38 billion revenue by 2022

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According to Publisher, the Global Fireproof Ceramics Market is valued at $3.25 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.1% to reach $6.38 billion by 2022. Rising applications of fireproof ceramics is one of the key factors contributing to the market growth. Furthermore, growth of end-user industries such as automotive, construction, aerospace and marine in which there is a huge demand for these ceramics is expected to propel the market growth. Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a significant rate owing to the growing manufacturing units in quickly developing markets of the region. Region is estimated to witness tremendous growth due to improved government investment on the manufacturing industry and growing opportunities for FDI in China and India. Currently, China is the largest manufacturer of these ceramics globally. Other major manufacturers of the market include Latin America, Italy, India, and Middle Eastern countries.For more information about this report:Some of the key players in the Fireproof Ceramics Market are Rath Inc., Luyang Energy-Saving Materials Co., Ltd., NGP Industries Limited, Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics Ltd., agdamba Minerals, Saffil Ltd., Isolite Insulation Products Co. Ltd., Zibo Jiuchen Trade Co., Ltd., Morgan Technical Ceramics, Jia Inc., IBIDEN CO.LTD., Skamol A/S, Zircar Ceramics Inc. and Unifrax I LLC.End Users Covered:-Power Generation-Aluminum-Ceramics & Glass-Petrochemicals-Iron &Steel-Other End UsersProducts Covered:-Module-Board-Paper-Bulk-Blanket-Other ProductsRegions Covered:-North America-US-Canada-Mexico-Europe-Germany-France-Italy-UK-Spain-Rest of Europe-Asia Pacific-Japan-China-India-Australia-New Zealand-Rest of Asia Pacific-Rest of the World-Middle East-Brazil-Argentina-South Africa-EgyptRequest Sample Copy atWhat our report offers:- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 7 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsCompany Profiling9.1 Rath Inc.9.2 Luyang Energy-Saving Materials Co., Ltd.9.3 NGP Industries Limited9.4 Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics Ltd.9.5 Jagdamba Minerals9.6 Saffil Ltd.9.7 Isolite Insulation Products Co. Ltd.9.8 Zibo Jiuchen Trade Co., Ltd.9.9 Morgan Technical Ceramics9.10 Jia Inc.9.11 IBIDEN CO.,LTD.9.12 Skamol A/S9.13 Zircar Ceramics Inc.9.14 Unifrax I LLCInquire before Buying atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Gaucher Disease - Pipeline by Competitor Information, Analysis, and Insights to Formulate Effective R&D Strategies 2017

Gaucher Disease

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SUMMARYWiseGuyReports published new report, titled Gaucher Disease - Pipeline Review, H2Pharmaceutical and Healthcare disease pipeline guide Gaucher Disease - Pipeline Review, H2 2017, provides an overview of the Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) pipeline landscape.Gaucher disease is a rare genetic disorder occurs due to lacks an enzyme called glucocerebrosidase. Symptoms include cognitive impairment, enlarged spleen, severe swelling, lung disease, fatigue and seizures. Treatment includes enzyme replacement therapy.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Report HighlightsPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Gaucher Disease - Pipeline Review, H2 2017, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders), 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 Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Gaucher Disease and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical and Discovery stages are 3, 1, 9 and 1 respectively. Similarly, the Universities portfolio in Phase I, Preclinical and Discovery stages comprises 1, 1 and 5 molecules, respectively.Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) 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.Additionally, various dynamic tracking processes ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.Scope- The pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders).- The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) 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 Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.- The pipeline guide evaluates Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) 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 Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders)Key points- 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 Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders).- 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 Gaucher Disease (Genetic Disorders) 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.Table of ContentsList of TablesList of FiguresIntroductionGlobal Markets Direct Report CoverageGaucher Disease - OverviewGaucher Disease - Therapeutics DevelopmentPipeline OverviewPipeline by CompaniesPipeline by Universities/InstitutesProducts under Development by CompaniesProducts under Development by Universities/Institutes..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
Potato Chips Market by Product, Analysis and Outlook to 2020

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The global potato chips market has been witnessing steady growth over the past few years. Initially, potato chips were available only in certain flavors. However, to attract new customers, the market vendors are offering potato chips in different flavors such as cinnamon, cheddar, and jalapeno. This is attracting many customers to try potato chips. Also, the availability of less or no oily chips has resulted in the demand for chips among health conscious people.Publisher's analysts forecast the global potato chips market to grow at a CAGR of 4.42% during the period 2016-2020.For more informationCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global potato chips market for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, Publisher takes into consideration the revenue generated from the sale of potato chips in the following geographies:- Americas- APAC- Europe- MEAThe market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- Europe- MEAPublisher's report, Global Potato Chips 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- Calbee Foods- Herr- Intersnack Group- PepsiCo- Snyder's-Lance- UTZ Quality FoodsRequest Sample CopyOther prominent vendors- Burtschips- Golden Flake Snack Foods- Great Lakes Potato Chips- Kettle Foods- Koikeya- Lorenz Bahlsen Snack World- Notions Group- Old Dutch Foods- Pop Chips- Proper Crisps- Shearer's Snacks- Tyrells Potato Crisps- Wise FoodsMarket driver- Availability of different varieties and flavors- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge- Threat of substitutes- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend- New product offerings- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMake an enquiry:Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Flavors and Fragrances market was valued at $29.12 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $44.60 billion, growing at a CAGR of 6.3% during 2022

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According to Publisher, the Global Flavors and Fragrances Market is accounted for $29.12 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $44.60 billion by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 6.3% during the forecast period from 2015 to 2022. The increasing consciousness of people towards beauty and food & beverages is creating opportunities in the dairy, soap & detergents, fine fragrance and cosmetic & toiletries industries. Emerging middle class population in developing countries acts as the growth factor for the market. Moreover, increasing demand for natural flavors is the key trend of the market coupled with high disposable income of consumer and rapid change in lifestyle. In addition to all drivers, high cost of raw materials is one of the major factors restraining the market growth.Aroma chemicals segment is expected to be the fastest growing segment owing to the increasing use of this material for making flavor and fragrance compounds. Diary, cosmetics & toiletries, and household product segments are anticipated to show above average growth in market, reaction to its various uses in daily lifestyle. North America is estimated to be the largest market, while Asia Pacific is estimated to be the fastest growing market due to the increase in disposable income and changing lifestyle.For more information about this report:Some of the key players in the flavors and fragrances market include Firmenich SA, Givaudan SA, Symrise AG, Agilex Flavors & Fragrances, Inc., International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc., Bedoukian Research, Inc., Aromatech SAS, BASF SE, Bell Flavors & Fragrances Inc., Sensient Technologies Corp., Takasago International Corp., Royal DSM NV, Cargill Flavor Systems, ConAgra Foods Incorporated and Kerry Group plc.Products Covered:-Flavor blends-Fragrance blends-Aroma chemicals-Natural Aroma chemicals-Synthetic Aroma chemicalsTechnologies Covered:-Cold Extraction Technology-Conventional Technologies-Enzymatic Routes-Flavor Encapsulation-Supercritical Fluid ExtractionApplications Covered:-Beverages-Confectionary And Bakery Products-Cosmetics And Toiletries-Dairy Products-Household And Other Products-Oral Care-Soap & DetergentRequest Sample Copy atRegions Covered:-North America-US-Canada-Mexico-Europe-Germany-France-Italy-UK-Spain-Rest of Europe-Asia Pacific-Japan-China-India-Australia-New Zealand-Rest of Asia Pacific-Rest of the World-Middle East-Brazil-Argentina-South Africa-EgyptWhat our report offers:- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 7 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsInquire before Buying atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Ovarian Cancer Therapeutics Development and Professional Review Analysis 2018

Ovarian Cancer

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SummaryOvarian cancer is any cancerous growth that may occur in different parts of the ovary. The majority of ovarian cancers arise from the epithelium (outer lining) of the ovary. Signs and symptoms of ovarian cancer include pelvic discomfort or pain, indigestion, gas or nausea, changes in bowel habits, such as constipation, loss of appetite and low back pain. The predisposing factors include age and family history. Treatment includes surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.Report HighlightsPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Ovarian Cancer - Pipeline Review, H2 2017, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Ovarian Cancer (Oncology), 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.GET SAMPLE REPORT @The Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Ovarian Cancer 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, IND/CTA Filed, Preclinical, Discovery and Unknown stages are 5, 2, 14, 141, 144, 7, 221, 26 and 10 respectively. Similarly, the Universities portfolio in Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical and Discovery stages comprises 10, 12, 45 and 8 molecules, respectively.Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) 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. Additionally, various dynamic tracking processes ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.Scope- The pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Ovarian Cancer (Oncology).- The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) 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 Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.- The pipeline guide evaluates Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) 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 Ovarian Cancer (Oncology)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 Ovarian Cancer (Oncology).- 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 Ovarian Cancer (Oncology) 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.Table of Content: Key PointsTable of Contents 2Introduction 12Ovarian Cancer - Overview 13Ovarian Cancer - Therapeutics Development 14Ovarian Cancer - Therapeutics Assessment 77Ovarian Cancer - Companies Involved in Therapeutics Development 111Ovarian Cancer - Drug Profiles 242Ovarian Cancer - Dormant Projects 2130Ovarian Cancer - Discontinued Products 2152Ovarian Cancer  Product Development Milestones 2157ContinuedACCESS 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
Global Marine Audio System Market 2018 Functional Outlook, Company Profiles, Analysis-2025

Marine Audio System

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http://bit.ly/2CFXnLT

Market Research Explore recently announces that, research report Global Marine Audio System Market 2018 analyses the crucial factors of the Marine Audio System market based on present industry situations, market demands, business strategies adopted by Marine Audio System market players and their growth scenario. This report isolates the Marine Audio System market based on the key players, Type, Application and Regions.Get Sample Research Report :The Marine Audio System is audio System in the boat. Adapt to the environment on the water, basically with features like waterproof, Resistance to salt spray corrosion.Include Marine Stereo Receivers, Marine Speakers, Marine Subwoofers And Marine Amplifiers.The global Marine Audio System market will reach xxx Million USD in 2018 and CAGR xx% 2011-2018. The report begins from overview of Industry Chain structure, and describes industry environment, then analyses market size and forecast of Marine Audio System by product, region and application, in addition, this report introduces market competition situation among the vendors and company profile, besides, market price analysis and value chain features are covered in this report.The Marine Audio System market research report mainly focuses on Marine Audio System industry in global market. The major regions which contribute to the development of Marine Audio System market mainly cover Marine Audio System market in various regions including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa.The Marine Audio System report provides the industry environment covering Marine Audio System policy, Marine Audio System economics, Marine Audio System sociology and Marine Audio System technology. Furthermore, the opportunities and the threats to the development of Marine Audio System market are also covered at depth in this research document.Initially, the Marine Audio System manufacturing analysis of the major industry players based on their company profiles, annual revenue, demand, sales margin, growth aspects is also covered in this report, which will help other Marine Audio System market players in driving business insights.Get Full Report with TOC :Key Highlights Of The Marine Audio System Market :The fundamental details related to Marine Audio System industry like the product definition, product segmentation, price, variety of applications, demand and supply statistics are covered in this report.The comprehensive study of Marine Audio System market based on development opportunities, growth limiting factors and feasibility of investment will forecast the market growth.The study of emerging Marine Audio System market segments and the existing market segments will help the readers in planning the business strategies.Finally, the report Global Marine Audio System Market 2018 describes Marine Audio System industry expansion game plan, the Marine Audio System industry knowledge supply, appendix, analysis findings and the conclusion.About Us:MARKET RESEARCH EXPLORE is a huge market research platform which provides market intelligence reports and consulting services. It includes latest industrial reports by reputed publishers. MRE covers public and private industries such as chemicals & materials, technology, food & beverages, consumer goods, electronics, pharmaceutical, healthcare and others. We have market research reports from number of leading publishers and we daily update our database to provide updated reports to our clients. MRE continuously track emerging trends and events to fulfill clients needs.Contact Us :Steel EnidSales ManagerChicago, IL United StateEmail @: sales@marketresearchexplore.com
Sepio Systems Sponsors Cyber Intelligence Asia 2018 on March 20-22, 2018 in Singapore

http://sepio.systems

January 4, 2018NORTH BETHESDA, Md. - Sepio Systems, a leader and pioneer in securing organizations against attacks via rogue hardware devices, will be presenting at the 2018 Cyber Intelligence Asia conference in Singapore.Cybercrimes in Asia are on an increase with many banks, utilities, law firms and governments being targeted. Singapore is a region hub for the financial industry and for banks, investment firms, and insurance companies protecting their infrastructure is a key to business resilience.Cybercrimes and sophisticated attacks are becoming an everyday occurrence forcing governments and utilities to make sure their cyber defense systems are top priority.During the past 18 months, we are seeing that the use of manipulated hardware by internal abusers has become a very compelling option for stealing sensitive information without being detected., said Bentsi Ben Atar, the CMO and Co-Founder for Sepio Systems. Internet connectivity is heavily monitored by enterprises and many of the attempts to simply email or upload the stolen data is caught. The use of manipulated hardware that can be easily and very affordably purchased online provides a complete invisible channel for safely taking the information out.In THE USE OF MANIPULATED HARDWARE BY INTERNAL ABUSERS workshop, Mr. Ben Atar will describe real incidents and will demonstrate common attack flows and scenarios. The session will provide best practice recommendations and a brief of available tools to secure organizations both against data leakage as well and infection campaigns  both of insiders as well as threat agents and organized cybercrime groups.Sepio Systems is a pioneer in securing organizations against attacks via rogue hardware devices. Strategic cyber weapon technology that has been leaked is currently in the hands of criminal organizations that are using it against civilian commercial targets with no defenses against it. These enterprises never suspect that the seemingly legitimate devices they are using have been compromised, allowing access to key assetsoften over long periods of time. Sepio Systems is headquartered in Maryland, with offices in New York and South Carolina, and a research and development center in Tel-Aviv.To learn more about Sepio Systems, visitCyber Sepio Systems Ltd.11810 Grand Park Ave. Suite 500Rockville, MD20852USAIftah Bratspiessinfo@sepio.systems
Pharmaceutical Microbiology - SMi Group Release Programme Insight Updates Ahead of Must-Attend-Event in London in January 2018

Pharmaceutical Microbiology Conference 2018

www.pharma-microbiology.com/openpr

http://www.smi-online.co.uk

Programme Insight Updates and Welcome to New Sponsors at this years Pharmaceutical Microbiology ConferenceHappy New Year and welcome back. At the back end of last year, SMi proudly welcomed the new sponsors and gave a brief update on what was new at the conference. Incase you missed it whilst enjoying the December festivities, here is a brief recap.There have been a number of updates to the programme and speakers, including both of our new sponsors speaking. They will be added to the agenda, to share their expertise with us at this years comprehensive and cutting-edge event. On day 1 there will be Jim Cannon, International Thornton Pharmaceutical Manger, Mettler Toledo speaking on Alternative Microbial Methods for Pharmaceutical Water and day 2 will see Kia Nesemann, Global Product Manager Rapid Detection, Sartorius Lab Instruments who will explore Rapid Detection of Bacteria in ATMP Prior Treatment - Validation of a qPCR-Based Test.Mettler Toledo are sponsoring the conference. A leading manufacturer of quality weighing, analytical, and measuring solutions serving a diverse range of industries in laboratory, industrial and food retailing environments. With 60 years of experience producing liquid process and ultrapure water analytics measurement solutions that allow manufacturing companies to control production through in-line, on-line or at-line analytical measurements. Our portfolio of analytical solutions includes pH, ORP, dissolved oxygen, dissolved CO2, turbidity, conductivity/resistivity, dissolved ozone, total organic carbon, microbial contamination, sodium ionic contamination, silica concentration, chloride and sulphate analysis.Sartorius Lab Instruments will also be sponsoring the event. Manufactures of laboratory instruments like laboratory balances, lab water systems, pipettes and consumables for research and quality assurance laboratories and provides relevant services. Key customers are from the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industries and from numerous research and educational institutes. The company is headquartered in Goettingen, Germany.Thank you to all Sponsors - bioMerieux, Charles River, Copan, Lonza, Mettler Toledo, NCIMB, Roche and Sartorius Lab InstrumentsIn order to keep our delegates up-to-speed and informed, we have released an updated event brochure, now available to download on our website.To find out more about the above, for the full programme or for any other details about the event, please visit the websiteSponsorship packages: Alia Malick | amalick@smi-online.co.uk | +44 (0)20 7827 6168Delegate inquiries: Kieran Ronaldson | kronaldson@smi-online.co.uk | +44 (0)20 7827 6744We look forward to welcoming you in January.Pharmaceutical MicrobiologyConference: 22nd & 23rd January 2018Interactive Workshops: 24th January 2018Holiday Inn, Kensington Forum, London, UK---ENDS---About SMi Group: Established since 1993, the SMi Group is a global event-production company that specializes in Business-to-Business Conferences, Workshops, Masterclasses and online Communities. We create and deliver events in the Defence, Security, Energy, Utilities, Finance and Pharmaceutical industries. We pride ourselves on having access to the world's most forward-thinking opinion leaders and visionaries, allowing us to bring our communities together to Learn, Engage, Share and Network. More information can be found atThe SMi Group is a highly Professional, Independent and Global event producing company that specialises in Business to Business Conferences, Workshops, Masterclasses and Training. We create and deliver events within Defence, Security, Energy, Utilities, Finance and Pharmaceutical sectors. We are Experts in knowing Experts and have been bringing you this Expertise since 1993!1 westminster BridgeLondon
Why Outsource Business Process or Function to a 3rd Party?

www.leadtomarket.com

https://goo.gl/xMkETV

Outsourcing lead generation & demand generation allows for the company to focus on the core details and outsource the more simple functionalities. It is imperative that if a company does decide to outsource, that they evaluate the options and outsource correctly.LEAD TO MARKET'S OUTSOURCING ADVICEDetermine whether you are an outsourcing candidate. You may outsource any process that is not the main focus of your business. In additions, ask the question whether the ouxrsourcing will increase production and reduce costs.Set out your objectives clearly with defined scope and schedule.Evaluate a service provider in the same way you would when hiring a full-time employee.Do your outsourcing company due diligence - if possible visit the outsourcing site. In the cases of both brick and mortar outsource centers (infrastructure) and virtual centers, make sure that the company has the ability to provide you with recordings and reporting.Ask for client references and review the company testimonials.Look for the specific experience fit in addition to quality serviceDo not choose a vendor based solely on price.Progress slowly and commit incrementally - do not walk in blind.Watch out for hidden costs.Be mindful regarding the security of your company data.Get everything in writing!Be an ACTIVE project manager - the great physical distance between the management and the outsourced team requires a shift in management methodology.Many organisations struggle when it comes to consistent outcomes, despite rigorous lead generation efforts. If you are thinking about improving and integrating content marketing into your sales process to reduce the marginal cost per sales engagement.Talk to us! We are happy to share our ideas and experiences. Meet our Marketing practice leader / learn about our Star Marketing suite -Take a survey study on the use of content to attract buyers those are distracted by multiple solution offers. Think of it as a how to guide on cutting out industry noise -Lead to Market provides fully comprehensive lead generation, inside sales and back office services, as well as a complimentary support and inbound call center solution, according to a unique cost efficient operational model. It is our aim to simplify the lives of clients and their customers. We provide innovative practices and strategies, tailored to meet our clients' very specific requirements, so they can focus on their core business. Our boutique sales services firm breaks the traditional cultural barriers when off-shoring key business functions. We believe in doing honest, high quality business while ensuring that each and every one of our customers profits from our services.Lead to Market,10701 Corporate Dr, Suite 286Stafford, Texas, 77477
Studivest launches new website as a gateway to Student Housing opportunities for Professional Investors

Studivest launches new website for PBSH opportunities for professional investors

www.studivest.com

www.studivest.com

www.mellstock.com

www.studivest.com

Focusing initially upon Central and Eastern Europe, a new website has been launched today that seeks to provide Professional Investors and Property Developers with a collaborative opportunity never seen before.will provide information and news on Purpose Built Student Housing (PBSH), its growing appeal among investors, its enduring investment fundamentals and new investment opportunities but with an initial focus upon Central and Eastern Europe.Studivest, one of the Mellstock family of brands, is backed by a team with over a decade of collective experience in the sector who are, in-turn, supported by designers, architects, structural and electrical engineers and developers and who are all dedicated to helping Professional Investors gain access to unique and financially rewarding opportunities across the Emerging Europe region.Its Business Development Director, Tony Trescothick, who has spent the past eight years as part of the senior management team for the Coral Student Portfolio said: We are thrilled to offer a unique platform that will offer a tantalising glimpse of new opportunities in this compelling real estate sector. As larger global names snap up mega-portfolios in mature and evolving markets alike, there are new opportunities in the frontier markets that Studivest can introduce. In terms of acquisition cost and commitments, these developments are ideally suited to more modest investment budgets.The Coral Student Portfolio was acquired by Student Accommodation specialist the GSA Group almost three years ago and, as GSA Coral, is now one of the markets most successful PBSH investment funds.Studivest has built an established network of experienced developers and designers across the region that have also spotted this growing trend that is sweeping across Europe. We are well-placed to work with Professional Investors eager to tap into the tried-and-tested business models that have seen billions of dollars of international investment being made in the past few years, he continued.Studivest is exclusively for Professional Investors and Developers to collaborate and to create partnerships that will be provide access to investment opportunities that will take full advantage of the growing numbers of globally-mobile students, projected by UNESCO to increase by almost 100million over the next decade.Studivest is a trading name of Mellstock Limited, an EU-registered business, and provides information to help Professional Investors source investment opportunities that match their requirements. Studivest does not provide investment advice and its services are strictly reserved for direct, Professional Investors and Developers and their respective advisers.Purpose-Built Student Housing (PBSH), also known as Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA), has grown in investor popularity over the past twenty years as its enduring fundamentals of economic cycle neutrality, growing rental incomes and relatively low risk profile, has thrust the asset class into the mainstream of Real Estate investing.Since the beginning of 2015, in-excess of $35billion has been committed to cross-border deals in PBSH assets, much of that into the UK and now, more recently into Western Europe. The opportunities in wider Europe are tantalising and First Movers have an opportunity that is rarely seen, to access new markets as they evolve.UNESCO has reported that almost 100million new students are expected to enrol in Higher Education over the next decade and growing numbers of them will seek university places in a foreign country. Many host governments have spotted this opportunity and are actively encouraging them to apply in their national tertiary education systems. Some countries, such as Hungary, are even providing financial support for students from abroad.Mellstock Ltd3rd Floor Josephides Building73 Agias Phylaxeos StreetLimassol 3087Cyprusinfo@mellstock.cominfo@studivest.com
Global Control Valves Market Projected to Reach USD9.88 Billion by 2023

MRRSE

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https://www.mrrse.com/control-valves-market

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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 Control Valves Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025 Request a Free Sample Report @The global market for control valves is fragmented in nature on account of the presence of a copious number of well-diversified regional and international manufacturers. The market is also highly competitive, in which keen players are seen growing their shares through mergers and acquisitions. Such inorganic manner of growth not just helps them to expand their market share but also to add to their existing product portfolios.Serving to boost growth in the global market for control verves is the power sector. Besides, the rising oil and gas exploration activities are also having a positive impact on the market. Overall, the growth in the pipelines worldwide on account of fast paced industrialization is majorly fuelling market growth.As per a report the global control valves market will likely rise at a CAGR of 6.4% during the period between 2017 and 2025. At this rate, the market which was worth US$6.01 bn in 2016 will likely become worth US$10.46 bn by 2024. In terms of volume, the global control valves market is expected to reach 13,734.6 thousand units in 2025.Outlook Complete Report with Table of Content @Cryogenic Valve Segment to See Maximum GrowthThe global market for control valves can be segmented based on different parameters. For example, by control valve type, the key segments of the market are ball valve, butterfly valve, cryogenic valve, globe valve, etc. The butterfly valve segment, of them, raked in maximum revenue in 2016. In the next couple of years, the segment is predicted to expand at a healthy clip. The cryogenic valve segment is also projected to see good growth in the upcoming years. In China ball valve segment is expected to grow at CAGR of 8% over the forecast period.Depending upon actuation technology, the global control valves market can be divided into manual control valve, electric control valve, pneumatic control valve, and hydraulic control valve. Among them, the segment of pneumatic control valve segment contributed the most to the revenue in 2016. In terms of revenue growth rate, on the other hand, the segment of electric control valve is expected to outpace all other regions.Send an Inquiry @From a geographical standpoint, North America currently dominates the global control valves market on the back of booming shale gas exploration. Control valves play a crucial role in shale gas extraction by helping to regulate the pressure or temperature throughout upstream, midstream, and downstream activities. The market in North America is being primarily driven by the U.S., followed by Canada. The TMR report predicts the market in the region to grow at a 5.1% CAGR from 2017 to 2025 to gross a revenue of US$2.936 bn by 2025.Powered by China and Japan that contribute the most to the revenue, the market in Asia Pacific is projected to clock maximum growth in the forecast period. The market will gain maximum market share by registering a CAGR of 7.3% from 2017 and 2025. The steadily growing chemical Industry is at the forefront of fuelling sales in the region.Honeywell International Inc. Emerson Electric Co., KITZ Corporation, Burkert Fluid Control Systems, Schlumberger Limited, Flowserve Corporation, AVK Holding A/S, Rotork Plc., General Electric Company, and Goodwin International Ltd. are to name a few prominent participants in the global control valves market.Check Discount @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:
Zero Liquid Discharge Systems Market share research by applications and regions for 2017-2024

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https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/zero-liquid-discharge-systems-market

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Zero Liquid Discharge Systems Market size will observe substantial growth owing to increase in demand for applications in pharmaceutical, energy & power, semiconductors & electronics, chemical & petrochemicals, textiles and food & beverages industry. Continuous rise in number of industries has led to surge in pollution that has reduced availability of fresh water. Demand for clean water is anticipated to propel zero liquid discharge systems market.Request for an in-depth table of contents for this report @Stringent government regulations namely Environmental Protection Agency and Target Zero associations have laid regulations regarding waste water generation and disposal of industrial waste into water bodies. Strong steps are taken by countries for conservation of water bodies and saving marine animals that is expected to boost zero liquid discharge systems market.Rise in global population has led to erection of power plants in various areas. Global power investment will grow by 11.5% and reach over USD 440 billion by 2024, to meet rising power demand. Mandates have been launched to increase awareness regarding wastewater disposal limits. Further, these help in recovering valuable minerals and compounds from industry that enhances cost effectiveness of process and gives positive outlook to zero liquid discharge systems market.Zero liquid discharge (ZLD) are processes that remove hazardous effluents and purify waste water. It employs advanced treatment technology that consists of ultra-filtration, reverse osmosis, evaporation and deionization processes to provide purified water. In this, first pre-treatment is done to remove dissolved solids and particles. These are quite efficient and easily meet discharge regulations and enhance management of produced water.Major constraint for zero liquid discharge systems market is high capital and operating expenditure. These systems need to be custom built for different industries owing to varying processes and end use that improves its overall cost. Further, space constraint is an important factor as its installation requires large space and poses a challenge for small industries. Though, growing strictness regarding disposal of industrial waste and consumer awareness will overcome these restrictions in forecast period.Browse Full Research Report On Zero Liquid Discharge Systems Market @Based on system, zero liquid discharge systems market is categorised into conventional and hybrid. Conventional accounts for larger share with its application in several small to large industries and low cost of erection as compared to hybrid. These have high demand in low and medium flow rate industries with involvement of standard processes. Hybrid is automated process with pre-concentrator and thermal technology with demand in large industries.On the basis of process, zero liquid discharge systems market is classified as pre-treatment, filtration and evaporation & crystallization. Pre-treatment has major share owing to need of removing solid wastes and effluents prior to further processing. These have huge demand from food & beverages and pharmaceutical industry. High demand for treatment of water due to chemical content in pharmaceutical wastage will boost its consumption.Based on end use, zero liquid discharge systems market is divided into pharmaceutical, energy & power, semiconductors & electronics, chemical & petrochemicals, textiles and food & beverages industry. Energy & power has major share with constant increase in power plants to meet rising energy requirements. These industries produce large amount of waste water that need treatment prior to disposal.Chemical & petrochemical industry has substantial share in zero liquid discharge systems market owing to demand of products from both developing and developed economies for petrochemical products. There has been an increase in number of refineries and major players are expanding their facilities to meet the demand that gives positive outlook to this market.North America has substantial share in zero liquid discharge systems market with rising number of energy & power and petrochemical industries. The U.S. is one of the largest consumers of energy and mainly dependent on non-renewable energy sources that produce huge amount of wastage.Asia Pacific, led by China, India and Japan has significant share and anticipated to grow with rise in number of electronics and petrochemical industry. Some states in India have made it mandatory to employ the product in industries. Rise in offshore drilling activities has further fuelled its zero liquid discharge systems market growth.Middle East & Africa is the hub for petrochemical industries with huge amount of crude oil reserves. Europe & Latin America have moderate share and will register significant growth with stringent government norms namely EU Water Framework Directive for wastewater disposal.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Zero liquid discharge systems market is moderately fragmented with presence of large number of regional and local players. Major players include Aquatech, GE Water Processes, Petro Sep Corporation, Veolia Technologies, IDE Technologies, Praj Industries, Doosan Hydro Technology, H2O, Degremont Technologies, Aquarion, Saltworks Technologies and Oasys Water.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:Connect with us: Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn | Twitter
Smart Home Speakers Market 2018 Global Key Players: Alphabet, Logitech, Philips, Invoxia, Lenovo, Mattel, COWIN Technology,.

Smart Home Speakers Market

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Smart Home Speakers Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Smart Home Speakers Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2022reports to its database.Executive SummaryThis report studies Smart Home Speakers 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, coveringAlphabetLogitechPhilipsInvoxiaLenovoMattelCOWIN TechnologyFABRIQOMAKEREdifierJBLInteractive VoiceLG ElectronicsPan Ocean TechnologySony Mobile CommunicationsOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoWiredWirelessBy Application, the market can be split intoHouseholdCommercialBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Request Sample Report @Table of content:Global Smart Home Speakers Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Smart Home Speakers1.1 Definition and Specifications of Smart Home Speakers1.1.1 Definition of Smart Home Speakers1.1.2 Specifications of Smart Home Speakers1.2 Classification of Smart Home Speakers1.2.1 Wired1.2.2 Wireless1.3 Applications of Smart Home Speakers1.3.1 Household1.3.2 Commercial1.3.3 Application 31.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 India2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Smart Home Speakers2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Smart Home Speakers2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Smart Home Speakers2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Smart Home Speakers8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Smart Home Speakers8.1 Alphabet8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 Alphabet 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 Alphabet 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Logitech8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Logitech 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Logitech 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 Philips8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 Philips 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 Philips 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 Invoxia8.4.1 Company Profile8.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.4.2.1 Product A8.4.2.2 Product B8.4.3 Invoxia 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.4.4 Invoxia 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.5 Lenovo8.5.1 Company Profile8.5.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.5.2.1 Product A8.5.2.2 Product B8.5.3 Lenovo 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.5.4 Lenovo 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.6 Mattel8.6.1 Company Profile8.6.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.6.2.1 Product A8.6.2.2 Product B8.6.3 Mattel 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.6.4 Mattel 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.7 COWIN Technology8.7.1 Company Profile8.7.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.7.2.1 Product A8.7.2.2 Product B8.7.3 COWIN Technology 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.7.4 COWIN Technology 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.8 FABRIQ8.8.1 Company Profile8.8.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.8.2.1 Product A8.8.2.2 Product B8.8.3 FABRIQ 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.8.4 FABRIQ 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.9 OMAKER8.9.1 Company Profile8.9.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.9.2.1 Product A8.9.2.2 Product B8.9.3 OMAKER 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.9.4 OMAKER 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.10 Edifier8.10.1 Company Profile8.10.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.10.2.1 Product A8.10.2.2 Product B8.10.3 Edifier 2016 Smart Home Speakers Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.10.4 Edifier 2016 Smart Home Speakers Business Region Distribution Analysis8.11 JBL8.12 Interactive Voice8.13 LG Electronics8.14 Pan Ocean Technology8.15 Sony Mobile CommunicationsContinuousFor 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
EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market by Technology, Application & Geography  Analysis & Forecast to 2022

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Market Study Report adds Global EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market By Manufacturers, Countries, Type And Application, Forecast To 2022 report to its research database. The report spread across 119 pages with table and figures in it.EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles are designed to absorb electromagnetic/radio frequency interference.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Request a sample copy of EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Research Report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers  NEC-Tokin (KEMET), 3M, TDK, Laird Technologies, Fair-Rite, Vacuumschmelze, Arc Technologies, Molex, API Delevan, Leader Tech, Mast Technologies.Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Table of Contents:Global EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market OverviewGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Manufacturers ProfilesGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Competition, by ManufacturerGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Analysis by RegionsGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles by CountriesGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Segment by TypeGlobal EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Segment by ApplicationEMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Forecast (2017-2022)Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and DealersResearch Findings and ConclusionAppendixMarket Segment by Type, covers Broadband EMI AbsorbersNarrowband EMI AbsorbersThermal PadsMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into Communications ElectronicsConsumer ElectronicsAerospace & DefenseOtherEnquire For Discount on EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Market Research Report @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles market.Chapter 1, to describe EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles, with sales, revenue, and price of EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles, 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 EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles, for each region, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 12, EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe EMI Absorber Sheets & Tiles sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceFor More Info on Market Research @Related Reports: -Global Breathable Membranes Market Research Report 2018In this report, the global Breathable Membranes 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.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
Bioburden Testing Market Share will Increase US$ 907 Million By 2022

Bioburden Testing Market

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Florida, January 08, 2018: Bioburden is defined as the number in terms of proportion, colony or cell count of bacteria that thrive on a given unsterilized surface. Bioburden testing additionally referred to as microbial limit testing provides quantification of the bacterial cell cultures on a given unsterilized surface. The key application of bioburden testing lies in implant fixation procedures that need testing of certain tolerable bioburden limit before implantation within the physical structure.The Global Bioburden Testing Market is segmented on the lines of its technology, treatment, application and regional. Basis on product type it covers Consumables and Instruments. Based on Test-type analysis the market is segmented into Aerobic Count, Anaerobic Count, Fungi/Mold Count and Spores Count. Based on application, the market is segmented into Raw Materials Testing, Medical Devices Testing, In-Process Material Testing, Sterilization, Validation Testing and Equipment Cleaning Validation. Based on End-user type it covers Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies, Medical Device Manufacturers, Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMOS), Manufacturers of Food & Beverage and Agriculture Products, Microbial Testing and Laboratories. Global Bioburden Testing Market on geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geographic market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.The Global Bioburden Testing Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 907.4 Million by 2022 at a CAGR of 8.5% in the given forecast period.You Can Browse Full Report:The major driving factors of Global Bioburden Testing Market are as follows: Growing Medical Device, Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industries Increasing Food & liquid Safety considerations Increasing Product Recall because of microbial Contamination Strong Trend of R&D Investments in Life Sciences Growing health care business and Medical spendingThe restraining factors of Global Bioburden Testing Market are as follows: High Costs of Microbial Enumeration InstrumentsThis report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Global Bioburden Testing Market and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2013, estimates for 2014 and 2015, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2022.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for using topical acne treatment Market.4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the Charles River Laboratories International Inc., Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, SGS S.A., Wuxi Pharmatech (CAYMAN) Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., Becton, Dickinson, and Company, North American Science Associates Inc., Nelson Laboratories Inc., Pacific Biolabs, and ATS Labs Inc. Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets for Global Bioburden Testing Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.Request Sample Report:Table of Contents1 INTRODUCTION2 Research Methodology3 Executive Summary4 Premium Insights5 Market Overview6 Industry Insights6.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis6.1.1 Threat From New Entrants6.1.2 Threat From Substitutes6.1.3 Bargaining Power of Suppliers6.1.4 Bargaining Power of Buyers6.1.5 Intensity of Competitive Rivalry6.2 Strategic Benchmarking7 Bioburden Testing Market, By Product8 Bioburden Testing Market, By Test Type9 Bioburden Testing Market, By Application10 Bioburden Testing Market, By End User11 Geographic Analysis12 Competitive Landscape13 Company Profiles13.1 Introduction13.2 Charles River Laboratories International, Inc.13.3 Sigma-Aldrich Corporation13.4 SGS S.A.13.5 WUXI Pharmatech (Cayman), Inc.13.6 Merck & Co., Inc.13.7 Becton, Dickinson, and Company13.8 North American Science Associates, Inc. (NAMSA)13.9 Nelson Laboratories, Inc.13.10 Pacific Biolabs13.11 ATS Labs, Inc.About MarketResearchEngine.comMarket Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862Country: United StatesWebsite:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Coding and Marking Market Size in APAC Worth $2 Billion by 2023 | Arizton

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The coding and marking market is projected to grow from $4.59 billion in 2017 to $6.60 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 6.25% during 2016-2022.Ariztons latest research report on the coding and marking market lists Brother Industries, Danaher, Dover, Hitachi, and ITW as the leading vendors that are likely to dominate the market during the forecast period. The study provides a detailed analysis of market segmentation by technology ((primary (CIJ, Laser, and TTO) and secondary (Palm, PIJ, VIJ, and TIJ)), product (equipment, consumables, and spare parts, and aftermarket), end-users (food and beverage, healthcare, electrical & electronics, chemicals & construction, and others), and geography (North America, Latin America, Western Europe, C&E Europe, APAC, and MEA).The three major segments in the global coding and marking market are discussed in detail below:APAC to dominate market share in coding and marking market during the forecast periodIn terms of geography, the global coding and marking market is divided into six major regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, APAC, and MEA. APAC dominated the coding and marking market by accounting for more than 29% of the total market share in 2017 and is expected to generate revenue of about $2.03 billion by 2023. The emergence of innovative, flexible packaging designs in countries such as Japan, South Korea, China, Indonesia, and India is driving the coding and marking market in the APAC region. The increasing demand for food products, electronic equipment, automobiles, and consumer durable items is propelled the development of the coding and marking market in APAC.Request for your free sample today!PALM technology segment will grow at an impressive CAGR in the coding and marking market during the forecast periodIn terms of technology, the coding and marking market is divided into seven categories: CIJ, Laser, TTO, PALM, PIJ, VIJ, and TIJ.The print and apply labeling machine (PALM) technology is the fastest growing segment in the coding and marking market, growing at a CAGR of 7.86% during the forecast period.This market segment comprises wipe-on, blow-on, twin-face apply, reverse-wipe tray, and pallet labelers. The extensive use of PALM technology for printing different types of text, numbers, graphics, barcodes, and logos on products and packages in the food and beverage industry is driving the growth of the coding and marking market. This technology automatically prints and applies labels to the product as it moves along the production line or any logistics facility, thereby improving the productivity of different business operations.Food and beverage segment to occupy the largest market share in the coding and marking market during the forecast periodThe global coding and marking market by application is segmented into five categories: food and beverage, healthcare, electrical and electronics, chemicals and construction, and others.The food and beverage segment dominated the global coding and marking market occupying close to 49% of the total market share in 2017.The tremendous growth rate of the pre-packed snack industry is driving the demand for coding and marking products in the food and beverage industry. TTO, TIJ, CIJ, and laser are the most widely used coding and marking technologies in this industry. Vendors will focus on developing taint-free coding and fast-drying inks to meet the high requirements from the confectionery industry during the forecast period.Control Print, ID Technology, Iconotech, Inkjet, Keyence, Macsa, Matthews International, Paul Leibinger, SATO Holdings, Squid Ink, Universal Labeling Systems, Weber Marking Systems, and Xaar are the other prominent vendors in the coding and marking industry.The complete overview of the latest market research report on the coding and marking market by Arizton is now available.The report offers a detailed study of major trends, drivers, challenges, and provides the market size and forecast for major geographical regions and key countries.Request for your free sample today!About AriztonArizton  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 and 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
Global Medical Nonwoven Disposable Market: Astute Players Resort to Product Diversification to Stay Ahead of Curve

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The global medical nonwoven disposable market is fragmented in nature. The top three players in the market, namely Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Paul Hartmann AG, and Svenska Cellulosa, together held just 39.3% share in it in 2015. In order to stay ahead of competition in such a fragmented market, keen companies are resorting to diversification of their product portfolio and tapping into high growth regions through strategic mergers and acquisitions.A report by Transparency Market Research studies the global market for medical nonwoven disposable and estimates that it would rise at a lackluster 4.0% CAGR during the period from 2016 to 2024. It projects the market, which was valued at US$12.9 bn in 2015, to attain a value of US$18.4 bn by the end of 2024.Obtain Report Details @Some of the key products available in the market are wound dressings, surgical products, and incontinence products. Of them, surgical products lead the market with maximum share. In surgical products again, the segment of drapes are most widely used. Surgical caps, gowns, and masks are also predicted to see swift uptake in the years ahead. Overall, the surgical segment is expected to account for a share of 52.0% by 2024-end.Geographically, Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa are the key regions studied in the report. North America currently holds a leading position in the market on the back of favorable reimbursement policies that encourage more people to opt for quality healthcare. Other than that a superior healthcare infrastructure coupled with continued innovations by savvy players domiciled in the region is also serving to stoke the market in the region.Rising Geriatric Population Driving DemandMainly serving to catalyze growth in the global market for medical nonwoven disposable are the growing pool of elderly who are highly susceptible to various infections and illnesses. The market is also expected to benefit from the rising occurrence of epidemics such as H1N1 virus, Ebola, Chikungunya, and SARS. These epidemics are at the forefront of driving demand for medical nonwoven disposables, which prevent the infection from spreading by offering a protective covering for doctors and nurses trying to treat patients.Another major growth driver in the global market for non-woven disposables is soaring demand for superior technology in manufacturing better quality products. For example, patients and doctors are increasingly going for products with anti-microbial properties and high absorbency in order to drastically reduce the chances of cross-contamination.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Government Initiatives to Prevent Infections Spurs Growth in MarketApart from that, growing number of government initiatives and schemes that are meant to thwart various types of infections and simultaneously improve the manufacturing capabilities, is also providing a tailwind to the global market for non-woven disposables. The market is being stoked by the rise in awareness on nosocomial infections too, explains the lead analyst of the TMR report.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact UsTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Luxury Hotels Global Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2021

Luxury Hotels Market

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Luxury Hotels Market to 2021: Market data and insights on global luxury hotels industry" to its huge collection of research reports.GlobalDatas "Global Luxury Hotels Market to 2021", report provides a thorough insight into global luxury hotels market. The report shades light into the key trends and issues. It offers key insights at regional level and major country level markets analyzing the number of hotel establishments, number of rooms, occupancy rate, room nights available, room nights occupied, average room revenue per available room, average room revenue per occupied room, average total revenue per available room, total room revenues, total non-room revenues, total revenues, and number of guests.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The presence of an affluent corporate culture and the growing impact of the manufacturing and services sector on the economies across the globe are expected to play a pivotal role in the growth of the luxury hotels market. Damages caused by unforeseen circumstances at a country level, such as natural disasters and terrorist threats have crippled several hotels in European and Middle Eastern countries, and continue to be lurking hindrances for market growth.Scope- The opening of three five-star eco-luxury resorts in June 2017 - Soneva Jani, Nekupe Sporting Resort & Retreat, and Alila Anji - has fueled a growing trend in sustainable luxury travel. Sustainable luxury was considered an oxymoron until recently when there was a shift in the trends in the luxury hospitality industry towards green and sustainable travel. The concept of sustainable travel has evolved from paperless checkouts and refillable soap dispensers to efforts in regard to sustainable development for all the value-added luxuries offered in the hotel. For instance, Soneva emphasizes luxuries while minimizing the use of junk, inorganic, and unsustainable products and using natural, organic products instead for the preparation of authentic cuisines, which helps to enhance the health of the customers. They also prioritize providing a pristine environment and wide open spaces in the hotels. These initiatives would definitely attract millennials to such hotels, and thereby would encourage the hoteliers to pursue such initiatives.- Chanels Karl Lagerfeld (premium clothing and accessories brand) and watch brand Shinola are two of the latest additions in terms of brands that plan to open boutique hotels by the end of 2018. Karl Lagerfeld plans to launch the hotel in Macau initially, followed by some other destinations including Detroit.In addition, homewares brands have plans to invest in properties for luxury hotels, mostly as an extension of their product and brand portfolios. West Elm, a popular furniture retail store chain, is expected to open hotel chains across the US (including Detroit, Savannah, and Indianapolis) by the end of 2018. These trends will increase and will create more competition in the market; therefore the success of these brands in the industry in the future will be highly dependent on their marketing activities.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Reasons to buy- Take strategic business decisions using historic and forecast market data related to the global luxury hotels market- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the global luxury hotels market- Gain strategic insights on the leading global luxury hotels marketAbout 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 Antiviral Drugs Market Driven by Mounting Unmet Demand in Africa, Asia Pacific

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The global antiviral drugs market is reasonably consolidated, with Gilead Sciences holding a majority 51% share in 2015. The high level of consolidation is likely to help the global antiviral drugs market develop sustainably over the 2016-2024 forecast period, as the competitive makeup of the market is unlikely to change. Other leading players in the global antiviral drugs market include Merck & Co. Inc., Mylan NV, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Cipla Inc., AbbVie Inc., and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. The lucrative opportunity in the antiviral drugs market is, however, likely to draw new players on a consistent basis, leading to the competition in the market intensifying over the coming years.According to Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global antivirus drugs market is likely to exhibit a solid CAGR of 6.40% between 2016 and 2024. The markets valuation is expected to rise from US$48.3 bn to US$82.9 bn over the forecast period.Obtain Report Details @North America, Europe Likely to Dominate Antiviral Drugs MarketThe global antiviral drugs market is segmented by region into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Developed countries in North America and Europe are likely to play a key role in the development of the global antiviral drugs market in the coming years due to the steady availability of advanced medical research infrastructure. North America accounted for more than 50% of the global antiviral drugs market in 2015 and is likely to retain a similar level of dominance through the 2016-2024 forecast period.Emerging countries in Asia Pacific, Africa, and Latin America could also play important roles in the growth of the global antiviral drugs market in the coming years. The rising prevalence of viral diseases has made these regions crucial for antiviral drug development and thus are likely to carry significant commercial weightage for players in the antiviral drugs market over the coming years.By disease indication, the global antiviral drugs market is segmented into HIV-AIDS, hepatitis, respiratory viruses, and others. The growing prevalence of AIDS is likely to keep it prominent within the international medical research field, leading to steady activity in the global antiviral drugs market in the coming years. Hepatitis has also become a key target for antiviral drugs market players and is likely to draw significant investment in the coming years.Improving Medical Research Sector in APAC Economies Vital for Antiviral Drugs MarketOne of the key drivers for the global antiviral drugs market is the steady growth of the medical research sector in emerging Asia Pacific economies such as India, China, and Japan. The rising government support in these countries to indigenous drug development and native pharmaceutical industry players has resulted in a steady opportunity for the global antiviral drugs market. Focusing on collaboration with medical research companies based in Asia Pacific could thus turn out to be a prosperous tactic for players in the global antiviral drugs market over the forecast period.Request for Sample Copy of Report @The high unmet need for antiviral medication in Africa is also likely to remain a key driver for the global antiviral drugs market over the coming years. Underdeveloped countries in Africa have received firm support from several international medical bodies in order to combat the growing prevalence of viral diseases and the lack of resources to counter the problem, which has led to a promising situation for the antiviral drugs market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact UsTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Mining Fiscal Regime 2017-A Focus on Major Taxes and Royalties in Selected Countries

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ReportsWeb.com published Mining Fiscal Regime Market from its database. 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."Global Mining Fiscal Regime 2017-A Focus on Major Taxes and Royalties in Selected Countries", Publisher's latest release, presents the essential information relating to the terms which govern investment in selected countries across the regions of Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, FSU, Middle East and Africa (MEA), SCA (South and Central America), Oceania and NA (North America). The report sets out in detail the contractual framework under which firms must operate in the industry and clearly outlines the governing bodies, governing laws and regulations and tax-related information on different commodities including coal, iron ore, copper, zinc, lead, bauxite, gold, silver, nickel, chromium and manganese.For more information about this report atScope:-Detail on legal framework and governing bodies administering the industry-Overview of governing bodies, laws and regulations and key fiscal terms governing the global mining industry-Detail on royalty and applicable tax rates including-corporate income tax, value added tax and withholding taxReasons to buy:-Gain an overview of global mining fiscal regime-Gain an overview of the most prominent mining taxes and royalties applicable in key mining countries.-Understand the complex regulations and contractual requirements applicable to mining industry.-Understand the regulatory and taxation framework in global mining industryRequest a sample copy atTable of Content1. Table of Contents 11.1. List of Tables 31.2. List of Figures 42. Global Mining Fiscal Regime 52.1. Executive Summary 53. Global Mining Fiscal Regime-Governing Bodies, Laws, and Regulations for Selected Countries 73.1. Asia-Pacific 73.1.1. China 73.1.2. India 83.1.3. Indonesia 93.2. Europe 103.2.1. Finland 103.2.2. Germany 103.3. Former Soviet Union 113.3.1. Kazakhstan 113.3.2. Russia 113.4. Middle East and Africa 123.4.1. South Africa 123.4.2. Zambia 133.4.3. Zimbabwe 133.5. North America 143.5.1. Canada 143.5.2. US 183.6. Oceania 203.6.1. Australia 203.7. South and Central America 213.7.1. Argentina 213.7.2. Bolivia 213.7.3. Brazil 213.7.4. Chile 223.7.5. Peru 224. Global Mining Fiscal Regime-Tax Rates for Selected Countries 244.1. Corporate Income Tax (CIT) 244.1.1. Canada 264.1.2. US 274.2. Value Added Tax (VAT) 294.2.1. Canada 314.3. Withholding Tax 325. Global Mining Fiscal Regime-Royalty Rates for Selected Countries 335.1. Australia 335.2. Brazil 355.3. Canada 365.4. India 375.5. Indonesia 385.6. US 396. Appendix 406.1. Abbreviations 406.2. Methodology 416.3. Coverage 416.4. Secondary Research 426.5. Contact Us 426.6. Disclaimer 42Inquire for Report atAbout 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.Contact Us:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Data Center Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Considerations in Retail Gaining competitive advantage through better understanding retailers' business and IT priorities

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This IT strategic insight report "Data Center Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Considerations in Retail", analyzes the challenges and opportunities regarding data center upgrades and the usage of cloud computing in retail. Spending forecasts are provided for servers, storage, systems management software and public cloud services, as well as strategic advice for IT vendors and retailers.Retailers are highly dependent on IT infrastructure for running key business applications and creating a competitive customer experience through innovative technologies. Since they are under a growing pressure to keep operating costs at bay while also launching various innovative solutions for maintaining competitiveness, retailers require updates to their IT infrastructure. Outdated servers, storage, networking and software need to be refreshed so that higher capacity, agility and scalability can be achieved at a lower or comparable cost.Request a sample copy atScope:- Most retailers look to implement a hybrid cloud solution that integrates on-premises and hosted environments in order to take advantage of scalability and cost-efficiency while also meeting data compliance requirements Although vendors tend to focus more on advances on the software side, retailers are still heavily hardware-focused and aim to maintain their own datacenter resources so that they can remain in control over their IT and meet compliance requirements- Retailers continue to invest in server and storage infrastructure, however the ongoing shift towards public cloud services leads to a gradual decline in hardware spendingReasons to buy:- Gain insight into retailers' data center infrastructure and cloud computing priorities. This reports helps you to structure your retail specific infrastructure strategy, and is especially useful for vendors that offer servers, storage, networks or cloud services.For more information about this report atCompanies MentionedCiscoHPEDellOracleAmazonIBMFujitsuSupermicroLenovoAMDARMSAPVmwareGoogleMydinKindKraft FoodsTable of Content1. Background: Retailers' Business Challenges 32. Data Center Hardware Infrastructure 53. Network Infrastructure 114. Cooling and Facilities 165. Virtualization and Workload Management 176. Cloud Considerations 217. Market Size and Vendor Landscape 278. Retailer Usage Cases 329. Advice for ICT Vendors and Retailers 3410. Appendix 36Inquire for Report atAbout 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.Contact Us:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Solar Charger Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Anker, GoalZero, Letsolar, RAVPower, ECEEN, Powertraveller, Solio, LittleSun, Voltaic Systems

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On - Solar Charger Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Anker, GoalZero, Letsolar, RAVPower, ECEEN, Powertraveller, Solio, LittleSun, Voltaic Systems.A solar charger employs solar energy to supply electricity to devices or charge batteries. They are generally portable. Solar chargers can charge lead acid or Ni-Cd battery banks up to 48 V and hundreds of ampere-hours (up to 4000 Ah) capacity. Such type of solar charger setups generally use an intelligent charge controllers. These devices have high degree of flexibility and highest efficiency as compared to any other green charger.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Solar Charger in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comMarket Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversAnkerGoalZeroLetsolarRAVPowerECEENPowertravellerSolioLittleSunVoltaic SystemsYOLKSolar Technology InternationalNOCOInstaparkXtormAllpowers Industrial InternationalHanergyMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversBelow 5 Wattage5 Wattage to 10 Wattage10 Wattage to 20 WattageAbove 20 WattageMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoPortable Consumer ElectronicsAutomotiveOtherAsk Query @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Solar Charger market.Chapter 1, to describe Solar Charger Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Solar Charger, with sales, revenue, and price of Solar Charger, 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 Solar Charger, for each region, from 2012 to 2017;ContinueTable Of Contents  Major Key Points1 Market Overview1.1 Solar Charger Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Below 5 Wattage1.2.2 5 Wattage to 10 Wattage1.2.3 10 Wattage to 20 Wattage1.2.4 Above 20 Wattage1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Portable Consumer Electronics1.3.2 Automotive1.3.3 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Anker2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Anker Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 GoalZero2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 GoalZero Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Letsolar2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Letsolar Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 RAVPower2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 RAVPower Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 ECEEN2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 ECEEN Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Powertraveller2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Powertraveller Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Solio2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Solio Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 LittleSun2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 LittleSun Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Voltaic Systems2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Solar Charger Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Voltaic Systems Solar Charger Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)Continue.Buy 1-User PDF @For 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.
4 Key Takeaways from Fact.MRs Report on Ride-on Power Trowel Market for Forecast Period 2017 - 2026

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The global ride-on power trowel market is projected to register a moderate expansion through the forecast period (2017-2026), according to a report recently developed by Fact.MR. Global sales of ride-on power trowels will surpass 30,000 units by 2026-end. Global volumes are expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.7% during the assessment period.Request For Sample Report-Requirement for Smooth Concrete Surfaces in Warehouses Accentuating Demand for Technologically Advanced Ride-on power trowelsRide-on towels have become essential in construction of floors having significant size, as they are productive and enable precisely flat finishes. Over the past few years, ride-on power trowels have gained significance as an imperative construction equipment that helps in achieving superior concrete surfaces by providing a variety of floating and finishing operations. These mechanized equipment have been witnessing a substantial demand in various countries worldwide for use in large construction projects including airports, industrial buildings and warehousing. The requirement for smooth high-tolerance concrete surfaces in the construction of massive warehouses is surging day by day, which in turn is accentuating demand for technologically advanced ride-on power trowels for application in high production finishing of large surfaces. Stricter laws have been enforced and inspections are carried out regarding surface finishes in developed as well as developing countries, thereby leading toward growth in advancements and adoption of ride-on power trowels. However, key factors such as high maintenance cost of ride-on power trowels, lack of operator comfort, high initial cost are expected to curb the market expansion during the forecast period.Browse Full Report With TOC-4 Key Future Prospects of Ride-on Power trowel Market for Forecast Period 2017-2026-1. Of all the regional segments included in the report, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) has been projected to register a relatively faster expansion in the global ride-on power trowel market through 2026. In addition, sales of ride-on power trowels in APEJ will account for the largest market share through the forecast period. Europe and North America are also anticipated to remain remunerative regions for the market growth. Sales from ride-on power trowel sales in these two regions will collectively exceed 15,000 units by 2026-end.2. Mechanical ride-on power trowel is anticipated to remain sought-after among contractors and other end-users in the market, with over two-third volume share of the market by 2026-end. However, demand for hydrostatic ride-on power trowel is expected to witness a rapid growth and their sales will reflect a relatively higher CAGR than that of mechanical ride-on power trowel through 2026.3. As heavy load operations related to smoothening and flattening large concrete surfaces, on the back of robust infrastructural development in developing and developed economies, are mounting in number, high load sustaining ride-on power trowels with larger diameters are in huge demand currently. 36 inch trowelling diameter of ride-on power trowel will remain preferred in the market. However, ride on trowel with 48/49 inch trowelling diameter will witness a relatively faster expansion in the market through 2026. Ride-on power trowels with trowelling diameter of 59/60 inch are anticipated to account for the lowest market volume share during the forecast period.4. Leading players in the ride-on power trowel market are enhancing their product portfolio that feature ergonomic user-friendly control systems for a wide range of applications. These players are increasingly focusing on improving their sales strategies, in a bid to consolidate their market shares in various regions. Key players actively supporting the market expansion include Roadway, Masterpac, Shenhua, MBW, Dynamic, Bartell, Parchem Construction, Dragon, Atlas Copco, Allen Engineering, Wacker Neuson, and Multiquip.Check 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:
Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth By 2022

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Florida, January 08, 2018: The global lifestyle drugs sales market is segmented on the lines of its technology, treatment, application and regional. Based on product type segmentation it covers tablet, capsule and injections; and based on end user/application it covers depression, dermatology, sexual dysfunction, obesity. The global lifestyle drugs sales market on geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geographic market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.Lifestyle drugs are an imprecise term applied as a pharmaceutical product, whereas it is characterized as improving the quality of life rather than relieving or curing disease. Lifestyle drug are most commonly used to treat the problems that are nonlife threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne. The speakers does not consider these causes as medical problems, rather they are treated under category as lifestyle drugs.The Global Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market is expected to exceed more than US$ XX Billion by 2022 at a CAGR of XX% in the given forecast period.You Can Browse Full Report here:The major driving factors of Global Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market are as follows: Craze in high lifestyle among the people. Increase in people interest for better lifestyle. Growth in new competitors with modified lifestyle drug store.The restraining factors of Global Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market are as follows: Huge competition with various products. Risk of side effects. Products that are not trust worthy.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for global lifestyle drugs sales market and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2013, estimates for 2014 and 2015, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2022.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for global lifestyle drugs sales market.4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets on Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.Request Sample Report:Table of Contents1 INTRODUCTION2 Research Methodology3 Executive Summary4 Premium Insights5 Market Overview6 Industry Trends7 Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market, By Type8 Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market, By Depth9 Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market, By Platform10 Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market, By Application11 Lifestyle Drugs Sales Market, By End User12 Regional Analysis13 Competitive Landscape14 Company Profiles14.1 Pfizer14.2 Acerus Pharmaceuticals14.3 Alkermes14.4 Amorepacific14.5 AndroScience14.6 Anterios14.7 Allergan14.8 BMS14.9 Eli Lilly.14.10 AstraZeneca14.11 Avanir Pharmaceuticals14.12 Avolynt14.13 Celtaxsys.14.14 CerecorAbout UsMarket Research Engine (MRE) is a next-generation provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. MREs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each Market Research Engines research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862Country: United StatesWebsite:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Speech and Voice Recognition Market Recent Study Including Growth Factors, Applications, Regional Analysis, Top Vendors and Forecast to 2024

Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024

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Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market 2017 Industry Research Report is a professional report which provides thorough knowledge along with complete information pertaining to the Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market a proposed supply, demand, applications, industry chain summary, industry policies in addition to plans, product specifications, manufacturing processes, cost structures.The Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market accounted for USD 6.1 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 20.1% 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.Get a sample copy of this report@Top Competitors: Nuance Communications, Inc. Microsoft Corporation Alphabet Inc. Cantab Research Limited Sensory, Inc. ReadSpeaker Holding B.V. Pareteum Corporation Iflytek Co., Ltd. (China) VoiceVault Inc. VoiceBox Technologies Corp. LumenVox, LLC, and Acapela Group SA Vocalzoom Ltd Biotrust ID B.V. Uniphore Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. among others.Get a Detail TOC @Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market, By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa), By Delivery Method (Artificial Intelligence (AI) Based, Non-Artificial Intelligence Based), By Technology (Voice Recognition (Speaker Identification, Speaker Verification), Speech Recognition (Automatic Speech Recognition, Text to Speech)), By End-user (Automotive, Enterprise, Consumer, Banking, Financial Services, & Insurance, Government, Retail, Healthcare, Military, Legal, Education)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Competitive Analysis:The report for speech and voice recognition 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.Request For Analyst Call @Market Segmentation:On the basis of delivery method:- Artificial intelligence (AI) based, and non-artificial intelligence based.On the basis of technology:- Voice recognition, and speech recognition. The voice recognition segment is further sub-segmented into speaker identification, and speaker verification. The speech recognition segment is further sub-segmented into automatic speech recognition, and text to speech.On the basis of end user:- automotive, enterprise, consumer, banking, financial services, & insurance, government, retail, healthcare, military, legal, education.On the basis of geography:- Global speech and voice recognition market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.Questions Answered in Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market Report:-What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market in 2024?What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market?What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market?Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market?Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market?What are the Global Speech and Voice Recognition Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?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.Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.comInvestor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.comVisit Blog:Follow us on LinkedIn:
Software as a Service (SaaS) Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment; 2017 - 2025

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The Insight Partners added Software as a Service (SaaS) Market to 2025 - Global Analysis and Forecasts by Cloud Deployment Model, Applications and End-user to its research database. The report is spread across 224 pages and supported by 15 company leaders.Paying for a software as per the usage on a subscription basis rather than fully owning can be defined as Software as a service (SaaS). SaaS applications are accessed using a web browser from a remote location and eliminates the hassles of installing, upgrading and maintaining the software for the owner. As a business delivery model for many corporate applications SaaS provides a huge variety of software to industries from various verticals and the software include database management software, messaging software, enterprise resource planning (ERP), gaming applications, service desk management, payroll software, computer designing software, customer relationship management (CRM), content management (CM), development software, virtualization software, collaboration, invoicing, talent acquisition accounting, management information systems (MIS), human resource management (HRM) and antivirus software. SaaS has been integrated by major upcoming and leading software companies with major adoptions witnessed by the SMEs. The advantage offered by SaaS is the cost reductions associated with it and the eliminations of hidden costs.The global Software as a Service market is bifurcated based on deployment model as: private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. Furthermore, the global SaaS market can be further divided by applications into ERP, HRM, CRM, supply chain management (SCM) and others (Web conferencing platforms, messaging applications and collaboration). Additionally, while considering on the basis of end-user SaaS can be further classified into small & medium enterprises (SMEs), and large enterprises. The end-user classification has been done on the basis of revenues.Request Sample Copy atSoftware as a Service is there to replace the traditional application service provider model on account of various benefits it caters. SaaS basically can be deployed into organizations via three different deployment models. Each model has its own advantages and disadvantages but the public cloud deployment model has been the largest adopted model for this market SaaS providers generally develop and manage their own software. The differentiating point between ASPs and SaaS vendors is that ASPs offer conventional client-server models that require installation of software at the clients premises, however SaaS requires a web browser and eliminates the need to install at the clients premise. In addition, major initial ASPs offered a separate instance of the user application for each enterprise, however, a software distribution model that allows sharing of applications and allowing access to organizations via a single tenant or multi-tenant architecture is basically SaaS.Businesses are seeking paradigm shift in their operations especially in developing economies like India and China of APAC region. Awareness about the benefits of SaaS in these regions has significantly increased the adoptions of Software as a Service solutions by various organizations. Furthermore, developing economies have been the breeding grounds for a large number of SMEs that are the largest adopters of SaaS models. As a result, Software as a Service market is expected to witness a huge opportunity with its rise in the APAC region. On the organizational point of view, SMEs are adopting and implementing this technology on account of significant cost reductions.Inquire and Speak to Expert for More Details atCustomers are the greatest asset for any organization and employees are the backbone of any successful business. Understanding the importance of both these resources, many small and large organizations globally have adopted CRM and HRM applications to establish long-term relationships with their customers and also manage their internal human resource efficiently. Google, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Amazon.com, Inc., ADP, LLC, IBM Corporation, Salesforce.com, Inc., Workday, Inc., Oracle Corporation, SAP SE and Microsoft Corporation are some of the major players in the global Software as a Service market.Table of Contents1 Introduction2 Key Takeaways3 Market Landscape4 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market - Key Industry Dynamics5 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Analysis- Global6 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  Competitive Landscape7 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  By Deployment Model8 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  By End-Users9 Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025 - Geographical Analysis11 Industry Landscape12 AppendixView Complete Company Profile and Table of Contents atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:TheInsightPartners.com is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township, Amanora Chambers, East Block, Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
What is the current market scenario of Global Heptaldehyde Market? Know what to expect from this Industry along with analysis and forecasts focusing by key players

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Heptaldehyde is an alkylaldehyde. It is a colorless liquid with a strong fruit flavor and is used as a precursor of perfume and lubricant ingredients. This can be obtained from castor oil by distillation under reduced pressure. It is synthesized by the decomposition of esters of ricinolic acid. It is also prepared by the hydroformylation of hexene. It is used industrially for the production of -amylcinnamaldehyde, which is a large fragrance ingredient. It is the predecessor of 1-heptanol and ethylheptanoate, the latter being a component of certain lubricants. The history of heptaldehyde as a starting material for the production of odorous compounds goes back to the early 20th century. Since then, it has become an important chemical for the synthesis of aroma compounds. In terms of volume, the world market for heptaldehyde was 87.17 kilograms in 2016 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.4% from 2017 to 2025, with a market share of $ 127.94 in 2014.Heptaldehyde Market delivers complete analysis of market challenges, market drivers, opportunities, potential application. The Market research report delivers developing market trends, raw materials analysis, manufacturing process, regional outlook and comprehensive analysis on different market segments.Request a sample @:Companies Profiled in this report includesXiamen Hisunny Chemical Co. LTD, Neostar United Industrial Co. Ltd., Acme Synthetic Chemicals, Triveni Chemicals, Shanghai Jianbei Organic Chemical Co. Ltd., Hanhong Group, Arkema and so on. Few of the other prominent players are Xiamen Hisunny Chemical Co. LTD, Neostar United Industrial Co. Ltd., Acme Synthetic Chemicals, Triveni Chemicals, Shanghai Jianbei Organic Chemical Co. Ltd., Hanhong Group and so on., and among others.Recent trends and developments in the global Heptaldehyde market have been analyzed. Opportunities leading to the growth of the market have been analyzed and stated. Drivers and restraints impacting the growth of the market have also been analyzed. A segmentation of the global Heptaldehyde market has been done for the purpose of a detailed study.Get well-grounded discount on this Report @:The market is segmented on the basis of key criteria. Data on the leading and fastest-growing segments along with what drives them has been given. This report implements a balanced mix of primary and secondary research methodologies for its analysis.This growth is due to increased domestic demand in developing countries such as India and China. With increasing disposable income in developing countries, population growth is expected to lead the global market. Increasing disposable income allows customers to spend more money on premium products, where perfume is essential.Get the Complete Report @:Objective of this Report:Most important data include the key recommendations and predictions by our analysts, intended to steer a strategic business decision. The company profiles section of this research service is a compilation of the growth strategies, financial status, product portfolio, and recent developments of key market participants. The report provides detailed industry analysis of the Global Heptaldehyde market with the help of proven research methodologies such as Porters five forces. The forces analyzed are bargaining power of the buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, and the degree of competition.Table of ContentsGlobal Heptaldehyde Market Research Report 2017Chapter 1 Global Heptaldehyde Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by RegionChapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 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 Market ForecastAbout 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:Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr,Houston, TX, Pin  77064,+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com,
Global Agricultural Insurance Market key trends, market drivers, challenges standardization, regulative landscape, preparation models, operator case studies

Agricultural Insurance Market

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Despite steep losses incurred in 2012, sharp increases in crop insurance protection in force and strong premium gains in 2011 have driven the performance of the Agricultural Insurance Market in the past five years. Moreover, regulatory changes are anticipated to dictate the industrys performance over the six years to 2012. The Farm Bill continues to solidify crop insurance as the most important means for farmers to hedge production and price risk. Ultimately, industry revenue is forecast to rise, with consistent increases in the agricultural price index driving up revenue from 2017 onward. Agricultural insurance, also known as crop insurance is purchased by agricultural producers, including farmers, ranchers and others. It protects against either the loss of their crops due to natural disasters, such as hail, drought and floods, or the loss of revenue due to declines in the prices of agriculture commodities.Get Sample report @The research report tries to understand the innovative approaches taken by vendors in the global Agricultural Insurance market to offer product differentiation through Porters five forces analysis. It also points out the ways in which these companies can strengthen their stand in the market and increase their revenues in the coming years. Ongoing technological advancements and the unstoppable penetration of Internet in the remote corners of the world are also responsible for the remarkable growth of the global market.Key Players:Allianz, FCIC, Swiss RE, Metlife, Munich Re, Zurich Insurance, BSI Insurance, Syngenta, Sumitomo, Anbang Insurance, CPIC.Regions Covered:United States, North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and RoW.The Global Agricultural Insurance Market is an exceptionally divided, niche market with the presence of a limited number of merchants. Suppliers in the market participate based on estimation, development, benefit, reputation, distribution, and promotion. As the market is still in its development stage, small merchants with inventive solutions have the odds of being acquired by leading players in the market.Get Reasonable Discount on this Report:The Global Agricultural Insurance Market is gaining pace and businesses have started understanding the benefits of analytics in the present day highly dynamic business environment. The market has witnessed several important developments over the past few years, with mounting volumes of business data and the shift from traditional data analysis platforms to self-service business analytics being some of the most prominent ones.Furthermore, the report profiles some of the most prominent enterprises in the global Agricultural Insurance market to provide valuable recommendations. The product portfolio of the companies profiled are studied in detail. Besides this, information is obtained from their financial reports and strategies they adopted over the last couple of years.For More Information:Table of ContentsGlobal Agricultural Insurance Market Research Report 2017Chapter 1 Global Agricultural Insurance Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Agricultural Insurance 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 AnalysisThe publication has estimated the sales forecast values for the Global Agricultural Insurance Market for the period 20172022. A section on the evaluation of market effect factors has shed light upon some of the most crucial aspects such as an environmental change due to economic or political reasons, change in consumer preference, and technological evolution in associated sectors.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
Jennifer Lawrence looks equally ready to break both bones and hearts in the new trailer for Red Sparrow, due out on March 8 from 20th Century Fox. Although her Russian accent might be a little shaky, her ability to kill a man has apparently not dimmed since The Hunger Games sailed off into its conclusion.

The film is based on a 2013 novel of the same name by Jason Matthews, and revolves around a Russian woman (Lawrence) who is forced into the life of a Sparrow, which essentially appears to be a secret agent/sleeper agent designed for exactly the kinds of missions youd expect to involve a beautiful young woman: Seducing generals, attending swanky soirees, occasional assassinations. You know, the regular ole stuff. At some point, shes put on the case of a possible Russian defector, but it seems that along the way she falls for an American CIA agent played by Joel Edgertona mere 16 years older than Lawrence, if you were keeping track. From there, were heading into particularly tropey territorywill Lawrence, the spy with a heart of gold, be able to extricate herself from the service of her (clearly evil) mother country?

Check out the trailer above to see Lawrence undergo tortuous training, combat and don unrealistic swimsuits. Red Sparrow will hit American theaters on March 2.
Petoskey's annual holiday parade returns Nov. 26

The parade will feature a float with Santa Claus as well as the Petoskey High School Marching Band.
Freedom - Flair Motion Demoreel 2017:

Three Years of Fun:

Build A Bigger Future:

Will Arblaster - Reckless Race Concepts:

Cascades:

Max Hides - Christchurch Adventure Park:

Wild Kingdom:

Happy New Year from the DHaRCO Collective:

Dog Year, Good year:

Juan David Pozo Raw V2:

Strahan Loken - Island Fall:

Bizet's New Water Jump and First DH Race:

Corey Walsh - Welcome to Cult Crew Pro:

Darryl Tocco - Kink x Eclat 2018:

Mark Burnett - Take Your Time:

The Flat Earth - Official Trailer #3:

Vibes and Stuff - Woods:

Jeremy Jones' Life of Glide:

Walls Are Meant For Climbing - Alex Honnold:

Moose:

Thank you everyone that was part of this journey! Here's to looking forward to the adventures 2018 holds. Happy New Year everyone!We did our first movie with Eliott Lapotre in 2015, since then the recipe has never changed: do what we like while having fun.A look back at some of the best shots from Commencal's 2017 videos.Video: Marcus Molloy.Rider: Rasto Baranek.After the 2017 fires which destroyed most of the forest and trails at the Adventure Park, the trail crew at the park have come back with some quality builds for 2018!The Ide family is fortunate enough to live in one of the best places to be if you happen to love mountain biking, Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Mark Clement's production really captures the spirit of the area as Knight, Daymien, and Jen ride and enjoy the superhero dirt, great friends, and easy access to three world class trail networks: Kingdom Trails, Burke Mountain, and Victory Hill.Thanks everyone for an awesome 2017! Stoked to bring in the New Year with you all and can't wait for more shredding to come.Riding in Japan.Video: Philip Bertogg. Rider: Juan David Pozo.Nothing like revisiting a Loken/LaRocque classic.Antoine Bizet's new vlog features him hitting a new water jump, competing in his first downhill race, and flying to Australia for Christmas. Enjoy!Stoked to see Corey go pro!Start 2018 off right with a heavy dose of that classic Darryl Tocco steeze.Shadow Rider Mark Burnett has been traveling, working his ass off, and collecting footage for two years to create this edit with filmer Ryan Chadwick.Starring: Jamie Foy, Chase Webb, Carlos Iqui, Mike Pulizzi, and Cody Lockwood.Into the river and over the woods to drink in a cabin we go. Civilization had us spent, so we ditched our cell reception and rolled around in the snow. Shot by Nick Nault over three days, this is the final installation of the mighty Vibes and Stuff Series. We hope you had fun, cause we had none. None at all.Inspired by a poem he wrote long ago, big mountain rider Jeremy Jones summons his greatest influences and dissects his lifelong passion for the simple and sacred feeling he calls, "The Glide."Alex Honnold gets animated about life, death, climbing and the elusive El Cap mouse people.When the waters continued to rise as Hurricane Harvey made its second landfall in Texas, Brandon Moose Johnsons truck quickly became the rescue vehicle his town didnt know they needed.Title Photo by: Robb Thompson To check out videos submitted by fellow Pinkbike members that didn't quite make Movie Mondays here
Pizza has been a constant in Brian Kesslers life, from the time he got a job in a pizzeria as a teenager until the day he met his wife in a pizza joint. Read moreIggy's Pizza Shop is now open in Mount Pleasant
State lawmakers are considering a ban on campaign contributions from investor-owned utilities in South Carolina, after the cancellation of two nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer station. Grace Beahm/Staff
Hapag Lloyd's New York Express is one of the shipping line's neo-Panamax vessels capable of carrying 13,000 or more cargo containers. The Alliance, a consortium of shipping lines including Hapag Lloyd, will bring a neo-Panamax ship to the Port of Charleston on a weekly route beginning in 2018. Provided/Hapag Lloyd
The trial for Russell Laffitte, a former top executive for Palmetto State Bank, continues this week in Charleston's U.S. District Court. He stands accused of helping Alex Murdaugh defraud his former law clients, while using money from his family's bank to prop up the disbarred attorney's shaky finances. Read moreFinal witnesses to testify in fraud trial for Murdaugh banker Russell Laffitte
There was a combination of superlative hysteria and political opportunism behind the warnings about the end of democracy leading up to last weeks elections, but it wasnt inconceivable that wed have flare-ups of violence and intimidation, that people who embrace the fantasy that the 2020 e Read moreEditorial: Election 2022 gave everybody something to celebrate
Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the attack on her husband, Paul, by an intruder in their family home made her think about staying on as the House Democratic leader. She says she almost thought about being leader again because she couldnt give them that satisfaction of intimidating her out of politics. Pelosi spoke to reporters Thursday at the Capitol after announcing she would step aside for a new generation of leaders. She will remain the congresswoman from California. Pelosi says shes not sad about her choice to step aside but feels balanced in her decision. She has no plans to endorse a successor and no desire to meddle with the new leadership's vision. Read morePelosi's big decision: 'Theres a life out there, right?'
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 08:32:01

LYONSCG enables support for multi-brand, global eCommerce initiative

PARIS and CHICAGO and LONDON, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lyons Consulting Group (LYONSCG), part of the Capgemini Group (CAP.PA), today announced its engagement with Claire's Stores, Inc., a specialty retailer of fashionable jewelry and accessories for young women and teens. Claire's has digitally transformed its business with LYONSCG and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the fastest path to unified commerce. Working with LYONSCG, Claire's achieved success through its new eCommerce strategy, design, implementation, and support services, launching six new sites for Claire's and Icing brands in the U.S., Canada, UK and France. Built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the sites leverage a master architecture that enables Claire's to manage multiple digital properties from a central console. Since launch, Claire's has seen a 20 percent increase in checkout completion on mobile devices.

Claire's selected LYONSCG because of its deep experience with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, as well as LYONSCG's ability to provide high-quality service for leading retailers and brands. It delivered the new sites within a four-month timeframe to meet Claire's aggressive schedule.

"LYONSCG was incredibly responsive to our needs. This was a complex project on a very aggressive schedule and the team delivered on time and under budget, without compromising quality and creativity. Our new sites are a huge step forward and we are already seeing great results," said Kristen Taganashi, Vice President Global Ecommerce, Claire's Stores, Inc.

The sites feature a mobile-first digital experience that captures the spirit of Claire's and Icing brands, including custom illustration designed to delight and inspire its young, fashion-forward customers. To replicate the fun, engaging in-store experience, LYONSCG developed a new, immersive digital experience featuring rich imagery, playful animation and detailed product content.

As one of the world's leading specialty retailers of fashionable jewelry and accessories for young women, teens, tweens and kids, Claire's has more than 2,500 stores in 47 countries. The company offers a wide-range of fun and affordable products, and continues to be a favorite shopping destination for 900 million customers across the globe. Icing is an extension of the Claire's brand, and caters to a wider demographic with over 350 stores across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.

"We selected LYONSCG and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to deliver this project as a critical and fundamental part of our global IT and digital transformation program at Claire's. This platform can help us maximize our proposition, drive increased revenue, scale and grow into new markets, and drive our business forward," said James Spencer, Executive Global Director of Development and Design, Claire's Stores, Inc. "LYONSCG understands the platform inside and out and they successfully delivered our project in record time while working with us as one delivery team."

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud as the foundation, Claire's now has a robust, flexible architecture that can easily scale to support the company's growth. The project also included several complex integrations including a new, custom order management system.

"Right from the start, Claire's had very clear objectives and our team was fully committed to helping them realize their goals. It's a great example of our 'one team' approach, working side-by-side with the client across regions to ensure the success of the project," said Danny Rippon, Director, UK at LYONSCG, part of the Capgemini Group. "The new Claire's and Icing sites are amazing and we look forward to working with them to further support their growth strategy."

About Lyons Consulting Group

Lyons Consulting Group (LYONSCG), part of the Capgemini Group, is a leading global commerce service provider, with capabilities that include consulting, digital agency, systems integration, technology services, and managed services. LYONSCG combines proven methodologies, deep technical expertise, and award-winning design to create digital commerce experiences that engage and convert consumers and buyers. Hundreds of leading B2C and B2B brands trust LYONSCG to realize their commerce vision and continually optimize it to drive profitable growth. LYONSCG is a partner of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Hybris, and Magento; is a recipient of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Global Sales Partner and Delivery Partner of the Year awards, and Magento Partner Excellence and Magento Innovator of the Year awards. For more information, go to www.lyonscg.com.

About Capgemini

A global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation, Capgemini is at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients' opportunities in the evolving world of cloud, digital and platforms. Building on its strong 50-year heritage and deep industry-specific expertise, Capgemini enables organizations to realize their business ambitions through an array of services from strategy to operations. Capgemini is driven by the conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. It is a multicultural company of 200,000 team members in over 40 countries. The Group reported 2016 global revenues of EUR 12.5 billion.

Visit us at www.capgemini.com. People matter, results count.

Salesforce and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.
Companion Animal Vaccines Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023

Companion Animal Vaccines Market

PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 13:01:49

Press Information

Precision Business Insights

Kemp House,



152  160 City Road,



London EC1V 2NX



satya

Lead Marketing

+1-866-598-1553

email

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com





# 929 Words

Kemp House,152  160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXLead Marketing+1-866-598-1553

Companion animal vaccines market report gives a comprehensive outlook on companion animal vaccines across the globe with special emphasis on key regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). The report on companion animal vaccines market gives historical, current, and future market sizes (US$ Mn) on the basis of product type, disease type, vaccine type, distribution channel, and geographic regions. This report studies companion animal vaccines market dynamics elaborately to identify the current trends & drivers, future opportunities and possible challenges to the key stakeholders operating in the market. In addition, the companion animal vaccines market report includes animal demographics; regulatory scenario, and competition analysis with vividly illustrated the competition dashboard to assess the market competition. Moreover, PBI analyzed companion animal vaccines market to better equip clients with possible investment opportunities across the regions (Regional Investment Hot-Spots) and market unmet needs (Product Opportunities). Key stakeholders of the companion animal vaccines marketreport include suppliers, manufacturers, marketers, policymakers, and veterinary healthcare service providers engaged in manufacturing and supply of companion animal vaccines.A sample of this report is available upon request @Global Companion Animal Vaccines Market:Global companion animal vaccines market estimated to be valued US$ 2406 Mn in 2017 and poised to grow at CAGR of 7.8% over 2017-2023. The market for companion animal vaccines projected to reach US$ 3767 Mn by 2023 owing to rising human and companion animals bondage by means of adoption across the globe.Increased awareness about pet health among pet owners projected to create market demand for companion animal vaccines over the forecast periodThere has been a rise in awareness regarding pet health among pet owners across the developed and developing economies expected to drive market revenue growth over the forecast period. Moreover, several studies on human and companion animals interactions showed that association with companion animals results in positive health benefits. Therefore, it is essential to veterinarians and caregivers to give utmost attention to companion animal health as companion animals are the primary source of zoonotic diseases spread to humans and vice versa, this is expected to create significant market demand for companion animal vaccines over the forecast period.Increasing per pet expenditure in recent times expected to drive market revenue growthSeveral respondents and pet owners revealed that pet expenditure is increasingly becoming an integral part of their monthly expenditure and companion animals are part of several families across the developed and developing economies. Moreover, rising interactions between pets and human beings prompting the caregivers and pet owners to adopt better healthcare services to the companion animals this is projected to drive market revenue growth over the forecast period.North America market leads the global companion animal vaccines marketNorth America market leads the global companion animal health vaccines and projected to remain same over the forecast period owing to large pet ownership. According to data from American Pet Products association as of 2016, around 40% of households owned one or the other pet animals. Europe companion animal vaccines market holds significant share in global companion animal vaccines market. Increased product introduction in Europe vaccine against Leishmania infantum, the causal agent of canine leishmaniosis which is significant breakthrough against zoonotic disease is one of the factors driving the market positively.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Competition AssessmentKey players profiled in the global companion animal vaccines market include: Bayer AG (Germany) Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH (Germany) Ceva Sante Animale (France) Eli Lilly and Company (U.S) Heska Co. (U.S) Hester biosciences (India) Merck & Co., Inc. (U.S) Vetoquinol S.A. (France) Virbac S.A. (France) Zoetis Inc. (U.S)Need more information about this report @Players in the companion animal vaccines market are launching the products in the market to garner larger market share. For instance, in 2016, Merck Animal Health launched Nobivac Canine Flu Bivalent vaccine in U.S market  the first vaccine to aid in the control of disease associated with both canine influenza virus (CIV) H3N2 and canine influenza virus H3N8.Key Findings of the Report: Companion animal vaccines market expanding at 7.8% CAGR over 2017 to 2023 to reach market value of US$ 3767 Mn by 2023 owing to increased adoption pet animals and rising zoonotic diseases Based on product type canine vaccine accounted for larger market revenue share in 2016 and projected gain larger market revenue share over the forecast period Veterinary clinics distribution channel is the prime source for companion vaccines across the globe and expected to remain attractive over the forecast period Players focusing on launching products to retain market position in global companion animal vaccines marketKey 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 market developments, 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 @Email: sales@ precisionbusinessinsights.com Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 14:03:14

Press Information





Published by

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# 395 Words

ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Friday Night Inc--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Friday Night Inc (CSE:TGIF). has issued a press release with the following headline:Friday Night Inc. Issues Statement on USA DOJ MemorandumTo 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 Friday Night 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/Friday Night IncSource: Friday Night Inc (CSE: TGIF, OTCQB: TGIFF, FWB: 1QF, ISIN: CA74840V1004, WKN: A2ABE2)Date: January 08, 2018Time: 8:00 AM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Friday Night 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.)
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 06:43:01

CALGARY, Alberta, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Serinus Energy Inc. ("Serinus", "SEN" or the "Company") (TSX:SEN)(WARSAW:SEN) reports that it has been successful in safely bringing the Moftinu 1001 gas well back under control. As previously released, the loss of control of the well occurred at 1:49am EET on Monday 18 December 2017, during routine operations to prepare the Moftinu 1001 well for future production. During that operation an unexpected gas release occurred and subsequently ignited.

Safety Boss, the well control experts, have been on site since 20 December 2017 and have worked diligently since that time to clear the site of damaged rig equipment in order to gain the required access to the well-head that allowed for the well control operation to be performed. The Romanian Ministry of Emergency Situations ("IGSU") was also on site and provided valuable assistance, including the provision of water pumping equipment and fire trucks.

The Company will now move forward with an independent investigation of the incident and evaluate the well workover requirements to prepare the well for production.

The Company is pleased to have the well safely back under control and would like to express its profound gratitude to the many people and contractors whose tireless work assisted the Company in its efforts. Those involved included Safety Boss, IGSU, ISU Satu Mare, ISU Maramures, ISU Bihor, ISU Bistrita, ISU Cluj, ISU Timis, ISU Salaj, the Mayor and people of Moftinu, the Prefect of the Satu Mare County, the National Agency for Mineral Resources Special thanks to Dr. Raed Arafat - in charge of the Emergency Situation Department, acting as State Secretary within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, for his valuable assistance and support. The Company was also active in keeping the local communities informed of the progress of the operation and expresses its gratitude for their patience and understanding.

The Company has been in continuous contact with its Insurance Broker and the appointed Insurance adjustor in regards to the incident and to the insurance coverage and claim.

About Serinus

Serinus is an international upstream oil and gas exploration and production company that owns and operates projects in Tunisia and Romania.

For further information, please refer to the Serinus website (www.serinusenergy.com ) or contact the following:

Serinus Energy Inc.

Calvin Brackman

Vice President, External Relations &

Strategy

Tel.: +1-403-264-8877

cbrackman@serinusenergy.com Serinus Energy Inc.

Jeffrey Auld

Chief Executive Officer

Tel.: +1-403-264-8877

jauld@serinusenergy.com





Translation : This news release has been translated into Polish from the English original.

Forward-looking Statements This release may contain forward-looking statements made as of the date of this announcement with respect to future activities that either are not or may not be historical facts. Although the Company believes that its expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date hereof, any potential results suggested by such statements involve risk and uncertainties and no assurance can be given that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. Various factors that could impair or prevent the Company from completing the expected activities on its projects include that the Company's projects experience technical and mechanical problems, there are changes in product prices, failure to obtain regulatory approvals, the state of the national or international monetary, oil and gas, financial , political and economic markets in the jurisdictions where the Company operates and other risks not anticipated by the Company or disclosed in the Company's published material. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature, they involve inherent risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statement. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in this announcement to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this announcement, unless required by law.

This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Serinus Energy Inc. via Globenewswire


PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 09:01:02

New Years Fireworks with MiFID II? SuiteBox Can Help Clear the Smoke!

SuiteBox

Brian Warfel, 954-603-6032

Director of U.S. Operations

brian@suitebox.com

New Years fireworks wont be the only loud bangs heard in the United Kingdom ushering in 2018. January 2018 will see the deadline for investment firms in the United Kingdom to comply with the Markets in Financial Instrument Directive (MiFID II) which puts additional reporting requirements on financial advisors.

There are many facets to the reporting compliance requirement changes from the MiFID II including the recording of all clients calls (interactions) and the production of written documentation for face-to-face meetings. Included in the list of information to be captured for financial advisor meetings is identification of parties present at the meeting, location of the meeting, the party responsible for running the meeting (initiator), and documentation of all orders requested and transmitted during the meeting.

How can a financial advisor meet these new requirements? The most logical first step for an investment firm to consider is the traditional conference call. While this seems to be the most cost-effective method (more on that later), it does not in and of itself, meet the basic requirements of MiFID II such as identity verification, documentation, and a written audit trail of all transactions performed during the meeting without some heavy work post conference call.

The next most logical step for an investment firm to consider is a webinar platform. This type of service offers more robust features to meet the MiFID II meeting documentation requirements, but also would require work after the meeting to document discussions, identities of meeting attendees and transactions performed.

What if there were a solution that could meet the MiFID II recordkeeping requirements and likely cost less than the conference call/after work expense or the webinar/after call work expense?

Welcome to SuiteBox where we close more deals. Anywhere. Anytime. SuiteBox is a virtual meeting room technology with full video of up to four parties present in a meeting, full audio of the entire meeting discussion, time/date stamp audit trail of all documents presented and executed during the meeting, and a full video of the entire interaction that is uploaded and stored in the subscribers SuiteBox account for the entire time the subscription is available (days, years, etc.).

The subscriber gets UNLIMITED meetings for the monthly subscription fee. No per minute charges (conference call services), no additional costs for video recording services, and no after meeting work to document as the audit trail is already completed for all transactions. It does not get much more efficient than that! SuiteBox can also be used for face-to-face meetings simply by starting the application and pointing the laptop camera/mike at the meeting. Most advisors will realize a cost savings over their current meeting methods/technologies BEFORE incurring the increased cost burdens of MiFID II. SuiteBox can have you up and running in a few hours as opposed to days, weeks, or months that many technology implementation plans require.

If you are looking for ways to make your MiFID II compliance requirements as efficient and low cost as possible, visit SuiteBox at www.suitebox.com for a free trial today. We have advisors located in the United Kingdom ready to assist you. Move the MiFID II transaction reporting requirements from your New Years to do list to your done list with no large budget changes (its that cost effective). Are you ready for MiFID II, we are at SuiteBox!!!!

About SuiteBox

SuiteBox is a digital workspace for professional services, enabling you to meet with your clients whenever, and wherever they are, helping you increase revenue and protect your business.

Our cutting edge technology brings secure video meeting collaboration tools to your meeting- screen share any documents, tools, applications- with the latest digital signing and verification technology, to accelerate sales and grow your business faster.

With regulations and compliance requirements becoming more and more onerous for professional services businesses, the importance of recording meetings and signatures on applications, documents, and proposals will become increasingly more important. Protect your business from getting sued or fined in the digital signature age with SuiteBox!

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801070050
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 01:02:01

Nexif Energy Signs EPC Contract for 110 MW Gas-Fired Cogen Project in Thailand

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Nexif Energy (Nexif), a leading independent power producer in Asia and Australia, announced that it has signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for its 110 megawatt (MW) cogeneration project in Thailands Rayong Province. Nexif acquired the project in June 2017 and is making rapid progress towards achieving financial close in the first quarter of 2018.

We are encouraged by the progress we are making in the development and financing of the project, our first in the country, said Surender Singh, Founder and Co-CEO of Nexif. We are pleased to serve our customers by providing reliable and competitive power and have the opportunity to contribute to the fast growing economy of Thailand.

The project will supply electricity to the Electricity Generation Authority of Thailand (EGAT) under a 25-year power purchase agreement and provide energy to industrial customers. It will be financed by a consortium of leading lenders on a non-recourse basis with Standard Chartered Bank leading the financing effort.

Ravi Chandran, Executive Vice President (Development) at Nexif, added, Our project is well structured, as it is underwritten by a long term PPA with creditworthy off-taker, has long term gas supply contracts with a leading gas supplier and has the ability to supply electricity and steam to industrial customers. We look forward to completing remaining permitting and financing by first quarter 2018.

The turn key fixed price EPC Contract was signed with a consortium of Korean construction companies comprising Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co., Ltd (Doosan) and SC Engineering Co., Ltd (SC Engineering). It includes the supply and erection of a General Electric 6FA gas turbine operating in combined cycle with a Doosan DST-G20 steam turbine.

Nexif is excited to work with leading Korean firms Doosan and SC Engineering, both of whom have a track record for delivering similar projects on time and on budget, said Srinivas Rao, Executive Vice President (Projects and Operations) at Nexif.

The entry into this project and the achievement of the EPC signing is yet another indication of Nexif Energys continued momentum in the Asia Pacific region since our formation in late 2015, said Matthew Bartley, Founder and Co-CEO of Nexif Energy. We are working hard to progress our pipeline of power generation projects throughout Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Australia.

In December 2017, Nexif was awarded a concession for an 80 MW wind farm project in Vietnams Ben Tre province. In addition, it achieved financial close on the first phase of its Lincoln Gap 212 MW wind farm and 10 MW battery project in Australia in November of last year. Nexifs Coc San hydro project in Lao Cai province in Vietnam was acquired in early 2016 and achieved commercial operations the middle of that year.

About Nexif Energy

Nexif Energy was formed in August 2015 by Nexif, a Singapore-based independent power management company, and Denham Capital, a leading global energy-focused private equity firm with more than US$9.0 billion of invested and committed capital across eight fund vehicles. Nexif Energys goal is to develop, finance, construct and opportunistically acquire conventional and renewable power generation assets across Asia and Australia.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801070051
vitreous tamponades market

PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 13:12:46

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Vitreous tamponades are essentials used in vitrectomy procedures for healing or reattachment of retina and in vitreous dysfunction. They are majorly used in various retinal disorders such as retinal detachment, diabetic retinopathy, retinitis pigmentosa, retinal degeneration, vascular occlusion, macular hole, epiretinal membrane, macular edema, uveitis, and retinopathy of prematurity. Vitreous humor is clear and colorless fluid made up of 99% water. It occupies the space between retina and lens of the eye. Vitreous protects the eye by holding their spherical shape and helps to stay retina in place. In vitreous dysfunction, vitreous gets liquefied and shrinks in size, which eventually leads to visual impairment. As vitreous humor cannot regenerate, the cavity must be filled with substitutes by vitrectomy surgery to treat vitreous dysfunction. They are replaced with artificial substitutes, which closely resembles the native vitreous in both function and structure. The ideal vitreous substitutes should be transparent, biocompatible and elastic. Vitreous substitutes such as Semi flourinated alkanes tamponades and silicone oil/semi flourinated alkanes combinations are more superior physically and chemically than conventional gas or liquid tamponades. Natural polymers, hydrogel, transplant/implants, and vitreous regeneration are new vitreous substitutes in developmental stage.Vitreous substitutes are used as intraoperative and postoperative tool for surgical treatment of vitreoretinal disease. They are used as temporary fillers, permanent fillers or used as surgical tool during short intraocular surgery.Request For Sample Copy@According to the data published by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in January 2014, retinal detachment is the most common vision-threatening retinal condition, with an incidence of 1 in 10,000 individual annually, which corresponds to around 8,000 new cases in Germany annually. Moreover, according to the study findings by Journal of Ophthalmology in 2016, the prevalence of retinal detachment ranges from 6.3 to 17.9 per 100,000 people annually. Increasing incidences of retinal detachment, ophthalmic conditions, and retinal disease are expected to drive the growth of vitreous tamponades market in near future. However, complications associated with the conventional vitreous substitutes hamper the vitreous tamponades market growth. The intraocular gases have high risk of elevating intracellular pressure on the surrounding retinal membrane. The widely used silicone oil shows short life cycle and needs to be remove early, due to the complications such as emulsification, band keratopathy, and secondary glaucoma. Heavy silicone oil leads to significant intraocular inflammatory reactions and may cause severe complications than conventional silicone oil. Although polymer appears to be more biocompatible, they biodegrade quickly. Hence, long term biocompatibility of existing vitreous substitute material and need to develop more suitable materials is expected to replace the existing vitreous humor, in turn boosting the growth of vitreous tamponades market.Vitreous tamponades market taxonomy:By type:Gaseous tamponades,Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) gas tamponade,Perfluoropropane (C3F8) gas tamponade,Liquid tamponades,Silicone oil liquid tamponade,Perfluorocarbon liquid tamponade,Balanced salt solutionQuick filling hydrogel is expected to replace conventional vitreous tamponades in near futureAccording to the recent finding by the University of Tokyo in March 2017, new hydrogel-elastic gel was introduced in the vitreous tamponades market. The new hydrogel is administrated in liquid form behind the retina, which then turns into jellylike substance in just 10 minutes. The conventionally available vitreous substitute such as silicone oil and gas do not mix well with water, hence they are not suitable for long term application and require long period for gels formation, thereby making them impractical to use during the surgery. The hydrogels have high water content and composed of similar materials those found in soft tissue of eye. Conventional hydrogels absorb water and swell resulting into pressure on the surrounding retinal tissues, which eventually cause damage. The study carried out on hydrogel implanted rabbits showed no adverse effects even after 410 days of treatment.The unique ability of newly developed hydrogel to transform into gel form in very short period and low polymer concentration makes it suitable for broader applications to treat trauma, tumors, and vitreoretinal disease. Potential development in vitreous substitutes are further expected to drive growth of the vitreous tamponades market in near future.The major players operating in the global vitreous tamponades market includes Alcon, Inc., Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Fluoron GmbH, D.O.R.C. Dutch Ophthalamic Research Center B.V., AL.CHI.MI.A.SRL , CROMA-PHARMA GmbH, and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc.Get More Details On this Report: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:Coherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email:sales@ coherentmarketinsights.com Visit our news Website: http://www.coherentnews.com
Veterinary Biopsy Needles Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023

Veterinary Biopsy Needles Market

PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 14:14:15

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Veterinary biopsy needles market report gives comprehensive outlook on veterinary biopsy needles across the globe with special emphasis on key regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). This report on veterinary biopsy needles market gives historical, current, and future market sizes (US$ Mn) of application, distribution channel and geographic regions. This report studies veterinary biopsy needles market dynamics elaborately to identify the current trends & drivers, future opportunities and possible challenges to the key stakeholders operating in the market. In addition, the market report includes regulatory scenario, and competition analysis with vividly illustrated the competition dashboard to assess the market competition. Moreover, PBI analyzed veterinary biopsy needles market to better equip clients with possible investment opportunities across the regions (Regional Investment Hot-Spots) and market unmet needs (Product Opportunities). Key stakeholders of the veterinary biopsy needles market report include suppliers, manufacturers, marketers, policy makers engaged in manufacturing and supply of veterinary biopsy needles.A sample of this report is available upon request @Veterinary Biopsy Needles Market:The veterinary biopsy needles market estimated to be valued US$ XX Mn in 2016 and poised to grow at CAGR XX%, and projected to reach US$ XX Mn by 2023.Does the surge in pet ownership have an impact on veterinary biopsy needles market?The surge in the pet ownership in developed countries coupled with increase in the chronic diseases like cancer is expected to drive the veterinary biopsy needles market. As per AVMA, in 2011, more than half of the U.S. households owned pets, and made at least one visit to the veterinary hospital during 2011. Burgeoning the prevalence of mammary tumors in female dogs (spayed or not spayed after two years) is anticipated to have a positive impact on the market revenue growth.How does disposable income in emerging economies affect market?Increased disposable income in emerging countries like India, China is expected to offer lucrative opportunities for the market players due increased adoption of small animals as well as increasing veterinary health care expenditure.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @North America accounts for larger market revenue share in global veterinary biopsy needles marketNorth America is set to expand at significant growth rate over the forecast period owing to adoption of state-of-art technologies at veterinary healthcare centers coupled with increased veterinarian visits. U.S. veterinary biopsy needles market has witnessed larger market share in 2016, and expected to dominate the regional revenue share over the forecast period. Favorable government and non-government organization (NGO) policies to create awareness regarding various types of cancer in animals are expected to foster the veterinary biopsy needles market. For instance, Veterinary Cancer Society (VCS) established in 1976 by a group of veterinary professionals to encourage the research and create the awareness among the members. Gradual increase in the pet ownership, strong emotional connection coupled with increasing prevalence of various type of cancer is expected to drive the China veterinary biopsy needles market.Competition AssessmentKey players profiles in the global veterinary biopsy needles market include: Jorgensen Laboratories (U.S.) Jrgen Kruuse A/S Smiths Medical SurgivetNeed more information about this report @Key Findings of the Report: Veterinary biopsy needles market is expanding at XX% CAGR over 2017 to 2023 to reach market value of US$ XX Mn by 2023. Based on application type tissue biopsy needles accounted for larger market share in 2016. Veterinary hospitals are prime channel for biopsy needles distribution across the globe. Players focusing on expanding geographic presence to garner market opportunities in developing economiesKey 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 market developments, 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 market.Get access to full summary @Contact to Precision Business Insights,Email: sales@ precisionbusinessinsights.com Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com
Veterinary Dental Equipment Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023

Veterinary Dental Equipment Market

PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-08 14:16:31

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Veterinary Dental Equipment market report gives comprehensive outlook on veterinary dental equipment across the globe with special emphasis on key regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). This report on veterinary dental equipment market gives historical, current, and future market sizes (US$ Mn) of product, animal type, distribution channel and geographic regions. This report studies veterinary dental equipment market dynamics elaborately to identify the current trends & drivers, future opportunities and possible challenges to the key stakeholders operating in the market. In addition, the market report includes regulatory scenario, and competition analysis with vividly illustrated the competition dashboard to assess the market competition. Moreover, PBI analyzed veterinary dental equipment market to better equip clients with possible investment opportunities across the regions (Regional Investment Hot-Spots) and market unmet needs (Product Opportunities). Key stakeholders of the veterinary dental equipment market report include suppliers, manufacturers, marketers, policy makers engaged in manufacturing and supply of veterinary dental equipment.A sample of this report is available upon request @Veterinary Dental Equipment Market:The veterinary dental equipment market estimated to be valued US$ XX Mn in 2016 and poised to grow at CAGR of XX%, and projected to reach US$ XX Mn by 2023.What would be impact of companion animal periodontal diseases on veterinary dental equipment market?Increased prevalence various dental disorders are expected to propel the veterinary dental equipment market. Periodontitis is predominant dental problem associated with most of the companion animals. It is occurred in upper jaw. The labial side of teeth was affected more severely than the lingual side. Rise in awareness levels among the pet owners regarding dental diseases and oral hygiene, regular checkups with veterinary specialists are boost the veterinary dental equipment market. Availability of cutting-edge technologies such as veterinary dental radiology offers necessary information to allow veterinarians to diagnose and treat oral or dental disorders.Asia Pacific is expected to offer lucrative opportunities for global veterinary dental equipment marketIncreased awareness coupled with surge in pet adoption rates in advanced countries like United States is expected to create lucrative opportunities for the players plunged in veterinary dental equipment market. Increased pet lovers in Canada are expected to drive the Canadian veterinary dental equipment market. Germany veterinary dental equipment market is set to expand at unprecedented CAGR, owing to increased various dental disorders in animals. Moreover, increased awareness in equine farms is expected to boost the market size. UK is contributing a significant market share, and expected to maintain the leverage over the forecast period. China veterinary dental equipment market is projected to dominate the revenue share in Asia Pacific, attributed to rising animal adoption coupled with increased prevalence of dental disorders. India veterinary dental equipment market is expected to grow at significant CAGR over the forecast period. Drastic change in the demographics, change in consumer preferences, increased disposable income, sophisticated veterinary healthcare facilities are some of the factors are rendering the market growth over the forecast timeline.Latin America veterinary dental equipment market is led by Brazil, is witnessing to grow at unprecedented CAGR over the forecast period.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Competition AssessmentKey players profiles in the global veterinary Dental Equipment market include: IM3 Vet Pty. Ltd (Australia) MAI Animal Health. Dentalaire International (U.S) TECHNIK Technology Ltd. (UK) KRUUSE UK Ltd (UK) VetDent Ltd (UK) Henry Schein (U.S) Wrights Dental (UK) Cislak Manufacturing Co (UK)Need more information about this report @Key Findings of the Report: Veterinary dental equipment market is expanding at XX% CAGR over 2017 to 2023 to reach market value of US$ XX Mn by 2023 Based on product, periodontal systems market is expanding at robust CAGR over the forecast period. Based on region type, North America is expected to account for major market share. Veterinary hospitals are prime channel for dental equipment systems distribution across the globe. Players focusing on expanding geographic presence to garner market opportunities in developing economies.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 market developments, 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 market.Get access to full summary @Contact to Precision Business Insights,Email: sales@ precisionbusinessinsights.com Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com
Legacy Pension Managers has appointed Ladi Balogun as its Chairman, Board of Directors and James Ilori as a Non-Executive Director.

The appointments of Messrs. Balogun and Ilori to the Board of Legacy Pension Managers (Legacy Pensions) come in the wake of the acquisition by FCMB Group of 60 per cent of the company, raising its interest to 88 per cent. The Central Bank of Nigeria, the National Pension Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the transaction in November 2017. The board appointments have also received the approval of the National Pension Commission.

Legacy Pensions has over N230 billion assets under management, which grew by 22 per cent in 2017. It has over 350,000 pension contributors, whom it serves from 48 locations across the country.

The new Chairman of Legacy Pensions, Mr. Balogun, was until March last year the Chief Executive Officer of First City Monument Bank (the retail and commercial banking subsidiary of FCMB Group). He has over 23 years experience in the financial services industries in Europe, the United States of America and Africa. Mr. Balogun also holds a Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School, United States of America.

His appointment in 2007 as the Managing Director of First City Monument Bank Limited saw the transformation of FCMB from an investment bank to a prominent mid tier Nigerian commercial bank and financial services group. By 2017, the banking group had 10,000 employees and contract workers, 4.3 million customers, 200 branches and a banking subsidiary in the United Kingdom. During this period, FCMB also birthed what became the countrys leading micro-lending institution, Credit Direct Limited. Mr. Balogun now runs FCMBs holding company: FCMB Group plc.

Mr. Balogun serves on the board of several FCMB Group companies and chairs the board of Credit Direct Limited. Mr. Balogun also serves as Chairman of Tenet Investment Company, a private equity investment firm, focused on the food and agri-business value chain in West Africa.

Mr. Ilori on the other hand has vast experience in Research, Business Development, Risk Management, and all areas of the investment decision-making process acquired from leading organisations in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Before his appointment as the Chief Executive Officer of First City Asset Management (FCAM) in 2014, he worked as a fixed income fund manager with Crown Agents Investment Management in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Ilori, who is a CFA Charter holder, has successfully propelled FCAM to become a top-rated wealth management company. It provides services that cut-across collective investment schemes such as mutual funds and investment plans predominantly for retail investors, as well as specialised discretionary portfolio management, for high net-worth individuals and institutional investors, within and outside Nigeria. Mr. Ilori will also serve on Legacys investment committee as the pension fund manager seeks to continue its strong investment performance track record, whilst diversifying its portfolio.

The appointments signal Legacy Pensions intent of tapping into the investment and distribution synergies that FCMB Group brings to Legacy Pensions. Analysts anticipate that the company will be better positioned to grow its market share, compete effectively, and also fulfill its ambition of bringing pension savings to Nigerias vast informal market. The company will leverage on the network and pedigree of FCMB Group Plc and its subsidiaries, which include First City Monument Bank Limited, FCMB Capital Markets, CSL Stockbrokers Limited, CSL Trustees Limited, First City Asset Management Limited, FCMB Microfinance Limited and now, Legacy Pension Managers Limited.
Oil prices rose on Monday, poised to make above 70 dollars on a slight decline in the number of U.S. rigs drilling for new production and sustained OPEC output cuts.

Brent sweet crude futures were at 67.95 dollars a barrel, 33 cents above their last close. The Brent oil is poised to rise over 70 dollars in spite of international Media manipulative stance, media editor reveals.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures had risen to 61.94 dollars a barrel by 1140 GMT,

Traders said the gains were due to a slight decline in the number of U.S. rigs drilling for new production. The rig count eased by five in the week to Jan. 5 to 742, according to data from oil services firm Baker Hughes.

In spite of this, U.S. production C-OUT-T-EIA is expected soon to rise above 10 million barrels per day, largely thanks to soaring output from shale drillers. Only Russia and Saudi Arabia produce more.

Rising U.S. production is the main factor countering output cuts led by the Middle East-dominated Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting countries and by Russia, which began in January last year and are set to last through 2018.

A senior OPEC source from a major Middle Eastern oil producer said on Monday that OPEC was monitoring unrest in Iran as well as Venezuelas economic crisis, but will boost output only if there were significant and sustained production disruptions from those countries.

Stephen Innes, Head of Trading for Asia/Pacific at futures brokerage Oanda in Singapore, said the OPEC vs Shale debate will rage this year, being a key price-driving factor.

However, Innes added that Middle East turmoil would remain a key focus for oil markets and had the potential to send oil prices rocketing higher.

(Reuters/NAN)
The Chief Executive Officer of the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, Yemi Kale, said the Second Quarter 2017 Gross Domestic Product, GDP, Report was one of the most downloaded reports in 2017.

Mr. Kale also pledged that the agency would remain professional in its operations especially as the political season kicks in.

Mr. Kale, the Statistician  General of the Federation, said this in his 2018 message posted on the bureaus website.

He said the report was followed by the National Survey on Corruption Perception, each with more than 5000 downloads within 120 days of their release.

My personal engagement with a vastly diverse sample of our clients convinces me of the growing appreciation for Nigerias official statistics. Yet, we can and must do better, he said.

Mr. Kale said with the countrys emergence from economic recession in the second quarter, came greater demand for data by policymakers and business leaders seeking to identify how to sustain the recovery.

Also to sustain the implementation of policies, prioritise programmes and ensure that the Nigerian economy gets on a more sustainable path of inclusive growth.

Concerned citizens, eager to witness immediate changes in their socio-economic circumstances, also paid closer attention to statistical reports, he said.

The statistician-general said that 2017 witnessed a considerable uptick in activities of NBS, driven in large part by an ever-growing demand for more and better data by governments, businesses and citizens.

As 2018 beckons, it is clear that we are unlikely to see a slowdown in such demand, and I am pleased to affirm that NBS is ready, willing and able to rise to the occasion again this year.

No doubt, 2017 was a remarkable year. A total of 198 reports were released, an increase of 85 per cent over 2016, he said.

According to him, NBS is committed to surpassing these milestones in 2018, as seen in its revised data release calendar, 189 reports are already planned.

As usual, they will be accompanied by clear, informative infographic materials, and disseminated widely across all our social media platforms.

We remain committed to quality improvement across all our service delivery channels, in order to continually justify our multiple awards in 2017.

As ever, the bureau will remain steadfast in guarding its professional and operational independence granted by the Statistics Act (2007), especially as the political climate builds up.

The statistician-general said that efforts would be made to provide adequate explanations and context for data releases, and prioritise statistical advocacy efforts to limit the misuse of data.

Kale, however, acknowledged the support of government at all levels and institutional partners towards improving the availability and quality of official statistics in the country.

The statistician-general prayed that 2018 would be a year of better statistical funding, both at the federal level and to state statistical agencies.

He said the importance of statistical data for identifying development priorities and shaping public policy should not be subjected to vagaries of the socio-economic or political climate.

Rather, leaders must continually emphasise and utilise evidence-based approaches, whether in policy or business.

If this is not done, it becomes impossible to objectively identify key areas in our society that actually require change.

It will be difficult to accurately determine what policy prescriptions will best respond to the real needs of the country or take advantage of the next big business opportunity in this resilient economy.

We are confident that the year will bring numerous opportunities for us to effectively support policymakers.

We look forward to another fulfilling year for us at the bureau, our partners and data users, Kale said.

(NAN)
An official of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), Chinedu Okoronkwo, has justified his claim as the unions authentic national president.

He said this while speaking with journalists in Abuja, where he stated that, a well-conducted election by the association on May 10, 2014, affirmed him as national president.

Controversy arose when three IPMAN officials introduced themselves as national presidents at the public hearing on fuel scarcity a few days ago at the National Assembly.

Obasi Lawson introduced himself first, followed by Sanusi Fari and then Mr. Okoronkwo.

I am Okoronko Chinedu, elected IPMAN Chairman and have been affirmed by the Appeal Court just two week ago, Mr. Okoronkwo said much to the surprise of the audience.

IPMANs national secretary, Danladi Passali, earlier said that the Appeal Court re-affirmed the judgment of the Federal High Court, Federal Capital Territory, in the suit No FCT/HC/CV/1479/2016 and that the lower court in its judgment delivered on May 28, 2014, upheld the election of IPMAN National Executive committee, conducted on May 10, 2014.

While explaining to journalists, Mr. Okoronkwo stressed that past executives of the association have refused to honour the courts judgment affirming his position.

Mr. Fari did not respond to calls and text messages by the reporter. Mr. Obasis numbers were not reachable as at the time of filing report.

Mr. Okoronkwo explained why he is the authentic leader of the association.

I was elected national president after the election on the 10th of May 2014 and prior to that period, when the outgoing administration was to leave power by May 2014, one Obasi went to court without any cause of action that he should be declared president of the association, for no reason. It happened that the judgement was delivered but the judge said he should be the president of the first defendant (board of trustees of the association).

The same day, the BoT filed an appeal and pending the determination of that case, he was not supposed to do anything. What he did was to bring in thugs from Port Harcourt and Abuja to burgle IPMANs office and beat people up and down.

The tenure of that administration ended and this election that brought me in was called; meaning by a fusion of time, he has nothing again to do. After the election, we decided to take legal steps asking him not to disturb us. Giving the fact that the tenure of Aminu Abdulkair (former president) had expired, the court ruled that our election was in order and he was asked not to disturb us.

He was not happy with the ruling so he went to appeal court. On the 7th, the appeal court affirmed that our election was in order. I was surprised to see him yesterday (public hearing) in total disregard for an appellate courts decision, he said.

Mr. Okoronkwo said he was invited to the public hearing. I dont know if the other two were invited there, he adds.

He also commented on the recent fuel crisis that rocked parts of the country and the way forward.

Refining this crude locally is the best answer. They (government) are working on ways to improve the system so that more things will be done locally and Nigeria must appreciate the fact that the crude is going up and we are gaining dollar right now. The increase in the crude price also affected the importation.

At this time, I dont support an increase in the price of fuel. Any increase right now will have a negative resultant effect on the economy. The N145 is non-negotiable.
Armed robbers on Saturday morning stormed the Festac, Lagos home of Nollywood comedian, John Okafor, popularly known as Mr Ibu. They reportedly made away with N14.3 million in cash as well as property.

The comic actor confirmed the incident to PREMIUM TIMES and added that it has been reported to the police. He said his wife was at home when the robbers invaded his house.

According to my wife, the operation started at about 3a.m. and lasted till about 4:25 a.m. on Sunday morning after which they left with all my property and cash, Mr Ibu said.

He, however, declined to reveal more details.

This is not the first time the actor will have an encounter with men of the underworld.

He had his experience with kidnappers in 2008, when he was abducted and released under 24 hours while dancing at a joint somewhere in the eastern part of the country.

In 2011, his wife and son were kidnapped for a ransom of a hundred million naira.

Mr Ibu, a GoTV Ambassador, is considered to be one of Nigerias most talented comic characters.
U.S. President Donald Trump has postponed the announcement of his Fake News Awards of the Year 2017 to Wednesday, Jan. 17, citing high interest.

The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday, the president wrote on Twitter.

The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated, Mr. Trump tweeted.

President Trump has often labelled media coverage critical of his administration as fake news, accusing leading U.S. media of spreading fake news against him during the U.S. presidential election campaign as well as after he became president.

In early December, multiple major U.S. news outlets reported that the White House was planning to remove the current head of the State Department, as his relationship with Mr. Trump was strained.

Mr. Trump denied it as FAKE NEWS! on Twitter, and added that Hes not leavingwe work well together.

On Dec. 11, President Trump dismissed a New York Times report that he watched four to even eight hours of television each day.

Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch four to eight hours of television a day  Wrong! he tweeted.

While responding to Mr. Trump, Clifford Levy, a deputy managing editor at New York Times, tweeted that the newspaper stood by its story, which was based on 60 interviews.(Xinhua/NAN)
The Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, is alive but is in a terrible state of health, the Nigerian Army said on Monday.

The army has repeatedly made contradictory claims on Mr. Shekau. Statements like Shekau had been killed or does not really exist have been made by the army in the past putting doubts in the minds of Nigerians.

Mondays stance on Mr. Shekaus terrible state of health is however the latest by the army on the sect leader, whose groups activities have caused about 100,000 deaths, according to the Borno State government.

In the Monday statement by its spokesperson, Sani Usman, the army also said the Boko Haram has devised a technique to evade detection of their homes by Air Force aircraft.

Mr. Usman, a brigadier general, also said a leader of another Boko Haram faction, Abu Musab Albarnawy, will soon be captured by the military.

There is no doubt that the main Boko Haram terrorists group factional leader, Abubakar Shekau, is in a terrible state of health and not much a threat as he is now a spent horse, waiting for his waterloo.

However, Abu Musab Albarnawy, who has been busy deceiving and recruiting gullible persons especially misguided youths into his fold will soon be captured. We reliably learnt that some misguided persons, particularly youths, are getting conscripted into the sect through enticements, he said.

On the technique to evade air detection, Mr. Usman said the insurgents deployed special roofing techniques in order to avoid air detection and bombardment from the Nigerian Air Force (NAF).

They resort to roofing their living accommodation and hideouts with a mixture of coated sugar and mud so that the roof will not reflect when there is sun shine.

The brigadier general, however, said decisive measures have been taken to deal with this deception.

Read the army spokespersons full statement below.

Boko Haram Terrorists Device Tricks of Evading Air Raid

The Boko Haram terrorists tricks of evading air raids have been unravelled by the Theatre Command of Operation LAFIYA DOLE combating insurgency in the North East of Nigeria.

The Boko Haram terrorists group have always perfected survival tricks to continue their nefarious activities through enticement, deceit, concealment and outright propaganda. These were decoded through credible intelligence which became imperative for the public to be aware of it.

The Insurgents deployed special roofing techniques in order to avoid air detection and bombardment from the Nigerian Air Force (NAF). They resort to roofing their living accommodation and hideouts with a mixture of coated sugar and mud so that the roof will not reflect when there is sun shine. Decisive measures have been taken to deal with this deception.

There is no doubt that the main Boko Haram terrorists group factional leader, Abubakar Shekau, is in a terrible state of health and not much a threat as he is now a spent horse, waiting for his waterloo. However, Abu Musab Albarnawy, who has been busy deceiving and recruiting gullible persons especially misguided youths into his fold will soon be captured. We reliably learnt that some misguided persons, particularly youths, are getting conscripted into the sect through enticements.

They are usually attracted to the sect because of the deceitful and erroneous impression that Abu Musabs Albarnawiy brand of jihad and insurgency is refined and genuine. This is far from it. Both factions are terrorists organizations whose activities constitute crimes against humanity. Their nefarious activities run contrary to the religion of Islam.

The faction has recruiters all over the country, especially in the north east. However, their clearing house for such conscripts is at Potiskum, Yobe State. Efforts are ongoing to track those involved.

There is no doubt that Mamman Nur Algadi has been wounded and he is more or less a cripple since 2014 at Mubi, he was hit by NAF while on motorcycle. He is not a fighter, rather he taught in Boko Haram terrorists enclave and he is also a member of the Shurah Council of the terrorists group. He was wounded along with one Abu Mujahid, an indigene of Saminaka, Kaduna State, who was later executed by Abubakar Shekau.

In view of the above, the general public should be wary of these unscrupulous elements attempting to recruit more youths into their sect.
These are some of the health stories published last week.

Kogi doctors begin indefinite strike

The Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, Kogi state chapter has directed its members to begin strike on Monday over alleged failure of the state government to meet their demands.

Godwin Tijani, Chairman of the association said reason for the strike is because doctors in the state are not been paid full salaries some doctors and some not paid at all. Tijani also alleged that the government had been deducting full tax from their pay while not performing it full financial obligations to the staff.

The strike is expected to be suspended when their demands are meant and this includes the full implementation of adjusted CONMESS (new salary structure) for doctors in the state civil service and the accrued arrears since January, 2014.

Typhoid: WHO pre-qualifies vaccine

The first conjugate vaccine for typhoid has been prequalified by the World Health Organisation late last year. This new vaccine, is expected to have longer-lasting immunity than older vaccines, require fewer doses, and can be given to young children through routine childhood immunization programs.

The fact that the vaccine has been prequalified by WHO means that it meets acceptable standards of quality, safety and efficacy. This makes the vaccine eligible for procurement by UN agencies, such as UNICEF, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts ,SAGE, on immunization, which advises WHO, recommended TCV for routine use in children over 6 months of age in typhoid endemic countries.

The use of the vaccine should also help to curb the frequent use of antibiotics for treatment of presumed typhoid fever, and thereby help to slow the alarming increase in antibiotic resistance in Salmonella Typhi.

Surgery death rates in Africa double global average  Study

Death rates for patients undergoing surgery in Africa are double the global average even though they tend to be younger, scientists said, adding that many deaths were likely preventable.

According to a study published in the Lancet medical journal, scientists said contributory factors include few specialists, poor hospital infrastructure and a lack of post-operative monitoring.

The survey, the most comprehensive study of surgery in Africa, which was funded by the Medical Research Council of South Africa and covered 247 hospitals in 25 countries showed about one in five surgery patients developed a complication.

Comparisons with international data for elective surgery showed that death rates from elective surgery were one per cent in Africa compared with 0.5 per cent for the global average.

The authors said infections accounted for more than half of complications and also suggested many lives could be saved by improving patient monitoring during and after surgery.

Pharmacists form drugs control group to curb drug abuse in Nigeria

The Pharmacists Council of Nigeria, PCN, is set to constitute a Codeine Control and Other Related Matters Working Group,CCRWG, as part effort to fightingdrug abuse in Nigeria.

The group will be tasked with the duty that will control the distribution of codeine in Nigeria.

Codeine is a narcotic pain-reliever and cough suppressant similar to morphine and hydrocodone but being abused and used as a stimulant and an intoxicant.

The registrar of the council, Elijah Mohammed, also said that the control group would also sensitise the public on the dangers inherent in codeine consumption.

Measles : FCTA to start immunisation in February  Official

The Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Primary Health Care Development Board, says plans have been concluded to immunise children against measles in February across the territory.

The Acting Executive Secretary of the board, Mathew Ashikeni said children between the ages of nine and five years would be vaccinated when the exercise commence in February 8 to February 13.

Urging parents to bring out their children for immunisation, he explains that the exercise would be conducted in all Primary Health Care centres, schools, on the streets and wherever children within the age bracket were found, to ensure no child is left out.

Measles cause brain infection, life threatening diarrhoea, vomiting and malnutrition and many affected children die if it is not properly managed.

Cross River NMA threatens withdrawal of services

Members of the Cross River Branch of the Nigeria Medical Association, NMA, had threatened indefinite withdraw of their services to members of the public from January 8, to protest the kidnap and non release of one its members.

The kidnapped doctor, Usang Ekanem, was abducted by gunmen, December 26, 2017.

The NMA state Chairman, Effiong Mkpanam, after an emergency meeting by the association in Calabar, said that members of the association had suffered series of abduction from kidnappers and as such wants the state governor and all relevant security agencies to urgently intervene in the matter.

Lawmaker agitate support for war against fake drugs

Obinna Emenaka, member representing Anambra East Constituency in the State House of Assembly, has called on government at levels to double efforts at combating the production, sale and circulation of fake and adulterated drugs in the country.

Emenaka noted that open drug market did not guarantee proper authentication of sources of drugs and should be discouraged.

He said that new outlet should be introduced to help decongest the Onitsha Drug Market and provide easy access to genuine drugs for patent medicine dealers, pharmacists and doctors who had private clinics.

He also called on the National Agency for Foods, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to take decisive actions against unwholesome drugs and products.
In a rare move, 49 University of Ilorin, UNILORIN lecturers whose appointments were terminated but were later reinstated by the Supreme Court have established a foundation.

The Supreme Court in December, 2009 ordered the reinstatement of the remainder of the 49 lecturers following an earlier reinstatement of five of them earlier in June 2009. The university dons were sacked for engaging in union activities of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in 2001. Some of the lecturers lost their lives during their battle for reinstatment.

Tagged the UNILORIN 49+ Foundation for Justice, the founders explain that the + stands for other victims of justice at UNILORIN who collaborated with them to establish the Foundation.

This, they added, also included the few just men and women in the Nigerian society and elsewhere, including the courageous and conscientious men and women of the judiciary and the fourth estate of the realm who support the struggle against injustice.

Its objective, the said is to assist in drawing attention to the plight of individuals or groups who may also be victims of oppression and injustice, thereby serving as an additional voice for the voiceless.

The launch of the foundation which was first reported in The Nation newspaper on January 4, was marked with two lectures delivered by Dayo Akinlaja (SAN) and Omotoye Olorode, an erudite scholar and social activist.

Speaking at the occasion of the launch of the Foundation, its Chairman, Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, explained the rationale behind the move.

The net effect of the problem of injustice in the country may not be generally appreciated. In our view, justice is also the first condition for peace and development. No country can be at peace or succeed in an atmosphere of oppression and injustice. No such country can foster a true sense of belonging.

The so called war against corruption in the country cannot succeed in an atmosphere of social and economic injustice, of jobless and unpaid citizens, of unpaid and oppressed workers and journalists, of uneducated and oppressed women and children; or of a marginalised and dehumanised citizenry.

The war against injustice requires a civil army comprising the entire populace; but a demoralised army is always a losing army  oppressed women, men and youths cannot help with the fight against corruption.

In his lecture titled, The Problem of Justice in Nigeria: A Legal Perspective, Mr. Akinlaja noted that although there are provisions for the execution of justice in Nigerian laws, these provisions are frequently frustrated by the powers that be.

Let it be mentioned posthaste that the discomfiting issue of disobedience to court orders has never been frighteningly chronic or pronounced with ordinary individuals and persons in the society The debacle has always been more tellingly and disquietingly visible in the quarters of the government, its institutions and functionaries. Whilst under military rule, disobedience to court orders was more of the norm and it was done with unmitigated impunity, the approach in our democracy has usually been to somewhat deviously find a way to stultify or circumvent whatever order(s) the powers that be are not minded to obey for reasons of self preservation or whatever exigencies, he said.

However, Mr. Olorode in his own lecture titled, Nigeria: Law, Society, Ideology and Justice under Neoliberalism, asserted that when a society is fundamentally unjust then, the judiciary and other apparatuses of justice cannot dispense justice no matter what the laws prescribe or what the procedures for their administration stipulate.

He noted that, in the circumstance, the laws, the courts and the precepts they proclaim become mere facades for perpetrating injustice.

In Mr. Olorodes conclusion victims of the hegemonic class that run institutions are thoroughly handicapped because the processes of seeking justice are tortuous, unaffordable and tardy. Consequently, justice is virtually inaccessible.

Speaking at the occasion, the Governor of Kwara State, Abdulfatah Ahmed, commended the UNILORIN 49+ for the initiative in establishing the foundation and for their resilience in standing against injustice in the society commitment to issues of justice.

As we all know, justice is an essential instrument for the protection of human rights  A strong and reliable justice system ensures that society is secure and enhances the growth of the economy. No doubt the success of society relies largely on the trust that is placed on the rule of law.

The governor said Kwara State under his governorship has always striven and will continue to strive for justice.

Meanwhile, the president of ASUU, Biodun Ogunyemi, observed that the formation of a foundation by the UNILORIN 49 victims of injustice and the erection of a monument to their monumental struggle, was a unique day in the history of ASUU.

He described it as a first in the annals of labour struggles in the country.

He also noted that the struggle of ASUU for justice in University of Ilorin has turned out to be one of the most protracted struggles in the history of the Union but that the Union will never give up its own noble objectives of protecting the legitimate rights of its members and defending them against oppression and injustice.

Noting that University governance and scholarship is never about razzmatazz, he called on the new Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin to redirect the University towards the path of legality and avoidance of acts of victimisation of workers.

Poet laureate and scholar, Niyi Osundare, sent a solidarity message.

He described the resilience of the UNILORIN 49 as a great example of how the oppressed masses can stand firm to resist injustice.

He described the justice scenario in Nigeria as appalling, while he also called on UNILORIN authorities to embrace the clarion call for justice.

The event, which took place at the UNILORIN 49+ Foundation House situated at No 1, UNILORIN 49+ Street, near the University of Ilorin campus gate was attended by among others, the Governor of Kwara State, who was represented by the Commissioner for Water Resources, AbdulRazak Akorede, Matron of the Foundation, Bolanle Awe, represented by D.I. Jimoh, (ASUU), Trustees and Past Presidents of ASUU, Assisi Asobie and Dipo Fasina, other Principal officers of ASUU such as S. Ighalo, Musa Abdullahi and Charles Onanuju including a host of other academics and activists.
Stella Oduah on Monday described as untrue a report that she was planning to leave the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA.

The lawmaker, who represents Anambra North Senatorial District, told the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Monday that the story credited to an online medium was based on mere speculation that was false.

Ms. Oduah said those spreading the falsehood were probably taking advantage of her grievances with the party in the build up to the 2017 Anambra governorship election.

It is untrue, there is nothing like that; I am still a full member of the PDP.

This is mere speculation probably because of my anger during the last governorship election.

I am still a full member of our great party, the PDP; if I want to leave a party I will make it public myself, she said.

She urged politicians to refrain from attempting to score cheap points by giving false information about other political actors.

(NAN)
The federal government on Monday said it evacuated 1,030 stranded Nigerian migrants from Libya between January 7 and January 8, 2018.

Mustapha Maihaja, the Director-General of National Emergency Management Agency, disclosed this at a joint news conference by the federal government delegation to Libya.

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, had on January 5 led a delegation on fact finding mission to Libya to secure the release of Nigerian migrants stranded in that country.

The delegation comprised of Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora and Muhammad Babandede, Comptroller General of the Nigerian Immigration Service.

Others were Julie Okah-Donli, Director General of National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and Sadiya Umar-Faruq, Federal Commissioner, National Commission for Refugees.

Mr. Maihaja told journalists that the returnees were 485 people, who came back on Sunday, and 545 others, who came back of Monday. He noted that they were part of the 5,037 stranded Nigerians identified for evacuation back home.

He stated that a reception centre approved by President Muhammadu Buhari had been set up in Port Harcourt, Rivers for the returnees.

According to him, the returnees on arrival will be formally received and profiled before being transported to their various states.

He said that the reception centre was organised in such a way that the Ministry of Health provided facilities to look after those with health-related problems.

He explained that those who were critically ill were taken to University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital for treatment.

He added that the returnees would be profiled through the Immigration, State Security Service and other agencies, emphasising that those with criminal tendencies and ISIS inclination would be taken

care of by relevant agencies.

Mr. Maihaja said the delegation had 21 days to complete its operation.

The Foreign Affairs Minister also said the delegation was in Libya to engage with Libyan Government at the highest level to facilitate the evacuation of the stranded Nigerian migrants from the North African country.

Mr. Onyeama said the Nigerian mission in Libya was coordinating the identification of the Nigerian migrants with the support of International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

According to him, they are being joined by a technical team comprising representatives from NEMA, Immigration and other relevant Nigerian government agencies.

The minister said that the political and security challenges in that country made it difficult to secure the evacuation of some Nigerians back home.

He added that there are different centres of power in that country. The central government recognised by the UN and AU do not have full control of the territories controlled by rebels.

He pointed out that there were over 50 detention camps in Libya, many of them under the control of rebels and militia groups.

The minister said that the young Nigerians being trafficked were shattered and battered and seen as commodity to be traded for economic gains.

He said the Libyan Government blamed the criminal elements for the human trafficking business, noting that the president was keen at dissociating the ordinary Libyan people from the narrative.

He noted that there were complaints about how some migrants in detention camps were being exploited by government officials for economic gains.

He said Nigerians who were residing in Libya legally complained of harassment by Libyan Government officials who they said destroyed their passports and other residency papers.

The NAPTIP Director General said the agency would profile the returnees to identify those who were real victims of trafficking.

Ms. Okah-Donli said the returnees would be counselled by trained personnel and those with medical condition would be treated at the agencys facilities.

She said the rehabilitation period would last for six months during which the returnees would be trained on different skills acquisition and empowered with tools.

We will monitor them for about two years to ensure that they dont re-embark on the treacherous journey, she added.

(NAN)
With barely a month to the 2003 presidential election in Nigeria, Funsho Kupolokun, the Special Assistant to then President Olusegun Obasanjo hurriedly put together a bid round for three oil blocks  OPLs 223, 251, and 257.

At the end of the bid round in which only Elf Petroleum (Nigeria) Ltd, ExxonMobil Ltd, Vintage Oil and Gas, and ECL International Ltd participated, ExxonMobil and Vintage Oil and Gas were jointly awarded OPL 257 while ECL International Ltd got OPL 251.

OPL 223 was not awarded to any company.

A House of Representatives committee which investigated those allocations five years later described the bid as curious because it was done three years after the introduction of the principle of open, competitive bidding. Also, none of the blocks was listed as being on offer in a report of the Committee on the Evaluation of Bids for the Year 2000 Licensing Rounds.

Part of the reasons for the flouting of due process in the allocation which led to the country losing billions was poor oversight of the process from the petroleum minister at the time  President Obasanjo.

After Mr. Kupolokuns allocation in 2003, the Bid Evaluation Committee discovered that both Vintage Oil and Gas Ltd and ECL International Ltd not only had doubtful experience, technical ability and track records; they were also unknown to the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

In a 2008 report by a House of Representatives committee on Due Process of Allocation of Oil Blocks by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, the lawmakers found no evidence that the 2003 bid round got a ministerial approval from the petroleum minister, Mr. Obasanjo.

In addition, a series of sharp practices dogged the payment of signature bonuses on the oil blocks. For instance, Vintage Oil and Gas paid a mere $2.5 million in signature bonus while Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited made a staggered payment of $15 million as against the assessed $20 million.

The circumstances in which Elf Petroleum Limited that had not been awarded OPL 223 on March 12, 2003, came to be awarded the same block six weeks later on April 29, 2003, is suspicious, the committee report stated.

It is all the more suspicious when this later award is juxtaposed against the fact that its partner on the block is NPDC, a subsidiary of NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation).

The committee recommended that since the award of OPL 223 could not be revoked due to the involvement of the NPDC, the balance of $5 million be immediately recovered from Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited.

It also condemned the role played by Mr. Kupolokun and called for his reprimand for arrogating to himself the discretionary powers of the minister.

Engineer Funsho Kupolokuns role in the subterranean award of OPL 223 should be thoroughly investigated to establish if any malfeasance borne out of interest influenced the circumstances of this award and prosecuted if such malfeasance is established.

In December 2003, Mr. Kupolokun, who became Special Assistant to the President in 1999, was appointed Group Managing Director of the NNPC.

FORCED MARRIAGES

To directly oversee the operations of the petroleum ministry, Mr. Obasanjo, a retired army general, appointed himself the petroleum minister, to be assisted by the late Rilwanu Lukman and Mr. Kupolokun as Presidential Adviser on Petroleum and Special Assistant to the President respectively.

Following Nigerias return to civilian government in 1999, the first licensing round was held one year later. Mr. Obasanjo opted to abandon the long-standing discretionary approach used by the military rulers  where oil blocks were given out to associates, friends and cronies without due process and at give-away prices  and replace it with a more transparent system.

In the past, beneficiaries of the blocks turn around and hawk them to international oil companies at huge profits.

There were 33 blocks on offer in the Year 2000 bid round: 22 offshore, half of them located in deep waters; seven in shallow waters; and four onshore.

The Bid Committee, ranking companies in accordance with the criteria contained in the guidelines for the allocation of the blocks (the best company ranked first and the least ranked last), submitted its Evaluation Report to the Mr. Lukman. Mr. Lukman was abroad, and so Mr. Kupolokun acted upon the evaluation.

In the end, only eight blocks were taken up.

The final result saw some of the companies ranked first in the bid committees evaluation report losing out in the allocations. For instance, Obekpa Petroleum Limited which was the preferred bidder for OPL 242 lost the block to Ocean Energy Limited and Nigerian Petroleum Development Company. Also, the concept of forced marriages was introduced into the award process leading to companies being paired to co-own oil blocks. The Nigerian Agip Exploration and NPDC were awarded OPL 244 although Statoil Nigeria Limited emerged the preferred bidder. Another block, OPL 322 in which Shell Nigeria Exploration & Production Company emerged the preferred bidder was awarded to the company and Dajo Oil.

All the 10 recommended awardees by the Evaluation Committee for 10 oil blocks in the 2000 bid round were no longer in possession of the blocks by 2007.

Although Peter Achebe, then acting Director of DPR, and Mr. Kupolokun testified before the House committee that there were no complaints on the forced marriages, Obekpa Petroleum Limited petitioned the committee over how it was edged out from OPL 242 by a consortium led by Ocean Energy Limited that did not participate in the 2000 bid round.

Igo Aguma, chairman of the House committee, said only $5 million, out of a possible $248 million, was remitted to the Nigerian government as signature bonus during the 2000 bid round.

The House committee noted that based on the preponderance of evidence before it, there was no way the bid committee could determine that every instruction received from both presidential aides  Messrs Lukman and Kupolokun  had ministerial approval.

In effect, it was not clear if these two political office holders were acting by the authority of the minister as provided in the Petroleum Act or on their own.

There was also no means of confirmation as access to the president who was also the Minister of Petroleum Resources was severely restricted.

PAPER COMPANIES

The wrongs of the 2000 bid round were taken into consideration at the next major licensing round in 2005 and led to the introduction of new elements. It was Nigerias first ever open auction as bids were projected simultaneously onto an electronic screen for everyone to view.

A total of 77 blocks were on offer, as against 61 blocks directed by the Presidential Adviser on Petroleum and Energy, Edmund Daukoru. Mr. Daukoru gave the directive dated March 5, 2005 in an internal memorandum sent to the DPR, the Permanent Secretary at the Petroleum Ministry, and NNPC.

Forty-four of the blocks were finally awarded.

But the principle of forced marriages continued and operators were mandated to give up to 10 per cent equity in any block to an indigenous company, known as the Local Content Vehicle (LCV). This threw up a lot of shell or paper companies and caused serious difficulty with due diligence. Out of the more than 100 LCVs that pre-qualified, only 10 per cent had previous experience in oil exploration and development.

Furthermore, it was the first time Asian National Oil Companies participated in Nigerias bid rounds. Being new in the terrain, they were guided into their choice for LCVs, according to a 2008 report by Chatham House.

The round raised over $1 billion in signature bonuses, which was far less than had been anticipated, the report added.

Many of the LCVs of choice turned out to be cronies of politically exposed persons in the country.

For instance, NJ Exploration Services owned by Emmanuel Ojie, a close associate of Mr. Obasanjo was the approved LCV on one of the blocks awarded to the Koreans. Another of his company, Emo Oil, was the LCV approved for two blocks awarded to India.

Southland, belonging to Andy Uba, who was a special adviser to Mr. Obasanjo, was teamed up with Korean National Oil Company.

Shore Beach Exploration, jointly owned by Mr. Ojie and Emeka Offor, was the approved LCV for blocks awarded to China in 2006.

Also, the principle of the Right of First Refusal, RoFR, was introduced in the 2005 round, offering the Asian companies lucrative blocks in return for strategic investments in the country. As a result, the international oil companies pulled out of the bid.

Fourteen blocks were tied to strategic downstream investments and had the RoFR attached to them  OPLs 274, 275, 277, 278, 280, and 290 were tied to refineries; OPLs 281, 282, 287, 289, and 732 to independent power projects; and OPLs 276, 283, and 288 to Liquefied Natural Gas/Gas to Liquid. Any company with a RoFR over a block had the right to match a winning bid and pay within a specified time.

The House committee report noted that although the objective of the 2005 round to be transparent was commendable, several factors were responsible for its failure.

First, the obvious manipulation of the bid process for various reasons to meet specific ends, and secondly, the room such manipulation created for abuse.

The result is that due process and transparency which were touted as the hallmark of this bid were definitely blurred. The International Oil Companies kept away, and the Asian National Oil Companies did not participate in the manner envisaged. Those companies that participated ended up generating controversy.

The committee found that there was confusion as to the number of approved blocks put on offer. While Mr. Daukorus internal memo stated 61, the Bid Report said 77. The same confusion re-occurred on the number of blocks won; where two figures  36 and 44  were reported to have been awarded.

A total of 38 companies whose names and application forms did not appear in the Bid Report won interests in 23 of the 36 oil blocks listed. The application forms of 11 companies who participated in the registration process and won blocks were also missing.

What is established is that companies that did not register for the bid process were pre-qualified, and eventually awarded blocks in clear violation of both the Internal Memorandum and the Guidelines, the House committee stated.

Moreover, participation in a bid process is, depending facto, an application for an Oil Prospecting Licence (OPLs). The non-registration of these 38 companies and their consequent non-payment of the statutory application and processing fees of US$10,000 each totalling US$20,000 per application (are) therefore a clear violation of paragraph 59(a) and (b) of the Petroleum (Drilling and Production) Regulations.

POLITICAL INTERFERENCE

A major setback to the process of awarding the blocks, particularly the 2005 Bid Round, was the inability of the DPR to provide a comprehensive data on the blocks on offer.

The bigger obstacle during the round, however, remained the governments use of RoFR  introduced one week before allocation round  which was not clearly defined in the guidelines and, as a result, led to the subversion of due process.

The government awarded OPLs 321 and 323, two deep offshore blocks, to KNOC on RoFR even though the blocks were not listed among those tied to strategic downstream projects.

In fact, there was no evidence that any strategic downstream project was attached to any deep offshore block in the 2005 Bid Round. Mr. Daukoru admitted that it was introduced late in the Bid Round and that a one week notice given to the bidders was sufficient.

The House committee said it found Mr. Daukorus explanation untenable in a system designed to be fair and transparent.

Our finding is justified by the fact that it was apparent that the introduction of the principle was influenced by the various Memoranda of Understanding signed between Dr. Daukoru as HMSPR (Honourable Minister of State for Petroleum Resources) and various Asian National Oil Companies, KNOC and CNPC inclusive in the course of the Bid Round Process wherein commitments to award oil blocks to these companies were made.

We therefore find that the introduction of strategic downstream project/RoFR late in the Bid Round with a patently insufficient one week notice and after MoUs had been signed with preferred bidders subverted the due process of the Bid Round.

It is however clear that the HMSPR was not acting on his own volition in introducing this principle, but on the instructions of the substantive minister, President Obasanjo.

Incidentally, the two deep offshore blocks, OPLs 321 and 323 were bided by the Indian oil company, ONGC Videsh Limited, at a signature bonus of $485 million. This was the highest signature bonus posted for the blocks, and based on the parameters for the commercial bid, the firm ought to have been declared winner of the block.

Curiously, Mr. Daukoru responded to the bid by announcing that KNOC had a RoFR over the block and invited KNOC to match the bid even though from the evidence obtained by the Committee, ONGC Videsh Limited was prepared to pay its signature bonus immediately and in accordance with the guidelines.

The ad-hoc committee found that the minister was prepared to subvert the due process because of the commitments contained in a MoU dated July 25, 2005 which he signed with KNOC. It noted that the minister knew as of the time he entered into the MoU that there were no strategic downstream projects attached to any deep offshore block. As a result, the only way KNOC could win any block was to post the highest signature bonus and make the corresponding payments in accordance with the bid guidelines.

But rather than KNOC matching the signature bonus posted by ONGC Videsh Limited, the company made misleading presentations to the ad-hoc committee claiming that it received a discount of $231 million on the payment of signature bonus. It did not present any evidence to support the assertion.

A. O. Chukwueke, the DPR director, in his internal memo dated January 4, 2006 and addressed to Mr. Daukoru admitted that KNOC was unable to meet their RoFR on blocks 323 and 321. This was long after the commercial bid had closed.

The total signature bonus paid on these two blocks was $255 million  KNOC paid $92.3 million and its partner, Equator Exploration Nigeria Limited paid $162.7 million. KNOC paid in June 2006 while Equator paid in March 2006.

However, none of the payments were made in accordance with the guidelines which required immediate payment of 50 per cent of the signature bonus at the time of the bid round or within 48 hours by a company with a RoFR.

$231 million is still outstanding on these blocks which KNOC believes that it does not have to pay. Surprisingly, the DPR presentation on signature bonus payments falsely signifies that KNOC has paid the sum.

Weeks of efforts to reach some of the actors in the 2000 and 2005 bid rounds were not successful.

Most of the companies who benefitted in the oil blocks allocations at the time are now virtually non-existent.

Messrs Kupolokun and Aguma could not be reached for comments.

Mr. Daukoru, who is now a traditional ruler in Nembe Kingdom in Bayelsa State, declined to speak on the allocations during his time.

(Any claim against Mr. Daukoru) is absolutely nonsense and unacceptable, we cannot answer, said Young-dede Howells, a Nembe Kingdom palace spokesperson.

They should go to NNPC and find out, not to us. The onus of proof that so and so happened is within the petroleum ministry. Thank you very much.

ALLOCATIONS HARDLY TRANSPARENT

No fresh allocation of oil blocks have been made since President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office. His predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, also made no fresh allocations. But fresh allocations may be made by the current administration with experts saying such is due. Like Mr. Obasanjo, Mr. Buhari, also a retired general, doubles as the petroleum minister.

Experts, however, warn that Nigeria must learn from the failures of the oil block allocations made by the Obasanjo administration.

Alex Neyin, a former Chevron staff, said oil block allocations in Nigeria are hardly transparent.

The one they did for the marginal fields in 2002/2003 was the only one that we can refer to as near-transparent, all others have been on a man-know-man basis, Mr. Neyin, a U.S.-trained Petroleum Engineer, told PREMIUM TIMES.

Subsequent ones like the Agbami were discretionary, the then head of state just look at people, this is a friend give this to him this is another friend give this to him.

Now, nobody should sit down and allow any nonsense like that happen because it is a common Nigerian property and nobody, call yourself president or whatever, should have the discretionary right to give those leases out without doing it honestly and transparently. If anybody does anything differently, it will amount to corruption and nobody wants that.

Mr. Neyin said several individuals who had been awarded oil blocks lacked the capability to operate them.

If you ask me, this is the time for retribution, said Mr. Neyin, who had supervised the allocation of marginal fields by Chevron in the past.

All the people you hear their names with oil blocks making millions, they dont know anything about the industry and have no business owning the blocks it was just the president saying you are my friend, take.

If you ask me, this is the time for retribution. They can call them  the people harvesting a national thing for personal gains and flaunting it over the faces of poor people  they should be able to sit back and say we want to review all these things. Its a hard thing to do but its doable.

Because what is causing the problem in the country now is inequity, you see people who are flaunting money, you cant see what they are doing but its just positional play and the down-trodden people are all there in their numbers hanging with nothing.

Saka Matenilola, ex-president of the Society for Petroleum Engineers, called for a review of the allocation process such that only those with the technical as well as financial competence would be beneficiaries.

This is our national heritage and something that if we get wrong, we will collectively suffer the consequence and one of the things that we are suffering from now. Imagine if those oil blocks were given to people who were capable and can attract the financial resources to develop them, it will create more jobs as well as capacity and competence of Nigerians.

(This report had support from the Natural Resource Governance Institute as part of the Media for Oil Reform Fellowship Programme).
A human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has warned against Nigerias continued detention of seven leaders of a Cameroonian separatist movement, by operatives of the State Security Service, the SSS.

The SSS reportedly arrested leaders of the Movement for the State of Ambazonia: a separatist agitation led by English-speaking Cameroonians, during a visit of the agitators to Nigeria on Friday.

Several sources confirmed the arrest to PREMIUM TIMES on Saturday.

The advocates include the president of the Movement for the Freedom of Southern Cameroon, Sikiku Tabe, Nfor Ngala Nfor, Fidelis Che, Henri Kimeng, Cornielius Kwanga, a professor identified as Awasum and a lawyer, Nalowa Bih.

The seven had allegedly arrived Nigeria for a meeting scheduled to hold in Nera Hotel, Abuja, before they were picked up by the SSS, at 5 p.m. Friday.

Reacting to a PREMIUM TIMES report on the arrest, Mr. Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said this countrys security forces should not compound the security challenges of Nigeria by declaring a war against Southern Cameroonians. He said this might result in exposing Nigerians at the Bakasi peninsular to great threat.

Mr. Falana said the detainees were entitled to certain fundamental rights which rendered their arrests baseless in law.

Since the Cameroonians entered Nigeria legitimately, their arrest and detention by the federal government cannot be justified under the law. As Africans the detainees are entitled to the human rights to personal liberty, freedom of association and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Nigerian Constitution. Furthermore, their unquestionable and inalienable right to self determination is protected by article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights which has been ratified by both Nigeria and Cameroon.

Having failed to crush the ideas which recently led to the demand for the State of Biafra by the members of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, the federal government should not attempt to provoke the marginalised people of Southern Cameroon by frustrating their legitimate demand for an independent state of Ambazonia. Since the federal government has not succeeded in completely defeating the dreaded Boko Haram sect, it should not declare war on the people of Southern Cameroon and thereby further expose the displaced people of Bakassi to reprisal attacks.

We are thetefore compelled to call on President Mohammadu Buhari to order the immediate release of the detained Cameroonian freedom fighters without any further delay, Mr. Falana said.

Mr. Falana also said Nigeria had no extradition treaty with Cameroon hence it (Nigeria) should not yield to any pressure from the Cameroonian government to hand over the detained freedom fighters.

Since Nigeria has no extradition treaty with Cameroon, the Attorney General of the Federation lacks the vires to initiate extradition proceedings under the Extradition Act (E25) Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 for the extradition of the detained Cameroonian freedom fighters. Although the federal government is under pressure from the Paul Biya regime to hand over the detainees to the security forces in Cameroon, it has to be realised that the detainees are entitled to reside or visit Nigeria without any molestation .

To that extent, the federal government has no power whatsoever to hand them over to President Paul Biya. The detained Cameroonian freedom (fighters) deserve to be released unconditionally from the unlawful custody forthwith. Instead of using the SSS to fight the proxy war of President Paul Biya, the federal government should direct the SSS and other security forces to collaborate with the Nigeria Police Force to fish out the criminal elements that have unleashed mayhem on the people of Benue State.

Also speaking on the matter, another Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Simon Ameh, differed slightly.

He said Nigerias security operatives can arrest persons found engaging in actions capable of threatening the peace of the country, even if they may not have violated any immigration laws.

He however added that only a threat to the security of Nigeria can validate such an arrest.

The arrests may not be due to illegal migration. If it concerns Nigerias security, the SSS can arrest, but they should not be detained for too long. They (SS) should only interview the persons and release them, Mr. Ameh said.

The problem between the English-speaking Cameroonians and the French dominated government of that country, led by President Paul Biya worsened in October, when the separatist group proclaimed freedom from their French counterparts.

The proclamation was however rejected by the government.

A team from President Biya had been received by Nigerias Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo last December.

Although the meeting was said to have been meant to intensify diplomatic ties between the two countries, sources say the meeting was also aimed at pressurising the Nigerian authorities to help capture 15 wanted members of the separatist movement. PREMIUM TIMES could not validate these claims.
The Peoples Democratic Party has derided the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress, John Odigie-Oyegun, for absolving the ruling party of blame for the controversial appointments into the boards of federal agencies.

The list released by the federal government was criticised for containing the names of six dead Nigerians and repeating the names of others.

The APC national chairman while addressing journalists in Abuja on December 6, 2017, said the party was not involved in the final stages of the appointment.

But in a statement by its national publicity secretary, Kola Ologbodiyan, on Monday, the PDP said Mr. Oyeguns excuse confirmed the opposition partys position that APC and the federal government are disorganised and ill-equipped to govern.

It said Mr. Oyeguns case was that of a leader who has no answer for the incompetence and misrule of his party.

According to the opposition party, Mr. Oyeguns reaction further exposed the confusion in the APC government and the reason all sectors of the nations economy are in allegedly a shambles under the APC government.

Is it not ridiculous, cowardly and a clear show of disorganization in the government for the APC National Chairman to try to exonerate his party from the failures and incompetence of a government which the party formed?

Chief Oyeguns comments amount to a vote of no confidence on the Presidency, but there is no way he can exonerate the APC, which he leads, from the failures of its own government.

The APC Chairman must therefore shed his penchant for excuses and address burning issues of misrule of the APC Government.

We challenge the APC National Chairman to address the issue of collapsing economy with its attendant eight million job losses and countless business closures, which have caused hardship on families across the country, all due to bad policies and incompetence of the APC Government.

Nigerians are still waiting for the APC National Chairman to address the issue of the biting fuel crisis also caused by the inept APC government.

What has Chief Oyegun to say about the now exposed corruption in the APC-led Federal Government, including sharp practices in hidden oil subsidy payouts, illegal lifting of crude worth trillions of naira to service APC interests and the unabated depletion of Nigerias foreign financial instruments by his partys government?

Nigerians are still waiting for the APC National Chairman to address the issue of aloofness and insensitivity of the APC Federal Government to the incessant killings of Nigerians in many parts of country by marauders, in addition to exposed diversion of funds meant for the insurgency related matters by APC interests.

The nation is also waiting for the APC national chairman to come up with explanations on the failure of his government to fulfill its campaign promises and why the fight against corruption has been lopsided with APC members who were publicly indicted of corruption now openly enjoying government cover.

Instead of facing these issues agitating the minds of Nigerians, the APC National Chairman is busy passing the buck while also attempting, just like the Presidency, to claim credit for projects initiated and executed by the PDP.

Our advice to the APC therefore is that they should spare Nigerians their excuses. They should also spare us their lies and fake promises as the citizens will never allow themselves to be deceived again as was the case in 2015.
The Abuja Division of the Federal High Court has declined an ex-parte application seeking to stop the Senates ongoing probe into the controversial recall of fugitive ex-pension task force chief, Abdulrasheed Maina.

An ex-parte decision is one decided by a judge without requiring all of the parties to the controversy to be present.

The application filed by Nigerias Attorney General, Abubakar Malami, had among other issues contended that the Senate lacked the powers to proceed with its investigation into Mr. Mainas recall by the executive arm of government.

Mr. Malami had asked the court to stop the Senate from carrying on with the ongoing probe into the reinstatement of the fugitive.

If granted, the order would have been enforceable, despite the Senates absence at Wednesdays hearing.

Following the controversial reinstatement of Mr. Maina by President Muhammadu Buhari administration in October, 2017, the National Assembly began its probe into the circumstances that resulted in his recall.

Mr. Buhari later ordered Mr. Mainas disengagement from the civil service after public outcry. Mr. Maina has since gone into hiding.

In November, 2017, Mr. Malami appeared before the probe panel instituted by the upper chamber of the National Assembly where he denied giving the directives for Mr. Mainas recall.

Shortly after Mr. Malami made his submissions before the senate, the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita took the floor and countered his (Malamis) claims.

The Senate subsequently on November, 23 requested more time to study additional information at its disposal.

But on Monday, the Cable Newspaper reported that Mr. Malami approached the court to stop the ongoing investigation.

According to the application filed before the judge, Binta Nyako, the attorney general submitted that the Senate cannot constitute itself into, a court that tries the executive arm over the discharge of its duties.

The plaintiff as the chief law officer and minister of justice of the federation is bound to ensure compliance by the Federal Government of Nigeria and or any of its cognate organs/agencies with the express or implied contents of extant judgements and orders of competent courts in Nigeria.

The defendant cannot constitute itself into a quasi-appellate court, tribunal or panel with a view to reviewing any executive action taken in compliance with the adverse judgment in the said Suit No: FHC/ABJ/CS/65/2013, Mr. Malami said in his application.

However, in a ruling after listening to the applicants in her chambers, Mrs. Nyako asked that the defendants including the Senate be served hearing notices to allow them attend court on the next adjourned date, January 15, to defend themselves.

The court specifically ruled that the defendants appear in court to explain why the application should not be granted.

Mr. Maina was sacked from the civil service in 2013 and was in 2015 placed on the wanted list of International Police (INTERPOL) by the EFCC.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported how Mr. Maina was secretly reinstated to the civil service and rewarded with promotion, despite being wanted for alleged corruption in the management of pension funds.
The Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, Kano Command, said it has prosecuted 1460 persons for various traffic offences in the state.

The spokesperson of the Command, Kabiru Daura, disclosed in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in Kano on Monday.

Mr. Daura said that out of the number, 75 cases were discharged after investigation, while 1,385 were still pending.

He explained that the major traffic offences recorded during the year were speeding and overloading, while the rate of reckless driving by some drivers was also alarming.

He also highlighted the dangers posed by underage drivers and urged parents to monitor their wards.

The spokesperson then advised commercial motorists to make effective use of speed limiting devices on their vehicles, to regulate the speed of the drivers.

(NAN)
The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has accused the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, of being deceitful about the killing of over a dozen people in the state on New Year day.

The alleged mastermind of the killing, Johnson Igwedibia, popularly known as Don Waney, was later killed on Saturday in Enugu State by a combined team of soldiers and personnel of the State Security Service, SSS.

Mr. Amaechi in a special message to the Rivers people said Governor Wike attempted to justify and casually explain away the cold-blooded murder of innocent Rivers people instead of rising to the challenge.

Mr. Amaechis message was aired on Monday on some radio stations in the state. A copy of it was sent to PREMIUM TIMES.

The governors attempt to justify and compare the Omoku murders or any other killings in Rivers State to whatever is happening in any other part of the country is a deceitful, poisonous narrative that we must never allow to flourish, the minister said in the message.

The governors repugnant attempt at finger-pointing, blaming oil companies, opposition politicians and everyone else apart from himself, is a clear indication that he has abdicated his primary constitutional responsibility to safeguard lives and property.

Mr. Amaechi, who is a former governor of the state and a critic of his successor, insisted that Mr. Wikes administration lacked the political will to tackle cult-related violence and killings.

Let no one deceive you with a twisted narrative on the origins, causes, and solutions to the bloodbath in Rivers State. Most of you can attest to how I battled and tackled insecurity when I served as your governor.

I led the fight against the cultists, gangs, thugs, and criminals masquerading as militants; they were driven out from hiding, many fled the State. I was able to do that because I was never in bed with the criminals; I never appointed any into political office or crowned any king.

The administration I led was able to return the State to serenity from the horrible state of insecurity and violence we met when we took over. Rivers people enjoyed peace until the months leading up to the 2015 general elections when these new men of power in the state introduced unprecedented violence and killings in the State, Mr. Amaechi said.

The state government has repeatedly accused Mr. Amaechi and the All Progressives Congress, APC, in the state of playing politics with the insecurity and the tragedy that has befallen the state.

The governor of a state cannot stop security agencies from carrying out their constitutional responsibilities. And it is also defeatist for anybody to imagine that a state governor would be spending hard-earned resources to support the security agencies to fight crimes in the state to turn around and also be encouraging the same thing, the Commissioner for Information in the state, Emma Okah earlier told PREMIUM TIMES.
An Osun State High Court on Monday in Ede sentenced a former local government chairman, Rufus Wole-Ojo, to six years imprisonment for stealing and using his position for personal gratification.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, had on May 28, 2013 arraigned Mr. Ojo before the court on a three-count charge bordering on stealing, using his position for personal gratification and money laundering.

One of the charges against the convict reads: You, Chief Rufus Woleola Ojo (Carrying on Business under the name and style of Rulekal Ventures) and others at large sometimes in December 2006 at Orolu Local Government Area within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, with intent to defraud fraudulently converted to your own use the sum of N22,058,021.30k (Twenty Two Million, Fifty Eight Thousand and Twenty One Naira, Thirty Kobo), property of Orolu Local Government Area of Osun State entrusted to you whilst you were its Executive Chairman.

The court found the former local government boss guilty of two of the charges and sentenced him to three years for each of the charges. The sentence will run concurrently; implying he will only spend two years in jail

Justice David Oladimeji discharged the convict of the charge of money laundering.
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Women who need a residential treatment setting in which to change their addictive behaviors achieve better and quicker results when their treatment occurs in an environment free of male presence.

Tekuma Recovery Group, Inc.

For many women, past triggers for addictive behavior are linked to negative past and present traumatic relationships with men. And the presence of men in a mixed gender treatment setting tends to restimulate trauma and invite a repetition of such behaviors in the treatment center itself. However, a women-only therapeutic community which is run by women for women provides the safety, security, and empathy needed to combat repetitive trauma. Such a therapeutic community exists in Israel and has now finally opened its doors to accepting English speaking applicants from outside Israel.

Applicants must be seeking recovery from addiction or alcoholism and be willing to live together in Israel for a minimum of four months. This program is run by experienced and dedicated Israeli professional women who are bilingual. The program combines twelve-step principles with the intimacy of a secure and safe urban collectivity of women who are living together in a mutually supportive therapeutic community in Haifa, Israel.

Israeli women have a long history of inspiring confidence and autonomy in others, functioning as leaders at every level of their country's cultural, political, military, and therapeutic sectors. The professional Israeli women leading this residential community offer values of responsible social membership that foster the kind of self-esteem that does not rest on male approval or attraction.

Contact us for an immediate & free evaluation: 1-914-813-2344.

About Tekuma Recovery Group

Tekuma Recovery Group (http://www.tekumarecovery.com) is a renowned leader in advancing the treatment of alcohol and drug addictions, gambling addictions, and eating disorders throughout the world.

Contact:

Evan H. Bellin, M.D.

1-914-813-2344

http://www.tekumarecovery.com/contact

www.tekumarecovery.com

SOURCE Tekuma Recovery Group, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.tekumarecovery.com


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ExL Events is hosting the inaugural Cannabis Partnerships Congress taking place March 12-13, 2018 at the Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront in San Francisco, CA.

This congress will offer key insights from all stakeholders that are involved in the cannabis industry, covering a variety of topics between scientific, medicinal, governmental and research development. There will be discussions about legislative hurdles, current and planned cannabinoid developments, and discovering how to improve the quality and efficiency of data integrity in clinical trials.

There has been continued enforcement of restrictive policies and regulations on research into the health benefits; therefore this is a great opportunity for those involved to understand the obstacles in order to enhance product development. To view the full agenda, click here.

Featured Speakers:

Bruce Bloom , CEO , CURES WITHIN REACH

, , Dean Petkanas , Chief Medical Officer, KANNALIFE SCIENCES

, Veronica Arroyave , Sr. Director, Global Health Programs, PARTNERSHIP FOR QUALITY MEDICAL DONATIONS

, Bruno Battistini , President, CEO and Scientific Director , NEW BRUNSWICK HEALTH RESEARCH FOUNDATION

, , Doug Brennaman , Scientific Advisory Board , KANNALIFE SCIENCES

, , Jerry Bryant , Managing Member , VYRIPHARM BIOPHARMACEUTICAL

, , Guy Chamberland , M.Sc. , Master Herbalist, Chief Scientific Officer and Regulatory Affairs , TETRA BIO-PHARMA

, , Jeffrey Chen , Director , UCLA CANNABIS RESEARCH INITIATIVE

, , Lezli Engelking , President and Founder , FOCUS

, , Elias Jackson , Ph.D. , President of Research and Development , VYRIPHARM BIOPHARMACEUTICAL

, , Thoma Kikis , Chief Marketing Officer , KANNALIFE SCIENCES

, , Darshan Kulkarni , FDA Regulatory and Compliance Attorney , KULKARNI LAW FIRM

, , Kimberly Lincoln , Manufacturing Scientist , ROCHE

, , Barbara Read , Vice President of Sales and Marketing , LIFESCRIPT

, , Mark Reichman , EVP, Client Services Director, Cannabis Patient Advocate , GUIDEMARK HEALTH

, , Jeremy Unruh , General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, PHARMACANN LLC

To visit our conference website, please visit https://goo.gl/52wQav

To register, please visit https://goo.gl/sXhGgY and use Priority Code C1033PRnews.

For more information, contact: ExL Events

Phone: 866-207-6528

Email: registration @exlevents.com

SOURCE ExL Events

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico and DUBLIN, Jan. 8 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gauss Research Laboratories, the .PR ccTLD manager, is pleased to announce that it has selected Afilias, a leading domain registry operator, to provide technical services to support Puerto Rico's country code top level domain (ccTLD) on the Internet, .PR.

Headquartered in San Juan, Gauss Research Laboratories manages the top-level domain .PR with a goal of providing a solid registry that provides Puerto Ricans with accessible services and tools that can aid in the development of a reliable IT community throughout the island.

The technical transition was completed on January 7, 2018, and the TLD is now running on a world class technical platform under industry standard policies. Interested registrants should contact their favorite registrar to select their name; interested registrars should contact [email protected].

.PR is unrestricted, so it's a natural address for Public Relations agencies and practitioners worldwide. Of course, it's also great for those doing business in Puerto Rico.

Oscar Moreno de Ayala, President of Puerto Rico Top Level Domain (PRTLD) explains: "The internet operating environment for ccTLDs is increasingly complex and hostile, prompting us to upgrade our technology to better protect our domain owners. A careful analysis led us to Afilias."

Pablo Rodriguez, Executive Vice President of PRTLD added: "We are pleased to be working with Afilias, a recognized leader in registry technology. Afilias will help us both enhance the security and reliability of the registry and expand distribution and sales worldwide."

"Afilias is proud to be selected to provide technical services in support of the .PR TLD. Our technology will strengthen .PR to make it less susceptible to natural disasters, more reliable and secure, and more broadly available across the thousand registrars serviced by Afilias. We are looking forward to working with Oscar, Pablo and the entire dotPR team to help .PR reach its full potential," said Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer of Afilias.

About Afilias

Afilias is the world's second largest domain registry, with millions of domain names under management. Afilias powers a wide variety of top-level domains, including TLDs for countries, cities, brands, communities and generic terms. Afilias' specialized technology makes Internet addresses more accessible and useful through a broad range of applications, including Internet domain registry services, managed DNS, and mobile Web services. For more information on Afilias services, visit www.afilias.info.

About PRTLD

PRTLD is a Puerto Rican company with almost 30 years-experience pioneering the presence of Puerto Rico on the Internet. The .pr registry has been operating since 1989, when founder, Dr. Oscar Moreno de Ayala, embarked on the responsibility of managing and building .PR from its beginning. PRTLD is the only organization authorized worldwide to administer the country code that represents Puerto Rico ".pr" and its people on the Internet. For more information on PRTLD, visit www.nic.pr Twitter PuntoPR

For More Information:

Puerto Rico Top Level Domain (PRTLD)

Ashley Clemente

+1.787.981.4655 cell

[email protected]

Afilias

Alan Wallace, Director of Corporate Communications

+1.425.691.8757 cell

[email protected]

SOURCE Afilias

Related Links

http://www.afilias.info


BOTHELL, Wash. and BERKLEY, Calif. and COPENHAGEN, Denmark and HEIDELBERG, Germany and CHIBA, Japan and YOKOHAMA, Japan, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AGC Biologics, a convergence of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics, announced today that effective January 8, 2018, the company will be integrated and newly branded as AGC Biologics.

AGC Biologics, a global leader in clinical and commercial manufacturing of therapeutic proteins, will offer the highest level of CDMO services to its clients from their state-of-the-art facilities in Seattle, WA and Berkeley, CA in the US; Copenhagen, Denmark; Heidelberg, Germany; Chiba, Japan; and Yokohama, Japan. The company will maintain and grow its global presence with microbial and mammalian capabilities, fulfilling early-phase through late-phase projects, both at small and large-scale.

The newly branded AGC Biologics features a highly-collaborative global team, along with multifaceted experience in a wide range of molecule types, in-house analytical expertise, and an exceptional regulatory track record.

This announcement accompanies the appointment of Dr. Gustavo Mahler as President and CEO of AGC Biologics. Dr. Mahler will be responsible for the strategic development and support of the company's future growth.

Dr. Mahler brings more than 20 years of scientific and executive management experience. Since becoming President and CEO of CMC Biologics in 2015, he has successfully increased growth and profit, resulting in double-digit growth, and highlighting the company as one of the fastest growing CDMOs in the industry.

"The emergence of AGC Biologics as a global CDMO powerhouse further accentuates the strong commitment of our organization to ensure we meet the demands of this fast-growing market, while providing our clients with unparalleled innovative solutions," said Mr. Hideyuki Kurata, Chairman & General Manager of AGC Lifescience General Division, AGC Chemicals, AGC Asahi Glass Company. "I'm incredibly pleased Dr. Mahler will continue to lead AGC Biologics. Under his leadership, I'm confident that we will achieve our goal of becoming the industry's leading CDMO."

"I'm thrilled at this opportunity to continue to lead this great organization," said Dr. Gustavo Mahler, President and CEO of AGC Biologics. "With our proven track record, I believe that we will clearly pave the way to a successful future, providing our clients solutions to their greatest development and manufacturing challenges, and enabling the delivery of breakthrough treatments to patients across the globe."

About AGC Biologics

AGC Biologics is a leading global Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), with a strong commitment to deliver the highest standard of service to our clients and partners. AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. The company currently employs more than 850 employees worldwide. Our extensive network spans three continents, with cGMP-compliant facilities in Seattle, WA; Berkeley, CA; Copenhagen, Denmark; Heidelberg, Germany; Yokohama, Japan; and Chiba, Japan.

AGC Biologics offers deep industry expertise and unique customized services for the scale-up and cGMP manufacture of protein-based therapeutics; from pre-clinical to commercial production, for mammalian and microbial. Our integrated service offerings include cell line development, bioprocess development, formulation, analytical testing, antibody drug development and conjugation, cell banking and storage, and protein expression  including our proprietary CHEF1 Expression System for mammalian production.

Further information can be found at www.agcbio.com

AGC Biologics Media Contact Information:

Ms. Kim Yang

Director, Global Marketing and Communications

Email: [email protected]

Office: +1 425.415.5438

SOURCE CMC Biologics

Related Links

http://www.agcbio.com


LONDON, and NEW YORK, and HONG KONG, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alcentra, the alternative fixed income specialist for BNY Mellon Investment Management (IM), today announced the appointment of Leland Hart as Managing Director and Head of US Loans and High Yield. He will report to Vijay Rajguru, Global Co-Chief Investment Officer.

Leland will lead Alcentra's 16-people investment and research team located in New York and Boston. He will be working closely with Chris Barris, Kevin Cronk and Frank Longobardi in their ongoing roles as portfolio managers for loan, high yield and multi-strategy funds. Alcentra's US liquid credit platform has experienced strong growth with current assets under management of $12.5 billion1 across a range of CLOs, mutual funds, commingled funds and separately managed accounts.

Leland joins Alcentra from BlackRock Investment Management, where he was a Managing Director having joined in 2009. As head of loans and CLOs, he had primary responsibility for investing, fundraising and managing the firm's loan business, including mutual funds, CLOs, and separate accounts. He was also co-head of the global infrastructure debt group. Prior to BlackRock, Leland was a Managing Director in the Leveraged Capital Markets Group of Lehman Brothers, where he worked for eight years. He started his career as a banker at Continental Bank and following the bank's merger with Bank of America, he joined Bank of America's high yield group.

David Forbes-Nixon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Alcentra, said:

"Leland is a recognized industry leader and well known to many of us at Alcentra, and we are excited about him joining the firm. He brings deep experience, knowledge and relationships, as we look to continue the growth of our U.S. business platform."

About Alcentra

Alcentra NY, LLC and Alcentra Limited (together, "Alcentra") are part of a global asset management firm with assets under management of approximately $34.7 billion2. Alcentra has an investment track record that dates back to 1998. Strategies include: senior loans, high yield bonds, direct lending, structured credit, special situations, and multi-strategy credit. Alcentra is a subsidiary of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Boston.

About BNY Mellon Investment Management

BNY Mellon Investment Management is one of the world's leading investment management organizations and one of the top U.S. wealth managers, with $1.8 trillion in assets under management as of September 30, 2017. It encompasses BNY Mellon's affiliated investment management firms, wealth management services and global distribution companies. BNY Mellon Investment Management is a division of BNY Mellon, which has $32.2 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration as of September 30, 2017. BNY Mellon can act as a single point of contact for clients looking to create, trade, hold, manage, service, distribute or restructure investments. BNY Mellon is the corporate brand of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (NYSE: BK). Additional information is available on www.bnymellon.com. Follow us on Twitter @BNYMellon or visit our newsroom at www.bnymellon.com/newsroom for the latest company news.

1 As of 30 September 2017

2 As of September 30, 2017; Assets under management reflect assets of all accounts and portions of client accounts managed by Alcentra. Specifically, certain assets under management reflect assets managed by Alcentra personnel as employees of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, Standish Mellon Asset Management LLC, and The Dreyfus Corporation under a dual employee arrangement.

All information sourced by BNY Mellon as of 8 January 2018. This press release is qualified for issuance in the UK and Europe and is for information purposes only. It does not constitute an offer or solicitation of securities or investment services or an endorsement thereof in any jurisdiction or in any circumstance in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful or not authorized. This press release is issued by BNY Mellon Investment Management EMEA Limited to members of the financial press and media and the information contained herein should not be construed as investment advice. The value of investments can fall. Investors may not get back the amount invested. Income from investments may vary and is not guaranteed. Investment Managers are appointed by BNY Mellon Investment Management EMEA Limited (BNYMIM EMEA) or affiliated fund operating companies to undertake portfolio management activities in relation to contracts for products and services entered into by clients with BNYMIM EMEA or the BNY Mellon funds. Registered office of BNY Mellon Investment Management EMEA Limited: BNY Mellon Centre, 160 Queen Victoria Street, London, EC4V 4LA. Registered in England no. 1118580. Authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. A BNY Mellon Company.

This press release is for information purposes only. It does not constitute an offer or solicitation of securities or investment services or an endorsement thereof in any jurisdiction or in any circumstance in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful or not authorised. The issuer of this document is BNY Mellon Investment Management Hong Kong Limited, which is registered with the Securities and Futures Commission (Central Entity Number: AQI762). BNY Mellon Investment Management Hong Kong Limited and any other BNY Mellon entity (ies) mentioned are ultimately owned by The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation. BNY Mellon is the corporate brand of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and its subsidiaries. This material is for wholesale clients only and is not intended for distribution to, nor should it be relied upon by, retail clients. If this document is used or distributed in Australia, it is issued by BNY Mellon Investment Management Australia Ltd (ABN 56 102 482 815, AFS License No. 227865) located at Level 2, 1 Bligh Street, Sydney, NSW 2000.

Contact:

Ben Tanner

(212) 635 8676

[email protected]

Christian Zarro

+44 207 163 3490

[email protected]

SOURCE Alcentra; BNY Mellon Investment Management
NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced the formal launch of the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform, an innovative funding model that brings together leaders from across the life science community to catalyze seed-stage investment in the most promising life science startups. The Alexandria Seed Capital Platform will be led by Alexandria Venture Investments and supported by a preeminent Advisory Board of seasoned biopharma and venture capital executives from Accelerator Life Science Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer and Roche.

As a distinguished leader in building world-class urban campuses that cluster innovation, talent and capital in the most attractive locations; providing strategic venture investment to cutting-edge life science companies; and convening a world-class network in renowned thought leadership programs, Alexandria is ideally suited to lead this Seed Capital Platform.

"Supporting leading entrepreneurs who are focused on translating early discoveries into transformative new treatments for patients is core to Alexandria's mission to advance human health and improve quality of life," said Joel S. Marcus, chairman, CEO and founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. and Alexandria Venture Investments. "We are thrilled to be launching the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform, backed by an impressive Advisory Board with a shared commitment to foster and grow every facet of the life science ecosystem."

Alexandria Venture Investments is led by a highly experienced team of investment professionals and has established a strong track record over its 21-year history. With increased focus on seed-stage investments, Alexandria has recently participated in numerous seed-stage financings in transformative life science companies across the country, including 3DBio Therapeutics, Cyrus Biotechnology, EpiBone, Molecular Assemblies, Skyhawk Therapeutics, TARA Biosystems and TwinStrand Biosciences.

The Alexandria Seed Capital Platform is a natural extension of the company's premier life science startup platform, Alexandria LaunchLabs, which opened its flagship site at the Alexandria Center for Life Science  New York City in June 2017. Demonstrating the strong demand for full-service, flexible co-working laboratory and office space in the heart of New York City's biotech cluster, Alexandria LaunchLabs  New York City has accepted over 20 member companies from a competitive pool of more than 150 applicants. All Alexandria LaunchLabs member companies will have the opportunity to apply for seed funding through the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform.

Other eligible investment opportunities will be sourced from across Alexandria's national network and will include novel drug discovery platforms, diagnostics, medical technologies and bioinformatics-driven healthcare solutions. Alexandria Venture Investments will vet seed-stage companies of interest through the Seed Capital Platform and guide milestone-driven investments based on the quality and differentiation of a company's technology, foundational IP, business strategy, financing plan and management team. Leveraging its deep experience in building and nurturing life science companies, Alexandria and the Advisory Board will also serve as mentors for the entrepreneurs who receive funding through the platform. This high level of engagement is designed to enhance the trajectory of recipient seed-stage companies and lay a foundation for future investment and collaboration.

"The Alexandria Seed Capital Platform will create momentum around seed-stage life science investing and attract new interest from traditional and non-traditional investors to funding opportunities that represent the promise of transformative discoveries in biomedicine, with significant financial returns," said Jenna Foger, senior principal of science and technology at Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. and Alexandria Venture Investments. "We look forward to reinforcing a strong pipeline of seed-stage companies and cultivating the next generation of industry leaders."

The Alexandria Seed Capital Platform was formally announced on Sunday, January 7, 2018, at the Alexandria Seed Capital Forum in San Francisco in advance of the 36th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. During this invitation-only forum, Alexandria convened a world-class network of leaders from across the life science and technology communities to discuss the opportunities for and challenges in nurturing a more collaborative culture around seed-stage investing in the life sciences.

About Alexandria Venture Investments

Alexandria Venture Investments, founded in 1996, is the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Alexandria Venture Investments focuses on novel, breakthrough discoveries in biopharma, diagnostics, research tools, agtech and technology. Based on its experience and in-depth understanding of the life science and technology industries, its long-term relationships with leading investors and its world-class international scientific advisory network, Alexandria Venture Investments is uniquely positioned to fund seed-, early- and growth-stage companies.

About Alexandria LaunchLabs

Alexandria LaunchLabs is the premier, full-service startup platform designed to dramatically accelerate the growth of early-stage life science startups. With its flagship site at the Alexandria Center for Life Science  New York City, Alexandria LaunchLabs provides move-in-ready office/laboratory space, first-class support resources, shared equipment and services, creative amenities and access to startup capital through the Alexandria Seed Capital Platformall of which are critical for driving the growth of seed- and early-stage companies in New York City and across the country. The Alexandria LaunchLabs team continues to accept applications for future members. For more information or to apply, please visit www.launchlabsnyc.com.

About Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an S&P 500 company, is an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, with a total market capitalization of $16.1 billion and an asset base in North America of 28.6 million square feet as of September 30, 2017. Founded in 1994, Alexandria pioneered this niche and has since established a significant market presence in key locations, including Greater Boston, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland and Research Triangle Park. Alexandria has a longstanding and proven track record of developing Class A properties clustered in urban life science and technology campuses that provide its innovative tenants with highly dynamic and collaborative environments that enhance their ability to successfully recruit and retain world-class talent and inspire productivity, efficiency, creativity and success. For more information, please visit www.are.com.

CONTACT: Joel S. Marcus, Chief Executive Officer, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc./Alexandria Venture Investments, (626) 578-9693

SOURCE Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.are.com


KINGSPORT, Tenn., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ANR, Inc. ("ANR") and Alpha Natural Resources Holdings, Inc. ("Holdings" and together with ANR, "Alpha") today announced the release of a Joint Proxy Statement/Offering Memorandum associated with Alpha's joint annual meeting of stockholders to be held on February 15, 2018, in New York, New York. Stockholders are being asked to approve a proposed transaction to streamline the company's capital structure by a reclassification pursuant to which outstanding shares of the existing classes and series of stock would be exchanged for new shares at different exchange ratios, approve related amendments to Alpha's charter documents, and vote on Directors for each company.

Alpha has already received commitments from stockholders holding a majority of the outstanding preferred stock and common stock to support the reclassification proposal. Alpha therefore expects that it will receive the requisite stockholder approvals at the joint annual meeting, and that upon completion of the reclassifications, Holdings will have a single trading class of common stock, compared to its current capital structure of common stock and two series of preferred stock, all of which trade, and ANR will have two classes of common stock (one of which would trade), compared to its current capital structure of three classes of common stock, one of which trades, and two series of preferred stock, both of which trade.

The reclassification of each of ANR and Holdings provides for the following exchange ratios for outstanding classes/series of stock:

Company Stock Class Stock Ticker New Stock Class Exchange Ratios* Alpha Natural Resources Holdings, Inc. Preferred A ALHAP New Holdings Common 0.3440x Alpha Natural Resources Holdings, Inc. Preferred B ALDDP New Holdings Common 0.4223x Alpha Natural Resources Holdings, Inc. Common ALHA New Holdings Common 0.2658x ANR, Inc. Preferred A ANNNP New ANR Class C-1 Common 1.2940x ANR, Inc. Preferred B ADDLP New ANR Class C-1 Common 1.5888x ANR, Inc. Common C-1 ANNNC New ANR Class C-1 Common 1.0000x ANR, Inc. Common C-2 N/A New ANR Class C-2 Common 1.4078x ANR, Inc. Common C-3 N/A New ANR Class C-1 Common 1.1173x

*Each share of the existing stock class/series is multiplied by this ratio to determine the number of shares to be received in the reclassification.

Only holders of record as of the close of business on December 28, 2017, will be eligible to vote on the proposals contained in the Joint Proxy Statement/Offering Memorandum.

About Alpha Natural Resources

Alpha Natural Resources has affiliate mining operations in seven counties in West Virginia, and supplies metallurgical coal to the steel industry and thermal coal to generate power. ANR has offices in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Julian, West Virginia, which support approximately 20 active mining operations. Alpha is committed to being a leader in mine safety and an environmental steward in the communities where its affiliates operate. For more information, visit Alpha's website (www.alphanr.com).

Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements." All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that we expect, believe or anticipate will or may occur in the future, including statements about the proposed reclassifications and the expected benefits of the proposed reclassifications, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words, such as "potential", "expect", "intend", "plan", "may", "subject to", "continues", "if" and similar words and phrases. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to publicly disclose any updates to these forwardlooking statements. All statements regarding the proposed reclassifications and expected benefits, the likelihood of satisfaction of certain conditions to the completion of the reclassifications, whether and when the reclassifications will be completed, and expected future performance are forward looking. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in our annual and quarterly reports. In addition, new risks emerge from time to time and it is not possible for management to predict all such risk factors or to assess the impact of such risk factors on our business.

Important Additional Information

The proposed reclassifications are being made pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") contained in Section 3(a)(9) of the Securities Act. Alpha is not filing a registration statement under the Securities Act or any other federal or state securities laws with respect to new common shares.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval. The proposed reclassifications are being made pursuant to the Joint Proxy Statement/Offering Memorandum. Stockholders are urged to read the Joint Proxy Statement/Offering Memorandum because it contains important information. Stockholders will be able to obtain a free copy of the Joint Proxy Statement/Offering Memorandum, as well as other information about Alpha, by contacting Alpha's Investor Relations department by telephone at (423) 723-8980 or by email at [email protected].

None of Alpha's common or preferred stock is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Alpha does not file annual, quarterly or current reports or proxy statements with the SEC.

SOURCE Alpha Natural Resources

Related Links

http://alphanr.com


The classic combination of black and white was a top choice with many women adorning their Globes gowns with dazzling Forevermark diamonds set in white gold. Angelina Jolie, nominated for her film First They Killed My Father, looked stunning in bold pear shaped drop earrings with round brilliant diamonds.

Allison Williams of the Golden Globes Nominated film Get Out topped her black strapless gown with a one-of-a-kind five-strand diamond choker, hand crafted with more than 40 carats of Forevermark diamonds.

Williams' stylist Cristina Ehrlich said of the look, "With the Golden Globes red carpet blackout, white diamonds were the immediate choice - it's such a classic and glamorous combination. I chose Forevermark diamonds for Allison not only because they are beautiful, but they tell a bigger story with Forevermark's ongoing support for women, and they pair perfectly with the theme of the evening."

Shailene Woodley, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Big Little Lies paired her modern gown with a classic pair of oversized princess diamond stud earrings and a timeless diamond eternity band and cocktail ring.

"I'm thrilled to be at the Golden Globes today in celebration of such wonderfully talented artists and their work over the course of the past year. I'm grateful to the HFPA for allowing us the opportunity to be here representing the acting community, but also in solidarity of women and men all over the world in tandem with the Time's Up Movement. Forevermark's commitment to creating opportunities for women in its diamond producing countries really speaks to the narrative of the night. I'm happy to be wearing their beautiful diamonds this evening," said Woodley.

Forevermark diamond looks at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards include:

Who: Angelina Jolie, Golden Globe Award Presenter and Nominee for Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language, First They Killed My Father

The Look:

Forevermark Diamond Drop Earrings set in 18k White Gold 12.50 ctw

Diamond Drop Earrings set in White Gold 12.50 ctw Forevermark by Pluczenik Integre Opulence Ring set in 18k White Gold 3.65 ctw

Who: Elisabeth Moss, Golden Globe Winner for Best Actress In a Television Series, Drama, The Handmaid's Tale

The Look:

Forevermark by Rahaminov Round and Pear Double Drop Earrings set in 18k White Gold 2.69 ctw

Who: Shailene Woodley, Best Supporting Actress in a Television Series Golden Globe Nominee, Big Little Lies

The Look:

Forevermark Princess Cut Diamond Earrings set in 18k White Gold 9.41ctw

Princess Cut Diamond Earrings set in White Gold 9.41ctw Forevermark Diamond Eternity Band set in18k White Gold 2.97 ctw

Diamond Eternity Band set in18k White Gold 2.97 ctw Forevermark Millemoi Diamond Ring set in18k White Gold 1.24 ctw

Who: Allison Williams of Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy Golden Globe Nominee Get Out

The Look:

Forevermark by Rahaminov Cushion Eternity Band set in Platinum 9.35 ctw

Cushion Eternity Band set in Platinum 9.35 ctw Forevermark by Rahaminov Cushion Eternity Band set in Platinum 5.07 ctw

Cushion Eternity Band set in Platinum 5.07 ctw Forevermark Five Row Diamond Choker set in 18k White Gold 43.15 ctw

Five Row Diamond Choker set in White Gold 43.15 ctw Forevermark by Natalie K Oval Cluster Diamond Ring set in 18k White Gold 5.01 ctw

Who: Alexis Bledel of Best Television Series, Drama Golden Globes Nominee The Handmaid's Tale

The Look:

Forevermark x Jade Trau Alchemy Round Diamond Short Drop Earrings set in 18k White Gold

Round Diamond Short Drop Earrings set in White Gold Forevermark x Jade Trau Alchemy Round Diamond Line Bracelet set in 18k White Gold

Round Diamond Line Bracelet set in White Gold Forevermark by Natalie K Diamond Line Bracelet set in 18k White Gold 6.46 ctw

Diamond Line Bracelet set in White Gold 6.46 ctw Forevermark by Natalie K Swirl Band set in18k White Gold 1.02 ctw

Swirl Band set in18k White Gold 1.02 ctw Forevermark Cluster Shield Ring set in18k White Gold 3.40 ctw

ABOUT FOREVERMARK

Every Forevermark diamond undergoes a journey of rigorous selection. The unique Forevermark inscription is an assurance that every Forevermark diamond meets the exceptional standards of beauty, rarity and is responsibly sourced. Forevermark goes beyond the standard 4Cs to hand select diamonds that are among the most beautiful in the world. Less than one percent of the world's diamonds are worthy of the Forevermark inscription.

Each Forevermark diamond is responsibly sourced and embodies Forevermark's principles of integrity, support for opportunities for women and dedication to the protection of the natural world. The inscription is an assurance of the physical integrity of a Forevermark diamond throughout its journey. Invisible to the naked eye, the inscription features a unique identification number and is just 1,5/000th the width of a human hair, made using bespoke technology from The De Beers Group of Companies.

Forevermark is the diamond brand from The De Beers Group of Companies and benefits from over 128 years of diamond expertise. For more information and to find your nearest Authorized Forevermark Jeweler, visit www.forevermark.com.

SOURCE Forevermark

Related Links

http://www.forevermark.com


HAMILTON, Bermuda and SAN FRANCISCO, and NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Apex Group Ltd. ("Apex"), Genstar Capital ("Genstar"), and SALU Capital ("SALU"), today jointly announce Apex's acquisition of M.M.Warburg & CO's Asset Management and Servicing business in Luxembourg ("Warburg"). Upon completion of the transaction, Apex, a Genstar portfolio company, will have nearly $350 billion of AuA.

The transaction is the third for Apex in the space of six months following the acquisition of both Equinoxe Alternative Investment Services and Deutsche Bank's Alternative Fund Services business in 2017. This latest move reaffirms Apex's position as the fastest growing fund administrator in the world and brings it closer to achieving its goal of becoming one of the top five largest fund administrators globally. Apex and Genstar partnered with SALU Capital, led by Managing Partner Markus Philipp Ehrhardt, whose market knowledge and network was instrumental in the successful origination and execution of the transaction.

The transaction will see Warburg Invest Luxembourg S.A. and M.M.Warburg & CO Luxembourg S.A. become part of Apex, adding a further $50bn to Apex's global AuA. The Group's unique operating model and globally connected service provision opens up additional jurisdictional expertise and investment options to Warburg clients.

The full depositary services and private equity depositary solutions provided by the Warburg Luxembourg units brings will add further weight to Apex's strength in delivering a complete service to European regulated funds, and will further complement the services integrated via the Deutsche Bank AFS acquisition.

Parent company, M.M.Warburg & CO (AG & Co.) KGaA, and Apex will form a strategic partnership for Luxembourg based asset management services businesses whilst Warburg Invest (Germany) will also continue to focus on its German asset management business.

Terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2018.

"The addition of the Warburg team and product suite further strengthens our capabilities in the highly regulated European market as we continue to develop the most complete service offering in the sector. There are benefits for both the transitioning Warburg clients and existing Apex clients in this combined offering and as we continue to grow we want to help them to grow with us," stated Peter Hughes, Founder and CEO at Apex.

Joachim Olearius, Spokesman for the Partners of M.M.Warburg & CO, stated, "In Apex we have found a partner for this transaction that perfectly meets the requirements and expectations of our customers. Apex's independence and unfailing dedication to delivering exemplary service to its clients means we can be confident that the transition will be smooth and service levels maintained. Our continued commitment to working closely with Apex as a strategic partner aptly demonstrates our trust and confidence in this combination."

"With our first deal, we are proud to be part of this significant transaction with strategic partners of the caliber of Apex and Genstar, and with a seller as reputable as M.M.Warburg & Co, proving our ability to originate and execute on complex investment opportunities," says Markus Philipp Ehrhardt, Managing Partner of SALU Capital.

Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Arendt & Medernach provided legal counsel to Apex and Genstar.

Notes to editors:

About Apex Group

Apex, established in Bermuda in 2003, is one of the world's largest independent fund administration and middle office solutions providers with offices in 35 locations worldwide. Apex has continually improved and evolved its product suite by surrounding these core administrative services with additional products spanning the full value chain; from information delivery and regulatory products to a full middle office solution and fund listings database. Apex now administers the investments of some of the largest funds and institutional investors in the world. www.apexfundservices.com

About Genstar Capital

Genstar Capital (www.gencap.com) is a leading private equity firm that has been actively investing in high quality companies for nearly 30 years. Based in San Francisco, Genstar works in partnership with its management teams and its network of strategic advisors to transform its portfolio companies into industry-leading businesses. Genstar manages funds with total capital commitments of approximately $9 billion and targets investments focused on targeted segments of the financial services, software, industrial technology, and healthcare industries. Genstar's current and previous investments in financial and business services companies include Ascensus, AssetMark, Strategic Insight, Mercer Advisors, Institutional Shareholder Services and Altegris.

About SALU Capital

SALU Capital (www.salucapital.com) is a special situations and private equity investment firm with focus on the global financial services and insurance sectors. SALU works with an established network of family offices and institutional investors enabling the firm to target investments with an equity value of between $20 million and $300 million for individual transactions. SALU's leadership and investment partners have deep and broad experience in global financial markets, private equity and the investment management industry, and SALU relies upon a network of senior advisors that includes former CEOs and senior operators with decades of experience in the sectors that SALU invests in.

About M.M.Warburg & CO

Founded in 1798, M.M.Warburg & CO is an independent German private bank. As a universal bank, it provides sophisticated banking services to discerning private clients, corporate clients, and institutional investors in its core business segments of Private Banking, Asset Management, and Investment Banking. The Warburg Banking Group has own funds of EUR 423.7 million, assets under management of EUR 54.1 billion, and 1,232 employees (as of December 31, 2016). It comprises M.M.Warburg & CO as well as the subsidiaries Marcard, Stein & Co, M.M.Warburg & CO Hypothekenbank and Warburg Invest.

Contacts:

For Genstar:

Chris Tofalli

Chris Tofalli Public Relations, LLC

914-834-4334

For Apex:

Rosie Guest

Global Marketing Director

[email protected] | +44 (0) 7770 858 280

For SALU:

Markus Philipp Ehrhardt

Managing Partner

[email protected]

SOURCE Apex Group

Related Links

http://www.apexfundservices.com


SAN DIEGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Forbes School of Business & Technology at Ashford University has launched a new Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT) degree program. The online program is designed to prepare students for the breadth of technical skills required of modern information technology (IT) professionals in a fast-paced, rapidly changing global workplace.

The BSIT program focuses on software and application development, business analysis, networking (including cloud-based infrastructure and on-premises and serverless systems), information security, network engineering and administration, project management, and database development and administration. The program builds a foundation in business theory and practice to help students understand the impact of IT on the workplace and become technological problem-solvers.

"IT professionals assume a vital role in any modern organization and are the true enablers in our economy, solving complex problems and devising solutions that help users meet their goals," says Dr. Kenneth Edick, Associate Dean of the Forbes School of Business & Technology at Ashford University. "The Bachelor of Science in Information Technology will introduce our students to the knowledge and tools needed to enter a dynamic, growing career field. Our exceptional faculty will work side by side with students to reinforce current industry and professional practices."

Students who successfully complete the BSIT degree will be equipped to apply strategies and techniques toward system improvement and development of cutting-edge IT solutions, utilize state-of-the-art project management tools and technical skills to apply the appropriate System Development Lifecycle methods, evaluate integration possibilities of various technologies from multiple sources in one-user environment, develop risk management and system security plans and procedures using best practices and appropriate system quality standards, and assess ethical, legal, security, and social aspects and values within organizations.

Graduates of the BSIT programs will be qualified to pursue such positions as Software Developers, Computer Systems Analysts, Software Developers, Computer Network Architects, Web Developers, Information Security Analysts, and Computer and Information Research Technologists.

For more information about the new Bachelor of Science in Information Technology degree, please visit the degrees page at https://www.ashford.edu/online-degrees/information-technology/bachelor-of-science-information-technology.

About Ashford University

Where heritage meets innovation  that's Ashford University. At Ashford, students discover relevant degree programs, innovative technology, and cherished tradition. Ashford offers associates, bachelor's, and master's degree programs online, allowing students to balance life by providing the flexibility to do school work anywhere, anytime. For more information, please visit www.ashford.edu, www.facebook.com/ashforduniversity, www.twitter.com/AshfordU, or call Lauren Coartney at 858.513.9240 x11636.

Contact: Lauren Coartney

858.513.9240 x11636  [email protected]

SOURCE Ashford University

Related Links

http://www.ashford.edu


MIAMI, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The New Year is fast approaching, and Dr. Jason Sanders of AZURI Medical Aesthetics and Rejuvenation Center in Miami Beach is in the know as to what men and women are doing in 2018 when it comes to quick and painless cosmetic procedures. The popularity of non-invasive cosmetic treatments has risen dramatically, and it's not just for celebrities anymore.

Dr. Jason Sanders

Azuri combines the best state-of-the-art techniques from non-invasive medical aesthetics, advanced laser and broad band light (BBL) treatments, body contouring and stem cell treatments all under one roof in Miami Beach. Some of the more specialized techniques at Azuri include advanced Angel PRP Therapy, CoolSculpting, Forever Clear and Forever Young BBL, Halo Hybrid Fractional Laser and the Vampire Facial.

A steady trend has been for people to seek minimally invasive or non-surgical treatments as most do not like the treatment time, pain and/or recovery associated with more invasive procedures. For this reason, more and more men and women are choosing treatments that can be done quickly, painlessly and with minimal down time.

Skin Tyte, the newest body contouring procedure offered at Azuri, is a revolutionary, non-surgical solution for tightening and lifting sagging skin. The treatment is completely painless and is feels like a warm massage. There is no downtime associated with this procedure and it can be used to treat multiple areas including the face, neck, chest, hands, stomach, butt, thighs and above the knees. It provides excellent results as a standalone treatment or can be a great complement to CoolSculpting, which is used at Azuri to target those hard-to-lose areas of unwanted fat.

Azuri also offers Broad Band Light (BBL) Fotofacial treatments. BBL, which is the world's most advanced intense pulsed light, offers quick and dramatic results with no down time for patients interested in clearing pigmentation and sun damage, tightening loose skin, improving acne and scars, reducing wrinkles, smoothing skin texture and stimulating increased performance and sensation with sex.

Azuri's Halo Hybrid Fractional Laser repairs the visible signs of aging, sun damage, discoloration, enlarged pores, fine lines and uneven skin tone. With the Halo Hybrid Fractional Laser, patients can get advanced laser treatment results with minimal down time, as most patients have recovered completely within 5-7 days. Treatment with the Halo laser will leave the skin smoother, clearer and glowing.

Another group of Azuri's very popular treatments is biomimetic therapy, which includes platelet rich plasma (PRP), AmnioPro and autologous stem cells. PRP involves concentrating the patient's own platelets and the growth factors they hold for use in treatment of pigmentation, wrinkles and scars, as well as joint and tendon pain. PRP stimulates regeneration of skin and soft tissues and is the cornerstone of treatments like the Vampire Facial and Facelift, the O-Shot and P-shot.

Unique to Azuri is the practice of restorative tissue technology, which patients can experience through AmnioPro and stem cell therapy. AmnioPro is derived from human amniotic and placental tissues and has been shown to guide regenerative healing while reducing inflammation, adhesion and scarring. Stem cells, which are mostly derived from fat cells, rejuvenate, repair and then regenerate the skin cells. These biomimetic minimally invasive, rejuvenating treatments create a more youthful look and feel and take about 20 minutes for each treatment.

"Azuri is a new paradigm in medical aesthetics and rejuvenation. Our state-of-the-art technology delivers excellent results with minimal downtime in a comfortable, premier facility in the heart of Miami Beach. We provide a complete range of services for skin, face and body rejuvenation," says Dr. Sanders. "Our procedures are all performed by or under the direct supervision of a specialty trained and board-certified surgeon, who is always on-site to deliver the best care and results for our clients."

Dr. Sanders graduated with honors from Harvard, attended medical school at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where he also completed his residency, and did subspecialty training in Southern California.

Azuri Medical Aesthetics and Rejuvenation Center is located at 300 West 41st Street, Suite 100, Miami Beach, FL 33141.

Media Contact:

(305) 770-6065

SOURCE AZURI Medical Aesthetics and Rejuvenation Center

Related Links

https://azuricenter.com


CHICAGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The 'Back to Kama' (BTK) organization (Kama is the indigenous native term for Africa; see www.backtokama.org) will support a Volunteer Dental Project (VDP) for the second consecutive year. This volunteer program was inspired by the BTK dream project and was created for the sole purpose of giving back to the African community, the homeland.

In 2009, Rael, spiritual leader of the International Raelian Movement (IRM), launched the 'Back to Kama' dream project to encourage well-educated, successful, and affluent people of all races and religions  especially descendants of slaves  to migrate to Kama and to relocate their businesses and operations there, along with transferring knowledge and wealth accumulated in the West. "To save Humanity, we must first save Kama," Rael said.

Five years ago, Raelian Guide, Larry R. Abdullah (DDS, PhD)  who has a general dentistry practice in Chicago, first had his DNA tested to trace down his African roots and the results revealed the Congo, Africa.

"My ancestry originated in the Congo and spread across the continent to West Africa. This is what inspired me to travel to Africa for the first time," Abdullah recalled. His trip resulted in his participation in the 'Back to Kama' program designed to reunite people of African descent with their ancestral homeland.

"Since I'm a dentist, I decided to initiate a program to provide dental services to the residents most in need," Dr. Abdullah said. In January 2017, he returned to Burkina Faso for two weeks where he treated nearly 100 patients with acute and chronic dental needs. Later this month (January), thanks to BTK, the Volunteer Dental Project will return to Kama for the second consecutive year where he will spend three weeks, and provide dental services in both the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

Dr. Abdullah and the staff of villagers he trained to help him will see an average of eight patients a day, and the goal is to perform extractions, emergency services, and some basic preventive services.

"The aim of the BTK program is to help enable people of African descent to reconnect with the continent by sharing their skills, experience, knowledge, and wealth," Abdullah said. He hopes that what he is doing can serve as a model for the African diaspora to give back to Kama.

SOURCE Back to Kama

Related Links

http://www.backtokama.org


MARLBOROUGH, Mass., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Block MEMS, LLC (Block) has been awarded Phase II of the Intelligence Advanced Research Programs Activity (IARPA) Program for the standoff detection of explosives and toxic chemical threats. Block was chosen for Phase II in a competitive down-selection process.

Under Phase I, Block successfully demonstrated the ability to detect trace quantities of explosives and other threats on multiple surfaces at 1 and 5 meter standoff distances in a few seconds.

A critical achievement under Phase I has been the development of a benchtop system based on quantum cascade lasers and an innovative chemical detection algorithm. The algorithm combines powerful data processing techniques, simulations of light/material interactions, and modeling of anticipated detected signatures in order to eliminate the effect of clutter, reduce false alarm rates, and improve limits of detection.

The IARPA program is called "Standoff Illuminator for Measuring Absorbance and Reflectance Infrared Light Signatures" (SILMARILS). The contract value of the program is now at $10.7 million. The program is managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Dr. Anish Goyal, Block's VP of Technology and Principal Investigator of the SILMARILS Program at Block, commented, "I am very pleased to receive the second Phase of the SILMARILS Program. The achievements of the previous Phase have taken a significant step towards the ultimate goal of the SILMARILS Program to be able to detect explosives and other chemicals at standoff distances of 30 and 50 meters. The ability to not only detect Chemical Warfare Agents (CWAs), but Explosives and Pharmaceutical Based Agents (such as Fentanyl) as well at these standoff distances is addressing a strong need within the Intelligence Community, the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security."

Dr. Petros Kotidis, Block's CEO added, "We are honored to receive this award and I am very proud of the accomplishment of the Block team under the SILMARILS Program. The technology being developed under this program has far reaching applications within the Security Markets, as it will eventually enable the highly sought-after capability of Standoff Detection of trace chemical threats. Ranging from protection of soft targets against explosive terrorist attacks and faster check-in lines at transportation terminals and airports, to detection of Chemical Warfare Agents (CWAs) and better surveying of contaminated ground and surfaces, the SILMARILS capability will revolutionize the field of chemical security."

About Block MEMS/Engineering LLC:

Block is a leading development, engineering and manufacturing company focusing on the commercialization of high performance Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs) and FTIR spectrometers. Block has been awarded numerous government contracts over the past decade for the application of its technologies toward the detection of explosives, buried IEDs, chemical warfare agents, toxic industrial materials and chemical clouds. Block's PORTHOS (TM) is a person-portable, passive FTIR spectrometer system that remotely detects chemical threats as far as three miles and provides early warning of chemical warfare agents. LaserWarn (TM) is a QCL-based system that is used to provide early warning against chemical attacks by establishing a "chemical trip-wire" using eye-safe laser beams. It is also used for safety, environmental, and fence-line monitoring of toxic and fugitive gases over a large area. Block's unique QCL-based analyzers include the LaserSense (TM) Gas Analyzer for the detection and quantification of a wide variety of gases for process control and field applications in the oil, gas, and energy industries. The LaserTune (TM) product line of QCL-based Infrared Sources is used for corporate research and academic markets and OEM applications.

Contact: Petros Kotidis, (508) 251-3101

This release was issued through The Xpress Press News Service, merging e-mail and satellite distribution technologies to reach business analysts and media outlets worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.XpressPress.com.

SOURCE Block MEMS, LLC
NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Brooklyn Law School, in collaboration with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory (Deloitte) and John P. Oswald, President and CEO of Capital Trust Group and a member of the Law School's Board of Trustees, is today holding its sixth annual "Business Boot Camp," a four-day intensive training program designed to enhance the business and financial savvy of its students and to better meet the needs of today's evolving global business marketplace. A "mini MBA" course, the Boot Camp has been developed and taught by top business professionals and the Law School's corporate and business law faculty and graduates. Since launching in 2013, more than 500 students have completed the course, for which they earn credit.

Led by Professor Michael Gerber, an internationally recognized expert in bankruptcy law, Business Boot Camp offers students instruction on a range of issues that business professionals regularly encounter and increasingly lawyers must be familiar with, including developing a business plan, reading financial statements, valuing assets, raising capital, and meeting business goals while complying with the law. Throughout the course, presentations and panel discussions will feature industry experts and alumni who will focus on a host of issues ranging from cybersecurity to how to buy and sell a business.

"The classic law school experience teaches students to 'think like a lawyer.' That is essential, but there are times when practicing lawyers need to reach outside the traditional legal toolkit and also think like a business person," said Gerber. "There are common issues that all business professionals confront, and Brooklyn Law School's Business Boot Camp introduces studentseven those who have never studied business, finance or economicsto the vocabulary and framework they will need to help clients deal with those issues."

Designed to complement and enhance Brooklyn Law School's corporate, commercial, and tax law courses, the Business Boot Camp syllabus is modeled in part on training that Deloitte has provided to first-year associates at major law firms. The curriculum traces the evolution of a hypothetical business from its founding and initial capitalization to its going public and acquisition of another company. The course is designed to teach students the vocabulary and skills needed to understand and implement clients' business objectives, and better enables students to launch their own entrepreneurial careers.

"Our current and prospective students understand that, in today's complex and layered business environment, arming themselves with highly relevant business skills better prepares them for dealing with corporate and entrepreneurial businesses alike," said Nick Allard, President and Joseph Crea Dean and Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. "Today's business leaders are facing greater legal and financial challenges than ever before and they have every right to expect their lawyers to be familiar with the basic business and financial concepts that are critical to the success of their enterprises. At Brooklyn Law School, we are determined to jump-start our graduates' careers by exposing them to the basic business skills their future clients will highly value."

"Developing business acumen and becoming financially literate are critical to success in today's globally connected world," said Anthony Campanelli, a Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, who helped launch and develop the course. He, along with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory US Anti-money Laundering and Economic Sanctions Practice Leader Fred Curry, principal, Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP, a 2003 graduate of Brooklyn Law School who also has been involved since the program's inception, will address students on the first day of Boot Camp.

More than 50 Brooklyn Law School alumni will lead interactive breakout sessions and share their experiences as successful practitioners and entrepreneurs. These alumni include partners in major law firms, CEOs, and general counsels of established companies and startups. The program culminates with a Q&A session with Dennis Block, Brooklyn Law School class of 1967, Senior Chairman of Greenberg Traurig's Global Mergers & Acquisitions practice, and Trustee of the Law School. Block, who has earned a reputation as one of the foremost M&A lawyers in the country and for whom the school's Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law is named, has taught M&A courses as an Adjunct Professor for the last 18 years.

"Whether you graduate from Brooklyn Law School and go into business or practice business law, what you learn at Business Boot Camp is that there are two kinds of business lawyers: the deal makers and the deal breakers," said Liz Holland, Class of 1993, Chief Executive Officer of Abbell Associates LLC, who will speak to students and participate in an alumni panel on the purchase and sale of a business. "Deal makers last long and prosper, and Business Boot Camp encourages productive deal making."

Oswald, a 1984 graduate of the Law School, who is also a certified public accountant, generously supports the program and said his goal is to inspire young lawyers to expand their business vocabulary and acumen to deliver the services that corporate clients now demand and law firms must provide to thrive in today's increasingly competitive and challenging market.

"The legal services job market, like the legal industry itself, is evolving and being reshaped by technology and ever-tighter budgets," said Oswald. "Business Boot Camp better equips our students to compete for career opportunities and be more practice-ready when they graduate."

About Brooklyn Law School

Founded in 1901, Brooklyn Law School offers a vibrant intellectual community emphasizing teaching excellence, cutting-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, in addition to the LL.M. for Internationally Trained Lawyers. Visit Brooklyn Law School at brooklaw.edu.

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 6,000 private and middle market companies. Our people work across more than 20 industry sectors to make an impact that matters  delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthy society. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them.

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms.

SOURCE Brooklyn Law School

Related Links

http://www.brooklaw.edu


OAKLAND, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Grasshopper Kiosks ( grasshopperkiosks.com), the developers of the nation's leading fully compliant self-service systems for the storage and dispensing of cannabis products, have installed a unit in Berkeley Patients Group (BPG), the nation's longest continuously operating marijuana dispensary.

The Grasshopper automated self-service sales system streamlines transaction times, tracks inventory and payments, and collects real-time data about sales trends. Grasshopper Kiosks sell products from a secure, climate-controlled, automated storage and dispensing system.

Grasshopper's systems are ADA compliant and were designed to work in accordance with the complex regulations that govern California's legal cannabis industry.

The system in use at BPG sells a variety of products, including pre-rolled joints, vape cartridges and edibles.

"The system has been purposefully designed for cannabis dispensaries, and can be utilized to accommodate and support a variety of business needs," said Ron Christensen, Vice President of Grasshopper Kiosks. "For instance, the system can be configured to handle only medical or only adult-use products, and will keep track of those transactions separately for regulatory and taxation purposes. In this manner, the Grasshopper system not only streamlines transactions for customers, but also reduces paperwork and inventory challenges for employees."

Grasshopper Kiosks can also be stocked with a dispensary's most popular items, creating a "Fastlane Checkout" for customers on the go.

"We recorded over 70 transactions on the system on its first day," said Sean Luse, COO at Berkeley Patients Group. "We appreciate having a tool that not only helps customers conduct transactions quickly and easily, but also provides us with excellent data and revenue reports."

Berkeley Patients Group was one of the few dispensaries in California that was licensed to sell adult-use cannabis beginning on January 1, 2018. The dispensary opened their doors to a waiting crowd, and Berkeley Mayor, Jesse Arreguin, performed a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. Reporters and photographers from both national and Bay Area television stations, newspapers, and wire services covered the event.

"We are excited to be changing the landscape of this new $7 billion legal industry with accomplished peers like the people at Berkeley Patients Group," said Martin Kaufman, CEO of Grasshopper Kiosks. "One of our top priorities is working with dispensaries to help them create a brand distinction in the market with a tool that enhances the customer experience and protects regulatory compliance."

For more information on Grasshopper Kiosks, call: 877-828-3879, email: [email protected], or visit: www.grasshopperkiosks.com

Connect with Grasshopper Kiosks on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

SOURCE Grasshopper Kiosks

Related Links

http://grasshopperkiosks.com


Two leading non-profits combine efforts to accelerate cancer immunotherapy for patients globally

NEW YORK and KINGSTON, ON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - The Cancer Research Institute (CRI) and the Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG) today announced a multi-year collaboration to develop and conduct clinical trials in immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy agents are already changing the standard of care for many cancer types, and the landscape continues to grow with over 940 immunotherapy agents in clinical development. There is an urgent need to collaborate on clinical trials and translational research and to unite leading experts. Comprehensive clinical trials, especially basket and umbrella platforms, are needed to efficiently evaluate emerging novel therapies that will hopefully lead to faster approval of better treatments for people with cancer around the world.

"This collaboration is what great partnerships look likeuniting CRI's cancer immunology expertise with the clinical research expertise and global footprint at CCTG, which I've observed is the fastest and most effective cooperative group worldwide. Together, and with our combined global expert network, we will accelerate innovation for patients," said Aiman Shalabi, chief medical officer, Clinical Accelerator, CRI.

CRI, a US non-profit organization that funds research internationally, has a 65-year legacy of supporting the discovery and development of immunotherapy for all types of cancer. Its unique clinical program, the Anna-Maria Kellen Clinical Accelerator, brings together non-profit-academia-industry partnerships designed to develop and organize the clinical study of combination cancer immunotherapies.

CCTG is a non-profit cancer research cooperative that designs and conducts clinical trials to improve the practice of treating cancer and to enhance the quality of life for cancer survivors. CCTG is recognized as being one of the most impactful and influential academic groups, and has a proven track record in rapid and efficient conduct of studies across an extensive network in Canada and internationally, many of which have been practice-changing.

"Global collaboration and partnerships are essential to the success of clinical trials and critical in moving the cancer research agenda forward. We are proud to leverage the strengths of both CCTG and CRI in this strategic collaboration to bring important improvements in cancer therapies to the patients that need them," said Janet Dancey, M.D., FRCPC, director, CCTG.

About the Cancer Research Institute

The Cancer Research Institute (CRI), established in 1953, is the world's leading nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to immuno-oncology and has invested over $357 million to support research at the world's leading medical centers and universities. CRI's clinical program, the Anna-Maria Kellen Clinical Accelerator, is a unique academia-nonprofit-industry collaboration model that serves as an "incubator" that delivers multi-center clinical trials for promising new immunotherapy combinations. CRI's venture philanthropy fund supports clinical trials within this program, which fosters a collaborative environment that enables scientists to advance their most ambitious research ideas, and accelerates studies that one group or company could not do alone. To learn more about the Anna-Maria Kellen Clinical Accelerator, go to www.cancerresearch.org/clinical-accelerator.

About the Canadian Cancer Trials Group

The Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG) is a cancer clinical trials research cooperative that runs phase I-III trials to test anti-cancer and supportive therapies in over 80 institutions across Canada and internationally. We are supported by core funding from the Canadian Cancer Society. From our centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, we have supported over 500 trials in over 40 countries aimed at improving survival and quality of life for all people with cancer.

SOURCE Canadian Cancer Trials Group
Manuel is a technology executive with over 15 years of experience in mobile, connectivity, software, and cloud technologies. An accomplished technology innovator & entrepreneur, Manuel has over 20 patents in connected devices, wireless systems, video platforms, and low-power RF. He has developed and commercialized leading edge connected devices, services, and applications at both established and start-up companies including Qualcomm, CardioNet, and NetworkCar.

Manuel is a graduate of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he received an MBA and a MS in Mechanical Engineering. He also holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a MS in Systems Engineering from MIT.

"As Cedar's extensive portfolio of driver awareness and information technologies continues to evolve, Manuel will apply his technical, business and operational experience to enhance the connectivity, embedded hardware, software, and cloud capabilities of our technology portfolio," said Chris Cowger, President and CEO, Cedar Electronics. "His long-range technology strategy, product innovation and technology partnerships will drive the execution of Cedar's strategic goals & technology transformation."

"I'm looking forward to bringing elements of my technology development expertise, particularly in connected devices, mobile and cloud to Cedar," said Manuel. "I'm excited for the tech transformation of Cedar as a critical element of our strategy."

Manuel will be based in San Diego, giving Cedar a new presence on the West Coast that will enable closer proximity to and relationships with key technology partners, as well as the world's leading software, mobile and connectivity talent.

About Cedar Electronics

Cedar Electronics Corporation, a leading global supplier of mobile and consumer products, possesses a portfolio of industry leading electronics brands including Cobra Electronics, ESCORT and Snooper. With locations in North America, Europe and Asia, Cedar is the largest designer & marketer of radar detection systems at every price point in every sales channel and the industry leader in Citizens Band radios. Cedar continues to aggressively grow its portfolio with an ever-expanding family of products that include dash cams, power inverters, portable jump starters, driver alert and information applications and more.

Media Contacts:

Chris Kooistra

Cedar Electronics

(773) 972-0691

[email protected]

SOURCE Cedar Electronics

Related Links

http://www.cedarelectronics.com


SAN FRANCISCO and RAMAT GAN, Israel, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Intuition Robotics, the creator of ElliQ, the Active Aging Companion, announced today the launch of its beta program, as the company approaches commercial launch in 2018. ElliQ is a proactive social robot designed to encourage an active and engaged lifestyle by helping to bridge the digital divide and keeping families closer together.

In the beta program, ElliQ will be introduced into the homes of dozens of older adults in California and Florida for an in-depth multi-week user trial. Intuition Robotics has partnered with Village to Village Network, Comfort Keepers and individual families that joined the program through the company's website. In the beta, the company plans to test how ElliQ integrates into the day-to-day lives of the seniors and their families, and examine how it can improve ElliQ to fulfill the company's mission to empower older adults to keep sharp, active and engaged. ElliQ has been rigorously tested with older adults over the past year and the response has been uniformly enthusiastic. Now the company is ready for a prolonged beta to test the impact on daily life over time and ensure an exceptional user experience that will make the product successful.

"Our mission with ElliQ is to harness the proactive power of cognitive computing to empower older adults to overcome the digital divide, and pursue an active lifestyle," says Dor Skuler, CEO and Founder of Intuition Robotics. "We are fortunate to have been working with many older adults to develop ElliQ's features and user experience, to meet their needs. Now, we are excited to begin the beta program as the next step on our way to a 2018 launch."

Over the past year, Intuition Robotics has worked on turning its prototype, first unveiled 12 months ago, into a product. ElliQ is designed to be a proactive, emotive social robot, featuring an entirely new way to engage users with remarkable ease of use and elegant design. The beta program will use the first units coming off the company's new manufacturing line. The company is conducting the very first demonstrations of the beta version of ElliQ to a select audience at CES 2018, where it has been declared the winner of the CES Best of Innovation award in the Smart Home category.

The company is also announcing additional investment from Samsung NEXT, SPARX Group and Glory Ventures bringing its total investment to $22M. Prominent previous investors include Toyota AI Ventures, iRobot, Bloomberg Beta, and leading Israeli-based venture capital firms.

Since emerging from stealth in January 2017, Intuition Robotics has garnered a stream of accolades and awards for ElliQ's innovative and thoughtful design and the robot's ability to address the specific needs of older adults, including:

- CES Best of Innovation Honoree - Smart Home category (Jan. 2018)

- Fast Company Innovation by Design Award Winner - UX category (Sept. 2017)

- AARP Innovation Champion Award - Social Well-Being category (June 2017)

About Intuition Robotics

Intuition Robotics is the creator of ElliQ, the Active Aging Companion, which helps older adults stay active and engaged with a proactive social robot that overcomes the digital divide. The company's AI cognitive computing technology, award-winning design, and intuitive interaction models provide a natural way for older adults to reap the benefits of technology without the need to master the tools. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Israel with offices in California. Intuition Robotics has raised over $20M in funding and is supported by renowned industry experts.

About ElliQ

ElliQ is an AI driven social robot for older adults aimed at reducing social isolation and loneliness by encouraging an active and engaged lifestyle. ElliQ seamlessly connects older adults with family and friends by making interactions with technology simple and intuitive, removing the complexity and frustration. This social companion adapts to the personalities and interests of the senior, recommending content they may enjoy such as news, music, TED talks and cognitive games. Communicating through body language, speech, sounds, light and images, ElliQ also suggests activities in the physical outside world such as taking a walk, medicine reminders or just calling family members.

Intuition Robotics' media kit can be found here.

SOURCE Intuition Robotics

Related Links

https://www.intuitionrobotics.com


SINGAPORE, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Clearbridge BioMedics today announced that it has successfully registered its target cell enrichment device, the ClearCell FX1 system, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a Class I Medical Device, for in vitro diagnostic use. This registration marks a significant milestone in providing a reliable liquid biopsy solution for clinical research in the United States. The ClearCell FX1 system has also previously attained CE marking to be used as an in-vitro diagnostic medical device in Europe and China Food and Drug Administration-approved Class I Medical Device status via the company's MGI partnership.

The ClearCell FX1 System is a leading, automated, label-free liquid biopsy device for the enrichment of target cells from blood. The system incorporates the innovative microfluidics CTChip to isolate and retrieve intact, viable target cells from a patient's blood sample.

Commercially launched in 2015, the ClearCell FX1 System has since been installed in laboratories worldwide and empowered numerous liquid biopsy studies. In 2017, it was chosen to be part of the prestigious CANCER-ID consortium, where leading cancer institutes and researchers use the technology to better understand the underlying biology of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The objective of such efforts is to generate new insights into the disease, to develop innovative cancer therapies and improve patient management protocols. The technology enables seamless processing of both CTCs and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) from the same patient sample for subsequent analysis, allowing comprehensive cancer profiling.

"We believe, the ClearCell FX1 System will play a critical role in the development of new therapies by providing label-free, intact and viable cells for analysis. Successfully listing the unit with the U.S. FDA for in vitro diagnostic purposes will accelerate research and the adoption of diagnostics from the tumor cells obtained. We will continue to work with our partners and the authorities to further validate the system, for use in cancer diagnostics, personalized therapy management and patient monitoring," said Michael Paumen, CEO of Clearbridge BioMedics.

In the U.S. the ClearCell FX1 system is sold directly through Clearbridge BioMedics Inc. In EMEA and Asia, the platform is currently available in more than 22 countries through distribution partnerships. In China, it is available through a strategic partnership with MGI, an associate of BGI.

About Clearbridge BioMedics

Clearbridge BioMedics Pte Ltd specializes in developing innovative systems with applications in oncology research and diagnostics. Clearbridge BioMedics has won numerous awards and garnered global recognition for its novel Circulating Tumor Cell (CTC) detection platform technology, the ClearCell FX1 System. The ClearCell FX1 system, when used in conjunction with its biochip and associated accessories, utilize state-of-the-art, non-invasive liquid biopsy to process blood samples for enrichment of CTCs. This enables the real-time analysis of disease before, during, and after treatment, which has become increasingly critical in the new era of targeted cancer therapies. www.ClearbridgeBioMedics.com.

SOURCE Clearbridge BioMedics
SUNTEC CITY, Singapore, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Crypto EXPO Asia forum goes live on Oct. 25-26, 2018, and Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Center hosts the world of blockchain and bitcoins for two days straight. Another outstanding show organized by FINEXPO is going to take place and promises to become a success as crypto world gained its popularity worldwide.

#1 International Blockchain, ICO and Cryptocurrency Expo in Singapore

Crypto Expo Asia 2018 are planning to welcome about 50 speakers and over 3,000 attendees throughout two days. Crypto EXPO Asia space will be filled with exhibitor booths, bars and seminar halls where everyone will get an opportunity not only build the network but explore the phenomena of crypto world itself and get more concrete and detailed information. The two-day event will include not only large exhibitions, panels and diversity of discussions but entertaining shows, lucky draws, fantastic prizes, live performances and AfterParty as well.

Meetings with the best crypto experts and leading Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and ICO companies are the unique opportunity available for every visitor. The diversity of topics in seminar halls is quite impressive and includes ICO and White Paper projects, digital AD, PR and marketing, ICO due diligence, global capital markets, Mining as actual business, blockchain and crypto-currency future, etc.

Crypto EXPO Asia has to become one of the most attractive crypto shows  the best way to build business connections and widen crypto knowledge. To become a part of this experience, complete the registration procedure on the official website. Each registered user will be provided with the access to the world of cryptocurrency markets.

Organizer of this show is FINEXPO - first and most influential financial event and fair producing company in the world since 2002 and its history of the organized events counts over 30,000 traders, investors and financial advisors with more than 3,000 financial companies and brokers on Stock, Option, Forex, Cryptocurrency and Futures markets (Crypto Expo Asia, Crypto Expo Moscow, Forex & Money Expo, Traders Fair & Traders Awards, Money Fair Hong Kong, Financial Expo, Investors Expo and more).

CONTACT:

FINEXPO Inc.

Margarita Yakupova

[email protected]

Related Links

Crypto Expo Asia 2018

Crypto Expo Moscow 2018

SOURCE FINEXPO Inc.
Those responsible for figuring out how to sustainably feed our growing population are likely currently sitting in classrooms, playing on playgrounds or yet to be born. The bottom line: Our youth are our future. That's why Culver's Thank You Farmers Project was created to make sure we have enough wholesome food to serve our growing population by supporting agricultural education programs that encourage smart farming.

In 2017, the nearly 650 Culver's restaurants in 24 states and the chain's support center donated over $400,000 to agricultural education initiatives in schools and organizations like the National FFA Organization, bringing Culver's total Thank You Farmers Project donations to date to more than $1.7 million.

Culver's Thank You Farmers Project, which is entering its sixth year, is designed to thank the people who have made Culver's the success it is today: the American farmer.

Of the total amount donated through Culver's Thank You Farmers Project, approximately 75 percent has come from guests supporting local fundraising at Culver's restaurants. The additional donated dollars come from Culver's sponsorship and funding of initiatives that benefit the National FFA Organization and Foundation, which helps its more than 653,000 student members develop their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education.

"Whether it's donating $1 on Scoops of Thanks Day, pledging support on our restaurant walls or dining with us on a fundraising day, every contributionbig or smallfrom our guests makes a difference," said Jessie Kreke, Culver's senior marketing manager, who's seen firsthand how these donations have saved a high school ag program and brought tears of joy to the eyes of students who've received scholarships and can now afford to pursue a secondary education.

In 2018, Culver's restaurants across the country will continue to fundraise for initiatives and organizations like FFA that work toward solutions for feeding our growing population. "To our guests who have supported the Thank You Farmers Project in the past and to those who will support it in the future: Thank you, from all of us at Culver's," said Kreke.

About Culver's:

For over 30 years, Culver's guests have been treated to cooked-to-order food made with farm-fresh ingredients and served with a smile. The ever-expanding franchise system now numbers nearly 650 family-owned and operated restaurants in 24 states. The restaurants' nationally recognized customer service is based on small-town, Midwestern values, genuine friendliness and an unwavering commitment to quality. Signature items include the award-winning ButterBurger, made from fresh, never frozen beef, and Fresh Frozen Custard, including the famous Flavor of the Day program. For more information, visit www.culvers.com, www.culvers.com/facebook, www.twitter.com/culvers or www.instagram.com/culvers

About the National FFA Organization:

The National FFA Organization is a national youth organization of 653,359 student members as part of 8,568 local FFA chapters in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The organization is supported by 344,239 alumni members in 2,051 local FFA alumni chapters throughout the U.S. The FFA mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education. The National FFA Organization operates under a federal charter granted by the 81st United States Congress, and it is an integral part of public instruction in agriculture. The U.S. Department of Education provides leadership and helps set direction for FFA as a service to state and local agricultural education programs. For more, visit the National FFA Organization online at FFA.org and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the official National FFA Organization blog.

CONTACT

Paul Pitas

608.644.2614

[email protected]

SOURCE Culver's

Related Links

http://www.culvers.com


CHONGQING, China, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) ("Daqo New Energy", the "Company" or "we"), a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry, today announced its chief executive officer, Dr. Gongda Yao, after more than nine years of dedicated service, will step down as the chief executive officer of the Company with immediate effect due to personal reasons. He remains to serve as a non-executive board member until March 31, 2018. The Board of Directors has started a search for a successor for the position of chief executive officer of the Company. The Company's Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder, Mr. Guangfu Xu, will act as executive Chairman and acting chief executive officer in the interim period.

"For the past nine years, it has been a privilege to work with the wonderful team of Daqo New Energy on its journey to become a world-leading low-cost and high-purity polysilicon manufacturer. I am proud of the achievements that we have accomplished together. Now as the Company has been performing very well both operationally and financially, I think it's time for me to step down from my position and spend more time with my family and pursue personal interests. " said Dr. Gongda Yao, " I will still stay on the Board of Directors until the end of March 2018, and work closely with Chairman Mr. Guangfu Xu and other board members to achieve a seamless leadership transition."

"I sincerely regret Dr. Yao's decision to leave, however I fully understand and respect his decision. We are extremely grateful for Dr. Yao's contribution to the Company in the past nine years, as Dr. Yao has built a world-class company with a leading position in the industry in terms of product quality and cost structure. Our diverse customer base today spans the leading manufacturers of solar products. Our Phase 3B capacity expansion is going smoothly and expected to further strengthen our competitiveness and advantages. We appreciate his hard work and dedication to the Company, and wish him the best with his endeavors and personal life in the future." said Mr. Guangfu Xu, Chairman of the Board of Directors and acting chief executive officer. "We have started a process of identifying qualified chief executive officer candidates and will bring the next chief executive officer on board as soon as we can."

About Daqo New Energy Corp.

Founded in 2008, Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) is a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry. As one of the world's lowest cost producers of high-purity polysilicon and solar wafers, the Company primarily sells its products to solar cell and solar module manufacturers. The Company has built a manufacturing facility that is technically advanced and highly efficient with a nameplate capacity of 18,000 metric tons in Xinjiang, China. The Company also operates a solar wafer manufacturing facility in Chongqing, China.

For further information, please contact:

Daqo New Energy Corp.

Investor Relations

Phone: +86-187 1658 5553

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Daqo New Energy Corp.
"Our solutions are created for those who, like us, believe craftsmanship is a virtue and aspire to create the best in residential and commercial design," said Christine Marvin, director of corporate strategy and design at The Marvin Family of Brands. "We've utilized insights for every detail from materials to design to develop products that advance the building industry. We're confident the products and design applications on display will both motivate and inspire, helping builders to perfect their craft."

Some of the new products on display at IBS 2018 include:

Marvin Home Automation  Lock Status Sensor  Giving homeowners peace of mind without adding complications for builders, the Marvin Lock Status Sensor is a fully integrated, factory-installed solution that indicates if a door or window is closed and locked or open and unlocked without requiring risky after-market modifications. It integrates seamlessly into new or existing security systems via wired or wireless connections and is compatible with a wide range of home security systems. Most importantly, its concealed design makes it the first solution on the market that has no visible components.

Giving homeowners peace of mind without adding complications for builders, the Marvin Lock Status Sensor is a fully integrated, factory-installed solution that indicates if a door or window is closed and locked or open and unlocked without requiring risky after-market modifications. It integrates seamlessly into new or existing security systems via wired or wireless connections and is compatible with a wide range of home security systems. Most importantly, its concealed design makes it the first solution on the market that has no visible components. Marvin Gallery Hardware Collection  To answer increasing consumer demand for more design options, Marvin partnered with four renowned manufacturers  Ashley Norton , Baldwin, Bouvet and Rocky Mountain Hardware  to create a curated selection of new hardware offerings. The Gallery Hardware Collection makes it easy for builders to provide a variety of solutions that reflect their customers' individual style, from traditional to contemporary and everything in between. Available now in numerous finishes and styles, the Gallery Hardware Collection was hand-selected to meet Marvin's high standards for aesthetics, quality and craftsmanship.

To answer increasing consumer demand for more design options, Marvin partnered with four renowned manufacturers , Baldwin, Bouvet and Rocky Mountain Hardware to create a curated selection of new hardware offerings. The Gallery Hardware Collection makes it easy for builders to provide a variety of solutions that reflect their customers' individual style, from traditional to contemporary and everything in between. Available now in numerous finishes and styles, the Gallery Hardware Collection was hand-selected to meet Marvin's high standards for aesthetics, quality and craftsmanship. Integrity All Ultrex Dark Interior Finishes  Expanding upon the popular Marvin Designer Black painted interior finish launched last year, Integrity will now offer both Bronze and Ebony interior finishes on All Ultrex windows and doors  an ideal option for homeowners interested in the growing dark-interior-finish aesthetic. The new window finishes will be available in February 2018 and will expand to All Ultrex sliding doors in June 2018 .

Expanding upon the popular Marvin Designer Black painted interior finish launched last year, Integrity will now offer both Bronze and Ebony interior finishes on All Ultrex windows and doors  an ideal option for homeowners interested in the growing dark-interior-finish aesthetic. The new window finishes will be available in and will expand to All Ultrex sliding doors in . Marvin Commercial Ultimate Double Hung Next Generation  With more requests for traditional window styles in larger sizes, Marvin is building upon last year's launch of the enhanced Marvin Ultimate Double Hung Next Generation with the introduction of a commercially-rated version. Available in February 2018 , the Commercial Ultimate Double Hung Next Generation is designed for historical and institutional commercial projects. It will be available in sizes up to 5 feet wide by 10 feet tall with a PG 50 rating option for select sizes.

In addition to these new products, The Marvin Family of Brands booth will feature several unique components, including two deconstructed window displays, a 29-window exhibit showcasing Marvin's full range of styles from contemporary to traditional, handmade tables designed by Marvin craftsmen and a historic replication corner highlighting the recently renovated 1878 Cincinnati Music Hall including an exact replica of a 16-by-20-foot ornate window used in the music hall.

Marvin and Tom Silva of "This Old House"

As a proud sponsor of This Old House, Marvin is pleased to host Tom Silva, General Contractor and longtime star of the show for two in-booth events. On Tuesday, Jan. 9 from 3  3:30 p.m., Tom will host a discussion around the benefits of using high-quality windows and doors with a Q&A and autograph signing to follow. In addition, Tom will be in the booth on Wednesday, Jan. 10 from 1  1:30 p.m. for a live podcast with Modern Craftsman and Christine Marvin.

For more information on The Marvin Family of Brands and the products and solutions on display at this year's show, visit www.Marvin.com.

About The Marvin Family of Brands

The Marvin Companies is a third- and fourth-generation family-owned and operated business, headquartered in Warroad, Minn., with more than 5,200 employees across 10 cities throughout the United States. The Marvin Family of Brands represents Marvin's fenestration portfolio, which includes Marvin Windows and Doors and its handcrafted wood and wood clad products that are made to order; Integrity Windows and Doors, which pioneered the fiberglass window category with the introduction of its patented Ultrex fiberglass material; and Infinity Replacement Windows, which offers homeowners a premier line of Ultrex replacement windows with distinctive design. Marvin's product portfolio also includes TruStile Doors, the leading manufacturer of made-to-order architectural interior and exterior doors. Marvin and its Family of Brands are distributed nationally through a network of independent dealers and are also exported internationally. Visit Marvin.com and TruStile.com to learn more.

SOURCE The Marvin Family of Brands

Related Links

http://www.Marvin.com


SNOHOMISH, Wash., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dream Dinners, a national meal-assembly company focused on families, is continuing its expansion efforts in select markets across Texas in 2018. As part of the effort, representatives from Dream Dinners are attending Franchise Expo South in January to meet with individuals interested in learning more about the Dream Dinners' franchise model.

Earlier this year, Dream Dinners announced it would add a sixth store in Texas and recently signed a franchise agreement for a new store in Frisco, Texas slated to open in late summer 2018.

In addition to Frisco, Dream Dinners is seeking qualified franchise candidates in the greater Dallas suburbs of McKinney, Plano, Richardson and Irving; Fort Worth, Arlington, San Antonio, and Houston suburbs such as The Woodlands, Spring, Atascocita, Katy, Sugarland and League City.

"Beyond a strong business acumen and the desire to control their financial future, we're looking for candidates who are committed to the Dream Dinners mission of growing great kids, and have the desire to make a positive impact on families in their respective communities," said Ashley Sawyer, Dream Dinners director of franchise development.

The Dream Dinners team will be onsite at Franchise Expo South from Jan. 18-20. Expo attendees are invited to stop by booth #310 to hear about the Dream Dinners concept and meet the team.

Potential franchise candidates can also learn more about Dream Dinners via a live webinar on Tuesday, Jan. 30. To join the webinar, register here.

For information on franchising opportunities with Dream Dinners in other markets, visit http://dreamdinnersfranchise.com/growth-markets/.

ABOUT DREAM DINNERS:

Founded in 2002, Dream Dinners' mission is to grow great kids by promoting the family dinner. Dream Dinners guests choose from seasonal, rotating monthly menus and prepare their dinners in-store without the hassle of planning, shopping and chopping. Dream Dinners lays out the ingredients in an easy-to-follow format so guests can assemble a month's worth of meals in about an hour. A pioneer and leader of the meal assembly industry, Dream Dinners brings Homemade, Made Easy to local communities through its 79 retail locations in 22 states. Learn more at www.dreamdinners.com.

SOURCE Dream Dinners

Related Links

http://www.dreamdinners.com


BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Drizly, the technology company behind the first and largest e-commerce alcohol app, announced the winners of its first-ever Drizly Blogger Awards. Drizly put out a call to booze-centric bloggers, from industry experts to imbibing enthusiasts, for nominations in 11 different categories to identify the blogs that consistently deliver the category's most creative, well-informed and entertaining content.

The awards were judged by three bona fide experts: Jesse Brenneman, Co-Founder and Chief Alchemist of Deacon Giles Distillery, Todd Maul, Co-Founder of Cafe ArtScience, and the team at Drizly. Entries were robust and there were numerous standouts, but the cream, as in 11 winners, eventually rose to the top and are all noteworthy for making distinct contributions to furthering adult beverage enthusiasm and knowledge.

2017 Drizly Blogger Awards Winners:

Best in Glass Winner: Natalie Migliarini from Beautiful Booze

Recognized as the top booze blogger in 2017  from cocktails to beer and everything in between.

Booziest Brain Winner: Greg Mays from Simple Cocktails

Recognized as the go-to industry expert and all-around guru for tips on everything beer, wine and spirits.

Best Drink Photography Winner: Aysegul D. Sanford from Foolproof Living

Photography can make or break the appeal of a cocktail, and these drinks are deliciously Instagram worthy.

Best Cocktail Blog Winner: Natalie Jacob from Arsenic & Lace

Features an arsenal of drink recipes that are loaded with creativity and innovation. Natalie can mix a mean drink.

Best Wine Blog Winner: Cindy Rynning from Grape Experiences

To honor a blog that breaks down vino for the most basic sampler to the most experienced connoisseur, and everyone in between.

Best Beer Blog Winner: Ryan Brawn from Hoppy Boston

A true lover of hops, this award honors the blogger who writes about everything from Porters to Sours and knows exactly what to crack open when.

Bartender's Pick Winner: Tyler Zielinski from Bon Vivantito

Any Bartender would happily select Tyler's drink out of the crowd.

Best Reinvention of a Classic Winner: Ivo Peshev and Mikey Gallop from Flair Project

Recognized for taking the initiative to make a classic drink, like a Gin & Tonic, their own.

Best Use of Booze in Food Winner: Jackie Dodd from The Beeroness

For the multi-talented individual who combines booze with cooking to create tasty recipes.

Craziest Concoction Winner: Leigh Ann Chatagnier from My Diary of Us

From sandwiches on top of a Bloody Mary to ice cream cone garnishes, Drizly recognizes the most creative cocktail recipes.

Best Original Cocktail Winner: Kristy Gardner from She Eats

The weirder, the better. Drizly honors the most inventive and original drink yet.

"Innovation is important in every industry, but at this moment in the alcohol space, it feels like innovation is booming," said Erin Schuster of Drizly. "We wanted to pay homage to the online enthusiasts with the inventiveness, know-how, curiosity and artistic talent to push adult beverage boundaries, who have worked so hard to earn their loyal, growing and fully-engaged followings."

The call for the next round of submissions will be announced in November 2018. Follow Drizly on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or visit Drizly.com for additional information.

About Drizly

Drizly is the world's largest alcohol marketplace and the best way to shop beer, wine, and spirits. With the speed and convenience of on-demand delivery, in-store pickup, or intrastate shipping, customers can easily browse and order their favorites from the Drizly website or mobile app. By partnering with the best retail stores in over 70 cities in North America, Drizly provides consumers a rich e-commerce experience that offers unrivaled selection, competitive pricing, and personalized content to users of legal drinking age. Drizly operates across the United States and Canada, from Austin to Boston, Calgary to Tampa, New York City to Denver (and beyond). Backed by world-class institutional investors, the company has raised $35 million to date.

SOURCE Drizly

Related Links

http://www.drizly.com


GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

DSIT Solutions Ltd. announced today that it has signed a contract with Tata Power SED to jointly supply 78 PointShield Portable Diver Detection Sonar (PDDS) units to the Indian Navy. The order is considered to be the largest ever in the field of underwater security systems.

The PointShield systems are to be supplied to the Indian Navy under special procurement program called "Buy Make India". Under this program, some of the Diver Detection Sonars will be delivered by DSIT directly while the rest will be manufactured by Tata Power SED in India with DSIT's supervision and support. The Indian Ministry of Defense selected DSIT and Tata Power SED after a tender process, in which all international Diver Detection Sonar manufacturers as well as large Indian companies participated. The process included rigorous sea trials, technical evaluation and commercial bidding.

Dan Ben Dov, DSIT'S Vice President for Sales and Marketing, commented, "This significant order strengthens DSIT's position as the market leader in the field of underwater security. It shows the growing concern among navies, coastguards and other organizations, seeking to protect their coastal and offshore critical sites and vessels from underwater intrusion and sabotage. With our AquaShield long range Diver Detection Sonar (DDS) and PointShield Portable DDS, we are ready to answer the market needs."

DSIT's AquaShield and PointShield underwater security systems are used by many customers worldwide. Both systems have been operational for many years and support automatic detection, tracking and classification of all types of underwater threats.

Benny Sela, CEO of DSIT, remarked, "We see this order as an important vote of confidence in our superior technology by the Indian Navy choosing us to protect their fleet against underwater threats. We look forward to work closely with Tata Power SED and deliver to the Indian Navy high quality and performance systems. We look at this project as an opportunity to launch a long and fruitful cooperation between the companies for the benefit of our joint customer."

About DSIT

DSIT provides detection solutions for HLS, Naval and Critical infrastructure markets. Our product lines include the Shield family of Diver Detection sonars, Blackfish Hull mounted sonar, portable acoustic range and SeaShield Coastal Surveillance system. On the ground, DSIT also offers a long-range Fiber Optic sensing solution called Lightline.

For more information visit http://www.dsit.co.il.

SOURCE DSIT Solutions Ltd.
ISLANDIA, N.Y., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Happy birthday dear Entenmann's, happy birthday to you! Entenmann's Bakery, a division of Bimbo Bakeries USA, announced today the launch of its "I Sing on the Cake" national sweepstakes in celebration of its 120th birthday. Fans of the iconic baked goods company can enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win sweet prizes and will receive a second entry by sharing a video singing Happy Birthday to the brand. For every video submitted, Entenmann's will share the gift of music to children across the country by making a donation to Give A Note, a non-profit organization that works to strengthen music education opportunities for all students.

"Entenmann's has been helping families celebrate sweet occasions and memorable milestones for generations, and now we are inviting those families to join us in celebrating ours," said Kim Bremer, Director of Marketing at Bimbo Bakeries USA. "It may be our big birthday, but we want our fans to get the presents, and being able to also give back to kids by supporting music education is truly the icing on the cake!"

"We're thrilled to join in celebrating this milestone with Entenmann's and grateful for their support for music education in our schools," added Beth Slusher, Give A Note Foundation President and Board Chair.

Starting today through March 31, consumers can enter the "I Sing on the Cake" national sweepstakes at www.entenmanns120birthday.com. To receive a second entry and to make the milestone even more memorable, fans are invited to sing Happy Birthday to Entenmann's on Instagram or Twitter using #entenmanns120 and #promotion or uploading directly onto the Entenmann's Facebook page. For every video submission received, Entenmann's will donate $1 to the Give A Note Foundation, up to $10,000.

The prizing includes:

An Ultimate Birthday party featuring a performance from the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters for the winner's friends and family

Four days and three nights of Family Fun in New York City with four Grandstand Tickets to the 2018 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

with four Grandstand Tickets to the 2018 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 120 winners will receive free Entenmann's products for a year

3,000 winners will receive a coupon for one free Entenmann's product

In 1898, William Entenmann opened his own bakery in Brooklyn, New York, delivering fresh-baked goods door-to-door in a horse-drawn wagon. 120 years later, Entenmann's is still committed to creating a wide variety of fresh, delicious baked goods  including its famous donuts, cakes, pies, Little Bites and more  and helping families across the country create sweet traditions and lifelong memories.

For more information on how to help Entenmann's create new memories and put the "I Sing on the Cake" in celebration of its 120th birthday, please visit www.entenmanns120birthday.com.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY Sweepstakes ends 3/30/18 11:59 p.m. ET. Void where prohibited. Subject to Official Rules www.entenmanns120birthday.com.

About Entenmann's Bakery

Entenmann's history dates back 120 years to 1898 when William Entenmann opened his first bakery in Brooklyn, New York. By the 1960s the company was selling delicious baked goods throughout the New York metropolitan area; by the 1970s it began selling nationwide. Today, Entenmann's markets over 100 different baked goods in the U.S., including its #1-best-selling classic Entenmann's Rich Frosted Donut.

About Bimbo Bakeries USA

Bimbo Bakeries USA (BBU), headquartered in Horsham, PA, is the nation's leading baking company providing the highest quality baked goods at a great value to customers and consumers. This includes well-known brand Entenmann's, producer of top quality donuts and cakes since 1898. Our team of 22,000 U.S. associates operates more than 60 manufacturing locations in the United States. Over 11,000 distribution routes deliver our leading brands such as Arnold, Bimbo, Boboli, Brownberry, Entenmann's, Freihofer's, Heiner's, Marinela, Mrs Baird's, Nature's Harvest, Oroweat, Sara Lee, Stroehmann, Thomas', and Tia Rosa. BBU is owned by Mexico's Grupo Bimbo, S.A.B de C.V., the world's largest baking company with operations in 22 countries.

About Give A Note Foundation

Founded in 2011 in partnership with the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), Give A Note Foundation was created to bring awareness to the importance of music education and to nurture, grow, and strengthen music education opportunitiesfor every student, every school, and every community. Learn more at giveanote.org.

SOURCE Entenmann's

Related Links

http://www.entenmanns120birthday.com


ATLANTA, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP is pleased to announce it has formed the Eversheds Sutherland Employee Relief Fund, which is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to assisting US employees and their families impacted by natural disasters, injury or illness, or personal disasters such as a house fire that cannot be adequately dealt with through personal resources, insurance or public programs (such as FEMA or the Red Cross).

The relief fund was created with the financial support of Eversheds Sutherland, and is also funded by partners and employees, who have the ability to donate a discretionary monetary amount through payroll deduction. The Board of Directors includes both partners and employees of Eversheds Sutherland with representation from all US offices, and is led by US Pro Bono Partner John H. Fleming. The relief fund is currently applying for its determination letter from the Internal Revenue Service.

"Our people are our most important resource," said Mark D. Wasserman, Co-CEO of Eversheds Sutherland. "When a colleague experiences a personal crisis or emergency and has nowhere else to turn, this fund allows us to respond quickly to help that colleague when he or she needs it most. Established in response to the desire of employees wanting to help their colleagues during hurricanes, fires and other recent disasters, the fact that support is provided, in part, from co-workers makes it even more meaningful."

Aileen Bleach, US Pro Bono and Corporate Responsibility Manager at Eversheds Sutherland, added: "We have always come together to help each other in times of crisis. This fund takes the existing generosity of our people and makes the process more efficient."

In addition to Eversheds Sutherland's commitment to its employees during life-changing moments, it is also dedicated to programs that support the community at large. Among other things, Eversheds Sutherland gives generously of its time, talent and resources by participating in charitable events, sponsoring volunteer projects, and supporting its own pro bono legal services program.

To learn more about the Eversheds Sutherland Employee Relief Fund or Eversheds Sutherland's pro bono and corporate responsibility efforts, contact Aileen Bleach at [email protected].

About Eversheds Sutherland

As a global top 40 law practice, Eversheds Sutherland provides legal services to a global client base ranging from small and mid-sized businesses to the largest multinationals, acting for 72 of the Fortune 100, 61 of the FTSE 100 and 120 of the Fortune 200.

With more than 2,400 lawyers, Eversheds Sutherland operates in 66 offices in 32 jurisdictions across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. In addition, a network of more than 200 related law firms, including formalized alliances in Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa, provide support around the globe.

Eversheds Sutherland provides the full range of legal services, including corporate and M&A; dispute resolution and litigation; energy and infrastructure; finance; human capital and labor law; intellectual property; real estate and construction; and tax.

Eversheds Sutherland comprises two separate legal entities: Eversheds Sutherland (International) LLP (headquartered in the UK) and Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP (headquartered in the US), and their respective controlled, managed, affiliated and member firms. The use of the name Eversheds Sutherland is for description purposes only and does not imply that the member firms or their controlled, managed or affiliated entities are in a partnership or are part of a global LLP. For more information, visit eversheds-sutherland.com.

Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP is part of a global legal practice, operating through various separate and distinct legal entities, under Eversheds Sutherland. For a full description of the structure and a list of offices, please visit www.eversheds-sutherland.com.

SOURCE Eversheds Sutherland

Related Links

http://www.eversheds-sutherland.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ExL Events, in collaboration with FiercePharma, is hosting the 2018 FiercePharmaMarketing Forum, taking place March 67, 2018 at the Crowne Plaza, Times Square in New York City.

The world of pharmaceutical marketing has never been more competitive, more exciting or more fraught with challenges. New categories of groundbreaking drugs, unprecedented competition and the growing demand for better patient solutions and outcomes are forcing pharma marketing to places it's never been. Add to that a thriving-but-disparate global market  along with renewed political, regulatory and reputational pressures  and you get just a glimpse into the demanding and difficult tasks facing pharma marketers and advertisers today.

It is into this arena that we debut the first FiercePharmaMarketing Forum. The editors and reporters of FiercePharma's marketing team are gathering some of the most innovative and creative marketing minds in the industry  from marketers inside Big Pharma to outside ad agency veterans to technology experts  all looking to solve modern pharma and healthcare marketing challenges.

Featured Speakers:

Natalie Mancuso , Senior Product Manager, Marketing , REGENERON

, , Anthony Molloy, Esq. , Vice President, Legal and Compliance, Deputy General Counsel , PACIRA PHARMACEUTICALS

, , Elissa Johnsen , Head of Product and Pipeline Communications , TAKEDA

, , Robby Zirkelbach , Executive Vice President , PHRMA

, , Danielle Salowski , Industry Manager, Healthcare , FACEBOOK

, , Yan Fossat , Senior VP , KLICK LABS

, , Megan Danielson , Head of Healthcare , GOOGLE

, , Catherine London , Executive VP Corporate Communications , BIOASIS

, , Stephen Ranjan , CMO , MERCK

, , Shira Derasmo , Head of Communications and Marketing , HUMANA

, , Dr. Julie Greely , National Director  Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Medical Affairs , ASTELLAS

, , Laurence Smith , Global Marketing Executive Director , MERCK

, , Bryan Cohen , Innovation Fellow , PFIZER

, , Stephanie Wenstrup , Head of Consumer Marketing, Cardiovascular and Diabetes , ASTRAZENECA

, , Graham Goodrich , Vice President, Diabetes Marketing , BOEHRINGER INGELHEIM

, , Gail Cohen , Vice President, Corporate Communications , ACORDA THERAPEUTICS

, , Sachin Kamal-Bahl , Vice President and Innovation Center Head, Global Health and Value , PFIZER

, , Aimee Lenar , Vice President of Gastroenterology Marketing , ALLERGAN

, , Kristin Demafeliz , Senior Associate Director , THE MICHAEL J. FOX FOUNDATION FOR PARKINSON'S RESEARCH

, Angela Horstmann , Consumer Lead for U.S. Vaccines, GSK

To visit our conference website, please visit https://goo.gl/RK6QJ8

To register, please visit https://goo.gl/7ea9KW and use Priority Code C1029PRnews.

For more information, contact: ExL Events

Phone: 866-207-6528

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE ExL Events

Related Links

http://www.exlevents.com


BEDMINSTER, N.J., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GAIN Capital Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: GCAP) ("GAIN" or "the Company"), a global leader in online trading, today announced the launch of Bitcoin trading in Australia and Singapore on the Company's City Index branded service, which is regulated by ASIC and MAS, respectively.

GAIN Capital's Bitcoin offering enables its customers to trade the value of the cryptocurrency through a highly-regulated, trusted broker, without the need to set up a digital wallet to take delivery of and store tokens. GAIN currently offers Bitcoin trading either as an over-the-counter (OTC) derivative or as a future, both of which allow traders to speculate on Bitcoin price movements without owning the underlying asset. Where permitted by regulation, customers may trade Bitcoin on margin.

"For those who want exposure to Bitcoin, trading the cryptocurrency as a derivative with a regulated brokerage firm offers several key advantages over a Bitcoin exchange," commented Glenn Stevens, Chief Executive Officer of GAIN Capital. "We view these benefits as: competitive fees and margin rates, the ability to go long or short, enhanced price discovery via aggregated liquidity from multiple Bitcoin market makers and exchanges, and fast trade execution."

The launch in Australia and Singapore follows the launch of Bitcoin trading to customers in the U.K. and Europe last month across the Company's City Index and FOREX.com brands. The Company's Bitcoin futures offering in the U.S. is available through its Futures Online and Daniels Trading brands.

GAIN plans to complete the global roll out of Bitcoin trading in the coming months, introducing Bitcoin trading to its customers in other markets in Asia and the United States. The Company also plans to expand its cryptocurrency offering to include Ethereum and other digital currencies in early 2018.

About GAIN

GAIN Capital Holdings, Inc. provides innovative trading technology and execution services to retail and institutional investors worldwide, with multiple access points to OTC markets and global exchanges across a wide range of asset classes, including foreign exchange, commodities, and global equities. GAIN Capital is headquartered in Bedminster, New Jersey, with a global presence across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions. For further company information, visit www.gaincapital.com.

SOURCE GAIN Capital Holdings, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.gaincapital.com


VANCOUVER, British Columbia, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Glance Technologies Inc. (CSE: GET.CN / CSE: GET.WT /OTCQB: GLNNF / FKT: GJT) announces that BTV's CEO Clips, a series of short video profiles on innovative publicly traded companies across North America, will feature Glance on CBC's Documentary Channel beginning January 8 to January 21, 2018, Monday - Friday between the hours of 6am - 12am. The video can be viewed at: http://reut.rs/2zfXbUy .

Further online distribution through BTV's CEO Clips include: BNN.ca, Thomson Reuters Insider Network Terminals, Yahoo Finance, TSX, Globe Investor, Stockwatch, Bloomberg, Stockhouse.com and BTV's YouTube channel.

About CBC's Documentary Channel and BTV

CBC's Doc Channel is a digital television station devoted to showing the best documentaries from Canada and around the world.

BTV-Business Television and CEO Clips produce and house the largest library of company video features and campaigns for publicly traded companies for broadcast on TV and financial sites. Contact [email protected]

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 Pay has entered into significant licensing agreements with Active Pay Distribution Inc., Cannapay Financial Inc. and Euro Asia Pay Holdings Inc. It also owns an end-to-end blockchain solution for a rewards-based cryptocurrency which is currently being integrated into the Glance Pay app.

For more information about Glance, please go tohttp://www.glance.tech.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: "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "potentially" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. 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 complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effects which may be accessed through the Glance's profile on SEDAR at http://www.sedar.com.

For more information, contact:

Christina Rao

Vice President, Investor Relations

+1(604)-723-7480

[email protected]



SOURCE Glance Technologies Inc.
DUBLIN, Dec. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Authentication Services Market by Service (Compliance Management, Subscription Keys Management, Managed Public Key Infrastructure, and Reporting), Managed Authentication Type, Managed Tokenization Type, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022" report has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

The scope of this research study covers the managed authentication services only. It is expected that the authentication services market size is expected to grow from USD 622.9 Million in 2017 to USD 1,619.5 Million by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.1% during the forecast period.

Major drivers for the authentication services market is the growing number of digital identities and stringent data security regulations, such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.

The authentication services market segmented by service, managed authentication type, managed tokenization type, vertical, and region. The managed PKI services is expected to hold the largest market share by growing at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. It is mainly due to an increasing need for managing and controlling large numbers of digital certificates for SSL, authentication, document signing, S/MIME, and other usages. Additionally, managed PKI services helps organization reduce the cost and burden of managing digital certificates.

The eCommerce segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The eCommerce vertical deals with selling consumer products and services to its clients through multiple channels. eCommerce is one of the top cost-conscious verticals and the most targeted by cyber-attackers, because of the potential payouts and a large number of monetary transactions via credit and debit cards. In addition, the increasing complexities of supply chain, employees, channel partners, and customers are expected to be forcing etailers to adopt authentication services.

The Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) segment is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. Due to the increasing number of cyber-attacks and identity theft, organizations are implementing the two-factor authentication solution. The MFA adds an extra security layer and makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to breach an organization's IT infrastructure. Additionally, various regulations and compliances, such as PCI DSS and GDPR, would drive the multifactor authentication segment's growth.

As per the geographic analysis, North America is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. This is due to the presence of large managed security services providers, and stringent data security regulations and compliance in the region. The APAC region is expected to witness the fastest growth in the authentication services market, due to increaseing number of digital identities, online transactions, and mobile computing devices. Additinally, India, Japan, and Singapore have all updated or introduced new national cybersecurity policies that would ramp up the market.

Major vendors profiled in the report include Verizon (US), Trustwave (US), Gemalto (the Netherlands), Wipro (India), Tata Communications (India), Bell Canada (Canada), GCI Channel Solutions (UK), Entrust Datacard (US), GCX (India), and Interoute (UK).

Market Dynamics



Drivers



Increasing Number of Digital Identities

Mobile Soft Token Outpacing Hard Tokens

Government Agencies Pushing for Standardization of Data Security Protocols

Companies Increasingly Appear Willing to Outsource Security

Enterprises are Heavily Relying on Mobile Computing Application

Restraints



Management of Virtual Server Increasing the Risk of Data Breach

Opportunity



Growing Integration of Biometric Sensor in Security-Based Application and in Mobility Devices

Wide Adoption of Authentication in Emerging Markets

Challenges



Limited Certified Security Experts

Uncertainty and Pushback From End-User

Access Points

Endpoint Access



Local Access

Remote Access

Companies Mentioned



Bell Canada

Entrust Datacard

GCI Channel Solutions

GCX

Gemalto

Interoute

Tata Communications

Trustwave

Verizon

Wipro

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/nmps6d/global?w=5





Media Contact:

Research and Markets

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[email protected]



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NEW YORK, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The market for palm sugar is dominated by the Asia Pacific region. Several companies are importing organic palm sugar from Indonesia, India, and Philippines at a very low price and are offering palm sugar with private labelling to other regional markets. Companies are currently focusing on launching palm sugar in different forms, especially the liquid form, and are pumping in investments in research and development for product innovation, with a view to expand their customer base and enhance their regional presence.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161114/438683LOGO )



Insights like these and more are the crux of a new report on the global palm sugar market published by Persistence Market Research. The report titled "Palm Sugar Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Forecast (2017-2025)" tracks the performance of the global market for palm sugar over a period of eight years from 2017 to 2025. The global palm sugar market is estimated to be valued at US$ 1,684.2 Mn by 2017 end, and is forecast to be valued at US$ 2,205.8 Mn by 2025 end. Sales revenue is projected to increase at a CAGR of 3.4% during the forecast period (2017-2025).

Global Palm Sugar Market Research Report Overview @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/palm-sugar-market.asp

Global Palm Sugar Market: Trends

Growing interest and popularity among consumers in organic food products

Increasing demand for healthier and premium food options such as smoothies and other bakery products

Growing interest among consumers regarding ethically sourced products, thereby providing opportunities for ethically traded palm sugar

More transparency in e-commerce, internet and online stores accompanied with review sites, thereby making it easy for consumers to compare products

Rising trend of consuming products such as pastries, biscuits and cakes

Request Sample [email protected] https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11023

Global Palm Sugar Market: Segmental Analysis and Forecast

The global palm sugar market is segmented on the basis of origin, end use, form, and distribution channel.

By origin the market is segmented into conventional and organic. The growing demand for organic food products is expected to boost the demand for organic palm sugar across the globe. The organic palm sugar market is estimated to account for a value share of 23.3% by 2017 end, and is anticipated to register a CAGR of 4.4% in terms of value over the forecast period.

On the basis of form the market is segmented into powder, crystal and liquid. The powder segment is expected to account for relatively high value share in the global market by 2025 end, while in terms of value, the liquid segment is expected to expand at a relatively high CAGR over the forecast period.

End use segmentation of the global palm sugar market includes food and beverage, foodservice, and household. With more than 80% value share, the household segment is expected to lead the global palm sugar market and register a CAGR of 3.2% in terms of value over the forecast period.

The segments by distribution channel comprise direct and indirect segments. In terms of value, the indirect channel segment is projected to be the most attractive market in the global palm sugar market during the forecast period.

Download and View Report TOC, Figures and Tables @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/palm-sugar-market/toc

Global Palm Sugar Market: Forecast Analysis by Region

The five key geographies of North America, Latin America, Europe, APAC and MEA have been covered in this report. Asia Pacific accounts for the highest market share throughout the forecast period. Indonesia is the largest producer as well as consumer of palm sugar in the Asia Pacific region and controls the dynamics of the global palm sugar market.

Global Palm Sugar Market: Key Players

Navitas Organics, Windmill Organics Ltd, Wholesome Sweeteners, Inc., Asana Foods, Organika Health Products Inc., Betterbody Foods & Nutrition LLC, Big Tree Farms, e Farms, Inc., Royal Pepper Company, Sevenhills Wholefoods, and Phalada Agro Research Foundation are some of the leading companies operating in the global palm sugar market.

Get full Report Now @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/11023

Persistence Market Research Overview

Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.

To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.

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SOURCE Persistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd.
HOUSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE: GPI), ("Group 1" or the "Company"), an international, Fortune 500 automotive retailer, today announced the addition of a new Land Rover Franchise in Watford, which is located in the northwestern portion of the greater London metropolitan market.

This Land Rover franchise is an open point and has been added to the Company's existing Beadles Jaguar Watford dealership, with both now located in a new, state-of-the-art facility. The new Beadles Jaguar Land Rover Watford dealership is expected to generate an additional estimated $35 million in annualized revenues. This opening increases the Company's UK operations to 56 franchises.

"As we further expand our footprint and brand portfolio in the UK, we are delighted to grow our existing partnership with Land Rover," said Earl J. Hesterberg, Group 1's president and chief executive officer. "With this addition, our UK operations are estimated to generate over $2 billion in annualized revenues."

About Group 1 Automotive, Inc.

Group 1 owns and operates 173 automotive dealerships, 228 franchises, and 47 collision centers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil that offer 32 brands of automobiles. Through its dealerships, the Company sells new and used cars and light trucks; arranges related vehicle financing; sells service contracts; provides automotive maintenance and repair services; and sells vehicle parts.

Investors please visit www.group1corp.com, www.group1auto.com, www.group1collision.com, www.facebook.com/group1auto, and www.twitter.com/group1auto, where Group 1 discloses additional information about the Company, its business, and its results of operations.

Investor contacts:

Sheila Roth

Manager, Investor Relations

Group 1 Automotive, Inc.

713-647-5741 | [email protected]

Media contacts:

Pete DeLongchamps

Senior V.P. Manufacturer Relations, Financial Services and Public Affairs

Group 1 Automotive, Inc.

713-647-5770 | [email protected]

or

Clint Woods

Pierpont Communications, Inc.

713-627-2223 | [email protected]

SOURCE Group 1 Automotive, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.group1auto.com


ST. LOUIS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Thibaut Inc. ("Thibaut") is now part of the Harbour Group family of companies, Jeff Fox, Harbour Group's chairman and chief executive officer, announced today. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Thibaut is a highly recognized global brand in the wallcoverings, fabrics and upholstered furniture markets, featuring distinctive designs serving a diverse base of high-end residential interior designers. The company's in-house designers produce exclusive collections under three brand names: Thibaut, Anna French and Thibaut Fine Furniture.

"Thibaut is a great addition to the Harbour Group family," said Mr. Fox. "Its brand and products have truly stood the test of time over its 130 year history. Management has done an excellent job growing the company and we are excited to work together to continue that trajectory both organically and through acquisition."

Bob Senior, Thibaut's CEO, added: "We look forward to continuing to grow and improve the operations of our business with the help of Harbour Group's team. We believe their knowledge of operations along with our deep understanding of our industry will allow us to continue growing at an accelerated pace."

About Harbour Group

Harbour Group is a privately owned, operations focused company based in St. Louis, Missouri. Harbour Group's companies are engaged in manufacturing and distribution across diverse industries including LED lighting, flow control, scientific products and lab ware, thermal management solutions, flow and energy measurement, boiler systems, professional diagnostic and repair tools, niche distribution, and auxiliary plastic processing equipment. Since its founding in 1976, Harbour Group has acquired 198 companies in 42 different industries.

SOURCE Harbour Group
Rock Om  will raise the volume on guests' fitness levels through DJ Drez , a renowned producer, musical director and sound ambassador, who has worked with top artists ranging from the Black Eyed Peas and Eminem, to Macy Gray and Project Blowed. The program will redefine the ordinary yoga session, providing a fresh take on a timeless tradition by fusing together the ancient serenity of yoga with the beat of music. Select Hard Rock Hotels will also offer live, on-site yoga classes for those seeking to practice in a group atmosphere.

"We are thrilled to team up with powerhouses like Manduka and DJ Drez to offer guests the highest quality of yoga experience," said Dale Hipsh, senior vice president of Hard Rock Hotels. "Rock Om is set to fan the flames for innovative hotel wellness experiences, and we couldn't be more proud to launch the program to all of our brand fans."

Available at all Hard Rock Hotels worldwide, as well as upcoming properties, the program is designed to deliver a customized yoga experience, allowing guests to refresh, rejuvenate and re-energize the mind, body and spirit through the power of music. Rock Om consists of three individual in-room yoga videos that will play on Hard Rock's television systems across the brand's portfolio, in addition to the Rock Om landing page where guests and non-guests can follow along and flow.

"Zenith" helps guests unwind through calming meditation and tranquil breathing exercises.

helps guests unwind through calming meditation and tranquil breathing exercises. " Zepplin" encourages guests to strike a pose and break a sweat to the beats and rhythm of high-energy Vinyasa flow.

encourages guests to strike a pose and break a sweat to the beats and rhythm of high-energy Vinyasa flow. "Zen" allows guests to recharge their bodies and minds with the traditional movements of classic flow.

"It's so exciting to see Manduka translated through the eyes and ears of the Hard Rock brand," said Cathy Quain, president of Manduka. "The Rock Om program is the perfect blend of our trusted premium yoga equipment and the graphic, modern design aesthetic for which Hard Rock is known. This collaboration inspires Hard Rock guests to practice yoga  safely and stylishly  anywhere their travels take them."

Additionally, as part of the program, guests can order an in-room yoga kit, which can be ordered either prior to arrival, at check-in or during stays. The yoga kits will include a regionally-inspired Yogitoes towel created by Manduka specifically for Hard Rock Hotels, a Manduka PROlite yoga mat and a Manduka Go Play carrier bag, all exclusive to the Rock Om program and available for purchase in the Rock Shop.

"As a yoga practitioner who also travels for a living, I am thrilled to provide a new wellness option to our guests, especially those who might not be able to hit the hotel gym, but still want to get a workout before going about their day," said Nora Swire, senior director of marketing for Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos. "We look forward to leveraging the brand's connection to music, vibe and energy, creating a differentiated, one-of-a-kind fitness experience for travelers across the globe."

Appealing to the modern business or leisure traveler, the elements of Rock Om aim to create an unparalleled wellness experience for guests. For more information or to book a stay at any of the Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos, please visit www.hardrockhotels.com. To engage on social media, use the official hashtags: #RockOm, #HardRockHotel, #Manduka and #DJDrez.

About Hard Rock International

With venues in 74 countries, including 179 cafes, 24 hotels and 11 casinos, Hard Rock International (HRI) is one of the most globally recognized companies. Beginning with an Eric Clapton guitar, Hard Rock owns the world's greatest collection of music memorabilia, which is displayed at its locations around the globe. Hard Rock is also known for its collectible fashion and music-related merchandise, Hard Rock Live performance venues and an award-winning website. HRI owns the global trademark for all Hard Rock brands. The company owns, operates and franchises Cafes in iconic cities including London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Dubai. HRI also owns, licenses and/or manages hotel/casino properties worldwide. Destinations include the company's two most successful Hotel and Casino properties in Tampa and Hollywood, FL., both owned and operated by HRI parent company The Seminole Tribe of Florida, as well as other exciting locations including Bali, Cancun, Ibiza, Las Vegas, and San Diego. Upcoming new Hard Rock Cafe locations include Managua, Cairo, Wroclaw and Chengdu. New Hard Rock hotel, casino or hotel-casino projects include Atlanta, Atlantic City, Berlin, Budapest, London, Los Cabos, Maldives, New York City, Ottawa, Dalian and Haikou in China. For more information on Hard Rock International, visit www.hardrock.com.

About Manduka

For more than 20 years, Manduka has built a reputation as the world's most respected yoga brand. Known for its legendary PRO Mat, Manduka creates high performance yoga mats, yoga towels, bags, props, and men's and women's fitness apparel. Designed by yogis and trusted by teachers worldwide, carefully selected and sustainable materials are paired with thoughtful design to create innovative products that allow a community of 4,000+ yoga studios, 700+ yoga ambassadors and over 2 million customers across the globe to deepen their practice. For more information on Manduka, visit www.Manduka.com.

For More Media Information:

Jill Trudeau/Erin Owens

The Zimmerman Agency  850.668.2222

[email protected]

SOURCE Hard Rock International

Related Links

http://www.hardrock.com


TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Honduran government lamented injuries to dozens of police officers inflicted by supporters of defeated Libre Alliance presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla and former president Manuel Zelaya in Choluteca and other Honduran cities on January 6.

According to reporting by Honduran outlet Tiempo Digital, supporters of the Libre Alliance threw stones at police officers and set fires in the streets of several cities.

Honduran Government Laments Injuries to Police During Violent Election Protests

At least 96 police officers were treated for injuries after auxiliary protests in Choluteca turned violent, including one officer who lost an eye and another who suffered a fractured jaw.

During the protests, police captured Jose Gabriel Godinez Avelar,a member of the MS-13 gang wanted for setting fire to a police station last month, in the Aurora district of San Pedro Sula.

Protesters also burned an American flag and threw trash in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. On December 22, the U.S. State Department offered its official congratulations to President Juan Orlando Hernandez on his victory in the recent Honduran presidential election.

In a January 3 tweet, the LibreAlliance called for a "great mobilization" against President Hernandez's victory on the streets of San Pedro Sula on January 6. Mr. Nasralla asked his Twitter followers to join the January 6 protests.

Leaders from across Honduras have criticized the violence. Speaking from his cathedral in Tegucigalpa yesterday, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga said that "those who are proclaiming hatred are ruining the country" and their actions would lead to "anguish and death."

Last month, Honduran Secretary of the Council of Ministers Ebal Diaz said that the Libre Alliance had "signed a pact with a government in the south that has been linked to violence . . . with a lot of people who are involved with organized crime."

The recent spate of violence has hurt the Honduran economy. Last month, Rafael Medina, the Executive Director of the Tegucigalpa Chamber of Commerce told the Honduran national television network that the Honduran economy lost between 1.4 and 1.5 billion lempiras -- more that $59 million -- in just two days of rioting, on November 30 and December 1.

Media Contact:

Andrew Grafton

[email protected]

(202) 471-4228 ext. 119

www.keybridgecommunications.com

SOURCE Republic of Honduras
DALLAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- VolunteerNow received IBM's Strategic Planning Impact Grant for a second time, valued at $56,500, and the technology nonprofit worked alongside IBM consultants to develop a five-year plan to connect communities with local schools through VOLY.org, VolunteerNow's proprietary platform.

For several weeks, IBM leaders and VolunteerNow staff members collaborated to refine and enhance this sophisticated and user-friendly volunteer recruitment and management tool, and created a plan to bring VOLY.org to districts nationwide to increase volunteer impact and involvement.

"IBM's corporate citizenship strategy includes the sharing of our best resource  IBMers and an innovative package of IBM business tools designed to help nonprofits build capacity," said Sandy Dochen, IBM Manager of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs. "VolunteerNow is a longtime IBM community partner, and we were please to donate IBM experts' time to help VolunteerNow update its strategic plan."

VOLY.org, powered by VolunteerNow, is currently being utilized in seven urban school districts, supporting more than 320,000 students with tens of thousands of volunteers directly addressing classroom needs. VOLY.org serves as a cost-saving one-stop-shop that allows districts to harness community engagement and stretch limited resources. It also connects 90,000 volunteers to 2,700 nonprofits annually.

"VolunteerNow is dedicated to transforming lives through volunteers, and how we accomplish that mission is always evolving," VolunteerNow CEO Tammy Richards said. "For 46 years, we have been at the forefront of innovation in the way citizens connect with their communities at large. VOLY.org is a powerful tool for school districts, and we're proud to develop this game-changing technology to better educate children. IBM has been a great partner and support of VolunteerNow, and now VOLY.org, as we expand into a national brand and help children, school districts and communities across the country."

About VolunteerNow

VolunteerNow serves as the hub of volunteerism in North Texas. Last year, VolunteerNow mobilized 70,000 volunteers who gave 1.3 million hours to 2,700 local nonprofits, driving a $32 million economic impact for the region. VOLY.org, powered by VolunteerNow, is the 24/7 connection between volunteers and local service opportunities. As a national thought leader in volunteerism and one of the largest volunteer centers in the country, VolunteerNow provides a wide range of programs and services that build capacity for nonprofits. www.volnow.org

SOURCE VolunteerNow

Related Links

http://www.volnow.org


SCHINDELLEGI, Switzerland, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

iKO Media Group, a global end-to-end service provider for broadcasters and content owners, and Zixi LLC., have announced today an expansion to their existing partnership enabling enhanced throughput capabilities to support iKO's expansion into Asia, Europe and LATAM.

The expanded integration of Zixi's technology platform into iKO's global video delivery network will allow iKO to establish new contribution and distribution links to deliver channels over the internet in the most rapid, effective and high-quality way to global customers.

"Our strategic partners are an integral part of our business," said Yaniv Maman, CTO at iKOMG. "To be able to offer our clients around the globe our holistic solutions for content distribution, we must stay competitive in terms of technical capacity and advancements. We are very happy to expand our operations with Zixi as we see them as high-quality service and solutions providers that will in turn allow us to continue providing excellent services to our customers."

The combined extensive experience of iKO and Zixi in the global market allows them to offer global coverage and reach using the most sought-after satellites and fiber connectivity to make sure content is smoothly delivered and within specific budgets.

"iKO Media is an exciting and game-changing service provider for content owners and broadcasters," said Michael Poppler, Director of Global Channel Sales at Zixi."Powered by Zixi, iKO Media enables perfect, secure, flexible and cost-effective managed delivery of live linear TV channel contributions and distributions to virtually any global teleport or affiliate within hours."

About Zixi LLC

ZiXi, LLC provides mobile, cloud-based, and on-premise solutions and services that enable broadcast-quality HD video delivery over the Internet, Wi-Fi, and mobile networks to any device. The company offers the ZiXi Platform for broadcasters, enterprises, over-the-top video providers, and mobile service providers around the world; and ZEN Management, a cloud-based platform that provides tools to configure, orchestrate, and monitor live broadcast channels and events across industry protocols. See a demo of the Zixi Platform and ZEN Master at CES January 9-12th in the Las Vegas Convention Center South Hall MP25563.

About iKO Media Group

iKO Media Group is a boutique end-to-end media service partner for broadcasters and content owners. They provide tailor-made solutions focused on customer needs through dedicated service to a wide range of global and local networks including delivery over the internet and mobile networks.

iKOMG delivers effective solutions customized to specific budgets and requirements without compromising on quality of service. As a trusted partner to dozens of global and local networks, iKOMG is identified with expert knowledge, dedicated service and professionalism. The company's sustainability strategy focuses on social, environmental, and economic responsibility.

For more information, visit http://www.ikomg.com/news

Press Contact - iKOMG

Yael Ayalon

[email protected]

http://www.ikomg.com

SOURCE iKO Media Group
"Steamboat will be an excellent addition to our Hedge Funds Partnerships platform as they exhibit key differentiators through their unique investment style and philosophy. We look forward to working together to achieve the firm's goals and ultimately deliver results to our clients," said Lionel Erdely, Head and Chief Investment Officer, Investcorp Alternative Investment Solutions.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with Investcorp who has a long and successful track record in working with emerging managers. Their strategic advice and experience will assist us in meeting our goals as we embark on our next phase as an investment firm," said Parsa Kiai, Founder, Managing Partner and Portfolio Manager of Steamboat Capital Partners.

Steamboat was founded in 2012 by Parsa Kiai and is a long-short, fundamental, value-oriented investment firm that specializes in undervalued and catalyst-driven investments. The firm's investment process seeks to capitalize on market dislocations, while maintaining a margin of safety for its investors. Prior to launching Steamboat Capital Partners, Mr. Kiai spent four years as a Partner at Sonterra Capital and three years as a Senior Analyst at Perry Capital, where he was responsible for coverage of the energy sector. Prior to joining Perry Capital in 2005, Parsa was an Analyst in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in the Industrials and Natural Resources Group, where he began his career.

Investcorp's Hedge Funds Partnership platform was launched in December 2004 to provide investors access to select investment talent with the backing of an institutional platform. Through this program, Investcorp together with select partners provides initial seed and acceleration capital, and distribution capabilities to emerging managers with proven track records, differentiated strategies and downside protection. As of June 30th 2017, Investcorp Group had $21.3 billion in program assets.

About Investcorp

Investcorp is a leading global provider and manager of alternative investments, offering such investments to its high-net-worth private and institutional clients on a global basis. Led by a new vision, Investcorp has embarked on an ambitious, albeit prudent, growth strategy. The Firm continues to focus on generating investor and shareholder value through a disciplined investment approach in four lines of business: corporate investment, real estate, alternative investment solutions and credit management.

As at June 30, 2017, the Investcorp Group had $21.3 billion in total AUM, including assets managed by third party managers and assets subject to a non-discretionary advisory mandate where Investcorp receives fees calculated on the basis of AUM.

Since its inception in 1982, Investcorp has made over 170 corporate investments in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East and North Africa region, including Turkey, across a range of sectors including retail and consumer products, technology, business services and industrials, and more than 450 commercial and residential real estate investments in the US, for in excess of $55 billion in transaction value.

Investcorp employs approximately 390 people across its offices in New York, London, Singapore and the Gulf. For further information, including our most recent periodic financial statements, which details our assets under management, please visit: www.investcorp.com.

Media Contacts:

Investcorp

Firas El Amine

+973 39987838

[email protected]

Prosek Partners

Catherine Wooters

212.279.3115 x 287

[email protected]

SOURCE Investcorp

Related Links

http://www.investcorp.com


CHICAGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Jelmar, a leading cleaning product manufacturer and maker of the popular CLR product line, today announced the launch of its newly redesigned website, www.clrbrands.com. The website features a refreshed, colorful and contemporary look that offers an improved user experience, easy navigation and mobile optimization.

The new homepage highlights the company's main tagline: "All Kinds of Dirty. One Kind of Clean." This leads into how the redesign is targeted to highlight the visitor's needs on knowing what, why and how to use varying Jelmar products with access to ample lifestyle content. Key features of the website include a library of "How To" videos, a suggestion list of products by room and newsletter sign up that delivers fresh content, including cleaning tips, prize opportunities, testimonials and more, as well as a redesigned press room with product images, and up-to-date news and happenings.

"Since Jelmar's beginnings 50 years ago, we have worked to continuously evolve our products and offerings to answer the needs of our customersfor example, reformulating products to meet EPA Safer Choice Program standards," said Alison Gutterman, CEO and President of Jelmar. "Our website redesign intends to do the same by giving our site visitors the tools they need to make well-informed decisions on their home and business needs when it comes to cleaning."

For Jelmar, feedback from customers is priority. The company also reflected consumer feedback in the rebranding of the CLR line in 2016 and the Tarn-X line in 2017. This website redesign brings together those key updates into one cohesive look, showcasing how Jelmar works to evolve over time with its customers.

Customers and partners alike are encouraged to explore the new website at www.clrbrands.com, which is now live.

About Jelmar, LLC:

Jelmar is a leading manufacturer of a broad range of household cleaning products, including CLR and Tarn-X brands of cleaners. Flagship CLR products include CLR Calcium, Lime & Rust Remover, CLR Bath & Kitchen Cleaner, CLR Mold & Mildew Stain Remover, CLR Stain Magnet and CLR Septic System Treatment. With its unique formulas, the CLR brand gets the cleaning job done in virtually every area of the home. For more information, visit www.clrbrands.com. You can also follow us on social media at @CLRCleaners on Twitter and www.facebook.com/CLRCleaners on Facebook.

Contact: Denee Zumwalt

Ogilvy PR

[email protected]

(424) 289-5315

SOURCE Jelmar

Related Links

https://clrbrands.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TBWA\Chiat\Day New York today announced that it has hired John Doris as Head of Integrated Production. Doris, who starts at the agency this week, is the first major hire for newly-appointed Chief Creative Officer Chris Beresford-Hill, who joined the agency in October.

Reporting directly to Beresford-Hill, Doris will lead production for the agency, and be a key driver in exploring and discovering new media, technology and platforms across its client roster, which includes Accenture, adidas, eos, Hilton, McDonald's, Michelin, Nissan, PepsiCo, TD Bank, Thomson Reuters, Tic-Tac and Travelers Insurance, among others.

"John and I both see production the same way, not just an extension of creative, but a true partnership," said Beresford-Hill. "I've worked with John in the past and seen firsthand the passion and expertise that he brings to the table, and so I feel incredibly fortunate to have him as a partner, leading production and bringing disruptive creative ideas to life for our clients."

Doris comes to TBWA from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, where he was Head of Integrated Production. As a lead and longtime curator for the world-renowned Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase, held annually in Cannes, Doris also has unparalleled experience in discovering and working with the best emerging filmmakers in the industry. Prior to New York, Doris was EVP, Executive Producer at Saatchi & Saatchi's London office, where he produced award-winning content for clients such as T-Mobile, NSPCC, Cadbury, P&G among others.

"TBWA is a storied agency, here in New York and globally, and I'm honored to have the opportunity to shape and grow its creative output alongside a really great group of talented people," said Doris. "This is an exciting new creative chapter for the agency, and I am thrilled to be a part of it."

Doris has won numerous creative awards throughout this career, and is responsible for some of the industry's most iconic work, most recently the Tide "Bradshaw Stain" Super Bowl commercial and live game integration, which brought home 12 Cannes Lions in 2017, a series of short films entitled "The Receipt" for Walmart that was featured on the 2017 Academy Awards broadcast, and Prop8's "Devin and Glenn" campaign, in which he worked in partnership with Beresford-Hill. Other work highlights include JCPenney's "Beware of the Doghouse," Luvs "Lullaby Lift" and Coordown's "Now You See Me".

For more news from the TBWA network please visit: tbwa.com/news

About TBWA\Worldwide

TBWA\Worldwide (http://www.tbwa.com) is a top-ten ranked global advertising collective that holds Disruption at its core to develop business-changing ideas for brands. TBWA has 11,300 employees across 305 offices in 98 countries and also includes brands such as Auditoire, Digital Arts Network (DAN), eg+ worldwide, The Integer Group, TBWA\Media Arts Lab and TBWA\WorldHealth. TBWA's global clients include adidas, Apple, Gatorade, Henkel, McDonald's, Michelin, Nissan, Pernod Ricard, Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore Airlines, Sotheby's and Vichy. Follow TBWA on Twitter and Instagram and like us on Facebook.

About Omnicom Group Inc.

Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) (http://www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom's branded networks and numerous specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, digital and interactive marketing, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries.

SOURCE TBWA\Worldwide

Related Links

http://www.tbwa.com


Kemin Industries, a global ingredient company that uses science to touch 3.8 billion people every day with its products and services, has entered into an agreement to acquire the textile auxiliary business of Garmon Chemicals and its sister company, The Italian Job. The companies will be gradually integrated over the next few months. All apparel and textile customers will continue to be served exclusively by the Garmon brand, with the values and benefits that they have come to expect and to respect over the years.

The acquisition will further increase the Garmon brand's R&D scope, commercial penetration and service level throughout the textile auxiliary global markets. The acquisition is expected to result in greater efficiencies and significant increase of market share. The company's global headquarters will remain in The Republic of San Marino.

"Kemin first became interested in entering the textile auxiliaries industry based on the adjacent technologies the industry has in common with existing Kemin research and products," said Dr. Chris Nelson, President and CEO of Kemin Industries. "Garmon's global reach, commitment to customer-driven R&D and unique marketing strategy cemented the decision for the acquisition to allow Kemin to enter the market."

With this acquisition, Kemin is able to play a significant role in additional textile markets. Kemin will continue to provide quality products and services to over half of the world's population every day, and will enter the textile industry with the new Garmon acquisition.

"The fusion of Garmon's undisputed know-how and market reputation along with the R&D power of Kemin and its global footprint is a new industry zeitgeist that provides customers throughout the apparel value chain with unprecedented innovation, solutions and business intimacy," said Maurizio Cappellini, President of Garmon Chemicals. "Garmon and Kemin joining forces is a notable sign of the global collaboration trend that creates a positive impact when two companies join together and create success with a concentration of resources."

About Garmon Chemicals

Garmon Chemicals (www.garmonchemicals.com) is a leader in the R&D and marketing of total chemical solutions, innovation and creativity for the denim and apparel industry. The company is internationally recognized as symbol of pioneering evolution in the name of a better tomorrow.

Since its birth in 1982, Garmon Chemicals established itself at the very center of a narrative that talks to manufacturers, apparel brands and retailers about innovative chemical auxiliaries and solutions. For over 30 years, Garmon Chemicals has been an R&D and marketing platform for fashion innovation and a reference for product quality and responsible practices.

With manufacturing facilities in San Marino, Brazil, China, India and Turkey the company operates in more than 30 countries through a commercial network of subsidiaries and agents. This global footprint ensures technical assistance in strategic textile areas around the world, as well as capillary distribution of both chemical products and related know-how.

About Kemin Industries

Kemin (www.kemin.com) has been dedicated to using applied science to improve the quality of life for over half a century. As a global company touching 3.8 billion people every day with its products, Kemin is committed to improving the quality, safety and efficacy of food, feed and health-related products to feed a growing population and be a resource for others in need.

Committed to feed and food safety, Kemin maintains top-of-the-line manufacturing facilities where over 500 specialty ingredients are made for humans and animals in the global feed and food industries, as well as the health, nutrition and beauty markets. The company provides product solutions and options to customers in more than 120 countries.

A privately held, family-owned and operated company, Kemin has more than 2,500 global employees and operates in 90 countries including manufacturing facilities in Belgium, Brazil, China, India, Italy, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and the United States.

Media Contacts:

Garmon Chemicals: Margherita Verlicchi, [email protected], +39 0543 798463

Kemin Industries: Lauren M.G. Burt, Worldwide Communications Manager, [email protected], (+1 515-559-5589)

SOURCE Kemin Industries

Related Links

http://kemin.com


SANTA ANA, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kush Bottles, Inc. (OTCQB: KSHB), a leading provider of packaging, supplies, vaporizers, accessories and branding solutions for the regulated cannabis industry, announced today it will issue its first quarter 2018 results press release on January 10, 2018 after U.S. markets close.

The company will also host a conference call on Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 4:30 PM Eastern Time.

Participant Dial-In Numbers:

Toll-Free: 1-800-281-7973

Toll / International: 1-323-794-2093

*Participants should request the Kush Bottles Earnings Call or provide confirmation code 8151586

Investors are also invited to listen via webcast on the Kush Bottles investor section of the Company website at http://ir.kushbottles.com. Please visit the website at least 15 minutes prior to the call to register, download, and install any necessary audio software. A replay of the call will be available on the Kush Bottles investor website approximately two hours after the conference call has ended.

Nick Kovacevich, Chief Executive Officer of Kush Bottles, and Jim McCormick, Chief Financial Officer, will be answering shareholder questions at the end of the call. Should you have questions during or prior to the conference call please send an email to [email protected] with "KUSH Question" in the subject line. Mr. Kovacevich and Mr. McCormick will answer as many questions as time will allow.

To be added to the distribution list please email [email protected] with "Kush" in the subject line.

About Kush Bottles, Inc.

Kush Bottles, Inc. is a dynamic sales platform that provides unique products and services for both businesses and consumers in the cannabis industry. Founded in 2010 as a packaging and supplies company for dispensaries and growers, Kush Bottles has sold more than 100 million units and now regularly services more than 4,000 legally operated medical and adult-use dispensaries, growers, and producers across North America, South America, and Europe. The company has facilities in the three largest U.S. cannabis markets and a local sales presence in every major U.S. cannabis market.

Kush Bottles aims to be the gold standard for responsible and compliant products and services in the cannabis industry. Kush Bottles has no direct involvement with the cannabis plant or any products that contain THC.

The company has been featured in media nationwide, including CNBC, Los Angeles Times, TheStreet.com, Entrepreneur, and business magazine Inc.

For more information, visit www.kushbottles.com or call (888)-920-5874.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking within the meaning of applicable securities laws. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgments, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this release. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. When used herein, words such as: "potential," "look forward," "believe," "dedicated," "building," or variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in any forward-looking statements made by us herein are often discussed in filings we make with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), available at: www.sec.gov, and on our website, at: www.kushbottles.com.

Investor Contact:

Elizabeth Barker / Phil Carlson

KCSA Strategic Communications

212-896-1203 / 212-896-1233

[email protected]

PR Contact:

Anne Donohoe

KCSA Strategic Communications

212-896-1265

[email protected]

SOURCE Kush Bottles, Inc.

Related Links

https://mktg.kushbottles.com


WASHINGTON and SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Latham & Watkins LLP1 is pleased to announce that Jean Pawlow has joined the firm's Tax Controversy Practice as a member of the Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley offices. She is a prominent trial lawyer with a track record of success in large tax cases for financial institutions, retailers, technology companies, and industrial manufacturers.

Pawlow's practice covers a broad range of tax controversy matters, including transfer pricing issues, tax accounting and insurance tax matters, tax-advantaged transactions, tax treatment of financial instruments, foreign tax credit and research credit issues, and leveraged leases, as well as credit card interchange and original issue discount matters. She has led tax cases in the federal trial and appellate courts, drawing on her extensive experience in administrative tax disputes (including audits and appeals), as well as alternative dispute resolution.

Miriam Fisher, Global Chair of Latham's Tax Controversy Practice, said: "I've been fortunate to know Jean since early in her career. So I can say with confidence that she will be a great addition to our team as we continue to broaden our capabilities in large-scale tax litigation with her impressive range of tax controversy experience and skills."

Michael Egge, Office Managing Partner of Latham in Washington, D.C., added: "Latham has a formidable group of trial lawyers who guide clients through their toughest tax disputes. The addition of another recognized, experienced litigator such as Jean further enhances the practice's depth and ability to deliver extraordinary results for clients both in and out of the courtroom."

Nicholas J. DeNovio, Global Chair of Latham's International Tax Practice, said: "International tax, including of course transfer pricing, is the dominant area of the tax compliance and controversy issues our globalized clients must navigate, and Jean is one of the leading practitioners in the field. Tax controversy is not just about handling disputes with the IRS over prior years, but also about helping clients make judgments about structures and deals today, and this trend will increase with the complexities and ambiguities of the international provisions in the new Tax Cuts & Jobs Act."

Pawlow joins Latham from McDermott Will & Emery. She is the latest prominent lawyer to join Latham's Tax Department in the last year, following the arrival of Andrew Strelka in Washington, D.C. and Elena Romanova in New York.

"I'm honored to be joining Latham's talented team of tax controversy lawyers," Pawlow said. "The firm provides me an exciting opportunity to further expand my practice. In particular, I look forward to contributing to a globally integrated team that ensures top-quality, consistent results for clients, regardless of their location."

Pawlow received her law degree from Harvard in 1988, cum laude, and her BS from Berkeley in 1985, with high honors. She is a fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel and serves on the Tax Committee of the US Court of Federal Claims Advisory Council. Pawlow also serves on the Tax Advisory Board of the San Jose State University Lucas College and Graduate School of Business.

About Latham & Watkins

Latham & Watkins is a global law firm with more than 2,600 lawyers in its offices located in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States, including: Barcelona, Beijing, Boston, Brussels, Century City, Chicago, Dubai, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, New York, Orange County, Paris, Riyadh, Rome, San Diego, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. For more information on Latham & Watkins, please visit the website at www.lw.com.

Notes to Editors

1Latham & Watkins operates as a limited liability partnership worldwide with affiliated limited liability partnerships conducting the practice in the France, Italy, Singapore and the United Kingdom and affiliated partnerships conducting the practice in Hong Kong and Japan. Latham & Watkins operates in South Korea as a Foreign Legal Consultant Office. Latham & Watkins practices in cooperation with the Law Office of Salman M. Al-Sudairi in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Contacts

Michael Egge, Washington, D.C. Office Managing Partner: +1.202.637.2285

Miriam Fisher, Global Chair of Latham's Tax Controversy Practice: +1.202.637.2178

Nicholas DeNovio, Global Chair of Latham's International Tax Practice: +1.202.637.1034

SOURCE Latham & Watkins LLP

Related Links

http://www.lw.com


Rorheim, who served as executive director, president and president emeritus of Awana, still regularly visited Awana headquarters in his late 90s. "I've never found the word 'retirement' in the Bible," he joked.

"Art Rorheim was a man whose influence for the kingdom of God will have a lasting impact for generations to come," said Valerie Bell, Awana CEO. "Throughout his life he tirelessly proclaimed the gospel and dedicated his life to equipping Christian leaders to share this message with millions of children and moms and dads all over the world. To that end he was relentlessly focused in serving his Savior all the days of his life. His heart and passion for Jesus inspired millions. Awana, and the entire Christian community, will dearly miss this extraordinary man."

Rorheim, who spent more than 70 years with Awana, was born May 7, 1918 to Norwegian immigrants who eventually settled in Chicago near the future site of the North Side Gospel Center, the church where Awana would be born.

After serving as a volunteer, he went into full-time ministry in 1943 as the youth director of the North Side Gospel Center. At the time, most churches didn't have mid-week programs for children like they do today. In 1950, Rorheim and Pastor Lance "Doc" Latham took the concept beyond their church and founded the Awana Youth Association as a non-profit provider of curriculum and training materials.

In the early days, Rorheim shared a desk with another employee in a stairwell at the North Side Gospel Center. Although he never attended college, Rorheim quickly showed his creativity and organizational skills, developing many of the programs that make Awana unique today, including Bible-based handbooks and Awana games competitions.

Scripture memorization has long been one of the trademarks of Awana, and Rorheim lived it out in his own life. On one occasion, he even required his children and grandchildren to recite Psalm 1 before attending a family reunion.

Friends and co-workers also praised him for his wit and love for children.

"He was so much fun, and he saw life as fun," said Jeff Schacherer, who worked closely with Rorheim at Awana and frequently traveled with him. "He loved to play jokes on people. He had a passion for life, and he felt a need to share it with others."

"Rorheim had tremendous energy because he had a passion for helping others connect with God," Schacherer said. When they traveled together, Rorheim wanted to sit separately so that he could have the opportunity to share his faith with the person sitting next to him.

"He didn't see bodies; he saw souls," Schacherer said.

Rorheim took Awana global in 1972 when he started the first international Awana club in Bolivia. He eventually visited some 50 countries to spread the word about Awana, and he continued to travel for the ministry well into his 90s.

Rorheim continued to lead the national and international expansion of Awana until retiring as executive director in 1990. He then served as Awana president until 1999 before assuming the role of co-founder/president emeritus.

He is survived by his son and daughter-in-law, Ken and Katie; his daughter, Kathlyn Brock; four grandchildren; 10 great grandchildren; and three great-great grandchildren. He is reunited in heaven with his wife, Winnie; his parents, Olaus and Alida; his brothers Roy and Leif Oliver; and his son-in-law Dennis Brock.

The memorial service will take place at Quentin Road Bible Baptist Church, 60 Quentin Road, Lake Zurich, IL 60047 at 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 27. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be donated to Awana's Rorheim Legacy Fund, account number 1400D.

FOR INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Steve Yount

972.267.1111

[email protected]

SOURCE Awana
CHICAGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lendr, the leader in specialty finance solutions, announced today that CEO and Founder, Tim Roach, has been accepted into the Forbes Finance Council, an invitation-only community for world-class executives in the financial industry.

Mr. Roach joins other Forbes Financial Council members, who are hand-selected, to become part of a unique network of industry experts. Mr. Roach will get a hold of a variety of exclusive benefits and resources, including the opportunity to submit thought-provoking editorials and tips on finance industry-related topics for publishing on Forbes.com. Forbes Financial Council members gain access to the people, benefits and facilities they need to grow their businesses and a dedicated member concierge who acts as a branch of their own team, providing a personalized approach.

"I'm honored to be recognized by Forbes Finance Council. Forbes is synonymous with business. Taking my 20- year career in Finance and bringing that into the Forbes Council of my peers will be a great experience and I am looking forward to the collaboration and networking with so many top professionals in their respected fields." Says Roach, "I know on behalf of myself and Lendr we feel this partnership will create better awareness for the specialty finance community."

About Lendr

Founded in 2011, Lendr Holdings, LLC is a privately-held financial services firm with offices in Chicago and New York. Lendr provides small- to -medium- sized businesses with creative, flexible, short-term financing solutions.

We are excited about adding three new financial products to the market. We will enter consumer lending, a business line of credit and offering debit cards. We feel this will create better options for our clients and greater flexibility for their business and personal needs.

Visit lendr.online for more information

Contact: Lindsay Schroeder

Phone: (855) 928-1919

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Lendr
"L'Oreal research shows that overexposure to UV rays is a top health and beauty concern of consumers worldwide," said Guive Balooch, Global Vice President of L'Oreal's Technology Incubator. "With this knowledge, we set out to create something that blends problem-solving technology with human-centered design to reach even more consumers who require additional information about their UV exposure. Whenever we develop a new technology, our goal is to make an enormous global impact by enhancing consumers' lives."

L'Oreal has long been dedicated to sun safety through research, product innovation, funding significant research with the Melanoma Research Alliance, and public education campaigns such as skin screenings, PSAs and social media activations. To underscore this commitment, L'Oreal's leading dermatological skincare brand, La Roche-Posay, launched the first-ever stretchable skin sensor to monitor UV exposure, My UV Patch, in 2016. Since the technology's debut, the La Roche-Posay brand has distributed more than one million patches to consumers in 37 countries free of charge to encourage sun safe behaviors.

Through consumer studies and feedback of My UV Patch users, L'Oreal learned that although users changed their behaviors  with 34 percent applying sunscreen more often and 37 percent trying to stay in the shade more frequently  they wanted a smaller wearable with longer wear and real-time data. Building on the architecture of the original patch, UV Sense allows further monitoring of UV exposure, to show trends of exposure over time with instant updates.

UV Sense is the first battery-free wearable electronic sensor to measure individual UV exposure and can store up to three months of data. The wearable is less than two millimeters thick, nine millimeters in diameter and designed to be worn for up to two weeks on the thumbnail. The sensor can be reapplied to the nail with additional adhesives, which come in the packaging. By putting this technology on the thumbnail  which receives optimal sunlight  consumers can increase wear time from several days with My UV Patch to several weeks with UV Sense.

Balooch continued, "Beauty trends show that adoption of wearable nail art accessories is on the rise, with a more than 65 percent increase in nail art trends over the last five years. Our innovation taps into this growing trend, while illustrating our deep commitment to sun safe behavior and protection."

Powered by the user's mobile phone and activated by UVA and UVB rays, UV Sense is the first wearable electronic UV sensor powered without a battery. The wearable has an accompanying mobile app, available on both iOS and Android, which translates and transfers data from the sensor using Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled technology. The app delivers consumer-friendly information detailing when the wearer should be mindful of UV exposure. Data is included in a profile within the app that outlines a user's exposure levels. Sun-safety habits  like spending time in the shade or reapplying sunscreen  are encouraged with facts about sun exposure and additional tips for protection.

"Design and technology are inextricably linked, and as products become more personalized to individuals, both elements are integral to providing people with seamless experiences," said Yves Behar, designer entrepreneur and founder of fuseproject. "By working with L'Oreal, we are able to pair deep expertise in beauty tech with an effective design that enhances consumers' wellbeing without distracting from their everyday lives."

Both UV Sense and the limited-edition of My UV Patch draw from research L'Oreal conducted in conjunction with MC10, Inc., a leading wearable technology company, and professor John Rogers at Northwestern University, through his portfolio of intellectual property (IP) and innovation around flexible, stretchable electronics. This research has provided valuable insights into the human skin, such as the calculations of personal daily safe UV doses around the skin phototype and minimal erythema dose.

"Proper sun precautions are vital to the health and appearance of our skin," added Dr. Whitney Bowe, a New York City-based Dermatologist. "According to a 2016 Ipsos study*, nearly half of Americans reported that they wanted to be better educated about their skin concerns. My UV Patch has demonstrated improvements in sun-safe behaviors and reduced sunburns among its users. That tells us that wearables can stimulate true behavioral change by helping consumers understand their actual level of UV exposure. It's a major breakthrough in changing our understanding of UV exposure daily and over time."

UV Sense will be available on a limited basis in the U.S. for the 2018 summer season with a global launch following in 2019. Details on where the limited-edition as well as the original heart design of My UV Patch will be available on www.laroche-posay.us. For more information and product availability, visit www.laroche-posay.us.

*Source: Health is the future of beauty, Ipsos, June 2016

ABOUT L'OREAL

L'Oreal has devoted itself to beauty for over 100 years. With its unique international portfolio of 34 diverse and complementary brands, the Group generated sales amounting to 25.8 billion euros in 2016 and employs 89,300 people worldwide. As the world's leading beauty company, L'Oreal is present across all distribution networks: mass market, department stores, pharmacies and drugstores, hair salons, travel retail, branded retail and e-commerce.

Research and Innovation, and a dedicated research team of 3,870 people, are at the core of L'Oreal's strategy, working to meet beauty aspirations all over the world. L'Oreal's sustainability commitment for 2020 "Sharing Beauty With All" sets out ambitious sustainable development objectives across the Group's value chain. www.loreal.com

ABOUT LA ROCHE-POSAY

Recommended by more than 25,000 dermatologists worldwide, La Roche-Posay offers a unique range of daily skincare developed with dermatologists for every skin type to complement and enhance their patients' treatments and to promote good skincare practices at home every day. Started from the world's leading center of thermal dermatology, La Roche-Posay develops formulas with its exclusive Selenium-rich water, used at the center since 1905, due to its antioxidant and soothing properties. The products are developed using a strict formulation charter with a minimal number of ingredients and are formulated with ingredients at optimal concentrations. Additionally, La Roche-Posay products undergo stringent clinical testing for efficacy and safety, even on sensitive skin. La Roche-Posay: A Better Life For Sensitive Skin.

ABOUT FUSEPROJECT

Founded in 1999 by Yves Behar, fuseproject is an award-winning design studio based in San Francisco. Utilizing an integrated approach to design, the studio offers a full scope of design services including industrial design, brand, packaging, UI/UX, and spatial design. Fuseproject believes that design should be a force for positive social and environmental change, and has received two INDEX: Awards for their work's social impact. Taking a long-term approach to developing and enhancing brands, fuseproject works internationally across a wide array of industries including tech and biotechnology, furniture, fashion, spatial design, and consumer goods. The studio has also pioneered venture design, working with entrepreneurs in providing holistic design services to support in scaling their businesses. The studio's work is internationally recognized, and lives in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Victoria & Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt and Centre Pompidou among others.

SOURCE L'Oreal USA

Related Links

http://www.loreal.com


WOBURN, Mass., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LoyaltyExpress, a provider of marketing automation and cloud-based CRM solutions for mortgage companies and banks, today announced the acquisition of Lending Manager, a leading point-of-sale and website creator for lenders of all sizes. The acquisition and integration of both companies' technologies will help automate lead flow and associated marketing for all aspects of the loan process. The combined company services 115 lenders with over 15,000 loan officers across all platforms.

"The ever-increasing expectation of consumers during the lending process led us to this merger," said Wayne Steagall, Founder of Lending Manager. "We are thrilled to partner with LoyaltyExpress. We look forward extending our solutions backed with the power of the LoyaltyExpress creative and fulfillment teams."

"After extensive due diligence and market research, it became immediately apparent that Lending Manager delivers incredibly efficient and automated lead capture systems and attractive corporate and loan officer websites," said Jeff Doyle, Chief Executive Officer of LoyaltyExpress. "Wayne and his team have developed integrations with over 75 CRM, loan origination, lead management, and point-of-sale systems which is a growing requirement of any solution in the mortgage industry. We look forward to integrating CustomerManager with Lending Manager."

About LoyaltyExpress

LoyaltyExpress simplifies CRM and marketing automation for banks and mortgage companies, including one of the top three retail lenders in the nation. Its flagship solution, CustomerManager, is an enterprise-wide, Software-as-a-Service platform that combines lead management, email and direct mail campaigns with a 360-degree view of each loan officer's customers, partners and prospects. The MarketingCentral service delivers a web-based, sales collateral store powered by custom content creation and integrated print fulfillment. LoyaltyExpress eliminates the need to share sensitive customer data with multiple vendors and has a team of world-class marketing and branding experts with extensive experience in the mortgage industry. LoyaltyExpress is backed by New Capital Partners. For more information, visit www.loyaltyexpress.com.

About Lending Manager

Lending Manager builds custom corporate and loan officer websites for lenders of all sizes. The Company delivers world-class flexible point-of-sale solutions with over 75 integrations with the leading mortgage technology providers. Lending Manager is based in Newark, Delaware. For more information, visit www.lendingmanager.com.

About New Capital Partners

New Capital Partners is focused on building great companies by investing in high-growth businesses and partnering with management teams in the healthcare, financial services, and business services industries. New Capital Partners is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama and has an office in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit www.newcapitalpartners.com.

SOURCE LoyaltyExpress

Related Links

http://www.loyaltyexpress.com


By Mukhaye Damali:

The opposition forum for Democratic change is to start an isolation campaign against members of Parliament who voted for the age limit removal and term limits extension in Parliament.

Addressing journalists at the party headquarters in Najjanakumbi, the party president Patrick Amuriat has said party officials are to go out and mobilize members of the public to isolate all the 317 MPs who voted in favor of the age limit removal.

He says since the MPs voted against the will of Ugandans, they should not be allowed to speak at any public function like funerals and in church.

He also notes FDC, is to show resistance against the constitutional amendment act and are ready to join hands with other forces to defy it.

The police have however cautioned the opposition against engaging in any unlawful activities
RENO, Nevada, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Magellan Gold Corporation (OTCQB: MAGE) ("Magellan" or "the Company") announced that effective December 31, 2017, it had agreed with Rio Silver Inc. ("Rio Silver") to mutually terminate the Company's option to earn an interest in Rio Silver's Ninobamba exploration property in Peru. Magellan previously announced entering into the option agreement in news releases on July 5, 2016 and October 25, 2016.

In connection with termination of the agreement, Rio Silver agreed, subject to regulatory approval and under certain conditions, to apply to the TSX Venture Exchange for an 18-month extension of 2,750,000 warrants that Magellan holds in Rio Silver stock, which otherwise would expire in February and July 2018. There can be no assurance the warrants will be extended.

Also in connection with the termination of the agreement, Magellan agreed to grant Rio Silver a right of first refusal on any sale of the 2,750,000 shares of Rio Silver stock that Magellan currently holds. The stock and warrants in Rio Silver held by the Company relate to two Cdn$75,000 private placement unit financings subscribed by the Company in 2016 and 2017.

About Magellan Gold Corporation

Magellan Gold Corporation (OTCQB: MAGE) is a US public enterprise focused on the exploration and development of precious metals. In November 2017 Magellan completed the purchase of the SDA Mill in the State of Nayarit, Mexico. Magellan also owns an advanced silver exploration property located in Arizona.

The SDA Mill is a fully operational flotation plant that also includes a precious metals leach circuit and associated assets, licenses and agreements. Currently the Company is focused on acquiring sources of high-grade gold and silver ore that can be trucked to the mill for processing. Several attractive properties have been identified and are being evaluated for potential acquisition.

The 100% owned Silver District Property in southwest Arizona comprises over 2,000 acres covering the heart of the historic Silver District. The property contains a near-surface historical drilled resource of 16 million ounces of silver and exhibits exploration promise for significant expansion.

To learn more about Magellan Gold Corporation, visit http://www.magellangoldcorp.com.

Cautionary Statement

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission permits mining companies, in their filings with the SEC, to disclose only those mineral deposits that a company can legally extract or produce. Under SEC Industry Guide 7 standards, a "final" or "bankable" feasibility study is required to report reserves. Currently we have not delineated "reserves" on any of our properties. We cannot be certain that any deposits at our properties will ever be confirmed or converted into SEC Industry Guide 7 compliant "reserves." Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of any "resource" estimates will ever be confirmed or converted into reserves or that they can be economically or legally extracted.

Forward Looking Statements

This release contains "forward-looking statements." Such statements are based on good faith assumptions that Magellan Gold Corporation believes are reasonable but which are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and business risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated are discussed in Magellan Gold Corporation's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Contacts:

Magellan Gold Corporation

Pierce Carson: (505) 463-9223

John Power: (707) 884-3766

Peter Nesveda (INT IR): +61-4-1235-7375



SOURCE Magellan Gold Corporation
Coolidge founded Majestyk Apps in 2012 following more than 8 years in the Marines Corps Reserves, with time served in Africa and Iraq. Under his leadership, the New York City-based agency provides an incubator-like experience that helps established brands and entrepreneurs design, develop, and scale their businesses using new mobile, digital and artificial intelligence technologies.

The scale and capabilities of Majestyk Apps today were just a dream for Coolidge when he first launched the company. In the early days, Coolidge built and marketed small apps on a tiny budget to a few clients. As the company grew, he began adding services and engaging with larger brands. Soon Majestyk Apps reached a critical inflection point.

"We were growing fast and needed to take our business to the next level. We had bids in front of two major prospective clients and we needed to scale our resources quickly to meet their requirements," says Coolidge. "We applied to various banks for financing, but were turned down because we were a young business without a credit history. We were however, profitable."

Coolidge turned to OnDeck. He applied online for financing in 2014 and was quickly approved for $30,000 in capital. Coolidge had the necessary funds from OnDeck in his business account the next day.

"Thanks to OnDeck, we won the two bids and those large companies became clients. Majestyk Apps saw an immediate 50% growth in revenue over the year we worked with OnDeck and that has continued to accelerate," says Coolidge. "Our headcount doubled as we took on more big name projects, largely because we now had the resources to invest in and win those deals. OnDeck was able to provide the necessary growth capital when banks and other lenders would not."

In 2015, Coolidge subsequently applied for and was approved for a second OnDeck loan in the amount of $35,000.

Today, Majestyk Apps is one of the fastest-growing digital technology agencies in New York and Coolidge's team has designed and launched products for several Fortune 500 companies. In 2015, the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) spinout, CogniToys, won a Time Magazine Best Invention of the Year and was tabbed as the "Best Use of A.I. in Education" by the coveted A.I. Awards. For more information on Majestyk Apps, visit their website at: http://majestykapps.com/

"In a world dominated by big, well known technology players, Donald used his Marine Corps background, technology expertise and fierce determination to help his business break through," says Andrea Gellert, Chief Revenue Officer, OnDeck. "OnDeck is proud to have provided a military veteran and business visionary like Donald with the capital needed to help turn his dream into a reality."

Since its inception in 2007, OnDeck has provided more than $604 million in capital to small businesses in New York State. In New York City alone, the company has lent more than $278 million to small business owners. Overall, OnDeck is the leading online small business lender with more than $8 billion in capital provided to more than 80,000 customers in 700 different industries across the United States, Canada and Australia.

The Small Business Spotlight series from OnDeck is designed to reinforce the vital importance of America's small business owners. Every month, OnDeck spotlights the achievements of its small business customers and how they are thriving as a result of receiving capital from OnDeck. To learn more, visit http://www.ondeck.com/smallbusinessspotlight

About OnDeck

OnDeck (NYSE: ONDK) is the leader in online small business lending. Since 2007, the company has powered Main Street's growth through advanced lending technology and a constant dedication to customer service. OnDeck's proprietary credit scoring system  the OnDeck Score  leverages advanced analytics, enabling OnDeck to make real-time lending decisions and deliver capital to small businesses in as little as 24 hours. OnDeck offers business owners a complete financing solution, including the online lending industry's widest range of term loans and lines of credit. To date, the company has deployed over $8 billion to more than 80,000 customers in 700 different industries across the United States, Canada and Australia. For more information, please visit www.ondeck.com.

SOURCE On Deck Capital, Inc.
IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) today announced the promotion of Jim Lievois, 60, to the newly created role of Executive Vice President (EVP). He also will continue to serve in his current role as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) while overseeing Finance, Administration and IT. Based at the company's Irvine, California Headquarters office, Lievois will continue to report to MNAO president and CEO, Masahiro Moro.

Mazda North American Operations Promotes Jim Lievois to Executive Vice President

In this new role, Lievois will oversee sales, service and marketing, and sales operations for MNAO. In addition, he will continue to oversee financial planning, treasury, accounting, tax, administration and information technology. Specifically, he will be tasked with implementing a customer-centric approach that is innovative, forward thinking and technologically advanced in order to deliver a positive Mazda brand experience at every touchpoint along the company's customers' journey from research through to ownership and back again to repurchase.

"As the Mazda brand continues to evolve into a more premium position within the industry, it's critical that we put our customers' needs and expectations at the forefront of everything we do in order to deliver an outstanding experience," said Masahiro Moro, president and CEO, MNAO. "Jim's future vision, vast experience and respected leadership style make him the perfect candidate to be successful in this new role."

Lievois has more than 35 years of experience in the automotive industry. He joined MNAO in 1997, following 16 years with Ford Motor Co. Throughout his career, he has held a number of management positions in finance, treasury and administration.

Lievois graduated with a B.A. in marketing from Michigan State University and received an MBA from the University of Detroit.

Mazda North American Operations is headquartered in Irvine, California, and oversees the sales, marketing, parts and customer service support of Mazda vehicles in the United States and Mexico through nearly 600 dealers. Operations in Mexico are managed by Mazda Motor de Mexico in

Mexico City. For more information on Mazda vehicles, including photography and B-roll, please visit the online Mazda media center at InsideMazda.MazdaUSA.com/Newsroom.

SOURCE Mazda North American Operations

Related Links

http://www.mazdausa.com


BNEI BRAK, Israel, January 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Merchavia Holdings and Investments (TASE: MRHL), an Israeli investment company specializing in early-stage life sciences companies, announced a signing of a non-binding memorandum of understandings in which it will invest $500,000 in Digital Therapeutics Company 'Wellness Layers', as part of an investment round of up to $1 million. After due diligence is completed, a binding agreement will be signed.

Eli Arad, Merchavia CEO: "Our portfolio consists of breakthrough biotechnology companies operating in major markets. The investments we have made already created significant value for us in clinical successes, reaching breakthrough commercialization agreements, and raising successful follow-up financing rounds. We are excited to bring 'Wellness Layers', which provides digital health solutions, into our promising portfolio. The company is mature, generating millions of dollars in revenue, and its customers includes global medical giants and leading medical institutions worldwide. Today, due to various market dynamics, healthcare stakeholders are forced to transition their various traditional patient relationship management and population health services to digital. 'Wellness Layers' offers a cloud solution that makes this digital transition easy and quick. The company is positioned at the epicenter of this momentous healthcare market change and we are convinced that the Wellness Layers team has an excellent professional and marketing infrastructure to become a market leader, while making an important contribution to creating value for Merchavia's shareholders."

Dr. Amir Kishon, Founder and CEO, Wellness Layers: "We are happy about the vote of confidence and the investment by Merchavia, which will speed up the company's growth. Wellness Layers operates in the Digital Therapeutics market in which the world of old healthcare is undergoing a digital transformation against a backdrop of enormous competition and with a requirement to provide digital healthcare that enables continual remote management, monitoring and guidance of patients by health systems and organizations - this with the aim of providing the best medical services as well as major savings in costs. We have recently seen increasing investments in Digital Therapeutics by leading companies in the medical device sector, large pharmaceutical companies, medical insurance companies and healthcare services providers, so that through the financing round, and our extremely easy cloud platform, it is our intention to deepen Wellness Layers' product activities, to lead marketing efforts, and to increase the company's revenue to a target of tens of millions of dollars in the next three years, while creating major value for our customers, their patients, and for society."

An outstanding example of the company's success is the clinical results presented in the digital therapeutics project for patients at risk of diabetes, which was conducted using the company's systems by Medtronic, in collaboration with IBM. For 83% of the program's participants, there was a major decrease of two points in HbA1c, which means the dramatic improvement of the health indices of those patients. The company's systems currently support tens of thousands of patients in areas such as diabetes, heart disease, AIDS, remote medication management, health rehabilitation, employee wellness, and weight loss.

Contact:

Eli Arad

[email protected]

+972-3-5788770



SOURCE Merchavia Holding and Investment LTD
DALLAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Methodist Family Health Centers, a part of Methodist Medical Group and affiliate of Methodist Health System, today announced the launch of Methodist NOW  an online diagnosis and treatment service that enables patients to receive convenient access to care by connecting them virtually with trusted Methodist Family Health Center providers. Methodist NOW is powered by Zipnosis, a virtual care company that enables health systems to provide virtual care services, meeting the needs of patients while improving access to care and maximizing clinical capacity. This launch marks the next phase in Methodist Medical Group's broad consumer access strategy.

Methodist NOW facilitates care delivery through evidence-based online interviews paired with real-time chat functionality that enables patients and providers to exchange messages when additional information is needed for a diagnosis.

"Our mission at Methodist Medical Group is to exceed our patients' expectations for expanded access through a transformation of care delivery that includes integrated urgent care, extended hours and same-day appointments, and now virtual care," said George Williams, MD, MMM, FACEP, President of Methodist Medical Group and Senior Vice President of Methodist Health System. "We believe expanding access and reducing barriers to high-value, ambulatory care will not only improve consumer experience, but also long-term health and wellness for our patients and community."

The trend toward healthcare consumerism is increasingly at the forefront of health system decisions. In growing numbers, patients are making healthcare choices based on the ability of providers and health systems to bring value in the form of access and experience. This patient-focused mindset is at the heart of Methodist Medical Group's strategic direction, and a key factor in their decision to launch Methodist NOW.

"Methodist NOW is a response to the growing demand for a consumer experience and expanded access to high-value ambulatory healthcare when and where patients need it most," said Ryan Alcantar, Director of Healthcare Transformation, Methodist Medical Group.

After logging on to Methodist NOW, patients complete a brief online interview during which they enter their symptoms and health history information. Once a patient's symptoms are entered, a Methodist Family Health Center provider will review the interview results and then respond with a diagnosis and treatment plan. If medication is appropriate, prescriptions will be sent to the customer's preferred pharmacy for pick-up. Patients can access Methodist NOW at any time of day, with providers responding within one hour between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., seven days-a-week.

Meeting the demand for convenience, patients can seek care from their smartphones, tablets or computers and be treated virtually for more than 25 common health conditions including minor skin conditions, pink eye, upper respiratory infections like cold and flu, and seasonal allergies  all for a set fee of $40 payable by credit, debit or health savings card. Patients will also soon be able to join Methodist NOW as subscribers, receiving unlimited visits for a low monthly fee. "Consumers need care to be available when and where they need it  a philosophy that Methodist Medical Group has embraced in their strategy to deliver greater access to care," said Jon Pearce, Zipnosis CEO. "As the first Zipnosis customer to launch our new chat functionality, Methodist Medical Group has further proven their dedication to patient care and convenience as well as their willingness to blaze new trails, marking them as a true leader in the Texas healthcare market."

About Methodist Health System

Guided by the founding principles of life, learning, and compassion, Dallas-based Methodist Health System (Methodist) provides quality, integrated health care to improve and save the lives of individuals and families throughout North Texas. Ten hospitals and more than two dozen Methodist Family Health Centers and Medical Groups are among the facilities served by the nonprofit Methodist Health System, which is affiliated by covenant with the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. Recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of the fastest-growing health systems in America, Methodist continues to add facilities and services to enhance patient care along the entire continuum. Additional information is available at MethodistHealthSystem.org. Connect through Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter at MethodistHealthSystem.org/SocialMedia.

About Zipnosis

Zipnosis (www.zipnosis.com) offers health systems a leading virtual care platform that pairs traditional telemedicine with next-generation online virtual care tools to drive exceptional clinical quality, significant clinical efficiency and durable financial returns. A trusted innovator in the industry, Zipnosis pioneered online adaptive interview technology, which is built on a foundation of clinical best practice guidelines. This smart alternative to traditional telemedicine allows providers to diagnose and develop a treatment plan for patients in just two minutes. With Zipnosis' unique platform approach to virtual care, patients can be treated through the online adaptive interview, video and phone technology, or when appropriate, referred to in-person care via the platform's advanced routing capabilities. Based in Minneapolis, MN, Zipnosis helps health systems keep pace with the changing demands of healthcare consumers.

SOURCE Zipnosis; Methodist Family Health Centers

Related Links

http://www.zipnosis.com


MIAMI BEACH, Fla., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- These days, finding a reliable and trustworthy contractor to complete any project is time consuming and beyond stressful. In the state of Florida however, it is growing even more complicated to find a reputable contractor, especially within the indoor air quality, water damage, and mold remediation industries. As Florida was directly hit with several record setting storms this past year, the amount of rebuilding and restoration work available has attracted a large number of opportunistic licensed and unlicensed contractors from across the state and nation. Florida is already proactive in combating predatory individuals and contractors by means of raising public awareness, conducting sting operations, and ultimately arresting those that are taking advantage of unsuspecting people.

One Florida indoor air quality, mold inspection, and mold removal company, Miami Mold Specialists, has taken notice and has already started to take action on several fronts to combat this major systemic issue.

Some of Miami Mold Specialists recent efforts-

- Hurricane Irma Relief Program.

- Anti-AOB Insurance Claim Awareness Campaign.

- Brand New Wi-Fi Camera Live Monitoring Service.

A spokesperson for Miami Mold Specialists recently stated, "Our state licensed mold removal technicians are now able to not only record an entire project from start to finish, clients are now able to watch the entire mold remediation process through a live video feed, allowing even more transparency and interactivity with Miami Mold Specialists. As we are in expansion mode, we felt that we should provide our clients and new franchise partners the opportunity to be able to monitor all technicians, as well as, our franchise quality control team as to ensure Miami Mold Specialists brand reputation."

For more information about Miami Mold Specialists new Wi-Fi live feed monitoring services, please visit-

https://www.miamimoldspecialists.com/wi-fi-integrated-equipment

About Miami Mold Specialists

South Florida's Premier Indoor Air Quality, Mold Inspection, and Mold Remediation Service Provider. High Tech and Eco-Friendly Indoor Air Quality, Mold Inspection, and Mold Removal Services by Miami Mold Specialist. Multi Certified, Licensed, Insured, Bonded, With Over 30 Years Experience!

Call- 1-305-763-8070

http://www.miamimoldspecialists.com

This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com.

SOURCE Miami Mold Specialists

Related Links

http://www.miamimoldspecialists.com


LONDON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart Metering in Europe is the thirteenth consecutive report from Berg Insight analysing the latest developments for smart metering (electricity and gas) in Europe.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4220211



This strategic research report from Berg Insight provides you with over 250 pages of unique business intelligence, including 5-year industry forecasts, expert commentary and real-life case studies on which to base your business decisions.



Highlights from the thirteenth edition of the report:

- Full coverage of the European market with in-depth market profiles of all countries in EU28+2.

- Case studies of smart electricity and gas metering projects by the leading energy groups in Europe.

- 360-degree overview of next generation PLC, RF and cellular standards for smart grid communication.

- Updated profiles of the key players in the metering industry.

- New detailed forecast for smart electricity and gas meters in 30 countries until 2023.

- Summary of the latest developments in the European energy industry.



More than 200 million European households will have smart meters in 2023

Smart metering has reached a stage of early maturity with massrollouts underway in significant parts of Western Europe.



Almost 40 percent of the 281 million electricity customers in EU28+2 had a smart meter at the end of 2017, a share that is set to increase to 70 percent over the coming five years. As a consequence, annual shipments of smart electricity meters will reach a peak of around 28 million units per year in 2019/2020.



The majority of the new installations will take place in France, Spain and the UK, with significant contribution also coming from countries like Austria and the Netherlands. After Italy, which had a head-start, Spain was the first major country in Western Europe to begin mass deployments at the start of this decade.



France and the UK have started to ramp up the rate of installations, which will peak at an aggregate level of 1012 million units per year in the period 20182020. Italy and Sweden were the first European countries to embark on nationwide deployments of smart meters in the last decade.



As the systems deployed in both countries reach their end-of-life, the DSOs are making preparations for a second wave of rollouts. In Italy, Enel's distribution arm e-distribuzione is leading the way with plans to install 13 million second generation meters by 2019 and another 28 million in the following decade. Sweden faces a more complex situation with some remaining uncertainty around regulations and a greater diversity of DSOs. Over the past years, some of the earliest moving municipal DSOs from the first wave began upgrading their systems.



In May 2017, Ellevio launched the first major second wave tender for the upgrading of 0.9 million metering points. The rollout will be the first where one existing large-scale system will be replaced by another. Germany is taking a highly cautious approach to smart meters.



The country is planning for a 1520 years' transition period during which smart meters are gradually introduced for selected customer groups. In July 2016, Germany reached a significant milestone as the new regulatory framework and roadmap for smart meters was formally approved. In the medium term, smart meters will become mandatory for around 10 percent of the customers by 2025/2028. For the remaining 90 percent, households using less than 6,000 kWh per year, the technology will be optional with a price cap. This does leave some room for more extensive rollouts during the 2020s by DSOs that can identify strong business cases.



Adoption trends in Central Eastern Europe are mixed. Estonia was the first country in the region to complete a nationwide rollout at the end of 2016. Latvia is doing a partial rollout to larger electricity customers and Lithuania has recently launched a pilot project.



Poland has seen some large-scale installations but there have not yet been any final decisions about the regulatory framework of technical standads. At the end of 2017, one of the five DSOs were committed to a complete rollout while the others had performed or planned to perform large-scale pilots. Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary have different approaches to smart meters. The cost benefit analysis in Czechia had a negative result and deterred the country from going ahead with a rollout. Slovakia found a positive business case for a partial rollout and will deploy smart meters to around 30 percent of the customer base accounting for half of the yearly consumption until 2020.



Hungary has established a subsidiary of the national TSO for the task of managing a national pilot project over the next years. Romania has seen an accelerated uptake in the past years as all three DSOs initiated significant deployments. Bulgaria does not plan a mandatory rollout, but the country's DSOs are gradually deploying smart meters to selected customers for similar reasons as in Romania. Greece is still in the process of organising a large-scale pilot that could lead up to an eventual nationwide rollout by the country's only DSO. PLC has been the dominant technology platform for smart metering solutions in Europe from the onset.



Berg Insight however believes that IoT-optimised cellular technologies such as LTE-M/NB-IoT and RF mesh networks will steadily increase their market shares in smart metering over the next 510 years. The shift from 2G to 4G/5G will eventually offer improved performance at lower cost. LTE-M will probably be the most suitable alternative for smart electricity metering, while NB-IoT will cover the needs in smart gas and water metering. At the same time, the standardisation of RF mesh networks by the Wi-SUN Alliance and other standard bodies has a good potential for establishing a thriving ecosystem



This report answers the following questions:

- What is the status of nationwide rollouts in France, Spain and the UK? What are the plans for second generation rollouts start in Italy and Sweden?

- Why is Germany taking a different approach to smart metering?

- Which European countries are next in line for large-scale rollouts?

- What is the status of smart metering in Russia & CIS and the Balkans?

- What is driving the shift from PLC to wireless communication technologies?

- What impact will LTE-M and NB-IoT have on the smart metering market?

- Which are the leading suppliers of smart metering solutions for the European market?



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4220211



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MPOWER Financing, a public benefit corporation focused on removing financial barriers to higher education in the U.S., has appointed Lutz Braum as its vice president of marketing and business development.

Braum, who has over 25 years of experience in marketing financial services, will be responsible for driving growth of the company's student loan portfolio by increasing awareness of MPOWER Financing among higher education institutions in the U.S., as well as prospective high-potential students from all over the world.

Previously, Braum was chief marketing officer of Higher One, the largest digital-only banking provider in the U.S. with more than two million student checking accounts and over 800 college campus clients, which was sold to Customers Bank in 2016 and is currently operating as BankMobile. Earlier in his career, he was the head of consumer marketing for PayPal and SVP of marketing at Wells Fargo Bank. Braum started his career at Citibank where he held increasingly senior marketing roles both domestically and internationally. He earned his M.B.A. at Wharton and B.S. in Finance from Arizona State University after moving to the U.S. from Germany.

"Lutz has a strong background in driving revenue, customer engagement and loyalty by building compelling value propositions and executing integrated marketing campaigns across on- and off-line channels," said Manu Smadja, CEO and co-founder of MPOWER Financing. "His expertise and global experience is exactly what we need to reach our $100 million loan portfolio goal. We know he'll do an excellent job enhancing both B2B and B2C marketing capabilities and will reach even more high-potential students who aspire to obtain a degree from the U.S."

"I believe that helping to turn the dreams of future global leaders and innovators into reality is of utmost importance, and their education should not be interrupted or derailed by a financial shortfall," said Braum. "I look forward to helping international students study in the U.S and become global citizens by offering them a supplemental financing source that doesn't depend on a co-signer or a traditional credit score."

About MPOWER Financing

MPOWER Financing is an innovative fintech company and provider of educational loans to high-promise international students. MPOWER Financing helps students build their credit histories and provides them with personal finance, education and gateway financial products to prepare for life after college. The team is backed by Zephyr Management, Goal Structured Solutions, 1776, Village Capital, VARIV, DreamIt, Fresco, Chilango, K Street and University Ventures. For more information, please visit www.mpowerfinancing.com, or follow MPOWER Financing on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Media Contacts:

Richard Anderson / Cara Johnson

Feintuch Communications

718-986-1596 / 212-808-4904

[email protected]

SOURCE MPOWER Financing

Related Links

http://www.mpowerfinancing.com


WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Media are invited to view the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S (GOES-S), the second in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) series of next-generation geostationary weather satellites, at 9:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, Jan. 16.

This event, to be held at the Astrotech Space Operations payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, is an opportunity to photograph GOES-S and interview project and program officials. Media interested in attending this event must email [email protected] no later than noon on Thursday, Jan. 11.

Due to clean room requirements, no more than 20 individuals will be allowed to participate, and no more than two per media organization. This event is open only to U.S. citizens who possess a government-issued photo identification, such as a driver's license, and proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate.

Facility Access

Please read these instructions carefully, or you may be denied access to the clean room.

Procedures for optically sensitive spacecraft must be followed by individuals entering the clean room where the spacecraft is being prepared for launch. Long pants and closed-toe shoes must be worn. No tank tops, shorts or skirts will be permitted. Full clean-room attire (bunny suits) must be worn and will be furnished. Please do not wear perfume, cologne, hair spray or makeup. Those wearing makeup will be required to remove it prior to entry.

Photographers will need to clean camera equipment under the supervision or assistance of contamination-control specialists. All camera equipment must be self-contained. Nonessential equipment, such as suede, leather or vinyl camera bags, carrying cases, camera straps, or accessories with Velcro must be left outside the clean room. No notebook paper, pencils or click-type ball point pens are permitted; clean-room paper and non-retractable ball point pens will be provided.

Use of wireless microphones and cell phones will be permitted if not contained in external cases or holding devices. Electronic flash will be permitted. The lighting in the facility is metal halide (white) for pictures. No food, chewing gum, tobacco, lighters, matches or pocketknives will be allowed and so should not be brought to the Astrotech clean room.

The GOES-R satellite series, which includes GOES-R, -S, -T and -U, is the nation's most advanced fleet of geostationary weather satellites that will extend the availability of the operational GOES satellite system through 2036.

GOES-S is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 5:02 p.m. EST Thursday, March 1, from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft 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.

NOAA manages the GOES-R Series Program through an integrated NOAA-NASA office and is responsible for the science and data applications. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides spacecraft project management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space of Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and is responsible for spacecraft development, integration and testing.

Mission operations will be performed by NOAA at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Maryland. Harris Corp., of Melbourne, Florida, provided the main instrument payload, the Advanced Baseline Imager, the antenna system for data receipt and the ground segment. NASA's Launch Services Program is responsible for launch management. United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colorado, is the provider of the Atlas V launch service.

For more information about the GOES-R Series Program, visit:

https://www.goes-r.gov

SOURCE NASA
OMAHA, Neb., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nebraska Total Care announced today that they are partnering with Habitat for Humanity of Omaha (Habitat Omaha) to provide support to new Habitat homeowners. At the Home Dedication Ceremony, Nebraska Total Care will present a gift card to each Habitat homeowner to help them purchase needed items for their new home.

"We are pleased to support Habitat Omaha and the families they serve," said Ryan Sadler, Plan President of Nebraska Total Care. "These goals align with Nebraska Total Care's mission to improve health and overall wellness for all Nebraskans. We are excited for the opportunity to support these individuals and families as they reach on this important milestone."

Habitat Omaha builds strength, stability and self-reliance through shelter. New and renovated homes are sold to low-income families at the full appraised value through a 20 to 30-year affordable mortgage. Families are selected based on housing need, ability to pay and willingness to partner. This year, Habitat Omaha will build or renovate 42 homes in the community.

Affordable housing allows families to:

Provide stability for their children

Gain improved health, physical safety and security

Increase educational and job prospects

Be engaged in their communities

"We welcome Nebraska Total Care to the community and thank them for their support of Habitat Families as they embark on a new, exciting chapter of their lives as first time homeowners," Kathy Roum, Sr. Director of Development and Marketing, Habitat Omaha.

About Nebraska Total Care

Nebraska Total Care is a managed care plan that provides health insurance in Nebraska. Established in 2017, Nebraska Total Care exists to improve the health of its members through focused, compassionate and coordinated care. Nebraska Total Care is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Centene Corporation, a diversified, multi-national healthcare enterprise. For more information, visit www.nebraskatotalcare.com.

About Habitat for Humanity of Omaha

Founded in 1984, Habitat for Humanity of Omaha is a grassroots organization that builds and renovates houses, forges community partnerships and breaks down barriers. We eliminate vacant lots and abandoned homes in the blighted areas of North and South Omaha while improving the overall appearance of our community. Habitat Partner Families are required to complete up to 350 hours of Sweat Equity before purchasing their homes through 25 or 30-year affordable mortgages. Through Habitat Omaha, more than 460 families have realized the dream of homeownership and are ending the cycle of poverty for their children.

In 2017, Habitat Omaha will build or renovate more than 40 homes, demolish 50 condemned houses and make critical repairs to 60 homes through the Habitat's Home Repair Program. For more information, visit habitatomaha.org.

SOURCE Nebraska Total Care

Related Links

http://www.nebraskatotalcare.com


At NBE, Smith was responsible for leading the successful integration and implementation of a series of projects to standardize and streamline key services in Nestle companies across the U.S. market. Smith brings to NWNA more than 30 years of sales experience and has held numerous management positions within the sales organizations of Nestle companies. Before moving to NBE, Smith served as President of the Nestle Walmart Team where he was the strategic leader and single point of contact for Nestle with Walmart on all matters across Nestle companies. Additionally, he was President of Nestle Business Services for all Nestle companies in North America. He has also served as President for the Nestle Sales Division for Nestle USA; Vice President Sales Operations & Customer Development for Nestle USA; Division Vice President, Category Sales Development for Nestle Chocolate & Confections; and Division Vice President, Category Sales Development for Friskies PetCare. Smith began his career with Nestle in 1985 and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Providence College.

"I am delighted that Tom will be joining the Nestle Waters North America family," said Fernando Merce, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nestle Waters North America. "His more than thirty years of sales experience will help to strengthen our core business as we look to identify new areas of growth and further our leadership position in the bottled water industry."

"As America's number one beverage of choice, more and more consumers are choosing bottled water over carbonated soft drinks," said Tom Smith. "I'm looking forward to leading the sales organization at NWNA and delivering profitable growth that drives the company's healthy hydration ambitions."

Smith replaces John Zupo, who is leaving NWNA to pursue opportunities outside of the company. "We are grateful for John's dedication to Nestle Waters North America over the past 19 years, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors," said Merce.

About Nestle Waters North America

Nestle Waters North America provides people with an unrivaled portfolio of bottled waters for healthy hydration. Brands such as Poland Spring, Nestle Pure Life, Perrier and S. Pellegrino have driven Nestle Waters North America to be the third largest non-alcoholic beverage company by volume in the U.S. Nestle Waters North America also owns and operates ReadyRefreshSM by Nestle, the largest home and office water delivery service by volume in the U.S. Based in Stamford, Connecticut with some 8,500 associates, Nestle Waters is committed to reducing its environmental footprint across its operations. As a natural resource company, Nestle Waters sustainably manages our 47 spring sources and maintains 21,000 acres of natural watershed area. The company is also committed to creating shared value and being a good neighbor in the 140 communities where it operates in the U.S.

SOURCE Nestle Waters North America

Related Links

http://www.nestle-watersna.com


REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nevro Corp. (NYSE:NVRO), a global medical device company that is providing innovative evidence-based solutions for the treatment of chronic pain, today announced that it has received FDA approval for its next-generation Senza II Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) System delivering HF10 therapy. The Senza II system offers the superior outcomes and clinical advantages of HF10 therapy through a smaller and more refined footprint while maintaining the performance and durability of the current Implantable Pulse Generator (IPG).

"My colleagues and I are excited about the approval of the Senza II SCS system," said Dr. Tom Simopoulos, Director of Pain Medicine and Co-Director of the Spine Center at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (an affiliate of the Harvard Medical School) in Boston, MA. "The reduced size and optimized design of the Senza II IPG allow for greater patient comfort and placement options. Most importantly, it delivers HF10 therapy, a non-opioid treatment option that provides profound and paresthesia-free pain relief for patients."

"We are pleased to have received FDA approval for Senza II so quickly after our recent CE Mark clearance. Senza II is a step forward that represents our company's commitment to continuously advancing our product portfolio," said Rami Elghandour, President and CEO of Nevro. "The smaller, refined footprint delivers the unparalleled performance of our current Senza system and is backed by the same best-in-class clinical evidence that you've come to expect from Nevro and HF10. The initial product feedback from our European customers has been excellent, and we look forward to launching Senza II in the United States."

About the Senza II System and HF10 Therapy

The Senza II system delivers Nevro's proprietary HF10 therapy, an SCS therapy that provides electrical pulses to the spinal cord to alleviate pain. The electrical pulses are delivered by small electrodes on leads that are placed near the spinal cord and are connected to a compact, battery-powered generator implanted under the skin. HF10 therapy is the only SCS therapy indicated to provide pain relief without paresthesia (a stimulation-induced sensation, such as tingling or buzzing, which is the basis of traditional SCS) and is also the first SCS therapy to demonstrate superiority to traditional SCS for back and leg pain in a comparative pivotal study. Nevro's innovations in SCS, including the Senza and Senza II systems and HF10 therapy, are covered by more than 140 issued U.S. and international patents.

About Nevro

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Nevro is a global medical device company focused on providing innovative products that improve the quality of life of patients suffering from debilitating chronic pain. Nevro has developed and commercialized the SENZA spinal cord stimulation (SCS) system, an evidence-based, non-pharmacologic neuromodulation platform for the treatment of chronic pain. The SENZA system is the only SCS system that delivers Nevro's proprietary HF10 therapy. Senza, Senza II, HF10, Nevro and the Nevro logo are trademarks of Nevro.

Investor Relations Contact:

Nevro Investor Relations

Katherine Bock

(650) 433-3247

[email protected]

SOURCE Nevro Corp.

Related Links

http://www.nevro.com


COLUMBUS, Ohio, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- No more neck and shoulder pain while traveling with wheeled carry-on bags! A new futuristic start-up, RetraStrap.com, is making traveling with carry-on luggage easier and pain-free with its revolutionary hands-free RetraStrap. The innovative product is a retractable strap which travelers can hook to their luggage and then wear the other end around their shoulder to keep both the hands free for other chores.

RetraStrap has won the prestigious Gold Merit Award from INPEX in 2016.

Retra Products LLC

"Being a frequent traveler I know the hassles of traveling with wheeled carry-on bags. Constant pulling of your carry-on in the same twisted posture throughout the trip gets really taxing on arm, shoulder and neck muscles. Moreover, it keeps your hands occupied which makes things inconvenient when you have to carry your coffee or talk over the phone or do any other chore with your hands. But you can finally bid adieu to all such hassles from now on. Our RetraStrap is meticulously designed to relieve you from the physical stress and other inconveniences you face while pulling the carry-on wheeled luggage. Put simply, we ensure you the much-awaited 'hands-free' travel with our revolutionary retractable strap. We also assure a safe way of traveling with your carry-on wheeled luggage when you are armed with our retractable strap," said Omar Abass, the inventor behind RetraStrap.

It's Omar's own painful experiences with traveling with wheeled carry-on bags that inspired him to brainstorm about an appropriate solution - and thus RetraStrap was born.

Speaking further, Omar Abass outlined the unique functional features of RetraStrap:

Comfortable hands-free and pain-free traveling with carry-on wheeled luggage. RetraStrap uses the torso to pull the weight.

Fitted with an elastic attachment for maximum comfort while walking. Most importantly, the elastic part absorbs shock and keeps the wheeled luggage stable while moving.

Keeps the bag just behind the user and follows him/her smoothly as the traveler makes a turn. No issues of the bag getting bumped into the user.

RetraStrap doubles up as an anti-forgetting and anti-theft device and keeps the wheeled luggage attached right to the body of the user.

As the strap is retractable, it does not hang loose or touch the ground or get entangled.

"Our RetraStrap can be used by anybody, irrespective of shape, size and height. You can adjust it easily to fit your specific body size and layers of clothing. Moreover, it's extremely easy to use and it takes only a couple of seconds to wear the strap and you are ready to go."

RetraStrap.com is soon to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to spread the word about its innovative RetraStrap to the world and garner mass support. Early contributors will be rewarded with the RetraStrap at highly discounted rates. (Deliveries of product to start as early as March 2018!)

"It will be great if you can subscribe with our site. Our email subscribers will receive all updates first, including the notifications of our upcoming crowdfunding campaign."

For more information, please visit http://retrastrap.com.

Media Contact

Company Name: RetraStrap

Contact Person: Omar Abass

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 614-500-7074

City: Columbus

State: OH

Country: United States

Website: http://retrastrap.com

Related Images

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Hands free

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Retractable

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Hands Free

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Anti-theft

Related Links

RetraStrap

SOURCE Retra Products LLC

Related Links

http://RetraStrap.com


SYDNEY, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading Asia Pacific CRO Novotech has won Asia Pacific Biotech CRO Company of The Year award in Frost & Sullivan's 2017 Best Practice Awards.

"Over the past 20 years, Novotech has grown to become the leading contract research organisation (CRO) in Asia Pacific. Novotech has been very focussed on serving the biotech sector, which has allowed it to develop a unique niche in the global industry," said Frost & Sullivan Transformational Health Associate Director Ms Geeta Dhanoa. "Novotech, has succeeded across a diverse range of markets by having strong local leaders and tailoring its approach to address each country's unique clinical trial conditions. Novotech's flexible, customer-centric approach ensures its clients receive the best value from their investment; positioning the company for sustained growth in the region."

Commenting on Novotech's win, Novotech Chief Executive Officer Dr John Moller said, "It is very satisfying to have won the award for this category. Over the last five years, Novotech has heavily invested in helping international biotech companies access the clinical trial benefits available in the Asia Pacific region."

"Working with a regional CRO makes a lot of sense for biotech clients. We believe regional specialisation results in higher quality feasibilities, stronger local KOL and site relationships, and a more comprehensive understanding of local regulatory changes, ensuring time and money is not wasted. The pace of positive reform in our region is extraordinary with many governments working hard toreduce regulatory hurdles, decrease clinical trial approval timelines, and increase levels of government support," explained Dr Moller.

With 13 offices in 11 countries throughout in the Asia Pacific, Novotech actively works with each country's regulatory authorities and clinical trial centres to improve approval processes and timelines. Novotech is committed in providing our clients with access to the untapped benefits available in the Asia Pacific region.

As the leading Asia Pacific CRO, Novotech continues to grow in the region with the:

Launch of a site monitoring (SMO) business to support clinical trial activity in South Korea and Taiwan

and Signing of MOUs with leading clinical trial networks in Korea with being negotiated throughout the region

Assisting sites and regulatory authorities to streamline contracts and processes

Launch of a central laboratory service in Australia

For more information about the untapped clinical trial benefits available in Australia and Asia,

Download free copies of the Frost & Sullivan white papers:

Or feel free to contact us.

About Novotech- www.novotech-cro.com

Headquartered in Sydney, Novotech is internationally recognised as the leading regional full-service contract research organisation (CRO). With a focus on clinical monitoring, Novotech has been instrumental in the success of hundreds of Phase I - IV clinical trials in the Asia Pacific region.

Novotech provides clinical development services across all clinical trial phases and therapeutic areas including: feasibility assessments; ethics committee and regulatory submissions, data management, statistical analysis, medical monitoring, safety services, central lab services, report write-up to ICH requirements, project and vendor management. Novotech's strong Asia Pacific presence included running clinical trials in all key regional markets. Novotech also has worldwide reach through the company's network of strategic partners.

For RFP enquiries: Please fill out the form available at www.novotech-cro.com/contact-us-0

SOURCE Novotech

Related Links

http://www.novotech-cro.com


ROSENBERG, Texas, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OCuSOFT Inc., a privately-held eye and skin care company with an established reputation for innovation in eyelid hygiene and ocular health, is pleased to announce a new distribution agreement with I-MED Pharma Inc., a Montreal-based biotechnology company to make the I-PEN Osmolarity System available in the United States. On December 22, 2017, the FDA issued an Acceptance Review Notification for the I-PEN Osmolarity System 510k submission. This distribution partnership will officially commence upon final FDA approval of the 510k, which is anticipated in the first quarter of 2018.

The I-PEN Tear Osmolarity System is a handheld device that measures the osmolarity (concentration of dissolved salts in solution) of human tears in normal and dry eye disease (DED) patients. The I-PEN Tear Osmolarity system, used with the I-PEN Single Use Sensors (SUS), provides a quick and simple method for determining tear osmolarity by measuring the tear soaked palpebral conjunctiva. After several seconds of contact with the eyelid tissue, the I-PEN displays a numerical tear osmolarity test result on the liquid crystal display (LCD) in units of mOsms/L with no calculations required. The I-PEN measures the electrical impedance in the tear soaked tissues 192 times in under 5 seconds and calculates corresponding the osmolarity of the tear film of the eye. Through this new distribution agreement, the I-PEN Tear Osmolarity System will now be available for purchase in the United States through OCuSOFT by calling (800) 233-5469 or online at www.ocusoft.com.

Cynthia Barratt, President and CEO of OCuSOFT states, "OCuSOFT is extremely excited about the I-Pen Osmolarity System and we know clinicians will be too. Continuing research demonstrates the importance of testing tear film osmolarity and now with I-Pen, there is an affordable means to do so. I-Pen is a hand-held device that practitioners can utilize in-office. It is efficient and highly reliable, enabling practitioners to diagnose and treat Dry Eye with confidence."

Daniel Hofmann, President of I-MED Pharma stated, "We are thrilled to partner with OCuSOFT, a company recognized for addressing clinical needs with innovative solutions. The I-PEN Osmolarity System is an invaluable asset for measuring tear osmolarity, a key step in identifying the presence and severity of dry eye disease. We believe that this partnership will offer the first economical solution for eye care professionals looking for an efficient and reliable diagnostic tool in this area."

For more information about the I-PEN or OCuSOFT Inc., please visit www.ocusoft.com or call (800 233-5469.

About OCuSOFT Inc.

OCuSOFT Inc. is a privately-held Richmond, TX USA-based ophthalmic research, development and supply company with an established reputation for innovation, particularly in Ocular Surface Disease (OSD). Since 1986, OCuSOFT served the ophthalmic industry with a unique selection of proprietary brands. A pioneer in ophthalmology, OCuSOFT introduced the first eyelid cleanser, the first topical anesthetic gel, the first "leave-on" antibacterial eyelid cleaner, the first supplement to enhance botulinum toxin injections and the first fourth generation preservative-free ophthalmic emulsion eye drop. Today, the company is most recognized for its #1 Doctor Recommended Brand of Eyelid Cleansers, OCuSOFT Lid Scrub, in addition to its standing as the preferred distributor of ophthalmic products and supplies by eye care professionals. For more information, please call 800-233-5469 or visit www.ocusoft.com.

About I-MED Pharma

I-MED Pharma Inc. is a privately held Canadian company, headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, servicing Canadian ophthalmologists, optometrists and the global eye care community. Established almost thirty years ago, I-MED Pharma creates and distributes innovative medical, surgical and veterinary eye care products worldwide. It continually researches, develops and sources the most effective and advanced solutions to eye disorders like cataracts, corneal degeneration, dry eye, glaucoma and Meibomian gland disease.

I-MED Pharma is proud to have been at the forefront of treating Dry Eye Syndrome as a serious disease and invests heavily into education and developing effective dry eye products. I-MED Pharma's ocular surface disease product range includes diagnostic tools, ocular hygiene, nutrition, dry eye drops and ocular occlusion devices.

Contact: Troy Smith, Vice President Professional & Technical Relations

Phone: 800-233-5469

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE OCuSOFT Inc.

Related Links

http://www.ocusoft.com


SAN DIEGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CureMatch will present the new release of PreciGENE Personalized Combination Therapy at Biotech Showcase 2018, to be held January 810 in San Francisco. Oncologists can now input specific drug therapies to score and rank among the millions of possible treatment options for each patient. This new capability will enable practitioners to better understand how well their proposed cancer treatment options are expected to match a patient's biomarker profile relative to the latest advances in precision oncology.

CureMatch is a digital precision oncology company that assists oncologists with personalized treatment decisions. Actionable intelligence is gleaned by scoring more than 4.5 million potential combinations of cancer drugs in massive clinical and pharmacological knowledge databases. Factoring genomics and proteomics, Personalized Combination Therapy options are ranked for individual patients to target specific molecular alterations.

In order to use CureMatch, an oncologist provides a patient's tumor profiling data (such as next-generation DNA sequencing performed by a 3rd party laboratory) plus up to three proposed treatment options. The mutations that are specific to each individual patient's cancer are identified, and a computational analysis is performed using proprietary algorithms and comprehensive custom-curated databases. The CureMatch report scores the oncologist's selected treatment options and ranks them alongside the top mono-therapies, two-drug combinations, and three-drug combinations for that individual cancer patient. The PreciGENE Score reflects the degree to which a therapy or combination of therapies matches a patient's biomarker profile. It is represented by a percentage and may be used to compare potential treatment regimens.

With CureMatch, physicians recommend patient treatment plans based on the most current precision medicine. The comprehensive analysis considers commonly-used cancer treatments, as well as all of the latest advances in cancer care, including immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapy, and newly approved cancer drugs, either alone or in combinations of up to three drugs. Matching treatments at the molecular level has been shown in various studies to result in improved outcomes.

"There are two million yearly oncology patients in just the United States, and only about 25% of current cancer treatments are effective. Precision medicine using drug combinations is the future of cancer care, and CureMatch enables Personalized Combination Therapy to be the first choice of treatment for all cancer patients." stated Stephane Richard Ph.D., CureMatch President and COO. "We look forward to highlighting how oncologists can now add specific therapies to rank and compare in the newest CureMatch Reports at the Biotech Showcase."

CureMatch will present the latest release of PreciGENE Personalized Combination Therapy at Biotech Showcase and concurrent Digital Medicine & Medtech Showcase during the J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference (one of the largest annual gatherings of healthcare investors), as follows:

CureMatch at Biotech Showcase

Date: Tuesday January 9, 2018

Time: 4:30 (PST)

Room: Franciscan D, Ballroom Level

Venue: Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel, 333 O'Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA

CureMatch at Digital Medicine & Medtech Showcase

Date: Wednesday January 10, 2018

Time: 2:15 (PST): Track: A-Cyril Magnin II (4th Floor)

Venue: Parc 55 San Francisco, Union Square 55 Cyril Magnin Street, San Francisco, CA

About Biotech Showcase

Biotech Showcase, produced by Demy-Colton and EBD Group, is an investor and networking conference devoted to providing private and public biotechnology and life sciences companies with an opportunity to present to, and meet with, investors and pharmaceutical executives in one place during the course of one of the industry's largest annual healthcare investor conferences, J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference. Follow Biotech Showcase on Twitter: @EBDGroup and @Demy_Colton - #BiotechShowcase

About CureMatch

CureMatch, Inc. is a San Diego-based digital precision oncology company focused on personalized medicine and combination therapy. CureMatch Reports guide oncologists with actionable intelligence to customize treatment for each individual patient based on each specific molecular tumor profile. Precision medicine is considered by many to be the future of cancer treatment as combination therapy has been used effectively in the treatment of other diseases, such as HIV/AIDS. The CureMatch technology has expert foundation in supercomputing, oncology, genetics, proteomics, biochemistry, and cell biology. For more information, visit www.curematch.com

SOURCE CureMatch

Related Links

http://www.curematch.com


"PicoStill is an exciting next step for us," said Dr. Bill Mitchell, CEO, PicoBrew. "We love offering new ways for our Pico owners to experiment and create great tasting beer that they can offer their customers or serve to their friends and family."

CES attendees will be among the first to see the PicoStill at CES Unveiled, Table #51, and throughout the show at Booth #40125 in the Sands Expo at Tech West (Smart Home Section). Samples of refreshing Pico-brewed craft beer from their award-winning brewery partners will be served all day, every day during the show.

PicoStill incorporates the most precise temperature control and safest technology to make distillation both simple and safe. PicoStill is a modern-day vacuum still that mitigates inherently dangerous situations produced when alcohol vapors are near open flames or other sources of ignition by using indirect heating sources and operating under vacuum to reduce temperatures and prevent flammable vapor leaks. It also incorporates patent-pending mechanisms to make distillation even safer, such as heating that shuts off automatically if the vacuum seal is broken and a custom methanol collection chamber to automatically isolate congeners.

"By developing technology that automatically separates the methanol from the heads, we have significantly reduced the dangers inherent in distilling spirits," added Mitchell. "The PicoStill provides commercial distillers a versatile, safe, and easy to use small batch distilling solution."

PicoStill comes with both a polished copper distilling column and clear glass infusion chamber that is crucial for essential oil extraction and designing flavored spirits. Water-extraction hop oils can be produced in less than an hour, and infused into the beer, compared to dry hopping which can take up to a week. In addition to hops, PicoStill can also distill water, herbs, spices, grains and more.

PicoStill is compatible with all of PicoBrew's line of Pico brewing appliances and it is currently available for pre-order at the discount price of $249. PicoStill MSRP: $349.

Pico Model C

PicoBrew's booth will also feature the Pico Model C, the second-generation craft beer brewing appliance that further simplifies the brewing and cleaning process.

"Anyone who has ever homebrewed is aware of the significant investment in time and money that goes into home brewing," offered Mitchell. "The Pico C features technology and new accessories that solve the most common issues that stand in the way of making great beer at home, opening the door for anyone to be part of the craft beer making community."

The Pico Model C features a completely reimagined 2-piece brewing keg that has a simplified hose connection and is dishwasher-safe. The PicoFerm, a new Wi-Fi connected smart fermentation device, attaches to the Pico Model C keg and uses patent-pending technology to closely monitor the fermentation progress until the exact time the beer is ready to carbonate and drink. PicoFerm monitors a variety of factors, including temperature and pressure inside the keg, to accurately predict fermentation progress and sends alerts to correct variables that might prevent the user from getting the perfect result. For data geeks, users can also track their brewing progress, plus see a detailed report of their fermentation progress, through the BrewHouse portal on PicoBrew.com.

Pico Model C is currently available at PicoBrew.com and in-store and online at leading national retailers. Pico Model C MSRP: $549.

PicoFerm is currently available for pre-order at PicoBrew.com. PicoFerm MSRP: $59.

Over 100 Recipes from Award-Winning Breweries

Pico uses compostable PicoPaks, which contain the fresh, pre-measured hops and grains needed to brew fresh, brewery-quality craft beer every time. With the push of a button, Pico Model C recognizes the PicoPak inserted and follows brewing process instructions transmitted over a home Wi-Fi connection. Pico Model C brews five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Beer is then fermented and carbonated, and in 7-14 days it is ready to chill and serve!

Pico users can now select from over 100 PicoPaks from award-winning craft breweries all over the world including the US, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Italy, and Central and South America. For those who want more customization, users can build a custom PicoPak using the online Freestyle tool in the BrewMarketplace. Pico Model C users can also brew Kombucha.

PicoBrew, and its line of brewery appliances have been recipients of numerous awards over the years including being named among Fast Company's The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2017 and CES Innovation Awards Honoree for Eco-Design and Sustainable Technologies in 2017 and Home Appliances in 2016.

For additional images, video and information, go to http://ces.vporoom.com/Picobrew.

About PicoBrew

PicoBrew was founded in Seattle in 2010 by brothers Bill and Jim Mitchell, a former Microsoft executive and food scientist, along with engineer Avi Geiger. Combining their food science and technology expertise with their passion for homebrewing, they set out to improve the craft beer brewing process for small producers and homebrewers. PicoBrew introduced its flagship product, the award-winning Zymatic automatic beer-brewing appliance for beer brewing professionals and homebrewers, in 2013. The Pico, designed for consumer craft beer enthusiasts, followed in 2016. Both product lines are designed to improve the precision, repeatability and overall quality of the brewing process to create consistently delicious craft beer. For more information, visit www.picobrew.com or follow PicoBrew on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

SOURCE PicoBrew
MILLS RIVER, N.C., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday, January 11, 2018, Prince Manufacturing and their Mills River, NC manufacturing factory are offering a unique job fair and the opportunity for the local North Carolina job seekers.

Prince Manufacturing is growing their North Carolina based plant operations. Thanks to the economic growth and the manufacturing conditions Prince Manufacturing is adding new USA-based jobs.

The North Carolina and the surrounding area manufacturing job seekers will be able to meet and visit with the hiring managers of the respective job areas.

Prince Manufacturing Human Resources Manager Carrie Smith said, "This job fair will offer a unique opportunity for job seekers not only to learn about what we offer here at Prince Manufacturing and all the significant benefits we provide but also they will be able to participate in the job interviews on the spot. We encourage people to come prepared to meet with our hiring managers. We are interested in people who are looking for a career, not just a job."

The job fair will take place on January 11, 2018, at Prince Manufacturing 209 Broadpointe Drive, Mills River, North Carolina location.

All positions are full-time, direct-hire. Prince is looking to fill these available positions:

Machine Operator

Assembler

Shipping & Receiving

Production Worker

Job Fair Details:

WHEN: Thursday, January 11, 2018, at 9:00am - 12:00pm & 4:00pm - 7:00pm

WHERE: 209 Broadpointe Drive, Mills River, NC

Shifts Available: 1st Shift, 2nd Shift, 3rd Shift, Weekend Shift

Benefits include Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), Life Insurance, Long Term & Short Term Disability.

Prince Manufacturing, Inc. is a manufacturing solutions company started in 1998, but its roots go back to 1965 when it was founded as Prince Corporation in Holland, Michigan. Mr. Iram Chavez is the President and CEO of Prince Manufacturing, Inc. Prince is a contract manufacturing solution provider. It focuses on eliminating waste by providing fabrication, forming, finishing, and assembly of metal and composite products. Prince Manufacturing capabilities and processes include Contract Assembly, Product Design, Metal Fabrication, Sheet Metal Forming, Powder Coating, Liquid Coating, eCoating, CARC, Metal Stamping, Sequencing, and Shipping Logistics.

This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com.

SOURCE Prince Manufacturing, Inc.
TUCSON, Ariz., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A self-selected committee of psychiatrists led by Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., is declaring a state of emergency that "could be the end of humankind" requiring the removal of President Donald Trump from office, states the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

They are calling for a "neuropsychiatric evaluation"by force, if necessary, and it seems apparent that they have already arrived at their conclusion, states AAPS executive director Jane M. Orient, M.D.

Dr. Lee has been criticized for allegedly violating the Goldwater Rule articulated by the American Psychiatric Association and recently reaffirmed following the election of President Trump. This prohibits making a diagnosis without personally examining a patient. But she claims that "we are not making a diagnosis" in commenting on the President's alleged "frantic state of mind," Dr. Orient notes. Dr. Lee is editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.

"The weaponization of psychiatry as a political tool is extremely dangerous," Dr. Orient comments. "The Soviet abuses of psychiatry were possible because of the unchecked power given to an 'expert' elite, and the lack of objective diagnostic criteria for psychiatric illness."

Dr. Lee claims to be able to see things the average person cannot, states Dr. Orient. Dr. Lee also claims that Trump's "madness is catching" and that his followers [nearly half of the U.S. population] have "cult-like characteristics."

Dr. Lee's "insights" themselves need critical scrutiny, Dr. Orient suggests, for example, her assertion that Trump is baiting North Korea into a potential nuclear war. "In fact, it's the other way around. North Korea has been threatening us with its nuclear program for 20 years. Appeasement has obviously not worked."

"Dr. Lee's concerns that a forced examination 'would look too much like a coup' are ironic because the end result would be similar," Dr. Orient states.

"The U.S. Constitution fortunately makes no provision for subjecting election results to a possible veto by academic psychiatrists," Dr. Orient states. "Virtually anyone could be diagnosed as mentally unfit by a politically motivated, non-accountable committee of elite experts. Those who object to Trump's policies should make their case in the political arena, instead of trying to remove him under the disingenuous cloak of their psychiatric credentials."

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in virtually all specialties and every state. Founded in 1943, AAPS has the motto "omnia pro aegroto," which means "all for the patient."

SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

Related Links

http://www.aapsonline.org


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ResMed (NYSE: RMD, ASX: RMD) today introduced Mobi, its first ResMed-branded portable oxygen concentrator (POC).

Mobi offers an industry-leading balance of oxygen delivery, weight and battery life so that millions with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or other respiratory condition can enjoy ResMed-quality oxygen therapy at home or on the go.

"We have focused decades of patient-centered ResMed technology and design innovation into this POC," said ResMed CEO Mick Farrell. "We've achieved great mobility, comfort and therapy quality in sleep apnea treatment with AirMini, the world's smallest PAP device. Mobi offers that same great balance to the many millions of people who rely on supplemental oxygen to enjoy their highest quality of life."

Mobility is particularly key for oxygen patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Regular physical activity is shown to lower the risk of hospitalization and death among those with COPD, according to a 2006 study published in Thorax: http://thorax.bmj.com/content/61/9/772.

"The time is now for portable oxygen," said Farrell. "Our patients demand a device that enables them to get out of their house and travel to visit friends and family. Mobi gives the gift of freedom to millions."

Availability

Mobi will be available to U.S. patients through their home medical equipment (HME) providers later this quarter. ResMed is pursuing clearance to sell in other countries in 2018.

About ResMed

ResMed (NYSE: RMD, ASX: RMD), a world-leading connected health company with more than 4 million cloud-connected devices for daily remote patient monitoring, changes lives with every breath. Its award-winning devices and software solutions help treat and manage sleep apnea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other respiratory conditions. Its 6,000-member team strives to improve patients' quality of life, reduce the impact of chronic disease and save healthcare costs in more than 120 countries. ResMed.com

SOURCE ResMed Inc.

Related Links

http://www.resmed.com


A federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), the SEI helps government and industry organizations develop and operate software systems that are secure and reliable. The SEI's Software Solutions Division develops and transitions methods, technical solutions, and services for software-reliant systems, thus ensuring critical mission capabilities are achieved in a predictable, affordable, and sustainable way. The SEI's FFRDC sponsor, the U.S. Department of Defense, has a nearly $1.5 trillion acquisition portfolio that is critically dependent upon highly complex software-reliant systems.

Ricklin previously served as senior adviser to the director in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Research & Engineering), chief scientist of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and director of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA).

"With her extensive background across both federal defense and civil agencies, Jennifer Ricklin is one of the nation's most talented professionals working at the intersection of defense science and technology research," said Farnam Jahanian, Carnegie Mellon's interim president. "We are so pleased to have her expertise to lead the Software Solutions Division of the SEI and work with partners in the government, private sector and with researchers across CMU on our most difficult software challenges."

In addition to her work at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Ricklin also served as chief technologist for the Air Force Research Laboratory, director of Strategic Technologies at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and as a scientist and leader at the Army Research Laboratory.

"Research from our Software Solutions Division plays a critical role in modern defense systems because of their complex functionality and use of autonomy," said Dr. Paul Nielsen, SEI director and CEO. "Jennifer's extensive experience with advanced technology in the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security makes her ideally suited to lead this division in its work to make software safe, predictable, reliable, and affordable."

Ricklin received her bachelor's degree in physics from Sam Houston State University, her master's degree in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University, and her doctorate in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She is a senior member of IEEE and a fellow of the Optical Society of America and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. She has more than 100 publications and patents, and is certified by the Army Acquisition Corps for Level 3 Program Management.

"As both a government and private sector entrepreneur, researcher, acquisition specialist and adviser for the past 30 years, I've come to appreciate the importance of supporting and transitioning cutting-edge research that delivers highly reliable and effective advanced capabilities," said Ricklin. "The SEI's role in providing innovative software solutions is critical. I'm excited to work with this exceptional team to create solutions for our nation's most vexing software challenges."

For more information about the SEI Software Solutions Division, see https://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/organization/softwaresolutions/index.cfm.

About the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University. The SEI works with organizations to make measurable improvements in their software engineering and cybersecurity capabilities by providing technical leadership to advance the practice of software engineering and security. For more information, visit the SEI website at http://www.sei.cmu.edu.

SOURCE Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute

Related Links

http://www.sei.cmu.edu


LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CES / Coinagenda -- Rivetz Corp. (https://rivetz.com/) today announced a partnership with CRIP.TO (https://crip.to) to enable interoperability between CRIP.TO devices and the Rivetz Trusted Application. The collaboration will ensure that secure messages can be sent between devices and that secure key management can be performed within the trust boundaries of two devices, providing users with a flexible solution that can enhance the security and usability of their collection of devices. Integrity and key recovery enable new models of decentralized security for messages and cryptocurrency transactions for the financial, consumer, and industrial markets.

CRIP.TO focuses on the communications side of the security and privacy equation. Its Black hardware device is the TEE equivalent of encrypted communications. With its custom-made FPGA chip and open standard encryption system, Black provides a second protected execution environment through which communications and data are encrypted and prepared for transmission. Through the integration on the blockchain, it is working to create a secure Open Network. The network will be opened to third-party developers to allow them to add their own apps, allowing them to also take advantage of the end-to-end encryption. Taken together, CRIP.TO Black and Rivetz-enhanced CRIP.TO Shield (an Android App) will allow users unparalleled security and identity protection for all their internet and mobile interactions.

"We are pleased to be working with CRIP.TO to support the full spectrum of hardware security for blockchain and secure messaging," Rivetz CEO Steven Sprague said. "The enhanced security that is provided by dedicated hardware offers owners the best levels of protection. The business and operational models of security provided by Rivetz and the RvT token can be extended to a variety of devices, and we are dedicated to supporting the full spectrum of capabilities."

"We're thrilled to be integrating CRIP.TO and Rivetz's technologies, recognizing the need for transactional and communication security and privacy on smart devices," CRIP.TO CEO Stefano Alberico said. "We each bring hardware-enabled solutions to meet this need."

Rivetz solves problems associated with consumer and machine-to-machine digital transactions. Rivetz's technology and services provide a safer and easier-to-use model for all users to protect their digital assets using hardware-based trusted execution technology. The Rivetz solution enables the device to play a critical role in automating security and enabling the controls users need to secure modern services. Rivetz leverages state-of-the-art cybersecurity tools to develop a modern model for users and their devices to interact with services on the Internet.

About Rivetz International

Rivetz is focused on solving problems associated with consumer and machine-to-machine digital transactions. Rivetz technology and services aim to provide a safer and easier-to-use model for all users to protect their digital assets using hardware-based trusted execution technology. The device aims to play a critical role in automating security and enabling the controls that users need to benefit from modern services. Rivetz leverages state-of-the-art cybersecurity tools to develop a modern model for users and their devices to interact with services on the Internet. For more information, visit www.rivetz.com.

About CRIP.TO

CRIP.TO is a company dedicated to providing the highest level of communication security available while protecting the user's identity. The CRIP.TO business model is built on a fee-for-service that eliminates the need to resell user data, as is common with most free apps. CRIP.TO is a 100% European company from product design to fabrication to service delivery. It hosts its services in Iceland, renowned for its legislation protecting freedom of speech and anonymity of individuals. CRIP.TO uses the best encryption technologies (software and hardware), as identified by encryption experts that are unaffiliated with any governmental or large commercial entity. Relying on a custom-built hardware encryption device (FPGA based) eliminates the possibility of backdoors making it into the solution. CRIP.TO provides users with the power to communicate fearlessly.

For more information, visit www.crip.to

SOURCE Rivetz Corp.

Related Links

https://rivetz.com/


BALTIMORE, Jan. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Saint Mary's Press Catholic Research Group, will host a non-denominational discussion on why young people are leaving religion and release the results of a two-year qualitative research project conducted in partnership with The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University and on the topic on Tuesday, January 16th at the Maritime Conference Center in Baltimore, MD.

The findings will be discussed during a candid, interfaith conversation moderated by Public Radio's award-winning journalist, Kerri Miller. Miller will be joined by four panelists, Jenan Mohajir, Beatriz Mendivil, Josh Packard, and Rev. Joseph L. Muth, Jr., whose backgrounds and contributions span sociological perspectives, interfaith activism, and personal narratives rooted in both belief and unbelief.

In addition, the report titled Going, Going, Gone! The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholic, will be available to media attending the event.

Space is limited and free tickets are available only through the event page. More details about the event are available here.

WHERE: Maritime Conference Center

692 Maritime Blvd.

Linthicum Heights, MD WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, January 16



INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY: Reception immediately following event with all panelists and selected audience members

Contact:

Sarah Wheeler

[email protected]

612.547.5017

SOURCE Saint Marys Press

Related Links

http://catholicresearch.smp.org


ATLANTA, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sakrete, the original dry cement mix brand and a leader in concrete and concrete-related products, is demonstrating its latest product lineup and project uses at World of Concrete, taking place Jan. 23-26, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sakrete invites industry professionals and attendees to visit the booth for project demonstrations, showcasing real-world applications of its concrete mixes and repair and maintenance products.

Sakrete will welcome World of Concrete attendees in two adjacent areas in the South Hall. The main booth will feature the latest products, including Sakrete's High Strength Concrete Mix, Polymeric Paver Sand, Leak Stopper and Concrete Crack Filler. Visitors are also welcomed to the Project Demonstration Booth, which will share real-world applications and projects using Sakrete products. Twice daily, Sakrete experts will live-demonstrate best practices for its Surface Bonding Cement and Stone Veneer Mortar. Visitors can also register to win a Trailers Plus 6x12 Carry-On Trailer at the booth by completing Sakrete's Concrete College, an interactive educational experience through Sakrete's products. Participants will explore Sakrete's Leak Stopper Hydraulic Cement, Concrete Crack Filler, Polymeric Paver Sand, Rapid Setting Anchoring Epoxy and High Strength Anchoring Epoxy, learning about each product's best uses and application tips.

"Our team is excited to meet with contractors to share our latest product innovations and the resources available to them that can help their business," says Cory Olson, SVP of sales. "Our goal is to serve as a reliable partner to help professionals build their concrete acumen and expand their service offerings on their next job. The interactive demonstrations will provide the ideal setting to share our insights with our loyal professionals and receive their feedback."

Attendees will have the opportunity to "Ask the Expert" in Sakrete's main booth throughout the show. Whether professionals have specific product questions or are interested in best practices for a new project, Sakrete welcomes all concrete inquiries.

Sakrete's products and team will be available at Booth S10827 and Booth S11026 in the South Hall. For more information, visit www.sakrete.com and receive discounted registration for World of Concrete via http://bit.ly/SakreteWOC2018.

About SAKRETE

SAKRETE was founded in 1936 as North America's original dry cement mix brand and is a leader in concrete and concrete-related products and other top-quality building products. The SAKRETE brand is owned and managed by Oldcastle Architectural. SAKRETE of North America is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For additional information about SAKRETE, call 1-866-SAKRETE or visit Sakrete.com.

Oldcastle Architectural is a division of Oldcastle Inc., the North American arm of CRH plc, one of the top five international building products companies  www.crh.com. For more information, call (855) 346-2766.

Elisa Suri

Trevelino/Keller

[email protected]

SOURCE Sakrete

Related Links

http://www.sakrete.com


BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Santander Bank is bringing respect back to banking. With the introduction of new features and upgrades to its digital banking platform at the end of 2017, the Bank topped off a year dedicated to showing customers how respect adds up. And, beginning this week with the launch of a new marketing campaign, including TV, radio, digital and social channels, Santander is kicking off the New Year by renewing its customer promise - to ensure respect is at the core of every customer interaction, every product, every service, and everything the Bank does.

"At Santander, it's our mission to help people and businesses prosper," said Maria Veltre, Santander's chief marketing and digital officer. "By actively listening to our customers and our communities, we've been able to introduce new and improved products and services that truly respect our customers' time, money and financial futures." She added, "Respect should be the foundation for everything we do, from how we interact with our colleagues to how we connect with our customers and engage our communities. Our customer promise is to treat people and their money the way we all want to be treated - with respect."

Santander's digital banking platform is designed to address customers' needs and respect their time without sacrificing security. Reviewed by more than 14,000 users in Apple's App Store and earning a rating of five out of five stars, the Bank's consumer mobile app now offers customers an array of more convenient, user-friendly options.

Credit and debit cardholders enjoy greater control over their money with the debut of Instant Card Hold, a new mobile banking security feature that allows customers to place a temporary hold on a misplaced debit or credit card to prevent unauthorized use.

New mobile features allow customers to reactivate the card once it's located, report a lost or stolen card, order a replacement card and activate a new card  all right from their mobile phone.

Other mobile upgrades include new auto-notifications that alert customers to account changes, giving them peace of mind and demonstrating respect for them and their money.

How else did respect add up for Santander customers, colleagues and communities in 2017?

Ultimate Cash Back Credit Card  Respect is unlimited 1.5% cash back on all purchases with no cap and five no-fee features.

 Respect is unlimited 1.5% cash back on all purchases with no cap and five no-fee features. Inclusive Communities  Respect is an $11 billion , five-year commitment to lending, community development and charitable giving.

 Respect is an , five-year commitment to lending, community development and charitable giving. Walk Out Working  Respect is activating customers' new mobile and online accounts before they leave the branch.

 Respect is activating customers' new mobile and online accounts before they leave the branch. Santander Treasury Link  Respect is a new online platform that meets the specific cash management needs of Commercial and Business Banking clients.

 Respect is a new online platform that meets the specific cash management needs of Commercial and Business Banking clients. Cultivate Small Business  Respect is fostering small business ownership and success in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

 Respect is fostering small business ownership and success in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Extended Branch Hours  Respect is longer, more convenient hours on weekdays and Saturdays.

 Respect is longer, more convenient hours on weekdays and Saturdays. Issues Resolution  Respect is empowering frontline colleagues to resolve customer issues with the support of an escalation team to ensure a better customer experience.

Santander Bank, N.A. is one of the country's largest retail and commercial banks with more than $79 billion in assets. With its corporate offices in Boston, the Bank's 9,700 employees, more than 650 branches, 2,100 ATMs and 2.1 million customers are principally located in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Bank is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Madrid-based Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE: SAN) - one of the most respected banking groups in the world with more than 125 million customers in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. It is managed by Santander Holdings USA, Inc., Banco Santander's intermediate holding company in the U.S. For more information on Santander Bank, please visit www.santanderbank.com.

Media Contacts:

Ann Davis

617-757-5891

[email protected]

Nancy Orlando

617-757-5765

[email protected]

SOURCE Santander Bank, N.A.

Related Links

http://www.santanderbank.com


DETROIT, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The auto industry is experiencing one of the most exciting periods in its history. Technologies are continuing to develop at a rapid pace and innovative breakthroughs are changing all manner of concepts for both cars and the world's mobility culture. At the 2018 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), Schaeffler will present its portfolio of technologies and products in three key mobility areas: energy-efficient drive technologies; drive train electrification; and a holistic analysis of the energy chain.

During NAIAS's Press Preview, Schaeffler will host a press conference at 8:10 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 15 in the Ambassador Ballroom (room 360 on the third level) of Cobo Center in Detroit. During the press event, Schaeffler executives will discuss:

The three key aspects of the global supplier's Mobility for tomorrow strategy;

Its global strategy to address the unique requirements of autonomous vehicles;

Anticipated 2018 global and North American growth and production plans; and

How its successful involvement in Formula E motorsports is driving research, development and testing of new technologies for passenger vehicles, among other topics.

In addition to approximately 30 engine, transmission and chassis displays, including its Glass Car centerpiece, Schaeffler's exhibit will highlight its environmentally friendly drive systems, including:

Electrification solutions that integrate Schaeffler's 48-volt system into the engine-transmission unit and axle;

Hybrid innovations for the next-generation high-voltage hybrid module and electric axle; and

Internal combustion engine developments, including a second-generation thermal management module, electric camshaft adjustor, hydraulic-switchable valve tappet and dual-mass flywheel with an integrated pendulum-type absorber.

Schaeffler will also present a holistic and sustainable approach that includes the entire well-to-wheel chain from the generation and storage of energy, through to mobile energy use in environmentally friendly vehicle drives. As an integrated automotive and industrial supplier, Schaeffler is positioned along the entire energy chain and has defined a correspondingly broad product portfolio that it will highlight at NAIAS.

Media interested in attending Schaeffler press conference can register by contacting Adriana VanDuyn at [email protected].

About Schaeffler

The Schaeffler Group is a global automotive and industrial supplier. Top quality, outstanding technology, and exceptionally innovative spirit form the basis for the continued success of the company. By delivering high-precision components and systems in engine, transmission, and chassis applications, as well as rolling and plain bearing solutions for a large number of industrial applications, the Schaeffler Group is already shaping "Mobility for tomorrow" to a significant degree. The technology company generated sales of approximately EUR 13.3 billion in 2016. With around 89,400 employees, Schaeffler is one of the world's largest family companies and, with approximately 170 locations in over 50 countries, has a worldwide network of manufacturing locations, research and development facilities, and sales companies.

Schaeffler is a recognized development partner for global automakers and suppliers. To serve the North American automotive market, Schaeffler operates development centers in: Troy, Mich.; Fort Mill, S.C.; Wooster, Ohio; and Puebla, Mexico. The company's 600 North American engineers and technicians, who are supported by a team of more than 6,700 global R&D engineers, drive development in the region by utilizing state-of-the-art test and measurement equipment, computational tools and CAD systems. Schaeffler Automotive has headquarters in Fort Mill and manufacturing facilities in: South Carolina; Missouri; Ohio; Ontario, Canada; Puebla and Irapuato, Mexico. For more information, please visit www.schaeffler.us.

Follow us on Twitter @schaefflergroup to get all of our latest press releases and news.

Schaeffler

Twitter

Facebook

Youtube

SOURCE Schaeffler
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- (SPECIAL TO CES 2018  Sands, Hall G - 51083) The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) announced that Sharpell Technologies has been recognized as a CES Eureka Park Climate Change Innovator. A CTA-selected committee of climate change and industry experts selected winners based on submissions that show the most greenhouse gases (GHG) reduction potential. Eureka Park is where more than 800 startups connect with buyers, suppliers, manufacturers, investors and media during CES 2018 taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada USA from Tuesday, January 9  Friday, January 12, 2018.

ReadyPack Lite battery packs use lithium iron phosphate cells but its primary use is for Puerto Rico. With donations via YouCaring.com/energize-puerto-rico , Sharpell Technologies will send 200 ReadyPack Lite packs that are fully rechargeable with a solar panel in as little as 6.5 hours. This will supply sustainable and plentiful electricity for each home for the next 20 years+. The Sharpell Technologies team is collaborating with community leaders and partnering with non-profit oganizations who realize the turmoil that surrounds these families in Puerto Rico. Our mission at Sharepll Technologies is not only to restore power to the communities of Puerto Rico, but to establish a safe environment for families to heal and return to normalcy. Please take the time to share this or make a monetary donation to help restore energy and make a difference to families in need.

Sharpell Technologies was recognized for its use of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cells in stationary energy storage systems. If widely adopted, using an eco-friendly based LFP cell and combining with the storage potential for use with renewable energy facilities, would reduce the nation's carbon footprint by 70%.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the United States emitted 5,162 metric tons of CO2 in 2016 due to energy consumption, and as the rise of electric vehicles takes place, that energy consumption is expected to increase. Renewable energy reduces that large carbon footprint; however, energy that is not used or stored is wasted. Battery storage facilities allow renewable energy to be stored and used at a later time, but the carbon footprint for batteries needs to be reduced.

"Reducing battery carbon footprints is vital to making a cleaner future," said Zachary Sharpell, President of Sharpell Technologies. "We see the ideal future of energy generation and storage coming from renewable energy and batteries, respectively."

The CES Eureka Park Climate Change Innovators Program highlights the leadership and innovation of consumer technology startups in combatting climate change. CES 2018 Innovators will be recognized during Sustainability Day on January 11, 2018 as part of the CES conference.

Sharpell Technologies designs, manufactures, and tests battery packs for the automotive, aerospace, defense, and energy storage sectors using tailored cell chemistry, proprietary ballistic grade protection, and the methodology of creating the most advanced battery packs ever. The Sharpell team envisions a future where its batteries provide more efficient and ecologically friendly solutions to consumers and businesses around the globe. Visit http://www.sharpelltech.com for more information.

Sharpell Technologies is currently raising funds to restore power to 200 families in Puerto Rico devastated by Hurricane Maria. Be part of the team that brings power back to Puerto Rico: https://www.youcaring.com/energize-puerto-rico

Media Contacts:

Xenia Moore

619-508-0488

[email protected]

SOURCE Sharpell Technologies

Related Links

http://www.sharpelltech.com


LONDON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Soft robotics has many promising applications. It brings a list of capabilities absent in most other robotics, including dexterity, flexibility and safe physical interaction with humans. Soft robotics refers to robotics that are comprised of either soft materials, soft joints or soft layers over hard armatures. ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm providing strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative technologies, has identified and created a detailed analysis of the largely uncovered subset of the robotics industry.

The soft robotics industry is in its embryonic stages, and ABI Research details the developments that will have to occur for them to become commercialized, including improvements in materials and sensors. "But for every challenge in this emerging new field, there are multiple opportunities for researchers, technologists, business leaders, and investors to secure innovative solutions," says Rian Whitton, Research Analyst at ABI Research. The research found that additional benefits of implementing soft robotics included the ability to move in unstructured ways and a potential for low-cost products due to lack of complex mechanical components.

Large-scale market commercialization was identified as still some way off. "Only with the rarest of exceptions, soft materials robotics development is confined to research projects. Development at the university level is occurring throughout the world, with most funding coming from governmental bodies," Whitton concludes.

Currently, the most promising commercial use of soft robotics can be found in soft gripper technology (for handling delicate objects like food or glass) and exoskeletons, where the superior flexibility of soft materials allows the wearer more natural movement. Two educational collaborations are laboring to bring these technologies to the main stream: Soft Robotics Inc., with their Soft Grippers and the Wyss Institute's Soft Exosuit.

The applicability of soft grippers to the food industry is particularly encouraging for the technology. In 2015, sales of industrial robots into the food industry accounted for US$389 million. This amount is expected to increase to more than US$1.6 billion in 2025.

For exoskeletons, the number of shipments globally is currently in the tens of thousands, but is expected to increase rapidly. This is a primary industry where innovations in soft robotics will be key. While some exoskeletons for heavy lifting may not require soft joints, most exoskeletons catered to the work-place, the military, the elderly, or for rehabilitation will need to allow for the dexterity and flexibility that only soft robotics can provide.

These findings are from ABI Research's Soft Material Robotics report. This report is part of the company's Robotics, Automation & Intelligent Systems research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights.

About ABI Research

ABI Research provides strategic guidance for visionaries needing market foresight on the most compelling transformative technologies, which reshape workforces, identify holes in a market, create new business models and drive new revenue streams. ABI's own research visionaries take stances early on those technologies, publishing ground-breaking studies often years ahead of other technology advisory firms. ABI analysts deliver their conclusions and recommendations in easily and quickly absorbed formats to ensure proper context. Our analysts strategically guide visionaries to take action now and inspire their business to realize a bigger picture. For more information about ABI Research's forecasting, consulting and teardown services, visionaries can contact us at +1.516.624.2500 in the Americas, +44.203.326.0140 in Europe, +65.6592.0290 in Asia-Pacific or visit www.abiresearch.com.

Contact Info:





Global

Deborah Petrara Christopher Leary Tel: +1.516.624.2558 Tel: +1.516.624.2544 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE ABI Research

Related Links

http://www.abiresearch.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) has named Jennison Asuncion, Engineering Manager  Accessibility at LinkedIn, as the recipient of the 2018 Stephen Garff Marriott Award. The award honors a blind or visually impaired individual who has served as an extraordinary mentor or who has attained remarkable professional success.



"Throughout his career, Jennison's commitment and dedication to ensuring digital accessibility has not only improved the experiences of people with vision loss, it has inspired those around him to do the same," said Kirk Adams, AFB president and CEO. "For his positive influence upon a generation of engineers and designers, for whom accessibility and inclusion will be an intrinsic part of the product creation and design process, I can think of no one more deserving of this year's Marriott Award."

As part of his role directing LinkedIn's digital accessibility efforts, Asuncion manages a team of software engineers who focus on enabling the global workforce of professionals with disabilities to be more productive and successful. Before coming to the Silicon Valley and LinkedIn in 2013, Jennison worked in the Canadian financial services industry. As a member of the Royal Bank of Canada's (RBC) IT Accessibility Team, he spent nearly seven years working with designers, developers, QA testers, project managers, and external vendor partners, supporting their efforts to meet the bank's IT accessibility standards.

Throughout his career, Jennison has been bringing leadership to organizations and initiatives that focus on digital accessibility and assistive technology, including acting as 2017 and 2018 General Session Chair for the annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference; co-founding Global Accessibility Awareness Day in 2012; co-directing the Adaptech Research Network since 1999; and founding the Bay Area Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup in 2014. Jennison sits on the Board of Directors for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired San Francisco and AMI (Accessible Media Inc.). He has received awards in the past for his accomplishments, including a Careers & the disABLED Magazine Employee of the Year award and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Jennison has a master's in Educational Technology and a bachelor's in Political Science, both from Concordia University in Montreal.

The Stephen Garff Marriott Award was established in honor of the late Stephen Garff Marriott, who lost his vision later in life and served as an exemplary role model to others with vision loss. He rose to the upper ranks at Marriott International through hard work and tenacity, and was known for being a talented executive, sales trainer, and ambassador of the Marriott brand.

The Stephen Garff Marriott Award will be presented at the 2018 AFB Leadership Conference at the Oakland City Center Marriott in Oakland, California, on April 6.

About The American Foundation for the Blind

The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is a national nonprofit that expands possibilities for people with vision loss. AFB's priorities include broadening access to technology; elevating the quality of information and tools for the professionals who serve people with vision loss; and promoting independent and healthy living for people with vision loss by providing them and their families with relevant and timely resources. AFB is proud to house the Helen Keller Archives and honor the more than 40 years that Helen Keller worked tirelessly with AFB.

About the American Foundation for the Blind Leadership Conference

The 2018 AFB Leadership Conference, cohosted by San Francisco's LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and the Northern California Chapter of the Association for the Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, provides a forum in which leadership personnel in the blindness field have the opportunity to increase their awareness of student and client needs, expand their knowledge, refine leadership skills, and share concerns and strategies. The event is sponsored by Google, Delta Gamma Foundation, Vanda Pharmaceuticals, and Microsoft, among others.

SOURCE American Foundation for the Blind

Related Links

http://www.afb.org


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On January 13-14, VetsinTech, the only non-profit organization focused 100 percent on helping military veterans transition into meaningful careers in the tech industry, will launch their inaugural national conference: The Invasion in Silicon Valley. The event will connect veterans from across the country with top technology leaders for content and networking opportunities, providing sessions in technology education, employment, and entrepreneurship.

Veterans are invited to attend the two-day event at Galvanize's San Francisco campus. The conference will feature panel discussions, workshops, and networking opportunities with Silicon Valley's industry leaders. The Invasion has a growing line-up of speakers from major tech companies, including:

Craig Newmark , Founder, Craigslist

, Founder, Craigslist David Kingsley , SVP Global HR Strategy, Salesforce

, SVP Global HR Strategy, Salesforce Raj Shah, Managing Partner, DIUx

Rick Howard , Chief Security Officer, Palo Alto Networks

, Chief Security Officer, Palo Alto Networks Loree Draude , Head of Ads Help and Education, Facebook

, Head of Ads Help and Education, Facebook Daniel Savage , Head of Veteran Affairs, LinkedIn

The event's programming benefits veterans pursuing various careers through the following three tracks:

Tech Education  where veterans can find opportunities to learn the in-demand new skills of data science, cyber security, CRM, web development, and more.

 where veterans can find opportunities to learn the in-demand new skills of data science, cyber security, CRM, web development, and more. Tech Employment  where veterans can work with leaders in corporate hiring and culture through professional development workshops to refine their LinkedIn profiles, elevator pitches, and other key tools used during the hiring process.

 where veterans can work with leaders in corporate hiring and culture through professional development workshops to refine their LinkedIn profiles, elevator pitches, and other key tools used during the hiring process. Tech Entrepreneurship  where veterans can learn how to start or grow a business by learning about design thinking, business law, lean methodologies, and securing VC financing.

"Eighty percent of service members transition out of the military without a career path," said Katherine Webster, Founder of VetsinTech. "We are proud to partner with innovation leaders and corporations to bring veterans opportunities to discover meaningful careers in technology."

"As a veteran who has had success in technology, I am very aware that there is so much we can do to assist our country's veteran community," says Mike Powers, Veterans and Disabilities Outreach lead for TEKSystems, title sponsor for the event. "The Invasion represents a key moment for technology leaders to build a stronger bridge with military vets, and offer meaningful resources at a critical time in a service member's transition to civilian life."

To register for the event, please click here. The event is only $25 for Veterans, and free for students, making it easy for all who can benefit to attend.

About VetsinTech:

VetsinTech supports our current and returning veterans with re-integration services, and by connecting them to the national technology ecosystem. ViT is committed to bringing together a tech-specific network, resources, and programs for our veterans interested in Education, Entrepreneurship, and Employment  the 3E's!

SOURCE VetsinTech

Related Links

http://www.vetsintech.co


RYE BROOK, N.Y., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to fighting blood cancer, announced today new funding for research programs in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) treatment through a generous donation from The Sarah Cannon Fund at The HCA Foundation.

Among the 72,000 new cases per year of non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs), approximately 4,000 new cases of MCL are reported in the United States each year. Lymphomas are cancers in which white blood cells in the lymph nodes become malignant and grow uncontrollably. Mantle cell lymphoma is one of the 100+ different types of lymphoma. It is a particularly aggressive disease, with a short remission to standard therapies and a median overall survival of four to five years.

The Sarah Cannon Fund at The HCA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of HCA Healthcare, has committed $5 million to LLS to support two leading-edge research programs, one at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, CA, and one at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

"Despite advances in the treatment of MCL, patients with this disease face a challenging prognosis," said Louis J. DeGennaro, Ph.D., LLS president and CEO. "LLS and Sarah Cannon share a commitment to advancing therapies for patients facing blood cancers and providing access to the latest treatments close to home. We know considerably more about the molecular basis of MCL now compared to 10 years ago, and we have the potential to further accelerate new treatment options through these research efforts for MCL patients."

"People facing cancer are at the heart of every decision that we make at Sarah Cannon," said Dee Anna Smith, CEO at Sarah Cannon. "Through cutting-edge research, we are working to transform care for people fighting this disease, aligning with our partners at LLS in our mission to advance the treatment of blood cancers. Through a generous donation to the Sarah Cannon Fund at The HCA Foundation, we can accelerate crucial new therapies for people with MCL."

The Sarah Cannon Blood Cancer Network, one of the largest providers of hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT), has been a national sponsor for the past three years of LLS's Light The Night fundraising campaign. Last fall, Sarah Cannon colleagues formed more than 120 walk teams with more than 2,600 registered walkers. Sarah Cannon has raised a total of $3.2 million through Light The Night since the sponsorship began in 2014.

The donation will support two multidisciplinary teams of researchers focused on developing innovative strategies to combat MCL.

One grant will support a team led by Selina Chen-Kiang, Ph.D., professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, investigating the efficacy of a therapy approved for breast cancer, palbociclib, for the treatment of MCL patients. Small studies have shown promise, either alone or in combination with ibrutinib, a targeted drug advanced with LLS research funding. Ibrutinib is already approved for MCL, however many patients are resistant or relapse, and the team is trying to understand why, and whether adding a therapy that boosts the immune system might help.

The other grant has been awarded to a team led by Larry Kwak, M.D., Ph.D., vice president and cancer center associate director for Translational Research & Developmental Therapeutics, director of the Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center and Dr. Michael Friedman Professor in Translational Medicine, at the City of Hope, to support his work studying novel immunotherapies to control MCL. This work includes developing new antibody-based therapeutics to control MCL as well as exploring the use of combining CAR T-cell immunotherapy, which is already approved for another NHL, with targeted agents, such as ibrutinib.

About The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is the world's largest voluntary health agency dedicated to blood cancer. The LLS mission: Cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. LLS funds lifesaving blood cancer research around the world, provides free information and support services, and is the voice for all blood cancer patients seeking access to quality, affordable, coordinated care.

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Rye Brook, NY, LLS has chapters throughout the United States and Canada. To learn more, visit www.LLS.org. Patients should contact the Information Resource Center at (800) 955-4572, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.

About Sarah Cannon

Sarah Cannon, the Cancer Institute of HCA Healthcare, offers integrated cancer services with convenient access to cutting-edge therapies for those facing cancer in communities across the United States and United Kingdom. Sarah Cannon's cancer programs include individualized patient navigation provided by oncology-trained nurses, more than 1,000 stem cell transplants performed annually throughout the Sarah Cannon Blood Cancer Network, hundreds of clinical trials, and molecular profiling capabilities. Through its services, Sarah Cannon is providing state-of-the-art cancer care close to home for hundreds of thousands of patients, a number unmatched by any single cancer center. To learn more about Sarah Cannon, visit sarahcannon.com.

Media Contact:

Andrea Greif

914-821-8958

[email protected]

SOURCE The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Related Links

http://www.LLS.org


LOUISVILLE, Ky., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Special Report from the third annual Advisor Authority Study, commissioned by Jefferson National, operating as Nationwide's advisory solutions business, and conducted online by The Harris Poll, profiles Generation X investors identifying key market opportunities for financial advisors. The latest findings help RIAs and fee-based advisors better understand Gen Xers' unique priorities, preferences and concerns, so they can move the needle for their practice, enhance profitability and build a foundation for future growth. The Advisor Authority Study surveyed roughly 1,600 RIAs, fee-based advisors and individual investors across the country.

"Being in their prime earning years and next in line for inheritance, Gen X is a vital segment for advisors to target in order to enhance profitability and set their firms up for future success," said Craig Hawley, Head of Nationwide's advisory solutions business. "And each year, successful advisors are most likely to say that Gen X will be their primary target over the next 12 months."

According to this latest Special Report, "Moving the Needle: Targeting Generation X," over half of Generation X investors (52%) say they do not have an advisor. And despite their growing wealth and their complex financial challenges, Gen X investors are the least likely to seek professional advice. There is a huge opportunity for RIAs and fee-based advisors to tap into this valuable client segment.

Attracting and Retaining Gen X Investors

Concern about saving enough for retirement (30%) is the number one reason, by a wide margin, that Gen X investors have an advisor. In comparison, all other generations, including younger Millennials, say that feeling confident in their financial future (27%) is the top reason for having a financial advisor. When choosing an advisor, Gen X investors say experience matters most (41%), with personalized advice for a holistic financial picture (26%) and a fee-based fiduciary standard (20%) also rated among the top three factors, year-over-year. Likewise, Gen X investors say face-to-face meetings far outrank all other forms of communication, and regular, in-person meetings are the most effective way for advisors to learn more about Gen X investors' needs. To effectively attract and retain Gen X investors, advisors must align with their top priorities.

To learn more, financial professionals can download this latest Advisor Authority Special Report on "Moving the Needle: Targeting Generation X" by visiting:

http://www.jeffnat.com/advisorauthority/chapter4

For more insights on Generation X and other segments of investors, financial professionals can also download the latest Advisor Authority infographic at: http://learn.jeffnat.com/advisorauthority/chapter4-infogram

About Advisor Authority:

The third annual Advisor Authority study explores the investing and advising issues confronting RIAs, fee-based advisors, broker/dealers and investorsand the innovative techniques needed for success in today's complex market. It features a special focus on the most successful advisors and the most affluent investors. These latest findings are to be followed by an ongoing series of special reports that will be released through year-end.

Research Methodology:

The third annual Advisory Authority study was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll on behalf of Jefferson National, operating as Nationwide's advisory solutions business, from March 13  April 7, 2017, among 779 employed financial advisors, ages 18+ and 817 investors, ages 18+ who are primary or shared financial decision makers with investable assets greater than $100K. Among the 779 financial advisors, there were 521 Registered Investment Advisors and 258 Broker/Dealers. Among the 817 investors, there were 208 Mass Affluent, 204 Emerging High Net Worth, 204 High Net Worth and 201 Ultra High Net Worth. By generation there were 164 Millennial, 204 Generation X, 348 Baby Boomer, and 101 Mature investors. And, among the investors, 524 have an advisor, while 293 do not. Investors are weighted where necessary by age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, education, income, marital status, household size, investable assets and propensity to be online in order to bring them in line with their actual proportions in the population.

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in Harris Poll surveys. Because the sample is based on those who were invited to participate in the Harris Poll online research panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. A complete survey method is available upon request.

About The Harris Poll

The Harris Poll is one of the longest running surveys in the U.S. tracking public opinion, motivations and social sentiment since 1963 that is now part of Harris Insights & Analytics, a global consulting and market research firm that delivers social intelligence for transformational times. We work with clients in three primary areas; building twenty-first-century corporate reputation, crafting brand strategy and performance tracking, and earning organic media through public relations research. Our mission is to provide insights and advisory to help leaders make the best decisions possible. To learn more, please visit www.harrisinsights.com or Contact us for more information.

About Jefferson National

Jefferson National, operating as Nationwide's advisory solutions business, is a recognized innovator of a leading tax-advantaged investing solution for RIAs, fee-based advisors and the clients they serve. Trusted partner to a network of more than 4,500 advisors, Jefferson National provides greater efficiency, transparency and choice through an adaptable technology platform, award-winning distribution strategy and cost-effective servicing capabilities. Named the industry "Gold Standard" as of 2012 and winner of more than 50 industry awards, including the DMA 2010 Financial Services Company of the Year. The company serves advisors and clients nationwide, through its subsidiaries Jefferson National Life Insurance Company and Jefferson National Life Insurance Company of New York. To reach our advisor support desk, please call 1-866-WHY-FLAT (1-866-949-3528). To learn more, please visit www.jeffnat.com.

About Nationwide

Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the U.S. and is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's. The company provides a full range of insurance and financial services, including auto, commercial, homeowners, farm and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; banking and mortgages; excess & surplus, specialty and surety; pet, motorcycle and boat insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com.

Nationwide, Nationwide is on your side, the Nationwide N and Eagle are service marks of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company.  2017

SOURCE Jefferson National

Related Links

https://www.jeffnat.com


BETHLEHEM, Pa., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tricia Szurgot, Chief Marketing & Retail Officer of First Commonwealth Federal Credit Union, was recently honored at an awards ceremony in New York City with the 2017 CMO of the Year Officers Award by The CMO Club.

The CMO Club Awards celebrate leaders in marketing and offers CMOs the opportunity to share insights that drive the industry forward. The CMO Officers Award is based on a "marketing executive's demonstrated ability to democratize the brand beyond the marketing department and lead the growth agenda for the company across functional areas." Szurgot has previously won eleven national awards for excellence in marketing, branding, and communications.

"This award recognizes the drive and commitment of the entire First Commonwealth team to adapt to an ever-changing marketplace and lead through innovation, teamwork, inspiration and a purpose-driven, people-centric philosophy," said Szurgot. "It's an honor to be recognized by my peers at The CMO Club for doing what I love and included with such an elite group of marketers from around the world."

The CMO Club Awards were established to celebrate the marketing industry's brightest leaders and to provide a forum to share their successes. As the only marketing awards program driven, voted on and decided entirely by an elite group of "peers only," the awards panel included CMO Club Chapter Presidents and key CMO Club members who determined the winners. While the financial services industry was represented among the winners, Szurgot was the only nominee and winner from the not-for-profit, credit union sector, bringing new visibility to the credit union industry.

Donna LoStocco, President/CEO of First Commonwealth Federal Credit Union, nominated Szurgot. LoStocco said, "Tricia is a natural born leader, which became evident the first time we met her. She has a compelling presence that exudes confidence, poise and professionalism. She is always positive even in the most stressful situations. Tricia came in and gave our team confidence as a true professional who would now take the lead. Within six weeks she had evaluated the team and reorganized each area, pitching to her peers the resources she would need to accomplish the organization's high growth goals. She quickly won the trust and confidence of her peers, the CEO and the board of directors."

Szurgot, a Berks County native and resident of Wyomissing, PA, joined First Commonwealth in February of 2017, bringing more than 25 years of marketing, communications, branding and strategy experience in various industries and global markets, as well as more than 15 years in senior leadership positions. She leads First Commonwealth's marketing, communications and member experience and is head of corporate social responsibility and The First Commonwealth FCU WE Thrive Foundation.

"The CMO Club is thrilled with the quality of all CMOs nominated and then selected as category winners for this year's CMO Awards voted on by their peers," said CMO Club Founder and CEO, Pete Krainik. "We are not only excited to honor their accomplishments and legacies, but also to continue to share their expertise and insights with other CMOs in The Club and the industry."

For more information on the awards program and category winners, go to: www.thecmoawards.com . For a full list of category finalists, go to www.thecmoclub.com/news-item/2017-cmo-awards-finalist/ .

ABOUT FIRST COMMONWEALTH FEDERAL CREDIT UNION

First Commonwealth, based in Bethlehem, PA, is a leader in banking innovation and the largest credit union in the Greater Lehigh Valley. With eight financial center locations and a best in class digital banking center, First Commonwealth serves more than 57,000 members and 1,200 member companies in the Greater Lehigh Valley and beyond. As a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative, First Commonwealth is a leader in the B2C and B2B financial services marketplace and has been committed to growth, innovation, technology and personal, friendly service since 1959. First Commonwealth has 170 employees and $700 million in assets and serves its membership through purpose-driven and mission-based values to help members prosper. First Commonwealth FCU is committed to giving back through their First Commonwealth FCU WE Thrive Foundation and Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. www.firstcomcu.org

About The CMO Club

The CMO Club is a membership organization exclusively for senior marketing executives who want to meet, share and learn from each other. Fueled by inspiring local dinners, regional events, CMO Innovation Summits, virtual Roundtables and the Digital "Members-Only" Clubhouse, marketers provide and receive valuable insights from each other, in a "non-vendor-selling" environment. Working with the over 800 club members and best-in-class strategic partners, The CMO Club also addresses the top CMO challenges each month with thoughtfully curated content. Visit us at www.thecmoclub.com

SOURCE First Commonwealth Federal Credit Union

Related Links

http://www.firstcomcu.org


MEMPHIS, Tenn., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TruGreen, the nation's leading lawn care company, has announced it is actively searching for qualified candidates to fill 15,000 positions nationwide.

WHAT: In preparation for its busy spring season, TruGreen is accepting applications for a variety of seasonal and full-time positions, including sales, lawn specialists, management, finance, IT, customer service and call center representatives. TruGreen seeks motivated candidates with excellent communication and relationship building skills. TruGreen offers competitive benefits including holidays, paid time off, medical, dental, vision and prescription benefit plans, and 401k participation. The company also offers an incentive and reward trip each year for qualifying exceptional employees. Past destinations include Hawaii, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. TruGreen also rewards its local branches that achieve the highest customer count in their region with a donation of $2,000 to a charity of the team's choice. In 2016, TruGreen donated more than $130,000 to non-profit organizations through this program.





TruGreen is currently accepting applications and coordinating interviews.



WHEN: Interested applicants can apply online now.



WHERE: Apply online at https://jobs.trugreen.com



WHY: TruGreen is committed to maintaining a work culture that fosters the highest standards of integrity, respect and professionalism. The company helps its employees reach their personal and professional goals by providing them with a unique combination of independence, support and opportunities for ongoing development and growth. TruGreen seeks candidates who share these values and who want to be part of a proud, dynamic team. TruGreen is committed to Diversity and Inclusion, serving as an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer of Minorities/Females/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities. For more details, click here.

About TruGreen

Memphis, Tennessee-based TruGreen is the nation's largest lawn care company, serving more than 2.3 million residential and commercial customers across the United States with lawn, tree and shrub care. TruGreen believes more life should be lived outside and is committed to providing a beautiful lawn to serve as the foundation for outside experiences and lifelong memories. As the leader in the professional lawn care industry, TruGreen helps define responsible lawn care practices, conducts industry-leading education and training for our people, pioneers new application technologies and educates our customers on proper mowing and wise-use watering techniques. Today, there are approximately 260 TruGreen lawn care branches in the United States and Canada, plus about 35 franchise locations. Go to http://www.TruGreen.com or http://www.facebook.com/TruGreen for more information about TruGreen.

SOURCE TruGreen

Related Links

http://www.trugreen.com


Arriving trucks accounted for 50.9 percent of all one-way U-Haul traffic in Arkansas to maintain its status a top-10 growth state. Arkansas secured the No. 10 growth ranking for 2016 and the No. 8 ranking for 2015.

Growth States are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul truck rentals entering a state versus leaving a state during a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from more than 1.7 million one-way U-Haul truck rental transactions that occur annually.

Texas was the No. 1 Growth State for the second year in a row. Florida ranked second, South Carolina fourth, Tennessee fifth and North Carolina seventh, continuing a strong growth movement in the Southeast. California overtook Illinois on the list as the biggest net-loss state.

View the complete top 50 rankings along with more migration trends reports, including U.S. Growth Cities, at myuhaulstory.com.

While migration trends do not correlate directly to population or economic growth, U-Haul growth data is an effective gauge of how well states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents.

Benton and Conway paced Arkansas's net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks. Bentonville, Centerton, Fayetteville and Hot Springs Village were among other notable cities to record strong net gains. Find U-Haul stores and neighborhood dealers in Arkansas at uhaul.com/locations.

U-Haul is the authority on migration trends thanks to its expansive network that blankets all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. The geographical coverage from more than 21,000 U-Haul locations provides a comprehensive overview of where people are moving like no one else in the industry.

The arrival of U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 is revolutionizing the moving industry through its more convenient, more secure way to pick up and return a truck. U-Haul live verification technology allows rental transactions to be carried out entirely on a smartphone at any hour  day or night. There are no membership fees. Simply visit uhaul.com to create an online account.

What They're Saying about Arkansas

"Arkansas has been steadily growing for the last five years. Little Rock and North Little Rock are battling for residents. The Arkansas River splits the two cities and there is a movement to revamp neighborhoods in order to get people to move to either side. There are a lot of high-rises being converted into living spaces, and the River Market District is booming."  Andrew Hicks, U-Haul Company of Arkansas president

"I've seen growth across the state, but specifically in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers area. Between 2013 and 2017, there were reports that 25 people a day were moving into this market. The Walmart home office is in Bentonville and there are reports that they are building a new, modern home here. I'm not surprised by the ranking. I've watched the growth firsthand over my 36-year career with U-Haul. Arkansas has so much to offer and we have people coming from all over the world to live here. It's a diverse place to call home."  Jim Smith, U-Haul Company of Tulsa president (serving NW Arkansas)

About U-Haul

Since 1945, U-Haul has been the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers, with a network of more than 21,000 locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 now offers customers access to U-Haul trucks every hour of every day through the self-service options on their internet-connected mobile devices. U-Haul customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to more than 150,000 trucks, 112,000 trailers and 40,000 towing devices. U-Haul offers more than 581,000 rooms and more than 51 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities throughout North America. U-Haul is the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry and is the largest retailer of propane in the U.S.

Contact:

Jeff Lockridge

Sebastien Reyes

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 602-760-4941

Website: uhaul.com

SOURCE U-Haul
Despite the spike in departures, arriving trucks still accounted for 52.2 percent of all one-way U-Haul traffic in Vermont to keep it among the leading net-gain states. Vermont earned the No. 9 growth ranking for 2016 after climbing from No. 16 for 2015.

Growth States are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul truck rentals entering a state versus leaving a state during a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from more than 1.7 million one-way U-Haul truck rental transactions that occur annually.

Texas was the No. 1 Growth State for the second year in a row. Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee rounded out the top five, and North Carolina ranked seventh, continuing a strong growth movement in the Southeast. California overtook Illinois on the list as the biggest net-loss state.

View the complete top 50 rankings along with more migration trends reports, including U.S. Growth Cities, at myuhaulstory.com.

While migration trends do not correlate directly to population or economic growth, U-Haul growth data is an effective gauge of how well states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents.

White River Junction and Burlington paced Vermont's net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks. Randolph, South Londonderry, Derby and Saints Johnsbury were among other notable cities to post strong net gains. Find U-Haul stores and neighborhood dealers in Vermont at uhaul.com/locations.

U-Haul is the authority on migration trends thanks to its expansive network that blankets all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. The geographical coverage from more than 21,000 U-Haul locations provides a comprehensive overview of where people are moving like no one else in the industry.

The arrival of U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 is revolutionizing the moving industry through its more convenient, more secure way to pick up and return a truck. U-Haul live verification technology allows rental transactions to be carried out entirely on a smartphone at any hour  day or night. There are no membership fees. Simply visit uhaul.com to create an online account.

About U-Haul

Since 1945, U-Haul has been the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers, with a network of more than 21,000 locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 now offers customers access to U-Haul trucks every hour of every day through the self-service options on their internet-connected mobile devices. U-Haul customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to more than 150,000 trucks, 112,000 trailers and 40,000 towing devices. U-Haul offers more than 581,000 rooms and more than 51 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities throughout North America. U-Haul is the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry and is the largest retailer of propane in the U.S.

Contact:

Jeff Lockridge

Sebastien Reyes

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 602-760-4941

Website: uhaul.com

SOURCE U-Haul
TULSA, Okla., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A U.S. Appeals Court has rejected all industry challenges that would prevent enforcement of a stricter workplace standard for respirable crystalline silica exposure. With the decision finalized, AIRIS Wellsite Services encourages frac site employers to anticipate ways to achieve compliance with the multi-faceted new OSHA standard.

The standard seeks to limit the negative health consequences from breathing silica dust, a common byproduct of the fracking process. Excessive exposure can lead to silicosis, chronic lung disease and lung cancer.

OSHA's stricter new standard for hydraulic fracturing operations reduces the permissible exposure limit to silica dust by 50% from to 100 to 50 g/m3. It becomes enforceable in June 2018.

"While some have been focused on the headline-grabbing reduction to the Permissible Exposure Limit," says AIRIS Wellsite Services CEO Brendan Ryan, "they may not realize there are more than 10 other significant obligations required by this rule."

Other obligations meant to increase worker safety including publishing an exposure control plan, performing exposure assessments, educating frac site workers through a hazard communication program and providing medical surveillance for workers who are exposed.

AIRIS Wellsite Services has seen an increase in clients calling for its consultancy expertise. AIRIS solution providers prepare employers to achieve and maintain compliance by walking them through the details and nuances of the OSHA rule and provide solutions.

"For example, to achieve compliance with the exposure control plan obligation," Ryan says, "it's not enough just to write a plan and have it on file at company headquarters. The OSHA rule requires the plan be readily available for examination on site for any employee who asks for it."

Companies that fail to maintain OSHA compliance risk citations and fines. Employers have the next six months to assess current levels of compliance in frac operations and seek a total dust control solution.

About AIRIS

AIRIS Wellsite Services is the marketleading provider of total silica dust control solutions to operators and pressure pumpers. AIRIS provides silica consultancy services and operates of a fleet of high-efficiency particulate vacuum units and patented technologies. With key regional offices in Houston, Midland, Texas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Okla. and Denver, AIRIS operates throughout the Rocky Mountains, Mid-Continent, Northeast and Texas regions.

Contact:

Katie Sallee

(918) 728-7026

[email protected]

SOURCE AIRIS Wellsite Services
BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Veritas Genetics, The Genome Company, and Mayo Clinic are entering into an agreement to make whole genome sequencing broadly available to healthy individuals.

As part of this collaboration:

The team at Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine will provide medical and clinical expertise to the Veritas team. Veritas will integrate Mayo Clinic's know-how into its flagship product myGenome. Patients who qualify for a Mayo Clinic research study of healthy adults will be offered Veritas myGenome screening test for whole genome sequencing. Mayo Clinic will become a shareholder of Veritas.

"The Center for Individualized Medicine at Mayo Clinic is the gold standard in personalized medicine and we are proud and honored to collaborate with such a professional and dedicated team. This is a great step to further realize the promise of the human genome," expressed Mirza Cifric, Founder, CEO Veritas Genetics.

Co-founder and advisor to Veritas Genetics genomics pioneer George Church said: "There are few organizations in the world that have the expertise and reputation to make whole genome sequencing a reality in clinical care as these two. I am very excited about this collaboration and I am looking forward to the impact it will have on the health of many thousands of patients and families."

The collaboration will be led by Keith Stewart, M.B., Ch.B., medical director of Mayo's Center for Individualized Medicine, which will be funding the study. Any revenue that Mayo Clinic will receive as a result of this collaboration will be used to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.

About Veritas Genetics

Veritas is The Genome Company. We screen the majority of an individual's DNA through whole genome sequencing and interpretation to provide insights on inherited disease risks, carrier status, drug sensitivities, traits and ancestry. Our mission is to help people understand their genetics and make more informed health and lifestyle decisions with the involvement of their physician and access to skilled genetic counselors. Co-founded in 2014 by George Church and leading scientists from the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, Veritas operates globally from its offices in the U.S., Europe and China. The company has been recognized twice by MIT Technology Review as one of the 50 Smartest Companies in 2016 and 2017. For more information, follow @VeritasGenetics on Facebook and Twitter or visit veritasgenetics.com.

SOURCE Veritas Genetics

Related Links

http://www.veritasgenetics.com


An expert meeting was held at the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Serbia to discuss the upcoming early presidential elections, as well as the progress and dynamics of systemic political reforms carried out by the President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
"We are pleased to have Ashley as part of our team," stated C. Frank Scott, III, President of Virginia Commonwealth Bank. "Ashley has been established in this role for the past few months and has performed an outstanding job with overseeing and coordinating our internal audits to provide assurance that the bank's risk management, governance and internal control processes are effective and sound."

Mrs. Smith joins VCB with 15 years of banking experience, most recently from Ernst & Young's Financial Services Office in Richmond where she spent four years in their assurance practice auditing a top ten national bank. Prior to that, she spent eleven years at First Capital Bank in Glen Allen, VA.

Mrs. Smith is a Certified Public Accountant. She's received her Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting, Magna Cum Laude, from Virginia Commonwealth University and her Master of Accountancy from VCU and was a Dean's Scholar Award recipient.

About Bay Banks of Virginia

Bay Banks of Virginia, Inc. is the holding company for Virginia Commonwealth Bank and VCB Financial Group. Founded in the 1930's, Virginia Commonwealth Bank is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. With eighteen banking offices located throughout the Richmond market area, the Northern Neck region, the Tri-Cities area of Petersburg, Hopewell and Colonial Heights, Middlesex County and Suffolk, the Bank serves businesses, professionals and consumers with a variety of financial services, including retail and commercial banking, investment services, and mortgage banking. VCB Financial Group provides management services for personal and corporate trusts, wealth management services, estate planning, estate settlement and trust administration.

For further information, contact Randal R. Greene, President and Chief Executive Officer, at 844-404-9668 or [email protected].

SOURCE Bay Banks of Virginia, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.baybanks.com


BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Voatz, a mobile focused election voting and citizen engagement platform, announced today that it has raised over $2.2 million in seed round funding led by Medici Ventures with participation from the Urban Innovation Fund and Oakhouse Partners. Other notable investors in the round include Walt Winshall, Michael Dornbrook, Joe Caruso and members of the Walnut Ventures angels group. The company plans to use the capital to build out its business development team, expand its reach across the United States and accelerate the development of several exciting new product features.

Voatz enables citizens to vote in many types of elections and voting events via a secured smartphone or tablet. Past attempts at Internet based voting have failed to gain traction due to fundamental concerns around security, auditability, and voter anonymity. The Voatz platform is able to tackle all these challenges by using biometrics for security and blockchain technology to ensure tamper-proof recordkeeping, identity verification and auditing.

"Voatz is a great addition to the Medici Ventures portfolio. The Voatz team has developed a leading solution to usher in an era of greater efficiency and transparency in voting," said Medici Ventures President Jonathan Johnson. "Democracy will benefit greatly from critical improvements blockchain technology can bring to voting systems. For example, providing secure, immutable record keeping will bring greater confidence in accurate results, and ease of use will lower the barrier to entry for citizens to participate in elections. We look forward to partnering with the Voatz team to improve this critical function of society."

Several leading universities, labor unions, state political parties, church groups and non-profits have already deployed the Voatz platform successfully for their internal elections, convention voting, and other voting functions. The company is now in the process of deploying its technology for town meeting voting in Massachusetts. The platform is currently accessible by invitation only and will be accessible to a wider audience in the coming weeks.

"We're excited to support Voatz in its bold mission to dramatically increase voting access and security," said Julie Lein, Managing Partner of the Urban Innovation Fund. "Voatz tackles two of the core challenges in voting -- low participation in local elections and the need for better citizen engagement. Its mobile-first solution is poised to be a category leader, democratizing voting across government, corporate, academic, and union elections."

"We are deeply impressed with the entire Voatz team. Their innovative approach to combining biometrics and blockchain technology achieves a dramatic improvement in voting infrastructure security. The Voatz platform increases voter confidence and participation, solving two critical objectives of voting system organizers around the world," said Andrew Maguire, Investor at Oakhouse Partners.

Voatz Co-Founder & CEO Nimit Sawhney added, "We are delighted and grateful for the support we have received from our investors to help grow our team and accelerate the deployment of our cutting edge voting and citizen engagement platform."

About Voatz

Voatz is an award winning startup based in Boston MA. Its innovative and highly secure mobile voting platform has been used by more than 70,000 voters in various elections and voting events in multiple jurisdictions including several pilot projects involving Town Meeting Voting & Participatory Budget Voting. The Voatz platform focuses on providing cutting-edge security alongside an easy to use interface to enable voters to make their voices heard in a convenient manner. Voatz has been recognized with several recent awards some of which include the 2017 MassChallenge Gold Award, the 2017 Harvard SECON Prize, 2016 MIT Startup Spotlight Cult Favorite Prize, the 1st Prize at the SXSW Citrix Hackathon, the Mass Innovation Nights Audience Favorite Prize and recently graduated from the 2017 Techstars & MassChallenge Startup Accelerator programs in Boston.

About Medici Ventures:

Launched in 2014, Medici Ventures is a wholly owned subsidiary of Overstock.com, Inc., created to leverage blockchain technology to solve real-world problems with transparent, efficient and secure solutions. Medici Ventures has a growing portfolio of groundbreaking blockchain-focused investments, including t0.com, Peernova, Bitt, SettleMint, Factom, and IdentityMind, Spera and Symbiont. The company's majority-owned financial technology company, t0.com, executed the world's first blockchain-based stock offering in December 2016.

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact. Additional information regarding factors that could materially affect results and the accuracy of the forward-looking statements contained herein may be found in the Company's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2017, which was filed with the SEC on November 8, 2017, and any subsequent filings with the SEC.

Contacts

Voatz

[email protected]

Medici Ventures

[email protected]

SOURCE Voatz
"We want our appliances to create simplicity for families throughout their various day-to-day tasks," said Jennifer Tayebi, communications brand manager, Whirlpool brand. "From integrating appliances with Yummly to voice-controlled commands, families can experience a smarter way to help care for each other."

Located in the Smart Home section at the Sands Expo Center, the Whirlpool Every day, care experience will take place in booth #41725, where attendees can experience award-winning product innovations:

The Whirlpool booth will showcase the latest in Whirlpool smart appliances designed to help families care smarter:

The Smart Front Control Range and Smart Over the Range Microwave with Scan-to-Cook Technology will integrate with Yummly to deliver a personalized cooking experience in 2018. 1

and will integrate with Yummly to deliver a personalized cooking experience in 2018.

Families will be able to control the Smart Range through the Yummly recipe app to integrate recipes and cooking functionality into one platform. The True Convection Bake Mode on select Smart Microwaves will also be compatible with the Yummly app to integrate recipes and cooking functionality into one platform. Just select from a database of curated recipes and send cooking instructions straight to the appliance. The instructions include everything from preheating to temperature and timing adjustments, and the Yummly functionality within the app will also take users through a step-by-step process  including images and video  to guide consumers on exactly how to prepare that item. 2



The Smart All-In-One Washer and Dryer will help families keep their daily tasks going, even when they're busy and forget about their laundry. The unit can be set to begin drying after the wash cycle completes, answering the need for less complex washing routines and providing a compact unit perfect for tight spaces where a separate washer and dryer might not fit.2

Whirlpool appliances also feature collaborations with Google, Amazon and Apple including:

Hands-free Help From the Google Assistant 2 : With voice command capabilities throughout the kitchen lineup, families can ask the Google Assistant how much time is left on the microwave, set and adjust cooking mode, set temperature and time on the range, start a cycle on the dishwasher or set temperatures in the refrigerator.

With voice command capabilities throughout the kitchen lineup, families can ask the Google Assistant how much time is left on the microwave, set and adjust cooking mode, set temperature and time on the range, start a cycle on the dishwasher or set temperatures in the refrigerator. Voice-control Appliances with Amazon Alexa 2 : With voice command capabilities throughout the kitchen lineup, families can ask Alexa how much time is left on the microwave, or coming soon, can set and adjust cooking mode, set temperature and time on the range, start a cycle on the dishwasher or set temperatures in the refrigerator. In addition to capabilities in the kitchen, simple voice commands in the laundry lineup allow families to start, stop and pause the washer or ask how much time is left on the dryer. Now families can simply ask "Alexa, how much time is left on the dryer?"

With voice command capabilities throughout the kitchen lineup, families can ask Alexa how much time is left on the microwave, or coming soon, can set and adjust cooking mode, set temperature and time on the range, start a cycle on the dishwasher or set temperatures in the refrigerator. In addition to capabilities in the kitchen, simple voice commands in the laundry lineup allow families to start, stop and pause the washer or ask how much time is left on the dryer. Now families can simply ask "Alexa, how much time is left on the dryer?" Amazon Virtual Dash: Within the connected refrigerator lineup, Prime customers will be able to order their favorite everyday products like beverages, snacks or paper towels, straight from their LCD touchscreens, with virtual Dash Buttons.

Within the connected refrigerator lineup, Prime customers will be able to order their favorite everyday products like beverages, snacks or paper towels, straight from their LCD touchscreens, with virtual Dash Buttons. Alert Notifications with Apple Watch: The Smart All-In-One Washer and Dryer can be remotely controlled from a mobile device through the Whirlpool mobile app.2 Through mobile device notifications or the Apple Watch, alerts are sent once a load of laundry is complete, so no more guessing and checking in frequently only to find out the cycle is not complete.

Whirlpool brand and Yummly are also bringing home three 2018 CES Innovation Awards for new and innovative kitchen products, including the Whirlpool Smart Suite in Fingerprint Resistant Stainless Steel, Whirlpool Smart Microwave with Scan-to-Cook Technology and Yummly 2.0 featuring ingredient recognition and connected recipes.

For more information on the company's care-centric products and to join the conversation, visit ces.whirlpool.com and follow #CareSmarter.

1 Not all frozen foods included. WiFi & App required. Features subject to change. For details and privacy statement, visit whirlpool.com/connect.

2 Appliance must be set to remote enable. WiFi & App required. Features subject to change. For details and privacy statement, visit whirlpool.com/connect.

About Whirlpool Brand

For more than one hundred years, Whirlpool brand has been inspired by how people care for their families. Whirlpool brand is designing home appliances that are focused on improving how families give and get the care they need with the latest technologies and innovations  whether that means most flexible refrigerator storage for all types of family needs, induction technology for efficient cooking and easier cleaning, or laundry pairs that sense and adapt to clothes with the latest in connected technologies. Whirlpool brand is part of Whirlpool Corporation, the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances. Whirlpool Corporation is also one of Habitat for Humanity's largest corporate partners for over 15 dedicated years, donating a refrigerator and range to every new Habitat for Humanity home built in North America. For more information on Whirlpool, please visit whirlpool.com /everydaycare or find us on Facebook at facebook.com/whirlpoolusa or Twitter at @WhirlpoolUSA. Additional information about the company can be found at whirlpoolcorp.com.

About Yummly

Yummly, founded by David Feller and Vadim Geshel in 2009, is a leading digital platform (mobile and web) for personalized recipes and cooking resources. Since Yummly's inception, it has been active in the digital kitchen and connecting users to the recipes they love. From recipe recommendations to handy tools and helpful videos, Yummly has everything needed to improve life in the kitchen every step of the way. The company, headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, uses patented technology and proprietary data to understand food and taste, making it the best source for recipes tailored to specific taste preferences. For more information, visit www.yummly.com.

SOURCE Whirlpool Brand
BENTON HARBOR, Mich., Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Whirlpool Corporation is taking its smart home appliance capabilities to new heights with Apple Watch. Rolling out in early 2018, connected appliances from Whirlpool Corporation will allow consumers to remotely communicate with ovens, washers and dryers via Apple Watch. The collaboration marks the first time an appliance maker has connected its products with Apple Watch and its capabilities.

"Bringing intuitive technology and functionality to the appliance category that helps take the friction out of household chores is chief among our goals as we innovate for the smart home," said Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool Corporation vice president, brand and strategy in North America. "Our consumers are sophisticated and expect their appliances to work smarter, not harder. Through the new collaboration with Apple, we're increasing a consumer's capability to interact with their appliances in new and more convenient ways."

Compatibility with Apple Watch will begin with a roll out to more than 20 Whirlpool brand connected appliances in 2018.

Consumers will be able to remotely communicate with their appliances through the Whirlpool app on Apple Watch in a variety of ways*:

Oven: Consumers will be able to see the current oven status and control commands during an active cycle.

Consumers will be able to see the current oven status and control commands during an active cycle. Washer: Alongside status updates, users can control the wash options of an active cycle. Whether it be a normal wash, delicates, or brights, consumers can adjust an active cycle on the fly via their Apple Watch.

Alongside status updates, users can control the wash options of an active cycle. Whether it be a normal wash, delicates, or brights, consumers can adjust an active cycle on the fly via their Apple Watch. Dryer: Consumers can control and detect if a cycle has started, understanding how much time remains before the cycle is complete.

This collaboration with Apple Watch is another demonstration of Whirlpool Corporation's commitment to innovation that serves a purpose. By expanding remote connectivity to home appliances, consumers can continue to personalize their appliance interactions and care for their families smarter, faster, and better.

From Jan. 9-12, CES attendees can get up close to all Whirlpool brand innovations at booth #41725 in the Smart Home section, located at the Sands Expo Center. For more information on the company's care-centric product innovations and to join the conversation, visit ces.whirlpool.com and follow #CareSmarter.

* Appliance must be set to remote enable. WiFi & App required. Features subject to change. For details and privacy statement, visit whirlpool.com/connect.

About Whirlpool Corporation

Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE: WHR) is the number one major appliance manufacturer in the world, with approximately $21 billion in annual sales, 93,000 employees and 70 manufacturing and technology research centers in 2016. The company markets Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Maytag, Consul, Brastemp, Amana, Bauknecht, Jenn-Air, Indesit and other major brand names in nearly every country throughout the world. Additional information about the company can be found at WhirlpoolCorp.com, or find us on Twitter at @WhirlpoolCorp.

SOURCE Whirlpool Corporation

Related Links

http://www.whirlpoolcorp.com


CHICAGO, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The following statement is being issued by Siprut PC regarding the lia sophia Class Action Settlement.

A Settlement has been reached in a lawsuit alleging that Act II Jewelry, LLC f/k/a lia sophia ("Act II") breached its promise to provide a lifetime warranty, and that Act II harmed its sales advisors by misappropriating their customer information and making false statements to those sales advisors concerning the closing of its business. Act II denies these allegations and denies any wrongdoing. The Court has not decided who is right.

The settlement covers Class Members of one or more of the following Settlement Classes which include all individuals in the United States who: Customer Class  purchased jewelry from Act II between June 23, 2011, and December 1, 2014; Sales Advisor Class  sold at least $250 of jewelry for Act II between January 1, 2014, and August 17, 2014; New Sales Advisor Class  purchased initial starter kits from Act II between August 1, 2014, and December 1, 2014. In total, the classes contain approximately 4 million members. If the settlement is approved, a settlement fund of $6.7 million dollars will be created for distribution among those Class Members who submit Valid Claims, attorneys' fees, incentive awards, and settlement administration expenses.

To get a payment class members must submit a claim online or by mail by April 9, 2018. Customer and Sales Advisor Class Members' cash payments will depend on the amount of jewelry purchased or sold from Act II, and the total number of Valid Claims filed. New Sales Advisor Class Members will receive a full reimbursement of the amount paid for his or her initial starter kit, which ranged from $99 to $149, subject to a cap on total recovery for the class.

Other Options. Class members that do not want to be legally bound by the Settlement's terms or who want to pursue their own case against Act II, must Opt Out of the Settlement by April 9, 2018, and will not get a payment from the Settlement. If a class member does not Opt Out, they may Object to the Settlement by April 9, 2018. The detailed notice available on the Settlement Website explains how to Opt Out or Object.

The Court will hold a Hearing on June 6, 2018 at 9:00 a.m. to consider whether to approve the Settlement and a request for attorneys' fees of up to one third of the $6.7 million Settlement Fund after settlement administration expenses (approximately $1,800,000) and incentive awards of $2,500-$7,500 to the Class Representatives. The Motion for Fees will be posted on the website after it is filed. You may appear at the hearing, at your own expense, but you don't have to. For more information, call or visit the website.

This is only a summary of the information related to the Settlement. For detailed information, about the Settlement, class member rights, and the benefits that may be available, visit: www.LiaSophiaSettlement.com or call 1-844-412-1945.

SOURCE Siprut PC

Related Links

http://www.liasophiasettlement.com


HOUSTON, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Zenith Energy, L.P. ("Zenith"), an international liquids and bulk terminaling company, today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire a liquids storage terminal facility in Hamburg, Germany from Royal Dutch Shell plc ("Shell"). The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2018. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The terminal assets are located in the Port of Hamburg, Germany's largest seaport and the third largest container port in Europe. The facility, located on 55 hectares, serves as a refined product import and blending terminal in North Germany with an expected storage capacity of over 480 thousand cubic meters / 3.0 million barrels for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel; inbound and outbound ocean vessel, barge, rail and truck; and pipeline connectivity in the Port of Hamburg. After transferring ownership to Zenith, Shell will remain a significant customer of the terminal.

"We are pleased to further Zenith's geographic expansion with the acquisition of these terminaling assets strategically located in the Port of Hamburg, one of the world's largest trading ports and a key terminaling center for crude and refined products in Europe," said Jeffrey R. Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer of Zenith. "This is a natural progression in our growth strategy and underscores our commitment to expand into key European markets. We are excited to be working with Shell, a leader in the global oil and gas industry, and all of our customers in Hamburg, as well as welcoming our new colleagues in the region and further investing in the terminal facility."

The acquisition of the Hamburg assets represents Zenith's third terminal in Europe following its acquisition of terminaling assets in Amsterdam from BP in April 2016 and its acquisition of the Bantry Bay terminal in West Cork, Ireland from Phillips 66 in February 2015. Zenith also operates a multi-product liquids terminal in Palermo, Columbia, formed through a joint venture with Grupo Coremar in 2014. In December 2017, Zenith Energy U.S. completed its acquisition of Arc Logistics, marking Zenith's entrance into the U.S. market.

About Zenith Energy

With headquarters in Houston, Zenith is an international liquids and bulk terminaling company that owns and operates over 16 million barrels of crude oil, petroleum products and vegetable oils storage in The Netherlands, Ireland and Colombia. Zenith is pursuing opportunities to buy, build and operate terminals primarily in Latin America, North America and Europe. The Company is focused on the storage and distribution for petroleum, refined products, natural gas liquids and petrochemicals, and expect to acquire and operate logistics and distribution assets that support terminals, such as pipelines, truck racks and barges. In August 2014, Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing, led a line-of-equity commitment in Zenith of up to $600 million. For more information, please visit www.zenithem.com.

Contact :

Zenith Energy

Jay Reynolds

[email protected]

(713) 395-6206

SOURCE Zenith Energy

Related Links

http://www.zenithem.com


Barings Real Estate Advisers, part of Barings LLC, has acquired a ca. 4,400 sq m office redevelopment at the edge of Porta Nuova, the main business district of Milan. The investment is being made through Italy Opportunity Fund, an Italian alternative investment fund set up on behalf of clients and

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Patrizia Immobilien AG announces the acquisition of the 259 apartments of the Marble City residential area in Copenhagen from the pension fund PenSam and the public company City & Harbour. The acquisition, which comprises twelve separate properties, was made on behalf of three Patrizia funds.

Commen...

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Karala, the Palm Beach trophy home, sold pre-Christmas selling for $12 million, making it the highest sale in two years at the northern beaches suburb.

The seven-bedroom residence was bought by Mosmanites Silvana Marshall, wife of lawyer Richard Marshall, the former head of legal for mining giant Glencore Xstrata.

Designed by architect Albert Hoggett, it was sold by Switzerland-based hedge fund manager Adrian Vanderspuy and his wife Vanessa, owners of the Oldenburg Vineyard in South Africa.

The Vanderspuys listed it with a $12 million to $12.5 million guide through David Edwards, of LJ Hooker Palm Beach in May.

Set on Pacific Road, the 1700-square-metre property has been one of Palm Beachs most expensive holiday rentals, regularly fetching $25,000 a week during the peak holiday season.
Federal Labor's negative gearing policy would likely have a modest downturn impact on home values, official Treasury documents have revealed.

Contradicting Turnbull Government claims the policy would "smash" Australia's housing market, the previously confidential advice to Treasurer Scott Morrison from his department has been obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information.

The ALP's plan to restrict the tax deduction, along with halving the capital gains tax (CGT) discount, was an policy difference issue at the 2016 election campaign.

The documents suggest "in the long term, increases in taxation on rental property could have a relatively modest downward impact on property prices."

It also noted as the after-tax returns for Australian investors in shares and property would fall due to the reduction in the CGT discount, households may increase their investment in owner-occupied housing which remains exempt from CGT which "would tend to counter any downward pressure on prices."

After winning a two-year FOI fight, the ABC revealed Treasury officials in early 2016 gave advice to Scott Morrison.

"The ALP policies could introduce some downward pressure on property prices in the short term, particularly if the commencement of the policy coincides with a weaker housing market," they wrote.

The department warned the price impact would be greatest if "uncertainty arising from the policy change itself" compounded any housing market "downturn that may be underway at the time".

The documents also noted Labor's proposal "runs the risk that more wealthy investors will continue to enjoy the same tax incentive benefits they get now, while more modest mums and dads will have to look elsewhere."

The papers advised previous changes to negative gearing (1985-1987) and the introduction of the CGT discount (1999) had little discernible impact on the market, though the housing market itself has historically been highly cyclical and it is "possible that uncertainty arising from the policy change itself could compound upon a cyclical downturn that may be underway at the time."

"Overall, price changes are likely to be small, though the composition of ownership may shift away from domestic investors."

"In the longterm, increases in taxation on rental property could have a relatively modest downward impact on property prices" and "returns for Australian resident investors will fall under the policy," Treasury advised.

There were 18 pages in the FOI release obtained by ABC political reporter Dan Conifer and ABC FOI editor Michael McKinnon.

Senior bureaucrats threatened to stop giving honest advice to the Federal Treasurer if negative gearing documents were not kept secret from the ABC.
And that, sadly, is that.

Australia's auto production industry is no more.

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) monthly figures recorded the production of one solitary vehicle in November.

As recently as 2013 it was common to see 15,000-20,000 vehicles per month rolling off production lines.

However, the persistently strong Aussie dollar and high cost of manufacturing in Australia ultimately proved to be an obstacle too far.

The Department of Employment projected that the factory closures at Elizabeth in Adelaide (Holden) and Altona in Melbourne (Toyota) could cost 27,500 jobs over the years ahead.

Many in the industry have been employed for more than two decades.



And consider how the world has changed since that time - there was no LinkedIn of Facebook back then, for example, and job applications were submitted on paper.

While the full impact on supply chains is as yet unknown, and despite some better industry readings of late, the manufacturing industry remains in a structural decline, with total employment falling again in 2017

I took a look at here at where future growth will come from instead.
In a memo to Macmillan employees sent Monday morning, company CEO John Sargent issued a forceful rejoinder to President Trump's attempt to prevent the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury by sending a cease and desist order to the publisher last week, as well as other intimidation tactics. An official letter to President Trump's attorney, Charles Harder, was subsequently sent that afternoon by Macmillan's outside legal counsel.

Noting that the battle between Trump and Macmillan is more than just about Fire and Fury, Sargent said the effort by the president to block publication is "flagrantly unconstitutional" and is something no court would back.

Sargent cited a number of Supreme Court Cases, including the case of the Pentagon Papers, in which Justice Hugo Black declared: Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints. In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.

After citing two other decisions in Supreme Court cases that praised the ability of a press to examine the workings of government free of worries about the government's ability to restrain publication, Sargent wrote: "There is no ambiguity here. This is an underlying principle of our democracy. We cannot stand silent. We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court. We need to respond strongly for Michael Wolff and his book, but also for all authors and all their books, now and in the future. And as citizens we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution."

In the letter from Macmillan's attorney, Macmillan's counsel writes: "You demand that my clients cease publication of the book and 'issue a full and complete retraction and apology.' My clients do not intend to cease publication, no such retraction will occur, and no apology is warranted." The letter continues: "Generalized and abstract threats of libel do not provide any basis for President Trump's demand that Henry Holt and Mr. Wolff withdraw the book from public discourse."

This article has been updated with further information.
PEN America and PEN Center USA, the East Coast and West Coast American branches of PEN International, will merge under the banner of PEN America, the nonprofits jointly announced on January 8.

The boards of both organizations have voted in favor of unification, but the decision is still pending as it awaits a final vote from PEN Center USA's membership, which will be asked, in compliance with California law, to ratify the recommendation, as it entails changes to the organization's bylaws.The two entities are hopeful that the unification process will be complete by March 1, 2018. The newly-united PEN America's board will still be overseen by current PEN America president Andrew Solomon, and PEN Center USA's board will be incorporated as well.

"PEN America has invested significantly in building its brand and visibility in recent years and, as the larger of the two organizations, is the logical name for our unified organization," a FAQ page on the unification on PEN America's website reads. "Accordingly, in connection with the unification, it is expected that PEN USA will change its name to PEN America Los Angeles." A spokesperson for PEN America added that, "as far as rebranding goes, we are unifying under the PEN America banner, so our brand, logo, and so on aren't changing."

The two organizations were founded separately and have historically been independent of one another, even as they each have worked to advance the parent organization's missions to defend and celebrate free expression. Founded in 1922, PEN America, which is based in New York but boasts members in 49 states, focuses on literary programs and awards, as well as a robust free expression advocacy program, and also operates a Washington, D.C., office. PEN Center USA, which was founded in 1943 and is based in Los Angeles, offers special programming for writers and and other proponents of free speech who live west of the Mississippi. The combined membership of the two organizations is approximately 6,500.

"The decision to join forces was born of a shared sense of urgency to fortify our collective efforts at a time of unprecedented challenges to free speech here at home," Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN America, said in a statement. "As a unified organization with strong tent poles on both coasts and a diverse, growing community of writers and readers all across the country, we can speak out more forcefully, mobilize a wider creative community, and mount a more forceful effort to defend free expression, amplify silenced voices, and foster dialogue that transcends differences."

Under the unification plan, Nossel will continue to lead PEN America nationally alongside an expanded Board of Trustees, including representatives from Los Angeles. Soon-to-be-rebranded PEN Center USA will be helmed by PEN Center USA's current executive director, Michelle Franke.

Building on the foundation of PEN Center USAs deep and longstanding regional roots, we are excited by the opportunities that national reach will afford the communities we serve," Franke said in a statement. "We look forward to leveraging new capabilities to build our programs and community of activists, members, and supporters, creating an even more engaged, vibrant, and dynamic locus for L.A.-based writers and their allies to mobilize behind our mission."
iQIYI has launched its big budget online drama Chosen in China and Taiwan, ahead of its global launch on Netflix later this year.





The Sony Pictures Television co-production is a three-part adaption from the American drama of the same name, and stars Lan Cheng-lung and Deng Jiajia. All three parts of Chosen will be made available to viewers at the same time both on iQIYI and later on Netflix, in a break from the Chinese norm in online films releases.This is a clear demonstration of confidence by iQIYI and its partners in the shows quality and their strength in promoting original online films overseas, said Yang Xianghua, senior vice president, iQIYI. We hope our new business model and innovation in distribution will lead to more cooperation with other global partners in the future and enable more premium content to be seen worldwide.Dai Huang, chief representative and vice president of distribution and production from Sony Pictures Television, added: The future of online videos, the novelty of content and whether it can resonate with audiences are all interconnected. We constantly strive to explore and broaden new distribution models and new content in order to bring larger quantity and higher quality products to audiences; Chosen is a prime example of this.Dou Lili, general manager of online film development centre at iQIYI, remarked that gaining original rights for American dramas and treating them with Chinese presentation and high quality production standards will help more of our productions globally.iQIYI has already sold original content to North America, Vietnam and South Korea. The company has also reached deals with international partners including Netflix to distribute productions such as online series Tiensin Mystic and Burning Ice.The digital service has recently won the rights to stream in China a raft of critically lauded Hollywood films , including The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Talpas feel-good format The Wishing Tree has been acquired for localisation by Vietnams HTV-3 DreamsTV.





In the show, children hang their wishes for someone they feel is deserving of them in a wishing tree.Since its launch in the Netherlands, The Wishing Tree has been sold to countries including Spain, Germany and Poland. Brazils Globo has also recently renewed the show for a second series. The Wishing Tree will be produced in-house in Vietnam by Novel Production and is expected to air in during autumn 2018.I love the format because its not about achieving a dream for yourself, its wishing a dream for somebody else. I think its a wonderful thing in the Vietnamese society, especially among the young generation who are more entitled than any other generation before them. They need to learn the sense of giving back to the community and giving back to people who dont have what theyre having, said Thanh Bui, the representative of HTV3-DreamsTV.No dream is too small, no dream is too big. All dreams are important and all dreams can be achieved with some help. If this show can help families and children through inspiring people to dream and not be afraid of the challenges they may face to get there, itll be one step in the right direction. I really hope this show can be heart-warming and inspire all families to encourage each other to live with their dreams. So I appreciate Talpa for the opportunity to work with them on this spectacular show.
When the order from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau hit Mike Donovans desk, he thought there must be some mistake.

Donovan does not run a bank or a financial services firm. His Virginia-based company, Nexus Services, specializes in securing bonds for detained immigrants. Nevertheless, the CFPB issued Nexus a civil investigative demand (CID) for voluminous documents, including all of its client information. Asserting its authority through the rationale that Nexus bond services are a form of credit, the bureau did not allege any specific wrongdoing in its demand, although it insinuated that Nexus may employ deceptive practices to land clients.

Civil investigative demands are routinely issued by government regulators, but the bureaus request struck Donovan as a fishing expedition far afield from the traditional financial services outfits on which the CFPB presumably focused. So Nexus Services took a rare step: It decided to fight the consumer bureau in court, in a case that is still under review.

Mike Donovan of Nexus Services.

These guys are bullies, Donovan said. They are probably the most abusive government agency Ive ever seen. They were creating an investigation to have an investigation.

In an emailed statement, the bureau said its investigations follow the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law and may arise from multiple sources, including but not limited to consumer complaints, industry whistleblower tips, inter-agency referrals, market intelligence, and through the Bureaus supervision activities. These can lead to one or more civil investigative demands, the statement added.

Envisioned by now-Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the bureau provided the government with broad new authority to regulate the financial sector in the aftermath of the Great Recession. It was part of Dodd-Frank, signed into law by President Obama in 2010 over the objections of conservatives who have attacked it as unconstitutional because it was insulated from congressional oversight and funded without congressional approval.

With its original director, Richard Cordray, having left in November to run for governor of Ohio as a Democrat this year, the bureaus civil investigative demands are coming under fresh scrutiny as it adapts to the regulation-averse Trump administration. Its not clear just how many such demands the bureau made  they are not public records unless challenged by the recipient  but acting director Mick Mulvaney is reportedly reviewing both their frequency and their sweep.

The CFPB, then, stands now as a case study in contrasting approaches to administrative government, first with a stern hand from the left and then with a freer hand from the right  approaches that play out far beyond hard-and-fast laws and in entirely new regulatory territory.

Critics hope reining in the bureau will signal a victory in the Trump administrations battle against regulatory zeal, including what they decry as legislating through regulatory language  a practice not limited to the consumer bureau in the Obama years.

Asked about the charges of heavy-handedness, John Czwartacki, an adviser at CFPB, said, Acting Director Mulvaney takes any such charge very seriously.

In its brief history, the CFPB has employed deliberately vague language in civil investigative demands, citing myriad parts of the law in an attempt to expand its regulatory footprint, according to attorneys, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some consumer groups. Critics also contend that the bureau has often directed its fire at progressive betes noires, such as the for-profit educational sector, making it seem more of an antagonist than a referee in narrowly proscribed financial matters.

Nexus Services has proved a lightning rod for some immigrant rights groups. They accuse the company of inadequately explaining the costs associated with their bonding service. Under the terms of agreements with Libre by Nexus, the company branch that handles immigrant bonding, the immigrants must pay a monthly fee while being monitored by a GPS device. Immigration activists believe the costs are too steep for and poorly understood by those detained. Donovan disputes these charges, insisting his company performs a valuable service for both the immigrants and taxpayers.

Regardless, the nations broken immigration system was not a concern when Congress drafted the Dodd-Frank legislation that created the CFPB. But, as is common in Washington, the vague language used to craft that law gave regulators wide latitude and the bureau emerged in the Obama administration as a powerful force in the regulatory state.

Theres strong evidence that the CFPB was pursuing Obama administration tactics and priorities, even if it was not directly coordinating with other Obama-run agencies, said John Berlau, a scholar with the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. As an example of such connections, Berlau pointed to Operation Choke Point, a 2013 Justice Department initiative during which the CFPB pursued payday lenders while prosecutors focused on banks dealing with those businesses or gun retailers.

Like other Obama regulators, the CFPB attempted to make law through administrative maneuvers, Berlau told RCI. Yet the CFPBs abuses of process exceeded even those of other Obama administration bureaucracies due to the bureaus unique lack of accountability.

That lack of accountability was one of the reasons a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the CFPB an unconstitutional entity in October 2016  a decision that awaits an en banc ruling from the Appeals Court. In the meantime, critics hope Mulvaney will rein in the bureaus regulatory reach.

Contrary to past CFPB leaderships assessment, the ability to issue civil investigative demands is not boundless, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote in a statement to RealClearInvestigations. Time and again the CFPB used its CID power to pursue fishing expeditions, both at financial institutions and other organizations beyond the Bureaus jurisdiction.

Like other agencies issuing CIDs, the consumer bureau is required to state the laws it believes the recipient may be violating. But the bureaus own manual tells staff to craft their demands with deliberately vague and sweeping language, lawyers knowledgeable about bureau methods say. As a matter of practice, former CFPB attorney Ori Lev and a colleague, James K. Williams, wrote last April,  the CFPB has typically provided this information in extremely broad terms that provided investigation objects with little insight into what conduct the CFPB believes may have violated the law.

The two men, who now defend recipients of CFPB investigative demands in their private practice, quote the bureaus regulatory manual: The general approach of the model language is to describe the nature of the conduct and the potentially applicable law in very broad terms to preserve the Bureaus ability to request a broad spectrum of information in any CIDs issued in the investigation, particularly since the direction and scope of the investigation might change.

Ori Lev and James K. Williams, who defend recipients of CFPB investigative demands.

This intentionally broad frame, the attorneys wrote, allows the bureau to change the focus of the agencys investigation based on what it learns from the materials it obtains.

When Nexus Services received its civil investigative demand last August, it found itself in a quandary. In theory, the CIDs initial private classification is designed to protect the company, according to attorneys familiar with the process. But it also contains a built-in incentive to comply. If a company seeks relief, the demand and objection become public records along with the adverse publicity of being perceived as a CFPB target.

And the bureau is not above reminding its targets of that fact, according to Donovan. When he and his legal team sat down with CFPB representatives, he said they tried to intimidate him into meeting their demands.

I dont think [the threat] was veiled, Donovan said. They said, Were going to publish all this stuff about you on our website. It was extortion, as if the best thing to do is to comply because you didnt do anything wrong.

In any event, filing an objection to the bureaus investigative demands is mainly an exercise in futility. Of the roughly three dozen CID petitions the bureau has on its website, which experts said is not the complete record of companies who have objected, only one was granted in part.

RealClearInvestigations on Dec. 18 filed a Freedom of Information Act request to disclose all such demands from the CFPB, but on Jan. 4 the bureau replied that we were unable to identify or locate any responsive records at this time.

One company that took the issue all the way to court and won was the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

In June 2015, while the Obama administrations efforts to clamp down on the for-profit education sector were in full swing, the CFPB hit the council with a civil investigative demand. Foreshadowing the action against Nexus, Cordrays lieutenants reasoned that because for-profit schools were deeply entwined in loans, they fell under the bureaus regulatory umbrella and that, by extension, so did their accrediting agency.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument. The laws enforced by the CFPB do not address, regulate, or even tangentially implicate the accrediting process of for-profit colleges, Senior Judge David B. Sentelle wrote.

The Obama administration eventually neutralized the council in a different way, with then-Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. stripping it of accrediting privileges in Dec. 2016, one month before he left office.

Former CFPB attorney Lev said he had hoped the council decision might push the bureau to reconsider its belief that it should push as far and wide as it can, when issuing civil investigative demands. Yet after reviewing some half-dozen CIDs his clients have received since then, Lev told RCI, I havent seen a substantial change since April."

Mick Mulvaney, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Still, Mulvaney put a 30-day hold on bureau activity after Trump appointed him acting CFPB director (he's also director of the Office of Management and Budget). Some saw that as an encouraging sign that the bureau might temper its approach going forward, a change Donovan said cannot come too soon.

We have a right to not be smothered by government regulatory agencies," Donovan said. "They were using the power of the federal government with reckless disregard, and trying to make political points off the backs of our clients.

Correction

Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018, 4:05 AM Eastern

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying photo caption misidentified James K. Williams, a private lawyer. He defends targets of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but did not previously work for the bureau.
This year, plan to have hard conversations about divisive issues with those close to you.
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TORRINGTON  The Backstage restaurant, a prominent feature on Main Street for almost a decade, is set to close at the end of the day Sunday.

Representatives of the restaurant announced the decision on Facebook Saturday evening, much to the dismay of some local residents.

Albert Corpus said he began to go to Backstage the day it opened, after he used to patronize its predecessor, the Cambridge Brew Pub. He was a regular  he estimated he went there once a week  and the staff became close to him, he said.

I think its sad, said Corpus. Its a big part of Torrington thats going to be missing.

Corpus said he saw signs that business was not as good as it used to be at the restaurant. The reconstruction of sidewalks on Main Street had slowed traffic a few years ago, dealing the owners a blow, and fewer customers were coming in recent days.

But he said he was surprised the development happened so quickly. He was there Saturday, he said  staff were informed of the decision at 4 p.m., and he came in at 5 p.m.

Everybody there was just in shock, said Corpus, noting that he was saddened that staffers would be laid off.

Winsted resident Cory Medlar said he and his wife, Krista, had begun to go to Backstage more than four years ago. It became where they went for a night out on the town, he said. When Kristas father would fly into town from Michigan to visit, they would go there and sit in the same booth, over by the bar.

During the holidays, they enjoyed the decorations and seasonal offerings.

My wife and I are greatly saddened by them closing so unexpectedly, and now we are at a loss to find a new regular spot for (our) date nights out, said Medlar. (Were) totally caught off guard especially since they always were so busy and the food and wait staff were always great.

Medlar said he and his wife would eat there one more time today, and hed try to get the recipe for their meatloaf dinner  the best hes ever had.

Sheila M. Hogan, a Torrington resident for 70 years, said she was sorry to see the restaurant, which she described as a vital part of downtown Torrington, close its doors.

It was always an enjoyable restaurant....food wise, service wise and Torringtonian wise, said Hogan. A great place to connect and meet up with friends and (acquaintances). I think it is going to be sorely missed by many.

Corpus, Medlar, and Hogan all said theyd like to see another restaurant take Backstages place. Corpus suggested that the space be split in two, cutting the cost of overhead for the next owner, who hed prefer be something unique instead of a chain.

In the meantime, hell miss the people he got to know there, he said.

Family  they were family to me, said Corpus. I feel like Im losing family.

The building housing Backstage is owned by the Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts, as is the neighboring Warner Theater.

Lynn Gelormino, listed as executive director of the group in its 2015 990 filing and the executive director of the Warner, traced the closure of the restaurant to unsuccessful negotiations over lease terms in a statement Sunday afternoon.

After several months of negotiation over lease terms and obligations, unfortunately the parties were unable to reach a resolution. We regret Backstage has decided to close, said Gelormino. The Warner has commenced activities to seek a replacement. Over the years, The Backstage has been a great dining option for our patrons, and it is our intention to build on that experience.

Owner Keith Mahler, also the owner of Waterbury-based Premier Concerts, and Director of Operations Bob DeZinno did not immediately return messages seeking comment Sunday.

We are proud of the restaurant that we created, our commitment to local sourcing and fresh made menu items, Connecticuts best craft beer selection, high standards of cleanliness and food safety, and our generosity to many, many local charities, said representatives of the restaurant on Facebook in announcing its closure. Mostly, we are proud to have worked with the 42 professionals who made their livings here at Backstage. While closing a business is never pleasant and brings its own set of challenges, our major concern at this time is for these great people.

Both the Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts and Backstage Torrington LLC currently owe property taxes on the space, according to city records. These bills do not become delinquent until Feb. 1.

Mayor Elinor Carbone said that the loss of a Main Street business creates a hole in the heart of the city, and advocated for Torrington residents to support local commercial enterprises.

These businesses are relying on our community to spend our time and our money supporting them. The space that is occupied by Backstage is extraordinary and historic and I have every confidence that it will be turned around very quickly, said Carbone in a statement. I just want to remind our citizens that any failure of a business is as much our failure if we are not doing what we can to support them.

People reacting to the closure on Facebook shared concerns about gift cards Sunday.

DeZinno said late Sunday that those with gift cards in their possession can email managers@backstageeatdrinklive.com to receive instructions on how to get a refund. He did not immediately respond to follow up questions about the restaurants closure.

UPDATE: The original version of this article referred to negotiations between the Northwest Connecticut Asssociation for the Arts and Backstage over the terms of a new lease. These negotiations were over the terms and obligations of an existing lease, Gelormino said Monday.

Reach Ben Lambert at william.lambert@hearstmediact.com.
How many steps will it take to walk off Thanksgiving dinner?
Prosecutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina say German authorities have arrested a former member of the Bosnian Serb forces who is suspected of war crimes during the country's war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The prosecutor's office said on January 8 that Milorad Obradovic was arrested in the Munich region on an international warrant from Sarajevo.

German authorities have launched procedures for the 51-year-old's extradition to Bosnia, a statement said.

Obradovic is accused of participating in the detention of some 120 Bosnian Muslim civilians near the northwestern city of Prijedor in July 1992

The civilians were later executed, three of them by the accused personally, according to the indictment.

Another suspect in the same case, Slobodan Knezevic, was arrested in Montenegro in December, the prosecutor's office said.

Bosnia's 1992-95 war resulted in the death of an estimated 100,000 people and the displacement of some 2.6 million more.

As part of the 1995 Dayton accords that mostly ended the violence, Bosnia was broken into two constituent states: a Muslim-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska.

Based on reporting by AFP and dpa
The search continued for missing crew members two days after a Panama-registered oil tanker and a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter collided off China's east coast. Chinese transport officials said on January 8 that search teams were still trying to locate 32 missing crew members from the tanker, including 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis. All 21 crew members on the bulk freighter -- all Chinese nationals -- were rescued. The collision took place on the evening of January 6 about 250 kilometers off China's coast. (CCTV via Reuters)
So in a way, the Kremlin may have been right after all.

It appears that the West may indeed really be about to intervene in Russia's presidential election.

And get ready because it may happen fairly soon.

Because the Russian Supreme Court has just upheld its rejection of an appeal by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny against a decision to bar him from running in the election.

Navalny's lawyers say they plan to appeal to the presidium of the Supreme Court and then the Russian Constitutional Court.

And let's face it, those rulings are fairly predictable.

But guess what happens once Navalny has exhausted all his domestic legal options.

That's right. His case can then go to the European Court of Human Rights.

And the European Court has already ruled that Navalny's fraud conviction in the so-called Kirovles case -- the case the Russian Electoral Commission is citing as its justification for barring him from the election -- was unjust.

Given this, a court's ruling on his election ban should prove to be quite interesting.

So this is how the West interferes in Russia's domestic affairs.

Not with disinformation. Not with hacking. Not with fake news.

But in an open and transparent court of law -- a court established and legitimized in an international treaty that Russia freely signed when it joined the Council of Europe.

Keep telling me what you think on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed and on our Facebook page.
A court in the Netherlands has convicted and sentenced to life in prison two Russians and one pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist in the 2014 shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine.

The three men, who were tried in absentia along with a fourth suspect, were convicted of murder by the Dutch court for their role in the shooting down of the passenger plane. The court acquitted the fourth suspect for lack of evidence as it issued its long-awaited ruling on November 17.

Ukraine welcomed the ruling, while Moscow called it "scandalous" and said it would not extradite its citizens.

The downing of flight MH17 in July 2014 killed all 283 passengers and 15 crew members onboard the flight, which had taken off from Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. The victims came from more than a dozen countries, although more than two-thirds of them were Dutch citizens.

WATCH: We take a look at what investigators say actually happened over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

"Only the most severe punishment is fitting to retaliate for what the suspects have done, which has caused so much suffering to so many victims and so many surviving relatives," presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said, reading a summary of the ruling.

The three men convicted were former Russian intelligence agents Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinskiy, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian separatist leader. Russian Oleg Pulatov, the only suspect represented by defense lawyers at the trial, was acquitted.

The three men, who are believed to be in Russia, were all found to have helped to arrange the transport into Ukraine of the Russian military BUK missile system that was used to shoot down the plane. Prosecutors said the convicted men have two weeks to file an appeal.

The ruling also said the missile that shot down flight MH17 was a Russian-made BUK missile supplied from Russia and fired from a field near Pervomaisk. Steenhuis said the court believed Russia had overall control at the time of the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

The court also awarded damages to the families of more than 16 million euros ($16.5 million), but it is unclear just who would pay that sum.

The verdict comes more than eight years after the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was blown out of the sky. The midair explosion and crash on July 17, 2014, happened amid a conflict between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Twitter that holding the "masterminds" accountable was also crucial "as the feeling of impunity leads to new crimes." Punishment for all of Russia's atrocities then and now is inevitable, he added.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told Reuters earlier the ruling sent a strong signal that "every war crime committed by the Russians will be documented, investigated, and brought to a conclusion no matter how much time it takes."

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the verdict as "a solid step" toward justice, but he said more work lies ahead to hold those responsible to account.

The verdict "reflects the Netherlands' firm commitment to establish the truth and pursue accountability in this case," he said in a statement.

Russia called the ruling politically motivated and said the court was under "unprecedented pressure" from Dutch politicians, prosecutors, and media.

"We deeply regret that the District Court of The Hague has neglected the principles of impartial justice for the sake of the current political situation, thus inflicting a serious blow to the reputation of the entire judicial system of the Netherlands," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Moscow said the trial in the Netherlands could go down in history as "one of the most scandalous in the history of legal proceedings with its extensive list of oddities, inconsistencies, and dubious arguments of the prosecution."

With reporting by Current Time, Reuters, AFP, and AP
TBILISI -- The leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church has used his Christmas message to urge the government to do more to prevent young people from sliding into drug addiction.

In remarks delivered at a holiday mass in Tbilisi's Holy Trinity Cathedral on January 7, Patriarch Ilia II called drug addiction a disease and urged Georgians and the government to be more tolerant towards drug addicts.

He called on the government "to work out new drug policies that would prevent young people from using drugs and create a negative attitude towards that dire disease."

Most citizens of the South Caucasus nation consider themselves Orthodox Christians, and the 85-year-old patriarch commands widespread respect.

In late November, Georgia's Constitutional Court decriminalized use of marijuana and other forms of cannabis-based drugs. However, the court preserved administrative punishment, such as a fine, for marijuana use.

Before that, Georgia's Criminal Code defined repetitive use of marijuana and possession of more than 70 grams of dried cannabis as a crime for which individuals could face punishment that does not include imprisonment.

The opposition Girchi party, which has led a drive to legalize marijuana since November 2016, said then that it would fight for complete decriminalization of marijuana in the former Soviet republic.
Welcome back to the China In Eurasia briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking Chinas resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Im RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish.

Before we get started, a few announcements: The newsletter is now biweekly, rather than going out only on the first and third Wednesdays of each month. To subscribe, click here.

And I will also be launching Talking China In Eurasia, a new podcast. Im joined by the Royal United Services Institutes Raffaello Pantucci to talk about Xi and Putin. Listen to the first episode here or below.

Xi Gets Pragmatic About Russia At The G20

It was light on optimism, but U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping injected a healthy dose of pragmatism back into the U.S.-China relationship with their meeting in Bali at a time when global anxiety is rising over Russias war against Ukraine.

Finding Perspective: The meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit was far from a breakthrough, but it did repair some damage from the recent backslide in relations between both countries and send some signals that the world isnt necessarily destined for Cold War 2.0.

The more than three-hour talks saw some blunt exchanges over contentious issues like Taiwan and North Korea, but the two leaders also pledged more frequent communications and decided that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing for follow-up talks in 2023.

Of particular note, Biden raised Russias invasion of Ukraine and threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons. Both leaders reiterated their agreement that a nuclear war should never be fought, according to a White House readout.

While far from a sea change for Chinese policy, thats notable. The credibility of Beijings claims to be neutral on the Ukraine war continue to come under scrutiny, and China has shown discomfort of late with the Kremlins nuclear saber-rattling.

Xi made similar comments after a November 4 summit with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and during another G20 meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, according to the French readout.

Why It Matters: Xi is not abandoning Putin, but this marks the latest shift for Beijings balancing act over Russias invasion of Ukraine.

Four Chinese officials briefed on the February 4 meeting between Xi and Putin, where they declared a no-limits partnership, told the Financial Times that Putin didnt tell Xi the truth about the invasion and that Beijing was caught off guard by it.

What Xi knew about Putins war plans has been a topic of debate, and there is evidence to support both the idea that Xi was aware and that he was caught off guard.

Many analysts are of the opinion that Xi knew about Putin's decision to invade but expected a quick victory, which perhaps was what Putin believed at the time.

Others point to a steady stream of dismissals from Chinese officials and experts about the likelihood of an invasion in February and the fact that Beijing did not evacuate its citizens from Ukraine  like Western nations did  as evidence that China was not expecting a war.

China certainly has its own interests in keeping a distance from Moscows war and using that space to do some upkeep with the West. But perhaps the most important point here is that even if Putin did blindside Xi, China has stuck with Russia despite its battlefield failures, political isolation, and the atrocities its troops are accused of committing.

Again, this is pragmatism more than anything else. As Chinese experts often say, even if Russia is looking unattractive these days, why would Beijing abandon its main anti-Western partner as China continues to be in the crosshairs of rising American pressure?

Read More

 Want to hear more about Russia and Chinas complex relationship amid the Ukraine war? Then tune in to the debut of Talking China In Eurasia today at 2 p.m. CET/ 8 a.m. EST. You can listen live here and find the episode on RFE/RLs website and wherever you listen to your podcasts.

 Condemning Russias invasion of Ukraine and its global fallout is shaping up to be the key theme of the G20, with the Financial Times reporting that a joint communique from the summit takes aim at Moscow.

Expert Corner: The Future Of The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

Readers asked: Did Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharifs recent trip to Beijing breathe new life into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)? How do Islamabad and Beijing really feel about the project after all these years?

To find out more, I asked Filippo Boni, an expert on China-Pakistan relations at the Open University in Britain:

Shehbaz Sharif's visit to China was high on symbolism and relatively low on substance. While the two sides were keen to reaffirm and emphasize the strength of their strategic partnership, no significant new commitment was made. Apart from a few memorandums of understanding and attempts from the Pakistanis in the run-up to the trip to address some of CPECs issues  including payments to Chinese independent power producers  nothing major came from the visit. This is despite Sharif's attempts at revitalizing CPEC since April and the very close ties he enjoys with the Chinese leadership.

The outcome of this visit is not entirely surprising, especially if interpreted against the backdrop of Pakistan's current domestic predicaments. The security situation for Chinese nationals has deteriorated, the economy is struggling, and political instability is at one of its highest points in recent years. All these dynamics, coupled with the global scaling down of Belt and Road Initiative financing, have likely impacted Beijing's lack of commitment to new projects.

After almost 10 years and $25 billion worth of projects, there seems to be a general consensus on both sides that the first phase of CPEC  the one focused primarily on energy projects  was largely successful. The same cannot be said for the second phase, including the slow progress on the development of Special Economic Zones, and for the port of Gwadar, where little progress has been made for the ports full commercial functioning.

Do you have a question about Chinas growing footprint in Eurasia? Send it to me at StandishR@rferl.org or reply directly to this e-mail and Ill get it answered by leading experts and policymakers.

Three More Stories From Eurasia

1. 'Sweep It Under The Rug'

Recent allegations of China operating 54 overseas police stations have fueled controversy around the world and sparked investigations, but in Hungary and Serbia the new findings are being met with swift denials by authorities, despite growing evidence.

The Details: My colleagues Akos Keller-Alant from RFE/RLs Hungarian Service, Mila Durdevic from RFE/RLs Balkan Service, and I reported on the fallout from these revelations and the slew of probes launched in many European countries recently.

The stations are overseas operations of the public security bureaus from two Chinese provinces and are used to persuade citizens to return to China, including through pressure on family members at home. While most of those involved appear to be suspected of crimes such as telecommunications fraud or corruption, dissidents have also reported that the stations have been used to monitor and threaten them.

Fourteen governments have already launched investigations into the overseas police stations, and the Dutch and Irish governments have ordered China to shut down the facilities in their countries.

But in Hungary and Serbia  two countries where Beijing is said to operate such facilities and whose governments prize their warming political and economic ties with China  officials appear to be trying to sweep it under the rug, as one analyst characterized it, despite growing scrutiny from opposition lawmakers in each country.

2. Global Ripples Hit Central Asia

Political and economic shocks from Moscows war in Ukraine, coupled with added strains from tensions between Beijing and Washington, are taking their toll around the world, especially in Central Asia, where countries in the region are closely tied to both China and Russia.

What It Means: As RFE/RLs Uzbek Service reported, Vladimir Norov, the countrys foreign minister, warned about geopolitical tensions affecting stability in the region and beyond while addressing his counterparts at an Organization of Turkic States meeting in Samarkand.

The breakdown in global cooperation is felt particularly strong in Central Asia. While some economies have been able to benefit by becoming a new home for businesses and capital relocated from Russia, others are seeing investment dry up and their economies coming under strain.

World Bank Vice President for Europe and Central Asia Anna Bjerde recently warned that Uzbekistan needs to continue with its market reforms in order to withstand the global economic shocks that are to come.

RFE/RLs Kyrgyz Service also reported that the countrys government is trying to court more investment but that questions remain from investors about Kyrgyzstans stability and investment climate. According to official statistics from January to June of this year, China is the leading source of foreign investment, with $129 million during that span.

3. The Tech In Moscows Iranian Drones

A new investigation by Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, looked into electronic components underpinning Tehran's production of the Mohajer-6 drone, which Russia has used in its war in Ukraine, and found that theyre far from homegrown.

What You Need To Know: The Mohajer-6 drones contain components produced by companies from the United States and the European Union, both of which have sanctions restricting the export to Iran of technology that can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

The investigation also found drone components produced in China, including a real-time mini-camera made by a Hong Kong firm.

The drone also contains a microchip bearing the logo of a California technology company and a thermal-imaging camera that Ukrainian intelligence says may have been produced by a firm based in Oregon or China.

The international tech in the drone not only highlights the complex ecosystem that allows firms and buyers to circumvent sanctions slapped on both Iran and Russia, but also the close networks between Chinese and Western tech companies that still exist, despite a recent push to break some of those linkages.

Across The Supercontinent

On The Mainland: The watchdog group Freedom House recently launched a new project called the China Dissent Monitor, which tracks protests and other forms of dissent inside China. Read it here.

Censored: Chinese authorities behind a major trade expo in Shanghai pulled an opening ceremony address by European Council President Charles Michel that was set to criticize Russia's illegal war in Ukraine and call for reduced European dependency on China, Reuters reported.

Backtracking: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has softened his countrys stance toward China, moving away from his predecessor Liz Trusss decision to label it a threat.

One Thing To Watch

How long will Chinas stringent COVID policies stay in place?

New infections are rising as a winter wave hits and popular frustration continues to boil over inside the country as investor confidence stays dented over the measures. New footage also showed crowds of residents in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou escaping a compulsory lockdown and clashing with police.

Thats all from me for now. Dont forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

Until next time,

Reid Standish

If you enjoyed this briefing and don't want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your in-box on the first and third Wednesdays of each month.
ASTANA -- Former Kazakh Economy Minister Quandyq Bishimbaev, who is being tried on charges of bribery and embezzlement, is protesting his innocence and pointing the finger at subordinates he said had "failed" him.

In his first remarks to the court since his trial began in November, Bishimbaev apologized to President Nursultan Nazarbaev and the country on January 8 but contended that he himself had done nothing illegal.

"I feel ashamed for the situation I am in now. I failed the president when I created my team," Bishimbaev said as the trial resumed after a holiday break.

"I picked up wrong people, who used me and my trust. I apologize to the president and to the nation for that," he said, adding that he will always be "deeply loyal to the president and the interests of our country and people."

Bishimbaev, 37, was arrested by Kazakhstans Anticorruption Service in January 2017, weeks after Nazarbaev fired him.

Elite Education

A product of an elite educational program supported by Nazarbaev, Bishimbaev had risen through the ranks quickly -- serving as deputy industry and trade minister and deputy chairman of Kazakhstan's sovereign wealth fund before becoming economy minister.

He is accused of accepting bribes when he was head of Bayterek, a state-controlled holding company.

He pleaded not guilty at a preliminary hearing in October, while several of his co-defendants pleaded guilty and concluded deals with prosecutors.

Authorities say Bishimbaev used his right to remain silent and did not speak to investigators after he and 22 co-defendants were arrested.

Several former officials have faced prosecution on suspicion of graft in the tightly controlled Central Asian country in recent years, with some sentenced to long prison terms.



During their trials, many of them have apologized to Nazarbaev, who holds near-absolute power and has been president since before Kazakhstan gained independence in the 1991 Soviet collapse.
A spokesman for the Iowa National Guard says Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj has canceled a planned visit to the U.S. state this week because "he was unable to get a visa."

The spokesman, Colonel Greg Hapgood, told RFE/RL on January 8 that the National Guard's commanding officer, Major General Tim Orr, had invited Haradinaj to an event on January 11.

"It is incredibly unfortunate that he was unable to get a visa to come and join us for that," Hapgood said.

"The explanation was that it's just not going to happen in this time frame, and we did not get a lot of additional information," he added.

The spokesman also said that the event will be attended by Kosovar Deputy Prime Minister Behgjet Pacolli.

An official at Haradinaj's office could not confirm that he had canceled his trip. "We have no confirmation if the visa was rejected." Halil Matoshi told RFE/RL.

Local media in Pristina reported on January 7 that the U.S. Embassy had denied a visa to Haradnaj.

Meanwhile, Kosovo's prime minister wrote in a message on Facebook that he was "still waiting for the visa."

Relations between Kosovo and the United States, its traditionally close ally, have recently cooled over attempts by the Balkan country's leaders to abolish a new war crimes court set up to try ethnic Albanian ex-guerrillas.

Dozens of Kosovo lawmakers on December 22 made a failed bid to revoke the law allowing the tribunal's work to go ahead, after war veterans handed in a petition saying the court was "biased."

A statement from the U.S. Embassy in Pristina on December 29 warned that any renewed efforts to scrap the tribunal "would have profound negative consequences for Kosovo's European future and its relationship with the United States."

The court, based in The Hague, was set up to prosecute crimes allegedly committed by top members of the Kosovo Liberation Army as it battled Serbian forces in their 1998-99 war.

Haradinaj himself is a former guerrilla commander who fought in Kosovo's battle for independence from Serbia.

He has been arrested twice on a warrant from Serbia -- in Slovenia in 2015 and in France in 2017 -- but was released both times.

Haradinaj was also charged with war crimes, tried, and cleared twice by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

NATO air strikes helped the Kosovars drive Serbian forces out in the 1998-99 war.

Western-backed Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move recognized by 115 countries, although not by Serbia or Russia.

Haradinaj, the leader of the center-right Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK), was appointed prime minister in September, helping to end months of political instability in the Balkan country.
Ethnic Armenian military authorities in Azerbaijan's breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region say one of their soldiers has been killed by an Azerbaijani sniper near the line of contact that separates the combatant sides.

Authorities said the 19-year-old soldier, Vache Chilingarian, was shot dead on January 7.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a conflict over Azerbaijans breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh for years.

Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan during a 1988-94 war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Three decades of diplomatic efforts aimed at resolving the conflict have brought little progress.


A Pakistani court has granted bail to pro-Taliban cleric Sufi Mohammad, days after Washington suspended security assistance to Pakistan until it takes "decisive action" against Islamic militants.

A high court in the northwestern city of Peshawar ordered the elderly cleric's release on January 8 on health grounds.

At the hearing, Mohammad claimed that he should be released "as his health is deteriorating with each passing day," Dawn newspaper reported.

"He was too old to move and was suffering from kidney problems and weakness, and was taken to hospital many times," his lawyer Fida Gul told the AFP news agency.

Believed to be in his 90s, Mohammad is the chief of the banned group Tehreek Nifaz-e Shariat Mohammadi and the father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban.

Mohammad, who has been held in a maximum-security prison since 2009, is currently on trial on charges of murder, treason, terrorism, and rebellion.

The Peshawar court's decision came less than a week after the United States announced a freeze on aid to the Pakistani military.

"Until the Pakistani government takes decisive action against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani group...the United States will suspend that type of security assistance to Pakistan," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on January 4.

Pakistan has responded harshly to the move, with the Foreign Office saying Washington's "arbitrary deadlines, unilateral pronouncements, and shifting goalposts are counterproductive" to addressing the threat of terrorism.

Based on reporting by AFP and Dawn
A senior White House official says the Kremlin has launched a sophisticated campaign to influence Mexicos 2018 presidential election, a video obtained by a Mexican newspaper shows.

The Reforma newspaper on January 7 said the comments came in a video clip from a speech given by U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster in December to the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

In the December 15 speech, McMaster said there was already evidence of Russian meddling in the Mexican elections scheduled for July.

"We've seen that this is really a sophisticated effort to polarize democratic societies and pit communities within those societies against each other," McMaster said.

"You've seen, actually, initial signs of it in the Mexican presidential campaign already," said McMaster, without specifying the type of meddling suspected.

McMaster added that the U.S. government was concerned by the Kremlins use of advanced cybertools to push propaganda and disinformation.

Reuters news agency said a request for comment from McMaster's office was not immediately returned. The Kremlin also did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the benefit of Republican Donald Trump and to the detriment of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the accusations.

"We have certainly never planned, do not intend, and will not meddle in the electoral process in any other country," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax news agency on January 8.

The clip had not previously been reported on, but McMaster did refer to Russian meddling in Mexico during an interview with Voice of America (VOA) on January 2.

The Russians were very active in Europe...in the French election recently, in the Spanish referendum in regards to Catalonia [independence]. You see them active in Mexico already, " he said in the interview.

Mexicans will vote in July to elect a new president to succeed Enrique Pena Nieto, who is prevented from seeking reelection because of term limits. Congressional seats and some governor races will also be decided upon by voters.

Opinion polls show that leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is running on an anticorruption platform and is the former mayor of Mexico City, is the favorite to win the presidency.

Some experts have said Lopez Obrador is also the Kremlin favorite, as he has received positive coverage from Russian state-run news media.

The candidate has said he would seek friendly relations with Mexico's North American neighbor but that he would demand respect from the U.S. government.

Mexican Senator Armando Rios Piter of the Party of the Democratic Revolution told the The Hill publication last year that if Moscow "intervened in the United States, there's every reason to think that Mexico is a target for attack."

CIA Director Mike Pompeo echoed McMasters comments during an interview with CBS TVs Face the Nation program, saying he is concerned about continued efforts by Russia to meddle, but adding that many foes want to undermine Western democracy.

There is "this Washington-based focus on Russian interference," he said, adding that he wanted to "make sure we broaden the conversation."

He said the CIA and other agencies are working to prevent potential interference in the 2018 congressional elections.

With reporting by Reuters, The Hill, and Reforma
Russia says 13 armed drones have recently been used to attack its air base and its naval facility in western Syria.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on January 8 that there were no casualties or damage as a result of the attacks on the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval facility.

Russian forces were able to overpower radio signals for some of the drones and gain control of them during the attacks overnight on January 5-6, a statement said.

Other drones were destroyed with short-range Pantsir-S1 antiaircraft missile systems, it also said, adding that the unmanned aerial vehicles were carrying foreign, professionally manufactured explosives.

"Engineering solutions used by the terrorists in the attack...could have been obtained only from a country possessing high-tech capabilities for providing satellite navigation and remote control," it added, without naming any country.

A monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the attacks were carried out by an Islamist rebel faction that operates in Latakia Province, where the Hmeimim base is located, according to the Associated Press news agency.

Russia has given President Bashar al-Assad's government crucial support throughout Syria's civil war and has long been at odds with U.S. support of certain rebel groups in the Syrian civil war.

The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes since it began with a crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Also on January 8, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that air strikes by Russian warplanes and shelling attacks by Syrian government forces on rebel-held parts of Idlib Province, northeast of Latakia, enabled the regime forces to advance into 14 villages.

At least 21 people were killed in the aerial bombardment and shelling since January 7, the observatory said.

Idlib is the only province in Syria to be almost entirely controlled by antigovernment forces that are dominated by a coalition of Islamist factions called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

The provincial capital, also called Idlib, was late on January 7 the scene of a deadly blast that hit the headquarters of the militant faction Ajnad al-Qawqaz. Many of its fighters are from the Caucasus and Russia.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing that claimed at least 25 lives.

More than 40 Russian military personnel died in Syria since Moscow launched a campaign of air strikes in September 2015, in many cases using Hmeimim as a base.

Russia's Defense Ministry said last week that two Russian service personnel were killed in a mortar attack on Hmeimim on New Year's Eve.

It denied a report by the Kommersant business daily that seven military planes were destroyed in the attack.

The ministry also said that one of its military helicopters crashed in Syria on December 31 due to a "technical malfunction," killing both pilots aboard.

During a visit to the Hmeimim air base on December 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory over "the most combat-capable international terrorist group" -- a reference to the extremist group Islamic State (IS) -- and announced a partial withdrawal of Russian troops.

Western officials say that the Russian campaign, particularly in its earlier stages, has focused heavily on targeting rebels seeking Assad's ouster rather than IS militants.

Putin said on December 28 that more than 48,000 Russian military personnel had served in the operation in Syria, and that Russia's presence at Hmeimim and Tartus would be "permanent."

On December 29, Putin signed a law ratifying an agreement enabling Russia to expand operations at its naval facility in Tartus.

With reporting by Reuters, TASS, Interfax, and dpa
Turkmenistan's president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, thinks white cars bring good fortune. And that's bad luck for owners of black cars in the capital.

For weeks, officials in Ashgabat have been impounding black vehicles without warning, wreaking havoc for owners who need special permission for repainting and then reregistering their cars.

While there don't appear to have been any official announcements, Berdymukhammedov has expressed frustration at swank black cars in the capital, known as the "city of white marble," and motorists told RFE/RL that the traffic stops and towing of parked dark cars began late last month.

The campaign is also foisting unforeseen costs on residents in a city where the State Statistics Committee puts the average monthly wage at under 1,200 manats, roughly $300 at the government-established exchange rate or less than $200 per month at the black-market rate that many are forced to use.

"When I came to the auto shop, I was told that the repainting would cost 7,000 manats but that in a week the price would rise to 11,000 manats," one car owner who requested that his name not be published told RFE/RL.

"My salary is 1,000 manats, so even if I don't spend any money anywhere, I will be forced to hand over pretty much my entire annual salary just to repaint, he added, noting that his car had already been impounded.

It's not the first time Berdymukhammedov, who has tolerated little dissent since coming to power after the death of autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006, and his administration have taken aim at black cars.

In 2015, Berdymukhammedov ordered customs officials to halt all imports of black cars after he began using a convoy of white vehicles when traveling to public events.

End Of A Golden Era?

Oil-rich Turkmenistan, wedged between Iran, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, has become well-known for the eccentricities of its leaders.

Niyazov built a giant gold statue of himself and located it in the center of the capital, where it constantly rotated to always face the sun until it was moved to a less prominent location under his successor.

Niyazov also renamed months of the year after his family members and adopted the moniker Turkmenbashi, which means the "Father of all Turkmen."

After early signs of cautious reform, Berdymukhammedov's carefully orchestrated achievements -- as an author and songster, a victorious car racer but hapless jockey, and a knife-throwing sharpshooter, among others -- suggest that his administration has also fostered a cult of personality to bolster his tenure.

Despite having a population of only about 5 million people and the world's fourth-largest natural-gas reserves, tightly controlled Turkmenistan's economy is struggling, with government revenues depleted due in part to unsuccessful energy deals and low world prices for natural gas, the Central Asian country's main export.

Like Niyazov, Berdymukhammedov long relied on subsidized prices for basic goods and utilities to help maintain his grip on power.

Turkmenistan's economy has slowed in recent years, according to the Asian Development Bank, and there have been shortages of staple foods in shops, and the government has decreased or abandoned subsidies on prices of household needs such as water, gas, and electricity.

Government critics and human rights groups say Berdymukhammedov has suppressed dissent and made few changes in the restrictive country since he came to power.
UNICEF has been testing an evidence-mapping tool to bridge a big disconnect between its activities and the evidence behind them, according to Kerry Albright, chief of Research Facilitation and Knowledge Management at the UN agencys Office of Research-Innocenti.

Across large parts of our organisation, [the] instructional incentives, time and space to slow down, take stock, learn lessons and draw upon the available global evidence base for improved decision-making are still evolving, she told SciDev.Net.

Albright made the remarks as part of a consultation on an evidence mapping tool that she said is part of a broader push to build a stronger evidence culture at the agency. She cautioned that her comments were her personal views and did not represent the views of UNICEF.

The tool, called Evidence Gap Map (EGM), is a matrix designed to help policymakers and practitioners quickly see where high-quality studies are plentiful, or where more research is needed. It indicates the availability of evidence  not what it says  from various sources, not just peer-reviewed studies.

Many widely-used approaches are unsupported by rigorous evidence. Kerry Albright

The global evidence base of effective interventions to meet the  challenges facing children is mostly weak, scattered and too poorly translated to be usable, Albright told SciDev.Net . Many widely-used approaches are unsupported by rigorous evidence.

At UNICEF, this has partly to do with the agencys original service delivery mandate that goes back to the aftermath of the World War II, according to Albright.

Working with the Campbell Collaboration, a social sciences organisation, to produce the mapping tools, is a small contribution to the larger evidence puzzle, she explained.

Barriers, duplication

The overall goal is to generate the practical knowledge needed to better understand what works, and to understand barriers to implementation of interventions. This ultimately avoids the costs of duplication and enables the agency to reach more children, said Albright.

But to get there, there are hurdles to overcome. Agency staff currently have trouble even getting their hands on evidence they need  its only available through a research access account managed on a shoestring, Albright explained.

Laurence Chandy, UNICEFs director of data, research and policy, added that staff are so burdened with operational work that they simply do not have the time to read about the latest studies. This means the evidence used in programmes can be outdated.

The UN agency is one of the organisations assessing how useful the mapping tool can be in practice. They also include the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Sightsavers, the Beam Exchange and USAID.

At a consultation this month (10 November)  which was part of London Evidence Week organised by 3ie, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, which also develops EGMs  Annalisa Brusatti, Senior Technical Advisor for Child Protection at IRC, echoed the need for evidence to improve the effectiveness of interventions on the ground. But in practice, there are limitations, she said.

Brusatti, who shared early experiences from the IRCs use of the tool, said that although the maps make finding evidence easier, they often fail to capture the context that makes evidence meaningful for staff who need to use it on the ground.

Yet Howard White, CEO of the Campbell Collaboration, says that although context matters and can affect the impact of an intervention, its role can be overstated or misunderstood.

[The] IRC transplanted a developed-country model of parenting programmes to developing countries, he noted. But although parents in some cultures may not believe in stimulating infants with things like storytelling and play, the evidence shows that psychosocial development interventions do help cognitive development, he explained.

So it is important to understand what elements of a programme are transferable and in what ways they need to be adapted, said White.

Both the IRC and UNICEF continue to promote use of the tool internally. There are still relatively few evidence gaps maps related to international development, says Albright.



UNICEF is developing a mega-map of child welfare interventions that is planned for completion next year. This is a type of map that shows gaps in evidence synthesis by factoring in systematic reviews and gap maps, but no primary studies.

Development of the mapping tools is a work in process. According to White, feedback from users suggests they prefer maps that are easy to understand and enable them to drill down to the underlying study.
DEAR DR. ROACH: I am a 72-year-old man in excellent health and physical condition. I ride a bicycle 60 miles a week, and I generally feel good. I have an irregular heartbeat in the form of a premature atrial contraction, which showed up years ago for the first time on a routine EKG. I have had this for many years, and I do not have any effects from it that I am consciously aware of. My family doctor is concerned and wants further tests. A cardiologist told me not to worry about it unless I start to have symptoms like chest pain or dizziness. My question is whether it is OK to just have this sort of irregular heartbeat for many years, or if I should look into it with further testing?  M.M.B.

ANSWER: Premature beats come in two different types: those that originate in the atria, the smaller upper chambers of the heart (called premature atrial contractions, or PACs); and those from the thicker, larger ventricles (PVCs). Both of these are common, and the vast majority of people with them have no problems. My training and experience correlate to what your cardiologist says.

Further, although there are medications and procedures to reduce them, there is no good evidence that the treatment will reduce your risk of a bad event like a heart attack, so treatment would be purely for those few people who are noticeably symptomatic from the premature beats.

DEAR DR. ROACH: Is there some reason penicillin and erythromycin are hard to get? The above antibiotics are what my old doctor prescribed. They cured what ails me! I have yet to find a doctor half as good as him. Has there been a shuffle in the medical profession?  B.J.P.

ANSWER: There has been a shift. Physicians are trying to prescribe fewer antibiotics overall in order to address the problem of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics are effective against bacteria, and many times they have been prescribed for viral infections, for which they are ineffective.

Penicillin is active against many types of bacteria, but it is considered the best treatment only for a relatively few infections. I seldom prescribe actual penicillin.

Erythromycin also is effective against many types of bacteria. It is used less often now because newer antibiotics (azithromycin and clarithromycin in particular) are as effective or more effective and have fewer side effects.

I hope you find a physician you trust as much as your former physician.

DR. ROACH WRITES: A recent column on bad taste in the mouth (dysgeusia) generated some interesting letters, which I wanted to share. One person noted that her symptoms seemed to be from eating a certain type of pine nuts, and disappeared when she switched to Italian pine nuts (pignoli). I also heard from a person who said that eating a small amount of peanut butter solved the problem, while a clinician wrote to say he had good results prescribing probiotics. I dont know if any of these suggestions will help, but I doubt they will hurt.

Dr. Roach regrets that he is unable to answer individual letters, but will incorporate them in the column whenever possible.
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Legal recreational cannabis sales began in San Francisco on Saturday morning, drawing crowds to the first six retail stores in the city to sell weed to anyone over the age of 21 who wants it.

At the Apothecarium, a dispensary in the Castro that opened at 9 a.m., Dominic Rea, 48, was the first person in line. Hed arrived at 4:20 a.m because he anticipated a line and because the symbolism was too good to pass up. He was the first person there by hours, but his excitement hadnt waned.

I was so excited, I just decided to come over, Rea said. I think Im going to get a sativa joint, an indica joint and a couple of candy bars.

Though sales began in other parts of California on Jan. 1, Rea had decided to wait for legal sales to start in San Francisco, skipping the opening of dispensaries in Oakland, Berkeley and other cities. I live here, and I wanted to be here, he said.

On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded three memos from the Obama era that had outlined a policy of noninterference with state laws on marijuana, jeopardizing and confusing the status of legal weed. Still, San Franciscans were celebrating Californias new rules.

Now Playing: The sale of recreational marijuana is legal in California starting Jan. 1, 2018, but it may be a while before you see it being sold in your city. Why isn't it available everywhere? San Francisco Chronicle cannabis editor David Downs explains. Video: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE

Were not thinking too much about whats going on in Washington, said Eliot Dobris, a spokesman for The Apothecarium. Were focusing on this incredible milestone.

There was much pomp and circumstance at the dispensary; state Sen. Scott Wiener and Supervisor Jeff Sheehy gave speeches and partook in a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. Wiener also had some words for Sessions.

Hes not going to know what hit him in terms of bipartisan support, he told The Chronicle. Wiener is co-sponsoring a bill to make California a sanctuary state for the marijuana industry.

In his speech, Sheehy spoke about the long history of activism for decriminalization and legalization of marijuana in the Castro. Weve had a movement that started really in San Francisco, took the state and then it moved across the nation, he said. Weve gone the next step now.

The co-founder of the dispensary, Ryan Hudson, recounted the down-to-the-wire circumstances of the opening day. While the dispensary had gotten its city license early Friday morning, the state license didnt come through until three minutes before the state office closed at 5 p.m. Then, he said, staff started scrambling for the 9 a.m. opening.

A line of about 25 people snaked down the block by opening time. A steady stream of people came into the dispensary throughout the morning, which has the vibe of a boutique hotel, replete with a chandelier and soft music. They sell weed that comes in flavors like Blue Frost and Harmony Rose. They sell cannabis tinctures, oils and waxesand even, for $29 or $39, dog treats made with cannabidiol (which, apparently, will relax them but not get them high).

Now Playing: Now that the sale of recreational marijuana is legal in California, you may want to try it for the first time or the first time in a long time. Here are some tips to help you navigate the overwhelming choices you'll find in a recreational marijuana shop. Video: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE

Wesley Hattan, 42, said that he planned to get some edibles and go to the movies to see The Shape of Water later in the afternoon. Im finally going to buy some recreational marijuana, Hattan said. Its a historic moment.

Saturday, the dispensary offered a 20 percent discount to anyone who brought in their mother. Thats our way of saying that this is a safe and respectable place where you can feel proud to bring your mom, Hudson said.
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LOS ANGELES  Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio used the eighth annual benefit for the J/P Haitian Relief Organization to publicly praise each others philanthropic work.

DiCaprio was the guest of honor at the $5,000-a-plate dinner Saturday night at Milk Studios, which raised nearly $4 million for Penns Haitian Relief Organization and its nonprofit partners.

DiCaprio was recognized for 20 years of supporting environmental causes through his namesake foundation. Penn said DiCaprios work motivated him to start his own charitable organization after the devastating earthquake in 2010 that left thousands of Haitians homeless and without basic resources.

As much as anyone, the inspiration for me was from Leo DiCaprio, Penn said. Here was this young guy who had not only continued to create so productively but had also created what takes a kind of Herculean effort.

RELATED VIDEO: Brad Pitt Unsuccessfully Bids $120,000 to Watch Game of Thrones with Star Emilia Clarke

Now Playing: Looks like Brad Pitt is a big Game of Thrones fan  or, at least, a fan of the shows star Emilia Clarke Video: People

Penn praised DiCaprios personal commitment to protecting wildlife and advocating for the planet, as well as the actors general optimism.

Thats why he deserves to be honored and thats why we dragged him down here to be honored, Penn said. Who else do you know whos doing what youre doing around this town?

DiCaprio returned the praise as he accepted his award, calling Penn an inspiration and a role model.

DiCaprio also supported Penns cause by bidding $80,000 on a painting during a live auction at the gala. Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke had her eye on the same piece and ultimately outbid the Oscar winner before the artist who made the painting revealed two copies were available. Clarke and DiCaprio each got their own for $80,000 each.

Brad Pitt got in on the auction as well. He bid $60,000 on a painting, but Arnold Schwarzenegger outdid him and won with $70,000. Pitt was successful on another lot, though: an exclusive experience with the San Antonio Spurs, which he snapped up for $40,000.

Other items up for auction included a private dinner with chef Jose Andres and Anderson Cooper, which sold for $50,000, and a Game of Thrones viewing party with Clarke, which went for $160,000. (Pitt bid twice on that one but didnt prevail.)

The most expensive item auctioned was a painting by Urs Fisher that sold for $1.5 million.

Penn has hosted a fundraiser for J/P HRO on the eve of the Golden Globes since he established the charity in 2010.

Sandy Cohen is an Associated Press writer.
Thanksgiving dining, carryout options are still available in Michiana

Want to take a break from the kitchen on Thanksgiving? We have some options and a reminder to support local businesses on Nov. 26.
View of a purported "fossil" in the famous Mars meteorite known as Allan Hills 84001. Doubters argue that the feature is too small to be a sign of Mars life.

Twenty years ago, NASA scientists and their colleagues announced they had spotted possible signs of Mars life in a meteorite. The claim ignited a scientific controversy that lingers to this day.

In 1996, researchers led by David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston suggested that they might have found microbial fossils in a meteorite from Mars known as Allan Hills 84001 (ALH 84001). (Cosmic impacts on Mars can be powerful enough to blast rocks off the Red Planet, a fraction of which crash on Earth, the moon and other bodies in the solar system.)

The meteorite was first discovered in 1984 by geologists riding snowmobiles through the Allan Hills region of Antarctica. Scientists think ALH 84001 originally formed 4 billion years ago on Mars and landed on Earth about 13,000 years ago. [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]

Such magnetite particles are not known or expected to be produced by nonbiological (abiotic) processes. As such, the study team members said these crystals might constitute evidence of the oldest life-forms known, with profound implications for the presence of life in the universe.

"I think the approach the group took of combining several lines of evidence was innovative and made the argument more compelling at the time," said Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Soon after the 1996 announcement was made, Timothy Swindle, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, conducted an informal poll of more than 100 scientists to see how the scientific community felt about the claims.

"On average, scientists thought that it was a completely open question whether or not there's been life on Mars, and were skeptical ... but didn't think it was ridiculous," Swindle said.

Still, these claims drew major questions. Decades later, scientists are still dueling over these and similar finds.

The doubters' view

Skeptics picked apart each of the four lines of evidence presented in 1996. For instance, doubters noted that carbonate globules and organic molecules seen in ALH 84001 might have formed without the need for Martian microbes, while wormlike features that resemble fossils could actually have been uneven patches in the coating used to prepare the samples for electron microscopy.

"The questions posed by the team were very difficult to refute at first, and only by a global scientific effort involving many research groups around the world [have] other interpretations become more likely," Steele told Space.com.

Still, one line of evidence stubbornly resisted doubters.

The Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which researchers claimed in a 1996 Science publication, may hold evidence of ancient Mars life. This interpretation is still under dispute today. (Image credit: NASA/JSC/Stanford University)

"When the ALH 84001 announcement first came out, I was intensely skeptical of all the lines of evidence for life on Mars except one  the magnetite," said Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and no relation to David McKay (who died in 2013 at age 76).

"At the time of the ALH 84001 announcement, there was no known abiotic process that could produce such magnetite crystals," Chris McKay told Space.com. "So this line of evidence was quite interesting."

However, he noted that subsequent research has shown that shockwaves can generate such magnetite crystals. This weakened the case that ALH 84001's crystals were created by life, he said.

Magnetite crystals from Mars might more persuasively indicate life if they're found in string-of-pearl formations, as they are when created by bacteria on Earth, Chris McKay said. "If we find these chains on Mars, it would be compelling evidence of past magnetotatic bacteria," he said. However, so far researchers have not detected such strings, he added.

Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the 1996 study "is that we really do not have a good working definition of what constitutes life," Thomas-Keprta told Space.com. "At the most fundamental level, we still do not know whether the difference between animate and inanimate is simply a difference in kind or degree. In absence of such a definition, the search for evidence of life of Mars is plagued by ambiguities."

Swindle concurred. "We've learned how hard it is to demonstrate that any fossilized feature is the result of biology," he said. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

NASA's next step could be to send an upgraded rover to take soil samples and test them for ancient life. (Image credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)

The legacy of Allan Hills 84001

Even if ALH 84001 did not conclusively prove the existence of life on Mars, the research did benefit science, researchers said.

"The interest resulted in the Mars Exploration Program being reinstated," Gibson told Space.com. "The Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix lander, Curiosity rover, Mars Express mission with its Beagle 2 Mars lander  all can be traced to the ALH 84001 research. The excitement of the possibility of potential past or present life on Mars is too important for humans to ignore."

In addition, "the ALH 84001 announcement, despite whether you are a believer of the hypothesis or not, has clearly been the guiding idea for the development of the new interdisciplinary field of astrobiology," Gibson added. "This must be viewed as positive for the field of scientific discoveries."

Steele agreed with Gibson. "Without this paper, the field of astrobiology may never have come to exist," Steele said.

The scientists behind the 1996 study "continue to support our original hypothesis," Thomas-Keprta said. Gibson concurred, adding that "no scientific data has been presented to date that disproves any of the four original lines of evidence presented in 1996. Interpretation of the data is where the disagreement arises."

"I think the way the story evolved was the way science is supposed to work," Swindle said. "I am skeptical that they found evidence of life, but their paper generated a huge amount of very good science in testing it, so I think it was a great paper."

"The features seen in ALH 84001 probably don't come from life, but the possibility of life on Mars is still there," Swindle said.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently completed thermal vacuum testing at the Johnson Space Center for a launch now planned for the spring of 2019, a delay from October 2018.

WASHINGTON  Scientists gathering this week for the country's largest astronomy meeting will discuss plans for future space telescopes, while raising questions about the status of upcoming missions.

More than 3,000 people are expected to attend the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) at National Harbor, Maryland, for a week of scientific presentations as well as mission and policy updates from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Astronomers come to the meeting as NASA's next two flagship astrophysics missions, the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), face delays and questions about their budgets and capabilities. ['Super Bowl of Astronomy' Attracts a Galaxy of Space Scientists ]

NASA had planned to launch JWST this October on an Ariane 5, but in September announced a delay until the spring of 2019. The agency said at the time that the mission was facing no specific hardware issues, but instead that integration and testing of the $8 billion observatory was taking longer than anticipated.

"This is nothing to worry about," said Martin Still, executive secretary of the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) at NASA Headquarters at a meeting of the group Jan. 7 in advance of the AAS conference. "This is the first time that NASA engineers and Northrop Grumman engineers had put all this together. They're learning as they go, and they were just a little bit overenthusiastic about their schedule, overenthusiastic about how many things they could do in parallel."

At a House Science Committee hearing a month ago, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said that an updated launch date for JWST would be ready for release in January and February, after an independent review of the status of the mission. Others at the hearing, though, cautioned that additional delays may be possible as the spacecraft goes through integration and testing work in the next year.

"More delays are possible given the risks associated with the work ahead and the level of schedule reserves that are now below what is usually recommended," said Cristina Chaplain of the Government Accountability Office at the Dec. 6 hearing.

NASA's next flagship astrophysics missions after JWST, WFIRST, is also facing scrutiny. Zurbuchen announced in October that he was asking program officials to make changes to the proposed mission, still in early stages of development, after an independent review concluded its estimated costs were approaching $4 billion. The redesign, Zurbuchen said, should bring the mission's cost down to $3.2 billion.

That effort is in progress and is scheduled to be completed in February. Zurbuchen, in his October memo calling for the redesign, raised the possibility of revisiting the decision to use a donated 2.4-meter telescope assembly from the National Reconnaissance Office for WFIRST, rather than a smaller telescope originally envisioned for the mission, should the redesign not meet its cost cap.

At the December hearing, Thomas Young, a retired aerospace executive, said he was not particularly concerned about the WFIRST review. "I want to emphasize that there is no cause for panic," he said. "What is transpiring is a perfectly healthy process to assure that the scope, cost and risk are appropriately defined prior to proceeding past milestone B," a reference to Key Decision Point B, which NASA has postponed while the WFIRST redesign takes place.

Despite the problems with JWST and WFIRST, another NASA astrophysics missions is making good progress for a launch in the next few months. At the ExoPAG meeting, Still said the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was wrapping up integration and test activities, and should be delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in February.

TESS is scheduled for launch no earlier than March 20 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, a launch date that is dependent on NASA certifying the vehicle in time for carrying science missions like TESS. Zurbuchen said at the December hearing that he expected that certification effort to be complete by early 2018.

"Everybody at Headquarters is excited enough that they're starting to book flights" to attend the TESS launch, Still said.

TESS is a successor to Kepler, a NASA mission that has allowed astronomers to discover thousands of exoplanets as they cross, or transit, the disks of the stars they orbit, causing brief, periodic dimmings of those stars that can be observed. Kepler is expected to end operations later this year when it runs out of fuel used by its thrusters and is no longer to maintain attitude control.

"It is very much running on fumes," Still said of Kepler. "Some time over the next 12 months, Kepler will indeed start to inelegantly drift away in pointing and will be unusable."

At the AAS meeting, scientists will also be looking ahead to missions unlikely to fly for more than a decade. As part of preparations for the next astrophysics decadal survey, scheduled for release in late 2020, studies are underway of four concepts for flagship-class missions for consideration by that report. Updates about those mission concepts  the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission, the Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor, the Lynx X-ray observatory and Origins Space Telescope  are scheduled for presentation at the conference, along with an update for the planning of the decadal survey.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
C utbacks by a major customer stymied passenger growth at London City airport last year, the firm admitted on Monday.

The business travellers favourite, bought by a consortium of Canadian pension funds two years ago, said 4.5 million passengers used the airport in 2017, flat compared with the previous 12 months.

It is understood the main handbrake on growth was Irish airline CityJets move early last year to scale back its operations at the airport, cutting staff and dropping services to Paris Orly and Nantes. Other airlines also decided to end routes, hitting passenger numbers.

But chief executive Robert Sinclair said traveller numbers were up nearly 50% since 2012 and insisted 2018 will see a return to growth. He added that its decision to press ahead with a 480 million development programme was a sign of confidence in prospects.

He said: This programme will transform the airport over the next four years, adding much needed capacity at peak, substantially enhancing the overall facilities and providing much more choice and flexibility for passengers, at a time when the London airport system is already highly congested.

Amsterdam was the airports most popular route last year, with a 16% rise in passengers thanks to the return of Dutch carrier KLM a year ago.
W hen KPMGs name appeared as an adviser to the Grenfell Inquiry, it was one of those moments when you say: You are kidding, right?

Anyone who had last year looked at the organisations associated with the tragic blaze could not fail to notice that KPMGs name kept popping up as auditor.

And when you added up the sums of money it had made from these clients over the years, the numbers quickly became mindboggling.

So how on earth could the Cabinet Office be so crass as to hand the firm hundreds of thousands of pounds more to help investigate those same people?

Though this was never a conflict of interest issue  the nature of the contract meant KPMG could not influence the substance of the investigation  it was distasteful in the extreme. Particularly when there was so much concern in the community that any inquiry would be an establishment stitch-up.

That the appointment was made without full competition just added to the bad smell. Especially as there are so many other consultancies and law firms capable of doing such work.

When the Evening Standard first started asking questions, it looked like inquiry officials would stick to their guns. Yes, they said, we knew KPMG was auditor to Rydon  the prime contractors on the tower refurbishment  and, yes, we knew it also did Kensington & Chelsea. But we ensured there would be no conflict of interest.

However, when this paper pointed out that the third major organisation involved  the maker of the towers insulation  was also a KPMG client, it seemed winded. A long pause ensued before the response came: Erm, no. We were not made aware of that.

Tut, tut, KPMG. From that moment on, its days seemed numbered.

Ideally, the inquiry would have corrected its mistake as soon as we highlighted it. In the end, it took a petition of politicians and pop stars to make it think again.

So, what should officials learn from this fiasco? First, we must rethink the grip the Big Four accountants have on the public sector. They moved into local government in force after Eric Pickles scrapped the Audit Commission in 2010. Like it or loathe it, the commissions abolition (which came after much lobbying from the Big Four firms) makes it ever more important that audit and consultancy work should never go to the same firms.

Second, the inquiry must learn to be far more scrupulous about its processes.

Although its haste in hiring an adviser is understandable given the pressure it was under to establish itself quickly, it clearly acted without thinking how its actions would be perceived by the public. Cutting corners rarely makes for good outcomes.
A ccountancy giant KPMG has quit as the adviser to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry after the Evening Standard revealed it has earned millions of pounds offering audit and other services to the three biggest organisations to be investigated.

The inquiry, which is under the jurisdiction of the Cabinet Office, hired KPMG as a project management adviser last year.

It is the latest humiliation for the Big Four accountant, which was criticised for its involvement in the Gupta scandal in South Africa and its failure to spot the looming collapse of its client HBOS before the financial crisis.

The inquiry made the appointment despite being made aware that KPMG was auditor to the much-criticised Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Rydon, the contractor in charge of the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. The refurbishment has been blamed for causing the tragedy.

It had not been told, until informed by this newspaper, that KPMG was also auditor to the maker of Grenfell Towers flammable insulation, Celotex, and its owner Saint-Gobain.

The Standards revelations about the appointment, for which KPMG was to be paid 200,000, caused immediate anger among Grenfell campaigners, academics and politicians.

Critics ranged from musicians Lily Allen and Cerys Matthews to Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable and communities and local government select committee chairman Clive Betts.

Welcoming the climbdown, the former KPMG partner Paul Moore said the appointment had been outrageous.

Its perfectly bloody obvious that KPMG shouldnt have accepted that engagement. What theyve done is a complete disgrace.

Cable said that the appointment had been inappropriate.

Prem Sikka, professor of accounting and finance at University of Sheffield, said: In my view the episode raises serious questions about whether the Grenfell inquiry will be fair or thorough. Everyone can see that at the very outset there was a potential conflict of interests.

He added: In order to secure public confidence, it is now vital that the correspondence and minutes relating to the KPMG appointment should be made publicly available.

Social justice group Research for Action, said: "KPMG's conflicted appointment underscores the importance of public scrutiny, and the need to separate audit and advisory work to avoid conflicts of interest. We need to have a serious conversation about regulation of audit & advisory work."

KPMG said: Whilst we are confident that no conflicts exist between our role advising the inquiry and our work for other clients, we recognise that strength of opinion about our role risks undermining confidence in the inquiry.

The accountancy said it would waive its fees for the work. The contract, which had been extended by three months, was due to be completed next month.

KPMGs role emerged in filings monitored by research group Tussell.

The accountant has billed nearly 1 million in fees for audit and tax advice at RBKC since 2012 and, over the past decade, 3.5 million for audit, tax and other advice to Rydon, 1 million for auditing Celotex insulation group Saint-Gobain Construction Products UK and 109.2 million globally from audit and other services to French parent Saint-Gobain.
V intage software provider Micro Focus hit a bump in the road on Monday after investors bailed out following sluggish sales at the UK tech giant.

The takeover specialist, which buys ageing software systems and squeezes them for more earnings, unnerved the market by forecasting a 2% to 4% revenue slide next year.

The shares plunged 14%, to 2229p from 2582p, and took the shine off gains made from the takeover of Hewlett Packard Enterprises software division.

Figures from HPE and Micro Focuss existing batch of systems were also weaker than expected in the final quarter, down 15% and 2.7%, analyst estimates suggest.

The problems at the existing Micro Focus business, which includes ageing software Cobol, was blamed on the loss of a sales team from Host Connectivity, another of its vintage systems.

Executive chairman Kevin Loosemore also said revenue was down as we put operational improvement plans on hold while working on the completion of the HPE Software transaction.

The company snapped up HPE Software last year for $8.8 billion (6.5 billion) in a deal stitched together by Loosemore and outgoing HPE chief executive Meg Whitman, who steps down as boss next month.

It made Micro Focus the UKs biggest tech company and propelled it into the list of UKs 40 biggest companies. Micro Focus subsequently appointed former HPE man Chris Hsu as chief executive of the company. There were some bright spots, however, with a new M&A head and beneficial US tax rates.

Former chief financial officer Mike Phillips will move over to become head of M&A, with ARMs Chris Kennedy, the former finance boss of easyJet, taking over on the finance front.
A s promised, the Golden Globes were transformed into a polished version of an anarchists black bloc demonstration. In terms of protest dressing, few would have picked up an award for their efforts. But silence en masse can be as commanding as a war cry, especially on a red carpet used to look-at-me dresses in every bedazzling shade. Presumably that was the point for women who feel that Hollywood hasnt afforded them the same voice (or pay packet) as their male counterparts.

In the past that dare-to-care attitude has mostly been dismissed as sanctimony. Only Vivienne Westwood, who uses every catwalk show as a platform for her ethical worries, has always been heard politely because shes the closest thing fashion has to a queen. Even King Karl Lagerfeld was criticised for his SS15 Chanel show during which models brandished placards proclaiming female empowerment. In fact, he could clearly smell revolution although it wasnt to be delivered by, as almost everyone believed at the time, Hillary Clinton. It would turn out to be a protest against the values of her nemesis rather than a moment of womens liberation.

We can spool back into costume history for clothes that had a message beyond a fashion statement. The French Revolution did for Marie Antoinettes extravagant satins as much as it did for the woman herself. They were replaced with gowns in poor cotton although, being France, revolutionary ideology and fashion found a way of coexisting.

There is a direct line between that time and the 1960s, when women achieved fashion emancipation. Along it the looser, less restricted shapes of revolution have repeated as public indication that women were in the mood for change. Rational dress reformers rejected the corseted tightlacing that rearranged internal organs. Pre-Raphaelites pushed for a more natural female shape over dishonest waspy waists. They all called for a serious reduction in undergarments and an increase in comfort.

Golden Globes: Stars wear black on the red carpet

Trousers have also played their role, beginning with the bifurcated skirt garment that Amelia Bloomer would give her surname to in 1851. Little did she know that they would shrink for a century and a half until they were reduced to little more than a pair of heavily frayed Daisy Dukes worn by a member of the Russian feminist protest group, Pussy Riot.

Last nights dark message was that serious times call for serious clothes. The results may look too glamorous to be a real fashion protest but they will connect with social media. Instagram has made the red carpet the biggest political platform of all and it must be obeyed.


I nstead of getting all WTFish about model Lily Cole not being qualified for a role as creative partner in events at the Bronte Society, and filing her next to Toby Young as the latest in a line of outrageously inappropriate appointments (almost as riling as that ex-hotelier turned President), pause for a moment to consider the benefits of bringing someone with a wealth of different experience and a fresh perspective into a new professional world.

I say this as today is my first day as a creative director at the advertising agency Ogilvy, after 15 years as a magazine writer and editor. Ogilvy has employed me precisely because of my lack of experience in adland. I come with no baggage, with no idea what the done thing is and an ever-diminishing hope that all desks are fitted with a Don Draper-approved cocktail trolley.

Im not disillusioned or struggling to embrace change  Im enthusiastic, ready to ask questions and try to challenge the status quo.

Any smart business should see the value in opening its echo chamber up in this way. Lily Cole has a Double First in history of art from Cambridge and her time in fashion means she knows a thing or two about events.

Meanwhile, Ive spent my working life telling stories and selling a brand. Were not exactly trying to remove someones appendix or land a plane with these transferable skills. So relax whats the worst that can happen?



Armie is cool enough without trying to look learned

Star quality: Armie Hammer with his wife Elizabeth Chambers last night (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Moet & Chandon) / Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Moet & Chandon

I got sent so many peach emojis when my friends found out that I had lunch with the actor Armie Hammer in Los Angeles last month.

I was interviewing The Golden-Globe-nominated star of Call Me By Your Name for a mens magazine and I was struck by how much he wanted to prove his intelligence before I might mistake him for a himbo on account of his obscenely good looks (some misguided roles in big screen flops such as The Lone Ranger may also be behind this insecurity).

Hes reading the book that is currently on all like, really smart peoples bedside tables  Yuval Noah Hararis Homo Deus  and he told me When I read books, I am circling, underlining. I have always been auto-didactic.

As if thats not enough he also said: I do keep a notebook in my pocket, I track things like whats going on, how I react and how I am feeling. Then I can learn how to grow from there. Its something I read in On Management.

As much as I admire a man with a notebook in his pocket, hopefully now that Hammer has come inches away from a Supporting Actor Golden Globe for his exquisitely measured performance in this beautiful film about young gay love, he can stop putting such pressure on himself to be an intellectual.

Taking that role, in that film at that time, is as Very Stable Genius (VSG?) as you can get in Hollywood, and losing out to Sam Rockwell last night makes it even more credible.

So Armie, abandon Homo Deus like the rest of us  spoiler alert, they all die in the end.

Dont touch my toothbrush!

Im concerned that President Donald Trump and I share similar thoughts on the subject of hygiene. Im not worried about being poisoned like he is, Im just an over-thinker when it comes to germs.

I dread being asked by a friend for a sip of my cocktail or a bite of my dinner, as theres no polite way of saying Id rather you didnt thanks.

Sharing concept restaurants fill me with dread but unlike the Germaphobe-in-Chief, Id rather brave Barrafina than have a McDonalds for one in bed at 6.30pm. Because if theres one thing that makes me even itchier than the thought of someone using my toothbrush, its food stains on sheets.

Im calling time on sexist studies

News has just come just in from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, where scientists have discovered the smell of their husbands sweaty T-shirts makes women less stressed, ergo she should do all the washing. She loves it!

It raises the question, who is signing off on these sexist studies and why are esteemed publications such as The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology giving them any air time?

May I suggest investigating the effect of greasy French fry fingers on White House bed linen to be a better use of resources?


Four months after American Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive announced her departure from the title she had helmed for 16 years, Conde Nast has appointed her replacement.

Samatha Barry, a New York resident originally from county Cork in Ireland, previously served as executive producer for social and emerging media at CNN Worldwide, where she led teams across all CNN bureaus and developed strategy for editorial teams working across publishing, news-gathering, digital and TV.

Prior to that, Barry worked at BBC World News in London, where she served as a social media producer and journalist, focusing on using social media as a tool for both news gathering and audience building.

It was announced in October last year that British Glamour would move towards an online-only model (shortly after which Jo Elvin, its long-serving Editor-in-Chief, announced her departure). The hire of digital native Barry would suggest that American Glamour's focus will be shifting to digital, much like its European counterpart.

While many industry commentators believed the position might go to Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Elaine Wentworth, Samatha's digital experience will be invaluable in transitioning the magazine into its next phase. Conde Nast chief executive officer and president Bob Sauerberg said.Samanthas fluency in connecting with consumers in digital, social and video will give Glamour fans the content they love, and in ways that are most meaningful to them.

At a time when magazines must evolve to adapt to a rapidly changing media landscape, the hire of a digital-native is a sage move.
W alls looking a bit drab? January getting you down? Maybe its time to get some new art.

The arrival of a new year brings another twelve months of great art fairs to spot up and coming new talents, bag a masterpiece, and find out exactly whats hot and whats not in the art world.

From the biggies like Frieze to the smaller, more intimate fairs, theres something for everyone to enjoy across the next twelve months.

Read on to find out when exactly your favourite art fairs are happening in 2018.

London Art Fair

Things get off to a great start with the 30th edition of the London Art Fair, with modern and contemporary art from around the world on show for visitors and collectors. Museum quality work hangs alongside pieces from global names, and there are specially curated spaces to enjoy too.

17-21 January, Islington Business Design Centre; londonartfair.co.uk

Talented Art Fair

This hip fair is still a new kid on the block - after a successful first fair in 2017, its back for round two. The thought behind the fair is for new artists to have a platform to sell their art directly to the public in a relaxed environment. That means its a great place to go if youre just starting out as a collector, with works selling for as little as 50.

2-4 March, The Old Truman Brewery; talentedartfair.com

15 exhibitions to look forward to in 2018 1 /15 15 exhibitions to look forward to in 2018 Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up V&A Museum, June 16 - November 4; vam.ac.uk Aperture All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life Tate Britain, February 28 - August 27; tate.org.uk The Estate of Francis Bacon Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-2018 Design Museum, March 28 - August 12; designmuseum.org Bristol Street War Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avante-garde Barbican Centre, October 10 - January 27; barbican.org.uk John Kasnetsis RA Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, June 13 - August 20; royalacademy.org.uk John Bodkin Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy Tate Modern, March 8 - September 9; tate.org.uk Tate Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One Tate Britain, June 5 - September 16; tate.org.uk The estate of Winifred Knights Michael Jackson: On the Wall National Portrait Gallery, June 28 - October 21; npg.org.uk David LaChapelle Andreas Gursky Hayward Gallery, January 28 - April 22; designmuseum.org Andreas Gursky/DACS, 2017 Monet & Architecture National Gallery, April 9 - July 29; nationalgallery.org.uk President and Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts Charles I: King and Collector January 27 - April 15, Royal Academy; royalacademy.org.uk Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017 Edward Bawden Dulwich Picture Gallery, May 23 - September 9; dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Estate of Edward Bawden Joan Jonas Tate Modern, March 14 - August 5; tate.org.uk Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London Artists at Work Courtauld Gallery, March 28 - August 12; courtauld.ac.uk/gallery Somewhere in Between Wellcome Collection, March 8 - August 26; wellcomecollection.org

Affordable Art Fair

You had us at affordable. This popular fair pops up in Europe, Asia and America, and you can find it in Battersea this spring. Its carefully curated selection features work from over 100 galleries, and is only a short stroll from Battersea Park if all that art makes you want to pop out for some air.

8-11 March, Battersea Park; affordableartfair.com

The Other Art Fair

Saatchi Art presents this vibrant selection of work from emerging and undiscovered artists. This fair has been praised for being a great experience for visitors, and this years will be themed around the unexpected.

22-25 March, Victoria House; theotherartfair.com

London Original Print Fair

This gorgeous boutique art fair offers five centuries worth of prints, shown in the familiar setting of the Royal Academys Main Galleries. Its a friendly setting with plenty of experts on hand to talk you through whats on display, with work from masters old and new.

3-6 May, Royal Academy; londonoriginalprintfair.com

Affordable Art Fair

Want more from the Affordable Art Fair? It pops up again in May, this time in Hampstead. Head to the lovely surroundings of Hampstead Heath, where youll find thousands of original contemporary artworks from UK and international galleries.

10-13 May, Hampstead Heath; affordableartfair.com

Art and Antiques Fair Olympia

If you fancy adding some stunning antiques to your home as well as art, this is the fair for you. It focuses on craftsmanship, design and brilliant quality interiors, jewellery, art, and other collectors items. Prices range from 100 to 1 million, so bring your wallet.

20-27 June, Olympia; olympia-art-antiques.com

British Art Fair

This much-loved fair is the only one on the calendar to specialise exclusively in Modern and Post-War British art. After a years hiatus, its back with a snazzy new venue - it will be held at the Mall Galleries after 25 years at the Royal College of Art.

12-16 September, Mall Galleries; britishartfair.co.uk

Start Art Fair

The fifth edition of START takes place this September. The fair shows work from new art scenes, allowing collectors to discover artworks from new developing global markets. It takes place across the gallerys three floors, with an aim of introducing a young generation of artists to new audiences and offer an insight into the future of contemporary art.

13-16 September, Saatchi Gallery; startartfair.com

Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters

Get your comfy shoes on - this is the big one. This is one of the biggest dates on the annual arts calendar, taking place right in the heart of Regents Park. Frieze Art Fair is a great gauge of whats happening on the contemporary art scene, with hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists showcasing their work. A short walk away is Frieze Masters, offering something for those whose tastes are slightly more classically inclined.

4-7 October, Regents Park; frieze.com/fairs

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair

Its only been around since 2013, but this fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora is already one of the heavyweights on the scene. Its title refers to the fifty-four countries that make up the African continent.

October 2018, Somerset House; 1-54.com
I didn't fall in love, the first time I went to Barbados.

There was something that felt a little too divided about it: the Simon Cowell-esque glitz battling the real, beating heart of the island, which I couldnt seem to infiltrate. Everything I did was tediously touristy, from the rum-soaked jeep safari to the rum-soaked boat trip. Though Id physically seen a lot of the island, in reality Id experienced nothing.

Second time around, everything changed.

A lot of that was down to my guide and taxi driver, Haskell Drakes. A former prison guard, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the island and a never-ending stockpile of gossip.

Driving with him meant I visited places Id never have found on my own. I saw much more of the north and east coasts  places far from the five-star resorts  where the beaches are empty and battered by waves, roads veer up practically vertical hills and the peaks are thick with tropical plants.

Over one of these impossibly steep hills we found Bay Tavern, a bar and restaurant in Martins Bay. It was early when I arrived and I was the only one eating. The menu was scrawled on a whiteboard, listing the fish that had come in that morning alongside classic Bajan sidesides such as black-eyed peas and rice, sweet potato pie and macaroni pie.

The fried dolphin caught my eye: dolphin on a Barbados menu means mahi-mahi, a bonkers-looking fish that tastes a little like snapper or mackerel. I ordered a plate of it, with the macaroni pie Id heard so much about, and took my platter to one of the wooden tables outside, where palm trees wavered over a deserted beach. The fish was incredible, lightly dusted in spice and a gentle batter, with the creamy macaroni underneath.

I ate in blissful solitude as my shoulders burnt, a frosty Banks beer never far from my hand.

It wasnt my only drink. Driving with Mr Drakes meant an insiders knowledge of the best rum shops the island has to offer. As far from a drearily chi-chi cocktail bar as you could hope for, these ramshackle bars are dotted all over the island, filled with locals ribbing each other over a glass of rum.

John Moores Bar is perched on the edge of the sea, the back room merging onto a narrow beach. Head to The Sea Side Bar in Bathsheba at lunchtime and you might snag a flying fish sandwich: hot and crispy fish in a soft white roll, best eaten with sand between your toes.

And while youre never too far from a beach (there are more than 70 miles of them), they are more diverse than you might expect. The long, languid stretches of white sand and dazzling turquoise waters that conjure Barbados to mind are on the west coast. But the powerful Atlantic has battered the east, creating dramatic spots with towering cliffs and cowering coves.

This Barbados feels more authentic. Something about a sleek Gucci store in a shiny mall just seems a little ill-suited to an island so laid back and, well, cool. Who would want to traipse sand through a designer store when you could be eating fish fresh off the coals next to the water?

The best news? All beaches are open to everyone  none are the private property of any hotel or residence. Thats not to say the resorts arent perched on the best of them. I stayed at Sandals Barbados, which has a curving stretch of powdery sand lapped by gentle waves, plus a host of watersports (kayaking, paddleboarding, diving and snorkelling) included in my stay. But it was the night visitors that made the beach really special.

Each morning, a cluster of blue and yellow fences would appear on the sands, laid out by staff to mark new nests of sea turtle eggs. I was desperate to see a turtle in the wild, without resorting to the touristy organised sails. But despite numerous attempts (and 3am alarms) I failed to catch any egg-laying action.

Then I went out to sea. A sailor friend manned one of the hotels tiny catamarans and we swooped over the waves, warm water splashing up as we swung under the sail. The water was so clear I could see the seabed, the odd patches of seaweed in among clusters of brightly coloured fish. It would have been perfect, I thought, if a sea turtle appeared right now.

And then one did, just feet from our boat. She swept up to the surface, gulped a lungful of air and hovered for just a second, her shell glimmering in the sunlight. And so I fell in love.

Details: Barbados

British Airways (ba.com) flies from Gatwick to Barbados from 571 return. Sandals (sandals.co.uk) offers seven nights at Sandals Barbados on an all-inclusive basis from 2,335pp, including flights and transfers.

A half day tour with Haskell Drakes costs about Bds$350 (129) in a private car. Call 001 246 232 0186 to book or email hdrakes98@gmail.com

visitbarbados.org
T he 13th-century explorer Marco Polo called Hangzhou the finest and most splendid city in the world.

Seven hundred years later, this city in the eastern Zhejiang province is still one of the most picturesque destinations in China. The West Lake is a Unesco World Heritage site, there are countless Buddhist temples and Hangzhous position at the head of the Chinas Grand Canal continues to pull in selfie-stick-wielding tourists.

The 2016 G20 meeting took place here  the first to be held in China  thrusting the city onto the global stage and giving it a lick of Westernisation in the process. New hotels and a metro system (so new that its still being finished) were created for the occasion.

Chinese internet mega-corporate Alibaba recently moved its headquarters to Hangzhou, and booming property prices in nearby Shanghai mean more and more people are moving into the pretty city limits to party, play and hike its mountainous outskirts.

Where to stay

Johan SellEn

The best bolt hole in Hangzhou is Amanfayun (aman.com), near the West Lake. This turbo-luxe property from Aman Resorts  42 rooms in traditional Chinese courtyard houses in the middle of bamboo forests, tea plantations and the Lingyin Temple  is more like a village than a five-star hotel. If youve stayed at an Aman, youll note the trademark stark style, with washi paper lamps, brushed stone floors and lots of light-wood furniture. Doubles from RMB 5,865 (686), B&B.

What to eat and drink

Follow the Ali ren (shorthand for the hipsters who work at Alibaba) to Mislead. Run by an Italian couple, this cosy dive bar serves pizzas cooked to order and huge portions of antipasti as a young crowd relaxes among squishy sofas and eclectic wall art upstairs. A range of imported chianti and the complimentary limoncello makes it feel like youre in a Chinese twist on The Sopranos.

Traditionalists should try Grandmas Home (waipojia.com.cn/WCMS), a chain of restaurants with its origins in Hangzhou. Its many branches continue to dazzle  and frustrate  visitors and locals with long queues (expect 30 minutes minimum) and cheap, piled-high plates of Zhejiang food: sweet-and-sour fish head, braised tofu and tea-scented chicken.

For a shot of arty Hangzhou, try Mamala in Loft 49, a clutch of pink factory buildings at 111 Tongyi Road repurposed as galleries and performing arts spaces. Restaurant Mamala at number 12 is industrial, open-plan and bursting with plants and light, filled with Hangzhous young professionals brunching on European-inspired dishes. Hang around after lunch to check out whats showing at one of Loft 49s warehouses, or pick up gifts at the Loft 49 Shop.

Dimly lit, super-sexy cocktail joint Vesper, named after the Casino Royale character and accessed via a green telephone box has the best whisky selection in the city  so large that theres a ladder to reach the rarer Japanese and Taiwanese bottles on the top shelf.

Johan SellEn

Where to shop

Touristy He Fang Jie (or Hefang Street) is like every other traditional shopping street in China  lined with teahouses and medicine shops. Its worth a visit if youre in the market for basic souvenirs but generally best avoided.

Youll find the Chinese glitterati at freshly built shopping centre In77 on Yanan Road, where luxury boutiques are housed in slate replicas of traditional Chinese courtyard houses. It also houses gallery space and plenty of cheap and cheerful restaurants.

Hangzhou is the home of Chinese silk, so its no surprise that the prosaically named Silk City at 253 Xinhua Road is the best place to buy. This vast space sells everything from silk napkins to wholesale rolls of the stuff. Its reliably good quality and relatively inexpensive.

What to see and do

Almost every cup of green tea youll drink in Hangzhou started life in Meijiawu, a tea plantation 15 minutes drive out of the city. An hours hike up from the village will skim you across the tea vines, and on a clear day youre rewarded with views over West Lake and the surrounding bamboo forests from on high.

Johan SellEn

Hangzhous best gallery is the Folk Art Galleries, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, recently added to the China Academy of Arts (0086 571 8707 9585; caa.edu.cn). The exterior is as impressive as the interior: sloping roofs merge gently with the tea plantations surrounding it.

Hangzhous most important Buddhist temple is Lingyin, helpfully right next to Amanfayun and free for hotel guests; otherwise its 30 RMB (3.50). Arrive early to explore the mustard-yellow pagodas and Buddha rock carvings  its absolutely swarming with tourists from 10am onwards.

Details:

British Airways (ba.com) flies to Shanghai from Heathrow from 501. From there, take the bullet train (52 minutes, 8.50) to Hangzhou.
A couple who met on dating website SingleMuslim.com have been found guilty of plotting an Islamic State-inspired bomb attack over Christmas.

Munir Mohammed planned to inflict devastating" carnage in a "lone wolf" attack he volunteered for after chatting on Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander.

He was helped by pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan, of Willesden Lane in north-west London, drawing on her knowledge of chemicals needed to make a bomb after seeking her out on SingleMuslim.com.

The 36-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested at his home in Leopold Street, Derby, in December 2016.

At the time he had two of the three components for TATP explosives as well as manuals on how to make explosives, mobile phone detonators, and deadly ricin poison.

Mohammed and El-Hassan, 33, denied preparing terrorist acts between November 2015 and December 2016.

Mohammed on a trip to his local Asda where he bought the wrong type of nail varnish remover to make explosives / PA

But following an Old Bailey trial, a jury found the pair guilty of the plot.

Judge Michael Topolski QC remanded the pair in custody and warned them they faced jail when they are sentenced on February 22.

Following the verdicts, he said: "Munir Mohammed, you have been convicted of planning a potentially devastating terrorist attack by creating an explosive device and deploying it somewhere in the UK targeting those you regarded as enemies of the Islamic State.

"Rowaida El-Hassan, you share the extremist mindset with Munir Mohammed and you were ideologically motivated to provide him with support, motivation and assistance.

"You knew he was engaging and planning an attack. You knew he was planning an explosion to kill and maim innocent people in the cause of Islamic State."

Munir Hassan Mohammed, 36, and Rowaida El-Hassan, 33 each denied one count of preparing terrorist acts

Mohammed arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and claimed asylum in February 2014, the court heard.

After being left hanging for more than two years, he appealed to Derby MP Margaret Beckett for help with his immigration problems.

The long-serving Labour MP was informed by authorities that his case was "not straightforward" and had been referred to a "specialist unit for consideration".

Meanwhile, Mohammed was working at a Kerry Foods in Derby making sauces for supermarket ready meals and wooing a potential British bride he met online.

The prosecution claimed he was drawn to University College London graduate El-Hassan because she referred to having a Masters degree in pharmacy in her dating profile.

Jurors were told the pair had a "rapidly formed emotional attachment and a shared ideology" and by the spring of 2016 were in regular contact on WhatsApp and had met more than once in a London park near El-Hassan's home.

Hydrogen Peroxide found in the home of would-be bomber Mohammed / PA

As well as arguments, jokes and everyday concerns, they also shared extremist views and videos.

Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC said Mohammed "resolved upon a lone wolf attack" and El-Hassan was well aware of his plan.

In August last year, Mohammed was put in touch via Facebook with a man he believed was an IS commander, known as Abubakr Kurdi.

He pledged allegiance to Kurdi and offered to participate in "a new job in the UK", said to mean an act of terrorism, jurors heard.

El-Hassan advised Mohammed on what chemicals to buy for a bomb, jurors were told.

In November last year, Mohammed got hold of a video containing information on how to manufacture ricin, the court heard.

In the days before his arrest, he was captured on in-store CCTV buying "acetone free" nail polish from Asda, in the mistaken belief it was a chemical component of TATP.

He also looked at pressure cookers at Ace Discounts, which the prosecution said could be used to contain the explosives.

When police raided his home on December 12 last year, they found hydrogen peroxide in a wardrobe and hydrochloric acid in the freezer.

Mohammed denied the chemicals were for a bomb, claiming the hydrochloric acid was to clean the alloys on his car and the peroxide was to treat a burn.

He told jurors he sent El-Hassan extremist videos "mainly for the news" and claimed his intention was "to marry her".

However, the court also heard he had an arranged marriage in Sudan with a woman he had never met called Fatima who he was hoping to bring to England on a student visa.

El-Hassan, who came to Britain from Sudan at the age of three, told jurors she had sulphuric acid for her drains and got face masks to wear as she dealt with a damp problem in her flat.

Asked if she had feelings for Mohammed, she said: "It was mixed feelings at the time. Yes, there was emotional attachment.

"There were feelings developing and we were getting to know each other. I was grateful for things he helped me with. And he was grateful for things I helped him with. I liked the attention he was giving me."

Additional reporting by Press Association
A n on-duty police officer was left needing 22 stitches after he was attacked with a bottle outside a bar in south London.

Police were called to Lucy 1st in Stockwell in the early hours of Sunday after a fight broke out between a group of young men and security door staff.

As a uniformed officer took statements in Clapham Road some members of the group who had been involved in the altercation returned, Scotland Yard said.

The officer tried to stop more fighting from breaking out and, as he attempted to detain one of the group, he had a bottle thrown at his head.

He suffered a serious injury and was rushed to hospital where he received 22 stitches.

Lambeth Chief Superintendent Richard Wood said: This dedicated response officer has sustained 22 stitches to the head after being assaulted whilst performing his duties. He was attacked as he worked to detain a volatile suspect.

His bravery and commitment in tackling this suspect is typical of the hundreds of response team officers in London who work 24/7 to catch criminals and put themselves in harms way to keep the public safe. I wish him a speedy recovery.

We have made four arrests and enquiries continue to work to apprehend others suspected to be involved in this incident.

Police attended following the attack on the officer and four males aged 17 to 18 were arrested on suspicion of violent disorder.

One has been bailed and the remaining three arrested released with no further action.

A man aged 18 was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder as a result of the initial fight involving the group and security staff.

Detectives are appealing for information and witnesses after the incident which happened at about 1am.

Anyone who witnesses or has information about this attack is asked to call police on 101 quoting CAD 291/7 Jan or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
S olicitors were today warned to be suspicious of house-buyers paying with large sums of unexplained wealth as law enforcers began a campaign to stop dirty money flowing into the capital.

The National Crime Agency and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which are working together, said legal professionals were an obvious target for organised criminals wanting to launder cash.

Unveiling the new Flag It Up campaign today, the SRAs Juliet Oliver said solicitors should be extra vigilant.

For example, if someone is buying a house at a high price, but does not seem to have an obvious source for the money. Each firm should have a way of assessing risk, and be clear when they will not accept work because the risks are too high, she said.

If solicitors are complacent, they could ultimately be helping to enable serious crime, such as human trafficking, drug offences and even terrorism. Individuals who are involved run the risk of both police action and disciplinary processes. She said solicitors should recognise that their obligations went well beyond the needs of their client. She added: They must consider the wider public interest and are legally required to take action where they suspect someone is trying to break the law, or risk involvement with the activities of serious criminals.

Sanctions could also be imposed on solicitors who set up companies or trusts  both often used to carry out the purchase of expensive property  without carrying out adequate checks on their clients or raising the alarm when suspicions emerge.

The campaign, which begins with an advert in todays Standard, has been prompted by concern about the way in which Londons property market is being used to launder criminal profits.

The issue has been highlighted in court courses, as well as by the NCA and the anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International.

The journalist Misha Glenny, whose book McMafia inspired the current BBC crime drama, said at the weekend that he believes London has become a centre of laundering filthy lucre and that successive governments had fallen desperately short in their efforts to address the problem.
T heresa May has kept the biggest beasts in her Cabinet in post in a reshuffle forced by the resignation of her former second-in-command Damian Green.

Justine Green quit Government after losing her job as education secretary and refusing to take the PM's offer of the work and pensions department.

Former justice secretary David Lidington was appointed to Mr Green's old position of Minister for the Cabinet Office and also the Duchy of Lancaster, but did not inherit the title of First Secretary of State which marked Mrs May's long-time friend and ally as her effective deputy.

Downing Street confirmed Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, Brexit Secretary David Davis and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt are all keeping their current jobs.

Brandon Lewis has been named the new party chairman, amid farcical scenes which saw the Tories' official Twitter account incorrectly announce that the job had gone to Chris Grayling.

Follow our Standard live blog for all the latest news and views ahead of day two of reshuffle on Tuesday.
T heresa May carried out a clearout of the Conservative campaign machine in her reshuffle today - overshadowed by an farcical blunder at party HQ.

Former Immigration Minister Brandon Lewis was made party chairman and put in charge of a completely new team at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

Sir Patrick McLoughlin, the former miner who served as a minister under four Premiers, carried the can for the general election disaster and the autumn party conference failings, including letters falling off the backdrop to Mrs Mays speech.

His departure breaks the last ministerial link with Margaret Thatchers government.

Confusion: This tweet was swiftly deleted from the party's official account

James Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary on health grounds moments before the reshuffle. The popular minister needs an operation on a lung for a lesion.

Other announcements were being delayed by well over an hour, fuelling speculation that some ministers had protested after being disappointed with offers.

The need for what was being described as a reboot of campaign HQ was underlined when a senior official accidentally tweeted the erroneous news that Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, was taking over as chairman at 10.50am.

With a headline Congratulations Chris Grayling and the hashtag #reshuffle, the tweet from the @Conservatives account appeared to be a gold-plated premature leak of Mrs Mays changes. But it was taken down within 30 seconds and red-faced party officials admitted it was simply wrong.

An hour later, Mr Lewis emerged in Downing Street to be the first minister to process up to the famous front door, making clear that he and not Mr Grayling was getting the job.

This news was confirmed on the official No 10 Twitter account, however due to a typo they deleted the tweet before quickly re-instating it.

Typo: the offending tweet which was promptly corrected

It appeared that the partys political director Iain Carter had issued the tweet after seeing a BBC report naming Grayling, which was based in turn on speculation by other journalists on twitter.

Other sources confirmed that Mr Grayling was leaving the Transport Department.

Braintree MP James Cleverly was promoted from the backbenches to serve as Mr Lewiss deputy, with Kemi Bandenoch, the newly-elected black MP for Saffron Walden expected to be made a vice-chair - the pair symbolising Mrs Mays wish to bring on youth and energy talent and to make the party high command more reflective of Britains diverse communities.

In another apparent cock-up, speculation that former nurse Ann Milton will take over the sensitive Department of Health was fuelled when her Wikipedia entry was mysteriously changed by somebody within the Westminster area this morning regarding the position of her husband as a former executive at Virgin Care.

The new entry said Dr Graham Henderson previously served in the position, suggesting somebody was keen to avoid an impression of a conflict of interests if she was confirmed in the post. Minutes later, however, it changed back.

Jeremy Hunt, the current Health Secretary, had been tipped in many reports to replace Damian Green as First Secretary of State.

However, that was not being confirmed by official sources and other names were also being tipped as possibles. Mrs Mays allies said Mr Greens replacement would inherit his 20 Cabinet committee places, making this the most politically charged appointment.

Insiders confirmed that there is no change to the four most senior ministers involved in the Brexit process: Chancellor Philip Hammond, Brexit Secretary David Davis, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. Boris Johnson was also staying as Foreign Secretary.

The big focus of what Mrs Mays allies called a significant reshuffle were the changes further down.

Mrs Mays allies said she would be promoting women and MPs from ethnic minorities to ensure the Government looks more like the country we aspire to represent.

Among women ministers tipped for promotion were Margot James, the Business Minister, Harriet Baldwin, the junior minister for Defence, and backbenchers like Lucy Frazer, Victoria Prentis and Anne-Marie Trevellyan.

Amber Rudd is still Home Secretary - leaving Downing Street

From the growing clutch of black and minority ethnic MPs, former London Assembly member James Cleverly, was set for a first job in Government. Other backbenchers tipped included astonishingly talented former businessman Rishi Sunak, and Nus Ghani, the Wealden MP.

There is recognition of the need for renewal, said a May ally. Theres a recognition it need to happen alongside delivering on housing, health and social care.

Sources poured cold water on a report that Brexit Minister Steve Baker would be appointed the minister for a no-deal Brexit, briefing the Cabinet on a Plan B if talks broke down with the other 27 EU members.

A source insisted such an outcome to the talks would not happen, but left open whether Mr Baker would attend Cabinet in future.

Sir Patrick McLoughlins departure breaks the last senior ministerial link with the Thatcher government. The former miner served in Cabinets for Lady Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron but carried the can for the election failings and the fiasco of dropping letters at the autumn conference stage.

Reports that sacked ministers would be forced to walk up Downing Street to be given the bad news were denied by No 10, indicating that Mrs May was delivering her dismissal notices in private.

But all those getting promotions for being confirmed in the same job were due to process through the front door of No 10, making it harder for the watching media to guess who had got what.

Ms Greening looked certain to be moved from the Department for Education after suffocating Mrs Mays plan for new grammar schools.
T heresa May swung an axe at the Tory campaign machine today in a reboot reshuffle that is expected to see party chairman Sir Patrick McLoughlin and Education Secretary Justine Greening leave their posts.

The Prime Minister began her first reshuffle since last years general election disaster by appointing a whole new team at Conservative Campaign HQ.

Among those set to join it was Kemi Badenoch, the newly elected black MP for Saffron Walden who symbolised Mrs Mays wish to bring on young talent and to make the party high command more reflective of Britains diverse communities.

At least four new faces were expected to be installed in party HQ to get the Tories ready to take on Jeremy Corbyn at the next general election, due in 2022.

Follow the latest on the reshuffle LIVE here

Young talent: new MP Kemi Badenoch

The key Cabinet changes were coming later today. Speculation that former nurse Anne Milton will take over the sensitive Department of Health was fuelled when her Wikipedia entry was changed this morning regarding the position of her husband as a former executive at Virgin Care.

The new entry said Dr Graham Henderson previously served in the position, suggesting somebody was keen to avoid an impression of a conflict of interest if she were confirmed in the post. Minutes later, however, it changed back.

Jeremy Hunt, the current Health Secretary, was tipped by many colleagues to fill the position of First Secretary of State, which is vacant following Damian Greens resignation last month.

Mr Greens replacement is expected to inherit his 20 Cabinet committee places, making this the most politically charged appointment. Other names being touted for the post included David Lidington, the Justice Secretary.

Amber Rudd is still Home Secretary - leaving Downing Street

James Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary on health grounds moments before the reshuffle. He requires a lung operation.

Insiders confirmed that there was no change to the four most senior ministers involved in the Brexit process: Chancellor Philip Hammond, Brexit Secretary David Davis, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. Boris Johnson was also staying as Foreign Secretary.

The big focus of what Mrs Mays allies called a significant reshuffle were the changes further down, including the reboot of party headquarters.

Reports that sacked ministers would be forced to walk up Downing Street to be given the bad news were denied by No 10, indicating that Mrs May was delivering her dismissal notices in private. However, all those being confirmed in the same job were due to process through the front door of No 10, making it harder for the watching media to guess who had got what.

Ms Greening looked certain to be axed from the Department for Education, having suffocated Mrs Mays plan for new grammar schools. But sources said she could move sideways rather than be fired outright.

Mrs Mays allies said she would be promoting women and MPs from ethnic minorities to ensure the Government looks more like the country we aspire to represent.

Among female ministers tipped for promotion were Margot James, the business minister; Harriett Baldwin, junior minister for defence; and backbenchers such as Lucy Frazer, Victoria Prentis and Anne-Marie Trevelyan.

From the growing clutch of black and minority ethnic MPs, former London Assembly member James Cleverly, MP for Braintree, was set for a first job in Government. Other backbenchers tipped included ex-businessman Rishi Sunak, MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire, and the Wealden MP Nus Ghani.

There is recognition of the need for renewal, said a May ally. Theres a recognition it needs to happen alongside delivering on housing, health and social care.

Sources poured cold water on a report that Brexit minister Steve Baker would be appointed the minister for a no-deal Brexit, briefing the Cabinet on a Plan B if talks broke down with the other 27 EU members. A source insisted such an outcome to the talks would not happen, but left open whether Mr Baker would attend Cabinet.

Sir Patricks departure breaks the last senior ministerial link with the Thatcher government. The former miner served in Cabinets for Mrs Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron but carried the can for last years election failings.

At the weekend, Mrs May insisted that she still wanted to lead her party into the next election, declaring: Im not a quitter. Im in this for the long term.
O ne of Jeremy Corbyns closest allies faced a fierce backlash today after backing the RMT rail strike which saw passengers pass out on an overcrowded London-bound train.

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner voiced her solidarity for union members taking part in the walk-out, which caused misery for hundreds of thousands of commuters.

The crowding was so bad on one train that passengers had to pull the emergency handle twice after commuters fainted in the crush.

The South Western Railway (SWR) 7.12am service from Basingstoke to Waterloo was brought to a sudden halt, with the guard rushing to help a stricken passenger.

Angela Rayner, Shadow Education Secretary, has backed the strike / PA

Later in the journey the emergency handle was pulled again following reports that another passenger had fainted in the heat and crush. This time the train continued on its journey into London. One passenger said: It was ridiculously overcrowded. It was certainly among the worst overcrowding I have ever seen.

January Rail Strike - In pictures 1 /13 January Rail Strike - In pictures Commuters ride a crowded South Western Railway train on the Portsmouth to London Waterloo line as workers in five rail companies stage a fresh wave of strikes in the bitter disputes over the role of guards, causing disruption to services in the first full week back to work after the festive break PA Commuters wait for trains at Clapham Junction train station AP Commuters board a Greater Anglia train at Shenfield in Essex PA Commuters wait for trains at Clapham Junction train station AP Commuters stand on a train waiting for their departure from Clapham Junction train station AP Waterloo Station this morning during the RMT strike Jeremy Selwyn Trains arriving st Victoria Station today during RMT action Jeremy Selwyn Waterloo Station this morning during the RMT strike Jeremy Selwyn v Jeremy Selwyn Waterloo Station this morning during the RMT strike Jeremy Selwyn

The RMT is staging industrial action on five train companies over the role of guards on trains and driver-only-operation. Its members went on strike today and will also walk out on Wednesday and Friday on SWR, Greater Anglia, Arriva Rail North and Merseyrail. They are also taking industrial action on Southern today.

Commuters talk about what they think of the rail strikes

Disruption was also forecast on the non-strike days of tomorrow and Thursday due to train stock being out of place. It was the worst concentrated series of strikes since the signal workers dispute lasting for three months in 1994 regularly brought the national network to a halt. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the latest walk-outs were always a sign of failure on all sides but pointed the finger at the rail firms and ministers.

Early this morning, Labours Ms Rayner tweeted: Today I am sending my #Solidarity to all @RMTunion members who are reluctantly having to take strike action in their continued Health&Safety campaign to #KeepTheGuardOnTheTrain.

The rail strike: What you need to know

But former transport minister Stephen Hammond, Conservative MP for Wimbledon, dismissed the strike as totally unnecessary, saying: This strike has nothing to do with health and safety and everything to do with a union trying to cling onto its powerbase. Croydon South Conservative MP Chris Philp added: Angela Rayner is showing no understanding of the misery the RMT is needlessly inflicting on many Londoners.

Ed Davey MP, Liberal Democrat MP for Kingston & Surbiton, added: Its shocking that a Labour frontbencher should back yet more chaos on the railways.

Many passengers were appalled by the crowding today. Megan Gray, 55, who had two trains cancelled from her commute from New Malden, south-west London, said: It was awful. Everyone was pushing and shoving to get on. Project manager Shaun Evans, 34, who got into Waterloo from Portsmouth Harbour, said: It was a depressing journey. People were standing, it was cramped, smelly and horrible.

The RMT defended the industrial action. General Secretary Mick Cash said: We continue to fight to put public safety, security and access before the profits of the train operating companies.
B BC journalist Carrie Gracie today said there is a depth of hunger for equality after it emerged around 200 women are taking action against the corporation over the gender pay gap.

Gracie announced last night she was standing down from her role as China Editor in protest at the broadcasters secretive and illegal pay culture.

Clare Balding, Emily Maitlis and Sarah Montague were among a string of prominent BBC broadcasters to voice their support for Gracie, who said the corporation was facing a crisis of trust by not paying its male and female workers equally.

After tweeting wish me luck, Gracie was back on air this morning presenting BBC Radio 4s Today programme alongside John Humphrys, the BBCs highest-paid news presenter.

Carrie Gracie on the Today programme hours after quitting as BBC China editor

Humphrys explained broadcasting impartiality rules meant he could not interview Gracie, but she made a short statement after her open letter prompted an outpouring of reaction that saw #IStandWithCarrie become a top trending hashtag.

Carrie Gracie, who has been with the firm for 30 years, accused the BBC of 'breaking equality law' / BBC

She said: I think the scale of feeling, not just among BBC women but also just more widely across the country and also internationally, the support that Ive had in the last few hours over this, I think it does speak to the depth of hunger for an equal, fair and transparent pay system.

And the other thing Id like to say is that what is lovely for me is that people are mentioning my China work, because I would not wish to be remembered forever as the woman who complained about money.

Humphrys then joked: Too late, too late.

Figures released by the BBC last year showed only a third of its 96 top earners are women and the top seven were all men.

Gracie was backed by campaign group BBC Women, which includes more than 130 broadcasters and producers, who said they wholeheartedly supported her.

In a statement, the group said: Up to 200 women that we know of in various grades and roles across the BBC have made pay complaints.

Balding said the move was about respect as well as reward.

She said: We dont want future female broadcasters, journalists, reporters, commentators, editors & producers to have to fight for the right to be paid equally for doing the same job.

Male broadcasters from the BBC also backed her, with political correspondent Chris Mason praising her zinger of a letter.

The corporations Middle East correspondent Quentin Sommerville said: Its wrong and embarrassing that BBC female colleagues, both on screen and off screen, dont receive fair pay.

Senior journalists from rival broadcasters also backed Gracie, among them Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman, who said it was a tragedy for the BBC to lose such a talented China Editor.

Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said it was determined to hold the BBC to account.

She praised Gracie, an NUJ member, for making a difficult decision to speak out against the injustice wrought upon her by her own employer.

The journalist, who has been with the BBC for 30 years and described leading its China coverage since 2004 as the greatest privilege of my career, stated her concerns in a letter addressed to the BBC Audience.

She wrote: The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee-payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

A BBC spokesman said: Fairness in pay is vital. A significant number of organisations have now published their gender pay figures showing that we are performing considerably better than many and are well below the national average.

The spokesman also highlighted the broadcasters independent judge-led pay audit for rank and file staff which showed no systemic discrimination against women and said a separate report for on-air staff would be published in the not too distant future.
P ro-choice campaigners have condemned Theresa May for appointing an MP who opposed the decriminalisation of abortion to a top women's issues role.

Maria Caulfield was selected as the Conservative Party's vice chair for women during Monday's Cabinet reshuffle.

But the move sparked a backlash after it emerged Ms Caulfield led parliamentary opposition to proposals to decriminalise some later abortions, arguing that any attempts to change the law would bring "unjust and oppressive change" and put women and unborn children at risk.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) said it was "shocked" by Ms Caulfield's new role.

Shadow women and equalities minister Dawn Butler said it was an "appalling decision".

"Women deserve to have the strongest advocates at the top of politics, not people who seek to restrict their rights and freedoms," she said.

A BPAS spokeswoman said: "We are shocked that the Conservative Party has decided to appoint as their vice chair for women an MP who supports the criminalisation of women who end their own pregnancies.

"Just last year, Ms Caulfield led the parliamentary opposition to a bill which would have decriminalised abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy."

Ms Caulfield spoke against the Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill in March and, although MPs voted in favour of the legislation by 172 votes to 142 at its first Commons stage, it ran out of time to make further progress after the snap election was called.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at Downing Street ahead of the reshuffle on Monday. / EPA

Under current laws, it is illegal for a woman to have an abortion after 24 weeks for non-medical reasons and each procedure must be signed off by two doctors before it can go ahead.

BPAS said the legislation sought to protect women who "in the most desperate of circumstances" use medication purchased online to end a pregnancy.

"That the new Conservative vice chair for women believes that these women should face up to life imprisonment is appalling," the BPAS spokeswoman said.

"Maria Caulfield has stated that she wants to be a 'voice for the unborn child'.

"It is profoundly disappointing that the Conservative Party did not think that a better choice for vice chair for women would be someone willing and able to speak up for the one in three women who will have an abortion in their lifetime."

In the Commons debate on the Bill, she said: "Too often today, debates about abortion - about the risks involved and the rights of the unborn child - are shut down, but I, and many colleagues who share my views, will not be silenced as we seek to be a voice for the voiceless, and as we argue for more modern and humane abortion law that upholds not only the dignity and rights of women but the dignity and rights of the unborn child."

A spokesperson for the pro-life charity Life said:"We believe that Ms Caulfields background, coming from a council estate, makes her well qualified to understand and identify with the issues and challenges that many women face, especially those thousands of vulnerable women we support at Life. We are not surprised at the intimidatory response from the abortion industry.

"They will always object to anyone who doesnt support their agenda to maximise income by profiting from the plight of women. We are sure that Ms Caulfield will stay steadfast in her support for women needing help and we wish her well in her new role."

A former nurse who grew up on a council estate in south London, the Lewes MP said criminal convictions for women were extremely rare and those seeking abortions were not "living under the constant shadow of arrest".

Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, said she was "staggered" by the appointment.

"Women's equality goes hand in hand with reproductive rights," she said.

"Someone who believes those rights should be restricted can never advocate effectively for us."
H igh street giant H&M has apologised after an image of a black child modelling a hoodie with the slogan coolest monkey in the jungle appeared on its website.

Outraged social media users described the advert as offensive, irresponsible and racist after it was posted on the Swedish retail companys UK website.

It is not clear how long it was on the website for but an H&M spokeswoman confirmed it has now been removed.

Blogger Stephanie Yeboah wrote: Whose idea was it at @hm to have this little sweet black boy wear a jumper that says coolest monkey in the jungle? I mean. What.

Selene Arianela compared the image to one of a white child modelling a hoodie emblazoned with the words Jungle survival expert.

She wrote: This is inappropriate, offensive, and racist. Why is the white kid 'a jungle survivor' and the black kid the 'coolest monkey in the jungle'?

How do you think this is okay? REMOVE this and the clothing piece. This is completely distasteful!

New York Times columnist Charles M Blow asked: Have you lost your damned minds?!?!?!

Christina Watkins said: Uh oh, @hm. Can yall explain why a black boy was selected to model a hoodie that says, coolest monkey in the jungle? Someone didnt think this through.

Karamo Brown described the image as disgusting & irresponsible.

He said: You know the history of racist using the term monkey to demean people of African descent... and you put this on your website!

Others blamed lack of cultural awareness while other defended H&M, calling the advert "an innocent mistake".

Another Twitter user said: Every company should invest in training that encompasses cultural competency and sensitivity. It is absolutely necessary.

An H&M spokeswoman said: This image has now been removed from all H&M channels and we apologise to anyone this may have offended.
R oyal Navy Frigate HMS Westminster has been sent to intercept Russian naval ships sailing through the English Channel.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed the Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate set off to escort the Russian fleet after it came into the Royal Navy's "area of national interest".

It was scrambled on Friday to sail with and watch two warships and two supporting vessels as they passed close to UK territorial waters in stormy conditions.

The Royal Navy warship remained at sea over the weekend to meet up with the Russian vessels and it will remain with the two Steregushchiy-class frigates Soobrazitelny and Boiky and support vessels Paradoks and Kola as they head north.

The four Russian ships are believed to be returning to the Baltic after operations in the Middle East. The English Channel is one of the worlds busiest shipping lanes, with UK shipping contributing more than 10bn to Britains economy.

It comes days after Britain warned Russia against naval "aggression" when two of the country's military vessels came through or near UK waters in the space of 24 hours at Christmas.

The HMS St Albans was sent to escort Russian warship the Admiral Gorshkov through the North Sea on December 23 as it neared British territorial waters.

The Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, said at the time: "I will not hesitate in defending our waters or tolerate any form of aggression.

"Britain will never be intimidated when it comes to protecting our country, our people and our national interests."

Commander Simon Kelly, the Commanding Officer of HMS Westminster, said on Monday: HMS Westminsters role as the Royal Navys Fleet Ready Escort is to be at very high readiness to respond to anything the British government requires.

While today most people are returning to work for the first time in the New Year, HMS Westminsters ships company has been at sea and at readiness as part of the Royal Navys commitment to keep Britain safe at all times.

The English Channel is an absolute lifeline for the UK, and it is very important HMS Westminster and the Royal Navy maintains a watchful eye on this key strategic link.

According to the Royal Navy, the festive season saw an upsurge in Russian units transiting UK waters.

The HMS Tyne was also called to escort a different vessel, a Russian intelligence-gathering ship, through the North Sea and the English Channel on Christmas Eve.
N ightclub owner Peter Stringfellow has sparked a lively Twitter debate by claiming the Brexit referendum was "a sham" and backing former PM Tony Blair.

The Sheffield-born entrepreneur, famous for his lapdancing clubs, surprised followers by branding Brexit a "massive mistake" as he condemned "untruths on both sides" and called for another vote.

His remarks were met with incredulity by some. One woman replied saying, "Peter, I always thought you were a hardcore Tory," to which he responded: "I'm a hardcore Englishman who doesn't believe in Brexit." He finished the tweet with the crumple-faced "weary" emoji.

The revelations began with a tweet by Mr Stringfellow reading: "This is not going to go down well BUT I now genuinely believe that Tony Blair is the man of the moment and before it's too late we should have another referendum !

"I believe it will be true democracy at work and no I haven't forgotten Iraq ! But Brexit is a massive mistake !"

His comment came after Tony Blair last week said billions being spent taking Britain out of the EU could be spent on the NHS instead.

The former PM said: "The NHS is frankly in a terrible situation, the Government...is going to be spending...3 billion over the next two years directly on Brexit costs, you have got additional reductions in revenue as a result of the reductions in growth, and we hiring what is an extra 8,000 civil servants when we have got staff shortages in the NHS."

One woman replied to Mr Stringfellow to argue that June 2016's vote, which was technically an advisory referendum and not legally binding, should nonetheless be the end of the matter.

She wrote: "So we keep having referendums until you get the result you want? That's democracy for you. The people have spoken, Peter, deal with it."

Other pro-Brexit voices chipped in, with another woman saying: "Exactly!! The only disgrace is the divorce bill!! Yet again we have been robbed!"

Mr Stringfellow replied: "No I'm sorry but everybody knows the referendum was a sham becourse [sic] of so many untruths on both sides but this time we can have a truthful referendum ..if this time Brexit wins again then so be it !!"

He added: "Politically we are in a right mess on all parties ..Where is our " cometh the hour cometh the man" ??.Now we know the cost of leaving the EU and we know it's our children who are going to have to pay the price for what ?..a blue passport ?.."

Some mocked the businessman, 77, with one man calling him "gullible" and another saying our children would "thank us" for Brexit.

But Mr Stringfellow responded: "You could be right but I don't think so !..I don't remember anything being so wonderful before we joined the EU !!"
T he Duke and Duchess of Cambridge today shared two photographs of Princess Charlotte at Kensington Palace this morning.

They were taken by Kate shortly before Princess Charlotte left for her first day of nursery at the Willcocks Nursery School.

Charlotte is snapped sitting down on some outside steps in the grounds of the famous palace and another standing as she holds onto a rail.

She is wearing a red coat, 120, by Amaia Kids teamed with a pink scarf and carried a Cath Kidston ballerina rucksack.

The photos were taken by the Duchess of Cambridge. (PA) / HRH The Duchess of Cambridge

Charlotte will be a full-time pupil at the nursery, which charges fees of just over 3,000 a term for pupils attending its Monday to Friday morning school, and employs lots of play as children learn.

Before starting officially, she would have been invited with her parents for a short 'stay and play'.

Princess Charlotte, four, smiles for the camera on the steps outside Kensington Palace. / PA

Kate and William would then have been asked to leave to see if Charlotte was happy to be left alone.

The school suggests to parents that pupils bring a toy or photo from home, and take a picture of their teacher back to their house.

It says: "As your child builds a rapport with the teachers, we will ask you to stay in the vicinity for the first few sessions so that you can return if needed."

Prince George Arrives For His First Day At School

Fees are 9,150 a year for morning sessions and 5,400 for afternoons.
A map showing Londoners whether they live in hotspots for Australian flu has revealed possible cases across swathes of the country.

Online tool Flusurvey, which updates every three minutes, monitors flu trends by asking members of the public to register and report their symptoms.

The map shows the spread of all types of "influenza like illness" reported around the UK, including the potentially fatal Australian strain, using a gradient system of no reports to "very high" numbers.

Red zones reveal where cases have clustered whereas cool blue zones show areas that are not affected.

And the number of reported cases has spiked in the space of 24 hours as the NHS braces itself for winter outbreaks.

Sunday: Red 'hotspots' have cropped up all over the country / Flusurvey.org

There are now less than five areas of the UK with zero reported cases of influenza.

Londoners in the City of London and Ilford are among those parts to have escaped the virus.

While Romford and Kingston Upon Thames, previously untouched, are marked red.

Leeds, Southampton, Plymouth and Bath are all among huge regions of the UK to have reported cases.

Previously, the London borough of Sutton was the only red part of the capital.

Saturday: The map was mostly showing blue, meaning no reported cases / Flusurvey.org

Australian flu - also known as H3N2 - killed hundreds of people in Australia earlier this year, during their winter.

A number deaths in Ireland have already been attributed to the strain, and Public Health England has said there were a growing number of reported cases in the past two weeks.

Cases have been reported all over the country in the last 48 hours / Flusurvey.org

Adding to the winter pressures facing Britain's hospitals, including outbreaks of norovirus, it arrived as as NHS England urged hospitals to defer pre-planned operations and routine outpatient appointments until the end of the month.

Dr Richard Pebody, acting head of respiratory diseases at Public Health England, said: "In Australia they saw excess mortality and other hospitalisations and so on due to H3N2."

He said the flu vaccine is currently the best preventative. While the effectiveness data for this year's flu is not yet available, Dr Pebody said hopes are that the vaccine will provide "reasonable protection" against Australian flu.

There are currently more than 7,500 respondents from all over the UK contributing, and the LSHTM is encouraging more people to get involved as it makes the data more useful.

While it takes 10 to 14 days for the vaccine to take effect, the NHS's free flu vaccine programme can be accessed by anyone who is pregnant or over the age of 65.
A ustralian actor Craig McLachlan has stepped down from The Rocky Horror Show stage musical amid allegations of sexual misconduct made by three women.

The accusations against the former Neighbours star, 52, concern his time as the lead role of Dr Frank N Furter during a 2014 run in Australia. A new season of the show has been running in Adelaide.

McLachlan has dismissed the claims as entirely false. Frankly, they seem to be simple inventions, perhaps made for financial reasons, perhaps to gain notoriety, he said.

Christie Whelan Browne, Erika Heynatz and Angela Scundi said they had come forward because they wanted to protect other cast members.

Neighbours heyday: Kylie Minogue as Charlene Mitchell, Craig Mclachlan as Henry, Anne Charleston as Madge Bishop, and Ian Smith as Harold Bishop / REX

Whelan Browne, a leading Australian musical performer, said McLachlan pulled aside her underwear during a performance and kissed her buttock.

She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: I think people who know him know that hes generous, warm, funny  I saw a different side come out in him which was terrifying.

Heynatz, who played Magenta and claims she was forcibly kissed by the actor, said: Hes really calculated and very manipulative, a predator.

Scundi, who was a member of the chorus, said she was the subject of unwanted sexual advances.

The women say their concerns were ignored by executives.

Australian police said they were investigating allegations of sexual offences dating back to 2014.

The Gordon Frost Organisation, the shows producer, said in a statement that it was shocked to learn of the claims. We have spoken to Craig and have mutually agreed it is not appropriate for him to continue in the current production.

"We will be conducting a full internal investigation and will co-operate fully with authorities. We were not aware of any details of these allegations until they were published in the media today.

It said it had no record of any complaints.
T wo people have been injured, one seriously, after a fire broke out at Trump Tower in New York.

The New York Fire Department attended the scene after a blaze was reported on the top floor of the building at 7am local time (noon GMT).

Although local media initially reported there were no injuries, one person sustained a serious, possibly life-threatening injury, and another had a minor injury, fire crews said.

Pictures posted to social media showed smoke billowing from the top of the skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan against pink skies in the early morning.

Fire engines parked outside the Fifth Avenue entrance as crews battled the blaze.

Firefighting crews gathered outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue / AP

Aerial views broadcast by local media showed firefighters on the roof working to bring the fire under control.

Eric Trump, second son of the US president and executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, wrote on Twitter that the fire had been electrical.

He wrote: "There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower.

"The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job. The men and women of the #FDNY are true heroes and deserve our most sincere thanks and praise!"

AP

About 84 firefighters were at the scene initially. A few remained on the roof about an hour later as smoke dwindled and the fire was brought under control.

According to CBS News, the president was not inside the tower but in the capital.

It tweeted: "The president is currently in Washington, D.C."

Stretching to 58 storeys, the 664-foot-high mixed-use skyscraper is a looming presence over Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets.

It houses luxury apartments and a number of businesses.

The news comes days after the publication of Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, about Donald Trump's tenure at the White House.
N orth Korea could be mining for cryptocurrency to bring extra cash into the country, a cybersecurity company has said.

AlienVault claimed that it found software that appeared to install code for mining cryptocurrency and send mined coins to a server at a North Korean university.

According to the company, the malware was deployed on Christmas Eve, and uses host computers to mine for Monero, a bitcoin alternative. Any Monero that is found is then sent to Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang.

AlienVault said: Crypto-currencies may provide a financial lifeline to a country hit hard by sanctions, and as a result universities in Pyongyang have shown a clear interest in cryptocurrencies.

The company did warn that it cannot say for sure that the cryptocurrency is being mined by a North Korean as the University is host to many students of varying nationalities.

It also said that the North Korean server found in the software does not appear to be connected with the wider Internet and that it could have been included in order to trick observers into connecting the software to North Korea.

Monero describes itself on its website as a secure, private and untraceable form of cryptocurrency where transactions are untraceable and a good option for people who want to avoid prying eyes.

The malware was spotted by Chris Doman, an AlienVault threat engineer. He told The Wall Street Journal that it was unclear how the virus was planted or how much Monero had been extracted.

The malware was spotted from a data base of computer viruses amassed by VirusTotal, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.s Google.

As only large organisations automatically upload large files to VirusTotal, it is likely that the malware was spotted at a large company.

Mr Doman said that he was unable to determine how many computers were affected or if the attack was on going.

The Standard has reached out to the Kim Il Sung University and Monero for further comment.
A n Iranian oil tanker is in danger of exploding and sinking after colliding with a grain ship and catching fire off Chinas east coast, it was reported today.

The news from Chinese state media came as an Iranian official said the body of one of 32 missing crew members had been found aboard the blazing tanker.

Rescue crews are trying to bring the fire under control and find the crew of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis.

Mohammad Rastad, head of Irans Ports and Maritime Organisation, was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency that the body was sent to Shanghai for identification.

Rescue crews are trying to bring the fire under control and find missing crew members / EPA

The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi was sailing from Iran to South Korea when it collided late on Saturday with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal in the East China Sea, 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai, Chinas Ministry of Transport said.

China, South Korea and the US have sent ships and planes to search for Sanchis crew.

All 21 crew members of the Crystal, which was carrying grain from the United States to China, were rescued, the Chinese ministry said. The Crystals crew members were all Chinese nationals.

A rescue ship sprays water to put out the blaze on the Sanchi tanker / AP

It was not immediately clear what caused the collision.

State-run China Central Television reported the tanker was still floating and burning, and that oil was visible in the water. It also said the search and cleanup efforts have been hampered by fierce fires and poisonous gases that have completely consumed the tanker and surrounding waters,

Photos distributed by the South Korean government showed the tanker on fire and shrouded in thick black smoke.

Chinese authorities dispatched three ships to clean the oil spill. It was unclear however whether the tanker was still spilling oil and the size of the oil slick caused by the accident also was not known.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 metric tons of condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, according to Chinese authorities.

By comparison, the Exxon Valdez was carrying 1.26 million barrels of crude oil when it spilled 260,000 barrels into Prince William Sound off Alaska in 1989.
T he long-term partner of Oprah Winfrey has said she would absolutely run for US president if she was backed by the American public.

Praise poured in for the veteran TV host following her speech at the Golden Globes, as she became the first black woman to win the prestigious Cecil B DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.

Her rousing speech became the talking point of Sunday nights star-studded ceremony, with the audience giving her a standing ovation and bowled-over viewers calling her words phenomenal.

Bookmakers slashed the odds of Winfrey, 63, becoming Donald Trumps successor as the next president of the US in 2020, plummeting from 89/1 to 16/1.

Oprah at the glitzy awards ceremony on Sunday night. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) / Reuters

Stedman Graham, who has been with Winfrey for more than 30 years, told the Los Angeles Times: Its up to the people. She would absolutely do it.

The chat show hosts best friend, Gayle King, echoed Mr Graham, adding: I thought that speech was incredible. I got goosebumps.

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Meryl Streep was among the celebrities to give her backing to Winfrey, telling the Washington Post: She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president. I dont think she had any intention. But now she doesnt have a choice.

Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures 1 /32 Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures Laura Dern, from left, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose in the press room with the award for best television limited series or motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Gary Oldman accepting the award for best actor in a motion picture drama for his role in "The Darkest Hour," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP The cast and crew of "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" AP prah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award AP Sterling K. Brown poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a television series - drama for "This Is Us" AP Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose backstage after winning the award for Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for "Big Little Lies." Reuters lisabeth Moss accepting the award for best actress in a drama series for her role in "The Handmaid's Tale," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP James Franco, left, winner of the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - musical or comedy for "The Disaster Artist," and Dave Franco pose in the press room with poses in the press room at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sam Rockwell embraces his wife Leslie Bibb as he poses with the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for his role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". Reuters Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Nicole Kidman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actress in a limited series or a motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Laura Dern accepting the award for best supporting actress in a series, limited series or motion picture made for TV for her role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Allison Janney accepting the award for best supporting actress in a motion picture for her role in "I, Tonya," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Ewan McGregor accepting the award for best actor in a limited series or motion picture made for TV for his role in "Fargo," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Aziz Ansari accepting the award for best actor in a comedy series for his role in "Master of None," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Frances McDormand accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Saoirse Ronan accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for her role in "Lady Bird," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Guillermo del Toro poses in the press room with the award for best director - motion picture for "The Shape of Water" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Reese Witherspoon, foreground, with the cast and crew of "Big Little Lies," as she accepts the award for best limited series or motion picture made for TV at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Gary Oldman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - drama for "Darkest Hour" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sterling K. Brown accepting the award for best actor in a TV drama series for his role in "This Is Us," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Amy Sherman-Palladino, foreground, accepting the award for best TV series, musical or comedy for "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP AP

Scores of people flooded Twitter with hopes of Winfrey entering politics, with comedian Sarah Silverman tweeting Oprah/Michelle 2020 while retired sportsman Taylor Twellman said: Did I just watch @Oprahs first campaign speech?!

Michelle Obama tells Oprah: We need a grown-up in the White House

In her acceptance speech, Winfrey told the audience of celebrities: When that new day finally dawns it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they become the leaders to take us to the time where nobody has to say 'me too' again."

Oprah Winfrey - In pictures 1 /50 Oprah Winfrey - In pictures Oprah Winfrey as Sofia in 'The Color Purple' (1986) Oprah Winfrey speaks after accepting the Cecil B. Demille Award at the 75th Golden Globe Awards Reuters Oprah Winfrey Network, shows Oprah Winfreys exclusive interview with Lance Armstrong in 2013 AFP/Getty Images US President Barack Obama (back) awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Oprah Winfrey (front), in the East Room of the White House in 2013 EPA Oprah Winfrey as Sofia in 'The Color Purple' (1986) Oprah Winfrey pictured at The Savoy, London in 1989 Associated Newspapers Oprah Winfrey collecting her Daytime Emmy award for her TV show in 1992 Oprah Winfrey receiving a BAFTA award in London in 1996 PA Television talk show host Oprah Winfrey delivers the keynote address at Wesleyan University in 1998 AP Danny Glover as Paul D and Oprah Winfrey as Sethe in 'Beloved' (1999) Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush kisses talk show host Oprah Winfrey in 2000 AP U.S. Vice President Al Gore appears in 2000 with Oprah Winfrey on her television show while campaigning in Chicago, Illinois Reuters Oprah Winfrey poses with former South African President Nelson Mandela during the Agenda for Earth Turning Ceremony for The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa in Henley on Klip south of Johannesburg in 2002 Reuters Television talk show host Oprah Winfrey displays her award at the 54th annual Emmy Awards in 2002 Reuters Former President Clinton reads an excerpt from his book "My Life" to talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in 2004 AP Oprah Winfrey embraces Christine King Farris in 2006, sister of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as they attend a musical tribute for Coretta Scott King at the new Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia AFP/Getty Images U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama is joined by entertainer and talk show host Oprah Winfrey at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa on 8 December 2007 Reuters U.S. talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, center, with learners, during an opening ceremony of her Leadership Academy for Girls School at Henley-on-Klip, South Africa in 2007 AP Oprah Winfrey takes a HIV test before families and learners at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy family day Celebration in South Africa in 2007 Reuters Barack Obama waves to the crowd while talk show host Oprah Winfrey and wife Michelle Obama look on at a campaign event in 2007 Getty Images Oprah Winfrey attends the opening night after party celebrating Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's 50th anniversary at the New York City Center in 2008 Getty Images Former Olympic medalist Marion Jones with talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in 2008 AP Oprah Winfrey is honored with Minerva Award at Maria Shriver Women's Conference at the Long Beach Convention Center in 2010 Getty Images Piers Morgan interviewing Oprah Winfrey in 2011 AP Oprah Winfrey is kissed by singer Usher next to actor Will Smith, former NBA basketball player Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, talkshow host Rosie O'Donnell, and Simon Cowell during the taping of "Oprah's Surprise Spectacular" in 2011. Reuters Oprah Winfrey and Paul McCartney listen to U.S. President Barack Obama as he gives a speech during the 2010 Kennedy Center Honorees to a reception in the East Room of the White House Getty Images Oprah Winfrey talks with Bobbi Kristina Brown, daughter of the late singer Whitney Houston during an interview in 2012. Ms Brown, the only daughter of Whitney Houston and R&B singer Bobby Brown died in July 2015 Reuters Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines and Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines in 'The Butler' (2013) Media mogul Oprah Winfrey acknowledges the cheers from students and audience after she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree during Harvard University's 362nd Commencement Exercises in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2013 Reuters Oprah Winfrey at The EE British Academy Film Awards 2014 at The Royal Opera House, London Dave Benett "Selma" producer Oprah Winfrey arrives at the 87th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California in 2015 Reuters First Lady Michelle Obama speaks to talk show host Oprah Winfrey during her final interview at the White House Oprah Winfrey as Deborah Lacks with Rose Byrne as Rebecca Skloot in 'The immortal life of Henrietta Lack' (2017) Oprah Winfrey presents the award for outstanding drama series for "The Handmaid's Tale" to Elisabeth Moss at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017 AP Oprah Winfrey attends the premiere of HBO Films' "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" at the SVA Theatre in 2017 AP Oprah Winfrey poses backstage with her Cecil B. DeMille Award at The Golden Globe Awards in 2018 Reuters Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham pose for a photo on the red carpet at the grand opening of Tyler Perry Studios Invision/AP Oprah Winfrey speaks during the WW (Weight Watchers Reimagined) & Oprah's 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus Tour at BB&T Center on January 4, 2020 in Sunrise, Florida Getty Images

I have been inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and powerful enough to stand up and tell their stories.

Oprah meeting Beyonce in September last year. / Larry Busacca/Getty

"This year, we became the story. Women who endured years of abuse because, like my mother, they had bills to pay and children to feed."

Media giant Winfrey, from Mississippi, began her broadcasting career in Nashville, becoming the youngest black woman to anchor the news at WTVF-TV aged just 19.

Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures 1 /101 Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd Getty Images Naomi Campbell Getty Images Mary J. Blige Getty Images Eva Longoria Getty Images Nicole Kidman Getty Images Halle Berry Getty Images Reese Witherspoon Getty Images Gal Gadot Getty Images Emilia Clarke Getty Images Saoirse Ronan Getty Images Zac Efron Getty Images Natalie Portman Getty Images Mariah Carey Getty Images Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Ansel Elgort Getty Images Margot Robbie Getty Images Angelina Jolie attends Getty Images Lily James Getty Images Tarana Burke and Michelle Williams Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Kate Hudson Getty Images Maggie Gyllenhaal Getty Images Viola Davis Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Diane Kruger Getty Images Michelle Pfeiffer Getty Images Octavia Spencer Getty Images Jessica Chastain Getty Images Isabelle Huppert Getty Images Kit Harington AFP/Getty Images Zoe Kravitz Getty Images Michelle Williams AFP/Getty Images Kendall Jenner Getty Images Chris Hemsworth Getty Images James Franco Getty Images Abbie Cornish Getty Images Alicia Vikander Getty Images Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel Getty Images Jessica Biel Getty Images Susan Sarandon Getty Images Sarah Paulson Getty Images Jude Law Getty Images Christina Hendricks Getty Images Nick Jonas Getty Images Heidi Klum Getty Images Barbara Meier AFP/Getty Images Dakota Johnson Getty Images Meryl Streep and Ai-jen Poo Getty Images Allison Brie Getty Images Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman Getty Images Mandy Moore Getty Images Alessandra Mastronardi Getty Images Katherine Langford AFP/Getty Images The cast of Stranger Things Getty Images Milo Ventimiglia Getty Images Claire Foy and Matt Smith Getty Images Claire Foy Getty Images Matt Smith Getty Images Tracee Ellis Ross Getty Images Catherine Zeta-Jones Getty Images Kelly Clarkson Getty Images Sebastian Stan Getty Images Alexis Bledel Getty Images Jamie Chung Getty Images Caleb McLaughlin AFP/Getty Images Sadie Sink Getty Images Dove Cameron Getty Images Gaten Matarazzo Getty Images Noah Schnapp Getty Images Finn Wolfhard Getty Images Caitriona Balfe Getty Images Debra Messing Getty Images Rachel Brosnahan Getty Images Allison Williams Getty Images

She moved to Chicago to host a morning talk show, which became the top local TV chat programme in just a month. Within a year, the show was lengthened to an hour and renamed the iconic Oprah Winfrey Show.

It went national in 1986 and has since become the highest-rated talk programme in American television history, reaching more than 40 million viewers a week in the US and licensed to 150 countries around the world.

She established her own studios in 1988 and in 2011 debuted her own network, which is available in 85 million homes.

Winfrey has also launched a magazine with company Hearst, her own website and studio, Harpo Films, has produced award-winning films including Beloved, based on Toni Morrisons novel.

She has also starred in films herself and voiced roles in animated movies including Charlottes Web and Bee Movie.

Through her charity, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the celebrity has campaigned for better education and empowerment of women, children and families in the US and across the globe.
CALEDONIA, Minn.  Houston County authorities on Sunday arrested two people after authorities located a missing Florida teen safely in Caledonia.

The 17-year-old girl was reported missing Friday from Hawthorne, Fla. Authorities believed she was in the company of Charles McMullen and his mother, Judy McMullen, who have ties to Caledonia.

Charles McMullen, 28, and Judy McMullen, 52, are jailed in Houston County as fugitives from another state on charges of motor vehicle theft, driving without a license and damage to property.
I f beauty is your vice, then youre probably almost always up to date with the latest and greatest makeup products. But are you aware of which beautifying formulas aren't tested on animals?

Thanks to various cruelty-free brands on the market, having a flawless face doesnt have to mean worrying about our furry friends.

From Pacifica to Urban Decay, here are our favourite makeup buys that are vegan-friendly.

Pacifica Alight Multi Mineral BB Cream

Pacifica has been making waves on the natural beauty scene with its full range of cruelty-free cosmetics, skincare products and perfumes. The light coverage of this BB cream makes it our go-to nailing a no-makeup makeup look and leaves a sheer finish. As its special mineral pigments immediately adjust to your skin tone, the shade-matching Natural can be used for a variety of light and warm skin colours  and worked pretty well with our medium skin-toned wearer. Like you would expect from a natural skincare brand, the formula is packed with sweet ingredients such as coconut water that leave your complexion glowing.

13.59, Naturisimo, Buy it now

Arbonne The Real Conceal Liquid Concealer

For great coverage without cakiness, Arbonnes The Real Conceal Liquid is unbeatable. As well as being comfortable on skin, the formula is long wearing and contains hydrating ingredients to boost your complexion. A flexible paddle applicator makes for a breezy application and picks up just the right amount of product. We found this concealer particularly good for hiding dark circles and other tell-tale signs of too-late nights. Our Asian-skinned wearers ideal shade was Medium Warm.

26, Arbonne, Buy it now

Urban Decay Cream Vice Lipstick

Your search for a comfortable, super-pigmented and long-lasting lippy is over. The Vice Lipstick from Urban Decay comes in a vast lineup of over 100 shades in 6 finishes, including the indulgent Cream Vice. We cant get over the intense colour: just one swipe will completely brighten up your pout. The formula is loaded with nourishing ingredients like jojoba oil and vitamin E. Our favourite shade is Bang  a versatile warm orange.

15.50, Urban Decay, Buy it now

Know Cosmetics No Bleeding Lips

This vegan lip liner is a big hit on Sephora, and with good reason too. The clear formula creates an invisible line around your smackers to prevent any coloured lipstick or gloss from bleeding or feathering. It glides on with ease for an effortless application and works a treat when creating a bold pout. With long-lasting wear, its a no-brainer why this baby sells every 2 minutes.

12.50, Lloyds Pharmacy, Buy it now

Illamasqua Beyond Powder

The lack of sun doesnt mean you have to lose your glow. This beautiful baked highlighter is perfect for illuminating the high points of the face and can also be used on the body. With an incredibly lightweight texture, its iridescent finish is subtle but can be intensified with extra product. Best applied with a medium-sized highlighter brush.

34, Illamasqua, Buy it now



Eco Tools Bamboo 6 Piece Brush Set

Whether its for grooming buxom brows or getting that eyeliner #OnFleek, every girl needs a good set of makeup brushes. The synthetic taklon bristles on these tools are completely cruelty-free, making them perfect for vegan beauty aficionados. Each set includes five quality brushes and a natural cotton and hemp case.

10.66, Boots, Buy it now

Too Faced Milk Chocolate Soleil Bronzer

Too Faced has come up with the dreamiest product for anyone whos a makeup and chocolate lover. Created with antioxidant-rich cocoa powder, the matte Chocolate Soleil bronzer is our go-to for contouring and smells good enough to eat. Sweep across the jawline and temples to add depth to your complexion or all over for a deep tan.

25, Debenhams, Buy it now

Neals Yard Remedies Lengthening Mascara Black

This curl-enhancing mascara has been proven to lengthen lashes by up to 85 per cent. It features a gently tapering flexible brush that catches even the tiniest lashes, creating a dramatic wide-eyed look. Thanks to its nourishing formula containing organic argan oil and white tea, it wont leave your lashes feeling stiff or flaky either.

16, Neal's Yard Remedies, Buy it now

Eyeko Skinny Liquid Eyeliner

Create all kinds of feline flicks with this eyeliner pen from Eyeko, which is vegan-friendly as well as cruelty-free. Whether youre in the mood for thick cat-eye flicks or a thin winged look, its pointed shape makes it a breeze to apply and it doesnt smudge or fade.

16, Beauty Bay, Buy it now

Anastasia Beverly Hills Tinted Brow Gel

Ever wondered what the secret behind Cara Delevingne's bold brows is? This cult beauty product is not only favoured among countless A-listers, but also comes at a pocket-friendly price. Its lightweight yet powerful formula can be used to amp up the sparse areas of your brows. Apply in small upward strokes.

23, Cult Beauty, Buy it now

NYX Soft Matte Lip Cream in London

Liquid lipsticks have fast become a must-have in every girls makeup bag, and this affordable range from NYX is a favourite among beauty-buffs. The creamy, moisture-rich formula glides on like a dream, offers a matte finish and has impressive staying power. London is a subtle mocha shade thats perfect for anyone new to the brown lip trend.

6, Boots, Buy it now

Nars Blush in Orgasm

A superstar in the beauty world, this peachy-pink blush is popular for transforming dull complexions in just a few sweeps. Its flecked with gold glitter and is flattering on just about every skin tone. If its good enough for Kim Kardashian-West...
A ziz Ansari has made history by becoming the first Asian male to be named Best Actor in a Comedy Series at the Golden Globes.

The comedian said he genuinely surprised to beat the likes of Kevin Bacon, Anthony Anderson and William H. Macy with his performance in hit Netflix show, Master of None.

Despite his landmark win, Ansari couldnt help dropping a few swear words, meaning that some of his speech was censored for broadcast on NBC.

I genuinely didn't think I was going to win because all of the websites said I was going to lose, he said on stage.

"I'm glad we won this one because it would've really sucked to lose two of these in a row; it would've been a really s***** moment for me, but this is nice.

Ansari thanked the cast and crew on the show and gave a special shout-out to the country where they shot the second season.

Golden Globes 2018 highlights

The only reason my acting is good in that show is because everyone else holds me up, he said. I want to thank Italy for all of the amazing food we ate in season two.

Speaking about the possibility of a third season earlier this year, Ansari said: Let me relax for a second. Let me just live my life. Forget season 3 of Master of None, Im also doing season 34 of Aziz Ansari.

Big winners at this years Golden Globes included Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which won Best Picture, and Big Little Lies, which was named Best Television Series.


T hree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the surprise winner at this years Golden Globes, beating Dunkirk and Call Me By Your Name to the Best Picture award.

Frances McDormand was named Best Actress, Drama for her role in the film, while Brit Gary Oldman was recognised for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Joe Wrights Darkest Hour, in a year marked by the #MeToo protest.

Irish actress Saoirse Ronan was given the award for Best Actress, musical or comedy while James Francos won the male equivalent for The Disaster Artist.

Supporting acting prizes went to Allison Janney for I, Tonya and Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards.

Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures 1 /32 Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures Laura Dern, from left, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose in the press room with the award for best television limited series or motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Gary Oldman accepting the award for best actor in a motion picture drama for his role in "The Darkest Hour," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP The cast and crew of "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" AP prah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award AP Sterling K. Brown poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a television series - drama for "This Is Us" AP Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose backstage after winning the award for Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for "Big Little Lies." Reuters lisabeth Moss accepting the award for best actress in a drama series for her role in "The Handmaid's Tale," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP James Franco, left, winner of the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - musical or comedy for "The Disaster Artist," and Dave Franco pose in the press room with poses in the press room at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sam Rockwell embraces his wife Leslie Bibb as he poses with the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for his role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". Reuters Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Nicole Kidman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actress in a limited series or a motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Laura Dern accepting the award for best supporting actress in a series, limited series or motion picture made for TV for her role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Allison Janney accepting the award for best supporting actress in a motion picture for her role in "I, Tonya," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Ewan McGregor accepting the award for best actor in a limited series or motion picture made for TV for his role in "Fargo," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Aziz Ansari accepting the award for best actor in a comedy series for his role in "Master of None," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Frances McDormand accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Saoirse Ronan accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for her role in "Lady Bird," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Guillermo del Toro poses in the press room with the award for best director - motion picture for "The Shape of Water" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Reese Witherspoon, foreground, with the cast and crew of "Big Little Lies," as she accepts the award for best limited series or motion picture made for TV at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Gary Oldman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - drama for "Darkest Hour" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sterling K. Brown accepting the award for best actor in a TV drama series for his role in "This Is Us," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Amy Sherman-Palladino, foreground, accepting the award for best TV series, musical or comedy for "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP AP

Lady Bird won the prize for Best Picture, Musical of Comedy, while Guillermo del Toro, was named Best Director for The Shape of Water.

Big Little Lies was the biggest winner over in the TV category, winning Best Limited Series as well as acting prizes for Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern.

Winner: Frances McDormand with her gong / AP

The Handmaids Tale was named Best Television Series, while Ewan McGregor won Best Actor for Fargo.

Seth Myers kicked off this years ceremony with a no-holds-barred speech referencing the Hollywood sexual assault scandal and Harvey Weinstein.

Prize: Saoirse Ronan wins for Lady Bird / AP

For the male nominees in the room tonight, this is the first time in three months it won't be terrifying to hear your name read out loud, he joked.

Golden Globe Awards 2018 - In pictures 1 /46 Golden Globe Awards 2018 - In pictures Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose in the press room with the award for best television limited series or motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hote AP Kendall Jenner arrives for the 75th Golden Globe Awards AFP/Getty Images Heidi Klum kisses Emily Ratajkowski at a 2018 Golden Globe Awards After Party @heidiklum Tom Hanks goes to the bar to get his own drinks at t the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards Twitter/Dan Fogelman Oprah Winfrey speaks after accepting the Cecil B. Demille Award at the 75th Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills Reuters Seth Meyers hosts the 75th Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills Paul Drinkwater/Courtesy of NBC via Reuters Willem Dafoe reacts to host Seth Meyers at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards NBC Presenter Natalie Portman and Ron Howard at the 75th Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills Paul Drinkwater/Courtesy of NBC via Reuters Ewan McGregor accepting the award for best actor in a limited series or motion picture made for TV for his role in "Fargo," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills Paul Drinkwater/NBC via AP James Franco accepting the award for best actor in a motion picture comedy or musical for his role in "The Disaster Artist," as Tommy Wiseau, left, and brother Dave Franco look on at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP The cast and crew of "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" AP Angelina Jolie attends The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards Getty Images Ewan McGregor wears a "Time's Up" pin on his all-black tuxedo Reuters Laura Dern accepting the award for best supporting actress in a series, limited series or motion picture made for TV for her role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Naomi Campbell arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Award AP Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain Reuters Sterling K. Brown accepting the award for best actor in a TV drama series for his role in "This Is Us," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Gal Gadot arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards AP Helen Mirren and Viola Davis AP Millie Bobby Brown AP Margot Robbie arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards AP Aziz Ansari accepting the award for best actor in a comedy series for his role in "Master of None," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Heidi Klum arrives at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards AP Emma Stone and Shirley MacLaine AP Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington AP Frances McDormand wins Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" at the 75th Golden Globe Awards Reuters Presenters Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon Reuters Claire Foy and Matt Smith arrive AP Kirk Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones AP Roseanne Barr and John Goodman, presenters at the 75th Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills Reuters Presenters Emma Watson and Robert Pattinson Reuters Sharon Stone and son Roan Joseph Bronstein EPA Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel AP Penelope Cruz AP Halle Berry AP

He added: Harvey Weinstein isn't here tonight because I've heard rumors that he's crazy and difficult to work with.

Solidarity: The Big Little Lies cast all wear black / AP

But don't worry, he'll be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person ever booed during the In Memoriam.

Speaking about the '#MeToo' protest on the red carpet, nominee Meryl Streep said: "People are aware now of a power imbalance and it's something that leads to abuse.

"It led to abuse in our own industry and led to abuse in domestic work... in the military, in Congress... and we want to fix that. We feel emboldened to stand together in a thick black line."
H ollywood's stars, including Claire Foy, Reese Witherspoon, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Amy Poehler united in wearing black to the Golden Globes in support of the victims of sexual harassment and assault.

The Crown star Foy, who is nominated for her role playing the Queen in the Netflix series, arrived dressed in a black double-breasted trouser suit.

She teamed the look with slicked-back hair and red lipstick, with a badge reading '50:50 Actresses Equal Representation' pinned to her cuff, as she walked down the red carpet with co-star Matt Smith.

Zeta-Jones arrived in a plunging lace black gown with a see-through skirt, teamed with green jewellery.

Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures 1 /101 Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd Getty Images Naomi Campbell Getty Images Mary J. Blige Getty Images Eva Longoria Getty Images Nicole Kidman Getty Images Halle Berry Getty Images Reese Witherspoon Getty Images Gal Gadot Getty Images Emilia Clarke Getty Images Saoirse Ronan Getty Images Zac Efron Getty Images Natalie Portman Getty Images Mariah Carey Getty Images Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Ansel Elgort Getty Images Margot Robbie Getty Images Angelina Jolie attends Getty Images Lily James Getty Images Tarana Burke and Michelle Williams Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Kate Hudson Getty Images Maggie Gyllenhaal Getty Images Viola Davis Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Diane Kruger Getty Images Michelle Pfeiffer Getty Images Octavia Spencer Getty Images Jessica Chastain Getty Images Isabelle Huppert Getty Images Kit Harington AFP/Getty Images Zoe Kravitz Getty Images Michelle Williams AFP/Getty Images Kendall Jenner Getty Images Chris Hemsworth Getty Images James Franco Getty Images Abbie Cornish Getty Images Alicia Vikander Getty Images Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel Getty Images Jessica Biel Getty Images Susan Sarandon Getty Images Sarah Paulson Getty Images Jude Law Getty Images Christina Hendricks Getty Images Nick Jonas Getty Images Heidi Klum Getty Images Barbara Meier AFP/Getty Images Dakota Johnson Getty Images Meryl Streep and Ai-jen Poo Getty Images Allison Brie Getty Images Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman Getty Images Mandy Moore Getty Images Alessandra Mastronardi Getty Images Katherine Langford AFP/Getty Images The cast of Stranger Things Getty Images Milo Ventimiglia Getty Images Claire Foy and Matt Smith Getty Images Claire Foy Getty Images Matt Smith Getty Images Tracee Ellis Ross Getty Images Catherine Zeta-Jones Getty Images Kelly Clarkson Getty Images Sebastian Stan Getty Images Alexis Bledel Getty Images Jamie Chung Getty Images Caleb McLaughlin AFP/Getty Images Sadie Sink Getty Images Dove Cameron Getty Images Gaten Matarazzo Getty Images Noah Schnapp Getty Images Finn Wolfhard Getty Images Caitriona Balfe Getty Images Debra Messing Getty Images Rachel Brosnahan Getty Images Allison Williams Getty Images

Meryl Streep arrived with activist Ai-jen Poo in an off-the-shoulder black gown, while Poehler arrived in a long black dress with a cape detail accompanied by Saru Jayaraman, the president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United & ROC Action and director of the Food Labour Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures 1 /32 Golden Globes 2018 Winners - In pictures Laura Dern, from left, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose in the press room with the award for best television limited series or motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Gary Oldman accepting the award for best actor in a motion picture drama for his role in "The Darkest Hour," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP The cast and crew of "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" AP prah Winfrey accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award AP Sterling K. Brown poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a television series - drama for "This Is Us" AP Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley pose backstage after winning the award for Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for "Big Little Lies." Reuters lisabeth Moss accepting the award for best actress in a drama series for her role in "The Handmaid's Tale," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP James Franco, left, winner of the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - musical or comedy for "The Disaster Artist," and Dave Franco pose in the press room with poses in the press room at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sam Rockwell embraces his wife Leslie Bibb as he poses with the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for his role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". Reuters Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Nicole Kidman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actress in a limited series or a motion picture made for television for "Big Little Lies" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Laura Dern accepting the award for best supporting actress in a series, limited series or motion picture made for TV for her role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Allison Janney accepting the award for best supporting actress in a motion picture for her role in "I, Tonya," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Ewan McGregor accepting the award for best actor in a limited series or motion picture made for TV for his role in "Fargo," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Aziz Ansari accepting the award for best actor in a comedy series for his role in "Master of None," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Frances McDormand accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hill AP Saoirse Ronan accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture comedy or musical for her role in "Lady Bird," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Guillermo del Toro poses in the press room with the award for best director - motion picture for "The Shape of Water" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Reese Witherspoon, foreground, with the cast and crew of "Big Little Lies," as she accepts the award for best limited series or motion picture made for TV at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards AP Gary Oldman poses in the press room with the award for best performance by an actor in a motion picture - drama for "Darkest Hour" at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel AP Sterling K. Brown accepting the award for best actor in a TV drama series for his role in "This Is Us," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Alexander Skarsgard accepting the award for best performance by a supporting actor in a series, limited series of film made for TV for his role in "Big Little Lies," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP Amy Sherman-Palladino, foreground, accepting the award for best TV series, musical or comedy for "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," at the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills AP AP

Big Little Lies star Laura Dern arrived on the red carpet with farm workers activist Monica Ramirez, both in black dresses.

She shared a picture of the pair on Instagram, captioned: "On our way! Holding our mothers and grandmothers and all brave women who taught us about Voice."

Michelle Williams, who is nominated for All The Money In The World, arrived in a black off-the-shoulder dress with a white floral panel across the chest, accompanied by Me Too campaign founder Tarana Burke, who chose an asymmetric sequinned gown.

Jessica Biel, who was nominated for her show The Sinner, arrived in a strapless dress with a black velvet panel, accompanied by her husband Justin Timberlake, who wore a black tuxedo and shirt with a Time's Up pin on the lapel.

Back to black: Nicole Kidman on the red carpet / Getty Images

Other actresses chose to add a pop of colour to their black gowns, with Get Out star Allison Williams opting for a black sequinned gown with a silver and orange bodice.

This Is Us actress Mandy Moore chose a black halterneck full-skirted dress with pockets, with a red ribbon around her waist.

In support: Gal Gadot in all black at the Golden Globes / Getty Images

Will & Grace star Debra Messing opted for a black dress with waterfall skirt over trousers on the red carpet, where she criticised the E! network for failing to pay women the same as men in a live interview on the channel.

Arriving at the Golden Globes, Messing referenced the departure of Catt Sadler, who resigned in December after learning her male co-star earned almost double her salary.

Messing told host Giuliana Rancic: "I was so shocked to hear that E! doesn't believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I miss Catt Sadler. We stand with her."

The ceremony was hosted by Seth Meyers at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
M ariah Carey may be pops biggest diva  but she found herself apologising after accidentally stealing Meryl Streeps seat at the Golden Globes.

The multi-award winning singer grabbed the nearest free chair at the Beverly Hilton Hotel after getting distracted on the way back to her table during a commercial break.

But it belonged to Streep who came back to reclaim her seat next to director Steven Spielberg.

Carey apologised to Streep on Twitter where she begged for her forgiveness.

Explaining the awkward situation she tweeted: Got caught mingling on the way to the loo during a commercial break.. took the first seat available, happens to be right next to Steven Spielberg. Cut to next commercial break, guess who comes back to her seat...

(me) Dear Meryl, please forgive me!!! (MERYL STREEP) You can take my seat any time!

Golden Globes 2018 highlights

Careys fans couldnt cope with two legends being in such close proximity, with one tweeting: 2 legendary iconic queens of their profession, 2 of the most successful females in showbiz and Im here for it!

Oops: Meryl Streep and NDWA Director Ai-jen Poo / Getty Images

Another posted: Meryl was probably thrilled to find Mariah in her seat!

A third told Carey she can do what she wants, posting: Youre Mariah f****** Carey you can do whatever the f*** you want.

Carey was at the awards ceremony to present the gong for Best Original Score with Common to The Greatest Showman for This Is Me.

The US singing sensation joined hundreds of stars by opting to wear a black gown in support of the Times Up movement against sexual harassment in the wake of the Hollywood scandal.
T om Hanks proved hes still one of the nicest men in showbiz after he turned bartender at the Golden Globes.

Hanks, who was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor for his role in The Post at this years ceremony, was pictured taking orders from his star studded table before waiting patiently at the bar during a commercial break.

The Hollywood star collected a tray of martinis which he served up to guests including Oscar winning director Steven Spielberg.

Hanks turn as a waiter was captured by This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, who took to Twitter to praise the actor.

He tweeted: Best thing I've seen here. Tom Hanks delivering a tray of martinis to his table. The best. #goldenglobes.

Debra Birnbaum, the executive editor of TV for Variety, also shared a picture of the actor propped up at the bar while waiting to be served.

The pictures soon went viral with hundreds of fans hailing him a class act while others urged him to run for office.

One fan tweeted: That takes some very stable hands genius at carrying that tray.

Golden Globes 2018 highlights

Another wrote: Reason number 357 to love Tom Hanks. He not only gets his own drinks, but brings martinis for the whole table. #Globes.

What a guy: Tom Hanks with his wife Ruth Wilson (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) / Getty Images

A third posted: Tom Hanks just became the most interesting man In the world.

Seth Meyers encouraged Hanks to run for Vice President under Oprah Winfrey as President in his opening speech.

Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures 1 /101 Golden Globe Awards 2018 Arrivals - In pictures Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd Getty Images Naomi Campbell Getty Images Mary J. Blige Getty Images Eva Longoria Getty Images Nicole Kidman Getty Images Halle Berry Getty Images Reese Witherspoon Getty Images Gal Gadot Getty Images Emilia Clarke Getty Images Saoirse Ronan Getty Images Zac Efron Getty Images Natalie Portman Getty Images Mariah Carey Getty Images Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Emma Stone and Billie Jean King Getty Images Ansel Elgort Getty Images Margot Robbie Getty Images Angelina Jolie attends Getty Images Lily James Getty Images Tarana Burke and Michelle Williams Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Kate Hudson Getty Images Maggie Gyllenhaal Getty Images Viola Davis Getty Images Millie Bobby Brown Getty Images Diane Kruger Getty Images Michelle Pfeiffer Getty Images Octavia Spencer Getty Images Jessica Chastain Getty Images Isabelle Huppert Getty Images Kit Harington AFP/Getty Images Zoe Kravitz Getty Images Michelle Williams AFP/Getty Images Kendall Jenner Getty Images Chris Hemsworth Getty Images James Franco Getty Images Abbie Cornish Getty Images Alicia Vikander Getty Images Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel Getty Images Jessica Biel Getty Images Susan Sarandon Getty Images Sarah Paulson Getty Images Jude Law Getty Images Christina Hendricks Getty Images Nick Jonas Getty Images Heidi Klum Getty Images Barbara Meier AFP/Getty Images Dakota Johnson Getty Images Meryl Streep and Ai-jen Poo Getty Images Allison Brie Getty Images Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman Getty Images Mandy Moore Getty Images Alessandra Mastronardi Getty Images Katherine Langford AFP/Getty Images The cast of Stranger Things Getty Images Milo Ventimiglia Getty Images Claire Foy and Matt Smith Getty Images Claire Foy Getty Images Matt Smith Getty Images Tracee Ellis Ross Getty Images Catherine Zeta-Jones Getty Images Kelly Clarkson Getty Images Sebastian Stan Getty Images Alexis Bledel Getty Images Jamie Chung Getty Images Caleb McLaughlin AFP/Getty Images Sadie Sink Getty Images Dove Cameron Getty Images Gaten Matarazzo Getty Images Noah Schnapp Getty Images Finn Wolfhard Getty Images Caitriona Balfe Getty Images Debra Messing Getty Images Rachel Brosnahan Getty Images Allison Williams Getty Images

Meyers joked that he once made discouraging comments about Donald Trump who later went on to become President, so attempted the same theory with Winfrey and Hanks.

Oprah while I have you, in 2011 I told some jokes about our current president at the White House Correspondents Dinner  jokes about how he was unqualified to be president, and some say that night convinced him to run, he said.

And if thats true I want to say, Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes to be president.

Turning his attention to Hanks, he continued: You will never be Vice President! You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.
N ew ITV drama Next of Kin follows doctor Mona Harcourt (Panjabi) who lives in London with political lobbyist husband Guy (Davenport). When a bomb goes off in London on the same day that her brother, Kareem, is abducted and murdered in Pakistan, Monas charmed life is shaken to its core.

In a thrilling tale of events, Mona comes face to face with the reality that that her brothers son Danish, known as Danny, has vanished from university and is being linked to both the bombing and the murder of his father.

With the family facing accusations and becoming embroiled in a tangled web of betrayal and conspiracy, Mona finds herself confronted with the ultimate dilemma - how far would you go to keep your family safe?

Here's everything you need to know about the new series.

1. It stars Emmy award winner Archie Panjabi (The Good Life, The Fall) as whip-smart doctor Mona Harcourt

Panjabi plays the highly ambitious and fiercely loyal Mona, a doctor who was born in Pakistan but moved to London with her family when she was young. The second of four siblings, she shares a special bond with her family, is the one to rally them when Kareem dies.

Though shes not Dannys mother, Mona feels incredibly maternal towards him and is faced with an unimaginable dilemma of how far she will go to protect and defend him.

2. Pirates of the Caribbean and Smash actor Jack Davenport plays Mona's husband Guy

Guy is a lobbyist working in Westminster, he comes from a middle class family, with a mother who encouraged him to appreciate the finer things in life, but he isnt overly interested in that lifestyle. He is very laid back and avoids confrontation at all costs, but is very good at his job and highly successful. Guys professional life is, however, constantly on rocky waters, fighting for work, contacts and influence.

3. Theres plenty of nail-biting moments that will have you on the edge of your seat

With a normal family being forced to make far from ordinary decisions, Next of Kin's complex family drama and themes of terrorism and conspiracy will have you gripped from the word go.

Panjabi has said the new series will see viewers asking themselves difficult questions.

One of the great themes of the story is family, love and loyalty. It asks the question, How far would you go to protect the ones you love? People watching will ask themselves, What would I do in that situation? What decisions would you make? she commented.

Family first: Harcourt is forced to choose between her family and justice / ITV

The dilemma Mona is faced with involves heartbreakingly difficult decisions along the way. Each of those choices and decisions she makes has an impact on a member of her family, including her relationship with her husband Guy.

4. The show is a collaboration between creator of Indian Summers, Paul Rutman and his author wife Natasha Narayan

Next of Kin is a family affair for its creator, the BAFTA-nominated Paul Rutman (Indian Summers, Vera), as it's his first collaboration with his wife, author Natasha Narayan.

The pair said the thriller has 'universal overtones' about the treatment of Muslims in modern society.

Across the West and beyond, large minority Muslim populations find themselves caught in this crossfire. They may deny that there is a problem, they may proclaim not in my name. Still theyre in danger  and not just to the resurgent far right  of being viewed as a threat.

"This seems to us a story with universal overtones. Like the Japanese in America when Pearl Harbour was bombed, Muslims can come to be seen as the enemy within.

Next of Kin is set within this territory, but it is firmly a show with family at its heart. It tracks the living, breathing experience of people who find themselves caught up in a maelstrom. As the story progress, it opens up to wider territory, but always retains the perspective of an ordinary family trying to do the right thing by themselves, each other, and their country.

5. The series will unfold in six parts

Next of Kin begins on ITV on Monday, January 8 at 9pm, with the next five episodes airing every Monday at the same time and on the same channel.
P iers Morgan revealed he has been forced to keep a bucket next to his desk on Good Morning Britain over fears he might be sick.

The host, who has returned to work after a bout of gastroenteritis, revealed during Mondays episode that he had taken precautions in case he became unwell on air.

Its good to be back Arsenal went out of the cup, England were out of the Ashes and Ive had gastroenteritis for three days.

Producing the bucket he said: We have this just in case and believe me, it might be needed

Sick of it: Piers Morgan revealed he had a difficult weekend after suffering a bout of gastroenteritis / ITV

"Its just a miserable day all round. If you stand for manning up, you have to man up.

New TV shows to look forward to in 2018 1 /22 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

The show was Morgans first on Good Morning Britain in 2018. Last year, Morgan helped the ITV chat show become the most complained-about programme on TV.

It topped the annual Ofcom list after a debate with Dr Michael Davidson on homosexuality sparked 1,142 complaints to the broadcasting watchdog.

Morgan took to Twitter to celebrate the news, posting: BOOM! No1.

Good Morning Britain continues weekdays at 6am on ITV.
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The Royal Family will attend on Saturday, January 13 2018, the 40-day memorial service since the passing of King Mihai I of Romania, the romaniaregala.ro website informs.



The service will be officiated by Archbishop Calinic of Arges and Muscel and it will be held at the Old Archbishopric and Royal Cathedral of the Curtea de Arges Monastery.



Afterwards, a prayer will be given at the tomb of King Mihai I, on the verandah of the New Archbishopric and Royal Cathedral, the quoted source mentions.



The Archbishop will be accompanied by a group of hierarchs from the Curtea de Arges Monastery and the diocese, headed by the monastery's abbot Father Caliopie.



The memorial service will also be attended by nuns from the Pasarea and Tiganesti Monasteries.



According to the quoted source, all those who want to take part in the event are welcomed, but the prayer given at the tomb will be attended only by the Royal Family.



King Mihai I died on 5 December 2017, at the age of 96, at his residence in Switzerland and he was buried on 16 December 2017 in the New Archbishopric and Royal Cathedral of Curtea de Arges.
Romania is "an example in the region in terms of the fight against corruption" and one of the goals of the partnership between Romania and the United States is to ensure that it will not allow public institutions "to withdraw from this progress," said Abigail Rupp, deputy head of the US mission in Bucharest, at the Bucharest Law School, at the roundtable meeting "President Wilson's Fourteen Points Speech and the Rise of Nation States in Central and Eastern Europe".

She evoked the 20 years of strategic partnership between Romania and the US and said that in 1997, when this process started, "it had mainly a security dimension". Romania is the leader of our alliance in Afghanistan, one of the first countries to provide support to the US after the events of September 11 and joined the Afghanistan coalition. At one point, Romania had 2,000 troops there. Today, Romania has more than 600 troops in Afghanistan, making it the fourth most important contributor to NATO, the US official said in the context. She recalled that in Afghanistan more than 100 Romanian servicemen were injured and 26 died.

Rupp spoke about how the Romania-US partnership developed. We can see this partnership beyond the security dimension. We can look at the Romania-US relationship and the transition of Romania towards a free market in these over 20 years and its integration into the world economy, said the deputy head of the US mission. She reminded that the US is the sixth most important foreign investor in Romania.

In the context, Rupp spoke about Romania as a regional example in the anti-corruption fight. Certainly, over the past year, we have seen a growing refusal on the part of Romanian citizens against corruption and increasingly higher demands regarding the integrity of public authorities, the US official said. In his turn, presidential adviser Bogdan Aurescu said that 2017 was "a very good year" for the Romania-US strategic partnership, describing the Washington meeting between Klaus Iohannis and Donald Trump as "substantial and very warm".

Aurescu recalled the 1997 letter signed by Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, sent to the Foreign Ministry. The top US official then said that "the Romania-US partnership should be based on two factors: a common commitment to democratic values and institutions and the recognition of Romania's pivotal position in South-East Europe." "I dare say that nothing has changed since then," Bogdan Aurescu said.

The roundtable meeting "President Wilson's Fourteen Points Speech and the Rise of Nation-States in Central and Eastern Europe" was the first debate dedicated to the Centenary of the Great Union of 1918 organized by the University of Bucharest. The event was hosted by the rector of the University of Bucharest, Mircea Dumitru, and brought together Romanian and foreign experts.

Agerpres.
The July 2017 peace plan the UN worked out is still limping along. The UN backed GNA (Government of National Accord in Tripoli) has continued to weaken while the HoR (House of Representatives government in Tobruk) now controls or contests most of the country. The July 2017 agreement provided six months to achieve a nationwide ceasefire, a date for national elections and UN recognition of the LNA (Libyan National Army). That was later extended to a year and now there is general agreement that elections will be held in 2018. In early December the HNEC (High National Elections Commission in Libya) began registering voters and by early 2018 had determined that there were about 1.8 million potential voters and had already registered 400,000 and was registering more at the rate of about 30,000 a day. Currently the only two people likely to win a fair national election for president is Seif al-Islam Kaddafi (a son of the former dictator) and Khalifa Hiftar. The first post Kaddafi elections in 2012 had nearly three million people voting. But since then many Libyans have fled the country or have given up on elections and just want peace. They might even elected Seif Kaddafi, who never held a government job and was considered the good son. Nevertheless he is still wanted by the ICC for war crimes (during 2011) and was convicted by a GNA court but later freed and granted full amnesty by HoR (at the behest of Hiftar).

The UN is still working on how to get the GNA and HoR to agree on key issues. The next effort will be a conference in February that will try and determine how to run national elections and obtain agreement on a new constitution.

The UN admits that they ignored the complexity of local politics in Libya and the ability of many local groups to block a nation-wide deal. It turned out that the HoR and their military leader Khalifa Hiftar had a lot more nationwide support than the UN or GNA realized or wanted to admit. HoR also had the LNA which has been demonized by many Europeans for a number of reasons most Libyans and Arab nations disagree with. The LNA was created by Hiftar and is the only organized and disciplined military force in the country. The LNA was initially founded to shut down Islamic terrorist groups and Libyan militias that supported them in eastern Libya. In contrast the GNA tried to build a national government with the support of militias, many of them supporting a new government using Islamic (Sharia) law and most Libyans had had enough of that because it was a tactic the former dictator Kaddafi has used to rule the country for decades until the 2011 revolution killed him and destroyed his hated government.

The UN and EU (European Union) were also appalled by Hiftars harsh tactics against the people smuggling gangs that were responsible for most illegal of the illegal migrants arriving in Europe. Some EU countries (like Italy and France) backed Hiftar early on but more importantly so did most Libyans. Hiftar has said that because of national support the LNA could easily take Tripoli, the traditional capital if the UN negotiations failed. But Hiftar also pointed out that Tripoli was not a priority, dealing with smuggling gangs, Islamic terrorists and corruption in general was.

The ISIL Issue

ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has been nearly wiped out in Syria and Iraq, never really got started in Israeli controlled areas (including the West Bank) but there are still several hundred active ISIL members in Egypt and even more in Libya. Israel and Egypt, plus a few other Arab states (like the UAE) are quietly cooperating to shut down ISIL in Libya.

The basic situation is that ISIL needs a base are and at the moment Libya is one of the most likely areas to operate in. This is essential for ISIL because a Libya base provides access to the rest of Africa as well as the Middle East via Egypt. There are still obstacles and restrictions. Getting across the Egyptian border is difficult as long as Libyan general Hiftar and his LNA operate throughout eastern Libya. The LNA has more problems with the Egyptian border since the collapse of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. Many of the surviving ISIL men are seeking to reach Libya via Egypt. Some of these ISIL personnel decide to join ISIL factions already established in Sinai (near the Israeli border) or western Egypt (near the Libyan border). This is the main reason why Hiftar still has a lot of support from Egypt and other Arab nations. Hiftar is genuinely hostile to Islamic terrorism but to the West he is seen as a potential new Libyan dictator. That is also an issue with many to Libyans, but not as important as personal safety and enough national unity to get the economy going again.

What it comes down to is Egypt officially supports the UN proposal for Libyan unity (which is hostile to Hiftar) while quietly continuing to support Hiftar. Egypt is a silent partner in the Al Khadim airbase the UAE is expanding in eastern Libya. Hiftar has long operated this airbase and now facilities are being added that can accommodate larger warplanes, like the F-16s that the UAE and Egypt both operate. Egypt is openly working with the Libyan National Oil Company to protect Libyan oil facilities and get the oil exported. Technically the UN opposes this but the reality is that Libya needs the money and the help in dealing with the ISIL forces still present. So everyone says one thing and does another as is the custom in this part of the world.

Then there is Libyas western neighbor Algeria which continues to side with Qatar in its feud with the other Gulf Arab oil states (and their allies, like Egypt and Israel). That means Algeria backs the UN faction in Libya while the UAE and most other Arab states back the HoR/Hiftar group. Actually Algeria was reluctant to back the UN approved government for Libya and that proved to be warranted when the Hiftar group abandoned the UN proposal and demanded that the UN come up with a more practical solution. This is a big deal for Algeria because of the long border they share with Libya. It is also a big deal for the UN, which considers Algeria the most successful North African nation when it comes to dealing with Islamic terrorism. Other nations in the region agree and Algeria regularly trains troops from other nations in counter-terrorism methods that worked in Algeria. Libya is another matter and after Hiftar rejected the UN peace plan Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia responded that they still backed the UN effort. That support is not permanent and Egypt has long supported Hiftar and still does. But the UN support includes the support of many Western donor nations who, for the moment, are not inclined to finance Hiftar (Russia, on the other hand, is). So the situation in Libya remains violent and flexible.

Repatriation

The number of illegal migrants reaching Europe (mainly in Italy, from Libya) dropped a third in 2017, to 119,000 (compared to 181,000 in 2016). The EU (European Union) sponsored illegal migrant repatriation program has moved (usually by air) some 18,000 of these illegals from Libya in 2017 and expects to move even more in 2018 because the UN approved new repatriation rules at the end of 2017.

This program was set up in 2015 and the EU has provided nearly $4 billion to make it work. The main problem is the corruption in the source countries. That corruption is usually what drove many of the locals to leave in the first place and that same corruption cripples the repatriation program mainly because the illegals are enticed to go home by financial inducements (up to $6,000 each for retraining) The problem is you cannot give the illegals the cash because many, once they get home, will seek out a people-smuggling gang and try again. Using the repatriation incentive fees to establish training programs in the home country often means most of the money is stolen by local officials. Libya gets around this by arresting illegals and detaining them under unpleasant conditions. This upsets the EU but the Libyans are unwilling to try the EU approach because it doesnt work in Africa.

Arrangements have to be made for the source country to verify that illegals are from where they claim to be from. Some countries, especially those with an Islamic terrorism problem, will not accept anyone suspected of being an actual or potential Islamic terrorist.

In the first week of 2018 the Nigerian government flew a batch of 481 Nigerian illegal migrants from Libya back to Nigeria. These Nigerians had used people smugglers in a failed effort reach Europe illegally. Another 5,000 are to follow quickly over the next month. The Libyans and the EU (European Union) finally managed to disrupt many of the smuggling operations and persuaded (threatened, bribed, embarrassed and so on) the countries the illegals came from to take them back. This process has intensified during 2017 and has reached the point where so many illegals are being returned that fewer people are willing to risk the cash, and their lives, to make the trip. But the illegals are still coming, even though Libya is even more dangerous for illegal migrants.

Finances

Libya tripled its oil income (to $14 billion) in 2017 and progress is being made towards a balanced budget and a higher standard of living for Libyans. Despite the civil war/disunity that has simmered since 2012 the UN and EU managed to get nearly everyone to leave the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and Libyan Central Bank (LCB) alone to deal with essential matters like importing food and other necessities that Libya does not produce itself. The NOC has managed to increase production for 2017 to record (since 2011) levels. Since June 2017 about a million BPD (barrels per day, including natural gas equivalents) are being produced. That was up from 250,000 BPD in mid-2016, 800,000 BPD in April 2017 and 880,000 BPD in May 2017. Now production growth is stalled because of the lack of foreign firms willing to work in Libya to repair and expand Libyan oil facilities. The chaos created by all the militias and lack of a reliable central government means foreign firms rate Libya as one of the least reliable places to operate and opt for working in other areas, even though the profits are lower. Risk is a big deal in the oil industry because huge amounts (often billions of dollars) are often required to get new (or refurbished) oil facilities producing.

There are still occasional disruptions because of all the independent minded factions. Despite that the NOC still hopes to reach 1.25-1.5 million BPD by the end of 2018 and 2.1 million BPD by the early 2020s. This is far in excess of pre-2011 levels (1.6 million BPD) but is necessary because of the need to finance reconstruction and adapt to the fact that the world price for oil keeps falling, despite OPEC (the Arab dominated oil cartel) efforts to reduce overall production and drive up the price. The problem is that the United States and Canada are producing a lot more due to new technologies (like fracking) that open up huge new sources that were long known but not reachable.

Since 2011 Libyan oil exports have shrunk and the Libyan Central Bank cash reserves are dangerously low. These reserves stood at $124 billion in 2012 and now only $67 billion remain. If peace and unity are not achieved soon no government would be able to buy and import food and other essentials. Even by Middle Eastern standards Libya was setting new records in self-destructive behavior. By 2017 more Libyans were agreeing that the situation was indeed becoming desperate and a lot more compromise was the only solution. Even with the current national compromise the tribal (Arab, Berber and black African) and religious differences (Islamic radicals versus everyone else) plus epic levels of corruption and entitlement keep peace and prosperity out of reach. At this point most Libyans will settle for survival especially since living standards continue to decline each year.

January 6, 2018: In the east (near the Tunisian border) two pro-GNA militias fought local smuggling gangs although some of the local militias accused the pro-GNA militias of seeking to make some money while engaging in government business. The main border crossing (Ras Ajdir) with Tunisia has long been a source of illegal income and a cause for lots of armed clashes. The Tunisian government has had to close the border crossing at times just to keep the peace. Fighting over the last few days has left over a dozen people dead or wounded.

January 1, 2018: During 2017 the LNA lost 27 soldiers to landmines and other explosive devices left by Islamic terrorists in Benghazi. The soldiers were killed while searching for and removing these devices and 170 civilians died as well, mainly refugees returning to neighborhoods Islamic terrorists had been driven from. The last Islamic terror group left Benghazi (and moved to Derna) in December but Islamic terrorists keep trying to get into the city and make attacks. Various surveys indicate that nationwide fewer than 500 civilians died during 2017 from the fighting between militias, Islamic terror groups, criminal gangs and the LNA. The armed men in these groups suffered higher casualties, most of them among the Islamic terror groups, which were considered legitimate targets by everyone.

December 26, 2017: Someone (ISIL was suspected) bombed an oil pipeline (capable of moving 90,000 barrels a day) south of the oil export port of Es Sider. The damage was repaired in a few days and the pipeline resumed operation. The key oil export ports in this areas are Ras Lanuf (620 kilometers east of Tripoli) and Es Sider/Sidra (20-30 kilometers further east). In normal times Es Sider and Ras Lanuf can ship 600,000 barrels a day.

December 13, 2017: Egypt and a Libyan electricity provider (General Electricity Company of Libya) agreed to build an electricity sharing system between the two nations. At first this will only benefit eastern Libya (controlled by the LNA) but would eventually extend further west.

December 9, 2017: In Egypt officials representing Libyan military leader Khalifa Hiftar met with senior Egyptian officials. It was not a secret meeting but was not heavily publicized. The meeting was one of many recently and was used to work out details of current cooperation between the LNA Hiftar rebuilt and led and Egyptian forces.

November 28, 2017: In Tripoli a Sunni Moslem group set fire to a Sufi mosque. This is the second such fire in the last two months. As long as no one is killed the local government (the GNA) is not willing to risk a gun battle to protect a Sufi mosque. Islamic terrorists tend to regard Sufis as heretics even though they are not. Rather Sufis are more intent on prayer and not radicalism.

November 27, 2017: In the southwest the Algerian government sent another aid convoy to border towns where refugees from into Libya were living. Similar aid was sent to other border towns further north. There is not much government on the Libyan side of the border but Algeria supports Tuareg tribes that have clans on both sides of the border and still allows these Tuareg to freely move back and forth.
One of our favorite smart locks is getting even smarter. Schlage announced today that Google Assistant control is coming to its Schlage Sense Smart Deadbolt.

Using Google Assistant on Google Home or iOS or Android smartphones, youll be able to lock the deadbolt by saying, OK Google, lock my door. If your OCD kicks in and you cant remember if you locked up, you can ask OK Google, is my door locked? The Google Assistant capabilities will require the Schlage Sense Wi-Fi Adapter ($70) to get remote access to the lock.

Schlage Forget to lock your door? Google Assistant integration will allow you to do it remotely.

This Schlage Sense is already an outstanding smart lock, with sturdy commercial-grade construction and an impressive set of features designed to let you hang up your house key permanently. You can assign up to 30 unique access codes to family and other trusted individuals. Each code can be restricted by schedule, so you can limit a persons access to specific times of day. Full logging allows you review which codes have been used and when via the Schlage Sense app.

Google Assistant integration comes on top of the deadbolts existing compatibility with Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit, making it easy to integrate into your choice of smart home system. Schlage says Google Assistant capabilities will roll out early this year.
As powerful men drop like flies due to their inability to resist abusing their authority, its clear that the problem is widespread. Similarly, its likely that well find the problem of alleged industrial espionage is not limited to Uber. You see, when people misuse authority  and the sexual harassment problem is a massive misuse of authority  folks typically dont just misuse it in one area.

For some time, Ive suspected that the harassment issues were just one aspect of a bigger problem. The allegations that Uber aggressively moved to steal intellectual property from Google and colluded to cover up evidence of the theft may be indicative of another area in which executives have been abusing their authority.

Rather than wait for the next scandal to surface, I thought it would be interesting (since Im an ex-internal auditor who has been through a cycle like this before) to look at the other areas where we likely will find that executives and others who wield authority have been doing scandalous things. Ill close with my product of the week: one of the few security offerings that could prevent against a significant amount of this immoral behavior, Varonis.

Connecting the Dots

It appears that one reason sexual harassment claims have gotten out of control is that human resource departments have been acting more to cover up problems like this than to correct them. This is largely because HR has the responsibility to make problems like this go away, but it currently lacks the authority either to fire or correct a misbehaving executives behavior. Even if it were possible, its likely that the career of the poor HR person who took such an action also would be over.

HR is hardly alone in terms of losing authority to do its job. Whenever you have a mismatch of authority and responsibility, you have a crucible for wrongdoing. Currently, a lot of staff organizations  like security, HR and internal audit  are so far below what should be minimal staffing standards that I expect there are a lot of companies that are just as unaware theyre bleeding as Google was.

Industrial Espionage

The last time I saw the rise of industrial espionage was in the early 1980s, when many Japanese technology firms made illegal moves to try to compete better with IBM. They were caught, and the monetary cost in terms of damages and penalties was massive  enough so that it mostly wiped out the practice outside of government-sponsored efforts from countries like China, North Korea and Russia.

Over time, the security organizations that once were staffed and missioned to catch and stop this kind of activity were defunded. They went from being staffed by ex-spooks (basically specialists in catching or being spies) to being run by hourly workers who, in far too many cases, couldnt even be hired as a beat cop.

There is a lot of money in selling intellectual property. There is a huge advantage if you can get hold of it, in terms of meeting your objectives, advancing, and getting a huge bonus. The incentives are massive. There are state-level players active again with far greater resources and cyberhacking capabilities, along with a ton of employees who havent seen a raise since Carter was president.

Expense Abuse

Weve seen a hint of this in the new Trump administration. Some members of his cabinet massively abused expense policies and either used government jets inappropriately or booked seats on private jets at huge premiums.

These were treated as isolated cases, but the people involved came out of the private sector, and behavior like this is typically learned. It is very likely that this practice of abusing expense accounts and company assets came from the firms where they were working prior to joining the Trump administration.

This suggests these practices are widespread, but because internal audit has been defunded, unlike government oversight, it likely isnt being caught yet. Much like it has been with sexual harassment, I expect that all we are waiting for is the right post on social media to be picked up by a reporter, and suddenly well have another wave of firings, and the firings for expense abuse likely will be far wider and deeper than the sexual harassment firings have been so far.

This is because accounting and finance, unlike HR, have retained a great deal of power. Boards watch expenses far more aggressively than they do things like sexual harassment (though, if things continue on the sexual harassment front, that likely will change, and it should).

Wrapping Up: Abuse of Power

The key element in all of this is abuse of power. Whether we are talking about jail guards or executives, there are a lot of people who dont do well when given power. Their limiters dont work, and the result is that they push the envelope until a catastrophe occurs and they are fired.

There should be controls and oversight to offset this behavior, but it is abundantly clear that those controls in many firms and government agencies currently arent doing the job. While we are focused on sexual harassment, we likely are missing other bad behaviors  like selling company assets or expense abuse  that go along with abuse of power.

Ill leave you with one more example of common power abuse, and that is carrying out vendettas: using your power to get revenge on someone you believe has done you harm, either inside or outside the company. This is extremely common among folks who abuse power, and it can create a vicious cycle and even escalate to violence.

There is a good chance you may not be able to affect change in others, but  and trust me on this  abuse of power is a career ender, regardless of the path you take. Making sure you and your employees (if you are a manager or executive) dont abuse power increasingly will be critical to preserving your career. In this age of social media, keeping such abuse secret soon may become impossible.

Im bringing back Varonis as my product of the week, because intellectual property theft almost cost me my job, and it is a company killer. Varonis has the best protection against IP theft (including customer and employee confidential records).

What Varonis does is provide a solution that ensures that people who shouldnt have access to internal data dont have access, and that any attempt to violate the related policies, either by internal or external actors, are caught and stopped quickly.

While much of the focus of late has been on protecting customer records, Varonis capability to both identify an attempted breach and ensure that it will fail is largely unmatched in the segment.

Given Ubers alleged theft of Googles intellectual property was the basis for this column, and that it allegedly was an inside job  something Ive argued is likely far more common than most firms realize  focusing on a product that could have prevented this theft or provided stronger evidence of it is why Im making Varonis my product of the week.
If you havent read last weeks Vanity Fair article on the institutionalized sexual exploitation going on in tech companies, you should.

This is on top of the realization that social media companies like Facebook are destroying the U.S., and former Facebook executives have been dissociating themselves from the company.

Further, news recently broke of what initially was reported to be an Intel flaw, but turned out to be a bigger industry-wide problem. Behind it was the report that Intels CEO dumped every share he legally could during the period when Intel knew of the problem but had not reported it. This may be an optics rather than an insider trading problem, but it does imply a severe lack of confidence in Intels future on the part of its own CEO (though it may be just a lack of confidence in the Trump administration).

I think we may be looking at a potentially catastrophic collapse of Silicon Valley. Given that the Valley supports the Democratic party almost exclusively, it doesnt bode well for the 2018 mid-term election  which, before this, was expected to be a Republican rout. Individually, each of these events is bad. Collectively, they are catastrophic.

Ill share some thoughts on that this week and close with my product of the week: an interesting way to keep your outdoor spa both warm and accessible during the winter months.

The Sport of Extreme Sexual Harassment

I get the need for the Valley to overachieve, but in this era of Harvey Weinstein and career-killing events, the concept of powerful men driving drug-induced sexual orgies seems to me to be suicidal. You need to read the linked Vanity Fair article, but in short what allegedly has been happening, is that the top Silicon Valley executives, bankers, VCs, and Ill bet some politicians have gone a tad sex-crazy.

They have been holding and attending what appear to be orgies, where women are given drugs to make them receptive, and then they engage in group sex. Many of the women apparently work for some of the men, and many of their spouses attend. This is not a well-kept secret, and the drugs allegedly used are for the most part illegal.

Recall that Harvey Weinstein reportedly abused a lot of women before one spoke up, and the entire thing cascaded until he lost his job, his company, and his position on boards. The father of one of his accusers reportedly even threatened to kill him. A parents reaction to this kind of behavior, as Sorvino demonstrates, takes anger to the extreme. The Democrats, who have a zero-tolerance policy regarding this kind of thing, likely will run from these folks like they have the plague, and the Republicans have no love for the Valley in the first place.

All it would take is a trigger event  say an underage woman alleging drug-induced rape at one of these parties, or a Justice Department raid (or both)  to cost most of these folks their jobs, companies and much of their net worth. Granted, many likely could get on their jets and avoid immediate arrest, but you dont recover from something like this. Just ask Roman Polanski. People dont forget this kind of thing (but they all could move to Switzerland).

From women who are abused through this practice, to politicians who want to gut Democratic Party funding, to law enforcement that wants to stick it to rich jerks who are abusing the law, to countries like China that would love to cripple Silicon Valley, the number of people who might use this to cripple the U.S. tech industry are legion.

Social Media Meltdown?

When executives start treating past jobs as if they were criminal activities, its a sign of a serious problem. The combination of a growing realization that Facebook is doing massive harm to the country with ex-Facebook executives treating their time there as if they had a substance abuse problem suggests things arent looking good.

There already have been a massive number of social media-fueled tragedies, including suicide and murder. Just last week, a YouTube star became infamous for showing the body of a suicide victim in a video.

Given that I was almost killed myself during a rave organized on Facebook, Im very aware of the risks surrounding the use and adverse impact of social media.

Personally, I find social media to be way too dangerous  particularly when it looks like your job prospects could be killed over posts taken out of context. The amount of false (fake) news generated on these platforms is incredibly troubling, and I find the arguments that social media didnt corrupt the elections to be so poorly researched as to be laughable.

The realization that a poorly worded tweet might start a nuclear war doesnt let any of us sleep very deeply now. (The idea of buttons on desks that could launch nuclear payloads is just wrong in so many ways.)

Maybe the words that will doom the world will be: Damn it I told you not to put my breakfast on my desk, youve just launched World War III you covfefe! In case you wonder what that word means

Brian Krzanichs Ill-Advised Share Sale

The problem with the Intel chips being a manufacturing defect of some kind appears to be fake news (though the Linux folks are less than amused), but selling every share you legally can sell during the window between when Intel learned of the problem and when it was disclosed appears not to be.

This leaves us with two possible obvious choices, both of which are bad. Either Krzanich sold the shares to make sure he didnt take the loss (insider trading), or he lost confidence in Intels ability to execute. My guess is that this likely had nothing to do with Intel at all, but with concerns that the market is going to correct massively when the U.S. president is indicted. (Krzanich was one of the early CEOs to abandon the president.)

This is a reminder of how important optics are, but the appearance of wrongdoing or lack of confidence in his firm adds to the overall impression that the valley is about to implode. Much of the valuation of a company is based on confidence in it, and if the CEO doesnt have confidence, regardless of the performance of the firm, investors, employees and customers wont either.

You can kill an industry or company with bad optics.

Wrapping Up: Silicon Valley Has Become Suicidal

In the post-Weinstein world, the idea of group sex parties with subordinates and drugs alone seems just nuts  but on top of that, the ability of the U.S. or a foreign government to use these things effectively to wipe out much of the market is unprecedented. In some strange way, you can almost hear Harvey Weinstein say, I was stupid and bad, but I wasnt THAT stupid and bad.

Then layer on the massive damage social media is doing to the country  damage that has caused executives to detach themselves from their own company backgrounds  and you get what could be termed a suicidal complex.

Finally, if you look at what one of the most powerful CEOs just did with his own shares well, while any one of these things would be bad individually, collectively they provide a picture of a segment that is behaving suicidally.

We thought 2018 was going to start with a bang, but I doubt that any of us were thinking that it would be the sound of the tech segment imploding.

My wife and I have a swim spa, which is basically a swimming treadmill. The problem last year was that it snowed so much, we often couldnt open the damn cover to get into the thing  it was covered with snow. Even when it wasnt, running around in a wet bathing suit trying to close the thing back up again when done was a nonstarter after the first time.

Finally, this spa is big, so the cover was heavy all by itself, and my wife had issues both getting it open and closed, so the spa basically would sit out the winter, which is when you kind of need to be able to use it. We needed something that handled the snow, was far easier to open and close, and didnt require you to run around the pool in near zero-degree weather while wet to close it up again.

What I found was the Covana Motorized Spa Cover. This isnt a cheap date, but it powers up and down, and it has the added benefit of not only being able to lift a lot of snow but also providing a cover for you while you are swimming or using the Jacuzzi side of the spa.

Covana Hot Tub Cover

Covana also makes smaller versions for hot tubs, and one of them has internal lights, privacy curtains, and a peaked roof that allows the snow to slide off.

It uses a solar-charged battery, so it is surprisingly easy to wire up (though you typically would have it professionally installed, which is what we did). Weve been using it for a few weeks now and love it  not to mention it looks cool opening and closing, though I think Ill rig a remote switch, so I can do that from inside the house.

One interesting feature is the escape hatch, in case someone closes the spa while youre in it (which could come in handy with that remote switch). We all need to exercise more, and part of the fun of a hot tub is using it in the snow. However, the power bill for leaving it open takes a lot of the fun out of it. The Covana motorized spa cover does both (we got the Legend), so it is my product of the week.
Evidence gathered with the assistance of the Swedish Navy showed seismic patterns corresponding to explosions on the seabed. | Read More
GUANGZHOU, China, Jan. 6, 2018 -- GAC Motor, China's fastest-growing automaker, will present its elite vehicle lineup featuring its existing sedan, SUV, minivan and NEV at the 2018 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), which demonstrates the brand's sincerity and determination to enter the North American market. A brand-new sedan model and a concept car will also make their world debuts on GAC Motor's press conference which held on January 15.The NAIAS will be on from January 13 to 18, 2018 at the Cobo Center in Detroit.

Three-time participating as the only Chinese automaker in the NAIAS has gained widespread interest for GAC Motor and has also allowed it to be more familiar to local consumers as well as to better understand their needs. GAC Motor's exhibition at 2018 NAIAS will feature high-end models including the GA8, GS8 and GM8, which provided safe and reliable service for attendees at the Fortune Global Forum 2017 as the event's official service vehicles. Most notably, GAC Motor will debut the GA4, an all-new signature sedan at 2018 NAIAS. This GA4 is a mainstream sedan model built on GAC Motor's own A-Class sedan platform, which is designed and positioned as a family sedan of quality and charm. Also, GAC is to release its first compact new-energy concept SUV designed for the North American market, called the Enverge, to unfold the company's cutting-edge technologies and tremendous potential in the fields of vehicle electrification, networking and intelligent system. The new cars are widely expected by the industry professionals, trade media and consumers.

As GAC Motor releases its new vehicles, the brand's product lineup is more comprehensive than ever, paving a path for GAC Motor to further explore global markets while demonstrating the company's advanced and upgraded capabilities in R&D, manufacturing and quality. By focusing on building high-end models and elevating travel experience, GAC Motor aims to define future mobility with products of supreme quality and personalized design.

"GAC Motor is proud to unveil our bold additions to the fields of SUVs, sedans and minivans at NAIAS," said Yu Jun, President of GAC Motor. "As we execute on our strategy of becoming an automaker with a global reach, we will continue to design products that will meet the different needs of customers worldwide."

In 2017, GAC motor met its target of annual sales volume of 500,000 for the year in China, with a 37.2% year-on-year increase, blazing a path of high-quality and sustainable development. As a highly-trusted brand, GAC Motor has received top quality ratings from JD Power for five consecutive years. This honor is recognition of its efforts to redefine and reimagine what Made-in-China means. The company's presentation of its complete product lineup at 2018 NAIAIS will be a showcase for its strength as an international automaker.

"GAC Motor will present an update to its strategy in the US market around brand, marketing as well as product at the NAIAS, offering a new blueprint as the company moves towards officially entering the market in 2019," said Yu. "The American market has the strictest standards, laws and regulations, so entering it is a challenge as well as test for GAC Motor's quality, technology and R&D capabilities. We believe that entering the North American market will drive GAC Motor to improve its R&D, product quality, brand influence and business management, while enabling us to integrate global resources in developed markets and further facilitate internationalization."

About GAC Motor

Founded in 2008, Guangzhou Automobile Group Motor CO., LTD (GAC Motor) is a subsidiary of GAC Group which ranks 238th among the Fortune Global 500 companies. The company develops and manufactures premium quality vehicles, engines, components and auto accessories. GAC Motor achieved a 37.2% year-on-year increase in 2017, and now it ranks the first among all Chinese brands for five consecutive years in J.D. Power Asia Pacific's 2017 China Initial Quality Study SM (IQS). The company built a production and sales volume of 500,000 vehicles in 2017 and aims to reach 1,000,000 vehicles by 2020.
CES Auto Show: Nissan Leaf Brain-to-Vehicle Technology

LAS VEGAS January 7, 2018; From technology that reads a driver's brain waves to the world's best-selling electric vehicle, Nissan will give visitors to CES 2018 a glimpse of its vision for the future of mobility  a future with more autonomy, more electrification and more connectivity.

Among the highlights will be Nissan's pioneering Brain-to-Vehicle (B2V) technology. B2V interprets signals from the driver's brain to assist with driving and to help the vehicle's autonomous and manual systems learn from the driver. The technology promises shorter reaction times and systems that adapt to maximize driving pleasure.

Also to be featured are the Nissan IMx concept vehicle and the all-new Nissan LEAF. Making its regional debut, the IMx promotes a stronger connection between car and driver. It has a full suite of autonomous driving capabilities, seating for four, and an electric powertrain with more torque than the Nissan GT-R.







The new generation of the Nissan LEAF, the world's best-selling electric vehicle, combines the excitement of 100% electric driving with advanced technologies such as ProPILOT (ProPILOT Assist in the U.S.), e-Pedal and enhanced connectivity. This icon of Nissan Intelligent Mobility went on sale in Japan in October 2017.

Nissan's stand is at booth 5431 in the Las Vegas Convention Center's North Hall. Executives from Nissan and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance will also join panel discussions during CES:

Nissan Executive Vice President Daniele Schillaci will join a discussion titled "Self-Driving Cars: the Future of Personal Transportation," from 10-11 a.m. on Jan. 10 at Tech East, Las Vegas Convention Center, North Hall, N257. Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan's senior vice president for global design, will join a discussion titled "Design Thinking for Your Business," from 10-11 a.m. on Jan. 11 at Tech East, Las Vegas Convention Center, South Plaza, 62000.

Christian Ledoux, director of mobility and connected services for the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, will join a panel titled "Autonomous Vehicles in the Cities of Tomorrow," from 9:30-10:15 a.m. on Jan. 10 at Tech East, Westgate, Level 1, Pavilion 9.

About Nissan Intelligent Mobility

Nissan Intelligent Mobility transforms your car into a more responsive partner by redefining how your car is driven, powered and integrated into society.

Nissan Intelligent Driving: More Confidence through increased safety, control and comfort for all on board.

Nissan Intelligent Power: More Exciting through driving pleasure that is also clean and efficient.

mNissan Intelligent Integration: More Connected by conveniently linking our cars and the wider society.



About Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Steinbach RCMP would like the publics assistance to identify two men who broke into JTs Store and Diner in Blumenort early Saturday morning.

Shortly before 4 a.m., the two men entered the store and stole a significant amount of cash and cigarettes. The men arrived at the store in a red vehicle, possibly a minivan police said in a release.

One of men was wearing a dark green New York Jets jacket, blue jeans, neon orange and black gloves. He was described as Caucasian, of medium build, around 6 ft. tall. The second man wore a black jacket. Both suspects had their faces covered with black balaclavas.

Two men are being sought after a break-in at JT's Diner early Saturday morning.

Anyone with information is asked to call Steinbach RCMP at (204) 326-4452 or CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or www.manitobacrimestoppers.com or text TIPMAN plus a message to Crimes (274637).

Tips sought for further thefts

Police also reported a break-in at a residence on Provincial Road 302 in the RM of Tache, sometime between 7:30 a.m. and 1:20 p.m. on Jan. 4. Electronics and firearms were taken from the residence, while a gray GMC pickup truck was seen in the area.

Tips are also been sought after a hydro pole was cut down in La Broquerie, between Dec. 15 and Jan. 4. The poles transformer was stolen with copper wire inside.

Anyone with information can also contact RCMP.
Photo: Getty Images

E! took a lot of hits at this years Golden Globes.

As stars made their way down the red carpet  dressed in black to support Times Up, Hollywoods new womens initiative to combat gender discrimination  many made a point to call out the network for allegedly failing to pay its own hosts equally.

A few weeks ago, former E! News correspondent Catt Sadler announced that she was leaving the network because of a massive pay gap between her and her male co-host Jason Kennedy. When E! reached out to renew and extend my deal, I learned that he wasnt just making a little more than I was. In fact, he was making close to double my salary for the past several years, Sadler wrote in a letter about her departure.

On the Golden Globes red carpet, actors spoke out about Sadlers treatment in interviews on E!, leading to some  awkward moments on camera. Were here for Times Up, we support gender equity and equal pay, and we hope that E! follows that lead with Catt as well, Eva Longoria told E! News Ryan Seacrest, while standing between Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. We stand with you Catt.

Eva Longoria brings up women equal pay and says "We stand with you Catt Sadler" to Ryan Seacrest and E!. Debra Messing also called out E! on the red carpet. #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/nzBVTI0WVz  Pop Crave (@PopCrave) January 8, 2018

Longoria was not alone in her criticism. Earlier in the evening, Debra Messing told E!s Giuliana Rancic:

I was so shocked to hear that E! doesnt believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I miss Catt Sadler, and we stand with her. And thats something that can change tomorrow. We want people to start having this conversation that women are just as valuable as men.

Later, Laura Dern added to the roast, telling Seacrest:

We need the powers that be, and all the industries, and all the networks, and E!, to help us with closing this pay gender gap.

She also added 50/50 by 2020! a reference to the Times Up working group focused on reaching gender parity in Hollywood by 2020.

Laura Dern also calls out E!  while on E!  for not paying its male and female employees the same salary pic.twitter.com/c0zlsCQHn8  Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) January 8, 2018

And Seacrest wasnt in the clear yet. Equality, parity and safe work environments for men and women across all industries are key, Sarah Jessica Parker told him, before putting her hands on his shoulders and saying, I know its affected your network.

"I know it's affected your network" Sarah Jessica Parker to Ryan Seacrest, sliding in #imwithcattsad Catt Sadler reference on #GoldenGlobes #redcarpet #TIMESUP "Parity & equality--this shouldn't be controversial" https://t.co/4dmr38kkkH  Laurie Ochoa (@Laurie_Ochoa) January 8, 2018

In summary, happy Golden Globes to everyone except E!.
Alex Azar. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

On Tuesday morning, Alex Azar  President Trumps nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  will appear before the Senate Finance Committee for his confirmation hearing. In advance of this, Politico brings us a fun fact about Azar: his old drug company once tested Cialis, the erectile dysfunction medication known for those weird bathtub commercials, on children.

Azar served as president of Eli Lillys U.S. operations from 2012 to 2017. (From 2005 to 2007 he worked as George W. Bushs Deputy Secretary for HHS.) During his stint at the pharmaceutical company, they found a curious way to extend their expiring patent on Cialis:

The drugmaker believed the erectile dysfunction drug might help a rare and deadly muscle-wasting disease that afflicts boys. The drug didnt work  but under a law that promotes pediatric research, Lilly was able to extend the Cialis patent anyway for six months  and thats worth a lot when a medication brings in over $2 billion a year.

Politico points out that this is completely legal and that their competitor, Pfizer, did something similar with sick children and the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. But, as critics like Democracy Forwards Tyson Brody puts it, it shows that Azar gamed the patent system to protect Eli Lillys taxpayer-funded profits under the guise of helping sick kids.
19-Year-Old Girl Killed at Maryville Bar After Vehicle Crashes Into Building

A 19-year-old college student was killed on Sunday, Jan. 7, after a car crashed into the front of a bar in Maryville, Missouri.

Morgan McCoy from Liberty, Missouri, was inside The Palms bar located on N. Buchanan Street when a vehicle crashed into the building around 12:40 a.m.

McCoy was rushed to an area hospital but later died as a result of her injuries, according to a press release from her university.

The student was a sophomore at Northwest Missouri State University with an elementary education major. She was also a member of the Sigma Kappa sorority. The group said in a Sunday tweet that it was so hard to believe this is happening.

Thank you to everyone for the love and prayers to our chapter. Morgan was an amazing girl and it is so hard to believe this is happening. We are sending prayers to everyone affected, especially her family. Dove love always ?? Fly high beautiful.  Sigma Kappa (@SigmaKappaNWMSU) January 7, 2018

The driver of the vehicle was taken into custody, the press release stated.

Nodaway County Prosecuting Attorney, Robert Rice, said in an email to KMA News that they have charged the driver, identified as 21-year-old Alex Allen Catterson of Maryville.

He was charged with first-degree involuntary manslaughter, which is a Class C Felony.

Morgan was hit by a random drunk driver as she was walking out the door, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help the family with funeral costs.

The campaign page states that the driver had a blood-alcohol level of .207.

A probable cause statement obtained by KMA News also states that Catterson was under the influence of alcohol when he crashed the vehicle. In Missouri, a driver is drunk when at .08 percent.

The accident is currently under investigation by the Maryville Public Safety and the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

The GoFundMe page had already passed the campaign goal in just one day, raising $10,840 out of the $10,000 goal, on Jan. 8.

The University is also encouraging students in need of counseling assistance to contact Wellness Services at 660.562.1348, or contact University Police outside of regular business hours at 660.562.1254.

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Corey Feldman attends the Ovation TV premiere screening of "Art Breakers"in Los Angeles on Oct. 1, 2015. (Photo by Araya Diaz/Getty Images for Ovation)

Actor Corey Feldman: Pedophilia Remains Number One Secret In Hollywood

Actor Corey Feldman alleged in a new interview that pedophilia remains the number one secret in Hollywood.

Former and current actresses have recently exposed a string of sexual harassment incidents, along with women outside of Hollywood. But Feldman says he believes molestation remains an epidemic.

Parents should be shaking, Feldman told Lifetime, according to the Daily Mail, adding that hes repeatedly refused when producers and others offer him show business opportunities for his 13-year-old son, Zen. I dont have my kid in this industry, what does that tell you?

Feldman recently created a television film documenting his relationship with late friend and colleague Corey Haim. Feldman is best known for his work as a child actor, appearing in films in the 1980s including The Goonies, The Lost Boys, and Stand By Me.

Feldman said he was 15 when he was corrupted by an adult who introduced him to adult activities such as drugs and nightlife. He said hes noticed many child actors have such adults influencing them.



Feldman said he will never give up fighting those who prey on children.

He revealed his own predator during an appearance on the Dr. Oz show in November.

Feldman said he made a promise to Haim before Haim died that he would expose predators working in Hollywood.

Corey asked me to make sure that if he died before me that his story was told. I am doing exactly that, he told E! News.

The only thing left is he wants people to know who the assailant was, and I hope to God that one day that story can be told, too.

Feldman has recently called out for those who witnessed incidents in Hollywood to come forward, in addition to those who suffered abuse.

I guarantee you that there were other kids that had these experiences. They need to stand up and use their voice, he told People.

There are producers that know about things that happened on their sets, or agents who know things about their clients, and actresses and actors themselvesits time to use our voices.

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From NTD.tv
Rescue workers carry victims after a bus crashed with a truck and careened off a cliff along a sharply curving highway north of Lima, Peru, January 3, 2018. (REUTERS/Guadalupe Pardo)

After Fatal Bus Crash on Devils Curve, Officials Make Tragic Find a Mile Away

It's unclear if the two cases are linked

Near a bus crash on a highway called Devils Curve in Peru that left at least 52 people dead, officials made a grisly discovery.

The bus drove off a cliff after it collided with a truck on the highway north of Lima, officials told Reuters. The cause of the accident is not clear. The accident on Tuesday took place on the Panamericana Norte highway near the area of Pasamayo on the Pacific coast.

The new death toll of 48 was updated from 36 people, according to Lewis Mejia Prada, a representative of the local fire-fighting company, and police late Tuesday, the news agency reported.

The Mirror reported Monday that the charred body of a woman was found inside a suitcase close to the site where the bus had crashed. The suitcase was discovered about a mile away by police from Chancay and Huaral in the district of Aucallama.

Body of burnt young women in suitcase found at 'Devil's Curve' bus crash https://t.co/aPl1prpOMo pic.twitter.com/LSGsxUMt1z  Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) January 8, 2018

Its not clear if the finding was linked to the bus crash. A police investigation is ongoing, the Mirror reported.

Local media reported that the woman was wearing sneakers and jeans. Officials think the body was burned to get rid of the evidence, according to the report.

Forensic experts and members of the missing persons unit from Lima are on the scene.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Death toll in Peru bus crash rises to 48 after the vehicle plunged 100 metres off a cliff onto a rocky beach https://t.co/cGS14HLCYf pic.twitter.com/FRje1qMWpW  Al Jazeera News (@AJENews) January 3, 2018

Death toll from Peru bus crash rises to 48 : emergency services https://t.co/Z53oO6ISvB pic.twitter.com/0gX6GSusXc  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) January 3, 2018

50 bodies recovered from Peru crash bus that plunged over cliff. https://t.co/UoG6aeMmOs pic.twitter.com/rPwX1lfHlb  The Straits Times (@STcom) January 4, 2018

51 Killed in Peru Bus Crash https://t.co/zVxB01w32Q pic.twitter.com/1LaFyNhTM7  The Voice of America (@VOANews) January 4, 2018

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A woman browses her smartphone in her office lounge in Beijing on Dec. 5, 2017. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Chinese Smartphone App Suspected of Monitoring Personal Conversations

Chinas embrace of advanced technology such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and smartphone mobile payments has already led observers to worry about the potential for mass surveillance and monitoring. These technologies are nearly ubiquitous in major cities around the country.

However, Chinese netizens have begun to grow concerned over invasion of privacy via smartphone apps.

On Jan. 3, a user with the handle passerby on the internet posted on Weibo, Chinas equivalent to Twitter, about a recent incident. He was chatting with his wife about picking strawberries on New Years Day. The following day, when he opened a popular news aggregator app, called Jinri Toutiao, on his smartphone, he saw articles related to strawberries.

The app, which is the most downloaded in China, uses artificial intelligence to analyze users social media interactions and the content users consume, in order to generate a tailored news feed for each user. Over 100 million users actively using the app daily, with about 700 million total registered users, according to the company.

The day after chatting with his wife about picking strawberries, the user saw articles related to strawberries when he opened a popular news aggregator app, Jinri Toutiao, on his smartphone.

Since he did not search for any related content to strawberries, the incident made him suspect that the app had used his phones microphone to listen in on his conversation.

His post was re-posted over a thousand times within a short period of time. Soon, Jinri Toutiao responded with a statement on Weibo, saying that it does not collect data without users knowledge, and that a user must first give permission to allow the app to access the microphonesuch as when a user opens the apps video feature.

Many netizens did not buy the explanation though, chiming in with their own personal accounts of how the app recommends content about subjects they mentioned in real life.

On a Chinese online forum called Newsmth.net, other netizens wrote about similar experiences.

Advanced technology has already been employed for surveillance via the Skynet security camera system, which combines artificial intelligence with facial recognition technology to gather personal information on passersby who are captured, in real time. There are currently 20 million cameras on the streets and the Chinese regime plans to cover the entire country by 2020.

Now smartphone apps seem to be used for invasion of privacy.

On Jan. 3, a netizen discovered that when viewing transactions on the Alipay mobile payment app, there was a line in fine print: I agree to Zhima services agreement, with the box already checked. Zhima Credit is a credit agency developed by Ant Financial, which also operates Alipay. Alipay had to apologize in a statement.

In 2016, the New York Times reported that preinstalled software developed by the Shanghai Adups Technology Companywhich were running on 700 million smartphones, cars, and other smart deviceshad transmitted the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information, and other data to a Chinese server.

Adups had designed the software at the request of a Chinese phone manufacturer in order to monitor users, according to the Times report, which noted that the software ran on some American Android phones manufactured by BLU Products.

Adups did not name the manufacturer, but on the companys website, it said it provides software to ZTE and Huawei, Chinas largest smartphone manufacturers.

Li Muyang contributed to this report.
Dad Saves 1-Year-Old Daughter From Vicious Dog Attack

A father from Massachusetts was forced to stab the family dog to death to stop it from attacking his 1-year-old daughter, according to police.

Falmouth Police Department responded to a call at approximately 8:54 a.m. on Jan. 7, from a home on Brick Kiln Road. A 1-year-old girl was being mauled by the family dog.

Police said the baby was playing in the kitchen when the unnamed father heard screaming and noticed that the family dog was attacking his daughter.

The preliminary investigation indicates that the child was playing in the kitchen with the father nearby. The family pit bull terrier attacked the child and bit her in the face causing major trauma, the police statement read.

He immediately tried separating the dog from his daughter but was unable. He then tried shooting the dog but realized that his pistol was not loaded.

The quick-thinking father then grabbed a kitchen knife and began stabbing the dog in order to protect his daughter, ultimately killing the animal.

The family had owned the dog for five years. According to a preliminary investigation, the attack was unprovoked. The dog had no known history of violence or aggression.

Ron Goulart, the fathers uncle who lives across the street from the family, said dogs usually got along with the 1-year-old girl.

Shes a cute little bunny, Goulart told Boston 25 News. Maybe a year old now. Shes very good. The dogs always got along with her, so I dont know what happened.

The little girl was airlifted to Boston Childrens Hospital and underwent a number of emergency surgeries, reported the news station.

Her family is grateful that she is alive.

The attack is currently being investigated by the police and the Falmouth Department of Marine & Environmental Services, Animal Control Division.

From NTD.tv

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[/epoch_video]
Lynn Tran and her husband Richard Hazen pose near their Australian pine treehouse Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018, in Holmes Beach, Fla. The couple is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will hear their case after city and state officials ordered the treehouse removed. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

Florida Couple Builds $30,000 Treehouse, but City Wants Them to Take It Down

The Supreme Court has declined to take on a case revolving around a $30,000 treehouse in Florida, it was announced on Monday.

Lynn Tran and Richard Hazen, of Holmes Beach, have constructed a treehouse fit for a magazine. It features two stories, a number of hammocks, and windows looking out on the Gulf of Mexico.

Passersby often stop and examine the beachfront structure, and the couple loves to relax in it.

But the relaxation has turned into stress after Holmes Beach officials ordered the structure taken down.

Tran and Hazen say they asked the city in 2011, before construction started, whether they needed a permit to build the treehouse. The answer was no. They then reached out to the online community to help them plan the structure.

Its a work of love, its a work of art for us, its fun a thing we always dreamed of having, Tran told the Manatee County News.

After it was built, though, local officials took note due to an anonymous complaint. After learning the treehouse is actually situated in an area where building is prohibited because of a city setback, officials ordered them to take it down.

According to Manatee County News, building official Tom OBrien said whatsaid the couples building became so large that its more than a treehouse.

Poorly-constructed, poorly-secured building elements become flying debris and presents a clear and present hazard, said OBrien.

The couples lawyer, David Levin, said the couples rights were violated when a Florida court rubber stamped the citys decision as opposed to bringing in independent consul, according to the Associated Press.

Levin and the couple wanted the Supreme Court to hear the case, but the court announced on Monday that it wouldnt.

The Supreme Court is the last court of resort, Tran told WTSP. If it doesnt work out, we dont want to think about it yet, its hard to think about, especially when we know we didnt do anything wrong.

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Florida Man in Critical Condition After Vicious Attack by Pit Bulls

A Florida man was left seriously injured after being mauled by a pack of pit bulls on Saturday, Jan. 6.

Tony Elliot, 55, was walking in his Lauderhill, Florida, neighborhood around 10 p.m. when he was savaged by three pit bulls.

The dogs owner told police that he was cleaning the dogs cage when the canines escaped from the fenced-in yard and onto the street, reported Local10.

Neighbors and the dogs owner got the dogs off of Elliot, who suffered puncture wounds to his face, both calves, and feet, along with a four-inch laceration to his left cheek.

The owner voluntarily surrendered the dogs to the authorities, saying they cant be trusted.

No criminal or civil charges have been pressed as of yet.

Elliots mother, Shirley Ace, said the dogs should have been removed by owners after they previously attacked three people in October.

I know these people that the dog belongs to. I dont want to say anything to hurt them, but the dogs should have been gone a long time (ago), Ace told Local10.

Elliot remains in intensive care at the Broward Health Medical Center, reported CBS.

Lauderhill police have partnered with Animal Control to investigate those previous attacks and criminal charges may be brought, the broadcaster reported.

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Ambulances sit outside the Accident and Emergency department of Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital on Jan. 3, 2018 in London, England. Winter illnesses are having a knock-one effect on emergency response times. (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

Former Soldier Dies After 98-Minute Wait for Ambulance

A former paratrooper has died of a heart attack after waiting for over an hour-and-a-half for an ambulance, it has emerged.

Peter Wilkinson, 61, who lives in Chorley in the UK, called emergency services last Tuesday at 6:07 p.m. after experiencing chest pains, according to the Daily Mail.

An ambulance didnt arrive until 7:45 p.m., however98 minutes later.

It was too late. Wilkinson had gone into cardiac arrest and despite efforts by the paramedics, they were unable to resuscitate him.

Wilkinsons description of his symptomsand the fact that he was conscious and breathinghad meant he was triaged as a category 2, with a target response time of 18 minutes.

The ambulance service has apologised for the slow response time and said they are launching an investigation.

The incident comes after the NHS announced it is canceling 55,000 routine operations to free up hospital beds as pressures from winter illnesses mount, with a knock-on effect on accident and emergency services.

His daughter Rosie Wilkinson told the Daily Mail: Maybe if they had been quicker they might have saved him. They must have thought there was a chance.

He was waiting so long for an ambulance that we will never know if he could have been saved.

She said that the most upsetting thing was knowing he suffered alone for 90 minutes.

He would have been frightened and scared. I feel sad that he suffered for so long without any help.

She said that when she was informed of her fathers death by police, no one mentioned about the delay, which she first learned of when a reporter from the Daily Mail contacted her. They didnt tell me a thing.

She has contacted the coroners office to ask for an investigation. She says that her father was sent home with a flea in his ear after having gone to his doctor about his chest pains between Christmas and New Year. The doctor said as a precaution they would do an ECG and take his blood on January 22, she said.

Wilkinson was a father of five, and an ex-paratrooper who survived an IRA bomb attack while serving as a paratrooper in Ireland. He also volunteered locally with a charity, Home-Start Central Lancashire.

So sad to hear the news of Peter, I will always remember his cheeky laugh and big smile, a message on the charitys Facebook page said.

Peter was a volunteer with us for several years and made a big difference to the many families that he worked with. He will be sadly missed, rest in peace.

According to the local Radio station 2BR, a spokesperson for the North West Ambulance Service said: We would like to offer our sincere condolences to the patients family. Our response time was not as quick as we would like and we are making attempts to contact the family as part of our investigation into the incident.

According to the Mail, the ambulance service in the local area was very stretched in the days running up to Wilkinsons death. Patients were stuck in emergency vehicles outside hospital departments for over an hour while they waited for spaces to become free.

The NHS recently advised hospitals to postpone routine operations and appointments to free up bed space as winter illnesses push the already stretched health service to the limits.

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Girlfriend, Grandmother Arrested in Connection With 3-Year-Old Carolina Girls Death

A woman was arrested in Cleveland County, North Carolina, earlier this month for the slaying of a young child, according to local reports.

Last month, police responded to a call about an unresponsive and unconscious 3-year-old girl in Lancaster County, South Carolina, according to the Shelby Star newspaper. They found a child lying on her back in the living room with no pulse.

The girl, identified as Lillian Schroeder, was then taken to Springs Memorial Hospital where she died. Cook was identified in a report from the South Carolina Herald as the girlfriend of the girls father.

Kayla Marie Cook told officials that she had been babysitting the child since 7 a.m. while the father was working. According to the report, she said that she put the child in a bathtub, but when she came back to check on Lillian, she was unresponsive.

An autopsy report found that the girl died of blunt-force trauma to the head, according to police.

A judge then issued a warrant for the arrest of Cook, 25, but she was nowhere to be found, according to the Star. She was arrested 10 days later by sheriffs deputies.

She was then sent back to South Carolina last Tuesday, Jan. 2.

This tragic incident has taken a heavy toll on the families involved. It has touched a lot of people including the community, first responders, officers and investigators involved as well, Lancaster Police Chief Scott Grant told the Star. We will continue to speak for the young victim in this case as it moves forward through the judicial process.

Cook told her neighbor that the girl was not acting right and asked them to tell the authorities, the South Carolina Herald reported.

Just in -Lancaster police have made an arrest in the death of a 3 year old girl back on December 18th on Heath Circle. Kayla Cook has been charged with homicide by child abuse. She was arrested in Cleveland County NC. pic.twitter.com/nN6nIoGMVa  Greg Suskin (@GSuskinWSOC9) January 3, 2018

On Monday, WSOC-TV reported that the slain girls grandmother, 48-year-old Tracy Helms Schroeder, was arrested in the case. She was charged with unlawful conduct toward a child.

She is being accused of lying to officials and breaking an agreement to be the main caregiver of the child by allowing the girl to stay with her father and his girlfriend without supervision, according to WSOC.

Lillians mother, Michelle Bigham, had shared a meme in a Facebook post about not holding onto to pent up anger, hurt, sadness, and holding grudges, Dearly.com reported. Bigham frequently has posted about missing her daughter.

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H&M Apologizes After Coolest Monkey Sweatshirt Ad Featuring Black Child Prompts Backlash

Clothing company H&M has apologized after unveiling a new advertisement campaign featuring a young black child in a sweatshirt that had the lettering Coolest Monkey in the Jungle splayed across the front.

The fast fashion retailer was selling the printed hooded top for $9 before removing the ad.

We sincerely apologize for offending people with this image of a printed hooded top. The image has been removed from all online channels and the product will not be for sale in the United States, wrote H&M in a statement obtained by Fox News. We believe in diversity and inclusion in all that we do and will be reviewing all our internal policies accordingly to avoid any future issues.

H&M was slammed with negative feedback shortly after the ad was pushed online, with many social media users threatening a boycott of the company.

Cant be more confused and disgusted. H&M decided to put the black boy in a Coolest Monkey in the Jungle hoody and the white boy in a Survival Expert hoody. Cant believe its 2018 and this offensive sickening racism still exists. We all must boycott H&M till they apologize. pic.twitter.com/OdynDKupjS  BASH (@XIBash) January 8, 2018

We all must boycott H&M till they apologize, said one Twitter user.

Others, though, noted that an apology wouldnt necessarily rectify the underlying attitude.

Sis said Boycott H&M until they apologize mind you someone apologizing for being racist doesnt mean theyre not still racist. You just want them to be racist quietly, said a Twitter user.

Still others noted that H&M doesnt have the most quality offerings, suggesting it would be better to shop elsewhere.

In the year 2018 theres no way brands/art directors can be this negligent and lack awareness. If look at other sweaters in same category they have white kids. We have to do better. pic.twitter.com/Av4bS4t6yn  alex medina (@mrmedina) January 8, 2018

Imma be honest, i didnt know people actually shopped at H&M still. Shouldnt be nothing to boycott lol why are yall there to begin with? said the user.

However, not everyone was offended. Some defended the brand.

Of course the internet is triggered by the H & M Coolest Monkey In The Jungle hoodie. When I first saw it, I just said nice hoodie, said one Twitter user.

Tbh prolly wouldnt mind wearing the same thing. Yall just looking to be offended.

From NTD.tv

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Huge Fire Breaks out at Northern London Warehouse

A huge fire has broken out at a warehouse in northern London, with witnesses saying they saw a fireball in the sky.

The London Fire Brigade tweeted that 15 fire engines and 90 firefighters are trying to contain the fire at a paint factory on Waterloo Road, Staples Corner. Please avoid the area if possible, the service said.

Huge fire just opened up at a warehouse on north circular by Staples Corner ? pic.twitter.com/T3GSRIN6lp  Achal Dhillon (@ActualDhillon) January 8, 2018

One woman told the Mirror that she saw a fireball in the sky amid the blaze.

Drivers have been advised to avoid the area around the fire.

What on earth is this. Was just on the north circular. #fire #northcirc pic.twitter.com/BgWA6FNBmQ  Theo Doukanaris (@TheoDouk) January 8, 2018

Paula Cogan, a witness, wrote on Twitter: Lots of smoke, noise and an eerie red sky in the direction of Staples Corner due to a warehouse fire. Keeping the windows closed  hope everyone is safe!

Huge fire just opened up at a warehouse on north circular by Staples Corner, Achal Dhillon tweeted.

10 fire engines & 72 firefighters & officers are tackling a warehouse blaze on Waterloo Road #StaplesCorner. Please avoid the area if possible https://t.co/bc0nTdC73c  London Fire Brigade (@LondonFire) January 8, 2018

15 fire engines & 90 firefighters & officers are dealing with a large blaze at a paint factory on Waterloo Road #StaplesCorner. Please avoid the area & keep doors & windows shut. Pic @BlakeRidder pic.twitter.com/PQfBcNNK7l  London Fire Brigade (@LondonFire) January 8, 2018

A Twitter user wrote: HUGE fire off north circular just now. Literally exploding, plumes of smoke. I think it is a warehouse although not confirmed.

Fire officials told the Daily Mail there were no reports of injuries.

We were called to a fire at a warehouse in Waterloo Road, Staples Corner at 9:21 p.m., a fire official told the Mail. We are using 15 pumping appliances, fire engines and other specialist appliances to surround the fire.

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Inner Mongolia Latest Region in China Caught Faking Finances

Communist authorities in Inner Mongolia recently admitted that they had exaggerated industrial revenue by 26 percent, or 53 billion yuan ($8.1 billion), according to state media on Jan. 3.

The numbers were fabricated using the following method: at the beginning of the year, the finance department sets a target for revenue that is too high. By years end, it is difficult to reach the target, but the department reports it anyway, while asking corporations to give funds to the government. With bad loans and fabricated numbers for revenue and expenses, it will appear as if the department reached the goal.

The Chinese regime encourages such dishonest behavior though, as officials are often rewarded promotion by demonstrating their regions economic productivity. A common saying in China is, Officials produce figures, figures produce officials.

This is not the first time Inner Mongolia was caught for flubbing numbers. Last June, the Partys anti-corruption agency singled out the region for such misdeeds.

Many officials in Inner Mongolia are associated with former Politburo Standing Committee member Liu Yunshan, an official with strong ties to the Partys opposition faction loyal to former Party leader Jiang Zemin. His faction is in a power struggle with the current leader Xi Jinping and his allies. Since Xi took power in 2012, he has ousted many members of the Jiang faction through a sweeping anti-corruption campaign. It is unclear whether the revelations about fake numbers are related to the Party infighting.

Another region known for faking numbers is Liaoning, a neighboring province to the north. Last January, the Liaoning governor admitted that cities and counties within the province had exaggerated data from 2011 to 2014, representing a fake increase of 20 percent. During this period, the Liaoning party secretary was Wang Min, an official who owed his political promotion to Jiang. Last August, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for accepting bribes totaling 146 million yuan (about $22.4 million).

In 2016, Liaoning also overstated its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) figures, which had actually fallen 23.3 percent.

The state revealed that Liaoning faked numbers by trumping up the amount of land it could collect taxes fromas well as the money it could collect from allowing the use of state-owned assets.

As recently as last month, the Partys audit office announced that in the third quarter of 2017, 10 cities and counties within Yunnan, Hunan, Jilin, and Chongqing had fake numbers, adding an additional 1.5 billion yuan (about $230 million) to their revenue, according to Chinese newspaper Beijing News.

Given the troubled economic state of the northeastern region, and many other provinces in the country, it is perhaps unsurprising that they are desperate to look better than reality.

According to estimates by American-based Chinese economist Dr. Cheng Xiaonong, out of Chinas 31 provinces and directly governed municipalities, 25 are in debt, surviving by relying on funds from central authorities. Only major financial centers like Shanghai and Beijing, as well as the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian are in the black, with a total surplus of three trillion yuan ($453 billion).

Li Jing contributed to this report.
Rashon Causey, pictured after being charged with the 2016 murder of Shanai Marshall. (Burlington County Prosecutor)

Man With 92 Arrests Sentenced to 50 Years for Murder of Sons Mother

A man with 92 arrests and 11 felony convictions under his belt has been sentenced to 50 years imprisonment for the murder of his sons mother.

Shanai Marshall was stabbed to death in her home in Burlington County, New Jersey on Nov. 14 last year.

In October of 2017, Rashon Causey, her former partner and the father of her young son, was found guilty of the murder.

On Jan. 5, he was sentenced to 50 years, of which he must spend at least 42 in jail, according to a statement by the Burlington County Prosecutor.

The 40-year-old from Burlington was also found guilty of burglary and weapons charges.

County Prosecutor Scott Coffina said in a statement: Given this defendants enormous criminal history, and the violent way in which he killed the mother of his child, it is hard to imagine a defendant more deserving of the life sentence the State sought here.

Shanai Marshall was described by her family and friends as a loving, fiercely loyal woman who was not afraid to speak her mind, according to NJ.com. She lived in Mount Holly, Burlington County and was also known as Doobie.

The sentencing of her killer was attended by more than 20 of her family members and friends.

Coffina said: The Courts sentence of 50 years makes it likely that he will never experience freedom again, and that will hopefully afford some degree of comfort to Shanais loved ones.

Marshall had broken up with her abusive boyfriend Causey just before he stabbed her to death with a butchers knife at her home in Monroe Street in Nov. 2016, reported NJ.com. According to friends and family, it looked like she had intended the split to be permanent.

She was done with the guy  You could see the glow in her, Nicole Vieira, 42, of Lumberton, told NJ.com at the time. She was serious, and he knew it.

Marshall, who died aged 37, grew up in Mount Holly, and has three sons. The eldest was 23 at the time of her death, another was seven, and the youngest, the son of Causey, was nearly two, according to NJ.com.

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Manhunt for Michigan Couple After 4-Year-Old Daughter Found Dead

A manhunt is currently ongoing for a Sumpter Township, Michigan, couple after their 4-year-old daughter was found dead, WXYZ-TV reported.

Police are searching for 24-year-old Candice Diaz and 28-year-old Brad Fields, the report said. They responded to a 911 call on New Years Day regarding an unresponsive toddler girl.

When police arrived, CPR was being administered to the girl by family members. The report stated that the girl was suffering from obvious severe burns about her extremities.

She was taken to the hospital, where she was later pronounced dead. Two days later, the Washtenaw County Medical Examiner said the childs death was a homicide, WXYZ said, adding that there was evidence of multiple traumatic injuries and signs of Battered Child Syndrome.

Diaz and Fields are believed to be driving a 2002 Chevy Cavalier with a Michigan license plate that reads DTR 1854.

ClickonDetroit reported that the home where the girl was discovered was filled with animal waste, guns, and drugs. In May 2016, officers stormed the home after reports of a barricaded gunman following a domestic disturbance. The girls mother said that her boyfriend abused her, shot their dog, and then shot himself.

Anyone with information about their whereabouts is asked to call the U.S. Marshal Detroit Fugitive Apprehension Teams 24-hour hotline at (313) 234-5656 or the Sumpter Township Police Department at (734) 461-4833 ext. 305.

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Mother and Daughter Killed in Three Car Crash in Texas

A mother and daughter were killed in a crash involving three cars on a wet road in Burleson, Texas, on the evening of Sunday, Jan. 7.

A minivan carrying a family of four was stopped on the 2300 block of Renfro Street at about 5:45 p.m. and was waiting to make a left turn when a Ford F-150 pickup did not see the minivan and struck it from behind, reported Dallas News, citing police.

Mother, daughter killed in Burleson crash that injured 5 others https://t.co/BD8GSb0bfx  Spaceman Reporter (@beatlesjad) January 8, 2018

Department of Public Safety Sgt. Dub Gillum said the minivan was then pushed into oncoming traffic and was hit by a Ford Ranger pickup truck that was carrying two passengers.

The mother and daughter in the minivan died at the scene. The father and another daughter were taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in a critical condition, reported the newspaper, citing Gillum.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiners Office identified the victims as Lorissa Quan, 36, of Burleson, and her daughter, Hannah Quan, 7, reported the Star-Telegram.

The driver of the F-150 and two passengers in the Ranger were injured and transported to the hospital.

Officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety said the driver of the F-150 was looking down when he struck the minivan from behind, reported NBC.

This is a developing story. More information will be released later.

From NTD.tv

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MP Geng Tan Showed Bad Judgement Intermediating on Behalf of Man Investigated for Fraud, Says Expert

The Prime Ministers Office defends Liberal MPs action delivering letter on behalf of Chinese-Canadian charged and later arrested for fraud

Liberal MP Geng Tan acted as an intermediary for a Chinese-Canadian businessman charged with fraud, The Globe and Mail reports.

According to the Globe, Tan hand-delivered a document to a top official at Canadas embassy in Beijing on June 1, 2017. The document was an unsigned letter from Toronto-based businessman Xiao Hua Gong, also known as Edward Gong, who was arrested on Dec. 28, 2017, in relation to fraud charges by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) and was released on bail the next day. Tan also reportedly spoke with Chinese authorities on Gongs behalf.

The Canadian embassy official turned the letter over to the RCMP, according to an OSC affidavit filed in a Toronto court, the Globe reported. In the letter, Gong denies running a pyramid scheme and promises to cooperate with the investigators in both Canada and China.

Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor and director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, says Tans move shows how naive he is, and very bad judgement.

The office of Tan, who represents the Don Valley North riding in Toronto, said the MP was unavailable for an interview but provided a statement attributed to him, stating: I simply transported a piece of correspondence on behalf of a fellow member of the Toronto-North York Community. I was unaware of any Canadian investigation into this individual. Any inference of influence in this matter is simply wrong.

Wiseman says Tan may not have known that Gong was being investigated by Canadian authorities, but obviously he was being investigated in China.

According to the Globe, the Prime Ministers Office did not confirm whether the prime minister condones or approves of Tans action, but said Tan was performing his parliamentary duties when delivering the letter to the embassy and talking with Chinese authorities about Gongs case. Gong does not reside in Tans riding but in Don Valley West, the Globe reports.

David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China, expressed surprise at the MPs actions and praised the embassy official for giving the letter to the RCMP, according to the Globe. It is the kind of thing you do in China  when you try to use your prestige or connections to smooth something over. It is not how things are done in Canada, Mulroney said.

Tan became the first MP originally from mainland China when he won the riding seat in the 2015 federal elections. His campaign included appealing to the Chinese community and generating support from Mandarin speakers.

Online reports in Chinese on the website of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office show Tan meeting with the head of the organization, which operates under Chinas United Front apparatus.

As reported previously by The Epoch Times, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses the United Front to run operations through Beijings overseas embassies and consulates, specifically working to create a united front for the CCP by subverting and influencing foreign governments and societies.

Tan, who obtained his Masters and PhD degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Toronto, was also chair of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) for two terms at the university in the early 2000s.

According to a paper by Anne-Marie Brady, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a global fellow at the Wilson Center, CSSAs are one of the main means the Chinese authorities use to guide Chinese students and scholars on short-term study abroad.

The about us section of the University of Toronto CSSA says in Chinese that the chapter was founded with the support of the Chinese Consulate.

Tan was also at one point the vice chairman of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations (CTCCO), which is known to adopt pro-Beijing stances on issues involving China, such as supporting inclusion of Beijings Confucius Institute in the Toronto District School Board.

Lawyers representing businessman Gong say in a statement that he denies all the allegations and will contest all the charges raised by the OSC and China.

Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated: Wiseman says Tan may not have known that Gong was being investigated by Chinese authorities, but obviously he was being investigated in China. This was corrected to: Wiseman says Tan may not have known that Gong was being investigated by Canadian authorities, but obviously he was being investigated in China. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Pennsylvania Couple Charged After Leaving Dog Outside in Freezing Weather

A Pennsylvania man and woman have been charged with animal cruelty after allegedly leaving their dog outside in freezing temperatures for hours.

Neighbors in Steelton noticed the dog tethered outside, whimpering, and called authorities.

Officers found the Husky chained outside with no food, water, or shelter, reported Penn Live. The temperature on the day, Dec. 31, hovered around 13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ivan Bailey, 25, and Catherine Shoenberger, age unknown, refused to identify themselves or cooperate with police, reported Fox43.

They were taken into custody and charged with cruelty to animals, obstruction of justice, neglect of an animal, failure to have the dog vaccinated, and failure to have the dog licensed.

A new Pennsylvania law allows for fines and even jail time if a dog owner leaves a pet outside without adequate shelter for too long in freezing weather.https://t.co/4DGicYT8cl pic.twitter.com/hlChRmRRKL  CBS 6 Albany  WRGB (@CBS6Albany) November 19, 2017

A Pennsylvania law passed late last year gives judges the authority to levy fines and even jail time to pet owners who tether their pets outside for longer than half an hour in temperatures below freezing, reported USA Today.

Continuous tethering can cause severe physical damages, such as cracked and bleeding paws, frostbite and hypothermia, Kristen Tullo, Pennsylvania state director of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a news release.

She said neighbors should report people who are violating the law.

If its too cold for you, its too cold for them, she added.

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Pennsylvania Man Sentenced After Marrying His Wifes Daughter

A 44-year-old American man has been sentenced to prison after pleading no contest to charges that he married his wifes daughter.

Christopher I. Hauptmann of Pennsylvania will serve a term ranging from one year to two years, reported Penn Live.

The saga started when Hauptmann married Shannon Deitrich in Florida in 2015.

A year later, Hauptmann married Deitrichs daughter Kaylee Durovickwithout having divorced Deitrich, according to a previous Penn Live report.



Durovick is 25 years younger than her mother.

This is a bizarre case, Shamokin District Judge John Gembic said, reported the Daily Item.

Hauptmann said he respects the law and always follows it in the initial hearing early in 2017.

I have always been on the side of the law, and I have had police back me up several times, he said, reported the Item.

Thats why they handcuffed me in the front because they know I am no threat to them.

Hauptmann and his second wife own and operate PA Bail and Recovery in Coal Township.



As part of the sentence, Hauptmann must not contact his first wife. As Penn Live noted, a no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is acknowledgment the prosecution had sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction if the case went to trial.

Hauptmanns first wife and her daughter are not on speaking terms, Deitrich indicated on Facebook.

Ripping my heart out all over again, she posted soon after her husband married her daughter, according to the Item.

On Oct. 31, Deitrich posted: Met with my divorce attorney  feeling very hopeful and seeing a light at the end of this black hole marriage. finally!!!

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A paper fragment recovered from the wreck of pirate Blackbeard's ship (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)/Illustration of Blackbeard (Library of Congress)

Stunning Discovery on Blackbeards Ship Reveals Pirates Reading Habits

Experts analyzing the remnants of a pirate shipwreck announced a stunning discovery after linking several paper fragments found aboard the vessel to an 18th-century book.

The paper fragments were found aboard the flagship pirate vessel, Queen Annes Revenge. The boat ran aground off the coast of North Carolina in 1718, National Geographic reported.

The ship was confirmed in 2011 to belong to notorious pirate Blackbeard. Scientists have lifted parts of the ship to the surface over the years, including several cannons, jewelry, and tools, according to Fox News.

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (NCDNCR) says that 16 paper fragments were found in a mass of wet sludge inside one of the cannons. The largest pieces were about the size of a quarter.

As the work progressed another discovery was made  that there was still legible printed text on some of the fragments, although only a few words were visible, explained NCDNCR, in its statement. The challenge then became not just to conserve the paper fragments, but also to identify where they were from.

It took months of research to link one of the fragments to a book: A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, 1708, 1709, 1710, and 1711, by Captain Edward Cooke.

The book was a narrative of a voyage, a genre popular at the time. The book chronicles a journey by two ships that sailed from England in 1708. The leader of the expedition, Captain Woodes Rogers, also wrote a book about the voyage.

Rogers and Cooke both describe how they rescued a man marooned on an island for four years. The description of the episode later inspired Daniel Defoe to write the famous novel Robinson Crusoe.

Although books like these voyage narratives would have been relatively common on ships of the early 18th century, archaeological evidence for them is exceedingly rare, and this find represents a glimpse into the reading habits of a pirate crew, NCDNCR explained in a statement. The historical record has several references to books aboard vessels in Blackbeards fleet, but provides no specific titles; this find is the first archaeological evidence for their presence on QAR [Queen Annes Revenge].

Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, captured a French slave ship in 1717 and renamed it Queen Annes Revenge. Royal Navy forces killed Blackbeard in November 1718, several months after his ship sank.

NCDNCR will hold several events to mark the anniversary of Blackbeards death later this year.

Experts are still working to document the other paper fragments.

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Ivan Pentchoukov Follow Ivan is the national editor of The Epoch Times. He has reported for The Epoch Times on a variety of topics since 2011.

From NTD.tv
Teen Girl Who Shaved Head for Charity Punished for Violating Schools Extreme Haircut Policy

A British teenager who shaved her hair off for charity was punished by her school for attending with a shaved head.

Niamh Baldwin, 14, was removed from her class by Mounts Bay Academy in Penzance the day after she donated her hair to Little Princess Trust, which makes wigs for sick children suffering from hair loss.

Her mother, 32-year-old Anneka Baldwin, took to Facebook to slam the punishment.

I think this is the most courageous and amazing thing to do and makes me so proud, thats why I am so upset that the school has made her feel so low and put her into isolation, she wrote in a post, which has been widely shared since.

Niamh has always had outstanding reports and feedback from all her teachers and everyone I know and she meets always say she is an maxing [sic] polite and lovely girl !! This doesnt change because of a hairstyle and to me it is discrimination!!! Im actually fuming!



But the schools principal, Sara Davey, told the Daily Mail that the teenager had broken the schools rules and deserved to be punished.

Davey said the family should have asked before conducting such a radical haircut, and if they had done so, she would have advised them to choose an alternative method to give to charity.

The family had every opportunity to contact the school about their actions before Niamh shaved her hair for charity but they for some reason did not do this, she said.

The policy on extreme haircuts in school is very clear and has been published in our behavior policy for many years. Extreme haircuts including head shaving have never been allowed and this is common for schools across the UK, Dewey said in a statement to Cornwall Live.

She said the teenager should wear a headscarf until her hair grows back.

Mounts Bay Academy Vice Principal Les Hall added to the BBC that her appearance was upsetting and confusing to a number of students and staff.

In case of a rule being broken, according to the schools policies, students may face a reprimand, students may be moved within the class, or students may face isolation in the same or a separate room.

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A Humpback whale jumps in the surface of the Pacific Ocean at the Uramba Bahia Malaga natural park in Colombia, on July 16, 2013. (Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images)

The Moment a Whale Saves a Snorkler From a Shark

A breath-taking video captures the moment a giant humpback whale protected a snorkeler from a tiger shark, by pushing her through the water and protecting her under its fin.

The stunning footage shows the 50,000-pound whale push marine biologist Nan Hauser to safety using its head and mouth, and tucking her under its fin.

I wasnt sure what the whale was up to when he approached me, and it didnt stop pushing me around for over 10 minutes. It seemed like hours. I was a bit bruised up, Hauser told the Mirror.

I tried to get away from him for fear that if he rammed me too hard, or hit me with his flippers or tail, that would break my bones and rupture my organs.

She added, I never took my eyes off him which is why I didnt see the shark right away.

Scientists have recorded cases where humpback whales have protected other species, but this is the first footage that documents them protecting a human, she said.

The video shows the moment Hauser realizes there is a circling tiger shark nearby and she breaks the surface of the ocean to let her team know.

Source: National Geographic

Some fisherman in the area had told her that the lurking tiger shark was about 20 feet long.

The snorkeler is eventually able to return to the safety of the boat. She looks back and the whale peaks over the surface, as if the animal is looking out for her safety.

Hauser, who has been studying whales for 28 years, had known about the altruistic behavior of humpback whales.

They truly display altruismsometimes at the risk of losing their own lives, she said.

The encounter was filmed off Muri Beach on the Cook Islands in the South Pacific by a cameraman who had never filmed a whale before. Hauser says the team decided to abandon their drone footage because they didnt want to film her death.

Ive spent 28 years underwater with whales, and have never had a whale so tactile and so insistent on putting me on his head, or belly, or back, or, most of all, trying to tuck me under his huge pectoral fin, she told the newspaper.

In my head, I was a bit amused since I write Rules and Regulations about whale harassmentand here I was being harassed by a whale.

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A Malaysia Airlines plane (below) prepares to go onto the runway and pass by a stationary Chinese Ilyushin 76 aircraft (top) at Perth International Airport on March 25, 2014. (Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images)

Malaysia Hires US Firm to Search for Missing Flight MH370

Malaysia has hired a Houston-based search company took look for the wreckage of Malaysia Air Flight 370, which disappeared mysteriously March 8, 2014.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 and 12 crew from the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. The flight disappeared from radar shortly after leaving Malaysia. Data analysis shows the plane flew about another six hours before crashing into the sea.

The flight initially headed northeast, towards Beijing, then made an unexpected turn southwest and then northwest, before making its last satellite contact northwest of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, according to Australian science bureau Geoscience Australia.

The plane was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet at last contact. This made the potential crash zone enormous.

Australia, with its greater resources took over the search from the Malaysian government on March 31, 2014, according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

The search was divided into a 52-day surface search covering several million square miles of ocean, and an underwater search covering 274,000 square miles, according to CBS News. According to ATSB the search area was one of the largestif not the largestin recorded history.

The search for the missing plane was officially abandoned on Jan. 17, 20171,046 days after it beganwith no information having been gained about what happened to the missing jet.

Now a private company, Ocean Infinity, based in Houston, Texas, has offered to take up the search, and Malaysia has agreed.

Ocean Infinity has offered to search free-of-charge unless it finds artifacts from the crash, which Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai called, No find, no fee, according to The Malaysian Insight.

It is our duty to look for answers and the plane, and as of today the government has decided to go ahead with the search, he told The Malaysian Insighter.

Malaysias government informed relatives of MH370 passengers of the new search effort in a message which said, in part, that the MH370 response team wishes to note that the government of Malaysia has engaged Ocean Infinity to undertake further search operation for MH370, according to AFP.

Ocean Infinity has leased the Norwegian research ship Seabed Construction, which is equipped with several autonomous underwater vessels (UAVs), essentially robot-controlled underwater drones which will scour a new region of the ocean bottom.

New Potential Search Zone

Photographs from French military satellites two weeks after Flight MH370s disappearance showed some 70 objects floating north of where the flight was suspected to have crashed.

Analysis of these photos by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) which is Australias official science agency, and Geoscience Australia indicated that 12 of the objects might be man-made.

CSIRO released a report in April 2017 indicating that the most likely crash site was in an area of just under 10,000 square miles, to the north of the original undersea search area of over 46,000 square miles, according to News.com.au.

A piece of a Boeing 777 wing, called a flaperon, washed ashore on Africas La Reunion Island in July 2015.

CSIRO scientist Dr. David Griffin conducted a test using another Boeing 777 flaperon, and after studying drift patterns, said the wing washing up on la Reunion confirmed the latest theory.

It indicates that the most likely location of MH370 is in the new search area, Griffin told News.com.au.

We cannot be absolutely certain, but that is where all the evidence we have points us, and this new work leaves us more confident in our findings, he continued.

Knowing how the flaperon, and the other parts of MH370 that have been found, respond to wind and waves is just as important as knowing the currents of the Indian Ocean.

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An Emirati Etihad Airways' Boeing 787 airliner is seen taking off from Beirut International Airport on Nov. 10, 2017. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)

Woman Arrested After Body of Newborn Baby Found in Airplane

A woman has been arrested after the body of a newborn baby was found in a plane toilet by cleaning staff in Indonesia.

The Etihad flight from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday, Jan. 7, should have gone straight to Jakarta, Indonesia. But about four hours into the flight, a woman began to suffer from bleeding, forcing the captain to divert to Bangkok, where she was evacuated by a medical team, reported the Jakarta Post.

It was not until the plane had gone on to reach its final destination in Jakarta without her that airline staff realized the woman had given birth on the flightwhen cleaners discovered the body of a full-term baby boy.

The woman was a 37-year-old from Cianjur in West Java.

She was identified by Indonesian police only as Hani, and was arrested when she arrived in Indonesia after catching another later flight from Thailand to Soekarno-Hatta airport in Jakarta.

She didnt look healthy and wont be questioned until she is fit, airport police chief Ahmad Yusef told AFP. The woman is now at the airports health center.

Yusef said that ground cleaners in Jakarta had found the body wrapped in a plastic bag in a drawer. He said that cause of death had not been established.

Police suspect that Hani secretly gave birth to the baby during the flight on the Airbus 380, which originally took off from Abu Dhabi.

Crewmember Francesco Calore told AFP, The woman was in economy class but then laid on a business-class seat with an oxygen mask. The captain then announced we should divert to Bangkok.

Calore said a medical team boarded the plane at Bangkoks Suvarnabhumi International Airport, where she was taken off.

Hani had been working as a domestic servant in the UAE for four years.

She has a husband and child back in her home country of Indonesia, according to the Jakarta Post.

Hani admitted it was her baby and said that she left the baby in the bin because he was the result of a relationship with her employer in Abu Dhabi, claims the Post.

About 70 percent of the 5 million Indonesian citizens who work abroad are domestic helpers, according to Newsweek.

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NEW YORKLast May, Jared Kushner accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, on the pairs first diplomatic trip to Israel, part of Kushners White House assignment to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Shortly before, his family real estate company received a roughly $30-million (U.S.) investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer that is one of Israels largest financial institutions, according to a Menora executive.

The deal, which was not made public, pumped significant new equity into 10 Maryland apartment complexes controlled by Kushners firm. While Kushner has sold parts of his business since taking a White House job last year, he still has stakes in most of the family empire, including the apartment buildings in and around Baltimore.

The Menora transaction is the latest financial arrangement that has surfaced between Kushners family business and Israeli partners, including one of the countrys wealthiest families and a large Israeli bank that is the subject of a U.S. criminal investigation.

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The business dealings dont appear to violate federal ethics laws, which require Kushner to recuse himself only from narrow government decisions that would have a direct and predictable effect on his financial interests. And no evidence has emerged that Kushner was personally involved in brokering the deal.

But the deal last spring illustrates how the Kushner Cos. extensive financial ties to Israel continue to deepen, even with his prominent diplomatic role in the Middle East. The arrangement could undermine the ability of the United States to be seen as an independent broker in the region. The Trump administration already inflamed tensions there when it said last month that it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and would move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

I think its reasonable for people to ask whether his business interests are somehow affecting his judgment, said Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington who specializes in government ethics and was general counsel to Sen. Rand Pauls presidential campaign.

Raj Shah, a deputy White House press secretary, said the Trump administration has tremendous confidence in the job Jared is doing leading our peace efforts, and he takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration.

Christine Taylor, a spokesperson for Kushner Cos., said the company has partners around the world. It does no business, she said, with foreign sovereigns or governments, and is not precluded from doing business with any foreign company simply because Jared is working in the government.

Menora, which is also Israels largest manager of pension funds, has done numerous other real estate deals, including several in the United States, said Ran Markman, Menoras head of real estate. He said he had never met Kushner. In negotiating the deal with Kushner Cos., Markman said, he worked with Laurent Morali, the firms president.

The deal was not done because of the so-called connections of Jared Kushner or Donald Trump, Markman said. The connection to the president was not an issue. It didnt make us do the deal, it didnt make us not do the deal.

Kushner resigned as chief executive of Kushner Cos. when he joined the White House last January. But he remains the beneficiary of a series of trusts that own stakes in Kushner properties and other investments. Those are worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings, and most probably much more: The estimate nets out the significant debt accumulated by the firm, which has done about $7 billion of deals in the past decade.

The Baltimore-area buildings in which Menora invested were the subject of an article by a ProPublica reporter in the New York Times magazine last year that documented the poor living conditions and aggressive tactics used by Kushner Cos., including garnishing the bank accounts of low-income tenants and turning off heat and hot water.

The White House has said Kushner would work with his ethics advisers to ensure he recused himself from any particular matter involving specific parties in which he has a business relationship with a party to the matter.

But a White House official also said Kushner had sold stakes in properties that would present unique complexity. For example, he sold his stake in the companys headquarters at 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan, which is seeking new investors around the world.

It is unclear why Kushner hasnt applied that same principle to the buildings in Maryland that received an investment from Menora.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement: Jared Kushner has not been involved in, nor spoken about any Kushner Companies activities or project, since shortly before the Inauguration. He has an ethics agreement, reviewed by lawyers, with which he is in full compliance. Connecting any of his well-publicized trips to the Middle East to anything to do with Kushner Companies or its businesses is nonsensical and is a stretch to write a story where none actually exists.

But Sanderson, the lawyer who specializes in government ethics, said, Their standard seems like some version of Its a conflict when I think its a conflict, and Ill make that judgment myself. 

One issue, said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics group, is that the ethics laws were not crafted by people who had the foresight to imagine a Donald Trump or a Jared Kushner.

No one could ever imagine this scale of ongoing business interests, not in a local peanut farm or a hardware store but sprawling global businesses that give the president and his top adviser personal economic stakes in an astounding number of policy interests, Weissman added.

The deal with Menora is one of many financial relationships that Kushner Cos. has in Israel.

In April, the Times reported that the Kushners had teamed up with at least one member of Israels wealthy Steinmetz family to buy nearly $200 million of Manhattan apartment buildings, as well as to build a luxury rental tower in New Jersey. The familys best-known member, Beny Steinmetz, is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department bribery investigation. Steinmetz has denied any wrongdoing.

Kushners company has also taken out at least four loans from Israels largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, which is the subject of a U.S. justice department investigation over allegations that it helped wealthy Americans evade taxes.

The firm also bought several floors of the former New York Times headquarters building in Manhattan from Lev Leviev, an Israeli businessman and philanthropist.

And the Kushner familys foundation continues to donate money to a settlement group in the West Bank.

Kushners close relationship with Israeli officials has even come up in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, spoke with the Russian ambassador before a UN Security Council vote to condemn Israels building of settlements in late 2016, according to court documents filed by Muellers office. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

A very senior member of the presidential transition team directed Flynn to discuss the resolution, the court documents said. Trumps lawyers believe that unnamed aide was Kushner, according to a lawyer briefed on the matter.

A lot of people wonder whether the United States has ever been an honest broker in the Middle East, and given the positions of the Trump administration, its probably even more vulnerable to those claims, said Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and is a professor at the University of Minnesota law school.

Now, the United States is sending over a special envoy who has already identified himself personally more with the hawkish views, Painter said, and he is getting money from wealthy citizens and businesses in one particular country.

Painter added: Youve got a situation that is going to be abused by people who dont like the United States. Hes going to make it that much worse.

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Arguments, fights and meltdowns have been a part of commercial airline service for decades, but airborne conflicts have become viral internet sensations in the past few years, now that nearly every flyer is armed with a smartphone and access to social media.

It has changed the dynamics of what happens in our planes and at our gate areas, said Suzanne Boda, American Airlines senior vice president for Los Angeles.

For that reason, the Fort Worth-based carrier is requiring all flight attendants and employees who deal with customers to take training on how to de-escalate conflicts with passengers. That applies to about 65,000 American Airlines employees.

The addition of such training had been discussed at the airline for months but became a priority after an incident in April when a feud broke out between a flight attendant and a passenger over a baby stroller. As has been the case with other cabin imbroglios, it was caught on camera and posted on the internet.

These things happen, Boda said.

An industry trade group said last month that fewer passengers became unruly on commercial flights in 2016 but a bigger share of those incidents involved serious behaviour problems such as fighting or threatening passengers and crew members.

The training at American Airlines began last summer and will continue for several more months.

United Airlines said last year that it would review its employee training after a passenger was dragged from his seat after refusing to give it up to make space for crew members. It was caught on video as well.

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The antique-style lamps that are fast becoming a design necessity for retro bars, hip restaurants and chic homes from New York to London are helping to save the Earth  and keep people buying.

The old-fashioned bulbs, which look like the inefficient incandescent technology patented by Thomas Edison in 1878, could encourage people to change their lightbulbs more than once a decade, even as the world moves to greener lamps.

By rearranging LED chips onto a strip inside the bulb instead of in a clump, bulb makers found they can satisfy the innate human desire for warmer, natural light, which the first generation of LED bulbs failed to offer.

People are looking for that sparkle and the cosy and warm effect that you see in incandescent bulbs, said Kristof Vermeersch, head of global product management of LED spots at Philips Lighting NV.

Shifting fashions in lighting could help drive sales of LED bulbs that would otherwise need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years, because theyre so much more efficient than incandescent bulbs that need to be replaced a few times a year.

The real problem of LED lighting is that the bulbs last for ages, so they dont have these replacement cycles where the market just carries on making money, said Tom Rowlands-Rees, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Now, the industry has found a way to make people pay more for lighting because its cool, not because they need it, he said.

When filament LED technology was first demonstrated, by Japanese company Ushio Inc. in 2008, it wasnt an immediate hit. Sales started to take off in the past two years, however, as the design was improved, prices fell and larger manufacturers from Philips to GE Lighting started making them, too.

When LED first came out, it looked like alien material, said Justin Wang, chief executive officer of AXP Technology Inc., the California company that introduced filament LED in the U.S. But when filament LED came out, it looked like a familiar incandescent bulb.

Just four years ago, the market for filament LED was tiny, and mainly focused in a few northern European countries. Now, shipments are growing rapidly, and the market could be valued at $20 billion (U.S.) globally by 2020, calculated Wang, using LEDinside and TrendForce Corp. shipment and pricing forecasts.

Filament LEDs could also solve a problem for policy-makers who have long desired to ban inefficient incandescent bulbs, over the objections of consumers who prefer the old-style look.

Almost a third of British people who voted to leave the European Union in 2016 said they wanted to see the return of the old bulbs that were banned by Brussels bureaucrats, according to a YouGov poll. Even U.S. President Donald Trump wrongly warned in 2012 on Twitter that energy-saving bulbs can cause cancer because of the minuscule amounts of ultraviolet rays they give out.

With better aesthetics, filament LEDs could help speed the switch from the 7 billion incandescent lamps still lighting the planet. Lighting demand is expected to rise 50 per cent in the next two decades as poorer countries gain more access to power, according to the United Nations. Switching to LEDs could offset some of that increase, avoiding the release of more than 390 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Its still difficult for consumers to tell the difference between an incandescent bulb and a filament LED, and manufacturers like GE say they need to do more to promote the benefits of this growing market.

LED has been a tricky sell because you have to teach consumers and retailers about the technology, said Matt Sommers, consumer innovation manager at GE Lighting. We cant just assume that they can look at it and know what it is.

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It all got brought back up again, at first, because of a joke.

Golden Globes host Seth Meyers stood before Oprah Winfrey, who was set to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award Sunday night and was sitting in the very front of the room. As Meyers opened the awards show, he mentioned his 2011 White House correspondents dinner gig, the one where he joked about Donald Trump not being qualified for president.

Some have said that night convinced him to run. So, if thats true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes. And Hanks! Wheres Hanks? You will never be vice president. You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.

Winfrey burst into laughter. But an hour later, she took the stage to deliver an incredibly rousing speech that was both personal and a universal call to action. I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon, she said to thunderous applause.

She brought the crowd at the Beverly Hilton to its feet. On social media, chatter built about her presidential prospects.

Its up to the people, her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. She would absolutely do it.

Her best friend, Gayle King, told the outlet: I thought that speech was incredible. I got goose bumps.

That night, the Los Angeles Times told Winfrey that the internet is saying Oprah for president in 2020. What does Oprah say?

I say, Im just glad I got through the speech! she answered. I thought a lot about it. I wanted this to be a meaningful moment.

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But would she consider a 2020 presidential run? Okaay! she reportedly responded.

CNN, citing two anonymous sources, said Winfreys confidants have been urging her for months to run for office. Brad Anderson, the Iowa state director for President Barack Obamas reelection, tweeted, Call me Oprah. Ive got some Iowa county chairs who would love to hear from you.

In the past, Winfrey has definitely shut down the suggestion. She told The Hollywood Reporter in June, I will never run for public office. Thats a pretty definitive thing.

There have also been several moments where Winfrey has teased at the possibility. In September, she tweeted out a New York Post column with the headline, Democrats best hope for 2020: Oprah.

Tagging the author, she wrote, Thanks for your VOTE of confidence!

In a March interview with Bloomberg TV, David Rubenstein asked Winfrey about her 2020 plans. As The Posts Helena Andrews-Dyer reported:

Have you ever thought that, given the popularity you have  we havent broken the glass ceiling yet for women  that you could actually run for president and actually be elected? asked Rubenstein.

The live audience, predictably, went a little nuts at the mere mention of Winfreys name in connection (even hypothetically) to the White House. For her part, Winfrey, who has been in the TV business for nearly 40 years, paused for dramatic effect.

I never considered the question even a possibility, she said, before adding, I just thought, Oh ... oh?

Without mentioning President Trumps name, Rubenstein then pointed out that its clear you dont need government experience to be elected president of the United States.

Thats what I thought, Winfrey said. I thought, Oh gee, I dont have the experience, I dont know enough. And now Im thinking, Oh.

King, Winfreys best friend, tried to clear things up the next day. It was clearly a joke, King said on CBS. I also heard on The Oprah Winfrey Show over the years you always have the right to change your mind, but I would bet my first, second born and any unborn children to come, that aint never happening.

Honestly, the tweets, the comments  they all could have been fun little jokes. But its no longer all that far-fetched to think that someone known primarily for their work on TV and with absolutely no governing experience could not only run for president but also win. And connecting an uber-popular name like Oprah with presidential campaign is naturally going to generate loads of excitement. (Also, lets not forget the speculation about The Rock 2020).

Then theres her popularity. A March 2017 Quinnipiac University poll found Winfrey had a 52 per cent favourable rating (and just a 23 per cent unfavourable rating). She was most popular with Democrats (72 per cent) and independents (51 per cent). But that doesnt mean those polled wanted her to throw her hat into the ring; just over one in five said Winfrey should run in 2020, and 69 per cent said she shouldnt.

For most of her time as a daytime talk show host, Winfrey avoided bringing politicians on for interviews.

I didnt want to delve into the world of politics because I felt I lost control, she said on the Making Oprah podcast. I cant get them to actually respond because a skilled politician knows how to give the answer they want. She ended up breaking with that stance in 2000, when she gave equal time to both major party candidates: Al Gore and George W. Bush. (Bushs approval ratings jumped that week.)

Then, in 2004, she heard Barack Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention. Thoroughly impressed, she brought the senator onto her show in 2006. When he ran for president in 2008, she publicly endorsed him. Winfrey  who commanded a viewership of tens of millions of loyal women  for the first time publicly put her formidable stamp of approval on a candidate.

It came from such a pure instinctive place, she said on the podcast. I didnt even think about it in terms of business or viewership.

Since then, Winfrey endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But would she challenge Trump? He had glowing things to say about her political prospects back in 1999. When asked whether hed ever consider a female running mate, Trump responded: Well, I would consider, and as Chris [Matthews] can tell you, I threw out the name of a friend of mine, who I think the world of. Shes great. And some people thought it was an incredible idea, some people didnt, but  Oprah. I said, Oprah Winfrey, whos really great. And I think we would be a very formidable team.

Then theres the time Winfrey interviewed Trump about his presidential hopes  in 1988.

I just probably wouldnt do it, Oprah, but I do get tired of seeing whats happening with this country, he said. And if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally.

And we all see how that turned out.

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NORTHLAND, N.Z.Im standing at the edge of a very steep, camel-coloured slope, staring out into a never-ending world of 100-metre sand peaks and valleys that have been sculpted by nearby winds from the Tasman Sea. The midday New Zealand sun is bearing down on my face, which is feeling markedly drippy after an inclined hike to the top of the giant Te Paki dunes in the North Islands Northland region.

Having been first in the climbing queue of tourists whove opted to partake in this full-day Sand Safaris expedition, I wait for a moment in silence. My only companion atop this grand vantage point is the slick-bottomed sandboard that Im expected to ride face-first to the dunes faraway bottom.

Making their way up the sandy trail several paces behind me are a mother and daughter duo, a young couple who have been smooching the whole bus ride to Te Paki, a family of four and a gang of besties who are documenting every frame of their travels for Instagram.

Im on top of the world alone, travelling very much solo and feeling leery of taking the sand-swept plunge without an assuring word or gesture from a partner, friend or family member.

It doesnt even look scary, says a tiny boy behind me who belongs to the family that has now made its way to the top of the dune.

Thats just wonderful to hear kid, I think to myself, because Im a 33-year-old seasoned traveller and Im feeling bloody terrified.

While gauging the amount of time it will take to careen toward my possible death, I spot the enthusiastic wave of our Sand Safaris driver Senny Robinson, who is encouraging me from a spot far below.

The veteran Northland tour guide of Maori descent has guided us to this point via an hour-long bus ride down Ninety Mile Beach.

Its actually considered a highway on the sand, Robinson had said along the way, as we had gazed into the distance from the cosy confines of our hefty dune rider bus.

It was here that I had come into brief contact with a lone hiker who was making his way south down the coastline along the ultra challenging, 3,000-kilometre Te Araroa trail.

I was told that the area was the resting place of many cars swept suddenly into the swell by three-metre long sneak tides, and yet I had ventured far from our vehicle to the waterline.

While snapping photos of the beachs famous Hole in the Rock, I became distracted and didnt notice a sheet of rushing water coming my way. A laughing holler of warning from the hiker sent me running in the opposite direction, saving my running shoes from inevitable immersion. Then the man walked away with his hiking pole to become a solitary speck along the beachscape.

So while Im standing on the edge of this dune, I think about this guy, a fellow loner in an unfamiliar place, and it occurs to me that here and on that beach werent the only times Id become aware of my solitude in this country.

I was alone when I walked myself into a tiny emergency room in the nearby town of Kerikeri a few days before, where I was tended to immediately and thoroughly by a wonderful doctor for an ear infection that had gotten out of hand.

I was alone when I had driven on the left side of the road for the first time in my life along the winding country highways of Rotorua, where a group of strangers I encountered at a gas station drew me an elaborate area map in case I got turned around.

I was alone when I arrived in Auckland and a cab driver transferred a small package of TimTams (chocolate biscuits) from his hand to mine after shaking my hand to wish me good luck on my travels.

And later this day I will find myself completely alone when Im taken by the Sand Safaris tour to Cape Reinga  an unforgettably spectacular lookout to turbulent ocean waters known by the Maori as the jumping off place of dead spirits to the underworld. There I will venture off to a secluded spot to watch the Pacific Ocean smash into the Tasman, losing all track of time before the smoochy couple from the bus will find me and remind me that its time to head back.

On New Zealands North Island Ive been alone, yes, but Ive never been lonely.

The Te Paki sand dunes were once a part of their own island, separated from what is now mainland New Zealand. Over millions of years the narrow mass of land was pushed by sand buildup from volcanoes in the south, eventually shifting the lands to connection.

Once in a world of its own, this very mountain on which I now stand was pushed by its surroundings to become a part of something bigger.

With a smile of encouragement, Robinson yells at me from down below to keep my elbows on the board as I get on my belly and shimmy the board closer the edge of the drop-off.

Hearing cheers from the safari companions behind me, I close my eyes, punch the hot sand with my back foot and plunge solo down the dune.

Liz Beddall was hosted by Tourism New Zealand, which didnt review or approve this story.

When you go

Get there: I flew with American Airlines from Toronto to Auckland with a stopover in Los Angeles. From Auckland, I flew with Barrier Air to the Kaitaia Airport, which is a five-minute drive from the Sand Safaris office.

Get around: I had a rental car from Far North Rentals at Kataia Airport. First-time left-side drivers can take an online driving quiz to perfect their skills before hitting the road.

Stay: I stayed at the expansive Ramada Resort Reia Taipa Beach, a short drive from Cape Reinga.

Surf the giant dunes: With the cheerful and insightful guidance of a local guide, visitors to the Northland can enjoy a full day of adventure in the region with tour group Sand Safaris. The daylong trip on an air-conditioned dune rider bus includes stops at Ninety Mile Beach, Cape Reinga, a barbecue lunch at Tapotupotu Bay and an unforgettable sand surfing experience at the Te Paki dunes.

Eat: The Mangonui Fish Shop is known far and wide for its locally sourced fish and chips and inspiring variety of dipping sauces.

Do your research: newzealand.com, northlandnz.com

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RUSSELL, N. Z.Where are the dolphins going to be? In the blue stuff ... thats all we know.

And with that declaration, skipper Martin Bonom of the 35-passenger Tutunui takes off from sparkling Kororareka Bay into the expansive waters of the Bay of Islands. There is nothing, we are told, to aid in the search for wild bottlenose dolphins but luck, keen eyes, and the knowledge that this is a favourite spot for the mammals to swim.

We recognize them only by sight, and the majority of the time, its the passengers who see them, Tutunui crew member Scotty Turton says. Together, he adds, well be looking for fins breaking the surface of the turquoise water and discolouring its vibrant glow with a dark shadow.

If you see a splash, or something black, yell and scream and point, Turton says, taking out his hefty binoculars. It could be a rock or a stick but it doesnt matter, it means youre paying attention.

There are about 20 pairs of eyes on board the Tutunui today taking part in the Fullers GreatSights dolphin eco experience. Our purpose-built boat with its powerful jet engine is eclipsing the ocean swells at an impressive pace as we whip our heads around under a sturdy canopy of shade.

Off the coast of the town of Russell, we are at one of the northernmost tips of New Zealands north island, where lush subtropical rainforests and slick, sand beaches grace the shorelines of the spectacular bay. Its an area soaking in history, having played host to significant whaling ports, expansive Maori settlements and affecting geological phenomena that has taken place across and in between its 100-plus islands.

Were going to be looking for a nice adult pod here, says Turton as we slow the vessel down near a row of volcanically designed basalt columns.

The landscape up top is quiet and spectacular, but underneath us, we are told, is a lavish universe of baleen whales, seals, sharks, penguins, and fish. One little girl looks petrified when its announced there may be orca in the water  another looks thrilled.

Early this morning, we saw dolphins jumping by the bow of that cruise ship, the boats skipper says, pointing to an enormous vessel stationed far to the south. But nothing has been seen since.

Turton adds over the crashing of ocean waves that dolphins can swim 200 kilometres a day. While boats in the bay often join forces by alerting each other of sightings, radar is not used for fear it might disrupt the natural order of the ocean. So, off we go again to chase the wild waves.

This is truly a game of cat and mouse, Turton says. Its nature.

Its also nature that decrees that although the water we want to explore beckons us to come swim, wading with the dolphins may not be an option today. Although its an experience that is theoretically offered as part of the eco dolphin journey, the stipulation that humans should not swim with a mother and her calf is one that Fullers GreatSights unwaveringly abides by.

Weve seen it before when private boats who dont understand the rules, Turton notes. Humans swim with them and the mother gets so distracted she will leave her little one and the little one will not know what to do. Its a touchy time of their lives in those early years.

Further, the company is passionate in its efforts to present the dolphins in their most natural state, exclusively trailing behind the dolphins or at their side so as not to disrupt their daily journey. And finally, Turton explains, if the dolphins seem disinterested in interacting with the boat, the crew will move on after five or 10 minutes of observation.

Its their world, Turton says. If they want to hang out, theyll show a lot of the signs.

While swimming with the mammals is not guaranteed, the possibility of a sighting is listed by Fullers GreatSights at 95 per cent.

And after our second hour passes in the scenic bay, and a possible fin in the distance turns out to be another rock breaking the surface of the water, I wonder if well be the unlucky few who dont benefit from the magnificent creatures wild ways.

And just like that, we have dolphins, Turton shouts suddenly, breaking up the engaged silence of the boats concentrated spotting efforts into a chorus of excited squeals.

At the boats left, there are three dolphins  visible as they swim in sync a few metres from our pointing fingers. One shows off a playful bellyroll, indicating a level of comfort with our presence, and so we climb quietly to the bows low-riding observation deck to watch them so closely that we can see every light scratch of history on their delicate skin.

When up to 15 of the marine marvels begin to make sudden appearances on either side of the boat, their presence leads to a mutual state of silence so that we all might catch each moment in our memories. With ease, power, and grace, they escort us through the bay for a full 30 minutes, bursting in and out of the waves as we sit, both elated and fixated on the natural display.

Soon after, its pointed out in a hushed tone that the dolphins can be heard peacefully breathing, a calf is spotted swimming with the pod alongside its mother, its tiny body and signature smile tell us that swimming wont be an option today, but reminds us that life is both bountiful and precious in these waters.

And with that, its decided that its time to let them be.

On one occasion, we saw a pod of transient orca that had come in from the South Pacific, Turton says, when asked about his most memorable expeditions as we make our way back to Russell. They were huge  it blew my mind.

On the way back from that, we saw a pod of about 1,500 to 2,000 common dolphins ... then in the very last stretch that same morning, we came across a humpback whale.

But no matter what occurs on the outings, Turton says that for most, the opportunity to see wild dolphins living dignified lives rather than ones cut drastically short by confinement and captivity is worth a scenic chase on the open ocean.

You dont know when its going to happen or whats going to happen ... it just happens, he says excitedly. Thats the beauty of it, really.

Liz Beddall was hosted by Tourism New Zealand, which did not review or approve this story.

When you go

Get there: I flew with American Airlines from Toronto to Auckland with a stopover in Los Angeles. Once in Auckland, I flew to Kaitaia with Barrier Air, then drove to Opua to catch a ferry to Russell in the Bay of Islands.

Get around: I travelled with a rental car from I collected from Far North Rentals at Kataia Airport. Driving is a wonderful way to take in the landscape, but Kiwis drive fast and country roads tend to by windy. Give yourself a few practice runs at the airport if youre a newbie to right-side driving.

Stay: I stayed at the gorgeous and time-preserved Duke of Marlborough hotel which overlooks Kororareka Bay in the historic village of Russell. Guests of the hotel should try the daily seafood special at the hotels gourmet restaurant.

Search for wild dolphins: The Fullers GreatSights office (dolphincruises.co.nz) is at the Kororareka Bay pier across from the Duke of Marlborough hotel in Russell. Tickets for the four-hour Dolphin Eco Experience include commentary about the area, snorkel gear, and a brief snorkel lesson. Those interested in swimming with dolphins pay extra but will be refunded if the swim doesnt happen. In the unlikely chance that dolphins are not spotted at all, you get a voucher for a future trip.

Do your research: newzealand.com, russellnz.co.nz

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OTTAWAOusted Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak blasted Andrew Scheer Monday, denying the Conservative leader asked her to remove racist letters from her personal Senate website.

Scheer announced Thursday he had removed Beyak from the Conservative caucus, citing letters posted by the senator defending her controversial views on the legacy of residential schools.

In a statement, Scheer called some of those posts racist, unacceptable and offensive, and demanded Beyak remove them. His office claimed when she refused, Scheer expelled her from the party.

But on Monday, Beyak said no such demand was made.

Contrary to his statement, that he asked me to remove content and I refused, neither I nor my staff ever spoke with Andrew Scheer, Beyaks statement read.

Beyak went on to attack Scheer directly, calling him an inexperienced leader who won last years Conservative leadership race by a slim margin.

We deserve better leadership other than the current choices, who are mired in, or hampered by, political correctness, Beyaks statement read.

Beyak did not respond to an interview request Monday.

When contacted by the Star, Scheers director of media relations, Jake Enwright, refused to say how the Conservative leader conveyed his demand to Beyak.

Im not going to go into detail about that, Enwright said.

I dont want to waste your time  Im just going to keep referring you back to the statement, because we stand by it.

A spokesperson for Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith declined further comment Monday.

The letters in question were posted by Beyak in support of controversial comments the senator made in 2017. Speaking in the Senate, Beyak heralded the good works of well-intentioned administrators of residential schools, where 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to study under the Christian churches.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the residential school system, in addition to the widespread and well-documented abuse of Indigenous children, amounted to a cultural genocide. It is estimated more than 3,000 children died in residential schools.

Some of the letters posted by Beyak push derogatory stereotypes of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and encourage the Ontario senator to continue speaking about Indigenous issues.

Beyaks comments, and her letters of support, have been widely denounced. On Friday, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde told the Star he wants the Senate ethics committee to take up the matter.

The Liberal cabinet ministers responsible for Indigenous issues, Jane Philpott and Carolyn Bennett, have written to Scheer and Smith  as well as the leadership of other parties in the Senate  asking that the comments posted on Beyaks site be removed.

We believe that the material on Senator Beyaks website should be removed as it is an obstacle to eradicating racism and engaging all Canadians on the journey of reconciliation, the ministers wrote in a statement.

Beyak said she would continue to post thoughtful ideas on her website.

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At 62, Anna Maria Grillo hoped decades spent working in sewing factories would afford her some modest comforts: family time in her longtime Maple home, spoiling her grandchildren with a present or two, and the occasional trip to Swiss Chalet.

Instead, she says, a workplace injury  and a practice at the workers compensation board known as deeming  has forced her to sell her house and move near Alliston to save money.

It means not being able to purchase a sweater or a pair of pants, not being able to purchase gifts for my daughters, for my grandchildren, she said.

For more than a million low-wage workers, Ontarios minimum wage hike brings the promise of more money in the bank. But for some injured workers with permanent disabilities, advocates say, it promises precisely the opposite.

Aidan Macdonald, of the Toronto-based legal clinic Injured Workers Consultants, says the wage bump to $14 from $11.60 an hour introduced this month brings fresh urgency to a long-standing debate over deeming at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. Its a practice Macdonald calls the biggest issue in terms of forcing people into poverty.

Deeming works like this: when an employee sustains a permanent injury, they are entitled to loss-of-earnings benefits to make up for the wages they earned before getting hurt. When the WSIB deems the worker capable of finding suitable, available work again  say, in a minimum-wage retail position  they get the difference between minimum wage and their pre-accident earnings.

So as the minimum wage rises, loss-of-earnings benefits for permanently injured workers will correspondingly fall. According to the WSIB, fewer than 1 per cent of the 80,000 Ontarians receiving loss-of-earnings benefits will be negatively affected by the wage hike  about 700 people. But spokesperson Christine Arnott said the board will phase in the adjustments over three years to help ease the impact.

Were here to help people return to health and return to work. While less than 1 per cent of people who receive loss-of-earnings benefits will see their payments impacted by the change in minimum wage, we do understand the impact is meaningful to them, she said.

The more fundamental issue, Macdonald argues, is that the WSIB cuts benefits regardless of whether the injured worker has actually found a new job after an accident. By the Injured Workers Consultants estimation, almost 82,000 people since 2007 have been deemed to have jobs without actually being employed.

The board knows that in many cases these people are not in fact working. As long as they have deemed people capable of working, they will cut their benefits, Macdonald said.

It totally disregards employment barriers that people with disabilities face.

Grillo permanently injured her wrists working in a sewing factory five years ago. Despite being deemed employable in a minimum-wage job by the WSIB, Grillo has never found work since the injury, which left her wearing wrist braces and unable to sew.

With the minimum wage rising to $14 this month, she says her $66 weekly benefit will soon disappear because she was making $13 an hour at the time of her accident.

I have applied a lot of places. When I show up and they see the braces on my wrists, they tell me well let you know, she told the Star.

I feel depressed, I feel bad. Because I did everything they told me to do, I did everything Im supposed to do, I did everything I could. Every time I go and apply, the answer is always the same. Well let you know. 

Some 92 per cent of injured employees return to work with no wage loss within one year of their accident, according to WSIB statistics. Employers generally have a duty to provide work for injured employees for at least a year. But as previously reported by the Star, the WSIB doesnt track what happens to injured workers beyond a year back on the job.

A 2015 study conducted by professors at McMaster and Trent universities looking at injured workers with permanent impairments in Ontario found that 46 per cent were living on the poverty line five years after their accident.

That, Macdonald notes, means the cost of workplace injuries is often ultimately borne by taxpayers  rather than the employer-funded workers compensation system.

I would say that almost everybody that comes into our office is already on some form of social assistance, he said.

In a statement, provincial Labour Minister Kevin Flynn said the WSIB, an arms-length body, has the legal authority to determine its own practices and procedures. But he said his government was prepared to explore further action when it comes to (deeming).

I have met, and will continue to meet, with injured workers regarding this issue and the best way it can be dealt with.

Our government believes in helping the most vulnerable, which is why we are raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour effective Jan. 1, 2019, he said, adding it has also launched new employment strategy to connect injured workers and people with disabilities to jobs.

The WSIB runs numerous programs designed to improve job prospects for workers who cant return to their original role after an accident. These include skills upgrading, essential skills and literacy skills programs, which the board says results in 88 per cent of participants finding new employment.

Grillo, who grew up in Italy, says the board paid for classes to improve her language skills.

Since I didnt really know how to read or write English, it did help me to learn and write, Grillo told the Star through a translator. But it didnt help me prepare for another job or my job, or prepare me in any way to be able to find another job.

Through a freedom of information request, the Star obtained audits of work reintegration programs conducted between 2014 and 2016. According to the documents, while 44 per cent of injured workers who speak English as a second language were classified as employable, just 13 per cent actually landed jobs after completing a board-sponsored work transition program. (These figures translated to a 23-per-cent employment rate, according to the review.)

In response to questions from the Star, the WSIB said it expanded its work transition program in early 2017 to include a heavier focus on English as a second language courses.

What we often see or hear from injured workers who are going through the return-to-work process is that the assistance that they are getting is not meaningful and not truly helping them obtain or sustain employment, Macdonald said.

The sustainability of work is really the crucial factor, he added.

Despite the slower phase-in, Macdonald said, the board should ultimately do away with deeming and compensate people for their actual lost wages.

No more of this pretending that people have jobs that they dont actually have.

After her injury and her inability to find a new job, Grillo says, she and her retired husband count on his pension and a $500 Penningtons gift card her family gives at Christmas for bare essentials.

I dont do anything anymore. I dont even go see (my daughter) in Maple because gas is too expensive, Grillo said.

Theres nothing left in my life.

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With the new year comes new life  the Toronto Zoo is welcoming a greater one-horned rhinoceros calf as the facilitys first newborn of 2018.

The zoo tweeted Monday morning that its 13-year-old rhino Ashakiran had given birth to a male calf Thursday. The pregnancy lasted 16 months.

This is the fifth greater one-horned rhino birth in the Toronto Zoos history, and the second for Ashakiran, who gave birth to Nandu in February 2016.

There are about 3,500 greater one-horned rhinos, also known as rhinoceros unicornis, left in the wild.

Greater one-horned rhinos, which nearly went extinct in the early 1900s, have been downgraded from endangered to vulnerable as their numbers have increased, but habitat degradation and poaching still threaten the species, the zoo said.

This news comes two weeks after another rhino birth at the zoo, this one a baby white rhino.

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The Ontario government is stepping up enforcement to ensure employers are paying workers the new $14-an-hour minimum wage.

Labour Minister Kevin Flynn said Monday that up to 175 new employment standards officers are being hired to inspect workplaces that may not be abiding with the hourly increase from $11.60 that took effect Jan. 1.

You cant break the law in the province of Ontario; you have to pay the minimum wage, Flynn told reporters at Queens Park.

Unfortunately, it appears some employers are abandoning the spirit of this legislation and some may even be doing more than that, the minister said.

The stories weve all heard over the past week have not only been disappointing, but quite frankly theyve made the premier, myself, and others in this province angry, he said.

That was a reference to the children of Tim Hortons co-founders reducing benefits to employees in response to the wage hike at their two franchises in Cobourg.

Ron Joyce Jr., whose father co-founded the coffee shop chain, and his wife, Jeri Horton-Joyce, daughter of Tim Horton, told workers they would no longer be entitled to paid breaks and would have to pay more for dental and health benefits.

The couple said the measures were to help their company cope with the jump in wages. Unlike independent businesses, franchisees cannot simply raise prices to offset higher labour costs.

Read more:

Tim Hortons minimum wage costs by the numbers

Why these small business owners are embracing the minimum wage boost

Minimum wage increases could lead to 60,000 fewer jobs by 2019: Bank of Canada

Similarly, a Scarborough Tim Hortons outlet banned employees from accepting tips and stripped them of paid breaks in response to a $2.40-wage rise. The Great White North Franchisee Association, which represents Tim Hortons franchisees, says the minimum wage increase will cost the average outfit $243,889 a year.

What do you think?

Tim Hortons corporate parent has dubbed them a rogue group, the actions of which do not reflect the values of our brand.

Echoing Premier Kathleen Wynne, Flynn warned such bullying behaviour will not be tolerated.

For the first time, the minister of labour can, by law, publish the names of employers who break the rules. This is something we are very willing to do, he said.

Were also stepping up enforcement to make sure that all of the new rules are followed.

The hope is that all complaints by workers can be resolved within 90 days. Flynn noted that calls to the ministrys tip line, 416-326-7160 in Toronto and 1-800-531-5551, are up 30 per cent.

Weve got your backs.

The additional enforcement staff will allow the Ministry of Labour to conduct more proactive workplace inspections  up to 10 per cent of Ontario businesses. As previously reported by the Star, those investigations have proven far more effective at recovering unpaid entitlements for workers.

Last year, the governments rate of recovery when individual workers filed claims for stolen wages and other entitlements was around one-third, according to data obtained by the Star through a Freedom of Information request. Since 2013, this low recovery rate has resulted in some $38 million in missing wages for workers.

The recovery rate for proactive inspections was almost 100 per cent.

With Ontarians heading to the polls on June 7, the minimum wage is expected to be a major election issue.

Wynne said if she is re-elected, the $14 rate will jump to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2019.

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown has said he would phase in the increase to $15 by 2022, raising it 25 cents annually until then.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, long a proponent of the $15-an-hour wage, said she was hopeful employers will follow the law and pay workers fairly.

But Horwath expressed concern about loopholes the Liberals left in place in the new labour legislation that could be exploited by unscrupulous employers by dubbing employees independent contractors instead of employees.

Thats a big loophole that we tried to close with an amendment (to Bill 148) but the Liberals wouldnt accept that, she said in an interview.

Its unfortunate this year to see some of these measures being undertaken. It saddens me that workers, who should be getting the benefits of this, are still going to have to fight.

Bill 148 does explicitly prohibit employee misclassification, and will place the onus on bosses to prove workers are not employees.

With files from Sara Mojtehedzadeh

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TEHRAN, IRANIrans Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.

In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns in Iran late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.

The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.

Read more:

Hard-line cleric in Iran blames social media, U.S. for protests, unrest

Iran blames CIA officials for anti-government protests, U.S. denies role in unrest

2009 versus 2018: How Irans new protests compare to the Green Movement of the past

Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not independently verify that.

The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the countrys supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators protested against the Guards massive budget, its costly interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.

Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include around 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semi-official ISNA news agency.

Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the past 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots, who will be dealt with seriously.

Iranian lawmakers held a closed session on Sunday in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest, IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.

The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began on Dec. 28 in Irans second-largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.

In recent days, government supporters have held several mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.

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SEATTLEA yearlong Associated Press analysis found more than a dozen firearms sold by law enforcement agencies in Washington state since 2010 later became evidence in new criminal investigations.

Identifying guns sold by law enforcement and matching them to new crimes required extensive research and dozens of public records requests to individual agencies.

Using those records, the AP created a database of almost 6,000 firearms sold by law enforcement since 2010. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives declined to release tracking information on guns associated with crimes, so the AP collected that information from individual agencies and compared it with its own database to find firearms with matching make, model, calibre and serial numbers.

Below are details about guns sold by law enforcement that were later picked up at crime scenes:

Baby shot in car seat

The Washington State Patrol traded a batch of crime guns with a firearms dealer in June 2010. The batch included a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol. In April 2015, a gang member shot at a car carrying a couple and their year-old daughter. One of the bullets hit the child in the head and killed her. While searching a home frequented by the suspected shooter and many other gang members, the Kent Police Department found a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol  the gun sold by the State Patrol.

Text threats

The Pierce County Sheriffs Office in April 2014 sold a list of guns at auction that included a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun. In October 2016, Jaylen Bolar sent text messages to his mother, threatening to kill her and others. Angela Almo contacted a behavioural health centre instead of the police because she knew her son had firearms, including a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and she feared hed be killed in a standoff with authorities.

When the Tacoma police became involved, he denied it, but his aunt confirmed that she, too, had received threats. Robin Olson showed an officer her phone, which contained a message from Bolar asking his uncle to kill him because he was tired of living.

Bolar also threatened to kill a woman who used to be his boss. He was taken into custody, and a search of his home found two firearms in his bedroom. One was the Mossberg shotgun sold by the sheriffs office.

Juveniles in stolen car

The Aberdeen Police Department sold a Lorcin Model L380 pistol in February 2011. In May 2016, the Kent Police Department located a stolen vehicle parked at the Benson Village Apartments and found a gun under the seat  the Lorcin Model L380 pistol sold by Aberdeen police. The three juveniles who stole the car were convicted felons.

Drunken felon

The Kitsap County Sheriffs Office sold a Hi Point 9mm pistol in March 2014. In October 2015, the Snohomish County Sheriffs Office responded to a 911 call from a woman who said she heard what she thought was a gunshot and went outside to find her daughters intoxicated boyfriend passed out on the front porch. When deputies arrived, they found a handgun, the Hi Point 9 mm pistol, on the ground next to the man. It was the gun sold by the Kitsap sheriffs office. A search found that the man was a convicted felon who wasnt permitted to have a gun. The deputy put the man in handcuffs and called for medical help.

Prohibited from having gun

The Washington State Patrol traded a Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol with a firearms dealer in June 2010. In May 2015, the Kent Police Department was investigating a 911 call and encountered four people outside the house. One of the men was prohibited from having a gun, but they found he was carrying a handgun, the Lorcin L380 semi-automatic pistol sold by the State Patrol. The gun had been reported stolen, and he was arrested.

Drug house assault

The Aberdeen Police Department traded a JC Higgins .22-calibre rifle with a firearms dealer in February 2011. In April 2015, the Yakima Police Department responded to a domestic violence assault involving a JC Higgins .22-calibre rifle with the same serial number. The dispute involved an elderly man who had handled his wife roughly and threatened her sister. The man was charged, and police took his firearm. In October 2015, Kent police searched a suspected drug house and arrested several people wanted on felony warrants. They found a .22 calibre rifle  the JC Higgins rifle sold by the Aberdeen police.

Facebook posts about killing

The Thurston County Narcotics Task Force sold a Smith & Wesson pistol in August 2012. In October 2013, the Tacoma Police went to the University of Washington, Tacoma to investigate a report of a student who was posting photos of a gun on Facebook and said he had vivid, colorful dreams of shooting and killing lots of people last night. Police found in his backpack a Smith and Wesson pistol, the one sold by the narcotics task force.

Cocaine party favours

The Bonney Lake Police Department in March 2011 traded a Davis Industries .380-calibre handgun with a firearms dealer who sold it to the public. In February 2012, Kent police stopped a man for an expired registration and discovered baggies of cocaine in his car. He said they were party favours. They also found his concealed handgun, the firearm sold by the police.

Threats to kill

Longview Police Department sold a Davis Industries.22 calibre pistol in August 2016. The Thurston County Sheriffs Office responded to a 911 call in April 2017 from a man who said his father headed to a house with a gun and planned to threaten the occupants. Jesse Brown threatened to kill the men who lived there and was arrested. Officers confiscated his Davis Industries .22 calibre pistol  the one sold by Longview police  and 15 other firearms.

Drunken father

The Thurston County Sheriffs Office sold a Mossberg, Model 590, 12-gauge shotgun in December 2014. In March 2016, the Tacoma police responded to a call by a 12-year-old girl who said she and her sister fled their home because their father was drunk and was threatening to shoot his girlfriend and threatening to beat up one of the girls because he couldnt find his gun. The police later found a Mossberg, Model 590, 12-gauge shotgun  the gun sold by the Sheriffs Office  in the bathtub.

Mans suicide

The Washington State Patrol traded a batch of guns to a firearms vendor in June 2010 that included a Smith and Wesson .9mm handgun. In September 2014, the Yakima Police Department responded to a report of a suicidal man with a gun. They arrived to find 24-year-old Kyle Juhl with a gunshot wound to the head. He used a Smith and Wesson .9mm handgun, the one sold by the State Patrol.

Mental health emergency

The Thurston County Narcotics Task Force sold a Springfield Armory .40-calibre pistol in December 2013. In February 2014, the Seattle Police Department helped take firearms from a man who was having a mental health emergency and was at the Involuntary Treatment Act court. One of the guns was the Springfield Armory .40-calibre pistol sold by the task force.

Read more:

U.S. holiday gun sales dip credited to Black Friday rush, Republicans in office

Rihanna calls for end to gun violence after cousin shot and killed in Barbados

Pulse nightclub shooters widow knew he would do something bad, investigators say

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WASHINGTONCristian Chavez Guevara gathered his entire family recently to discuss with his wife, mother and brother what they should do if they suddenly faced the prospect of being deported from the United States, where they have lived legally for two decades.

The El Salvador-born, Texas-dwelling IT worker says they specifically discussed one possibility: Moving to Canada. After doing some research, they discarded the idea  it was legally complex, required a return to El Salvador and would uproot them from their home in Houston.

I love this country. My kids were born here (in the U.S.). They go to school here. They have friends, he said. We dont want to leave. We want to continue our lives.

Their concerns became real Monday as the Trump administration ended a major immigration program for El Salvadorans, leaving nearly 200,000 people in legal limbo and a trail of potential ripple effects up and down the hemisphere.

Read more:

Salvadorans, Hondurans could form next wave of asylum seekers, U.S. advocates warn

Flee to Canada? Brooklyns Haitians in flux after Trump cancels protected status

U.S. decision to end temporary status for Haitians has Canada on alert for asylum seekers

The administration announced an 18-month grace period  giving people like Chavez just over a year to either leave the U.S., apply for a different immigration status or stand their ground and hope Congress passes a law allowing them to stay.

Mondays move did not catch the Canadian government by surprise.

El Salvadorans are the No. 1 user of a U.S. program granting temporary legal status to people from crisis-hit countries, with four times more users than Haitians  who flocked to the northern border by the thousands last year when their similar program was cancelled.

By declaring that El Salvador no longer meets the criteria for the program, the U.S. government has cast its people into the same cauldron of uncertainty as 50,000 Haitians, and the 800,000 undocumented youngsters whose program the Trump administration also cancelled.

The administration explained in a statement that the El Salvador program was created to deal with earthquakes  17 years ago: The original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist. Thus, under the applicable statute, the current TPS designation must be terminated.

To counter the potential onslaught, the Canadian government is embarking on an online ad campaign aimed at providing the same information Chavez discovered: Immigration isnt easy or automatic, Canada also has laws and people are taking a huge gamble if they uproot their lives to try crossing the border.

Canadian MPs who speak Spanish and Creole have also been fanning across the U.S. to deliver that message.

Liberal Pablo Rodriguez has travelled to Chavezs hometown of Houston, as well as Dallas, Los Angeles and New York to correct a pair of urban legends: that Canada allows automatic entry, and that it has a system for people who have lost U.S. protected status.

There was a lot of misinformation out there, he said, citing some erroneous reporting in foreign-language media.

My message is: Before leaving your job, withdrawing your kids from school, do the research ... We have a robust, structured immigration system.

Last year there was a spike in migration along the Canadian border, with a nearly 20-fold increase in new refugee claims from Haitians. Caught off guard, the Canadian government was forced to set up temporary shelters and winterized trailers along the Quebec-New York border.

Rodriguez said he doesnt see as dramatic a migration surge from El Salvadorans, whose asylum claims rose last year, but still didnt crack the top 10 for nationalities.

Yet a mass deportation would have multiple effects across two continents.

That includes economic effects in the U.S., where nearly 90 per cent of native El Salvadorans are in the labour force. About one-third hold mortgages. Some 37,000 work in construction, and 22,000 work in restaurants and food services. Most have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years.

Mark Drury, the vice-president of one Washington-area construction company, told a conference call of immigration advocates Monday that he couldnt replace them with new workers because theres a desperate labour shortage in their sector.

Its disheartening, he said. But Im hoping to push Congress to repair this.

Some of the worst impacts would be in Central America, said Frank Mora, a foreign-policy analyst at Florida International University. He said 17 per cent of El Salvadors economy comes from money transfers from relatives in the U.S.

The sudden disappearance of that revenue would create more poverty, more violence and more instability on Americas doorstep, resulting in more migration, he said: (This decision) does not make sense, Mora said. It seems to me like a self-inflicted wound.

For his part, Chavez doesnt know what hell do next.

He said some of his family has U.S. residency, while others dont  and he fears the family will be ripped apart, even though he works, pays taxes, learned English  everything an immigrant should do.

I actually dont have a plan ... I feel lost, he said.

All my plans for the future just ended ... Everything (has) just vanished.

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ROMEAs many as 64 African migrants, including a mother whose surviving 3-year-old child desperately clung to her as she drowned, are feared dead after a traffickers overcrowded rubber dinghy from Libya started sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said Monday.

The Italian coast guard rescued 86 people from the boat hours after it started sinking Saturday morning after it took on water and started deflating, a UN migration agency official said.

Specially trained rescue divers leapt into the water to pull dozens to safety, including those who managed to stay aboard the half-submerged dinghy as well as others already flailing in nearby cold waters.

Read more:

Spain rescues 66 migrants from two boats in Mediterranean Sea

Some 100 migrants missing after shipwreck off Libyas coast

Eight bodies were recovered on Saturday. Officials at the time said the corpses were all women, but UN migration officials who met the rescue ship when it arrived Monday in Catania, Sicily, said two of the eight dead were adult men.

Since trafficking dinghies are often crammed with far more than 100 migrants, fears quickly arose Saturday that dozens more could be missing in the sinking. An Italian coast guard search that went through the night didnt find any more survivors or corpses.

Flavio Di Giacomo of the International Organization for Migration said in tweet Monday that survivors interviewed by the agency in Catania said 150 people had been aboard the dinghy when it set out from a Libyan beach east of Tripoli.

Sixty-four migrants lost their life in the shipwreck (which) occurred last Saturday, Di Giacomo said, saying probably 56 missing migrants perished at sea.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Di Giacomo said the dinghy was packed and made of poor quality rubber. Some eight hours into the Mediterranean crossing, water started pouring in, panic ensued, the migrants all moved to one side, and the boat lost its balance and was deflating.

Some migrants managed to cling to the portion of the dinghy that wasnt submerged but many others fell into the sea, he said, adding that the Italian coast guard arrived quickly, about a half-hour after being spotted by a European naval aircraft.

Catania Mayor Enzo Bianco told Italian Radio Radicale that among the survivors was a child who lost her mother.

I watched a 3-year-old girl while she was starting to play at the port here. She was saved, grabbed at the last second by the coast guard in the sea, the mayor said. She was clinging to her mother and she saw her drown.

Bianco said the child is now with her aunt, who was among the survivors.

All of the missing are adults, Di Giacomo said, adding that three other children survived, boys aged 2, 9 and 10.

The migrants came from Mali, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria, he said.

A doctor said some of the survivors needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation when they were brought aboard the rescue ship.

We can proudly say that many among those we resuscitated are now alive, said Dr. Maria Rita Agliozzo, who was aboard the coast guard rescue ship with a paramedic. Unfortunately some of them did not make it.

She said the surviving children are in good condition.

We still have to reconstruct their personal stories, because the children are shocked and didnt answer our questions. Its a step-by-step process, hopefully they will work through what happened, Agliozzo said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been rescued at sea and taken to southern Italian ports in the last few years, including nearly 119,000 last year. Another 3,100 drowned along the way in 2017, the IOM says.

Di Giacomo said the Libyan coast guard in recent days rescued 250 other migrants from traffickers boats and recovered the bodies of two women, while survivors said another 10 migrants were missing.

Those putting themselves at the mercy of smugglers and the sea include refugees fleeing wars or persecution who hope to receive asylum as well as economic migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, who arent eligible for permission to live in Europe.

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WASHINGTONA massive influx of Puerto Rico residents displaced by recent hurricanes is transforming communities in Florida and other states, and a conservative group is moving quickly to woo them ahead of the midterm elections.

The Libre Institute, an offshoot of the Libre Initiative, a group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, is launching new outreach programs this week in the Orlando area designed to provide English-language courses and civics lessons to thousands of Puerto Ricans living at least temporarily in Central Florida as the island continues rebuilding after deadly hurricanes Irma and Maria last fall.

Full power has not yet been restored on the island, and Florida officials say more than 300,000 people have at least passed through the Sunshine State from Puerto Rico in pursuit of new opportunities or temporary shelter. Thousands of young island residents have been enrolled in Florida schools while their parents seek work and housing.

Read more:

Dark, desperate life without power in Puerto Rico

Puerto Ricos electrical grid unlikely to be fully repaired until May, U.S. official says

More than 3 months after Hurricane Maria, barely half of Puerto Rico has power

Residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens who can participate in presidential primaries but cannot cast a vote for president  unless they move to the mainland and register to vote. With hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans leaving the island, they are poised to transform several communities in Florida and bolster fledgling island communities in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, while adding to their already large numbers in New Jersey, New York and parts of New England. The ongoing churn has the potential to transform the political dynamic ahead of Novembers mid-terms, especially in down-ballot races, in which even a few hundred new voters could make a difference.

The Libre Institutes Welcome to Florida classes will launch this week at the groups offices in the Orlando area, part of an initial $100,000 commitment by the group that is set to grow in the coming weeks as the program expands to centres in Miami and Tampa, two other parts of the state attracting Puerto Ricans.

The group is relying on partners such as Florida Hospital Orlando, Spanish-language radio stations and a network of churches across the region to help spread the word about the classes. State officials greeting Puerto Ricans arriving at airports in the state also are referring them to Libre for assistance, according to David Velasquez, deputy state director for Florida for the Libre Initiative, a sister group focused on political advocacy that is overseeing the courses.

Were talking to a lot of people whove lost everything, he said.

As it has elsewhere since at least 2012, the group is offering English-language classes, courses on how to update professional licences, and civics courses designed to highlight the groups focus on economic empowerment. What the classes will not include are direct appeals to vote for certain candidates or causes, because the institute is a non-profit barred from direct political activity.

We want people to make an educated decision for themselves. We really feel that in the Hispanic community, people need to know these topics, Velasquez said. You have people coming to Florida from all over the world, and they dont understand how the system works. A lot of things get miscommunicated or misunderstood. So, we want to educate people about the principles that are close to our hearts, and then leave it to them.

In the past, Libre has offered drivers licence classes, tax preparation help, wellness checkups, scholarships and food giveaways in Texas, Colorado, Florida and other states. It has bought ads touting the free market, smaller government and school choice, and its officials are a growing presence on Spanish-language news stations, where they talk about the virtues of self-reliance.

Daniel Garza, president of the Libre Initiative, said much of the groups work is from personal experience. Garza, who grew up in South Texas, said his parents worked too hard for too long until they hit a time of prosperity. It was over 20 years in the orchards working across America, with no English training and no citizenship  thus, barriers of opportunities.

The people from Puerto Rico are citizens, but what we can do is help guide them to a place where they can remove those barriers and move up the economic ladder, Garza said.

Democrats and progressive organizations have sounded the alarm about Libres work in the past, accusing the group of skirting non-profit laws by handing out ideological material; collecting names, email addresses and phone numbers; and basically doing the early legwork that Republicans should otherwise be doing to win over new voters.

Doing anything to track down and even indirectly woo potential Latino Republican voters could be critical next year in Florida, which faces an open gubernatorial race, a competitive reelection fight for Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and a handful of congressional races that could tip the balance of power in the House of Representatives.

Garza insisted that there will be no specific advocacy for any specific issue or candidate.

Its a win-win. They get the needed guidance and tools theyre going to need to transition faster. But its also an opportunity for us to educate them on the ideas that we feel make America strong  the principles of economic freedom, he said.

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HONG KONGRescuers were searching Monday for crewmen missing from an Iranian oil tanker that had collided with another ship off Chinas coast, leaving the tanker in flames and at risk of exploding and sinking, Chinese authorities said.

The Panamanian-flagged tanker, the Sanchi, collided with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, around 8 p.m. Saturday about 160 nautical miles east of Shanghai. That area of the East China Sea is frequently crossed by ships travelling to China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

All 21 Chinese crew members of the CF Crystal, which was transporting grain from the United States to Guangdong province in southeastern China, were rescued, Chinas Ministry of Transport said. But the Sanchis entire crew  30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis  were missing after the collision. One body has been recovered, Irans Ports and Maritime Organization said Monday.

Four Chinese government ships, two pollution control vessels, four commercial vessels, several fishing boats and a South Korean Coast Guard ship were aiding the search.

The burning oil was making it difficult to get close to the tanker and search for missing crew members, Iranian authorities said.

The U.S. navy also sent a P-8A Poseidon airplane from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan. It searched about 3,600 square nautical miles without locating any missing sailors, the Navy said Sunday.

Flames and thick black smoke were seen pouring from the burning tanker Monday in video and photographs released by the South Korean Coast Guard and Chinese state news media. Chinese authorities warned that the ship could explode and sink.

The 899-foot Sanchi is owned by Bright Shipping Ltd., a subsidiary of the National Iranian Tanker Co. registered in Hong Kong, according to Chinese authorities and an International Maritime Organization database. It was carrying 136,000 tons of condensate, a light oil, from Iran to South Korea, Chinas Ministry of Transport said. It was not clear how much had spilled or burned off after the collision.

Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group, said it was worried about the potential for environmental damage and would be monitoring cleanup efforts.

The Sanchi was built in 2008, had at least four previous names and was previously flagged in four other countries, according to the International Maritime Organization and MarineTraffic, a ship monitoring service.

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Crew of 32 missing after oil tanker and freighter collide off China coast

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CAIROEgypt will hold its presidential election over three days in March, officials said Monday, with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi virtually guaranteed to run for and win a second four-year term amid a heavy clampdown on dissent.

El-Sissi has yet to formally announce his candidacy, but with less than three months to go before the vote, no candidate who could pose a serious challenge to him has emerged. Nearly all prominent critics of the government have been jailed, left the country or gone silent, while authorities have blocked hundreds of websites and banned all unauthorized demonstrations.

El-Sissi has meanwhile drummed up support with official functions in which he touts new infrastructure projects and delivers an upbeat assessment of the economy, which is slowly recovering after years of unrest.

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With a comfortable win all but guaranteed, el-Sissi has repeatedly called on people to vote, perhaps fearing that a low turnout could undermine his legitimacy. That the vote is staggered over three days, March 26-28, appears designed to maximize participation.

El-Sissi, a former general, led the military overthrow of an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013. Since then, authorities have jailed thousands of critics, mainly Islamists but also a number of prominent secular activists, including many of those behind the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Human rights groups have been placed under draconian restrictions, and several rights campaigners have been banned from foreign travel or had their assets frozen.

Lasheen Ibrahim, the chairman of the National Election Authority, announced the dates for the election at a televised news conference. He said a runoff will be held April 24-26 if no candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote. Egyptian expatriates will vote March 16-18 and April 19-21. Campaigning is allowed for less than a month, beginning Feb. 24.

We will run the election with integrity and keep an equal distance from all candidates, Lasheen said. He urged the media, which is dominated by el-Sissi supporters who fiercely vilify critics, to be objective in reporting on the vote.

The election, said Lasheen, must be an epic of love for Egypt.

The announcement came just one day after a former prime minister and a career air force general who had declared his candidacy last month said he would not run against el-Sissi.

Ahmed Shafiq, who served as the last prime minister under Mubarak, declared his intention to run while in the United Arab Emirates, where he lived in exile after his close defeat in the 2012 presidential election won by Mohammed Morsi, a leading figure in the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood group.

Shafiq was subjected to harsh criticism by Egypts pro-government media immediately after he announced his intention to run. Some of that criticism amounted to character assassination, with a flurry of unsubstantiated accusations thrown at him.

An army colonel who declared his intention to run was meanwhile court martialed and convicted of breaching military regulations prohibiting political activism. Col. Ahmed Konsowa was sentenced to six years in prison last month. The case prompted critics to post images on social media dating back to 2014, when el-Sissi announced his presidential candidacy while wearing his military uniform.

Another hopeful is Khaled Ali, a prominent rights campaigner who shot to national fame after he won a court case that annulled Egypts transfer of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. The government went ahead with the transfer after the agreement was ratified by parliament.

Ali was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison in September for allegedly making an obscene gesture while celebrating the courts ruling last January. He is appealing the verdict, but if his conviction is upheld he would not be eligible to run.

Mohammed Anwar Sadat, an opposition politician who last year was thrown out of parliament  a 596-seat chamber packed with el-Sissi supporters  says he intends to run but complains of harassment by security agencies.

In a recent letter to Lasheen, the election commission chief, Sadat said the agency mandated with domestic security has been preventing him from booking a venue to officially announce his candidacy. Sadat is the nephew of the late President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981.

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TRENTON, N.J.New Jersey corrections officials, challenged by a civil-rights group, announced Monday that a bestselling book on mass incarceration and racial discrimination that had been banned at two state prisons would now be available to inmates at all state correctional facilities.

The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had sent a letter Monday asking why at least two prisons had banned The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

The group called the ban ironic, misguided, and harmful. It said the ban amounted to unconstitutional censorship of speech on issues of public concern, which is entitled to special protection under the First Amendment.

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Corrections officials noted there was no departmentwide ban on the book. They said the book already was being used as a teaching tool in a state program that requires inmates to enrol in college-level courses while incarcerated.

Prisons and jails are allowed to ban reading materials based on certain concerns, such as security, but the ACLU contends officials cant claim that justification applies in this case. They also note that Texas  which the group says has a 10,000-title list of banned reading materials  not only allows the book but included it on a list of publications the state has affirmatively approved.

Michelle Alexanders book chronicles how people of colour are not just locked in, but locked out of civic life, and New Jersey has exiled them even further by banning this text specifically for them, said Amol Sinha, executive director of New Jerseys ACLU chapter. The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives. Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.

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SEATTLEKyle Juhl made one last attempt to patch things up with his fiancee, then took back his ring, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger as she and her mother ran from the apartment. The bullet went through a wall and narrowly missed a neighbours head as she bent to pick up her little boy.

The Smith & Wesson 9 mm that Juhl used to kill himself in Yakima, Wash., in 2014 was familiar to law enforcement: The Washington State Patrol had seized it years earlier while investigating a crime and then arranged its sale back to the public. It eventually fell into Juhls hands, illegally.

It is fears of tragedies like that, or worse, that have created a split among law enforcement officials over the reselling of confiscated guns by police departments, a longtime practice allowed in most states.

Juhls gun was among nearly 6,000 firearms that were used in crimes and then sold by Washington law enforcement agencies since 2010, an Associated Press review found. More than a dozen of those weapons later turned up in new crime investigations inside the state, according to a yearlong AP analysis that used hundreds of public records to match up serial numbers.

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The guns were used to threaten people, seized at gang hangouts, discovered in drug houses, possessed illegally by convicted felons, hidden in a stolen car and taken from a man who was committed because of erratic behaviour.

While those dozen or so guns represent an extremely small percentage of the resold firearms, some police departments contend the law shouldnt be doing anything to put weapons back on the street. The AP did not look at how many of the resold guns figured in crimes committed out of state, so the actual number of misused weapons could be higher.

We didnt want to be the agency that sold the gun to somebody who uses it in another crime, said Capt. Jeff Schneider of the Yakima Police Department, which sold guns until about a decade ago but now melts them down. He added: While there is almost an unlimited supply of firearms out there, we dont need to make the problem worse.

Similarly, the International Association of Chiefs of Police says confiscated guns should be destroyed because putting them back in circulation increases the availability of firearms which could be used again to kill or injure additional police officers and citizens. Also, federal agencies must destroy seized firearms unless they are needed as evidence or being used by the agency.

On the other side of the debate, some law enforcement officials say the selling of guns raises money to purchase crime-fighting equipment, and if the practice were abandoned, people would just buy weapons somewhere else. In fact, a growing number of states from Arizona to North Carolina are passing laws prohibiting agencies from destroying guns.

These guns are going to be out there, said Sheriff Will Reichardt of Skagit County, Wash. If I destroy them all, Im just helping Remington or Winchesters bottom line.

Phyllis Holcomb, a manager with the Kentucky State Police, which oversees Kentuckys gun sale program, said such transactions have helped equip officers with body armour and other gear.

The debate is playing out in Washington state, where the State Patrol is pushing back against a state law that requires the agency to auction off or trade most guns.

The State Patrol hasnt sold any weapons since 2014 and at one point accumulated more than 400 in the hope the Legislature would change the law and let the agency destroy them. Democratic Rep. Tana Senn of Bellevue, Wash., is sponsoring such a bill.

I know many of the police chiefs in my district chose not to sell but rather to destroy, and in their own words, Its so we can sleep at night,  Senn told a legislative committee.

The National Rifle Association opposes the plan.

The police chiefs maybe could sleep better if they went out and apprehended the criminals behind the guns and didnt worry about destroying perfectly legal firearms that are no more easy to purchase than a brand-new firearm at a firearms dealer, NRA spokesperson Tom Kwieciak said.

Tragedies involving police-sold guns have happened throughout the U.S.

In 2010, a mentally ill man ambushed and wounded two Pentagon police officers with a handgun sold by Memphis, Tenn., police. Also that year, a Las Vegas court security officer was killed by a man with a shotgun sold by a Memphis-area sheriffs office. And in 2015, an unstable man walked into City Hall in New Hope, Minn., and wounded two officers with a shotgun sold by the Duluth Police Department. The department has since stopped selling guns and now destroys them.

The weapons sold back to the public in Washington include Colt, Glock and Ruger pistols, 12-gauge shotguns, .22-calibre rifles and assault weapons such as AR-15 and SKS rifles. All such sales are handled through federally licensed firearms dealers, including auction houses, pawnshops and sporting goods stores. Before buyers can take their guns home, they must pass an FBI background check.

On a recent Friday night, owner John West of Johnnys Auction House in Rochester, Wash., about 129 kilometres south of Seattle, launched into his rapid-fire bid-calling to a packed room, selling necklaces and coins. Before he offered up the first police-confiscated gun for sale, he had a warning.

Straight up, he told the crowd, if you cannot possess a firearm and you cant pass a background check, just dont even bother bidding.

There is no master list of guns sold by police, so compiling one for Washington state involved dozens of public-records requests to individual agencies. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives keeps track of crime guns but refused to release information from its database, so the AP collected databases from individual agencies and compared them with the sold guns.

One of the guns that ended up in a new police report was a .22-calibre handgun sold by Longview police in 2016. In 2017, a drunken Jesse Brown and a friend armed themselves with the gun and two other weapons, went to a house and threatened two young men they believed were selling drugs, police said.

Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha said that while some resold guns may be used in new crimes, if theyre going to get a weapon, theyre going to get a weapon. Selling guns generates money used for drug investigations, he said.

The Seattle Police Department and the sheriffs office in surrounding King County dont sell crime-scene weapons; they hand them over to a foundry to be melted down at no cost to themselves.

For years, the State Patrol traded confiscated firearms to dealers for other gear, and the dealers then would sell the guns to the public. In one exchange in 2013, the State Patrol traded in 159 weapons and got a credit of $27,420 (U.S.), which it then used to buy handguns for the force.

The weapon Juhl used to kill himself was in a batch the State Patrol traded in 2012. It was purchased by a man in Yakima, who sold it to someone else, who then sold it on Craigslist. Juhls girlfriend told police thats where he acquired it.

Juhl, 24, was not legally permitted to own or possess a gun. He received a bad-conduct discharge from the Army after serving time in prison for using the drug ecstasy and going AWOL for about two months. An Army spokesperson said Juhls criminal history was sent to the FBIs Criminal Justice Information System, but the police detective who handled Juhls suicide said he checked the FBIs database but didnt find Juhls convictions.

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Albert Schultz has resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment by four women. Its a case of yet another man accused of abusing his position of power, this time one who has been admired and respected in Torontos theatre world for almost 20 years.

In November, I saw Schultz in Soulpeppers recent production of Edward Albees The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? I admired Schultzs performance. Albees language was overblown, and the play seemed to be trying too hard to be clever. But Schultz, as the successful architect who destroys his marriage and his career through his sexual love for a goat, Sylvia, was sympathetic.

Battered and saddened by his familys anger and grief, he managed to also portray the joyous wonder of being swept away by love. His impassioned insistence that he still very much loved his wife and that he could not live without Sylvia, was painful because we believed him so much.

As the play unfolded, I realized Id seen it before. It must have been years ago, since I could not remember what was going to happen next. How could I have forgotten a play about a guy who has sex with a goat?

I think it is because the bestiality hadnt really stood out for me. I had seen it as a tragedy about falling in love outside of societal norms. I had felt compassion for Martin, who is torn by his love for his family and his irresistible attraction to Sylvia.

He is a thoughtful, compelling, and sensitive character. And I had liked him more than his aggrieved wife, who is portrayed as shrill and violent. She seems close-minded, and incapable of listening to his explanations, or of understanding desire and passion.

Seeing it again, right as the Harvey Weinstein allegations emerged, I understood it so differently. This time it was a play about a powerful man risking his career and his personal life on a sexual impulse. It was a play about a man whose wife had shaped her life around his ambition, and who couldnt believe how selfishly he threw it all away.

What shocked me the most was the scene in which he alludes to the sexual nature of his relationship with Sylvia. It was mutual. The goat would, he insists, make it clear that she wanted to have sex.

What hubris is this? The man imagines that the feelings he projects onto another being are reciprocated. He does not take into account the differential positions of power that they both inhabit. How does the goat, owned and kept by him, feel? He doesnt know, he can only surmise by looking into her eyes, which, he says, see into his soul.

Plaintiffs speak to press after filing a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment by Soulpepper Theatre Company director Albert Schultz.

Albert Schultz is accused, by Diana Bentley, Hannah Miller, Kristin Booth, and Patricia Fagan, of being a serial sexual predator. Booth has cogently described her belief that this was just the way the theatre world worked, and that the cycle of abuse and praise made her almost worship him. Maybe this complex mix of emotions came across to him as sexual willingness. Maybe he didnt care whether they were willing or not.

In 2002, when Sylvia was written, it was an attack on the homophobia and normativity of a middle class. People were too quick to label certain desires as acceptable, and others as inappropriate. We needed to expand our ideas of what was normal sexuality. If a man truly loved a goat, why was it so certain that his life would be ruined?

But now the conversation has shifted in salutary ways. We are talking more about how power is inextricable from these allegations of sexual misconduct. Gone are the days in which we saw a workplace relationship between, say, an older man and a younger woman, as a personal preference.

We are beginning to ask hard questions about the differential positions of authority and privilege that shape our sexual encounters. We have less sympathy for the man who has transgressive desires, and more understanding of how someone may feel attraction and fear, may consent because she feels complicit, or may play along in the hopes of gaining status.

Eva-Lynn Jagoe is a professor of Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies University of Toronto.

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When Margaret Thatcher was asked what she regarded as her greatest achievement as Britains prime minister, shes said to have answered: Tony Blair and New Labour. By which she meant she had redefined British politics and forced her once-socialist opponents to endorse the essence of the conservatism she stood for.

In a similar way, its worth wondering whether Kathleen Wynnes greatest achievement may turn out to be Patrick Brown.

Wynnes Liberals and Browns Progressive Conservatives will face off next June in a general election. And by any conventional measure the outcome ought to be pre-ordained: the Liberals will have been in power for 15 years by then and victory should be Browns for the picking, on his own terms.

Yet its not turning out quite that way. The latest opinion polls show the Liberals actually closing the gap with the PCs, despite all the baggage they have accumulated after being in power for such a long time.

More to the point, Brown has made it clear that his Conservatives will be essentially running on Liberal turf. The Peoples Guarantee election platform they rolled out at the end of November could have been borrowed from the Liberal playbook.

There was no red meat for social conservatives, and no talk about rolling back the Wynne governments progressive social measures. The headlines from the PC announcement were about help for families with child-care costs, a middle-class tax cut, and a $1.9-billion, 10-year initiative on mental health.

Certainly, the program can (and will) be picked apart by progressives. Theres a major funding gap and the question for Conservatives is always, what will you cut to pay for all that?

But overall, Brown has clearly decided to run down the middle, where Ontario elections are won. After the PCs spectacular flame-outs as they campaigned to the right in 2011 and 2014, he has dragged the party back to the middle. The best proof of that are the howls of outrage from ideological conservatives asking whats the point of a Conservative party if its going to turn into an echo of the lefty Liberals?

In effect, Brown is paying tribute to the Liberals remarkable record of electoral success under Dalton McGuinty and, for the past four years, Kathleen Wynne.

Of course, its easy to poke holes in the Liberals record. From the e-health fiasco to cancelling gas plants on the eve of an election, the McGuinty and Wynne governments have had their full share of missteps and scandals. And when youve won four straight elections, a lot of voters are going to want change simply for the sake of change.

But before the pre-election season gets into high gear, its worth reflecting on why the Wynne government still has political life in it and a fighting chance of holding its own next June.

It would have been understandable if the Liberals had drifted for the past year or so, exhausted by years in power and demoralized by polls showing the party and the premier trailing badly.

Instead, the government has put in place a series of ambitious policies designed to counter the corrosive effects of inequality. Its been out to show that government can work for the majority of the population and step in when the system leaves many behind.

A couple of those policies will kick in on Jan. 1. Most obviously, there will be a substantial increase in the provincial minimum wage, from $11.60 an hour to $14 (with a hike to $15 scheduled for 2019). This will bring the poorest paid workers closer to a living wage.

On the same day, Ontario will extend pharmacare coverage to everyone under 25. Its a big step toward building a full pharmacare program for everyone  something that should be near the top of every governments agenda.

Those measures come on top of a raft of other steps brought in by Wynne. Theres a big improvement in public pensions, which started as a plan by Ontario to expand its plan and turned into a national initiative to boost pension payouts by 2025. Thats a major long-term step toward repairing the frayed social safety net.

Ontario also brought in full-day kindergarten and a significant increase in child-care spaces. It introduced free post-secondary tuition for students from lower-income families. It broadened rent control and provided relief on hydro bills. And it started a pilot program on a guaranteed basic income; there are many problems with such an approach but at least it got a public discussion going on what kind of economic guarantees society should offer those who are falling far behind.

The New Democrats, of course, complain the Liberals are stealing their ideas  especially on the minimum wage and pharmacare. That will be hashed out in the coming election campaign, but for ordinary people its more important that the policies become reality than which party gets the credit.

If the Ontario PCs followed past practice, they might be expected to challenge all this and promise to return the province to a more conservative path. But if their election platform is to be believed, they wont do any of that. They wont cancel the pharmacare or tuition plans and they wont roll back the $14 minimum wage (though they would phase in the increase to $15 more slowly).

In fact, they even plan to run a deficit in their first year in sharp contrast to the Liberals, who have balanced the provincial books (leaving aside a dissent on that point by Ontarios auditor-general).

The bottom line is that Patrick Brown has essentially accepted that the progressive course Wynne has charted is what most Ontarians want. They dont want a turn toward social conservatism or a downsizing of what is already a comparatively lean government.

As it looks now, the election will be fought on which party is best equipped to deliver on that vision. And that may be the biggest legacy of Wynne and the Liberals, regardless of who wins in June.

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In kicking Senator Lynn Beyak out of the Conservative caucus last week, Andrew Scheer finally did the right thing. It was not a swift decision, nor necessarily made for the right reasons. But Beyaks ouster is nevertheless an encouraging signal that, whether for moral reasons or more crassly political ones, for this moment, Canadas political leaders are rejecting at least the rhetoric of anti-Indigenous racism.

The movement to have Beyak removed from the Conservative caucus began last March, when the senator, then a member of the Aboriginal peoples committee, delivered an ignorant and muddled speech making the case that the upside of residential schools is unfairly overshadowed by all the negative press about, you know, cultural genocide.

There was plenty to love about the schools, according to the senator. Nobody meant to hurt anybody, the little smiles in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are real, the clothes are clean and the meals are good, she said. There were many people who came from residential schools with good training and good language skills, and, of course, there were the atrocities as well. Close call: on the one hand, clean clothes; on the other, the atrocities.

Amid the controversy that followed, Beyak refused to repent, insisting she had said nothing wrong and that there were no lessons to be drawn. Citing a friendship with an aboriginal fellow, Beyak coined the perfect anti-reconciliation slogan: I dont need any more education.

At the time, the Star joined a chorus of critics calling on the Conservative Party to take Beyak off the Aboriginal peoples committee, as her actions had cast serious doubt on her ability to serve as a parliamentary representative on this profoundly important, complex and sensitive issue. We also urged the opposition leader to consider whether someone who has displayed such ignorance of history and insensitivity to suffering should be allowed to sit as a Conservative.

Then-interim leader Rona Ambrose did turf her from the committee, and a few months later, after another spate of hateful comments, the Conservative caucus in the Upper House removed Beyak from all of her other committees. Yet it wasnt until last week, after some 10 months of the senators doubling down, that her partys leadership finally decided she was unfit for caucus.

The final straw seems to have been an article in the Walrus magazine calling attention to more than 100 letters posted on Beyaks website in support of her speech on residential schools. One of these suggested that Indigenous people should be very grateful for the residential schools. Another characterized First Nations as a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.

On Thursday, after Beyak refused to remove the offending comments, Scheer issued a statement denouncing the senators tacit endorsement of the racist letters and declaring that racism will not be tolerated in the Conservativee caucus.

This was a welcome and overdue move, but we neednt rush to applaud Scheer. Garnet Angeconeb, a residential school survivor and recipient of the Order of Canada, says he tried to alert the leaders office to the letters months ago, but was ignored. In any case, Beyak has been entirely consistent on this issue. The letters should have come as no surprise.

What the decision does suggest, however, is that the Conservatives have determined, in the wake of their failed last election campaign, that flirtation with fear and division is not the right direction. Whether thats a principled stand or a political calculation, its good for Canada.

The question now regarding Beyak is whether further action is possible or desirable. New Democrat MP Charlie Angus has called on the prime minister to pressure the Senate to use all of the tools at its disposal to remove Beyak from office. Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, meanwhile, has called for a Senate ethics inquiry into Beyaks actions.

Clearly Beyak should not be allowed to use the platform of her parliamentary position to advance her ignorant and insensitive views on Indigenous peoples. Now that she has no caucus, sits on no committees and her powers have been rightly constrained, she might consider whether she really wants the institution she serves to be brought into further disrepute by her unholy crusade. Despite what she thinks, no one is looking to infringe on her speech rights. But if she insists on continuing to peddle her vile views, she could save everyone a lot of grief by doing so as a private citizen.

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Concerns about the corrosive effects of extreme inequality are nothing new. In the 4th century B.C., for example, Plato wrote that no person should be more than four times wealthier than any other, lest the divide lead to laziness among the rich and stifle opportunity for the poor.

He would not be very pleased, then, by a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which shows that the countrys 100 highest-paid CEOs make more than 200 times the average income  a ratio unprecedented in Canadas history. Nor would he be impressed to learn that the two richest Canadians own as much wealth as the poorest 30 per cent combined.

There is much disagreement about the causes of rising inequality, but much less about its effects: the decline of trust and social cohesion, the threats to democracy, the impact on economic growth of shrunken demand. The astounding gaps that have emerged between the richest and the rest are not only unfair, but also dangerous in their unfairness. As Justin Trudeau said after Donald Trump won the presidency, Trumpism triumphed in part because many in America felt they were not sharing in their countrys prosperity and this is a situation Ottawa must work to avoid.

Yet one of the federal governments most powerful tools for containing growing inequality, the tax system, is not nearly as effective as it once was in reducing income disparities. Surely thats one of the reasons Finance Minister Bill Morneau declared tax fairness his top priority and promised to review the tax code in search of loopholes that benefit the rich and make no discernible contribution to the public good. Last years small-business tax reform fiasco, disastrous for reasons largely unrelated to the packages policy purpose, was the first result of this review. The new numbers from the CCPA should serve as a reminder that, however politically painful the project, Ottawa cannot stop there.

In an opinion piece that appeared on the opposite page earlier this week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh proposed two sensible steps the federal government can take to ensure that corporate executives are not padding their salaries at the expense of other taxpayers.

First, the Liberals should finally do as they promised during the election campaign and close the tax break on executive stock options.

Currently, compensation received in the form of stock options is taxed at a much lower rate than regular income. The tax break was conceived, in part, to help capital-starved start-ups attract top talent, but has been co-opted by executives at established companies as a way to reduce their tax load. Until recently, Ottawa lost about $1 billion every year through the loophole, more than 90 per cent of which went to the top 1 per cent of earners.

In 2013, for instance, 75 of Canadas 100 top-paid CEOs received part of their income as stock options. This allowed them to accrue combined savings of $495 million, or $6.6 million each. Thats half a billion dollars of forgone revenue to subsidize 75 very rich people.

Moreover, its not at all clear that incenting companies to compensate employees with stock options is really such a good idea. The evidence suggests it encourages CEOs to drive up expectations, and thus stock prices, not necessarily results.

Some start-up executives have expressed concern that closing the loophole might drive innovators out of the country, particularly in light of the Trump regimes low-tax frenzy. These arguments seem to have convinced Morneau et al. to back off. Of course, those who benefit from the loophole have every reason to make that case, whatever its merits. In any case, surely there is a way to help small enterprises without requiring an annual billion-dollar public gift that mostly benefits those who have nothing to do with start-ups.

Closing or capping this loophole would be a good start, but as the CCPA report points out, companies are already finding workarounds in anticipation of a crackdown by Ottawa. Instead of offering stock options, it seems, many companies are simply compensating their executives with stocks.

Hence Singhs second proposal: increasing the inclusion rate for capital gains of CEOs. Currently, only 50 per cent of such investment income is taxable. Many have suggested the inclusion rate is too low. Over 50 years ago, the Carter Commission, the last comprehensive review of Canadas tax system, argued against giving excessively favourable treatment to investment income compared to earned income. After all, as the commission famously concluded, a buck is a buck.

Moreover, as the CCPA data on compensation shows, this tax break creates enormous benefits for those who need it least. The inclusion rate for capital gains costs Ottawa about $3.8 billion per year, 87 per cent of which goes to the top 1 per cent of earners.

Wealthy people can afford the very best accountants and financial advisers to help them find creative ways, unavailable to most, to reduce their tax load. The lost revenue and unfairness compound inequality and erode trust. Over decades, Canadian tax policy, with its proliferation of loopholes, has been taking us in the wrong direction. The Trudeau government seemed to understand this when it promised to change course. It should follow through.

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I dont believe Joshua Boyle.

Never have.

Not the alleged abduction of Boyle and pregnant wife Caitlin Coleman in Afghanistan by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, not their diverse reasons for venturing into a benighted and extremely dangerous war-ravaged country where the Taliban has been clawing back swaths of territory since NATO and American forces withdrew, not the purportedly wretched circumstances in which they were held captive for five years, and not the inconsistent details of a rescue operation conducted by Pakistan commandos last October.

My skepticism long predates the latest twist in the couples saga  Boyle hit with a slew of criminal charges when he appeared in an Ottawa court on New Years Day: eight counts of assault, two counts of sexual assault, two counts of unlawful confinement, one count each of uttering a death threat, administering a noxious substance and misleading police.

None of the allegations has been proven in court. Further details are proscribed under a routine publication ban.

Read more:

Joshua Boyle makes court appearance via video link, remanded in custody until Monday

A timeline of the captivity and release of Joshua Boyle and his family

In first sit-down interview, Caitlan Coleman tells of forced abortion, disputes official account of her rescue in Pakistan

I have no personal history with Boyle, apart from an unsolicited email received almost a decade ago when he was still married to Zaynab Khadr, sister of convicted murderer Omar Khadr, enthusiastic defender of the Taliban, formerly in kinship with Osama bin Laden, and currently living, apparently, in Sudan while the bulk of her notorious family continues to reside in Toronto. In the email, Boyle objected to my characterization of Zaynab as an unapologetic acolyte for terrorism and loather of both Canadian ideals and Canadian political policies.

It should be kept front of mind that Boyle inserted himself into the Khadr family, with no previous connection to Canadas first family of terrorism. The patriarch, Ahmed Said Khadr, was a senior associate of bin Laden (who attended Zaynabs second marriage; Boyle was her third husband) and was believed to have been a fundraiser-financier for Al Qaeda. Ahmed Khadr, who dragged his family between Canada, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was killed in a shootout with Pakistan forces along the Afghanistan border in October 2003, a year after son Omar threw a grenade during a firefight that killed one U.S. serviceman and blinded another. Omar ultimately pleaded guilty at a Guantanamo Bay trial, though later, safely back in Canada, he retracted the confession. And later still, he was the beneficiary of a $10.5-million payment and apology from Ottawa for infringement of his charter rights.

For a year, during his marriage to Zaynab, Boyle functioned as the family spokesperson, a role which he certainly appeared to relish.

Joshua Boyle, who was recently freed after years of being held hostage in Afghanistan, has been arrested and charged with at least a dozen offences, including sexual assault. (The Canadian Press)

Boyle, a journalism graduate, seems to thrive on the edges of reporting and self-aggrandizing, spooning out interviews since the couples return to Canada with three young children born in captivity. He picks the journalists who will receive his words and, from what I can tell, he sets the interview parameters. Though some of his media overtures have been puzzling. On Friday, Sun columnist Candice Malcolm  hardly a sympathetic sounding board, that paper  revealed Boyle had been in contact in a series of email exchanges, between Oct. 28 and Dec. 20, in which he excoriated his captors. My problem with the Haqqani Network pre-date my capture, he wrote, as reported by Malcolm, insisting the terrorist group is not composed of devout Islamists. Its not about ideology for the HN, theyre just ghetto trash gangbangers, drug dealers, carjackers who realize they can throw on a black turban, memorise (sic) the Quran . . . .

Theyre just religious hypocrites, criminal miscreants and warmongers.

Boyle added  and hed alluded to this in other interviews  that the network had tried to recruit him, offering a position in their organization. On four occasions, said Boyle, hed rejected the overture.

Boyle has said he wants the Haqqani thugs brought before the International Criminal Court  as if  for, among other atrocities, ordering the murder of my infant daughter by spiking his wifes food with massive doses of estrogen, triggering a spontaneous abortion. In an unusual move, a Taliban spokesperson issued a statement flatly denying the accusation, claiming Coleman had suffered a miscarriage.

Well, we can hardly take anything the Haqqani say on faith. But the outfit is not known for taking women and children captive. Which begs the question  not fully answered yet  of how Boyle and Coleman fell into Haqqani hands. In various expositions, Boyle has claimed they unwittingly crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan while backpacking through Central Asia, that theyd gone to Afghanistan as pilgrims on a humanitarian mission to help civilians living in Taliban-control regions, and also that hed hoped to get himself embedded as a journalist with the Taliban. Take your pick.

Either they were hopeless naifs or they knew exactly what they were doing. Certainly the subtext to the Sun emails is that Boyle  who has affected the Islamic appearance of beard, no moustache, while his wife continues to wear a hijab  drew a firm line between insurgents who cleave to Islamic teachings and ghetto trash criminals.

In an email interview with The Canadian Press: As near as we can tell, we were targeted because it was well-known by the eventual kidnappers that Caitlin was heavily pregnant, wrote Boyle, recalling that couple was then staying in a small Afghan village. They spoke often immediately following the kidnapping that America will pay for you very quickly, America will not want to risk the baby is born here in prison. 

The Haqqani network indisputably is in the business of kidnap for ransom or kidnap for prisoner swap. Very early in the couples captivity, there were reports that the kidnappers had demanded $150,000 in ransom. Then  nothing. A later report claim the Haqqani leadership was seeking, in return for the couple, release of their members from Pakistani jails, particularly Anas Haqqani, son of the groups founder, who was under an execution sentence. Again  nothing further.

There is no indication that ransom was sought from the abductees families or from the Canadian government, never over five years. Ottawa is adamant that no ransom was paid. If anything, the reaction from the Liberal government  apart from relief and gratitude to the Pakistani forces, allegedly acting on U.S. intelligence  seems more outright surprise, as if theyd been clueless about what sounds very much like an ambush of the vehicles transporting the Boyles into Pakistan.

Injecting a further frisson into the familys escapade, after their release, were photos  tweeted out by the Boyles  of a now controversial meeting they had with Justin Trudeau last month, the prime minister bouncing the littlest Boyle on his lap. While Trudeaus critics have been making hay about the private meeting  a political gotcha  there are legitimate questions about why this confab ever took place, especially if Joshua Boyle was perhaps already under investigation by police for the ensuing charges.

A security lapse, as some have argued, sounds a bit of a stretch. Only nutbar conspiracy theorists would view Joshua Boyle as some kind of potential Manchurian Candidate.

But so much of the Boyle story just makes no sense.

Did he and his wife convert to Islam? Hardly a crime. Boyle wont say.

Did they willingly deliver themselves to the Taliban as, I dont know, fellow ideological travellers, then prevented from leaving?

What were they up to for five long years, apart from breeding?

And who is there to corroborate anything they say?

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You get what you pay for, or, in Torontos case, what you dont. The shelter crisis of recent weeks  or is it years?  has been a clear indication that whatever demands our political masters are prepared to make of us, helping the homeless survive a deep freeze isnt among them.

What this says about us is up for debate. But as the old adage has it; we get the leadership we deserve. This is a crucial point in any discussion about how we treat the poor in Toronto. As Councillor Gord Perks has said of the current shelter crisis, on Twitter, This was predictable. It was predicted and not prevented. It was CHOSEN in order to keep taxes low. Low taxes mean threadbare services with no spare capacity.

If nothing else, this months extreme cold has revealed just how little spare capacity there is in Torontos ability to respond to such a crisis.

How cold has it been?

Well, according to Councillor John Campbell, cold enough to keep people off the streets. As he told the CBC, When its -15 C, people dont want to walk a block-and-a-half to get to a restaurant; they want to park within 100 metres.

Campbell was explaining why restaurateurs on King St. W. are complaining about how bad business has been lately. According to the councillor, the loss of 180-odd street parking spots for the transit pilot project has turned King into a dead zone.

Even though there are thousands of parking spots within a few minutes walk and despite the ease with which the King streetcar now travels, Torontonians hate to be outdoors for a minute longer than necessary when temperatures are so low.

Makes one wonder how the homeless manage to make their way to the aptly named Better Living Centre, where Toronto has cleverly opened a homeless shelter. Far from transit, but surrounded by parking, the shelter on the grounds of Exhibition Place has beds for 20 and plans for 100 by the middle of the month. Too bad the homeless dont own cars.

Despite reports to the contrary, however, Councillor Joe Mihevc, assured the press last month that, These are spots that are real and that will bring people in from the winter cold.

Lets not forget: poverty includes more than the homeless. Although a job is enough to keep many off the streets, more people than ever rely on food banks to eat. So when Ontarios new $14-minimum-wage came into effect on Jan. 1, business owners took immediate action. The most emblematic response came when certain Tim Hortons franchisees sent word to staff, or in Tim Hortons parlance, team members, that, henceforth, they would not be paid for breaks and would also be required to contribute a whole more to their benefit programs.

What choice did the owners have?

By the time the team heard the news, Daniel Schwartz, CEO of Tims parent company Restaurant Brands International, who took home a modest $6.2 million in 2016, might already have made the yearly earnings of some of them.

Workers and executives have nothing in common, Carleton University business professor, Ian Lee told the press. Of CEOs, he said, Comparing them to an ordinary person is like comparing apples to kumquats; its a false comparison.

That might account for the scarcity of kumquats.

But not even kumquats cost 200 times as much as apples, which is the rate the countrys top CEOs make compared to the average workers salary.

What we have here is an unabashed attempt to legitimize inequality; the rich are rich because they deserve to be, because theyre superior. Ordinary people, by contrast, are inferior, and, therefore, deserving of poverty. Their very ordinariness condemns them to minimum wages and unpaid breaks.

The homeless, at the bottom of the barrel, are wholly undeserving.

Taxes or Timmies, the dominant values of a society devoted to the acquisition of wealth are those of the rich. This is already apparent in the U.S. under Donald Trump. And where America goes, Canada isnt far behind.

The notion that taxes could be a means of redistributing wealth is now considered a socialist heresy.

The idea that poverty, the main cause of human suffering, affects everyone, including the rich, has become apostasy.

Either youre rich or youre poor; theres no room for anything in between.

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The flaw in New Years resolutions is that people are expected to do ethereal high-minded things, which is amusing because thats not going to happen.

My promise for 2018 could not have been less demanding. Each morning I would drink the healthful glass of water that sat beside the bed all night. I was literally to reach out, the only time the phrase has ever been appropriate. I could do it in my sleep.

I remain parched.

Much better to make resolutions for other people, the kind where they stop doing something. Subtracted effort works. After telling myself to stop drinking the water, Im now fully hydrated.

1. Prime Minister JustinTrudeau: The medieval gargoyles of Notre-Dame de Paris exist to protect the cathedral and scare away harmful spirits, a rather spousal role for those mini-dragons and spitting grotesques. The PM needs a personal gargoyle, one from out of town.

Find him an adviser  an outsider  who can warn him off dodgy people and events. Joshua Boyle, facing 15 serious charges including sexual assault, was already seen as dubious, having taken his second wife, Caitlan Coleman, on a mysterious trip that ended in the couples five-year kidnapping in Afghanistan.

Does Trudeau really want to be photographed with a man who made his wife pregnant at least three times in captivity? She gave birth without sanitation, painkillers or good health. In the photo, Trudeau looks a bit grim  though hes always good with babies  but hes clearly keeping his distance from Boyle.

Only Coleman is smiling, but thats basic for all women, hostage or otherwise. I wonder if Coleman might have had a chance at a private chat with Trudeau. Blink twice for help, maam.

Equally, the prime minister should not have attended the funeral service for Honey and Barry Sherman, found hanged in their home. Its not clear whether it was a double suicide or a double murder but a possible scenario remains murder-suicide.

I do not wish to see our feminist PM anywhere near a service for a serially litigious and unprincipled businessman who may have killed his own wife. Trudeau is entitled to do it, just as the admirable Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan is allowed to fly a government jet from Ottawa to Trenton for $6,358, as the Globe reported. But why do it?

Get thee a gargoyle.

2. Stop saying nuanced, problematic and incredible. Writing is hard. Easy shortcuts make it unreadable.

3. Tim Hortons, dont stiff your staff in 2018. Jobs, however exhausting, are done best by workers who are treated fairly. The children of the chains co-founders, the Joyce family heirs who run the Cobourg franchise, are punishing their staff for Ontarios new $14-an-hour wage by cutting wages and benefits.

Other Tim franchisors and fast food places  including Sunset Grill and East Side Marios, the CBC reports  are doing the same.

People go to Tim Hortons not for the coffee (boiled) or the food (leaden) but the intangibles: theyre open, friendly and predictable refuges. So why not raise prices? Id pay 14 per cent more for bad coffee.

4. Dont keep guns in the house if you have a teenage son with autism. If I wrote for an American audience, I would end that sentence after the first three words. For a Canadian audience, I add in the house.

But a family massacre in New Jersey, 20 minutes before New Years, has a lesson for gun-owners who missed 1,000 other lessons. The boy, 16, is accused of killing a loving father, the mother who home-schooled him, his sister and a 70-year-old woman who was a family friend. He used a semi-automatic rifle belonging to his dad.

Family homes should never contain the means of their own annihilation.

U.S. gun slaughter is so commonplace that even after their annihilation, this family was described as picturesque. In what way?

Rifles shouldnt be kept at home unless every family member is stable to the point of being emotionally marbleized. Autism is an exhausting family problem at the best of times. If we learned nothing from Nancy Lanza in Sandy Hook, who bought guns for her autistic son and took him to shooting ranges, its this: autism and guns dont mix.

I look forward to seeing your wisdom and caution flower this year. Im sure we shall, as always, get along famously.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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Snap Inc. is a social media company operating globally. The company was founded in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. Originally known as Snapchat, the company changed its name to Snap in order to represent its offerings better as it grew over the years. The companys headquarters are in Santa Monica, California and it is a very tightly held company. The original founders, Evan Speigel and Bobby Murphy own a combined 45% of non-dilutable shares with ownership transferable to the other upon death. The two remain active in the company today serving on the board and acting as CEO (Speigel) and CTO (Murphy).

The company was formerly known as Snapchat, Inc. and changed its name to Snap Inc. in September 2016. Snap Inc. was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. Over the years it has been courted by most of the big tech companies including Facebook and Google but has always opted to remain a standalone company. The business went public in 2017 and raised $30 billion on its opening day which is about 10 times the expected amount.

Today, Snap operates as a camera company internationally. The companys main revenue streams are Snapchat, a mobile app for cameras and communications, and Spectacles, a wearable augmented reality device. Snapchat is a camera app that allows users to take pictures and tell stories, the platform also permits ad sales which is an integral part of the revenue and earnings. The companys mission? To empower people to express themselves in todays digital world.

Spectacles is a hardware device that can connect with Snapchat to deliver pictures and video from a point-of-view perspective. The company has since made three upgrades to the original version and has a Next Generation model available too. The Next Generation of Spectacles are not intended for sale but will be made available to creators who wish to push the boundaries of video and digital communications.

In October 2022 the company reported it had more than 347milion daily active users with more than 250 million engaging with AR each day. The platform had more than 250,000 Lens creators (Lenses are AR experiences) with more than 2.5 million lenses created. There were more than 6 billion lens plays each day and more than 75% of 13-34-year-olds in 20 countries were users.
GE is a multi-national conglomerate that was originally incorporated in 1892. The company was founded by Thomas Edison as the Edison General Electric Company and shortened its name to General Electric following a merger with two other early electric pioneers. The name was later shortened again to GE. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts but has operations on a global scale. One of the original 12 Dow stocks, the company was a component of the index for 122 years until its ousting in 2018.

Originally intended to make and market Edisons incandescent lamp and following products, the company grew over the years through mergers, acquisitions, and natural expansion into newly created fields. Among the many early accomplishments is the creation of RCA and NBC which will both become forces of their own. Other major innovations include the worlds first turbine superchargers, industrial gas turbine engines, and the first jet engine. In the field of computing, General Electric Company is credited as being one of the 8 major computer companies of the 1960s and shares responsibility for todays digital world. In regard to its employees, two were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work with the company.

Today GE operates as a high-tech industrial company in Europe, China, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa. The company operates through four segments including Power, Renewables, Aerospace, and Healthcare although there are plans in the works to split the company into three separate entities. The three new companies would be GE Vernova (power and renewables), GE Health, and GE Aerospace. The spin-offs are expected to be completed by 2025.

The Power segment offers a variety of turbine engines for power production as well as the full range of services from plant construction to retrofit and refit. The Renewables segment is focused on solutions for renewable energy including wind and hydro and the technology to operate them. The Aviation segment manufactures aircraft engines of all varieties and the Healthcare segment offers technology for imaging, monitoring, diagnostics, and drug discovery to health and medical facilities.

General Electric is committed to helping the world transition to a greener way of life and is exiting the new-build coal-fired power industry. Instead, its advancements in wind, grid efficiency, and natural gas are being deployed around the world helping to reduce emissions and generate cleaner energy for businesses, industry, and communities. The company is targeting 2030 for its own carbon neutrality and 2050 for net zero emissions.
Honda Motor Co., Ltd. develops, manufactures, and distributes motorcycles, automobiles, power products, and other products in Japan, North America, Europe, Asia, and internationally. It operates through four segments: Motorcycle Business, Automobile Business, Financial Services Business, and Life Creation and Other Businesses. The Motorcycle Business segment produces motorcycles, including sports, business, and commuter models; and various off-road vehicles, such as all-terrain vehicles and side-by-sides. The Automobile Business segment offers passenger cars, light trucks, and mini vehicles. The Financial Services Business segment provides various financial services, including retail lending and leasing services to customers, as well as wholesale financing services to dealers. The Life Creation and Other Businesses segment manufactures and sells power products, such as general purpose engines, generators, water pumps, lawn mowers, riding mowers, robotic mowers, brush cutters, tillers, snow blowers, outboard marine engines, walking assist devices, and portable battery inverter power sources. This segment also offers HondaJet aircraft. The company also sells spare parts; and provides after-sale services through retail dealers directly, as well as through independent distributors and licensees. Honda Motor Co., Ltd. was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
How many steps will it take to walk off Thanksgiving dinner?

lafayette
LAS VEGAS - It's a little bit cute and a little bit creepy. And it will definitely turn heads at the airport. At CES 2018, I test drove the most advanced luggage I've ever seen.

The CX-1 from ForwardX robotics is the "world's first self-driving carry-on," and it features a combination of facial recognition, auto-follow capabilities and object avoidance to keep your hands free while you're walking through the terminal.

After a very quick training session, which involved little more than staring into the robot's face, this little bot had no problem following behind me as I strolled around a large room inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel. The lidar comes in handy for real-time positioning.

However, the CX-1 temporarily lost sight of me when I purposely made an abrupt turn, as its camera is limited to 170 degrees.

MORE: LG Unveils Jaw-Dropping Rollable OLED TV

Worried about someone taking your luggage? The CX-1 comes with a small anti-theft wristband that will receive an alarm signal if the CX-1 gets out of range.

With a max speed of up to 7 miles per hour, this piece of high-tech luggage offers up to four hours of battery life on a charge, and it can also juice your gadgets using a built-in mobile charger. The company says the battery is removable, if you're concerned about airlines cracking down on checking anything with Lithium-ion batteries.

The CX-1 is so new that reps from ForwardX Robotics told me that the name could change between now and when the product launches in the U.S., which could be as early as this summer. The company also isn't ready to provide a price range.

Overall, the CX-1 very much looks and feels like the concept that it is, but it's also the type of fun surprise that reminds me why I come to CES.

Credit: Mark Spoonauer/Tom's Guide
LAS VEGAS  Honor, Huawei's youth-focused smartphone brand, is bringing the artificial intelligence powers of the Honor View 10 to the U.S.

There's still no firm date for U.S. availability after Honor's CES kickoff last night (Jan. 7). But executives did confirm to Tom's Guide that the phone is U.S.-bound, with it likely reaching these shores sometime in the first quarter of 2018.





Honor View 10

There's no price for the phone yet in the U.S., but we're expect it will cost less than $500, making it competitive with the $499 OnePlus 5T. In Europe, the Honor View 10 sells for 499.



What we saw of the Honor View 10 in Las Vegas looks an awful lot like the phone previewed in December. The Honor View 10 uses Huawei's Kirin 970 chip, which comes with a built-in neural processor. That allows the View 10 to flex its AI smarts, particularly when it comes to photography.

MORE: Best Unlocked Smartphones - Phones Under $200, $300, $500

The View 10 can recognize 13 different photo scenes  everything from portraits to food to cats and dogs  and adjust camera settings on the fly. So point the View 10's dual rear cameras (a 16-megapixel main lens and a 20-MP monochrome shooter) at your pooch, and you'll get a differently composed shot than you would if you snapped a photo of an appetizer. It's a feature we've seen in Huawei's Mate 10 Pro (which is also powered by the Kirin 970 chip), and it impressed us when we had a chance to test that phone.

Honor president George Zhao showed off a few of the View 10's other AI-centric features at CES, including the ability to unlock the phone with your face. (For added security, there's a fingerprint sensor on the phone's front bezel, too.) In a feature that sounds like it's out of the iPhone X's bag of tricks, the Honor View 10 will also recognize when someone who isn't you is looking at your phone, disguising notification on the device's lock screen until it detects your face.



Honor says the neural processor on the View 10's CPU is also powerful enough to translate languages, even when the phone isn't connected to the Internet. In fact, it worked closely with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Translator into the phone. I've tested the translation features in Google's Pixel Buds, and I've been impressed by how seamless it is, though you need a wireless connection to use that feature. I'm eager to see just how fluent the Honor View 10 is when there's no connectivity to be had.



Another Honor View 10 feature isn't necessarily a sign of the phone's smarts, though it could come in handy if you've got a friend who also buys the new phone. The Sync Play feature uses NFC to connect multiple View 10s, effectively turning them into a speaker system that plays the same song simultaneously. Sync Play is set to arrive on the View 10 later in the first quarter, Honor says.



Speaking at CES, Honor's Zhao outlined an aggressive vision for how his company will expand its presence beyond China, where it currently get 85 percent of its sales. In three years, Honor hopes that revenue will be split evenly between China and the rest of the world. To meet that goal, Honor is picking its spots in the U.S., emphasizing product lines like the View 10 (as opposed to the Honor 9) as well its Honor X lineup.



The upcoming red version of the Honor 7X



The most recent addition to the latter product line, the Honor 7X, sells for $199, and when we had the chance to review the phone, we appreciated how Honor brought a full-screen experience to a sub-$200 phone.



The Honor 7X currently comes in blue and black, but starting Feb. 14, Honor plans to sell a red version of the phone that certainly caught our eye at the company's CES event. In addition, Honor plans a software update for the 7X that will bring face unlocking features to that phone.

Image Credits: Tom's Guide
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Robot vacuum buying guide: What you need to know

Not sure where to start your search for a robot vacuum? It doesn't matter how little or how much you want to spend, there's a cleaning robot out there for everyone.
2017 has been a particularly eventful year, with the assumption of duty of a new Commission. I have had the privilege of serving with a diverse group of individuals over the past nine months, and the results have been encouraging.

Youth has been at the center of our agenda, as the African Union works to open up opportunities for them in every field. 2017 was the year of Harnessing the Demographic Dividend through Investment in Youth. This made it possible to renew our commitments, as African States and institutions, to achieve our targets for young people, including through reducing the proportion of youth unemployment by at least 2% annually. In adopting the African Union Demographic Dividend Roadmap, Member States have pledged to open up financial services for young people, promote entrepreneurship, increase investments in health, education, and create spaces for youth civic engagement and political participation. They further pledged to mobilize investments in sectors with the potential for high employment multiplier effects and to engage the corporate sector to encourage on-the-job training and philanthropic programmes.

Member States also renewed their commitments to empowering the youth through the ratification, domestication and full implementation of all African Union Shared Values instruments, including the African Youth Charter and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance.

I am pleased that several African Union Member States have launched the Continental Demographic Dividend Roadmap and committed to report annually on progress made. The vast majority of Member States completed the development of their Demographic Dividend profiles. This now gives us a clearer picture of the high-impact areas that require strategic investments in order to harness the demographic dividend. I call upon the Member States that have not yet done so to complete these profiles.

Reports of African migrants being auctioned as slaves in Libya by international criminal networks were received with shock across the continent and beyond. In response, the Commission took a number of steps, including working with the Libyan authorities, as well as the United Nations, the European Union, the International Organization for Migration and the High Commissioner for Refugees, as part of an African Union-led task force, to facilitate and accelerate the voluntary repatriation of migrants. I requested the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights to carry out an investigation into the situation and to report as soon as possible. Alongside this, the Commission will also take additional steps to address the underlying drivers of irregular migration.

In November, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, which was established to further the advancement of our people. While the task of making these aspirations into reality is a long one, we are confident that it will be achieved.

This year, the Commission reevaluated the effectiveness of its previous policies and strategies with respect to gender equality and womens empowerment on the continent. On this basis, a new gender equality and empowerment strategy has been developed, which ensures better alignment with agenda 2063, places stronger emphasis on tangible results and accountability, and promotes innovative practices.

Regional integration remained a priority for the African Union. Significant progress has been made regarding the negotiations over the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA). Following the 4th meeting of the African Ministers of Trade, held in Niamey in December 2017, it is envisaged that the CFTA agreement and other related documents would be adopted in March 2018. The CFTA, which is a flagship project of Agenda 2063, will create a market of over 1.2 billion people. Its establishment will significantly increase intra-African trade, create economies of scale and regional value chains, and augment job opportunities. In parallel, a legal framework for the management of migration and mobility  the Protocol to the Treaty Estabilishing the African Economic Community Relating to the Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment has been elaborated. It is due for adoption by the African Union Summit of January 2018.

The Commission will also accelerate the implementation of a number of continental policies, including in the area of infrastructure, with the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), and agriculture, with the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). In this respect, greater emphasis will be placed on food security and safety.

Another Agenda 2063 flagship project is the Single African Air Transport Market. This initiative is a follow-up to the Yamoussoukro Declaration of 1999, and will be launched in January 2018, on the margins of the African Union Summit. Twenty-three Member States have pledged their solemn commitment to the Single Air Market, the implementation of which will increase the number of routes, reduce the cost of air travel and contribute to the expansion of intra-African trade and tourism. I call on all Member States that have not yet done so to join this important initiative.

On the institutional building front, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government took an important decision to transform our Union into an effective and efficient institution capable of accelerating progress towards economic integration, peace, security and overall prosperity for African citizens. In line with this decision, I have established a Reform Implementation Unit to co-ordinate the implementation process. I am particularly pleased with the progress we are making on the Financing the Union agenda. In 2018, Member States will be funding almost 40% of the African Union programme budget, compared to less than 5% in 2015 when the initiative was launched. A number of measures will be taken to strengthen overall finance and budget management accountability. In January 2018, I will be submitting a progress report, setting out a number of reform implementation proposals and recommendations, for discussion by the Summit.

Several successful elections were held in Member States. I note, in particular, the peaceful conduct of presidential and representative elections in Liberia. This bears testimony to the commitment of the Liberian people and leaders to sustain peace in their country. I congratulate the peoples and Governments of the countries that held elections for their commitment to ensuring smooth electoral processes, moving us closer to realizing the spirit and letter of the African Charter on Elections, Governance and Democracy. I urge all concerned to respect the will of the people, abide by their national and international obligations, and to use non-violent and legal means in resolving electoral disputes.

As we work towards building stronger institutions and promoting prosperity, the fight against corruption assumes even greater importance and urgency. It is a well-recognized fact that corruption hinders efforts aimed at promoting democratic governance, socio-economic transformation and peace and security. It creates inequality in our societies and erodes the rule of law. While empirical evidence shows that Africa has made some encouraging steps in the last five years, huge challenges remain. In recognition of these, the African Union Assembly declared 2018 as the African Anti-Corruption Year (Project 2018), with the theme Winning the Fight Against Corruption: A Sustainable Path to Africas Transformation.

The African Union remains committed to working with the Member States to deliver on the ambitious Agenda 2063 flagship project of Silencing the Guns by 2020. We all need to rededicate ourselves to ending violence and sustaining peace in our continent, including by bringing to a successful conclusion the ongoing peace processes in Mali and the Central African Republic, ensuring that the elections planned in the Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2018 take place on time and in a conducive environment, consolidating progress made in Somalia, and ending the threat posed by terrorism in the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and in Horn of Africa.

It is my earnest hope that the south Sudanese stakeholders will deliver on the commitments made in the Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities, Protection of Civilians and Humanitarian Access signed as part of the IGAD-led Revitalization Forum that took place in Addis Ababa in December 2017. The people of South Sudan, who have endured so much pain and suffering, desperately need and deserve peace.

We have had several key engagements with our strategic partners. We started the year with a high-level African Union Commission-United Nations Secretariat meeting. We renewed our commitments to work together on Africas peace, security and governance challenges. In November, the African Union-European Union Summit took place. The outcomes of these meetings stand to significantly enhance the quality, effectiveness and impact of these partnerships.

As we enter 2018, we should remember all those who lost their lives not because they lost the will to live, but because of the deadly cloud of conflict, intolerance and disregard for human life and endeavor. We ought to do more and better in 2018 to ensure a future for ourselves, our children, our continent and our world, where the right to life, peace, opportunity and protection should be the basic barometer of our shared humanity.

We should not also forget the women and men serving in African Union or United Nations peace operations in Africa. In 2017, many of them were killed in the line of duty. Their sacrifices should not be in vain.

I wish you all, fellow Africans, a prosperous and peaceful 2018 for our Continent and its people.
Businesses within the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) could save up to $450 million in clearance documentation once the bloc adopts blockchain technology for clearing imports.

Comesa is looking to roll out a digital free trade area  the first in Africa  modelled along the Malaysian Free Trade Zone, where parties to a transaction are connected in real time through a web of ledgers that are secure.

The application also supports generation of an electronic certificate of origin whose authenticity can be verified using national information technology systems.

This will be a marked break from the current practice which involves manual applications and physical presentation of documents to tax bodies and other government agencies that cause businesses delays.

Trade financiers could be the biggest losers once the system is in place.

We are rolling out the Digital FTA in 2018, beginning with willing member states on the basis of the principle of variable geometry, said Comesa spokesman Mwangi Gakunga.

Last month, Comesa completed the design and action plan of the Digital Free Trade Area, the Electronic Certificate of Origin (e-CO) and their draft regulations.

Ending border queues

Piloting of the digital FTA is expected to start in 15 of its 19 member states, enabling large and small enterprises alike to trade using their smartphones and tablets.

The e-certificate of origin is a good practice around the world but Comesa will be the first regional economic bloc in Africa to have it as a regional FTA instrument, he added.

According to Comesa Secretary-General Sindiso Ngwenya, the digital economic integration will do away with long queues at border posts for goods and people moving across borders.

We have developed a mobile application for cross-border traders which shall be launched in the countries that are involved in the simplified trade regime. We shall integrate them to Customs and other agencies and also to the Comesa centre, he said.

The participating countries are Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Seychelles, Malawi, Mauritius, Madagascar, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, which are all part of Comesas Simplified Trade Regime that allows traders with goods valued at $1,000 or less to access cross-border markets duty free.

Breakthrough

Exporters from Uganda say this is a breakthrough in regional and international trade, even though it comes with new risks and challenges, especially member states that have not yet provided for e-CO laws.

The risks are there but they can be mitigated. There must be software to prove that the electronic certificate of origin is authentic so that tax authorities can read it, says Chris Kaijuka, the managing director of grain exporting company AfroKai Ltd.

Mr Kaijuka welcomes the innovation but adds that he is keen to test the effectiveness of the electronic certificate of origin in solving some of the import-export hitches that traders face in the market.

But I welcome it. We wanted the e-certificate of origin which helps me on taxation, he says. Someone brings in goods from outside Comesa but declares them as of Comesa origin, which they are not, Mr Kaijuka adds.

Diminished role for banks?

The financial services sector for counterparties makes easy money in international trade deals  globally totaling to $100 trillion  because the importing party in most cases does not know or trust the exporting company.

Within the Comesa region alone, some $450 million is paid to commercial banks annually to confirm letters of credit.

But the blocs chief executive argues that soon this will be a thing of the past because the Comesa digital FTA has applications that can connect Customs, commercial banks, ministries of finance and central banks in real time, even when it comes to remittances.

Lets say you are an exporter from Zambia and you are exporting to Egypt, it will be accounted for because all these parties will be able to access that information simultaneously and this is through the block chain application, says Mr Ngwenya.

But a source at KCB Bank Uganda  one of the largest providers of trade finance  told The EastAfrican that it is too early for these innovations to reduce the role of commercial banks to the periphery in international trade.

Customers still rely so much on banks to ensure payment, he said.

Enabling laws

In 2014, the Comesa Council of Ministers decided that member states that were ready to accept and use the e-CO should do so by July 31 of that year.

The Council further directed member states whose legal systems did not provide for e-COs to enact enabling laws as soon as possible with the view to replace the manual certificates of origin with the electronic certificates in a bid to speed up the process of certification and facilitate trade in real time.

The Council also wanted the designed digital applications to ensure that they integrate small and medium enterprises  which make up over 90 per cent of the employment base in Comesa for its 492 million citizens, according to the blocs data.

In March this year, Malaysia launched its digital free trade zone (DFTZ)  a global first  that is expected to increase SMEs contribution to the countrys GDP, which currently stands at 37 per cent, despite 97 per cent of businesses in Malaysia being micro or small and micro enterprises.

According to its website, the Malaysian DFTZ has the potential to increase the SME goods export to $38 million, create over 60,000 jobs and support $65 billion worth of goods moving through the DFTZ by 2025.

Observers say, over this period the DFTZ will double the growth rate of Malaysias SMEs goods export.
The 29th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July 2017, elected Rwanda to lead the Union for a period of one year, in 2018.

The 30th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government, that convenes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from January 28 to 29, will therefore be chaired by President Paul Kagame in his capacity as Chairman of the Union.

He takes over from his Guinean counterpart, President Alpha Conde.

It will be the very first time that Rwanda will lead the Union since the latter was launched in 2002.

At the 27th AU summit in Kigali in July 2016, African leaders tasked President Kagame to lead a new effort to reform the AU Commission and the Union to make them more efficient.

The AU Chair is the ceremonial head of the Union elected by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government for a one-year term.

Accelerate reforms

The Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and East African Community Affairs, Amb. Olivier Nduhungirehe said the Chairmanship of President Kagame will accelerate the AU reforms programme which will allow his successors to continue on the same path, thus allowing Africa to reach its goal of self-sustenance and having its voice heard on the international scene.

Uduak Amimo, a broadcaster based in Kenya who covered Ethiopia and the AU for the BBC from 2009 to 2011, said President Kagame will bring a plain-speaking, hands-on, action-packed style to the continent that emphasises focused, responsible leadership and ownership of Africas development.

She said his style will have some African leaders uncomfortable because he will call them out, as he did when they trooped to Europe for a security Summit on Africa.

He will lead from the front as he did in offering to resettle African migrants stranded in Libya and at risk of being enslaved, Amimo said.

In driving the reforms agenda at the AU, he will demand that attitude and mindsets change both at the commission itself and in how African leaders engage with and support the AU.

Those reforms will not gather dust on shelves as many of our African decisions and initiatives have done. Under his leadership and direction, a critical mass of African countries will implement the reforms and we will see a more autonomous AU.

According to Dr. Marco Jowell, the Director of Africa Research Group and research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, there is an opportunity for pragmatic and realistic strategic direction of Pan-African ideals which Kagame is very well placed to provide.

Kagame is clearly highly respected by the AU having been tasked with leading its reform which bodes well for chairmanship of the continental body. He has also steered Rwanda to be leading peacekeeping contributor and is a champion of economic development and African trade, core elements of the AUs agenda, Dr. Jowell said.

The ideas are there, but pragmatism, consensus and the implementation of feasible activities is required for the AU to effectively meet some of its expectations.

Peace and security

Africa faces insecurity though leaders have set 2020 as the year by which conflicts on the continent will have been resolved.

Nduhungirehe said that Kagame, as AU Chairman, will work closely with his counterparts around the continent on strengthening the pillars for the Agenda 2063, a strategic framework for the socio-economic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years.

The Agenda 2063 entails the end of conflicts on the continent by 2020. This means that President Kagame will have to work closely with regional organisations and other heads of state to find sustainable solutions to conflicts and prevent their causes, Nduhungirehe said.

Most of the conflicts we have on the continent could have been avoided if countries could talk peace, he added.

Besides the vulnerability associated with climate change and other factors there are hot spots of insecurity associated with war and conflict that require the AUs attention. These range from the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria; a never ending armed conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, the Central African Republic conflict; violence in South Sudan; repeated attacks by Somalia-based Al-Shabab terrorist group on Kenya with far-reaching effects; and Islamist militant and terrorist activity in the Maghreb and Sahel regions of North Africa.

Nduhungirehe noted that the AU has a panel of wise personalities mostly composed of former Heads of State and Government that are usually sent on missions around the continent to prop up peace talks between governments and the opposition on pertinent issues. The AU maintains peacekeepers in different African countries.

During Kagames Chairmanship, the Union is set to start implementing reforms under the oversight of a steering committee, the minister added.

Africa is the poorest continent with over a billion people, but it has good weather with a lot of natural resources that could help it prosper. This means that we have a hard task of making good use of our people, land and other resources, Nduhungirehe noted.

Donor dependence

Nduhungirehe said that its sad that 80 per cent of AU programmes are funded by donors though Africa could do it by itself.

Under the Kagame-led reform plan, each country will deduct 0.2 per cent of its tax income from taxable imports and contribute it to the AU commission to help the Union achieve self-reliance.

So far, 20 countries (out of 54) started remitting the contribution. It is hoped that all will have come onboard by year end.

Navigating complex continental diplomatic relations, lack of capacity

Dr. Jowell said Kagame is clearly highly respected by the AU having been tasked with leading its reform but noted that there are a number of AU internal challenges, external challenges and many expectations which he may not be able to deliver on.

The AU, like most multi-lateral organisations, is only as strong and able as its member states. Navigating the complex continental diplomatic relations in developing accepted and implementable policy is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the AU, not least with regional hegemons, he said.

Dr. Jowell who is former strategic adviser to the Rwanda Peace Academy said a further internal challenge is the lack of capacity.

That is, the AU secretariat, commission and subsidiary departments and organs are significantly understaffed. At the same time an ever expanding remit of business and a plethora of meetings, strategizing and planning dominate officials time, he said.

Related to this, Dr. Jowell as well pointed to the issue of over reliance on foreign aid for operating costs and the obligation to cater to external demands.

Member states must meet their pledged contributions and the AU must secure independent streams of funding. These issues result in a final but crucial challenge. Strategizing and planning is often well developed, coherent and undertaken by experienced and quality officials. However, the implementation of these plans is wrought with difficulties, not least those outlined above, he said.

Contradicting national interests

Despite the positives Kagame brings, Amimo too is not unmindful of the challenges Kagame faces at the helm of the AU and, she pointed out a few particularly in the angles of self-determination and dignity; and free movement of people.

Under self-determination and dignity, she said, President Kagame has to get more than 50 countries aligned and acting together as one.

Unfortunately, Amimo added, African countries have or perceive themselves to have different and sometimes contradicting national interests.

She said: Economies and budgetary priorities are at different levels, some countries even have their entire national budgets funded by donors. Several countries have not paid their membership dues in years, others are chronic defaulters. Some are more loyal to their colonial masters and their interests, than to the interests of their African neighbours.

Some countries are reliant on Western countries for their defence and security. So it will be difficult for him to change the mindset and attitudes of such countries to one that embraces ownership of and responsibility for Africa. This in turn means that there will be countries that actively and passively undermine the continents ambitions for self-determination and dignity.

How about free movement of people?

Amimo observes that free movement of people across borders, something high on the regional integration agenda for many countries because of the prospective trade gains associated with it, is also fraught with hurdles.

The AU has rolled out the African Union passport; several African countries have announced that African passport holders will no longer require visas to enter their countries. However, young Africans are still risking their lives in the thousands to leave Africa and access Europe, she explained.

A key challenge will be defining how the free movement of people relates to Africans in search of employment opportunities and refuge.

Nduhungirehe said that Rwanda is looking forward to share her experience with and to learn from the rest of Africa.

African countries have different histories but we can learn from each other, he said.

Asked about the view that some African countries are still under the control of their former colonial masters even as they officially gained independence, he said the most important thing is for all countries to be in position to chart an honourable future of their own and for the continent to work together on advancing African interests on the global stage.

In many cases, we face common challenges and threats and there is need for us to unite and confront them and to pursue shared aspirations as a continent, Nduhungirehe said.
Vacation Agent Magazine

A version of this article appears in print in the June 2017 issue of Vacation Agent Magazine. Subscribe
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Hii

Me and my husband are traveling to Europe in late May Early June for our honemoon. We will be traveling to London,Amsterdam and Switzerland. We we are looking for Fun and exciting things to do while we are there. We are 25 year olds who love to eat and drink and are open to just about anything! We have never been to Europe so any advice would be much appreciated. Thank You!
I am planning my first backpacking trip in Australia and hopefully New Zealand too. My plan is to land in Sydney from the UK, then head to Melbourne and Adelaide, then maybe Uluru and Alice Springs. I definitely want to go from Cairns to Sydney. After this I am thinking of going to New Zealand from Sydney.

I am free from mid February to late April and I have about nine weeks. I am thinking of spending five to six weeks in Australia and three to four weeks in New Zealand.

I have read that I can take the Greyhound or Premier busses along the east cost, but wondered what is the cheapest transport along the Victoria cost to Adelaide, then Adelaide, Alice Springs and on to Cairns?

I have a 3 month eVisa until November. Could you also send me any links that would help with planning itineraries for backpackers on those routes please?

Thanks
Your OP reads as if you plan to spend 6 weeks at the Gold Coast!

Six weeks is a great amount of time for a roadtrip from Brisbane to Cairns. I'd time it so you have a week in the Cairns region at the end. You could spend a couple of days on the Gold Coast at the beginning as that's only an hour or so from Brisbane. I do like Seaworld, but other than that I much prefer the hinterland - Springbrook, Lamington and the Border Ranges. However, there are other fantastic things to see up the coast, so a few days would be enough there imo.

Edit: on rethinking, I wonder what you believe the Gold Coast is? Other visitors have thought it is much longer. The Gold Coast is the name given to the coastline (and now city) from Coolangatta to Beenleigh. It covers about 60 kilometres.

Edited: 4 years ago
Re: tsetse fly and mosquitoes- Is it bad in February?

1. Re: tsetse fly and mosquitoes- Is it bad in February?

It depends up on area such like Tarangire there is tsetse flies but most of time tsetse flies are actvies during the day (midd day hours)but morning and late evening is ok

Same as lake manayara but there is not tsetse flies in ngorongoro area at all

Well serengeti yes but not in central area maybe if you visit western corridor or norhern also ndutu area is ok

Only thing you can spary only during the game drive time

Most of time i'm used no bite only and it works good special in some remote area where there is tsetse flies
I am arriving in HCMC in late June 2018 for a 7 week trip through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos. I understand I can apply for a pre-arrival visa online for Vietnam that is valid for 30 days with a single entry via air.. I will be leaving Vietnam before the 30 days is over and entering again at the end of my trip from Laos or Cambodia to catch my flight out of HCMC... I am having a hard time figuring out what kinds of visas I will need to apply for on this journey given that I will be visiting various countries for less than 30 days each, but with possibly multiple entry points... I want to keep things simple but will definitely have to enter Vietnam twice since I am flying in and out of there. Anyone have experience with this? What about visas for the surrounding countries? Thanks in advance
My husband and I are trying to figure out the best way to plan the first part of our trip. We land in Hanoi Feb 24 3:30pm. The following is what we want to do but we don't know what order to do them in or the time needed to spend in each place.

1. Hanoi, land on feb 24. Spend Feb 25 in old town

2.Cat Ba Island (Lan Ha Bay)

3. Ninh Binh

4. Pu Luong nature park

5. Phony Nha -Ke Bang national park 3 day 2 night cave tour.

Can we do all these things in 8 days? By march 4th?

We're young seniors who don't like busy, touristy places. More relaxing off the beaten path.

We'll be making our way down the coast of Vietnam, which we're going to plan as we go, leaving for home on Mar 18 from Saigon.

Thanks DB
Re: should we travel Vietnam with a tour group or individual

2. Re: should we travel Vietnam with a tour group or individual

Hi Beccy,

"should we travel Vietnam with a tour group or individual"

Well, that's personal preferences stuff.

For me, without question, it's definitely DIY.

"...and the best way to get around."

Planes and trains. Avoid buses, and in particular, night buses.

"Any suggestions as to where are the best places to visit"

The problem is that my 'best' places, probably wouldn't be your 'best' places.

This is where you need to do some research to see what appeals to you.

You can find plenty of information here on Trip Advisor, including in the pinned 'Trip Reports' thread at the top of the forum.

You can also find information at travelfish.org

With two weeks, limit your destinations to four or five at the most.

Scott
Hi,

Shin Osaka not being available on this Kansai Hiroshima pass does not make sense to me as the bullet train for Hiroshima departs from that station. To my knowledge Shin- Osaka is where the national trains go from and Osaka is where the local trains go from.

I have found this website to always be super helpful and a reliable source of information.

The Kansai wide pass: https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2361_08.html

The Ksansai Hiroshima pass https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2361_kansai_hiroshima.html .

- It states in the points below that you get unlimited use between Shin - Osaka and Hiroshima as the trains for Hiroshima depart from that station.

- Osaka station is also shown on the map you would have use of that station.

From what you have said if your priority is Hiroshim and Miyajima then I would get the Kansai Hiroshima pass as that covers all the areas you would like to visit where as I get the impression that the Kansai Wide area pass is for those who do not want to travel as far as Hiroshima.

I literally think the deciding factor between the two pass is if you are going to Hiroshima or not.

You can also use this website to plan your travel itineary - https://www.jrpass.com/farecalculator you can put in all the rail trips you would like to take and it will give you a price if you brought the tickets separetly and it will then also recommend a pass as well.

I hope that helps.

Edited: 4 years ago
Is your company in need of the most reliable and efficient best Best Jasmine Tea s in the market? Your good luck led you to the ideal situation, so congratulations! You are in the best possible place. By eliminating the need to read through dozens of Best Jasmine Tea reviews, we are saving you time and stress.

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- Hassan Omar verbally attacks the judge presiding over his election petition against Governor Ali Hassan Joho

- The former senator has accused Justice Lydia Achode of being biased against him during the petition's hearing

- He wants the judge to excuse herself from the bench and Chief Justice David Maraga to have his case file assigned to a new judge

- Omar is pushing for nullification of Joho's August 8 poll victory and a fresh poll over alleged widespread irregularities

Outspoken ex-Mombasa county senator, Hassan Omar, has sensationally accused high court judge hearing his high-stakes petition of being biased against him.

Omar, who is challenging Governor Ali Hassan Joho's August 8 poll, wants Justice Lydia Achode to completely excuse herself from presiding over the case.

Through his lawyer, Yusuf Aboubakar, Omar claimed that the judge was lenient to Joho's lawyers but unfairly restricted the petitioner's advocates during cross-examination of witnesses.

READ ALSO: Mkuu wa COTU Francis Atwoli azungumzia mipango ya kumwapisha Raila

Justice Lydia Achode hearing election petition filed by former Mombasa senator Hassan Omar challenging Governor Hassan Joho's August 8 poll victory. Photo:NMG.

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The judge, according to Omar, also tolerated several applications filed by Joho but declined those filed by his lawyers.

The former senator is now pleading with the chief justice, David Maraga, to intervene and have his case file transfered to a new judge.

READ ALSO: Uhuru officially receives Omar Hassan to Jubilee party (photos)

Omar is seeking for nullification of Joho's August 8 poll victory over alleged widespread election malpractices.

The former Wiper party official argued that several form 37Bs that IEBC relied on to tally results were not signed by the county's Returning Officer Nancy Kariuki.

READ ALSO: Hassan Omar narrates how Raila and Kalonzo drove him out of NASA to Jubilee

Kariuki admitted that she did not sign all form 3Bs. It also emerged that some of the forms did not have names for constituency tallying centers as required.

In its defense, IEBC lawyers argued that the anomalies pointed out in forms 37Bs did not affect the overall election outcome, and that Governor Joho was still validly elected.

READ ALSO: Omar HASSANS exit confirms our fears about Raila and Kalonzo

Omar wants the August 8 Mombasa county gubernatorial elections to be rendered null and void and fresh poll held.

The petition is set to be heard again on Thursday, January, 11, 2018.

Raila Odinga's 'Swearing in' Unstoppable - On Tuko TV

Source: TUKO.co.ke
One Ukrainian soldier was seriously injured after an explosive device blew up in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in Luhansk region over the past day.

Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Spokesperson for ATO issues Oleksandr Motuzianyk said this at a briefing on Monday, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"One soldier was blown up by the explosive device near the village of Lopaskyne (24km north-west of Luhansk). He was taken to a military hospital where he received the necessary medical assistance, he said.

He added that Russian-backed militants continued to launch attacks on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbas in last day despite the agreements of the Trilateral Contact Group on ceasefire during the New Year and Christmas holidays. In Donetsk direction, militants fired 82mm mortars and small arms on Ukrainian strongholds.

ish
The State Emergency Service of Ukraine has issued warnings for mountainous areas in Ivano-Frankivsk and Zakarpattia regions, where a high avalanche danger is expected on January 8-9.

The State Emergency Service reported this with reference to the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center's forecasts. On January 8-9, a considerable (III) level of avalanche risk is expected in the Carpathian mountains, the report reads. ish
There is a need to change the so-called "Minsk format" of negotiations on the settlement of the conflict in Donbas.

First president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk said this in an interview with Radio Liberty.

"The second step [to stop the war in Donbas] is to change or to fill the "Minsk format" with other content. I consider the following options: go to the "Budapest format" or to fill the "Minsk format" with other possibilities," he said.

He also believes that the leaders of two states have to hold a meeting as the situation in Donbas is the hand of the Kremlin. According to Kravchuk, the termination of the war formally depends on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his opinion, having a neighbor like Russia, Ukraine has to join NATO.

Kravchuk also believes that Ukraine will "return Crimea when Russia is not able to rule the peninsula."

ish
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the closure of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, saying it perpetuates the Palestinian problem. Netanyahu also told his Cabinet meeting Sunday that the agencys ultimate goal is to terminate the state of Israel and therefore must go. VOAs Zlatica Hoke reports.
Two major Apple investors have urged the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone addiction among children, highlighting growing concern about the effects of gadgets and social media on youngsters.

New York-based Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, or CalSTRS, said Monday in open letter to Apple that the company must offer more choices and tools to help children fight addiction to its devices.



"There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility," the letter said. "Apple can play a defining role in signaling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do."



The two investors collectively control $2 billion worth of Apple shares.



Among their proposals to Apple: establish an expert committee including child development specialists; offer Apple's vast information to researchers; and enhance mobile device software so that parents have more options to protect their children's health.



The letter cited various studies and surveys on how the heavy usage of smartphones and social media negatively affects children's mental and physical health. Examples include distractions by digital technologies in the classroom, a decreased ability of students to focus on educational tasks, and higher risks of suicide and depression.



The investors' call reflects growing concerns around the world about what the long-term impact will be of using mobile devices and social media, especially for those who start to use smartphones at an early age.



While tech companies have not acknowledged openly that their gadgets may be addictive, some Silicon Valley insiders have begun to speak to media about how gadgets, mobile applications and social media sites are designed to be addictive and to keep users' attention as long as possible.
Violent clashes involving gunmen, a community police force and state police killed 11 people in the troubled southern state of Guerrero on Sunday, while a separate series of shootouts the previous night left seven dead in the northern Mexico beach resort of San Jose del Cabo.

Guerrero state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said eight people were initially killed when gunmen ambushed community police before dawn in the town of La Concepcion, near the resort city of Acapulco. Two of the dead were from the community force.

Later in the morning, state police arrived to disarm the local agents, and another shootout erupted in which three people were killed. Alvarez said he did not know how they died, but local media said they were community police.

State Attorney General Xavier Olea Pelaez said 30 members of the community police were detained on suspicion of crimes including homicide and illegal weapons and drug possession.

Among those arrested was Marco Antonio Suastegui, the founder of the community force and the leader of a social movement that for over a decade has fought against a hydroelectric project in the region.

Photojournalist Bernandino Hernandez said that while covering the violence he was beaten, kicked and dragged by state police and forcibly relieved of his camera's memory cards. He also witnessed several other journalists being treated roughly.

Hernandez said he had photographed police using force against locals who tried to prevent the arrest of the community agents: "Some people were dragged by the hair to take them away."

Hernandez is a regular contributor of photographs to The Associated Press but was not on assignment for AP at the time.

Guerrero has been one of Mexico's most violent states in recent years, home to marijuana and opium poppy fields as well as warring organized crime gangs.

It's also where 43 teachers college students disappeared in 2014 after being taken by police from the city of Iguala who allegedly handed them over to a drug cartel. They remain missing.

In the northern state of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said in a statement that marines responding Saturday night to reports of gunfire in San Jose del Cabo came upon heavily armed men wearing tactical vests and riding in two vehicles with license plates from the U.S. state of California.

Both vehicles sped off with the marines in pursuit and subsequently crashed, the statement said. In two separate exchanges of gunfire, all seven of the cars' occupants were shot dead by marines.

Baja California Sur has also seen an explosion of violence as the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels battle for territory in the state. In late December, four bodies were found hanging from highway overpasses in the resort-studded Los Cabos area.
As Britains 2019 exit from the European Union edges closer, it is looking to carve out a new role for itself on the world stage. Many analysts say it could struggle to retain its influence as other world powers demand greater representation in global bodies like the United Nations. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from London, the British government insists it is looking to build global alliances beyond Europe.
A new proposal in California would allow residents to make donations instead of paying taxes in order to avoid the new federal tax plan's cap on deductions of state taxes.

The California legislation, introduced Thursday by Democratic Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon, would allow residents to donate to a new state public-purpose "excellence fund" and receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit in return. De Leon says taxpayers would then be able to deduct the donation from their federal taxes, essentially undermining that part of the law signed by President Donald Trump.

The proposal is one of a few ideas under consideration by high-tax states that will most acutely feel the sting of the new federal cap on state and local tax deductions.

Democratic governors in New York and Connecticut have raised the possibility of challenging the constitutionality of the cap.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was developing a plan to restructure the state's payroll tax system.

California and other states with high income and property taxes are scrambling to deal with the $10,000 federal deduction cap imposed by the sweeping tax overhaul bill passed by congressional Republicans and signed into law last month by Trump.

"The Republican tax plan gives corporations and hedge-fund managers a trillion-dollar tax cut and expects California taxpayers to foot the bill," de Leon said in a statement. "We won't allow California residents to be the casualty of this disastrous tax scheme."

About 6 million California taxpayers, a third of the total, itemized deductions on their tax returns, claiming an average of $18,438 for state and local taxes, according to a fact sheet on the legislation.

The excellence fund would be created by the proposed legislation and exist within the states general fund, according to de Leons office. The bill did not provide details on how money in the fund would be used.

Because states are not registered as charities, their tax codes would have to be modified for them to be considered charitable organizations, said Joseph Callahan, a lawyer with Mackay, Caswell & Callahan in New York.

"I'm scratching my head at how that would work," he said. "From [a U.S. Internal Revenue Service] perspective, it is against public policy; it is against the intention of the Congress."

An IRS spokesman on Friday declined to comment on the California bill.

The bill's fact sheet said California and other states had created tax credit programs to fund access to college and private education.

White House economic adviser Gary Cohn said the federal government might try to block attempts to circumvent the cap, Bloomberg reported Friday.

The California proposal is modeled after an existing tax credit offered for contributions to the CalGrant program that provides college scholarships. Seventeen other states use similar models to fund private education.
Both of Maya's parents were Islamic State suicide bombers. Her four siblings were among their victims.

Plump, smiling and younger than two years old, Maya may never know anything of her past. "Maya" is not her real name.

"She was skin and bones when we got her," says Sukaina Mohammed, director of the Department of Women and Children in the Nineveh province of Iraq, in the Mosul orphanage where Maya now lives.

"That baby had six broken ribs when she arrived," she adds, pointing to another toddler standing in one of the white cribs lining the room.

As authorities in Iraq sort out the children that IS left behind  their orphans, the orphans of their victims, abandoned children of sex slaves, and children of foreign fighters  aid workers say they want to shield the youngest ones from their painful beginnings.

None of the small children born of or raised by IS are considered a threat to society, but officials fear they will be stigmatized nonetheless. Maya's best chance for happiness, says Mohammed, is if she and any prospective adoptive parents never know anything more than that she is a victim of war.

"I don't tell people which babies' parents were IS militants," Mohammed explains, "because if someone wants revenge on IS, they might hate the children."

The less lucky ones

Older children of IS don't have the luxury of forgetting, adds Dalal Tariq, an aid worker with the International Organization for Migration in the Haj Ali refugee camp in northern Iraq.

Many of the residents here are the wives and children of IS fighters who are now dead or in jail. The children arrived at the camp terrified, Tariq says.

"They were afraid of the soldiers," she explains. "IS militants told them the soldiers would beat them up."

WATCH: Some of the Children Left Behind

Other children watched their fathers die in battle and "they come here nearly destroyed," she says.

The IS war is now officially over in Iraq, and families here are not accused of any crimes, but leaving the camp is not an option, according to Hoda, a mother of three children whose husband was an IS fighter before he was killed in an airstrike.

In her village, the children of IS are considered suspect, and local leaders ordered her not to return.

"If anyone from IS families goes back there, they will throw grenades at the house at night," she explains while in her tent, surrounded by her children and other neighbors. "Even if my family comes here to visit me, they could be in danger."

Before they were found

At the orphanage in Mosul, dozens of children wait for the chance to be adopted.

"All the children we found were in a terrible state," Mohammed says from her Mosul office. "I remember one time, we found a baby who was so thirsty, she died in the hospital after only a few days. She had no energy left to live."

Some babies were rescued from the streets after being left in the sun as bait to draw Iraqi soldiers into the line of fire. Others were found in destroyed homes after their parents died fighting with IS.

There are the children of rescued sex slaves, whose families will not accept them. Many children were found alone in the rubble after airstrikes and battles annihilated much of Mosul. One boy survived alone under a collapsed house for seven days after the bombing.

"Some we don't know about exactly," Mohammed later says at the orphanage, pointing out a girl about six years old. "She speaks only Turkish. We think she was kidnapped by Turkish militants in 2014."

Foreign children

Orphans of foreign IS fighters in Iraq and Syria will not be able to avoid stigma if they stay, according to Mohammed, and some countries have moved to repatriate them.

Last month, three children were sent to live in foster care in France, while their mother and youngest sibling remain among the 1,400 foreign wives and children of IS fighters being held in Iraq, according to Human Rights Watch.

Officials from Germany, Russia, Chechnya and other countries have also requested the children of their nationals to be returned.

Around the world, children are increasingly front-line targets and human shields, and forced to fight in battles, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency.

"Children are being targeted and exposed to attacks and brutal violence in their homes, schools and playgrounds," Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF director of emergency programs, said in late December. "As these attacks continue year after year, we cannot become numb. Such brutality cannot be the new normal."
Packed inside an SUV and heading to Las Vegas, employees of CaptureProof, a San Francisco startup, are part of a time-honored technology industry tradition  attending the giant consumer electronics show that takes over the Las Vegas strip every January.



Starting Monday, more than 180,000 people are expected to attend CES  the show once know as the Consumer Electronics Show  with about one-third of them international visitors. There will be 4,000 exhibitors in every conceivable tech category  gaming, self-driving cars, digital health, digital sports, drones, robots. Outside official CES, many companies set up their own events in hotels throughout Las Vegas.



The result is a crush of people and cars, a cacophony of sounds and logos, as everyone tries to get each others' attention.



And that is true for CaptureProof, as well. This is its fourth year at CES, the only consumer-focused show that it attends. The small company, which offers an app to help doctors and patients to visually track symptoms, is a regular at medical and investor shows.



But it has to go to CES, says the firm's CEO. There's potential partners and clients to meet  and the possibility that a conversation begins on the convention floor that leads to other business in a new direction.



Getting noticed



"Every innovation lead of every company walks through CES and spends at least 24 hours there," said Meghan Conroy, CaptureProof's CEO.



Costing $4,500, the 10-foot by 10-foot booth in the Sands Expo will include a make-believe doctor's waiting room, with old magazines and uncomfortable chairs.



With a message that no one loves doctor's waiting rooms, the company pitches itself as a more efficient way for doctors and patients to connect outside an in-person visit.



At its booth, a giant smartphone (really a 43-inch TV screen) will show the CaptureProof app as the more appealing alternative to waiting around.



"Getting the right patient to the right doctor is what we are talking about at CES," Conroy said.



Packing away food, water



Once at CES, the CaptureProof staff has to be self-sustaining, much like going camping, said Conroy.



She has put thought into the details  the thickness of the booth's floor padding, tables that need to double as storage space, the amount of snacks and water to stow away. The total cost to the company, including the booth, the carpet pads, the staff, hotel and travel is $12,000.



Rising above the fray



From prior years, the company has learned it has to put its logos and company name at least four feet off the ground  to be seen above the masses of people.



Part of the marketing strategy is giving away things affixed with the firm's logo  bags, pens, stickers  so that people walk around advertising the firm.



Like many who have been to CES, Conroy acknowledges, "It's awful."



But she adds: "Everyone is there. You never know who you will meet."
Official figures show that 100,412 persons applied for asylum in France in 2017, up 17 percent on the year before.



Pascal Brice, director of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees (OFPRA), told CNEWS television Monday that the number seeking asylum was the highest level for "at least 40 years.''



The highest asylum requests came from Albania, Afghanistan and Haiti.



Though France saw asylum requests spike further in 2017, Brice noted that Germany registered twice as many during the year.



About 36 percent of applicants were granted refugee status, a slight decrease on the year before.



The agency said a focus was placed on women victims of violence  over 6,000 girls and young women received refugee status to protect them from a risk of genital mutilation.
French President Emmanuel Macron said China and Europe should work together on Beijing's "Belt and Road" initiative, the project intended to build a modern-day "Silk Road" which Macron said could not be "one-way."

Speaking Monday to an audience of businessmen, academics and students in the city of Xian, the eastern departure point of the ancient route, Macron said the Silk Roads were never only Chinese," adding that "By definition, these roads can only be shared. If they are roads, they cannot be one-way."

The Belt and Road project, unveiled in 2013, is aimed at connecting China by land and sea to Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Central Asia, and beyond to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged $124 billion for the New Silk Road project at a summit in May, but it has been received with suspicion in Western capitals as more of an intention to assert Chinese influence than Beijing's desire to spread prosperity.

After a three-day visit in Xian, Macron and his delegation of some 60 business executives and officials will travel to Chinas capital.

Macron plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on a number of issues, including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord after the United States withdrew from the deal.

Along with his wife Brigitte, Macron began an official trip to China Monday, visiting the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xian, a centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda - a Buddhist site - and the city's mosque.
Canadian ex-hostage Joshua Boyle's case has been put off until next Monday while his lawyers work on a bail plan.

Boyle made brief court appearance via video link Monday. He is facing 15 charges, including sexual assault, following his release from captivity in Afghanistan.

Boyle had a beard and wore an orange jumpsuit. He'll remain behind bars while his lawyers prepare a bail application.

Boyle, his wife Caitlan and their three children were freed in October in Pakistan, five years after the couple was abducted by a Taliban-linked militant group during a trip in neighboring Afghanistan. The children were born in captivity.

The purported acts allegedly occurred between Oct. 14 and Dec. 30 after Boyle returned to Canada. A publication ban bars reporting information that could identify the alleged victims.
A 22-year-old Iranian protester has died in custody, according to two Iranian lawmakers, intensifying fears of a repeat of the prisoner abuse that followed similar protests in 2009.

A reformist member of parliament, Mahmoud Sadeghi, says he was told the detainee, identified as Sina Ghanbari, committed suicide. Another lawmaker, Tayyebe Siavashi, said the detainee had been arrested in Tehran.

Details of the incident were not immediately clear, but it was thought to be the first death of a protester in custody as a result of the current demonstrations sweeping the country.

Iranian authorities have arrested more than 1,000 people in response to the demonstrations that broke out nearly two weeks ago. At least 21 people have been killed in the unrest.

Sadeghi has called for an investigation into Ghanbari's death, and says he warned authorities against abuses such as those that took place following the 2009 protests.

'Devastating to hear'

No matter the cause of Ghanbari's death, it reflects poor conditions inside the prison, says Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran.

The prison guards and authorities are responsible for the lives of prisoners while in custody, and its devastating to hear that once again Iranian authorities have failed to protect lives, Ghaemi told VOA.

Iranian prison guards routinely use intimidation, including physical and psychological pressure, on detainees, according to Ghaemi. For some people, it's unbearable and they reach a point they can't endure, he said.

There were widespread reports of torture and murder in Iranian jails following the violent crackdown on the 2009 protests over a disputed presidential election. Iranian officials later acknowledged three detainees were beaten to death.

Although the more moderate government of President Hassan Rouhani is in office, the basic power structure in Iran has not changed since 2009, said Alex Vatanka, who specializes in Iran at the Middle East Institute.

It doesnt matter who is president, said Vatanka. The revolutionary guards, the intelligence branch of the revolutionary guards, the judicial branch, the law enforcement  none of those entities are answerable to the president.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who came to power in 1989, holds ultimate authority in Iran. Religious and political leaders hold other key positions, but must be vetted by the clergy.

Rising food prices

Rouhani, who has sought to relax the countrys strict social controls, on Monday took a more conciliatory approach to the protesters, suggesting they had in some cases legitimate grievances.

One cannot force ones lifestyle on future generations, Rouhani said, according to the ISNA news agency. The problem is that we want two generations after us to live the way we like them to.

The protests began as a response to rising food prices, but quickly turned into sometimes violent displays of discontent with Irans conservative leaders.

Some believe that people only want money, Rouhani said. But would someone be fine having a good monthly pay and have internet access fully blocked, or have his movements outside the house restricted, or not have the right to speak?

The protests are believed to have died down. But some people continue to speak out, including outside Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where many of the protesters are believed to be held.

For some, Ghanbari's death is a sign that the violence may have just begun.

A 22-year-old who had just been picked up for protesting against the authorities? I find the idea that this person would commit suicide to be unlikely, Vatanka said. I have a number of red flags that go up, and I think that would be the sentiment across Iran, particularly given what people went through in 2009.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet Sunday the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees perpetuates the problem and should be shut down.

Netanyahu complained that the U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) is focused solely on Palestinian refugees and that its funding should instead be shifted to the U.N.s blanket refugee agency.

WATCH: A call to U.N. aid

"It also perpetuates the right of return narrative in order to eliminate the state of Israel," the prime minister said. "Therefore UNRWA must become a thing of the past."

The agency says there are 5 million refugees eligible for its services.

They are the Palestinians who left their homes during the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948, or their descendants. Today, more than 1.5 million Palestinians live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said the agency will continue its work until there is a "just and lasting solution" for the refugees.

"What perpetuates the refugee crisis is the failure of the parties to deal with the issue. This needs to be resolved by the parties to the conflict in the context of peace talks, based on U.N. resolutions and international law, and requires the active engagement by the international community," Gunness said in a statement.

Efforts to push forward Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been stalled for several years, and the prospects were further complicated last month with U.S. President Donald Trumps recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital.

The decision was a break from longstanding U.S. policy and the path advocated by the United Nations, which sees Jerusalems status as an issue to be resolved through negotiation.

The Palestinians envision East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state under a two-state solution.

Trump also threatened last week to cut aid to the Palestinians, and Netanyahu offered him praise in his own comments Sunday.

Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi rejected Trumps threat, accusing him of sabotaging the peace process and then blaming the Palestinians for "the consequences of his own irresponsible actions."

Ashrawi said further the Palestinians "will not be blackmailed."

Trump did not specify exactly how much funding was involved in his threat.

The U.S. provides about one-third of UNRWAs funding and provided more than $350 million to the agency in 2016.
Jordan's intelligence service has foiled an Islamic State plan to carry out a "massive" scheme of simultaneous attacks, the country's state news agency said Monday.

State news agency Petra said the country had arrested 17 people and seized other weapons from a cell that intended to carry out attacks against moderate religious figures, security installations, and others last November.

The group had planned to rob banks and steal cars to finance the attacks, and had manufactured homemade explosives from materials bought at local markets.

Jordan has been a key partner in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State terror group.
As many as 64 migrants are feared dead when rescuers found an overcrowded trafficker's boat sinking off the coast of Libya, officials said Monday.

The Italian coast guard rescued 86 of the nearly 150 people traveling on the boat through the Mediterranean on Saturday. Eight bodies, all women, have been recovered thus far.

"According to testimonies gathered by @OIMItalia staff in Catania, the rubber dinghy, at the moment of the departure, was carrying 150 migrants," Flavo Di Giacomo, the spokesperson for the International Organization of Migration (IOM), said on Twitter Monday.

The boat was initially spotted by a plane from a European naval mission to combat trafficking on Saturday.

The IOM has called the Mediterranean the world's "deadliest border," having recorded 2,832 migrants perished in 2017, and 4,581 in 2016 trying to reach Italy from North Africa.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Jordan, Egypt and Israel on behalf of President Donald Trump later this month, Pence's office said in a statement Monday.

The vice president is traveling to the Middle East to reaffirm our commitment to work with the United States allies in the region to defeat radicalism that threatens future generations, said Alyssa Farah, Pence's press secretary. The vice president is looking forward to meeting with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Israel to discuss ways to work together to fight terrorism and improve our national security.

The visit, now scheduled for Jan. 19-23, had been delayed due to unrest in the region following Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The U.S. motion to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital was rejected by the U.N. Security Council and condemned by international leaders.

The statement also said that Pence would discuss the need to assist persecuted religious minorities during his trip.

Last month, a gunman opened fire outside a church south of Cairo and at a nearby Christian-owned store, killing at least nine people, including a policeman.
Southeast Asias two biggest countries, the Philippines and Indonesia, are joining forces to stop Islamic State sympathizers from crossing a porous sea border and helping violent rebel groups in deadly battles against the government in Manila.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi met Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in the southern city of Davao recently for talks that focused on stopping the threat. Duterte and the Indonesian foreign minister agreed to "elevate cooperation" on "maritime security" and "eradicating terrorism," the presidential office website in Manila said.

Predominantly Muslim Indonesia is known to have sleeper cells of sympathizers of Islamic State, a world terrorism sponsor based in Iraq and Syria. In 2016 Islamic State, or IS, picked a Filipino rebel, who was recently killed, as its emir in Southeast Asia, the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group says.

Some Indonesian sympathizers worked alongside Filipino rebels in a five-month war in the southern Philippines last year.

"President Duterte said that he wants to intensify maritime security in cooperation with Indonesia as foreign and local terrorists continue to enter and exit the country despite the military efforts to go after these elements," the Philippine presidential office website said.

Support for 2017 war

Philippine officials suspected that Indonesians as well as Malaysians had reached the southern island Mindanao last year to support a battle being fought by local Islamic State-inspired rebels. That fighting killed at least 1,127 people, including more than 900 militants.

In October, troops declared victory over the Maute Group of Muslim rebels, which had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, which is also referred to as ISIS.

At least 38 Indonesians were helping the Philippine rebels as of June, a month after the battle broke out in the city of Marawi, a police spokesman told news outlets in Jakarta at the time.

Some of the 40 to 50 foreign rebel supporters in Marawi had traveled from Indonesia, "responding directly to the call of the ISIS," said Bibhu Routray, a visiting security and counter-terrorism professor at Murdoch University in Australia.

Thirty Indonesians got there from Syria, apparently sent by IS, Routray said. "A lot of Indonesians had actually gone to Syria and on their way back to (their) home country they were routing through the Philippines, so thats one direct evidence that ISIS probably had sent them back to fight in Marawi," he said.

Continued cross-border threat

The Indonesian government said in November it would support the Philippine effort to stop radical elements in Marawi. In June the same government had sent 119 police officers and 200 special forces to Sulawesi Island to help the army squelch terrorists.

Philippine officials have warned against new Muslim rebel violence in Mindanao even with Marawi under control.

"I think its logical that Indonesia should always keep its guards up, because they know for a fact that their main sleeper cells around Indonesia are waiting for opportunities to come," said Eduardo Araral, associate professor at the National University of Singapores public policy school.

About 20 Muslim rebel groups operate in resource-rich but impoverished Mindanao, the southernmost major Philippine island and the site of Marawi.

They believe the majority Catholic country has taken a lopsided share of resources despite five centuries of Muslim settlement. Rebel violence has left about 120,000 dead in Mindanao since the 1960s.

Indonesia as a source of rebels

IS "sleeper cells" operate in most Indonesian provinces, the Straits Times of Singapore has reported, referring to groups that can be called to action as needed. The radical Islamic group East Indonesia Mujaheedin, which recruits young people in the jungles of Sulawesi island, has pledged support to IS.

"Despite the ending of the physical war in Marawi, the two countries remain vigilant because they know that theres still a lot of risk and threats that have not been totally eliminated," Araral said.

"The capability of ISIS and their affiliation in Southeast Asia to the group is still there," he said. "Financing is still flowing. The ideology is still there. They might have lost leaders, but Im sure there will be new leaders that would come around."

Porous sea border

The presidential office did not spell out how Duterte and the Indonesian minister planned to control migration by suspected terrorists.

Analysts point to a chronic lack of patrols in the Celebes Sea, a 285,000 square-kilometer body of water bounded by Mindanao to the north, Borneo to the west and Sulawesi to the south.

Ten years ago the sea was already a "serious maritime black spot," the Jamestown Foundation security research organization says in a study.

"Decades of poor governance, economic and political marginalization, lack of state capacity, and separatist conflict have turned this area into an ungoverned space and hence a haven for transnational criminals, including terrorists," it says. The Philippine armed forces ran a poorly funded navy then, it adds.

But Indonesia and the Philippines have overall strong ties plus a record for reaching maritime agreements.

They signed an agreement in 2014 after two decades of talks on formal boundaries around their exclusive economic zones in the Celebes Sea  a deal aimed at improving resource cooperation.

"Theres a lot of cross-border traffic there, and so thats caused some problems, but as much as its caused some problems its also been the focus of some agreements that have been fairly promising in terms of maritime boundary delimitation," said Jonathan Spangler, director of the Taipei-based South China Sea Think Tank.
Hundreds of members of the Iranian diaspora protested in Los Angeles, California Sunday, in support of the anti-government protesters in Iran.
The U.S. government will suspend a protection extended to some 262,500 citizens of El Salvador who have lived in the United States for nearly two decades, senior administration officials announced Monday morning.

Temporary Protected Status, which shielded hundreds of thousands of nationals from the Central American country from deportation following devastating earthquakes in 2001, will end Sept. 9, 2019.

On that day, those who have lived and worked legally in the United States for nearly two decades will revert to the immigration status they had before they received TPS, if it is still valid. They also have the option to apply for other immigration benefits, like family or work-based visas.

Undocumented status



The decision will almost certainly leave some Salvadorans in an undocumented status, making them immediately vulnerable to deportation.

In a regularly-scheduled review of the conditions in El Salvador, the Trump administration determined that the country had recuperated enough from those natural disasters for its nationals in the United States to return, a senior administration official told journalists in a conference call Monday morning.

Despite previous extensions to TPS for Salvadorans that included a link between the natural disasters and the countrys struggle with organized crime and violence, the administration official said the Department of Homeland Security weighed only the recovery from the earthquakes, not violence on the ground in its assessment.

Officials on the call, as well as a written statement from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, indicated that the 18-month delay in ending TPS for Salvadorans will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative solution.

Lawmakers have struggled for years to make substantive changes to the U.S. immigration system, however, and there is little indication on Capitol Hill that any new law would pass in time to salvage Salvadorans affected by Monday's decision.

President Donald Trump is hosting a bipartisan group of senators Tuesday to discuss immigration.

The New York-based Center for Migration Studies said the Salvadorans represent more than 135,000 households, with 88 percent of them in the U.S. workforce.

About a quarter of them live in the west coast state of California and another fifth in the Washington, D.C., area.

Most of the Salvadorans have learned English and about 10 percent of them have married U.S. citizens.

Donald Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies, told VOA the Trump administrations El Salvador decision "creates nothing but losers," chiefly for the beneficiaries themselves and their U.S. employers. He said many Salvadorans work in construction.

Moreover, Kerwin said, "El Salvador has said they cannot safely accommodate them. A lot will be victimized if they return" to violence-plagued communities in the Central American nation "without good economic prospects."

He added the decision also could break up many families. Salvadorans protected by TPS have become parents to an estimated 192,700 U.S.-born children since entering the country, all of whom automatically became U.S. citizens by birthright; that citizenship is not immediately or automatically conferred to their parents, however.

Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for a merit-based immigration system and an overall cut in immigration, said it is time for the Salvadorans to "honor their commitment" and return home, and that the process should not have gone on this long.

"We should not allow that to happen because in the long run what it is going to do is prevent us from offering similar benefits to other nationalities in the future," he said.

Largest group of TPS holders



Salvadorans - by far the largest group of TPS holders - are the latest casualty in the Trump administration's cuts to the program.

In recent months, DHS declined to renew the special status for Haiti (which will expire July 22, 2019), Nicaragua (which will expire Jan. 5, 2019), and Sudan (which will expire Nov. 2, 2018).
With new options and conveniences, there's never been a better time for shoppers. As for workers... well, not always.

The retail industry is being radically reshaped by technology, and nobody feels that disruption more starkly than 16 million American shelf stockers, salespeople, cashiers and others. The shifts are driven, like much in retail, by the Amazon effect  the explosion of online shopping and the related changes in consumer behavior and preferences.

As mundane tasks like checkout and inventory are automated, employees are trying to deliver the kind of customer service the internet can't match.



So a Best Buy employee who used to sell electronics in the store is dispatched to customers' homes to help them choose just the right products. A Walmart worker dashes in and out of the grocery aisles, hand-picks products for online shoppers and brings them to people's cars.



___



Yet even as responsibilities change  and in many cases, expand  the average growth in pay for retail workers isn't keeping pace with the rest of the economy. Some companies say that in the long run the transformation could mean fewer retail workers, though they may be better paid. But while some workers feel more satisfied, others find their jobs are just a lot less fun.

Bloomingdale's saleswoman Brenda Moses remembers the pre-internet era, when the upscale store was regularly filled with customers ready to buy. These days, department stores are less crowded and the customers who do come in can make price comparisons on their phones at the same time as they pepper staff with questions.



"You tell them everything, and then they look at you and say, 'You know what? I think I will get it online,'" she said.



Moses has seen her commission rate rise to 6 percent from a half a percent, but her hourly wage dropped from $19 to as low as $10 before it came back up to $14. Depending more on commissions means her income fluctuates, and she's competing with her colleagues for each sale.



"Now," Moses said, "you have to fight to make your money."



The same could be said for the retailing industry, overall. In 2017, 66,500 U.S. retail jobs disappeared (not taking into account jobs added in areas like distribution and call centers). In the past decade, about one out of every seven jobs have vanished in the hardest-hit sectors like clothing and consumer electronics, says Frank Badillo, director of research at MacroSavvy LLC. Though department stores have suffered the most, smaller businesses also have struggled to compete with online sellers.



Many of the survivors are rushing to adapt. Of the retail jobs that remain, over the next decade as many as 60 percent will either be new kinds of roles or will involve revised duties, says Craig Rowley, senior client partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a human resources advisory firm. He estimates the number is about 10 percent now.

How fast retail jobs will change and what they'll look like depends on three factors, Rowley said: the pace at which online shopping advances; the speed at which robotics and other technology progress; and shifts in the minimum hourly pay.



"Jobs for workers will get more interesting and be more impactful on the company's business," Rowley said. "But the negative side is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs and there will be more pressure to perform."



Some retail workers at the vanguard of the changes  like Laila Ummelaila, a personal grocery shopper at a Walmart in Old Bridge, New Jersey  speak glowingly of their new responsibilities.



Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, has scrutinized every job in its stores as it looks to leverage its more than 4,000 U.S. locations against Amazon's internet dominance.

The company now has 18,000 personal shoppers who fill online orders from store shelves, and 17,000 check-out hosts whose responsibilities are more extensive than the greeters of old, including keeping the area clean and making sure registers move efficiently. The company has also shifted workers from back-room clerical jobs and eliminated some overnight stocker positions in favor of more daytime sales help. The customers like the changes, company officials say, pointing to more than three years of sales growth at its established U.S. stores  a contrast with other, suffering retailers.



Ummelaila became a personal shopper after joining the company three years ago. To meet her store's goals, she must pick one item per 30 seconds. If she can't find something, she has to quickly get a substitute that's as good or better.



"You start to get to know the customers, you know what they like," she said, `"How they like their meat ... and how long they keep milk in the fridge."

Best Buy, meanwhile, has begun a free service in key markets where salespeople will sit with customers in their own homes and make recommendations on setting up a home office to designing a home theater system. Best Buy said shoppers spend more with a home visit than they do at the stores. The project follows Amazon, which reportedly has been testing a program that sends employees to shoppers' houses for free "smart home" recommendations.



At Steve Frederick's townhouse in Chicago, Billy Schuler offered advice about speakers that can be adjusted from a smartphone. Schuler, who had previously worked at Best Buy for 14 years, returned to the company to take on the new role.



"Customers are more relaxed when they are in their home," he said. "We can do a walkthrough of the house and see their needs." He likes to "break the ice" by calling the person and chatting a day or two before the visit.



Frederick, who's spending close to $20,000 on the equipment, describes himself as "old-school" and says he needed a lot of help. He thinks it was worthwhile.



"When you are spending that kind of money, you want to have someone come in and explain it," he said.



Schuler declined to give specifics but says he is well compensated. Ummelaila says her pay went up to nearly $12 per hour from $10 when she became a personal shopper.



Target credits its strategy of assigning dedicated sales staff in areas such as clothing, consumer electronics, and beauty for helping increase sales, and says having visual merchandisers create vignettes like shoppers would see in specialty stores inspires people to buy. "You are making an outfit and telling a story on each rack," says Crystal Lawrence, who works at a Target store in Brooklyn, New York. She likes the variety in her new job, and Target says it plans to keep paying higher wages for those specialized roles.



But a survey of nearly 300 retail workers  conducted by the Center for Frontline Retail and Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center  found that of those workers whose job responsibilities have changed, more than 40 percent said they hadn't received pay increases to reflect that.



Wages for hourly retail workers have risen less than 9 percent since 1990, compared with 18 percent for overall workers in the private sector. There has been some progress recently; some of the biggest retailers, like Walmart and Target, have made moves to increase pay in the face of low unemployment and competition for workers.



"For a long period, these retail jobs were just terrible on average," said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute. "Retail stores have been following one strategy: high turnover, low wages. That strategy is no longer viable."



Mandel sees hope in technology, which he says has historically created more and better-paying jobs than it has eliminated.



The National Retail Federation trade group points to government data showing that even in large supermarket chains where self-checkout has become standard, the number of employees per store has held steady over the 15 years through 2014. And the demand for grocery cashiers increased in the past few years, says Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes labor market data.



McDonald's says the self-serve kiosks it has been rolling out won't result in mass layoffs, but will mean that some cashiers shift roles to accommodate changes like offering table service.



But a report prepared by Cornerstone Capital Group for the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute predicts that more than 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being eliminated by automation over the next several years.



Amazon is testing a grocery store in Seattle without cashiers, using cameras and shelf sensors to keep track of the items that shoppers grab and charge them. Eatsa, an automat-style restaurant in San Francisco, lacks cashiers as well  diners order at kiosks and workers prepare the food behind an opaque wall, with virtually no interaction between them.



A labor group representing 1.3 million grocery and food workers is trying to combat automation by highlighting that workers' specialized skills  like the care they take in icing a rose on a wedding cake, or arranging flowers, or the ability of human workers to recognize spoiled food  provide a benefit to shoppers.



"Separating progress for the consumer, for the worker, for the economy versus the stockholders ... those are completely different things," says Erikka Knuti, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.



Others say automation and happy workers are not necessarily incompatible.



Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon foresees fewer sales associates at his stores, but they'll be better paid and better trained. Walmart has trained 225,000 supervisors and managers on topics like new apps and better customer service. It says managers who go through the academies have better retention rates than those who do not. Workers who report to those managers stay longer. And entry-level workers who complete a new training program are more likely to remain.



It's a shift retailers may have to speed up. Government figures show the rate of retail workers quitting their jobs in 2016 was at its highest since 2007.



Alfredo Duran, who started as a sales associate at Gap and worked at six retailers over 15 years, left the industry two years ago. As a manager at clothing chain Mango, he was making $75,000 a year. But once the store closed, he had trouble finding another job in retail because no one wanted to pay him for his experience.



"It's gone down. One person is doing three jobs. And you can't move up," said Duran, 38, of Queens, New York.



He's now a concierge at a Manhattan hotel, making half of what he used to earn  but happy he left retail.



___



Editor's note: This story is part of Future of Work, an Associated Press series that explores how workplaces across the U.S. and the world are being transformed by technology and global pressures. As more employers move, shrink or revamp their work sites, many employees are struggling to adapt. At the same time, workers with in-demand skills or knowledge are benefiting. Advanced training, education or know-how is becoming a required ticket to the 21st-century workplace.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Monday all officials can be criticized and that protesters in Iran are upset about more than economic issues.

Rouhani also called for the lifting of bans on social media.

As protests broke out nearly two weeks ago, the government instituted restrictions on messaging apps, including Instagram and Telegram. Authorities lifted the Instagram ban on Sunday, but Telegram remained blocked.

Hamid Shahriari, Iran's deputy judiciary head, said Monday that all of the leading figures of "recent riots" have been arrested and will face harsh punishment.

In Photos: Iran Protests

The protests are the largest anti-government demonstrations Iran has seen since 2009. Protesters complained about unemployment and rising food prices, and also called for governmental reforms. Other demonstrators rallied in support of the government.

At least 21 people have died and hundreds have been arrested.

Iranian leaders have blamed foreign governments, mainly the United States and Saudi Arabia, for fueling the protests.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday the people of Iran have the right to protest and suggested U.S. allies in the Middle East do not. He also told a security conference in Tehran that no country can create a secure environment by creating insecurity for other nations.

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday about the situation in Iran at the urging of the United States.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called the protests "a powerful exhibition of brave people who have become so fed up with their oppressive government that they are willing to risk their lives in protests." She also addressed the Iranian government, saying, "The U.S. is watching what you do."

In response, the Iranian ambassador, Gholamali Khoshroo, said it is a "discredit" to the Security Council to hold such a meeting on Iran in the face of the conflicts taking place in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. He, along with a number of Security Council members, said the United States is meddling in Iran's domestic affairs.



In Photos: California Protest Against Iranian Regime
South Sudan's government is accusing former military chief of staff Paul Malong of ordering opposition fighters to attack government positions across the country.



Government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny on Monday pointed to audio tapes leaked on social media, alleging that Malong was heard giving orders for fighting that included clashes outside the capital, Juba, last week that violated a cease-fire.



The tapes could not be independently verified. Malong's wife, Lucy Ayak Malek, denies it was her husband speaking.



Malong had been one of President Salva Kiir's closest allies before he was fired in May and put under house arrest. In November he was granted permission to leave the country on medical grounds.



South Sudan's civil war has killed tens of thousands. The Dec. 24 cease-fire has seen multiple violations.
Syrian government forces captured 14 villages on Monday as they advance on the largest rebel-held enclave in the country's north amid a wave of airstrikes.



Syrian government forces and their allies have been on the offensive since late October in Hama and Idlib provinces, capturing nearly 100 villages from insurgent groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee. The offensive intensified on Christmas Day after reinforcements were brought in from other parts of Syria.

The main aim of the troops is to reach the rebel-held Abu Zuhour air base and secure the road linking the capital, Damascus, with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest. Rebels captured Abu Zuhour in 2015 after a three-year siege.



The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media said the newly captured villages, include Freija, Jahman, Dawoudiyeh and Jub al-Qasab, bring the troops closer to the air base.



The SCMM and the opposition's Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that 14 villages have been captured over the past hours.



The offensive in the southern parts of Idlib province comes amid intense airstrikes and shelling that have killed 21 people since Sunday, according to the Observatory.



Clashes also erupted Monday near the Damascus suburb of Harasta, after government forces reached troops trapped for more than a week in a military base surrounded by insurgents.



State media said the Syrian army broke through rebel lines Sunday to reach soldiers trapped at the Murakabat vehicle base near Harasta, in the eastern Ghouta suburbs.

Rebels surrounded the base late last month, trapping an unknown number of soldiers inside. The rebels say they have taken numerous soldiers hostage. The Observatory says 159 rebels and government soldiers have been killed in fighting over the base since Dec. 29.



In the northwestern city of Idlib, meanwhile, paramedics said the death toll from a massive car bombing the previous evening has risen to at least 25. Nearly 100 people were wounded. The Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, said four children and 11 women were those killed.

The Observatory on Monday gave a higher death toll, saying 34 people were killed, including 18 civilians.



The Sunday night bombing targeted the office of Ajnad al-Koukaz, a militant group consisting of foreign fighters mostly from the Caucuses and Russia, according to activists. Idlib is the capital of a province by the same name that is controlled by insurgent factions, including an al-Qaida-linked group.
Retired U.S. military officers, members of Congress and former U.S. ambassadors were among 52 U.S. national security experts who signed a letter released on Monday urging President Donald Trumps administration not to jeopardize the international nuclear deal with Iran.

Trump faces deadlines related to the deal starting late this week, including deciding whether to reimpose oil sanctions lifted under the 2015 agreement. He will make the decision as Irans government deals with protests over economic hardships and corruption.

Signers of the letter, organized by the National Coalition to Prevent an Iranian Nuclear Weapon, included Richard Lugar, a former Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under Republican President George W. Bush; Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, and Admiral Eric Olson, former commander of Special Forces.

We support the rights of Iranian citizens to free speech and peaceful protest and we condemn the use of force against peaceful demonstrations, the letter said.

In responding to developments in Iran, now and in the future, the U.S. should be careful not to take any steps that might undermine the JCPOA (nuclear agreement) which remains vital to U.S. national security, it said.
Zimbabwes opposition icon Morgan Tsvangirai, currently afflicted with cancer of the colon and receiving treatment in South Africa, has hinted of a possible retirement.

In a new year message, covering topics ranging from the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change, the 2009 Unity Government, political processes in Zimbabwe, the departure of former President Robert Mugabe from the political scene to current issues affecting the country, Tsvangirai said he is looking forward at prospects of the old generation passing the baton to the new generation.

Beyond what we have achieved together, we ought to leave a lasting legacy where the baton can be changed peacefully, in a tranquil and cordial atmosphere of unity and togetherness. At a personal level, I am using this New Year not only to reflect on the onerous journey that we have travelled together but also to peer with renewed hope into a bright future.

I am looking at the imminent prospects of us as the older generation leaving the levers of leadership to allow the younger generation to take forward this huge task that we started together so many years ago with our full blessing and support. It was therefore not by accident but by design that when I disclosed to you my health status, I also took a bold step to appoint an additional two Vice Presidents to assist me. As I have said before, while politicians only think about the next election, true statesmen think about the next generation, for current leaders are only but caretakers for future generations. We do not have any entitlement to lead but we have a duty to serve.

He urged his followers to recognize the imperative that new hands, with the full blessing of the people, must take this struggle and this country forward with the destination remaining the same - a society that prides itself for not leaving anyone behind in their pursuit of freedom, prosperity and happiness. That is the only lasting legacy and precedence that we must leave to future generations.

Political analysts said Tsvangirais message indicates that he is preparing to leave the post of MDC-T president and let members of the party choose a successor.

On the political front, he noted that with the forthcoming general elections  we must not lose sight and misinterpret what happened in November 2017. The departure of Mugabe resulted in a change of guard at the helm of our state but #ChangeIsNotEnough. This country requires transformation of both our governance culture and the way we do business.

Our war war cry therefore for the upcoming elections is simple Munhu Wese Kubasa  Umuntu wonke emsebenzini  Everyone to Work. Whether you are an investor, a commercial farmer, an industrialist, a teacher, a banker a worker or a peasant farmer, lets all go back to work in order to prosper. We need to produce in order to grow our economy and create new jobs.



He said for that to happen, Zimbabwe needs both domestic and international investment capital which must be guaranteed a safe, predictable, secure and corruption free environment underpinned by the rule of law, constitutionalism, respect for property and human rights and freedoms.

Tsvangirai said the starting point for the envisaged take off for Zimbabwe is a return to legitimacy through a free, fair, credible internationally supervised and monitored election whose outcome is not contested.

Anything short of this will spell doom for our great nation. I therefore call upon the interim leaders of our country not to miss this opportunity by dipping their heads in the sand and wish away our crisis by not implementing the necessary reforms required before elections -- for history will judge you harshly.

He urged those who have not registered to vote to take advantage of the extended registration exercise to register so that they can participate in shaping your new destiny.

According to Tsvangirai, President Emmerson Mnangagwas new government has to earn its legitimacy through a proper election through seeking the peoples mandate.

The new government has to break away from the past and genuinely chart a new trajectory to a dispensation of clean politics that truly puts the country and its people first. It has to respect diversity and to appreciate that despite our different political formations, we are all patriotic Zimbabweans who yearn for the best for our country.

Mnangagwa last Friday visited Tsvangirai at his residence to check his health condition.

For me, that visit to my residence by the new president was significant not only in terms of the content of what we discussed but in the import of its overall relevance. The visit signaled what must be the bane of the new politics of our time that an opposition party, especially one represented in our national Parliament, does not in any way constitute an enemy of the State. The opposition is just as patriotic and aspires and wishes for the best for our people.

Indeed, my engagement with President Mnangagwa must herald a new page in our politics -- a page in which the opposition is considered a partner and not an enemy of the State. The visit can be built upon by truly well-meaning Zimbabweans to herald a new politics of engagement in our country.

He further noted that political difference must be celebrated and the people should be allowed to express themselves.

That is why I was shocked by the new regimes iron-fist response two weeks ago to Zimbabweans in Bulawayo who sought to alert the government of the deep-seated wounds that are still festering since the Gukurahundi atrocities of the 1980s. That response was wanton, unjustified and shows that the Mnangagwa administration still has a lot of work to do to earn our faith and trust.

Several members of Mthwakazi Republic Party were beaten up last week when they staged a peaceful protest at a church convention attended by Mnangagwa, who they accused of being part of the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces in the 1980s when the Mugabe government claimed that it was cracking down on dissidents allegedly linked to Joshua Nkomos PF Zapu party.

Over 20,000 people were killed in the massacres.
U.S. President Donald Trump and aides on Sunday heaped scorn on a new book detailing his chaotic first year in the White House and suggestions that he is not mentally fit to be the U.S. leader.

Trump, in a Twitter comment, said, "Ive had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

Trump's ire was aimed at journalist Michael Wolff, who, based on 200 interviews with Trump and numerous of his aides, described a dysfunctional White House in his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, released Friday.

Trump said that three decades ago, another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, was also faced with stories questioning his mental acuity "and handled it well. So will I!"

Stephen Miller, Trump's top policy adviser, assailed Trump's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon for comments in the book alleging that Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a key White House adviser, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort were "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" for meeting in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign with Russians claming to have incriminating information about Trump's challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Miller on CNN described Bannon as an angry, vindictive person whose grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality. Miller said the whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments in the book.

Miller said the Wolff book "is best understood as a work of poorly written fiction. The author is a garbage author of a garbage book. ...The betrayal of the president in this book is so contrary to the reality of those who work with him."

CNN anchor Jake Tapper abruptly ended the interview with Miller, calling him "obsequious" and concerned only about pleasing "one viewer," Trump.

A short time later, Trump tweeted, "Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"



Two other Trump administration officials, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo also expressed support for Trump's performance on Sunday news talk shows, a day after the U.S. leader described himself as "a very stable genius."

Haley told ABC News that based on her once-a-week visits to the White House, "No one disrespects the president." Pompeo told Fox News, "I have watched him take the information that the intelligence community delivers and translate that into policies that are of enormous benefit to America."

Bannon has not disputed quotes Wolff attributed to him in the book but on Sunday voiced some regret over his role.

He told the Axios news site: "Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

Bannon, who returned to Breitbart News, an alt-right website with nationalist views, after leaving the White House, also avowed his continuing support for Trump.

"My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda," Bannon said, "as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama.

"I regret that my delay," he added, "in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency."

Trump has claimed that he "authorized Zero Access" to Wolff at the White House to do his research for the book.

But Wolff told NBC that the president, personally, if reluctantly, allowed him to roam the corridors of the White House and conduct interviews with his aides, at one point saying, "Who cares about a book?"

But by Sunday, two days after its release, Fire and Fury was the top-selling book on the Amazon online retail site.
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ROME  As many as 64 African migrants, including a mother whose surviving 3-year-old child desperately clung to her as she drowned, are feared dead after a traffickers' overcrowded rubber dinghy from Libya started sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said Monday. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The Italian coast guard rescued 86 people from the boat hours after it started sinking Saturday morning as it took on water and started deflating, a U.N. migration agency official said. Rescue divers leaped into the water to pull dozens to safety.

Eight bodies were recovered Saturday.

Trafficking dinghies are often crammed with far more than 100 migrants, so fears quickly arose Saturday that dozens more could be missing. An Italian coast guard search that went through the night did not find any more survivors or corpses.

Flavio Di Giacomo of the International Organization for Migration said in a tweet Monday that survivors interviewed by the agency in Catania said 150 people had been aboard the boat when it set out from a Libyan beach east of Tripoli.

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"Sixty-four migrants lost their life in the shipwreck," Di Giacomo said.

Catania Mayor Enzo Bianco told Italian Radio Radicale that among the survivors was a child who lost her mother.

"I watched a 3-year-old girl while she was starting to play at the port here. She was saved, grabbed at the last second by the coast guard in the sea," Bianco said. "She was clinging to her mother and she saw her drown."

Bianco said the child is now with her aunt, who was among the survivors.

All of the missing are adults, Di Giacomo said, adding that three other children survived, boys ages 2, 9 and 10.

The migrants came from Mali, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria, he said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been rescued at sea and taken to southern Italian ports in the past few years, including nearly 119,000 last year. About 3,100 drowned along the way in 2017, the IOM said.

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Di Giacomo said the Libyan coast guard in recent days had rescued 250 other migrants from traffickers' boats and recovered the bodies of two women, while survivors said 10 more migrants were missing.

Those putting themselves at the mercy of smugglers and the sea include refugees fleeing wars or persecution who hope to receive asylum, and economic migrants mainly from sub-Saharan Africa who are not eligible for permission to live in Europe.

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TEHRAN  Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to protests against the government that erupted last month. In a statement on its website, the Revolutionary Guard blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahideen-e Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.

The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.

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Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning, but the assertion could not be independently verified.

The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators rallied against the Revolutionary Guard's massive budget, its costly interventions across the region and the supreme leader himself.

Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include about 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Iranian Students' News Agency.

Later Sunday, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail in the past 48 hours. He added that more people would be released from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots, who he said will be "dealt with seriously."

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Lawmakers held a closed session Sunday, in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

"It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest," IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.

The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began Dec. 28 in Iran's second-largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.

In recent days, government supporters have held mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.

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The publisher of a critical book that President Trump has sought to block sent a defiant letter to Trump's lawyer on Monday, saying the company has no plans to withdraw it or apologize as the controversy surrounding it continues to fuel sales. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight "My clients do not intend to cease publication, no [retraction] will occur and no apology is warranted," wrote Elizabeth A. McNamara, an attorney for Henry Holt & Co., the publisher of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff.

Trump's attorney Charles Harder sought last week to stop publication of the behind-the-scenes book, whose revelations prompted Trump to denounce Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist. Bannon told Wolff that it was "treasonous" for Trump's son Don Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to meet with a Russian lawyer they believed possessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

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Harder threatened legal action, including a libel lawsuit, if the publisher failed to "immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book" or excerpts and summaries of its contents. Trump's representative also accused Bannon of breaching a confidentiality agreement by giving Wolff interviews.

The publisher responded last week by speeding up the book's publication date by several days and expanding its press run.

"We're commencing to sell as many books as we can," said John Sargent, chief executive of Henry Holt's parent company, MacMillan Publishers USA, in an interview Monday. "We have multiple printings at multiple printers now and all of our suppliers are doing a remarkable job of getting books into the marketplace. They all realize the importance of this book as a commercial success, but they also recognize the huge importance of reading a book the government is trying to stop."

Sargent was almost gleeful about the controversy whipped up by Trump and White House officials, saying that the publicity it has generated has propelled sales. The publisher now has orders for more than a million hardcover copies, making it the fastest-selling nonfiction book in Henry Holt's 151-year history, he said.

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Its sales prospects are so strong that Holt has no plans at the moment to publish a paperback edition; Sargent said he expected the hardcover version to sell well for the next two years.

The White House and Trump have disputed Wolff's characterization of the president as mentally unfit for office. Trump has tweeted that he is, "like, really smart" and even "a very stable genius."

McNamara, the publisher's attorney, wrote in her letter to Harder that "we have no reason to doubt . . . that Mr. Wolff's book is an accurate report on events of vital public importance. Mr. Trump is the President of the United States, with the 'bully pulpit' at his disposal. To the extent he disputes any statement in the book, he has the largest platform in the world to challenge it."

She noted that any lawsuit filed against the publisher would open Trump up to discovery that could reveal information that Trump has declined to disclose.

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"Should you pursue litigation against Henry Holt or Mr. Wolff, we are quite confident that documents related to the contents of the book in the possession of President Trump, his family members, his businesses, his campaign, and his administration will prove particularly relevant to our defense," she wrote.

Trump has a long history of threatening legal action against news organizations that published articles that displeased him in some way. The list includes The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Rolling Stone, NBC News, USA Today and the Village Voice, among others. In each case, he didn't follow up. Trump did sue a journalist, author Tim O'Brien, over a few lines in a book O'Brien wrote in 2005. Trump claimed O'Brien had libeled him by understating his net worth. The suit was dismissed by a superior court judge; an appeals court upheld the decision.

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Dear Readers: Today's sound off is about stealing people's lunches from the employee refrigerator:

Dear Heloise: I work in a large office where we bring our own lunch. We either write a name on the lunch or we tag it so it's identifiable. Someone has been taking food that doesn't belong to them. Two employees found that someone had taken their lunches the other day. We can't seem to catch the person responsible. Any suggestions?"

Lois L., Bonne Terre, Mo.

Lois L., oh my, the old "Who took my lunch?" dilemma. This is not new at all. Try to keep a close eye on the lunchroom, and mention it in an employee meeting. Posting a sign on the refrigerator might help.

I was at a radio station in Washington, D.C., once and commented to the program director that the break room was the cleanest I had ever seen in a radio/TV station. His reply was that since they had put in a camera to prevent items from "going missing," employees were cleaning up after themselves! Maybe ask management to do the same. It can't hurt!

Dear Readers: Here are some uses for old blankets:

* Local pet shelters need them.

* Keep in the trunk of your car for an emergency.

* Use to keep dirt off when storing furniture.

* Use to cover a bed in the guest room. No pet hair!

Dear Heloise: I've read that the American Dream is dead for most young people. By "American Dream" I mean owning a home, having children, sending the kids to college, building a retirement fund, things like that.

F.W. in California

F.W. in California, the "American Dream," as it's called, isn't slipping away, but it is changing. Instead of big homes, many are opting for smaller homes that require less work and less expense. There also is a trend of multigenerational homes. It's a different time.

Dear Heloise: I may be the last male on Earth to know this, but I use a used dryer sheet to clean the dryer lint filter. Much better than a wet finger!

L.H., Bedford, Texas

L.H., it's amazing that what is new to you is old hat to others. Readers, please be sure to clean the lint filter every time the dryer is used. Also, check the exhaust hose. You would be shocked about how many home fires are started by a lint buildup.

P.S. Don't put the clothes in the dryer and then run a quick errand! Oh, by the way, when I visited the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine docked at Pearl Harbor, I learned this hint from them: When they do laundry, someone always stays in that room while the dryer is on. Fire on a submarine is very dangerous. Learn from them.

Dear Heloise: My trash can would slide when we stepped on the lid release, so I purchased a small pet food mat. I use it under the trash can, and no more sliding!

Lynn D., Colorado Springs

(c)2018 by King Features Syndicate Inc.

Heloise's column appears six days a week at washingtonpost.com/advice. Send a hint to Heloise , P.O. Box 795000, San Antonio, TX 78279-5000, or email it to Heloise@Heloise.com.
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A student who steps into a classroom in Virginia's largest school district is likely to be Hispanic, Asian, black or multiracial. Chances are, that student's teacher will be white. Students of color made up more than 60 percent of the Fairfax County school district's enrollment last fall, according to state data. Meanwhile, teachers of color were about 18 percent of the school system's teaching staff, data from the school district shows.

Officials say they are trying to bridge those differences with recruiting and hiring practices aimed at courting a more racially diverse teaching force. Recruiters have twice taken trips to Puerto Rico in the past two years and participated in employment fairs hosted by institutions that serve people of color.

The redoubled focus has helped, but Superintendent Scott Brabrand said the 188,000-student school system is committed to further diversifying its cadre of teachers.

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"We need to have a workforce that reflects the diversity of our students," he said. "The reality is that our work around hiring teachers of color is improving but it's still not where we want it to be."

The Northern Virginia school system is hardly the only district grappling with issues of teacher diversity. The student population throughout the country has diversified dramatically in the past three decades, as the proportion of white K-12 students in public schools fell from 70 percent in the mid-1980s to 51 percent in 2011-2012, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

At the same time, the proportion of nonwhite teachers rose far less sharply, from 13 percent to 18 percent.

In the 2016-2017 school year, 81.5 percent of Fairfax teachers were white, according to data provided by the school district. About 7.3 percent were black, 4.9 percent were Asian, 4.2 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 2 percent were multiracial. Meanwhile, 39.3 percent of Fairfax students were white, 25.4 percent were Hispanic or Latino, 19.5 percent were Asian, 10.1 percent were black and 5.3 percent were multiracial, according to fall 2016 enrollment numbers from the Virginia Department of Education.

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The Washington Post requested data on the racial makeup of the school district's teachers after a George Mason University study published in the spring issue of the Harvard Educational Review asserted that the district discriminated against black teaching applicants.

Researchers did not identify the school system, but current and former school officials previously confirmed to The Post that Fairfax was the subject of the study.

The study determined that black teaching applicants were far less likely than white candidates to receive job offers. Black applicants, the study found, had somewhat more advanced degrees and classroom experience but slightly lower pass rates on a screening test than white candidates. Researchers determined that Hispanic and Asian teacher applicants were hired proportionally to the rate in which they applied.

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The study did not examine how candidates fared in job interviews or other in-person interactions crucial to hiring.

For Sean Perryman, education chairman of Fairfax County's chapter of the NAACP, the breakdown of the school district's teacher demographics reinforced findings in the university study.

Perryman said he's aware of the school district's intensified recruiting efforts but said those strategies don't address the underlying problem identified in the George Mason study: Black applicants are applying for teaching positions but aren't being hired at the same rate as their counterparts.

George Mason researchers examined job application information from 2012 that showed black candidates made up about 13 percent of Fairfax's applicant pool and received 6 percent of job offers. White candidates accounted for 70 percent of applicants and received more than 77 percent of the offers, according to the study.

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"It's not a supply problem," Perryman said. "It's a demand problem."

The study also found that when black applicants were offered jobs, they were usually in schools with a large population of students of color or higher levels of poverty.

Perryman pointed to the differences between West Potomac High School, where last year about 17 percent of teachers were black, and McLean or Langley high schools, where black teachers accounted for 2.3 and 4.8 percent of the teaching force, respectively.

Judith Howard, chairwoman of the Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee, a school board advisory group, said she hadn't yet reviewed the school district's data. In May, the committee requested that the district appoint an outside investigator to examine findings in the George Mason study.

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The committee, which studies student achievement gaps in the county, will examine the racial makeup of educators in schools that receive Title I funding, have large populations of students of color or campuses with high levels of poverty.



Fairfax doesn't keep data on candidates who reject job offers, officials said, but the school system provided information on applicants who accepted positions they were offered.

In 2016-2017, white candidates made up 65.8 percent of qualified applicants and accounted for 74.8 percent of candidates who ended up working in the district. Black applicants made up 11.3 percent of qualified applicants and accounted for 8.5 percent of teachers who accepted teaching posts.

For the same time period, Hispanic applicants accounted for 6.2 percent of qualified applicants and accounted for 6 percent of teachers who accepted positions with the school district. Asian teachers represented 7.5 percent of qualified applicants and 6.7 percent of teachers who ultimately joined the district.

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In addition to recruitment, Fairfax also will focus on retaining teachers of color, said Chace Ramey, assistant superintendent for human resources, and soon will mandate that a minimum number of candidates be interviewed for teaching positions.

The school district's human resources department screens teacher applicants for qualifications such as proper licensing and degrees, but much of the hiring is left to individual schools. Requiring that a certain number of applicants be interviewed, Ramey said, "ensures that more individuals have opportunities for positions that are available."

Racial diversity among teachers varies significantly throughout the district, with some schools having few or no teachers of color while others have significantly higher numbers.

Last year, all teachers at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean were white, while 58 percent of teachers at Mount Vernon Woods Elementary School in the Alexandria section of Fairfax were nonwhite.

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Brabrand, the superintendent, said schools with more students from affluent families tend to have fewer teachers of color. Teacher diversity, he said, benefits students who interact with those of a different race or gender, while students of color also benefit from seeing teachers who resemble them.

"Every child needs to be able to see their hopes and dreams realized and see real-life role models of folks that look like them doing things that they love, having success," Brabrand said. "Every teacher, no matter what your background, can do that. But I think we need to create a culture and a society where diversity is a strength."

Data shows an increase in teacher diversity in Fairfax in recent years. In 2011-2012, 84.4 percent of teachers were white, compared with 81.5 percent in the past school year.

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County School Board member Dalia Palchik, the board's liaison to the Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee, said in a statement that the ability to recruit and retain "quality teachers who understand our students" depends on the district's ability to provide competitive salaries.

Starting salaries for teachers with bachelor's degrees in Fairfax lag behind those of neighboring Arlington and Loudoun counties, according to 2016-2017 data compiled by the Virginia Department of Education.

Earlier this year, the school system slashed $50 million from its budget after it faced a revenue shortfall. In 2016, voters rejected a measure that would have imposed taxes on restaurant meals and prepared foods that was projected to give schools a $67 million annual boost to teachers' pay.

"I hope our funding bodies also acknowledge the challenges we face and the fact that we need to fully fund our teacher salary scale to continue to be competitive," Palchik said.

Moriah Balingit contributed to this report.

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Ten years ago, girls were so scarce in high school computer science classes that the number of female students taking Advanced Placement tests in that subject could be counted on one hand in nine states. In five others, there were none. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Latino and African American students were also in short supply, a problem that has bedeviled educators for years and hindered efforts to diversify the high-tech workforce.

Now, an expansion of AP computer science classes is helping to draw more girls and underrepresented minorities into a field of growing importance for schools, universities and the economy.

Testing totals for female, black and Latino students all doubled in 2017, following the national debut of an AP course in computer science principles. It joined a longer-established AP course focused on the programming language Java.

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Racial and gender imbalances persist. But education leaders said the data show a significant advance in a quest to banish the stereotype that computer science is mainly for coding geeks who tend to be white or Asian American boys.

"We're trying to diversify a field that for whatever reason has remained not so for generations," said David Coleman, president of the College Board, which oversees the AP program. "Really, what this is about is computer science breaking out of its narrow role."

Coleman acknowledged: "There's more work to do."

About 27 percent of roughly 100,000 AP computer science test-takers last spring were girls. Black students accounted for 5 percent of those tested and Latino students for 15 percent, well below their overall shares of school enrollment.

The quest to broaden the computer science talent pool hinges, in many ways, on stoking the passion of students such as Adesoji Adenusi and Daijah Etienne to explore the power of programming.

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The two Maryland teenagers were hunting one recent morning for commands in Java to maneuver a wheeled robot, known as the Finch, through left-handed turns along the edges of a square floor mat. Keeping the gizmo on track was not easy.

At the keyboard, Adenusi toyed with numbers for wheel velocity. "A couple extra zeros never harmed anybody," he joked.

"It depends," shot back Etienne as she walked with the balky little robot. "What if you put a couple extra zeros on a check?"

Adenusi, 18, and Etienne, 17, both seniors, are in the Java-centered class called AP Computer Science A at Charles H. Flowers High School in Prince George's County.

Adenusi, who aims to major in computer science in college, said he is drawn to video-game design and has developed an appreciation for the precision and creativity the subject demands. "Everything really in coding is a choice," he said. "Colors, shapes, sizes  that's all up to you."

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Etienne, who is considering studying computer engineering in college, also took AP Computer Science Principles in the past school year. She said the courses have deepened her understanding of the power of software to make objects come to life. "An iPhone, for example," she said. "A block of metal, in all honesty. But when you add the coding, it becomes something more."

At Flowers High, 86 students took an AP computer science test in the spring. That was more than triple the total of 26 in 2016. The new principles course fueled the growth. Most of the school's students are African American. Nearly half of those enrolled in AP computer science are girls.

College Board data show that 20 high schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District notched gains in 2017 of at least 50 students in AP computer science testing, compared with the previous year. Thomas S. Wootton High in Montgomery County had the largest growth: Its students took 238 of the exams, up from 76 in 2016.

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Universities are tracking these developments closely because they have struggled for years to broaden the demographic base of students in computer science beyond white and Asian American men. The AP program, which enables students to obtain college credit through testing, offers one of the strongest links between high schools and higher education.

For more than 30 years, high schools have offered AP classes in computer science. But about 10 years ago, educators began to worry about participation. Overall numbers were low. About 20,000 students took the computer science tests in 2007, fewer than the totals for AP French or studio art.

A closer look showed even more dismal trends that year: Only about 3,360 female and 1,300 Latino students took the computer science tests. The African American total was a mere 734.

Trevor Packer, senior vice president of the College Board and longtime head of the AP program, said annual reports on computer science testing in that era would make him wince. Idaho, for example, counted 25 boys taking the tests in 2007  and zero girls.

With help from the National Science Foundation, the College Board and computer scientists at various universities fashioned a new course meant to appeal to a broader audience. AP Computer Science Principles, or CSP, launched nationally in fall 2016.

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A College Board video promoting the course made explicit appeals to underrepresented students. "A lot of girls are intimidated because they see computers as, like, a 'guy thing,' " one girl says in the video. "If more girls were, like, encouraged, then that wouldn't be an issue anymore."

Last spring, 92 girls from Idaho took an AP computer science test. Most were in Computer Science Principles.

Owen Astrachan, a professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University who helped develop the new class, said it is meant to complement Computer Science A.

"In CSA, it's all programming, all the time," Astrachan said. "In CSP, programming is part of it, but it's not the center of it." Students have more freedom to design their own projects in CSP. They are assessed at the end of the course on a digital portfolio of work  including a task focused on creating a computer program  as well as a multiple-choice test.

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Duke gives credit to students who get a top score of 5 on the new exam or scores of 4 or 5 on the original computer science exam, allowing the students to place into higher-level courses. "I'm a big fan of trying to empower high schools," Astrachan said.

Expanding computer science in high schools takes more than adding a new AP course. It also requires investing in teachers, who often are not experts in the field. Course offerings have long been skimpy in many schools. In 2014, The Washington Post found that fewer than 1 in 10 high school students in the Washington region were taking a computer science course.

College professors, mindful of these issues, aim to help.

David J. Malan, who teaches a popular introductory course in computer science at Harvard University, said a version of it tailored to the AP CSP curriculum is available online for high school teachers who want to mine it for problem sets and homework assignments. The goal, he said, "is broadening access to and interest in computer science."

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At Flowers High, Marilyn Fitzpatrick has taught computer science for five years. She said she wants students to see connections from the classroom to the working world in disciplines such as software development and cybersecurity.

"I try to engage them all," she said. "We need more minorities in the field."

On this December morning, her computer science classes were bustling with students who programmed robots  including a daredevil racing device with nubby tires called an Ollie  and completed self-paced assignments at terminals.

On the walls were posters with inspirational quotes, including one from President Barack Obama: "Don't just play on your phone, program it."

Christian Vasquez Rubio, 15, a sophomore in CSP, fiddled with coding commands for an Ollie to navigate an obstacle course. He said it was his first AP class. "This is a fun way to learn," he said. "I like it when we're able to do hands-on stuff."

Vasquez Rubio said he's intrigued by careers related to computer science. "I don't know what exactly, but somewhere in the field." And college? "Of course," he said. "That's a big goal of mine."

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Oscar Cortez feels like he has an ordinary American life. He carries a Costco card. He roots for the Boston Red Sox. And five days a week, he rises before dawn, pulls on four shirts and two pairs of pants, and ventures into the frigid air to work as a plumber, a good job that pays for his Maryland townhouse and his daughters' college fund.

The U.S. government opened the door to this life in 2001 when it granted Cortez and about 200,000 other migrants from El Salvador Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a provisional reprieve from deportation that has allowed them to work legally in the United States for 17 years.

On Monday, the federal government said the protection will end in September 2019, sending waves of outrage and anxiety from Washington to Los Angeles and to the Central American nation itself.

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In Bethesda, Md., a janitor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center burst into tears. Before a news conference in Dallas, an advocate who has TPS took a moment to comfort his daughter, who is in the fifth grade and is worried that both of her parents will soon have to leave the United States.

At 15th and L streets NW in Washington, Cortez saw the news on his mobile phone while taking a break from laying copper pipe at the construction site of the new Fannie Mae headquarters.

"You feel like you're up in the air," the silver-haired 46-year-old said. "I feel bad and offended. They're playing with our stability."

Congress created the TPS program in 1990 to offer provisional humanitarian relief to migrants whose homelands were engulfed in war, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions. Critics say past presidents misused the program by allowing it to drag on long after the emergencies passed.

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Salvadorans were allowed to apply after two powerful earthquakes devastated their country in 2001. Many had come to the United States illegally or overstayed their visas, in some cases long before the earthquakes. For them, the program was an opportunity to reside legally in a country they saw as an escape from poverty and violence. They have since been vetted, bought homes and raised families, including an estimated 190,000 children who were born in this country and are U.S. citizens.

"I consider this my country," Cortez said.

The largest number of Salvadoran TPS recipients  about 32,000 people  live in the Washington area, studies show, followed by Los Angeles, New York and Houston.

Helen Avalos, a 41-year-old janitor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, has three children, two grandchildren and a house in New Carrollton, Md. Her mother in El Salvador depends on the money she sends home.

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"It doesn't affect just one person," she said of Monday's decision, her voice shaking. "It affects the whole family."

Though they have desperately tried to preserve it, Salvadorans say they have mixed feelings about TPS, which never offered them a path to legal residency. Every 18 months, they worried that the next extension would be the last. Now they say they will pour their energy into lobbying Congress to pass a law and let them stay.

"The reality is that TPS never took us anywhere, but it also is terrible to be left without anything," said Edwin Murillo, an official with the Dallas chapter of the National TPS Alliance, who spent part of Monday reassuring his daughter.

"We've lost a battle but not the war," said Orlando Zepeda, a TPS holder from Los Angeles. "We're going to put all our efforts into this fight."

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Zepeda arrived at age 17, too late for the 1986 amnesty for undocumented immigrants signed by President Ronald Reagan. Now he is 52 and married to a fellow TPS holder, with two U.S.-born children whom he sends to private school.

Labor leaders said Salvadorans with protected status mop floors in Washington museums and empty wastebaskets at the World Bank. They are also construction workers, business owners, managers and investors. A mass exodus would impact the D.C. workforce and economy, as well as the economy in El Salvador, where TPS holders send millions of dollars to family members each year.

"It is going to be devastating for us," said Prince George's County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D). "Whether it's construction or the service industry, the impact it will have is just devastating."

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Many Salvadorans say they will try to stay in the United States illegally  a fate they find more bearable than facing the rampant gang violence in their homeland. Cortez said he visited his parents in 2016 for the first time since he left and was shocked to see that the house had six locks on every door to ward off burglars. People he knew had left or died. Strangers stared at him on the street.

"I felt like a foreigner in my own land," he said. "Everyone is looking at you like you're from outer space."

His co-worker Jaime Contreras, a welder on the project that will extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport, said TPS and his job have transformed his family, both in Maryland and in El Salvador.

As a child in El Salvador, Contreras went to school in the mornings and to work in the afternoons, painting houses at age 7 and welding at 11. At 20, he moved to the United States seeking higher wages. Now he is 37 and the owner of a modest yellow-brick house in Beltsville, where he lives with his wife and three U.S.-born children. He sends $300 a month to his mother in El Salvador to pay for treatments for her failing kidneys.

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"My children, my wife and my mom depend on all this  and me, too," he said.

Both men said they are hoarding their savings in case they lose their jobs along with their protected status. Cortez has put off replacing his old Mitsubishi Montero, with 150,000 miles and a sputtering engine.

Like many TPS recipients, they say they will try to obtain legal residency. His wife is a legal resident, and Cortez hopes she will someday be able to sponsor him. Contreras said he is trying to get a green card through his wife, a U.S. citizen. But there are no guarantees.

"It's ugly," Contreras said. "Without legal papers, we will lose practically everything."

Cortez nodded. "We'll lose our jobs," he said. "We'll lose it all."

Nick Miroff and Arelis R. Hernandez contributed to this report.

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday called for the creation of an "investigator general" to address complaints in local school systems, arguing that parents  who have complained over the past year about altered grades in Prince George's County and inadequate heating and air conditioning systems in Baltimore City and Baltimore County  are losing confidence in public schools.

Hogan (R) said an independent investigator would have subpoena power and full authority to investigate ethical claims and corruption allegations against school officials. The position, which must be approved by the Democratic-majority General Assembly, would be based in the state Department of Education.

"Taxpayers, parents, teachers and especially students have a right to expect, and they deserve, more accountability," Hogan said at a news conference to announce education bills he plans to propose during the 2018 legislative session.

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Hogan said he also will submit a bill to change the schools accountability plan the General Assembly approved over his objections last year, reviving an issue that resulted in a veto override. In addition, he announced a bill to provide emergency funds to help pay for heating repairs in Baltimore City schools, which closed some buildings last week, and again Monday, because of extreme cold.

Aides to Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) said they had not seen the proposals and declined to comment.

Sean Johnson, the director of legislative affairs for the Maryland State Education Association, called the investigator general proposal "a tool to go on a fishing expedition to create a lack of public trust in public schools."

He said the governor should focus instead on the work of the Kirwan Commission, a panel examining whether current school-funding formulas are equitable.

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"The governor should stop attacking our public schools and start rolling up his sleeves with the rest of the state's leaders to reverse this shameful underfunding and make sure the Kirwan Commission's recommendations become law," Johnson said.

Hogan said school leaders have "repeatedly failed" their students.

The governor has been particularly critical of facilities problems in both Baltimore City and County, and of Prince George's response to a graduation-rate scandal.

He says Prince George's County Executive Rushern L. Baker III, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Hogan in November, and Kevin Maxwell, Baker's handpicked schools chief, have not responded adequately to allegations that school officials changed grades so that more students could get their high school diplomas.

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On Monday, Maxwell said Hogan "has not provided any details" of his proposal for an investigator general "and he hasn't asked for any input from school superintendents about how best to support our public schools."

Prince George's school board member Edward Burroughs, the leader of the group that brought the grade-changing allegations to light, said he would welcome an independent investigator.

The state board of education "does not have the capacity to investigate wrongdoing on a larger scale," Burroughs said. "So to have an [investigator general] with the ability to subpoena documents, the ability to compel people to testify and to refer individuals that have done unethical things to law enforcement is an important thing."

Del. Alonzo T. Washington (D), a lawmaker from Prince George's, has proposed a bill to create a similar position solely for that county's school system.

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Montgomery County school board member Patricia O'Neill said she sees no sign of diminishing confidence in public education but also has no problem with an investigator-general approach to accountability.

"I think every school system, every public entity, needs to be held accountable," she said.

To address heating and air conditioning repairs at Baltimore schools, Hogan said he will propose emergency legislation to provide $2.5 million in emergency state funds.

"This is not to reward these people responsible who have failed," the governor said. "This is about saving kids from being freezing in winter and from sweating . . . in warm weather."

Over the past week, city and state officials have battled over who is responsible for the nearly 60 schools in the city that lacked heat during a historic cold spell. Some repairs were done over the weekend, but eight schools were closed Monday morning for facilities issues.

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The governor's school accountability proposal would change a performance plan approved by the General Assembly last year. That plan, which had the support of the state's teachers union, says 65 percent of a school's rating would be based on academic indicators such as standardized testing, student achievement, student growth and graduation.

The rest of the rating would depend "school quality" indicators such as absenteeism, school climate and access to a well-rounded curriculum.

Hogan wanted academic indicators to count more heavily. He vetoed the bill, but the legislature voted to override the veto.

At the news conference, Hogan said he will propose a bill to raise the weighting of academic indicators to 80 percent.

O'Neill took issue with the idea of increasing the weight of test scores in determining school performance. Strong outcomes, she said, are the result of multiple factors, including good teaching and strong school leadership. While it is important to hold school systems accountable for every child, she said, "an overemphasis on testing does not improve public education."

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Two boats were involved, officials said. And no one was hurt.

D.C. Fire and EMS had the early morning blaze under control at the James Creek Marina at 2nd and V streets SW.

Two boats were ablaze Monday at a marina in Southwest Washington, but firefighters were able to quickly control the flames.

The cause of the fire is under investigation. But officials said the fire appeared to involve fuel from the boats. Foam was used to put out the blaze and deal with burning fuel.
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Xavier Lyles was only 3 years old when he was brutally beaten to death. Medical experts determined the boy had more than 70 injuries on his little body. They said some had been inflicted months, even years, before his death. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Following a month-long October trial, a jury found the boy's mother guilty of first-degree murder, child neglect and other charges. On Monday, a D.C. Superior Court judge sentenced 28-year-old Francis Lyles to 45 years in prison.

"It's heartbreaking to think of that little boy's last hours," Judge Zoe Bush said. "He was abandoned and abused. He deserved a better life than he got. But in death, he will have justice."

Through the testimony of the family's neighbors and medical experts during the trial, prosecutors were able to present a narrative of continued physical and verbal abuse of the boy by his mother.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Wright said it ended when Lyles grew angry with Xavier the night of June 23, 2014, and beat him before he went to bed. The next morning, she discovered his body. But before calling paramedics, Wright said, Lyles asked a cousin to come to the house.

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It was then, Wright said, that Lyles began lying. She told authorities that she never struck her son and that her boyfriend had been alone with the boy and had beaten him. At the time, Lyles, her three children and the boyfriend shared the apartment in Southeast Washington.

For months, police suspected the boyfriend and investigated him as the primary suspect. Some of Lyles's family members threatened the man on social media, encouraging street vengeance against him, Wright said.

Lyles's family members were outraged and wanted to help secure the arrest of Lyles's boyfriend. One of Lyles's cousins told police she had recorded conversations on her cellphone with a recording app and gave prosecutors permission to access them.

The recordings, however, did not implicate Lyles's boyfriend, prosecutors said. Instead, prosecutors say that Lyles can be heard describing harming the child after he knocked over his newborn brother's bouncy seat while the infant was in it. On the recording, Lyles, using the child's nickname, said she "f---ed Xay up."

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Lyles's boyfriend was not arrested in Xavier's death and later testified during Lyles's trial that she often abused the boy.

In addition, a neighbor testified that she once found Xavier wandering outside in the cold without a coat or shoes and that when she returned the boy to his mother, she overheard Lyles beating him.

"There was a pattern of neglect and abuse," Wright told the judge. "After beating him, she left that little boy to die alone. She left that little boy alone for 15 hours to die alone."

Lyles's attorney Elliott Queen said his client maintains she did not hit Xavier or cause his death. He also said that, other than Lyles's ex-boyfriend, no one testified to seeing his client hit her children.

Queen also said that Lyles had a "troubled" childhood and that she had tested as having a low IQ. Queen did not elaborate on either statement.

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Wright made the unusual request of asking the judge to sentence Lyles to life in prison. "This was an extraordinary case," she said. "Her actions were unreasonable, cruel, beyond the pale and atrocious."

Lyles did not testify during the trial. At her sentencing, she tearfully said she was not responsible for Xavier's death.

"I would never hurt my kids. I loved them more than life itself," she said. "My son is gone. I would never hurt my kids. I loved them too much."

As part of the sentence, the judge required Lyles to undergo an anger management program, grief counseling and drug treatment.

Lyles still faces additional charges in the case. Prosecutors say Lyles tried to tamper with witnesses who were scheduled to testify during her trial. A hearing for that charge  should prosecutors decide to move forward with the case  is scheduled for March.

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Police are investigating the killing of a man who was found shot last week in an SUV.

Officers found David Knott Jr., 30, suffering from gunshot wounds after responding to a call about a shooting about 3:45 p.m. on Jan. 4 at the intersection of Hill Road and Willow Hill Drive in Landover, Prince George's County police said.
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A 65-year-old Maryland man who went missing last week in the extreme cold might have been picked up by a driver along Route 1 in Prince George's County. Daniel DeHaven, who has dementia and is nonverbal, went missing last week while on a shopping trip at a Costco. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In a Twitter message, police said Sunday that DeHaven might have been picked up Jan. 2 while he was walking on Route 1 by a driver who dropped him off in the 800 block of Annapolis Road in Gambrills.

The public is asked to be on the lookout for DeHaven.

Prince George's County Deputy Chief Sammy Patel said the department has been working with police in Anne Arundel and Howard counties to expand the search for DeHaven after receiving the latest tip.

The man who picked up and dropped off DeHaven thought he was homeless or someone who couldn't speak English or who who needed to get to a shelter, Patel said.

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DeHaven was picked up around Savage, Md., and pointed the driver to an area where he eventually was dropped off at Arundel High School, according to officials.

Police plan to return to the area in force Tuesday afternoon for another extensive search after sending helicopters over the area during the weekend.

"This hasn't slowed down," Patel said. "We're hoping we'll have a positive outcome."

When DeHaven was missing last week, officials launched helicopters, bloodhounds and dozens of police officers to search for him.

He was last seen about 11:30 a.m. Jan. 2 at the Costco on Baltimore Avenue in Beltsville, according to Prince George's police.

DeHaven's son, Kevin, had said his father is a kind man who is open to new people. He said his father is probably confused.

"He's out there somewhere probably cold and probably hungry, but he is nice and approachable," Kevin DeHaven said.

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The D.C. region has faced harsh cold throughout the past week. Authorities have reminded family members to keep a close watch on elderly relatives who may require extra help.

In this cold snap, a 79-year-old woman was found in dire condition in freezing temperatures in Fairfax County. She suffers from dementia.

DeHaven is described as a white man, 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing about 175 pounds. He was last seen wearing a long black coat.

Anyone with information is asked to call 301-699-2601.

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An 18-year-old woman was convicted of murder Monday for stabbing a teenage girl just after vowing to see her in hell, a brutal attack carried out with other MS-13 members and associates in Fairfax County in January 2017. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Venus Romero Iraheta, who was 17 at the time of the killing, pleaded guilty as an adult in Fairfax County Circuit Court in the slaying of Damaris A. Reyes Rivas, 15, of Gaithersburg. Iraheta faces up to life in prison when she is sentenced on May 25.

Iraheta, of Alexandria, Va., was a main player in the torture and killing, which generated national headlines and came to symbolize the resurgence of MS-13 in the D.C. region after years of relative dormancy. In court, she wore a green jail jumpsuit and spoke only to answer a judge's questions.

Here is what you need to know about MS-13, a street gang with an international reach. (Video: Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post, Photo: ULISES RODRIGUEZ/The Washington Post)

Iraheta was one of 10 MS-13 members and associates who met Damaris at Springfield's Lake Accotink Park on Jan. 8, 2017, after the girl was tricked into going there by one in the group.

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The gang members blamed Damaris for luring the leader of their local clique, Christian Sosa Rivas, to his own vicious killing about a week earlier in Prince William County and wanted to exact revenge, prosecutors said. The gang captured the brutality that followed in cellphone videos.

Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh played the videos in court Monday, saying he wanted to make clear for the judge the depravity involved in the horrific murder of the high school girl.

Damaris's mother, who was in the courtroom, bowed her head and cried as the videos played. Even Iraheta appeared to cry at one point, dabbing a tissue at her eyes.

"Some kids are prodigies at the violin and some kids are prodigies at violence," Morrogh said after the hearing. "This is a prodigy at violence."

Morrogh said the incident began when Damaris arrived at the park and a handful of the gang members took her into the woods. Morrogh said Iraheta hit Damaris in the face, cutting her, and then knocked her to the ground.

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Iraheta told Damaris that she had to die, Morrogh said, and that it would be carried out the same way as the killing of Sosa Rivas, who was attacked with machetes and rocks before being dumped into the Potomac River on New Year's Eve 2016. Iraheta had dated Sosa Rivas.

The first video shows Damaris in the Springfield, Va., woods, being interrogated by the gang members and associates, all of whom were then between the ages of 15 and 21 . They shout at her in Spanish as she gets up from the snow-dusted ground.

At one point, one MS-13 member ominously clicks a cigar cutter and another tells Damaris she could lose a finger, before the screen fades to black.

Morrogh said Damaris was made to take off her shoes and shirt, so that she could feel the chill Sosa Rivas felt, and then was walked to another part of the park. A video taken there shows a shoeless and shirtless Damaris shaking violently on the 21 degree day.

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Iraheta is seen wielding a large hunting knife, before someone shouts off camera in Spanish: "What the f---! Just stick the steel in her."

But Damaris would not die then.

Instead, gang members walked her out of the woods and back to a car, Morrogh said. One gang member even slung his arm around Damaris, so that it would appear like they were boyfriend and girlfriend and not raise the suspicions of others in the park.

Once in the car, the gang members played "MS-13 music," Morrogh said, and Iraheta again told Damaris she was going to be killed. The gang members drove to a nearby a Beltway overpass and train tracks.

They once again took Damaris into the woods, after forcing her to crawl through a 3-foot tunnel covered in MS-13 graffiti.

Morrogh said all the gang members and associates charged in the case kicked and punched Damaris, before some peeled away. Eventually, Iraheta climbed on top of Damaris, who was on the ground, and asked her if she had slept with Sosa Rivas. Morrogh said Damaris admitted that she did and asked for forgiveness.

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None would come.

Iraheta sliced a tattoo off Damaris's hand that Sosa Rivas had gotten for her, Morrogh said. Iraheta later told investigators she did not feel bad about what happened next and described how she told Damaris to remember her face.

"I told her 'I'm not going to forgive you and you'll remember me till the day I see you in f---ing hell,'" Morrogh said Iraheta told investigators.

Iraheta stabbed Damaris repeatedly in the abdomen, chest and back. Another gang member jabbed her with a stick, before the third and final video taken while Damaris was alive begins.

Damaris is seen prone on her back amid dead leaves, with blood on one hand and forehead. A section of tree trunk is shoved against her head and blood trickles onto the leaves near her abdomen.

An alleged gang member, Wilmer A. Sanchez-Serrano, enters the frame and jams a large stick into Damaris's neck again and again, before the video abruptly ends. Sanchez-Serrano was convicted of murder in November.

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The gang members left Damaris for dead, and Morrogh said the girl probably lived 20 more minutes. Morrogh said she was stabbed 23 times and suffered trauma to the head.

Later that night, some of the gang members returned, took a brief video of Damaris's body and dragged it underneath the Beltway overpass, Morrogh said. They placed her face down in a puddle of water and piled railroad ties on her back.

Morrogh said the gruesome videos were taken so some of the MS-13 members could send them back to El Salvador to earn a promotion within the gang, which requires violence to move up the ranks.

The end was precisely the opposite of what Damaris's mother had hoped for her daughter when she brought Damaris to the United States from El Salvador at age 12 to escape the gang. But Maria Reyes said her daughter became involved with MS-13 here and disappeared from home in December 2016.

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To date, seven of the 10 gang members and associates charged in the case have been convicted of crimes, including murder, related to Damaris's killing.

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In a bid to cover a financial gap that has hampered Metro since its creation, state lawmakers in Virginia and Maryland will consider bills to give the agency a permanent, dependable source of funding worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight It will be the first time since the agreement to build the subway more than 50 years ago that lawmakers in Richmond and Annapolis have simultaneously sought to provide dedicated funding for the transit agency.

The District strongly supports the goal, so agreements in the Maryland and Virginia legislative sessions that begin Wednesday would mark a breakthrough. Metro is the only major transit system in the country that does not receive a significant part of its funding from a tax or other dedicated source of revenue, a shortcoming that has been identified as a weakness as far back as 1979.

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A key to the new effort is flexibility; each state would come up with its own way to raise the money. Virginia is considering doing it partly through tax increases in Northern Virginia, whereas Maryland is looking at diverting existing transportation funds to Metro. All three jurisdictions say they will provide additional funds only if the other two do so .

Success is hardly assured. In Virginia, both Democrats and Republicans are raising objections to a plan proposed last month by outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) that would increase taxes on real estate sales, hotel stays and wholesale gasoline.

In Maryland, obstacles could arise in the perennial tug-of-war between Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly.

It's also possible that the combined measures would fall short of the $500 million a year in additional, dedicated funding that Metro says it needs, starting in July, to ensure safety and reliability.

Still, it's significant that the effort has advanced this far, analysts say. Senior legislators in Virginia and Maryland say the bills will receive serious consideration amid hope that progress on one side of the Potomac will encourage movement on the other.

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Political winds are favorable. Democrats, who are traditionally pro-transit, won all three statewide offices in Virginia in the November election and gained 15 seats in the House of Delegates.

In Maryland, the two powerful leaders of the General Assembly  Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel)  said last week that they support dedicated funding if certain conditions are met. Hogan has signaled he is open to the idea, although he is deferring judgment until a bill gets close to his desk.

"We have cause for measured optimism," said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a longtime Metro supporter. "All three jurisdictions are talking about dedicated funding at the same time, and I hope last November's election creates a real opportunity for Richmond to show its commitment to Metro's future."

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In addition, a high-powered coalition of regional business organizations and nonprofit groups was formally launched Mondayto back efforts in Richmond and Annapolis to provide Metro with the dedicated funding it needs and to change its governance.

The group, called MetroNow, grew out of a Metro reform effort started in late 2016 by the Federal City Council. MetroNow is being led by the council and five other groups: the Greater Washington Board of Trade, the Greater Washington Partnership, the 2030 Group, the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Their representatives will be active in lobbying in the state capitals for measures to help the transit agency.

"We will be on the ground simultaneously in Richmond, Annapolis and D.C., advocating off the same hymnal," said Michael Forehand, vice president for government relations at the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce.

The business community has supported dedicated funding for Metro in the past, including in a major report in 2005. Business leaders have redoubled their efforts, however, because the success of Metro is viewed as critical to the region's economic health  in attracting both workers from the pro-transit millennial generation and investment dollars.

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The value of Metro was reinforced recently when online retail giant Amazon said access to transit was a top priority in picking a site for its new second headquarters and the accompanying 50,000 new jobs. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

"If you look at Amazon and what their criteria are, transit is crucial," said Maryland Del. Marc A. Korman (D-Montgomery), a sponsor of the Metro funding bill in Annapolis. "It's particularly important for us in Maryland with Gov. Hogan to have significant business community support."

The pro-Metro coalition also includes nonprofit transit advocates and environmentalists. The Sierra Club has listed dedicated funding for Metro as a top priority in both the Annapolis and Richmond legislative sessions.

"The most effective collaborations we have had have been when business and nonprofits worked together," said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. He referred to past efforts to support the light-rail Purple Line in suburban Maryland and redevelopment of the Tysons Corner area in Fairfax County.

In Virginia, McAuliffe's budget proposal includes $150 million a year in dedicated funding for Metro, of which $65 million a year would come from higher taxes on Northern Virginians for real estate sales, hotel stays and wholesale gasoline. The remaining $85 million would come from committing transportation funds Northern Virginia already receives to Metro.

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But Northern Virginia Democrats have asked for revisions to the proposal so that at least some of the money comes from state funds  and their region does not have to bear the full burden.

"There has to be state revenue in there, not just regional revenue," said Del. Vivian E. Watts (D-Fairfax), a former state transportation secretary who also is the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee.

In addition, key legislators expressed doubt that it would be possible to persuade the GOP majorities in the House and Senate to go along with the higher real estate and hotel taxes. Some of the necessary money may have to be found elsewhere, they said.

Republican leaders also have signaled that they would set conditions on any additional money for Metro, such as requiring curbs on overtime pay, pension benefits and other labor costs. They would not be satisfied with McAuliffe's plan to fix the transit agency's governance simply by replacing its 16-member board with a five-member reform board.

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"All of those are issues," Watts said of the GOP concerns. "Whether they end up being conditional [for funding] will be what this session is all about."

Sen. George L. Barker (D-Fairfax), who is helping draft the legislation, expressed confidence that a funding bill would be approved because lawmakers realize Metro is critical to Northern Virginia's economy, which is vital for the state's prosperity.

"Nobody is going to get everything they want, but . . . there is clear unanimity of opinion that this issue needs to be addressed," Barker said.

In Maryland, the bill backed by Korman and two other legislators would commit $125 million a year to Metro from the state transportation trust fund. Miller and Busch, the state's top legislative leaders, said Thursday in separate interviews that they are supportive.

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Miller said he supports additional state funding for Metro "coupled with a plan for improvement, expansion and maintenance, and also management."

"There are going to have to be some concessions in that regard, but if you can get those concessions we can get a funding source from Maryland and Virginia and D.C., and positive things happen," Miller said.

Busch agreed that Maryland should provide dedicated funding if the other two jurisdictions agree to do so.

"If they put up the money, I think it's an obligation that certainly the state of Maryland has to do that," he said.

There appeared to be little interest in Annapolis in McAuliffe's plan for a five-member reform board, which also has support from the MetroNow coalition.

Korman said it's "appropriate" to provide money only if changes are made, but said the reform board is not necessarily the right vehicle.

"It's not clear that is gong to be the exact path of reform, but we all want to make sure the money is spent well," Korman said.

Josh Hicks contributed to this report.

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Seven years ago, Robert Kerley, who makes his living as a truck driver, was loading drywall when a gust of wind knocked him off the trailer. Kerley fell 14 feet and hurt his back. For pain, a series of doctors prescribed him a variety of opioids: Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In less than a year, the 45-year-old from Federal Heights, Colo., said he was hooked. "I spent most of my time high, laying on the couch, not doing nothing, falling asleep everywhere," he said.

Kerley lost weight. He lost his job. His relationships with his wife and kids suffered. He remembers when he hit rock bottom: One night hanging out in a friend's basement, he drank three beers, and the alcohol reacted with an opioid.

"I was taking so much morphine that I [experienced] respiratory arrest," Kerley said. "I stopped breathing."

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An ambulance arrived, and EMTs administered the overdose reversal drug naloxone. Kerley was later hospitalized. As the father of a 12-year-old boy, he knew he needed to turn things around. That's when he signed up for Kaiser Permanente's integrated pain service. (Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

"After seven years of being on narcotics and in a spiral downhill, the only thing that pulled me out of it was going to this class," he said. "The only thing that pulled me out of it was doing and working the program that they ask you to work."

Subscribe to KHN's free Morning Briefing.

The program he refers to is an eight-week course, available to Kaiser Permanente members in Colorado for $100. It's designed to educate high-risk opioid patients about pain management. A recent class met at Kaiser's Rock Creek medical offices in Lafayette, Colo., a town east of Boulder. Will Gersch, a clinical pharmacy specialist, taught several patients learning to battle addiction the science behind prescription drugs.

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"So, basically the overarching message here is the higher the dose of the opioids, the higher the risk," he told the group, as he jotted numbers on a whiteboard. "If you're over these two doses, that's a risk factor."

Upstairs, Gersch's colleague Amanda Bye, a clinical psychologist, highlighted a key element of the program: It's integrated. For patient care, there's a doctor, a clinical pharmacist, two mental health therapists, a physical therapist and a nurse  all on one floor. Patients can meet with this team, either all at once or in groups, but they do not have to deal with a series of referrals and appointments in different facilities. A spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente said researchers tracked more than 80 patients over the course of a year and found the group's emergency room visits decreased 25 percent. Inpatient admissions dropped 40 percent, and patients' opioid use went way down.

"We brought in all these specialists. We all know the up-to-date research of what's most effective in helping to manage pain," Bye said. "And that's how the program got started."

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Bye said the team helps patients use alternatives like exercise, meditation, acupuncture and mindfulness. Some patients, though, do need to go to the chemical dependency unit for medication-assisted treatment for their opioid addiction. Benjamin Miller is an expert on integrated care with the national foundation Well Being Trust. Kaiser is on the right track, he said.

"The future of health care is integrated and, unfortunately, our history is very fragmented, and we're just now catching up to developing a system of care that meets the needs of people," he said.

Similar projects in California showed a reduction in the number of prescriptions and pills per patient, said Dr. Kelly Pfeifer, director of high-value care at the California Health Care Foundation. Her group released case studies of three programs similar to Kaiser's Colorado program. (Kaiser Health News produces California Healthline, an editorially independent publication of the California Health Care Foundation.)

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"We've seen great success with these models that are integrating complementary therapy, physical therapy, behavioral health and medical care," Pfeifer said. A key strategy is to gradually decrease the amount of opioids a patient takes, rather than cut them off before they're ready. "It works so much better when the patients have access to these complementary therapies," she said. "And it works even better when those complementary therapies are part of an integrated team."

But it can be difficult to implement universally. One challenge is scale: Big systems like Kaiser Permanente have ample resources and enough patients to make the effort work. Another issue is payment. Some insurers won't pay for some alternative treatments; others have separate payment streams for different kinds of care.

"Frequently, behavioral health and medical health are paid for by entirely different systems," Pfeifer said.

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The need for programs like Kaiser's is urgent. In 2016, a record 912 people died from an overdose in Colorado, according to data recently released by the state health department. Of those, 300 people died from an opioid overdose. Opioid use often leads to an addiction to heroin, which claimed another 228 lives last year in the state. Those two causes together now rival the number of deaths from car accidents in the state.

Colorado faces a severe shortage of treatment options. Making matters worse, the state's largest substance abuse treatment provider, Arapahoe House, decided to close as of Jan. 2.

Kaiser's integrated pain service has given some patients a second chance.

Robert Kerley, now a veteran of the program, recently shared his story with other patients. "I got my life back. I can sleep. I can eat. I can enjoy things," Kerley told them.

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To cope with pain, Kerley starts his morning with stretching and a version of tai chi that he calls "my chi." He practices deep breathing. His advice to others suffering from pain or addiction?

"Do whatever it takes to walk away from it, like no matter what," Kerley said. "Trust me, it gets better. It gets 100 percent better than where you're at right now."

Better for Kerley means his relationships with his family have improved. And he's back at work, once again able to make a living as a truck driver.

This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, Colorado Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with any advertisers on this site. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 20 percent of people 65 and older struggle to pay medical bills. Almost half of Americans surveyed said they'd have trouble paying an unexpected medical bill of $500. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight A 2015 nationally representative Consumer Reports survey of 2,200 adults found that 30 percent of privately insured Americans had received a medical bill where insurance covered less than they expected, leaving them on the hook for the rest.

When dealing with a daunting medical bill, such as an unexpected tab from a hospital stay, one approach many people overlook is negotiating a lower price. Whether your bills are the result of a high deductible, an out-of-network charge, a procedure that's not covered or lack of insurance, experts say the following could help cut them up to half. (Regulations limit discounts that can be offered under traditional Medicare, but providers have freer rein with Medicare Advantage and other health plans.)

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1. Be proactive. For planned surgery, make sure your insurer covers both the procedure and the facility where it is being done. Tiering (where consumers pay more for certain facilities) is on the rise. Ask your doctor whether everyone involved takes your insurance, and request a written response; that might help if you later learn an out-of-network provider was used.

If you'll be paying out of pocket, ask beforehand for a rate in line with what insurance companies pay. "When you deal with things that aren't covered by insurance, there is a tremendous opportunity to discuss the fee and negotiate a discount off the posted charge," says Abbie Leibowitz, chief medical officer of Health Advocate Solutions, an advocacy and health assistance company.

2. Do your research. Whether you're negotiating in advance or after you get a bill, websites such as Fair Health and Healthcare Bluebook can help you determine what insurers pay in your area. "Say, 'I know this is the reasonable and customary charge; can we come down a little bit?' " suggests Adria Gross, chief executive of MedWise Insurance Advocacy.

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3. Talk to the right person. If you get a bill, check it to make sure it's correct. Then ask your insurer whether some or all will be covered. If not, call the provider who sent the bill. Start with someone in the billing department or the patient financial counseling office. "The first response will be 'No, I can't do anything,' " Leibowitz says. Keep asking for the manager of the person you're talking to, until you get to someone with the authority to make a deal.

4. Offer to pay cash. If you can pay most of a bill, offer to do so immediately. Medical advocates say they can often get a 15 to 20 percent "prompt pay" discount this way. "Appeal to their sense of a good business decision," says James Napoli, chief executive of Medliminal, which works with consumers and companies to reduce medical costs.

5. Explain why you can't pay. "If you are in retirement on a set income, that will play into it," Napoli says. The possibility of not getting paid gives health-care providers a reason to offer a discount or payment plan. (Ask that it be interest-free.) Some states, such as California, require hospitals to provide free or reduced-fee care to consumers within certain income limits. Ask whether yours does.

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6. Enlist help. Many hospitals have patient advocates who can help you understand billing codes and pinpoint errors. Hiring a medical advocate is another option, but it can be expensive. Some take a flat fee, and others charge a percentage of what they save you. (Twenty-five percent is typical.) When considering advocates, ask for their track record and make sure they have experience with complicated medical billing codes.

Copyright 2017-2018,

Consumer Reports Inc.

Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Read more at ConsumerReports.org.

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DISAGREEMENT IN Congress is not necessarily a sign of dysfunction. But when both parties broadly agree that something should happen yet serially fail to follow through, the nation's leaders look particularly inept. The example of the moment is the ongoing saga of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a popular service that covers 9 million young Americans  and that is rapidly running out of cash, alarming families that rely on the federal aid to keep their children healthy.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress created CHIP in 1997 to assist families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, the health-insurance program for the poor, yet who do not have reasonable alternative options for insuring their children. Given that decent health care in early years is crucial, lawmakers rightly decided to invest in the nation's future health. The program has been a remarkable success, driving children's uninsured rate down to about 4 percent.

But, unlike Medicaid, Congress did not make CHIP an entitlement program that automatically and perpetually draws as much money as it needs from the treasury. Rather, it required lawmakers to regularly re-up CHIP's funding, which they did in 2015, under the reasonable assumption that Congress would not want to be blamed for kicking children off their insurance.

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The 2015 funding dried up in September, and lawmakers pumped in enough emergency funds to sustain the program for only a few months. States have begun planning for a funding shortage, with some warning families that their coverage might lapse. The disruption uselessly alarms parents, scrambles doctors' planning and eats up time state officials could use for more important things.

House Republicans might feel as though they already did their job; the chamber passed a CHIP funding bill back in November. But the proposal would have siphoned money from a preventive-care fund created under Obamacare. Unsurprisingly, given the fund's provenance, Republicans have criticized how the fund's money has been spent. In fact, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have used the fund to invest in vaccinations, diabetes programs and anti-tobacco efforts. Reprogramming its money to fund CHIP would rob Peter to pay Paul. Democrats rightly objected, leading to the current impasse.

It is possible that CHIP will feature in a big compromise funding package that keeps the government open, raises unrelated federal spending caps and perhaps even determines the fate of the "dreamers," undocumented immigrants brought to the United States when they were children. The sooner Congress settles all of these issues, the better.

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Yet the fact would remain: Funding CHIP should be routine business, and it has instead been over the past year a desperate, last-minute mess. Politicians often decry Washington "dysfunction" when what they really mean is that their party cannot get its own way. But to much of the public, it is episodes such as the CHIP debacle that are the problem.

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Larry Davidson is president of Davidsons, a clothing store for men in Roanoke, Va. He has served as president and board member of Downtown Roanoke Inc. and the local Merchants Association. Before modern e-commerce even existed, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that shaped our digital economy. In 1992, the court created a loophole that has allowed online-only retailers to avoid collecting sales taxes while still requiring local businesses to do so. Through this, the court essentially created a corporate welfare program for online-only retailers  some of which are now digital giants  that has stood for a quarter-century.

This precedent has had profoundly negative consequences on American businesses, acutely felt by local merchants during the holiday shopping season. For years, retailers such as myself have urged Congress to close the online loophole, and every year we've received lip service but seen no action. This year was more of the same, if not worse, as Congress overhauled the entire federal tax code yet did nothing to address the concerns of local retailers who have been treated unfairly as the result of this special treatment in the law.

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But retailers now have another avenue for reform: asking the Supreme Court to yet again intervene after years of congressional neglect. The state of South Dakota has petitioned the court to take up a case that would give the court a chance to overturn the 1992 precedent. I'm hopeful the justices will do just that and bring our tax system into the 21st century.

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that North Dakota had no right to collect sales taxes from an office supply company that had no physical presence in the state, even though the company was selling its products to customers in the state through a computer program. Ever since, companies that do not have a physical presence in states  such as a retail outlet or distribution facility  have essentially been able to sell their products to people in those states without paying taxes.

The justices understood their ruling might carry damaging and unintended consequences, which is why they asked Congress to update federal law to better regulate interstate commerce and restore a sense of basic fairness. Sadly, the court overestimated the will of Congress to act.

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In the meantime, this loophole has done significant harm to Main Street retailers, as well as state and local budgets. In the decades since that decision, thousands of retail storefronts have disappeared while states and municipalities have lost billions in uncollected sales tax revenue  at least $23 billion annually.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in the 2015 case Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl, essentially suggested states should force the issue by filing a case that would allow the Supreme Court to reconsider its stance on our tax system. That's why South Dakota has quickly pushed their case up to the highest court.

By revisiting its original decision and striking down its 1992 ruling, the court could allow states to pass common-sense laws mirroring the statute passed in South Dakota that require large online sellers to comply with the same sales tax laws as local businesses. If it chooses, Congress could also decide to pass legislation in the wake of a court decision creating a national framework. But waiting for Congress to act proactively is a fool's errand.

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The digital world has changed drastically over the past quarter-century. It is long past time for our laws to catch up. Brick-and-mortar businesses continue to be the heart of America's economy, creating 64 percent of net private-sector jobs. These businesses aren't asking for special treatment, just equal treatment, and our only realistic shot is for the court to revisit and strike down Quill. Small retailers across the country are desperate for the court to rectify what Congress has left to fester.

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As a Virginian, I'm outraged by U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III's decision in the case of the incorrect ballots [" No new vote in disputed Va. race ," Metro, Jan. 6]. At least 147 voters were disenfranchised , and a do-over is the only possible solution. I strongly suspect the judge of a partisan bias.

Judge T.S. Ellis III declined on Friday to enjoin the Republican candidate from being seated as a delegate from House District 28, which effectively caused the disenfranchisement of 147 voters who were assigned to the wrong districts by a registrar who is now deceased. These irregularities should have been the basis to nullify the election in District 28 and reschedule a vote when the error was discovered. Instead, the disenfranchisement of many voters in this district, coupled with the highly irregular actions by judicial overseers during the recount of votes in District 94, has cast a shadow over the 2017 elections in Virginia.
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In his Jan. 4 op-ed, "This president will not be silent on Iran," Vice President Pence charged that President Barack Obama effected "an abdication of American leadership" and "emboldened Iran's tyrannical rulers." Mr. Pence, in contrast, promised that "under President Trump, the United States is standing with" the Iranian people. Mr. Pence noted that "Trump swiftly offered the Iranian people America's unwavering support [and] committed to provide assistance in the days ahead." He promised that the "administration will continue to support the protesters " and that "we stand with the proud people of Iran."

What do all these promises mean? Are Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump egging on the Iranian demonstrators with promises of unwavering support? What kind of support? Tweets? Speeches? Weapons? Armed intervention? Should Iranian demonstrators take riskier actions, believing in this promised support? If and when the Iranian government imprisons opponents and hurts or even kills them, what kind of support will the United States provide? Tweets? Speeches? Diplomatic pressure? More economic sanctions?

President Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't egg on the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956 in their revolt, knowing that there was little the United States could do to help them succeed. On the other hand, in 1991 after the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush encouraged Saddam Hussein's opponents to rise up. They did, and they were massacred by the thousands. They believed the United States' words, and they paid the ultimate price.

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Be careful what you promise and what "unwavering support" you are prepared to deliver.

Peter Schoettle, North Bethesda

I was pleased to see Vice President Pence state that "the United States has long stood with those who yearn for freedom and a brighter future." Now the administration should show the "dreamers" and many, many hard-working Central Americans in our country that the United States indeed does and will continue to stand with those who yearn for freedom and a brighter future.

Patrick Dozier, Washington

While claiming to support the Iranian people, Vice President Pence neglected to mention the devastating impact of the Trump administration's Muslim travel ban and steep cutbacks in refugee admissions.

The Trump administration's policies are discriminatory and based on false claims that people from certain majority-Muslim countries, including Iran, have not been screened. I have worked on hundreds of cases of Iranian asylum seekers and others seeking resettlement in the United States. Many Iranians have been awaiting resettlement in the United States for years, after having undergone thorough vetting by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and multiple layers of screening by U.S. agencies. These include members of persecuted religious minorities such as the Bahai community and those who have experienced human rights abuses for their peaceful activities. Iranians who had been granted asylum and refugees resettled in the United States have contributed to their communities and to this country in many ways. They are not potential enemies.

I hope that the current administration will correct its harmful policies so that the United States will welcome and truly support those who have suffered repression.

Elise Auerbach, Chicago

The writer is the Iran country specialist

for Amnesty International USA.

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African teens and young adults are actively recruited, not driven, into "migration" and terrorism. The European Union's crackdown is not causing greater risks. It is the unintended consequence of decades of failed foreign policies and mismanaged foreign aid.

Ten years ago, the "human flow" was through Senegal and Mauritania to Spain. Investment in coast guard patrols and maritime security displaced migration to routes through vast, ungoverned expanses of land in Niger and Libya to Italy. Effective border patrols and anti-trafficking laws are necessary, but they are also opening up alternative routes branching off from the "tie-and-die" road (replacing the earlier "salt-and-silk" road) that runs from Ethiopia and Chad to Senegal and back.

The root of the migration "virus" is not poverty and strife. It is a lack of empowerment, autonomy and agency to make other choices that foreign policies and aid have failed to generate over the past four decades. Isn't it time that makers of foreign policy started pressuring African governments to be more accountable to the citizens that flee them? Isn't it time aid started working for those who have limited choices instead of against them?
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ALL OFFICIALS entering government must swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. President Trump made his own such promise. Yet he appears to believe that the public servants of the Justice Department owe their allegiance not to the Constitution but to him. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up. ArrowRight The litany of Mr. Trump's attacks on the integrity of federal law enforcement is lengthy. He reportedly requested personal loyalty from FBI Director James B. Comey and then fired him. He has raged over the refusal of Justice Department leadership to do his bidding. He has demanded an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton and her former aide Huma Abedin.

New reporting by the New York Times makes clear the depth of Mr. Trump's disregard for the importance of a nonpartisan and independent Justice Department. Angry over Attorney General Jeff Sessions's recusal from the Russia investigation, the president reportedly compared Mr. Sessions disfavorably to the unscrupulous New York fixer Roy Cohn. Mr. Trump seems to view Mr. Sessions not as a public servant but as a personal assistant  someone to shield him from political winds, regardless of ethical or legal obligations to the contrary.

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The same is true of Mr. Trump's view of White House counsel Donald McGahn, whom the Times reports Mr. Trump tasked unsuccessfully with talking Mr. Sessions out of his recusal. The White House counsel represents the office of the presidency, not the president's personal interests. But this distinction appears lost on Mr. Trump.

Not all of the president's abuses are as explosive as his reprimands of Mr. Sessions or as high-profile as his tweets. But also disturbing is his departure from years of precedent by chief executives who agreed to keep federal prosecutors free of political interference. Instead, Mr. Trump has interviewed three candidates for U.S. attorney, or lead federal prosecutor, in key jurisdictions. One, Jessie K. Liu, is now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Another, Geoffrey S. Berman, currently heads the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York on a temporary basis. Mr. Berman could potentially lead investigations into Mr. Trump's Manhattan businesses  making Mr. Trump's personal interaction with him particularly troubling.

Mr. Trump has the constitutional authority to meet with U.S. attorneys and make demands of Mr. Sessions and Mr. McGahn. But what's legal is different from what's right. It's appropriate for the president to confer with the attorney general in setting policy priorities. It's not appropriate to demand that the attorney general violate departmental ethics rules, interfere with particular investigations or target specific individuals.

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Most disturbingly, Mr. Trump seems not to recognize anything wrong or unusual in his conduct. He argues instead that then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. "protected" President Barack Obama in the same manner Mr. Trump reportedly demanded of Mr. Sessions.

For this reason, it's the responsibility of those who work with Mr. Trump to restrain him as best they can from destroying the norms he fails to recognize  as Mr. McGahn allegedly failed to do. And it's the responsibility of Congress to fulfill its constitutional role as a check to the president's abuses. The Senate can start by refusing to consider any future U.S. attorney nominee who has been interviewed by Mr. Trump.

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President Trump's former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon issued an apologetic statement on Jan. 7, as Trump's anger at his unflattering comments continues. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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President Trump's former chief strategist offered a semi-apology Sunday after days of withering castigation from the White House over his scathing comments in a new book, praising Trump in a public statement that aimed to soften his earlier criticism. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Stephen K. Bannon's mea culpa came as Trump and his senior aides continued a barrage of public insults against him. The president's top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, on Sunday called Bannon an "angry, vindictive person" whose "grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality."

In a written statement, Bannon asserted that passages in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff in which he was quoted as being critical of Donald Trump Jr.'s contacts with a Russian lawyer  calling their meeting last year at Trump Tower "treasonous" and "unpatriotic"  were a mischaracterization.

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Bannon insisted his criticism was aimed not at the president's eldest son but rather at former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was fired and is facing charges in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's Russia investigation. Manafort, who also attended the meeting along with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, should have known "how the Russians operate," Bannon said.

"Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man," Bannon said. "He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around."

Bannon was quoted in the book speculating that Trump Jr. told his father about the meeting shortly after it took place but offered no evidence. In Sunday's statement, however, Bannon emphasized that he believes there "was no collusion" between the campaign and Russian operatives, who have been accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of meddling in the presidential election.

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Stephen K. Bannon used to be a member of President Trump's inner circle, but now he's been ousted from Breitbart News after critical comments in a new book. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

"The investigation is a witch hunt," Bannon said. "I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr. has diverted attention from the president's historical accomplishments."

But the White House did not appear eager to forgive Bannon or welcome him back into Trump's good graces. And Trump on Sunday continued to lambaste Wolff on Twitter, denouncing the "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author."

Amid questions raised in the book about his mental fitness for office, Trump wrote in the tweet that "Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!"

On CNN's "State of the Union," Miller repeatedly slammed both Bannon and Wolff, calling the book a "betrayal of the president" that is "so contrary to the reality of those who work with him."

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Miller added that "the book is best understood as a work of poorly written fiction. The author is a garbage author of a garbage book."

Wolff defended himself on NBC's "Meet the Press" and suggested the chaos and uncertainty in the White House is worse than his book described.

"If I left out anything, it was probably stuff even more damning. It's that bad," he said. "It's an extraordinary moment in time. The last several days focused on my book are proof of this. What happened here? What's going on here?"

Wolff went so far as to raise the specter of the 25th Amendment, which allows a president's Cabinet to remove him from office for being unable to perform his duties, although experts said that amendment was designed with the idea of a president being incapacitated by, for example, a coma.

"It is not an exaggeration or unreasonable to say this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff," Wolff said.

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Bannon's statement came after Trump berated him in public and private, mocking the often disheveled Breitbart News chairman on Twitter as "Sloppy Steve" and belittling him as "poor" and "a liar" to Republican leaders during weekend meetings at Camp David, Md.

The ugly falling out between the two men  Bannon served as campaign chief executive after Manafort was dismissed and was widely credited with helping Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton  has threatened to distract the White House from its policy agenda in an election year.

Although Bannon was forced out of the White House in August amid escalating feuds with Trump's family members and other senior aides, Trump remained close to him, speaking to him occasionally by phone over objections from advisers.

Bannon had planned to use his continuing clout with the president, along with the news pages at Breitbart, to advance his own nationalist agenda, including threatening to try to unseat Republican incumbents who did not support Bannon's hard-line immigration and anti-globalization positions.

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Instead, Trump has sought to punish Bannon, and the former insider appears isolated, not only from the West Wing but also from his outside supporters, including financier Rebekah Mercer. Mercer, who had helped finance many Bannon initiatives, issued a rare public rebuke of him in which she said she would sever ties with him.

At Breitbart, company leaders have debated whether they could force Bannon from his top perch.

"Bannon's apology had nothing to do with repairing the relationship with Trump," said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax and a Trump confidante. "It had everything to do with repairing his relationship with Trump supporters who read Breitbart and big donors he depends on."

Inside the West Wing, aides said Trump and his top advisers quickly issued an ultimatum: Allies had to choose sides  they either supported the president or they supported Bannon. There could be no middle ground

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Bannon's statement, one person close to him said, was as much about stanching the tide of supporters and potential backers distancing themselves as it was appeasing the president. He continues to privately criticize Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, whom, according to the book, he referred to as "dumb as a brick."

Bannon also has continued to call Trump a "vessel," a Bannon ally said, while casting himself as something of a revolutionary in the conservative movement.

He has tried to convince allies in recent days that all will be fine  even texting one "onward!"  but he seems jolted and "even more manic than normal," in the words of one person who spoke to him. He has remained ensconced in his Capitol Hill townhouse, with a rope on the steps blocking people from approaching. "STOP!" a large red sign reads, urging visitors to check in downstairs.

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"He knows he is at his lowest point," said one associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. "He won't tell you that, but he knows it."

In his statement, Bannon declared that his "support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda. . . . President Trump was the only candidate that could have taken on and defeated the Clinton apparatus. I am the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism; and remain ready to stand in the breach for this president's efforts to make America great again."

Almost as soon as excerpts from Wolff's book leaked last week, many Bannon associates urged him to issue a statement defending himself. But before he could do so, the White House released a personal statement last week from Trump saying his former adviser had "lost his mind."

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At first, Bannon did not want to apologize, people who spoke to him said. But after meeting with allies and advisers, he grew convinced that things would worsen unless he did. Those close to Bannon said that as the controversy unfolded, he seemed eager to find a way to try to repair his relationship with the president.

Bannon has told others that Trump will eventually come back around to him when the president needs him, and that he plans to use his Breitbart platform to wage battles with the Republican establishment over spending and immigration this spring.

But whether Bannon will have the clout  or any allies  to launch a fight remains unclear.

Miller and Bannon were once considered kindred spirits  both immigration hard-liners who sought to exploit Trump's populist rhetoric to advance a nationalist agenda. But as Bannon lost favor in the West Wing, Miller reportedly realigned himself with a faction led by Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Asked on CNN whether the president knew about Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer when it occurred, Miller said Bannon was not present and therefore "is not even a remotely credible source on any of it."

Growing frustrated as Miller praised the president while evading questions and repeating his talking points, CNN host Jake Tapper cut him off early and went to a commercial. "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time," Tapper said as Miller attempted to keep talking.

"Welcome back to planet Earth," Tapper said to viewers after the show returned.

But Trump was eager for the last word.

In a tweet, the president wrote: "Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!"

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Every 45 seconds or so, oystermen plunge their long-handled tongs into the shallow blue-gray waters of Apalachicola Bay, rake the bottom and deposit meager-looking piles on the bow of their flat-bottomed boat. A gloved co-worker culls the keepers from the empty shells and immature oysters, which are tossed back. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight "See these guys here?" asked Shannon Hartsfield, whose family has fished and oystered and crabbed and shrimped here for four generations. He pointed to a nearby boat.

"Three tongers and one culler? Usually you'd have one tonger and two or three cullers. That's the flip-flop. Used to, that man right there'd keep two cullers busy all day long."

Apalachicola Bay, an estuary recognized by the United Nations for its uniqueness, once produced 10 percent of the nation's oysters and 90 percent of those from Florida. Why it doesn't anymore  why its oyster production has fallen so dramatically  has been the subject of decades of litigation, which now has landed before the Supreme Court.

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Florida v. Georgia, which is to be argued Monday, is a water fight that pits the thirsty megalopolis of Atlanta and the farmers of southwestern Georgia against conservationists and seafood producers in this stretch of the Florida Panhandle called the Forgotten Coast. Both states need the fresh water that starts in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains  as well as in a spring just south of the Atlanta airport  and meanders hundreds of miles before finding its way into the Gulf of Mexico via the Apalachicola River.

So far, Georgia has been the big winner, aided by decisions from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that allow it to keep the lion's share of the water.

Often in such Supreme Court fights, each state wants water for growth. But in Apalachicola, leaders say getting a greater share is necessary to allow the place to stay as it is. The fresh water provides the perfect degree of bay salinity required to sustain the seafood industry, they say, and thus a way of life.

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Rural Franklin County has as much coastline as the state of Alabama but fewer than 12,000 residents, "and only one traffic light that changes color," said county Commissioner Joseph "Smokey" Parrish.

"There's no theme parks, there's no movie theaters, there's no shopping malls. There's no 10-story condominiums," said Parrish, whose day job is overseeing the processing of shrimp at Buddy Ward & Sons Seafood in the town of Apalachicola. "Everybody who comes here says, 'Man, keep it just the way you have it.' "

Dan Tonsmeire of the conservation group Apalachicola Riverkeeper noted that the area's significance has received international, national and state accolades. If state and local officials in Florida have often squandered its natural resources in the name of growth, they've done the opposite here, he said.

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"You can't come up with an area that has more designations of its ecological importance," Tonsmeire said. "And we're going to lose it, knowingly. That's what's at stake here for the Supreme Court."

The legal fight has been raging for three decades; Florida has spent nearly $57 million in legal fees on the current lawsuit alone. Georgia has spent upward of $40 million and says it is time for the Supreme Court to end the fight.

"Florida would have this court put at risk the economic foundation of the country's ninth largest metropolitan area, as well as a multi-billion dollar agricultural sector that provides key crops and generates thousands of jobs," Georgia says in one of its filings with the justices.

Florida has not proved that dramatic cutbacks in Georgia's water usage are necessary to save the bay, Georgia's lawyers said.

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"It is one thing to make allegations  and Florida has made plenty of them  but it is another thing altogether to back them up," the brief states. "On that score, Florida's case fell woefully short."

At stake is the water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, which drains roughly 19,600 square miles in parts of Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

The Chattahoochee River flows from north of Atlanta, and there are five federal dams that provide flood control, hydropower and recreation. Especially important is Lake Sidney Lanier, which provides drinking water for many of the nearly 6 million residents of metro Atlanta.

The Flint flows from a spring near Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest in the world, and sweeps through southwestern Georgia, where farmers depend on irrigation for growing cotton, corn, soybeans, peanuts and pecans, among other crops in a more than $4 billion industry.

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The two rivers converge at the state border to become the Apalachicola, which runs for 106 miles to the bay. Its wide flood plain through the Florida Panhandle serves as a spawning ground for crabs and Gulf fish, and it nourishes the largest stand of tupelo trees in the world. In the spring, beekeepers bring their hives upriver to collect tupelo honey, which is prized not only for its unique taste but because it does not crystallize.

Florida argues that the ever-increasing water consumption by its neighbor to the north endangers an estuary that is home to the highest density of amphibian and reptile species in North America, and which supports hundreds of endangered or threatened animal and plant species.

The state blames the lack of fresh water for leading to a collapse of the Apalachicola Bay oyster fishery in 2012. A higher degree of salinity in the bay supported predators, such as conchs, that devastated the oysters.

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Georgia says Florida made its own mess, by allowing the bay to be over-harvested, and says studies question the role the reduced fresh water played in the declining oyster population.

Disputes between states are called cases of original jurisdiction at the Supreme Court. Having the high court decide the equitable apportionment of natural resources, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, was the alternative to the states taking up arms against each other. Before hearing the dispute between Florida and Georgia on Monday, the justices will review a fight that pits Texas against Colorado and New Mexico.

To hear Florida's complaint, the court assigned Ralph I. Lancaster Jr. of Maine to be special master. He processed years of conflicting expert reports, conducted a five-week trial and begged the states to settle the fight themselves. Seventy lawyers converged; no compromise emerged.

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Lancaster ultimately delivered, from Florida's perspective, a good news/(very) bad news decision.

"As the evidentiary hearing made clear, Florida points to real harm and, at the very least, likely misuse of resources by Georgia," Lancaster wrote. "There is little question that Florida has suffered harm from decreased flows in the river" and "Georgia's upstream agricultural water use has been  and continues to be  largely unrestrained."

Lancaster followed that with a big but. Even if he ruled for Florida, Lancaster said, there was no guarantee that reduced consumption in Georgia would result in more water in Florida. That decision would be made by the Corps of Engineers. And because the Corps enjoys sovereign immunity, Florida could not force it to be a party to the lawsuit.

Georgia tells the Supreme Court to accept the special master's bottom line.

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"Florida failed to prove, by clear and convincing evidence (or any other plausible standard), that the relief requested would effectively redress its alleged injuries," its brief states.

Because it is the Corps that regulates the water in the basin, it said, "any potential benefits to Florida from a consumption cap on Georgia would be either speculative or nonexistent."

Florida tells the justices it is only common sense that restrictions in Georgia would yield more water downstream. It contends the special master made a mistake of law by requiring Florida to "guarantee" its proposed remedies would work, and asks the court to send the case back for more work.

In an amicus brief, the U.S. government sides with Georgia. But Florida points to somewhat vague language in the brief to argue that the Supreme Court's decision could influence the federal regulation of the riverflow.

Back on the river, a bald eagle glided overhead, and the marshes appeared lush and wild. But Tonsmeire spots plants that tolerate salt water too far upstream, and remembers the loss of tupelo trees. He has been the Apalachicola "riverkeeper" since 2004, and will soon retire with its future in doubt.

"I know we can get better conditions in the bay without having to starve the farmers off the face of the Earth up there and without having Atlanta having to stop growth," he said. "It's possible to do."

Hartsfield, president of the Franklin County Seafood Workers Association, knows that it is not as simple as getting more fresh water.

It used to be that 90 percent of Apalachicola's oysters were shucked in the processing plants, and their shells returned to the bay where they formed a bed for the next generation. But Americans now want their oysters raw, not fried or stewed, and the oysters leave here with their shells.

The oystermen on the bay were once limited to 20 bushels a day  about 250 oysters in each. "The limit now is three bags per person" and each bag brings about $70, he said. "Nobody catches their limit."

Hartsfield believes the bay should be closed to oystering for a couple of years, a view that is not popular with all of his peers. Maybe that would show whether the bay could recover on its own.

But Apalachicola is used to talking in superlatives about its most famous product, and Hartsfield said: "We have the fastest-growing oyster in the world, with the right conditions."

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The Supreme Court on Monday gave a black death row inmate in Georgia a chance to challenge his death sentence because a white juror in his case later used a racial epithet in an affidavit and questioned whether black people have souls. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The justices stayed the execution last fall of Keith Leroy Tharpe, who was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of his sister-in-law, Jaquelin Freeman. He shot and killed Freeman and left her body in a ditch while kidnapping and later raping his estranged wife.

Years after his conviction, Tharpe's attorneys interviewed one of the jurors in his case, Barney Gattie. Gattie told them in a signed statement "there are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. N-----s."

The Freeman family was in the former category, according to Gattie's statement. But Tharpe "wasn't in the 'good' black folks category in my book, should get the electric chair for what he did," he wrote. He added that after "studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls."

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Lower courts turned down Tharpe's appeals based on Gattie's statement, which he said had been taken after a long day of drinking. He signed a second affidavit saying race did not enter into his or other jurors' decision-making, and courts found the jury had not been prejudiced against Tharpe.

The Supreme Court, in an unsigned 6-to-3 opinion, said Tharpe deserved another chance in court.

"Gattie's remarkable affidavit  which he never retracted  presents a strong factual basis for the argument that Tharpe's race affected Gattie's vote for a death verdict," the court wrote.

"At the very least, jurists of reason could debate whether Tharpe has shown by clear and convincing evidence that the state court's factual determination was wrong."

The justices said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta "erred when it concluded otherwise."

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Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only African American member, objected and was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.

Thomas said the court was swayed by the "odious" remarks in Gattie's statement, but should have focused on procedural problems with Tharpe's case and the lower court's determination that Tharpe's death sentence did not depend upon racist considerations by the jury.

Thomas wrote that his colleagues "must be disturbed by the racist rhetoric in that affidavit, and must want to do something about it. But the court's decision is no profile in moral courage."

Instead, he wrote, the decision "callously delays justice for Jaquelin Freeman, the black woman who was brutally murdered by Tharpe 27 years ago. Because this court should not be in the business of ceremonial hand-wringing, I respectfully dissent."

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Supreme Court justices on Monday seemed sympathetic to Florida officials who complain that their neighbors to the north in Georgia are hogging water in a way that endangers a sensitive Sunshine State estuary. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But while the court seemed to think "common sense" and maybe even physics favored Florida, the powerful U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not  it favors Georgia, and even the Supreme Court's clout might not be enough to overcome that.

"There's nothing common-sense about the operations of this basin," said Craig S. Primis, a Washington lawyer representing the state of Georgia, who spent much of his time at the lectern during oral arguments fighting questions about why capping Georgia's consumption of river water would not necessarily result in more water downstream.

"It is incredibly complicated," he said.

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So complicated that the states have been fighting for three decades over the waters in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint basin, which covers more than 19,600 square miles in three states. The current Supreme Court battle alone has eaten up a combined $100 million in legal fees.

At stake in the decades-long litigation is whether the flow of waters will favor Atlanta and the farmers of southwestern Georgia or the seafood producers of the Florida Panhandle.

The Chattahoochee River flows from north of Atlanta, and there are five federal dams controlled by the Corps of Engineers that provide flood control, hydropower and recreation, as well as drinking water for the nearly 6 million residents of metro Atlanta.

The Flint flows from a spring near Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and sweeps through southwestern Georgia, where farmers depend on irrigation for growing cotton, corn, soybeans, peanuts and pecans, among other crops in a more than $4 billion industry.

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The two rivers converge at the state border to become the Apalachicola, which runs for 106 miles to the bay. Its wide flood plain through the Florida Panhandle serves as a spawning ground for crabs and Gulf fish, and the famed bay once accounted for 90 percent of the oysters produced in Florida.

Florida has sued to impose consumption caps on Georgia, saying the reduced flow of the water, especially during droughts, has harmed its ecosystem.

Ralph I. Lancaster Jr., a special master appointed by the Supreme Court to study the issue, agreed Florida had been harmed. But he ruled that the Corps really controls the flow of water and that Florida had not met its obligation to show that the caps it would impose in Georgia would actually benefit Florida.

Lancaster, of Maine, reasoned that when the water is most needed  during drought conditions  the Corps would be more likely to store the water in its reservoirs than to send it down to Florida.

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Justice Elena Kagan told Florida's lawyer, Gregory G. Garre of Washington, that "you have common sense on your side." But she added "there seems to be a real dearth of record evidence specifically quantifying how much more water you would have gotten, exactly what benefits would have followed from that."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed for more evidence, as well.

Garre responded that Florida didn't have to show with "absolute precision" how it would benefit. But he said even if the water flowed during non-drought conditions, that would help stave off drought.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was critical of Georgia's argument that the Army Corps' decision on how the water should be regulated is beyond question.

A finding by the Supreme Court that Florida has not gotten its equitable share of the water, Roberts said, "will at the very least change the facts on the ground and, according to the Corps itself, cause them to adjust its operations accordingly."

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But Primis added that "the Corps is governed by a panoply of federal statutes, congressional dictates and mandates" about its responsibilities in the basin.

"And it is not as simple as if extra water comes in, then you just pass it through to Florida because they have articulated one concern," he added.

Florida pressed its claims against Georgia without the Corps of Engineers as a party to the suit. The Corps has sovereign immunity and cannot be sued without its consent. Its absence made the case more difficult.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Jr. complained about that to Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler, who was representing the federal government. He said the parties were left to speculate what the Corps might do even after the court's decision.

Kneedler said the Corps has gone through the process of deciding how the water should be allocated to carry out the obligations it has been given by Congress. But those are not completely in sync with what Florida says it needs.

For instance, Kneedler said, it is not clear whether the Corps even has the authority to provide more water to the bay to help the oyster industry. Its jurisdiction probably stops when the river meets the bay.

The case is Florida v. Georgia.

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The Washington Posts Ed OKeefe looks at President Trumps demands in the negotiation over a program shielding young undocumented immigrants from deportation. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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With a potential government shutdown less than two weeks away, congressional leaders and the White House will meet this week to discuss ways to end an impasse over the legal status of young immigrants, which has become a primary obstacle to a spending deal. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Over the weekend, President Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, warning that any plan to address the fate of immigrant "dreamers" won't happen without it. Democrats once again balked at such demands, but the party is split over whether to force a government shutdown to get its way.

A bipartisan meeting on immigration policy at the White House on Tuesday is designed to bring the sides together. If Trump and lawmakers can strike an immigration deal, negotiators on both sides think that other issues, including how to fund a children's health insurance program and a roughly $80 billion package to pay for disaster relief, could be resolved.

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These former congressional interns share why the battle in Congress over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is so personal. (Video: Melissa Macaya, Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

Ahead of the meeting, the Trump administration released to lawmakers a request to pay $18 billion over 10 years for a mix of walls, fencing and other security technology. GOP lawmakers have said they were waiting for the plan to know the parameters of talks with Democrats.

"Instead of the saber-rattling, let's get in a room and figure out reasonable, sound policy for securing the border, helping [dreamers] . . . and solving this problem for the first time in two decades," Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a lead GOP immigration negotiator, told Fox News Channel on Sunday.

But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who voted against the temporary spending plan in December, characterized the looming shutdown as an opportunity for Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

"I believe that if we can increase voter turnout by 5 percent from 2014, Democrats will regain the House and Senate. But you cannot do that unless ordinary people believe you are fighting for them," Sanders said in an interview. "If it's more tax breaks for billionaires and huge increases in military spending, you have a lot of working people and young people who will say: 'It doesn't make a difference. Why should I be involved?' "

Here's a look at the "dreamers" whose DACA protections are set to expire. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post, Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Republicans control Congress but Democrats hold significant leverage over spending talks. In the House, hard-liners on the right have regularly voted against recent spending bills, requiring GOP leaders to rely on at least some Democratic votes to pass. In the Senate, spending bills require at least 60 votes to avoid procedural hurdles, and Republicans only hold 51 seats.

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Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a lead Democratic negotiator on immigration, called Trump's detailed request "outrageous" and said he would continue working instead with Republicans "who understand what is at stake" in hopes of striking a bipartisan deal.

Progressives such as Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), whose Harlem-area district is home to more than 2,000 constituents protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, said he will continue voting against GOP spending plans that don't include protections. Over the holiday recess, he said DACA "was the issue I heard about the most when I'm walking in my district."

"Every time it's delayed, the movement just gets stronger, the outcry gets louder," he added.

Progressive groups are planning to apply fresh pressure on Democrats who voted to temporarily extend government funding in December without addressing DACA  a mix of moderates facing reelection this year in states Trump won in 2016 and others from states with sizable populations of federal government workers.

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"We are laser-focused on January 19 as a do-or-die moment," said Greisa Martinez, advocacy director for United We Dream, an immigrant advocacy group organizing protests on Capitol Hill against Republicans and Democrats who have voted for previous GOP spending bills.

Although the situation facing dreamers is "a crisis that was created by Donald Trump," Martinez said Democrats "are not without power," especially now that Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) has joined the caucus. "They have a closer margin now, and we expect them to meet their public and private commitment to us that they'll use every leverage they have."

Indivisible, the progressive grass-roots network of citizen groups, said it will focus its efforts on six Democratic senators from left-leaning states  Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall of New Mexico and Tim Kaine and Mark R. Warner of Virginia. Kaine, Stabenow and Heinrich face reelection this year.

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"Democrats have done a poor job of playing hardball," said Angel Padilla, the group's policy director. "They said for three months they would use their leverage in December to get this done, and that didn't happen. In order to have leverage, the other side has to believe you'll use that leverage, and I don't think that [Republicans] think that [Democrats] will use that leverage."

Spokesmen for the senators said the lawmakers support dreamers but had various reasons for backing the last spending bill.

Udall said a government shutdown "would be a disaster for New Mexico" and the 45,000 residents who work for the federal agencies and research labs in his state.

A spokeswoman for Kaine, whose state is home to hundreds of thousands of federal employees, said he will keep pushing for a solution for dreamers and "he'll evaluate a deal once he's seen it."

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Despite Trump's renewed calls for a border wall, Republicans remain frayed over how to move forward. Some moderates are willing to either pass a bill giving dreamers a path to citizenship or craft a deal with Democrats that would include some border security measures. But the bulk of the conservative rank-and-file want more in exchange for accepting an immigration policy that much of the Republican base opposes.

As the fulcrum of the immigration talks has shifted decisively toward the Senate, lawmakers on the hard right are pressuring House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to be more assertive. They are wary that House members will get "jammed" with a Senate bill that they will have no choice but to pass mainly with Democratic votes.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said it was essential that House Republicans pass a stand-alone immigration bill that promotes conservative priorities in line with Trump's agenda.

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"If the only thing you do is wait for something the Senate can pass, then what we might as well do is have the House recess for the next nine months," he said. Allowing Democrats to dictate immigration policy at a time of Republican control of Congress and the White House is "distasteful and certainly not in keeping with what we promised the American people."

Amid a slate of partisan and bipartisan proposals, another conservative immigration plan may emerge in the coming days. According to a lawmaker and a GOP aide familiar with the plans, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is expected to unveil a bill as soon as this week that would address DACA in exchange for a raft of conservative priorities on immigration.

Goodlatte's plan would grant legal status to DACA recipients, provide funding for a border wall, end a visa lottery program criticized by Trump, take action against "sanctuary cities" that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and roll back rules allowing legal immigrants to sponsor the entry of certain family members. But House Republican leaders do not think the bill will be able to garner enough support to pass by the deadline.

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A spokeswoman for Goodlatte declined to comment.

Bipartisan immigration talks in the House have produced little visible progress. A bipartisan group of moderates, the Problem Solvers Caucus, created an immigration task force that formed the outlines of a deal, said Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), one of the participants, but the larger caucus wouldn't sign on.

"We're not there right now, and we're going to start working on it again when we come back," Coffman said.

AshLee Strong, a Ryan spokeswoman, said he was continuing to speak with lawmakers in both chambers but isn't committed to permitting a vote on a bill granting dreamers a path to citizenship.

Beyond DACA, Republicans and Democrats say they're making progress over how much money should go to the military vs. domestic programs, something that has to be settled to raise automatic spending caps.

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The White House wants to set discretionary defense spending levels at about $603 billion, which would exceed current automatic spending caps by $54 billion. Republicans think non-defense levels should see less of an increase, closer to $35 billion. But Democrats are insisting on "parity," arguing in recent weeks that non-defense spending bolsters programs to fight opioid addiction and terrorism and protect the southern border.

Sanders said he would urge Congress to reject any deal that increases military spending by more than what is spent on domestic programs. "If we're going to spend a dollar more in the military, we must spend a dollar more on the enormously important issues facing working families. All of these issues are in crisis mode, and they have to be dealt with right now."

Jeff Stein contributed to this report.

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With indications that special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking an interview with President Trump, here are some burning questions his team will want to ask. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

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Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has told President Trump's legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mueller raised the issue of interviewing Trump during a late-December meeting with the president's lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.

The special counsel's team could interview Trump soon on some limited portion of questions  possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

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"This is moving faster than anyone really realizes," the person said. Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election, the person added.

However, the president's attorneys are reluctant to let him sit for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some of the questions from Mueller's investigators, as President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller's team to demonstrate that it could not obtain the information it seeks without interviewing the president.

The legal team's internal discussions about how to respond to a request for an interview were first reported Monday morning by NBC News.

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With White House Counsel Donald McGahn's departure, President Trump's large and ever-changing legal team is thrown into turmoil once again. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Dowd and Sekulow declined to comment.

In a statement, Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the administration's response to the Mueller investigation, said that "the White House does not comment on communications with the OSC out of respect for the OSC and its process," referring to the special counsel's office.

"The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution," Cobb added.

Cobb had repeatedly said all interviews of White House personnel by Mueller's office were on schedule to be completed by the end of December or early this year. On Monday, he said he remains confident that any portion of the investigation related to the president or the White House will wrap up shortly.

Mueller and Trump's legal team plan to meet again soon to discuss both the possible terms and substance of the interview, as well as Mueller's timeline for the investigation, according to one person familiar with the plan.

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Trump's lawyers hope to obtain from the special counsel's team a clear idea of the categories of questions that would be posed to the president.

For months, Trump's legal team has been researching the conditions under which the president would be required to submit to an interview with the special counsel, who is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

"No lawyer just volunteers their client without thinking this through," said one of the people familiar with the talks.

It has long been expected that Mueller would seek to interview Trump, in part because the special counsel is scrutinizing whether actions he took in office were attempts to blunt the Russia investigation, according to people familiar with questions posed to witnesses.

In May, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey after Comey testified on Capitol Hill that he could not comment on whether there was evidence that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign.

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The president also dictated a misleading statement later released by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., about a meeting that Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign.

Veteran prosecutors said it is unlikely that Mueller would agree to have any witness, even the president, submit a declaration or provide written answers to questions to avoid a sit-down interview.

Some experts said a presidential interview could signal that Mueller's investigation into Trump's actions is nearing its end, but they cautioned that the special counsel might have a different strategy.

"It would certainly seem they would be close to wrapping up as it relates to the core matter they are investigating," said Solomon Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel who questioned President Bill Clinton in 1998. "You would want to know as much as possible before you go to the president. "

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Asked on Saturday if he had agreed to be interviewed by Mueller, Trump said he had nothing to hide.

"Just so you understand, there's been no collusion, there's been no crime, and in theory everybody tells me I'm not under investigation. Maybe Hillary [Clinton] is, I don't know, but I'm not," Trump told reporters at Camp David. "But we have been very open. We could have done it two ways. We could have been very closed, and it would have taken years. But you know, sort of like when you've done nothing wrong, let's be open and get it over with."

"Because, honestly, it's very, very bad for our country," the president added. "It's making our country look foolish. And this is a country that I don't want looking foolish. And it's not going to look foolish as long as I'm here."

In June, after Comey told a congressional panel that Trump had privately asked for his loyalty, the president said he would be willing to testify under oath to dispute the fired FBI director's claims.

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"One hundred percent," Trump said when asked if he would give a sworn statement to Mueller.

Sitting presidents have been interviewed by prosecutors in the past, though courts have urged government investigators to seek such interviews only when they cannot obtain relevant information another way.

Clinton's attorneys repeatedly fought independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's attempts to interview their client until investigators obtained a subpoena to force his testimony. It was the first grand jury subpoena served on a sitting president. Clinton then negotiated to testify before a grand jury via video and audio link from the White House Map Room.

In the videotaped interview in August 1998, which lasted four hours and saw questions from three prosecutors, Clinton admitted to inappropriate sexual activity with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but he claimed he had been legally correct in denying that he had had sexual relations with her. He also denied having committed perjury in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

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Not all presidential interviews with prosecutors have come at the end of an investigation.

In 2004, President George W. Bush sat for an in-person interview with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was investigating whether senior White House aides leaked a CIA operative's identity and broke her cover as punishment for her husband's criticism of the Iraq War. Bush volunteered for the interview, which lasted 70 minutes and was conducted in the Oval Office. Bush was far from the last one interviewed in the probe; Fitzgerald later questioned several more central witnesses.

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said at the time, adding that Bush was "pleased to do his part" to aid the investigation.

Reagan testified in the Iran-contra investigation while in office and twice more after he left office. He also answered in writing some written questions presented to him by the grand jury and the independent counsel in the probe.

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In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford was interviewed as part of a grand jury investigation into an assassination attempt. In a taped session in the Old Executive Office Building, Ford shared his recollections of events when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, tried to shoot Ford at close range in Sacramento in September 1975. The tape was used at her trial that year.

Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.

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The Justice Department will soon start trying to jam cellphones smuggled into federal prisons and used for criminal activity, part of a broader safety initiative that is also focused on preventing drones from airdropping contraband to inmates. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told the American Correctional Association's conference in Orlando on Monday that, while the law prohibits cellphone use by federal inmates, the Bureau of Prisons confiscated 5,116 such phones in 2016, and preliminary numbers for 2017 indicate a 28 percent increase.

"That is a major safety issue," he said in his speech. "Cellphones are used to run criminal enterprises, facilitate the commission of violent crimes and thwart law enforcement."

When he was the U.S. attorney in Maryland, Rosenstein prosecuted an inmate who used a smuggled cellphone to order the murder of a witness. A gang member in North Carolina used a contraband cellphone to direct a hit on a prosecutor's father, who was subsequently kidnapped and assaulted by the inmate's associates. And an inmate in Tennessee used a smuggled cellphone to download and transmit child pornography, Justice Department officials say.

Next week, the department will begin testing a "micro-jamming" system to evaluate whether such technology can be used to halt inmates' calls without disrupting services in the surrounding area, including those used by first responders.

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"There are circumstances where it is appropriate to jam cellphone signals," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "But these techniques are double-edged. The Federal Communications Commission has warned that cellphone jammers pose a risk to public safety."

In August, Assistant Attorney General Beth A. Williams, who leads the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, urged the FCC to act to stop inmates from using cellphones.

"Addressing this problem should be a chief priority" for the FCC and the Justice Department, Williams wrote. She said the cellphone problem is "significantly worse" in state and local correctional facilities.

The Bureau of Prisons  which oversees 185,000 inmates in 122 federal prisons, 11 private prisons and more than 200 community-based facilities  is also facing a safety challenge because of the increasing use of drones.

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"In the old days, cellphones and other contraband items entered our facilities through the doors, or the loading docks," Rosenstein said. "In some cases, they were thrown over the fence. Today, we face another technological threat: drones that can fly contraband into jail and prison yards."

Stopping drones is difficult. "Technological solutions to detect and disrupt drones are in their infancy," Rosenstein said, adding that the Justice Department supports regulatory changes that would make it easier to deploy interdiction technology and cellphone jamming.

"Before using any technologies, we need to evaluate their compliance with a maze of federal and state laws governing the interception of electronic communications, and even laws that criminalize actions aimed at disabling aircraft," he said.

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Justice officials do not know exactly how many drones are delivering cellphones, drugs and weapons to prisons in the United States or other countries.

In the summer, a drone dropped a package of cellphones, cigarettes, marijuana and razor blades inside a state prison in Michigan. In November, a drone carrying drugs and cellphones to inmates in Buckeye, Ariz., crashed in a prison yard. In 2016, London prison security cameras caught a drone delivering drugs to a prisoner's window. And two years ago, a fight broke out in an Ohio prison exercise yard after a drone dropped heroin there.

Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

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MEXICO CITY  The Trump administration's decision to eliminate residency permits for some 200,000 Salvadoran migrants could cause far-reaching disruptions in the small Central American country, including a steep decline in remittances from abroad and a destabilizing wave of returning citizens to a homeland still racked by violence, according to immigration experts.

But Salvadoran officials took a more optimistic view Monday. They characterized the U.S. decision as an 18-month grace period, giving the government time to lobby Washington to find a permanent solution to avoid deportation for these Salvadorans.

"We are going to focus on the United States Congress, so that they pass legislation that allows our compatriots" to become residents, Hugo Martinez, El Salvador's foreign minister, said in a phone interview. "We think we have sufficient time and will work hard for this alternative."

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DHS announced May 4 that it will end protected immigration status for 50,000 Hondurans living in the U.S. since 1999. This is what you need to know about TPS. (Video: Melissa Macaya, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

If no legislation materializes, Monday's decision could result in the deportation of Salvadorans who have lived in the United States for decades, whose children are U.S. citizens and who send home billions of dollars a year to relatives in El Salvador. They would be returning to a country that has had one of the highest murder rates in the world in recent years, as well as a rampant gang problem.

The Salvadoran government has lobbied the Trump administration for months to find a solution that would allow these people to stay in the United States, rather than ending the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, that has been in effect since 2001. Over the weekend, El Salvador's Foreign Ministry continued tweeting about the benefits that Salvadorans bring to the U.S. economy and culture, saying that 95 percent of Salvadorans in the program are employed or own their own businesses.

The Salvadorans with TPS status "have become important members of their communities in the United States, and their contributions are key to the development of that nation," the ministry wrote Sunday on Twitter.

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Protesters gathered in front of the White House on Jan. 8 to defend Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans living in the U.S. (Video: @nostredamnz/ Instagram)

Martinez, the foreign minister, predicted that even if no solution is reached after 18 months, the number of deportees will be "far fewer than 190,000," as Salvadorans can try other paths to regularize their immigration status. The government is also planning a "very intensive program" for deportees, including loans and job training, he said.

"We have in the immediate future a great challenge," Martinez said at a news conference Monday.

Under the terms of the decision announced Monday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the administration will notify Salvadorans who benefit from the program that they have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave or find a way to obtain legal residency.

In 2001, after two deadly earthquakes struck El Salvador, the George W. Bush administration allowed undocumented Salvadorans who were residing in the United States before February 2001 to apply for protected status, which allowed them to obtain work permits and spared them from deportation. The temporary program has been renewed several times in the ensuing years.

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"Salvadorans have been beneficiaries of this program for so long it created an illusion that this would lead to a permanent residency," said a Latin American diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The prospect of losing this status is "going to be very, very disappointing, not only back in El Salvador."

According to the DHS statement, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen decided that conditions in El Salvador have improved significantly since the earthquakes, erasing the original justification for the program. The announcement also comes in the context of the Trump administration's wider efforts to cut legal immigration to the United States and deport more of those who enter the country illegally.

The estimated 200,000 Salvadorans who enjoy this protected status also have roughly as many U.S.-born children, who are now at risk of seeing their parents and other relatives deported. "Families will be torn apart," the diplomat said.

If all TPS holders return or are deported, it will impose an enormous strain on a country of 6.2 million people where poverty is widespread and gang violence remains a serious problem. Although homicides have fallen over the past two years, El Salvador still had nearly 4,000 killings last year, giving it the highest murder rate in Central America, at more than 60 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2001, the year of the earthquakes, there were about 2,300 homicides.

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Another major impact of the decision could be a decline in the amount of money that Salvadorans in the United States send home. Remittances now surpass $4.5 billion a year, accounting for about 17 percent of the country's GDP, according to the World Bank, and ranking as its single greatest source of income.

"The economic impact is going to be undeniable," said Roberto Rubio-Fabian, executive director of Funde, a nonprofit research organization in San Salvador. Remittances are the "pillar that supports an economy with serious structural problems," he said.

Experts said there are no good estimates yet about the potential loss in remittances, as it remains unclear how many migrants with TPS might end up returning to El Salvador. If large numbers do return, voluntarily or by being deported, they could push others out of the workforce.

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"They're going to come back as pretty qualified, bilingual people," said Geoff Thale, a Central America expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. "What this is going to do is displace people there" and potentially cause "another surge in people leaving the country and looking for work here."

The administration's decision could also mean political trouble for President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former guerrilla commander during El Salvador's civil war who has been in office since 2014. As a result of the TPS decision, his leftist political party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), could suffer in local and congressional elections in March, and in a presidential contest next year, according to political analysts.

"This will have a cost," said Sandra de Barraza, a columnist with La Prensa Grafica, a Salvadoran newspaper. "The government could have had a more aggressive policy of assisting" those in the TPS program.

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Some Salvadoran officials noted that other countries, such as Honduras, received a shorter grace period before their TPS program ended.

"I see this time they've given us as positive, so that we can fight for another status, and I don't expect a massive deportation in the short term," said Hector Antonio Rodriguez, the head of El Salvador's immigration agency.

He predicted that if TPS holders are deported, many will try to return to the United States.

"They are not going to want to stay in El Salvador," he said. "They are going to try again to go by land into the U.S."

Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

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Rube Goldberg Whimsy Connects STEM Students to WSU

January 8, 2018

OGDEN, Utah  Students of all ages will have the chance to explore the fun side of STEM, science, technology, engineering and math, as Weber State University and the Utah Air Force Association sponsor the Live Division II Rube Goldberg Competition Jan. 19 beginning at noon in the Shepherd Union Ballroom.

The Rube Goldberg Contest really brings STEM home to kids, said Dana Dellinger, director of the Center of Technology Outreach for the College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology. They are applying what they learn in school in a fun hands-on project, using problem solving, teamwork, engineering and loads of creativity.

Rube Goldberg machines, named after the comic Rube Goldberg, involve a complex chain of events leading to the accomplishment of a simple task. The machines vary in size from a water bottle to an entire warehouse. The machines have been featured in movies Such as Pee-wees Big Adventure and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Last year six schools competed in the annual event. This year 13 teams will compete in three divisions (high school, junior high and elementary) The task this year is to pour a bowl of cereal.

We had six high school and junior high teams last year, so are pleased with the increased interest, Dellinger said. For Weber State to be able to partner with the Air Force Association and Hill Air Force Base to bring this fantastic competition to Utah and our campus shows our commitment and support of excellent community outreach.

Admission to the competition is free, and the public is welcome.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
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Federal Industry Minister Navdeep Bains is in Winnipeg this week to, among other things, financially backstop a number of Manitoba economic development organizations to help them develop the western Canadian clean technology sector.

Bains, who is also the minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada, announced funding totalling close to $7 million for five organizations: Composites Innovation Centre, North Forge Technology Exchange, Information and Communication Technologies Association of Manitoba (ICTAM), Life Science Association of Manitoba Inc. (LSAM) and Genome Prairie.

The timing of new funding commitments will allow some of them to breath a sigh of relief, as provincial funding has become more tenuous.

PHIL HOSSACK / Winnipeg Free Press Industry Minister Navdeep Bains announces funding on Monday at the Composites Innovation Centre to help develop Western Canadas clean technology sector.

Mondays announcement was the result of a call for proposals from Western Economic Development last year.

Bains made it clear that in addition to developing the domestic market, the ultimate goal of this kind of investment is for Canada to become a global leader in the space.

I am confident we will attract more talent and build new firms that will develop into globally competitive businesses, he said on Monday. The ambition is not just to succeed locally or nationally  we want them succeed on the global stage.

The funding announcement was made at the Composites Innovation Centre (CIC), which received the largest piece of the financial assistance, $2.05 million for three years to support its ongoing work to develop biomaterials and strengthen supply chains to support commercialization.

Sean McKay, CEO of the CIC, said the new funding will provide substantial support in continuing to develop networks, that have been in the works for several years, on ground-breaking work to make lighter and more environmentally friendly materials for aerospace and ground transportation equipment manufacturers.

It currently has partnerships across Canada and in the U.S., China and Australia.

For several years the CIC has been doing foundational work towards introducing the use of biomaterials  for instance parts made with hemp or flax fibre  that could replace carbon or petroleum-based fibre as a more lightweight, sustainable type of fibreglass.

The CIC has been a key contributor in several projects that have built biomaterials parts for transportation vehicles.

McKay said his research and development organization will be able to leverage the new funding from Western Economic Diversification into an additional $11 million from other entities in the clean technologies area and generate an additional $75 million in exports.

Although he said patience is required to eventually make it possible for manufacturers to use biomaterials in their commercial production runs, he said the tipping point is coming.

When the CIC started working on biomaterials in 2005, there were only four other entities working in the field. Now there are 30, including companies that are now part of a commercial supply chain. Bains said part of the function of the new funding is to focus on scaling companies up.

In the past, North Forge Technology Exchange has focused on supporting startups in whatever way necessary.

Jeff Ryzner, CEO of the organization, said the new funding  $1.156 million  is going to allow North Forge to start working with larger companies to help them become larger.

Ryzner said North Forge will partner with Manitoba Environmental Industries Association to launch a $3.3-million initiative to scale up larger companies across the Prairies.

We will help them to create new products, new technology, new services and many of those new innovations will help Canada become a global leader in clean technology, he said.

The new funding for LSAM ($1.6 million) and ICTAM (close to $1 million) will also be used in pan-Prairie initiatives.

Bains also announced close to $1 million in funding for On Screen Manitoba to increase market opportunities for francophone audio-visual and digital small- and medium-sized enterprises and $25,000 to Entreprises Riel Inc., to develop a narrative to reposition francophone and Metis cultural tourism in Manitoba.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
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This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  Opposition MPs are concerned the Liberal governments $40-billion national housing strategy will leave rural Manitobans in the cold.

Rural Canadians, in particular, are getting quite frustrated with the way theyve been treated as second-class citizens, said Conservative MP James Bezan, who represents Manitobas Interlake.

The Liberals launched the strategy in November after announcing part of it at a Winnipeg conference, where it received much fanfare from housing advocates. Many said it would address the citys problems such as rental units falling into disrepair, a lack of mixed-income buildings and a lack of federal support for rent subsidies.

ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Manitoba MP James Bezan (Selkirk-Interlake) has sponsored a petition calling for Ukrainians to be allowed to visit Canada without a visa.

But Bezan fears the strategy doesnt address long-standing needs hes heard about from mayors, charities and real estate agents.

For example, the Interlake town of Ashern has a hospital, but not much housing other than seniors lodges. The Peguis First Nation has a similar situation. Meanwhile, the Selkirk Mental Health Centre has patients who visit for days or weeks at a time for therapy, but rely on the towns older hotels because theres nowhere else to stay.

Bezan said hes heard Ottawas tighter mortgages rules are making it harder for people moving to agricultural communities.

The Liberals changed the rules to make it tougher to qualify for a mortgage. As of Jan. 1, homebuyers face a new minimum qualifying rate  or stress test  even for uninsured mortgages, which have down payments of at least 20 per cent. The move was aimed at cooling off the out-of-control housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto.

Its made housing unaffordable in the rest of the country for first-time homeowners, Bezan said.

It disadvantages rural Canadians, especially in Manitoba.

That puts the agriculture and health sectors at risk, Bezan said, because both are trying to attract employees from other areas, and even abroad.

This is where the catch-22 happens. They dont have a place to stay because of the lack of available housing, and theres no affordable housing, he said.

Bezan said Selkirk had a shortfall of more than 180 units a decade ago and spent years getting some units built through public partnerships, but wasnt as successful building affordable housing as Gimli and Winnipeg Beach were.

To address particular needs, Ottawa will craft an agreement with each province. Discussions with each province are ongoing, said a spokesman for federal Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos.

We know that in many provinces, there are huge needs outside of cities, and it will be part of agreements, wrote Mathieu Filion. The (strategy) was developed in order to help Canadians from coast to coast to coast whether they live in a city, a suburb or a rural area.

Part of that is a co-investment fund where Ottawa aims to help governments and private companies build 60,000 homes and repair 240,000 existing units. This money could be invested directly into rural communities, Filion wrote.

Bezan said hes glad the strategy includes public-private partnerships, but says theres no guarantee that companies will have an incentive to build rental properties in rural areas, despite the growing need for them. Which public and private organizations, and companies, are going to want to invest in a place like Fisher Branch? he asked.

He also worries that funds earmarked for low-income options could skew to the cities, which hold most affordable-housing projects and government-owned shelters. Volunteer groups do the heavy lifting in many Manitoban towns, he said, and dont always know how to access federal cash.

While the Tories invested a fraction of the Liberals pledge for housing, Bezan says the Harper governments strategy had the flexibility to help smaller communities. It helped charities fund studio-size, low-cost apartments known as pocket suites, to help people gain stability and eventually move into regular housing.

Bezans hopeful these projects will be part of the strategy, but noticed the 40-page plan doesnt go into detail on the role of non-profits and charities in housing.

The Liberals say their proposed Canada housing benefit would provide an average of $2,500 annually to each recipient, including in rural zones. Yet Bezan worries that unlike a subsidy, a tax credit wont reach thousands of Canadians who are no longer on the tax roll, such as seniors.

NDP MP Niki Ashton, who represents northern Manitoba, has said shes concerned the strategy wont kick-start the construction of enough units in northern and remote areas.

Housing stock has not kept up with population numbers, where its much more expensive to build a home because of isolation and climate factors, and you end up with situations of extreme overcrowding, Ashton said in November. The funding certainly isnt reflective and neither is the sense of urgency.

She said shes watching for the Liberals Indigenous housing strategy, which the government intentionally kept separate to address issues for First Nations and Inuit communities, which are largely administered outside provincial jurisdictions.

Winnipeg deputy mayor Jenny Gerbasi, who leads the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, says the group is far more optimistic about the strategys impact on rural communities. We feel the strategy actually is focused on all sizes of communities.

Federal data shows 600,000 social-housing units were built from 1960 to 1993, of which 15,500 are in rural areas. The strategy aims to repair and upgrade social housing across Canada. Gerbasi said that was a key demand made by the federation, as was repairing units, building new ones and helping with rent subsidies.

The federal government was moving away from social housing for so many years. So here, this is a breakthrough to come back to that with significant investment.

The province is keeping a close eye on the policy.

In a statement, provincial Families Minister Scott Fielding said he was encouraged by Ottawas re-engagement in housing, and that his officials were meeting with federal colleagues about the strategy.

A key issue for Manitoba is that new federal commitments support all regions of the province, including rural and northern communities.

Fielding said the government will form its own housing strategy that is synchronized to the federal plan.

Our strategy will outline initiatives in response to current challenges and opportunities, inform effective housing policy and program design and support improved outcomes for low- to moderate-income households.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
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This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  The federal governments $18.8-million lawsuit against Omnitrax proceeded Monday, but the government has insisted it wont hinder talks aimed at transferring Churchills rail link into local hands.

In November, the federal government filed a statement of claim against the Denver-based company over its decision to not repair the Hudson Bay Railway after a May 23 flood washed out sections of the line.

Monday was the first scheduled court appearance related to the case. In Winnipeg court, the parties agreed to resume proceedings Feb. 22.

Omnitrax Files The federal government filed a statement of claim against Omnitrax over its decision to not repair the railway to Churchill after a May 23 flood washed out sections of the line.

In the Nov. 14, 2017, filing, the federal government argued the company had a duty under a 2008 funding agreement to keep the railway running. Ottawa now seeks to claw back the $18.8 million Ottawa had already contributed under the agreement, which intended to provide $20 million within a decade for railway upkeep.

The lawsuit came after Transport Canada gave the company a month to repair the railway, a task that would cost $43.5 million, according to an Aecom engineering report.

Under a similar 2008 agreement, the provincial government also pledged $20 million, which it has already advanced in full. It remains unclear what obligations are laid out in the document. The province has refused to publicly release that contract, asking the Free Press to file a freedom-of-information request, which Manitoba Infrastructure subsequently denied on the grounds of a possible lawsuit.

Ottawa transferred the Hudson Bay Railway and Port of Churchill to Omnitrax in 1997.

The federal government has continually stressed it sees progress in ongoing talks aimed at transferring both assets into local hands, through a consortium of two northern Manitoba groups.

Churchill residents and northern Manitobans who rely on the line have widely been skeptical the negotiations will lead to a solution in the near future, due to the talks late start and legal threats. But federal Energy Minister Jim Carr has insisted the talks are making progress.

A source familiar with the negotiations says the talks are currently focused on a viable business plan with a five- to 10-year timeline, with a focus on AGT Foods, a partner of the multibillion-dollar investment firm Fairfax. In November, Ottawa said the firm expressed interest in partnering with the consortium.

Though the company has not put up any funds, the source said the fact Fairfax announced its interest publicly means it is more than just pondering in a deal, and AGT Foods has done similar deals with Prairie communities for its existing shortline railways.

The plan may include plans to import goods, as well as exporting grain.

The source said the government is focusing on firming up the business plan before approaching Omnitrax to discuss the value of the rail line and port, and how much is adequate compensation.

They all have to do their due diligence; they have to determine what the business case is, going forward, said the source. We do not have an endless source of funding here for this; were all looking at this from what will be reasonable going forward.

The source echoed the governments interest in having the province reveal more about the $500 million Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister pledged for Churchill in September, which he later clarified includes already planned spending. The takeover talks involve the province, but only peripherally until the business plan is finalized.

Those involved in the negotiations have no deadline, but a goal to get contracts signed before the spring thaw, so the railway can be repaired by this summer.

Meanwhile, Ottawas legal spat with Omnitrax may intensify.

The same day that the federal government filed its lawsuit, Omnitrax responded with a notice of intent, with plans to file a $150-million claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement. An Omnitrax spokesperson was unavailable to comment Monday, but it appears the company has not yet proceeded to formally file a NAFTA claim.

In the notice of intent, the company alleged a continuum of behaviour by both the federal government and the province, which lured Omnitrax into believing in their commitment, followed by government conduct that persistently undermined, instead of developing, the potential of the assets.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

Ottawa's statement of claim against Omnitrax
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This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  A years-long, multimillion-dollar quest to get a sprawling area of Manitoba and northwestern Ontario designated a World Heritage Site could finally be achieved this summer.

For at least 14 years, First Nations people living in the boreal forest in eastern Manitoba have tried to get the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to recognize the land and their connection to it.

Now, those overseeing the Pimachiowin Aki project are hopeful for a breakthrough in July.

Pimachiowin Aki tour photographer J.J. Ali The Bloodvein River is among 29,040 square kilometres of boreal forest and traditional Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) territory in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario that would be recognized as a World Heritage Site.

The value of this site is to put it forward as a cultural landscape, and the relationship of the people to the land, that has existed for thousands of years, project manager Gord Jones told the Free Press last week.

Its helping to maintain that relationship with the land.

The bid is proceeding in collaboration with just four First Nations in Manitoba, leaving behind a fifth reserve in Ontario that derailed what could have been successful bid in 2016.

The area involves roughly 13 per cent less land, but still includes parts of Ontario.

It spans 29,040 square kilometres of boreal forest and traditional Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) territory, roughly the size of Belgium.

Thats down from the original 33,400-sq.-km proposal.

Last month, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna unveiled a short list of eight sites from 42 applications that will be added to Canadas nomination list, which already has six sites, including Pimachiowin Aki.

The term is an Ojibwa phrase that means the land that gives life.

The tract of land includes the Poplar River, Bloodvein, Pauingassi and Little Grand Rapids First Nations in Manitoba, and Crown land in both provinces.

Jones said local groups hope UNESCO status will attract tourism and economic activity.

The World Heritage Committee lauded the Pimachiowin Aki bid when it appeared before the committee a second time, in July 2016.

But the committee deferred its decision after learning the Pikangikum First Nation in Ontario had withdrawn its support.

The committee gave the bid until 2019 to present an updated proposal.

However, the group decided to restart the application and submitted a new bid in January 2017.

Members of two UN advisory boards will again consider the Pimachiowin Aki project, and also visit the site.

In May, they will reveal whether the project is among the sites they recommend the World Heritage Committee designate with UNESCO status.

If it advances, the Pimachiowin Aki project will be before the World Heritage Committee in July, alongside the Klondike Gold Rush area, McKennas office said.

Jones, who has spent a decade working on the bid, said all the governments involved in the project are committed to it.

Nobodys happy about the fact that weve had to take much longer than anticipated, said Jones, who imagined hed be running educational programming by this point.

It has been a long time.

Jones said the site has potential for climate-change research.

Locals have noticed muskeg starting to dry out, as well as the appearance of new bird species.

Provincial Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires confirmed for the Free Press Thursday her government is dedicated to funding the group, and seeing the project through.

The Manitoba government continues to support the UNESCO nomination for Pimachiowin Aki as a World Heritage Site, and remains hopeful for the bids eventual success.

Similarly, Ontario says its supporting the bid in hopes of an uptick in research and ecotourism.

This vast area contains the largest protected section of boreal shield ecosystem in North America, wrote Michelle Nowak, a northwestern Ontario outreach specialist in the Natural Resources ministry.

She said UNESCO status could also be a demonstration of Indigenous customary stewardship and collaborative resource management.

The provinces have spent a combined $15 million on the bid, with most coming from Manitoba.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Its going to be a good year in space, and the new players are aiming high. The Indian Space Research Organization intends to send Chandrayaan-2, an uncrewed orbiter, lander and rover, to the moon in March.

In July, Japans Hayabusa2 spacecraft will arrive at its target, the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, in an effort to return samples of this space rock to Earth.

And in June, China will launch the first part of its mission to the dark side of the moon, Change 4, which will position a communications satellite 60,000 kilometres beyond the moon to provide a link with Earth. That 425-kilometre relay satellite will also guide the second element of the mission, a lander and rover, down to a soft landing on the far side of the moon, where nobody has gone before.

YOMIURI SHIMBUN PHOTO Carrying asteroid explorer Hayabusa2, H2A Rocket No. 26 blasts off from Tanegashima Space Centre in 2014. The probe will reach the asteroid 162173 Ryugu in July this year.

One benefit of being on the far side is that the moon blocks out stray radio signals from Earth, so the view of the radio spectrum of the universe is far better. But the Change 4 lander also will carry seeds and insects to test whether plants and animals can be grown on the moon.

The container will send potatoes, arabidopsis seeds and silkworm eggs to the surface of the moon, explained Zhang Yuanxun, chief designer of the container. The eggs will hatch into silkworms, which can produce carbon dioxide, while the potatoes and seeds emit oxygen through photosynthesis. Together, they can establish a simple ecosystem on the moon. Very simple  but the first step toward a sustained human presence on the moon.

The older space powers are also breaking new ground. Russia is testing a nuclear engine this year that could cut travel time to Mars from 18 months to just six weeks. In October, the European Space Agency will launch a mission to Mercury. NASAs InSight Mars lander will launch in May, and the American agencys OSIRIS-REx vehicle will rendezvous with near-Earth asteroid Bennu in August and start taking samples for return to Earth.

But the main event of the year, beyond doubt, is the planned launch of Elon Musks Falcon Heavy vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (The launch window opens on Jan. 15.) Its guaranteed to be exciting, Musk said last July. Theres a real good chance that it doesnt make it into orbit I hope it makes it far enough from the pad that it doesnt cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win. Major pucker factor.

This is known as lowering expectations, but it is also known as realism. Falcon Heavy will boost 21/2 times the payload of any existing rocket into Low Earth Orbit: more than 45 tonnes. Moreover, both the main rocket and the two boosters that are strapped onto it are designed to return to Earth and land, ready for reuse, which would transform the economics of putting things into orbit. If it all works.

It almost certainly will all work eventually, but this is effectively a new design, not just an upgrade, and there are many elements in a big vehicle such as Falcon Heavy that cannot be tested on the ground. The aerodynamics are different, the stresses are different, and nobody has ever launched a vehicle with 27 rockets. The adage applies: anything can happen and probably will.

Yet, Elon Musk is also one of the greatest showmen and self-publicists of our time, so hes an inveterate optimist. In early December he tweeted, Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars orbit. Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesnt blow up on ascent. (That is, a solar orbit such as that of Mars, not an orbit around Mars. But everybody knows he does intend to go to Mars eventually.)

Its easy to get carried away by hope, of course, but after Falcon Heavy comes NASAs Space Launch System vehicle, which is designed to put 63 tonnes into Low Earth Orbit, with a follow-on version capable of nearly 120 tonnes (although its rockets will not be reusable). And Musks future plans include the BFR (big fing rocket) that would really go to Mars.

These are the sort of vehicles we need if we are really serious about getting out into space in a big way. When I watched the last of the Apollo Moon landings on TV in 1972, I assumed we would be seeing rockets like this by the early 1980s. (See Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, for a perfectly reasonable vision of where we could have been in space technology by the turn of the century.)

Instead, the money was cut, and then the Cold War ended. The whole enterprise was mothballed for 40 years, except for unmanned interplanetary missions and a low-orbit International Space Station. But this year it does feel like we are back on track and going somewhere.

Forty wasted years, but better late than never.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 08/01/2018 (1775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He was denounced by a former president as as insincere and cold-blooded an opportunist as we ever had in the presidency. After an exasperating meeting, the French ambassador to the United States described him as a man who, had he lived a couple of centuries ago, would have been the greatest tyrant in the world, because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong. An angry political opponent was more succinct, labelling him an ingrate and a liar.

If you guessed that these critical comments were made about U.S. President Donald Trump, youd be mistaken. Though these rebukes might be applicable to the current commander-in-chief, they were made 100 years ago about one of Trumps illustrious predecessors, Woodrow Wilson, who served as president from 1913 to 1921.

His detractors were not entirely wrong: Wilson, a southern-born Democrat, was no saint. Like Trump, he could be stubborn, thought he was superior to those around him and detested anyone who disagreed with him.

PBS files U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) was a controversial figure, but he truly believed he had a moral obligation to help solves the worlds problems.

He is best remembered for his celebrated Fourteen Points speech that he delivered to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 8, 1918. It was his vision of how to achieve a lasting peace in Europe. That didnt happen, and by 1939 Europe was again at war. But the speech and its message still resonate a century later.

A historian, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and raised the universitys profile and academic standards. But he shared the racist views of the era about African-Americans, whom he regarded as inferior. As a 2016 report on Wilsons legacy at Princeton pointed out, he indisputably opposed the idea of admitting black students to the Princeton of his time. Entering politics, he continued supporting such discriminatory practices and as president sanctioned segregation of the U.S. federal bureaucracy.

As with other controversial historical figures, however, his record was not all bad  even from our 21st-century perspective. He favoured granting the vote to women, appointed Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish justice to the Supreme Court and reformed government. Above all, there was his transformative, if idealistic, foreign policy.

For the first two years of the First World War, Wilson had resisted U.S. participation in the European conflict. But after the Germans proposed a military alliance with Mexico  in the infamous Zimmerman telegram  he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, which was approved in early April 1917.

For Wilson, victory in the war was essential, but so was peacemaking. More than half of the 14 points in his speech dealt with specific territorial adjustments among the countries waging or impacted by the war. Six, however, addressed general principles to building a better world. Wilson proposed open covenants (treaties or agreements) openly arrived at: freedom of the seas; free trade; reduction of armaments; and adjustment of colonial claims based on the principles of self-determination. Most important, he advocated for a general association of nations, what was to become the League of Nations, to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity (of) great and small states alike.

These principles were not without flaws. It was never clear what Wilson meant by self-determination, since it was impossible for every nation or ethnic group to have its own geographically defined territory. (Wilson, for example, did not believe that Irish nationalists, then in conflict with Britain, had a God-given right to govern themselves.)

And while the idea of a representative world body to promote global peace and co-operation remains a worthy goal, neither the League of Nations  which the U.S. ultimately did not join, owing to opposition of the Republican-dominated Senate  nor its successor, the United Nations, has ever had the power and influence required to truly change the world. Few countries, the U.S. and Canada included, have easily relinquished their national sovereignty over their respective foreign policies to a global association.

Now, under Trump and his America First policy, in which winning is the chief objective, global co-operation has taken a step backward. Though it is true, as a New York Times editorial recently argued, that Trumps first national security strategy report issued a few weeks ago highlighted  on paper, at least  the importance of American leadership, a strong defence, a vibrant economy and democratic values. However, by his actions and rhetoric  his refusal to accept that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election and his gutting of the State Department  the significance of the report as actually reflecting the administrations future goals is debatable.

We are not sure that Mr. Trump has any idea what he means by winning, the Times editors concluded. What we do know is that his boastfulness and belligerence and tendency to self-aggrandizement are not only costing America worldwide support, but also isolating it.

If there is a major difference between Wilson and Trumps foreign policies it is this: Wilson truly believed he had a moral obligation to help solve the worlds problems (even if U.S. interests took precedence). Trump, on the other hand, sees the world as a global version of The Hunger Games, with the U.S. standing essentially alone in a dark corner of the planet where even the motives of its allies are not to be wholly trusted. Such a depressing dog-eat-dog view is, to use one of Trumps favourite Twitter terms, sad!

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.
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This article was published 07/01/2018 (1776 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MANDALAY, Myanmar  Myawady Sayadaw, a crimson-robed monk whose eyes dance behind round spectacles, casts himself as a genial warrior in Myanmars long struggle against military rule.

Inside his monastery stands a tall stone monument to students killed in pro-democracy protests. In 2007, he and tens of thousands of monks marched peacefully in streets countrywide, staring down columns of soldiers in what was dubbed the Saffron Revolution.

Today, with the military having yielded some powers to an elected government, Myawady Sayadaw peppers his sermons with references to human rights and interfaith understanding. But when it comes to Myanmars most explosive political issue  the army-led purging of Rohingya Muslims  the outspoken monk becomes taciturn.

That book was poison. Over 50 or 60 years, the army provided fertile ground for hate, and putting that into the mind of a third- or fourth-grader brings you the results we are seeing today Wakar Uddin

Buddha loves all people and teaches us to try to resolve suffering, but we have a duty to protect our country at the same time, he said at his simple monastery outside the northern city of Mandalay.

Most of the Muslims, he went on, are extremists.

In Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, hatred for the Rohingya runs far deeper than the fears over Islamist terrorism that the army has used to justify a ruthless, four-month crackdown in the western state of Rakhine. Soldiers have killed, raped or maimed thousands of Rohingya, according to international human rights groups, and more than 640,000 have fled across the border to refugee camps in Bangladesh.

The antipathy toward the small Muslim minority  in a country that is 90 per cent Buddhist  is a virulent brew of ethnic, economic and religious nationalism promulgated for decades by the military, and spread easily via social media across a population with some of the lowest education levels in Southeast Asia.

It is built fundamentally on racial differences: the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar, are physically and culturally more similar to the peoples of Bangladesh and India than to Myanmars ethnic Bamar majority. Scholars say they descend from Arab and Persian traders who arrived in what is now western Myanmar more than 1,000 years ago.

Those differences have driven a deep wedge through this country of 50 million. Of all the monks, student activists, ethnic guerrillas and other dissidents who once opposed the armys abuses, almost none have spoken up for the countrys most beleaguered people.

All these democratic activists, when they talk about human rights and citizens rights, they have a prejudice  the Rohingya are not included, said Thet Swe Win, director of the Center for Youth and Social Harmony, a Myanmar non-profit.

No one is on the Rohingyas side. That is the tragedy here.

For years, Myanmars army has rallied Buddhists by claiming a Muslim plot to overtake the country. It rewrote the countrys arcane citizenship laws to exclude the Rohingya, and routinely ignored hardline monks who spewed hatred toward Muslims.

The propaganda was seemingly confirmed after a small insurgent group  the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA  rose up in 2016 and began attacking Myanmar security forces. Now monks such as Myawady Sayadaw freely reconcile Buddhas non-violent teachings with a military offensive that some call a possible genocide.

Once ARSA emerged, it allowed even pro-peace, pro-interfaith people in the country to write off the Rohingya as a terrorist threat, no matter how implausible that is, said Matthew Walton, a professor and Myanmar expert at the University of Oxford.

In this case, government officials have a very good sense of what public sentiment is, so almost no one is going to object to something nasty about the Rohingya.

There was little outcry in October after one of the countrys most influential monks, Sitagu Sayadaw, gave a speech at a military base in which he appeared to justify ethnic cleansing. He invoked a parable about an ancient Sri Lankan king who was advised not to grieve for the many Hindus he killed in battle because non-Buddhists were not human beings.

Myawady Sayadaw said his fellow clergymans words were dangerous. But in the next breath, he accused the international media of exaggerating the violence against the Rohingya.

Outsiders shouldnt blame our country so easily, he said. We need to search for the truth in Rakhine state. I dont believe the media reports, and our people dont believe them either.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who spent years under house arrest and now heads the civilian government, has been pilloried internationally for defending the military, but remains Myanmars most popular politician.

Of the dozens of ethnic minority groups that long battled the army for greater rights, only one  a womens organization representing ethnic Karen, many of whom are Christians  has issued a statement condemning the militarys campaign against the Rohingya.

As one of the few Myanmar activists to champion the Rohingya cause, Thet Swe Win, 31, has come under attack on social media. Nationalist groups have labelled him a maggot and accused him of taking bribes from Muslim countries.

His mother said she couldnt support his work. Friends have deserted him.

Most of the people inside Burma, all the information they get is from government propaganda and from nationalist groups, he said. So this is how most Burmese people believe that those Rohingya are not from our country.

When the army took power in 1962, it began pushing the narrative that the Rohingya had been brought into Myanmar illegally by British colonial rulers, who used labourers from present-day India and Bangladesh to build roads and infrastructure. The generals created an educational system that inculcated bigotry in generations of schoolchildren.

One Rohingya, Wakar Uddin, remembers such lessons from his days as a sixth-grader in Rakhine in the late 1960s. His class read a story that described Indians as filthy street-sweepers with monstrous features; Uddin recalled liberal use of the slur kalar  used to describe dark-skinned people  and that when the teacher read from the book, Buddhist students laughed and applauded.

That book was poison, said Uddin, a biology professor at Penn State who directs the Arakan Rohingya Union, an advocacy group.

Over 50 or 60 years, the army provided fertile ground for hate, and putting that into the mind of a third- or fourth-grader brings you the results we are seeing today, he said.

Even as the Myanmar government and Bangladesh pursue a plan to repatriate Rohingya refugees starting in January, the state-supported climate of hate makes it all but impossible to imagine that many could return.

If we were Buddhists, the whole Bamar majority would take our side. But we are Muslims, said Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya activist who fled Myanmar at 16 and now lives in Germany. They dont want this population in the country. This is the national policy.

Public officials can say just about anything about Rohingya without fear of it diminishing their stature. In 2009, Myanmars consul general in Hong Kong wrote a letter to foreign diplomats calling the Rohingya ugly as ogres with dark brown skin. (By contrast, he said, his own skin was fair and soft and good-looking as well.) The remark did not hurt his career; the military government later appointed him ambassador to Switzerland.

When a Rakhine state lawmaker was asked last year by a BBC journalist about soldiers sexually assaulting Rohingya women, he giggled. Soldiers could not have committed mass rapes, he explained, because Rohingya women were very dirty.

 Los Angeles Times
Several thousand Bangladeshi teachers, who began a fast-unto-death on December 31 at the National Press Club in the capital of Dhaka, called off their protest on Friday January 5.

Over the past 12 years, I have been working without any pay and living in inhumane conditions, said Sohrab Hossain, one of the teachers. It is better to die here than return home with empty hands, he told a representative of the European Pressphoto Agency last week.

Since December 26, thousands of teachers have been engaged in a round-the-clock sit-in protest outside the Press Club despite shivering cold temperatures. When the sit-in failed to secure their demands, they began a hunger strike five days later. Their chief demand was to gain coverage under the governments Monthly Payment Order (MPO) system.

Over the course of the six-day hunger strike 117 of the teachers required hospitalization.

Nearly 80,000 Bangladeshi teachers and employees at 6,000 government-recognized schools work without government pay, house rent or medical allowance. And this state of affairs has existed, according to the protestors, for 15 or even 20 years in some cases.

Sohrab said he received just over $12 a month at the madrassa school where he works, requiring him to take on private classes and employment at a store in the evenings to survive. Those who gain access to the MPO system receive the countrys minimum wage of $137 a month from the government, reported news4europe.

On Friday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina promised to meet these demands. Non-MPO Educational Institutions Teachers and Employees Federation Secretary Binoy Bhushan Roy accepted the prime ministers assurances and shut down the protests. The acting president of the Federation Golam Mahmaudunnabi Dollar declared, We believed that she [the prime minister] would listen to us. We are going home today.

Earlier in the week, the group had rebuffed offers by the Education Minister Nurul Nahid, stating that the government had falsely promised job regularization 22 times in the past, without doing so. Prime Minister Hasinas Awami League coalition faces national elections at the end of 2018 or early 2019.

Mohiuddin Alamgir noted in the Bangladesh paper New Age, Teachers from primary schools to colleges have frequently been observing hunger strikes, abstaining from work, holding sit-ins and taking part in processions over the last couple of months and have warned of continuation of such demonstrations until their demands were met.

There are three basic educational systems in Bangladesh. The majority are public schools, followed by private English medium schools, and religious-based Madrassas.

According to a 2016 report Educational System in Bangladesh, a major factor discouraging teachers is the lack of the most basic facilities such as chairs and tables, water, electricity, and even toilets are absent in many schools outside the city corporation areas. In many cases there are even no buildings. Five percent of schools do not have toilet facilities in Bangladesh while another 14% have to make do with just one. The report also pointed to the high class sizes, an average of 54 students to one teacher in public schools and slightly lower ratios in private schools and madrassas.

The governments promised increases in education spending have not materialized. Last year the already minuscule spending on education and health (about two percent of the gross domestic product) was cut by 10 percent, despite the claim of a 14 percent increase.

At least 80-110 million Bangladeshi people live on less than $2 a day, according to the Financial Express. The Hasina government has responded to a deteriorating financial situationdeclining remittances from overseas workers, food price rises and lower export growthby assaulting garment workers striking for higher pay, demanding the removal of Rohingya refugees and pushing a 14-year plan to build 100 cheap labor zones.

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[2 August 2017]
Exploratory talks on forming a new government between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) have been long and drawn out because all three parties know full well that their plans for increased militarism, strengthening the repressive state apparatus and further social attacks are broadly despised among the population. However, even though these parties have agreed to not speak publicly about the state of the talks and to draft the new governments programme behind the backs of the population, a clearer picture is emerging.

While the CSU demanded a massive military rearmament at the end of last year, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) set the tone in the new year in an interview with Der Spiegel last Thursday. He advocated a great power policy for Germany, directed against Russia and China in particular, but also the United States.

The combination of his aggressive language and absurd attempt to pose as a victim, recalled nothing so much as the argument of enforced self-defence used by Wilhelm II to justify to the Reichstag Germanys entry into the First World War. Gabriel stated, Vegetarians have it tough in a world full of carnivores, and bluntly called for rearmament and a militarist policy.

Germany could no longer depend on France, Britain and especially the Americans enforcing our interests around the world, Gabriel declared. The assumption that the US would come to Germanys aid in the event of war should not be overstretched, he continued. In an uncomfortable world, we cant afford as Europeans to take it easy and wait on the US, he said.

The entire world is already taking advantage of Germany, he added. In reality, Moscow, Beijing and Washington also have something in common: they dont value the European Union at all, they abuse it, Gabriel insisted. Authoritarian states were making fun of the EU because its member states were failing to place their own national interests above those of the international community.

The portrayal of a moral, integral vegetarian EU, which has to assert itself in the shark-infested waters of global politics, is obviously nonsense. Germany and other EU states are pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, waging brutal wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Mali, and menacing Russia with a major build-up of troops on its borders.

Gabriels rhetoric is aimed at initiating a further escalation of German militarism and freeing Berlin from any restrictions. Europe was not adequately projecting strength, technology, and political and military influence, according to the Foreign Minister. It had to therefore rearm and extend its influence: We have to show that those who view us in such a way have made a mistake, that we can agree, that as a community of democratic and free states, we are economically successful and are gaining influence politically. For this, Europe also has to project its power.

For example, Europe should challenge China in Africa, and Russia in the Balkans. China is steadily gaining so much influence in the south and east that some European states no longer dare to take decisions against Chinese interests. It is noticeable everywhere: China is the only country in the world with a real geopolitical strategy.

Gabriel wants to counter this with a major European military build-up, under German leadership. Although he criticised the CSU proposal for Germany to unilaterally increase its defence budget to 2 percent of GDP, he called for the same policy to be pursued in cooperation with France. This was the only way for Germany to make its voice heard on the world stage.

According to the Foreign Minister, such a policy should not be based on values, but oriented towards interests. To date we have frequently defined European values, we are much too weak with the definition of common interests, he said. Under these conditions, Germany could not be successful in a world of loud, tough-talking states representing their interests.

In a keynote foreign policy address in December, Gabriel declared that there is no longer a comfortable place on the sidelines of international politics for Germany. In the speech, he warned against a fixation on law as the form for overcoming political challenges. He called for political-strategic thinking, whose gaze did not drift to the horizon of moral norms and imperatives.

In his speech, as in the recent interview, Gabriel referred explicitly to the political scientist Herfried Munkler. The professor at Berlins Humboldt University has become the most important spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. In his new book about the Thirty Years War, Munkler calls for the placing of morals under the guardianship of strategic thinking. Prior to that, he called for Germany to become Europes hegemon and disciplinarian.

The consequences of such policies, which are based on Germanys imperialist interests, were summed up by Munklers colleague, Jorg Baberowski. The professor for Eastern European history at HU stated in October 2014 at a discussion on Germany: an interventionist power, referring to the war in Syria, if one is not willing to take hostages, burn villages, hang people and spread fear and terror, as the terrorists do, if one is not prepared to do such things, then one can never win such a conflict and it is better to keep out altogether.

The right-wing extremist professor, who came to prominence not only for such glorifications of war, but also due to his downplaying of the Nazis crimes and agitation against refugees, was explicitly supported last year by SPD politician and HU president Sabine Kunst and defended against criticism from students.

The militarist and inhumane agenda, developed by professors like Munkler and Baberowski, is now official foreign policy. This confirms the warnings made by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which has systematically resisted right-wing and militarist ideology at HU in recent years. The youth organisation of the International Committee of the Fourth International has organised meetings, written articles and distributed leaflets which have pointed to the significance of the work of Munkler, Baberowski and others for the revival of German militarism.

In the foreword to the book Scholarship or war propaganda, which has documented the conflict at the HU, we wrote two and a half years ago that the book dealt with the relationship between scholarship and politics in periods of militarism, mounting international conflict and growing social tensions. It focuses on the question: Will the universities remain centres of scholarship and free criticism? Or will they once again become state-directed cadre-training centres for right-wing and militarist ideologies, as previously in German history?

The ruling elite, which confronts mass opposition to its war policies, is very conscious of the significance of this conflict. In the interview with Der Spiegel, Gabriel expressed disappointment that there were an insufficient number of such cadre-training centres, stating, Unfortunately, we have no experience and no real structure for strategic considerations: there is not a think tank culture here. One of the tasks of foreign policy will be to develop this intellectual capacity in Europe and Germany.

Gabriels plans for a German great power policy not only vindicate the IYSSEs struggle at the HU. They underscore the necessity of constructing the IYSSE as an international youth movement for socialism, uniting youth and young workers around the world in a struggle against capitalism and war.
The wave of anti-government protests by unemployed youth and impoverished workers that swept across Iran for at least five days beginning December 28 has now abated.

While the clerical political establishment has staged a week of large counter-demonstrations and security forces are proclaiming that the challenge to Irans bourgeois nationalist regime has been successfully quelled, none of the acute socio-economic problems that propelled tens of thousands to take to the streets of more than 80 cities and towns have been attenuated, let alone resolved. It is only a matter of time before working class anger and opposition bursts forth anew.

The Iranian regime responded to the protests, which were driven by anger over food-price increases, mass joblessness, pervasive social inequality and years of government austerity, with repression. Over 20 people were killed and hundreds more arrested in the crackdown by police and security forces.

The government has justified the security crackdown with spurious claims US imperialism and its allies fomented and manipulated the unrest.

Yesterday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a statement saying, Irans revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces (IRGC affiliated militia), police and the Intelligence Ministry have broken the protest movement. Iranian authorities admit to arresting more than a thousand people, although they claim many have now been released after swearing to forego further anti-state activity.

The government and its supporters have tried to equate the protests with the 2009 Green Movement, which, egged on by the US and European imperialist powers, challenged the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that movement was aimed at bringing to power the faction of the bourgeois elite most eager for rapprochement with Washington and drew its support overwhelmingly from the most privileged sections of Iranian society.

The current movement, whatever its political confusion, erupted against poverty and social inequality, mobilizing elements from the most oppressed layers of the population. Particularly noteworthy was its rapid spread to smaller district cities and towns that have traditionally provided a base of support for the regime, but have been ravaged by lack of investment and drought in the surrounding countryside. Moreover, the events of the past week-and-a-half were preceded by months of worker protests, sit-ins and strikes against job cuts and the failure of employers to pay back wages and benefits.

Iranian authorities have seized on the utterly hypocritical and fatuous claims of the Trump administration, fronted by a barrage of tweets from the president himself, of support for the protests to lend an air of truth to their charges of imperialist subversion. On Friday, the US forced a UN Security Council debate on developments in Iran.

The efforts of the billionaire would-be despot Trump to cast himself as a friend of the Iranian people would be risible were the US demonization of the Islamic Republic not bound up with its predatory war plans against Iran. Not only has Trump moved to blow up the Iran civil nuclear deal with the worlds major powers, the recently released US National Security Strategy places Iran on a par with North Korea as a threat to American dominance that must be countered and vanquished.

The key mobilizing theme of the Iranian regimes rallies against the internal unrest has been opposition to the threats and bullying of Iran by the US and its regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The rallies have also targeted Britain, which held Iran in semi-colonial bondage in the first half of the 20th century, only to be supplanted by the US after the CIA restored the Shah to power in 1953. London has been Washingtons staunchest ally in the quarter-century of ruinous US wars in the Middle East. The pro-government rallies have resounded with chants of Death to America, Death to Britain and Death to Zionism.

The anti-imperialist sentiments of many of the pro-government demonstrators, fueled as it is by decades of US aggression against Iran and the people of the Middle East, were no doubt genuine. But the Islamic Republics bourgeois-clerical eliteas underscored by numerous overtures to Washington stretching back to at least 1989would be more than willing to reach an accommodation with the US if only it abandoned its drive for regime-change and recognized Tehran as a junior partner in stabilizing the Middle East.

A key aim of the anti-working class austerity policies of the current Iranian government led by President Hassan Rouhani is to woo European and ultimately US investment. Since coming to power in August 2013, the Rouhani administration has accelerated privatization and slashed social spending, while rewriting the rules governing investment in the oil sector to satisfy Total, Shell, Eni, and other European energy giants.

The governments proposed budget for next year would cut $5.3 billion in income support for poorer Iranians, raise gasoline (petrol) prices by as much as 50 percent, expand privatization of education and cut infrastructure spending by $3.1 billion. This in a country where, according to a report published in the IRGCs own political organ, Sobhe Sadeq, 50 percent of the people live below the poverty line.

A study conducted by BBC Persian found Iranians are 15 percent poorer than they were a decade ago. The consumption of bread, milk and red meat has dropped by 30 to 50 percent, as growing numbers of families can no longer afford them. Meanwhile, as around the world, the income and wealth chasm between the richest 1 and 10 percent of Iranians and the rest of the population has widened.

The eruption of the anger of the long-suppressed Iranian working class at the end of 2017 took the regime by surprise. As the protests expanded across Iran on the weekend of December 30-31 and took a pronounced anti-government turn, with participants taking up slogans challenging the institutions of the Islamic Republic and clashing with security forces, Irans security apparatus was rapidly mobilized. Important social media platforms were suspended, and police, Basij and, in some cases, IRGC units deployed.

Repression alone, however, does not account for the sudden ebbing of the protests. The overwhelmingly young and predominantly working class demonstrators lacked a clear and worked-out political perspective.

As the regime was quick to exploit, monarchist and ultra-right-wing elements tried to latch onto the protests and misdirect them. This included not only raising reactionary slogans, but no doubt also encouraging protesters into precipitous attacks on government property and security forces.

That such elements could find any support is not the fault of the working class, but of the regime. For decades, Iranian workers have been denied any form of genuine self-organization and political self-expression.

The Islamic Republic was consolidated though the derailing of the mass anti-imperialist movement that overthrew the blood-soaked, US-sponsored regime of the Shah in 1979. After executing a few exemplars of the Shahs tyrannical rule, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters concentrated their energies on defusing the threat from the working class of socialist revolution. While some social concessions were made, this operation principally and increasingly took the form of savage suppression of all socialist and left parties and of the workers councils that had emerged in the many worker-occupied factories.

The attempt of ultra-right elements to leverage the protests that erupted December 28 and, above all, the lack of a clear counter-perspective articulating opposition to imperialism and all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie caused broader sections of the working class, as well as middle class layers otherwise sympathetic to the protesters social grievances, to remain on the sidelines amid the mounting repression.

One indication of the character of the debate now taking place in Iran is the discussion reportedly raging on social media under the rival hashtags, We will not become Syria and We will become Tunisia.

The regime also, it should be underlined, rushed to reassure the public that the popular anger over price rises and poverty had been heard, even as it slandered the protests as foreign-fomented. Both government spokesmen and leading members of the Majlis (Iranian parliament) have promised that changes will be made.

As concerns petrol prices, we must absolutely take into account the situation of the people because the tensions are absolutely not in the interests of the country, said Majlis Speaker and leading Principlist Ali Larijani last week.

All factions of Irans deeply divided ruling elite have united to support the suppression of working class unrest. But, in a stark indication of the depth of the crisis, the various factions are now fighting over who is to blame for the deep-rooted popular alienation and anger. There are unconfirmed media reports that former president Ahmadinejad was arrested over the weekend. Some of Ahmadinejads rivals have accused him of initially lending support to the protests as a means of advancing his own factional interests.

Infighting within the regime and above all the ever-widening class divide, under the impact of the world economic crisis and US bullying and aggression, ensure that sooner rather than later working class anger and opposition will re-erupt.
Angelina Jolie has a strong connection to Cambodia, the country that inspired her to make her Golden Globe nominated movie, First They Killed My Father.

Based on Cambodia human rights activist Luong Ungs memoir, First They Killed My Father documents her experience as a young girl under the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge.

The actress history with the country began in 2000 when she filmed the hit Tomb Raider on location and later returned two years later to adopt her first child, Maddox. 17 years later, Jolie, 41, has introduced the rest of her brood to the South Asian country nestled between Vietnam and Thailand through her Netflix passion project, which is up for the best foreign language film award at Sundays Golden Globe.

Weve been coming back and forth for 17 years, it feels like a second home to me, Jolie told reporters at a press conference the day before the films Cambodia premiere where she stepped out with the whole family. The children have close ties to the children here, many of them are their best friends. Maddox is happy to be back in his country.

Jolie fell in love with Cambodia while filming her role as Lara Croft role in Tomb Raider. She found the poverty-stricken country still recovering from the genocide inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime, which led to the deaths of nearly a quarter of the population from 1975 to 1979. The group was active until 1999, and the war tribunals started in 2009 are ongoing.

A still from the movie shot by Angelina Jolie's son, Pax Jolie-Pitt

The Netflix movie, directed by Jolie, was shot on location with Maddox, 15, and Pax, 13, working on the production and their siblings  Zahara, 11, Shiloh, 10, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 8  joining the family during filming.

It was an especially personal shoot for Maddox as he helped research the devastation inflicted on Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge communist party in the 1970s that killed nearly 2 million people in a population of 7 million. He was the one who just called it and said he was ready and that he wanted to work on it, which he did, Jolie recently told The Guardian of Maddoxs role in the film. He read the script, helped with notes, and was in the production meetings.

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Angelina Jolie with son Maddox Jolie-Pitt and book author Loung Ung on set of First They Killed My Father

Shortly before its release the actress expressed hope that by shedding light on the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge communist partys regime, the Cambodian people will take pride in what they survived instead of feeling hatred or resentment for what the country endured in the late 1970s.

I hope this doesnt bring up hatred. I hope this doesnt bring up blame, Jolie told the BBC in a behind-the-scenes special produced by the British TV network about the genocide and the making of her film that aired on Sunday. I hope the people of this country are proud when they see it, because they see what theyve survived.
Angelina Jolie Brings Son Pax to the 2018 Golden Globes, Wears Feather-Adorned Dress Angelina Jolie hit the red carpet of the 2018 Golden Globes with her 14-year-old son, Pax.

Angelina Jolie hit the red carpet of the 2018 Golden Globes with her 14-year-old son, Pax.

The 42-year-old actress wore a sheer black gown featuring long sleeves adorned with feathers at the annual awards show, while Pax looked dapper in a black suit. Jolie styled her hair in an elegant updo, and wore diamond drop earrings to complete the look.

Getty Images

Getty Images



The Time's Up movement was felt throughout the red carpet on Sunday, with the majority of actresses -- and actors --wearing black to support the movement. In October, Jolie told The New York Times that disgraced studio mogul Harvey Weinstein made unwanted advances towards her during the release of Playing by Heart in 1998.

I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did, Jolie told the newspaper in an email. This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable."

Jolie's film, First They Killed My Father -- an adaptation of Cambodian-born human rights activist Loung Ungs childhood memoir -- is nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe. On Saturday, Jolie attended the HFPA and American Cinematheques Golden Globe Foreign Language Nominees Series Symposium at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to support the film.

The movie is especially personal to Jolie, given that she adopted her eldest son, Maddox, from Cambodia in 2002. Maddox, 16, worked as an executive producer, while Pax worked as an on-set photographer.

ET spoke to Jolie in September at the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where she brought along Maddox, Pax, 12-year-old Zahara, 11-year-old Shiloh and 9-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.

Watch below:

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Former Google engineer James Damore  who caused a firestorm in August with a company-wide memo calling the tech giant an ideological echo chamber  has filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming discrimination against white male conservatives.

Damores lawsuit says the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with boos during companywide weekly meetings, while female workers were celebrated solely due to their gender. Hes joined in the lawsuit by former Google engineer named David Gudeman, who worked for the company for three years. The lawsuit  filed in Santa Clara County in Northern California  is seeking monetary, non-monetary, and punitive damages.

We look forward to defending against Mr. Damores lawsuit in court, aGoogle spokesperson told TheWrap.

Damore was fired by the company in August after his internal paper widely circulated. In it, Damore argued the chasm between male and female engineers was due to women being biologically less inclined, on average, to pursue tech jobs than men.

Also Read: Fired Google Engineer Feels 'Betrayed' Over Anti-Diversity Memo: 'They Shamed Me' (Video)

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we dont have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership, said Damore in his memo.

In August, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said Damore peddled harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace, and was fired for violating the companys code of conduct.

The lawsuit, filed by Dhillon Law Group, says it is on behalf of any Google employees who feel theyve been targeted for their perceived conservative political views by Google, as well as their male gender. Damore says after his memo went public, he was subjected to multiple threats and insults from coworkers. He also says his peers were given bonuses for touting political views in-line with Googles.

Also Read: IGN Fires Editor-in-Chief After 'Alleged Misconduct'

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Damore adds Google implements illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favored minority candidates. Managers that dont meet their quotas are shamed, according to the lawsuit. This process, in the end, shows male and Caucasian employees as less favored than others, says Damore.

You can check out the full 161-page lawsuit here.

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Sam Rockwells Golden Globe win for playing a racist cop in Three Billboards is troubling many people (ddp)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the biggest winner at Sunday nights Golden Globes, picking up four out of six of the awards it was nominated for. Its success was certainly unsurprising given the critical acclaim the Martin McDonagh-written and directed film has received over the last few months, however, for many viewers and critics the films praise is rather problematic.

Three Billboards tells the story of a feisty and independently-minded mother who takes on the local police force following the brutal rape and murder of her teenage daughter. Frances McDormand plays this bereaved parent, Mildred Hayes, who rents out the titular three billboards and emblazons them with three messages: Raped While Dying. And Still No Arrests? How Come, Chief Willoughby?

Mildreds fight to get justice for her daughters murder is superbly presented and the narrative promotes themes of female empowerment and bravery, but McDonagh, a white British-Irishman, seems to takes less care when introducing and dealing with racial elements of the story.

You see theres another pretty central character to the story, played by Sam Rockwell, and hes a terrible person. Officer Jason Dixon is a bigot, a racist and a sexist who has been abusing his position of power to brutally channel the anger he has with himself and the world. Its made clear from the very beginning that this man is the poster boy for police brutality, with characters using the word torture to describe his treatment of the black people he has taken into custody.

Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormands characters face off in the fil

McDonagh uses one of these moments to also throw in the n-word and make a cheap joke about it. Hows it going in the n****r-torturin business, Dixon? Mildred asks him to which he replies, You cant say n****r-torturing no more, you gotta say, peoples-of-color torturing. Maybe people could have accepted the humour at the expense of African Americans if the black characters  played by Amanda Warren, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Clarke Peters  were given a chance to give some back, but McDonagh never really lets them.

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Instead, he turns Dixon into a hero and gives him a redemption storyline while these black characters (a co-worker of Mildreds, a police chief, and a man who helped put up the billboard signs) are positioned as little more than victims without much opportunity to get justice for the mistreatment of black people by the dirty cop.

Many black and ethnic minority (BAME) critics and commentators have pointed out the problematic nature of the movie and have suggested its critical acclaim is indicative of the still heavily white-dominated field of film criticism.

NPRs Gene Demby said the movies high score on reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes is a damning indictiment of the whiteness of the critical establishment.

The 94% that Three Billboards outside of Ebbings, Missouri has on Rotten Tomatoes is a pretty damning indictment of the whiteness of the critical establishment. Jfc.  Gene GD Demby (@GeeDee215) November 24, 2017

The Huffington Posts Zeba Blay says that the films success lies on a continuum of movies that go largely unchallenged by critics and audiences because they absolve certain viewers from actually having to care about the larger implications of their themes.

Because few critics are willing or able to engage critically with the movie on race, McDonagh himself does not have to engage, does not have to wrestle with some of his failures as an artist, she continues while Ira Madison III compares the film to Crash on The Daily Beast.

[Three Billboards] attracts the type of crowd that likes to reward simplistic tales of racism like Crash, where white people learn how to be good to one another at the expense of black people, he writes.

Its not only an attempt at emotional manipulation that runs cold, but its also a journey thats play throughoutAltogether, its wholly offensive  so is it any wonder that its a frontrunner at the Golden Globes and most likely the Oscars?

Three Billboards sweeps an award show that Get Out was shut out of. Really makes you think pic.twitter.com/xQpC3rYWpf  Jenn Kaytin Robinson (@JennKaytin) January 8, 2018

Their predictions were right and the movie earned a Best Supporting Actor win for Sam Rockwells racist cop, while a film like Get Out was overlooked in several categories during the nomination stage and then at the ceremony. Of course the white-dominated industry showed more support for the movie with the overt racist gone good than the one with Bernie Sanders voters hosting a modern day slave auction.

Thats because Jordan Peeles critically and commercially successful social thriller holds up a mirror to the casual racism of liberal white America, so they were hardly going to thank him for it. And now, as we get closer to the Academy Awards, well no doubt see this response repeated with Three Billboards getting significant Oscar nods and Get Out being overlooked as a genre film rather than the brilliantly conceived piece of art that it is.

For the sake of black representation on film lets hope the Academy shows better judgement.

READ MORE

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Natalie Portman calls out sexist Globes category




Back up, what was that Nicole Kidman?

During her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television for her work in Big Little Lies, Kidman kicked off with a line, First cab off the rank, which mightve thrown some of the shows American viewers for a loop.

The line is an Australian expression meaning, the first person to do, or take advantage, of something. Literally, its a taxi in a line of other cabs departing first, but in this case, Kidman used it as an opportunity to be the first (of what will for sure be many) of the evening to address the #MeToo and #TIMESUP movement.

Also Read: Golden Globes: 5 Actresses Who Brought Activists to the Show (Photos)

I do believe we can elicit change through the stories we tell and how we tell them, Kidman said.

Kidman also paid tribute to her husband Keith Urban during the speech, and several on Twitter felt it was a great way to kick off the ceremony.

Nicole Kidman to Keith Urban: when my cheek is against yours, everything else melts away; and thats love. ????#GoldenGlobes  Lynn (@BrooklynNashie) January 8, 2018

Thanks for making me cry, Nicole Kidman. Again.#GoldenGlobes  Remi Holiday (@RemiHoliday) January 8, 2018

Nicole Kidman won me back in Big Little Lies but her #GoldenGlobes speech stole my heart. What a woman. ????????????????  Sylvia Beirnes (@sylviabeirnes) January 8, 2018

Twitter did take some guesses at what Kidman meant by first cab off the rank, so maybe now that shes won she can sit back and relax.

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Nicole Kidmans first cab off the rack idiom means shes getting the F out of that Beverly Hilton. #GoldenGlobes  Tony Gomez (@gonytomez) January 8, 2018

Also Read: Golden Globes: The Complete List of Winners (Updating Live)

Kidmans Big Little Lies co-star Laura Dern also had some thoughts about #MeToo and #TIMESUP while walking the red carpet. Dern said on Instagram that she is holding our mothers and grandmothers and all brave women who taught us about Voice by wearing black on the red carpet.

Its time for us to make a difference, and everyone can make a difference, she added.

Dern brought along activist Monica Ramirez, who said, When we learned about what was happening in Hollywood, our members felt very strongly they wanted to send a message  that they are not alone  Part of our work is to fight for gender parity along all lines.

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It was widely held that the overall favorite within the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. this year was Martin McDonaghs Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It makes sense for a movie about America, told from an outside perspective, perhaps tone deaf in some areas but certainly biting in others. Some in the group felt it should not have been in the drama category, given its scathing black humor, but that wasnt enough to derail its potential in the end. The organization showered McDonaghs film with four awards Sunday night, including best picture, drama.

Cue a hundred what does it mean for the Oscars? headlines

It means precious little. To reiterate the usual point, this is a group of 80 or so foreign journalists, a far cry from an 8,000-strong group of industry professionals. What the HFPA does provide, however, is an opportunity in the thick of Oscar voting, a ceremony beamed into living rooms worldwide as Academy members sit with ballots in hand. So with that in mind, Three Billboards and this years best picture, comedy or musical, winner, Lady Bird, get to capitalize on the exposure.

But the tenor of the evening wasnt at all one about what all of this portends in the Oscar (or Emmy) race. It was about an industry on the verge of a shift, and a rally cry that time is up.

Salma Hayeks Three Billboards introduction crescendoed with that very refrain, from the stage and from the audience; Allison Janney pivoted I, Tonya to a larger idea about examining class; Gary Oldman remarked about how Darkest Hour reminds of the power of words to change a world that needs changing; Natalie Portman dragged the HFPA for not nominating a female director, as did Barbra Streisand in her own way. It was an issue-driven evening, with the awards themselves feeling (perhaps rightly) like a side spectacle, interstitials in a program dominated by activism.

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It was also an evening punctuated by an Oprah Winfrey speech, in accepting the HFPAs Cecil B. DeMille Award, that thundered like some star-making keynoteexcept she was already the biggest star in the room.

But lets look at those winners. Three Billboards is a story about compassion, Sam Rockwell said in accepting the supporting actor prize; its a movie, taken to task in some quarters for a perceived ham-fisted handling of race relations, that ends on a definitive note of reconciliation. The Shape of Water, as director Guillermo del Toro laid out again on a recent episode of Varietys Playback podcast, is a story about the other and the power of empathy. I, Tonya is indeed about class, but as well, the devolution of broadcast media into bloodsport. The zeitgeist was in the air with these nominees, so it was bound to be in the air at the Beverly Hills Hilton  not unlike last year, when Meryl Streep stirred our Commander-in-Chief to lash out on Twitter.

There wasnt much surprising about the business at hand. The Greatest Showman securing the original song prize for La La Land songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul was a bit unexpected, but certainly not for the only best picture nominee in the category. There was a moderate spreading of wealth, unlike last year when La La Land swept so loudly that the Moonlight best picture, drama, win felt like an afterthought (oops). Nevertheless, a few movies were ignored entirely: Call Me by Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, The Post  all bridesmaids, with no momentum to be had.

A certain standard may have been set, however. How will the intense show of activism on the red carpet and at this ceremony snowball in the coming weeks? Will the Oscars become another battlefield for the cause? How much pressure might the Academys directors branch feel to nominate a Gerwig or a Dee Rees after those Portman and Streisand barbs?

You see, the Golden Globes can impact the awards race in ways far beyond who won and what that means for the Oscars. Its a soapbox, an audition, a trial run, all in one.

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Meghan Markle's father comments on Prince Harry for first time since engagement announcement

Meghan Markle's father is speaking out on her engagement to Prince Harry for (essentially) the first time.

Thomas Markle released a joint statement with his ex-wife, Meghan's mother Doria Ragland, on the day that the couple's engagement was announced in November and later declared that he would "love" to walk his daughter down the aisle, but since then he's laid very low.

SEE ALSO: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle make unusual travel decision during New Year's trip to Monte Carlo

He reportedly lives in Rosarito, Mexico, and has yet to meet Harry in-person (though Harry says that he's spoken to Thomas on the phone).

Over the weekend, a so-called "passerby" at a convenience store in the small Mexican town asked Thomas what he thought about the upcoming royal wedding, scheduled for May 19. The footage was obtained by British outlet The Sun.

"I think its wonderful," he responded. "Im very delighted. I think theyre [a] very good match. Im very happy for them, Meghan and Harry. I love my daughter very much -- Harrys a gentleman."

"Now leave me alone, please," he concluded. "Dont bother me anymore. No more flashing cameras in my eyes or Ill flash back."

SEE ALSO: Queen Elizabeth is breaking protocol for Meghan Markle: Here's why

The comments come in the weeks after Harry turned heads by declaring that Meghan joining the British royal family represents a "family she never had."

Meghan's half-brother and half-sister both publicly condemned the comments.

The former "Suits" actress is incredibly close with her mother, who has met Harry in person on multiple occasions, including at the Invictus Games in September, where Harry and Meghan made their first joint public outing as a couple, too.

So much so that reports surfaced recently that Meghan is hoping to "break" royal tradition in May by having her mother walk her down the aisle at Windsor Castle instead of her father.

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Hollywood is weighing in on Twitter on Saturday after President Donald Trump defended his mental stability and called himself not smart, but genius.and a very stable genius at that!

When Trump tweeted I am a very stable genius this morning the 25th Amendment literally jumped out of the Constitution, Albert Brooks tweeted, while Mindy Kaling just wrote, Hahahahahaha, alongside a meme about her character from The Office.

The president launched his Twitter storm on Saturday to defend his mental capacity and fitness for office in the wake of questions raised by senior White House officials in Michael Wolffs explosive new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Also Read: Trump Calls Himself a Genius, Let the Memes Begin!

Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart, the POTUS wrote.

I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try), he wrote, neglecting to mention his short-lived bid for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party in 2000. I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius.and a very stable genius at that!

Also Read: Trump Defends His Mental Capacity, Brags He's a 'Very Stable Genius'

See Hollywoods reactions to Trumps statement below.

A not-funny person: Im funny!

A total racist: I give everyone shit equally!

A boring person: Strap in cuz I am OUT there!

A homophobe: *I* have zero problems with gays, but the Bible says

An unstable cretin: I am a st  Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 6, 2018

The only true stable genius has to be Mr. Ed., who talks in more complex sentences than the current occupier of the Whitehouse.  Rob Reiner (@robreiner) January 6, 2018

Hey #stablegenius Obama won on his first try AND won the popular vote. Also won a Nobel, shepherded economic recovery & secured healthcare for millions. You lost on your first try (Reform Party in 2000), lost the popular vote to Hillary & tanked Trumpcare. Also, you crazy.  Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 6, 2018

Thats what I do is I do things proper. Donald J. Trump  president of the United States (and very stable genius)  Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 6, 2018

When Trump tweeted I am a very stable genius this morning the 25th Amendment literally jumped out of the Constitution.  Albert Brooks (@AlbertBrooks) January 6, 2018

Upsettingly Ive heard this kind of thing from a number of people who have known #Trump for years. They have been appalled and worried since the campaign https://t.co/6af18CYV3O  Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) January 6, 2018

????Trump, Defending His Mental Fitness, Says Hes a Very Stable Genius  The New York Times https://t.co/u0YH45ySld  Katie Couric (@katiecouric) January 6, 2018

Imagine if Churchill started saying he was a stable genius, we would INSTANTLY think he'd gone mad. Rather, KNOW he'd gone mad. To me, everything Trump says can be translated as a deep cry for help from a terrified little boy.  Miranda Hart (@mermhart) January 6, 2018

Ask every single Republican member of Congress whether they think Trump is a very stable genius.  Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) January 6, 2018

This only way this tweet could be less reassuring would be if it was in macaroni letters glued to the inside cover of a Highlights magazine. https://t.co/iL4UybbStF  David Simon (@AoDespair) January 6, 2018

Who is writing this stuff, David Mamet? Who's directing it, Julie Taymor? This is new. This isn't a political script, it's a theatrical one.This is not Trump himself in his own voice or Trump allowing himself to be fig-leafed by some lesser Ted Sorensen.  Mimi Kramer (@nhmeems) January 6, 2018

Related stories from TheWrap:

Donald Trump Has 'Close to Zero' Chance of Legally Blocking Michael Wolff's 'Fire and Fury'

Steve Bannon Blasts Donald Trump Jr as 'Treasonous,' 'Unpatriotic' in New Book

Heckler of Donald Trump Animatronic at Disney World Responds to Haters: 'Check Your Privilege'
Hours before the Golden Globe Awards, the #WhyWeWearBlack protest is already in full effect with plenty of big names speaking out and answering the question of why they will be wearing black to tonights Hollywood awards show.

Taking to her Instagram story, Eva Longoria rounded up several celeb motivations behind the black motif. We wear black for many reasons, she said next to Instagram newcomer Natalie Portman. One, to support the brave women who have come out with their stories. To those that are still silenced, we are with you.

We wear black because were looking forward to a new day where the powerful do not exploit others, Portman added.

Other actresses and actors in attendance chimed in with their reasons, like Laura Den, who is wearing black because times up on imbalance and abusive power. Brie Larson says she is wearing black to stand with the 90% of restaurant workers who have reported that theyve experienced sexual harassment.

Heres a roundup of the collection of those whove spoken out about why theyre wearing black.

Rashida Jones

Tessa Thompson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Brie Larson, Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington and Rashida Jones thanked those that have donated over $15 million to the Times Up fund. The foundation was created, according to Witherspoon, for people who were victims of sexual harassment and discrimination and abuse in the work place and they dont have access to legal representation.

Instagram Photo

Natalie Portman

Instagram Photo

Mark Ruffalo

Ruffalo is wearing black to support a lot of really wonderful, courageous women who are asking for fairness in the work place by stopping sexual harassment and harassment in general. Its been a long time coming and were here. And its exciting.

Instagram Photo

Rosario Dawson

We wear black to symbolize solidarity, that the death knell has stuck on abuse of power, and that its time to celebrate each other. Not just the nominees on film and television screens, but our storytellers who have bravely come forward and courageously shared their personal stories, which have liberated so many of us. Me too.

Story continues

Instagram Photo

Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez posted from Puerto Rico, where she had traveled to help provide relief to the territory that is still suffering after Hurricane Maria. She shouted out #TimesUp, stating that like the women at the Golden Globes, the people in Puerto Rico just want to be treated equally. Jessica Chastain, a Globes nominee, reposted the video, thanking Lopez and writing This is more than just the Golden Globes this is worldwide.

Instagram Photo

Reed Morano

Reed Morano, the director of The Handmaids Tale wrote, Today I wear black because I wont be silenced and I want to send a very clear message about how I feel  It has taken me a long time to realize I dont have to accept being treated differently or taken advantage of because Im a woman in my position. It occurred to me that I am still allowing it to happen because Ive always accepted it and have become so accustomed to it, that I often dont even realize its happening. This is happening to women and minorities everywhere right now and Im not going to accept it anymore. We will ALL be treated WITH THE RESPECT WE HAVE EARNED. 

Instagram Photo

Shannon Purser

Stranger Things Shannon Purser wrote on Twitter, I wear black a lot, but today it will remind me of all the voices that have been silenced. The testimonies brushed aside. And now, the downfall of predators and the survivors who are taking the power back. Abusers beware.

I wear black a lot, but today it will remind me of all the voices that have been silenced. The testimonies brushed aside. And now, the downfall of predators and the survivors who are taking the power back. Abusers beware. #TIMESUP pic.twitter.com/fjVw7v3ShS  Shannon Purser (@shannonpurser) January 7, 2018

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WASHINGTON  Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, issued something akin to an apology over comments he made in Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

In a statement to Axios, Bannon expressed regret that his delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don. Jr. has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency.

The initial stories about Fire and Fury last week focused on comments that Bannon made about Donald Trump Jr.s Trump Tower meeting with Russian individuals in June, 2016. Bannon called the decision to meet with the Russians, some with links to the government, as treasonous. He also said that Special Counsel Robert Muellers prosecution team is going to crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.

Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, Bannon said.

My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda  as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and appearances from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Arizona and Alabama, he said.

Bannon did not challenge the accuracy of the quotes that Wolff attributed to him. Wolff said that he had tapes of conversations with some of his sources.

Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and in the storm of reaction to the book, one of the stakeholders in the outlet, Rebekah Mercer, with whom he has had close ties, issued a statement rebuking his comments and siding with the president.

Bannon, in his statement, contended that his comments about the June, 2016 meeting were aimed at Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign chairman. He also said that he thinks that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt.

Story continues

Bannon served as chief strategist until August, when he was dismissed. Trump named him campaign CEO in August, 2016.

Related stories

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Trump Defends His Mental Stability, Lashes Out at Critics in Early Morning Tweetstorm

'Fire and Fury' Sells Out at Bookstores on First Day of Release

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I feel a tremendous sense of pride, beamed This Is Us actor Sterling K. Brown upon being notified in the Golden Globes press room tonight that he made history, becoming the first black actor to win the TV lead actor drama category. Browns win tonight follows his best lead actor Emmy win back in the fall for playing the role of Randall Pearson on the NBC/20th Century Fox production show.

Brown described how his childhood experience imbued his performance as an adopted black child in a white family.

Hes a fish out of water and two individuals who love him and appreciate him take him into their lives even though he doesnt look like they do. Hes trying to find his way in the world. Growing up, my mother always told me Id have to work twice as hard; that the world wasnt going to react and respond in the way of my white counterparts. When those kids were making trouble, she said I wouldnt have the same kind of latitude as them if I got in trouble. The repercussions would be different.

The second half of season 2 of This Is Us returns to NBC on Tuesday, January 9. Immediately, well learn what happens to Kevin Pearson (Justin Hartley) following his DUI and whether or not Randall and his wife Beth will adopt again. Randall had a nervous breakdown last season and weathered his birth father dying.

Previously in the category of TV lead actor drama, Jimmy Smits made headway for Latin Americans when he won in 1996 for NYPD Blue.

Related stories

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Natalie Portman's All-Male Directors Category Remark Prompts Quick Reaction

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Ally Sheedy tweeted -- then deleted -- a cryptic message about James Franco as he took the Golden Globes stage

As the Golden Globes rolled on Sunday night, Twitter was buzzing -- and not just about Oprah's speech.

Ally Sheedy, the actress best known for '80s hits like "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo's Fire," tweeted -- then deleted -- multiple cryptic messages, mostly targeted at James Franco, who took home a statue for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. The tweets seemingly suggested that she blames Franco for her departure from Hollywood.

"Why is James Franco allowed in?" she tweeted, adding, "Said too much."

She followed that up with two more posts. The first: "Ok wait. Bye. Christian Slater and James Franco at a table on @goldenglobes," hashtagging "#MeToo."

Around the time of her tweet, Christian Slater's name was already circulating on Twitter as some pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of him wearing a "Time's Up" pin, meant as a statement of solidarity against sexual harassment in abuse. The actor was convicted of assaulting his girlfriend in 1997 and in 2005 said he didn't regret any of his past behavior.

Finally, Sheedy capped off her short tweet spree with this: "James Franco just won. Please never ever ask me why I left the film/TV business."

She worked with Franco in 2014, when he directed her in the play "The Long Shrift."

Neither Sheedy nor Franco has publicly commented on the tweets, which Sheedy has since deleted.
Drake was Millie Bobby Browns security at a Golden Globes after-party, and thats baller

After the party is the after-party, and after the 2018 Golden Globes is the official Netflix after-party! After the awards show, Millie Bobby Brown linked up with Drake at the Netflix bash, because Brown and Drake are, like, legit friends now. Brown shared a photo with the rapper and jokingly referred to Drake as her muscle. Blessed to have my security be my +1 at the netflix party, the Stranger Things star captioned the Instagram photo.

The best part is that Brown introduced Drake to all her buddies. Gaten Matarazzo snapped a selfie with the rapper and called him the nicest guy Ive ever met. Caleb McLaughlin also met the icon and captioned his pic OK SO THIS HAPPENED. Someone at the party snuck a pic of Drake chatting it up with Brown and Finn Wolfhard, the latter gazing into Drakes eyes like he was meeting God for the first time.

How funny is it that little Eleven is the conduit between the Stranger Things crew and Drake?

Millie Bobby Brown and Drake attend the Netflix Golden Globes after party at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills on January 7, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California.

OK SO THIS HAPPENED pt 2 @champagnepapi A post shared by Caleb McLaughlin (@therealcalebmclaughlin) on Jan 8, 2018 at 9:56am PST

Brown and Drake showed up in an Instagram photo together back on November 11th, 2017 after meeting at one of Drakes concerts in Australia, and since then, the internet has really embraced this unexpected friendship.

this guy... A post shared by Millie Bobby Brown (@milliebobbybrown) on Nov 11, 2017 at 12:29am PST

Drake and Millie Bobby Browns friendship is so pure god bless  lindsey (@linds3ynic0le) January 8, 2018

At first we thought it was random that Drake attended the Netflix after-party, but hes executive producing a series for Netflix called Top Boy. Top Boy was a British show that ended in 2013, but Drake is reviving it for the streaming site after becoming a huge fan of the original series.

@AshleyWalters82 is too incredible!! Everybody on Top Boy gives such incredible performances. That show is just too good.  Drizzy (@Drake) October 9, 2014

And also, were sure Drake wanted to pop by and say hi to his Stranger Things pals.
By now, you've probably seen that actresses and actors are planning to wear black to the Golden Globes in a show of protest against sexual harassment in Hollywood. However, they want the movement to spread beyond the confines of the red carpet, and several actresses have posted powerful calls-to-action, encouraging fans to share their own "blackout" pictures to social media.

Daredevil star Rosario Dawson was one of the first actresses to encourage people everywhere to join the movement. In her Instagram video on Saturday, she explained, The death knell has struck on abusive power, and its time to celebrate each othernot just the nominees on our film and television screens but our storytellers who have bravely come forward and courageously shared their stories which have liberated so many of us.

Eva Longoria reposted Dawson's message, adding, "Everyone can join in tomorrow and post a pic of yourself in Black standing in solidarity with women everywhere trying to fight the imbalance of power!"

Yaaas @rosariodawson! This is why we wear black! Everyone can join in tomorrow and post a pic of yourself in Black standing in solidarity with women everywhere trying to fight the imbalance of power! #TIMESUP on abuses of power! Today is a new day! pic.twitter.com/uGrJ6ja7FY  Eva Longoria Baston (@EvaLongoria) January 6, 2018

On Sunday, ahead of the Golden Globes, actresses Cara Delevingne and Priyanka Chopra both shared powerful statistics via the Time's Up movement, encouraging their followers to join the initiative.

Story continues

#TIMESUP A post shared by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne) on Jan 7, 2018 at 8:08am PST

Meanwhile, Kerry Washington, Brie Larson, Reese Witherspoon, Tracee Ellis Ross, Rashida Jones, and Tessa Thompson made a video of themselves explaining that they want us all to wear black and stand together.

We'll be here in black, tonight!
Model Barbara Meier at the Golden Globes last night - NBCUniversal

The only two ways to guarantee yourself a spot on the inexorable worst-dressed lists at this years Golden Globes? Wear any colour other than black, or wear Marchesa, the label designed by Harvey Weinsteins now-estranged wife Georgina Chapman, which numerous actresses claimed they were forced to parade over the years by the film producer, or face threats of funding cuts to their projects.

Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Angelina Jolie and dozens more of the most powerful women in Hollywood wore exclusively black dresses on the red carpet last night, putting on a united front for the Times Up campaign, and rallying to end the run of sexual abuse, harassment, and misuse of power within the industry.

Three women, however, abstained, with each giving a different reason as to why they were wearing colour on the first big night of 2018s awards season.

The first, and perhaps most understandable was Meher Tatna, the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. She chose to wear an embroidered red dress and robe with a Times Up brooch and explained that she was totally in solidarity with the actresses wearing black, but had chosen to wear red because it is customary to do so during a celebration in her Indian culture. Its a cultural thing, she said as she arrived. When you have a celebration, you dont wear black.

Meher Tatna at the Golden Globes last night

Perhaps less clear, though, were the intentions of actress Blanca Blanco and German model Barbara Meier. Blanco, wearing a slashed, bandage-look red dress from Atria Clothing, had simply decided that she didnt want to take part, and later borrowed her boyfriend, the actor John Savages, suit jacket to cover up as she exited the solo safety-zone of the red carpet and had to mingle with the rest of the herd.

Actress Blanca Blanco at the Golden Globes last night

Meier, meanwhile, chose a deliberately sexy Eva Poleschinski gown which looked unfortunately like a Marchesa design.

A lot of women will wear black tonight to support the times up movement [sic], she wrote before she arrived on the red carpet. I think this is a great and extremely important initiative. Nevertheless I decided to wear a colorful dress tonight. If we want this to be the Golden Globes of the strong women who stand up for their rights, I think, its the wrong way not to wear any sexy clothes anymore or let people take away our joy of showing our personality through fashion.

Story continues

A post shared by Barbara Meier (@barbarameier) on Jan 7, 2018 at 3:59pm PST

Meier continued to make the case for defiantly sexy clothing, suggesting that her outfit symbolizes our freedom and our new strength. We were fighting a long time for the freedom to wear what we want to and that it is also ok, to dress up a little more sexy, she added. If we now restrict this, because some men cant control themselves, this is a huge step back in my opinion. We should not have to wear black to be taken serious. [sic]

The directive to wear black was given almost a month ago, giving the styling teams behind Hollywoods great and good plenty of time to organise a dress accordingly. There was no chance of missing this memo - the plot has been covered by media outlets around the world since its formulation - and so anyone who didnt comply with the dress code was giving a definite snub.

Golden Globes 2018: See what everyone is wearing on the red carpet

But can you really blame them for finding the opportunity to stand out irresistable, when the field has been levelled for every other player? There was still a competition, ultimately, to find the best black dress of the night. We're still pawing over the glamorous pictures and the outstanding, dazzling jewellery. Were still passing judgement on those who wore black, and how well they did the conservative look, as much as we are on those lesser-known names who opted not to.

Did those who fronted the blacklash do the sisterhood down? Probably not. But in their minimalist ribbons, their short-term win will likely not pay off in the long run. You can bet the Hollywood elite left Blanco and co. out in the cold when the after parties came began last night.

Golden Globes 2018: the best beauty selfies
People are calling out Justin Timberlakes hypocrisy at the 2018 Golden Globes

The internet is all about the 2018 Golden Globes tonight, talking about everything from the activists actors have brought to the thoughtful responses from them. Theyre also talking about Justin Timberlakes hypocrisy. Lets rewind. From the moment stars began arriving on the red carpet, it was clear that the 2018 Golden Globes werent going to be your typical awards show. Instead of the tired Who are you wearing? question, actresses and actors have been asked about the #MeToo movement, as well as the launch of the groundbreaking Times Up campaign. Almost all attendees  both men and women  are dressed in black to protest sexual harassment in Hollywood.

Justin Timberlake posted a photo of himself wearing a jacket with the words Times Up, accompanied by the hashtag #whywewearblack. He was also interviewed with his wife Jessica Biel on the red carpet while proudly wearing his pin and all-black ensemble. Were all about displays of solidarity, but theres just one problem  Timberlake stars in Woody Allens latest film Wonder Wheel.

Needless to say, plenty of people arent here for hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of sexual misconduct.

youre literally in the new woody allen movie https://t.co/5jAElrqeFz  laura j. brown (@laurjbrown) January 7, 2018

Justin Timberlake is literally starring in a Woody Allen movie but uhhh okay performative feminism https://t.co/7V9NDzoMcd  rae paoletta (@PAYOLETTER) January 7, 2018

justin timberlake wearing black and times up pin like he didnt just star in a woody allen movie  leah misses kjh (@mikhailkolyadas) January 7, 2018

Dear Men In Hollywood,



A friendly reminder that none of your displays of solidarity at the #GoldenGlobes tonight matter unless you also refuse to work with harassers and actively listen to and bolster women's voices.



Sincerely,



Women  Suzie Samin (@suzannesamin) January 7, 2018

The Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment allegations were reportedly an open secret in Hollywood  but allegations about Allens sexual misconduct have been public knowledge for decades and, even lately, hes inexplicably been spared. Allens daughter, Dylan Farrow, has maintained for years that her father sexually assaulted her when she was just seven years old, an allegation that has been corroborated by three adults under oath.

In December, Farrow penned an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times in which she criticized the #MeToo movement for being selective. Actors and actresses have scrambled to distance themselves from Weinstein, but have continued to work with and praise Allen.

Farrow pointed out that a few of the same actresses who slammed Weinstein, including Kate Winslet, Blake Lively, and Greta Gerwig, have not only worked with Allen but have dismissed questions about his misconduct by saying they dont know much about the allegations or the veracity of those allegations.

Like Weinstein, Allen hasnt been convicted of any crimes  but Connecticut prosecutor Frank Maco went as far as to publicly state there was enough evidence to file charges and he chose not to because he didnt want to put Farrow through an exhausting trial. Earlier this week, Washington Post reporter Richard Morgan detailed decades worth of Allens private notes and reached a conclusion that will surely shock no one: Hes obsessed with teenage girls.

Anyone who takes a strong stand to say they believe women needs to practice what they preach, and its astoundingly hypocritical to position oneself as an ally while continuing to work with one of the most problematic men in Hollywood.

Timberlake hasnt addressed his working relationship with Allen or expressed regret that he participated in Wonder Wheel. Anyone can wear black and declare theyre an ally, but actions speak louder than jacket stitching.
The airport was already facing delays due to the recent bomb cyclone winter storm

Two planes collided at John F. Kennedy International Airport Saturday just after midnight, causing hundreds of flight delays.

East Coast airports have already been dealing with a number of delayed flights due to the powerful bomb cyclone winter storm that hit earlier in the week. A number of flights remain delayed as of Saturday afternoon, according to JFK Airports website.

The right wing of a China Southern Airlines plane hit the tail of a Kuwait Airways plane, according to CNBC. The collision caused damage to both planes, but no injuries occurred, and the passengers were able to get off the plane safely.

The China Southern plane was being towed when the collision happened, the Federal Aviation Administration told CNBC. That plane had no passengers onboard. On Twitter, Kuwait Airways said their plane was parked at the time.

Anyone flying out of JFK Saturday is advised to visit the airports website to monitor the flight status.
Kensington Palace has shared photos of Princess Charlotte on her first day of school. (Photo: Kensington Palace via Instagram)

Princess Charlotte started school on Monday, and parents Kate Middleton and Prince William couldnt resist sharing adorable photos snapped by mom.

In the two pics, Instagrammed and tweeted by Kensington Palace Monday, the 2-year-old is wearing a $162 red, Amaia Kids coat with matching Mary Jane shoes, a baby-pink scarf, and brown tights. Shes also carrying a pink backpack.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to share two photographs of Princess Charlotte at Kensington Palace this morning. The images were taken by The Duchess shortly before Princess Charlotte left for her first day of nursery at the Willcocks Nursery School, the palace captioned the photos, which have over 550,000 likes combined.

Photo: Kensingtonroyal via Instagram

Photo: Kensingtonroyal via Instagram

Fans on Twitter also gushed over the tot.

She looks so proud  fruijui  (@fruijui) January 8, 2018

What amazingly natural young lady! So calm, happy and confident. Thank you for releasing these photographs, Im temporarily ill & they are a great tonic.  LorraineBaxterMcPhie (@LBaxterMcPhie) January 8, 2018

That outfit is a dream to be honest.  Rosie  (@rosiebsteele) January 8, 2018

What a little darling!!  Audra Atoche -Auggie (@Odrah) January 8, 2018

In December, the palace announced that Charlotte would attend the Willcocks Nursey School, a female-led academy at the Holy Trinity Church. The school, where tuition for its 5-day program is about $12,000 (plus a $2,000 initial deposit), strives to maintain its ethos for high standards, excellence and good manners, according to its website.

Story continues

The school offers lots of free play for its 32 students, between the ages of 2 3/4 and 5 years old, who learn to read, write, and perform simple math with the minimum of pressure. And parents can sign up for the Lunch Club, an additional learning experience with French lessons and activities like painting and drama.

Princess Charlotte is attending the Willcocks Nursery School in London. (Photo: Getty Images)

We are delighted that The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have chosen the Willcocks Nursery School for Princess Charlotte, the school said in a December statement. We look forward to welcoming Charlotte to our nursery in January.

Many assumed Charlotte would attend Westacre Montessori School in Norfolk just like 4-year-old brother Prince George, who also enrolled at age 2. On Georges first day in 2016, Middleton shared a few snaps of her son heading off to school wearing a blue puffy coat with plaid lining and carrying a light-blue backpack.

The future king currently attends Thomass Battersea in London, for children ages 4 to 13, where on his first day in September, he was photographed nervously holding his fathers hand and meeting the head teacher.

Prince William walks Prince George to his first day of school, where they were greeted by a teacher. (Photo: Getty Images)

Its unclear how Charlotte will be addressed by the school staff, but it might be Charlotte Cambridge, similarly to George Cambridge, as hes called at school.

Its a time of new beginnings for the young royals, between Prince Harry and Meghan Markles highly publicized engagement, the impending birth of the duke and duchesss third child in April, and Middletons 36th birthday on Tuesday.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
Sorry, Twitter: Your favorite social media platform isnt going to ban Donald Trump

Ever since Donald Trump became president, people have been begging Twitter to ban him from the platform. The calls only get louder when he uses the social media site to, say, tweet that his nuclear button is bigger than Kim Jong Uns, the leader of North Korea. We can all agree no one wants a nuclear war started over Trumps Twitter feed, right?

But while many insist Trump repeatedly violates Twitter rules on threatening violence and engaging in abusive behavior, it doesnt appear the president is going anywhere. Twitter didnt specifically mention Trump, but it did release a blog on Friday, January 5th, outlining its policy for world leaders on Twitter. The blog reads in part:

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

But POTUS doesnt just use Twitter to joke about being violent with the media, or to falsely take credit for zero air travel deaths in 2017. He sometimes uses the platform to announce major policy decisions, like when he tries to prevent transgender people from serving in the military and push for an unpopular wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. And that, apparently, helps advance the global, public conversation Twitter mentioned in its blog.

The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our Country at all cost!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017

Were all for free speech when its not inciting harm or violence. But we think its pretty clear Trumps tweets encourage hate and threaten harm.

Twitter is unlikely to change its mind on banning Trump, especially because his tweets probably help drive the sites growth.

Its nice that Twitter wants to be transparent about its policies. But until Twitter changes its mind (please change your mind!), well have to learn new ways to cope with the stress of Trumps dangerous tweets.
Taking a cue from actresses who are using the 2018 Golden Globes to speak out about the Times Up initiative and to amplify the voices of activists, The New York Times decided to release a commercial during the big event that shows their support of the #MeToo movement and reminds us of the power of the truth.

The video  aptly titled The Truth Has a Voice  debuted online a few days ahead of the awards show, and while its incredibly simple, its also incredibly moving.

At the beginning of the ad, on a stark white background, black text spells out, He said, followed by, She said. The words then repeat themselves a few times, mimicking the way sexual harassment, abuse, and denial has permeated the industry for years.

After the fourth He said, though, the words She said appear again and again in rapid succession, as the background music swells to a climax, mirroring the growing chorus of voices who have spoken out against harassment in Hollywood.

The spot ends with the message, The truth has power. The truth will not be threatened. The truth has a voice.

The NYT released a statement about the commercial on Friday, saying its just the beginning of the next phase of their campaign that will focus on original, independent journalism that holds power to account.

It was the Times that first published allegations against Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinstein back in October. Though Weinsteins attorney, Charles J. Harder, said the article about his client was saturated with false and defamatory statements, the paper has stood by their reporting.

And from by the looks of their continuing campaign, it seems like they have no intention of backing down.

What do you think about the New York Times The Truth Has a Voice commercial? Let us know @BritandCo!

(photo via New York Times/YouTube)
Catania (Italy) (AFP) - Ten migrants perished over the weekend and dozens are missing, including children, after their boat sank off the Libyan coast, aid organisations said Monday.

An inflatable boat loaded with men, women and children left Garabulli, 50 kilometres (31 miles) east of Tripoli, on Friday night, but after eight or nine hours it began to deflate and take on water.

Several people fell overboard, while others clung on to what was left of the boat as the bodies of drowned victims floated in the sea.

The Libyan navy and Italian coastguard rescued 86 people and recovered the bodies of six women and two men.

When the survivors arrived in Catania in Sicily on Monday, they said the boat had left with 140 to 150 people on board, meaning dozens were missing, including 15 women and six children aged two to six, according to aid groups -- the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Doctors without Borders (MSF).

"We saved 86 migrants," Maria Rita Agliozzo, an Order of Malta doctor on the Italian coastguard vessel, told Radio Radicale.

"We did many resuscitations. We resuscitated two children -- a two-year-old and a three-year-old -- and also a woman."

The IOM and UNHCR said the migrants came from The Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon and Nigeria.

The bodies of another two women were found on Sunday by the Libyan navy, which had rescued 290 others from two boats in distress.

Since the 2011 fall and killing of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi, Libya has become a key launch pad for migrants making desperate bids to reach Europe, often on unseaworthy vessels.

Last year alone, 3,116 people died attempting the crossing, according to the IOM.

There was a sharp drop in arrivals in Italy during the second half of 2017 following efforts by Rome to discourage migrants from attempting the crossing.
The Trump Administration is revoking protections that allowed some 200,000 El Salvadorans to live and work in the U.S. in the next 18 months.

On Monday, the Trump Administration will announce that Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador will end on Sept. 9, 2019. Administration officials said Monday that the decision will give migrants time to get their affairs in order for a return or apply for any alternative status they may be eligible for in the U.S.

How long have Salvadorans had Temporary Protected Status?

El Salvadorans are the largest group of recipients in the United States and more than half have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. The migrants are also estimated to be the parents of more than 190,000 U.S.-born children.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, Salvadorans were first been granted temporary protection by Congress in 1990 in response to a deadly civil war. The institute estimates that one-quarter of the countrys population fled during the bloody war, between 1980 and 1990.

Since 2001, migrants from the Central American country have been able to avoid deportation thanks to the Temporary Protected Status designation that was granted to them by President George W. Bush. In January of that year, a catastrophic earthquake struck the country, killing over 1,000 people and displacing thousands more.

What has changed under President Trump?

Temporary Protected Status is technically a temporary program, as the name suggests, but every 18 months since 2001 presidential administrations have renewed the status for the thousands of Salvadoran migrants whod come to call the U.S. home. Cornell Law Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr told TIME in November that presidents have typically maintained the status because ending it could pose a political challenge.

Individuals from those countries settle here, they have roots, they marry U.S. citizens, they have U.S. citizen children, he said. So if you take it away then youre dividing families and sending some people back to their home country.

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But under the Trump Administration, which has taken a more hardline approach to immigration in general, protections have been rolled back for several groups of migrants. Thousands of migrants from Haiti and Nicaragua will be at risk of deportation in the coming months when their designation officially ends. The Trump Administration is expected to make a final decision about the fate of Hondurans, who have been in the U.S. since a 1999 hurricane, in July 2018.

What does this mean for Salvadorans?

The Trump Administrations decision means that many Salvadorans will face a tough choice of deciding whether to voluntarily return to a country that havent called home in decades or risk facing deportation. According to the Center for Migration Studies, more than half of beneficiaries from El Salvador have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. As TIME reported in November, Temporary Protected Status does not provide a pathway to legal citizenship in the U.S.  recipients do not receive green cards and they are not deemed eligible for citizenship or legal permanent residence based on their TPS status.

Each individual, if they want to transition from Temporary Protected Status to a green card has to qualify within one of the existing green card categories such as marrying a U.S. citizen or having an employer sponsor them, Yale-Loehr explained at the time.  Theres no easier path to a green card for people who have Temporary Protected Status.

Their departure could affect the U.S. economy, too. The Center for Migration Studies also estimates that the labor force participation rate for TPS recipients from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras is between 81 and 88%, above the total U.S. population rate of 63%. The bulk of beneficiaries work in construction, the food services industry, landscaping, child care, and grocery stores.

El Salvadorans would face violence if they were to return to the Central American countrythe State Department has issued a travel warning to U.S. citizens traveling there citing gang violence, high levels of homicide, extortion, and robbery as potential risks. But according to an administration official, that violence did not factor into their decision. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen based her decision on the conditions on the ground as they relate to the 2001 earthquake that led President Bush to grant protection initially, an official said. The Department of Homeland Security is now saying it would be up to Congress to institute a permanent fix and the 18 month delay gives them time to do so.
Board shows many flight cancellations and delays following a bomb cyclone in Boston, Massachusetts.

During the first week of 2018, the East Coast was pummeled with strong winds and several inches of snow thanks to a meteorological phenomenon called a Bomb Cyclone. While millions of New Yorkers and New Englanders rode the storm out huddled at home, I was one of the unlucky travelers stranded in the airport. Over the course of two days, I had three canceled flights and incurred unplanned expenses for lodging and food.

For as much as I travel, this was the first time that I had been stranded in an airport for more than a couple of hours.

The silver lining is that I walked away from this stressful situation armed with some new travel strategies. Here are some tips to remember the next time mother nature gets in the way of your travel plans.

Hold your flight, then call

I talked to five different American Airlines agents on the phone during my two days of delays. It was a frustrating experience until I talked with an agent named Vera, who armed me with one foolproof hack that changed everything.

During snow storms and other periods of inclement weather, seat availability changes from second to second. In some cases you can manage your flight digitally, but other times you may have to jump on the phone and rebook with the airline. This means that a flight youve found on your own may disappear by the time you get through to speak to an agent.

To prevent this, Vera told me to select my desired flight through the app (or desktop if youre on a computer), and go through the booking process. This will hold your seat. Right before you click confirm, call the airline and have them book it for you. This keeps you from incurring any additional costs.

I used this tactic to secure my final flight back to New York, and was shocked that it actually worked. When I called the reservation line, the agent said, Wow, there is just one seat left on that flight, and I knew the hack had worked!

Call the right number

After my first flight was canceled in Dallas, I called the generic airline number to rebook my itinerary. While I was hoping to speak with an agent right away, I was met with an automated message informing me of a 2-hour wait time. Then, out of the blue, an American Airlines employee handed me a card with the phone number to a separate reservations line. Within five minutes I had talked to a human and rebooked my flight.

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Even if youre waiting in the customer service line at the airport (which was hours long in my case), dont be afraid to pop up to the front and ask the agent for a number to call. In the case of American Airlines, they had the information readily available, but didnt have time to pass it out to everyone in line. So take matters into your own hands and ask for the best number to call.

Download the apps

After your flight is canceled, some airlines will allow you to rebook your own itinerary. The easiest way to do this is through the app. All of your information is already on file, and its easy to browse through flight options and update your itinerary. Ive done this dozens of times in the past, but during the Bomb Cyclone, the American Airlines app wouldnt let me rebook my itinerary. Still, it can save you a lot of aggravation when it works.

Ask for discounts

Be sure to ask for hotel discounts if your travel is delayed.

Unfortunately, airlines are not responsible for your lodging and meals if a flight is delayed for circumstances out of their control, like weather. Still, many airlines will work with travelers by offering discounts at certain hotels and restaurants. A good airline agent will offer you these discounts  but if they dont, dont be afraid to ask.

Even with the discounts (American Airlines offered me 35% off a nightly hotel room rate), you may still be able to find cheaper accommodations. Personally, I used the app HotelTonight, which is designed to offer the lowest rates for last-minute bookings. I found unbelievable deals on this app, including hotels with free airport shuttles and complimentary meals.

Check your credit card for coverage

Its important to read the fine print if you booked your flight with a credit card.

Many cards have insurance included if your trip is canceled or interrupted. For instance, Chase Sapphire reimburses users if a portion of your trip that you purchased with the card is interrupted. Specifically, the issuer will reimburse you for travel expenses (tickets, hotels) you have to cancel because your trip was delayed. This only applies to pre-paid expenses, not new expenses. If you rebook and reuse your old itinerary, Chase covers the change fee (but not fare difference). The maximum amount you could reimbursed is $10,000.

Your credit card can also help with new expenses. With Chase Sapphire, travelers can request reimbursement up to $500 for expenses like hotels, taxis and meals caused by a weather or mechanical delay.

The American Express Platinum and Citi Prestige credit cards have similar perks, so be sure to read through your guide of benefits before your next trip.

Buy insurance

The decision to purchase insurance is always personal, but its worth considering if youre flying at a time when weather can be unpredictable  like hurricane season.

In my case, I opted to buy insurance because I know that flying in December often involves canceled flights. I paid $15 for my plan with Allianz, which provides $500 for expenses during a trip delay. While I struggled to rebook my flight back to New York, I spent $200 on hotels and about $75 on meals. Now that Im back home, its nice to know that I will get all of that money back.

Buying insurance doesnt always pay off, but it sure is sweet when it does.

Brittany is a reporter at Yahoo Finance.

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Germany is eager to find out if Merkel can form a 'grand coalition' with the opposition - DPA

Angela Merkel has warned it will take enormous work to break Germanys three-month political deadlock and form a new coalition government, as she headed into fresh negotiations with the countrys second largest party yesterday.

"I think that it can be done. We will work very swiftly and very intensively," she told journalists as she arrived at the headquarters of the Social Democrats (SPD) for the first day of exploratory meetings, which are expected to last until the end of the week.

"I am going into these talks with optimism, she said. At the same time it is clear to me that we will have an enormous piece of work in front of us over the next few days but we are willing to take it on and to bring a good result."

Mrs Merkel is hoping to form a coalition government with the SPD, more than three months after the general election in which her party was the largest party, but without a majority vote.

The two parties governed together from 2013-2017 in a so-called grand coalition of left and right, however, negotiations are unlikely to go without challenges.

Graphic: Germanys political spectrum

Initially, Martin Schulz, leader of SPD, refused to contemplate joining another alliance with Mrs Merkel, after his party suffered its worst ever result since World War Two in the federal election.

Mr Schulz only made a U-turn, agreeing to talks, after he was threatened with a possible leadership challenge from members of his party, following the breakdown of negotiations between Mrs Merkel and two smaller parties in November.

Immigration policy is likely to be a sticking point in the talks. Mr Schulz has said he is in favour of allowing the family members of some refugees to join them in Germany whereas Mrs Merkels conservative coalition want tougher immigration policies.

Mrs Merkels open-door policy in 2015, when more than a million refugees and other migrants arrived in Europe, is blamed by her party for losing votes to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

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Mr Schulz has also called for a United States of Europe, which could prove problematic for CSU and CSU politicians, and for compulsory state health insurance for all.

However, as he headed into talks with Mrs Merkel, Mr Schulz said he hoped for constructive and open talks, and noted that the German people deserve to see quick progress.

Were not going to draw lines in the sand, but we want to push through as many (of our) policies as possible, he said. A new coalition government is not expected to be formed before March or April.
In an exceedingly tense interview Sunday morning, a top White House aide continued to deride a new book about the Trump administration while simultaneously downplaying Steve Bannons role in it and defending President Trumps tweets about his intelligence.

CNNs Jake Tapper, who was conducting the interview with White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller, cut the conversation off after 12 and a half minutes, telling Miller he was spewing rhetoric solely to gain approval from the President. Theres one viewer that you care about right now and youre being obsequious in order to please him, Tapper said. I think Ive wasted enough of my viewers time.

During the interview, Miller characterized the new book about the Trump administration, Fire and Fury, which was released Jan. 5, as a work of very poorly written fiction.

The author is a garbage author of a garbage book, said Miller, explaining that the depiction of the President was contrary to his own experience.

The book contains several explosive allegations, particularly from former White House chief strategist and chief campaign executive Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian attorney in the summer of 2016 was treasonous, and insinuated that Trump had met with the Russians that day. (Miller, who was working for the campaign at the time, said he did not know anything about that meeting). Trump publicly broke with Bannon last week after the remarks were publicized before the books publication.

Its tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive, said Miller. It reads like an angry vindictive person spouting off to a highly discredible author.

When Tapper pressed Miller about Bannons influence in the Trump administration and his role in implementing the first version of the the travel ban, Miller said Bannons involvement was minimal, despite the description in Wolffs book that he wanted the rollout on a Friday so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.

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His role has been greatly exaggerated whereas the President hasnt gotten the due for he deserves for the movement that he put together to tap in to the kinds of people whose life concerns dont get a lot of attention on CNN, said Miller.

Miller also staunchly defended the Presidents tweets Saturday morning, in which he defended himself as a very stable genius and said his two greatest assets throughout his life have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.

It happens to be a true statement, Miller said of the characterization. A self-made billionaire who has revolutionized reality T.V. and has changed the course of our politics.

Im sure hes watching and he will be happy that you said that, Tapper replied.

Shortly after the interview aired, Trump confirmed Tappers prediction. Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky! he wrote on Twitter.
London (AFP) - British police have detained a French businessman as part of a long-running investigation into suspected Libyan financing of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign, officials said on Monday.

Alexandre Djouhri, the subject of a European arrest warrant, was apprehended at Heathrow Airport on Sunday and remanded in custody after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Monday.

A spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police confirmed Djouhri's arrest "under a European arrest warrant".

"The warrant was issued by French authorities for offences of fraud and money laundering," the spokesman added.

A court official said Djouhri would remain in custody at least until another court appearance on Wednesday at which "he could be released on bail or could be kept in prison" pending a formal extradition hearing.

Djouhri has been a focus of the inquiry, opened in 2013 by judges investigating claims by former Libyan ruler Moamer Kadhafi and his son Seif al-Islam that they provided funds for Sarkozy's election effort.

But Djouhri, well known among France's rightwing political establishment and a close associate of Sarkozy, has refused to respond to summons for questioning in Paris.

Formerly employed by the French environmental services group Vivendi Environnement, now Veolia, he is often described as a go-between for deals involving water systems, trash collection and oil.

- Cash-filled suitcases -

In 2016, the former president's links with Kadhafi came under heightened scrutiny after another businessman, Ziad Takieddine, admitted delivering three cash-stuffed suitcases from the Libyan leader for Sarkozy's first presidential bid.

In a media interview, Takieddine said he had made three trips from Tripoli to Paris in late 2006 and early 2007, each time carrying a suitcase containing 1.5 billion to 2 billion euros ($1.8 to $2.4 billion).

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the claims of vindictive Libyan regime members furious over his participation in the military intervention that ended Kadhafi's 41-year rule.

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French investigators expanded their investigation in 2016 to suspicions of embezzlement in the 2009 sale of a villa in the French Alps, for around 10 million euros, to a Libya investment fund managed by Bashir Saleh.

Djouhri is suspected of being the true owner of the villa, which was sold at a "very inflated" price, a source close to the inquiry told AFP.

Both men failed to heed summons for questioning issued by the anti-corruption investigators in September 2016.

Investigators also suspect Djouhri of helping Saleh get out of France in spring 2012, as he faced a Libyan arrest warrant a few months after Kadhafi's overthrow.

Saleh, Kadhafi's former chief and staff and manager of Libya's multi-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, eventually escaped to South Africa, and has been sought since then.

In a series of conversations caught by wiretap, Djouhri can be heard promising to send judges a letter whereby Saleh would deny any Libyan financing of Sarkozy's campaign.
As we get closer to a world where the car is doing most of the driving, traditional automakers are trying to figure out what passengers will be doing when they're not driving. Car startup Byton thinks it already knows what people want -- and and unlike most automakers isn't burdened by tradition while it builds its electric SUV of the future.

Byton showed off the near-production version of its upcoming electric SUV at CES. According to the company, the "Concept" (which will start at 300,000 in China or approximately $45,000) is "85 percent" done and will launch in China in 2019 and the United States and Europe in 2020.

The slick-looking car (and it does look slick with no door handles or mirrors) rolled onto the stage amid flashing lights and loud music. In addition to slightly futuristic-looking head and tail lights, there's a thin spiderweb of illumination on the front and rear of the SUV that can be used to convey the car's status to pedestrians. There are facial recognition cameras in the B-pillars (the pillar between the front and rear side windows) that are used to unlock the car. Those missing mirrors have been replaced by cameras (if allowed by regulators) that are merged with rear-view camera to create a panoramic view of the world behind the car on the dash.

The company is going for futuristic without being polarizing. It wants a vehicle everyone likes to look at that's also sleeker than other SUVs on the market.

But it's not the outside that really counts with Byton (even though I'm actually a fan of the design). The interior and systems it houses are what the automaker is hoping will make its vehicles stand out from the rest of the automotive world. It's about changing the experience of driving. Byton CEO Dr. Carsten Breitfeld told Engadget that "if you want to create something new then you have to change the paradigm."

That change includes a gigantic 40-inch Shared Experience Display that runs the width of the dash, and front seats that swivel towards the center by 12 degrees, so passengers in the back have a clearer view of the screen. Optional rear displays will also be available at launch.

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Controlling the infotainment system, climate control and media are handled by gestures, thanks to a camera installed in the dash. The driver can also use their voice or a touchscreen tablet installed in the steering wheel. It's basically an Android tablet that can be used as such when the car's doing all the driving.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The vehicle also has facial-recognition sensors in the dash for driver profiles. But it's more than just setting up your seat the way you like it and tuning to your favorite station -- it's part of Byton's mobility plan. Your facial data and vehicle info (Byton ID) can be sent to the cloud if you prefer, and when you enter another Byton vehicle, the car conforms to your preferences. So if these cars end up in a local shared fleet or as part of a nationwide rental company, the Byton automobile you sit in will adjust to your liking. That, like the rest of the features, sounds great. And it's not all that far-fetched.

Audi, BMW and other automakers are investigating how to keep drivers and passengers entertained when their cars are driving themselves. What Byton is hopes is that its lack of car-building history means they can build something from scratch that appeals to automotive enthusiasts and and gadget fans alike

CES and Silicon Valley are littered with the crushed dreams of automotive startups. At last year's CES, Faraday Future showed off its FF 91 SUV and has since bled executives while toning down its launch and factory-building plans.

Even the companies that are succeeding, like Tesla, are finding it difficult to bring a car to the market at scale. Building one car is easy. Building 100,000 cars is harder than people realize.

Breitfeld says that Byton has learned from the mistakes of those who came before them. He also notes that the core of the company comes from the auto industry including his 20 years with BMW. Before he left the German automaker he was project manager for the i8.

The company will build its cars in China where it's easier to get a factory up and running than in the United States. It's also launching in China first with level 3 autonomy in its SUV. The US and European market will see the car sometime in 2020. While level 4 autonomy is expected to roll out to the cars via a software update in 2021.

The Concept will have a range of 250 miles for the rear-wheel drive version and 325 miles for the all-wheel drive version, with 71 and 95kWh battery packs respectively. Both vehicles will support fast charging to 80 percent in 35 minutes or less. And even though it's not supposed to be that important, the entry level SUV will have 272 horsepower while the more powerful version will push out 476. Even if you're a fan of an immersive user experience, you still might want to go fast.

All those specs are for naught if the company can't deliver. It sounds like Byton is on the right track, but a lot of other new car companies seemed ready to take on the automotive world, only to fizzle out.

On stage at the company's CES launch event, vice president of marketing Henrick Wenders talked at length about the user experience; a new way people will be transported from point A to B. People clapped when they were supposed to and as the vehicle appeared on stage, and we all pulled out our cameras. We're either taking photos of the future or something we'll never see again.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.
SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Costa Rican authorities raided the offices of Nature Air on Monday, part of the investigation into a New Year's Eve plane crash that killed two Costa Rican pilots and 10 Americans. Chief investigator Walter Espinoza told reporters that the offices of Costa Rica's civil aviation agency were also raided, describing both operations as routine to collect information. He said it is still too soon to speculate on what caused the Cessna 208B Grand Caravan to plummet from the sky shortly after takeoff in the mountainous area off the Punta Islita beach town in the province of Guanacaste, about 140 miles (230 km) west of the capital San Jose. Enio Cubillo, the director of the civil aviation agency, said last week that it could take months to determine the cause of a plane crash. He said experts from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, along with representatives from Cessna, the company that made the plane, are assisting with the probe. Investigators are focusing on the weather conditions at the time of the crash, possible mechanical failures and human error. (Reporting by Enrique Andres Pretel and David Alire Garcia; editing by Grant McCool)
LONDON (Reuters) - A couple, who met on a dating site and began researching how to make homemade explosives and the deadly poison ricin, were found guilty on Monday of plotting Islamic State-inspired chemical and bomb attacks on Britain. Munir Hassan Mohammed, 37, from Derby in central England, began sharing extremist material within weeks of meeting Londoner Rowaida El-Hassan, 32, who in turn helped him find information on making ricin. "This then rapidly escalated and El-Hassan, a qualified pharmacist, readily passed on her knowledge to Mohammed giving him the technical assistance he needed in preparing for a terrorist attack," said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Greenwood. "Although we do not know what Mohammed and El-Hassan's exact intentions were, a number of concerning items had already been purchased and the pair had done extensive research regarding making TATP (acetone peroxide) and ricin." When arrested Mohammed already had two of the ingredients needed to make the highly unstable TATP, known as the "mother of Satan", which was used by a suicide bomber in an attack on a pop concert at the Manchester Arena last May, killing 22 children and adults, one of four deadly attacks in Britain last year. Prosecutors said the couple had met on internet dating site, singlemuslim.com. "I am looking for a man I can vibe with on a spiritual and intellectual level. Someone who can teach me new things and inspire me," El-Hassan wrote on her dating profile. She sent messages to him on the WhatsApp messaging service with links to websites with details on making ricin. He sent back her graphic videos of IS beheadings, shootings and killing prisoners using explosives. When police arrested him in Dec. 2016, Mohammed, who worked in a food factory making meals for supermarkets, possessed instruction manuals on mobile phone detonators, ricin and how to make explosives, prosecutors said. He had also contacted an IS commander via Facebook and offered to carry out a "lone actor" mission. Mohammed, who the BBC reported was Eritrean-born and had come to Britain from Sudan as an asylum seeker, and El-Hassan were both found guilty of preparing for act of terrorism at London's Old Bailey court and will be sentenced next month. (Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Kate Holton)
Gary Oldman won his first-ever Golden Globe on Sunday night, snagging the prize for Best Performance By an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the film Darkest Hour. He accepted the award while dressed in all black and wearing a Times Up pin as symbols of protest against sexual harassment and gender inequality.

But some viewers were quick to point out that Oldman has been accused of domestic abuse, and many blasted the Globes for honoring the actor.

gary oldman, an abuser, just won a golden globe while wearing a times up pin. incredible  f (@surfinginthesky) January 8, 2018

Gary Oldman is an abuser, next.  Michelle Collins (@michcoll) January 8, 2018

Timothee Chalamet gave the performance of the year and Gary Oldman beat his wife in the face with a telephone  Simon Curtis (@simoncurtis) January 8, 2018

Once again, the Golden Globes prove their concern is only performative- how do you give an award to known domestic abuser, Gary Oldman, and speak out the side of your mouth about justice for women  Nerdy POC (@nerdypoc) January 8, 2018

Oldmans ex-wife Donya Fiorentino said in 2001 that the actor had attacked her in front of their children.

As I picked up the phone to call the police, Gary put his hand on my neck and squeezed, she said of the alleged incident, according to the New York Daily News. I backed away, with the phone receiver in my hand. I tried to dial 911. Gary grabbed the phone receiver from my hand, and hit me in the face with the telephone receiver three or four times. Both of the children were crying.

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Oldman denied the allegations, and was awarded sole custody of the couples two children after a custody battle. The actors manager told The Washington Post in November that the assault never happened and charges were never filed.

Also in November, Daily Beast writer Ira Madison wrote a piece about Oldmans dark past, describing problematic comments the actor had made.

In a 2014 Playboy interview, for example, Oldman defended Mel Gibsons anti-Semitic comments and Alec Baldwin using a homophobic slur. He also used a sexist slur to refer to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

If I called Nancy Pelosi a c**t  and Ill go one better, a fucking useless c**t  I cant really say that. But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobodys going to stop them from working because of it, Oldman told the magazine. Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian. He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, You fag? I dont get it.

Were all fucking hypocrites, he later added. Thats what I think about it. The policeman who arrested [Gibson] has never used the word n****r or that fucking Jew? Im being brutally honest here. Its the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.

A reminder what Gary Oldman said to Playboy in 2014......#GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/bHGf6YCsy7  Yashar Ali  (@yashar) January 8, 2018

When he accepted his Golden Globe on Sunday, Oldman talked about how desperately the world needs to undergo change.

It was great that words and actions could change the world  and boy, oh boy, could it use some change [now], the actor said while praising Churchill and his ability to inspire a nation with his words.

Madison argued in his piece that real change in Hollywood can only occur when men like Oldman are taken to task for their behavior.

Its not just that Oldman makes excuses for bad behavior in Hollywood; its that hes been accused of engaging in bad behavior himself and called others hypocritical for being offended, he wrote. At some point, change will mean addressing all of Hollywoods ghosts  not just the ones who are cartoonishly monstrous like [Harvey] Weinstein and [Kevin] Spacey.

Also on HuffPost

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Democratic donor Tom Steyer -- the billionaire behind a high-profile Trump impeachment campaign -- announced a plan on Monday to take back Congress from the current Republican majority.

Rolling out a $30 million "NextGen Rising" initiative aimed at increasing millennial voter turnout, Steyer says he's willing to do whatever it takes to "save our country."

"I'm going to continue to work on the grass-roots efforts we had in place, and amplify them, and make them bigger," Steyer said during a Monday press conference. We're going to register voters, then encourage them to participate. That means we want to talk about issues people care most about. We need to  just go back and look at millennial turnout in 2014, the last midterms. Its shocking how low it was."

RELATED: Rising political stars to watch in 2018



Steyer first entered the political sphere with his NextGen Climate push in 2013, and soon became a figure many thought would run for Congress or a Gubernatorial seat. Despite Steyer's increased visibility due to his "Need to Impeach" efforts, Steyer says he will not be running for office himself.

"People have been asking me for 12 months and five days what Im going to run for," Steyer said in a pre-press conference interview on Monday. "Im not going to run for anything. Ive said all along, the question I always ask is: Where can I make the most differential impact? And when I look at the jobs I can run for in California, they all have reputable Democrats running for them already."

NextGen Rising will target GOP-held congressional seats and a number of swing seats in states including Florida, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Even as Steyer rolled out his new campaign surrounding the young vote, the donor is still firing on all cylinders when it comes to criticism of President Donald Trump and his administration. In the wake of Michael Wolff's explosive "Fire and Fury" release, Steyer recently said he has bought a copy of the book for every member of Congress, and would be working with citizens to have the books personally delivered.
Protesters gathered in front of the White House in Washington on January 8 to defend TPS, or Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador nationals living in the US, after the Trump administration announced that the designation will end.

Salvadoran nationals residing in the US under TPS, a protection extended in 2001 after earthquakes struck the country, will have until September 9, 2019, to leave or become legal residents another way, according to reports.

The administration also recently announced the retraction of TPS for nationals of Haiti and Honduras. Credit: Instagram/Janis Contreras via Storyful
Donald Trumps lawyers are reportedly discussing ways in which the President could be interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Muellers probe into alleged ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Expecting that Mr Mueller will ask to interview Mr Trump, the Presidents legal team is discussing a range of options for the format of such an interview, such as written responses to questions in lieu of a formal sit-down, according to NBC News.

Politico reported last year that Mr Trumps cadre of attorneys wanted the President to be interviewed by Mr Mueller, believing that it could help the special counsel finish his investigation faster and dispel the allegations that Mr Trump committed any wrongdoing.

Mr Mueller is trying to determine if Mr Trumps campaign advisers colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

That investigation also reportedly involves a probe into whether the President obstructed justice when he allegedly asked ex-FBI director James Comey to drop an inquiry into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Mr Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, becoming the first senior White House official to cut a cooperation deal in Mr Muellers inquiry.

As the White House has been increasingly cooperating with Mr Muellers investigative team, there has been mounting anxiety  and disagreement  about how to respond to the prosecutors demands.

NBC reported on Monday that the Presidents lawyers are looking for clarification on whether Mr Trump would be interviewed directly by Mr Mueller, as well as the legal standard for when a president can be interviewed, the location of a possible interview, the topics, and how long the discussion could last. But the Presidents team could also be hoping to avoid an interview altogether.

There is also a question over whether Mr Trump could just sign an affidavit affirming that he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

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A meeting with Mr Mueller could pose serious risks for Mr Trump, as it would expose him to questions over some of his most controversial actions as president, including his firing of Mr Comey and his possible obstruction of justice.

Even if he has nothing to hide, Mr Trump has demonstrated a willingness to bend the truth  a quality that could cause headaches for his legal team.

The White House originally attributed Mr Trumps decision to fire Mr Comey as a result of the former FBI directors handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton. But in an interview with NBC two days after the firing, Mr Trump tied his actions directly to the FBIs Russia probe. Mr Comey had been leading the investigation for the bureau at the time he was dismissed.

In June 2017, Mr Trump told reporters he was 100 percent willing to testify under oath about alleged Russian ties to his campaign. He has also repeatedly denied allegations of collusion and has referred to the probes being conducted by congressional committees and Mr Mueller as a witch hunt and a hoax.
Donald Trump's days finish around 6pm, according to his private schedule: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

President Donald Trumps official schedule has shrunk significantly since the start of his presidency, reportedly to make time for more tweeting and television.

The US President demanded more "executive time," according to private schedules obtained by Axios, which officials said "almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence".

The schedules say Mr Trump has "executive time" in the Oval Office each day between 8am and 11am, according to Axios. Schedules sent to the White House press pool routinely show Mr Trump's first meeting beginning at 11am.

Former President George W Bush usually arrived at the Oval Office by 6.45am, while Barack Obama preferred to work out and got to the office between 9am and 10am.

Mr Trump's days are also shorter than during the early days of his administration, Axios reports, and finish around 6pm when he returns to his residence. Schedules released to the press show Mr Trump's last meeting of the day has routinely begun between 1 and 4pm.

The President's schedule for last Thursday  the day before he departed for a retreat with Congressional leaders  showed his last meeting at 3:30 pm, with the Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to the report by saying the President always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during his so-called executive time.

The President is one of the hardest workers I've ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long, she said. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him."

Mr Trump's penchant for TV and Twitter is well-documented, with the New York Times reporting he spends an average of four hours a day  and sometimes double that  watching television. The President regularly sends early-morning tweets based on news he likely saw on television, such as the firing of the Today Show's Matt Lauer, which he tweeted about five minutes after it appeared on Fox and Friends.

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But Mr Trump has strongly denied spending much of his time watching TV, even lashing out at journalists who reported on the subject. After the Times report was published, Mr Trump lashed out on Twitter, calling it "bad reporting" from the "failing @nytimes".

On a trip to Asia in November, the President insisted that he "do[es} not watch much television".

"People that dont know me, they like to say I watch television  people with fake sources," he told reporters on Air Force One. "You know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I dont get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. Im reading documents. A lot."
Donald Trump is said to not start work until 11am before finishing at 6pm (Rex)

Donald Trump has one of the most important jobs in the world, but refuses to give up his lie-ins and clocks in fewer hours than the standard working day, according to reports.

The President is said to not start work until 11am every day and clocks off to go home by 6pm after a seven-hour shift.

According to Axios, Trump likes to have a morning lie-in so he can watch television and get on with trolling the world on Twitter.

Reports claim the President likes to spend his morning watching television and tweeting (Rex)

The site claims that the start of Trumps working hours are known as Executive Time, which is meant to take place in the Oval Office but actually takes place in the White House residence.

By comparison, former President Barack Obama would arrive in the Oval Office between 9am and 10am after a morning workout.

Trump is said to have a meeting or two during his time at work but spends a good deal of time making phone calls and watching cable news in the dining room adjoining the Oval, according to sources.

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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit back at the claims, describing Trump as one of the hardest workers Ive ever seen.

She said: The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time.

It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him.

Trumps Executive Time is meant to take place in the Oval Office (Rex)

Trump has previously denied spending up to eight hours a day watching television.

He said last year: I dont get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. Im reading documents. A lot.

I actually read much more  I read you people much more than I watch television.
The Trump administration has declined to renew the temporary protected status of Salvadoran immigrants to the US, giving an estimated 263,000 people less than two years to leave the country or be deported.

The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation has allowed immigrants from El Salvador to live and work in the US since 2001, when a pair of earthquakes crippled much of the Central American nation.

Immigrants will have until September 2019 to leave the country or find other means of lawful residency, according to multiple news reports.

In a letter to Congress members, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said conditions in El Salvador had improved significantly since 2001, rendering the original justification for the protected status void.

Congress now has 18 months to pass legislation protecting Salvadoran immigrants or their legal status will be revoked, according to a letter first seen by The Washington Post.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) occasionally grants protected status to immigrants from countries where conditions prevent the countrys nationals from returning safely, or where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately. The designation must be renewed in six, 12 or 18-month periods.

Every president since George W Bush has extended the protected status of Salvadorans, allowing many to create permanent lives within the US. More than half of all Salvadoran immigrants have lived in the US for 20 years or more, according to the Centre for Migration Studies. 10 per cent are married to a legal resident.

Amanda Baran, a consultant to the Immigrant Legal Resource Centre, called Mondays decision reckless and heartless.

El Salvador is one of the worlds most dangerous countries, and will be unable to absorb the return of these thousands of people whose lives are inextricably intertwined with those of ours here in the United States, she said in a statement.

Amnesty International also decried the decision, claiming the US "could be sending people to their deaths".

Story continues

More than 1,000 people died and thousands more lost their homes in the 2001 earthquake in El Salvador. While the country has since rebuilt, poverty and gang violence remain rampant.

El Salvador was ranked the third most dangerous nation on the globe by the World Economic Forum in 2017. The countrys homicide rate remains one of the highest in the world, with a reported 80.94 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016.

The Obama administration cited drought, poverty and widespread gang violence  among other things  as reasons for renewing the TPS in 2016.

El Salvadorans were the largest group receiving protected status in the US, followed by some 86,000 Hondurans, whose fate is still unclear. The Trump administration rescinded protections for approximately 45,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans last year.
At least eight migrants died and 86 others were rescued Saturday from a smugglers' rubber dinghy after it starting sinking in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya, the Italian coast guard said.

The Italian coast guard, which coordinates rescues in international waters off Libya's coast, said an aircraft on patrol for a European anti-smuggling operation had spotted the dinghy, which was in difficulty Saturday.

All eight victims were female, the coastguard said. A spokesman said survivors told rescuers that roughly 150 migrants were aboard when the dinghy was launched from Libya's coast.

Proactiva Open Arms, a Spanish humanitarian group that is one of the few NGOs which still operate their own rescue ships outside Libyan waters, said some of the migrants had spent hours in the water before being saved.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have reached Italy in the last few years after being rescued in the central Mediterranean from traffickers' unseaworthy boats. Some 119,000 migrants arrived that way in Italy in 2017. The International Organization of Migration also recorded more than 3,100 deaths among migrants making the Mediterranean crossing in 2017.

North African migrant routes

Since last summer, the number of migrants coming across the Mediterranean has dropped after the Libyan coast guard, trained and aided by the Italian military, started more aggressively intercepting smugglers' boats shortly after they were launched.

The deaths in the Mediterranean came as more than 200 sub-Saharan Africa migrants seeking to get to Europe stormed over a high double fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla on Saturday.

Mobile phone footage broadcast by Spanish media showed a group of migrants running through the streets of the city. They have since been taken to a migrant detention centre.

The number of migrants to reach Spain in 2017 hit a record high of nearly 22,900, according to EU border agency Frontex, amid concerns that a new migration route is opening up.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte are welcomed on the tarmac by children upon their arrival at Beijing's Capital Airport on January 8, 2018. - AFP

President Emmanuel Macron of France has responded to China's "panda diplomacy" by offering counterpart Xi Jinping a horse of the elite Republic Guard.

The offer of Vesuvius, an eight-year old brown gelding from the presidential cavalry corps, came as Mr Macron embarked on a three-day visit to China with his wife Brigitte.

The French First Lady in November became the godmother of a baby panda lent by Beijing to a zoo near Paris.

The choice of the horse was an "unprecedented diplomatic gesture" according to the French presidency; it came after the Chinese president heaped praise on the 104 horsemen who escorted him during his last visit to Paris in 2014.

"It mattered a lot for the president, even if it was very complicated to import a horse for sanitary reasons. It's a symbol of French excellence," said an Elysee official. The horse, which was flown in a special plane, is currently stuck in quarantine.

It came with a special harness and sword from Mr Macron.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte pose with China's President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan during their meeting in Beijing, China January 8, 2018 Credit: REUTERS

France has become accustomed to its young new leader's attention to symbols and historical references.

He wowed US president Donald Trump by inviting him to attend France's Bastille Day military parade down the Champs-Elysees last July to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the US entry into World War One.

Before that, Russia's president Vladimir Putin was treated to the pomp of Versailles, the palace of Sun King Louis XIV.

Xing Hua, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, told The Telegraph there was nothing "strange" about the gift.

"The horse is an animal which means running, rolling ahead ceaselessly. I think the president sees China as a country which develops rapidly like a horse," he said. By comparison, Mr Macron's political movement, En Marche, refers more to a stroll than a trot.

Perhaps controversially, Mr Hua also pointed out that President Macron's Chinese name is Ma-Ke-Long, which means "horse vanquishes dragon".

Story continues

Still from a video presenting Vesuve de Brekka (or Vesuvius), the Republican Guard horse gifted by French president Emmanuel Macron to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping Credit: Telegraph

That didn't stop Lu Kang, foreign ministry spokesperson, saying: "China expresses its thanks and appreciation for the friendly act by the French side."

Mr Macron kicked off his visit in the northern city of Xian where he called on China and Europe to work together on Beijing's "Belt and Road" initiative - a $1 trillion investment project aiming to build a modern-day "Silk Road" - as Theresa May prepares to visit Beijing to forge closer economic ties for the UK.

He is then due to head back to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping.

Belt and Road aims to link Asia, Africa and much of Europe with massive infrastructure projects.

It has been seen as a major part of Mr Xis drive to position China at the heart of a new world order, but some have expressed concerns it signifies Chinas expansionist ambitions.

Mr Macron, who is travelling with 60 French business executives, said France and Europe should join the new initiative.

Vesuve de Brekka (or Vesuvius), the Republican Guard horse gifted by French president Emmanuel Macron to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping

But he warned: "They cannot be the roads of a new hegemony that will put the countries that they traverse in a vassal state. Multilateralism means balanced cooperation."

Mr Macron also called on Europe and China, the world's top polluter, to team up on curbing climate change in the face of the US decision to withdraw from the Paris accord.

"China kept its word," he said, referring to its respect of the COP 21 accord. "You demonstrate your immense sense of responsibility."

Cooperation will "show the world that the French and Chinese are capable of making our planet great and beautiful again", he said in Chinese.

UK chancellor Phillip Hammond last year pitched Britain as a natural partner for the scheme, as he sought new opportunities for post-Brexit trade. Mrs May is expected to visit Beijing later this month for a long-delayed trip aimed at boosting trade ties between China and the UK.

Additional reporting by Christine Wei
Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's ethics watchdog on Monday cleared Finance Minister Bill Morneau of accusations that he illegally profitted from his own tax policies when he sold shares in his family business.

Opposition parties had asked parliament's independent ethics commissioner, Mary Dawson, to probe the sale of shares in Morneau Shepell in late 2015, days before a major tax announcement that sent the company's stock price spiralling downward.

In a letter to Morneau seen by AFP, Dawson said: "I am of the view that (Morneau) did not benefit from insider information."

She notes that the increase in income taxes on the country's highest earners that precipitated the share sell-off had been part of the ruling Liberals' election platform and was also touted in the media a month prior to Morneau dumping his shares, which were worth millions of dollars.

In a separate review, Dawson also cleared Morneau of allegations that he pressed the Bank of Canada to renew its contract with Morneau Sheppell to manage its employee pensions last year.

"I am satisfied that, as minister of finance, you had no involvement in the Bank of Canada's decision of the renewal of the Morneau Shepell Inc. contract," she said.

In the last months of 2017, Morneau had been a drag on his Liberal party's popularity, which started with a backlash over proposed changes to Canada's small business tax regime.

Almost daily attacks from opposition benches ensued over his failure to disclose his full holdings to the ethics commissioner after he took office, including a villa in southern France.

Morneau defended his actions as simple administrative failures.

It all came to a boiling point at the end of November when Morneau was accused of insider trading, which he angrily rejected.
James Damore, a former Google engineer who wrote a controversial memo criticizing the companys diversity policies, sued the company on Monday for allegedly discriminating against white male conservatives.

Lawyers for Damore and David Gudeman, another former engineer, filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California that charges Google discriminated against employees for their perceived conservative political views. Harmeet K. Dhillon, the committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California, is representing the two men.

Googles open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law, the lawsuit says. Googles management goes to extreme  and illegal  lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google.

A spokesperson for Google did not immediately respond to TIMEs request for comment.

In August, Google employees spoke out against Damores internal memo, which said that biological gender differences make women less effective programmers and argued the company suppressed conservative voices. Google condemned Damores document, and he was subsequently fired.

In recent years, the company has made efforts to increase the diversity of its workforce. In 2017, Google reported that 91% of its employees were white or Asian, while women accounted for 31% of its global workforce. In September, three former female Google employees filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the company, alleging systematic pay discrimination at the company.
Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has taken a positive view of U.S President Donald Trump's tweets on North Korea . Speaking to CNBC on Monday on the sidelines of the UBS China Conference in Shanghai, Ban downplayed concerns about what many have called Trump's reckless rhetoric in response to President Kim Jong Un's ballistic missile tests.Trump's tweets, in which he mocked the North Korean leader and called him "rocket man," among other things, have caused significant controversy and sparked fears of escalation."There is a tendency to see President Trump's remarks as very provocative rhetoric. But I would like to interpret that in another way  these are strong words and (a) message of (the) international community given to North Korea," Ban said.Tweet1Ban's comments came ahead of what is set to be a momentous meeting between North and South Korean leaders in the border town of Panmunjom on Tuesday  more than two years since the last government-level talks were held. The proposal for talks originally came from South Korean President Moon Jae-In, who took office in May 2017 on the promise of opening dialogue with the North.The upcoming talks represent an important effort to quell hostile activities near the countries' shared border; they take on a sense of urgency following the unprecedented pace of North Korean missile development in recent months. Ban, who is South Korean, described the current climate on the peninsula as possibly at its most tense since the end of the Korean War in 1953.Unprecedented escalation Pyongyang has fired 23 missiles during 16 tests since the start of 2017, conducting its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in July, which it claimed could reach "anywhere in the world." These claims have been disputed by Western security officials. But Kim Jong Un has now tested more missiles than his father and grandfather combined, according to a report by CNN. "North Korea is the worst norm-breaker of the international community," Ban said. "It is important that, whether it is called Trump rhetoric or not, we must be united in sending out a very strong message to North Korea so that they realize there is no other way for them to return to the international community as a responsible member (than by) abiding by all of these basic norms and principles of the United Nations Charter."The UN Security Council has imposed nine major sanctions resolutions on North Korea since 2006, in response to its nuclear and missile-related activities."We sincerely hope that after so many years of (this) highest level of tension will lead to a larger and more meaningful dialogue between South and North Korea in addressing a meaningful denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," Ban added.Protecting the Iran nuclear dealBan also talked about the Iran nuclear deal and its fast-approaching January 15 deadline. By that date, the Trump administration will have to decide whether to recertify the deal or not.Ban urged the safeguarding of the deal as an assurance of U.S. credibility, warning that if the Washington didn't follow through on its international agreements, other countries may find little reason to enter into multilateral disarmament deals."I have been urging through certain channels to the U.S. administration that it's important that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) must be kept and implemented faithfully, as agreed among the parties concerned," he said."Otherwise, this may give a very negative message to even North Korea. When trying to agree... on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, how can they have trust in the international community, particularly the U.S., when any agreement could be easily broken by the parties who have agreed on that?" Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has taken a positive view of U.S President Donald Trump's tweets on North Korea . Speaking to CNBC on Monday on the sidelines of the UBS China Conference in Shanghai, Ban downplayed concerns about what many have called Trump's reckless rhetoric in response to President Kim Jong Un's ballistic missile tests. Trump's tweets, in which he mocked the North Korean leader and called him "rocket man," among other things, have caused significant controversy and sparked fears of escalation. "There is a tendency to see President Trump's remarks as very provocative rhetoric. But I would like to interpret that in another way  these are strong words and (a) message of (the) international community given to North Korea," Ban said. Tweet1 Ban's comments came ahead of what is set to be a momentous meeting between North and South Korean leaders in the border town of Panmunjom on Tuesday  more than two years since the last government-level talks were held. The proposal for talks originally came from South Korean President Moon Jae-In, who took office in May 2017 on the promise of opening dialogue with the North. The upcoming talks represent an important effort to quell hostile activities near the countries' shared border; they take on a sense of urgency following the unprecedented pace of North Korean missile development in recent months. Ban, who is South Korean, described the current climate on the peninsula as possibly at its most tense since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Unprecedented escalation Pyongyang has fired 23 missiles during 16 tests since the start of 2017, conducting its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in July, which it claimed could reach "anywhere in the world." These claims have been disputed by Western security officials. But Kim Jong Un has now tested more missiles than his father and grandfather combined, according to a report by CNN. "North Korea is the worst norm-breaker of the international community," Ban said. "It is important that, whether it is called Trump rhetoric or not, we must be united in sending out a very strong message to North Korea so that they realize there is no other way for them to return to the international community as a responsible member (than by) abiding by all of these basic norms and principles of the United Nations Charter." The UN Security Council has imposed nine major sanctions resolutions on North Korea since 2006, in response to its nuclear and missile-related activities. "We sincerely hope that after so many years of (this) highest level of tension will lead to a larger and more meaningful dialogue between South and North Korea in addressing a meaningful denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," Ban added. Protecting the Iran nuclear deal Ban also talked about the Iran nuclear deal and its fast-approaching January 15 deadline. By that date, the Trump administration will have to decide whether to recertify the deal or not. Ban urged the safeguarding of the deal as an assurance of U.S. credibility, warning that if the Washington didn't follow through on its international agreements, other countries may find little reason to enter into multilateral disarmament deals. "I have been urging through certain channels to the U.S. administration that it's important that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) must be kept and implemented faithfully, as agreed among the parties concerned," he said. "Otherwise, this may give a very negative message to even North Korea. When trying to agree... on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, how can they have trust in the international community, particularly the U.S., when any agreement could be easily broken by the parties who have agreed on that?"



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French President Emmanuel Macron was in China on Monday for a three-day state visit designed to bolster economic and political ties between Beijing and the euro zone's second-largest economy.Improving trade and business relations is top of the agenda, with Macron leading a delegation of around 50 top business representatives to China. Like other nations making overtures to Beijing, such as the U.S. and U.K., France is keen to increase its access to China's lucrative markets and consumers. Toulouse-based Airbus (Euronext Paris: AIR-FR) is reportedly offering China an industrial partnership if it places orders for the aircraft manufacturer's largest passenger jet, the A380 . Airbus Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier, who is part of Macron's trade mission, is due to hold talks in China on Monday. Recent reports have suggested that Airbus was ready to phase out production of the A380 due to slow sales, so a deal could be crucial for the company. The visit comes hot on the heels of trade agreements signed between China and France in December that pledged "reciprocal" treatment in terms of commercial relations. China has long been accused of a protectionist approach to its economy, but has said [when?] it will open more markets to foreign investment. Speaking in the city of Xi'an on Monday, Macron endorsed China's Belt and Road initiative , saying China and Europe should collaborate so that a new Silk Road isn't a one-way street. He also referenced concerns about China's trade surpluses. The French president is due to meet his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, later Monday. Gift horse Like other global leaders visiting China and hoping to woo the country's leadership , France has been keen to make a good impression with Macron reportedly presenting President Xi Jinping the unusual gift of a horse ahead of his state visit. The horse is an eight-year old gelding called Vesuvius, according to Reuters, and belonged to France's elite Republican Guard. The gift was reportedly made after Xi expressed an interest in the presidential cavalry corps during a visit to Paris in 2014. France's horses are not the only thing to have caught China's attention, with the country's cheeses, wines and meats gaining favor in the country's increasing consumer market . There were concerns in the cheese-producing nation last year when China put a block on soft cheese imports over fears of the bacteria used in their production . French cheese-makers breathed a sigh of relief when China lifted the restrictions in October, allowing Brie, Camembert and Roquefort to enter the country again. Building trustDavid Baverez, private investor and author of "Beijing Express  How to Understand New China," told CNBC on Monday that Macron should push to cement France's  and Europe's  relationship with China, as U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump looks precarious."Really, President Macron should be speaking not as the president of France, but he should be speaking as someone who wants to rebuild Europe. And you cannot rebuild Europe without redefining what should be the relationship with the second largest economic power which, at some part of the 21st century, will be the first (economic power in the world). That's really the challenge for Macron," he said.Macron, who is seen to have injected France and the euro zone with renewed hope, should take some "disruptive" messages to China, Baverez said."Macron should tell the Chinese: 'You need to recognize that they need the West more than ever, because you have an economic problem which is productivity. It is not increasing fast enough, so your wages are not increasing fast enough, so the rebalancing of the economy through internal consumption is not working. So you need Western technology. You're not going to get it from the U.S. under Trump so the only place you can come is actually Europe,'" he said."Macron's other disruptive message should be a redefinition of reciprocity the 21st century should be about building trust between Europe and China, because the U.S. under Trump is not going to build trust with China, that's for sure."Baverez said Macron's trip had come at a good moment for France, as it looks like the most stable nation in Europe given the U.K.'s uncertain exit from the European Union, a continuing lack of government in Germany, and political uncertainty in Italy ahead of elections in the spring."We all know that President Macron is a lucky man so the timing is absolutely fantastic. I think it's a unique opportunity for President Macron to be as disruptive in foreign affairs as he has been in internal politics in France," Baverez said. French President Emmanuel Macron was in China on Monday for a three-day state visit designed to bolster economic and political ties between Beijing and the euro zone's second-largest economy. Improving trade and business relations is top of the agenda, with Macron leading a delegation of around 50 top business representatives to China. Like other nations making overtures to Beijing, such as the U.S. and U.K., France is keen to increase its access to China's lucrative markets and consumers. Toulouse-based Airbus (Euronext Paris: AIR-FR) is reportedly offering China an industrial partnership if it places orders for the aircraft manufacturer's largest passenger jet, the A380 . Airbus Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier, who is part of Macron's trade mission, is due to hold talks in China on Monday. Recent reports have suggested that Airbus was ready to phase out production of the A380 due to slow sales, so a deal could be crucial for the company. The visit comes hot on the heels of trade agreements signed between China and France in December that pledged "reciprocal" treatment in terms of commercial relations. China has long been accused of a protectionist approach to its economy, but has said [when?] it will open more markets to foreign investment. Speaking in the city of Xi'an on Monday, Macron endorsed China's Belt and Road initiative , saying China and Europe should collaborate so that a new Silk Road isn't a one-way street. He also referenced concerns about China's trade surpluses. The French president is due to meet his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, later Monday. Gift horse Like other global leaders visiting China and hoping to woo the country's leadership , France has been keen to make a good impression with Macron reportedly presenting President Xi Jinping the unusual gift of a horse ahead of his state visit. The horse is an eight-year old gelding called Vesuvius, according to Reuters, and belonged to France's elite Republican Guard. The gift was reportedly made after Xi expressed an interest in the presidential cavalry corps during a visit to Paris in 2014. France's horses are not the only thing to have caught China's attention, with the country's cheeses, wines and meats gaining favor in the country's increasing consumer market . There were concerns in the cheese-producing nation last year when China put a block on soft cheese imports over fears of the bacteria used in their production . French cheese-makers breathed a sigh of relief when China lifted the restrictions in October, allowing Brie, Camembert and Roquefort to enter the country again. Building trust David Baverez, private investor and author of "Beijing Express  How to Understand New China," told CNBC on Monday that Macron should push to cement France's  and Europe's  relationship with China, as U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump looks precarious. "Really, President Macron should be speaking not as the president of France, but he should be speaking as someone who wants to rebuild Europe. And you cannot rebuild Europe without redefining what should be the relationship with the second largest economic power which, at some part of the 21st century, will be the first (economic power in the world). That's really the challenge for Macron," he said. Macron, who is seen to have injected France and the euro zone with renewed hope, should take some "disruptive" messages to China, Baverez said. "Macron should tell the Chinese: 'You need to recognize that they need the West more than ever, because you have an economic problem which is productivity. It is not increasing fast enough, so your wages are not increasing fast enough, so the rebalancing of the economy through internal consumption is not working. So you need Western technology. You're not going to get it from the U.S. under Trump so the only place you can come is actually Europe,'" he said. "Macron's other disruptive message should be a redefinition of reciprocity the 21st century should be about building trust between Europe and China, because the U.S. under Trump is not going to build trust with China, that's for sure." Baverez said Macron's trip had come at a good moment for France, as it looks like the most stable nation in Europe given the U.K.'s uncertain exit from the European Union, a continuing lack of government in Germany, and political uncertainty in Italy ahead of elections in the spring. "We all know that President Macron is a lucky man so the timing is absolutely fantastic. I think it's a unique opportunity for President Macron to be as disruptive in foreign affairs as he has been in internal politics in France," Baverez said.



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Paris (AFP) - Asylum claims in France hit a record 100,000 last year, official figures showed Monday, as President Emmanuel Macron's government draws up hotly-debated new legislation on immigration.

Officials said the rate of arrivals was "historic", with Albanians forming the biggest group of applicants despite their country being considered safe by France.

"It confirms that France is one of the countries receiving the most asylum claims in Europe," Pascal Brice, head of France's refugee protection agency OFPRA, told AFP.

"It's a historic level," he added, though he noted the numbers are just half of those seen in neighbouring Germany last year.

Macron's government is preparing to unveil a bill on immigration next month, but his centrist Republique En Marche (Republic On The Move) party are divided on how to tackle the issue.

Macron and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe have vowed to speed up the process for managing asylum requests and offering improved conditions for successful applicants.

But they have also promised a much tougher line on economic migrants that would see an increased number of deportations and tighter controls on people arriving.

Last year France forcibly removed 26,000 people from the country, a 14 percent increase on the year before, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told AFP Monday.

"The goal now is to improve the conditions of repatriation, whether voluntary or forced," he added.

In his New Year's message, Macron had warned that France "cannot welcome everyone" although he pledged an immigration policy that walked the line between "humanity and efficiency".

- Albanian influx -

Albanians made up the biggest group applying for asylum in France last year -- some 7,600 adults, almost all of them set to be sent home because their home country is considered "safe".

Brice attributed the 66-percent jump in Albanian asylum claims to "economic emigration", an issue he said was worrying authorities in both countries.

Story continues

Albania announced an action plan in July to fight trafficking, with France complaining that too many spaces in its refuges are taken up by Albanians who will never be granted asylum.

Afghans made up the second biggest group last year with nearly 6,000 applications, followed by migrants from Haiti, Guyana and Sudan.

Applications from Syria were down 10 percent to just over 3,000, though almost all of them were granted asylum.

OFPRA also reported a sharp rise in applications from francophone west Africa including Ivory Coast and DR Congo. Brice said they were part of the wave of migrants crossing to Europe from Libya.

In December, migrants' rights groups heavily criticised a decision to take a census of the population of migrant shelters, saying this went against their mission to provide unconditional aid.

Under pressure, Prime Minister Philippe promised a public consultation.

Though the notorious "Jungle" camp in Calais was dismantled in 2016, many migrants continue to head to the northern French coast hoping to reach Britain, an issue which will be on the agenda when Macron heads to London for talks later this month.
BERLIN (Reuters) - German security officials are preparing for the arrival of over 100 infants and children of people who left the country to fight for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, amid concerns about the radicalization of minors. Nearly a thousand people are believed to have left Germany to join up with the Islamist militants. As the group's presence in the Middle East crumbles, some are returning with family members, while German authorities are trying to secure the release of children whose parents have been detained. In a document addressed to a lawmaker and seen by Reuters on Monday, Interior Ministry State Secretary Emily Haber said it was difficult to estimate the exact number of children set to arrive since it was unclear how many babies were born while their parents were in Iraq or Syria. But security officials had information indicating that "a low three-digit number of minors is expected," with the majority believed to be babies or toddlers, Haber said in a reply to a formal parliamentary query by Greens lawmaker Irene Mihalic. Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the BfV domestic intelligence agency, had warned in October that children of returning Islamists could pose a threat after being "socialised and indoctrinated in the battlefield areas." The radicalization of children has been in the spotlight given that three of five Islamist attacks in Germany in 2016 were carried out by minors, and a 12-year-old boy was also detained after trying to bomb a Christmas market in Ludwigshafen. The German government says it has evidence that more than 960 people left Germany for Iraq and Syria through November 2017 to fight for the Islamic State jihadist group, of which about a third are believed to have returned to Germany. Another 150 likely died in combat, according to government data. State Secretary Haber said there was no evidence of a big increase in the return of people from Iraq and Syria in recent months despite military setbacks for Islamic State. The German foreign ministry was providing consular services to German citizens and their children who had been detained or imprisoned in Iraq, and was seeking the return of children that were now imprisoned with their parents in Iraq, Haber said. "No timeline can be given for the return of these children since this is largely dependent on the cooperation of the Iraqi authorities," she wrote. Given Germany's decentralized federal structure, state officials had the main responsibility for deradicalization of those who returned from Iraq and Syria, including those were convicted and incarcerated, Haber said. But she said the federal government was supporting those efforts through a number of initiatives, including support for families of those who left Germany to fight for Islamic State. New federally-funded programs were planned in 2018 to educate and deradicalize returning foreign fighters, and the federal government was also funding programs in each of the 16 states to prevent further radicalization in prison, Haber said. (Reporting by Sabine Siebold and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Toby Chopra)
Golden Globe Ambassador Simone Garcia Johnson and her popular dad, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, speak onstage during the Golden Globes. (Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

One of the fascinating things about attending the Golden Globes at the Beverly Hilton Hotel versus watching it on TV is being able to see the stars interact IRL. Its a night of interesting and unlikely pairings, of people gravitating toward one another for moments of awesomeness before careening back into their own orbits, of the famous and infamous fanboying and fangirling over one another in a way that makes them seem just like us. Watching these moments, which often are not caught on camera, makes the show all the more fun.

For example, there were several people who everyone gravitated to throughout the night. In the early hours, the contest for most popular person in the room was a tie between the kids from Stranger Things and actor-comedian Billy Eichner. Any time one of them would try to take a seat, someone would come over to chat them up, give them praise, or take a picture (and none of them seemed to mind that they were missing out on the Globes famously early dinner offerings as a result).

But Dwayne the Rock Johnson, whose daughter Simone was this years Golden Globe Ambassador, was also a contender. Johnson inspired true pandemonium among show attendees across every age, sexual orientation, and relationship status. They all clamored for a photo with him, despite the stated rule that cell phone photography would result in ejection from the ballroom. Apparently, the Rock is worth the risk, and countless people threw themselves at his feet. (OK, maybe not literally. But you got the feeling that had everyone not been in their best formal wear, they might have taken their adoration that far.)

By the end of the night, actors Kate Hudson and Armie Hammer were the belles of the ball. Neither seemed capable of taking more than a couple of steps for the door before they were stopped for hugs and kisses from well-wishers. They caused a traffic jam among the crowd, resulting in the remainder of attendees filtering out on either side of the throng.

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Of course, there were also the romantic relationships you expect to see at the Globes, and the ones you hope are as good in person as they seem to be on TV and in magazines. Were talking about actress Nicole Kidman and her husband, country music crooner Keith Urban, who are just as adorable as youd both hope and expect. The two were glued at the hip all night, and they were always touching  holding hands, Urban guiding Kidman by the arm, or Urban placing his hand at the small of Kidmans back. The two managed to nudge so close to one another, it was as if they were magnets.

Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman had the look of love at the Golden Globes. (Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

And that love was spread throughout the Golden Globes ballroom. When Kidman talked about Urban in her acceptance speech  she won the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television for her role in Big Little Lies  and what its like to be cheek to cheek with him, the entire audience melted into the puddle of a collective awww! and started a murmured discussion about relationship goals.

Sometimes, the opportunity for new relationships surface, and we certainly hope thats the case for actors Hammer and Chris Hemsworth, who strode purposefully toward the back bar, parting the crowd like the Red Sea and leaving dropped jaws in their wake. Everyone immediately fell to their respective chiseled, dirty-blond, tall and handsome charms. No word on what the duo drank or discussed, but if this is a new Hollywood bromance forming, were fully onboard.

Chris Hemsworth and Armie Hammer caused a stir at the Golden Globes. (Photo: Getty Images)

And then theres the friendships you kind of hope are happening, but dont always get visual confirmation on until an awards show brings everyone together. One such example is director Ava DuVernay and CBS This Morning anchor-Oprah BFF Gayle King, who helped each other swim upstream of the crowd, attempting to tsunami their way out of the ballroom as the Globes came to a close. DuVernay is close with the Mighty O, of course. Winfrey and DuVernay have partnered on several creative projects, the most recent being the upcoming big screen adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. But seeing DuVernay and King palling around was a delight.

Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey, and Ava DuVernay made up the cool girl table at the Golden Globes. (Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Moet & Chandon)

Finally, even the most seasoned Hollywood players can find themselves overwhelmed by the Globes crowd  and lose track of their spouses in the process. Thats what happened to actor Seth Rogen after the show. As adoring fans waited behind roped areas in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Rogen ignored the desperate cries of his name as he searched high and low for his wife, actress Lauren Miller.

A fan stopped him to ask for a selfie, but Rogen waved her off, saying, I need to find my wife! The fan said she understood, and Rogen continued his hunt, deep in the world of Golden Globes after-parties.

We hope you found your wife, Seth!

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BURLEY  Steve Hines has noticed there is a lot of hay stacked in sheds and on field corners as he drives around the Magic Valley.

A lot of hay did get fed last winter but there is still a lot around, the University of Idaho Extension educator for Jerome County said during an ag outlook conference in December. And theres a lot of hay around us.

Nationwide, hay growers had 24.3 million tons of hay in stacks on May 1. Most western states had less hay on hand in 2017, but Nevada was up slightly  220,000 tons vs. 215,000 tons in 2016. Idaho had 510,000 tons of that, about half of the previous year but still well above the 320,000 tons on hand in May 2014.

Idaho, Oregon and Washington all planted fewer new alfalfa seedings last year, but Nevada, California and Montana all seeded more acres.

You would think the price would go because plantings are down but theres just a lot of carryover, Hines said.

Dairy hay prices averaged $180 a ton between the 2011 and 2016, but has been hovering around the $140 to $150 mark. At $145 per ton, hay growers are essentially breaking even when producing dairy quality hay.

Looking forward into 2018, Hines doesnt see much reason for optimism. Despite drought conditions in the Northern Plains last summer, much of the nations range and pastures were in good shape going into winter. That lowers hay demand from beef producers. Drought in the Southern Plains between 2011 and 2015 helped prop up hay prices in Idaho.

Low milk prices arent helping the situation. Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymens Association, said milk prices arent good in any major dairy producing region around the globe.

Processors are sitting on heavy inventories of many dairy products thanks to plentiful milk supplies.

We have to chew through those (inventories) before we will see better prices, Naerebout said.

According to the U.S. Department of Agricultures November cold storage report, total cheese stocks have built to 1.259 billion pounds. Of that, American cheese accounts for 733.2 million pounds. Other cheese stocks rose nearly 12 percent, likely a result of higher mozzarella production.

Milk production is still increasing in the U.S but at a slower pace. U.S. total milk production came in at 17.279 billion pounds in November, below trade expectations of 17.391 billion pounds but still 1.05 percent ahead of last years pace. Milk production appears to be on pace to grow at 1.5 percent.

Idaho produced 1.173 billion pounds of milk in November, down from 1.180 billion pounds in 2016. Average per cow production was 1,955 pounds, down from 1,970 pounds in November 2016. The number of dairy cows has remained essentially flat at around 599,000 head.

California, on the other hand, has seen cow numbers fall to 1.743 million head, the lowest level since February 2005 when the herd was just 1.742 million head.

U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasters have lowered estimates for both 2017 and 2018 production citing a slower pace in growth of milk per cow. Cow numbers are also expected to increase slowly.

Still milk prices are likely to be less than cost of production for the next few quarters. Magic Valley producers need, on average, $16 per hundredweight to break even on their milk. Futures contract prices are between $13.62 and $14.70 per hundredweight for the first half of 2018. Milk prices in 2017 were flat compared to 2016.

Dairies are frustrated, Naerebout said. They have had 18 to 24 months of slow equity burn on their balance sheets. There is less interest in growing the milk supply.

Despite the opening of the Chobani yogurt plant in Twin Falls, southern Idaho continues to produce more milk than can be processed within the region. Transporting that excess milk to other regions increases their costs and lower profits.

Until dairies can return to black ink, they will continue to look for cheaper feed alternatives to hay, Hines said. Thats a large reason why corn silage acres have increased 44 percent over the last 25 years in the Magic Valley.

Still, dairies need hay. A mature dairy cow consumes three-quarters of an acre of alfalfa each year. With roughly 75 percent of the states dairy herd located in the Magic Valley, the region needs to grow about 326,250 acres of hay or roughly a third of the total irrigated acres in the region.

We cant grow all the hay here we need, Hines said adding that each year dairies import about 100,000 acres of hay from other regions. But its a hard sell to keep alfalfa in the rotation with hay prices low and no real hope in sight.

Until the dairy market comes back, he said, hay prices wont.

Until the dairy market comes back, hay prices wont. Steve Hines, University of Idaho Extension educator in Jerome
DAKAR (Reuters) - Gunmen shot dead 13 people and wounded seven others on Saturday in the forest of Senegal's southern region of Casamance, the army said. It was not clear who was responsible or what the motive was for the attack on a group of civilians searching for firewood near the town of Borofaye and about 10 km (six miles) from the Guinea Bissau border, said army spokesman Abdoul Ndiaye. The area is home to separatist rebels who in 1982 formed what is now one of Africa's oldest rebellions in their search for independence from northern Senegal. The Movement of Democratic Forces for Casamance (MFDC) is active in the area of southern Senegal, which is separated from the more affluent north by Gambia. The movement has been largely dormant since a ceasefire in 2014. However, many areas remain off-limits because of land mines and arms stockpiles. President Macky Sall called in his New Year address for dialogue with the rebels and a lasting peace. (Reporting by Diadie Ba; Writing by Edward McAllister; Editing by Adrian Croft)
Its official! Gwyneth Paltrow is heading down the aisle again. The Goop CEO has confirmed that she is engaged to producer and writer Brad Falchuk.

We feel incredibly lucky to have come together at this juncture in our lives when our collective successes and failures can serve as building blocks for a healthy and happy relationship, the couple said in a joint statement to Good Morning America.

Paltrow, 45, and Falchuk, 46, appear together on the cover of the new issue of Goop magazine, hitting stands on Tuesday, to discuss the happy news.

Photo: Steven Pan / Courtesy of Goop

Its not surprising that the official announcement involves Goop: After all, it was on Paltrows website where she revealed that she and Chris Martin were splitting in a post famously titled Conscious Uncoupling.

GMA teased the issue with a black-and-white photo of the couple on Twitter.

CONGRATS to @GwynethPaltrow, ENGAGED to Brad Falchuk!  pic.twitter.com/GCjJBDWmt1  Good Morning America (@GMA) January 8, 2018

It was reported in November that the couple was engaged  and that they apparently kept it secret for a year. They have been dating for three years.

The Iron Man star first met Falchuk in 2010 when she guest-starred on Glee, which he co-created. They were both married at the time, but their friendship turned romantic when they found themselves single in 2014. Falchuk ended a 10-year marriage in March 2013 while Martin and Paltrow announced their separation in March 2014 after a decadelong marriage.

Clearly, theres no awkwardness between Martin and Falchuk. Paltrow shared a photo of her ex-husband and her fiance brunching together in November.

Paltrow captioned this snap, Sunday brunch #modernfamily. (Photo: Gwyneth Paltrow via Instagram)

Paltrow and Martin share two children, Apple and Moses, while Falchuk has two children, Brody and Isabella, with ex-wife Suzanne. No word yet on any details for their impending nuptials but we have a feeling well find out eventually on Goop.

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Moscow (AFP) - The ongoing rift between the Ukrainian and Russian churches was highlighted in their leaders' Christmas messages ahead of the Orthodox holiday this weekend.

Patriarch Filaret, the head of the Kiev-based Ukrainian Orthodox Church, wished his country a "victory over the aggressor" on Saturday amid a continued conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels.

"We wish that our Lord help us banish all evil and help us bring victory over the aggressor because the truth is with us," Patriarch Filaret said in a video published on the Kyivan Patriarchate's website, calling for God to lead Ukraine to a "final victory over the enemy".

The 2014 outbreak of the separatist conflict between Kiev and Kremlin-backed rebels in the east of the country exacerbated already existing religious tensions.

In his Christmas message published late on Friday on the Moscow patriarchy's website, Russia's Patriarch Kirill said the church believed the "nations of historic Rus will keep and renew their spiritual unity".

After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, a conflict erupted between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church backed by Moscow and a breakaway Kiev-based Ukrainian Orthodox Church now led by Patriarch Filaret.

The rift was highlighted earlier this month after it was reported in Ukraine a bereaved father punched a priest from the Moscow-led church after he allegedly refused to bury his young son who died in a freak accident.

In November, the Ukrainian church leader sent a letter to his Russian counterpart calling on him to end "confrontation" between the two institutions for the sake of the faithful. Patriarch Filaret also expressed hope that Russia would recognise his branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The letter was reportedly read out at a key congress of Orthodox bishops in Moscow and the Russian Church said it had established a commission to look into the matter, but added that there were no plans for the two spiritual leaders to meet.

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The Kiev-based Ukrainian Orthodox Church supported a bloody popular uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed government in 2014.

Patriarch Filaret said in 2014 that Russia's Vladimir Putin "like Judas Iscariot, had become possessed by Satan".

Patriarch Kirill, meanwhile, is considered to be a close Kremlin ally and has supported Putin in his views on both the Ukraine and Syria conflicts.

The Russian religious leader helped mediate talks on a prisoner exchange that took place between Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels on December 27.

Eastern Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7, while those in the West observe it on December 24 due to differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
Hindu farmer Surodhon Pal has packed his bags, eager to return to Myanmar after fleeing for Bangladesh during a wave of violence last year, but he is in a tiny minority -- most of the refugees are terrified of going home.

Bangladesh wants the more than 655,000 refugees who have flooded into the country since late August to start returning to Myanmar by the end of this month under a controversial agreement between the two nations.

The vast majority are Rohingya Muslims who have faced decades of persecution in Myanmar, which sees them as illegal immigrants, even though many have lived there for generations.

They say they would rather stay in the squalid camps in Bangladesh than return to the scene of violence the US and the United Nations have said amounts to ethnic cleansing.

But a small community of Hindus who lived alongside the Rohingya in Myanmar's Rakhine state and were caught up in the turmoil say they do want to return.

"We want security and we want food. If the authorities can give us those assurances we'll happily go back," Pal, 55, told AFP.

"The Bangladeshi government and the UN looked after us well, but now we have prepared our bags and are ready to return to our country."

Last month Dhaka sent a list of 100,000 refugees to Myanmar authorities for repatriation after the two governments signed an agreement in November for the process to begin on January 23.

But rights groups and the United Nations say no one should be repatriated against their will and so far only around 500 Hindu refugees have expressed willingness to go.

- Massacre by masked men -

Modhuram Pal, a 35-year-old community leader, said some 50 Hindus had already returned to Rakhine where they were welcomed by Myanmar security forces.

Hindus who fled the area have told AFP that masked men stormed into their community and hacked victims to death with machetes before dumping them into freshly-dug pits.

Myanmar's military alleges the Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army (ARSA) carried out the massacre on August 25, the same day the rebel group staged deadly raids on police posts that sparked a military backlash. At least 45 bodies have been found in mass graves.

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The ARSA has denied the allegations, saying it does not target civilians.

But Pal and his fellow Hindu refugees say they will only go back if they are rehoused away from their former villages in Rakhine.

Monubala, a Hindu woman who like many of the refugees goes by one name, told AFP masked men dressed in black had attacked her village near Kha Maung Seik, where the massacre occurred.

"I left my home, including my chickens, ducks, goats and all property, and came to Bangladesh to save my life," she said.

Doctors without Borders estimates that thousands were killed in the violence that hit Rakhine in late August.

Consistent accounts by Rohingya refugees of security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist mobs driving them out of their homes with bullets, rape and arson have shocked the globe.

Although the influx has slowed, hundreds of Rohingya are still crossing into Bangladesh, now home to around a million refugees.

Rights groups say the crackdown was the culmination of years of persecution and discrimination against the Muslim group in mainly Buddhist Myanmar, where they are effectively stateless and denigrated as outsiders.

- 'Communal divide and rule' -

It remains unclear why the Hindus were targeted, but they appear to have been caught in the middle of a conflict between the military and Rohingya militants. Some reports say each side viewed the Hindus as collaborators with the other.

Myanmar state media said last month that the Hindus would be first to be accepted back -- a stance that expert Shahab Enam Khan called a "classic case of communal divide and rule".

"The issue of religion as a tool for repression is visibly clear now, the global community should be aware," Khan, professor of International Relations at Jahangirnagar University in Dhaka, told AFP.

Tensions between the two communities have persisted in Bangladesh, where the Hindus live away from the main refugee camps.

Pal, the community leader, said two Hindu refugees in Bangladesh had been killed by Rohingya in a dispute over the sale of cattle they had brought over the border.

Local police chief Abul Khaer confirmed that a complaint had been lodged, and the body of one of the alleged victims found.

"We were tortured because of the war between Myanmar government and the (Rohingya) rebels," Shshu Pal Shil, 25, told AFP in his makeshift shelter.

"Thats why we were forced to come to Bangladesh. If the Myanmar government wants to take us back now, well be happy to go back."
Salvador Nasralla addresses the crowd in San Pedro Sula during the protest against the reelection of Juan Orlando Hernandez: Getty Images

Thousands of protesters have staged a massive protest in Honduras second city over the victory of President Juan Orlando Hernandez in an election the opposition claim was fraudulent.

Opposition leader Salvador Nasralla lead the protests in the city of San Pedro Sula.

Addressing the crowd, he said: We will not stop until Hernandez says he's leaving.

It was the first march in the city since the 26 November election, and the losing candidate once again appealed to the Organisation of American States and the countries that have recognised Mr Hernandez's victory to listen to the protesters.

Former President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted by a military coup in 2009, also joined the protest, Deutsche Welle reported.

Speaking to the crowd Mr Zelaya, who lost an election to Mr Hernandez in 2013, said: We won the presidency and we are demanding the triumph of the people at the polls. We will not stop complaining until the government is handed over to the candidate of the Alliance, president-elect Salvador Nasralla.

According to the official count, Mr Hernandez won with 42.95 percent to 41.42 for Mr Nasralla.

But the OAS called for a repeat of the vote, saying the official version of the count included extreme statistical improbability.

An early lead by Mr Nasralla disappeared after the public vote count mysteriously stopped for more than a day then restarted.

Mr Hernandez denies the vote was fraudulent and has called on Hondurans to accept his re-election. Some countries, including the US, have recognised his victory.

Street protests in other parts of Honduras left at least 17 dead last month but Saturday's march went without incident.

Mr Hernandez was only able to stand for re-election after a controversial Supreme Court ruling in 2015 which annulled the one-term presidential limit in the Honduran Constitution.

Former President Manuel Zelaya (centre) rides his bike to take part in the protest (Getty Images)

Honduras is one of several Latin America countries where its leaders are trying to amend the constitution to allow them to run for multiple presidential terms.

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Following the rise of dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s many Latin American countries subsequently imposed strict term limits which either ban multiple terms in office outright or only allow presidents to return to office after waiting out at least one term.

Five countries, including Brazil and Argentina, now allow two consecutive terms while seven others allow non-consecutive re-election.

Meanwhile while in Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro has become increasingly autocratic as the countrys economic crisis deepens, term limits have been abolished altogether.

Additional reporting by agencies
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran has banned the teaching of English in primary schools, a senior education official said, after Islamic leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a Western "cultural invasion".

"Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations," Mehdi Navid-Adham, head of the state-run High Education Council, told state television late on Saturday.

"This is because the assumption is that, in primary education, the groundwork for the Iranian culture of the students is laid," Navid-Adham said, adding that non-curriculum English classes may also be blocked.

The teaching of English usually starts in middle school in Iran, around the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools, below that age, also have English classes.

Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day. And many children from more privileged families attending non-government schools receive English tuition from daycare through high school.

Iran's Islamic leaders have often warned about the dangers of a "cultural invasion", and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei voiced outrage in 2016 over the "teaching of the English language spreading to nursery schools".

Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in that speech to teachers: "That does not mean opposition to learning a foreign language, but (this is the) promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children, young adults and youths."

"Western thinkers have time and again said that instead of colonialist expansionism ... the best and the least costly way would have been inculcation of thought and culture to the younger generation of countries," Khamenei said, according to the text of the speech posted on a website run by his office (Leader.ir).

While there was no mention of the announcement being linked to more than a week of protests against the clerical establishment and government, Iran's Revolutionary Guards have said that that unrest was also fomented by foreign enemies.

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Iranian officials said 22 people were killed and more than 1,000 arrested during the protests that spread to more than 80 cities and rural towns, as thousands of young and working-class Iranians expressed their anger at graft, unemployment and a deepening gap between rich and poor.

A video of the announcement of the ban was widely circulated on social media on Sunday, with Iranians calling it "The filtering of English", jokingly likening to the blocking of the popular app Telegram by the government during the unrest.

(Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by John Stonestreet and Alison Williams)
Tehran (AFP) - Iran warned the world on Monday to prepare for the possible withdrawal of the United States from the landmark nuclear deal agreed in 2015.

"The international community must be prepared for the US possibly pulling out of the JCPOA," said deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, using the technical name for the nuclear deal.

Iran signed the accord in 2015 with six world powers, agreeing to curb its nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of many international sanctions.

US President Donald Trump openly despises the deal -- a central foreign policy achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama -- but has so far continued to waive the nuclear-related sanctions at regular intervals as required to stay in compliance.

The next deadline for Trump to waive sanctions falls on Friday.

"It's been more than a year that the US president has sought to destroy the JCPOA with all his efforts," said Aragchi, speaking at the Tehran Security Conference.

"We in Iran are prepared for any scenario. The international community and our region will be the biggest loser, since a successful experience in the international arena will be lost," he added.

"Our region will not become a safer region without the JCPOA."

A withdrawal by the US will lead to an "appropriate and heavy response," added foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi.

"The US administration will definitely regret it," he said on state television.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is due to travel for talks with the European parties to the deal -- Britain, France, Germany and the EU -- at the end of the week.

Zarif denied reports that the talks would focus on the recent protests in Iran that claimed 21 lives, saying such claims were "baseless and unfounded".

"Given the importance of JCPOA these days, and in particular considering the US destructive policies, based on talks we've had, we agreed to have a consultative meeting between Iran and the three European Union members," said Zarif, according to state broadcaster IRIB.
Sex is big business in dairy farming, which is why a battle is brewing in the U.S. over new technologies designed to make sure only milk-producing cows are born.

Most of Americas 9.4 million dairy cows were bred using artificial insemination from bulls with specific genetic traits, but theres still a coin-flip randomness about the sex of the offspring. So, more farmers are paying a premium for semen that contains only the X chromosomes for females. Its a small but growing business dominated by one company, Inguran in Navasota, Texas.

Over the years, dairies improved breeding to boost milk output using fewer cows. Sex-specific semen is a recent innovation, and its so promising that New Zealands Engender Technologies plans to sell its own version of the product in the U.S. Companies also are fighting in court over patents for the technique. Farmers welcome more competition because sex-sorted semen vials can cost $30 for a typical dose, about double those that cant guarantee a female calf.

We have no choice but to pay, said Russ Warmka, owner of a dairy farm in Fox Lake, Wis., that milks 500 cows a day and uses sex-sorting semen on his heifers. We spend our entire lives as farmers trying to breed a better cow. If we know well get a heifer calf, we can spend a lot more on that semen.

Thats because a young female that will eventually produce milk for four to six years is far more valuable to a dairy than a steer that gets shipped to a beef-processing plant, said Albert De Vries, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. At an auction Nov. 28 in Springfield, Missouri, baby heifers sold for as much as $350 each, while bulls sold for as little as $50, according to the Springfield Livestock Marketing Center.

Dairy farmers use artificial insemination to impregnate heifers shortly after their first year, and nine months later, a calf is born. After that, the cow produces milk for 10 months. Typically, she will give birth two to four times during her time on the dairy, before output drops and she is sold for slaughter.

On average, U.S. cows produced a record 1,910 pounds of milk a month in the past year, up about 14 percent from a decade ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Thats allowed farmers to expand output while shrinking their herds.

Still, sex-determined semen for breeding remains relatively new and accounts for only 3 percent of a global market, so theres plenty of room for growth, as long as farmers can be convinced the extra investment will pay off.

When you look at the dairy industry, this is a fundamental problem that hasnt yet been widely resolved, said Brent Ogilvie, managing director at Auckland-based Engender, which primarily serves the New Zealand dairy industry, the worlds largest milk exporter. Sex is the most-important genetic trait. Farming is all about genetics, and most farmers dont have control over the sex of their herd.

In the U.S., the market is dominated by Inguran. Its Sexing Technologies unit provides the sorted semen which is marketed through the STgenetics unit. Inguran has patents on improvements to a technology first developed by a USDA researcher more than two decades ago. Using the cell-sorting science of flow cytometry, the company says it can deliver heifer calves in about 90 percent of pregnancies, which is a big increase on the 50-50 chances of conventional semen.

In flow cytometry, sperm cells move single file past a laser beam at about 50 miles an hour, with special detection machines making about 180,000 measurements per second, said George Seidel, a professor at Colorado State University who worked to apply the technology to dairy farms in the 1990s.

Inguran uses a fluorescent dye to cells that reacts differently on female X chromosomes than male Y chromosomes. The amount of fluorescence is measured and then an electrical charge is applied, which deflects the cells into different containers. The sorted semen is then sold in vials known as straws.

The technique has some obstacles. More mature cows dont always get pregnant, so farmers tend to use it only on virgin heifers, which conceive more easily, said Matt Gould, Philadelphia-based analyst for the Dairy & Food Market Analyst newsletter.

Fertility rates matter because a cow only has one opportunity to get pregnant each month, and the animals will produce less milk if too many months go by. Farmers are so concerned about getting cows pregnant at the right time that some have started attaching pedometers to them, according to Gould. When cows are fertile, they wander around looking for a mate, and the number of steps they take increases.

Ingurans conception rates are now comparable to those of conventional semen vials, according to Jim Hiney, the companys marketing manager.

Engender, which hopes to start selling sex-sorted semen in the U.S. within two years, says its product has a higher pregnancy rate because their sorting process is gentler. It uses photons, or pulses of light, to physically nudge sperm cells into specific channels. The company also says its product will be cheaper and easier to supply.

Of the 175 million semen straws sold globally each year, only about 5 million are sex-selected, and 2 million of those are in the U.S., according to Ogilvie at Engender.

While Engender targets Inguran customers, some U.S. companies are eyeing its technology. Genuss ABS Global of Wisconsin, a stud company that wants to enter the sex-sorting business, persuaded the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to rule two patents invalid. An appeals court is reviewing that decision. Inguran filed suit in June accusing ABS of infringing patents and stealing trade secrets.

The same court is considering whether to revive antitrust claims brought by another firm, Trans Ova Genetics, which says many of Ingurans patents are simply combining known ideas. Trans Ova accused Inguran of burying the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in paperwork so examiners wouldnt spot information that showed the applications didnt cover new inventions. Inguran said it developed ways to preserve the cells, improve the sorting process and produce sexed embryos.

There will be millions of dollars in intellectual-property battles, no matter the merits of who or whatever, because some of the patents are written so broadly, Colorado States Seidel said.
Stephen Miller, left, and Jake Tapper. (Photo: CNN)

Most of the Donald Trump-related TV coverage is now going to journalist Michael Wolff and his Fire and Fury book. Wolff is making the interview rounds, and gave an almost unwatchable interview to Morning Joe on Monday morning  unwatchable because Id forgotten how nauseatingly self-absorbed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are; they barely let Wolff answer one maundering question after another. But the more significant Trump-related interview was a Wolff-less one that occurred Sunday: Jake Tappers amazing set-to with White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, on State of the Union on CNN.

Miller, whose permanent affect is that of a peeved possum wedged into a shiny suit, had been dispatched from the White House to defend the presidents honor, such as it is. He spoke in the aggrieved, rapid manner of other Trump TV surrogates such as Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, who recite their talking points quickly and loudly in order to escape necessary follow-up questions. When Tapper asked him about Fire and Fury, Miller attacked Wolff with all the subtlety his boss brings to debates, referring to Wolff as the garbage author of a garbage book, calling the book a pile of trash. (Possums like to poke through garbage.)

Tapper read Miller the tweets Trump issued over the weekend defending himself as a very stable genius and asked if such missives help the presidents case. What he got back from Miller was one of the purest and most concentrated formulations of the meretricious hype all of Trumps TV surrogates have been pumping into American minds since the campaign: The presidents tweets absolutely reaffirm the plainspoken truth: A self-made billionaire revolutionized reality TV and tapped into something magical thats happening in the hearts of this country. Something magical happened to my nose as I savored the aroma of that bull.

Then Tapper made a crucial decision: He called the interview to a halt. As Miller continued to hector Tapper with more gush about the truth of Donald Trump instead of answering questions, Tapper stopped trying to be heard over his guest. Stephen, there is one viewer you care about right now, and youre being obsequious and a factotum in order to please him. I think Ive wasted enough of my viewers time.

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This was a great thing for Tapper to point out: That Millers primary intention was to deliver verbal violence against a perceived enemy of his boss  to have Trump, sitting in the White House glued to the TV, witness his deputy fighting a hollow fight with a member of the media. Tapper was correct: Thats a waste of our time. It would be great if more TV news outlets did the same whenever the White House sends out the same talking heads to make the same points, over and over and over again. Better yet, stop booking these people: TV news folks are always complaining about lack of access to the president  give the presidents men and women less access to the airwaves. It might change things.

State of the Union With Jake Tapper airs Sundays at 10 a.m. on CNN.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan said on Monday it had foiled an Islamic State plot that included plans for a series of attacks last November on security installations, shopping malls and moderate religious figures, state media reported.

State news agency Petra said the country's intelligence department had arrested 17 members of a cell and confiscated weapons and explosives that the militant group had planned to use in several operations.

"The members of the cell had planned to execute a number of terrorist attacks simultaneously to destabilise national security and sow chaos and terror among civilians," the statement said.

A security source said that members of the cell had been under surveillance from the start when they began to survey high profile civilian and military potential targets.

Security forces have been extra vigilant in recent months with warnings that sympathisers of Islamic State could launch revenge attacks after the militants were driven out of most of the territory they once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

The detainees, who were all from the working class city of Zarqa east of the capital, were being interrogated before being put on trial in a military court, the authorities said without giving a date.

The impoverished city of Zarqa, a traditional hotbed of fundamentalist jihadists, has seen dozens of youths influenced by hardline Islamist ideology joining radical groups in Iraq and Syria in recent years, according to security sources.

The statement said the cell had planned to wage a series of bank robberies and car thefts to get financing, and manufactured homemade explosives from material bought from local markets.

Militants from al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups have long targeted the U.S.-allied kingdom and dozens of militants are currently serving long prison terms.

King Abdullah, a Middle East ally of Western powers against Islamist militancy who has also safeguarded Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, has been among the most vocal leaders in the region in warning of threats posed by radical groups.

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Jordan plays a prominent role in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, providing military, logistical and intelligence support, according to Western diplomats and regional intelligence sources.

Several incidents over the past few years have jolted the Arab kingdom, which has been comparatively unscathed by the uprisings, civil wars and Islamist militancy that have swept the Middle East since 2011.

In the last major incident, Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for a shootout just over a year ago at a Crusader castle in the southern city of Karak in which 10 people including a Canadian tourist were killed.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Sandra Maler)
Kensington Palace has released two new portraits of Princess Charlotte taken by the Duchess of Cambridge [Photo: Getty]

We all thought that Princess Charlotte started nursery last week but it seems the young royal may have conquered the milestone this morning.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridges second child has started nursery at Willcocks Nursery School in London  conveniently located a mere 12-minute walk from their apartment in Kensington Palace.

And Kensington Palace has finally shared two images (taken by mum-turned-photographer Kate Middleton) on Instagram.

The adorable pictures were released this afternoon by Kensington Palace [Photo: The Duchess of Cambridge]

In the adorable snaps, the young royal dons a crimson coat by Amaia Kids (which weighs in at 120) with co-ordinating shoes and a Cath Kidston backpack.

And with the Princess Charlotte effect in full swing, we predict a sell-out on the horizon

In the newly released photographs, Princess Charlotte wears a crimson coat and blush pink scarf [Photo: The Duchess of Cambridge]

The princess, two, is the first member of the royal family to attend Willcocks: Prince George attended a Montessori close to his parents Norfolk home, while Prince William and Prince Harry spent their early years at Mrs. Mynors Nursery School in Notting Hill in the 80s.

Willcocks Nursery in Kensington, London, where Princess Charlotte now attends [Photo: PA]

Willcocks, which costs 14,500 a year, is said to be delighted that Charlotte has joined them. Owned and run by headmistress Lavinia Taylor and boasting an all-female staff, it was once featured in Tatlers guide to top nurseries  ideal for a princess-in-training.

Charlottes first day involved a stay and play and enabled William and Kate to settle their daughter in before leaving her for a short while to see if she could cope. Eventually, she will be left for an entire morning or afternoon.

Click below to see photos of royal children from years gone by starting nursery, school and university:

Its not just Princess Charlotte whose Christmas break is over. Prince George is back at school at Thomas Battersea and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a fairly busy schedule over the coming weeks.

On 10 January, Kate will visit Reach Academy Feltham to look at their work with Place2Be. Prince William will visit the The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust on the same day. On 16 January, the couple will head up to Coventry to visit Coventry Cathedral, Coventry University and The Positive Youth Foundation.

Story continues

At the end of the month, the pair will undertake a brief tour of Sweden and Norway.





Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for non-stop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyleUK.

Read more from Yahoo Style UK:

Everything you need to know about Princess Charlottes new nursery

Princess Charlottes most sought after outfits and where to buy them

The best throwback photos of royal children starting nursery, school and university
U.S. regulators and prosecutors have requested information from the real estate development business run by Jared Kushners family over a program that allows wealthy foreigners to obtain visas for investing in American projects, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors for New Yorks Eastern District issued subpoenas to Kushner Cos. in May seeking details about its use of whats known as the EB-5 program, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the requests werent public.

Jared Kushner is a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and is married to Trumps daughter Ivanka, whos also an assistant to the president. Kushner was chief executive officer of Kushner Cos. until he stepped down and divested some of his investments to family members when he joined the administration.

Christine Taylor, a Kushner Cos. spokeswoman, said in an emailed response that as we said months ago, we are cooperating with all government requests for information about our past legal use of the EB5 program. SEC spokeswoman Judith Burns didnt immediately return an email seeking comment. John Marzulli, a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment.

It couldnt be determined what the SEC is reviewing, and the agency hasnt accused Kushner Cos. of any wrongdoing. The SEC subpoena was reported earlier Saturday by the Wall Street Journal, which also published a story in August on the subpoena issued by New Yorks Eastern District.

EB-5 Program

Last year, Kushners sister, Nicole Meyer, touted her brothers White House role as she urged Chinese investors to fund a New Jersey housing development through the EB-5 program.

EB-5 offers foreigners green cards  permanent residence  in exchange for investing $500,000 in certain U.S. businesses that create at least 10 jobs per investor.

While Kushner Cos. isnt publicly traded, the SEC has oversight of the EB-5 program because the investments can be deemed securities transactions under federal laws. The agency has previously brought enforcement actions against developers that it accused of raising money through the program and then using the proceeds for personal use, instead of financing development projects.
Kweli.tv aims to be the go-to streaming media platform for black filmmakers all over the world to share their content and make money from its distribution. KweliTV handpicks all of its content, with 98 percent of the content having been official selections at film festivals worldwide.

"There are a lot of really great filmmakers out there globally," KweliTV founder DeShuna Spencer told me. "For us, we're offering an avenue for filmmakers of color to make money off of their work and be celebrated for the work they do."

Perhaps, more importantly, KweliTV wants to be a source of authentic storytelling of the black community from the black perspective. A recent study showed the mainstream media (news and opinion media) offers a consistently warped view of black people and black families. For example, black families represent 59 percent of the poor in mainstream media even though they make up just 27 percent of low-income people, according to Color of Change. Meanwhile, white families make up just 17 percent of low-income people while they officially represent 66 percent of the country's low-income population.

Kweli, which means "truth" in Swahili, aims to tell all sides of the black experience. In order for content to be featured on KweliTV, the the main character needs to be of African descent and "not the sidekick, the friend of the fairy godmother," KweliTV founder DeShuna Spencer told me. "The black person has to be the main character."

An example of some KweliTV content is a film called Something Necessary. Created by Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge, Something Necessary explores life after the civil unrest in Kenya following the 2007 elections through the eyes of a woman named Anne. In 2013, the film was nominated for audience choice award at the Chicago International Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

There are currently 200 titles on the platform, with KweliTV adding about three titles a week in the categories of documentary, shorts and full-length features. Subscribers can watch KweliTV on the web or via Roku, Apple TV or Google Play. Unlike Netflix, the goal is not to have an endless library of content. Instead. KweliTV wants to keep it intimate with no more than 500 titles at a time.

Story continues

KweliTV, which launched out of beta just a few months ago, currently has 2,000 paying subscribers. By the end of the year, the goal is to hit 30,000 paid subscribers. An annual membership costs $49.99/year and a monthly one costs $5.99.

As a value-add to the streaming content, KweliTV partners with other black-owned businesses to offer discounts and other perks to its subscribers. Subscribers can access discounts at companies like Heritage Box, Black Card Revoked, African Ancestry and others.

On the creator side, filmmakers get paid based on how many minutes people spend viewing their content. More specifically, 60 percent of Kweli.TV's revenue goes to filmmakers, who get paid quarterly.

In alignment with Spencer's desire to keep it intimate, KweliTV is going to start hosting in-person events for its members to connect with each other. The first event will be next month.

"We really see Kweli as being a community more than a streaming service," Spencer said. "Our customers are asking us to be more community-oriented."

KweliTV is a bootstrapped company in the traditional sense, meaning it hasn't raised funding from any angel investors or VCs. The company has, however, won $65,000 from a couple of startup competitions.

"It's a full-time job to raise money," Spencer said. "That's not to say we'll never raise but today, my focus is on revenue."

One of KweliTV's competitors, Afrostream, shut down last August, despite raising $4 million in capital. Spencer pointed to Afrostream as a bit of a cautionary tale of trying to grow too quickly.

Instead of becoming a unicorn, Spencer sees her company as a zebra. Unlike unicorns, zebras a profitable and work to improve society, and KweliTV is achieving both of those requirements.
Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - At least a dozen people were killed over the weekend in apparent tit-for-tat clashes between farmers and cattle herders in central Nigeria, police and community sources said Monday.

The violence between Christian Bachama farmers and Muslim Fulani herders happened in the Lau district of Taraba state on Friday and Saturday.

Police spokesman David Misal said 12 people were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked Fulani settlements on Friday. A reprisal attack followed on Saturday, he added.

"We recorded four deaths in the Fulani settlements and eight in the Bachama village," he told AFP.

Residents of the affected villages put the death toll at 40. It was not possible to verify either figure independently.

The attacks are the latest in a bloody, long-running dispute over land, exacerbated by religious and ethnic tensions that have killed thousands in recent decades.

The International Crisis Group warned last September the conflict was becoming "as potentially dangerous as the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast".

Herdsman Abdullahi Hamma said suspected Bachama tribesmen launched a dawn attack on his village of Donadda and two others, Babagasa and Katibu.

"We buried 15 bodies of people killed in the attacks on our communities," he added.

On Saturday, Fulani herders stormed Bachama-populated Robi village on motorcycles and opened fire on residents.

"We lost 25 people to an unprovoked attack by Fulani gunmen on our village," said Robi youth leader Felix Uban-Doma.

"Several people were injured."

- 'Spill over' -

Police spokesman Misal said the killings were a "spill over" of similar violence last month in neighbouring Adamawa state. Lau district lies near the state border.

Then, at least 30 Fulani herders were killed by Bachama militia in an attack on four Fulani villages in the Numan district of the state.

The killings led to reprisal attacks by Fulani herders on nearby Bachama villages where several people were killed, leading to an exodus of residents from the area.

Story continues

"It was those aggrieved by the attack on their kinsmen in Numan that attacked the Fulani communities in Lau, which shares border with Adamawa, and led to the reprisals," Misal said.

Police were deployed in the affected area to contain the violence, said Misal, adding the police arrested three suspects in connection with the violence.

Dozens more people are believed to have been killed in a week of violence between Fulani herders and ethnic Tiv farmers in the Guma and Logo areas of central Benue state.

Benue police spokesman Moses Joel Yamu said it was not yet established how many had died.

"Our primary responsibility is to ensure that lives are protected," he told AFP, adding that reinforcements had been sent to the affected areas.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of the Benue state capital, Makurdi, over attacks on farming communities.

The mainly Muslim nomadic cattle rearers have been clashing with largely Christian farmers over grazing rights in Nigeria for decades.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari -- a Hausa-speaking Fulani from northern Nigeria -- has condemned the deadly clashes as "wicked and callous".

But he has been criticised for not doing more to prevent the attacks.
Xian (China) (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday launched a state visit to China in Xian -- the starting point of the ancient Silk Road -- in a nod to his counterpart's scheme to revive the famous trading route.

Macron will visit the northern city's famous terracotta warriors along with his wife Brigitte before delivering a keynote speech on the future of Franco-Chinese relations.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient Chinese artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

Macron is beginning the three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's colossal New Silk Road project, an ambitious initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabric, spices, and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt One Road", the plan is to see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has elicited both interest and anxiety and France has so far been cautious on it. Observers say China is waiting for Macron to outline his views on the scheme, in his emerging role as a European leadership voice.

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage for his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism and climate change, and make Xi an ally in implementing the Paris accord to fight climate change after the US pulled out of the deal.

After Xian, Macron will travel on to Beijing along with his delegation which takes in some 60 business executives and institutions.
Beijing (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe Monday to take part in China's massive Silk Road infrastructure project but warned against "hegemony", saying both sides should share the benefits.

Macron, on the first day of a state visit, also called on Europe and China to team up on curbing climate change in the face of the US decision to withdraw from the Paris accord.

"Our destinies are linked," he said in a keynote speech on the future of Sino-French relations during a visit to the northern city of Xian, the starting point of the ancient Silk Road.

"The future needs France, Europe and China," Macron said, adding he would travel to China "at least once a year".

Macron started his three-day visit in Xian as a gesture to Chinese President Xi Jinping's huge New Silk Road project, an initiative to connect Asia and Europe by road, rail and sea.

The $1 trillion infrastructure programme is billed as a modern revival of the ancient Silk Road that once carried fabrics, spices and a wealth of other goods in both directions.

Known in China as "One Belt, One Road", the plan will see gleaming new road and rail networks built through Central Asia and beyond, and new maritime routes stretching through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

The project has spurred both interest and anxiety in many countries, with some in Europe seeing it as an example of Chinese expansionism.

Macron said Europe should join the new silk road initiative but added a warning.

"They cannot be the roads of a new hegemony that will put the countries that they traverse in a vassal state," he said.

"Multilateralism means balanced cooperation."

The ancient Silk Roads were never purely Chinese, he said. "These roads are to be shared and they cannot be one-way."

The United States and Europeans often accuse China of restricting access to its vast market even though they have opened up to Chinese imports.

Story continues

France has a 30-billion-euro ($36 billion) trade deficit with China.

- Climate battle -

Macron's first official visit to Asia marks a new stage in his diplomacy, which has so far been concentrated on Europe and Africa.

He plans to seek a "strategic partnership" with Beijing on issues including terrorism.

In a French version of panda diplomacy, Macron has brought Xi a gift: a retired Republican Guard horse that is currently in quarantine in China.

On climate change, Macron said he would talk to Xi about "relaunching the climate battle" by preparing an increase in their engagements to combat global warming at the COP 24 talks in Poland later this year.

He praised China, the world's top polluter, for committing to the Paris accord after President Donald Trump gave notification of America's withdrawal.

"China kept its word," he said. "You demonstrate your immense sense of responsibility."

Cooperation will "show the world that the French and Chinese are capable of making our planet great and beautiful again", he said in Chinese.

After Xian, Macron travelled to Beijing along with his delegation which includes some 60 business executives and representatives of institutions.

Macron and his wife Brigitte met Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan on Monday night at the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where the Chinese leader praised France's foresight in being the first major Western country to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China, in 1964.

"That you have chosen China as your first destination on your first visit to Asia shows the high importance you attach to the relationship's development," he said.

On Tuesday Macron will visit the Forbidden City, meet top Chinese officials and oversee the signing of business deals.

Human Rights Watch has urged him to call publicly for human rights improvements in China during his meeting with Xi, but the French president's office said the matter would be addressed privately.

Along with Brigitte, Macron visited the famous terracotta warriors in Xian, as well as a centuries-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda -- a Buddhist site -- and the city's mosque.

The 8,000-man clay army, crafted around 250 BC for the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang, is a symbol of ancient artistic and military sophistication in a country that proclaims itself a 5,000-year-old civilisation.
Actor Peter Fonda and wife, Parky, at an awards season event in Los Angeles, Jan. 6, 2018. (Photo: Danny Moloshok/Reuters)

Ahead of Sundays Golden Globes, arguably the first Hollywood event following the bombshell revelations of widespread sexual misconduct and assault in the industry, many are discussing how the issue will be dealt with during the awards ceremony. A gathering of stars this Saturday in Los Angeles for the annual British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) Tea Party, many actors and film and television professionals spoke with Yahoo Lifestyle out about their take on the proposed symbolic donning of all-black fashion to make a statement on the red carpet.

Even legendary actor Peter Fonda chimed in while attending the BAFTA event, offering his perspective on the issues, on Times Up, and on the continuing conversation about the abuse of power in Hollywood. He stated that hes all in favor of the black dress movement. There is so much that needs to be talked about, said Fonda standing with his wife on the BAFTA red carpet. Fortunately, right now is a brilliant time to be talking about it.

We all came from women, he continued. We owe them a huge favor. Without them, there is no us!

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.




BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday she was "optimistic" going into exploratory talks with the Social Democrats (SPD), whose leader Martin Schulz said his party would not draw any red lines at the start of discussions. Merkel's conservative bloc and the SPD have scheduled five days of talks to see if they can find enough common ground to form a re-run of the 'grand coalition' that has governed Germany for the last four years. Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) - the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) - said he was going into the talks in "high spirits" and said the parties needed to come to an agreement. (Reporting by Michelle Martin; editing by John Stonestreet)
(Photo: HuffPost)

(Photo: Lucy Nicholson / Reuters)

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OPRAH STOLE THE SHOW AT THE 2018 GOLDEN GLOBES Oprah called for a day when no one has to say me too in a speech that had the internet clamoring for her to run for president. Her longtime partner Stedman Graham fueled the 2020 rumors by saying shed absolutely do it if the interest is there. While the #TimesUp movement dominated the night, many Hollywood men were silent on the issue. Check out all the looks from the fashion blackout as Hollywood elected to wear black to show solidarity with the victims of abuse and sexual harassment. Natalie Portman dragged the announcement of the Best Director category for being all-male. Sterling K. Brown became the first black man to take home best actor in a TV drama, and his speech is one to watch. The New York Times sexual harassment ad elicited a wide range of reactions. And dont forget to look at the list of all the winners  Big Little Lies, Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won big. [HuffPost] [Tweet | Share on Facebook]

STEVE BANNON BACKPEDALS ON HIS COMMENTS ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AND HIS FAMILY IN BOMBSHELL BOOK Calling Donald Trump Jr. a patriot and a good man. [HuffPost]

FIRST CAME THE FIRES, AND NOW COME THE FLOODS California hasnt even had time to catch its breath. [HuffPost]

WHY UBER CAN FIND YOU, BUT 911 CANT Accurate location data is on smartphones, so why dont more wireless carriers use it to locate emergency callers? [WSJ | Paywall]

NO, YOU DIDNT DREAM IT The president did tweet that he was a very stable genius this weekend. [HuffPost]

SO THE CDC IS WARNING ABOUT HOW TO PREPARE FOR A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION No, nothing to worry about at all. [HuffPost]

10 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES WELL BE WATCHING THIS YEAR Theres a lot going on in Illinois. [HuffPost]

WHATS BREWING

YOU DIDNT THINK WE WERE DONE TALKING ABOUT THE GOLDEN GLOBES, DID YOU? No one knew how to take Seth Meyers Harvey Weinstein joke. Actresses brought a bevy of activists to the Globes. Debra Messing blasted E! News for wage inequality. James Franco blocked Tommy Wiseau from his Globes moment. Elisabeth Moss thanked Margaret Atwood, saying, We no longer live in the gaps between the stories. Dylan Farrow said she hoped the #TimesUp movement didnt spare Woody Allen. The internet went wild for Sharon Stone and Mariah Carey walking the red carpet together. Nicole Kidman said the most adorable thing about her husband Keith Urban during her acceptance speech. And Amy Poehlers reclaiming my wine might be our new motto for 2018. [HuffPost]

Story continues

JAKE TAPPER PULLED THE PLUG ON THAT NOW-CLASSIC STEPHEN MILLER INTERVIEW Which ended with Ive wasted enough of my viewers time. [HuffPost]

OCEAN DEAD ZONES HAVE QUADRUPLED IN THE LAST HALF-CENTURY Scientists warn the damage is due to climate change. [HuffPost]

WE ARE HERE FOR THIS DREAM CASTING OF HELENA BONHAM CARTER AS PRINCESS MARGARET IN THE CROWN Imagine the cigarette pulls and continued disdain. [HuffPost]

A COUPLE HAS BEEN ORDERED TO PAY THEIR ENSLAVED NANNY $121,000 IN RESTITUTION For two years of unpaid work. [HuffPost]

BRAD PITT BID SIX FIGURES TO WATCH GAME OF THRONES WITH EMELIA CLARKE And still lost. [HuffPost]

BEFORE YOU GO

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
By Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trod carefully on Sunday around a threatened U.S. aid cut to Palestinians, stopping short of backing a funding halt as he repeated calls for a U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees to be dismantled. Netanyahu's public comments appeared to reflect a desire to show support for a major ally, but also concern that choking off funds would deepen Palestinian hardship and could put Israel and militants on a course for war. With Palestinians seething over U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition last month of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, he threatened on Tuesday to withhold aid money, accusing them of being "no longer willing to talk peace". On Friday, in a report denied by a State Department official, the Axios news site said Washington had frozen $125 million in funding for UNRWA. The U.N. agency, founded in 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees, is a main provider of educational and health services in the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu said UNRWA was "an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian problem." "It also enshrines the narrative of the so-called 'right of return'. Therefore, UNRWA should pass from the world," he told a weekly cabinet meeting. Netanyahu made almost identical comments about dismantling UNRWA in June - a message he said at the time he had conveyed to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Praising Trump's "critical approach" on the aid issue, Netanyahu steered clear of advocating a suspension of funding for the Palestinians. He said U.N. money for them should be transferred gradually to its global refugee agency UNHCR "with clear criteria for supporting genuine refugees and not fictitious ones, as is happening today under UNRWA." Chris Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said the refugee crisis was being perpetuated by "failure of the parties to deal with the issue..." "UNRWA is mandated by the General Assembly to continue with its services until a just and lasting solution is found for the Palestine refugees," Gunness said in a statement. Palestinian officials have said Trump's declaration on Jerusalem, overturning decades of U.S. policy, meant he could not serve as an honest broker in peace negotiations that Washington has been trying to revive, and they condemned his remarks on a funding halt as blackmail. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they seek to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The United States is the largest donor to UNRWA, with a pledge of nearly $370 million as of 2016, according to the organization's website. Gunness said the agency had not been "informed directly of a formal decision either way by the U.S. administration" on cuts. In addition to its services in Gaza, UNRWA operates in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. (editing by John Stonestreet)
By Hani Amara TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Nigeria is starting flights to evacuate thousands of its citizens from Libya which will continue until all those wanting to return home have done so, its foreign minister said on Saturday. Nigerians have recently been the largest national group among African migrants travelling to Libya and trying to cross from there to Italy by sea. Since local armed factions and Libya's coastguard began blocking more migrants from leaving in July last year, large numbers have been trapped in Libya, where they often face dire conditions and abuse, including forced labour. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has in recent months accelerated a "voluntary returns" programme to repatriate migrants from a number of countries. Nigeria now joins Niger in organising bilateral returns. "The main objective, and we're very focused on that objective, is to get these Nigerian citizens back home as quickly as possible," Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyema told reporters during a visit to Tripoli. "Our president has made available all the resources necessary to repatriate all the Nigerians here. "We have two planes arriving today and God willing we are hoping to evacuate anything up to 800 Nigerians today." Nigeria had been expecting to fly back about 5,500 migrants, Onyema said, but the situation on the ground made the actual number hard to ascertain. "Some of the difficulties with getting precise numbers is that some are within the control of the central government in camps, some are clearly outside the camps, some are also in less accessible areas where there might not be full central government control and authority," he said. Facilitating voluntary returns could also be complicated by lack of access, Onyema said. Criminals involved in smuggling and trafficking migrants "also (have) an interest that a number of them should not be repatriated, because these represent economic assets for them". Libya has been in turmoil since a 2011 uprising, with rival governments and armed factions vying for power. Onyema was hosted by the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, which has struggled to assert its authority on the ground. Slightly fewer than half as many migrants reached Europe by sea in 2017 than 2016, the IOM said on Friday, largely due to a drop in numbers crossing from Libya. (Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Nvidia (NVDA) drove into CES 2018 riding high as the go-to chip maker for the up and coming self-driving car industry. And the company is going to roll out in even better position, thanks to the introduction of its new artificial intelligence-powered co-pilot system.

Dubbed Nvidia Drive IX, or intelligent experience, the software will serve as a kind of guardian angel for both drivers and passengers alike. Powered by Nvidias new Xavier system on a chip running in its Nvidia Drive Pegasus AI platform, Drive IX is designed to work in future fully autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles.

Volkswagen will be among the first automakers to take advantage of Drive IX, installing the system in its Buzz I.D. prototype vehicle.

Volkswagen is among the first automakers to develop Nvidia IX software to create an AI-powered co-pilot.

AI is my co-pilot

According to Nvidia, Drive IX will allow automakers to create digital assistants that function as co-pilots that monitor every aspect of your driving experience and alert you if they see something you dont.

Say, for example, youre driving and you look down to grab something in your center console or on the passenger seat when someone steps off of the curb in front of you. Drive IX will see the pedestrian using your cars external sensors and recognize that youre looking away from the road using your cars internal sensors. It will then immediately alert you that someone is in the road, so you can take the appropriate action.

The Nvidia Xavier system on a chip will power autonomous vehicle technologies.

Nvidia says Drive IX will also be able to use facial recognition technology to unlock and start your car without a key, alert you when youre drowsy and even open your lift gate as you approach your vehicle.

Its an interesting prospect for the future of driving, as it could ensure you stay focused, while helping to keep you aware of road hazards you might not recognize on your own. Theres no doubt some drivers will be turned off by these kind of nanny features, so automakers will likely include ways for consumers to override their vehicles co-pilots.

Augmenting your drive

In addition to Drive IX, Nvidia announced its Drive AR, or augmented reality, software. Drive AR will let automakers create digital overlays drivers will see projected onto the real world. Nvidia says the technology will enable features like notifications or information for points of interest and improved navigation.

Story continues

All of this tech comes via Nvidias new Pegasus AI computing platform. Built using two of the companys powerful Xavier systems on a chip and two graphics processing units, Pegasus takes the kind of autonomous driver hardware that use to take up the trunk of a car, and shrinks it down to the size of a license plate.

Nvidia says automakers will begin receiving their first versions of Pegasus starting in mid-2018. Many companies believe theyll have fully-autonomous vehicles available between 2020 and 2025. If thats the case, Pegasus is likely to play a big role in that push.

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Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
(HELSINKI)  A man in Stockholm picked up an unknown object from the ground that detonated in his hand Sunday, accidently killing himself and injuring his female companion near a subway station, Swedish police said.

The blast took place about 11 a.m. just outside the Varby Gard subway station in Huddinge  a residential district in greater Stockholm, said regional police spokesman Sven-Erik Olsson.

The man was seriously injured after he picked up something from the ground and this device exploded, Olsson said, adding that experts were examining the object.

The man, in his 60s, was rushed to hospital but later died while the woman, in her mid-40s, received minor wounds to her face and both legs, Olsson said.

The Swedish tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen claimed the device may have been a hand grenade but Olsson dismissed that as speculation.

Police initially were investigating the incident as an attempted murder, but later said there was no reason to believe that the couple was targeted. Olsson also said nothing has indicated that terrorism was involved.

Olsson said police were scanning and sweeping outside and inside the subway station to make sure no additional explosive devices were there.
Sunday evenings Golden Globes began with a monologue from host Seth Meyers, who made a satirical remark directed at Oprah, stating, You will never be president!

But an identical jab from the talk show host to Donald Trump at the 2011 White House correspondents dinner is rumored to have motivated 45th president to run, and now Meyers may have persuaded another mogul to at least consider the idea.

Oprahs friends and fans weigh in on the prospect of her running for president. (Photo: Getty Images)

Some have said that night convinced him to run, Meyers reflected onstage. So, if thats true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes. And Hanks! Wheres Hanks? You will never be vice president. You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.

And see we did, as Oprah took the stage to accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award and delivered the most memorable speech of the night.

The woman of the hour delivered an unforgettable speech. (Photo: Getty Images)

In nearly nine minutes, the media mogul, actress, and philanthropist communicated to people across the country what theyve been waiting to hear for years  a call to all industries, and to all women and men, to take action against societys most toxic systematic issues. The speech was indeed presidential in both the manner of its delivery and its meaning, which left many on social media  including, for a few hours, the NBC network  begging one question: Will Oprah (please) run for president in 2020?

Much like the other political initiative of the night, #TimesUp, a hashtag and social media campaign quickly followed Oprahs speech, while media correspondents at the event asked about her reaction. The Los Angeles Times told the A Wrinkle in Time actress, The internet is saying Oprah for president in 2020. To which Oprah responded, Im just glad I got through the speech! But when pressed later about her consideration for running, she slyly said, Okaay!

Its not just what the multifaceted woman said herself, however, as other friends and longtime partner Stedman Graham shared their own insight with The Times as well.

Story continues

I asked Stedman if @oprah would run for President. "It's up to the people. She would absolutely do it." https://t.co/rAficpB060  Amy Kaufman (@AmyKinLA) January 8, 2018

Its up to the people. She would absolutely do it, Graham shared. While Meryl Streep told The Washington Post, She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president. I dont think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesnt have a choice.

Additionally, two blindly sourced friends of Winfrey told CNN on Monday that her confidants have privately been urging her to run, and these conversations date back several months. The sources did stress, however, that Winfreys mind is not made up.

The sentiments are shared throughout social media.

Why this massive #Oprah2020 moment? Because Oprah is the antithesis of Trump: A well-spoken, incredibly smart & confident black woman, who energizes people not with hatred & anger, but with hope & vision. When we hear her speak, it reminds us of who we can be as a country.  Like, Totally Stable Genius (@dvorakoelling) January 8, 2018

Humane, inclusive, enlightening, inspiring and eloquent. It's been a while, but this is what a leader is supposed to sound like, right? #Oprah2020 #GoldenGlobes  Elizabeth Weitzman (@EWeitzman) January 8, 2018

I will now officially divide time like this : Everything that happened before @Oprah speech : Everything that will happen after.  Reese Witherspoon (@RWitherspoon) January 8, 2018

I would willingly vote for a woman with no political experience, but excelled at the human experience. #Oprah2020  Tangela Ekhoff (@tangelaekhoff) January 8, 2018

Oprah went from being dirt poor to becoming an ACTUAL self made billionaire, is intelligent, empathetic, hardworking & has done so much humanitarian work on top of being one of the best communicators on earth, why SHOULDN'T she run for president?! #Oprah2020  Matty (@mattymonsterz) January 8, 2018

But with so many people posing the rhetorical question of why shouldnt she run, others are providing some answers.

In a piece for The Daily Beast titled Why Oprah Winfrey Shouldnt Run for President, Ira Madison III addresses this exact point, while acknowledging the many reasons that people believe she should. Oprah is a generous queen for sure, Madison writes, but lets not pretend that her stepping into the White House would magically mean a new Pontiac arrives on the doorstep of every American who voted for her.

Another Twitter user addressed the work that has yet to be done before a woman like Oprah could even have a chance at the presidency. And it has a lot to do with who Americans are currently voting for.

Y'all want #Oprah2020 so bad? Prove it. Spend this year electing Black women to office in 2018. Put in the work. Show some receipts. Then we can talk about the presidency in 2020. Deal? pic.twitter.com/6zX0rpTJJ3  April (@ReignOfApril) January 8, 2018

The man behind Louder With Crowder, Steven Crowder, also took a hit back at those who are highlighting Oprahs many wins by insinuating some hypocrisy in her speech. With a meme thats now gone viral of Oprah alongside Harvey Weinstein, Crowder hopes that the photo will make an impact.

Its unclear how impactful the old photos of the female mogul have been amongst the rest that are celebratory, and her words, which were so uplifting  including those that acknowledge a persons mistakes.

Ive interviewed and portrayed people whove withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, Winfrey said in her speech, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights.

After prevailing through the dark nights of 2017, it seems that the New Year is already feeling a bit brighter with Oprahs poised words. Yet were still left wondering what exactly she means when she says, a new day is on the horizon! And time will have to tell.

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(This version of the Jan 6. story corrects the third-to-last paragraph to show the Transportation Safety Board is an independent investigative agency, not a Canadian regulator)) By Julie Gordon (Reuters) - Dozens of passengers were evacuated from an aircraft at Toronto's Pearson Airport late on Friday after a plane under tow struck an arriving jet that was waiting to park, sparking a small fire, the airport authority said. Fire and emergency services responded to the collision between the two planes from Sunwing Airlines and Westjet Airlines , which happened at 6:19 p.m. (2319 GMT), the Greater Toronto Airport Authority said in a statement. Calgary-based Westjet said it had unconfirmed reports of "minor injuries" in the incident, but that all 168 passengers and six crew members on board its plane were safe and accounted for. The jet, a Boeing 737-800, had just arrived in Toronto from the resort of Cancun, Mexico, and was waiting to proceed to the gate at the time of the collision, Westjet said. Sunwing, part of the privately held Sunwing Travel Group, said there were no passengers or crew onboard its plane at the time of the collision and that the aircraft was being towed by ground handler Swissport International Ltd. A spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board, a Canadian agency that investigates transportation incidents, said a team was headed to the airport to investigate. Swissport, a provider of ground and cargo handling services for the aviation industry, confirmed late on Friday that one of its employees was involved in the collision and said it would cooperate in the investigation. "The incident occurred when our employee was pushing back the plane from the gate," Pierre Payette, Swissport Canada Handling Inc vice president of operations for Toronto, said in a statement emailed to Reuters. "The impact caused a small fire in the empty aircrafts exterior generator, which was quickly extinguished by the Fire Department." (Reporting by Julie Gordon in Vancouver and Jim Finkle in Toronto; Editing by Sandra Maler and Lisa Von Ahn)
(ACAPULCO, Mexico)  Violent clashes involving gunmen, a community police force and state police killed 11 people in the troubled southern state of Guerrero on Sunday, while a separate series of shootouts the previous night left seven dead in the northern Mexico beach resort of San Jose del Cabo.

Guerrero state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said eight people were initially killed when gunmen ambushed community police before dawn in the town of La Concepcion, near the resort city of Acapulco. Two of the dead were from the community force.

Later in the morning, state police arrived to disarm the local agents, and another shootout erupted in which three people were killed. Alvarez said he did not know how they died, but local media said they were community police.

State Attorney General Xavier Olea Pelaez said 30 members of the community police were detained on suspicion of crimes including homicide and illegal weapons and drug possession.

Among those arrested was Marco Antonio Suastegui, the founder of the community force and the leader of a social movement that for over a decade has fought against a hydroelectric project in the region.

Photojournalist Bernandino Hernandez said that while covering the violence he was beaten, kicked and dragged by state police and forcibly relieved of his cameras memory cards. He also witnessed several other journalists being treated roughly.

Hernandez said he had photographed police using force against locals who tried to prevent the arrest of the community agents: Some people were dragged by the hair to take them away.

Hernandez is a regular contributor of photographs to the Associated Press but was not on assignment for AP at the time.

Guerrero has been one of Mexicos most violent states in recent years, home to marijuana and opium poppy fields as well as warring organized crime gangs.

Its also where 43 teachers college students disappeared in 2014 after being taken by police from the city of Iguala who allegedly handed them over to a drug cartel. They remain missing.

Story continues

In the northern state of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said in a statement that marines responding Saturday night to reports of gunfire in San Jose del Cabo came upon heavily armed men wearing tactical vests and riding in two vehicles with license plates from the U.S. state of California.

Both vehicles sped off with the marines in pursuit and subsequently crashed, the statement said. In two separate exchanges of gunfire, all seven of the cars occupants were shot dead by marines.

Baja California Sur has also seen an explosion of violence as the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels battle for territory in the state. In late December, four bodies were found hanging from highway overpasses in the resort-studded Los Cabos area.
(Reuters) - A deputy sheriff in Washington state was fatally shot on Sunday night while chasing two suspected burglars, one of whom was found dead at the scene, police and local media said.

The Pierce County Sheriff's Department said on Twitter that the officer, who has not been identified, was dispatched along with other deputies to a house in Frederickson, about 18 miles south of Tacoma, shortly before midnight.

The suspected burglars fled on foot. Deputies were chasing them when the shooting erupted and one officer was struck by gunfire, the Tacoma News Tribune newspaper reported.

"White male suspect found deceased at the scene, black male suspect remains unidentified and on the loose," the sheriff's office said.

Police said a manhunt was under way for the second suspect. They did not immediately say how the white suspect died.

"It is with incredible sadness ... that our deputy has passed away from his injuries," the sheriff's department said.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Oprahs Golden Globes speech included an inspiring tribute to Recy Taylor, who fought for justice after her 1944 rape. (Photo: Getty Images)

Everyone is buzzing about Oprah Winfreys inspiring Golden Globes speech as the first black woman to accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. And its subject, the late Recy Taylor, deserves much of the credit.

On Sunday, the A Wrinkle in Time star delivered the rousing speech to a sea of audience members wearing black, an act of solidarity to protest sexual harassment. The dress code was organized in the wake of the #MeToo movement, sparked by allegations that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and other famous men targeted dozens of women.

Winfrey commended the media for its insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.

And theres someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know too, said Winfrey. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service shed attended in Abbeville, Ala., when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasnt an option in the era of Jim Crow.

Recy Taylor, who was raped nearly seven decades ago by a gang of white men as she walked home from church, was photographed in her Florida home in 2010. (Photo: AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File)

She continued, The men who tried to destroy her were never [prosecuted]. Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived, as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

Winfrey was referencing Times Up, a new Hollywood-backed initiative that established a multi-million-dollar legal defense fund to help underprivileged women to report sexual crimes.

In September 1944, Taylor was only 24 when she was kidnapped at knife- and gunpoint, gang-raped, blindfolded, and discarded on the side of the road by six white men while walking home with a friend and her 18-year-old son, West. Despite the mens threats to kill Taylor if she reported them, the young mom did just that  an incredibly brave move in the Jim Crow era, a slang term to describe a period of time marked by racial segregation.

Story continues

Jim Crow laws were established in the 1890s by Southern states that required black people to abide by humiliating and degrading rules, such as using separate water fountains and sitting in colored sections of restaurants, buses, and libraries. Black people were not allowed to vote, attend the same schools as whites, or  in some states  marry a person of another race.

So for Taylor, a black woman, to report a crime against herself and by a group of white men, to a justice system where black people often faced all-white juries, took an incredible amount of courage and fortitude.

Recy Taylor visited the White House in 2011, nearly seven decades after she was denied justice following a violent assault. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

According to the Congressional Record, no arrests were made, so the NAACP in Alabama took on Taylors case, assigning it to a woman named Rosa Parks, who more than a decade later would become a famous civil rights leader by getting arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus.

Parks organized the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, supported by fellow activists W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, which prompted a second investigation  and a confession from one of the men  but no convictions.

In 2011, when Taylor was 91 and living in Florida, the state of Alabama issued an apology to her for neglecting her case, in response to publicity from the book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance  a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by historian Danielle L. McGuire.

Taylors younger brother  Robert Corbitt of Abbeville  said he remembers the day his sister was raped 67 years ago like it was yesterday, saying the police tried to blame his sister, and the family was harassed so that he was not allowed to play in the front yard, according to the House Joint Resolution, which called the event a deplorable lack of justice. The document also read, Be it further resolved, that we express our deepest sympathies and solemn regrets to Recy Taylor and her family and friends.

I never lived in a way that nobody cared about my feelings, Taylor told The Root a few months later at a D.C. event called Reintroducing Rosa, which honored Parks for her work in Taylors case. I never lived that kind of life, but I always wanted it. Now I believe that a lot of people care about me, and that makes me feel good.

Of the apology, Taylor further told The Root, I was proud to hear that they [apologized]. But I cant explain just how I feel right now. I find myself getting nervous talking about it too much because it gets me disturbed, thinking about what happened. But I felt good over the apology.

According to an obituary published by the New York Times, Taylor died three weeks after the release of the documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor.

I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on, said Winfrey on Sunday. It was somewhere in Rosa Parkss heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and its here with every woman who chooses to say, Me too. And every man  every man who chooses to listen.

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The investigations into the Trump teams Russian connections are only likely to gather more pace and scale: Getty

In August last year two staffers from the US House Intelligence Committee arrived in London and turned up unannounced at the office of Christopher Steele. Not finding him there, they went to the office of his lawyer demanding to see him.

The timing of the visit was of importance. It took place when special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee were making progress in their attempt to speak to the former MI6 officer who had produced the dossier on Donald Trumps Russian connection. The two men had been sent by Republican members of the House Committee with the aim, it was suspected, of intimidating Mr Steele.

Last Friday, at the end of a week which had been dominated by highly damaging and humiliating revelations about Mr Trump in Michael Wolffs book Fire and Fury, two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsay Graham and Chuck Grassley asked the US Justice Department to start an investigation of Mr Steele over his contacts with the media. It is highly unlikely to come to anything, accompanied as it was with the acknowledgement that it is not intended to be an allegation of a crime.

But this is part of a far wider pattern of action to damage the investigations into the Trump teams Russian connection, something which is only likely to gather more pace and scale after the announcement that preliminary discussions have already been held for the President to be interviewed by the FBI.

The attempt at undermining the inquiries had begun soon after they were announced with Devon Nunes, the Republican chair of the Houses own inquiry into Russian meddling, being forced to step down over secret contacts with the Trump White House.

Mr Nunes, who refused to recuse himself temporarily from the chair and was subsequently cleared by the House Ethics Committee over the passing of information, has declared to Fox News that I am in charge, I have always been in charge of the House investigation. Mr Nunes, it is believed, was one of those who sent the staffers to see Mr Steele last Summer without telling the Democrats in the Committee.

Story continues

Mr Nunes has been pursuing alleged bias against Mr Trump in the Justice Department and FBI, issuing subpoenas for confidential documents in the Russia inquiry. Mr Nunes has charged that it seems the Department of Justice and FBI need to be investigating themselves. The senior Democrat in the House Committee, Adam Schiff, has complained from the beginning of this investigation theres been an effort to circle the wagons around the White House by the chairman and some of the presidents allies". Mr Nunes, he held, wants to investigate anyone but the Russians.

A whole range of FBI and Justice Department officials, from Robert Mueller and acting FBI Director Christopher Wray to deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who has been vocally supportive of Mr Mueller, have come under attack from the Republican right.

Some of the focus is now on Jeff Sessions. The attorney general recused himself from the Russia investigation after revelations of a meeting he had with the Russian ambassador to the US in 2016. Mr Trump is reported to have been furious with Mr Sessions and had asked White House counsel Don McGahn to urge him to change his mind.

Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against Mr Rosenstein. Even last July he was annoyed that Rosenstein is from Baltimore: there are very few Republicans from Baltimore, if any, He is a Democrat, Mr Rosenstein, it has been pointed out, is neither from Baltimore, nor a Democrat. But Mr Trump continues to see him as threat.

Soon after the news broke of Mr Trumps projected interviews with investigators, messages began to appear in social media from the Presidents supporters of the need for changes in the Justice Department. Tom Fitton, the head of a conservative lobbying group called Judicial Watch, tweeted: Sessions should unrecuse himself and clean house. Republican congressmen Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan have demanded recently that Mr Sessions should resign.

The removal of Mr Sessions, Trump supporters have pointed out, would enable the appointment of a new attorney general who could take back the Mueller investigation from Mr Rosenstein, then give it a time limit and start cutting back on funding with the hope that it will peter out.

The net may appear to be closing around the Trump White House, with the Presidents former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn already charged, and Jared Kushner under intense scrutiny. But the campaign to protect Mr Trump will not end anytime soon.
Actress Rose McGowan said Sunday that it was Hollywood fakery for actors to wear black to the Golden Globes as a way to protest sexual misconduct.

McGowan, an actress and activist who has accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her, criticized the awards show in an impassioned Twitter exchange with Asia Argento, another alleged Weinstein victim.

When Argento pointed out that McGowan had spoken out about Weinstein and inspired others to step forward, the former Charmed star wrote in reply: And not one of those fancy people wearing black to honor our rapes would have lifted a finger had it not been so. I have no time for Hollywood fakery, but you I love, @AsiaArgento #RoseArmy.

And not one of those fancy people wearing black to honor our rapes would have lifted a finger had it not been so. I have no time for Hollywood fakery, but you I love, .@AsiaArgento #RoseArmy https://t.co/9e0938y5sI  rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) January 8, 2018

No one should forget that you were the first one who broke the silence. Anyone who tries to diminish your work is a troll and an enemy of the movement. You gave me the courage to speak out. I am on your side until I die.  Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) January 7, 2018

When word spread in December that actresses planned to wear black dresses to the awards ceremony, McGowan zeroed in on Meryl Streep. She said the Oscar winner showed hypocrisy for having worked with Weinstein. Streep has insisted that she knew nothing of Weinsteins alleged criminal behavior, and told HuffPost through a representative that she was hurt by McGowans comments.

Story continues

Actress Amber Tamblyn said at the time that she was friends with McGowan but that those remarks had been beneath her.

Rose McGowan is a friend and while I support her kind of movement, I do not support any woman (or man) shaming or taunting the movements of other women who are trying to create change, Tamblyn tweeted.

Also on HuffPost

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Michelle Williams with activist Tarana Burke

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Giuliana Rancic

Allison Williams

Claire Foy

Amy Poehler with activist Saru Jayaraman

America Ferrera and Natalie Portman

Catherine Zeta-Jones

Mandy Moore

Chrissy Metz

Samira Wiley

Bob Odenkirk

William H. Macy

Kelly Clarkson

Mary J. Blige

Heidi Klum

Emma Watson and activist Marai Larasi

Halle Berry

Jessica Biel

Zoe Kravitz

Dakota Johnson

Diane Kruger

Millie Bobby Brown

Reese Witherspoon and Eva Longoria

Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan

Jessica Chastain

Emma Stone and activist/athlete Billie Jean King

Jude Law

Ava DuVernay

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday militants had used drones to attack its naval and air bases in Syria on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported. The Russian Defence Ministry said there were no casualties or damage as a result of the attacks, which involved thirteen armed drones, on its Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base in western Syria, the agencies reported. The ministry said last week that two Russian service personnel were killed in a mortar attack on the Hmeimim base on Dec. 31. (Reporting by Jack Stubbs; Writing by Polina Ivanova; Editing by Jack Stubbs)
Moscow (AFP) - The head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill on Sunday called on Russians to vote in upcoming presidential elections expected to extend President Vladimir Putin's rule.

"I call on all of you, including Orthodox believers, to take part in the upcoming presidential elections. This is very important," the cleric said in an interview to Russian state television aired to mark Orthodox Christmas.

The Patriarch also warned Russians of "the possibility of malicious people or forces to use digital technology to render irreparable damage to our country and society."

Last week, Russian opposition politician and popular blogger Alexei Navalny urged voters to boycott the March vote after election bosses barred him from standing.

In the interview, Patriarch Kirill praised Putin's role in Syria and warned of the dangers of social divisions.

The religious leader said Moscow's 2015 intervention in the Syria conflict was aimed not only at stabilising the situation on the ground and stopping jihadists from taking power but also at defending Christian minorities.

"There was also the important idea of defending the Christian minorities. And thanks to Russia, the genocide of Christians was stopped," the church leader said.

Without Russian involvement in the conflict, he added, the situation in Syria would look like Iraq after the fall and death of Saddam Hussein.

The powerful cleric said he had been to Iraq when Saddam was still in power, including Mosul, where he visited Christian monasteries.

"I saw the piety of the people and I was glad that Christian churches existed peacefully in a Muslim milieu. Now nothing of that is left. The monasteries are destroyed, the churches are blown up and 85 percent of Christians are either dead or thrown out. That could have happened to Syria," he said.

The Patriarch said he believed Russia has historically been guided by its conscience over its pragmatism.

Story continues

"The uniqueness of Russia, although this has sometimes caused problems for the country, is that it is conscientious," he said.

As an example, he cited Russia's role in the 19th century Balkan Wars when "thousands and thousands of Russians went to fight for their Slavic brothers" and when Moscow defended Serbia in the First World War.

The Patriarch also called on Russian authorities to do more to diminish the gap between the rich and poor in order to "increase justice in our national life."

"Socialism tried to solve this problem. But let's say it straight: it did not," the Patriarch said.

He also called on Russians to "respect the life" of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II, following a film about his love affair with a ballerina that stirred controversy in Russia on the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution last year.

The Russian Orthodox Church considers Nicholas a saint.

The Patriarch said the film "threw more dirt at the martyr (the Tsar)" and explained that it had offended Orthodox believers.

He added that an expert study on the presumed remains of the Tsarist family, executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, is ongoing.

Russian president Vladimir Putin meanwhile praised the role of the Orthodox Church after attending an Orthodox Christmas church service in his native Saint Petersburg late Saturday.

"This holiday gives millions of believers happiness and hope, brings them back to spiritual sources and native traditions and unites (people) around the eternal Christian values of our nation's centuries-old cultural heritage," Putin stated.

Attending the service in an 18th-century Saint Petersburg church where his father was baptised, Putin praised the "truly selfless activity of the Russian Orthodox Church and other Christian confessions in helping to support civil peace and harmony in our country".
At this years Golden Globes, celebrities actually wanted to be asked hard-hitting red carpet questions. To show their solidarity with womens rights across industries, the Times Up movement requested that celebrities dress in black. And most did, a visual symbol that their attention was on the sexual harassment allegations and movement for change in Hollywood and that they were ready to open up on the red carpet. Unfortunately, the red carpet interviewers werent necessarily ready themselves  particularly when it came to speaking with Hollywoods leading men.

Ryan Seacrest at the Golden Globes, Jan. 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo: Getty Images)

As many are pointing out across social media, Ryan Seacrest and other red carpet reporters werent asking enough of men. Women in their striking black gowns were ready to talk politics, and plenty of men also signified their support with black tuxedo shirts and #TimesUp pins. As New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum described it, I know it would be awkward but I love awkward.

I do wish theyd ask the guys about the Reckoning instead of the women. I know it would be awkward but I love awkward.  Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) January 7, 2018

Others agreed that women shouldnt be the only ones discussing changes in Hollywood.

How come E! is not asking the men in all black on the #GoldenGlobes red carpet why they are wearing black?  Vanessa Friedman (@VVFriedman) January 8, 2018

hello @RyanSeacrest you have about 43 minutes to ask ANY ONE MAN ABOUT TIMES UP come on you can do it  Jamie Feldman (@RealGirlProject) January 8, 2018

Ryan Seacrest seems so relieved every time he gets a guy and he can not have to ask about sexual harassment.  Rachel Sklar  (@rachelsklar) January 8, 2018

Ryan Seacrest looks like he would rather die than talk about Tine's Up  John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 8, 2018

So was Justin another man wearing a Times Up button not at all asked about it by Ryan Seacrest? This is a male-created problem; questioning should reflect that.  Michael Arceneaux (@youngsinick) January 7, 2018

Others pointed out that celebrities publicists may have dictated who would and would not be open to more serious interviews ahead of time.

Story continues

Or maybe it was just a pronunciation issue?

Ryan Seacrest can't say the word "solidarity" for some reason. like, it's very difficult for him #ERedCarpet  Candice Frederick (@ReelTalker) January 8, 2018

Whatever the reasoning, its clear that men are both willing and ready to be a part of the conversation about gender inequality  we just have to start asking them. Fortunately for Ryan Seacrest, awards season is just beginning.

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Riyadh, - AFP

Eleven princes in Saudi Arabia have been arrested for staging a sit-in protest at having to pay their own utility bills, after the kingdom announced subsidies would be cut as part of a major economic overhaul.

The princes had gathered at Qasr al-Hokm palace in the capital Riyadh to demand the cancellation of a recent decree that halted state payment of water and electricity bills for royal family members.

The government is currently trying to reduce its dependence on oil revenues. Public spending has been targeted, including the lifting of some government subsidies.

The economic reforms have been linked to the arrest of more than 200 princes in an anti-corruption purge in November spearheaded by Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

They have led to tension within the royal Al-Saud family which counts thousands of members - only a handful of whom wield direct influence over the kingdom.

Saudi families arrive outside a stadium to attend an event in the capital Riyadh Credit: AFP

All those detained over the weekend, arrested for disturbing the peace, were thought to be sons of the deposed King Saud bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud.

Prince Mohammed has sidelined his cousins to become heir to the throne and has since consolidated his grip on the kingdom's economy.

Saudi officials estimate that corruption and embezzlement has cost the kingdom at least $100 billion over decades.

Reports suggest the Saudi authorities have demanded money in return for releasing the Saudi princes held at the Ritz Carlton hotel for nearly two months. They want at least $6 billion (4.4bn) from Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the worlds richest men.

The 11 princes were being detained at Al-Hayer prison south of Riyadh, the capital, pending trial.

"No one is above the law in Saudi Arabia. Everyone is equal and is treated the same as others," the statement said.
Princess Charlotte was all smiles before heading off to her first day of preschool.

The young royal was photographed by her mother, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, at Kensington Palace before she left for her first day at the Willcocks Nursery School in London, a preschool located at the Holy Trinity Church, on Monday.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to share two photographs of Princess Charlotte at Kensington Palace this morning. pic.twitter.com/dDIOZdA7aM  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) January 8, 2018

Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their 2-year-old daughter would attend the school in their Christmas card, released in December. Her older brother, Prince George, attended preschool at Westacre Montessori School in Norfolk.

Willcocks Nursery School, founded in 1964, offers activities for children between ages two and five including poetry, acting, snack time, singing and show and tell. The school also involves students in activities like sports, cooking, painting and music.

Parents who want their children to attend Willcocks must pay a nonrefundable 125 ($168) registration fee and later visit with their child to fill out a registration form. Selected students will receive an Offer of a Place via email, requiring parents to put down a deposit of 1,500 ($2,027). Tuition at Willcocks costs 3050 ($4,121) per term.
Ziguinchor (Senegal) (AFP) - A rebel movement in Senegal's restive southern region of Casamance on Monday blamed the massacre of 13 men at the weekend on a feud in the illegal teak logging industry.

The Casamance Movement of Democratic Forces (MFDC) said it "firmly condemns" the killings, which it claimed sought to wreck efforts to restore peace to the troubled Casamance region.

The movement "will not let itself be distracted or disorientated by the gravediggers of peace", said the group, which has been campaigning for the region's independence since 1982.

The west African nation began two days of mourning on Monday as flags flew at half mast in Ziguinchor, the region's biggest city.

"They sold firewood... for 200 francs (CFA, some 30 cents)," said Mamadou Diallo, whose father was killed in the violence.

Due to lack of work in the city, he said his father was "forced to go into the bush" even if it was dangerous.

The MFDC called on the authorities to "focus their inquiries" on local military and governmental officials "who are at the head of a vast network of illegal logging and selling of teak".

Teak is a high-value tropical hardwood whose resilience makes it prized for use in boat decking and outdoor furniture.

- 'Definite peace' -

The killing is linked to a feud between sawmill operators, "whose fierce competition has instilled animosity between workers," the MFDC claimed.

The 13 were murdered on Saturday in an execution-style killing deep in Borofaye forest in the commune of Boutoupa-Camaracounda, according to a survivor.

The government said 10 were shot dead, two were stabbed to death and one was burned. Half a dozen more were wounded.

Casamance, separated from the rest of Senegal by The Gambia, has been the target of an independence campaign for more than 35 years.

Violence has left thousands of civilians and military personnel dead and forced many to flee. The economy, heavily dependent on agriculture and tourism, has been badly hurt.

Story continues

However, the region has been calm in recent years after President Macky Sall came to office.

In October 2016, France, the former colonial power, removed Casamance from its list of danger zones for tourists visiting the area.

Last October, the government and a rebel faction met in Rome to revive a peace process under the Catholic organisation Sant'Egidio.

In a New Year's message, Sall had appealed to the rebels to continue talks to create a "definite peace".

The MFDC said the attack "seeks nothing more than to break the dynamic of peace in order to live more profitably from conflict."

A local rebel leader, Oumar Ampaye Bodian, also condemned the attack, saying in an interview on the private radio station Sud FM that the "evil attack" had occurred while "the president is reaching out" on the Casamance issue.
During the opening monologue of the 75th Golden Globe Awards, host Seth Meyers addressed the growing unrest in Hollywood after a year riddled with stories of sexual assault and harassment, as well as claims of gender inequality.

Meyers pointed out how this is the first time men in Hollywood have had to panic whenever hearing their names said out loud. He joked, Did you hear about Willem Dafoe? And after a pause he said, He was nominated. This drew quite a look from Dafoe, who was in the audience.

Meyers joked about embattled producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by numerous women. Weinstein was not in attendance, but Meyers said, Dont worry, hell be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person ever booed during the In Memoriam, drawing some groans from the audience, who thought the joke may have been a little bit in poor taste.

Meyers also took a shot at shunned actor Kevin Spacey. Meyers suggested that Spaceys replacement in All the Money in the World, Christopher Plummer, also replace Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Meyers joked, I hope he can do a Southern accent because Kevin Spacey sure couldnt.

And while the topics of sexual harassment and gender inequality are serious, Meyers did his best to lighten the mood. And to deliver the punch line to some of those jokes, Meyers even enlisted the help of some stars in the room, like Jessica Chastain.

Meyers set Chastain up, saying, The Golden Globes are 75 this year And Chastain replied, But the actress that plays its wife is still only 32.

See why everyone was wearing black at the Golden Globes:





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Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below. And check out our host, Kylie Mar, on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Six people were killed on Sunday when a vehicle going the wrong direction on a northern California highway collided with another vehicle, causing a fire that engulfed both cars, police said.

The female driver of the 2013 Chevrolet going the wrong way on Interstate 5 as well as the five people in the other vehicle, a 2013 Dodge, were all pronounced dead at the scene, the California Highway Patrol said.

There were three females and two males in the Dodge. The names of those killed have not yet been released.

Authorities said they have not yet determined if drugs or alcohol had played a role in the crash that took place in Woodland, about 85 miles (135 km) northeast of San Francisco.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)
Diane Kruger and Norman Reedus arrive at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Jan. 7, 2018. (Photo: Christopher Polk/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Diane Kruger is having a helluva night. Not only did the German actresss film In the Fade win Best Motion Picture  Foreign Language at the Golden Globes, but she also went public with Norman Reedus.

The pair  who have been linked since their 2015 film, Sky, but started stepping out together early last year (who can forget that city sidewalk make-out session?)  walked the red carpet together for the first time at the awards show at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. They wore black, along with almost everyone else in support of the Times Up movement, making it relatively low-key as far as those things go.

However, there was nothing low-key about the kiss Kruger, 41, and Reedus, 49, later shared during the awards show. When her movie was announced as a winner, the delighted actress planted a kiss on the Walking Dead stars lips. It was a grab-the-face kind of smooch.

Diane Kruger kissed Norman Reedus on the way up to the stage at the 2018 Golden Globes. (Image: NBC)

In December 2015, Kruger  on a break with longtime beau Joshua Jackson  was spotted kissing Reedus at an NYC bar. Since then, rumors followed them. While they were clearly friendly in public (she attended his photo exhibit in Paris in December 2016), in March of last year they seemed to let their guard down in public. In September, they attended the U.S. Open together, taking silly selfies together.

Kruger is divorced from French actor Guillaume Canet. Reedus has never been married, but he has a teen son with model Helena Christensen.

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 Actresses may wear black to the Golden Globes to protest sexual harassment. Is that slacktivism?

 Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan: The shocking true crime story behind I, Tonya

 This protest pin will be the Golden Globes trendiest accessory  but will it make a difference?

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People in South Korea are the least likely to believe that North Korea and the US will go to war.

Despite worldwide fears of a war between the two nations, those in the country closest to the potential conflict are the most relaxed about it.

According to a world poll by Ipsos Mori, two thirds of people in South Korea (66%) think a war is unlikely.

Thats much higher than the world average of 40% who believe it wont happen.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (Picture: Getty)

A slightly higher percentage of those surveyed  42%  think a war is likely.

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In the US, however, there are more fears about a possible war, with 47% of people thinking a battle with North Korea is on the cards, compared to just 33% who think its unlikely.

Ipsos Mori polled more than 21,000 people across 28 countries for its survey.

Meanwhile, in the UK, only 39% believe a North Korea/US war is going to happen.

They are much more concerned about security matters at home, however, with Britons the most likely out of the 28 nations to think a major terrorist attack will happen in their country in 2018.

More than two thirds of Britons (65%) think a terror attack on their home soil is a likelihood, more than people in Turkey (60%), France (53%), Germany (51%) and the US (51%).

When it comes to politics stateside, 43% of Britons believe Donald Trump will be impeached as US president in 2018.

Will Donald Trump be impeached in 2018? (Picture: Getty)

But only 7% of people in the UK think aliens will visit Earth this year.

Despite the terror fears, Britons remain optimistic about the year ahead, with 66% saying that 2018 will be a better year than 2017.

Almost half of people in the UK (46%) think the global economy will be stronger this year.
Copies of the book 'Fire and Fury' by author Michael Wolff are displayed on a shelf at Book Passage on 5 January 2018 in Corte Madera, California: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

After losing supporters and donors, Steve Bannon apologised for his alleged remarks about President Donald Trumps son in the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

According to the books author Michael Wolff, the former White House strategist and current Breitbart News executive said Donald Trump Jr was treasonous and his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the height of the 2016 campaign was unpatriotic.

Mr Bannon told Axios in a statement that Mr Wolff misquoted him: My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort.

The bombastic editor was effusive in his praise of the Presidents son after billionaire and Breitbart news financial backer Rebekah Mercer threw her support behind Mr Trump.

Mr Trump Jr is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, said Mr Bannon in his apology.

Theyre going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV, Mr Bannon is quoted as saying in the book as special prosecutor Robert Mueller carries on with the FBI investigation into alleged collusion between Russian officials and Trump campaign team members.

Mr Manafort, the former campaign manager, has been indicted on several counts of financial crimes in the investigation.

Mr Bannon said in his apology that Mr Manafort is a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.

He also explained this his comment about the June 2016 meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Mr Trump Jr, Mr Manafort, and the Presidents son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner stemmed from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines as well as his stint at the Pentagon during President Ronald Reagans administration.

Story continues

Mr Bannon also snuck in a dig at Hillary Clinton, making sure to mention his films about Reagans war against the Soviets and [Ms] Clintons involvement in selling uranium to them.

His apology comes on the heels of several tweets by the President about the made up stories in the book, a few in particular in which he referred to his former staffer as Sloppy Steve.

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

The Mercer Family recently dumped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon. Smart!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018

Mr Trump also said in an official statement from the White House that

Mr Bannon "has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind," emphasising that he only brought Mr Bannon on to the campaign after he won the Republican nomination in July 2016.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was, the White House statement read.

Still, in the apology Mr Bannon described his support for the Presidents agenda as unwavering and said he was the only person to date to conduct a global effort to preach the message of Trump and Trumpism.

To perhaps further prove his role as a surrogate for the President, Mr Bannon repeated Mr Trumps claims that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt.

I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the presidents historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency, Mr Bannon said.

Though, he appeared to hold back any apology for his comments about Mr Kushner and the Presidents daughter Ivanka Trump, whom he allegedly referred to as Javanka in the book. Mr Bannon had called the pair the railhead of all bad decisions, according to Mr Wolff.

Mr Wolff, for his part, said on MSNBC that Mr Bannons comments were certainly directed at the Presidents son and not Mr Manafort.

Fire and Fury went on sale days earlier than planned and publishers are rushing to print more copies in order to meet high demands.

Mr Wolff gathered the reporting in the book by spending time with the transition team and at the White House over 18 months with the freedom to record conversations.

He conducted 200 interviews including Mr Trump and took, according to him, something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing to do so.
WASHINGTON  Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer wont run for political office this year, putting his focus instead on helping Democrats win control of the House in the 2018 elections.

I am willing to do whatever it takes to help save our country, Steyer said on Monday at a press conference near Capitol Hill. To that end, he announced plans to invest $30 million to boost voter turnout among younger Americans.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)

The initiative will be run by an arm of NextGen America, the political organization he founded that supports progressive positions on climate change, immigration and health care. The group said it aims to conduct the largest youth vote organizing effort in American history.

As one of the Democratic Partys top donors, Steyer was discussed as a potential candidate in either the race for California governor or Senate this year. His moves opposing the Trump administration have also spurred speculation about a possible presidential run in 2020.

Steyer is one of the most prominent advocates of impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Last year, he collected millions of signatures calling for Trumps impeachment and paid for billboards in New Yorks Times Square as part of a $20 million ad campaign urging Congress to act.

My fight is not just in California, my fight is in removing Donald Trump from office, and from power, Steyer said Monday, adding that he believed that the president had committed eight impeachable offenses so far.

Steyer said his group would help elect Democrats to the House even if they do not necessarily back impeaching Trump.We are not going to have a litmus test on impeachment, he said.

The news is a blow to Republicans, who hoped to use the push for impeachment to drive a wedge between wary incumbent Democratic lawmakers and the partys more liberal base.

Still, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee characterized Steyer as a hindrance to Democratic prospects this year.

Story continues

Tom Steyer can light as much of his money on fire as he wants, but that doesnt change that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi view him as a distraction because of the impeachment issues, Michael Ahrens said, referring to the House minority leader from California. If Democrats message for 2018 is a baseless impeachment threat that the majority of voters disagree with, theyre going to lose.

Democrats believe turnout among young Americans will be one of the keys to retaking at least one chamber of Congress in 2018 and thus stopping the Republican legislative agenda. The party saw a major voter surge in college areas in recent elections. Young people came out in droves to help elect Democrats Doug Jones to the Senate in Alabama and Ralph Northam to Virginias governorship.

For this years midterm campaign, Steyers group set goals of registering 250,000 young voters and helping to elect progressive House candidates in at least 10 states. NextGen said plans on hiring 200 full-time staff to organize on more than 300 college campuses.

In 10 months, God willing, the people of America are going to send a wave across the nation, Steyer said at his press conference. This tide will wash away the stain of the Trump administration.

Steyer did not address whether he had plans for political office beyond 2018. He also dodged a question about a new potential Democratic presidential candidate  Oprah Winfrey.

The talk show hosts powerful speech at the Golden Globes awards ceremony on Sunday night set off speculation about a possible campaign challenging Trump in 2020  CNN reported that Winfrey was actively thinking about jumping into the race.

Steyer praised Winfreys speech as fantastic, but stressed he is concentrating on November 2018.

This story has been updated with comment from a spokesman from the Republican National Committee.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
A top journalist just resigned over the BBC gender pay gap, calling it secretive and illegal

Even in 2018, women are still fighting for equal pay in the workforce. The gender pay gap affects women in all countries and industries. Most recently, BBC journalist Carrie Gracie resigned due to the revelation that her male coworkers were earning 50 percent more.

Gracie was the BBCs China Editor, and she had been working for the news organization for more than 30 years. On January 7th, Gracie wrote an open letter on her blog detailing her decision to resign from her position in China and resume her previous role as a normal news anchor.

It was reported in July that two-thirds of the corporations top earners were male. After the report was released, Gracie and more than 40 female BBC employees published an open letter in The Telegraph demanding that the corporation resolve the pay gap.

In her blog post, Gracie referenced the July report and wrote that the two male international editors at the BBC made 50 percent more than the two female editors. When Gracie requested she be paid the same as her male counterparts, the BBC offered her a raise that still didnt match the two mens salaries.

This is not the gender pay gap that the BBC admits to, Gracie wrote. It is not men earning more because they do more of the jobs which pay better. It is men earning more in the same jobs or jobs of equal value. It is pay discrimination and it is illegal.

She also noted that women of color have a wider wage gap and said called the BBCs pay structure secretive and illegal.

On Twitter, many expressed their support for Gracies decision. And in an interview at the Golden Globe Awards, Emma Watson applauded Gracies actions, saying that her resignation highlights the importance of holding organizations accountable for sexist policies.

. @EmmaWatson has reacted to the news that the BBC's China Editor has stepped down over what she called an "indefensible pay gap between men and women".https://t.co/0AHs3xIP8a pic.twitter.com/X3qH08lIBf  BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) January 8, 2018

In an explosive letter leaked to BuzzFeed News, one of the BBCs top female journalists has accused the British corporation of a having a secretive and illegal pay culture and breaking equality law in the way it pays female staff https://t.co/PZwaNVJQ4n  Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) January 7, 2018

Carrie Gracie's letter in full on her own website. I have seldom read anything so dignified and powerful. So selfless and brave https://t.co/72EEh96q5q China is the future. And we have just lost our guide @BBCCarrie  Paul Lewis (@paullewismoney) January 7, 2018

As a former union rep at the BBC I say: solidarity to @BBCCarrie - tip of the iceberg https://t.co/ZNdLEbAC3z  Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) January 7, 2018

The BBC released a statement on January 8th in response to Gracies letter stating that an independent audit of the organizations payroll showed no systemic discrimination against women. In the statement, the news company pledged to release another report on employees salaries in the near future.

Despite what critics say, the gender wage gap is real. We applaud Gracie for speaking up, and we implore the BBC and all workplaces to pay employees of all genders equally. Its 2018: Pay inequality needs to end.
CNN abandons Stephen Miller interview as aide rants in defence of boss

Author Michael Wolff insists 25th amendment alive in the White House

Bannon backs off Fire and Fury treason comment on Donald Trump Jr

Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up upon arrival on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Allies of Donald Trump insisted on Sunday that he was fit for office, amid mounting concerns in Washington about the presidents mental stability.

Fellow Republicans defended a claim by Trump on Saturday that he was a very stable genius, an extraordinary statement even for a president renowned for his outlandish remarks and erratic behaviour.

The debate over Trumps capacity raged after being thrust into the political mainstream by a new book by Michael Wolff that portrays him as unstable, disengaged and incapable of processing information.

Stephen Miller, a senior White House official, echoed the presidents boastful tweet, saying the book was contrary to reality and that he witnessed Trump show mental sharpness and agility during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I saw a man who was a political genius, Miller said, in a bad-tempered interview on CNNs State of the Union that was abruptly abandoned when Miller refused to stop ranting about his boss.

Nikki Haley, Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, claimed on ABCs This Week that in the White House no one questions the stability of this president, despite claims to the contrary in Wolffs book Fire and Fury.

Mike Pompeo, Trumps CIA director, told Fox News Sunday: We talk about some of the most serious matters facing America and the rest of the world, complex issues.

The president is engaged. He understands the complexity, asks really difficult questions from our team at CIA. Ive watched him do that.

Senators eager to secure Trumps approval also weighed in. But Wolff and members of the Democratic party continued to express fears about the actions and comments of the 71-year-old leader of the worlds richest country and most powerful military.

While low-level alarm about Trumps behaviour has long been articulated by critics, Wolffs book has placed his mental health at the front of Washingtons news agenda. An in-depth examination of the topic appeared on the front page of Sundays New York Times.

Story continues

Appearing on NBCs Meet The Press, Wolff said it was not unreasonable to say that this is 25th amendment kind of stuff, referring to the section in the US constitution on removing a president from office.

Wolff said that during interviews for the book, senior White House officials had insisted: Were not at 25th amendment level yet. That had changed, he said.

This is alarming in every way. The 25th amendment is a concept that is alive every day in the White House.

Several Democratic members of Congress were briefed on the subject of Trumps mental fitness last month by Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale University and the editor of a book compiling assessments of the president.

From the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland on Sunday, Trump continued to give publicity to Wolffs book.

Ive had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President, Trump said in a tweet. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author.

Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told CNN there was a seriously flawed human being in the Oval Office and that many others in Washington shared his concerns.



I dont think theres anyone in Congress, frankly, from either party, who does not concur at least privately with those observations and concerns, Schiff said.

But Republicans in the Senate claimed on Sunday to have no such concerns. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has been floated as a possible member of Trumps cabinet, said the president was an active, engaged and effective leader. Questions over mental fitness were politically motivated, he said.

The media made similar claims about Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Cotton told ABC. What they all have in common is theyre Republican presidents.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once dismissed Trump as a kook, claimed he enjoyed a productive working relationship with the president.

I dont think hes crazy, Graham told NBC.

Little is publicly known about Trumps medical history. Past presidential candidates published detailed information; Trump released a letter from his doctor declaring vaguely that he would be the healthiest president in history. The doctor later said he dashed off the letter in a few minutes while a limousine sent by Trump waited outside his surgery.

Trump is due to undergo an annual presidential physical examination on Friday by a White House doctor who also examined Barack Obama. It is unclear what results will be disclosed to the public. A memo on Obamas examination in 2016 featured details of his neurological system.

Wolffs book also created a new split among allies of Trump after Steve Bannon, formerly campaign chief executive and White House chief strategist, was quoted being sharply critical of the president and his family.

Trump responded by claiming Bannon lost his mind after being fired last year. On Sunday, in the words of a source close to the Trump White House, Millers appearance on CNN was specifically intended to trash Bannon.

Stephen Miller: I saw a man who was a political genius. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Its tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive, said Miller, who previously stood alongside Bannon in their war on the Republican establishment.



Trump tweeted that Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed by Miller. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!

The Guardian revealed last Wednesday that Bannon told Wolff a meeting involving the presidents son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort and a group of Russians at Trump Tower was treasonous and unpatriotic.

Bannon dutifully released a statement on Sunday expressing regret for his comments and defending the president from allegations his campaign colluded with Moscow to win the 2016 election.



There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch-hunt, Bannon said in the statement to Axios, repeating a phrase used frequently by Trump to deny wrongdoing.
Just a day after he declared himself a very stable genius and like, really smart, President Donald Trump mixed up the word consequential with consensual in an embarrassing tweet.

The screwup appeared in a Sunday night tweet in which Trump praised a supportive column in the New York Post. Writer Michael Goodwin lauded Trumps enormously consequential presidency, but Trump referred to it in his tweet as an enormously consensual presidency.

It took dumbass President @realDonaldTrump an hour of Twitter mocking him before he noticed. #ConsensualPresidency pic.twitter.com/hbHsaiPORQ  Isaac Kvasager (@ikvasager) January 8, 2018

When Trump asked readers to check out the entire piece, he also mistakenly posted Goodwins email address instead of a link to the column. In addition, he used an ellipsis in his tweet to conveniently skip over Goodwins remark about his own frustration over Trumps missteps.

America's Stable Genius just tweeted out a writer's email address instead of the link to his story.



I guess we're supposed to email him and ask for a copy.#consensualpresidency. pic.twitter.com/7OcCnHiMeT  The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) January 8, 2018

Someone quickly noticed the gaffe before it was changed (and missteps added). By then, Twitter had gone wild and the hashtag #consensualpresidency was born. Several tweeters called it a Freudian slip because of Trumps controversial grab em by the pussy comment to Access Hollywood.

Story continues

A "consensual presidency" is when one grabs a country by the pussy and they let you, because you're a star. https://t.co/0bmKFMGSyL  PAPYRUS font (@JennaGoose) January 8, 2018

There are at least 19 women who kept telling us Trump didn't know what "consensual" meant.

They were right.#ConsensualPresidency pic.twitter.com/sOjouqrkLl  Cling 2 Reality (@Cling2Reality) January 8, 2018

MSNBCs Joy Reid couldnt help but notice the timing of the phrase consensual presidency just as women were appearing in black at the Golden Globes to protest sexual harassment.

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He also coined the soon-to-be trending term consensual presidency, on the night of the black dress, #TIMESUP #goldenglobes no less. Yeah this show wont make it to season two... pic.twitter.com/CG2isRxrKI  Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 8, 2018

WTF is a "consensual" presidency?

Stop taking Ambien before you Tweet.  David Watson (@medic854) January 8, 2018

"... consensual presidency! Then he tweeted the guy's email address instead of the link..." pic.twitter.com/tgSq0Ftiyn  William Peace  (@WilliamPeace81) January 8, 2018

Related...

Trump Lawyer: Trump Jr.'s Meeting Wasn't Illegal And Also Trump Knew Nothing About It.

What Trump Says And What Trump Means

How Does Trump Trump Trump? Start a War.

Also on HuffPost

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
By James Oliphant CAMP DAVID, Md. (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would "absolutely" be willing to talk on the phone to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and that he hopes a positive development results from talks between North Korea and South Korea. North Korea agreed on Friday to hold official talks with South Korea next week, the first in more than two years, hours after Washington and Seoul delayed a military exercise amid a standoff over Pyongyangs nuclear and missile programs. Trump, answering questions from reporters at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, expressed a willingness to talk to Kim but not without preconditions. "Absolutely, I would do that," Trump said. "I have no problem with that at all." Trump and Kim have exchanged insults ever since Trump took office, with Trump repeatedly calling Kim "rocket man" for testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Earlier this week Trump dismissed Kim's taunt that the North Korean leader has a nuclear button on his desk, saying he has a bigger button. The talks between North Korea and South Korea are expected to cover the Winter Olympics, to be held in South Korea next month, and inter-Korean relations. Trump suggested the talks might lead to an easing of tensions and took credit for the diplomatic breakthrough, saying it was a result of his steady pressure. "Look, right now they're talking Olympics. It's a start, it's big start. If I weren't involved they wouldn't be talking at all right now," he said. Kim "knows I'm not messing around. I'm not messing around. Not even a little bit, not even one percent. He understands that," said Trump. "If something can come out of those talks, that would be a great thing for all of humanity, that would be a great thing for the world," he said. On Sunday, North Korea announced a list of five officials who will represent Pyongyang, a day after South Korea confirmed its representatives, the South's unification ministry said. The North's delegation will be led by Ri Son Gwon, head of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland that is usually tasked with dealing with South Korean affairs. (Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli and Clarence Fernandez)
By Yeganeh Torbati WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants allowed to live and work in the United States since 2001 will lose their right to remain in the country in 2019, officials said on Monday, marking the Trump administration's latest move to tighten immigration enforcement. The United States will end the Salvadorans' temporary protected status (TPS) on Sept. 9, 2019, giving them 18 months to leave or seek lawful residency, and for El Salvador to prepare for their return, administration officials said. The status was granted in the wake of two devastating 2001 earthquakes in El Salvador that left hundreds of thousands in the country homeless. The decision to end TPS for Salvadorans is part of the administration's broader push to tighten immigration laws and expel those living in the United States illegally. The move was heavily criticized by immigrant advocates who said it ignored violence in El Salvador and gave the Salvadorans few options but to leave the United States or remain illegally. The Trump administration has faced a series of deadlines over the past year to decide whether to end the protected status of immigrants in the United States whose home countries have been affected by disasters. Salvadorans are by far the largest group under TPS, a program administration officials said is supposed to provide a temporary haven for victims, not a permanent right to remain in the United States. Critics have complained TPS has allowed participants to repeatedly extend their stays in 6-month to 18-month increments. Patricia Hernandez, 53, arrived in the United States in 2000 and applied for TPS after the 2001 earthquakes. She has lived in North Carolina for 18 years and runs a subcontracting construction business with her Honduran husband. The couple have two U.S.-born teenage sons. "This is a real blow for everyone," said Hernandez by telephone. "Most of us pay taxes, we're not living off the government, we're not criminals." The family will move to Honduras with their children and the couple do not intend to return north, she said, though they worry about violence and political instability in central America. Trump administration changes to the TPS program mean that over the next two years approximately 250,000 people who previously had permission to live and work in the United States will be subject to deportation if they remain. Haitians and Nicaraguans will lose their protected status in 2019 and Hondurans, the second largest group in the program, could lose their rights later this year. "The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the 'temporary' protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration," said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which favors less immigration overall. VIOLENCE IN EL SALVADOR Advocates of the program say long-term resident Salvadorans and their children should not be sent back to El Salvador, a country struggling with a weak economy and gang violence that has given it one of the world's highest murder rates. "Our (U.S) government is complicit in breaking up families  nearly 275,000 U.S.-born children have a parent who is a TPS holder  and further destabilizing our neighboring countries," said Oscar Chacon, executive director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant advocacy group. There are approximately 1.35 million Salvadorans of any status living in the United States, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. A senior administration official briefing reporters on the decision said it was based on the status of El Salvador's recovery from the 2001 earthquakes. The country has received millions of dollars in aid and rebuilt schools, homes and hospitals, the official said. In the past two years, the United States has repatriated 39,000 Salvadorans, showing the ability of El Salvador to absorb an influx, the official said. The government of El Salvador said on Monday that it was glad the administration decided to at least leave the program in place until September 2019. "El Salvador's Foreign Ministry lobbied heavily for the interests of our fellow citizens," the government said in a statement, adding that it would continue to search for alternatives and seek action by the U.S. Congress to protect the migrants. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had urged the government to extend TPS protections for Salvadorans, Haitians and Hondurans, saying "the loss of employment authorization for these populations would adversely impact several key industries," including "construction, food processing, hospitality, and home healthcare services." Congressional Democrats on Monday expressed support for finding a permanent solution to help Salvadorans in the United States. But that will be politically difficult at a time when there are rival immigration priorities, including providing permanent protection for "Dreamers" - undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. That effort has been weighed down by demands from conservatives in Congress to couple any such move with new efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration, especially from Mexico and Central America. (Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Mica Rosenberg in New York and Nelson Renteria in San Salvador; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Sue Horton, Andrew Hay and Rosalba O'Brien)
(This January 5 story was corrected to replace U.N.-translated quote from French ambassador for added accuracy) UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday to discuss recent protests in Iran turned into criticism of the United States for requesting to meet on what some member states said was an internal issue for Tehran. France's ambassador to the UN said the protests do not threaten international peace and security, in what may be an implicit criticism of the United States. "As worrisome as they may be, developments in recent days do not pose a threat to international peace and security," Ambassador Francois Delattre said. "We must respond appropriately, that is, with all the vigilance required by the risks of violence against peaceful demonstrators, while avoiding any manipulation of this crisis, which would only reinforce the extremes and thus have the opposite of the effect we are seeking." Demonstrations erupted in Iran over a week ago after the government announced plans to raise fuel prices and cut monthly cash handouts to lower-income Iranians. The unrest spread over 80 cities and towns and has resulted in 22 deaths and more than 1,000 arrests, according to Iranian officials. The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, said Iran is "on notice," after listing what she referred to as slogans chanted by Iranian protesters. "The Iranian regimes contempt for the rights of its people has been widely documented for many years," said Haley, adding that the United States stood "unapologetically with those in Iran who seek freedom for themselves, prosperity for their families, and dignity for their nation. We will not be quiet. No dishonest attempt to call the protesters 'puppets of foreign powers' will change that." Iran's U.N. Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo told the Security Council that his government has "hard evidence" that recent protests in Iran were "very clearly directed from abroad." Khoshroo also said the United States had abused its power as a permanent member of the Security Council by calling for a meeting to discuss the protests. "It is unfortunate that despite the resistance on the part of some of its members, this council has allowed itself to be abused by the current U.S. administration in holding a meeting on an issue that falls outside the scope of its mandate," he said. Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the United States was abusing the Security Council's platform and the meeting was an attempt to use the current Iranian situation to undermine the Iran nuclear deal, which the U.S. administration opposes. Discussing the domestic situation of Iran at the council "does not help resolve the domestic issue of Iran," said China's Deputy U.N. Ambassador Wu Haitao. (Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by James Dalgleish)
By Amanda Ferguson BELFAST (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a new Northern Ireland minister on Monday after James Brokenshire resigned due to ill health, posing a new challenge in efforts to resolve a political crisis in the British province. The change in personnel, which formed part of a wider cabinet reshuffle by May, could complicate moves to restart talks in the coming weeks to avoid a return to direct rule from London for the first time in a decade. Karen Bradley, 47, was given the job, moving from her role as head of the government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, where she is best known for adopting a tough stance over Rupert Murdoch's bid to buy all of broadcaster Sky. Northern Ireland has been without a regional government for almost a year, destabilising the delicate balance between Irish nationalists and pro-British unionists that has been shaken by Britain's June 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Brokenshire, who had been responsible for the province since July 2016, is to step down ahead of surgery following the discovery of a small lesion on his right lung. In a letter to May, Brokenshire said he would not be able to give the "complete focus" required to resolve the crisis. In November, Brokenshire was forced to begin setting a budget for the province, but he said a return to direct rule could still be avoided. Talks between Irish nationalists Sinn Fein and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party had been expected to resume in the coming weeks. Brokenshire was criticised for continually resetting deadlines in talks to restore the region's power-sharing government. Despite studious efforts by Brokenshire to be seen as an honest broker, some of the parties said a deal by the DUP last year to prop up May's government made this impossible. A reversion to direct rule could further strain relations with Ireland, which have deteriorated drastically in the past 12 months. Last year, Bradley overruled the advice of regulator Ofcom and pushed for the firmest possible scrutiny of the proposed Sky deal. Her as-yet unnamed successor will have to handle the preliminary findings of a review by the competition regulator, expected this month. (Writing by Conor Humphries and William James,; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, with registration number 9M-MRO, before it disappeared over the Indian Ocean - Reuters

Malaysia's government said Saturday that it had approved a new attempt by a private company to find the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, nearly four years after its disappearance sparked one of aviation's biggest mysteries.

The Texas-based company Ocean Infinity dispatched a search vessel this past week to look in the southern Indian Ocean for debris from the plane, which disappeared March 8, 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members.

The governments of Malaysia, China and Australia called off the nearly three-year official search last January. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau's final report on the search conceded that authorities were no closer to knowing the reasons for the Boeing 777's disappearance, or its exact location.

"The basis of the offer from Ocean Infinity is based on 'no cure, no fee,"' said Liow Tiong Lai, Malaysian Transport Minister, on Saturday, meaning that payment will be made only if the company finds the wreckage.

"That means they are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometers (9,653 square miles) pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters," he said.

Investigators recovered debris from a Boeing 777 wing on Reunion Island Credit: AP

However, he said, "I don't want to give too much hope ... to the (next of kin)." He said his government was committed to continuing with the search.

He did not offer other details.

Ocean Infinity said in a statement that the search vessel Seabed Constructor, which left the South African port of Durban on Tuesday, was taking advantage of favourable weather to move toward "the vicinity of the possible search zone".

MH370 | The theories

In the initial search for the plane, a 52-day surface search covered an area of several million square miles in the Indian Ocean west of Australia, before an underwater search mapped 274,000 square miles of seabed at depths of up to 20,000 feet. They were the largest aviation searches of their kind in history, according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

Story continues

Despite other methods such as studying satellite imagery and investigating ocean drifts after debris from the plane washed ashore on islands in the eastern Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa, the 1,046-day search was called off on January 17, 2017.

However, the ATSB's report said the understanding of where the plane may be is "better now than it has ever been," partly as a result of studying debris that washed ashore in 2015 and 2016 that showed the plane was "not configured for a ditching at the end-of-flight", meaning it had run out of fuel.

All you need to know | MH370

The search team also looked back at satellite imagery that showed objects in the ocean that may have been MH370 debris. The report said this analysis complemented work detailed in a 2016 review and identified an area of less than 10,000 square miles  roughly the size of the US state of Vermont  that "has the highest likelihood of containing MH370".

The search was extremely difficult because no transmissions were received from the aircraft after its first 38 minutes of flight. Systems designed to automatically transmit the flight's position failed to work after this point, the report said.
Washington (AFP) - The US government announced Monday the end of a special protected status for about 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants, a move that threatens with deportation tens of thousands of well-established families with children born in the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced the end of the "temporary protected status" (TPS) granted to Salvadorans already in the United States in 2001, when two major earthquakes rocked the Central American country.

They were given 18 months to leave or be deported, which officials said is enough time for a legislative solution to be crafted by Congress to allow them to stay.

"Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS," said the Department of Homeland Security.

Part of a broader crackdown on illegal immigration by President Donald Trump, the move comes after 59,000 longtime resident Haitians and 5,300 Nicaraguans were stripped of similar protections late last year, after having been allowed to set deep roots inside the United States for decades.

Democrats in Congress are also fighting to protect the right to stay inside the US of 690,000 young immigrants known as "Dreamers," people who arrived in the country as children.

Trump has said he will back a compromise on the Dreamers if Congress budgets $18 billion to build an anti-immigrant wall along the border with Mexico.

Canada said it wanted to "make sure we're ready" for an influx of Salvadorans, in an effort to prevent the kind of massive flooding of the border that took place after the US ended protections for Haitians.

- 'My life is here' -

Many, if not most, of those shielded by TPS had originally entered the country illegally or overstayed visas, but the program had effectively allowed them to settle down without the constant fear of deportation.

Previous governments rolled over the protected status with little debate, but Trump has pursued a tougher "law and order" approach to the issue.

Story continues

For TPS beneficiaries, the decision was a thunderbolt.

"My life is here," said Minda Hernandez, a 48-year-old housekeeper from Long Island who fled conflict in El Salvador 20 years ago -- leaving a one-year-old child behind.

"This is where my home is, where I pay my taxes. I am happy here -- even if I work myself to death."

Now she fears most for her 16-year-old son, who was born in the United States.

"There are so many gangs and crime back there," she said. "But how could I leave him here alone?"

In San Salvador, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren avoided criticizing Washington and focused on the 18-month grace period.

Ceren's administration "considers this decision to be a recognition of the contribution of our compatriots who hold this migratory benefit, who are an important workforce in that country," the presidency said.

Ceren's government has grown closer to the United States, and was one of only eight countries at the United Nations to support the US move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December.

- Important to US & Salvador economies -

Without a change in the law, some 195,000 Salvadorans will be forced to leave the country by September 9, 2019, in what amounts to one of the Trump administration's most substantial moves yet to enforce its crackdown on illegal immigration.

This impacts large communities of deeply-rooted people in California, Texas and around the US capital -- more than 135,000 households -- according to the Center for Migration Studies.

Nearly all have jobs, over a quarter own homes with a mortgage, 10 percent are self-employed and about 10 percent have married US citizens.

They are as important to the Salvadoran economy as they are to the US.

Remittances from the more than one million Salvadorans across the United States account for large chunk of Salvadoran GDP.

"We are not criminals. We came here to realize the American dream, which unfortunately we cannot obtain in our country," said Hugo Rodriguez, a 48-year-old Salvadoran cook in Brooklyn's celebrated Peter Luger Steakhouse.

"We have succeeded due to our work... We are a part of the economic engine of this country."

The decision will also impact nearly 193,000 children of Salvadorans born inside the United States -- who have citizenship rights unlike their parents.

Washington union activist Jaime Contreras, who arrived from El Salvador in 1988 and earned his citizenship, called the DHS decision "shameful" and "inhumane."

"We have 18 months to pressure Congress and tell them it's time once and for all to give TPS holders a path to citizenship," he said during a small protest outside the White House immediately following the announcement.

"Today's decision is a poignant reminder that we have an anti-immigrant president who turns his back on hardworking families and insists on governing by fear and intimidation," said Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.
By Mi Nguyen HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam began the trial on Monday of 22 executives charged over losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars at the state oil firm, PetroVietnam, with the most serious offences potentially carrying the death penalty. The defendants included the communist state's first politburo member to face trial in decades and a businessman who Germany says was kidnapped by Vietnamese agents from a Berlin park. The trial is part of a widespread crackdown on fraud and mismanagement in the energy and banking sectors that intensified after the security establishment gained greater influence in the ruling party last year. The PetroVietnam trial in Hanoi was taking place simultaneously with a separate trial in the commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City, where a fraud case involving Vietnam's Construction Bank was being heard. The 46 defendants include the bank's ex-chairman Pham Cong Danh, who is accused of causing losses of 6.1 trillion dong ($268.62 million), according to the government's news website. Total losses caused by fraud at the bank amounted to 15.5 trillion Vietnam dong ($682.55 million), a previous report said. The PetroVietnam case at the Hanoi People's Court was not open to the public and security was tight. Photographs released by the Vietnam News Agency, the official state news provider, showed defendants handcuffed as they were led to the courtroom. Of the 22 executives on trial, 12 are accused of "violation of state regulations on economic management causing serious consequences". Eight are accused of embezzlement, according to the government's official news website. Two are accused of both. The most senior former executive on trial is Dinh La Thang, who was arrested last month. He is a former politburo member who was dismissed from his post over the losses at PetroVietnam and then stripped of his role as party head of Ho Chi Minh City. Also on trial is Trinh Xuan Thanh, who Germany says was kidnapped last year and taken home against his will to face accusations over losses of more than $150 million at a subsidiary of PetroVietnam. Thanh is accused of both corruption and breaking state rules on economic management. A Reuters reporter saw the bespectacled Thanh arrive under police escort at the court on Monday. Thanh appeared on state television in August and said he had decided to return home to turn himself in. Neither Thang nor Thanh made any comment at the court and Reuters was unable to contact the lawyers representing them. The maximum jail term for deliberate violation of state regulations is 20 years in prison, state television VTV1 reported in a news bulletin on Monday. Government critics have voiced suspicions that the corruption crackdown is politically motivated, at least in part, and aimed against those close to former prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who lost out in an internal power struggle in 2016. The trial is due to last until Jan. 21. In a separate case linked to the corruption crackdown, a fugitive Vietnamese tycoon was arrested in Hanoi on Thursday after being sent home from Singapore, where he was accused of immigration offences. Phan Van Anh Vu, 42, told his lawyers he was also a senior officer in Vietnam's secret police and was trying to get to Germany and could have details of the operation in which Thanh was spirited home from Berlin last year. ($1 = 22,709 dong) (Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Paul Tait)
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. (Photos: Yuri Gripas/Reuters, Brynn Anderson/AP)

WASHINGTON  Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley slammed the door on former chief West Wing strategist Steve Bannon on Monday. Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One, Gidley suggested he doesnt believe theres any way for Bannon to repair his relationship with President Trump.

I dont believe there is any way back for Mr. Bannon at this point, Gidley said.

Gidleys comments, which were made as Trump flew to Nashville, Tenn., for a speech, capped off days of feuding between Bannon and the White House. The back-and-forth began on Jan. 3, when the Guardian published excerpts of Fire and Fury, a book on the Trump White House by journalist Michael Wolff. In the excerpt, Bannon suggested that a meeting between the presidents son Don Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer was treasonous. Bannon was also quoted as saying the special counsels investigation into whether Trumps campaign colluded with the Russian government would likely focus on the finances of Jared Kushner, the presidents son in law. Both Kushner and Trumps daughter, Ivanka, are top White House advisers.

Within hours of the excerpt being published, Trump issued a lengthy statement in which he said Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency.

When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind, said Trump, who has since repeatedly derided Bannon as Sloppy Steve.

Onboard Air Force One, Gidley doubled down on Trumps past comments about Bannon.

The president has been very clear on his thoughts; issued a four-paragraph statement about Mr. Bannon. Zero ambiguity in those statements, said Gidley, later adding, The president pointed to that and also pointed that Mr. Bannon is not in it for the country but instead in it for himself. And those statements still stand.

President Trump in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Gidley indicated the president felt his family had been attacked by Bannon.

When you go after somebodys family, in the manner in which he did  two of the presidents children who are serving this nation, sacrificing in their service  it is repugnant, it is grotesque, Gidley said of Bannon. I challenge anybody to go and talk about someone elses family and see if that person doesnt come back and come back hard.

Story continues

Bannons comments are among many damaging allegations about the Trump administration that were included in Wolffs book. In his statement, Trump accused Bannon, who was quoted extensively in the book, of having helped Wolff. The White House has repeatedly dismissed the book as inaccurate and Trumps personal attorney sent the publisher a letter demanding they refrain from publishing it.

Gidley reiterated the administrations position on the book in his comments on Air Force One.

It was obvious that the book was false and fake, he said.

Bannon, who is executive chairman of the conservative media company Breitbart News, exited the White House last August amid conflicting accounts of whether he was fired or left under his own accord following months of infighting with other top officials. After Trumps scathing statement about his comments in Wolffs book, Bannon attempted to smooth things over by issuing an apology to the website Axios on Sunday.

In his mea culpa, Bannon alluded to the work he has done to promote Republican candidates since leaving the White House.

My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda  as I have shown daily, said Bannon.

Steve Bannon arrives for the presidential inauguration last year. (Photo: Saul Loeb, Pool via AP)

Bannon also suggested his comments about Don Jr. had been misconstrued and were actually a critique of Paul Manafort, who was running Trumps campaign at the time of the meeting.

Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around, Bannon said.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment on this story. However the seemingly irreparable tensions between Trump and Bannon have left the former White House strategist increasingly isolated. On Jan. 4, the day after the initial flap over Bannons comments in Wolffs book, billionaire conservative donor Rebekah Mercer, released a rare public statement denouncing Bannons statements. (Mercers family has supported Bannon on Breitbart and other projects.)

I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected, said Mercer. My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.

Since leaving the White House, Bannon has worked to support Republican candidates. His apparent break from the president and loss of the Mercers backing will make it harder for him to connect with the conservative base. And those close to the president doubt the bridge between Trump and Bannon can be rebuilt.

I wouldnt want to be Bannon these days, one Trump ally said.

Read more from Yahoo News:
The move toward legalized marijuana has gained momentum in recent years, and a majority of states now have laws on the books that allow residents to use marijuana for at least some purposes. The early success of measures to make medical marijuana legal led to more extensive legalization efforts aimed at allowing recreational use. High-profile events like the recent legalization of pot in California and the U.S. Department of Justice's decision to rescind its early policy and allow federal prosecutors to enforce federal drug laws will only heighten the debate between proponents and opponents of legalization.

One argument that many proponents of marijuana legalization made early on was that regulating marijuana sales would lead to extensive tax revenues for forward-looking states. Indeed, that has been the case in many of the most prominent early adopters of marijuana legalization, with states like Washington and Colorado seeing considerable impacts to overall budgets as a result of marijuana-related taxes. Yet more recently, states have gone beyond simply looking at marijuana as a cash cow and instead are incorporating broader policy thinking into the way they structure state taxes on pot. The prevailing trend appears to be toward lower taxes, even if that results in less state revenue.

Greenhouse with marijuana plants under a row of lights.

Image source: Getty Images.

Starting out high

When states first started adopting marijuana legalization laws, taxes were an important element of gaining political support for the measures. Many anticipated that there could be higher public costs involved with legal marijuana, including setting up the infrastructure of regulation and enforcement of new guidelines. Accordingly, tax rates have tended to get set at high levels. Washington initially had the highest tax rate of 37% among the first four states that allowed legal pot for recreational use, according to data from the Tax Foundation, while Colorado weighed in at 29% and Alaska and Oregon charged 25% tax rates.

Story continues

Tax revenue from the measures proved to be significant. In Colorado, lawmakers initially expected about $70 million in tax revenue, but the law produced $113 million in taxes during 2015. Washington saw initial collection of about $62 million in marijuana excise taxes between July 2015 and June 2016, and collection estimates for the subsequent year are seen doubling to $134 million, according to the Tax Foundation.

Taxes on the decline

Yet over time, many states have started to adopt a more user-friendly tax rate structure on marijuana sales. Alaska, Colorado, and Oregon have all taken steps to reduce their tax rates on marijuana. Moreover, new states considering legalized marijuana for recreational use have considered lower excise tax rates than those initially chosen by early adopting states. Many ballot initiatives have set lower rates in the 10% to 25% range, with a 15% excise tax set in California.

Two primary reasons explain falling marijuana taxes. First, states have a policy interest in balancing the amount of tax revenue they raise with the incentives that high taxes create in promoting black market sales of marijuana. Colorado's experience with a high tax rate showed that illicit pot sales continued at alarming levels. Lower taxes make it less profitable for black market sellers to make illegal sales, diverting more business through legal regulatory channels.

At the same time, there's also likely a competitive aspect to marijuana taxation. In the West, where states are larger, it typically makes less sense to travel to a different state just to obtain marijuana at a lower tax rate. As smaller states like New England's Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine move forward with marijuana legalization efforts, taxing authorities in different jurisdictions will have to be mindful of not creating huge incentives for interstate movement of marijuana by coordinating tax rates.

What to expect from marijuana taxes

California should provide an interesting look at the taxation issues related to marijuana in 2018. Even though its 15% excise tax is less than that charged in many other jurisdictions, some note that additional cultivation taxes, as well as the existing framework of high sales and local business taxes that affect marijuana producers in the same way as any other business, could add up to an uncomfortably high overall tax rate on pot.

All of this will play into the policy debate on marijuana going on right now at both the state and the federal level. As important as the business of marijuana is to many investors, the revenue and public policy implications will keep governments highly interested in hanging onto the reins of their regulatory and tax structures.

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For the first time in nearly a decade, Israel has an opposition. The last time Israel had an opposition, Ehud Olmert was prime minister and Benjamin Netanyahu was the leader of a medium-sized 12-member faction. The chairman of the Likud faction at the time was Gideon Sa'ar, and together they showed the Kadima-led government how it should be done.

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Since Netanyahu rose to power, the opposition parties have been groveling to him one after the other. Suddenly, it seems, something different is happening.

The opposition is actually led by the chairman of the Zionist Union faction, Knesset Member Yoel Hasson. He grew up in Likud, moved to Kadima and landed in Zionist Union as part of Tzipi Livni's Hatnua party.

MK Yoel Hasson. Whoever fails to comply with his policy is shamed (Photo: Dana Koppel)

Hasson is the person who fought Netanyahu and Likud during the Olmert era, and Labor leader Avi Gabbay apparently made the right decision when he appointed him faction chairman although Hasson didn't endorse him in the Labor leadership elections. Hasson is familiar with the Knesset's work and with Israeli politics and has a lot of experience in dealing with Netanyahu.

Hasson keeps the opposition on a short leash. There are no deals and no offsets. Whoever fails to comply with this policy is shamed. Thanks to Hasson and his successful cooperation with MK Ofer Shelah, chairman of the Yesh Atid faction, the groveling has disappeared.

Hasson is targeting a weak, depressed coalition in a state of conflict. Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman blatantly broke ranks with the coalition last week with the supermarket bill, but Likud members remained silent. It's not that they dont hate what Lieberman is doing to them, but the fear that Yair Lapid will grow stronger is paralyzing each and every one of them, to the very last Likud backbencher. Likud would rather have Lieberman keep centrist and rightist voters than let Lapid attract them in light of the growing bitterness over the Shabbat laws.

Lieberman (R) and Bennett. Smelling elections in the air, they're fighting over right-wing votes (: ",  )

One person who did attack Lieberman is Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett, who was shortly hit with a counterattack. These two aren't fighting over the supermarket bill, but over right-wing votes. They both smell elections in the air.

Meanwhile, Shas leader Aryeh Deri, the man who used an onion to help him cry in a campaign video, broke a new cynical record last week. While attacking the opposition for refusing to offset the absence of Likud MK Yehuda Glick as he mourned his wife Yaffa,

Deria religious Jewtried to pull the mourner from his wifes shiva to vote at the Knesset for a law which no oneapart from Deri himselffinds particularly important or urgent.

This conduct and the attacks between the coalition members do not indicate that the Netanyahu government players are interested in elections. They could point, however, to a miscalculated risk: Like in Gaza, a war which can break out at any given moment just because one of the sides thinks the other side is about to initiate it. No one wants elections, but they're right around the corner, just one small mistake away.
A company commander in the Nahal Brigade's reconnaissance battalion decided to borrow a sheep from a private citizen recently, held it in the outpost he commanded near the Syrian border and allegedly planned to use it in military operations.

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The commander claimed in an initial inquest into the unusual recruit that he harbored no intentions of shooting the sheep, but testimonies provided by combat soldiers serving in his battalion and obtained by Ynet said the sheep was indeed meant to be used in target practice.

The officer quickly released the sheep in open land Friday, following Ynet's overtures to the army on the matter, and it has since disappeared, despite attempts to locate it. While the Nahal battalion initially claimed it was returned to its rightful owner, it later said it was released with his consent.

The company commander may have intended to use the sheep for target practice, soldiers said

Further testimony obtained by Ynetwhich the company commander summarily deniedstated that after the elite unit failed to use the sheep in operations against Syrian terrorists in the Syrian Golan Heights, they considered slaughtering and eating it at a team-building event.

The IDF's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) was made aware of the irregular occurrence, but has yet to decide whether to open a criminal investigation into the company commander's conduct.

The Nahal's reconnaissance battalion is currently tasked with the Syrian border sector, and a Nahal source said that, "The sheep was held in the outpost as if it was completely normal. Some soldiers were disturbed by it and others were apathetic. It's much more than animal crueltyit's a real blow to the army's value system."

The event took place on the backdrop of the army making clear Northern Command's prohibition on soldiers avoiding coming into contact with animals at all costs, due to the increased proliferation of rabies in the region stemming from the Golan Heights.

IDF Spokesperson's Unit commented, "Using animals for operational ends is completely prohibited by IDF orders, as is raising animals anywhere on the grounds of army bases."

"The aforementioned event will be questioned by high command and disciplinary action may be taken in accordance with their conclusions. It should be stressed no harm was intended to come to the sheep," the comment concluded.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day , January 27, three Israeli performers will sing a stirring song in Hebrew, English and Arabic, dedicated to the catastrophe's survivors, at a United Nations (UN) ceremony marking the somber day.

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"And a million eyes are gazing at me now, I am the last one left to tell (the story)," go the lyrics of the song "The Last Survivor", written by Moshe Klughaft and composed by Amir Benayoun, who will be joining Miri Mesika and David D'Or onstage in singing the song.

Survivors anthem

X

"Every day, some 40 Holocaust survivors die in Israel, and this song declares their desireto never cease sharing their account," said Klughaft, the song's writer. "While writing it, I imagined a future reality in which there will only be one Jew left alive who experienced the Holocaust. The song was written with him in mind."

Amir Benayoun

The UN ceremony will be attended by ambassadors from all over the world as well as Holocaust survivors in honor of International International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which correlates to the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. It also marks 30 years since the Walk of Life event was initiated.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon, who invited the singing delegation to the event, said, "Especially at the UN, where we are exposed to modern anti-Semitism, there is a need to declare loud and clear: never again!"

In the words of the song's composer, Amir Benayoun, "Soon there will be no more survivors left to speak. Our duty is to be their voice. We will have to combat Holocaust denial and this song, in three languages, will be one of the tools."

Ahead of the performance at the UN, a music video was recorded with the participation of Holocaust survivors from the Israeli organization "Amcha", which offers psychological and social services to Holocaust survivors and their families, who were filmed alongside photos of themselves as children.
The supermarket bill that would enable the interior minister to strike down municipal bylaws and shut down businesses on Shabbat is set to be put before the Knesset plenum for its second and third reading Monday.

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The controversial bill was approved by the Knesset in early December in its first reading, with 59 Knesset members voting for the bill and 54 opposing it.

The readings are expected to constitute yet another test for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus precarious coalition that has recently been struggling to withstand the weight of threats made by its party leaders to bring it down over core legislative issues.

(Photo: Yuval Hen)

The vote, which was supposed to be held last Tuesday, was postponed for the following week as coalition leaders feared they would fail to gather enough votes to pass the bill.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Fears arose due to the absence of two lawmakers set to vote for itYehuda Glick (Likud) was mourning his wife who died on the morning of the vote, and Minister of Religious Services David Azulay (Shas) who was recovering from a medical operation.

But the timing of the vote comes in the midst of a particularly stormy political climate, not merely due to vociferous opposition that is expected to accompany the debate. On Sunday night, MK Motti Yogevs (Bayit Yehudi) mother passed away and his expected absence as a result threatens to throw into doubt yet again the coalitions ability to assemble its slender majority for ramming the bill through.

Deri attacked the opposition's refusal Monday to offset Glick's vote. "I heard about the opposition's unprecedented conductand I'm including Yisrael Beytenu in thisand am awed by the lack of humanity on display here, and indifference to people in their darkest hour," Deri said.

Vote offsetting is a common practice in the Israeli parliament, according to which a member of Knesset who cannot attend an important vote reaches an agreement with a lawmaker on the other side of the aisle that they would both not vote.

Knesset (Photo: Hadas Parush/Knesset Spokesman's Office)

The coalition also crashed into other obstacles along the way to the readings, with government party members fiercely remonstrating against the bill.

Minister of Social Equality Gila Gamliel of the Likud party was one of those voicing her displeasure with the bill in a Ynet studio interview last week. "I truly hope the Haredi parties will see this week the error of their ways and the tragedy in passing this bill," she said.

Last week, the Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut city council amended a municipal bylaw that will allow for the operation of limited commerce on Shabbat, making it the third city to attempt to outmaneuver national legislation that would grant the interior minister the authority to cancel such bylaws.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett clashed Sunday over the Likud's refusal to support legislation seeking to incorporate Israeli West Bank academic institutions into the Council for Higher Education.

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Earlier in the day, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked decided to stop discussions at the Ministerial Committee for Legislation over Likud MK Yoav Kisch's refusal to support what is dubbed as the "Ariel University bill," which is sponsored by Shaked and Bennett's fellow Bayit Yehudi party member Shuli Mualem-Refaeli.

In a tit-for-tat, Kisch declined to support the Bayit Yehudi legislation after Mualem-Refaeli refused to throw his weight behind his own bill proposal, which seeks to determine that upon separation or divorce, mothers would enjoy automatic sole custody over their children only until the age of two, following which the two parents would share custody.

Bennett and Netanyahu at the Knesset (:  )

Kisch's bill has become one of the more problematic pieces of legislation in the coalition, with Likud and Bayit Yehudi unable to agree on it.

During a coalition party leaders' meeting on Sunday, Bennett told the prime minister that the Ariel University bill "is a very important bill that needs to be passed, and you've been delaying it for three weeks. This is not a symbolic bill."

"Don't preach to me about Ariel University, we built it," Netanyahu fired back.

The prime minister then demanded Bennett to resume discussions at the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, yelling "You're bound by coalition discipline."

"We're the most disciplined faction in the coalition," Bennett responded.

The Likud Party said in response that "During the coalition party leaders' meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu unequivocally stated he supports the Ariel University bill and will work to pass it as soon as possible. The prime minister commented that the argument was unnecessary because in a week's time, MK Miki Zohar will begin his role (as the chairman of the Knesset's House Committee) and pass the bill, so any attempt to create a confrontation on the matter at the coalition party leaders' meeting was artificial, unnecessary and meant solely to make headlines.

"The comments made to Minister Bennett were in response to the unnecessary and childish insistence over a decision that has already been made. The prime minister, who helped Ariel college become a university, does not need to be preached to or encouraged to support applying the Council for Higher Education Law on it."
NEW YORK - US President Donald Trumps special advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner has come under scrutiny that calls into question his ability to act as an impartial peace broker between Israel and the Palestinians, after it recently emerged that although he sold shares of his businesses before taking a position in the White House, he remains involved in family business that have dealings with Israeli companies.

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According to the Sunday report in the New York Times (NYT), shortly before Kushner touched down in Israel with his father-in-law last May , his real estate company received a massive investment of $30 million from an Israeli insurance company, Menora Mivtachim.

The business dealings dont appear to violate federal ethics laws, which require Mr. Kushner to recuse himself only from narrow government decisions that would have a direct and predictable effect on his financial interests, according to the NYT report. And no evidence has emerged that Mr. Kushner was personally involved in brokering the deal.

Jared Kushner (Photo: Reuters)

However, skeptics posit that the involvement of firms in which he has a stake in business deals in Israel may constitute a potential conflict of interest and undermine his ability to act as an impartial arbitrator in the Middle East peace process.

Christine Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Kushner Companies, was quoted in the NYT report saying the company has partners around the world but it does no business with foreign sovereigns or governments, and is not precluded from doing business with any foreign company simply because Jared is working in the government.

It is not the first time the political rookie has become unstuck over his management while in the White House. In September it was reported that Kushner used a private email account alongside his official White House account to exchange messages with other administration official.

President Trump and Jared Kushner (Photo: AP)

Between January and August 2017, Kushner was said to have exchanged at least 100 emails with White House officials using his private email account after taking up his new post.

The use of private email accounts for governmental matters was one of the centerpieces of Trumps political attacks against his rival Hillary Clinton, who was embroiled in a scandal that involved the exchange of tens of thousands of emails on matters relating directly to State Department work using such email account.

During one of the presidential debates, Trump promised that if he became president, he would order a special prosecutor to look into her case and suggested that if he was president, she would be in jail.
The Shin Bet and the Israel Police have arrested two 19-year-old Bedouin women suspected of planning to carry out terror attacks on behalf of the Islamic State (ISIS), it was cleared for publication on Monday.

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The two, Rahma al-Assad and Tasnin al-Assad, Israeli citizens from the Bedouin town of Lakiya, were arrested in December 2017.

According to the Shin Bet, over the last year the two planned to carry out a terror attack against Jews in Israel and considered various options to that end.

Tasnin al-Assad and Rahma al-Assad

They were also in contact with ISIS-affiliated terror operatives from abroad and were instructed by some of these contacts to carry out tasks in preparation for an attack, according to the indictment against them.

Tasnin al-Assad allegedly used the Telegram app to talk to a man identifying as "Sheikh Qassim," an ISIS online operative. She purchased a SIM card especially to that end.

During their conversations, Sheikh Qassim broached the possibility of carrying out an attack in Israel, and Tasnin expressed willingness to aid him in that endeavor.

Sheikh Qassim asked Tasnin to examine the entrances and security arrangements at three Be'er Sheva locations: Ben-Gurion University, the Kaye Academic College of Education and the Central Bus Station.

Ben-Gurion University (:  )

At some point, Tasnin contacted Rahma al-Assad and the two scouted Ben-Gurion University and the Kaye Academic College of Education to gather intelligence ahead of a planned bombing that entailed bringing a suitcase with explosives into one or both of these academic institutions.

Kaye Academic College of Education

The two women reached the conclusion the security arrangements in both locations were too strict to carry out such an attack.

The Shin Bet investigation further revealed the two women planned to travel to the Sinai Peninsula and join ISIS. To that end, they had passports issued.

They also posted content online praising ISIS as well as inciting to terrorism against Jews in general and Israel in particular.

The defendants also allegedly tried to convince 24-year-old Ahmad Abu Ramila from east Jerusalem to carry out a religiously-motivated attack on New Year's Eve.

Ramila was indicted for contact with a foreign agent, conspiring to commit a crime (membership in a terror organization), obstruction of justice and evidence tempering.

Ramila, according to the indictment, was a member of several Telegram groups affiliated with ISIS. He also allegedly planned to marry Tasnin and travel to Sinai with her to join ISIS.

When he became concerned of the possibility Rahma and Tasnin have been arrested, he deleted his conversations with them in an effort to cover his tracks.
The Security Cabinet discussed Sunday the strategic and tactical aspects of the threats on Israel's northern border, as well as the necessary diplomatic activity vis-a-vis Russia and the US in an effort to prevent Syria from turning into a base for Iranian forces.

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The Cabinet, according to a report on Channel 10, was asked to discuss a scenario envisioning an Iranian attempt to establish a foothold in Syria.

At present, the working assumption is that Syrian President Bashar Assad is not allowing Tehran to establish a permanent base on his territoryincluding an airport, sea port surface-to-surface missile depots.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: AP)

Assad has likely also refused to allow the Islamic Republic to deploy Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries in Syria and rejected an offer by the Iranian Chief of Staff, Maj.-Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, to that end.



Bagheri raised the possibility during a recent visit to Damascus in light of Russian opposition to a permanent Iranian presence in Tartus, the second largest port city in Syria.

Among other things, Bagheri floated the idea of establishing an array of military industries on Syrian soil, as well as an intelligence base, an air base and a naval base, and deploying surface-to-surface missiles such as those that were deployed with the help of Hezbollah in Yemen for the Houthi rebels.

However, is may be surmised that Assad has rejected the move out of fear that to do so would give Israel pretext to launch a military campaign in Syria, thereby jeopardizing all his accomplishments of recapturing control over his territory, which have been facilitated by Moscow during the violent civil war.

Maj.-Gen. Mohammad Bagheri (Photo: Reuters)

The security apparatus in Israel views the threat in Lebanon at its most severe yet, but recently Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Syria and Lebanon are part and parcel of the same northern front

In any development that takes place, it will be one areaSyria and Lebanon together, Hezbollah, the Assad regime and all collaborators of the Assad regime. Regarding the Lebanese region, were no longer talking solely about Hezbollah, Lieberman said in October, describing what he dubbed the New Middle East.

Speaking in an interview with Ynet on Monday, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz was asked about the Cabinet discussion and about the concern lingering over the northern frontier.

I wont comment on the discussions in the Cabinet meetings and wont say what the subject was, Steinitz succinctly stated.

Minister Steinitz (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

There are a lot of matters discussed in the Cabinet, but it is no secret that we are concerned. The prime minister has expressed this concern about the efforts Iran is undertaking to establish military presence in Syria, and with his leadership we are taking diplomatic steps and also intelligence and security steps in order to prevent Syria becoming a military front for Iran, he continued. It is a process that will take a few years, and it will happen, but we are determined to prevent it.

In response to the question how Israel is preparing for the day after, Steinitz said that Israel was  preparing for the day before.

We dont want to see an Iranian naval and air base in Syria, a base for Iranian rockets, for divisions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, he said, repeating the red lines that have been expressed on numerous occasions by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

We are determined to prevent all of these things. We wont allow the brutal civil war in Syria to be exploited by Iran in order to turn Syria into a military base for Iran against the State of Israel.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon (Kulanu) presented a new plan Monday that will enable school students to attend enrichment courses during vacation.

This March, during the Passover holidays, students will be able to attend the activities during five of the days in educational institutions in the Jewish, Arab and Druze sectors. The costs of the course will be no more than NIS 30 per day.

Starting next year, ten days of enrichment activities will be made available to the children during the Hanukkah holidays and Passover holidays in the Jewish sectors, and ten days during the spring and winter breaks for non-Jewish sectors in the country.
A 20-year-old IDF soldier crashed his vehicle into a street pole on Monday after Haredim threw rocks at his vehicle on Rabbi Elazar Street in Beit Shemesh.

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Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedics evacuated the soldier to Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalems Ein Kerem in light condition.

Illustration (Photo: Reuters)

Police were called to the scene and launched an investigation.

The soldier told the MDA paramedics that Haredi assailants spotted him as he was driving in his civilian vehicle in the Ramat Beit Shemesh neighborhood and saw that he was clad in military uniform before they began hurling rocks in his direction.

Upon arriving at the scene, the medics found the soldier outside his vehicle following the crash having sustained bruises.

When we arrived at the scene, we saw the driver walking around the vehicle that had crashed into an electrical pole, a medic recalled.

He told us that he hit the pole after a rock was thrown at him. He was suffering from light wounds. We gave him medical treatment and evacuated him in light condition to the hospital.
Syrian government forces captured 14 villages on Monday as they advance on the largest rebel-held enclave in the country's north amid a wave of airstrikes.

Syrian government forces and their allies have been on the offensive since late October in Hama and Idlib provinces, capturing nearly 100 villages from insurgent groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Levant Liberation Committee. The offensive intensified on Christmas Day after reinforcements were brought in from other parts of Syria.

The main aim of the troops is to reach the rebel-held Abu Zuhour air base and secure the road linking the capital, Damascus, with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest. Rebels captured Abu Zuhour in 2015 after a three-year siege.

The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media said the newly captured villages, include Freija, Jahman, Dawoudiyeh and Jub al-Qasab, bring the troops closer to the air base.
Iran said on Monday it might reconsider its cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog if the United States failed to respect its commitments in the nuclear deal Tehran struck with world powers in 2015.

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President Donald Trump must decide by mid-January whether to continue waiving US sanctions on Iran's oil exports under the terms of the nuclear pact that eased economic pressure on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.

In October, Trump refused to certify that Iran was complying with the deal , also known by its acronym JCPOA, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was.

Iran's nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said his country may pull out of the nuclear deal (Photo: AP)

"If the United States does not meet its commitment in the JCPOA, the Islamic Republic of Iran would take decisions that might affect its current cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)," Iran's nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, was quoted as telling IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano in a phone call.

The IAEA is an international organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and is scrutinizing Iran's compliance with the agreement.

Supporters of the deal insist that strong international monitoring will prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs. Iran has denied that it is seeking nuclear weapons.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on Monday that Tehran "would not prejudge the decision that America would take on January 13," but said it was ready for all possible outcomes and " all options were on the table ."

Deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said world powers should be ready for a possible US withdrawal from the deal.

President Trump must certify Iran is complying with the nuclear deal by mid-January or sanctions will be resumed (Photo: AFP)

"The international community might come to this conclusion that the United States will withdraw from the JCPOA in the next few days," Araghchi was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA.

"The international community must be ready for this development," Araghchi added, warning that such a decision would affect stability in the region.

Trump is weighing whether the pact serves US security interests, while the other world powers that negotiated it France, Germany, Britain, Russia and Chinastill strongly support it.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in September that the United States should consider staying in the Iran deal unless it were proven that Tehran was not abiding by the agreement or that it was not in the US national interest to do so.
Channel 2 News aired a recording Monday evening of a conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair and the son of gas mogul Kobi Maimon, despite the prime minister's frantic attempts to prevent the embarrassing story from airing since Monday morning.

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The conversation between Yair Netanyahu and Maimon's son Ori was recorded sometime in 2015, when the country was embroiled in controversy surrounding the Israel's newly discovered natural gas deposits and the rights to drill there, partially owned by Maimon's company Isramco.

PM Netanyahu's son Yair (R) was recorded in an embarrassing phone conversation (Photo: AFP)

In the recording, aired on the channel's main newscast Monday, it was revealed Yair Netanyahu visited a strip club with his security guard and driver in tow, accompanied by his friendsone of which was Ori Maimon and another was Roman Avramov, who works for Australian billionaire James Packer who provided testimony on the illicit gifts affair.

In the recording, Yair can be heard telling Maimon that he has to "hook him up" with 400 NIS, which he later said was for soliciting a prostitute.

"Bro, my father cut a great deal for your father. Fought for it in the Knesset, bro," Yair is heard telling Maimon. "My father set you up with $20 billion, and you can't even hook me up with a show for NIS 400?" he added, laughing.

The conversation, as mentioned above, was recorded during discussions on gas drilling licenses. Kobi Maimon had a vested interest in the draft agreement formulated by the government being implemented due to his ownership of one of the companies partnering in the gas project.

Finance Minister Kahlon recused himself from debating the gas arrangement due to his ties to Maimon (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon even recused himself from any discussions on the matter due to his friendship with Maimon.

After Yair's comments, Maimon is heard lamenting the results of the Sheshinski Committee, which was set up by the government to examine the appropriate tax burden on the production of oil and natural gas in Israel, and the results of which cost his father millions in taxes.

"It was hell," Ori said, to which Yair replied, "In that he fu***d you, but then he paid you back."

"My father set your father up for $ 20 billion, and you cry to me about 400 shekels, you son of a bitch," he said, still laughing.

"Do not let this conversation get out," Roman is then heard saying, joining in the laughter. "God forbid, if this gets out, God, it's going to be hell."

(Photo: Motti Kimchi)

On their way to the strip club, the three are heard making salacious and disparaging comments on women, recounting their night and the many hundreds of shekels they spent on strippers.

Yair is even heard calling his two friends "dummies" for being seen outside the club with its female workers, asking them half-jokingly whether they they understood "how it would look" if they were caught on camera.

Yair then proposes to arrange for his friends an intimate meeting with a young woman who was previously in a relationship with him, saying it will "clear all his debts" with them.

Finally, a phone rings, and Yair is heared saying it was his mother, Sara Netanyahu, and how much of an embarrassing situation it is. He decides not to pick up the call, and, shaking off the embarrassment, tells his friends: "invite the Japanese girls, bro, come on."

The Netanyahu family's attorney Yossi Cohen attempted to block Channel 2 from airing the recording (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

The Netanyahu family attorney, Yossi Cohen, sent an urgent letter Monday to the Israel Television News Company demanding they withhold the recording's contents from the public.

Rumors abounded regarding the recording's contents Monday, with some sources saying the two youngsters spoke of call girls or strippers, and mentioned the relationship between their parents.

The prime minister canceled a multi-person meeting on reforming the electric sector at the last minute Monday morning. According to the Prime Minister's Office the meeting was postponed due to "scheduling conflicts," but another source said it was pushed back to allow Netanyahu to deal with the problem arousing from the expected airing of the recording.

Comments

Commenting on the tape's publication, Yair Netanyahu apologized for his "drunken nonsense," saying it doesn't represent who he is and dismissing any claim that what he said regarding the natural gas regulation agreement was anything more than banter.

"This evening, I watched a shameful yellow article that presented illegal tapes from a conversation I had two and a half years ago," he said.

"In the conversation, under the influence of alcohol, I said some nonsensical things about women and other drivel that should not have been said. These things do not represent who I am, the values I was raised by or what I believe in.

"I regret it and apologize if anyone is hurt by them."

The Netanyahu family commented to say, "Let any parent who watched the report consider how they would have responded if any offhanded remark by their children made headline news on Channel 2, every outing night out the subject of an investigative report and every conversation a target of secret recording.

"Persecution, bloodletting and shamingevery tool at your disposal to harm the Likud government headed by Netanyahu, even at the cost of harming his family members.

"You've never covered the family members of any previous prime minister with such malicious nosiness, including family members who demonstrated against IDF soldiers during a military operation and received almost no coverage.

(Photo: Kobi Gideon, GPO)

"Your witch-hunt has now reached an all-time unprecedented low with the publication of a secret recording of things said jokingly between drunken young men two and a half years ago. This should not have made a cheap gossip show, let alone a central newscast.

"Security officials decide on the prime minister's sons' security and transportation arrangements. When an Iranian site publishes the photo of Yair and Avner (Netanyahu) and calls for their deaths, it appears security officials have good reason to do so.

"The prime minister has no connection to Kobi Maimon, who he met once ten years ago. Prime Minister Netanyahu passed the gas agreement precisely because he wanted competition for the Tamar rig owned by Maimon. The prime minister knew nothing of the relationship between his son Yair and Maimon's son. Yair he no input into the gas arrangement, and if he commented on the matter, he did so jokingly.

The Prime Minister's Office commented, "The decision to provide security for the prime minister's sons was reached by a ministerial committee on the recommendation of an advisory board, and stems from threat assessment and the fact both Yair and Avner are internationally recognizable. The prime minister and his family take no part in said security arrangements. They are also not party to the prime minister's sons' transportation arrangements, which are also determined by security officials."

The "Na'amat Movement of Working Women & Volunteers" also commented on Yair Netanyahu's recording and said, "His utterances are revolting and degrading to women. A pointed, unequivocal denunciation should be put out by the prime minister and his wife tonight, decrying these severe and violent statements.

"If this is how women are treated at (the Prime Minister's Residence), it's patently unsurprising women are still forced to fight and claw for what by now should have been obvious."

The woman Yair Netanyahu mentioned in his conversation, and who was jokingly attempting to "set up" for his friends, told Ynet, "No one can sell me. It was locker room talk and I wasn't offended by it."

"He never mentioned my name," said the young woman, who was in a relationship with the prime minister' son. "I'm sure it was a mistake and he wasn't talking about me. And if he was, so what? Anyway, I wasn't offended."

'Examine security needs, Netanyahu-Maimon link'

Zionist Union Chairman Avi Gabbay commented on the report as well, saying, "When I was fighting against the corrupt gas arrangement from within the government I said it was clear to me there was something big we weren't aware of. There's what was on the surface and things hidden from view."

Zionist Union Chairman Gabbay said he knew there was more to the gas arrangement than met the eye (Photo: Avi Moalem)

MK Mossi Raz and MK Michal Rozin (Meretz) announced they will be contacting Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit demanding he examine the security needs of Yair Netanyahu and the prime minister's relationship with Kobi Maimon.

"The recording arouses suspicion that before the draft gas agreement was approved there may have been illicit ties between the Netanyahu and Maimon families, constituting a conflict of interest consider the decision eventually made," the MKs said.

Commenting on the contentious supermarkets bill, which has been put to a Knesset second and third reading votes Monday, Zionist Union MK Merav Michaeli said, "All that's missing is for Netanyahu to add the 'Yair exclusion' to the supermarkets bill, so strip clubs can continue operating on Shabbat."
US Vice President Mike Pence will visit Egypt, Jordan and Israel from Jan. 20 to 23, the White House said on Monday, embarking on a tour originally planned for last month after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Pence will hold talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Jordan's King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House said in a statement.

Pence, a strong supporter of Trump's decision on Jerusalem, will also visit the city's Western Wall and give a speech at the Israeli parliament, it said.

Trump's decision on Jerusalem and announcement in December that the United States would start the process of moving its embassy from Tel Aviv led to uproar and protest in the region.

"At President Trump's direction, the vice president is traveling to the Middle East to reaffirm our commitment to work with the US's allies in the region to defeat radicalism that threatens future generations," said Alyssa Farah, a spokeswoman for Pence.

He plans to discuss with the three leaders "ways to work together to fight terrorism and improve our national security," she added.
US Vice President Mike Pence will visit Israel, Egypt and Jordan from January 19 to 23, the White House said on Monday, embarking on a tour originally planned for last month after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

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Pence will hold talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Jordan's King Abdullah and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, the White House said in a statement. Pence will also visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

Pence, a strong supporter of Trump's decision on Jerusalem, will also visit the city's Western Wall and give a speech at the Knesset, it said.

VP Pence will be visiting Jerusalem later this month (Photo: AFP)

Trump's decision on Jerusalem and announcement in December that the United States would start the process of moving its embassy from Tel Aviv led to uproar and protest in the region.

"At President Trump's direction, the vice president is traveling to the Middle East to reaffirm our commitment to work with the US's allies in the region to defeat radicalism that threatens future generations," said Alyssa Farah, a spokeswoman for Pence.

He plans to discuss with the three leaders "ways to work together to fight terrorism and improve our national security," she added.

In his first visit to the Middle East as vice president, Pence is not expected to meet any senior Palestinian officials, who were incensed with the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and canceled planned meetings with the vice president.

Prior to Trump's announcement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was slated to meet Pence in Bethlehem, but the meeting was canceled in protest of the recognition.

Pence postponed a planned visit to Egypt and Israel last month to stay in Washington for a congressional vote on Trump's tax overhaul plan.
HAILEY  Blaine County commissioners last week unofficially agreed to withdraw from a state fund that helps cover defense costs in death penalty cases. The move was an attempt to deter use of capital punishment, they said.

But just two days after the Jan. 2 meeting, each of the commissioners publicly announced that they had changed their minds. Pulling out of the Capital Crimes Defense Fund would have had the costly side effect of cutting off the countys access to the State Appellate Public Defenders Fund, which represents indigent defendants through all post-conviction appeals  something Commissioner Larry Schoen, who spearheaded the push, said he didnt realize at the time.

Going forward, Schoen said, he plans to recommend that the county stay in the fund, while seeking a legislative amendment that would separate participation in the fund from access to the State Appellate Public Defenders Office.

Though the incident likely wont lead to any significant changes in Blaine County, the discussion and subsequent backlash from the county prosecutor and others raises questions about just how and why prosecutors decide to pursue the death penalty.

Pulling out of the Capital Crimes Defense Fund would have put the high cost of defending those facing the death penalty entirely on Blaine County  a shift that commissioners said they hoped would discourage the prosecutors office from pursuing the death penalty in the first place.

The death penalty, while legal in Idaho, is rare: the state has only put three people to death since 1976.

In his 22 years as Blaine County prosecuting attorney, Jim Thomas has never sought the death penalty in a murder trial. But, he said, money has never played a role in that decision. And he says if the county were to pull out of the fund, it wouldnt have affected any future decisions.

Determining whether to pursue the death penalty is a huge process that involves considering the circumstances of a homicide, conversations with the family of the victim, consultations with law enforcement, and seeking advice from other experienced prosecutors, Thomas said.

Its probably the most important, weighty decision that I would make, he told the Times-News. And to think that we would make it on the basis of finances  I think thats probably what insulted me most, frankly.

To be eligible for the death penalty in Idaho, a case has to fit a certain set of criteria. First, the defendant must be found guilty of first-degree murder. But the case must also fit at least one factor under the legal statute governing whether the death penalty can be given.

Possible factors listed under the statute include especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel murders, a defendant who is seen as a continuing threat to society, and the murder of somebody working in the criminal justice system, such as a judicial officer or prosecuting attorney, for reasons related to their work.

By law, a prosecutor must be able to prove at least one of these factors beyond a reasonable doubt. But ideally, a prosecutor should be able to prove more than one of these factors, Twin Falls prosecuting attorney Grant Loebs said.

Just because a prosecutor can legally pursue the death penalty in a case doesnt mean they will, as the legal criteria is just the beginning of the decision-making process.

Factors such as the mental health of the defendant and whether drugs, alcohol, or the bad influence of other people played a role in the crime must be taken into account, Loebs said, along with conversations with the defendants attorney and the wishes of the victims loved ones.

In Twin Falls County, prosecutors have sought the death penalty three times since 2006, according to Loebs. None of those cases resulted in a death sentence.

Twin Falls County commissioners have never discussed withdrawing from the Capital Crimes Defense Fund, Commissioner Don Hall said, and it appears unlikely that theyll do so anytime in the near future.

It really is a good insurance policy we all put in, especially for the smaller counties that maybe dont have as much of a budget to handle something like that, Hall said.

But in the event that Twin Falls commissioners were to consider pulling out, Loebs said, their withdrawal wouldnt have an effect on the number of death penalty cases pursued by the county.

Its too monumental a decision to allow things like dollars and cents to play into it, Loebs said.

Its probably the most important, weighty decision that I would make. And to think that we would make it on the basis of finances  I think thats probably what insulted me most, frankly. Jim Thomas Blaine County prosecuting attorney
The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in ...
The CIA chief Sunday rejected Tehrans accusations as he noted that the intelligence agency did not help the weeklong protests, which shook the Iranian regime.

Mike Pompeo made the denial to Fox News as he chalked the protests up to Irans failure to address economic concerns of its people.

Thats what caused the people to take to the streets, he said.

He said Irans accusations are false. Irans prosecutor general, Mohammad Javad Montazeri last week accused the CIA of colliding with Israels Mossad and Saudi Arabia to work with exiled Iranian dissenters to stir protest in the Islamic Republic.

This was the Iranian people  started by them, created by them, continued by them, demanding a better set of living conditions and a break from the theocratic regime, he said.

Protests claiming better economic conditions late December in the city of Mashhad quickly spread across 80 cities in the form of regime change demonstrations.

Over 20 people died as authorities strived to quash the anti-regime unrest, the biggest since 2009.

Authorities cracked down on internet by banning Telegram messaging app and photo sharing app Instagram and arrested hundreds of people but the measures failed to curb the protests.

They had to unleash powerful Revolutionary Guards to break the anti-government demonstrations. On Sunday, the Guards claimed they have suppressed the unrest.

Irans revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces, police and the intelligence ministry have broken down the chain (of unrest), the Guards said.

Local residents in various cities told Reuters that the protests have lost momentum. Reports say the government has lifted the ban on Instagram but maintained the ban on Telegram.

The CIA chief Pompeo however predicted that the unrest will continue. The violent unrest is not behind us, he noted.

US President has been following the development in Iran and has given his support in a set of Tweets chided by French President Emmanuel Macron who also lambasted Israel and Saudi Arabias public stance on the crisis.

Analysts believe Trump may use the unrest and authorities response to renew opposition to the 2015 nuclear deal signed between Iran and world powers.

The US leader faces deadlines around mid-month on whether to renew temporary waivers or restore US sanctions on Iran, the Associated Press reports.

In October Trump already refused to certify that Iran was in compliance with the accord that he deemed a bad deal.
Iraq will start exporting oil from the northern fields of Kirkuk to Iran by the end of January, Iraqi oil minister announced.

Jabbar Alluaibi said about 30,000 barrels per day will be trucked to Irans Kermanshah refinery in the first set of shipments.

Iraq initially announced the planned deal with Iran in November 2017, negotiated by Iraqs State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO), to export 30,000-60,000 barrels per day to Irans Kermanshah province.

The deal stipulated that Iraq receives the same amount of oil from Iran through its southern borders.

Kirkuk crude sales have been halted since Iraqi forces took back control of the fields from the Kurds in October.

Kurdish forces took control of Kirkuk in 2014, when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of Islamic State. The Kurdish move prevented the militants from seizing the regions oilfields.

Iraq and Iran are also planning to build a pipeline to carry the oil from Kirkuk to avoid having to truck the crude, Jabbar Alluaibi said last month.
The US is planning concrete steps to diplomatically recognize the independence of the area, east of the Euphrates river, controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a majority Kurdish area, Acharq Al Awsat reported.

The paper quoted a US official saying that the 28,000 square km territory, controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a collection of predominantly Kurdish militias including the YPG Peoples Protection Units, took its first step toward US recognition after US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis promised to send US diplomats to SDF-controlled areas to work alongside US troops operating in the region.

According to the official, US initiatives in the region include empowering local councils, backing reconstruction efforts, assisting in training of government agency workers, improving public services and infrastructure, protecting SDF areas and engaging in the upkeep of military bases, all of which will eventually lead to diplomatic recognition.

Such a move would trigger the wrath of Turkey, which opposes any empowerment of the Kurdish YPG Peoples Protection Units, close to the PKK rebels whom Turkey has been fighting for decades.

Turkey announced over the weekend it is preparing to unleash an offensive against the Kurdish-controlled Afreen region in northern Syria.

Afreen is a strategic Kurdish-controlled area, whose capture will deal a strong blow to the Kurdish Syrians and their plan to have an autonomy stretching along the Syrian-Turkish border.
@NewsbySmiley

In the hotly contested race to replace the retiring Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, running a winning campaign is easily going to cost millions of dollars.

That's millions, with an "S."

More than a half-dozen viable candidates reported six-figure fundraising efforts through September, with Democrats alone raising a combined $2.2 million. And with a primary looming in August, the politicians angling for Ros-Lehtinen's seat -- which many expect will turn blue come November -- are pushing hard to get their name out to voters.

But on Monday, a candidate who emerged this fall as a front-runner in the money race said he's shunning a potentially lucrative funding source: political action committees.

Matt Haggman, a former Knight Foundation program director gunning for the Democratic nomination for Florida's 27th Congressional district, wrote in an opinion piece that he won't accept contributions from political action committees, or PACs, which are typically created to further business and ideological interests or organized labor by funding candidates and campaigns.

PACs can give up to $5,000 to federal candidates per election cycle. And those contributions can add up, with political committees accounting for more than a third of the $1 billion raised by House candidates running in 2016, according to OpenSecrets.org.

"I don't believe there's any room for influence-seeking money in our politics," Haggman wrote in an essay published to Medium.com.

While it's not unusual for candidates to proclaim their disdain for special interest money, more often than not the politicians who take hard lines are underdogs shunning money that they weren't going to receive in the first place. Viable candidates and incumbents taking anti-PAC stances are more difficult to find.

Haggman, however, just about led a crowded Democratic primary field as of the most recent financial reports with $512,000 raised. That's a notable showing for a first-time candidate. Only State Rep. David Richardson reported more money raised, at $517,254, thanks to a $250,000 self-loan.
@alextdaugherty

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it will end Temporary Protected Status for about 200,000 Salvadorans in September 2019, and the three Miami Republicans in Congress voiced opposition to the Trump administration's decision. Monday's move comes after the Trump administration decided to end TPS for Haitians and Nicaraguans last year. TPS allows foreign nationals from countries affected by disaster and unrest to live and work in the United States for a period of time.

"I am in strong disagreement with the Administrations decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadoran nationals who reside in the United States," said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami. "These innocent people fled their home country after a disastrous earthquake, and while living conditions may have slightly improved, El Salvador now faces a significant problem with drug trafficking, gangs, and crime. Since 2001, these people have established themselves in the United States, making countless contributions to our society and our local communities. As I did with the decisions to end TPS for Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Honduran nationals who reside in the United States, I strongly urge the Administration to reconsider this decision."

"Todays decision about Salvadoran TPS  and previous decisions about Honduran and Nicaraguan TPS  are disappointing," said Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Miami. "Many years of short-term extensions have created anxiety and uncertainty, not only for these immigrants and their families, but also for employers and neighbors who have welcomed them to our communities."

"It is unconscionable that @POTUS would terminate the much needed #TPS status of more than 200,000 people from #ElSalvador who have been here for years, working legally + sending remittances to their families," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, said on Twitter.

It is unconscionable that @POTUS would terminate the much needed #TPS status of more than 200,000 people from #ElSalvador who have been here for years, working legally + sending remittances to their families https://t.co/zQbliOPwmU  Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (@RosLehtinen) January 8, 2018

The three Miami Republicans, who all represent districts with large Latino populations, are signed on to a bill that would provide a path to permanent residency and American citizenship for immigrants currently living in the U.S. under TPS from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicarauga and Honduras.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is also in favor of extending TPS for Haiti, and all of the Democrats representing South Florida including Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Frederica Wilson and Sen. Bill Nelson are opposed to the Department of Homeland Security's decision.
via @FrancoOrdonez

Sen. Marco Rubio pushed back Sunday against comments from a Republican colleague that the United States has found no evidence of sonic attacks in Cuba.

The Florida Republican charged the attacks were a documented fact.

In a series of tweets Sunday, Rubio dismissed comments by Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a longtime advocate for improving ties with Cuba, stating that any U.S. official briefed on the mysterious events in Havana knows full well that while method of attack still in question, that attacks and injuries occurred isnt.

Its a documented FACT that 24 U.S. govt officials & spouses were victims of some sort of sophisticated attack while stationed in Havana, Rubio tweeted.

Flake said Saturday that he has seen no evidence that American diplomats who suffered health symptoms while in Havana were attacked, according to the Associated Press.

After meeting with high ranking Cuban officials, Flake said classified briefings from U.S. officials had given him no reason to doubt Cuban officials who said there was no evidence any health symptoms were a result of an attack.

Rubio countered calling it impossible to conduct 24 separate & sophisticated attacks" on U.S. government personnel without Cuban officials knowing.

The back and forth between the two senators sets up a potentially explosive hearing Tuesday at a highly anticipated Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing chaired by Rubio. Members are expected to press State Department officials for more answers about the mysterious events.

The Trump administration has already pulled much of the U.S embassy staff from Havana and expelled 15 of their Cuban counterparts working in Washington.

The State Department continued to call it an attack on Sunday despite not knowing the source or cause of the events.

Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen also sharply criticized Flake on Sunday.

Saying the #Cuban regime is not responsible for attacks on our diplomats is not only wrong but is also naive. No, @JeffFlake, #Castro - a murderer, #humanrights violator - is not innocent of any crime. U claim 2 stand up for folks, apparently not the Cuban people though https://t.co/Hw6KjuveEO  Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (@RosLehtinen) January 8, 2018

Read more here.
@alextdaugherty

Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Ted Deutch announced Monday they will co-sponsor a bill that expands airport security programs administered by the Transportation Security Administration in the wake of a 2017 shooting at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport that left five people dead.

Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, and Deutch, D-Boca Raton, will introduce the Airport ALERT Act which would require the 28 airports included in the TSA's highest security level to install a "unified operations center" to oversee security operations throughout the entire airport. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Miami International Airport are among the 28 airports nationwide included in the TSA's highest security level. MIA is already constructing such an operations center, according to a press release from Wasserman Schultz.

"One year ago, our community became the latest to experience a mass shooting we never thought would happen here," Wasserman Schultz said on Twitter. "After conducting a thorough review, Im proud to introduce this bill to help ensure the safety of travelers at all of our nations major airports."

"Let's learn from last year's tragedy at @ FLLFlyer," Deutch tweeted. "I'm proud to cosponsor the ALERT Act, which will enhance airport operations to be better prepared for future situations."
For picture posts from 2010 and earlier, see the Earlier Picture Posts Page
Waves crashed and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds briefly as Father Rob Spaliatsos blessed the Clark Fork River at Brennan's Wave on Sunday afternoon.

The crowd, which Spaliatsos said was the largest to date, gathered slowly on the deck overlooking the river at Caras Park to celebrate the feast day of Theophany (the baptism of Jesus Christ) with a blessing of the waters.

After a short ceremony, Spaliatsos trudged through the snow, down to the water's edge and threw a cross made of olive wood into the river three times as he sang a hymn.

"We ask for the blessing of the Jordan to come upon our local waters so that the same gift of life and recreation can be bestowed upon us," said Spaliatsos, who is the priest at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of Missoula.

The cross was specially made by a Palestinian family from Bethlehem whom Spaliatsos met at a church service several years ago.

This was the third time the event has been held and it was by far the warmest, Spaliatsos said, adding that it was 4 below with the windchill last year.

The blessing of the water is connected to the belief that through entering the waters of the Jordan River, Jesus offers rebirth and transformation to all his creations through water and spirit.

Lakes, rivers and even oceans are blessed by Orthodox Christians around the world, with the biggest celebration in the United States happening in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where the Gulf of Mexico is blessed.

Sugene Gavrisheff attended last year's celebration and was one of many members of the church to partake in the holy tradition.

"Our faith just isn't inside the church doors, it's outside in creation," Gavrisheff said. "I like being a part of creation."

After throwing the cross into the river three times, Spaliatsos gave those who wanted the opportunity to toss the cross into the water for themselves. Several people did.

Peter Stokstad, who has been present at the event every year, was one of the people who took that opportunity.

"I feel like it's a blessing to participate in the event," Stokstad said. "It's important for me to participate in our church's services and I love the fact that we get to express our faith in a physical way."

Upon the conclusion of the ceremony, the group posed for a photo on the deck before going about their day.

Speaking on the importance of the feast day, Spaliatsos said it's the beginning of recreation.

"This is why it is important for us to bless local bodies of water because we continue to ask for our community to experience this healing and transformation of the water and the spirits," Spaliatsos said.
To fully capture how interesting R. David Wilsons life has been, you'd need a very long non-fiction novel illustrated with world maps.

After growing up in Whitefish, Wilson graduated from high school in Brazil before living in Spain, teaching in Chile on a Fulbright exchange, living in Mexico and traveling to impoverished agricultural villages in Honduras during a decade of work as a translator for a group of volunteers called Missoula Medical Aid, which delivers medical care to thousands of people in urgent need.

And those are just some of the highlights of Wilsons life.

He also adopted an infant daughter in Chile who has now made him a grandfather. He ran a drywall company and worked in the historic Many Glacier Hotel after the tourists left. He taught Spanish for many years at Big Sky High School in Missoula. Hes an accomplished painter. He's traveled to Cuba. And he spent many summers teaching the children of migrant cherry orchard workers in the Flathead Valley for the federal Migrant Education Program.

This month, Dudley Dana is featuring Wilson as the Dana Gallerys first-ever Artist Humanitarian of the Year. There will be a formal ceremony and open house on Saturday, Jan. 20, from noon to 5 p.m. at the downtown gallery on North Higgins Avenue.

David has given freely of his time to encourage, teach and inspire any number of artists in the Missoula community, Dana said in a statement next to the area where Wilsons works are displayed. We have represented and known David personally for 14 years. In that time he has routinely showed us in working and interacting with other artists and gallery staff the primary characteristics of a humanitarian individual.

"He is certainly one of the most compassionate, generous, kind and least self-serving persons in the art world and the world in general.

Now retired, Wilson lives near Missoulas Hip Strip neighborhood and takes long walks with his dog Coco on the Kim Williams Trail almost every day. Often, he spots a scene that strikes him and sits down for a plein air (outdoors) painting session. About half of his paintings are done that way, while some are done from his apartment window or from photographs of families he took in Honduras.

He uses heavy oils, and likes to make quick, unplanned motions as he paints to create a more unpredictable look to his art. His work has a lot of texture and color, and his eye is attracted to the natural beauty of Missoula, especially the river and the fall colors.

My mother was an artist, and I was an only child, he explained. So I started when I was very young.

Wilson was known as Senor Wilson to his high school students at Big Sky, where he still donates paintings for raffles to support Aerie International, an award-winning literary arts magazine for students around the world that is edited exclusively by students at Big Sky High School.

He still has a very special place in his heart for Guanajuato, Mexico, where he spent a year on sabbatical working as an artist.

Artistic life in Mexico can be a 24-hour roller coaster of workshops, gallery openings, animated discussion and artistic interchange that leads one to believe it is a bona fide existence, he said.

Wilson also has a whole series of paintings from his time traveling with Missoula Medical Aid. That group formed in 1999 as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed 11,000 people and left 2.7 million people homeless in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

I was one of the translators, Wilson recalled. The goal was to create self-sustaining public clinics for people to come by the hundreds.

The group performed both routine care and critical surgical procedures, and continues to help countless thousands of people every year.

Wilson said the indigenous communities have been hit hard by gang culture and other factors, but he has a great fondness for the people and culture in Honduras.

It was a life-changing experience, he said.

Wilson was surprised this month when Dana informed him that he was featuring his work at the gallery. But for Dana, it was an easy decision to make.

David is one of those rare individuals who make all around them better, Dana said.
You recall the article about the first airplane flight into Butte in 1912 and how it was often erroneously reported as happening in 1910? The 1912 date I reported in my article was correct, but it wasnt the first airplane flown into Butte.

The real first flight (at least until further research shows otherwise) was in 1911, by an aviator named Eugene Ely. Thanks to a tip from reader Tony Baumgartner, we know Ely flew in several exhibition flights in Montana during the summer of 1911, including Kalispell, Great Falls, Lewistown, Missoula, and Butte.

Butte was apparently the first stop on the tour. The aircraft, a Curtiss, arrived by train from Portland, where Ely had been flying prior to coming to Montana. The plane was the same one Ely used to become the first flyer to land on a ship  the battleship Pennsylvania  and return to a landing field in San Francisco.

The birdman is here, The Anaconda Standard announced when Ely and his wife arrived in Butte on Friday June 9, 1911, with plans for two days of flying on Sunday and Tuesday. Elys Curtiss D-60 had a wingspan of 26 feet and a top speed of 60 mph. A crowd estimated at more than 15,000 watched him disappear into the sky at about 7,800 feet above sea level  close to a half-mile above the grandstands at the race track.

Elys 18-minute flight reached the top of the divide east of Butte on his June 11 exhibition, but on Miners Union Day, June 13, as he began his takeoff run, crowds of people swarmed the field, and he had to take off sooner than planned. A wind gust caught him, and he landed  uninjured, but the aircraft was damaged beyond immediate repair.

Ely had already made history by performing the first landing of an aircraft on the deck of a ship, on the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay in January 1911. Just over four months after his flights in Montana, Ely was killed in a plane crash in Macon, Georgia. He was 24 years old.

So how did the 1912 flight by Maroney come to be considered the first airplane into Butte? Maybe its as simple as the error putting his flight in 1910. But I really dont know.
HAMILTON  Montana Sen. Pat Connell, R-Hamilton, has asked representatives from the U.S. Forest Service to discuss the impact of last summers wildfires at the Montana Water Policy Interim Committee meeting this week.

The committee also will discuss possible modifications to the state policy regarding exempt groundwater wells during its meeting Monday and Tuesday.

Connell said a recent presentation in Hamilton on climate change and its impact on water flows in the Bitterroot Valley prompted him to invite a hydrologist to the committee meeting to discuss data that may have signaled last summers fiery season, and to discuss the aftermath.

"The fundamental key is the Forest Service manages the majority of the headwaters in the state of Montana, and their influence on what happens with water flows is of critical import to the rest of Montana for agriculture and recreation," Connell said. " ... I am anxious to hear discussions about the impacts of climate change beyond wildfire behavior, to include the necessary management to protect waterflows for downstream senior water right folks.

There is no doubt that water is the most critically valuable treasure of Montanans.

While the climate change issue is focused on surface water, the committee also will look at groundwater.

Montana state law allows an exemption from a water rights permit if a groundwater well is limited to 35 gallons a minute and 10 acre-feet each year. The Department of Natural Resources and Conservation has issued nearly 123,000 water right certificates for these wells, typically used for homes or farms.

In recent sessions, the Legislature has passed bills seeking to modify that limit, which Gov. Steve Bullock has vetoed. Then, in 2016 the Montana Supreme Court ruled that DNRC had been misapplying state law and stated that an entire new subdivision or development may have to share one exemption  instead of allowing one well per lot.

That situation came up recently at a Ravalli County Commission meeting, when commissioners gave preliminary plat approval to a 36-lot subdivision proposed for just southwest of Corvallis.

The Farm View Estates subdivision, with three commercial lots and 33 residential lots, will have individual wells for drinking and other domestic uses, but will pull water for lawns and other non-potable uses via an agreement with the Corvallis Canal and Water Co. The use of surface irrigation rights makes the subdivision fall within the constraints of being in a closed basin, according to a letter from DNRC.

Planning Department Director Terry Nelson had said DNRC estimates that with the surface water rights and irrigation, the 36 lots will use 9.99 acre feet, just under the 10-acre feet limit.

Jim Rokosch, president of Bitterrooters for Planning, had urged the commission to require a community well to ensure the subdivision wouldnt affect existing water users and water rights.

When you have an urban development of this density, a community well makes all the sense in the world in order to be able to not only monitor the quantity, but there are water quality issues as well, Rokosch said.

While commissioners said they understood the concern, they approved the preliminary plat with the individual wells. The subdivision will hook into an existing sewer districts wastewater system.

Trout Unlimited will make a presentation to the committee for a new policy proposal on Tuesday, Jan. 9, and the committee is soliciting other ideas during public comment on the issue. Other issues related to exempt wells will also be discussed.

The Water Policy Interim Committee meets in Room 172 of the Capitol. It will be live-streamed beginning at 10 a.m. Monday, Jan. 8, at leg.mt.gov/css/default.asp and will be broadcast on Television Montana (TVMT).

Other Water Policy Interim Committee members include Rep. Zach Brown (D-Bozeman), vice presiding officer, Sens. Jill Cohenour (D-East Helena), Jon Sesso (D-Butte), and Jeffrey Welborn (R-Dillon); and Reps. Bob Brown (R-Thompson Falls), John Fleming (D-St. Ignatius), and Carl Glimm (R-Kila).
The Vision Statement for the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services/ Developmental Disabilities Program states: People in services have a voice and the support to live productive, healthy and fulfilled lives in the community of their choice.

Further, DDPs Mission is to Create a system that coordinates resources, supports and services for people to have meaningful lives in their communities.

Noble words. How does the department deliver on this promise to eligible Montanans with a developmental/intellectual disability? Through a network and coalition of private (mostly nonprofit) direct care providers, targeted case managers (state and contracted) in partnership with DDP/DPHHS; most of it funded through state general funds and Medicaid dollars. You can find the full Vision, Mission and Value Statement at http://dphhs.mt.gov/dsd/developmentaldisabilities

The system referred to in the above Mission is like a three-legged stool: the State of Montana through DDP, the direct care providers (mostly private non-profit agencies) and case management (state and contracted agencies). After the last session, the Legislature gave direction to DPHHS to find money to cut; DPHHS chose to cut one leg of the stool: contracted case management. Case management was a successful, cost-effective system that helped to keep people safe and lessen impact of other systems (law enforcement, APS, hospitals, OPA, etc.) Life is hard enough for families and individuals living with an intellectual disability; with this decision, it just became harder. Contrary to what many people think, there are no entitled services once a person finishes public education. The only entitled component, if eligible, was a case manager. Now, that support is being drastically changed. Why?

In my opinion, the recent decision to eliminate contracted agency case management services puts into question how DDP will be able to continue to meet their stated Vision and Mission to the most vulnerable citizens of Montana. In the Butte/Anaconda/Dillon area, the elimination of the contracted services of HI Case Management affects nearly 300 individuals and their families, this includes people on the wait list as well. Why was this done?

Since the early 1990s Montana has successfully worked to create a case management partnership of state and private agencies to serve the needs of this targeted population. The case manager (CM) embodied Montanas promise to individuals and families; in turn, the face and voice of the people the CM served was reflected back to the state. The four contracted agencies were an independent voice for all people in services. What does a CM do? Simply stated: Assess a persons needs, link and refer that person to all appropriate services (not just DDP funded), work with the individual to develop an appropriate person-centered plan of care, and follow up and monitor that plan of care, as well as assist in any crisis. The CM helps to give people a voice; the CM is the support, on a daily basis, to help people live a productive, healthy, fulfilled life in the community. The CM provides the support that often can keep a person from becoming homeless, safe from predators, connected to health care, find a meaningful job and be connected to a community. The CM knows your name and whats important to you. Much better than the institutional life that used to be the fate of a person with an intellectual disability.

Montana has partnered with the federal government to care for this targeted population through a Medicaid Waiver. The funds from Medicaid pay for the direct care services (group homes, activity and work programs, transportation and more) comes with strings attached. Those strings are called Assurances. Acceptance of Medicaid Waiver funding says: Well give Montana money, but we want to be sure people are:

1. In the right kind of care,

2. That there is an individual appropriate plan of care,

3. That the plan is followed,

4. That the money is only spent with qualified providers,

5. That people are protected from abuse, neglect and exploitation,

6. That the money is accounted for through documentation.

Reasonable requirements in exchange for millions of dollars. DPHHS/DDP gave a huge responsibility to the case management system to make sure those Assurances are met on a monthly and yearly basis. Everything the case manager does is related to those Assurances. In 2007, a caseload of 35 was determined to be reasonable to meet the health, safety and care needs of the individuals Montana serves. As a former CM and CM supervisor, I know that task to be difficult on many days. I would also like to believe that Montana, even if there was no Waiver funding, would find these Assurances to be valuable because the people served are valuable. On March 31, 2018, those are the standards, on April 1 when the contracts end, and caseloads grow, are those still going to be the standards?

The state has now determined that one CM can now do those tasks for many more people when they eliminated the contracted CM agencies. Why? What has changed with Medicaid? What has changed with the Vision and Mission of DDP? The 70 people across the state who will lose their jobs will, hopefully in time, find other work. However, the experience, knowledge, dedication, and compassion will be lost to the thousands of people they have served.

To DPHHS, DDP, the Governor, the Legislature, I would ask Why? Why do this to the most fragile of our fellow Montanans?

-- Rose Brock, Butte, a retired contracted case manager/supervisor
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
Mike Sonko has declared that he will not be seeking re-election as Nairobi County governor in 2022.

Since his win against Evans Kidero in the August polls, the County boss has endured a turbulent time in a bid to fulfill his campaign pledges and clean up his predecessors mess. Worse still, a recent opinion poll ranked Nairobi County as the second worst performing county after Homa Bay.

However, Sonko is optimistic about delivering his promises and intends to leave a legacy before his tenure is over.

He spoke to a local daily about his challenges and achievements thus far.

Critics have questioned your performance. They say nothing is going on

Look, it was impossible to shoot off from the blocks because I inherited a city office infested with corruption, where powerful cartels were deeply entrenched.

There were no functional systems. It has not been an easy task cleaning up the county administration.

So what have you done so far?

We have had to fire and prosecute all administrators whom we arrested conducting dubious deals.

I know my critics have been discrediting my performance, but my plea to Nairobians is to be more patient and watch us transform the city when systems are back in place.

A recent opinion poll ranked Nairobi County as the second worst performing county after Homa Bay

You cannot rate a cosmopolitan county like Nairobi with a provincial county within 100 days. We dont even receive the same shareable revenue within those days.

There are so much we have achieved since taking office, including increasing and streamlining revenue collection, curbing corruption and now we are closing in on the city cartels that I inherited from my predecessor who have messed this city.

Furthermore, we have also managed to pay off a bank overdraft of close to Sh1 billion accrued from the previous administration and are able to pay our staff salaries directly, which has seen the end of the constant downing of tools by county staff. Very soon, Nairobians will see the effects of these milestones.

Residents complain that hawkers and street families have taken control of the city since you became governor

We are in the process of acquiring a number of city markets and establishments where we will resettle the hawkers and street families.

Im currently engaging hawker representatives so that we can resolve the matter in an amicable manner. I am uncomfortable with the approach of previous administrations that employed violence to get hawkers from the central business district.

However, we will allow hawkers in some selected streets at night as well as on Sundays. Its a system that is already working in cities like Bangkok and we will be rolling the pilot soon.

And street families?

Street children will also be relocated from the Central Business District and those aged over 18 years old who are involved in crime will face the law. We are also lighting up streets and installing security booths within city estates in collaboration with security agencies to deal with crime.

City Hall has always been a cash cow. How will you prevent theft of public funds?

A month ago, the Nairobi City County government launched a data centre to better service delivery in the city. We are working on building a digital city. As a result, we are now depositing close to a billion shillings in revenue collection every month, a sum that is more than double what the previous regime accounted for. We are advocating for stiff penalties against any administrator caught engaging in corruption and the digitised systems will help us achieve zero tolerance to the vice and significantly reduce corruption.

Some of the roads in the city are hopeless to say to say the least

I blame the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) for awarding tenders to nonperforming companies.

We will have to work jointly with KURA and review all tenders awarded and undertake the procurement process together to avoid duplication of contracts and also control internal awarding of tenders that lead to shoddy roads.

But what are you doing as a government?

We have acquired two modern pothole patching machines that are already fixing roads within the city.

City Hall has always had ghost workers

We have a staff biometric identification system that will aid in vetting and weeding out ghost workers. But the challenge is bigger than ghost workers.

We are already staffed with unskilled and aged personnel who either need training or a send-off package.

My aim is to reduce the wage bill by close to Sh100 million every month and put aside a Sh1.5 billion retirement package for the current staff. Its time for us to also give fresh blood a chance to inject new energy and help us achieve our five-year agenda.

Fires are a big a problem in the city. What are you doing to ensure residents dont lose lives or property?

I have dispatched 26 fire engines to each sub-county police station, including a crew that is on a 24-hour call to respond to emergencies.

Critics say going by what youve have done so far, you are unlikely to be re-elected as governor in 2022

I want to leave a legacy because I will not be running for a second term. I have never run for the same office twice in my political life, so why should this be the first time? I will deliver and leave an efficient office for Nairobians then move on to the next assignment for Kenyans.

Will you run for president?

Dont get ahead of yourself! I could even vie for a county assembly seat (MCA). I mean, that is one seat I have never contested for!

But for now, my focus is on working round-the-clock to ensure that we get Nairobi running like the world-class city it ought to be.
Hussein Shaban is a self-confessed former gangster who used to terrorize city residents with his gang. According to Shaban, he changed his stealing ways after most of his gang colleagues were shot dead.

Speaking to The Nairobian, Shaban revealed how he got into crime and walked out of it all with nothing. He disclosed that he wasted all the money he stole on women and drugs.

Heres his story:

You became a criminal at such a young age. What drove you to the underworld?

I blame my family background. I come from a very poor background and I was forced to fend for myself at a very young age. With no education and job, the only option was to steal.

I also suspect that crime genes run in my family. My grandfather, I am told, was a serial pickpocketer!

Looks like you knew crime is bad, yet you willingly got involved

Yes. You dont realise how bad it is until you are deep in it. You become a slave. You cannot get out despite knowing too well your days are numbered.

It is like an addiction. You get easy money. You might be broke in the morning, but flowing in money in the evening. Tulikuwa tunapiga ngeta mchana, sio usiku (we use to mug people during the day, not at night). I used to wear expensive clothes every day.

Believe it or not, I had no time to wash clothes. I just used to throw the dirty clothes away and buy new ones!

How many guys were you in the gang and how did you operate?

We were a group of 13 men. We all had different roles. I was the one assigned to spot people who appeared rich. I had that talent.

I could tell if someone was rich from the way they dressed and the car they drove. I would then signal my gang to strike.

We never spared anyone. In most cases, we left our victims with nothing! Lazima tungepita na wewe na ganji zote na kila kitu hadi viatu (we cleaned out our victims of everything, including money and shoes)!

Have you ever been arrested?

Never. I was very lucky, though policemen had marked and warned me.

When and how did you finally see the light?

After most of the gang members were shot dead. I knew I was next. Im the only one alive or not in prison.

Six of my friends were killed, while the rest are rotting in jail. I can only thank God for the life and the lessons learnt.

Do you have any regrets?

Yes. I enjoyed free money and lavish lifestyle for seven years, until 2005. But I still walked out of it with nothing. I wasted that money on drugs and women. I wish I had invested.

You were used to free and lots of money. How are you currently coping?

Maisha ni ngumu (life is tough), but Im striving to make ends meet. I have learnt to appreciate what I get from my own sweat and it has made me think of more legit ways of making money.

I currently work with a garbage collection firm based in Majengo. Im hopeful that God will open doors for me.

Your message to the youth?

Learn to be patient with your hustle. Avoid crime and God will bless the work of your hands.
In late 2017, Congress passed a massive tax bill that will have far-reaching effects in the lives of many Americans.

This bill is vast, and I cannot address all the changes. But I hope to relay some of the changes that will likely affect the most taxpayers.

Most Americans will see a decrease in their taxes as the brackets have shifted.

This change means that Americans can earn more income before their money is taxed at higher brackets. There are also some key credits and deductions that have become more favorable.

Another benefit for many taxpayers will be the doubling of the standard deduction.

In 2017, joint filers who did not itemize received a $13,000 standard deduction. Beginning in 2018, the joint standard deduction will be $24,000. Single filers will see their standard deduction jump to $12,000 from $6,500.

While most Americans will see their taxes go down, not all the changes are beneficial.

Personal exemption deductions are eliminated.

Last year, taxpayers received a $4,050 deduction per person. This means a family of five would have received a $20,250 deduction. No more. Larger families will miss this deduction.

A few other important deductions will be limited.

State and local tax will have a $10,000 deduction maximum.

State and local tax are sometimes referred to as SALT taxes. This is terrible news for high-income states like California. It is even worse for taxpayers with high home values.

Lets suppose that last year, a local Napa resident paid $15,000 in state income tax and $8,000 in property tax.

In a typical tax year, that would amount to a combined $23,000 deduction. Now that deduction is limited to $10,000. No matter how much an individual pays in state and local taxes, they will be limited to $10,000.

Mortgage interest deduction will also be limited.

Mortgage interest from new debt can only be deducted on $750,000 of debt. This limit is just for new mortgage debt. Previous debt is grandfathered.

To round out some changes, the Child Tax Credit can now be up to $2,000, and 529 plans can be used for education expenses before college.

These tax changes are significant and complicated.

There is no universal line you can draw in the sand to demonstrate who will experience an increase or decrease in taxes, but it does seem that those in higher income taxed states are more likely to pay more.

There will be a sizeable minority of Napa residents who are going to experience an increase in taxes.

If you are worried about having enough money withheld from your taxes start planning now, work with a professional to make sure you will not be penalized when you file the 2018 tax returns.
Im a big fan of festive, holiday foods like crab and smoked salmon, special cheeses and charcuterie, of Beef Wellington, prime rib and roast turkey, of cakes, cookies, and all kinds of elaborate sweets, but I also look forward to the post-holiday season, when my food focus shifts to simple things.

Savory pies are a particular favorite of mine this time of year. These are essentially one-dish meals that combine meat and vegetables and have a pastry crust or other topping. They may take a bit of time to make. But once they are done and in the oven, theres no last-minute stirring, frying or finishing needed before serving. The fillings can be made ahead for the most part, and the crusts added just before baking. When served with a green salad, savory pies make an ideal meal.

Savory Chard and Raisin Pie

A specialty of the area around Nice and its back country is Swiss chard pie , which I first learned to make it while living in Saorge, a mountain village north of Nice and not far from the Italian border. The combination of chard, sausage, and pine nuts with raisins makes for a subtle marriage of sweet and savory.

5 large or 10 medium chard leaves

2 cups water

1 piece bacon, chopped

1 pound bulk pork sausage or links with skin removed

1/2 onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

3 tablespoons pine nuts

1 egg plus 1 egg yolk mixed with 1 tablespoon water

1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon raisins soaked in 1 cup water

Pastry for 2, 8-9 inch pie crusts, homemade or purchased

Preheat an oven to 375 degrees F.

Remove the ribs from the chard and reserve for another use, such as steamed, then dressed with vinaigrette. Roll the chard leaves and chiffonade them. Place 2 cups of water in a soup pot or large casserole along with the chard leaves and the bacon and cover. Over medium high heat, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and cook until the chard is tender to the bite, and the volume has reduced considerably, about 15 minutes. Remove and drain. When cool enough to handle, squeeze out any remaining liquid and chop the chard. Squeeze again and set aside.

In a frying pan over medium high heat, crumble in the sausage, breaking it up into smallish pieces. Saute, turning often, until opaque, but not browned, about 8 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon to a paper towel lined plate to drain.

In the same pan, over medium heat, saute the onion and garlic until soft and translucent, about 2 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon to join the sausage.

In a large bowl, combine the chard, sausage, onions, garlic, pine nuts, 1 egg, cheese, and salt and pepper. Drain the raisins and add them. Mix well. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if desired.

Roll out the pastry to a 10-inch round. Drape it over a 9-inch pie pan, then gently tuck the pastry into the bottom and sides. Do not trim the overhang. Line the pan with foil or parchment paper and add pastry weights or dried beans to prevent the shell from puffing up.

Bake the shell for 7 to 8 minutes, until the edges begin to turn pale bisque, then remove the foil and weights or beans. With a fork, prick the bottom of the shell and bake until the bottom is lightly bisque, another 3 to 4 minutes. If it puffs, prick the puff with a fork. Set aside to cool slightly, about 5 minutes. Gently fill the pastry shell with the chard mixture, spreading the mixture evenly.

Roll out the second pastry to 9 inches. Run a bead of water along the edge of the lower shell, then gently lay the second pastry over the top, pressing the edges into rim of the lower sealing it. Dont worry if some of the overhanging lower pieces break off. These will eventually be trimmed. Once the top is secure, cut a -inch diameter circle in the middle to allow steam to escape and trim the pressed edges of the pastry even with the tart pan.

With a pastry brush, brush the top pastry with the egg yolk and water mixture to make a glaze.

Place the pie pan on a baking sheet and into the oven. Bake until the crust is golden and the sides begin to pull away slightly from the edge of the pan, about 25 minutes.

Remove and let stand 30 minutes before cutting into wedges and serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Serves 6

Mediterranean Shepherds Pie

This is a Mediterranean take on a classic British dish, cooked and seasoned meat topped with mashed potatoes. I make it with ground lamb, herbes de Provence, and finish it with mashed celery root and potatoes. This is a cozy, convivial dish for a cold night.

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

2 pounds ground lamb or substitute beef

2 bay leaves

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 onion, finely chopped

2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

1 tablespoon flour

1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme

1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary

1/2 teaspoon minced fresh sage

1 cup beef broth

1 cup fresh or frozen peas

For the topping

4 medium to large potatoes, peeled and quartered

1 large celery root, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes

1/2 cup whole milk

3 tablespoons butter

Salt and pepper to season

1 egg

Preheat an oven to 375 degrees F.

In a large skillet over medium high heat, combine the butter and the olive oil. When the butter foams, add the lamb and brown it lightly. Add the bay leaves, sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of the salt and a half teaspoon of the pepper and stir several times. Remove the meat and bay. Add the onion, carrots, and celery and saute several minutes, then sprinkle with the flour, thyme, rosemary and sage, and continue to cook, stirring constantly. The flour will start to brown. Let it become very brown, as this will give the stew its rich, dark color, about 6 to 8 minutes. While stirring and scraping the pan bottom, add the broth a little at time, scraping up all the bits. Return the meat to the pan. Simmer, partially covered, until the vegetables are tender and gravy has formed, about 20 minutes. Stir in the peas.

While the meat and vegetables are cooking, prepare the topping.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the potatoes and the celery root and cook until tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain. Return the hot vegetables to the hot pan along with the milk, and 2 tablespoons of the butter. Adjust for salt and pepper and stir in the egg. Whip the potatoes with a wire whisk or an electric beater, or mash them with a potato masher. Taste again for seasoning, adding more salt and pepper if desired.

Spoon the stew mixture into a casserole and top with the potato mixture, spreading evenly. Dot with the remaining butter and bake until the top is lightly browned and the stew is bubbling, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Serves 6.

Turkey Pot Pie

You can readily find frozen versions of pot pies in any supermarket, but its easy to make your own. A pot pie is essentially a thick stew, either encased or topped with a crust. If you have leftover turkey or chicken, this is a good way to incorporate it into a full meal. The filling and crust can be prepared up to day ahead, and then assembled just before baking.

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 onion, chopped

2 stalks celery, chopped

4 carrots, peeled and cut crosswise into  inch rounds

1/4 teaspoon celery seed

1 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon chile flakes (optional)

2 tablespoons flour

2 to 2 1/2 cups homemade turkey broth or substitute homemade or purchased chicken broth

3 cups cooked turkey, cut into 1-inch pieces, or substitute cooked chicken

1 cup fresh shelled or frozen peas

1/2 cup sliced mushrooms, any kind

Pastry for 1 9inch pie, homemade or purchased

Preheat an oven to 375 degrees F.

In a large frying pan, over medium heat, melt the butter. When it foams, add the onion, celery, carrot and celery seed and saute, stirring often, until the onion and celery are soft, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle with the salt, pepper, optional chile flakes and stir, then sprinkle over all with flour, stirring until a paste has formed. Slowly pour in the broth, stirring or whisking until the flour is well blended, about 2 to 3 minutes. Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer until the carrots are easily pierced with the tines of a fork, about 15 minutes.

Remove the cover and increase the heat to medium. Add the turkey, peas, and mushrooms and cook until thickened, increasing the heat if necessary. Taste for seasonings, adding more salt and pepper if desired.

At this point, the filling may be cooled and refrigerated for up to 2 days. Reheat before using.

Spoon the mixture into a 9-inch, 1  inch deep glass or metal pie pan. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the pastry dough to 10 inches in diameter. Drape over the filled pie pan, folding the edges snugly. Trim if needed. Cut two or three slashes in the pastry to allow steam to escape.

Place in the oven and bake until the pie crust is golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve hot, scooping out portions with a serving spoon.

Serves 4.
On Instagram and Snapchat, sadness melded with rumor and fear. Students reeled first from the suicide of a 16-year-old girl at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Six days later, social media lit up again.

Another student was dead in the same suburb outside Washington.

For a second time, teenagers shared the loss by posting an emoji heart set against a stark black background on Snapchat. The first suicide drew a red heart. The second was green. Then, amid a wave of disbelief, some teens posted a heart in blue, suggesting a third death.

"It was pretty shocking," said Anna Kessler, 14, a ninth-grader at Northwest High School in Germantown, Maryland, who recalled wondering how many colors of hearts would accumulate. "I thought, how long is this going to go on?"

In a fast-moving phenomenon that provides fresh evidence of the power of social media, news of teen suicides traveled in a cascade of hearts that flashed on phone screens in recent weeks to teens around the Washington region.

Many parents learned about the deaths from their children, instead of the other way around. And some worried that, for a time, middle- and high-schoolers were left to mourn and manage difficult emotions and questions about self-harm with little adult intervention.

"The community is just aching for these kids," said Jenna Nober, a parent of two teenagers in the Bethesda area.

The losses - at high-performing schools fewer than four miles apart - started Nov. 27 with the death of Jordana "Jojo" Greenberg, a cheerleader at Whitman who played volleyball and was passionate about animal rights.

Then, on Dec. 3, Thomas "Tommy" Silva, a 16-year-old 11th-grader and Boy Scout who had just joined the wrestling team at Walter Johnson High School, also died by suicide.

Federal data show that teen suicide is on the rise. Rates doubled among 15- to 19-year-old girls and jumped more than 30 percent among boys from 2007 to 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase followed a period of declining rates.

A 2014 report, based on youth survey data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, showed that nearly 16 percent of high school students in Montgomery County seriously considered attempting suicide during the previous year, and almost 12 percent made a plan - roughly reflecting state averages.

After the Bethesda deaths, social media buzzed with messages: "RIP" and "Rest Easy," photos and videos on Instagram, longer takes that included a suicide hotline number or offers of support to other students in need.

The flow of hearts on Snapchat began after Greenberg's death. And as word spread about Silva's death the night of Dec. 3, students posted hearts again, this time in green, one of the Walter Johnson school's colors.

But as many absorbed the news of a second suicide, they were jolted by the sight of blue hearts and later, for some, purple hearts. Teens messaged friends for details. Many believed it meant a total of three or four suicides that week.

Most public and Catholic school systems in the Washington area contacted by The Washington Post in December said they have had no suicides this school year. Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Schools reported one suicide, but spokesman John Torre declined to provide details, citing family privacy. A few school systems said they do not release such data or don't track it.

At least one private school, Holton-Arms, posted a letter dated Dec. 4 on its website saying it had not had a suicide.

Susanna Jones, head of the school, said the blue heart was apparently linked by some to Holton-Arms, which has colors of blue and white, and then the mistake was passed on and on. "There were a lot of girls who were very upset," she said. The school urged students to disconnect from social media if they see disturbing news that is unverified.

Natasha Greenstein, 15, said it was frightening to consider the specter of multiple suicides in the region. The recent losses underscored the severity of mental health issues, she said, and the idea that "this could happen to someone I know."

She said she would welcome more exploration of the topic at school. "I couldn't stop thinking about it for days," she said.

Britt Rathbone, a clinical social worker in Bethesda who treats adolescents, said the barrage of hearts - which he learned about from patients - reflects the social nature of grieving death. The concern is that while the posts may show respect and remembrance, the added layer of attention may increase interest in suicide among a subgroup of at-risk teens.

"The tragedy of all of this [suicide] is [that] depression is treatable," he said. "We always say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."

Montgomery County has had student suicides before, but the Bethesda deaths gained especially wide attention. The two families have been open about the nature of the deaths.

Greenberg's family recalled the teenager's infectious enthusiasm, wacky humor, love of painting and happiness while rappelling down a mountain in Costa Rica. Her favorite class was Arabic. She imagined the possibility of joining the Air Force.

They were equally open in a published death notice that although she had a sunny disposition and many friends, she "fought a hard battle" against depression and was enthusiastic about the communal healing of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. They asked that others help raise awareness about teen depression.

"She was a force of joy," her father, Jonathan Greenberg, said in an interview. "She touched so many lives."

Silva's mother, Patti Silva, recalled her son with similar affection. She was a single mother. He was her only child. He belonged to a gaming club at school, liked environmental science class and recently became a wrestler. But he was most active in Scouting - and was one rank away from Eagle Scout.

He was quiet and bright, his mother said - although not always comfortable with the structure and stress of school. "It's not a puzzle we can solve," she reflected in an interview a few days after losing her son.

The two teens who died had not been identified by their schools as students in peril. Police say there is no indication that the deaths are linked, and the families have not identified bullying or harassment as factors.

After the first suicide, Whitman High sent a letter home to families. After the second, Walter Johnson did the same - and other schools soon followed.

"In the wake of recent deaths of young people in the community, it is important to me that students never feel alone," Donna Redmond Jones, principal of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, wrote the day after the second death.

Lyric Winik, PTA president at Westland Middle School, said she learned about both suicides from her two children, who found out through social media.

She argues that students in a wide swath of the county are so connected that more parents should have been informed after the first suicide - and offered guidance and resources - to help students safely process the frightening and confusing losses.

"This is uncharted territory for many parents," she said.

At Westland, Winik grew more worried as a makeshift memorial for Greenberg arose near Westland's entrance, not far from a bridge over a street where the teen took her life. Students encountered it every day: flowers, notes, banners, photos, clothes, even a Christmas tree.

She wrote her own letter to alert families. Later, she and 13 other PTA leaders at Westland wrote Superintendent Jack Smith and the county school board, saying the district had not allowed principals to inform parents "on the day when it mattered most" and had displayed "a deafening silence."

They pointed out that teens were already having suicide conversations on Snapchat and Instagram "in the silence and alone-ness of their phone screens, in most cases without an adult to see or overhear, unless they voluntarily share."

Westland's principal sent a letter to families Dec. 5, two days after the Walter Johnson death and eight days after the suicide of the Whitman student.

School system spokesman Derek Turner said the focus is first on schools directly affected by tragedy. The district does not want to stir undue anxiety in other schools - and it does not want to inadvertently glamorize death or spur copycats, he said. Resources are posted on its website, he noted.

"As a school system, we have a powerful voice, and we need to be responsible when we speak," he said.

Turner also said that the district can't respond to everything that happens on social media and that the larger issue is inside schools. Principals, teachers and other staff have undergone training this year on recognizing signs that students could be at risk of suicide.

The school system is working to bring suicide prevention programs to all its middle and high schools next school year. Now, they exist in some schools but not others.

At the schools most affected - Whitman and Walter Johnson - counselors and crisis staff members stepped in.

At Whitman, students signed posters remembering Greenberg, or played with dogs brought to the school, said Principal Alan Goodwin. A combination vigil and suicide prevention event drew 1,000 people.

At Walter Johnson, Principal Jennifer Baker encouraged students to join in suicide prevention activities as a way to remember Silva. Students created videos about coping and ordered bracelets saying "You Matter." Puppies were on hand in a counseling area.

Suicides happen for complex reasons that include internal vulnerabilities and external triggers, said Stephen Brock, a professor of school psychology at California State University in Sacramento. The most common internal factor is a mental illness such as depression, he said. "One important suicide prevention strategy is mental health treatment," he said.

Denise DeRosa, a Bethesda parent and cyber-safety consultant, compared the use of social media in recent weeks to what previous generations did through word of mouth in times of tragedy. She said misinformation and rumors are not new.

The difference, she said, is that "now it is spreading so fast and we almost accept things as fact because they're shared so many times." Still, she said, while parents may want to shield children from troubling news - or be the ones to inform them - kids want to share what they know and support one another through social media they use every day. "You want to mentor them to use it wisely . . . but we also have to allow them that outlet," she said.

In Montgomery County, the two teen deaths followed two other suicides earlier in 2017 of people under age 18. Three of the four involved 16-year-olds and one a 12-year-old, said Mary Anderson, spokeswoman for the county's Department of Health and Human Services. That compares to three teen suicides in 2016 and three in 2015.

At a recent Boy Scout meeting of Troop 1449, Todd Misura, one of the adult leaders, said that three to four times as many parents showed up than usual. There were two social workers to help Scouts and parents grapple with the loss and with how to talk to children about suicide.

The previous meeting had ended with a dodgeball game. Tommy was laughing and smiling that day, Misura said. "He was just being a regular kid," he said.
One of the hoariest myths about California goes something like this:

As they take refuge in their homes from sub-freezing temperatures and snow, residents of Eastern and Midwestern states watch telecasts of Pasadenas Rose Parade on New Years Day, which is seemingly always bathed in balmy sunshine. On the spot, many decide to move to California, contributing to its high population growth.

There once was a grain of fact in that scenario, but youd have to go back a half-century to find it.

Fact is  as two new reports on population trends underscore  California loses more people to other states each year than it gains. Thats been true for at least a quarter-century and, if anything, the exodus from the state has been growing, thanks to high housing prices, taxes and other costs of living.

Our population growth now is well under 1 percent a year, scarcely a third of what it was in the 1980s, and appears to be slowing even more as births drop and deaths in the large baby-boom generation increase.

State Department of Finance demographers calculate that in the year ending on June 30, the state gained 301,000 residents, mostly by having more births (485,622) than deaths (265,025), and stood at 39.6 million residents.

The U.S. Census Bureau sees a similar number, 39.5 million, and both agencies agree that a net loss in state-to-state migration is a major factor in the states modest growth rate. The state calculates that net loss at 105,211 during the 2016-17 period and for the seven years since the 2010 census at 558,186, meaning its likely to be about 800,000 for the full decade.

Its also evident that soaring housing costs are a major reason for the outflow of the young  with Texas their No. 1 destination. The Census Bureau report said that Texas had the nations highest numerical growth in the 2016-17 period  399,734  with Florida second and California third.

Half of Texas growth was from migration, including an 80,000-person net increase from other states such as California.

It should be noted, too, that Californias neighboring states in the West all were among the nations fastest-growing, including No. 1 Idaho, No. 2 Nevada, No. 3 Utah and No. 4 Washington. Arizona and Oregon were also in the top 10, along with Colorado and Texas.

The decline in births, falling immigration from other countries and the outflow of young adults to other states with lower living costs mean that California, whose population traditionally has been relatively young, is now graying markedly.

These trends also pose serious issues for the states economy, such as a decline in the working-age population. With unemployment rates now at an historic low, economists universally see shortages of trained and trainable labor as the greatest impediment to continued economic growth in California.

The potential economic effect, in turn, poses serious issues for political policymakers.

The foremost, obviously, is Californias acute and growing housing shortage, which drives costs upward and encourages the young and ambitious to go elsewhere.

But right behind housing is education. We are not doing a very good job of preparing children, especially those from poor families, for the workplace and/or higher education. And with so many college graduates migrating elsewhere, we are falling behind in producing enough to replace retiring baby boomers.

Finally, the sharp increase in the states elderly will impact costs of health care and other services.

These are serious matters, and we must compel those seeking political office in 2018, particularly would-be governors, to address them, not merely exchange bromides.
In a year of extraordinary natural disasters from hurricanes to floods to wildfires, heres another record-setter: Fiscal year 2017 was the U.S. Forest Services most expensive fire season yet. The cost of battling blaze after ever-bigger blaze across the country topped $2.4 billion.

Two decades ago, the cost of fighting fires only consumed about 15 percent of the Forest Services budget. But increased development in and around undeveloped open spaces, along with, paradoxically, decades of fire suppression, mean that wildfires are growing larger, more intense and more dangerous to communities. Many scientists believe the warming climate is exacerbating the situation.

As the cost of firefighting has gone up, the Forest Service budget has stayed relatively flat. The result is that fire suppression now consumes 55 percent of the agencys annual budget, and some officials estimate that could grow to two-thirds in a few years.

The problem is this: The Forest Service ends up hoarding the money intended for other forest management programs  including fire prevention  because officials know theyre going to need it later in the year to fight fires. The agency has to shelve vital programs designed to reduce the threat of catastrophic blazes, such as thinning dense tree stands, controlled burns or insect control.

That makes no sense. Its far more expensive to fight fires and to rebuild after fires than it is to prevent them  even before you take into account the terrible toll these mega-blazes have on life, property and the environment.

By comparison, the government provides emergency money from a federal disaster fund to communities ravaged by hurricanes, tornadoes and most other natural disasters.

The good news is that there is bipartisan agreement that the federal government has to fix the way it pays for fighting wildfires. There are proposals in Congress to allow the Forest Service to tap emergency funds when it exceeds its firefighting budget. So, in unusually bad years like 2017, the agency could get one-time funding to handle the need, rather than having to gut its forest health and prevention programs.

The bad news is that partisan, ideological battles have, so far, stymied the needed changes. Republicans, including several from California, are pushing for legislation that would tie the budget fix to forest management proposals that would allow for more commercial logging on public land while weakening environmental reviews and endangered species protections for such projects. This cynical attack on environmental rules threatens to torpedo the very real reforms needed for healthier forests.

California has a lot riding on the budget fix, especially in the Sierra, where drought and bark beetle infestations have killed more than 100 million trees since 2010, according to the Forest Service. Nearly a quarter of the trees have died in some areas, leaving vast swaths of orange and gray hillsides; the accumulation of dead fuel can cause fires to burn hotter and spread more easily. The Forest Service has tried to increase ecological thinning, which means cutting and removing some small and dead trees, and controlled burns to reduce the density of flammable material. But those are exactly the kinds of projects that are put on hold when the agency has to hoard money for firefighting.

Also, the state relies on the Forest Service for help in combating fires. The fires that raged through Northern California this fall were not on federal land, but the federal government sent 1,500 firefighters, along with air tankers, helicopters and water scoopers to help. State officials worry the ongoing budget crunch will weaken the Forest Services ability to assist in future fires.

Congress must move forward with the bipartisan Forest Service budget fix. The longer it waits, the more fire prevention projects are delayed and the threat of more catastrophic fires grows.
Editors note: Until my son moved to Los Angeles to go to medical school and then decided to stay there for his residency, Id never thought of L.A. as a culinary destination. But since then, every time we visit him, he takes us to a new and fascinating place: a hole in the wall that serves fabulous ramen, or a seemingly ramshackle place on the beach the cooks up spicy wonderful Caribbean food, or the place that is reported to have the best burger in L.A., located down a hallway behind a butcher shop in Santa Monica. Who knew that an intern has so much time to eat? But it is turning out that L.A. has one of the most vibrant and diverse food scenes Ive ever visited. With this in mind I asked our wine columnist Allison Levine, who lives in L.A., for a list of her favorites. Sasha Paulsen

For years, when one thought of food, restaurants and must-eat-at destinations, Los Angeles was not a city that came to mind. But the city of 14 million has been gaining recognition for its food scene over the last five or so years.

Los Angeles Times Food Critic Jonathan Gold called Los Angeles the food city of the moment and restaurant critics from New York and San Francisco have agreed. In fact, Zagat named Los Angeles number one in their list of 30 Most Exciting Food Cities in America 2017.

I spend much of my time traveling around the country and the world. It is always exciting to explore the food scene in a given city and enjoy wonderful meals. But every time I come home to Los Angeles, I am really blown away by the quality and diversity of the food scene, where chef-driven restaurants, exotic cuisine and innovative cooking are all celebrated. There is also the sheer quantity of restaurants.

New restaurants are opening on a weekly basis. Local celebrity chefs have opened additional locations, new young chefs have realized their visions and a handful of well-known out-of-town high-profile chefs have descended upon Los Angeles for their newest outposts. At times, it seems almost impossible to keep up, but I do my best. Here are some of my favorite restaurants where I had some of my more memorable meals of 2017.

Downtown Los Angeles

71 AboveLocated on the 71st floor of the US Bank building in downtown L.A., the breathtaking 360-degree views of Los Angeles from 950 feet above ground level make this a must visit restaurant. However, the three-course pre-fix modern American menus by Chef Vartan Abgaryan feature seasonal ingredients and wonderful flavors that may distract you from the views.

Spring  Chef Tony Esnault melds the flavors of Provence and California at Spring, an elegant French restaurant located in the old 1898 Douglas Building on the corner of Spring Street and Third Street. The dining room is in an atrium filled with trees and fountains with views of the open kitchen and the flavors are clean, fresh and bright.

Redbird  Sitting at a table at Redbird, located inside the former rectory building of the Vibiana cathedral-turned-event-venue, the high ceilings and warm atmosphere are comforting. Redbird is casual fine-dining and Chef Neal Frasers menu of New American cuisine showcases his love for Los Angeles diverse cuisine.

Factory Kitchen and Officine Brera  These two Italian restaurants owned by Matteo Ferdinandi and Angelo Auriana are in the same building in the Arts District and yet offer something different. The long and narrow Factory Kitchen with its low ceilings, concrete walls and floor-to-ceiling windows in the front of the building serves delectable handmade pasta dishes, especially the Mandilli di Seta, aka Handkerchief Pasta with Creamy Pesto. Officine Brera, on the other hand, has a high ceiling, exposed brick and a more industrial feel and offers a heavier traditional menu of meats and breads from the wood-burning oven, the grill and the rotisserie.

Hollywood

Kali  Featuring only ingredients sourced from California, business partners and fine-dining veterans Drew Langley and Chef Kevin Meehan have created the perfect neighborhood restaurant. Kali is located on Melrose Avenue near Paramount Studios, and while it is a casual restaurant, the service is as if you were at the finest of restaurants.

Gwen LA  For the meat-centric lovers, Curtis Stones Gwen LA is the answer. A European-style, chef-driven butcher shop sits at the front of the restaurant. Inside, the restaurant offers a 16-bite tasting menu with meats cooked in the big walk-in fire pit.

West Hollywood

Verlaine  I first tried Chef Diego Hernandezs food at his restaurant Corazon de Tierra in the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja California. At Verlaine, he has created a modern Mexican menu with a California influence, enhanced all the more as you sit outside in the open-air patio.

Rosaline  Peruvian Chef Ricardo Zarates Rosaline is a project that reflects his passion for Peruvian cuisine. At the bright, vibrant Rosaline, classic Peruvian dishes as well as street-food fare are served with a California touch. Selecting something from the ceviche menu is a must.

The Ponte  With arguably one of the best patios in Los Angeles, The Ponte is a contemporary Italian restaurant by James Beard Award-winning chef Scott Conant. The menu offers pizzas, pastas and meats but one of the stand-out dishes is the mushrooms with polenta, as well as the simple, yet extraordinary, pasta al Pomodoro.

Beverly Hills

Maude  Chef Curtis Stone opened the 25-seat Maude in 2014 and I have been a fan from the start. For four years, he featured a different seasonal ingredient each month that was integrated into a 10-course tasting menu. Out of 47 seasonal menus, I indulged in 38 of them. The format is changing in 2018, and Maude will focus on a wine region each quarter and create a tasting menu around that region. First upRioja.

Santa Monica

InothekeCarolos Tomazos, who is originally from the island of Cyprus, opened Inotheke to offer a modern interpretation of Greek cuisine. After two trips to Greece, it was wonderful to find a Greek restaurant serving the clean, fresh authentic flavors that I had enjoyed during my travels.

Rose Cafe  An iconic Venice restaurant, it was given a makeover a couple years ago and is a vibrant, bright, energetic restaurant and bakery. Chef Jason Neroni offers a produce-driven menu, as well as many pastas. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, this is a favorite brunch spot.

Studio City

The Bellwether  The Valley has always had a negative reputation for food, but The Bellwether is a shining example to the contrary. Ted Hopson and Ann-Marie Verdi opened a modern gastropub serving a market-inspired menu that showcases the abundance of California produce making The Bellwether a destination for people to drive over the hill for a meal.

Pasadena

Union  Currently competing on Top Chef, Chef Bruce Kalman specializes in homemade charcuterie, pickles and fresh pasta. All of this can be found at his restaurant Union with its menu of Northern Italian-inspired cuisine with local, farm-fresh ingredients. The food is simple and straightforward but is full of flavor and served in an intimate neighborhood restaurant.

Are your taste buds enticed? There are direct flights on Alaska Airlines from Santa Rosa to LAX or fly in luxury on the public charter JetSuiteX from Concord to Burbank. With the ease of travel between Northern California and Southern California, there is no time like the present to come to Los Angeles to explore the food scene.
Coding Camp Tammany Grant and Maya Nair, two Emory seniors, will again teach their Media Coding Camp this spring to those not majoring in computer science. The semester-long course does not require a background in programming and will teach Python using multimedia applications. Classes are held from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. every Tuesday between Jan. 23 and April 24. Students must agree to attend all classes to be accepted. Deadline to apply is Jan. 12. Apply here.

Tammany Grant arrived at Emory thinking she would study languages and politics. For Maya Nair, the future was something in health care, most likely as a doctor, despite a lifelong love of music.

Then the two women met in a lab for Intro to Computer Science (CS 170) that pivoted their view. They connected over questions and the gradual aha moments about the computer algorithms they were learning.

Now seniors, both are studying computer science, and they are cofounders of Girls Who Code Emory, a nonprofit that relies on college volunteers to expose high school and middle school students to the field.

Grant and Nair also spent the fall co-teaching Coding Camp, a pilot programming course for non-CS majors, and have become the student faces of a growing program that is working to draw more women and students of color to the field. The course was so popular that they will teach it again in the spring.

When youre surrounded by people like you, its just easier, especially in the beginning, says Grant, a double major in computer science and French.

Adds Nair, who is pairing her finance degree at Goizueta Business School with an unofficial computer science minor, I think about high school, and no one ever said to consider computer science. It was expected for the guys, so just having other women in the first class kept me going.

It also fuels their work with Girls Who Code, the campus chapter of a national nonprofit that teaches tech skills to middle school and high school girls. Now in its second year, the Emory chapter focuses on the basics of computer science and programming by working on projects in the real world, such as a website that pinpoints Atlanta-area homeless shelters.

Such real-world implications have helped grow Emory Colleges computer science for years. The number of students majoring in just computer science has grown 170 percent in the past 15 years, to 116 students this year.

When counting those students who have a joint major, the number grows to about 200 students, says Vaidy Sunderam, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.

The field of computer science is growing so fast that the U.S. Department of Labor shows that it outpaces all other occupations in the U.S.

But while women have made big gains in many fields, and currently earn 57 percent of all undergraduate degrees, the percentage of women who receive CS degrees is the smallest across STEM fields, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The increase in demand is part of the reason behind the math and computer science departments proposed split next year, which will create a standalone CS department.

The mathematics department will focus on the theoretical and applied mathematics that Emory is acclaimed for, while Sunderam hopes the CS department will continue its growth as part of the undergraduate liberal arts experience.

That, in turn should draw more women and underrepresented minorities to the field, he says.

Computer science is a very rational process, but it is best coupled with very creative thinking, Sunderam says.

Grant and Nairs pilot coding class could become the standard to teach computational thinking. Last fall, almost 100 people applied for 25 spots in the non-credit class that teaches programming in Python.

More than half of the students in the course were women or people of color who are learning coding as a vehicle to understand the underlying logical process of computer science.

Diversity of thought is something they dont talk about enough in computer science, but we understand it fully at Emory, Sunderam says. We are in a great place to create our own legacy of what computer science can be.

Using computers to solve human problems

As a leading STEM major, computer science may not be the first discipline to come to mind when thinking of the liberal arts. But the field emphasizes the same critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are the foundation of the Emory Colleges teaching excellence.

It can be the focus of a technical career, now Grants career path. She arrived at Emory having spent a year in France in high school and at first planned to study French and political science. She had a limited science background, but was so skilled and passionate about math that she completed AP calculus her sophomore year of high school.

That ability, and a passion for languages, has proven to be a natural fit for computer science. The design and analysis she has since learned also feeds her desire for a career that can make a difference and also allow her to collaborate and learn from others.

She has completed a software development internship in Europe, helping design a seating algorithm for a movie chain there.

I dont think I went 45 minutes on those projects without asking a question, or someone else asking me a question, Grant says. Every single bit of code is someones thought process, and there are so many ways to do calculations. Its such an interactive way to work.

The foundation for a professional career

Nair took that first CS course mostly out of curiosity. She found that she loved the logical flow of the programming principles and data structures.

Thats why even when she shifted from plans for medical school to business school  with a focus on finance and information systems and operations management  she wanted computer science to remain a foundation.

Nairs interdisciplinary approach has paid off. She has a job lined up with investment banker Raymond James after graduation, where she will work as an analyst, helping with mergers and acquisitions of technology and business companies, for two years.

But she hasnt forgotten her first love. Her combination of technology and business, she says, should lay the groundwork for a career at Apple Music, Spotify or another music-oriented tech company.

Her goal is to work in development or strategy, helping users as they create playlists or try to find new bands or genres.

Going into the consulting side of a tech firm instead of the development side, you still need to have a level of understanding of the work being done, Nair says. Its very exciting to be the person who can communicate between the two sides, where you see the idea and see how it works.

Solving the pipeline problem

Emory professor Avani Wildani had that same excitement when she discovered computer science years ago. Long before Google and Silicon Valley made the field a ticket to riches, computer science rewarded attention to detail in trying to solve complex logical and mathematical problems.

She appreciated that framework and has since used it to figure out the puzzle of how the brain works. As an assistant professor in computer science, Wildanis work calls for understanding first how computers save information by duplicating it, then reverse engineering how such a process might work in the human brain.

Emory is fertile ground for research that connects neuroscience and computer systems, she says, just as it is for developing students who ask such big questions.

If you can get into Emory, you have the verbal and logical ability to excel in computer science, Wildani says. Even better, we have students from every different background here, which means they all have different ways of thinking but we know they are all academically talented.

Emory College also has made a concerted effort to hire faculty who represent that diversity. For instance, this year the department welcomed associate professor Dorian Arnold, who studies high-performance computing systems.

In addition to his new appointment as Distinguished Speaker for the Computer Research Association, Arnold also leads the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.

For her part, Wildani co-runs the technical program for the Grace Hopper Celebration, the worlds largest conference for women technologists.

There has been a study that shows the earlier you encounter women in computer science, female students stay with it and do statistically better, and male students do just as well, says Joyce Ho, an assistant professor of computer science who serves as the faculty advisor for Girls Who Code Emory.

It's great to see the enthusiasm of 20 Emory students committed to mentoring younger girls in computer science, she adds. We will not only empower these girls but also grow and diversify the field of computer science.

Grant and Nair agree. They have benefitted from mentors who are women and people of color and are likewise eager to pass along their knowledge at Girls Who Code.

The group, which meets with high school and middle school girls for two hours every week for a year, has a succession plan that will see other female CS majors and minors take over next year. The effort will still focus on allowing girls to explore computer science on any platform they choose.

People as a whole are becoming more interested in computer science, so its important for Emory to show that women, people of color, people with disabilities and really everyone are a part of that, Nair says.
The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has pledged $400 million to find new cures for disease, develop innovative patient care models and improve lives while enhancing the health of individuals in need.

The transformational gift, the largest ever received by Emory University, will change the lives of patients and their families. Through a new Winship Cancer Institute Tower in Midtown and a new Health Sciences Research Building on Emorys Druid Hills campus, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundations generosity will help advance new solutions for some of medicines most challenging diagnoses, even changing the meaning of what it means to receive those diagnoses for future generations.

This is an extraordinary gift at an extraordinary time in Atlantas history, said Emory University President Claire E. Sterk, PhD. We are grateful and honored to be the recipients of the Robert W. Woodruff Foundations stalwart trust in our mission. The legacy of Mr. Woodruff lives on, and even today, his spirit of generosity is creating hope for those facing the most difficult days of their lives.

For many decades  at each phase of Emorys growth and development  the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has served as the universitys chief advocate and partner, transforming health care, supporting education and making greater quality of life possible for patients who pass through Emorys doors.

This gift will allow us to accelerate the scientific discoveries needed for breakthroughs in patient care and to extend our reach in reducing the burden of disease for patients and their families, said Jonathan S. Lewin, MD, Emorys executive vice president for health affairs and CEO of Emory Healthcare.

The Winship Cancer Institute Tower in Midtown will provide urgently needed infusion facilities, operating rooms, clinical examination rooms, spaces for rehabilitation, imaging technology and clinical research capacity. In April 2017, Winship Cancer Institute became Georgias first and only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, joining an elite group, the top 1 percent of cancer centers nationwide.

The new Health Sciences Research Building on Emorys Druid Hills campus, a laboratory-focused facility, will house faculty and staff who are charged with developing a pipeline of cures, interventions and prevention methods, all aimed at improving the health of patients. Research teams working in the state-of-the-art facility will partner with Emory colleagues to target five emerging priorities in 21st century medicine: brain health; cancer; heart and vascular health; immunology and infectious diseases; and radiology, biomedical engineering, and imaging sciences. In a continuing partnership with Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory researchers in the new building also will investigate childhood diseases, focusing on discoveries that advance treatments and cures for our youngest patients.

The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has provided unparalleled philanthropic support to Emory, said Robert C. Goddard III, chair of the Emory University Board of Trustees. Our Woodruff Health Sciences Center would not be what it is today without the Foundations vision and commitment. We are indeed grateful.

Robert W. Woodruff, the late legendary leader of The Coca-Cola Company, became a major benefactor of Emory beginning in 1937. In 1979, he and his brother, George Woodruff, gave Emory the then-record sum of $105 million, the first nine-figure gift to an institution of higher education, empowering the university to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in the service of humanity.
The Japanese government plans to conduct in fiscal 2018 its first nationwide survey on middle-agers who are shutting themselves in their homes.

The survey will cover randomly picked 5,000 households with members aged between 40 and 59 to estimate the total number of middle-aged recluses in Japan.

The government also hopes to know how frequently those people go out, why they have withdrawn from society, what kind of family situation they are in and what assistance their families want to receive.

Based on a law enacted in 2009 to help nurture children and youngsters, the government conducted surveys on recluses aged between 15 and 39 in 2010 and 2015.

But it now sees more and more recluses getting older to leave age groups assumed by the law.
Nasir el-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna state, visited Tunde Bakare, serving overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly, at the church auditorium in Lagos on Sunday.

This visit is coming one week after the fiery preacher declared his intention to become the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, not stating when exactly he would run for office.

El-Rufai, who was one of the persons who pleaded with the pastor to run alongside President Muhammadu Buhari in 2011, came into the church auditorium on Sunday afternoon, while Bakare was preaching.

The pastor welcomed the governor with a hug, and said: I have missed you it is a good time to come.

Bakare had said earlier in the service that all those putting up deliberate sinful silence (DSS) about the killings in Benue would pay for it.

We cannot keep quiet while hardened murderers and criminals fill our land with the crimes of blood. That would be DSS deliberate sinful silence, and i think secret service is guilty of that, he said

Buhari, el-Rufai and Bakare have come a long way

The brutal murder going on in Benue state and other parts of Nigeria is very attrocious and wicked. There will be consequences of this dastard murder. Every one involved in one way or the other, either overtly or covertly, shall pay for it

Neither Bakare nor el-Rufai disclosed the reason for the governors visit.
Battered by a sharp decline in its international reserves, Algeria made of tourism a key sector to relieve its economy from an acute dependency on oil revenues. However, little is done to boost the contribution of tourism in GDP, which remains limited to 1.4% in 2016 with most tourists being Algerian expatriates returning to visit their homeland.

With over 1600 km of Mediterranean coastline, important cultural and historical sites, and the vast desert, Algeria is endowed with a potential that could enable it to be a leading tourist destination. Nevertheless, the country is falling short of establishing a reputation as a tourist friendly state as it continues to be perceived as lacking tourist infrastructure coupled with serious security concerns.

The tourism sector has been sidelined since the countrys espousal of socialism. In the 1990s, the civil war dealt the already fragile sector a heavy blow. As of 2008, authorities made of tourism a national imperative and struggled to improve the countrys image with the goal to expand from 1.74 million tourists in 2007 to 20 million tourists by 2025. A draconian goal when considering that only 2.4 million tourists visited the country in 2017 compared to 11 million tourists for Morocco and about 7 million for Tunisia.

The underdeveloped tourist infrastructure is by large a detrimental factor to the growth of tourism in Algeria which ranks 111th out of 136 countries in the World Economic Forum 2017 ranking offering 0.1 hotel room for 100 inhabitants.

The lack of incentives for private foreign and local investors is another impediment. In a country where foreign investors are only allowed to own 49% of shares, it is hard to lure global tourism operators to the Algerian market.

General Manager of Hilton Algiers had told the Global Ris insights that Algeria lacks supporting industries to develop effectively, citing the banking sector as an example.

Because only one bank in Algeria provides credit card payment terminals, it usually takes 20 minutes for clients to pay when they check out, he commented. This is unacceptable to develop our tourism business.

Algerias visa regime has long been an obstacle to attracting foreigners to the country. Algiers imposes nearly visas on all foreigners. This burdensome process further undermines Algerias competitiveness globally.

By imposing strict visa processes, Algeria is sending the world a message that it does not want tourists. Some analysts deem that Algeria is only interested in domestic tourism since it cannot protect foreign tourists.

This raises the issue of latent terrorism. In Algeria, tourists cannot leave big cities without heavy police presence. A trip to the desert would require a special permission and escort by security forces. The Algerian breathtaking desert is awash with terrorist groups that engage in kidnapping and ransom taking.

In 2014 a French tourist, Herve Gourdel, was beheaded by a terrorist group linked to IS after being kidnapped in the mountains of Kabylie east of Algiers.

The UK travel advice for instance advises to avoid traveling to Algerias insecure south. The US for its part advises visitors to Algeria to be aware as terrorist groups remain active in some parts of the country.

While Algeria has natural and cultural assets that enable it to be a leading tourist destination, the successive governments have done little to build a strong tourism infrastructure, enhance the countrys image globally and lure investors and foreign tourists alike to the country. While security conditions have improved since 1990s, Algeria still struggles to put an end to residual terrorism, which further undermines its efforts to promote tourism.
Migrants and particularly Sub-Saharans continue to risk everything for a better life in Europe. The number of those who lost their lives in the Mediterranean is rising dramatically.

This weekend, at least eight people died and 86 others were rescued after their small inflatable boat sank off the coast of Libya, according to the Italian coast guard.

The coast guard, which coordinates rescues in international waters off Libyas coast, said an aircraft on patrol for a European anti-smuggling operation spotted the dinghy in difficulty.

All eight victims were female. Survivors told rescuers roughly 150 migrants were on board when the dinghy was launched from Libyas coast. Proactiva Open Arms, a Spanish humanitarian group, one of the few NGOs that still operate their own rescue ships outside Libyan waters, said some of the migrants had spent hours in the water before being saved.

The aid group tweeted that possibly dozens more could be missing from the boat. A spokesperson for the Libyan navy and coast guard said the migrants boat capsized and sank in international waters and the Libyan navy did not have the resources to deal with the issue.

In 2017, about 119,000 migrants arrived in Italy from across the Mediterranean and, according to the International Organization for Migration, more than 3,100 died making the crossing.

Libya is a hotbed for human traffickers, whose networks thrived due to the chaos prevailing in the North African country since the fall of the regime of former ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The Islamic State has taken advantage of the situation to conquer vast swaths of land in the country, mostly in coastal regions where many criminal gangs indulge in illegal migrant trafficking.

According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya are at the mercy of Libyan authorities, militias, armed groups and smugglers often working seamlessly together for financial gain.

Tens of thousands are held in overcrowded detention centers, suffering abuse, ill-treatment and even slavery.
The participants in the International Rally-Raid, Africa Eco Race, ignored the threats and injunctions of the Polisario and crossed safely the Guerguarat crossing post at the Moroccan-Mauritanian border this Monday (January 8).

During the crossing, under the watchful eye of the MINURSO, participants who came from the city of Dakhla, were brandishing posters stating the Sahara is Moroccan while Moroccan and Mauritanian flags were flowing all along the road.

Despite the Polisarios threats, the Africa Eco Race has crossed Guergarat without a hitch, an organizer was quoted by Moroccan Telquel.ma as saying.

The hundred or so participants in the rally crossed the Moroccan-Mauritanian border without any trouble on January 8, Thierry Scharff, a race organizer and media officer, told Telquel, from the Mauritanian border post. Weve come out of Morocco. All the competitors have crossed the post. There are only a few elements of the assistance team that are still in Morocco, said Thierry Scharff.

The rally of cars, motorbikes and trucks departed from Monaco on December 31 and is due to reach Dakar on January 14.

After a day of rest Sunday in Dakhla, competitors started a new stage in Mauritania between Boulanouar and Chami in the early afternoon of this Monday.

In a video released Jan. 7, the Polisario threatened to prevent participants in the Africa Eco Race rally from crossing the Guerguarat buffer zone, where elements of the separatist Front have been reported for the past few days, in violation of the ceasefire agreement as stated in a letter Morocco sent to the UN last Friday (Jan.5).

Morocco had strongly condemned the deployment of Polisario militiamen in the demilitarized border crossing with Mauritania, in Guerguarat, as a blatant violation of the UN brokered ceasefire agreement and a disregard for the calls made by the UN Secretary General for the withdrawal of all troops from the demilitarized buffer strip.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned the Polisario of obstructing commercial traffic flow between Morocco and Mauritania, and called on the front to retreat from the area. Regular civilian and commercial traffic should not be obstructed and no action should be taken, which may constitute a change to the status quo of the Buffer Strip, Guterres said in a statement relayed by his Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq.
A fire broke out on the roof of the 68-story Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan on Monday morning, injuring two people before it was extinguished, according to several reports. President Trump was not in the building, and nobody inside it was evacuated.

Images from the scene showed smoke rising at the top of the skyscraper, which is located at 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Street.

NEW: Firefighters work to extinguish small fire on roof of Trump Tower in NYC: https://t.co/yLbRIV15jg pic.twitter.com/P702BGqjcd  Good Morning America (@GMA) January 8, 2018

Emergency responders told CBS News that the fire began in a ventilation shaft. Dozens of firefighters responded to the blaze after the initial call came in around 7:30am. ABC News reported that a firefighter and a building engineer suffered minor injuries.

Eric Trump, the presidents son who co-runs the Trump Organization with his brother Donald Trump, Jr., posted a tweet thanking New York City firefighters for their service.
John D. Rockefeller once said that God gave me my money, much as He had given human beings dominion over the Earth, and though John D. couldnt have known it then, the original sin of the Rockefeller family would be committed in 1863, when he opened his first oil refinery in Cleveland. Within a few decades, Standard Oil controlled more than 90 percent of petroleum production in the United States, and by the time of his death in 1937, God had given John D. a fortune that made him the richest man in the world.

As the 20th century wore on and John D.s descendants converted the familys oil money into a broader empire  building Rockefeller Center, becoming governors, senators, vice-presidents  the world began its fossil-fuel-induced march, with increasing speed, toward environmental disaster. Climate change wasnt directly the Rockefellers fault, of course: The family more or less got out of the oil business in 1911, when the Supreme Court deemed Standard Oil too big to exist, splitting it into 34 companies, including two that became ExxonMobil. And if John D. hadnt dug the wells, someone else would have. But as the 21st century dawned, it became impossible for younger Rockefellers to spend time at the familys island estate in Maine without recognizing that the waves lapping closer and closer to their home were the result, at least in part, of their good fortune.

All of which is how ExxonMobil found itself in federal court this past November arguing that the Rockefellers were funding a conspiracy against it. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York was hearing the latest arguments in a legal battle that had begun more than two years prior, when members of the Rockefeller clan, in their latest attempt to pressure the erstwhile family business to deal with climate change, funded journalists who uncovered documents showing Exxon had known about the dangers of burning fossil fuels for decades while publicly denying it was much of a problem at all. The Rockefeller-backed reports had inspired multiple state attorneys general to investigate whether Exxon might be liable like tobacco companies that lied about the cancer risks of smoking had been.

Didnt Standard Oil grow up to be Exxon? Caproni asked Justin Anderson, one of Exxons lawyers, after Anderson repeated Exxons conspiracy claim against the Rockefellers. Thats ironic, dont you think?

Its disturbing, Judge, Anderson said.

No, its ironic  come on, Caproni said.

It could be both, Anderson said. Ironic and disturbing at the same time.

Fascinating, Caproni said. What happened to those Rockefellers?

Your Honor, what happened was they got on this bandwagon   Anderson said, before Caproni cut him off to interject: They care whether subsequent Rockefellers can breathe.

Twice a year, many of the 270 living descendants of John D. Rockefeller gather in New York for a family reunion. Attendance is nonmandatory and irregular  Half of the 270 people I wouldnt recognize, said David Kaiser, one of John D.s great-great-grandsons  and the activities range from the traditions of any family reunion (sharing baby photos, catching up) to the tasks required for maintaining one of Americas largest fortunes: debating, for instance, how to manage Kykuit, the familys sprawling estate on the Hudson.

During the winter reunion in 2016, Kaiser stood at the front of a conference room at the Museum of Modern Art, which the family helped found. He was addressing a group of his relatives (uncles, cousins, his mom), some of whom wanted to air their grievances about an article detailing the climate allegations against Exxon that Kaiser had recently published in the New York Review of Books. Not every family member was thrilled with their sudden collective position as anti-Exxon crusaders. For one thing, a significant portion of the familys wealth is still tied up in Exxon stock. If Exxons stock price suffers, the whole family will lose money, Kaiser said.

While the Rockefellers have been overtaken by more modern fortunes, they remain Americas 23rd-richest family, tied with the Butts (Texas grocers) and one spot ahead of the Gallos (booze and cheese). For decades, Rockefellers have inhabited the most powerful circles of American society: John D.s grandsons included Winthrop, a governor of Arkansas; David, the CEO of Chase; and Nelson, who was Gerald Fords vice-president. The members of that generation were the ultimate insiders, said Lee Wasserman, who runs the Rockefeller Family Fund. They were able to sit down with any world leader they wanted.

Todays Rockefellers have comfortable nest eggs but relatively little of their ancestors backroom influence. David Rockefeller, his generations last surviving member, died in 2017, and Jay Rockefeller, who served as West Virginias senator for 30 years, retired in 2015, leaving behind descendants who are academics, aspiring novelists, digital marketers, green architects, couture equestrianwear designers, and the owners of hip clothing stores in Minnesota. (In 2008, The Wall Street Journal reported that newer branches of the sprawling family tree would be unlikely to live solely off their ever-smaller slices of the Rockefeller trust.) If the Rockefellers have a modern means of exerting influence, it is primarily through their web of philanthropies: the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the countrys largest private charities; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, named for John D.

Jr.s five sons  There was also a sister, but times were different back then, Wasserman said  and the Family Fund, which the brothers created to encourage their childrens philanthropy.

Americas business titans have a tradition of turning, late in life, to charity. Andrew Carnegie gave away nearly 90 percent of his fortune, and Henry Ford left much of his to an eponymous foundation, which now has an endowment of $12 billion. But it is rare for an American dynasty to confront the source of its wealth. The Sacklers, for instance, recently passed the Rockefellers on the Forbes list of the countrys wealthiest families, thanks to profits from OxyContin, now one of Americas most abused drugs. They have donated many millions of dollars to museums, universities, and other institutions but have given next to nothing to combating the opioid epidemic.

The Rockefellers, however, have long been interested in environmental issues. The Family Fund, in particular, came of age at a time when there was considerable tumult in society, and the interests of the cousins were those kinds of issues  the environment, economic justice for women, corporate accountability, said Wasserman, who is not a Rockefeller. Many of the familys newer members have adopted the wealthy liberals preferred mix of safely progressive causes combined with a mild embarrassment at their inherited affluence: Several told me how much easier life was for those who had married out of the family name. When I asked Kaiser, the Family Funds current board president, how much of the familys environmentalism stemmed from guilt, he demurred. I always think its sort of embarrassing when people talk about how proud they are of their great-great-grandfather, he said. I dont think I get any credit for the good things he did. I also dont think I deserve any blame for any of the bad things. But others pointed out that, guilty or not, there was an element of atonement. Theres something about the moral imperative of what were doing  or trying to undo,  Peter Case, another of John D.s great-great-grandsons, told me. I mean, what would you do?

Rex Tillerson and Lee Raymond in 2005. Photo: Donna McWilliam/AP Photo

The Rockefellers campaign against Exxon began in 2003, when Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, an economist at Tufts and John D.s great-granddaughter, co-sponsored a resolution at Exxons annual shareholder meeting demanding the company study climate changes impact on its business. Investor activism was unusually plebeian for a Rockefeller  Goodwins father, David Rockefeller, told her it was mostly carried out by nuts  and the resolution failed. But a year later, Goodwin and several other family members secured a meeting at Rockefeller Center with Exxons head of investor relations. We wanted to say, Theres a crisis building, and youre part of it,  Goodwin told me. The Exxon employees seemed surprised, she said, and responded by saying, I guess our PR folks should be fired.

In 2006, Lee Raymond, Exxons former CEO, invited David Rockefeller, who remained one of the most influential people in New York finance, to lunch with Rex Tillerson, who was taking over Raymonds job. Rockefeller had become concerned about climate change and asked that his daughter join them. Goodwin told me Raymonds staff initially objected on the grounds that Tillerson didnt need to be subjected to that kind of thing, but her father insisted, and the foursome met at a seafood restaurant looking out on the Rockefeller Center skating rink. (At Exxons Texas headquarters, Raymond and Tillerson often ate in the companys Rockefeller Room.) Goodwin said she was told to behave myself and not say much, but she managed to ask why the company wasnt investing more in alternative energy. We tried that, and it didnt work, Raymond said. According to Goodwin, Tillerson largely deferred to Raymond.

The following year, Exxon earned the largest profit in American corporate history  $40.61 billion  but the 2006 release of Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth had also served as a galvanizing moment for the environmental movement. During a meeting at the familys summer reunion at Kykuit, in a building decorated with portraits of their ancestors, a dozen Rockefellers agreed to take on Exxon in public. In 2008, Goodwin and several others held a press conference at the Parker Meridien Hotel to announce they were sponsoring three climate-change-related shareholder resolutions. ExxonMobil needs to reconnect with the forward-looking and entrepreneurial vision of my great-grandfather, Goodwin said at the time, encouraging Exxon to pursue wind and solar energy just as John D. had embraced the shift from whale oil to petroleum. It was a relatively buttoned-up moment in the annals of activism  These are people who were bred not to raise their voices too forcefully in public, Daniel Gross wrote in Slate, reviewing the press conference  and the resolutions were soundly defeated. The effort prompted a Wall Street Journal columnist to ask, Do the Rockefellers still matter?

A number of family members signed letters urging Tillerson to take action on climate change, but the companys response to one letter, Goodwin said, was, roughly, If you dont like the company, sell your stock. Exxon  currently valued at $367 billion  had grown so large that, during the shareholder battle, Exxon said that the dissenting family members owned just .006 percent of its shares. Those Rockefellers who tried to sell their stock found that much of it was tied up in a trust whose managers rejected requests to divest. When the Brothers Fund considered divesting from Exxon in favor of renewable-energy stocks, which it eventually did, some board members expressed concern about diminishing returns.

Meanwhile, the Family Fund had begun pursuing a project that seemed potentially interesting but might not go anywhere, Kaiser said. In 2013, Wasserman met with Steve Coll, the dean of Columbia Universitys School of Journalism, who had published a book called Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. As they discussed the funds possible endowment of a reporting project on climate change, Coll said one topic from his book that had gone uninvestigated was the suggestion that what Exxon knew about climate change internally did not fit with its public proclamations. Dont believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesnt think climate change is real, a former Exxon manager had told Coll.

The Family Fund gave Columbia $550,000 to look into the topic. Around the same time, InsideClimate News, a website that covers the environment and receives significant funding from the Brothers Fund, began a similar investigation. Both sets of journalists say they initially looked into a number of fossil-fuel companies but it quickly became clear that Exxon had not only done the most robust climate research but had also sown doubt about climate change. When Coll gave an update to the Family Fund, he warned it that the soon-to-be published investigation would likely focus on Exxon.

So what did Exxon know? There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels, James Black, an Exxon scientist, told company executives in 1977. Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical. Five years later, an internal report declared that without major reductions in fossil fuel combustion, a number of potentially catastrophic events, such as the eventual flooding of much of the US East Coast, including the State of Florida and Washington D.C., could occur. The changes wouldnt come for decades, the report said, but once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.

It quickly became clear that Exxon had not only done the most robust climate research but had also sown doubt about climate change.

The journalistic investigations, published in late 2015 by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, which collaborated with Columbia, made it clear that while Exxons scientists acknowledged the inherent uncertainty in predicting the future, they said that the scientific community had reached consensus and that Exxon had an ethical responsibility to study the problem and make its findings public. The company seemed to agree, spending $1 million in 1979 to outfit a supertanker with equipment to analyze carbon-dioxide levels along the ships route between the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico.

It wasnt surprising to find that Exxon, which employs some 16,000 scientists and engineers, was an early climate-research leader. They have astrophysicists on their payroll, for Chrissakes, Kaiser said. What was surprising, and helpful to the journalists, was that some former Exxon employees turned out to be pack rats and had kept copies of decades-old reports. An early break came when InsideClimate News spoke to Mike MacCracken, a former government scientist whose great-grandfather, coincidentally, was John D. Rockefellers legal counsel. (We still have the silver tea set he gave my great-grandfather, MacCracken told me.) MacCracken had worked with Exxon in the 1980s and 90s and said its research was among the best, citing a 1985 report that concluded that the Earth would warm two to five degrees Celsius by 2100. Thats exactly what wed say today, MacCracken said.

By the late 80s, the rest of the world had begun to grasp the problem; for 1988, Time named the Endangered Earth its second-ever nonhuman Person of the Year, after The Computer. By then, Exxon and other fossil-fuel companies had begun factoring climate change into their business decisions. We considered climate change in a number of operational and planning issues, Brian Flannery, Exxons in-house climate adviser at the time, told the Columbia reporters. In 1989, Shell raised a natural-gas platform in the North Sea by several feet to accommodate rising sea levels, while engineers designing a pipeline owned by several companies, including Exxon, said they would have to account for the considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change. A researcher at an Exxon subsidiary even argued that climate change offered a silver lining as the company looked for oil in the Arctic: Potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.

What Exxon knew in 1982: The companys scientists predicted dire effects from climate change.

Publicly, however, Exxon was working to cloud the debate. In 1988, an Exxon spokesperson wrote a memo arguing the company should emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions. In the decades to come, Exxon gave millions to groups that denied climate change, including the American Petroleum Institute, which waged a $6 million public-relations battle in the late 90s against the Kyoto Protocol, one of the worlds first attempts to deal with the issue. Victory will be achieved when: average citizens understand (recognize) uncertainties in climate science and when recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom,  one memo read. The strategy echoed one promoted by a tobacco executive in 1969: Doubt is our product.

Lee Raymond, Exxons CEO at the time, was a devout believer in fossil fuels. He once suggested carving the words Crude Oil into stone at company headquarters, and shut down Exxons early efforts in renewable energy, which he saw as acquiescence to environmentalists in Washington. Presidents come and go, Raymond told Steve Coll. Exxon doesnt. In public, Raymond pressed the case that climate science was far from settled. Many people  politicians and the public alike  believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty. But its not, he said in 1997. In 2000, as the world considered the Kyoto Protocol, Raymond put up a slide at Exxons shareholder meeting showing a widely circulated list purporting to include thousands of scientists who had signed a petition questioning the climate consensus  a list that included several Star Wars characters and a Spice Girl. A year later, the Bush administration abandoned Kyoto.

The Rockefeller-funded articles sent climate activists into a frenzy. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmentalist, was arrested while protesting at an Exxon gas station with a sign that read, THIS PUMP TEMPORARILY CLOSED BECAUSE EXXONMOBIL LIED ABOUT (#EXXONKNEW) CLIMATE. A hashtag was born, and activists tried naming a melting Antarctic iceberg Exxon Knew 1 and brought a 13-foot Exxon Knew ice sculpture to the companys shareholder meeting. For the Rockefellers who had taken a risk with the grant, the results were validating. It proved the whole debate over climate change was a phony construct from the beginning, Wasserman said.

Exxon, meanwhile, struggled to come up with a defense. The company sent a letter to Columbia, accusing its journalists of cherry-picking documents, to which Coll responded with a six-page letter defending the reporters and pointing out that Exxon didnt seem to be challenging any facts. (The journalists suffered cyberattacks after their stories were published but werent able to determine who was responsible.) During a Fox Business appearance, Tillerson punted on a question about the controversy  Im not sure how helpful it would be to talk about it  just as he did later, during his confirmation hearing as nominee for secretary of State.

By spring, Exxon had decided to play the victim. We all sat around the table and said, This feels very orchestrated,  Suzanne McCarron, Exxons vice-president of public and government affairs, told Bloomberg in 2016. Exxon cited a meeting between various environmental groups at offices shared by the Brothers Fund and the Family Fund; one participant had sent an email with possible discussion topics, including how to establish in the publics mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm. When the Family Fund announced it was divesting from Exxon as a result of the companys morally reprehensible behavior, Exxon responded, Its not surprising that theyre divesting from the company since theyre already funding a conspiracy against us.

There was, of course, precedent for condemning the Rockefellers as shadowy puppet masters. The Trilateral Commission, which David Rockefeller founded in 1973 to connect nongovernmental organizations in different countries, has long been a central node in any conspiracy theorists map of the globalist power structure. David Rockefeller never completely rejected the accusation  Conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure  one world, if you will. If thats the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it, he wrote in his memoir  and his descendants did not deny having coordinated their efforts to bring Exxon to task. They simply disagreed with the idea that they had done anything wrong. Were getting creamed by the right, and Exxon, for doing nothing but associating with other civic associations to try to address larger societal problems, Wasserman said. They are attacking behavior that is pretty central to what this country is about.

Kaiser expected Exxon to go after the family but was surprised by the ferocity of the attack. Theres not a giant appetite for being the next name after Soros in all these right-wing screeds, Kaiser said. A writer for Natural Gas Now, one of numerous pro-oil sites that began denouncing the family, declared, Its time to RICO the Rockefellers. (This guy from Daily Caller writes about us every other day, Wasserman said.) Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman from Texas, filed subpoenas against the Rockefeller funds and various environmental groups alleging they were attempting to deprive Exxon of its First Amendment rights. When Kaiser went on an NPR call-in show alongside an Exxon spokesman who dismissed the allegations as so-called journalism that was hired and paid for by two Rockefeller organizations, Kaiser took a call from Tony in Michigan, who identified himself as somewhat of a skeptic about climate change. I feel that the taxes and all the things that happen because of the so-called climate-change crowd affect a small person like myself as opposed to Mr. Rockefeller, Tony said, referring to Kaiser. I would just like to ask Mr. Rockefeller how he gets around the country and the world  is it one of his familys many private jets or private yachts? Kaiser replied that he flies commercial  economy, by the way  and that every family, including his, could do more.

The Rockefellers themselves are not uniform in their views. There are conservative and liberal Rockefellers. Some still work in the fossil-fuel business. Ariana Rockefeller, a 35-year-old competitive equestrian rider who runs an eponymous fashion brand, called the campaign by her relatives deeply misguided, and told CBS, I dont think denouncing a family legacy is the best way to go about doing this.

Kaiser would not admit to any significant familial tension  Ari and I just disagree about this  and the Rockefellers I spoke to were generally just as committed to a patrician sense of discretion as they were to the environment. Whenever I asked about intrafamily conflict, Kaiser would pause, then speak at a pace that would make any lawyer proud. He was nervous enough about the family reaction to his NYRB piece that he warned some relatives about its impending publication and asked the NYRB not to title it The Rockefellers v. Exxon. During the discussion at MoMA, several relatives objected to the Exxon campaign on ideological grounds, while others said they simply didnt like seeing the family name in the news. But Kaiser declined to say which of his uncles and cousins thought what. We had a very civil conversation, he said. And nobody persuaded anybody of anything.

In 2015, Lee Wasserman met with New York attorney general Eric Schneidermans office to discuss whether Exxons alleged climate deception might have violated the Martin Act, a wide-ranging New York State securities law that prohibits all deceitful practices contrary to the plain rules of common honesty. Schneiderman was already pursuing similar claims against Peabody Energy, the worlds largest public coal company, and shortly after the Exxon articles were published, Schneiderman announced he would investigate whether Exxon had defrauded its shareholders, and the public, by denying the impact of climate change.

Exxon has since devoted considerable effort to delaying that process. As attorneys in Schneidermans office made their way through Exxons subpoenaed emails, they found an address with the name Wayne Tracker, which they discovered was an alias used by Tillerson. Exxon had not turned over all emails from the account, and an attorney for the company said that it would be an interesting test of whether the attorney generals office is reading the documents. (Exxon says that many emails from the account cannot be found.) The company also sued Schneiderman and Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, who had launched an inquiry, arguing that their investigations were politically motivated. Exxon filed the suit in Texas, where Judge Ed Kinkeade wondered aloud whether New York and Massachusetts would be so worried about climate change if they had as much oil as Texas. Im just saying, think about it, Kinkeade said. (Kinkeade eventually acknowledged he didnt have the jurisdiction to hear the suit and sent it to Judge Caproni.) In the meantime, 11 Republican state attorneys general filed a brief questioning the AGs right to conduct the investigation  and thus their own ability to conduct similar investigations  by arguing that they falsely presume that the scientific debate regarding climate change is settled and that, regardless of what one believes about global warming and climate change, no ones views should be silenced.

The First Amendment claim was a curious one for Exxon, in part because its official position on climate change has shifted. The companys spokespeople routinely respond to questions about its climate record by noting that, today, ExxonMobil acknowledges the risk of climate change is clear and warrants action. When Tillerson became CEO in 2006, other fossil-fuel companies had begun acknowledging the problem  British Petroleum changed its name to BP, for beyond petroleum  and Tillerson created a task force to reconsider the companys position. In 2007, Exxon promised to stop funding climate-change deniers, and just before Barack Obamas inauguration, Tillerson announced his support for a carbon tax. The shift was more of a strategic adjustment to new realities than a sincere change of heart: The Obama administration was pushing a cap-and-trade system that would have tackled the issue more aggressively than a carbon tax, and some observers believe Exxons carbon-tax campaign helped scuttle the administrations plan. The change also appeared to have a more practical rationale: According to Coll, Exxon had begun to realize that its climate position might do shareholders real damage, in ways comparable to the fate of tobacco companies, and that if ExxonMobil were ever judged in a courtroom to be cooking science, it could be devastating.

Proving Exxons legal culpability remains a difficult task, and veterans of the tobacco litigation, which produced more than $200 billion in settlements, point out that it took many years for incriminating documents to emerge and the legal process to play out. Exxons lawsuit against the AGs remains in front of Judge Caproni, and there is no saying when a trial might begin, if ever. But the Rockefeller-funded journalistic investigations have helped open the door to a range of litigation. Several coastal cities in California, including San Francisco and Oakland, have sued Exxon and other fossil-fuel companies over the costs of adapting to rising seas, and the SEC launched an investigation into whether Exxon has improperly valued what have come to be known as stranded assets  oil reserves that companies count as potential profit on their books but that may go unused if the world makes a serious effort to regulate fossil fuels. In January 2017, Exxon wrote down more than $2 billion in such assets, and the company seems nervous enough about potential lawsuits that when it recently renewed its support for a carbon tax, it backed a plan that would also protect it from liability in climate litigation.

In May, Exxons shareholders approved a resolution, for the first time, demanding the company prepare a report on the impact of climate change on its business. (An equal-pay resolution got just 8 percent of the vote.) Neva Goodwin, who led the Rockefellers early shareholder efforts, said she had largely lost faith in the strategy but that things had changed when major financial institutions like BlackRock and Vanguard expressed their concern about stranded assets. Bob Litterman, a former head of risk management at Goldman Sachs, told me that he had helped the World Wildlife Fund make what he called a stranded-asset total-return swap as part of its endowment strategy, essentially betting against companies with potentially stranded assets, like Exxon, which is one of the swaps largest positions. So far, it has returned a 64 percent profit.

When I met David Kaiser for coffee in the fall, his family had come under attack again, this time for sponsoring two Harvard researchers analysis of Exxons claim that the journalists had cherry-picked documents. The academics rejected Exxons assertion, but the companys supporters quickly dismissed the report as part of the Rockefeller Family Fund cabal, and Exxon accused the Rockefellers of seeking reparations. Kaiser admitted as much  adapting to climate change will cost trillions, and someone will have to pay for it  but insisted he and his relatives werent interested in destroying the family business. I would be delighted if ExxonMobil was able to stick around, but looking very different, he said, citing renewable energy as a way forward.

But Kaiser said he believed the most good would come from Exxon admitting that its history of climate denial had been disingenuous all along. A recent study found that Republicans identify with Exxon more than any other brand  Democrats see themselves most in Starbucks  but climate change had not always been partisan. Its not a liberal or conservative thing were talking about, George H.W. Bush said, urging action on global warming in 1988. In Kaisers view, Exxon had turned it into a divisive issue and was now uniquely positioned to undo that damage. I would like to see Exxon come clean and admit to the public what theyve done, Kaiser said.

What the Rockefellers hoped, in essence, was to push Exxon toward the light, just as their own family came to understand the various ill effects of its success. In the early 1900s, Ida Tarbell wrote a series of articles in McClures magazine lambasting John D. Rockefellers business practices:

Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner for the kind of influence [Rockefeller] exercises. From him we have received no impulse to public duty, only lessons in evading it for private greed; no stimulus to nobler ideals, only a lesson in the further deification of gold 

Over time, the family took such criticism to heart. After the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which two dozen workers were killed during a strike at a Rockefeller-owned mine, John D. Jr. tried to improve relations with workers. His son John D. III later wrote his college thesis on the topic and said his fathers efforts hadnt gone far enough. And in 1932, five years before his death, John D. himself acknowledged the fortune God had given him would require amends. As a nation, Rockefeller said, looking proudly to our past where it has been noble, and recognizing with humility our mistakes of extravagance, selfishness, and indifference, let us with faith in God, in ourselves, and in humanity, go forward courageously resolved to play our part in worthily building a better world.

*This article appears in the January 8, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
Police officers and soldiers patrol the streets of the historic center of San Salvador, on August 22, 2017. Photo: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Monday that it would be ending temporary protections for almost 200,000 Salvadorans who immigrated to the United States in 2001 after a pair of devastating earthquakes.

The drastic move means that the immigrants, many of whom own homes and businesses, and have children who are U.S. citizens, would need to leave the United States by September 2019 or risk being deported.

The decision was not unexpected, given a pattern that had emerged in recent months. The Trump administration announced in November that it would end temporary protection for 60,000 Haitians who fled their countrys catastrophic 2010 earthquake; 5,300 Nicaraguans lost similar protections last year, and tens of thousands of Hondurans who came to America after 1998s Hurricane Mitch are probably next in line.

But Salvadorans are by far the largest group of several nationalities that were granted protection under the Temporary Protected Status law, which was signed by George H.W. Bush in 1990 (during a very different era of the Republican Party).

The George W. Bush and Obama administrations had extended the waivers several times since the Salvadorans arrival. In 2016, the Obama administration cited El Salvadors endemic violence as one reason to do so; it has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

There is nothing to go back to in El Salvador, Veronica Lanugas, one beneficiary of the program, told the New York Times in Spanish.The infrastructure may be better now, but the country is in no condition to receive us.

El Salvador had urged the United States to extend the protections. The country is plagued not only with violence, but with poverty and drought. And Salvadorans in the U.S. provide a significant boost to the economy by sending earnings back to their native country.

But President Trump, coming into office with his hard-line immigration rhetoric, has taken a different approach from his predecessors as part of his attempt to curb both illegal and legal immigration. His administration judged that El Salvador had sufficiently recovered from the earthquakes that sent citizens fleeing, and that the countrys other, deep-seated problems werent relevant to the matter at hand.

Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years, a DHS statement read, according to the Washington Post.

Congress may end up doing just that before the temporary protection statuses run out for the threatened groups. But for President Trump to agree on such legislation, he would probably need an anti-immigration measure to compensate  perhaps the diversity visa lottery program he has repeatedly criticized.
The Camp David retreat was definitely fun and not at all awkward. Photo: 0001561/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Though the news was understandably lost between President Trump threatening nuclear war on Twitter, trying to ban a tell-all book about his administration, and proclaiming himself a genius, over the weekend Republican congressional leaders huddled with the president to map out their 2018 agenda.

When last we left our heroes, they were giddy about the passage of their tax bill, and trying to decide whether to pursue welfare reform or infrastructure next  though both policies have little chance of passing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already dashed House Speaker Paul Ryans dreams of targeting the poorest Americans in 2018, and on Saturday Trump seemed to do the same.

Its a subject thats very dear to our heart, Trump said of welfare reform, after emerging from the Camp David retreat. Well try and do something in a bipartisan way. Otherwise, well be holding it for a little bit later.

One might think that means the long-promised infrastructure plan is a go. Before the holidays, the Trump administration was said to be finalizing its 70-page plan for release in mid-January, and White House officials had begun offering a preview. Trump policy adviser D.J. Gribbin said the incentive program would put up $200 billion in federal seed money in the hopes of attracting $800 billion in spending from state and local governments, and private-public partnerships.

But theres a problem: Trump told GOP leaders on Friday that he doesnt think relying on public-private partnerships to fund infrastructure projects will work.

Or maybe there isnt a problem? On Friday Gary Cohn, the director of Trumps National Economic Council, told Fox Business, Januarys going to be a big month for us on infrastructure. The next day he described the plan in detail  including public-private partnerships  to those assembled at Camp David.

According to the Washington Post, theres been no official change of plans, Trump was just grousing about the idea, as hes been doing for several months:

White House officials and Hill aides confirmed the presidents comments. Another White House official briefed on the comments said that Trump was musing aloud and that the administration still planned to pursue public-private partnerships for infrastructure. This person, though, said Trump had continually expressed skepticism behind the scenes about such a plan.

He doesnt think they will work, this person said.

In a statement issued on Sunday night, White House press secretary Lindsay Walters seemed to confirm the infrastructure plan is unchanged. The presidents infrastructure vision is very clear and is based around two main goals: leveraging federal funds as efficiently as possible in order to generate over $1 trillion in infrastructure investment and expediting the burdensome and lengthy permitting process, she said.

So now in addition to promoting an infrastructure plan thats probably going nowhere in Congress, White House officials will have to explain why their boss seems to show little enthusiasm for a plan theyve been crafting for months. Its becoming more apparent why Cohn, when asked how long hell stay at the White House, said on Friday, Im here today.
A screenshot from Neon Nettles verified Facebook page.

The metabolism of fake news seems continues to speed up.

Shortly after a fire broke out at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the verified Facebook page Neon Nettle shared a story on Facebook claiming that Donald Trump was feared dead in the small rooftop blaze, writing:

Fears are mounting for Donald Trumps safety after a huge fire has suddenly broken out at Trump Tower in New York. The President has yet to be accounted for with many fearing the fire could be deliberate.

A link to that post was shared 70 times on Facebook as of this writing.

A follow-up post written about 30 minutes later upped the ante, claiming that the fire was an attempt to kill President Trump, in a post titled Trump Tower Fire Was a Deep State Assassination Attempt On The President:

Following the massive fire that broke out at the Trump Tower in New York this morning, fears that President Donald Trump may have been a victim of a deep state assassination attempt have begun to circulate. The President still has yet to be counted for as many fear the fire was deliberate as dozens of firefighters scramble to tackle the inferno at Fifth Avenue in New York. Alex Jones recently claimed the deep states had a long-term plan in place to remove the president from office by assassination, you only have to look at the like of John Lennon, Gandhi, Martin Luther King who stood up to the New World Order.

Neon Nettle is a relatively small fish in the fake news ocean, though it is so brazenly cynical that even alt-right Reddit clone Voat had a several posts in its Pizzagate forum alerting members that Neon Nettle was fake news. (Put another way: Even people who believed that a Washington D.C. pizza parlor was the focal point for a global ring of pedophiles thought Neon Nettle was a bridge too far.)

Neon Nettle appears, from the outside, to be a single person writing under multiple pen names  the site uses several different bylines, but all share similar linguistic and syntactical quirks. It seems to monetize via recirculation boxes run by the company Revcontent, a content recommendation service similar to Outbrain. It has over a half million fans on Facebook, and its stories are a mixture of factually true tabloid stories (Naked Man Launches Attack in Phuket Airport After Overdosing on Viagra) and astoundingly fake ones (Justin Bieber Shapeshifts Into Reptile at Airport Causing MASS PANIC).

None of what Neon Nettle is doing is new. Its well established that fake news can be profitable, particularly thanks to its ability to spread quickly on Facebook. Facebook has made various efforts to stop its spread, but little seems to be working. Sites like Neon Nettle continue to operate unchecked, reacting quickly to the news cycle with a new ways to garner clicks on Facebook with completely fabricated news.
Concerned youth have petitioned the Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga to have minister of Foreign Affairs Sam Kutesa impeached over what they term as questionable conduct in Uganda and at international level.

Led by former Makerere University guild president David Bala Bwiruka, lawyers; Simon Peter Esomu, Henry Byansi and Martin Twomo among others argued that despite his censorship as Finance state minister over corruption in 1999, Kutesa has continued to engage in scandalous acts even as Foreign Affairs minister, tainting the countrys image.

Hon. Kutesa was once formally censored by our parliament for corruption and has since been involved in many other scandals dating back to 1999, when he deviated public funds in connection with Uganda Airlines, the national carrier which eventually collapsed. He has been accused of deviating state funds when we hosted the Chogm [Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting] in 2007 where $150m still remains unaccounted for, the petitioners told Kadaga.

Some of the youth who petitioned Speaker Rebecca Kadaga to have minister Sam Kuteesa impeached

Details of a criminal bribery case being prosecuted in the United States indicate that Kutesa allegedly received a $500,000 bribe to help a Chinese firm obtain business advantages in the energy and banking sectors including potential acquisition of a Ugandan bank while serving as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

The petitioners also based on various local and international media reports in November last year where it was reported that the Justice Department of the United States of America had implicated Kutesa for successfully creating a fake charity organization with a ploy to engage in bribery and money laundering activities.

The petitioners say that contrary to principles established in the Constitution, Leadership Code of Conduct, values and aspirations of Ugandans, Kutesa conducted himself in a manner indicative of corruption tendencies and detrimental to the public good, welfare and good governance of the country.

Shs 1.8 billion bribe was transmitted through New York to an account designated by Kutesa in Uganda. That bribe was paid on or about May 6, 2016 after Kutesa finished his term as president of the UN General Assembly, Bala said.

We are further concerned that through the impugned conduct, Kutesa has maligned the image of Uganda hence putting its future on cold ice. We are concerned that Uganda is now viewed as a country of greedy and egocentric people with no political will to fight corruption, he added.

The petitioners have demanded that Kadaga, sets up a committee or refers the matter to an appropriate committee for investigations as well as moving a motion to impeach Kutesa as a Foreign Affairs minister for his dishonorable conduct.

The group also threatened to petition court should parliament not take action against Kutesa.

We demand that this matter be taken seriously lest we shall be constrained to refer the matter to the courts of law to compel parliament to perform its constitutional oversight role over the executive, Bala said.

Kadaga however promised to get back to the petitioners on the way forward, noting that Ntungamo Municipality MP Gerald Karuhanga tabled the same matter before the House with similar demands.

Although Karuhanga mid last month raised a matter of national importance asking that parliament through the speaker summons Kutesa to explain to the country the role he played in the bribery case to help a Chinese energy company get unlicensed oil blocks in Uganda, Kadaga instead told the MPs to refer that issue to Financial Intelligence Authority.

"Lodge a complaint as a concerned citizen. If the offence was committed here, I would have no problem. But I have no control over another jurisdiction,' Kadaga said then.

namuloki16@gmail.com
Ruth Nalweyiso Nkoyoyo, the widow of Archbishop Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo, has asked mourners not to feel sad about the death of her husband, but instead celebrate the life of the departed prelate.



While eulogizing her husband at All Saints Cathedral in Nakasero, Mrs Nkoyoyo started by singing 'Tukutendereza Yesu', a popular Anglican hymn, composed by the late Reverend Simeone Nsibambi.



"We have come to celebrate the life of my friend. He has gone to be with his God whom he served and loved very much," Ruth told mourners.

Nkoyoyo, a retired Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, died on Friday at Kampala hospital where he had been undergoing treatment for Pneumonia. He was 80. In early 2017, Archbishop Nkoyoyo underwent successful treatment for cancer in the United Kingdom.

Ruth Nkoyoyo lays a wreath on her husband's casket

Ruth says her husband of 52 years always told people not to feel sad at his passing. The couple got married on May 1, 1965 at St. Paul's Cathedral, Namirembe. Together, they had five children - Isaac, Naomi, Martin (deceased), Margret and Julius Nkoyoyo.



In 2015 when the couple celebrated 50 years in marriage, Ruth talked of love and trust as the bedrock of their long marriage. "He loved me unconditionally, and, because of this, I found it very easy to love him back," she said.

Nkoyoyo's children described him as "unique man who was strong and real". From individual experiences, Isaac Nkoyoyo said, his presence has always given them safety. He said they all felt secure "because there was someone much stronger and wiser."

The family said Nkoyoyo had friends from all denominations - with his religious might cutting across all beliefs. He had passion for a martyrs museum at Namugongo and looked forward to its completion. President Yoweri Museveni pledged to complete the museum. He said he will hold discussions with Archbishop Ntagali to see what's needed.

James Abola, the head of laity at All Saints Cathedral, lauded the departed archbishop for championing the construction of the new cathedral at Nakasero. Abola said the kingdom of God expanded under the leadership of Archbishop Livingstone.



Representing the clergy, the vicar of All Saints Cathedral, Reverend Canon Geoffrey Byarugaba, said Nkoyoyo also steered the construction of Church House which had stalled for decades. His hand was all over several other projects including the Bishops palace and synod.



Even in his retirement, said the vicar, Archbishop Nkoyoyo was busy with the construction of the Uganda martyrs museum, Namugongo.



The vicar said Archbishop Nkoyoyo stood firm against liberal theology and abnormalities including homosexuality. He said: "We are going to miss a leader who had a big heart and who raised the position of catechists in the church. Let's emulate him and take his legacy forward."
Parliament is hell-bent on dodging the much-awaited 2021 elections by awarding MPs a two-year extension, a move that has not gone down well with many Ugandans.

In the national interest, we soldiers who face bullets are asking you, MPs, to sacrifice a bit as well and face the ballots; they do not kill, after all

That plea was made in 1993 by Maj Gen Gregory Mugisha Muntu to the National Resistance Council (NRC) which was the parliament of the time and to which Muntu was a member as army commander.

Uganda was then preparing the countrys new constitution and the question was on which body would undertake this historic mission.

Gen Mugisha Muntu

Many NRC members felt they were best-placed for the task as opposed to Ugandans directly electing Constituent Assembly delegates. But the move was vehemently opposed by the public and the Peoples Army, National Resistance Army. In a speech preserved in the NRA/UPDF magazine Tarehe Sita of May 1993, this is what Gen Muntu told the House.



MUNTUS SERMON

Mr Chairman, in geographical terms, I do not represent a constituency. I had no intention of speaking in the first place. We in the army had thought that a matter like this would be automatically supported by the House. To us it means life and death, because it is us who have die to settle affairs whenever those who legislate mess.

The establishment of democracy is a process. There cannot be stability without democracy. Even with apparent stability in an undemocratic situation, it is always temporary. Without democracy, there are always undercurrents of instability.

Once they gather enough momentum, they explode and instability results. To build democracy does not happen over-night; it is a process. Our people have struggled to be free to decide their own destiny. Not all struggles succeed, but they are always a step forward.



NRA GIVES GROUND

NRA had a successful peoples armed struggle which culminated into capture of state power. We have since ensured that people decide their own destiny and recover their dignity.

Paragraph 14 (b) of Legal Notice 1 of 1986 specified that the Army Council (NRAC) and the National Resistance Council (NRC) would act as the Constituent Assembly (CA). The Uganda Constitutional Commission only emerged after NRAC relinquished its role in CA.

And what was the basis for this crucial decision? I attended the Army Council and I know the strong sentiments expressed by officers in attendance. The basis was the trust and confidence we have developed in our people.

We assessed that over time our people could no longer be easily manipulated like in the past. We have created stability. Our people can stand their ground and decide on matters affecting their lives without fear or manipulation.

We decided that the people must take their destiny in their own hands. We wanted a constitution that would outlive governments; one that would provide for change but where protection of democracy would be a permanent and continuous process. That can only happen where the people directly, through universal suffrage, elect representatives to the Constituent Assembly.



PEOPLES POWER

NRAs mission has always been peace-building. NRA shall follow whatever the people decide. We only ask for some representation in the Constituent Assembly to witness the most historic event that will be the highest achievement of our sacrifice.

We request that if any members were to support NRA involvement in this exercise, it should be in light of that, but not on the basis of fear that NRA would overthrow the constitution.

We now ask NRC to give the people power to elect a Constituent Assembly directly. Of course, NRC Members are free to stand. As NRA, we have fulfilled our mission by establishing order through direct sacrifice. Asking NRC to give people a chance to exercise their will is not asking for too much!

What example would NRC be giving, anyway, if it is seen to have stuck to power? I am touching on sensitive ground, Mr. Chairman, and I hope I will be forgiven, but we cannot erase history. The image of many of our politicians in Uganda is nothing to be proud of. The majority of our politicians are always vacillating, tending to serve their personal interests.



FILTHY POLITICIANS

This struggle has pulled in politicians who were out crawling in the mud; it brought them up and presented them back to our people in a new form. Unfortunately, many retain a strong tendency to crawl back into the mud.

Ordinarily, if they do not want to be clean, they could be left alone to mess themselves up. Unfortunately, they can drag the whole society into the mud with them like has happened many times in the past. We should allow individuals who want to mess themselves up to do so, but not to take the whole society with them (applause).

There is an underestimation of our peoples ability to identify their interests and fight for them. Let them decide; the fear that they will make mistakes is misplaced and should not be an excuse to make shortcuts. That would be a fundamental error.

If we do not give way to a new Constituent Assembly, we will be planting seeds of violence and instability. It happened in the past and we have paid heavily to re-establish sanity.



BALLOT or BULLET?

And when the seeds of violence germinate and grow to fruition, who is going to pay again? Do we know what instability means anyway, or have we forgotten already?

No member here can name any place in Uganda where we soldiers did not bleed and die for mistakes made in this House or by earlier legislative organs. So, do you want us to keep dying for no fault of ours?

What examples are we being given if the motion to stick in here succeeds? What will you be telling NRA? It is ironic! I never anticipated a time when an army representative would be in parliament trying to convince MPs to relinquish power.

NRA pulled out of CA to let Ugandans directly exercise their rights; we did so voluntarily without pressure, because we are patriots and are interested in democracy and permanent stability. This is why we fought and bled.

The only payment for our sacrifice is for our people to directly decide for their lives. After all, we are part of this society and we will not die in the Army.

When we leave the Army we want to join a stable society. Now, MPs seem to be telling us that we soldiers took a stupid decision to pull out. For us we face bullets and you know bullets kill, but we are still ready to sacrifice for a national cause.

In the national interest, we soldiers are asking you, MPs, to sacrifice a bit as well and face the ballots; they do not kill, after all

As we get into 2018 and as we plan to hold off (rather than hold) elections in 2021, think deeply about Gen Muntus sermon.
One of the six police officers being court-martialed for kidnapping two Rwandan political asylum-seekers in 2013 has dashed to the civil division of the High court challenging General Court Martial proceedings.

Nickson Agasirwe Karuhanga says all charges against him and other officers are concoctions aimed at persecuting, and not prosecuting him.

In an application filed on January 5, 2018, Agasirwe wants the civil court to declare that the UPDF unit disciplinary committee and General Court Martial (GCM) have no jurisdiction to try him of the offences disclosed in last years charge sheet.

Besides kidnap, Karuhanga faces a raft of charges including unlawful possession of arms, ammunition or equipment ordinarily being the monopoly of defence forces.

Nickson Agasirwe Karuhanga ( in black jacket) arriving at the Court Martial

To the contrary, in the application, in which the attorney general is the only respondent, Agasirwe contends that the charge sheet is defective since it doesnt disclose the fact that he is a member of police entitled to a firearm and other defense artillery.

The particulars of the offence, according to Agasirwe, dont further disclose that he possessed a firearm certificate for his armory issued by the chief licensing officer.

That if the said particulars had been disclosed by the military tribunal, I would not fall within the jurisdiction of the General Court Martial for trial, Agasirwe says in his affidavit in support of the application.

That of all intents and purposes, there is no nexus between the charges that have been preferred against me and I cannot be tried for having been in unlawful possession of a firearm.

At the military court, Agasirwe, a senior superintendent of police and a former commander of police special operations, is facing trial with the commandant of polices Professional Standards Unit, Joel Aguma, and Assistant Superintendent of Police James Magada (Crime Intelligence).

Others are Sgt Abel Tumukunde (Flying Squad), Faisal Katende (Flying Squad), Amon Kwarisima, Rene Rutagungira, a Rwandese national, and Bahati Mugenga Irunga, a Congolese national.

They were all charged in October last year. It is alleged that on September 25, 2013, the accused persons kidnapped Lieutenant Joel Mutabazi, a former bodyguard of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, in Kamengo along Kampala-Masaka road and forcefully conveyed him to Rwanda.

Mutabazi had fled for his life from Kigali to seek political asylum in Uganda with a United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) looking out for him. Mutabazi was sentenced to life in prison.

The group was also charged with the kidnap of Jackson Kalemera, Mutabazis brother, on the same day. Similarly, Kalemera was also dispatched to Rwandan authorities against his wishes.

However, through Joel Olweny and Company Advocates, Agasirwe says even his co-accused cannot similarly be tried of the said offences because they are also police officers.

From the foregoing, Agasirwe says, it is clear for court to see that the military tribunal is biased, their charges are misconceived and there is no nexus between the charge sheet and my circumstances.

He pleads with High court to issue a permanent injunction stopping the trial arguing that the he is not being accorded a fair hearing by the Court Martial whose members are acting as the judge and jury.

That the misconception by the military tribunal partly formed the basis of their bias and if not checked by this honorable court [civil division of the High Court] shall greatly result in irreparable injury and occasion a miscarriage of justice as my fundamentally protected rights guaranteed under the constitution shall be greatly infringed upon for which no amounts in terms damages can adequately compensate, Karuhanga says.

The decision to go to the civil court seems to have been inspired by the fact that the Court Martial has twice differed Agasirwes bail ruling. At the same time, prosecutors at the same court continue to prefer fresh charges against Agasirwe without justification but with impunity and malice geared at keeping me incarcerated.

Last week, Agasirwes co-accused Aguma filed a bail application before the criminal division of the High court after the military court had thrown out his bail application last year.

dkiyonga@observer.ug
In November 2015, the World Health Organization released new guidelines recommending that all people diagnosed as HIV-positive be enrolled on antiretroviral therapy (ART) regardless of disease stage.

The universal test and treat (UTT) policy soon followed. There is persuasive research which forecasts that, globally, if as many people as possible are tested, and immediately enrolled on treatment (if diagnosed as HIV-positive), their ability to transmit the virus will be limited, rendering the end of the HIV epidemic as a feasible target by as early as 2030.

Indeed, many countries have rolled out test and treat. In Africa, Botswana is among the countries that have registered tremendous success in this regard. In Uganda, many health facilities began implementing test and treat this year following its inclusion by Pepfar, a predominant donor in Uganda, in its annual program targets.

Without doubt, the test and treat policy is a potent strategy in the national HIV response in Uganda and globally.

However, field research we have been conducting across Uganda with colleagues from Makerere University, School of Public Health and a partner US university over the last six months, suggests that a myriad of bottlenecks stand in the way of Ugandas implementation of test and treat.

Perhaps the most prominent of these is the widespread and prolonged stock-out of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), especially second-line regimens in the regions of Busoga, Bugisu and Acholi which we visited twice in 2017 in two rounds of data collection (mid 2017 and late 2017).

Patients who used to get a three-month supply of ARVs have had that reduced to as few as two weeks. An un-interrupted supply of ARVs is a cornerstone of the test and treat strategy.

As the print media has consistently reported in the last couple of months, Uganda is experiencing nationwide stock-outs of ARVs with the clear and present danger of a systemic drug resistance.

It was welcome news recently when Deborah Malac, the US ambassador to Uganda, announced a grant of over $18 million government to address ARV stock-outs. We cant wait for operationalization of Ugandas AIDS Trust Fund (ATF) to reduce our heavy dependence on international assistance in our national HIV response.

Clearly, test and treat demands new kinds of performance of the Ugandan health system and requires unprecedented resources. In one of the health facilities we visited, active patients on ART almost doubled from 2,000 to 3,800 in a space of less than six months.

Health workers partly attributed ARV stock-outs to increased demand due to test and treat but we now know that other factors were also at play at national level.

Health workforce shortages, a perennial constraint, featured prominently. Despite a dramatic increase in patient volumes, the number of health workers remained the same or declined. In some health facilities, health workers shunned ART clinics due to punishing workloads.

Because of implementation of test and treat and escalating patient burdens, the waiting time for patients was reported to have become longer.

As a country, we need to evaluate our readiness for implementing test and treat or double our investments at the level of government and donors to realize its successful implementation. Surely, pilot studies must have been conducted before full-scale rollout as I have seen reported elsewhere.

This piece is by no means aimed at discrediting test and treat but is intended as a reflection on our national readiness for implementing of a clearly worthwhile and potent strategy. As things stand today, the more clinically-needy patients may have been denied life-saving treatment as test and treat may have spread us thin.

During our field visits, we found little evidence in the field of implementation of differentiated care models.

These have been touted as another strategy for managing the escalating demand for HIV treatment where visits to clinics are reduced for stable patients and more are permitted for patients not achieving viral suppression. This strategy, too, could potentially aid in Ugandas implementation of test and treat.



hzakumumpa@cartafrica.org



The author is a health systems researcher and CARTA Fellow at Makerere University, School of Public Health
Forests are very important because they provide wood for construction, energy, food security, a natural habitat for animals, and help to reduce the effects of climate change. But between 1990 and 2015, Uganda lost an average of 90,000 hectares of forests annually, shrinking the forest cover from 24 to 10 per cent. However, according to the ministry of Water and Environment, only about 7,000 hectares of planted forests have been established yearly in the last 15 years.

This imbalance threatens Ugandas ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially on sustainably managing forests to mitigate climate change, transformation of Uganda into a green and modern economy, and the contribution of forests to livelihoods of current generations and those is posterity.

I applaud the government of Uganda for supporting commercial forestry through innovative approaches, while at the same time creating jobs and increasing household incomes. One such approach is the Sawlog Production Grant Scheme (SPGS) Phase III Project implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) on behalf of the government of Uganda with funding from the European Union (EU), for a period of five years, starting in 2016.

SPGS III seeks to encourage private sector investment in commercial timber plantations by providing grants and forestry technical advice to private sector investors involved in tree planting for production of timber and electricity transmission poles.

Through this model and recognizing favorable government policies such as Build Uganda, Buy Uganda that promotes local consumption of domestic products, FAO, supported by the UN Office for Project Service (UNOPS), offers the investor a conditional grant of about 30 per cent of the estimated total investment.

The retrospective disbursement is made after a field inspection confirms that the investor has carried out critical forest operations and has complied with the FAO/SPGS III recommended standards for quality forest plantations.

This model helps to guarantee that the investor will have sufficient funds to effectively establish and manage the forest plantations while also ensuring that the plantations benefit from the recommended silvicultural operations that will favour high quality timber and transmission poles. Neglecting some key operations results in poor forest plantations and, therefore, poor return on investment.

So far, 520 small, medium and large scale tree growers have been selected throughout Uganda.

These will receive grants to plant a combined area of about 23,000 hectares. Grant management is done by UNOPS, for transparency and efficiency of financial resources.

Another success factor in SPGS III Project is the voluntary certification of tree nurseries and forest plantation contractors as key service providers in commercial forestry. Certification is vital because many investors in commercial forestry in Uganda have limited skills in operations related to forest plantation establishment and maintenance.

FAO/SPGS III offers training and recommends acceptable standards to nursery operators and contractors, who thereafter receive one-year rating-based certification which empowers them to guarantee customer satisfaction.

Lists of certified nursery operators and contractors are shared with the investors to enable them identify where to buy good quality seedlings or access technical know-how for establishment and maintenance operations such as planting, weeding, pruning and thinning.

Currently, FAO has certified 66 tree nurseries and 40 contractors (pruning and thinning).

The demand for certification is a positive indicator of the relevance that private sector players attribute to providing quality planting material and forestry services to support a vibrant sector.

FAO/SPGS III project is supporting downstream processing  including plantation infrastructure, skills development, timber logging, access to finances, saw milling and timber market development along the commercial forestry value chain to help match Ugandas wood processing capacity to the local demand for wood products.

The State of Ugandas Forestry 2016 reports that the estimated sawn-wood market in Uganda is 369,000 cubic meters with an estimated value of Shs 101 billion. FAO forecasts consumption of industrial wood at 1.7 million cubic meters by 2030. As such, SPGS III will help to expand supply while ensuring high quality timber on the Uganda market.

Local communities and institutions that are highly dependent of wood for energy are also benefitting from the SPGS III project which targets establishment of 4,000 and 2,500 hectares by communities and institutions respectively, majorly for provision of wood fuel or bioenergy.

So far, FAO, through the SPGS III project, has distributed about two million seedlings to communities and institutions in the country. Grants are also provided to growers, up to a target of 5,000 hectares for pruning and thinning forest operations.

To promote ownership and sustainability of this unique approach, FAO is implementing the Project with support from private and public entities. These include Uganda Timber Growers Association (UTGA), Forestry Sector Support Department (FSSD) of the Ministry of Water and Environment, Nyabyeya Forestry College, Makerere University, National Forestry Resources Research Institute (NaFORRI) and the National Forestry Authority (NFA).

FAO has also trained 20 district forest officers and forest officers from NFA, in plantation establishment and in drafting Forest Investment Plans.

Finally, the SPGS III project is fast showing that a model of co-investment (public-private partnership) and retrospective payment of grants for commercial tree planting can greatly incentivize private sector players to invest in commercial forestry and contribute to a critical mass of high quality plantations.

The latter are envisaged to result in high quality forest products such as timber and create jobs along the commercial forestry continuum. But, efforts are required in downstream processing, research and development as well as policy formulation and implementation to propel the sector.



The author is the project coordinator, Sawlog Production Grant Scheme (SPGS III),

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.




Various newspaper columnists have already exhaustively written on the effect of the presidential Age Limit removal.

I, however, still feel that for the sake of our young citizens and the sizeable ever gullible citizens, it is important to further contextualise the Constitution Amendment (No 2) Bill 2017 and sum up the obvious consequences. From the beginning, the bill was nonsensical, because it fell from the sky.

It had no mischief to remedy. The deceptive attempt by Igara East MP Raphael Magyezi and company to associate it with the Supreme court ruling in the 2016 Amama Mbabazi presidential election petition was the most absurd, but not surprising.

Not surprising because, deception, lies and trivializing of serious national issues is no longer a preserve of the Museveni regime. It has actually become an NRM/national culture. Primarily, members of parliament, like any other leaders, are expected to be people of integrity, honest, patriotic with above average intelligence, and with common sense.

Article 102 (b) was not entrenched because given the debate that raged during the constitution-making process, it was very clear that, in future, citizens may need to revisit it.

Questioning the relevance of parliament now does not necessarily mean that it has been relevant before. By the fact that the 1995 Constitution provided for a one-party state, it was very clear that Mr Museveni/NRA had not gone to the bush to fight for democracy, constitutionalism and development of Uganda.

Given the way the promised transition of four years had been cunningly extended; it was clear that the NRA was not a sincere organisation and that parliament was going to be a vehicle of enhancing their hidden agendas.

Indeed, from 1996 to date, parliament has not proved to be a patriotic or real body holding government to account as provided by the doctrine of the separation of powers.

By the fact that MPs reward themselves such hefty salaries and benefits already shows that parliament is just a predatory and selfish body.

While NRA/NRM/Museveni had deceptively managed to convince a sizeable number of Ugandans that Parliament was relevant and an example of the fruits of their sacrifice, removing age limits with such primitive arrogance, at last, revealed the real hopeless body it has been all along.

For the people of Luweero, it was first the UPC councillors who were butchered. Without heads of families, the widows were forced to marry bushmen/join the war, die or abandon their ancestral lands.

Their daughters were raped, married off and others conscripted in the guerrilla ranks. The boys were obviously forced into the NRA and other guerrilla formations. The family structure in Luweero was totally dismantled, the future of so many young people was destroyed, the dreams of many parents perished.

This country lost close to 500,000 people in the Luweero war. Before they died together with their families, they had been promised a better Uganda.

For an NRM group, dominated by members from one region, to arrogantly and violently amend the constitution to perpetuate their dominance of the political, social and economic life in this country is an absolute abuse and desecration of those who perished in Luweero.

For over 20 years, this country endured one of the most brutal and senseless civil wars in the northern/eastern parts of the country in which close to one million people perished. They died all in the name of fighting barbarism and sectarianism.

The cynicism, arrogance and tribal superiority displayed by NRM is a total spit in the face of a region whose wounds are still bleeding.

Hence, that explains the anger and call for secession seen in parliament during the debate on the bill. For whatever reasons, personal or national, with or without the satanic verses, the age limit removal is a total insult to many Ugandans by parliament.

The facade has been removed; it has totally discarded itself from many Ugandans. I strongly believe that, from now on, parliament is only a decoration, important to those who benefit from it, not for national interest.
Cantonese and Mandarin in Hong Kong and Taiwan

by Kate Chernavina

It is a known fact that a language may vary, especially how it is spoken, depending on the region where the language is used. But have you ever heard of two languages that are written in a same way but have nothing in-common in terms pronunciation? Today we will look into some differences between the Mandarin of Taiwan and the Cantonese of Hong Kong, and see how it can influence communication and interpersonal relationships if one is looking to negotiate or do business in these two Chinese-speaking regions.

Effective communication is the key to success in todays business world. Due to the increasing demand for native resources to help you successfully target the Chinese market, it is now crucial to be aware of the differences in writing and speech between these regions where traditional chinese characters are used.

In Taiwan, people write in Standard Chinese using traditional characters ( [fantizi]), and most people speak Mandarin, which is the official language of Taiwan, and the main language used in education. The Mandarin of Taiwan ( [guoyu]) differs somewhat from the Mandarin of China in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary, and the way it is written - in China they write with simplified characters ( [jiantizi]). However, the two forms of Mandarin are mutually intelligible.

About 80% of the people of Taiwan also speak Taiwanese, a form of Southern Min ( [ban-lam-gi]) that originated in Fujian province in China, and which is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. There is no standard way of writing Taiwanese, and it is rarely written. Some people also speak Hakka ( hak7ga1wa3), another variety of Chinese, or Formosan languages, which are part of the Austronesian language family.

In Hong Kong, most people speak Cantonese, and write in Standard Chinese, which is based on Mandarin. When they read text aloud however, they use Cantonese pronounciation. Colloquial Cantonese is sometimes written, and it differs significantly from written Standard Chinese to the extent that Mandarin speakers cannot understand all of it.

Negotiations between business people from Hong Kong and Taiwan are sometimes conducted in English, as relatively few Hong Kong citizens can speak Mandarin, and very few Taiwanese people speak Cantonese. However, the number of people in Hong Kong who can speak Mandarin is increasing.

Vocabulary

TW: Did you get here by bus?

HK: No, I came here on my little lamb* ( [min4joeng4zai2])

As you can see from the small talk, the little lamb actually means a scooter and is a popular word used among younger generations. The equivalent in Taiwan is  (motuoche). It may sound natural to bilingual speakers in Taiwan because most young people have access to videos, YouTube or films made in Hong Kong. However, the larger populations from different social classes may feel awkward about hearing such a novel idea coming out of nowhere. Here are a few examples of the differences between the two languages in terms of word usage in formal business writing or marketing campaigns.

Term Taiwan Hong Kong go to work  (shangban)  (faan2gung1) finish work  (xiaban)  (fong3gung1) boss  (jichengche)  (dik1si6) Grammar Grammar can affect the way people write business letters when two parties from different cultural backgrounds try to talk business and settle things clearly. During the early years of British colonization, the Hongkongese became much familiar with the English structure and therefore changed the original sentence structure of Mandarin, which is a paratactic language focusing on its meaning and deep structure in formal writing. For example, a weak verb is sometimes applied to a Chinese sentence or phrase and changes the way people write in formal letters. Heres an example. English: "The expert carries out an experiment to study the formula."

Mandarin: . (zhuanjia zuo shiyan lai yanjiu peifang)

Cantonese: . (zyun1gaa1 zik6 jau4 sat6jim6 deoi3 pui3fong1 zeon3hang4 jin4gau3 ) Note that the two languages preserve and use the Traditional Chinese characters quite differently due to the historical background of a split Chinese language tree. The language system of Traditional Chinese in Taiwan adopts the mother system of Standard Chinese. This standard can now be spoken and written intelligibly by business people in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, because of its colonial and linguistic history, the sole language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, with the use of the same Traditional Chinese characters. However, the majority of Traditional Chinese users (Hong Kongese, older generation of Mainland China, Taiwanese) can read Taiwanese Mandarin. Therefore, if anyone wishes to create a website targeting the Traditional Chinese-speaking market, you can use Taiwanese Mandarin for the best search results to improve user experience. Internet Language Another great idea to consider is to look into the network language commonly used by online users today. Since the internet now seems to prevail over older media, theres no reason one should not be aware of the new burst of fashionable language spread across most networks for marketing use. Here are some examples of what you may find in advertising campaigns. Term Taiwan Hong Kong OMG (oh my god) Orz;  (jiong);  (tian a)  (m4 hai6 gwaa3) God-like  (daren);  (shengshou)  (gwat6 gei1) Service plan  (fangan)  (gai3waak6) Read But No Reply  (qianshui);  (yi du bu hui)  (cim4seoi2)

When entering Chinese speaking markets, it is important to remember that Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite different when it comes to life habits as well as speaking habits. They share a common written language, but not a common spoken language, unless one side makes an effort and learns the language of the other (Mandarin is an optional second language in public schools in Hong Kong). And of course, other factors such as population, size of your target market and wage levels must be considered before translating your web site or marketing materials.

Do not hesitate to share this article with your friends or colleagues and stay tuned for the latest updates!

Note

Cantonese transliterations are given in Jyutping, using Cantonese Tools. The numbers indicate tones.

Information about Cantonese | Phrases | Numbers | Family words | Time expressions | Tower of Babel | Learning materials

Information about Mandarin | Phrases | Numbers | Colours | Family words | Terms of endearment | Time | Weather | Tongue twisters | Tower of Babel | Articles | Links | Learning materials

About the writer

Kate Chernavina has a great background in linguistics, majoring in Chinese language, she lives in China for the past 12 years and works at Hi-Com Asia, an international translation and copywriting company.

Written Chinese: Oracle Bone Script, Simplified characters, Bopomofo, Types of characters, Structure of written Chinese, Evolution of characters, How the Chinese script works, Xiao'erjing, General Chinese

Spoken Chinese: Mandarin, Dungan, Wu, Shanghainese, Wenzhounese, Yue, Cantonese, Weitou, Min, Jian'ou, Taiwanese, Teochew, Fuzhounese, Puxian, Hakka, Xiang, Gan, How many people speak Chinese?

Other Chinese pages: Chinese numbers () | Chinese classifiers () | Electronic dictionaries | Chinese links | Books: Chinese characters and calligraphy | Cantonese | Mandarin, Shanghainese, Hokkien and Taiwanese

Writing systems | Language and languages | Language learning | Pronunciation | Learning vocabulary | Language acquisition | Motivation and reasons to learn languages | Arabic | Basque | Celtic languages | Chinese | English | Esperanto | French | German | Greek | Hebrew | Indonesian | Italian | Japanese | Korean | Latin | Portuguese | Russian | Sign Languages | Spanish | Swedish | Other languages | Minority and endangered languages | Constructed languages (conlangs) | Reviews of language courses and books | Language learning apps | Teaching languages | Languages and careers | Being and becoming bilingual | Language and culture | Language development and disorders | Translation and interpreting | Multilingual websites, databases and coding | History | Travel | Food | Other topics | Spoof articles | How to submit an article

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The Indian Railways is promising free Wi-Fi at speeds of 20-40 MBPS in 257 railway stations in the country, which is better than what we get at most homes. Not only that, the railway ministry is now ambitiously looking at equipping each and every railway station across the country, numbering nearly 8,500, with Wi-Fi facilities at the cost of Rs 700 crore. The ministry timeline targets 600 Wi-Fi enabled railway stations by March 2018 and 100 per cent station Wi-Fi coverage by March 2019.

The Station Wi-Fi project, launched in 2016 as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative, provides free Internet to passengers under Railwire, the retail broadband distribution model of RailTel Corporation of India Limited. RailTel is a Mini Ratna PSU and one of India's largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers owning a pan-India optic fiber network on exclusive Right of Way (ROW) along railway tracks that has roped in Google to provide tech support and set up the wireless infrastructure. Around seven million rail passengers are already benefitting from this facility but it is currently limited to select A1, A and some B-listed stations only.

According to Railtel, "This initiative is part of bridging the digital divide & providing high speed access network to all rail users with financial inclusion of local cable operators...Once (fully) implemented this shall be one of the largest public Wi-Fi projects in the world."

As per the plan finalised at a recent railway ministry meeting, 1,200 stations have been identified for this facility to primarily cater to rail passengers. Significantly, a whopping 7,300 stations have reportedly been earmarked to also serve the local population in rural and remote areas - in addition to train commuters - to promote e-governance as part of the digital makeover of rural India. According to media reports, railway stations in rural areas will have Wi-Fi enabled kiosks that will become digital hotspots offering services such as digital banking, tax filing, paying bills, Aadhaar generation, issuing government certificates, including birth and death certificates, among others. The kiosks will also enable the local populace to order and receive goods from e-commerce portals. "These kiosks will be operated at stations with private participation for the local population," said a senior Railway Ministry official, adding, "The modalities of setting up such digital hotspots are being worked out with the Telecom Ministry."

Presently, RailTel has created over 45,000 km of optic fiber network connecting over 4,500 cities and towns on the network. But the ministry's plan for 100 per cent Wi-Fi enabled stations in the next 14 months seems overtly optimistic considering that since February 2017, only 142 additional railway stations have been included in the project. According to Inc42 Media, work is in progress at 161 more railways stations but it is slow going due to a limited number of partners like Google coming on board.

The free Wi-Fi service works on a model where there is no cap on the volume of data consumed. However, as there are no free lunches in the world, after the first 30 minutes of usage, the Internet speed one would enjoy would be gradually reduced. But it's still free, and fast. Wondering what's in it for Google, apart from public gratitude? "For Google, this is an ecosystem project. Our idea with this is to make sure there is more and more broadband adoption. The more the adoption, the more people come online, and the greater the economic impact. When there is economic impact on digitisation, we get directly impacted because we are a stakeholder in the digitisation of the country," Gulzar Azad, head of connectivity, Google India had explained earlier. And the Indian Railways gets less irate customers.

(With agency inputs)


The recent decision by the Government of India to breathe life into the country's capital-starved public sector banks (PSBs) over a short span of the next two years is seen as a game-changing measure to revive the flagging economy.

The jury is still out on how much of the proposed INR 2.11trn capital will ultimately fuel the growth, after PSBs' balance sheets are cleaned. But, whatever be the quantum of capital left over, it can still have a multiplier effect on the economy since a bank's equity lays the foundation for its lending growth. Further, the positive relationship between credit and real output implies that the first-order positive impact of a faster clean-up of PSBs' balance sheets is higher credit growth for the larger PSBs and private financials, and hence growth in output. A second-order impact and a necessary condition for a faster output growth could be a revival in capex driven by improvement in the economics of the sectors that house the stressed assets.

Our internal estimates indicate that the four large PSBs (constituting 53.7% of loan market share) will need around 59% of the promised INR 2.11trn infusion to conform to the Basel III norms by March 2019. However, this is expected to translate to merely 100bps of higher growth capital. For achieving growth higher than 11% CAGR in loans, additional growth capital will have to be generated internally. This would mean that as the smaller and weaker PSBs struggle with asset quality and capital deficiencies, the larger ones and private financials will gain from better-managed balance sheets and product-specific moats. Further, improved bank capital would ultimately increase competitive intensity in segments such as mortgages, Loan Against Property, SME and infra. Since these weaker PSBs are relatively inefficient vis-a-vis private financial institutions (the Return-on-Assets for PSBs has never exceeded 1% versus 1.5% for private financials even during bad times), we expect the private financials to be better placed to navigate through such competition.

A necessary and second-order condition for a sustainable increase in output is revival in capex which in turn is dependent on the improvement in the fundamentals of the infrastructure and metals sectors (accounting for c.49% of industrial credit and 63% of stressed assets within industries). Focussing on steel and power specifically, we analyse what a 50% hair-cut to outstanding bank loans (one can run with other scenarios as well but this is close to sustainable debt in many of the stressed assets) can mean for them. In power, for ex., the tariffs for stressed power plants could drop to as low as INR 3/kWh, making them more attractive for merchant power and long-term contracts. However, low plant load factors (estimated at 60%-65% by FY20E) and inadequate Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) could mean that the earliest revival of capex could happen only by FY20 by when the thermal power capacity addition drops to a third (7GW p.a.) from 21GW in FY15. For the steel sector, though, the availability of stressed secondary steel players for purchase, combined with the robust capacity expansion plans of India's steel majors, has engendered a fruitful opportunity for consolidation. These will augment prevailing strong industry fundamentals with capacity utilisation set to touch 85% in two years, amid prevailing strong global steel prices. We expect the resolution of stressed assets in steel to pave the way for capex revival from FY19, with power following a year or two later.

All in all, we believe that the recapitalisation of India's PSBs is a much needed move and pre-requisite to reviving capex and hence triggering growth in the economy.

By Suhas Harinarayanan, Head-Institutional Equity Research, JM Financial Institutional Securities Ltd.
This article is to commemorate the 18th Anniversary of the formation of the Tertiary Students Confederacy of the New Patriotic Party (TESCON).



It also coincides with the 25th Anniversary of the birth of the Fourth Republic.



From its humble beginnings as the tertiary students wing of the NPP, TESCON has steadily evolved into a powerful political machinery, occupying an important place within the structure of the NPP.



Since its inauguration on January 8, 2000 by the venerable John Agyekum Kufuor, the distinguished former president of the Republic, TESCON has been at the forefront of student and political activism, and grassroots mobilisation.



It has produced a wealth of talented individuals, whose skills and drive have been aptly utilised by the NPP to build capacity and enhance its stock as a demonstrable political guild, not only in Ghana, but Africa.



I must take this opportunity, yet again, to commend the founding members who gave birth to the Confederacy and the Patriots whose Herculean sacrifices, over the years, have nurtured it into the formidable political force it is today.



The 2016 elections, like that of year 2000, was a defining moment, not only for TESCON and the NPP, but Ghanaians at large. Eight years of economic mismanagement, flagrant abuse of power, unbridled corruption and incompetent stewardship was threatening to bring Ghana yet again to the brink of economic and social degradation. Indeed, we were at the abyss and only an undiluted resolve of the citizenry could savage this precipitous decline.



While the task ahead remained enormous, it did not seem to daunt hardworking party members or sympathisers who were disillusioned by the poor level of governance the NDC had bequeathed Ghanaians. Lacing boots and girding up their loins, the presidential candidate of the NPP and his running mate travelled extensively across country, rallying the base and bringing the message of hope.



We were to discover on those worthwhile journeys the true state of the country. Despite the song and dance about transforming Ghana, which the NDC claimed was unprecedented, we witnessed unfathomable hardship of many who were wallowing in abject poverty and social exclusion.



We also saw at first-hand, the deplorable state of our road infrastructure. It seemed the die was cast, win to competently steer the affairs of State or perish into political oblivion. It was a stark reality that confronted us as a party and we were determined to rise to the occasion.



Ghana Beyond Aid



TESCON was to play a critical role in complementing the efforts of the presidential candidate and his campaign team. With determination and incomparable vigilance, from polling stations to collation centres, TESCON members joined fellow patriots to deliver a crushing blow to the faint hopes of an incumbent which had resolved to conduct a divisive and tribalistic campaign, devoid of substance that addressed the legitimate needs and concerns of the Ghanaian people. The resounding electoral victory of the NPP, unprecedented in the history of Ghana, was a clear rejection of the myopic policies of the NDC but more importantly, a decision by the people of Ghana to embrace the new vision that the NPP was seeking the mandate to implement.



This vision has been reiterated by President Nana Akufo-Addo on many occasions, but none more fortuitous than during the visit of the President of France to Ghana: A Ghana Beyond Aid!



The battle for electoral victory, having been comprehensively won, the newly sworn in government on January 7, 2017, has set about to reverse the decline of our economic competitiveness and swiftly laid an impermeable foundation for the new industrialisation agenda to take off. The challenges have been many and the tasks arduous, but this government would be unrelenting in its pursuit of building a more just, equitable and progressive society, where all have equal opportunities to realise their dreams and fulfill their potentials, irrespective of social status.



Pledges



The implementation of our flagship campaign programme, the Free Senior High School remains a radical but necessary step towards the socio-economic transformation of Ghana.



The One-District, One-Factory programme has begun in earnest and gathering steam.



Restoration of nurses and teachers allowances, payment of accrued arrears to road contractors and other government suppliers have been done with minimal fiscal implications to the economy. Revamping of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and the School Feeding Programme are but a few of the social interventions that government is committed to as part of efforts to broaden the social safety net.



Without a doubt, job creation remains a key priority for the NPP government. Commendable efforts have been made, through the dynamism of the Vice-President, to create a formal and digital economy, evidenced by the National Digital Address System, E-registration of businesses at the Registrar General office and the Paperless Ports Project.



While enhancing efficiency and reducing cost of business, the digital economy will undoubtedly create opportunities for new businesses to mushroom, not least e-commerce.



It will also help government raise the needed revenue to meet its obligations to the people.



Aside the digital economy, government continues to adequately resource the Youth Employment Authority to perform its duty of developing feasible policies to engage the the youth.



As eloquently stated by the President, it is people who build nations. It is not gold, cocoa, diamonds, timber or oil that is going to build nations. It is Ghanaians, especially the youth of today, who are going to build Ghana. Maximising the demographic dividend requires a new mindset, coupled with the creation of an ecosystem that stimulates new thinking, fosters innovation, creativity and unleashes the entrepreneurial spirit of the youth.



Government has set up the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (NEIP), a flagship initiative, aimed at stimulating investment and providing timely support and advice to budding entrepreneurs.



Contribution from TESCON



TESCON, as a youth platform with dynamic minds, can contribute meaningfully to the realisation of this ecosystem. The seeds for growth and jobs have already been sowed. Now is the time for it to be watered by honing skill sets to take advantage of the opportunities that a buoyant economy will present. We must inject the same levels of energy, drive and zeal that characterised our collective efforts in winning the elections into discovering new pathways for success and prosperity. Not everyone would welcome our success as a government and party nor seek the collective interest of Ghanaians with genuine intention.



To such, the response must be to strengthen our resolve to deliver on the promises made and to build the capacity of the youth to navigate this brave new world driven by technology and innovation.



As we mark a year into office and also celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fourth Republic, my appeal to TESCON is to remain united, resolute, focused and diligent in helping government implement its laudable initiatives.



The accelerated development of Ghana is a shared responsibility of both a purposeful government and a dutiful citizenry.



The flame of hope has been lit and all productive forces, including TESCON, must put their shoulders to the wheel in driving the transformation agenda forward.



Being Ghanaian must mean something. It must mean living a life of dignity, self respect, discipline and personal responsibility.



It must mean a dedication to our cherished values of fearless honesty, commitment to service and a desire to see each other strive for excellence. Ghana will rise again as the Lord continues to bless us with good leadership and patriotic citizens. Happy New Year 2018!



Authored by: Francis Asenso-Boakye, founding president of TESCON, and currently Deputy Chief of Staff and Political Assistant to the President.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Around 1 p.m., right after the lunch rush, 87-year old Flo Silbach will start slowing down. She wont quit, though. Oh no, no way shes quitting. Her shift at Pamelas Diner in Millvale doesnt end until four. So, instead of shuffling around the tables and booths, jotting down orders in neat cursive and clearing empty plates once overflowing with hash browns, Belgian waffles piled high with strawberries, and BLTs, shell just start her cleaning. Get all her chores done. Chat with the fella sitting at the lunch counter who grew up in Millvale, too. Punctuate every sentence with a laugh that bubbles.

Order up! one of the short order cooks calls out from behind the open grill.

I got it, Flo replies, wiping her hands across a white dishtowel tucked into her black apron.

I got it, Flo, the other waitress smiles, waving her off. I got it.

Flo was up at 5 a.m. today, just as she is every Monday. Couldnt wait to get up. Couldnt wait to get to the diner, where shes been waitressing since 1968.

Flo, youll never make it, her husband replied when she told him about her new job. Back then, oh, she was shy. Just in a shell. Her first day coincided with the Millvale Centennial. What a madhouse. Pamelas was pure chaos. One of the older gals, a redhead named Stella, took Flo under her wing and showed her the ropes. We got through it, Flo laughs.

When each of her three daughters turned 16, they all got a job here, too. But it was never work for Flo. Not even after she got up to working six to seven days a week, then back down to two after getting both knees replaced in 2013.

Shell still get up before dawn, hurry in to talk to her co-worker Gloria, spend most of their time together laughing.

If you ask, shell tell you about the time she did Karaoke at the Christmas party. Oh, that was so fun!

When she went up in the hot air balloon for her sixtieth birthday. We were up for an hour over Wexford. Just beautiful!

The two bus trips she made to Toronto to see Phantom of the Opera, her favorite. I love the theater!

I love my home, but I dont want to stay there, she says. Id rather be here, seeing people and being active.

She chalks her good health up to being blessed and the aspirin she takes daily. The Makers Mark and club soda doesnt seem to be hurting, either.

You still on your Makers Mark? her doctor asked.

Yeah, Flo replied.

Well, whatever youre doing, her doctor replied, keep doing it.

When four oclock rolls around, shell hurry home to start baking her Christmas cookies. She already has 10 different doughs made. Theres the Mexican wedding cookies, the nut horns, thumbprints, peanut butter blossomsthat one with just the peanut butter and chocolate in the middle

Well get together at noon on Friday and will get done baking at midnight, she laughs. A group of four women and one man. He serves the beverages. She likes to gift her cookies to people, like her three neighbors. Shell bring in a big tray for everyone at Pamelas, too.

Flo has seen a lot of changes over the past five decades. The biggest change is the way kids behave. Or, dont, to be honest. Theres no behavior, she says. Im a big believer in children should be seen and not heard, but not everyone agrees with me, she laughs.

But its okay. She likes people. Even when theyre grumpy or growling or carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders and taking it out on their eggs and the person with the bubbly laugh serving them, Flo wont get mad. Wont ever walk away in a huff.

I smile and take every day as it is, she says, her face lighting up. There are a lot of things we cant change, so just keep smiling.
Traveling east from our Pittsburgh plateau area to the central Appalachian Mountains in the middle of the state makes us aware of the vast and diverse lands of Penns Woods. Hikers and nature lovers can experience the unique characteristics of central Pennsylvanias rugged mountain terrain by exploring the Cherry Run watershed and State Game Lands No. 295 in Clinton and Centre counties.

The Ridge and Valley Province occupies a diagonal zone where the Appalachians traverse the middle of the state. The valleys are juxtaposed with the rugged forested ridgelines of the mountains, which offer experiences for remote hiking and exploring. Of Pennsylvanias protected public lands, a significant portion is on these high mountain ridges. State Game Lands No. 295, also known as Cherry Run, is one such destination.

A hiker into this game land will find lots of rocky terrain and refreshing, clear cascading brook trout streams such as Cherry Run, which is designated as a Wilderness Trout Stream. Sculpted from the flanks of Big and Bear mountains, Cherry Runs pristine waters gather in uninterrupted forests of northern hardwoods, oaks and eastern hemlock, with thickets of dense rhododendron along the cool stream sides. The best option for immersing oneself in the wilds here is to hike six miles of trail that parallel Cherry Run within its deep valley.

In 1979, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy permanently protected the 12,000-acre Cherry Run property to create this game land.

More information about hiking, fishing and hunting on this property is available from the Pennsylvania Game Commission at www.pgc.pa.gov .
Will Doolittle projects editor Follow Will Doolittle Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

I read "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," by David Grann, published in 2017.

This is a great piece of journalism that publicizes a shocking episode in American history in the 1920s and '30s and uncovers new information. Grann, a journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker, is not a poetic writer, but his straight-ahead prose works well for a story whose details are more lurid and appalling than you could imagine.

The skeleton of the story, without spoilers, is that, in the late 1800s, the Osage tribe, which had dominated huge swaths of the West, had retreated to a barren section of Oklahoma. Then oil was found under their land  a whole lot of oil. The tribe owned the rights to the oil, and for awhile the Osage had one of the greatest concentration of millionaires in the country. But the white power structure did everything possible to prevent the American Indians from controlling their own wealth by manipulating the law and the levers of power, and then things got much worse: Members of the tribe started dying in suspicious or obviously criminal ways.

The eventual involvement of the FBI, then in its infancy and not even called the FBI yet, adds a fascinating edge to the tale.

You read through this book, following the ups and downs of the case, and when you think you're done, you notice you've got about four chapters to go. Those chapters are the most chilling of the book, transforming it from the expected: a tale of crime and investigation, pursuit and resolution, to something far deeper and far worse. The book reveals a conspiracy, but in the end, the nature of that conspiracy proves to be different and more disturbing than you expect. Justice does not prevail.
Just west of Pamplona, Spain, about halfway up Alto del Perdon, are the beautifully rusting sheet-metal sculptures of 13 pilgrims fighting the winds and storms of this historic spot along the 500-mile trek across the Pyrenees Mountains from France to Spains cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

It is along this journey that some grieve, some heal and some find spiritual and physical renewal. And it is the sheet-metal sculptures discovered in the first days of this nearly 1.1 million-step journey that mark the beginning of a pilgrimage some take despite sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds.

And not unlike those sheet-metal touchstones along the historic el Camino de Santiago, the magnificent sheet-metal and rebar sculptures of Steven Mestyan Sr. are much more than beautiful works of art. They are part of his pilgrimage from the depths of profound grief, they are his expression of his love for his son, they are a path that has taken him beyond the bounds of earth and life and what seems impossible.

These are the touchstones keeping him connected to his son, Steven Mestyan Jr., who lost his life to a seizure on Friday, June 20, 2014. He was 24.

Unfortunately, his passing forced me to do something with my mind and hands, to get myself out of the hole, Mestyan said in an interview the day after Christmas. Its an everyday process when losing a child. He was a great kid. I worked in corrections and know what its like; this boy was something else.

The love never ends, said Mestyan.

You love them even more, he said. And what Im doing is showing him I love him and showing the world I miss him.

A sons path

In the 2010 Emilio Estevez film The Way, Martin Sheen plays Tom, an American physician who travels to St. Jean Pied de Port, France, after his 20-something son was killed during a storm while walking the el Camino de Santiago. Once there, Tom decides to finish the 40-day journey for his son and leave handfuls of his sons ashes along the way.

In real life, Mestyan, in a similar fashion, is honoring his sons art and carrying on works his son is unable to complete.

Im doing this is in my sons memory; he is my inspiration, he said. I feel Id be doing him a disrespect if I didnt do something with my gift; he cant do things with his talent.

To see Mestyans sculptures is to believe they are created by a long-seasoned sculptor with years of experience mastering the intricate details, movements and emotional expressions of a much larger than life spread-winged eagle, a running 11-foot-tall Bigfoot, an 800-pound moose.

Nonetheless, the way Mestyan explains it, hes only been doing this a few years.

Steven taught me how to weld. He said, Oh, let me show you how, Dad,  Mestyan said, adding that he originally bought a welder a few years ago to repair his Harley trailer. Im self-taught.

But, looking into the emotionally captivating eyes of his recently installed Bigfoot structure, one wonders, How?

Mestyan said his love for his son is in these pieces, which have recently garnered national attention.

There are times when I am out there (in his studio) and Ill ask him, Steven, what do you think we should do about this?  he said. Im self-taught, but I am being taught. I feel his presence in the garage with me so strongly.

A few years ago, the father and son began working together in a studio they created at Mestyans Hampton home, naming it Skelabar Studio. The name is a combination of rebar and skeleton, because rebar is the skeleton for the sculptures.

From sketching to photography to carving marble, Steven was always trying something new, he said. We worked closely together. We had a lot of good times. It was not long enough. He said to me, Dad youve got talent. And hed get me out there.

Steven Jr., a 2012 Castleton University graduate, showed his work in several group exhibitions and at the time of his death, his most recent sculpture and photography was in an exhibition at the 30 Under 30 show at Chaffee Art Center in Rutland, Vermont.

A metal core, metal hair

Mestyans first sculpture was a rebar dragon.

It wasnt until later, in the development of his craft, that he began covering the rebar skeletons in sheet metal.

But seeing a piece of sheet metal and seeing the way he shapes and forms it into nearly living creatures is transformative.

One of his more recent creations, a 1,000-pound Bigfoot in a near full-run on the edge of Route 4, just outside the village of Whitehall on the Vermont side, has been getting lots of attention since its December unveiling.

What makes this Bigfoot so lifelike are the strips of finely and tediously cut metal for his hair.

With electric shears, I cut longer, thinner, shorter pieces, Mestyan said. Then it was the placement of the strips. I reached my hand into a big bucket of strips and I would decide where to place it.

And now that Bigfoot has settled into his new home at the edge of the village, his metal strips will weather into a rusted patina, much like the sculptures along the el Camino.

Mestyan developed his own formula, a combination of ingredients, including salt, that he sprays on the metal when completed to enhance the aging process.

Paul Thompson, the owner of Vermont Marble, Granite, Slate & Soapstone Co., who commissioned the sculpture to sit outside his business, said, People have been pulling over and stopping to get a better look. I was going to get an 8-by-4 piece of plywood and make a silhouette of Bigfoot.

But before Thompson had time to create his own Bigfoot, Mestyan approached him.

He said, Ill make it the way you want it,  Thompson said, adding that Mestyan said Thompson did not have to buy it if he did not like the finished creation. When I first saw it when he was building it in his garage, I put down a deposit on it.

According to Mestyan, it is not about the money, though. He is compelled to keep making the sculptures.

For me, its priceless. How can I put a price on this? he said.

A sculpture of a motorcycle with a coffin and skeleton, The Grim Reaper, was created in the depths of grief, he said.

Mestyan also created the Bigfoot sculpture at the Skene Valley Country Club in Whitehall.

The nearly finished Moose, which took about four to five 4-by-8-foot sheets of metal, will soon find a home at the Pine Grove Diner in Granville.

After Moose, hes not sure whats next. Maybe a knight riding a horse. Maybe a guardian angel, kneeling on one knee.

For now, he said he hopes people seeing the sculptures enjoy them.

He talks about Stevens sharp wit and the way he could make people feel happy.

Im not very good at that; Steven touched so many peoples hearts, Mestyan said. So, if I could use my art to touch somebody the way Steven did personally, that would make me happy.
MOREAU  After eight congressional candidates, hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, responded to questions for nearly three hours during the NY-21 Congressional Candidates Forum in South Glens Falls on Sunday, Democrat Tedra Cobb emerged as the frontrunner from a straw poll of 176 attendees.

The event at the Moreau Community Center drew nearly 200 who, by a show of hands, indicated they were there to learn more about the candidates and their platforms.

According to forum organizer Bob Lippman of CAT21, the grassroots organization hosting the forum, those who officially announced their congressional candidacy for the November midterm election as of Jan. 2 were invited to participate. Originally the deadline was Dec. 12, but it was later changed.

Our goal is to increase awareness on issues relevant to the constituents of District 21 and to increase community engagement in the process of governing our nation, Lippman said.

Of the eligible candidates, nine agreed to participate in Sundays forum, the second hosted by CAT21.

Democrats Tanya Boone of Granville, Don Boyajian of Cambridge, Tedra Cobb of Canton, Sara Idleman of Greenwich, Ronald Kim of Queensbury, Emily Martz of Saranac Lake, Patrick Nelson of Stillwater and Katie Wilson of Keene were present. Republican Russell Finley of St. Lawrence, who plans to run against Stefanik in both the Republican and Conservative party primaries, was unable to participate at the last minute because his mother was undergoing emergency surgery in Syracuse. Finley, however, sent his apologies, which Lippman read to the audience of nearly 200.

Additionally, Finley wanted to clarify a point about the upcoming election.

To the media and constituents in attendance, I want to make a clarification about this race. This is no longer about which Democratic candidate is going to be challenging the winner of the Republican primary, Lippman read from Finley. Given that the Congresswoman has not attended any of the five forums, spent any time in the district with the voters and especially has not announced for re-election, this race is now which one of many Democrats will be challenging me as the Republican nominee in the November election.

Those attending laughed.

According to Lippman, Stefanik did not respond to her invitation to attend. In an email response to The Post-Star last week, Stefaniks campaign spokesman, Lenny Alcivar, said the congresswoman held a strong lead when she was previously elected and that the crowded pool of Democratic challengers shows support has not coalesced around any single candidate.

Nonetheless, Lippman said that Sundays forum, the second hosted by CAT21, was a way to begin narrowing the field of candidates vying for the nomination.

As we are coming ever closer to the Democratic and Republican primaries, we have modified our format to help draw distinctions between the candidates, probe their positions and get a sense of whether favorites are emerging.

At the opening of the forum, attendees were given a paper ballot and asked to mark their three top candidates for a closing straw poll to see where candidates emerged. According to the poll: Cobb, 23 percent; Nelson, 17 percent; Martz, 14 percent; Boone, 12 percent; Kim, 10 percent; Wilson, 7 percent; and Idleman, 7 percent.

SUNY Adirondack Assistant Professor of Political Science Wendy Johnston moderated the forum, asking candidates four questions relating to what percent of the funding they have already raised comes from the district; the recently passed tax bill and whether it will benefit District 21; what is their message to voters who supported Stefanik and how will they win their support; and will they pledge, if they are not the winner, to help elect the Democratic nominee.

Initially, Johnson invited all eight candidates to speak for five minutes about what distinguishes them from the pack. There was a common theme about how the American dream has vanished and how difficult it is for families to succeed. A majority of the candidates pointed to Stefanik as not having the interest of her constituents in mind.

We need to ask, where was Elise? said Cobb. Wheres Elise? Shes not here, thats what we need to do, we need to hold her accountable.

Boone said she will work to reverse income inequality. She talked about how her grandfather, Daniel Boone (and yes, she said they are descendants of the American pioneer Daniel Boone) was able to make a living and how her maternal grandfather, who worked at Comstock prison, could support a family of nine children on one income.

Today, my middle brother works two jobs and he works harder for less, Boone said.

Others echoed Boones sentiments. And Boyadjian said he wants to be an architect for change.

Cobb talked about her family, her parents, her biological brother and her nine adopted siblings; about how she sees issues like CHIP funding, HIV-AIDS money; opioid addiction treatment through the lens of her life experiences and her time working with her own business and at a state prison.

Idleman said what distinguishes her is that she is electable; Kim said, as a lawyer, he works with clients about to lose their homes or those who have been sexually harassed. Those are the laws Im going to change, he said.

With her economic development experience, Martz said she knows about how to get jobs and keep jobs. Nelson said hes talked to voters from the Canadian border to the Capitol and they believe the government no longer works for them. This is what corruption looks like, he said.

And like many of the other candidates, Wilson talked about the pressures on families to just get by.

Our families and our futures are under attack like they have never been before, Wilson said.
Eight homeless families in Warren and Washington County have been put up in motels since the brutal cold weather hit the region  seven families in Washington County and one family in Warren County, according to officials at the social services departments for both counties.

Approximately 33 homeless individuals between the two counties have been placed in motels by the social service departments since last month.

And we probably dont even see a fraction of the homeless people in the community, said Eileen Irwin, director of assistance programs with the Washington County Department of Social Services.

According to a survey of Saratoga, Washington, Warren and Hamilton counties, an estimated 268 people were identified as experiencing homelessness this past year.

Homeless experts from social service departments, law enforcement and other areas that work with the homeless community dont suspect those numbers have decreased since last year.

Yet many of those personnel are surprised by the lack of calls and presence theyve seen this winter, considering the record low temperatures and no homeless shelter for people to sleep  until this past weekend.

Open public restrooms and spaces are where a few homeless men who were using the temporary warming shelter on Lawrence Street admitted to sleeping a few Monday nights ago.

Police department lobbies and the hospital emergency rooms are also common places to find the homeless at night.

But the Warren County Sheriffs Department and the Glens Falls Police Department said they havent had any calls about people sleeping in the streets or in open public restrooms and spaces since the extreme cold came.

The police departments protocol is calling the social service departments when they do.

Most likely, people are finding places to go, said Warren County Undersheriff Shawn Lamouree.

Glens Falls Police Chief Anthony P. Lydon said hes allowed people to sleep in the lobby of the police department occasionally to stay warm, but it hasnt happened this winter.

A spokeswoman at Glens Falls Hospital said, Surprisingly, we havent seen an uptick of any cold-related injuries so far.

Irwin, with the Washington County Department of Social Services, suspects people bounce from place to place so they dont feel like they overstay their welcome. She also noted that in extreme cold conditions like this past month, its harder for families and acquaintances to say no to hosting homeless people when the outdoors is life-threatening.

Kim Cook, director of Open Door Ministries, which runs the Code Blue shelter, speculated that some people couch surf or sleep in their car.

If they dont come for services, we dont know where they are, Cook added.

Cook has turned the Open Door Kitchen on Lawrence Street into a temporary warming shelter, in lieu of the Code Blue shelter on Warren Street having construction delays. The temporary shelter has been open since Nov. 10 and shes had an average of 5 people per night. A few years ago, the shelter hosted around 15 people per night, Cook said.

Numbers are definitely down from the past few years, Cook said, which sounds good... but you also hope they have somewhere to sleep.

Last Monday night when Cook opened the doors early at 8 p.m. because of freezing cold temperatures, there was a single person using the temporary shelter.

Cook asked the man where he thought everyone else was sleeping.

The man shrugged his shoulders in response.